All in all, both novels, for all their affiliation with realist fact-writing, also testify to the complexities of, and tensions in, the relationship between fact and fiction. They also show that even realism, which from a postmodernist perspective was a period of almost naïve veneration of positivistic facts and fact-writing, was not so naive after all. And these novels perhaps also show something else: With an eye to the romantic affiliation of *Hard Times* and the proto-modernist attitudes discernible in *Adam Bede,* one may be led to suspect that the oppositions literary historians have created from various perspectives in their fact-writing, oppositions between the mentalities and epistemologies allegedly underlying epochs and trends such as romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism are – at least to some extent – facts in the etymological sense: *facta*, constructions. They are indispensable and useful for orientation but must again and again be subject to scrutiny – in order to approach the elusive ideal which Eliot's narrator so eloquently propagated in chapter 17 of *Adam Bede*, namely Truth.

#### **Bibliography**

Abbott, H. Porter (2015): "How Do We Read What Isn't There To Be Read? Shadow Stories and Permanent Gaps", in: Zunshine, Lisa (ed.): *The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies*, Oxford, 104–119.

Anger, Suzy (2001): "George Eliot and Philosophy", in: Levine (ed.), *The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot*, 76–97.

Barthes, Roland (1968): "L'Effet de réel", in: *Communications* 11, 84–89.

Coover, Robert (1970) [1969]: "The Magic Poker", in: id.: *Pricksongs and Descants*, New York, 20–45.

Craig, David (1969): "Introduction", in: Dickens, *Hard Times*, 11–36.

## **A 'Real' Novel?** Narrating Facts in *El hombre que amaba a los perros*

*Iyari Martínez Márquez (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)*

A couple of weeks ago, I moved to Giessen in Germany. New city, new language, new name for almost everything; new all. This experience, as a whole, is not only mine. Many people find themselves in such a situation every day. However, what is special to me is how much relief I felt when I saw a Woolworth store in the mall near my new home. I was born in a small city in Mexico, where Woolworth did not exist. I lived there for almost 30 years until I moved to Madrid to study. The last Woolworth store in Spain closed in 1980. This was 34 years before I arrived in Spain's capital. There is certainly not a single Woolworth in Lisbon, where I moved afterward. But now there was one. So, how come I felt calmer when I saw the big red letters on the billboard? Letters that I had never seen in real life until that moment?

In 1975 Judith Kerr published *The Other Way Round*, the second book of her *Out of the Hitler Time* trilogy, in which the main character Anna and her family experience the most intense German air raids on London. At some point in the novel, Anna goes to a Woolworth store to buy something, because it was the cheapest store around. This memory stayed with me for years. I must have read the novel when I was 15 years old, and the recollection came back the moment I saw those big red letters. "This is a cheap store," I thought, "it is the same store where Anna used to shop." Why did I know that for a fact? Because a mixture of reality and memory, straight from a narrative work, had just saved my day.

This is, of course, a very private story, and it involves only a minimum number of facts. Or what could be considered to be facts. Or, even better, a double layer of 'factual' events. On the one hand, I undoubtedly moved to a different town in a different country, and I definitely (and awkwardly) did not speak the local language. At the same time, the Woolworth store is there, at the Neustädter mall. On the other hand, Kerr's book exists. You can easily get

a copy and read it. Furthermore, in the book, Anna, in fact, goes to a store that exists in her world. A small but important detail here is that such a store 'also' exists in our world. But not only the store. It is a fact that her context too refers to a real event in history, namely London being bombed by Nazi Germany's forces during WW2, while her story as a Jewish refugee resembles countless similar stories from that period. Like many other things and events that exist in both worlds, hers and ours.

A couple of questions comes up here: If I am aware that Anna does not exist in my world and that her story is a fictional narrative despite the many correlations with our world, why was I able to relate her Woolworth to my Woolworth? By which means did Kerr's depiction of London meld with my reality of a German city? How does such a process of mixing fiction and fact work? Can this process be applied to narratives in general?

I would like to answer these questions by starting with the last two of them. A good way to do so is to look at a genre that is deeply related to narrative forms: historical novels. This particular genre allows a closer view at the described 'overlapping' process, since it appeals to factual events while also filling up the spaces between them. The long tradition of the genre gives an idea of the importance of reporting such events in a narrative form and the need to relate them to characters, feelings, and actions. Hence, narrative "might be well considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate *knowing* into *telling*, the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific."1 Furthermore, "[w]e may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty *understanding* a story coming from another culture,"2 or, if I may add, *about* another culture.

Yet another important trait of the historical novel, that adds to make it suitable for the purposes of this study, comes from the process that determinates our reading process: "[i]n order to understand and evaluate a story, we often implicitly decide which genre it represents. In the semiotics of stories, genres are the analogs of species in biology – we apply them for fast and useful categorization."3 Thereby we expect certain inputs from any given text, according to the category we establish for them. We enter, then, in the realm

1 White 1980: 5.

2 Ibid.

3 Brandt 2009: 6.

of 'possible worlds,' and these possible worlds created by literary artifacts are affected by forces that may create the plot and lead the story forward, on a larger or smaller scale. Which forces are they? Following Brandt, these elements are what gives each text a worldly context, what determines the rules of each world, from a middle ground to the 'real' world. Adding magic locally or globally will lead us to the realm of the fantastic while the addition of fatal forces leads us to the grotesque or the absurd. It is not the interest of the present paper to discuss the nomenclature or nature of such divisions and genres but to be aware that distance and proximity from the 'real' world create a set of different scenarios in which stories develop.

Within these possible worlds, we must acknowledge that there are a variety of ways to create and develop them. Some stories can take place in entirely imaginary places and with imaginary characters. Other stories 'reproduce' a certain reality that vaguely reminds us of any city or character through narrative strategies such as never mentioning a name or avoiding details. One can think of Dostoyevsky's cities or Kafka's characters. Some other species of stories, as Brandt would put it, place fictional characters in 'real' contexts, as in the story that served to introduce the present paper. In the case of historical novels, the strategy is to present all these elements in order to create a relation with reality: verifiable characters, places, and events. The blank spaces, or 'the missed scenes,' between events are filled through the authors' imagination, their artistic practice, and the intentions behind their narrative work. In this sense, a historical novel makes use of a strategy that puts the genre in a close position to historical writing, according to Hayden White.4

However, it is important to remember that neither of the previous, and inconclusive, possible ways to approach a story play entirely by the rules of our reality. Each of the given examples belongs to a particular space, with a particular set of rules that make sense and work accordingly to the logic that builds up the narrated world. This is especially obvious in the case of a wholly fictive universe, where 'imaginary' or 'non-real' forces such as magic are overall present and dominant. But as these forces shift towards a zero degree of their agency in the stories, following Brandt's idea on genres, the narration starts taking place in (a) 'reality,' or to what can be understood as a 'real world' that seems to mirror our own world, and one might forget that every fiction belongs to a realm of its own. This inclination to relate fiction to

4 White 1981, 1980.

our own reality has been called "pseudo-mimesis"5 by Czech critic Lubomir Doležel. In the case of historical novels, the narrations propose a "transworld identity"6 within the possible world semantics domain, which

claims that Tolstoy's fictional Napoleon or Dicken's fictional London are not identical with the historical Napoleon or the geographical London. It insists that fictional individuals are not dependent for their existence and properties on actual prototypes. Still, persons with actual world "prototypes" constitute a distinct semantic class within the set of fictional persons; an ineradicable relationship exists between the historical Napoleon and all fictional Napoleons. However, this relationship extends across world boundaries, fictional persons and their actual prototypes are linked by transworld identity.7

It is within this frame that an overlapping of fiction and reality is possible. Ever since they belong to two different dimensions but do, however, maintain a transworldly identity that makes it possible to identify one *in* the other. Furthermore, and continuing with Doležel, it is also important to keep in mind that "[t]he fiction makers practice a radically nonessentialist semantics; they give themselves the freedom to alter even the most typical and well-known properties and life histories of actual (historical) persons when incorporating them in a fictional world."8 The overlapping becomes clearer by following this train of thought.

In order to illustrate the ideas regarding the superposition of fiction and reality presented so far, I would like to consider Leonardo Padura's essay *La novela que no se escribió: Apostillas a El hombre que amaba a los perros* (2013-2018) which is a reflection on the writing process of his novel *El hombre que amaba a los perros* (2009) and provides an example of the construction of a historical novel that engages with the aforementioned narrative strategies. As for the novel, Padura presents a three-fold narration, in which different perspectives converge around a major historical event: Liev Davidovich Trotsky's assassination by the hand of Ramón Mercader in 1940 in Mexico City. To begin with, we are presented with a thread that narrates Trotsky's life from the moment of his exile from the USSR.We are 'witnesses' of his dislocations between Turkey, France, Germany, Norway and, finally, Mexico. We follow his thoughts on the

5 Doležel 1998.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.: 16–17.

8 Ibid.: 17.

global political context of the time but also take a look on his daily life and his preoccupations and relations with his family and friends. Secondly, we are faced to Ramón Mercader's story, one that took him from his involvement in the Spanish Civil War to a collaboration with the Stalinist secret police and the execution of one of the most discussed crimes of the 20th century. And, finally, we have a third story line that refers to an entirely fictional Iván Cárdenas and his encounters with Ramón López, Ramón Mercader under a false name, in La Habana. Within this thread, we 'hear' the narration of Ramón Mercader's story.

As for the essay on the process of the novel, Padura presents the personal interests that led him to write down such a text, but he also describes his approach to the writing of the characters. Furthermore, Leonardo Padura gives an insight into his journalistic process that allows him to obtain information and to be as close as possible to 'reality.'

The best way to present my argument is to split it in two parts: A first section will take a look at Padura's construction of his characters and the novel by departing from his own exegesis of the work and by following his opinions on how his artistic work shaped an alternate, possible, world for these characters. In this section, thus, it is my aim to show that Padura is very aware of the limits of his desire to be as 'faithful' to reality as possible, and, also, of the limits of the narrative to build up the tension between the characters. In the second section, I would like to discuss an idea on the process through which these transworld characters integrate into reality via the reader's cognitive process which involves their imagination, but also both their episodic and semantic memory. In other words, I would like to argue for a two-way gaze regarding the relation between our world and the possible world: one that comes from the author's writing and codification process, and another that depends on the decodification (and recodification) that takes place on the reader's end.

#### **1.**

A first element to which I would like to bring attention in *La novela que no se escribió* is the resonance between Padura's personal take on the drawing of his characters and on the nature of such characters that are based on historical, real, figures. Let us take a look at his first reflection on the different degrees

of difficulty when it came to fictionalizing both historical characters in order to create their transworldly mirrors:

[…] how to deal with the writing of a novel with one character able to fill it with information and another blurred behind a barely known, and hardly real, biography that has been fictionalized and distorted in many of its passages by the subjectivity and the informants' search for limelight, but also by other interests (political, family, sectaries)?9

It is a central question when storytellers face the complex task of mixing their own vision, their world making activity, with facts in order to give the reader a deceiving perspective that can confuse them, a *trompe l'oeil* created entirely for the illusion to be part of our reality. In this way, the transworldly nature of the characters, and their context, is a masquerade behind documented events and characters (which do not lose their transworldliness in any case but appear to be real and relatable to their 'real' pairs; a sort of doppelganger between their world and our world).

Padura argues that his approach was different for each character. Due to the amount of information about Liev Davidovich Trotsky's life, his own autobiography and Isaac Deutscher's work particularly, Padura's strategy is to narrate Trotsky's inner life, giving weight to his private thoughts and inner dialogues concerning his context, which are "essential elements of his individuality, so important for the *creation* of the character but barely decisive for the *historical frame* […]."10 In this sense, the facts are not only given in contextual form but also in the known events that involved Trotsky in person, his dislocations around the world as exiled, the houses where he lived, the people he talked to, all the elements that surround the character and that cannot be changed to maintain the 'real' mask. Hence, the fiction comes in the form of his inner life. A different situation appears when dealing with Mercader's character:

9 Padura 2019b: 130. "¿Cómo lidiar en la escritura de una novela con un personaje capaz de atiborrar con la información y con otro difuminado tras una biografía real a duras penas conocida y en muchos de sus pasajes bastante ficcionada o distorsionada por la subjetividad y hasta la búsqueda de protagonismo de los informantes y por los más diversos intereses (políticos, familiares, sectarios)?" All translations from this book are my own.

