“I know that books don’t save lives on the grand scale. They don’t end wars and such. They don’t cure cancer. But at the same time, books saved my life. And I know they’ve done that for friends of mine.”
— At The Nervous Breakdown, Rob Roberge interviews himself, and it is excellent.
But I’m not sure what to think about this part.
I’d say books have done a helluva lot more on a grand scale than, say, electoral politics (call me jaded.) I mean, haven’t books played a major part in ending most wars? How many Nobel Peace Prize winners are also writers? But it’s also true that most books don’t have a huge effect on a grand scale. Still, couldn’t the smaller effect of a lot of books saving the lives of its readers be more important than a grand scale effect of one big book?
What do you think?
One response
Well, the name of my blog is How Fiction Saved the World, so that’s where I’m coming from. In fact, there’s a lot to say about fiction as a survival mechanism, a sort of literary Darwinism, in which reading a narrative story has an evolutionary and social importance: it provides people the opportunity to experience the impacts of actions and events on others in fictional form. Neuroscientists and literary scholars have shown that this can quite literally transform our brains by, among other things, increasing the storyteller’s and the audience’s capacity for empathy (see the works of David Lodge, Lisa Zunshine, Sharon Begley and Suzanne Keen). Some have even gone to far as to say that fiction is the only art form that allows us to experience another’s consciousness, by way of the device of the third person limited point of view. (See David Lodge, in Consciousness and the Novel)
Jane Smiley ways it well, I think, in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel: “When we talk about the death of the novel, what we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy, however minimal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has died. If the novel has died for the bureaucrats who run our country, then they are more likely not to pause before engaging in arrogant, narcissistic, and foolish policies. If the novel has died for me (and some publishers and critics say that men read fewer novels than they used to), then the inner lives of their friends and family members are a degree more closed to them than before. If the novel dies, or never lives, for children and teenagers who spend their time watching TV or playing video games, then they will always be somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well. If the novel should die, what is to replace it?… novels can be sidelined — dismissed to the seraglio, where they are read by women and children and have no effect on those in power. When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people who speak rather like us and look rather like us but who have no way of understanding us or each other.”
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.