Actual photo of PJ Reece having a mystical experience while researching this blog post.
What if we knew WHY READERS READ.
Imagine how confidently we could hammer out manuscripts. Armed with the motive for consuming fiction, we could easily make our stories come true.
Why readers read—writers would kill for the answer.
I know, they say that reading is an escape, that it’s a relief from our hum-drum lives. That’s what they say. Who the heck is they, anyway? Conventional wisdom, that’s who.
Yes, I’m pretty riled up. Any student of fiction should soon discover that stories are no mere palliative. We’re hooked on reading. We’re addicts. And yet no one—authors, critics, publishers, writing gurus—no one is digging for a deeper explanation.
And then, to my surprise, I see in the spring issue of The Kenyon Review where poet and novelist Amit Majmudar is talking about the “mystical nature of the literary experience”.
The MYSTICAL NATURE of the literary experience!
Majmudar speaks of a “mystical union” between reader and protagonist. He says that by “dwelling outside ourselves a while” the reader experiences a “dissolution of the self.”
UNSELVING he calls it.
(My wife says, “Take that word out and shoot it.” If anyone can coin a better word, please let me have it.)
What’s much more important is that Majmudar believes that this literary empathy is…are you ready for this:
“The highest expression of the novelist’s or dramatist’s art.”
Amit Majmudar is my new best friend. Here he is again:
“To forget one’s selfhood by experiencing fully the reality of another living being—this is the mystical experience par excellence.”
Fantastic. And yet Majmudar doesn’t quite nail it. “Experiencing the reality” isn’t good enough. Mystical implies another level of reality. A hidden reality. Simply experiencing another person’s everyday reality is not good enough.
With all due respect to Majmudar’s thesis, I’m going to take it a step further:
Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes may be therapeutic, but mystical isn’t about healing. Mystical is about “dying”. Readers tag along with fictional heroes to vicariously experience their struggles and failure. The death of “who we think we are” forces protagonist and reader to leave their everyday realities behind.
That break with the everyday happens in the heart of the story.
If reading is an escape, it’s an escape to more tension, not less. But it’s a tension pregnant with profound potential. A protagonist heading for a certain dead-end—that’s compelling.
To experience someone else’s shoe size and belief system is entertainment, but to experience that belief system breaking down—that’s an existential crisis. And the only way out is to rise above it.
To unselve.
Hero and reader, they’ve got each other for company until the ground beneath their feet gives way in the heart of the story. Then everyone’s on their own.
Says Amit Majmudar:
“By reading or watching these works, we, too, unselve vicariously… Never mind that it’s temporary and artificial—[it’s] similar to mystical unselving. The high is the same, and addictive.”
I watch for this “unselving” in all fiction, be it book or movie. I realize it’s not only why I read and watch, but why I write.
What stories have you liked lately? Can you isolate that moment of unselving? Let us know by adding a COMMENT.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I haven’t got a word for ‘unselve’, but I get the jist. Life seems a continuing disslolution and resolution of our ID kits. The big washing machine in which we are chucked around with strong detergent and come out squeaky clean at the end of the cycle. Does the protagonist want to clean up his life-act and is drawn to the big cosmic washing machine? What goes on while the big clean-up is happening – a kind of helplessness, surrender until it’s all over – is the ‘heart of the story’?
I recall reading an account of a psychiatric patient compelled to watch the Fellini movie, La Strada, many times because she so empathised with the little waif in the story that she experienced a major release from her own suffering.
Oh JOY! This ability to COMMENT!
Darned if I know where I read it but brain waves change when reading fiction and when watching a movie, to a similar pattern forming when meditating. This tuged a chord which has been resonating, and ringing again with your post.
The temporary cessation of self dominance when reading is transcendent. Majmudar may use eastern words for saying what storytellers have been doing for years – suspending your know-it-all thought processes, and transporting you elsewhere.
Here’s a question for you, Sarah: is it of any use to a writer, this awareness of the transcendent nature of fiction? How might it help her write better? I’m serious. I would like to know. Cheers.
Think of writers who are SELF conscious. I’m sure we can all see when style or just the writer’s ego gets between the reader and the story. From a reader’s POV transcendece happens when the story flows and the writer is the barely visible nudge.
PJ, have you ever had a baby? I’ve had three. The moment of un-selving happens in childbirth, you know… and it’s what I think of also, when you talk of the heart of the story. It’s that moment of passing through the eye of the needle.
In labour (NZ spl) the body cracks open bit by bit with each contraction. Just the same way the protagonist does, under the weight of each blow we, the writer, rain upon to him.
The baby moves down the canal. The hero approaches the threshold.
Then comes the point of choice.
Shall the woman let go, and release into the pain, even though she can feel the baby’s head (the biggest part), and is frightened she is going to split asunder? Shall the hero release himself to the fire of the pits of hell, even though he’s terrified?
But she must because to go back is death to both of them. And so it is for the hero. There’s no turning back or the story dies. The agony of the fire must be entered, endured…as the only way to the ultimate triumph of birth/rebirth!
Yvette… that’s wonderful. I hesitate to even comment. Except to wonder out loud why I haven`t thought about “birth” before… perhaps because I’ve never had the pleasure. Thanks for sharing that.
