[0:00]A few years ago, I did not read fiction ever. And I was not alone. Young men are, by and large, simply not reading fiction. So much so that some have argued we are in a “male reading crisis.” The thing is, many of the arguments I see people give to try and persuade men, and specifically young men, to read fiction, just would not have appealed to me seven years ago. I would have simply said, “what’s the point in reading something that’s not true?” And I think that this is actually a very fair question. The reasons for reading fiction are certainly not obvious, especially if the idea does not naturally appeal to you. So today, I’m going to give you the case for why everyone, and more specifically young men, could really benefit from reading literature. I’m going to try to remain as unsentimental as possible, and try to demonstrate how reading novels could not only be straightforwardly pleasurable, but can directly and dramatically improve your life. My name is Joe Foley, and this is Unsolicited Advice.
[1:10]When I was a teenager, I became incredibly interested in sort of the psychology around small acts of kindness. It felt satisfyingly anti-cynical to discover that actively trying to be more kind to others reliably increases our own happiness, making it a sort of win-win situation in almost all circumstances. It’s not that I was massively cruel or anything before this point, but the lesson took on a new significance. Like a lot of 16-year-olds, I thought that I’d discovered the meaning of life and that this one insight would totally transform my reality. I should have been slightly more skeptical, considering that every other week I would have one of these life changing realizations when I was a teenager, but this one stuck around longer than most. And I do still remain firmly convinced of the value of these seemingly small acts of kindness to the person being kind, as well as the recipient of that kindness. As trite as it sounds, I just think that it rings true to my experience and is also backed up by empirical research. However, from my day to day life in this period, you probably wouldn’t notice that I’d come to this conclusion. I remained, broadly speaking, kind of a dick in the way that a lot of teenagers are kind of dicks; I was still learning to understand how other people worked and what made them tick, and I was hormonally irritable. But even in my less adolescent moments, the lesson would in some sense struggle to stick to me. However cognitively I knew that putting effort into loving others through these small acts of kindness would make me happier, it just didn’t have that emotional anchor that would naturally tie it to my everyday actions. It was so easy to forget about this the moment I was inconvenienced or frustrated by something. And I imagine this is not just a me thing. Pretty much everyone would say that kindness is incredibly important if you ask them, but how many of us truly live by this idea? It seems like this kind of situation is a common problem, regardless of the lessons you’re trying to learn. I will occasionally peruse the world of self-improvement YouTube, and every major channel almost always has multiple videos titled something along the lines of, “I just can’t put these lessons into action,” specifically about how self-improvement lessons and ideas just struggle to stick to people. I mean, how many times have you read something in a psychological study or a self-help book and thought, “yeah, that makes total sense. I’ll give that a go.” Only for the lesson to fade from view almost immediately. If someone asked you if it were true, or if it were a good lesson, you would certainly say yes. But somehow the lessons stopped short at actually being implemented, no matter how hard you just think about it. It’s now almost a decade from having this realization about small kindnesses, and I do think that I’ve made a little bit of progress in this mission over the past few years. I am by no means perfect, and I can still be an absolute grumpy bastard, but some advancement has been made in this direction. So what changed? Well, for me, a big part of it was that alongside learning that giving people compliments had a statistically significant positive effect on a person’s mood, I started to read an awful lot more fiction, which tended to contain that same rough lesson, but in a narratively and emotionally resonant way. Take one of my favorite novels: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. I won’t spoil it here partly because I’ve spoiled it in other videos, but to vaguely summarize the key themes, it’s a tale of someone trying desperately to be kind, and it basically all ends up blowing up in their face. But at the same time, the way that Dostoevsky writes this character dignifies the failure. You end the story wanting to be kinder at a visceral level in a way that feels deeply motivational. This is just one of the reasons I love Dostoevsky so very much. So many of his books are about kindness and interpersonal love, and reading his works made the lesson of being kind through these small, active acts of kindness far more emotionally compelling, and it stuck with me for far longer. It’s allowed the idea to sink through to my bones in a way that translated far more easily into direct action. The fact that it was written in a great novel did not make the lesson true; it was true and good regardless. But it did allow it to translate into the emotional and motivational “parts of my psyche” - for want of a better term - much more effectively. This is just one benefit I have