The Therapeutic Relationship

A relationship of knowledge requires three components: someone who knows, something that is known and a context in which the knowing takes place. Knowledge requires a Subject and an Object, a knower and a known. A lepidopterist studies butterflies; he or she is the Subject and butterfly anatomy is the Object. A linguist studies grammar and syntax; the linguist is the Subject and language is the Object. A doctor is an expert on the human body and the illnesses that affect it. I see my GP and I describe certain symptoms, such as a metallic taste in my mouth or blood in my stool; the GP diagnoses a disease based on my symptoms and recommends some form of treatment. The GP is the Subject and, for both him and for me, my body is the Object. The technical term Heidigger uses, appropriate here, is 'conspicuous': the symptoms of a physical illness are conspicuous in that they have the effect of forcing me to realize that I am not my body, I am something else. I am a Subject and my body is the Object and my body is letting me down.

All science is based around relationships of knowing, about Subjects who know and Objects that are known. But scientific discourse tends to conceal or erase the knowing Subject. If I read a textbook on meiosis, for instance, I don't expect the author to describe to me how he or she came to learn what he or she has to tell me. I expect the author to keep out of it. Scientific discourse is quite literally 'objective'. It is concerned quite literally only with Objects. Scientists rarely concede that science has a subjective component as well, because to use the term 'subjective' implies that perhaps the scientific theory being described might not be correct. In common usage, the word 'objective' is taken to mean 'verifiable, true' and the word 'subjective' carries a connotation of relativism, of potential falseness. But arguably all knowledge is really subjective because no knowledge can exist outside the mind of a knower.

Psychiatry and psychology pretend to be sciences and consequently the Subject-Object relationship prevails here too. The shrink is the Subject and the patient is the Object. Suppose I somehow end up in a psychiatrist's office and tell him that I believe George W. Bush is talking with me telepathically or that the CIA has bugged my flat. The psychiatrist, who of course is a doctor, subjects me to his gaze, his scrutiny, and interprets these reports as hallucinations and delusions, as symptoms of an illness, definitely psychosis and potentially schizophrenia. The patient is psychotic. Psychosis is a disease and the appropriate treatment for a disease is medication.  If the patient doesn't want to take medication, the psychiatrist will find ways to force him to take it. The therapeutic relationship is a Subject-Object relationship again, one in which the shrink is the knowing Subject and the patient is the Object. The shrink knows the patient better than the patient knows himself. The patient may not even have sufficient insight to know that he is sick. The situation is different from a consultation with an ordinary doctor: an ordinary doctor tells me that the reason for my illness is a problem with my body. The psychiatrist by contrast tells me, in effect, not that I have a disease of the body but that I have a disease of the mind. He tells me that I myself am the illness. In this way, a psychiatric diagnosis is inescapably a form of moral judgement, and this is why psychiatry straddles the line between Medicine, and Law and Order. The Subject-Object relationship is also a relationship in which the Subject has power over the Object and some, such as Michel Foucault, have argued that there is always an element of sadism in this relationship.

To know something about other minds, to understand the soul rather than the body, one requires a discourse that makes sense of human personalities. In psychology and psychiatry, the method used to carry this out these days is to divide people into different kinds. The DSM 5, that bible of modern psychiatry, is a catalogue of labels, a sort of taxonomy of human kinds. A patient can be 'diagnosed' with any of many psychological conditions, such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and so on. Ordinary medicine deals with a taxonomy of diseases - as the result of reported symptoms, an appropriate diagnosis is made and an appropriate treatment advised. Psychiatry deals with 'abnormal' human kinds as if the people who are assigned to one group are all common sufferers of a single disease. The aim of medicine is to efficiently facilitate and expedite the most effective treatment –  although to be frank, psychiatrists and psychologists have almost no idea how to treat unhappy people effectively… But they love putting people in boxes. Patients become the objects of the discourse, while the psychiatrist himself remains apart, invisible, omniscient, God-like. A quote from  James Joyce conveys this idea well: "The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails".

The therapeutic relationship is composed of a Subject (the shrink), an Object (the patient) and the context (the consultation and the room in which it takes place, the patient's records, family testimony, psychiatric discourse itself, and so on). It is within this situation that the patient's condition comes to be disclosed, comes to be known. And for Knowledge to occur, at least three things are required: the Object of knowledge must be stable over time, the Object of knowledge must be independent of the Subject's observations of it, and the Object must be independent of the theories created to describe it. (There is some overlap between these last two criteria because all theories, all systems of knowledge, belong to the Subject rather than the Object.) 

The problem, as I see it, is that within the therapeutic relationship, all three criteria are questionable.

