Some time ago, a media wonk wrote an op-ed piece regarding
the reading habits of her friends.
In her experience, men preferred non-fiction while women leaned toward
fiction. Is this true?
Those given to pop psychology can be forgiven for assuming
her observations were proof that men are all about facts and reality while
women are all about dreams and fantasy – an assumption we know is untrue. Still, it’s tempting to embrace the notion
that the fault lines of reading habits relate strongly to gender.
I submit we can dispense with any biological support for the
argument. Scientists now know that
the distinctions between male and female - child-bearing capability excepted -
are by no means clear. The mix of
X and Y chromosomes is astonishingly complex and varied (we each have a lot
more of the other than we might care to admit). It’s hard to imagine evolution
gives a damn about reading habits. Aligning ourselves in this literary dust-up
between fiction and nonfiction is foolish and has little real merit.
I know I stand with both feet firmly planted in both
camps. I flip flop like a landed
trout, one day awed by the sheer drama of ‘Into Thin Air’, the nonfiction
account of a doomed Mt. Everest expedition or amazed by Bill Bryson’s humorous
and lucid explanation of a part of this world I should know about; the next day marveling at Carl Hiassen’s
roguish tales of skullduggery and bad behaviour in Florida or shaking my head
at the brooding power of Cormac McCarthy’s pen.
But I’m no zealot.
When caught up a discussion dealing with fiction vs. non-fiction
preferences, I am inclined to retire quietly to the conversational coward’s ‘You may be right’ or the even more
feckless ‘It does seem that way, doesn’t
it?’
I defend myself – albeit to myself – by dismissing the
matter as one of those arguments in which neither side is prepared to budge,
content instead with their stated preferences that contain more than enough
wisdom to damn the opposition to lives of an irredeemable literary darkness. Perhaps
it’s a sign of the times, this need to be identified with a camp that
absolutely believes it is right (it seems to apply to politics).
And, in one way, it’s fun to argue an issue where the
empirical evidence is so ready to hand.
And it’s a harmless (we trust) debate. We’re lucky not to be living in a by-gone era when one could
lose more than just face for coming down on the wrong side of such an argument
(Galileo, your arguments are not only
pure fiction but they’re heretical and, if you don’t recant, we may have to
burn you at the stake just to prove it!)
So here in the relative (?) safety of the Internet, I wish
to broaden the discussion and urge one and all to join my camp. Loosen that terrier-like hold on the
fiction/nonfiction bone and pretend you’re back at a cub-scout/brownie wiener
roast listening with a long lost intensity to tales about this world we live
in, magical concoctions that set your mind spinning. Real or fantasy?
Fact or fiction?
And that’s the whole point. With half-hearted apologies to the polar schools of dogmatic
rationalists and devotees of horoscopes and mystical superstition, neither of
whom will understand, we live in a world of dimension-less wonder, its enduring
lesson being we need all the help we can get to begin to understand it, that we
have an obligation, if you will – apologies for using a hackneyed business
phrase - to ‘think outside the box’.
Straddling the worlds of fiction/nonfiction can help. There is plenty of
ammunition. If Alice Munro
or Dennis LeHane announced that their luminous stories were, in fact, fact, how
much trouble would you have believing them?
Conversely, if
“insert-politician/celebrity/corporate
thug’s-name-here” suddenly experienced an unwelcome attack of candor and
admitted his/her biographical writings were as fantastic as anything written by
Lewis Carroll, would we not simply nod our heads in rueful understanding?
What I am trying to say is that, perhaps without being aware
of it, we’ve been in both camps all along. The nonfiction of Barbra Tuchman gives us the historical big
picture, if you will, while the thrilling drama of Alan Furst’s fiction tells
us what it was like in the trenches. They’re both looking at the same fount of
lore, only with different lenses.
And, as an aside, isn’t ALL written history a fiction, a tale told by
the victors?
I leave you with a vivid example of two approaches – one
nonfiction, the other fiction – to telling a story in which reading both arguably
enriches us more than each on its own.
The subject is the Belgian Congo in the late nineteenth
century. The nonfiction ‘King Leopold’s Ghost , by Adam
Hochschild, is a chronicle of an
especially tragic example of western colonialism in Africa. In the search for ivory and, later,
rubber, King Leopold’s private armies and companies (the country, Belgium,
could argue little involvement in or awareness of what was going on, at least
in the early years) conducted a systematic and wholesale slaughter and
enslavement (the former helped in the latter) of perhaps millions of Africans
and the eradication of centuries-old cultures. The book is a well-written, informative treatment of a story
too long left untold. It is
not an easy read.
In the early years of this subjugation a young Polish sailor
signed on to pilot steamboats running up the Congo River. He lasted six months before
returning to England to write. His
name was Joseph Conrad. One of
Conrad’s first fictions was ‘Heart of Darkness’, a bleak story, set in the
Congo, about the enigmatic Kurtz, a hugely successful ivory trader whose
methods in getting natives to gather ivory were the stuff of legend even in a
time of government-sanctioned brutality. Conrad’s interpretation of that world of systematic
savagery went far to mark him as one of the greatest writers in the English
language. Consider Marlow speaking
of Kurtz: ‘I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no
faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself’ Could the same perhaps be
said of King Leopold?
Two very special looks at the same subject. Fact and fiction. With good writing the lines are
blurred. As they should be.
Robert Alan Davidson
May 7,
2014
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