Of the many different genres of books, the one I love most are fictional stories, with made-up characters inhabiting made-up worlds, authors taking license to create powerful action. For me, reading a novel suspends time and allows me to experience the inner workings of another human. It is a radically subjective experience. For the empiricists reading this, research has confirmed that reading fiction increases levels of empathy, but great literature cannot be reduced to its instrumental value, and one should probably not go in search of books to devour for the sole purpose of becoming more empathetic.
Though I read in solitude does not mean that fiction isolates me. Fiction is always a collective endeavor. Novels reflect the people who make up a society and their aspiration for a feeling of unity. When Nick Carraway is narrating his encounters with the tortured Gatsby, or when Meursault is indifferent in retelling his murder of an unnamed Arab on an Algerian beach, they were pushing me to try and better understand human beings, who, like myself, are imperfect and contradictory creatures. This aspiration for universal understanding is why fictional novels break loose conventional stories and travel to far-flung territories where they move all sorts of people.
The irony of fictional novels is that they are dressed-up lies (different word) with one crucial caveat: Unlike most lies, novels attempt to reach some fundamental truth that our newsfeeds could probably never match. People of all types have long debated the question: what is the purpose of stories? To me, the purpose of stories is to ask and attempt to answer the question of what it means to be human—a question implanted in our skulls from birth, asked by sages, answered by prophets, and explored by novelists.
Even our holy books take on novelistic forms; they are filled with stories of people wrestling with questions of good, evil, justice, morality. They inspire and require readers to use their imaginations and interpretive abilities to understand the messages they contain. Humans work in stories, and the prophets of the holy books were storytellers communicating their version of the universe.
Novels allow me to reimagine what is possible for my society regardless of what the establishment, the elite, the status quo, or the powerful, think. Few art forms can fill me with the anxiety of living in a totalitarian outpost under the watchful eye of an all-powerful dictatorship the way Orwell’s 1984 does—written, incidentally, the same year Kim il-Sung established his racist party-state of North Korea. To read Toni Morrison allowed me to witness to the daily violence (but also the boundless love) of African-American life pre and post-emancipation. Morrison’s books forced me to imagine what is impossible even in the abstract. What would it be like to live in a society that condemned me before I was born? A society that would turn my grandparents into disposable property and my parents into untouchables? And to still find light and warmth between the cracks, how would that feel?
Finally, there is something to be said about novels in relation to totalitarianism, an ideology which seeks to obliterate competing narratives and alternative history. It attempts to vanquish the human experience while trying to resurrect a perfect glory around a monopolized truth. There is a good reason why Sir Thomas More’s term, utopia, actually means nowhere. Imagination and memory, and the instinctual desire to find moral lessons in experiences—these are human qualities, not even the most repressive state can extinguish. In communist circles not too long ago, to challenge the official consensus of what the past was and what it meant to be labeled a ‘counter-revolutionary.’ Yet people resisted and subverted this, very often on the threat of death. Why? Because remembering and retelling one’s version of events is as natural as breathing, even amidst violence and chaos.
So, what have novels taught me about life? They taught me that reality is ambiguous, that human beings are fallible and are guided by basically the same instincts and insecurities. They showed me that we are all capable of depravity but also heroism. They remind me that there is always time for humor and that my life is by definition absurd, so I might as well laugh as I go along. Perhaps more than anything else, novels paint me a picture of the complex humanity of characters negotiating between hope and hatred, lust and love, integration and resistance, and get me inside someone else’s head to experience a reality that is, as the name of the form suggests, completely novel.