How Fiction Shapes Us

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence.

Ken Taylor
I’m Ken Taylor.

John Perry
I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from Litquake—San Francisco’s annual Literary Festival.

John Perry
Our thinking originates down Highway 101, at Stanford University. There at Philosophers Corner is where Ken and I teach philosophy.

Ken Taylor
Welcome everyone to Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
Today: how fiction shapes us.

John Perry
How fiction shapes us… Come on Ken, fiction can do all sorts of things for us. It can entertain us, stimulate our imagination, move us, confound us, even outrage us. But how is fiction supposed to shape us? Well, I don’t even know what that even means.

Ken Taylor
Oh John, look, fiction unleashes the imagination. Take Borges, one of my favorite offers office, for example. He takes us on guided tours of the boundless space of human possibilities. He creates imagined worlds that are morally, psychologically and even metaphysically complex.

John Perry
Yeah, Borges is a good example of how fiction can confuse us, but how does it shape us?

Ken Taylor
Well, take Ian McEwan atonement. There’s a morally complex novel, and that novel offers us multiple perspectives at the same time on the same complicated moral universe. Real life can’t do that.

John Perry
You know, it’s very deep Ken that’s very poetic, but it does not answer my question. How does fiction shape us?

Ken Taylor
Well, fiction shapes us by giving us practice at living. And if you practice anything, you become better at it. Reading fiction makes us more psychologically astute, more empathetic, more attuned to moral complexity.

John Perry
I don’t think fiction, reading fiction, is going to make you anything that you aren’t already. If you’re a compassionate person, sure you’ll, you’ll empathize with the characters you read about. If you’re a miserable curmudgeon like me, reading fiction probably not going to change much of anything.

Ken Taylor
I think you’re underestimating the power of fiction, John. Think of it this way, every human being is confronted with some basic existential questions, who should I be? How should I live? How should I treat others? Now answering those questions that’s a way of choosing a life for yourself, choosing an identity. And what a good work of fiction can do is can force you, compel you to reflect on such questions. It can even propose answers to such questions, you can accept them or reject them, but fiction can do that.

John Perry
That’s a pretty complicated theory, and does it really fit I mean, take Lalita. There’s a great novel. How is reading that going to make me a better person? Going to make me more moral? Oscar Wilde said there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are either well written or they’re not. That’s it.

Ken Taylor
Well actually, John Lolita is a perfect example of what I’m talking about, because reading a novel can have a payoff, a moral payoff. It can do that even if it’s a morally challenged or challenging novel. And I think that part of what makes Lolita such a masterpiece is that nobokov gets us to inhabit humberts morally perspective, and in doing that, he compels us to stretch and strengthen our moral muscles.

John Perry
Well, reading fiction can heighten our esthetic sensibilities and it can be fun. I think that’s about it. It pretty much leaves us as it finds us. It can’t turn a sinner into a saint or a fool into a wise man,

Ken Taylor
I think you’re wrong, John, you are what you read, or at least you are what you make of what you read, at least in part. Now

John Perry
Don’t get me wrong. I mean, there are novels in which morality is an important part. Take Huckleberry Finn, for example. A great thing about that novel is the way it captures the moral complexity of the relationship between Jim and Huck, but what the relevance of that is that it grasp it, it depicts it. It isn’t that it has an effect on the reader of making the reader more moral. Who knows what effect it has?

Ken Taylor
Well, look, I’m not going to say that the only thing about a work of fiction is its ability to morally improve us. I agree there’s esthetic values too, but that’s part of what makes novels worth reading at all. If they didn’t do that, why bother what consider fun to read?

John Perry
I think they’re way too focused on the moral dimension of fiction. I think fiction warms up the entertainment modules in our brain, and I don’t think it really does much with the morality modules in our brain.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I think the science fiction module in your brain is kind of going haywire here, but look, why don’t we see what effect reading fiction actually has on our brains? And to do that, we sent our roving philosophical reporter, Caitlin Esch, to find out how fiction shapes us right down to the synapses. She files this report.

Caitlin Esch
Keith Oatley wanted proof that reading fiction is healthy.

Keith Oatley
Probably for maybe two and a half 1000 years, people have thought that literature was good for you.

Caitlin Esch
But he wanted to know why. See, Oatley is a cognitive psychologist and novelist living in Toronto. About 10 years ago, Oatley and York University Associate Professor Raymond Mar began an experiment. Here’s Mar.

Raymond Mar
I got this idea that, well, if people are constantly imagining what characters in fiction are thinking and feeling, then maybe it could help them sort of build up or bolster these abilities.

Caitlin Esch
In other words, he thought reading fiction helps people relate to others and increases empathy. So they tested this theory by measuring how much fiction a person reads, then they measured that person’s ability to empathize using a test called Reading the mind in the eyes. Here’s how it works. You match emotions like surprise, anxiety or desire with facial expressions. Again, Keith Oatley.

Keith Oatley
What we found is that the more fiction people read, the better they were the mind in the eyes test.

