You know that I'm obsessed with the reader experience: what it is to read; what happens to the reader; where they are; who they are. Well...
(1) This week, I've been thinking about fairy tales and children and the fact that I once read somewhere that reading fairy tales is a safe way for children to experience difficult ideas, like being orphaned.
(2) And that made me think about another thing I once read - that dreams are a way of practising difficult situations.
(3 )And then I thought about Catherine Roach's article on IASPR: Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy, from which I will selectively quote this small passage:
romance does deep psychic work for its readers by functioning as a fantasy antidote to patriarchy, to the extent that it is still a man’s world out there: the heroine and, vicariously, the female readers get that fantasy paradox of an alpha male who is strong and dominant, yet also caring and sensitive; sexy and desired, yet devoted totally to the heroine and her sexual pleasure; indeed he is helpless and lost without her love. Part of the reading pleasure, too, is the fantasy conquest of patriarchy.
So by this time, naturally, I was itching to blog about the idea of reading as a way of notionally experiencing something.
Being the rigorous (*laughs*) sort of blogger I am, I decided to look for something that would corroborate my woolly, half-remembered notions set out at (1) and (2) above. However, I didn't get very far. Reason being that I came across this wonderful article by Phillip Pullman about the childhood reading experience which is long but which is very much worth being read in full. I rather want to quote the whole thing, but will try to content myself with a few highlights. Firstly, this:
So: do children believe what they read in stories, or don’t they? And if they do, in what way do they believe it? Well, this is what I think about it.
I think it’s very like play – perhaps more like play than like anything else. ...we pretended to be figures from the stories we’d seen in comics, or heard on the radio, or seen at the cinema, and we acted out stories that we improvised as we went along. I knew I wasn’t really Batman, or Davy Crockett, but at the same time I was imitating things I’d seen Batman do on a printed page or Davy Crockett do on the cinema screen – say at the siege of the Alamo, where the defenders held out for as long as they could, while knowing that they were outnumbered and they were probably going to die. And when we died we did so with heroic extravagance. My body was doing all a nine-year-old body could to run out from behind a wall, fire a musket, clutch my chest, stagger, crumple to the ground, slowly drag a revolver from a holster with a trembling hand, and kill six Mexicans as I breathed my last.
Those were the physical things my body was doing. What was my mind doing? I think it was feeling a little scrap, a tiny fluttering tattered cheaply printed torn-off scrap of heroism. I felt what it was like to be brave and to die facing overwhelming odds. That intensity of feeling is what both fuels and rewards childhood play. When we children play at being characters we admire doing things we value, we discover in doing so areas and depths of feeling it would be hard to reach otherwise. Exhilaration, heroism, despair, resolution, triumph, noble renunciation, sacrifice – in acting these out, we experience them in miniature, or, as it were, in safety.
I think you begin to see where the Charlie's Angels photo comes in, no? I was always Kelly. Or Diana Prince (Wonder Woman). And Mr Tumperkin? Ponch Poncherello, from Chips, I'm told.
But how did this 'experience... in miniature' translate in terms of belief?
...I was wondering about belief, and the way we believe in stories, and in play. At no time during the endless hours of play I spent as a child did I believe that I was anyone other than myself. I was acting; I was pretending. Sometimes I was me, and sometimes I was me pretending to be Davy Crockett. But now that I think about it carefully, I realise that it was a little more complicated than that. The two kinds of me were superimposed and not separate; I could be Davy Crockett to the hilt, and be me at the same time, trying out what it would be like to be Davy Crockett – to be still myself, but close to Crockett-hood. But it wasn’t consistent; it varied a lot.
He goes on to explain yet more about the nuances of the experience; the further variations on the two experiences related above (being Davy Crockett/Wonder Woman/Ponch Poncherello and being a related Phil-Davy/Tump-Wonder/MrTump-Ponch creation). He talks about being a bit like the Davy Crockett's trusted and best friend. And that reminded me of a post Laura V did about how readers relate to characters.
You see how it all comes together?
Back to Phil:
If someone had asked me, in a serious kind of way, why I thought elephants had long trunks, I’d have scratched my head and said “I dunno.” I knew, even when I was very young, that “Because the crocodile got hold of the elephant’s child’s nose and pulled and pulled” would be the wrong sort of answer. I would have been just as fascinated, in a different kind of way, to hear the real answer; but that wouldn’t diminish my pleasure in the story, including the delight I felt in murmuring the sounds of the words: the “’satiable curtiosity” of the Elephant’s Child; the “great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever–trees.”
I knew these things weren’t real, but that didn’t matter, because I didn’t want them to be real, I wanted them to be funny. Or delightful. Or exciting. Or moving. And they could be all those
things, and real as well, as some things were, or all those things and imaginary, and I could tell the difference, and it didn’t matter.
So it's this. This belief that is not belief. This experience in miniature. It's real; it's not real. It's about the willing suspension of disbelief and it's about the desire to believe. It's about the yearning for a made-up story to convince. To be authentic.
