back
6 comments
Ah, "testimony" and "personal narrative"!!! Okay:

Gee, finally: Early in school, I was very interested in learning good information. For "fiction", my summary was that it was by definition and its own admission not true so definitely not the information I was interested in.

Later I guessed that maybe fiction could have some value as information if viewed it as suggestions or hypotheses about people, maybe actually valuable if the author had some unusually good insight -- information about people stands to be important, but people can be complicated and good insight when available might be about the best information we can hope for so far. For academic research in psychology, my brother tried that through his masters but changed to political science for his Ph.D. because of his summary of the psychology research -- had some solid results that applied to rats but not to humans.

Then I complained: Reading fiction, (A) I was not sure what the author was claiming to be true and, (B) even if there was a good guess about the claims, the evidence is not very good.

Then I noticed that I have some guesses about humans, and when I see fiction that agrees with such a guess I can start to conclude that at least the fiction writer was guessing that lots of his audience will agree with his guesses about humans. So, at least a reader of the fiction can come away with some evidence that some audience agrees with the guess about humans.

Finally I settled on the description that mostly fiction was about entertainment, call it vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE)! Yup, and movies about Superman, Batman, and Spiderman can get a lot of revenue!

Many novels are told from a first-person point of view, mimicking a testimony. Moby Dick. The Great Gatsby. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Handmaid's Tale. The narrators are far from ungrounded voices coming from the middle of nowhere as the OP insinuates. They are deliberately created to be as relatable, or sometimes alien, as the author chooses.

The oldest stories were personal testimonies, told, retold, embellished and reinterpreted over centuries. It should not be surprising that modern storytellers follow this tradition, and aspire to match the power of testimony. Bad novelists obviously fail at this task. Good ones kinda succeed. The greatest novelists, playwrights and screenwriters, on the other hand, can create fictional narratives that feel even more real than the testimonies of real people. Testimony is powerful, sure, but there is no need to disparage the power of fiction in comparison.

> The oldest stories were personal testimonies

What do you mean here? The oldest known is the Oddysey and it is not personal testimony by any definition.

Tales told around the bonfire in stone-age villages, about that one time Uncle Steve took down a wooly mammoth all on his own, or the mystic forest your great-grandfather came across when he was lost in the snowstorm but couldn't find again when he looked for it the following summer.

Generations pass. Steve the Mammoth Slayer becomes a legendary warrior, and the mystic forest is now inhabited by gods. Travelers from other villages bring their own tales of gods and warriors, love and adventure. People start arguing over which hero is stronger, which monster is scarier, whose goddess is sexier. War and conquest would have settled most of those disputes by the time you reached civilization, so that people like Homer could compile the stories that were passed down to them into a more or less consistent mythology.

To indulge briefly in my own pedantry, I believe Gilgamesh predates the Iliad by nearly a thousand years.
Perhaps it is simply a question of balance, or of longing: there is SO much fiction available to us (and so much of it is the same, or at least so similar), those who want the traditional benefits, if you will, of fiction - escapism, experiencing the perspective of another, etc. - are more likely to find it in non-fiction narrative than in fiction.

And not because these things are no longer found in fiction but that so much fiction is formulaic and familiar that the odds aren’t there.

Curating a set of non-fiction narrative to find the gems is simply likely to take less effort and to yield more results.

Consider too that writers of narrative may well have an advantage in finding an authentic voice, since their narrative is theirs, reflecting their unique experience, where fiction (typically) tries to find common ground.