Why Read Fiction?
«While books are not subjects, they are not just objects, not simply random things stranded among countless other things».
Rita Felski, «Uses of Literature»
I have been wondering for a long time already, why people actually read books. What makes them feel concerned about fictional characters and their lives? Why, when choosing a way to rest they decide to spend time reading, often call it a hobby, and discuss imagined stories with friends? I wanted to figure out this problem for myself, and recently I made a list of real reasons why I think we keep reading books (and actually should do this). The list turned out to be even longer than I thought it to be at first, and now I want to share it with you.
The way to enlarge life
Reading literature (especially good, classical literature) when we are young can shape our personalities, because «it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorizing them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us» [1].
Literature gives us an enormous, vast, and deep life experience. It gives us the comprehension of how the world is built in a compressed form without the necessity to live through many-many real-life situations. Reading develops an understanding of life in all its complexity.
We project our experiences on the characters of the stories we read. We sympathize with the hero (sometimes even the negative one), and try to solve the mystery together with him, we feel happy when he finds a solution and worry or regret when he does not understand something we have already understood [5].
Thus through artistic empathy, the reader lives a make-believe experience and feels strong emotions, which are either difficult to find in real life (dangerous and exciting adventures) or are even better to avoid (fatal and tragic experiences).
Reading different kinds of stories about different people enriches our mindset, and broadens our worldview because we get acquainted with a wide range of situations possible in life, a wide range of different scenarios.
Literature, in this sense, is kind of an exercise in the cognition of the world. At the same time, literature, unlike science, suggests all this experience to its readers not as ready-to-use information but as a process: we as readers need to live through a lot of complex and dramatic emotions described in the story and gain this knowledge ourselves [5].
The difficult pleasure
Literature satisfies need for the difficult pleasure. Our brain likes exploring and getting new experiences. Reading fiction (especially complicated ones) gives it food for thought because when reading we need to constantly solve mysteries that the author suggests to us.
The work of thought, the process of resolving the mystery gives us pleasure.
«Readers and viewers engage in covert yet complex acts of decoding, their brains silently buzzing away, carrying out complex forms of mental processing, drawing upon accumulated reservoirs of tacit knowledge. We are always involved in translating signs into imaginary scenarios, responding to subtle textual cues, filling in the blanks, elaborating and expanding on what a text gives us» [4].
The language in which the text is written can also give us pleasure — the difficult pleasure of exploration and comprehension. The way the words are formed into sentences, the way they sound, all that itself enchants us, gives joy.
Distinguishing important from not important
When reading fiction, we learn to distinguish culturally significant statements that deserve detailed interpretation and study from those that one can put aside and forget. If we understand why classical literature is more important and complicated than pop culture, we are more likely to better deal with life.
Fiction text represents a compact model of our culture in which there are many discourses, many languages and codes. In the example of the fiction text, we learn to unravel the multilingualism of the real social life in which we live in [5].
Thinking structurally
Everything in this world has its own structure, and literature teaches us to see structures in our lives. When reading books, we need to figure out who is the main hero and who is the secondary, which phrase is a joke and which is a paradox. Certain characters and phrases in texts differ, but we as readers understand how to approach them, because we got used to these oppositions. We learn to see text not as a set of random facts which are not connected with each other, but as a structure, a universal frame. We see the connections between its elements, because we are able to «rid» the text of all concrete and perceive it as a set of roles which different elements play in it.
Fiction trains its reader to decode different structures and this skill then is transferred to the real life [5].
I learned it from my own experience at the end of my bachelor studies (I am a graduate of the philological department). I suddenly understood I perceived the world differently, not the way I did when I just enrolled in the university. I felt I was now able to typify life situations, I could easily judge characters and analyze situations not in particulars, but in total, perceiving different life events not just as fragmented episodes, but as components of the whole. This change in my mindset happened because I have been studying literature for 4 years at the university.
When people say that everybody needs to learn math because it trains us to think logically and structurally, they are right of course, but they forget to add that it is not only math which develops these skills. Literature also does. And for some people reading fiction may seem a more pleasant way of learning this skill rather than solving mathematical problems.
Literature is a form of the good
After having read some particular authors, the reader might feel a desire to become better. It is not about some moral pressure that their stories impede, it is only about an aesthetic phenomenon: one reads an inspiring text, feels good, and wishes to become a better person himself [2].
