The Anathemas Q-and-A: Why a Novel rather than Non-fiction?
So here I was with a mystery that went back millennia and touched the lives and minds of half the world’s population. Why not just write the facts and let the reader come to his own conclusion? Why a novel?
Search the Internet and you will find thousands of items, from one extreme to the other, on reincarnation, Justinian, and the Council of Constantinople, but those gathered tracts and theories can leave one cold. By themselves, history can be stodgy and religion passé; but the inside-the-mind saga of people living multiple individual lifetimes, The Anathemas’ perspective, can electrify and revivify that vast region that lies behind barriers in ”normal” memory.
The Anathemas, as a novel, is fiction—a creation—not entirely dependent on the records of the past events depicted, even while it takes them into account. So, it is free to fill in where the record falls short, to adjust where the record seems in error, and to postulate the record’s impact—the advantage of hindsight—on later and present thinking and behavior. This, by the way, is also done in non-fiction, but the novel needs no footnotes to prove that what is being written is based on what someone else has already written.
Resorting to fiction, I’ll admit, can be a defensive device. Those with a vested interest in keeping reincarnation under wraps are still around. As Dan Brown learned with The Da Vinci Code, even the best-plotted fiction, coming too close to debunking enshrined myths, generates furious backlash.
Fiction as a present-time Event
The word, fiction, essentially means “something created.” It’s root fict– is only one letter off from fact. From the predominant mechanical viewpoint, we give more credence to theories made up from sense phenomena than to those conjured up from the thin air of imagination. We call the first science and the latter fantasy. And yet we flock to concerts, art museums, movies, and sporting events or park for hours in front of TVs, all more fantasy than science.
In his book, Beyond the Occult, Colin Wilson says: “Imagination is the power to anticipate reality by conjuring up mental connections.” The fiction writer conjures consciously, usually with the intent to anticipate, or foresee, a present or future reality.
The Anathemas is based on a piece of history that takes place in the 6th Century, a critical event that changed the course of western civilization up to the present. However, the restitution required of the Justinian character, the perpetrator of the untruth, is not in the 6th century, the time of the crime, nor in the 19th century with Richard Strawn, but in the present time, since the misinformation persists and will continue to do so until corrected. Examining a “given” idea, no matter how old, to establish its validity is a present time activity, for both writer and reader.
Erroneous history is a present problem. Our history—what has been recorded about our past—bounds our view of ourselves and our kind. It governs how we think in the present and thus plan, and so create, the future. The details, as they happened, might be lost, but the essentials cannot be.
As the Jesuit DuPont observes in novel: “But there’s good news. Perennial truth, which the words in any document can but poorly represent, remains perennially true. So, it remains there to be observed and verified by the present observer.” (P. 315)
********
Click to subscribe to this site’s RSS Feed.
Click this link to order a copy of The Anathemas, a Novel about Reincarnation and Restitution.
Copyright 2013 by Victor E. Smith. All rights reserved.
Share your thoughts on this post. Put in your comment in the space below. Thank you.