Fiction as Truth

I used to volunteer sometimes in a tiny one-room library.  One day a woman came in and I welcomed her, saying, Fiction is on the right, non-fiction on the left.  She said, “Which ones are the true ones?”

Which ones, indeed?

I was remembering this encounter after reading Melissa Merli’s recent column where she asked herself “What am I getting out of reading so much fiction?”  She found evidence that reading, in general, relieves stress and promotes mental health and success; in addition, fiction readers have been found to have more empathy for others.  No mention of Truth.

In the interests of full disclosure:  I read primarily fiction and have always found facts to be of a lower order.  Of course, they have their factuality in their favor, they can certainly be useful and even compelling.  A steady diet of them would seem quite tedious, though, and I refuse to grant them superiority in the revelation of Truth.

Seriously, I believe an important function of fiction is its ability to help us know, at least as well as is possible, without the actual experience.  Several masterpieces of fiction come immediately to mind:  Toni Morrison’s Beloved on slavery; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart on colonialism; Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front on war.

James Welch in The Heartsong of Charging Elk offers a howl-worthy scene comparable to Achebe, but on cultural isolation.  The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton and House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, two very different books, both depict death by a thousand cuts, the myriad, unnoticed tiny steps one takes on the path to acts of irrevocable violence and tragedy.

There is no better perspective on Tourette’s Syndrome than that offered by Jonathem Lethem in his mystery novel, Motherless Brooklyn.  In similar fashion, we can at least glimpse autism through Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. 

Perhaps at this point you’re thinking this is Empathy Development rather than Truth.  I disagree.  At my library, we have rows of very fine books on our war with Vietnam.  But if a patron were to ask me for something that would tell what it felt like to be there, I would not send him to those shelves.  I would give him Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and with a 26-page story, he would know.

My most unforgettable instance of Fiction as Truth came accidentally.  I was visiting my daughter who was in college and in her apartment I came across the book Mothers and Shadows by Marta Traba.  This title, a translation of Conversacion al Sur, was one of the readings for a class in International Feminist Literature.  It was the easiest one, according to my daughter, one that I might enjoy.

Marta Traba was born in Argentina and lived in Bogota and Montevideo; Conversacion al Sur was published in 1981; the author was killed in a plane crash in 1983, three years before the book was published in English translation.  It is set during one of the most turbulent periods of South American history, during the reign of terror in Argentina , the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, and a time of common military torture in Uruguay.

It is the story of two very different women brought together by the inescapable terror of those times.  Irene is an aging actress in Buenos Aries, a woman of privilege and wealth.  Dolores is a working class woman from Uruguay.  The actions of Irene’s son and Dolores’ husband lead inexorably to their connection and shared experience at the hands of the Uruguayan military.

The book is presented as a dialogue between the two women five years later.  It is the perfect Undergraduate International Feminist Literature book, full of discussion points and possible paper topics, not the least of which would be the intentional obscurity of the two voices.  Although I was enjoying it, there were times when I felt I was just slogging through, and then … and then.

Irene decides to go to the Plaza de Mayo and join the demonstration, the “Madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo” protesting the disappeared.  This was some of the most powerful writing I have ever encountered.  By the end, I was panting and reaching to see if my white headscarf was still in place, the scarf that we each donned as a symbol of hope for our disappeared. 

In the end, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo brought down the Reign of Terror in

Argentina.  Reviewers refer to this section of the book as “memorable” or “cathartic” – I think I’ll just call it Truth in Fiction.

Meanwhile, I recommend compiling your own personal list of Books That Have Made Me Howl.  I’ll bet there won’t be many non-fiction titles on it.  Stay the course, Melissa, stay the course.

(Photograph from puroticorico, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)