Caitlin Esch
So reading a lot of fiction increases a person’s ability to understand emotion in real life, or what psychologists call theory of mind. Oatley says fiction isn’t just a description of the world. It’s an opportunity for readers to simulate experience, or maybe it’s more accurate to say experience assimilation.

Keith Oatley
You don’t just have to live your own life. If you read fiction. You can lead many lives. You can enter many different kinds of situations. You can meet many different kinds of people. So it is a kind of expansion of ordinary, everyday life.

Caitlin Esch
Other experiments compared brain scans of people who are reading to people who are actually experiencing. And it turns out, from the brain’s perspective, there’s not a huge difference. Again, Raymond Mar.

Raymond Mar
Reading something and actually experiencing or performing that thing lead to similarities in neural activation. So if we were to read about somebody kicking a ball, for example, then you would see activation in the motor cortex. But more specific to that, it would be in the area of the motor cortex that has to do with the lower body, so our legs, you know. So it’s quite specific.

Caitlin Esch
While every kind of fiction affects the brain, from trashy romance novels to Shakespeare, Oatley says quality still does matter. Take the Chekhov experiment.

The Lady With the Little Dog
A new arrival that was said had appeared on the Esplanade: a lady with a dog.

Caitlin Esch
Oatley and other colleagues compared how the brain responds to literature that’s considered art to how it responds to the low brow stuff. So they took Chekhov’s short story, the lady with the little dog.

The Lady With the Little Dog
I had spent two weeks in Yalta, and it got used to the place.

Caitlin Esch
A colleague wrote a version that was similar. It even had some of the same dialog, but in a less descriptive, non fiction style, definitely not Chekhov. Subjects were given personality tests before and after reading both versions,

Keith Oatley
And what we found is that people who read the Chekhov story changed their personality a little bit.

Caitlin Esch
People rated themselves in terms of neuroticism and agreeableness, and they actually changed their answers in different ways after reading the Chekhov story, but not after reading the knockoff version fiction, it seems, helps us see even ourselves from a different perspective.

Keith Oatley
And so what we found very interesting about that is that maybe literature, although it has a social effect on us, isn’t an effect like persuasion or advertising or getting you to think this or that. It doesn’t enable you to think but in your own way. And that’s, we think, a rather wonderful idea.

Caitlin Esch
So what we read changes us. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Caitlin Esch.

John Perry
thanks Caitlin for telling us about how psychology is studying fiction and bringing new insights to that field. I’m John Perry, along with my fellow Stanford philosopher Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from Z space. We’re a part of Litquake—San Francisco’s Literary Festival.

Ken Taylor
Our guest today is a professor of French and Italian from Stanford University. He’s a world famous literary theorist, and he’s author most recently of “How to Do Things with Fictions.” Please welcome Joshua Landy.

John Perry
Josh, the title of your book suggests that you got a lot of experience doing things with fiction. So tell us briefly. How did you get interested in thinking about fiction and literature and all this stuff.

Josh Landy
Well, it’s not exactly a straight line. I mean, when I was young, I I envisioned myself becoming a mathematician, because I loved mathematics and and hated literature, and didn’t understand what relevance, if anything, it had to anybody’s life, let alone mine. And then, luckily for me, it turned out I was. Very good at mathematics, and then I went to university and fell in among some professors who introduced me to Proust and other wonderful books, and showed me not only how wonderful those books are, but just how relevant they can be to a young person’s life. And I sort of never, I never left school.

John Perry
So proof saved you from mathematics and probably lots of worldly success. So Ken and I disagreed earlier about about what fiction is all about. Ken had this harebrained idea that it morally improves us. I thought he was missing the boat. We read fiction because it’s so much darn fun. Any moral reaction we have is just a reflection of the values we already hold. Who do you think is right?

Josh Landy
I don’t. I’m not with either of you, really. I think I’m closer to Ken on this than to you. I mean, let me, let me try to be charitable to both of you. How about that?

Speaker 1
Okay, a little charity.

Josh Landy
John, you said a book doesn’t transform you from a curmudgeon into something else. I agree with that. But to make a version of Keith oatley’s point, it can help you to see that you’re a curmudgeon, and maybe make you a better curmudgeon, more of a curmudgeon, assuming that’s what you want to be absolutely and and to Ken, I would say, Yeah, I like this idea that we’re getting better at certain kinds of skills, I just I would draw the line. I would say, I’m not sure that they’re always moral skills.

Ken Taylor
So well, what kind of skill? I mean, moral skills is one kind of skill. You think fiction makes you what smarter and increases your cognitive abilities?

Josh Landy
Well, I think there are certain kinds of abilities that fiction can uniquely help to fine tune.

John Perry
Yes. So do you think this is true of all fiction? I mean, probably the most popular fiction read today is Harlequin. Novels and other bodice rippers for the slightly more mature is all is it the essence of all that fiction to improve the various abilities of the people that read it?

Josh Landy
No, absolutely not. And here’s where I agree with another thing that Ken was saying earlier. There’s all kinds of fiction out there. There’s not one thing that all fiction does, and some fiction really doesn’t do that much of anything. Maybe it’s in the category of your entertainment, pure entertainment.

