Why We Need to Read Fiction

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I was young it was not unusual to find me and my parentals spread around the family room reading our various books after dinner.  As we staked out our positions my dad would put on a record from his extensive collection, anything from Madame Butterfly to Maynard Ferguson.

My parent’s book choices ranged from Grisham (dad) and Steel (mom) to non-fiction, mostly western history, gardening, politics and religion.  I, on the other hand found their choices mostly dull and greedily hoarded my collection of Roald Dahl, Michael Crichton (he had me at “The Great Train Robbery“) and “The Boxcar Children” series…with a little Shel Silverstein thrown in to free up my poetic side.

Now before you mischaracterize my childhood as something out of a Wes Anderson movie let me assure you that we watched t.v. like every other red-blooded American family, but we weren’t afraid to turn it off once and a while either.

The exercise of daily reading is something I will always be most grateful to my parents for cultivating in me at such an early age.  The books I read served not only to keep me entertained for hours on end when either the friends were grounded or the sub-zero Wyoming winters turned my neighborhood into a freezer-burned  suburban still-life, they also taught me that the limits to knowledge and understanding were confined only by the endurance of the human eye to stay open for one more chapter.

Somewhere in high school, I can’t put my finger on a specific event or circumstance, the dark and poorly-formed idea entered my noggin that if a man truly wanted to be educated he must read only non-fiction and leave the fluff of novels to suburban moms, hairdressers and loyal subscribers of “People” magazine.  The people who were content with living in their self-imagined fantasy world rather than daring expose themselves to the harsh light and straight-edges of reality.  Fiction was a waste, non-fiction was utility, or so it went in my head as I perused the business section of our local Hastings.

I carried this highly discriminatory view of reading with me to the Air Force Academy where I remember one fateful day using it as a verbal battering ram against my unsuspecting and slightly aloof sophomore English professor who had the poor fate of noticing my fiction-free reading diet.  Maybe he was content with spending hours probing the depths of literary themes, character development and other pie-in-the-sky nonsense, but as for me, I would not be donating my precious time to his cause when it was to be used for reading non-fiction books that would grow my mind, advance my career and further some unspoken notion I had of  future global domination.

I’ll never forget his response as he looked at me, all 6’4” of him, from behind his gold-rimmed English-professor-glasses.  ”Interesting…” is all he said with a slight raise of his eyebrows.  As if he was so convinced that I was wrong it was of no use discussing it when he knew I’d eventually discover it myself anyway.  I was ready for a fight, but his response took the wind out of my sails and I slumped off back to my room unsure of my next move…or book.

Of course, by the mere fact I’m writing this you know where the story turned.  It wasn’t that afternoon, perhaps not even that month, but I eventually picked up some fiction.  At first I was unsure what I was doing, it seemed so pointless, but I pressed.

Eventually I came to understand the immense value of fiction lie in its ability to subversively probe the thousand different angles of man and his relationship with the world in ways that the writer of non-fiction would never dare to mention, either out of sheer embarrassment or a loyal sense of discretion towards the subject.

Nothing is off-limits in fiction and it strikes a nerve with us because we realize that all the awkwardness, heroism, fear, courage, debauchery and love is more real than much of the sterile, surface-level commentary and theory found in non-fiction.  It’s real because it’s us.

As my friend and mentor Glenn Packiam once pointed out,

The best fiction, though, reminds you of yourself. It makes you come clean about your hidden thoughts or motives. It makes you admit your fears and face your demons. We are not as pure as we imagine. We are not as hopeless as we feel.

The beauty of good fiction is it makes us face ourselves without our being threatened by a confrontation. Think of Nathan the prophet telling David the King that he has sinned against God by sleeping with Bathsheba and murdering an innocent man. It was the power of a story that allowed Nathan to lead David to see his own guilt– though David didn’t know it until Nathan said “You are that man!”

Fiction reminds us that when we forsake the seemingly insignificant details, side-stories and irrational behavior found in a story, we don’t just lose a paradigm or angle, we lose humanity.  ”There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person,” remarked G.K. Chesterton.  Real life is found in the dirt and the weeds.

