General Paper 1 Q 21
Fiction is not so limited as to
only cover what it is to be a fucking human being. Fiction can be about
many things or even nothing at all.
Fiction can be
classified into different genres each of which is about something
different. Science fiction is about philosophy and morality. Historical
fiction is about dramatizing history. Fantasy is about fighting evil
with whatever talents you possess. Crime fiction is just a puzzle
wrapped in a story. Erotic fiction is a text version of pornography.
Some of the greatest works of fiction have had cardboard or cartoony characters, for instance Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series, because they were about abstract ideas not about people, in Asimov's
case about different types of institutional power and different ways to
organize society. In others the main characters aren't human: for
instance Toad Rage which features an Australian cane toad trying to learn why humans hate them so much.
A novel series I was engaged by was the Animorphs, in which
archetypal teenagers gain the ability to transform into animals to fight
alien mind-controlling slugs. Most of the human characters are highly
sterotyped with little depth, much more time is spent describing the
instincts and drives of the animals the teens transform into. As such
the books were more about what it is to be an animal than what it is to
be human.
Fiction can have other purposes as well. Some novels aim to teach empathy (eg. Anabelle teaches empathy for intersex people through the eyes of an intersex child in the 1960s), others warn of dangers (eg. 1984
warns of the dangers of authoritarianism and state-surveillance). Many
works of fiction aim to persuade or convince the reader of a particular
political/philosophical position (eg. Animal Farm, Germinal, or Atlas Shrugged). Still others ask nothing more of the reader than to be entertained (eg. Wee Free Men
about a young shephardess who becomes the leader of a band of small
blue kilt-wearing super Nac Mac Feegle). Some works of fiction are
simply an exercise in writing within specific constraint (eg. Not A Wake which was written such that the numbers of letters of each word are the digits of pi).
Fiction
can be about what it is to be a fucking human being, but it can also be
about what it is to be a fucking animal, live in a different fucking
time-period, experience a different fucking political organization, live
with different fucking technology, survive a fucking apocolypse, or
no-fucking-thing in particular.
