Why do people reread novels? Why do they listen over and over to pieces of music they’ve already heard? A worn and dog-eared copy of a repair manual, or a recipe book, or a dictionary, or a dense philosophical text makes sense, but somehow that of a novel less so. Young children will listen to the same favorite story read to them many times in a row, and request the same story at the next opportunity, while a stack of other books stands unread nearby. Why would humans waste their time rereading an account of fictional lives in fictional worlds? Why would they bother listening to music that they know so well they can whistle it?
Two of my favorite thinkers have discussed these phenomena, and I was surprised to find on closer inspection that their arguments are interestingly similar. C. S. Lewis, early twentieth century author of the Chronicles of Narnia series and Christian apologist, said that it is very difficult to know whether a story is affecting another reader’s “deeper imagination or only exciting his emotions”. One way to test which the other reader experiences is to learn whether she “often rereads the same story”. Rereading is a sign of interest and attention to something other than the plot and its sequences of suspense, climax, suspense, climax: “Knowing that the ‘surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff….It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia” (Lewis, p. 16).
But why should attending to the “surprisingness” (p. 16) be any more valuable than attending to each surprise-event as it occurs in the story? Lewis enlarges the perimeter of the concept, though, and says that it’s not just surprisingness that we value – it’s theme. Themes likes “giantness,” “otherness,” “the desolation of space,” “home-coming,” “reunion with a beloved”, among others, attract us deeply. “All that happens [in a story] may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?” (p. 18) Rereading is an iterative attempt to find ourselves enveloped within the theme, almost in spite of the plot. Lewis then proposes that that tension between these two story elements is precisely that which makes story and real life so much alike: “We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never embodied” (p. 18). We want to experience something larger and more comprehensive, more coherent than the ostensibly stochastic plot events as they are unfolding. So we go back again and again to the events to attend the birth and development of theme and to feel ourselves a part of it.
In a chapter entitled “Musical Parsing and Musical Affect,” the generative and cognitive linguist Ray Jackendoff (1992) argues against the idea that affect in music is largely determined by the music’s novelty for the listener. He notes, “musical affect is produced not just by hearing (and predicting) the musical surface of a piece, but by the activity of deriving in real time all the details of abstract musical structure. The musical structure has intrinsic points of instability or tension, which require resolution and therefore result in affect” (p. 153). Jackendoff posits a “musical parser” that is “informationally encapsulated from musical memory” and that continues to parse independent of the listener’s conscious knowledge of, in Jackendoff’s example, a “deceptive cadence” that is about to be heard. Despite the fact that the listener is likely not unduly surprised by the cadence, having heard it before, nevertheless the listener can still experience genuine emotions elicited by the piece because of this encapsulation. Jackendoff argues that if we think in terms of the listener’s “conscious expectations” or if we take the view that there is a free exchange between the cognitive faculty that “constructs abstract structures that analyze the musical surface” (p. 155) and musical memory, then neither fresh affect nor heightened affect can occur. In his view, affect originates in part through in the structure of the musical phrase itself and in the parser’s ongoing identification of the “most salient structure” (p. 154) to be pursued in light of the instability inherent in every “analysis of the musical surface”. And this, independent of conscious memory.
Now, one must be careful not to approach the two views reductively. These thinkers occupy different temporal cohorts, different fields of inquiry, and different areas of creative media. Nevertheless, both are analysts of an artistic pursuit that they understand deeply. Lewis wrote dozens of novels and stories, and Jackendoff has worked closely with the composer and music theorist Fred Lerdahl in developing their theory of musical reception and production, based on the Chomskyan paradigm of generative linguistics. I am struck by the similarities in Lewis’ and Jackendoff’s views of how affect, and not uncommonly extraordinary affect, can arise in spite of great familiarity with a piece, whether of fiction or music. Lewis’ plot events would seem to align with Jackendoff’s musical phrases, as they both have accepted ways of building and resolving, and accepted deviances thereon. Both elements are numerous and temporally intertwined. Both have accepted discrete boundaries at which points the soul or parser detects and discards implausible assessments of the elements.
More interesting, though, is both thinkers’ strong insistence on the lack of communication or articulation between the theme/memory entities and the plot experiencer/musical parser. If Lewis had been a cognitive psychologist, he might have said that the plot components are processed in a massively parallel fashion and the theme is fashioned in a heavily constructivist sort of way from the results of that processing. Jackendoff, as an author of children’s fantasy fiction, might have asked can a series of musical phrase analyses “quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted” (Lewis, p. 18). Indeed, this informational encapsulation would seem to be a crucial part of the pleasure-in-rereading conundrum. What we want in reading a cherished, dog-eared book with which we are in some sense in love, is to get back to the way we felt when we were entertaining that book’s big ideas at the most abstract levels of analysis that the soul/ parser can experience. We don’t need to remember what exactly we were thinking or feeling during each analysis. We need, at most, the desire to set the parser to work again, “trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive” (Lewis, p. 18).
Jackendoff, R. (1992). Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Lewis, C. S., (1966). Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories. Edited with preface by Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
By Dr. Rebecca Wells-Jopling.
