TRUTH OR FICTION?: Andrew Keanie discusses Doreen Maitre’s view that a work of fiction can expound philosophical ideas just as effectively as an academic text
Truth or Fiction?
Doreen Maitre
Greenwich Exchange, London, 2024
ISBN: 9781910996768
176pp £19.99
In the 1970s, as Steve Torrance points out in his Afterword to Doreen Maitre’s ‘delightfully transgressive book’, ‘Someone in the House of Lords asked why our institutions needed so many philosophy lecturers when the subject played such an unproductive role in the British economy’ With this snapshot, from half a century ago, Torrance transports us to a bygone era when hostility to free thinking was on the rise rather than scrupulously standardized. In time, the intermittent antagonism would ripen into the ubiquitous indifference which has made Sir Keir Starmer and Coldplay possible, and in which lizard-invigilated academics carry on correcting morals and giving their own a good airing.
David Miller’s Preface to Truth or Fiction? introduces us to the pioneering and inspirational Maitre, a writer largely committed to lecturing at Middlesex Polytechnic (later Middlesex University), and later at Bristol University Department of Continuing Education. She was also largely consumed with the poignant drama of parenthood and with looking after an increasingly ill husband, the poet R.A. Maitre. As Miller reports, Maitre was left very badly hurt by a vicious attack on her teachings and writings by one of her (unnamed) former students, the development of whose sense of entitlement (unaccompanied by merit) coincided with a period of vulnerability for Maitre (under pressure as a carer before finding herself under fire in her place of work).
Truth or Fiction? was under contract to be published by the Bristol Classical Press in the early 1990s. However, after being taken over by Gerald Duckworth, it appears that the press messed Maitre around so much that she decided, understandably, that she had had enough and would not sign the unlooked-for new contract. Maitre’s manuscript has now been published at last, 33 years later. Thank goodness for Greenwich Exchange. Truth or Fiction? is a book that anyone interested in thinking about the fiction they read will want to read.
During the twentieth century, philosophy (in its guise as an academic discipline) got less and less interested in the correctness of thought and more and more absorbed by the correctness of language. No modern philosopher of any note has had much to say about what always matters to human beings, such as love or beauty. It became clearer and clearer to readers with a taste for philosophy that contemporary novelists, not contemporary philosophers, were providing most satisfaction. Lots of people have read fiction – including, say, the ‘suspense fiction’ of Patricia Highsmith, or the ‘novel of ideas’ by Iris Murdoch, or the postmodern guerilla fiction of Will Self – because they have, if truth be told, wanted to read philosophy.
Maitre makes an inspiring case – or, more accurately, five inspiring cases – to illustrate the vitality of this commitment in fiction readers to philosophy redirected. She revisits Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, John Buchan’s Greenmantle, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Martin Amis’s London Fields. In each case, Maitre demonstrates just how essential a piece of fiction with a love of wisdom (philosophy) can be.
In Death in Venice, the ageing von Aschenbach’s attraction to young Tadzio is so strong that von Aschenbach invents all sorts of ways to deceive himself about its true nature. With masterly concision, Maitre shows how Mann has merely shown the reader von Aschenbach’s divided nature and his inability to stop himself (a respected and respectable writer) from falling head over heels in love with a boy. As Maitre shows, ‘some acquaintance with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud may help us to understand von Aschenbach’s predicament in Death in Venice, though it will not tell us conclusively whether these views are correct.’ Mann, like Shakespeare, shows without telling, and Maitre’s appreciation – for the fact that great fiction leaves readers a margin for error in which to imagine and infer – is elegant, eloquent and essential: ‘All human beings are natural philosophers, although many of them do not realise that they are.’
John Buchan’s characters are active, in what is after all an action novel, and Maitre deftly shows how Buchan has these characters become aware (albeit only briefly and occasionally) that their cause (imperialism happened to be the big political fantasy at the time) might not be the ‘just’ cause they have been conditioned and propagandized into allegiance to. And yet, because Buchan’s novel is an action novel, none of the characters get the opportunity to air any reservations or hangups, let alone blow the whistle on any fault or malfeasance in the prevailing politics.
