Reading books to read minds

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.

Relationship status: It's complicated

The relationships between the characters in "The Hours" and Mrs. Dalloway are complicated but fascinating. 
(Click to enlarge and get a better picture)

The one thing that I thought the movie "The Hours" did an amazing job with was connecting all the characters to create both a new story while still alluding to the themes and ideas from Mrs. Dalloway. The story was so interesting because it took bits and pieces from many different characters and then melded them all together to make a powerful story.

 The film also did this through the way it was filmed and edited to make jumps in time between the stories. I loved the opening sequence where you see all the characters waking up and getting ready for the day with parallels such as the vases of flowers and washing their faces.

After today's fascinating discussion about characters in "The Hours" and Mrs. Dalloway and how they relate to each other, I drew up this weird diagram to illustrate the various connections going on between the film and the book. (Yeah, I'm that nerd that has to color-code everything educational.)

The circles are the four stories that are woven together by the movie "The Hours," and the main characters of these stories are placed around their respective circles (check the key for the color coding). The arrows drawn all over the diagram look messy at first glance, but they actually do mean something. The arrows connect the characters from the different stories based on how the characters are variations of the original Mrs. Dalloway characters. 

For example, the arrows coming from Virginia Woolf point to both Septimus and Clarissa Dalloway. This is because Woolf was similar to Septimus in that she had mental problems and struggled with depression--eventually taking her own life like Septimus did. She's also connected to Clarissa Dalloway because Clarissa's character's thoughts could be similar to how Woolf thinks when she isn't struggling with mental issues like Septimus. Also, Woolf's marriage with Leonard is much like Clarissa and Richard's relationship. 

I'll spare you the long-winded explanation of each and every character's connections, and instead I'll just give you explanations of the ones I find most interesting.

Laura --> Rezia 

Laura connects to Rezia because they are both trophies from the war. In both cases, their husbands married them immediately after the war, and it seems that they weren't necessarily wed out of love for each other but instead out of a desperation to return to civilian life. Septimus marries Rezia because he's trying to get back the human emotions that he lost when he got PTSD in WWI. Dan married Laura because the thought of having the perfect little wife and a perfect middle class life had haunted him all throughout the war, and Laura was the first woman to come to his mind after the war. 

Dan Brown --> Holmes

Dan is similar to Holmes in the way that they both have no clue what depression is. Both are just happily leading their lives, and if anyone is struggling with issues such as depression they don't understand it. In Mrs. Dalloway this leads to Holmes giving Septimus some bad advice on how to cope with PTSD, and in "The Hours" Dan can't even tell that his own wife is extremely depressed.

Vanessa Bell --> Holmes

Vanessa Bell is clueless about her sister's depression--like Holmes was clueless about Septimus--and is almost scared of her sister. Instead of letting Virginia talk about her problems, Vanessa ignores her and skirts around the subject of Virginia's mental issues until she is finally confronted in the dramatic kissing scene. 

Louis --> Peter

The scene between Louis and Clarissa Vaughn has many parallels to the scene in Mrs. Dalloway between Peter and Clarissa Dalloway. Louis barges in way too early for the party, and when Clarissa V. is asking about his life he says that he has found true love once more. Later, Clarissa breaks down crying once they start talking about Richard. This is very similar to the scene in Mrs. Dalloway where Peter comes in declaring his love for someone in India, and then he starts crying as Clarissa D. awkwardly sits next to him fixing her dress.