Reading Fiction Broadens Our Experience of Life!

I have a friend who says she never reads fiction. She considers it a waste of time. That's unfathomable to me! My response is to recall a fictional conversation between Anne Shirley and Marilla in the novel Anne of Green Gables beautifully depicted in the movie where Anne is played by Megan Follows and Marilla by Colleen Dewhurst. Anne asks Marilla if she can call her Aunt Marilla. Marilla says no, just call her Marilla since she doesn't believe in people using names that are not their own. "You could imagine you're my aunt," Ann suggests. Marilla replies, "No I could not." "Don't you ever imagine things differently from what they are?" Ann asks. "No!" is Marilla's short reply. With a sigh and a little headshake Ann takes Marilla's hand lamenting, "Oh Marilla, how much you miss." 

And that's what happens to those who eliminate fiction from their reading plan. How much they miss: the Iliad, the Odyssey, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, the great Russian novelists, Greek and Roman and Norse mythology, Don Quixote, Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. Even the Bible contains fictional books and Jesus Himself was a storyteller. How can anyone dismiss reading the rich world of fiction as a "waste of time?"

Most of us will never be world travelers. None of us will every visit the past or the distant future. Any experience we have of places far away, or historically distant in time, or in our imagination about the future often begin with reading. Some of that reading can be non-fiction: historical documents and letters, detailed descriptions of particular events, e.g., the Revolutionary War, the Johnstown Flood or, more recently the devastation of Hurricane Helene. But to limit our reading to non-fiction narrows our field of vision. There is more to learn about human nature, good and evil, friendship, loyalty, etc. in Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters' novels or in children's books like Charlotte's Web or the Narnia Tales than in a historical description.

Fr. James Schall, S.J., Georgetown professor and philosopher wrote an article in 2010 titled On Reading Fiction. In it he contrasted the immediacy of modern cell phone life talking with friends versus reading fiction. Starting with a comment by a student, Schall writes:

But the issue posed by my student-friend, I think, is a good one. Do we need fiction in addition to the reality of constant communication? Why so? What sort of reality impinges on us when anyone can call us, or we can call anyone in any place or time of day or night? I suppose this ability was implicit in the almost obsolete telephone, or perhaps even in the written letter.

So do we need works of fiction these days to give us a broader understanding of the world?  Schall would say yes:

The poet and the fiction writer are not merely substitutes for our not talking to our friends wherever they are, whenever we want. So when people spend time on immediacy in place of fiction, are they closer to understanding the reality they live in? We can doubt it....We will not have taken the time, as C. S. Lewis once said, to live other lives than our own. Books allow us to do this vicarious living, especially fiction. To be sure, we have good and bad fiction. Yet, I recall Rudolf Allers [Austrian psychiatrist who took strong issue against Freud's views] once saying in class that we should constantly be reading fiction, even bad fiction, for we will almost always find there scenes of human reality that we would not notice otherwise. 

Strange, isn't it, to think that fiction can open our eyes to "human reality that we would not notice otherwise." That book we're reading at the beach can inspire deep thoughts that otherwise might never occur to us. I will never be able to fly like a bird, but I can read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and imagine soaring in the heights. I have no experience of the exploitation of children in factories and workhouses, but can see its reality in Dickens' novels and stories like A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The choices for vicarious learning experiences are endless. 

Another proponent of fiction was Jesuit Fr. John Hardon whose Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan is filled with fiction recommendations including The Masterful Monk series by Fr. Owen Francis Dudley, a convert to Catholicism. I recommend the series which is gripping.

Right now I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago in the abridged version approved by Solzhenitsyn. The original three volume work was unlikely to be read widely so Solzhenitsyn worked with his translator to produce a more accessible book. He describes the reign of terror and the gruesome torture by the communists in Russia. The descriptions are horrifying. But Orwell's depiction of the same thing in 1984 is more immediate and personal because he creates characters with whom we can identify and we see them pursued and trapped by Big Brother's tyranny.

Reading has been compared to a magic flying carpet and indeed it is. And how can one dismiss fiction when a brilliant man like Albert Einstein said this:

What's on your summer reading list? And do you agree that reading fiction is a waste of time?