Consider, first, the idea that personality types and categories are stable over time. This notion is indispensable to modern psychiatric practice. If someone is diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, for instance, it is assumed that it developed either as the result of bad genes or as the result of the family situation during childhood and is set for life. How could psychiatrists perform their job if someone shows indications of autism at one time and then never again? I saw an idiot psychiatrist for a period who told me that delusions, by definition, are fixed. Why believe this obviously spurious notion unless it is convenient? Conditions are always assumed to be permanent. If someone is diagnosed schizophrenic, it is understood not only by the psychiatric community but by the general population that the diagnosis is life-long. I myself am under a Compulsory Treatment Order, having been officially diagnosed schizophrenic in 2013. Last year I requested and received an independent review of my status as someone 'subject' to community treatment. It went against me, of course. Afterwards, during a telephone conversation with my lawyer, I was told, "Andrew, I find it difficult to represent you because you admit you were ill in the past." I felt like saying, "Have you ever represented someone put under the Mental Health Act who was never ill at all?" But this is the way of the world. Despite considerable evidence that people often recover from schizophrenia (famous examples including John Nash, Janet Frame and Mark Vonnegut), the term 'recovered schizophrenic' is considered an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. No one recovers from schizophrenia. By definition. Either a person must accept the label 'schizophrenic' for life or pretend they were never schizophrenic at all. This puts patients in an invidious position, an impossible position. Should I have followed my lawyer's suggestion – and lied? Surely the maddest response to psychosis is to pretend one was never psychotic at all.

Schizophrenia is an episodic condition and occasionally a particular episode can be the last. I'll give a second example that demonstrates the difficulty of assuming that personality traits and attitudes are stable over time. My relationship with my father is ambivalent and has fluctuated considerably over the course of my life. My negative feelings were not entirely baseless: my father's divorce from my mother when I was seven proved traumatic for me at the time. Around Easter 2013 I told a psychiatrist that I hated my father - I think that I needed to express deeply buried feelings of resentment towards him to someone in power, to get it out of my system. In late 2014, a psychologist I was seeing told me disdainfully, "You hate your father". He made this statement without any justification – I had never suggested this to him at any time. My attitude towards my father had changed by then. I must presume that my assertion about my dad in 2013 had gone into my record (as it should have) but had been misrepresented as an enduring hostility rather than as a transient outburst.

This brings me to my second criticism. As I have said, the therapeutic relationship consists of a Subject, the shrink, and an Object, the patient. A psychiatrist tends usually just to listen and very occasionally to ask questions; he or she doesn't look for signs that the patient has changed; he or she almost never discusses his or her own life or opinions. The shrink transcends the situation in a way that the patient does not: the shrink is the invisible objective observer. At least this is the aim, the ideal. In practice, the patient is to some extent himself or herself the Subject and the shrink is the Object. The patient is continually observing his psychiatrist's body language and looking for cues from the questions he is asked to make sense of the situation in which he has found himself. The question the patient is continually asking himself is, "What does this person think of me?" And the shrink is not a transcendental impartial observer. He or she is a person with his or her own personality traits, experiences and prejudices, his or her own potentially bogus theories, his or her own baggage, all of which is brought into the relationship.

No amount of training or research into best practice will prevent a psychiatrist who is an asshole from behaving like an asshole or being recognized as an asshole by his patients.

In an earlier post, Rationality vs. Mysticism, I claimed that schizophrenia is not independent of one's observations of it. The truth is that this thing we call 'schizophrenia' (or Aspergers Syndrome or Borderline Personality Disorder) is a condition invented in the doctor's office. I would go further and say that identity itself is constructed in the space between the Self and the Other… at least if a person does not have defense mechanisms in place to protect him from others' opinions. The doctor-patient relationship is reciprocal. And it can be arbitrary. An example… It seems that many people in the world hear voices who have not and should not be diagnosed schizophrenic. Likewise there are very many people in the world who are arguably delusional, Birthers for instance, or those who believe, like Donald Trump, that the theory of global warming is a conspiracy invented by the Chinese. If hallucinations and delusions are so common, a diagnosis of schizophrenia becomes capricious. How can one discriminate between a defensible belief and a delusion? Why assume that the devout Christian who has Jesus as his personal friend is crazy? It all depends on what the patient chooses to report and how the psychiatrist is feeling on the day. Psychiatry is concerned with 'abnormal' personality types - but who gets to decide what constitutes normality?

