I read a piece in the Observer a week or so ago in which an author with a background in psychotherapy said she had learned more about human psychology from Conrad, Shakespeare, etc than from Freud, Yung, et al. It is often said that we learn a great deal from novels.
But what do we learn, exactly? What kind of "truth" do novels contain?
I can see that if I read a story about a killer, that laid out how he became a killer in such a way that I can see that I too could have ended up like him, then I have learned something valuable. I can also see that I might read about a concern someone has in a story that I share, but thought was unique to me, and so learn that I am not alone in having such thoughts and feelings. I can also see that I might have a feeling that I find difficult to articulate, and in a novel find a perfect expression of it. "Yes!" I might think, "That's how I feel". Novels can also provoke us to think about things we might not otherwise have considered. These are ways in which I could learn something, gain some insight.
On the other hand, novels are stories. And stories can be propaganda, even unwitting propaganda. Literature can be used to tell lies about the human condition. A skilled writer may, by pressing our emotional buttons, make us feel sympathy for a cause we should revile, or make what is wrong seem right or normal, for example.
Literature is about a good yarn with a beginning a middle, and an end, a strong character that develops, and so on. Real life rarely has these features. People rarely change, and when they do, rarely change in the ways that a good story requires. The real explanations for why people do things are rarely as dramatically satisfying and neat as those for fictional characters. When people write biographies or dramatized accounts of real events, real life has to be very heavily edited and shoe-horned into the conventions of literature, so that we get a good story. Either that or the author has to search hard for one of those unusual episodes or lives that actually meets the requirements of good literature.
So isn't literature, in many ways, profoundly misleading, providing the illusion that real life has a clear narrative structure, a plot, a moral, is driven by psychological principles, etc., that are actually rarely if ever present in real life?
Isn't the "psychology" it presents, often as not, mythical, rather than actual, reflecting what an all-too fallible individual, the author, thinks makes people tick, rather than what actually makes them tick?
Indeed, aren't we just endlessly presented with the same stock of archetypal plots and characters over and over again, which function as cultural sign-posts for us: "Oh, it's a story about a quest, and X is the flawed hero, and he learns this sort of lesson as he pursues the quest...". Even when a story deviates from these archetypes, doesn't it succeed precisely by deliberately flouting them - by revealing itself to be of another archetype, rather than the one it initially appeared to be (the plot with a "twist").
Anyway, these reflections lead me to ask: given that people regularly claim to have learned so much about the human condition and psychology from literature (novels), what's the most important thing you have learned? Is there a novel you were reading, when suddenly you were struck by a rather profound insight? If so, I'd be interested to know.
My suspicion is that, because people always say that learned this profound stuff from novels, but seem rarely if ever to provide an actual example of something they learned, that actually the profound truths and insights contained with novels are largely, if not entirely, mythical.
Of course I know this will provoke howls of outrage from literary types and that I shall be branded a philistine. I am just asking, that's all... If the insights are there let's have some examples. Otherwise, I'm thinking "Emperor's New Clothes" (ok, there's an insight right there!).
Remember - it's genuine penetrating insights I am after, not statements of the bloody obvious dressed up in literary garb.
But what do we learn, exactly? What kind of "truth" do novels contain?
I can see that if I read a story about a killer, that laid out how he became a killer in such a way that I can see that I too could have ended up like him, then I have learned something valuable. I can also see that I might read about a concern someone has in a story that I share, but thought was unique to me, and so learn that I am not alone in having such thoughts and feelings. I can also see that I might have a feeling that I find difficult to articulate, and in a novel find a perfect expression of it. "Yes!" I might think, "That's how I feel". Novels can also provoke us to think about things we might not otherwise have considered. These are ways in which I could learn something, gain some insight.
On the other hand, novels are stories. And stories can be propaganda, even unwitting propaganda. Literature can be used to tell lies about the human condition. A skilled writer may, by pressing our emotional buttons, make us feel sympathy for a cause we should revile, or make what is wrong seem right or normal, for example.
Literature is about a good yarn with a beginning a middle, and an end, a strong character that develops, and so on. Real life rarely has these features. People rarely change, and when they do, rarely change in the ways that a good story requires. The real explanations for why people do things are rarely as dramatically satisfying and neat as those for fictional characters. When people write biographies or dramatized accounts of real events, real life has to be very heavily edited and shoe-horned into the conventions of literature, so that we get a good story. Either that or the author has to search hard for one of those unusual episodes or lives that actually meets the requirements of good literature.
So isn't literature, in many ways, profoundly misleading, providing the illusion that real life has a clear narrative structure, a plot, a moral, is driven by psychological principles, etc., that are actually rarely if ever present in real life?
