Doug Shaver

Any of them can be. None of them necessarily is.

Doug Shaver

When I use the word, I mean a narrative that is (a) not factually true, (b) known by the narrator to be not factually true, and (c) not intended by the narrator to be construed by his or her audience as factually true.

spin

Is a tradition that is retold by someone who believes that it is factually true, though has no way of checking its factual truth, fiction?


spin

mikem

That would depend on whether the original tradition was factual. If a tradition is based on story/myth that has no basis in historical fact, it does not become fact by virtue of someone who believes it to be factual retelling it, I think.

If the tradition has no basis in historical fact, then no amount of retelling will ever make it historically true. Whether a "story" is fact or fiction is in principle, a matter of objective truth, and does not depend upon the writer's intention.

I use the phrase "basis in historical fact", because a story can undergo all sorts of embellishments and still be at bottom historical.

Having decided that a narrative is historical in this sense, one can then go on to study how accurately it corresponds to the original event that generated it, and perhaps trace it's development.

Although it's not quite that simple is it? How does one decide that a particular narrative is based on historical fact unless there are other sources referring to the history in question? And what if there are no other sources?

But that thought generates a whole new crop of questions, so I'll stop there.

NatSciNarg

Hmmm. Difficult one. In my mind, I think there is a difference between 'fiction', meaning a genre of literature, telling a story which is known by the author to not true, and 'a fiction', something that turns out to be wrong or to be a lie (intentionally, or otherwise).
For example, if I were to belive that writer X wrote a story that X belived to be true, then he was not writing fiction, because he thought it was true, but if later analysis showed it to be wrong then it would still be a fiction.
I 'm not sure I have quite hit on the distinction between 'fiction' and 'a fiction', and am happy to be corrected, but I think there is an important disticiton in meaning being missed if we coninue to use 'fiction' without qualification. To get around this, I would prefer people to say, for example, 'I think GMark was intended as a story not accurate history' than 'GMark is fiction', or 'GMark does not accurately represent history' than 'GMark is (a) fiction'.
Pedantic and long-winded as this approach might be, it would remove some of the ambiguity of the word 'fiction'.

Best wishes,
Matthew

spin

In my eyes collections of traditions are very hard to categorize into simple terms. There may be invented materials mixed up with historically based materials, but then (some of) those inventions may have been perceived as the only logical way something must have been in the past.

I understand the exodus as a reworking of the Hyksos story, so there is certainly historical content in the tradition. The Egyptians later identified the Jews, some of whom had been living in Egypt since the time of Nebuchadnezzar, as those who had been driven out by the pharaohs of the 17th dynasty. Jewish speculation on the Egyptian libels, I believe, gave us the exodus story as we now have it. Fiction? If so, whose?

We see some of the christians who visit this site taking absurd positions to defend biblical inerrancy, for they believe the information to be true and representative of the past. How many people still believe that Adam and Eve were real people and use their modern knowledge to present them as real to a modern audience. Are they "perpetrating" fiction? Wouldn't ancients have held onto their beliefs just as firmly?

I can easily see Paul speculating on messianism and a bolt hits him that the messiah must have been and we simply missed him. Fiction?

Thanks to mikem and NatSciNarg for going further down the road. I would probably argue that fiction involves a particular intent, but also that identifying fiction is much harder than we are at present ready to accept.


spin