musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Are you telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…?


I’m confused about a lot of things I suppose, but lately I have been vexed by the removal of ‘offensive’ books from the shelves of libraries both here and in the USA: books disguising themselves as ‘nonfiction’ when their detractors are convinced they are actually fictional (and hence not to be believed).

I used to think the difference between fiction and nonfiction was a matter of whether or not the document in question purported to describe things as they actually existed in reality; and yet, that belief is time-stamped isn’t it? If it were the case, then often today’s nonfiction is tomorrow’s fiction. But the notes that, let us  say, I took in class years ago -the facts (the truths as they were known at the time)- are they now fiction? Surely they were not lies; they were never attempts to deceive but to edify. Reality is a transitional sequence; it is a Phoenix forever renewing itself from its ashes.

Trying to resolve the confusion without wading into abstruse philosophical epistemology, I happened upon an article that attempted to go where even angels fear to tread.[i] ‘Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand, the inclusion of falsity isn’t enough to render a work fiction… On the other hand, not all fictions include false content since there are fictions that include only actual events.’ What matters for nonfiction is that its content is believed to have been true at the time of its writing.

And yet, ‘If truth were valuable ‘in itself’, then any truth, merely by virtue of being true, would be worth knowing – but this clearly isn’t the case: for instance, someone who keeps a meticulous daily record of the number of cars parked in the nearest lot with no use for the knowledge would strike us as odd. So, that something is true doesn’t justify our interest or commitment. Instead, we care about truths that inform specific enquiries or projects. What grounds the nonfiction/fiction distinction is not that the former is based on truth or facticity per se, but that the former contributes to how we see the world insofar as it organises the kinds of truths that we care enough about to read and write about.’

In other words, fiction and nonfiction are not binaries, and fiction is not the same as lies; and of course, there is ‘bad’ nonfiction which is, at the very least, misleading. For some reason, I am reminded of the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknowns and unknown unknowns’… At any rate, fiction merely pretends to assert; it is a costume…

The article offers an illustrative example that helps to differentiate fiction from nonfiction: a wooden duck. In a duck-hunting community, ‘the wooden duck’s ‘point’ is determined in response to its similarities and differences to a real duck: it must be similar enough to trick other ducks into thinking it’s a real duck, but it must be different enough for humans to know not to shoot it… The point of asking about the nature of the duck is to ask what one is meant to do with the object.’

But for another, perhaps non-hunting urban community, that same wooden duck might be seen as an aesthetic object. ‘The wooden duck’s ‘point’ is determined in relation to the shape and colour that constitute the duck, and different views might form depending on their reactions to the duck: it must be beautiful, or interesting, or compelling in some way to merit attention… asking about the wooden duck’s nature presupposes, or at least develops in tandem with, what we’re meant to do with the object.

‘What the wooden ducks show is that the kinds of questions we ask of the same object (or concept) can differ depending on the background practices and commitments that we bring to it. Each culture’s understanding of fiction arises from their pre-existing commitments about what the world is like. ‘Fiction’ is difficult to define because fiction is not a standalone concept with its own intrinsic properties, but a concept that responds to a given metaphysical system.’

My essay (that I hope you are still reading) is an attempt to digest the contents of another essay. So, is my own outline of it fiction, or nonfiction? If the article I summarized were itself fiction, does my synopsis of it -however accurately done- become fiction as well? You can see the risk of infinite regress looming, I think.

Perhaps, as the original article suggests towards its end, ‘One of the most interesting – and promising – features of fiction is that it creates a space between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. Good fiction tends to destabilise such dichotomous ways of approaching the world through thoughtful content, innovative form, or self-referentiality.’

So is there really a need to scrutinize library shelves, hunting for whatever does not accord with the current Zeitgeist? Is fiction simply a first-past-the-post voting result? Is there still a need for book-burning…?

[i]https://aeon.co/essays/before-you-define-fiction-check-your-metaphysical-assumptions?

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