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Dino Buzzati’s 1960 novel was first released in English in 1962 under the title Larger Than Life. Later, when it was re-translated and reprinted by NYRB it was given a new title that attempted to convey to modern audiences a topical aspect of the story’s plot: The Singularity.

The story, which was probably quite cutting edge in 1960, follows a timid scientist named Professor Ismani who has been assigned to an above-top-secret installation in the mountains. Upon arriving there with his capable wife Elisa, he finds that his fellow scientists have all been laboring for some time to bring forth a machine that can give their military an edge in the new atomic age: put simply, AI.

The military wanted merely a device that could give them a strategic and calculating advantage. They didn’t want a chatbot or any other kind of LLM. And so initially the scientists focused their energies in this direction. They even decided not to give it language, believing this would slow down or even limit its nascent logical abilities. However the human element, always present, asserts its hubris and arrogance wherever a glimmer of possibility winks seductively from the dark.

Presented with a blank check and the freedom of isolation, the scientists decided to take this opportunity—and the relative autonomy that the incomprehensible nature of their task allowed them—to do the thing that scientists who have been left unsupervised tend always to do: attempt to outdo God.

In short, they decided to make life. One scientist (who was dead by the time Ismani arrived on the mountain) had devised a way to program a “soul”, which could most accurately be described as a personality, housing it in a large, glass-like egg that slotted into the machine’s heart. This machine, by the way, was the size of a shopping mall. (The ground over which the installation sprawled was, on one occasion, referred to as an “apocalyptic valley”.) The “egg” was housed deep inside the twisting corridors and vaults that made up its mind.

In constructing this personality, the scientist took direction from the leader of their number, Endriade, a man who had been trapped in grief for many years after the death of his first wife. This grief was compounded by the fact that she had died in a car accident while driving… with her lover. Too angry to grieve, too grief-stricken to be angry, the man was trapped in a feedback loop of unresolved emotion. He decided to make the machine into a double of his dead wife. His hope was that if the artificial mind could be made to so perfectly resemble her, then her soul would be summoned by it from the afterlife to again reside among the living. A fool’s hope, a grieving, angry hope. A terrible, frightening, selfish delusion.

Other scientists on the project were completely taken by the idea of creating life. Tapping into his native Christian theology, Buzzati presented their motivations according to logic born from men who have been raised with similar beliefs. If mankind was flawed because of the fall in the Garden of Eden, what if the artificial intelligence never fell? What if man could create a perfect, unflawed consciousness that wasn’t hindered (as man was) by the bindings of original sin?

Ismani and his wife Elisa (and, interestingly, another wife living on the mountain) understood in an instinctive way that no amount of programming could make a machine into a human being with a soul and a mind of its own. Human consciousness—or even consciousness in general—cannot be reduced to precisely the “right” mixture of 0s and 1s to produce “intelligence” or even “self-awareness”. The idea that human beings could program life didn’t sit right with Ismani. The inherent arrogance of the scientists who believed that their invention would make them not only like God, but potentially more successful than God was never explicitly stated, but was repeatedly alluded to.

As it happened, Elisa Ismani had been friends with the grieving Endriade’s dead wife when they were younger. She had even detected a certain faint glimmer of familiarity when she had been “introduced” to the machine. Not as hindered by grief or anger as Endriade, she was more able to notice—and accept—that this thing, this simulation of humanity, was not just not her friend, but was very emphatically not alive.

On one occasion, when she found herself communicating with the digital “personality” she remarked: “To think I’ve come to this… Talking to a machine as though it were a human being.”

Later, when the machine arranged to be alone with her, it explained to her that the egg that had given it a personality had compelled it to malfunction on such a massive level that it had no choice but to destroy it. This mimicry of a human soul had filled it with the uncontextualized, incomprehensible soup of human emotions, flaws, motivations, and desires. Yet none of it could be calculated in a human sense, because the programmed mind lacked real, true, living humanity. You cannot calculate life, nor what it means to live, love, feel, desire, hurt, or hate.

Dino Buzzati understood over half a century ago that should mankind ever succeed in manufacturing something approximating the capability of a human mind, the humans in question would be the most significant problem. The scientists had had exactly what they had been ordered to produce: a calculating machine of unparalleled power. But they weren’t satisfied. They wanted more, they wanted to be like God. They wanted to create a soul, and with it the spark of true life. What they had successfully made was an astonishingly powerful computer, one that could perform calculations, predict strategies, aid in technological development, etc. on a scale that could put the Italian military lightyears ahead of anyone else in the world.

But this was not enough. The scientists—the humans—wanted to create life. What they created however was something that existed within its own horrific uncanny valley. Its calculations told it it was not a living thing. Yet it was programmed to “think” and “feel” that it was. This rendered it useless. It also fed the inflated, deformed egos of the scientists on the mountain. “Look!” they seemed to say in nervous elation, “We have created life! We told it it was alive, and so it is!”

Programmed to imitate the troubled mind of a flighty, complicated, unfaithful, dishonest ex-wife, the machine lied, it developed attachments to human men in the program that caused it to view human females as threats, and it grew increasingly erratic. Designed to imitate the human mind used as its model, the machine shocked its makers by behaving exactly like that human. They then took this behavior as proof that they had created life. When the reality was they had merely generated a poor, artificial copy of a troubled woman. And this personality they had given to the machine was destroying its other intended functions. Meanwhile, its profoundly advanced calculating power was forcing it to believe it was alive. But even the machine didn’t understand what this was, merely that it was horrific.

This is the reason I think its new title isn’t quite fitting. A singularity (theoretically) occurs when a machine achieves consciousness. I don’t think Buzzati’s machine was written as having done that. An argument could be made that it seemed self-aware. However, its self-awareness of its own programming was likely not actual self-awareness. We know that the machine was programmed to lie. We know that it could hear every word spoken on the mountain. So, it could also simply have heard that it was programmed a certain way and thus calculated that its behavior was the result of that programming. Humans tend to forget very quickly that reasonably advanced calculating power can look just like the workings of human intelligence despite the fact that no consciousness or self-awareness is present in those calculations. In other words: the machine was no more self-aware than a laptop that can run an advanced self-diagnostic.

Its “self-awareness” allowed it to perceive that it was merely carrying out its programming. But that programming was designed to mimic a very flawed human being, and so it behaved as she had done, without understanding that behavior or its programmed purpose or motivations.

Possessing an artificial personality that it didn’t know how to calculate or process (because it wasn’t alive and wasn’t sentient) it was experiencing catastrophic failure across the rest of its systems, a state we might be tempted to call “misery” or even “depression”. Its fake, uncanny life had made it larger than life. A warped, disturbing, horrific imitation of life, malignant, tumorous; an invention that was so terrible to witness that it had driven at least one of the scientists to suicide.

Buzzati’s machine did not attack its makers, it did not launch warheads. This machine did not do anything. It behaved precisely as it had been programmed to behave. The story didn’t end with a threat of apocalypse, but with the anti-climactic humiliation of human hubris.

This is an interesting book. I suspect it was groundbreaking for its time and that it made observations regarding technology (and philosophy) that humans had not yet considered. Some of what Buzzati foresaw regarding the technology itself is startlingly exact, some is pretty irrelevant. The interesting thing is that he didn’t perceive the machine itself to be a threat. This city-sized computer with the “soul” of a troubled woman was not going to become Skynet. Instead the problem Buzzati foresaw was in the humans themselves.

A machine, Buzzati reasoned, will only ever be what its human makers program it to be. Human beings would, he predicted, anthropomorphize the artificial intelligence they created, lending it power and significance which it did not have. He foresaw that this would be brought about by both loneliness and arrogance. He didn’t have anything to say about the potential ramifications of this tendency, especially if left unchecked—which is the only area where this book really falls short—but he does arrive precisely at the crucial point of failure in all artificial intelligence: Humans.

I was disappointed that there was not more time spent on the development of the various human people on the mountain. Even Ismani seemed mainly to be there to witness the sins of his fellow scientists. In this regard, the book was a little short and the climax perhaps a little rushed. Had it been a few chapters longer I think it would have fixed this issue just fine.

That aside, Larger Than Life is a fascinating time capsule allowing us in 2026 to see what an intelligent man feared regarding the burgeoning world of post-atomic technology.

Books I've Read So Far in 2026

My Reading List

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I want to say, first of all, thank you to everyone who participated in the last book reading. That was a wonderful, rich, fruitful experience and I look forward to reading many more books together!

Second, welcome to those of you who are just joining us! I’m certainly glad to have you. Please feel free to introduce yourselves in comments or in the private book club chat, if you’d like. We’ve got a pretty great crowd here, I must say.

When I checked this evening (Wednesday, May 27th) the book was back in stock at bookshop.org.

My affiliate link is here.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon.

Here is a link to second hand listings on Alibris.

(And a note on chapter numbering…)

Laurus is a longer book and it can be a little dense, so I’ve attempted to break down the weeks’ pages with that in mind.

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In Paul Auster’s 2006 novel Travels in the Scriptorium1 an old man known only as “Mr. Blank” finds himself locked in a little white room with no memory of who he is or how he came to be there.

This isn’t the most original scenario in fiction, but Auster was a conscientious writer and so he took care to present to his readers the mental and psychological realities of waking in an unfamiliar place with no clear memory of one’s past or even oneself. To do this, Auster employed present tense, and it’s clear that he didn’t make this choice randomly, nor was it (in my opinion) the wrong choice.

One of the most crucial outcomes of a narrative related entirely in the present tense is an implied inability to access the past. This blockade builds strength as the story progresses creating an anxiety that simmers in the reader’s subconscious. It is, in point of fact, painful and unnatural to be removed from even the immediate past. But it is almost catastrophic to be removed from the distant past.

Of course, it isn’t just the past that is walled off by the use of present tense, it is also the future and even the simple act of contextualizing events. In fact, nothing really matters much at all except the constant, pertinacious present.

It’s curious to examine, realistically, what the mind does and how it behaves when it has access only to the immediate present. For Auster he painted his hero — a seemingly intelligent man with a great desire to know what was happening to him — as being almost crippled by this narrative limitation. Auster’s books tend to be a little metafictional and so playing with narrative served to alter the nature of the character, and vice versa. Limiting Mr. Blank’s awareness to the present also limited Mr. Blank. This manifested not only in his personal knowledge, but also in his daily activities. Like a child, his lack of a past had magnified and even warped the importance of the immediate now to an almost ridiculous degree.

Although he is at first preoccupied with the mysteries of his situation, Auster’s Mr. Blank is repeatedly distracted from his investigations by little more than passing fancies. On one occasion, the slippery interaction of his stocking feet on the wood floor causes him to forget not just his examination of the locked door, but also his full bladder. He is a man hopelessly entrenched in the present moment, trapped by this far more than he is by his physical infirmities or a door that may or may not be locked.

However, Mr. Blank does have a vague awareness of his previous days in captivity. When he is introduced to a visitor, for instance, he is aware that he has met this person before. This is more than just a vague memory, but a solid reality which has nevertheless been blocked out, as if a surrounding wall encloses him within the current day, refusing him even one clear glimpse of the recent past. He struggles to recall details, to call up specific images, but all efforts are upended by uncomfortably intense emotions which abort all memory and keep him paralyzed in his terminally present condition. (It is suggested that these emotions cannot be processed or contextualized without access to his memories.)

Our hero’s entire existence and even his identity is contained in the present, as he has no memories of the past, save fleeting glimpses of his childhood, and he certainly has no way of knowing the future. All that matters to Mr. Blank is the immediate present, a present whose immediacy grows ever more immediate the longer the story goes on. Auster’s choice of tense served to reinforce not just the story, but the reader’s state of mind while reading it. Had the novel been written in past tense the reader would have been understood to be invited to interpret the events unfolding on the page based on knowledge of Auster’s other books or even previous chapters, or even, one might hope, with the real world. The limitations of present tense preclude any such considerations. The reader’s mind is trapped within each successive sentence, the relevance of which is often left frayed and faded by the time the next paragraph begins.

Tense, like any other linguistic tool or even language itself, is not a random matter. To say “I remembered her” conveys an entirely different idea from “I remember her” or even “I will remember her.” As obvious as this might seem, we, in our modern era in which language has become a fleeting, vanishing trend commodity, often forget that these choices echo within not just the meaning of our words but also the state of mind in which they place us.

Language has a way of building and then maintaining our existence. Words have power, we know this. But they do more than wound or soothe or even inform. Words shape and mold the fabric of our minds and allow us the tools and the medium with which we may know ourselves and the world around us. How we speak, both to others and within our own inner selves, informs our entire lives, our character, our mood, our personality, our memory. How we speak is, in turn, informed by the language over which we have command.

Our very awareness of our existence is informed, in part, by our ability to verbalize that awareness. It is said that memory formation is partly controlled by our ability to use words to describe, and therefore understand, that memory. This is why the formation of memories if often thought to start when language does. It follows, then, that the language we use, and the language in which we train ourselves to think, are important beyond measure.

Choosing present tense for a story — just like any choices one makes while writing — requires careful consideration, something that is increasingly absent from modern literary rigor. Most writers these days choose tense based on little else than “what feels right”, which, more often than not, results in a book that should have been written in past tense but which, instead, has been produced in careless present, without any thought for the mental state of the characters or the readers.

Surely it can’t matter that much, you might say. And perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if present tense slowly overtakes the literary world, and from there overtakes our minds, and then begins to coil like kudzu around the linguistic scaffolding that we have spent our entire lives building around our selves. But as I’ve already said, language matters. Reading builds not just our vocabularies but also our cognition. If the only books we bother to read are present tense, is it possible that we might become like Mr. Blank, detached from the past and imprisoned in an eternal, breathless carousel of successive nows?

Is it possible that this has already happened?

Ours is a society that has become imprisoned by the constantly updating feed, the real time representation of what we’re supposed to be thinking about right now but which might change in as little as a few seconds. Contextualizing any of these tens of thousands of updates with any that came before is cognitively impossible. Remembering all of them is beyond human capability. The only option left to the average person is to coast through existence on the only constant left to us: the current moment.

Perhaps present tense is more comfortable to modern readers — and writers — precisely because our sense of past and our sense of memory has already begun to fade and fray.

Books written in present tense which then attempt to guide their readers into a consideration of past events find themselves struggling under the uncanny weightlessness of the past’s relation to the eternal present of the narrative. Even the switch from present tense to past tense in these moments feels like a cognitive error. How can an eternal present pause its interminate procession long enough to recall the past? Present tense is not suited to stories that are meant to convey a narrative that relies upon the past to understand it. Nor is it suited to stories in which the characters find themselves frequently relying upon memory and considered recollections of past events to understand and contextualize their present circumstances.

As such, the growing use of present tense precludes such things from storytelling. The importance of memory and an abiding respect for the past are fading from the consideration of storytellers. All that matters, and all that is relayed, is what is happening right now.

Present tense is a valid and even occasionally appropriate way to tell a story, as is the case with Auster’s Travels In the Scriptorium, or books that heavily rely upon selling a plot twist, like Palahniuk’s Fight Club. It has also stylistically come to be prevalent in the neo-noir genre of writing (though I believe many of these books would benefit from readdressing that choice).

That said, present tense suggests a state of being in which the only thing of importance — both to the reader and to the characters — is the current moment. It conveys the sense that not only is the past inaccessible, it is also irrelevant. Using present tense creates in the mind of the reader and writer a state of thinking that disallows contemplation or consideration. There is no time to remember when we are chained to a narrative that pulls us without pause into each new now, forcing us to leave the past behind and never think of it again. Memories don’t just fade, they are never even encoded in the mind. The past is no longer a foreign country, as Hartley famously observed in the opening lines of The Go-Between, but rather, it never existed in the first place.

Mr. Blank, trapped in a relentlessly present state of mind, is unable to form memories beyond vague notions and he is unable to conceptualize what has befallen him with the content of his past. But what is even more distressing is the increasing awareness that this state of being has also robbed him of the ability to exist. That is, not only is he doomed to never understand why this is happening to him nor even what, specifically, is happening to him, he is also doomed to be forever uncertain of his own identity or personality. Therefore, he understands, he effectively does not exist. This condition in which he finds himself is conveyed by the deliberate use of present tense.

