Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think
- “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” wrote Albert Camus. It remains an important social and political tool.
- Reading fiction has been shown to increase empathy and understanding.
- In the Instagram age, novels are still a necessary form of communication.
Having a spy as a mother must be challenging, especially if she dumps you off with a strange cast of characters during your influential teenage years. One day you’re living with two parents when suddenly your father lands an overseas gig with Unilever; your mother is required to travel with him. The next, a shady man who ferries greyhounds across the channel to participate in dog fights is teaching you how to survive in the underbelly of the British economy. The familial dissolution fractures your relationship with your sister. When your mother returns you never regain that closeness, until one day she is murdered years after the war has passed.
Such an existence is foreign to nearly all of us. Yet the themes present—parental issues, friendship, social confusion, peer pressure, heartbreak—are universal. There are hundreds of volumes of historical nonfiction about World War II. Yet in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Warlight, we shed the macrocosm to home in on how war uproots one family. Though widespread death and destruction is absent, what replaces it is an ability to empathize with the imagined characters.
As relevant as the study of history is, this ability to feel and share the emotions of others is arguably more important.
A recent commenter on Reddit argues the reverse, citing Dan Carlin’s podcast, Hardcore History, as the catalyst for their intellectual transformation:Listening to Dan Carlin’s podcasts with my 11 year old son is what sparked my interest and took history beyond the names and places I had previously memorized for passing grades. It awoke something in me and made me realize that I have little need for fiction with so many unread historical accounts still out there.
I’d never argue against Carlin. It takes a special thinker to narrate six hours on the Celtic Holocaust and leave listeners wanting more. It’s also important that more people study history, a fact Carlin has played no small role in promoting. He’s not the only one. In a recent episode of Sam Harris’ podcast Waking Up, historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that history is a framing of the present. Without knowing where we come from it is impossible to realize how we’ve arrived at where we are, a theme especially pertinent to Americans today.
But abandoning fiction for history? The two go hand-in-hand. Mythologies and epic poetry are predominantly fictional accounts influenced by historical events yet have shaped the way we interact as societies, war with one another, and communicate across political boundaries. History requires narrative; a disinterested recording of events has never occurred—most often we’re…
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