Truth in fiction

Andrew Mason · 07 Jan 2011, 20:40 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2011 20:40:18 +0000
Subject: (urth) Truth in fiction
Message-ID: <AANLkTimUd8ETus_=4Se-EOay0+uhtY5Bq7iBmn=r67ZO at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:

> As Jane says, this is fiction! It is not possible for there to be a "right" answer. There is no objective reality
> to measure. Ideas are not found in dots on a page or screen. Ideas are not floating around in the aether either. They
> ONLY to be found as neural patterns in each human being's brain. And as long as one intelligent, sane person has a certain
> idea, that idea has validity.

There is no such thing as the truth about what actually happened on
Sainte-Anne, etc., but there can be a truth which is relevant to the
discussion; the truth about what the author meant and intended us to
see. That is a fact about what happened in some human being's brain.
There isn't always such a truth; perhaps he intended it to be
ambiguous; perhaps he just didn't think about some question. But
sometimes there is. You need not take an interest in it if you don't
want to, but I think many of us here do care about it.

I think it's clear that _sometimes_ Wolfe has a particular answer in
mind, and not all these cases are obvious. John V. Marsch is a good
example; from Wolfe's own testimony he not only intended that Marsch
had been replaced by an abo, but expected us to work it out.  Yet in
fact the matter was disputed. In such cases it surely makes sense to
try to work out what the answer is, and compare theories and consider
their advantages and disadvantages.

Not every case need be the same. In fact, Wolfe's behaviour in
interviews suggests they aren't; sometimes he gives perfectly
straighforward answers to questions that were doubtful, even adding
comments along the lines of 'How did you not get that?' other times he
refuses to answer or remains cryptic, suggesting that these are things
to which there isn't meant to be a clear answer.

Now, there are presumably other cases where Wolfe has a definite
answer in mind, but hasn't told us it, because it never came up. In
such cases we may never know for certain what the answer is. But still
there is an answer, which the author intends us to discover, so
debating it still makes sense. This doesn't seem very puzzling to me;
in all sorts of fields answers can't be known for certain, but some
answers are more plausible than others, and there are reasons for
accepting or rejecting them.

The real problem, of course, is that we can never know which are the
cases where there is a definite answer and which are the cases where
there isn't.So we may be going on wild-goose-chases some of the time.
I don't see an solution to this.

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