Self-Protection

A post at OnFiction speculates on a phenomenon in which "readers sometimes struggle against or try to mitigate the effects of reading the fictions in which they are engaged."

Some readers say that they slow their reading before coming to the culminating moment in a tragedy. I wonder if book clubs are another strategy that people use to put some distance between themselves and the fiction they read. We simply do not know what we’re coming upon in the wilderness of some stories. If we have the company of others, though, we may feel emboldened to carry on.

Apparently, some readers need such "self-protective strategies" that "buy time, until the reader can sort out what is happening to her emotionally. . . ." I say "apparently" because this is a reading practice so foreign to my own that I want to think the "struggle" invoked here is being considerably exaggerated. I have never tried to "mitigate the effects" of any fiction I am reading other than to read more carefully. I have never engaged in a "self-protective strategy" in order to "buy time," especially not to "sort out" my emotions. If a particular work of fiction does provoke a strong emotion--which for me actually happens only rarely--I presume that this is the emotion the text was designed to create (otherwise I'm just reading badly) and that my role as reader is to meet the text halfway and pursue that emotion where it's going to lead. That I would try to actively resist the work's effects--emotional, psychological, or formal--seems antithetical to my understanding of what a "reading experience" has to offer.

The explanations that the post's author, Rebecca Wells Jopling, gives for this resistance among some readers seem to me as unconvincing as the phenomenon itself is strange. "It could be," she writers "that these readers know, perhaps not consciously but subconsciously, that the book could change their beliefs, and not always in a predictable way." I can understand a kind of squeamishness about strong emotions--fear, grief, anger--that one doesn't necessarily want to indulge (although in that case you probably shouldn't be reading the kind of fiction you know is going to give rise to such emotions), but that reading a work of fiction might make one squeamish about one's beliefs seems a very large leap, even, as explicated, incoherent. Beliefs about what? Research is cited that supposedly shows that readers are vulnerable to a kind of cognitive incaution and "must engage in effortful processing to disbelieve the information they encounter in literary narratives." "Belief" is thus largely epistemological, or so it would seem, the process of arriving at conclusions based on "information."

But is this "information" about the characters or incidents in a fictional story, or is it "information" of the sort one needs to form firm beliefs about the world outside the text? Since it is implausibe that readers would need to disbelieve their supension of disbelief--we all know going in that our suspension of disbelief is artificial--it must be the second kind of "information" that needs to be combatted. Again, I am hard-pressed to understand this fear of "information," since I don't read novels for information, and wouldn't recognize it if it were presented. Reading fiction is an experience, an aesthetic experience in which at best "information" is woven into the fictional fabric, conditioned by its manifestation in fiction. Novels that attempt to convey information without integrating it in this way are bad novels, and I don't know why a theory of reading would focus on such a flawed conception of what novels do.

The post continues:

Perhaps strong feelings of rejection toward a story and the resulting strategies for distancing oneself arise because readers somehow know that continuing to read may leave them walking around holding beliefs that they do not want to hold, having thoughts that they do not want to have, and re-experiencing images that they do not want to re-experience.

While it is more plausible to me that some readers might while reading, or after reading, a novel be "having thoughts that they do not want to have, and re-experiencing images that they do not want to re-experience" than that they are "walking around holding beliefs that they do not want to hold," it remains unexplained why any serious readers of fiction would be so shocked that what they read might challenge their assumptions or present vivid images. These are among the most historically-recognized functions of literature, and even in popular fiction many readers return to particular  genres precisely because they know that certain kinds of "thoughts" and certain kinds of "images," some of them disturbing, are going to recur. Unless the authors at OnFiction, in their concentration on the psychology of fiction, are confining themselves to the most naive and most unadventurous of readers, it's very difficult to accept that the fear of alien thoughts, images, or beliefs motivates many readers' responses to aesthetically credible novels, or any works of narrative art, for that matter.

The very need to "distance ourselves" in the emotionally immediate way described in this post only really testifies to a flawed, unreflective way of reading fiction. It posits an intensity of involvement with "character" and "event"--the creation of which isn't ultimately very hard for most minimally skilled writers--such that all other considerations, point of view, style, narrative method, simply disappear into irrelevance. A reading attentive to these elements already incorporates an appropriate "distance." A reading of fiction that ignores them is to that extent an impoverished reading.

Comments

[Jacob Russell]

How is it possible to hold a thought or belief one doesn't want? What does 'want' mean here? That it exposes repressed or unacknowledged desires that one in fact does hold? What is the 'self' here that is doing the wanting, and how distinguish that from the 'self' that holds these unpleasent thoughts? As for challenging a reader's psychological comfort zone vis a vis their ideas about reality--isn't that precisely the experience they seek when they read Stephen King? Vampire novels? Ghost stories? It would seem that the experience of having one's core illusions tweaked is both mildly titilating and comforting--confirming how easily the holes in the painted curtain are patched over.

On the other hand--if the tea baggers are any evidence--the most common reaction to a real challenge of core illusions would seem to be outrage and absolute denial. Now there's a thought... is there something about fiction (not the scary parts, not those powerfully evocative scenes), that alters our very way of percepting reality--at a level more subtle and difficult to identify?

After all, the aesthetic experience is not something altogether removed from the way we perceive reality outside the book, but is woven into the tapistry of our being in the world, a world-reality we are constantly adjusting and re-creating. Maybe not what Marie Darrieussecq was getting at, but enough there to suggest, mutatis mutandis, ways these thoughts might be worth closer examination.

