The benefits of reading literary fiction

As an avid reader, I often take for granted the importance of reading and think, naively, that others do as well. Then I come across statistics such as these (from the Statistic Brain Research Institute):

• 46 percent of U.S. adults can’t understand the labels on their prescriptions;

• 50 percent of U.S. adults are unable to read an eighth-grade-level book;

• 33 percent of U.S. high school graduates will never read a book after high school;

• 42 percent of college students will never read a book after they graduate.

My disappointment deepens when I read of studies showing that a person’s ability to be empathetic increases through reading.

Is this connected to the increasingly vitrolic and mean comments we read online? Do these voices showing hatred, seeing the world in black-and-white terms and failing to allow for the complexity of other human beings reflect the dearth of reading?

In her article “Reading as a Form of Therapy” (newyorker.com), Ceridwen Dovey refers to a study in 2013 in Science that found that “reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to ‘theory of mind’: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of 4.”

But what is literary fiction? Some would say it’s elitist, snobbish, hard to understand, an arbitrary label. Wikipedia defines it as “works that offer deliberate social commentary, political criticism, or focus on the individual to explore some part of the human condition.” I would add that it generally presents characters that are complex, not one-dimensional or predictable.

Dovey refers to Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, who has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction. He says: “We have started to show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood.”

Dovey writes about her experience with a bibliotherapist named Ella Berthoud, who asked her about her reading habits. After several sessions, conducted via email, Berthoud recommended a list of books for Dovey to read.

She worked her way through the books over the next couple of years and gained some insights. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Dovey writes. “Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself.”

Dovey calls bibliotherapy a “broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” She traces the first use of the term to a 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” The author refers to an early bibliotherapist who says: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.”

Bibliotherapy is not a panacea, and not every reader is necessarily empathetic. Yet regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than nonreaders.

 

Jeanette Winterson has written that fiction and poetry heal "the rupture reality makes on the imagination." It's worth a try.