진실에 이르는 두 개의 문

Two Doors Toward Truth: Fact and Fiction

All the academic disciplines pursue truth. Whereas history discloses truth by narrating fact, literature does it by narrating fiction. Which door is, however, the bigger one leading toward truth? Picasso defined art as ‘a fiction telling about the truth of a fact’. In contrast, history is a discourse telling about the truth of the past. Discourse can be defined as fiction, because it is eventually a construct of a historian. It is a matrix made by modern realism which holds fact to be true and fiction to be wrong. Like reality and dream in human life are simply two sides of a same medallion, both history as a factual narrative and novel as a fictional narrative are about the general truth of human life. These two should form a complementary relationship, not a contradictory one. Forming such a relationship should be preceded by a recognition of the genre difference between history and literature as a matter of various thinking frames about ‘the actual’ and ‘the possible’ as Aristotle put forward in his Poetics. The history which a historical novel and a historical drama are telling is not ‘a real history’, but ‘a history of dream’. This dream is not the one of the contemporaries, but the one we are dreaming now as a historical reality. History basically aims at representing the reality which existed in the past. In contrast, faction is an alternative history which we wish had happened in the past. Neither the historical reality of the past should not be distorted by the present dream, nor the fictional reality as a reality which could have happened should not be prevented from being dreamed.