Fiction of my imagination

I'd written some notes on reading non-fiction vs. fiction, but after reading through them I realized that a) I'd covered that ground before and b) I didn't really agree with what I'd just written. Because of that I decided to just include a memory of high school English class, and some comments on reading books on science. I don't really have time for more right now.

I recall my high school English teacher, Father Naumann, explaining to us that one of the criticisms of Dickens is that he 'sacrifices art for pamphleteering', but regardless of how faithfully I copied it down in my notes, and preserved it in my brain, at the time, it's not something I fully agree with now (at least, I wouldn't apply it universally to all writers). Novels are a subjective expression of the human experience, whether some well-known historical event or an aspect of life that is universally known but individually experienced, such as love, death, growth, that sort of thing. Poverty is part of the human experience, and part of the power of the novelist is to take that and personalize it by, instead of describing the horrors of poverty, simply showing them. Maybe Father Naumann's criticism was that Dickens was doing quite enough by showing us the poverty of Victorian London, and didn't need to harangue his readers with essays about injustice at the same time. Which, to be honest, I don't recall his doing. It's been a long time since I've read a Dickens novel. And Father Naumann did once also say that my high was home to 'boys and other idiots' so maybe everything he said should be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless, my point is that a novel can have a political perspective without necessarily weakening itself, and a good political rant can be an effective literary device if put into the mouths of a character and not the narrator. Unless the narrator is a character and not outside of the story, in which case it's much more involved. But this is neither the time nor the place for a discussion of the profoundly influential field of narratology.

I should probably clarify that what I said above about non-fiction doesn't apply to books on science, or scientific study in general. Reading about politics and history is essentially looking at words written by humans about what other humans have done. Reading about science is looking at words written by humans about the natural world that we have to deal with every day, regardless of our intellectual inclinations, so I differentiate it as people writing about things instead of people writing about people. I think fiction writers with a knowledge of science have the option to add an extra dimension to their work (and not just in science fiction), which I don't think I'd ever fully considered before. This is something I've been reflecting on since discovering Simon Mawer's essay on Science and Literature, providing me with a delightful and convenient bridge between my recent science kick and my love for the experience of reading good fiction. It included this line:

As an undergraduate I heard the Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen start a lecture course on animal behaviour with the words, “Some people try to extrapolate from our studies to human behaviour but if you wish to learn about the behaviour of man don’t ask the ethologist; turn rather to the great writers. Read Dostoevsky, read Tolstoy.”