Science Meets Literature: What Elias Canettis Auto-da-Fé Tells Us about the Human Mind and Human Behavior

By Dario Maestripieri

“Science Meets Literature” analyzes and discusses Elias Canetti’s 1935 novel “Auto-da-Fé” (original German title, “Die Blendung”) as an example of the way in which literature can contribute to the scientific understanding of the human mind and human behavior. A growing number of scholars promoting “consilience” have arg

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785270710

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Science Meets Literature

Science Meets Literature

What Elias Canetti’s Auto-Da-Fé Tells Us about the Human Mind and Human Behavior

Dario Maestripieri

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

First published in Italian as: La scienza incontra la letteratura: cosa ci rivela Auto da fé di Elias Canetti sulla mente e sul comportamento umani. Roma: Giovanni Fioriti Editore, 2019.

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Dario Maestripieri 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Maestripieri, Dario, author.

Title: Science meets literature : what Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé tells us about the human mind and human behavior / Dario Maestripieri.

Description: New York: Anthem Press : London, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019020676 | ISBN 9781785270697 (hardback) | ISBN 1785270699 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Canetti, Elias, 1905–1994. Blendung. | Mind and body in literature. | Human behavior in literature.

Classification: LCC PT2605.A58 B5585 2019 | DDC 833/.912–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020676

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-069-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-069-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One Why Science and Literature?

Chapter Two Elias Canetti: A Visionary Literary Genius on a Quest to Understand Human Nature

Chapter Three The Plot of Auto-da-Fé

Chapter Four Auto-da-Fé Is a Novel about Human Nature

Chapter Five Major Themes Running Through Auto-da-Fé

Chapter Six Analysis of Part I: A Head Without a World

Chapter Seven Analysis of Part II: Headless World

Chapter Eight Analysis of Part III: The World in the Head

Chapter Nine Narrative Strategies in Auto-da-Fé

Chapter Ten Consilience, the Canetti Way

Elias Canetti: Chronology

References

Index

PREFACE

Happiness is … to be able to pursue all of your interests simultaneously, according to a Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza wishes he could do his favorite activities—eat, watch TV, and have sex—all at the same time. My search for happiness is what prompted me to write a book in which I simultaneously pursue my interest in the science of human behavior and my passion for literature.

The first time I read Elias Canetti’s novel Auto-da-Fé I was a college student in Italy. I can’t tell how good or bad the Italian translation was relative to the German original, but it must have been good enough for me to be struck by the extraordinary quality of Canetti’s prose. It’s stylistically rigorous and sophisticated, original, witty, energetic, playful, erudite, and a lot more. The way Auto-da-Fé is written is so striking and unique that a literary scholar, Harriet Murphy, had developed a theory and written a whole book about it (Murphy 1997). Canetti’s prose is particularly congenial to my taste for writing. If I were a writer of literary fiction, my goal would be to write like Canetti. But my interest in Auto-da-Fé is not just a matter of literary taste. For me, reading a piece of literary fiction (or admiring any work of art) is always about making a connection with the mind of the person who created it. If I recognize that I have some affinities with the writer, it’s likely that I will find his work interesting (but having affinities with writers is neither necessary nor sufficient for me to like their work). With my first reading of Auto-da-Fé, there was definitely the perception on my part of some deep affinities with the author. Here is a writer, I thought, who values intelligence, knowledge, culture, literary craftsmanship, clear rational thinking, ambition, and commitment but who is also playful, witty, has a great sense of humor, and knows how to use irony. Although I suspected that Canetti had something new and important to say with Auto-da-Fé, at the time of my first reading I wasn’t sure what that was. Clearly, the novel resonated with me in many different ways but it wasn’t clear to me exactly how or why.

