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.
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