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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

OT, and possibly unpopular here, but this really gets on my nerves:

> In Paul Graham’s essay on, How to Do what You Love* he warns us about the prestige trap: (...) you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you’re going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies*

PG's contempt for anything literary pervades in many of his essays, which may reveal some kind of unhealthy obsession, esp. for someone who brands himself a "writer".

But this quote shows a deep misunderstanding of what literature is. Literature is about the TRUTH. It may be the only way to gain an actual comprehension of human nature.

A novel can be viewed as an experiment: put characters in a controlled setting of your design, and then see what happens. This is the best tool we have for this.

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Surely putting imaginary characters in an imaginary setting can only result in stories limited by the authors imagination. If the author does not know all that much about human nature in the first place, only unrealistic stories will be the outcome. Worse, as a reader it is not possible to discern realistic behavior unless you already understand human nature, which makes literature somewhat useless for learning about it.

I would argue that understanding of human nature is a necessary (but not sufficient) element of becoming a good writer, but writing in itself is not necessarily a good way to learn about human nature. As an aside, I'm a bit weirded out by the idea that reading books would be the best way to learn about human nature as opposed to going "out there" and interacting with people.

Events happen in fiction that can be rare and unpleasant to experience oneself IRL... Fiction is a magnifying glass, a condenser.

That made me think of the start of a recent talk by Charlie Stross (the excellent SF author and HN user cstross):

"Good morning. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money."

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artific...

This is especially good. Thank you.

Accelerando is a wild ride.

I also took issue with that line as it reminded me of a quote from Orwell: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

I think he is just being brusque to make the point. If he had written "you have to like constructing fantastic worlds and intriguing characters" it would obscure the message. I mean, it seems unlikely PG hates literature.

Literature is a reflection of human nature, but only as understood by the author. It is not going to take you any farther in comprehension than than the original author had already figured out. So while it might be truth, and certainly holds value, it is sheer arrogance to say that it is the "only way to gain an actual comprehension of human nature".

Novels don't contain some otherwise ineffable TRUTH (in all-capital letters), they're just made-up stories for entertainment. Which is a perfectly fine thing for people to work on and to enjoy.

If anything this bizarre attitude that literature "may be the only way to gain an actual comprehension of human nature" might be an artifice of people's desire for success and prestige--puffery motivated by a personal insecurity about the significance of one's interests or work. You want to gain an actual comprehension of human nature? Read history. Go to the bar. Have some kids. Sit down on the curb and talk to a homeless person. Travel. Put yourself in extreme situations with other people (like joining the military or something). You'll learn a hell of a lot more that way than by reading novels.

Additional support: Most good novelists lived interesting lives

I do have kids. Did they teach me something about human nature? Not that I noticed. I still go to the bar often. Do I learn anything about human nature there? A little, yes, but not much (in essence, that people act stupid when drunk. They can be very funny though). Do I travel? Yes. What does that teach me? Mostly, that there's no place like home.

I maintain you will learn a lot more, and a lot faster, by reading Shakespeare, or Flaubert, than by talking with any number of people.

It's likely that putting yourself in "extreme situations" will teach you something about yourself, and by extension, about human nature in general. But you may die learning. There must be a better way.

If you think novels are "made-up stories for entertainment", chances are you didn't read many of them, or many good ones.

Novels are literally made-up stories. If they actually happened, they wouldn't be novels, they would be memoirs or history or something.

We do disagree on whether the purpose of novels is to entertain or to deliver what you call TRUTH. Now, to be as generous as possible to your point, some writers can distill a lifetime of wisdom and experience into a work of literature in a way that expresses some meaningful sense or generality about the human condition. How do we tell those people apart from the ones who fall short of that? I don't think you can tell them apart by just reading their work. You'd need to have enough of a base of reference to understand whether the literature you're evaluating actually matches up to human nature. In other words, you have to already have some understanding of the human condition before you can accurately judge whether a work of literature actually contains the TRUTH about the human condition.

It's true that putting yourself in extreme situations will teach you a lot about the human condition. It's also true that you might die learning. It's especially true that most people who have actually been in those situations will almost universally agree that if you weren't there and you didn't experience it yourself, you will never actually know. You can tell because they write about it in their memoirs sometimes.

Between the base-of-reference problem and the nothing-perfectly-matches-up-to-the-real-thing problem, I just think it's bizarrely hyperbolic to write in all-capital-letters that novels are the only path to the TRUTH. That's an absurd and unrealistic expectation. Based on what you said, it would certainly imply that the best way to get even more TRUTH would be to have someone spend their life locked in a room doing nothing but reading fiction, and then whatever fiction they wrote based on that would really be the TRUTH. But that's not really how it works at all; most good novelists actually have some interesting real-life base of reference.

Capitalization really seems to have upset you! It was more shouting than praying, though. I meant to say NO! to the statement that novels are "lies". They are the opposite of that. Lies are meant to deceive and exploit. Novels want to help you find the truth, any which way you want to type it.

And to respond to your 2nd paragraph, I'm not saying that (good) novels contain wisdom plainly stated as clever observations every few sentences. That would be a kind of diluted essay and would be of very little value.

That's not the point at all. Novels are machines. They work or they don't. You don't need to have extensive wisdom to decide if they do, just like you don't need to be a mechanic to know if your car won't start.

When they work, they show you a true situation. They don't "deliver" anything. They show. They make plain. They are not a list of interesting tidbits ("10 hidden truths about yourself!!"); they are an experience.

> I'm not saying that (good) novels contain wisdom plainly stated as clever observations every few sentences

I'm well aware that you're not saying that, and I'm utterly mystified where you got that idea from. By "wisdom", I meant the basic understanding of the human condition. An author who understands the human condition can express aspects of it in literature by constructing characters, placing them in narrative situations, and so forth. And on that count, I agree that literary fiction can be a way to show the human condition.

But that's not what you said. What you said was that literature--in context, meaning fictional literature--"may be the only way to gain an actual comprehension of human nature". That's a ludicrous and hyperbolic statement and if you hadn't gone that far I wouldn't have bothered responding because otherwise I do, in fact, have some sense for what you're getting at.

> Put yourself in extreme situations with other people (like joining the military or something).

I don't disagree with your point generally, but for someone with no interest in being in the military, reading Hemingway is a perfectly acceptable way to understand the ugliness of war. He absolutely captures the human condition in his books.

I don't disagree with that; I'm just saying that when you read Hemingway, you're experiencing all that stuff second-hand and I suspect Hemingway himself had a much broader understanding of the human condition than anyone can ever achieve by reading Hemingway.

I took it as an offhand joke.

You are being very dogmatic with your definition of literature. Literature, as practiced today, is written art. Most of it (and even the best part of it) is just tales created for the simple pleasure to tell a story, that's it. Yes, Dostoevski, Kafka, Tolstoy, et al had this supreme talent to express "truths" about the human condition, truths which perhaps belong to the fabled-Jungian "collective unconscious", but those guys are a minority. Even most of their works can be read and appreciated just as marvelous tales.

Literature, like any form of art, should be rated using the best works, not the worst ones, or the most common ones, or the most recent ones. Who cares if there are a million bad books. That's not the point at all.

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