Fact and fiction

One of the most amazing things about this blog is that it offers me windows on the past when I happen to be perusing things for this reason or that one. For instance, this post from 2012 about a nine-year old Graham who was just learning the distinction between fact and fiction. 

A few minutes back I found myself looking out the window at the snow reflecting on the fact that I needed to wait till Monday to find out what followed from the most recent cliffhanger episode of Sex Education. I believe I have extolled the show in the past, if not, let me do so here. It's quite good.

In any case, it occurred to me my caring about what happened in the show was in fact a function of my own poor boundaries between fact and fiction. Since I know the show is fiction, why should I care about what happens to the characters? The answer, of course, is that it is good fiction, fiction which has made me care about the characters, because it rings true in important ways, despite the fact that so much about the show is utterly ridiculous, far-fetched and idealized (a school in which teenagers talk openly to one another about their sexual hang-ups and deepest insecurities? yeah right).

The show, in short, displays many of the hallmarks of good realism in that it captures an important human reality (characters we want to both like and hate) while idealizing some things and taking ridiculous liberties with plot pacing and probability (Maeve and Otis keep ending up alone by accident) to speed things along.

An important part of growing up, then, is learning that fiction isn't literally real. But just as quickly as we learn that, for strong realistic literature to work, we have to turn right around and accept that there can be something literally real about fiction.

Sadly, I think that nobody outside of Slavics studies the structuralists who came out of Tartu, Estonia and Moscow starting in the 60s and 70s. There were a lot of smart people that came through there, first and foremost amongst them Iurii Lotman. I remember being astounded by his statement in his 1976 Analysis of the Poetic Text that prose is inherently more complex than poetry, because it was always proceeded by negating the things that poetry did to make it art. Something like that. In the end, I think what he meant that artistic prose had to demonstrate that it was different from a simple journalistic or narrative description to demand enough attention to stand the test of time. It had to do something special to elide the distinction between fact and fiction, to walk the tightrope between ideal and real, to hold our attention.