My livelihood depends on fiction. To this end I have published a book arguing for the importance of literature in life. I have posted personal blogs that combine internal reflection with cultural commentary. In short, I see the absolute importance of narrative in life and work. Yet, I also realize that stories can get in the way of understanding life.
Let’s look at the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. These events have become inundated by personal narratives about the candidates. We have come to expect the soppy anecdotes, from tales of perseverance to details of breakfast cereals. Listening to al the hype, you get the impression that you could reach the authentic Obama or Romney, unmediated by their campaigns.
A similar strategy is at work in the broadcast of the Olympic Games. NBC has always felt the need to give a “human” spin to the competitions, as if the contests themselves had not sufficed. We can’t see the running without the slush. (No wonder some Americans travel north for Olympic coverage on the CBC – more sports, more athletics, fewer sketches, fewer American flags.)
This holds true for broadcast news as well. Ever since Dan Rather turned reporting into a soap opera, it is hard to detect the difference between the six-o-clock news and Entertainment Tonight. Open up an article on autism in a magazine and it inevitably begins with the author’s own autistic son. A column on cancer will often be about personal triumph and survival. (Friends and colleagues frequently tell me that editors insist on the personal angle.) It took me some time to realize that this is an American phenomenon.
My experience abroad and my conversations with friends from other countries have led me to conclude that journalists, commentators, and academics elsewhere are not always compelled to include their private sides in all their expositions. They may talk about ideas without having to delve into their chthonic selves.
Reading Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal. How Stories Make Us Human reinforced my hypothesis. I picked up the copy as soon as it came out because I wanted further ammunition in my own defense of literature. Here was a book that promised to prove that stories make manifest our humanity.
But the book is illustrative of the narratomania I described earlier. For every insight on the importance of stories, we get many anecdotes, often personal, strung together in a chatty style that is supposed to make reading fun. And you glide along with the ease of a Sunday afternoon sail.
Gottschall’s study manifests a certain direction of American commercial non-fiction, which places emphasis on the private, the superficial, and the anecdotal at the expense of the analytical. You wonder if this preference for narrative is motivated by a fear that the American public is capable of understanding a diagnostic sentence only if it is underwritten by a plot line. You write this way because your agent tells you that Houghton Mifflin will reject a manuscript that is not confessional or at least anecdotal.
(Needless to say not every book falls into this paradigm. Before coming to Gottschall’s volume, I read with pleasure and profit Mark Pagel’s Wired for Culture. Origins of the Human Social Mind. Also published by a commercial press, Norton, this is an engaging and informative explanation of how we are hard-wired for culture. Is it surprising that Pagel is British?)
Ironically for a book that sings the virtues of stories, in Gottschall’s case the narratives more often obscure than illuminate. I am not suggesting here a traditional argument that fiction functions as ideology, preventing us from seeing the truth. I mean it in a literal way that the compulsion to provide personal anecdotes and delightful yarns gets in the way of the analysis itself. Turning everything into a story can be reductive. Sometimes showing is not enough. You have to tell.
Cut the fun out and you get a very thin book. This is a pity because Gottschall’s topic is very serious. He offers a strong case for the universality of stories, that they are a constant feature in human society. And he also argues that they are changing form, depending on the technology. So if people read less, it means that they are getting their stories on the screen, in song, or in their video games.
If narrative is so pervasive, you wonder why you need a book that explains its necessity. This is what gets Gottschall into trouble, namely when he posits an ethical justification for narrative. He claims that stories “make society better by encouraging us to behave ethically.” He then offers unsubstantiated, breath-stealing assertions about the extraordinary influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the anti-slave movement.
Gottschall ends his study with suggestions, much like recommendations about the latest exercise, on the ways narrative can improve your life. “Read fiction and watch it. It will make you more empathetic” and “Revel in the power of stories to change the world.” In short, stories will enhance your life just like the paleo diet can make you more vigorous!
You can make these propositions abut the ethical import of narrative only if you have forgotten that people were listening to “Fidelio” after returning from the crematoria and that the plantation owner read Jane Austen in his parlor. It is too late in our post-naïve age to argue for the ethical justification of literature. To do so seems desperate or uninformed.
