fictions that claim to be true

FICTIONS
THAT CLAIM TO BE TRUE

Remarks after dinner by Patrick Killough
to the Torch Club of Asheville-Blue Ridge, North Carolina

First Thursday, February 04, 2010
Asheville Renaissance Hotel/Orchard Dining Room

Revisited Saturday February 06, 2010

I. INTRODUCTION

In our first fifteen minutes I showcase five authors and their works. I then go through them a second time. I suggest mysteries in how authors or their religious community claim factual truth or authenticity for their works. I give an offbeat definition of "fiction." I ask why some readers prefer fictions that "feel" true.

I wonder why novelists and poets sometimes claim objective truth for their most imaginative creations -- even when readers know they are playing games with our minds.

After my half-hour opening remarks, the floor is all yours during our follow-on discussion forum. Please help unravel a literary-philosophical puzzle.

Our first two authors and selected works are secular and perhaps less familiar. The last three are better known to people of faith.

Five Authors and Their Texts:

-- (1) James Macpherson and his so-called "translations" of FINGAL: AN ANCIENT EPIC POEM (1761) and THE WORKS OF OSSIAN (1763).

-- (2) Sir Walter Scott and his historical novel, THE TALE OF OLD MORTALITY (1816).

-- (3) Anonymous. Moses and the TEN COMMANDMENTS.

-- (4) Anonymous author of THE BOOK OF JOB.

-- (5) Ellen Harmon Gould White and THE MINISTRY OF HEALING (1905).

II. MY THESIS AND ARGUMENT

I suggest that oral communication, by definition, begins as "fiction," something "made up" within an individual's mind, memory and imagination. And it need not do more.

To claim that that fiction points at or describes an external reality is to add something to it -- at least conceptually. Non-fiction is, thus, something, derivative, added on. Non-fiction is dressed up fiction. Think of classical logic and its distinction between the proposition, such as, "The present King of France is bald," and the judgment that that proposition is true or false, or something impossible -- Bertrand Russell's contribution.

A. Our First Look at Five Authors

SECULAR TALES

-- (1) Consider James Macpherson and his 1761 "translation" into English of FINGAL: AN ANCIENT EPIC POEM allegedly written in Gaelic by a 3rd Century bard named Ossian. Macpherson, a poet, searched across the Highlands of Scotland for ancient poems. In 1763 he published a collected edition, THE WORKS OF OSSIAN.

The claim that a Gaelic bard had composed ancient poems which Macpherson translated into contemporary English verse was immediately challenged. In 1775 Dr. Samuel Johnson charitably suggested that MacPherson had selected fragments of old material and then enlarged and woven them into an original yarn of his own imagining. Macpherson never produced his alleged originals.

I suggest that there was no ancient source and that Macpherson winged it. He wrote an orginal poem in English and then tried to make readers believe it was not his. Macpherson did, however, produce a powerful work of creative, imaginative art.

Many argue that OSSIAN did more than any other fiction to launch the romantic movement in European literature. Germans fell in love with Macpherson. Goethe even embedded some Ossian into his early novel, THE SORROWS OF THE YOUNG WERTHER (1774). Methodist pioneer John Wesley wrote that Ossian

"is little inferior to Homer or Virgil, and in some respects superior to both."

Many today still praise OSSIAN for its beauty as wistful romantlc fiction.

Mystery: why did Macpherson not let his beautiful subjective fiction speak for itself? What was a fictional provenance supposed to add to the value of OSSIAN?

Other literary fakers soon passed off their fictions as authentic. But when the truth emerged, their readership at once plummeted. Why did readers react that way?

Mystery: Weren't the poemata, the subjective "fictions," all by themselves enough for readers? Why were discredited claims of historical authenticity decisive for annihilating popularity? Are fake truth claims the mark of an inferior writer?

-- (2) In WAVERLEY (1814) Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832) created a new literary genre, the historical novel. History is displayed at major turning points -- such as the Crusades or Bonny Prince Charlie's 1745 rising. And fictitious "little people" interact with real giants like Richard the Lion Heart and Oliver Cromwell.

Scott sometimes invited readers to believe that his fictions were true and verifiable. He believed that he increased reader enjoyment by "authenticating" his imaginative yarns. Take, for example, 1816's THE TALE OF OLD MORTALITY. Everyone knew that it was fiction, albeit "historical" fiction. But Scott spilled many misleading words concocting how someone else had earlier penned the manuscript which Scott published anonymously.

Eye-witnessed deeds of long gone religious wars in Scotland 1679 -1689 were allegedly told during a chance encounter in a country churchyard by historically real Robert Paterson to fictitious Peter Pattieson more than 30 years before OLD MORTALITY was published.

That historical novel (fiction with a heavy factual backdrop) was framed within pretended oral recollections from much earlier times by a very old man. Peter Pattieson preserved but reordered the facts told him by Robert Paterson. Scott told his readers:

"... Mr. Peter Pattieson, in arranging these Tales for the press, hath more consulted his own fancy than the accuracy of the narrative; ... each Tale is preceded by a short introduction, mentioning the persons by whom, and the circumstances under which, the materials thereof were collected."

Mystery: What on earth is going on? Whence this elaborate deception which no one believes? Is there a grounding in Scott's early habit of publishing his novels (but not his narrative poems) anonymously, as "The Author of Waverley?"

RELIGIOUS TALES

"As true as the Gospel" is a phrase used by James Fenimore Cooper to invoke the highest degree of factual accuracy and personal confidence in the historical basis for two of his fictions.

But consider the Gospels and more broadly the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Do their authors always assert claims to be literally "true?" Or have other later readers sometimes made that claim that for them?

Not seldom Gospels name witnesses to various events: e. g., Mary of Magdala to the resurrection of Jesus. An early reader might therefore conceivably have looked Mary up and asked her to retell her eyewitness account.

Jesus is described asserting things about himself and his works that are "true" in widely differing senses. What, for instance, is the same or different in statements such as "This is my body" and imaginative didactic parables, e.g. of the Good Samaritan or the Widow's Mite?

--(3) In the Hebrew Scriptures (Exodus 31- 34) Moses (c. 1200 BC ?) climbs Mount Sinai twice to meet with God. Twice Moses returns to his people carrying two stone tablets with commandments from God. Some excerpts:

"And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables"; ⁽¹⁾

"The Lord said to Moses, 'Cut two tables of stone like the first; and I will write upon the tables the words that were on the first tables, which you broke.'" ⁽²⁾

Mystery: What really happened on Mount Sinai?

-- (4) God's longest single, connected utterance (Job 38 - 41) in all the Scriptures is in the Book of JOB (written sometime between 650 and 400 BC). Excerpts:

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? ... when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" ⁽³⁾

Did the author of JOB anticipate Macpherson and claim truth by anchoring his creation in a source outside himself? No, absolutely not. But others would later make the claim for him.

--(5) Finally, we turn to Ellen Gould Harmon White (1827 - 1915). We read a Maine court transcript from February 1845 describing in passing that founding prophetess of Seventh-day Adventism. She was then Miss Ellen Gould Harmon, age 17. In a private house during a meeting of disappointed Millerite Adventists (Jesus had failed to appear as predicted three months earlier), young Ellen lay on the floor in an unbroken five-hour trance. She was described under oath in court by witnesses as lying there speaking religious visions.

Always sickly, Ellen claimed to have been told many things by God.

Thus, in 1863 God forcefully told Mrs White that He intended all humans to be healthy. At various times God indicated that He wanted women to stop torturing themselves with corsets, to wear short skirts over trousers and no longer drag their dresses in the dirt. Skirts were to be lifted six inches above the ground.

Ellen Harmon White recorded visions aloud and she or others then wrote down her makings, her poemata, which, non-judgmentally, I style her fictions.

Mystery: Mrs White's ideas on diet, exercise and dress can stand or fall on their own merits. Do Adventists, however, accept them primarily because they are commanded by God?

B. Our Second Look at Five Authors

SECULAR WRITERS

Let's consider James Macpherson and Walter Scott together. In 1763 Macpherson published his epochal OSSIAN. Curiously, only a year later the first "gothic" novel appeared, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO by Horace Walpole. Walpole, initially anonymous, claimed that his distinctively original fiction was a translation of a document published in Naples in 1529.

Gothic had a brisk 60-year vogue and produced such eerie novels as the 1818 FRANKENSTEIN by 20 year-old Mary Shelley. Concern for historical accuracy and detail did not predominate among gothic novelists. History was mere colorful backdrop, "history lite." Gothic was pitched to readers caring little for factual accuracy.

Yet even Gothic's father, Walpole, tried to make readers of his non-historical fiction believe it rooted in real external world facts, a translation of a verifiable earlier text.

Mystery: Why did Macpherson and Walpole falsify their fictions? Why did readers love it?