found from reading fiction regularly. If experience is the best teacher, then reading a novel that illustrates a given principle or lesson is learning through vicarious experience. And this is not just my anecdotal experience either. One of the most reliable results in the psychology of fiction is called identification. This is where you latch onto or identify with one or more of the characters in a story, and you begin to see the world through their eyes. This can sound a little bit woo-ey, but it is actually measurable. One recent study by Timothy Broom et al. found that when we experience fiction, our neural activity when reading or thinking about the character we identify comes much closer to the activity when we think about ourselves, suggesting that there really is some substantial, neurologically-based identification going on there - although the details do remain in their nascent form. As they put it, summarizing some prior research: “Research shows that the greater one’s identification with a character, the more likely it is that one’s self-beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors will change to become more similar to those of the character. This backs up the experience that so, so many people have of learning a deep lesson through a novel, or saying that a novel fundamentally altered the course of their life, or made them see the world in a different way. Another finding referenced in this study is the amount of people who went into law influenced by fiction like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Something worth noting about this study was that it actually extended some previous results concerning reading fiction to watching fiction as well. They actually used the TV show Game of Thrones. So even if you personally are not a big reader, the effects of just experiencing a fictional narrative is well established. But why might this be? Well, if we do identify with the characters in a fiction, we’re sort of simulating their experience from our own mental perspective. It mimics the way that we learn by doing in the real world. And this then plausibly helps the lessons and experiences from the fiction sink into us in a way that they might just not from reading a study, or learning a list or a set of facts - though I am slightly inferring from the data here rather than simply repeating what the empirical evidence suggests. However, this does mean that reading fiction comes with an inevitable accompanying warning. Because it does have the power to teach us lessons and make us experience things on a really quite deep level. This also means that it could teach us disastrously wrong or self-destructive lessons. The Greek philosopher Plato was so frightened of this eventuality that he thought that fiction should be carefully regulated. Now I obviously disagree with Plato here, but I do think that it means that we must keep our critical thinking skills engaged when we’re reading fiction. Something being in fiction obviously doesn’t make it true, and it would be impossible to say that everything in a fiction book, even a classically renowned fiction book, is worth listening to. However, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t engage with fiction altogether, any more than statistical dodginess like p-hacking or falsifying results would mean that we shouldn’t read statistical studies or do statistical analysis. The important thing, like almost everything else, is to subject the lessons that you learn from fiction to critical analysis, as you would any other lesson. But if you are learning a very valuable lesson or a very valuable idea from a work of fiction, then that has the potential to fundamentally change your life or your outlook in a way that very few purely informational works can do. So even if you are the most hard nosed nonfiction purist, there are excellent, hard nosed, practical reasons to pick up some fiction. But before moving on, I just want to take a quick moment to thank today’s very kind sponsor Squarespace. If you’re looking to build a website, then you know it can be a real pain. First you have to choose a domain name, and then you’ve got to design the entire thing, and there’s always this nagging voice at the back of your mind telling you that you’re messing up and creating something that doesn’t just look untidy, but outright unprofessional. But this is where Squarespace comes into play. They take all of that complexity and headache and compress it down into a single platform. using ready made templates to take most of the stress and hassle out of website building. They also have a feature called Blueprint AI, which uses artificial intelligence to help you make design choices, which is very handy if, like me, you’re not necessarily that technologically gifted and don’t have the mind of a graphic designer. Head to squarespace.com/unsolicitedadvice to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain name. But, anyway, back to the video.
