Science Finally Demonstrates That Reading Great Books Is Good for You

Ah, what would we do without science? Without science, how would we know that boys are different from girls, that parenting is stressful, or that reading good literature improves our imaginative abilities?

Or, as The Atlantic puts it in the title of their October 4^th news article: “Now We Have Proof Reading Literary Fiction Makes You a Better Person.” So, were Aristotle and Sir Philip Sidney right?*

Of course, long-time readers of good literature know that their exposure to “literary fiction” (as opposed to “popular fiction”) has helped develop their ability to imagine what other people in other places, other times, or other situations might experience. This ability to imagine other experiences, and therefore to empathize, is what the researchers of an article published this month in Science Magazine have focused on.

Others have recapped the findings in news articles, so here are links to The Atlantic and Scientific American. In the series of experiments, adults were given readings from what the authors call “literary fiction” (“serious” fiction? what might be contained in a literature anthology?), from “popular fiction” (including formulaic or genre fiction), and from non-fiction. While popular fiction, as Scientific American attempts to explain, tends to “follow a formula to take readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and exciting experiences,” good literature makes readers use their imaginations to explore the more complex characters and situations it presents.

I am immediately reminded of C. S. Lewis describing in An Experiment in Criticism the way “unliterary” and “literary” readers read books.

Sir Walter Scott monument, Edinburgh

The unliterary reader (these are his terms) looks for what Lewis calls “the Event,” with a capital “E.” Unliterary readers, says Lewis, “lack the attentive and obedient imagination which would enable them to make use of any full and precise description of a scene or an emotion. On the other hand,” he continues, “they lack the fertile imagination which can build (in a moment) on the bare facts” (chap. 4). In other words, the unliterary reader only wants a swift-moving plot, easy-to-figure-out (formulaic) characters, and an emotional high. The unliterary reader, therefore, has no tolerance either for in-depth description/character psychology/complexity or for that which is not explicitly spelled out and therefore calls for more subtle reading.

The literary reader enjoys the complexities of well-drawn characters and plots, as well as the way in which these elements are conveyed. It’s not that the literary reader doesn’t like the plot points and emotional experiences that come with a good story, Lewis hastens to clarify, but that the literary reader enjoys “the fullness of literary experience” (including elements of style), while the unliterary reader only looks for and enjoys “the Event” (chap. 4).

I notice that Lewis focuses on a developed imagination as one of the key differences in his two categories. It is this imaginative sympathy (or empathy) with others that Kidd and Castano focus on in their article “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind” in Science Magazine. The ability to place ourselves in others’ shoes through an empathetic imagination “is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies,” explain Kidd and Castano. And this study demonstrates that the “polyphonic”** nature of good literature exercises our imaginations to develop this skill.

But it is not only our relationships with those in our own society that are at stake. As Lewis reminds us in A Preface to Paradise Lost, it is our experience of our own humanity, as well as our relationship to human history, that can be affected by what we read and the way we read it: “To enjoy our full humanity,” says Lewis, “we ought, so far as is possible, to contain within us potentially at all times, and on occasion to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an eighteenth century Londoner while reading Johnson” (chap. 9). Lewis elaborates in other works on why it is good for us to have an understanding of humankind from the past. See, for instance, Screwtape Letters (letter XXVII) and the essay “Learning in War-Time” from The Weight of Glory.

Reading about Kidd and Castano’s research leaves me with many questions: Did they primarily use modern and contemporary “literary fiction”? In other words, might their results be different if participants were given poetry or even prose that pre-dates the psychological novel? After all, complexity of character and scenario have not always been the driving force of good literature. I have not yet finished reading the actual science article (as opposed to the journalistic simplifications), so I may re-visit the topic.

Kidd & Castano’s study shows how good literature can do what popular fiction and nonfiction often can’t. As Lewis stated so well 50 years ago, “[W]e seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own” (Experiment “Epilogue”).

 

So, want to become a better person? Go read some Austen or Shakespeare!

* For instance, Aristotle in the Poetics on the benefits of tragic drama and Sidney in his Defense of Poesy.

** A term they borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin. Lewis had previously compared the many notes and “voices” of more complex musical pieces with the type of literature that a literary reader can enjoy, while an unliterary reader (who is only interested in the “tune”) does not (Experiment chaps. 3-4).