A FEELING FOR FICTION
Keith Oatley
“YOU BE THAT ONE,” I remember my daughter saying to a companion. “And I’ll be this one.” My daughter was about 5 at the time, and, as in the imaginary games played by children of that age, she and her friend were arranging roles. But they weren’t about to play a game. They were preparing to watch a movie.
We tend to think of movie watching or book reading as passive activities. That may be true physically, but it’s not true emotionally. When we watch a film or read a novel, we join ourselves to a character’s trajectory through the story world. We see things from their point of view—feel scared when they are threatened, wounded when they are hurt, pleased when they succeed. These feelings are familiar to us as readers or viewers. But our propensity to identify with characters is actually a remarkable demonstration of our ability to empathize with others.
When we examine this process of identification in fiction, we appreciate the importance of empathy—not only in enjoying works of literature, but in helping us form connections with those around us in the real world. The feelings elicited by fiction go beyond the words on a page or the images on a screen. Far from being solitary activities, reading books or watching movies or plays actually can help train us in the art of being human. These effects derive from our cognitive capacity for empathy, and there are indications that they can help shape our relationships with friends, family, and fellow citizens.
THE STUFF DREAMS ARE MADE ON
In the West, the tradition of understanding literature derives from Aristotle, who, nearly 2,400 years ago, wrote a book called Poetics. The subject matter of his book was not just poetry. More broadly, it was what we now call fiction, which, like poetry, means “something made.” Aristotle said that whereas history lets us know what has happened, poetry (fiction) is more important because it is about what can happen.
The central term in Poetics is mimesis, the relation of the story to the way the world works. This term can be interpreted in two ways. If you read an English translation, you will find the Greek word mimesis translated to mean “copying,” “imitation,” or “representation.” These translations get it half right. While literary art can serve to imitate the world—what Hamlet called holding “the mirror up to nature”—it can also create new worlds. In other words, Aristotle thought that great plays, such as the tragedies of Sophocles, which he discussed in Poetics, created worlds of the imagination. Shakespeare likened this to the way we dream, such as when Prospero, the protagonist in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, says that humans “are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Dream is an apt metaphor because when we dream, without any input from eyes or ears, we create worlds of places, people, and emotions. What a good story does, by means of black marks on the white pages of a novel, or by the actions of a small group of people several yards away on a stage, or by the flickering images on a screen, is to offer the materials—a kind of kit—to start up and run the dream of the story world on your mind. A story is a partnership. The author writes it, and the reader or audience member brings it alive.
The emotions that you experience as you breathe life into a story are related to the characters, but they are not the characters’ emotions. They are yours. How does this happen? How can an artificial world conjure up such real emotions, and what mental capacities do we engage in order to feel those emotions? Brilliant though Aristotle was, his Poetics is curiously silent on this question, as is much of the canon of Western literary theory that followed him.
But other traditions—one of Western psychology, one of Eastern literature—can help shed light on how fiction elicits such empathic responses from us.
MOVING PICTURES
Empathy can be thought of as feeling with someone, or for them. In a recent study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of brain activity, Tania Singer and her colleagues showed that a basis for empathy can be identified in the brain. Singer and her colleagues administered electric shocks to volunteers and also gave these volunteers signals when a loved one, present in the next room, was being shocked. In some parts of the volunteers’ brains, activation occurred only when they themselves received a shock, but other parts associated with feeling pain were activated both when the volunteers received a shock and when they knew their loved one was getting a shock. Singer and her colleagues describe this dual activation as the emotional aspect of pain. They argue that their results show that the empathic response that we feel for someone we know and like is the same as the emotional aspect we feel ourselves.
That will ring true for anyone who’s ever been caught up in a play, book, or movie—anyone who has wept for the young lovers in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or with the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or with those who have suffered in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.
Our fondness for fiction shows that we enjoy feeling with other people, even when sometimes the feelings are negative. In another recent psychological study, Tom Trabasso and Jennifer Chung asked 20 viewers to watch two films, Blade Runner and Vertigo. Each film was stopped at 12 different times. Soon after the beginning of each movie, and again at the end, all the viewers rated their liking for the protagonist and for the antagonist. One set of 10 viewers had the job of saying, at each of the film’s 12 stopping points, how well or how poorly things were going for the protagonist and for the antagonist. These ratings agreed with the experimenters’ own analysis of the characters’ goals and actions. The job of the other set of 10 viewers was to rate what emotions, and of what intensity, they themselves were experiencing at each point where the film was stopped. These viewers experienced more positive emotions at points where things went well for the liked protagonist or badly for the disliked antagonist (as rated by the first set of 10 viewers); they also felt negative emotions when things went badly for the protagonist or well for the antagonist.
So, whenever we read a novel, look at a movie, or even watch a sports match, we tend to cast our lot with someone we find likable. When a favored character in a story does well, we feel pleased; when a disliked character succeeds, we are displeased.
This process seems rather basic. It is rather basic. If this liking for a protagonist were all there was to it, reading fiction and watching dramas would not be much different from going on a roller-coaster ride. Indeed, some books and movies do little more than offer just such an experience. They are called thrillers. But in some books and films, much more can occur. Along with the basic process of empathic identification, we can start to extend ourselves into situations we have never experienced, feel for people very different from ourselves, and begin to understand such people in ways we may have never thought possible. George Eliot, a novelist whose books offer such effects, put it like this:
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment…. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.