I know people deeply immersed in one or the other, and just a few immersed in both. The thing is, non-fiction gives us a direct dosing of ideas, seemingly without setting or apparatus. Fiction often doesn’t pay off what it promises, in terms of meaning. And our reading, really, is either a search for entertainment or a search for meaning.
Non-fiction, though, really does come with a substantial apparatus. In place of the normal aspects of fiction – plot, characterization, setting – we get the author’s presuppositions (e.g. about what the important questions are), his unaccountable absolutes (the unchallenged assertions inherent in his ideas), his biases, and the emotional impact of his own convictions, if any. In other words, there’s more weeding and processing to do than some readers acknowledge.
I’m a fan of both forms, but I confess I prefer fiction when I can get it. The thing that unites both forms is theme. If we refer to the theme of “the union of all men”, someone can suggest a non-fiction work, and I can suggest a work of fiction. But frankly, I find there are more subtle themes available in fiction that are as yet unexplored in non-fiction, and that would force me to look there, in any case.
One is not more important or significant than the other, but I think it’s easy for non-fiction lovers to deprive themselves of the real value of fiction by, if not careful, seeing everything as a prosaic proposition. There’s a kind of communication of through the whole soul available in fiction that seems only rarely accessible in its counterpart.
For me, sci-fi and fantasy are the unparalleled repositories of soul in modern art.
I’m referring to literature – not films, games, comics, etc. which often as not are mere masquerades – parodies of what these genres are about. Harry Potter is not fantasy, even in novel form. Not really. Most sci-fi films are not really sci-fi. And even the Lord of the Rings films, I think, did not achieve the twin goals of satisfying the diehard lovers of the literature while introducing non-literary types to the genre. It was only about 80% successful in the former goal, and I think spectacularly unsuccessful in the latter. Likewise, dragonlance isn’t fantasy. Terry Pratchet is parody and appeals to a particular personality type, but is only fantasy in the way that Get Smart is an espionage drama.
All of that is to say that I’m talking about the actual literature – the stuff with high doses of ‘soul’ rather than the McLiterary derivatives which retain the trappings (elves or space ships) but have become largely soulless. Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay – this, generally speaking, is literature. In fact, a friend of mine, from my childhood, used to say that sci-fi/fantasy (literature) is the last form of prophetic literature. I tend to agree.
Well, I’m opinionated about it, but I think those ‘lost’ in the mainly intellectual world of non-fiction, or who supplement this, at best, with biography (crossover literature – nonfiction as story), are missing out. But they don’t know it. You can’t discuss with them some things, because the only way to communicate is in a language of literary references. They’ll often challenge this, but that’s an indication of precisely the conviction that all things are reducible to propositions, something a fiction-lover cannot really accept.
In fact, sometimes, the quality of what is being communicated, recapitulated, in a work of literature, gives it a ‘bible-like’ status. For me, Speaker for the Dead (the sequel to Ender’s Game) is this way. But even in the realm of philosophical fiction, there are some works whose contents simply have never been conveyed as effectively in non-fiction, and perhaps never will be. Rational Anarchy in Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Objectivism in Atlas Shrugged. Even, perhaps, evil in A Wind in the Door.
You notice it when you’re having a discussion about these things and you realize you’re not really speaking the same language. You can’t use the literary references, because you don’t have a shared literature. You want to hand someone a novel, but it’s not like when they hand you a non-fiction book. The latter is greeted more like a manual, and the former more like an endeavour. So you do what you can to make converts. 🙂
In that sense, there’s some parallel between the writings of the academic theologians, like St. Maximus the Confessor, which are brilliant, life-changing, and essential, and the writings of the theologians of the desert. Theology, we understand, is true prayer. That’s what it is we seek. What an academic describes as a rejection of all propositions about God’s nature, a rejection of attributes, and of confusing operations with the unknowable essence, a desert theologian writes of as ‘removing from the mind all false images’. They are both describing apophasis. But the latter, as I see it, shows us how it is really used, what it is for.
I tend to think story is like that. It’s like history. It’s like real events. It shows us in an enfleshed way, what we otherwise can only ‘know’ in an intellectual way. It’s only my opinion.
How does one determine whether a literary work has ‘soul’? It seems to me like such an intangible thing to quantify. Is it because works like Dragonlance (which, for better or for worse, I loved as a junior higher) fit the ‘McLiterary’ bill, in that they strike one as lacking the gravitas that one finds in say, Tolkien? Is it only a matter of having experienced both Tolkien and Weis/Hickman?
Please answer me this as well: how does an Orthodox justify reading fantasy/science fiction — which I love! — given both the recent condemnations of such works from different monastic communities, as well as the unanimous patristic warnings against the imagination?
I am newly illumined (baptized and chrismated Lazarus Saturday!), and I want to be absolutely obedient to the mind of the Church.
