Alternative Facts And Anna Karenina
Narrative is the original alternative facts
As John Oliver recently noted, we can’t really even discuss complex policy issues “until we address something even bigger: the concept of reality itself.” Oliver goes on to summarize and lampoon how the loopy echo chamber of Trumpian lies reinforces itself:
He’s hardly the first to address the issue. Trump was a liar long before he had presidential aspirations and alternative facts were on the rise before Kellyanne Conway popped up on people television screens. Ryan Holiday’s 2012 book Trust Me, I’m Lying explicitly walks through his “confessions of a media manipulator” — and it reads more or less like a how-to for someone developing a mythology in service of his or her own interests, for someone looking to create, in Oliver’s words, “real policy based on fake facts.” In other words, manipulating people by controlling the narrative is a tried and true strategy.
Even if a story is objectively false, once published, it’s a fact that the story was written. When other news outlets subsequently report that an objectively false story was written, this is a true story. And so the echo chamber begins. When fake news calls the real news “fake news,” it’s real news that the fake news is calling the real news “fake news.” Pretty soon, it becomes difficult to tell the difference and inevitably pieces of the original false story remain. If it feels like America’s trapped in a circular reference error, it’s because we are.
But there’s a precursor to what’s going on here, one that operates outside Trumpian fictive reality but nevertheless functions in much the same way as alternative facts: realistic fiction. Mimesis, or the imitative representation of reality in art, involves a similar post-truth trompe l’oeil — and realistic fiction invokes our sense of what real life is actually like (as opposed to magical realism or fantasy or satire, etc.) Representations of reality can create worlds that seem very real, blurring the line between art and nature, fact and fiction. (For an in-depth look at mimesis in Western literature, check out Erich Auerbach.)
One way to think about these representations of reality is on a continuum of high-fidelity to low-/no-fidelity. A representation of reality is simply how content is presented to consumers of information. For example, novels are marketed as fiction, whereas biographies chronicle the lives of actual human beings. (Yet both involve editorial narrative choices, despite their different ostensible obligations to reality.) Fidelity in this sense refers to the extent that content — regardless of its representation — mirrors things here on planet Earth. The possible relationships between representation and fidelity are illustrated in the matrix below:
When we represent our world based on empirical fact, this is a high-fidelity representation of reality. This is what news should be. There is a natural agreement here: we are told it’s real, and for the most part, it reflects reality. Fantasy — that is, low-fidelity fiction — yield similar agreement. While we may identify with and see parallels between Harry Potter and the real world (I know I do), based on the broomsticks, magic spells, etc., Harry’s is an obviously fictional world billed as fiction.
But both low-fidelity reality and high-fidelity fiction — e.g. realistic novels and Trumpism, respectively — create disagreement between representation and fidelity that often seems realer than the news: the former by creating a real-seeming world we know to be fictional and the latter by billing empirically-disprovable falsehoods as reality through a narrative that genuinely feels real to many. The point being: they both feel real. How real something seems, it turns out, can be divorced from representation or fidelity. After all, for many, it’s still unbelievable — almost literally — that Trump is actually the president; it doesn’t feel real, though it is high-fidelity reality. Conversely, fantasy can feel real when you’re engrossed in the narrative. Just look at how many Harry Potter obsessives there are, how “muggles” has seeped into our collective cultural consciousness.
Tension between representation and fidelity offers the ability to create particularly powerful illusions. I remember reading The Fountainhead and feeling grateful I hadn’t picked it up when I was younger and more impressionable. Rand’s repugnant philosophy is laid bare in its solipsistic ugliness in her philosophical essays, but in her fiction, it takes on an appealing lacquer. The fiction does less persuading yet is far more persuasive, appealing to feeling and empathy rather than reason, making an argument without making an argument. Under the guise of mimetic fiction, Rand creates a world that both seems real and glamorizes greed and rape and apathy into mastery and confidence and singularity of purpose. Fiction influences reality because we are narrative machines that look for patterns — patterns feel real to us; narrative is a digestible, easily recognizable pattern. There’s a reason governments throughout history have banned novels — or supported them, as the CIA did when it bankrolled literary journals.
My favorite example of fiction’s narrative advantage over fact is Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. It presents an explicit dichotomy, a battle, between fiction and reality — and their respective abilities to depict, well, reality. It’s solidly a work of high-fidelity, mimetic fiction, following 19th century Russian aristocrats that look a lot like actual 19th-century Russian aristocrats. The novel weaves between the story of its eponymous heroine’s flagrant, scandalous love affair (entirely fictional) and thoughtful landowner Konstantin Levin’s philosophical struggles with god, work, and marriage (based on Tolstoy’s own). The two plots are largely separate and the characters unknown to each other for much of the novel, but converge at the end, deeply blurring fictional-philosophical lines. With Levin, Tolstoy transforms life into art; in Anna he transforms art into life.
Levin is, to some extent, a misrepresentation of reality as fiction. He is borderline autobiographical, serving as a mouthpiece for Tolstoy’s own religious and philosophical views. The “real” anecdotes he recounts, however, such as Levin’s proposal to his wife Kitty, are often boring and pious and flat (maybe not unlike the news). Levin is just too morally-scrupulous, too unbelievably good. He is bad-poetry incarnate — so much so that even though he’s allotted fully half of the novel, his role is usually dramatically cut or even left out entirely of adaptations. Tolstoy was a great writer, but his real life didn’t make a great story.
By contrast, without a parallel in Tolstoy’s life, Anna lives only — but fully — in his text; she is made real to the reader by artifice alone. She is selfish and cunning and beautiful and cruel. She is seduced by fiction and makes herself up to look natural. Above all, she is interesting. We forgive Anna’s brilliance because she is so flawed, and we forgive her flaws because she seems human. While Levin gives us a window into Tolstoy’s mind, Anna gives us a window into her own. Her seeming directness and unfilteredness (sound like anyone?) are so much more convincing. In the words of Matthew Arnold, “we are not to take Anna Karénine as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life. A piece of life it is.”
The highly artificial out-reals the real here.
Trump is using a rarefied toolkit. Fictional worlds can affect the real one even when properly billed as fiction. It isn’t in any way controversial to assert that art (in the broadest terms) shapes our reality by shaping people’s perceptions and narrative expectations of it. Similarly, Trumpism has already induced, for about a third of our country, a kind of hypnotic pseudo-simulation where he can do no wrong. His narrative feels real to people because they’ve bought that he’s the outsider underdog who’s come to save them, and he did this by telling people what he knew would feel real to them (like Anna) rather than what is real (like Levin).
It’s important to remember this when reading the news, especially in the current echo chamber: that in both real and fictional worlds, fiction has an inherent advantage over fact: it can glamour and bait, it can bend, move, and change. It can be given a cohesive narrative arc out of thin air. It is easier to make interesting. The circular reference error of fake news and alternative facts is not the result of stupidity but a devastating strategic advantage, battle-tested and refined by narrative-spinners going back as far as when people told stories around a cave fire. It’s probably impossible to fight alternative facts with actual facts. You have to control the narrative by telling a story that seems real.
Natasha Joukovsky is based in some specific places, but she’s kind of everywhere, like the wind.