As Maitre guides us through these novels, she sheds Nietzschean, Schopenhauerian, Freudian, Platonic, and even Eagletonian (there are five Terry Eagleton books listed in the bibliography) light on her chosen literary authors (and their plots and characters), but in a way that does not insist that such light is indispensable. In this way, Maitre – for whom the intermingling of literature and philosophy is the best and only way – takes her isms (postmodernism, deconstructionism, Marxism and so on) lightly, and makes clear how amusingly arrogant theorists have been in seeming to think that in looking back they were looking down. ‘While Buchan’s British Empire scenario, with its class hierarchies, its faith in the rightness of the cause, its code of honour in wartime, its now-quaint attitude to women, has been replaced by other values and beliefs, by other ideologies, they have their problems too, and will no doubt seem as absurd to future generations as Buchan’s does to us.’
In the diachronic sense it is interesting and instructive to observe what people have thought about, say, love, or war, in different historical ages (Plato and Plutarch, half a millennium of the so-called Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, and all the way through to the Enlightenment and beyond). In the synchronic sense, in the late twentieth century (when Maitre was writing), philologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguisticians, structural semioticists, literary historians and so on all had their valuable but fallible contributions to enrich the reader’s understanding.
The Waves, Woolf’s study of introspection and the utter uncertainty of the self and personal identity, is beautifully handled. How should I live? Should I model myself on him? Her? The important quality of Woolf’s contribution to a philosophical conversation – involving Hume, Kant, Sartre, Russell and Wittgenstein – is vividly brought out. Each of Woolf’s characters wrestles with the problem of personal identity in his or her own way. ‘Bernard wavers uncomfortably between many personae, unable to establish any one of them as his own. Louis and Rhoda, lacking Bernard’s outgoing approach and interest in others, experience the problem in a rather different way.’
It is satisfying to see literature being sifted so observantly for matters of consequence to the study of humanity. This is a key aspect of what Steve Torrance calls Maitre’s ‘highly original thinking on how philosophy and literature could be studied in tandem’. In Woolf’s characters, one recognises oneself – how one’s airy soul gets spun into matter and subordinated to its blind laws. Which of Woolf’s characters is closest to living the best life? What is one to say? Whatever there may be to say, it can be said passionately (from the inside of the problem, and from the perspective of a coherent individuality, rather than at some pretended remove), which does not automatically make it credible. Whether you think Percival, Susan, Jinny or Neville might have anything more than a confused grasp on what life is, it is only what you think, and nothing else. However, even though you cannot prove the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what other people think. This, for Maitre, is what novelists and their readers do, and what philosophers used to do.
Terry Eagleton’s tours of ideology (including some helpful handling of ‘false’ consciousness) can look rather clever and conceited compared to Maitre’s unfeigned autonomy and unforced focus on what it feels like (if not what it might finally mean) to be alive and in the world. With his Bible in one hand and Das Kapital in the other, Eagleton could never have been like Maitre unaffiliated, notwithstanding his weakness for counter-inflationary Wildean witticisms. He was, however, by the turn of the century, wise to academics’ cooling enthusiasm around the Karl Marx karaoke machine in the senior common room. His After Theory (2003) is perhaps something of a papering over of his pact with the salary-paying capitalist ‘enemy’.
Umberto Eco’s interest in comedy is revisited in the most freshening and worthwhile way. Maitre (writing, remember, in the early 1990s) appreciatively quotes ‘in full Eco’s masterly reconstruction of what Aristotle might have said in a work on comedy’. Now, in 2024, AI could surely have a go at such a reconstruction, and it would be fascinating to see how Eco versus AI would turn out.
Martin Amis’s London Fields, which is somewhere between ‘a chilling apocalyptic vision’ and ‘school-boy smut’ is a kind of postmodernist joke: Samson Young, the American narrator living temporarily in London (and dying from some unspecified terminal illness), is transcribing something that appears to be happening. His record as a writer confirms that he is incapable of making things up, but at the same time Nicola Six, Keith Talent and Guy Clinch (and the supporting cast of colourful characters) are fantasies – Amis’s basket of deplorables to be found somewhere between implosion and illusion.
If Woolf’s characters had civilised Bloomsbury difficulties in ascertaining who they were, Amis’s characters are more like the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we might have been better to deny in a conspiracy of silence. For Maitre, Amis ‘loses his grip on this tricky form of presentation so that much of its effectiveness is lost by the end of the book.’ But the fact that Amis got his grip for long enough to show something recognisable and worthwhile is Maitre’s take-home message.
