Forgotten, Unforgiven, and Excessively Romantic

 

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.

– Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900

The bulge in the thin hull would burst at any moment. The pilgrims, oblivious, slept, eight hundred of them: could their mystic dreams have brought them any closer to Paradise than their real peril? It was too late, and the lifeboats too few. Silently lowering two boats, the officers slipped away into the night.

The officers failed to recognize that Allah held the Patna in the palm of his hand. How could they have known, when they told of her capsizing, that the inevitable had through some miracle been averted, that days later the drifting hulk would still be afloat, its passengers still alive to tell the tale to their rescuers?

Of the would-be Ishmaels only Jim did not disappear; only Jim stood trial.

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything! …He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his first feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on talking for truth’s sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round, distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape.

Believing themselves to be the only survivors, the officers constructed a myth about the sinking of the Patna. Myth drowns in facts, brutish things that offer no salvation to drowning heroes. Later Jim would recreate himself in the interior, a profligate world where only facts do not grow. A lone European knew Jim’s fate; only the one could bear witness to the legend of Lord Jim:

And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly. Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.

 

Mythical Truth, Mythical Reality

Statements make linguistic references to particular worlds. Cumulatively, statements can be used to construe the meaning of the world, transforming it into a reality. The construction of meaning is an iterative process: extract relevant pieces of information from or about the world, assemble the information into a schema for making sense of the world, use subsequent pieces of information to expand and modify the constructed schema. Various kinds of meaningful schemata can be constructed: scientific, ethical, aesthetic, etc. A reality consists of a world made meaningful by means of a particular schema. Through application of multiple schemata the same world can be multiply real; e.g., an apple can have meaning as food, as the representative of a particular species of plant, as an object in a still life, as an object pulled to the earth by gravity, as an object of temptation in the Garden of Eden, etc.

A philosopher or an artist or a scientist can create a meaningful schema and use it to make sense of the everyday world, thereby turning the world into a reality. A storyteller can create an entire reality by creating both a fictional world and also a schema for making sense of that world. A storyteller can also create a fictional world and make sense of it with an existing schema: allegory works this way. It’s also possible to make sense of the everyday world by means of a schema derived from a fictional reality: this is the idea of life imitating art.

What about myth? A myth isn’t exactly a work of fiction, because the myth presumably refers to the everyday world. But neither is it just the application of a meaningful mental schema to the everyday world. Myths typically consist of fictional characters and events that are superimposed on the everyday world: supernatural beings living among us, stories about interactions between these beings and humans, and so on. These fictional imports are embedded within the system of meanings that structure everyday reality. But mythic reality is a kind of ghostly half-reality: myths help make sense of everyday reality, but the mythic beings and events have no existence in the everyday world.

Myths aren’t just invented for the heck of it: they typically serve as proxy sources of meaning, accounting for the otherwise-unaccounted-for. It’s hard to know whether the original propagators of a myth believe it themselves, or whether they’re just making something up until a better explanation comes along. Myths work only as long as people don’t think of them as myths; that is, as long as people believe that the mythic beings actually exist and the mythic events actually happened. But belief dies slowly even after myths are exposed as having only fictional existence: witness the continued widespread belief in Saddam’s WMDs and ties with al-Qaida.

What would a “true myth” be? In a prior post I proposed that a statement is “true” if it refers to something that exists in a particular world. “There’s a fly in my soup” is false in my present everyday reality, but it’s true in my imagination. Based on this definition, a mythical being or event that has no existence in the everyday world is not true of that world. If, on the other hand, a mythical event or being – something invented as a placeholder for the as-yet-inexplicable – turns out to exist in fact, then the myth proves to be “true.” So if somebody establishes the existence of Nessie, then his status is upgraded from mythic being to actual being. I think that about exhausts the possibilities for “true myth.”

I think the idea of “true myth” confounds raw existence with meaning. A myth might, for example, be invoked to support prohibition against seeking personal vengeance. The prohibition might be sustainable as a permanent ethical-legal principle even after the myth is abandoned. The myth may have served as a temporary catalyst for establishing a continuing principle of everyday ethical reality, but that doesn’t make the myth “true.” The myth served as a temporary foundation for meaning until a better one could be found to replace it.

I’ve got a couple more “First Lines” posts dealing with truth versus myth in fictional realities. After that, probably Monday, I’ll apply these ideas about myth to the Genesis 1 creation story.

Moby Dick: Truth or Myth?