[10:51]How well do you think you know yourself? One of the most revolutionary findings of the past 200 years of psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind and straightforward therapeutic practice is that we probably know ourselves far less than we think. There are depths to our unconscious and our subconscious that we very rarely probe, and we quite often fool ourselves into thinking that we are open books, when in fact we have many things that, to quote Dostoevsky, we “would not even admit to ourselves.” Another, more obvious fact about humans is that we’re surprisingly different, especially when it comes to our psychology. Not only is there a huge variety of behavior between cultures, but if you’ve just met a lot of people, it’s immediately clear just how different people can get and are. They approach the world in different ways, they feel very different things, they react differently in different situations. The idea that we will one day come up with a detailed theory of the human that can explain each person’s life in extreme specificity and be generalized in some kind of finite semi-axiomatic system seems just incredibly unlikely. It is difficult enough understanding one person in a lot of detail, let alone everyone. This is partly what makes universal or near-universal replicated findings in psychology, like that almost everyone is slightly loss-averse, or that babies prefer a higher register of speech, so very impressive because of this variety. But you can’t just live on these universal discoveries. You presumably want to know at least about yourself and the people around you in much greater detail than this. This is one reason why people can find therapy so helpful, or why people learn about themselves through journaling or intense introspection. But I want to add another use for novels here. The novel, and more specifically the psychological novel, is an incredibly valuable tool for learning about yourself and the people around you in detail. Let’s take one of the greatest psychological novelists of all time: the French author Stendhal. One of the themes in much of Stendhal’s writing is that people often fall in love for not entirely noble reasons. A lot of the passion in his books is sparked because the characters feel some kind of internal lack. They repeat disastrous patterns of behavior because they idealize their lover to a frankly unreasonable extent, which then makes them feel unworthy and overly vulnerable in their presence, which tends to mean that they’ll just screw up the whole romance aspect of things. It is true that not everyone experiences love in the way that Stendhal presents it in his novels. I’m sure that some people are very naturally secure in their lovability and in their loving relationships, and so the characters playing out this dynamic in the novels simply don’t resonate with them at all. But on the other hand, if you or people you know are prone to this sort of insecurity infused love, as many of us are, to a greater or lesser extent, then you can learn something incredibly valuable about yourself or the people you know through reading this novel. By recognizing your own behavior reflected back at you, you can sort of examine it from a third person perspective. This is not automatic and would require a certain level of self-reflection to make the connection work, but it can be immensely revealing when you do make such a connection. Importantly, I’m not claiming anything like generalizability here. I’m not suggesting that everyone will learn something about themselves from every novel, even Stendhal. I’m instead making the much more modest claim that if you happen to read the right fiction book at the right time, then that gives you the potential to discover something incredibly significant and new about yourself in quite a lot of detail. As one study by Carney and Robertson point out, even the most reliable effects of reading novels, such as positive impacts on mental health, are mainly facilitated by a combination of the reading itself and then reflecting on that reading. So we should expect more dramatic and sporadic effects, like vast improvements in self-knowledge, to require far more in-depth thinking. This is why I’m not saying that “if you read novels, you will definitely know yourself better after you finish each and every one,” but rather something like “if you read novels, you are much more likely to come across ones that allow you to know yourself better upon further reflection, and that these bursts of dramatically increased self-knowledge could potentially have a very positive impact on you personally.” We can think of it a bit like this. Psychological novels are quite often a laser focused, incredibly detailed account of one person’s view of reality and how humans work. It is, by its nature, anecdotal and ungeneralizable. But since it is so detailed, if the observations that the author has made about their own situation applies to you, your situation, or the people around you, then you will probably get an outsized benefit from reading this author. I think this probably also accounts for a fair bit of the life-changing or life-discovering effects of certain novels. I think we can make a similar argument for existential or philosophical works of fiction. Many of these works were meant by the author to give some semi-universal or general truth about reality or human nature, but we don’t have to always read them this way. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, is partly about the realization that life feels inherently pointless, and it elucidates that feeling in profound detail. Now, you might not personally think that life is meaningless. It might not seem that way at all. You might be a theist, or you might just feel this profound sense of meaning already infused inherently with life. In other words, you just might not be in the situation of Sartre’s protagonist. And in this case, the book might read as a little bit strange to you. But if you are in a moment of deep existential difficulty, or you have been in the past, then you can get an insight into one incredibly clever person’s way of approaching it, wrapped up in an emotionally compelling bow. I think this is one reason why philosophical and psychological novels can often be so divisive. I sometimes scroll through Goodreads reviews, and you will quite often see a lot of people who took an awful lot from them, and a lot of people who simply didn’t see their point. And I suspect that much of this has to do with their own individual temperaments, and whether their own state coheres at all with the authors, and whether their own experiences are at all similar to the authors. But why does any of this matter? Well, partly because it can make you feel less alone to have a character on hand that is roughly similar to you in certain ways, or bears some kind of psychological relationship to you. Some psychologists have compared this to the comforting effect of a parasocial relationship, and have argued that it could reduce loneliness. But also, because getting to know yourself better will very plausibly allow you to make much better choices. Getting to know the parts of you that you didn’t even know were there can help you decide how to move forward on a given situation. I have had this with Stendhal myself. I am very prone to idealizing lovers and can get very anxious in the early stages of seeing someone. Reading his protagonists go through the same kinds of dilemmas first of all reassured me that this was relatively normal, or at least normal enough that a Frenchman felt it 200 years ago. But it also helped me understand that these phases will pass, and not to take them all that seriously. Another good example is reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and realizing that some of my more self-destructive urges are found within its unlikable protagonist, or even recognizing that some of my embarrassing social tendencies are found in the Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina. Each of these has helped me get to know myself better in subtle ways, as well as the people around me when the characters are similar to the people around me. And I like to think that it has helped me make better decisions and get to know the people around me better. But we can learn about much more than just how to make better choices through self-knowledge by reading fiction. We can also learn about feelings themselves. And I want to talk about this desperately, because I think that it is one of the most underrated and incredibly valuable effects of really diving into novels. 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[19:59]One of the most reliable findings about fiction reading is that it is correlated with a high skill in empathy. Although part of this is probably that if you’re already quite empathetic, fiction is probably more compelling, there is still some causative effect here. Especially with regards to literary fiction, it does appear that people can learn to empathize to a greater degree through reading these novels. However, I do think that framing things this way overlooks a related enormous potential benefit of reading fiction that goes almost unnoticed, which is simply that it can often help you identify emotions in much higher definition than our standard vocabulary allows. Lots of novels are absolutely replete with detailed descriptions of quite nuanced emotional states, and that gives us a reference point for understanding when we ourselves feel those states. A higher granularity understanding of our emotions is also linked to greater well-being. So this is potentially a pretty big benefit. People who can identify and talk about their emotions in greater detail are likely to deal with them in better ways. Though it is also worth noting that a lot of the studies that I could find that discovered this did use thought diaries as their method for thinking in greater granularity about emotions, so there could be some interference from the simple fact that journaling has positive effects on mental well-being. But either way, this ties back to our discussion about self-knowledge from the last section. In this case, it is the ability to identify our different emotional states in a high degree of detail that allows us to know how to respond to them in each situation. This point is actually really quite straightforward. Most of us have seen examples where someone is gravely mistaken about what they’re feeling to disastrous effect. Say someone mistakes their sadness for frustration or anger. Well, then they might lash out when that might not be the most productive way to address the root causes of their sadness. This is also related to our first point about identification. What better way to learn about emotion in detail than to experience it vicariously through a character? Some researchers have referred to this as the “flight simulator” effect of reading fiction. The same process that allows you to learn these vicarious life lessons through characters also allow you to learn about emotions, including your own emotions. If anything, it’s even better suited to this specific task, because whereas you have to stay critically engaged when you’re taking life lessons from fiction, this is much less important when you’re just vicariously feeling what a character is feeling and building your emotional recognition skills that way. So that’s one pretty big emotional benefit of reading fiction. But as we said, this also comes with another boon, which is the ability to understand others. It will, I am sure, come as a shock to many of you that I did not have the highest degree of social aptitude, shall we say? When I was younger, I struggled to relate to people, I had incredible