It’s a common source of bafflement to many sermonizers that anybody reads fiction at all. Why should they bother themselves about a pack of lies? Why should they distract themselves from pious books which offer facts by reading tales about people who never existed or if they did walk the Earth were considerably less interesting than poets have made them? As Shakespeare says, who’s he to Hecuba? One of the troubles with this classic argument offered by Jeremy Taylor is that what an age considers to be non-fiction often turns out to be fantasy.  Taylor was thinking that this could never happen to the Bible. He had no augury that  German scholars were going to claim most  of it was fiction two centuries later.

            Taylor’s argument is mirrored in an odd way in Oscar Wilde’s amusing essay: The Decay Of Lying. Wilde says that Art offers a way to escape the commonplace. In his comedic turns Wilde implies that Nature is not as worthy of his attention as imaginative worlds conjured in words by very inventive people. In another essay Wild says that Nature often copies Art, at least as much as Art’s apes Nature. It’s of course a kind of upside down reflection on Aristotle’s dictum that Art mirrors Nature. This argument has rich roots in ancient philosophy.

            Whether Creation is good as the Bible says, or a collection of tepid and sorry banalities as Wilde suggests certainly is the basis of some religious controversy over the millennia. Hillel was known as a man who always accepted his fortune. He engineered the limitations of the human will and assumed there was justice, sometimes ineluctable,  in what came his way outside his aegis. Koheleth and the authors of the Book of Jonah and Job advise one not to question the designs of Creation or its Creator. Wilde not only doesn’t find Creation justifiable but praises those who create artifice that seems to exist in a superior world.

            Sometimes what seems to be pure invention  turns out to be fact. In H.P. Lovecraft’s story Pickman’s Model a follower of a great Artist known for his imaginative depictions of monsters follows the Artist into a subterranean cave and discovers Pickman has merely been rendering real creatures. Conversely much of what was called fact even two centuries ago has been relegated by subsequent explorers of truth to be pious fantasy.

            In practice human beings  do both a lot of lying and telling of  truths. They don’t find such seemingly cloven enterprises inconsistent with  themselves and their polyhedrons character. As much as Thucydides complained that poets lie if the truth were to be told about human history we might have to take a very long snooze or be elsewhere to avoid such tedious testimony.     Moreover, I doubt very much everybody in Greece was as articulate and clever as Thucydides himself claimed people in his history were.  I wasn’t in Greece at the time but I find it dubious that the subtle characters Thucydides quartos were all such subtle adepts at turns of debate and argument. I will accept that the leaders of Greece and its republics were much superior to our own inarticulate stalwarts in Congress. One does hear a high level of discourse if one take in the English parliament today as a  spectator. It’s  possible the ancient Greeks were just as good or better.

            When I ask people why they read fiction they said tautologically that they like it, or, after a bit of reflection,  remark that is more interesting than life, preferable as an amusement than most live people uttering their shameless banalities. That is a good  if superficial answer. We really can’t objectify what anyone finds valuable in anything or anybody. Whatever is interesting or valuable to some people  is tedium and dross for others.

            Reading about things that never happened and people who nerve existed  as a past time does heighten our vulnerability  to anything that might be happening in the real world from dragons to poisoned chocolates and limit our capacity to enjoy the world’s  felicities. Apparently for some people who love reading the real world isn’t much of a competitor to fiction. 

            My own theory is that it doesn’t matter whether whatever one reads in a book is fact or fiction. If the substance in a book we value is some kind of moral parable or bit of secular or metaphysical wisdom we humans will take it in very well in the form of fictional discourse. It doesn’t mean that the sermon or moral hidden in a tale is the whole of the blessing within reading such matter. Edgar Allen Poe sometimes wrote out baldly the point of a few of his tales in his Marginalia. We wouldn’t want to lose the grace ,elegance and invention of his tales  and come away only with his quod erat demonstrandums.

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            This hub of parable is more obvious in the Bible, Voltaire or Shelley than in  let us say, Robert E. Howard or Carl Ashton smith. Moreover some authors are better at writing elegantly about the surface of life than delving into any hermetic subcutaneous beneath a gaudy exterior. Part of the  magic attractiveness of homer’s Iliad or many of Tolstoy’s wonderfully argued stories is the surprising turns in a discourse that at first seems to be in an elaborate Ciceronian manner going utterly the other way. 

