Maybe the only thing more amusing than telling people I’m studying for a degree in arts is the particular facial expression that I see over and over as I tell people that my major is English. It’s generally a cocktail of revulsion, with a dash of pity, and finally, a splash of ‘what a waste of time’ to complete the mixture. And because I studied English in high school, I can empathise to a degree.
But I’m coming to the end of my studies now, and I have never been more convinced that fiction (and poetry) is one of the most powerful tools for revelatory truth that humanity has at its disposal; and am devastated that it is so widely undervalued.
“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.” – Francis Bacon
Why wouldn't you take everything this guy says seriously?
One of Tolstoy’s biographers made the observation that when he finished War and Peace and returned to ‘real life’ he had the sense of turning to something paler and less true than Tolstoy’s art itself. The following is a brief passage from Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” where Ivan, who has been ignoring his growing illness, can no longer avoid it:
Then suddenly he could feel the same old dull gnawing pain, quiet, serious, unrelenting. The same nasty taste in his mouth. His heart sank and his head swam. ‘O God! O God!’ he muttered. ‘It’s here again, and it’s not going away.’ And suddenly he saw things from a completely different angle. ‘The blind gut! The kidney!’ he said to himself. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the blind gut or the kidney. It’s a matter of living or…dying. Yes, I have been alive, and my life is steadily going away and I can’t stop it. No. There’s no point in fooling myself. Can’t they all see – everybody but me – that I’m dying? It’s only a matter of weeks, or days – maybe any minute now. There has been daylight; now there is darkness. I have been here; now I’m going there. Where?’ A cold shiver ran over him; he stopped breathing. He could hear nothing but the beating of his heart.
The Death of Ivan Iliych
This novel, written in 1886, explored for the very first time in popular consciousness the notion of the personal aspect of death. Prior to the nineteenth century, death is essentially considered to be a reconnecting with God since there was widespread certainty of an afterlife. This is lost in the nineteenth century, and coupled with a high mortality rate and loss of social security (in Russia), death changes to become a private event. Through this fictional character, Tolstoy is able to examine these effects with powerful outcomes.
This work in particular also either inspired or influenced much art, literature, and psychology of the twentieth century. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” Kubler-Ross’s “Five Stages of Dying,” and Heidigger’s “Being and Time” are just a few of the works that came from this work of fiction. This is not to say that they are evidence of fiction’s power in and of themselves – merely that this simple story opened up the possibility for expressing fears about death and dying that had always been underlying the human experience, but had never been articulated.
All of this is to (hopefully) point towards the reality that fiction is a powerful tool for expressing, or allowing others to express, truth about their experience. And that it is definitely something to invest time in.
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