difficulty predicting how they would react in different situations, and just generally struggled to accurately tell what people were feeling based on their external behavior. I even used to write down my observations of how people behaved under different conditions, like a terrified little adolescent anthropologist. My point is, I started from a pretty significant disadvantage here. But one of the things that had a huge effect on my ability to understand other people was reading novels, and specifically a variety of novels told by authors who clearly had quite different temperaments, both from myself and from one another. Again, this comes back to that idea that when we’re reading a work of fiction, we have to simulate another person’s thoughts and feelings in our own mind. This allows us to partly sort of learn what the world looks like, or would look like from their perspective, and inhabit a viewpoint that’s not necessarily our own. Interestingly, while a lot of initial studies into this area claim to show that reading literary fiction gave an immediate short term boost to empathic skill and, broadly speaking, social intelligence, that finding has not been reliably replicated, which is kind of unsurprising if we think that reading fiction might build a skill over a long period of time. And instead they did find that long term fiction readers do score higher on tests that measure empathic skill and social understanding. The strongest causal evidence that it is the fiction reading causing the increased skill rather than just empathetic people reading more fiction is that fiction-based interventions on children have been shown to increase their theory of mind post-Intervention. At a more down-to-earth level, shall we say, reading a novel written by someone with a very different viewpoint and understanding to you, you can allow you to learn what it’s like to think like them. For example, I personally am not religious as I’ve spoken about on the channel before, but reading a Christian author like C.S. Lewis gives me an idea of what it might be like to see the world through a fundamentally Christian lens. I obviously did not live through the Great Depression of the 1930s, but Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath enables me to get a sense of how it would feel to go through such a terrible event. I’ve seen this argument be made about something like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. Though it’s been critiqued for aspects of its historical rigor, it has remained an excellent source for what it felt like to live through Stalinism. Even his explicitly fictional novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, has been praised for capturing what it would be like to be a prisoner in a gulag in a way that a broad historical account might struggle to do. I am a man, if you can believe it, but reading someone like Jane Austen or Emily Bronte or Virginia Woolf has given me some rough ideas about what it might be like to be a certain kind of woman at different points in history. All of this helps when I am out in the world interacting with people, because this has been a kind of training in how to shift perspectives and see the world as someone else does - something that I struggled immensely with as a teenager and as a young adult. And again, this is both intuitive, and it chimes very well with the empirical evidence that we just looked at regarding the flight simulator effects of reading fiction, especially literary fiction. Hell, when I was a teenager, I was absolutely hopeless at talking to girls I was interested in in a romantic way, until I spent like three months reading and analyzing a whole bunch of women’s romance literature. I’ve personally found that you learn quite a lot about people from reading their favorite books. I know it’s not as exciting as getting into the gym and packing on loads of muscle, but if you’re looking to forge deeper connections with those around you, including romantic connections, then reading literature written by or aimed at people like your friends or like those you are interested in can be really helpful. And this process of reading literature in general can hone this perspective-shifting skill. I think people often don’t appreciate quite how much of a difference increasing your social understanding in this way can have. Take it from someone who started out without much natural ability to understand other people, it’s really quite life-changing. It makes social interaction less confusing and it really strengthens the skills you use to build interpersonal relationships. Considering that those interpersonal relationships are among the greatest bringers of happiness in our lives, these are definitely skills worth working on, and fiction is a fantastic way to do this. If you’re into self-improvement, as many young men are, this is one of the most impactful areas you could possibly improve in. And one of the greatest ways to do it is with novel reading. Also, I just wanted to note that there are other, more straightforward benefits to reading fiction, such as it being a relaxing, not overstimulating way to spend your time. We live in a rather hyper-stimulating environment, which can be kind of stressful. Reading a novel is often entertaining and enjoyable, but is also a relatively gentle stimulus, if that makes sense. Reading has also been shown to improve attention spans, which is a near constant complaint of many people in the modern age. This might not sound like a particularly compelling reason, since we often see entertainment as something entirely frivolous, but I don’t think there is anything frivolous about putting time and effort into something that helps you enjoy life more, and the escapism and entertainment that even quite lighthearted books can grant is nothing to be sniffed at. If, additionally, it can boost your focus, then that’s even better. So I think we’ve established in a pretty hard-nosed, no-nonsense fashion that there are numerous benefits not just to reading in general, but specifically to reading fiction. But if you will permit me to get a little bit more abstract, I think there is another deeply significant use for fiction that goes tragically under-appreciated.