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk coming to you from lit quick, San Francisco’s annual Literary Festival. We’re talking about how fiction shapes us with Joshua Landy from Stanford University.

John Perry
How have you been shaped by fiction? Do you read or consume novels and other kinds of fiction to expand your moral universe or just to pass the time? Does fiction help you fine tune your cognitive abilities, or is it just kind of fun and entertaining?

Ken Taylor
Fiction, and how it shapes us—along with questions from our lively audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Plāto’nes
When I write the book about my love.

John Perry
Thanks to our musical guest, the play tones. This is Philosophy Talk, and I’m John Perry

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Joshua Landy, world famous literary theorist and author of How to do things with fiction. And we’re talking about how fiction shapes us.

John Perry
So what do you think? Have you really been shaped by fiction? Has there ever been a book that turned your thinking around about something? How did that happen? Join the discussion by stepping up to the microphone right in front of the stage here.

Ken Taylor
So Josh, let’s go back to your idea of fiction shapes our cognitive capacities. I never really thought of fiction as something that made you smarter. I thought of as something that make you better. Give me an example of how fiction might shape your cognitive capacities.

Josh Landy
Well, one example comes from your end of the quad, so forgive me, but Plato is a pretty good example.

Ken Taylor
He’s a novelist. He’s

Josh Landy
definitely not a novelist, but

John Perry
he is a writer our musical group, the Plato, not those

Josh Landy
guys. Plato is obviously a philosopher, but he chooses to write in a fictional form. So he chooses to invent imaginary conversations that people never had, and everyone knows they never had them. This allows him then to put bad arguments in the mouth of some of his characters, including even Socrates. Might not expect that. And this then invites the reader to get involved, to get active, to go and actually correct some of those arguments, to complain, you can’t get away with this. And that, I think, is the beginning of philosophy. I mean, this is, this is a series of fictions whose purpose is to make us better at reasoning.

Ken Taylor
So you think, in reading something like the symposium, which you and I teach together, right, in reading something like the symposium, Plato’s trying to not just tell you things, but kind of invite you to do things you. And the things he invites you to do, kind of strengthen your mental muscles. That’s exactly right. Okay, that’s a philosophy book. That’s what philosophers do. What about fiction that invites you to strengthen some kind of mental muscle or cognitive capacity or something? Do novels do that same kind of thing?

Josh Landy
Absolutely. I mean, not all of them. But take a novel like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which I thoroughly recommend in spite of its 3000 page length, this is a novel that is periodically reminding us that it’s a fiction. And obviously it’s not the only thing that does this. Can think of a number of movies, for example, that remind us that you’re watching a movie. This does a really interesting thing to the reader or viewer, which is that it forces us to occupy this weird, divided state where we, part of us believes that the thing is actually happening, and part of us disbelieves it. And that turns out to actually to be a very powerful capacity. We can have the capacity to divide ourselves like that.

John Perry
But look, I mean, people like to do lots of things, and people have to do lots of things. So if you work at physical labor, it will make you strong, but that’s not why you work at physical labor. You work at physical labor to get something done and to make a living. Playing various sports might make you stronger and more agile, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because it’s fun. So isn’t this kind of just an academic distortion designed to really take the fun out of fiction by saying, Ah, you might have thought you were just reading it to be entertained and having a good time, but actually you’re strengthening your muscles. That’s the kind of thing that would make me go do something else,

Josh Landy
completely understandable. And that’s sort of actually how I feel about the moral argument. Read this because it’s going to make you more moral. That’s not that’s not really a great enticement. It seems to me that works like these are great fun too, and actually, they’re all the more enjoyable for the exercises that he put us through. So there’s something I mean, runners get a runner’s high from overcoming the resistances. You don’t necessarily enjoy running immediately, but after a while you do. It’s the same kind of thing with reading. You get a writer’s high.

Ken Taylor
I want to push back on you here, because, OK, so you said you kind of like some of the things I said in the opening, but I know from your book that you think that the views that think fiction morally improves you. You’re with those who say, well, not only are those views false, you kind of think those views are like, well, somebody in the back cover of your book said those views are depressing. I think those views are uplifting. I think that’s really cool. That fiction could make you, I don’t know about a better person in your real life, but, but that fiction could stretch you morally, could challenge you morally. Look, you go through life, you encounter one set of actualities. You read fiction, you you encounter, if you read it voraciously, you encounter a boundless set of possibilities, and a lot of those are moral possibilities, morally possible universes. And you’re asked to judge them. You’re asked to evaluate them. You ask whether to empathize or not empathize. And you can make of it what you will, but you you’re asked to make something of it. Why isn’t that morally improving? And why isn’t that an important thing? And why isn’t that different from just sort of making you smarter without anchoring to moral

Josh Landy
values? We’re not actually disagreeing, except when you phrase it as moral improvement, I take moral improvement to mean I become a nicer person, right? I’m more likely to help little old ladies across the road and, you know, give to charity and this kind of thing. And I think that there’s no guarantee of that, because it might be that after I’ve practiced making my moral judgments, right, it’s the judgments that I make about certain situations, I’ll become even more of a horrible person, right, even more of a selfish person, whatever it is that I was going in. So there’s no guarantee. I mean, I think it serves an extraordinarily valuable service of making us more who we are.

