What have I learned? It's hard to sum up, but suffice it to say that I've found my purpose. I'm going into the workforce with a clear vision of what I want to achieve with my work and what my work means to me and the world around me.
I was privileged to participate in the English department honors program where I had the opportunity to write a scholarly thesis. My peers and I were given wide latitude in choosing and researching our respective topics. Therefore, what I chose to write about says a great deal about what I have learned so far and how I have come to interpret it.
I chose to write about how novels inspire wonder in readers and examined just how that response functions within a text. I would be honored if you would take the time to read it. I think you may enjoy it, especially if you're a book lover. It's very low on jargon and, I believe, is very accessible for the average non-academic reader. I hope you find it as interesting to read as it was for me to write. I'd like to dedicate this post to my parents, Janet and Merrill. You've both been unflinching in your patience and in your support of my efforts these past few years, and you have my eternal gratitude.
--Tom
Amazing Stories: Wonder as a Reader Response to the Contemporary
Novel
Carter
Beats the Devil,
a novel by Glen David Gold tells a story whose title character is a
real magician named Charles Carter. Set primarily in
turn-of-the-century Oakland and San Francisco, California, the story
follows Carter from his childhood experiments with magic to the
flowering of his career in the middle 1920s. Through his travails,
his love of stage magic as a craft not only gets him out of difficult
situations, it ultimately saves his life, both physically and
spiritually. A master of illusion himself, he knows full well how all
the tricks work. Nevertheless, Carter still feels a sense of wonder
about magic; knowing "how its done" does not diminish his
enjoyment in the least. Consider the scene where Carter has just
witnessed an illusion by Harry Houdini. Carter discusses the act
they've just witnessed with his old vaudeville colleague and rival,
Mysterioso, in a casual encounter that quickly becomes adversarial:
"It happened as you say. He had all of us feeling
pleased with ourselves, just because he fooled us. If I think about
it, I suppose he's well enough to escape from a light-bulb tomorrow.
But I don't want to think about it." Mysterioso smirked and
Carter continued. "That's right, that's right—that's the magic
of it."
"Oh," Mysterioso moaned, clutching at his
heart as if Cater had shot him there. "Magic. Of course,"
he shook his head. "I'd been wondering exactly what kind of
idiot you are, rich boy."
The crowd had tapered a bit. Mysterioso gave one last
sad shake of his head and walked away.
Carter called after him, "Mysterioso," but got
no response, so he continued, "how do you make the lion roar?"
Mysterioso called over his shoulder, "Magic, you
moron," as he turned his collar up and merged with the crowd.
At this point in the story, Carter's career in magic and his
personality is far from fully developed. He exists in a space
somewhere between an expert technician and an avid consumer. Like so
many who work in a creative field, his practice begins as an eager
spectator of the kind of work he wants to pursue. He doesn't want to
think about "how it's done" until adversity compels him to
dwell in that knowledge, to survive by it in preparation for a time
when he can thrive by it. But the journey begins with wonder.
Wonder is an under-valued quality in literary works, a quality that,
if better understood, would yield reading experiences that are both
more enticing to readers and more lasting in their cultural impact.
There is much about wonder as a reader response, what I call the
wonder response, that seems intangible and mysterious. Like stage
magic, the wonder response has its secrets. But revealing these
secrets will deepen the wonder response, not spoil it. Here, I will
attempt to do just that while drawing greater attention to a reader
response with a complex life cycle and which I believe is essential
to a successful work of literature.
Author
As Magician
In broad terms, wonder is a reaction to a stimulus that creates a
question in the beholder. This question may be answered or not, to
varying degrees, but this interaction produces a pleasurable
response. This reaction is the basis for magic shows as a form of
entertainment--wonder taken on the road. Wonder is also, perhaps, the
central appeal of museums. In fact, early American museums were often
established with the goal in mind of creating a wonder response,
education being a congenial secondary goal. The modern craft of
designing museum spaces still takes this kind of response seriously
in attracting both visitors and donations.
Wonder,
as a reader's response to literature, is a complex set of emotional
and cognitive interactions that play a central role in determining
whether a work is successful in connecting with a given reader. This
is not something a literary work can force on a reader, but results
from an interaction between the work and the reader. Asking "What
creates a wonder response: the reader or the work?" is like
asking "What sustains a fire: the fuel or the oxygen?" This
thesis will explicate the fundamental elements of the wonder response
coming from both the reader and a given work and will begin a
tentative exploration of how these two interact.