Isn't the "psychology" it presents, often as not, mythical, rather than actual, reflecting what an all-too fallible individual, the author, thinks makes people tick, rather than what actually makes them tick?
Indeed, aren't we just endlessly presented with the same stock of archetypal plots and characters over and over again, which function as cultural sign-posts for us: "Oh, it's a story about a quest, and X is the flawed hero, and he learns this sort of lesson as he pursues the quest...". Even when a story deviates from these archetypes, doesn't it succeed precisely by deliberately flouting them - by revealing itself to be of another archetype, rather than the one it initially appeared to be (the plot with a "twist").
Anyway, these reflections lead me to ask: given that people regularly claim to have learned so much about the human condition and psychology from literature (novels), what's the most important thing you have learned? Is there a novel you were reading, when suddenly you were struck by a rather profound insight? If so, I'd be interested to know.
My suspicion is that, because people always say that learned this profound stuff from novels, but seem rarely if ever to provide an actual example of something they learned, that actually the profound truths and insights contained with novels are largely, if not entirely, mythical.
Of course I know this will provoke howls of outrage from literary types and that I shall be branded a philistine. I am just asking, that's all... If the insights are there let's have some examples. Otherwise, I'm thinking "Emperor's New Clothes" (ok, there's an insight right there!).
Remember - it's genuine penetrating insights I am after, not statements of the bloody obvious dressed up in literary garb.
Comments
So all we do learn from literature is things we already know.
Joseph Conrad makes the case for fiction most eloquently here:
http://www.underthesun.cc/Conrad/Narcissus/Narcissus1.html
http://www.mrbauld.com/niggnar.html
As you suggest, literature is in the business of manipulating emotions, not addressing issues or advancing knowledge. And there's something rather unseemly about, say, trying to tweak people's moral judgments by creating an adorable doe-eyed innocent and then giving her a good kicking (stand up, Thomas Hardy).
I find it virtually impossible to read 'worthy' literature now - I tend to find myself just thinking, 'Yes, but you just made it up, didn't you?' or 'If you've got something to say, just say it!'
Having said all that, I know I'm a very literal-minded, geeky sort of person, the sort of person who wants everything to be pinned down and not left 'woolly'. I'm sure many people would be left absolutely cold by the sort of philosophical writing that interests me, and engage with issues much better if they're wrapped up in an engaging, human story. (Which is where books like 'The Philosophy Files' come in, of course, with their vivid storytelling/dialogue elements.)
I'd also nominate the short stories of Borges, and Lem's Solaris, as literature that really made me think philosophically.
What about the plays of Tom Stoppard? Such as Arcadia? or Jumpers?
In one sense it is very unlikely that a novel which truly reflected real life (whatever that is) would succeed. Nothing much would happen for pages and pages. If the story did not include the mind numbing tedium and triviality you could justly say that it did not reflect real life.
Isn't literature [novels] profoundly misleading? Provided that it's in the fiction section, no. Most of the readers know that it is fiction.
It's much less misleading than other stuff like biography, some histories or documentary. After all these contain facts, details of things which really happened, comments actually made by the protagonists, all of which help to conceal any spin that the author might wish to impart.
I’ve actually taught fiction writing, and one of the universal appeals of stories, both fiction and biography, is the idea of a character overcoming adversity, because, I believe that’s how we all find wisdom and self-knowledge. A bit like Socrates’ adage about the unexamined life. It’s only when we fail that we really examine ourselves, and that’s what fiction reflects. Whether it’s successful or not depends on the skills of the writer and, to a large extent, what the writer has experienced him or herself.
When I was 16, I read Albert Camus’ La Peste (The Plague) and it challenged my idea of God, so that’s pretty powerful. It was one of only 2 books that we were set when I was at school that I actually read. The other one was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
When a really good story touches us, I don’t believe we know why. We don’t analyse it, we are just affected by it. Stories are like dreams in that they expose us to situations we might not meet in normal life, but they have to be well written enough to put us in someone else’s shoes.
Regards, Paul.
In my opinion whatever a novel can teach us about reality, a good textbook can teach us better and in more depth. While a textbook can be impartial, a novel is always written from a point of view and this usually introduces impartiality when not outright bias.
Literature is entertainment, something for whiling away a rainy afternoon. When it becomes an academic subject, its importance is inevitably exaggerated because critics and lecturers do not want to seem to be talking about "mere" entertainment. It has to "meaningful" and "important".
If people like reading novels, fine, but they should remember the important thing: it's all made up, you know!