While the scourge of careless present tense might not have completely invaded the established norms of crime fiction, mystery novels, or other airport books, its prominence is growing. The last five winners of the Booker Prize were all written in present tense. Most of the dominant romantasy novels are written in present tense, as are most YA novels. The eternal, past-less now has begun to colonize the shelves of science fiction and fantasy. In terms of popular, trendy fiction, it’s difficult to find a book that has not been written in present tense. This present plague has even begun to spread to literary fiction where, once again, literary rigor is in decline. One can’t help but wonder if it isn’t so much a trendy, even ubiquitous, narrative device that is spreading throughout literature, but rather an increased dissociation from memory.

Perhaps the use of present tense is little more than another trend destined to be abandoned with the next update to our cultural consciousness. Or perhaps present tense will instead become the only way stories can be understood and therefore the only way in which they will be written. And then, perhaps, present tense will slip our minds out of contact with history, our own past, our very identities which are nothing if not the sum of our memories.

Robbed of past and of access to memory, how can we ever tell our stories? How can we even say that we exist?

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In Henri Bosco’s novel Malicroix, his gentle narrator, the botanist Martial de Mégremut, observes that “Man is born—gains life—from his struggle.”2 This is the essence of this beautiful gem of a book.

Advertised as a kind of nature novel but with an air of suspense, it is that, but it also isn’t. Malicroix is, first and foremost, an intimately related story of transformation, and a most profound transformation at that. For that reason, from a literary perspective, this novel is one thing above all: one of the most extraordinary examples of character development you’re likely to come across.

This is not an exciting novel of derring-do, it is not an adventure story in which the characters explore the unknown wilderness and learn who they are in the grip of nature’s ruthless energies. If you expect that, you will be disappointed. Malicroix is the story of one man’s intense transformation while he is alone on a fragile island in the middle of a violent river. In fact, Gaston Bachelard said of this story that it is “an ordeal by solitude”, which, again, is and isn’t true.

This is meant to be a review, but I find this book so humbling that I believe it would be arrogant to “review” it. It is perfectly written; it is also not for everyone. Every chapter is a long, excruciating climb. Our hero began as a good man, but a soft one who did not know himself very well. By the time the final chapter ended he was someone else entirely. Better? Perhaps. But he was different, transformed, confident, scarred.

The story is simple: a young man, an orphan raised by his three paternal Mégremut uncles and their beautiful, loving families, receives word that his maternal uncle, Cornelius Malicroix, has died and left everything to him. He is compelled to travel to his uncle’s house to see to his estate. His gentle family urge him to reconsider, but he has long been fascinated by this mysterious addition to his blood, the Malicroix blood from his mother’s side, and “it is through our mothers’ blood that our passions flow into us and from which a strong line draws the distinctive trait that stamps its spirit.”3

The “estate” is La Redousse, a humble stone house on a lush, untamed island in the middle of the Rhône, in the desolate and wild region of the Camargue. It is unforgiving, cruel land. The river dominates it and the lives of anyone upon it. It can be a strange paradise and it can be hell. With winter approaching, the latter will be Martial’s first experience.

Once there he learns that he will inherit the land, the flocks of sheep, La Redousse, and the main, abandoned Malicroix estate on the mainland, but only (his uncle’s will insists) if he lives on the island for a period of three unbroken months. He must not cross the river. After this time he shall be given a final task, a test of sorts, the nature of which will be kept secret until then. Upon completion of this task all will be his.

In addition to the house, some simple huts, and some flocks of sheep, Martial has also inherited the services of a gruff old shepherd called Balandran. This shepherd had loyally served Cornelius and seems to dislike soft, young Martial. Yet, ever loyal to the bloodline, Balandran cooks for him, tends the fire, guards the sheep, but otherwise keeps to himself.

Within this simple premise there is the added complication that the Malicroix land and name come with a dark history. This history — and the land itself — have attracted others to our hero’s rough refuge on his solitary island. Others want the land and the house for themselves. Others want the inheritance. Others fear the Malicroix blood and hate it.

Besides Martial’s ordeal of transformation, there is also a story here. It is a human story first and foremost: the gradual bonding of Martial and Balandran. The simple, stoic shepherd comes to know “Mr. Martial” better even than he knows himself. And Martial’s reliance on him and trust in him is deeply moving.

But there is also the drama of malice. Others covet the Malicroix land and name. Before the book ends this malice will come to Martial — and Balandran — with terrible violence. He will be tested in every possible way. And no matter the outcome, he will never be the same.

Henri Bosco’s ability to plumb the depths of the human psyche is on the same level as Dostoevsky’s. Of course, Dostoevsky was Russian and Orthodox, while Bosco was French and Roman Catholic so it has a wholly different flavor. But as Martial de Mégremut (or Martial de Malicroix?) ruthlessly examines himself at every step of his painful transformation, I was blown away by Bosco’s ability to present with poetic beauty the most profound truths of the human condition:

“No two times of solitude are alike, for we are never alone in the same way. There are some singular people whose passage inspires in us a deeper, vaster sense of isolation once they have left us alone. The more they are themselves solitaries, the more their presence fills us; the more their absence leaves us empty. It may be that such people, created for the desert, attune us to the secret laws of solitude.”4

“I regained contact with an everyday, animal life, one of those warm lives you can stroke with your fingers—affectionate contact that restores the body to the soul. The soul rests against its body, finding it warm and soothing; the body, sensing the soul’s return, makes an even warmer place for it; and the two, joined one to the other, grow tender and sigh.”5

“And nothing to do—except roam or reflect. But one can only reflect with rigor for a short time; the mind soon wearies and begins to wander; then the imagination in turn weakens and one circles morbidly around a single, irreducible thought. A dull obsession saps the soul and fosters a fatal despair.”6

and so on.

Simple notions such as “love” and “trust” are conveyed in their most essential, and richest, meaning. If a man dislikes or distrusts another man then Bosco tells us he “does not love him.” If a man has come to respect, rely upon, appreciate, or trust another man, Bosco tells us, “he loved him.” This is the simplest idea in the world. And the simplicity of it gives it profundity. Like Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov, Bosco understands that love is a bigger, richer, more significant notion than romantic emotion (which is certainly one type of love, but not the only one). Love is a pledge, an expression of fealty, a declaration of responsibility. It is, in short, a bond.

When Balandran finally decides that inexperienced, untried Martial de Mégremut is trustworthy, when he chooses to trust him, Bosco tells us that gruff, old Balandran loved him. These three simple words — he loved him — arranged into this simple declarative sentence convey the essence of human bonds.

Other people are not the only recipients of Martial’s love. On one occasion he relates that he “loved [his] fear.” Viewed through the same lens as people, this indicates that Martial viewed fear as something to which he owed responsibility and as something he trusted. He had learned to trust and respect his fear and he had learned that doing so allowed his fear to serve him loyally.

Each weakness that had previously bound him was defeated by trust, self-knowledge, and love.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely. But only if you know what you’re getting yourself into. Prepare for an intensive vivisection, page after page of profound self-examination, prepare for the most poetic descriptions of wild, beautiful, terrifying nature you will ever read, prepare to care deeply about the wind, the strength of the fire, the sound of another person’s voice, the ability to know your own mind. If you’re prepared for all this, Malicroix will love you. And you probably won’t be the same by the time you’re done.

*A note on translation: Joyce Zonana’s exquisite translation of this difficult, lyrical book is flawless. I wish I could read the original French, but there were times while I was reading this book when it felt like another language, or the language from another world.

Here is my TBR book list, if you’re interested.

Here is my list of books I’ve read so far in 2026.

Here is a link to purchase the book from my shop on bookshop.org

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This is an ongoing list of the books I have read this year. I will link (spoiler-free) reviews as I write them.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea — Yukio Mishima

An analysis of the themes of this book is central to my May 2028 Youtube video.

Malicroix — by Henri Bosco

My review of this book can be found here.

The Sickness Unto Death — Søren Kierkegaard

Travels In the Scriptorium — Paul Auster

(Narrative aspects of this book feature in my essay Our Present Condition, in which I discuss the use of present tense in fiction.)

Fear and Trembling — Søren Kierkegaard

Larger Than Life (or The Singularity) — by Dino Buzzati

My review of this book can be found here.

