Literary Creation

What is the purpose of all the pretty stories that authors have created for most of human history? Obviously, there are multiple reasons to read fiction: one gets something different out of Michael Crichton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Vladimir Nabokov. But I don't think the difference between those authors is merely their choice of topics. They are all writing for different reasons, trying to impart a different message to their readers.

With Crichton, the purpose is entertainment. Establish a few characters that the reader cares about, conjure an elaborate plot involving (preferably) dinosaurs or something equally unlikely, write in an accessible style...and presto, one has an entertaining way to spend a few hours of an airplane ride. Fitzgerald's purpose is more complicated, and more serious. He wants to describe a certain class of Americans in a certain time period. He wants to describe their glamor, their weaknesses, and how they think. At the broadest level, he is engaging in social commentary disguised as fiction.

Nabokov sometimes comments on political affairs -- specifically the Soviet takeover of Russia -- but that's not his primary concern. Essentially, he's concerned with recording beauty. Preserving images in everyday life is an end in itself for him. I'll let him have the last word. This is from "A Guide to Berlin":

"The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray out time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old custumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor's uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor's purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine -- every thing will be ennobled and justified by age.

I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirror of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."