The Big Question, part 4: instead of an introduction

So, now I finally continue my “doctoral thesis” with what should have been the introduction – the part where I explain what I intend to investigate. But, the funny thing: I didn’t know when I began to investigate. I didn’t know that I had set out to ask the question I REALLY wanted to answer in my master thesis in a different way. Basically, in my master thesis, I tried to describe the way a fictional text works by comparing three different texts about the same subject, and, basically, nothing came of it. Though I was thrilled when I wrote it, and certainly pleased to get an “A”, I think I knew this. I didn’t even REACT to the cryptic praise my professor gave me afterwards, recognizing, I think, that, however clumsy, I had actually tackled a “research topic”. Nobody is supposed to do that writing their master thesis. I knew that I had, though, and I KNEW that nothing had come of it. NOTHING had come of anything I had done at uni.

What I did was just step back from the whole thing, turning my back on it for decades. Now I concentrated my efforts on getting my life in order, getting a job, even making some clumsy attempts on the relationship-front, maybe just to prove a point … and trying to write. I had finally got the hang of writing fiction, though I had never had much time for it. Suddenly I had lots. And writing, I thought, was the one thing that had come of my studies.

But I was wrong. I even knew that I was wrong, but it took me about twenty-five years to prove it. It took me the better part of two decades even to find the RIGHT things to read.

I think I have been DELIBERATLY unclear about what question(s) exactly I want to answer. I just found out recently that EVERYTHING I was doing investigating texts has been ABOUT the same thing. The question about the nature of a fictional text, about why we are reading, and about what makes a fictional text relevant – the subject of my master thesis - all hinge on the same thing. Which is also the thing I have been investigating in my blog. And, of course, the one thing I have learned at uni, and the one thing I never gave up, obviously, was ASKING these questions. I think I was kicked into permanent awareness during my very first lecture at uni – where my professor stated that fiction is one of the human activities of solving problems. I was so thrilled - though no attempt ever followed to explain what he meant by it  – that I would never again let this go. Just because somebody HINTED at an answer.

It is important, I think, to state that I KNOW that I am being naïve doing this. I know very well that most of the reading that actually occurs is not done for any “relevant” reasons of the kind I am after. It is done for reasons like being able to relax without having to watch stupid German tv. Or - my generation still – having been told that we are better people than the ones who only read the sports pages of their local newspaper. Or feeling that we have to watch certain series on Netflix because everybody else does. These are probably much stronger incentives for the selection of certain texts and the rejection of others than any “genuine” need for reading. The most widespread reason why we are reading is probably that we have got used to reap the benefits. Or, in other words, that it still makes us FEEL BETTER, more centered, than being online all day and “outside our heads”, chatting and chasing for information, always exposed to other people’s needs and influence. But this is also something we are NOT SUPPOSED to know. It is probably the most important reason for me to actually read the things I read. Or read, at the time, waiting for the latest novel by Elizabeth George or Donna Leon, or watching series like “The Spooks” and “Doctor Who” time and again. The really important part of the reading – the kind that got into the blog - is mostly just “contraband”. But I am sure that I have been so successful with “Shakespeare” because I chose it for a GOOD reason. And purposefully looking for text that might have a good reason written into it has certainly improved my reading and enhanced the benefits. Which doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with any of these “general” reasons, but I am sure that for meeting these needs there might have been different objects and activities invented, and, in fact, have been. Only when we know what is so SPECIAL about reading - so unlike what any other activity provides - we will know what reading and fiction really are about.

In the long run, I think, it was the disappointment of my master thesis that made me suddenly “sober up” and see more clearly. See that these questions would never be answered in a way I could take seriously by the scientific community. Strictly speaking, arts and humanities were never part of any scientific community, but I also think that THIS has always been kept PURPOSEFULLY unclear. For arts and humanities there have never been any methods of establishing knowledge “everybody” believed in. For the Social Sciences – which, for reasons I will not go into now, I wouldn’t really regard as “science” as well - there are at least recognized empirical methods. Whereas, for arts and humanities, there is just some sort of “license”, which usually consists in writing a doctoral thesis on art, or fiction, or philosophy, or not even that. Having written ANYTHING on these subjects that got published, or even proving that you have read “the lot” and are able to quote Foucault, may suffice to be recognized by the community as one of their own. And, basically, there is nothing wrong with it. Basically, it is just about PROVING that you are GOOD WITH TEXT. As there are no established methods there are also no genuine qualifications. ANYBODY may be good with text. But there must, of course, be SOME KIND of proof.

As there is none, in my case, apart from my own conviction that I am good with text, I have to write this INSTEAD of a doctoral thesis. But of course I think that I have a point AS GOOD AS ANYBODY ELSE as there must be a reason it is still called “HUMANITIES”. Maybe that’s just because there is philosophy as well as “text science” – which is what “art” IS from the point of view of analyzing it. But I think that we have come to forget the “humanities” bit. About what it means to be human there is no discourse within the “humanities” -  only in EVERY fictional text ever written, or painted, or composed, or performed and photographed, and so on. All that stuff is just ABOUT what it means to be human, and when we “deconstruct” fiction, or analyze it, or investigate it by any method, WITHOUT dealing with the human stuff AT THE CENTRE of it, we have just failed.

