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.

If Bill Gorton was a taxidermist

Bill Gorton would probably make ridiculously ironic stuffed animals if he ever decided to become a taxidermist. He would also probably come up with most of these ideas while drunk. (Picture taken on the Uni German trip)

We walked down the St. Martin Strasse on a chilly June evening. The road split into two. One road was surrounded by small shops. The other had mostly hotels and restaurants. 

"We are smack dab in the middle of tourist central."  Brigitte pointed to the shops. "Better pull out your wallet because we're expected to pay some big bucks here. Garmisch doesn't pull anything over on me."

We walked on.

"Here's a fun tourist shop," Brigitte said. "Want to buy anything? Perhaps a stuffed hare?" 
"Come on," I said, "You can't seriously be buying into that tourist trap."
"Suppose they're hiding drugs in in it," Brigitte joked.
"Whoever made it was probably on those drugs," I said. 
"I want one," said Brigitte, "Just one winged bunny. And it even smokes!"
"For 50 euros? Hell no."
"Think of what it'd mean to have one though. You pay for their drug addiction. They give you a centerpiece to scare the neighbors." 
"It'd probably scare customs more than your neighbors."
"Fine. Have it your way. Doomed to a life of mediocre decor. Don't say I didn't warn you."

We walked on. 

Woolf Withdrawal

I'm going through Woolf withdrawal.

It's painful.

For the time being, I have to tear myself away my love for Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, because if I don't then I will never be able to enjoy Hemingway's writing. My brain still wants to read in "Virginia Woolf" mode and hasn't yet adjusted to the simpler "Ernest Hemingway" mode.

This mostly manifests itself when reading Hemingway's short short sentences. After reading the long and beautifully metaphoric Woolf sentences, Hemingway's seem abrupt and choppy. It doesn't read the same. It takes almost more concentration to get used to these short sentences, which is ironic seeing as it should be easier to read because of its simplicity. 

But I think the thing I miss most about Woolf is the way she wrote her characters. She wrote the book almost from their point of view. We were privy to the innermost thoughts of all the characters, even some random Londoners walking down the street with Mrs. Dalloway. The story switches perspectives many times, giving us a vast amount of information on what the characters thought about the world, their place in it, and the people around them. 

The one thing that I find interesting about Hemingway versus Woolf is that Woolf used hardly any talking in her novel, and if there was it sometimes wasn't obvious at first glance who was having the conversation. In The Sun Also Rises, the majority of the book is either conversation between characters or thoughts from Jake.

These thoughts from Jake, a highly sarcastic and ironic narrator whose cynicism can be quite annoying at times, are interesting. But I want to know what Brett's thinking. I think Brett's thoughts would be fascinating to read because she has such a flamboyant public personality, and I wonder what her private self would look like. There are also so many other characters who would be interesting to read about from their perspective--characters like Robert Cohn, Frances, and Bill. Maybe even the policeman who smiled at Jake in the bar would have an interesting tidbit to add to the story, much like Scrope Pervis in Mrs. Dalloway.

I find Hemingway's writing style and his "iceberg principle" to be annoying after reading a book like Mrs. Dalloway. I don't just want to know about the surface interactions like the chit chat at the bar. I want to know what's beneath all that--what's going on in their heads at the bar (although, perhaps it's nothing coherent anyway if they're drunk). 

Mrs. Dalloway is a puzzle in book form. All the pieces of the story are laid out for us--scrambled around on the pages. It's up to us to piece them together as we read through each character's thoughts. The Sun Also Rises, on the other hand, is a riddle where a small amount of important information is available, and the reader must interpret and figure out a meaning for themselves by using what's present in the text. 

I really want to be able to like The Sun Also Rises, but so far I think I prefer the puzzle to the riddle. Hopefully as I get used to not reading Virginia Woolf I'll be able to appreciate Hemingway more than I do now.