A Feeling for Fiction: Becoming What we Behold
David S. Miall and Don Kuiken
Departments of English and Psychology
University of Alberta
Edmonton
Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E5
Email: David.Miall@Ualberta.Ca
Paper prepared for The Work of Fiction: Cognitive Perspectives
Conference, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, June 4-7, 2001
http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu/Culture/WoF/
Abstract
Feelings during literary reading can be characterized at four levels. First, feelings such as suspense and amusement are reactions to an already interpreted narrative (Hansson, 1990). While providing an incentive to sustain reading, these feelings play no significant role in the distinctively literary aspects of text interpretation. Second, feelings that derive from perceived affinity with an author, narrator, or narrative figure are the outcome of an interpretive process by which a fictional representation is developed. Although important in the reader’s development of a situation model (Kneepens & Zwaan, 1994), these feelings, too, do not derive from distinctively literary aspects of text interpretation. Third, feelings of appreciation (aesthetic pleasure or interest) are an initial moment in readers’ response to the formal components of literary texts (narrative, stylistic, or generic). Although serving to capture and hold readers’ attention (Miall & Kuiken, 1994), these aesthetic reactions only anticipate the level of feeling that will be the focus of this presentation. This fourth level of analysis involves the multifaceted and even conflicting tendencies of feeling triggered by the formal components of literary texts. We will argue that (1) the formal components of literary texts provide composite and interactive metaphors of personal identification that modify self-understanding; (2) the outcome of textual re-interpretation at this level is the accentuation of intimacy and intricacy in the reader’s experiential self; (3) the points at which textual re-interpretation exerts this modifying power are those at which individual differences between readings are most apparent and important; and (4) the familiar concept of catharsis (the conflict of tragic feelings identified by Aristotle) identifies one particular form of this more general pattern of response in which feelings evoked during reading modify the reader: in Coleridge’s words, we "become that which we understandly [sic] behold and hear" (1804).
1. OverviewPoetry [is] a rationalized dream dealing . . . to manifold Forms our own Feelings, that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal Selves. . . . O there are Truths below the Surface in the subject of Sympathy, & how we become that which we understandly behold & hear, having, how much God perhaps only knows, created part even of the Form.-- (Coleridge, Notebooks, II, 2086)
1.1 Feeling has now been a focus for empirical studies of literary reading for over ten years. In that time, several different aspects of feeling have been studied, and important proposals have been made, notably by Kneepens and Zwaan (1994) and by Cupchik (1994), both presenting arguments for a typology of feeling responses, and by Oatley (1999; in press), who has presented reading as a form of simulation in which emotion is central. Our own research, beginning with Miall (1988, 1989), has focused in particular on the dynamic aspects of feeling: we have tried to understand the role that feeling performs during reading. We have asked to what extent feeling may be said to guide the reader’s interpretive activity, doing so at a level more fundamental than the cognitive processes involved in reading about which much more is known. One of our suppositions has been that, during literary reading, processes of feeling may operate that are distinctive to the literary domain, although this is clearly a contentious proposal and one that is still far from being well established empirically. In this paper we try to bring together in one framework several of the leading components of the empirical work on feeling both as experience and as process, and to offer a new perspective on the dynamic aspects of feeling. We ask, in a word, how, during reading, in Coleridge’s words, "we become that which we understandly behold & hear."
1.2 Before turning to the literary issues, we should point out that the general literature on feeling in psychology and philosophy is, of course, also far from decisive. To this day several quite fundamental issues remain in dispute. To mention only three: first, the argument about the extent to which feelings are culturally determined continues to be debated with social constructivist positions on the one hand (Harré, Averill) and pan cultural positions on the other (Izard, Epstein). Second, the debate begun by Zajonc (1980) about the so called "primacy" of feeling over cognition is also unresolved; opposing positions have been argued by Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987) and others, although evidence from neuroscience has offered some support for Zajonc’s position (LeDoux, 1986). Third, while some scholars (Plutchik, Russell) continue to propose coherent models of emotion in which valence and intensity are the primary variables, other commentators (Griffiths, 1997) have argued that emotions are modular and operate in distinctive ways, thus ruling out the common sense notion that feelings and emotions form a unified system. It is not to be expected, then, that psychological research can offer any straightforward guidance regarding the role of feeling in literary response. Indeed, the position may rather be the reverse: given the detail and complexity that literary response affords to the study of feeling, the conclusions that we will eventually be able to reach about feeling may become important in pointing psychological investigators of feeling in some new and more productive directions. Even the distinction between emotions and feelings is rather unclear, but in what follows we will not take time to lay out our own position on this problem but speak of each as the occasion warrants.