The last chapter of Moby Dick ends with the sinking of the Pequod. The three masts subside, their lookouts still manned by the three harpooneers.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

The end? Not quite. There’s an Epilogue, one page long. It begins with a quote:

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” – Job

Job. The narrator begins his story by telling of a day when the sons of God came to present themselves to Yahweh, and Satan came also among them. And Yahweh said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered Yahweh, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. Yahweh gives Satan his permission to destroy everything Job has, just to see whether Job will curse Yahweh. Immediately four messengers come to Job, each one recounting a separate catastrophe. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” each of the messengers concludes his story. Is this a true story about Job? No one alive can vouchsafe the messengers’ stories. And who bore witness to the conversation between Yahweh and Satan?

The Epilogue of Moby Dick continues:

The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? – Because one did survive the wreck.

The Epilogue reminds us that we’ve been reading a story told by Ishmael, an otherwise-undistinguished crewmember of the ill-fated Pequod. It seems that Queequeg’s coffin, empty and sealed, shot up from the vortex of the wreckage. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main – until another passing whaler plucked him from the sea.

Is Ishmael’s story true? He only is escaped alone to tell the tale. Maybe he was telling a fish story. Maybe, by embellishing the mundane facts of a pointless accident, Ishmael created a legend. But we have no reason to doubt his word, do we? As it happens, we do.

About halfway through the book Ishmael notes a passing encounter with the Town-Ho, a whaling ship that had recently sighted Moby Dick near the Cape of Good Hope. He then describes in much greater detail an earlier event on the Town-Ho involving a leak, a mutiny, and a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so-called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. The instrument of God’s judgment, it turns out, was Moby Dick himself. Only three former crewmen of the Town-Ho lived to tell the tale, one of whom told it to Tashtego, who recounted it among his shipmates aboard the Pequod.

Ishmael doesn’t integrate the Town-Ho’s story into the rest of the narrative; he brackets the tale in quotations to preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon the gilt-titled piazza of the Golden Inn. Ishmael even quotes his Spanish friends’ occasional interruptions of this prior telling. Ishmael brings the story to its dramatic, and improbable, conclusion:

“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that destroyed him…

“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian quietly.

“I am, Don.”

“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own conviction, this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press.’”

Ishmael calls for someone to bring him a copy of “the Evangelists” on which he can swear his honesty. No, says Don Sebastian, but there’s a priest nearby. Bring the priest also, Ishmael tells him. A man comes, tall and solemn – here is the priest, says Don Sebastian. Ishmael places his hand on the Holy Book:

“‘So help me, Heaven, and on my honor, the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’”

But wait. Didn’t Ishmael say that the Pequod’s crew heard the story from Tashtego, who allegedly heard it from an eyewitness? And when would he have met the crew if only three of them survived? Maybe Ishmael had heard the tale before, on one of his prior voyages. But no: at the beginning of the book Ishmael said that he’d never been on a whaling ship before…

The “Real” Meaning of a Text

Prior posts have zeroed in on what a spoken or written statement means. There’s…

1. linguistic meaning, as determined by the internal structure of the language and its vocabulary, grammar and syntax. There’s…
2. referential or semantic meaning: what the words and phrases point to in the world. Then there’s…
3. contextual meaning: the particular world in which the statement makes sense.

“There’s a fly in my soup” is a linguistically meaningful, well-formed English sentence. It’s meaningful referentially – we know what a fly is, what soup is, etc. As I sit typing this sentence, the fly-in-soup statement makes no sense: I have a cup of coffee in front of me but no soup, etc. I can, however, imagine a world in which I do have a bowl of soup: in that context the sentence is meaningful.

“Moby Dick is a great white whale.” This sentence has threefold meaning in the context of Melville’s fictional world. But that isn’t the end of it. What does Moby Dick mean? This isn’t a question about the meaning of the sentence: it asks about the meaning of the sentence’s subject: the sentence refers to Moby Dick, but what is Moby Dick about? This is a fourth kind of meaning, what might be called:

4. real meaning: the significance of the statement in making sense of the world to which the statement refers.

Moby Dick is a great white whale in Melville’s novel of the same name. Really, Moby Dick is the object of Ahab’s monomaniacal quest and his executioner, and so on.

It could be argued that, while Moby Dick himself has real meaning, the specific sentences referring to him don’t. But I think that’s wrong. Sure, I can construct an image of Moby Dick that’s independent of any particular sentence about him. However, I have no experience of Moby Dick independent of the book: my mental image is derived entirely from the sentences that Melville wrote about him (and doubtless also from sentences that other people wrote after having read Melville’s book). The reality of Moby Dick emerges from the sentences about him in the book, but his reality isn’t reducible to the sum of all the sentences. My image of him is grounded in the sentences of the text, but I also interpret the real meaning of any particular sentence based on a mental image of Moby Dick that’s separate from the sentences in the text.

