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March 27, 2016 5:24 AM Subscribe
The idea that religion caused the separation in this classification is a fascinating point that I'd love to read more about. Great article though! Thanks.
posted by mikeo2 at 5:48 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by mikeo2 at 5:48 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
1) I would love to see a deeper analysis of the origins of the fiction/non-fiction divide in anglophone countries. The guesses that it is connected to religion are interesting, but seem like no more than guesses in this article.
2) Speaking of religion, I am holding on to this article to show people when I have discussions about historicity in the Hebrew Bible. Whenever someone says "do you believe this really happened?" Or "how much of this story is literally true?" I always respond with "You are asking a question that neither the ancient writers nor the ancient listeners would have ever asked. To them, these were 'their stories,' and strong divisions into things like history and myth hadn't happened yet." Seeing that many contemporary cultures don't have the fiction/non-fiction divide may help people to see to understand that the Biblical writers didn't either.*
*This is very true for the Hebrew Bible, quite a bit less so for the New Testament, which came after the development of historiography and which accordingly shows a concern for things like witness testimony and evidence.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 5:49 AM on March 27, 2016 [33 favorites]
2) Speaking of religion, I am holding on to this article to show people when I have discussions about historicity in the Hebrew Bible. Whenever someone says "do you believe this really happened?" Or "how much of this story is literally true?" I always respond with "You are asking a question that neither the ancient writers nor the ancient listeners would have ever asked. To them, these were 'their stories,' and strong divisions into things like history and myth hadn't happened yet." Seeing that many contemporary cultures don't have the fiction/non-fiction divide may help people to see to understand that the Biblical writers didn't either.*
*This is very true for the Hebrew Bible, quite a bit less so for the New Testament, which came after the development of historiography and which accordingly shows a concern for things like witness testimony and evidence.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 5:49 AM on March 27, 2016 [33 favorites]
Locating this divide in English just seems like nonsense to me.
a) The ancient greeks certainly made a clear distinction between fiction in the form of poetry (Homer, Hesiod etc) drama etc versus philosophy/science. What exactly was Plato complaining about Poetry for in The Republic - that it was all "false"?
I'm pretty sure that Aristotle also thought his investigations of political constitutions and animals etc where of a different type than Hesiod's mythical stories.
b) the word "fiction" is derived from latin "fingere" meaning contrivance.
c) the distinction certainly exists in German, fiktion and roman exclusively refer to imaginative tales.
posted by mary8nne at 6:09 AM on March 27, 2016 [20 favorites]
a) The ancient greeks certainly made a clear distinction between fiction in the form of poetry (Homer, Hesiod etc) drama etc versus philosophy/science. What exactly was Plato complaining about Poetry for in The Republic - that it was all "false"?
I'm pretty sure that Aristotle also thought his investigations of political constitutions and animals etc where of a different type than Hesiod's mythical stories.
b) the word "fiction" is derived from latin "fingere" meaning contrivance.
c) the distinction certainly exists in German, fiktion and roman exclusively refer to imaginative tales.
posted by mary8nne at 6:09 AM on March 27, 2016 [20 favorites]
All the OED's examples of "fiction" that relate it to stories (as opposed to just lies) are after around 1590. It's interesting, but I don't much care for the vaguely pejorative handling of the distinction in the article though. "Did it really (verifiably) happen?" is a useful and interesting question to ask about a story. It's not the only relevant question that could be asked, but it's a good one. And with my lawyer's hat on, it strikes me as a pretty crucial question to ask about many narratives.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:18 AM on March 27, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by Aravis76 at 6:18 AM on March 27, 2016 [11 favorites]
I'd have been interested to read some discussion of the rise of the term creative non-fiction, which I guess similarly speaks to the relationship between factual information and style. While I understand that the point of the term is simply to praise, it does rather beg the question of what non-creative non-fiction is. Technical writing?
posted by GeorgeBickham at 6:26 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by GeorgeBickham at 6:26 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
I must confess: as a native English speaker, all of this is rather baffling to me.
“My sense is that relating and evaluating a literary text in relation to its truthfulness has to have some kind of religious and moral, probably Protestant, possibly Puritan, roots,”
No? It's because true stories and imagined stories have fundamentally different relationships to the world. So when you're reading a story, it's helpful to know which it is.
If the story is imagined, then I'll be looking for things like allegory, allusions to prior literature, how it follows or subverts the expectations of its genre, foreshadowing, how the author draws their characters, what contemporary themes and concerns it might be commenting upon, etc. To look for these things in a nonfiction story would be nonsensical.
Similarly, if the story is true, then I'll be looking for connections to other historical events that I know about, connections to other things I might know about the author's life (if it's memoir), incidents I might want to research further, etc. Again, none of these would make sense if I were reading fiction.
Moreover, nonfiction is expected to have a certain degree of journalistic or documentary integrity: there's a contract between the author and the reader that the events are described as faithfully and accurately as possible. We can trust that we're learning something about the world as it really is, not as the author imagines it to be, or wants to portray it as being. We could, at least in theory, verify the account independently, or research specific parts of it further, or use it to build an argument by citing (counter)examples from the text, or use it as a source for historical research.
None of this has anything to do with Puritanism. It's just, when someone makes a statement to me, it's very useful—sometimes even crucial—to know whether they're striving to report the matter accurately, or saying it because they think it has poetic or aesthetic value. Yes, in many cases, I could divine that from context. But there's a gray area, and the explicit "fiction" vs. "non-fiction" divide addresses that gray area: it forces the author to commit to one or the other, to sign a contract saying either "you may trust this as a good-faith attempt to impart fact", or "don't take this work literally; I have taken creative liberties". Violations of that contract—attempts to sell imagination as fact—face censure, because they deliberately mislead their audience.
I always respond with "You are asking a question that neither the ancient writers nor the ancient listeners would have ever asked. To them, these were 'their stories,' and strong divisions into things like history and myth hadn't happened yet."
Does that mean that it isn't a valid or interesting question, though? Regardless of how the original writers and audience would have regarded the question, our own purposes in reading the text today are different than theirs were. If our sole interest is to understand how the original authors and writers regarded it as a literary object, then okay, your point is taken. But that's certainly not my sole interest in such a text. The historicity of any text is a very natural and relevant thing to ask about, I think. The answer may be "it's probably a mix of history and myth, but we just don't have enough of a record to say for certain which parts are which". But that's a totally fair answer.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 6:42 AM on March 27, 2016 [25 favorites]
“My sense is that relating and evaluating a literary text in relation to its truthfulness has to have some kind of religious and moral, probably Protestant, possibly Puritan, roots,”
No? It's because true stories and imagined stories have fundamentally different relationships to the world. So when you're reading a story, it's helpful to know which it is.
If the story is imagined, then I'll be looking for things like allegory, allusions to prior literature, how it follows or subverts the expectations of its genre, foreshadowing, how the author draws their characters, what contemporary themes and concerns it might be commenting upon, etc. To look for these things in a nonfiction story would be nonsensical.
Similarly, if the story is true, then I'll be looking for connections to other historical events that I know about, connections to other things I might know about the author's life (if it's memoir), incidents I might want to research further, etc. Again, none of these would make sense if I were reading fiction.
Moreover, nonfiction is expected to have a certain degree of journalistic or documentary integrity: there's a contract between the author and the reader that the events are described as faithfully and accurately as possible. We can trust that we're learning something about the world as it really is, not as the author imagines it to be, or wants to portray it as being. We could, at least in theory, verify the account independently, or research specific parts of it further, or use it to build an argument by citing (counter)examples from the text, or use it as a source for historical research.
None of this has anything to do with Puritanism. It's just, when someone makes a statement to me, it's very useful—sometimes even crucial—to know whether they're striving to report the matter accurately, or saying it because they think it has poetic or aesthetic value. Yes, in many cases, I could divine that from context. But there's a gray area, and the explicit "fiction" vs. "non-fiction" divide addresses that gray area: it forces the author to commit to one or the other, to sign a contract saying either "you may trust this as a good-faith attempt to impart fact", or "don't take this work literally; I have taken creative liberties". Violations of that contract—attempts to sell imagination as fact—face censure, because they deliberately mislead their audience.
I always respond with "You are asking a question that neither the ancient writers nor the ancient listeners would have ever asked. To them, these were 'their stories,' and strong divisions into things like history and myth hadn't happened yet."
Does that mean that it isn't a valid or interesting question, though? Regardless of how the original writers and audience would have regarded the question, our own purposes in reading the text today are different than theirs were. If our sole interest is to understand how the original authors and writers regarded it as a literary object, then okay, your point is taken. But that's certainly not my sole interest in such a text. The historicity of any text is a very natural and relevant thing to ask about, I think. The answer may be "it's probably a mix of history and myth, but we just don't have enough of a record to say for certain which parts are which". But that's a totally fair answer.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 6:42 AM on March 27, 2016 [25 favorites]
I fear they're asking the wrong question, or at least overfocussing on a tiny part of literature where there may be overlap. Capote's In Cold Blood does push the border, but were a language truly to have no distinction between Windows for Dummies and Lord of the Rings I would be worried. "As a reader I like to know where I am" seems like a sensible position.
posted by Emma May Smith at 6:43 AM on March 27, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by Emma May Smith at 6:43 AM on March 27, 2016 [9 favorites]
Windows for Dummies and Lord of the Rings
I would like to read the text that lies exactly halfway between these two books. cortex, fire up the Markov machine. For best results, make sure to use a Windows 98 edition of the former.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 6:46 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
I would like to read the text that lies exactly halfway between these two books. cortex, fire up the Markov machine. For best results, make sure to use a Windows 98 edition of the former.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 6:46 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
When was the idea that there is an "objective reality" invented? We tend to assume it was always an accepted concept but are there news sources without bias?
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:57 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:57 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
NOTHING IS REAL EVERYTHING IS AN ILLUSION LET'S GET NAKED AND BURN DOWN A PIZZA HUT
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [20 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [20 favorites]
I dunno. It's hard to believe that anyone encountering, say, Aesop's Fables (widely translated well before modern times) would consider it in the same category as a maths or medical textbook. And Biblical parables were explicitly illustrative stories - curiously non-miraculous, given the 'true' stories of miracles described in the gospels - where nobody is expected to believe that there really was a rich man with three sons.
'fiction' and 'non-fiction' may be genres of literature, and not all languages will have explicit names for those genres, but it doesn't mean they don't exist, aren't appreciated and have their own rules by which readers judge the worth of a work in either.
posted by Devonian at 7:14 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
'fiction' and 'non-fiction' may be genres of literature, and not all languages will have explicit names for those genres, but it doesn't mean they don't exist, aren't appreciated and have their own rules by which readers judge the worth of a work in either.
posted by Devonian at 7:14 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
The article is in the same family as discussions about "a thousand words for snow," or "using the same word for the colors blue and green." On one hand, yes, there is an interesting thing about the languages. But on the other hand, it isn't as important as it is made out to be.
"Is it (intending to be) true?" is such a fundamental question to ask about a story, every modern language must have a way of asking it. For example, a functional legal system is impossible without a working concept of truth.
posted by yesster at 7:20 AM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]
"Is it (intending to be) true?" is such a fundamental question to ask about a story, every modern language must have a way of asking it. For example, a functional legal system is impossible without a working concept of truth.
posted by yesster at 7:20 AM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]
And what about the political speeches of presidential candidates? What percentage of followers are concerned with whether their stories are true?
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:25 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:25 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
Its such a weird article - its starts off with "English literature's made-up divide" and then goes on to explain that well,... actually there are pretty much the same divisions in a whole bunch of other euro languages and chinese and .. blah blah
And then I think, well wait a minute... is there really this "mighty canyon" in bookshops? There seem to be loads of books that sit somewhere in between in my local bookshop - that end up in their own little sections: biography, mystical speculative stuff, fictionalised accounts, "true crime",...The whole thing starts to seem more and more like a manufactured controversy.
posted by mary8nne at 7:31 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
And then I think, well wait a minute... is there really this "mighty canyon" in bookshops? There seem to be loads of books that sit somewhere in between in my local bookshop - that end up in their own little sections: biography, mystical speculative stuff, fictionalised accounts, "true crime",...The whole thing starts to seem more and more like a manufactured controversy.
posted by mary8nne at 7:31 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
Would trends in western philosophy angling towards the essence of hard science have influenced the contemporary hard line between fiction/non-fiction? I say hard line but the more I think about it the bigger the grey area. True story but names have been changed to protect the innocent. A few characters combined to improve the storyline. Fictional memoirs... omfg, what is really real? Just the now, my memory of grabbing a coffee and clicking to read this link is ephemeral. (was not coffee)
Returning from the wacko I wonder if the philosophers here will chime in. I was browsing a book by Putnam that had one argument splitting hairs on the difference between "conceivable" and "possible". Fine divisions like that alternately fascinate and infuriate me. Just like the comment by yesster about the words for snow in different cultures/languages is the Wittgensteinian trend to split finer divisions between the scientific and non true shade our western perception of fiction?
posted by sammyo at 7:40 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Returning from the wacko I wonder if the philosophers here will chime in. I was browsing a book by Putnam that had one argument splitting hairs on the difference between "conceivable" and "possible". Fine divisions like that alternately fascinate and infuriate me. Just like the comment by yesster about the words for snow in different cultures/languages is the Wittgensteinian trend to split finer divisions between the scientific and non true shade our western perception of fiction?
posted by sammyo at 7:40 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
While I think that it's an interesting concept, there are a lot of odd things that are said in that article:
"I think that fiction in general is relatively new in Arabic culture"
I wonder if that wasn't the word the speaker was looking for? There's a really vibrant tradition of classical arabic literature - which did put poetry ahead of prose, so I wondered if they were just talking about the novel form. But even then, there are Arabic novels from the mid-19th century onwards.
