SUSAN HAACK
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doesn't convey the truths (or falsehoods) it conveys by stating them, but
by making statements which, being about fictional characters, are
not
true.
Though it would take a whole other paper to unpack that "conveys,"
an example will illustrate the idea. Alison Lurie's novel,
Imaginary
Friends,
conveys without stating some of the same truths that Leon Fes–
tinger's studies of cognitive dissonance convey by stating. Festinger
describes experiments and social-scientific studies of people's reactions
to inconsistency or "dissonance" in their beliefs, or between their beliefs
and their attitudes; predicting,
inter alia,
that if their prophesies are fal–
sified, members of millennial sects won't give them up, but will reinter–
pret them, and/or start proselytizing more energetically. Lurie tells the
story of two sociologists who pretend to join the spiritualist sect they
are studying, and, with the others, wait for Ro of Varna to come to
earth in his spaceship as the Message promised . When, apparently,
nothing happens, the real members of the sect don't lose faith; Ro
has
come, his spirit has entered one of them. Which one?-the senior soci–
ologist, who soon starts to believe it himself, and by the time the novel
ends is off his head entirely.
A novelist, I shall say (using "pretending," as distinct from "feign–
ing," to mark the difference between fiction and fraud), pretends to
refer, pretends to state truths, but with no intent to deceive his readers.
As this reveals, the possibility of fictional pretended-reference is para–
sitic on the practice of regular reference to real people, events, etc., and
the practice of truth-conveying on the practice of truth-stating.
The truths that works of literature convey aren't peculiar literary
truths, but regular truths, sometimes as startlingly familiar as the truths
about
homo academicus
that Malcolm Bradbury conveys in
Stepping
Westward
about James Walker and his colleagues at Benedict Arnold
College, or David Lodge in
Changing Places
about Morris Zapp and his
colleagues at Euphoric State and the University of Rummidge. Perhaps
there are moods that can only be evoked or emotions that can only be
expressed by obliquely literary means; but there are no truths that can
be fictionally conveyed but cannot, even in principle, even at clumsy
length, be stated . Here I'm with Frank Ramsey:
"If
you can't say it, you
can't say it, and you can't whistle it, either"; which, however, is by no
means to say that all truths fall within the scope of the sciences to dis–
cover.
As everyone knows whose first chemistry lesson, like mine, was
devoted to the use of the passive voice, a studiedly neutral "style of no
style" has become the norm in scientific writing. Insofar as the goal is