1.3 The plan of the present paper is as follows. First we will briefly review some of the salient accounts of feeling from the empirical research on literary reading to illustrate the types of feeling that have been proposed and their implications. Second, we will outline the main proposals that have been made – and here we will primarily be reviewing our own work – for understanding the processes that feeling initiates during literary reading. Finally, we will offer a more comprehensive view of the modifying processes of feeling that, we believe, better accounts for the power of literary texts and the distinctive mode of engagement that such texts are able to evoke in their readers.
2. The contributions of feeling to literary reading
2.1 Feeling in literary response can roughly be classified into four domains: (1) reactive feelings, to use Cupchik’s (1994) term, such as pleasure or suspense; (2) feelings that reflect engagement with some specific aspect of the content of a text, such as empathy with a character or response to a narrative setting or event; (3) feelings of aesthetic appreciation or interest in response to the formal components of literary texts (narrative, stylistic, or generic); and (4) feelings that serve to modify or restructure the reader’s understanding, including both the textual referents and the reader’s existing modes of feeling or her self concept. While there are, perhaps, no clear lines of demarcation between these four different domains, we propose that each depends upon characteristically different underlying structures or processes of feeling. We will claim that the fourth domain, that of the modifying role of feeling, is most likely the domain in which we can locate what may be distinctive to literary response. In the remainder of this section we will briefly remind you of the kinds of feeling that have been examined in the first three domains.
2.2 Feelings of pleasure or suspense are quite often experienced by readers, and may even be the primary goal of a reader. They are not unique to reading, however, and may equally often be experienced when watching a movie or a television soap opera. Perhaps Hansson’s (1990) study of readers of popular fiction is one of the clearest accounts of such feelings. While Hansson overthrows the common supposition that such readers are passive, read for compensation, or are manipulated by their reading, he finds that "relaxation, rest, entertainment, and diversion" are the primary motives given for reading (p. 285). The main feelings expressed, as judged by ratings Hansson collected, are that the books are felt to be entertaining, exciting, engaging, or amusing. No questioning of conventional views of life are reflected in these requirements: readers commonly say "they feel as though they had taken part in something they are already familiar with from the reading of other books" (p. 287); they don’t feel after reading that they "have taken part in something new and different" or that they would like "to ponder over the book" (p. 288).
2.3 As Brewer and his colleagues have found (e.g., Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982), readers judge narratives as "well-formed" only if they successfully evoke and satisfy such feelings. But the narratives at the focus of these studies are, in general, what we would consider sub-literary – Hansson’s popular fiction, and Brewer’s experimenter-constructed fictions. More important, what Hansson or Brewer report are feelings that seem to have no interpretive function. Their primary role is to sustain reading. Thus we might term such feelings "entertainment" feelings, or E-emotions.
2.4 Entertainment feelings can be distinguished from the type of emotions that Kneepens and Zwaan (1994) examine. These are, in their terms, either F-emotions, fiction emotions, prompted by events and characters in the fictional world, or A-emotions, artefact emotions, prompted by appreciation of the formal aspects of a text, including response to structure, style, foregrounding, and the like. F-emotions may be subdivided into those relating to other characters, that is agonistic emotions, or F(a)-emotions, and those reflecting engagement of the self, or ego-emotions, as in empathy; these are F(e)-emotions. With F-emotions, feeling serves to mirror a text rather closely and in detail, in contrast to the generalized E-emotions. When experiencing in a lively manner a character’s fear, for example, feeling functions to represent an aspect of a text’s content. We might call such feelings mimetic, and with some historical precedent, since it was this mode of response to literature to which Plato objected. Oatley (1994) also suggests that feeling plays a mimetic role: reading, in his term, is a simulation: "the central process is that the reader runs the actions of the character on his own planning processes, taking on the character’s goals, and experiencing emotions as these plans meet vicissitudes. . . ." (p. 66). To mirror a scene in a text, however, such as imagining oneself in the position of a character, is not in itself necessarily to transform anything. It draws upon a common faculty we have in social contexts, enabling us to understand others and to maintain an appropriate stance towards them. As Oatley (in press) points out, however, through fiction "our emotions may be transformed by having them deepened or understood better, and they may be extended towards people of kinds for whom we might previously have felt nothing." We examine some of the processes through which this might occur in more detail later. It seems likely that fictional response modeled on familiar or stereotyped social situations, in which we and others play expected roles, show emotions running on pre-scripted lines.
