The Pleasure of Reading Fiction
«How is it that black squiggles on a page can conjure up such vivid simulacra of persons, things, actions, places; that readers can experience such powerful sensations and emotions as we react to these shadows and phantasms?»
Rita Felski, «Uses of Literature»
These days one issue of literary studies interests me a lot. I really want to understand what makes fiction captivating for people. Why we experience pleasure when reading books? They did not explain this to me when I was studying at the university, but I want to dig into the factors which make our brain experience aesthetic pleasure when viewing icons printed on paper (i. e. words and sentences). This text is my attempt to do it: I found several factors which appear in great texts that give readers true pleasure.
The plot
It would be difficult to manage without this aspect…
P. Brooks* states, that we live in the age of narrative plots, «consuming avidly Harlequin romances and television serials and daily comic strips, creating and demanding narrative in the presentation of persons and news events and sports contests. For all the widely publicized nonnarrative or antinarrative forms of thought that are supposed to characterize our times, from complementarity and uncertainty in physics to the synchronic analyses of structuralism, we remain more determined by narrative than we might wish to believe» [2].
Peter Brooks (born 1938) — an American literary theorist and writer, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Yale University.
Captivating plot is, I think, one of the main reasons why people read books, because it is the plot that allows the reader to exercise his imagination. I guess, we find it intriguing to read about other people’s lives, even though the characters we read about are (most often) just literally the letters printed on the paper, but not the real people. However, when diving into stories about them we forget about this and perceive them as if those were existing humans.
«Human beings not only have a propensity to dwell in imaginary worlds. They have a positive need to do so. This need is not in itself unhealthy» [6].
It is the same like gaining pleasure from playing computer games, watching films, and going to the theatre. Creation and consumption of story-telling in different formats (text, audio, video, etc.) is natural for human culture. In all these cases we delve in fiction worlds and enjoy spending time there. The very process of this interaction with the world which is different from our familiar one gives pleasure. So does literature.
Being more than ourselves
Reading gives us pleasure, because when getting acquainted with different stories we fantasize about lives other than ours, we allow ourselves to be more than just ourselves.
«Ultimately we read — as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree — in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests. We experience such augmentations as pleasure» [2].
Fiction enlarges our being and this process feels like pleasure for us. It also helps us feel less lonely, because in other’s stories we can find something similar to our lives, even if we are constantly being misunderstood by our surroundings in the real life [3].
Difficult pleasure
When reading different sources on this issue I discovered Roland Barthes books «The Pleasure of the Text»
Roland Barthes described the pleasure he was getting from the reading process this way: «Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading» [1].
I found this thought intriguing, because I never perceived reading from this point of view, while there is something in it.
Barthes divided texts into 2 groups according to the way they influence us. I found this division quite ingenious. According to Barthes, there is «the text of pleasure» and «the text of bliss».
The text of pleasure is «the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading» [1].
The text of bliss is «the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language» [1].
I would say, that the pleasure we get from the first type of text comes mostly from recognition of familiar elements of culture: twists of plot, the language of the book, the way author articulares his thoughts, etc. While the pleasure we acquire when reading the second type of texts is more related to the fact, that our brain enjoys gaining knowledge, learning new things and exploring the world. And literature provides us with all this, gives our brain food for thought. Out brain finds it interesting and exciting, and that is also one of the reasons why reading gives us pleasure.
H. Bloom* claims, that «the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure» [2]. This is exactly about the text of bliss and the way it influences readers, I think.
*Harold Bloom (1930–2014) — an American literary critic and professor of humanities at Yale University.
Emotions
I think, that good fiction text gives us not only intellectual, but also emotional work which is equally important. When reading fiction, we experience many different emotions. Sadness, happiness, anger, tenderness, irritation, excitement, wonder, boredom, anticipation, disappointment, etc. I guess, this is also the reason why we enjoy reading fiction: because when experiencing different emotions we feel alive.
A fresh view of the world
The fresh view of the world which the fiction text gives us becomes possible due to one of the effects which text produces on its readers. This effect can be called enchantment [5]. And I find the mechanism of its work extremely interesting!
«Enchantment is characterized by a state of intense involvement, a sense of being so entirely caught up in an aesthetic object that nothing else seems to matter. <…> Wrapped up in the details of a novel, a film, a painting, you feel yourself enclosed in a bubble of absorbed attention that is utterly distinct from the hit-and-miss qualities of everyday perception [italics mine — P.]. This sense of immersion seems self-enclosed and self-sustaining, demarcated by a distinct boundary; the transition back to the everyday world feels unwelcome, even intrusive» [5].
When being enchanted one can experience unusual intensity of perception and affect (that is why enchantment is often compared to the condition of being intoxicated, drugged, or dreaming). Colors seem brighter, perceptions are heightened, details stand out with especial sharpness. The reader is not examining a text with a sober and clinical eye, but is being pulled into its orbit, he is in text’s merci [5].
The role which enchantment plays in our perception of the world is that it pulls the reader out of the real world to which he is normally inextricably tied. Due to this the reader is able to perceive the world as an object, from kind of a distance, not being a part of it himself. Even if this abstraction from the reality is only momentary, it may enable us to view our own world as a thing freshly understood. Fiction gives us «a momentary release from the reign of the mediocre and mundane, from the endless drudgery of daily compromise and concession» [5].
«The fact that we have been temporarily isolated from our real world does not mean that we now return to it with new directives. What it does mean is that, for a brief period at least, the real world appears observable» [6].
W. Iser considered, that «if we are absorbed into an image, we are no longer present in a reality — instead we are experiencing what can only be described as an irrealization in the sense that we are preoccupied with something that takes us out of our given reality. This is why people often talk of escapism with regard to literature, when in actual fact they are only verbalizing the particular experience they have undergone. And it is only logical that, when the process of irrealization is over — i. e., when we put the book down — we should experience a kind of awakening» [6].
«Novels give us the magic, as well as the mundanity, of the everyday; they infuse things with wonder, enliven the inanimate world, invite ordinary and often overlooked phenomena to shimmer forth as bearers of aesthetic, affective, even metaphysical meanings» [4].
This effect of enchantment also makes reading fiction pleasurable for us, because we abstract from the reality for a while and it gives our brain kind of a respite and refresh.
The sound of the language
It is not only the plot that can capture readers.
Sometimes it is just the rhythm of the text we read that creates the pleasure of the narrative [1]. There is such thing as an emotional cathexis onto the sounds of words. The language of the text in this case is not an obstacle which the reader needs to overcome in order to reach to the pleasure, but an essential means of achieving it. When reading really good writers we are often captures by «a cadence of tone, by particular inflections and verbal rhythms, by an irresistible combination of word choice and syntax» [5]. This aspect of the text construction also greatly influences the pleasure we find in reading.
I think I am not fully done with this issue, but these are definitely the aspects which play a great role in creating the pleasure we experience when reading fiction. But I also think that the main mystery of the fiction text always remains a mystery. If the text is really great, we can not get to its core and fully understand what exactly in it gives us as readers pleasure. And this is also a pleasure in itself.
P.
Literature:
- Barth R. The pleasure of the text. New York, 1975. 67.
- Bloom H. How To Read and Why. New York, 2001. 283 p.
- Brooks P. Reading for the Plot: Design and Invention in Narrative. Cambridge, 1992. 363 p.
- Bruns C. V. Why Literature. The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching. New York, 2011. 159 p.
- Felski R. Uses of Literature. Chicago, 2020. 199 p.
- Iser W. The Act of Reading. Maryland, 1980. 239 p.
- Miller H. On Literature. New York, 2002. 164 p.