10 Ibid.: 131. "[…] los componentes esenciales de su individualidad, tan importantes en la *creación* misma del personaje pero apenas decisivos para el *cuadro histórico*, […]." My emphasis.

Ramón Mercader, on his side, is an absolutely literary construction, elaborated from a few reliable bibliographical references and many contextual elements that should or could influence him: the epoch's conflicts during his lifetime. In this way, the bibliographical elements are inserted in real events such as the establishment of the Second Republic in Spain and the Civil War (1936-1939), in which Mercader took part, his becoming a Soviet secret agent and the political and ideological environment of the time […], which allowed me to sketch a character from what *actually* happened in his life and, over all, *what could have happened accordingly to that historical context*. 11

It becomes clear that Leonardo Padura is aware of the transworldly nature of the characters in his novel and of the *possible world* they inhabit and in which the events 'could have happened.' Ever since his writing strategies are in line with the idea that

[p]ossible worlds semantics makes us aware that the material coming from the actual world has to undergo a substantial transformation at the world boundary […] actual-world (historical) individuals are able to enter a fictional world only if they become possible counterparts, shaped in any way the fiction maker chooses.12

At this point one can come back to Hayden White's idea of narration as problem solver which touches the question of knowing and telling. I would like to consider this in connection with the analysis of Leonardo Padura's reflections on his own work. What is the problem that is being solved by this story? What exactly is coded here? The answer to this question relies on the third narrative thread: Iván Cárdenas. The character's importance can be seen in two ways; first, as a sort of 'key master' that opens and closes the doors in the narration,

11 Padura 2019b: 131–132. "Ramón Mercader, por su lado, es una construcción absolutamente novelesca, elaborada a partir de unos pocos referentes biográficos creíbles y de muchos elementos contextuales que debieron o pudieron influirlo: los conflictos de la época que le tocó vivir. De este modo, los datos biográficos son insertados en acontecimientos reales como el establecimiento de la Segunda República en España y la Guerra Civil (1936-1939) en la cual Mercader participó, su conversión en agente secreto soviético y el ambiente político e ideológico del momento […], con lo cual pude ir moldeando un personaje a partir de lo que realmente ocurrió en su vida y, sobre todo, *de lo que pudo haber ocurrido de acuerdo a ese contexto histórico.*"

12 Doležel 1998: 21.

allowing us to approach Mercader's story. However, Cárdenas' role goes beyond a purely literary consideration, he is a representation of an entire Cuban generation, deprived of means to access the events outside the island, and, furthermore, outside the official pro-Soviet perspective of the world: "Iván is a fictional entity, built with elements from many different lives, real or possible, known by first or second hand, since I decided to make him into a synthesis of many experiences lived by a specific Cuban generation, to the generation to which I belong."13 Padura encodes the answer to the problem of knowing and telling as such: The novel links isolated dots of information and events of the 20th century to which a whole generation only gained access through narrative and fictional means. Beyond the documented facts, Padura reaches back to the people that met Ramón Mercader during his time in Cuba, like doctors and family members. Thus, the possibility to fill in the blanks is a result of this form of writing facts. Hence, the last words in Padura's essay:

[…] through emails, phone calls, face-to-face comments, and, also, letters received through postal service, dozens of Cuban readers expressed, in their own words, the same reaction to the book: they thanked me for writing the novel, because, by reading it, they have learned many stories that they did not know, and even they have learned many things from their own and personal history.14

Leonardo Padura codifies these elements, and it becomes the readers' task to decodify and recodify them by their own means and through their own cultural frame. This involves a series of knowledge that functions as a 'tool kit' to perform the task of making sense out of the text.15 Thus, it is necessary to understand that a part of the responsibility concerning the overlap between

13 Padura 2019a: 59. "Iván es un ente de ficción, construido con elementos de muchas vidas, reales o posibles, conocidas de primera o de segunda mano, pues me propuse convertirlo en una síntesis de diversas experiencias vividas por una generación específica de cubanos, la generación a la cual pertenezco."

14 Ibid.: 172–173. "Porque a través de correos electrónicos, llamadas telefónicas, comentarios cara a cara e, incluso, cartas recibidas por el correo ordinario, decenas de lectores cubanos me expresaron, con sus palabras, la misma reacción a la lectura del libro: me agradecían que hubiera escrito la novel pues, leyéndola, habían aprendido de muchas historias que no conocían e incluso, habían aprendido muchas cosas de su propia y personal historia."

15 Cf. Bruner 1991.

facts and fiction relies on the reader's own strategies and abilities to approach a fictional narrative.

### **2.**

If on the author's side the overlapping between fiction and reality forms part of a strategy, a well-crafted *trompe l'oeil*, in order to cross the line between actual/empirical/historical and possible worlds, the reader's side is no less interesting in terms of the decodifying strategies that need to be followed in order to understand the world created by the writer. How do the readers enter such a world? Where does this process take place? Is it in the reader's imagination? Is it a matter of purely understanding of the text? The language? Are there different ways to understand a certain narrative by different readers? How does this de(re)codification process affect the reader's reality? How do fictional facts overlap with real facts? Lubomír Doležel offers an answer to all these questions:

Readers access fictional worlds in reception, by reading and processing literary texts. The text-processing activities involve many different skills and depend on many variables, such as the type of reader, the style and purpose of his or her reading, and so on. But possible-worlds semantics insists that the world is constructed by its author and the reader's role is to reconstruct it. […] Having reconstructed the fictional world as a mental image, the reader can ponder it and make it a part of his experience, just as he experientially appropriates the actual world. The appropriation, which ranges from enjoyment through knowledge acquisition to following it as a script, integrates fictional worlds into the reader's reality.16

Some of Doležel's points need to be further explored in order to clarify the process that permits the reader to 'appropriate' the author's proposed world. For this purpose, I would like to argue that a way to understand such processes can be found in the cognitive theories' approach to literature, particularly by simulation theory.

*Simulation*, as a cognitive process, takes place within the mirroring activity that is performed by our brain when a mental image is projected, either by imagining an activity we need to perform, the act of reading, or any other

16 Doležel 1998: 21.

mental process that involves our imagination. In this sense, we *picture* ourselves making coffee, for instance, taking into account all the elements that will sourround such activity. Furthermore, we can also imagine any possible obstacle to our goal. This is a very simplistic example, since simulation is also used to prepare ourselves for interactions with other persons, calculating possible outcomes, and predicting the other's feelings towards our actions.17 In this sense, we can distinguish between goal-oriented simulations and interpersonal simulations: "When we simulate objects, we tend to follow prototypes. When we simulate actions, we often follow scripts – at least if the actions are limited and routine enough to be covered by scripts."18

In this way, the reader enters a mental *simulation* of the writer's world in which he or she adopts a proper point of view, provided by the writer in the form of the narrator, and by putting oneself into the story. This creates the possibility for the reader to not only *experience* the fictional world but also to create experience from it. Turning whatever event takes place in the story into a personal event to be used to project future outcomes is what we do with our real-world experiences. This passage between worlds is discussed by Gallese and Wojciehowski:

It appears therefore that the border between real and fictional worlds is much more blurred than one would expect. This finding opens interesting scenarios for a neurocognitive approach to art, in general, and to narrative, in particular. As the Italian philosopher Alfonso Iacono recently proposed, entering into the fictional world of art implies the inhabiting of an intermediate world whose fictional character is naturalized, henceforth it acquires a natural character, in spite of its artificial nature.19

Furthermore, according to Turner,20 human beings have the ability to blend with their imagination. In this way, we can position ourselves into the other's perspective in order to understand their acts, to feel empathy but also to try to figure out their perspective on things, events, and beings. Such a blend is necessary to make the events and characters in the narrative fiction plausible for the readers since it will turn them into 'real' entities, capable of feelings, will, and able to perform actions. This process, then, blurs the line between fiction

17 Cf. Hogan 2013.

18 Ibid.: 11.

19 Gallese/Wojciehowski 2011, in: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2 (21.05.2022).

20 Cf. Turner 2007: 90–115.

and reality even more, since the readers have the ability to blend themselves with characters and places in their imagination, which adds to the inherent relation between transworldly elements and their real models, creating the intermediate world, as proposed by Alfonso Iacono: "One enters the picture through the frame forgetting about having entered. This process, which takes place while being in an emotional state and which can be ritualized (actually it is necessary for rituals), is at the origin of the process of naturalization […]."21 As such, we have a series of steps that lead to an overlapping between fiction and reality: the readers project a simulation of the fictional world, once 'inside' this world, the reader blends with the characters obtaining in this way an experience that can be extrapolated to the reader's reality. One can now see the impossibility of separating an experience obtained in a transworldly space from its real model. An experience that seems to be applicable to an actual situation. Building up a narrative that allows the reader to project into 'reality' knowledge taken from fiction. Storing this as memories that fill blanks in the reader's view of the world.

However, other elements are necessary to make fictional facts blend with real facts, namely, our previous knowledge about the world. In this sense, we know that building simulations is related to our memory, whether it be "episodic memory" [EM] or a larger and more general "semantic memory" [SM].22 In this sense, we rely on our past experiences to predict future outcomes, Hogan, exemplifies this by picturing a coffeehouse: if we talk about a known coffeehouse, we will call on our memories of it to simulate it, and any specificality will come from these episodic memories we have of this specific site. However, when we talk about coffeehouses in general, we might also use this episodic memory but only for comparision and to set a series of characteristics shared by what should be called a 'coffeehouse.' Hogan states:

Thus we may distinguish two levels of simulation – general and particular. These are associated with distinct, although interrelated means of simulation – semantic and episodic memory. Of course, semantic and episodic elements are not fully segregated. In any complex simulation, real or literary, we make use of both. Perhaps even more important, both are integrated with emotional memory. Emotional memories are implicit memories that revive the relevant emotions when they are activated (see LeDoux Emotional). Thus

21 Iacono 2010 (quoted in Gallese and Wojciehowski 2011 and translated by the authors).

22 Cf. Hogan 2013. My abbreviations.

an emotional memory of a frightening event will, when stirred, give rise to fear.23

Therefore, it is necessary to differentiate between the process involved in the *representation* of unknown spaces and the *recreation* of those spaces that we are familiar with; this is particularly important in the case of a text such as *El hombre que amaba a los perros* that works with transworldly characters and spaces that can be 'lived' and 'verified' with their actual counterparts.

By following the aforementioned difference and Doležel's emphasis on the type of reader, I would like to distinguish two possible readers to illustrate this point: one who *represents* the text entirely (RR1); this means that he/she possesses no information regarding the characters or the spaces which is why they rely on the description of the narrator and on his/her semantic memory. In the case of *El hombre que amaba a los perros*, this is a reader that does not know about the historical person Trotsky, nor about his fatal end. Since for this reader the entire story is a fictional work, he/she would have no problem to separate any information from the real world and to accommodate the gained experience into the proper semantic memory. A second type of reader (RR2) who is familiar with the character's factual history can rely on his/her episodic memory in order to understand the textual information and the adjacent subtexts within it.These readers will bring the experience gained through the text to the real world and apply it to their knowledge about it. Here, the frame to enter and exit the transworldly space and characters is not strictly defined, as the episodic memory will be affected by the information coming from the text. Adding thoughts to the historical figure of Trotsky or filling the blanks in Ramón Mercader's life is part of a strategy that mediates the space between knowing and telling in the sense that Hayden White24 has proposed. It is a narrative way to construct a story around facts and to anchor fiction to a plausible, yet fictional world.

As one can easily see, the questions coming with the processes of reception and the focus on the role of readers provide notable and significant insights into the processes through which writing (fictional) facts affect the real world and vice-versa. An insight that shows the impact of literature and fiction on our knowledge of the world and the way we learn about it.

23 Ibid.: 12.

24 Cf. White 1980.

#### **Bibliography**

Brandt, Per Aage (2009): "Forces and Spaces – Maupassant, Borges, Hemingway. Toward a Semio-Cognitive Narratology", in: *SSRN*, https://papers. ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=1595803 (21.05.2022).

Doležel, Lubomí (1998): *Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds*, Baltimore.

Gallese, Vittorio/Wojciejowski, Hannah (2011): "How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology", in: *California Italian Studies* 2/1, https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2 (21.05.2022).

Hogan, Patrick Colm (2013): *How Author's Minds Make Stories*, Cambridge.

Kerr, Judith (1987): *En la batalla de Inglaterra*, Madrid.

Padura, Leonardo (2019): *Agua por todas partes*, Barcelona.