[29:26]If you’ve watched this channel before, then you will know just how closely connected I think narratives and the concept of existential meaning are. Narratives carve up the passage of time into a structure that is significant for human interpretation, which is basically the definition of making life seem meaningful. I mean, let’s take a look at some of the classic images used to demonstrate that someone feels that their life is futile: The sun rising and setting each day in just the same way, from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Emptying a cup of water into another cup, and then back again, from Dostoevsky. Rolling a boulder up a hill, just to watch it roll back down again, from Camus. And running on a treadmill forever. I’ve seen so many people use this. What do all of these have in common? Well, they defy any kind of narrative structure. They’re mostly cyclical or otherwise deny a sense of progress or satisfaction. I am speculating a little bit, but I think we severely under-appreciate just how much felt meaning is narrative in nature. I think this even applies to cultural meaning, hence the term “cultural narrative.” Take the American Dream, for example. This is the idea that, in theory, anyone can make it in America through hard work. I have enough European skepticism to doubt that this is totally true, but let’s look at how it is communicated. It is often told through stories. Even the dream itself is of a narrative structure whereby we imagine someone in America working hard and achieving everything they ever wanted. It is a compelling idea, partly because it comes ready-attached to a narrative. Most religions communicate their messages through stories like Christ’s fables or ancient Greek myths. The entire New Testament is sometimes called “the greatest story ever told.” When memory athletes have to memorize multiple decks of cards, they often do this by placing them in a mental location and then going on a journey through that location, which is a narrative-like process. Personally, I suspect that this is a kind of self-reinforcing cycle. Narratives are partly so compelling because they are natural vectors of meaning, and then this allows them to construct broader personal or societal ideas about meaning. But what does this have to do with specifically reading fiction? Well, if we conceive of compelling narratives as good or effective vectors of meaning, then being exposed to a whole variety of different narratives is also being exposed to a whole set of ways to make life seem meaningful, or just make sense of life. This can sound like a much more abstract point than it actually is. It’s simply extending a pretty everyday phenomenon, often referred to as “romanticizing” something. We often hear about romanticization when it comes to negative things like romanticizing mental illness or romanticizing needless suffering. But there are a whole heap of everyday things that we do that could be reasonably described as “romanticization.” I’ve mentioned this on the channel before, but I do a lot of my reading and studying and writing while listening to playlists on YouTube titled things like “study like a medieval philosopher having the truth revealed by divine grace” or “study like Kant awakening from the dogmatic slumber” in which his philosophy was immersed - those are both real, by the way, and they are brilliant. You might say that this is deeply cringe, and I would 100% agree, but it does help create a kind of romantic gloss on the process of working. It makes it feel more meaningful and motivating because I am painting it in terms of narratives that I recognize and enjoy, such as that of the wizard-like researcher or just the figure of Kant. We see people frame whole portions of their life like this, as when they describe their romantic relationship as “like a movie.” You might take issue with the particular narratives being used, especially when it comes to romance, I would as well, but my point is that the use of narrative structure to alter, or make sense of, or enhance the meaning of a particular set of experiences is already something that we do. So why do we need to read fiction then? I would suggest that reading fiction gives us access to a wider variety of these meaning-creating narratives, and as a result, it allows us to forge meaning and make sense of a wider set of situations. Take The Idiot, which is the book I mentioned at the start of the video. One of the reasons I talk about this book a lot, and why I consider it such a life-changing read, is because it lent a dignified narrative structure to the experience of being kind, and then that kindness blowing up in your face, which is something that has happened to most people at some point. The fact that this mimics a character in a spectacular novel that I personally look up to, makes events like this much easier to deal with, and prevents a hasty nihilistic conclusion