JEAN-FRANÇOIS VERNAY: Fiction is not a simple story that we consume for entertainment. Because it competes with other forms of entertainment, including those with images that provide a more democratic pleasure, it is increasingly promoted for its ability to boost the social brain. At a time when the French Education Department is consolidating its ambitions around a college of experts composed of neuroscience specialists such as Stanislas Dehaene, it is difficult not to link education, cognition, emotions and cooperation. The cement could be literary culture, whose greatest virtues can easily be identified. What qualities should be developed to make Homo sapiens an even more cooperative species? How can we fight the contemporary trend towards tribalism that divides, isolates and encourages individualistic behavior? In order to help the most vulnerable people, how can we cultivate empathy by broadening its endogenous tendency which seems more natural than showing compassion for complete strangers?
From Social Dissolution to Cooperation
Twelve years ago, Richard Sennett noted the social dissolution that can be observed in the development of a certain form of tribalism, of withdrawal into one’s community, or in territorial segregation between different social classes. The American Professor of Sociology placed empathy at the heart of his social project in Together. The Rituals, Pleasures And Politics Of Cooperation (2012). According to him, “Sympathy is based on identification. […] the person who shows sympathy is capable of feeling all sorts of emotions, even those linked to experiences very far removed from him. On the contrary, empathy consists of welcoming the new, and trying to understand it without necessarily appropriating it, or reducing it to an event in one’s own history. This implies being able to navigate a certain form of ambiguity, of complexity. It is much richer, but also much more difficult.”[1]
Literature makes you more human
In the last ten years in particular, many literary theorists (such as Antoine Compagnon, Vincent Jouve, Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Yves Citton) have questioned the utilitarian role of literature in order to know whether it was relevant giving literature a purpose, if not a goal to achieve. Cognitive literary studies, which have developed in the Anglo-Saxon field since the 1990s, have only confirmed the humanist conception of literature as it was embodied in the Renaissance by the Latin motto humaniores litterae: literature makes you more human.
The adjectival phrase “more human” should be understood as an ameliorative added value and not as an absolute value: you are not fundamentally good only because you read the works of Leo Tolstoy, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Milan Kundera, John Coetzee, Gustave Flaubert, Toni Morrison or Honoré de Balzac. And if you are not fond of this high-ranking literature, you do not necessarily have a corrupt soul, that goes without saying. What is more, saying that if you had not read so much, you would have become a monster, as Mark O’Connell did, is a caricatured observation that adds nothing to the debate.[2] So, there is no point in making exaggerated claims because fiction, as Antoine Compagnon rightly suggests, does not have “the exclusivity of awakening moral conscience to adjust our actions and make us good beings.” So poor readers are not necessarily worse humans, of course.”[3]
With a Shadow of a Doubt
That said, doubt is permitted and one can be skeptical about the proposition that literature makes us better. Gregory Currie goes so far as to reverse this assertion: “But can you be sure that this friend so intelligent, generous, attentive to others and who reads Proust became that man partly because of his readings? Could it not be the other way around? That bright, understanding and socially competent people are more inclined than others to enjoy the complex pictures of human interactions that one finds in literature.”[4] So while it is not certain that fiction has civilizing virtues, it is nevertheless proven that reading these fictional plots of great psychological complexity increases in a not insignificant way the cognitive value of literature and stimulates the circuit of our social brains. The specific region is located in “the anterior frontal cortex and in what is called the temporoparietal junction of the right hemisphere”.[5]
The Intangible Powers of Literary Fiction
According to the results obtained by Castano and Kidd, among the intangible powers of literary fiction (as opposed to potboilers) is the ability to improve one’s behavior in society by fine-tuning Theory of Mind. Keith Oatley, novelist and eminent specialist in cognitive psychology, puts forward the idea that attentive reading of fiction develops empathic intelligence: “people who often read written fiction seem better able to feel empathy, to understand others and to put themselves in their shoes”.[6] For Antoine Compagnon, “literature has this irreplaceable quality that it contributes to practical ethics through the experience it provokes in readers who enter a new, foreign world and set out to discover the Other. It therefore chiefly makes us more comprehensive.”[7]
Two Concomitant Logics
The question according to which literature would have an ameliorative power on readers by giving them added value essentially addresses, in my eyes, two logics: the first, capitalist, wishes to give a utilitarian role to everything, including a field like literature and aesthetic pleasures that have long been promoted for non-practical purposes. The second, health-related, follows this well-being movement that, for several years, has flooded consumers with good advice for a better life. In Les livres prennent soin de nous, Régine Detambel wishes to convince us of the many virtues of books and reading, beyond the cognitive capacities that we usually attribute to them. Literary works would thus have an ameliorative power on mental health, a restorative and consoling power, even an anxiolytic effect. They would also have invigorating virtues, if not anti-depressant and reassuring ones.
On many health forums, with a host of studies in neuroscience and cognitive science to support it, it is not uncommon for us to be urged to read fiction! Such activity is said to mitigate stress, improve sleep, boost your brain and delay cognitive decline… In short, reading works of literary fiction with their rich emotional content should make us happier. So why wait if science tells you so!
This piece is based on Jean-François Vernay’s La séduction de la fiction (Hermann, 2019), which has not yet been translated into English.
[1] R. Sennett, “Il faut restaurer le vivre ensemble”, L’express 3266 (2014), p.14 & 16.
[2] https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/does-reading-fiction-make-you-a-more-empathic-better-person.html
[3] A. Compagnon in S. Viguier-Vinson, « Rencontre avec Antoine Compagnon : Que peut la littérature ? », Sciences Humaines 284 (août-septembre 2016), 20.
[4] G. Currie, « La littérature nous rend-elle meilleurs? », Courrier international 1187 (1-21 août 2013), 9.
[5] S. Dehaene in S. Dehaene, Y. Le Cun & J. Girardon, La plus belle histoire de l’intelligence. Des origines aux neurones artificiels : vers une nouvelle étape de l’évolution (Paris : Robert Laffont, 2018), 63.
[6] K. Oatley quoted in Currie, « La littérature nous rend-elle meilleurs? », id.
[7] A. Compagnon in S. Viguier-Vinson, Id.
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