## **Rewriting Gender?** (De)constructions of Masculinities between Scientific Discourse and Literary Practice

*Riccardo Schöfberger (University of Graz)*

### **1. Introduction**

Facts were put on the table and promptly challenged when feminist journalist Alice Schwarzer and anti-feminist essayist Esther Vilar met for a TV debate on *WDR* in February 1975.1 An exchange of views over the topical issue of whether women in West Germany were actually oppressed by men or vice versa had failed due to the vehement rejection of the opposing arguments and had shown the incompatibility of their respective standpoints right from the start. Subsequently, reference was made to scientific data, in order to seek a fact-based way out of the dilemma. Schwarzer and Vilar tried to let the facts speak for themselves,2 but it turned out that these facts – as common scientific denominators – allowed for opposing interpretations. Both opponents relied on the same surveys, such as the recently published *Die Wirklichkeit der Hausfrau* (*The Reality of Being a Housewife*) by sociologist Helge Pross. However, Vilar interpreted Pross's finding that housewives – in despite of objective disadvantages – were subjectively satisfied with their lives3 as a mere validation of her thesis4 that women led de facto a better life than men, while Schwarzer proposed to question the private notion of 'life satisfaction' politically.5 This

1 Cf. Schwarzer/Vilar 1975.

2 Cf.: "Now let's be very concrete, let's leave the metaphysical level, let's talk in facts and figures." (Ibid.: 10:36–10:41) All translations by R.S.. Page numbers in the running text always refer to the original texts.

3 Cf. Pross 1975: 169–200.

4 Cf. Vilar 1973 [1971]: 117–128.

5 Cf. Schwarzer 1975: 214–219.

deconstructive approach would also soon characterize Schwarzer's book *Der 'kleine Unterschied' und seine große Folgen* (*The 'Little Difference' and Its Big Consequences*), in which she tried – in analogy to numerous writers of the time – to rewrite the facts in women's lives.

During the same September days in 1975 when Schwarzer's main text was first available in West German bookstores, a similar debate was sparked in Italy. *Effe*, Italy's first and most widespread feminist magazine, published an article that due to its critique of the leading media's portrayal of feminisms can also be read as a renegotiation of previously valid notions about gender relations. In her opinion piece "Il femminismo secondo 'Il Corriere della Sera'" ("Feminism According to 'Il Corriere della Sera'"),6 essayist Carmela Paloschi deconstructed a few clauses from the column "Non è femminista la donna bandito" ("The Woman Bandit Is Not a Feminist"),7 recently published in the newspaper *Corriere della Sera* by Gabriella Parca – a feminist journalist herself, who had become known in the 1960s for the earliest science-oriented surveys of the behavior of Italian women and men.8 In the Italy of the 1970s, marked by terrorisms and the abortion debate, Parca had now tried to show with figures and data that no factual link between emerging feminisms and terrorisms could be proven.9 Paloschi was by no means concerned with refuting this thesis, but she did want to make the premises visible that had moved Parca to her query in the first place. Thus, the 'old' feminist assumption that 'new' feminisms posed a threat to men could hide a new fact – that more and more feminists were not aiming at a war against men but rather at a collaborative rewriting of gender and, thus, at "the invention of a world without power."10

The abovementioned debates are emblematic of the processes of validating, challenging, and negotiating traditionally accepted gender notions and

6 Cf. Paloschi 1975: 9.

7 Cf. Parca 1975: 5.

8 Cf. Parca 1965 and 1959. Parca's surveys are quite comparable to those later published by Pross (cf. in addition to the aforementioned study on housewives, the one on men, which appeared three years later). With regard to the science-orientation, see especially the subtitle of Parca 1965: "A rigorous investigation carried out throughout Italy using scientific criteria".

9 Cf. "The figure of the female bandit therefore has nothing to do with the emancipation of women [...]. [...] it is certainly not by shooting, that we can delude ourselves that we have achieved gender equality." (Parca 1975)

10 Paloschi 1975, 9.

the legitimacy of feminisms in the early 1970s. Declaring something as fact or fact-based served to either affirm or undermine traditional or innovative gender conceptions. In these processes, facts – that is, notions concerning gender considered to be universally true and stable, but paradoxically used selectively and for incompatible arguments – gained a powerful and challenging role. At that time, a (de)construction of gender-related facts promoted the scientification and circulation of feminist discourses, as well as several legislative changes and introductions.11 But it also posed a male dilemma that oscillated between an uncertainty in light of the deconstruction of traditional masculinity and the need for a pro-feminist collaboration.12 Consequently, writings positioned towards feminisms commonly dealt with gender-related facts, in order to propagate, discuss or counteract the "normative power of 'facts'"13 in a phase of journalistic, scientific, and literary boom. To better understand these processes, I will examine two literary and two science-oriented texts published between 1973 and 1975 in German-speaking countries as well as in Italy: *Montauk* by Max Frisch and *Caro Michele* by Natalia Ginzburg, as well as *Der Untergang des Mannes* by Volker E. Pilgrim and *Maschio per obbligo* by Carla Ravaioli. By comparing these texts, I would like to stress that the powerful and challenging role of gender-related facts becomes understandable by looking at the interrelations between scientific discourse and literary practice. Accordingly, an analysis of the textual interrelations can be particularly suitable to illuminate the affirming, refuting, or subversive functions of facts. If the early 1970s are regarded as a first peak of the intensifying debate on gender issues after 1968,14 this trend can also be seen as a consequence of manifold relations between European and US-American feminist discourses. By participating in these discursive relations, the selected texts show fundamentally different ways of dealing with the same gender dilemmas. In this respect, the comparison of texts from different cultural areas is meant to emphasize the diversity inherent to processes of validation and representation of facts. Since it is precisely at this time that masculinity increasingly came

11 Cf. Kahlert 2003: 87, and Bock 1988: 54. Cf., e.g., the introduction of the divorce law in Italy in 1970, the introduction of the right to abortion in the German Democratic Republic in 1972 and in Austria in 1975, and the reform of family law in Italy in 1975 and in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1976.

12 Cf. Krammer 2018: 135–136, Bellassai 2011: 126–137, and Schneider 1974: 113–116.

13 Daniel 2001: 18.

14 Cf. Bojar 2022: 28–38.

into the focus of feminist renegotiations as a construct in need of explanation and change, in this paper I will shed light on the (de)construction of masculinity-related facts and propose this as a complementary perspective to grasp the rewriting of gender in the early 1970s. Specifically, I will show that the two science-oriented texts, i.e. Ravaioli's and Pilgrim's, aim at affirming the feminist (de)construction of masculinity and supplementing it with new perspectives, while the two literary texts, i.e. Ginzburg's and Frisch's reflect and problematize an uncertainty that accompanies such groundbreaking processes.

#### **2. Natalia Ginzburg and Carla Ravaioli: Rewriting the Facts of Male Dis-/Reorientation**

Il mondo ora è pieno di questi ragazzi, che girano senza scopo da un posto all'altro. Non si riesce a capire come invecchieranno. Sembra che non debbano invecchiare mai. Sembra che debbano restare sempre così, senza casa, senza famiglie, senza orari di lavoro, senza niente.15

At the beginning of her 1973 essay "La condizione femminile" ("The Female Condition"), the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg wrote that she did not love feminism, although she shared all of its practical demands.16 What she rejected was essentially the deconstructive approach advocated by Schwarzer and Paloschi – especially since she believed to recognize in feminism an "attitude of the mind" (182) that challenged stable notions of gender. In this regard, she spoke of "a vision of the world that, in the end, does not reflect reality" (183) and attributed it to a tendency towards abstraction that would produce a loss of facts. This abstraction would supposedly replace the true/false

15 "The world is now full of these young people, wandering aimlessly from one place to another. There is no telling how they will grow old. It seems like they should never grow old. It seems like they should always stay this way, with no home, no families, no work schedule, no nothing." (Ginzburg 1973: 71–72)

16 Cf.: "I don't love feminism. I do, however, share everything the women's movements demand. I share all or almost all of their practical demands." (Ginzburg 1974: 182–183)

dichotomy with moral claims,17 and thus produce unstable, unsettling, and incorrect gender conceptions. Moreover, by favoring women, this feminist tendency would disregard the "fatto, noto e indiscutibile" ("noted and indisputable fact") (182) that there are no qualitative but only mutual differences between men and women18 – a fact becoming more glaring than ever in the early 1970s, as she pointed out. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that Ginzburg's position concerning gender differences was rather ambivalent, since she had already criticized 'female' writing in previous decades: She deemed it too abstract and emotional, whereas she wanted to approach 'male' writing, which she believed to be more sober and fact-based, as she stated in a 1963 interview with essayist Oriana Fallaci.19 This ambivalence can also be observed in light of her 1949 essay "Il mio mestiere" ("My Craft"), in which Ginzburg wrote that she has been terrorized by the idea of being recognized as a female writer,20 while in 1963 she claimed that a woman should write 'like a woman' but again strive for the abovementioned 'masculine' qualities.21

This is arguably the reason why a similarly plain writing style still characterizes *Caro Michele* (*Dear Michele*) In this epistolary novel, published in 1973, Ginzburg deals with the issue of a radical loss of facts in an era of feminist and terrorist uncertainty. Here, the time after 1968 appears to be shaped by the difficulty of assigning clear meanings to increasingly isolated, contradictory, and fragmentary facts. Indeed, the fictional facts regarding the central figure of Michele can be summarized quickly: At the age of 21, he leaves his dying father, his lonely mother and a pregnant girlfriend in Rome and moves to England – a few months later he is killed during a student protest in Belgium. However, the letters that relatives and friends write to and about him feature perspectives that are incompatible with one another and therefore

17 Cf.: "In feminism, at the center are not [...] the false and the true, but [...] revenge, vindication, humiliation and pride." (Ibid.: 184)

18 Cf.: "Feminism assumes that women [...] are better than men. [...] Qualitatively, they are equal. The difference between man and woman is the same as the difference between the sun and the moon, or between day and night." (Ibid.)

19 Cf.: "To write like a man means to write with the detachment, the coldness of a man. Something women are rarely capable of." (Fallaci 2015 [1963]: 321)

20 Cf.: "I terribly wanted to write like a man back then, I was terrified that somebody could tell I was a woman from the things I wrote." (Ginzburg 1962: 80)

21 Cf.: "A woman must write like a woman but with the qualities of a man." (Fallaci 2015 [1963]: 321)

do not allow a definitive interpretation of these few facts. It remains uncertain, for instance, whether Michele fled from entanglements with family or with terrorism, whether he is really the father of the child, and why he is finally stabbed in Bruges.22 In *Caro Michele*, the possibility of knowing, saying or thinking anything with absolute certainty is largely prevented. The resulting discomfort is stressed by Ginzburg, showing the need for facts as more urgent than ever for the post-1968 era. As a prime example, it was also hitherto necessarily the case that "to know if one is the child of another [man], there are no safe systems" (167) – nevertheless, that the scientific proof of paternity is considered indispensable for family cohesion appears as a novel phenomenon here. Michele's obscure destiny appears in the novel not as an individual example but rather as representative of an entire generation that is devoid of home, family, and memory, wandering the world "aimlessly from one place to another" (71), eventually dying for abstract ideals.23 This conflict between the facts of life and the pursuit of fictional ideals particularly affects young men. In contrast to the more practical and active female figures, all young men are unsuccessful artists or writers and are depicted as being out of touch with reality, as well as weak in decision-making, and sexually indecisive.24 The failed painter Michele, described in the letters alternately as homosexual and as "ambidextrous," (107) i.e. bisexual, is neither able nor willing to fulfill his parents' expectations of him as the "only male child." (7) He lacks the pragmatism of his sisters and cares as little for his potential offspring as he does for his terminally ill father. When his father eventually dies, Michele explains neither his absence at the funeral nor his renunciation of the inheritance. Therefore, the apparently fact-based masculinity is replaced by an "absence of man"25 and a gender-related void, the filling of which Ginzburg will reflect in later essays and novels.26 In this context, Michele's indifference towards a ruinous tower left to him by his father, which neither the sisters nor other characters want to preserve, appears as symbolic27 in view of a renunciation of supposedly stable orientations to masculinity: "[...] you never

22 Cf.: "[...] these are all hypotheses. In truth we don't know anything and all we will be able to know will be other hypotheses." (Ginzburg 1973: 174)

23 Cf.: "Above all I thought that young people were dying, that young people were risking death [...] for political or pseudo-political reasons." (Ginzburg 1999: 144)