My reaction to the breeziness of this advice is: I WISH IT WERE TRUE. I wish that fiction could make us into better human beings, that literature could change the world, that art could fashion a more empathic society. It would make it much easier for us to persuade the governor to fund the arts, the principal to offer literature in elementary school, and the student to read novels outside of the classroom. And we would bid farewell to the tribunal where for centuries we have been pleading for the justification of the arts.
In fact, to argue for the ethical efficacy of literature is to play by the tribunal’s instrumentalist, means-driven, results-obsessed mind-set and to lose. A more plausible way to justify fiction is to through fiction itself. I have argued that it is by maintaining the boundary between reality and invention that we can understand the difference between them. In other words, only from the perch afforded by make-believe can we observe the real world, criticize it, and change it.
In my view, stories are important not because they make us behave morally but because, on the one hand, they encourage us to confront the barrier between the imaginative and actual universe and, on the other, they discourage us from adopting a literalist view of this universe.
For the moment haven’t we had enough stories about an author’s children, about parents with Alzheimer’s, or their addiction to drugs? In the balance between teaching and pleasing, American commercial publishing may have pushed too much on the side of the charming and the congenial. Please risk boring us for a while. Spare us the backstory and give us some ideas.
Agreed, on many fronts! Even if one were to accept a vision of fiction as morally improving, it would surely not be for Gottschall's reasons. Gottschall's central argument appears to be that the vast majority of fictions reward the hero and punish the villain; as a result, readers (who presumably confuse fiction with reality) become convinced that crime doesn't pay, and hence reform their evil ways. "Fiction generally teaches us," he says elsewhere, "that it is profitable to be good." In short, it's the poetic justice doctrine all over again, made new by the addition of evolutionary-psychological speculations.
This is a bit of a surprising view given all those highly prestigious works of fiction involving moral ambiguity. It's even more surprising when you think about tragedy (are we supposed to think that Coriolanus got what was coming to him? how about Iphigeneia? Britannicus? Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown?). And then again there are all those prestigious and popular but not exactly reassuring novels in the realist and naturalist traditions (think, say, of Zola's Germinal); and all those dystopian fictions (Kafka, Orwell...); and of course all those antihero-type works in which we fall for the charismatic villain. (Gottschall thinks it's enough that fictional mafiosi tend eventually to get their just deserts, but let's face it, we are saddened, not cheered, when Sonny Corleone bites the dust. And they don't all bite the dust, either.)
The least one can say is that if the function of fiction is to make us think it's profitable to be good, it's been spectacularly inefficient.
Joshua, thanks for elaborating on this point. You are right. Gottschall's work does not sufficiently take into account the moral ambiguity that inspires most literature. There is no way that literature can teache us that it is profitable to be good. To your list of texts, I would like to add the Iliad. Where is the good and where the evil in this text? Homer himself does not take sides in the conflict.
Gottschall presumes that, just because we can stand in the shoes of a particular literary character, we could trasnsfer this empathy to the outside world. But there is no evidence that this trasnference takes place, that we become more empathetic after reading a particular novel or short story.
Finally, I wanted to bring out again what I see as the gulf separating academic and journalistic writing in the US, that I don't see in other countries. The mode that this book is written in and the way it ignores so much that has been written by academics on the subject shows that we are sadly operating in two different worlds.
Gottschall actually has a pretty good book on Homer.
As for the (social) function of fiction, what about Lord Henry's last words in The Picture of Dorian Gray? "Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile." Doesn't it seem to be the case that reading literature, especially those "highly prestigious works," make people act less (and thereby act fewer evil acts, if not act less evilly)? The kind of inwardness built by reading difficult (or, long and boring) literature seems inevitably to turn into a Grand Hotel Abyss (scaled down, a motel abyss, a "room of one's own" abyss), where you can (among other things) have a respite from the evil ways of the world. Didn't someone say that Finnegans Wake, if its intent were heeded, could have prevented World War II? I read something to that effect somewhere, and I think there must be a bit of Lord Henry in it. Can we not say that evil persists, the world is deeply ailing, partly because not many people are reading long and boring books?
