Matters of Fact & Fiction: Finding Truth in Speculative Literature
By Editor-in-Chief Nicolette D’Angelo ’19
Last spring at the Princeton University Art Museum, Colson Whitehead spoke about The Underground Railroad, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel which recounts the story of two slaves, Cora and Caesar, running through an alternative antebellum United States away from plantation life. As Whitehead explained before reading a few excerpts, the novel is a thought experiment hinging on one simple premise: what would have happened if the underground railroad wasn’t just a metaphor? What if instead it were an actual railroad, with tracks and locomotives operated by conductors and engineers secretly beneath Southern soil? Sixteen-year-old Cora marvels at such a system’s existence upon seeing the railroad for the first time, comparing it to slave work. To her, much like harvesting cotton, the railroad
“was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but not one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them. The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables — this was a marvel to be proud of. She wondered if those who had built this thing had received their proper reward.”
The novel’s own intrigue with the idea of the railroad recalls a childhood memory common to most American readers: the memory of when we were first told — perhaps at school or at home — that, no, the underground railroad was not literally a railroad, but was instead a codeword for the covert routes and safe houses used by runaway African American slaves in their escape to freedom. By recalling this innocent naivete, Whitehead validates the sort of innate, imaginative affinities for dignity and justice we tend to have intrinsically as children; a lost sense of Amelia Bedelia-esque moral literalism we’ve since been told to discard for more pragmatic philosophies (for a cause like ending slavery, why wouldn’t we be that inventive?)
In other words, Whitehead, through literature, has invented a history which many of us once imagined to have happened in order to reenvision and question the history that did happen. The result is a novel that calls attention to the cruel mistakes of America’s past in such a way that, while meaningfully resonating with our present moment, does exactly not align with what are considered to be the facts of history. “I didn’t stick to the facts,” Whitehead told NPR in a 2016 interview about his writing process. “I guess I tell myself I stuck to the truth.” In the same vein, it becomes productive to approach The Underground Railroad — and, with it, fictional writing about history in general — open to the consideration that fiction can be at once both contrafactual and true.
Popular support for such an approach was not so palpable, however, during the Whitehead reading itself, particularly during Q&A at the event’s conclusion. One woman in the audience asked why Whitehead in writing The Underground Railroad would choose to explore the landscape of an “alternative” United States history, rather than the one that, insofar as we know, actually happened. Why, she asked Whitehead, “would you choose to ground your novel in a fictive proposition rather than in matters of historical fact?”
This question was valid in a certain sense. Before his reading excerpts aloud, Whitehead had stressed the thorough scope and sheer amount of research involved in writing The Underground Railroad: a process that was ongoing for sixteen years, ever since the idea for the novel originally occurred to him. Given all the slave narratives he studied in order to populate his own narrative world — for example, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and how it deeply informed the characterization of Cora, his novel’s female protagonist — one might indeed wonder why Whitehead then chose to add a fictive framework to the rich primary source texts he had read. After all, it was not technically necessary to reimagine the Underground Railroad when one did exist in time and space in some capacity, albeit mostly metaphorically.
I nonetheless still felt perplexed by the woman’s question. Her phrasing desperately insisted upon “fact” as some sort of prerequisite for progress, implying that even an African American novelist should avoid taking liberties with a story about the United States’ own troubled past with liberties.
As the reader might already be aware, this implication is a dangerous one that speaks to ever-present political demands for empirical fact to prove often unquantifiable structures of oppression such as racism, sexism, (post)colonialism, the list goes on. I’d say this is a fairly universal anxiety in our current political moment, even for lovers of fiction and fans of authors such as Whitehead whose work seeks to reimagine and rework history. Both leading up to and since the 2016 election, the dominant response to new developments in American politics seems to be and have been a “hermeneutics of suspicion”: an against-the-grain technique of always reading between the lines, constantly doubting the information presented to us (especially when presented by politicians). On all sides of the political spectrum, there is a deep-seated commitment to being hermeneutically suspicious toward media, as well, even though it is thanks to the media that we possess obsessive, ongoing inventories of politicians’ omissions, mistakes and missteps. It is maybe for this reason that many politicians explicitly tell their supporters to ignore certain partisan or biased media outlets, further encouraging distrust en masse.
