Fiction

The word ‘fiction’ comes from the Latin ‘fingere’ which means ‘to form’ or ‘to contrive’. So when Jorge Luis Borges entitled his collection ‘Ficciones’ I am thinking that his intention was not so much to indicate that the stories were untrue, but that they were formed, without making any comment, necessarily, about their veracity, which really is not relevant or important. As Michel Serres notes, ‘poetry’ comes from the Greek for ‘creation’, without any connotations of untruthfulness. Similarly, I do not think that anyone considers fictional literature to be in any way fake. The academic discourse on cultural production seems to be aimed at making the point that things considered natural are really culturally produced and therefore, viewed in the most antagonistic sense, fake or false. There are more nuanced threads in the discussion that focus on determining the history and origins of culturally produced phenomena, but too often the message is that because a certain feature of a society is culturally produced it must be in some sense invalid; but of course, anything considered valid was also culturally produced. There is no escaping it.

My aim in this post is to focus on the use of fictions, of creating fictions, as a way of managing dissonant scales. In this sense, any human relationship, for example, is a fiction. A family is a fiction, that is rendered to make the world livable, for it is very hard to live as a resident on earth without having some kind of mediating scale, or a set of mediating scales, between a person and the world. Ask any poet.

Plants must serve this purpose. I was watching a documentary on beauty yesterday in which several anthropologists made the point that certain features of the natural landscape are considered beautiful because they provided evolutionary assistance: running water, green plants, and other similarly life-assisting things. There is also the discourse on symmetry of features, waist to hip to shoulder ratio, and other body parameters, that relate to fertility.

Fair, enough, as far as it goes, but there were some dissenters. They dissented not so much by saying that this evolutionary understanding of beauty is wrong, but that it is insufficient, that it does not account for less instrumental postures and engagements of the human mind. I wonder, therefore, if it might be possible to tease out the various reasons why humans find plants to be beautiful. I will have to think a bit more on this and write about it in the next post.