Marilynne Robinson writes, “Two questions I can’t really answer about fiction are (1) where it comes from, and (2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute. There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell.”
The whole article (in the Chronicle of Higher Education) is fantastic. So many wonderful quotables outside of that excerpted above. For instance:
The tendency of the schools of thought that have claimed to be most impressed by science has been to deny the legitimacy of the kind of statement it cannot make, the kind of exploration it cannot make. And yet science itself has been profoundly shaped by that larger bias toward irony, toward error, which has been the subject of religious thought since the emergence of the stories in Genesis that tell us we were given a lavishly beautiful world and are somehow, by our nature, complicit in its decline, its ruin. Science cannot think analogically, though this kind of thinking is very useful for making sense and meaning out of the tumult of human affairs.
We have given ourselves many lessons in the perils of being half right, yet I doubt we have learned a thing. Sophocles could tell us about this, or the book of Job. We all know about hubris. We know that pride goeth before a fall. The problem is that we don’t recognize pride or hubris in ourselves, any more than Oedipus did, any more than Job’s so-called comforters. It can be so innocuous-seeming a thing as confidence that one is right, is competent, is clear-sighted, or confidence that one is pious or pure in one’s motives.
As the disciples said, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus replied, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible,” in this case speaking of the salvation of the pious rich. It is his consistent teaching that the comfortable, the confident, the pious stand in special need of the intervention of grace. Perhaps this is true because they are most vulnerable to error—like the young rich man who makes the astonishing decision to turn his back on Jesus’s invitation to follow him, therefore on the salvation he sought—although there is another turn in the story, and we learn that Jesus will not condemn him. I suspect Jesus should be thought of as smiling at the irony of the young man’s self-defeat—from which, since he is Jesus, he is also ready to rescue him ultimately.
I found a quote from GK Chesterton once. Paraphrasing, “Literature is a luxury. Fiction, a necessity.”
That’s a curious quote. Was he just criticizing cultural elitism?
I’m not sure one can say he was “just” criticizing cultural elitism, but he consistently defended the vital importance of the value common cockney blokes got from literature against the sort of jaded upper-class who can’t remember what it’s like to gleefully leap into a book, just for fun. I think he would consider literature a subset of fiction, however. Certainly he was a big fan of Doestoevski, Dickens, &c. (even Chaucer, though for the wrong reasons).
But his point is that critics get it backwards. Civilization can get along just fine without Yeats or Doestoevski; it can’t survive without humans sitting around a campfire swapping tales, or trading stories at the local pub. A lot of Chesterton’s words are spent defending not some supposed great and magnificent pinacle of civilization, but the fundamental building blocks of culture. I think it’s a healthy perspective. One of the reasons I keep coming back to Chesterton is his ability to strip life down to its joyous, unjaded fundamentals. Again and again, life comes down to people interacting joyously with people, and with God.
(Incidentally, I think this is why Chesterton was so much more of a vehement protester of Imperialism than, say, C.S. Lewis. For Chesterton, the people of South Africa told stories and carried on love affairs and lived and died and fought just like the English; the only thing imperialism could possibly bring to them of any value was Christianity, and he already saw that gunpoint conversions generally didn’t do anyone any good, and he knew that the British Empire would rather launch a war for profit than any religious crusade. His high-culture friends generally had a much more worshipful view of high culture, and of England’s destiny to uplift the Savage Races to their level.)