Have you ever heard anyone airily dismiss the reading of fiction as "unproductive" or a "waste of time"? Like you're meant to be reading supposedly self-improving business books or whatnot, all with a view to learning how to kiss arse more effectively or rip people off more efficiently and thereby do your duty as a social climbing, aspirational and hardworking unit of production and consumption.
I've never actually bought that line. I was always an avid reader of fiction, even before learning that there exists a rather utilitarian explanation of the value of spending time on people who never existed and things that never happened (sometimes in places that never existed). Schema theory contends that we build mental structures of preconceived ideas, each such framework representing an aspect of the world we live in. These schemata influence how we absorb new information and ideas, allowing people not to waste the brain's processing power puzzling over phenomena which conform to their pre-existing calculations about how stuff works. Most of us in developed countries have each been to lots of different restaurants on many, many occasions. So you have built a restaurant schema built from your observations about things like how a dining area is laid out, how table service works, appropriate ways of interacting with the waiting staff and when you're expected to pay for your meal. Every now and then you find yourself in a restaurant which offers challenges to that restaurant schema. Perhaps you're in Portugal, tucking into small savoury items and bread rolls brought to your table before you've even read a menu. At the end of the meal you're surprised to learn that you have been charged for them. Or perhaps you go to a sushi bar with dishes on a conveyor belt for the first time. Either way, your brain will work hardest to make sense of anything which is new. Anything familiar (e.g. credit cards are accepted and this is made clear by a prominent sticker you see upon entering) requires much less processing power. Each new eaterie you visit offers opportunities for you to refresh your restaurant schema. That said, schemata are highly resistant to change and will only be significantly revised in the face of a critical mass of information which challenges their key assumptions.
An example of a strong challenge to my own restaurant schema concerns dining in Poland. When I first visited that country in 1993, most traditional restaurants offering table service and a relatively formal atmosphere featured something I had never observed at home in the UK - an old lady sitting at the entrance to the WC and expecting to receive a small cash tip for, as far as I could see, doing absolutely nothing. So I quickly adjusted my restaurant schema to account for this. It therefore quickly became an automatic habit to ensure I had a small denomination banknote (there were no coins in circulation in Poland at that precise time) on my person each time I went for a meal. Over time, however, the practice of having the WC staffed in this way fell out of fashion and my (Polish) restaurant schema needed to be revised again.
Where does fiction fit into this? Well, I contend that each time we walk in the shoes of some narrator in some book, we get to challenge our schemata. You certainly can't literally become another person and you probably won't visit most of the places or experience many of the events you read about in novels - definitely not in the case of stories set before you were born or in the imagined future. Literature, then, allows you to try out new ideas and new ways of using language to describe concepts and phenomena. It enables you to stretch and refresh the assumptions built up through your own limited observations and experiences. It does all this, moreover, very efficiently.
I reflected on this when I recently realised that my life's practical preoccupations had prevented me from reading any fiction since DECEMBER LAST YEAR. Such a long break from enjoying novels or short stories is without precedent in my adult life. I won't allow it to happen again. So I put aside what turned out to be a very boring and somewhat depressing examination of how UK governments waste money and picked up a slim volume of Vonnegut short stories. It's put a spring into my step at a time when that's no bad thing.
