Nicholas Higgins 25/05/2020

The Case for Fiction

‘What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright’, Gustave Flaubert

We should all know that reading is good for us. Books are the way we communicate with the dead, the way we glean wisdom from the intellectual giants of the past. As Rene Descartes put it, ‘the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest people of past centuries’. By exercising the mind it improves memory, focus and analytical skills, which makes you smarter and even staves off Alzheimers disease. In what’s been called ‘bibliotherapy’, reading is being prescribed for its stress and anxiety reducing effects.

Non-fiction is especially lauded since it is factual, relevant and applicable. With so much knowledge in the world better to start here, and not with some story dreamt up in an author’s head. Fiction doesn’t even make it onto the reading lists of the high flyers of our day. Warren Buffet recommended 19 books in 2019 and not one of them is fiction. Of the 94 books Bill Gates recommended over a 7 year period, only 9 are fiction. Fiction is at best entertainment, an escapist, even indulgent use of leisure time.

Fiction however, deepens and extends our experience of the world in a way that non-fiction can’t. This is urgent since modernity is increasingly experiencing, what Walter Benjamin called, ‘the atrophy of experience’. The iPhone, computer and television screen bombard the viewer with vibrant, dynamic, bright, rapidly changing images. Reality, however, tends to be dull, tedious and static. Screen behaviours are heightened: instagram posts magnify attraction, humour in comedy is laugh out loud every 2 minutes, action films are 120 minutes of explosions, blood and guts. Ever greater stimulation has literally rewired modern brains to only notice ‘dramatic’ details.

The great fictional novel revitalises this impoverishing of experience. They take the small details of life, and make what appears drab and dreary to be mysterious and extraordinary. Take this passage from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

‘He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible. He heard nothing but the swish of scythes, and saw before him Tit's upright figure mowing away, the crescent-shaped curve of the cut grass, the grass and flower heads slowly and rhythmically falling before the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the row, where would come the rest’.

Tolstoy turns an otherwise humdrum event, scything a field, into something lyrical and profound. More than just escapism, this spills over into reality. After reading a good novel, I do find myself seeing the familiar world with new eyes. Instead of craving more and more novelty, I start to notice the smaller things in life the way a good author does - the reflection of the sun off a blade of grass, the expression on someone’s face, an atmosphere in a room. Like the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, the fictional novel makes the present incomparably richer.

A good novel is also proven to improve your experience with other people. In a novel you devote your mental energy to stepping into an imaginary person’s inner sanctum. Even with objectively atrocious characters, you understand their predicament, sympathise with their heartache, feel their pain, and share in their joy and happiness. You convert letters on a page into someone else’s unique view on the world. Neither TV nor factual journalism can achieve this level of sensory engagement. For what other reason are most people disappointed by movie adaptions, ‘it wasn’t as good as the book’!

What this does is hone your ability to do the same with other people. The evidence shows that just as you’d considered the goals, desires and problems of a fictional character, so you’re more inclined to do the same with people in real life. This is important since empathy is a tool for building people into social groups, for allowing us to function as more than selfish individuals. Sounds like it’s time to lose the stereotype of the socially inept bookworm.

Delving into someone else’s world, you also see yourself reflected back from the page. Picking up a favourite novel is like returning to an old friend, and each time gaining new insights from that friend. Each new insight you peel back a new layer not only of who you are, but who you ought to be. As Kafka said, books ‘are like an axe for the frozen sea inside of us’. Anyone who’s read classic ‘coming of age’ literature; Dickens’s Great Expectations, Bronte’s Jane Eyre or J. D. Sallinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, knows this. Those readers who’ve reeled from rejection and alienation in life can be comforted that they’re not the first. They can study the measures and the mindsets these fictional characters upheld in the midst of their suffering. These books might be dark, but they’re extraordinarily sensitive to the complex, often painful human condition in the reader.

A reader, in short, uses their imagination to learn about the world and himself. It trains the mind to use its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others. The non-fiction book, boiling down issues until they become binary, does no such service. Nor does the screen, which spoon-feeds its passive viewers definite information. This can be great, we get actual sounds and pictures instead of mere descriptions of them. But is there not a case to be made for letting the imagination run free? Imagination, after all, is more important than we like to admit. Images, ideology, ‘culture’, everything in the room you’re sitting, from your chair to your phone, has been the result of someone else’s imagination.

It is a pity, then, to hear that sociologists speculate that reading books will one day be the province of a special ‘reading class’. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity, but will become and ‘increasingly arcane hobby’. Sure reading is one of the more demanding pastimes, but this also makes it one of the most rewarding. To enjoy fiction is to come to terms with yourself and the world in strikingly meaningful ways. It gives ample space, as Maryanne Wolf put it, for ‘the brain to have thoughts deeper than those which came before’.