Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Language, History, Fiction, and Truth Boiling in a Cauldron

Cultures without writing are cultures without history in the Enlightenment sense of the word. But that does not mean that they are cultures without a past. What it means is that the functions that we currently divide between the essential forms of storytelling that we call history and fiction are combined in a single form of storytelling that we call now call myth. This is not to say there are not different types of myth: there are stories about this or that named leader leading the people against this or that enemy in triumph or defeat based in actual events still in or just beyond living memory alongside stories of the magical creation of the world. But the difference between these types of story is never absolute. Historical becomes myths; mythic understandings inform historical events. Writing changes this—or appears to. We can now base historical events on what we name as facts and put them into place in the changeless past. We can rail against those who would presume to “rewrite history.” We can think of the past as a series of complete and immutable events which we can tell in great detail, or when we can’t, we can say precisely what details we don’t have, what holes must remain or be papered over with speculation. We can maintain an absolute distinction between history and fiction. This changes everything. And nothing.

The problem is that the distinction is not in any way real. It cannot be supported. It cannot be maintained by reason. The more you look at history the more you understand that it is organized out of only those facts which are available and which we have chosen to look at out of the infinite number of possible facts, most of which we would consider too trivial to bother with if we thought about them at all or which we have to acknowledge that we just don’t have access to. The stories we tell from the facts that remain are as accurate as they can be, but they are not more accurate in any statistically significant way to the past, to what actually happened, than is myth. Nietzsche was perhaps the first to observe this. In other words what we call history is another form of myth. What we call fiction is also another form of myth. And our attempts to keep them separate academically—one should really say officially—belies the fact that we don’t can’t and shouldn’t try to keep them separate in practice. Historians looking for the facts about the life of Henry V do not rely on Shakespeare. Historians trying to understand Henry V do.

In fact the best historical accounts of the past are no more accurate than the best science fiction accounts of the future. Or a journalist’s account of the present. The thing history pretends to do is something that language cannot do and that the mind could not comprehend even if language could. Nonetheless the idea—the myth, the story—that we tell ourselves that history is possible in history determines the structure through which we perceive that we see the world. This is a false lens. I would not say that the purpose of this discovery—which of course is by no means mine—is not that we should abandon it. The culture that we have built or which history built and placed us in at this moment cannot do without it. Abandoning the structure through which we see reality would be catastrophic. What is necessary, and this is a fundamental insight of Postmodernism (which we are supposed to be past, but which, as Derrida noted, not calling it Postmodernism, is something that we can acknowledge or ignore but which we cannot get through to the other side of because it has no other side, is an absolute barrier)—what is necessary is that we never lose our self-awareness of the insight. Ignoring it has implications. Ignoring it determines who has power over whom. Acknowledging it brings power to the objects of that power, turning them into subjects. Acknowledging it also elevates and clarifies fiction. It elevates the status of fiction, which has retained much of the mythic power it has already had, but had unofficially. We have always as Americans looked at the tradition of the Western to know who we are, looked much more powerfully and effectively to the Western than to that subject we learned in school, to know who we are (or rather to determine and to become who or what we will be), though we give lip service to “history” as the superior discourse since it is supposedly true. (A form of “truth” which is an Enlightenment fantasy.)

Acknowledging the seriousness of our stories takes them out of the false, dangerous, Novocain realm of “entertainment.” Whole realms of scholarly discourse have long understood this. But this understanding has failed to penetrate to the culture at large. Indeed there are powerful forces that serve to prevent this knowledge from escaping the genie-bottle of academic discourse. And there may be those who believe that fiction is all the more powerful for being an unacknowledged, even a denied power—with a power analogous to the Freudian unconscious. I don’t think so. True, the implications and power relations are different. But I think that, as Freud thought of the unconscious, bringing it to light is more powerful, more liberating, than keeping it in the pretended world of entertainment, allowing capitalism to be the cauldron’s dancing, clanking lid.

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