My
goal in this thesis is to produce a better understanding of wonder,
that it might be more fully appreciated as the complex, engaging, and
rewarding reader response that it is. As I will show, this better
understanding will have applications for readers, for writers, and
for critics.
Considerations
of Genre
This
thesis aspires to broad application, primarily, for novels in any
genre. I will, however, be touching on literary, speculative,
juvenile fiction, and popular thrillers in the course of my
discussion. Since the application to different genres may not be
readily apparent, I will briefly outline a basic idea of how wonder
response works among different genres to at least begin a discourse
on the subject.
While
I contend that the wonder response as outlined here has applications
to many kinds of literary works, I will be focusing on the novel as a
medium partly to limit the scope of the argument, but also because
novels depend on wonder in particularly acute ways given the nature
of the medium. Here I will define a novel as a work of fiction of
such a length that it's understood that the reader will need more
than one sitting to finish reading it. Also, regardless of the many
critiques concerning the novel as a dominant form of literature in
the English language, dominant it remains. In any event, my
discussion on the wonder response should also translate well to
shorter or more mixed media (graphic novels, for instance).
Consider
for a moment the way most readers interact with a novel. A reader's
interest is piqued concerning the subject of the novel, its cover, or
perhaps a conversation with a friend who has read it. The reader
obtains a copy, often spending money on it, though not always. The
reader reads, then sooner or later comes to a stopping place. This
stopping place can be suggested by chapters or sections, or come
naturally with the rise and fall of the drama unfolding. The reader
may also stop because of the exigencies of life, like, say, reaching
an appointed bus stop or falling asleep. The reader repeats this
process, picking up the novel and putting it down. This reading
continues until they have reached the end, other things push the
novel out of their attention, or they simply elect not to continue
reading. It is what the author does for the reader during those
"picked up" phases where the wonder response does most of
its heavy lifting, but I will argue that the wonder response has a
life cycle of its own starting when the reader has contact with the
title of the novel, through all the reading, to well after the
reading is finished.
Wonder has varied definitions in reference to literature and is
largely posed as a negative. Adalgisa Lugli describes this negative
definition of wonder as something that exists on "that
precarious balance between credulity and curiosity," (Kareem,
6). This kind of definition is understandably arrived at, since a
significant feature of wonder is the presence of questions occasioned
by a stimulus. In other words, wonder begins with something a person
realizes they didn't know, but would like to. From one point of view
this is a negative cognitive space, a vacuum, something in between
asking and knowing. Such an analysis has its value, but wonder as a
reader response goes much further than this and merits a more useful
definition. Just because the cognitive space where wonder dwells is
negatively defined does not mean, however, that it is not active and,
indeed vital in a reader's response to a novel. Consider the truism
"nature abhors a vacuum"; so, too, does wonder. Wonder is
not a void, but a vacuum—a tension between something known and
something not known.
The
primary differences among genres in creating a wonder response is in
the choice of stimulus. Science fiction, for instance, relies on
technology, the future, the alien, and what might be waiting for us
"out there" to draw readers in the initial stage of the
wonder response. 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne grabs its readers with the promise of a journey that
was considered impossible to Verne's first readers, and descriptions
of technology that did not exist, but which Verne earnestly tried to
convince his readers could
exist.
In
contrast, literary fiction uses entirely different means to
accomplish the same thing: internal struggle, familial or political
conflict, poetic use of language—all these things create a wonder
response every bit as enthralling and memorable to its readers. I
will argue that successful fiction, regardless of genre, accomplishes
many of the same things to the degree that they effectively create a
complete wonder response.
Literary
Success: A Functional Definition
What constitutes a "successful" novel or work of fiction?
There are a number of possible metrics to apply here, but this one
should cover most of them, if not all of them; a successful novel or
work of fiction draws the attention of at least one reader, holds
that reader's attention to such a degree that the reader finishes
reading the work and finds pleasure in doing so, and, finally, that
the reader continues to find pleasure in engaging with the work long
after the initial reading. My exploration of the wonder response will
effectively be a thorough breakdown of this definition.
I will discuss and define the wonder response by describing its life
cycle, dividing it into three distinct stages which are readily
identifiable, but which, as I will show, bleed into each other:
Initiation, Conversation, and Legacy. Initiation: How does a
successful novel attract a reader's attention? What makes a reader go
to the effort to obtain and begin reading a long work of fiction?
