Fiction Reveals the Truth that Reality Obscures: Jessamyn West
Just as any other reader of fiction, I have often been pressed to justify my "frivolous" interest in it, so here goes.
Fiction Reveals the Truth that Reality Obscures: Jessamyn West
To fully comprehend this vivid epigram, it is necessary to fully comprehend its most weighty components: Fiction, truth and reality.
The truth: it always triumphs, always comes out in the end, and is still getting its boots on while lies are already halfway around the world.
We have plenty of ideas of what the truth does? But what is the truth, the formless entity performing all these actions?
According to some, truth is beauty and beauty, truth. But if truth is beauty, and reality is ugly, reality must be disparate from truth. And so what is reality?
We’ve been told perception is reality. Just as colourblind individuals may never know that they are colourblind, and that they experience the world very differently from most of the population, we may never know that we experience a reality any different from another persons version of reality. To know the difference between our realities we need a reference point.
But if there were a person who sees what most people see as green as red and what most people as green as red, would we ever know? If given a rose, they would also call it red as they were taught to do, but what they experience as red, we would normally see as green. Comparing our respective realities does not necessitate only a reference point, it necessitates a reference point that is perceived exactly the same by everyone. And is there such a reference point?
The five senses are clearly fallible, as exemplified in the cases of colourblind individuals, and in diseases like COVID that alter our sense of smell. It must be something that cannot be perceived by the senses? Can truth be this universal reference point? But the truth is often stated to have been hidden, to have been obscured. Some people “just can’t see the truth”. And this clearly rules out truth as a universal reference point. And does this universal reference point exist at all?
If not truth, what else can be? It has clearly not been discovered yet.
People will never quite perceive the world the same way, and if one experiences the world there is no way of choosing which version is more correct as there is no standard reference point, unlike in colourblindness alone, where doctors have now presented standard sets of colours that people should normally be able to differentiate. (and this too is fallible, as in the hypothetical scenario of the person who perceives colours on the spectrum not as similar to each other, but as the opposite of what a “normal person’s” perception is.
But if reality is so versatile, is there no such thing as a lie? No, when one relates an action that one did not perceive, one may be said to have been lying.
Lies are often presented as the counterpart of truth. But lies may more naturally presented as the counterpart of reality.
If a person sees a UFO, and tells someone about it, and then the object they called a UFO crash lands on earth and it turns out to be a stray kite, can they be said to have been lying? No, if the person experienced the object as UFO, they cannot be said to have been lying.
However, if they perceived the kite only as a kite, and still said it was a UFO, they were lying. And if they perceived the ki
te as a UFO, but said it was a kite, they were still lying.
Having somewhat defined reality and lies, we circle back to our definition of truth.
We have established that truth is not a universal reference point, which is not to say truth is not universal, it just may not be universally perceived. Truth however, must fundamentally transcend perception in some way, otherwise it would merely be a
perception. The truth is thus external to perception, though whether it is seen or not is based on the individual, it is a constant, it does not warp and shift with the personality and circumstances of the individual.
Fiction is a work that is explicitly stated by the author to be work written about events objects or concepts that were not experienced or perceived by a living person, only by fictional characters. And thus, if perception is reality, and the events, objects or concepts written about were never perceived by any real person, they cannot be reality. However, can they be truth, or contain truth?
Fiction is inherently an exercise in empathy, it requires people to attempt to vicariously experience events, objects or concepts from another’s perspective. This differs from normal communication as follows: The characters live in a world separate from our own, and are unaware of our existence. There is no incentive for the characters to manipulate or influence the reader, unlike in real communication. And so an event in a fictional a narrative is thus perceived differently from a real event described by a real person.
There is also no way for us to perceive firsthand the events described and compare and contrast them with our own perspectives.
Fiction thus requires a person to take a great leap of faith and wear someone else’s skin without any barrier of skepticism. What is written on the page must be accepted at face value, because of the fact that fiction does not profess to be any living person’s reality. Thus, counterintuitively, the fact that fiction is definitively not reality instills in us a deep and profound trust in it that we would almost never have for any living person’s version of reality.
Fiction, can thus be seen as ceding to another’s reality, even for the span of a book.
