What's the point of fiction?

Brian Pol

It's pointless to read fiction in the same way as sports and music are pointless-that's the whole point and what makes these things enjoyable.

Just do it if you enjoy it, innit.

Chris M

I don't read fiction - haven't done so for years. Even back then I tended toward fiction based on fact (e.g Schindler's Ark') I find too much of it contrived and dictated by trend and fashion - as well as pandering to all kinds of prejudices in reader and author. And it's often tedious.

I watch very little of a fictional nature on TV either - about the only thing I don't miss are reruns of Hugh Laurie in 'House' which is hokum - but quite stylish hokum.

Prentia Clove

To say that you have never seen the point of novels, when you quite happily spend your time watching plays and movies and listening to music, is somewhat disingenuous. That you don't enjoy them I could understand (may be you have no imagination), but to say that you don't see the point of them sounds shallow.

Novels are a form of entertainment and are as legitimate as any other.

tuppy

If you think you've only wasted your time in reading fiction, you clearly haven't been reading the right fiction.

A good novel - be it 19th century or 21st - thrills, enriches, and fills the soul like almost no other art. Very few good ones are written these days. But oh! Thackeray, Austen, Scott, Stevenson - Vanity Fair, Emma, Ivanhoe, Treasure Island... I could go on... just think of what it is you dismiss! Such a shame.

Simon Orr

Some works of fiction can help you look at or understand the real world in new ways. For example, few non-fiction books are referenced as often '1984' when discussing the state of our nation.

Nicholas Storey

I started Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds in 2001. It is a damned fine yarn and I really mean to finish it.

DBA Lehane

Surely, a more befitting question is, what's the point of Stephen Pollard?

Ahem...okay, so YOU do not read novels. Yes. Computed and considered.

No wonder, when we are bombarded daily with such factual trivia, some of us choose to lose ourselves in the entertaining comfort of fiction.

David

Um, to be entertained? Presumably you only watch documentaries?

Joshua

"I don't read novels either."

That is probably the reason why Oliver Kamm writes so beautifully and Stephen Pollard does not.

ellen Popper

I could have written Pollard´s comments myself. Together with Germaine Greer, there´re at least three of us. Oh, the joy to realize I´m no longer all alone with such a pecularity.

Marcus Cotswell

I feel the same way about fiction but I still read some as I do enjoy it, in the same way as I occasionally allow myself to watch fairly stupid television programmes - just to relax, basically.

My real blind spot is art, though. I just cannot for the life of me understand why people spend hours trailing round galleries looking at pictures and sculptures and the like. Especially modern art.

The justification usuallly given is that the piece of art is 'saying something' about society or the human condition or whatever.

So why not just say it? Or write it? So then everybody can see exactly what you're getting at.

(By the way, you could read Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts, if you haven't already. You'd enjoy it, I'm sure.)

Frank Pulley

I recently acquired, very gratefully for a song, all eleven volumes of "The Story of Civilisation" by Will Durant (the later volumes with his wife Ariel): works that were in the past slated by academic historians as 'superficial and populist'. Having read the first three, I disagree with those critics and suspect that sour grapes were the main ingredients of their reviews; In fact I wonder whether the critics even read them. As the Durants spent a whole lifetime in travel, assiduous research and writing them (both into their 90s), I consider it my bounden duty to finish all thirteen before I die. I may be cutting it fine.

Of course despite their best efforts they failed to complete the Story of Civilisation; they passed on a little too soon; if they had held on a decade or so they could certainly have witnessed the beginning of the End of Civilisation, which I fear is now well under way.

But then ... I remember ... adducing the evidence from the first three books, many civilisations have come and gone and we are beneficiaries of each of them, just as we all suffer from the historical barbarity that is part of the flux; plus ca change....

So perhaps they would have done better to entitle their opus major: The Continuing Story of The Ups and Downs of Civilisation.

The gentle irony that carries the storyline through each volume illuminates the cadences of both the progress and numbing stupidities of Man and, for me anyway, the books are a transport of delight.

Tiberius

Not read Thomas Hardy or George Orwell? I'd say you can't really be a writer then.

The gratuitous use of the f-word says all you need to know about Greer - a waste of space, print, breath and air time.

John

And protoplasm. I have always said that Greer is a very stupid woman indeed, and this is just more evidence. Her disdain for novels shows that she is shallow, indeed quite a simpleton. Failing to see the point of novels, which are wonderful reflections of the world and especially of people in the hands of a good writer, is the statement of a person who is hugely arrogant with no justification for this arrogance, and at the same time an uncivilised boor.

Tom

Hours spent reading blog posts (or Independent columns and articles), which remind me why I stopped listening to people at the bar in the pub.

Edward Rivers

I don't read fiction either. But there is some useful information in fiction, it enables the development of character. Why for example do English literature students read the bible (not necessarily classing it as fiction), because they gain an insight into different characters and cultures. Fiction can be both experimentation and insight, it is never entirely fictional it is just employing real concepts in a new scenario.