Learning by Doing

Very moving. Thanks.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy said a few years ago that he hadn’t read a novel in years, and I believe he also said he thought that reading fiction was a strange thing to do. Your opening reminded me of that. Incidentally, CM reportedly has a new book coming out next year called The Passenger, a large book he has been working on for many, many years. One of the main characters is a female mathematician. There has been some news about the new book this week, including a reading of selected passages from it at an event hosted by the Santa Fe Institute.

Really excellent read.One other bit of context. Ireland had also engaged heavily in post-colonial Africa in the 1960s via the UN role in the Katanga crisis. Of course this turned out to be fraught with complexity and politically loaded, but it also reflected a view at home that perhaps there was a distinctive role for Ireland in these self-determination crises.

Maria, great post.

Very thoughtful – and your point about the teaching power of fiction is very good. If someone doesn’t learn something from a novel then you’re probably dealing with a brainless novel or a brainless reader…. I find this particularly true for historical fiction- the interesting part of the challenge in understanding historical events thousands of years and or miles away lies for me less in the chronology and more in the psychology. And a good novel is often a better way to understanding an alien mindset than a research paper.

Great article Maria. I very much like the way you seamlessly pass from narration to idea, event to philosophical remark. Ironically, this is just the style I look for in an author, even though in the very words you are challenging the efficacy and motives for writing fiction. In this, I think, the most interesting point of your article lies; when we read (or, rather, write) is it the content which is important or the insight into another human’s mind?

Last year I applied to University for English Literature, fascinated as I was by the ability of Man to communicate across generations, cultural and linguistic barriers, through the written word. Of course I also found great pleasure in an exciting novel with a great plot, but, when it came to the decisive factor in choosing a degree, it was the opportunity to study humanity through English which attracted me above all.
When my offers came through, however, I started to have reservations, even doubts, about English. This was not due to a waning passion for the written word, in fact, it was quite the opposite.

A growing interest in Current Affairs (spear-headed largely by the Election and general news of the time) combined with my existing fascination with the study of humans through books, resulting in the thought that the medium of fiction is not an accurate, or at least practical, way for me to further my study of people. The clue is in the word ‘fiction’; if we know that an author is not writing about reality, how can we be sure that what we are reading is a just reflection of the author’s thoughts or perception of reality? As you so succinctly (and accurately) put it, “They won’t believe it is really happening because it is not happening to them”. How many times have you honestly read a book about a natural, military or societal disaster and thought, “Gosh, I hope that does not happen to me?” I always found the notion of the cathartic impact of Greek Tragedy in leaving the audience ‘drained and afraid’ of the possibility of a fictitious realisation in reality difficult to comprehend, and even harder to imagine.

Fully aware of this natural cynicism (and perhaps arrogant denial) in a reader, do writers truly write to convince and explain, or simply to share a point of view? If they know that “no one is coming”, surely the sole purpose of writing extends no further than a desire to reach out to others, to emanate a voice which would otherwise be lost in the loud hubbub of an increasingly global and connected world?

Returning to the original quotation, therefore, whilst purposefully contentious, perhaps a valid point has been made after all. If you truly want to learn objective facts and truths, fiction is not the place to be. The only thing one can learn from fiction is what the author wants to convey through his, or her, chosen words.

Fiction discomfits me, and I no longer read it.

I to some degree understand the way “This is not a pipe” in the Magritte painting and visual representation; and I understand the ways it is not a pipe in poetry; but I no longer seem to be able to buy into and comprehend the conventions and imaginary that make it a pipe (and not a pipe) on the pages of a story or a novel. Reading fiction feels deceptively private and radically social.

I get my fictions and figurations from visual media everyday.

” At one point, he guides a western journalist who munches a chocolate bar as he makes disparaging comments about children roasting a rat to eat.”

Now there’s an image.

“Personally I tend to prefer non-fiction because there’s more originality and complexity there. Fiction tends to be composed of a things borrowed from other books and comments on things borrowed from other books. And mostly what it says about the world is either that it’s okay or that it can’t be changed.”

I’m struggling to think of a non-fiction book I’ve read, with the originality and complexity of – to pick one example – “100 Years of Solitude”. Any suggestions?

@Maria – I’d argue Red Plenty largely lies on the fictional side of the ledger, though the factual research underpinning the story is first rate.

Maria @ 18

Red Plenty is outstanding – a belated thanks to CT for pointing it out. That said, I think it makes the case that fiction (by which I mean novelization) is more effective. Also, too, the excellent HHHH (again thanks!), which manages to be both an historical novel and an exposure of the conceit of historical novels. Neither book is in my view nonfiction, though I can see why others might see it differently.

