The Literary Trojan Horse: How Fiction Smuggles the Truth Past our Defences

I have an agenda today. I keep running into the idea, lately, explicitly expressed or implicitly held, that reading literature is a waste of time. That its value is limited to the classroom as an archaic rite of passage, outside of which its purpose is only entertainment, and that in a world where there are many more efficient ways to inject entertainment into our veins. That it has no value in and for the real world and is superfluous to life and the pursuit of God.

I could not disagree more. So this is the one where I try to persuade you to read more literature, because literature is life giving.

By literature I mean works of fiction that invite us to encounter our own humanity and the humanity of others through the imagination, with reasonable latitude as to the nature and form of that encounter. It might be delightful, or shocking, unsettling or horrifying, it might resolve, it might not. What is true is that on the page and through the power of words, we catch a glimpse of the divine nature that God himself placed in man and all the ways that nature can be expressed or distorted.

The best of literature is about human beings or their avatars wrestling with the complexity of their humanity, encountering the range, depth and expanse of the soul and responding in heartening, perturbing and dreadful ways. It sets them in configurations that are alternately mundane and wild, alongside other human beings who may be friendly, hostile or indifferent, among diverse things, places and ideas, and churns all these elements together to serve us new and enlightening ways of seeing ourselves, others and the world we live in.

Oswald Chambers speaks of the light that shines so bright that it is a kind of darkness. If you have ever dared look into the glare of brilliance, you know this to be true. Emily Dickinson offers up her powerful Tell the Truth But Tell it Slant. The truth, she suggests, is too bright for our imperfect selves to bear.

Two trains arriving at the same destination from disparate directions.

We saw this play out when David, God’s own beloved, the one after his own heart, did a terrible thing. He committed adultery with another man’s wife, impregnated her, tried to set up her husband, failed, and having failed, got him killed. A disappointing, tragic, domino chain of poor choices that displeased God.

So God deployed a story, delivered skilfully by Nathan, the Prophet. A story about a rich man who commandeered a poor man’s only sheep in lieu of one of his many. David received the story with indignation and anger. Unsurprisingly. The injustice of it is clear for all to see. He wished death upon the rich man. Only then did Nathan deliver the twist of the knife: the rich man, he told David, was he. It did not matter that the poor man and the rich man were imaginary. It mattered that they were true.

Some truth in plain form is hard to receive. Its light is so bright that it blinds us. But when that truth is handed to us swathed in story, our lowered defences receive it, and then in looking at it, we see clearly what has always been. In this way, literature can be a trojan horse bearing truth past our outer walls into our inner sanctum. Sneak past those watchful dragons, in C S Lewis speak. Past our conceptions of ourselves and our self-deception, holding up a mirror, forcing us to see ourselves as we are. Stories bypass rational and emotional barriers to present difficult truths in ways that enable us to hear them. And faith is strengthened by encountering the truth.

That’s only one of the things that the best literature can do to us and for us. It has myriad other uses. It can deepen empathy by presenting to us flawed others and their human foibles in ways that gives us access to their imagined interiority. Would we join those who walk away from Omelas, or would be among those who remain? It can remind us who we are capable of becoming as we watch little Lucy stand up to her older siblings and determine that if they will not, she must go where Aslan leads. It can force us to face our frailty as we witness The Death of Ivan Illyich. It can remind us we are not alone, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, and it can be, for a moment, a means of escape from the world, if we so desire it.

And there is, into the bargain, the breathtaking showcase it provides of human creativity. It reaches for what is possible, touching it lightly, and in so doing, stirring up in us a sense of what could be. It is the product of the human imagination in much the same way as we are the product of God’s imagination, therefore it is not surprising that encountering good literature calls up the divine in us.

And with literature, unlike with other creative art forms such as music, art and film, there is a unique act of co-creation between writer and reader. The writer imagines and describes. The reader interprets and imagines. In that liminal space between writer and reader, worlds upon worlds are spun and woven.

We worry, rightly, that our attention span has been shattered by the proliferation of the visual and textual short form on social media and wonder whether we can carry the length of a substantial piece of literature. Fortunately, this adverse effect on our attention is not a terminal condition. We can hunker down and retrain our long-term attention. It’s a muscle we need to exercise and we are losing it because we’re not using it. If we read longer, and read increasingly more complex writing, we will wean it right back. The way back to reading more literature , therefore, is by reading more literature.

I have heard it suggested, too, that championing the reading of literature is elitist. But that suggestion itself is an act of patronising snobbery. Aesthetic and literary appreciation is not the preserve of a particular class of people. Everyone has an aesthetic sensibility and people from all walks of life can and do appreciate good literature.

I offer two anecdotes in brief counter to the charge of elitism:

The one is recounted by Chimamanda Adichie in her highly regarded TED TALK, The Danger of a Single Story. In it she tells the story of a messenger who worked at a TV Station in Nigeria where she was attending an interview. Chimamanda describes her as part of the ordinary masses of Nigeria who were not supposed to be readers. But this messenger had not only read Chimamanda’s book, she had strong opinions about a sequel and was not afraid to express them to the author.

The other is from Jonathan Rose, who, in The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes, documented how one of the key complaints by young working class women in the UK at the advent of mass industrialisation was that the increased factory hours were eating into their reading time and time for other intellectual pursuits.

The pleasure of reading, of engaging the imagination and soaring into new worlds on the wings of words can be and should be afforded to anyone and everyone. If only we deign to address such fundamental questions as universal literacy and affordability.

If you have not read a work of literature in a while and your interest is piqued, I offer a short reading list to awaken your literary tastebuds:

Short Stories

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

Tekayo by Grace Ogot

The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen

A Righteous Man by Tochi Onyebuchi

Novellas

The Great Divorce by CS Lewis

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy.

Pick one, find it, read it, savour it. Don’t be afraid to face the questions it asks of you.

Opening yourself up to literature, even literature that takes you to uncomfortable places such as the pieces I have shared above, is opening yourself up to an encounter with the transcendent: with the good, the true and the beautiful.