What can fiction tell us about real life?

Absolutely nothing. Fiction can only tell us about fiction. But that can offer us rewards too, in addition to the entertainment and pleasure value of reading a novel.

No fictional character ever existed in real life. Not even in Historical Fiction which takes real people from history for their characters. The Historical Fiction novel creates a version of the real person to suit its narrative needs. Even memoir, which purports to be a true record, is fictive, in that any human life, while unfurling chronologically, is not experienced as such and any written narrative imposes retrospective order and pattern on a life that is likely to have been lived oblivious of them. The subjects of memoirs, only head towards a destiny, an outcome elicited by the end of the book, through the narrative’s arrangement, no less than with fictional characters.

So we follow a novel’s characters through their lives and events which never actually happened, or versions of actual events. To what advantage? Well in our so-called ‘real world’, fictions abound. Firstly you have phenomena such as the spin of politicians, the dark arts of advertisers, the myths and fables of religious preachers, which an appreciation of fiction might possibly provide some ability to detect and parse. Fake News anyone? We’ve been reading it for years, only in an already avowedly admitted fiction. 

But deeper than that, you have the notion of ‘hyper-reality’ which affects us all. Our very own memories, experiences, elements of our own identities and how we see ourselves, may have originated externally rather than from within, though we have absorbed them and unwittingly ascribed them to all our own mental work and personal experience. If you hear a point of view of an argument that speaks to you, you may well remember it and roll it out in future discussions without attributing it to the original citer, not out of wilful plagiarism, but more likely because that argument has settled down so comfortably in your psyche, you come to believe you thought of it yourself, or at least that it is very much seared into your marrow. If someone tells you an anecdote and you trip it out in future company, are you careful to frame it as a story told to you by someone else? Even if you are, how do you know it really happened to them exactly as they told it, or even that they too haven’t borrowed it from the person who first told them? None of this really matters in terms of consequence, but it reveals the mechanisms by which we partly acquire and retain information. On one level that anecdote becomes part of my experience because it resonated enough for me to remember it; on another level it was never part of my experience because I never lived its story. Just as with fiction and its imaginary characters.

So fiction could help us unravel the more direct experiences for ourselves, from those imported ones. This could be particularly acute for things we absorb more passively than a friend telling us a story, but from films, or reading a news story, or the dread advertising and politics implanting ideas we later imagine we originated. Think about how we may acquire our identity for example, when we explore commonalties with others in our ‘tribe’. Some of those perceived shared values will undoubtedly originate from inside you, but when the historical and political dimensions are added, such as how your group is excluded or oppressed, or viewed in a certain light by other tribes, have you come up with all those connections yourself, or have they been supplied by the commonality that unites you all together? The historical and analytical context is held by the collective and passed on to you so that it informs who you are and where you derive from. Then you plot your own experiences against its matrix. 

Since narrative provides pattern and order on the events it portrays, this can mirror the same techniques we use to make sense of our actual world. Human nature craves pattern and order in order to render a familiar and negotiable landscape in which we move through. Imagine the menacing chaos if the everyday was not recurring and cohesive, our flight or fight reflex would be constantly triggered every minute, with every step we took. It would be exhausting. Our evolution has raised us from the minute to minute awareness of threat, experienced by all animals except possibly those at the top of the food chain. But in order for it to have done this, we have constructed hugely elaborate fictions to regulate our environment, to make it predictable and readily readable. 

Our perception system is not the one way directional of what the eye sees, the brain interprets. Rather it is largely the other way around, the brain has preset templates of what the eye should be seeing, so that the eye is really only scanning for variation from that normative vision. Pattern and familiarity are thus fundamental to our perceptive functions. And this is fine, but there also exists both the opportunity to look beneath the pattern and arrangement of both our actual environment and also to somehow elucidate its reciprocal relationship with those templates in our brains. To probe the fictional elements inbuilt into the structure of our ‘reality’. Fiction can echo the analytical wavelengths to reach some of these realisations, for narrative too is predicated on order and pattern. It can show up the processes by which we manage to obfuscate our own fictional creations, which we have managed to install as a hard and fast reality over and above ourselves. Challenging that self-reinforcing feedback loop. That way lies madness? Bring it on I say, who knows what illuminations it may yield us. 

The other thing fiction can explore is a language. For words are all a novelist has, their only tool. Yet language itself is a pretty blunt tool, especially when it comes to its primary function, that of communication. JK Rowling, Jonathan Franzen and Martin Amis all speak the same language, yet produce wildly divergent types of books from each other (even taking Rowling’s adult novels, not her writing for children). Readers speak the same language as the writers whose work they’re reading, unless reading in translation, but the range of possible response is myriad; if different writers can’t agree on a single method of communication within the novel, what chance the poor readers? We all speak the same language, but how we interpret it is almost infinite. 

