What's the Point of Fiction?
“Could there be a story that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self?”
What’s the point of reading fiction? I’ve read fiction basically my entire life, mostly because I enjoy it. Well, I enjoy some books anyway. Other books, I find objectionable, probably with more vigor than is called for. But maybe not. Maybe it’s the appropriate amount of vigor. It depends on what books are for. If they are merely for entertainment, if they’re just for fun, then I probably care too much about what makes a book good or a book bad. But, I, as in all areas of life, want books to be more than just fun.
I didn’t really consider myself a reader of contemporary fiction, but I felt like I finally achieved book hipster status this year by reading a book by Olga Tokarczuk (the ‘cz’ is pronounced like a ‘ch’ so to-kar-chook) before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Flights is a great book (even if it makes me sad), and Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is much less experimental but no less engaging, so I was excited to read her Noble address. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. It’s a little long, but I recommend reading it, because it captures contemporary answers to what the point of fiction is, her desire for literature, and it’s a starting point for me in thinking about what I want out of fiction.
Fake news has seemed to have sparked a crisis of conscious in contemporary fiction. For Tokarczuk, “fiction has lost the readers’ trust since lying has become a dangerous weapon of mass destruction, even if it is still a primitive tool.” Fake news presents as nonfiction while it is truly fiction. We normally think of fiction and nonfiction as mutually exclusive categories, Tokarczuk chafes at this separation:
I have never been particularly excited about any straight distinction between fiction and non-fiction, unless we understand such a distinction to be declarative and discretionary. In a sea of many definitions of fiction, the one I like the best is also the oldest, and it comes from Aristotle. Fiction is always a kind of truth.
Tokarczuk doesn’t seem to see this blurring of fiction and truth as responsible for fake news. Instead, she sees merely the proliferation of available information facilitated by the internet as the culprit for what “has differentiated, divided, enclosed in individual little bubbles, creating a multitude of stories that are incompatible with one another or even openly hostile toward each other, mutually antagonising.”
Perhaps more important than the availability of information is how we view it. Tokarczuk sees fiction as always a kind of truth, and much of contemporary literature and theory has argued that truth is always a kind of fiction. This is why I have a hard time reading biographies. To tell a coherent story of someone’s life, some things must be emphasized while others are ignored. Every editorial decision is a deliberate choice by an author. Thus, every ‘nonfictional’ account has the inescapable frame of the author.
Because every work is inevitably and fundamentally shaped by circumstances and perspective of the author (even if they aspire to universal appeal), what is ‘true’ is limited to only a person speaking about their own subjective experience. This is why, as Tokarczuk notes, that first person “autofiction” has taken over the landscape of contemporary fiction. “I think that first-person narration is very characteristic of contemporary optics, in which the individual performs the role of subjective centre of the world… Here man is the lead actor, and his judgment – although it is one among many – is always taken seriously.” Fake news, and the disjointed media landscape itself, is a response to this retreat into the self. Truth always is a form of fiction, so anything may be disbelieved. The self is not just the center of the universe but the self creates its own universe, where all things become contingent upon the subjective perceptions of the self.
Torkarczuk comes to a point of frustration in her speech with the loss of trust, the over emphasis on genre, and the all consuming presence of first person.
Could there be a story that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self, revealing a greater range of reality and showing the mutual connections? That would be able to keep its distance from the well-trodden, obvious and unoriginal centre point of commonly shared opinions, and manage to look at things ex-centrically, away from the centre?
This gets back to our question: what’s the point of fiction? One common answer I’ve seen is generating empathy. Empathy is feeling the emotions of others, and though a worthy goal, it does not get us to look at things ex-centrically. If we read to foster empathy, we are still reading for ourselves, we read to make ourselves better people. Books, and the authors behind them, can be reduced to selfish, utilitarian purpose.
Torkarczuk says we must use literature to foster tenderness:
Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it. It has no special emblems or symbols, nor does it lead to crime, or prompt envy.
It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self”.
Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.
I think tenderness doesn’t go far enough. Tenderness, feeling the emotions of others and seeing the bonds of connection, is not enough. Empathy, feeling the emotions of others, isn’t enough. We need compassion, feeling the emotions of others, seeing the bonds of connection, and suffering with each other. Empathy can be self-centered, but compassion never is.
If Torkarczuk does not see tenderness in the Gospels it’s because tenderness is not the full expression of love. In the incarnation, God coming to earth in Christ, God shows not only “deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time” but He enters into a suffering with us, and takes that suffering upon himself. Christ is compassionate, with us in our suffering so that we might be with him.
This is the point of fiction. Or it should be. Not to save the world, but to spur us to compassion. In compassion, we escape the pull to view ourselves as the universe, and not just look, but act ex-centrically.
