Zambezia (1975-6), 4 (ii).FICTIONS*R. A. LEWISDepartment of Modern Languages, University of RhodesiaWE ALL OF US know what fiction is. It is a form of literature, or an exerciseof the imagination in which we occasionally indulge in order to get out ofa tight comer. But we do not usually put the word in the plural, and if I havedone so tonight one of my motives was undoubtedly to attract you here,knowing you to be motivated by that incorrigible academic curiosity whichsupposes that the unfamiliar is always worth investigating. Let me assureyou that I do not intend to speak of works of fiction: or rather, when I do so,I shall speak of them only as part of a larger subject. 'Fictions' is not theplural of the generic term 'fiction', but of the more specific one 'a fiction',and this, it seems to me, is a useful term by which to describe one of themost important activities of thought and language. As I propose to use thisexpression in my lecture tonight, a fiction is a hypothesis which, so far aswe are concerned, is unverifiable, and which we accept because it helps to makeliving easier or humanly possible. It is an imaginative interpretation of ex-perience. Certainly we seek to base our lives and actions on known facts, butthese need to be organized and amplified into fictions if they are to make anysense at all. We are intelligent but inadequately informed individuals. Allliterature makes use of fictions, not merely the novel and short story; and sotoo do history, physics, mathematics, sociology, economics, politics and allother systems which the mind extrapolates from human experience. I do notintend to attempt the exposure of those moments in which otherwise rationalminds slip into superstition, convention or prejudice. Far from it. I wish tosuggest that, for us, our fictions are as valid as our facts, and, indeed, that thelatter cannot make much sense without the former.I would not deny that the academic disciplines to which I have referredare based upon the study of fact. But facts take on significance only in agiven context. Innumerable apples had fallen to the ground before that dayon which Newton decided to integrate this phenomenon into a theory ofgravitation which, if it had not been for Einstein, we should doubtless stillregard as fact. If we are merely gathering apples to make cider, we needpay no attention to either Newton or Einstein. Their fictions were directedprimarily towards specialists whom they enabled, by their conjectures, toform a more satisfying picture of the working of the universe than they hadhitherto possessed. In order to do so they had recourse to concepts of size* An Inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Rhodesia on 10 October 1974,5758FICTIONSand distance, minute or astronomical, which are totally unreal so far as humanexperience is concerned. In their work the difference between a fact and anapparently valid deduction seems to disappear. But such interpretations areacts of the imagination, acceptable in so far as they correspond to con-temporary knowledge. They may be accepted or rejected or otherwise inter-preted by physicists of the future. All our fictions are apparently valid deduc-tions from experienced fact, necessary because such experience, without someintellectual or imaginative interpretation, is meaningless.The world as understood by the physicist, the chemist, the economist,the historian or the geographer is the world not as we know it by day-to-daycontact but as interpreted by the light of a particular fiction. To say thisis not to deny that modern science uses experienced fact both as a spring-board for the imagination and as a restraining influence. Even so, Africadid not exist as an entity until the geographers invented it. It remains a con-cept more easily understood by the student who opens his glossy atlas andsees the continent displayed on a single page than by the tribesman who livesand dies within its confines. The physicist may recognise that we are largelycomposed of empty space, but nothing in our common experience suggeststhis, nor do we think of it as true except when pursuing the particular pre-occupations of physics. The conscientious historian may be thought of as aslave to facts, but of course he is not; it is he who chooses the facts whichhe thinks are relevant to his thesis, and In so doing he opens to us a worldfrom which we are for ever cut off by time. The economist treats us aseconomic units, and though we could not possibly live our personal lives onthe basis of such an assumption, we find his picture useful. We dare notquestion mathematics, since we make such abundant use of it in our every-day lives; but we know that mathematics is a closed system which reliesheavily on concepts for which there is no real-life equivalent. Two and twomake four, but two is an abstraction: two elephants and two irregular verbsdo not make four of anything. When we view the world in the context ofsuch disciplines, it is rather as if we see it through a piece of coloured glass.It is the same world, but the colour of the glass gives it a new character and anew uniformity.It may be objected that such studies are