How Is Fiction True and Valuable?
Abraham Piper writes:
"If we read fiction or poetry and we look for 'the point' instead of immersing ourselves in the experience, we ruin our faculty for truly enjoying it. We will see or read or listen to great art and only think of it as a cipher to be broken. The pleasure of the art will be replaced by the pleasure of 'figuring it out.' Sure, there is sometimes deciphering to be done, but that is not the point of a story or a poem."
Read the full post here.
Let me know what you think about his article. What if the fiction author actually has a point that he intends for the reader to figure out? How much good fiction is written "without a point"?
(HT: MouseNaround)
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Very insightful, I thought.
What if the author actually has a point...How much good fiction is written without a point, you ask? In short, he/she does and none.
O'Connor and Piper aren't saying there isn't a point. I think they're saying quite the opposite. The question is not WHETHER or not the story has a point, but WHERE that point is to be discovered. That's why she says, "...the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience..."
She's saying the whole story is the point, the meaning. Christians are fairly good at maybe reading with discernment, trying to figure out "the point" - looking for the moral of the story. But we're maybe a little too Neo-Platonic/Gnostic and so we have a hard time sitting down to enjoy a good book as a sense experience. We're often so busy trying to reduce the story to THE point that we miss the point.
Don't Christians do this with the Bible all the time? (NOTE: I'm not saying the Bible is fiction!) Rather than being overwhelmed with the grace and drama of the metanarrative, they search diligently for THE point of every nuance of every tidbit. In the process, I think most would agree they often create their own meaning, rather than drawing the original meaning from the story. [Like the story I preached from on Sunday where Abraham buries Sarah in Canaan - which many good commentaries had turned into a polemic against cremation, which certainly is not the point of the story!]
I could be totally wrong in how I understood the quotes you referenced. But it seems their point is to enjoy the story (or the art) and let the whole thing tell its own story - let it make its own point - rather than always having to isolate THE point.