Since anomie has been brought to the table

[alice wellintown]

My point was that Golding hit upon the truth of the human condition.
Sometimes fiction is better able to hit the truth than history or
science. Moreover, given latitude, the great magicians, teachers,
story-tellers (to use Nabokov's definition of a major artist), like
Shakespeare and Dante and Milton and Melville, are able to communicate
the the truth that seems far too elsusive for the mere historian. Tkae
the example given, the non-human deaths caused by war. Well, history
and science may estimate and measure, but art, for example, Thin Red
Line (1998), a film based on a novel, gets to the bottom of it.


> Well, I cannot agree that fiction is an adequately representative
> sample of human insight upon which to base a generalization to all
> humanity, and particularly not Nobel literature, which prize is
> awarded more for prose and overall beauty than the deep study of human
> psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Literature certainly can shade
> our interpretations and provide metaphors by which to express the
> insights derived through study, but it does not substitute for
> scientific investigation. Anyway, for every Nobel laureate awarded for
> insights into human violence, there are legion examples of human
> kindness and succor in the world.