Falsification in Literature, also some meandering thoughts

"One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous."

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Truer words have never been spoken. Yes, hello paradox, I see you there. So much of human experience is characterized simply by what's convenient, yet highly questionable from an ideological framework. I'm getting far away from my more pragmatic book and film reviews. I normally don't deal in matters of truth, per se. It's a tired, yet necessary concept. I tend to circulate not so much around the truthfulness of an argument or an issue, but rather, the quality of an issue; that is, the very essense of the thing--that which makes it interesting.

The following is an incoherent little slightly edited tidbit from a paper I wrote a few months back. Enjoy it if you know what I'm talking about,cause I sure as hell don't.

Is literature just an artfully crafted, romanticized lie? What may be discerned from its expansive archives, if fiction is a simple forgery? With theorists assigning their own agendas to the genre, and various authoritative efforts having been made to blur/eradicate the boundary between fiction and reality (If we want peace, we must prepare for war,) it's getting harder and harder to pin down anything that's significant. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes, “Our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live…". Aside from his distinct ability to diffuse and complicate matters of binary logic, Nietzsche makes the argument that falsification is the primary means of human understanding. If this elusive philosopher’s assertion has any implications on literature, it may be reflected in the critical works of reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser.

In his faithful attempt to describe the reading process, Iser touches upon the notion of falsification; he writes, “As we read, we oscillate to a greater or lesser degree, between the building and breaking of illusions. In a process of trial and error, we organize and reorganize the various data offered us by the text.” As Iser describes it, reading is the process of narrowing down possibilities in order to achieve a different perspective. While the concept of falseness may itself superficially trivialize literature in a way that does little justice to the art, Iser has pointed out the all too real consequences of the written word. Iser says, “What at first seemed to be an affirmation of our assumptions leads to our own rejection of them, thus tending to prepare us for a re-orientation." And, while Iser tends to depict the reader as both a passive observer and an active participant in the reading process, the impression left upon the reader is ultimately what makes literature significant, and it is an impression created through falsification.

A little unrefined, and I suppose it is a bit of a stretch connecting Nietzsche and Iser, but hey, it's all relative. I think what I was getting at is that literature (and life in general) is a process in which one narrows down possibilities. Iser does suggest that there is a little more to the reading process other than falsification. There is a kind of new perception acheived from reading a work. Then again, is that anything special? We're a different person with each tick of the clock; we achieve, in varying degrees, new perspectives every single moment of our life. Plotwise, it seems like literature winds down in terms of events, narrowing down every single possibility until there is only one kind of text before us. A work tends to set up certain rules for itself, gradually eradicating all possibilities, until there is only one left. The ending, no matter how ambigious or anticlimatic, is still the ending. There are no more words for the reader to decipher. Side-note: Doesn't it seem like everyone who tells you to broaden your horizons really means 'your horizons should be the same as mine, because I'm a whole lot better than you.' It's just code for 'you should think like I do.'

But back to falsification. From what I understand, science works by means of falsification. Sir Karl Popper wrote: "Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks." I regards to literature, it certainly isn't a matter physical experiments, but rather observation by which the reader comes to know the work. I think this notion is very much appropriate in relation to the brevity of human experience. I suppose the real question is, by what criterion in every day matters are we assessing what is patently false? I'll go ahead and quote The Weather Man here, because I think it sums up what I'm saying pretty damn good :

"I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few ever became any qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer. Until finally they got reduced to one, to who I am. And that's who I am, the weather man."