What fiction is for

In The Pleasures of Fiction, Denis Dutton writes,

Fictional narrative supplies us with pleasure, but what does it do for us adaptively?

[Steven] Pinker himself uses a games analogy in How the Mind Works (1997): "Life is like chess, and plots [in fiction] are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits." In life as in chess, "there are too many possible sequences of moves and countermoves for all of them to be played out in one's mind." Familiarity with fictional plots obviates the need always in to learn things in first-hand life experience; it can aid in the development of mental flexibility and adaptability to new social problems and expanded physical environments...

Pinker treats the intense pleasures of art, including fiction, essentially as by-products. The arts are a means by which we identify "pleasure-giving patterns" in the brain...

[In Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, Joseph Carroll] argues that literature is a means by which people learn to understand their own emotions and the feelings of others. Fiction provides us with templates for a normal emotional life. "For these mental maps or models to be effective in providing behavioral directives," he says, they must be "emotionally saturated, imaginatively vivid. Art and cultural artifacts like religion and ideology meet this demand." They help us "make sense of human needs and motives," simulating life experience, allowing us to grasp "social relations, evoke sexual and social interactions, depict the intimate relations of kin, and locate the whole complex and interactive array of human behavioral systems within models of the total world order. Humans have a universal and irrepressible need to fabricate this sort of order, and satisfying that need provides a distinct form of pleasure and fulfillment."...

The meaning of a literary work, Carroll says, is not in the events it recounts. It is how events are interpreted that makes meaning. Interpretation, in turn, involves necessary reference to a point of view. This is defined as "the locus of consciousness or experience within which any meaning takes place." Following M.H. Abrams, Carroll argues that an interpretive point of view is constituted by three elements: the author, the represented character, and the audience. These elements come together, in the experience of the reader, as situated in the mind of the author...

The importance of fiction depends on a sense of a communicative transaction between reader and author — understood as a real, not an implied or postulated author. Authors are actual persons who negotiate between the various points of view of fictional persons (the characters), the author's own point of view, and the point of view of the audience. Carroll insists that these three elements are present in every literary experience and that they exhaust the list of operative elements: "There are always three components. There are only three components."...

Literary forms are analyzed and understood in terms the complex relations between authors, characters, and audiences. As I understand Carroll's view, this makes the experience of a work of literature inescapably social, and not just about an imaginary social life. The author is always a palpable presence, which would explain why intentionalism has never died in criticism or literary theory.

...it seems to me that Carroll's approach is most congenial to classic fictions of the sort we read from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, or Jane Austen. If we set Carroll against Pinker, we find, as so often in the history of aesthetics, that the two theoretical outlooks look better or worse depending on the choice of examples adduced to back them up. Does everything Carroll says in applying his evolutionary theory of fiction work as well with a Harlequin Romance as it does with Daniel Defoe? I think not. Carroll dislikes Pinker's characterization of literature in terms of fantasy, escapism, and ephemeral entertainment values, and provides powerful arguments for seeing fiction in a different, more cultivated and informed way...

It strikes me that Carroll and Pinker are both correct to some extent about all fiction, with each more correct than the other about different subclasses. Pinker is most right about popular, effects-driven blockbuster movies, TV, and cheap thrillers. Carroll is most right about high art, the classics whose values endure across generations, the "best that is known and thought in the world."

Yeah, but sometimes I get impatient with it. Is is because it seems so fake, or because I dislike the voice of so many authors?