Why Read Fiction?
W. Robert Godfrey, Ph.D.
First published in Evangelium, Vol.
4, Issue
3.
Through the centuries the reading of fiction has been criticized by various Reformed thinkers.
These critics have voiced three major concerns. First, they contend, the reading of fiction is a
waste of time. The time taken to read a novel could be much better spent in Christian service or
in pious reading that would be genuinely improving – like reading Evangelium. Second, fiction is
fundamentally dishonest. It speaks of things that never actually happened as if they had.
Time is better spent reading true biography or history. Third, fiction is too often morally
corrupting. The people and situations depicted in fiction are often sinful and provide very
bad examples to readers.
Such criticisms cannot be dismissed out of hand. Christians certainly must be careful and thoughtful about how
they use their time and how they are influenced. Still, with all these caveats firmly in mind, I believe that a
case can be made for reading fiction.
For help in this task we can turn to C.S. Lewis. While Lewis is today remembered best for his work as a Christian
apologist and as an author of children’s books and science fiction, professionally he was an outstanding professor
of literature. He presented a case for reading literature in his little book,
An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1961). In this book Lewis rejected much of modern
literary criticism as missing the point of literature and indirectly offered an insightful defense of reading
books which are not immediately or obviously edifying.
First, Lewis suggested that we read literature because it is enjoyable. He recognized that some Christian
traditions questioned the legitimacy of doing anything simply for enjoyment, but Lewis rejected such a form of
Christianity. God made many things in this world for our enjoyment, and we should receive them with thanksgiving.
Psalm 104:15, 26 points to this truth: “You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to
cultivate, that he may bring food forth from the earth. . . .There go the great ships, and Leviathan,
which you formed to play in it” (ESV).
The enjoyment we can derive from reading is not only the joy of well-crafted words and ideas. It is not only
the fascination of meeting new people, both attractive and appalling. It is also the wonder of seeing an
author’s creative mind at work – creating as an expression of the image of God in human beings.
Second, Lewis argued that the value of reading literature was a way to experience many things that we would not
otherwise experience. “We want to see with other eyes, imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other
hearts, as well as with our own” (137). Lewis explains what it means to see with other eyes in these terms:
“In reading imaginative work, I suggest, we should be much less concerned with altering our own
opinions – though this of course is sometimes their effect – than with entering fully into the opinions,
and therefore also the attitudes, feelings and total experience, of other men. Who in his ordinary senses
would try to decide between the claims of materialism and theism by reading Lucretius and Dante? But who
in his literary senses would not delightedly learn from them a great deal about what it is like to be a
materialist or a theist?” (85-86). When we read well, we enter into new worlds: “A true lover of literature
should be in one way like an honest examiner, who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling,
felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates” (86).
Third, Lewis suggests that as we enjoy and experience good literature we will ourselves grow as human beings
in the understanding of others. He writes: “[W]e seek an enlargement of our being” (137). We are changed
by experiencing other minds, even where we largely reject their point of view. “Literary experience heals
the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality….in reading great literature I become a
thousand men and yet remain myself” (140f).
While reading literature can be defended in its own terms, as Lewis does, it is appropriate in this place to
note that literature also has a special usefulness for Christians. Learning to read literature will be an
invaluable tool for reading the Bible. Learning to read well, that is, learning to listen to a text and
notice the way in which its form contributes to its meaning, is necessary to good Bible reading.
Reading is more than learning the alphabet and vocabulary. Good reading is understanding what an author
is expressing. Christians must be good readers if they really want to understand the Bible. One reason
that there are so many interpretations of Christianity is that many readers of the Bible do not know how
to read.
If you are still not convinced of the value of fiction, let me suggest a book that may change your mind.
It is not a novel or a Christian book.1
The book I have in mind is the memoir of an Iranian woman who taught
English literature at Iranian universities during the early years of the Muslim revolution against the Shah.
Since the book is a historical memoir, you will not be reading fiction. You will learn from the inside what
it is like to live in an Islamic republic.
This book – Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (New York: Random House, 2004) – has many strengths.
