Is fiction the elixir of truth?

Two great thinkers on culture wars, cancellation and the power of storytelling

By Stephen FRY and Jordan PETERSON

anybody would dare to wave a flag, and claim to own it, and ask them to value it, was so disgusting, they could barely speak. It’s an extraordinary passage. Kipling makes the point that one’s relationship to one’s country is intensely private. And it may be that one has great love for it, but it’s a love that is complex and confounded with all kinds of disappointment, and hatred, and fear, and shame. But to fly [the flag], and to say “It means this” is a lie, and an imposition on the personal experience of those boys in that story. I would urge everyone to read that because it comes from a surprising source.

JP: These problems are complicated. And they have to be sorted out very carefully. But it seems to me that abandoning our past is a very bad idea – you kill one god and another emerges, and it might be much worse than the one you dispensed with.

I know what’s happening in the broader public landscape is bothering you.

You’ve got tangled up, for example, with

J K Rowling.

SF: Yes. She’s a friend and will remain a friend. But I’m also sorry that people are upset. You know, the two things are not incompatible. I endorse the efforts of trans people everywhere to live the lives that they feel they want to lead. I recognise the courage it takes. And I hate how they are often treated. JP: Yes, and you’ve put your money where your mouth is on that front over the course of your whole life. But you’re disturbed, none the less, at something that’s happening in our culture that’s not sitting right with you. How do you defend against it without making the claim that we do have something of, let’s say, higher value, that is the consequence of following a particular tradition? Because, without that, you lose the argument instantly. SF: We have to remember that morality is a question of manners. Our parents and grandparents had a very, very different and very firm sense of what was immoral. If the word “immoral” was used in a newspaper, or by a person, “that person is immoral”, it would have a sexual meaning. It would mean that they lived with someone to whom they weren’t married, or they lived with someone of the same sex, or that, in some way, they were philanderers. “Loose in their morals” was entirely to do with the bedroom. These were the unforgivable behaviours for a generation so close to us that we can still hug them in the garden, when Covid allows. That’s how quickly morality changes.

So the idea of “the culture” is a false one. There is no “the culture”. In 1400, God was answerable for everything. A couple of hundred years later, a few things have been taken away from him – we were discovering how the stars actually were not holes in a black cloth. Cosmos used to mean a very small sphere of the section of the solar system, and now it’s some infinite thing. Everything is redefined in each generation. So what is left that is absolute?

JP: There’s a core tradition that remains intact. I’ve looked for what might be regarded as eternal verities in the moral domain. So let me put a few forward:

1. The beautiful is more valuable than the ugly.

2. Truth is to be sought after in opposition to falsehood.

That’s particularly true in relation to the spoken word. The spoken word brings about remarkable transformations of reality itself. SF: This brings us back to the importance of myth and parable, and reminds me of a great one told by Oscar Wilde, which illustrates how literature, and the art of wit, zooms to the truth so much more quickly, it seems to me, than so many other attempts to rationalise. Once, someone at dinner was being rather envious of someone, rather unpleasant, and Wilde said: “The devil was walking one day in the Libyan Desert and he saw a monk being tormented by some of his demons. And he approached, and the demons bowed in front of him and said, ‘Master, for 39 days and 39 nights, we have tried to tempt this holy monk away from his god, and his religion. We have offered him powers and principalities, we’ve offered him the joys of the flesh, we have offered him wine, and food, and riches, but he has turned us down. There’s nothing that we can do to win this holy man to our cause.’ And the devil said, ‘Out of my way,’ and he whispered in the monk’s ear. And instantly the monk took the pectoral cross around his neck and snapped it, and filled the air with hideous curses against his god, and his church, and his religion, and swore he would never follow Christ again. And the demons fell down in front of the devil and said, ‘Master, what can you have said in one second that we could not?’ The devil said, ‘Oh, it was very simple. I just told him his brother had been made Bishop of Alexandria.’”

That seems to me (a) very funny, and (b) profoundly truthful about how envy and resentment are so much a part of who we are. It’s a model to me of how to express yourself if you want to say something, if you want to change minds, if you want to burn people with the flame of love, and hope, and connection that we all secretly believe in, that makes us gasp when we read poetry, or makes us feel what love is, and joy, and all the things that we’re mostly too embarrassed to talk about because they’re a bit soppy.

The way, I think, to bond people to ideas is not to talk abstractly. If you can tell a story instead, especially if it’s funny, or it’s sexy, then you bring people to a connection. But, unfortunately, most of the world who use the art of rhetoric and persuasion do it for nefarious purposes.

Maybe that’s the key – to try to build up the value of story and look deeply into the nature of characters within stories. Even though it’s just a story, it might actually be a portal to something profound that will touch you, and change your life. JP: That’s just exactly the right place to stop.

The Jordan B Peterson Podcast with Stephen Fry is now available at jordanbpeterson.com/podcast. Beyond Order: by Jordan Peterson (Allen Lane, £25) is out now

Inside a trailer in the American West, a pack of wolves is causing havoc: tearing at curtains, sinking fangs into a bedspread, turning the place inside out. Thank goodness whoever lives here isn’t at home. This frightening scene from Redoubt, a new, two-hour film by Matthew Barney, is playing when I visit London’s Hayward Gallery, where it forms the centrepiece of the American artist’s first major museum show here in a decade.

