Is Fiction Real?

Sammanfattning

In my essay, Is Fiction Real? I attempt to navigate and investigate my own obsession with truth and/or the absence of lying. I do so in hopes of finding out if fiction is an effective and sustainable way of presenting and validating my experience. In this process I look at personal and public examples from history, of fictions, lies and untruths that take over, or shape, the narratives that they originate in. These being the origins of the song I Believe in the Sun by Kim André Arnesen, the 1949 riot in Quito, Ecuador following the broadcast of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, and the legends of the premiere of L’Arivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat. To do so I draw from Cecilia Alvears article Martians land in Quito, Jefferson Pooley and Micheal J. Socolows article The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic, and Martin Loiperdingers article LUMIÈRES “ARRIVAL OF THE TRAIN”: cinema’s founding myth, among others. In the essay I reflect on the aesthetics of the real world and on strictly factual stories, through mud as an analogy of the unclear, the blurry, and the less definable. I touch on different forms of imitation in relation to fact and fiction. I also propose the aesthetics of science as a potential path to a universally validatable expression of subjective experiences. Although I understand that science and universality is also a part of the system that has, both historically and far too recently, robbed people like me of our validity. Throughout the essay I attempt to draw these ideas back to my own doubts about art as a medium for truthful, validatable, and effective communication, while simultaneously, and perhaps ironically, simplifying the notion of truth and lying to a very binary concept, all in an attempt to communicate my struggles with longing for validation of my experience as a trans non-binary and likely neurodivergent person who has not yet been validated through either of the related medical systems.