I read Auto-da-Fé a second time years later, this time the English translation, and still liked it (unlike what has happened with many other novels, which grabbed my interest at a young age, but greatly disappointed me when I read them again as a mature adult). By this time, I had become a behavioral scientist and was familiar with theories and empirical research on the human mind and human behavior in psychology, biology, and anthropology. I realized that part of the reason why Auto-da-Fé resonated with me so much was that it was a novel about human nature and that the ideas and concepts expressed in the novel were well aligned with my scientific knowledge and understanding of human nature. However, I knew virtually nothing about Elias Canetti, hadn’t read anything else written by him, and hadn’t read any essays about Auto-da-Fé written by literary scholars. I can’t say that after my second reading I understood the novel the way I think I understand it now, but I already appreciated that it was an interesting combination of good science and good literature.

I have been interested in human nature and in literary fiction since I was a child, but until recently I always kept these interests separate. Back in high school, I briefly considered pursuing a college education in the humanities and then an academic career as a literature professor but eventually decided to study biology and from there work my way toward the scientific understanding of the human mind and human behavior. I continued reading literary fiction but kept this as a parallel activity, with no direct connection with my academic interests. Some recent developments in my work have led me to the current state of affairs and the present efforts toward the integration of science and literature. First, I have expanded my horizons of inquiry from biology to other scientific disciplines including psychology, economics, and anthropology, and shifted my behavioral research from nonhuman primates to humans. Second, my interests have increasingly concentrated on universal psychological and behavioral processes that all human beings share as members of the species Homo sapiens: in other words, human nature. Third, I have become increasingly frustrated by the extreme reductionism in contemporary science and the growing tendency for research in the biological sciences to be driven by technology rather than by important questions about life, including human life.

My desire for getting a big picture view of human nature has prompted me to look outside of science and take into consideration the perspectives offered by other intellectual and artistic endeavors. Going to literature was a natural move for me, and reinterpreting Auto-da-Fé as a novel about human nature was the event that precipitated this move. So, I set out to read Auto-da-Fé for the third time armed with a yellow highlighter and ready to take notes. To make a better connection with the mind that created Auto-da-Fé, I also read Canetti’s autobiography and almost everything else he had written. Auto-da-Fé is such a rich text that every successive reading reveals something new about it. As Canetti himself recognized in his autobiography, Auto-da-Fé releases its secrets slowly and gradually, and only to people who have the persistence to look for them and the willingness to dig deep beneath the surface of the text.

From his autobiography, I learned that Elias Canetti was someone who liked to engage with other people—whether real people in his life or the readers of his work—but always did it on his own terms. Canetti was a deep thinker with serious intellectual ambitions who was unwilling to dumb down his literary work simply to reach a larger audience. Moreover, he was not interested in engaging with readers as passive recipients of his ideas or knowledge. He expected his readers to make as much effort in understanding his work as he did in creating it. He was selective in the release of information about himself, his life, and his ideas, and rarely made his intentions or his intellectual strategies explicit (and, in some cases, he actively concealed them). In part, this attitude came from the strong commitment to his principles regarding the autonomy of the artist: he was unwilling to play by any well-established rules unless he was fully convinced of the validity of these rules (more often than not, he made his own rules). In part, his attitude toward others served as a filter to ensure that he engaged intellectually with the right people and to protect himself from unwanted attention.

Canetti had no patience for ignorance or stupidity, or for people who don’t think with their own head but simply embrace ideological, religious, political, or sociocultural dogmas. However, he was not an aristocratic, snobbish, ivory-tower intellectual who kept a distance from people in real life, or who wrote with an unusually complex and pretentious language to give the impression of conveying complex and valuable thoughts and ideas. Rather, he was fascinated by all people and enjoyed closeness to them: in social situations he was a listener more than a talker. He was also highly committed to expressing himself in writing using a vocabulary and a syntax that were simple enough that could be understood by everyone, regardless of their education. He absolutely abhorred the act of showing off intelligence or artistic skills. Whether Canetti’s strategies for managing his own persona, his relationships, and his work were effective is debatable. On the one hand, the recognition of his intellectual accomplishments through the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981 indicates that his work was understood and appreciated by at least some of his peers. On the other hand, Canetti and his work are still ignored, misinterpreted, disliked, or dismissed by a lot of people. Although Canetti craved for intellectual recognition by his peers, he did not crave for popularity or commercial/financial success, and by and large he did not get it.