Layman, you might try Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo.
Or perhaps Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee.

Layman @17
A random assortment of books I personally have been meaning to re-visit, since I don’t feel sure I’ve mastered their complexity: Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah; Vico, The New Science; Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens; Harris, Rise of Anthropological Theory; Arrian, Campaigns of Alexander; Procopius, Secret History; Penrose, The Road to Reality; Susskind, The Black Hole Wars; Deborah Bennett, Logic Made Easy (oh, dear, should be higher on the list!)

Books I hope to read that promise great originality: W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology; Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides; Boole, The Laws of Thought, and frankly books whose existence of which I am unaware but would eagerly read, about such interestingly complex topics as the War of the Triple Alliance; the biography of Joan of Arc; the Langlands program; a history of WWII that starts in 1937; the book that explains how humans like the Neanderthals can persist for thousands of years without any discernible change in culture, while the extant variant is in constant cultural change.

I think what you meant by “complexity” and “originality” is not quite what is ordinarily meant. Perhaps you mean something more like “refined sensibility” and “advanced style”? Or perhaps “sophisticated moral analysis” and “psychologically definitive”? But I suppose it is possible that I’m not using complex and original in the correct literary context.

The thing is, by that standard, the writer I know who best captures the complexity and originality of daily life is Dickens (who no more knows the inner thoughts of the people around us than I do.) The last I heard the literary people don’t rate Dickens very highly. But doesn’t that suggest I would indeed be better advised to stick to non-fiction? Not chew off more than I can handle?

I have a comment in moderation (not sure why) re: Red Plenty & fiction / non-fiction.

@ Bloix, I’ve read Agee but not Boo, thanks for the pointer!

@ geo, was driven away from Nietzsche by too-early mandatory exposure, and left with the impression he was very far up his own rectum. I’m aware that’s an unfair take, and resolved to one day give him a fairer try.

@ steven johnson, that’s some list. On WW2 I suggest Shirer’s Collapse of the 3rd Republic and Manchester’s The Last Lion volume 2 – both focused on the run up to the war, in France & Britain respectively. Shirer is dated but contemporary and I haven’t found anything better. And I do think we mean something different by ‘complexity’ and ‘originality’.

“Is that the right yardstick, though?”

I didn’t mean it to be. I read fiction & non-fiction, and find insight in both. I personally think fiction can inform about the lived experience of human history in ways that non-fiction rarely does. As an example, I’ve read good histories of Occupied France, but none conveyed the human story of life under the occupation as well as do the novels of Modiano, Simenon, & others. Red Plenty is another example.

There are a lot of books to read, and too little time.

Fiction is like time travel — poetry, too.

Novels tell us what other people think and feel and imagine and fear and wish and regret and hope. I think that counts as “learning something.”

Layman: James Macpherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom comes immediately to mind. :) Also, Edwin Barnhart’s Lost Worlds of South America.

Maria, I love this post very much. Thank you for writing it.

Quite a bit of fiction is wish fulfillment – it can be brilliantly done and very satisfying, but it doesn’t tell us much about the world as it is. Cormac McCarthy is a great novelist, but I hope people don’t read All the Pretty Horses to get an idea of what Mexico in the early 1950’s was like.

Val- Flight Behavior is an extraordinary novel, isn’t it? Kingsolver is often uneven — the characters are good but the plot isn’t credible, or the environmentalism becomes an animated lecture acted out by cardboard figures – but in that novel everything comes together with a sustained insight and intensity that is just brilliant.

Layman – I was trying to think of non-fiction that does what fiction does, in terms of creating characters and plots that are credible and illuminating. A lot of non-fiction has people walking through it to conclusions that we already know, and we don’t feel that we know them or how the events that occurred could possibly have happened. Some nonfiction genuinely understands the people that inhabit it.

I’m struggling to think of a non-fiction book I’ve read, with the originality and complexity of – to pick one example – “100 Years of Solitude”. Any suggestions?

It’s been ages since I’ve read it, but the book that comes to mind is Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch’s book about the civil rights movement (the first of a trilogy. It sets an extremely high standard for skillful writing, compelling subject matter, and complexity and detail.

