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.