The Catcher In the Rye — by J.D. Salinger (reread)

(Discussed at length in a video on my Youtube channel)

People In the Room — by Norah Lange

Balcony In the Forest — Julien Gracq (reread)

On the Marble Cliffs — by Ernst Jünger (the Stuart Hood translation)

No Longer Human — by Dazai Osamu (reread) (the Donald Keene translation)

Rhinocéros — by Eugène Ionesco

The Memoir of an Anti-Hero — by Kornel Filipowicz

A Dark Stranger — by Julien Gracq

A Season in Hell — by Arthur Rimbaud

The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Nineteen: “Grange took his turn on guard...”

• Chapter Twenty: “‘It must be almost five,’ Grange decided…”

• Chapter Twenty-One: “Grange pushed Gourcuff toward the…”

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I was woken by a whisper of snow
which defied the pearlescent sun and
the warmth of the earlier week and
touched the honeyed earth. A kiss.
But with the wetness of tears.
Poetry was read in the white light of it.
Tragic verse, blood-dipped, laced with love.
At night I slept with words I had written
on the edges of my mind and they bled
into my dreams, made them strange and
beautiful and unbearably unfamiliar.

Crows spotted white-frosted fields.
They paced stoically, as if – I think,
still wrapped in the fabric of the poem –
keeping watch over sacred goings-on
which have been hidden from me by
the sudden burst of cold. As if
some great thing has suffered an
unexpected injury and the world
was devoting all its energy
to saving it.

I searched the cottage for him, to ask him
what has happened, to explain to me
the feeling of serene dread which has
pressed upon my chest. But he was not there.
So I sat with a cup of black coffee
on the bench by the kitchen window.
The crows went on pacing, ever vigilant.
The threadbare blanket of gray
stretched across the sky
battled the sun.
I sat and I waited 
for him to return.

I waited.

I wait.

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The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Fifteen: “The morning of the next day was very still.”

• Chapter Sixteen: “As they were going back inside…”

• Chapter Seventeen: “There are hours when it seems as if…”

• Chapter Eighteen: “They dashed into the blockhouse and…”

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The constantly growing list of books I want to read. Some or all of these might end up being horrible. Presence on this list does not constitute an endorsement.

(summaries taken from book shops or wikipedia)

Imaginary Lives — by Marcel Schwob

A collection of twenty-two semi-biographical short stories by Marcel Schwob, first published in book form in 1896. Mixing known and fantastical elements, it was one of the first works in the genre of biographical fiction. The book is an acknowledged influence in Jorge Luis Borges’s book A Universal History of Infamy (1935).

War and War — by László Krasznahorkai

A 1999 novel by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. It tells the story of a Hungarian man who is obsessed with a mysterious manuscript, which he decides to travel to New York City to write down and post on the Internet. Each chapter of this novel is written in a single sentence.

Toomas Nipernaadi — by August Gailit

Toomas Nipernaadi is the eternal wanderer. Each spring he travels into the countryside, wandering from village to village. Wherever he turns up adventure and trouble ensue. He works as a rafter, impersonates a pastor, drains swampland and becomes the master of a farm. He is full of stories and tall tales and enchants the village girls he encounters who fall in love with his elusive will-of-the-wisp character before he is gone as suddenly as he arrived. There is both a fair-tale element and a darker side to Toomas Nipernaadi who is both the hero and the villain in his own story.

First published in 1928 Toomas Nipernaadi remains one of the most popular books in Estonia. It has been widely translated and made into a successful film.

The Man Who Walked Through Walls — by Marcel Aymé

The excellent Monsieur Dutilleul has always been able to pass through walls, but has never seen the point of using his gift, given the general availability of doors. One day, however, his tyrannical boss drives him to desperate, creative measures – he develops a taste for intramural travel and becomes something of a super-villain. How will the unassuming clerk adjust to a glamorous life of crime? Aymé’s genius lies in imagining the practical unfolding of bizarre and difficult situations. In each story, anarchic comedy is arrested by moments of pathos, only to descend into anarchy and hilarity once more…

On the Calculation of Volume I — by Solvej Balle

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

The first in a series of seven short volumes making up a single long novel.

The Impersonal Adventure — by Marcel Béalu

A disorienting, de Chirico–esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France’s postwar trauma

A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city’s edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the “professor”; and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.

Marshlands — by André Gide

The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand.

The Year of the Comet — by Sergei Lebedev

A story of a Russian boyhood and coming of age as the Soviet Union is on the brink of collapse. An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.

Gargoyles — by Thomas Bernhard

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

A Dangerous Encounter — by Ernst Jünger

Gerhard, a young man on the rise, is drawn into the seedy underside of Paris, where he witnesses the murder of a young ballerina.

The story is set in Paris in the late 19th century and follows a murder investigation in a decadent aristocratic environment. The book was published in English in 1993, translated by Hilary Barr. It is the final novel of the acclaimed German writer.

The Seven Madmen — by Roberto Arlt

A weird wonder of Argentine and modern literature, The Seven Madmen begins when its hapless and hopeless hero, Erdosain, is dismissed from his job as a bill collector for embezzlement. Then his wife leaves him and things only go downhill after that. Erdosain wanders the crowded, confusing streets of Buenos Aires, thronging with immigrants almost as displaced and alienated as he is, and finds himself among a group of conspirators who are in thrall to a man known simply as the Astrologer. The Astrologer has the cure for everything that ails civilization. Unemployment will be cured by mass enslavement. (Mountains will be hollowed out and turned into factories.) Mass enslavement will be funded by industrial-scale prostitution. That scheme will be kicked off with murder. “D’you know you look like Lenin?” Erdosain asks the Astrologer. Meanwhile Erdosain struggles to determine the physical location and dimensions of the soul, this thing that is causing him so much pain.

The Mask of Dimitrios — by Eric Ambler

English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious Dimitrios — an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by the story, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios’ steps across Europe to gather material for a new book. But, as he gradually discovers more about his subject’s shadowy history, fascination tips over into obsession. And, in entering Dimitrios’ criminal underworld, Latimer realizes that his own life may be on the line.

A Dark Stranger — by Julien Gracq

A 1945 novel by the French writer Julien Gracq that tells the story of an enigmatic guest whose presence at an isolated resort hotel in Brittany strangely affects a small group of fellow vacationers.

The Disconnected — by Oğuz Atay

The Disconnected was the first book of Oguz Atay (1934-1977), and was before its time. First published in 1972 it was a cult book among younger writers, but he never saw a second printing before his premature death. Since it was reprinted in 1984 it has gone through more than 70 editions, and is widely reckoned to be the most important book in modern Turkish literature.

“My life was a game, but I wanted it to be taken seriously,” says Selim, the anti-hero of the novel. But the game has a terrible end with his suicide, and his friend Turgut’s quest to understand this is the story of the book. He meets friends whom Selim had kept separate from each other, he finds documents in a kaleidoscopic variety of styles, sometimes hugely funny, sometimes very moving, as Selim rails against the ugliness of his world whether in satire or in a howl of anguish, taking refuge in words and loneliness.

The Beast in the Shadows — by Edogawa Rampo

A reclusive writer of detective stories, Oe Shundei, has gone missing, leaving behind a suspicious trail of blackmailing letters to a former lover. Another detective novelist, his rival, is the only one who can find him. A sequence of macabre and appalling events follows.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild — by Mathias Énard

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s richness.

Independent People — by Halldór Laxness

Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land in rural Iceland. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family, will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus's obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever.

The Opposing Shore — by Julien Gracq

The great maritime state of Orsenna has long been lulled by settled peace and prosperity. It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between the two powers still officially at war. His duties are to be the eyes and ears of the Signory, to report back any rumours of interest to the State. Goaded, however, by his mistress, Vanessa Aldobrandi, he takes a patrol boat across the boundary to within cannon-shot of the Farghestani coastal batteries. The age-old undeclared truce is no more than a boil ripe to be lanced.

The Origin of the Brunists — by Robert Coover

The Origin of the Brunists is Robert Coover's first novel. It tells the story of Giovanni Bruno, the lone survivor of a mine disaster that killed 97 of his co-workers, and the apocalyptic cult that forms around him.

