Fact, History and Norman Mailer

March 10, 2003

Norman Mailer, the writer and novelist, has a lively imagination, and he is aware of the difficulty in knowing something as fact. He says we cannot know fact, that what people call facts are actually fiction - meaning the product of imagination. This puts writing back to the time of religious scribes as well as to Homer, when imagination was allowed to run free, when people allowed themselves to believe whatever they wanted to believe free of any need of discipline. But this is not good enough for writing of history, which advanced with Herodotus and Thucydides. Mailer calls fact fiction because he thinks of fact as little beads of absolutism, and there are no such beads of absolutism.

Facts are not independent wholes. They are events that we aspire to grasp with as good an approximation as we can. We can determine as fact that a particular tree has crashed to the ground although no one chopped it down or saw it fall. We do so by choosing between rival alternative hypotheses. We see the tree lying on the forest floor and judge that it got that way by gravity rather than having been pulled up by its roots and gently laid down.

In history, facts are a part of our empirical world and of reporting rather mere imagination. The following is not a statement of fact:Caesar's star shot across the sky. A factual statement might be: Tacitus wrote that Romans saw a star shoot across the sky and they called it Caesar's star. (I am not saying this is a fact; I'm saying it might be a fact.)

That Caracalla was an evil man is a value judgment and therefore more of a product of imagination than it is empirical fact. That he killed his brother is more to the world of empiricism and therefore more to fact.

In conversation it is useful to differentiate between opinion about a fact and the fact itself. Some people get muddled and claim that their opinions about a fact are the fact itself. This obscures what both sides in a conversation agree upon. Facts, as our dictionaries describe them, are supposed to be indisputable. Do not for example let someone claim that he is not expressing opinion in his argument that B.C. is proper and B.C.E. improper because of the fact that B.C. is a designation created by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede in the 7th century.

The distinction between the factual and non-factual is a useful tool that humanity best not throw away as has Norman Mailer.

address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/com/mailer.htm