A Deeper Dive

Tall Stories

Patricia Hodges

Medieval English literature (500–1500) is read through a historical lens because writers saw their work as recording ‘truth’ and tradition rather than making up pure fiction. Writers based their work on older accounts of events such as the Bible and ancient chronicles, to show that their work was accurate and significant. Their writing was supposed to teach people how to behave; it praised rulers, patrons or explained God's will. Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) used narrative and allegory, but they were not structured like the modern realist fiction we are used to. Aphra Behn’s Oronooko (1688) was a crucial turning point in this history when she bridged the gap between short, episodic prose, and complex long-form storytelling.

There was an important outside influence too, for the triumph of fiction: the Industrial Revolution created a new mercantile and professional middle class with disposable income and leisure time. This group rejected stories about mythical knights or kings, favouring stories, albeit fictional, about people like themselves: merchants and their servants, love and family relationships, the ups and downs of self-made individuals, and domestic and romantic plots.

But what drives us to read fictional stories? According to a book of evolutionary literary theory Comeuppance: Costly Signalling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (2007) by William Flesch, the source of our love of fiction is the desire to punish other people for their bad behaviour. People love mysteries, detective stories, thrillers, true crime exposés, revenge narratives and stories about plucky, kind-hearted nobodies who are bullied but eventually succeed in life. According to Flesch, we love tales of punishment and poetic justice because we are drawn to ‘moral outrage’, (what W H Auden called “the fantasy that guilt will be revealed”).

We respond to stories in which the guilty are unmasked, cheats flushed out, and predators made to pay a high price. Flesch states that the sheer volume of fictional ‘justice’ stories we consume must come from a primal fantasy that the world is fair or it can be made to be fair. Perhaps our most beloved stories depend on activating this ‘moral outrage’. Neuroscientists and psychologists have shown how the brain simulates real-world feelings and empathy when reading stories (How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation - PMC). The keen, sensitive reader of fiction will be able to engage imaginatively with that important aspect of a story which goes beyond engaging with a finely crafted, imaginative world. This means a story's success is not just about what happens, or even about great characters, but about how far cognitive and emotional reality is simulated for the reader, including the incentive to moral outrage.