24 Cf. Bazzocchi 2018: 105.

25 Therein, Ginzburg will recognize a motif central to *Caro Michele*. (Cf. 1999: 144)

26 Cf. Minetti 2018: 118.

27 Cf. Niefanger 2021: 663–664.

think about the tower. Viola and Elio wanted to buy it from you, but they went to see it and were disappointed [...]. And then this tower looks like it will fall down if you just touch it." (120–121) These male figures' discomfort with the behavioral patterns expected from them in family and romantic relationships should be considered in light of Ginzburg's above-mentioned essayistic diagnosis about the occurrence of an unsettling loss of facts in the early 1970s. In *Caro Michele,* masculinity is depicted as a normatively transmitted, albeit now blurred relationship between sociocultural meanings and anatomical conditions. Ginzburg's representation aims at illustrating and emphasizing a new cultural discomfort.28 As she will clarify in a 1990 interview, she attributed this unease to the productive correlations between feminist demands, changing gender roles, and a pervasive cultural, social, and political upheaval in the 1970s:

Ma, io credo che negli anni settanta ho sentito che circolava un disagio, e mi sembrava che derivasse da quest[a] [rottura culturale]. [...] c'è anche qualcosa nel femminismo che non mi piace, voglio dirlo. Io certo che sono femminista [...] però il femminismo ha creato un qualcosa di competitivo che non mi sembra giusto [...]. E questo fa sì che le donne, oggi, sentano molto la solitudine, e gli uomini non sanno che ruolo avere, e le donne sanno che ruolo avere, però sentono la mancanza degli uomini. [...] E penso che se ho raccontato qualcosa, forse, nei miei romanzi, ho cercato di raccontare questo: la solitudine delle donne e la fragilità degli uomini.29

With this statement, Ginzburg points out a dilemma that is apparent in both her examined texts: Although feminisms would have reinforced the orientation of women, the former asymmetry of roles that had to be fought against has now been reversed to the detriment of disoriented men. Indeed, it is especially in regard to masculinity that the relationship between facts and established interpretations appears to be undermined by her texts. By doing so,

28 Cf. Solte-Gresser 2014: 73–74.

29 "But I think in the seventies I felt that there was a discomfort circulating, and it seemed to me to derive from that [cultural rupture]. [...] I want to say that there is also something in feminism that I don't like. Of course, I am a feminist [...] but feminism has created something competitive that doesn't seem right to me [...]. And this makes women, today, feel a lot of loneliness, and men do not know what role to assume, and women know what role to assume, but they miss men. [...] And I think that if I have told something, perhaps, in my novels, I have tried to recount this: the loneliness of women and the fragility of men." (Ginzburg 1999: 184–185)

Ginzburg takes a dismissive stance towards the feminist deconstruction of facts. Nevertheless – as she would also partly acknowledge in the following years30 – she employs a merely provisional knowledge of coeval feminist theories for her writing. It was neither true that all feminist positions advocated a superiority of women, nor that they renounced a fact-based rewriting of gender conceptions.

For it was precisely male disorientation, which Ginzburg depicted as a downside of feminisms and as the painful consequence of a loss of facts, that was considered by feminist essayist Carla Ravaioli to be a symptom of a desired reorientation of men and an indisputable fact. As she argued, the phenomenon was inspired by feminist demands, but in the first place it could point out already existing dilemmas of masculinity. She wrote that in the early 1970s, more and more men began to question the role assigned to them on the basis of biological characteristics: "Symptoms that this may happen, or rather that it is happening with increasing frequency, are not lacking. [...] today young men especially do not seem to agree so much anymore: being a king does not seduce them anymore."31 She authenticated this shift as a fact through sociological references and she used it as a starting premise for her science-oriented text *Maschio per obbligo* (*Male Out of Obligation*) in which she argued that most positions within the women's movement still disregarded the fact that a normative commitment to traditional gender roles was no longer satisfactory for many men either. Therefore, challenging the relationship between gender and role would be necessary for men: "[...] the battle for the liberation of the male from the fictitious role to which he has been condemned is just another face of the liberation of the woman." (back cover) Ravaioli proposed – perhaps for the first time in Italy – a scientific perspective on masculinity, to foster a rewriting of facts and a pro-feminist rejection of the sex-role concept. What is remarkable about her text is that the traditional relationship between anatomical conditions and sociocultural meanings is viewed as a fiction, resulting in a 'destiny' that must be refuted: "[...] the male role is a prefabricated destiny no less than the female one."

30 In 1990, Ginzburg said in an interview that her critique of 'female' writing as inherently 'sticky' had been based on past beliefs; in the same interview, she also conceded that equality between men and women had, in fact, still not been achieved entirely and everywhere. Nevertheless, she emphasized her conviction that feminisms could only endorse a partial, namely a 'female' view of the world. (Cf. ibid.: 29–30, 185–187)

31 Ravaioli 1973: 10.

(9) While Ginzburg deplores the undermining of this relationship as unsettling, Ravaioli sees in male discomfort a discomfort with masculinity itself. By deconstructing the deterministic relationship between biological sex and sociocultural gender, she seems to reinforce an emerging feminist thesis that developed at the same time in other cultural areas too and still appears discursively effective today.32 Since she believes that the reference to biological knowledge is hiding the danger of an allegedly 'natural' legitimation of traditional masculinity (cf. 21–22), she finds it more effective to deconstruct cultural knowledge and the genesis of gender-related facts and attributions taking place within it. By pointing out the constructiveness of gender, she attempted to open up a conceptual space for the development of new ideas about masculinity: "For women as for men, it is a matter [...] of beginning to modify culture by modifying themselves [...]." (73) Ravaioli argues that male uncertainty was based on the difficulty of living up to the myths and ideals of patriarchal masculinity, and proceeds to validate this through the textual examination of an extensive corpus of advertising material, literary texts, and schoolbooks.

32 Cf., e.g., Repo 2016: 84, and Schwarzer 1975: 190–194.

#### **3. Max Frisch and Volker E. Pilgrim: Rewriting the Facts of Male Lives**

Über Liebe, als Beziehung zwischen den Geschlechtern, gebe es nicht Neues mehr zu berichten, das habe die Literatur dargestellt in allen Varianten ein für allemal, das sei für die Literatur, sofern sie diesen Namen verdient, kein Thema mehr – solche Verlautbarungen sind zu lesen; sie verkennen, daß das Verhältnis zwischen den Geschlechtern sich ändert, daß andere Liebesgeschichten stattfinden werden.33

The necessity for a reassignment of gender-related facts can concurrently be found in texts by Max Frisch. The Swiss writer firstly positions himself towards feminisms in *Tagebuch* (*Journal*), in which he evokes – under the heading "WOMEN'S LIBERATION"34 – the symbolic image of a facts-demanding woman and a snoring man, who had discussed the naturalness or construction of the differences between women and men without being able to find a common and fact-based way out of the dilemma. Frisch later also steers towards the same topic in his autofictional story *Montauk* (1975). "He is resolutely in favor of it, [...] nothing is more urgent in our society,"35 he has himself say – under the analogous heading "WOMAN'S LIBERATION" – to his young lover Lynn during an American weekend recounted in *Montauk.* Here, the two days form the starting point for an examination of the "Tatbestände" ("facts of the case") (122) regarding his destructive love relationships, first and foremost the one with Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. It is exactly Bachmann whom he quotes at the beginning of the story to explain the truth claims of his ex-

33 "There is nothing new to report about love as a gender relationship, literature has presented that in all its variants once and for all, it is no longer a topic for literature, if it deserves this name – such statements can be read; they fail to recognize that gender relationships are changing, that other love stories will take place." (Frisch 1975: 89)

34 Frisch 1972: 373. English original.

35 Frisch 1975: 89. The following heading is English original.

amination: "TRUTH IS REASONABLE TO HUMAN BEINGS." (24)36 On the same page, Frisch attributes the fact that this claim is to be accompanied by a rewriting of his masculinity to the influence of Philip Roth's recently published novel *My Life as a Man* (1974), which also deals with a destructive love relationship: "Why would I shy away from the German title: Mein Leben als Mann? I want to know what I, writing under the compulsion of art, learn about my life as a man." (24)

This project, which Frisch wants to realize "without inventing anything" (82) and using an objectifying third-person narrative – from which he expects, as he writes in *Tagebuch*, 37 greater knowledge of the truth – takes the form of a confessional writing. The resulting search for facts and meaning aims at resolving the dilemma of whether he should feel guilty for his destructive vice "MALE CHAUVINISM" (94, English in the original) or whether the misery in his love relationships could be explained by an intrinsic misunderstanding between men and women.38 However, the attempt to assign to the facts of his life new meanings that would also be valid from a feminist standpoint fails because of his belief that cross-gender writing is still impossible in a language that does not implicitly reproduce the existing gender power relations. As initially assumed by the abovementioned snoring man in *Tagebuch*, and later suggested by Frisch as a plausible response to the dilemma of whether gender relations are biologically fixed or culturally constructed, the women's movement itself had so far failed because "women do not have their own grammar for their way of thinking but are dependent on male language"39 and on "categories of male thinking." (371) Probably for this reason he wrote to Bachmann in the 1950s that "We need the representation of man by woman, the self-representation of woman." (90) In light of this necessity, Frisch's disorientation towards feminist demands could be attributable to the paradoxical fact that *Montauk* contains a representation of women by a man, and the self-representation of a man. For if a male writer inevitably reproduces male supremacy and domination by writing his 'life as a man,' a profeminist collaboration of men through writing can only seem futile.

36 Cf. also Bachmann 1959: 2:39–2:42.

37 Cf.: "For the purpose of confessional literature (maximum uprightness towards yourself), the third-person form is more appropriate." (Frisch 1972: 310)

38 Cf. John-Wenndorf 2014: 403.

39 Frisch 1972: 148.

While the belief in an inherently different genesis of facts and meanings in men and women is reminiscent of Ginzburg's ambivalent aspiration for 'male' writing, in Frisch's writing this seems to be accompanied by a tendentially essentialist understanding of gendered writing. On the one hand, Ginzburg's separation of 'female' and 'male' writing still considers the possibility for female writers to approach a writing that traditionally seemed reserved for men – a possibility which recalls the Woolfian ideal of an incandescent-creative "androgynous mind."40 On the other hand, in Frisch's texts it is precisely this blending of gender categories that seems unthinkable and impossible. As a result, he claims that he can only write about women "my invention, my draft on their nature" (118) and that, in his love relationships, he "always live[s] in ignorance of the situation."  (197) A recounted talk with an American student, who does not ask the usual questions of secondary literature but questions whether the central figure of Frisch's novel *Stiller* really wants his wife to be redeemed or rather wishes to be her redeemer can be considered emblematic of this. (Cf. 18) Since a deconstruction of gender-related facts is occurring in this passage, Frisch's writing can only give a partial answer to this question – as to his initial question of guilt – because, according to him, he can provide merely a 'male' answer, and not one that is valid regardless of gender.

A similar representation of a man thinking "[...] all in opposites and contradictions, not in associations and unions,"41 and almost unknowingly wielding destructive power, can also be found in one of the earliest German-language texts proposing a science-oriented perspective on masculinity: *Der Untergang des Mannes* (*The Downfall of Man*). Starting with the motto "The man is socially and sexually an idiot" (10), writer and activist Volker E. Pilgrim positioned himself – concurrently with Ravaioli – towards the feminist thesis that there is no deterministic relationship between sex and gender while attempting to validate this as a fact through an often paltry – but symptomatic of earliest men's studies – examination of psychoanalytic and ethnological texts. He argued that feminist scholars have proven Freud's dictum "Anatomy is destiny"42 to be fiction "wrapped in a scientific construction." (152) Both in

40 Woolf 1993 [1929]: 52.

41 Pilgrim 1973: 193–194.

42 Freud 2000 [1924]: 249.

Pilgrim's and Ravaioli's texts, the importance of Freud's thesis is striking. Being both restrictive and suggestive, its function is remarkably homogeneous: positioning the writer in the ongoing debate about the fixed or fluid quality of gender roles and relations.Thus, in texts such as Vilar's *Der dressierte Mann* (*The Manipulated Man*) and Wilhelm Bittorf 's "Der anatomische Imperativ" ("The Anatomical Imperative"),43 the deterministic relation between anatomy and destiny is revisited as a kind of pre-scientific fact and seen as foreshadowing affirmation of traditional female roles. Conversely, in both selected texts, Freud's thesis is questioned as an outdated factual relic and taken as an occasion for a re-writing of gender-related facts. Hence, for Pilgrim and for Ravaioli, it became an indisputable fact that neither anatomy determined destiny, nor that nature determined man. Nevertheless, men would continue to destroy nature, women, and themselves.