Ishmael, the narrator, tells me that a sperm whale is longer than a whaling boat, that a whale can capsize a boat, that a whale can eat a man in a single bite. Ishmael tells me that Ahab had his leg bitten off by a whale, and not just any whale – it was Moby Dick. Ishmael gives me example after example illustrating the uncanny horror of white things. From the sentences of the book I assemble an image of Moby Dick: his raw physicality, the motive force he provides to the story, his near-mythic status as an object of awe and terror. When at last the Pequod arrives at its fated and fatal confrontation, the great white whale is enormous, imbued with layer upon layer of meaning that establishes the reality of that confrontation.

One of the curious things about Moby Dick is how it drifts along on currents and gets caught in eddies that distract the reader from the book’s dramatic development. There are chapters about boats and riggings, paintings of whaling scenes, the whale oil rendering process; Chapter 64 is entitled “The Whale As a Dish.” In Chapter 31, “Cetology,” Ishmael presents a taxonomic scheme for describing and categorizing every known type of whale. This chapter establishes the scientific reality of Moby Dick as representative of the largest and most formidable species of whale. Clearly we’re meant to take this chapter seriously, inasmuch as Melville includes several footnotes that he attributes explicitly not to Ishmael but to “H. Melville.” Why are Ishmael’s and Melville’s obsessions with cetology important to the present discussion? Because real meaning isn’t limited to narrative or metaphysical meaning; it can also be scientific. A scientific taxonomy is a mental construct for making sense of the specifics. The scientific reality of a taxonomic system, like the reality of a fictional character, is built up from specific instances, but it isn’t reducible to the sum of the instances. And by the way, the book’s emphasis on the sheer physicality of the whale keeps the reader from jumping with both feet into a mythic reading of the text… which will be the subject of the next post, I hope.

A Sort of Secret Society About Nothing

 

That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments.

– Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart, 1938

It’s the kind of book that belongs on those musty shelves: the generic blue cover distinguished only by a subtly embossed “EB,” the yellowed sticker carefully pasted on the front:

English-American Library
Founded in 1863
10,000 Volumes on Open Shelves
12, Rue de France, Nice

We’ve paid our deposit authorizing us to check out two books at a time – or four paperbacks, if we like. The Belgian lady behind the desk chatters amiably with another visitor as she pulls our card from the file, jots down the title and the date, and places it back in the box. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, who sought refuge here from the English winter, once served as patrons of this library. Men speaking variously-inflected English discuss World War Two back by the newspapers as I head out the door and up the steps into the warmth of another perfect afternoon on the Mediterranean.

Around chapter three I began thinking that I’d read something like this before; later, that maybe I’d started it once but never finished. Only near the end, when a devastated Portia seeks refuge with Major Brutt in the attic bleakness of the Karachi Hotel (of a style at once portentous and brittle) did I realize that I’d actually read the entire book before, and not all that long ago.

In his elegiac review Jonathan Yardley remembers The Death of the Heart: “I first read it in the 1950s, when I was a teenager, far too young and callow to appreciate it, much less understand it.” Could that have been why the book hadn’t made much impression on me the first time? But I was fifty, not fifteen. Have I lost that much innocence in these past few years? Perhaps.

It’s an icy, brittle world that with a few deft taps Bowen reduces to jagged shards. She puts the jeweler’s hammer in the hand of St. Quentin, that prototypical upper-class “old family friend” of English novels who, as it happens, is himself a famous novelist. After administering, assassin-like, the petit coup that will shear these lives apart, St. Quentin cries loudly to the dazed Portia:

‘These lacunae in people!’

‘What did you say?’

‘You don’t ask what made me do that – you don’t even ask yourself.’

She said, ‘You are very kind.’

‘The most unlikely things one does, the most utterly out of character, arouse no curiosity, even in one’s friends. One can suffer a convulsion of one’s entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It’s not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other’s existences. Even you, with that loving nature you have – In a small way I have just ratted on Anna, I have done something she’d never forgive me for, and you, Portia, you don’t even ask me why. Consciously, and as far as I can see quite gratuitously, I have started what may make a frightful breach. In me, this is utterly out of character. I’m not a mischievous man; I haven’t got time; I’m not interested enough. You’re not even listening, are you?’

‘I’m sorry, I – ’

What a precise, sad, funny, devastating book this is – on second reading.

 

Linking Fictional Reality to Everyday Reality

In the last post I tentatively proposed that the relationship between fiction and truth is mediated by meaning. Fiction writers create an imaginary reality; most of a novel consists of ordinary narrative prose that describes that imagined reality: who’s there, what they’re like, what’s going on, etc. These are the truths of the fictional reality. Still, no matter how much the fictional reality resembles the world as we experience it, the people, events, etc. aren’t true of the ordinary world we live in. It’s true that Moby Dick is a big white whale, but only in the fictional version of the seven seas that Melville created.