2.5 Beyond this, process aspects of feeling are alluded to by Kneepens and Zwaan: they suggest, for example, that the more indeterminacy a reader encounters in a text – what they call "abstract and conceptually vague descriptions" – the more the reader will draw on F(e)-emotions (those relating to self) to provide orientation. Here, however, the third type of feeling we outlined also plays a role – feelings prompted by foregrounding or other formal features of a text, the A-emotions of Kneepen and Zwaan. These feelings, in response to striking and defamiliarizing aspects of the text, serve to capture and hold readers’ attention (Miall & Kuiken, 1994). At such moments readers also report greater uncertainty. Since it is these moments that tend to challenge the reader’s existing cognitive framework for understanding, feeling appears to act as an agent for locating an interpretive context. Thus A-emotions may offer more than appreciation of formal aspects; they may play a guiding role in shaping the reader’s grasp of textual meaning.
2.6 Some hints in this respect are provided by several studies by Cupchik and his colleagues. For example, Cupchik, Oatley, and Vorderer (1998) looked at the role of emotion in response to short stories by James Joyce. After reading each of four segments from a story (totaling approximately 700 words), which were focused either on description or on the emotions of the main characters, readers answered questions about any emotions they experienced, and whether these were fresh or remembered emotions. Over the four segments, emotion memories were more frequent early on (that is, type 2 or mimetic emotions), whereas fresh emotions became more frequent later. This seems to imply an orienting role for emotion memories, and a constructive or interpretive role for fresh emotions. If a text such as Joyce prompts fresh emotions, however, we might begin to doubt how far literary reading can be characterized only as a mimetic experience. Oatley (in press) himself suggests this, remarking that during reading a fiction may enable a reader to reflect on an emotion: "then the reader may reach an insight, and build a new piece of his or her model of the self and its relations. In other words, some cognitive transformation may result." Although A-emotions, as we noted, may initiate such change, we now want to consider more broadly how feelings may play a determining role in modifying readers’ understanding, doing so in ways that are distinctive to the literary domain. Thus, in what follows, we discuss the modifying power of feelings and emotions, or M-emotions.
3. Three properties of feeling
3.1 The distinction between remembered emotions and fresh emotions, then, seems to mark two distinctive modes of feeling in literary response. In remembering an emotion during reading, we find a similarity between the world of the text and some experience or situation in memory, whether experiential or literary. We "recognize" a setting as something familiar, or a character’s behaviour reminds us of something we have done or seen done by someone else, or of some scene in another text. In experiencing a fresh emotion, in contrast, we are presumably registering something in a literary text that we have not previously experienced, or not experienced in the context provided at this point in the text. If we are able to simulate a novel emotional situation, as we undoubtedly do in literary response, then what processes particular to feeling enable us to develop new insights, to bring about "cognitive transformation," in Oatley’s term? We have previously shown how three properties of feeling, which have no corresponding mechanism in standard accounts of cognitive processing, enable feeling to be a vehicle for cognitive change (Miall, 1989).
3.2 First, feeling cuts across standard conceptual boundaries, a feature we have termed the "cross-domain" property of feeling, and which Bower and Cohen (1982, p. 329) referred to rather aptly as the source of affective similes and metaphors. The conceptual boundaries that are crossed are often unique to the individual. Thus, the reason why I might feel the same way about an argument with a colleague and the taking of a driving test, is that in both cases I feel that I am being evaluated unjustly, on inappropriate grounds; the result is that all the feelings and reactions that were present in the first situation, the argument, are now reinstated in the other, the driving test (although they might here be rather inappropriate). While in real life such reinstatements may be either adaptive or maladaptive, during reading the imported feelings can provide an important orienting context. The next scene I read may now be imbued with feelings that I had not previously associated with such situations, causing me to modify my understanding of it.
