How to Do Things with Fictions

by Joshua Landy

Why does Mark's Jesus speak in parables? Why does Plato's Socrates make bad arguments? Why are Beckett's novels so inscrutable? And why don't stage magicians even pretend to summon spirits anymore? In a series of captivating chapters on Mark, Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Chaucer, Joshua Landy not only answers these questions but explains why they are worth asking in the first place.Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are sometimes best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises designed to fortify specific mental capacities, from form-giving to equanimity, from reason to faith.Delivering plenty of surprises along the way--that moral readings of literature can be positively dangerous; that the parables were deliberately designed to be misunderstood; that Plato knowingly sets his main character up for a fall; that metaphor is powerfully connected to religious faith; that we can sustain our beliefs even when we suspect them to be illusions--How to Do Things with Fictions convincingly shows that our best allies in the struggle for more rigorous thinking, deeper faith, richer experience, and greater peace of mind may well be the imaginative writings sitting on our shelves.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Writing, Books About Books, Literary Criticism

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Chair of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he teaches "Film and Philosophy," "Literature and the Brain," "Getting through Proust," and other hopefully fun classes. He also co-directs Stanford's Initiative in Philosophy and Literature. And since 2017, he's been one half of the nationally syndicated public radio program “Philosophy Talk.”

Reviews

[Searnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
"Yes," answered Joshua Landy
For his message is that as music fails to sooth the savage beast
So too fiction fails to improve (morally) its readers in the least.
(And. Now, dear (wished for) reader please attend that
I do not give a brace of copulating damns
whether this hash smells like poetry
or like green eggs and hams.)

Consider then that before reading Landy's book of viewing the Stanford Ethics and Society Center's 'You Tube' discussion of the very issue addressed in his, "How To Do Things With Fictions", which is: "Does Reading Literature Make You More Moral?" (Landy is one of the discussion's panel members.) All three of the panel members answer, "No. It does not."

But. But that doesn't mean that reading literature is categorically without moral/ethical efficacy (You see the trick here is to leave the "Must" implied rather than explicitly stated in the question.) Given how the question is asked here the answer Must be No. And believe it or not, all of the panel members acknowledged this "fact". So, I will observe that when reading fiction, for example, a reader does not go where she/he does not want to be taken and vice versa.

And the buts go on; Here, but here on this colon /dash of 'fill in the blank" of message, meaning and morality Landy jumps the ancient charge of literature 'to educate and delight' to disclose his own vision of literature's 'insidious intent". And that is that fictions train rather than teach. Novels show rather than tell (Coetzee comes to mind here, but Landy uses Becket instead) ways to ponder or blunder on their path to "eudemonia". So, fictions do have a mission if not (only) a 'message' or a 'moral' after all.

[Josh Axelrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

A modest, astute, practical account of one way of using books. Landy articulates a portion of what a lot of us probably feel regarding the fiction we tend to go back to again and again: that it's doing work beyond entertainment and well beyond any simple kind of information-delivery, insight-delivery, pedagogy-delivery. He argues that literature, some literature, has a formative effect. That its best use is to train readers' minds not in rote facts or rote ethics but in the particular methods of thinking and methods of being that are at work in the particular text.

[Roy Kenagy]

Publisher: "Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit. It reveals that authors are sometimes best thought of not as entertainers or as educators but as personal trainers of the brain, putting their willing readers through exercises designed to fortify specific mental capacities, from form-giving to equanimity, from reason to faith."

[James Klagge · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly learned book of literary criticism that is yet readable and engaging. The 80 pages of endnotes can be left to scholars if desired. The basic idea of the book is that much/some fiction is designed to transform the reader through the practice of reading, rather than through informing the reader. The case is made through 5 case studies--Chaucer, St. Mark, Mallarme, Plato and Beckett. It is hard to believe there are many (any?) readers who would be well-versed in all of these authors (I was well-versed in only 2 of them--St. Mark and Plato), but it is still quite readable even so. While I had some quibbles concerning Mark, I fully agreed concerning Plato and had some to add there.
The author is not claiming that all fiction is formative in this way, but that some (important) fiction is--so the case study approach is well-suited to his purpose.
I read the book with the hope that it would help me think about how Wittgenstein tried to transform his reader. The author hardly mentions Wittgenstein, except for the epigram to the Introduction, where he quotes him: "I don't try to make you believe something you don't believe, but to make you do something you won't do."

[Mattschratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't remember ever having read a theory/criticism book like this before and thought so clearly "yes, that is how I want to read." If you want to read books the way I do (which, to be sure, I do not recommend), then you can't do better than checking this one out for some really rich but accessible theorization.

[Alec L · Rating 4 out of 5]

While "How to Do Things with Fictions" is academically very ambitious, the introduction is nevertheless a wonderful argument for Landy's basic thesis that some books are best analyzed as being "formative" fictions---as a sort of training-ground with which the reader can *practice* how to think (a qualitatively different experience than the book simply *imparting* information on how to think). This beginning of the book serves as an effective articulation and framing (with plenty of academic references to other perspectives on the "purpose" of fictions), as well as an plea to move away from more naive perspectives like straightforwardly assuming that every work must "have a message". As the book progresses through, working through parts of the Canterbury Tales, the Gospel of Mark, Mallarme's poetry, Plato's dialogues, and Beckett's novels, it reads each of these in turn from a "formative" perspective to generate novel analysis and fairly strong claims (for example, that Plato's Socrates makes some arguments which the reader is *expected to recognize* as being wrong, rather than serving as e.g. a mouthpiece for Plato's own beliefs). It is somewhat difficult for me to evaluate the academic impact of Landy's claims (and indeed, when discussing the Gospel of Mark, Landy further moves towards making *theological* arguments), but at the very least (with very extensive endnotes and citations, in addition to what seems like a fairly comprehensive framing of the existing discussion for each work), it looks as though Landy is at least deeply aware of the disjoint discourses he is contributing to. Importantly, the fact that Landy takes on analyses of such disparate and difficult works, and in particular, works with which there is already so much sophisticated scholarly discourse, implicitly strengthens all his basic claims; it displays through example that the concept of "formative" fictions is strong enough to generate compelling and novel re-readings of well-trodden texts, leaving it as an exercise to the reader to apply it elsewhere. Indeed, a more accessible version of this book would be far less interesting and effective---the introduction is likely enough to convince the reader that Landy's basic claim is *true*, but the additional work is necessary to show that the concept is truly *useful*.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt like I had kind of a strange experience reading this book-- it's not like I disagreed with what Landy was saying, more like I wasn't interested in the same things he was in these texts.

The basic premise of his book and it's five chapters is that certain books-- the Gospel of Mark, some of the Canterbury Tales, Beckett's last three novels, the poetry of Mallarme, and a pair of Socratic dialogues by Plato-- have a second order effect, wherein they don't only present something we'd usually call a theme, but they also instruct us in how to read them, in order to disrupt our sense of closure, our ability to accept a theme.

And really, I find this an intriguing prospect, and when Landy's analysis aligned with my own, as it did in his chapter on Mark's parable of the sower, I totally agreed with him. But I struggled when Landy came to more literary texts, maybe because my training makes me ask other questions of these texts than what, precisely, are their designs on readers. I should be interested, I want to be interested, in how these texts rewire our interpretation apps-- but I wasn't. And I can't tell if the failing is in me, or if it's in Landy's approach.

I do know that the way he talks about texts seems to bracket questions of their value to readers-- there's no sense of why these books reward readers, or why they've endured. But I'm not sure that it's fair to take Landy to task for that, or that if he had tackled that question alongside the one that interested him, it would have made his book better instead of just longer.

Puzzled by the book, more than I'm driven to find out more.

[Tasshin Fogleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I especially liked the chapters on Chaucer and Mark (and its connection to Baudelaire!), and the Mallarme chapter made me want to read Mallarme. The Plato chapter was not terribly interesting to me, but it had a good explication of how you might read Plato formatively. I am probably in need of such assistance!

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

So choked with jargon, completely unreadable. Darn shame, because his ideas are interesting. Might have a go at it again some other time.