I proposed that the correspondence between fictional reality and everyday reality is to be found not in truth but in meaning. The author writes a bunch of truth statements describing a fictional world. Through the selection and organization of these truth statements, and in the narrator’s and characters’ commentaries about the fictional world, the author ascribes meaning to the fictional world. A string of mere truths is a collection; truths infused with meaning become transformed into a reality. If the meaning that the author builds into fictional truths also makes sense of everyday factual truths, then the meaning is robust enough to extend beyond fictional reality into the world of true facts.

C.S. Lewis distinguishes between truth and reality. In his scheme too a single reality may encompass a multitude of truths. For Lewis reality comes before truth; or, perhaps more precisely, truths are the diverse manifestations of a single underlying reality. “Truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is.” Or, unraveling the syntax, truth is about reality. The interpreter’s job is to look past the specific truths in order to discover the reality that is the source of those truths.

In a prior post I said that truths are about the stuff that sentences refer to. The statement “Moby Dick is a great white whale” is a truth statement about a particular thing in a particular world. But truths are also about what they mean and why they’re important – their reality. The reality of Moby Dick – he is the great Nemesis of Promethean man, God and the devil rolled into one, the unswerveable force of destiny that confounds all acts of human freedom, and so on – is what Moby Dick is about in Melville’s created reality. This reality may manifest itself variously as a great white whale in Melville’s fictional world, as an unapproachable castle in Kafka’s world, as the father in Freud’s world, and so on.

Fictional realities don’t just come into existence; they’re created. Even if the writer claims to let the characters develop, to let the story emerge spontaneously, there’s always a ghost in the machine. Maybe Melville began with a clear picture of the reality of Moby Dick; or maybe the whale’s character and role in the story unfolded gradually. Either way, Melville wrote the great white whale into existence. An intelligent designer stands behind the fictional facts, and also behind the reality that makes sense of the facts.

But Melville wasn’t the designer of the everyday world of nineteenth-century New England. In what way is the reality he created in Moby Dick relevant to his own world, or to ours? I presume it might have worked like this: Melville experienced in his own life something that led him to conclude that perhaps free choice is an illusion, that the results of even the most forceful acts of individual will are determined by unassailable and impersonal forces. And so in Moby Dick he created a fictional world, some characters, and a story that illustrated his insight about reality as he had come to understand it. Melville the man found a strand of meaning in his life; Melville the author imposed that meaning on a world of his own creation. Seeing meaning in the world is the author’s vision; extending meaning into a created reality is the author’s art. Extracting the meaning out of a fictional world and seeing whether it makes sense of everyday life: that’s the reader’s creative contribution to the “work” of fiction.

Now we’re about ready to address a related question: is there such a thing as “true myth”?

 

Truth and Meaning in Fictional Realities

This was a hard post to write. I hope it’s coherent.

We read a text. We understand the language of the text – vocabulary, grammar, syntax. We understand the referential characteristics of the text – the word “whale” refers to a big sea creature, etc. The question remains: in what reality is the text’s meaning true? In normal conversation we communicate about the social reality we occupy jointly. Likewise with normal writing: what I write in this post refers to a reality I share with the reader that includes things like conversations and texts. This is the three-fold requirement for a literal reading: normal use of language, normal linguistic reference, normal mutual reality.

Most fiction uses language normally, with normal referential meaning – straightforward narrative prose. It just happens to refer to a different reality. A fictional text presents a series of statements that are true in some alternative, fictional reality. Because we understand how language refers to the kinds of things that comprise a reality, we can use a fictional text to infer characteristics of the fictional reality to which it points.

But a text doesn’t provide an exhaustive description of a reality. The reader of a novel has to read between the lines to infer characteristics of the fictional reality that aren’t explicitly described in the text. As a rule of thumb, the reader infers that the fictional reality is a lot like ordinary everyday reality unless the text says or infers otherwise. So if the novel says that Bob is married to Susie, the reader infers that Bob is married only to Susie and not to someone else at the same time. Love, anger, deception, jealousy forgiveness – interpersonal relationships in the fictional reality work pretty much the same as in normal reality, unless the author tells us otherwise. In general, most fictional realities work pretty much the same as ordinary reality: fictional people are like real people, they have realistic thoughts and feelings, they engage in realistic activities and relationships. It’s generally easy to understand fiction, both because the language is straightforward and because the fictional reality is so much like ordinary reality.

