Since anomie has been brought to the table

[Ian Livingston]

> 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.
>

I respectfully disagree on all counts.

1. Golding hit upon some truth about part of human behavior.
2. Great historians may likewise communicate truths artists only allude to.
3. The Thin Red Line was a better book than it was a movie, and it was
not Jones's best novel, did not get to the
bottom of anything, really, but offered some deep insights into the
modern Western warrior culture and psyche as had no work before it.



On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 3:18 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant