Last night, I was in the library. Contrary to the general state of affairs, none of my friends was sitting at our favorite table, so I meandered through the sections, haphazardly perusing the children’s fiction section in the far corner, behind the shelves.
I say haphazardly, but I meant to end up here. I usually do—it’s the same in bookstores, where I begin among my preferred literary darlings, the Donna Tartts and Oscar Wildes, and migrate into the Harry Potters and the Artemis Fowls and Percy Jacksons.
It’s the strangest mixture of books, in the children’s section of the library, a constellation of my childhood and middle-school experiences: wizards, djinn, geniuses; the boy who fell into a world below New York; the quirky sixth-grade trivia team; the boy riding the unicorn and reciting an ancient rune; the Christmases at Hogwarts, poring over chapters rich with cozy description.
Somehow, these are the texts that have embedded themselves the most deeply in my mind. Random, innocuous phrases send me spinning back into the pages I wore down with rereading as a middle-schooler. Fragments of conversations and certain words conjoined remind me of that prophecy that I’ve somehow still got memorized, while that particular joke sounds like that thing Fred and George said in the first “Harry Potter” book. Though I’m quick to inform people that I read Greek myths before “Percy Jackson,” a reference to particular aspects of Greek mythology still rings of middle-school quests.
I consume pages on pages of academic fare every semester, yet still, as a twenty-one year old, I feel most comfortable in the middle-school fiction section of any library or bookstore. I’ve theorized that, perhaps, my comfort with these old, middle-grade books is merely habit. I’m most familiar with them; thus, I’m most comfortable with them.
But there’s still a pull to middle-grade fiction, I think, beyond its familiarity. These stories comprised a hefty amount of my childhood; they aided in cultivating my imagination; they became foundational for the ways in which I perceived the world; and, thus, they’re reluctant to be shaken.
I don’t think we give such stories enough credit, and I don’t think we read them enough. Instead of becoming displaced by the academic reading I’ve been doing for years now—the collegiate texts that demand most of my attention—they’ve only receded slightly into the background of my mind.
Despite this reality, I still call them ‘children’s books’ in polite company, with a little grin that admits that I’m alluding to my childhood, and using them as some sort of tool to refresh my mind for whatever more pressing reading I have due tomorrow.
These stories are, though, I contend, more vital than my academic reading. These are the works that taught me to think, to imagine; these are the works that introduced me to characters I would still say that I know intimately. Rather than treating them as guilty pleasures or nostalgia trips, I ought to be more willing to acknowledge them as the texts I find most integral to my thought and to the ways in which my mind works. I find both solace and intellectual stimulation in fiction—the literary fiction I read and write now stems from the fantasy I read as a child.
Academia, while a world in which I have a personal stake, is not the world in which I find myself primarily invested. Instead, for years, I have interacted most comfortably with words, stories, worlds, and fiction. The two are often considered bleakly disparate, yet I’ve found that the two necessarily intertwine. My academics inform my fiction; my fiction informs my academics. The two cannot be isolated into the ‘serious’ and the ‘frivolous,’ or the ‘childish’ and the ‘adult.’
Such a separation betrays an over-analyticism of academia, and an imposed solemnity that oughtn’t be attributed to academic study. The whimsical or fictional needn’t become serious to be treated academically; rather, whimsy, fiction, and academia ought to correspond, as weighty, legitimate facets of the human experience. They compose parts of our constellation of experience—that which we feel, touch, perceive, know, and study.
Fiction is that which we encounter, as beings and as humans, and that which shapes us as we shape it. Fiction, like other facets of academic study, offers a lens through which we experience the world; yet, I argue, it penetrates the nature of reality and of the human experience in an intimate manner that lends it credence as a foundation for our perception of the world.
Naturally, when I speak of lenses, I acknowledge that every reader of this paper has a different lens with which they approach both academia and the wider world of experience. Fiction need not and should not be everyone’s foundation of perception; however, I want to offer it as a legitimate foundation, both for those who work within and outside of the realm of literature.
For those who think fiction an unlikely contender as a foundation of their perception, I encourage you to nonetheless venture into that section of the library. Rather than being a bygone, middle-school phase or guilty pleasure, view fiction as a way to perceive and experience the world. Let’s add stories to the repertoire of ways in which we unashamedly and openly experience reality.