Finally, I want to tackle the idea that mental illness is independent of the theories we use to describe it. The philosopher Ian Hacking has described a process called 'looping'. (His essay "Making Up People" can be found in the London Review of Books.) His basic idea is that people are not passive objects; they interact with others and with the world, and if a person accepts a label, he or she seeks to find out what that label means. Hacking's focus is on Multiple Personality Disorder (a now widely discredited classification) but what he says about looping can be applied to those diagnosed schizophrenic as well. A person is labelled schizophrenic; he or she discovers that schizophrenics are frequently violent; his or her friends, family and acquaintances, who are also part of the world, start expecting the schizophrenic to become violent; consequently, unless the schizophrenic rejects this myth (and it is a myth) he or she may become violent as a result. He or she unconsciously seeks to conform to others' expectations. Or, to take a less extreme example, it is currently accepted medical wisdom that schizophrenics have difficulty obtaining boyfriends and girlfriends. The young schizophrenic learns this, internalizes it, and this expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the Object of a discourse is also a human being, he or she is not independent of the theories we invent to describe him.

The diagnosis creates the condition.

The essence of the problem is that it is doctors who run the Mental Health Services of all countries. Doctors tend to assume two things: that mental illness is literally an illness, and that the patient is unaffected by the therapeutic relationship itself. Patients are Objects of knowledge only and the doctor has no affect on the him or her. No attempt is made to ascertain the environmental and situational causes of a psychotic episode. No credence is given to the idea that psychiatrists inevitably, no matter how hard they try not to, influence their patients, for better or for worse. The only answer, people assume, is drugs. This is wrong. There is a better answer. But in order to change the world, we need to change everything – the discourse, the institutions and the people who run things. This is really the only solution.

An Appreciation of Morrissey

Morrissey, the lead singer and lyricist for The Smiths, is a polarizing figure - at least among men (although women are more likely to embrace him unreservedly.) I met a Social Worker once, an ex-member of a Birmingham band, who described himself as having a "love-hate" relationship with the man – this is not unusual. Even those who genuinely like The Smiths are often reluctant to admit it.

Despite the stigma associated with saying it, I have decided to go out on a limb and admit that I like The Smiths quite a lot. Below I transcribe the lyrics for one of their songs, "I Know It's Over", a song which you can find on Youtube along with a beautiful cover of it by Jeff Buckley. I shall then discuss the song a little.

I Know It's Over 

Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head,

And as I climb into an empty bed,

Oh well. Enough said.

I know it's over – still I cling,

I don't know where else I can go… Oh…

Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.

See, the sea wants to take me,

The knife wants to slit me,

Do you think you can help me?

Sad veiled bride, please be happy,

Handsome groom, give her room.

Loud, loutish lover, treat her kindly

Though she needs you

More than she loves you.

And I know it's over – still I cling, 

I don't know where else I can go,

Over and over and over and over...

I know it's over.

It never really began

But in my heart it was so real.

And you even spoke to me, and said:

"If you're so funny

Then why are you on your own tonight?

And if you are so clever

Why are you on your own tonight?

If you are so very entertaining

Why are you on your own tonight?"

I know…

'Cause tonight is just like any other night.

That's why you're on you own tonight.

With your triumphs and your charms,

While they're in each other's arms…

It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate,

It takes strength to be gentle and kind

Over, over, over, over…

It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate,

It takes guts to be gentle and kind

Over, over,

Love is natural and real

But not for you, my love,

Not tonight my love.

Love is natural and real,

But not for such as you and I, my love.

Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head…

[Repeat x 4]

Now, the first thing to say about this song is that it is obviously autobiographical. The situation Morrissey describes is a relationship of unrequited love which only ended, if it ended, when the woman he loved married another man. When I was younger, I thought lyricists just wrote whatever sounded good at the time, fitted the tune. I now no longer believe this. Most great pop songs, I now believe, are autobiographical - examples from the Beatles of confessional songs include "Yesterday' and "Norwegian Wood". Many, though not all, of Smiths' songs are autobiographical. (There are exceptions, "Girlfriend in a Coma", for instance, is a song more playful than sincere.) In "Still Ill", to take another example, when Morrissey sings, "Under the iron bridge, we kissed/ And all I ended up with was sore lips", I believe he is describing something that actually happened to him.

Morrissey is undoubtedly a profoundly talented writer. When he sings "The sea wants to take me, the knife wants to slit me" he is saying, "Sometimes I want to drown myself, sometimes I want to slit my wrists". He projects his suicidal impulses on the means of their consummation. There is probably a name for this type of rhetorical device, this type of personification, but if so I don't know it. What is certain is that Morrissey is a great poet. In addition to being a kind of love song, there is a subtle hint of malice to the song. When Morrissey sings "She needs you more than she loves you" and "Love is natural and real, but not for you, my love", he is asserting the loved woman does not truly love her affianced. He is effectively saying to the groom, 'She doesn't really love you, it's really me she loves.' He denies her the authenticity of her feelings. This is the natural and even inevitable knee-jerk reaction of the spurned lover.

The song is at once beautiful and truly great. And it is great because it springs from authentic feelings.

