Be more Alice! The fictional characters with lessons for lockdown

Should we be suspicious of the idea that fiction can help us to live meaningful lives? After all, as Plato observed (via a fictionalised Socrates), Homer’s stories were composed to stir and entertain rather than to instruct us. They may be a lot of fun, but they have nothing to tell us about living well. How could fictional characters, shadowy beings who exist only in words, offer any meaningful purchase on the all too solid problems of our daily lives?

If we try to enlist the help of novels by extracting rules and hacks and counsel from them, we will probably prove Plato right. Novels, or at least the ones worth reading, draw us in not by offering moral instruction or practical guidance, but by helping us to see ourselves in all our strangeness and complexity.

Having spent a large portion of my life reading fiction and practising psychotherapy, this strikes me as the essential overlap between the two. Each gets us to listen to the nuances and rhythms of human experience, to make ourselves available to the unsuspected thoughts, feelings and desires murmuring below the surface. Listening is the engine of curiosity, and so of change and growth.