Parting the Waters belongs on the list.
A very different sort of book that also belongs is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes.
Another is Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed.

a child in Ireland knows about the Biafran war from activism by Western-linked individuals and organizations operating in nominally-postcolonial Biafra – it was really this overrepresentation of Westerners in Biafra and Western-linked Biafrans that led to such overconfidence in waging armed secession. For as long as British boots were on the ground, a Western-oriented political mobilization oriented around civic institutions and newspapers and university educations in England were sufficient; it was not necessary for local elites to have effective military or logistical preparations in the event of a civic breakdown inasmuch as patronage and family wealth. That influence would be sufficient for boots to be shipped in from India or elsewhere. Indeed, before independence, the north feared domination by the south, not the other way around.

but post-independence, it turned out that mere alliances with NGOs in the West was no longer sufficient; Labour politicians who had been eager to work with Nigerian civic leaders towards decolonization had their own priorities now. Social democrats would wring our hands about the baleful influence of BP in Nigeria or copper interests in Katanga, but we would write noble epitaphs, not advocate troubling career-ending compromises at home (especially as the Nigerian/Biafran sides kept switching Cold War aisles along the course of the war – unlike the bloody Katanga crisis earlier, Biafra was fraught with divided US/UK/USSR/PRC interests and carefully avoided waving socialist or anticommunist banners throughout – it was never clear that an independent Biafra would expropriate Shell-BP at all, even, and conversely Nigeria promptly nationalized BP after the war). It is this dis-conjuncture of expectations and reality that led to the Biafran war. It may be humiliating to concede to compulsory Islamic education, shariah law, religious persecution etc., where one previously enjoyed British-imposed standards of religious freedom (which effectively favoured the wealthy evangelistic south over the traditionalist Muslim north), but it would still have been better than starving to death.

I have thousands of books on my shelves, almost entirely novels, some my father’s, some mine; there are more in the attic. My detailed knowledge of the world was to a considerable degree imparted by these confections. It certainly isn’t dependable knowledge, but it’s rich in verisimilitude, close enough for its likely customer.

The contents of a famous book are facts themselves: one’s expected to know what Dostoevsky wrote. Books of another era are at least evidence of how people thought about themselves and the rest of the world at the time, and contemporaneous non-fiction isn’t necessarily more reliable.

Following an author entails a vicarious personal relationship with an articulate human who, being confined to a book, has certain advantages over a warm breathing creature. It doesn’t insist on conversation when you’ve just crawled out of bed needing coffee and the newspaper.

Maria, your interesting post jogged some old memories for me.
As it happened, I visited the Eastern Nigerian region of the former Biafra about six months after the war had ended. I traveled by taxi from Benin City to Enugu in one of those reliable and very hardy Peugeot 404 estate wagons, which had been packed as per usual to just over capacity with an assortment of mostly Igbo passengers going back to Eastern destinations. The taxi stopped on the western bank of the mighty River Niger, just before crossing the bridge into Onitsha, the sprawling market town which we could see way over on the other bank, and the passengers got out to stretch their legs. I understood that the river was the dividing line between the recently warring factions, and I think the passengers were reflecting at that point about what the recently past events had meant to them. It was there that a situation unfolded among our little taxi group that made a profound and lasting impression on me. (Let me just say that at that point people still called me a “kid” (or the translation equivalent); I didn’t really know much of what was going on in the world.) Anyway, there was a confrontation between one of the passengers, a Nigerian (federal) soldier, who had his weapon with him, and the Igbo passengers, especially a couple of young fellows who I took to be university students, since they were clearly educated and articulate. It was the kind of scene that could be a fruitful focus for literary treatment, since the significance for ordinary people of a very complicated social upheaval was clarified in a concentrated moment. The possibility for a deeper and richer probing of the aspirations and understandings of ordinary people facing crisis of this magnitude is something nonfiction accounts will miss, but fictional accounts can fruitfully realize. Writing would be first of all, I suppose, a way of making sense of such a complex reality for oneself. Sadly, I suppose, I’m not a fiction writer, but for me the (at its effective heart verbal) incident gave me a lasting example of what is possible when the people are aware of their rights vis-a-vis even military power (and when the representatives of power retain a shred of humanity: there’s the mystery!).

about Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour: Okay, I’m going to look for this now. I stopped looking for her fiction after reading The Lacuna. She is indeed an uneven writer, but when she is good she is brilliant. My favourite of her novels is her first, The Bean Trees, though I admire The Poisonwood Bible. The Prodigal Summer was too much of a lecture (though I learned a lot!)

Her non-fiction can be as delightful as it is clever. How many other collections of essays begin, as High Tide in Tucson does, by talking about a hermit crab and his frock?

I read non-fiction looking for insight; I read fiction looking for revelation. While most of the novels I read are at best intriguing, the endless search for revelation is what keeps me reading fiction. A few examples: Mrs. Dalloway; Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels; Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman and everything else; Portrait of the Artist; Dubliners. Life for me is the search for those rare moments of revelation, and fiction is one path.

