What Fiction Does When We're Not Looking
I've been trying to remember the first time I understood that other people were as real as I was. The visceral knowledge that behind every face is a consciousness as total and overwhelming as my own. I can't locate the moment. But I can locate the book: George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans) Middlemarch, which I read at sixteen, too young to understand most of it, but old enough to feel the weight of Dorothea Brooke's interior life pressing against my own. There's a moment in the book where the narrator pauses the story to address the reader directly:
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
I underlined it. Not because I understood it, but because it made my chest hurt. Years later, reading Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good, I found her writing almost the same thing: "Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real." She wasn't talking about romantic love. She was talking about the basic perceptual labour of acknowledging that other people exist at the same ontological level as you do. Most of us, she suggested, spend our lives treating others as semi-real characters in our own story rather than protagonists of their own.
Fiction is one of the few places we practice this acknowledgment. Not because stories teach us to be good, but because their very structure demands we inhabit a consciousness that is not our own. For the duration of a novel, someone else's perceptions become more authoritative than yours. Their pain matters more than your comfort. You submit to their pace, their preoccupations, their particular way of noticing the world.
This is supposed to make us more empathetic.
The Empathy Studies: What the Science Actually Shows
David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s 2013 study in Science showing that reading literary fiction (specifically literary fiction, not popular fiction or nonfiction) improved performance on tests measuring Theory of Mind, the capacity to infer others' mental states. They had participants read excerpts from Don DeLillo, Wendell Berry, and then tested their ability to identify emotions from photographs of eyes. Literary fiction readers did better. Not by much, we're talking small effect sizes, but measurably.
The study was seized upon. Here was empirical proof that literature makes you a better person, or at least better at reading faces, which is presumably a step toward being a better person. Book culture celebrated. It was cited it in funding proposals. Teachers invoked it to defend humanities curricula.
But the study had a problem nobody wanted to talk about: it measured empathy as a cognitive skill, not a moral orientation. Being good at inferring mental states is also useful for manipulation, for advertising, for interrogation. Paul Bloom points this out in Against Empathy. The title is deliberately provocative, but his argument is precise: empathy, the capacity to feel what others feel, is morally neutral. It can generate compassion or cruelty depending on where you aim it.
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”
The 18th Century Problem: When Fiction Trains the Wrong Feelings
There's an older anxiety here, one that predates neuroscience. In the 18th century, when the novel was still a suspect form, moralists worried that fiction was too good at generating feeling. In his Rambler essay #87 (1751) Samuel Johnson warned that readers might "lose the power of comparing" their own lives to elevated fictional standards and become dissatisfied with reality.
Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights traces how 18th-century epistolary novels coincided with the emergence of human rights discourse. She argues the connection is causal: learning to care about the inner lives of fictional characters prepared readers to recognise the rights of real strangers. The novel trained the imagination in universality.
But Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection complicates this genealogy. She looks at slave narratives; texts explicitly designed to generate empathy in white readers, to make them feel the interior horror of enslavement. And it worked, sort of. But does the slave's humanity becomes legible only when filtered through the master's capacity for feeling?
Empathy requires the oppressed to perform their suffering in ways that suit the oppressor's emotional range. And even then, the empathy is unstable. It can curdle into identification so complete that the reader imagines themselves in the slave's position, centering their own hypothetical suffering instead of recognizing the actual person in front of them.
Why Diverse Literature Matters (And It's Not About Your Empathy)
Fiction's capacity to expand moral imagination is also its capacity to colonise it. Every time you inhabit a character, you're bringing your own architecture of feeling to someone else's experience. You can only understand them through your own available emotions. This is why diverse literature matters, because it refuses the assumption that empathy is the goal. Some experiences aren't for you to feel. Some stories resist your identification on purpose.
Vladimir Nabokov despised the idea that literature should teach empathy. In his Cornell lectures, he forbade his students from talking about "relatable" characters or identifying with protagonists. "Fondle details!" he commanded. "The divine details!" Literature, he insisted, was about precision of perception, not emotional communion. You were supposed to notice how the author constructed the illusion, not disappear into it.
But there's something disingenuous in this, because Nabokov himself was one of the great empathy engines. Lolita is unbearable precisely because he makes you inhabit Humbert Humbert's consciousness so completely that you momentarily forget he's a monster. The novel doesn't ask you to sympathise, but it almost tricks you into it, then horrifies you with what you've done. That's a different kind of moral training: learning to distrust your own capacity for identification.
And yet. And yet there's something that happens in reading that isn't reducible to moral training or aesthetic appreciation. It's closer to what poet, John Keats called Negative Capability, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Fiction doesn't resolve its moral questions. Good fiction doesn't even frame them as questions with answers. It puts you inside someone else's particular way of being bewildered by existence.
“... it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
I think about this because of After Dinner Conversation, the literary magazine where I read submissions. Every story is supposed to pose an ethical dilemma. What I've learned: the stories that do this overtly (the ones that set up a clear moral choice and then watch the character squirm) are almost always bad. They're ethics homework dressed as fiction. The good stories don't pose dilemmas. They dramatise consciousness under pressure, and the ethical dimension emerges as a byproduct of watching someone think.
