The social purpose of fiction versus non-fiction

Fiction versus nonfiction

“The imagination is in love with the feel of fact.” John Bailey

The other day, I was speaking with a colleague about great works of contemporary fiction. The conversation was sparked by my recent reading of Coetzee’s Disgrace. As I narrated the main points of the story, my colleague’s expression morphed from one of interest to one of antipathy, and she stopped me mid-flow saying, ‘I wouldn’t read a book like that. Life is hard enough without having to experience a more difficult existence in fiction.’

She is a journalist. She is more inclined to the hard facts of reality than the folly of fantasy. She argued that non-fiction has a value and purpose. Fiction is ultimately entertainment. ‘At least with fiction you can put the book down and console yourself with the fact that none of it is true,’ I reasoned. But she wasn’t buying that.

We talked about examples of non-fiction that were harrowing in their depiction of the depravity of real life, much more so than any fiction could be because of the fact that it's true. I raised Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah as an example (my colleague is Italian) which, from the opening passage, is a thoroughly disturbing yet utterly compelling description of the malignant force of the Italian mafia. So vivid is Saviano’s prose that reading Gomorrah is like watching a full colour documentary playing in the cinema of the mind:

Gomorrah, Ch. 1: The container swayed as the crane hoisted it onto the ship. The spreader, which hooks the container to the crane, was unable to control its movement, so it seemed to float in the air. The hatches, which had been improperly closed, suddenly sprang open, and dozens of bodies started raining down. They looked like mannequins. But when they hit the ground, their heads split open, as if their skulls were real. And they were. Men, women, even a few children, came tumbling out of the container. All dead. Frozen, stacked one on top of another, packed like sardines.

I also brought up Blaine Harden’s recently published Escape from Camp 14. The story of the first and only person to escape from a North Korean gulag is so distressing that a friend had to stop listening to the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week after the first transmission. 

Still, I could empathise with my co-worker’s position. I used to be of the same opinion. I’ve never been a great fan of fiction - until recently -for two reasons. 

One, selfishly, is that I feared the superiority of the writer and the power of his/her storytelling. For someone who has long dreamed of being a published author, it was hard to read other’s work without acknowledging the skill, craft and commitment required to deliver that level of output without fearing that I would never be able to write as well as the author in question. The art of fiction scared me.

Two, I’m a realist like my colleague. Why lose yourself in fiction when you can engage in the living, breathing world, in all its colour and complexity, equally intriguing, if not more so, than anything the human imagination could create.In the past, when reading fiction, there was always that nagging awareness at the back of my mind that none of what I was reading was real so why bother? Needless to say, I’ve never been a big movie fan either.

In regards to my first reason, I have now overcome that anxiety. Through the formal study of non-fiction, I have learnt to dissect the techniques that writers use that are essential to great storytelling – pace, tension, dialogue and plot. It has become clear to me that much contemporary non-fiction owes a debt to traditional fiction techniques, most of which can be learnt.Capote famously cross-fertilised genres and employed techniques from playwriting, reportage, short stories and novellas into his non-fiction. In fact, much of the best contemporary literature is genre-bending. With good fiction, you forget that you’re reading fantasy, perhaps because of the relevancy or urgency of the prose, or the way it manages to capture the zeitgeist (e.g. Teju Cole’s critically acclaimed Open City and Rabih Alameddine’s difficult and chaotic Koolaids). The same can be said of reading good non-fiction, written narratively and with such deep characterisation that it reads like fiction. Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing and Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land are good examples of  non-fiction that transcends its genre and completely transports the reader to another place, learning without knowing it. The best non-fiction is subtle in tone, observed and written with a good deal of authorial distance (excluding biography) and lets its “characters” speak for themselves thereby allowing the reader to make up his or her own mind without authorial intrusion. Conversely, the best fiction is often purposefully provocative and political, deftly weaving in analytical elements within the prose. Fiction has long had the power to catalyse social and political change. We see in books from across time and across continents that the pen is mightier than the sword. If this were not the case, there would be no fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer’s books would not have been banned, Chinua Achebe would not be an icon and the great Russian writers would not be so lauded.

My second justification is also easily dealt with. The reason why a writer with the intellectual and literary ability of Orwell flitted between fiction and non-fiction is because it allowed him the freedom to espouse ideas more freely and creatively – artistically – in a way that non-fiction doesn’t.

Orwell, Why I write: “Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”

What fiction does is to allow for the malleability and rationalisation of fact into a story with the kind of meaning and structure that real life doesn’t always allow for.The callous nature of life and its randomness means non-fiction doesn’t always have a rational ending; sometimes fiction does, restoring our belief in hope and the salvation of human nature. 

Not everyone can swallow the bitter pill of reality. And for those who can’t, reading fiction is a way of engaging with the real world through the hypothetical one. Even a purposefully political writer like Orwell, who committed himself to making political writing into an art form,chose the mode of fiction to communicate his ideas, perhaps for reasons of accessibility.

The social value of fiction is that offers:

• Escapism and a journey into the unknown
• Knowledge of other worlds, real and imagined
• Unpalatable truths in a palatable way.

In these difficult time, while some are jettisoning their love of the make-believe for the instruction of the real, I am finding that my understanding of the modern world is enriched and enlightened by my reading of classic fiction- Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and The Grapes of Wrath, Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains and Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy.It is impossible to read any of these great works without feeling that the characterisation and storytelling necessitates that, though fictional, they are plainly based on the authentic.

My colleague’s preferred choice of fiction is Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife. Fiction doesn’t have to be good (as in benevolent), it just has to tell the truth, regardless of whether it offends our sensibilities. If anything, fiction offers an opportunity to tell a truer version of the human condition in all its intricacies and with all its vagaries. As Isherwood said, “…a changeover from fact to fiction often begins with the weeding-out of superfluous details.”