impasse

The topic I wish to address today – the general relationship between fiction and reality – is one that is no doubt familiar to you all. But I’d like to address it in a way that is rather different from the ways it has been addressed up till now. My own impression is that debate around this topic has become rather bogged down in recent years, and it seems to me it’s time now to pause and ask some fundamental questions about the issues at stake. So that’s what I’d like to do – in the hope that a new approach along the lines I will suggest might offer a way out of what is beginning to look suspiciously like an impasse.

The question, then, is how we are to understand – to conceptualise – the relationship between fiction and the so-called ‘real world’ or ‘reality’, and in particular whether, and in what sense, fiction can be said to be a source of truth or knowledge about the real world. Most of what I will say will relate to the treatment of this issue by what is broadly termed analytic aesthetics, but my arguments also have implications for continental aestheticians, and towards the end I will add a brief comment under that heading as well.

Within the analytic school, there seem to me to be three principal answers to the question I’m addressing.

First, there are those bold enough to suggest that fiction is often a source of truth about the real world and that, to quote one writer of this persuasion, ‘some fictional works contain or imply general thematic statements about the world that the reader, as part of an appreciation of the work, has to assess as true or false.’[1] Then, at the opposite pole, are those who deny that fictional literature can tell us anything true about the real world – or who believe that if it does, the best we can expect are, in Stolnitz’s words, mere ‘garden variety’ truths which are, in his words, ‘distinctly banal.’[2] And finally, there is a third approach which tries to steer a middle course between these positions and claims, in language that characteristically tends to be somewhat nebulous, that fiction certainly furnishes truths about the real world but they are not ‘fact-stating’, ‘propositional truths’, like those of science, but truths of a different kind. Fiction, as one advocate of this view puts it, allows the reader to acquire nonpropositional, ‘empathic beliefs and knowledge’ which then become available to apply in real life situations.[3] Or in the words of Lamarque and Olsen, who adopt a similar stance, what matters in fiction is not the truth or falsity of statements about human life but ‘[themes] which [are] in some sense central to human concern and which can therefore be recognised as of more or less human interest.’[4]

Thus, there seems to be a triad of basic positions – the view that fiction is a source of truth about the real world; the view that, if it is, those truths are at best banal; and then the somewhat elusive claim that literature is about a special kind of truth called ‘empathic knowledge’ or ‘themes central to human concern’. As I read the literature on this topic, all participants tend to take up positions somewhere within the boundary marked out by this triad, but there is little sign of an emerging consensus about which position, precisely, is to be preferred. The debate has being going on for quite some time now and there’s more than a hint that it has begun to stall – as if all positions have been thoroughly explored, and the best one can hope for is a kind of entente cordiale based on a deftly worded compromise.

I would like, today, to suggest a more radical course of action. I think it’s often a useful step when a debate reaches an impasse as this one seems to have done, to go back to the starting point, re-examine the question one is asking, and see if there’s not something in the nature of the question itself that’s blocking progress. And I want to suggest that this in fact the case. I want to suggest that there is an unexamined difficulty lurking right at the heart of the question which is hindering clarity of thought and which, if left unexamined, will simply go on fostering confusion and disagreement. Let me explain.

The debate, as we’ve said, is about the relationship between fiction and reality. So there are two terms in our equation: on the one hand there are works of fiction – such as Hamlet or Crime and Punishment and many others – and, on the other, there is something called ‘reality’ or perhaps ‘the real world’, or in alternative formulations sometimes employed, ‘the world around us’, or ‘real life’ or perhaps ‘human experience’. At first sight, this seems very simple and straightforward and we feel we’re ready to move straight on to whatever the next step might be. But in fact I think we need to pause right there because what we’ve said is not simple and straightforward at all and we have already, perhaps without realising it, raised a very thorny question which we cannot afford to ignore.

