Why+We+Read+Fiction

WHY DO WE READ FICTION? In //New and Selected Essays// Robert Penn Warren

Why do we read fiction? The answer is simple. We read it because we like it. And we like it because fiction, as an image of life, stimulates and gratifies our interest in life. But whatever interests may be appealed to by fiction is always our interest in a story.

A story is not merely an image of life, but life in motion — specifically, the presentation of individual characters moving through their particular experiences to some end that we may accept as meaningful. And the experience that is characteristically presented in a story is that of facing a problem, a conflict. To put it bluntly: no conflict, no story.

It is no wonder that conflict should be at the center of fiction, for conflict is at the center of life. But why should we, who have the constant and often painful experience of conflict in life and who yearn for inner peace and harmonious relation with the outer world, turn to fiction, which is the image of conflict? The fact is that our attitude toward conflict is ambivalent. If we do find a totally satisfactory adjustment in life, we tend to sink into the drowse of the accustomed. Only when our surroundings — or we ourselves — become problematic again do we wake up and feel that surge of energy which is life. And life more abundantly lived is what we seek.

So we, at the same time that we yearn for peace, yearn for the problematic. The adventurer, the sportsman, __the gambler__, the child playing hide-and-seek, the teen-age boys choosing up sides for a game of sandlot baseball, the old grad cheering in the stadium — we all, in fact, seek out or create problematic situations of greater or lesser intensity. Such situations give us a sense of heightened energy, of life. And fiction, too, gives us the fresh, uninhibited opportunity to vent the __rich__ emotional charge — tears, laughter, tenderness, sympathy, hate, love, and irony — that is stored up in us and short-circuited in the drowse of the accustomed. Furthermore, this heightened awareness can be more fully relished now, because what in actuality would be the threat of the problematic is here tamed to mere imagination, and because some kind of resolution of the problem is, owing to the very nature of fiction, promised.

The story promises us a resolution, and we wait in suspense to learn how things will come out. We are in suspense to learn how things will come out. We are in suspense, not only about what will happen, but even more about what the event will mean. We are in suspense about the story in fiction because we are in suspense about another story far closer and more important to us — the story of our own life as we live it. We do not know how that story of our own life is going to come out. We do not know what it will mean. So, in that deepest suspense of life, which will be shadowed in the suspense we feel about the story in fiction, we turn to fiction for some slight hint about the story in the life we live. The relation of our life to the fictional life is what, in a fundamental sense, take us to fiction.

Even when we read, as we say, to “escape,” we seek to escape not //from// life but //to// life, to a life more satisfying than our own drab version. Fiction gives us an image of life — sometimes of a life we actually have and like to dwell on, but often and poignantly of one we have had and do not have now, or one we have never had and can never have. Or, perhaps most often, the ardent fisherman, when his rheumatism keeps him housebound, reads stories from //Field and Stream//. The baseball fan reads //You Know Me, Al//, by Ring Lardner. The little co-ed, worrying about her snub nose and her low mark in Sociology 2, dreams of being a debutante out of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and the thin-chested freshman, still troubled by acne, dreams of being a granite-jawed Neanderthal out of Mickey Spillane. When the Parthians in 53 B.C. beat Crassus, they found in the baggage of Roman officers some very juicy items called //Milesian Tales,// by a certain Aristides of Miletus; and I have a friend who in A.D. 1944 supplements his income as a GI by reading aloud a juicy novel, //Forever Amber//, by a certain Kathleen Winsor, to buddies who found that the struggle over three-syllable words somewhat impaired their dedication to that improbable daydream.

And that is what, for all of us, fiction, in one sense, is — a daydream. It is, in other words, an imaginative enactment. In it we find, in imagination, not only the pleasure of recognizing the world we know and of reliving our past, but also the pleasure of entering worlds we do not know and of experimenting with experiences which we deeply crave but which the limitations of life, the fear of consequences, or the severity of our principles forbid to us. Fiction can give us this pleasure without any painful consequences, for there is no price tag on the magic world of imaginative enactment. But fiction does not give us only what we want; more importantly, it may give us things we hadn’t even known we wanted.

In this sense, then, fiction painlessly makes up for the defects of reality. Long ago Francis Bacon said that poetry — which, in his meaning, would include our fiction — is “agreeable to the spirit of man” because it affords “a greater grandeur of things, a more perfect order, and a more beautiful variety” than can “anywhere be found in nature. . . .” More recently we find Freud putting it that the “meager satisfactions” that man “can extract from reality leave him starving,” and John Dewey saying that art “was born of need, lack, deprivation, incompleteness.” But philosophers aside, we all know entirely too well how much we resemble poor Walter Mitty.

If fiction is — as it clearly is for some readers — merely a fantasy to redeem the liabilities of our private fate, it is flight from reality and therefore the enemy of growth, of the life process. But is it necessarily this? Let us look at the matter in another way.

The daydream which is fiction differs from the ordinary daydream in being publicly available. This fact leads to consequences. In the private daydream you remain yourself — though nobler, stronger, more fortunate, more beautiful than in life. But when the little freshman settles cozily with his thriller by Mickey Spillane, he finds that the granite-jawed hero is not named Slim Willet, after all — as poor Slim, with his thin chest, longs for it to be. And Slim’s college instructor, settling down to //For Whom the Bell Tolls,// finds sadly that this other college instructor, who is the hero of the famous tale of sleeping bags, bridge demolition, tragic love and lonely valor, is named Robert Jordan.

In other words, to enter into that publicly available daydream which fiction is, you have to accept the fact that the name of the hero will never be your own; you will have to surrender something of your own identity to him, have to let it be absorbed in him. But since that kind of daydream is not exquisitely custom-cut to the exact measure of your secret longings, the identification can never be complete. The more sophisticated reader plays a deep double game with himself; one part of him is identified with a character — or with several in turn — while another part holds aloof to respond, interpret, and judge. How often have we heard some sentimental old lady say of a book: “I just loved the heroine --I mean I just went through everything with her, and I knew exactly how she felt. Then when she died, I just cried.” The sweet old lady, even if she isn’t very sophisticated, is instinctively playing the double game too: she identifies herself with the heroine, but she survives the heroine’s death to shed delicious tears. So even the old lady knows how to make the most of what we shall call her role-taking. She knows that doubleness, in the very act of identification, is of the essence of role-taking: there is the taker of the role and there is the role taken. And fiction is, in imaginative enactment, a role-taking.

For some people — those who fancy themselves hardheaded and realistic — the business of role-taking is as reprehensible as indulgence in a daydream. But in trying to understand our appetite for fiction, we can see that the process of role-taking not only stems from but also affirms the life process. It is an essential part of growth.

Role-taking is, for instance, at the very center of children’s play. This beginning of the child’s long process of adaptation to others, for only by feeling himself into another person’s skin can the child predict behavior; and the stakes in the game are high, for only thus does he learn whether to expect the kiss or the cuff. In this process of role-taking we find, too, the roots of many of the massive intellectual structures we later rear — most obviously psychology and ethics, for it is only by role-taking that the child comes to know, to know “inwardly” in the only way that finally counts, that other people really exist and are, in fact, persons with needs, hopes, fears, and even rights. So the role-taking of fiction, at the same time that it gratifies our deep need to extend and enrich our own experience, continues this long discipline in human sympathy. And this discipline in sympathy, through the imaginative enactment of role-taking, gratifies another need deep in us: our yearning to enter and feel at ease in the human community.

Play when we are children, and fiction when we are grown up, lead us, through role-taking, to an awareness of others. But all along the way, role-taking leads us, by the same token, to an awareness of ourselves; it leads us, in fact, to the creation of the self. For the individual is not born with a self. He is born as a mysterious bundle of possibilities which, but by bit, in a long process of trial and error, he sorts out until he gets some sort of unifying self, the ringmaster self, the official self.

The official self emerges, but the soul, as Plato long ago put it, remains full of “ten thousand opposites occurring at the same time,” and modern psychology has said nothing to contradict him. All our submerged selves, the old desires and possibilities, are lurking deep in us, sleepless and eager to have another go. There is knife-fighting in the inner dark. The fact that most of the time we are not aware of trouble does not mean that trouble is any the less present and significant; and fiction, most often in subtly disguised forms, liberatingly reenacts for us such inner conflict. We feel the pleasure of liberation even when we cannot specify the source of the pleasure.

