The Truth-Telling Power of Fiction

When we discuss literature, it is both inevitable and natural that at some point the conversation turns to its sister discipline, philosophy. Both forms of expression interpret our experience through language. Moreover, the relationship between them is reinforced by the obvious but seldom-stated fact that philosophers are not just thinkers; they are also writers. And our finest storytellers, the ones who transform and deepen our understanding of the world, are not just writers; they, too, are engaged in the adventure of ideas, to borrow a phrase from Alfred North Whitehead.

Unfortunately, many of us hold prejudices and misconceptions about the nature of philosophy and literary art—for example, that writers tell only stories (mere fiction), but philosophers tell the truth. But the creative process that characterizes literary art may, if viewed from the inside, clarify some aspects of this relationship and help to demystify both fiction and philosophy.

For me, a novel or story is a very special thought experiment because I’ve always seen the literary as a potential site for philosophical agency. And I’ve never seen ideas as existing in some abstract realm floating high above human experience. Rather, I see ideas as originating in the historical muck and mud of our daily experience, cloaked in the particulars of this world—only later do we abstract them for the purpose of study and reflection.

So what does this philosophical novelist do? I simply try to return those ideas to the palpable world of experience from which they sprang. That approach is not different from what the philosopher Hilary Putnam suggested when he wrote that the novel helps us “in the imaginative re-creation of moral perplexities, in the widest sense.” Put another way, fiction is capable of clarifying aspects of ethical problems by dramatizing those moral dilemmas. If philosophy is direct discourse, then fiction, as Michael Boylan has long argued, must be seen, not as play or frivolity but as a form of indirect discourse that makes claims or judgments about this world and how it works.

It helps to remember that Ernest Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. Literary art is founded precisely on that painstaking process of revision, trial and error—or re-envisioning. It is, first and foremost, as William James depicted philosophy, a “peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly,” and it also aims for the most sophisticated and memorable performance of language.

Crafting language takes time, because writing well is the same thing as thinking well. Techne is vision, a form of truth, and style is sense. In What Is Literature?, Sartre wrote, “Each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed.” This is so for two reasons. First, because language antedates every writer. As Sartre explained in Saint Genet, “Language is nature when I discover it within myself and outside myself with its resistances and laws which escape me: words have affinities and customs that I must observe, must learn.” And the second reason is because literary art demands specificity and granularity of detail, what the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus called haecceitas (the “thisness” of things) and what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins referred to as “inscape.” To achieve this, every aspect of a well-wrought story must be scrutinized hundreds, if not thousands, of times, for, as the French dramatist and short-story writer Prosper Mérimée said, “In fiction there must be a theoretical basis to the most minute details. Even a single glove must have its theory.”

So a writer relentlessly asks questions about every decision or judgment he makes and how it will be received or experienced. Is a statement accurate? Have you checked and double-checked and triple-checked every fact? Is a sentence, image, or word in poor taste? None of this means that you censor yourself. There is no way that a writer can satisfy everyone. But what it does mean is that you take into account the possibility that you might unintentionally offend or hurt a reader by one of your decisions—and, if one is a moral writer, you choose not to do that.

Fiction writers and philosophers like James find this process so arduous that James lamented to friends about how, after working all day and rewriting half a dozen times, his efforts yielded only a page and a half of manuscript. “Everything comes out wrong with me at first,” he said, “but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.”

Such poking and scraping at the “resistances” that Sartre understood to be so recalcitrant is 90 percent of good writing, because precision in the shaping of language requires sustaining for days, months, and even years that most difficult and fatiguing of conscious activities: our full attention. T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets expressed the problem this way:

When we examine words, we find, if we are phenomenologists, the Other. Others who have used those words, left their sweat on them, invested them with multiple meanings, thereby creating a horizon of sense that we shall never—ever—reach.

But emotion and passion properly understood do serve reason. Concepts have an affective quality, an emotional or feeling tone, just as feelings, in the Heideggerian sense, disclose an analytic dimension, that is, they bring forth profiles of the world that are meaningful. So these two experiences—ideas and feelings—cannot be easily separated. Taking this a step further, the philosopher J. Loewenberg, writing about Hegel’s dialectic, reminded us that, “Ideas and beliefs, too, may be pretentious, pedantic, fantastic, bizarre, grotesque, inept, perverse, reckless, blind, and blatant.”

