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 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