Fiction brings up from their dark oubliettes our shadowy, deprived selves and gives them an airing in, as it were, the prison yard. They get a chance to participate, each according to his nature, in the life which fiction presents. When in Thackeray’s //Vanity Fair// the girl Becky Sharp, leaving school for good, tosses her copy of Doctor Johnson’s //Dictionary// out of the carriage, something in our own heart leaps gaily up, just as something rejoices at her later sexual and pecuniary adventures in Victorian society, and suffers, against all our sense of moral justice, when she comes a cropper. When Holden Caufield, of Salinger’s //Catcher in the Rye,// undertakes his gallant and absurd little crusade against the “phony” in our world, our own nigh-doused idealism flares up again, for the moment without embarrassment. When in Faulkner’s //Light in August// Percy Grimm pulls the trigger of the black blunt-nosed automatic and puts that tight, pretty little pattern of slugs in the top of the over-turned table behind which Joe Christmas cowers, our trigger finger tenses, even while, at the same time, with a strange joy of release and justice satisfied, we feel those same slugs in our heart. When we read Dostoyevsky’s //Crime and Punishment//, something in our nature participates in the bloody deed, and later, something else in us experiences, with the murderer Raskolnikov, the bliss of repentance and reconciliation.

For among our deprived selves we must confront the redeemed as well as the damned, the saintly as well as the wicked; and strangely enough, either confrontation may be both humbling and strengthening. In having some awareness of the complexity of self we are better prepared to deal with that self. As a matter of fact, our entering into the fictional process helps to redefine the dominant self, even, as it were, to re-create, on a sounder bases — sounder because better understood — the dominant self, the official “I.” As Henri Bergson says, fiction “brings us back into our own presence” — the presence in which we must make our final terms with life and death.

The knowledge in such confrontations does not ordinarily come to us with intellectual labels. We don’t say, “Gosh, I’ve got fifteen percent of sadism in me” — or thirteen percent of unsuspected human charity. No, the knowledge comes as enactment; and as imaginative enactment, to use our old phrase, it comes as knowledge. Even if it comes merely as a heightened sense of being, as the conflict in the story evokes the conflict in ourselves, evokes it with some hopeful sense of meaningful resolution, and with, therefore, an exhilarating sense of freedom.

Part of this sense of freedom derives, to repeat ourselves, from the mere fact that in imagination we are getting off scot-free with something which we, or society, would never permit in real life; from the fact that our paradoxical relation to experience presented in fiction — our involvement and noninvolvement at the same time — give a glorious feeling of mastery over the game of life. But there is something more important that contributes to this sense of freedom, the expansion and release that knowledge always brings; and in fiction we are permitted to know in the deepest way, by imaginative participation, things which we would otherwise never know — including ourselves. We are free from the Garden curse; we may eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and no angel with flaming sword will necessarily appear.

But in the process of imaginative enactment we have, in another way, that sense of freedom that comes from knowledge. The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions, and accidents of ordinary life. We can now gaze at the inner logic of things — of a personality, of the consequences of an act or a thought, of a social or historical situation, of a lived life. One of our deepest cravings is to find logic in experience, but in real life, how little of our experience comes to us in such a manageable form!

We have all observed how a person who has had a profound shock needs to tell the story of the event over and over again, every detail. By telling it he objectifies it, disentangling himself, as it were, from the more intolerable effects. This objectifying depends, party at least, on the fact that the telling is a way of groping for the logic of the event, an attempt to make the experience intellectually manageable. If a child — or a man — who is in a state of blind outrage at his fate can come to understand that the fate which had seemed random and gratuitous is really the result of his own previous behavior or is part of the general pattern of life, his emotional response is modified by that intellectual comprehension. What is intellectually manageable is, then, more likely to be emotionally manageable.

This fiction is a “telling” in which we as readers participate and is, therefore, an image of the process by which experience is made manageable. In this process experience is foreshortened, is taken our of the ruck of time, is put into an ideal time where we can scrutinize it, is given an interpretation. In other words, fiction shows, as we have said, a logical — and psychological — structure which implies a meaning. By showing a logical structure, it relieves us, for the moment at least, of what we sometimes feel as the greatest and most mysterious threat of life — the threat of the imminent but “unknowable,” of the urgent but “unsayable.” In so far as a work of fiction is original and not merely a conventional repetition of the known and predictable, it is a movement through the “unknowable” toward the “knowable” — the imaginatively knowable. It says the “unsayable.”

