My Bachelor's Degree--What I Learned and What It All Means

Well, it's here: the time we've all been waiting for and working for at our house for years now. I'm about to earn my bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Washington, and it feels great. As of this writing, I still have two class periods to attend and small handful of assignments to turn in, but all my work outside of class is completed. 

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.