“My sense is that relating and evaluating a literary text in relation to its truthfulness has to have some kind of religious and moral, probably Protestant, possibly Puritan, roots,”
Thucydides would like to have words. He devotes a good chunk early in his History to be at pains to state its truthfulness.
posted by Vortisaur at 7:47 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
"I think that fiction in general is relatively new in Arabic culture"
I wonder if that wasn't the word the speaker was looking for? There's a really vibrant tradition of classical arabic literature - which did put poetry ahead of prose, so I wondered if they were just talking about the novel form. But even then, there are Arabic novels from the mid-19th century onwards.
“My sense is that relating and evaluating a literary text in relation to its truthfulness has to have some kind of religious and moral, probably Protestant, possibly Puritan, roots,”
Thucydides would like to have words. He devotes a good chunk early in his History to be at pains to state its truthfulness.
posted by Vortisaur at 7:47 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
"I would love to see a deeper analysis of the origins of the fiction/non-fiction divide in anglophone countries. The guesses that it is connected to religion are interesting, but seem like no more than guesses in this article."
Definitely the emergence of the novel as a category of books sparks a series of panics in the 1700s and forward (like, novels existed before that, but their emergence as a popular form of literature). For starters, early novelists realized they could write a lot of sex that never happened, and booksellers realized they could sell a lot of sex, so as with all emerging technologies, porn drives sales. Which makes people panic as the middle and lower classes -- and, worse, WOMEN -- start to get their hands on them. Second, Protestant countries are a LOT more literate at this time, and have a lot more printing presses per capita, and get a lot more novels into general circulation a lot earlier. Puritans in England -- and the US, and Canada -- really, really struggle with novels, especially as they become clearly a form of literature that can be wonderful (and religiously didactic, even), but also a form that a) frequently features licentious behavior and b) is, fundamentally, based on telling a lie that seems true, on purpose. Strains of this persist in English-speaking fundamentalist-leaning Protestantism for a long time (to this day, really), and once you're alert to it it pops up everywhere. Old conservative, devout aunties in 19th-century and early 20th-century children's books scolding child from reading that "pack of lies." Young men being allowed to read carefully selected novels but young women being considered too delicate in their mental workings to read lies on purpose, in religious tracts from the Great Awakenings. Even today, the Harry Potter panic among evangelicals is a rather direct descendant -- the idea that JK Rowling is telling LIES and that children will be harmed because they can't tell Satan's (Rowling's) lies from God's truth. (Its opposite -- that Rowling is telling the truth about witchcraft and children will learn to do Satanic spells -- comes out of a different strain of panic, but also appears in evangelical communities.) I can't off the top of my head think of a strain of Protestantism that STILL bans novels -- the concept of a naturalistic, false narrative is way too embedded now to fight -- but there are plenty on the conservative end of the spectrum who are enormously suspicious of the damage novels can do by creating fantasy worlds and encouraging children (in particular) to believe lies are real, who very tightly curate allowable novels to prevent spiritual damage.
Would trends in western philosophy angling towards the essence of hard science have influenced the contemporary hard line between fiction/non-fiction?
I would guess so, but I would also guess that the late 19th-century professionalization of journalism in English-speaking countries (especially the United States), with its strange new emphasis on reporting the facts with as little bias as possible, rather than reporting necessary information in support of particular agendas, has a strong influence. Relatedly, the development of common law libels laws that provide that truth is an absolute defense to libel, combined with strong First Amendment protections in the US that allow you to say pretty much any damn thing you want about anybody, without consequences, as long as it's true, creates a strong impetus to separate fact and fiction. But I'm just kind-of noodling, if someone were comparatively studying how fiction/non-fiction works across cultures, those would be a couple of things I'd want to see addressed. (But it's just intuition, that's why it needs support.)
""You are asking a question that neither the ancient writers nor the ancient listeners would have ever asked. To them, these were 'their stories,' and strong divisions into things like history and myth hadn't happened yet."
Does that mean that it isn't a valid or interesting question, though? Regardless of how the original writers and audience would have regarded the question, our own purposes in reading the text today are different than theirs were."
It is a DIRE question that renders students incapable of understanding the text in front of them because they insist on retrojecting modern attitudes and world-views on ancient writers, rather than trying to place themselves (as well as they can) in the worldview of the ancients who originated the texts, and in doing so they close themselves off to knowledge and understanding of the text or its creators or its world. By immediately imposing this MODERN category divide of "true/not-true" on ancient texts that did not function in that dichotomy, you make it impossible to learn the ancient worldviews or really to go any deeper into the text. It is a question that kills undergraduate Biblical theology classes STONE DEAD if students can't be moved past it or at least convinced to suspend it until the end of the semester.
"The answer may be "it's probably a mix of history and myth, but we just don't have enough of a record to say for certain which parts are which". But that's a totally fair answer."
These are not categories the ancients used and not how they understood their texts. You have immediately put yourself outside the possibility of understanding how they DID mean, write, and understand their texts by insisting on modern categorizations that DO NOT FIT and do not advance understanding. Like, often it's all "true" but they are working with wildly different understandings of what "true" means than you are. And by that I don't mean bad, dumb, false, pre-scientific understandings; I mean a wholly different concept of the nature of reality, of the oral and written word's ability to capture that reality, of the virtues and values of different kinds of story, of the ways to impart information factual, moral, and real. Of structures that have no modern counterparts and you can't even talk about the "truth value" or "myth vs history" until you dig into the structural issues. It's like you're demanding I tell you "What percentage of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' is history and what's myth?" IT'S A BIZARRE QUESTION. It is, as they say, not even wrong.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:48 AM on March 27, 2016 [41 favorites]
Definitely the emergence of the novel as a category of books sparks a series of panics in the 1700s and forward (like, novels existed before that, but their emergence as a popular form of literature). For starters, early novelists realized they could write a lot of sex that never happened, and booksellers realized they could sell a lot of sex, so as with all emerging technologies, porn drives sales. Which makes people panic as the middle and lower classes -- and, worse, WOMEN -- start to get their hands on them. Second, Protestant countries are a LOT more literate at this time, and have a lot more printing presses per capita, and get a lot more novels into general circulation a lot earlier. Puritans in England -- and the US, and Canada -- really, really struggle with novels, especially as they become clearly a form of literature that can be wonderful (and religiously didactic, even), but also a form that a) frequently features licentious behavior and b) is, fundamentally, based on telling a lie that seems true, on purpose. Strains of this persist in English-speaking fundamentalist-leaning Protestantism for a long time (to this day, really), and once you're alert to it it pops up everywhere. Old conservative, devout aunties in 19th-century and early 20th-century children's books scolding child from reading that "pack of lies." Young men being allowed to read carefully selected novels but young women being considered too delicate in their mental workings to read lies on purpose, in religious tracts from the Great Awakenings. Even today, the Harry Potter panic among evangelicals is a rather direct descendant -- the idea that JK Rowling is telling LIES and that children will be harmed because they can't tell Satan's (Rowling's) lies from God's truth. (Its opposite -- that Rowling is telling the truth about witchcraft and children will learn to do Satanic spells -- comes out of a different strain of panic, but also appears in evangelical communities.) I can't off the top of my head think of a strain of Protestantism that STILL bans novels -- the concept of a naturalistic, false narrative is way too embedded now to fight -- but there are plenty on the conservative end of the spectrum who are enormously suspicious of the damage novels can do by creating fantasy worlds and encouraging children (in particular) to believe lies are real, who very tightly curate allowable novels to prevent spiritual damage.
Would trends in western philosophy angling towards the essence of hard science have influenced the contemporary hard line between fiction/non-fiction?
I would guess so, but I would also guess that the late 19th-century professionalization of journalism in English-speaking countries (especially the United States), with its strange new emphasis on reporting the facts with as little bias as possible, rather than reporting necessary information in support of particular agendas, has a strong influence. Relatedly, the development of common law libels laws that provide that truth is an absolute defense to libel, combined with strong First Amendment protections in the US that allow you to say pretty much any damn thing you want about anybody, without consequences, as long as it's true, creates a strong impetus to separate fact and fiction. But I'm just kind-of noodling, if someone were comparatively studying how fiction/non-fiction works across cultures, those would be a couple of things I'd want to see addressed. (But it's just intuition, that's why it needs support.)
""You are asking a question that neither the ancient writers nor the ancient listeners would have ever asked. To them, these were 'their stories,' and strong divisions into things like history and myth hadn't happened yet."
Does that mean that it isn't a valid or interesting question, though? Regardless of how the original writers and audience would have regarded the question, our own purposes in reading the text today are different than theirs were."
It is a DIRE question that renders students incapable of understanding the text in front of them because they insist on retrojecting modern attitudes and world-views on ancient writers, rather than trying to place themselves (as well as they can) in the worldview of the ancients who originated the texts, and in doing so they close themselves off to knowledge and understanding of the text or its creators or its world. By immediately imposing this MODERN category divide of "true/not-true" on ancient texts that did not function in that dichotomy, you make it impossible to learn the ancient worldviews or really to go any deeper into the text. It is a question that kills undergraduate Biblical theology classes STONE DEAD if students can't be moved past it or at least convinced to suspend it until the end of the semester.
"The answer may be "it's probably a mix of history and myth, but we just don't have enough of a record to say for certain which parts are which". But that's a totally fair answer."
These are not categories the ancients used and not how they understood their texts. You have immediately put yourself outside the possibility of understanding how they DID mean, write, and understand their texts by insisting on modern categorizations that DO NOT FIT and do not advance understanding. Like, often it's all "true" but they are working with wildly different understandings of what "true" means than you are. And by that I don't mean bad, dumb, false, pre-scientific understandings; I mean a wholly different concept of the nature of reality, of the oral and written word's ability to capture that reality, of the virtues and values of different kinds of story, of the ways to impart information factual, moral, and real. Of structures that have no modern counterparts and you can't even talk about the "truth value" or "myth vs history" until you dig into the structural issues. It's like you're demanding I tell you "What percentage of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' is history and what's myth?" IT'S A BIZARRE QUESTION. It is, as they say, not even wrong.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:48 AM on March 27, 2016 [41 favorites]
this has been known since at least the time of the lizard Popes
posted by thelonius at 7:48 AM on March 27, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 7:48 AM on March 27, 2016 [9 favorites]
All the OED's examples of "fiction" that relate it to stories (as opposed to just lies) are after around 1590.
Well, we're getting into a bit of a fuzzy area with the "just lies" qualifier. Under another subheading, the OED cites John Trevisa's translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum the 1398 line "Devout doctors of Theology or divinity...prudently and wisely read and use natural philosophy and moral, and poets in their fictions and feigned informations...." (Thus the word - the context muddies the waters a bit further.)
For historians, even historians of the modern, trying to make the division between what is actual and what merely talk can be a challenge. Thucydides himself quotes speeches that he basically made up and historiographers of the 16th century found no problem with the practice so long as the historian can argue that the basic tone and meaning were in accord with the speaker and circumstance. Moderns, of course, try to hold to a higher standard, von Ranke's wie es eigentlich gewesen, what truly happened. Comes a point, sadly, where best intentions have to give way to Occam's Razor, best guesses, shots in the dark.
The further we go in that direction, the more we are forced into historical fiction. Which can be useful when it provides plausible answers which strict rules of evidence may not uphold. Robert Graves (related to von Ranke, as it happens) in his historical novels was motivated by historical conundrums. (That, and the need to pay school fees.) Useful, but to be handled with the greatest care.
After all, it's chiefly just stories.
posted by BWA at 7:51 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
Well, we're getting into a bit of a fuzzy area with the "just lies" qualifier. Under another subheading, the OED cites John Trevisa's translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum the 1398 line "Devout doctors of Theology or divinity...prudently and wisely read and use natural philosophy and moral, and poets in their fictions and feigned informations...." (Thus the word - the context muddies the waters a bit further.)
For historians, even historians of the modern, trying to make the division between what is actual and what merely talk can be a challenge. Thucydides himself quotes speeches that he basically made up and historiographers of the 16th century found no problem with the practice so long as the historian can argue that the basic tone and meaning were in accord with the speaker and circumstance. Moderns, of course, try to hold to a higher standard, von Ranke's wie es eigentlich gewesen, what truly happened. Comes a point, sadly, where best intentions have to give way to Occam's Razor, best guesses, shots in the dark.
The further we go in that direction, the more we are forced into historical fiction. Which can be useful when it provides plausible answers which strict rules of evidence may not uphold. Robert Graves (related to von Ranke, as it happens) in his historical novels was motivated by historical conundrums. (That, and the need to pay school fees.) Useful, but to be handled with the greatest care.
