"Prophetic" Fiction
The modern simulacrum of prophecy is a game of hide-the-mechanism
Prophecy, at least by the Jewish standard for prophets, means predicting future particulars in detail. Oddly, the particular is precisely that aspect of the future that tends to hold the least interest for us. I mean sure, sports betting results or certain personal affairs are relevant to us, but the vast mass of future facts will concern others’ lives or no lives and amount to nothing in ours. Only G-d could possibly care about so many irrelevant details. Perhaps that’s why a man having such information is proof of speaking to the Creator.
When we say a literary work is prophetic, by contrast, we mean something far more vague. General occurrences roughly fit the form of the work. We today find it appropriate to feel the vibe it taught us. “That cyberpunk movie sure was prophetic, not that anything in it occurred, but the feeling it suggested is the feeling I’m having reading the news.”
Of course, if all of reality molding the human mind is ultimately a mechanism, then all outcomes are implicit in initial conditions. The prophetic work is only prophetic as a caching operation. At most, a genius looked at much that already was, saw its deep structure, assumed those structures to persist, and extrapolated from them. We then recognize that extrapolation in some of what we see around us. It is a stupendously impressive caching operation which we call prophetic, almost in solidarity with forgetting, with admiration for the black box of formal abstraction. Prophets are made simply by obscuring the (often intuitive and non-linear) process of seeing the future implicit in the present. “Who is wise? One who sees what is born,” says the Talmud, who can infer consequence.
The Jewish prophet is a prophet because he sees particulars, the things that would be accomodated by a vast array of abstractions and intuitions. He doesn’t see how something emerges from something, but how something emerges from nothing, how the facts that fall between the cracks of even the sharpest intuition will eventuate. It is as if he sees past and behind all the mechanisms, all the rules; he heads them off at the pass and cuts ahead at the level of being itself. His claim is directly on the facts of the matter, and facts of the matter, on an ex nihilo view, are encompassed by no mechanism.
Perhaps we accept the black box version of prophecy, the “prophetic book" that is merely intuitive and not prophetic at all, because our civilization has rebelled against the tyranny of capturable, knowable transcendence by rejecting transcendence altogether. There is nowhere for anything new to come from. We must pretend that all things are “explained” if we are only careful enough to look; it is that same Victorian intuition behind the invention of Sherlock Holmes, the archetype of the modern prophet. Given a long enough story of causes and effects, we manufacture a forgetting just so we can call eating our own outputs “prophecy”. There is good news however, as there always is. Transcendence really can’t be captured. Our fake prophecy has prepared us to appreciate the real thing by sharpening our sense of what counts as explanation. The sheer absurdity of fact can and will lead us through. Reality always will outrun theory. “Orwell could give us a general picture, Isaiah. We seek something more.”