Conversation: What happens to a reader that gets them from the front
cover to the back and through every page in between? Legacy: What
makes a novel feel like an old friend to a reader? What is it about a
novel that prompts multiple readings, adaptations, fan letters,
themed tourism, Halloween costumes, fan fiction, or other such
enthusiastic responses? Where does such enthusiasm for a mere book
come from? My discussion of the Legacy phase will focus on how novels
and other works create this phase of the wonder response, with only
passing attention to how the Legacy phase manifests itself in
readers. The increasing critical and academic attention on fan
culture is more than adequately describing and exploring the nature
of these manifestations, but I mention some of these both above and
below to give the uninitiated some idea of just how vibrant and
resonant this phase of wonder can be. All these phases of wonder
deserve more attention that I can give here, but identifying and
explicating them is a crucial step this thesis is attempting to take,
with benefits for readers, writers, and critics alike.
For
readers, I hope that understanding wonder and how it functions in
literature will be de-mystified. Understanding, I hope, will furnish
spirited debate on wonder as a reader response, help readers
understand their own relationship with literature, and thus help
increase its value as a living expression of the culture.
For
writers, I hope that finding ways in which an understanding of wonder
as a reader response will give writers a diagnostic tool for gauging
the effectiveness of their work.
Critics
will have a new way to measure a novel's success. New, more clear
definitions will also help move our understanding of the wonder
response beyond the negative spaces and into an understanding of
wonder response as a living, evolving reaction to literature.
But
isn't the trick ruined if you know how it's done? By no means do I
think de-mystifying the wonder response will cause it to
auto-destruct--for readers, for critics, for anyone. On the contrary,
I believe a greater understanding will enhance the experience for
readers, raising reader expectations, and thus raising the bar for
writers. The cumulative effect, ideally, could be an upwards
boot-strapping for literature as new works are created going forward
in an ever-accelerating cycle of engagement, understanding, and
responsive creativity.
Initiation
The
Initiation stage begins with a catalyst event that turns a pedestrian
into a reader. A colleague of mine who prefers to remain anonymous
tells the story of how he made this transition from pedestrian to
reader, not just in the case of a single book, but for reading
fiction as a vibrant component of his lifestyle. I will call him
James.
James
did fine in school as he grew up. Like many, James was functionally
literate, but never saw the appeal of books through his childhood and
adolescence. This attitude informed the better part of his adult life
until his adolescent son started reading Twilight
by Stephanie Meyer at the height of the book's popularity. His son
seemed so absorbed in the experience of reading that it lead James to
be curious about what was so captivating by this particular book.
That curiosity got the book in his hands. Which lead to other books.
Which lead to a Bachelor's degree with a major in English. Such is
the power of curiosity when it triggers a wonder response.
Curiosity
is a component of wonder. I am not conflating the terms “wonder”
and “curiosity.” These are distinct experiences. Still, curiosity
is usually expressed with reference to wonder, as in James' case: “I
wonder why my son can't put that book down.” This is the initial
spark, or wonder question, that guided James to pick up a
novel for his own pleasure: the satisfaction of his own curiosity.
Initial
curiosity, it seems, can imprint on the reader how they experience
wonder in literature that impacts every other interaction with
literature going forward. Pi Patel, a narrator of Yann Martel's novel
The Life of Pi puts
it this way: “First wonder goes
deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first.” This seems to be born out in James' story, and in my own casual
poll of friends and family through a social networking site.
When
asked “What novel has given you a feeling you would describe as
'wonder'?”, 81% of respondents cited novels in the juvenile fiction
or high fantasy genres. The Hobbit
and The Chronicles of Narnia
series were well represented. Other genres included literary fables
and political thrillers. There are a number of factors that go into
these responses, but the one factor most relevant to my point here is
that the majority of the titles cited were intended for adolescents,
regardless of when the respondents read these works. When the word
"wonder" was used to prompt a response, for most of the
respondents it conjured their earliest positive experiences with
literature.
James'
story, cited above, shows how independent this process is from age or
cognitive development. James encountered Twilight
as a fully grown adult. He moved on to other works, gravitating
towards gothic themes and images in literature and studies of works
that seem to evoke strongly negative critical reactions. While James'
taste in literature has since evolved and developed, that first
positive encounter still informs his reading choices and the stakes
of his academic work.
The
results of the pull also seem to support Rosenblatt's idea that
readers find meaning in a text through a matrix constructed of and
informed by works a reader has previously had contact with. Initial
curiosity gets the book in the readers hands. The wonder response
begins here, but the book must continue to earn the reader's
attention, let alone affection.
