From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Spoilers - continuing discussion
Date: 21 Jul 92 20:32:37 GMT
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario


                                   Tuesday, the 21st of July, 1992

Keith Morgan writes, regarding spoilers:  
  My contention wasn't that knowing the ending ruins ALL novels. It can
  be unimportant in many cases. Yet, even in this example, imagine being
  told, not that only Ishmael survives, but the specific fate of Ahab
  and his companions. Certainly this is an example of what must be a
  predetermined novel; however, imagine asking Melville: "so you've
  written a novel Mr. Melville, how does it end?" 

Keith, _Moby Dick_ would be an example for me where I'd think knowing any plot
detail would be utterly irrelevant. People tell me they do read it as a whaling
adventure story. And it may be that I just came to it much too late in
life ever to experience that. Maybe I've thereby missed something. But,
when I did read it, for me _Moby Dick_ had precisely nothing to do with
whaling or high-seas adventure. Instead, it was about telling God He's
a dirty bastard to His unveiled face. And I cannot imagine anything
more thrilling than the experience of reading about that.
  
Perhaps I can think of a personal counterexample in ``The Chronicles
of Narnia''. I read this for the first time maybe 6 years ago (in my mid-20s)
and found the Christian allegorizing so tedious that I found myself intoning
Tolkien's line about detesting allegory in all of its manifestations.
Friends have told me on the other hand that they read it as children, didn't
have a clue then about the allegory, and loved the books.

I gave examples of what *I* would call WOWs, and Keith responds: 
  OK, but these examples are not analogous to my examples. You're
  talking about a certain pleasurable response to a certain portion of
  certain novels. Of course great novels will work their magic again and
  again but there are other moments that can be ruined in the same
  novels, while the magic remains eternally.

Agreed that my WOWs were qualititatively different, but that was part
of my point. I'm not understanding which WOWs I should be going for.
Is it even thinkable that one could get all of them? Even, say, with
a lifetime of reading and rereading a particular work?

About a Penguin editor giving away the plot of _Romola_ a hundred
pages too early: 
  Well, since I can't really discuss my point without becoming a spoiler
  myself, I'll just comment that if you read the footnote without having
  read the book first you will never be able to judge why Eliot deleted
  the line. You will know what the line was, when she deleted it, and
  this knowledge will affect your perception of the plot. If the
  offending note is read after the novel is completed you will be able
  to judge objectively.

It's this ``objectively'' that I question. With ``Romeo and Juliet''
by now I've had a number of different experiences with the play. 
The first time back in high school was more romantic. This last time,
I was particularly caught up in the Nurse and Friar Lawrence, their
separate betrayals of the pair, and how R&J were able to transform
mere adolescent passion into something grander by choosing the course
they did. Also, being myself now a parent, I found the discovery
of Juliet's supposedly dead body by the nurse and by her parents
particularly moving. I'm wondering who's to say which is the better
or more ``objective'' experience of this play? Maybe the best experience
of R&J still awaits me a dozen readings or performances in the future.

You seem to imagine, Keith, that there is an imaginable state of
``first-time reader'' for any given book, with an ideal mixture
of both foreknowledge and ignorance about that book and its subject
matter that can be prescribed.

Why should virginity be preferred to knowledge?

Also, is there ever a state of true virginity? I mean
we've seen some examples where our knowledge of the story
goes way, way back (if not to mother's milk, then to Bugs Bunny
cartoons). I would contend that certain story lines just are
better than others. That we know this almost from birth. That they
just resonate with our brain better. So, I think,
in some sense we already know *all* the good stories already.
The plot can't surprise us as much as the artistry
with which it is told.

And, besides our own experience (being a parent, having once
been in love, etc.) history intervenes so that in some sense
we can *never* read the work as intended. For example,
it's pretty impossible to unremember the successful outcome
of the American Revolution for a reading of _Common Sense_.
Even if we deliberately avoid the Introduction and the Notes,
the book is necessarily different for us now than it was then.

I think there's no such thing as an uninterpreted reading, no
such thing as an un-preconceived reading.

Also take the case of reading narrative history. We usually already know
the story.

Right now, I'm in the middle of Bernal Diaz del Castillo's
history of the conquest of New Spain. This after having read Prescott,
and Cortes' letters. The story is the same one. No surprises in plot.
And yet the story is marvelous anew.
  
Regarding Mark Taranto's example of a prof giving away the ending of
_Anna Karenina_, Keith writes:
  A perfect example. Theoretical agreement still can't stamp out the
  emotional gut-feeling that something is wrong when choices are taken away.

Again, I would have said that the fact she jumps in front of a train
was ``in the air''. I've never read the book, and I don't know wherefrom
I know that (and how) she kills herself, but knowing it doesn't stop me from
desiring to read the book, doesn't make me feel cheated.
  
I had said: 
  	I'm definitely not one to argue authorial intent with you, but
  	I guess I'm also not convinced that one-time surprise was
  	essential to, say, Eliot's intent.
  
And Keith responded:
  Sure you are! Isn't that part of the fun about this group? accusing
  each other of gross misreadings of every author in the world?

Well, I meant that I wasn't going to make the fashionable claim that authorial
intent is either inscrutable or irrelevant. That argument would be inimical
to both of our points of view.

I do agree that arguing readings is half the fun of r.a.b. Personally,
I think that learning about other people's readings invariably *adds*
to my own. 
(See, again I regard more knowledge as an unmixed *good*.) 

And:
                                                                However,
  as to the Eliot example, my comment is that this is not a surprise
  that is revealed, it is that in revising the manuscript for
  publication (it had appeared in Cornhill's magazine previously) Eliot
  deleted a line so as to make certain actions ambiguous. She did that
  so the story would proceed in a certain way. 

But, I think the story *does* proceed in this certain way, with or without
the offending footnote. The footnote just lets me peek behind the curtain
a little to admire the intent and execution a little more than I would
have. Again, maybe I just don't surrender myself enough
to the story, I keep always some critical distance so that part of my brain
objectifies the work I'm immersed in. Probably
Fiona's willed forgetting describes it best, but for me it's only part
of my brain that can do this, that experiences the story as story. The
rest of my brain craves anything the critical apparatus can give me.  
  
And finally Keith wonders: 
       ... if there is a tendency to forget that, first and foremost,
  these are just *stories*, that was the primal authorial intention.
  Jane Austen didn't sit down to write "literature" she just wanted to
  tell stories.

*Are* they just stories?

For all of ``Romeo and Juliet'', _Moby Dick_, _Anna Karenina_, Jane Austen,
and George Eliot, I think that the ``story'' is the *least* important
part of the reading.
              
            Mike Morris
      (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
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