3.3 Second, feeling has an anticipatory dimension; it alerts us to the fuller significance of an event as that event begins to unfold. This is one of the fundamental properties of feeling, although it is perhaps not always obvious. In the case of an emotion such as fear, the anticipatory component is quite clear: fear mobilizes us to take action to avoid an imminent threat. But a less primal feeling such as nostalgia is also anticipatory: despite its apparently backward-looking stance, it unfolds a scenario in which we sense the irretrievable disappearance of something we have valued. Feeling, in a word, has script-like qualities, leading us to act as if certain contingent events were likely to unfold in the immediate or near future. During reading this property of feeling, once instantiated, enables us to monitor the ongoing response process and to shape its significance, as new events fall within the scope of the anticipation or fail to do so.
3.4 Third, through feeling we activate some salient component of our existing value system. In other words, feeling has a self-referential dimension, acting as a monitor of our self-concept and alerting us to potential challenges to, or departures from, the themes that sustain our sense of identity. Such themes can, in a sense, be regarded as scripts on a larger scale, the narratives we weave about who we are or what we wish to become, and by which we navigate the vicissitudes of daily life. This aspect of feeling may also be invoked during literary reading, most obviously by empathic identification with a character, but such feeling can also undergo successive modifications under the pressure of subsequent turns in the narrative, a type of variation that we have characterized as fugal, analogous to this form in music (Kuiken & Miall, 2000).
3.5 In each of the three properties of feeling, what we have been indicating is the possibility that feeling is called into play mimetically, as remembered feeling, in Cupchik’s term, but that as response unfolds such feeling may be challenged, evolving in new directions under the impact of the text. Remembered feeling, in other words, is not merely replicative; in the literary context its dynamic aspects are available to help shape the reader’s developing understanding of the text. Thus, what began as remembered feeling may eventuate in some fresh feeling. Either the feeling itself modifies in the light of the text, or the limitations of the feeling may be shown in such a way that a fresh feeling is created in its place. In several previous studies of feeling in literary response, we have provided some evidence to illustrate the modifying power of feeling, in particular showing how A-type feeling appears to be the primary vehicle in accommodating the defamiliarizing, novel aspects of a text during reading (e.g., Miall, 1989; Miall & Kuiken, 1999), a view that we formalized in terms of a model of response consisting of three phases (Miall & Kuiken, in press). This model was based principally on some empirical evidence for the response to foregrounding, which we showed to be a dynamic, sequential process with a specific integrity of its own. We will now specify beyond this model an outline of what we believe to be the dynamics of the modifying process embodied by feeling.
4. The modifying power of feelings
4.1 Each of the three properties of feeling we have outlined endows feeling with a certain generalizing power: the cross-domain property enables generalization to other, apparently unrelated instances; the anticipatory property to the amplification of the feeling by additional evidence or further cases; the self-referential to the larger implications for the self, whether these are negative or positive. This suggests that feeling acts in part by placing a specific instance within a class. This may be a familiar, already established class, in the case of a remembered feeling, or a created, ad hoc class, in the case of a fresh feeling.
4.2 For example, to cite an instance from a short story we have employed in several empirical studies (e.g., Miall & Kuiken, 1994), the opening of O’Faolain’s "The Trout" (1980-82) describes the "Dark Walk" in an old garden in these sentences:
It is a laurel walk, very old, almost gone wild, a lofty midnight tunnel of smooth, sinewy branches. Underfoot the tough brown leaves are never dry enough to crackle: there is always a suggestion of damp and cool trickle.
4.3 The foregrounded features here, especially the words "smooth sinewy," and the verbal echo set up by "crackle" and "damp and cool trickle," arouses feeling in most of the readers we have studied. One reader, for example, commented on these two sentences that it "sounds like a dream, or a nightmare of some sort," and because the main character Julia is said to visit it every time she comes to the garden, "it’s a lot like a dream where leaves are never drying up to crackle, where in the dream, the same thing happens over and over again." Through the feeling it evokes, the Dark Walk has been classed by this reader as a kind of dream or nightmare, although qualifying this observation with the word "like" suggests that an ad hoc category has probably been created, which involves some of the attributes of the nightmare. If the Dark Walk is located as an example of the class nightmare, then a range of additional possible meanings can be activated.