What is remarkable about *Der Untergang des Mannes* is that in view of a male reorientation, that Pilgrim considered indispensable, he proposed to question the factual relationships of men with women, whereas in Frisch's text a similar approach turned out to be inadequate to answer the question of male guilt. Particularly in light of a pro-feminist collaboration between men and women, Pilgrim suggested that the hitherto tacitly legitimized male domination must now be scrutinized and questioned substantially: "In order to learn fundamental things about the woman, it is not yet possible to ask what *she* wants. Instead, the man must be examined: what does *he* want from the woman, how does *he*relate to her?" (70, original emphases) In such a framework, a rejection of the belief in an incompatibly 'male' or 'female' genesis of facts and meanings seems to come gradually into focus, since both gendered perspectives are first understood as culturally different, but they can then become compatible with each other. On the one hand, the mood of upheaval or even decline prevailing in Pilgrim's text may recall Ginzburg's depiction of feminisms as both the consequence and the source of an unsettling paradigm shift in the early 1970s. On the other hand, in this case we find an attempt not merely to deplore a loss of facts and the rejection of traditional notions of gender but to write new facts in order to motivate cross-gender acknowledgment of feminist discourses.

43 Bittorf 1975.

#### **4. Conclusions**

The texts I have selected have one thing in common: they address a destabilizing dilemma concerning the meaningfulness of gender relations and roles – a dilemma that became topical in the early 1970s.44 Within feminist discourses, this perspective corresponded to the deconstruction of a deterministic relationship between anatomical conditions and sociocultural meanings, as well as to the construction of new gender conceptions. All the authors I have examined saw the necessity to position themselves towards this paradigm shift and an arising male dilemma through writing. However, the processes of validating, challenging, and negotiating facts taking place in these texts differ fundamentally. In her epistolary novel, Natalia Ginzburg shows that an unambiguous interpretation of plain facts has become problematic in the post-1968 era and diagnoses a disorienting loss of facts that has afflicted masculinity. In his autofictional story, Max Frisch sees irreconcilable gender differences in the genesis of facts and meanings. This is the reason why he is finally denied a rewriting of the facts of his "LIFE AS A MAN" (152, English in the original) and of his relationships with women in a meaning that would also be valid from a cross-gender perspective. In contrast, it is precisely the deconstructive undermining of normative and essentialist gender differences that motivates both Carla Ravaioli and Volker E. Pilgrim to outline a male reorientation through a (de)constructive rewriting of sociocultural facts and meanings. Both scienceoriented texts attempt to confirm and alter the gender status quo by advancing a collaborative rewriting of gender-related facts and thus enabling innovative perspectives. Conversely, an altering or rejecting depiction of gender discomfort accompanying these processes and the aesthetic problematization of these perspectives are reserved for the literary texts. Since all the selected texts – like both introductory debates – concern the same gender dilemmas but deliver fundamentally different ways to acknowledge them, the presented comparison highlights the fact that the processes of (de)construction and representation of gender-related facts are diverse, contradictory, and controversial.

44 Cf., e.g., Rigoletto 2014: 139, and Kosta 2001: 224.

#### **Bibliography**

## **The Loss of Biodiversity in the Anthropocene and Its Representations in Literature and the Arts (Late 20th and Early 21st Century)**

*Annette Simonis (University of Giessen)*

#### **1. Introduction**

Nowadays an increasing ecological awareness is not only present in public and political discourse but can also be traced in European literature since the beginning of the 21st century. The rising interest in ecological topics has inspired a number of novels and best-selling books in the course of the last two decades. On the first image, I have arranged a selection of recent book covers illustrating the sudden emergence of ecology in contemporary literature (see figure 1). This is just a random collection of recently published titles, including fictional works and literary essays without any claim to completeness.

Among the favored topics of the last few years is the ongoing extinction of natural species due to climate change and the destruction of natural environment – a precarious development and phenomenon which scientists also call the loss of biodiversity.1

Writing about these issues in fictional works evidently transcends the entertaining qualities of narratives usually expected when talking about popular fiction and other iconic aesthetic works. What exactly characterizes this new wave of narratives and aesthetic essays aiming at distributing knowledge or intensifying our awareness of the risks at stake if our natural environment and its seemingly abundant resources steadily diminish and disappear?

The topics of ecological concerns such as climate change, species extinction, and loss of natural habitats have inspired many writers and artists

1 See the illuminating multidisciplinary collection of articles in *Loss of Biodiversity*, ed. Sharon L. Spray/Karen Leah McGlothlin 2003.

*Figure 1 showcases the surge in topical literature focusing on ecological problems like climate change and species extinction.*

around the globe. Their works provide concise examples of a very productive and sometimes complex process of oscillation between fiction and fact.

Before I will discuss some of the most striking examples to illustrate this idea in more detail, it seems useful to briefly dwell on the notion of factuality and fictionality respectively. This raises the question in which sense the difference between the two concepts and their mutual interaction does apply to my material and my observations.

### **2. Factuality and Fictionality in Literary Texts and the Arts**

When speaking about the fictional and factual aspects of literature and the arts in this article, I will resort to some implicit presuppositions and concepts which I would like to explain in the following part of my essay. We all have a common-sense notion of what is meant when talking about factuality or facts. This pre-scholarly, common idea is roughly summarized in the following definition in the *Collins Dictionary*: "Something that is factual is concerned with facts or contains facts, rather than giving theories or personal

interpretations. Synonyms are: true, objective, authentic."2 At first sight, this explanation sounds quite simple and straightforward. The current scholarly and philosophical definitions, however, are mostly much more subtle and far more comprehensive. As it turns out, the task of defining what exactly constitutes the 'mere facts' proves to be quite challenging when considered from a more philosophical perspective. The same holds true when approaching the problem from a narratological point of view. In their introduction to the recently published *Handbook of Factual Narrative* Monika Fludernik and Marie-Laure Ryan offer a diligent and complex definition including a considerable amount of critical reflection:

Another issue raised by the notion of factuality concerns the rigidity of the distinction between true and false information. In classical logic, true and false are regarded as binary categories that do not admit of degrees. But while a factual text is meant to elicit belief in the receiver, this belief can be either weak or strong. Depending on the genre, audiences will grant factual texts various degrees of credibility, and they will be more or less tolerant of unverified or unverifiable information. In oral narrative of personal experience, for instance, audiences accept exaggerations, embellishments, and free reconstruction of dialogue, regarding the story as true in its broad outline.3

Fludernik's and Marie-Laure Ryan's approach seems very plausible and differentiated in many respects, although some questions still remain open to further discussion: What exactly are the deductions from their findings with regard to the relationship between factuality and fictionality within narratives, especially with reference to fictional texts? If the concepts of fact and fiction can no longer be considered a binary opposition, as Fludernik and Ryan rightly assume, what, then, are the further implications of this insight?

As we have seen, the terms factuality and fictionality are not mutually exclusive. They are not directly opposed to each other, either. In which way, then, are we to conceive of their mutual relationship? Fludernik and Ryan suggest a gradation, a range of various degrees of credibility. What precisely does this mean with reference to literary texts or works of art? At first sight, one might conclude that the more fictional and aesthetic elements a text or

2 See the straightforward entry "factual" in the online edition of the *Collins Dictionary*: h ttps://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/factual (27.04.2020).

3 Fludernik/Ryan 2020b: 11.

an aesthetic representation includes, the less authentic it is. This conclusion, however, does not sound quite convincing. As we will see below, the examples from my sample point in quite a different direction.

In fact, I would like to argue that it is often quite misleading to assume that factuality and fictionality in a given text are inversely proportional, i.e. that the credibility of the facts would be diminished by the fictional framework. Employing aesthetic or poetic elements does not necessarily diminish the factual aspects of the representation, the attribution of authenticity. On the contrary, our awareness of the means of construction may even enhance the effect of authenticity, the impact of a narrative or a sequence of images.

Evidently, fictional and aesthetic elements in literary texts and other media prove to be more than a mere framework that could be isolated from its factual content. They are part of the aesthetic expression, which is in turn intricately interwoven with the factual core or meaning. The process of reception is often much more subtle than the simple choice between true or false, authentic or fictitious. Our disposition to believe in the authenticity of a given text depends on genre conventions and expectations as well as the cultural and historical context shared by the author and his or her readers.

In this sense, fictional works can be far more compelling and more poignant than reports and analyses. Their powerful appeal to our imagination, which is in turn rooted in a collective or cultural imaginary shaped by multiple artistic, literary and aesthetic traditions, exerts a considerable impact on our perspectives, our cognitive and emotional response. In so far, there can be no doubt that fictional texts substantially contribute to our cultural knowledge in general and to our individual knowledge in particular. Knowledge or insight can be considered as being based on a more or less convincing interpretation of facts,4 be it empirical observations or scientific experiments, whereas the 'bare facts' themselves are largely inaccessible to the human mind.5

Binary oppositions like the one between fact and fiction, or truth and invention, are theoretical constructions, whereas in reality the boundaries are fuzzy and fluid.6

4 Cf. for instance Danto 1984.

5 Cf. the interesting study on Nietzsche by Gori 2019: 62.

6 As Ryan has shown, narrativity itself is also characterized by a certain degree of fuzziness. (Cf. Ryan 2007)

In the following, the interrelatedness and various interactions between factual and fictional aspects can be explored in more detail with reference to the continuous loss of biodiversity which undoubtedly constitutes an urgent problem and a considerable social and political issue. In order to illustrate the impact of the issues and problems implied, let me quote from an extract from the European Commission's 2030 *Biodiversity Strategy Paper*:

Plant and animal species are disappearing at an ever faster rate due to human activity. What are the causes and why does biodiversity matter? Biodiversity, or the variety of all living things on our planet, has been declining at an alarming rate in recent years, mainly due to human activities, such as land use changes, pollution and climate change.7

The European Commission presented the new 2030 Biodiversity Strategy in May 2020, "following calls from the Parliament in January 2020 to address the main drivers of biodiversity loss and set legally binding targets."8

In how far and in which respect does this topic constitute a larger concern that is not only negotiated by politicians and sociologists but has also attracted much attention in recent cultural studies? In her seminal study *Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species* Ursula K. Heise points out aptly:

We are currently facing the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, biologists claim – the first one caused by humans. Activists, filmmakers, writers, and artists are seeking to bring the crisis to the public's attention through stories and images that use the strategies of elegy, tragedy, epic, and even comedy. *Imagining Extinction* is the first book to examine the cultural frameworks shaping these narratives and images.9

This conception of cultural imaginings, as proposed by Heise, is indeed very illuminating and entails further questions relevant for a detailed investigation.

How, when, and why do we invest culturally, emotionally, and economically in the fate of threatened species? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we not tell, about them? What do the images that we use to represent

8 Ibid.

7 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20200109STO69929/biodi versity-loss-what-is-causing-it-and-why-is-it-a-concern (27.04.2022).

9 Heise 2016: Cover text.

them reveal, and what do they hide? What kind of awareness, emotion, and action are such stories and images meant to generate? What broader cultural values and social conflicts are they associated with?10

In her book, Heise draws attention to the circumstance that there is a large number of tales and documentaries on the mass extinction of species that participate in certain literary and aesthetic genres and thus employ typical literary devices and narrative strategies which can best be analyzed by literary historians. It is noteworthy that her focus is on stories and images – both constituting powerful means of aesthetic expression.

In the following second part of my article, I would like to take a closer look at some of the recent fictional texts on the extinction of species, the ongoing anthropocene and the human animal relationships involved. My examples have moreover in common that the visual experience is prominent, either on a level of figural language, including metaphors and imagery, or by the use of intermedial compositions of texts and images.