Personally, when I encounter the term ‘reality’ or an equivalent term of the kind I’ve just mentioned, in a philosophical analysis I usually begin to get uneasy. What exactly do we understand by the term? I don’t mean: does reality exist? I’m not asking the venerable philosophical question about the existence of the so-called external world. But I am, nonetheless, acutely aware that ‘reality’ is one of those chameleon-like terms whose meaning shifts in subtle but very important ways depending on the context in which it is used. So I need to know which meaning, precisely, it is assuming in the present context – that is, when we’re speaking of the reality to which fictional literature is addressed. I need to scrutinise the idea and ensure that the meaning I’m ascribing to it is clear and unambiguous, and relevant to the context to which I’m applying it. Because if I don’t do that, I’m simply embarking on a philosophical analysis in which one of the key terms has been left in a conceptual limbo; and an analysis that begins in that way is obviously destined to achieve very little.

How might we clarify the idea? An important first step in discovering what we mean by the concept of ‘reality’ in the context of fictional literature is to be clear as possible about what we do not mean. And one way of doing that is to compare literature with other areas of intellectual endeavour – with history and politics, for example – and ask if the same understanding of the concept seems to apply in those cases, and, if not, what the differences might be. Fortunately, certain writers have already given some thought to this problem, and I’d like to spend a few moments examining one analysis which strikes me as particularly insightful and enlightening.

Early in Stendhal’s novel La Chartreuse de Parme, there is a very interesting scene set on the battlefield of Waterloo. The novel’s hero, the young Fabrizio, is an ardent admirer of Napoleon and has made his way onto the field of battle to witness what he expects to be a dramatic moment in History – the momentous clash of European armies – and even perhaps, he hopes, to fight for his heroic Emperor. Hostilities have already begun when Fabrizio arrives, but strangely, the prodigious historical event he is anticipating never materialises. Instead, everything he encounters on the field of battle seems strangely random and confused, and his attention is constantly caught by what seem to be irrelevant details – like the dirtiness of the bare feet of the first corpse he sees, or the little black lumps of soil flung inexplicably into the air in a nearby field (kicked up, he realises soon after, by enemy cannon shot).[5]

The scene, as one astute critic points out, is a masterly depiction of the elusiveness, from the point of view of the individual, of what one might conventionally call an ‘historical event’. ‘When [he] describes Fabrizio searching for the battle of Waterloo and not being able to find it’, this critic writes,

Stendhal was expressing, in his own nimble way, one of the great insights of nineteenth century sensibility. It was a flash of pure wonder at the utterly paradoxical relation between an individual destiny and whatever general significance might be attached to an ‘historical event’. In fact, it was the splendid illustration of a myth which no historical venture, and no amount of sophistry, has thereafter been able to obliterate from our consciousness…. The myth is about man and history: the more naively, and genuinely, man experiences an historical event, the more the event disappears and something else takes its place: the starry sky, the other man, or the utterly ironical detail….[6]

The key point is in those last lines: ‘the more naively, and genuinely, man experiences an historical event, the more the event disappears...’ Recast to fit the terminology of our present discussion, the point might be formulated in the following way: In a loose, and not very informative sense, literature and history can both be said to be concerned with ‘reality’ or ‘the real world’. But history’s focus is a collective reality – the collective experience of men and women. Like kindred areas such as political or social thought, history’s concern is not an individual’s thoughts and feelings in themselves but only as they are understood as part of a world in which people act upon, and react to, one another. As a conceptual possibility, that is, history cannot be confined within the perspectives of an individual life. It rests on an intellectual schema which cannot even begin to be drawn up without the initial resolve to transcend the individual and his or her ‘private’ world of joys and sorrows, in order to posit the existence of a collective world which is presumed to exist ‘among’ men and women when they act upon one another. To state the matter in a paradoxical but nevertheless quite precise form, history concerns everyone, and for that very reason, concerns no one. This is not of course to imply that the events history records affect no one. That claim would merely be contrary to common sense. The point is simply that the categories of historical explanation – the concepts that claim to impose intelligibility and meaning on the otherwise formless multiplicity of a collective event – are, by their very nature, designed to illuminate something quite different from the world as perceived and understood by the single individual. Thus, to return to Stendhal, Fabrizio is unable to find the event called ‘the Battle of Waterloo’ which is in fact raging all around him, and his attention constantly focuses on seeming irrelevancies while a page of what we might quite reasonably call ‘history’ is being written before his very eyes. There is an apparently unbridgeable gulf – an ‘irretrievable disproportion’ as the critic I have been quoting calls it[7] – between the forms of thought that confer meaning on a collective event and the categories that shape the individual’s own experience.