not fictions, but are remotefrom common experience only In that they involve a high degree of specialisa-tion. But in fact what is interesting in them is that they are of universal ap-plication. Each has its own story to tell, and each works within its ownconvention. The sum total of all the knowledge they convey would not giveus a picture of life, but merely a compendium of different approaches to life.We cannot think of their adepts as so many masons each contributing in hisown way to the building of some definitive cathedral of truth. On the contrary,each develops or reforms the conventions of his own type of thinking, whichrepresents the fictional extension of some dimension of human existence andexperience.I must make it clear that in describing such systems as 'fictions' I amFL A. LEWISnot saying anything about their truth. The point has been usefully made byR. Wellek and A. Warren in their Theory of Literature (1949, p.34): 'Theopposite of "fiction" is not "truth" but "fact" or "time-and-space existence".'One cannot say that one's life consists of so many facts. Facts only becomefacts when, for some reason or another, we become conscious of them as afeature of our experience. Each specialist must select his own facts and dis-miss the irrelevant. In so doing he does not diverge from truth, but necessarilysubstitutes his own fiction for the reality of common experience. This is pre-sumably why scholars are not necessarily any wiser or more prudent thanother human beings, and may indeed be a good deal more useless than othersin any real-life situation.We cannot substitute terms such as 'hypothesis' or 'postulate* for 'fictions*,since though our fictions may be hypotheses or postulates they are not feltto be so, nor do we expect to prove them. The physicist cannot question thevalidity of physics as a whole, nor the historian of history. The philosopheror mystic may question the validity of physics, and the geophysicist may dis-miss as unimportant the trivial flash of time which is the field of the historian;and the psychologist and economist may do battle over the significance ofany event in human experience. But each must accept his own conventionsand work within his own pattern of thought. In less academic fields, fictionsare a part of our ordinary life, and we question them scarcely more fre-quently than we question the facts of our actual experience. I have illustratedthe concept of the fiction by reference to academic disciplines, but most fic-tions do not belong to such systems or fit into neat categories. They are simpleextensions of known fact, extra rooms added to our human habitation, extralines or colours added to a scene to make it a picture. They come into beingbecause the human mind needs other dimensions in which to move than thosewith which fact provides him. The animal lives in a world of fact, of spaceand-time existence. We share that world, but if we were restricted to it wewould not be human. The instrument we use to extend it is language. Fictionsare verbal, and one of the prime functions of language is to produce them.I shall not attempt to prove that a factual world actually, or absolutely,exists: since philosophers these days are prepared to beg that particularquestion, it is a responsibility which I may legitimately shirk. To demonstratethe existence of a verbal world understood and accepted in terms of its verbalequivalents presents no difficulties. For Descartes' splendidly ambitious asser-tion 'Cogito, ergo sum' Š 'Je pense, done je suis' Š we may substitute a moremodest alternative: 'Je parle, done je suis.' The fact that a lecturer istalking does not prove that he is thinking, but in so far as words confer exist-ence, he exists. Let me illustrate the difference, as I understand it, betweenfiction, fact and truth. Sexual relations between men and women are a fact.Romantic loye may play a greater part in a man's life than sexual relations,but is even so a fiction for which only some societies, ages and individuals havefelt a need. Religious experience is a fact, but its association with any specificbelief in God is a fiction. This tells us nothing about its truth. I am not6OFiCTiONSarguing for logical positivism. But there is a clear distinction between tnccase of the man who denies that it is raining when he is soaked to the skinin a downpour and one who denies the existence of God, even though, tothe convinced Christian believer, who sees the atheist as part of God's creation,both denials may seem equally absurd. I would add that, had this distinctionbeen more generally recognized, a great deal of massacre and persecutionmight have been avoided.Even so, the distinction between fact and fiction is not usually so easyto make. According to the Book of Genesis, the world itself is a verbal fiction.'God said, "Let there be light" ' Š and He was, of course, talking to Himselfat the time, as there was nobody else around Š and there was light. 