When Nora met Jerry...

Can fiction be written the same register as non-fiction?

Jerry Fodor was a philosopher most known for The Language Of Thought, which asks if people think in the same register as they talk. Nora Ephron was a writer most known for the screenplay When Harry Met Sally…, which asks if men and women can ever be friends. Good questions both. The answers are no and yes, respectively. (The texts imply yes and no, but they’re both wrong.)

I recently read Ephron’s 1983 quasi-autobiographical novel Heartburn, based on the breakup of her second marriage. It caused me to wonder if fiction can be written the same register as non-fiction. (For that matter: Can novelists and philosophers ever be friends?) Because of all things, Ephron’s text reminded me most of all of Fodor, especially his essays in the London Review of Books.

Here’s Heartburn’s lead character describing what happened after she discovered her husband’s infidelity:

After I found the book with the disgusting inscription in it, I called Mark. I’m embarrassed to tell you where I called him — okay, I’ll tell you: I called him at his shrink’s. He goes to a Guatemalan shrink over in Alexandria who looks like Carmen Miranda and has a dog named Pepito. ‘Come home immediately,’ I said. ‘I know about you and Thelma Rice.’ Mark did not come home immediately. He came home two hours later because — are you ready for this? — THELMA RICE WAS ALSO AT THE SHRINK’S. They were having a double session! At the family rate!! I did not know this at the time. Not only did Thelma Rice and Mark see Dr. Valdez and her Chihuahua, Pepito, once a week, but so did Thelma’s husband, Jonathon Rice, the undersecretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs. Mark and Thelma saw Chiquita Banana together, and Jonathon Rice saw her alone — and that man has something to do with making peace in the Middle East!

And here is Fodor, opening his review of

Rob Kurzban

’s book, Why Everyone (Else) Is A Hypocrite:

Sometimes, when I’m feeling dyspeptic, I wonder why psychologists have such a down on minds. Psychologists, of all people. In philosophy, ever since Plato, the mainstream opinion has been that the mind is the organ of thought; thinking is what the mind is for, and we act as we do because we think what we do. But psychologists, for the last hundred years or so, have mostly viewed that sort of ‘intellectualism’ as an embarrassing remnant of the Enlightenment: behaviourists say that the question of what minds are for doesn’t arise, since there aren’t any. Freudians say that the myth that we think is a sort of cover story that the mind tells itself to avoid having to confess to its libidinous urges. Associationists say that we don’t need a mind to think with (‘we don’t need an “executive”’ is how they put it) because ideas think themselves in virtue of the mechanical connections among them. And neuropsychologists say that since the mind is the brain, we don’t need the one because we have the other. That this bundle of muddle is recommended as the hard-headed, scientific way to do psychology is, I think, among the wonders of the age.

Both write about serious things in an informal way. They are candid, conversational and incredulous. Fiction and fact in the same key. Both are furiously intelligent and expect their readers to keep up. Talented writers, they use punctuation not merely for its ordinary function as a reader’s guide, but as a part of the text itself. Ephron’s double exclamation mark (“At the family rate!!”) is so effective: you can hear the intonation.

I notice that both Fodor and Ephron were New York Jews: and so is Woody Allen whose best work has some similar qualities. So let’s play a game, it’s called Ephron, Fodor, Allen. Match the writers to their lines: there’s two of each. Answers are in the footnotes.¹

• “If I cared about what I ate, then I'd have to care about the air I breathed, and if I cared about the air I breathed, then I'd have to move back to Connecticut, and I hated Connecticut.”

• “When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

• “I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.”

• “Why hadn’t I realised how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemonade?”

• “My cholesterol was so high that my doctor had a heart attack.”

• “In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.”

Fodor was skeptical that brain imaging could tell us much about how the mind works. When he wrote about this in the London Review of Books his Rutgers colleague, Benjamin Martin Bly, wrote in to disagree. Fodor replied that Bly “seems not to grasp that there is a difference between, on the one hand, trying to find out ‘the way the structure of our minds depends on the structure of our brains’… and, on the other hand, making brain maps of what lights up where when one thinks about teapots. Roughly, it’s the difference between a scientist who has a hypothesis and one who only has a camera.”

Anyway, read Heartburn, it’s great. Fodor’s essays make me both think and laugh at the same time, and Heartburn did that too. The film adaptation is, sadly, only so-so: not a bad movie but also not a good one. Still, Meryl Streep is excellent as Ephron’s alter ego. “I highly recommend having Meryl Streep play you” said Ephron some years later. “She plays all of us better than we play ourselves, although it’s a little depressing knowing that if you went to an audition to play yourself, you would lose out to her.”

1. In order: Fodor, Allen, Allen, Ephron, Fodor, Ephron.