"The denial of moral absolutism leads not to relativism, but to nihilism."
Paul Boghossian, "The Maze of Moral Relativism"
I never thought I'd see a decent Captain America film in my lifetime, but this time Marvel has managed brio without ponderousness. When I was into comics in the 1980's, Cap was, it must be said, my favorite. While I enjoyed a number of titles, he eschewed the smart-alecky goofiness of Spider-Man, the self-involvement of the X-Men, and the contrived contortions of the Fantastic Four; sober but spirited, he was neither the hipster Batman nor the staid Superman (that George Washington of superheroes).
In the 1980's, shrouded by the forgetfulness of his reading public, Captain America bore little resemblance to the "old-growth superhero" (in A. O. Scott's memorable phrase) of the 1940's. Making up in steadfastness for what he lacked in flamboyance, he merely did his workaday thing month after obdurate month. In the new movie he reclaims a bit of the Nazi-slugging romance (Red Skull always was the villain par excellence, implacable and inscrutable without being ridiculous, compared to which Darth Vader was a clown).
Needless to say, Cap also embodies American exceptionalism as well as the absolute injunction to act morally. As Boghossian compellingly argues in his piece, if one wishes to avoid believing in nothing, it is logically necessary to believe in something. For the non-psychopath there is no evading moral dialogue (or in the case of comic book films, moral combat).
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Eccentrics
Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic is the rare prophet with subtlety, arguing with great ingenuity but always in opposition, whether to thoughtlessness, smug certitude, or superficial sociability. He is the rare intellectual insider who dares to be deeply and skeptically unfashionable; as such, he steers a tight course between the curmudgeonly, the lugubrious, and the devastating.
In his most recent piece (not available online except to TNR subscribers), he uses the metaphor of birds that sing at night (because they can't get a tune in edgewise in the growing cacophony of the urban day) to lament his growing disconnection with the insulted and humiliated of the world:
"Not long ago I surprised myself with the embarrassing thought that I no longer know any lonely people...But I am cut off from the ones who are cut off, from the disconnected and the un-networked (our technology of communications is supposed to have made such marginalizations obsolete, but I do not believe it: our culture is filling up with evidence of the lonely digital crowd), the ones who lead lives of radical solitariness, of aloneness without appeal, with no bonds to console them and no prospects to divert them, who struggle for stimulation and expression, whose beds are deserts, whose phones almost never ring, who march through their difficulties without any expectation of serendipity or transcendence. Their absence from my experience makes me feel disgracefully narrow."
This is a brave admission, and an acknowledgement by Wieseltier that he is, despite himself, one of the elite. But as one who gets to know many such people (as many physicians and most social workers do), I see a risk in extolling the lives of the disaffected and alienated. There seems to be romanticizing here, as of the overlooked poet scribbling in his garret, the anchorite glorying in his desert cave, or the oppressed dissident in the labor camp. Wieseltier seems to be claiming the inherent dignity of suffering, and while there is that, does this mean we should be any less assiduous in our struggle to alleviate distress? Suffering has the potential to lead to wisdom, but arguably in actuality it most commonly does not.
The prophet (whether secular or religious) is always positioned somewhere between the eccentric and the crank. The eccentric lingers "away from the center" of human experience, but can still engage in dialogue with a significant part of his fellows, whereas the crank has been cut off, as when a man goes into the desert for transcendence but never makes it back to relate the tale.
In his most recent piece (not available online except to TNR subscribers), he uses the metaphor of birds that sing at night (because they can't get a tune in edgewise in the growing cacophony of the urban day) to lament his growing disconnection with the insulted and humiliated of the world:
"Not long ago I surprised myself with the embarrassing thought that I no longer know any lonely people...But I am cut off from the ones who are cut off, from the disconnected and the un-networked (our technology of communications is supposed to have made such marginalizations obsolete, but I do not believe it: our culture is filling up with evidence of the lonely digital crowd), the ones who lead lives of radical solitariness, of aloneness without appeal, with no bonds to console them and no prospects to divert them, who struggle for stimulation and expression, whose beds are deserts, whose phones almost never ring, who march through their difficulties without any expectation of serendipity or transcendence. Their absence from my experience makes me feel disgracefully narrow."
