Long Live Fiction

There's no way he could have anticipated that his assertion would become the topic of a Member Monday discussion more than fifty years after the fact. The "he" is Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-born American writer of fourteen novels, memoirs, short stories and essays in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. His assertion: reading fiction is a waste of time (Who Needs Literature?).

The crux of Mr. Singer's position, in this recent translation of his long-ago essay, is that nothing invented by the mind can compare with the factual accounts and psychological surprises that play out in the real world. Literary fiction in the past might have served as a kind of historical travelogue or otherwise as the principal means to educate the reader about the ways of the world, but that is no longer the case -- not in this new (1963!) era of ubiquitous information sources. Literary fiction has become little more than entertainment or, perhaps, mere intellectual sport. You know, like poetry.

Well, let's consider this in the context of our Member Monday experiences, virtually all of which have been based upon nonfiction reading material. Perhaps we can take this one session to truly appreciate what literary fiction, with its many subcategories -- Mystery, Thriller, Horror, Romance, Fantasy, Science, Realistic, Historical Fiction, etc. -- has to offer. We might start with the last two categories by citing Mr. Singer's observation that what is nowadays sold under the label of "novel" is, in fact, mostly or completely a journalistic exercise. So if, as he says, the boundary between journalism and literature has become blurred, how can he bemoan the lack of fiction writers with the power to affect readers the way they did a generation ago? After all, would one's reading Steinbeck's affecting novel Grapes Of Wrath be considered a waste of time just because its characters were a composite of those he'd so closely studied with a journalist's eye?

In fact, it could be argued, just as a caricature portrait of a face is to the actual photograph, fundamental truths are often most powerfully revealed when "facts," even if somewhat exaggerated, are seen through the lens of a talented author. Mr. Singer maintains there can never exist a perfect novel but it's hard to imagine a more perfect presentation of a chosen world than Tom Wolfe's depiction of New York City circa 1980s in his classic novel The Bonfire Of the Vanities. My one prayer to the literary gods is that someone with Wolfe's literary (and decidedly non-PC) talent would take on the most earth-shaking historical event of most of our lives i.e. the fact and the aftermath of 9/11.

So it's hard to know whether Mr. Singer is speaking ironically, satirically, or simply pulling our leg when he blows off fiction. Perhaps the point is to question the whole fiction nonfiction genre divide in the first place. And that raises an even more fundamental question i.e. the fact or the illusion of life itself. Perhaps everything out there is but fiction, even so-called facts being simply filtered impressions.

The club is midway through our lunch session series on How To Read the Bible. A threshold question concerned the literal truth of "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Libraries tend to categorize it as nonfiction. Who are they to decide?