Just because a story is made up doesn’t abrogate the potential for its contents to be any less potent or important or meaningful than non-fiction. Photo by Prasanna Kumar on Unsplash
We know there’s trouble ahead the moment Boromir toots his own horn in Rivendell. Even if you’re not a Tolkien fan, the warrior nobleman of Middle Earth practically declares his inevitable deceit, even before he knows it himself. We readers know it’s coming as soon as he enters the tale, and yet we still hope he’ll overcome his outsized sense of self to defend his companions. He does not, of course, and as a result The Fellowship disbands chaotically, almost catastrophically.
Everyone know how this feels. Tolkien’s narrative thread remind us of similar events in our lives, even if those events do not include magic golden rings. We’ve all encountered Boromir-types and each time we’ve hoped things would turn out differently. We may not face orcs or dragons, but when confronted with colleagues who put us in tough spots or contractors who don’t complete a job, some of us draw from sources outside our own lives. Beyond listening to our trusted friends, clergy, or celebrity influencers (what a strange world, right?), fiction offers more than just food for thought. It offers possibilities. Social media, conversely, offers us shallow moments of vicarious sensation. As something usually less than reportage, and certainly something substantially less than earnest invention, social media generally traffics in distraction where fiction, even in its most banal expressions, asks something more.
In its ability to provoke change, frisson exists in the friction of fiction.
Fiction is made-up. It’s a series of words and images that may look like real life, may be based on real life, may even quote from real life, but isn’t actually real life. Its importance stems directly from a story’s ability to let us consider circumstances without having to live them. In fiction of all types, an author tells us a priori that her story is an invention. That gives us license to embrace it completely and fully, and as such, we are free to perform whatever thought experiments we might devise or require to make sense of the experience. If it’s good—that is, if it’s something that has the ability to move us and shape our thoughts—it takes on aspects of veracity, of truth. It becomes a force that acts upon us: fiction becomes something real. If it were anything less than real, it wouldn’t be able to influence us in the real world.
Expanding that definition, it’s fair to declare that most artwork functions as a type of world-building, a process of arranging details to suit a particular desire we would not otherwise be able to engage. From trivial bagatelles to large scale ambitions, art is the process of turning thought experiments into things discussable. A painted image fundamentally describes a particular need of the person creating the painting. A painting is fiction, plain and simple, even if a painting is a photorealistic likeness of something or someone captured in real life. Need proof? In real life, the subject of a painting does not sit frozen in time. Captured in paint, that moment lasts forever, and it is the artist who chooses what moment to capture, which details of that moment to preserve, and what methods to use in presenting that moment. The fact that a painting might propel viewers to perceive something essential, sentimental, angry, or truthful is something else entirely. A painting may speak the truth, but it does so by fabrication. It fabricates, and then, once created, the artwork itself becomes a part of reality, from meaning to feeling to sensual experience. Same goes for movies. Same goes for novels.
Should people care about this or is this simply one bibliophile’s celebration of a dying culture experience, fading in the glowing light of a billion social media screens? I propose that people should. In the privacy of our own thoughts, fiction affords us all the potential to consider our lives, our loves, our passions, and our fears. Do we pursue paramours like Anna Karenina’s Count Vronksy, or do we learn through the process of getting to know that fictional, tragic Russian officer that a selfish life is ultimately a doomed, lonely one? In fiction, we can consider our alternatives. In fiction we can run our own internal experiments. In fiction, we can discover that truth is a function of the stories we tell ourselves, and some stories have the power to change the world.