John Perry
But I mean, Ken, your description is full of these evaluative modal terms. Fiction makes us do this. It requires us. That’s baloney. That’s just you. You’re a philosopher. When you read fiction, your philosophical inclinations force you to do all sorts of things. If you read Lolita, you read Lolita, you probably say, Well, what is it about Humbert that makes him so different? Is this really evil it? Is it blah, blah, blah, but a person that, I mean, that’s not the novel that’s doing it. That’s just the way you’re reacting to the story. The story is just a story that

Ken Taylor
no the story puts a world on display, and it puts it on powerfully, and it puts it on in a compelling way. And if I don’t respond to that, that’s like not responding to the pedophile in my midst. Look, I respond to life with all this normative outpouring and fiction is life reimagined?

John Perry
I think there’s a huge difference between reading Lalita and responding to the pedophile.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening you’re listening to philosophy, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re at Litquake, San Francisco’s annual Literary Festival. We’re in front of a live audience there. We’ve got questions from that live audience. Welcome to Philosophy

Speaker 2
Talk. Sarah, yes. Hi. I’m Matt rainen from San Francisco, and my question for Josh is, there’s a number of theories about dreams, that dreams are actually one of the roles of dreams is to. US rehearse for things we may encounter in our life. And I’m wondering if your theory around fiction is similar, is that a more narrow view? Is your view a broader view than that?

Josh Landy
That’s a lovely point. And it gets back to things that you guys were talking about earlier, possible, and also Keith Oakley, the possibility to use fiction as a kind of simulation space that seems completely reasonable to me. It’s just again, it’s going to be one among a number of possibilities. The one I was more focusing on, along with Ken, was the possibility of using the kind of hurdles that literature, certain literary works, put you, put you over in order to fine tune certain capacities. I think I want to split the difference between you two guys. I think it’s like a weight room. The novel provides the weight room. You don’t have to lift the weights. So without the weights, you’re not going to get exercise. But also, without your active engagement in the right kind of way, it’s not going to happen either. So you’re right. It’s totally possible for me to read one of these fictions and be completely passive and not really do anything with it, but we’re invited to,

Ken Taylor
but Right? I mean, it depends on how you read. You could read as just the sort of passive observer, but if you’re trying to read fiction to make something of the world in your mind, in your evaluative horizons, to make something of the world with which you’re presented. And I think, well, really commanding fiction gives you something that you have to make something of and by. And I guess I agree with you. By trying to make something of it, you are exercising those meaning making muscles. I guess I think there’s more. I mean, let me ask you a question about so take some morally problematic work of fiction Gone With the win. The novel’s crappy. The movie many people think is a masterpiece. I think it’s morally abominable, right? It’s an apologia for herself. It never was right. Okay, tell me how to think about how that, you know, forms me.

Josh Landy
Well, again, I don’t think every novel has to. And I think novels like that, one wants to say, might start to verge on propaganda. Which point our best response to them is to resist. And I actually include in that even well intentioned propaganda, right? So even the books we don’t say, oh gosh, that’s an apologia for the South, we’ve got to treat moralizing fictions with with a great distance.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk. What’s your comment or question?

Speaker 3
Thank you. My name is Alita Brandenburg from San Francisco, and I’m wondering if you can speak to the difference between a novel that’s written in first person and whether there’s a certain power that comes with that. Because if you’re reading a lengthy novel and you’re reading it, and the first person is, I did this, I experienced that my emotion was such that that can maybe speak to even more of having an impact on your, you know, your moral philosophy, or anything thereafter.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I know some people are studying that, and I don’t, we don’t know yet what the answer that question is. One thing, I would say is one thing that a first person narrator allows you to do is mess with the reader’s head. You can have an unreliable narrator so you can have readers reading along, quite blithely, accepting what’s being presented to them as the truth, and then the rug gets pulled. And I think this is a powerful workout for our skills of social interaction. We need to be able to keep track of the sources of information, otherwise we’re in big trouble. And works like that, have an unreliable narrator in the first person. Are wonderful exercise for that capacity.

Ken Taylor
When it’s narrated in the first person, am I invited to take that perspective? Is that, am I supposed to hear myself narrating that? Or is it, is there supposed to be a distance between me and the narrator? I mean, it

Josh Landy
varies from case to case. And sometimes, I mean, so it’s very likely you’re going to occupy the skin so to speak, of the protagonist, whether first person or otherwise, whether the protagonist isn’t the right or otherwise. And then different writers will play with that. We’ll start to stretch the difference between.

Ken Taylor
I mean, when Don says to me, I did this, I did that. I think he did this. He did that. I don’t think I did that. But when a novel says I don’t really view the narrator as a it’s not quite that I view the narrator as a second person.

