Popular fiction

The first stories were probably regarded as histories, fact rather than fiction.  Judging by the residues that have come down to us, they seem to have mostly concerned the gods and creation, and were therefore nearer explanatory natural history, or science, than consciously false fables. 

After the gods, the stories would soon have been of the great predecessors, the heroes and heroines down through the generations.  Almost by definition these would have been the kings and queens, and hence divine or semi-divine themselves, extensions of the pantheon.  These are the characters which live on in the literatures of the Heroic Age: the Greek princes at Troy, the Germanic Beowulf.

Two major developments then took place. First, the inherently subversive nature of writing meant that stories became increasingly democratised.  After the kings and queens it was the nobles who became the focus, even further removed from the divine than royalty.  And then finally mere mortals were granted the same privilege of textual apotheosis.

The second factor was a move away from the literal.  At first tales would have been attempts at factual reportage; then embellishments would have crept in, rhetorical flourishes to impress the audience, magnify the achievements.  One of the earliest examples is the Egyptian saga of Kadesh, the battle of Ramses II which was at best a draw and at worst a disaster for him, but which became in the hands of his gifted scribes a personal triumph for the king.  From such convenient blurrings it was only a short step but a crucial one to invent entire events, complete characters.  So the divorce between fact and fiction, real and imagined, began.

Over the centuries, that gap has widened. Writers seeking originality have created ever more striking characters in more extreme situations.  Initially the process was slow as fiction retained its pristine sense of discovery and audacity - being able and daring to create other worlds with words.  But as with all such processes, the need constantly to outdo predecessors, and to overtrump contemporaries has led to a gradual but unmistakable acceleration through the ages.  This century in particular has seen the boundaries of fiction pushed ever further - from the initial shocks of 'Lady Chatterly's Lover' and 'Ulysses' through to the more recent brouhaha over 'American Psycho'.

But something strange is happening.  Where before such books moved away from the everyday, now they find themselves being outdone by it.  When story-telling began, the world's population may have been less than a million.  Within each tribe, everyone was known and part of the community.  Today we are moving rapidly towards the ten billion mark, and people have never been so isolated.  Within that loneliness, society creates its monsters.  The fact is, there are now simply so many people in the world, and so many outside the process of socialisation and normalisation that some live out realities stranger than any imaginable fiction.  And so we have come full circle, with all of our writings, however extreme and superficially implausible now, nothing but histories of unknown characters, waiting out there amidst the people for their author to discover them.

(1.2.92)

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