Fact and Fiction to Deal with the World

Mirror @ Art room by finlaysphotos/Flickr.com/Creative Commons

Theory and fiction– that line that we constantly have to straddle as students and as people. Do we write our life as it happens or do we step back and study it, and then write? Or is there no difference at all? On the last day of my Philosophy of Art class, for which we also had to do art every other week, we sat down together to do a post-mortem of the past semester. Many of us agreed that it felt more honest to actually have made art alongside philosophizing about it and writing analytical papers. We had done and thought, and our experience had been holistic.

There is an honesty people tend to see in producing original art. Fitting art into elaborate arguments (from which follow more arguments) so that both the art and the argument look good even seems pretentious. The artist touches, sees and feels, and creates things of beauty. Theorists sit removed and contemplate things they really know nothing about. This seems to be the difference between writing literature and writing literary criticism, or even between studio art and art history. There is a general appreciation for people that do both, or for people that only create, but suspicions arise when they merely think and theorize.

This way of thinking seems a little unfair though. If we think of, for example, literary journalism, which creates narratives based on true facts, and academic disciplines like political theory that create systems of ideas based on true facts, they are really not that different. The narrative nature of literary journalism does not make it closer to real life or more original than the systematic nature of theory. The facts themselves do not change– only the ways we use to explore them do. There is no difference between contemplative production and “pure” production. The same can be said about fiction and theory. Fiction manipulates, distorts and invents things. But it is still based on the facts of the world. Theory can distort facts and show new ways of conceiving things, too. And when theory studies fiction to create more theory, it reveals new things about the fiction that nobody would have seen otherwise.

So there are many ways to deal with facts–-narrating them artfully, creating them, or studying them to create new systems of study. It is unfair to argue which of these is the most true, or even the most false, because we would only end up coming back to the place where we started.