Fiction VII

Fact as a Virtue

Fiction certainly has its virtues. It can enlighten and inform, exercise reading skills and increase vocabularies. It gives audiences access to concepts, landscapes and situations they would otherwise never encounter. At times it’s the best way to communicate important ideas, sometimes the only way.

Nevertheless, there are limits on the sort of information that be conveyed in this manner. Most of the time, the best way to learn about the world is to study it first-hand, or at least as close-hand as you can get.

While Newton’s bizarre life-story might be usefully illuminated by dramatisation, his Principia would suffer dreadfully. Calculus is difficult enough without it being further encoded into a human storyline. If you want to learn how to solve equations there’s no better way than studying equations directly – certainly more illuminating than studying narratives about people who themselves study the equations. In this case it’s definitely best to study first-hand.

In the last part I suggested that some of the virtues commonly ascribed to fiction are undeserved. As with mathematics, politics and human-nature are subjects best studied first hand. You might top-up your knowledge of these subjects with a fiction, or even be inspired to investigate further after consuming a fiction, but a fiction alone would be pretty worthless, in understanding these complex matters.

It may sound facetious, but I sincerely believe the best way to ‘lay bare the human condition’ is by reading pop science. The whole magnificent corpus of natural philosophy is available in lucid terms, written with the layman in mind. Evolution, genetics, psychology, theory of mind – these are our best hope of or seeing ‘directly into the human soul’. While fiction might provide gut-wrenching sensations of existence, pop science actually provides understanding, comprehension.

Just the same with politics. Watching The West Wing or Yes Minister might add colour and structure to your notion of government and civil service, but it’s no substitute for real politics. Without any accompanying knowledge of real politics political fiction becomes mere decoration.

I suspect a bit of self-deception is sometimes at play. It’s just so much easier to consume a fiction than go to source, and it’s a great bonus to think it’s doing us some good. Watching a drama about Newton is a far less daunting prospect than tackling his theories. Watching The Deer Hunter is far easier than reading Manufacturing Consent. Watching M*A*S*H is far easier than studying Korean history.

It’s a bit like the one about the lazy lit student – watches the film of the book instead of reading the book itself. Dramatisations of important discoveries and events are bound to be less of a struggle to swallow than material closer to source, but we tend to pay for that decrease in difficulty with a proportional decrease in useful learning.

The ease with which we gulp down most of our fiction is a pretty good indicator that nothing too profound is being acquired. Real learning – such as that carried out by lit students – is a difficult, head scratching, business. Uncritically consuming fiction, on the other hand, is a breeze.

For the consumer it might sound like a free lunch, but as usual someone ends up paying. It’s tempting to let our feelings towards fictions become a substitute for legitimate moral concern. Reading about child labour in nineteenth-century Lancashire feels like a moral act, but it’s far less disquieting, or implicating, than reading about child labour in Vietnam today – great surges of compassion, none of the guilt. It hurts less to read Dickens because it doesn’t implicate us. All the emotion with none of the culpability.

If we allow ourselves to project our compassion onto simple fictional victims instead of ugly reality, the consequences are anything but virtuous. If we allow ourselves the warm moral glow when there’s no chance of a moral effect it’s a net moral loss. Read in isolation, fiction won’t change the world. You can read and discuss Dickens until the cows come home, but it’s morally worthless if you never apply it to the present. It’s just milking away your morality, rather than acting upon it.

Fiction VI

Fiction as a Virtue

Once upon a time our English teacher asked us to list the books we were reading out of school. I doubt I was reading anything, but I wrote down the last few titles I could remember. She frowned at my list, “You know you really should be reading some fiction.”

It was voiced with genuine concern for my well-being. Like many people, she saw a life without fiction as a life lacking. Like vitamins, fictions were missing from my psychological diet, a deficiency that would narrow my outlook. Without fiction I would grow into a less ‘well-rounded’ character.

But does consuming fiction make a better human of you? Does it make the world an easier place to comprehend, and cause you to act in a more enlightened way?

Obviously much depends on the fiction. By definition, virtuous fiction would tend to instil virtue, help form that ‘well-rounded character’ all responsible educators desire. Enlightening writing is that which enlightens, leaves you better able to cope in the world. If the only fiction you read is morally and intellectually enlightening the experience is bound to be a constructive one.

But that doesn’t sound much like the average fiction, or the average purchaser. Most of us buy fiction for pleasure, not self-improvement. Although often intelligent and entertaining, it seems uncontroversial to suggest that the mass of fictions we consume range from morally irrelevant to morally malevolent, they certainly teach us nothing useful about the world.

Love it as they might, few viewers of Coronation Street could claim they’d become better moral agents by watching it. After forty years, what could you have possibly learned?: Old women gossip, but it’s usually their undoing in the end? Schoolgirls sometimes fall pregnant? Factory owners drink scotch?

The proportion of useful ideas popular fiction conveys to public minds is slight in the extreme. Popular fiction is about pleasure, not learning, I’m sure most fiction consumers and creators would agree.

There’s less agreement about the virtues of more highbrow fiction, often renamed literature or classics. Such works are heralded as the peak of human intellectual achievement. To whatever degree this might be true, some claims seem quite unjustified. While there is nothing wrong in principle with the idea of virtuous fiction, some powers attributed to it simply don’t stand up to inspection.

It is frequently suggested, without comment, that Shakespeare or even Jane Austen ‘see directly into the human soul’ or ‘lay bare the human condition.’ I really don’t think this is true – but I have an idea why it gets said. Good fiction triggers deep emotion. Subtle dramatisations of profound human interactions can be deeply moving. If it’s done with sufficient intelligence it can feel like you are witnessing vital moral and emotional truth.

But feeling isn’t the same as learning. The fact that a fiction can instil powerful emotions in us has no bearing on the depth of any message it might convey. This misunderstanding seems central to the frequent mistaken elevation of fiction from pleasure to virtue. The beauty we witness and the deep feelings we experience while consuming it can encourage the idea we have learned something deep along the way, when it might not be the case at all.

Politics for example, and Shakespeare again. I remember an interview in which an RSC bigwig emphasized the political profundity of Julius Caesar. Its greatest lesson, he suggested, was that it teaches us ‘the impossibility of politics’.

Again, I don’t think the first claim is true – as before, profundity of feeling is being muddled with profundity of learning. However powerful and moving Julius Caesar might be I’d challenge anyone to identify a novel political insight in it. Its profundity lies in its beauty, its humanity and language, but there’s nothing in it that might make you better able to cope with contemporary politics – certainly nothing as useful as actually studying contemporary politics. It’s eminently quotable, but it won’t clarify current global economics, or inspire social reform.

Indeed if ‘the impossibility of politics’ is the great lesson of the play that greatness is highly questionable, at least to those of a progressive persuasion. It’s really an appeal to political resignation – resistance is futile. For while it’s certainly a great truth that political ambition does invariably descend into corruption and betrayal, it also won us every existing liberty. Although those successes are dust beside the failures, we only possess them because some of our predecessors refused to believe politics was impossible, refused to give up. If the ‘great lesson’ of Julius Caesar actually wards people away from politics its ethical consequences are in fact degenerate, at least in that respect.