I was listening to NPR a week or so ago and I heard a Story of the Day podcast that was about the study that found that reading literature makes you more socially adept by enhancing your ability to perceive the thoughts and feelings of people around you. I thought immediately of The Sun Also Rises.
The study compared what they called popular fiction novels, books with predictable plots and common tropes, and literary fiction which tends to be more focused on complex character development and hidden meanings. Many times, readers have to infer what's going on in literary novels.
The scientists found that the people who read literary fiction did better on tests of mind reading, and the group who read popular fiction did about as well as people who hadn't read anything at all. The explanation for this was that reading books is like immersing yourself in a new world of social interaction, and that even though it is a fictional one you still go through some of the same analysis and thinking when reading literary fiction that you do when interacting in real life.
I think Ernest Hemingway is a good example of this kind of literary fiction that makes you think critically about human interaction. The Sun Also Rises is a great example of a book that requires much inference to be fully understood. The iceberg effect that Hemingway uses means that you almost have to read the book twice to get all the references and small details that are important to how the story unfolds.
The Sun Also Rises is a book that revolves completely around social
interaction with ironic subtext that the reader has to decipher. Jake's narration gives more background understanding and also interprets the conversations that he has with the people around him. One good example of this is all of the meaning behind Jake's last words of the novel: "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?". Throughout the entire book, the reader has to interpret Jake's narration to figure out how exactly his judgements and biases influence the story.
Perhaps
this was one of the reasons why I didn't like the book very much when
we first began reading. I didn't pick up on all of the small details,
and I couldn't understand how a story like this would be interesting. It
seemed to have little plot aside from various relationship conflicts
and drinking at bars. After all the class discussions, though, the book
became more interesting as we made connections and inferred what was
going on in the story.
I personally think that it's cool to think that after reading literary fiction we're better at mind reading. It almost makes me want to go out and read a bunch of literary fiction just so that I can be a mind reader and (if I may reference Mrs. Dalloway just once more) be able to know people by instinct like Clarissa Dalloway felt she could.
I like this whole idea. It seems like Hemingway, however, has a prerequisite of reading lots of other fiction. You go into the novel needing to be able to understand people's mannerisms in order to get the subtext of the novel. There were so many times where I knew I was missing something but couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. There were so many layers to the novel and the characters that the conversations hide extremely well.
ReplyDeleteIs "mind-reading" another way to say "empathy" (i.e. seeing and feeling from another's point of view)? If so, this sounds like another way of getting at the findings of the article I mentioned earlier in the semester, about how immersive reading makes us more empathetic people, as it literally exercises the part of our brains that are engaged in actual real-life social interaction.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you cite Hemingway as the best illustration of this principle at work, since "reading minds" appears to be much more Woolf's concern (when we read her novel, we're quite literally reading minds). But it makes sense: as you say, Hemingway requires this kind of inferential work on the part of the reader, and characters' motivations are never explicitly spelled out. Because his narrative sticks to the surface (Jake *never* speculates as to what others are feeling or seeing or thinking), the reader has to do that "mind-reading" ourselves.