Tuesday
This past August author Michiko Kakutani published a fine article in The Paris Review about how fiction grapples with our “vanishing reality.” Mentioned in the piece are Philip K. Dick, Philip Roth, Homer, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Stanisław Lem, Federico Fellini, and Thomas Pynchon.
Kakutani opens the piece with a passage from Dick’s 1969 short story “Electric Ant” before noting how surreal reality has become:
Do I want to interfere with the reality tape?
And if so, why?
Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. (Dick)
Surreal and chaos have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, when artificial-intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN.
If you are an author who wants to capture truth in your art, what are you do to? Kakutani notes that authors have been wrestling with the craziness of American reality at least since the 1960s:
In 1961, Philip Roth writes of American reality: “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complains, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise … ”
Quoting Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 book The Image, Kakutani talks about how
the idea of “credibility” was replacing the idea of truth. People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.” And as verisimilitude replaced truth as a measurement, “the socially rewarded art” became “that of making things seem true”; no wonder that the new masters of the universe in the early sixties were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue.
Baudrillard would take such observations further, suggesting that in today’s media-centric culture, people have come to prefer the “hyperreal”—that is, simulated or fabricated realities like Disneyland—to the boring everyday “desert of the real.”
I’ve been getting at these ideas in my own way, wondering if the public turned to carnivalesque Trump as a reaction to “no drama Obama.” (Of course, this is not to dismiss either the phenomenon of white backlash or Russian interference in the election.) Kakutani goes on to cite one of my favorite short stories to show how an alternate reality can take us over.
This story is Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which a Memphis millionaire sets up “a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians, moralists, painters and geometricians” to invent an entirely fictional planet. After a while, his fiction begins seeping into our reality:
Bits and pieces of Tlön start surfacing in the real world: an artifact here, a description there, and things speed up around 1942; eventually, the narrator notes, the teachings of Tlön have spread so widely that the history he learned as a child has been obliterated and replaced by “a fictitious past.”
Borges had Hitler’s and Stalin’s alternative realities in mind when he wrote the story, but one can see it at work in today’s society as well. Kakutani writes,
Borges draws direct parallels between the power of fictions about Tlön to insinuate themselves into human consciousness and the power of deadly political ideologies based on lies to infect entire nations; both, he suggests, provide internally consistent narratives that appeal to people hungering to make sense of the world. “Reality gave ground on more than one point,” Borges writes. “The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever that gave the appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we will never completely perceive. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.”
In other words, we prefer a human-manufactured reality to a messy reality around which we can never entirely wrap our minds.
Kakutani also mentions Pynchon and I think of The Crying of Lot 49, my favorite Pynchon novel. In it, Pynchon describes a centuries-old underground postal system (the Tristero) that defies state-run mail monopolies, something that is either an amazing accomplishment or the crazed hallucination of unhinged conspiracy theorists. The book ends with a question mark: we don’t know whether this is real or a fantasy. As Kakutani describes Pynchon’s characters, they
wonder whether the paranoiacs have it right—that there are malign conspiracies and hidden agendas connecting all the dots. Or whether the nihilists are onto something—that there is no signal in the noise, only chaos and randomness. “If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia,” he writes in Gravity’s Rainbow, “there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
Kakutani quotes social media researcher Renee DiResta, who warns that
the algorithms of social networks—which give people news that’s popular and trending, rather than accurate or important—are helping to promote conspiracy theories. This sort of fringe content can both affect how people think and seep into public policy debates on matters like vaccines, zoning laws, and water fluoridation. Part of the problem is an “asymmetry of passion” on social media: while most people won’t devote hours to writing posts that reinforce the obvious, DiResta says, “passionate truthers and extremists produce copious amounts of content in their commitment to ‘wake up the sheeple.’”
DiResta concludes that “the Internet doesn’t just reflect reality anymore; it shapes it.”
I grappled with some of these issues a while back in a blog essay on Wallace Stevens’s The Blue Guitar. As intoxicating as fiction may be, Stevens says, in the end it is unsatisfying if it is not grounded in truth. Think of superficial narratives as a sugar high instead of a well-balanced meal.
Unfortunately, not everyone is committed to eating healthy.