In ordinary conversation, speakers need the cues of facial expression, gesture and inflection to interpret each other’s words. For example if someone says “that man looks nice” while pulling a face, the listener realises that the speaker means the man doesn’t look nice at all. Then you need context as well. If a speaker says ‘he did this, then he did that’, is she speaking about her father, her boyfriend, a mugger or her pet dog? You need something establishing who the subject was, or failing that, a reference to digging up a bone might place it as the dog, unless she happened to be speaking about a scene of crime technician or an archeologist. Well you do at least always get context in a novel. When someone says they are hungry and need to get some food, they are communicating a pretty literal state of affairs as they are experiencing it. They may additionally employ a metaphor for emphasis, such as saying they’re so hungry they could eat a horse. So everyday speech can be either literal or metaphorical, whereas writing in a novel is always metaphorical, because the people & the situations are always imaginary. And here we face the problem of language in the novel. Even though a novel can provoke an emotional response in the reader, (tears, laughter, irritation, rage etc), authors cannot write actual emotions. They can only set down words that approach emotions, that represent emotions, not the actual emotions themselves. 

The artist René Magritte produced a painting called “The Treachery Of Images”, consisting of a pipe and the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). His point was you couldn’t smoke his pipe, since it was an image of a pipe not a real object. Additionally it wasn’t just an image of a pipe, it was a painting of the image of a pipe, so the object if anything is a painting, not a pipe. But consider this, without his helpful caption smeared on the canvas, would the layers of meaning and reflection upon images and objects still exist for the viewer, or is it really only cued up by the linguistic element of the painting? In which case the material object is as much a piece of literature (commentary/question/philosophical axiom), that is a text, as it is a painting? Yet the text is only commenting on the image/symbol of a pipe. The metaphorical nature of the painting rather relies on the caption and the title existing in words. You can’t paint or write pipes, only their symbol, their referents. Now consider this for something that doesn’t even have a material existence such as emotions. (for more on this) 

What is fiction for? It exists to entertain us. With the happy boon of potentially enabling us to question the real life in which we exist. 

Related posts:

The Limitation of the senses

The Lie Of The Mind

Out Now

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

The Limitations Of The Human Senses

Evolution has structured us humans so that we of all species can not only thrive in any environment on our planet, but through our inventiveness we will probably be able to thrive on other planets in the future. In order to do so, we have analysed, measured and constructed our world and accordingly developed tools and instruments with which to master it. However, what if that analysis and measurement was at heart in error? Hamstrung by its own perceptive apparatus, its first assumptions? 

There are plenty of things beyond our sensory apparatus. Wavelengths of light beyond the visible spectrum, which we only make visible through x-raying, ultraviolet and infrared devices. There are also sound frequencies beyond our hearing, such as those dogs can hear but we can't. Scientists deal in sub-atomic particles and quantum mechanics which is posited entirely on probability; the latest of these is the hunt for the Higgs Boson which theory has posited must exist long before we have been able to discover it in actuality. At the other end of the scale, from the infinitesimally small to the planetary sized, current theories have the universe existing in around eleven or twelve dimensions in order for the cosmological equations to work. Yet the human brain is constituted to function only in three (height, width, depth). Trying to conceive in four dimensions is difficult enough let alone in eleven! Our brains work brilliantly for the scale we operate in our world. It struggles when the scale is either shrunk or inflated beyond that. The scientific theory may advance our understanding, but our hard-wiring means we are limited in utilising such understanding in coping with our everyday world. 

And that should be the clue into the state of things. Perceiving in three dimensions, within the visible spectrum of light and the wavelengths of audible sounds, works for the human race. It works so well we have mastered our planet and created all sorts of tools to advance our abilities, even to get us into space. BUT, we are equally trapped by this same way of operating that has got us this far. Machines can 'see' the invisible wavelengths for us and indeed we use this to great effect with our medical imaging machines to penetrate the opacity of the human body to locate threats deep within, through Positron Emission Tomography, Computerised Axial Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Ultrasound, Dynamic Spatial Reconstructors... But these are images and versions of our bodies. Mediated through instruments. They are not directly perceived through our own bodies.

Even if we had X-Ray vision ourselves, so that we could see into other's bodies and solid objects, the way our visual system works is one of cutting corners. There are so many visual stimulations in our everyday environment, that when our eyes are scanning ahead of us they are only 'seeing' a mere 10-15% of what is actually there. The other 85% is stuff it filters as unremarkable, stuff that accords to the brain's templates of what a street scene should look like, or what the view across farming land should represent. That is the brain has pre-constructed what we are seeing and the eye is only scanning for deviations from the normal anticipated view. Because from an evolutionary point of view, ancient man would have been looking for threats in the environment and that's what has been passed down to us. We look for difference, for the unexpected. The everyday and normal is taken as read. The laying down of these templates of 'reality' happen during the child's development as it learns not only how the world works, but how the world 'is'. And so the cycle spins on, as this takes place in a mere three dimensions as the world view is acquired from those teaching the child.