            One can take that way of thinking with its rather narrow presumption that fiction is a sheathed bit of Ciceronian polemic or has the emotional content of a menu at a greasy spoon diner, and ask oneself if one is an author what sort of fare is one offering a reader that has such Voltarian use of extended parable to offer its wisdom. If I look at my own work I can see very well that if I never lacked for substance my talent at writing a seemingly casually beautiful sentence after much labor was much stronger than my knowledge of the world. The only two writers I can think of that had the intellectual power to astound us all before he was twenty were Rimbaud and Keats.

            Music for some reason can produce performing wunderkinds that literature cannot. Music may take more talent than writing. Outside of Mozart, nobody ever wrote a great piece of music until he was twelve. Even Mendelssohn waited until he was twelve to produce his first masterpiece.    Shakespeare’s extraordinary narrative poems he wrote at 23 suggest he might have been equally precocious. Nobody  is that great and wise without a lot of talent and hard work. Even God took six days to produce Creation. 

            Shakespeare himself Inferentially testifies to that season in his early  life in the Tempest when he describes himself as too involved in reading to notice he was being betrayed by people in his family. Still after one takes a few beatings, is put out in a storm like Lear,  and recognize some supposed self evident reality as illusion one has more to say after twenty five than under it. The most deep if not always the most brilliant writing in litterateur usually comes to an author between 27 and 60. After 60 years of life one might be experience more weariness with existence than is good for one’s talent.

            I suspect that sometimes writers like Voltaire and Poe thought of the substance of their discourse first in a pithy way, then proceeded to invent extended fictions that demonstrated their initial idea. Poe  says as much in his Philosophy of Composition. He claims great Art can be produced by such purely intellectual procedures. Frankly I always thought Poe wrote The Raven in a different way. I suspected he heard a pet talking raven, which like corvids can both talk and think, and took up the observable phenomena as a metaphor first, the intellectual part of his narrative later. Since Poe says otherwise I defer to his own explanation of how he made that poem.

            I can testify that my own ideas always some from images that produce  a small epiphany in which I say to myself:”That’s a great idea for a poem or story.” I don’t extend any intellectual discourse in a Euclidean way at all at first; I try to unravel the garbled version or mysterious inner content of some image or sound. It’s like somebody peeling an onion. Almost always  my instant intuition is much faster than my  powers of extension by taking up some Aristotelian propulsive deduction. For years I carried a notebook in my pocket to write down the epiphany enough so that I could take up its expansions from such pithy nuts later when I was home and alone with a typewriter.

            In such a situation one does wonder what might happen if I never got an initial idea. When I was young I would sometime play music of a sublime character to open the sluices of my spirit to such murky intuitions. I’ve gotten many of my ideas in the half sleep before waking. I  don’t have the gift of many writers like Thomas Wolfe who seem to always be worth reading if later on one wonders what fare he had offered that was in the moment as fascinating as it was.

            Like actors whom we find magnetic even when they read the telephone book, we sense that people like Thomas Wolfe are inspired with some eerie intuition that is probably pretty close in a coarse way to the one that offers us our own sources for our work. We sense talent or closeness to divine or eerie worlds in some murky way that currently remain inexplicable t o us. I’ve always from childhood divided writers into two categories: seers and those who are merely clever. Some are on more civil terms with their muses than others.

            The more one writes autobiographically and a clef as Wolfe did, the more one loses a detached sense of what might be valuable to a reader who doesn’t know who Wolfe is and never has been in North Carolina. It’s why these kinds of writers usually producer  books not notable for  unobtrusive brevity and pithiness.  As long as one is inventing everything like Stanley G. Weinbaum’s  notion of Venus, one can control  what might be interesting in a generic way to a variety of readers  in a way  that one can’t when one is wailing abut lost spirits one cherished as Wolfe does.

            We accept a lot of falsification in our novels and plays that allow us to enjoy the supposedly savagely recidivist felicities Wilde praises. We never deride Shakespeare for giving various historical figures from Julius Caesar to English kings Shakespeare’s own wonderful run of genius in their speech. Wilde is right in one sense; we don’t want to deprive ourselves of the talents of  somebody like Shakespeare putting  his wit at the service of people who lacked it. We do have seven books of Julius Caesar, all of which suggest Caesar was disinterested in such fancy or incapable of anything Shakespeare’s run of language.

            I can say after writing many historical plays  that part of the craft is to disguise how much beneath the surface idiosyncratic style one gives such actors how much of their dialogue and even their character is foaled by one’s own invention. It’s necessary to be selective about what qualities one wants to portray in characters who were physical and mortal actors in history. One doesn’t want them to be too disputed, too unreflective, too inconsistent, too disgusting. One wants to make even one’s avatars of evil charming as Shakespeare made Richard Third.

