Well that's a cheap shot at fiction. The nub of the matter is that if we scrutinize any moment in which numerous people are going about their routines, or breaking out of them, we will find oddities that, if we are looking for devils, will look devilish.
That's a fair and reasonable. When we observe things, we change them - some psychology study said so. And so what about fiction, and truth, and strangeness?
There isn't enough time to get into it right now. No matter what I do, I always end up here at about 11:35 pm scrambling something together for this consumptive blog-monster. That's true. It's not strange. It's completely predictable. Almost reliable, except that I'm not.
And I'd use this situation in a piece of fiction because it might be interesting, and because it's easy to believe that it's true, and because fiction isn't supposed be strange, it's supposed to be plausible and, wait for it, insightful. The point of most fiction, from Stephen King's horror to Ursula K. Le Guin's speculations, is to say something about the "human condition." (I put that phrase in quotation marks because I need to tell you that while it should be ubiquitous, and in many ways is rather than cliched, you can't be sure of much these days. But in some circles you can't say "It's about the human condition." without a significant incidence of eye-rolling.)
What is "strange" anyway? Purely a matter of point of view isn't it? We don't need too many examples to recognize that the major factor in anyone's declaring an event or a person as "strange" is their perspective on the subject.
What is "true?" A matter of point of view too? Likely. That and consensus I imagine. If a large group of us agree on an account or an explanation, we come to allow ourselves the luxury of certainty and we declare the thing as true. Ahhh. Now we don't have to think about that thing anymore. We've got it filed. If anyone asks, we can refer them to our neatly stored reality.
What is "fiction?" When someone has the audacity, or imagination, to go back to one of those files, open it, reread it, and suggest another interpretation of the person or the event, he's created a fiction, another version of the truth. Sometimes these story-bound suggestions go further afield than others - read Philip K. Dick sometime - and sometimes they read like, well, like it's not been imaginative enough, that the interpretation is more like a paraphrase than anything - think about the trouble James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) got into when he (or his editor) walked this line.
So what is fiction? It's that truth we've all already agreed upon being made strange again so we can re-see it, re-imagine it, re-consider it, even re-tell it. Truth is not stranger than fiction. Fiction is truth made strange again.
Ride report
in: -3'C wind 20 ks S
out: -5'C wind 15 ks S
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