Interestingly, the implications of taking a negative or dismissive view of fiction may be more vast than simply missing out on some healthy soul-searching.  In his book “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” former diplomat and Yale graduate Charles Hill points out that perhaps a lack of literary knowledge is partially to blame for America’s deteriorating quality of foreign policy. (h/t Isegoria)

Of all the arts and sciences, only literature is substantially and methodologically unbounded. Literature’s freedom to explore endless or exquisite details, portray the thoughts of imaginary characters, and dramatize large themes through intricate plots brings it closest to the reality of “how the world really works.” This dimension of fiction is indispensible to the strategist who cannot, by the nature of the craft, know all of the facts, considerations, and potential consequences of a situation at the time a decision must be made, ready or not. Literature lives in the realm strategy requires, beyond rational calculations, in acts of the imagination.

——-

To be more specific about why literary insight is essential for statecraft, both endeavors are concerned with important questions that are only partly accessible to rational thought. Such matters as how a people begins to identify itself as a nation, the nature of trust between political actors or between a government and its people, how a nation commits itself to a more humane course of governance — all these and many more topics dealt with in this book — can’t be understood without some “grasp of the ungraspable” emotional and moral weight they bear. A purely rational or technocratic approach is likely to lead one astray.

Though Hill points to the need for strategists and diplomats to read fiction, the underlying logic applies to all of us.   It’s an inconvenient truth that none of us know what’s going to happen in the next month, let alone the next decade.  Globalization has produced a world where change is both accelerated and multiplied.  To live well in such a world requires our ability to quickly match our own thinking and decision-making to the realities at work around us; fiction develops the muscles necessary to accomplish this.

Some will offer the accurate rebuttal that non-fiction helps us develop these decision-making abilities just the same.  It’s true in a way and I’m not trying to propose that one genre is better than the other.  Fiction, however, presents the world’s complexities in a manner that constantly forces our minds out of the limits set in place by non-fiction.  Put another way, non-fiction provides us a basic set of rules, fiction helps us learn when to ignore them.

If there was ever a time for us to exercise this nuance it is now.  Our nation, our military, our business institutions are suffering from an absence of leaders, few will disagree.  Technocrats and bureaucrats we have aplenty, but leaders seem to have gone John Galt.  But, maybe we’re missing the issue a bit when we cry out for leaders.  I agree with William Deresiewicz that when we talk about a need for more leaders what we really mean, though we may not know it, is that we need more thinkers.  People who can think for themselves and point us in new directions.

More than anything, I’ve found that fiction forces me to think deeply.  The classics are often categorized as such because they touch on universal questions common to humanity regardless of place or time.  The types of questions that cannot be evaded with a quick “yes” or “no”, but must be reckoned with over a long period of time, slowly and methodically like drawing sap from a maple tree.

Today we have access to more information than we know what to do with.  Blogs, podcasts, wikis, online forums, journals and books available in virtually any and every medium.  We have enough data and statistics to make a technocrat giddy as a schoolgirl, but the ominous revelation is beginning to sink in for some that maybe it’s doing more harm than good.  Just ask the intelligence community.

We have the information available, but few souls smart or courageous enough to honestly interpret it.  Ironically, the very reality we are desperately hunting after is being lost in the oceans of data we collect in its pursuit.  It’s a bit like the conundrum Wonka faced with his incredible “Wonkavision” which took reality, broke it up into bits floating through the broadcasting ether only to be reassembled again for the end user.  As Mike Teavee found out, this is devilish hard work.

What we need now are more thinkers, more people who can cut through the static, people who have read Tolstoy and Heinlein, Hemingway and Updike, who understand that the world isn’t always logical or one big game of carrots and sticks no matter how many pie charts or bar graphs there are saying otherwise.  It wouldn’t be wise to simply turn the keys of civilization over to philosophers and artists, but it’s quite possible that we’d all be better off if we read a bit more fiction and discovered what it really means to be human.

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