John Perry
But take a really novel that does play with like the murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, which I assume everybody’s read, but so I don’t want to give it away. Don’t say anything, John, but you couldn’t write that novel in the third person. It has to be in the

Josh Landy
first person. That’s right. If you want to play certain kinds of trick on the radio, it has to be that

Ken Taylor
way. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re a part of lit quake in front of a live audience at z space in San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, man.

Caitlin Esch
Thank you very much. My name is Sally Chang. I’m from Los Gatos. So you talk about how fiction allows us to be more empathetic and stretch our minds and such. How would you respond if someone was to say, if someone was to contend that theater and movie do a better job? Absolutely

Josh Landy
no problem with. That, I mean, so I’m classing under fiction, anything that has some kind of story that didn’t happen, and everyone knows didn’t happen, that would include fictions in the cinema and in the theater. Obviously there, there are many differences between those presentations, but the same kind, you can do the same kinds of things in all

John Perry
but usually, usually the story is that a novel, theater, a movie, say each step gives less for the imagination to do, and it’s more handed to you. What you’re supposed to think and believe in less up to your is that,

Josh Landy
I think it completely depends on the work. And you take a TV show like lost, for example, that finished a couple of years ago. I mean, that’s OK. So the difference is not between popular and highbrow or one mode or another mode. It’s between challenging and not challenging. Lost was extremely challenging. There’s a lot you can do, even in the medium of TV that’s sometimes disparaged,

Ken Taylor
but you don’t think a story. Take the same sort of story, write a novel, make a play, make a movie. You don’t think that the medium makes some kind of important difference to the telling of that

Josh Landy
story makes huge differences,

Ken Taylor
but it doesn’t carry the answer to the How would you tell me a little bit about how the medium makes

Josh Landy
a difference? Well, I mean, a really simplistic way of thinking about it is that films are have a much easier time moving us. You can present a face crying, and that’s almost enough to move us. And novels have a much easier time presenting complicated inner states.

Ken Taylor
And a theater with live actors, a theater live

Josh Landy
actors, that what that gets is a feeling of being involved in a public event, right? That’s a kind of communal, almost like a communal ritual. So they’re different. They’re very important differences. But at the same time, the work of fiction is still present each of them, and so they can. They each have the opportunity to fine tune our capacities. Welcome

Speaker 4
to Philosophy Talk. Bill, thank you. My name is Joyce Burris San Francisco. Your original question was, do we feel or not feel that fiction, reading fiction can transform us? And I just want to give you an example of my experience, which is reading Mary Renault’s Persian boy living in San Francisco, working in San Francisco, surrounded by a lot of and being fiercely heterosexual myself, but working and living in San Francisco, being surrounded by a lot of gay people, I didn’t have a problem with their sexuality, but I didn’t understand it, and I really had a hard time imagining that what they called Love was the same understanding that I had. Reading that book changed that for me. And that book, by the way, is written in the first person.

Ken Taylor
Thus you are refuted.

John Perry
That’s beautiful.

Ken Taylor
What do you think? I think I think you were just refuted

Josh Landy
well, so I think that kind of thing is possible. It’s just, it’s not it’s not guaranteed. One could imagine a reader responding to work like that, you know, with with negative feelings. So it’s not guaranteed. But I do love the point that certain works of fiction are designed to represent somebody’s experience of life their qualia, it’s their perspective on the world, and that’s something that’s actually very difficult to convey, because you can’t convey your perspective of the world in sentences. You have to do it through style. And maybe there can be moral upshots of this. I don’t think it’s guaranteed in every case, but there’s certainly the one Upshot there is, is the world is re enchanted by virtue of all these perspectives that we get to enjoy. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, sir. I’m Ben

John Perry
from San Francisco, so I’m a little confused I think about what the position Josh’s offering is so at some points, you’re saying reading fiction is like a workout. It improves some skills recognizing bad arguments, maybe, maybe something more abstract. In other cases, the first thing you said was that reading fiction might make John realize he’s a curmudgeon, or that it might make us more who we are, or something like that. That seems more like a shift in perspective. It’s not obvious to me how that is the upshot of a skill,

Josh Landy
absolutely. So no, that’s right. Those are two separate points, right? So I just want to go back to the general point. It. Fictions are very various, and some of them probably just entertainment, and others of them benefit us in different ways. So here are two ways. One, John learned something about himself. Oh, I’m a curmudgeon, and I like that. Maybe I’ll become more of a curmudgeon. Two, more of the Ken Taylor view this work, let’s say Plato symposium is a training ground for my capacity for reasoning, two separate types of benefit that are on offer from different texts.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk this time, we’re talking about how fiction shapes us with Joshua Landy from Stanford University, how

John Perry
can we become better consumers of fiction? Is there a secret to reading fiction that makes some people better at it than others. How should we apply ourselves when reading? I mean, should we kind of approach it like a crossword puzzle and look up everything we’re unsure about, or more approach it like a warm bath, enjoy it and not worry about exactly what’s going on. We’re

Ken Taylor
coming to you from Litquake, San Francisco’s annual Literary Festival. We’ll take more questions from our audience when Philosophy Talk continues,

Unknown Speaker
that’s what I’m going to I’m

Unknown Speaker
going to write a note.