There's a story I vetted about a hospice nurse who realises one of her patients is her childhood piano teacher who used to hit her hands with a ruler when she missed notes. The patient doesn't recognise her. The nurse has to decide whether to mention it. But that's not what the story is about. It's about the texture of providing intimate care to someone you have historical reason to hate, while they're unaware that history exists. It's about how the body remembers what the mind forgets. It's about whether kindness means anything when the recipient can't recognise the moral labour of offering it.
I finished reading and realised I'd been holding my breath. Not because the story told me what to feel, but because it put me inside a situation where every available response was inadequate. That's what fiction does when it's working. It doesn't expand your empathy so much as complicate your confidence. It makes you less sure, not more.
The Transfer Problem: Why Caring About Fictional Refugees Doesn't Change Votes
Zadie Smith has this essay, "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov," where she describes two modes of reading: the Barthesian, where you surrender to pleasure and let the text seduce you, and the Nabokovian, where you resist and maintain critical distance. Most readers, she says, want pure Barthes. They want to be transported, to lose themselves. But that loss is dangerous. It's how propaganda works. It's how nationalist fiction turns ordinary people into mobs.
The counterargument is that without Barthesian surrender, you never actually encounter the text. You're just analysing it from outside. Martha Nussbaum makes this case in Love's Knowledge. She argues that certain moral truths are only accessible through narrative. Philosophy can tell you about the complexity of moral choice, but only fiction can make you live inside that complexity for three hundred pages. The knowledge is in the duration, the accumulation, the slow accretion of detail. You can't shortcut it with argument.
But what if the knowledge you gain is specific to that particular fictional consciousness and doesn't transfer? What if reading Tolstoy makes you better at understanding 19th-century Russian aristocrats and nothing else? The transfer problem is real. Studies show that empathy learned in one context doesn't automatically generalise. You can care deeply about fictional refugees and still vote to close borders.
Maybe the point isn't transfer. Maybe fiction is more like scales on a piano? You're not learning specific songs, you're training the capacity itself. You're practicing the cognitive motion of imagining that someone else's perceptions are real. Whether you then apply that capacity morally is a separate question. Fiction gives you the instrument. It doesn't make you play the right notes.
I keep returning to that line from Eliot about hearing the grass grow. She's saying full empathy would be annihilating. If you actually felt everyone's pain with perfect clarity, you couldn't function. You'd be paralysed by the total roar of consciousness happening everywhere simultaneously. So we protect ourselves with partial attention. We care about some people fully and others abstractly. Fiction exploits this. It forces full attention onto invented people, which creates a protected space to practice caring without the annihilation.
But maybe that's the problem. Maybe fiction lets us practice empathy in a domain that's safe because it's not real, and this makes us worse at the real thing. We expend our moral attention on characters and have nothing left for the actual sufferers around us. Fiction becomes an empathy sink, draining the resource it claims to cultivate.
I don't know if I believe this. But I notice that my most morally engaged friends aren't always big readers. And my most literary friends aren't always the most present. There's no correlation I can detect between reading habits and ethical behaviour, which should trouble me more than it does.
Fiction's Real Work: Not Empathy, But Articulation
What I do know: fiction changed how I think, not what I think. It gave me access to modes of attention I wouldn't have discovered alone. The experience of reading Mrs. Dalloway isn't that I understand Clarissa Dalloway better than I understand real people. It's that Woolf showed me consciousness could be rendered as a river rather than a sequence. That time could work differently if you paid attention to its texture instead of its march. This didn't make me more empathetic. It made me more curious about the mechanics of perception.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe fiction's moral value isn't that it makes us feel for others, but that it reveals how thoroughly our apprehension of reality is constructed. Once you've inhabited enough consciousnesses on the page, you can't forget that yours is also just one way of parsing the blooming, buzzing confusion. That's not empathy. It's epistemological humility.
Which might be more important.
There's a passage in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead where the narrator, an elderly minister, is watching his young son play in the yard. She writes: “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?"
I've carried that passage for many years. It named something I'd felt but couldn't articulate. The way ordinary life occasionally becomes numinous, and then stops, and you're left with the knowledge that the transformation is always available but you can't live inside it constantly without losing the ability to function.
This has nothing to do with empathy. It's something else fiction does. It gives you language for your own experience that you didn't have before. And sometimes, if you're lucky, that language is precise enough that when you share it with someone else, they recognise their own experience in it too.
Perhaps that's the moral work. Not feeling for others, but building shared vocabulary. Not inhabiting other minds, but creating maps of consciousness detailed enough that people can locate themselves and realise they're not alone in the territory.
Fiction doesn't make you good. It makes you articulate about complexity. Whether you do anything with that articulacy is your problem, not the book's. If this resonated, subscribe below.
KUALA LUMPUR
NOVEMBER 2024