In the face of these complicated contradictions, the only refuge seems to be the faithful solidity of fact, be that fact historical, scientific or otherwise. Facts bring with them objectivity — they appear to be prior to mankind, to our defects and deceptions, corresponding instead to some world of Forms somewhere in the ether. This preoccupation with fact is often present on both sides of the political spectrum, regardless of one’s partisanship or education. Some, for example, want scandals to be substantiated and “political correctness” to be dismissed as bogus. Others want global climate change and evolution to be universally acknowledged as real, or mental illness, or the somatic consequences of oppressive systems like racism and classism.
Maybe it was well-intentioned, then, that the woman’s question at the Whitehead’s reading seemed most preoccupied with fact: perhaps, like myself, she wanted the important historical underpinnings of The Underground Railroad to remain intact at the same time that they were reimagined through fiction. But ultimately, her reflexive, knee-jerk preoccupation is likely a crutch, a point elucidated quite thoroughly in the work of French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour.
In a prescient 2004 lecture called “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? Matters of Fact and Concern”, Latour has a lot to say about “matters of fact,” namely about the dangers of “accepting much too uncritically what matters of fact [are].” In this regard he takes issue with not just French society, but also with other academics, particularly their tendency to 1) only legitimize facts which, if real, are suitable to their beliefs, ideological interests and cherished objects of study, only to then 2) deconstruct ideas or behaviors which are ideologically unpalatable by comparison, or worse, 3) just ignore anything which doesn’t fit into this schema. The facts are, consequently, whatever is either untouched or leftover when the critic is done disassembling everything else.
Based on this picture of the critic’s method, Latour takes issue with the sheer “barbarity” of academia today, especially insofar as it seems not to want to multiply knowledge, but to subtract. That is, not to further or add to our fledgling understanding of the world, but rather “to destroy” — not only “religion, power, discourse, hegemony,” etc., but even scientific objects in the process. And as a result of this situation, “the level of realism never increases.” Instead, we obsessively pick and choose, leaving behind a small number of subjectively-filtered, politically useful objective facts, while the rest is said to be “socially constructed” in such a way that sometimes dismisses the real processes behind social construction as being inconsequential. This is a phenomenon that might be familiar to anyone who has taken a university liberal arts course of any kind.
What’s most concerning about such a “fact or fairy” process, especially as it happens in higher education, is its hypocrisy. In the same breath that critics may call modern and historical understandings of gender relations “socially constructed”, they might also want politicians to listen to them about facts of the matter pertaining to the realities of wage disparity, domestic violence and poverty, among other issues which themselves are not immune to their own measures of construction and ambiguity, despite nonetheless being pressing and important policy concerns. There is clearly a double standard here, in that the same person — well-intentioned, I’m sure — decides that some facts should never be questioned, while others deserved to be. What has resulted is a constant progression and regression of knowledge around highly contested political topics to which many intimately link their personal identities and beliefs. (It is perhaps not unrelated that, as Latour says, “the humanities have lost the hearts of their fellow citizens.”)
My motivation here has not been to condemn the academy alone or wholesale, nor has it been to wholly demonize the spirit of contemporary critique which, in its noblest form, seeks to deconstruct our everyday world in order to ask how, why and by whose help or harm we got here, as well as whether this world is the only one possible for us. Arguably Whitehead’s historical strategy is one which academia explicitly condemns. It is never considered rigorous, especially historiographically, to propose a contrary-to-fact hypothesis (i.e. “What if Hitler won WWII?”). Nevertheless, “If not this, then what would life be like?” is one question which always seems to preoccupy our sociological dreams, prompting successful (but less dreamlike) arguments against violence, prejudice and oppression. But rarely is this question among those which are allowed to make it onto paper.
