Real or Not Real?

    The story I’ve been working on since, it sometimes seems, forever, has experienced significant changes as it’s evolved.  It began as historical fiction, but now has moved into the realm of speculative fiction.
    While working in the framework of history, I learned a number of things. First, I’m hung up on fact. This isn’t to say that an historical novel can’t imaginatively elaborate on events or characters, but I find that for me, the essential facts have to be accurate. Even if you're writing an alternative history, it has to start from actual known fact.

Clementinum, Prague

     If facts are unknowable right now, but potentially discoverable—that is, at present there’s no record, but buried somewhere in an archive, a record may exist—I’m uncomfortable filling in that gap with imaginary facts.
    Second, truth is as important in fiction as in non-fiction.  Truth isn’t the same thing as fact, although they’re related.  I understand truth as essence, the core of meaning. A novel, even if set in a world that objectively never existed except in the author’s imagination, can be true if the created world and the characters who occupy it conform to the reality that defines their context.
    Since the world I was originally writing about involved historical places set in a specific historical era, subject to objective facts I couldn’t nail down, I decided to let it go. The option for telling the story I want to tell was to create my own world and imbue it with facts that would form a coherent reality. This isn’t an easy process! In pursuit of the truth that is at the core of this imaginary world, I still have to align the facts in such a way as to create a reality that works—even where the fantastic or the surreal may intrude. In other words, I can’t just pick facts I like and ignore the logical implications flowing from those facts. If a river is unpredictable and changeable in chapter 3, it can’t suddenly become navigable and calm in chapter 5 absent a reason for the change: wizardry, engineering, natural disruption of some kind… there’s got to be a reason or the story loses its credibility.
    These concepts—truth, fact, reality—pretty much govern my perception of daily life in the world where I live: present day Maine, a chilly corner of the United States, in the early 21st century. Which is why over the past few months, whenever I look at what’s going on in my culture, in my country, I find myself severely disoriented: there’s a major dissonance between what the facts are telling me about reality, and what my government, especially the executive branch, is telling me about reality.
    The withdrawal from the Iran agreement is a case in point. According to the president, it had to be scrapped because the United States and its allies are unable to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon “under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement.” Yet the U.S. Defense Department affirmed Iran was abiding by the agreement, the U.S. security agencies agreed, and U.S. allies also assert that Iran is in compliance. Compliance, by definition, means Iran is not building nuclear weapons. So the objective fact is that nuclear weapons are not being built, and therefore, there’s no inability to stop Iran from building them—although it is true that you are unable to stop something that doesn't exist in the first place.

    The truth of the reason for withdrawal seems to me to lie in the close of the remarks by the president when he announced it: a statement explicitly directed to the “long-suffering people of Iran.”  He said:  “[T]he future of Iran belongs to its people. They are the rightful heirs to a rich culture and an ancient land, and they deserve a nation that does justice to their dreams, honor to their history and glory to God.” This sounds suspiciously like a call for Iranians to rise up against their government, which has by implication denied them their rightful inheritance.

AP (September 2017)

    If that’s the case, the president seems to be making up facts according to what he wants reality to be: that somehow Iran will throw off the yoke of the imams so they can realize their dreams. What he means by the reference to honoring their history and doing justice to the “glory to God” isn’t clear.
     Or maybe the remarks were just meant to inspire Iranians to somehow force their government to renegotiate an internationally accepted multilateral agreement because one party doesn't like it.
    But maybe I’m being overly generous. Maybe the president doesn’t have any vision, no matter how distorted, of the reality of the Iranian situation. Maybe it really is just a case of undoing anything his predecessor did because he can.
    Whatever the case, it doesn’t make the assessment of noncompliance true, it doesn’t change the actual terms of the agreement into something that was never agreed, and it doesn’t alter objective reality or the facts that constitute it. It instead injects a dangerous delusion into the complex tensions of the Middle East, even as it puts the U.S. in the position of a rogue nation, that is, one that ignores the obligations of international law, thereby continuing the downward spiral of America’s credibility… one hopes not irretrievably.
     In the novel Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, Peeta Mellark, after he's subjected to severe brainwashing, suffers from an inability to interpret his memories according to what happened in actuality. The tension between his memory of real facts used to build false interpretation of what they mean and those false interpretations is profoundly disorienting to Peeta, who must repeatedly ask
when a memory surfaces, "Real? Or not real?"
   It is our responsibility amidst the current barrage of misinformation, to ask the same of what we are told. We may not like the answer, we might wish the real world were other than it is, but we ignore reality and its truth at our peril.