After all, it's chiefly just stories.
posted by BWA at 7:51 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
When was the idea that there is an "objective reality" invented?
Possibly Aristotle. If there is an objective reality (and there almost certainly isn't at the quantum level) then we never have any direct experience of it. Our experience of the world and our memories of it are fictions we construct for ourselves. Acknowledging this seems a more healthy approach to me than imagining that we are completely objective about anything.
posted by walrus at 7:52 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Possibly Aristotle. If there is an objective reality (and there almost certainly isn't at the quantum level) then we never have any direct experience of it. Our experience of the world and our memories of it are fictions we construct for ourselves. Acknowledging this seems a more healthy approach to me than imagining that we are completely objective about anything.
posted by walrus at 7:52 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
they insist on retrojecting modern attitudes and world-views on ancient writers, rather than trying to place themselves (as well as they can) in the worldview of the ancients who originated the texts, and in doing so they close themselves off to knowledge and understanding of the text or its creators or its world.
In a similar vein, it is difficult for modern people to not see ancient philosophers (like the pre-Socratics) as something other than sort of defective 17th century scientists, who are Doing It Wrong
posted by thelonius at 7:53 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
In a similar vein, it is difficult for modern people to not see ancient philosophers (like the pre-Socratics) as something other than sort of defective 17th century scientists, who are Doing It Wrong
posted by thelonius at 7:53 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
When was the idea that there is an "objective reality" invented?
Possibly Aristotle.
.
I'd go with Parmenides
posted by thelonius at 7:55 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
Possibly Aristotle.
.
I'd go with Parmenides
posted by thelonius at 7:55 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
For historians, even historians of the modern, trying to make the division between what is actual and what merely talk can be a challenge.
Is this why we have the genre sometimes called 'oral history' - where the author does the legwork of finding people with a story to tell and simply tries to get out of the way while they do it? The fact that they're telling it is taken as enough 'truth' anyway.
Reminds me of the recent Nobel prize for literature awarded to Svetlana Alexievich partly for her Zinky Boys collection of interviews about the Soviet war in Afghanistan - an incredible book.
posted by colie at 8:04 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Is this why we have the genre sometimes called 'oral history' - where the author does the legwork of finding people with a story to tell and simply tries to get out of the way while they do it? The fact that they're telling it is taken as enough 'truth' anyway.
Reminds me of the recent Nobel prize for literature awarded to Svetlana Alexievich partly for her Zinky Boys collection of interviews about the Soviet war in Afghanistan - an incredible book.
posted by colie at 8:04 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's an interesting article, but I think it is not commenting on Truth and Imagination so much as publishing genres. Hemon even says early of course everyone knows about "truth and untruth," it's just not the most important part when describing the book. You can debate about whether science fiction should get it's own section, and if so why aren't half of Margaret Atwood's books there. This is essentially asking the same thing about literary memoirs, essays and autobiographical novels--why not one big section? Still another section for lay science books and history texts that are half footnotes.
My take is a lot of readers really like reading things that are (mostly) true. I know several people who will only read memoir and similar works. I'm almost the opposite. So publishing is meeting a demand, but you could still find the books you wanted if they were mingled together. And presumably readers still get mad if they thing they are reading things that are true and they later discover them to be completely invented.
posted by mark k at 8:04 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
My take is a lot of readers really like reading things that are (mostly) true. I know several people who will only read memoir and similar works. I'm almost the opposite. So publishing is meeting a demand, but you could still find the books you wanted if they were mingled together. And presumably readers still get mad if they thing they are reading things that are true and they later discover them to be completely invented.
posted by mark k at 8:04 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
If the story is imagined, then I'll be looking for things like allegory, allusions to prior literature, how it follows or subverts the expectations of its genre, foreshadowing, how the author draws their characters, what contemporary themes and concerns it might be commenting upon, etc. To look for these things in a nonfiction story would be nonsensical.
Similarly, if the story is true, then I'll be looking for connections to other historical events that I know about, connections to other things I might know about the author's life (if it's memoir), incidents I might want to research further, etc. Again, none of these would make sense if I were reading fiction.
I think there are works of non-fiction that use foreshadowing, have characters drawn by the author (by selecting particular facts about them and leaving others out of the narrative), and clearly comment on contemporary themes and concerns. Similarly, there are fictions in which you will miss much of what's worthwhile in the work if you don't look for connections to historical events, facts you know about the author's life, and incidents you might want to research further.
posted by layceepee at 8:09 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
Similarly, if the story is true, then I'll be looking for connections to other historical events that I know about, connections to other things I might know about the author's life (if it's memoir), incidents I might want to research further, etc. Again, none of these would make sense if I were reading fiction.
I think there are works of non-fiction that use foreshadowing, have characters drawn by the author (by selecting particular facts about them and leaving others out of the narrative), and clearly comment on contemporary themes and concerns. Similarly, there are fictions in which you will miss much of what's worthwhile in the work if you don't look for connections to historical events, facts you know about the author's life, and incidents you might want to research further.
posted by layceepee at 8:09 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
I like to confuse my high school English students by telling them that Fiction purports to tell the truth about the human condition, whereas books claiming that Reptilians run the world are shelved in the Non-Fiction section.
And, in other news, Buddhism claims that samsara = nirvana. Q.E.D.
posted by kozad at 8:10 AM on March 27, 2016 [7 favorites]
And, in other news, Buddhism claims that samsara = nirvana. Q.E.D.
posted by kozad at 8:10 AM on March 27, 2016 [7 favorites]
When was the idea that there is an "objective reality" invented?
Not being glib, but too busy to get into this with any depth right now, but isn't the first time a child reaches the developmental milestone of grasping "object permanence" a de facto introduction to the idea of objectivity? Objectivity in narratives may be an impossibility, but without accepting some form of objective reality as a given, we end up with all kinds of otherwise nonsensical/inexplicable phenomena in everyday experience that would then require some other, more exotic explanation (like supernatural forces, magic, etc.).
posted by saulgoodman at 8:17 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
Not being glib, but too busy to get into this with any depth right now, but isn't the first time a child reaches the developmental milestone of grasping "object permanence" a de facto introduction to the idea of objectivity? Objectivity in narratives may be an impossibility, but without accepting some form of objective reality as a given, we end up with all kinds of otherwise nonsensical/inexplicable phenomena in everyday experience that would then require some other, more exotic explanation (like supernatural forces, magic, etc.).
posted by saulgoodman at 8:17 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
It's like you're demanding I tell you "What percentage of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' is history and what's myth?" IT'S A BIZARRE QUESTION. It is, as they say, not even wrong.
Well, I'm not "demanding" anything—but, no, it's not like that at all. When I ask "which parts of the Hebrew Bible actually happened?", the authors' intentions and understanding of the text are neither here nor there. I'm asking, "which parts of the Hebrew Bible actually happened?". Because some sort of actual, historical events actually transpired among the ancient Hebrews—and each specific statement made in the text either accurately reflects that history, or it doesn't.
This might not be the question you want me to ask, but there's nothing nonsensical about it. And you might not understand why the answer would matter to me, but it does.
You have immediately put yourself outside the possibility of understanding how they DID mean, write, and understand their texts
See? You're making assumptions about the purpose of my question. If my goal is to appreciate the text as a piece of literature—if I hope to understand it on an aesthetic level—then yes, it's probably gonna behoove me to understand the context in which it was originally created and appreciated. That's a perfectly good and noble goal—but, at least for the purposes of this question, it is not my goal.
I, for one, am not "insisting" on "imposing" modern models of literary interpretation on an ancient text. I am not participating in literary interpretation. I'm asking a (perfectly valid and sensible) question that happens to lie outside of that discipline. Please don't score me according to the rules of a game I am not playing.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 8:22 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
Well, I'm not "demanding" anything—but, no, it's not like that at all. When I ask "which parts of the Hebrew Bible actually happened?", the authors' intentions and understanding of the text are neither here nor there. I'm asking, "which parts of the Hebrew Bible actually happened?". Because some sort of actual, historical events actually transpired among the ancient Hebrews—and each specific statement made in the text either accurately reflects that history, or it doesn't.
This might not be the question you want me to ask, but there's nothing nonsensical about it. And you might not understand why the answer would matter to me, but it does.
You have immediately put yourself outside the possibility of understanding how they DID mean, write, and understand their texts
See? You're making assumptions about the purpose of my question. If my goal is to appreciate the text as a piece of literature—if I hope to understand it on an aesthetic level—then yes, it's probably gonna behoove me to understand the context in which it was originally created and appreciated. That's a perfectly good and noble goal—but, at least for the purposes of this question, it is not my goal.
I, for one, am not "insisting" on "imposing" modern models of literary interpretation on an ancient text. I am not participating in literary interpretation. I'm asking a (perfectly valid and sensible) question that happens to lie outside of that discipline. Please don't score me according to the rules of a game I am not playing.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 8:22 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
Ah, Eyebrows, how I like the insight that conservative Protestants can't really work out whether they distrust novels because they are lies, or because they tell the truth - and don't really care, just picking the stance best suited to fuel the moral panic du jour. I think that illustrates their MO rather well.
I keep coming back to the Bible when thinking about how pre-modern cultures perceived literature, not because of any religious aspects but because there aren't many other Iron Age/early CE works still in popular circulation outside academia and literary circles. It seems to me that there's rather too much emphasis on 'this is true, look, here are the lists and the precedents and the fulfilments of prophecies' to support the idea that nobody could or cared to differentiate between what we'd call fact and fiction, back then.
And although I am by no means well-read in other ancient texts, I do know there were a lot of different categories serving a lot of different needs, practical, polemical, educational and entertaining, and I just can't buy the notion that the utility of this spread of writing didn't require a decent working knowledge of what was rooted in real events or practicalities, and what was illustrative of humanity's internal world.
posted by Devonian at 8:26 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
I keep coming back to the Bible when thinking about how pre-modern cultures perceived literature, not because of any religious aspects but because there aren't many other Iron Age/early CE works still in popular circulation outside academia and literary circles. It seems to me that there's rather too much emphasis on 'this is true, look, here are the lists and the precedents and the fulfilments of prophecies' to support the idea that nobody could or cared to differentiate between what we'd call fact and fiction, back then.
And although I am by no means well-read in other ancient texts, I do know there were a lot of different categories serving a lot of different needs, practical, polemical, educational and entertaining, and I just can't buy the notion that the utility of this spread of writing didn't require a decent working knowledge of what was rooted in real events or practicalities, and what was illustrative of humanity's internal world.
posted by Devonian at 8:26 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
In re literature at the boundary between fiction and nonfiction:
I'm not sure this boundary exists or is as defined as some think. When you read Herodotus, his retelling of obvious tall tales told to him by others remind me more of Twain's Innocents Abroad than some ostensible factual work.
I would argue all literature is fiction. Any piece of nonfiction writing is, at best, an image of reality viewed through the authors biases, language, embedded paradigms of 'how things work,' and imperfect knowledge. Consider any piece of supposedly factual history. Christopher Hill's overtly Marxist nonfiction such as The World Turned Upside Down, the drawing room bourgeois histories of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August or A Distant Mirror, or the Christian proselytization of Edward Gibbon's Decilne and Fall of the Roman Empire. Scratch any supposed nonfiction work deep enough and underlying assumptions bleed through. They are all products of a time and a person. The gaps in understanding and knowledge are filled by the author's invention, drawn from his or her education and experience, or his or her adenda.
Historical fiction can, paradoxically, provide a more true picture of events. Not the bland fascism of a Tom Clancy procecural, but more nuanced works like Mario Vargas Llosa's War at the End of the World or even Tolstoy's War and Peace. The drawing of the culture that produced the historical event and the greed, myopia, stupidity, ignorance, and credulity of the actors, as well as the actions and repercussions are the true lessons of history.
posted by sudogeek at 8:38 AM on March 27, 2016 [5 favorites]
I'm not sure this boundary exists or is as defined as some think. When you read Herodotus, his retelling of obvious tall tales told to him by others remind me more of Twain's Innocents Abroad than some ostensible factual work.
I would argue all literature is fiction. Any piece of nonfiction writing is, at best, an image of reality viewed through the authors biases, language, embedded paradigms of 'how things work,' and imperfect knowledge. Consider any piece of supposedly factual history. Christopher Hill's overtly Marxist nonfiction such as The World Turned Upside Down, the drawing room bourgeois histories of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August or A Distant Mirror, or the Christian proselytization of Edward Gibbon's Decilne and Fall of the Roman Empire. Scratch any supposed nonfiction work deep enough and underlying assumptions bleed through. They are all products of a time and a person. The gaps in understanding and knowledge are filled by the author's invention, drawn from his or her education and experience, or his or her adenda.