The
Conversation
What does a reader experience once they begin to read? Reading is a
demanding, interactive exercise. On what basis does a reader decide
that the effort might pay sufficient dividends? Something signals to
a reader, in the case of a particular novel, that the effort will be
worth it. Perhaps it's the recommendation of a friend, the themes of
the novel, the cover, a professional review, or some combination of
these things. Reading begins. What follows from there is a gathering
of information with the objective to satisfy their initial curiosity:
to answer their first wonder question and the questions that follow
those answers. This objective may change as the reader proceeds
through a work, but it always starts there.
The more the pages pile up, there's a component of will that must
take over, a will that may be challenged by a number of factors. The
holy grail of all writers and publishers, if one can be identified,
is a formula that reliably "hooks" readers and leads them
through a trapeze act of tension-filled scenes towards a conclusion.
Many formulas have aspired to this, and many have found some measure
of commercial success within certain genres, but all seem to fall
short with one set of readers or another. Note that in my definition
of the wonder response outlined above, I referred to one reader
rather than an "audience" of them, carefully avoiding
commercial considerations. But I also want to emphasize that the
wonder response is an individual experience. This is evident in the
way an individual reader's will moves them from page to page. While
success in this area often leads to commercial success, this an
entirely different set of considerations which I won't be addressing
here. In any case, the individual reader's will has a conversation
with the text, consisting mainly of asking questions which are then
answered or not, but which produce the pleasurable wonder response.
This is a delicate dance between text and reader which can easily go
wrong.
The novel has to present little enough resistance to the reader
relative to their will to push through it, making it possible for the
reader will feel themselves propelled from one page to the next until
the novel's end. If this resistance is too low, however, there is a
risk in losing the reader. There's an optimal challenge level for a
reader, or sweet spot: if a reader finds a work has too little
challenge, (if the author-as-magician is sloppy and reveals too much
to the reader at once, for instance) then the reader will move on,
having grown bored with the reading process for that particular work.
The wonder response, to continue our flame analogy, is deprived of
adequate fuel, and the response dies. On the other end, if a work is
too challenging for the reader, the reader may decide that satisfying
curiosity, or whatever intermediate objective they have formulated
for themselves, just isn't worth it, and will put the book down.
Here, too, the wonder response aborts.
Neither extreme necessarily indicates “bad writing.” While inept
craftsmanship may be a factor in losing readers, a mismatch of reader
to book may also be at play. A familiar nursery rhyme in the hands of
a tenured professor of poetry, on it's own, would likely do little to
hold that particular reader's interest. A novel by the opaque Henry
James, on the other hand, would quickly overwhelm even the most
determined sixth-grader, though the works in both examples certainly
have their artistic merits. This is why the "holy grail"
formula is an impossible fantasy; no two readers are exactly alike.
But what makes this second stage of wonder a conversation?
The
Conversation will depend on the reader and the work, each playing a
role. A specific example from the genre-bending works of Ray Bradbury
may provide an instructive testimonial on the interaction between
reader and novel. In Bradbury's short story “The Kilimanjaro
Device,” the abbreviated nature of short fiction necessitates a cut
to the chase not typical of most novels. Acknowledging that our focus
here is novels, not short fiction, this story illustrates a powerful
wonder response through a science fiction scenario, but that scenario
is not the central focus. Bradbury is not cheating his sci-fi
readers. The truck actually travels through time. But the story does
not dwell on the truck's ability to travel through time or just what
technology allows it to be possible. The truck is merely a vehicle
for a story about the magic the narrator has found in the works of
Ernest Hemingway and plays out a Hemingway fan's fantasy about giving
“Papa” the kind of death and legacy he deserved. When a passing
trucker questions the narrator on what fuel his time machine runs on,
the answer is indicative of an appreciation of life and literature
real wonder can produce. It also gives us a starting place for
identifying, on a mental and emotional level, what happens in a
reader when they experience the wonder conversation.
“What kind of mileage you get?”
he said.
“I don't know yet.”
“You don't know anything,” he
said.
“This is the first trip,” I said.
“I won't know until it's over.”
“What do you fuel a thing like that
with?” he said.
I was silent.
“What kind of stuff you put in?”
he asked.
