For The Reader Who Doesn't Read

Les miserables ... Olivia Colman, Adeel Akhtar, Dominic West, Lily Collins, David Oyelowo, Josh O’Connor and Ellie Bamber. Photograph: Mitch Jenkins/BBC/Lookout Point/Mitch Jenkins via The Guardian

‘So much is happening in the world today that I don’t have time to read fiction. I need to focus on more important things—politics, finance, technology, the AI Revolution... you know, urgent stuff. No time for novels.’

I have heard such things before. Whoever says “I don’t have time for novels” is basically saying “I don’t have time for imagination. I don’t have time for empathy. I don’t have time for my own feelings.”

There is a group of citizens—usually from certain professions that closely associate money with time and time with money— who tend to assume that literature belongs to a dreamlike fantasy universe, while the real world, being far more important, material and pressing, demands a different kind of reading. The last novel they have read was probably sometime in high school, and their notion of literature is based on a vague memory.

The same type of reader will also tell you that whenever they need “emotional stories”, not that they often do, they will watch films instead, and that will serve the purpose.

It is rather unfortunate that the word ‘fiction’ in the English language is at times understood and employed as the opposite of ‘fact’.

The etymology of the word takes us back to Latin fictionem, meaning ‘fashioning or feigning or inventing.’ If we follow this path we might end up thinking that fiction has nothing to do with reality.

This gives the impression that novels are meant to be read whenever we seek a break from this world and its myriad challenges—an escape into a fabricated and figmental universe that bears little, if any, resemblance to our own.

But the magic of literature lies precisely in its ability to blend the near and the far, the possible and the impossible, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the real and the surreal, the self and the Other, the past and the present, the present and the future in such a radical yet organic way that it dismantles and surpasses all such dualities.

To put it more bluntly, fiction brings us closer to the truth.

‘Our mind is enriched by what we receive, our heart by what we give.’

These words belong to the brilliant French novelist Victor Hugo who was a fascinating author, thinker, and a public intellectual. In his fiction he dealt with universal and timeless issues: love, hatred, inequality, poverty, justice, power, corruption, moral philosophy….. He remained committed to egalitarian reforms, human rights and universal suffrage. He supported social campaigns for the abolition of slavery. He was also firmly against the death penalty. For all these reasons and many more, he had to spend a considerable amount of his life in exile.

Today there is a crater on Mercury named after him.

If we want to understand France in the 19th century—as well as humanity today—we must read Hugo. His fiction contains timeless truths that we cannot fully grasp if we limit ourselves solely to politics, economics, data or numbers.

There is a second etymology of the word ‘fiction’—one that remains largely forgotten. It traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root dheigh, which means “to shape from liquid to solid,” “to knead like dough,” or “to form out of clay.”

I like that meaning better.

Like kneading bread, distilling water, tending a garden, fiction is as urgent and essential for our survival in this world—the real world.