Canetti made it quite clear that he was not interested in literature or art as an expression of one’s aesthetic sensitivity but as a tool to analyze and understand human nature, to generate and communicate new knowledge to others, ultimately hoping that this new knowledge would contribute to the improvement of humankind. Canetti did not become a behavioral scientist mainly because the behavioral science he was looking for did not exist at that time. If he were alive today, he would be enthralled by modern social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology. At the time Canetti wrote Auto-da-Fé, in the late 1920s, however, psychology was dominated by Freud’s ideas and approach, which Canetti found profoundly unsatisfactory, evolutionary biology had not yet began the systematic application of evolutionary principles to the study of behavior, and social-cognitive science had not yet started the objective study of perceptions, beliefs, and attribution of mental states to others. But Canetti was a behavioral scientist at heart (sometimes it takes one behavioral scientist to recognize another one) probably without knowing it or admitting it, as well as a very erudite and sophisticated man of letters.

Reading Canetti’s autobiography and his other writings have led me to interpret Auto-da-Fé as a text that is simultaneously a scientific treatise on human nature and a work of art.

Contemporary literary scholars have interpreted Auto-da-Fé mainly through the lens of the intellectual paradigms that are currently dominant in the academic literary community, such as postmodernism or feminism. As an outsider to this community, I am hoping to provide a fresh new look to a novel that is almost 100 years old and is considered a masterpiece of twentieth-century European literature. Previous interpretations of Auto-da-Fé are not necessarily incompatible with mine, since some of them have focused on Canetti’s prose and narrative strategies, or the intertextual references of the novel, rather than on its plot or characters. The fact that Auto-da-Fé invites and encourages interpretations from different perspectives is part of what makes this novel interesting and valuable as a work of art.

Canetti had a vast knowledge and deep understanding of both science and literature, including their history, their traditions, and their most recent accomplishments. And yet, he traced and walked his own path, without following any specific scientific or literary traditions. In terms of his insights and intuition about human nature, Canetti was a man ahead of his time. For example, his understanding of how human minds and human behavior work was a lot closer to reality than that of some illustrious predecessors or contemporaries who had a huge influence on psychology, such as Sigmund Freud. Canetti’s idea of writing a text that was both literary and scientific was not novel or original, but it’s something scientists or humanists rarely do these days.

This is a good time for rediscovering and reanalyzing’s Canetti approach to knowledge production. Despite some lingering resistance on both sides of the fence, there is now growing recognition that the complete separation and lack of communication between scholars in the sciences and the humanities, particularly with regard to inquiries into human existence, the human condition, or human nature, is artificial and detrimental. There are many ways in which the sciences can inform the humanities and vice versa, and new truly interdisciplinary approaches across sciences and humanities can be effectively pursued both in scholarly inquiry and in training of students. Some of the conceptual (e.g., philosophical, epistemological) obstacles to the integration of sciences and humanities have been effectively addressed by scholars pursuing the consilience agenda. Specific examples of effective integration of science and literature have been provided by work in cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary psychology, including the recent growth of Literary Darwinism. Elias Canetti found his own way to integrate literary and scientific inquiries into human nature and presented this experiment in Auto-da-Fé. Reading Auto-da-Fé for the fourth time has made me realize that his approach is viable and promising, and it could represent one of the paths with which we can pursue the consilient integration of sciences and humanities in the future.

