Why Read Fiction when You can Read Nonfiction by Orlando Bartro
At dinner one evening, a doctor said to me, “I never read fiction. I only read nonfiction. I want to learn something, and when I read nonfiction—I learn something! To know literature is to know nothing that’s real!”
The doctor, therefore, agreed with Mr. Knowell, that old gentleman in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humour”:
. . . idle poetry
That fruitless and unprofitable art,
Good unto none, but least to the professors,
Which then, I thought the mistress of all knowledge:
But since, time and the truth have waked my judgment,
And reason taught me better to distinguish
The vain from the useful learnings.
There are, of course, a few easy and practical objections to this view.
For example, the reading of good fiction expands a person’s vocabulary, which expands what a person can think and express; good reading improves a person’s ability to employ rhetoric for the purposes of persuasion; good reading can provide good moral examples, exposure to other cultures . . . But none of these benefits are exclusive to fiction. The doctor’s objection still holds! Why read fiction when you can read nonfiction?
My personal answer would be because, for me, the reading of literature provides entertainment at a high level of enthrallment. I’m reminded of the composer Hector Berlioz rolling joyfully in the grass along the banks of the Arno River after reading “King Lear.” This is the kind of ecstasy obtainable from beauty!
But not everyone easily apprehends the beauties in literature. The doctor’s objection may need to be qualified, but it still holds for those who enjoy other things.
Beauty, however, isn’t the only good being offered in literature.
After even a few hours of intense and difficult reading of works of high artistry, a person’s mind can acquire a wonderful clarity in which many new thoughts interlace and compete. Literature provides an extraordinary stimulus for the brain. It expands the imagination. —True, the doctor admits; but nonfiction provides stimulus, too, and about things that actually are!
So, maybe those who wish to defend the usefulness of fiction must retreat to Proust’s penetrating view of its value:
“. . . the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain forever the secret of every individual. Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.” —In Search of Lost Time, by Proust
Our plucky doctor might still object: “We now know the landscapes of the moon. And there’s always psychology books!”
I’ll make one last attempt to convince him:
To read an old classic is to give yourself perspective, to see how the world has changed, and to see how it remains the same; to see how cultures differ, and how they do not. It is an exploration into that thing that Aristotle called “human nature,” the substance of our being that persists throughout the accidents of history. And perspective is also gained into the self, as the echoes from characters conceived in other eras rebound in our own minds and experiences. These perspectives, taken together, can result in an increase of that elusive attribute, wisdom.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew - usually available at Amazon for $4.91.