What Usually Follows

According to Matt Ridley,

There is a growing conviction within neuroscience that one of the human mind's chief preoccupations is prediction. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing who is now a full-time neuroscientist, argued in his 2004 book "On Intelligence" that the mind does this by detecting a familiar pattern in its input, then anticipating from past experience what usually follows. The more unexpected something is, the more conscious we are of it.

Although this research concerns immediate disruptions of pattern (sudden surprises or anomalies), and therefore I would not suggest an extrapolation to more deliberative situations is necessarily scientifically sound, the human brain's response to changes in "familiar pattern" as described here by Ridley does make me wonder if something like this phenomenon helps explain many readers' resistance to experimental or innovative fiction.

Through their own habitual reading experiences and/or the critical discourse and pedagogical practices associated with fiction, most readers believe "novel" or "short story" name identifiable forms with discernible features. Stories generally put more emphasis on plot, novels allow more development of character, both establish a setting within which the plot and characters are delineated, etc. Some stories or novels might be allowed to deviate to a limited extent from the underlying standard, as long as they can still be recognized as the sort of thing a novel or story is supposed to be.

An experimental fiction introduces the "unexpected." It makes the reader conscious the implicit paradigm is being violated. One might hope at this point that the reader would  exploit this intensified consciousness of difference to give the new a chance, to let the work be what it will be. Some readers no doubt do this, perhaps assuming the work eventually can be accommodated to the paradigm after all. Most probably don't, either giving up when it continues to be "difficult" or finishing it but pronouncing it "boring" or "pointless" or "a slog."

That readers might be confused or uncertain when confronted with an aberrant work of fiction is understandable. What is disappointing is that these readers can't summon up more curiosity about the challenging or the unusual, using it to expand their appreciation of the possibilities of fiction rather than shut them down in favor of the already familiar. It's my belief that fiction as a literary art depends upon challenges to convention or it becomes just a somewhat more respectable alternative to watching tv. Perhaps many readers are comfortable with this role for fiction, preferring not to burden it with the expectation it be "literature." Perhaps it is just a fact of our brain's wiring that we favor the customary and find its transgression disturbing. In this way we are all inescapably conservative.

Many innovations in fictional form or style--although not all--eventually become more accepted, more established as among the devices readers of fiction might encounter in stories and novels. Many writers initially judged too difficult or too adventurous gradually seem less so, although often enough the greatest of such writers, Joyce or Beckett or Faulkner, still can give uninitiated readers fits. By that time, of course, their innovations have themselves become conventions, which can be as overworked as any other, consolidated into "familiar pattern." It may be that this is the best adventurous writers can hope for: long-lasting influence, but at best late recognition of their accomplishments.

Comments

[Kevin]

"What is disappointing is that these readers can't summon up more curiosity about the challenging or the unusual, using it to expand their appreciation of the possibilities of fiction rather than shut them down in favor of the already familiar."

Perhaps resistance to The Unexpected is an important stage in the development of new literary forms and styles.

Without it, any old technique would be quickly absorbed into orthodox narrative practices.

Kevin

[Gerard Stocker]

Have you ever read Mark Turner's "The Literary Mind?" It explores the literature/neuroscience angle in a creative and unusual way. It got kudos from Antonio Damasio so he must be doing something right.

http://markturner.org/lm.html

[Jim H.]

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.

[Shelley]

Sorry to be off the topic of prediction, but here's a sad one: it might be a good time for us to do some Paul Revere-ing on the Internet–today the FCC is passing down the first of the Net Neutrality rulings. Al Franken on HuffPo (scroll down middle column) says we should be outraged, and he doesn’t usually exaggerate. The Internet should not be headed toward corporate blogs buying the fast lane and the rest of us stuck in slow.

Not sure where to make our voice heard, by emailing the White House or maybe the FCC page with How To Make ECFS Express Comments? It might be good if non-corporate websites had a community way for us to alert each other when something important like this comes up. Please pass it on, FYI.

[Dan Holloway]

I think that's a very plausible thesis. I don't think those of us who write and publish literature whose tastes and forms run to the exotic, can claim we are uniquely misunderstood. Modernism as a whole, not justJoyce and Faulkner, was met with a mixture of dismissal and a despair that possibly the end of civilization had come. From Duchamp through Schoenberg and Picasso right up to Steve Reich and Steve McQueen's Deadpan, people feel - and you use exactly the right word - "disrupted" by Modernism (it's another debate, I know, but it's worth discudding the way we as a society "get" Postmodernism with its endless referencing and rootless cross-cutting, but find the much older Modernism still utterly beyond us - I think it has to do with the way we understand content more than we understand form but that's another discussion).

I was lucky enough to study The Sound and the Fury at school. We studied lots of texts, but for all of us this was our favourite. It was a jolt the first time we read it, but we had a teacher who told us how exciting what Faulkner was doing was, and we bought straight into that. I think a lot of it is that we are told to expect to find things difficult and strange - too few people really explain just why this kind of literature is SO exciting