'What It Is Like To Be Someone Else'

I stayed up too late the other night reading and marking passages in Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (2021). I’m reading not sequentially, front to back, but leapfrogging among topics that interest me. The authors are Gary Saul Morson, a scholar of Russian literature, and Morton Schapiro, an economist, both at Northwestern University. I try to read everything Morson writes (go here and here). I’m not interested in summarizing or criticizing the volume, but merely want to point out several passages of interest. In a chapter titled “Literature: How to Ruin It and Why You Shouldn’t,” Morson and Schapiro write: 

“[F]or us, nothing teaches more about the human world than the best of fiction. When you read a great novel and identify with its characters, you sense from within what it is like to be someone else. . . .By living a character’s life vicariously, you not only feel some of what she feels, but also reflect on those feelings, consider the nature of the actions to which they lead, and, with practice, acquire the wisdom to appreciate actual people in all their complexity.”

 

This is shrewd and very unfashionable. No political glossing, no academic circle-jerking. Morson and Schapiro understand, as many of our unsophisticated ancestors did, that books are human documents, cross sections of humanity dramatized. Great fiction is self-renewing. Such novels and stories never wear out. You can read Oblomov or The Spoils of Poynton as many times as you wish, and always be rewarded. Think of the impoverished nature of minds that dogmatically dismiss such books without having read them, or read them only to dismiss them as propaganda or tedium. Here’s a sort of corollary to the passage above:

 

“Only mediocre works illustrate a single, clearly formulated idea. Those are the works that, our students report, many high school teachers (and some of their university counterparts) tend to favor, because such works are easily teachable. . . . But if a book can be reduced to its message, why not just memorize the message?”

 

The authors note that great literature has turned into “something of an embarrassment,” associated with “hopeless traditionalists.” Much of the push behind such thinking is the vulgarity of simple-minded politics, of course, but it’s also plain old laziness. It’s as though we want to reward the dumb, unambitious kids in class. I read Minds Wide Shut as a moral pep talk, a reminder that the culture that made us goes on rewarding us.