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

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Reality And Fiction

The novel was once a radical art form. It represented a slow turning away from sacred and transcendent literature and placed the human subjectivity of the author at the steering wheel. Though religion didn't immediately lose its influence within literature, no longer did authors have to re-present traditional themes, forms and symbology. They were free to choose what they wrote about and didn't have to refer to previous conventions and traditions if they opted not to.

Cervantes and Sterne celebrated this with their gorgeous insinuations as to the unreliability of their narrators. Could fiction be lying to us, making things up and stuff? What could mendacious literature be for then? Did it seek to reflect the real world? Was it intended to provide an interpretation of the world? How does any of that play with the fact that it is a work of fiction, an imagining of an author's mind, no matter how much 'based on truth'? How did the subjectivity of its single author's imagination square with imparting anything universal to a readership?

In painting similar development occurred. Western art was in thrall to theology, with prescriptions, proscriptions and a ready made symbolic palette to refer to. Within these limitations however, artists advanced their art by discovering perspective and how to play with light and colour, so that religious icons were supplanted by the sumptuous canvases of Giotto and Titian. It may have been revolutionary to move the Madonna and Child away from the very centre of the painting, but it was still utterly rooted in religious iconography and imagery.

It was the various modernist movements in art, Impressionism, Cubism and the like, which took the religious shackles off the image in painting as artists went in pursuit of 'truth'; that is the essential real nature of objects, be it landscapes, still lifes or figurative art. These were inquiries into the truth of objects through exploring the way we 'see' things. But the revolutions didn't stop there as art freed itself from the figurative, passing through abstraction and into conceptual forms that eschewed canvas and paint entirely. Art became self-aware, not just of light, colour and perspective, but of its very fictions too.
It reached its apotheosis perhaps with Magritte's painting -



It expressed a key realisation: a picture of a pipe was not the same as a pipe itself. A picture of a pipe was actually a symbol, an image of what we know and recognise as a pipe. It cannot represent or reflect the ceramic/wood ensemble that constitutes the object that is the pipe, for this is a two-dimensional representation only of its image. Art had so freed itself from depicting and portraying, that it had shrunk its own horizons into fairly arid considerations of the image (Pop Art, much conceptual art for example). The image itself had been supplanted by the sign. What something stood for. Art became aware of its limitations and its fictional nature, almost completely cut off from trying to portray the real.

The novel has not had nearly as many revolutions and paradigm shifts as visual art. Yet it should have arrived at the same place in terms of becoming conscious of itself as fiction. In fact, fiction ought to have a competitive advantage in all things fictional, seeing as it's even in its very name! Magritte's painting wouldn't work without the tension set up by the words "This is not a pipe".

There are some hard and fast realities about the novel, or any artwork, that make them have some actual substance in the world. A print book is an object, while even an e-reader data file exists on some level. Books take up space on libraries and shelves and if they remain in print after the author is long dead, then they could definitely be said to have contributed to the lasting store of human knowledge and ideas. So as a material entity, any book forms part of reality. But of course we are really talking about the contents within. The body of the written word.

Novels are stories rather than truths about the real world, though there can be points where they catalyse truth in the form of the emotional reaction of the reader. And through all its seismic changes, painting being a visual artform has always placed at its centre an inquiry into ways of seeing and the nature of perception. What's the literary equivalent of visual art's primary inquiry? Well it has to be language, since that is literature's only real tool. The author may have a palette with plot, character, imagery, setting and the like on it, but all are solely rendered through words.

So any novel ought to be aware of its relation to language. How words work to build up images, voices, narratives. But also how all of these are at one remove from reality, since the fictional building, tree or person is only constructed through words rather than brick, wood or flesh. A tale involving a pipe is not an actual pipe, only a representation of one through story.

And it becomes more complex, for the word PIPE has a myriad of meanings all differing from one another; a smoking pipe. Some plumbing pipe or duct. A blowpipe. A sewer. A gas pipe(line). A hose pipe. An organ pipe, or other musical pipes. The anatomical windpipe. Various tubular formations that channel things through them, such as in volcanos or in geology. And that's without any of the meanings of the word when employed as a verb.

Magritte's painting would not have worked so well if the image was of a bit of copper tubing. It relies on the primacy our brains give to the word 'pipe' to associate it with the act of tobacco smoking. Words have inbuilt hierarchies of meaning, they have etymological roots rooted in historical realities. Anglo-Saxon words, Norman french words, Latin, Greek, Arabic and all the imports from colonies ruled by English speaking imperial powers. There are reasons why certain classes of anglo-Saxon words survived into the language, while others didn't, supplanted by Norman-French ones. There is the Latin from the original Roman invasion, Latin from Christian liturgy, Latin and Greek from the slowly developing scientific orthodoxy and classification. It is organic, constantly shifting and evolving. It is loaded with value judgements and assumptions, even if these are not apparent. The choice of Latin and Greek was often to convey the sense of the word being scholarly and not really accessible to the common man. The legal system is replete with such abstruse words. It's a very distorting medium that both muddies interpretations of the real world even as it purports to classify and sequence it by grouping things into classes. So not only does language construct an author's representation of any human world he cares to compose, language is also already at one remove from everyday reality as its descriptive medium. The author may write of a smoker's pipe, but in real life the concept of a pipe is already a shorthand and a convention couched in language.