This is a brave admission, and an acknowledgement by Wieseltier that he is, despite himself, one of the elite. But as one who gets to know many such people (as many physicians and most social workers do), I see a risk in extolling the lives of the disaffected and alienated. There seems to be romanticizing here, as of the overlooked poet scribbling in his garret, the anchorite glorying in his desert cave, or the oppressed dissident in the labor camp. Wieseltier seems to be claiming the inherent dignity of suffering, and while there is that, does this mean we should be any less assiduous in our struggle to alleviate distress? Suffering has the potential to lead to wisdom, but arguably in actuality it most commonly does not.
The prophet (whether secular or religious) is always positioned somewhere between the eccentric and the crank. The eccentric lingers "away from the center" of human experience, but can still engage in dialogue with a significant part of his fellows, whereas the crank has been cut off, as when a man goes into the desert for transcendence but never makes it back to relate the tale.
Monday, July 18, 2011
The Elegaic Mode
For W. G. Sebald, the modern world, a composite of contemporary detritus and forlorn nature, is a kind of forme fruste of the historical human condition. Sebald was a past-intoxicated writer, and in The Rings of Saturn a ramble through southeastern England yields disquisitions on Joseph Conrad, herring fisheries, imperial decline, and the silkworm industry. The entropy is inescapable. Here are a few choice quotes:
(On fishermen): "I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness."
(On the writer Michael Hamburger): "Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."
(On Thomas Abrams, who devoted his life to a minute reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem): "In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch."
(On the melancholy of medieval weavers): "It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread."
(On the destructiveness of civilization): "Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away."
If as many say, we now live in the Anthropocene era, in which the activities of Homo sapiens directly affect planet-wide processes, why can't we regard humanity with kindness, as we might regard any natural force? Just as a levee is meant to withstand the flood, one's mourning, indignation, and even resentment are meant to withstand and, if possible, to divert the human flood from that which one holds dear.
(On fishermen): "I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness."
(On the writer Michael Hamburger): "Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."
(On Thomas Abrams, who devoted his life to a minute reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem): "In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch."
(On the melancholy of medieval weavers): "It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread."
(On the destructiveness of civilization): "Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away."
If as many say, we now live in the Anthropocene era, in which the activities of Homo sapiens directly affect planet-wide processes, why can't we regard humanity with kindness, as we might regard any natural force? Just as a levee is meant to withstand the flood, one's mourning, indignation, and even resentment are meant to withstand and, if possible, to divert the human flood from that which one holds dear.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
That (Self-) Blaming Feeling
"Why, worthy thane,
You do unbend your noble strength to think
So brainsickly of things. Go get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand."
Lady Macbeth
In a compelling argument for the congruence of brain and mind, and the ethics that ought to follow therefrom, David Eagleman maintains that blame derives from a misguided and outmoded belief in free will. He claims that blame is basically backward-looking, implying that one could and should have done differently (than one just did). But when we face up to monism and the brain-as-mechanism, we realize that, after the fact, there is nothing to do but acknowledge that given the conditions that prevailed at any past time, one could not in fact have acted differently.
Eagleman argues that shame and blame are not, in fact, very good at modifying behavior, and what we need is a more rational and forward-looking attempt to achieve desired outcomes, in ourselves and others. A la B. F. Skinner, he proposes that we approach brains as we would approach engines or computers that are on the blink. Both sticks and carrots may be necessary to shape desired behaviors, but they should be undertaken in a dispassionate way, free of messy or reckless vindictiveness.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about his advocacy of what he calls "the frontal workout," that is, an updated biofeedback project whereby one might learn (or teach) better control over impulses. But he might have said more about the phenomenology of guilt and blame, which are, after all, very deep aspects of human experience. These are very distinct and familiar subjective phenomena, and arguably they are far from arbitrary or nonsensical.
