Emily Klotz

ENGL 601

4/15/12

I’M WALKIN ON ZUNSHINE!

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.

Why We Read Fiction was both intriguing and disappointing to me. I think (this is really silly of me) that a major part of the reason it was disappointing was the title. Although of course I know, consciously, that there is probably no clear answer to why we read fiction, I think that I had some subconscious expectations that this book would bring me to some kind of enlightenment about why people (most importantly, me) not only enjoy but actually need fiction. The title of this book made me secretly hope that I was finally going to get some answers. And I think that Zunshine knew that I would think that.

(See what I did there? Three levels of metarepresentation!)

However, although I did not reach enlightenment from this book, I found it extremely interesting the entire way through, particularly in Zunshine’s close analyses of the unreliable narrators in Clarissa and Lolita - which was surprising, actually, as I expected the section about detective fiction to be the most interesting to me, but I though the extremely close scrutiny of Lovelace and Humbert was really effective. I really did not know much at all about cognitive literary theory before going into this book, and Zunshine presented it in a way that I found both easy to follow and fascinating. In the final chapter especially, Zunshine seemed to be asserting that cognitive theory really could explain why we read fiction – one day. But of course, at the moment, it is simply too early to fully grasp. So the titular question remains mostly unanswered, though Zunshine has done her best to shine some cognitive light on it.

It’s hard to say why exactly I feel a little unsatisfied by Zunshine’s answer to the question of why we read fiction. I found all her analyses insightful, and the connections to autism and schizophrenia that she discussed early on were, to me, indicative that she was definitely on to something. But I wonder if possibly my slight dissatisfaction was related to another (less silly) disappointment I had with this book: that Zunshine largely failed to discuss any kind of fiction outside of the realm of the novel. I was personally reading this book with my final paper in mind, which of course is not about a novel but a computer game. And Myst particularly demands that the player be a detective, attempting to read the minds of the characters based not only on what they say about themselves and about each other, but on the physical evidence left behind by them in the various worlds of the game. But, of course, the mind-reading that must be done in order to “solve” the game is, I think, a bit different than the mind-reading required to “solve” a detective novel – or any novel. And the resolution of the narrative itself is dependent on the player’s ability to do this, rather than in a novel where the ending will be the same no matter what the reader thinks. I was also thinking about movies quite a lot – no particular movie, but just the genre of movies in general, and how that mind-reading aspect must work differently when we, the viewers, do not have an author or narrator there to tell us about the character’s thoughts. Same thing with an extremely complicated and mysterious TV show like Lost, in which most of the characters are liars, incidentally. We obviously do get some pleasure out of being able to read character’s minds; much of the fun of Lost involves reading not only people's minds but also their environment (another slight disappointment: Zunshine only really focused on how we read people). But I think that the role this "mind-reading" plays in our actual enjoyment of fiction differs in significance depending on both the story and the medium in which it’s told.

For example, several years ago when the more recent film version of Pride & Prejudice came out (the one with Keira Knightley), a good friend of mine said that she didn’t think the movie did the book justice because, in the book, we could be in Elizabeth’s mind. Rather than just seeing her wander the halls of Pemberley and look around in amazement, in the book we knew all about what she was observing in the house, what she thought of it all, what amazed her, how it all related in her mind to her previous rejection of Mr. Darcy, and all the mixed emotions that thus went along with those jumbled thoughts. While I personally like the fact that films can leave even more room open to interpretation of a character’s actions because of this lack of insight into their minds, there’ve been many times that I’ve heard similar complaints about movies that are based off of books. People who have read the books don’t being outside the character’s minds in film… It’s not always like that, of course, but I’ve heard it enough that I think it’s significant.

In fact, the ways people respond to the translation of a novel to a film would be an interesting topic of study in cognitive theory. And then there's the question of who we ascribe the "source-tag" to in a film or game or any non-book medium? Films, games, TV shows, etc, don't really have authors the way that books do. While some directors have their names closely associated with their films - Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, M. Night Shyamalan, Hayao Miyazaki - and so, I guess, attempt to create a similar kind of author-text relationship, usually even then it's not the same. So when it comes to the question of our "metarepresentation" of fiction as fiction, do the dynamics change? I think they do, but how significant the change is, I can't say.

I’m not sure what my point was there. I don’t think I had a point, actually. It was just something I was thinking about, and I wish that Zunshine had talked about it a little bit.

But, otherwise, I liked this book quite a lot. J