Not to dredge up old fights, but a top­ic we dis­cussed on the blog back in 2009 has cropped up in a cou­ple of recent essays. The issue is whether there is a form of truth that lit­er­a­ture can con­vey, per­haps even a lev­el of lit­er­ary truth which can­not be con­veyed through oth­er means. The top­ic came up orig­i­nal­ly in the con­text of ways we might inter­pret reli­gious texts, but it applies more generally.

So, in this week’s New York Times book review sec­tion, we have an exchange between the edi­tors and review­er Mohsin Hamid in which Hamid explains:

I’m a polit­i­cal ani­mal. How the pack hunts, shares its food, tends its wound­ed — these things mat­ter to me. So I write about them. Fic­tion and non­fic­tion are just two dif­fer­ent ways of lying to try to get at truths. Fic­tion lies by fab­ri­cat­ing what isn’t there. Non­fiction lies by omit­ting what is. Doing both is use­ful: it keeps me aware of sen­tences, a novelist’s obses­sion, and the pow­er of the void that sur­rounds them, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of journalists.

And in The Guardian, Avengers star Tom Hid­dle­ston (he plays Loki), explains the val­ue he sees in super­hero movies:

Actors in any capac­i­ty, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curios­i­ty, by their desire to explore all quar­ters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinc­tive­ly want to reflect human­i­ty, their own and each oth­er’s, in all its inter­mit­tent virtue and vital­i­ty, frailty and fallibility.

I have nev­er been more inspired than when I watched Harold Pin­ter speak in a direct address to cam­era in his Nobel lec­ture in 2005. “Truth in dra­ma is for­ev­er elu­sive. You nev­er quite find it but the search for it is com­pul­sive. The search is clear­ly what dri­ves the endeav­our. The search is your task. More often than not you stum­ble upon the truth in the dark, col­lid­ing with it or just glimps­ing an image or a shape which seems to cor­re­spond with the truth, often with­out real­is­ing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there nev­er is any such thing as one truth to be found in dra­mat­ic art. There are many. These truths chal­lenge each oth­er, recoil from each oth­er, reflect each oth­er, ignore each oth­er, tease each oth­er, are blind to each oth­er. Some times you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fin­gers and is lost.”

Big talk for some­one in a sil­ly super­hero film, I hear you say. But super­hero films offer a shared, faith­less, mod­ern mythol­o­gy, through which these truths can be explored. In our increas­ing­ly sec­u­lar soci­ety, with so many dis­parate gods and dif­fer­ent faiths, super­hero films present a unique can­vas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apoc­a­lyp­tic night­mares can be pro­ject­ed and played out. Ancient soci­eties had anthro­po­mor­phic gods: a huge pan­theon expand­ing into cen­turies of dynas­tic dra­ma; fathers and sons, mar­tyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – sto­ries that taught us of the dan­ger of hubris and the pri­ma­cy of humil­i­ty. It’s the every­day stuff of every man’s life, and we love it. It sounds cliched, but super­heroes can be lone­ly, vain, arro­gant and proud. Often they over­come these human frail­ties for the greater good. The pos­si­bil­i­ty of redemp­tion is right around the cor­ner, but we have to earn it.

This con­nects nice­ly with a piece John Wilkins blogged a cou­ple years ago, attempt­ing to clar­i­fy what it means to be a god:

Philoso­phers have always treat­ed the deity as a high con­cept enti­ty, some­thing that has the attrib­ut­es of per­fec­tion: all-know­ing, all-pow­er­ful, omnipresent, omnibenev­o­lent and so on. This is a view of God that is pre­sumed in most dis­cus­sions of athe­ism, the exis­tence of God, the prob­lem of evil and the like. But it is a very rare view of God in actu­al, you know, reli­gions. The reli­gions of the Folk have divine deities of all kinds, rang­ing from the all-too-human and fal­li­ble vari­ety of Norse and Irish mythol­o­gy, through to the dis­tant and unknow­able gods of Epi­cu­rus. So what sort of a test should we apply to divinities?

I pro­pose a rough and ready kind of test I call the Greek Pan­theon Test: If it would be a god in the Greek Pan­theon, then it’s a god. Of course, a num­ber of divini­ties not includ­ed by the Greeks, the Titans, would also be divini­ties in my book, but that is a mat­ter of restrict­ing divine beings to Olym­pus, which is a cul­tic mat­ter. If Chronos were unknown to the Greeks, he’d def­i­nite­ly be includ­ed as a god when they were giv­en a description.

