Reading as text production: an introduction (and a Christmas carol)

I wrote that I was looking forward to a period of not writing, but here I am at my desk, on the second day of Christmas, trying to make sense of my notes about “A Christmas Carol” which this year happened to become my “Christmas special”. It is the most interesting case of Not Reading I have encountered so far, but I selected it mainly to introduce the sequel of my “thesis”.

Interesting because it was definitely one of these stories I never cared for – and that EVEN THOUGH I never read it. I am positive I never read it, or saw any production of it, when I watched the first Christmas special of “Doctor Who” with Matt Smith as the Doctor and didn’t even know that the Michael Gambon character was called “Scrooge” in the original story but instantly recognized it as an inspired version of “A Christmas Carol” transferred into the “Doctor Who” universe. This November, when a film with the rather clumsy title “Dickens – the man who invented Christmas” came to the cinema, I thought I’d watch it but didn’t even think about buying the book because I already knew that I didn’t care about the story - without knowing anything about it. I  MUST have known something about it to be so sure that I didn’t care about it, but I never discovered what this knowledge consisted of and where it came from.

I watched the film twice because it became extremely interesting for an entirely different reason, and I mended my ignorance by buying the book and the “classical” film version with Patrick Stewart. I still don’t care about it, but really reading it made a big difference, and, as it usually does, modified my prejudices which are the habitual outcome of Not Reading. They – and the fact that I didn’t care about the story - certainly had something to do with my own attitude towards Christmas which I judge to be overrated “humbug” – a time for lying to children and relatives, for being compelled to write meaningless Christmas cards and pretending to be delighted about dodgy presents, and, of course, having a bad conscience about not caring enough about people we have no good reason to care about. In spite of that I came to like Christmas these last years - not only for the many holidays – and was surprised to find such an unexpected explanation in “A Christmas Carol” why Christmas actually IS special.  

For me, the story “happened” when I read about Marley’s ghost telling Scrooge about his fate. The fate of all the spirits that hadn’t got round in the world enough and have to roam the earth for years before they can find peace. Of course it is all about meanness and charity, and Tiny Tim and so forth, but there is also an amazing explanation running through the story of WHY Christmas is important as this “window of opportunity” that opens once a year. Actually a modern interpretation of the ancient belief that the time around the winter solstice is a time where the “window” towards the other world opens – as an opportunity to look ELSEWHERE, not at what we are usually looking. Which means AT OURSELVES in the first place - at what we have been, at what we are, at what we might become if we don’t find a way of getting round in the world more. Of developing our own potential especially in striking meaningful and satisfying relationships with other people. Everything that might never be developed if we narrow down our life to one goal, one single way of thinking and looking at things, and people, which usually occurs when we are growing older. Perceived and “observed” like this, Christmas actually has the potential of making us “better”, and, accordingly, CANNOT be overrated – in the same way reading cannot.

This surprising insight didn’t make me fond of the story, and I didn’t really like the film either. Nonetheless I saw it twice, not for any aesthetical reasons but because I became fascinated by the degree of detail and truthfulness it applied to its subject: the genesis of “A Christmas Carol”. The film actually contains the most comprehensive and sophisticated description of a TEXT PRODUCTION PROCESS I ever came upon.

The story turns out to be a veritable fluke in this respect. We seldom know so much about how a work of fiction actually “came together”. It might even be possible to put figures to it: how much money Dickens expected to get out of this business venture, how much of this he wrote off as an investment, how much it actually made. As almost always with this kind of spectacular success there was a risk – quite considerable in this case because Dickens produced the book himself, on a very tight schedule. And in this case one thing is absolutely certain: “A Christmas Carol” would never have come into being if Dickens hadn’t been in dire need of money. “Christmas”, as we know it, might have been put off indefinitely … Not that there is anything surprising about this. Looking into it, we would probably find that economic circumstances are a more decisive factor in almost any cultural venture than any internal motivation. It is just a splendid example to show HOW BIG the part of text production that I am NOT concerned with in this blog actually is. Money – and time and pressure! – the preconditions of ANY successful capitalistic venture apply here as well as in any other line of business. And these external production conditions are by no means accidental to the content and structure of the fictional text that ensues. This is strikingly obvious for “A Christmas Carol” because the economic venture depended on Christmas as part of a marketing strategy as much as on its content. In this case, they are just two sides of the same coin. Without Christmas the story wouldn’t just never have been thought up or finished, it would never have made this kind of tidal wave which was the precondition of its spectacular economic success. In most cases this influence will be more complicated and less direct but it is always there. Even “Shakespeare” wouldn’t have become what it is without its author’s aptitude for making money out of words.

There is, of course, the personal situation of the author to consider when it comes to producing a fictional text. Its influence on the content of a single artistic venture is usually a big issue where these stories are concerned, and, in my opinion, is usually very indirect and uncertain. In this case – even though there is a lot of biographical stuff in the film – they didn’t even try to strike such a connection. It is always important, though, that the person we have become by decisive influences on our growing-up will have a decisive influence on all the choices we make – in the case of Dickens and “A Christmas Carol” his attitude towards economic success is certainly a key feature. There would have been no “Christmas Carol” without it, but that’s just because there was nothing, at the moment, Dickens really WANTED to write about.