Blame is the social group's means of imposing its norms, and blame works most effectively when it is internalized as guilt and shame. Blame is a deterrent, plain and simple. And as is so often the case, it works best when it is involuntary (when blame is reflected on too carefully, one arrives at Hamlet). This is not to say that shame and blame are generally good things, merely that they are natural (and many perfectly natural human behaviors are odious). However, even in Eagleman's handyman-of-the-brain world, some impetus and motivation for change must exist, and I don't know whether that motive would come from unless from those primeval emotions of guilt and shame. They merely exist in healthy and in pathological forms. Guilt and shame may seem to be primarily about the past, but really they project forward into the future; like pain, they are the brain's message to itself: That didn't go well, so try something different. Blame and guilt are modes of moral (self-)argument.
And in a follow-up to the recent post about reading, the literati are a bit atwitter about Philip Roth's declaration that he has stopped reading fiction. In a Salon article Laura Miller speculates that inasmuch as fiction provides insight into character and human subjectivity, perhaps some do reach a point at which they have all the insight they need. After all, the novel isn't called the novel for nothing, and some readers do believe there is nothing new under the sun. But then again, one could paraphrase Samuel Johnson and say that "He who is tired of fiction is tired of life."
You do unbend your noble strength to think
So brainsickly of things. Go get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hand."
Lady Macbeth
In a compelling argument for the congruence of brain and mind, and the ethics that ought to follow therefrom, David Eagleman maintains that blame derives from a misguided and outmoded belief in free will. He claims that blame is basically backward-looking, implying that one could and should have done differently (than one just did). But when we face up to monism and the brain-as-mechanism, we realize that, after the fact, there is nothing to do but acknowledge that given the conditions that prevailed at any past time, one could not in fact have acted differently.
Eagleman argues that shame and blame are not, in fact, very good at modifying behavior, and what we need is a more rational and forward-looking attempt to achieve desired outcomes, in ourselves and others. A la B. F. Skinner, he proposes that we approach brains as we would approach engines or computers that are on the blink. Both sticks and carrots may be necessary to shape desired behaviors, but they should be undertaken in a dispassionate way, free of messy or reckless vindictiveness.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about his advocacy of what he calls "the frontal workout," that is, an updated biofeedback project whereby one might learn (or teach) better control over impulses. But he might have said more about the phenomenology of guilt and blame, which are, after all, very deep aspects of human experience. These are very distinct and familiar subjective phenomena, and arguably they are far from arbitrary or nonsensical.
Blame is the social group's means of imposing its norms, and blame works most effectively when it is internalized as guilt and shame. Blame is a deterrent, plain and simple. And as is so often the case, it works best when it is involuntary (when blame is reflected on too carefully, one arrives at Hamlet). This is not to say that shame and blame are generally good things, merely that they are natural (and many perfectly natural human behaviors are odious). However, even in Eagleman's handyman-of-the-brain world, some impetus and motivation for change must exist, and I don't know whether that motive would come from unless from those primeval emotions of guilt and shame. They merely exist in healthy and in pathological forms. Guilt and shame may seem to be primarily about the past, but really they project forward into the future; like pain, they are the brain's message to itself: That didn't go well, so try something different. Blame and guilt are modes of moral (self-)argument.
And in a follow-up to the recent post about reading, the literati are a bit atwitter about Philip Roth's declaration that he has stopped reading fiction. In a Salon article Laura Miller speculates that inasmuch as fiction provides insight into character and human subjectivity, perhaps some do reach a point at which they have all the insight they need. After all, the novel isn't called the novel for nothing, and some readers do believe there is nothing new under the sun. But then again, one could paraphrase Samuel Johnson and say that "He who is tired of fiction is tired of life."
Sunday, June 26, 2011
The Tree of Life
Solitude from mere outward condition of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectation of irony and skepticism have no place...After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality. It had emerged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Terence Malick's The Tree of Life consistently defies expectations of coherent narrative, instead implanting myriad images implacably in the mind. One could be haunted by this film. As David Thomson wrote in his review in The New Republic: "Less than a framework of story, we have a situation, and this is itself not just fair, but an enlightening novelty. Most of us do not feel that we are living stories (at least not until later); we believe we are getting on with a situation."
