The power of fiction

"Until recently, we’ve only been able to guess about the actual psychological effects of fiction on individuals and society. But new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis is finally taking questions about morality out of the realm of speculation.

"This research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

"But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place."

-- Jonathan Gottschall

Facing the blank page

Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. in 2002, winning several literary awards including the National Jewish Book Award and The Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, dealt with a 9-year-old coming to terms with his father's death in the World Trade Center during 9/11.

Here he describes his process for writing fiction.

I begin with nothing and I unfortunately usually end with nothing in terms of the day-to-day process, but you know, it’s just a blank page.  I’ve never had characters before I started writing.  I’ve never had a moral.  I’ve never had a story to tell.  I’ve never had some voice that I found and wanted to share.  Auden, the poet, said, “I look at what I write so I can see what I think.” 

And that’s been very true for me in my process.  I don’t have a thought that I then try to articulate.  It’s only through the act of writing that I try to find my own thoughts.  So, it can be quite scary because you know, it’s... there’s a kind of faith, I guess, that you have to have either in yourself or in the process that something good will come from filling blank pages. 

And it very, very often doesn’t feel that way, but every now and then you stumble upon something.  Some idea which you didn’t know you had, or a feeling that you didn’t know that you had.  And there’s nothing like that revelation and I don’t know of anywhere else in life to find it.

You want to be right, right?

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion

draws all things else to support and agree with it.”
-- Francis Bacon

You want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information which confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions, journalist David McRaney writes. This is called "confirmation bias."

If you are thinking about buying a new car, you suddenly see people driving them all over the roads. If you just ended a long-time relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see them everywhere.
Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.

McRaney points out how we willing use confirmation bias, particularly in the way we look at the news.

Punditry is a whole industry built on confirmation bias. Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views. If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them. Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

I know this is true, because I deliberately seek out The Onion to confirm my biases about how the world works. McRaney concludes:

Over time, by never seeking the antithetical, through accumulating subscriptions to magazines, stacks of books and hours of television, you can become so confident in your world-view no one could dissuade you. Remember, there’s always someone out there willing to sell eyeballs to advertisers by offering a guaranteed audience of people looking for validation. Ask yourself if you are in that audience. In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

“Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable. 

If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don’t give it a second thought, 

rather we just try out a different query and search again.”
- Justin Owings

The decline of the American novel

D.G. Myers, a critic and literary historian on leave from Texas A&M University, writes about the contemporary American novel at his delightful A Common Place blog:

It is hard to imagine a living American novelist writing a passage like the last four paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, summoning up the “fresh, green breast of the new world.” American novelists by and large do not identify with ordinary Americans any longer, nor with the American dream (“the last and greatest of all human dreams”), but with their intellectual class—the people with whom they went to school, whose minds are furnished with the same authorities and assumptions, who share a similar understanding of the world. The American continent no longer compels them into an aesthetic contemplation they neither understand nor desire. What moves them are the envies and ambitions, the disdains and irritations, of their class.

Thus all their characters sound like literary intellectuals. Thus they cannot even imagine what their own non-writing spouses, nor anyone else for that matter, do every day at work. Thus the world outside literature and academe is a vague blur, if not entirely invisible. Thus human decency is identified with the correct (and partisan) political opinions. Thus fiction becomes little more than an occasion for ventilating anti-American grievances.

And thus the American novel, once a lively voice in the national debate to specify the American idea, has devolved into the voice of a homogeneous intellectual class. It is just another means, like similar work, training, and lifestyle, for promoting class solidarity.

The writer who came into his own

John Le Carré

William Boyd writes in The Guardian about John le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, which Boyd says reshaped the spy novel: "it was a paradigm shift in the genre – it would never be the same again and indeed its wider influence in literary fiction was manifold."

And, he writes, it was Le Carré's third novel, in which there "is a clear sense in The Spy of a writer hitting his stride with resolute confidence. Technically, on a purely writerly analysis, Le Carré seems to me to be operating at the highest levels."

He comments on the author's technique:

Unusually for a spy novel, Le Carré's narrative point of view is omniscient – a dangerous choice, because with authorial omniscience you cannot have your cake and eat it. If you are saying to the reader that you can enter the thoughts of any character and can comment on the action or events in your own voice, then any deliberate withholding of information counts as a black mark. The narrative house-of-cards begins to collapse; the reader's trust in the author's control dissipates immediately. 

There is never a sense that we are being overly manipulated – the choice of those characters whose inner thoughts he shares with us seems entirely apt – we never feel we are being narratively duped. Also, for a relatively short novel a tremendous amount is included. The ellipsis between chapter two and three is a model of how a simple change of point of view can eliminate pages and pages of laborious exposition.

Boyd has read and re-read the novel, and I suppose I should, too.