The main reason why Morrissey elicits ambivalent reactions from male fans is that there is some doubt about his sexuality. In songs like "Hand in Glove", "This Charming Man" and even "Shoplifters of the World", there is some suggestion of a gay subtext. Partly, I believe, this suspicion about his sexuality arises from Morrissey's vocal delivery. And music fans do tend to worry about contagion. Even "I Know It's Over" can seem slightly suspect to a young man. For an adult male to address a song to his mother, well… Adolescent boys, as they mature, seek to individuate themselves from their parents and, in particular, tend to repudiate their former dependence on their mothers. They cut their mothers out of their lives.  Perhaps it is only when a man becomes truly mature that he can acknowledge his love for his mother. When I was younger I had trouble with "I Know It's Over" for these adolescent reasons, that it seemed somehow fishy for Morrissey to address a song to his mother - I had difficulty with John Lennon's song "Mother" from his solo career for the same reason. Ironically, however, I quite liked "Heart Shaped Box" by Nirvana, perhaps because it is so ambivalent, because Cobain is saying "I love you" and "I hate you" to his mother simultaneously.

Despite rumors or impressions that Morrissey might be gay, he has never come out as gay. I have a friend who opines that Morrissey is probably bisexual and has had sexual relationships with both men and women; my own feeling is that Morrissey was and perhaps still is effectively celibate. His romantic life, it seems to me, has been typified by long periods of unrequited love, perhaps for one woman, perhaps for a couple serially. I get this feeling not only from "I Know It's Over" but also from another great song "Half a Person". It may well be that Morrissey needed a female love in his life and that this is why he found it so hard to let go of one. I leave it to you, dear reader, to deduce what you will about his sexuality from this.

When young men imagine rock stars, they tend to think of a life-style revolving around sex, drugs and rock and roll. "If I was a famous rock star," they think, "I'd be getting laid by a new girl every night." Some rockers, such as Gene Simmons from Kiss and Lemmy from Motorhead, who have each bragged of over a thousand conquests, fit the stereotype, but most rock stars don't. Famous musicians are not so far removed from ordinary people as adolescent males believe. Morrissey is not unique. Cobain, I suspect, may have only had two sexual partners in his life: his first girlfriend and Courtney Love. Yes, he enjoyed sex, but I doubt he was promiscuous. Cobain believed in love. I surmise that Mike Patton from Faith No More, after his marriage fell apart, went off sex altogether. The Beatles were rumored to have shagged their way around the world when they first became famous, a rumor McCartney has done nothing to dispel in later years - but I suspect McCartney is fibbing a little, partly from bravado and partly from regret at the opportunities he passed up when he was young. Consider: the subject of most popular music is love. I don't see how a belief in true love can co-exist with a need to screw anything with two legs.

I should give another reason why "I Know It's Over" appeals to me. Like Morrissey, much of my romantic life has been characterized by unrequited love, love that I have clung to for extremely long periods of my life. For many years I was in love with one girl and dating her best friend - I do not feel proud of this now. The lines, "I know it's over, it never really began, but in my heart it was so real" resonates with me as the story of the second part of my life. The song itself suggests closure. But can anyone ever really find closure? I doubt it. 

More on the Phenomenology of Knowledge

In today's post I want to add to the previous post Literature and Truth by taking a phenomenological approach to knowledge. For those who don't know the term 'phenomenology', I shall give a rough definition. Phenomenology is the study of consciousness from a first-person point of view. A phenomenologist like Husserl might look at a chair and then describe what it is like to look at the chair from his own perspective. In doing so he performs an act called epoch or transcendental reduction - he brackets out the issue of whether the object he observes is real or not. Instead he  focusses on his experience of looking. In the phenomenological account I am intending to give I am not exactly going to bracket out the issue of truth and falsehood. The purpose of the essay is to talk precisely about these things. Rather I am going to give some account of how one decides what is true or not.

I wake in the morning, having dreamt that I was talking to Che Guevara. For a moment, when I awake, I do not know if the dream was real or not. Then reality reasserts itself: Che Guevara was a real person once but my conversation with him did not really occur. It was only a dream. I am now in reality. I get up and read the paper. I read that there has been a massacre in Nice, the French city. I know Nice is real - in fact, I have been there. Because I have memories of Nice I know it exists. But even if I had never visited Nice, I know from TV and newspapers, from books and from the accounts of friends who have visited it, that Nice exists. I could put my faith in credible hearsay, even if I had no memories of it. I read that a massacre has occurred. I regard the newspaper I am reading as a trustworthy source of information about the world and so I choose to believe that this massacre actually happened. It would not surprise me if some small details were wrong - no journalist is perfect. But it is likely that what I read is true.

