Experience and Meaning in Fiction
Meaning doesn't mean what you think it means
What does a novel mean? That’s the wrong question. Consider:
A ship appears on the horizon. The only part of the ship that is visible is its topmost sail. In the town, the news of the sail brings many thoughts to mind. Some wonder if it brings their loved ones back to them. Some wonder if it contains a cargo that will make their fortunes. But on the dockside, one bright Johnny contemplates the sight of that topmost sail and wonders why he cannot see the hull. And then it dawns on him. The world is round.
We can note several things here:
The notion that the world is round came as a result of observing the approach of the ship.1
The man who built the ship was not thinking about proving that the world was round.
The ship is a real objective phenomenon in the world.
The sight of the ship approaching brought different thoughts to different people in the town according to their hopes, fears, and expectations, but all these hopes, fears, and expectations were in response to the objective reality of the ship.
One school of thought holds that each work of literature holds a specific philosophical meaning, veiled by the author as a sort of code to be discovered and broken by the reader. It holds, in short, that the novel has a message, that it is saying something. Another school holds that there is no meaning at all, that the author’s intention is entirely irrelevant, and all that exists is each reader’s individual experience of the story.
Neither of these schools of thought does an adequate job of explaining literature and its effects, though each of them has proved very effective over the years in ruining the reading experience of countless students and putting them off novels for good.
Let’s see if we can chart a middle course. The experience of reading a novel is like the experience of seeing that ship approach the land.
Each person who reads the novel, like each person who sees the ship, has a different reaction to it because of differences in their hopes and fears and experience.
The novel is, nonetheless, an objective fact in the world.
Many readers in similar circumstances will have similar reactions to the story, just as many who see the ship will have similar reactions. Their reactions are broadly predictable given their circumstances.
The ship builder will have expected certain reactions to seeing his ship approach, and may go down to the harbour to see the hope and expectation on the faces of those awaiting the ship. And so the novelist will have expected the reactions of many people to their story and be pleased to see these expectations fulfilled.
Just as some bystanders may have reactions to the approach of the ship that the shipbuilder did not anticipate or intend, so some readers may have reactions to reading the novel that the author did not anticipate or intend.
Such reactions are not incorrect interpretations of the novel. Nor are they purely subjective phenomena unconnected to the novel or the author. They are genuine reactions to the reality of the novel, as the realization that the world is round is a genuine reaction to seeing the ship approach.
Such reactions to a story occur because a story is an experience, and our whole lives are made up of experiences. Our experiences are shared in the important sense that we are all seeing the same objectively real ship and reading the same objectively real novel. But the totality of our experience, which shapes how we receive and contemplate the individual experiences that we share with others, is unique for each of us, and can therefore create individual reactions and insights which are true impressions of the work, even if they are not impressions that the author intended or anticipated, just as the sighting of a topsail on the horizon while the hull of the ship is still hidden can lead to the realization that the earth is round even if that was no part of the shipbuilder’s motivation or intent.
Experiences can lead to people forming moral or philosophical convictions. After all, without experiences, there would be nothing to form moral or philosophical convictions about. Such convictions, then, are a consonant reaction to the experience of the story. An author may hope that readers will form such conclusions, but if they try to stack the deck in favor of such conclusions, they rob the story of its truth and thus diminish any impact it may have as an experience. Just because you develop such a moral or philosophical conclusion as a result of reading a novel does not mean that that was what the novel was saying. That is to misunderstand how a story works, what its nature and purpose is.
The question of whether a novel is true has nothing to do with whether the reflections any reader has of it are true, or if any reactions intended or planned for by the author are true, but, by analogy with the ship, whether it floats and holds water and answers to the helm. A true novel is a true novel in the same sense that a true ship is a true ship.
The capacity of the novel to produce true and insightful reactions depends on it being true in this sense. If the ship sinks, it cannot produce any of the reactions or insights it would have produced on approaching the harbor, even those that the shipbuilder planned for.
The attempt on the part of the shipbuilder to design the ship to produce specific reactions, rather than to stay afloat and steer true, can lead to the demise of the ship, for example, by making it top-heavy by putting too much sail aloft in an attempt to make the effect of the curvature of the Earth more pronounced. The intent to make a novel mean something in particular can similarly make it founder and have no true impact on the reader at all.
This does not mean that there can be no false reading of a novel, any more than it is impossible for there to be a false understanding of a ship. Every beam and halyard on the ship was designed with a specific intent which the shrewd observer can divine. Similarly, every scene and allusion in a story was designed by the author with a specific intent which a shrewd observer can divine. But these observable design intentions relate to the function of the ship or the novel itself, not to the impressions or insights it provokes in the reader or the observers waiting on the dockside.
Just as a biased or uninformed observer may not recognize a white square on the horizon as a ship, and thus cannot have any of the impressions or insights that the observation of a ship would provoke, so a biased or uninformed reader may not recognize the nature of the story they are reading and so may not have impressions or insights that are consonant with the story as it is.
A novel, in short, is a real thing which enters into the set of real things that each reader has experienced in their life, which conditions how they receive each new real thing they encounter in their lives. Reactions to novels vary to the same degree and for the same reasons that reactions to other real things vary. Far from detracting from its objective status, therefore, these varied reactions affirm its objectivity, even if they differ from the reactions that the author anticipated or intended. Conversely, if there is a uniformity of understanding and interpretation, that is evidence that the novel is not a true story (in the way a ship is a true ship) but a veiled argument.