JG

I only want to register my reaction–beautifully written post.

The Quiet American is one of those books that explains more about American foreign policy than 500 IR scholarly tomes (even the good ones).

@2 Chris Bertram Ghastly, and yet—a good novelist could do wonders with that bit of inadvertent self-parody. He or she would have to know the type–but what glorious raw material for an epic of self-absorption.

I’ve just been reading Dos Passos’ America all the way through. I can’t imagine a better way to understand how people actually lived in the first decades of the twentieth century. Only fiction can do that so vividly.

Goodness, listening to Bach, Coltrane or DJ Shadow gives one exactly zero “information about the world”, are the enlightened non-fiction readers also dismissing music in the same way?

Besides, fiction does many things the sciences cannot do at all and in some fields (ethics, psychology, sociology) complements them or even beats them at their own game – this is just silly.

novakant@55 You got me.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/06/j-s-bachs-comic-opera-the-coffee-cantat.html

Belated response to Suzanne @16: Thanks for the reply.

For me there isn’t much chance that a movie can overcome or replace the impressions of a good book. The impressions of a good book are so vivid to me that there’s really no point in seeing a movie of it. I didn’t like the “Lord of the Rings” movies, again because where they matched the book I already knew that scene and had pictured it in my head, and where they left things out or changed them I was disappointed. Had I never read the books, I might have enjoyed the movies, and then gone on to enjoy the books more.

I didn’t know the movie of “The Maltese Falcon” left out the Flitcraft story, because I stopped watching it after a few scenes, but there’s another example. If I had never read the book I would have enjoyed the movie, then gone on to read the book and enjoyed the missing parts.

The few times I have liked a movie better than the book it was based on it is when the book contains cardboard characters, and the movie necessarily uses real people who have expressions and try to convey emotions.

That’s just the way my mind and tastes work. It is interesting to know there are people whose minds run differently.

My mother read to me at a young age. I don’t remember being taught to read, but I could read before I entered school, and devoured Dr. Seuss books. In college I meet some friends who had a tough time with reading assignments, and it turned out their parents had not read to them as children. So I think that is an important part of child development – perhaps training imagination neurons. I wonder if the people who only read non-fiction were read to much as children.

bob@60: After twenty years, I decided that literature was not going to make me a better person.

But think what you might be like if not for those twenty years.

Mostly agree on the pt re fiction as a source of insight, but to address glancingly a diff. issue —

from the OP:

The famine in Biafra was wholly man-made, a weapon of war wielded by the Nigerian military junta, and supported – by military, financial and political means – by Britain, Russia and the United States. About a million people were starved to death and as many again were displaced; the same numbers as in Ireland in the 1840s…. People in the west knew about Biafra’s suffering, but they didn’t quite seem to believe it. Distance, race and the time lag of sixties news cycles meant Biafra was all too ‘other’. Grotesquely beautiful black and whites of starving children were printed in Time, Life and Sunday newspapers, but the situation seemed too complex to understand, still less to address.

An interesting contrast with the Biafra tragedy, from several angles, is the birth of Bangladesh in Dec. 1971, only several years later. One contrast has to do with the response in the West, where journalistic accounts of the Bangladesh crisis (originally sparked by one journalist in particular) did have an impact on public opinion, leading among other things to the Concert for Bangladesh, w famous rock musicians and Ravi Shankar, etc. The story (incl. that aspect) is well (if not absolutely flawlessly) told in S. Raghavan’s 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. What accounts for the difference from Biafra esp. in this respect is not, to me, altogether clear, since there was no 24hr news cycle in ’71 any more than there was during the Biafran war. However, it may be that the identification of obvious villains was easier in the Bangladesh case, and the overall situation somewhat easier to make sense of. The eventual outcome obvs. differed b.c of the Indian intervention, but I’m referring here mainly to the difference in public response in the West. There was some concern about Biafra in the West but as the OP indicates, it didn’t really seem to translate into mass action.

“But by 70 AD it was clear that no one was coming, at least not yet, and probably not for a long time.

And that’s when I realised.

You write because no one is coming.”