What about going the other direction, from fictional reality to ordinary reality? Are we able to understand ordinary reality because it’s similar to some fictional reality we’ve come to understand? I think perhaps it can be done, but the relationship is more tenuous. Fictional realities are sparser than ordinary reality, so it’s hard to picture how a sketchy fictional reality can fill in the truth gaps in a relatively more complete ordinary reality. However, features of fictional realities aren’t simply there, like they are in ordinary reality: they’re put there by the author. Still, nonfiction writers do the same thing, calling attention to certain features of ordinary reality by writing about them.

Still, I made the case in an earlier post that the truth of a statement is relative to a particular reality, and I still think there’s something sound in that contention. Truth is a judgment of factuality or accuracy. No matter how relevant I might think Moby Dick is to ordinary life, the facts of that book are not true in ordinary life.

But the meaning of Moby Dick can apply to ordinary life even if the facts don’t.

I’ve already talked about the meaning of texts in two other ways: the linguistic meaning and the referential meaning. Now I’m talking about something more metaphysical or interpretive. In what way do the truths of a reality hang together so that I can make sense of things? Part of what a good novelist does is to impose a meaningful framework on the facts and truths and events described in the book. Arguably it’s this larger interpretive meaning that gives shape to the reality of the novel, not the individual facts and characters and events that populate it.

So, if an interpretive reality arises within a work of fiction that seems to work when applied to ordinary reality, then that fictional reality is meaningful also in ordinary reality. In fact, one could argue that part of the fiction writer’s job is to illustrate in a fictional setting the robustness of a particular interpretive context for making sense of the world. The writer doesn’t just tell stories; he shows what the stories mean to the reader’s life.

So, instead of talking about whether truths cross between fictional and ordinary realities, it’s more important to talk about the crossover of meaning. It’s meaning that defines a reality, not the specific truth statements that can be made within that reality. If the author embeds a fictional reality within a robust enough set of meanings, then the novel’ crossover to ordinary reality may be strong even if the specific facts do not overlap between the two realities.

 

Natural Language and Literal Hermeneutics

Yesterday I said that, for the medievalists, the “literal” meaning of a text is one that assumes the words are being used “normally” or “naturally.” I suggested that the normal, natural, literal meaning of a text is more or less the same for us today as it would have been for a Near Eastern Bedouin from 3,000 years ago. Why?

Because all human languages work pretty much the same way. Even otherwise primitive cultures use sophisticated grammar and syntax. All human languages are grammatically and syntactically similar to one another. By an early age children become adept users of the language spoken in whatever culture they happen to be raised in, even without explicit instruction. And again, why?

It’s not completely clear. Chomsky asserted that the human brain is specially structured to understand a “universal grammar” common to all languages. Chomsky doubts whether this specialized and highly complex cognitive structure could have resulted solely from natural selection. Pinker argues that it could – that the evolution of language is not that different from the evolution of vision. Just as incremental improvements in light sensitivity and motion detection and depth perception would have afforded adaptive advantages, so too would incremental improvements in the ability to communicate and to understand others’ communication. But language isn’t just an individual cognitive ability; it is also – it is primarily – a means of social exchange. A language isn’t just inside the head; it’s part of a shared cultural environment. Science, math, architecture, agronomy: these cultural artifacts have increased in complexity over the millennia, but not because the human brain continues to evolve. It’s because our biologically modern ancestors continually thought up incremental improvements and taught them to others, who in turn passed them down through the generations to us. The languages we use today are the product of thousands of generations of cumulative incremental modifications.

Only recently have people begun systematically studying linguistic evolution, which means we haven’t been able to witness a lot of historic transformation of real languages. Tomasello suggests that all languages are structurally similar to one another because they’re all offshoots of a single complex Ur-language:

“It may just be that language, for whatever reason, began its historical development first – early in the evolution of modern humans some 200,000 years ago – and so reached something near its current level of complexity before modern languages began to diverge from this prototype.”

It seems fair to say that genetic, developmental, cultural, and historical forces have all contributed to the similarity of all modern natural languages. Say we’re trying to read a Biblical text written in 1000 BC. From the standpoint of genetic evolution the writer would have been no different from us in terms of sheer brain capacity and ability to use language. In linguistic history three thousand years just isn’t all that long ago: the structure and complexity of ancient Hebrew is more or less the same as modern English. We should be able to understand what the ancient writer had to say.

But what about text – written rather than spoken language? Written language wasn’t invented until about 6,000 years ago, which is like last week in linguistic history. The spoken languages would already have achieved modern levels of complexity before writing was invented. Unwritten languages spoken by isolated tribes are as complex as modern written languages. Writing was independently invented probably only three times in human history: in Mesopotamia, in China, in South America. Modern English writing and ancient Hebrew writing stemmed from the same Middle Eastern source – so our understandings of written language wouldn’t be all that different.