Unknown Speaker
I’m writing it for

John Perry
you thanks to our musical guest, the play tones. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Ken Taylor
except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Joshua Landy, author of How to do things with fictions.

John Perry
Josh What’s the secret to getting the most out of books, out of reading books? How can we in our audience become better readers or consumers of fiction. And

Ken Taylor
before you answer that question, I want to interject something. Reading your book. You said, Not fictions usually come with a instruction manual tells you how to read the book. I never actually found that in any work. Tell tell us how you’re supposed to back of the fly.

Josh Landy
Well, let me give you a quick example. In the Gospel of Mark, which is not a fiction. There are some fictions in the form of parables, and

John Perry
this is the actual gospel action Mark God, not a book somebody’s written.

Josh Landy
Jesus decides to use this fictional form parables in order to do some teaching. Many people think that the point is to teach lessons, but they’re very, very opaque, really. The point of them is to get people to think metaphorically. Why? Because metaphor is a bridge between the tangible and the intangible. This is a way to get people out of the immanent into the transcendent. How do we know this? Because there’s a manual for use right there in mark four, where the disciples asked Jesus to explain about the parables, why he’s using the parables, and he explains, you need to look for it, but that’s one answer to your question, how to become better

Ken Taylor
readers. Where’s the manual for reading Ulysses? Finnegans Wake Ulysses is one of my favorite books of all time. I spent many hours reading that in college. I was utterly gripped by but where’s the manual in that book? For I mean, is it really true that there’s always a manual in it,

Josh Landy
in in all of the cases that I’m talking about, the cases where you have a challenging work which is designed to allow you to fine tune one of your capacities, somewhere, there’s got to be a manual for use. Otherwise you’re doomed. You’re never going to be able to use

Ken Taylor
it the right way. Welcome to philosophy

Raymond Mar
talk now. Hello. I’m Samantha Lynn from Stanford. You’ve talked a lot about how readers either read for enjoyment or for moral improvement, but do you think novelists have an obligation to write with a message that challenges readers’ perceptions in addition to writing a captivating story?

John Perry
That’s a very good question. And I mean, just let me pin it down. You think that Proust, I don’t think he was writing for the money. What I mean, did he have these intentions to produce all the effects that you think reading Proust

Josh Landy
can. It’s not always possible for us to know, but we can infer things from what people said in their letters. They burden II. In the case of Plato, I think it’s very, very likely that he wanted his dialogs to get people to become philosophers. In the case of Proust, there are some things that he wrote about other authors that suggest he’s thinking about that. He’s really thinking about what the effect of his writing is going to be. This is very different from sending a message. By the way, please don’t confuse me for someone who is claiming that works of fiction should have messages. I think they shouldn’t.

Ken Taylor
I get you and I know that you think that people who think that fiction morally improves by giving messages as if work of fiction issues a command, you are in strong disagreement with. Such people, to put it mildly, indeed, you’re scathing against such people in your very fascinating book, but still, I still I’m not sure if you agree or disagree with this. I think most people who write a work of fiction are grappling with something themselves. They’re grappling with a question or a set of questions. They’re grappling with questions about identity and all that sort of stuff. And their work of fiction is designed to make you grapple as they grapple, right? And if they’re maestros at it, they make you grapple. That’s exactly right. We’re not disagreeing. We’re not No, but that’s improving, because how do I get people to live a better life? I get them to grapple with life’s fundamental questions, who am I? What shall I be? What do I owe other people? You know, the

Josh Landy
example of atonement you gave earlier is a beautiful example, because it’s a case of moral luck. It’s a case where where some action is committed and then later on, it has horrible consequences. Well, how much effect does that have on the morality of the

Ken Taylor
decision? Right? My father, when he saw the movie Match Point, which I think is one of Woody Allen’s Greatest Movies. Was so upset. He said, How could he get away with that? There’s something not right about he was so disturbed. This is he was disturbed by the Woody Allen suggestion that, in the end, it’s just moral luck. It’s just where that ball bounces right. He didn’t want a universe like that, but he was my father’s confronted by that movie with a universe like that, and it disturbed him to the guts of his being.

Josh Landy
And I think your father is half right. He’s right to be disturbed and to grapple with it, but he’s wrong to think that the function of that film, or any fiction film, is to send a message. I

John Perry
mean, look, reading a novel, watching a film is an experience. There’s lots of experiences that don’t involve fictions and don’t involve authors that have profound moral effects on us. Somebody might lose a tennis game because of an odd bounce. Wasn’t any authorial intention there, it was just bad luck. So in noticing that reading a novel can have all kinds of profound effects on us. Does that really tell us anything special about fiction, or is that just, well, you know, a dream can have all kinds of profound effects on you. These an automobile accident can have

Josh Landy
designed these works are designed to like the weight room. They’re designed to allow us to do certain kinds of things. Now, I completely agree that if you want to have your moral perspective changed, go out in the world, because there you’re actually seeing real things happening, and you won’t be confused. If you go to fiction, you’ll be deeply confused with all kinds of things that are completely impossible. You should not get your morals from fiction, but fictions are designed to have these special devices that force the reader to do certain kinds of things that life doesn’t foresee. Welcome to Philosophy

The Lady With the Little Dog
Talk. Man, hi. My name is Christine Chen from Stanford, California, and I was wondering if the act of reading is intended to be an exercise in morality or empathy or simply a simulation of life. Why is reading fiction as opposed to nonfiction the better choice? Isn’t nonfiction more compelling because it’s real.

