The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

In his contribution to The Stone last week, Alex Rosenberg posed a defense of naturalism — “the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge” — at the expense of other theoretical endeavors such as, notably, literary theory. To the question of “whether disciplines like literary theory provide real understanding,” Professor Rosenberg’s answer is as unequivocal as it is withering: just like fiction, literary theory can be “fun,” but neither one qualifies as “knowledge.”

Literature has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.

Though the works of authors like Sophocles, Dante or Shakespeare certainly provide us with enjoyment, can we really classify what they have produced as “fun”? Are we not giving the Bard and others short shrift when we treat their work merely as entertainment? Does their fictional art not offer insights into human nature as illuminating as many of those the physical sciences have produced?



As a literary theorist, I suppose I could take umbrage at the claim that my own discipline, while fun, doesn’t rise to the level of knowledge. But what I’d actually like to argue goes a little further. Not only can literary theory (along with art criticism, sociology, and yes, non-naturalistic philosophy) produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Professor Rosenberg’s assertions, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.

We especially revere the genius of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I’d like to focus on the genius of another writer, a Spanish one, Miguel de Cervantes, who shaped our world as well, and did so in ways that may not be apparent even to those aware of his enormous literary influence. With the two parts of “Don Quixote,” published in 1605 and 1615 respectively, Cervantes created the world’s first bestseller, a novel that, in the words of the great critic Harold Bloom, “contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”

As if that were not enough, in writing those volumes Cervantes did something even more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. What he passed down to those who would write in his wake, then, was not merely a new genre but an implicit worldview that would infiltrate every aspect of social life: fiction.

Leif Parsons

What is fiction? And how does reading fiction affect how we experience the world?

The literary historian Luiz Costa Lima has argued that prior to the invention of fiction, narratives were largely measured against one overriding standard: the perceived truthfulness of their relation to the world. That truth was often a moral or theological one, and to the extent that narratives related the deeds of men, proximity to an image of virtue or holiness would be considered worthy of imitation, and distance from it worthy of opprobrium.

Fiction is different.

For a prose narrative to be fictional it must be written for a reader who knows it is untrue and yet treats it for a time as if it were true. The reader knows, in other words, not to apply the traditional measure of truthfulness for judging a narrative; he or she suspends that judgment for a time, in a move that Samuel Taylor Coleridge popularized as “the willing suspension of disbelief,” or “poetic faith.” Another way of putting this is to say that a reader must be able to occupy two opposed identities simultaneously: a naïve reader who believes what he is being told, and a savvy one who knows it is untrue.

In order to achieve this effect the author needs to pull off a complex trick. At every step of the way, a fictional narrative both knows more and less than it is telling us. It speaks always with at least two voices, at times representing the limited perspective of its characters, at times revealing to the reader elements of the story unknown to some or all of those characters.

While writers prior to Cervantes deployed elements of this fictional template, he was the first to use the technique as a basis of a full-blown, extended narrative. In order to do this, Cervantes imported into the art of prose narration a ploy he learned from his favorite art form, the one he most desperately wished to excel at — the theater. Like a playwright including a play within a play, with characters dividing into actors and audience members on the stage, Cervantes made his book be about books, and turned his characters into readers of and characters in those books.

Cervantes is parodying our inability to suspend the judgment of truth and falsity that reduces all narrative to one standard.

In one of the many debates about literature that take place in “Don Quixote,” the canon, a staunch critic of the kind of reading that occupies his good friend, says, “For my part I can say that when I read the tales of chivalry, as long as I avoid thinking about the fact that they are all lies and frivolity, they give me some enjoyment. But when I realize what they are, I throw the best of them against the wall, and would even throw them into the fire if I had one close by, which they richly deserve, as false and deceiving and outside of the treatment required by common nature, and as inventors of new sects and new lifestyles, and as giving the common people reason to believe and accept as true all the stupidities they contain.”

One of the standard scholarly interpretations of “Don Quixote” is that Cervantes wrote it principally as a send-up and criticism of the romances that passed for literature at the time. But this reading fails to see how the book holds all positions, even that one, up to criticism. Cervantes is not parodying the tales of chivalry but rather the inability to suspend the judgment of truth and falsity that reduces all narrative to one standard.

Cervantes multiplies levels of authorship and readership from the first lines of his masterpiece. The front matter of his book is packed with poems of praise ridiculing the practice of packing books with poems of praise; the author’s place of authority is also quickly undermined, as the narrator claims the book to be the work of an Arab historian that he had translated by a market scribe.