But what if the world really isn't like that? That it only appears thus, because that is the most convenient ways for our brains to perceive it thus, conveyed over millennia of evolution? Take measurement for example, a key concept in our mastery of the planet that has enabled us very successfully to fly to the moon, Jupiter and beyond. Yet the history of measurement, the drive for unimpeachable accuracy, is back to front. We have measurements first, then we try and define and centralise them. One of the earliest measurements used by man, peppering the Old Testament, is the cubit. That is the length of the human forearm. But your forearm is not the same length as my forearm. Could cause trouble in land disputes when trying to mark out boundaries... Or take the humble metre, finally defined in the late eighteenth century as the distance between two marks on a brick made of a metal alloy that was resistant to expansion for temperature variations. What could be more materially defined than a lump of metal? And yet the definition of a metre was further refined, first by a measurement of radioactive decay of an isotope of caesium and more recently a fraction of distance travelled by light because light has a constant velocity. All this time we've merrily been using humble metres and centimetres and millimetres, blissfully unaware that we were probably not actually measuring a true metre. Measure first, then define retrospectively. Just as a side note, the large hadron collider searching for the Higgs Boson essentially works by slamming particles against one another to break them apart into ever smaller ones. While the cubit and other similar measurements such as the pole, perch and the rod which were actual rods pressed against the earth to measure it, well all this is a rather male way of partitioning the world and its matter isn't it?

In my latest novel, "The Dreams In The Key Of G", I have a character who challenges this way of portioning up the world as she declares war on the SI system of units. What would be the upshot if we were no longer able to measure things? It would be a most different world that is for sure. As it is quite possible anyway, since our senses, our processing brains and the output from them including how we measure things, has probably become outmoded by the present level of technology we have attained. When our children start learning things about the world, it becomes solidified in the brains as 'reality'. But in doing so, those neurons close off other possible pathways for the brain to compute and calculate and process its stimulatory output from without. It is quite possible this is a fundamental disservice we do not only to our children, but to the species itself. Worth thinking about perhaps... 

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

The Human Brain, 'Seeing' and Symmetry

So, the human brain then...

When our eyes communicate with the brain as to what they 'see' they are not presenting a complete set of data. Instead they scan a few bits of information for the brain to compare against its template of what reality is, in case those bits of data contain anything 'surprising' or 'off the map'. Figures from research suggest that information from the eye only provide 10-15% of what we see. The brain's pre-set picture of reality is the other 85%. This is because there is just too much information in our reality for the eye to cope with. The short-cutting is how we can interact with our environment speedily and without being overwhelmed, or taking so long that we are eaten or attacked. We take a lot for granted. To wit, the entire image of reality that the brain holds up as a knitting or jigsaw pattern. Our brains posit that human adults are upright creatures and trees also are vertical. The unpredicted and 'strange' are when we see a human or a tree horizontal. Then context comes into play as a modifier. We may not find a human lying down so strange if it is on a bed, or a sunlounger or a lilo. A horizontal tree, well has it been cut down or blown over in a storm? Or was there simply no one to see & hear it fall over and therefore it didn't? Perhaps an example of a left-field logic trying to explain something that doesn't accord to the regular template. 


In order for the brain to hold this template of constancy as to what perceived reality is, it requires pattern. Since our senses are actually searching for deviations from pattern to report to the brain as divergence requiring a possible response. And pattern derives from symmetry. Is it at all surprising that we find symmetry underpins all laws of the universe? (and of course is vital for the hermetic system of mathematics to function, the same maths that defines the physical laws of the universe). We need symmetry to organise and pattern the templates of our brains. Which our brains then stamp on all its interpretations of reality making them symmetrical. Again, I don't really buy into the centrality of symmetry. It just suits our anatomies and how they interact with our environments. And yet there are no straight lines in nature to form an axis of mirror or radial symmetry. Are our faces symmetrical? Not to my mind, but since face recognition is so hard wired into us humans, conceiving of face symmetry is an important value in face recognition so again we overlay it into our processes of seeing other faces. 

So for me my desire as an artist is to get to that 85% picture of reality the brain holds and take an axe to it. Or at least figure out where some of its assumptions/constructions derive from. That way madness lies? I'm pretty confident not. Also to strip away the notions of symmetry where they in fact may not exist, but our brain proffers that they do because it is so reliant on it. And as part of this process, that involves moving away from the symmetries of story, of beginning, middle and end as established by Aristotle in his "Poetics" The argument is that human beings are so constituted that story is naturally very important to us. And indeed it is because story organises events and experience into patterns. But as I suggest above, these patterns do not accord to anything by a workable reality, when in fact we may now strive for something just a bit better than 'workable'. I really believe that our fixed notions of reality hold us back and we would be far more creative and inventive (and who knows less exploitative in our dealings with our environment) if we had say more of a quantum approach to our reality. Just because it's comfortable for our brains to tell us this is how things are, doesn't mean that's the best recipe for going forward. Time for artists to think and write out the box. Visual artists have over a century's head start on us writers as painters like Monet, Cezanne, Seurrat et al challenged the way we 'see' things on a flat 2-dimensional canvas. They explored light, colour and materiality. They did not take their reality as given.