Educating free-thinking individuals
Literature makes us free people. It happens, because when reading, we do not just absorb the ideas of the text, do not assimilate a uniquely defined meaning, but constantly make choices. This idea is strongly connected with the issues I have been recently writing a lot about questions of text perception, of the ways we read and communicate with text.
The thing is, reading is a creative process. It is a free activity that allows the reader to choose all the time, starting with the choice of whether to read this text at all or not. The reader can also choose the way he reads — he can read critically or not critically, and he can apply different methods of decoding the structure of the text at different points of reading. He can even make up a different end of the story if he can not agree with the ending that the author gave to the story [5].
We can also read a text in different languages and with different purposes, we can read for the first time or reread a text, and our reaction will differ from the one we had when reading the story for the first time.
All this means, that literature shapes the reader as a free person who can independently develop his position in life. At the same time, it means that we, as readers, are learning not unlimited freedom but responsible freedom. There does not exist such a thing as an «unambiguous» and «canonical» interpretation of the text, but different interpretations are subject to comparison and evaluation, not all of them equally have the right to exist. And it is our freedom as readers to interpret the text according to our view of the world but not to treat the text the way we want it to be, imposing ideas that are clearly not inherent to it.
If we understand text structures, we can better understand the unpredictability of the real world.
The world around us is open for a lot of different meanings and interpretations and we should responsibly conceptualize it. And literature helps us learn this skill [5].
Defining oneself
Literature plays «a crucial role in exploring what it means to be a person. <…> Depicting characters engaged in introspection and soul-searching, it encourages its readers to engage in similar acts of self-scrutiny. <…> One learns how to be oneself by taking one’s cue from others who are doing the same» [4].
The thing is, we cannot learn the language of self-definition alone. We discover ourselves through others, through our reaction to their deeds, and our behavior with them. It happens not only in real life with real people but also when we read fiction.
Texts offer us new ways of seeing ourselves, help us reflect on who and what we are and give moments of «heightened self-apprehension, alternate ways of what Proust calls reading the self» [4].
Reading helps us not only to adopt the skill of self-reflection, but also to recognize aspects of ourselves in the description of others. It means, that «seeing our perceptions and behaviors echoed in a work of fiction, we become aware of our accumulated experiences as distinctive yet far from unique» [4]. Fiction gives us the feeling of bond with a «repertoire of stories, histories, beliefs, and ideals that frame and inform our individual histories» [4].
Verification of feelings
«Every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity».
Marcel Proust
Literature confirms that we are not alone in our feelings and that there are other people who think or feel like we do. Through this experience of affiliation, we feel ourselves acknowledged. It rescues us from the fear of becoming invisible, from the danger of not being seen and understood [4].
I felt this keenly before emigration when I was reading the literature of Russian emigration (Nabokov, Tsvetaeva, Bunin, etc.). I needed to somehow «check» my emotions, and compare them to those which other people had when they were leaving their homeland. Our shared homeland. Literature then gave me an understanding that I was not alone in my feelings of frustration, fear, complete disorientation, etc. I was not alone, and I was also able to figure out some ways of coping with these feelings — which were completely new for me — by borrowing this experience from literature.
At the same time, fiction teaches us to split tangles of feelings into specific emotions we experience at specific moments of time. It means that one can explain to himself, what exactly is happening to him right now. He does not just think «I am shocked», or «god, what a shit» without being able to deal with the chaos of his inner world. He can untwist this complicated lump of many negative feelings into separate emotions and understand, that he is, for example, frightened due to this or that reason, or he is angry (and why), or sad (and why), etc. It is a very useful skill because by being able to distinguish and verbalize our feelings, we can not only understand how to cope with them but we can also build more effective and positive communication with other people.
This was my list of reasons why we read. I will be glad to read your lists in the comments!
P.
Literature:
- Calvino I. Why Read the Classics. New York, 2001. 288 p.
- Bloom H. How to read and why. New York, 2000. 282 p.
- Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. New York, 1982. 1056 p.
- Felski R. Uses of Literature. Oxford, 2008. 160 p.
- https://arzamas.academy/materials/1624
If you enjoyed this post, you can read some of my other texts:
