learning things from fictions

"Introduction"
in The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula LeGuin
New York: Penguin Group
1976

LeGuin, in the introduction, treats the question "How and what can we learn from science fictions?" (or at least her fictions). There's a puzzle: she writes, "I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth." As she puts it elsewhere, given that fictions are packs of lies, it is very strange to think that we could learn anything from them. How can we get closer to the truth by reading falsehoods? I think that LeGuin provides some part of an answer when she first references thought-experiments in science, and then writes, "I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information [information about the future]... All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like--what's going on--what the weather is now, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen." And later, "Yes, indeed the people in it [The Left Hand of Darkness] are androgynous, but that doesn't mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing."

There's a lot to be gained from these comments; I'll do my best with it. One thing to be learned is, in a way, that the purpose of novels is to teach us new concepts, or to show us our old concepts (or, equivalently, our old world) in a new light. LeGuin, for example, states that she wants to show us that we're androgynous already. She doesn't do this by telling us anything substantive new about ourselves - rather, she provides the concepts (the facility and flexibility with concepts) that enables us to come to substantive judgments about ourselves, here and now.*

This, interestingly, means that, in a way, there's little difference between those fictions that have been written, and those that are merely possible or speculated upon. That is, we can (in a sense, for the details are often lacking in speculated-upon fictions, and all the important bits are in the details) learn as much from what LeGuin hasn't written, the ending she didn't write, as the ending she did. It is their possibility, not their actuality, that concerns us.**

Of course, there are reasons that we have for taking the actual version as more worthy of discussion than the possible one. One reason is discussed elsewhere here - we don't have time to consider every possible fiction, every possible world, so we stick to the ones that the authors seem to have had in mind, for they probably knew a thing or two.

Much of this is echoed in Cora Diamond's "Missing the Adventure," in her Realism and the Realistic Spirit.

Anyways, perhaps of this explains why it is one of my ambitions, albeit one I don't pursue as continuously as others, to write a novel. There are some ways I'd like to get people to see the world, and I think a novel might be a good way to do that.

* There can be other sorts of fictions, which take substantive truths that we might not have thought to combine, and bring them together in new ways to show us new substantive truths. Many of Eintein's thought experiments function like this.

** This commits me to the claim, I think, that fictions are descriptions of possible worlds. Books like House of Leaves play hell with that notion. I don't yet know what to do with such books.