[MD] Art and Stories

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Mary, Ian, Matt, Marsha, all,


> Could you say that fiction is more honest that non-fiction?  At least
> fiction acknowledges itself as such.


I agree, Mary. I would say that fiction CAN be more honest than
nonfiction. Someone could write a nonfiction book that is full of
inaccuracies or outright lies. I guess a nonfiction book can also be
competely factual yet completely trivial.

Fiction can certianly _ring_ true as well as feel contrived (which of
course it always is), but I think something more than "this sounds
like a story that actually could be true" is meant by Martel, Gaiman,
and maybe Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried) when they call fiction
"true."

For example, in the Midsummer Night's Dream issue of Gaiman's Sandman
Puck says, "This is magnificent--and it's true! It never happened; yet
it is still true. What magic art is this?"

But what Gaiman mean by "true" here in putting these words in the
mouth of Puck? In what sense is Midsummer's Night Dream "true"?

Gaiman and Martel aren't philosophers with a spelled out theory of
truth, but if they did have one, I don't think that it would be
coherent unless they distinguished at least two very different ways in
which they use the word "true." There are sentences that are true and
then there is the essence, Truth.

Personally, to be clear about truth, I like to keep truth as a word
that applies only to sentences and never treat truth as an essence.
Gaiman has his own literary purposes, but for my purposes, I usually
want to make the sort of claim like "Jesus is Truth" sound like
gibberish by asking, "Can a person be true or false? Is Jesus really
equivalent to that property which all true sentences share? Isn't it
more clear to say what if any specific sentences about Jesus are being
affirmed here?"

I would like to see people stop treating notions such as Truth,
Reason, Human Nature, etc. as essences for the same reason that we
(all of us listed in the address I think) would all like to see
certain appeals to God dropped from our vocabularies--appeals to such
essences impede our attempts to ask what we can become, what we should
do, and why we should do it by offering poor justifications for
current beliefs and putting unneeded constraints on ways we may make
life better. Such terms suggest that there is simply a Way Things
Really Are that we need to conform to and can never be imporved upon.
As Rorty put it, they are attempts to "lend our past practices the
prestige of the eternal."

I think when Gaiman says about Midsummer's Night Dream that it is
true, he means the sort of truth I denoted with a capital-t--something
like that it is a bit of Ultimate Truth. I think that is what he and
Martel and others are doing in calling fiction true, but I hope not.
What do you think?

When regarded as an eternal essence (not just the propert that true
sentences share but that entity or whatever that _makes_ sentences
true), Truth becomes an impediment to coming up with ways that we can
make ourselves better in the future. This capital-t Truth is something
that always looks backwards. People find it in the
past such as in a Shakespeare play or the Bible, while small-t truths
look to the future for justification. I would rather try to have a
bunch of good provisionally held truths than claim to have a piece of
Truth itself.

I think the idea of Truth in Yann Martel and Neil Gaiman's work,
though presented as something new, is part of that old idea that goes
back at least to Plato--the idea that we are hopelessly out of touch
with Reality, the idea that there is something "out there" with which
we need to try to get in touch. James called such a notion, "the
religious impulse."  If we want to be thorough-going in our irreligion
I think such Truth-talk about some eternal realm or idyllic past ought
to be dropped from our vocabularies and that we ought to instead
promote provisional truth-talk about our hopes for making a better
future for ourselves and our grandchildren.

We can find other ways to talk about how good Shakespeare is without
saying that his play is True in the sense of being deeply in touch
with an eternal essence. Midsummer's Night Dream doesn't tell us what
Human Nature really is. Instead, it is part of our human
self-creation. Humanity is not a Nature in this view but rather a
ongoing project that has a lot of promise. Midsummer's Night Dream
isn't good art because it conforms to something old or eternal but
because it makes us into something new, something better than we ever
were before.

What does all this say about Quality? Is Quality presented by Pirsig
as such an essence that we ought to get better intouch with?

Best,
Steve