What do People Read For?

During a recent late night discussion with The Sheep,  the idea was raised that I tend not to engage emotionally with art and that the form of engagement I favour instead is a rather uncommon one.  Indeed, my dislike of fantasy may very well boil down to the fact that I am incapable of using a fantasy novel in the way that it is intended.  I was puzzled by this idea and thought I would take it to the blogosphere to see whether a) anyone else has a similar experience to me and b) what the ramifications of this might be.

I have never emotionally engaged with a novel.

By this I mean that I have never invested much emotion in the outcome of the characters.  I don't feel sad when a beloved character dies, I don't cheer when the hero wins and I don't generically "feel the pain" of characters or feel much empathy for what they're going through.  I never project myself into a novel.  This might well be the case as a result of reading too many shitty books, but when considering the issue more widely, I think it is also true of other forms of art.  I have never wept at a particularly beautiful piece of music, I don't have much of an interest in poetry and paintings never affect me on a visceral level.  I remain constantly detached, aloof, analytical.

When I read a book or watch a film, I constantly think in the way I do in my reviews.  I don't empathise with characters but I see the strings of emotional manipulation that attempt to make me do so and I am capable of making a judgement about whether the attempt is a good one or a bad one.  When I look at art my reaction is never more than "Ah... I see what he was trying to do there" and my engagement with music is never more than liking a particular tune and being able to tell whether a song is uplifting or not.  I never feel particularly uplifted or depressed by a film but I can see the attempts to make me feel that way and I can be either impressed or repulsed by them.

I feel emotion in the real world and am capable of feeling without necessarily knowing why I am feeling it but never in a fictional or artificial context.  In fact, the idea of escaping from the real and going on an "emotional roller coaster" ride for fun rather repulses me... I don't quite grasp why one would want to be emotionally manipulated.  The best example of this in the context of a book would be the troublesome case of Ned Stark carrying out executions himself in George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.  A little while ago, I got into a heap of trouble for saying that Martin's sympathetic portrayal of Ned Stark suggested that Martin was tacitly accepting fantasy's authoritarian moral narratives.  Martin fans disagreed with me for a number of reasons but I think the problem was that I was not engaging with the text in the appropriate way.  The appropriate way is to take Stark's decision to execute criminals himself as a way of saying that he's a ruler who takes his duties seriously and who takes responsibility for the actions of the state.  You're not supposed to look at Stark through the lens of the real world where a head of state who executed criminals would widely and rightly be seen as a psychopath or a sadist.  You're not supposed to ask the kind of questions and make the kind of judgments that I can't help but ask.  Instead, I think, you're supposed to engage with the emotional narrative of a competent and good leader who is out manoeuvered by more ruthless and skilled politicians.  His decision to wade into the morass of courtly politics despite lacking the relevant skills ultimately sends his world and his family into upheaval.  I expect that one is supposed to feel something here... sadness perhaps? pity?  anger?  I don't know because I don't feel anything.

Personality reflects taste.

My tendency to see texts as collections of ideas and assumptions and decisions tends to draw me towards books that are more about ideas and, I think I have that is Hard SF.  Im reminded of one scene in Stephen Baxter's Emperor when one character complains about how poor the characters and plots are in a particular book only for another character to respond that the book isn't about that... it's about the ideas.  It doesn't really matter to me how good the plot and characterisation is in a novel as I don't engage with that, I engage with the ideas.  The Sheep suggested that when it comes to a novel such as Blindsight, I am rather rare in loving the book because of the ideas in it, rather than engaging emotionally with the characters and enjoying the escapist silliness of "Vampires in Spaaaace".

Indeed, I hate french art house cinema in the "3 coulours" "Filme d'apartement" style as much as I hate fantasy and this is because I never engage with the characters... instead I see them as a series of theses on the nature of human psychology or the nature of relationships.  Seeing as practically all of these films deal in middle class people in unhappy relationships, the ideas become stale and I lose interest and the lack of interest then becomes irritation as these films keep getting made.  In truth, I'm just not engaging with the films in the way I'm supposed to... on an emotional level.  This is true of all drama... unless someone is saying something inherrently interesting about the human condition, I'm largely uninterested in "experiencing" a piece of drama... I watch, I think about, I interpret, I analyse but I am never moved.

So I wonder, am I uncommon in this? 

Do other people read Blindsight whilst remaining largely uninterested in the ideas about the self and the brain?  or are most people capable of engaging with a book on that level but also the emotional one?  do some people engage with things purely on an emotional basis but never theoretically?  I don't know.

Personality reflects Personality.

