Literature and Truth

I am leery of the notion that the purpose of literature is to impart truth. Not because literature cannot express truths about matters temporal or eternal, but because the literary artist is concerned first and foremost with creating a literary world and its concrete objects. These creations serve as more than just aesthetic coverings for the author’s philosophical or theological ideas. A work of literature is about its characters, settings, events, conflicts, images, and its other earthly aspects; these have greater significance than any simplistic “message” or “moral” the reader might abstract from the work. What matters most in Macbeth, for example, is not that the reader walks away with a premonition that it’s best not to kill people in the pursuit of power. Catholic author Flannery O’Connor put it this way: “What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.”