Death is real. You may wonder about many phenomena how seriously you should take them, how much reality value they still have, but death is unadulteratedly real. Threat of death is therefore serious. Religions – and some religious people sometimes forget this – regard beating to death as a taboo. There is even a biblical commandment that forbids killing, it ranks fifth in the Ten Commandments.
A petition came whirling by that I took to be a petition against death threats. Petitions always come along and then people don’t automatically feel like speaking out in favor of one and against the other, for this, against that, but you could take this petition as a simple plea not to want to beat each other to death. So I signed.
I understood that something had happened to a poem. A writer was supposed to write a poem for children because of the Children’s Book Week, concerned citizens were concerned about themes in his earlier work, he was threatened with death and now he is not writing the poem. Concerned citizens, including fashion models and conservative Christians, had rejoiced that good had prevailed through those death threats. But as an observer you were left with two loose ends.
The first loose end was death. About that later. The second loose end was reality, since defenders of the writer argued most loudly that you should view his work separately from it. A story is fiction, they said, and a novel is not real. To me this seemed like a poor defense of literature – because why the hell would anyone ever write or read a story if it has nothing to do with reality?
The main editorial comment NRC said something interesting in this regard. “In 2023, fiction is read less and less, and apparently less and less understood.” This was primarily about literature, but if you wanted, you could read a time analysis in it, a sincere observation of a new relationship between fiction and reality. A new situation that not only calls for more literature education, but also for learning to read the world around us.
Because you can blame people for not understanding fiction. But you can also look more broadly and conclude that the phenomenon of fiction has indeed become incomprehensible. “AI-created faces now look more real than real photos”psychologist Manos Tsakiris recently wrote on the site The Conversation. He referred to an earlier article he wrote in the magazine iSciencewith the ominous title ‘On the Realness of People Who Do Not Exist‘. On the authenticity of people who do not exist: the social effects of artificial faces.
Yes, fiction is less understood. People can no longer distinguish artificially generated photos, videos and texts from photos, videos and texts made by humans. On social media, in marketing and political propaganda, non-existent people are used to influence existing people. Real people adapt their behavior to fictional reality and become insecure as soon as they discover its artificiality.
Fiction does not lose ground, fiction is everywhere. Much of the online content,’content‘, is not made to impart knowledge, but to make money; fake websites, too click farms lure you with fake content and then show you ads for stuff that doesn’t actually exist, so you keep clicking. This way you can read on without ever encountering anything real along the way. This is the new relationship between fiction and reality: you can hardly distinguish what texts and images refer to.
Defense of literature as fiction is therefore pointless and barren at the moment. A literary work is much more firmly rooted in reality than one clickfarm. It is therefore not the falseness of literature that we as citizens must learn to understand, but the falseness of the artificially created world. And the real of the existing world of which death is the anchor and about which the literature tells us.
Threats of death belong to the fictional world in which people can no longer distinguish between appearance and essence. It’s folksy. A show of bewildered citizens who have lost their grip on reality and who have to learn to see again that death is real. That it’s serious. That you don’t threaten it.
To regain control of life, everyone should therefore sign a petition against death threats: fashion models and conservative believers in the lead. Out of respect for existence.
Max February is a lawyer and writer, www.maximfebruari.nl.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 11, 2023