The depressing thing is that the fiction that gets read is the fiction that people like to read, which is fiction that does not instruct them but tells them they’re wonderful just as they are.
A corrective has historically been the concept of good literature. See for example George Eliot, Anton Chekhov, etc.
Reading Anton Chekhov’s stories, one feels oneself in a melancholy day of late autumn, when the air is transparent and the outline of naked trees, narrow houses, greyish people, is sharp. Everything is strange, lonely, motionless, helpless. The horizon, blue and empty, melts into the pale sky, and its breath is terribly cold upon the earth, which is covered with frozen mud. The author’s mind, like autumn sun, shows up in hard outline the monotonous roads, the crooked streets, the little squalid houses in which tiny, miserable people are stifled by boredom and laziness and fill the houses with an unintelligible, drowsy bustle. … There passes before one a long file of men and women, slaves of their love, of their stupidity and idleness, of their greed for the good things of life; there walk the slaves of the dark fear of life; they straggle anxiously along, filling life with incoherent words about the future, feeling that in the present there is no place for them. … In front of that dreary, gray crowd of helpless people there passed a great, wise, and observant man: he looked at all these dreary inhabitants of his country, and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, with anguish in his face and in his heart, in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them: “You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.” — Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov (BW Huebsch, 1921)
I’ve often wondered why we like reading bleak stories. That sounds like the explanation is that reading Chekov makes you feel like “a great, wise, and observant man”.
I agree, but it may be that the best way to accomplish that end, or at least the route Chekhov has taken, is actually to make wise observations. If we are capable, as a culture, of sometimes recognizing writers whose observations are indeed wise, who help us to simulate the experiences of other people, or better possible selves, with high fidelity, then good literature is probably worth a look. That has been my experience, at least. (Another reason to enjoy reading bleak stories might be an aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of the language, for example.)
The depressing thing is that the fiction that gets read is the fiction that people like to read, which is fiction that does not instruct them but tells them they’re wonderful just as they are.
A corrective has historically been the concept of good literature. See for example George Eliot, Anton Chekhov, etc.
I’ve often wondered why we like reading bleak stories. That sounds like the explanation is that reading Chekov makes you feel like “a great, wise, and observant man”.
I agree, but it may be that the best way to accomplish that end, or at least the route Chekhov has taken, is actually to make wise observations. If we are capable, as a culture, of sometimes recognizing writers whose observations are indeed wise, who help us to simulate the experiences of other people, or better possible selves, with high fidelity, then good literature is probably worth a look. That has been my experience, at least. (Another reason to enjoy reading bleak stories might be an aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of the language, for example.)
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