If the job of the novelist is to depict the experience of being confronted with an issue without getting to the truth of the issue, what about Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s fairytales? What about parables and proverbs? Are stories allowed to be instructive?
I’ve always thought about it in terms of which part of you is being engaged. Logic and propositional truth appeal to the mind, but we all know what it’s like to understand the thing we should do and still choose not to do it. Usually those decisions are made because we lack emotional agreement or instinctual knowledge. And that’s what stories do - they contextualize cerebral problems in experiential truth.
If the job of the novelist is to depict the experience of being confronted with an issue without getting to the truth of the issue, what about Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s fairytales? What about parables and proverbs? Are stories allowed to be instructive?
I’ve always thought about it in terms of which part of you is being engaged. Logic and propositional truth appeal to the mind, but we all know what it’s like to understand the thing we should do and still choose not to do it. Usually those decisions are made because we lack emotional agreement or instinctual knowledge. And that’s what stories do - they contextualize cerebral problems in experiential truth.