It's something my three year old can already do brilliantly when we read The Elephant and the Bad Baby, which is a book of unsurpassing imagination and joy.
And when we - that is my three year old and I - go Rumpeta, rumpeta, rumpeta all down the road, at the end of the book (which is to say, when the bad baby goes to bed) we are not really the Elephant. Nor, actually, are we the pork butcher, or the baker, or the snack bar man. Or the lady from the sweet shop, or the barrow boy.
That leaves the bad baby. And his mummy. And that is who we are.
We are the bad baby and his mummy; except not. We are their friends; like them but not them. Or them for a moment. Or not. Because my littley isn't a bad baby, he tells me.
He laughs. I laugh.
Goodnight.
Posts
7 comments:
This amused me greatly. The Roach quote made me instantly think of this passage from FLAWLESS, which comes out next year:
He liked to think that she gloried in reminding him of her decision to leave, such as standing him up that evening, but he honestly believed that she rarely revisited the topic. The realization only reinforced the power she had over him, an unnatural power borne of an infatuation he'd never wanted and was certainly loath to admit. She still considered him some idler, a no-account gambler whose thoughts began and ended with the pursuit of pleasure. Miles hadn't been that man since she left for New York. He'd been something other, broken and limping.
I love to see that my subconscious is busily railing against the patriarchy, even in a fantasy sense. Take that, unequal wages and inequitable distributions of power! I'll create...a romance hero!
I don't remember enough about what I experienced when reading as a youngster to know whether what Pullman describes is accurate or not, although I wish I did. I only remember going to the library nearly every day after school, checking out the maximum number allowed (there was a restriction), and consuming them nearly overnight, many of them by Albert Payson Terhune. None of my 6 siblings did. But doing so established a life-long pattern of constant reading. Later, when I taught literature courses in college, I discovered that many people don't seem to have whatever it is that impels readers to read and somehow translate words into something other than merely words, as Pullman suggests he did. They seemed able to "imagine" as well as I, but printed words weren't the catalyst for them that they had always been for me.
So I've often wondered, why me? It doesn't appear to have been genetic, at least from the evidence my family provides; even my children are only sporadic readers. What quirk is it that makes readers have the urge, almost impossible to resist, to read words and pretend? I don't know. I only know that it's a gift from a generous god.
dick
Another lovely post! How do you make me cry so easily? You've managed to strum this emotional memory, of me reading with my mother, of me reading with my kids. I can never put the joy of those moments into words but you seem to do it so effortlessly. I actually got all teary and came back and now I'm getting teary again. Jeez.
I have this book I read to my girls called Mama, Do You Love Me? and it has the same effect. Kills me every time. *sobs*
I can't remember pretending to be a character from TV or books as a child. I remember trying to fly a lot. I remember wanting to be Daphne in Scooby Doo, but not acting out any scenarioes. Hmm.
I also recall my mother crying while reading Where the Red Fern grows, and I cried when I read it by myself a few years later. But I don't think I cried while SHE was reading. I'm not sure if that is on topic. I think there is a personal connection a reader has with a book--can the listener be as deeply engaged?
Carrie - yes, your subconscious is doing deep work.
dick - and are you *experiencing* what is happening, in any sense when you read? (BTW - do you blog post anywhere? I am very intrigued to know more about your perspective on romance, reading and romance-reading).
Jill - one aims, of course, for tears. There are a few children's books that make me a bit weepy. (Gorilla by Anthony Browne, notably). I think you have a different (poignant) perspective on children's books when you read them to your own child rather than reading them as a child.
@Tumperkin:
No, I don't blog; I just comment on others'. I don't really know how to go about setting up a blog, as a matter of fact.
Am I "experiencing" what the characters experience? I don't think so. I have empathy for them, but I think in most instances I "watch" rather than participate. I may have when I was younger, but I simply don't remember. I'm still fascinated by "story," but while reading years of academic study and training lodged as firmly in the brain as straightforward appreciation interfere, disconcertingly at times.
dick
Janet W: The Elephant and the Bad Baby! How your blogs take me back to when my children were young. The little boy I read that to is now a professor who's guest-lecturing at his sister's college ... the same young lady who called me yesterday to say she was having a time of it and needed a change so she got a 2nd piercing in her solo-hole ear. But you remind me that somewhere all of us are still there ... now just bring on some grandbabies for me! I would love to do a guest blog someday on books that are just meant to be read aloud ... and so many of the ones on my shelves are by British authors. Thank you!
bad baby and mummy! What a great post. So much to think about. I do love that the way these ideas open up a possibility somewhere between total projection, and total outsiderness. That does feel real.
I remember watching Gilligan's Island, and we'd "call" which character we were for the show. I was a slower girl, and often ended up as Mrs. Howell instead of Ginger or MaryAnn.
Post a Comment