And I say that without having read Gottschalk's book at all, though I've read some of his academic work and know of his evpsych school. Nor, for that matter, have I read Oatley cover-to-cover, something I rarely do these days unless I'm reading fiction.
Oatley reviews and synthesizes a wide range of more or less empirical work on fiction. He's got a chapter on the effects of fiction, and it includes reports of the moral improvement sort, such as Lynn Hunt's work showing that "the establishment of human rights has been strongly affected by literary art" (p. 168), which may be where Gottschalk got his Uncle Tom's Cabin stuff.
But he also has this bit of information (p. 166):
I'm particularly fond of his final chapter, which is about reading groups. He points out that each of us, of course, will be partial to this or that aspect of a given book. When a group of people gather to talk about the book, each contributes comments about their favorite bits. The net effect is that everyone gains a richer sense of the book and, perhaps, of themselves.
If we want to get a better grip on the effects of fiction, I think we should give more attention to those microsocial interactions which, when scattered throughout society over decades, will have an effect. But one that's not captured by anecdotes about how this or that story changed my life.
With respect to Sunjoo's comments on The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry's suggestion has a tinge of the nothingness and hyperbole of nineteenth-century aestheticism. Let's not move to the opposite direction, however, whereby we deny art any import in social life. The questions is what type of import and how? (I do like the idea of providing political leaders with long and boring books. It may not please the authors but it if has the desired outcome, why not?)
Perhaps Bill's points closer to the truth. I have not read Oatley but it seems that the effects of fiction may lie in these micro interactions that Bill describes. Literature, as both text and institution, has a nuanced relationship to the world around it. When a lot of people read and discuss a particular novel, for instance, their comments, essays, reviews may become incorporated in a greater political project.
But this is different from saying that the appearance of a particular book leads directly to a particular result. It is the one-to-one corresponde between literature and reality that is problematic.
"When a lot of people read and discuss a particular novel, for instance, their comments, essays, reviews may become incorporated in a greater political project."
Yes.
Think of literary culture as a circus tent. The canonical texts are the tent poles. The other literary texts, the ones that didn't make the canon, including of course those that shift in and out of it, pop culture, whatever, are the canvas, tent pegs, guy wires, etc. Everything else, everything under the tent, that's the secondary and tertiary texts and jillions of conversations.
“Plutarch yieldeth a notable testimony of the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraeus, from whose eyes a tragedy, well made and represented, drew abundance of tears, who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood: so as he, that was not ashamed to make matters for tragedies, yet could not resist the sweet violence of a tragedy.”
Rorty hopes that reading novels might make people marginally more moral, but also that the effects are very small. The real problem would be if reading novels made people less moral or less just. Certainly true of the effects of propaganda (Proust: “the nasty man thinks he’s punishing someone nasty”, but see, you can learn that from Proust).
But the question is whether this would be true in the long run. I think that if you'd bet on literature making the world somewhat more just, in the minimal sense of somewhat better outcomes for humanity (or in the sense of something like Pareto efficiency) at the beginning of the modern period, say 1300, you'd have won your bet, but you'd owe a lot of that to luck. Still, I think literature has done more good than harm. I am dubious that that's true about religion, though it might be.
I have a separate comment to make on Gottschall's (brief) use of my work.
Gottschall cites me in support of his thesis. But my claim is somewhat different: that cooperation, empathy, caring about what other people think, are extraordinarily complex human impulses and lead to extraordinarily complex human attitudes and thought, a whole lot of which are counterintuitive. Let's take the Iliad, since you mention it: the death of Patroclos, the death of Hector, the foreshadowed death of the infant Scamandros (whom Hector called Astyanax, lord of the city), and so forth: where is the good and evil in this text, is the question you ask; why is there so much moral ambiguity if literature is about poetic justice, Josh asks (though I note this is a modern use of poetic justice and that Addison's actual coinage of the term in no way saw the death of Cordelia as contrary to but as in fact an example of poetic justice: briefly it comports with her greatness, not with her interests as a real human being. She's not real. She's part of poetry.)