Historical fiction can, paradoxically, provide a more true picture of events. Not the bland fascism of a Tom Clancy procecural, but more nuanced works like Mario Vargas Llosa's War at the End of the World or even Tolstoy's War and Peace. The drawing of the culture that produced the historical event and the greed, myopia, stupidity, ignorance, and credulity of the actors, as well as the actions and repercussions are the true lessons of history.
posted by sudogeek at 8:38 AM on March 27, 2016 [5 favorites]
"Well, I'm not "demanding" anything—but, no, it's not like that at all. When I ask "which parts of the Hebrew Bible actually happened?", the authors' intentions and understanding of the text are neither here nor there. I'm asking, "which parts of the Hebrew Bible actually happened?". Because some sort of actual, historical events actually transpired among the ancient Hebrews—and each specific statement made in the text either accurately reflects that history, or it doesn't."
You cannot untangle what "actually happened" without first working through a lit-crit deconstruction of the text and attempting to understand what the writers were trying to do. "Just tell me the parts that are true and aren't" you CANNOT DO without working through all of these lit-crit tools, that you're dismissing as important for literary enjoyment but irrelevant to historicity-uncovering. YOU CANNOT DO THE HISTORICITY WORK without deep, profound, complicated, hard, long textual criticism, which first and fundamentally involves trying to understand WTF the authors and redactors were trying to accomplish and how they understood their own work. Where are you going to find the historical narrative if not IN THE TEXT? And how are you going to dig it out if you reject textual tools?
" the authors' intentions and understanding of the text are neither here nor there"
It's a text. That's literally all that's there.
"Because some sort of actual, historical events actually transpired among the ancient Hebrews—and each specific statement made in the text either accurately reflects that history, or it doesn't."
If you refuse to work with the text, or use textual tools, I literally can't answer your question about what "accurately reflects actual historical events." You've said "Tell me what parts of the Bible actually reflect actual historical events, but without using any of the tools that scholars use in this task, because I think those tools are dumb and irrelevant."
"See? You're making assumptions about the purpose of my question."
And I feel like we arrived pretty much exactly where I assumed we would. "Modern truth categories must be placed upon ancient texts! Just tell me what's historical!" "Well that's a very complicated question and to answer it you have to start with all these tools ..." "No, those are for literary understanding, not historical truth, give me the TRUTH."
Okay. You go pull out Numbers and start telling me, using no textual criticism tools, which parts are historical. I don't have the vaguest idea how you even propose to begin. Everyone who's contributed to that work has used textual criticism tools, so I'm curious what your alternative method is.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:40 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
You cannot untangle what "actually happened" without first working through a lit-crit deconstruction of the text and attempting to understand what the writers were trying to do. "Just tell me the parts that are true and aren't" you CANNOT DO without working through all of these lit-crit tools, that you're dismissing as important for literary enjoyment but irrelevant to historicity-uncovering. YOU CANNOT DO THE HISTORICITY WORK without deep, profound, complicated, hard, long textual criticism, which first and fundamentally involves trying to understand WTF the authors and redactors were trying to accomplish and how they understood their own work. Where are you going to find the historical narrative if not IN THE TEXT? And how are you going to dig it out if you reject textual tools?
" the authors' intentions and understanding of the text are neither here nor there"
It's a text. That's literally all that's there.
"Because some sort of actual, historical events actually transpired among the ancient Hebrews—and each specific statement made in the text either accurately reflects that history, or it doesn't."
If you refuse to work with the text, or use textual tools, I literally can't answer your question about what "accurately reflects actual historical events." You've said "Tell me what parts of the Bible actually reflect actual historical events, but without using any of the tools that scholars use in this task, because I think those tools are dumb and irrelevant."
"See? You're making assumptions about the purpose of my question."
And I feel like we arrived pretty much exactly where I assumed we would. "Modern truth categories must be placed upon ancient texts! Just tell me what's historical!" "Well that's a very complicated question and to answer it you have to start with all these tools ..." "No, those are for literary understanding, not historical truth, give me the TRUTH."
Okay. You go pull out Numbers and start telling me, using no textual criticism tools, which parts are historical. I don't have the vaguest idea how you even propose to begin. Everyone who's contributed to that work has used textual criticism tools, so I'm curious what your alternative method is.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:40 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
(I should say that I absolutely agree that in many important ways, the ancients thought differently to us and certainly had many different categories which do not map well onto modern thought, and that you will fail to achieve important insights if you don't work to understand those as well as you can. You can't be that Yankee in the court of King Arthur. It's just I disagree with the original article; there isn't a vast chasm now, and there wasn't a smooth undifferentiated landscape then. The geography has changed, but it's still the same land.)
posted by Devonian at 8:40 AM on March 27, 2016
posted by Devonian at 8:40 AM on March 27, 2016
I had a philosophy teacher who said he liked Henry James for the philosophy and William James for the literature.
posted by colie at 8:41 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by colie at 8:41 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
You cannot untangle what "actually happened" without first working through a lit-crit deconstruction of the text and attempting to understand what the writers were trying to do. "
Of course you can, this is ridiculous.
Where are you going to find the historical narrative if not IN THE TEXT? And how are you going to dig it out if you reject textual tools?
You compare things that are claimed to have had happen against the historical and archeological record. For example, questions like:
"Did the Flood happen?"
"Did the events as described in Exodus happen?"
"Did the kingdoms of Judah and Judah exist, and did they operate in the manner described in the Old Testament?"
"What happened to the Lost Tribes?" (an interesting question that has recently yielded some interesting answers)
"Was Herod king of Judea around the time it's claimed Jesus was born? Did he order the death of all young male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem?"
are all questions that have historical answers that can be answered by historical/scientific investigation, though the resulting answer may be that we don't have enough information to provide a full answer. You don't need "lit-crit deconstruction" to answer them. I think you're begging the question over and over here. You keep assuming people want to appreciate the text as a piece of literature instead of wanting to know how the events described correspond to reality.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:49 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
Of course you can, this is ridiculous.
Where are you going to find the historical narrative if not IN THE TEXT? And how are you going to dig it out if you reject textual tools?
You compare things that are claimed to have had happen against the historical and archeological record. For example, questions like:
"Did the Flood happen?"
"Did the events as described in Exodus happen?"
"Did the kingdoms of Judah and Judah exist, and did they operate in the manner described in the Old Testament?"
"What happened to the Lost Tribes?" (an interesting question that has recently yielded some interesting answers)
"Was Herod king of Judea around the time it's claimed Jesus was born? Did he order the death of all young male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem?"
are all questions that have historical answers that can be answered by historical/scientific investigation, though the resulting answer may be that we don't have enough information to provide a full answer. You don't need "lit-crit deconstruction" to answer them. I think you're begging the question over and over here. You keep assuming people want to appreciate the text as a piece of literature instead of wanting to know how the events described correspond to reality.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:49 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
I would argue all literature is fiction. Any piece of nonfiction writing is, at best, an image of reality viewed through the authors biases, language, embedded paradigms of 'how things work,' and imperfect knowledge.
Yet still it is not fiction unless all reality is fiction. The post-modern rabbit hole leads nowhere but absurdity.
posted by Emma May Smith at 8:54 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
Yet still it is not fiction unless all reality is fiction. The post-modern rabbit hole leads nowhere but absurdity.
posted by Emma May Smith at 8:54 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
Questions that have historical answers are often answered by interpreting historical texts. All you are saying is that, in additional to interpreting the Biblical sources, we need to interpret texts from other ancient authors (and we need to know how they thought too) as well as to interpret rocks and things from the period. I think it's mad to deny the truth/falsity distinction but it's sensible to interpret textual evidence of truth and falsity within the framework for understanding reality held by the author.
posted by Aravis76 at 8:58 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Aravis76 at 8:58 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
And apologies for thread-sitting (I have to run soon, but I'm enjoying this too much) - but if anyone says you can't read Darwin's Origin as a great work of science AND a great work of literature, then they're dead to me. It is a beautifully written book, the product of a mind that has struggled not only with understanding the real world but also on what that understanding means to us as humans. It is, in places, lapidary in its prose: there is not one false word.
You have to bring all parts of yourself to it. It paints a picture of uncommon clarity and importance, at a time when that picture was barely visible otherwise, and it uses the arts of literature to do so.
posted by Devonian at 9:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
You have to bring all parts of yourself to it. It paints a picture of uncommon clarity and importance, at a time when that picture was barely visible otherwise, and it uses the arts of literature to do so.
posted by Devonian at 9:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
/Points vaguely out of obligation at Cervantes' most famous book about how ha ha no, those airport fantasies of Amadís de Gaula and Tirant lo Blanch and Esplandián and their sequels and imitators don't have anything to do with the reality of 1600s Castilla la Mancha you dummy
/Points also vaguely at those sadly forgotten genres like the scientific poem because we could do with a De Rerum Natura thing
posted by sukeban at 9:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
/Points also vaguely at those sadly forgotten genres like the scientific poem because we could do with a De Rerum Natura thing
posted by sukeban at 9:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Reality may be, well, real, but 'nonfiction' is a human product. There is no absurd rabbit hole, only a warning to be aware that stories, fiction or nonfiction, are only one view of it. Tale told by an idiot , full of sound and fury, etc., etc.
posted by sudogeek at 9:03 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by sudogeek at 9:03 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
I mean, you ask "did the Flood happen?" and examine whether the Bible implies it did. But if "did the Flood happen?" is not an interesting question to the authors of the texts in question, then you aren't going to get much of an answer from them. The next question is whether the main thing you care about, in this context, is whether the Flood happened. If so, maybe stop reading the Biblical texts and move to archaeology. There are other things there, though, if you are prepared to ask other questions.
posted by Aravis76 at 9:03 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Aravis76 at 9:03 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
"You don't need "lit-crit deconstruction" to answer them."
You kinda do, because what are the events described in Exodus? How does the Old Testament describe the workings of the two kingdoms? Your questions immediately demand recourse to the text just to ask the question, which demands textual tools. Even if we want to take the flood narrative (which is pretty clearly in the mythical end of the spectrum although certainly people want to talk about oral and written histories of large floods in local mythologies, so you will have to reckon with that), there are two frequently-contradictory flood narratives intertwined in the Biblical text (J and P sources), so are we talking about one in particular?
Off the top of my head, there are four-ish popular scholarly theories about what Exodus is "actually" talking about; the OT descriptions of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are so extensive and from so many sources, traditions, and redactors, that you'd have to narrow waaaaaaay down or write an 800-page book.
I know people want them to be easy questions, but they're not easy questions. Archaeology itself is not always straightforward, and even when it is straightforward and clear, it doesn't always answer the questions raised in the text we're concerned with. (Archaeologists working on Biblical eras and sites can tell you a shit-ton about how bread was baked and where magnetic north was located (based on the deposits of burn residue in the ovens), but they often have frustratingly little to say about events described in the Bible.). And when we're talking about ancient texts, frequently the text is the lion's share of what we have for trying to "know[ing] how the events described correspond to reality." So you can't avoid engaging with the text with all these critical tools.
Anyway, to tie it back to the main topic of the spectrum of fiction and non-fiction AND one of MetaFilter's favorite things, this is one of the huge points of "Hamilton," which is that because Hamilton died so young and with so many enemies, he had zero control of his legacy, and even with copious historical records, he was written into a villain trying to destroy our pure Jeffersonian democracy. Ron Chernow's book doesn't uncover any new, significant sources; he just re-examines what's already there and (crucially) looks at the biases and motivations of earlier biographers and commentators. And now we have, suddenly, an entirely different, rehabilitated picture of Hamilton from the exact same sources. Which one is "true"? Which one is "factual"? Textual criticism matters for finding out what "really" happened.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:18 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
You kinda do, because what are the events described in Exodus? How does the Old Testament describe the workings of the two kingdoms? Your questions immediately demand recourse to the text just to ask the question, which demands textual tools. Even if we want to take the flood narrative (which is pretty clearly in the mythical end of the spectrum although certainly people want to talk about oral and written histories of large floods in local mythologies, so you will have to reckon with that), there are two frequently-contradictory flood narratives intertwined in the Biblical text (J and P sources), so are we talking about one in particular?
Off the top of my head, there are four-ish popular scholarly theories about what Exodus is "actually" talking about; the OT descriptions of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are so extensive and from so many sources, traditions, and redactors, that you'd have to narrow waaaaaaay down or write an 800-page book.
I know people want them to be easy questions, but they're not easy questions. Archaeology itself is not always straightforward, and even when it is straightforward and clear, it doesn't always answer the questions raised in the text we're concerned with. (Archaeologists working on Biblical eras and sites can tell you a shit-ton about how bread was baked and where magnetic north was located (based on the deposits of burn residue in the ovens), but they often have frustratingly little to say about events described in the Bible.). And when we're talking about ancient texts, frequently the text is the lion's share of what we have for trying to "know[ing] how the events described correspond to reality." So you can't avoid engaging with the text with all these critical tools.
Anyway, to tie it back to the main topic of the spectrum of fiction and non-fiction AND one of MetaFilter's favorite things, this is one of the huge points of "Hamilton," which is that because Hamilton died so young and with so many enemies, he had zero control of his legacy, and even with copious historical records, he was written into a villain trying to destroy our pure Jeffersonian democracy. Ron Chernow's book doesn't uncover any new, significant sources; he just re-examines what's already there and (crucially) looks at the biases and motivations of earlier biographers and commentators. And now we have, suddenly, an entirely different, rehabilitated picture of Hamilton from the exact same sources. Which one is "true"? Which one is "factual"? Textual criticism matters for finding out what "really" happened.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:18 AM on March 27, 2016 [12 favorites]
Oh god, I really must go, but Sukeban - you force me to mention Maxwell's poetry and force me further to contemplate the CERN Book Of Quantum Doggerel which has not yet been written but which jolly well should be.
