Strange Bedfellows (Part I)

Is it still socially responsible to write fiction?

Part 1 of a 4-part series.

We should demand Truth from our political leaders, our legal system, and our press. It's a value we should uphold in our religious institutions and our schools. We should teach it to our children, and embrace it as part of our personal code.

But we should not make Truth our defense for writing fiction. . . .

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

                     ―Franz Kafka

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It’s understatement to say that we live in politically complicated times. And though it has been postulated that, out of struggle, great art is born, our current cultural climate poses undeniable challenges for poets and writers. A new president has taken office—one who does not read and does not write (a sharp contrast to his literate predecessor [2]). To top it all off, there’s reason to believe that the new administration will discontinue support for writing and the arts. For this reason (and a myriad of others), now may be the most important time in our nation’s history for writers and artists to speak out creatively and intellectually.

But where does this leave writers of realist fiction?

As a matter of technique, it is easier for writers of creative nonfiction (and even poets) to be overtly political in their writing. Because realist fiction is reliant on the skilled and artful creation of an immersive dream state in ways that other genres of writing aren’t, there is little room for directed social commentary in, say, a novel or a story. The moment the author steps forward to comment, the fictional dream is broken. And when the dream is broken, the story dissipates to vapor. (It remains, at best, a fable or parable; at worst, a diatribe.)
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This begs the question: is it socially responsible to be writing fiction during these times, or should prose writers stick to creative nonfiction with its room for reflection and pointed commentary, or those other fabulist fiction genres with their thinly disguised morals and epiphanies? 

​It's a fair question.

I can recall a time in graduate school during the Hurricane Katrina disaster when the writer teaching my fiction workshop implored all of us to think hard about why we sit around making up stories in a time when so many are suffering, when we could be manning phone lines or riding in boats rescuing people from flood waters. He wasn’t encouraging us to give up fiction writing. He wanted us to have an answer.

In this four-part series, I am going to try to answer the question I’ve raised here. In a time of civil unrest, is it okay to continue writing fiction ("diddling in a corner" as William H. Gass once put it), and if so, why? 

Over the past few years, even before the recent election cycle, I’ve heard more people in book groups and writing classes say that they avoid reading fiction because it is “made up.”
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The line of reasoning goes something like this: Why follow the plight of characters who never existed when we can read about the plight of people who did? Why do we need lies when we can read the truth? 

​Fiction gets dismissed as fluffy, lightweight entertainment—the stuff of television and blockbuster films (with their emotional shortcuts and their dubious special effects).

When I hear these demurrals, I often ask (as I used to inquire when my college students would tell me on the first day of class that they “don’t like poetry”), “How do you know? Have you read much fiction?”

People are often surprised to learn that (despite its perceived association with contemporary “low art”) fiction is not, in fact, the new kid on the literary block. It’s been around roughly 2,800 years (which means it predates Petrarchan verse poetry by more than 2,000 years). They are even more shocked when I explain that we’ve really only started thinking about nonfiction as a creative genre in the last 50 years or so (starting with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood).

Duration and longevity are not measures of value, of course. However, they do illustrate an important part of our literary evolution that gets missed by those who assume fiction is a newer form: namely, fiction’s 2.5 millennia of artistic influence on creative nonfiction (a genre which, by definition, uses fictive devices and techniques to tell factually accurate narratives).

As I argue for the importance of realist fiction, one thing I will not be arguing for is fiction’s superiority over other genres, such as creative nonfiction or poetry. It’s a silly argument to make, impossible to defend or quantify. Nor will I argue that everyone must love fiction—taste is personal.
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Simply put, the unique qualities often used to dismiss realist fiction are, in fact, the very qualities that make fiction the genre we need now more than ever in our current polarized political climate—not because fiction provides an escape from reality but because it provides us with something far more valuable than escape.

That value is not ​Truth.

Historically, the go-to answer to criticism has revolved around the singular notion (now workshop cliché) that fiction “lies to tell the Truth.” This expression has been uttered, in some form or another, by writers and artists far more skilled and talented than I am, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pablo Picasso, Milan Kundera, Albert Camus, and Khaled Hosseini, to name a few. It’s easy to understand the impulse among fiction writers to overreach, defending their life’s work by saying that they are involved in the legitimizing, even sacred, business of “truth-telling.”
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However, it seems to me that this is the opposite of what fiction actually does.

I say this not out of disrespect to the artists above, and not because I am a nihilist who believes that Truth is a fabricated construct, a jingoist slogan (though I do believe it can be both, at times). To the contrary, in time where the empty term "Alternative Facts" has entered our lexicon, we should demand Truth from our political leaders, our legal system, and our press. It's a value we should uphold in our religious institutions and our schools. We should teach it to our children, and embrace it as part of our personal code.

But we should not make Truth our defense for writing fiction.

When we invoke what I call the well-intended “Truth Paradox” we radically devalue fiction’s uniquely subversive position in our world, its rarefied power to do something nuanced that virtually no other form of writing attempts. Our job as writers and thinkers is not to explain away that power with hazy capital-letter abstractions, but rather to study it on its own terms and protect it against extirpation.

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For more on fiction’s rarefied power, stay tuned for my next blog entry “If Not Truth, Then What?”

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Jason Kapcala

Jason Kapcala is the author of North to Lakeville (forthcoming on Urban Farmhouse Press). When he's not writing, he enjoys reading, cooking, rock and roll, driving his Dodge Challenger, and studying the craft of writing.