To state that the “human stuff” is what art and fiction are about may be contestable. But IF we grant this it follows that the most important ingredient of any text is a READER. And it follows because the reader is WHERE the human stuff is located. A reader is not just the “recipient” of the human stuff contained in the text, but the SOURCE where the human stuff comes from.

There is, I think, still an ingrained belief that the author is the most important ingredient of a text. As somebody with a habit of writing fiction, I just know that this is wrong. I know from experience that the text I am writing begins to exist – respectively: to make sense - THE MOMENT I begin to read it – which might be with the first word I am writing but nonetheless! The writer has certainly an important but completely undefinable position in the process of text creation. He or she is the “black box”, not just because they don’t know themselves where the text comes from but because it is ESSENTIAL for it to become a great text that they don’t. The most important thing you “do” writing a fictional text is to STAY OUT OF IT. Which doesn’t mean that the author cannot be the best reader the text will ever have, but this is a DIFFERENT POSITION. The author is just the person who is writing the text, NOTHING ELSE. Whatever they think they are doing when they are writing, or what made them write the text, is mostly without consequence for understanding it. A comprehensive and relevant DESCRIPTION of a text can only be made FROM A READER’S PERSPECTIVE.

The obvious solution would therefore be an empirical approach. “Give” a text to as many readers as possible and make a survey to collect the “outcome” of their reading. But reader-response criticism was over even before I started my studies thirty years ago. And there might be a good reason for it, not just the usual “erratic” behaviour of critics. It just didn’t work. And I am convinced that it doesn’t work because the starting-point was way too naïve. What is really important about the author of “non-trivial” text is not who he is but that he is the person who had DIFFERENT ideas about the human stuff, or NEW ideas about how to present it to the reader. And this entails that, to deal with relevant text, it isn’t enough to be able to read. The first thing we need for the text to come into existence is a SKILLED reader.

And this, in my opinion and experience, doesn’t mean: a reader with special skills, or learning, or even experience. The great thing about reading fiction is that it is available to everybody – unlike playing a musical instrument, or, say, tennis, which requires talent and determination. Reading fiction might just happen to everybody. My favourite example is about my sister – the older one who, by her own admission, never cared about reading fiction, not even as a child – lying on the beach reading Kafka and becoming “this other person”. I think there is some kind of “talent”, or disposition, involved which mainly consists in not being set in one’s ways of feeling and thinking, which I know my sister is not. She is even the only grown-up person I know who still has “different” thoughts and opinions. So, EVEN THOUGH she didn’t really care for the text, in this case, the text “engaged” her. And I think this happens all the time - mostly undetected - because fictional text is DESIGNED to get the human stuff out of us. It certainly is the usual practice to become a skilled reader by reading a lot of DIFFERENT text, but it isn’t necessary. The basic thing is not quantity, but the QUALITY of the reading. As a rule, literary critics are notoriously bad readers because they have “forgotten” how to read and have acquired the skill of putting theories and opinions in the place of genuine thoughts and feelings. (Whereas, as a rule, great actors are incredibly skilled readers, even kind of “text magnets”, pulling ever more and more of the human stuff out of the text to enhance their acting. That’s the reason I stick to them instead of critics.) - If we envisage text as this vortex movement which is amplified by the intensity of the reading it is obvious that it can be stopped by throwing things into the text that don’t belong there. Of course we can throw all kinds of things at the text and it might work, but usually it isn’t necessary. The text will “find” the right stuff within us to play with. I BELIEVE my sister that she actually BECAME this other person. And this description about what happens is so infinitely valuable because it proves that it is possible to understand “esoteric” text on its deepest level without having been fed any of the current theories and prejudices on what Kafka is supposed to be “about”.

So, the first thing I need to find out what reading fiction is about is a skilled reader – which means that I cannot just throw a text at anybody and tell them to read it. I’d actually have to “catch” the person WHILE they are reading. And - unlike we should be able to “catch” people while they are dreaming, judging by their eye-movement - we will never know if this actually happened unless they tell us about it afterwards. And this is the second thing I would need to tackle these questions: the kind of description I wrote about, or a detailed protocol, of what happened when somebody has been reading. Of course I was thrilled when my sister told me about Kafka, or when her son, as a child, told me why reading Tolkien was so different from reading “childrens’ books” like “Peter Pan”: because he actually WAS on this journey, “TOGETHER with the elf, the dwarf, and the hobbit”. I knew what he meant because I had been there myself, as I think lots of people have. But, until then, I lacked PROOF that somebody else was actually doing the same thing I was doing when they were reading. And this kind of DIRECT proof is incredibly hard to come by – basically, I needed a child to tell me about it. Quite often, reading is about things that are no topic for a casual conversation. I suppose that even I wouldn’t tell just anybody about how I suddenly discovered – and pitied! – myself in Shakespeare’s “shrew”, or on which occasion I shed a tear seeing “The Desolation of Smaug”, or had my best orgasm in a long time, watching “Elizabeth”. That is what this blog is for.

