Why read fiction

FICTION ELEMENTS AND WHY WE SHOULD READ FICTION

Good fiction does not “send a message.” That leads to didactic writing, which is boring and tends freeze a reader's emotions. Good fiction holds a mirror to reality and lets the story tell itself. Authors make a more powerful impression by presenting characters that attract or repeal. We want to be like them, or we do not want to be like them. Literature primarily intended to instruct usually fails.

LITERATURE: What is it? Literature is narrative writing drawn from author’s imagination rather than from history or fact. What are the various kinds of literature? Why do authors write fiction? Why do we read it? What is good literature and what is bad? These questions leads us into the elements of literary criticism.  That is a subject to be treated in the various book reviews.  

READING GOOD LITERATURE HAS MANY GOOD BENEFITS, INCLUDING SOME YOU MAY NOT THOUGHT OF

Why would an author write about something that did not really happen? To entertain. To instruct. To edify. Can not factual information do this? Yes, but usually not with the dramatic impact that a factual story has. That’s why great teachers used stories--Christ had good reason to teach in parables.   

Besides, with factual stories, the dramatic impact may not be so strong because we don’t know the characters that well. With fiction, we get to know and care about these characters, even though they never existed. And of course, we can’t get inside the minds of real persons as an author can put us in the mindset of a fictional character.

Expressing the inexpressible: An author may want to tell us something important. Real life events may be insufficient to get his point across. And even if they were, we may not recall what transpired because we don’t know the characters enough to care about them There are times when great events and great characters do exist in real life. For that reason, we read biographies. But for fiction, the author must create events and characters so as to make his point. 

Examples: In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky shows us that criminals have a conscious that inspires them to confess their guilt. He could simply tell us that, but his story drives home the point.

In the Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway tells us his personal story of how he came close to joining the Church, but then did not follow through. He could have just told us about it, but he wanted to give his account in a memorable way and because a simple retelling would not have conveyed his ideas.

Multiple meanings: Many stories, parables are good examples, can have several levels of meaning. Conveying multiple levels depends on authors knowing how to create those meanings.  These will be discussed in various book reviews.

Any additional reasons for reading literature? Yes, but these reasons are rarely discussed by literature teachers. Students gain more than literary knowledge when they are made to think outside of literary context. They can at least began to learn what social science scholars (psychologists, sociologists, historians, cultural anthropologists, and political scientists) gain from fiction. 

Psychology: Students can learn the complexity of fallen human nature and the multiple varieties of human personality by reading stories by authors who were especially observant of people, and who thus created believable characters. Great literature, defined here as literature with truly believable characters, can serve to illuminate psychological concepts

Examples: From Shakespeare: Hamlet and Iago, or King Lear and his daughters. An almost forgotten American author, Sherwood Anderson, created realistic characters in Winesberg, Ohio. I know they were real because I have actually met some of them in real life. John Galsworthy, the English author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for Forsyte Sage, gave us characters so memorable that readers may actually wonder how they did in later life.    

Historians, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists read a society’s stories for what it tells us about a society.

Examples: James Fenimore Cooper’s stories tell us of the hardship and the confidence of early Americans. Read The Last of the Mohicans.  Washington Irving tells us about New York life in the late colonial, early Republic era. Read: The Headless Horseman, or Rip Van Winkle.  John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath tells us how desperate but hardened agrarians survived the Great Depression. We could read about such matters in history books, but history books simply cannot convey to us what it was really like to live in past eras.

Political life: Readers can learn much of the political environment of past societies by reading fiction.  Sometimes, in states where the government is the enemy of the people, authors must resort to cleverly disguised fiction to get their points across. They may write political satire (satire being another literary genre), or they may expose practices demanding legislative action.

Examples: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels is an amusing treatment of life in England when rival Protestant factions were in contention. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle bought about changes in the meat industry, circa 1900, which led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.

Historical fiction: Some contemporary authors weave fictional episodes about actual historical characters, epochs, and settings. Why? For one thing, the historical incidents can provide interesting plot material. But more importantly, we can learn more about what people really were like, what their motivations were, during an historical event than we can by reading factual history. I never could understand what made colonial Americans willing to kill British troops during the Revolutionary War. Their grievances never seemed seriously enough to motivate killing. After all, being willing to die for a cause is one thing, being willing to kill for it is something much more.  But Kenneth Roberts’ fictionalized histories helped me understand their rage. Historical fiction can give us a sense of what it was like to been alive and involved in a great event.   Read Rabble in Arms.

 

Shock of recognition: If you are told that you are acting like a fool, you may resist the message. If you read about someone acting like a fool, you will form an antipathy toward him or her. If, upon reflection, that person turns out to be you, you may be inclined to correct your behavior. Animal Farm was directed toward the socialist would-be, do-gooders. Mark Twain rather forced Southern people to realistically see themselves in Huckleberry Finn. In other words, fiction can help us correct our behavior. It can motivate us to resist illicit behavior too. Or, it can motivate us to avoid certain behaviors. After reading Sinclair Lewis’ Maim Street, no one wants to be a boorish businessman. Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby should deter us from being ego-inflated fools

Personal growth. You have only one life to lead. We learn from experiences, but you can only have so many experiences in one lifetime. However, if an author writes well enough to cause us to have a “willing suspension of disbelief,” than we can “vicariously” enter into another person’s life. This requires believable characters. You share their emotions. When you read such good fiction, you can have a multiplicity of learning experiences, many more and usually more significant than what will happen to you in real life. Moreover, you can have these benefits without the “ruinous effect of direct experience."