#### **3. Forms of Storytelling Oscillating between Factual Documentation and Fictional Narrative**

My first example is drawn from the iconic novel by the Norwegian best-selling author Maja Lunde, *The History of Bees* (*Bienen Historie*), which was first published in 2015. The time frame of the narrative is quite sophisticated and multidimensional, but the first part is clearly revealed as a dystopian outlook on the year 2024, because it starts by mentioning the name of the female narrator and by offering a precise specification of time and place: TAO, District 242, Shirong, Sichuan, 2098. The beginning of the first chapter presents a detailed depiction of the Chinese woman at work, performing her daily labor in a large field of fruit trees:

Like oversize birds, we balanced on our respective branches, each of us with a plastic container in one hand and a feather brush in the other. I climbed upwards, very slowly, as carefully as I could. I was not cut out for this, wasn't like many of the other women on the crew, my movements were often too heavy-handed. I lacked the subtle motor skills and precision required. This

10 Ibid.: 165.

wasn't what I was made for, but all the same I had to be here, every single day, twelve hours a day.11

The powerful image of the human being moving as an oversized bird among the branches of a tree, in order to perform the task of pollination usually attributed to animal agents like bees and other insects, functions as an interesting metaphor for the anthropocene. The impact of the opening passage largely relies on the immediate visual presence of the somewhat grotesque and enigmatic bird-like figures clumsily moving on the branches and accentuates the precarious efforts taken by human beings in order to substitute animals and compensate for their loss. The readers are thus stimulated to visualize the scene and search for answers as to what has necessitated such actions. When first reading this passage, I regarded the image and the action described as a poetical invention typical of dystopian novels. As the discussion by readers and critics in social media and reviews reveals, many readers believed the idea of people climbing into trees in order to pollinate the blossoms to be purely fictional. This misleading conclusion is apparently inspired by the genre framework of the dystopian novel, stimulating the readers' expectation of a society controlled by a totalitarian regime and dealing with future inventions and cultural techniques yet unknown. Hand pollination, however, has become a common practice in the province of Sichuan in China after the bees became extinct in the region, as a prize-winning documentary *More than honey* (2012) has reported in detail. This documentary by Swiss director Markus Imhoof has been rightly praised for its revealing insights and diligent scientific research and has become known as "most successful documentary of the year."12

In an interview, Imhoof explained his motives and the methods of his investigation: "It was just a view I chose – of what would happen if we didn't have any bees. I travelled to four farms in China where they were doing hand pollination. I chose one employing mainly women."13 Imhoof 's documentary film thus provided detailed information about the global situation of endangered honeybees and, to a certain degree, made the vanishing of the bees accessible to cultural knowledge.

11 Lunde 2017 (Kindle edition, no page numbers).

12 https://www.austrianfilms.com/news/en/more\_than\_honey\_wins\_lola\_for\_best\_docu mentary (27.04.2022).

13 Interview with Markus Imhoof 2012.

The film has indeed been very successful, yet three years later Maja Lunde's novel almost immediately became an international bestseller and reached an even wider international audience. Lunde's book has attracted even more attention than the film and, especially in Germany, stimulated diverse activities and initiatives to save the bees as well as a veritable flood of novels and narratives dealing with the topic. Apparently, popular fictions like Lunde's novel are more liable to alert the readers' awareness and trigger their emotional and personal response than other discourses and sources of information.

As a second example, I would like to briefly touch upon another popular novel, entitled *Elefant*, by Swiss author and screen writer Martin Suter. In Suter's novel, significantly, the title figure is an animal agent, a pink miniature sized elephant which turns out to be the product of genetic manipulation, a so-called glowing animal well-known to specialists in this field of scientific research. Usually, glowing animals serve as indispensable instruments in the investigation of diseases like aids and cancer and the production of possible remedies: In 2011, researchers from the U.S. and Japan used the green protein to help them monitor the activity of a gene they had inserted into cats which helps them resist the feline form of Aids. Cats are one of the few animal species that are normally susceptible to such viruses and scientists say that the experiment is designed to help better understand Aids in both cats and humans.

These scientific data and facts have been presented to a larger public in diverse journal articles since their discovery around 2008. Let me quote an instructive passage from an article recently published in an internet journal:

Pigs that glow from inside out and glow-in-the-dark cats and dogs may sound, and look, pretty ridiculous, but scientists are increasingly using genetically modified animals in an effort to help them understand diseases that affect humans. One way they are doing this is by inserting fluorescent proteins, generally a green protein found in the Aequorea Victoria jellyfish, into animals, making them glow. The fluorescent proteins help scientists to monitor the performance of genes that they have altered. The pioneers of this method were even awarded the 2008 Nobel prize in chemistry for their efforts.14

14 Bloomfield 2013, in: https://www.mic.com/articles/40527/7-genetically-modified-anim als-that-now-glow-in-the-dark-thanks-to-science (27.04.2022).

In the case of the glowing elephant in the novel, however, the motives of his origin were commercial and illegal. But this information is not revealed to the reader and the human protagonists of the novel from the very beginning. The first encounter of the elephant in the book, therefore, sounds like a passage from a fantasy novel and, consistently, it resorts to the typical genre characteristics of "hesitation,"15 as described by French critic Tzvetan Todorov in his famous introduction to fantastic literature. From the point of view of the human protagonist, a homeless person called Schoch who found the animal in his retreat, the appearance of the pink elephant constitutes a marvel and a mystery which he cannot easily explain, oscillating between thinking he is still drunk after a hangover or having indeed encountered a supernatural being. The opening passage is subtly recalling these literary components of fantasy with Schoch acting as an unreliable witness:

It couldn't be withdrawal syndrome as he'd had plenty to drink. Schoch tried to focus on the object. A child's toy, a tiny elephant as pink as a marzipan piglet, but more intense in colour. And glowing like a pink firefly, right at the back of the hollow, where the ceiling of the cave met the sandy ground. […] He closed his eyes and tried to get something like sleep. But then he had a 'merry-go-round', which was what he called those states of inebriation when everything started spinning the moment he crawled into his sleeping bag. In all these years he'd never managed to put his finger on what caused drunkenness to become a merry-go-round. […] everything was still spinning. Maybe it was something to do with the weather. […] He'd never found out whether it was better to keep his eyes open or closed either.16

Significantly, the protagonist hesitates and seems to doubt the existence of the small pink elephant, while confronted with the enigmatic animal. He observes it more closely, yet he still cannot make up his mind about the nature of the phenomenon.

Schoch opened them. The toy elephant was still there, but it appeared to be a little further to the right. He closed his eyes again. For a moment the little elephant spun beneath his eyelids, leaving a streak of pink. He immediately wrenched his eyes open. There it was, flapping its ears and lifting its trunk into an S-shape. Schoch turned over onto the other side and tried to stop

15 Todorov 1975: 25.

16 Suter 2018.

the spinning. He fell asleep. Schoch crept out of his sleeping bag and tried to breathe deeply to calm the pounding of his heart. What he could see wasn't a hallucination. You couldn't touch hallucinations. But what was it? A miracle? A sign? Something mystical?17

While Schoch is still wondering and hesitating, the narrative exactly corresponds to the genre conventions of fantastic literature. According to Tzvetan Todorov, the protagonists of fantastic tales and the readers find themselves in a situation of uncertainty about the nature of the phenomena encountered or described. Thus, they experience a characteristic process of oscillation between confirming the observations and doubt, a hesitation that can be perpetuated till the end of the narrative. In this respect, Martin Suter's novel toys with the genre expectations of fantasy and speculative fiction without ultimately confirming them. Again, scientific phenomena and factual aspects are disguised as fictitious and while we primarily consider them as typical elements originating in the vivid imagination of an ingenious novel writer, they are gradually revealed as realistic elements – whose real-life counterparts are forming part of our contemporary reality. The text establishes an interesting relationship between the scientific discourse on glowing animals and the prototypical genre expectations of fantastic literature as described by Todorov. On the whole, the retardation of insights into the factual phenomena seems to enhance the impact of the knowledge rather than to diminish its effect, because it comes to most of the readers as a sudden revelation.

### **4. Representations of the Loss of Biodiversity in Contemporary Artist Books**

As we have seen above, rhetorical and metaphorical techniques serve a double function in the narratives focusing on biodiversity loss. On the one hand, they underscore the aesthetic quality of the text and intensify the reading experience. On the other, they also trigger a cognitive process in the readers that ultimately leads to insights into the scientific aspects of the phenomena in question. When popular novels negotiate issues originating from scientific research, they contribute to the dissemination of expert knowledge and stimulate their readers to participate in the discussion of the possible consequences and implications.

Apart from the novel, there is another very successful and more subtle literary genre which presents and illuminates the extinction of species in the age of the anthropocene, namely the 'bestiary'18 in the form of the artist book. In this literary genre, texts are accompanied by images, paintings or photographs, which greatly enhances their impact on the reader. The intermedial framework provides a very powerful means of commemorating and retracing the extinction of species caused directly or indirectly by the agency of human beings in the anthropocene.

Fascinating examples of the mutual interaction and interplay of facts and aesthetic elements can be found in the work of Errol Fuller, a British writer, artist and animal painter, who has published a whole series of artist books dedicated to the subject matter of endangered animals. These artist books combine zoological texts and personal observations with outstanding drawings and paintings. The book design is expensive and also artistically designed.

Fuller's recent book *Lost animals* surprisingly dispenses with colorful illustrations. Instead, it is based on a collection of black and white photographs from the early twentieth century. The author elaborately explains his motivation and the reasons for this choice of rather inconspicuous images:

When friends or acquaintances thumbed through the book a peculiar and unexpected thing became very noticeable. They were attracted by the high quality of the paintings, of course, but they were truly riveted by the photos. They would pause over them and just gaze, sometimes even raising the book towards their eyes in the vain hope that this action would allow them to see more – more than there really was to see! Almost always the same question cropped up. "Is this real or have you just faked it?" All this was despite the fact that most of these images were, inevitably, poor in quality (for many were taken in difficult circumstances in the early days of photography), and showed little detail.19

He further elaborates this idea with reference to the special aura encapsulated within ancient photographs, poignantly enhancing the sense of irretrievable loss:

18 Cf. Simonis 2017a.

19 Fuller 2014: 8.

It seems that a photograph of something lost or gone has a power all of its own, even though it may be tantalisingly inadequate. But despite all of the handicaps, these photos are evocative and moving records of creatures that are gone. They are close enough to touch – almost, but not quite!20

The passage quoted above also explains why Fuller refused to digitally remaster the pictures. The aesthetic design and selection of media, i.e. in this case the choice of old photographs, are crucial and interwoven with the central functions of cultural memory, the slow and incomplete process of reconstruction by memory:

A photograph of an animal long-gone evokes a feeling of loss more than a painting ever can. Often tinted sepia or black and white, these images were mainly taken in zoos or wildlife parks, and in a handful of cases featured the last known individual of the species.21

The book includes rare black and white photographs of various extinct mammals and birds like Tasmanian wolves, ivory-billed woodpeckers, and the quagga which looks like a hybrid of horse and zebra. (See figure 2 and 3)

Another book about endangered or mostly extinct animals, which is to a certain extent comparable to Fuller's collection, has been published by the author Luc Semal and the photographer Yannick Fourié. The work is entitled *Le Bestiaire disparu. Histoire de la dernière grande extinction*, assuming the role of providing a chronicle of recent species extinction. The considerable size and expensive design of the volume indicate that the genre, again, is the artist book. Each double page offers a complex intermedial composition which consists of a small miniature picture, i.e., a painting of the animal species in question, followed by a larger text on the left page while the page on the right contains a full-size photograph of a museum exhibit, a stuffed animal, also called taxidermy. Notably, the background color of the photos is frosted black throughout the book.

The photographic images were taken by Yannick Fourié in the Dutch museum *Naturalis* in Leiden. Apart from the expected naturalist descriptions of the species, their scientific Latin name, their appearance, distributions, natural habitats, etc., the texts often include small narratives, mostly anecdotes about the fate of individual animals. They tell memorable stories with comic

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

*Figure 2: Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) Image of a juvenile male thylacine at Hobart Zoo taken by B Sheppard in 1928. Sadly, the animal died the day after it was photographed.*

or tragic elements often illustrating the human animal relation before the species became finally extinct. These fictional elements are characteristic of Semal's bestiary. At the same time, the photographs enhance the impression of constituting a well-designed work of art beyond mere embellishments. They are aesthetic objects, employing subtle techniques to attain special effects. The overall impression conveyed by the dark background color is that of melancholy and mourning.22 The photographs thus testify the irreversible loss of species (involving numerous individual deaths), the loss of biodiversity, and, at the same time, they appeal to the readers' imagination and initiate a process of collective mourning or cultural commemoration.