The only way I could come up with to investigate this matter was, obviously, to write these “protocols” about what actually happened when I was reading myself. But even though this activity made me discover a lot about myself, and reading, and fictional texts, and actually MADE me a better reader, it is of course faulty for a number of reasons. Though I have tried to be truthful about what happened when I was reading there are of course blind spots, I suppose, lots of them. Where I cannot “capture” what I am doing. (My description of reading “The Crucible” is a tale about chasing for blind spots. And, basically, I still don’t know if I have been successful.) But this wouldn’t be so bad because it would have been the same for any reader. And, as I NEED a reader, there is no avoiding this.

The uncomfortable fact of the investigator being the object she investigates is not a genuine obstacle either. I know, and proved to myself, that, if anything, I am a skilled reader and don’t have to figure out how to determine that the object of my studies is “valid”. And I always “have” the complete context of any instance of reading – as far as this is possible. But of course it would be invaluable to have independent corroboration that the same kind of thing happens to other people as well.

The real problem is rather that these protocols about my readings are of course informed by my theories about WHAT I THINK I am doing when I am reading, and why I am doing it. Some of it might be part of the learning curve every reader of non-trivial text has to perform. (Back then, when novels “sprang up” in the eighteen century and, for the first time, created readers of fiction on a big scale, reading was considered as EDUCATION - a method of improving our ability to feel, and interact with other people in a “civilized” way. This has certainly changed but, still, I suppose, self-reflection is a step on the way of learning NEW things.) On the other hand, there will always be the peril of theories “taking over” and obstructing “genuine” reading. What I did instinctively to avoid this dilemma is, basically, not to read interpretations, “uproot” prejudices and received ideas about the text, and try to focus on what ACTUALLY HAPPENED when I was reading. Protocol any strong reactions I had to the text. But I learned as well that this attitude is not just naïve, but partly squeamish and inapt, even perverse sometimes, except for the last bit. In fact, THERE IS NO AVOIDING THE DILEMMA. Strictly, “scientifically”, I just proved that my method is invalid. And, still, I am totally convinced that something like this is the ONLY serious and honest starting-point for asking the Big Question.

(So, if I dreamt of a doctoral thesis  - which I don’t believe I did – I can skip that. It will ALWAYS just be a metaphor. Though, becoming increasingly aware how powerful metaphors are in terms of moving the stuff INSIDE US about, I don’t really mind that either.)

Nonetheless I know that what I am doing is flawed by the way I am doing it. My protocols are the only comprehensive samples of “live” reading available to me, but they are not really protocols, they are essays. It is my stimulation for writing them, and that means there are a lot of “objects” drawn into them that don’t belong into the original readings, just to make them more attractive and readable. It is kind of when I waked, having had a dream, and then tried to memorize the dream. I know that the dream gets completely changed by this process. There probably wasn’t “a text” to begin with, as there probably isn’t a text about the text I am reading when I am actually reading. There is an act of CONSCIOUSLY putting myself into the process by memorizing, or thinking about it, or writing. On the other hand, there wouldn’t be a trace of the dream left only minutes after waking if I hadn’t tried to memorize it. And most of the content of my reading only survives because I love it to think and, above all, write about these things. But there are a few good reasons to mistrust this person that is writing. Most of the time, I don’t even know who she is.

For some reason, I feel a lot safer with something like this kind of bleak statement my friend gave me about why she thinks she is reading interpretations. As I have written three posts in the meantime I have to repeat it here. She wrote that it came to her as an “epiphany” that reading (different) interpretations of a text is part of her technique of dealing with the world and other people. As everybody is a universe of their own, to get on in the world and be able to deal with other people, she has to find out how they think and feel. If this doesn’t work she might be in deep shit, much worse than if she knows that she will never get on with the other person, or find any common ground at all. And she enjoys reading (different) interpretations (of one text) because they explain the many facets of a fictional world, in analogy to the many facets of real people and real life issues.

Now, one important thing about this statement – even though it is just amazing as to the depth of the analysis and the many aspects about reading it contains – is that it is NOT about reading FICTION. But this might even be a benefit because it might actually be a good idea to tackle the issues of reading and reading fiction separately. The most exciting aspect for me in this context is that it sums up a genuine experience about READING AS PART OF THE HUMAN ACTIVITY OF SOLVING PROBLEMS. I even think that it can be used as a starting-point for demonstrating how the human activities of solving problems, playing, and reading might be connected - which I will attempt in my next post.