For someone like me who grew up in a community where Nepali was the only means of oral communication, writing in English has always been an art of enigma and experiment. Before coming to the United States in 2016, my writing process in English was a form of translation. Ideas came to my mind in Nepali first, and before I wrote them down, my subconscious mind unknowingly translated those ideas into English.
My fascination with English was solely because of the books I read—especially works of fiction. During my freshman and sophomore years at college, I was extremely fascinated with the works of Ernest Hemingway. One of the things I learned from the author of “A Farewell to Arms” was its ultimate simplicity—the art of conveying the deepest realities of human existence using modest and unadorned prose.
Books of non-fiction provide an eye to critically analyze and understand the world. Meanwhile, fiction helps us fit ourselves into the shoes of the characters and experience their emotional and psychological tension which we would have otherwise never experienced in our life.
The exact story depicted in fiction may not be true, but it is not groundless and perfectly imaginary. Even the fantasy fictions have some indirect connections with the realities of human life. In other words, fiction is an “untrue” way of understanding the truth.
I consider most of the religious texts depicting the lives of gods and goddesses to be fiction masterpieces beautifully woven with symbolism, faith and mythology.
It is debatable whether the stories are true. It is certain that the same form of devilish, and good, characters exist in human life. The suffering of the characters in the religious texts are also inevitable in our own lives. The power of fiction in religious texts is such that the symbolism has now evolved into a strong form of belief, and the characters have now lived beyond the stories inside people’s consciousnesses.
The oral tradition of storytelling has now been replaced by the digital form, but this art was very rich and viable in my village when I was a kid. I grew up listening to folktales from my grandmother like other kids in my neighborhood. In other parts of the world as well, the oral form of storytelling may have been a child’s first introduction to literature in the pre-digital era. I think nothing in the world teaches a child the moral and ethical issues of life as good as the oral tradition of fiction.
We all love stories, and we all consume them in various forms including books, movies, television series and even in the form of daily narratives from our closest friends. The stories we consume have a big impact on our understanding of the world and the faith we believe in.
Fiction opens a door to boundless perspectives on human life. Besides serving as a healthy form of entertainment, it also helps us understand another unfamiliar part of the world and find fascination in an entirely new language and culture.
For instance, from V. S. Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas,” one can understand the social consciousness of the people living a colonial life on an agricultural island. Naipaul’s and Hemingway’s works are enough to give us the glimpses of the jazz age and the lost generation respectively. Khalid Hosseini’s works take us to the life of people in war-stricken Afghanistan.
A good work of fiction never loses its significance, and it is never confined within one geographical boundary, language or chapter of history. The ancient tales of the Mahabharata, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Don Quixote and the works of Shakespeare are still relevant, and they never fail to justify their aesthetic superiority.
In a rather personal context of an author’s writing process, Naipaul says, fiction never lies. I agree with his assertion because I too feel a great work of fiction is the truest possible reflection of our own lives.
