“The Best Tool Available”: Portugal’s José Rodrigues dos Santos on Truth vs. Fiction
• José Rodrigues dos Santos, one of Portugal’s best known journalists and novelists, discusses the relationship between truth and fiction.
• “If I was doing journalism, I should tell the truth, right?” he posits, only to reveal that sometimes fiction is, indeed, “the best tool available” — the proverbial lie that tells the actual truth.
By José Rodrigues dos Santos
LISBON: The American Super Stallion helicopters landed in the Kuwaiti desert amongst much dust and panache, and the US Marines took position in the sandy grounds in full combat gear, pointing their guns towards invisible enemies hidden somewhere in the horizon.
It was a terrific, almost Hollywoodean, scene. The troops were combat-ready and it was precisely at that moment that the American press officer waved to the reporters waiting on the road.
“You can go now,” he said.
We came to the desert in three buses rented by the Marine Corps and we all felt eager to join the action. Our newsrooms demanded good war pictures. So, when the press officer gave us the green light, the reporters stampeded towards the Marines, looking for the best angles to use their cameras.
It was at that moment, when the crowd of correspondents was running downhill towards the waiting soldiers, that I began to laugh. It seemed a scene out of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. There were hardly sixty Marines camped in the sand, and three hundred reporters soon surrounded them with all their camera gear, clicking and filming. M16s against Nikons and Sonys. Who would win?
I decided my day’s story would not be “US Marines combat-ready in the Kuwaiti desert”, the angle surely desired by the people who had brought us here, but “Reporters outnumber US Marines in Kuwaiti desert show for cameras.” If I was doing journalism, I should tell the truth, right?
Wrong. My cameraman got the whole scene on video and, when I went back to my hotel room to view all the pictures before editing, I was stunned by what the small screen showed me. Despite the fact that the reporters heavily outnumbered the Marines, my cameraman managed to film the entire scene without a single journalist showing up in the pictures. Not one reporter was in view.
The story I wanted to tell my viewers could not therefore be told. I had no pictures for that. That episode was a major lesson and, believe me, it provided me plenty of food for thought about my profession. For it was at that moment that I came to realize that, in my journalistic work, I wasn’t dealing with reality anymore. I was a fiction writer of sorts.
So you can see how easy it was for me to move from journalism to fiction. So many other reporters had followed the same path in the past: Ernest Hemingway for starters, but the list is plentiful: Isabel Allende, José Saramago, Amin Maalouf, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, to name a few… I understood now why.
And I understood it better when I began writing novels, for I realized too that through fiction I managed to tell the truth better than through non-fictional discourse. It was weird, but in time that realization became clearer and clearer. How was this possible?
It works like this. All non-fiction writers have to base what they say in sources. Sometimes these sources manipulate the rules under which you operate and trap you in a lie. The story I was forced to tell in the Kuwaiti desert was basically a lie. The Marine’s press officers were aware that newsrooms demanded war scenes and knew that cameramen would focus the soldiers in their videos, avoiding anything that “spoiled” the picture. Like reporters. Just by providing you a combat-attractive setting, they manipulated our work. It was clever, of course, and it was not their fault that journalism is driven by commercially attractive pictures. They just used our motivations to their advantage.
No such problems in fiction. You know something is true and you just say it without having to “prove it”. That’s why I love writing novels. I can express intuitive truths without having to prove them at all. I can travel into the mind of one of the Marines waiting in the desert for the reporters and explain how he sees the scene unfolding before him.
“Stupid crowd”, he thinks, caressing his M16 while the reporters stampeded towards him –- I would write.
I couldn’t write that in a work of non-fiction. And you know what? I would probably be close to the truth in the fictional writing.
So, that’s what I try to do in my novels. When I wrote by new novel, The Einstein Enigma, for example, I wanted to explain what science had uncovered about the existence of God. A lot, I came to realize. So, using the discovery of a new Einstein manuscript with a hidden enigma and enveloping it in a spy story involving cryptograms and Iran’s quest to develop a nuclear bomb, I managed to explain to my readers the amazing discoveries really made by scientists on this major issue.
For fiction, believe it or not, is the best tool available to us to tell the truth.
José Rodrigues dos Santos is one of Portugal’s best known journalists and novelists. He is the author of the international bestseller Codex 632. His new novel, The Einstein Enigma, is published in the United States this week by Harper Collins.
DISCUSS: Can Fiction Be Trusted to Tell the Truth?
READ: José Rodrigues dos Santos’s recent essay about Einstein, Stephen Hawking and the existence of God at the Huffington Post.
