When I was little, I was lead to believe that having artistic endeavors was an all right way to make a life. My generation is raised on the happy self-esteem concept that there was nothing you couldn't do. Everybody in the microcosm that was my high school was to be a professional athlete, a T.V show host, a legendary ballet dancer or just someone famous. Hey,if it could happen on television, it could happen to us, right?.
Unlike the boys of my town I quickly lost interest in pursuing hockey. From a very young age, staying home, watching the cartoons and later reading a book was a more attractive idea. My mother was the "I-Feed-Books-To-My-Son, Maybe-He'll-Read" kind. I am thankful today for that it was a turning point in my life. So I wanted to become a writer. My surrogate family, the Simpsons, were talking about Gore Vidal and re-enacting Edgar Allan Poe's poems on their show, so it couldn't be all that bad if you could end up on The Simpsons.
You can see where this is going. I grew up, and out of high school. The future professional hockey players became accountants, the future models became insurance agents and me, well I had to go to school and be serious too so I stored my pencils and enrolled in class to be a literature teacher. That was the next best thing, I could keep on reading those books I liked and be paid for it, what a sweet deal. The further I went in my studies, the most I was confronted to a single, but very good question: "What use is fiction?".
It's a question I asked over and over again and over the years and I had ZERO valuable answers. The easiest answer to sweep away is that it's escapism. That it's a way for mankind to put the breaks on reality and go back to the well to resource themselves. Neither it is fancy historical chronicles or starking mental pictures of an era. Perhaps the most insidious answer came from one of my teachers in college that said: "It has no proper use to speak of, unless it has a use to you". All of these answers are false. There is a use to fiction.
I just finished to watch The Wire (hence the display photo of Omar Little) and it hit me upon the head like this. Throughout the viewing of the series I kept asking myself: "Why do I like it so much?" and "Why is it so much more gripping that anything else on television?". I guess I needed a vacuum to understand why it was so important to have fiction anyway. For me, the vacuum was reality television.
What reality shows do is quite subtle in the greater scheme of things, but it allowed me to understand more about the mechanics of fiction. The point of reality TV is to reverse the power relationship of the viewing experience. The spectator doesn't sit still and watch the characters interact, but he is involved in the show like never before. He witnesses one of his peers go on television and be put in abnormal situation in order to provoke some outlandish behavior. This way, the participant is judged and the viewer is empowered, sometimes to the point of dictating the future of the contestant on the show. The viewer dictates what happens on television (to a certain extant) and not the opposite (the viewer getting told a pre-written story). The viewer becomes judge, jury and executioner.
What is to learn from a reality show though? Nothing, except maybe that it propels ordinary people into stardom for no apparent reason, so everybody wants to be a part of those (just ask Kate Gosselin). Fiction, on the other hand offers something, which became clear to me as I finished the last episode of Season 5 of The Wire. Ideas are vehiculed to the masses through the works of fiction. From the call to a political uprising to the simple, personal morals, fiction (novels, television shows, video games and mostly cinema) is a vehicle for what you're trying to say, so that everybody can reach. Think about it. When you try to explain a point to someone, isn't it easier with an example?
The Wire itself expresses how the American institutions cannot bend far enough to help on a mass level. That for every redeemed person, ten will die in misery. The Great Gatsby is a story of friendship and integrity. Weren't you, like me, disgusted by Daisy Buchanan? How could she have looked at herself in a mirror afterwards? Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and Fight Club are two testimonies of the collapse of the common ideals of the American Dream. They are angry, answers of writers that try to keep their humanity in this world they don't want to be a part of. Stephanie Meyer on the other hand wants young girls to submit to an abusive lover, saying it's OK as long as you love him.
Ideas are democratized through the works of fiction of a society. That's why reading is so important and that's why reading and writing fiction shouldn't be frowned upon or dismissed as mere escapism. There is a weight to your words and there is a pride that should be taken in being a fiction writer. I wish I didn't shy away from duty for so long, but I'm racing with great enthusiasm to make up for lost time. People have been writing fiction for thousands of years, in times of war, great disasters of whenever there was something more pressing to do. Why? Because it's pertinent, because human experience need to be put at a distance to be understood and appreciated to its fullest.