Someone Who Is Not Like Anyone Else (1965)
by Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967)

I dreamt that someone is coming
I dreamt of a red star
and my eyelids keep fluttering
and my shoes keep falling into line and may I be blinded
if I am lying
I dreamt of that red star when I was not asleep.
***
Someone is coming
Someone is coming
Someone else
Someone better
Someone like no one else, not like father, not
like Esee, not like Yahya, not like
mother
and that someone is just like he ought to be and he is even taller than the tree in Macmar’s
yard and his face
is more radiant than the face of the Twelfth Imam and he’s not afraid of Sacid Javad’s brother
who went
and put on a cop’s uniform
and he’s not even afraid of Sacid Javad himself who owns all the rooms
in our house
and his name which mother
invokes at the beginning and end of her
prayers
O, Judge of all Judges
O, Providers of all Provisions
and he’s able
to recite all the difficult words in the Third
Grade Book with his eyes closed
and he’s even able
to subtract 1000 from 20 million without any
difficulty
and he’s able to get as much as he wants from
Sacid Javad’s shop

and he’s able to make the neon sign of “Allah”, which was green, like the green of the early
morning
against the sky of Moftahyan Mosque, shine again ah . . .
how splendid is the bright light
how splendid is the bright light
and I wish so much
that Yahya
could own a push cart
and a Coleman lantern
and I wish so much
that on the push cart of Yahya among the water- melons and melons
I sit
and go around the Mohammadiyah Square ah . . .
how pleasant to go around the Square
how pleasant to sleep on the roof
how pleasant to taste Pepsi Cola
how pleasant to go to Fardin movies4
and how much I enjoy all these things
and I wish so much
to pull the hair of Sacid Javad’s daughter.
***
Why am I so tiny
that I get lost in the streets?
Why is father who is not so tiny
and who doesn’t get lost in the streets
doing nothing to hasten the arrival of the one who has come into my dreams?
And the people in the slaughter-house neighborhood
whose flower-beds are bloody
and the soles of their shoes are bloody
why don’t they do something
why don’t they do something
***
How lazy is the winter sun
***
I have swept the steps of the roof
and I have washed the window-panes
why must father dream only when he’s sleeping? ***
I have swept the steps of the roof
and I have washed the window-panes Someone’s coming
Someone’s coming
Someone who’s with us in his heart, with us in
his breathing, with us in his voice Someone whose coming
cannot be arrested
and handcuffed and put in jail
Someone who has given birth to a child under the
old trees of Yahya and day by day
grows and grows
Someone from the rain, from the pitter-patter of the rain
from the murmur of petunias
Someone from the shower of fireworks in an evening sky of Topkhanah Square5 comes
and spreads a cloth
and distributes the bread
and distributes the Pepsi Cola
and distributes the City Park
and distributes the whooping-cough syrup
and distributes the registration day at school
and distributes the hospital waiting-room numbers and distributes the rubber boots
and distributes Fardin movies
and distributes the clothes of Sacid Javad’s
daughter
and distributes whatever does not sell and gives us our share
I dreamt . . .

ZM, that is a beautiful poem.

js, irritating, perhaps, but often irresistible! We are just watching the 4-part HBO miniseries Olive Kittridge, based on the novel by Elizabeth Strout. That novel is one of my favourite books of all time. I can’t praise it enough. Strout takes such risks with her MC, but pulls it off, and amazingly the novel is comprised of short stories that were written over the space of twenty years. So I read the novel a few years ago, and now we’re watching the mini-series and naturally I’m comparing what I remember, noticing differences and similarities, but being blown away all the same. Remarkable acting, the scenery is beautiful and evocative…We are 3/4 of the way through and I’m as impressed with the miniseries as I was with the novel. {Happy sigh}

js @59,

Thanks for The Nation article. Well thought out and composed.

I don’t think anyone commenting here is unaware of the difference between film and literature. But it would be naive not to recognize that filmmakers are often engaged in revealing, to the best of their ability, the same essential truth that the novel contained. Sometimes what’s annoying about the movie is noticing what the filmmaker apparently viewed as extraneous or misleading, which was actually essential. Sometimes the movie improves on the novel–especially when the novelist is very aware of film traditions and mostly ignores literary ones. Graham Greene and Michael Crichton were more intelligent writers than most in that category, but their books filmed well because they kept what filmmakers would make of the material in mind as they were writing.

I would complain about the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights since it completely omits the culminating Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw romance, which resolves the story through Hareton’s redemption though love and poetry (folk ballads).

Wonderful post. Thanks, Maria.

I’ve just returned from a vacation in Africa – safari in Botswana mostly. To prepare I read most of the “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series which may not aspire to a literary classic, but worked very well for the purpose: Introducing a sense of place that I only had hazy ideas of as a place with desert, diamonds and HIV epidemic. To be honest, I did do a bit of non-fiction reading also.

On the trip I also brought “Half of a Yellow Sun” (which I only finished yesterday), and it was a good pick for several reasons.

First, it’s a fine novel, even if I did have trouble keeping up my reading pace — something about the main characters losing their capacities for acting and instead becoming more or less passive victims and observers of the – gruesome – circumstances. (Or maybe it was just me).