In the early 21st Century, we are actually at an advantage where fiction is concerned. We have become so saturated by media, by images and data bombarding us, it is often the case that thoughts and ideas and even feelings that emerge from within us, may not have actually originated with us. Advertising may have implanted an idea, or you may have read something but forgotten you ever had read it and now credit that the idea was your own. This is the world of the hyperreal, where everything is constructed through media, sign and symbol and nothing is definitively real. Or if it is, we certainly can't tell the difference, because it has all become conflated. Now imagine constructing your fictions out of that? You already start from the world of the fictional. You are reflecting the unreality of constructed reality back on itself. In this way, fiction may just help us in our ways of seeing and conceptualising reality and to consider the part language plays in moderating and defining our reality back to us. Fiction isn't real, but it can help interrogate the world around us to see what may equally not be as real and unconstructed, unfabricated by various assumptions, connections and abbreviations. Novels can't solve the conundrum of reality, but it can help us get beneath the surface of appearances

This is not to say all fictions have to engage with writing about the manufacture and prefabrication of the hyperreal. But if writing contemporary fiction you ought probably to be aware of it. Add to that a consciousness of how language operates to obfuscate as much as illuminate and the power bases and relationships it has stemmed from. Although part of the liberation from religion and supernatural explanations of the world came from a greater understanding of cause and effect, ironically we still don't understand much, such as the workings of the human brain, about the nature of the cosmos, the blind drive of genes to reproduce themselves. The contemporary author who seeks to explore our world should really start from a position of acknowledging the limits of his understanding and that the world, or parts of it at least, go in and out of focus like a mirage as he seeks to grasp hold of it.

If the author accordingly is dialoguing with this mirage in his fiction, then it will also entail the reader does the same. The author and reader constantly dialogue together through the book,  as the levels of its 'reality' shift and mutate, as the language and perspectives on offer are constantly being redefined between the two of them.

This is unlike the vast majority of books which lead the reader passively through a constructed story. No matter how much the reader's imagination is engaged in following the author's carefully laid out trail, the book does not change in its essence. It does not take on a life of its own outside of the story being read. There may be twists and unexpected turns, but how much is the reader determining these? These beautifully crafted, self-confident yarns leave no room for doubt, even if the ending is left open or ambiguous. It is done so artfully. The implication behind such crafted stories is that the world is and has to be exactly as is portrayed in the book and by this I don't mean the real world, merely the world described in the book. The author is in absolute control of the world he builds, creates every detail and knows even the workings of things not referenced in the book at all.

Nowhere is there room for fictional scepticism to be chipping in. That although say a city or a planet is described, the reflexivness of the writing pulls against that surety at the same time (one example where the author does this is Stanislau Lem's "Solaris". Kafka's work though more mundane in setting also had this pull-me, push-you dynamic). Instead the world of the yarn book is established by the author to facilitate the plot. It can't heave loose threads that might unravel it. It must be hermetically sealed within the world of the novel, narrators can't be picking holes in it unless it's a "Matrix" type scenario being written about. The world is great or terrible and the hero reacts accordingly, but the world is unquestionable and unbreakable even if the hero manages to effect some sort of regime change within it. We cannot be so certain about the workings of our own world. Fiction perhaps ought to reflect that tremulous doubt in our own minds in its presentations. Authors who start from a postion of confessing their own relative ignorance about the nature of reality, will produce very different novels from those who either feel they have an excellent grip on the nature of reality, or deny any need to bother trying to comprehend it.

Insanity And Murder - Why Apocalypse Now Is My Favourite Film Of All Time

Sometimes it amazes me that films ever make it all the way through on to the screen, such is the welter of hands clawing at any singularity of artistic vision it could ever hope to possess. Scripts that go through innumerable scriptwriters, endings that are trialled and changed before release, the input/meddling of powerful lead actors swinging their weight, the interference of the Executives worried about bloated budgets and how the film will be received. "Apocalypse Now" had all these and more, yet still emerged as a stunningly literary and mesmeric piece of film-making that for me still outmuscles any film about modern warfare.

Like most scripts, John Milius' for AN was constantly rewritten, even to the point of Michael Herr being brought in well down the shoot, to write interior monologues for Martin Sheen without which the narrative would make far less sense. The film had so much material, that the "Redux" version was brought out twenty-two years after release with 53 minutes of footage omitted from the original (and to my mind adds nothing that wasn't already in there, while serving only to break up the narrative flow). Other inundations on the production included a typhoon in the Philippines which wrecked several sets and forced a hiatus as everybody decamped back to the US. Marlon Brando arrived on set appallingly overweight which made demands on how all of his scenes were shot. Such an ensemble of bon vivants as Hopper, Brando and the then alcoholic Sheen, were forced to make their own entertainment in remote jungles. A recipe for diaster. Sheen aged 36 suffered a heart attack, but bounced back into the production in under two months. Goodness alone what fourteen year old Laurence Fishburne made of it all, having lied about his age to land his role. He was seventeen when the shoot finally wrapped up.