Now, this analysis falls well short of a comprehensive account of the differences between history and fictional literature. But it does, nevertheless, point to a crucial dividing line between their fields of operation, and gives some initial shape and form to the concept of ‘reality’ that applies in each case. The ‘reality’–, the ‘real world’, the ‘human experience’– with which literature is concerned, the analysis suggests, is that of the living human individual – the reality of the individual’s hopes, fears, joys and sorrows. The reality of history, by contrast, is constituted on a plane that transcends the individual.[8] There is, in other words, a fundamental difference between the reality with which fictional literature is concerned, and the realities constructed by historical, social and political thought. This conclusion, I should add, is in no way inconsistent with the obvious fact that certain works of fictional literature – so-called ‘historical novels’ for example –sometimes incorporate episodes from history, and occasionally even historical figures (Napoleon being an obvious example). But such works characteristically make use of historical events as part of their plot or setting , and there is a major difference between that and the quite different proposition of attempting to close the gap between the perspectives of individual experience and the categories of historical explanation. So the mere fact that history makes periodic appearances in works of fiction is not an objection to the claim I am advancing. It remains the case, as I have argued, that the ‘realities’ – the ‘real worlds’ – addressed by literature and by history are of quite different kinds, and to confuse the two, or assume that they do not need to be distinguished – as many theorists do – would be to ignore a crucial feature of the concept of reality relevant to fictional literature. It would in effect be to send the concept back to the definitional limbo of which I spoke earlier.

Now, I see this analysis as an important first step in clarifying the notion of reality in the context of fictional literature and I want to return to these ideas in a moment. But before doing so, I would like, very briefly, to take the analysis a step further by drawing another comparison – this time not between literature and history, but between literature and science.

Debates about the relative importance of literature and science are not new. One well-known episode is the ‘Two Cultures’ controversy of the 1960s; another was the so-called ‘science wars’ debate of the 1990s which, while concerned principally with science itself, also had implications for literature and for the humanities more generally. One familiar line of argument in these debates goes something like this: “Science aims to give us an account of reality based on objective evidence – evidence whose validity is verifiable through public processes of experimentation and demonstration. The reality of which fictional literature speaks, on the other hand, is much more questionable. Literature has no equivalent to science’s public tribunal of experimental verification, and the knowledge it provides – if one can call it knowledge – cannot be described as objective.” Advocates of this line of argument might perhaps concede that, at their best, works of literature give us an author’s sincere and carefully observed view of the world, and this may intrigue or entertain us; but ultimately, they would argue, the ‘reality’ in question is simply a reality perceived by the author: it is necessarily only ‘subjective’.

As I say, this argument is a familiar one and I’m sure you’ve heard it many times before. Yet familiar though it is, it has a rather irritating persuasiveness. We’d like very much to dismiss it as facile and superficial but where exactly is the flaw? Where does it go wrong?

It goes wrong, in my view, through an ambiguity lurking within those over-used terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ – and I think it’s very instructive to reflect on that ambiguity for a moment.

Our comparison between fictional literature and history, you’ll recall, suggested that the focus of literature is the world as perceived and understood by the single individual – the reality of the individual’s hopes, fears, joys and sorrows. History’s focus was the collective reality presumed to exist ‘among’ men and women as they act upon one another – a reality which necessarily transcends the individual. Neither ‘reality’, we recall, emerged as more ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ than the other; they were distinguished simply by this individual/collective contrast.

