It’s a common understanding that when someone says a story or theory or statement is “fiction,” they’re saying it’s made up, not real, and, for some people, not worth paying much attention to.
The great Argentinian author, Julio Cortazar, told a story about loaning a favorite book of his to a classmate when they were 12 years old. His friend returned the book and said, “I can’t read it. It’s pure fantasy.”
Many believe that stories have to be “realistic,” whatever that exactly means. It’s often presumed that nonfiction is about reality, whereas fiction is not, but has to be plausible. Oftentimes, fiction is viewed simply as entertainment, requiring the suspension of disbelief so we can get wrapped up in a made-up story, movie, or TV episode. But humans are not so simple.
Cortazar recalls that when his 12-year-old friend refused to read one of his favorite books, he suddenly realized that he had a very different view of reality than many others. He writes, “I think that already at that time I was profoundly realistic, more realistic than the realists, since the realists, like my classmate, accepted reality up to a certain point and then everything else was fantastical. I accepted a larger reality, one that was more elastic, more expansive, one where everything fit.”
What he’s referring to, I think, is that fiction can incorporate human experience, including sensations, dreams, fantasies, presumptions, perceptions — any of which can be integral to a person’s lived experience and can strongly affect our ideas and behavior. Some writers express these sensations by exaggerating them, the way any effective performer does in order to clearly convey a feeling or perception to an audience. Sometimes these ideas are confined to a realistic framework, such as a clearly marked dream, but sometimes an author allows a story to veer into subjective perceptions without any clear marker, as in magical realism.
Magical realism is a hallmark of Latin American literature, but is present in works of literature everywhere. French author Boris Vian mixed into his novels ridiculously amusing fantasy, and you could picture the author reading it out loud with a perfectly straight face as if it was all really happening. It was unabashedly magical, and yet it always seemed to fit the situation and characters. For example, one woman in a Vian novel becomes increasingly sick and confined to her bedroom, and the walls of her bedroom begin to close in on her until her bedroom is the size of her bed. Why would some simply dismiss this as “made up” when it conveys so graphically the feeling of imprisonment the woman must have felt as she grew sicker?
Mark Twain once wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities: Truth isn’t.”
Many writers of literature use their verbal freedom to explore people, situations, ideas. In an earlier post, I talked about the difference between literary and political minds, where literary minds use story to examine truths, including nonverbal ones, while political minds seek to further an agenda.
I could go farther than that and reverse the whole common understanding of reality vs fiction with this suggestion: Fiction is truth, while nonfiction is opinion. In many cases, writers of fiction draw upon experience, observation, and storytelling to expose truths that transcend the author’s thoughts and beliefs, whereas many nonfiction writers compile, select and present evidence in order to convey the opinion of the author.
Of course, that’s a big generalization with loads of exceptions and gray areas. Most such dichotomies are instructive but too black-and-white to be swallowed whole. Still, reversing presumptions is an interesting starting point for opening our minds. I side with Julio Cortazar in believing that the fantastical is so much a part of our lived experience that no realistic story can do without it.
Even writers who aim for pure entertainment base their tales on lived experience in all its ambiguity. And for the millions who watch reality TV, which is stage-managed and edited to assure good ratings, the question about what reality really can become quite murky!
Excellent.