At Least In English, We KNOW We're Studying Fiction!

Recently I was watching Star Trek II, when this microbiologist kept interrupting to protest how "unrealistic" the science was--"they're just making things up!" she kept repeating.  "Hey, you know what else is made up?" I said, "Literally everything else.  The characters, the lines, the story--this is all made up kiddo, it's fiction!" 

I used to get defensive when folks said us English students "just" study fiction--but I've had of late one of those sudden epiphanies about my discipline, one that sounds so silly at first until its full, deathly import dawns on you:

At least in English, we know we're studying fiction!

Mathematics?  Numbers are symbols, metaphors, that is, fictions--useful fictions perhaps, ones that help represent and mediate reality to our little skull-sized kingdoms--but then, so do words, and no self-respecting English professor would ever confuse those for anything but fiction!  "Numbers never lie," you say?  Please, I took a Stats class in college, and if I learned nothing else from it, it's that numbers lie all the time--just like words--just like fiction, but at least we know it's fiction!

Business?  Finance?  All these so called "real world" concerns?  Give me a break, the open secret is that money is a glorified fiction that we've all agreed to live by--again, a useful fiction perhaps, maybe even a necessary fiction, arguably--but still a fiction!  This fantasy that your money is backed up by anything is the greatest fiction of all.  "Return to the gold standard" you say?  The idea that gold has any intrinsic value at all is still a fiction as complete as the green paper in your wallet or the numbers(!) flashing on your bank account!  And how much bloodshed and misery has been perpetrated by these fictions--which, alas, are only to real?  But in English, we at least know we're reading fiction--useful fictions perhaps, even necessary fictions, but still fictions nonetheless.

Marketing?  Advertising?  Communications?  Fictions, fictions, and more fictions, with this important and dangerous difference: these are fictions presented as facts!  Consider all the times an advertisement has presented a product as a need, or a political candidate or party has tried to "control the campaign narrative," or a government or corporation has sought to "influence the public perception," because these all know that it is the story, the fiction, that matters most.  It is no mystery to me why business and government types wish to dismiss "Literature" and "fiction" as unnecessary--for indeed, it is more difficult to push your petty fictions on an undiscerning public that doesn't understand what it is.  But in English, we at least know we're studying fiction!

History?  What first prompted this rant is when, in the middle of my graduate Spanish class this semester, I read a paper by a historian arguing for the studying of how a historical event is remembered, not just the event itself; while I saw the value of such an approach, I protested that this study of the story, of the fictions of history that we all remember, is surely the province of literary critics, not historians!  Historians were the ones supposedly engaged in the noble work of verification, for figuring out (no matter how quixotic a quest that may be) what actually happened, not what everyone says happened!

But no, the historians are now behaving like literary critics, studying fiction as a way to understand history.  But in English, we make no such pretensions, for we at least know we're studying fiction--and I often wonder if what this world of confusions and deceptions and ads and press releases needs more than anything is a healthy dose of fiction, self-evident, self-declared, obvious fiction, in novels, poems, dramas, movies and so forth, to remind us all of what fiction actually looks like, so we know how to recognize it everywhere else.