In response to a question about fact and fiction in one of his poems over at How A Poem Happens, J. Michael Martinez says:
I don’t see the difference between the terms ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’: both are methods of description of this world. As a child I was raised to see the material world as a manifestation of a spiritual reality: the interior world is in constant dialogue with the world of manifestation, positing signs and symbols in answer/response to the deepest interior questions. The duality of fact/fiction seems to debase and reduce the provocation and re-creation that metaphor can offer to life. All this is to say, I navigate the world with a sense that a particular grace is always speaking itself outward, whether that is in a scientific study about global warming, watching a bird pivot, or with my grandmother describing her experience with spirits. Something Adorno said in his Aesthetic Theory resonates: “By their presence art works signal the possibility of the non-existent; their realities testify to the feasibility of the unreal, the possible.”
Since I don’t think Mr. Martinez is a Rortyan pragmatist doubting the value of the term “truth” to philosophical inquiry, I’m not sure what to make of this statement. That fact and fiction “both are methods of description of this world” is trivially true; it’s obvious that both describe the world. The question is what kind of descriptions are they? Lumping together scientific studies about global warming and watching a bird pivot erases any meaningful distinction between naturally occurring events (and how they’re mediated by human consciousness and language) and human endeavors (does grace resonate through a scientist writing the global warming study? What about climate change deniers?).
The claim that “[t]he duality of fact/fiction seems to debase and reduce the provocation and re-creation that metaphor can offer to life” is a creative—if opaque—way of avoiding the question and saying, again, either something that is trivially true or non-sensical. This isn’t a truth/fiction distinction Martinez is dismissing, it’s a fact/fiction distinction. This makes a mess of meaningful discussion about things that happen that we can measure (or attempt to measure) like global warming, and things that someone made up, but are convinced reflect a spiritual reality. I think there’s any easier way discussing how poems blur the distinction between fact and fiction (and what that might mean for poems that ring true to us, but are not factual), but offering up a heap of obscurantist mysticism is another way to go, I suppose.