Second, it’s about a war that I vaguely registered as a kid from its fleeting “cause célèbre” status in the West and haunting TV images of starving children, but which was otherwise ignored and soon forgotten — and the Vietnam war loomed infinitly larger on the media and political agenda. At least I wasn’t exposed to much information about it, nor did I ever seek any myself. Yet, it was a true human disaster, and a political one as well, and I was fundamentally curious to find out more about that. And now I wonder how current developments like the Boko Haram are tied to what went on back then.

Third, Nigeria figured quite prominently in places I visited on the way, notably Johannesburg where we had a guide who more or less equated the city’s terrible crime rate with Nigerians. Reading a piece of fiction like “Half of a Yellow Sun” provides one with a deeper perspective when confronted with such assertions.

And, more. But I’d say it’s essential to always read some factual accounts, too.

Lynne — I agree that comparisons can sometimes be irresistible. And when the book and the film, or other type of adaptation, are both good, then it’s great, and the adaptation can gain an extra layer of richness and meaning through it’s relation to its source. (And this is as true of, say, Throne of Blood as of more conventional sorts of adaptations.) I completely understand all of this.

What I do find irritating is a very common sort of complaint, one that always seems to go in one direction… I also understand that I’m in the minority here insofar as I’m probably more invested in film than most people on here (bob mcmanus excepted, of course!), and I’m certainly a less sophisticated/knowledgeable reader of fiction than most people on here (which isn’t to say I don’t like it, I very much do). But—and without at all meaning to pick on LFC here—this is the sort of thing I find odd:

I’m not sure whether it was just a bad movie, or a bad adaptation of the book, or both.

LFC maybe doesn’t mean this, but this seems to imply that (a) something could be a good movie while being a bad adaptation, and (b) something could be a bad movie while being a good adaptation. And if it’s (a), then I don’t see why I should be troubled that it’s a bad adaptation—it’s a good movie, after all; and if it’s (b), then the overriding fact is that it’s a bad movie, seems to me anyway. It’s really not totally clear to me why I’m supposed to care about about the quality of the adaptation, rather than just the quality of the movie.

“I’m struggling to think of a non-fiction book I’ve read, with the originality and complexity of – to pick one example – “100 Years of Solitude”. Any suggestions?”

Well, just at random:
“A Mathematical Theory of Communication”
“The Art of Computer Programming”
“Concentration Inequalities”
“Prediction, Learning, and Games”

Re books and movies: if I read the book and then see the movie, I’m too often thinking during the movie of all the motivations, thoughts, and incidents that are missing. But of course that doesn’t mean movies are worse, just different: the best can be transporting and overwhelming in visual and emotional intensity.

Re novels for self-improvement: as with having children, traveling, or meditating, the motivation of doing them to “become a better person” is dubious. Treating the world as a moral gymnasium seems dubious in general: you’re going to die anyway, why bother to die rich, or “a better person”?

Don’t many writers do it because they have to: they have a great inner compulsion? But yeah, no one is coming. “However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

p.s. The sentence in parentheses is not well phrased: what I meant was the judgment can only be made if the viewer has read the bk; it might still ‘matter’ in some abstract sense, however. Btw, this is not something I think about a lot b.c I don’t see very many movies.

And as bianca s. pointed out upthread, if a novelist writes w/ a cinematic sensibility (or whatever word you want), then the issue often tends to dissolve. I think ‘Atonement’ for ex. was a good adaptation of the Ian McEwen novel b.c it’s the kind of book that can be adapted well. Henry James, by contrast, is going to be difficult to put on screen, and the judgment will have to be adjusted accordingly. The ’90s movie version of ‘The Wings of the Dove’ was a reasonably good adaptation, as I recall (even though in that case I read the novel after seeing the movie).

js, Absolutely something can be a good movie but a bad adaptation, and maybe no one would care, if they hadn’t read the book. Or if they’d read the book but the movie had a different title and was only loosely based on the book. But if the titles are the same, people are led to expect that the movie is going to tell the same story the book tells, so if the movie is then a bad adaption because it misses some of what is essential to the story (in the book) naturally there will be disappointment. I think a lot of this disappointment could be avoided just by changing titles. The movie version of One True Thing changed the end! Which changed everything. That was a good book, but a terrible movie adaption. Grr.

I think, though, that you are getting at something true: that people have unrealistic expectations of movies as compared to books. I think it was Nick Hornby, who has had several novels made into movies, and who has written screenplays himself, who said, when someone complained about a movie version of one of his books, (paraphrasing) “The book is still there. It’s still on the shelf to read. The movie hasn’t replaced it, it is something else.”