I read a chapter of the novel I borrowed from the library, Hystopia by David Means. One of the protagonists is a character called Singleton. I know that Singleton does not exist and has never existed. He is only a character in a novel. I conclude that he does not exist based on a great deal of circumstantial evidence. The work I am reading gives all indications of being a novel, and novels are fictions that deal with fictional characters. Consequently Singleton must be fictional. The novel is set in an alternative America in which JFK has survived multiple assassination attempts and is serving his third term. I know that JFK was a real person. I know this from newspapers, conversations with friends and from historical textbooks. But I also know that the real JFK died during his first term. In my world there are two JFKs, the real one and the one invented by David Means. The first is (was) real; the second is fictional.

I go for a walk down real streets and past real people. I visit a library which my senses tell me is palpable and real and not some phantom library in a dream. I think of the phrase by William Blake; "How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way,/ Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?" In the library, I pick up an old copy of The National Enquirer and read the front page article that reports that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the JFK assassination. I judge this story false. I judge it false for a number of reasons: I know that The National Enquirer is not a reliable source of information, I know that its readers often like conspiracy theories and that this paper tries to pander to its audience, I suspect that the coincidence (Cruz having been a presidential candidate) is too great for this story to be plausible. Too great a coincidence often disqualifies something from being true. I know, furthermore, that other more reputable news sources have rubbished this claim about Ted Cruz's father. Having read this article, I reflect that Donald Trump chose to believe it, and reflect furthermore that in Trump's world The National Enquirer is a reliable source of information even though in my world it is not.

I return home and watch Bill Maher on Youtube. I believe that Maher really exists and is really called Maher. Maher makes the following joke about Trump: he says (in part) that it is obvious that Trump is "an abandoned, frightened child swirling in black emptiness". I do not know if this assessment of Trump's personality is true or false but it seems plausible. I could choose to believe it if I want. I think of Obama's refusal to use the phrase "Islamic terrorism" - I suspect that this phrase could name a true phenomenon but I do not believe that West is engaged in a war against Islam. However many others do. How can one make up one's mind about a great abstract idea like "Islam"? Or "love" or "war" or "freedom"?

The point I am trying to make is that the world is full of objects and propositions, some of which are real and some of which aren't, some of which are true and other false, some of which it is impossible to know whether true of false. When we engage in the world we are constantly attributing reality to, or withholding it from, the various things we encounter. From a phenomenological perspective, existence is a property. Now, traditional analytic philosophy does not consider existence a property; rather it is considered the instantiation of properties. Analytic philosophy denies the existence of fictional objects. But the problem with this perspective is that philosophers (and scientists and psychiatrists) who say this are implicitly assuming an omniscience that is not justified, an objectivity that is unwarranted. Reality is subjective, not objective. We do not all live in the same world. Rational philosophers do not have unproblematic access to an objective reality. Every individual lives in a different world, "clos'd by your senses five". This is the lesson of phenomenology. We do not base most of our knowledge on empirical observation; rather almost everything we know comes to us from others, from hearsay. For instance, I choose to believe Einstein over Newton, not because I have performed the necessary experiments, but because I accept the scientific consensus. The test of intelligence is the ability to judge who to believe and who not to believe, whose opinion to accept and whose to discard. This conclusion may be depressing. But is better for intellectuals to step off their pedestals and admit fallibility, then to adhere to dogma. We may all live in different worlds but our worlds are connected. The alternative to phenomenology is fundamentalism. Or even totalitarianism.

Literature and Truth

What is the truth value of a literary interpretation or review? If I say "Hamlet has an Oedipal complex" or "Captain Ahab seeks his own death" or "Gabriel Conroy in The Dead is threatened by anything that challenges his vanity", am I making true statements, false statements or statements that are meaningless, have no truth value at all? The subjects of these propositions do not exist and have never existed, they are fictional. The names "Hamlet", "Captain Ahab" and "Gabriel Conroy" have no referents and have never had referents. How then we make true or false statements them,  about entities that have never existed? This problem is basic to literary criticism. One would like to think that some literary interpretations are better than others, truer than others, but there is no way to independently legitimize a proposition asserted by a piece of criticism. There is no state of affairs obtaining in the real world to which we can point to verity or refute a claim made by a piece of literary criticism. All we can do is point to the text we are interpreting and say "It's in there, trust me".

I have explored this issue in earlier posts, particularly the ones titled Ascribing Attributes to Fictional Entities, Meiongianism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge and Literature as Speech-Act. The purpose of this post is not to say anything new but to attempt to re-express these ideas more clearly than I did then. I may or may not succeed. If this post turns out confused or confusing, I advise the reader to have a look at these earlier posts.

