Thoughts: Fiction and non-fiction

What is the difference between fiction and non-fiction?

Fictional and non-fictional narratives draw content from each other. Because human memories are imperfect, when we describe non-fictional events of the past, we cannot recall every detail precisely and accurately. We omit some details; other details we misrepresent. Our minds do not intentionally misrepresent these events– -- that is, we do not set out to lie --– but misrepresentation occurs. Recall the major geopolitical event of the 21st century, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. When the Boeing planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, gray smoke bellowed from the collision. Was the smoke gray? Possibly it was, but I did not know for sure. Yet, my account seemed very realistic, regardless of the validity of that detail. Why did it seem so? Because in our minds, when we read the word "smoke,"” we immediately think of the many other representations of smoke that we have previously seen, in movies, around campfires, on July 4th, and elsewhere.

Our memories blur reality. We remember smoke as an abstract object, and when we recall specific instances of that abstract concept (unless the instance was particularly memorable, such as green or red smoke), our mind interposes the abstraction on reality, creating memory. This is how non-fiction draws from fiction -- an event that occurred borrows details from other events creating a memory of an event that is not strictly accurate.

Fiction also draws from fiction. Some philosophers argue that our imaginations cannot create anything that is not already present in the world around us. A mind is, essentially, nothing more than the sum of its inputs. If that is true, then fiction can do nothing but re-process reality. More so, not only is fiction limited to reprocessing reality, but fiction is not even privileged enough to deal with reality as we see it. Writers of fiction work with those abstract concepts that our mind creates out of our many particular experiences. Thus, fiction is twice removed from reality, first, by our inability to precisely remember events and, second, by the re-processing of those events into an innumerable different combinations.

From here, two possibilities of originality arise. First, the re-processing of reality yields events that either do not exist, or could not possibly exist in our reality. Tolkien creates Hobbits, Asimov creates feeling, dreaming robots -- these do not exist in our reality. Rowling creates humans who can fly unaided by technology -- these cannot exist in our reality. But none of these creations is new. Men fight, robots fall in love, and Hobbits die. Rain, for example, falls in all three worlds. Sometimes the rain is red, at other times blue, yet at other times invisible and deadly. But the primary concept of rain is borrowed from our reality, not invented. This is just an imposition of our reality on our imagination, proving that our imagination is just the re-processing of our reality.

A second possibility of originality can exist if our mind is more than the sum of its inputs. Some philosophers argue that our mind can create something that does not exist in the world around it. Most things we create, however, resonate with reality. This is where argument stops and belief begins. I believe that fiction pushes at the boundaries of the real, and sometimes uses its narrative to represent reality in a different light, but never breaches the boundary of the real, simply because it is impossible to do so.

Some questions remain unanswered here. If we accept that fiction is a re-processed narrative of the external world, then how can we explain fictional narratives that predict science, like the Jules Verne's Nautilus? In that example, and many others like it, does science follow fiction, or did the science already exist for the fiction to follow. Does, in short, art imitate life, or life imitate art?


If fiction and non-fiction are hopelessly interwoven, what privileges one type of narrative over the other?

Something causes most readers to adopt a mindset when they are reading fiction that differs from the mindset they adopt when reading non-fiction. That something is a type of a social contract between the reader and the writer, an agreement about the nature narrative presented to one by the other. The social contract states that, on the one hand, the reader agrees to suspend disbelief when reading a fictional narrative and, on the other hand, the writer agrees to protect his non-fictional narrative from the encroachment of fiction. But all non-fiction suffers from misrepresentation (as I discussed in part 1), so the writer’s part of the contract is not a strict oath (as strict as a social contract can be), but rather a promise to battle fictitious accounts to the best of his or her ability.

Historians, the chroniclers of past events, are, therefore, the foremost warriors against fictitious narratives. Theirs is the task to separate fact from fiction and write down only fact for future generations to read and believe.

The interesting question arises when historians craft our understanding of our own past events. What happens when a historian breaks his or her oath? If caught, surely the perpetrator is punished. At most, he or she is banned from recording events; at the very least, the contract between the reader and that particular historian is broken.

But if the act goes uncaught, what is its effect on our understanding? Each uncaught misrepresentation of past events creates a writer bias. We have, therefore, two types of biases in non-fictional writing, intentional and unintentional misrepresentation of past events. Unintentional misrepresentation should not create much bias, because these errors, being natural, would be made on all sides of any given argument or all retellings of any event. (There is no reason to assume that various natural biases would not be normally distributed around the real version of any given event.)

Intentional bias creates a much larger problem if it goes uncaught. This bias is not cancelled out by offsetting natural bias, and there is no reason to assume that offsetting intentional bias always exists. This means that if a historian intentionally misrepresents events and this act is not corrected by further historians -- due to, among other things, lack of information -- then a permanently erroneous version of reality is recorded.

Next: What happens when history errs?