Consider now the fleeting photon, that subtle twist in time and space
Which feels not one second in a billion years
Yet marks them out.
It folds upon itself, two fields entwined, a place
That moves and does not move
A wave and not a wave; a jot.
A raindrop in an empty sea
That is not there.
Now see what you've made me do, you cur.
posted by Devonian at 9:20 AM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]
Consider now the fleeting photon, that subtle twist in time and space
Which feels not one second in a billion years
Yet marks them out.
It folds upon itself, two fields entwined, a place
That moves and does not move
A wave and not a wave; a jot.
A raindrop in an empty sea
That is not there.
Now see what you've made me do, you cur.
posted by Devonian at 9:20 AM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]
But if "did the Flood happen?" is not an interesting question to the authors of the texts in question, then you aren't going to get much of an answer from them.
Why is it hard to understand that some people have zero interest in what the authors of the text were interested in, or what they were saying and believing, and just want to know if the events described really happened?
If so, maybe stop reading the Biblical texts and move to archaeology.
No, I'll do both, because I want to know if the Biblical texts are describing events that happened. Some of what the texts say reference supposed historical events, and these can be investigated, especially if they reference things we already know exist like Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon. Then we can compare what we already have evidence for against what the texts claim has happened.
This is especially important when it comes to the Bible, because the Bible is used as a basis for moral and even political authority. If someone is telling you society should be a certain way because Jesus or Moses said so, it's not unreasonable to ask if Jesus or Moses actually existed, or if any of the things written about them happened.
It at all seems like a dodge to avoid having to answer uncomfortable questions.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:20 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
Why is it hard to understand that some people have zero interest in what the authors of the text were interested in, or what they were saying and believing, and just want to know if the events described really happened?
If so, maybe stop reading the Biblical texts and move to archaeology.
No, I'll do both, because I want to know if the Biblical texts are describing events that happened. Some of what the texts say reference supposed historical events, and these can be investigated, especially if they reference things we already know exist like Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon. Then we can compare what we already have evidence for against what the texts claim has happened.
This is especially important when it comes to the Bible, because the Bible is used as a basis for moral and even political authority. If someone is telling you society should be a certain way because Jesus or Moses said so, it's not unreasonable to ask if Jesus or Moses actually existed, or if any of the things written about them happened.
It at all seems like a dodge to avoid having to answer uncomfortable questions.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:20 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
you force me to mention Maxwell's poetry
Erasmus Darwin was one of the most famous practicioners of the genre, but I really like Lucretius. Scientific poems are also why syphilis is named "lover of pigs" in Greek.
posted by sukeban at 9:22 AM on March 27, 2016
Erasmus Darwin was one of the most famous practicioners of the genre, but I really like Lucretius. Scientific poems are also why syphilis is named "lover of pigs" in Greek.
posted by sukeban at 9:22 AM on March 27, 2016
This thread reminds me of the other recent thread about the fading power of facts and reason. "Is there really a difference between fact and fiction" is another worrying step.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:25 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Sangermaine at 9:25 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Conflating 'fact' with 'nonfiction' is, I think, what's at issue here.
posted by beerperson at 9:32 AM on March 27, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by beerperson at 9:32 AM on March 27, 2016 [11 favorites]
You cannot untangle what "actually happened" without first working through a lit-crit deconstruction of the text ... Where are you going to find the historical narrative if not IN THE TEXT
The specific text under study isn't our only source of information about the history in question. We have the physical archeological record to tell us whether (and where) settlements existed or battles occurred, and to verify how ancient economic and social systems actually functioned. When it comes to questions of ancestry and population migration, we have genetics, historical linguistics, and other techniques. By observing when and where non-native plant and animal species appear in various places, we can reconstruct likely trade patterns. We can even turn to astronomy to suggest whether a light in the sky might have been an actual eclipse or a comet. We can turn to various kinds of scientific knowledge to identify specific parts of the text which cannot possibly be true. Etc.
To give one concrete example: the Bible claims that hundreds of thousands of Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians. To my understanding, there is little else in the historical record to support this idea (and in fact there is specific evidence against it).
It is possible to construct a history of the ancient Hebrews—however imperfect that history might be—without once referring to the Hebrew Bible. When I ask "how historically accurate is the Hebrew Bible?", I'm simply asking something like:
"How closely does this text agree with what we know of history from non-textual sources?"
or even,
"Given the established historical consensus (which was arrived at by synthesizing information from many diciplines including textual analysis), how much does this text agree?"
I don't know why this upsets you. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't use the techniques you're advocating. I'm not an academic who is trying to walk through the minutiae of historical interpretation with you. I'm a layman asking a perfectly natural question. The stories in question involve historical places and peoples, but also contain many elements of the fantastic. Of course I'm curious to know, generally, how much it leans toward one or the other.
You seem convinced that I'm trying to force some tortured, wrongheaded methodology on your work. I think you're just misunderstanding where I'm coming from.
I mean, I'm a web developer. If you ask me a question about a website, I'm not going to exclaim "Oh my GOD, do you even KNOW anything about web services, you can't just slap up some REST API without configuring CORS, and how on EARTH do you expect to write unit tests with this kind of object composition..."
posted by escape from the potato planet at 9:32 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
The specific text under study isn't our only source of information about the history in question. We have the physical archeological record to tell us whether (and where) settlements existed or battles occurred, and to verify how ancient economic and social systems actually functioned. When it comes to questions of ancestry and population migration, we have genetics, historical linguistics, and other techniques. By observing when and where non-native plant and animal species appear in various places, we can reconstruct likely trade patterns. We can even turn to astronomy to suggest whether a light in the sky might have been an actual eclipse or a comet. We can turn to various kinds of scientific knowledge to identify specific parts of the text which cannot possibly be true. Etc.
To give one concrete example: the Bible claims that hundreds of thousands of Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians. To my understanding, there is little else in the historical record to support this idea (and in fact there is specific evidence against it).
It is possible to construct a history of the ancient Hebrews—however imperfect that history might be—without once referring to the Hebrew Bible. When I ask "how historically accurate is the Hebrew Bible?", I'm simply asking something like:
"How closely does this text agree with what we know of history from non-textual sources?"
or even,
"Given the established historical consensus (which was arrived at by synthesizing information from many diciplines including textual analysis), how much does this text agree?"
I don't know why this upsets you. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't use the techniques you're advocating. I'm not an academic who is trying to walk through the minutiae of historical interpretation with you. I'm a layman asking a perfectly natural question. The stories in question involve historical places and peoples, but also contain many elements of the fantastic. Of course I'm curious to know, generally, how much it leans toward one or the other.
You seem convinced that I'm trying to force some tortured, wrongheaded methodology on your work. I think you're just misunderstanding where I'm coming from.
I mean, I'm a web developer. If you ask me a question about a website, I'm not going to exclaim "Oh my GOD, do you even KNOW anything about web services, you can't just slap up some REST API without configuring CORS, and how on EARTH do you expect to write unit tests with this kind of object composition..."
posted by escape from the potato planet at 9:32 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
I'd stop believing people who say the Bible is inerrant truth, if I were you, Sangermaine, because they don't actually care whether it is or isn't. If what they say is bothering you, you're certainly wasting your time even opening the Bible or digging rocks; you should look at the people instead. That's where the hard questions lie.
If on the other hand you want to know whether _a_ flood happened, which is an interesting question, and why it would be reported in the Bible as it was, and what it means to us now and what it meant to them then, then you'll need the right tools. If you just want to 'disprove the inerrant truth of the Bible', then that's a trivial task and has been already done. You should look elsewhere for the progress you desire.
posted by Devonian at 9:33 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
If on the other hand you want to know whether _a_ flood happened, which is an interesting question, and why it would be reported in the Bible as it was, and what it means to us now and what it meant to them then, then you'll need the right tools. If you just want to 'disprove the inerrant truth of the Bible', then that's a trivial task and has been already done. You should look elsewhere for the progress you desire.
posted by Devonian at 9:33 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
Novels can tell you what a memoir or a psychological case study cannot; a clear window into a soul. Example from Walter Kaufmann. Consider the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the hypothetical(?) real-life model for the character of Natasha Rostov in Tolstoy's novel. Napoleon's ghost reads the full stack of sixty Napoleon biographies, sets the last aside, and muses with satisfaction that his secret his safe. Natasha's ghost reads the Tolstoy book and is horrified "oh god they knew."
posted by bukvich at 10:02 AM on March 27, 2016
posted by bukvich at 10:02 AM on March 27, 2016
But is that what those two ghosts really said?
posted by RobotHero at 10:06 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by RobotHero at 10:06 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
""Given the established historical consensus (which was arrived at by synthesizing information from many diciplines including textual analysis), how much does this text agree?"
I don't know why this upsets you."
It doesn't UPSET me, I'm trying to tell you what's wrong with the QUESTION that you're not going to get answers you like. Like, in your example, the Exodus narrative is complicated, long, and has multiple overlapping sources just within the Biblical text. I can't tell you what "the Exodus" is because there ISN'T just one clear Exodus story in the Bible. Moreover, as I said in my comment which I feel like maybe you didn't read, there are at least four relatively supported scholarly interpretations -- which, again, we can't really talk about without talking about the minutia of the text. And, finally, back to the topic that kicked this off, It matters a lot what the authors were trying to do to understand the "factiness" of what they're telling you. Your base claim is that the authors' intention doesn't matter -- do you think that Fox News's intentions don't matter when they "report" on the presidential race? Of course it matters.
If you want to know "Did this specific series of events that they told me about in Sunday school happen?" then I can probably give you a pretty simple answer to that. (The answer is almost certainly, "No, that didn't happen, and also a lot of it isn't in the Bible to start with.") If you want to talk about what's in the Bible, first we have to talk about what's in the Bible, which is the step you seem badly to want to skip.
Or, if you like, my answer to just about every factual question you have about the Old Testament will be, "Maybe? Sort-of? Some of it? It's pretty complicated, it depends on what the definition of is is."
"If you ask me a question about a website"
Yeah but if I ask you "why doesn't your website deliver me pizza through my disk drive?" you're going to have to start out with some fairly basic misconceptions and category errors.
We have the physical archeological record to tell us whether (and where) settlements existed or battles occurred, and to verify how ancient economic and social systems actually functioned. When it comes to questions of ancestry and population migration, we have genetics, historical linguistics, and other techniques. By observing when and where non-native plant and animal species appear in various places, we can reconstruct likely trade patterns.
I think if you dig into a lot of this you will find it not as helpful as you'd like it to be. The archaeological record tells us some kinds of things, but often not the kinds of things we'd like to know in terms of historical EVENTS. Ancient economic and social system information relies to a very large extent on textual clues, from receipts to contracts to censuses to property records (we can get some from physical buildings and settlements, sure, but only some, and there's a lot of interpretation going on there, turning the site into its own sort of text requiring interpretation). You don't get a clear, correct narrative of history; you get (hopefully-expert) interpretation of messy and partial facts, that you're setting against texts that (back to the main point) are very different from modern texts, with different goals and modes of storytelling and symbols and ideas about what's important enough to record and what isn't. There are few things as common as archaeologists going, "Hey, we think our original interpretation of that mysterious, partial ancient site was TOTALLY WRONG." My husband oversees several archaeological sites -- much more recent than the ones you're talking about -- and they're all, "So we think this was maybe for this. Probably? Maybe. I don't know. Maybe? Let's dig for six more decades and I'll give you a better guess. Can I have $100,000 for ground-penetrating scans?" The work they do is awesome, fascinating, enlightening, but it's really not terribly conclusive very often. More of it is mysterious than not. If you read the site reports, they'll be like 800 pages of "we found this cool shit that we have absolutely no idea what it was for" and like 200 pages of "okay we have some good hypotheses on this stuff." The 200 pages gets reported, and makes it sound much more certain and settled than it is, and leaves out the 800 pages of important and fascinating stuff that as yet has no explanation.
"This is especially important when it comes to the Bible, because the Bible is used as a basis for moral and even political authority. If someone is telling you society should be a certain way because Jesus or Moses said so, it's not unreasonable to ask if Jesus or Moses actually existed, or if any of the things written about them happened.
It at all seems like a dodge to avoid having to answer uncomfortable questions."
Naw, man, this is the serious-person attempt to ANSWER those questions, because "evidence" for Jesus and Moses is entirely within the text, so you have to very closely interrogate the text. I know you're probably coming from dealing with Biblical literalists who are like "IT'S IN THE BIBLE THEREFORE JESUS EXISTED!" which, yes, that is pretty much the dumbest possible answer to your question. But reasonably contemporary "evidence" for Jesus exists 1) in the Bible; 2) in extra-Biblical Christian (or Christian-ish) sources (i.e., Gnostic gospels); 3) like 2 mentions in Josephus. So anyone who is taking your question SERIOUSLY is doing it by engaging deeply with these texts.
