Saying truth with wrong facts

Reading a work of fiction means reading someone’s imagination.  Do some people consider it a waste of time? Is it profitable in any way? We know that mankind was always obsessed with stories. He loved to read about other people. We like to imagine things we ourselves haven’t experienced. We like to live as many lives as possible.  Now the point is,  we are coming to the realization that reading fiction helps us to understand the human mind better than any social science book. Writer  Nassim Nicholas Taleb says,

Fiction is a certain packaging of truth or higher truth. There is more truth in Proust than in the babbling analysis of the New York Times. ……. newspapers lie with right facts: a novelist says the truth with wrong facts.

This observation is profound. Perhaps, Taleb emphasizes what every reader of fiction realize.  Any reader of a  work of fiction will vouch for the many ways in which the author help him/ her to understand the complex human relationships, emotions, conditions etc.

In this write-up,  let me invite you to an interesting essay where the author attempts a comparison of ancient fiction versus modern fiction as far as the depiction of feelings is concerned.   Here, of course, one can disagree with the author who goes on to argue that ancient fiction contained mostly narration of facts as compared to complex analysis of human emotions in modern fiction.  Many of us are however familiar with a number of texts from the ancient world which did treat human emotions deeply. According to the author,

 the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous.

Leaving the argument whether ancient fictions were just facts or more,  aside, we reach the interesting conclusion that, reading fiction adds to the social intelligence of people. The author discusses the many experiments which are being done to link the mentalizing skills of people with the kind of books they read.  While admitting that, establishing clear linkages between people ’s social intelligence and reading habits may be an arduous task, such experiments make sense anyway.  It may perhaps help us hugely in suggesting texts for children so that they pick up life skills and in understanding the larger role of literature in shaping human minds. We can ask some interesting questions to us also. What are our primary motives while reading fiction?  How those books perhaps helped us in resolving our dilemmas?  The link to this interesting essay by Julie Sedivy in www.nautil.us  is given below.

http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-doesnt-ancient-fiction-talk-about-feelings-rp