As the movie's epigraph from Job suggests, the situation is one of inevitable suffering and loss, albeit experienced in a perpetual haze of existential glory. The tone of the work is continually exalted, which probably accounts for its controversial and varied reception. For those predisposed to its message, irony is silenced; the sacred is always a puzzle to the intelligentsia.
The situation in The Tree of Life, is, most mundanely, that of a family in 1950's Texas, but really Malick is concerned with the situation of human life and its vexed relation to life, broadly considered. Much has been made, both derisively and respectfully, of Malick's depiction of the history of the universe and the pre-human earth (dinosaurs even!), but I'm not sure why. Narratively, this is merely the use of a very wide-angle lens, and a salutary use at that--there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Manhattan. Indeed, a few aerial shots of early hominids would not have been out of place. Psychologically, the "family romance" may seem endlessly interesting, but neither man nor woman lives by interpersonal relationships alone. There is that which preceded us and that which will outlast us.
In the first few minutes of the film, as we get our first impressionistic views of the O'Brien family, a female voice-over poses the contrast of nature and grace, asserting that the way of nature is domination and self-indulgence, whereas the way of grace is care and endurance. Much of the film unforgettably documents the necessity of nature--deep space, inscrutable water, arboreal visions, scathing light, barren rock, towering glass and steel--but the realm of grace is uniquely human. Consciousness is dualistic not in substance (body and soul, brain and mind) but in moral experience, in what we have no option but to choose.
Only human beings, in all of life that we know of, can fail the test of grace, and we see the risk and stakes of such failure in the boy, Jack, of 1950's Waco and the contemporary man, Jack (a ravaged Sean Penn). Violence and predation antedated humanity by many millions of years, but only with the first glimmer of consciousness did the storyline of Cain and Abel come into the world. We see it in the boy Jack's sullen resentment of his father and his acts of petty boyhood mayhem (breaking windows, mistreating frogs, stealing lingerie). Similarly, only humanity is prey to despair, of which contemporary Jack appears to be a classic example, suffering Kierkegaard's "sickness unto death."
Some reviews I've read seemed to infer that the culminating beach scene was some kind of Rapture-like representation of the end of the world, but to me it seemed a symbolic depiction of redemption, as Jack somehow breaks through his granitic alienation. The idea and the ideal of the sacred presume that amid seemingly endless tawdriness or trauma there are still spaces and times of grace if we can only find them.
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Terence Malick's The Tree of Life consistently defies expectations of coherent narrative, instead implanting myriad images implacably in the mind. One could be haunted by this film. As David Thomson wrote in his review in The New Republic: "Less than a framework of story, we have a situation, and this is itself not just fair, but an enlightening novelty. Most of us do not feel that we are living stories (at least not until later); we believe we are getting on with a situation."
As the movie's epigraph from Job suggests, the situation is one of inevitable suffering and loss, albeit experienced in a perpetual haze of existential glory. The tone of the work is continually exalted, which probably accounts for its controversial and varied reception. For those predisposed to its message, irony is silenced; the sacred is always a puzzle to the intelligentsia.
The situation in The Tree of Life, is, most mundanely, that of a family in 1950's Texas, but really Malick is concerned with the situation of human life and its vexed relation to life, broadly considered. Much has been made, both derisively and respectfully, of Malick's depiction of the history of the universe and the pre-human earth (dinosaurs even!), but I'm not sure why. Narratively, this is merely the use of a very wide-angle lens, and a salutary use at that--there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Manhattan. Indeed, a few aerial shots of early hominids would not have been out of place. Psychologically, the "family romance" may seem endlessly interesting, but neither man nor woman lives by interpersonal relationships alone. There is that which preceded us and that which will outlast us.
