Fiction, Characters, Reality, Text

In response to the previous posting, Danny asks, first of all, if the Bible is a work of historical fiction, and if so, was Abraham the product of someone’s imagination? Both of these questions suggest that there is a dichotomy between persons and characters, between history and fiction. I’m not so sure. I think that our perception of reality is so shaped by the text, by the author, that once we have the written text, it’s very hard to separate that text from the reality of what happened. And in the case of events when we only have the text, that written version subsumes reality; it becomes the reality of those events. To see that idea more clearly, let’s look at a few examples that are not as highly charged as Genesis.

Benjamin Franklin is one example of this difficulty. He left us his autobiography, but the character Franklin in the autobiography is apparently quite different from the actual Franklin who participated in the drafting of our constitution. Franklin himself has altered the reality of his character, merely by writing about himself. In the case of Franklin, however, because we have an historical record, many original documents, his biographers can try to reconstruct the person, and the events of his time, although even these efforts are affected by their authors’ biases and perspectives. My favorite example of this dilemma, because these ideas are informed by Bloom, is Hamlet. There probably was a prince of Denmark named Hamlet. He lived and died, and may have done something good for his subjects. But for all practical purposes today, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is more real than this person. We know more about the character Hamlet, and what he thought, and this character has had a far greater impact on human thought, and human history, than the original guy ever did. While both the character and the Prince are real, the former is only one who makes any difference to us today. A more remote example is someone who fought at Troy, say Odysseus. Today it hardly matters whether there even was an Odysseus; all that matters to us is the Odyssey. The Odyssey is more real than anything that ever happened between the Greeks and the Trojans. And Odysseus is far more real than any Greek person of that time.

So this leaves me with two theses: first, the process of writing about events changes those events. It’s sort of a variation on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states than an observation alters an event, and so we can’t ever know exactly about that event, because our attempt to understand it (our observation) had irrevocably changed the event. The second idea is that, when we are left with only a text, and no writing other than that text, the text has become the reality. Thus, it’s not important whether the text is fiction or history; in fact, there is really no such distinction under those circumstances. There is only the text. Similarly, there is no longer any distinction between the person and the character. There is only Odysseus. So the entire reality about those events and that person is found in the surviving text.

The greatest difficulty comes when we look at the basic assumption – is Genesis a text written by a person? Or is Genesis part of the revealed word of God, given to Moses on Sinai? If the latter, then my attempts to understand that text, and also my musings about Abraham, are futile. But if Genesis was written by people, and if the events in Genesis had been passed down orally from the time of the Patriarchs, then it’s possible to have a different understanding of Abraham. After all, in most other disciplines, human understanding is not regarded as fixed and immutable. Newton thought he had figured out how the universe worked, but Einstein (and others) discovered that Newton’s understanding was incomplete. Why can’t we revisit the events of Genesis and try to understand more clearly, and with greater appreciation, what actually happened? I think my ideas, as uninformed as they are, give us reason to be more appreciative, not less, of the contributions of Judaism. I think it’s possible that Genesis, the first book of the Torah, is not the literal word of God, yet at the same time a more important and influential text for that very reason.