This leads us, as a sort of aside, to the notion that fiction sometimes seems to be, for the individual or for society, prophetic. Now looking back, we can clearly see how Melville, Dostoyevsky, James, Proust, Conrad, and Kafka tried to deal with some of the tensions and problems which have become characteristic of our time. In this sense they foretold our world — and even more importantly, forefelt it. They even forefelt us.

Or let us remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway did not merely report a period, they predicted it in that they sensed a new mode of behavior and feeling. Fiction, by seizing on certain elements in its time and imaginatively pursuing them with the unswerving logic of projected enactment, may prophesy the next age. We know this from looking back on fiction of the past. More urgently, we unconsciously turn to fiction of our own time to help us envisage the time to come and our relation to it.

But let us turn to more specific instances of that inner logic which fiction may reveal. In //An American Tragedy//, Dreiser shows us in what subtle and pitiful ways the materialism of America and the worship of what William James called the “bitch-goddess Success” can corrupt an ordinary young man and bring him to the death cell. In //Madam Bovary//, Flaubert shows us the logic by which Emma’s yearning for color and meaning in life leads to the moment when she gulps the poison. In both novels we sense this logic most deeply because we, as we have seen, are involved, are accomplices. We, too, worship the bitch-goddess — as did Dreiser. We, too, have yearning like Emma’s, and we remember that Flaubert said that he himself was Emma Bovary.

We see the logic of the enacted process, and we also see the logic of the end. Not only do we have now, as readers, the freedom that leads to a knowledge of the springs of action; we have also the more difficult freedom that permits us to contemplate the consequences of action and the judgment that may be passed on it. For judgment, even punishment, is the end of the logic we perceive. In our own personal lives, as we well know from our endless secret monologues of extenuation and alibi, we long to escape from judgment; but here, where the price tag is only that of imaginative involvement, we can accept judgment — upon our surrogate. In the story, it is our whipping boy and scapegoat that receives the punishment. We find a moral freedom in this fact that we recognize a principle of justice, which also perhaps some gratification of the paradoxical desire to suffer.

It may be objected here that we speak as though all stories were stories of crime and punishment. No, but all stories, from the gayest farce to the grimmest tragedy, are stories of action and consequence — which amount to the same thing. All stories, as we have said, are based on conflict; and the resolution of the fictional conflict is, in its implication, a judgment too, a judgment of values. In the end some shift of values has taken place. Some new awareness has dawned, some new possibility of attitude has been envisaged. Or perhaps some old value is vindicated.

Not that the new value is necessarily “new” in a literal sense. The point, to come back to an old point, is that the reader has, by imaginative enactment, lived through the process by which the values become valuable. What might have been merely an abstraction has become vital, has been lived, and is, therefore, “new” — new because newly experienced. We can now rest in the value as experienced; we are reconciled in it; and that is what counts.

It is what counts, for in the successful piece of fiction, a comic novel by Peter de Vries or a gut-tearing work like Tolstoy’s //War and Peace,// we feel, in the end, some sense of reconciliation with the world and with ourselves. And this process of moving through conflict to reconciliation is an echo of our own life process. The life process, as we know it from babyhood on, from our early relations with our parents on to our adult relation with the world, is a long process of conflict and reconciliation. This process of enriching and deepening experience is a patter of oscillation — a pattern resembling that of the lovers’ quarrel. When lovers quarrel, each asserts a special ego against that of the beloved and then in the moment of making up finds more keenly than before the joy of losing the self in the love of another. So in fiction we enter imaginatively a situation of difficulty and estrangement — a problematic situation that, as we have said earlier, sharpens our awareness of life — and move through it to a reconciliation which seems fresh and gratifying.

Reconciliation — that is what we all, in some depth of being, want. All religion, all philosophy, all psychiatry, all ethics involve this human fact. And so does fiction. If fiction begins in a daydream, if it relieves us from the burden of being ourselves, it ends, if it is good fiction and we are good readers, by returning us to the world and to ourselves. It reconciles us with reality, or helps us deal with reality.

Let us pause to take stock. Thus far what we have said sounds as though fiction were a combination of opium addiction, religious conversion without tears, a home course in philosophy, and a poor man’s psychoanalysis. But it is not; it is fiction.

