THE TRUTH OF FICTION

                      THE TRUTH OF FICTION:         BY CHNUA ACHEBE 

                                                               

                         A SUMMARY BY NWANI UCHENNA WILLIAMS

Picasso, a playwright claimed that all ‘art’ is false. His argument draws attention to the exaggerated manner of seers that arts cannot be a carbon copy of life, thus, cannot be true.

        According to Frank Kermode, he defines Fiction “as something we know does not exist but which helps us to make sense of, and move in, in the world.” Therefore, a writer of fiction creates a new, unique, individual world through the apparatus or acts – of fiction. Just like a mathematical fiction of ‘infinity plus one’ expedites the solution of certain problems in pure mathematics, albeit, it does not exist; or the legal fiction used in some legal system to pretend that the wife’s death precedes that of the husband in the case of the pairs’ demise, in the pursuit of equity to minimize the hardship brought upon their estate; in a similar vein, ‘fictions’ are invented to help us out of certain problems we run into while living, albeit, not clear-cut or consciously perceived as the Lawyer’s or mathematician’s formulations. A fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

         Achebe explained that there exist two aspects of fictions namely: fictions that help (beneficent fictions), and fictions that hinder (malignant fictions).

Beneficent fictions address moral problems practically. It evokes our common humanity with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. If you check it, if you watch a magician and marvel at his sleight of hand and management of optical tricks, an ‘imagination’ is formed. It uses the phrasal expression: “let us pretend.

Thus, beneficent fictions functions within the peripheries of imagination.   So Fictions through the apparatus - imaginations, stretches the world.

     Malignant fictions on the other hand are superstitious. They are like racial superiority, asserting its fiction as a proven fact and a way of life. It never uses the phrase: “let us pretend.” It does not grant us our sense of imaginative faculties comprising our personal, social and human reality.

       The fiction which imaginative literature offers liberates the mind of man. It does not beget prejudice and superstition. It gets down to an escapade in self-discovery and culminates in wisdom and benevolent moral sense.