…

Now the coun­ter­in­tu­itive out­comes of this test: angels are gods. St Michael is indis­cernibly dif­fer­ent from Thor or Mars or Huitzilopochtli as a god of war. Saints are gods. Mary and the Evan­ge­lists play a role as inter­me­di­aries between the High God and wor­ship­pers, just as the Vyan­taras in Jain­ism, or the Demi­urge in Pla­ton­ism and the dai­mones in Greek mys­ti­cism. Jinn are gods. They have, as the Dis­ney film put it, “super-phenomenal cos­mic pow­er­s”. Prophets can also be gods. Ances­tors, espe­cial­ly in the Con­fu­cian tra­di­tion, are gods. Devas in Tibetan Bud­dhism are gods. Any reli­gion which has super­hu­man agents in it, has gods, no mat­ter what the philo­soph­i­cal­ly pure elite the­ol­o­gy may say.

The Justin Bar­rett view of gods as “Minimal Coun­ter­in­tu­itive Agents” – effec­tive­ly humans with super­hu­man pow­ers – ties in with this. A god is a super­hero or supervil­lain. They are like us in all respects except their abil­i­ties or some oth­er super­stim­u­lus fea­ture. This is the folk view of gods, and it is some­thing that phi­los­o­phy of reli­gion had bet­ter come to terms with sometime.

Not only is Thor a god in the Norse pan­theon, he’s also a god in the Mar­vel pan­theon, and so too is Spi­der­man, and Super­man and Bat­man on the DC side. Whether writ­ten as sequen­tial graph­ics on a page, or pro­duced as a movie, or writ­ten out as a nov­el, or passed down as oral tra­di­tion and edit­ed into a canon over mil­lenia, peo­ple use such god­like fig­ures to work through com­pli­cat­ed ideas about why the word is as it is, how we ought to behave, and how we can make things bet­ter. The adven­tures of Super­man and Bat­man and John Con­stan­tine offer argu­ments about how things should be, and the lit­er­ary tech­niques they use are not so far from what you find in the para­bles and alle­gor­i­cal let­ters of the Chris­t­ian New Tes­ta­ment or the clear­ly lit­er­ary sto­ries told in the Old Testament.

Rec­og­niz­ing that truths exist in these lit­er­ary works does­n’t require sci­ence to sur­ren­der any epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ground, nor does it require us to take any stance for or against the claim that there is some addi­tion­al form of truth in reli­gious texts.

The great sci­ence writer Stephen Jay Gould expressed an ele­ment of this in his essay Wide Hats and Nar­row Minds:

But if we laugh with deri­sion, we will nev­er under­stand. Human intel­lec­tu­al capac­i­ty has not altered for thou­sands of years so far as we can tell. If intel­li­gent peo­ple invest­ed intense ener­gy in issues that now seem fool­ish to us, then the fail­ure lies in our under­stand­ing of their world, not in their dis­tort­ed per­cep­tions. Even the stan­dard exam­ple of ancient non­sense – the debate about angels on pin­heads – makes sense once you real­ize that the­olo­gians were not dis­cussing whether five or eigh­teen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infi­nite num­ber. In cer­tain the­o­log­i­cal sys­tems, the cor­po­re­al­i­ty or non­cor­po­re­al­i­ty of angels is an impor­tant mat­ter indeed.

And, in a world before cal­cu­lus, the amount of space occu­pied by an infi­nite num­ber of infi­nite­ly small objects was hard­ly a triv­ial mat­ter. Here, angels were standins for the sorts of fic­tion­al objects sci­en­tists often invoke: point mass­es, mag­net­ic monopoles, fric­tion­less sur­faces, etc. Angels were the only object every­one involved could coher­ent­ly con­ceive of that exist­ed in great num­bers but might have no mass or vol­ume, so they were invoked to clar­i­fy a con­fus­ing and com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lem. Just as these sorts of sci­en­tif­ic fic­tions show us truths about sci­en­tif­ic real­i­ty, char­ac­ters in fic­tion­al works let us take ideas to a lim­it and per­ceive truths about real­i­ty we might not have seen otherwise.

To me, and no mat­ter what fic­tion­al engi­neers say, this view enno­bles lit­er­ary works, whether we are track­ing Job’s tra­vails, Ahab’s mono­ma­nia, or Joss Whe­do­n’s take on the Avengers.