Jun 3, 2013

What's The Deal With Fiction?

Some of you may remember that I blogged about the positive influence of fiction almost exactly a year ago. The argument was that fictional stories stories shape us for the better and make us more understanding of other people, since the majority of these tales teach us that crime doesn't pay and that the good guys ultimately win.

But the other day I read an article in the New York Times by Gregory Currie that basically says: "Not so fast. Where's the evidence for that?" Of course we like to tell ourselves that it's true, especially if we count ourselves among those that enjoy reading great literature. Yet Currie makes an interesting and important point regarding the correlation of being a good person and reading good fiction:
We are poor at knowing why we make the choices we do, and we fail to recognize the tiny changes in circumstances that can shift us from one choice to another. When it comes to other people, can you be confident that your intelligent, socially attuned and generous friend who reads Proust got that way partly because of the reading? Might it not be the other way around: that bright, socially competent and empathic people are more likely than others to find pleasure in the complex representations of human interaction we find in literature?
In other words, might reading good literature be the consequence and not the cause of being a morally good human being? Can he prove it? Nope. But can you prove that he's wrong? According to experiments conducted by psychologists here's what we do know:
We know that if you get people to read a short, lowering story about a child murder they will afterward report feeling worse about the world than they otherwise would. Such changes, which are likely to be very short-term, show that fictions press our buttons; they don't show that they refine us emotionally or in any other way.
In the end, says Currie, it all comes down to what you believe. A matter of faith, so to speak. Or in his words:
There is a puzzling mismatch between the strength of opinion on this topic and the state of the evidence. In fact I suspect it is worse than that; advocates of the view that literature educates and civilizes don't overrate the evidence -- they don't even think that evidence comes into it. While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is.
I have to admit that I do like Gottschall's (the guy who wrote the article that inspired my first post on the topic) argument that fiction can seemingly change the course of a society regarding a hot topic (see Uncle Tom's Cabin, he says). But maybe he got even that famous historic example wrong. What if the people that read Harriet Beecher Stowe's revolutionary novel in the middle of the 19th century already had their doubts about slavery and thought it might be a good idea to abolish it?

What do you think? Which is the cause, which the effect?

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