Walter Scott came to novel writing only after several youthful summers scouring the Scottish countryside on horseback for oral recollections of fast disappearing ballads. Scott's profession was law and the factual accuracy demanded by Edinburgh courtrooms. Yet before his first anonymous novel, WAVERLEY, Scott was already Europe's most popular narrative poet through works such as "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810).

Key to mystery: Perhaps Europe had tired of "the Scottish Enlightenment" and dry Calvinist ultra-rationalism. Europeans were rediscovering and admiring their home-grown stories, including medieval history. Scott mixed skills in versifying, storytelling and researching into his new genre, the historical novel. He attempted accuracy, minute accuracy, in the historically attested part of his narratives. And whenever he was not accurate, he would candidly let readers know. But did they care? If so, why?

A Walter Scott novel is "history heavy," not "history lite." Descriptions of old-timey clothing, armor, furniture, buildings and landscapes are as dense, detailed, colorful and accurate as Scott could make them.

Mystery: Why did Scott's readers relish pseudo-factuality as a frame for a novel?

Sir Walter had a younger rival: historical novelist James Fenimore Cooper, already styled "the American Scott," following THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826) and other tales. In 1838 Cooper published a novel and sequel for which he claimed verifiable sources.

The first, HOMEWARD BOUND, was a sea adventure tale. Yet when the dismasted passenger packet Montauk limped into Manhattan three years earlier no newspaper had noted it.

In his Preface to both volumes, Cooper suggested that skeptics consult the (imaginary) ship's log or interview the captain and officers of the Montauk, all "unimpeachable witnesses." As for New York media,

"all which appears in a New York journal is not necessarily as true as the Gospel."

Mystery: Why does Fenimore Cooper wrap novels in false truth-claims? Does he do it tongue in cheek as a humorous tribute to Sir Walter?

Incidentally, in 1823 Cooper created the sea adventure genre of novel as a rebuke to Scott's novel THE PIRATE (1821). Scott, a militia cavalry officer was no sailor. Cooper had been a commissioned U.S. naval officer. Offended by technical inaccuracies in THE PIRATE, Cooper wrote THE PILOT about John Paul Jones fighting in English waters for American independence -- just to show readers of Scott how a real sailor would describe a real ship at sea.

Macpherson, Scott and other writers in the age of Romanticism believed that readers loved such reality-drenched literary framings of imaginative fictions.

Mystery: Is there anything to this passion for factual accuracy in fiction beyond the obvious?

Surely there were no readers sending letters to secular writers like Walpole, Macpherson, Scott and Cooper saying, we beg you to seduce us with facts. Please overwhelm us with lying claims to factual authenticity!

What was going on?

I look forward to hearing in just a few more minutes your solutions.

RELIGIOUS WRITERS

We now cast a second glance at religious writers. They feel familiar.

Familiar? What makes a piece of writing feel familiar?

Anyone in this room can give the gist of ancient EXODUS and JOB. And Adventist prophetess Ellen White is our fellow American. Like older contemporary Fenimore Cooper, Ellen wrote in our language, experienced in our own land what our great-grandparents also experienced: an America full of religious inventiveness and sometimes frenzied experimentation.

What about EXODUS's claims to record Moses's direct, personal communications with God regarding the Commandments? What really happened?

-- Remember Cecil B. DeMille's epic starring Charlton Heston as Moses? God chiseled words into stone tablets with special Hollywood effects of lightning zaps.

-- In the spirit of John Calvin, some argue that EXODUS certifies its own truth ⁽⁴⁾.

-- Others believe Moses's historical poem a man-made myth, but nonetheless a "true" myth, because Jews included the story in the emerging Hebrew canon. That is, community acceptance authenticated the religious truth of the story.

Unlike EXODUS, the author of JOB tells a story as detachedly non-historical as the gothic CASTLE OF OTRANTO. JOB is first and foremost a poem. It feels like a parable spoken by Jesus. True, God is an active player in JOB. So is "the Satan." Unlike Horace Walpole, the author of JOB disdains to root his poetic vision in pre-existing documents or eyewitness accounts. He just tells his great tale. And yet readers instinctively feel: here be truth.

The astonishingly brilliant JOB is a beautiful, unadorned work of art. Yet, additionally, it feels "true," pointing to realities beyond the author's imagining. JOB reminds of a dialog with Socrates. Is this that Divine self-certification asserted by Calvin ⁽⁴⁾? Did the creators of the Jewish canon accept JOB's certifying itself as a gift from God?

For most of us, EXODUS and JOB are hard-wired parts of our personal religion. We defer reverently to these sacred texts. We no more doubt them than we ask why it is that we breathe.

