Whether literature provides a moral education, or any kind of education at all rather than just functioning as escapism, is a debate that has serious ramifications. Funding for the arts and humanities, as well as enrollment in arts and humanities majors, has declined in the past decades. If you can prove that literature isn’t just about teaching you to read—because, let’s be honest, you can teach that without assigning Shakespeare or Toni Morrison—but about forming better citizens, then you can make a case for increased structural support for the humanities.
But this case has never been easy to make.
Over 1,600 years ago, Saint Augustine marvelled at humankind’s willingness to weep over the fate of fictional people in stories but to care so little for their fellow characters in real life. If literature improves us, shouldn’t it direct our sympathies toward the world?
Critics have long wrestled with the fact that great literature does not make people immune from barbarism. The same culture that reared its children on Goethe and Schiller also produced Hitler. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazis, wrote a dissertation on a Romantic playwright.
Perhaps this is to be expected. It’s not like books come populated with saints. The majority of unpleasant people I have known I didn’t meet in real life. I encountered them in stories. Then again, I come across many to admire in these stories too. In the last month alone, I fell in love with a young woman working in a grocery store in Texas and a middle-aged mom in suburban Los Angeles. I also met soldiers who saved lives and travelled across America and back, accumulating experiences that would take multiple exceptional lifetimes to amass.
No one’s life is long enough to grant as much as a library offers, especially when you consider that so much of what it offers involves fantastic worlds and bygone eras. Reading introduces us to the immensity of the world.
Let’s call this the Reading Rainbow argument, after the beloved PBS show that encouraged children to crack open a book by promising them untold adventures. “I can go twice as high,” the show’s theme song goes. “I can go anywhere / Friends to know / And ways to grow / A reading rainbow.”
The idea is not so dissimilar to arguments put forward on behalf of travel, learning another language, or getting to know people outside your bubble. Where reading differs is that these are not actual people we are meeting, and their settings and situations are but simulacra of the living, breathing world. That’s what irks Augustine: How can you get worked up about fictions when you ignore what’s unfolding before your eyes? The problem with poets, Plato similarly argues, is that their creations are too many steps removed from reality.
Whether or not you buy Plato’s argument will depend on which part of reality you are focused on. When we have a nightmare, the events that occur in the dream are not actually transpiring, but the fear they provoke is genuine. Something similar seems to occur when we read. Some research suggests that the emotions we feel in response to a story’s villains and love interests are not so different from the ones we feel when someone angers or captivates us in real life.
I think we’ve always understood this. If in his day and age Augustine hadn’t noticed how authentic audience reactions were, I doubt he would have felt the need to criticize them. For anything to be threatening, it has to first and foremost be plausible.
Aristotle understood this too. Otherwise, he could not have argued that an audience’s emotional reactions to tragedy could be purgative. In his defence of theatre, Aristotle says that a fiction works when it presents characters whose actions seem plausible. That’s why even a story as unlikely as Oedipus’s can function as a realistic portrayal of human psychology.
In emphasizing the plausibility of plot and character, Aristotle is able to turn over-the-top storylines into paradigmatic examples and make fiction more truthful than nonfiction. A work of history tells us what happened, Aristotle says, whereas fiction tells us what could happen. That makes it apposite beyond a limited set of circumstances. It’s why we still find relevant something as unlikely as ancient Greek tragedy.
In the twentieth century, the notion that fiction rehearses real life got yoked to the logic of evolutionary biology. Suddenly, fiction’s removal from reality was its boon, not its defect. The idea is pretty simple: Reading literature is like playing make-believe, and make-believe prepares us for the real thing.
All mammals play make-believe. When your kitten is pouncing on its siblings in the litter, it is exerting a whole lot of effort on behalf of a made-up scenario. It’s not out on a savannah stalking prey. And it’s not going to go hungry if it falls flat on its face. This is all just fooling around. But through that fooling, the animal hones vital skills for survival.
According to evolutionary arguments, the games we humans play rehearse important skill sets too. It’s why little girls and boys play dress-up, battle imaginary bad guys, and throw tea parties for their dolls. Ninja and host alike are figuring out how to make sense of the complex emotions that might arise later on, not just in tea soirees and mock skirmishes but in more plausible moments of tension, conflict, and social innuendo.
Reading literature is a more elaborate form of make-believe, which can be packaged between a front and back cover and shipped around the world. I’m never going to discover that I inadvertently murdered my father and married my mother. But the emotions that Oedipus enacts onstage—the dread of powerlessness, the hubris that comes from taking responsibility—are ones that do rear their heads in life.
When we call something “literature,” when we ascribe importance to it, it’s because it makes us swoon. Literature rehearses the extremes of human behaviour: passion and vitriol, vengeance and horror and mendacity, sacrifice and devotion, love. It’s the main reason we imbue books with the power to make us better people. The experiences that change us and confirm us are the kinds of experiences that are deeply felt and—fortunately and unfortunately—rare.