Yours truly,
Zxcv
This is all quite therapeutic for me - I've been living with the lingering sense that I'm somehow stupid and/or uncultured for preferring 'dry' non-fiction to literature ever since my BA days. Seems I'm not the only one who's inclined to think fiction is generally best seen as more or less thought-provoking entertainment, leaving non-fiction to deal with the serious stuff.
Does this mean I can stop beating myself up about reading old detective novels in preference to Joyce, and non-fiction in preference to either?
Best examples on DVD or video, in my opinion, are The Third Man starring Orson Welles (Greene wrote the original screenplay) and The Tenth Man, which was a lost manuscript (originally written during the War, I believe) he rediscovered it in 1985 and it was turned into a film starring Anthony Hopkins.
Regards, Paul.
We go to literature for precisely the same reason that you went to the mountains recently: defamiliarization. Just as the mountain air is charged with fresh sensations, so literature is charged with fresh language; and just as mountain paths wind in ways unfamiliar to the first-time visitor, so literature winds for the first time reader of, say, James Baldwin. When we go to literature, we are being provoked via charged language and authorial path-plottings to see and think differently from our usual grooves of sight and thought. And here's the kicker: Unlike walking in nature, where there is no telos---no designer---directed towards the landscape---when we trod through a poem, a novel, a short story, or a play, we are encountering an author who has laid out (metaphorically) every stone in our path, every vista, every animal and plant we stumble upon. When we come, for example, to a poem by William Blake, unlike with purposeless blind nature, we know that Blake (in a poem like "London") meant to alliterate here ("marks of weakness marks of woe") and reflect on the spread of syphilis there ("blight with plagues the marriage hearse").
Blake doesn't just prosaically say: "Isn't the spread of syphilis awful!" He charges the language, our imagination, and a consequence of syphilis that maybe we hadn't thought about (men, after visiting prostitutes, bring it home to their wives---turning the marriage carriage into a marriage hearse).
I'd also like to address something else that you said: You questioned the value of the plots of literature, that they weren't real, but contrived. But I'd like to suggest that all narrative---including historical narrative---is a form of contrivance after the fact. In other words, we all tell narratives from the vantage of death, as obituary. We cannot, in surveying the landscape of a story that we are currently in, tell a person what, exactly, will be the salient points in that landscape 50 years from now. We can only speak from the vantage of what has already died and past---and as the narrative seems to us now. Like the detective who goes over the objects of a crime scene, we cannot tell a narrative about something---historical or fictional---without making decisions about what was most important in light of a death---something complete. For example, when Oliver Stone makes a film about Bush, or a historian makes a book about Bush, what will be chosen out of the Bush landscape to tell? These are authorial matters of emphasis dependent on the passage of time.
One of the things that we do when we read, say, a short story (like Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener") is find out what the salient objects of Bartleby's existence was for that narrator. What Bartleby ate, how he interacted with employees, what he did---all of these things are the objects of narrative that seem important in the light of Bartleby's death, in retrospect, and from the vantage, say, of a narrator writing of him a year after Bartleby's death.
You yourself, Stephen, will no doubt tell a different story about what were the salient and important things about your life, and the key objects and events, from the vantage of 70 than from your current vantage. Things passed over now may rise to huge narrative importance 20 or 30 years from now, and things that seem important in your narrative now may drop into insignificance from a different narrative vantage.
Literature, like life, is an author's dream that evokes different evocative objects from different vantages. When we enter the dream of Blake's "London" poem (for example), our eyes are cast on "the marriage hearse" one moment, and the "marks of weakness, marks of woe" at another. These are the "plot points" on which narrative is built, and the charged language is the air literature moves in.
We read literature as Freud listened to patients, quietly overhearing their dreams, making meaning of them and from them.
---Santi Tafarella
P.S. I'm an English prof. and my blog is "Prometheus Unbound" at santitafarella.wordpress.com).
More seriously, I still think I learnt nearly all of what one needs to know about politics and power from Orwell's 1984.
s.
I also learned a little bit more about love from Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina), kitsch and the meaning of life from Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), absurdity from Heller (Catch-22) and also Camus (The Plague).
Indeed I thought The Plague and Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov would be useful reading for anyone interested in religious claims to moral authority?
I also learned a little bit about 'madness' from Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar) and Sebastian Faulks (Human Traces).
Literature has its place. Especially in helping us fully appreciate and imagine the consequences of acting on a set of complex moral or political beliefs. In this it helps scientists, politicians, moral philosophers and other decision-makers to generate and test the bold hypotheses so admired by Popper.
I find I read less and less fiction. When I do read fiction seriously, it tends to be "ideas" novels (Doris Lessing, Philip K Dick, Philip Pulman spring to mind) where philosophical concepts are explored through the situation and story. (Science fiction is, as has been noted, a rich source for philosophical thought experiments.)