This is why when I write a story, I am very conscious that the first of sins would be for me to try to make it say something. The whole of my task is to make it be something, a story that is true in the way that a true ship is true.
I raise all this because of a recent post by Katie Branigan in her Rediscovering Beauty newsletter, which looks at my Cuthbert’s People series in the context of the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition.
Much of what Branigan observes here about my books is not anything I had consciously in mind as I wrote the books. I had, of course, immersed myself in the history and literature of the Anglo-Saxons before writing the books, but I did not go into the project trying consciously to tie them to any particular work or theme. Branigan’s impressions are a reaction to the book as a thing in itself in the context of her love of Anglo-Saxon poetry. She writes of the opening lines of The Wistful and the Good:
Isn’t this an exquisite articulation of that Anglo-Saxon yearning, of that windswept wildness in tension with stark rootedness, yearning that aches against the landscape—both that of earth and that of the imagination?
And yes, I think it is, but it draws a connection that was certainly not in my mind when I wrote that opening, though I suppose you could argue that it was buried somewhere in the back of my psyche.
Branigan goes on:
“The Seafarer’s” aged sailor laments,
To conceive this is hard For the landsman who lives on the lonely shore— How, sorrowful and sad on a sea ice-cold, 15 I eked out my exile through the awful winter . . . . . . . . deprived of my kinsmen.In Elswyth, Baker explores these two Anglo-Saxon personas, and their seemingly paradoxical elements, in tension with each other. She is at once Wistful Elsywth—passionate, beautiful, and with a heart for the sea and adventure—and Melancholy Agnes—silent, grieved, and penitential. She embodies both the aged and the young sailor, and the work of her life over the course of Baker’s books is the work of reconciling these two parts of herself.
Is this a reflection that is consonant with the work itself? Absolutely. Was it something consciously in my mind as I wrote, a message I was hoping to artfully conceal within the text? It was not.
But what pleases me most about Branigan’s essay is something much simpler. It is this:
Cuthbert’s People provokes these reflections not in spite of being a genuinely fun story to read, but precise because it is a fun story to read.
Because that is exactly the point of my reflections above: to evoke profound reflections, a story must strive not to provoke reflections but to produce a story that is true to the nature of story, a story that holds water and can steer a true course by a true star. Because only a true thing, a true experience, can produce reflections of any merit or interest.
Another example of this comes from Courtney Kim’s review of Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight:
The counter-feminist challenge of this moral fable involves serious grappling with the dilemmas of postmodern womanhood, with a clear-eyed examination of various dead-ends, including the dead-end of nostalgia for an imaginary age of innocence. It works as a story because of the stark fairy tale structure. As in a fairy tale, Isabel experiences a series of stylized encounters, but as in a novel, the interiority of the characters is the focus. The result is a dark but fascinating psycho-fable.
Did I set out to make a counter-feminist challenge or grapple with the dilemmas of postmodern womanhood? Did I set out to critique the dead-end nostalgia for an imaginary age of innocence? No, I did not. Do these reflections strike me as consonant with the story I wrote? Absolutely, they do.
A novel should not be read, nor should it be written, with explicit philosophical meaning intended. Nor should it be dismissed as a thing of mere subjectivity, which can produce only a subjective response of no relevance to anyone but the individual reader. A novel should be a good story as a ship should be a good ship, and as a meal should be a good meal, a real thing whose truth is to its nature, form, and purpose.
And like all things that are true to their nature, form, and purpose, it may produce a number of reactions and reflections which, though varied and individual, can nevertheless be said to be true or false to the object that gave birth to them.
This is almost certainly not how the roundness of the Earth was discovered, and such an observation is almost certainly impossible to make, according to what I have read on the subject, but grant me the myth for the clarity of the example it provides.
What you’re getting at here is quite alarming to some people, including some writers. It implies that there is a creative process that the novelist is not in control of. It doesn’t mean that the writer isn’t grappling with explicit philosophy while writing the story. But the process of figuring out the story is also a journey. So, for example, when I started writing my first novel, I was Presbyterian. By the time I finished it, I had become Catholic. Looking back, I see that my trajectory in life is rendered into the plot and characters of the novel. But I had no thought of any such trajectory at the outset, nor any intention of writing about such things. What happened?? As a Christian I believe that God was guiding me in life. As a writer, well, I went where the thing had to go, even though it lost me most of my former friends (also not at all desired or expected). But not everyone who writes fiction lives (or writes) in this intuitive way.
This is so beautifully articulated. Your balance of the subjective and the objective truth of a novel rings very true to me, and your love of story in and of itself (ie. not strictly as a means of conveying some truth, be it religious, moral, political, or otherwise, but as a story qua story) is, I think, why your books are such fun to read. It makes them books that act upon (and create within) the reader, rather than merely books that must be acted upon by the reader.
It is certainly true that I entered into The Wistful and the Good expecting the "ship" of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, and I was thrilled to see its sails. Thank you for your work--both your essays and your novels--and for taking the time to read my little article!