One critic has noted that the lighting of Fourié's photographs is sparse and selective, sometimes leaving part of the animals' face in the dark as is the

22 Cf. Simonis 2017b.

*Figure 3: A quagga mare at the London Zoo in 1870; this is said to be the only specimen photographed alive. Contributed by Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, to the Online Biodiversity Library: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ page/28201475/#page/209/mode/1up*

case in the picture of the Java tiger.23 The critic considered this as a technical deficiency, not noticing the aesthetic aim of the strategy. The shadowy part of the pictures and the highlighting of selective parts of the animal body are intentional because they contribute to the dominant impression of fragmentation, defiguration and decomposition. Since the species presented in Semal's bestiary cannot be revived, there seems to be a cultural need of commemorative work, a kind of collective grief work ('Trauerarbeit'). When examining the anecdotes more closely, this crucial impression is confirmed on the textual side of the volume.

The small narratives often recall a harmonic relationship between the human beings and animals before the contact is disturbed and disrupted by

23 Alberti 2014, in: https://www.spektrum.de/rezension/buchkritik-zu-bestiarium/1322037 (20.04.2022).

death or the moment of extinction. It seems that those species which appeared trustful and friendly to humans were on the whole even more prone to extinction.

Here are two examples highlighting this fatal relationship:

There is an anecdote about a laughing owl (Ninox albifacies) from New Zealand who proved a Musical Owl: "He could still be lured from his hiding place in the rocks after dark by the sound of an accordion. The bird would then pass silently over the musician and, finally landing nearby, would listen until the music stopped."24 (See figure 4)

The anecdote quoted above is embedded in an elaborate account of the species' characteristics, the date and particular circumstances of its first discovery, and the multiple reasons for its extinction. Similar embedded narratives about the interactions of individual animals with human beings can be found throughout the volume. Some of them showcase the deplorable outcome of these interactions and the premature deaths of the animals.

Then, for instance, a highly revealing anecdote about a Falkland Fox from the Falkland Islands can be found:

Captain John Strong and his crew there discovered a curious canine, half wolf, half fox, the only land mammal on this uninhabited archipelago. The animal was so docile that they tamed one and embarked it as a mascot on their ship, the Welfare. He lived like this for several months with the sailors, until an encounter with the French fleet ended up in a violent cannonade: terrified, the beast jumped overboard and drowned.25

In the case of the Falkland Fox the death of the individual animal serves as a metaphor and anticipates the moment of species extinction.

In Semal's bestiary of extinct animals, the structure of the texts as a whole turns out to be quite complex. They provide scientific biological information as well as fictionalized material in the form of snapshots of individual memories which include fictional and subjective aspects. Accompanied by the powerful visual dimension of artistic photographs, the function of the book clearly goes beyond providing factual information, though this might have been the primary intention of its authors. The elaborate structure and design of the

24 Semal 2014: 86.

25 Ibid.: 66.

*Figure 4: Male laughing owl mount from the collection of Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Naturalis Biodiversity Center/Wikimedia Commons*

commemorative work, appealing to their imagination and provoking an emotional as well as an intellectual response. book seek to involve the readers in a multidimensional cultural process of

#### **Bibliography**

— (2015): *Bienes Historie*, Oslo.

*Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research*, ed. Achim Hölter/Norbert Bachleitner, Leiden, 372–396.

## **"One + One is one two. Two is one two"** (De-)Construction of Facts and Documentarism in Hanne Darboven's *Schreibzeit* (1975-1999)

*Monika Voithofer (University of Vienna)*

### **1. Spatialization of Time**

Numbers are one of the most elementary construction kits of our world. Among many other things, we also measure time in numbers. Events – whether subjective experiences or historical landmarks – are fixed to certain days, months, and years. Be it the day of one's birth, the day of death of important persons, the Ides of March or September 11, we all associate certain factual events with certain calendar days. And it is precisely such numbers that form the artistic frame of reference of the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941-2009). "One + One is one two. Two is one two. That is my original thesis for all the laws that mathematically run through my work. I write mathematical literature and mathematical music," is how Hanne Darboven described her aesthetic approach.1 She saw herself less as an artist than as a constructivist: "I build something up by disturbing something (destruction – structure – construction). A system became necessary."2

In this respect, Darboven developed a very specific system for her artistic treatment of ciphers: They are added, combined and varied, written out in numbers or as words, visualized as lines or cubes and transferred into musical notation and thus her artworks oscillate between a kind of artistic arith-

1 As cited in: Kleine 2016: 53. Note: English translations of the quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are by the author of this paper, who takes full responsibility for any errors. Original quote: "Eins + Eins ist eins zwei. Zwei ist eins zwei. Das ist meine Urthese für alle Gesetze, die bei mir mathematisch durchlaufen. Ich schreibe mathematische Literatur und mathematische Musik."

2 Darboven 1999: 62.

metic and geometry in her frame of reference.3 In so-called daily calculations ("Tagesrechnungen"), she adds up year and day data, resulting in cross totals ("Quersummen"), construction- or K-values ("Konstruktions- oder K-Werte"). Darboven always follows the same scheme she developed: the day and month of the Gregorian calendar are each treated as a unit and added to the last two digits of the calendar year, which are treated as separate, to determine the construction value. Her birthday, as an example, 29 April 1941, results in the construction value 38 in the calculation 29 + 4 + 4 + 1 while her date of death on 9 March 2009 would correspond to the calculation 9 + 3 + 0 + 9 = 21K. These ascertained values are the foundation of her works and are represented geometrically, written out in words, transferred into letters of the alphabet or into musical notes.4

The moment of temporality gains a completely new dimension and meaning in this processual artistic procedure with calendar data: calendar data as, on the one hand, objective indications of the natural, cyclical course of time and, on the other hand, as an expression of the subjective experience of time, of one's own experiences and events in the sense of an individual and also collective culture of memory. As such 21 June 1905 (21+6+0+5=32K), to which Darboven repeatedly refers (among many other data as, for example, the day of death of Ulrike Meinhof, Mao Zedong or John Lennon) in her major work *Schreibzeit*, which will be dealt with in more detail later in this text, is not just the factual birthday of Jean-Paul Sartre. As a main representative of existentialism, his philosophy provides also significant impulses for the artistic work of Hanne Darboven. "My work is a recording in the sense of existence, it is working through," hence another characteristic quote from the artist about her artistic approach.5

By presenting individual sheets with the diverse representations of the daily calculations – which in Darboven's respective works often count several thousand – framed and hung on the walls of exhibition venues, the works gain an additional specific aesthetic quality of spatialization and visualization of the category of time. In their installation-like, yet processual character, the works create a relationship between the individual sheets that is no longer

3 Cf. Bippus 1999: 18–19.

4 On specific compositional techniques in Darboven's œuvre cf. Voithofer 2021.

5 Darboven, in: https://www.hanne-darboven.org/kuenstlerin/lebenslauf/ (26.05.2022). Original quote: "Meine Arbeit ist ein Aufzeichnen im Sinne von Dasein, es ist Durcharbeitung."

*Figure 1: Hanne Darboven, "Schreibzeit" (1975-1999)*

(c) Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg

merely horizontal but equally vertical, no longer merely unidimensional but equally anachronistical and intermedial and can be conceived as a total work of art.6

Working with numbers is something highly artificial. Ciphers are never mere objects that stand alone but always refer to something – a quantity, size

6 Cf. Bippus 1999: 20–21.

or, in this case, time. "It's not pure number and has other meanings. If I were making it up, I couldn't possibly write all that. It has to be totally simple to be *real* writing," says Darboven about her artistic approach to numbers.7

*Figure 2: Hanne Darboven, Exhibition "Hanne Darboven: Aufklärung – Zeitgeschichten. Eine Retrospektive", Munich, Haus der Kunst 2015*

(c) Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg

### **2. Writing Frenzy**

Alongside arithmetic procedures, writing is the fundamental process in Darboven's œuvre. "Writing, not describing," is her artistic credo in this context.8 From 1971 onwards, Darboven integrates a wide variety of text types into her work. In the extensive, lengthy, torturous process of transcribing texts – primarily in the German language –, such as the first five cantos from Homer's *Odyssey*, the epilogue from Bertolt Brecht's *Kriegsfibel*, excerpts from poems by

7 As cited in: Lippard 1976: 190.

8 As cited in: ibid.: 187. Original quote: "Schreiben, nicht beschreiben."

Kraus, Hölderlin, Brecht, Schwitters, Charles Baudelaire's *Les Fleurs du Mal* or Rückert's "Die Schöpfung ist zur Ruh' gegangen, o wach' in mir" and entries from the Brockhaus-Encyclopedia (such as "proletariat" ["Proletariat"] or the page "cauliflower to flower vases" ("Blumenkohl bis Blumenvasen"), it is the depiction of the internalization and incorporation of these very testimonies of time that is expressed in Darboven's works.The daily calculations ("Tagesrechnungen") are joined by the daily writing ("Tagesschrift") which in the form of uniformly meandering waves – art historian Elke Bippus speaks of "u-bows" ("u-Bögen")9 as an adaptation of ditto marks used to mark word repetition – recreates in a mantra-like gesture the act of writing itself, the "writing without words."10 Indeed, her daily writing with its undulating loops also reveals vibrant, rhythmic aspects. In reductionist, insistent repetition – a technique very similar to the procedures of minimal music – a spatial expansion of the perceptual dimension takes place.

Hanne Darboven's opus magnum is appropriately titled *Schreibzeit* (*Writing Time*). The majority of the work was written between 1975 and 1981, and it consists of a monumental volume of almost 4,000 pages, sorted into twenty numbered DIN-A4 and DIN-A3 binders which Darboven herself did not want to be understood as a work of art but as a "political-cultural-historical book" addressed to "everyone."11 The lengthy process of creating *Schreibzeit* took over 20 years, during which Darboven assembled an extremely diverse wealth of material of text types spanning the end of the 18th century to the second half of the 20th century. Having provided the work with an index, one can consult it to find that its index of names lists about 1,100 entries.12

In its early parts, Darboven devotes herself to transcribing parts of *Die Wörter*, a German version of Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiographical book *Les Mots* (*The Words*); an interview with Sartre in the German news magazine *Der Spiegel* published in June 1975 on the occasion of his 70th birthday under the title "Ich müßte sehr niedergeschlagen sein" ("I should be very depressed"), in which Sartre comments on the fundamental importance of writing in his life; and the interview "Das ewig Weibliche ist eine Lüge" ("The eternal feminine is a lie") by Alice Schwarzer with Simone de Beauvoir, also published in *Der Spiegel* a year later in April 1976.

9 Cf. Bippus 1999: 19–20.

10 Cf. ibid.: 25.

11 Cf. Jussen 2000: 15.

12 Cf. Busche 1999: 146.

*Figure 3: Hanne Darboven, "Schreibzeit" (1975-1999)*

(c) Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg

The publication and production history of *Schreibzeit* is long and convoluted, in part due to the work's mammoth scope. It is worth providing a brief overview of its construction history, in order to also give a sense of the work as a whole. Darboven produced the largest part of *Schreibzeit*, more than 2,000 pages, in 1976. Two years later, in 1978, she created the self-contained work *Bismarckzeit*, which she subsequently declared to be part of *Schreibzeit*. 13 In it, the artist engages – over the course of 900 sheets – with the historical Bismarck era. Or more precisely: She deals with the time of the Prussian Prime Minister and later Chancellor of the German Empire Otto von Bismarck in the period from 1850 to 1890 and sets it in dialogue with themes, events and politics of the then present, the year 1978. One can read not only the life data of Otto von Bismarck but also of his political opponent August Bebel – always accompanied by daily calculations on the respective calendar dates. Furthermore, a transcript of excerpts from the biography of Bismarck by Ludwig Reiners (published in 1970) and the cultural-historical account of that era by Rudolf Malsch (*Deutsche Kultur. Eine geistesgeschichtliche Fibel,* 1951) is interpolated into the work.14 Darboven relates these historical documents in *Bismarckzeit* to then topical testimonies, such as, for example, an essay by Willy Brandt from 1978 printed in the *Sozialdemokratisches Magazin* with the title "Wir müssen wachsam sein" ("We must be vigilant"), in which Brandt refers to the anti-socialist laws passed under Bismarck. Connections are also made to everyday utilitarian objects from Darboven's personal collection of domestic objects, such as quotes from porcelain plates, like "Einer spinnt immer wenn 2 spinnen wird's schlimmer" ("One is always crazy when two are crazy it gets worse").