The film uses Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness" for its narrative spine, swapping the Congo for the Mekong. It too is an investigation into a jungle-borne colonial heart of darkness, represented in the figure of Brando's Colonel Kurtz a direct echo of Conrad's character of the same name. Kurtz is the colonial gone native, ascending to a tribal god. Summed up by Hopper's photojournalist character as "The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad". It tilts at the "fisher king" archetype of Fraser's "The Golden Bough", a book Kurtz is shown reading, where the infirm king is culled by the young Pretender, thus healing the infertile landscape, in this case Sheen's character is the assassin that must commit the patricide of terminate Kurtz's command "with extreme prejudice". The circle of literary references in the film are completed by Kurtz reading TS Eliot's "Hollow Men", which has Conrad's "Mistah Kurtz he dead" for its epigram.

So with a strong narrative armature in place, the film goes on to fashion a uniquely cinematic treatment of its themes. On an epic level, there is a clash of mythological proportions between Sheen and Brando's characters, resolved to the haunting echo of The Doors' Oedipal song "The End". The complexity of both characters knocks rival films like Oliver Stone's "Platoon" into a cocked hat, since they offer little more than a good versus evil scenario. What elevates AN to a unique pinnacle, is that it didn't just pursue a "war is terrible, war is futile" line, but actually suggested the insanity of war on the ground. Here I believe it is in Lance Johnson, the only other character to survive the carnage by the film's end,  who holds the key to the movie. Johnson is a Californian beach bum and renowned surfer, GI grunt fodder for conscription. A likely stoner back home, his hardening drug use along the course of the journey up the Mekong is the filter through which this war is refracted. He drops LSD and views the stunning battle scene for the bridge at Do Long as an array of psychedelic lights and colours. It is Johnson who gets more upset at the loss of a puppy, than the slaughter of its human family he has recently helped perpetrate. And it is Johnson who is so dehumanized by his experiences, that he readily adopts the pale-face paint on his face and bow and arrow armoury of the legions who follow Kurtz the tribal god once they are in Cambodia. Sheen has to lead him by the hand back to the boat at the film's end, an adult who has fully regressed into a bewildered childlike state.

Vietnam may not have been the first asymmetrical war of liberation from a colonial power, but it probably represents the biggest reversal for a first world power (and of course it was an American war and America has Hollywood). Here was an enemy who would not engage along a battlefield, but rather emerged from below via tunnels, or from above with snipers and booby traps in the jungle canopy. 'Hostiles' who could not be determined from the 'friendlies' and neutrals just by looking at them. This war was already shaping up as something of a hallucinatory battlescape compared with prior conventions, before some of the American troops resorting to drug use to help get them through it. The scene where the Playboy Bunnies are helicoptered in to a stage erected in the river to entertain the troops, is sufficiently unhinged without the use of mind-altering drugs; juxtaposed with the hard material fact that Sheen's character is trying to secure the necessary diesel to keep the boat fuelled for its journey. This hyperreality is what Johnson's character represents so well, and indeed all the boat's crew have no idea where they are heading and to what purpose. It is a delicious irony that this mission is to wipe out one of their own. This level of cultural blindness, of not coming 'to know thine enemy' as Kurtz actually does, is what undermines the entire American campaign (and just about every campaign fought since), which is why I feel the main addition in the "Redux" version, of a long scene on a vestigial French rubber plantation where the characters discuss colonialism is redundant, because it's already utterly coursing through the grain of the film.

These represent the bigger picture, but there are so many powerful vignettes, so much wonderful dialogue within the film that have really seared it into people's minds. I'm unsure what the appearance time limit on a cameo role is, but Robert Duvall gives what I reckon is the greatest cameo appearance ever committed to celluloid, where he just picks an already engaging film up by the scruff of the neck and hurls it to new heights. Much like the boat that his choppers airlift and drop into a Nung river tributary. The film's fiery, apocalyptic opening is played out to the Doors' "The End" and segues into Sheen's inverted face and the opening line, "Saigon, shit I'm still only in Saigon". In fact, I'll just give you a link to some of the movie's best quotes, but I'll end with what is probably my favourite, from the scene of the battle for the Do Long bridge, when Sheen asks a beleaguered GI "Hey soldier, do you know who's in command here?" to be met with the response "Ain't you?" The chaos of an unwinnable, rudderless, aimless war summed up in two lines. I commend you to another look at this masterpiece. But don't watch the "Redux" version. Somehow, by hook or by crook, the original 1979 print forms the definitive film.