'In thebeginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word wasGod', St John tells us, in his more sophisticated interpretation of primitiveman's belief in the creative power of language. On an individual level, manmay be said to create his own personality through speech. The baby cries,and the response it obtains from its mother is testimony from the outsideworld that it exists as a significant individual. Adults, I suspect, talk formuch the same reason. It is difficult to imagine how, if one were shut up fora long while in a dark cell, one could remain conscious of one's own identitywithout talking to oneself, or thinking to oneself, in words. There was atime when linguists and philosophers were agreed that the primary functionof language was to communicate thought. They held this improbable view,I suppose, because that was how they themselves used language, at least whenthey were writing their books. A few moments spent listening to the averageconversation should have convinced them of their error. Speech may havemany functions, but one of the most important is that of establishing, in ourown minds, the conviction that we significantly exist. The experience of being'sent to Coventry' can produce a nervous breakdown: that of taking a pro-minent part in a discussion produces a sense of elation and power. To createour personality we ally ourselves with a body of sympathies, hatreds, conceptsand assumptions Š a process which may range from supporting a footballteam to belief in the Holy Trinity Š which we only know ourselves to possesswhen we express them in language. In this connexion, the question of whetherthese beliefs are true or false in any objective sense is of no importance; ifthey are manifestly false the holder is more vulnerable to argument, but thisis unlikely to worry him If he holds a handgrenade or a machine-gun. Theanimal inherits an individual and communal character which it can donothing to change, and its speech is adapted only to limited and stereotypedsituations. But man's language is a medium which enables him to develop,for good or ill, along lines not entirely governed by fact. So far as I am aware,no one has as yet explained why living things should be possessed by an over-riding desire to survive (even lemings, until they make their last and fatalmistake), but in the case of humans it is clear that survival involves notmerely avoidance of physical death but vindication of personality; that is,of the fictions with which the individual has associated himself. I would notR. A. LEWISagree with Donne that every man's death diminishes me, for, to quote a sagewhose name I am afraid I can no longer remember, there are some peoplewho would be greatly improved by death; but I have no doubt that everydefeat suffered by my adopted fictions does so, unless I am able to adaptso as to identify myself with the victorious ones which replace them.I have spoken of academic disciplines as fictions, since they are imagina-tive extrapolations from reality, even though they are based on and testedby the study of fact. But some fictions might aptly be described as prejudices,were it not that the word is applicable, in common usage, only to otherpeople's views. The appropriate term for one's own views is 'convictions' or'principles'. It is a fairly widespread belief that prejudices are bad things,but there is no justification for such a sweeping assertion. We are all pre-judiced, and would not be one whit better if we were not: indeed, it is doubt-ful whether, without prejudice, we should even exist, since belief in the de-sirability of our own survival rests on no rational basis. The man who, onseeing a child playing within striking distance of a cobra, sits down to debatesuch vital questions as to whether there is any reason to suppose that ahuman life is of greater value than a cobra's, or whether the child, if saved,might not ultimately die an agonizing death from cancer or multiple sclerosis,or alternatively become a sex-maniac or a politician, or whether the worldis not already grossly overpopulated, so that the removal of one child wouldbe a kindness to the human race Š such a man would be not a supermanbut a monster. If he is a man he acts according to instinctive prejudice andsaves the child, even if, regrettably, this means killing the cobra. The viewthat human prejudice is a characteristic which could or should be eradicatedseems to me absurd, both on the grounds that it runs counter to naturalinstincts that we share with the animals, and also because the endorsement offictions, by definition unprovable, is necessary to our humanity. The real pro-blem is not to eliminate them but to recognize them for what they are, in our-selves as in others, so that we may learn to distinguish between those whichare harmful and those which are helpful to humanity in given circumstances.The fiction that all men are brothers may be a useful one (although its valueis lessened by the fact that so were Cain and Abel) but not all the nagging ofall the moralists and politicians of the world will induce us to feel for manin general what we feel for those near and dear to us; and for this we maybe thankful, since otherwise we would either go mad under the pressure of un-fulfillable responsibilities or develop an armour of total indifference. Since I amspeaking in a Rhodesian