Any literary work can be decomposed into a large number of propositions. For example, one proposition asserted by Joyce's Ulysses is "Leopold Bloom is married to Molly Bloom"; another is "Bloom carries a potato with him in his pocket wherever he goes". Some propositions have reference to states of affairs that exist or have existed; others are authorial inventions. Ulysses is set in Dublin, a real city, and many of the pubs, landmarks and other locations that feature in Ulysses are genuine. On the 16th of June 1904, the horse Throwaway won the Dublin Gold Cup, an event to which Ulysses refers: this actually happened. So the proposition "On the 16th of June 1904, Throwaway won the Dublin Gold Cup" is unequivocally true. Other propositions asserted by Ulysses, though, are inventions. For example, the proposition "Bantam Lyons won a lot of money betting on Throwaway" is, according to positivist accounts, unverifiable. Bantam Lyons is a character invented by Joyce; he never existed. It seems then that that we can divide propositions asserted by a literary work into two types, factual and fictional. The problem, then, is how to assess the truth values of the fictional propositions - although as we shall see later, the situation is more complex than that.

Not only can we divide the propositions asserted by a literary work into the fictional ones and the factual ones, we can also divide them into those that are explicit and those that are implicit. For example, the propositions "Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He [Bloom] stopped and gathered them" is explicit - it is a direct quote. The proposition "One of the letters is from Blaze Boylan who will sleep with Bloom's wife Molly later that day" is implicit. Despite the fact that this 'fact' is central to the plot of the novel it is only ever implied. 

The role of literary criticism is to reproduce in a different form the propositions expressed by the original text. Reviews tend to reproduce the explicit propositions (giving some sense of the plot while avoiding spoilers) and to make evaluative judgements about the text as a whole (the work is "a tragedy", "a comedy", "well written", "cliched", "a must-read", " a tedious failure"). Interpretative criticism focusses on the implicit propositions and on the relationships between the various propositions the original text expresses. Literary interpretation usually avoids evaluative judgements. I had a lecturer once who said that the purpose of literary criticism is to postpone judgement. The purpose of this essay has little to do with evaluative statements about texts taken as wholes. Rather it is concerned with the way criticism reproduces propositions made explicitly and implicitly by texts.

Consider the statement "Bilbo Baggins lives in a hole in the ground". When this proposition is found in an interpretation of The Hobbit, is it true or false or meaningless? I would like to say that it is true. It is true because it faithfully reproduces a proposition found in the original work. To this extent at least the interpretation is an accurate re-presentation. Interpretations which accurately re-present the propositions, both the explicit ones and the implicit ones, contained in the source work are faithful interpretations. Interpretations that do not do so are false interpretations. How we judge whether an interpretation is faithful or not is, however, often quite difficult.

Now consider the statement "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" ( a hobbit we later find to be Bilbo Baggins), the first line in The Hobbit. Is this proposition, found in the original work rather than an interpretation of it, true or false or meaningless? I would argue that it is none of these things. It is a speech-act. That is, it is a linguistic building block, a sentence that together with the other sentences in the book helps create or construct a fictive world, the world of middle earth. The type of speech-act it most closely resembles is a definition. Suppose I say, "I define the word grue to mean green before today and blue after". This definition is neither true nor false nor meaningless - rather it creates new conditions for future language use. If someone in my language community, someone who has adopted this word, says about his blue shirt tomorrow "My shirt is grue", it will be true, assuming use of the word 'grue' has taken off.  Similarly, if someone today says, "Hobbits live in the ground and have hairy feet", he is expressing a true proposition – because in The Hobbit, Tolkein included the facts that hobbits live in holes and have hairy feet as part of the definition of what constitutes a hobbit.

Literary texts create fictive worlds and this form of creation can be best understood as a series of definitions.

This issue is one I also explored in the post Meiongianism and the Phenomonology of Knowledge. The central idea I proposed is that the world, understood in its broadest possible sense, and going beyond what we mean when we talk of the real world is the total system of beliefs and propositions we hold about it. True propositions reproduce propositions which have been accepted as true by the language community. If I say "unicorns each have a single horn" I am making a true statement because 'having a single horn' is part of the definition of the word "unicorn". It is analytically true because it is tautological. It is a posteriori true because in order to meaningfully make statements about unicorns, we need first to have learned the meaning of he word.

The world is divided into different domains. For example, there is a domain created by Tolkein called Middle-Earth. Until fairly recently, if one used the word 'hobbit' one could only be referring to Tolkein's creations and so the proposition "Most Hobbits live in the Shire" would be unequivocally true. In 2003 remains of an extinct species in the genus Homo was discovered in Indonesia and nicknamed 'hobbits'. If applied to these hobbits the proposition "All Hobbits live in the Shire" is false - because in fact they lived in Indonesia. We now are dealing with a single word that has two different senses and features in two different linguistic domains. The novel Fatherland is set in a world in which German won the Second World War. The proposition "Germany won the Second World War" is true with respect to the linguistic domain created by the author Robert Harris in his novel but false with respect to the domain 'historical reality'. Propositions may be true with respect to one domain and false with respect to another.

