The Anonymizing Force of Fiction

From William Blake's Milton: A Poem

It's easy to feel born out of time. I think a lot of people (myself included) tend to look back at various points in history and tell themselves that they are better suited to those epochs.

But we don't realize that what we are not looking back upon times or places or things or ideas. We are instead admiring the people who have come before us. People that are composed of matter and genetic encoding just like us. People who, the same as we, struggled with the same sorts of problems: tyranny of groups, unending change, the desire to be seen.

And in wrestling with those demons, they created a world that would be remembered or found by you decades, centuries, millenia after their passing. In the writings of the Ancients, you could replace the names of people and places, and references to the times. And you'd discover that they were asking the same questions and coming up with the same answers.

This is why fiction is powerful. It surveys all of history and all of mythology, and in turn presents an audience with many alternatives. There is an anonymizing force of fiction, which those literalists of our time desperately need. This force removes us from our own times just enough to see that although it appears that everything is changing, things have always been the same.

And while much has been said about the death of fiction, I think that the proliferation of television and movies plays the counter. Marvel is building it's own retelling of Western mythology. And James Cameron, so long as the Avatar movies keep making money, is working on telling a universalist's history of mankind. Even smaller, non-blockbuster stories have cult followings, who spend their free time uploading video essays analyzing contemporary film. (Like Stories of Old has changed my life. I'll write about that someday.)

So fiction has never been more alive, and people have never been more receptive to it. At the same time, non-fiction has never threatened like it is, but I hope that dies down as people learn the rich universes they can build for themselves.

All they've got to do is try.

I started this in the morning and got sidetracked, so couldn't finish. This thread of thought shows great promise, and I really like the title, so don't be surprised if I give this one another go.