Universal truth: a literary fiction

Among literature’s many grand claims is that great works embody universal truth about the human condition. It’s frequently used to emphasise the importance of literary fiction and establish the importance of canonical works and authors.

The former canonical heretic and latter-day literary saint, James Joyce, himself declared Ulysses to be a novel of universal truth:

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

James Joyce, 1922 (or thereabouts)

Far be it from me to disagree with a man whose most celebrated work is notorious for being impenetrably referential and almost impossible to finish. It is, nevertheless, a breathtaking assertion to claim that living in three European cities in the early 20th century — Paris, Trieste and Zurich — is the key to every city on the planet. Would Joyce have felt as certain of Dublin’s essential cititude if he had returned to Dublin from metropolises less influenced by the European model: perhaps Ulan Bator, Timbuktu and Hanoi?

My goal is not to malign Joyce or Dublin, but to question a literary truism. As a journalist I developed a nose for hyperbole, and universal truth has more than a whiff of the improbable.

Indeed, the concept of universal truth may have been fit for the literary set of Joyce’s era. In the 21st century, it feels inappropriate. Yet literature remains rife with appeals to universal truth and readers are conditioned to expect it.

The fallacy of solipsism

A perverse feature of modern culture is that it moves simultaneously towards homogeneity and heterogeneity. We eat, drink and often live in places defined by brands and social media trends, curated by algorithms that even their creators don’t understand. At the same time, we’re increasingly atomised by our political and religious beliefs, gender identities and the generational ghettos beloved of marketing psychology.

Many of the microcultures which arise from these heterogeneous beliefs and identities embrace the desire to be recognised yet not to be subsumed into the mainstream. These tensions encourage people to think that their individual experience is simultaneously universal, and lead to impossible expectations of harmony through homogeny.

In the mid-2010s, I briefly travelled the metaverse with the user name “Not A Representative Sample”, because there’s nowhere better than social media to discover the pitfalls of solipsism.

Surfing the bell curve

Twitter, Reddit and Facebook are infested with people who believe that they are the everyman and their experience is firmly situated in the centre of the bell curve. Arguments erupt when supposedly universal truths are asserted by one party and denied by another. Neither party is able to reconcile the truth: we are not alike.

We are widely distributed, shotgunned by life into Venn diagrams which cross over far less than we would like to believe. Perhaps that is a universal truth, but then, I would say that because I am the everyman.

That’s not to say that people from different cultures don’t have things in common. I’m fond of retelling an encounter I once had in the hills of central Mauritania, halted at a checkpoint by a man with an AK-47 who wanted something from me in order to open the gate. I offered himcigarettes that I’d hoarded for such occasions. They were refused, even though he obviously enjoyed a smoke.

What this man desired were “cadeaux pour les enfants”, and an exchange ensued at the pace of my rusty GCSE-level French. “Presents for the children” also did not mean sweets, but I finally understood “livres et stylos” — books and pens to help his children through school.

You might say that a desire to help your children through school is universal. The point is that I don’t have children. That north African checkpoint guard had more in common with parents in Stoke-on-Trent, Kansas or Yekaterinburg than he had with me.

Embedded myths

You will find the myth of universal truth buried deeper than the thematic level in contemporary storytelling.

Modern fiction has been hijacked for a half-century by the homogeneity of Joseph’s Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. Entire careers rely on propagating this formula as the only way to tell stories in any medium.

The alleged monomyth attempts to embed a claim for universal truth at the structural level of storytelling. Campbell cherry-picked myths no less than than Joyce did cities, but many writers follow his template with a religious zeal. Critics and writers now question Campbell’s gospel, but it remains ubiquitous. Consumers are so habituated to the monomyth that many people find it jarring when stories depart from its path.

Another literary conceit which flattens difference to serve the myth of the universal is our contemporary addiction to narrative tropes.

As a tool, tropes are no more fundamentally wrong than using The Hero’s Journey to inform structure. Again, their ubiquity has created a craving amongst consumers. Formats like “enemies to lovers” have become a mental comfort food that reduces characters to easily-digestible behavioural stereotypes.

The anthropic fallacy

The dominance of human consciousness as the only possible experience is also receiving a welcome challenge. Biologists and anthropologists increasingly recognise conscious experience amongst non-human intelligences, from primates to octopi.

The further we move from the human template, the harder it becomes to align those experiences with our own. Yet it is this alien realm where the difference becomes most interesting.

At the other end of the template, somewhere just beyond the bleeding edge of technology, lies artificial general intelligence. As yet, it is impossible to determine how this will manifest and today’s AI prototyes will be a poor guide.

AGI might emerge at the animal level and require nurturing for it to progress, just as human intelligence evolved. Some techno-evangelists believe that AGI will burst into life with superhuman capabilities when computing power reaches a critical mass. Machine intelligence may need to be embodied in functional machines that interact with the environment. It may already exist, unrecognised, within the chaos of the internet. What is almost guaranteed is that universal human truths will not apply to AGI.

It’s also statistically likely that non-human intelligence also exists somewhere else in the universe. It’s also physically unlikely that we’ll encounter it in the probable span of human existence. Extraterrestrial truths can wait for another day.

What is literature without universal truth?

The obvious answer is that literature can celebrate the truths of groups and individuals without perpetuating the myth of universality. Some forms and genres find it more difficult to resist because that’s what their readers expect.

You might expect me to point at an easy target like romance, where truths are curated for specific readers. However, literary authors, critics and readers often seek and reward the delivery of avowed universal truths.

I believe — naturally, I’m biased — that science fiction and fantasy are literature’s best hope to avoid the lure of universal truth. Of course, there are subgenres of SF&F which rely on structural and narrative tropes as much any other. Nonetheless, free from the shackles of mundanity, it’s easier to create scenarios where the Venn diagrams of experience rarely intersect.

The best of science fiction and fantasy has long explored the opportunity space of experience, human and otherwise. From Frankenstein to the Children of Time, SF&F authors have embraced their diversity and imagination to help us understand one another without falling for the myth of universal truth.

Dublin, Paris, Trieste, Zurich, Ulan Bator, Timbuktu and Hanoi photographed by Peter Miller, Patrick Nouhaille, Stephen Colebourne, Evgenii Klebanov, bayasaa, Michael Fludkov and United Nations Photo.

AI cityscapes created by Microsoft Copilot Designer.