The Complicity of the Reader

Reading fiction requires a form of imaginative consent that is rarely made explicit. To read a novel is to agree, temporarily, to inhabit a world constructed by someone else — to follow characters into situations one would not choose, to adopt perspectives one does not share, and in some cases to experience identification with people whose actions one would, in reality, condemn.

This capacity for readerly identification is part of what makes fiction morally interesting and morally complicated. The reader who identifies with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is not thereby endorsing murder. But they are doing something more than observing it from a safe distance. The imaginative engagement that produces genuine reading is not the same as the spectatorship of observing someone else's behaviour. It is, in some ways, closer to rehearsal.

Whether this rehearsal is morally beneficial — whether the capacity to imaginatively inhabit different perspectives produces more empathetic people — has been the subject of a great deal of optimistic assertion and rather less empirical validation. The psychologist Raymond Mar has conducted research suggesting a correlation between fiction reading and social cognition, but the direction of causation is contested: people who are already more socially attuned may be more drawn to fiction.

What seems clearer is that fiction can produce moral discomfort of a productive kind — can make the reader complicit in perspectives and desires they would prefer not to have, and in doing so force an encounter with aspects of human experience that more comfortable reading would avoid. Whether readers take the opportunity this discomfort offers, or explain it away, is a matter of what they are willing to do with reading. The text provides the occasion; the interpretation is their own.