From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Spoilers - more
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 04:01:06 GMT


                                       Sunday, the 26th of July, 1992
  
Keith Morgan writes:
  Of course the story is what the author intended.

Of course.

                                                  He had something to
  say and he *chose* to do so in the form of a story.

For the purposes of this discussion, I would say no. I would say
the author intended that some amount of story has some level
of importance to his work.

                                                      You seem to think
  that I don't believe there may be levels beneath the story line.

No, Keith. I think that your statement here that these levels are
``beneath'' the story line implies a hierarchical model of the components
of a work of fiction that I don't share.

So, when you say:
                  The point is that the book is also worth reading the
  first time.

there's an implication that there is only one right way to read
a novel the first time, that the ``depth'' both can and should wait for
later readings, that the first time is ``natural'', that the later times
are ``interpreted'' and ``artificial''.

Epictetus (_Discourses_, Bk. I.vi.19):
But god has brought man into the world to be a spectator of Himself and of
His works, and not merely a spectator, but also an interpreter.

Or, we might paraphrase Socrates:
The uninterpreted book is not worth reading.

In this light, I thought of my experience with ``King Lear'': I didn't
like it at all on first read. Now, having seen some more of life
and family conflicts such that I can understand Cordelia, Lear,
Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Edgar, etc., I rate it with ``Hamlet'' as about
the most intensely perfect written work in existience. For me, my first
reading left me disliking ``Lear''. Now, after a number of other readings,
I think that about the only merit in that first reading was that it eventually
got me to a second.

  1. It is criminal to spoil the simple enjoyment of allowing the story
  to unfold the way the author originally intended.

Well, I reserve ``criminal'' for physical injustice (for things which
ought to be crimes), sometimes more conventionally just for legal transgress.
But, it's not so much the occasion for a political platform here that
interests me as the extremity of your statement. I'd suspect the editor
of the Penguin _Romola_ probably just got off submitting some article
titled ``Overdeterminations of the Element of Surprise
in Late Victorian Novelists'' to _The Victorian Novel Quarterly_ and
was really proud of having found evidence that Eliot had deleted the
passage to make for more surprise. It probably didn't cross Mr. Sanders'
mind he was doing anything so dastardly as stealing the Christmas roast beast.

I'd call it unfortunate, yes, what he did. But I couldn't go much
further than that. 
  
  2. If it is indeed a great book, the story will never simply be a
  throw away. In order fully to understand the underlying messages in
  the book, it will be necessary constantly to compare the depths of the
  book with its surface. Those messages can only be illuminated in the
  light of the story line that has structured their presentation.
  Consequently, it is necessary first to get the story right--the way
  the author intended the reader to get it.

I agree with everything here except the ``first''.
  
  3. There is no shortcut to this process. Reading everything one can
  about the book prior to reading the work itself is no substitute for
  doing the legwork of various comparative readings oneself. At best,
  one ends up with a bunch of opinions about a work and no genuine
  understanding of it. It's fine to read that stuff afterward, but if
  you read it beforehand, it really just gets in between you and the
  author.    
  
Sorry, but I disagree. First of all, I think there is a shortcut.
The right critical comment can set you on to something you'd miss
in a lifetime of readings. Wrong critical comments can be discarded,
making your reading more active than it otherwise would have been.
So, second, I don't think this stuff gets in the way.

Keith, if you don't already know them, I'd highly recommend two
little stories/essays/? by Borges that address this point of stuff
``between'' you and the author: I'm thinking of ``Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote'' and ``Kafka and His Precursors'' (both are in
the _Labyrinths_ volume). Both of them express the idea, much more
delightfully than I can, that it is impossible to meet any author
as he intended.

I question both whether we can or even should shun those intervening
layers. Why delight in them, use them?

Also, I'm remembering that when I first read the Wake, I wandered
up in the Caltech library and located a full shelf of books
on Joyce (it was surprising to me that there was anything, since
that library has a particularly high architecture-to-books ratio). On the
Wake, I remember noting one little book by an English arachnologist
(I think it was). He had shunned turning to any critical help
outside of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and the like, had worked his way
through the Wake slowly and carefully and had written this little book
around that experience and around the interpretation he had come up with. 
(I'm sorry I do not remember anything more than this about the book.)
Now, I think his program was admirable, but I figure I just didn't and
don't have the two years or whatever he spent to devote to it myself.
Same reason I resorted to looking at the _Oxford Companion_ to get a clue
about what a normative interpretation of _Moby Dick_ might look like: I'm
probably not going to be keen enough about it to go read Melville's
correspondence.

  In short: a great work has a surface and a depth. No matter how
  profound the depth may be, I would prefer to get the surface enjoyment
  out of it as well. I want them both. The work is diminished if one is
  sacrificed for the other.

I think you have a model of ``great work'' that works best for certain
19th-Century especially plotty novels. You may be right for Austen
and Eliot. I don't think you are for the Melville, mainly because I think
lots of students who approach _Moby Dick_ with this model in mind get turned
off by its relative un-plotty-ness. Well, OK, call that one arguable
at least. When it comes to 20th-Century stuff, I think your model breaks
down. I think I probably approached my first Joyce, _Dubliners_, with
something like your model in mind. My first reaction was ``There's no story
here at all. Nothing happens.'' I think the same can be said to be true
of a lot of 20th-Century fiction. Even in Thomas Mann, who is much more
conventional and accessible than Joyce, in _The Magic Mountain_ and
_Doctor Faustus_, not much *happens*. Without the so-called ``depth'',
that is. I should think that trying to stick to ``the story'' only on
a first reading of these works would make them pretty boring.  

  Finally, as you cited the _Oxford Companion to American Literature_ in
  support of your position, let me cite a comment of Robert Alter's
  in support of mine:

I'll let it remain, both because I like it and because I think
it actually is in support of my position:
  
  	To read [the language of literature] adequately requires a
  	prehensile activity of the mind on the details of the text as
  	it unfolds, a willingness to entertain multiple and unresolved
  	meanings, an openness to the pleasures in the sound and look
  	and combination of the words.... there is a necessary, if
  	subordinate, place for literary studies alongside reading.
  	Analytic attention to the distinctive formal resources of
  	literature is never a substitute for the immediate experience
  	of reading, but it can give us a sharper focus on the dynamic
  	play of elements in what we read. 
  	
  	_The pleasures of reading in an ideological age._
  	Simon and Schuster, 1989, p.48.
  
       Mike Morris
   (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
  
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books