In conclusion, then, it seems reasonable and empirically justifiable to assert that, when we read an ancient text, our natural, literal understanding of that text is pretty similar to how the writer’s contemporaries would have understood it.

 

On Taking It Literally

Last post I proposed that statements are neither true nor false in and of themselves. A statement is true or false relative to a particular reality. The same statement can be true of one reality while at the same time false in another; e.g., “There’s a fly in my soup” might be a true statement in a play being staged in a “real world” where there is neither fly nor soup.

Bearing this interpretation of truth in mind, let’s evaluate what the “literal” reading of a text might mean. The term “literal” came into use among medieval exegetes to distinguish the natural meaning of a text from its mystical or allegorical meaning. The “natural” meaning would refer both to the internal and the referential meaning.

· The internally natural meaning of “light” has to do with a property of the world that makes vision possible, as opposed to an internally metaphorical meaning of “light” which might mean “truth” or “moral goodness.”

· The referentially natural meaning of “light” is that it refers to light in the “real world” – the world as jointly experienced by the writer and the reader. A referentially metaphorical or mystical meaning of light refers to light in some other reality: in the spiritual realm, say, or in some imagined world.

To take someone “literally,” then, is to assume that he uses words as they are normally defined, with reference to the normal world we occupy. We can maintain that there are no literal meanings because all language is metaphorical, or because no word can be defined with logico-mathematical precision. But if “literal” means “normal” or “natural,” then the idea of a literal meaning seems perfectly… normal/natural. It’s how we use language most of the time.

However… the terms “normal” and “natural” can’t really be defined categorically. There’s a more-or-less quality, a gradual fade from black to gray as you move farther away from dead-on normalcy. If I say “bird” and you think “penguin,” are you normal? Do we occupy the same real world as some Near East bedouin who died three thousand years ago?

Frankly, I think you are and I think we do, more or less.

 

There’s a Fly in My Soup: True or False?

Language evolved as a means of communication. For language to work, both the speaker and the listener have to share a more-or-less common understanding of what the sentences mean. Sentences have meaning within the language: word definitions, grammar, syntax, etc. Sentences also have external meaning: meaning with reference to the world outside of language. So if I were to tell you “There’s a fly in my soup,” I would assume you understood what I meant in both senses.

You’ve understood my meaning both linguistically and referentially – but what if there isn’t really a fly in my soup? I’m lying; I’m joking; it wasn’t true; I didn’t really mean it. The question is this: how does the truth of a phrase differ from its meaning? Here’s my proposition:

A phrase is true if it is meaningful with reference to a particular reality shared by the speaker and the listener.

Suppose you and I are staging a bit of theater. I pretend to be eating a bowl of soup. “There’s a fly in my soup,” I assert. You lean over, peek into the imaginary bowl, reach daintily in with your thumb and forefinger, pluck the imaginary fly from the bowl and flick it aside. We both know there is no “real” fly, but there is a fly in our shared imaginary reality. We’ve agreed that there “really is” a fly in that imagined bowl of soup – all the while agreeing that there “really isn’t” a fly in the particular corner of the material world that we’re jointly occupying.

When I said, “There’s a fly in my soup,” I was simultaneously speaking both a truth and an untruth. How can that be? I spoke the phrase only once; I didn’t tell the truth first and then tell an untruth. The truth or falsity of my fly-in-soup assertion isn’t part of the assertion itself; it is true or false relative to the particular reality or realities to which it refers. My statement isn’t both true and false at the same time; rather, it’s true in some realities and false in others. A statement is true in a particular reality if it has referential meaning in that reality; i.e., if it offers a valid description of some aspect of that reality.

Why is this important? I’m not sure, but here’s the context. Hermeneutics is the study of meaning; epistemology is the study of truth. Presumably a good hermeneutic is required before you can do proper epistemology: you need to know what something means before you can determine whether or not it’s true. What I’m suggesting here is that truth is a kind of meaning, a subcategory of meaning. A statement is true if it has referential meaning not to a hypothetical generic reality, not to all possible realities, but to a particular reality.

And if that’s true – if that’s a meaningful characterization of the relationship between statements and realities – then epistemology should be demoted to a subspecialty within hermeneutics. Rorty would certainly agree with subsuming epistemology under hermeneutics; I suspect that Gadamer and Derrida would too.

So, if truth is a kind of referential meaning, then what are the implications for, say, literal reading of Scripture? Or the truth of fiction? Tomorrow, or more likely Tuesday. Comments, as always, are welcome.