In the second half of the book, Maitre puts the philosophers front and centre, and it turns out that they are just as flaky as their fiction-writing brothers and sister on the other side of Maitre’s Interlude. Socrates is problematic – his personality, and his attitude to democracy and even to his own family, seems wrong to the reader (in 1991 or 2024). David Hume’s thoroughgoing uncertainty about himself – what he is doing, how he is doing it, why he is doing it – makes him as lost and lacking in traction as any character in The Waves.
‘Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics was to argue that knowledge depends on both Reason and Sense Experience.’ Maitre’s inclination, however, to eclipse Kant with a whole world of fictional-philosophical symbiosis, is the axis of her boldness and originality: ‘Some commentators have argued that Kant was well aware of the “groundlessness” or “fictionality” of his metaphysics.’
Mill was impressed by Coleridge’s ‘criticism of attempts to generalise about human beings; to treat them as all the same rather than taking account of their individuality.’ One can suppose from this that Mill and Coleridge would have approved of Maitre’s fiction writers as the unacknowledged philosophers of the world.
Maitre preserves tangles of complication left by philosophers not of the same view. It mattered to Mill that social and political problems be solved. It didn’t to Socrates. For Descartes, ‘there is no way of checking what people say about their own mental experience.’ Ryle sees behaviour more than mind, and ‘literary works make it frighteningly clear that very few people operate with clearly delineated ideas about anything’ For Maitre, the confusion and complexity present the fractions and fragments of life to be studied most whole-heartedly.
No doubt, Iris Murdoch’s splendid expression, ‘inhabited philosophy’ (by which she meant the love of wisdom with which one can look at the world from the perspective of a coherent individuality), would have been dismissed as more and more people piously signalled their faith in the spirit of utility. Maitre’s conclusion amounts to an expression of the need for an important coalition, an amalgamation of minds: ‘Philosophy and Literature are complementary activities, not opposing ones, or even competing ones’. It is as fresh a call to arms in the mid-2020s as it would have been in the early 1990s.
Dec 4 2024
TRUTH OR FICTION?
TRUTH OR FICTION?: Andrew Keanie discusses Doreen Maitre’s view that a work of fiction can expound philosophical ideas just as effectively as an academic text
In the 1970s, as Steve Torrance points out in his Afterword to Doreen Maitre’s ‘delightfully transgressive book’, ‘Someone in the House of Lords asked why our institutions needed so many philosophy lecturers when the subject played such an unproductive role in the British economy’ With this snapshot, from half a century ago, Torrance transports us to a bygone era when hostility to free thinking was on the rise rather than scrupulously standardized. In time, the intermittent antagonism would ripen into the ubiquitous indifference which has made Sir Keir Starmer and Coldplay possible, and in which lizard-invigilated academics carry on correcting morals and giving their own a good airing.
David Miller’s Preface to Truth or Fiction? introduces us to the pioneering and inspirational Maitre, a writer largely committed to lecturing at Middlesex Polytechnic (later Middlesex University), and later at Bristol University Department of Continuing Education. She was also largely consumed with the poignant drama of parenthood and with looking after an increasingly ill husband, the poet R.A. Maitre. As Miller reports, Maitre was left very badly hurt by a vicious attack on her teachings and writings by one of her (unnamed) former students, the development of whose sense of entitlement (unaccompanied by merit) coincided with a period of vulnerability for Maitre (under pressure as a carer before finding herself under fire in her place of work).
Truth or Fiction? was under contract to be published by the Bristol Classical Press in the early 1990s. However, after being taken over by Gerald Duckworth, it appears that the press messed Maitre around so much that she decided, understandably, that she had had enough and would not sign the unlooked-for new contract. Maitre’s manuscript has now been published at last, 33 years later. Thank goodness for Greenwich Exchange. Truth or Fiction? is a book that anyone interested in thinking about the fiction they read will want to read.