I don't dispute it can be totally aggravating to have your Biblical literalists be like "IT'S IN THE BOOK THEREFORE IT'S TRUE" and to have your Biblical scholars be like "Almost all we've GOT is the book so we're gonna have to mine the fuck out of this motherfucker and strip it bare." Because they're both saying "you've gotta go to the book!" But anyone who's claiming they can talk to you about the "historical Jesus" without talking about the Bible is conning you.
(Anyway I'm not all that invested ... Jesus probably existed, we have good textual evidence that such a person existed. Whether he did what's described in the texts? Ehhhhhhh tough question requiring a lot of recourse to what the texts MEANT and even then in the end you're going to have to decide how trustworthy you think the texts are. And anyone who can't accept that some people will find those texts more trustworthy than others is kind-of a dumbass who has somehow missed the last 2000 years of religious issues.)
Some of what the texts say reference supposed historical events, and these can be investigated, especially if they reference things we already know exist like Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon. Then we can compare what we already have evidence for against what the texts claim has happened.
All evidence for Nebuchadnezzar is texts (even if you've got a tomb, you generally know whose it is based on some kind of text). You're just going texts vs. texts. Which is legit and great and amazing! But you can't be like "I want to look at this one text vs. this outside evidence, and by calling the latter evidence privilege it over the text I have questions about." It's texts all the way down!
Anyway I shall cease my part of this now-derail after this but you (anyone) can memail me if you want me to continue the discussion.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:10 AM on March 27, 2016 [17 favorites]
I don't know why this upsets you."
It doesn't UPSET me, I'm trying to tell you what's wrong with the QUESTION that you're not going to get answers you like. Like, in your example, the Exodus narrative is complicated, long, and has multiple overlapping sources just within the Biblical text. I can't tell you what "the Exodus" is because there ISN'T just one clear Exodus story in the Bible. Moreover, as I said in my comment which I feel like maybe you didn't read, there are at least four relatively supported scholarly interpretations -- which, again, we can't really talk about without talking about the minutia of the text. And, finally, back to the topic that kicked this off, It matters a lot what the authors were trying to do to understand the "factiness" of what they're telling you. Your base claim is that the authors' intention doesn't matter -- do you think that Fox News's intentions don't matter when they "report" on the presidential race? Of course it matters.
If you want to know "Did this specific series of events that they told me about in Sunday school happen?" then I can probably give you a pretty simple answer to that. (The answer is almost certainly, "No, that didn't happen, and also a lot of it isn't in the Bible to start with.") If you want to talk about what's in the Bible, first we have to talk about what's in the Bible, which is the step you seem badly to want to skip.
Or, if you like, my answer to just about every factual question you have about the Old Testament will be, "Maybe? Sort-of? Some of it? It's pretty complicated, it depends on what the definition of is is."
"If you ask me a question about a website"
Yeah but if I ask you "why doesn't your website deliver me pizza through my disk drive?" you're going to have to start out with some fairly basic misconceptions and category errors.
We have the physical archeological record to tell us whether (and where) settlements existed or battles occurred, and to verify how ancient economic and social systems actually functioned. When it comes to questions of ancestry and population migration, we have genetics, historical linguistics, and other techniques. By observing when and where non-native plant and animal species appear in various places, we can reconstruct likely trade patterns.
I think if you dig into a lot of this you will find it not as helpful as you'd like it to be. The archaeological record tells us some kinds of things, but often not the kinds of things we'd like to know in terms of historical EVENTS. Ancient economic and social system information relies to a very large extent on textual clues, from receipts to contracts to censuses to property records (we can get some from physical buildings and settlements, sure, but only some, and there's a lot of interpretation going on there, turning the site into its own sort of text requiring interpretation). You don't get a clear, correct narrative of history; you get (hopefully-expert) interpretation of messy and partial facts, that you're setting against texts that (back to the main point) are very different from modern texts, with different goals and modes of storytelling and symbols and ideas about what's important enough to record and what isn't. There are few things as common as archaeologists going, "Hey, we think our original interpretation of that mysterious, partial ancient site was TOTALLY WRONG." My husband oversees several archaeological sites -- much more recent than the ones you're talking about -- and they're all, "So we think this was maybe for this. Probably? Maybe. I don't know. Maybe? Let's dig for six more decades and I'll give you a better guess. Can I have $100,000 for ground-penetrating scans?" The work they do is awesome, fascinating, enlightening, but it's really not terribly conclusive very often. More of it is mysterious than not. If you read the site reports, they'll be like 800 pages of "we found this cool shit that we have absolutely no idea what it was for" and like 200 pages of "okay we have some good hypotheses on this stuff." The 200 pages gets reported, and makes it sound much more certain and settled than it is, and leaves out the 800 pages of important and fascinating stuff that as yet has no explanation.
"This is especially important when it comes to the Bible, because the Bible is used as a basis for moral and even political authority. If someone is telling you society should be a certain way because Jesus or Moses said so, it's not unreasonable to ask if Jesus or Moses actually existed, or if any of the things written about them happened.
It at all seems like a dodge to avoid having to answer uncomfortable questions."
Naw, man, this is the serious-person attempt to ANSWER those questions, because "evidence" for Jesus and Moses is entirely within the text, so you have to very closely interrogate the text. I know you're probably coming from dealing with Biblical literalists who are like "IT'S IN THE BIBLE THEREFORE JESUS EXISTED!" which, yes, that is pretty much the dumbest possible answer to your question. But reasonably contemporary "evidence" for Jesus exists 1) in the Bible; 2) in extra-Biblical Christian (or Christian-ish) sources (i.e., Gnostic gospels); 3) like 2 mentions in Josephus. So anyone who is taking your question SERIOUSLY is doing it by engaging deeply with these texts.
I don't dispute it can be totally aggravating to have your Biblical literalists be like "IT'S IN THE BOOK THEREFORE IT'S TRUE" and to have your Biblical scholars be like "Almost all we've GOT is the book so we're gonna have to mine the fuck out of this motherfucker and strip it bare." Because they're both saying "you've gotta go to the book!" But anyone who's claiming they can talk to you about the "historical Jesus" without talking about the Bible is conning you.
(Anyway I'm not all that invested ... Jesus probably existed, we have good textual evidence that such a person existed. Whether he did what's described in the texts? Ehhhhhhh tough question requiring a lot of recourse to what the texts MEANT and even then in the end you're going to have to decide how trustworthy you think the texts are. And anyone who can't accept that some people will find those texts more trustworthy than others is kind-of a dumbass who has somehow missed the last 2000 years of religious issues.)
Some of what the texts say reference supposed historical events, and these can be investigated, especially if they reference things we already know exist like Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon. Then we can compare what we already have evidence for against what the texts claim has happened.
All evidence for Nebuchadnezzar is texts (even if you've got a tomb, you generally know whose it is based on some kind of text). You're just going texts vs. texts. Which is legit and great and amazing! But you can't be like "I want to look at this one text vs. this outside evidence, and by calling the latter evidence privilege it over the text I have questions about." It's texts all the way down!
Anyway I shall cease my part of this now-derail after this but you (anyone) can memail me if you want me to continue the discussion.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:10 AM on March 27, 2016 [17 favorites]
I was raised by literary Russians (among other things, my grandmother wrote a lot of literary criticism, my mom wrote short satirical stories in the immigrant media that were very obvious, thinly-fictionalized stories about real people in our community, and I got an intense education about Literature And It's Importance growing up, and this education started before I was in America). While I am not an expert in the 'studied this in college' sense, I have a pretty good native idea of what Russian culture thinks of it's famous literature.
My impression is that the lack of convenient words for 'nonfiction vs fiction' doesn't map all that much onto our mental concept of the terrain. I believe people use 'literature' to mean fiction and other creative art writing of prose in the same way that people use 'fiction' here.
My impression is also that we might POSSIBLY view thinly-fictionalized storytelling as a higher form of art than Western/English literature does- but it's not like the lack of a comfortable word for the broad fiction and nonfiction categories makes people confused about which is which.
posted by girl Mark at 10:31 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
My impression is that the lack of convenient words for 'nonfiction vs fiction' doesn't map all that much onto our mental concept of the terrain. I believe people use 'literature' to mean fiction and other creative art writing of prose in the same way that people use 'fiction' here.
My impression is also that we might POSSIBLY view thinly-fictionalized storytelling as a higher form of art than Western/English literature does- but it's not like the lack of a comfortable word for the broad fiction and nonfiction categories makes people confused about which is which.
posted by girl Mark at 10:31 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
This is especially important when it comes to the Bible, because the Bible is used as a basis for moral and even political authority.
The missing step in your analysis is that the moral authority doesn't rest on the historicity of the Flood. (I personally think the metaphysical and spiritual claims of Christianity do rest on the historicity of the Resurrection but this is a different point and lots of Christians disagree with me). If you want to engage with people who aren't Biblical inerrancy Protestants - a tiny fraction of the world's Christian population - who believe in the moral authority of the Mosaic law or Jesus' teaching ministry, it will probably be more fruitful to use your empathy and imagination to challenge / engage with what they are saying about what the stories, morally, mean. The factual question is certainly a possible one, but it won't get you anywhere much if you want to talk about moral authority.
posted by Aravis76 at 10:56 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
The missing step in your analysis is that the moral authority doesn't rest on the historicity of the Flood. (I personally think the metaphysical and spiritual claims of Christianity do rest on the historicity of the Resurrection but this is a different point and lots of Christians disagree with me). If you want to engage with people who aren't Biblical inerrancy Protestants - a tiny fraction of the world's Christian population - who believe in the moral authority of the Mosaic law or Jesus' teaching ministry, it will probably be more fruitful to use your empathy and imagination to challenge / engage with what they are saying about what the stories, morally, mean. The factual question is certainly a possible one, but it won't get you anywhere much if you want to talk about moral authority.
posted by Aravis76 at 10:56 AM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
Though on the subject of Josephus, in the prefaces for both Wars of the Jews and Antiquities of the Jews he discusses writing in terms of accuracy:
posted by RobotHero at 10:59 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
For some of them apply themselves to this part of learning to show their skill in composition, and that they may therein acquire a reputation for speaking finely: others of them there are, who write histories in order to gratify those that happen to be concerned in them, and on that account have spared no pains, but rather gone beyond their own abilities in the performance: but others there are, who, of necessity and by force, are driven to write history, because they are concerned in the facts, and so cannot excuse themselves from committing them to writing, for the advantage of posterity; nay, there are not a few who are induced to draw their historical facts out of darkness into light, and to produce them for the benefit of the public, on account of the great importance of the facts themselves with which they have been concerned. Now of these several reasons for writing history, I must profess the two last were my own reasons also; for since I was myself interested in that war which we Jews had with the Romans, and knew myself its particular actions, and what conclusion it had, I was forced to give the history of it, because I saw that others perverted the truth of those actions in their writings.To my modern ears, that does sound a lot like he's claiming his goal in writing is factual accuracy. And he was unlikely to have been an English Puritan. (Though technically I have quoted William Whiston's translation, so there's some potential of English ideas contaminating the quote that way.)
posted by RobotHero at 10:59 AM on March 27, 2016 [4 favorites]
Fiction and non-fiction are, in my opinion, two sides of the same coin. I had a couple of professors in college who helped blur the lines between the two.
One was an African history professor who pioneered the use of oral tradition in writing history. He introduced me to the concept that facts exist in a vacuum. Anything one says about the events afterwards is an interpretation reflecting one's biases and prejudices. I had an English professor who said the way to write a short story is to take an event and start telling lies about it. I took another literature class that concentrated on novels that were heavily footnoted. We read the cited sources in addition to the novels to see how the authors used the sources to create their novels.
As a result, I see fiction and non-fiction as existing along a spectrum of truthiness.
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 11:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
One was an African history professor who pioneered the use of oral tradition in writing history. He introduced me to the concept that facts exist in a vacuum. Anything one says about the events afterwards is an interpretation reflecting one's biases and prejudices. I had an English professor who said the way to write a short story is to take an event and start telling lies about it. I took another literature class that concentrated on novels that were heavily footnoted. We read the cited sources in addition to the novels to see how the authors used the sources to create their novels.
As a result, I see fiction and non-fiction as existing along a spectrum of truthiness.
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 11:01 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]
Well, I'm enjoying this thread so much I'm going to actually go read The Fine Article whilst awaiting new (better than mine) comments. So there!
posted by comealongpole at 11:26 AM on March 27, 2016
posted by comealongpole at 11:26 AM on March 27, 2016
/Points also vaguely at those sadly forgotten genres like the scientific poem because we could do with a De Rerum Natura thing
It's been done. Not well, but it's been done.
I'm honestly rather surprised to see people searching for some kind of lit-non-fiction thing, though. Science ... is. There's a lot of murky stuff that goes on, but I'm not sure why wanting to read about what is rather than wanting to read something that's written beautifully (for select definitions of beautiful: as a natural speed reader, I find poetry's information content lacking) is some kind of literary sin. There's stuff that can be questioned about papers in the latest issue of Nature, but pretending that these things exist as some kind of fiction (and thus that they need to be evaluated on their literary merits, which I will admit are generally lacking) definitely misses the point.
That goes for narrative non-fiction as well. I like it as much as anyone else, but I'm much more drawn to narratives that label the dialog and scenes they've added as padding in the text or omit it entirely ("we don't know what they spoke about, but...") than those that only admit to speculation when you read the footnotes. Yes, there are narrative aspects of popular non-fiction (and there are, equally, factual aspects of popular fiction), but it's not like one can't divide between the two.
To my modern ears, that does sound a lot like he's claiming his goal in writing is factual accuracy.
One of the things that blew me away when I read Plutarch's Lives was that he would start deconstructing myths by citing various sources. Which isn't to say he was writing non-fiction the way we know it, but it seems to elevate him above the stories we read about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 11:54 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
It's been done. Not well, but it's been done.
I'm honestly rather surprised to see people searching for some kind of lit-non-fiction thing, though. Science ... is. There's a lot of murky stuff that goes on, but I'm not sure why wanting to read about what is rather than wanting to read something that's written beautifully (for select definitions of beautiful: as a natural speed reader, I find poetry's information content lacking) is some kind of literary sin. There's stuff that can be questioned about papers in the latest issue of Nature, but pretending that these things exist as some kind of fiction (and thus that they need to be evaluated on their literary merits, which I will admit are generally lacking) definitely misses the point.
That goes for narrative non-fiction as well. I like it as much as anyone else, but I'm much more drawn to narratives that label the dialog and scenes they've added as padding in the text or omit it entirely ("we don't know what they spoke about, but...") than those that only admit to speculation when you read the footnotes. Yes, there are narrative aspects of popular non-fiction (and there are, equally, factual aspects of popular fiction), but it's not like one can't divide between the two.
To my modern ears, that does sound a lot like he's claiming his goal in writing is factual accuracy.
One of the things that blew me away when I read Plutarch's Lives was that he would start deconstructing myths by citing various sources. Which isn't to say he was writing non-fiction the way we know it, but it seems to elevate him above the stories we read about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 11:54 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
I picked up my copy of Whiston's translation of Josephus to re-read the preface. Josephus talks about drawing "historical facts out of darkness into light" but, at least for his Antiquities and much of the Wars of the Jews, he is translating and interpreting Hebrew history for Roman ears. At the time of that writing, Josephus was very much a Roman partisan - and personal acquaintance of Vespasian and Titus.
He certainly was a participant in the Jewish revolt and witness of Vespasian's campaign and his reporting is a valid historical document. The earlier chapters, though, are not contemporaneous but are second or third hand, including the chapter mentioning Jesus.
posted by sudogeek at 12:04 PM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
He certainly was a participant in the Jewish revolt and witness of Vespasian's campaign and his reporting is a valid historical document. The earlier chapters, though, are not contemporaneous but are second or third hand, including the chapter mentioning Jesus.
posted by sudogeek at 12:04 PM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
Though discussing whether something is first or second or third hand information is only sensible when we are discussing non-fiction. You wouldn't seriously discuss whether Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has first-hand or second-hand knowledge of the activities of Sherlock Holmes, because the stories about Sherlock Holmes are firmly on the side of fiction. You could discuss whether Watson has first-hand or second-hand knowledge, because he is also a character within the same story, and people certainly have.
posted by RobotHero at 12:27 PM on March 27, 2016
posted by RobotHero at 12:27 PM on March 27, 2016
pound pastrami
can kraut
six bagels
—bring home for Emma.
posted by klarck at 1:23 PM on March 27, 2016 [5 favorites]
can kraut
six bagels
—bring home for Emma.
posted by klarck at 1:23 PM on March 27, 2016 [5 favorites]
It's interesting that there are two genres, "crime fiction" and "true crime", which insist on telling you whether the events described really happened in the genre's own name.
posted by kandinski at 3:49 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by kandinski at 3:49 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Fiction is a really interesting concept. The first thing to grasp is that fiction is not the same as lies. This seems obvious, but this took centuries to take hold after the word first began to be applied in a roughly modern way in the 17th Century. For instance, when Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, it was presented as a true account, because Defoe didn't really have the category of fiction available to him until later in life.
Fiction is not the opposite of lies either, but is rather a different category from truth and lie. But because human beings have a tendency to think in opposites, it's been common to see people assign either truth and lie as the opposite of fiction. If truth is the opposite, then fiction is just a fancy word for lies. If lies is the opposite, then fiction is a deeper truth about the human condition.
What's clever about the term non-fiction is that it sidesteps both truth and lie to create a new opposite for fiction. However, this concept is currently going through a process similar to the one fiction went through back in the 17th and 18th Centuries. It's proving quite hard to grasp, and I see a tendency to apply the old truth and lie dichotomy to non-fiction. If truth is the opposite, then non-fiction is a false representation of reality. If lies is the opposite, then non-fiction is a true account of events that happened and people who exist. Which is basically how people interpreted Robinson Crusoe back in the early 18th Century.
If you go back a few decades, you can see non-fiction in its embryonic form in an even more confused state. If you read issues of The New Yorker from the 30s and 40s, one thing that jumps out is that fiction and reportage aren't as clearly demarcated as today. One famous example of this confusion is Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery". Many readers interpreted it as an account of something that really happened. To readers today that seems completely baffling, even ridiculous. But when it first appeared, it lacked the context clues that people would get today, i.e. no one told the readers that this was fiction and it appeared in a part of the paper where people might well find accounts of real events and people.
That said, as a publishing category, I'm not surprised it doesn't have many takers outside the English-speaking world. There are few businesses more culturally specific than bookselling. For instance, in Lithuania the big important authors write poetry or essays. Writers of fiction are completely marginalized. A non-fiction category is completely useless in that kind of culture. In Iceland, there's been an attempt recently to create a category of non-fiction, but it hasn't really taken hold. The reason isn't that it is impossible to express the concept in Icelandic, but that it wouldn't make sense as a category for selling books. One day it might be and then you might walk into a bookstore in Reykjavík and ask to see their "sannsögur" section, but as of yet no one really has any use for the term except for people interested in the study of literature.
However, it makes sense in the US because reading fiction is heavily coded as a feminine activity, so males are culturally conditioned to seek out "true stories", meaning there's a sizable market for non-fiction. And because publishers need texts to sell to booksellers, there is a push to write the sorts of books that fit into that category, which furthermore makes it a material of study for scholars, and object of instruction for creative writing teachers. Something similar happened with novels. I think it isn't a coincidence that the European tradition of the novel arose at the same time as movable type printing. The ability of presses to print huge numbers of books in an affordable way meant that there was a huge new market with a limited amount of product. When the publishers started to run out older texts, they asked for new material, and fiction was reasonably quick to produce. So authors were pushed into writing fiction, and thereby creating the necessity for the understanding of the concept, which led to scholarly interest, which further entrenched the category so that today we have a hard time understanding how people viewed texts from before fiction was a big, important cultural category.
posted by Kattullus at 4:14 PM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]
Fiction is not the opposite of lies either, but is rather a different category from truth and lie. But because human beings have a tendency to think in opposites, it's been common to see people assign either truth and lie as the opposite of fiction. If truth is the opposite, then fiction is just a fancy word for lies. If lies is the opposite, then fiction is a deeper truth about the human condition.
What's clever about the term non-fiction is that it sidesteps both truth and lie to create a new opposite for fiction. However, this concept is currently going through a process similar to the one fiction went through back in the 17th and 18th Centuries. It's proving quite hard to grasp, and I see a tendency to apply the old truth and lie dichotomy to non-fiction. If truth is the opposite, then non-fiction is a false representation of reality. If lies is the opposite, then non-fiction is a true account of events that happened and people who exist. Which is basically how people interpreted Robinson Crusoe back in the early 18th Century.
If you go back a few decades, you can see non-fiction in its embryonic form in an even more confused state. If you read issues of The New Yorker from the 30s and 40s, one thing that jumps out is that fiction and reportage aren't as clearly demarcated as today. One famous example of this confusion is Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery". Many readers interpreted it as an account of something that really happened. To readers today that seems completely baffling, even ridiculous. But when it first appeared, it lacked the context clues that people would get today, i.e. no one told the readers that this was fiction and it appeared in a part of the paper where people might well find accounts of real events and people.
That said, as a publishing category, I'm not surprised it doesn't have many takers outside the English-speaking world. There are few businesses more culturally specific than bookselling. For instance, in Lithuania the big important authors write poetry or essays. Writers of fiction are completely marginalized. A non-fiction category is completely useless in that kind of culture. In Iceland, there's been an attempt recently to create a category of non-fiction, but it hasn't really taken hold. The reason isn't that it is impossible to express the concept in Icelandic, but that it wouldn't make sense as a category for selling books. One day it might be and then you might walk into a bookstore in Reykjavík and ask to see their "sannsögur" section, but as of yet no one really has any use for the term except for people interested in the study of literature.
However, it makes sense in the US because reading fiction is heavily coded as a feminine activity, so males are culturally conditioned to seek out "true stories", meaning there's a sizable market for non-fiction. And because publishers need texts to sell to booksellers, there is a push to write the sorts of books that fit into that category, which furthermore makes it a material of study for scholars, and object of instruction for creative writing teachers. Something similar happened with novels. I think it isn't a coincidence that the European tradition of the novel arose at the same time as movable type printing. The ability of presses to print huge numbers of books in an affordable way meant that there was a huge new market with a limited amount of product. When the publishers started to run out older texts, they asked for new material, and fiction was reasonably quick to produce. So authors were pushed into writing fiction, and thereby creating the necessity for the understanding of the concept, which led to scholarly interest, which further entrenched the category so that today we have a hard time understanding how people viewed texts from before fiction was a big, important cultural category.
posted by Kattullus at 4:14 PM on March 27, 2016 [8 favorites]
"What exactly was Plato complaining about Poetry for in The Republic - that it was all 'false'? "
This is a facile understanding of the falseness he was railing against. Even if you've only read Republic, it should be obvious that the context for understanding his complaint against poetry is his theory of forms -- poetry and rhetoric and attempts to persuade are all shadows on the wall. They are at best deeply imperfect and at worst actively misleading. Plato privileges the dialectic as a rational process whereby one might have a more reliable glimpse of truth through the process, not by virtue of the words which are used or because of people's attempts to explain what they think they know. Plato wasn't distinguishing between poetry/drama and what we'd call "nonfiction" -- he was just as distrustful of narratives of what we'd call "fact".
Truth, for Plato, could be gained possibly by divine revelation (Socrates avers that the oracle reveals truth but that he is in no position to make claims about it) or, at best, "recollected" via reason. Divine truth aside, the only truth for Plato is deduction from incontestable first principles -- it is not something found in the world and all words are in some sense lies. Plato railed against rhetoric for this reason, because it claimed to impart truth, and he railed even more strongly against poetry because, really, it was making a parallel competing claim -- deduction and intuition are two sides of the same idealist coin.
So the ideas that you're bringing to the table about facts and truth and fiction are all misapplied with regard to Plato, just as is happening in this larger discussion.
There was more than a whiff of popular Whorfianism in the article and I was left with a lingering annoyance, that it was making its case too strongly and too simplistically, almost a mirror image of the implicit claims that it was contesting. But very quickly this thread pushed me in the other direction because, wow, do many people have very unexamined but ardent ideas about truth and narrative. Thank goodness for Eyebrows McGee, who is doing yeoman's service in this thread.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:57 PM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
This is a facile understanding of the falseness he was railing against. Even if you've only read Republic, it should be obvious that the context for understanding his complaint against poetry is his theory of forms -- poetry and rhetoric and attempts to persuade are all shadows on the wall. They are at best deeply imperfect and at worst actively misleading. Plato privileges the dialectic as a rational process whereby one might have a more reliable glimpse of truth through the process, not by virtue of the words which are used or because of people's attempts to explain what they think they know. Plato wasn't distinguishing between poetry/drama and what we'd call "nonfiction" -- he was just as distrustful of narratives of what we'd call "fact".
Truth, for Plato, could be gained possibly by divine revelation (Socrates avers that the oracle reveals truth but that he is in no position to make claims about it) or, at best, "recollected" via reason. Divine truth aside, the only truth for Plato is deduction from incontestable first principles -- it is not something found in the world and all words are in some sense lies. Plato railed against rhetoric for this reason, because it claimed to impart truth, and he railed even more strongly against poetry because, really, it was making a parallel competing claim -- deduction and intuition are two sides of the same idealist coin.
So the ideas that you're bringing to the table about facts and truth and fiction are all misapplied with regard to Plato, just as is happening in this larger discussion.
There was more than a whiff of popular Whorfianism in the article and I was left with a lingering annoyance, that it was making its case too strongly and too simplistically, almost a mirror image of the implicit claims that it was contesting. But very quickly this thread pushed me in the other direction because, wow, do many people have very unexamined but ardent ideas about truth and narrative. Thank goodness for Eyebrows McGee, who is doing yeoman's service in this thread.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:57 PM on March 27, 2016 [6 favorites]
"Fiction is not the opposite of lies either, but is rather a different category from truth and lie."
