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.