The Point

"I don't understand the point of fiction," somebody said to me recently. They picked up their fork and they said it: as if it meant nothing. As if it was something you could say while you picked up a fork.
"What do you mean, 'you don't understand the point of fiction'?"
"I don't see any reason for it. I mean, it's not even real, is it. It's just made-up stories."
There was a silence while I looked at him and at his fork and at the man I thought I loved.
"What kind of book do you see the point in, then?"
"I don't know. Facts. Autobiographies. Self-help books."
"Self-help books?"
"Yeah. At least there's a point to them, isn't there?"
I opened my mouth and then shut it.
"You don't see the point in fiction writing at all?"
"No."
"None of it?"
"No."
"I... I'm not sure... What do you... I...". And then I stopped. "I'm sorry for that," I said, and put my fork down because I was no longer hungry.

What I wanted to say - what I couldn't say, because he wasn't listening, and would never listen - was: fiction doesn't have a point. It is the point.

We all live - each of us - in our own little worlds: trapped in our own minds, in our own bodies, in our own existences; bubbled into our own thoughts and our own loves; condensed into our own hopes, our own fears, our own daily routines and personalities and obsessions and families. We have but one world each - our own - and from that there is no break, and no holiday. We cannot escape our own stories - cannot escape the story of ourselves that grows as we grow, and follows us as we move - and we are walled up inside it: trapped into the person we are and have been and would be, no matter where we travel or how far we go. Through that we struggle, or we glorify, or we nestle, and within that we make mistakes and we do great things and we hurt and we love and we help and we cherish. And because of this one, solitary world each - a world divided into pieces as small as the people in it - comes all of the greatness in all of the world, and all of the damage. Wars, heartbreak, murder, peace, kindness: all created by the separate worlds of individual people, understanding themselves and themselves only.

Fiction breaks these walls down. Through books - especially through great books - we don't read about other people: we become other people. We see the world through different eyes, in different places, in different situations, with different hopes and dreams and ambitions and fears. Through books we travel, and we empathise: through books we leave ourselves behind, momentarily, and are no longer walled up inside ourselves. And it doesn't matter where we go, or who we become - whether we are suddenly a young wizard, whether we are a starving family in outback America, whether we are a Jewish girl locked in an attic, whether we are a milkmaid on the Devon moors, whether we are a savage caught in a Utopian world three hundred years from now - we are no longer ourselves: we have left ourselves behind, and we have crawled into the deepest parts of other people and seen a new world from inside them. And with these new fears, and new thoughts, and new loves, and new hopes, we learn more than we can ever learn from just looking inside ourselves: we learn compassion, and we learn understanding, and we learn what the world is, and not just what it seems to us. We learn love and hope and pain and horror that are more than our own loves and hopes and pains and horrors. They are love and hope and pain and horror as they stand: multiple and brilliant and different to every single one of us.

If there is one thing in the world that can save the world, it is fiction and the compassion that is entwined in it. There could be no murder if the thoughts and fears of the victim were known: there could be no war if the pain of those warred against were understood. There would be no unnecessary heartbreak if the feelings of others were dealt with gently, and kindly. In escaping from ourselves through literature, we do more than escape ourselves, and we do more than take a much needed break from the suffocating presence of our own thoughts and desires and overwhelming sense of I. We take pieces of other people's worlds, and - in so doing - build another world entirely: a world composed of more than just ourselves. A world as it is, rather than as it is to us.

There is no point to literature if your own world is the only one that matters. But if you can ever hope to help yourself - if you can ever hope to really help more than just yourself - you have to understand others, and you have to see through their eyes, and you have to understand the world as more than just yourself. And there is no more complete way to do that than through literature: through burrowing into the lives of others - whether real or imagined - and living through them.

If there is a point to any of us, it is in being more than just ourselves: it is in seeing the world from more than our own tiny corner of it.

And if there is a point to fiction, it is in enabling us to do just that.