FICTIONAL TRUTHS AND TRUTHFUL FICTIONS

I took part in a talk, along with Anna Kennedy, at the Portobello Book Festival on October 8th. The talk was entitled
The Castaway, and it looked at the gradual isolation of Hugh Miller, his sense of abandonment and the social
and cultural context for it (me) and the psychological and human factors, (Anna). We had a lively conversation and
the sixty or more people there seemed to enjoy it. I received quite a few emails from audience members. One of
these has sparked this post and also will form the basis for a talk I am giving at the Edinburgh Bookshop on November 2nd. 
My book is a fictional history and I refer to it as a fabricated fiction. A fiction does not mean something that is
false, rather it is a structure we impose on life to make sense of it, whether it be a wedding ceremony, a temple, a
novel or a symphony!  But we should be clear when we are talking about an invention by an author or even
a fabrication of several facts. I have tried to be clear about that in my Afterwords at the end of the Second Part and
by the posting of the standard biographies and lists of sources on this website.
In my talk I discussed several real characters who appear in the novel. I mentioned a woman I greatly admire, a
feminist and socialist called Emma Martin (information on her appears in this website). She anticipated Nan
Shepherd’s idea of the female view, which sees the interior, contrasted with the male view of the outline. In
Shepherd’s case, this was in reference mountains, where, she says it is the interior that constitutes the mountain, not
its exterior. Martin said that the original symbols of the womb- a cave, had been substituted by the male phallic
cross. (She of course explains it in more detail and better in her pamphlet, Baptism, A Pagan Rite). For Martin,
when men look at a cathedral, they see the spire. A woman would see the cave, the interior. Likewise with
the pyramids.
So far, so true. My novel looks at other “triangular fictions”, such as Prof. Goodsir’s view that human anatomy is
based on the triangle. And in the chapter, They Become Water, I describe a meeting of Emma Martin’s where I
have the female members of the audience stand up and form a triangle with their thumbs and forefingers. In
the context of my fiction and in consonance with Martin’s views, I think that is a justified fancy. But I have no
evidence that this in fact happened, and I was wrong to say so in my Portobello talk.  I did not wish to mislead
people, - it is three years since I wrote that chapter, but I evidently did. I want to say thank you to Gaby Porter,
who wrote a nice email to me asking for the source of my claim. I was happy to answer and indeed found that
Martin did empathise the shape of the womb and the vaginal opening as the essential human forms (she was
a midwife and spoke from deep experience). But, to my surprise, I found no reference to the feminist triangle. I
would be delighted if anyone can tell me when that first started.
So thank you, Gaby. This has got me thinking about other crossovers, intentional and unintentional, between fact
and fiction in my novel and elsewhere, and will form the basis for my talk and readings from the novel, on
​November 2.   Brian