Why we read stories.
What does fiction do for us?
Reading as a child:
I think back to my youngest days when I was a child between the ages of five and seven, when I read Fifty Famous Fairy tales- a book my father gave me to pass time in my isolation from the family as I was in the infectious stage of Chicken pox.
I liked them all although the characters lived in Europe a foreign and alien land, and I in India. They wore different clothes and had names I had never heard before, like Cinderella. I did not know what cinders were, no one in my family knew what they were, I guessed it was something dirty from the illustration of a little girl kneeling by a fireplace sweeping something black. But I understood her unhappiness, and the jealousy of her ugly stepsisters. Why did the father let this happen? Where was he? were questions perturbing my mind, but I carried on reading because I knew something good would happen.
I loved stories because they gave other worlds in which other people had the same thoughts, fears and desires as me, and within the rules of that strange world, somehow, they solved them or came to happy endings.
Tragic stories which I read later- such as Romeo and Juliet, were fewer and harder to come across, and I sensed there was some deeper meaning to them which Adults seemed to grasp, which I could not yet, and did not want to know. What is the point of unhappiness?
Stories as moral and emotional learning:
Stories are a way of learning about how the world works. The most obvious in message are parables and fables that have clear moral lessons in them. But they bored me. Adults around asked questions about lessons learnt from them,like they forced medicine on us. “Sour Grapes” was one such story read aloud by a schoolteacher, in which the fox walked away from unreachable grapes, saying those grapes must be sour. (Did foxes eat grapes?) At 7 yrs of age, not getting the point of the story, but sensing some oppressive lesson, I shrugged it off, maybe they were sour…so what?
Fiction is a dream; indeed, John Gardener writes in the “Art of fiction” of the fictional dream, and how we must not disrupt the dream for the reader. Do foxes eat grapes was such a disruptor for me. Like dreams, stories are instruments of wish fulfillment which address our deepest desire, and the relationship between the writer and the reader is a contract in which the writer knowing what is in you, the reader’s heart, provides you a set of circumstances in which that thing that you desire, happens- for example meeting a Prince who falls in love with you and you live happily ever after, or a villain in your life is vanquished by a hero who sees the goodness in you and punishes the villain. Or, in other stories if you seek thrills, the writer takes you on a journey to strange lands like Lilliput or Treasure island, where you overcome difficulties by your wit and effort.
From mythology to the problem of villains:
What kind of stories did we know before the printed word became widely available? Before short stories, before novels, before books? Mythology -through oral tradition.
Stories were told and retold with embellishment, calibrated to listeners’ interests, filled with drama and enactments, dances and songs,that held your attention. And so stories got more and more fantastic over time, whereas things might have started in fact ( The Mahabharata of India, which describes a battle between rivals over a dispute over property, of which the Bhagavad Geeta is a part, names places that exist today, Kurukshetra, a town in a, India) becomes wonderful fiction with characters that have strange pasts and birth stories, strong ambitions and desires, victories and defeats. There are men with superpowers and women who gave birth to superchildren because their father was a Wind God or Sun God (Virgin births).
And then there are moral lessons to be learned through these stories; wonderful dialogue like that of the Demon king of Lanka who sends his son to battle and admonishes his weeping wife who fears the consequences for her son, over the duties of a righteous son. Dilemmas become the focus of problems. But not to fear, all becomes good due to the righteous action of good men, defeating the bad guys. This is where stories begin to ask harder questions: not only who is good or bad, but how we know the difference.
Do villains know they are bad? Did anyone tell them they were on the wrong path? I guessed not- from the sincerity and strength with which they fought. They must believe they were good. As a character in the Vampire stories of Anne Rice says,says” Evil is just a point of view”
But we the readers of stories, know and agree on who the good and bad guys are.
Who reads stories of revenge, redemption and atonement? What kind of person? Emphathisers, victims, the long-suffering powerless dreamers and wishers. Not villains, they simply act, they take. There are no villains in history who read a book and thought, ok, I should not do that ie be a villain, because that would cause suffering and that is wrong. Indeed you can feel sympathy for a well written story about a bad person. Why are there so many people who empathise with Humbert Humbert in Lolita?
Every villain thinks he is the one who is owed something, some wrong must be righted with no regard to the suffering of others. His suffering supercedes that of others.
Why is this? Because typically to have no regard for others and do harm to others requires lack of empathy and a sense of entitlement. And villains do not have empathy, generally feel they deserve what they want, do not read or write and especially do not read fiction which are made up stories written by losers for losers. I have literally heard this said from a very successful businesswoman.
So, the world consists of regular people living lives within rules, and villains who disregard these rules. Stories are born of these clashes: the clash between rule followers and rule breakers, between those who suffer and those who cause suffering. Religion and mythology indirectly address these clashes. And the justice system addresses it directly in everyday life. Fiction gives us desired outcomes.
Who writes fiction? People who understand and empathise, have seen and witnessed suffering. Villains do not write. They do not read.
Realistic fiction and the need for validation:
I like to read realistic fiction, which means stories of people doing their best to survive in a real world, without superpowers or talents, who have to face bad characters or bad circumstances. The fictional parts are structural, ie names and places, not the the problem or desire, and most often the biggest, sweetest lie of fiction is the ending which for the writer is the most difficult part of the story- What happened in the end question. Sometimes a fade away ending is the best, ie a no ending as in Anton Chekov’s stories. A shrug, a sigh, tears and acceptance. It is the most believable. So, what do I, the reader get from such and ending? Validation. That I am not the only one in this world who has been through this.
In reading fiction, you might learn some problem solving, learn some patterns of situations, learn how they were overcome, or not. Sometimes there are errors in the learning, we may overlearn favourite outcomes, such as the love story of Pride and Prejudice which ends with the Fall of pride and Overcoming prejudice, how delicious! But we know in real life that that’s not true, that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people and in much of the real-world, bad persons, those who cause us suffering remain undetected, unpunished, and indeed, often rewarded.
Does it matter?
Yes, it does. Dickens’ novels describing the misery of the underclass in London brought about social changes for the poor and changed the conditions they lived in. Russian fiction by Tolstoy and Chekov created empathy for the enormous suffering of people- the rich and the poor and maybe contributed to revolutions.
True stories, true crime, Truth
and the unresolved why:
And so, society evolves and now evolving at a faster rate. If you watch true crime shows and forensic procedures, true stories have clean endings with jail and death penalty. You find that evil still exists, bad people exist, but we catch them faster and quicker, we can see that in documentaries and court TV.
From the enormous success of these shows, it seems as if fiction has now been slowly replaced by true stories.
Truth is much more appealing because we know that there is no writer there who is manipulating your emotions or telling you falsehoods. If you have a taste for falsehoods listen to defence arguments in true crime court hearings.
True crime television is satisfying to watch because there is resolution, restitution, and the ending feels good.
But the mystery of why, why did the villains do this remains unanswered .
Stories, whether fictional or true, return us to the same need: to understand suffering, to get justice, to right wrongs, to fulfil our wishes, but the motives of the person who harms , the why did you do this, question remains unresolved. Motives tell us if whatever was done was justified or not. Whether it was selfish or not. And when the question of motive remains unanswered, fictional speculation fills that need, telling us what we feel is believable.