An unoriginal thought about fiction
+Jan 14, 2025 +
+Why are we surprised that Nosferatu is funny?
+The Odyssey is funny. Pride and Prejudice is funny. +Don Quixote is well-known to be funny. And more from the +Western canon: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Borges’s +Ficciones (title tells you everything), Shakespeare’s plays, +Plato’s Symposium. These are, to varying degrees, all satire, +all lampooning the society in which they were written! Keep searching; +you’ll only find more to support my observation.
+Rana asks: how come, in our education on classical literature, we +seem to only read satire like Cervantes and Austen?
+There is nothing else.
+All great literature is satire. Irony is a prerequisite. Nothing +important can be said without a current of humor. Telling a story is, +inherently, satire of life! 1
+Every writer knows, deep down, that to sit down and write is, +necessarily, to adopt an ironic disposition—to make fun at the expense +of something else. (You can, of course, set out to tell a joke and then +tell a bad joke.)
+But do not mistake irony for disgust.
+++Don Quixote could only have been written by someone who +really loved chivalric romances, really wanted his life to resemble them +more closely, and understood just what it would cost.
+
– Elif Batuman, The Possessed
+It is weird to compose fiction. The moment you acknowledge that what +you are doing is fiction, you have admitted to telling a lie. The gap +between reality and the story hangs over the work as a wellspring of +irony and humor. The artfulness of storytelling lies in the interplay +between that awareness and the suspension of disbelief.
+If we admit that to tell a story is to weave a lie, where does that +leave the audience, apparently gullible fools eating up this nonsense? +In fact they are in on it. Part of fiction’s inherent humor is the basic +dramatic irony that the audience knows it is a lie!
+++[When I write,] I am describing certain aspects of pyschological +reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately +circumstantial lies.
+In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that +the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word +of it.
+[…] All fiction is metaphor.
+
– Ursula K. Le Guin, Author’s Note to The Left Hand of +Darkness 2
+We know when we are being lied to. We choose to believe it, because +we can learn just as much from well-constructed lies as we might from +well-constructed truths.
+Everyone involved in this delusion knows exactly what is going on. +Watch blooper reels from film and television; when actors break, in the +most serious scenes, the veil is pierced, they burst out laughing.
+Paraphrasing Lee Maracle: I learned storytelling from my grandfather. +I was a child, and I told him a lie. He said, “That’s a good story. Tell +it again, differently.”
+Thus fiction emerges from collaborative lying.
+++Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, +number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look +straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with +Dionysios, every now and then.
+
– Le Guin, ibid
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I might as well disclaim that my +criterion that a story be “humorous” or “ironic” or “satirical” must not +be taken so strictly that we count as fiction only those stories which +get generically categorized under “Comedy.” Putting aside the fact that +this genre is a relatively recent invention, let me just observe that my +idea of humor includes such a simple thing as portraying characters who, +when placed in an unbelievably melodramatic scenario, react with a +reasonable degree of realism. It also includes the opposite: unexpected +reactions to mundane scenarios. Each implicitly satirizes real life. +Finally, even the most serious drama toes the line of absurdity; the +film ends and the curtain closes, and I grin, because of how +embarrassing it is to find I have been, once again, willingly +deceived!↩︎
+This author’s note is rich and +informative. I recommend you find it and read it in full.↩︎
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