I am the kind of person who after reading a novel four times feels the urge to write a book about it. Auto-da-Fé has become a bit of an obsession for me (as my friends know well), and I have had enough thoughts about it to fill the pages of a book. If nothing else, writing this book has been a way to get these thoughts out of my head and free myself from this obsession. I hope that this book will encourage people who have not read Auto-da-Fé to read it for the first time, and people who are already familiar with it to read it again. I also hope that this book will help readers enjoy Auto-da-Fé, make sense of it, and think deeply about the issues it raises. Finally, I hope that some humanists and behavioral scientists will agree with me and my contention that if we follow Canetti’s lead we may gain a more comprehensive understanding of human existence and human nature than we currently have, above and beyond the boundaries of academic disciplines, and independent of any conceptual paradigms that constrain our ability to analyze ourselves and the world we live in.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the people who played an important role in the completion of this book. My long-term friend Aldo Badiani first recommended that I read Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé many years ago and then indulged me in endless conversations about the novel while I was working on this book. My mother Elena and my sister Daniela also shared my long-standing interests in literature and supported my endeavors in writing and publication. My friends and colleagues Jennifer Beshel, at Loyola University in Chicago, and Julia Fischer, at the University of Gottingen, in Gottingen, Germany, read an entire first draft of the book manuscript and provided helpful comments and suggestions for revision. My colleague Joe Carroll at the University of Missouri, too, read earlier drafts of the book and provided expert constructive criticism. Finally, my partner Sian and my children Elena, Luca, and Sarah give me every day reasons to enjoy my work and my life and to make it all worthwhile.

Chapter One

WHY SCIENCE AND LITERATURE?

Existential Questions

Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? How do we explain human existence? How do we explain what we call the human condition? We human beings have been asking ourselves these questions for millions of years, since our ancestors evolved a brain that was sufficiently large and complex to give us the ability to consciously reflect upon ourselves as well as the ability to talk about it. We all ask ourselves existential questions at some point in our lives. Some are unable to find satisfactory answers and come to believe that human life is an unsolvable mystery; others accept the answers that are given to them by their parents, society, culture, religion, or their professional education.

Human beings have the ability to acquire knowledge about their own essence and existence, and such knowledge can be objectively recognized by others and shared with them. For example, we all learn and accept some basic facts about how our bodies are built and how they function. Each generation teaches these facts to the next one, using verbal, written, or digital language-based education. No one in their right state of mind would challenge the knowledge about the human body that is currently taught in professionally accredited medical schools. Each one of us, however, also has the unique subjective experience of existence and the unique subjective perception of himself/herself and of the outside world through his/her senses and thoughts. The extent to which this subjective experience of existence can be objectively recognized by others and shared with them is a matter of debate.

Although human existential questions can be tackled by anybody older than 4–5 years of age, there are people who undergo specialized education and training to search for answers to these questions, and who spend their entire professional lives studying and researching these answers. Some of these folks are university professors. Part of their job is to learn any relevant knowledge acquired throughout past human history, generate new knowledge, and then transfer all knowledge to the younger generations through education and teaching. Every year, universities around the world recruit a new cohort of students to whom professors can teach everything that we, as a species, have learned about ourselves during the course of our long history.

As part of this process of recruitment, not too long ago, a distinguished professor in the humanities at a large private university in the United States said the following to an audience of prospective students:

If you ask the question What is this organism that you call a human being? that question is best answered by the sciences, but if you ask the question What is the experience of being this organism that you call a human being? the question of experience is best answered by the humanities.

This professor essentially told the prospective students that they found themselves at a fork in the road, from which the paths to objective and subjective self-knowledge begin to diverge, and that they had to choose one of these paths. The students typically take the advice, make their decision, and later come to accept that these paths run on parallel tracks, without ever intersecting again. The notion that the sciences and humanities ask different kinds of human existential questions and provide different kinds of answers is almost universally accepted these days.

Almost universally. I happen to believe that the view of the fork in the road and the two parallel paths to self-knowledge is misleading and counterproductive. Of course, I share the view that the sciences can explain a lot about the human organism. Over the last two centuries, advances in evolutionary biology have provided answers to many questions about the origins and the characteristics of our species, Homo sapiens. For example, evolutionary biologists have clarified where and when human life originated, as well as the relationships between our species, other forms of life, and the environment in which life has evolved and continues to exist. At the same time, research efforts by psychologists and other behavioral scientists have elucidated many aspects of how the human mind works, the interactions between mind and body, between an individual and others, or between groups and societies. These advances in evolutionary biology and psychology, however, have not occurred in isolation but have been built upon the knowledge produced by other scientific disciplines (e.g., mathematics, physics, chemistry, genetics) as well as by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, and many others. We cannot give the sciences all the credit for explaining the human organism. Humanistic disciplines have contributed to the foundations for the acquisition of all the knowledge we currently possess about ourselves.

