None of it is real.
Why we think fiction doesn't matter anymore.
An exciting update!
I’ve been busily working on book two of The Liminal Library Series, a process that is joyfully encumbered by a baby and all my homemaking duties. I can finally say I’m done with the first-ish draft. I’d finished a draft simply to finish it, knowing I was going in a direction that inevitably wouldn’t work out. Then, after a break, I went back to tackle the last quarter and figure out what actually ought to happen, and now I’ve done that. I can happily say I’m moving on to draft two, beta readers, and God-willing, publishing eventually.
It’s a funny thing as a grown woman, with a Master’s degree and a growing family, to watch confusion and horror slowly dawn on someone who’s just asked me, “What do you write?”
They never expect me to say Christian fantasy. Isn’t that an oxymoron anyway? And aren’t there more important things to write, like devotionals and bible studies?
Why bother with fiction?
With facts like these, who needs fiction?
Aristotle in his Poetics, describes art as mimetic. Artists recognize patterns and universal qualities, adding “reality” to their art. Humans are imitative in nature, and our art imitates reality.
In this post, Don Beck put it very well: If a book doesn’t at all times reflect believable causes and effects, motivations, reactions, or emotional truths—even if it’s about wizards riding polka-dotted space-dragons through the fifth dimension—it collapses into crap. Good fiction of any type must behave like the real world, even when it doesn’t look like that world.
No wonder we value fiction for its “relatability” now. Sitcoms like The Office were beloved for the mockumentary style. “Mocumentary” was a term coined specifically to describe shows and movies that mock reality in the style of a documentary. The performative virtue, the looks to the camera, all suggest to the viewer, “we’re thinking the same thing.” Don’t get me wrong, I love The Office and many shows like it, but if we ever encountered someone behaving like Jim Halpert or Michael Scott in real life, let’s be honest, they’d be insufferable. There’s something affirming in watching the characters roll their eyes at an annoying boss, or awkwardly confess a long-time crush in the break-room, or see feuds over yogurt cups escalate. We’re able to watch it and say, “Hey, that’s me, and that’s exactly how I feel in that circumstance.”
Part of the attraction of these characters is their hyper-specificity. They feel like real people because they’re just as full of dichotomies and dissonance as a real person. But they aren’t real. They’re still exaggerated for humor and drama.
Other types of media, even those meant to be factual, are in the same state. News and social media are fictions that convince us they’re real. I often joke to my husband that I’d like to read the Founding Fathers some of today’s news headlines.
Congressman slams actress over political comment.
Pundit claps back at the politician who came for his wife.
It’s all so overstated and over the top. It’s not real. In order to figure out what’s meant, we have to dial the meaning down by 90% and then tread with skepticism. Whichever side of the aisle you’re on, we know the news is exaggerated and curated to keep us glued to the screen.
“Relatability” sells on Instagram, even though we know it’s just as scripted and edited as The Office was. Rage-bait has become impossible to avoid.
So what is the real purpose of fiction?
In her book, The Read-Aloud Family, Sarah Mackenzie dives deep into the research. It’s irrefutable: Having good fiction read aloud to them has myriad benefits for children of every age.
I’d argue these benefits don’t disappear when we grow up. Reading fiction builds our empathy and causes us to think about the transcendent.
Empathy
“A book can reach us where a news report cannot. It’s not when we hear a summary on the news of what’s happening in the Middle East that our heart catches fire. It’s when we hear the story of one person— one man, one woman, one child… It’s then that we feel the human-to-human connection. That’s when our empathy is stirred,” (page 75, The Read-Aloud Family). “In fact, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that reading a story gives the brain similar network connections as actually living through an experience yourself,” (page 78, The Read-Aloud Family).
The transcendent
On her podcast, Your Morning Basket, Pam Barnhill interviewed Angelina Stanford, an expert on fairytales. Here are a few of her insights:
Every single fairytale tells the gospel story, and that is because the gospel story itself is a fairy tale.
People will sometimes say, “Well, fairytales are so unrealistic. They’re teaching kids terrible things. They’re teaching kids that once you get married, life is smooth sailing.”
No, that is not what a fairytale is teaching, because that’s not how fairytales work. A fairytale is not a marriage handbook. A fairytale is pointing us to the transcendent reality of the spiritual realm. And in that reality, the bridegroom is going to marry the bride, and it is going to be happily ever after eternally.
Fairy tales, and fiction more broadly, help us to understand something real, but transcendent. In that way, they are very much true.
Even Tolkien said, “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.”
This is not an exhaustive list of why we need fiction, and especially Christian fiction. I plan to write a whole post about that in the future.
But not all fiction is created equal
I hear a lot of complaints and dismissals of fiction, which usually cite bad fiction as examples. Romance novels that amount to porn, stories that blur the lines between good and evil, and the targeting of younger and younger readers for mature content are all real problems.
Basil the Great, in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Literature, said,
“You should not unqualifiedly give over your minds to [secular authors] as a ship is surrendered to the rudder, to follow whither they list, but that, while receiving whatever of value they have to offer, you yet recognize what it is right to ignore.”
It’s true that we have to be alert and careful about what we read, but to dismiss fiction is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even secular fiction might have something of value hidden within (like I talked about in my post about K-pop Demon Hunters). The point is to be alert, like Basil the Great says: receive whatever is of value and recognize what you ought to ignore.
We don’t feel when something’s not real anymore, because everything is trying to feel real, and so when fiction marks itself as fiction, we don’t know what to do with it. What is the point of fiction, we ask ourselves.
What do you think?
Memento mori,
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