4.4 This reader is rather explicit about the feeling he experiences, but it seems likely that feelings evoked during reading will act in this way as reinstated or ad hoc categories, providing in consequence a range of potential additional meanings relevant to that category. This account may be compared to that given for metaphor by Glucksberg and Keysar (1990). Objecting to comparison or similarity theories, they propose that a metaphor is better understood as a case of class inclusion, as is suggested by familiar nominal metaphors such as "My job is a jail." They point out that a noun can often be used to represent—through exemplification—a class of objects or situations (jail may, according to context, exemplify the class of confining, oppressive places; or, the class of multioccupant buildings, etc.). A metaphor promotes the class meaning of the vehicle, that is, it exemplifies its prototypical meaning.
4.5 They also point out that a class term, such as jail in this example, has two types of structure. First, it is hierarchical, in the sense that a superordinate term such as food includes the subordinate term vegetable, which in turn includes instances such as broccoli. To say "My job is a jail" places the job at a subordinate position in the hierarchy. Second, it offers a horizontal structure: for example, where prototypes are well established, broccoli is more prototypical as a vegetable than tomato. The metaphor thus endows "My job" with some of the prototypical attributes of the class of situations denoted by "jail." Similarly, then, a feeling, such as the reader’s identification of the Dark Walk as a kind of nightmare, nominates the Dark Walk as an instance of the class nightmare, and configures its properties horizontally (sinewy branches, cool trickle) as an ordered series of signs, determined by the prototypical aspects of nightmares – here, their haunting and repetitive nature. Feeling is, indeed, all the more powerful as a class inclusion matrix for meaning because, being self-referential, it provides a significant, hierarchically ordered set of implications for a reader; and, through its anticipatory and potentially cross-domain features, it provides a set of related horizontal contexts that may be worked out during subsequent reading.
4.6 The evocation of a class by feeling is not, of course, unique to the literary domain – this is how feelings operate in everyday experience. What may be important to literary reading are those ad hoc, or fresh feelings evoked when the cross-domain relation is a more distant one, such as the Dark Walk-nightmare relation; this ensures the organization of the materials of the text being read both hierarchically and horizontally in novel ways. Beside its implications for text meaning, such organization will also, of course, have implications outside it for the self-concept of the reader; this may be the germinating point of those new cognitive insights. In Coleridge’s words, literary reading deals "to manifold Forms our own Feelings, that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own personal Selves" – clearly an argument for fresh feelings and their constructive role.
4.7 Our second main proposal concerns conflicts of feeling. Since a literary text will usually evoke more than one feeling, or evoke opposed feelings, it will also be possible for one feeling to modify another. In this respect the standard accounts of catharsis seem to us to have consistently overlooked one important feature of Aristotle’s somewhat enigmatic account of the tragic emotions. Apart from James Joyce, who pointed this out in Portrait of the Artist, commentators have paid little attention to the opposed nature of pity and fear. Joyce suggested that both terror and pity arrest the viewer, confronting us at the same with the individual being pitied and the "secret cause" of the terror; thus he construed the tragic emotion as static (Joyce, p. 205). In practice, however, as shown in the dramas of Sophocles that were Aristotle’s main examples, fear in the end appears to be modified by pity.
4.8 According to Belfiore (1992), Aristotle appears to have meant by catharsis the action of the emotions (of pity and fear) in the service of restoring order, that is, to bring about the "proper state" of the audience. Catharsis is said to act allotropically, separating the worse from the better; thus, it modifies inappropriate emotions. As Belfiore summarizes it, "This shock of tragic emotion opposes and counterbalances our shameless desires and beliefs" (p. 345). Both Belfiore (1992) and Nussbaum (1986), two important recent commentators, have seen hubris, or shamelessness, as the emotion that the Greek dramatists aimed to cure; thus pity and fear are administered as opposites, not because they are of especial value in themselves, but because they convert the aggressive and potentially dangerous effects of hubris to a more respectful, balanced stance towards the world. In Belfiore’s account, in tragic catharsis "the initial shock of extreme pity and fear passes off, along with the shameless emotions they have ‘mastered’" (p. 345).