            A writer often has to give his talent to kings, priests, and heroes who might have lacked his gifts because he wants to persuade his audience he isn’t quite as inventive as he is. The essential lie in al fiction is that people are more interesting than they are in real life. Another one is that some mortal action can produce a decisive resolution. Those of us who invoke the Aristotelian designs of exposition, development and resolution, with some degree of reversal and an end to the action are in a deep way always working to distract their audience from their nearly psychotic neglect of  observable reality.

            Sometimes this can frustrate a writer. In my one attempt in the long form to write a novel a clef I couldn’t help make may models for the story more interesting at least to me then they were. It annoyed me. Yet Art if it can do many intrepid things can never equal the talent of Creation itself for an egregious ooze of banality, a great flood of tedium and triviality. Many narratives have orbited around rudder of its characters because violent death is a resolution  of a severe sort we find rarely in our life if it satisfies a longing in us for neat conclusions we don’t come across  too often in the physical world.

            In life we mostly have to be content with short term harvests of boons and atrocities and then long term ones, often at a remarkable polarity. Resolutions  of actions in our pesky reality lead to new situations, unknown dilemmas and woes, improbable benefices. A book that mirrored such a reality would have no beginning or end.

            It is true as Aristotle says that Art uses the furniture of the real world to mount its fictions. Yet Aristotle’s example of a perfect work of Art, Oedipus Tyrranos, states very clearly in its first lines that it is a parable of human circumstance in all times and places. Aristotle, one of a very analytical bent, never takes up that side of that play. He never investigates what sort of invention Sophocles brought to the tragedy.

            If one honors Sophocles’ own testimony, Oedipus’ experience  resonates to all humanity because we all share an inability to apply our will and virtues to influence our fortune. If our experiences didn’t have the metaphorical hub we would never have the fiction that generalizes from them. A totally singular experience would be inexplicable to us.

            Its metaphorical power like one of Aesop’s pithy fables resonates in us all the more deeply because we are not Oedipus, not the gleaner from Corinth whose terrible specific harvest is his fate. We often have to be content with more ordinary woes.  The power of such a tale is that it is both sensational as man bites dog journalism and yet banal.     

            Many writers in America in the last century with the musical ability to produce a graceful sentence often worked in the bottom galleys of genre fiction. Some like John P. Marquand also did straight social realism novels. 

            One of the shibboleths of the 20^th century had been that invention such as Wilde valued should be replaced by information that mirrored the real world. It produced the genre we call realism and such writers as Zola, Dreiser, Farrell and so on. Even Wolfe and Kerouac write realism if there is plainly more to those authors than their testimony about their lives in some coded form. It’s very rare that any writer has an interesting life. He’s too busy in a hermitage putting words on blank pieces of paper. 

            The two main fields of this kind of genre writer, mysteries and science fiction  call upon the invention of the more self involved authors like  Wolfe, Kerouac never aimed for. In fact one of the pleasures of  this sort of fiction is that the reader and writer are almost conscious partners is the concoction of the production of some fantastical  souffle.  Such focus on pure invention understandably makes writing in long forms more easy.

            Characters based too fully on people one has known tend to take on their own life in fictions one hoped would be more translatable into  a story. Yet one of the ineluctable talents of Wolfe and Kerouac is to make us interested in seemingly almost real people about whom one can’t say at all why they are mysteriously fetching in some way to oneself. It might be that the competition in real life is so faint that we will accept Wolfe’s and Kerouac’s fascination with anybody.  

            My own feeling is that we cheat ourselves out of understanding what is happening to us in the reading experience if we think we are taking in information in fiction like a savoring a recipe or a train schedule. There are forms of Art like movies or video games that try as much as they can to offer their audience as much precise physical phenomena as possible in an hard edged objective way. It’s mostly visual and auditory stuff but the direction is to produce a scientific and absolutely clearly defined Art much as John von Neumann might have hoped for when he translated as much of the physical world as he could into mathematical formulae.

            It’s not true about either literature or music. Both are at least half a magical conjuring of worlds invented by the audience as much as the author. Music, which Mallarme felt was a purer form of literature, doesn’t even have any cues beyond an occasional bird warbling or bells clanging to mirror the phenomenal world.

            When the fashion for trying to make Art into a science abates we are going to have to admit it involves many central elements abut which we know nothing.