Emptywheel's response to Chris's diary,"The Rise of the Non-Fictional Aesthetic." was a fascinating read. I agreed with amost everything in "The Count of Monte Cristo Was Not Fiction", except for the title. In it, among many other things, she wrote:
And I mean it when I say, "the Count of Monte Cristo was not fiction"--even though it's one of the most compelling stories of all time and even though it gets stored in the juvenile fiction shelf of most libraries. "It's a book you read when you're fourteen," Slavoj Zizek scoffed to me once.
But the narrative was published in a newspaper. Not the kind of literary journal you think of when you thin of Dickens' serialized novels, but an honest to god daily newspaper, with each installment beginning on the bottom of the front page, just under the reports from Parliament.
Similarly, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City --a Balzac-styledz portrait of intersecting gay and straight characters and cultures in 1970s San Francisco--was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, and while not a direct parallel to The Count of Monte Cristo, there are enough similarities that it immediately sprung to mind when I read this passage. Those similarities are perhaps best summarized by saying that both books, published in a newspaper, evoked and provoked a broadly-shared public mythos, a term explained below.
Emptywheel argues that the fact/fiction divide is culturally contingent, but I do not believe in so lightly dismissing the distinction simply because it is culturally contingent. More importantly, however, I believe that the distinction taps into--though it is not identical with--a much more fundamental distinction that I think can be very clarifying for us: the distinction between mythos and logos, which plays a crucial role in Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God, an invaluable book on the rise of fundamentalism since 1492 in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. |
| Down For the Count
Regarding The Count of Monte Cristo, Emptywheel goes on to show that its publication had profound implications:
This story, about a guy imprisoned at least partly because he once met with Napoleon, who then goes on to become a Napoleonic figure plunked down in "modern" Paris, appeared at a time when censorship laws dictated that you couldn't use the words "Bourbon" or "Republique" if you were writing things critical of the government. Dumas wrote the story after having met Louis-Napoleon, who was sitting in prison for one of his early unsuccessful coup attempts. But he wasn't the only one writing these Napoleonic narratives. Every single major daily in Paris--every one--was printing some kind of narrative about Napoleon in this period, whether they were "fictions," memoirs from Napoleon's brothers, race track reports using a horse named "Napoleon" as an allegory for speed and skill. These stories were all different conceptualizations of a certain kind of power that exerted tremendous influence in Paris at the time. All these narratives about Napoleon usually get described as the cultural phenomenon that was the "cult of Napoleon" but, as events would later prove, that cultural phenomenon was in no way fictional.
The same could be said of Maupin's work. It was, in fact, a mirror in which the city saw itself, a genuine sensation that captivated the city's attention. And when PBS broadcast it as a miniseries years later, it blew the lid off their usual ratings, while drawing a savage conservative counter-attack that derailed plans for PBS to air further sequels. (This was 1994, years before Ellen came out, or Will And Grace came on.) In fact, it seems quite commonplace for fact and fiction to interact like that, though rarely with such intensity that it becomes so obvious, even striking.
Rather than argue over the fact/fiction distinction, however, I want to shift focus to what seems a more fruitful and profound dichotomy, the aforementioned mythos and logos. For what I think is most essential that Emptywheel is pointing to is the power of mythos, and there is no denying its power to make history. The trick is making good history.
Mythos And Logos
In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong discusses two distinct modes of understanding that have become confused in modern times--particularly (but by no means exclusively) by fundamentalists. (The introduction to her book is available online here, and presents the basic framework for understanding her argument, from which I'm going to quote.)
Armstrong writes:
We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence.
Regarding mythos, she explains:
Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.
And regarding logos:
Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.
And regarding their interaction:
In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. Yet the two were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse. They had separate jobs to do. Myth was not reasonable; its narratives were not supposed to be demonstrated empirically. It provided the context of meaning that made our practical activities worthwhile. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world.
While they didn't always manage to keep the realms separate, they didn't suffer from systematic and persistent confusion. That came about with the remarkable burst of progress made in Europe from the time of the Renaissance onward. The more it seemed that logos could do, the more mythos was diminished, and the more people tried to replace mythos with logos--or, to reinterpret mythos as logos, which is what fundamentalists do with "creation science", for example. Far from being traditionalists, Armstrong argues, fundamentalists are distinctively modern--they have utterly lost the pre-modern understanding of the two realms, as well as the taken-for-granted attitude that mythos is by far the more important of the two. Instead--although quite unconsciously--they believe implicitly in the absolute superiority of logos, and therefore feel driven to prove that their mythos is logos, because if it is not, then it is nothing.
For a pre-modern person of faith, it is hard to imagine a more blasphemous attitude. But you need an historical (logos-based) consciousness to even realize this.
The mythos/logos divide is not the same as the fiction/non-fiction divide. Fiction can be soaked in logos. Not just detective fiction, hard science fiction or social realism, but virtually any sort of fiction can be quite concerned with the logic of how things happen, or the specificity of physical detail. Our fictions as much as anything else have been impacted by the rise of logos, and the shrinking of mythos. And yet, there is a connection, still, that goes to the issue of purpose. Generally speaking, the purpose of fiction is to explore, create, define or lament the lack of meaning. In contrast, the purpose of non-fiction is to further the understanding of how things work--although, as a working 19th-Century style journalist, my own reporting is clearly intended to engage in meaning-making. I wouldn't have it any other way.
For me, the issue is consciousness. At this point in history it's simply impossible to keep mythos and logos in separate containers. Oh, you can do it sometimes quite well, there's no denying that. And you should. But there are simply far too many ways in which the two realms interpenetrate one another to ever put a stop to it, which is what Emptywheel's example of The Count of Monte Cristo says to me.
Fundamentalists are systematically dangerous precisely because they they're unconscious about how they have jumbled the two modes together. It's not the jumbling per se that's dangerous--although it can be. But if one is conscious, if one can critically engage, then one can confront and deal with the danger. These are key: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate, which implies an ability to hold others, and oneself accountable. These are the essential elements of culture that allow us to collectively and collegially and socially sort out the various narratives by which we make and remake our world. |