Maria :”But a novel changes the ‘we’ to ‘me’. Some theorists say de-familiarisation is the hallmark of fiction; it makes the familiar seem strange and allows us to experience it afresh. Others go for verisimilitude and the re-creation of life as it is lived in someone else’s head, something that’s ironically been best achieved by difficult modernists.”

bob mcmanus: ” There is an ideology, involved here, and an semi-conscious social decision made say 1850-1925, as to what visual media would represent and what prose narrative would focus on.”

bob mcmanus — to tell you the truth, when I read your list of authors you read in the 1970s I don’t think you chose the right authors if you were looking for books to make you a better person. You would have been better off swapping Ibsen for Paul Gallico or another pleasanter writer.

I think I would make your time period a bit later too, maybe 1865-1965?

When I was doing my undergraduate, I often puzzled on the different sorts of modernism — how is James Joyce modern like Le Corbusier is modern? I would think to myself, as they are quite different.

But now I’m studying urban planning instead, there is an easier way to understand modernism — the relative importance of the individual to the public realm — as Maria says, the (modernist) novel changes the we to me.

In cities you get lots of object buildings that don’t contribute very well to the public realm, and while one or two are alright (especially if they are good examples, but many are poor examples unfortunately) once you get too many object buildings it is detrimental to the urban fabric of the city: “while Modernism’s ‘best solo performances’ may have been ‘more virtuoso’, they failed to produce ‘good’ streets or ‘good’ cities, and there was a recognition that ‘…the typical fabric and its overall orchestration were better in previous eras’ (Kelbaugh)” (Heath, Oc, Tiesdell).

In this case it is easy to see how James Joyce and Le Corbusier are like each other.

Also, on novels as “self-improvement”, even if readers today would sit still for all the irrelevant bits you get in Hugo or Eliot, a lot of the informational character novels used to supply is now available elsewhere: instead of long descriptions of Roman architecture in a novel set in Rome, say, now it’s expected that the reader will just Google the background for him/herself.

Maria,

An excellent and well written piece – thank you. Fiction does have a power to get inside an experience in a way that is hard for non-fiction.

In reality, though, there is no clear line between the fiction and non-fiction. Somewhere between purely internal fantasy stream-of-consciousness and a list of cold dry facts are a range of narratives that put together pieces of truth to tell a story. Some narratives are closer to the list of facts, and some closer to internal dialogue. Fiction is often a label for those stories that explore the emotional and aesthetic qualities of an experience, of telling truths that must be felt.

As for non-fiction that approaches the literary quality of fiction – Te-Nahisi Coates maybe?

I work a lot with Native American communities, and I often think if you want to understand more about Native experience, read the literature. Oh, by all means read some good *accurate* history and the like, but Native fiction can bring it to life and give a sense of Native world-views in a way that the historical facts just can’t. I mean, you can read all about how the US cavalry slaughtered 3000 horses of the Yakima and Nimi’ipuu (Nez Pierce) on the banks of the Palouse, about the importance of the horses to the people, etc. but to read Big Ma’s memories of it in Reservation Blues is to understand it in a deeper, more visceral way.

But in it’s power, lies also the danger of fiction. The ability of the story to take us into a world and make it real can be used to deceive as well as to enlighten. Fiction played an enormous role in glorifying colonialism, occupation, and genocide. Before there were Hollywood Indian’s, there were the “savages” (whether violent or noble) of James Fenmore Cooper and a hundred other frontier and western writers.

Absolutely something can be a good movie but a bad adaptation, and maybe no one would care, if they hadn’t read the book. Or if they’d read the book but the movie had a different title and was only loosely based on the book. But if the titles are the same, people are led to expect that the movie is going to tell the same story the book tells

Lynne — it’s interesting you say this because in one of my responses to LFC I almost said something like: “well, then you could just solve the problem by changing the title,” but I stopped myself because it didn’t seem right that the point would turn on something so trivial. But maybe you’re right and the point isn’t so trivial—it’s certainly not trivial when the cachet of the title is leveraged to get people interested in the film, e.g. So, I’m thinking now that it definitely matters, e.g., for Luhrmann’s Gatsby or Gone Girl: very famous novels/big Hollywood productions.

I’m less convinced that, e.g., Blade Runner would have to be evaluated along a whole new dimension if only it were called Do Androids Dream… Or e.g. that whatever adaptation-related problems attach to Mildred Pierce (the Joan Crawford one, not the Todd Haynes one), would have gone away if it had simply been called “Veda” or something.

A lovely post Maria, thanks.