Consider the proposition "Bilbo Baggins likes to smoke pipe weed" and "Bilbo Baggins exists". The first proposition is true; the second is false. The first is true because Tolkein defines Bilbo as a lover of tobacco or hashish; the second is false because the proposition "Bilbo Baggins exists" asserts that Bilbo Baggins is included among those objects that fall within the domain of real, currently existing objects. The inescapable conclusion we must draw from examples such as this is as follows. The notion that existence is an instantiation of properties, as proposed by Logical Positivists like Russell and Frege, must be false. Existence must itself be a property. And specifically it is the property of belonging to the domain of real existing things.

How do we decide which objects are real and which are fictional? I don't believe there is any way for an individual to know. Knowledge is phenomenological, contingent and limited. Individuals cannot know everything. Did Leopold Bloom once exist? Did Harun al-Raschid? Did the dinosaurs? Does Donald Trump currently exist now? Reality is subjective and always open to contestation, and what we judge real based not on experience or intuition, but rather on our acceptance of opinions presented to us by the people we choose to believe. Are there aliens in Area 51? I assume not but I cannot be sure.

The problem of what is real or fictional is almost irresolvable because no single person has a high enough vantage to always distinguish truth from fiction, fact from fable. No one is omniscient. We are, all of us, down below in the trenches, doing the best we can with the information we have.

An Appreciation of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"

I first picked up a Sandman graphic novel when I was about thirteen. The collection was Dream Country and I devoured it in the comic book shop. Over my teenage years, I read and reread every Sandman issue and I have returned to this comic throughout my life; over the last several weeks I reread the series from beginning to end. The Sandman has been called "the greatest epic in comic book history", up there with Alan Moore's Watchmen and some would say even better. During its run, the author Neil Gaiman, working with a variety of different illustrators, invented his own mythology, seemingly inspired by William Blake's maxim "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's". He made it all up as he went along and, unsurprisingly, there are often internal inconsistencies: occasionally the inconsistencies are bothersome but more often in some strange way they make the work deeper and more interesting. 

The Sandman concerns the anthropomorphic personification of Dream, who goes by many other names but is often simply called Morpheus. Morpheus rules the realm known as the Dreaming and is the third eldest of seven siblings, collectively called the Endless – the others being Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium. Dream's siblings, who all have distinctive personalities, frequently feature in the comic. The Endless have existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist until time's end. In the first issue of The Sandman, published in January 1989, Dream is captured by an English magus in 1918 and held prisoner until he escapes in 1989. Towards the end of the series, which finished in March 1996, Morpheus effectively commits suicide – and is replaced by another incarnation. That is, the personification of Dream continues to exist but as a different person with a different personality, a different point of view. During its seven year run, the series told many other stories about many other characters, often featuring Morpheus only incidentally, but taken altogether, a unified narrative with a clear character arc, pivoting on the idea that sometimes people must either change or die, emerges. It was an immensely popular comic. Since the official finish of the series in 1996, Gaiman has returned to the universe he created occasionally, for example in the one-off series Endless Nights and more recently in Overture.

The Sandman is set in the DC Universe and so, apart from the characters Gaiman created, other DC Superheroes occasionally feature. These include John Constantine from Hellblazer, the Martian Manhunter and a couple of Batman villains early in the run, and Batman and Superman themselves towards the end.  But Gaiman went beyond the DC Universe. Often he incorporated genuine historical figures, such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, the Roman Emperor Claudius, Marco Polo, Robespirre and Joshua Norton among others;  he also included figures from older mythologies, such as Orpheus and Calliope from Greek mythology, Bast and Anubis from Egyptian mythology, Ishtar the Mesopotamian Goddess of love and war, the Norse gods and so on… These historical and mythological personages do not appear just as cosmetic allusions, they interact with the Endless and play roles in the tales Gaiman is telling. For example, Norse god Loki and woodland sprite Puck team up in The Kindly Ones to try to destroy Morpheus. Gaiman is always, importantly, immensely respectful of his source material (unlike, say, the Thor films), but there is also a kind of historical and mythological revisionism at work, a postmodernism much like that of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Whereas traditional Fantasy writers following Tolkien have set their stories in worlds conspicuously different from and other than our own, Gaiman's work is set in a world that is almost but not quite ours. It is as if knowledge of the Endless is a Hermetic mystery into which the reader is being initiated. Gaiman is creating a mythology for the real world rather than for a fantasy one.

