"Why read something made up . . . ?": On unknowableness in fiction

"Write about dogs!" (from Cartoon Bank)

I've been teaching long enough that, on the first day, at least, I'm not often caught up short by students' questions--they tend, after all, to be about housekeeping matters. But on Wednesday in my Intro. to Literature class, after we'd gone through the syllabus, made introductions, and I asked if they had any questions of me or of the class, an older student asked a question so basic, so fundamental to the nature of the class, that as I thought about how to respond I realized I'd never questioned it, either:

"Why read something made up when a true story can teach us the same thing?"

She didn't ask in a hostile way; this wasn't like asking, "Why do we have to do this?" Nor was this a question about theory or hermeneutics. She wanted to know, basically, why does fiction exist at all? What need does it serve? This was, in other words, a foray into metaphysics.

The answer I gave her in class was that, no matter how engrossing someone else's anecdote or someone else's biography is, when I hear/read them I'm always subconsciously aware that they are about, well, someone else, someone who exists or once existed in the world I now inhabit. Engrossing their stories may be, but I don't find myself entering imaginatively into the spaces of those narratives because I am already in them. Fiction, though, always has as its starting point, its spark, the world I inhabit (see the cartoon above), but it turns all that inside out: even realist fiction is "about" a space other than mine, because it is about the lives of people who have never existed; thus, as I read, I begin to identify with or become intrigued or repulsed by the inhabitants of that world.

So far, so good. But the next morning, while walking Scruffy, I realized that there's more to this than that--at least for me. And I'll just say that what follows doesn't pretend to be either profound or definitive. [UPDATE: But it does have a brief little something appended to it now that wasn't there this morning.]

This summer, after my baby-wrangling duties had ended for the evening, I read George Jones' autobiography, I Lived to Tell It All. Jones just may be THE greatest country singer who's ever lived . . . or is likely to live; but to describe his personal life as "messy" would be a considerable understatement. I knew the general outline of his alcoholism, his tempestuous marriage to Tammy Wynette, etc. Reading his autobiography, which concentrates on his personal life far more than on his career, more than filled in that outline for me, to the point that it was astounding to me that he was alive at all, much less was able to make music, most of it at least decent and some of it extraordinary, while all that was going on offstage, as it were. To put things in some perspective: recall the worst story of rock-n-roll chemical excess you know--Rick James, say, of whom Drew Carey said, "He died doing what he loved--drugs;" then, oh, double or triple that excess. You get George Jones.

And yet. Look at the title of his autobiography. The reader knows that, no matter how bad it gets before the end, there is an end in which Jones will emerge, more or less triumphant. Even without reaching the end, we already know it. The same is true, in a sense, of any biography. We may not know all the details, but we know the outline of the life . . . or else, most likely, we wouldn't have bothered to begin reading it in the first place. To borrow a phrase from Derrida, biography is always already "ended" for the reader, even before we've begun to read it. To put it more directly: biographies are rarely written about losers. In some sense, they've always achieved something, no matter how ignoble their beginnings or ends.

Fictive worlds are different, though: as I said above, their characters' worlds are not ours. Moreover, with fiction, especially contemporary fiction, we have no guarantees as to the winnerliness or loserliness of its characters. Even in the case of those novels we've read many, many times--in my case, Madame Bovary comes to mind--we read wanting to find out what happens to their characters: the choices they make and why they make them. Those novels, each time we read them, manage to recreate in the reader the sense that these stories are happening as we are reading them. Why else, after all, do we keep going back to those novels?

Thus, there's an alertness in us as we read fiction that, I'd argue, we don't have as we read biographies. In fiction, we don't know either the details of the story or its general outline. That attentiveness draws us in; we are more likely to wonder what we would do if we were in that particular circumstance. There doesn't exist the remove between us and that world. We cannot so easily distance ourselves emotionally from that world or, perhaps, even intellectually.

I don't know if this will satisfy my student, but this at least feels a bit more complete a response than the one I gave her, even if it turns out to be a contingent one. I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this, too.

UPDATE: As is usual with me, it's taken me almost 12 hours to realize that the short way of saying all this is: it's fiction's unknowability that causes it to be a whole lot like Life as we experience it.