context, I may add that the concept of the inherentsuperiority of the European is equally fictional, as is the belief that all menand all races are equal, by some kind of divine right. Superiority can be fac-tually demonstrated only in free and equal competition, and even then is onlymeaningful in specific fields, while the experience of centuries seems to sug-gest that none of us have more than squatter's rights on any part of the earth'ssurface. But such concepts are useful, or dangerous, to the degree that theyfoster loyalties which benefit or endanger our communal survival. In their62FICTIONSimperial pride the Romans committed the most bestial atrocities and alsofounded an enduring civilization. We must seek to eliminate the evil andfortify the good results of man's faith in himself, but not to destroy that faith,prejudice though it necessarily is. I am afraid that many people today areendeavouring to do just that, by a wilful substitution of ideological and moralfictions for lived experience. Just as one may burn a man at the stake forthe good of his soul, so one may subject him to servitude in the name of'liberation'.In this respect, the failure to distinguish between fact and fiction is ofparticular relevance to the case of the modern university, whether here orelsewhere. The proportion of students who are actively espoused to any poli-tical fiction is, I suspect, quite small in any country where politics is notcompulsory. Yet the general public often feels that students and, indeed,academic staff are dangerous revolutionaries. I think we should make someeffort to understand this feeling. Politics is partly factual and partly fictional,as most things are. The factual side is limited to the conflict of ambitiousindividuals and groups, to economic and social pressures, and to the elementof pure chance which furthers or frustrates human designs. The general publichas little experience of it, save perhaps in small nations where domestic affairspredominate, or occasionally in great nations at times of crisis. For the generalpublic (which is itself a fiction, since it consists of individuals), politics islargely a matter of fictions. The concept of the nation or race, and the ideathat one man may speak for it, whether as self-appointed dictator or on abasis of 'one man, one vote', is pure fiction. So is aristocracy, which pre-supposes, to a degree not borne out by experience, that the ability to ralecan be inherited from generation to generation. So too is democracy, whichpresupposes in all men an access to information, an ability to think, a concernior public affairs and an understanding of the art of government which quiteobviously they do not possess. All men are not equal Š and cannot be madeso by giving them the right to put a cross on a ballot paper: power will remainnot in their hands but in the hands of those who have the talent, the ambition,the ruthlessness and the weapons necessary for its exercise. The small mancrushed out of existence by the big combine finds that private enterprise, too,is a fiction, as is the popular socialism which eliminates those members ofthe public who do not endorse it. As we have said, fictions are necessary tohuman mind, but they should be recognized for what they are.The common man, excluded though he may be from the factual world ofpolitics, nevertheless has his own facts on which politics impinge. It is hewho is likely to die in wars, or lose his life's savings, or find his earningchannelled to support the ambitions of the great or the furtherance of politicalfictions in which he may have little interest. For the most part he has a certainscepticism about these fictions, and where one finds the masses united insupport of them, one finds also that this situation is brought about by censor-ship of the news media and considerable pressure from the police and the army.It is a situation which can result only from a good deal of crude politicalR. A. LEWIS63engineering. Now the universities present a different picture. Although theyrarely admit the fact, they are cloistered institutions devoted to the pursuit offictions. The students who attend them have the minimum of contact withthe real problems of the community, the minimum of factual responsibility,the minimum of factual experience. But many of them have gone to univer-sity imagining that there they will learn about life, and their elders have un-wisely told them, only too often, that they are the natural leaders of thefuture, although there is no evidence that a university education confers uponits recipient a talent for leadership. It is not unnatural that some, imbuedwith the simple fictions of their studies, imagine that if the world remainstoday, as it always has been, something of a mess, it is really quite easyfor them to alter this state of affairs. They have not been told, and would notwant to believe, that one learns about life by living it Š outside a university.I am aware that this view sounds very middle-aged and reactionary. Butthe fictions we teach at universities are both splendid and dangerous things.There is no theoretical reason why Rousseau's Social Contract should