# La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay
(review)

Diana Mistreanu

► To cite this version:

Diana Mistreanu. La séduction de la fiction by Jean-François Vernay (review). SubStance, 2022, "Life Writing and Cognition", guest editor: Lisa Zunshine, 51, pp.151 - 155. 10.1353/sub.2022.0021 . hal-04749913

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PROJECT MUSE®

*La séduction de la fiction* by Jean-François Vernay
(review)

Diana Mistreanu

SubStance, Volume 51, Number 3, 2022 (Issue 159), pp. 151-155 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0021

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For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/872676
Review

Vernay, Jean-François. *La séduction de la fiction*. Hermann, 2019. 214pp.

Published in Hermann's prestigious "Savoirs Lettres" book series founded by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Vernay's latest work is a compelling neurophenomenology of literary fiction. This makes it a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of cognitive literary studies pioneered in Anglo-Saxon research in the late 1970s, but which French academia, with a few notable exceptions such as Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pierre-Louis Patoine, Alexandre Gefen, Catherine Grall, or Françoise Lavocat, is still largely reluctant to embrace. The author is a lecturer in Australian studies at the Global Institute in Sydney, and he is a bilingual literary scholar whose recent research explores the complex interface between fiction and human cognition.

Vernay's book starts by restating a narratological cliché: in the words of Paul Valéry, stories accompany humans from the cradle to the tomb, as monsters, pirates, fairies, and other fantastic creatures fascinate children's minds from the first years of their lives (7). A truism follows this cliché: the origin of any story is the human brain (16), as the author reminds us by underlining the bio-anthropological origins of fiction in pages that cite the works of Umberto Eco and Nancy Huston (the writer who coined the notion of "espèce fabulatrice," "the tale-teller species" [2008]), and that echo the research of scholars such as Mark Turner (1996) and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1999). Indeed, oral and written stories are not only created, but also interpreted by human minds, triggering states and emotions that range from extreme boredom to excitement and inviting identification with fictional characters. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of the interaction between the human mind and brain and one of its most sophisticated products, namely fiction, are largely still understudied in the field of literature. Placing fiction under the sign of seduction (8) – which allows us to read between the lines an homage to Roland Barthes, the theorist of the "plaisir du texte" referenced later in the book (85-86) – Vernay defines works of fiction as catalysts of a sensori-affective experience
that engages almost all our senses and arouses emotions ("*le vecteur d'une expérience sensori-affective qui sollicite la quasi-totalité de nos sens et suscite des émois*" [19]). Characterized by the interdisciplinarity that forms the core of cognitive approaches to fiction, Vernay's study investigates the literary phenomenon in its complexity, asking not only how fiction seduces us, but also why it sometimes fails to do so. Drawing on state-of-the-art research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the book manages to eschew over-simplified or reductionist analyses. Our engagement with and consumption of literary fiction is thus analyzed by discussing marketing strategies and editorial choices, the activity of reading as a solitary pleasure versus a professional obligation, as well as the interplay between society, politics, and educational curricula. The author answers his multi-layered research question in nine different chapters, each of them exploring one facet of the relationship between literature and the human mind.

The first chapter, "Émois livresques," highlights the marketing value of books, as well as their status as objects of consumption, in the capitalistic sense of the word. Books are presented here as the targets of our desire, since in financial terms, the notion of reader, the author reminds us, is a mere euphemism for that of consumer (20-22). As we are entering the era of what Yves Citton, often quoted in this essay, calls "cognitive capitalism," a system in which society is conceptualized as a set of machines that process information (21), fictional literature, along with the arts, is devalued. To counterbalance this trend, Vernay explains, the book industry has to adopt effective strategies that create a desire for consumption. Thus, this chapter addresses the editorial and marketing techniques designed to attract our attention and trigger our impulse to buy and read. From the smell and color of books to the blurb and the careful mention of literary prizes, no detail is overlooked or considered redundant.

After addressing the interplay between fiction, capitalism, and human behavior, the second chapter, "Pensez à le rendre!" (3-53), considers the relation between books and our affective processes. We are thus reminded that books arouse not only our impulse for consumption, but also an emotional attachment to objects – the books themselves – as well as to fictional characters, the latter being able to trigger our empathy and our identification mechanisms (33-42). The third chapter, "Au pays des merveilles" (55-69), addresses how we choose the books we read. The author establishes here a distinction between the professional reader, for whom reading is an obligation, and the hedonistic reader, who consumes fiction for recreational purposes. Making it clear that, contrary to age-old myths on emotion, cognition and emotion are intertwined, Vernay highlights the role played by emotion in election mechanisms. The chapter ends with an important reminder that draws on Stanislas Dehaene's famous work on
the neuroscience of reading, which understands the activity as function
performed by the brain (65-69).