Just as the sciences cannot claim a monopoly of knowledge of the human organism, the humanities cannot monopolize knowledge of the subjective experience of being a person. In fact, the sciences have a lot to say about that, too. For example, psychology has scientifically investigated subjective mental experiences, including perceptions, beliefs, and feelings (not to mention dreams, hallucinations, artistic and religious inspirational states, etc.) for decades. Evolutionary biology and neuroscience can make important contributions to explaining subjective experiences too. Subjective mental experiences originate from the brain, which is a biological organ. Both the brain and its products can be studied scientifically just like any other parts of the body and their products.

What about the humanities, then? What’s left for them if the sciences can do it all? Well, the sciences can’t do it all, not all by themselves at least. Although the scientific method has turned out to be a very powerful approach to generate new knowledge about the human condition, its limitations have also become apparent. For example, the experience of human life is extremely variable, both among different individuals and over time, and many questions about human life are not amenable to direct scientific inquiry (for example, why do individual lives take particular trajectories? Why do these trajectories often change unpredictably? Why do some individuals seem to express their full potential and others don’t? How is happiness achieved?). Modern science has become a highly reductionistic enterprise, and questions that are unlikely to have reductionistic answers are simply not being asked by scientists.

We all agree that humanistic approaches can lead to knowledge and understanding of the self. For example, another colleague of mine said the following to an audience of prospective students who were considering enrolling in the humanities division of our university:

The humanities are very much involved in telling a story about ourselves. A story is not just a fiction, a story is a self-understanding.

And this is what novelist Milan Kundera wrote about novels in his book The Art of the Novel:

All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self […] A novel examines primarily the enigma of existence [...] A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality. (1988, pp. 5–6, 23)

Art and literature can generate knowledge about ourselves. But what kind of knowledge exactly? In my opinion, the humanities have a lot to say both about the human organism and about the subjective experience of being human. Just like the sciences, the humanities can investigate both objective and subjective phenomena, and they produce both objective and subjective knowledge (this distinction is actually unnecessary and may be misleading). The approaches of sciences and humanities are different but can complement each other. For example, humanistic approaches can provide a more holistic perspective on human phenomena. Furthermore, humanistic ways to generate knowledge can rely more on intuition, insight, and creativity, while the scientific method relies more on logic and empirical data. Hypothesis-testing, however, can be effectively performed within both the sciences and the humanities. As pointed out by Edward Slingerland (2008), the sciences have integrated themselves in a vertical hierarchy with disciplines providing the lowest levels of explanations, such as physics, at the bottom, and disciplines with more complex levels of explanation, such as chemistry, biology, and psychology, at progressively higher steps of the hierarchy. The humanities can be ‘vertically’ integrated with the sciences by positioning themselves at the top level of the hierarchy. This way their approach remains autonomous and unique, but there is continuity between humanistic and scientific explanations of human phenomena, so that scientific theories might inform and constrain humanistic theories, while humanistic work can contribute to the identification of questions and formulation of hypotheses to be tested by scientific disciplines.

Consilience in the Acquisition of Knowledge about the Human Mind and Human Behavior

Both sciences and humanities can address objective and subjective aspects of self-knowledge, and it would work best if they did it together. The idea that sciences and humanities deal with different questions about human beings and that these approaches are best kept separate originated and became established in the second half of the twentieth century. But things are changing now, although more slowly than some of us would like. Here is what Louis Menand, a professor of English Literature at Harvard University, wrote in his book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University:

The most important intellectual development in the academy in the twenty-first century has to do with the relationship between the life sciences—particularly neurobiology, genetics, and psychology—to fields outside the natural sciences, such as philosophy, economics, and literary studies. (p. 19)

And also:

Interdisciplinarity is a new way to organize teaching and scholarship, […] it holds out the promise of some kind of unification of knowledge (scientists and humanists speaking the same language, for example), and […] it can refresh old paradigms and, almost by itself, generate radically new perspectives and ideas. (p. 95)