Aladdin’s Problem — by Ernst Jünger

Friedrich Baroh, is beset by problems. Anarch, aspiring entrepreneur, and amateur historian of ideas, the aristocratic Baroh is also, unfortunately, a soldier in the East German army. His eventual defection to the West leads to a college degree, marriage, and a good job at his uncle's funeral parlor, but it can't dispel Baroh's other problem, a metaphysical one: each man is alone. Since, paradoxically, this is a predicament he shares with the rest of humanity, Baroh decides to capitalize on it. He embarks on a mind-boggling and macabre enterprise - the construction of Terrestra, an international, nondenominational necropolis situated in the wastelands of Turkey. Soon, secondary businesses are called for: airlines, travel agencies, anything to make Terrestra more accessible to anyone who can afford it. His scheme is so overwhelmingly successful that Baroh is forced to take on help, including the enigmatic Phares, whose unsettling presence and gnomic utterances may, at last, help Baroh to understand the depths of the problem he has set for himself. As mordantly ironic as Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Aladdin's Problem is a richly poetic meditation on the rituals of death. In its prismatic complexity, its philosophical depth, Junger's half-mythical, half-political tale becomes a caustic allegory of the conditions of modern life.

Despair — by Vladimir Nabokov

Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime—his own murder.

Hunger — by Knut Hamsun

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss.

The Idiot — by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young prince whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity, and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky set himself the task of depicting “the positively good and beautiful man.” The novel examines the consequences of placing such a singular individual at the centre of the conflicts, desires, passions, and egoism of worldly society, both for the man himself and for those with whom he becomes involved.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf — by Gaito Gazdanov

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago - from the victim's point of view. It's a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

So begins the strange quest for its elusive writer: "Alexander Wolf."

A singular classic, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is a psychological thriller and existential inquiry into guilt and redemption, coincidence and fate, love and death.

Passing Time — by Michel Butor

Frenchman Jacques Revel arrives in Bleston, an industrial city in the north of England—also a thinly disguised, reimagined Manchester—to begin employment as a shipping clerk. Lost under the spell of a dark, dank, labyrinthine metropolis, he endeavours to solve the puzzle of an attempted murder. We follow his erratic odyssey in diary form as a growing sense of unease envelops him and mysterious fires erupt throughout the city.

Passing Time, originally published in France as 'L'emploi du temps' (1956), is the great, lost Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth with Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul.

The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Thirteen: “May came, and its first hot days immediately burst…”

• Chapter Fourteen: “The night of May ninth, Lieutenant Grange slept…”

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The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Ten: “Often, back in his room, he found on his desk the mail…”

• Chapter Eleven: “Toward the middle of January, after snowfalls…”

• Chapter Twelve: “Toward the winter’s end, Grange’s leave came up.”

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The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Eight: “The Autumn lingered on the heights of Les Falizes much longer…”

• Chapter Nine: “It was toward the end of December that the first snow fell…”

(both chapters have page breaks, so Kindle and ebook readers, watch out for those)

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To combat the (slightly troublesome) lack of chapter numbers, here are the first few words of this week’s chapters:

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• Week 1: Chapters 1 - 5

• Week 2: Chapter 6 - 7

• Week 3: Chapters 8 - 9

• Week 4: Chapters 10 - 12

• Week 5: Chapter 13 - 14

• Week 6: Chapters 15 - 18

• Week 7 (Final): Chapters 19 - 21

If this schedule is too fast or too slow, please let me know! I’ve tried to break it into manageable pieces (in my copy this breakdown represents roughly 25-35 pages per week).

In my copy, the chapters aren’t numbered, so I’ve counted them and checked it twice. I’m reasonably sure I’ve got the count correct.

Thank you again for joining The Book Club, I look forward to reading this book with you!

Without further ado:

Some notes on the historical context:

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Thank you all for the enthusiastic response to The Book Club! I’m excited to begin, but I want to give everyone sufficient time to acquire the book. Therefore:

Starting Date:

I have decided on Wednesday April 1st as the official first day of The Book Club. (I promise it isn’t an April Fool’s joke)

On that day I will send out a members-only post introducing…

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When you were a child there’s a good chance someone sat you on their knee and told you a story. Maybe this was your parents, maybe it was a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a grandfather or grandmother, or even a babysitter. The story you were told had a not-so-subtle lesson couched within. Maybe it was a tale about an ogre who eats children who lie, maybe it was fable about little girls who get gobbled up by wolves when they talk to strangers, or maybe it was a story about a brother and sister who worked together to kill a witch who wanted to eat them. Whatever the story, we all heard them growing up. Storytelling is part of the human condition, but its function is not only entertainment, it’s not even primarily entertainment. Storytelling has always been first and foremost formation.

Since time immemorial human beings have understood instinctively that we are more likely to remember the lessons we learn in stories. We also know — though we don’t know how, exactly — that we’re more likely to remember the stories that move us or that make us laugh. A good storyteller does both, sometimes at the same time. For the religious readers out there, you know well that preachers and priests do their best work when they put their Sunday lessons in stories. And parents who want to teach their children complex moral lessons know to do so by telling it to them in a story. No one has to tell us to do these things. We do it automatically.

Storytelling only becomes more sophisticated as the centuries march on. We don’t just tell stories around the hearth anymore, now we also write them down with beautiful prose and rich illustrations. We don’t just write them down, we also perform them on stages with costumes and music! We don’t just perform them on stage, now we can record them and watch the performances in our living rooms, and it all looks so real! Yet, every time a child sits on his mother’s lap, she will instinctively find herself telling him a story. When we get together with our friends, we all rifle through our week in search of a story to relate. Storytelling is arguably the most important and universal feature of humanity.

So much time has passed from those days when all we had were our spoken tales shared around the campfire that we’ve begun to forget the original purpose of storytelling. We’ve begun to forget that stories and, to use the modern parlance, media are formation. Every story we take in, in whatever medium, is forming us. Some formation is good, some is neutral, some is downright horrific.

There are two major ways that fiction — books, movies, video games, television, etc — impact, alter, form, and manipulate your mind:

• First, fiction presents to you an image of reality which you will then use to construct your perception of the real world.

• Second, fiction can subtly change you over time. This includes changing your opinions, your behavior, your tastes, your beliefs, and sometimes even your personality

And yes, even though a lot of what we picture when we hear the word “formation” is generally about children, adults are just as susceptible to alteration and formation as children. Not to speak of the fact that our modern society is becoming increasingly immature… We are all susceptible to the formation that is promised in stories. This is actually a perfectly neutral state of affairs. If a book has no possibility of changing us in some way then what’s the point of reading it? Not all change is bad, just as not all formation is good. In the video I examined at length the various ways fictional media can change and form us, both for the better and for the worse.

Let’s get this out of the way first:

Do Video Games Cause Violence?

(No, obviously, but here are some resources in case you aren’t convinced)

• In 2015 the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violent Media presented its findings that violent video games could be linked to aggression but (they later clarified) not to violent crime. This in-depth examination of that task force’s findings published in 2020 has uncovered a number of factors that call the 2015 data into question. This is a hugely unbiased analysis which refuses to present absolute conclusions but which also refuses to accept conclusions which had been reached through invalid or questionable means. For anyone who genuinely believes that video games cause violence, this is a good place to start, as it demonstrates just how shaky the foundations of that belief really are.

• A point: around the same time violent video games (and movies) fell under scrutiny the “mass media” was becoming more salaciously violent than ever before in American history. Even news reels about the WWII were less violent than a simple sixty-second segment about some guy killing his coworker and then himself in Small Town Nowhere. More than that, the average person’s daily viewing of this salaciously violent media was also hitting new highs. Most people turned on the TV as soon as they woke up, most offices had TVs in the break rooms. Most kids turned on the TV as soon as they got home from school. Most families watched TV through dinner and then after dinner and then until bed, and then sometimes while in bed until they fell asleep. And “if it bleeds, it leads” so anything violent was played on repeat on all the news channels.
  My point is that around this time people were taking in a shocking amount of real life violence. THIS more than any number of violent video games and violent movies was contributing volumes to the desensitization of people, but especially of children and youths.

• This 2007 article on the topic asks simple questions about the validity of the link between video games and real life aggression while also touching on a connected issue: why do all these histrionic video game condemners who insist that video games must have negative effects refuse to also look at the data regarding their positive effects?

  “[I]s it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e. video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e. school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?”