It shows how many different views existed among Iranians who opposed the Shah. It reflects the differences
among Muslims on the relationship between their religion and politics. Most of all it demonstrates how
great the pressures are upon women in Iran: the requirement to wear the veil in public, the prohibition
against being alone with any man who was not a close relative, the difficulty of getting an education,
the insistence that women were responsible for stimulating the lusts of men, and the subjection to morality squads.
The picture of the lives of women in Iran is vivid, fascinating and horrifying. The book is well worth reading
just for its insight into the totalitarian character of this Islamic republic.
Nafisi’s memoir is not only a remembrance of life in Iran, however. She tells her story by focusing on a secret
reading group that she formed with several of her female students. These students came from different backgrounds
and had different attitudes toward the revolution and Islam. What united them was a common interest in English
literature. We get to know these women as we see them reflecting on various works of literature.
Many may feel that novels by Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen would be
completely irrelevant to women living in Iran under the ayatollahs – or at best would offer escape from the
world in which they lived. But in fact these women found the novels to be a source of liberating and profound
insight into themselves and their world. In discussing Nabokov’s UI, they recognized: “What Nabokov captured
was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of
false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner” (23).
In discussing Nabokov’s notorious novel Lolita, the women discovered the ambiguity of life and of literature.
How should the young girl Lolita be evaluated in relation to the older man in her life, Humbert Humbert?
“Thus another Lolita emerges that reaches beyond the caricature of the vulgar insensitive minx, although she
is that, too. A hurt, lonely girl, deprived of her childhood, orphaned and with no refuge” (43).
On reflection we may be able to understand the relevance of Nabokov to these women since he too was the son
of revolution. But what of Fitzgerald and his The Great Gatsby, the quintessential novel of the jazz age in
America? Or James and his novels of American innocence in decadent Europe? Or especially Austen and her
novels of English country mores? But professor and students learn an amazing amount about themselves and
life from these novels.
Nafsi teaches how much a Muslim extremist could have learned from Fitzgerald: “I could have told him to learn
from Gatsby, from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flesh and blood
to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. He was killed, left at the bottom of the
swimming pool, as lonely in death as in life” (114f).
From Henry James’ Washington Square, they learn the extraordinary courage of which an ordinary woman is capable:
“As she is shunned by her father, manipulated by her aunt and finally deserted by her suitor, Catherine Sloper
learns, painfully, to stand up to each and every one of them – not in their way but in her own, quietly and
humbly….She surprises them with her every act. In each of these instances her actions arise not from a desire
for revenge but from a sense of propriety and dignity, to use two outmoded terms much favored by Jamesian
protagonists” (225).
With Austen, in the first place they did have “fun” (258) which was both vital and also perhaps somewhat escapist.
But Austen was much more than that. The women in Pride and Prejudice were revolutionary: “These women,
genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers
(there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen’s novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism
and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy:
the right to choose” (307).
Nafsi expands on the democratic impulse in Austen:
“One of the wonderful things about Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies. There are so many
different forms of dialogue: between several people, between two people, internal dialogue and dialogue through
letters. All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen’s ability to create such multivocality,
such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the
best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel….All we needed was to read and appreciate the cacophony of
voices to understand its democratic imperative. This was where Austen’s danger lay” (268).
It is also where her pleasure and power lay: “And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop –
there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the page and mischievously leave the novel
tingling in our ears” (269).
Each of the novels which the women read illumined a different aspect of human life for them. But Nafsi
insists that all good novels serve one great purpose: they develop empathy in us for others: “Empathy lies
at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels – the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems
and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence” (132). Surely empathy is a virtue that Christians
need to cultivate. Empathy is not approval or the abandonment of ethical or doctrinal standards. It is a
sensitive understanding of the condition of other human beings.
The reading of novels should be enjoyable. But it is also profitable. Learning to read novels well will make
us better readers of the Bible and more empathetic human beings. Read a novel. If you do not know where to
begin, begin with one of those that moved and helped those remarkable women in Iran.
Footnotes
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S. M. Baugh
R. Scott Clark
Iain M. Duguid
Bryan D. Estelle
W. Robert Godfrey
Michael S. Horton
Dennis E. Johnson
Hywel R. Jones
Peter R. Jones
Joel E. Kim
Julius J. Kim
George C. Scipione
Robert B. Strimple
David M. VanDrunen
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