These observations don’t apply to one particular part of the situation: other people. I suppose, depending on what kind of a text it is but even in the case of a “simple” story, there always is a considerable and decisive influence of other people in various capacities on the end-product of a writing process: people who are supportive, like Dicken’s best friend and agent, people who are annoying and obstructive, like parents, people who figure as readers, like the little housemaid who saved Tiny Tim. I am sorry, but with Tiny Tim dead the whole thing simply would have flopped … These additions and influences are certainly very real, very important and, in most cases, their impact on the story more specific than the impact of the economic situation. I think they are “real”, but in the present case probably inventions or elaborations – apart from the friend and agent. The point is to show that they are very substantial – a substantial part of text production that usually never comes into our reading and is certainly NOT a part of what I am dealing with in this blog.

 In the case of a fictional text with so many substantial characters there are probably always people coming into a story “as characters”. It is actually a great filmic illustration of the growing of a fictional world to let Dicken’s study, a discouragingly lonely place in the beginning, get so crowded and lively in the process that, sometimes, he just HAS to get out. But, on closer inspection, most of these characters are fictional, or partially fictional, and I am certain that they were right to assume that he never actually MET Scrooge. Great exemplary characters like him come out of fiction, not life, they are original inventions. In fact, NAMES became much more important than real people. And I think this is true: names and words conjure up fictional reality. They work on our imagination. In more general terms: the whole process of reality being transferred into fiction certainly is a substantial part of text production – which usually does NOT come into our reading, nor into this blog.

There is a part of it, though, that comes into it, I’d say: always, because it is at the centre of what made a fictional text so successful that it got canonized. With the outcome that we still know about it and may get inclined to “update” it for ourselves by reading. It is the SPECIFIC HISTORICAL SITUATION it referred to – or even just the specific reason that people at the time found it so relevant that they bought it and read it, and, in this case, got so much changed by it that they were willing to give more money to the poor than they usually did! THIS, I think, is what is most unique and special about “A Christmas Carol” – apart from the more sustainable outcome that it probably changed “our” way of thinking about Christmas, and reacting to it, permanently. But it is hard to actually PROVE this, unlike the measurable “cash flow”. I think, the fact that our reading is an update of some kind of a historical situation always comes into our reading of historical fiction in some way or another, most of the time much less spectacularly or consciously. (See my remarks on “timelessness” and “updating” on behalf of “Macbeth” and “The Merchant of Venice”.) In this case, I got to really read the story for the sole reason that I found the historical implications fascinating. That Christmas, as we know it, is shaped by Capitalism and THEREFORE, basically, still is THE SAME as it was at the time. As it still serves the same purpose, or became an answer to the same predicament. The combination of scary ghost story and the “Christmas spirit” still doesn’t appeal to me any more than it did in the beginning.

Though this process of conscious updating is fascinating in some cases, it is again NOT what this blog is about. I dealt with the film so extensively for the sole reason that I wanted to show how huge the text production process can be – ESPECIALLY for a text that became hugely successful, and which we are still reading because it had been so successful at the time. (Not always as a business venture in the first place, but quite often so.) It is huge already for a “tiny” work of prose like this one, and more so for big productions of international film or series. I often watch specials and find this big part of text production – the iceberg of which we only see the tip even in specials! – quite fascinating. But it is NOT what this blog is about. It is about a “tiny” part of text production which I dealt with in the fourth paragraph of this post and which I call READING. Tiny not even where numbers are concerned because something like “A Christmas Carol” has been read an infinite number of times by an infinite number of people but as to the meagreness of ATTENTION it receives. It is probably the most widespread and efficient PREVENTIVE therapy ever invented against stress, burnout, and depression caused by external overload that inhibits us from focusing on ourselves. (Or was, currently it is probably computer games and UTube – just as to numbers, not, I am afraid, efficiency!) And even though practically EVERY PERSON I know uses it - or did, at some time in their lives, use it - NOBODY appears to be aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it. In my opinion, the psychological reason for this is that modern capitalism isn’t really about money anymore but – increasingly! - about (quantifiable) ACTIVITY and ATTENTION. Which is good, by the way. But an “activity” that doesn’t burn any fat cells, usually goes unnoticed by any “twitter”, and is cheap as to the amount of funds, sweat, and labour it requires, is per se unlikely to be taken seriously. Even though “we” still KNOW that it is an ancient technique of improving ourselves which is easy to learn because we are using it on our children! It might be ridiculous indeed – and quite superfluous, of course – to want to know what it is, or try to promote it, let alone improve it  - which I don’t think it is, by the way! But nobody would probably oppose this, whereas it is certainly cheeky to consider it as A PART OF TEXT PRODUCTION, like writing, performing, illustrating, CGI, producing or directing films and so on – “serious” activities that are not designed JUST to produce text but to generate hashtags, jobs, and money!

Nonetheless, my theory about reading being a form of text production is not meant to provoke – who, by the way? There is no likeliness of any hashtag … On the other hand, it is certainly not some kind of established theory or customary way of thinking about it. It wasn’t FOR ME until I actually OBSERVED it. How this happened was one of the most interesting and productive “accidents” I have ever had which will be the focus of part two of my introduction and my next post. (That is, if “Anthony and Cleopatra” doesn’t get in the way which – fingers crossed! – I will see next Wednesday (!!!) in the Olivier Theatre. I just figured out how to get there and back again …)