The subsequent chapter, "Petits plaisirs solitaires" (71-88), is entirely dedicated to the "literary hedonism" (85) alluded to in the book's title. The author establishes a typology of the pleasure experienced by the reader of fiction by making a double distinction between cognitive pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction on the one hand, and anticipatory and consummatory pleasure on the other. Chapter V, titled "Petit guide de la séduction" (89-107), takes the exploration of the "seduction" of fiction one step further. In Vernay's view, a writer always writes for others (91), but mere writing is not enough, as they also have to seduce their audience. Among the strategies deployed in doing so, Vernay identifies the "mimetic will," which involves the desire to create the illusion that the storyworld is a "true" representation of the real one; the need to keep the reader interested and engaged through the use of curiosity, suspense, humor, and depictions of love; and a further need to spur their desire to read, which can sometimes take on an erotic form. Chapter VI, "Quand fiction rime avec émotions" (109-125), addresses the complex interplay between fiction and emotion, and constitutes one of the most important segments of this book. Here, the author insists upon the affective links that form between readers and books, and reminds us of the reward mechanisms associated with "consuming" books, which only reinforce our connections to them (122). The following chapter delves into our affective engagement with fiction by discussing topics such as empathy and identification, as well as the sense of entitlement, betrayal, and indignation readers might feel when their favorite characters and authors do not live up to their expectations. Although not quoted in this essay, Suzanne Keen's work on narrative empathy (2006, 2007, 2008, 2011) can provide a useful set of complementary insights for those who want to explore this topic further. The last two chapters, "Des bons usages de la fiction" (145-163) and "Plaisirs défendus" (165-185), place fiction on social, political, and educational grounds, and critique the French government's approach to teaching literature. The book ends with a plea for educational reform and urges us, as Vernay's earlier work does, to reintroduce the question of human emotion in the study of literary fiction.

This well-documented essay draws on state-of-the-art research in lit-
erary theory and cognitive science, including works by Françoise Lavocat,
Raphaël Baroni, Alain Vaillant, Yves Citton, Georges Vigarello, Serge Tis-
seron, Antonio Damasio, Norman Doidge, and Stanislas Dehaene. Indeed,
Vernay illustrates his ideas in excerpts of works by French and Australian,
as well as German, Japanese, and South American writers. In doing so, he
points to the fact that despite local and culturally constructed variations,
there are some universal invariants that define and shape our relation-
ship with literature. The book recalls the “affective turn” that emerged in
the humanities and social sciences in the mid-1990s, underscoring one of
its key contributions: the recognition that emotions play a major role in
literary interpretation. In Western philosophy, emotions have a long his-
tory of being marginalized or perceived through the lens of a binary logic
that opposed them to reason. However, contemporary neuroscience has
shown that emotions play a central role in reasoning, an idea that consti-
tutes the core of Vernay’s reflections on literature, which he convincingly
reiterates in citing researchers in both the humanities (Michel Lacroix,
Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, Jean-Marie Schaeffer) and cognitive science
(Antonio Damasio, Luiz Pessoa, Jean-Paul Forgas) who have called into
question the reason/emotion dichotomy. Vernay presents the somewhat
outmoded view of emotions that sees them forming in the limbic system
(63-64), a notion countered in recent, more nuanced assessments which
locate their origins in multiple regions of the brain (Rolls 2015; Feldman
Barrett 2017; Roxo et al. 2017). Vernay does, though, effectively challenge
the age-old opposition between emotion and reason by demonstrating the
extent to which our reading practices are influenced by what we feel and
by considering the ways in which affect can be manipulated by narrative
and stylistic strategies and by marketing forces.

This essay enhances our understanding of the complex interplay
between the human mind and literary fiction, but it also urges us to stop
ignoring the relationship between the two. The idea that the humanities
would benefit from familiarizing themselves with research on literature
being carried out in other fields – an idea previously advanced by cogni-
tive literary theorists such as Mark Turner, Lisa Zunshine, Jonathan Gott-
schall, or Patrick Colm Hogan – finds its echo throughout Jean-François
Vernay’s book. By reminding us that our interaction with fiction is an
embodied experience and by carefully analyzing the structure of that
experience, from the act of buying books to the immersion in the story-
worlds they depict and our identification with the characters that inhabit
these fictional worlds, Vernay provides a fresh perspective that expands
our understanding of how and why we read. Dedicated “to all those who
are – and even more so, to those who are not – conquered by the pleasure
of fiction” (“À toutes celles et ceux qui sont – et plus encore celles et ceux qui
ne sont pas – gagnés aux plaisirs de la fiction” [5]), La séduction de la fiction is
one of today’s most important Francophone contributions to the field of
cognitive literary studies.

Diana Mistreanu
University of Szeged
Works Cited

Feldman Barrett, Lisa. *How Emotions Are Made. The Secret Life of the Brain*. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Huston, Nancy. *L'espèce fabulatrice*. Actes Sud, 2008.

Keen, Suzanne. *Empathy and the Novel*. Oxford University Press, 2007.

---. "Readers' Temperaments and Fictional Character." *New Literary History*, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp. 295-314.

---. "Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial and Broadcast Narrative Empathy." *Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte*, vol. 82, no. 3, 2008, pp. 477-493.

---. "A Theory of Narrative Empathy." *Narrative*, vol. 14, no. 3, 2006, pp. 207-236.

Rolls, Edmund T. "Limbic System for Emotion and Memory, But No Single Limbic System." *Cortex*, vol. 62, 2015, pp. 119-157.

Roxo, Marcelo, et al. "The Limbic System Conception and its Historical Evolution." *The Scientific World Journal*, vol. 11, no. 5, 2011, pp. 2428-2441.

Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. *Pourquoi la fiction? Le Seuil*, 1999.

Turner, Mark. *The Literary Mind*. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Vernay, Jean-François. *Plaidoyer pour un renouveau de l'émotion en littérature*. Complicités, 2013.