What fiction is for

I just read the passage below from an essay by American writer Adam Gopnik. I wanted to share it because it relates to discussions we sometimes have here about mistaking fiction for reality. It's also quite moving (he was writing about the recent attack on Salman Rushdie).

“The most rudimentary thing about literature... is that words are not deeds,” (said the Soviet dissident author Andrei Sinyavsky shortly before being sentenced to a labor camp for writing the 'wrong' kind of novels). Literature exists in the realm of the hypothetical, the suppositional, the improbable, the imaginary. We relish books for their exploration of the implausible which sometimes defines a new possible for the rest of us. Our commitment to that belief - to what is quaintly called freedom of speech and liberty of expression - must be as close to absolute as humanly possible, because everything else that we value in life, including pluralism, progress, and compassion, depends on it. We don't know what it is possible for us to feel until we are shown what it is possible for us to imagine.

As a defense of free speech in literature, this makes solid arguments. I believe Gopnik even states the obvious intentionally to contrast this view with extremism that would silence anything a group finds objectionable. However, as someone who has often participated in the discussions here over realism versus fantasy in spanking stories, I don't feel Gopnik's piece works as an argument for that issue. It certainly does not appear to be his intention either.

Fiction encompasses many genres, and even these separate genres can overlap and intermingle, but critique is essential in any artform to evaluate whether a creative person's efforts are hitting or missing the mark. Bates' short story that inspired "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" both deal with man's inhumanity to man in different ways. Both are valid, but how well would Lee's piece work if after all that Atticus goes through, he just summons a robot to rescue his client from possible lynching?

And while I prefer spanking stories that drip with believability, I myself wrote a piece in the form of a children's story, complete with anthropomorphic pigs. Fantasy is fine. Many even seek it out with the more outrageous theme the better. But not only does preference play a part, but consistency as well. So while I agree with the sentiment expressed in the Gopnik piece, I still stand by my assertion that a fictional spanking story that is trying to sound realistic, needs to convey its elements in a believable way, and some of those elements are feelings and sensations that might not NEED to have been personally felt by the author to understand enough to write about, but at least need to be acknowledged enough so that the author can learn about them through research so that the finished product, when read by someone WITH such experience, causes them to sigh and nod with empathy rather than wince with confusion or disbelief.

(As an acknowledgement of what I think EM was referring to though, my position on this has expanded a bit over time and with more experience in seeing how others react and defend the opposite, to include another possibility. I am thinking that spanking fiction written without personal experience may indeed have a valid, appreciative....and even enthusiastic audience among those with the same interest and experience level. I had not considered this years ago when I first argued against this type of writing, but I have seen that I was missing something that now seems obvious. So you could say my position on this has softened quite a bit, even though my personal preference remains pretty much the same.)

Some very interesting thoughts here. It's certainly true that people can easily forget what fiction is. I once heard Jeremy Irons say that after playing a paedophile (in Lolita) some people started treating him as if he was a paedophile in real life. And I remember I once wrote a controversial story (which has since been quietly removed from the library) and it was criticised by some commenters as if I was condoning the bad behaviour described, which I certainly wasn't. I wanted to scream at them "It's fiction, for goodness' sake!"

On the other hand I do feel a little sympathy for those critics. Some fiction has always had an agenda and served to promote the author's views. Uncle Tom's Cabin was intended to increase opposition to slavery and Conan Doyle wrote fiction promoting his belief in spiritualism. How is the reader supposed to know whether the story is an exercise in pure imagination, or is selling a point of view? So while I agree with Gopnik that literature exists in the realm of the hypothetical, maybe there's a bit more to it than that.