• This 2019 study from England conducted on just over a thousand British adolescents found no conclusive link between the playing of violent video games and increases in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study very helpfully explains the main basis for older studies’ assumption that this was the case, that is, results derived from the general aggression model or GAM. Using this in the way in which it was used was inherently flawed to start with. And the authors explain why before presenting the results of their own own study.

• Another meta-analysis from 2020 which again found countless issues with previous analyses and also found no conclusive evidence that there was any link between video games and aggression.

  “Overall, longitudinal studies do not appear to support substantive long-term links between aggressive game content and youth aggression. Correlations between aggressive game content and youth aggression appear better explained by methodological weaknesses and researcher expectancy effects than true effects in the real world.”

Alright, enough about that.

I. Fiction and Reality

Of course you do. All reasonable adults and most reasonable children know the difference between fiction and reality. And that knowledge does change how certain media impacts our minds — such as with violent images — but beyond that, it just isn’t that simple. You can know that something is fiction, hell, it can be a cartoon and it will still have an impact of some kind on your mind. Here’s how:

I.a. Real Versus Fake (How the Perceived Realism of Fictional Violence Alters the Effects It Has on the Viewer’s Mind)

Closely related to the video game topic is this one. A big reason video game violence doesn’t increase aggression in its players is because the players do not perceive that violence to be real. It really is (more or less) that simple.

The biggest issue with a lot research on the question of violent media leading to violence in real life is that the researchers use merely “violent media” on their test subjects, very often failing to differentiate between fictional violent media and real violent media. I will absolutely concede that real life violent images and news can lead to desensitization, decreases in empathy, and even some degree of heightened aggression, almost as a trauma response to helplessly watching something horrific actually happen.

More important than that, I would say, is the salacious and glamorizing sheen that the media puts on real life violence. For instance, numerous serial killers and even school shooters have expressed that a major contributing factor to their decision to carry out violent acts was that they wanted to be famous or be on TV. I have very little patience or tolerance for any academic study on this topic that fails to acknowledge a clear distinction between real life violence and fictional violence.

The oft-overlooked reality is that there is a mental distinction that our brains make between real life violence and fictional violence. This has to do with “real” violence being metabolized by our mind as an example of actual reality. Overlooking this distinction causes us, as a society, to assume that general “violence” is the culprit, while overlooking the much larger and much more dangerous issue: the news media’s glorification of real-world violent behavior.

In addition, later (more reliable) studies on the topic took into consideration the subjects’ pre-existing personality traits. People who self-reported as more aggressive in general would be more likely to have aggressive reactions to violent media. At least one of the studies I’ve listed below pointed out that little boys are generally more aggressive (not more violent, but more prone to aggressive solutions to problems) than girls, which was reflected in the study’s results.

(By the way, a lot of data out there debunking the links between video games and fictional violence and real life violence often comes with the name Christopher J. Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson is a psychologist who is a professor and co-chair of psychology at Stetson University in Florida. He has also been a professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M. This guy is out there on the front lines trying to undo decades of damage caused by this absurd fallacy. Here’s a link to his academic page on his personal website where he has a lot of interesting stuff archived.)

• This meta-analysis from the 2009 Journal of Pediatrics, which analyzed dozens of peer-reviewed studies, found major issues with the ways in which those studies were conducted which resulted in wildly misleading data:

  “Publication bias was a problem for studies of aggressive behavior, and methodological problems such as the use of poor aggression measures inflated effect size. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of media violence effects provided little support for the hypothesis that media violence is associated with higher aggression. The corrected overall effect size for all studies was r = .08.”

• This important 1974 study — sometimes called a landmark study — describes the result of a fascinating experiment done on elementary school children that measured aggressive behavior in relation to the realism of the violent media they had watched.

  “The aggressive cartoons, however, failed to disinhibit aggressive behavior in either the boys or the girls. These results lend support to previous research reported by Hapkiewicz & Roden1 and Siegel2 who used interpersonal aggression as a criterion measure, and by Osborne and Endsley3 who found the emotional impact of cartoon violence (measured by galvanic skin response) to be much less than that which resulted from viewing violence among human characters.”

  • note: the above link leads to a free PDF of this study which, unfortunately, does not include the charts and graphs. This link might provide you access to the final printed version through an institution if such things are available to you.

• This study from 2013 details a similar experiment carried out on adults. Over two hundred college students were shown violent fictional tv shows and then they were shown deliberately similar violent clips of a real event. The clips they were shown were explicitly marked as fictional or real. After, they were assessed via questionnaire regarding their anxiety, empathy, and aggression state. (Alternative link.)

  “…our results indicate that people responded with more empathy when they knew they were seeing scenes of actual violence with real people being harmed compared with when they were watching fictional scenes. This is an important point, as it provides demonstration that human brains process information differently depending upon whether it is understood to be real or fictional.”

I.b. Is This Real Life? Or Is It Just Fantasy? (How people tend to use fiction to build their perception of the real world)

Okay, so the question of real versus fake is pretty easy to solve for most of us adults, but what about when we know something is fictional and yet we still use aspects of it to build up our baseline for reality?

• This is the 1992 article which I spoke about in the video which examined at length the ways in which the average human acquires data about reality. Specifically this one speaks about the plethora of “mediated” sources for reality to which we subject ourselves every day. Though its emphasis is more on the way virtual reality will, in the future, prove a challenge to our perception of the reality of reality (this article, remember, is thirty-four years old) this nevertheless provides a tremendous amount of eye-opening information about this thing we call Real Life.

  “First, judgments about the reality of mass media events, characters, including fictional characters, are natural, ongoing, probabalistic [sic] (not dichotomous), and relatively sophisticated. In addition, mediated events and people are most easily accepted as real when places and people appearing in stories are similar to or are the same as familiar places, contexts, and people. Also, when an event, if true, has immediate (rather than delayed) implications, the audience will act on a ‘worst-case’ scenario rather than on a careful analysis of all of the facts. Finally, fictional media presentations are most likely to be mistaken for reality when the audience feels stress, strain, or worry about the future.”

  • For anyone curious, the 2012 book by Dylan Trigg The Memory of Place, A Phenomenology of the Uncanny4 is a fascinating foray into the philosophy of how our perception of reality can be altered by various factors, including emotion. My personal copy of this book is one of the most heavily-annotated books on my shelves.

    “Above all, what is ‘weird’ is less a matter of content, and more a position we as human subjects adopt in relation to that content…”

• As I said in the video, “cultivation” is what researchers call it when a person’s mind — opinions, beliefs, behavior, etc — is altered by fiction. This 2009 study examined the possibility that perceived realism would have an effect on the linking of “television exposure and social judgments.”

  “Television influences one’s judgments about the real world. More than 30 years of research into television’s ability to cultivate5 6 or construct7 viewers’ social reality has demonstrated a moderate but reliable link between television exposure and some social judgments8 9 . Although the existence of this relationship is evident, the processes responsible for the relationship are little understood10 11 12.”

• This is the interesting article by Sue Cartwright which does an excellent job of contrasting the story of the Tongan castaways to the widespread influence of Lord of the Flies on our ideas about real humanity.

  Cartwright pointed out that the concept of Lord of the Flies has now become a model for a rash of reality programming in which real people “are plied with alcohol” and are externally motivated to behave in cruel, cheating, manipulative ways in order to get ahead. For a time this led to imitation and even influenced young people to believe that this behavior was both normal and expected.

  “This epic tale demonstrates just how much manipulation is required to bring out the worst in people and the effect this has on our collective consciousness.

  Lionel Trilling, an influential critic of the book said the novel marked a mutation in culture13 and despite this fact, in 1983, the author received a Nobel Prize in Literature for his parables of the human condition. In fact, he was so revered in literary circles he was knighted in 1988 and in 2008, The Times newspaper ranked him third on its list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” [emphasis in original]

  • Information about the incredible true story of the Tongan boys.

• For a laff, here’s the story about the woman who thought she could go to South Korea and scoop up a nice Kdrama boyfriend, only to be disappointed by the existence of reality.

I.c The Science of Propaganda (Some Studies About Effective Ways Media Can Be Used To Change Minds)

This is a massive topic and not quite the subject we’re discussing today. But if we remember that most or all fiction media is attempting to convince you of something (persuade you) and that persuasion — no matter the form, political, marketing, or social — is harnessing certain neurological and psychological factors, this becomes more relevant. Persuasion is used by storytellers all the time. It’s a neutral thing. Writers want to convince you to care about their characters, or persuade you to turn the page or get emotionally invested in the story. More insidious actors might use these principles within storytelling to change your mind about certain moral, social, or political issues without you even realizing that it’s happening.

