According to Elif Shafak, fiction "encourages empathy, oneness, pluralism, wisdom and understanding, especially in these awfully fractured times."
I think of all the fiction I have read and ask myself how often what I have read made me think I was accomplishing one of these goals.
Never have I actually experienced empathy, because empathy is something you feel for actual people, and there are no people in fiction at all, only words. Sometimes a work encourages me to share an illusion that people are present, but I am also unable to experience empathy with an illusion. A work of fiction, at least a work of realistic fiction, attempts to create a representation of human experience, but even if I agree to feel empathy for a particular representation of such experience, I would only be deceiving myself if I pretended that some real act of empathy for real people has occurred.
I am not exactly sure what "oneness" is supposed to mean--I presume some sense of solidarity with my fellow humans--but again it would be extremely weird to think that in reading a work of fiction and its various representations I am experiencing oneness with anyone or anything. Reading fiction is in fact a private, isolating experience, and I am perfectly happy with that isolation if it allows me to intimately connect with a work of art. (So much for "pluralism" as well.)
It is possible that my many years of reading fiction has produced wisdom in me, but this would be wisdom about how to read fiction with more satisfaction and pleasure. If I am supposed to be an example of how fiction has made someone a "wise" person outside of this special context, God help us all.
I assume wisdom is associated with "understanding." Here I can't say that reading fiction has helped me to understand it better, because each work of fiction actually makes different demands on my ability to comprehend what I am reading. If it doesn't do this, if it's easy to understand, that's because it's just a repeat of other works I have read, and this is isn't helpful to me at all. (In fact, I have probably stopped reading it, anyway.) What I can say about the best fiction I have read over what is now many, many (many) years, is that these works have helped me to understand that we will never understand why human beings are as they are and do what they do. (Now that I think of it, if this is actually wisdom, maybe I am wise, after all.)
Maybe I am just a bad person. I know that many other smart and well-meaning people believe that fiction exists to accomplish all of these virtuous tasks (and I guess have made them virtuous), but they all seem to me to transform fiction into bathos and hokum. For some reason, I have a deep-seated aversion to hokum.
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