Column: Finding truth in fiction
By Charles Jeanes
‘I read fiction for the story, and find a novel at its best when it’s pure storytelling. Not to say that I don’t care about politics, but that I can get my fill of current thought through non-fiction books, podcasts, radio shows, and all the rest.’ — Tara Thorne Burns
‘I may forget what this novel said, or what its characters did, but I will never forget how it made me feel.’ — Maya Angelou
Introduction: is Literary Fiction “lies”?
I would hope no one would answer “yes” to the question I just posed.
The reason novels of fiction have never gone out of fashion or use since they began to be written in quantity 200 years ago, is that they tell truths.
Or, as one decent brief history of novels would say: “…the novel consistently presents the society as the individual must confront it, explains that society to itself, and helps society to define itself.” [see https://literariness.org/2020/07/02/a-brief-history-of-english-novels/]
Do not read novels, please, if you do not grasp this. Fiction is not lies. It is a way of telling truths about humans that is not fact in the manner of scientific fact. It tells truth using invented character and situation.
(Since I mention science, let me also mention religion. It seems to me a safe assertion that without humans’ love of story, religion would never have been part of human cultural development, for good and ill. Story is inseparable from religious faith.)
You got it now. Fiction is not a pack of lies. Fiction tells truth about human being.
History: facts, yes — selected, interpreted, narrated, arranged, argued.
Readers of The Arc know I take History, the discipline of study of the Past, very seriously indeed. And that I grasp that History is not a total, inerrant reflection of what happened in the Past. The Past happened. Historians write about it.
I won’t call History ‘a pack of lies’ – an opinion attributed to Voltaire, Napoleon, and George Santayana, among others – because that is not a wise saying. The professional historian does not lie as a habit of the profession. Certainly, there are liar historians… and atheist priests.
But one cannot dismiss the effort of sincere historians to tell truth just because some are liars.
A Paradox: ‘inside-the-mind’ story-telling builds truth on a falsehood
So, alright, the fiction in novels never happened/happens. So what?
One must be able to handle this (small) cognitive dissonance: truth about the human world, the human being, human behaviour in the world, can be told with stories that are not ‘true’ to an actual Past or Present [or Future]. But truth about being human is not a matter only of “facts proven by Science.” Being is mysterious. (Or at least I find it so. I ought not to speak for other people.)
There are few readers I’m sure who have not heard the phrase, “the human condition.” Very aptly, the phrase was coined by a writer. And very curiously, it is a phrase of quite recent invention. How did we ever do without the phrase? It so succinctly captures the weirdness of this certain knowledge: being human is not like anything else.
A novel is not a History. It is a story. Stories have no responsibility to be “true to fact.” Story-tellers are not accountable to the reader to present a material, physical reality in the novel, or a person who has lived and breathed as the reader does. The author has a responsibility to know the truth of human feeling, not with facts of physics. It does not matter if the story allows magic or other impossibilities.
The “omniscient narrator” is impossible, in life. In fiction, it’s rewarding.
I read novels to learn about human being. Being human is a vast experience. I cannot experience all that a human might. My own being will have to be limited.
But literary fiction by a masterful, intelligent, sensitive, skilful writer is of immense value to me as I try to understand my own tiny piece of the human story. The characters and experiences of fictional people are a path to knowledge otherwise unavailable to me. Reading expands my mind. Expanded minds grow wiser.
Sub-creation: when the author assumes godlike power over a story
The author of a story knows the minds of the characters in the story. In that way, the writer is ‘godlike’, able to know more about a person in the novel than any human can ever know another human in our reality. J. R. R. Tolkien called his fantasies “sub-creation” – a serious enterprise in making a world that never existed but is emotionally truthful. It is a human version of what the God of Genesis did in the Bible: making a world. The best authors excel at this.
This is not a problem, that the author cannot really know why or how some character in her/his own reality is thinking and acting; in fiction, the omniscient narrator knows and tells us. (Not all authors use this device.)
Thus, the reader has two relationships proceeding as the novel unfolds: a relationship with the invented character – the best novels truly grip us because we care about the characters – and also a relationship with the author who has invented this story and whose mind is therefore somewhat exposed on the page. I, the reader, might have strong feelings about the author’s motives and what I consider mistakes and defects in their authorial choices and plotting. When an author disturbs or disappoints me too often, I put the book down! Hopefully, I learn from literature about the vast field of human differences.
Conclusion: human beings are blessed by creativity
The variety of forms in fiction is enormous, and has expanded exponentially over the past half-century of the modern and post-modern eras. Ideally there is a genre for every taste, and reading will never be obsolete despite competition from our vast array of entertainment technologies that also offer compelling stories.
It is beyond my scope to conjecture the reasons why some humans are bibliophiles like myself, and others find books opaque and without appeal. I am happy to be as I am, and no doubt others would say the same. Those others consume stories in other forms, while I stick to the printed literature still so much part of our cultural landscape. Audiobooks are at least recognizably novels entering the mind through the ear; films and TV are not.
Serious thinkers believe that in future, readership will decline with time, if it has not already retired into twilight obsolescence. [see for example https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction
https://www.loudcoffeepress.com/post/can-reading-go-extinct-a-world-without-words ]
The fiction novel would be of small interest to the person who doesn’t have a mind to create inner environments where the story happens, with details to stimulate all five of one’s senses. Imagination is made by practice, and reading is one path to nourishing the imagination. Music and poetry are others.
Ultimately, reading fiction is the activity of a mind, and mind is one of those human mysteries science is unraveling with brain research, neuroscience and new discoveries in biology, physics, and chemistry. Consciousness and soul are somewhere in any scientific illumination, in any revelation of why humans so obviously need stories and create them.
Postscript
I will take this opportunity to express my heartfelt and eternal gratitude to the hundreds, maybe thousands, of authors of fiction, who have enlightened and uplifted me through a long lifetime of reading. As one who writes short pieces (like this) myself, and who also knows some struggling authors, I am in awe of the dedicated labour required to write fiction. Thank you.
The work is worth it. Even if ‘the market’ has not rewarded you — or the reading public has not embraced your writing — the process has enriched you. I think you all know that, authors. At least I hope that has been true for you.