4.9 In terms of class inclusion, however, what appears to be taking place in a drama such as Oedipus is, that with the disaster of the play, hubris is relocated within the context of fear. The pride and prowess of Oedipus have, in the words of the Attendant, brought about "Calamity, death, ruin, tears, and shame, / All ills that there are names for" (Sophocles, 1947, p. 61). This radical manoeuvre, which literary texts are able to carry out for their audience, redefines the emotion of hubris in order to impose upon it the prototypical attributes of fear, thus transforming its familiar meaning (presumably a chastening experience for the ancient Greeks who watched this happen on stage). But fear in turn is then modified by its relocation within the context of pity in the final scene of the play. Most poignantly, this is witnessed in Oedipus’s appeal to Creon over his daughters: "Creon – If I could touch them once, and weep" (p. 66).
4.10 A similar process can be observed in the tragic process enacted in King Lear, where (roughly speaking) hubris predominates in the figure of Lear in Acts I and II, fear in the mad scenes of Acts III and most of IV, and pity finally taking over in Act IV, scene vii, when Lear awakens from his madness and seeks forgiveness from the estranged Cordelia. If feeling considered as class inclusion instantiates a process similar to metaphor, then the apparent reversal of meaning I have described here can also be illustrated by metaphor: for example, as Glucksberg and Keysar (1990) point out, the metaphor "the surgeon was a butcher" reverses the customary attributes of surgeon by including the surgeon in the class of butchers. Thus, to contextualize fear within the class represented by the feeling of pity, radically qualifies our understanding of fear in plays such as Oedipus and King Lear, appearing to humanize it and to ameliorate the immoderate aspects of its power.
4.11 This radical qualification of one emotion by another in our rereading of catharsis, suggests that catharsis is likely to be a special case of a more general process in literary reading. But in looking for examples of this process, we should not limit ourselves only to those that are formally structured into the text itself, such as Oedipus or King Lear, since the indeterminate nature of response to literature will often ensure that readers’ feelings vary, so that different, specific confrontations of one emotion with another will occur. In the case of the "Dark Walk," for example, what was felt as nightmare for one reader, as we have seen, was experienced as a pleasurable reminder of her parents’ farm for another; so too, the subsequent feeling that confronts or modifies the first feeling may also be distinctive to that reader. But the process will depend in part on how compelling are the emotional qualities of the text in question, and what personal concerns, memories, and experiences a reader brings to the text.
5. Transitions of feeling in responses to a story
5.1 Most literary reading is less arresting than witnessing Oedipus or King Lear, yet narratives can unobtrusively implicate our own feelings as readers, leading us to moments of recognition or acknowledgement that signal change. In this last section we lay out a five-part model for construing such change, drawing on the "fugal" model that we mentioned above. The transitions can be seen in musical terms as variations or transpositions upon an opening "theme." To illustrate the moments of transition, we will cite from two protocols collected in response to O’Faolain’s story, "The Trout," including the example cited above.
5.2 In the story, Julia, a 12-year old girl at her family’s summer home, revisits the Dark Walk in her garden, where she soon finds a live trout trapped in a well, or small pool; after hearing improbable accounts of how it came to be there, and considering its predicament, she eventually goes out alone at night with a container, locates the trout in the dark, and releases it into a nearby river; she tells no-one what she has done. After dividing the story into 84 segments (roughly one sentence each), we asked readers to think aloud in response to each segment of the story as it appeared on a computer screen. From the thirty protocols collected, we provide short excerpts from only two below. We show the overall phase of the model in abstract terms first, followed by its specification for this story. Then to illustrate the phase in question we insert a short extract from each protocol, with the segment number of the story that had just been read. While we cannot assert that these phases occur in all readings, we think it probable that most "naturally" occurring readings (i.e., outside the classroom or study) reflect some of the processes we describe.
5.3 I. Identifying a preliminary mood, a thematic meaning that is vaguely felt—as though there is something "more" to understand
"Trout": The reader’s vague recognition of Julia’s fascination with the darkness of a natural setting, the Dark Walk, that is visited during childhood vacations; this may be evoked in part by foregrounded features of the description ("smooth, sinewy branches," etc.) and the uncertainty they tend to create.
4. Mmm, she must feel safe there or something if she’s running to it.
3. . . . it's almost as if Julia has climbed down this walk many times before and it's always the same. . . . like a dream . . . where . . . the same thing happens over and over again.
