Fictional Realities
What are the realities of fiction, in this or any other time?
Do they have to do with the reality of the author’s goals, the work of crafting something to realize those goals?
Or the “realities” of the author’s world, which influence whatever he seeks to express?
Or is the very phrase “realities of fiction” a contradiction in terms, since nothing in fiction is real?
And the correct answer, for this essay at least, comes down to “all of the above.”
Obviously, it’s a platitude to say that every author’s fictional works are informed by his perception of the real world, whether he advocates changing that world or keeping things as they are. But one could say the exact same thing about an author who produces non-fictional works. So what’s the difference, if any, between the activity of making fiction and that of making non-fiction?
The simplest difference goes like this:
With non-fiction, the author makes a proposition regarding the lives of real people—past, present, or future– and attempts to support it with evidence.
With fiction, the author makes a proposition regarding the lives of mostly made-up people but may choose to support his proposition through a variety of strategies. These strategies may include the sort of evidence used by the non-fiction author. But it’s far more frequent that the fiction author supports his propositions by encouraging audiences to identify with the unreal lives of his made-up people.
My identification with the lives of made-up people was the reason I had generally “liberal” politics in my younger days. I’m sure I was exposed to a certain amount of non-fictional persuasion about this or that aspect of reality.
Yet whether I read comics or “real” books, or watched plays, movies or television shows, I found most propositions carried more resonance when one saw them “acted out” with characters who were innately unreal. And on the whole, I think the majority of Americans are more persuaded by fiction than by non-fiction.
But there’s a caveat about using fiction to make points about reality, and that caveat was best expressed by the Roman author Horace, when he wrote about what he called “poets” (by which he meant creators of fiction in any form):
“The poet wishes to benefit or to please, or to be pleasant or helpful at the same time.”
This could be seen as the ancient Roman’s anticipation of the Mary Poppins advice that a spoonful of sugar (i.e., something that’s pleasing) would help in the assimilation of a necessary sour medicine (i.e., something that’s beneficial and necessary). And that was usually the formula I saw enacted in the popular entertainment of my youth.
An example from the comics medium would be 1970’s GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW. This series reeled off a litany of liberal concerns about capitalism, racism, overpopulation and many other concerns. However, I feel sure I became invested in the comic because writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams gave the superhero readers some of the things they expected, such as spectacular fight-scenes and last-ditch rescues.
I didn’t change my politics because of comics specifically. Still, comics provided a medium where it was easy to see the influence of “Progressive Liberals,” as well as their method of getting across their messages. That method was one in which the writers and artists strove to avoid delivering anything “pleasing” when making their various cultural or ethical arguments. Indeed, pleasure seems to be viewed as a distraction from the messages.
In the Horace quote above, the author admits that it’s POSSIBLE for a “poet” to focus only on seeking to “benefit” his readers. That said, that strategy might have worked well in ancient Rome, but it doesn’t today. The single-minded desire to “benefit” readers is the thing most characteristic of modern comics-writers.
The creators who came into their own in the past fifteen years seem totally divorced from the very idea of providing “pleasure.” What I’ve usually encountered amounts to humorless lectures and virtue signaling.
No signature example stands out, though I will note a parallel to my GREEN LANTERN example in the climax of the CAPTAIN MARVEL movie, where the script allows the audience to think they’re going to see a rousing fistfight between the heroine and her main adversary. Instead, the Captain Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken just blasts her foe, because she supposedly has nothing to prove.
And such is one of the “realities” of fiction; if you can’t figure out a way to make your medicine go down in a pleasing manner, it probably won’t go down at all. Not that I’m sorry to see the Progressives fail in their inflated goals, while the majority of comics readers turn to manga for their satisfaction. But I guess there’s a part of me still invested in all the “unreal people” I knew in my youth, since I still hate seeing them go broke so that their writers can claim to be woke.
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