Fiction as Antidote

I’ve been thinking about how the power of fiction lies in its capacity to override unknowability, dissolve the boundaries of separateness, and control the potency of impermanence by means of make believe. Let’s hear it for the make believe ballroom. The majesty of unknowability is my gospel and mortality is its chapter and verse. When we stretch out on our new IKEA sectional to watch Somebody Somewhere or the occasional sporting event, Frank mentions that we are getting so much use out of it that we’ll have to replace the cover at some point. But then he adds, we probably won’t live that long and we laugh with impish delight at this shared recognition, a kind of conspiracy. We have no idea whether our lifespans will outlast the life of the upholstery.

Nothing that is really worth knowing can be known. Birth and death, motherhood, pain, love….these processes, these encounters are beyond the capacity of the rational mind. They can only be captured fleetingly in dreams and in art.

Like most people, I playact through my days, pretending to know what’s going on. But sometimes my dreams become nightmares and I need to revisit unknowability in an intentional way like making a reservation at a favorite restaurant or maybe more like driving to the ocean, wading in tentatively to allow the shock of the cold water to meet the warmth of my body. We all have a natural resistance to unknowability. I find myself reluctant to jump in, fearful of losing my bearings, my footing. I want to stand on solid ground, cheerfully deluded by my fixed apprehension of things, what I have convinced myself that I know. But the fact is, I don’t know jack.

Photo by Gautam Arora on Unsplash

In the category of things that can be known, I’m stuck with the capital of Nebraska, my shoe size and the name of the wife of my first cousin once removed. I am bored to distraction and sometimes enraged by these limitations. What interests me is the pain of a Nebraska farmer no longer able to pay the bank. What interests me is the miracle of walking on the earth in those shoes and what animal gave her life for them. And what interests me is what went through the mind of Adele, said cousin’s wife, when she took her last breath. I can’t know these things. When I reach out to grasp them, I find myself lost in the fog of unknowability, face to face with the illusion of a separate self, the reluctance to accept the truth of impermanence. I find myself reaching, sometimes frantically, for fleeting memories of a past already washed away by the tide of the next minute in time. I want so much to hold onto it, to hold on to life. Who I am, where I am, what I am, but that’s not how it works.

This is where fiction makes such a valuable contribution. If I were writing a story about Adele as she wasted away in her bedroom on Riverside Drive, I would imagine the overstuffed furniture, the chintz drapes, even the words she spoke as she lay dying. “I wanted children,” Adele whispered, a single tear rolling down her cheek. “I didn’t want another fur coat, I wanted children.” It’s easier to be empathic when you encounter someone on the page. For one thing, you have more information than you could possibly have off book. Within hours of meeting Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse which I read recently, you know that she’s ambivalent about her husband and aware that people think she’s beautiful. But you also know that she feels called upon to keep the peace in the household and manage everyone else’s affairs. Her influence is domestic. You know her in a way that I could never know Adele. Additionally, if you tire of any characters, you can put them down on the night table and, crucially, they don’t talk back. You are not called upon to be your best self when you’re reading. You are allowed to be selfish, delighting in characters who are frivolous or mean-spirited provided they entertain and enlighten. Anna Karenina can die on you and come back to life repeatedly every time you re-read her. You have infinite opportunities to get it right.

Fiction is a blessed reprieve from the daily struggle with unknowability. It has evolved with enormous generosity to give us the opportunity to pretend, to experiment with partial understanding, to die and be reborn.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.