[Aiculik]

If the fiction is important? It depends.
It is as important as is all art. Books make people see the world from different perspective, to think, to ask themselves questions. But so does all art. It is frequent argument that fiction is more accessible for masses than e.g. paintings or music, because it uses language as its medium. And everyone can read.

I disagree. The fact that someone knows his abc doesn't mean that they can read artistic texts. I see many people all around me - and some are real bookworms, mind you - that simply can't go below the most obvious, top layer of the book. They don't know what to think of the book unless they read the review or critic. And they often choose books because someone, somewhere said that this book is good and worthy, it's classic, it's in some canon or whatever. They ask the questions someone else told them to ask, find meanings someone else found in the text. And I don't see how that can be important or useful. On the contrary, it would be more useful to read a phonebook.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that such people are unitelligent, uneducated, less worthy or anything. It's just that literature is art, after all, and many people simply don't know how to approach it, how to find any meaning in it. Just as I can't find any meaning in modern paintings or music.

Fiction is important - but only for those people who understand its language.