The philosopher Sisela Bok, who writes about lying, makes the point that it's not a lie if you're not expecting factuality or honesty. One of the key points of a lie is that it's meant to mislead. So for Bok, there are a whole variety of categories that we wouldn't categorize as "truth" or "lie" -- ranging from poetic language, to jokes, to fiction.
Which kind-of highlights the way "non-fiction" can be a little dangerous as a label if we take "fiction" to mean "made-up" and "non-fiction" to mean "true or real." The one that jumps to mind is "Into the Wild," where, working from rather scant evidence, the author makes some pretty big leaps about what the McCandless probably did, or what he was thinking, and has come up with a hugely controversial theory of how McCandless died (that's been wildly and often angrily debated). Don't get me wrong, I really like the book, but there are some real questions about the veracity of the narrative, and in many way it's very novelistic -- but it's shelved in non-fiction so people assume it's "true."
(I'm not trying to call it out as particularly egregious -- it's bog-standard narrative non-fiction and Krakauer does a nice job -- it's just what jumps to mind first because I love "Go West, Young Man!" narratives and have them on my mind today.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:17 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
The philosopher Sisela Bok, who writes about lying, makes the point that it's not a lie if you're not expecting factuality or honesty. One of the key points of a lie is that it's meant to mislead. So for Bok, there are a whole variety of categories that we wouldn't categorize as "truth" or "lie" -- ranging from poetic language, to jokes, to fiction.
Which kind-of highlights the way "non-fiction" can be a little dangerous as a label if we take "fiction" to mean "made-up" and "non-fiction" to mean "true or real." The one that jumps to mind is "Into the Wild," where, working from rather scant evidence, the author makes some pretty big leaps about what the McCandless probably did, or what he was thinking, and has come up with a hugely controversial theory of how McCandless died (that's been wildly and often angrily debated). Don't get me wrong, I really like the book, but there are some real questions about the veracity of the narrative, and in many way it's very novelistic -- but it's shelved in non-fiction so people assume it's "true."
(I'm not trying to call it out as particularly egregious -- it's bog-standard narrative non-fiction and Krakauer does a nice job -- it's just what jumps to mind first because I love "Go West, Young Man!" narratives and have them on my mind today.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:17 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
My terminology in describing how to write fiction was, upon reflection, rather sloppy. I was quoting my professor. As Kattullus pointed out, fiction is not the same as lies. A more accurate way of phrasing it would be that one way to write fiction is to take real events and embellish upon them. That process is common to fiction and creative non-fiction, hence the term 'spectrum of truthiness.'
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 6:29 PM on March 27, 2016
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 6:29 PM on March 27, 2016
I mean, I'm a web developer. If you ask me a question about a website, I'm not going to exclaim "Oh my GOD, do you even KNOW anything about web services, you can't just slap up some REST API without configuring CORS, and how on EARTH do you expect to write unit tests with this kind of object composition..."
So, at first I rolled my eyes because building a website and investigating ancient history are such different tasks they are nearly opposite. But I believe that a certain amount of unknowability hobbles every human endeavor, including web dev, so let me try my hand at an analogy.
Imagine that I asked you to build a website. "Okay, what kind of website?" you might reasonably reply. I send you a rambling and vaguely helpful email, full of misused jargon, as well as a link to my server where I've started to build it myself. When you send me your numerous follow up questions, you get the sad response that I've been hit by a bus. There's money put aside for you, though, if you'll just build the website.
You login to the server but my code is uncommented, incomplete, and nowhere close to functional. In fact, it seems like more than three quarters of it were accidentally deleted. Luckily, you've got my email. It may be inane on first read, but by going through them over and over again, and using your knowledge of who I am and where I came from, you can understand them better. I probably meant "responsive", not "reactive", based on the way I mistook the two words in a blog post six months ago. My request for "changing colors" gets placed in the context of a recent design fad for customizable colors. And, hey, maybe "APO" means an API given that one file imports a popular REST framework.
By using the existing code and the email together you are able to get a better picture than you would alone. And without the email, you wouldn't even have thought to look at that server for a website's source to begin with.
"But wait," you say, "how will we know if and when I've successfully built the website you really, truly wanted?"
Well, let's leave that up to the fine folks debating on Metafilter.
To bring this back around to fiction vs nonfiction - just because there are elements of fiction in everything doesn't mean there's no difference between writing that aims to reduce the fictitious and writing which embraces it. We may never be certain that something is true, but we can still rule other things out.
posted by galaxy rise at 7:04 PM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
So, at first I rolled my eyes because building a website and investigating ancient history are such different tasks they are nearly opposite. But I believe that a certain amount of unknowability hobbles every human endeavor, including web dev, so let me try my hand at an analogy.
Imagine that I asked you to build a website. "Okay, what kind of website?" you might reasonably reply. I send you a rambling and vaguely helpful email, full of misused jargon, as well as a link to my server where I've started to build it myself. When you send me your numerous follow up questions, you get the sad response that I've been hit by a bus. There's money put aside for you, though, if you'll just build the website.
You login to the server but my code is uncommented, incomplete, and nowhere close to functional. In fact, it seems like more than three quarters of it were accidentally deleted. Luckily, you've got my email. It may be inane on first read, but by going through them over and over again, and using your knowledge of who I am and where I came from, you can understand them better. I probably meant "responsive", not "reactive", based on the way I mistook the two words in a blog post six months ago. My request for "changing colors" gets placed in the context of a recent design fad for customizable colors. And, hey, maybe "APO" means an API given that one file imports a popular REST framework.
By using the existing code and the email together you are able to get a better picture than you would alone. And without the email, you wouldn't even have thought to look at that server for a website's source to begin with.
"But wait," you say, "how will we know if and when I've successfully built the website you really, truly wanted?"
Well, let's leave that up to the fine folks debating on Metafilter.
To bring this back around to fiction vs nonfiction - just because there are elements of fiction in everything doesn't mean there's no difference between writing that aims to reduce the fictitious and writing which embraces it. We may never be certain that something is true, but we can still rule other things out.
posted by galaxy rise at 7:04 PM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'm not sure this boundary exists or is as defined as some think. When you read Herodotus, his retelling of obvious tall tales told to him by others remind me more of Twain's Innocents Abroad than some ostensible factual work.
Innocents Abroad is a good comparison, but IMHO mostly because it's sort-of-factual in the same way as the tall-tales parts of Herodotus. You are supposed to believe Twain went on the cruise and is telling stories he really heard, or about things he saw, with some embellishment. I mean, I don't believe French barbers were literally butchers, but I'd feel betrayed if he actually thought he was getting a good quality shave.
I would argue all literature is fiction. Any piece of nonfiction writing is, at best, an image of reality viewed through the authors biases, language, embedded paradigms of 'how things work,' and imperfect knowledge.
This approach relies on redefining "non-fiction" as meaning something like "objectively and impartially true" and fiction as everything else. But to pick at the low-hanging fruit, film critics write opinion-based pieces and are doing non-fiction unless they invent a character to comment on the movie. More subtle opinions or perspectives don't make academic history "fiction" either.
I think Kattallus's point that fiction/non-fiction is different than truth/lie, is worth while. I won't wade into the Bible-as-history dispute, but picking up the them with one of yours: It matters to me whether Tuchman was accurate when she said there was a nobleman named Enguerrand de Coucy or a battle called Crecy or a war in 1914. And if someone credible criticized her for getting those wrong, I'd like her to care a lot about it, and not say "that wasn't the point."
Completely fine to criticize me as a reader if I buy the whole narrative she tells don't remember she had her own blindspots and interpretations. That'd be tiresome and naive of me (and I know people do it, so it's not a straw man complaint.) But at the same time the "no different than a work of fiction" isn't helpful for understanding it either.
posted by mark k at 8:29 PM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
Innocents Abroad is a good comparison, but IMHO mostly because it's sort-of-factual in the same way as the tall-tales parts of Herodotus. You are supposed to believe Twain went on the cruise and is telling stories he really heard, or about things he saw, with some embellishment. I mean, I don't believe French barbers were literally butchers, but I'd feel betrayed if he actually thought he was getting a good quality shave.
I would argue all literature is fiction. Any piece of nonfiction writing is, at best, an image of reality viewed through the authors biases, language, embedded paradigms of 'how things work,' and imperfect knowledge.
This approach relies on redefining "non-fiction" as meaning something like "objectively and impartially true" and fiction as everything else. But to pick at the low-hanging fruit, film critics write opinion-based pieces and are doing non-fiction unless they invent a character to comment on the movie. More subtle opinions or perspectives don't make academic history "fiction" either.
I think Kattallus's point that fiction/non-fiction is different than truth/lie, is worth while. I won't wade into the Bible-as-history dispute, but picking up the them with one of yours: It matters to me whether Tuchman was accurate when she said there was a nobleman named Enguerrand de Coucy or a battle called Crecy or a war in 1914. And if someone credible criticized her for getting those wrong, I'd like her to care a lot about it, and not say "that wasn't the point."
Completely fine to criticize me as a reader if I buy the whole narrative she tells don't remember she had her own blindspots and interpretations. That'd be tiresome and naive of me (and I know people do it, so it's not a straw man complaint.) But at the same time the "no different than a work of fiction" isn't helpful for understanding it either.
posted by mark k at 8:29 PM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]
in the US because reading fiction is heavily coded as a feminine activity, so males are culturally conditioned to seek out "true stories"
Again, I’m doing it wrong.
posted by bongo_x at 10:11 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
Again, I’m doing it wrong.
posted by bongo_x at 10:11 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]
I think it isn't a coincidence that the European tradition of the novel arose at the same time as movable type printing.
The European novel is certainly a product of print, but the relationship is mediated through the invention of the news, which also arises in a comparable time-frame – not exactly at the same time as movable type printing, but a couple of centuries after (print being the ultimate slow-burn technology whose impact is dependent on things such as the price of paper, labour, credit and distribution).
Both the novel and the news derive their effect from print's ability to reach large numbers of readers at once while simultaneously (and unrelated to print) claiming the ability to adequately represent time - Crusoe's journaled days, months and years on the island, the newspaper's testimony to what happened last week. J. Paul Hunter has a nice line to the effect that several developments, including better time-keeping, conspired to give the impression that 'the moment' almost became an art-object. Both genres therefore also struggle with the impression that they are ephemeral, populist, gossipy and untrustworthy - an unease that Defoe brilliantly plays off of (see in particular his Journal of the Plague Year). The continuing debate about the factuality of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is also very pertinent - a romance that claims (or 'claims') to be an eyewitness account of a slave rebellion in a colony where Behn may or may not have been present and who, being female, is still charged with being at best a gossip and at worst a liar.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 1:29 AM on March 28, 2016 [2 favorites]
The European novel is certainly a product of print, but the relationship is mediated through the invention of the news, which also arises in a comparable time-frame – not exactly at the same time as movable type printing, but a couple of centuries after (print being the ultimate slow-burn technology whose impact is dependent on things such as the price of paper, labour, credit and distribution).
Both the novel and the news derive their effect from print's ability to reach large numbers of readers at once while simultaneously (and unrelated to print) claiming the ability to adequately represent time - Crusoe's journaled days, months and years on the island, the newspaper's testimony to what happened last week. J. Paul Hunter has a nice line to the effect that several developments, including better time-keeping, conspired to give the impression that 'the moment' almost became an art-object. Both genres therefore also struggle with the impression that they are ephemeral, populist, gossipy and untrustworthy - an unease that Defoe brilliantly plays off of (see in particular his Journal of the Plague Year). The continuing debate about the factuality of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is also very pertinent - a romance that claims (or 'claims') to be an eyewitness account of a slave rebellion in a colony where Behn may or may not have been present and who, being female, is still charged with being at best a gossip and at worst a liar.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 1:29 AM on March 28, 2016 [2 favorites]
According to the translator Nicky Harman, the English-speaking world is not entirely on its own, with the division between fiction and nonfiction mapping straightforwardly on to the Chinese xu gou (虚构) and fei [not or non-] xu gou (非虚构).
As an avid Chinese novel reader (albeit mostly online books), I don't see the words "虚构" associated with written works much. It is usually used in disclaimers for films and TV shows and sometimes books, e.g. "This story is entirely made up. Any similarities are purely coincidental" "此故事纯属虚构。如有雷同实属巧合“
Prose writings are usually categorised as 小说. I've seen bookshops categorise nonfiction as 真人真事 which literally means "real people and real events". The term 纪实 is usually used for documentaries or nonfiction works.
posted by Alnedra at 9:19 PM on March 28, 2016 [2 favorites]
As an avid Chinese novel reader (albeit mostly online books), I don't see the words "虚构" associated with written works much. It is usually used in disclaimers for films and TV shows and sometimes books, e.g. "This story is entirely made up. Any similarities are purely coincidental" "此故事纯属虚构。如有雷同实属巧合“
Prose writings are usually categorised as 小说. I've seen bookshops categorise nonfiction as 真人真事 which literally means "real people and real events". The term 纪实 is usually used for documentaries or nonfiction works.
posted by Alnedra at 9:19 PM on March 28, 2016 [2 favorites]
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posted by Joe in Australia at 5:40 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]