There is even a term to indicate the unification of knowledge across scientific and humanistic disciplines. According to Harvard evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, we can call this consilience (Wilson 1998). And according to his Harvard colleague, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker,

Today we may be seeing a new convergence of explorations of the human condition by artists and scientists—not because scientists are trying to take over the humanities—but because artists and humanists are beginning to look to the sciences, or at least to the scientific mindset that sees us as a species with a complex psychological endowment. (2002, p. 418)

Although early calls for consilience did imply a threat for scientific disciplines to take over the humanities (e.g., see Wilson 1975; 1998; Tooby and Cosmides 1992), the second wave of the consilience movement has clarified that consilience does not threaten the autonomy and heuristic value of humanistic approaches and recognizes that the flow of explanation and interaction between sciences and humanities can be fully bidirectional (Slingerland and Collard 2012).

Of all the questions we can ask about ourselves, consilience is badly needed especially for answering questions about our minds and our behavior. The study of the human mind and of human behavior is traditionally the field of inquiry of psychology. Psychologists study how the mind works (including cognitive, affective, and motivational processes), interactions between mind and body, and behavioral interactions between an individual and his/her surrounding environment including other individuals, or between a group of individuals and other groups. One area of research within psychology has been the investigation of human universals, that is, patterns of behavior, emotional expression, and thought that can be observed in all human societies and cultures, and are therefore hypothesized to be genetically determined and hardwired in our brains. These human universals, which we commonly refer to as human nature, represent the psychological and behavioral characteristics typical of our species, Homo sapiens, and are presumably the result of evolution by natural selection and expressed in all individuals when these individuals develop in our species-typical environment. Psychologists are not only interested in what all human beings have in common but also in variation in psychological and behavioral traits across individuals or groups of individuals, which may result from genes, environment, or both.

Interest in human nature and human psychological and behavioral variation is by no means limited to psychologists. Understanding the human mind and human behavior is also important to other scientists, economists, lawyers, entertainers, and many other people employed in the private sector. Exploring the human mind and human behavior is also at the core of the arts and especially literary fiction.

What Literary Fiction Can Tell Us about Human Nature

A writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true" […] the unit of truth, at least for a fiction writer, is the human animal, belonging to the species Homo sapiens, unchanged for at least 100,000 years.

John Updike, novelist (cited by Pinker 2002, p. 419)

There is an interesting parallel between scientific theories and novels. Scientific theories are fictional narratives about how the world works. So can be novels. There is a creative process at the origin of scientific theories that is similar to the creative process that produces literary fiction or any work of art. For example, my own research has shown that the best known and most important theories developed by prominent physical, biological, and social scientists were published approximately 10 years after the publication of their first scientific work, just as the publication of the best work of fiction by prominent novelists occurred approximately 10 years after the publication of their first work of fiction (Scrivner and Maestripieri 2018). This suggests that science and literature have more in common than most people think.

Behavioral scientists sometimes use computer simulations to test whether their models of human social processes are internally consistent and produce realistic interactions. For example, computer scientists using agent-based simulations (in which individuals behave according to particular sets of rules, such as when individual A encounters a same-sex, younger, unrelated individual B in a particular situation X, A will behave assertively toward B and produce a particular outcome Y) have recreated social, economic, and political processes, down to the specific interactions between individuals, in both contemporary and ancient human societies (e.g., ancient Egypt). Novels may present simulations of reality similar to those of behavioral computer scientists. If an author has a theory about how the minds and behaviors of human beings work, he can create a fictional human society in which mental and behavioral processes are regulated by certain rules. If the theory is correct and the simulation is sufficiently accurate and sophisticated, the fictional society created in the novel will be internally consistent and realistic: it will provide a coherent representation of reality that matches real human societal processes. A novel is similar to a scientific theory also because some of its aspects are already well established and empirically supported, while others are speculative. The speculations of novelists can encourage, inform, and guide the empirical work of scientists the way scientific theories do.

This is, of course, one particular view of what literature is and what it does. People write and read fiction for many different reasons. According to Steven Pinker, people enjoy reading novels for the same reason they enjoy life. He believes that

novels work like experiments. The author