Preamble

 “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, that is all /Ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn.

To begin, some prefatory remarks about the origins of this blog. I have for a long time now been interested in narrative theory, literary theory, what has contentiously been termed ‘aesthetics’, a term I construe as the scientific study of what makes good art good. I first became interested in literary theory studying English Literature at University a long time ago, but I did not seriously tackle this subject until 2011 when I kept a blog, with the rather silly title ‘persiflage’, in which I explored various issues of aesthetics and philosophy, writing critical reviews of various books and films, and experimenting with and developing various abstract ideas - without, however, ever being able to reach a definitive conclusion. ‘Persiflage’ has, by the by, long since evaporated. In 2012, I completed a Masters of Creative Writing through AUT, writing a film script and, as an accompaniment to the screenplay, an essay known as an ‘exegesis’ in which I set out, in passing, a theory about the nature of narrative, a theory which was a small part of the exegesis but a big part of my thinking, the culmination and crystallization of many years of serious contemplation.

The hypothesis I came up with is, I believe, not only an important contribution to literary theory and a corrective to other manifestly bogus theories of narrative, but also immensely useful as a basis for literary criticism, in the sense that when used as an approach to literary texts it is highly productive in terms of generating interpretation.  The hypothesis is also I admit, particularly in its metaphysical implications, quite radical - something which may be an obstruction to its general acceptance. After I submitted film and exegesis to my supervisors, my marker got back to me to say that he found the section of the exegesis in which I proposed the theory ‘not particularly interesting’ and had skimmed over it; despite this, I have remained convinced that I was on to something important. I considered going back to University to do a PhD on narrative, as an excuse to write a scholarly treatise promulgating my ideas in more extended form, but my sister, level headed as she is, pointed out that rather than pay for yet four more years study, I could just write a book in my own time. Or (and this is what I have decided to do) set it all out online.

The literary theory I came up with is quite simple and can be boiled down to a set of four propositions.

1. Literary works, whether they be films, novels, short stories or poems, are fundamentally rhetorical, in the sense that they are trying to persuade or confirm their audience of a particular view of the world.

2. The characters, locales, actions and other components of a literary text have double functions: as particular concrete instances and as representatives of more abstract ideas.

3. Unlike other examples of rhetoric, such as legal arguments, a literary text presents, simultaneously or alternately, two opposing ideological positions at the same time. This is the fundamental difference between literary texts and other texts. The two opposing themes are named by Robert McKee in Story as the Idea and the Counter-Idea but I shall describe them, with a nod to Hegel, as the Thesis and the Antithesis.

4. Unlike the Hegelian Dialectic, where Thesis and Antithesis are followed by a Synthesis, a literary text usually concludes with the victory of the Thesis over the Antithesis.

The best way to support this theory is with reference to specific texts. For example, the film Star Wars is dedicated to the premise that “Good always triumphs over Evil”. The antithesis to this thesis is the proposition that Evil, at least sometimes, triumphs over Good. The rhetorical efficacy of Star Wars rests on the fact that it presents Darth Vader and the Empire as vastly more powerful than Luke and the Rebels – and yet Good still prevails. The moral of the film Sleepless in Seattle is “Everyone is destined to be with his or her true love” and this moral is proved by pitting the protagonists against seemingly insurmountable odds, by putting them on opposite side of the United States. In both these cases, the proposition at the heart of the film is not true but is, rather, something that people want to believe even though, in their heart of hearts, they know it to be false. This is the radical aspect of my theory. For a long time, particularly since the Romantic era, literature has been viewed as a kind of truth-telling - the quote at the beginning of this posting underscores this (although one can wonder if Keats may have intended the line to have a touch of irony). I believe, by contrast to the Romantics, that in the realm of human experience in which literature operates, there is no such thing as truth – only the fictions that we require to survive and maintain some semblance of happiness.

As I have said, the best way to support the theory I have put forward is with reference to specific texts. As this blog evolves, I shall view a number of works through this prism: “Ghostbusters”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Donnie Darko” and “A Beautiful Mind” to name a few. I like films and they are the first type of text that readily springs to mind. I may also interpret “Moby Dick” by Melville, “The Dead” by Joyce and “The Waste Land” by Eliot; I have a theory of music that I may also elucidate although music and literary texts are, in fact, very dissimilar types of beast. Because this is a blog rather than a book, I reserve the right to stray onto other topics that interest me, such as theories of mind and interpretations of quantum physics.

One cannot propose a good theory of fiction without also having a good theory of reality. In the realm of the soul, there is no truth, only what people believe. Better to look a little deeper than settle for a comforting falsehood.