East of the sun and west of the moon - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Carmel Bird
IF THERE ARE already so many made-up stories from which to choose to read, why do people keep inventing new ones? Why do people keep reading the new ones as well as the old ones? I think it is because of that ability fiction has to stimulate the imagination, to thrill. The new novel promises, first of all to the writer and then to the reader: This might happen. Non-fiction says: This did happen. Fiction pushes the imagination forward. Non-fiction engages the imagination too, but I believe the ability of fiction to go wherever it wants to go gives it a different kind of power to inform the human mind. I do not say it is better, but different. And necessary. People need to read true stories; they also need to read speculation. It is important to be able to read a story and say: Well, life might be like this - or like this. And to be furnished by the fiction with the possibilities. Non-fiction can say: This is what happened - here is what could happen now as a result. Fiction can pretend something happened and dramatise the outcome. It is the pretence that is so exciting. These things might happen, and the fiction offers a shape and a pattern and a way in which they can or could.
I so enjoyed reading The New Girls because it could take me into the details of the hearts and minds of the characters in a way that the Vanity Fair story about the events at Miss Porter's could not. I knew Beth Gutcheon was in a way guessing about her characters, and I liked that. There was no place for that kind of guessing in the story about the girl who was expelled from Miss Porter's. Yet I took pleasure in both readings.
The pleasures of reading fiction differ from the pleasures of reading non-fiction. I think that fiction, because it has a special ability to engage the reader in its game, somehow conflates the writer and the reader and gives the reader a role in the making of the tale, and takes the reader along as the narrative tests the possibilities.
Non-fiction can engage the emotions of readers who feel rage at injustice and tenderness in the face of beauty, feel despair and joy; it can make you laugh, make you weep. So if true stories can move you to tears, why go to all the trouble of making things up, of reading about made-up things? It's partly because of the magical power of fiction. Real events, real characters, real places inspire fiction, but they do not make it. Historical novels, biographical novels – these books have the ability to partake of that special quality I found as a child in the story of East of the Sun and West of the Moon. The special trigger to thought and feeling and creativity. The magic.
IMAGINATION IS ONE of the most rare, beautiful and important qualities of human beings. I don't mean the ability to fantasise; I mean the ability to envisage what might be, to empathise with the situations of others, to place oneself outside oneself, to see relationships between one thing and another, to – in that strange way that only fiction knows – believe that the characters in the novels of Charles Dickens or of Thea Astley or of Patrick White are alive. The belief is possible when the imagination of the writer is powerful enough, with language and image, to engage the imagination of the reader. When levels of meaning and richness of metaphor take the reader along subtle pathways that deepen and multiply with each reading of the text. The mood and interpretation of the reader have a role in making fiction. And I return, again and again, to the importance of the imagination, not only in individuals, but in cultures.
For a culture to thrive and develop it needs to imagine itself into being, and to continue to imagine. You have to be able to imagine danger, to imagine the enemy, to imagine the good. Before Australia was colonised by Europeans, the Indigenous peoples here had developed vast and beautiful fictions that imagined the meanings of the place. In contemporary English the body of these fictions is described as the Dreamtime. This is an infinite spiritual cycle in which are embedded the values of the peoples and societies. The Dreamtime exists in a place that is different from, but parallel to, everyday reality. I hope it is not too crude to say that as I understand it, everyday reality is like non-fiction and the Dreamtime is more like fiction. The Dreamtime is where the culture is imagined into being, and the Dreamtime is indispensable.
The imagination is central to Indigenous culture. It must be the same for any culture. The imagination must be nourished in order to fashion the identity. The stories you make up about yourself tell you who and what you are, whether you realise it or not, and tell the world who and what you are, and also afford you the chance, the space, to move forward creatively. The fiction written in this country since the arrival of Europeans demonstrates that this is so. In 1831 the forger Henry Savery published what is considered to be Australia's first novel, Quintus Serviton. The subtitle explains that it was ‘A Tale Founded on Incidents of Real Occurrence'. It was a nice beginning, and not so very long ago, and the subtitle is actually a fair description of a lot of fiction.
Imagination is a human quality, and is not simply in the service of the country to which you belong. Yet, just as the landscape, the native plants and animals of a place are specific, so the literature of a country is coloured by its place of origin. And in turn characterises that place. My reflections turn out to be a Möbius loop: feed the imagination with fiction; make some more fiction; feed some more imagination. Fiction, written in some form, and read, is only one marker of a culture, one product, but it is the food for the imagination itself. It is the medium in which human nature is explored and revealed in all its ugliness and beauty, using only the tool of language, in all its miraculous shapes.
Robert Manne (The Monthly, July 2009) concludes a magnificently lucid analysis of the 2009 Victorian bushfires by saying: ‘The answer to the question of why we weren't warned on 7 February requires not only the forensic capacity of a royal commission but also a sociologist with the capacity to illuminate the strange character of our postmodern world.' He is right, yet I would add that the question also requires a fiction writer with the capacity to analyse and dramatise the characters of the people involved, and to enter once more the strange territory of the human spirit, the human heart.
Fiction is not optional. It is necessary. ♦