Now, what exactly gives rise to the persistent tendency to associate science with the idea of ‘objectivity’? In my view, the reason is very largely the methodology to which I have referred – science’s well known procedures of experimentation, openness to public scrutiny by peers, and willingness to have experiments repeated by others. But, if we reflect on it, is ‘objectivity’ the best, most accurate, term to describe what takes place in such contexts? The feature of this methodology that’s even more obvious – so obvious, in fact, that we easily take it for granted and overlook it – is the importance placed on the impersonal nature of the processes employed and of the knowledge thus acquired – that is, the importance of being able to reach the same conclusion irrespective of who is asking the question. Like history, though in a different way, and for different reasons, science also seeks to free itself from anything dependent on the perspective of the single individual. Francis Bacon, that well known early advocate of the scientific method, wrote that one of the ‘illusions which block men’s minds’ is that brought about by ‘the individual nature of each man’s mind and body; and also in his education, way of life and chance events’.[9] Viewed from the standpoint of science, in other words, the individual, with what are regarded as his or her ‘merely personal’ perceptions, is a potential source of distortion rather than of knowledge. The ideal perspective for science is quite deliberately no-one’s perspective: it is, so to speak, a ‘public’ perspective, and the reality it pursues is, as a matter of principle, an entirely impersonal reality.

The danger of the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ in drawing distinctions between science and literature is not in other words that they are entirely irrelevant – because they are not – but that they can so easily be misleading. While capturing to a degree the idea of impersonality, the term ‘objective’ can also very easily suggest the idea of ‘correspondence with the facts’, or ‘what reality is truly like’. ‘Subjective’, similarly, can suggest not just that which owes its origin and nature to individual experience, but that which may also be biased and therefore unreliable. Once we clear those confusing ambiguities away, however, we see that we are really dealing with intellectual enterprises of quite different kinds. Literature, we see, is concerned with the reality of the single individual’s perceptions and understandings (which, incidentally, will also include his misperceptions and misunderstandings). Science explores a reality which systematically aims to exclude anything of that nature. Both could with equal justice claim to be describing ‘what reality is truly like’ because they are looking at what are, in terms of human understanding, two quite different kinds of realities.

Of course, this analysis makes no more claim to provide a full account of the methodology of science than the earlier discussion did to provide a comprehensive analysis of the theory of history. The comparison with science does, nevertheless, throw further light on the very troublesome issue raised in the introductory section of this paper – the multiple meanings of the term ‘reality’ and of equivalents such as ‘the real world’ or ‘the world around us’. The reality addressed by science, the analysis suggests, is a specific kind of reality, just as the reality of history is of a specific kind – and both differ from the reality addressed by fictional literature. Both science and history, albeit for different reasons, are obliged, as a matter of principle, to shun the domain of the individual or the ‘merely personal’. For literature, by contrast, the ‘merely personal’ is a sine qua non of its existence.

I would now like, very briefly, to draw out certain implications of this analysis for current debates about fiction and reality. As I indicated earlier, most of what I say will relate to analytic aesthetics, but I will say a little about continental aesthetics as well.

How, we first need to ask, do writers in the analytic sphere define the concept of reality in their deliberations on the relationship between fiction and reality? I regret to say that in my reading of the relevant material I find very little attempt to define the concept at all. One encounters various cursory formulations which are used as synonyms – such as ‘the actual world’, ‘the rest of the world in which [aesthetics objects] exist’ (that variant is Monroe Beardsley’s) and even Stolnitz’s rather odd phrase, ‘the great world’. But obviously none of that really tells us anything more than the terms ‘the real world’ or ‘reality’ do in the first place. Certainly, there is nothing to give us any guidance on the issues I have raised in my analysis.

