Source: The Atlantic
by Noah Hawley
“As a novelist and filmmaker, I spend a lot of time thinking about the value of fiction. I tell stories to help me understand my world and the people in it. My job is to create feelings in the audience — fear and longing, joy and anger. When I consider the author’s role in our culture, I picture the following sequence: first comes news, then comes history, then comes fiction. Novelists and filmmakers are the cleanup crew, parsing meaning from the historical realities we have shared. But over the past 10 years, I’ve noticed something at first puzzling, then alarming. Fact and fiction are trading places in the sequence. … My feelings, your feelings, everybody’s feelings are facts — and facts of equal value to actual reality. Crime is up because I feel like crime is up. And you will never convince me otherwise, because my feeling is a fact.” (11/30/24)