How constructed realities help us understand the world
By TARA ROMERO — tcrome@ucdavis.edu
The world is confusing, and humans are naturally curious. That’s why we’ve developed different ways of understanding the world — through belief systems, natural sciences, philosophy, every major that UC Davis offers and every form of knowledge gained outside the classroom. There are so many ways to acquire knowledge and feed our hungry minds with concrete facts, so why do we even bother with fiction?
Fiction isn’t real anyway. It’s all unicorns, Smaug and Bella Swan. What’s the point of reading “Crime and Punishment” when I can just go read a scientific study on how murderers deal with guilt? Why pick up a copy of “Beloved” when I can go read the old newspaper clippings about Margaret Garner?
What’s especially funny about those questions is that the answer is in the novels themselves. Fiction represents the world in ways that scientific theories and historical records cannot do on their own. Through stories, we can step into someone else’s life (even if it’s not “real”) and assign meaning to it. We use invented stories as a way to understand the world and ourselves as individuals within it.
Think of your favorite childhood fairy tale. “Little Red Riding Hood.” “Goldilocks.” These fictional stories are constructed to teach children lessons: Don’t talk to strangers and beware if your grandmother looks like a wolf; Meet in the middle and don’t go into random bears’ houses. These stories construct worlds that exist in a vacuum to relay certain morals and values; there’s rarely anything included in the story that doesn’t have a direct meaning to it. Simply telling a child these lessons does not help them understand the consequences of their actions. World-building allows children to understand these lessons as they are acted out, so that they get a better grasp of how the world works, even if it’s told through wolves and bears.
Yet, most fictional stories are much more than simple moral lessons. If the main takeaway from “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is “and that’s why you shouldn’t be vain,” then we lose so much of what the story is truly presenting to us. The story forces the reader to sit and reflect about what art means, imitation compared to reality, how we deal with aging and queerness through the construction of its own world. Yes, themes and lessons can be drawn from it, but the story itself presents the author’s own unique understanding of how the world works, embedded within this narrative. We don’t just learn a simple lesson; we learn to understand this fictionalized version of the world.
No matter what genre of fiction, invented stories will never quite represent reality as it is. Many authors try to portray our world as it exists. Stories like “Anna Karenina” or “Of Mice and Men” place fictionalized characters within the “real world.” Although there’s nothing inherently “unreal” about these depictions, these representations of reality are limited to what the author needs us to see for the sake of the story. Fantasy worlds like “Lord of the Rings” or “The Poppy War” are purposely constructed as metaphors for different parts of how the world works. Fiction represents and misrepresents reality with intention. Authors need us to view the world in a certain way, so that their stories have meaning.
Fiction constructs different versions of reality, or unrealities, with the purpose of assigning structure to the chaos of life. It presents hypothetical universes and places parts of reality under a microscope to help us see things that might be hidden within us and our society.
The world is confusing right now, but reading stories helps us find patterns within the confusion — every story we read tells us a little bit more about how the world works. Understanding the “unreal” gives meaning to what is real.
Written by: Tara Romero— tcrome@ucdavis.edu
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