As for what I have learnt from literature, it is difficult to say. I suspect I have learnt enough to understand the literary allusions that permeate our culture and thus appear well-educated....
I haven't linked the article because you have to be a subsriber to access it. But it's headlined with: Reading novels isn't just entertaining, it helps you navigate the complex social world, says Keith Oatley.
They found, from 'reading' eyes in a 'letter box' view to judge emotional content, readers of fiction scored higher. And people even scored higher after having just read something, if I remember the article correctly (I haven't re-read it).
This is not surprising when one considers that empathy is a prerequisite for fiction to work.
I would contend that empathy is what the world needs more than anything else and that's the best reason I can think of to promote fiction.
Regards, Paul.
And people surely do feel the need to be empathizing constantly - poking their nose into other people's emotional lives just so they can feel sorry for them, or happy for them, or angry for them. Often those people are fictional, but plausibly much the same thing is going on here as when someone sits down with a 'tragic life' memoir to put himself through the emotional wringer, or flicks through a 'true life' or celeb magazine.
"Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, Ã la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the Golden Rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one's own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that "there but for fortune go I."
The whole article is fascinating. I often wonder why people tend to talk as if the world is going to hell when it's pretty obviously getting better and better all the time - Pinker is addressing the point of violence specifically, pointing to evidence on just how vastly less violent today's world is than the world of centuries or millennia ago.
It's here if anyone's interested:
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2009april/Pinker054.php
If we carried on as if it was getting better and better it would probably go to hell in pretty short order!
We talk that way because our standards and expectations of behavior are being raised up. Before cosmopolitanism we simply didn't care one way or the other what went on in the next village. Now we do - "Aren't they dreadful over there?"
I just find it interesting that in some areas our high expectations are accompanied by the knowledge that things are improving (e.g. we see how far medicine has come and are therefore less willing to accept illness as something inevitable), while in other areas (e.g. war/violence) our high expectations are accompanied by a belief that things are actually getting worse.
My grandmother was recently trying to tell me how much better things were in her day, for instance. You know, the good old days when the Nazis were rampaging through Europe, your friends and family were dying of diseases that are now treatable etc. etc.
It makes no sense, but that sort of belief is everywhere. When people talk about not wanting to bring kids into the modern world, I always feel like pressing them to name a decade they'd have preferred to have kids in. Some time in the Victorian era, perhaps? Nah, don't be daft. Early 20th century? Hmm, best wait for the World Wars to finish. Actually, let's hang on for the NHS and penicillin. Oh, and some measure of sexual equality would be nice, and IRA bombs were a bit of a pain, and the internet has its uses, and...
Sorry, this thread is veering way off topic. It did all start out with a point about fiction and empathy, honest!
I put it to you that this statement represents a wilful ignorance on the subject, but, libel aside, I'd like to take a stab at answering your question.
As a philosopher you are intimately aware of the necessity to distinguish between different forms of truth, yet you appear to project literature as a medium which may access only factual truths. I would argue that literature has the ability to share all manner of truths with its consumers.
The most obvious example is, as you say, myth. The ability to convey myth alone bestows a certain kind of truth-telling power on any medium. As Joseph Campbell argues in his book "The Hero with A Thousand Faces," myths across many (he argues all) cultures communicate similar values and images. By looking at psychoanalysis, it is also possible to postulate that even those people without access to the traditional imagery and narratives of any given culture's mythology tend to reproduce said ideas in their own dreams and fantasies. In other words, there are fundamental truths in myth - truths which concern the nature of human identity. And what could be more profound than the kind of self-knowledge which unites the consumer with a much greater whole?
This is the most important kind of truth which literature can contain: truth about human identity. In your fourth paragraph, you do literature a great disservice. You assume rule where I see only convention and myopia. Where are the beginning, middle and end in a Joyce novel, or in one of Stoppard's plays? Where is the character development in Kafka's work? Using these traditions to define literature is like claiming that cinema is about ninety minutes of romance, or that philosophy is about grad students with bad facial hair and incomprehensible books. You are confusing form with content.
But enough lollygagging. You asked for profound truths which I have found in literature. Well, here's one which has never ceased to amaze me, throughout my short life. Every time I return to the medium, I am astonished by the potency of the realisation that I am alive, in a world full of riches, and treasures, and wonderful humans.
That's kind of the point, actually. Literature and philosophy don't have to compete for justification. They're different. Philosophy obsesses over truth, and it's a worthwhile goal. Literature, like all art, just begs us to share our insides with one another.
I hope that goes some way to answering your question.
