Enduring Fiction

A young acquaintance told me recently that he loves reading. When I asked him what novels or plays he had read lately, he replied that he doesn’t read fiction because if he’s going to spend time reading, he prefers learning something. But do we read or watch fiction to learn something? Is its aim to give instruction, to pass on information, to convey some sort of message, to be morally improving? Or rather, is the objective what Toni Morrison thought which is to give readers something to ‘feel and think about’ (Morrison, 1984). This brings up the question, does fiction affect our emotions? Many people would say it does, either because the author is really experiencing something, inspiring the reader to experience it too, or simply by means of an author’s creative technique: finding the words or images which will affect the reader emotionally. A few people I have spoken with about the subject think that our emotions are not always fully present to us and that we need help to know what we already know and feel what we already feel: they think that the best fiction encourages introspection. As Kafka so grandly put it, ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us’ (Kafka, 1904). But in fiction there is the gift of knowledge of the world at large too, surely. Perhaps the knowledge of a cultural moment (Romeo and Juliet), or the way a fictional world relates to our actual world (Homer’s Odyssey). We can also consider how the various fictional worlds relate to each other, stimulating analysis, synthesis and evaluation. And there is more: other friends tell me that, given that imaginative literature ‘defamiliarises’ the world, presenting it in an innovative and unusual light, fiction sharpens perception; so there is a beneficial cognitive process as well. Of course, we can just celebrate with Roland Barthes ‘the glorious uselessness of fiction, its ostensible inability to yield anything beyond pleasure’ (Barthes, 1975). Whatever. Fictional stories persist and are all around us; in books, on Netflix, on the Internet, as prevalent and popular as they have always been.

Contribution by KES member Patricia Hodges