FICTION

I read the following in a New Yorker blog last week by Keith Ridgway and have been chewing on it since. Here is a link to the complete post.

"And I mean that--everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones--they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor--please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience--with our senses and our nerves--is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos."

"So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn't what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it."

I must say, the first part throws me a bit. If we admit Ridgway's contention as truth, and I really see no escape from doing so, what does that say about our lives? Our relationships? Is part of our deception, rather our storytelling, a false conviction that our lives are and can even possibly be built upon honesty--honesty with ourselves and honesty with those whom we love and call friends? Perhaps he is not positing so spectacular a theory. After all, the post is about writing and the fact that he is not completely sure from where his writing comes. I am sure he did not intend to send me on some sort of metaphysical quest. But, that paragraph in particular leaves me wondering. It is difficult enough to find meaning in the drudgery of the day-to-day. If you stop and ask yourself why am I here, you may actually find yourself paralyzed by the fact that the question cannot truly be answered. After all, is it not the question from which all human endeavor began and for which we still seek an answer? Some among us believe they have answered that question. But, if Ridgway is correct, and I contend he is, then those things upon which our faiths are built are merely creations of our minds, the selves we constantly rewrite in order to suit our needs and desires.

Perhaps, though, there is something to be found in the usage in the preceding sentence of that one little word, merely. For as much as I have been chewing on the first paragraph, I am struck more profoundly by the second. That particular part of the post is in keeping with the spirit and ongoing discussion here on my own blog--intended first and foremost to be a celebration of the literary life. So, maybe the selves we have created are not mere creations in the least. They are, instead, THE creations. All that we know. All that we are. All that we wish to be.

Beacuse his point is absolutely clear to me and voices well what I myself feel about fiction--that it gives us everything. We all know how to do it because it is essential to our own understanding of ourselves, whether we care to admit so or not, and it is absolutely essential to an understanding and insight of others.