Fiction's "Grand Ambition"
"If fiction works, it doesn’t work because it diverted your attention for five hours or three days. It should work as if you got into a space capsule and you lived another life, and you came back and it’s only Tuesday, and you’re carrying all the lessons with you from that other life. That’s the grand ambition and the opportunity fiction has." Dr. Abraham Verghese uttered these words during my March-April interview with him as we discussed his latest book and first novel, Cutting for Stone. I've been thinking about them for a while now. What makes them especially true is his assertion that the lessons of fiction are transportable, even over vast spans of time, circumstance, and reason. We know that fiction is fiction, right? Well, yes and no. All fiction is based on fact. What else have we to build stories on? But the novel you or I hold in our hands conveys a kind of false, make-believe world to us. Those people and places do not exist in our world. Just try holding a conversation with one of them at your next dinner date and see where that gets you. Yet, the "unrealities" of fiction--that is, fiction done right--can become the realities transported back to our world after the last page has been turned. As Verghese rightly states, what an "opportunity," what a "grand ambition" for any author to aspire to. Remembering a story is one thing, but remembering a story's lessons is quite another. I can remember the plot of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (small-town white lawyer defends black man who's been framed in the 1940s south), but the lesson (prejudice hurts not only the persecuted, but the persecutors) is the real value, the real "point" of the story. It is Mockingbird's message of prejudice and its damage that I bring back to my world--hopefully to make a difference in it--in my "space capsule." There are countless other literary examples I could mention, and maybe you can think of your own. If so, drop me a comment and let me know what's on your mind. Lessons are for passing on, after all.
Praise for Depending on the Light
"This is a work that shatters the separation of body/spirit, logic/emotion, virtue/sin, Christianity/lesbianism to create a space for human growth and understanding. Heise’s raw insights and well-sculpted language are definitely worth reading."
—Emily Golson, Ph.D.
American University in Cairo
University of Northern Colorado
"Karen Heise never shies away from two of the most important things in life: truth and honesty. At the core of her sensibility is an undeniable desire to know what it means to be human regardless of gender and social mores. This is a must read for anyone who is intrigued by the notion that a woman can be courageous enough to swim against the tide of public criticism."
—Laurie Wagner Buyer, author of
Spring’s Edge: A Ranch Wife’s Chronicles
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