like “being kind to people is bad and self-destructive in all cases.” Additionally, to bring this back to men, it has become a pretty common observation or complaint that there are few positive role models of masculinity for young men to look up to. But I just have to disagree. There are so many role models in novels that are perfect for young men like myself to look up to. I mean, half the characters in The Lord of the Rings are like paragons of different forms of masculinity and manhood, all of which are naturally and intuitively compelling in their own ways. If you want a role model of wisdom, then you can’t get much better than the Elder Zosima from The Brothers K or Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. If you want a flawed hero who struggles with growing up in socially pressured environments, then Pierre from War and Peace is absolutely fantastic. If you want a competent yet tender protagonist that you can admire, then I would recommend someone like Dr. Rieux from Albert Camus’ The Plague. These figures are both naturally appealing for young men like myself when we read them, and as a result, they help us decide the type of man that we want to be. I mean, they’ve certainly done that for me. And all of this has to do with something that I think exceptional fiction does very well: combine sensible conceptual content with sheer, overwhelming beauty. Most of us are probably familiar with the experience of being awestruck by beauty. For me, it is looking at mountains. Whenever I have the incredible privilege of looking out at, or up at a mountain range, I am bowled over by just how gobsmackingly beautiful it is. It makes the whole world feel like it’s standing still, and it completely captures my attention. But for all its brilliance, the mountain view doesn’t communicate much, if any, straightforward conceptual content. It doesn’t house ideas, even though I can start drawing ideas from it if I try. But I would argue that truly great novelists can write equally beautifully or construct narratives as equally beautiful as a mountain range, but they also have a distinct advantage, which is that they can use that beauty to communicate ideas as well. This is part of what can make their lessons stick. It’s part of what makes their role models so compelling and their narratives so valuable. When something is presented incredibly beautifully, as in a great novel, it lends it a kind of dignity that can ennoble the experience and ennoble the narrative. I’m largely going to have to base my argument off anecdotes and appeal to your own personal histories here, but among the fiction readers that I know, they quite often report turning to the narratives in their novels not only for comfort or escapism, but to imbue what they’re going through with this sense of beauty. Again, this can seem kind of airy fairy, but it probably reflects a fairly straightforward thought process. 1. I respect and admire this character and/or find this narrative beautiful and meaningful. 2. In this situation, I bear some similarity to the character and/or the narrative. 3. Inasmuch as I am similar to this character or my situation is similar to this narrative, I and my situation resemble something beautiful. And sure, you can say that this is “all going on in the reader’s mind,” but all experience goes on in our minds, and I don’t see how this diminishes the practical import of the narrativization at play here. Moreover, considering that one of our most natural ways of organizing information, especially life orienting information, is in the form of a narrative, you may as well try and see a lot of different narratives and different narrative structures, so that you can tell which ones will be useful to your particular situation. To not narrativize at all is just not really an option. All fiction does is help us become well versed in an incredibly important phenomenon that is working away at the back of our minds anyway. It has the potential to make us skilled and competent narrative crafters, rather than just letting events fall wherever they will in our internal story of the world, which will be telling a narrative anyway. And again, this is where the grain of truth in that question we asked right at the beginning, “why would I read something that is not true?” comes into play. Because of course, internalizing unhelpful or self-destructive narratives can be incredibly counterproductive. Say we only had narratives where people were totally helpless before dying in some horrible way. Well, that clearly wouldn’t be great. I’m not suggesting that we begin mindlessly parroting the narratives that we read in novels. I’m in fact suggesting just the opposite: that reading a variety of different novels by a variety of different authors can help us to not swallow a given set of narratives as if they’re the default, because we’ve just inherited that from our parents or our cultural context; we haven’t necessarily chosen them or cultivated them. By reading lots of novels, we can then gather the tools necessary to weave an artistic flare into our own lives through this narrativizing process. I’m not suggesting this is the only way you can do it, I’m just suggesting it is one incredibly impactful way, and it’s certainly had a huge impact on the way that I live my own life. So yes, on balance, I think there are excellent reasons why everyone, including men and including young men, would benefit immensely from reading fiction. And if you haven’t read any fiction in a while, then I really hope that this has persuaded you to pick up a novel again.