One of the functions of religions and mythologies is to give some kind of account of the afterlife. Most people are conflicted about this, torn between a hopeful belief in a life after death and the knowledge that death is the end – a tension explored so well in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Even committed Christians who have faith in Heaven look both ways before crossing the street. It is interesting to approach The Sandman with respect to its approach to death and the afterlife. Gaiman commits his fictional universe to the existence of the afterlife in a very early issue when Morpheus visits Hell to recover his helmet. If there is a Hell, there must also be a Heaven. However, despite the existence of a Heaven and Hell, The Sandman's mythology is not at all typically Christian. In Season of Mists (a storyline in which Lucifer quits his position as Lord of Hell), it is suggested that the damned in hell are there because they consciously or subconsciously expected to go there when they were alive, not as the result of divine judgement.  At the end of Season of Mists, Morpheus's ex-love Nada is given a choice of afterlives and opts for reincarnation. This idea, that the afterlife differs from person to person, and that people effectively choose what happens to them after they die, is reminiscent of Terry Pratchett (with whom Gaiman co-authored the novel Good Omens).  The perfect word to describe Gaiman's approach to the afterlife, and to mythology and religion generally, is syncretistic. On the one hand, again and again, particularly in moments featuring the vixenish character Death, Gaiman implies that death is the end; on the other hand, he also wants to present all religions and mythologies, all views of the afterlife, as equally valid, equally true. The world is shaped by our beliefs about it - an idea not only associated with Pratchett's comic fantasies but more broadly with Postmodernism generally.

Morpheus is the Shaper of Stories and it is difficult often to know if he is in charge of the stories he features in, or a pawn in them. What power relation exists between Morpheus and the various gods and demigods he encounters? At one point (I forget where) Gaiman has Morpheus say that all gods begin in his realm (the Dreaming), walk the Earth for a while and then return to the Dreaming  – when  people stop believing in them. The gods gain their strength, their existence, from the faith people have in them, like the god Om in Pratchett's novel Small Gods. Morpheus, however, has existed since the beginning of time and will continue to exist, in some incarnation or another, until the end of the universe – he does not draw his power from belief and arguably seems higher up the mystical hierarchy than the various gods and goddesses he encounters. Yet, in Season of Mists when preparing to go to Hell to fight Lucifer, he tells a servant that Lucifer is by far more powerful than he, Morpheus, is. The implication is that Lucifer's adversary, who is more powerful than Lucifer, who is called the Creator by Gaiman but is unmistakably the Christian God Jehova, is where the buck stops. There is a contradiction or inconsistency here. On the one hand all Gods and mythologies are stories and thus subordinate to Dream; on the other, it seems here that Dream is subordinate to the Christian narrative. Is Christianity then ontologically distinct from other mythologies, does it transcend them somehow? Gaiman is vague here. Neither Jehova nor Christ feature in The Sandman and I believe that Gaiman changed the way he wanted to situate Christianity within his mythology as the mythology evolved. In a later story,The Golden Boy, Gaiman presents an alternative USA, the USA of an alternative dimension, ruled over secretly by a deity known as Boss Smiley. Boss Smiley is a kind of satiric caricature of Jehova who presides over his own heaven. When the protagonist of the story, Prez, dies, Boss Smiley suggests that Prez should sit at Smiley's right hand and sing praises. Prez is thus a kind of Christ figure. Morpheus intervenes, saying "I am Prince of Stories. The boy is under my jurisdiction not yours." Despite Boss Smiley's impotent threats ("I will destroy you!"), Morpheus removes Prez from his home dimension and when asked about Boss Smiley says, "He would not be the first to threaten me. But I have no fear of Boss Smiley". The implication, here, is not only that Dream is more powerful than any local God but, more than that, that Christianity is also just a local story. Is Christianity really any more true than Greek or Norse mythology? The Sandman is ambiguous it its attitude towards Christianity and this ambiguity is never resolved.

There are other inconsistencies that run through The Sandman but probably the main one is simply this. How powerful is Morpheus? Sometimes, on some occasions, Morpheus is all-powerful; on other occasions, his puissance is bounded, circumscribed. In The Kindly Ones, he is brought low by the Eumenides, daimons from Greek mythology. We can compare Morpheus to another famous comic book hero, Superman. Superman is God-like in his power but stories require conflict and so Superman requires weaknesses. The possibility that Superman can be defeated must exist and so the Superman mythos requires kryptonite. In The Sandman, Morpheus's weakness is that he must abide by rules; the Eumenides have the power to drive all those who spill family blood to repentance or suicide and this law is somehow more ancient than Dream himself. Where in the Sandman universe do these laws originate? Gaiman does not tell us but it as though Morpheus, as the Lord of Stories, must himself adhere to the rules of narrative. He is a creature of story as much as an author of them.

This post only touches on the many interesting aspects of The Sandman. When I was completing my MA in English, I met a couple of people who wanted to write theses on this comic book. I had considered it myself. And why not? Some comic books are arguably more literary than most prose works. I'd wager there are many universities that offer courses in graphic novels. As they should. If film and popular culture can be deemed worthy of critical scrutiny, why not comic books?