And by ceding to another’s reality, we may identify commonalities with our own, of which truth may be a part, as truth is a universal, more readily than through any other medium.
Hence, fiction, by never guising itself as a part of anyone’s reality, is a path to that which transcends reality: Truth
To fully comprehend this vivid epigram, it is necessary to fully comprehend its most weighty components: Fiction, truth and reality.
The truth: it always triumphs, always comes out in the end, and is still getting its boots on while lies are already halfway around the world.
We have plenty of ideas of what the truth does? But what is the truth, the formless entity performing all these actions?
According to some, truth is beauty and beauty, truth. But if truth is beauty, and reality is ugly, reality must be disparate from truth. And so what is reality?
We’ve been told perception is reality. Just as colourblind individuals may never know that they are colourblind, and that they experience the world very differently from most of the population, we may never know that we experience a reality any different from another persons version of reality. To know the difference between our realities we need a reference point.
But if there were a person who sees what most people see as green as red and what most people as green as red, would we ever know? If given a rose, they would also call it red as they were taught to do, but what they experience as red, we would normally see as green. Comparing our respective realities does not necessitate only a reference point, it necessitates a reference point that is perceived exactly the same by everyone. And is there such a reference point?
The five senses are clearly fallible, as exemplified in the cases of colourblind individuals, and in diseases like COVID that alter our sense of smell. It must be something that cannot be perceived by the senses? Can truth be this universal reference point? But the truth is often stated to have been hidden, to have been obscured. Some people “just can’t see the truth”. And this clearly rules out truth as a universal reference point. And does this universal reference point exist at all?
If not truth, what else can be? It has clearly not been discovered yet.
People will never quite perceive the world the same way, and if one experiences the world there is no way of choosing which version is more correct as there is no standard reference point, unlike in colourblindness alone, where doctors have now presented standard sets of colours that people should normally be able to differentiate. (and this too is fallible, as in the hypothetical scenario of the person who perceives colours on the spectrum not as similar to each other, but as the opposite of what a “normal person’s” perception is.
But if reality is so versatile, is there no such thing as a lie? No, when one relates an action that one did not perceive, one may be said to have been lying.
If a person sees a UFO, and tells someone about it, and then the object they called a UFO crash lands on earth and it turns out to be a stray kite, can they be said to have been lying? No, if the person experienced the object as UFO, they cannot be said to have been lying.
However, if they perceived the kite only as a kite, and still said it was a UFO, they were lying. And if they perceived the ki
te as a UFO, but said it was a kite, they were still lying.
Having somewhat defined reality and lies, we circle back to our definition of truth.
We have established that truth is not a universal reference point, which is not to say truth is not universal, it just may not be universally perceived. Truth however, must fundamentally transcend perception in some way, otherwise it would merely be a
perception. The truth is thus external to perception, though whether it is seen or not is based on the individual, it is a constant, it does not warp and shift with the personality and circumstances of the individual.
Fiction is a work that is explicitly stated by the author to be work written about events objects or concepts that were not experienced or perceived by a living person, only by fictional characters. And thus, if perception is reality, and the events, objects or concepts written about were never perceived by any real person, they cannot be reality. However, can they be truth, or contain truth?
Fiction is inherently an exercise in empathy, it requires people to attempt to vicariously experience events, objects or concepts from another’s perspective. This differs from normal communication as follows: The characters live in a world separate from our own, and are unaware of our existence. There is no incentive for the characters to manipulate or influence the reader, unlike in real communication. And so an event in a fictional a narrative is thus perceived differently from a real event described by a real person.
There is also no way for us to perceive firsthand the events described and compare and contrast them with our own perspectives.
Fiction thus requires a person to take a great leap of faith and wear someone else’s skin without any barrier of skepticism. What is written on the page must be accepted at face value, because of the fact that fiction does not profess to be any living person’s reality. Thus, counterintuitively, the fact that fiction is definitively not reality instills in us a deep and profound trust in it that we would almost never have for any living person’s version of reality.
Fiction, can thus be seen as ceding to another’s reality, even for the span of a book.
And by ceding to another’s reality, we may identify commonalities with our own, of which truth may be a part, as truth is a universal, more readily than through any other medium.
Hence, fiction, by never guising itself as a part of anyone’s reality, is a path to that which transcends reality: Truth
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