Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

9 Fact and Fiction

9 Fact and Fiction ฀ Since the opposition between fact and fiction has come to seem such a given,it is surprising to find that the words fact and fiction both derive from Latin words that mean nearly the same thing—to฀do or to฀make (as does poetry from the Greek poeien). In English,fiction has always had the primary sense of something fashioned or feigned—though fashion, like fact, derives from the Latin facere, whereas feign, like fiction, comes from fingere. It took until the nineteenth century for the sense of fact as something actively done or made to be completely driven out by the sense of something that simply and passively is. Fiction too seems mostly to have fossilized into a genre, a stable kind of thing, a noun. In other words, the distinction between fact and fiction has itself come to seem like a fact. In fact, though, as even this thumbnail etymology shows, the distinction between fact and fiction is really a fiction, something people have manufactured. In telling the story of how this state of affairs came to be, it would be misleading to repeat the old cliché that the ancients lived in an enchanted world,lacking our distinction between reality and fantasy—a childlike world we have since lost. For one thing, ancient languages are very capable of making similar distinctions using their own words. One might say instead that the distinction has branched out, wedging categories apart the way a tree root splits a sidewalk, or that some long-term continental drift in language has put oceans between once contiguous regions of discourse: “There rolls the deep where grew the tree,” as Tennyson put it. As fact seems to have petrified into something that simply is, it has become more difficult, at least 06-10.31-57_Livi.indd฀฀฀43 9/6/05฀฀฀10:39:03฀AM 44 . between science and literature in ordinary language, to understand the world as an event, as something continuously made. So how did the sibling rivalry between fact and fiction arise and devolve into such a crude and entrenched impasse (IS! Is NOT! IS! Is NOT!)? Well, it’s a long story,culminating in the invention and polarization of science and literature—two more words that acquired their modern currency only in the nineteenth century.For example,scientific authority came to aspire to anonymous objectivity (for example, in the ideal of the repeatable experiment), whereas literature was fixed to subjectivity through the ideological figure of the author—a fixation Foucault identified as a way of containing “the great danger with which fiction threatens our world” (“Author” 118). Although this arrangement has been naturalized for so long as to seem common sense, it is in fact a reversal of much older traditions that attach scientific฀authority฀ to฀great฀authors and literary฀value฀to฀anonymity฀and฀repeatability (especially when oral transmission and performance predominate over written texts). But the story is a soap opera, and these are only the first couple of episodes; stay tuned for more big plot twists. As it is, so much of our world has seemed to be built on the distinction between fact and fiction that even imagining its being breached tends to take the form of an apocalyptic scenario.Jorge Luis Borges’s 1940 short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” tells of a secret society that, for many generations , has been compiling an encyclopedia of Tlön, a fictional planet where even the physical world is subject to lively traffic between fact and fiction. When parts of the encyclopedia are discovered, the fascination with Tlön spreads like wildfire: “Almost immediately, reality began to yield. The truth is that it longed to yield” (17). Disciplines such as history begin to metamorphose into their Tlönian counterparts, and strange artifacts described in Tlön’s archaeology begin to be found.The narrator—who has withdrawn into his own pre-Tlönian scholarly pursuits—gloomily predicts that within a hundred years or so, “the world will be Tlön” (18). William Burroughs’s short narrative “Apocalypse” (1990) starts with the premise that the god Pan was declared dead at the birth of Christ. Until then, Pan had induced “the sudden awareness that everything is alive and significant,” and though he “lives on in the realm of imagination” he has been “neutralized, framed in music, entombed in books.” Thus, when the collective realization that “nothing is true” begins...