In the first few minutes of the film, as we get our first impressionistic views of the O'Brien family, a female voice-over poses the contrast of nature and grace, asserting that the way of nature is domination and self-indulgence, whereas the way of grace is care and endurance. Much of the film unforgettably documents the necessity of nature--deep space, inscrutable water, arboreal visions, scathing light, barren rock, towering glass and steel--but the realm of grace is uniquely human. Consciousness is dualistic not in substance (body and soul, brain and mind) but in moral experience, in what we have no option but to choose.
Only human beings, in all of life that we know of, can fail the test of grace, and we see the risk and stakes of such failure in the boy, Jack, of 1950's Waco and the contemporary man, Jack (a ravaged Sean Penn). Violence and predation antedated humanity by many millions of years, but only with the first glimmer of consciousness did the storyline of Cain and Abel come into the world. We see it in the boy Jack's sullen resentment of his father and his acts of petty boyhood mayhem (breaking windows, mistreating frogs, stealing lingerie). Similarly, only humanity is prey to despair, of which contemporary Jack appears to be a classic example, suffering Kierkegaard's "sickness unto death."
Some reviews I've read seemed to infer that the culminating beach scene was some kind of Rapture-like representation of the end of the world, but to me it seemed a symbolic depiction of redemption, as Jack somehow breaks through his granitic alienation. The idea and the ideal of the sacred presume that amid seemingly endless tawdriness or trauma there are still spaces and times of grace if we can only find them.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Drill Imagination Right Through Necessity
Play
Nothing's going to become of anyone
except death:
therefore: it's okay
to yearn
too high:
the grave accommodates
swell rambunctiousness &
ruin's not
compromised by magnificence:
that cut-off point
liberates us to the
common disaster: so
pick a perch--
apple branch for example in bloom--
tune up
and
drill imagination right through necessity:
it's all right:
it's been taken care of:
is allowed, considering
A. R. Ammons
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Missing
"How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?"
Jorge Luis Borges
Some time ago Linda Holmes at NPR wrote a wonderful piece observing that, by virtue of sheer plenitude of space and time, each of us is destined to miss out on the vast majority of whatever it is we love in life. Far from being a downer, it is comforting and even self-transcending to realize that no matter how assiduous or dynamic one may be, there are just more people to meet, books to read, films to see, or sunsets to witness than any one life can manage. It is a reminder that even if, as the cliche goes, the world is much shrunken owing to the speed of travel and communication, one can divide infinity many times over and still be left with infinity. To live a lifetime is to gaze upon an ocean of experience, yet be allowed to dip one's hand in the water only once.
One consequence of having a large "physical" library (as opposed to having a Kindle sitting unobtrusively on the table) is that the many hundreds of tomes mutely gaze outward, as if in reproach of my all-too-human forgetfulness. My eight-year-old has asked before, "Daddy, why do you have all of these books if you can get them all on the computer?" One reason is that my recall isn't what it once was, and my library is one kind of living personal record. Many volumes I do dip into now and again--a poem here, an essay or short story there--but how many, realistically, will I live to reread altogether?
For some 20 years--roughly, from 15 to 35--I was a prolific reader, of all genres, but particularly fiction. You know: the canon, the great books (and many that were not-so-great). While I still read, of course, typical life circumstances have much reduced the time available for it. Whether by coincidence or not, I find myself less patient with fiction, and more given to non-fiction, than used to be the case, but I continue to fight that. Proust I feel sure I will live to reread, all 3000 pages. But the 1000 pages of Les Miserables? Probably not. Much of Dickens I hope to reread, but probably not Barnaby Rudge. Recently I read Harold Bloom claiming that rereading Samuel Richardson's Clarissa was a great priority. Really? I've never read Richardson even once. Do I need to read him before expending time on rereading Jonathan Swift? And should I do that before, or after, I brush up on American history?
Inasmuch as there is nothing outside of reality, fiction is merely a peculiar branch of non-fiction, reality's myriad conscious self-reflections. Per Stendhal, a novel is a mirror carried along a main road, but it is a puzzling kind of mirror, with surprising concavities and convexities. Fiction seeks reflections that reverberate and recreate reality in microcosm, a la Borges's Aleph. A successful work of art achieves a unity that symbolically reproduces the completeness of reality. Non-fiction is always a magnifying glass, if not a microscope--clarity is purchased at the expense of breadth. Fiction is a necessarily distorting mirror, since any simple mirror or magnifying glass capable of capturing everything we care about would have to be as large as the universe itself.