During the twentieth century, philosophy (in its guise as an academic discipline) got less and less interested in the correctness of thought and more and more absorbed by the correctness of language. No modern philosopher of any note has had much to say about what always matters to human beings, such as love or beauty. It became clearer and clearer to readers with a taste for philosophy that contemporary novelists, not contemporary philosophers, were providing most satisfaction. Lots of people have read fiction – including, say, the ‘suspense fiction’ of Patricia Highsmith, or the ‘novel of ideas’ by Iris Murdoch, or the postmodern guerilla fiction of Will Self – because they have, if truth be told, wanted to read philosophy.
Maitre makes an inspiring case – or, more accurately, five inspiring cases – to illustrate the vitality of this commitment in fiction readers to philosophy redirected. She revisits Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, John Buchan’s Greenmantle, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Martin Amis’s London Fields. In each case, Maitre demonstrates just how essential a piece of fiction with a love of wisdom (philosophy) can be.
In Death in Venice, the ageing von Aschenbach’s attraction to young Tadzio is so strong that von Aschenbach invents all sorts of ways to deceive himself about its true nature. With masterly concision, Maitre shows how Mann has merely shown the reader von Aschenbach’s divided nature and his inability to stop himself (a respected and respectable writer) from falling head over heels in love with a boy. As Maitre shows, ‘some acquaintance with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud may help us to understand von Aschenbach’s predicament in Death in Venice, though it will not tell us conclusively whether these views are correct.’ Mann, like Shakespeare, shows without telling, and Maitre’s appreciation – for the fact that great fiction leaves readers a margin for error in which to imagine and infer – is elegant, eloquent and essential: ‘All human beings are natural philosophers, although many of them do not realise that they are.’
John Buchan’s characters are active, in what is after all an action novel, and Maitre deftly shows how Buchan has these characters become aware (albeit only briefly and occasionally) that their cause (imperialism happened to be the big political fantasy at the time) might not be the ‘just’ cause they have been conditioned and propagandized into allegiance to. And yet, because Buchan’s novel is an action novel, none of the characters get the opportunity to air any reservations or hangups, let alone blow the whistle on any fault or malfeasance in the prevailing politics.
As Maitre guides us through these novels, she sheds Nietzschean, Schopenhauerian, Freudian, Platonic, and even Eagletonian (there are five Terry Eagleton books listed in the bibliography) light on her chosen literary authors (and their plots and characters), but in a way that does not insist that such light is indispensable. In this way, Maitre – for whom the intermingling of literature and philosophy is the best and only way – takes her isms (postmodernism, deconstructionism, Marxism and so on) lightly, and makes clear how amusingly arrogant theorists have been in seeming to think that in looking back they were looking down. ‘While Buchan’s British Empire scenario, with its class hierarchies, its faith in the rightness of the cause, its code of honour in wartime, its now-quaint attitude to women, has been replaced by other values and beliefs, by other ideologies, they have their problems too, and will no doubt seem as absurd to future generations as Buchan’s does to us.’
In the diachronic sense it is interesting and instructive to observe what people have thought about, say, love, or war, in different historical ages (Plato and Plutarch, half a millennium of the so-called Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Reformation, and all the way through to the Enlightenment and beyond). In the synchronic sense, in the late twentieth century (when Maitre was writing), philologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguisticians, structural semioticists, literary historians and so on all had their valuable but fallible contributions to enrich the reader’s understanding.
The Waves, Woolf’s study of introspection and the utter uncertainty of the self and personal identity, is beautifully handled. How should I live? Should I model myself on him? Her? The important quality of Woolf’s contribution to a philosophical conversation – involving Hume, Kant, Sartre, Russell and Wittgenstein – is vividly brought out. Each of Woolf’s characters wrestles with the problem of personal identity in his or her own way. ‘Bernard wavers uncomfortably between many personae, unable to establish any one of them as his own. Louis and Rhoda, lacking Bernard’s outgoing approach and interest in others, experience the problem in a rather different way.’
It is satisfying to see literature being sifted so observantly for matters of consequence to the study of humanity. This is a key aspect of what Steve Torrance calls Maitre’s ‘highly original thinking on how philosophy and literature could be studied in tandem’. In Woolf’s characters, one recognises oneself – how one’s airy soul gets spun into matter and subordinated to its blind laws. Which of Woolf’s characters is closest to living the best life? What is one to say? Whatever there may be to say, it can be said passionately (from the inside of the problem, and from the perspective of a coherent individuality, rather than at some pretended remove), which does not automatically make it credible. Whether you think Percival, Susan, Jinny or Neville might have anything more than a confused grasp on what life is, it is only what you think, and nothing else. However, even though you cannot prove the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what other people think. This, for Maitre, is what novelists and their readers do, and what philosophers used to do.
