| 9/6/08 12:36 am - ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) t3dy - some "high theory" nicked from senordildo, appropriate for a high
"The Rushdie affair points to an aspect of the novel that may seem to us its most obvious but that has historically aroused the greatest incomprehension (and, frequently, hostility), and that is--even now, even in the West--its most difficult to define: fictionality. The novel isn't true, like history, nor is it manifestly false, like legend or fable, so what is it? As Henry Zhao notes, 'it seems that the very idea of fictionality baffled Chinese thinking,' and the same was true in Europe, where, as Francisco Rico writes, fictionality constituted, upon its emergence, 'a category of artistic perception hitherto unknown.'
...This uncertainty should be no cause for embarrassment, however, but is rather an indication of the enormous difficulty with which a traditional culture, for which revealed religion was the exclusive standard of truth, wrapped its mind around so alien a concept. The establishment of fictionality as an epistemological possibility midway between truth and falsehood is an enormous cultural achievement, its possession an enormous cultural resource.
"So what exactly is fictionality? As Catherine Gallagher explains in what is in a sense the collection's central essay, the idea of fictionality arose in contradistinction not, as we might expect, to the fantastic and improbable tales of, say, medieval romance but to what today we would call romans à clef, thinly veiled satires of real people. Fiction means that which is believable without soliciting belief, that which is referential without referring to real figures and events. Fiction is, in a word, representative: Because it doesn't tell us about anyone in particular, it can tell us about everyone in general, including ourselves. Fictionality enables identification, the chief of readerly pleasures, because it frees us from moral responsibility toward those about whom we read, but it also enables self-reflection, the chief of readerly virtues. Fictionality allows us to imagine (not fantasize)--an act that is not only not anti-intellectual but is in fact supra-intellectual, for it integrates intellect with feeling. The truths that the reading of fiction brings us are not factual and specific but general and philosophical--what earlier ages called wisdom. That may be why our own age of information has less and less use for both reading and fiction. Scientism (which seems to be more the property of laymen than scientists) believes that all truth is quantifiable and attainable through scientific method. Popular culture turns increasingly to 'reality' programming and the memoir. Education has become simulation: the guy at Walden Pond who pretends to be Thoreau, the high school teaching segregation by dividing its students, for a day, by eye color. Lost in these exercises is the ability to imagine--to think and feel your way into other people's experiences without pretending to be them, to hold similarity and difference simultaneously in mind. The idea of fictionality, that cultural treasure, is in the process of being dismantled."
-- William Deresiewicz on the novel.
p.s. --lifted from a post in alphabet_soup
"bibliomania"
c. 1000 To avoid parting with his collection of 117,000 books while traveling, the avid reader and Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, has them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order. --A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel
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anti_oedipus
working on essays.