So, in the absence of any explanation, we are, I think, obliged to draw our conclusions from the way the term ‘reality’ is used. That is, we need to look at particular treatments of the relationship between fiction and reality offered by analytic thinkers and ask: what kinds of phenomena do these writers cite as examples of the ‘reality’ to which fictional literature is said to relate, and what can we deduce from these examples about the notion of reality they seem to have in mind?

I’m sure you can think of many instances yourselves; but the examples I have found in discussions by analytic aestheticians of what is meant by ‘reality’ or the ‘real world’ include the following:

It is, I think, fairly difficult to infer any very clear definition of the concept of reality from these examples but I am nevertheless going to hazard what I think is an educated guess. I believe that the implied concept of ‘reality’ or ‘real world’ underlying examples such as these is not very far from the concept of reality I have identified in the case of science. The examples, if we examine them, all suggest states of affairs that anybody could verify – that is, an impersonal, ‘public’ reality which is, as far as possible, independent of the perspective from which it is viewed. Certainly, these examples don’t really evoke the idea of scientific methods of verification – propositions of this kind are, after all, much simpler than those that science normally addresses – but, it is interesting and revealing, I think to see that we can easily add one or two elementary scientific propositions to the list and find that they do not seem out of place. [The list above was shown on a PowerPoint slide. At this point, I showed the same slide with the following two additions:

You can no doubt see now where I’m going with this, so I won’t labour the point too heavily. If it is true, as I have argued, that a work of fictional literature, such as Hamlet or Crime and Punishment, addresses a reality of a specific kind which is not the impersonal reality of science – any more than it is the collective reality of history – ought we really be surprised that analyses that assume the contrary seem, as we noted earlier, to be making little headway and to be caught in an impasse? One commentator has written recently that the relationship between fiction and reality is a problem that ‘has proved remarkably resistant to satisfactory resolution’[10] which is perhaps a more diplomatic way of expressing the point. But however we describe the situation, the cause, in my view, is fairly clear. The debate has resisted satisfactory resolution because it is, in effect, trying to fit literature into a world in which it simply does not belong – a world viewed from an impersonal vantage-point, made up of publicly demonstrable facts, a world which, as a matter of principle, needs to treat the single individual’s perspective as not just as inadequate but even suspect. Asking what fictional literature can tell us about a reality of this kind is guaranteed to lead us into an impasse for the quite simple reason that literature is, by its very nature, addressed to a reality of a quite different kind.

I mentioned earlier that I would also say a word about continental aesthetics but it will be very brief. Continental and analytic aesthetics tend, as we know, to adopt very different approaches to their subject matter but one feature they share is that theoretical analyses in both contexts make extensive use of the notion of ‘reality’; and continental aesthetics, like its analytic counterpart, is apt to comment frequently on the relationship between literature and ‘reality’, or ‘real world’.

Tied to the real world, art adopts the principle of self-preservation of that world, turning it into the ideal of a self-identical art … It is by virtue of its separation from empirical reality that the work of art can become a being of a higher order…[11]

I should be honest and confess that I do not know precisely what this statement means, but I do note that it seems to rely heavily on concepts termed ‘the real world’ and ‘reality’ – the word ‘empirical’ adding very little in my view. Now, nowhere in his Aesthetic Theory, as far as I can tell, does Adorno provide a clear definition of what he has in mind when he uses these terms, so, as with analytic aesthetics, I am obliged to infer his meaning from the contexts in which the terms are used. This quote is taken from an early section of Aesthetic Theory headed ‘On the relation between art and society’ and that in itself, I think, is very revealing. In fact, as one reads through Adorno’s text, one repeatedly has the impression that when he uses terms such as ‘the real world’ or ‘empirical reality’, he means a social reality, or perhaps a socio-cultural reality, of some kind – but in any event a collective reality – a reality understood, as I said in my earlier discussion of this issue, in terms of the collective experience of men and women.

This, I should add, seems to be a prominent characteristic of much continental theory, especially of Frankfurt school thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Marcuse – but also of other writers such as Sartre, Foucault, Derrida to some extent, and on this side of the Channel, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton. Seldom, once again, is the question addressed in any explicit way, but there is, to my mind, a constant underlying suggestion that the reality to which art is addressed is understood as a political, historical or cultural reality – that is, a collective reality of some kind.

