Last week I looked at the writer/reader contract in a general way. Today’s riff breaks it down a bit more. What do people expect when they come to books? Does the new or occasional reader look for different things than the experienced reader?
Resolution. I think that one of the most powerful drives to storytelling is the human craving for resolution. The most enduring novels generally offer resolutions big and small—they can be simple, they can be complicated, they can be incredibly tense.
Someone will be quick to point out the fictional works that lean away from resolution, making a virtue of mirroring the muddle of real life. One of the sharpest divides in reader reactions occur over such novels; this narrative path, which I tend to think began with Lawrence’s Tristram Shandy, seems a tour de force to some and a confusing, boring waste of trees to others.
Motivation The new reader seems more ready to accept novels whose characters have single motivations, if they aren’t identified by their motivation. For example, in many of the science fiction stories I grew up with, there was usually a ‘science guy’ who was always to be found in his lab, wearing his white coat as he worked on arcane experiments day and night. He was always ready and willing to stop what he was doing and helpfully lecture the heroes on science factoids, and to invent robots or futuristic machines out of tools in dad’s garage, or the science lab at school, that the heroes then used to execute the action—unless, of course, he was a Mad Scientist. Then he would only issue his lectures after he captured our heroes, before which he worked 24/7 on machines to take over the world, or super-weapons, or giant-brain computers that we would now call AIs. He didn’t have a family, interests, didn’t even seem to have a home, unless bad guys were blowing it up.
This single motivation can especially extend to crowds, who all have the same expression, reaction, and action—without being mobs. (Mob psychology being a different, and terrifyingly fascinating subject.) Those crowds are there as set decoration, or to serve as audience to the heroes, and to underscore what the narrative voice wants the reader to think about characters or action.
Way at the other end of the spectrum are novels whose characters have such complex motivations that disentangling them is the real thrust of the book, and not the plot. There is relatively little action because we are buried so deeply inside characters’ heads that we are reading pages of self-examination and extended descriptions of emotional reactions to minutiae.
Meta-representation and levels of intent, or, expectations of accessibility. In the most accessible novel, the narrative voice clues the reader what to think about the characters and sometimes about the story. A character with “piercing eyes” is either a hero or villain, though in real life, what exactly are piercing eyes, since no one’s glance actually stabs us? But piercing eyes are the insta-signal of a character who is going to carry dramatic tension.
There’s probably a whole other riff in the various ways the narrative voice clues the reader in to things the characters don’t know. But right now I’m trying to stick to what brings us to novels . . . and what sends us away. For example, the contract can break when the more experienced reader feels that the narrative voice is telling her what to think about the characters and ideas. But some readers accept without question the judgments of the narrative voice.
Before I leave narrative voice, I want to add the observation that though committing the intentional fallacy is a literary no-no, I think we all occasionally play armchair detective (or psychologist), trying to reach into the mind behind the fiction. On a meta level, the narrative voice is going to reveal more than the author intended; cultural assumptions leap out when one reads very old novels, cultural assumptions being customs or viewpoints that the novel expresses as universally accepted, or reasonable, or even invisible, that are no longer so today.
Levels of intent are tied tightly with motivation, emotion, and reaction, but the levels come in with our recognition of who knows what. In novels considered difficult, or less accessible, part of the pleasure of reading is cognitive adaptation—the reader trying on different states of mind, without having actual responsibility for them.
Another part of the lure of less accessible novels comes in trying to comprehend who knows what. Some writers make the reader work hard to gain clues to motivation, such as Hemingway’s reporting on body language of characters, without letting the reader inside anyone’s thoughts. Virginia Woolf exhibited her mastery at hiding layers of intent in tiny clues in works such as Mrs. Dalloway: who noticed what about whom, leading to surmises about a third person, which influences a fourth, are little mysteries to be solved for the careful reader.
Resolution definitely! I love mysteries because at last Justice Is Done! And if it isn’t I feel cheated and think the contract was shattered.
Also I think JRRT had it right at least for the kinds of books I like–Escape and Consolation.
“The Good end happily and the Bad unhappily.” Or else I won’t like it.
I agree on all three counts.
Some writers make the reader work hard to gain clues to motivation, such as Hemingway’s reporting on body language of characters, without letting the reader inside anyone’s thoughts. ———The problem with this as a method is that body language and ways of behaving can signal different things in different cultures. So for instance, looking a person directly in the eye could be seen as a sign of honesty and straightforwardness in one culture and a sign of antagonism and challenge in another, and failing to meet the eye could be seen as a sign of shiftiness and dishonesty in one culture or as modesty and deference in another. But that’s a minor point.
…. But for a lot of these things (I’m thinking about resolution right now), what’s normative depends on your culture. So for instance, my mother-in-law complains about Japanese novels that they don’t seem to her to have much resolution. Part of this may be that only very arty, literary-establishment-type novels tend to get translated into English, but part of it is definitely culture.
As a reader, I enjoy both seeing the familiar done well (which isn’t a challenging experience, but a very pleasant one, like eating a favorite food) and seeing something new and startling. As a writer, I suspect I’m rather pedestrian in my vision, but I’ll try my damnedest to make the walk an interesting one.
Very true about culture–and about books being open to interpretation. That’s a plus for some readers, I think especially those, like Nabokov, for whom literature was largely an intellectual game. I can understand this point of view, I can even sympathize with it, but I am still by preference an immersive reader.
There is so much we can discuss about this essay, Sherwood, but I will mention that at the beginning of your talk, The Example leapt to mind — a book that was attractively packaged, not a first book, looked like an engaging other world fantasy — and for me it was a big FAIL on the contract, so much so that I literally threw the book across the room after reaching the end.
Turned out it was the first of a series (a duology, with other related books later? Mamory is now blurred) and it did not answer ONE SINGLE QUESTION posed by the author. NOT ONE. At least of the questions I had. This turned out to be a big thing for me, and a lesson I immediately started working with in a large, unpublished fantasy.
In an arc, there must be Questions posed and questions answered. You can carry over questions, or The Question, over multiple books (I think Patricia McKillip did it very well in her Riddlemaster trilogy) but you must keep feeding answers to the reader – or the reader doubts you will ever answer the questions.
I’ve never read another book by that bestselling author. Can’t bring myself to trust her again.
Kathi, that’s another side-road we could explore: the series that seems to be one story drawn out lengthily, as opposed to a roman fleuve, an actual story that happens to be divided up into several book-length units. Your example sounds like it might fall into that first category.
Never had a family? Nonsense! He had a Beautiful Daughter.
Given that there is never hair nor hide of the mother, one might speculate about her origins, but family he had.
A beautiful but evil daughter, whose sole purpose seems to be to fall for the hero’s manly physique and try to seduce him, unsuccessfully of course.
The lack of mothers for their children isn’t limited to villains either. There are whole fantasy realms or SF universes without any mothers.
In novels considered difficult, or less accessible, part of the pleasure of reading is cognitive adaptation—the reader trying on different states of mind, without having actual responsibility for them.
Is the reader necessarily trying them on, do you think? I like to immerse myself in stories, but to me trying on a state of mind suggests that I’m partly becoming the character and the more difficult the book the less likely I am to do that. Or am I misunderstanding?
I used that phrase in hopes that people would interpret it any way they like. (The problem with trying to talk about ideas in very short form has me puzzling sometimes how to cover a broad spectrum without losing sense. As you can see, still very much a work in progress!)
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