Fiction and the Weave of Life

by John Gibson

Literature is a source of understanding and insight into the human condition. Yet ever since Aristotle, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible account of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary work means that literature concerns itself not with the real world but with other worlds - what are commonly called fictional worlds. How is it, then, that fictions can tell us something of consequence about reality? In Fiction and the Weave of Life , John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and life, and shows that literature's great cultural and cognitive value is inseparable from its fictionality and inventiveness.

Genres: Philosophy

212 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2007

Reviews

[withdrawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll start with an admission that I was first attracted to this book by the cover. Doré’s Don Quixote in his library, the cover illustration, is my identifying picture in Goodreads. But I was also drawn by the subject matter in which the author, John Gibson, sets out to explore a tension that he sees between two intuitions of what literature means to us or how literature relates to life, an approach to answering, “Why do we read?”
The tension he perceives is one between the intuition that “we turn [to literature] when we want to read the story of our shared form of life: our moral and emotional, social and sexual, -- and so on for whatever aspects of life we think literature brings to life – ways of being human.” The other intuition is “that in literature the imaginative basis of literary creation presents to the reader not her world but other worlds, what we commonly call ‘fictional worlds’.” How do we reconcile that fact that we read fiction to better understand our world when the world of fiction is not the same world? In attempting to resolve this tension, Gibson takes on both traditional analytic philosophers and deconstructionists/poststructuralists. The position he sets out to defend is that of what he calls the ‘literary humanist’ who would say that literature involves a cognitive engagement with the world in living out our lives as humans.
Gibson presents his arguments in clear, usually comprehensible, language and concise, complete arguments. He progresses by putting forth what he sees as the counter arguments of his opponents against humanist positions. The opponent is ‘the sceptic’. Gibson gives much weight to these counter arguments using them to narrow down his own position, sort of Socratic argument in reverse and quite effective. My basic problem with the method is that, as with Socrates, not all plausible positions can be covered in such a short book. While choosing strong opponents to struggle with, Gibson has still been selective in only choosing opponents who lob off those aspects of humanist positions which he doesn’t need to champion his literary humanist position.
Finally, Gibson wants to present the literary humanist position as one in which our responses to fiction serve to direct us to the world and reveal the world more clearly to us by enriching our cognitive engagement with the world. This cognitive engagement with the world does not bring us new truths about the world but effects how we bring meaning and significance to our experiences in the world. Rather than bringing us new knowledge, literature broadens our experience of the world making us more aware and sensitive to what we do know and how it relates to human activity and our social practices. We thus fit what we know into “the weave of life”.
“The weave of life” is a metaphor which seems to suggest the richness of our lives and how we live. It carries a suggestion of depth. I am not sure that I am finally satisfied with Gibson’s model but I do identify with much of his view. I do remain suspicious that he has moved me too smoothly through various arguments, perhaps not taking into account new ideas from cognitive science and related philosophical theories. It has been an entertaining and challenging read, however, and I have much more to think about in my own questioning of why and how we interpret literary fiction. A good book with a great cover.

[Searnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paradoxically, those that would defend the value of reading fiction by virtue of its instrumental connection to non-fictional life, i.e. its prompting readers "to get up and do something" in their "real" lives, instead, seriously undermine the very value of reading fiction that they sought to support. In "Fiction and the weave of our life", John Gibson argues for a solution to this ancient, and always already wholesale dismissal of fiction's connection to our non-fictional lives.
One of the difficulties in closing or crossing the gap between fiction and life, however, is the sweet appeal of the instrumental argument itself. No one denies that reading fiction impacts a reader's life, but how it does so may not always meet well with the social activism implied in the domain of instrumentalism. What is at stake here then is the fiction itself. That is, in the case of the instrumental demand for "doing", the fiction, which seems to share the fate of Wittgenstein's beetle, drops out of the picture. (The "animal lives" literature that rose from the corps of Coetzee's novel "Elizabeth Costello" illustrates the danger, the habit of instrumentalism to collapse fiction into fact.)
Here it serves best to switch from the image of crossing the gap between fiction and life to closing that gap by the crisscrossing of conceptual threads; the image that neatly knits with Gibson's use of the "weave of life" in the title of this work is that of a spindle. For this reader, Gibson's successful entwining of the threads of fiction and life into a coherent tapestry depends on two spindles: one is the notion of social practices, and the second is the notion of supervenience. The threads that run off these spindles offer a "naturalistic", or a "what is given" account of our relationship to and our use of fiction. In short, no theories need apply to justify the social practices that enable us fact to tell fact from fiction or as in the case of "thought experiments" to use fiction to illustrate issues of reality. Additionally, and this where the supervenience enters, Gibson notes that we have no trouble understanding the lyrics of romantic songs, which, for example, often suffer from slippery pronouns. That means that significance, meaningfulness nevertheless arises for listeners out of...what shall one say...nonsense. But, if one changes or tightens say the grammar (whether linguistically or musically) of the tune, the tune loses its previous impact. This supervenience aspect of our relationship to fictions (et al) means that the fiction never suffers the fate of Wittgenstein's beetle. Thus, fictions can inspire readers "to be out of doors doing" and yet remain near at hand to please, delight, and inspire wonder.