Of course I realize that fiction writing is making things up, but when I've really been at it a long time at one stretch, it strikes me how absurd a practice it is to keep creating realities for imaginary people. I often treat fiction writing like it's a very serious business. Many writers do. But it's probably healthy to take a step back sometimes and just think about what it is we're doing in a more macro sense. I just spent the last hour imagining the love life of two people who don't exist until I had given one of the two fake people a little tendency to do something that slightly bemused or irritated the other. I'm daydreaming, which is often thought of as one of the biggest wastes of time one can do--so much that we yell at students who are caught doing it when they're supposed to do something else--and then putting the results of that daydreaming on paper.
No activity could be a more confident assertion that life is ephemeral and not something, ultimately, to be taken that seriously. Or, as Vonnegut put it, "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different."
A. You need some Sartre: we create our own meaning, our own reality. Or, as SMBC said yesterday: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meaning-2
ReplyDeleteB. Back in Tin House #50, Marilynne Robinson wrote an essay "On Beauty" (it ended up in Pushcart 2013) which included the idea that telling stories - which goes back to when people first became people and sat around a campfire, as far as we can tell - played a role in sharpening judgment, intuition, "theory of mind", guessing whether the stranger walking into your camp was hungry and lost, or was going to kill you for your roast beast. Storytelling - imagination - had evolutionary value. For the record, there are theories that religion had a similar evolutionary role, strengthened communities. These features could be why storytelling (and art in general) and religion seem to be nearly universal in prehistoric times; humans who couldn't or didn't use them were outmatched by those who did.
C. Has literature (broadly defined) had any impact on you over the course of your life - changed your mind about something, helped you figure something out, see a new perspective to deal with something? That's the effect of someone else's imagination; would you deny it has value?
Ok, I'm kind of frazzled from moving, so this may be stupid.
By the way, I checked O. Henry out of the library. Haven't had time to read any of it yet, but as the boxes get unpacked, I'm hoping to make some progress. Your story reviews force me to try.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20190711-the-books-that-turned-a-life-around
ReplyDeleteReplying to both Badibanga and Karen a bit here, there is one book I read that went a long way to convincing me that maybe fiction is useful in a very non-fluffy, hard-data kind of way. It was Mark Turner's The Literary Mind. Like Robinson's essay Karen referred to, he argued that there must have been an evolutionary value in story-telling. And he pointed out how very rife with story telling even everyday prose is. One example I remember was, "The economy slowed down last year." With this trope, we're being asked to imagine an economy that is moving like a living thing, and then has slowed down. Economies don't really slow, of course, but we can easily picture what the figure of speech means, because we're wired to create meaning from stories. We can't even talk about the economy without creating a little story to get our heads around it. This is true of an astonishing number of metaphorical images.
ReplyDeleteSo yes, literature is meaningful, and not just in the diseased brain of the people strange enough to create it. But it also feels really weird if, while you're creating it, you stop and think about what it is you're doing. Today, I was imagining a woman I created having a text message conversation with a man I created, and I was going over in my mind various version of the chat they might have shared. One version of their chat made me laugh, and it wasn't so much because it was really a funny line as because I thought, "That's so her," and then I realized that was a very strange thought to have.
I think I've talked before about how Moby Dick was my book that turned my life around.
Novels can be more effective ways of dealing with issues that might defy pure reason. I hate Ayn Rand, but Atlas Shrugged is something of this sort. Skinner's Walden II is also something of this sort. 1984. You know.
ReplyDeleteCertainly. Not to leave out Worlds of Power: Metal Gear, the novelization of the 1987 video game by the same name. But I'm sure it was just a momentary lapse for you to neglect to cite it as an example.
DeleteI'm just catching up to the 20th century.
ReplyDelete