In the conversation about the fate of the humanities in the postmodern moment—no grand narratives allowed, no perspectives thought to be more valid than others—there is no single magisterial voice that speaks reliably on the state and future of fiction. Some who muse on the topic seem to think we’re in a secret golden age of the art, one whose richness will only be known in a future we can only achieve if we believe in its possibility. We could even appreciate it right now, if only we could sense its reality through the static. Others believe we’re in radical decline and that, in five or ten years, no one will be seriously reading anything at all. We might call this latter position “literacy doomerism.”
A subvariant of literacy doomerism is the kind of conversation about fiction that immediately veers into examples from recent popular films. The speakers may have read excellent work. They may even have read it deeply and passionately. But they lack any confidence that the people to whom they’re speaking have done the same. So to make any kind of point about narrative, they feel they have to fall back on the type of story most people nowadays probably know: palatable pabulum, simplistic and safe.
Still others in this populist vein haven’t quite given up yet on the act of reading. But they tend to wonder aloud if the products of imaginative invention have any validity unless they can gather an audience comparable in size to the number of eyeballs that flicker every ten milliseconds over a TikTok video. This is the “get big or get out” approach to the life of the mind, and it has the same effect on the brain that “get big or get out” farming has on the body.
Now, nobody thinks it’s a bad thing to reach a large number of people. The question is: What are you reaching them with? You don’t need to be told again what corn syrup has done to the American diet and the American body. What we have tended to ignore, and cannot afford to anymore, is the corresponding corn syrup of the soul.
The pursuit of satisfaction without the pursuit of truth is self-defeating. It cannot nourish us. We become nutrient starved, even while we’re emptily overfilled.
What stories at their best can provide is the ethos and pathos that prepare us to receive and value logos.
As with the body, so with the mind. If nothing can nourish us, if we cannot ultimately know, then all our conversation and all our perception becomes a version of the plotless plot of Katherine Anne Porter’s life-consuming novel Ship of Fools, which may have taken her twenty-seven years to complete in part because of the inane vagueness of its vision of life: an endless cruise on a choppy ocean toward an undetermined destination, in unpleasant company. Porter’s stories, by contrast, remain masterpieces because they tell us something real about the sorrows and losses of life. What they see is vivid, sharp, tragic: hard to take, sure; not the whole truth, sure; but still true.
If we are to write well, or live well, we need a vision more fulfilling than one of ourselves as insecure creatures adrift on a ship of fools. If we keep looking for that vision in all the wrong places, we can only expect more of the same frustration and waste that comes from not being who we really are.
I think so many people have lost confidence in humans’ ability to pass along stories that matter because we have first lost confidence in the thought that our souls exist and matter—and to hold on to that, we need confidence that God exists, matters, loves us, cares about us, acts in history, gives us reason to hope, and will make all things well in the end. Stories not only don’t have to spend time proving any of those things: They should not spend time trying to prove them. Syllogistic proof is a different mode of rhetoric than the rhetoric of fiction. Both rhetorics have their limits. But when a story grows from ground in which those deeper, truer beliefs subsist, the reader can taste the difference.
This is why we still write stories—not only tell them in oral form, as humans have always done, but record them in stable texts that herald their ambition to be as lasting and as alluring and as ennobling as the rest of the best that has been thought and said. This is why we even have a canon of great books; this is why we care about trying to add to it, or at least to craft work that does not shame it. I agree with a point Phil Christman made recently in an essay in Plough: There is ultimately no logical way to deliver proof of the goodness of this act—or other good human acts—to someone who lacks the ethos and pathos to receive it. What stories at their best can provide is the ethos and pathos that prepare us to receive and value logos.
If, one day soon, the conditions to sustain the act of writing stories stop existing, then we will find other ways to record and transmit and preserve stories. Humans have always done this, all the more so when we have been scorned and bullied and threatened for doing it. But for now, in most places, writers are not being scorned or bullied or (except in the case of mainstream humanities departments) threatened. We are just being ignored. To some, being ignored may as well be not existing. But I submit that this is weak sauce. What has happened to tough-mindedness in the face of adversity? Nobody at Oxford (in a mainstream humanities department) thought much of Tolkien’s furtive scribbling underneath the proofs of the Oxford English Dictionary. Nobody now thinks that Tolkien did not exist or did not matter.
So let’s just prescind from all the self-eviscerative self-questioning about whether and why what we’re doing is good, not only when it comes to fiction but for all human activities that are obviously good in themselves. Let’s stop asking and answering questions whose purpose is to put us on the defensive: What are we doing? Is there a point? Who will remember? In the light of the good itself, all this anxious agitation self-unmasks as futile.
So long as we define and decide our actions not by what is good in itself but by what we think other people will be doing in five or ten years—when mimesis in the social sense overtakes mimesis in the aesthetic sense—we will be not ourselves but a facsimile. And if, as facsimiles, we then hand our human agency over to other facsimilies—stochastic parrots we anthropomorphize and allow to do all our thinking, feeling, and living for us—that will be no great surprise. It will have the emptiness of all totalitarianisms and the dispiriting flatness of all bad and predictable plot developments: We saw it coming for miles; no one did anything to stop it; it ruined everything. But it is hard to see what the point of the ruin was, or exactly what anyone ever realistically thought could be gained by it.
But that blighted future is, for now, still not inevitable. Meanwhile the point about literature, the good it offers, is not the mere existence of some words out in ether: disembodied, uprooted, unrelated. The key thing is the moment when the word crosses your mind, having first crossed another human mind, and creates a complex relation between the word, your mind, and that mind.
And that relation is not the mere literalistic representation of my experience, or yours, as expressions of typical sociological instances. Nor is it the mere communication of a single internal consciousness, a subjective perspective, a single “I” (monumental as that may be). It is the sharing of a world. It is the knowledge, which we haven’t yet lost and can still keep (for now) if we want it, that thinking, feeling, writing, reading, and living are good. It is the desire to continue doing these things, as our real selves, in communion with others who are also real.
You can be told this all day, and the teller will get nowhere, as long as the words speak only to your rationalistic cerebrum, the part of you that is well defended and accustomed to big words and anxious about preserving its self-concept as savvy and smart and special. But in literature, you can experience it: mind, heart, body, spirit.
You can do this—if you want. You can share in the fruits of others’ efforts to do it too. All of this is not just a complicated advertisement for Luminor’s short story contest, a cookie-cutter call for submissions. (Although it is that too: Please send in your submissions here. Click the link to submit your work through the Typeform section until June 1, 2025; I invite your work and look forward to reading it.) It is no less than an affirmation of being.