[MD] Art and Stories

[MarshaV]

Greetings,  

My German grandmother, who spoke very little, 
had a Doberman Pincer named Puck.  I think 
she was a great communicator.   


Marsha 






On Jun 4, 2010, at 8:28 AM, Steven Peterson wrote:

> 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
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