Terry Eagleton’s tours of ideology (including some helpful handling of ‘false’ consciousness) can look rather clever and conceited compared to Maitre’s unfeigned autonomy and unforced focus on what it feels like (if not what it might finally mean) to be alive and in the world. With his Bible in one hand and Das Kapital in the other, Eagleton could never have been like Maitre unaffiliated, notwithstanding his weakness for counter-inflationary Wildean witticisms. He was, however, by the turn of the century, wise to academics’ cooling enthusiasm around the Karl Marx karaoke machine in the senior common room. His After Theory (2003) is perhaps something of a papering over of his pact with the salary-paying capitalist ‘enemy’.
Umberto Eco’s interest in comedy is revisited in the most freshening and worthwhile way. Maitre (writing, remember, in the early 1990s) appreciatively quotes ‘in full Eco’s masterly reconstruction of what Aristotle might have said in a work on comedy’. Now, in 2024, AI could surely have a go at such a reconstruction, and it would be fascinating to see how Eco versus AI would turn out.
Martin Amis’s London Fields, which is somewhere between ‘a chilling apocalyptic vision’ and ‘school-boy smut’ is a kind of postmodernist joke: Samson Young, the American narrator living temporarily in London (and dying from some unspecified terminal illness), is transcribing something that appears to be happening. His record as a writer confirms that he is incapable of making things up, but at the same time Nicola Six, Keith Talent and Guy Clinch (and the supporting cast of colourful characters) are fantasies – Amis’s basket of deplorables to be found somewhere between implosion and illusion.
If Woolf’s characters had civilised Bloomsbury difficulties in ascertaining who they were, Amis’s characters are more like the lunatic family members in the attic whose existence we might have been better to deny in a conspiracy of silence. For Maitre, Amis ‘loses his grip on this tricky form of presentation so that much of its effectiveness is lost by the end of the book.’ But the fact that Amis got his grip for long enough to show something recognisable and worthwhile is Maitre’s take-home message.
In the second half of the book, Maitre puts the philosophers front and centre, and it turns out that they are just as flaky as their fiction-writing brothers and sister on the other side of Maitre’s Interlude. Socrates is problematic – his personality, and his attitude to democracy and even to his own family, seems wrong to the reader (in 1991 or 2024). David Hume’s thoroughgoing uncertainty about himself – what he is doing, how he is doing it, why he is doing it – makes him as lost and lacking in traction as any character in The Waves.
‘Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics was to argue that knowledge depends on both Reason and Sense Experience.’ Maitre’s inclination, however, to eclipse Kant with a whole world of fictional-philosophical symbiosis, is the axis of her boldness and originality: ‘Some commentators have argued that Kant was well aware of the “groundlessness” or “fictionality” of his metaphysics.’
Mill was impressed by Coleridge’s ‘criticism of attempts to generalise about human beings; to treat them as all the same rather than taking account of their individuality.’ One can suppose from this that Mill and Coleridge would have approved of Maitre’s fiction writers as the unacknowledged philosophers of the world.
Maitre preserves tangles of complication left by philosophers not of the same view. It mattered to Mill that social and political problems be solved. It didn’t to Socrates. For Descartes, ‘there is no way of checking what people say about their own mental experience.’ Ryle sees behaviour more than mind, and ‘literary works make it frighteningly clear that very few people operate with clearly delineated ideas about anything’ For Maitre, the confusion and complexity present the fractions and fragments of life to be studied most whole-heartedly.
No doubt, Iris Murdoch’s splendid expression, ‘inhabited philosophy’ (by which she meant the love of wisdom with which one can look at the world from the perspective of a coherent individuality), would have been dismissed as more and more people piously signalled their faith in the spirit of utility. Maitre’s conclusion amounts to an expression of the need for an important coalition, an amalgamation of minds: ‘Philosophy and Literature are complementary activities, not opposing ones, or even competing ones’. It is as fresh a call to arms in the mid-2020s as it would have been in the early 1990s.