SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE)

 

Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. --Mark Twain (or someone imitating him).

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

I’m reasonably sure that neither Twain nor Melville were first to observe that the pure artifice of fiction—whether one calls it “sense” or “symmetry”-- was radically different from the chaos of experience known as “the real world.” Of the two, though, Melville’s term proves more piquant in terms of its associations.

I introduced the concept of “artifice” as a counter to that of “verisimilitude,” and in this essay I aligned verisimilitude with the world of finite things, perata, and artifice with the world of the theoretically infinite, apeiron. Melville’s alignment of “fable/fiction” with “symmetry” has a related appeal, not least because he seems to be saying that the world of facts and reality is by contrast dominated by “asymmetry,” signified by his claim that “truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.”

Assuming that this projected parallel is a fair extension of Melville’s thought, what’s “asymmetrical” about “truth” in its connotation of factual occurrences? The sense I get from Melville’s “ragged edges” is that the real world, unlike the world of fiction and fable, doesn’t ever come to a designated end, be that ending comic or tragic. Reality just goes on and on and on—and so do people. Though the sailors who witness Billy Budd’s symbolic crucifixion are impressed enough that they keep in their hearts “the image of the Handsome Sailor,” people who never met Billy will not only not know of him, they may believe the false reports of newspapers (the “fake news” of the day) that claimed the Handsome Sailor was a base mutineer.

In contrast, though there may not be such a thing as an absolutely “pure fiction,” fiction is “symmetrical” in terms of using recognizable tropes to put across emotional effects. In creating BILLY BUDD Melville knows that by using tropes that associated the titular sailor with Jesus Christ, he can produce a symmetrical effect in which Billy’s sacrificial death parallels that of Jesus. That is not to say that any reader will make a strict one-on-one equation of the two: at most Billy Budd is a literary “imitatio Dei.”

Further, the tropes used in art and literature must be judged to be “open signifiers” after the fashion of Jung’s archetypes. Neither tropes nor archetypes have content as such: their content changes according to the way they are used by creators. Melville uses Christian sacrificial tropes to impress his readers with the nobility of the central character and the pathos of his sacrifice to the “god” of mortal expedience. Another author, however, may use the same images to different effects. The tropes belonging to artifice are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is,” no matter whether the reality is that of ancient Rome or 19^th-century Nantucket. Their effect is asymmetrical insofar as they function to either counteract or at least counterpoint the symmetry of artifice.