Well, first, understand that I cannot give you advice on what to read or do w. your time; that’s for your father confessor and/or spiritual director. What’s good for me or bad for me, may not have anything to do with you.
I don’t try to justify what I read, but my understanding of the fathers is not a condemnation of the imagination, but of the use of imagination in prayer and in theology. Our theology and prayer are apophatic – involving the elimination from the mind of all false images. But the imaginative faculty was created by God and is necessary to our deification. At least, that’s what I think the fathers say. I am not a wise man.
I would condemn a lot of fantasy and sci-fi as well, though perhaps for different reasons than might be expected (I can’t stand Terry Pratchett’s work, because I think his stuff is a mockery of meaning) but remember there can be no single prescription for all of us. And yet, there really is. The prescription is theosis – deification – but the working out of that will be different for each of us. Not under our own wisdom only, not by independence or mere self-direction, but neither by raw obedience to a universal rule or a domineering personality. The same monks write of what I’m saying, and would rightly give you personal counsel only if you asked for it, and would send you to your spiritual director/confessor in most cases.
On your question about what the difference is between art and Mc/art, certainly we’re talking in part about subjective judgments. Though not entirely. There is art theory (a science of art) that treats a painting differently than the work of a mere colorist, that deals with sophistication (or lack thereof) of literary development, that can analyse themes for universality, character development for maturity, drama for substance, and so on. I’m not saying you can measure poetry, but neither is it something we have no language to discuss; our preferences have causes, after all. The same thing exists in musical theory. There’s a quantitative/qualitative difference between John Phillip Souza’s band music and CPE Bach’s sonatas. And not just for there being a difference in genre. But I’m not a musicologist. Think of it like this: there’s coffee and there’s McCoffee, there’s a hamburger (not to tempt you during Great Lent) and there’s a Mc-burger (from the world’s largest importer of cow anus), there’s food and McFood, jobs and McJobs, health insurance and McInsurance.
The reason it’s such a difficult conversation is that we’ve become accustomed to McEverything, and so the playing field seems level to a lot of people. I have a friend who sucks down TV dinners and thinks it’s good cooking. He’s lost the ability to actually taste the difference between that and real food. When I was a child, my father conditioned me to be able to taste lima beans, asparagus, crab (not crab soaked in cream sauce or ranch, but the thing itself). For my peers, later in life, everything began to taste alike. Like chicken. The same thing happened with film. Most of my ‘buddies’ see a naturalist film with a nihilist ending and can’t any longer fathom (and don’t have the aesthetic language to discuss) the difference between that and a romantic film, with an epic plot, universal themes, and heroic ending.
There’s all the difference in the world between No Country for Old Men and The 13th Warrior. The sad thing is that, generally speaking, our culture has lost the language to communicate, anticipate, and evaluate the difference. All we have is the pseudo-aesthetic language of the critics. There’s a difference between the ancient fairytales and the latest scholastic book that’s just right for a certain reading level and has the right mix of social issues, bullet points for marketing to an age-segment, etc. Of course, we can’t see all that through the lens of Grimm, but then fairytales weren’t for children anyway. Nothing lurks in the woods outside Hogwarts thats as serious as what Red Riding Hood encountered. Not that that’s a subject for this venue.
Your thesis is something that I have often intuited.
I love fiction myself, and fantasy in particular, precisely because I felt that I could get a better sense of the soul of the writer thereby, because they fed me meat compared to the milk of most other sources.
To your list I would add Brian Jacques (for younger readers), C.S. Lewis (both Narnia chronicles and cosmic trilogy), Lloyd Alexander (Prydain chronicles), and pretty much anything by the superlative George MacDonald.
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My brother once asked me which theologians had had the greatest impact upon my life. This stumped me. Individual theologians? I am no student of theology, and indeed most works of theology are dry as toast and just as exciting. Instead, I got to ruminating on which thinkers/writers in general had had this kind of influence on me.
And I ended up with a short list of George MacDonald and J.R.R. Tolkien. Sometimes fiction can be more potent than theological treatises.
– V.
My first mentor considered C.S. Lewis his mentor. When I asked him which books he favored most (mine are still Abolition of Man, Miracles, and God in the Dock), he said the highest expression of his work is in his fiction.
I think that last is true of Ayn Rand, too, whose non-fiction works, while great, consist in the main of chapters made from columns and articles she published for popular consumption int he NY Times and elsewhere. She was an atheist, but I pray for her sometimes. She was trying to find meaning.
There are many people who have been led to Orthodoxy by the fiction of C.S. Lewis (who wasn’t even Orthodox). I med some science fiction fans in Bulgaria who said they first began to take Christianity seriously when they read C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy. It broke through the communist indoctrination fo their youth.
Yes. He had a fascination with Holy Orthodoxy, too, and frequently visited Orthodox Churches, though he was solidly Anglican.