5.4 II. Imaginal entry into a "literary space" within which a similar thematic meaning accrues generalized ("symbolic") but conventional and/or intertextual connotations
"Trout": The reader’s characterization of Julia’s experience in the Dark Walk as connoting a known, but conventional theme ("death-rebirth" or a "joust").
7. Yeah, she races right on through. Some sort of... I don’t know-- I guess it goes back to the birth kind of idea. "Drinking in the sun"-- yeah, it definitely sounds like she’s being reborn or... or reemerging into the world.
8. It’s almost as if she’s playing a game. It’s almost like the image of a joust or something, where you’re going through a straight path and then you turn and go back again.
5.5 III. Waiting in uncertain faith that the thematic meaning will accrue as yet unarticulated connotations
"Trout": The reader’s anticipation that something will happen involving Julia and the trout she has discovered stranded within the Dark Walk.
28. Well, why don’t you save the fish? Maybe they have no place to take it to. He’s in prison.
29. Can’t you find out how the trout got there?
29. "Nobody knew how the trout got there" is very, reminds me of something like a ghost story where... a mysterious stranger appears and helps someone, and then no one knows who he is and he disappears.
5.6 IV. Articulating "constructive" personal-conventional connotations of an incongruous (or even conflicting) thematic meaning
"Trout": The reader’s realization that, as the reader may recall in her own life, Julia’s ability to set aside her possessiveness about the trout is part of her maturation. (Here she has just released the trout into the river.)
77. Aw, that’s sweet, that she hoped he wasn’t dizzy. She’s not as old as she would like to be. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that because I probably would’ve thought the same thing.
77. . . . She realized that he would die if she left him there, kept him trapped, so she’s let him [go], sacrificed her enjoyment for his life. She’s become more, uh, aware of other things around her.
5.7 V. Articulating "existential" (temporally and humanly extended) personal connotations of the incongruous complexity of the thematic meaning
"Trout": In construing Julia’s maturation as a transition into responsibility, not only for her actions, but her way of construing the world, the reader also realizes that something is at stake in his or her own position.
[End] you could see how a girl that age or my age could, um, respond to it, you know, having had a younger brother, you can understand, you’ve reached that age where you don’t buy stories any more and you want to make them yourself; you want to be the authority, not them anymore. And, how something can just hold on to your mind that way.
[End] she’s gained, she’s made the first step towards maturity, although we can’t, uh, you don’t become mature overnight, that you, uh, it takes time, and you’re not aware that you’re becoming mature until many years down the road when you look back and, you can understand what was happening to you
5.8 Each of these examples suggests one or more of the components of feeling that we laid out in theoretical terms earlier. In the opening, first phase of the response, we detect a degree of uncertainty in readers’ responses; while the foregrounding and the unknown reason for Julia’s behaviour have evoked a preliminary feeling, it is not yet evident to the reader where this will lead. In the transition from phases one to two, an initial vaguely sensed feeling is elaborated to provide a generalized but conventional framework for understanding the meaning of the story (here, either death-rebirth, or a joust): this points to the cross-domain role of feeling, which has enabled the Dark Walk to be subsumed within a metaphorically broadened category that includes entering the Dark Walk but, more importantly, is exemplified by the vehicle of the metaphor that the reader offers, death-rebirth in the first case and jousting in the second. Through this metaphoric broadening of categories, the Dark Walk, as we observed earlier, takes on qualities that are characteristic of the class exemplified by the vehicle of the reader’s metaphor, i.e., connotations of safe re-emergence in the first case and of repetitive challenge in the second. This phase provides an initial generalization about the meaning of the Dark Walk, as well as a horizontal reference to features that are in line with the reader’s metaphor. In the present examples, this metaphoric transition from phases one to two associates safety with rebirth for the first reader but associates the repetitive element of dreaming with the challenge of jousting for the second.
5.9 In the third phase the reader’s feelings are engaged explicitly in the forward movement of the narrative: both readers speculate about possible completions of the narrative gaps that the story presents at this point. In both cases the feeling appears to represent a variation on the feeling evoked in the first two phases: for the first reader, the question of safety has been replaced by an anxiety about the trout’s imprisonment; for the second, the ghost story seems to develop the uncanny suggestion of the repeated dream. Feeling is evidently also acting here in an anticipatory mode, explicitly so for the first reader, while for the second a more complex supposition about a type of story is evoked that implies narrative progression.