So first, the evil: Alexandros (Paris). No doubt about it. The tragedy of the Iliad, as Hegel says of Antigone is that the conflict isn't between right and wrong but between right and right. Now why is there a conflict between right and right? Why do Hector and Achilles go after each other? Well there's a deeper relation between them than conflict, a relation that is manifested in conflict but could also be manifested, in another world, in friendship. Or to put it another way, in tragedy there often is, or there often comes to be, a strange friendship between enemies, within enmity. Not that Achilles feels that way in the slightest when he destroys Hector. He says there can be no treaties between lions and men, and this sheer rejection of Hector from the world of the human is Achilles's worst moment. But later, after he mourns, and when Priam comes to supplicate for Hector's body, he recollects Hector's humanity, and he feeds Priam.
He feeds Priam offering him the choice between breaking bread together or death. The laws of hospitality are laws of friendship between enemies. The friendship may be deeper. Punishment (this is my point) qua punishment always acknowledges the humanity of its victim. Such acknowledgement may be dark and violent, but it's still acknowledgement. Achilles punishes, but that means he acknowledges humanity. Paris doesn't punish: he kills. He's selfish, and Achilles isn't. So the literary characters we care about are the ones who put (let's use a more neutral word) communication above self-interest. Communication is pro-social. It can be very grim indeed: violence and homicide as modes of communication. But literature can bring out the residue of friendship or possible friendship or possible humanity in such relationships of absolute enmity. If it doesn't, it's not tragedy, but just violence.
I think one way to see this is to see that in almost all successful depictions of violence without depth, without friendship, the good guys win. In tragedy the violence has to have depth for that tragedy to be any good, to be felt to be any good. But its relation to the promotion of some sunny moral system is going to be very fragile.
William, Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I agree very much with your observations in your penultimate commentary. You are right. We are better off with literature. There is no doubt in my mind that literature has a profound impact on our lives individually and socially. This is why I wanted to read the book in the first place -- to get more evidence of this. But what is the "what?" What is this impact? I have written in the past about the leading role literature has played in nationalism. Both literary authors and literature texts have been on the vanguard of these movements.
The issue of moral improvement is what seems troublesome to me. How can we ever determine this, especially about past texts, be they the Iliad or Uncle Tom's Cabin? Do we have any empirical studies from today that can show the moral impact of a novel or a short story. The topic is not trivial at all, going back to Plato's fears that epic and tragedy could stir the emotions and thus make people lose control. Is there a difference between literary and real emotions, that is, the emotions we feel for a character and those we feel for our brother?
I am trying to connect this with your fascinating reflections in your previous commentary. It is not clear to me when you say "that literature can bring out the reside of friendship" whether you are referring to the represented friendships in the texts or to our friendship, as readers, with these characters, or both? Do we become friends with the play, having opened up a mode of communication with it, or with the people in the play?
I would say that empathy is important in both -- our relationship with the text and our relationship with our friends. An empathic understanding is vital in both friendships -- the aesthetic and the actual one.
I think I want to say something very simple, and not to generalize too much. I think that the Iliad is a profoundly anti-war poem. (I know a lot of people think that attitude is naive, but I think that one value of teaching to read carefully would be showing how powerful an antiwar poem it is). There are a lot of debates in any culture both for and against violence. Literature can be enlisted, literature can be written, that takes the right side of those debates.
Some literature probably promotes human understanding and decency and human values, and some doesn't; some debases human understanding and decency. This is true of all humanistic inquiry, I think. Now literature is a human universal. It's not going away. So the question can't be: should we support literature or has it done more harm than good? (Not that you're asking that.) It's rather, is there any connection between the aesthetic quality of literature and its ethical tendencies? I'm not a consequentialist about ethics (who knows where that would lead?), so I can't and won't demand that literature not be written lest one day it console a monster. But I do think that one high literary quality is that of solidarity with another's solitude, of one's own with another, and that this is an ethical as well as an aesthetic good.
Blanchot describes an ethical relation which is also a literary one: to bear witness to a sorrow so terrible and fragile that it cannot even bear being witnessed, so carefully and attentively as to make one's attention bearable. I am entirely unembarrassed to say that I think literature can promote that relationship.
