Why we read fiction

Thanks to friend WS for sending me recently several links to good articles and essays about various odd facets of literature - last night read Harvard Gazette interview with critic and novelist and rof James Wood - made me want to pursue some of the words he mentions, as it seems we have similar literary tastes, an interest in realism, naturalism, and high literary value without sacrificing it all on the altar of postmodernism or European decadence and self-abnegation. I wish I'd sent him (and spouse Claire Messud?) Exiles to read and review, too late alas. Especially like reading Ian MacEwan's essay on giving up on (reading) fiction. What serious reader hasn't had those thoughts at one time or another? As if we'd read everything of value already (as if!) and every new novel we come across just disappoints or disappears from the mind. MacEwan, in those fits, decides for the moment that fiction isn't really all that important, it's just a matter of he married her, she married him, she left him, etc. - so he decides to read nonfiction only, bios science philosophy - until he realizes he realizes he's missed the whole point. Fiction - as I've argued in several previous posts - is the ultimate realism. Imagine for a moment our world as it would be if we did not have novels (and, to take this further, add plays and films as well): first of all we would know virtually nothing about any other culture on this planet, past or present. We would know our of village and family only. Second, even if we could know, from nonfiction, the facts about other cultures and times (the history of the Civil War, say), we would know little or nothing about the interior life of anyone from the past (can you understand 19th century American without having read Hawthorne, Melville, and James?); we would also have no understanding about the how others think and imagine, about the way the human mind works - other than from conversation and observation, much of which is superficial, trivial, or simply functional. Fiction forms our ideas of consciousness and of the imagination - it is innate and essential to the human spirit, and I am sure that people told tales to one another long before the development of  a written language. Fiction is our way of making sense of the world. Clearly, TV and cinema has opened the world of fiction and narration over the past century in ways previously unimaginable - and that I think has had as much or more to do with the quality of life in the late 20th century even than the advance of technology.