It’s my intention to try and document the journey of my way towards a PhD as transparently as possible. So amidst the pieces of fiction I post, you’re going to see the occasional essay dealing with subjects related to my focus. If you’re only here for the erotica, you might want to skip these. If you’re a writer yourself, they may be of some interest to you. If you’re a masochist, please read on.
I’ve been a reader since the age of three, or so my mother affirms. Fiction, especially, has always held great pleasure for me. Even when I was quite young, I remember being acutely conscious of how books could make my world seem horizonless. At a base level, reading fiction has allowed me the sheer pleasure of escape from my quotidian reality. At a more complex level, the ideas, possibilities and dialogue that transpires in a good piece of fiction are things I can take into my everyday reality. I can compare and contrast them, apply them, convince myself of their veracity or falsehood.
I haven’t quite formulated a neat version of my thesis question yet, but I know that it will concern how people experience fiction on twitter and contrast that with what is known of how people experience fiction in other forms of media. Twitter is interactive, dialogic and ephemeral (very different from reading on a printed page) but when presented with a piece of fiction, do twitter readers simply resort to reading they way they would in a book, or on a blog? Do they simply take in the text and digest it, or do they intervene, interfere and affect the fiction as it is being produced? Does the interaction affect the way other readers understand the fiction? Is this interactive platform simply a TV with more buttons? Or is it a stage on which all of us play parts?
To examine this question, I have to go back and get a very firm understanding of what happens to people when they read anything – a book, for instance.
You might think that reading is an obvious thing – a matter of literacy. Of course, it is that. But what actually happens in the mind of the reader when they read a piece of fiction? Turns out there is a lot of debate on what goes on in the brain and what happens to the reader’s sense of self and other when they become immersed in the text.
Linguistically, it’s interesting to look at how we talk about our experience of reading: ‘I devoured the book in a day’, ‘I was totally absorbed by the story / it sucked me right in’, ‘I felt at one with the hero’, ‘it was like I had been transported into the story’, ‘it felt like I was right there’ …some times we speak of the act of reading as if we are possessed or devoured by it. At other times, as if it were something consumable, swimmable, possessable.
So, let’s take it from the very baseline of reading. There are words and there is meaning. Words are symbols that stand for ideas. The word ‘train’ is a symbol that English speakers all agree refers to the object that runs along rails and transports things from one place to another. If you don’t speak Spanish, and I use the word ‘mantequilla’ – I’m offering you a nonsense symbol. If you do speak Spanish, however, you have accepted that I’ve handed you the word that, in English, means ‘butter’. So when we read and speak fluently with each other, we’re trading off a string of symbols that individually, or together, represent ideas that have meaning to both of us.
However, those symbols (words) we use end up accumulating a lot of baggage as time goes by. We attach values and nuances to them. For instance, if I say ‘cat’, you know I mean a domesticated member of the feline family. But if you love cats, you immediately have a twinge of positivity that goes along with the word. If you don’t like cats, you get a little twinge of the opposite. And, if you are from another culture – one that venerates cats (perhaps you are an ancient Egyptian) the word might strike in you some feeling of sacredness. Whereas, if you are Vietnamese, where sound-alike words sometimes have meaning-associations with each other, the word for ‘cat’ is ‘meo’, which sounds like ‘ngeo’ (poor) and carries a significant negative nuance. So, as you can see, the baggage, or semiotics, a word carries with it is both experience and culturally dependent.
When writing something like erotica, writers can, in fact, play a great deal with the cultural semiotics of certain words. Understanding the positive, negative or associated nuances of a word can really make a difference to the readers’ experience – if the writer and the reader share enough of a common understanding of not only the language, but the semiotic nuances of it. When I use the word ‘slut’ in the middle of a sex scene, I know it’s a volatile word. For a long time, the word has had a negative connotation in our society. Yet in the last little while, both writers and readers of erotica and pornography, as well as others, have made an attempt to reclaim the word as a positive thing – inferring an affirmation of a person’s sexual appetite. Still, it is it’s very history, it’s taint of the bad and the dirty that can also make the word exciting and erotic to use in the right place.
One of the most powerful parts of fiction is its ability to make us feel almost uncanny oneness with a character or characters in the story. This phenomenon has been discussed at great length by many literary theorists. But it all comes does to one question. While you are deep in the middle of reading an absorbing piece of fiction, who is ‘I’?
Many people, including Georges Poulet, the famous French literary theorist, have said they feel that part of them feels taken over by the ‘I’ or the “He†or “She†in the story. In immersing in the story, they are giving up some amount of themselves and letting the story carry them along, living through the experience of the fictional character. They feel that the writer has a great deal of control over their sense of self and agency at the time they are reading.
Other literary theorists reject this. They argue that no one can enter into the mind of another, and therefore, it becomes a futile sort of reaching out towards an understanding of the mind of another we can never really attain.
Others, Roland Barthes in particular, believed very little of what the writer writes actually matters. That they offer a string of symbols to the reader, but that he or she actually makes meaning of the story as they read, by bringing their own life experience into the story.
One of my favorite erotica writers, Mike Kimera, signs all his emails thus: “What you read is not what I wrote: I supply the words, you supply the meaning.†I love the sign-off, but I don’t completely agree with it. Because although I do think that a reader supplies most of the meaning, I feel I can, perhaps, suggest alternate meanings to you. They might build on your own, or elaborate yours, but I’m not convinced the writer is absolutely incapable of communicating meaning. Not if both the reader and the writer are willing.
Here’s a little poll I’d like to offer you. When you read, who is making the meaning? Do you feel taken over by another mind and life? Do you feel it’s more like two minds and experiences (yours and the character’s) merging? Or do you feel like the writing acts as a trigger for your own imagination and memory?
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Having suffered through this post, please leave a comment telling me how you experience reading, or what your feelings are, as a reader or a writer, about what I’ve brought up.