Fiction and non-fiction

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything had been said better than we can put it ourselves.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

Why do we read books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, web articles etc? Is it entertainment, information, education or something else? I don’t know why others read, but in part I’m looking for insights. Sounds pompous I know, but from what others have written online over the years, insight seems to be a very common reason for reading. It applies to both fiction and non-fiction.

Take two examples, firstly from fiction and secondly non-fiction.

Mrs. Dale was one of those empirical thinkers who love to philosophize generally, but who make no specific application of anything to their own affairs.

Theodore Dreiser – The Genius (1915)

The Hanoverian kings owed their position as kings to the Whigs. They paid for their right to reign by the abandonment of the powers that had hitherto inhered in the monarch.

Charles Downer Hazen - The Long Nineteenth Century (1919)

Of course insights vary between fiction and non-fiction as these two quotes demonstrate. They are certainly not equivalent, but the dividing line can more diffuse than we usually assume. Factual information is an insight in itself, but even factual information ends up distilled and compacted into wider and more general insights. Lists of facts are not in themselves particularly useful.

For example even a cursory study of Operation Barbarossa could lead to the obvious insight that this was Hitler’s biggest mistake. Alternatively one might study Operation Barbarossa in enormous detail, extract from it a number of insights about Hitler, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s regime, the course of WWII and so on. Insights become wider and more nuanced.  

On the other hand fiction may give subtle insights about human behaviour, social mores and the power of language. In many cases fictionally-derived insights are cogently expressed reminders of familiar viewpoints. Such insights may be expressed so powerfully that we absorb them into what we are whereas factual information may slip into the background.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1853)

…not a man of refined conscience, or with any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to everyday duties; not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen must live, and without private fortune it is difficult to see how they could all live genteely if they had nothing to do with education or government.

George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Another difference between fiction and non-fiction is that non-fiction tends to be comparatively recent and written from a modern perspective. Obviously a vast amount of modern fiction is written from a modern perspective too, yet a vast amount of readable fiction and even non-fiction was written decades or even centuries ago from perspectives which are no longer modern but still valid.

But vain men are fools as well as ignorant of themselves, and make this plain to all the world; for, not doubting their worth, they undertake honourable offices, and presently stand convicted of incapacity: they dress in fine clothes and put on fine airs and so on; they wish everybody to know of their good fortune; they talk about themselves, as if that were the way to honour.

Aristotle – The Nicomachean Ethics

This escape from modernity can provide interesting insights into our modern concerns and assumptions. Often older fiction reminds us of aspects of the human condition which have slipped into the background but do not change.

The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them—like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.

George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

In addition, older fiction frequently reminds us of numerous economic, political and practical changes which have influenced the way we live. These tend to be much more compact insights than a work on social history is likely to provide.

Wishing to be polite, he entered, in spite of the artistic disgust he felt for all that zinc, coloured to imitate bronze, and having all the repulsive mendacious prettiness of spurious art. ‘Good morning, monsieur. Is Henri still at home?’ The manufacturer, a stout, sallow-looking man, drew himself straight amidst all his nosegay vases and cruets and statuettes. He had in his hand a new model of a thermometer, formed of a juggling girl who crouched and balanced the glass tube on her nose.

Emile Zola - The Masterpiece (1886)

To my mind the attraction of older fiction is that we see fictional scenarios through eyes which looked out on a world no longer ours. Our times are so intense, so suffused with manufactured drama that escaping from it every now and then is something of a necessity. If we don’t escape we can’t see what it is to escape.