haveopened the floodgates of Terror In the French Revolution, but to no smallextent it did. Karl Marx, reading In the prim silence of the British Museum,did not know that he was beating out a path which was to lead countlessthousands to the prison camps of Siberia and elsewhere. Plato and the in-offensive Nietzsche did not know that their views would find a grotesqueparody In Nazi Germany. Whether Christ knew that his words would be onthe lips of the judges of the Holy Inquisition and the witch-burners ofseventeenth-century England Is a question best left to the theologians. But Imust admit that I have some sympathy with those who regard universitieswith qualms of misgiving. We are not, as we sometimes like to believe, thecustodians of the world's conscience. We are armaments manufacturers, andthe use which will be made of the weapons we produce will not be decidedby academics.Man's survival is closely linked with the fictions he endorses, but the usethat will be made of these depends on factors which no one can anticipate.Man progresses and regresses by reason of his will and imagination. His willto survive can be either reinforced or undermined by his fictions. The univer-sity, as a nursery of fictions, has a vital role to play, and the student who isprepared to undergo Its disciplines is by no means opting out of life. Thewisdom he acquires may be of decisive importance. But it requires patience.Christ's public life was restricted to some three years: the preparation for ittook ten times as long. Of the student who has a less ambitious aim onedemands less, but one demands at least that he shall thoroughly understandhis evidence before he reaches his conclusions. It should be a matter forserious concern to universities, in which knowledge, if not wisdom, Is obtainedby the free interchange of conflicting fictions, that in some countries bothstudents and academics are acquiring a most disturbing reputation for in-tolerance. In Britain, the university appears to be the one institution In whicha visiting speaker is liable to be prevented from expressing his views by a64FICTIONSminority already convinced that what he has to say will be immoral. If thiscriticism should seem contrary to what I have already said about the needfor prejudice, I would point out that there is a vast difference between onthe one hand endorsing a fiction knowing it to be such and appreciatingits value, and on the other believing one's own fictions to be fact and con-demning out of hand those who do not so regard them.Since this lecture is given by one who professes a modern language,it seems appropriate to lay some stress on the fact that the natural tendencyof language to generate fictions manifests itself in the creation of literature.All forms of literature help to give the illusion of a homocentric world, andcreate a population of phantoms, in some ways more real than reality becausemore easily comprehended, to reinforce our beleaguered garrison on earth. 1shall have time tonight to refer to only one genre, the novel. This appearsto differ from other fictions we have considered in that it is a conscious liewhich the reader does not really believe. But in its more significant forms itmust be rather more than this, for we not infrequently hear intelligent menrefer to the characters of books Š and of course plays and films Š as ifthey were in some way real and could be judged, analysed and learnt fromas would be the case if thev had really lived. This may be justified in so faras they represent facets of the author's experience illuminated by his flashesof insight. But even so. one wonders . . . How is it that Balzac, who portrayedso brilliantly the machinations of a society based on money, was himself soincompetent in money matters: that Stendhal who wrote with such perspic-acity on love, was an unsuccesful lover; that Flaubert, who castigated thebourgeoisie with such caustic irony, was himself a kindly bourgeois; or forthat matter that Conan Doyle seems to have been a Dr Watson rather thana Sherlock Holmes? Should we agree with Borges that literature holds up amirror to nature in that it presents it to us in reverse? Certainly the groundsfor supposing that it presents us with a faithful copy are slender. We haveall of us found, at one time or another, that in recounting our adventureswe are able to produce a verbal equivalent which is a good deal more satis-fying than fact, and even the most superficial observation of human conversa-tion will demonstrate that this process of 'tidying up' experience to thenarrator's advantage is one of the permanent obsessions of the human race.Freud's view that literature is a compensation for life may not be adequate,but should not be ignored; we may, after all, find the verisimilitude of liter-ature a good deal more satisfying than chaotic truth.A character in Andre Gide's novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs is rescued fromthe wreck of the Bourgogne. She is picked up by an already full lifeboat, andundergoes the traumatic experience of seeing the seamen cutting off thehands of those struggling in the water who attempt to clamber into thealready