The film is set in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, not far from the city of Boise, where Barney grew up. Born in San Francisco in 1967, he moved there when his father got a catering job at the local university; after his parents divorced in 1979, his mother, an abstract painter, relocated to New York, which is where he lives today.

Barney tells me that the idea for Redoubt “has been kicking around in the back of my head for a while”: it was inspired by a controversy that flared up in Idaho while he was a teenager. The dispute concerned a local programme to reintroduce the Canis lupus, or grey wolf, which, in America, had been driven almost to extinction. In favour were the conservationists who wanted to bring the landscape back “into balance”, Barney explains. Against them stood the “ranchers and people whose businesses centred around hunting – because wolves kill a lot of elk, as well as livestock and domestic animals.” In the end, the ranchers lost and in 1995, 31 wolves were released in Idaho. By 2015, there were nearly 800.

The wrangle stayed with Barney – in part because, as he puts it, “wolves have been mythologised for centuries. For some, they represent a kind of evil, or the chaos in nature. They instil fear.”

At first, Barney, a reticent, gnomic presence, unafraid of long pauses as he formulates his thoughts (one, during our conversation, stretches to 19 seconds), considered filming himself over six days as he tracked wolves in the wilderness. But hunting for wolves, he tells me, is “not an easy thing to do: they’re elusive”. So, he switched tack, wrote a script, and found “a guy who had a pack of eight wolves in Montana”, which were brought in to film the “more difficult scenes” since “they were used to being around people”.

The film’s shape shifted, too. Barney – who once worked as a catalogue model, and has a daughter with his former partner, the Icelandic singer Bjork – still appears, but as a figure called the Engraver, a uniformed Forest Service ranger, sporting a bushy white beard. In his spare time, the Engraver heads into the mountains to make detailed etchings of the landscape and its wildlife. One day, he chances upon Diana, a mysterious figure on a wolf hunt (played by Anette Wachter, a real-life champion sharpshooter and gun blogger) dressed in camouflage, and accompanied by a pair of nymph-like helpers who sleep, top to tail, in a hammock.

Two more characters appear – but, fundamentally, the film, which is divided into six hunts, reworks the myth of Diana, the ancient goddess of hunting, and Actaeon, an unlucky young hunter. After Actaeon catches sight of the goddess and her attendants bathing naked in a spring, Diana turns him into a stag, which his own hounds rip apart.

While making Redoubt, Barney even stuck on the wall of his New York studio a reproduction of Titian’s famous painting of the story, which was a popular subject for Renaissance artists – though, he says, “I was not really interested in taking the myth too literally.” Rather, he wanted to use the historical split in Idaho, over the reintroduction of wolves, to “put a lens on the division which one can feel in the whole country right now”. The film’s title, which, Barney has said, “refers to a defensive military fortification”, alludes to the so-called American Redoubt, an extremist survivalist movement that advocates retreating from the reach of government and urban life. Barney won’t say where he stands on all this. “I don’t think it’s useful,” he says, since the film represents “an attempt to make a work around a politically loaded topic without making a political work.”

He rejects suggestions that the casting of Wachter, an active supporter of the National Rifle Association, was a deliberate provocation. In fact, he says, he chose her for her gunmanship. “I started looking at sharpshooters capable of hitting copper plates from a long distance, which happens in the film.”

As well as Diana and the Engraver, there is, arguably, a third protagonist: the Sawtooth Mountains, captured with astonishing sensitivity by Barney’s director of photography, Peter Strietmann. Barney describes the film as “a portrait of that place”; he spends a lot of time outdoors in a remote region of Idaho, “very close” to where Redoubt was shot.

“The mountain range forms a kind of fortress wall, and creates a kind of isolation that I certainly felt growing up in that area – it was the condition I was born into,” he says. “If you grew up around that, you tend to need it, somehow.”

Much of the film consists of mesmerising footage of the range’s frozen wastes. There are also beautiful panoramic shots of the night sky, focusing on the constellation of Lupus. In keeping with his earlier work – such as the epic Cremaster Cycle, five cryptic, feature-length films, made between 1994 and 2002, which won Barney international renown – Redoubt is a deliberately elliptical, open-ended piece, dense with possible meanings but free from dialogue. Several characters communicate via contemporary dance, with choreography by Eleanor Bauer, who also plays one of Diana’s followers.

In other ways, though, Redoubt is a departure for Barney. Cremaster established the operatic, spectacular mode for which he’s known: Cremaster 3, for instance, culminates with Barney, wearing a neon-pink bearskin hat, scaling the interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, encouraged by a chorus line of semi-naked, smiling tap dancers.

By contrast, Redoubt feels restrained, even chaste; the prevailing mood is sombre, introspective. It feels like the work of an artist who has left behind youthful exuberance for middle age. “I’m not sure,” says Barney, after another lengthy pause. “There’s always a ratio between the artificial and the natural in the work I make, and this is, by far, the furthest I’ve gone into the natural end of my range.”

Typically, Barney immerses himself in projects for years at a time. Redoubt occupied him for almost four: speedy, by his standards.

“Exactly,” he laughs. “I think I’m slow, in general. It takes time for me to sort of flesh out an idea. I know a lot of artists who are quite quick. And I’m just not.”

Matthew Barney: Redoubt opens at the Hayward Gallery, London SE1 (020 3879 9555) on Wednesday