I got my old psychology textbooks out and had a look, discounting the possibility that I was autistic or a psychopath by virtue of the fact that this lack of emotional engagement seems to be confined to the fictional.  I can and do "feel for" real people and am actually very intuitive as far as knowing how other people are feeling in particular circumstances.  So the other option is that this is some kind of personality quirk.  I am, apparently, an ENTJ according to the MBTI test.  Apparently this was also Hitler's personality type so you can see where the emotional detachment comes from as well as the tendency to see the world as something fixable because you can see the forces operating upon it.  Indeed, in terms of how the personality code breaks down, I score very highly on Thinking, which is opposed to Feeling.  The Sheep, who is an opera singer and a long time lover of fat fantasy scores quite well on Feeling, suggesting some kind of correlation.

So how do people out there engage with fiction?  are they detached or does a book's story wash over them viscerally?  can they experience both?  can they experience only one?  are there other forms of engagement out there?

I genuinely want to know.

Comments

[Brian]

I am about the same when it comes to the written word. I read primarily for the fiction and ideas. An emotional engagement with the characters is rarely established, though there have been a few exceptions.

The odd thing though is I am completely unlike you with film. I suppose I view films through a different lense or something because I OFTEN find myself empathizing and cheering. And I do love Arthouse cinema of that French variety you dislike. Ingmar Bergman (RIP) and Pedro Almodovar are my top two directors, with Akira Kurosawa coming in a close third.

[Brian]

Err... I meant to say I read fiction primarily for the themes and ideas, not "I read primarily for the fiction and ideas." Haha.

[Ian Sales]

First, I too like art house cinema - Kieslowski, Bergman, Almodovar, Kaurismäki, Suleiman... But I also like crap sf films.

I don't read sf for the ideas. Probably the biggest draw for me is the stories themselves- although perhaps that's just the use the ideas are put to. There has been the odd book that I have reacted to on an emotional level - and those books immediately become favourites. Back in January, I decided to reread those favourites, just to see if they still had that emotional impact. Some did, some didn't.

I find it difficult to engage with characters in high fantasy series, chiefly because the poor writing and world-building puts me off. The only exception to this I've found is Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania and its sequels - but Park makes it difficult by drawing his villainess, Baroness Ceaucescu, best of all the characters.

Oh, and apparently I'm an INTJ.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I like art house cinema too. I love Almodovar and Bergman but I like them mostly for the ideas and the situations. I never engage emotionally with any of the characters. I just have a problem with a lot of French cinema as I think you're supposed to mostly engage with the characters primarily.

Actually, thinking about it, I do kind of engage emotionally with Ozu's films. Tokyo Story and Tokyo Twilight are quite touching in their bitter sweet ways. Weirdly though, Kurosawa leaves me quite cold in that area, I have to engage with it intellectually.

Interesting stuff though, thanks guys. I can't remember the last time I read a book for the story. Maybe The Road but that's an excellent example of a book that left me completely cold emotionally whereas I know a lot of people find it quite hard going on that level.

[Max Cairnduff]

I think there is a huge range of ways to engage with fiction, what strikes me (and these are neither exhaustive nor exclusive) a story may be about includes:

Ideas, which could be factual (what would it be like if society were full of telepaths?) or conceptual.

Mood paintings, Viriconium to me is not about ideas but is about an evocation of loss, despair, ennui and emotions I'm not even sure I have a name for. Similarly Peter Ackroyd's novels are really mood paintings.

Pure escapism.

Exploration of character. Much literary fiction depends on this, and crime fiction almost entirely so.

Exploration of setting, this is one for the SF and fantasy crowd, though it's common in crime too hence the popularity of historical crime and crime in interesting locations.

Plot. Important to genre fiction generally, but not so much to literary.

Language, sheer beauty of prose.

Emotional engagement.

Fantasy fiction to me is not about ideas at all, it's about escapism, plot, exploration of character and exploration of setting. It is rarely about mood, which is part of why I think it is artistically bankrupt, but the main reason I think it is artistically bankrupt is that as a rule it's not very well written. Exploration of character requires characters worth exploring, but fantasy characters tend to be very shallow.

SF tends to be a fiction of ideas, characterisation is often weak or barely there at all, that's a common (albeit quite misguided) criticism of it. Misguided as it's criticising an apple for its lack of orangey goodness, but hard sf in particular is fiction about ideas.

Literary fiction tends to be about emotional truth, about character, sometimes simply about the language, but is not much about ideas save perhaps vague conceptual ones. French arthouse cinema tends to be about the truth of people and relationships, ideawise it's trite but then ideas are not the point, the point is the recognition of truth in another's situation.

Hm, I'll come back to this, it's a huge topic and requires a fair bit of space.

[Max Cairnduff]

Ozu is personal, Kurosawa is epic, most of us have experienced the personal and the small disappointments of life, epic is not by its nature something we identify with in the same way.

Tokyo Story expresses truth about human experience, about disappointment and family life, stuff which is small in the grand scheme of things but vitally important in our lives.

By contrast, take Seven Samurai. It's a great movie, I adore it, but it expresses little about my own life, it's an epic which has much to say about honour, about the nature of the Samurai and their values (and whether those are values worth preserving or not), it has a lot going on within it beyond the sheer epic nature of it. But it's not quietly personal the way Tokyo Story is.