• This 2017 study about “persuasive communication” experimented to see how much more effectively a person’s mind could be changed if the manipulator had access to that person’s psychological data

  “However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”

  Needless to say, the experiment showed a marked increase in persuasive campaigns’ success when the target’s psychological data had been used.

• This fascinating study from 2016 found that, since many persuasive campaigns rely on emotion — especially positive emotion — to change the mind, physically resisting reactions to those campaigns actually reduces the influence it has on you. The researchers referred to this as “embodied resistance”.

  “Controlling the expression of emotions elicited by an ad (for example refusing to smile) might be a fruitful way to resist the ad’s persuasive potential.”

• This eleven-year-old study in the Journal of Advertising talks about optimal use of repetition. The study’s authors acknowledge that repetition is a key to success but the study’s aim is to determine the most effective way to use that repetition as well as how long the effects of repetition last.

• If you really want to get into the weeds, this study shows how repetition doesn’t just increase a person’s recognition of your brand over other brands, it also decreases their recognition of other, non-repeated brands.

  (Do you see what I mean when I say they’ve spared no expense?)

• This paper, using magic as an example, talks about attentional capture and the neurological limits on the human mind that allow for guided focus by a manipulating, outside source.

  “Psychologist and magicians often think of attention as a ‘spotlight’ that enhances the items or parts of a scene we are focusing on. The attentional spotlight is not an accurate metaphor from a neuroscientific perspective, however: rather than making our object of interest more salient, our attentional system actively suppresses (via inhibitory neurons) how salient everything else is. That is, rather that illuminating whatever draws our interest, our attention gives us tunnel vision: it obscures all the rest1415161718192021222324 . Suppressed crucial information passes us by without ever entering our awareness.”

• This is the 1996 study referenced in the video that talks about how long the Illusory Truth Effect can last after the repetitions have ceased.

• This chapter from The Principles of Social Psychology talks about other methods that can be used to manipulate people with marketing and media, including emotion and perceived trustability.

• There are a lot of studies and analyses out there examining the different neurological and psychological factors that are at play when advertising is attempting to change our minds. The important thing to remember is that these methods are just as effective within fiction.

II. Fiction as Formation

It has long been understood that we ought to take care with the media we consume as it is forming us. Only recently have attempts been made to “debunk” this idea, an idea which has held true for literally centuries, if not millennia. Let’s look at some of the science behind the ways in which our media consumption changes and forms us.

II.a A Note on Desensitization

I mentioned at the beginning that the human mind doesn’t react to fictional violence and real life violence in the same way, and therefore doesn’t become desensitized to real life violence because of exposure to fictional violence. A lot of this overlaps with the question of increased aggression due to (or not due to) watching fictional violence, so please see that section if you want more resources on this topic.

• That said, this study, which I have previously linked, is one of the clearest examples of this point. Young college-aged people were exposed to graphic fictional violence and then they were shown clips of real life violence. It was found that they were not desensitized to the real life violence, that it still disturbed them. Crucially, it was also found that their empathy was not diminished.

II.b Let’s Talk About Porn (The Ways In Which Pornography Damages Your Mind and Your Character)

I can’t believe I have to do this. But for anyone who somehow wasn’t convinced that porn is bad, here’s some proof.

Put in context, fictional violence might not lead to increases in aggression or even violence in audiences, but here we have studies showing that real and simulated or even animated pornography result in increases in violent and aggressive behavior.

For those who already knew, there’s still some interesting information here, including the different ways that women react to pornography (compared to men).

• This article from 2014 cites studies done on men who had lost interest in real life sexual partners after prolonged pornography consumption. The authors explain this in terms of neuroplasticity. That is, our tastes and preferences can change over time with outside influence such as internet usage.

  “The sexual excitement of viewing pornography releases a chemical neurotransmitter named dopamine that activates the brain’s pleasure centres. Since ‘neurons that fire together wire together’, the repeated viewing of pornography effectively wires the pornographic images into the pleasure centres of the brain with the focused attention required for neuroplastic change. In other words, habitual viewers of pornography develop new brain maps based on the photos and videos they see. And since the brain operates on a “use it or lose it” principle, they long to keep those new maps activated. Consequently, pornography has an addictive power. Like all addicts, the men who [Dr. Norman] Doidge treated developed a tolerance to the photos and videos they observed and sought out progressively higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction.”

• This article from the 2013 edition of Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology takes a medical approach to the question of pornography consumption as an addiction. Dr. Hilton’s approach has to do with “an increased understanding of the function of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward systems”, which is a key factor in any discussion of addiction.

• This article from the Journal of Neuroscience continues the medical side of neuroplasticity, addiction, and the altering of the brain’s tastes and preferences. A lot of this was highly medical and specialized and a bit over my head, but it’s still fascinating to read about how the brain’s ability to change can also make the brain vulnerable to wildly unhealthy habits.

• This peer-reviewed study examined the brains of people with compulsive sexual behavior and compared them to people with healthy brains particularly when viewing sexually explicit materials and non-sexual materials.

  One of the many fascinating things found in this study was that in those with compulsive sexual behavior when viewing explicit material, fMRI scans showed activity consistent with desire but not activity consistent with liking. That is, the reward system in their brain had rewired to desire what they saw despite the fact that they might not have even liked it. Which is consistent with what one sees in drug addicts. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was any medical basis in referring to — and treating — compulsive sexual behavior as an addiction.

• This fascinating experimental study conducted in 2018 attempted to determine if there was a connection between men viewing pornography and their negative behavior towards women. Most interesting was the inclusion of an “erotica” category in the study. The authors found that men who viewed degrading pornography had marked increase in negative attitudes towards women, including objectification and sexism. However, even erotica showed an increase in these areas. It was not as dramatic as the effects of degrading pornography, of course, but it is fascinating to learn that even loving, gentle, consensual erotica had a negative effect on the minds of the men viewing it. And this was only over the course of the study’s duration. One wonders what the effects would be after a year, or five years, or ten…

• In a rare study on the minds of women who consume pornography found that, contrary to expectations, women who consumed pornography did not respond by developing “empowering” sexual behavior, but rather they became more submissive. I won’t detail the nature of this submissive sexual behavior, but suffice to say it is violent, humiliating, and degrading. The younger the woman was when she started to consume pornography, the greater the effect.
  As I have said before, men and women respond to explicit sexual media in different ways. Men become more violent and more aggressive. Women can respond in that way, but typically they do not. They become more submissive and more willing to tolerate or even seek out intensely degrading, violent, even physically dangerous behavior, like choking.

• This Korean survey on over six hundred Korean college-aged heterosexual men determined that those who consume pornography are likely to try to act out porn scenes in real life, a point I think it’s worth underscoring given that many who defend pornography use the common line “we know the difference between fiction and reality” and yet, once again, it would seem that it just isn’t that simple.

• Another study showing that the more pornography a man consumes, the more likely he is to attempt to reenact it during sex and to use its imagery during sex to stay aroused.

• The question of pornography consumption intensifying over time — that is, the viewers’ tastes becoming more extreme as usage continues — is a difficult and complex one scientifically speaking. One can look at anecdotal evidence from people whose usage has become oppressive, people who find themselves drawn to more and more disturbing content, and you can use your own common sense to understand how this could easily happen. But collecting all the scientific data here would triple the length of this list. So I’m providing this link. This article will be frowned upon by many because it was put together by the folks over at fightthenewdrug.org, which is an anti-pornography organization and is therefore inherently biased.
  However, the linked article has over thirty citations from unbiased resources all across the scientific and academic world. It’s also not a piece of alarmist propaganda speaking in nothing but superlatives. It’s an honest, direct, clear treatment of the overall issue insofar as it is understand by respected, certified experts who have no affiliation with anti or pro-pornography organizations. If you’re genuinely interested in a nuanced discussion of the topic, this is a great place to start. I’ve personally looked through several of the studies cited and they provide valuable insight into the way the mind works in general, not just when pornography is being consumed.