“One cannot read a book: one can only reread it,” Nabokov said. Surprised you missed that one. I’m rereading a book at the moment. It’s one of my own admittedly. I’m editing it, copyediting it; the story’s sound enough but it needs all the hyphens excised and I don’t think there’s a page without the word ‘seems’ on it. I haven’t looked at the book in years which is a habit I’ve got into and not a bad one if you can be patient enough. I don’t reread many books other than my own but there have been a few I first read when I was young—and clearly was too young to fully appreciate—that I’ve taken a second look at, Nabokov being one of them. The reason I don’t reread more is because there are so many authors, so many great authors, whom I’ve never read anything by—it’s an embarrassingly long list—and so a book would really need to be something for me to take time out to read it again. I wish I did have the time because so many of the books I’m reading at the moment deserve to be read a second time, in fact when I write my reviews this is something I often comment on as a good thing that a book could be read more than once, that once really isn’t enough. Films I often watch more than once—must’ve watched Blade Runner six or seven times—and there’s a good reason for that. On a first viewing—and this applies equally to books so let’s include ‘on a first read’—you’re only going to get the gist; the fine detail is going to wash over you. I read articles on films all the time and am continually amazed by what I’ve missed. Take a film like Airplane. I must’ve seen that film three or four times and every time I noticed something new. Well books are exactly the same. We miss all the clever stuff. We might has well watch a TV or film adaptation and be done with it. And even then we’d most likely miss a lot. I’ve heard musicians talk about rehearsing a new piece. At first they’re focused on their own part exclusively and it’s not until they’ve got it licked they can sit back as it were and actually listen to the music.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your thoughts on rereading and relistening, Jim. I very much agree with your sentiments. Readers do often miss the “clever stuff”. In reflecting on this, it seems to me that the deeper the ideas and the more skilled the expression of those ideas, the more I go back to a work, and that’s true across genres. For example, I regularly reread some authors -- Donald Harman Akenson (historian), David Deutsch (physicist), Karl Popper (philosopher), Keith Stanovich (psychologist), and the novelists Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Marilynne Robinson – just because I very much enjoy being in their brilliant thinking space. And, I agree, there are so many authors and good works out there to read. I’ve sometimes wondered how humans will even come to choose a novel to read the first time, once the inventory is in the hundred of millions or billions. But of course by that time there may be some way of uploading a work that doesn't involve reading, or rereading, at all.
ReplyDeleteOdd coming from someone who still enjoy reading, Rebecca, and i sure hope that your forecasting for (re-)reading habit will prove not true.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, Radu-loan Mereuta. It IS a weird idea. I wouldn't call it a prediction, just a wondering, really. I suppose before the advent of writing if one person had told another that instead of hearing and enjoying a wonderful story from the lips of a storyteller, that she might one day be able to sit all alone before a section of compressed bits of plant fiber and somehow know a story in its entirety, experiencing all the emotions attendant thereon, everyone would have thought it some very strange futuristic scenario indeed. I really like David Deutsch's insistence on the fact that we cannot know the future from our vantage point -- period. But imagining... that's another case entirely.
ReplyDeleteI must admit, I find it difficult to reread a book. Though I can see myself in agreement with the comment by Lewis, I must assert the emotional response to a story is the catalyst for the intellectual response. I find, the quality inside books which prompt a "deeper imagination", are stories which find their way into one's life. By this I mean, if a person intuitively draws connections between their life and a story they've read, the book holds sway over their imagination. I prefer referencing over rereading.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment, Justin. I think you're right in that the emotional engagement is primary if a story is to incorporate itself into the fabric of one's experience, imagination, or memory. Because of that important level of engagement, which we can't meaningfully consciously control, could it be said, perhaps in a reversal of the Nabokov quote that Jim cites above, that "one cannot reread a book, only read it", at least in the sense that you can always reread a book, but never revisit the initial experience of reading it.
ReplyDeleteTo whom it may concern:
ReplyDeleteI used to revisit a couple of authors like R.Pirsig, V.Jankelevitch, T.Parsons, H.Hesse, G.M.Tamas, M.Foucault some 2X per year.
Now that was mentioned the case of "revisiting" a book, an author or what not, only in (my) imagination, I begin to wonder if that's not the only way that you can "experience" something (someone). Of course it can be argued that experience can come somewhere in the middle, between the thing, situation, event, fact and the one that "registers" the experience, between a supposed subject and a sought for object.
Blessed are those who can only read, experience, imagine in the absence of the drive to revisit that "place" as the same (the case of not returning of the same).
And talking about a fine brew of psychology, "revisit-ing the initial experience" of reading, loving, dying is possible, among other things for the complex reason of hardwiring it into the brain.
The neuromuscular pathways are there for the skilled experiencer to activate them.
That doesn't mean that thing outside us cannot trigger the same experience. Why? Simply framed because similar experiences tend to orbit around the same nucleus of meaning/-s, feelings,thoughts etc.
I'm still advocating a take on human life of brain plus mind - although i think it is awfully tiring to cling to a horizon of subjectivity in which the body is absent, or no more