I could have said: Reading late at night, reading many
nights over the years until almost morning, reading up in the
mountains in the snow or reading at noon in Pamplona, or reading by
the streams or out in a boat somewhere along the Florida coast. Or I
could have said: All of us put our hands on this Machine, all of us
thought about it and bought it and touched it and put our love in it
and our remembering what his words did to us twenty years or
twenty-five or thirty years ago. There's a lot of life and
remembering and love put by here, and that's the gas and the fuel and
stuff or whatever you want to call it; the rain in Paris, the sun in
Madrid, the snow in the high Alps, the smoke off the guns in the
Tyrol, the shine of light off the Gulf Stream, the explosion of bombs
or explosions of leapt fish, that's the gas and the fuel and the
stuff here; I should have said that, I thought it, but I let it stay
unsaid.
Of course, what our narrator has done here has let it be said, but
in the sacred silence of the reader's mind rather than allowing it to
be profaned in the dialog—a monolog that might have induced an
incredulity in the hunter asking about the fuel. The reader is
allowed to share the private sentiments of the narrator—sentiments
full of memory which, weather the reader is thoroughly familiar with
Hemingway or not, speak of an affection for books and the places
books take us that any bibliophile can identify with. The images come
in a staccato montage of moments from specific times and places that
evoke either locations where Hemingway's writing was experienced
(“reading up in the mountains in the snow”), or where Hemingway's
works actually took place (“the rain in Paris, the sun in Madrid”).
The phrase that stands out in relation to the subject at hand is
“remembering what [Hemingway's] words did to us.” What exactly is
he talking about? There's a hushed quality to the tone of this
passage that suggests why the narrator refuses to say any of this
out-loud. The narrator, and those like him, have had a sacred
experience with literature, an experience that's deeply private and
personal. While it is true that novels are, like all artifacts of
language, public documents, the individual reader's experience is
deeply personal. What the narrator is rhapsodizing about here, then,
is not a fun, forgettable beach read. As popular as Hemingway was,
it's likely that many of his readers approached his work in a casual
way, but the narrator's reminiscing suggests something much more
profound. This profound experience is the second phase of the wonder
response: the Conversation.
While Hemingway's works flirt with exoticism for his American
readers (Paris, Pamplona, the high Alps, etc), his characters are
earth-bound, staying generally in locations the author saw for
himself, often having lived in these locations for long periods of
time. So while the initial marvel of a far-away place or an adventure
may have drawn his readers in, Hemingway's stark style leaves his
readers to fill in many of the blanks. So what explains Bradbury's
rhapsodizing through this narrator? Wonder was the catalyst. Wonder,
at the Initiation level, opened the covers of the books and kept the
pages turning. The wonder Conversation was the flesh on the skeleton
of Hemingway's words, bringing the colors, sounds, movement, and
characters to life on the page. A novel, however, need not provoke
such affection or nostalgia for the wonder Conversation to be
effectively executed. Some of the most commercially successful works
create these first two stages of the wonder response and keep readers
coming back for more.
Best
selling author John Grisham comes closer than most to being a master
of beginning and carrying forward the Conversation stage of the
wonder response. This at least partially explains the broad
popularity of his legal-themed pot boilers. I defer here to Donald
Maass's thorough-going study of bestselling fiction, Writing
the Breakout Novel.
In the chapter on plot techniques, Maass makes a study of Grisham's
work in The Partner:
“Grisham keeps us going by making sure every scene advances or sets
back Lanigan's friends or enemies. His prose is plain but direct. He
does not waste words. His scene setting is perfunctory but efficient.
His characters may be cardboard, but each has a clear, uncomplicated
purpose. Every moment of the story contributes to building conflict.
Flip to any scene in The Partner
at random, and you will find Grisham building tension.” Grisham's
highly-calculated tension hits the "sweet spot" for most of
his readers, offering just enough challenge and resistance to keep
the reader asking questions, almost all of which will be revealed by
the end. So much for keeping the pages turning. But what keeps
readers hovering over a title in their memories long after the last
page is turned?
The truly successful novel does more than simply keep the pages
turning, but will bring the wonder response into its full flower,
establishing a Legacy: a living relationship between the reader and
the work independent of the act of reading.
The Legacy
Wonder, having initiated the reader and propelled them from one
cover to the other, has more work to do. This phase, the Legacy,
raises the pitch of the internal conversation until the wonder
response becomes a creative, public act. Ayn Rand compared emotions
to “lightning calculators” giving an instant sum of suffering and
pleasure that serves as a gauge for where thoughts and actions are
leading an individual. While I reject the simplistic dichotomy that
is the basis for Rand's analogy, it can be usefully applied here. The
Legacy stage of wonder is arrived at in the mind of the reader
without any conscious awareness of the process, but it is real.
