When theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin began writing A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines it was a work of non-fiction. But she realized, as her subjects Gödel and Turing had, that the tools of non-fiction—or those of scientific inquiry—were insufficient for discerning truth. As a novelist, Jonathan Lethem traffics regularly in different degrees of truth and is similarly fascinated with what constitutes reality. Recently the two met for lunch at the National Arts Club in New York to talk about this elusive concept—its guises, its enchantments, and how we know it when we see it.
Click on the image to watch highlights from the Salon. To watch the full, hour-long conversation, click here
Janna Levin: I've found it very interesting that in all of your novels, there's something fanciful. There is always this element that's not real, even though there's a very realistic quality to your writing.
Jonathan Lethem: Well, I think one place that comes from is that my father was a painter, and I was trained as a visual artist.
Levin: And that shows up in The Fortress of Solitude.
Lethem: Yeah. The main character in Fortress has a painter-father too. And we both took our father's work and incorporated them into a worldview. In the case of my father's painting, he always combined representation with the imaginary or the fantastical. And I took this as a kind of basic condition of art that, in a way, was inherent in my worldview before I could ever have questioned it. Art consisted of a combination of observed elements and—the other word is always harder—the imaginary or fantastical or metaphorical. In some ways I think "metaphorical" is the word that captures it best for me, because I've come to see that one thing all of my writing has in common is some element of imagery that moves out of metaphor and into the real space of the story. Whereas in someone else's story, the people might feel that they're superheros, in my book the characters actually get to try out being superheros. It's a kind of literalness about metaphor.
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Levin: That's an interesting way of putting it—a literalness about metaphor. What you said about the confluence of the observed and imagined is very interesting because that's of course what every novelist must do, at some level. We're disappointed if novelists don't combine the observed and the imaginary.
Lethem: I agree completely. And I always find it remarkable that people are praised for their realism in books that sort of sublimate the imaginary or metaphorical elements because it seems to me that if anyone were actually ever handed utter realism, which is to say a kind of a transcripted human conversation—
Levin: Which our readers are going to get!
Lethem: —they'd be bitterly disappointed. And yet this notion that that author ought to deliver reality in some kind of document persists as praise. But I think it's inherent to art, and certainly to the art of fiction, that invented and observed material go together. And what I do, I guess, is kind of make the point of collision rough and obvious instead of smooth or sublimated. I have a tendency to want to make it unmistakable and, in some cases, kind of uncomfortable for the reader. So, as you say, Fortress of Solitude invites you to feel that you're in one kind of depiction of reality.
Levin: And then suddenly there's something—
Lethem: —an eruption of magical possibilities.
Levin: Right. But what's so disappointing about reality? Because I know what you're saying, but what is it that we need to be repackaged and rephrased for us so it hits our pleasure centers better?
Great dialogue!
Peter Gallagher
March 7, 2007 09:59 PM
Jana Levin hits the nail on the head when she talks about how computers need to evolve. The problem with computers is that they were created by intelligent design. So they are stupid. People interested in the history of science should take a look at Herbert Simon and Allen Newell's pioneering report on their study of chess players as a lever for generating artificial intelligence. Their method for codifying mental processes of the players? They asked them! AI went off the tracks right there. By forcing answers into first person reports, the only acceptible answers were those that recapitulated the logic of the positions--quite independently of whether the chess players actually used such processes. (In fact, most chess players when interviewed claim they "see" rather than "calculate.") The point is that the logic of an action is only half the picture; the other half is the interaction with an environment. So far, computers are mostly programmed by logic, whereas the potential for evolution requires dynamics and dialectics. Why was Stephen Wolfram's magnum opus stillborn? Because it is static. There is no provision for the interplay of processes. One topic than Levin and Lethem might have touched on but didn't was what reality has in common with invention. The answer is representation. This is most evident in looking at the "character" of a process or reality--we can lift the character off like a skin and reproduce it in a narrative.
David McCullough
March 19, 2007 06:46 PM