October 24, 2006: Another Take on Fiction

My head is still reeling from reading the full transcript of the Israel Lobby "debate" posted by ScribeMedia. When so much effort is expended over "facts" with so little resolution, one begins to appreciate the "security" of fiction! Therefore, I shall retreat to an observation that Michael Wood recently made in his recent New York Review article about William Gass:

Fictions are not lies, or not necessarily lies, because they don't usually try to deceive. They arrange events and feelings, in the sense of a musical arrangement. They give experience an angle or a story. Sometimes we are not sure they are fictions—we just suspect them of some sort of stylization, catch in them what Brecht in another context calls "the scent of a mythology."

October 17, 2006: More on Reality and Fiction

Perhaps it is not just that reality is "too much with us." Perhaps the ultimate virtue of fiction is that, at its best, it tells us more about reality than "reality itself!" Consider today's report in Assimilated Press (which, for my money, has now displaced The Onion as the best source of satirical journalism). The headline reads "Kansas Farmer See Cheney's Face In Cowpie;" and the author picks up this theme and runs with it at a breakneck pace never encountered in Swift. Like the best of satire, this reflects a reality with far more accuracy than conventional prose could ever do.

Technology has changed our perspective of reality, probably not for the better. A friend of mine used to observe that hand-drawn images in biology texts that predated the camera were almost always superior to any subsequent photographs. In this case the reason was simple: The photograph showed too much. On the other hand the drawing showed just enough to make sure that the reader saw what the author wanted him (or her) to see. So it is that satire provides the author with a better command of the reader's attention than expository prose can. Is it any wonder, then, that Jon Stewart is now regarded as a more credible news reporter than the network anchors; and, perhaps because he is more up front about his point of view and the motives behind his texts, he really is more credible!

September 19, 2006: Did Kleist Anticipate Sokal?

To call Heinrich von Kleist a strange writer is to mince around with understatement. There are too many examples of his fiction and drama that leave you thinking, "I can't believe I'm reading/seeing this!" So one has to wonder whether or not one should react the same way to some of his essays. He could have perpetrated the sort of hoax that, in our time, Alan Sokal pulled off in publishing "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the journal Social Text. As we now know, Sokal tried to "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions" and succeeded. Two hundred years earlier, Kleist published some "learned essays" on topics sufficiently odd for his time to leave the reader wondering whether or not to take him seriously.

My favorite is "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking." The basic thesis is that the thoughts we have "in our head" are, for the most part, vague and ill-formed; and it is only when we try to express them in words that they become concrete enough to be called ideas. (At this point I should not that the fact that Kleist had a thesis at all makes him more credible than Sokal. The editors of Social Text apparently did not require him to have a thesis statement, so he did not provide them with one: He wrote no abstract and avoided anything that looked like a thesis sentence in both his opening and closing paragraphs. Kleist may have decided to explore a weird thesis, but at least he told you where he was going!) After stating this thesis, he backs it up with a series of examples and concludes by reaffirming that thesis. In that respect it is a model essay.

As a matter of fact, I think everyone should read it, not only because it is a model essay but also because I think his examples do support this thesis! Why not? In his "Theaetetus" Plato has Socrates lead Theaetetus to explore the definition of "knowledge." Theaetetus proposes four definitions, each of which is deftly refuted by Socrates, leaving us at the end of the dialog with no definition for knowledge! Perhaps we have such muddled ideas about "thoughts in the head" that Kleist may be right: Those thoughts really are not there and only take shape when we try to express them. In Kleist's own more poetic language, "it is not we who 'know'; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that 'knows.'"

So, the next time you encounter an article that does have an authentic thesis, rather than a mere concatenation of meaningless jargon, no matter how absurd it may seem, accord it the respect of a serious claim. Then see if the author can back up the claim with an argument, making sure that the argument is not pulling off any rhetorical sleight-of-hand. If you can drag the claim through that test and it emerges intact on the other side, it may be less absurd than you thought!