But what if these texts were about someone else's religion?

Reflect on a cynical-sounding axiom that we may debate in a few minutes: "Nothing seems weirder than someone else's religion."

The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures are body and blood of our personal religion, of Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians. Scriptures present difficulties. But they seem no weirder to us than we seem to ourselves.

Dare we say the same, however, about how we judge other religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or even the self-proclaimed Christian religions created or refined in America such as Shakerism, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science and others such as Universalism or Scientology ?

Let's look again at made-in-America Seventh-day Adventism. Adventism had three 19th Century founders: Mr and Mrs James White and retired sea Captain Joseph Bates.

All made-in-America religions were created at a time when the press eagerly showcased newsworthy religious happenings and gleefully printed attacks upon new prophets. The new American religions also drew converts from among avid American readers of the fictions of Macpherson, Walpole, Scott, Shelley and Cooper.

Ellen White claimed personal revelations straight from God. Certainly, not one of Ellen White's ideas about good health was original with her. Scholars see her as a foremost popularizer of other people's ideas on health. She admitted, to take but one example, that she had read Amelia Bloomer's ideas on women's fashions. But God had revealed true doctrine before she read Mrs Bloomer -- and also before she read a wide range of other authors on other subjects. If a good idea proved true, Ellen first heard it from the mouth of God.

For two American religions the years 1844 - 1845 were especially important.

In June 1844 a mob killed Mormon prophet Joseph Smith in a Nauvoo, Illinois jail. On October 22, 1844 Jesus failed to appear, despite the Millerites' supremely confident predictions that He would. In February 1845, 17 year old Ellen Gould Harmon lay on a Maine parlor floor in a trance, describing visions and impressing mightily people around her. God would soon teach Ellen how to reinterpret the true meaning of Jesus's non-appearance in 1844.

Ellen White née Harmon spent her life preparing herself and her followers for the second coming of Jesus and teaching the ABCs of living healthily as ordained by God.

In his 2008 bestseller, THE BLUE ZONES, Dan Buettner demonstrated that Adventists clustered in and around Loma Linda, California live extraordinarily long, healthy, happy lives. Mrs White, using the awesome power of revelations, converted or strengthened millions of healthy-living vegetarians and non-users of tobacco, tea and coffee.

If Mormonism be not your religion, it seems weird that God revealed that Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and other Mormon adult male saints were authorized to have many wives.

Skeptical Smith biographer Fawn Brodie thinks that Joseph used his status as prophet to rationalize personal compulsion for sex with many women. Tiring of plain wife Emma, and surrounded by adoring female followers,

"he must soon have realized that for a prophet it is easier to change marriage laws than to contravene them." ⁽⁵⁾

If you are not a Seventh-day Adventist, it seems weird that God revealed contradictory things to Ellen White about tobacco, tea, coffee, butter, meat, corsets, women wearing pants, skirts to be so many inches above the ground, etc. Down the decades, White would fine tune and even radically correct her writings by invoking current recollections of earlier revelations by God. A vision itself had been indisputably true. Her words reporting that vision, had, however, sometimes, in retrospect, been inaccurate.

III. CONCLUSION

I sometimes think that I am the only member of a club in the International Association of Torch Clubs (IATC) that believes what I am now conluding by saying. Namely, that a speaker like me talks to a torch club just to stimulate and frame follow-on discussion among you members and your guests. Torch is about your comments and insights.

Some questions that you may now wish to debate might include:

-- (1) What is truth? What is fiction?

-- (2) What is writing? Is all writing in origin "fiction" or "poetry," in the Greek sense of being first and foremost a poieisis, a "making", a poem, an outpouring of personal imagination and creation? And only secondarily something else.

-- (3) Why do some writers of fiction, including Dan Brown in mystery-detective novel THE DA VINCI CODE, frame their fictions within a search for mysterious documents or external sources of historical truth?

-- (4) Jewish and Christian writers appeared upon history's stage. One by one their works were accepted within an emerging canon of divinely inspired literature -- or were denied canonical status. For what reasons? By what process?

-- (5) Accuracy and factuality in language can matter: e. g., when identifying the latitude and longitude of buried treasure, or when calculating distance and elevation of a cannon shot. Are authors to be blamed because they flesh out internal visions with alleged external facts?

-- (6) Is the man in the street more likely to accept something rationally defensible if it is also taught by his religion or ancient tradition? Does religion corroborate fact or fact corroborate religion? Did Socrates sense this when he wondered how to persuade citizens to believe his myth of four metals given by God to make up human beings? ⁽⁶⁾

Let the curtain now go up on the main show! Your reactions, if you please!