The passage from "The Kilimanjaro Device" above
illustrates the inadequacy of language to convey, on behalf of a
reader, just what the wonder response feels like. Bradbury's narrator
is reduced to images, references to Hemingway's books. This is little
more useful than a reader recounting which parts of a book were his
or her favorite. This is merely the sum of the emotional arithmetic
that goes into the Conversation phase of wonder response and the way
it leads into Legacy. The list of images in this passage is actually
only half of the data factored into the emotional equation whose
answer is a mature wonder response. The other half is hinted at in
the phrase “what [Hemingway's] words did to us.” This short line
implies a world of reactions, projections, sympathies,
misapprehensions, and other psychological machinations that no reader
can fully comprehend for themselves, let alone articulate.
It is in the intimate details of the wonder Conversation where we
find the mystery of the wonder response defiantly refusing to
surrender its secrets; if the reader does not know why they are
experiencing the wonder Conversation (if they're even fully aware of
this at all), and the author doesn't know, and the critics don't know
. . . Well, there's nobody left, is there. But we do have the books.
One of the functions, then, of criticism, is to offer up as much of
the possible constituent parts of the wonder Conversation as can be
explicated and examined. I will be more thoroughly examining the role
critics can play in exploring the wonder response below, but their
role here in understanding why the wonder Conversation happens and
how it functions is yet to be fully realized. But what does the
Legacy of the wonder response look like? The answers are as varied as
novels themselves, but there are potent examples that show some
common characteristics that should at least begin a conversation
about what the Legacy of wonder response is and how it functions.
One
of the most successful novels of all time, both commercially and
culturally, is The Lord of the Rings.
This fantasy trilogy is JRR Tolkien's most significant work of
fiction. All other fictional works by this author now in print are
either prequels or works set in the same fantasy world of
Middle-earth. Effectively, Tolkien spent a lifetime writing one book;
or, if you like, creating one world. The intensity of Tolkien's focus
on his created world, the depth of invented "information"
extant on this world's peoples, races, mythology, religion,
iconography, and geography, his erudition in drawing from real
languages and cultures--all these things combine to create an almost
fanatical, fixated wonder response in readers matched by few works of
English literature in any genre. The success of Tolkien's
Middle-earth novels is so stable and tenacious that entire publishing
houses rose to supply similar works by the shelf-load, spawning a
renaissance in high fantasy publishing during the middle of the last
century. How was this done? How does a mere book go from being a
diverting, though enriching, activity to suggesting whole lifestyles,
industries, even religions? The answers to these questions in this
case, surprisingly, have little to do with Tolkien's facility with
literary conventions.
As
many critics have noted, Tolkien's prose breaks important conventions
in fiction. His handling of time is awkward. His pacing is uneven: at
times pedestrian and slow, at other times at a scale too vast and
epic for a reader to easily follow. Crucial characters have no scenes
in the novel or even dialog, including the antagonist. For all these
sins and many others, The Lord of the Rings continues to have a power
over its readers as mysterious as the magnetic pull of the One Ring
of the novel's title. Wonder response, however, gives us some clues
as to how and why this is while teaching us something of how the
Legacy phase of the wonder response actually functions.
George
R. R. Martin described the impact of Tolkien's creation and its
impact in this way: "Tolkien gave us wonderful character,
evocative prose and exciting battles . . . but it is the place
we
remember most of all. [ . . .] Even those who disparage Tolkien most
loudly cannot escape his influence. The road goes ever on and on, he
said, and none of us will ever know what wondrous places lie ahead,
beyond the next hill," (Haber, 4-5). I would take his
observation further, comparing Middle-earth to a
rich landscape painting. The foreground is lush and involving. For
all that, however, there's something about the mountains in the
distance that lead the reader onward, further, deeper into this place
to learn its secrets. Such is the richness and the depth of all there
is to know about Middle-earth that, as the plot moves forward, one
gets mere glimpses of stories, characters, in-world literature, or
architecture. Behind these glimpses, at times, is a whole world
within the world waiting to be explored. Take, for instance, some of
the founding myths of the "kingdoms of men" or the realms
of human beings in Middle-earth. The story of The
Lord of the Rings or its prequel The
Hobbit do not, in themselves, demand
that this story be told. There were, however, enough of these teasing
glimpses of something more to be learned which caused readers to
demand a closer look at Tolkien's paracosm. Consequently, Tolkien's
writings on the founding myths of Middle-earth were eventually
published as The Silmarillion.
