Nonfictioned to Death

In his piece “Why I Wrote The Seeker Academy as a Realistic Novel,” posted recently at Nimble Spirit, L. D. Gussin observes:

Nor is today’s secular art of much apparent use to counterculture forces that care most about political change. A member’s manual for The Network of Spiritual Progressives, an outgrowth of Tikkun Magazine, has a reading list for study groups that are pursuing a spiritualized politics. All sixty recommended books are nonfiction—there is no fiction, poetry, or drama. Yet a similar study group of a century ago would surely have been reading Dickens, Tolstoy, Ibsen, etc.

I sometimes feel as though I am being “nonfictioned” to death. Facts, opinions, punditry. Whether it’s CSPAN’s admirable BookTV, or the authors featured on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, nonfiction seems to be the star of the book show. And when that happens, the upshot often seems to be the kind of go-nowhere shouting match that’s been the stock-in-trade of talk radio since the 1980s and has spread like kudzu to the 24/7 news networks, public-access cable, and, no doubt, Memorial Day picnics and the local bus stop.

Come on. Tell me a story.

If you want, for example, to explore the faith/reason, sacred/secular dichotomy, you couldn’t do much better than to read Chet Raymo’s In the Falcon's Claw: A Novel of the Year 1000, in which an Irish monk accused of heresy for denying miracles faces a world in which end-of-millennium superstition rivals that of the lead-up to Y2K just a few years ago. It’s entertaining and instructive and will keep you turning the pages late into the evening.

But you can’t soundbite it. And Chet’s a nice guy who’s not really pushing an agenda; he’s exploring the world in all its complexity and nuance. He won't be likely to get into a shouting match on CNN or Fox News with James Dobson or Bill Donohue. So instead we get Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and their nonfiction cohorts versus the above-named and their cohorts.

It gets a little tiresome. Come on, tell me a story.

I’ve written elsewhere about how reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five when I was 16 influenced my worldview, especially around topics of war and peace and violence. And very little nonfiction can hold a candle to a Charles Dickens underdog like Nicholas Nickleby overcoming the machinations and abuses of his money-grubbing Uncle Ralph. Even the most well-intentioned action-item email from your favorite dot-org, on the left or the right, is not likely to get your dander up the way a good story will.

Stories take time. You might have to sit still for a while to take a story all in. You might have to hear it or read it twice or more. You might have to tell it yourself in order to see it more clearly.

Stories can be looked at from many angles, just as facts and statistics can be, but, unlike the latter, it’s tougher to make a story say what you wish it would say. A story sets its own terms and it won’t ring true if it’s manipulated for purposes other than its own. Religions are made from piles and piles of stories. Theologians and religious power-brokers like to whittle the stories down to dogmas and rules—the who, why, when, where, what of faith and spirituality—but they fail to do justice to the stories when they reduce them so. Jesus may very well “save”—who knows?—but the story of Jesus is sure as heck salvific.

Do yourself a favor. Tell someone a story.