On the topic of literary adaption, it is an oft-repeated cliche that it is easier to make a good movie from a bad book than from a good or great one (I paraphrase). Apparently, this is in part because a bad book provides greater freedom for the move-maker: they are less inclined to try to stick so closely to the novel (and there will be fewer people to complain that it does not live up to the original). I do think, as Lynne suggests, that it is often better if adaptations rely only loosely on their source material.

On topic, I have learnt a lot from fiction but I’m a bit suspicious of justifications for fiction as self-improvement (as a quite a few people here). Really, I read it (and non-fiction too) because I enjoy doing so. I’m always baffled by those people who eschew fiction because they only want “facts”. It is not just that they are deluding themselves if they think that non-fiction is any less reliant on authorial intention and narrative convention than is fiction but it just seems such an instrumental vision of life. Don’t they do anything just for fun? I understand (sort of) when people just don’t like reading or think most fiction is poorly written or prefer TV or movies; it is the suggestion that someone’s time is too important to spend on something made-up (and thus apparently frivolous) that I just don’t get.

Exstasy

From a psychological perspective, ecstasy is a loss of self-control and sometimes a temporary loss of consciousness, which is often associated with religious mysticism, sexual intercourse and the use of certain drugs.[1] For the duration of the ecstasy the ecstatic is out of touch with ordinary life and is capable neither of communication with other people nor of undertaking normal actions. The experience can be brief in physical time, or it can go on for hours. Subjective perception of time, space or self may strongly change or disappear during ecstasy. For instance, if one is concentrating on a physical task, then any intellectual thoughts may cease. On the other hand, making a spirit journey in an ecstatic trance involves the cessation of voluntary bodily movement.

js, you are clearly far more versed in films than I am. :) Expectations matter so much to enjoyment of both books and movies, don’t they? And with that banal observation I think I’ve exhausted my contribution to this discussion.

Jack Clayton directed “The Innocents” which is a very eerie adaptation of Henry James’ very eerie “The Turn of the Screw”. He’s also famous for “Room At The Top” which I haven’t seen.

Expectations are indeed incredibly important, just think of all the hype and marketing that goes into blockbusters, but it also applies to less commercial director driven films, e.g. “the new Fincher/Mann/Allen/PT Anderson/CoenBros” etc.

I’m still not quite sure, and I include myself in this, what people who have read and loved a book actually expect from a film adaptation – worth investigating.

1. This has been haunting me since Maria put up the post:

We lived, we died, and someone should know.

The “we” and the “someone” are, arguably, the same, at least collectively: i.e., all of us. So we have a responsibility to take both roles if we can…..?

Maybe that’s why people invented god(s), so there would always be “someone.”

Maybe that’s also why people who write stories, whether fiction or non-, are treasured: because they also speak, at least symbolically, for the millions and billions whose stories will never be explicitly told.

I have just been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which seems apt somehow.

2. From a different angle, I am reminded of an essay I love — “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” by Annie Dillard — and this line from it:

We are here to witness.

Interesting that “witness” can apply to both the “we” and the “someone” of Maria’s concluding line.

3. I’m not a movie person, so my experience isn’t wide. But the only time I’ve ever liked a movie adaptation as well as the book was A River Runs Through It. The movie and the book were uncannily alike in the mood they created and the reaction they inspired, at least in me. Plus, in the movie you actually got to see the beautiful mountain scenery and Brad Pitt, instead of just imagining them.

4. Why aren’t movies adapted into books? ;-)

Movies are adapted into books, all the time. Look for the key term “novelization”; you’ll find hundreds of them. In general they are terrible, presumably because those who buy such books want every scene and every line of dialogue that they remember (and like) to be incorporated in the text, leaving very little room for literary artfulness.

As for why bad books often make good – or at least successful – movies, my simplistic view is this. A “bad” book that is successful in reaching an audience (and why otherwise would you make the movie) often, lacking either gracious writing or nuanced characterization, depends very heavily on plot. And plot is something Hollywood knows how to do. Whereas a well-written book achieves much of its virtue precisely through the subtler arts of character development and literary style, which are far far tougher to “transfer onto the screen.” Not impossible, but beyond the capacity of most screenwriters and directors.

Examples (or counter-examples) of this hypothesis are left here as an exercise for the interested reader.

It is true that if I think of what I consider to be the greatest films (and my tastes are vaguely canonical), almost none of them are based on works of fiction (tho again, see #1 on that list—and it’s very certainly not for the reason dr. ngo considers). In fact, I’d say that the movie adaptations I love are ones that make the source material more or less entirely their own, and this can happen whether the adaptation, qua finished product, closely matches the source material or whether it deviates wildly from it.