While ostensibly a companion book to The
Lord of the Rings and The
Hobbit, it proved for many readers to
be less accessible than these first books. Those that met the
challenge and pressed on, however, only found more to whet their
appetites for more of Tolkien's work set in this world. This pursuit
of what's over the next rise in Middle-earth has become so rich and
rewarding for those involved that some have built entire careers on
pondering Tolkien's fiction and considering its implications.
The
Lord of the Rings is a fantasy novel,
and is unusual in its popularity, but I choose it not as an
aberration, but as an example of what has developed since the
beginning of the study of modern languages. A similar story can be
told of the works of Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, and
many others. I argue that the biographies of the works of these other
authors would be similar. The process by which an enduring popularity
followed fame for these authors has shared many of the same
characteristics. This thesis will not delve into the histories and
the particulars of these other bibliographies. I leave that to those
who follow, using this thesis as a touchstone.
Genre
factors significantly in the approach that a given work takes in
creating the wonder response. Pulp science fiction stands out as a
loud, yellow example of how wonder is used to draw a reader in. While
individual works are rarely immortalized or receive the kind of
significant attention literary or non-genre works receive, these
kinds of works still have an interesting story to tell regarding the
role of wonder in drawing readers in and inspiring the kind of
participation characteristic of the Legacy in the wonder response.
In
Astounding Wonder,
John Cheng
discusses how pulp science fiction magazines and the stories within,
while inherently disposable, served as nuclei of interest around
which whole communities of fans and hobbyists began to gather in the
interwar period in the US. The Legacy phase of wonder response took
on new dimensions of participation and evolved in a unique way. The
individual wonder response evolved into a collective one, not
beginning or ending with one work any one author, but rather
springing from an inherently disposable, periodical form of fiction.
The Legacy response flowered in a collective sympathetic response to
works that were themselves a response to larger cultural forces at
play. These included the rapid development of technology, economic
instability, and the rise of totalitarian governments. The wonder
response soon took on a life of its own in the Legacy stage, spawning
independent fan groups, "fanzines,"
and other developments that significantly transcended the texts that
spurred this response. While most of the cultural motion that Cheng
describes took place as a result of the pulps, a few authors managed
to get their work published as successful novels, leaving us with a
more permanent and durable taste of what pulp science fiction had the
power to do for its fans in a more permanent way.
A
Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice
Burroughs serves as an excellent example from the sci-fi pulp milieu
because Burroughs wrote it in imitation of the early pulps. It
therefore appealed to many of the same readers. Like his most famous
characters, Tarzan and John Carter, Burroughs entered a world new to
him which he later went on to conquer. He began his writing career as
a newcomer not only to science fiction and pulps, but to literature
in general. In spite of this, Burroughs' novels conquered the
publishing world, making him not only king of the pulps, but one of
the most widely-sold authors of his time. He re-dubbed Mars as
"Barsoom," peopling it with multiple races with their own
languages and architecture as a setting for high adventure and
characteristically pulpy derring-do. Burroughs' talent for world
building in A Princess of Mars
and its ten sequels spurred the imaginations of original fans,
including Ray Bradbury, (Sellers, location 63) but also found new
readership in paperback reprints during the sixties and seventies.
These reprints of the Mars novels
directly and indirectly inspired a generation of authors,
film-makers, and even scientists. Star
Wars and
Avatar both,
their respective film-makers frankly confess, were
heavily inspired by these novels, and could be considered to be
creative responses to them.
In
both examples what we see are works that inspire so indelibly that
their readers, either consciously or unconsciously, feel that they
must
respond somehow: that the mere act of reading, even repeatedly, is
inadequate. One possible explanation for this is that the work, as is
the case with Tolkien, provokes questions that go unanswered when the
book is finished. Let us not mistake this artful unanswering with
sloppy workmanship, cliff-hanging, or mere loose threads. Artful
unanswering is a delicate balance point, similar in nature to what
takes place in the wonder Conversation, in which the reader is
enticed to go further, but is challenged to act. From a simple
re-reading to the establishment of a fan-site, this action can take
on many forms, but in all cases, some connection is made between the
characters and world of the novel on one hand and the character and
world of the reader on the other. We can see this in play with our
two example fantasy worlds. Wonder, as stated above, abhors a vacuum.
The Legacy phase is characterized by an attempt to fill that vacuum.
The result is a response that goes beyond mere pleasure or an Ah!
provoked by a pithy conclusion, pushing, rather, into the realm of
mythic and religious significance for the reader.
