An unoriginal thought about fiction

Jan 14, 2025

Why are we surprised that Nosferatu is funny?

The Odyssey is funny. Pride and Prejudice is funny. Don Quixote is well-known to be funny. And more from the Western canon: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Borges’s Ficciones (title tells you everything), Shakespeare’s plays, Plato’s Symposium. These are, to varying degrees, all satire, all lampooning the society in which they were written! Keep searching; you’ll only find more to support my observation.

Rana asks: how come, in our education on classical literature, we seem to only read satire like Cervantes and Austen?

There is nothing else.

All great literature is satire. Irony is a prerequisite. Nothing important can be said without a current of humor. Telling a story is, inherently, satire of life! 1

Every writer knows, deep down, that to sit down and write is, necessarily, to adopt an ironic disposition—to make fun at the expense of something else. (You can, of course, set out to tell a joke and then tell a bad joke.)

But do not mistake irony for disgust.

Don Quixote could only have been written by someone who really loved chivalric romances, really wanted his life to resemble them more closely, and understood just what it would cost.

– Elif Batuman, The Possessed

It is weird to compose fiction. The moment you acknowledge that what you are doing is fiction, you have admitted to telling a lie. The gap between reality and the story hangs over the work as a wellspring of irony and humor. The artfulness of storytelling lies in the interplay between that awareness and the suspension of disbelief.

If we admit that to tell a story is to weave a lie, where does that leave the audience, apparently gullible fools eating up this nonsense? In fact they are in on it. Part of fiction’s inherent humor is the basic dramatic irony that the audience knows it is a lie!

[When I write,] I am describing certain aspects of pyschological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.

[…] All fiction is metaphor.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, Author’s Note to The Left Hand of Darkness 2

We know when we are being lied to. We choose to believe it, because we can learn just as much from well-constructed lies as we might from well-constructed truths.

Everyone involved in this delusion knows exactly what is going on. Watch blooper reels from film and television; when actors break, in the most serious scenes, the veil is pierced, they burst out laughing.

Paraphrasing Lee Maracle: I learned storytelling from my grandfather. I was a child, and I told him a lie. He said, “That’s a good story. Tell it again, differently.”

Thus fiction emerges from collaborative lying.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number—Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.

– Le Guin, ibid.

  1. I might as well disclaim that my criterion that a story be “humorous” or “ironic” or “satirical” must not be taken so strictly that we count as fiction only those stories which get generically categorized under “Comedy.” Putting aside the fact that this genre is a relatively recent invention, let me just observe that my idea of humor includes such a simple thing as portraying characters who, when placed in an unbelievably melodramatic scenario, react with a reasonable degree of realism. It also includes the opposite: unexpected reactions to mundane scenarios. Each implicitly satirizes real life. Finally, even the most serious drama toes the line of absurdity; the film ends and the curtain closes, and I grin, because of how embarrassing it is to find I have been, once again, willingly deceived!↩︎

  2. This author’s note is rich and informative. I recommend you find it and read it in full.↩︎