Professor Oatley begins from the vantage point that fiction presents opportunities for the reader to ‘model’ or ‘simulate’ worlds. We become partners with authors in a play of fictional actions and emotions that trigger neurons in the very same centres in our brains that would be activated were we to be performing these actions or experiencing these emotions for real. The object of this play is social as we situate ourselves in a social world. And being so, it is at the same time conversational, that being a key component of the social. It turns out that talking about fiction, as readers, is one of the most useful things we could be doing.
Unsurprisingly this is rich ground for a cognitive psychologist and sometime novelist to plough. The main portion of the text sets up the basis for the fiction as simulation theory. Here, every statement seems to be supported by some psychological study. But few, if any, of the supporting materials are challenged. Which may be the way psychologists build positions, seemingly by accretion. For my part, I worry that the conceptual roots of these various studies and theories from the past hundred or more years may not, in practice, cohere so nicely. But perhaps this is merely a way of noting that psychology is not philosophy.
The final three chapters are especially interesting: ‘Writing fiction’; ‘Effects of fiction’; and ‘Talking about fiction’. The first of these provides some practical guidance for potential authors, drawing upon Flaubert’s writing practice. That practice consists in five phases: planning, scenarios, drafts (of which there are many), style, and finally the finished draft. The chapter on the effects of fiction asks whether reading literature is good for you. Oatley treats this primarily as a question about measureable outcomes such as increased cognitive or problem-solving abilities. He acknowledges that in a time of severe pressure on educational curricula, such demonstrable benefits may be essential to sustain literature’s place in our schools. But of course for many, the idea that literature might be good for you is really a question about whether it is morally improving. Here Oatley hands off to Martha Nussbaum’s writing, uncritically, to settle the matter. The final chapter may be particularly interesting to those of us who attend book clubs or participate in online discussions of our reading. Oatley states emphatically: “To talk about fiction is almost as important as to engage with it in the first place” (178). It’s a great statement and I agree with it, naturally, though I would prefer to see much more on the relation between such discussions and the (potential) moral benefits of reading literature. That, however, is not a criticism, merely a wish for future reading.
Although written for a general audience, Such Stuff as Dreams has a vast number of citations in the forty pages of endnotes that function almost as a parallel text. It seems, at times, as though Oatley has canvassed every possible study, monograph, or text at all relevant to his project. Thankfully his twenty-plus page bibliography should provide the keen student of these ideas ample fodder for further investigation.