The unreal is a dangerous place; in fiction anything can happen. ‘Facts, Facts, Facts’ cries Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, and it seems so does our society, which like him often discards fiction as not 'serious', not ‘relevant’. Noel Gallagher recently brushed it off as being a ‘waste of time’ while in 2010, Philip Roth announced he was ‘bored’ of fiction. Fiction seems associated with frivolity, lacking the cold hard realism that we need to survive in the world of the 21st century. It has been argued that it instils a damaging outlook on life. False aspirations to grandeur, success and happy endings are often blamed on an apparently unedifying habit for fiction. People see aspiration as naïve, an engagement with fiction as a threat to the realities of the everyday.  Why invest emotion into the made-up as opposed to the characters walking on your street? 

Yet fiction is, if anything, an area where we need to invest more time, not less. Despite its devalued status, the popularity of novels in our society, from Fifty Shades to the Booker winners, reveals the influence fiction has whether we like it or not. Fiction is a form that connects people; it can stretch from the very lowest corner of culture to the peak. Why? Because it is our capacity for imagination that allows us to act justly. A capacity fostered by fiction that enables us to connect with strangers: as Sartre maintained, words themselves are acts. Good fiction has the power to motivate social change; it is anything but a ‘waste of time’.

Researchers at The University of Toronto and The New School have proved fiction inspires and develops the imagination, teaching us powerful lessons while also enhancing our capacity for empathy. It is through fiction that we develop as children, living in fantastical worlds, imagining situations that enable us to interact with the realities we come across in everyday life. It promotes a psychological acuteness and awareness that transfers itself to normative functions, enforcing a social understanding where, within the confines of a cover, we are taught ultimately to feel for those other than ourselves. As Mark Edmundson notes, "real reading is incarnation." Just because a work is classed as fiction does not make the events depicted any less of a reality. Men and women die, people love, people grow, just as they do in life.

The cloak of fantasy that surrounds fiction can be deceiving. Orwell’s animals may talk, but through the appropriation of human characteristics they teach us more about ourselves, just as the troubles of far off realms, of the Discworld, Middle Earth or Neverland remind us of the conflicts written into the fabric of our own. There is proof that fiction functions like a powerful antidepressant and is a powerful therapeutic tool. Fiction assures us we are not alone in this world: it helps us to laugh, it helps us to cry, and most importantly it helps us to dream. It tells us ardently that we are not a fiction, that we are real, that our actions count and are weighted with meaning, that the emotions we feel are real and worthy to be felt, that we have the power to strive for a better life and a better world; as Mario Vargas Llosa observes it acts as "a protest against the insufficiencies of life." The dreams we create through reading, in other words, allow us to imagine how we can change the world. Our protests against injustice are often grounded in the earliest fictions of our lives; we don’t want the fairytale villains to win, we yearn towards a happy ending.

We—like Hamlet— ‘hold the mirror up to nature’ when we read and write fiction. We examine the reality of life. Fiction allows us to reflect, to contrast, to compare, to scrutinise our actions against those of characters who— although ‘unreal’—allow us to explore the possibilities of our own existence. Fiction not only betters humanity through its championing of empathy and our social mobility, it also expands our moral consciousness, as the clichéd comeuppances endured by our childhood fairytale villains develop into the injustice of those villains who often remain unpunished in the real world. Yet literature also provides a sanctuary, a space in which writers are able to comment freely on regimes and political figures with the guise of fiction providing a beacon of hope, a place of even ground, where the writer can cry just as loud as the dictator.

There is a powerful trend in society towards the utile, the ‘realistic’. Vocational degrees are encouraged; universities rate themselves on how successful they are in getting their graduates employed. In such a world, the study of fiction can seem a needless luxury. There is the vague sense that we should all be getting degrees in something more, ahem, ‘relevant’ than literature. Why study Greek tragedy, you might ask, when we could be studying the tragedies of the stock market?

Well, we need fiction more than we need realism. There is plenty of the real in every life, plenty of the drab ordinariness of the everyday. The 'unrealistic' idealism that people so often criticise in fiction is actually hope, a hope that is precisely what our contemporary world needs. Fiction gives us solace and advice. Frustrated you’ve made a social gaffe? Look to Pride and Prejudice for inspiration on how to retrieve your dignity. Funds running low? Re-read Crime and Punishment and things won’t seem so bad.  Angry at your parents’ remarriage? Consider Hamlet and count your blessings. Literature does not disable us, if anything it animates us, it reawakens us from suburban slumber and self involved problems and inspires us to rise up with the words of other men and women wrapped to our skin, making idealism a reality, and fiction…fact.