Moreover, in *Schreibzeit* Darboven also includes photographs of items that symbolize technological progress – from a cradle to a compass, a globe, a telescope, an ophthalmic optics device or a steam engine. While working on *Schreibzeit*, Darboven was also laying the foundations for her extensive collection of three-dimensional objects (such as everyday utilitarian objects, toys, antiques, musical instruments, mannequins, historical postcards, souvenirs, or objects she herself commissioned to be made), which are integrated into many of her installations, providing a further medial dimension to the work.15

It is not until the 1990s that Darboven added a prologue and an epilogue to *Schreibzeit* which consist of about 500 photographic reproductions of books. The prologue shows the photographic reproduction of pages from a historical publication on battles during the Seven Years' War entitled *Gespräche im Reiche derer Todten* (*Conversations in the Realm of the Dead*, 1792). The epilogue shows the 1975 financial record book of the "Strandhalle" in Over at the Süderelbe

13 Cf. ibid.

14 Honnef 1999: 37.

15 Cf. Kleine 2016: 52–53.

(close to Hanne Darboven's home and place of work, Hamburg-Harburg), in which the kiosk operator Helga Mahlwitz noted the sale of various drinks using tally marks.16 After the publication of *Schreibzeit* in autumn 1999 by the Max-Planck-Institute for History in Göttingen, the work could be considered complete.

The historian Bernhard Jussen rightly asks how one should deal with *Schreibzeit* from a scholarly perspective as a volume of contemporary historical and art-historical documents which Darboven herself saw not as a work of art but as a "political-cultural-historical book."17 Although *Schreibzeit* closely adheres to the format of scientific work with its pagination and source references, the work is, as it were, a fragmentation of individual- and worldhistory with its renunciation of "chronological linearity."18 Jussen speaks of a "hermetic offer" of historiography in *Schreibzeit*. 19 Darboven is thus a chronicler and scriptwriter of her own deeply subjective experience of the world which she reproduces in her work according to her very own rules, using the detritus of popular history and ephemera, engaging therefore in a conversation with common daily experience through reproductions of weekly magazines or postcards.

#### **3. Archival Art – Its Disclosure of Power Structures and Epistemology**

In *Schreibzeit* – as in all of her works –, Hanne Darboven interweaves individual and collective memory by incorporating various semantic reference systems from history, politics and art. The essential moment here is the fusion of subjective experiences with historically recorded events. The contents are inextricably merged in their form and related to each other. Darboven refers to the extra-artistic reality of historical facts and critically reflects and comments on this seemingly objective reality. In doing so, she always makes her intervention in the documents clear and thus follows the artist's self-image as a commenting outsider, an engaged contemporary and a chronicler who must take a political stand.

16 Cf. Busche 1999: 155.

17 Cf. Jussen 2000: 28–30.

18 Cf. ibid.: 34.

19 Cf. ibid.: 40.

Jussen hence rightly points out that Darboven's approach differs fundamentally from that of historians, as she does not attach importance to completeness and linearity in the representation of history in her works. In this context, however, it can be asked whether it is not precisely through her artistic treatment of historical facts that the problematic nature of a general historiography as such, its fragility and gaps, are revealed. Under what criteria and conditions do historical narratives emerge? What is considered a historically important fact? What becomes the historical canon and by whom? What events, on the other hand, can be carelessly forgotten and why?

Furthermore, it can be questioned whether it is through her curation and reproduction of historical documents that her personal interpretation and socio-cultural imprint opens up new dimensions and perspectives on the representation of history (in the case of *Schreibzeit* to a very specific section of German cultural history). To what extent, then, does Darboven's work offer epistemological implications?

According to art historian Hans Dickel, Darboven's work examines historiography for its meaningfulness, puts it up for discussion and makes the political dimension explicit in the process: "By calling up historical data, facts and narratives and putting them up for disposal, she contributes to the deconstruction of 'history', disenchants it in its apparent meaningfulness. Instead of an overarching creation of meaning, modern artistic means are used to convey a questioning of meaning."20 In returning to Darboven's statement, quoted at the beginning of this paper, in which she sees herself not as an artist but as a constructivist, it can be noted, that she disturbs a system – the system of historiography – deconstructs its structure, rebuilds it and reassesses it.

Art critic Hal Foster detects an "archival impulse" in contemporary art since the postwar period in currents and artistic movements such as conceptual art, institutional critique, and feminist art – to which Darboven must be related.21 According to Foster, the archive is the starting point for those art practices that work with historical information. While Foster does not name

20 Cf. Dickel 2016: 104. Original quote: "Indem sie historische Daten, Fakten und Erzählungen aufruft, zur Disposition stellt, trägt sie zur Dekonstruktion von 'Geschichte' bei, entzaubert sie in ihrer scheinbaren Sinnhaftigkeit. Anstelle übergreifender Sinnstiftung wird mit modernen künstlerischen Mitteln eher eine Sinnbefragung vermittelt."

21 Cf. Foster 2004: 3.

Darboven amongst the artists he observes to possess such "impulse" (e.g., the Independent Group, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Prince), Darboven can decidedly be placed in this movement. Following Foster's definition of an archival art, her works are "recalcitrantly material, fragmentary rather than fungible, and as such they call out for human interpretation, not machinic reprocessing."22 The selection of the documents is subject to the highly individual decision of the artist, who thereby takes a self-reflexive stance on her own identity, socio-cultural imprint, art tradition and political life. Foster also speaks of an "anomic fragmentation as a condition not only to represent but to work through." In proposing "new orders of affective association," archival art does not only represent but must also be interpreted.23 Darboven uses documentary approaches, disrupts, and criticizes the traditional order and functioning of cultural memory. She brings questions of authorship and overlooked or failed ideas from art, philosophy, politics, or everyday life back into focus by installing a kind of counter or complementary memory.24

Philosopher Jacques Derrida draws attention to the original meaning of the word archive from the Greek *arkheion*:

[…] initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the *archons*, those who commanded. […] The archons are first of all the document's guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives.25

In this respect, it can be stated that in *Schreibzeit* Darboven not only appropriates factual documents and events from history but also critically reveals and questions the process of archiving documents from history itself. That hermeneutic power of interpreting the archives, which was withheld from the archons, Darboven transfers into her work. She takes the right to (re)interpret factual reports, to place them in various non-linear contexts and to place everyday occurrences – the banal – alongside the supposedly important events or historical landmarks on equal terms. Patriarchal power structures

22 Ibid.: 5.

23 Ibid.: 21.

24 Cf. ibid.: 21–22.

25 Derrida 1995: 9–10.

of exclusion are thereby exposed. Questions of relevance and the "biographical unworthiness" of certain groups of people can thus be raised.26 What and who should be included in a canon of history? What is worth preserving in an archive? Who determines what ultimately finds its way into cultural memory?

The selective documents of *Schreibzeit* are on the one hand a mirror of personal imprints, Darboven's role models and reference works. The great ancestors, who are still seen as influencing reference points of her own tradition – whether positively in the sense of providing important impulses or in the negative turning away from them – are hauntologically evoked.

On the other hand, *Schreibzeit* with the many and disparate archival documents gathered within it, can be read as an expression of cultural memory. In the 1920s, cultural studies scholar Aby Warburg worked out his theory of "social memory," to which the concepts of "cultural memory" and "cultural memory spaces" created by the cultural scientists Jan and Aleida Assmann were related and further elaborated. Cultural memory is a collective term for all the knowledge with which a specific group identifies itself in a specific framework; differentiates itself from other groups; and transmits, reproduces and adapts this knowledge. It is composed of "memory figures," significant events in the past, artistic products and "institutionalized communication."27 In the self-reflexive debate, cultural memory always takes a stand on itself, is criticized and revised. As Jan Assmann notes: "Cultural memory exists in two modes: firstly, in the mode of potentiality as an archive, as a total horizon of accumulated texts, images, patterns of action, and secondly in the mode of actuality, as the stock of objectified meaning updated and perspectivized from a respective present."28

Darboven's artistic work with the archive is a "self-reflexive memory work." "For the artists are not concerned with technical memories, but with a 'treasure of suffering' in which they recognize an artistic fund," says Aleida Assmann.29 *Schreibzeit* oscillates between individual and cultural memory

26 Cf. Schweiger 2009: 32.

27 Cf. Assmann 1988: 9–12.

28 Ibid.: 13. Original quote: "Das kulturelle Gedächtnis existiert in zwei Modi: einmal im Modus der Potentialität als Archiv, als Totalhorizont angesammelter Texte, Bilder, Handlungsmuster, und zum zweiten im Modus der Aktualität, als der von einer jeweiligen Gegenwart aus aktualisierte und perspektivierte Bestand an objektiviertem Sinn."

29 Assmann 1999: 22. Original quote: "Denn es geht den Künstlern nicht um technische Speicher, sondern um einen 'Leidschatz', in dem sie einen künstlerischen Fundus erkennen."

and is thus in a certain sense a mirror and affirmation of the current state of art's tradition anchored in cultural memory.

This documentarism, in which original, authentic documents on history find their way into the work, also has the epistemological potential to create knowledge. One learns not only something about the time from which the materials come but also about how archival studies deal with source material per se. Cultural studies scholar Susanne Knaller sees great potential in the strategies of artistic documentarism with regard to epistemological and ontological considerations as well as socio-critical functions. Documentarism brings concepts of reality, forms of time and models of truth up for discussion and is thus also helpful for meta-reflection on various discourses of science.30

Hanne Darboven incorporates history through her writing. *Schreibzeit* consists of the sum of its parts and works relentlessly and openly with ambiguities. In it one becomes aware that historiography is not a static end product but is subject to constant dynamic processes of established norms and values of a culture, in which new insights into the past are brought to light. By asserting the right to (re)interpret and (re)evaluate documents from the archives of history, Darboven not only demonstrates with her work the power to create knowledge but also offers facts that transcend aesthetic concerns.

#### **Bibliography**

30 Cf. Knaller 2010: 175.

## **MEDIA AND WRITING PRACTICE**

## **An Iterative Poetics of Writing Facts** Louis de Cahusac's *La Danse Ancienne et Moderne ou Traité Historique de la Danse* (1754)

*Rita Rieger (University of Graz)*

With *La Danse Ancienne et Moderne ou Traité Historique de la Danse*, published in 1754, the French dance theorist Louis de Cahusac (1709-1759) presents a revised collection and some new drafts of his articles on "Danse", "Ballet", "Geste", "Figurants", "Fêtes", and "Enthousiasm" written between 1751 and 1757 for Denis Diderot's and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's *Encyclopédie*. 1 With the aim of advancing the 'truth' about dance and hoping to be of some 'advantage' for future readers, as mentioned in the "Avant-Propos",2 the treatise demonstrates the interrelation between 'writing' and 'fact' through the re-writing of ancient dance theories such as Lucian of Samosata's dialogue *On Dance,*the rewriting of own texts and the articulation of current innovations in mid-18th century European theatrical dance practice, characterized as *danse en action*.

As this paper elaborates, the treatise deals not only with the cultural practice of writing as a historical fact but also gives insight into how writing influences the facticity of facts when it comes to presenting coincidences with 'reality,' 'truth' or the results of some 'acts' and 'actions' in historical writings on dance. Scrutinizing the act of writing allows the discerning of specific types of 'writing facts,' which in the case of Louis de Cahusac's treatise rely on philosophical empiricism and sensualism and will be described in this article as a

1 Cahusac contributed with more than 120 articles especially on the topics of dance and opera to the encyclopedian project, where his entries are signed with the letter (B). The first edition of the *Traité Historique de la Danse* was published in 1754 in three volumes at La Haye by Jean Neaulme. The quotes in this article refer to the commented new edition published in 2004 by Nathalie Lecomte, Laura Naudeux and Jean-Noël Laurenti at Paris. (Cf. Cahusac 2004)

2 Cf. ibid.: 36–40.

poetics of iteration. Therefore, this contribution in a first part elaborates on the notions of 'fact,' 'writing' and 'iteration' and in a second one deepens the poetical analysis of the treatise with the aim to present three different types of an iterative poetics of writing facts.

#### **1. On the Interrelation of Fact, Writing, and Iteration**

The general understanding of 'fact' in European 18th century discourses and cultural practices shows an awareness of the difficulties the term implies as Denis Diderot's entry on "Fait" (Fact) in the *Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers* demonstrates: To define 'fact' as the 'coming into existence of a potentiality,' which allows obtaining knowledge of facts by experience such as eye witnessing actions, monuments and artefacts or through oral and written tradition, does not prove to be a suitable characterization.3 But it indicates the intricacy of the relation between 'truth' and 'fact' that can be analyzed from an ontological, epistemological or logical perspective.4