Stressing the studies are preliminary, he speculates the personality shifts may be produced by the reader entering into the fictional character's mind.
He uses the metaphor of a flight simulator to explain fiction's role in our lives: Just as the flight simulator allows the pilot-in-training to quickly and safely encounter all sorts of contingencies that might happen in the air, so fiction allows us to experience emotions in a safe place, training us to understand ourselves and others.
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is a wonderful example of the simulator effect. In the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy, both of them intelligent and proud, initially misread each other, but gradually come to an understanding of one another's minds that will then grow into love. Oatley points out that the reader undergoes a similar process, coming to know and love the characters as Austen unfolds their story, thus experiencing the same dawning understanding and growing attachment.
“That is a beautiful structure,” he said.
This function also explains why reading groups are popular, and in Oatley's scheme, very important: They take the emotional training and multiply the effect.
“When you read the book yourself you have a particular understanding, but it is always very partial, so the moment you start talking with someone else about it, you are increasing the amount of brain power and coming at if from all these different directions,” Oatley said. He has participated in the same book club for 20 years and finds its discussions often deepen his understanding not just of the book, but also of his friends in the group.
So, a book club improves what psychologists call “theory of mind.” Acquired around the age of five, theory of mind is our awareness of our own and others' consciousness – and of the possibility they may believe something different from us.
U.S. English professor Lisa Zunshine
Following that work, Oatley's cognitive approach is part of a trend toward seeking concrete explanations for literature's utility both inside and outside the English department. The so-called literary Darwinists see evolutionary purposes behind a kind of mental training that is crucial to living in groups, and argue that storytelling has evolved as an art form because of the prestige that accrues to the socially necessary storyteller.
The evolutionary theorists put great emphasis on the storyteller; Oatley prefers to give pride of place to the reader. But both schools do permit their practitioners to judge the writer's art, even as some literary critics complain these new approaches are reductionist. Brian Boyd, a Nabokov scholar from New Zealand, subjects The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who to evolutionary criticism in his recent book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. He shows how the master storyteller holds his audience's attention and draws it toward particular aspects of his tale: Through the sympathetic Horton, Dr. Seuss makes us feel for the plight of the microscopic Whos.
For his part, Oatley is convinced that the better the writer, the more powerful the simulation, and he makes a distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction.
“You can have a good read, but it is sort of like going on a roller coaster. The engineers have constructed it so you have a particular set of experiences. You get off, your heart is beating a bit, but you are still the same person,” he says of reading a thriller or detective story. On the other hand, “Chekhov was a great artist: The effect is different – the extent to which [the reader] can really inhabit another mind.”
The roller coaster may be fun, but the flight simulator … now that's art.