-OOO-

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END NOTES

(1) Exodus 32:16

(2) Exodus 34:1

(3) Job 38: 4,7

(4) Fawn M. Brodie. NO MAN KNOWS MY HISTORY, Ch XIII, p. 187.

(5) John Calvin. INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I.vii.2 and I.vii.4-5. 1536. 1559 (Latin editions.)

"Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit."

(6) Plato. REPUBLIC, Book Three, 414f.

IV. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Including (in blue) clickable
on-line book reviews by Patrick Killough.

-- HOLY BIBLE. Revised Standard Version. 1973.

-- Fawn M. Brodie. NO MAN KNOWS MY HISTORY: THE LIFE OF THE MORMON PROPHET JOSEPH SMITH. 1945. Second edition 1973. My copy 1995.

-- Dan Brown. THE DA VINCI CODE. 2003.

-- Dan Buettner. THE BLUE ZONES: LESSONS FOR LIVING LONGER FROM THE PEOPLE WHO'VE LIVED THE LONGEST. 2008.

-- John Calvin. INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. (Institutio Christianae religionis). 1536, 1559 (Latin). 1560 (French).

-- James Fenimore Cooper:

---- THE PILOT: A TALE OF THE SEA. 1823;

---- HOMEWARD BOUND. HOME AS FOUND. 1838.

-- George Dekker. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER:
THE AMERICAN SCOTT (1967).

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. THE SORROWS OF THE YOUNG WERTHER. 1774.

-- Stephen Gottschalk. THE EMERGENCE OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE IN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 1973.

-- Ronald Knox. ENTHUSIASM: A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE SVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 1950.

Knox's ENTHUSIAM, Ch XVIII, "A Profile of John Wesley," is the source for Wesley's extravagant praise of OSSIAN quoted in my remarks.

-- James Macpherson. FINGAL: AN ANCIENT EPIC POEM. 1761. THE WORKS OF OSSIAN. 1763.

-- Ronald L. Numbers.

---- PROPHETESS OF HEALTH: A STUDY OF ELLEN G. WHITE. 1972. 1992. 2008. Third Edition.

---- "Sex, Science, and Salvation: The Sexual Advice of Ellen G. White and John Harvey Kellogg," pp. 206 - 226 in Charles E. Rosenberg, ed., RIGHT LIVING: AN ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADITION OF SELF-HELP MEDICINE AND HYGIENE. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003.

-- Plato. THE REPUBLIC. c. 380 B.C.

-- Fiona Robertson. LEGITIMATE HISTORIES: SCOTT, GOTHIC, AND THE AUTHORITIES OF FICTION. 1994.

-- William Safire. THE FIRST DISSIDENT: THE BOOK OF JOB IN TODAY'S POLITICS. 1992.

-- Sir Walter Scott:

---- THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. 1805;

---- THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 1810;

---- WAVERLEY. 1814;

---- THE TALE OF OLD MORTALITY. 1816;

---- THE PIRATE. 1821.

-- John Patrick Shanley. DOUBT: A PARABLE. 2005.

DOUBT is Shanley's Pulitzer Prize winning stage play about a 1960s Brooklyn nun who asscuses a much younger priest of molesting a Catholic school's only black student. In 2008 the play was made into a feature film. Meryl Streep as school principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier won an Oscar for best actress of 2008.

In the Preface to the published text of his play, author Shanley wrote that our American stage culture has become dominated by courtroom scenes, accusations, judgments and verdicts.

"Discussion has given way to debates. Communication has become a contest of wills. Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere."

COMMENT: it is my personal belief that the free give and take of Torch Club evenings is a healthy antidote to a culture of talk for the sake of defeating an opponent. TPK 02/06/2010.

-- Mary Shelley. FRANKENSTEIN 1818.

-- Horace Walpole. THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO. 1864.

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FOLLOW - ON NOTES AND COMMENTS

(Work in earliest progress 02/06/2010)

Fifteen souls braved snow and freezing rain to attend my remarks in uptown Asheville 02/04/2010. Our 30 minutes of follow-on discussion, the maximum permitted by Torch Club tradition, was spirited and, as I had hoped, marked by striking flashes of insight and experience from members and guests. My wife Dr Mary K Killough took notes of the discussion and I will draw on those notes and my own recollection to flesh out and continue the notions of that wintry evening.

-OOO-

Wednesday 02/06/2010

TPK
Black Mountain, North Carolina