I was talking with my teenage son yesterday about a book series he is into, “Game of Thrones.” What struck me was how fascinated he is with the story and in reporting about how “awesome” it is, one of his first comments was how the author keeps killing off the main characters. Your post came to mind – the association for me being triggered by this idea of “unselving” being a killing off of one’s own “main character,” the one who is always dominating the stage, the one that is always co-opting the point of view. Isn’t work on self about the willingness to let an inner main character perish by refusing to acquiesce to its demand for attention and to put one’s attention on an alternative, quieter, or more patient character within who has something valuable to say, offer, or contribute – to empower a new contributor?
Sounds good, Rick. I would only add this question: do we “let” the character perish? And do we “put” our attention elsewhere? Or are we forced to? I would say this about that: in meditation or perhaps religious ritual we can encourage this alchemy to happen. But in stories, it’s all about drama, about characters being forced to “unselve”. There’s nothing “awesome” about watching someone meditate, but it’s thrilling to watch someone go kicking and screaming to their own empowerment. I`ll look into that “Game of Throne”!
I get your drift. It seems to me that life, which story aims to artfully represent, is about how those two things mingle and resolve, the individual’s own attempts to transform and the ultimate help that comes from life itself by cornering the untransformed one and giving him no choice, where there can be no more “attempt,” only succeed or perish. That would be quite an accomplishment though if you could pull it off, an entire story about someone in meditation that is as griping and compelling as an action adventure. I think you ought to give it a shot.
Shades of Sarah’s first comment, but I saw a program recently in which subjects were scanned by an MRI machine while watching videos of other people being injured and while they themselves experienced physical pain. The scans showed the same areas of the brain lighting up when someone was hurt and when that person saw others being hurt. They were literally feeling the other person’s pain. This was done primarily to see if psychopaths could be I.D. via their lack of empathy, but I think it applies here. Perhaps this ‘unselving’ (yes, needs a better name) is when humans, visual learners that we are, make the jump between feeling sympathetic pain for people in a video, and feeling it for an (often) text based character that we know to be fictional. Something to mull over at least.
I saw a movie recently, “The Fall”, and was very surprised that I enjoyed it; it isn’t the type that I usually go for. A few days later it hit me like- I liked it because it had a well executed and definite ‘heart’. What’s more, I realized that I don’t usually like similar movies because they were heartless (ha!) or had a ‘broken’ heart. Connections! How exciting!
As much as I do love your theories, I wonder if perhaps you are over thinking it? And I *know* you are looking to dig deeper and find out *why*, down with the mysticism and the muse and whatnot, and I don’t disagree but… well. I don’t think it is within my skill to explain, but if you read ‘The Foxman’ by Paulson, that’ll probably do it. (I just realized that I don’t think ‘The Foxman’ has a heart, which is curious because it totally worked for me. Perhaps that alone will make it of interest to you.)
Well, that got longer than I intended… Love your blog, keep a-goin’.
Holly… thanks for all that. First of all, I’m going to borrow that “broken heart”– that’s wonderful, and so obvious that I’ve overlooked it. I’ll also check out “The Foxman”. As for, ‘am I overthinking’? Sometimes I think it’s killing me!
The question I ask myself is — does it matter that our motive for reading & writing is found in our need to “unselve” ourselves? We already enjoy reading and there’s no end of writers happily writing. I suppose that I imagine by becoming intimate with underlying realities that we’ll stand a better chance of writing material that contains a “whole heart”. And that we’ll know what were doing, as writers. And will therefore save time. The master craftsman knows what she`s doing. The way it seems to work now is that writers write multiple drafts and finally get it right… because the form demands to be found. I’m just trying to help… but sometimes… I wonder if I really am. It’s true. What a predicament.
Come back again, Holly.
Thanks for this post, which I found very interesting. I like the idea of reading as “unselving;” I agree that it’s a concept that is necessary for a good theory of why we read. For me, a bit of an earthling, the idea that this is mystical is a bit beyond my grasp, but I could reach for spiritual. I think that being oneself and also being someone else, a metaphorical process, is near the centre of how we take part in art, and perhaps too how we take part in relationships with others. Best, Keith
That’s beautiful and I agree. If you look at the definitions psychologists give for empathy, it’s eerily similar to the writing (and reading!) process. Great post, PJ.
Also, you need to put some pants on in that picture. I can see your bum.
Thanks, Keith. NOTE TO READERS: Keith Oatley knows a thing or two about these matters. His latest book is “The Passionate Muse”. I’ve ordered mine from my local bookstore.
Well, that’s why I lay prostrate on my laptop… instead of supine… in which case you’d really have something to complain about!
Story hearts, like agave hearts or pinyas … wow! Every man his own jimador! Then drunk on the possibilities of his distillation. (I’m talking vertical integration of the distilling process.) I remember in Tequila taking a tour of a distillery … and everyone leaning in over the 18th and last vat, the distillation of the heart of the pinya. Ah. Silly tourists. You have to plunge right in!
“You have to plunge right in!” Si! Instinctively we know this. But naturally we avoid it. Typically we take the path of least distillation, and yet, paradoxically, the path of the most tequila. Say, Greg… you want to write a guest post for this blog? “What the tequila factory taught me about writing” …or something?