But words are just the first linguistic dimension that a writer must despoil. He must also consider another larger unit of reason and expression: the paragraph. Each sentence is a unit of energy, something we realize when we hear a writer read his or her work out loud, or if an actor performs it. When writing well, one works very hard at creating a musical variety in sentence length, in sentence forms, and throughout a paragraph; at chopping away waste and remplissage; at harmoniously blending the final sentence of one paragraph with the first sentence of the next through rhythm and rhetorical techniques; at revising until a sentence surprises.

In addition, each paragraph should have at least one good idea or something special in it that justifies its presence on the page. These are not things most readers will see, nor should they, for craft should be experienced the way we do our eyeglasses or contact lenses, as something that enables us to see while not calling attention to itself. Again, this process requires time, since revision is an almost endless exercise in cutting away (like sculpting a sentence or paragraph from stone) and also a constant layering of language (like working with a sentence as you would clay).

I can’t emphasize enough the importance of this layering process. In it we see what Sartre meant when he wrote in Saint Genet that “words sometimes display surprising independence, marrying in defiance of all laws and thus producing puns and oracles within language.” It is precisely those unexpected oracles, those surprises and discoveries, that a writer hopes to stumble upon. You know a piece is finished when you can’t pull out a single sentence or change a word or syllable, for if you do extract that heavily polished sentence, you create a chasm between the sentence before and after it. You destroy not only the sense but the sound, not just the meaning but the music, that links those sentences.

Yet even after all those linguistic considerations, the work of a fiction writer who loves truth, and is pledged to honor James’s “peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly,” has only just begun.

To tell a story, one must have a plot. And creating an elegant, original, efficient plot that keeps a writer, then a reader, in a state of suspense, constantly probing and asking the right questions, is always a challenge for the novelist or short-fiction writer who refuses to rely on formulas, political ideology, kitsch, or pre-established meanings.

Plot, the scaffolding in every story, should be of great interest to every philosopher (and reader) because, according to John Gardner, who knew a few things about writing, “Plot is the writer’s equivalent to the philosopher’s argument.” Eighty-six years ago, in Aspects of the Novel, a now classic series of lectures, E.M. Forster drew a distinction between story and plot that is still useful today:

“Let us define a plot,” Forster wrote. “We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.”

The question we ask of plot—"why?"—is akin to the question we ask in philosophy. Both literature and philosophy begin with wonder. In an interrogative mode. Even more important, the question why reminds us that we think and organize our experience in narratives, as Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneer in cognitive neuroscience, demonstrates in his book The Ethical Brain.

Narrative, then, is one way we are hard-wired for interpreting temporal events, and it is what Plato meant in the Timaeus when he spoke of even our scientific explanations being a “likely story.” In other words, our explanations for this mysterious universe we inhabit are just that—"likely,” not absolute. And they are always provisional, subject to revision based on new evidence.

But even after exerting that control over a complex story, a mountain of work remains, for the writer must make thousands of interpretative decisions to achieve coherence, consistency, and completeness, which are the same criteria we use for evaluating works of philosophy.

In his Notebooks (1935-42), Albert Camus notoriously said, “Feelings and images multiply a philosophy by ten. People think only in images. ... If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.” A few philosophers have wisely heeded this advice—William Gass, George Santayana, Rebecca Goldstein, Michael Boylan, and Iris Murdoch, to name just a few. They understood the risks and rewards of embracing the natural kinship of storytelling and philosophy.

Yet in the interest of honesty, I must say that what we lose when philosophy takes the form of storytelling is exact precision in the presentation of a claim; but what we gain through the techniques and tools of a literature that is richly imagined and deeply felt is the ability to uniquely engage an audience’s intellect, emotions, and imagination in their fullness—the “everything” that Sartre felt literature (and perhaps also philosophy) should be.

Charles Johnson, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington, has a Ph.D. in philosophy. His most recent book is for children—Bending Time: The Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder (Booktrope, 2013), which he wrote with his daughter Elisheba Johnson and also illustrated.