Fiction is not the same as lying, even though it is made-up.
This week’s #FictionFriday is brought to you by David Fell
Fiction is not the same as lying, even though it is made-up. Fiction can be a route to truth where facts are awkward thorns and briar. Fiction uses stories; but not all stories are fiction.
What makes a good story? One that keeps us engaged. A good story is one where we ask ‘what next?’ and want to find out.
Are some people just good story-tellers? Or are there rules? Do stories emerge from some mysterious creative realm; or can they be composed by algorithms?
Both extremes seem uncomfortable. I, for one, dislike the idea of the ‘muse’, and not just for its historic and implicit sexism. When I write a story I want it to be me that is writing it; I don’t want to believe that some ineffable ‘other’ is somehow responsible.
On the other hand, many of us are disquieted at the thought of our emotions being manipulated by a story written by artificial intelligence.
In practice, all (human) writers, however apparently creative, rely on rules, ranging from the formalities of grammar and syntax through the more-or-less obvious scaffolding of plot to the sometimes invisible devices writers use to capture our attention with particular pieces of phrasing or poesy.
Few are as explicit, however, as Italo Calvino, one of my favourite writers. In Mr Palomar, for example, Calvino includes an Index in which he explains that “the numbers 1, 2, 3 that mark the titles of the index… correspond to three thematic areas, three kinds of experience and enquiry that, in varying proportions, are present in every part of the book.” The three areas are, roughly, the visual, the cultural and the philosophical. Each of the twenty seven chapters has a mix of these three areas corresponding with their chapter number (1.1.1, 1.1.2… 2.2.3… 3.3.1 and so on).
This sounds like a recipe for a text so formulaic that all emotional resonance is lost, as if it were something written by a computer. In fact, Mr Palomar is a work of heart-rending beauty, a short suite of moments in an imagined life which throws crystalline light on the real human condition. On my human condition. On your human condition. If you have not yet read it, I urge you to do so; if you have, then you already know you want to read it again.
“The swimming ego of Mr Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of fields of force, vectorial diagrams, bands of position lines that converge, diverge, break up. But inside of him there remains one point in which everything exists in another way, like a lump, like a clot, like a blockage: the sensation that you are here but could not be here, in a world that could not be, but is.”