You can, I imagine, readily anticipate what I want to say about this. Areas of continental aesthetics influenced by thinking of this kind seem to me to suffer from the same problem I have identified in the analytic approach – though for a different reason. Once again, we see an attempt to yoke fictional literature to a reality which is not its essential concern – in this case, a reality which, as I argued earlier in my discussion of Stendhal, is, as a matter of principle, separated from the world of fictional literature by an unbridgeable gulf – an ‘irretrievable disproportion’. In analytic aesthetics, I have argued, the debate seeks to link fiction to a semi-scientific reality, a reality made up of the impersonal, publicly demonstrable fact. Large areas of continental aesthetics, I would argue, attempt to link literature to a reality which is just as alien – the world of collective experience which, as we saw, is also, by its very nature, obliged to transcend the world of the single individual.

One of the central challenges facing modern aesthetics – continental or analytic – is, in my view, to develop a theory of literature – and of art generally – that overcomes the fundamental problem analysed in this paper. Firstly, it is crucial in my view to recognise that the concept of ‘reality’, ‘the real world’ etc must not be left in a conceptual limbo and waved away with cursory phrases such as ‘the world around us’, ‘the actual world’, ‘the rest of the world in which [aesthetics objects] exist’, or ‘the great world’. The nature of the reality to which literature is addressed needs to be analysed and defined. It needs to be given the same degree of philosophical precision we would expect in any other part of our analysis – especially given that it is one of the two key elements in our equation. Secondly, I believe we need to recognise clearly that the reality to which literature – and all art – is addressed is a reality of a specific kind – which I have called, in very summary and general terms, the reality of the living individual, as distinct from the impersonal worlds of science or history. We need, in short, to situate literature in the context in which it rightly belongs and cease seeing it as a competitor in areas in which it has no essential place.

That of course is only a beginning. The real challenge, once having taken those steps, is to develop a theory of literature and art that builds on this foundation – a theory based firmly on the recognition that the reality to which art is addressed is a reality perceived and understood by the single individual. I know of only one theorist in recent times who has done this and that is the much-neglected French theorist André Malraux, and those of you who are familiar with his work will know that it offers us a perspective on the world of art and literature very different from that offered by analytic or continental aesthetics. But my time has run out and I don’t intend to say anything more about Malraux than that. I mention him only because you may perhaps think that my strictures against the analytic and continental approaches leave us with a rather empty and desolate landscape with nowhere else to go. I think there is an alternative. I think it is perfectly possible to develop a theory of literature and art which is based squarely where it should be and which avoids the pitfalls I have described. And I think that if we are to make real progress – and emerge from our present impasse – that is the challenge that lies before us.

Footnotes (need one or two details added)

[1] Kivy, Philosophies of Arts, 125, 122.

[2] 342

[3] Novitz

[4] Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature, A Philosophical Perspective, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 332, 450.

[5] Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal, Romans et Nouvelles (2) (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 59-65. Fabrizio says to one of the French sergeants, ‘Sir, this is the first time I have been present at a battle. But is this a real one?’ (p.65)

[6] Chiaromonte, "Malraux and the Demons of Action," 98,99.

[7] Ibid., 99.

[8] This does not imply that literature is necessarily always concerned with individual differences (as suggested, for instance, in Rousseau’s well-known claim that Nature ‘broke the mould’ in which he was formed). The enormous range of human types which literary works present suggest on the contrary that the ‘categories that shape the individual’s experience’, to use the terminology I employed a moment ago, can take an endless variety of forms and need not revolve around a special value attached to an individual’s distinctive characteristics.

[9] Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverstone (eds.), (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000). 41,46.

[10] Peter Lamarque. Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics 377 [check]

[11] T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 6.

Fiction and Reality: A Way out of the Impasse?