In all cases Cervantes is playing with the previously established conventions of storytelling, and then incorporating that play into his work. The result is a world that mirrors our own, because it includes in its purview our representations of the world and how we judge them. His novel becomes a mise en abyme, with representations of representations of representations, creating characters whose blindness as to the perspectives of those around them becomes the central source of drama and laughter.

In one famous episode, Don Quixote and his squire Sancho encounter a barber from whom the Don had previously stolen a basin, convinced that it was the famous magical helmet of the legendary — and fictional — king, Mambrino. Sancho had also taken advantage of the fight to steal the man’s packsaddle, and when the barber accuses them of theft before a group of fellow travelers, Quixote responds by declaring him under the sway of an enchantment. When the barber turns to the other travelers to verify his version of the story, they decide to play a trick on him and pretend that they too see a helmet and not a basin. There is no question but that this is a joke, and that in “reality” the packsaddle and the basin have never been anything but what they are. In one of the book’s great comic moments, Quixote admits that, if they want his opinion, the packsaddle looks like a packsaddle, but that he is not about to take a position on that matter.

Political leaders have become remarkably adept at manipulating the fictional worldview to their own ends.

The point to stress is that the characters can argue about the nature of their perceptions only insofar as we, the readers, have a concept of reality that is independent of their various reports. In fact, the common notion of objective reality that most of us would recognize today and the one on which Professor Rosenberg’s defense of naturalism rests — as that which persists independent of our subjective perspectives — is mutually dependent on the multiple perspectives cultivated by the fictional worldview. It is not a coincidence that the English term “reality” and its cognates in the other European languages only entered into usage between the mid-16th and early-17th century, depending on the language. (In the case of Spain, the first recorded usage was two years after the first book of “Don Quixote” was published.) And it was not until Descartes wrote his “Meditations” at the end of the 1630s that a rigorous distinction between how things appear to me and how they are independent of my perspective entered the philosophical lexicon.

As readers of the novel, in which we must relate conflicting reports about reality to the independent reality required by the story, we divide ourselves into two, and momentarily forget to ask the question of how the fictional interior reality relates to our own. This division of the self was the active ingredient in the German Romantics’ reinterpretation of irony, which they often based on readings of Cervantes, and which they identified as the key trope of aesthetic modernity.

The fictional worldview, then, is one in which we are able to divide our selves to assume simultaneously opposing consciousnesses, and to enter and leave different realities at will, all the while voluntarily suspending judgments concerning their relation to an ultimate reality. This worldview has had an extraordinarily powerful impact on the modern world; in some interpretations it is the very epistemological signature of modernity, affecting equally our thought and politics as thoroughly as it does our art and literature.

Take the impact on politics. People in the modern, industrialized world tend to ally their identities with large symbolic bodies called nations, and then within those nations with other more intimate groupings — from religious communities to sexual orientations to nuclear family units. Political leaders have become remarkably adept at manipulating the fictional worldview to rally these various levels of identification to their own ends. But if the fictional worldview allows for such manipulation, it also gives us the tools to fight back — tools Cervantes already developed at the dawn of the modern age.

In an interview published in The New York Times Magazine in 2004, Ron Suskind quoted an aide to then-president George W. Bush who mocked him and other journalists for their allegiance to “the reality-based community.” The administration’s apparent nonchalance about truth, along with its skill at using the media to influence the public’s perception of world events, inspired the comedian Stephen Colbert to arm his right-wing alter-ego with lexical zingers like “truthiness” (“the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”) and that non plus ultra for all political debate, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” When Colbert pushed his act to its extreme, roasting Mr. Bush and the Washington press corps in their presence, he was borrowing from Cervantes’ repertoire to cross swords on a battlefield at least in part of Cervantes’ making. The battle was over reality, and whose version of it would hold sway; the weapon was the irony that only fiction supports.

“The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady,” Colbert said, standing in front of the president of the United States. “You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.” Colbert’s routine mocked the administration’s slippery relation to truth (what happened Tuesday), and identified the president’s famous “resolution” as the character trait that the administration relied on to sell their version of reality.

The brilliance of Colbert’s attack, though, lay in how it was delivered. Colbert’s body was inhabited by two conflicting realities, one in which “Colbert” was a right-wing pundit expressing his admiration for the president, and another that undermined the first by reveling in its inanities. Like Cervantes before him, Colbert used irony to sever his audiences’ conflated identities; the discomfort and hilarity of his act stemmed from our watching as fictions that had blurred into truths were expertly extracted and revealed for what they were.

As Cervantes realized in the context of the newly born mass culture of the Catholic, imperial, Spanish state, irony expertly wielded is the best defense against the manipulation of truth by the media. Its effect was and still is to remind its audience that we are all active participants in the creation and support of a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality.



William Egginton is Andrew. W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is “In Defense of Religious Moderation.”

