Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, ‘A Scientific Justification for Literature: Jane Austen’s Free Indirect Style as Ethical Tool’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 43 (2013), 1-18.

A year ago I wrote a post mostly about the work of Keith Oatley (here). I discussed his idea that literature makes us better at understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with other minds. As I said then, this research seems like good news for literature people like me, because it attributes tangible benefits to the kind of reading I recommend to my students, and that I want to do anyway.
      I was also a bit hesitant. I was wary about the direct and instrumental way literature was said to work. I made a wry observation (so, so wry) along the lines that if literature really did equip us to relate well to other human beings, then you’d expect meetings in the Faculty of English to be a bit less fraught. And, I must be honest, I knew that this Fletcher and Benveniste essay was in the offing, and I was leaving it some intellectual room. In the offing, I thought, but now in fact it’s been out for more than a year. Still, it’s better to catch up and discuss it late, than never.
      The essay focuses on the (FID) of Jane Austen. This has been cited by Oatley as the sort of technique that enhances the empathetic skills of literary readers. Fletcher and Benveniste advocate a different approach to the question, which starts by analysing what literary texts and their cultural contexts reveal in themselves, rather than starting with a theory from the scientific perspective: ‘we will begin with a literary analysis of form and open it up to scientific verification’ (p. 2).
      The main argument is that Austen’s FID does more to restrain our mind-reading than to enhance it. What we get from a sophisticated experience of FID is a richer awareness that other minds are different from ours, hard to read, physically separate, largely unavailable. The argument draws in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which, a half-century before Austen, formulated the proposition that literature encourages us to restrain ourselves in our interactions with other minds, rather than giving access to them.

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In Richardson’s epistolary novels, and then in the FID of Austen, we see two scrupulous, indirect routes to ethical considerations in literature. Another neat turn in the argument registers that from Sense and Sensibility to Emma, early to late Austen, something changes. In the former, Fletcher and Benveniste argue, FID is used to exert ‘moral control’ (p. 9) over the reader, whereas in Emma it inculcates tolerance – it is ‘a way to model the self-restraint of propriety’ (p. 10).
      There is a further aspect of the argument: experimental testing of the hypothesis. For the detail here, we will have to wait for another publication, though some results (which ‘supported the view that FID encouraged restraint’) can be obtained from the authors (see p. 13). This promises to be a large and fascinating survey of how different literary styles encourage, or do not, this sort of self-checking.
      Keith Oatley and his collaborators want to tell literary people that their chosen medium is straightforwardly good for us; but now I find myself responding positively to literary people talking back to scientists and saying ‘we’re not so sure that it is, not so straightforwardly anyway’. It’s a bit ironic. However, while the ability to read minds is a hugely significant evolved phenomenon, the ability to question and analyse that ability is a subtle but crucial contributor to sophisticated social life. It’s the kind of thing that I can believe literary experience really helps build, in children and adults and even colleagues.