In a new posting, Theron Kelso considers whether works of fiction can usefully counter the habitual optimism of business and leadership books. He links to an interview on the subject with Joseph Badaracco, author of Questions of Character, a leadership study based on several works of literature. Theron's comments brought to my mind the work of Robert Coles.

Coles has a book, The Call of Stories, about training doctors using works of literature to help them explore the social and psychological elements of human experience, aging, and illness. For example, William Carlos Williams, himself a doctor and primarily a poet, has a short story called "The Use of Force" in which a doctor visits a child who must have a vaccination in order to survive an illness. Among the insights one can consider from this very small story is the anger that the doctor struggles with in himself when the poor family doesn't know how to best make use of the services of modern medicine and won't force the screaming, feverish child to comply. The idea that a person in authority in medicine, or business for that matter, might have to master his or her own anger is interesting to consider. I imagine this is true of other professions as well. I know that teachers sometimes get burned out and speak disdainfully of their students, which is deeply problematic for all concerned. So literature takes us to those kinds of places, I agree. It is not to counter a rote habit of optimism that I turn to literature but to see parts of human experience sharply and usefully illustrated.

Williams rooted for literature most notably in these lines: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." ("Asphodel, That Greeny Flower")

The short story writer Anton Chekhov felt that his job was formulating, not solving. He wrote in a letter to Alexei Suvorin: "You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist."

And in The Call of Stories Coles wrote: “Novels and stories are renderings of life; they can not only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisors — offer us other eyes through which we might see ... Every...student...will all too quickly be beyond schooling, will be out there making a living and, too, just plain living — that is, trying to find and offer to others the affection and love that give purpose to our time spent here....[Characters] can be cautionary figures...who give us pause and help us in the private moments when we try to find our own bearings.”