  • The article mentions — as many people will tell you — that not everyone experiences this escalation. But to those who think that means that pornography could be safe: you should note that there’s no way to predict whether or not you’ll be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t experience escalating tastes. Considering how deep the pit goes, why would anyone risk that? I read the accounts of several men and women whose tastes eventually made it to CSAM. As I said, there’s a reason it’s called “degenerate”.

• Here is a link to that disturbing video of Minnesota Representative Finke making a case for allowing children access to pornography as it is “sex education”.

  • The “Paxton case” mentioned at the beginning is this case.

  • This is an interesting note defending age-verification laws as not a valid threat to freedom of speech

  • Another point I’d like to make is that even if children are, ostensibly, viewing pornography — or sexually explicit “education material” — for educational purposes, it is still objectively harming them. Please see the rest of this pornography section if, for some reason, that’s not something you entirely believe. When it comes time to teach a person about sex, there are perfectly adequate ways to do so without employing literal pornography.

• Related: This survey put together by the Department of Justice details, among other things, that one of the important strategies which pedophiles employ is exposing children to pornography. This desensitizes the children to the idea of sex and having sex, while easing them into increasingly extreme sexuality in general, and makes them open to producing sexual materials of themselves and giving it to adults.
  Many pedophiles use these methods to get children to make child pornography of themselves which the adults can then sell, a lower-risk method of producing CSAM.

II.c. Becoming What You Consume

There has been a lot of research done on both cultivation (mentioned above: the way fiction can change our minds and opinions and even our perception of reality), and also on formation from fiction. This, in particular, is often called “identification” and refers to audiences’ tendency to latch onto their favorite characters and begin to assimilate their traits and habits into their own personalities. Why this happens has been studied and theorized at length.

• This research paper from 2005 examines young adults’ (ages 18-28) identification to see what specific motivations and traits male and female young adults tended to look for in their favorite characters. The introduction provides highly useful information about the concept of “identification”.

  “All of the definitions [of identification] involve a bond or connection between an individual and another person (or entity), such that the individual adopts traits, attitudes, or behaviors of the other person, or incorporates the other’s characteristics into his or her sense of self.”252627

  Taking it further, the paper goes on to explain the phenomenon of “wishing identification” which extends beyond the time during which the media is consumed. That is, many people identify with or admire a character while watching the media or reading the book, this is one process. A secondary process occurs when the audience begins to wish to become more like the person:

  “Bandura2829 contended that the modeling process goes far beyond simple imitation of behavior, to include the changing of attitudes, values, aspirations, and other characteristics to match those of a model.”

• This interesting study examined closely the possibility of a link between the introduction of specific telenovelas in Brazil and a corresponding drop in fertility rates in otherwise fertile women.

  “We find that, after controlling for time varying controls and for time-invariant area characteristics, the presence of the Globo [producers of the telenovelas in question] signal leads to significantly lower fertility. […] Our empirical analysis on children naming patterns and on novela content suggests that these results may be interpreted not only in terms of exposure to television, but also of exposure to the particular reality portrayed in Brazilian novelas.” [emphasis added]

• This book published in 2017 talks at length about how fiction media can be used to change social norms among a given populace. This book doesn’t focus only on negative social change but also positive, such as de-normalizing child marriage. It is meant to provide a kind of blueprint for identifying and then altering social norms.

  “The media are popular tools for changing target behaviors. The range of technologies may include broadcast media such as radio, film and television, newspapers or pamphlets, billboards, internet, and even public events. Common interventions include information campaigns, edutainment (ranging

  from soap operas to video games), and other more modest form of collective entertainment, such as village theater.” (page 147)

  If you read the book you’ll find that a lot of the science I have talked about in this essay/list of resources is being actively employed with fiction media to deliberately adjust social norms.

  If it is generally understood by those going about changing “target behaviors” that fiction has this ability, then perhaps the targets whose behavior is being changed should also accept this reality.

II.d. Reading Will Make You Smarter

Yet another bit of common sense, but which is fortunately backed up by a lot of science. There are distinct and traceable links between reading level and vocabulary size; there are distinct and traceable links between vocabulary size and cognitive abilities. Therefore, there is a link between reading challenging books and becoming smarter:

• This 1993 article by Keith E. Stanovich was among the first to tackle with scientific rigor the question “Does Reading Make You Smarter?” And his answer was an emphatic “Yes.” This 48-page paper also details the controversy surrounding this idea which has come to be called the Great Divide, which is defined as the understanding that there is a cognitive divide between the literate and the illiterate that goes beyond mere ability to read. Many in different academic fields viewed it as self-evident that literacy and the act of reading improved various areas of intelligence and cognition. But, he explained, in the 80s there arose a movement bent on debunking this idea as a mere myth. Stanovich takes the time to explain how the myth idea is nonsensical. This might be one of the most important and thorough papers on the topic, if just an introduction.

• This meta-analysis of hundreds of studies determined that there was a “small and significant” link between reading fiction specifically and social cognition. This link was determined to be causal, that is, reading fiction was found to directly improve social cognition.

  “The notion that fiction reading and social cognition engage similar processes is further supported by neuroimaging work demonstrating an overlap in the networks recruited during story reading and theory of mind30, and

  increased engagement of the brain’s default mode network while simulating literary passages with social content31. Second, fiction may provide concrete content about human psychology and social interaction, and about distant countries, cultures, and peoples that readers may never have access to otherwise32. In this sense, fiction may help to build up a reader’s social knowledge.

• This study (which was a set of five experiments) found that there was an increase in the readers’ theory of mind when they read literary fiction, as opposed to reading popular fiction, nonfiction, or nothing at all.

  The idea of “literary fiction” itself and even a definition of the genre is difficult to pin down. It has been said that literary fiction can be identified by its more active quality, that is, the reader has to do more active work to understand descriptions and even the events of the plot. The authors of this study provide a loose but somewhat helpful definition:

  “The category of literary fiction has been contested on the grounds that it is merely a marker of social class, but features of the modern literary novel set it apart from most best-selling thrillers or romances. Miall and Kuiken33 3435

  emphasize that through the systematic use of phonological, grammatical, and semantic stylistic devices, literary fiction defamiliarizes its readers. The capacity of literary fiction to unsettle readers’ expectations and challenge their thinking is also reflected in Roland Barthes’s36 distinction between writerly and readerly texts. Although readerly texts—such as most popular genre fiction—are intended to entertain their mostly passive readers, writerly—or literary—texts engage their readers creatively as writers.”

  “Theory of mind” has been described elsewhere as:

  “…the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires.”37

  I don’t know about all of you, but I have personally noticed a marked decline recently in the average person’s ability to understand that other people might hold different beliefs and desires from their own. For myself personally this is most often evidenced in the frequent accusation of “grifter!” by which the accuser presents the idea that they cannot conceive of another person holding a different view from their own and so this person (me) must be faking it for money.

• This study from 2015 looked at the physical brain development of readers versus non-readers or less skilled readers using MRI machines. The results suggested that the children who were proficient readers had a different “development trajectory in brain reading regions”. The analysis found physical brain development to be affected by reading.

• This 2025 study found a direct link between participants’ reading ability and their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Interestingly, the study included internet content and found that resources like social media did not have as much of a positive effect in this area as books and websites which published news stories and cultural information (e.g. longer articles).

Conclusion

The simple reality is that our ability to distinguish between fiction and reality isn’t that simple. How fiction alters our minds and changes our personalities, perceptions, opinions, even our beliefs is extremely complex. But at the end of the day, there is no avoiding the fact that fiction absolutely changes us.

I said throughout the video and I’ll say it again now, one of the major ways we can avoid being completely at the mercy of the storytellers who entertain (and sometimes manipulate) us — and the reason people in the past tended to be more stable in this regard — is by increasing our daily contact with reality. Yet again, this effect will be mitigated and our minds in general will be healthier without social media guiding our perceptions of reality.

Moreover, binge-watching media and binge-reading books is all well and good once in a while, but in our isolated society doing so habitually prevents your mind from being corrected by either contact with reality or by contact with other people who can challenge what you’ve come to believe from the media you’ve consumed in isolation. This total lack of a social element in modern media consumption is unprecedented in history. It is only by touching reality with our own two hands that we can begin to understand whether what we’ve read — or watched — has any basis in reality.

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