[Jim H.]

Jacob: Google "negative capability"

A person of my acquaintance would not let her kids read the Harry Potter series or see the movies because some fundamentalist pastor had told her that it was through witchcraft and the occult that Satan entered their minds and possessed their souls. Of course, you have to believe in something called a 'soul' and that it can be supplanted or taken over or possessed by something that it 'not you' to even begin to credit such nonsense. Still, it is a model for the psyches of people who do not wish to hold a thought they do not want—they fear losing themselves in a very "real" sort of way (however delusional & pre-modern).

Religious beliefs are certainties which, if challenged, threaten to erode the very identity of the believer. Readers don't necessarily have to be religious to have this sort of psychological insecurity. There are stages and degrees of mental illness—high functioning illnesses at that—in which it is quite easy to 'lose one's mind'. One thinks, here, of "Glass Menagerie" and other tidy, little, frangible worlds.

I am not unsympathetic to the type, but I prefer Dan's robust call to the fullness of aesthetic experience. That's why I read.

Best,
Jim H.

[Jacob Russell]

Jim,

Granted what you say about both those with formulated irrational beliefs and those who hold to, shall we say, sub-rational, unexamined and unconscious ways of dealing with reality, but beyond that, there is an aesthetic element in how even quite healthy and intellectually mature persons experience the world... it would not be a 'world' but for that. Nothing pathological here. Art, among other things, raises awareness of the aesthetics of perception--is, in a sense, constructed out of them. In that way, it's not unreasonable to think that fiction might indeed have the power to affect, change and alter how we perceive and engage with reality. My point being, that aesthetic experience is broader and more inclusive than the works of art that raise them to fuller consciousness and enable us to speak, think and write about them.

[Jim H.]

Jacob,

"it's not unreasonable to think that fiction might indeed have the power to affect, change and alter how we perceive and engage with reality."

Absolutely no disagreement there. And that's what's so scary to people who lived tightly-controlled, -modulated, -sheltered emotional lives. Conventional types ("Well he gets up in the morning...") for whom change is bad, even tho' it never stops happening really. Horror and conspiracy and the other genre types are safe qua stories because we know how they're supposed to work, and if they stray from the usual patterns it's only enough to question the genre, not the world-view it represents.

Best,
Jim H.

[CM]

I'm not sure why it would seem strange, unbelievable, or exaggerated that a human might try to avoid or mitigate pain, which is exactly what a reader is doing when they employ cautious reading strategies. This post approaches the issue from a very intellectual standpoint, talking about our understood experience of the text, but the impact of books (and films and what have you) lodges immediately and permanently in a deeply unconscious place, which the intellect doesn't touch, though it can talk around it. In other words, once you have wept bitterly over Jude the Obscure or Old Yeller, in some way that experience of sorrow and loss takes up permanent residence in a part of the brain, and that's nothing to be taken lightly. Neuroscience is even teaching us that the brain memorizes and uses painful experiences in ways that can be particularly pernicious (and no amount of saying 'this is artifice' impacts the intensity of that initial encounter with the material which reads as experience, because theses are two different processes occurring in different parts of the brain, at two different times apparently). In life, when we know we will encounter sorrow and suffering, we look to others to support us, we try to avoid it, or, at least, we try to steel ourselves for the inevitable. Ironically, while avoidant, these strategies actually honor the full intensity of emotional experience, which can be overwhelming. I have to say, this post actually feels slightly resistant to the full intensity of emotional experience by simply not acknowledging why an individual might naturally seek to mitigate it.
Also, I have to disagree about the primacy of aesthetics; reading is not simply as aesthetic experience, but a mode of communication in which ideas and information are transferred. The transference of information doesn't only take place clumsily in bad novels, but in all novels. To use Jude again, the ideas communicated both by Jude as a character and by the narrative voice, harshly challenged accepted notions of class in England at the time of publication (and also led to feelings of emotional pain on the part of readers, and still do) and, not surprisingly, the public and critical reaction was pretty hellish. Talk about avoidance strategies.
Also, Jacob, I don't think it's merely folks who live tightly controlled lives who feel threatened when ideas press against the boundaries of their belief system. I'd even go so far as to say this psychological insecurity might be damn near universal, seeing as ideas and beliefs comprise so much of what most people consider the self, and the construction of a self (shaky though it may be) is an attempt to keep the chaos of everything at bay.
Anyway, longtime reader, never posted. Love this site.

[CB]

CM, lovely coment.

I too am a lover of this site, and was very surprised by the content of this post. It esp. surprises me because I think so much of the point of experimental fiction is to challenge a reader´s expectations and understanding of the world. This experience can be very pleasurable and beautiful but it can also be painful. I concede that literature is (or ought to be) predominantly an aesthetic experience, but I think the aesthetic aspect of the text can shock our conceptions of the world as much if not more so than any secondary information a text may impart.

[Dan Green]

CB: See my next post.

[Jacob Russell]

Jim: "Jacob, I don't think it's merely folks who live tightly controlled lives who feel threatened when ideas press against the boundaries of their belief system. I'd even go so far as to say this psychological insecurity might be damn near universal, seeing as ideas and beliefs comprise so much of what most people consider the self, and the construction of a self (shaky though it may be) is an attempt to keep the chaos of everything at bay." I think that was what I said--with the added point that this is precisely because the aesthetic experience is not confined to works of art--but is central to our engagement with reality, hence, power of art to create anxiety at the deepest levels.