Reality and truth

I don't usually read novel introductions. There's something about the self-consciousness of the established author that never fails to engage my scorn. Yes, you have figured it out, Mr. Writer, figured out how people work, how your book came to be; why it was written, why your story is important. Now get on with it.

But the first few lines of the introduction to Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness made me pause --

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here and now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. If this goes on, this is what will happen. A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation.

I found myself nodding at these observations. The author was about to embark upon what I sensed was a flouting of these well-established tropes; was about to tell us how, in her novels at least, one would not find such an obvious adherence to tradition.

This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens.... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrodinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrodinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the "future," on the quantum level, cannot be predicted - but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

The paragraphs appeared to echo my opinion of good science-fiction, the sort that is purveyed by the Neal Stephensons of this world rather than the Robert Heinleins. The limitations of the mind's extrapolative ability are never so stark as when they attempt to enumerate the singular anatomy of an alien race, say, or describe to us the horrific nature of said alien race's motives. The invocation of disgust is usually all that the 'traditional' horror science fiction story aims for; such things as dread, fear, awe -- these are beyond its modest capabilities.

This has more to do with our own reaction to the material than its inherent deficiencies. The seasoned (science fiction) reader brings to the reading table a degree of cynicism, of dubiousness; his attitude towards the work before him is more along the lines of 'Let's see what you've got' than the 'Science fiction is the best!' Most authors are aware of this, of course, aware of what is sometimes called the burden of influence, and try to defy its effects on their writing. The results vary; some writers get away with a superficial originality that conceals the ordinary nature of the plot, and some cannot transcend their desire for originality to produce anything worthwhile. It is the rare science fiction author that can achieve that balance of familiarity and incongruity that provokes in the reader the visceral thrill of another space, another time.

And so it was that I continued nodding my head, appreciating the author's insight. But then she proceeded to say this --

[...]A novelist's business is lying.

"The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies. They may describe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real textbooks of psychology; and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenomenon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalisable region, the author's mind. In fact, when we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even
become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

She has jumped here, I think, to the wrong conclusion. It is in some sense true that most novelists lie, and one metric of their relative skill is the method in which such lies are perpetuated and the degree to which we -- the readers -- accept these lies. But -- as I shall proceed to demonstrate -- the lies themselves form no part of the fiction.

At any given point in time we have open to us many possibilities. I can choose to place the lid on the stewpot, or choose not to; I can accept this invitation to a party at a friend's place, or decline; I can buy this excellent book today, or postpone the inevitable. These possibilities, explored and unexplored, form an invisible framework of realities that influence our existences in strange undefinable ways. Our actions are meaningful, but no less meaningful is our inaction, our impotence; a day in our lives can be -- indeed, and is -- clarified as much by the things we did as the things we did not, or could not do.

We can, however, exist in only one reality; possibilities fold up as choices are made, and our arrival at a point is defined by these choices. What may have transpired had I not chosen to alienate my parents, what I may have achieved had I simply worked with assiduity, what might have happened if that car had swerved a tiny bit to the left -- such questions cannot be indulged in. We are here, we are now; nothing else matters; nothing else can. Our impoverished realities are the only ones that we are allowed to inhabit.

Except, of course, in a novel. It is the novelist's job to invent a new reality for his characters, one which could have transpired, one that is plausible. He says, 'Imagine if ---', and we do. We suspend our disbelief to allow the author to establish his premise. In so far as context is concerned, we indulge the novelist's every whim. This new world that the novelist has constructed is not, as Ms. Le Guin suggests, 'a tissue of lies' -- it is instead an exploration of what could have been. Perhaps hobbits could have existed, perhaps the Sun does have a sister star that orbits a few thousand AU away; who am I to say that it is not, it could not have been? Who am I to say that it is all lies?

(An inevitable question is -- why? Why do we need a separate reality to define us? Those among us that feel the need to deplore escapism will no doubt claim that this is in fact that selfsame abominable quality asserting itself -- where is the point in escaping, they say, when we have in the end to return to our own world? But this is both misguided and wrong; misguided because it is human to want to escape, to want to leave; wrong because escapism is only the specious reason, the surface beneath the surface. The real reason we fictionalize things is because our own context precludes perspective. We cannot understand what happens to us when we are surrounded by ourselves, when our world is filled with so much that is close to us. It is the author's job to achieve distance through artifice; it is ours to understand this achievement, and in so doing come closer to understanding ourselves.)

The fiction in a novel, then, is not lies -- it is reality. More specifically, it is a reality, one in which the author can tell the truth more comfortably. The telling of the truth, as I have discussed in numerous other posts, is the primary duty of the writer; it is his calling. (Whether or not he succeeds in confronting the truth is another matter.) And so it is that we accept the talking rabbit and the itinerant mouse; we empathize as much with our three-fingered protagonists as we do with our five-fingered ones. The fact that the worlds in which such things exist are in fact impossible -- in the limited sense that everything that is not possible is impossible -- does not bother us, because something inside us understands; knows that the truth is not anthropic.