 

Truth in Fiction

 

The big split in zoology is between plants and animals; the big split in books is between fiction and nonfiction. The main distinction is that nonfiction deals in fact, whereas fiction… doesn’t. Fiction might be realistic, such that the characters and the situations seem just like the sort of thing that might happen to you and me. But we understand that the story and the characters aren’t real; they’re figments of the author’s imagination.

There are hybrids: semi-fictionalized memoirs, novels in which the author appears as a character in the story, alternative history, those long discourses on the physiology of whales in Moby Dick, and so on. But you know what I mean.

So the question is this: can fiction – the clearly made-up parts of fiction – possibly be construed as “true”?

Certainly there are facts internal to the work of fiction: Sherlock Holmes smokes a pipe, he has a friend named Dr. Watson. There are broader internal truths too; e.g., Holmes is a great detective. What I’m talking about are fictional truths that are also true in the “real world.” Is such a thing possible? If so, how does it work?

 

Sometime Other Than Meantime

 

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

So here’s the thing about publishing: the quality of your work doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as being able to identify a ready-made market for it. The obvious niche for a book about Genesis 1 is the creation-versus-evolution controversy. Although my book takes the creation narrative seriously and literally, it doesn’t fit well with the faith-based community. Why not? Because it implies that maybe God didn’t create or design the material universe after all. So that means I should ally myself with the evolution side of the argument. It makes sense: undermining Judeo-Christian theism from inside the main theistic text really is a pretty cool move. There’s a bit of a backlash against the heavy-handed polemics of Dawkins and Sam Harris; my argument is scriptural, theological, literary, nuanced, cultured. My book is what’s next.

But here’s the other thing: I’m just not that interested in fighting for evolution. Sure I believe that it’s sound science. Sure I believe that evolution can account for a lot of things that traditionally fall within the purview of religion: cosmogony, human nature, morality, both selfishness and altruism, beliefs. But what’s so great about attributing everything I value about humanity to natural rather than divine causes? I’m just replacing one deterministic explanation with another.

We look to origins as first causes. Where did we come from? Why are we the way we are? What has set the course of our development and history? Creationists and evolutionists are equally concerned with origins. One side sees God as the source; the other, random variation and natural selection. Both are asking fundamentally the same question: what events beyond our control determine the course of our lives? Backward-looking, deterministic, ultimately dehumanizing: evolution and providence aren’t all that different from one another.

What defines the beginning for God is a conscious act of creating. To create isn’t to be caused; it’s to be the cause. Everything that’s determined happens “in the meantime”: in the middle time between first cause and final effect. To cause something different to happen, something determined neither by nature nor by God, is to create a beginning. By doing something unprecedented, God created a beginning for himself. If we’re created in his image, then that’s what we need to do too: create beginnings for ourselves. Reducing everything to natural causes or to the will of God is to live in the middle. Every time we create we begin again. The lesson of Genesis 1 isn’t to keep looking back at that particular beginning, but to learn from the creator what it means to begin.

The shrewdest move publication-wise is to position the Genesis 1 book in the middle of the creation versus evolution debate, to take sides, to add fuel to a fire that’s already burning. If I don’t provide my particular fuel somebody else will surely add theirs. The post-Christianization of America is a sociohistorical movement that’s already underway: go with the Tao rather than resisting it. But I don’t really want to go with or against that particular tide. Why takes sides on whether natural or divine forces shape my destiny? It doesn’t really matter which side I choose, just so long as I get myself onto the field of play. But I believe this: there may be no use in fighting destiny, but there’s nothing interesting about going along with destiny either.

Here’s my point, and also that of elohim in Genesis 1: whatever got me to this place, I’m going to set something different in motion, something that might never have happened if I didn’t do it. But here’s the tragedy: if I don’t choose sides and get into the game that’s already underway, whatever else I do will never be noticed by either the players or the audience. The book will never get published.

 

The Force of Moral Gravity

 

“Boys growing up in nineteenth-century England weren’t generally advised to seek sexual excitement.”

– Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, 1994

The Bible begins with a really great first line. While putting together the first draft of the Genesis 1 book I started getting interested in the first lines of other books. I looked at the first sentences of a bunch of books on my shelves and wrote down the ones I found particularly stimulating. Unfortunately I failed to write down the titles of the books these sentences came from. Eventually I either remembered or retrieved all of them – all, that is, except the sentence at the top of today’s post.

Yesterday I watched part of a YouTube video of Richard Dawkins responding to questions from the audience at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. I’d been thinking about Dawkins in the context of creation versus evolution, a theme that’s inescapable when dealing with Genesis 1. On his website Dawkins lists his upcoming and recent appearances. Randolph-Macon Woman’s College immediately caught my eye because it’s my wife’s alma mater. Skipping the part where Dawkins reads from his latest book, I jumped ahead to the Q&A.