over-loaded boat. From this she derives a philosophy Š which herauthor does not share Š of survival by ruthless selfishness. Walter Lord, inhis carefully documented account of the sinking of the Titanic, records thatall the lifeboats, pitifully few as they were, pulled away from the sinkingR. A- LEWIS65>Łship half-empty, leaving hundreds to drown who might have been saved. Thefiction presented by the novel suggests one morality, the real-life episode sug-gests another.Albert Camus, in La Peste, imagines a city isolated from the world byan outbreak of the plague. It goes without saying that the characters involvedbehave in a manner which illustrates appropriately the author's concept ofman's situation in an absurd universe. In seventeenth-century England, beforethe universe became absurd, an actual outbreak of the plague did occur inthe small Derbyshire village of Eyam and the village isolated itself voluntarily,to contain the spread of the disease, from the rest of the world. So far asone can judge people acted with considerable self-discipline and sense of res-ponsibility, and this little episode in history certainly would not lead one'sthoughts in the same direction as Camus' novel. Here we have a clash offictions. I am not criticizing Camus for not literally describing events of whichhe had never heard; but it is a disturbing fact that millions have read Camus'novel, and from it have doubtless drawn appropriate conclusions about life,while few have heard of Eyam. In this sense the novelist may be said not somuch to interpret life as actually to change it. How much of our view ofthe nature of living is derived from fictional concepts which we no longerconsciously think of as being anything other than real?Some years ago I read a brief newspaper item to the effect that anumber of Japanese schoolchildren had been rescued from an island on whichthey had been marooned for many months following a shipwreck. Theyappeared to have suffered from nothing worse during their stay than a veryunderstandable boredom. But this, of course, would have made a much lessinteresting novel than William Golding's Lord of the Flies.It may be rightly objected that documented studies, historical events andnewspaper reports are no less fictions than novels: we cannot kiiow from first-hand experience the events from which they derive, and evtn the most con-scientious research can give us no more than an interpretation. But the factremains that though novels may be made to 'look like* life, their essencederives from their author's imagination; and if he is a successful conjuror withwords they become a part of what we think of as our experience. They maywell become even more vivid than fact, since they are pre-digested and maybe readily assimilated into an overall pattern, whereas real-life facts arenotoriously untidy. We can talk quite naturally of the world of Balzac, Zolaor Proust, thus acknowledging that their world in some way differs from whatwe think of as the 'real' world. Yet their worlds, by reason of wide dissemina-tion in print, have become part of the experience of vast numbers of readers;they are shared in a way that the factual events of life are not. They createfictional experience, and change the nature of living. I wish we would give alittle more thought to what this implies. Professor D. J. Boorstin, in his bookThe Image (1962), has given a very disturbing account of the manner in whichwhat we now call 'the media' Š television, radio, newspapers and books Šencourage the fabrication of events which are arranged simply for the purpose66FICTIONSof being reported. Literature would seem to belong to this sham world. Oughtwe not to examine the implications of this form of mental persuation moreseriously than we do, instead of taking it for granted that this kind of con-scious fiction in some way necessarily enhances our knowledge of real life?In the three examples I have quoted of discrepancy between what weknow of real-life experience and its fictional equivalent, it is notable that ineach case fiction made the event and its outcome more catastrophic anddisturbing than was, apparently, the real-life equivalent. The lifeboats of theTitanic could have returned to pick up survivors and should have done so:a commonplace conclusion, and therefore less interesting than that proposedby Gide's fictional character on the basis of a fictional experience. The in-habitants of Eyam behaved on the whole, it would seem, very much as wewould wish them to, and so proved themselves to be unsuitable as charactersin contemporary fiction. And since the Japanese schoolchildren did not revertto barbarism, they merit no more than a passing reference in the press.Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in some respects a classic of realism, maybe described as a story in which everything ŠŁ absolutely everything Š goeswrong for the heroine. Devotees of the cinema will be familiar with thisapproach as being that of innumerable Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardycomedies, in which a character cannot walk under a ladder without havinga bucket of whitewash fall on his head. In fact, Flaubert's story could havebeen narrated as hilarious farce, without any substantial change in characteror event. Thus the world as presented in fiction is, as it were, modulated intoa certain key which is of the author's choosing, or at least corresponds to thecast of his thought. Taking literature as a whole, and at all levels, the effectof this is to add vastly to our awareness of certain aspects of living Š amongthem sex, \iolcnco, anti-social behaviour, and various forms of disaster andfrustration which, in ordinary experience, would be highly unpleasant. Itis striking that the objectors to censorship (which I am not advocating)consistently turn a blind eye to this obvious fact. They speak of the author'sright to treat any aspect of life, but seem to be unaware that the craft offiction has never encouraged such a catholic viewpoint. If, as has so oftenbeen noted, Milton in Paradise Lost makes Satan a great deal more interestingthan God, this is an effect not of his religious belief but of his craft. Wemay dismiss, as the result of modern sensationalism, the fact that the averageadolescent has seen a thousand murders perpetrated on his television screen;but, no less than the author of the latest television serial, Aeschylus andShakespeare find murder far more interesting than the experiences whichmost of us are likely to encounter in everyday life.The fact is, surely, that the author creates a fictional world in whichwe have the illusion of participating; but we are only spectators, comfortablysettled in our armchairs while the world of our fictional characters crumblesaround them. If the writer shows little interest in such pleasant subjects ascookery or happy marriage this is because, if we are lucky enough to enjoysuch things, we do not need them in his fictions. Even the most escapist ofR. A. LEWIS67literature dwells on the hazards and difficulties which precede the ringing ofwedding bells. On a more serious level, life can be disturbing, puzzling,terrifying; and so we value the gift the author has of enabling us to facethese aspects of the human condition in safety through his fictional creations.We may admire the power of the lion's muscles and claws from behind acar window in a game park, but not if we meet it unexpectedly in the bush.So far as I am aware, no theologian or moralist has yet solved the problemof evil in the world. However, if we imagine ourselves as divine spectators,viewing the panorama of the world from a safe distance and with no morethan imaginative involvement, the problem ceases to exist; it is the verysubstance of the plot in which we are absorbed. We are only too anxious toget Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden so that the serious business ofadultery and murder can begin. The novelist is concerned with the illusionof the real only in that, if he fails to convince us that what he is writing aboutis real life, he fails to liberate us from reality. We must believe that the mon-sters we are watching are real monsters and not merely stuffed bears orpuppets manipulated by a mortal like ourselves.I am not advancing a theory of literature, and would not deny that ithas functions and qualities other than those which have been discussed to-night. But we should not forget that art is illusion, and its practitioners con-jurors who by a combination of imagination and dexterity transform thefamiliar and the repulsive into a source of pleasure. We are all of us, throughour daily use of language, creators of fictions which enable us to see the worldin terms related specifically to our needs as humans. When the Frenchmanuses the expression Tout le monde' he means, incredibly enough, people, notdeserts, seas, spiders and microbes. Man cocoons himself in his language. Thewriter, by his gift for mimicking reality, makes us at one and the same timemore aware of it and also, while we are under his spell, confers upon us acertain immunity to it, which helps us to tolerate the intolerable and some-times even to change it. His art is a splendid one which enormously widensthe bounds of our experience. We should study this magic art both for itsown sake and for the light it throws on the general human need for fictionsto make the world comprehensible in our own terms. Fictions provide uswith a dimension in which our needs and desires are significant. But thepoint I would leave with you tonight is that, by definition, they are not fact,Whether they are based on science or convention or literary imagination, theyare no more than expedients to be tested continually against experience. Theeras which have produced the most splendid fictions are also those whichhave excelled in practical achievement; but if we seek to bludgeon realitywith our dreams and our verbal antics, if, in any field of human activity, weallow our awareness of fact to be obscured by our fictions, and cease to re-place these when they become obsolete or irrelevant, then we fall victim tothe most total of all tyrannies, the oppression of commonsense and commonhumanity by diabolical or ridiculous abstractions. When that happens, thegates are open to the Inquisitors and the gunmen.