3. What is Fiction?
All fictions contain some fact. While Hilda Ogden is clearly fictional, such characters do exist. In that sense at least she is something of a truth about the world. Similarly, while Hilda’s home town of Weatherfield is an invention it’s one structured around reality. If nothing else the accents – even if the dialogue is totally fabricated those accents are a true part of Manchester, a truth about the world.
Fiction is a bit like salt. It’s something we sprinkle on representations to enhance their credibility. Clearly there’s fictive content and real content in every novel, film and television program.
Television news, of all things, sells itself as pure fact. Of course it does possess factual content, it’s usually about real people and real events, and the newsreaders are real people too. Nevertheless the journalism is usually rich in fiction. If the truth is an honest summary of the days events, one that might enlighten and inform a democracy, television news is shot-through with fiction. In this sense, the very last thing it does is tell the truth about the world.
Novels are card-carrying fiction. They’re a celebration of the art of making things up. But just like soaps, the key is realism. Snippets of reality, things we already know and recognise, fabricated into novel narratives for the sake of entertainment. This sort of fiction is deeply dependent on fact.
Sci-fi for example. While Daleks are obviously fictional, their personality traits are cherry-picked from real humans. Ruthlessness and blind obedience to tyranny are, sadly, persistent aspects of human life. Daleks are a mixture of these and other unfortunate earthly conditions. Conversely, Marvin the Paranoid Android is a collection of facts about decent people, capable people, melancholy people. Like Eyore, he warms us with memories of our own friends and acquaintances. Neither Dalek nor Marvin would engage us if we didn’t already have experience of nasty humans, and tragicomic humans. That’s what they’re based on.
Pornography is obviously phoney, but it works by looking real. However ludicrous the screenplay, the players must at least look human if it’s to work. Pornography is a bold example of how fiction works by impersonating reality. It makes people horny by giving them the feeling they are actually witnessing or participating in real sex. Certainly explains the moaning and the looks to camera, and the frightening close-ups. At some level of consciousness, you could almost be there.
Odd as it sounds, even maths textbooks contain some fiction. Errors in theory or in the answers at the back would be fictional. They’d be untruths that would leave the student with a worse understanding of the world. More positively, fictions can also be employed actively, to help with the explanations: “Bryan has sixty pence. He gives thirty to Charlie…” Pure fiction, but for a noble cause. A little fiction to clarify important facts.
Biography and autobiography may claim the status of fact but they often embody more fiction than novels. A biography of Churchill might be chronologically precise in a manner Citizen Kane never can be, but the inferences drawn concerning his life and character might be wholly inaccurate, fictional. If the biographer already loves or loathes Churchill they’ll tend to pick and position those facts which express their own feelings towards him, the narrative path they want him to wander down, rather than an honest appraisal. And of course Kane was based on Hearst, who certainly was a real man. Perhaps Hearst’s life as embodied in Kane was a highly accurate portrait, more so than many a deferential Churchill biography.
Like novels, biographies are finely woven threads of fact and fiction. Things can get very tangled. It’s often difficult to say which parts are true and which false, even for the author. Even if we agree that fact and fiction are at work in a given text, we’ll often disagree as to which aspects are the real ones, and which the invented.
No more so than with historical writing. Unlike maths books, there’s always disagreement about which aspects of history books are fact and which fiction. The main contention is of course politics. Political belief is inseperable from historical belief. We each advocate the politics we advocate because of what we believe to have happened in the past. Every political colour cites the past as the justification for their current stance. If you want to applaud the Nixon administration you cite their record in office. If you want to condemn the Nixon administration you cite their record in office.
Clearly something funny is going on here. Logically, some written history must be fictional, at least in parts. If it’s possible for two radically contradictory histories to be published concerning the same historical event, one of them must be a shameless travesty, perhaps both.
Being of my own political persuasion I tend to see conservative historians as purveyors of fiction. Not wilfully cynical, or inaccurate with dates – that’s not the level the fiction operates at. The fiction comes in the selection of facts, the order they are put into, the story this gives rise to. The fiction comes with the picture of the world this sequence of facts implies.
Although I’d be surprised if there was ever a wrong name or wrong date in a Simon Schama television history, the way the facts are employed produces a downright fictional picture of social change. He gets you thinking about all the wrongs things. It might be pretty, and heart-rending, to imagine that the decisions of kings and queens drive civilisation onward, but it teaches you nothing about the world. “At that moment Elizabeth realised, England was hers” – a bold image certainly, but one that teaches you nothing useful about the world.
Of course Simon Schama would say the same thing of left history. It’s leftists who don’t understand the true engine of history – elite humans, but it’s not good enough to put this all down to point of view. At least one of us must be wrong. Was the cold war Soviet aggression or an American fiction? Clearly both factors played a part, but which was prevailing? Which version best explains the current state of the world? Noam Chomsky and Niall Ferguson would doubtless have a thousand examples on hand to throw at each other, but what’s the fact? Unless it’s a dead heat, one of these accounts must be nearer to the truth, and the other predominantly fiction. One of these commentators must be pushing false history.
Of course there’s another way in which news-anchors can be economical with the actuality. He might be wearing a toupee or a girdle, she’ll certainly be wearing lipstick, or even breast implants. For that’s where this all starts. As humans we all tell fibs to some degree. The fictions we incorporate into our representations are just a cultural extension of our day to day lies.
In this sense, fiction is as old as human consciousness. Lying is as much a human reality as honesty. At the very least, we all modify our behaviour in different company. We have ideals about ourselves we work to and we’re often prepared, consciously or otherwise, to bend the truth a little when we can. We affect telephone voices. We assure children that their paintings are beautiful. We tell interviewers that the job sounds fascinating, and loved ones that the meal was lovely, and no, of course you don’t look fat. We all have to lie sometimes just to keep the peace, and not break each other’s hearts. Sometimes it’s downright immoral not to lie. Then again, sometimes we lie cynically, for material, emotional or political gain.
The fictions we read and write are an extension of our daily fabrications, our mix of innocent daydreams, white lies, and cynical deceits. In turn, the effect of these fictions can be good or bad, moral or malevolent. Like lies, some fictions really are worse than others, and that’s the subject of the following parts.
