Richard French, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Richard French
Fiction and Truth 4/24/2016 4:07:55 PM
"What do you do in your spare time?" someone asked me a few years ago.
"I write fiction," I said.
"Then you tell lies."
"I lie through my teeth," I admitted.
Not a sparkling riposte, but the man's question stayed with me and I've wondered how to defend the art of fiction. Here are some responses that have occurred to me.
The man was working within a narrow framework. So far as I know, people have always made up stories -- to entertain, to illustrate points, to expand minds. We can think of Homer's Iliad, the Gilgamesh, the stories grown-ups have told children, and the various different kinds of stories today. I bet my friend's friend watched mystery stories on TV or the comics page in the paper.
There are degrees of untruth. A big difference exists between lies that hurt and deceive and stories that spring from the human imagination meant to charm or provoke thought. Even Plato, who criticized the methods of artists, used imaginative devices in his famous parable of the cave. A lot depends on purpose and intent. Consider the language of politics and ad writing and propaganda at their worst.
If a novel or a story is clearly labeled as fiction, what harm does it do? I don't mean pornography or malicious writings that spread hatred. I'm thinking of creative works that show our minds and our imaginations at their best and that enhance our lives. They injure no one.
On the positive side, fiction takes us to places we've never been and introduces us to people we would never know. How much poorer our experience would be without Shakespeare's vision of Denmark or what Chekhov tells us about late 19th century Russia.
Fiction can illustrate profound truths about human life. The sequence in The Brothers Karamazov called "The Grand Inquisitor", for example, or Melville's epic of the sea.
some fiction writers create massive and intricate pictures of the world. Dostoevsky, Balzac, Faulkner, Henry James, Dickens, Lady Murasaki. Someone could do a study of their procedures and their viewpoints.
The layers of meaning in Don Quixote, say, can show us value in our own lives that we may have ignored or not been able to think of on our own.
I could go no, but this is a good stopping point.