In the case of both Burroughs' Barsoom and Tolkien's Middle-earth,
the created worlds have some concrete referent to "the real
world" the reader experiences. One could look up into night sky,
for instance, identify Mars, and imagine it once teeming with Thark
warriors, its skies darkened with light-driven sky ships, its lands
scattered with the cities and civilization of the red martians, all
just as Burroughs' described. Similarly, one could stumble on an
unidentifiable old rune in Britain's landscape, or hear the lilting
tones of Finnish and imagine some residual contact with the long-lost
cultures of Middle-earth. This nexus between reality and fantasy is
potent, even ritualistic. In this way, a novel that creates a mature
wonder response through the Legacy phase begins to look something
less like mere fandom and more like a religion, complete with
pilgrimages, relics, sects, and even a holy writ, of sorts, in the
text that initiated the wonder response in the first place.
I
should point out, however, that a text need not create a world of
fantasy or be situated in any particular genre to culminate in a
mature wonder response. In the case of Carter
Beats the Devil,
for instance, the world of the novel is the early twentieth century
and its technological developments; a world every bit as
strange-yet-familiar as Tolkien's Middle-earth or Burroughs' Barsoom.
Readers, authors, and critics of literary fiction would do well to
notice this similarity between the genres and the way it effects
reader response.
Beyond the Next Hill: Wonder Response and the Future of Literature
What
does this new definition and understanding of wonder as a reader
response mean for the future of literature? This question is really a
box containing a multitude of questions. But the answers will come
from people: the individual writers, readers, and critics currently
playing their own role in the literary game.
Writers tend to have something in common with Charles Carter:
writers become technicians and practitioners because of their
experiences as spectators. Toni Morrison, among other authors, has
said that a primary motivation for her writing is to create the kind
of novels she herself would like to read, but which have not been
written. As a fiction writer myself, I feel exactly the same way
about my own work. This impulse to write, driven by a search for the
book that doesn't exist, is an expression of the Legacy wonder
response, though nobody has identified it as such. They do not need
to. Neither will that sense of wonder disappear if it is understood.
But I believe a self-conscious search to auto-create a wonder
response on the part of a writer will create better work. This, as
opposed to groping for a 'holy grail' formula for best-sellers, is
where the future of successful literature lies.
What
can an understanding of the wonder response do for readers? The arch
of Charles Carter's character in Carter
Beats the Devil gives
us some clues as to just how important it can be to experience and
generate wonder. Charles Carter is a good magician and a good man to
whom bad things happen. While Mysterioso is Carter's nemesis, he does
not dog Carter's every move through the novel. Rather, Mysterioso is
a specter, sometimes distant, sometimes hiding behind our hero in the
shadows: an embodiment of what Carter could become if he gave into
the bitterness that threatens to close in on him and take over as
tragedies and betrayals test him. While magic serves as Carter's
first taste of wonder, the narrative suggests that this taste is
merely a primer—a gateway to finding wonder in even the smallest
things. It is this sense of wonder, this ability to be dazzled by
life's coincidences, beauties, little mercies, audacious challenges,
and strokes of good luck that make the miracles of survival and
living possible.
Similarly, in my discussion of the wonder response, what I am really
getting at is the importance of the arts generally and literature in
particular—not in the way these enhance our lives, but in the way
these things are among the necessities of human life. Here, critics
can play a vital role in developing understanding for writers,
readers, and future participants in the great game of literature.
Critics are not consciously doing their work in the interests of
understanding the wonder response, but they do not necessarily need
to. Simply examining the elements of fiction is crucial to an
understanding of how the wonder response is functioning, and much of
this work is already being done. If critics begin to see how elements
of a text may induce or nurture the wonder response, this may lead to
a new level of understanding, however. The wonder response could
begin to inflect both criticism that has been done, and that which is
to come. Still, there is much that can be done in understanding the
matrix of wonder-responses in readers. This can point to a better
understanding of how novels function. While I have attempted to begin
some of this kind of work in this thesis, it only manages to suggest
a direction for the larger discourse. I have barely begun to scratch
the surface of the potential for this kind of work.
Where will this work go? What is our destination? As we go, it may
become clear to us that in asking questions about the wonder
response, we are beginning to tease at answering literature's bigger
questions: what is literature really good for? What separates mere
entertainment from life-enriching, wonder-inducing artistic
expression? The wonder response, I suggest, is an important part of
the answer to these questions. Wonder is a conduit by which beauty
and truth are united; where abstract form can, through the medium of
the reader, flower into dazzling self-perpetuating substance.
