More linkage today! I’ve got two different articles I want to post, though, and I think they’re both important enough to really recommend reading them, so instead of cramming them both into one post, I’ll make two posts out of it and hope that, despite what this blog’s stats reports typically indicate, people will click the links and read the articles!
Today, we have yet another article linked by Jeffrey Overstreet at Looking Closer. This time it was a blog post by Abraham Piper at Desiring God, and as is typically the case when I link, it’s on a subject near and dear to my heart. The title of Piper’s post is “How Is Fiction True and Valuable?” and it quotes liberally from Flannery O’Connor, whose viewpoints I am intrigued by, even though I know very little about them. Check it out; it’s pretty short, actually.
In a nutshell, I appreciate Piper’s (and O’Connor’s) perspective that art does not have to be explicitly “Christian” to be true or even to express qualities of God. Fiction has much to tell us, even without growing didactic. That’s partly why I love fiction and fantasy so much; not just for its escapist qualities, but because sometimes it can be bigger, more admirable, and more real than things in the “real” world. C.S. Lewis knew this and evoked it as he wrote The Last Battle. Even children’s stories such as The Velveteen Rabbit recognize the power that imagination has over the real. There is much that can be gleaned experientially through good fiction and the power of imagination that is far more powerful and real than anything taught through facts and figures. (Why do you suppose Jesus used parables?)
I think this ties in well with the post from Orson Scott Card on Harry Potter that I referenced recently…
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
That’s what the Harry Potter series did for me and for millions of others. We know it’s only fiction; but the best fiction is true in many ways. It is true morally…, it is true with a powerful internal logic, it is true in its assertions about human nature.
Above all, though, it is true because it was so powerfully created in my mind that it now lives in my memory with a vividness that the “real” world only occasionally approaches.
The elitists are such boneheads they think literature exists to be admired. Wrong. Literature exists to create memories so true and important that we allow them to become part of ourselves, shaping our future actions because we remember that once someone we admired did this, and someone we hated and feared did that.
Literature matters only to the degree that it shapes and changes human behavior by making the audience wish to be better because they read it.
It becomes importantly bad only to the degree that it entices the audience to revel in actions and memories that debase the culture that embraces it.
Next to that, questions of how one literary work influences other literary works, or how the manner of writing measures up to the tastes of some elite group are so trivial that you marvel that someone who went to college could ever think they mattered more.