Ken Taylor
I think reading nonfiction is cool. I mean, I write nonfiction, I hope, and I hope people find it compelling. I love biographies, I love histories, but I do think fiction does something look life takes you through a particular walk, through the space of possibilities. I experience this, this, this, and I don’t experience other things. Fiction opens up for you everything humanly possible, and presents it to you and says, how about this? Right? It puts you to the test in a way that actuality may not. So I think fiction is really

John Perry
cool for that reason. I have a somewhat different theory. So why did language evolve? Well, probably exchanging information. And then then we find it’s fun to gossip. Tell stories about people, mostly that are alive. May be helpful to deal with those people. And gossip is so much fun, we find out that when people start dying, it’s still fun to gossip about them. So we start talking about dead people from which the history departments of the world come. And that’s, that’s a little bit puzzling. What is it good? What good does it do? You To Know About dead people. They’re dead. You’re not going to meet them at the supermarket, and need to know what to talk about. But even that doesn’t exhaust our lust for stories and gossip. So we invent fiction. We just, you know, not enough real people around to tell stories about, so we have other people to tell stories about, but that’s all. It’s telling stories,

Josh Landy
okay, but this doesn’t explain why we tell the kinds of stories that we do. And I mean, so we should just have only realist fictions, but we have all these weird fictions that, as I was saying before, that break the fourth wall and reveal to us that they’re fictional nonfictions. Don’t do that. We have these weird fictions that sort of these, these puzzles, like in Plato, non fictions generally don’t do that sometimes, but rarely. We have these fictions, like the parables that cause us to enter a different way of thinking about the world, a metaphorical, figurative way. Non fictions don’t do that, and gossip doesn’t do that. Welcome to philosophy

Josh Landy
time. Hi. I’m Mallory Frazier. From Stanford, and I had a question, do you think that bad novels and bad fiction can occupy the same place as Socrates bad arguments in the symposium and confront us and challenge us, unintentionally, perhaps to argue against them and to develop our own perspectives? And

Josh Landy
it’s a lovely question, but I think the intentionality is key, because we have to want to fix the arguments in Plato. And the reason we want to is because these are great questions that have been partially answered by some of the characters, and we think we’ve been led to think this is a brilliant writer. If we do the effort, there’ll be a payoff with bad fiction. I just want to move on and read something

Ken Taylor
better. It depends on what you mean by bad. If it’s just esthetically bad, inept, that’s one thing, right? But if it’s challenging fiction that you are prone to reject, the content of it, the scenario, the what you’re asked to sympathize with, that can give you a real workout, right? That can teach you something about yourself, the other all kinds of stuff. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Sir Hi.

Speaker 5
I’m Alejandro Ruiz Esparza from Stanford, and with all the various forms that fiction can take, I’m wondering how different levels of immersion might influence the impact of fiction. So like would a reader have a different experience from someone who’s acting or someone who’s looking at a painting, or even just a kid who’s really enthralled by video game plotline.

Josh Landy
So one thing to say is, in the case of Proust and other people like that, Fellini geed, people who want you simultaneously to imagine something and know you’re imagining it, then, in fact, you can’t afford to be too immersed. You have to be part immersed in part not Calvino is another example. But the actor question is a beautiful one. I mean, Brecht thought that the best way for people to use the theater to transform themselves was to be actors, not to be spectators. And I think there’s something to that it’s been very different about being an actor and feeling what it is to occupy somebody else’s shoes from just sitting in the audience and watching, welcome to Philosophy

Speaker 6
Talk. Bill. My name is Emily alter. I’m from Larkspur, California, and I was wondering, I was thinking about Bruno Bettelheim, and he talks about how fairy tales force children to encounter darkness before they’re actually forced to encounter it later. And I was wondering whether or not fiction might sort of have a similar moral preparation function, where it prepares people to to encounter moral moral decisions that they may encounter later in life.

Josh Landy
Well, it seems reasonable to think yes. I mean, along the lines of what Ken was saying earlier, that fiction is a simulation space, and by the time you get to a decision in real life, it’s often too late for you to say, Hang on time out. I’ve got to figure out what I actually were, actually stand on this issue. That makes perfect sense again, and I think we’re agreeing here. That doesn’t mean it makes you it predisposes you to make one decision rather than the other, but it’ll allow you to know what it is that you think you should do.