Nearly all the prose I read is non-fiction. I read more poetry that prose, and find it a valuable way of exploring my own emotions.
One thing I have learned from literature, both poetry and prose, is how to use the English language - and that includes playing with it as well as using it to convey information and to persuade other people.
There's a sense too in which one needs to learn from one book how to understand another. I sometimes wonder how British children nowadays who do not have the 1611 AV and 1662 BCP as part of their 'mental furniture' can appreciate much subsequent prose or poetry.
And how could we argue with the Christians if we didn't have some knowledge of their sacred texts? [I hope Stephen will agree that they count as fiction!] Discovering what others believe can help one get on with them socially and understand where they are coming from.
But there's also an implication here that the only value of literature is to learn from it. It provides a valuable source of pleasure too - like anticant I found 'The Count of Monte Cristo' a source of much enjoyment as a child. [BTW - there's an excellent new translation by Robin Buss in the Penguin Classics series.] Immersing oneself in another person's created world - be it Dumas or Tolkien - can extend one's empathy too.
Freud liked it.
Isn't "The God of Eth" a story?
1. Siddartha helped me "get" Buddhism
2. The Stranger helped me "get" existentialism
3. Life of Pi provided the insight of how stories make more sense to us than hard facts
4. Crime and Punishment and the feeling of Napoleon-like specialness
5. Cellist of Sarajevo and value and hope and morality in life and war
On and on...
Literature is just another way of putting things. Sure, it can manipulate, but what about the Sophists of non-fiction? Sure, stories have to be shoe-horned, but so does non-fiction. There is no history book or philosophy book that chronicles every angle, every cause, every influence that leads to a conclusion. That's why people keep writing - fiction and non-fiction. There's no sense exaggerating the case for either one. I think that they bot play their roles.
2. Have you learnt a fact, or just an author's opinion?
3. Did you get a new idea, or is it a feeling? Certainly there's a difference.
4. A book can give me a feeling I've never had before. Have I then learnt something? That would seem to be an awfully broad definition of 'learning'. It would be almost the same thing as 'experience'.
5. When we get practical information (how to hot-wire a car, say) from a novel, it can only be because that part of the book is not fictional. Say a fascinating character showed me something about how to think (as the protagonist of Connie Willis's Passage might). This can only be helpful if her advice is true.
6. Many books, whether nominally fiction or nominally nonfiction, give bad advice. How do we tell the difference?
Second, of course much of literature, including the supposedly enlightening literature, is pure fiction in terms of its events. Further, Stephen is right that, at a slightly more subtle level, life doesn't exactly have plot, clear progression, resolution, etc. But, as has been pointed out above, people know that, too. If they didn't, that would e.g. seriously blunt the enjoyment of escapist literature. Those who are most likely to learn from fiction are probably those who know these slightly more subtle points; those who didn't recognize that life doesn't have typical plot development are not likely to learn anything anyway, I would guess.
So, what good is literature? It's not because it lists facts, obviously. I used to think that it should reflect ways in which people actually are, and so reveal human nature that way. I more recently came to realize, partly by reading someone who I unfortunately cannot recall, that rather what greater literature tends to do is magnify. Take two examples mentioned above, both of which I'd agree with, both written by people with serious philosophical interests: The Stranger, by Camus, and The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky. Mersault and Ivan are not realistic people, that much is clear. But what they teach us, if anything, isn't what living people are like. Rather, we learn about elements of human life, aspects of living, and potentialities. With Mersault, roughly, the idea is to see a life lived absurdly, to see how the world could be seen in eyes that find no connections, no overall significance. It magnifies elements and tendencies in some of our own lives, or that we see in others, and that's how Mersault 'speaks to us.' Similarly, Ivan Karamazov is the atheist intellectual pushed to human extremes by a question many of us face: what is justice, what is meaning, without God? We rarely face it like Ivan did, but just for that reason Ivan can (presuming, of course, that Dostoevsky is reading the situation right) tell us about our own concerns and thoughts; the subtleties and intricacies of our own problems, or about human nature generally, are shown in these ways in bold relief.
That's one intellectual use of literature, and not the only one. For example, I said nothing about allegory (partly because I've never cared for it as much). I recently reread The Hobbit in preparation for the movie; Tolkien's descriptions of Goblins, of dwarves, and of, on the other hand, hobbits and elves show a particular way of looking at industrialization and nature, at overwhelming shows of power versus cooperation, and greed versus kindness. There are no doubt other things, too, but it can be said without listing them all that literature is certainly worth a lot more than nothing, if not just a whole lot.
http://kenmacleod.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/fictitious-narrative-considered.html