* * *
Months later, enrolled in a course on “Medical Storyworlds” sponsored by a 2017–18 initiative by the Princeton Humanities Council to address the medical humanities, I was reminded of Whitehead’s reading and Q&A. For class we were assigned to read the article “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination Through Speculative Methods” by Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist and associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton. Despite the fact that “Racial Fictions, Biological Facts” was published in the second volume of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience and at first has the veneer of a typical journal article, to refer to it as such would be inaccurate. After an aptly-titled first section called “The facts alone will not save us”, in the second section the reader finds themselves reading a science-fiction short story “Ferguson is the Future”. Set in 2064, the story explores how the 50th anniversary of Ferguson is being celebrated through a regenerative medicine initiative that seeks to revive victims of police brutality from cryosleep.
According to Benjamin herself, “Ferguson is the Future” is a “critique of the power/knowledge nexus through narrative”. Narrative in this context seeks to
“reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world — alternatives to capitalism, racism, and patriarchy — are urgently needed. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with different scenarios, trajectories and reversals… Such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our versions of what is possible.”
Despite the fact that Benjamin’s story is set in “a not-too-distant future where race, science, and subjectivity are reconfigured differently, defiantly, and hopefully”, I do not see it as operating in an ideological framework any different from that which underlies The Underground Railroad. While Whitehead’s novel works in the opposite temporal direction, focusing its efforts on the past, it similarly provides a new imaginative landscape upon which we can map these possibilities, useful because of its counterfactuality, rather than in spite of it. Both Benjamin and Whitehead’s stories in this way are imaginative endeavors to account for atrocities that are so unreal, to the extent that the only solution of thinking through them is an unreal literary topography: not where fact resides, but where truth does. Especially given how this truth concerns race and racial relations in the United States, Benjamin is seeking to with question, then, in the words of Amade M’charek, Professor of Anthropology of Science at the University of Amsterdam, “How is race simultaneously factual and fictional?”
M’charek’s question brings us back to the question posed at Whitehead’s reading: a very different question in which factuality and fictionality seem diametrically opposed. Again, like so many of us (including Latour’s portrait of today’s critics) she may have had her heart in the right place. Especially in a society where everyone must find a way to legitimate their point of view empirically, it’s dangerously easy to mistake “objectivity” and “fact” as magic words, the single most powerful weapons available for fighting the chimera of hermeneutic suspicion, doubt and the half-ironic battlecry of “fake news.”
But what if we were to stop privileging fact as final, as the end-all be-all of knowledge production? What if we could elevate the truths gleaned through fiction to the same status? It is, after all, perhaps the upfront fictionality of their work which has made Whitehead and Benjamin so successful. If their prose had remained in the confines of nineteenth century white audiences’ ideas of what a slave story was (or should) be, or operated only in the register of how we already talk about atrocities like Ferguson, these authors might have been confined to our everyday realm of knowing, a realm where we often find ourselves unable to unlearn socialized ways of thinking and talking about problem-resolution which are, frankly, boring. Furthermore, this is also the realm where, according to certain actors and ideologies, some ideas are considered objective while others are entirely discarded, leaving no place for any truth to come from the contrafactual: from what Benjamin calls “speculative methods” of experimental storytelling in scholarly and political practice. These methods may remind us of a way of thinking usually attributed to the imagination of children, but by virtue of this resemblance, speculative methods may pedagogically possess what we need as readers, writers, and citizens to reinterpret the issues our world faces both today and with its past.
Ultimately, the practice of these speculative methods is not meant to erase or deny what we think we know about the past, but rather to supplement this knowledge, acknowledging how often it is by the design of certain past forces that holes and gaps exist in the archive. In other words, that which has rendered historical knowledge inaccessible is exactly what makes the use of speculative methods necessary for imagining not only other ways of living with these forces, but also other worlds where they no longer exist. Though I am unsure what truths will be revealed as we become willing to engage with these methods, I doubt any of them could be stranger or more dangerous than the realities we currently face.
Acknowledgments:
Many thanks to Dr. Erin Vearncombe, Managing Editor Annabel Barry ’19 and the whole of the Nass Lit staff for endlessly speculating with me about the content and revision of this essay.
