I don't buy into the idea that there is a qualitative difference
between fictional and non-fictional narrative.
* If you have ever been interviewed by anyone on anything you
probably know that you have been misquoted or at least
misrepresented at some level. What you knew to be truth when you
said it became fiction before it was published.
* If you read the memoirs of anyone you know well, you will find
that their remembrance of events (and especially the framing and
the intention of your and probably their actions) differs
significantly from your own remembrance (or preferred version).
I'm not sure exactly what Lee means by *idiographic* in this case, but I
think I might prefer *figurative*. And in that sense, characters and
circumstances in fiction are usually (maybe necessarily) *caricatures*.
I'm not precisely sure how I would go about proving this, but I highly
doubt that we could learn much if anything about "human nature" if we
eliminated *figurative* language from our description of it. It is our
very ability to "read between the lines", to "extrapolate and
interpolate" that allows us to make generalizations about anything, most
especially something as nebulous and fuzzy as "the human condition".
Reading from the CIA Factbook, one might say "the mean height of the
Swahili male is 1.97 meters with a variance of .2 meters" but in a
travel book it might read "the Swahili are very tall, taller on average
than most anyone you have ever met who does not play basketball for a
living" and a work of fiction might go off in any direction to give you
the true "gist" of just how tall the Swahili's are, and how it feels to
be amongst them, etc.
Now you might argue that in a work of fiction, there is nothing
suggesting (nor requiring) that the author stay anywhere close to
reality... the author might diverge by perhaps referring to "the
Swahili" as some other much shorter group of people, perhaps
preternaturally short people... and you would be right that the author
propagated (knowingly or exceedingly sloppily) "false facts". But the
same could happen in non-fiction... many poorly researched and written
descriptions of other peoples and other places put forward huge
misunderstandings as if they were fact.
I read quite a variety of fiction and non-fiction... and when I read
non-fiction I am always aware that the author may either be operating on
a skewed model of their subject or may actually have gathered their
facts poorly. I value non-fiction writers who are very good at what
they do. With fiction writing, I rarely look for accuracy in *facts*
except perhaps historical fiction, what I'm looking for are what I would
call *deeper truths* about the human condition.
Fiction uses parable and allegory to tell fundamental truths about the
human condition. I would suggest that many of us learned more about the
human condition by reading Bre'r Rabbit stories or watching the
Roadrunner and Wiley E. Coyote cutting up than we do by reading the CIA
Factbook or even Travel Books.
I find it sad when people imagine that *Fiction* is nothing more than
"entertainment". Jane Austen's novels may give me the best
understanding of a certain class of people living in that era than I'll
ever get short of becoming a scholar on that era. She may also have
propagated numerous subjective slants of her own to me, but that doesn't
stop me from reading several history books of the period (who may each
paint a distinctly different picture themselves, based on the biases of
the authors of *those* books) to help me frame what she wrote.
- Steve
On 14 Oct 2010 at 20:32, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
I don't buy into
the idea that it would help understand the 'human condition' because
after all we are talking about fiction.
And Lee Rudolf wrote:
a work of
fiction can (probably) be used as an *idiographic*
study of the "human condition" (if one wants to
use it that way), but getting from one idiographic
study (or a whole batch of them) to general
conclusions is ... difficult.
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