This is a woman’s college we’re talking about – although finally and not without regret the school, nodding to market pressures, goes coed next year. So why are there so many college-aged young men hulking over the floor microphones? It’s because R-MWC is located in Lynchburg Virginia, the home turf of Jerry Falwell and his Liberty University. Turns out it’s mostly Liberty underdgrad guys queueing up to take their shots at the famous atheist. I’ll refrain from comment on whether I agree with Dawkins that he cleaned their clocks, or whether it would have been an impressive display of debating prowess if he did. What interested me was the fact that most of the questions had to do with morality.

Now I’d just gone a couple rounds at Open Source Theology about Dawkins’ views on morality; namely, that our selfish genes may actually promote altruistic behavior. Why, I wondered, is it important to dismiss this idea as scientistic hogwash? Certainly we’re instinctively predisposed to protect our children and kinfolk: being genetically similar to us, they’re able to perpetuate our genetic legacy into the next generation. Certainly we’re instinctively predisposed to cooperate with our neighbors: if we don’t they might retaliate; if we do they might reciprocate when we’re in need. Certainly we’re instinctively predisposed to empathize: we’re able to learn from others because we’re able to see ourselves in the other’s shoes, pursuing the same goals in the world as they do. If evangelicals are going to take on Dawkins they’d better bring their “A game,” and denying the adaptive advantages of cooperation just isn’t going to cut it.

In any event, I can’t remember whether Dawkins specifically cited Robert Wright’s book or whether I was just reminded of it by the discussion. Wright offers an excellent discussion of the evolutionary underpinnings of morality. So I pulled it down from the shelf, opened to the beginning – and there it is, that first line I’d been looking for! I expected the writer to have been English, so I never thought about Wright as the source. On the frontispiece Wright quotes a passage from The Power and the Glory, which was written by an Englishman and the first sentence of which likewise appears in my compilation of notable first lines.

And what, you ask, does this first sentence about English boys have to do with the evolution of morality? Wright begins his book by establishing the sociocultural context in which Charles Darwin grew up: a pre-Victorian era of prudery invoked by a newly-ascendant evangelicalism. Man is evil by nature; only the sternest measures of suppression can keep the beast at heel. I suspect that today’s evangelical hasn’t changed all that much from Darwin’s day. Today perhaps there’s a greater willingness to acknowledge forgiveness and the possibility of moral regeneration – although the Wesley boys were preaching that same gospel back in the day. But the idea that God can redeem and restore our innate moral goodness? I don’t think so.

 

Intellectus Archetypus

 

Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three!

– Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., 1968

Brock Rutherford’s boy Damon is six outs away from perfection. He doesn’t know it yet, but it’s already in the cards – or the dice, rather. Even Henry Waugh doesn’t know it yet, and he’s the guy who’s rolling.

Baseball is allegorical for just about anything heroic in America; it’s our national kitschmyth. We can get caught up in the numbers game, the statistics of greatness, the rigid economics that guarantee a continual supply of winners and losers. In kitschmyth there are no numbers. Never lose sight of the humanity, the tragedy of being a god with feet of clay, the redemption in love and self-sacrifice, the inspirational ballad that stays with us even after the credits have all been rolled up.

There was a time – before baseball, before America, before time itself – when the numbers were mythic. Eternity begat time, pure number begat instantiation, God begat man. The heroes – the daimons – occupied an intermediate realm between form and matter, between God and man.

“Emma Bovary, c’est moi!” Flaubert famously declared. He died in the nineteenth century, once and for all, but Madame Bovary? She dies but she comes back, over and over again. What elixir is this, what sorcerer’s stone – how did this mortal scribe gain access to the hermetic secrets of immortality? Did Flaubert imbue Emma Bovary with a vestigial memory of her creator? Perhaps there was never a Flaubert other than Emma.

What sort of middle realm must Cervantes have occupied to conjure such a demiurge as Quixote? Sometimes the worlds start slipping apart, or perhaps they multiply themselves, and parallel Quixotes start showing up inside the text. Did Cervantes himself show up inside the story? I forget now.

The elohim created a universe out of nothing and on the seventh day they rested. Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichos – they taught that Yahweh pulled a universe out of himself, in stages. Even Augustine, Calvin’s patron saint, was Greek. The printing press made the novel a quintessentially Protestant art form, but the Catholics got the ball rolling. The Romancers held onto Plato long enough to beget Cervantes, who begat Flaubert. There were Englishmen too striving for enlightenment: Newton the alchemist, who begat Lawrence Sterne, who tried to protect his progeny with the eternal name of Trismagistus when the secret was right under his nose.

J. Henry Waugh. JHW_augH.

…who begat Coover…

All fiction is metatheology.