The stakes are high in the arts--the potential payoff is high, but when fiction seriously fails, it is upsetting, because it is as if reality itself is being mocked or even maimed. Bad non-fiction is like a lie, which is bad enough, but bad fiction is like blasphemy. I forever vacillate between Plato--who saw the arts as begetting deceptive images (among the myriad shadows on the wall of the cave), distractions from the pursuit of truth--and Aristotle, who argued that poetry at its best reveals necessary truths, while history merely documents contingencies. Perhaps it is just a matter of epistemological and existential focus, the iris of the inquisitive mind.
Jorge Luis Borges
Some time ago Linda Holmes at NPR wrote a wonderful piece observing that, by virtue of sheer plenitude of space and time, each of us is destined to miss out on the vast majority of whatever it is we love in life. Far from being a downer, it is comforting and even self-transcending to realize that no matter how assiduous or dynamic one may be, there are just more people to meet, books to read, films to see, or sunsets to witness than any one life can manage. It is a reminder that even if, as the cliche goes, the world is much shrunken owing to the speed of travel and communication, one can divide infinity many times over and still be left with infinity. To live a lifetime is to gaze upon an ocean of experience, yet be allowed to dip one's hand in the water only once.
One consequence of having a large "physical" library (as opposed to having a Kindle sitting unobtrusively on the table) is that the many hundreds of tomes mutely gaze outward, as if in reproach of my all-too-human forgetfulness. My eight-year-old has asked before, "Daddy, why do you have all of these books if you can get them all on the computer?" One reason is that my recall isn't what it once was, and my library is one kind of living personal record. Many volumes I do dip into now and again--a poem here, an essay or short story there--but how many, realistically, will I live to reread altogether?
For some 20 years--roughly, from 15 to 35--I was a prolific reader, of all genres, but particularly fiction. You know: the canon, the great books (and many that were not-so-great). While I still read, of course, typical life circumstances have much reduced the time available for it. Whether by coincidence or not, I find myself less patient with fiction, and more given to non-fiction, than used to be the case, but I continue to fight that. Proust I feel sure I will live to reread, all 3000 pages. But the 1000 pages of Les Miserables? Probably not. Much of Dickens I hope to reread, but probably not Barnaby Rudge. Recently I read Harold Bloom claiming that rereading Samuel Richardson's Clarissa was a great priority. Really? I've never read Richardson even once. Do I need to read him before expending time on rereading Jonathan Swift? And should I do that before, or after, I brush up on American history?
Inasmuch as there is nothing outside of reality, fiction is merely a peculiar branch of non-fiction, reality's myriad conscious self-reflections. Per Stendhal, a novel is a mirror carried along a main road, but it is a puzzling kind of mirror, with surprising concavities and convexities. Fiction seeks reflections that reverberate and recreate reality in microcosm, a la Borges's Aleph. A successful work of art achieves a unity that symbolically reproduces the completeness of reality. Non-fiction is always a magnifying glass, if not a microscope--clarity is purchased at the expense of breadth. Fiction is a necessarily distorting mirror, since any simple mirror or magnifying glass capable of capturing everything we care about would have to be as large as the universe itself.
The stakes are high in the arts--the potential payoff is high, but when fiction seriously fails, it is upsetting, because it is as if reality itself is being mocked or even maimed. Bad non-fiction is like a lie, which is bad enough, but bad fiction is like blasphemy. I forever vacillate between Plato--who saw the arts as begetting deceptive images (among the myriad shadows on the wall of the cave), distractions from the pursuit of truth--and Aristotle, who argued that poetry at its best reveals necessary truths, while history merely documents contingencies. Perhaps it is just a matter of epistemological and existential focus, the iris of the inquisitive mind.
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