Ken Taylor
Josh, this has been a real, really fascinating conversation. We’ll have to have you back sometime. Okay, delighted. Okay, our guest has been Joshua Landy. He’s professor of French and Italian from Stanford University. He’s author of How to do things with fiction. Josh, thank you so much for joining. Thanks very much. Applause.

Ken Taylor
So, John, what are you thinking now? Well,

John Perry
I’m thinking that a lot of our theorizing about fiction and novels is really based on, you know, a really skewed part of the curve, a lot of exceptional cases, you know the Proust or the Dostoyevsky. I’m not sure that that it’s very helpful thinking about these things that appeal so much to literature professors and philosophy professors to think about the real function of of fiction as a real phenomenon. Fiction wouldn’t be supported by those books if it weren’t for all the mystery novels and the harlequin novels and all the stories that people like to tell and read.

Ken Taylor
Oh, that’s true. I grant you that there are some fictions that don’t live up to this high standard, don’t purport to live up to that high standard. But just think about it. Once you drive a really, really nice car and then somebody says, Well, no, I’ll take this little whatever. I don’t want to diss any kind of car. Take this little putt. Putt guy, drive it. You think, Oh, my God, I want a car. Man, I want to really, I’m gonna cut that froze. Well, so once you read spruce, did all that, you want a car. That room, you want fiction that vrooms.

John Perry
Once I read, once I read volume one of Proust, which I kind of enjoyed. I couldn’t wait to get back to Dickens once I read, once I read Ulysses. I couldn’t wait to get back to Mark Twain and edit goes that, and it goes on from there. Well,

Ken Taylor
this conversation continues on our blog, the blog dot philosophy talk.org where our motto is Cogito ergo. Blog, oh, I think, therefore I blog. You can also find out more by visiting our Facebook page, and you can follow our tweets on Twitter

John Perry
and check this out. You can get the free weekly podcast of Philosophy Talk at our website. Philosophy Talk, dot O, R, G. Now we hurry between fact and fiction with Ian Scholz, the 62nd philosopher

Ian Shoales
Ian s many works of fiction have had a direct effect on society. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, was a factor in the abolitionist movement. It’s hard to think of novels today with that impact, although 50 Shades of Gray seems to be a factor in the growth of light bondage among soccer moms. The Satanic Verses itself didn’t have an impact on culture, but yet, reaction to it echoed around the world. Author Salman Rushdie received a death sentence issued by an Ayatollah who had not read the book. I bought the book at the time as a gesture of solidarity, and must confess, I couldn’t get into it. One who condemned, one who approved, neither had read The Satanic Verses belongs to a class of books that are fiercely discussed but seldom read. Like the prince, Origin of Species, Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto, The Turner Diaries, Lolita, anything by the Marquita sod lady, childish lover, Naked Lunch, Madame Bovary, etc. Now it’s weird to lump all of these titles into one large slush pile of evil, because clearly, evil is relative. I don’t consider Origin of Species evil that many creationists do. Lolita is one of the best novels ever written, in my opinion, but its protagonist is indeed a murderous pedophile. How is this uplifting? I would say, by great writing and by a punk attitude from the aristocratic Nabokov. I’m Nabokov. I’ll write about whatever the hell I want. When I came across underground comics in college, I was initially disturbed by the bizarre sex and violence found in R, crumb, s, Clay Wilson and others, until I realized, wait a minute, this is a comic book. It isn’t real. Did it with Nabokov? He doesn’t endorse pedophilia. He endorses great writing. And of course, there are those books that might be considered evil because they’re addictive. The Twilight series, 50 Shades of Gray series, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with the James Bond books. Later, I wound up tracking down and reading every Philip K Dick novel. Luckily, it was a book addiction. It doesn’t lead to harder drugs, and that’s buying a Kindle counts. Plus, as soon as you’ve read all the James Bond books, presto, addiction over unless, of course, you’re addicted to James Bond movies as well, which could be considered the crack cocaine to the marijuana of James Bond novels and with Philip K Dick novels, the addiction could go on for some time. He wrote 44 novels and 121 short stories. As if to offset that jaw dropping output, we have cult novels by John Kennedy Toole Harper Lee and Ayn Rand. Harper Lee only wrote one cult novel To Kill a Mockingbird. John Kennedy Toole wrote two, but only Confederacy of Dunces inspired a cult. And fortunately for me, Iron Man’s cult novels are both large and unreadable. To protect yourself from bad prose, addictive properties or insidious ideologies, just remember it’s only a book. Close the cover and walk away. I gotta go. You. The

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Manila productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2012

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David temaris. Music from Merle Kessler and Joshua Raul Brody

John Perry
the play tones. Special thanks to Elise Prue and to all the folks here at Litquake. Thanks also to genius Carola, kraitmar, dan Brandon, Caitlin, Esch, Dave Millar and Corey

Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
Talk and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates,

John Perry
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Ken Taylor
even when they’re true and reasonable. This conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk.org

John Perry
I’m John Perry and I’m Ken

Ken Taylor
Taylor. Thank you for listening and

John Perry
thank you for thinking you.