[Image: Forked Tongue at Window Rock, one of a series of “Arizona Postcards” by Scottish artist James “Jimmy” Cosgrove. To view the entire collection, see this page.]
A science-fiction story I read long ago tells of a visitor from another planet who simply cannot understand why human beings lie. I don’t remember much about the story — no author, title, catchphrase, so I can’t even Google it easily — but I seem to remember that it went one level further: Once it had received (and reluctantly accepted) the explanations (to gain an advantage over someone else, to inflate one’s self-image, etc.), the alien asked, So then why do you write fiction, which serves none of those purposes?
I have no idea how I’d answer an alien with a question like that (or with any others, for that matter). In general, though, one simple answer is: We write fiction in the expectation that someone will read it. Even if only the story’s author will ever read it, without at least one reader I myself can’t see the point, either.
But still that ducks the question, which is really: Why do people read fiction?
As it happens, writers aren’t the only ones interested in that question. An article in the New York Times last week reported on neuroscientists who want to know about it, too — and related questions. What goes on in our brains when we read fiction? How does that whatever’s-going-on differ from what goes on when we read non-fiction?
Now, the Times article doesn’t answer those questions, exactly — just raises them, and points (albeit indirectly) to several resources which might end up answering them. But reading the article did exercise my mind quite a bit, both during and after.
Note: If you’re feeling ambitious, you might want to follow up on one of those implied leads. The article opens with a discussion of some theories of Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky. By tracking down some of her writings, you can pursue this all much further. I particularly direct your attention to her essay (12.6KB PDF), “Why Jane Austen Was Different, and Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It,” and her book, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (available here, in limited preview on Google Books).
Selfishly, what interested me particularly about the article were these two passages:
Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality….
At the other end of the country Blakey Vermeule, an associate professor of English at Stanford, is examining theory of mind from a different perspective. She starts from the assumption that evolution had a hand in our love of fiction, and then goes on to examine the narrative technique known as “free indirect style,” which mingles the character’s voice with the narrator’s. Indirect style enables readers to inhabit two or even three mind-sets at a time.
This style, which became the hallmark of the novel beginning in the 19th century with Jane Austen, evolved because it satisfies our “intense interest in other people’s secret thoughts and motivations,” Ms. Vermeule said.
Why did this interest me? Because this “free indirect style” (also referred to as “free indirect discourse,” or FID) turns out to be the way I write nearly all the fiction I’ve ever written. (And I didn’t even know it! *slaps forehead* See, for example, this work-in-progress excerpt from last year.) I mean, I sorta knew I was doing something, but couldn’t put my finger on it. Funnily enough, I’d even halfway decided — and asserted to The Missus at one point — that in the WIP I’d “stop doing that interior monologue thing” and just write it all in straight third-person form.
Apparently I’m incapable of shutting off the FID valve. And now I wonder if subconsciously, I knew I’d have to use it, if I wanted to represent (counting) up to six different “levels of intentionality” at the same time without hopelessly confusing readers…
Naaaah. I was just making it up as I went along. (And for all I know, readers will be confused anyway.) But it’s nice to be able to point to literary theory — and now brain science — and imply, sniffing with condescension, that I knew what the heck I was doing.
__________________________
P.S. The Web has a ton of information on free indirect style/discourse, from simple dictionary definitions to abstruse psychological and lit-crit papers.
P.P.S. The Times article refers (as does Lisa Zunshine herself) to an episode of “Friends” which seems to illustrate the what-we-know-about-what-fictional-characters-know hall of mirrors. Here’s an entertaining mashup of scenes from the episode they’re talking about:
DarcKnyt says
Hm. This is all interesting. I don’t, however, think I have the brain capacity to write more than one or two levels myself. I’d be overwrought and driveling at the end of it, and I’d more likely than not lose at least one of them along the way.
But it IS interesting stuff, ne? :)
barry knister says
Neuroscientists will I suppose soon figure it all out. Until they do, I still hold to the conventional view that people crave order, and that stories–especially those with plots–satisfy this craving.
As for questions related to point of view and narrative approaches, the best book I’ve read is James Wood’s HOW FICTION WORKS. It’s short and clear, and a must-read for fiction writers.
Tessa says
I know why I read – to be stimulated and entertained. As to why I want to write … I’m not even sure I do. And I definitely don’t want it to be analyzed to death. There was another SF story I read years ago – I think it may have been by the great Asimov himself, but I’m not sure. In it, some scientists decide they’re going to find out why humans love jokes, yet they hate puns. To make a long story short, they eventually discover that jokes are part of an alien experiment on the human race, while puns are homegrown. The aliens get pissed at being found out and leave, and suddenly nobody can think of anything funny to say – except puns. Or at least I think it went something like that. And that’s the way I feel about the endless analysis of why people read and/or write. We just do, so let’s not mess about with it, or we might lose it.
Froog says
I’m intrigued by the notion that patterns of brain-stimulation might be quite different when we’re reading fiction as opposed to non-fiction. I wonder how that might work when the categorization of what we’re reading isn’t clear – where the story has a would-be documentary framing device like a diary or a series of letters; or where a newspaper or magazine piece that purports to be real turns out to be an April Fool’s spoof.
Froog says
I’m not a huge fan of Ricky Gervais, but I thought his film The Invention Of Lying was marvellous.
He creates a parallel world where human beings are incapable of telling any sort of untruth. They don’t even have words for such a concept, because it is a thing that just does not exist. When the protagonist (played by Gervais himself) stumbles on the knack of lying – for the first time in human history – he struggles to describe what he’s done: “I just said something… that wasn’t.”
One quaint corollary of this non-existence of lying is that people have absolute trust in anything anyone says to them.
A less pleasant side-effect (and what, I imagine, first drew Gervais to the idea, since it does seem to be one of the main hallmarks of his comedy) is that people are brutally tactless to each other all the time.
marta says
You could read The Midnight Disease by Alice W. Flaherty and Head Case by Dennis Cass.
I love neuroscience, but for all I’ve, I’m not sure I know why I write. Maybe there are several factors involved. If you happen to have enough of those factors packed into your brain, presto! Writer.
Maybe I write to create order, to communicate, to let the chatter out of my head, because I don’t know much else to do that I like.
fg says
Great Friends clips, ha ha, poor Joey.
Hope all is well – good to know McD’s saved the day… now that hardly ever happens.
The Querulous Squirrel says
We also write fiction to know what we think, to bypass the logical left brain and let the subconscious speak. This layers of mental states is fascinating, especially as it applies to Virginia Woolf, and a challenge worth pursuing as an experimental story in my own blog. I loved that Friends episode.