Of course there are dangers here. But as I say literature is not going away. So you have to engage with it. It can do evil. But I think it can also do good, and more good than evil the better the way we engage with it.
Think of chess. Biology provides the board, the pieces, and the rules. And that's it. How one actually plays the game, that's strongly dependent on the strategies and tactics your culture has accumulated and which among those you've managed to learn.
In that metaphor literary texts (oral, written, acted, filmed) are repositories of strategies and tactics. Over the long haul (centuries and millennia) more and more, and more sophisticated, routines accumulate and are made available for use. Does the availability of a richer repertoire make for a different kind of society, with people have more flexible personality structures?
I think the answer is "yes" on both accounts and have made such arguments in papers here and there (some of them online). But humanistic inquiry over the past 50 years has operated under assumptions which render such arguments at best invisible, but often enough, they're deemed retrograde & dangerous.
In order to reply to both comments above, I would say that stories are universals (and here I am in agreement with Gottschall). I would call literature, to use Bill Benzon's metaphor, part of the richer repertoire of culture. It has a much more recent history than the human engagement with narrative. Its existence is threatened. So while novels may disappear as a type of writing in the liquid world of the Web, stories will continue to survive as long as there are humans.
So we not only engage with literature, as both of your write, but we also need to defend it from those who don't think it's important or who believe it's dangerous.
It's true that we need to defend the novel against those who believe it's dangerous (not very many any more) and against those who don't think it's important (almost everyone by now). I actually happen to think that the whole "moral improvement" idea has worked against us. If novels are either morally improving or useless, and it turns out that novels are not morally improving, then novels are useless, and everyone can get back to watching YouTube videos. (A weaker version of the claim: if a given novel is either morally improving or useless, and it turns out that that novel is not morally improving, then that novel is useless, and we needn't bother reading it.) Much better to speak of the kind of work the novel *can* do for us: the kind of self-understanding Bill Benzon was mentioning earlier, for example.
This.
Suzanne Keen has a wonderful book about this, called Empathy and the Novel. Keen actually did the leg-work, looking at a whole bunch of studies as well as testing widely-held claims against possible objections. At the end of the day she concludes -- with mild reservations, including the point Bill B. mentioned above about discussion groups -- that “the link between feeling with fictional characters and acting on behalf of real people... is extremely tenuous and has yet to be substantiated” (146). “We will be bitterly disappointed," she adds, "if we expect novel reading to accomplish the work of forming world citizens for us.” (168)
Keen also has helpful things to say about Lynn Hunt's excessively rosy view (xix). (I also recommend David Bell's review: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/david-a-bell/un-dret-egal.)
In short, well worth a read, and much more illuminating than Gottschall!
I wanted to refer to Keen's work in my original post but did not have space. But I was thinking exactly of her type of sober down-to-earth work on the relations between the novel or the aesthetic and real life. She believes that readers can identify with characters. But these characters don't change these readers' life in any measurable way, not in a way that Gottschall believes.
The contrast between her book and Gottschall's shows the ravine still separating academic from some journalistic criticism that I wanted to emphasize in this and other blogs. I don't know if we each each other's work with obvious consequences.
In light of our discussions, these lines from Auden's poem, "Under Which Lyre," written at Harvard in 1946, seem relevant. Sometimes we may be moved by a work of art but remain cool to suffering in real life.
Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter Poems of Donne.
I don't think the stanza's about being cool to suffering. They're GI Bill students who survived the horrors they participated in, and are now returned into a world of trivial concerns that no one who survived the war can experience "normally." It's like the end of The Hurt Locker, when James just can't stand the supermarkets and goes back to Iraq. Auden (I think) is describing and also manifesting, what's now called PTSD: the world they fought to defend is not a world that they can find tranquility in. Home is not home; no place is.
Upon rereading the poem, I can see that Auden is describing the impossibility of fitting into everyday reality. But don't the last two lines of the stanza I cite mean that the soldiers respond more to a poem than to slaughter? It's not their fault but this is how it is.