The unrivalled power of a novel
Last night, Tristan (my teenage son) and I were talking. He’s reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and he commented on how he loved the richness of the language, especially the way people spoke to one another.
We then talked about how the language of Charles Dickens’ novels is still influencing our language and culture today. Amongst many other examples, we now say someone is a scrooge if he is miserly and mean, but Scrooge was a sour, penny-pinching character Charles Dickens invented and the name was invented with him.
We discussed how Charles Dickens’ influence went even deeper than that. Through the humble novel, mere stories that entertained the masses, Charles Dickens changed the very society in which he lived. Angry at what he saw around him, Charles Dickens wrote in a time of the industrial revolution when poverty was rife, class was everything, children were dying in workhouses, and entire families were in debtor’s prison or living on the streets. Charles Dickens did not say, “Here are the crimes of our age and the injustices.” Charles Dickens just wrote novels. But those novels angered people so greatly about situations they had previously simply accepted or even, in the case of the wealthy, overlooked, that it brought about change.
And Charles Dickens was not the only author who brought about change through the act of telling stories. Jane Austen, the writer of “mere” romance novels, wrote in a time when class and status were everything and one married for that status, not for love. Many decent men and women were overlooked because they were not born of wealth and prestige, and plenty of couples who loved each other could not wed. Jane Austen roused the people to demand change.
CS Lewis was so influential a thinker in his time that even now if you want to quote wisdom in a speech or novel or article, you would draw on the likes of CS Lewis. You can back up or emphasize something you say by including a CS Lewis quote. His Narnia series is still one of the most-read children’s books of all time and the 2005 and onward films far out-shone and out-sold the bitter, anti-Christian movie based on Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass that was released around the same time. And all this in a time when Christians are social pariahs.
Lewis Carroll, during the era of the strict Victorian upbringing, believed in a God who laughed and loved children dearly. Lewis Carroll believed children should be allowed to have a childhood and have fun. He did not write stories of repressed children suffering at the hands of their parents and nurses. He wrote a totally nonsensical and outlandish story for children set in a world Alice found by slipping down a rabbit hole. Adults who read it were plunged into the imaginations of their childhood and reminded of what they had either left behind or been denied. And children were given a reason to laugh and to stretch their often suppressed imaginations. His mere nonsense novels helped people see the wonder and beauty of childhood and gave people a desire to preserve it. It changed children’s fiction forever.
Tristan and I went on and on with example after example, and it all came down to what I said to him in conclusion:
“Never underestimate the power of a novel to change our world.”
But how is that even possible? How does a “mere” romance novel, or a nonsensical adventure into imagination, or a story about three ghosts appearing at Christmas, actually change our world?
The answer lies in the novel’s power to produce empathy.
No other form of entertainment has the power to produce empathy like the novel does, not even movies.
Let me say that again because in a time when movies, TV series and YouTube videos seem to be everything, you may wonder if the novel you long to write or read still matters or whether encouraging your kids to read still matters:-
NO other form of entertainment has the power to produce empathy to the same degree as a novel does.
In a novel, you are not reading about a character, you are becoming a character. You are seeing things from their perspective. You are feeling the things they feel, living the things they live, suffering what they suffer. You become them and then you learn to care about them.
Science backs this up. Studies have shown that the same parts of the brain light up when you get fully immersed in a novel as the parts that would have lit up in a character’s brain, whether the character is real or not. For example, if a character feels fear, the fear part of your brain lights up. You are not experiencing fear to the same degree as if it were real, and it is without the same level of potential trauma or lifelong negative effects, but the pathway has been formed.
And it goes even deeper than that. It is not just emotions we share; it is the physical experiences too. If a character is running, or swimming, or riding a horse, the same parts of your brain light up as if you too were doing those things. For a short period of time, you are that character.
This is empathy. And empathy can change the world.
About the Author: Lisa Saul
