What's The Point Of Fiction

At some point near the beginning of 2021, I needed something to listen to while walking to the grocery store, and having had my fill of music at that moment (a pretty unusual feeling for me) I decided to try listening to a podcast, and just through random choice tried out Hardcore History with Dan Carlin.

If you are already familiar with Dan Carlin you probably don’t need to hear me explain it, but as someone new to his podcast I was totally blown away. He talks about ancient history in a way that makes it relatable, visceral, and—unlike so many other historians—human. With Hardcore History, you don’t just get an explanation of events, you get an experiential dive into the time period.

I’ve always been enamored with ancient history, but usually find historical non-fiction writing and documentaries so dry and lifeless that it kind of kills the magic of learning about the subject. With Dan Carlin, not only does the history come alive, but it somehow feels even more magical and fascinating than it did before—he has a way of making the mystery ever deeper, even as he uncovers it.

And so over the last year I spent many many hours listening to those very very old true stories, rather than reading modern fiction as I typically do.

One of the refrains that Dan Carlin repeats in many of his episodes is that ‘history has ruined fiction’ for him. The first time I heard him say that I thought, that’s silly, it would never happen to me. I love history, but not as much as I love novels. But then after several months of listening to pretty much nothing else, I started to wonder if maybe he was right, and that nothing fictional can even compare to real history.

It might sound strange at first, what with the majority of historical non-fiction being portrayed dull as a rusty spoon, but when you start to fathom the lives that some of these remarkable people led—real lives that we can verify with relative certainty—it’s kind of astounding we have any need for fiction at all.

I used to think that right now we live in a time of extreme experience, where we modern humans get to feel, see, and hear things that our ancestors couldn’t even dream of. In some ways that’s true, but in many ways the reality is the opposite. The extremes of experience that ancient people went through would be utterly mind-shattering for most modern people today, experiences that we can’t begin to comprehend from our modern vantage point.

What was it like to encounter a hitherto unknown ethno-cultural group of people, when they show up at the edge of your town with thousands of fearsome, alien-looking warriors, and now you have to pick up a sharp hunk of metal and try to stab them all to death while they try to do the same to you, all face-to-face and flesh-to-flesh, or else you and everyone you know will probably be dead by the end of the day?

That’s the kind of shit that happened hundreds and thousands of times to our own ancestors, happened to many of them multiple times, and certain extraordinary individuals experienced situations like that dozens of times over; quite a few of them even seemed to enjoy it, according to ancient accounts.

But instead of learning about those real incredible people and real incredible moments, here we are reading fabricated pulp about horny teenage robots or something. What’s the deal with that?

…

But I don’t really feel that way. Regardless of how fascinating real history may be, I can’t even imagine giving up all the great fictional stories I’ve read, watched, or listened to in my life. I couldn’t even consider sacrificing all the inspiration and meaning and empowerment I’ve gleaned from them.

There are truly unbelievable stories in the past, more incredible than any fiction, and yet I still feel that fiction serves a separate, yet equally essential, purpose. Because no matter how incredible a true story may be, we cannot experience it as an audience without making fundamental assumptions—about the states of mind of the people involved, their subconscious motivations, the deep nature of their relationships, the actual sensory input they experienced, where they put their attention and focus—that automatically fictionalize the account.

In order for us as the audience to in any way ‘experience’ the story, it must have some semblance of narrative, and if there is any sense of narrative at all, the story has moved beyond pure historical fact and towards fiction.

Which leads to the next source of value in fiction: the meaning. While I don’t think all stories should have a clear ‘message’ to them, I think any good narrative will at least ask some questions around an existential theme or philosophy. Here again, if we do this to a historical account we are automatically making assumptions and applying a perspective, and probably cherry picking events that fit the intended narrative.

While I think some amount of theme and philosophical narrative can reasonably be applied to historical accounts with them still qualifying as non-fiction, it does create a major limitation to the narrative if you want to remain factually accurate. This is a limitation that fiction does not have, which sets it free to explore so many possibilities within the human spirit that non-fiction, by its own virtues, cannot.

Finally, there is style. Once again, exceptionally well-written non-fiction may be able to pull off a certain amount of style without undermining its integrity, but once again it will be severely limited in this regard. Every stylistic choice by an author necessitates a perspective and underlying assumptions, and therefore can only go so far before it betrays its factuality.

A fictional manuscript, on the other hand, can take its style to the furthest extremes, and not only will this not compromise the story, it will often enhance it.

To illustrate, I’m going to cross-reference the non-fiction book Empire Of The Summer Moon, which explores the culture and geopolitics of the Comanche empire, with the fictional Blood Meridian, which (in some chapters) describes a bloody conflict between the Apache nation and a mercenary militia.

(I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Comanches and Apaches were the same ethno-cultural group or that we can treat them as interchangeable, but for the sake of this comparison I believe that they are similar enough; S.C. Gwynne, the author of Empire Of The Summer Moon actually quotes Cormac McCarthy at the beginning of the book, and it’s clear his non-fiction investigation of the Comanches was partly inspired by McCarthy’s writing about the Apaches… further evidence to support my thesis here about the different but equally important functions of fiction and non-fiction).

Empire Of The Summer Moon: “For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.”

Blood Meridian: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of crane feathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeon-tailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

You will notice that, despite being exceptionally descriptive and stylized for its genre, Empire gives us more of a bird’s-eye view, a generalized and somewhat detached explanation of something happening elsewhere to other people. Meridian on the other hand, puts us directly in the experience, as if we are there in the protagonist’s shoes, feeling what he’s feeling. Both fascinating, both highly engaging, with similar yet different intentions and similar yet different effects on the reader.

So… all this is just a long-winded way of saying that, while real history is head-bustingly unbelievable and is utterly invaluable for so many reasons, that does not mean that fiction is not also very valuable for its own reasons. Fiction serves a similar but essentially different purpose.

And the great thing is that there is plenty of room for both. There is no reason one cannot consume equal parts history and fantasy, and I believe anyone who does so will see how the differences between the two are part of the reason each is so valuable.

…

Hmm, I feel like my recent posts have gotten a bit pedantic. It can be hard to know what subjects will attract people’s attention, while maintaining a consistent theme on my blog. I actually have a couple of light and fluffy posts on deck, which were fun to write and I hope will be fun to read, but I hesitate to post them because they are more like “Top 10!” lists, which is not my typical style. So, let me know in the comments if you like this kind of abstract literary tangent such as in this post, or if you would prefer to see more light-hearted and fun/frivolous topics.

In any case, what do you think? Is non-fiction more valuable than fiction? Does it depend on your interests or your occupation? Is Children Of Men approaching the point of being non-fiction? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks for reading!

Flibson