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Scientists and theologians are often at odds about whether or not God exists. But, is it possible to find God using science? Two books coming out this fall address this crucial philosophical question from different perspectives. One is physicist Stephen Hawkings' "The Grand Design" and the other is my novel "The Einstein Enigma."
When we search for the scientific proof of God's existence, we first need to establish one crucial thing: what is God?
Some people imagine God as an old patriarch with a white beard who looks down at the world, listens to our prayers, and protects us.
But, if you look through the end of a telescope on a starry night, no such entity will be visible. So, the question becomes, is there a different form of God out there and how does science uncover Him?
First, science deals with God not as a supernatural entity, but as something natural. Remember: the supernatural is only the natural we do not understand.
Second, it looks at the universe and searches for two things: intelligence and intention. Is the universe intelligent? Just look around - there are clever things everywhere. See the extremely intelligent way a cell divides in two, and then in four, and so on, in a process that ends up with a human being. Isn't that intelligent? But what if this intelligence is merely accidental?
If the universe is accidental, there is no God and life has no meaning - it's just an accident. But if the universe is intentional, then there is God and, yes, life has a meaning. That's why we also need to find intention. How do we do that?
Let us suppose I find a flower lying on the ground. I will think: well, this is a flower, a natural thing, and that's it. But let us suppose that, instead of a flower, I find a pen. I know a pen has a purpose and someone invented it with an intention: to write. I may not know personally who that inventor is, but I know someone invented the pen with an intention.
Now, if I can say this about something as simple as a pen, why can't I say the same about a flower? Why do I accept that a pen is an intelligent device created by someone with an intention and I cannot say the same about people, life, the universe? Aren't the trees, and the clouds, and the rain, and the planets, and the stars much more complex and intelligent creations than... a pen?
Or for example, suppose I ask an engineer: "What is television?" He's going to open up a TV set and say: "Well, television is a device with chips and wires and electrical stuff". He's right, of course. But it's much more than that, isn't it? Television is also about news programs, sports, soap-operas, reality-shows, game-shows, movies.
But, if you ask a scientist: "What is the universe?" He will say: "Well, the universe is quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons, atoms, planets, stars, constellations, galaxies, clusters". He's right, of course. That's the hardware of the universe, but scientists do not examine the software. What is the program that is playing? What is behind the hardware?The problem is, perhaps, perspective. Imagine there's a small ant on top of a Persian rug. If I told the ant that she's walking on a beautiful rug, she would say: "What rug? What are you talking about? This is just the ground." So, if I want the ant to see how beautiful the rug is, I have to lift her from the ground and show her the rug from a vantage point, giving her the full view.
"The Einstein Enigma" is a novel that, through a love and spy story involving a hitherto unknown manuscript by Albert Einstein, addresses God from science's perspective. And it shows, using recent scientific data, that the universe is fine-tuned for life, a discovery with tremendous philosophical implications because it means there is intention in its creation. Because the book is fiction, I get to play with some of these ideas in a way that scientists cannot.
So, where does Stephen Hawkings' "The Grand Design" fit in? He deals with these same disturbing scientific discoveries explained in detail in "The Einstein Enigma." He admits they are "odd" and "difficult to explain" without accepting God exists, but he tries anyway. How? He comes up with a theory that explains the strange fine tuning of the universe as something accidental. He says: there are zillions of universes and, out of zillions, one was bound to come up fine-tuned for life.
The evidence for this? An interpretation by Richard Feynman on a quantic experiment called The Buckyball Experiment, which involves projecting particles against a double-slit barrier. Feynman states that at every moment the universe is splitting in two in such a way that a particle goes through the left slit on Universe 1 and the same particle goes through the right slit on Universe 2 and the same particle goes back to the left slit on Universe 3 and the same particle goes back to the left slit on Universe 4 and so on and so on.
Hawking discusses Feynman's interpretation of its results by saying that out of these endless possibilities, it was inevitable that a universe fine-tuned for life would emerge - it's just a statistical accident.
Convincing? You decide. Hawking's extravagant theory is all there is to explain the discoveries in a way that does not link the universe to an intentional intelligence. What I say to you, as the author of "The Einstein Enigma," is that the universe is a strange place. In fact, quantum theory tells us that things are so bizarre that particles only decide in which place they are when we look at them. If we accept these weird concepts, why don't we accept a simpler evidence: that the universe is intentional?
Remember, we are really ants walking on top of a rug. What I try to do in my novel is to give you a new perspective to see the universe. A vantage point. The solution to Einstein's last enigma.
>via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-rodrigues-dos-santos/hawking-science-finds...