5.10 Most of the central part of the narrative following this moment is focused on a series of false leads: the gardener, Julia’s parents, and Julia herself in her meditations on the trout, each makes an appearance that only delays the fulfilment of the reader’s expectation that the story will reveal how the trout’s predicament will end and what it means. Finally, however, Julia rescues the trout. In the fourth phase both readers recognize the significance of the step forward this represents for Julia, and both seem to acknowledge a shift in their feelings about the character, from a certain detached impatience to admiration. Readers’ feelings about Julia are evidently more complex now than during the opening segments of the story, and responsive to aspects that are incongruous with their earlier assessments of her character. Although the first reader’s response is more limited, a sense of surprise is evident ("Aw, that’s sweet"), as well as recognition of the character’s similarity to herself. A cathartic shift seems in progress here, as one feeling is recontextualized by another.
5.11 The extracts for the last phase are taken from the readers’ comments after reading the story as a whole. If the previous phase represented a shift in feeling, here readers’ reflections on the implications of this cathartic shift have come into focus. In each case (and this is typical of a number of responses we have collected), the thematic significance of the story has become superimposed upon the reader’s own sense of self. As the repeated use of the generalized pronoun "you" indicates, the reader is enacting the implications of the story for her own understanding, merging the identities of Julia and the reader in a single, although complex, perspective on the question of what the story might mean: "you’ve reached that age where you don’t buy stories any more"; or "you don’t become mature overnight." While both readers address the issue of maturation, which seems particularly in question at segment 77, both do so in their own ways, each containing an incongruity that is carried forward from the previous phase: the first reader refers to how something "can just hold on to your mind that way," while the second reader suggests that Julia is not aware of her own maturation and won’t be until later in life. Thus a reconfiguration of individual feelings and beliefs occurs for each reader at the end of the story. Although, given the nature and relative shortness of the story, this is neither a dramatic nor a striking process, it is one in which both readers seem to derive a degree of satisfaction, characteristic of aesthetic experience. The "you" form of response suggests, in other words, how we make the stories we read our own, "becoming what we . . . behold and hear."
5.12 The mode of analysis we have demonstrated here enables us to situate some of the more salient moments in the evolution of readers’ feelings, as these exhibit specific developments or transitions towards a (provisional) final response. Of particular interest, the role of the self in this process, given the potentially self-referential nature of feeling, remains to be explored. It is apparent that most of the specific moments we have isolated involve F(a) feelings, i.e., those relating to the motives and behaviour of the central character. Implication of the self, or F(e) feelings, occurs only momentarily at segment 77 for the first reader, and then more substantially for both readers in their concluding comments. However, these and other protocols contain references to readers’ feelings frequently enough that we can assume readers regularly recognize and incorporate their own feelings into their reading (in the study of readers of "The Trout" that we have drawn on here, we find that 3.1% of comments at the segment level refer to readers’ feelings: Miall & Kuiken, 1999, p. 132); they also refer about as often to personal memories evoked by some aspect of the setting or a character (3.6% of comments). Thus, in the background of the response as a whole, it seems likely that readers are often making implicit comparisons between the world of the fiction and what they know, believe, or feel about their own lives, since these comparisons surface from time to time in the form of either explicit feelings or memories. The readers who, in metaphoric fashion, situated their conception of Julia running through the Dark Walk in relation to death-rebirth or a dream (and then joust) may, in this manner, be locating the story within a personally significant complex of meaning. If so, the response already signifies the beginning of a modifying process dependent upon the cross-domain role of feeling. In some cases, as the two protocols we have cited show, the engagement of the self of the reader is manifested explicitly in the occurrence of the "you" form of reflection in which the self and the character seem to have merged. The reader has, we might speculate, confronted some long-standing prior feeling about the self, and recontextualized it in the light of the fresh feelings aroused during their reading of the narrative. This process, if it involves a transformation of existing feelings about the self, thus represents a type of catharsis that, as we suggested, is shaped by the distinctive feelings that a given reader brings to the narrative. This may be one of the most interesting and characteristic effects of literary reading.
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Document version: October 30th, 2000