More from A Public Space, issue 1
From Marilynne Robinson and her apologia for fiction “You Need Not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True”:
I know of no way to parse that phrase, once upon a time, in terms of English usage—it seems sui generis. In the same way the Latin writers used the word olim, to mean, paradoxically, you need not doubt what I say because it is not true. It may be that, in acknowledging fiction as fiction, the readers or hearers divest themselves of a kind of self-interest. We are normally protective of our sense of reality—we want to see ourselves, and to be seen, as competent judges of the truth of things. This is how we retain a faith in our own sanity, among other things. Fiction relieves us of this defensiveness—in fiction we expect surprise, irony, reversal. In effect, we expect to be fooled.
In the United States, we are a solitary bunch, and we have very few of what can be called purely social values—that, for example, families should live in the same town, that an unmarried daughter should take care of her mother in her mother’s old age, that a church’s mission is to minister to the weakest everywhere, not just those in attendance on Sunday. We Americans lock our doors, and we watch or read the news whose slant we’re prepared to agree with. We’re individualistic, awfully so.
But fiction rallies against individualism. It forces the reader to believe in a world he is not—can never—be fully a part of, because it belongs to the writer, lives in her mind. To read fiction, you must be humble, you must be social. You not only suspend your disbelief; you suspend beliefs. To that effect, fiction, to the militantly individualistic, is a powerful, terrifying weapon.