I'm not saying Tokyo Story is the better movie, but they are doing different things. In Tokyo Story I recognise the truth of what it is to live within a family, or one truth anyway. It hits home in a way an epic movie can't really. Epic may stir the emotions for an evening, but it's unlikely to leave you with any deep emotion.

Similarly the French movie La Separation is about a divorce, it contains nothing unusual or surprising really, but it is an illustration of the pain of a terrible breakup and as such is both true and recognisable within our own lives. It's again, whether well done or badly, not a film of ideas or of epic sweep but an attempt through art to express a truth of human experience.

[Liam]

I read because it is something I do. I read all the time. My mum and dad brought me up in a house full of books so it's something I just do with little thought. I'll read anywhere any time: on the bus, in bed, whilst eating. When I am driving I listen to audibooks. If I somehow forget to take a book with me to the loo I will happily read the back of a shampoo bottle.

I read because I like stories. That may sound silly but it's true. I have a vivid imagination and I like a skilled author to have their way with it.

[Serdar]

When I watch a movie or read a book, I try to disengage my critical faculties so I can let the book/movie do its work. When I'm done, then I go back over what happened. If I got angry/sad/whatever, was that legitimate, or was the work stacking the deck in an unfair way? Stig Dagerman's "A Burned Child" got under my skin, but for wholly legitimate reasons -- I didn't feel manipulated, but more like I was in the presence of kindred souls. "The Fountain", on the other hand, annoyed the hell out of me from beginning to end.

[Serdar]

Max, I've seen both "Tokyo Story" and "Seven Samurai" and they're both favorites of mine for entirely different reasons. I have trouble putting either one completely out of my head. Everything that works will work for its own reasons.

[Serdar]

And let me go back up to the top and spar with the core statement, that you have never emotionally engaged with a novel.

There's a part of me that wants to say, "Geez," and wonder what went wrong. But there's also a part of me that knows that not everyone has an emotional engagement with everything. Granted, one of the reasons people still write books or do anything "artistic" is because there's some kind of emotional connection between them and the guy at the other end -- even if that connection is rarefied. If I listed to Stockhausen's "Mantra" (and I do, often; it's one of my favorite pieces) the emotional connection is there, even though it's not something specifically *in* the music. It's a reminder of the time when I discovered it (i.e., nostalgia, which the music is just a harbinger of), and a sense of admiration for the creator. If I want to get something really emotional, I go read Anne Tyler, or watch Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage."

"I don't quite grasp why one would want to be emotionally manipulated." Because, well, some of us like that sort of thing? Amazingly, some of us do -- albeit in a fairly controlled way. I didn't like being emotionally manipulated against my will, but I enjoyed it when Hitchcock did it in "Vertigo" or when Chan-wook Park did it in "Oldboy", because there was an aesthetic purpose on top of that; it wasn't just about some selfish loser trying to get my attention (as has happened to me personally).

I've met a few people who up to a certain point in their lives were not emotionally affected by drama or fiction, and then experienced something fairly ghastly -- a personal loss, a blow to their ego, something along those lines. When I saw "Ikiru" at the age of 21, I approached it like a formal exercise. When I saw it at the age of 35, it approached me, like a warning about what not to do with my life.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I don't have any films or books or music that makes me emotional. There's nothing I can watch that'll systematically have an effect upon me. If I'm feeling down there's some stuff I'll watch because it cheers me up but that tends to be either comedy or something whimsical like Topsy Turvy. Similarly, I never do the whole "listening to sad music when I'm down" thing.

I know... I'm dead inside.

Oldboy, for example, is a film I really really like but I find it emotionally completely inert. In fact, I find a lot of Asian cinema (Ozu aside) to be quite emotionally cold. The idea of watching Oldboy and getting emotional seems a bit strange to me.

I'm just naturally aloof when it comes to art I think. I'm trying to break the habit but it's not particularly easy. I've been listening to the three musketeers on audiobook while I commute and trying to lose myself in the book's sympathies but I can't help but think about what complete pricks the Musketeers are and wanting the cardinal to win as he seems to be the only person in the entire book who actually cares about the direction the Kingdom is headed in.

[Serdar]

Here's the thing: As long as you can admit openly to that when reviewing something for the sake of others, you probably have a leg up. It's when you think EVERYONE ELSE should be like that, that we have a problem.

Of course, I don't expect everyone else to automatically get moved by the things I like, either. I just expect them to allow me to defend my position on it, and take that defense on face value.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Ah, now you're drifiting into the philosophical underpinnings of criticism and what the critic's standpoint should be and what it's fair to expect from a critic.

[Ren from afar]

Yay, you're dead inside! *does cheerleading pom-pom dance* Another freak to join my table ;-)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Another? how many do you have?

how goes your grand world tour? when are you coming back to help us kill things and take their stuff?