"Exploration is not so much a covering of surface as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning." Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques.

The latest study to cause some (happy) turmoil in the literature garret of the Ivory Tower is this one: "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge". Basically, the paper argues that literature, with its focus on human relationships and individual experience over quantitative analysis, can reveal systemic problems that plague development. Which is what we in literary studies have been saying since we incorporated the novel into rhetorical studies, but I digress. I should also digress from saying that the authors quote Walter Benjamin quite early on, and do so in a very cavalier and to me annoying way - but I digress from that digression.

More importantly, however, is trying explain how this should work, that novels should be included in training and opening assessments of development strategies. As someone with academic experience on both sides of this particular divide, I proffer my two cents; imagination and cognition. There. Done. Explained!

In short, imagination in this sense consists of understanding how, in the opacity of markets, knowing human affections, tendencies, desires, and relationships brings about a way around the notorious reluctance of people being studied to explain everything about themselves to researchers. As a personal example, I have to admit to my own ignorance, corrected by a novelistic imagination in the case of Random Family. Random Family is one of those books that doesn't change your life - it merely changes your mind, a much less-lauded, and yet more valuable result. Specifically, in my case, the belief that poverty is aggravated by the lack of birth control, abortion services, and family planning in the inner city. What I hadn't thought about, and which the empathy, patience, understanding, and clarity that LeBlanc brought to Coco's family rebuked me for, was the dire necessity of an inner city single mother to try and maintain a man associated with the house. What I mean by this is, is that so often when we hear about the "welfare queen", we assume that she's having children more children to qualify for food stamps or what have you. This is half-right; what she's trying qualify for is the sustained affection and loyalty of a man through having his child. The government doesn't swing by at random with money and food and clothing - a man who cares for his child will, which benefits all the children of a single mother through "offsets", that is, if the father brings clothing for just his child, then it's as if he's given the mother a discount on clothing for all the rest of her children, etc. As such, abortion is, in the real life of the streets, often a self-defeating gesture, in which the man, who now knows that the woman doesn't really have any plans for attaching herself to him, continues to use the woman for sex, without ever bringing any benefits into her home life. Now while all of this sounds fairly obvious when explained this way - at least, it makes middle-term economic sense, if not emotional or long-term sense to those of us in the middle-class or above - it was one of those facts of life which escaped me, and colored my opinions of women - and through my experiences in working in education, I've met several - who had those multiple children without any obvious way of supporting them. I personally am the wiser for having read that book, and as a simple matter of fact, could not, if someone gave me the opportunity, produce a development plan that ignored the reality that trading sex for money isn't the one-night debasement that the "Indecent Proposal" crowd would have it, but rather part of the whole structural economy of the struggling class.

Cognitively, I can do no better than recommend again the "Edge Master Class" series of discussions on behavioral economics. The liberal economic being as posited by econometricians and classical economists alike has of course been thrown out; but the implications of this rejection still remain in the fact that few economic choice studies take into account the "embodiment" of certain economic choices. For example, Dr. Mullainathan talks about "depletion", that is, the wearing down of the part of your brain that says "No, you can't do that, it's better if you wait, do this very carefully, etc." While we tend to think of willpower as something almost mystical, just like a muscle, it grows weary over time. And in this case, I'm always reminded of prison literature, specifically holocaust and gulag literature (ain't that a hell of a course title!) in which individuals make economic choices under extreme duress; and at every point, the writer intervenes to remind you that you cannot predict who will be the moral person in the camp, and whom the devil incarnate.

For example, Shalamov in Kolyma Tales writes of one person sent on an out-camp extended woodcutting job; basically, the prisoners are taken out into the woods, given an axe and a shovel, and told to chop wood until the guards return in a month or so (after all, where in the hell are you going to run to in Siberia?) What struck me about the story was the fact that, able to eat more in the woods than in the camps, the anonymous narrator tells us that the first things to return were anger, resentment, and rage, and then after that, the urge to think of escaping or something of the sort. Quite literally, the prisoners were too hungry even to think of flight or rebellion; only when they had some food in them, were they able to think of resistance. And this kind of behavior plays itself out in real life as well; the most major prison rebellion in the Soviet Union, the Vorkuta rebellion, was caused when new Ukrainian prisoners were brought into a camp full of long-term Russian prisoners. Hunger is a bitch, and knowing how people react to it, which is something that science, since the University of Minnesota experiment in World War 2, has not been able to test, requires careful examination of literature and observation to understand - if only because quantitative analysis is impossible for ethical reasons. It furthermore appears that poverty has the same sort of effects, if less dire, on political participation in democracies; poor people who feel that things are getting worse are less likely to vote than poor people who feel things are getting better, a counter-intuitive result entirely predictable if one reads The Grapes of Wrath carefully.

I want also to point out that I'm not limiting this to the written word entirely - The Wire, I feel, has as much insight into the failures of our judicial, educational, and media organizations as any given study, and certainly has vastly more appeal. And there are perhaps dozens of others I could name as well. But the notion that fiction and literature have little to tell us, all other considerations - ahem, I'm looking at you Stanley Fish - of beauty aside, is simply false.

That Is All For Now.