Reading Fiction Again

'A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us'

‘No. You must read things that will help the world.’

‘Yes. I want to escape, if I’m honest.’

‘No. You must read things that will make you more intelligent.’

‘Yes. I want to commune with deep souls.’

‘No. You must read things that will advance your spiritual development.’

These are some of the stories I have in my head about reading fiction again, after a decade of consuming droves of psychology, self-help, criticism, theory, spirituality, history etc. As it turns out, I’ve got it back to front. Reading fiction will help the world, make you more intelligent, and advance your spiritual development.

I started out studying filmmaking for my BA before switching to literature (afraid I wasn’t going to get a ‘real job’ with a film degree - jokes on me). Though I find myself back on the film horse, I have no regrets about this decision to switch. I recall those days fondly. They were alive, stuffed with possibility. Literature played a huge role in this feeling. There was a sense of exploration, of communing in the realm of poiesis and metaphysics and of words that tasted good, felt good, felt true…

Life fizzed - me and my naive bunch of misfits were on the frontiers. Not of anything new, we were just like all the other indulgent 20-somethings existing on a diet of romance, bin-end red wine and clove cigarettes, when we could afford them (insufferable literary cliches, I know). We would sit in the university cafe drinking Guinness and talk about Kerouac, Vonnegut, and Pynchon like we were onto something. At the risk of sounding somewhat tepid and sentimental, we were inspired. And it showed.

I wrote my dissertation on 1984 and Brave New World, not knowing that what I thought was fiction would later come to pass as real. I had an inkling something was up with society, but it was just an inkling. These were the days before my consciousness had really taken residence in me. I was discovering my agency, slowly, through reading fiction and through relating with others who were reading fiction. I had a particular fascination with dystopian literature… The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, Slaughterhouse Five, Animal Farm, A Clockwork Orange… I wanted to know why humans wrote these things and what they meant. It transpired that they meant an awful lot.

When I started out in ‘cultural activism’ a decade ago (still looking for a better description), everything changed. These stories became terrifyingly real. The romance of being a literature student was unceremoniously crushed by the reality of trying to forge a meaningful life inside the plasticine world, where every-fucking-thing gives you cancer, climate breakdown is very much real, and people can be, it turns out, pretty-fucking-nefarious. ‘Welcome to the real world,’ people would say. ‘Time to get your head out of the clouds,’ they’d carry on. Despite this, there was a sense of familiarity - I had read about these things in stories (and experienced my fair share, if there is such a thing, of tragedy in my own life).

A pile of books in the Gometra barn

Reality check aside, something else changed. ‘Being in service to life’ meant being better. And what did ‘being better’ mean? It meant being smarter, working harder, and knowing everything about everything. It meant ‘personal development’, seemingly infinite regression into the self, and an assault on every modicum of trauma I’d ever experienced. It meant finding people smarter than me who wrote books about the state of the world. It meant getting into the intellectual boxing ring and throwing ‘theories of change’ around. It meant being more enlightened and more moral than those ‘sheeple’. Living became a self-improvement project. With knowing came narcissism, not wisdom.

Words took on a different role. They weren’t about beauty or truth or imagination anymore. They were utilitarian, designed to convince (of another kind of truth). Of course, I didn’t realise any of this, and it’s not entirely black and white, because at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing, and maybe I was. There was a potent sense of purpose. I congregated with yet more naive misfits in the hopes that we would save the world by saving ourselves. If we were the outcome of a sick culture, could we reverse engineer it all and remedy the culture by ‘doing inner work’?

Reading fiction felt like an indulgent escape into other worlds when it was this world we needed to focus on. Out went the novels, in came the non-fiction. It’s what the activist-philosophers would write, so surely it was wise to read this stuff? Well, yes, in part. I’m not dissing anyone here – there’s some truly world-changing non-fiction out there. But I can’t help but wonder, what would happen if our wisest minds put more of their energy into reading and writing fiction?

I just finished reading a novel. It’s the first I’ve read in years. It’s unpublished, written by a friend (an activist-philosopher of sorts, too). It was a long and complicated novel and at times a drag (sorry my love!). But it was phenomenal. I can’t remember the last time I stayed up until the small hours turning the pages of a book like this. It was about the world at large, yet was so deeply personal. Big ideas mixed with descriptions of feelings so precise and amorphous in the same breath that they left me dizzy with intimacy. The novel got at something in a way most books (especially non-fiction) don’t. There was this sense of the uncanny, ‘an expression of the beauty of existence, but the way it goes wrong’, an ‘exaltation to courage’… It unsettled me. It caused me to question my sources of meaning, my relationships… It was tragic and beautiful and raw and mundane and savage and erotic and disturbing and human. I rarely find this in non-fiction.

We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. - Kafka