The Importance of Fiction: A Defense Against an Overdose of Non-Fiction

There are days when I feel a little worse than usual (more boring, more anxious, more stupid), so I review my habits. Am I sleeping less? No, it doesn’t. Am I eating badly? As usual. I don’t do sports? Not now, not never. By elimination, I end up reaching the same conclusion that I have reached on other occasions. What happens to me is that non-fiction has gone too far and I miss a bit of narrative, fiction, imagination and conflict in my body. Too much information makes me sad.

I admit it, there are times in my life when I only read an essay, and when I do, I end up looking in the mirror and seeing myself grey, wrinkled, bored. So I put a couple of novels on the menu (and the odd little classic movie) and the joys of living come back to me. There was a time when I thought I liked the beach, until I discovered that what was probably happening to me was that it was the only time of the year when I went back to the little horror or science fiction novels of my adolescence. That was what made me feel good, not scorch in the sun.

Essay is a sign of maturity, like buying a car or growing a beard

Even so, there are many people who only read essays and who would not approach a fiction book in life, nor do adolescents who, out of rebellion, stop watching animated films (adults have less problems with animation film because precisely being an adult is that, don’t care about everything). They don’t have time for cartoons because they have enough to understand the complex reality. It is frowned upon to fantasize, because they think that all fiction is fantasy, when sometimes it is more real than reality.

There are people so, so sad, that they only read nonfiction. I say people for don’t say men, because we are usually men. I don’t know any woman who only reads essays (although a friend qualifies this impression and tells me that there are many women who go through that phase “to get guys to like them” until they get fed up). The essay is a sign of maturity, like buying a car or growing a beard. I have done it myself in some season. Because? I guess insecurity. I was starting to work as a journalist and I had the feeling that I didn’t know everything, so the best way to hide my shortcomings was by devouring 450-page bills (there are many 450-page essays) on different pressing current issues that today no one remembers.

Those trials produced an effect on me similar to eating three hamburgers at a fast food chain. An occasional satisfaction when I read them (how smart I am!), an intoxication after hours (I don’t remember anything I’ve read!) and, finally, a certain existentialist unease (Is this all that life has in store for me?). It’s not something that happens to me with the novel, which even at its worst, provides the intimate peace of mind of knowing that there are human beings out there. I no longer remember what happened in March 1937 in the Spanish Civil War, but I do remember how Nastenka rejected the nameless narrator of White Nights.

Part of this dissatisfaction could be attributed to the fact that, let’s face it, there are a lot of very bad essays out there. Or worse yet, very redundant. A classic model of Anglo-Saxon essayism is to present a thesis that can be summarized, and in fact, is summarized in the first twenty pages, to be declined over and over again over the next 400 pages. Well that: like him carbonara pasta dish that tastes so good at the first prick and that, five minutes later, it becomes a ball.

People who only read essays tend to upload photos of their barbecues to social networks

Something similar happens with documentaries. There are people who only watch movies or series from the Marvel Universe and others who only watch movies or documentary series, which is basically the same thing. These documentaries belong to their own cinematic universe: they recount in great detail a forgotten historical episode in a lost country that we don’t care much for, but which is a very appropriate topic for discussion at the dinner of the day. Have you seen that sect’s documentary? You have to see that sect’s documentary.

The profile of people who only consume essays or documentaries is very similar. For some reason, it’s similar to people who upload photos to Instagram eating stew or having a barbecue, buying a big car or sharing a song from extreme hard why that was music. Or that they open a Twitter account in which they are called “Commercial Law Spain”, as that which said that “read fiction [sic] is not a merit” and that “the sooner you stop reading fiction [sic]better”. At least, they have the same energy. Serious, informed people, who know what they want, and who in the past would have been the target from an ad for Ponche Caballero.

Like so many masculine things, reading nonfiction (sorry, non fiction) is very prestigious. Like good alcohol, bleeding meat and gigantic devices. Men are dedicated to important things. Meanwhile, the novel is seen as a vice for idle women. A study published in 1989 summarized that the average reader of fiction in the US was “a middle-aged white woman who lives on the outskirts of a western or midwestern city“, between 30 and 49 years old, generally with a university education, medium-high income and who is not dedicated to the literary world. A profile that we know.

This fascination with essays has created new gods, such as Jordan Peterson o Yuval Noah Harariwho sit to the right and left of the father god Steven Pinker. But fans of the essay have their own subcategories: gentlemen over 50 how they only read historical-war books, with many technical details (“that’s right they are machine guns”); the young activist who does not leave the three leading publishers that have economically monopolized the industry of what-bad-everything, or the entrepreneurs who only read books coaching, trading and other terms in English.

The useful things, the inefficient things

Politics, history or sociology are the important issues that we men resolve in meetings and for this reason, we have to be well informed, to be able to quote them randomly in columns like this. This is how it happens to us later, on the other hand, that we have the same sensitivity as a plaster cat and the same ability to manage difficulties as a Lladró figurine, which as soon as it falls, breaks.

Fiction is not a genre apart from the world, but its mirror or its decline

I am not, however, of the opinion that we must read fiction to complete ourselves as human beings, nor that all novels are unintentionally a portrait of the time in which they were written. or any bullshit like that, because every time I am more against looking for useful applications to anything; less, to the hobbies. (Although you never know when you are going to use that knowledge: thanks to Moby DickI think I could catch a whale. Is it called fishing?) Neither emotional education nor bagpipes, I like cartoons because without them I would die.

It is also possible to state that the great essays have a lot of narrative, and that great stories have a lot of essayas in the previously cited case of Moby Dick. What is clear to me is that fiction is not a genre apart from the world, but its mirror or its declination, in the same way that we forget that surrealism is not unreal, but another level of realism. But reality can be much more deceitful than fiction.

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I am telling all this as the author of an essay that fits that stereotype of the modern essay: a powerful idea, a tedious development, great concepts to fill our mouths. In his last pages he recognized that what we need is less reality and more imagination, the subconscious and dreams, that it is the excess of literality that produces monsters. How could he have defended the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain ManThere is no better essay than the phone book. Now that’s non fiction, the book that best describes reality. Zero fantasy, all true.

There are days when I feel a little worse than usual (more boring, more anxious, more stupid), so I review my habits. Am I sleeping less? No, it doesn’t. Am I eating badly? As usual. I don’t do sports? Not now, not never. By elimination, I end up reaching the same conclusion that I have reached on other occasions. What happens to me is that non-fiction has gone too far and I miss a bit of narrative, fiction, imagination and conflict in my body. Too much information makes me sad.