Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories, by Angus Fletcher

To paraphrase 18th-century British playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, this book contains a great deal of both what is new and what is true. Unfortunately, what’s new is not true, and what’s true is not new.

Mashing up his degrees in literature and in neuroscience, Angus Fletcher, professor of story science at Ohio State University, provides a spectacularly broad examination of narrative from Greek tragedy to Tina Fey’s sitcom 30 Rock. Each of his 25 chapters discusses related texts that allow for pseudoscientific explanations of different narrative “inventions”. Self-help sections, introduced by subheadings such as “Using the Secret Discloser Yourself”, demonstrate that literature is a technology to help us deal with emotions.

What’s true here is old hat. The “inventions” are simply new names for familiar literary devices. Omniscient narration, for example, becomes “the God voice”. Literary patterns are “blueprints”, while the novel, the epic simile and the twist ending are tarted up as literary “technologies”.

Fletcher promises to break new ground with neurological and psychological explanations of the effects of literary techniques (technologies) on the brain. Take, for example, Jane Austen’s use of irony, which resides in the cortex, and love, which resides in the amygdala. “By focusing our cortex and our amygdala on different narrative objects,” we are told, “literature can inspire a neural mix of wry perspective and romantic feeling.” So Austen’s “cortex-amygdala blend” is her “gift…to our neural circuitry”.

When science wags literary criticism, the results are unfortunate. For Fletcher, literature becomes a form of psychotherapy that releases hormones such as oxytocin and cortisol. Reading stimulates neurotransmitters such as dopamine and regions of the brain such as the amygdala. Unfortunately, most of these neurological claims are unsubstantiated and unsupported. Fletcher ignores relevant scholarly research and literary criticism, including cognitive theory-of-mind approaches and reader-response/reception theory.

By generating feelings such as love, empathy and serenity, literature becomes a “technology” for therapeutic self-improvement. Fletcher prescribes specific stories for their curative effects: if you’re depressed, try Euripides and “pivot into happiness” (the Invention of Clinical Joy). Read The Iliad to increase courage (the Invention of the Almighty Heart) or Cinderella to fight pessimism (the Invention of the Fairy-tale Twist). My favourite bit of advice is that, instead of taking LSD, readers should trip on John Donne’s poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, which “triggers the same neural pathways that go active in soul sight, stimulating a wonder loop…”

Each chapter ends with recommendations of additional works that will produce the effect of the specific “technology” discussed. (If Shakespeare’s “Sorrow Resolver” in Hamlet doesn’t do the trick, try Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.)

Although Fletcher’s reductive formula ultimately results in insights that are neither new nor true, he does tell a good story, I’ll give him that. Did I mention that he is a professor of story science? Although this discipline is newly invented and most attempts to interpret literature in scientific terms are fraught, if you can get past the neurological gibberish, much of Wonderworks is the retelling of many stories in a readable, engaging way that may make literature more understandable and appealing for the lay reader. Ultimately, however, Fletcher is weaving a tall tale.

Deborah D. Rogers is professor of English at the University of Maine. Her history of the university, Becoming Modern (co-edited with the late Howard Segal), will be published in January.

Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories
By Angus Fletcher
Swift, 464pp, £20.00
ISBN 978180070210
Published 2 September 2021