It is only itself, and that //itself// is not, in the end, a mere substitute for anything else. It is an art — an image of experience formed in accordance with its own laws of imaginative enactment, laws which, as we have seen, conform to our deep needs. It is an “illusion of life” projected through language, and the language is that of some individual man projecting his own feeling of life.

The story, in the fictional sense, is not something that exists of and by itself, out in the world like a stone or a tree. The materials of stories — certain events or characters, for example — may exist out in the world, but they are not fictionally meaningful to us until a human mind has shaped them. We are, in other words, like the princess in one of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales; she refuses her suitor when she discovers that the bird with a ravishing song which he has offered as a token of love is only a real bird, after all. We, like the princess, want an artificial bird — an artificial bird with a real song. So we go to fiction because it is a //created// thing.

Because fiction is created by a man, it draws us, as human beings, by its human significance. To begin with, it is an utterance, in words. No words, no story. This seems a fact so obvious, and so trivial, as not to be worth the saying, but it is of fundamental importance in the appeal fiction has for us. We are creatures of words, and if we did not have words, we would have no inner life. Only because we have words can we envisage and thank about experience. We find our human nature through words. So in one sense we may say that in so far as the language of the story enters into the expressive whole of the story, we find the deep satisfaction, conscious or unconscious, of a fulfillment of our very nature. It is important to remember this when we see the actual play made from fiction. When the medium changes from page to stage, the final impact changes. Not entirely, but significantly. A change in form is, ultimately, a change in meaning.

As an example of the relation of words, of style, to the expressive whole which is fiction, let us take Hemingway. We readily see how the tripped, laconic, monosyllabic style relates to the tight-lipped, stoical ethic, the cult of self-discipline, the physicality and the anti-intellectualism and the other such elements that enter into his characteristic view of the world. Imagine Henry James writing Hemingway’s story //The Killers//. The complicated sentence structure of James, the deliberate and subtle rhythms, the careful parentheses — all these thing express the delicate intellectual, social, and aesthetic discriminations with which James concerned himself. But what in the Lord’s name would they have to do with the shocking blankness of the moment when the gangsters enter the lunchroom, in their tight-buttoned identical blue overcoats, with gloves on their hands so as to leave no fingerprints when they kill the Swede?

The style of a writer represents his stance toward experience, toward the subject of his story; and it is also the very flesh of our experience of the story, for it is the flesh of our experience as we read. Only through his use of words does the story come to us. As with language, so with the other aspects of a work of fiction. Everything there — the proportioning of plot, the relations among characters, the logic of motivation, the speed of retardation of the movements — is formed by a human mind into what it is, into what, if the fiction is successful, is an expressive whole, a speaking patters, a form. And in recognizing and participating in this form, we find gratification, though often an unconscious one, as fundamental as any we have mentioned.

We get a hint of the fundamental nature of this gratification in the fact that among primitive peoples, decorative patterns are developed long before the first attempts to portray the objects of nature, even those things on which the life of the tribe depended. The pattern images a rhythm of life and intensifies the tribesman’s sense of life.

Or we find a similar piece of evidence in psychological studies made of the response of children to comic books. “It is not the details of development,” the researchers tell us, “but rather the general aura which the child finds fascinating.” What the child wants is the formula of the accelerating buildup of tension followed by the glorious release when the righteous Superman appears just in the nick of time. What the child wants, then, is a certain “shape” of experience. Is his want, at base, different from our own?

At base, no. But if the child is satisfied by a nearly abstract pattern for the feelings of tension and release, we demand much more. We, too, in the build and shape of experience, catch the echo of the basic rhythm of our life. But we know that the world is infinitely more complicated than the child thinks. We, unlike the child, must scrutinize the details of development, the contents of life and of fiction. So the shaping of experience to satisfy us must add to the simplicity that satisfies the child something of the variety, roughness, difficulty, subtlety, and delight which belongs to the actual business of life and our response to it.

We want the factual richness of life absorbed into the pattern so that content and form are indistinguishable in one expressive flowering, in the process that John Dewey says takes “life and experience in all its uncertainties, mystery, doubt and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deep and intensify its own qualities.” Only then will it satisfy our deepest need — the need of feeling our life to be, in itself, significant.