Normalisation: interpreting fiction

This section lays the groundwork for future discussion of normalisation. To do so, I characterise the process of forming impressions of fiction as interpretive. I claim that this interpretive process tends to aim towards maximising three qualities in fiction: consistency, coherency and rationality. I explain each of these concepts and show how they guide our interpretation of fiction.

When the reader forms her impressions of a fiction, she performs a kind of interpretation. She interprets the direct content of the fiction (its constitutive words, images and sounds—see pp. 41–43), using it to inform the impressions she draws. This interpretive activity is often low-level or even unconscious. It is far more primitive than other types of interpretation, such as the interpretation of themes or symbolism. It is a matter of parsing the fiction and understanding that it is representing a particular set of circumstances. Take the following extract from Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms, where the narrator, Naoe, overhears her daughter and son-in-law speculate about her oncoming senility:

77

“She started to stick her hands inside her pants, but I caught her in the act and she stopped and started laughing,” Keiko continues...

“Maybe her crotch is itchy,” Shinji suggests.

There is a gurgle in my chest, up my throat, and at the back of my mouth. I bite my blankets to muffle the sound but snort through my nose instead (Goto 1997: 40–41).

Forming an impression of this scene involves interpreting several pieces of information which are obvious, but not explicit. For example, the reader must interpret the fiction in order to arrive at the fact that Naoe is laughing. Similarly, at no point in the scene (including outside the given extract) is it made explicit that Naoe is in bed, or that she tries to hide the sound of her laughter from Keiko and Shinji. These are all extremely basic pieces of information which any competent reader can glean from the extract alone, let alone from the wider context of the novel. However, the information must still be extracted via interpretation, as it is not explicitly stated in the direct content of the fiction. The reader interprets the gurgling as Naoe laughing, and the blankets as indicating that she is in bed.

Some philosophers, such as Peter Lamarque, might challenge the idea that I have described an act of interpretation. Lamarque argues that an object can only be interpreted in the event that its meaning is unclear (Lamarque 2000: 98). There is no real ambiguity in the extract from Chorus of Mushrooms; a reader who does not think that Naoe is laughing, or that she is in bed, is simply wrong. Nothing turns on the use of the term ‘interpretation’ in this chapter, so this potential objection is not damaging. If, as Lamarque claims, interpretation is at its broadest definition the practice of making sense of things, then it should be clear that the practice I have described is similar to interpretation (Lamarque 2000: 98). Lamarque, and others like him, might therefore think of the process described above as interpretation-like rather than an act of actual interpretation.28 _{Where such a}

reader objects to the use of ‘interpretation’ in this chapter, the word could be replaced with ‘interpretation-like’ with no impact on my arguments.

The low-level interpretation described above is how the reader makes sense of the fiction and forms her impressions. To interpret a fiction in a way which makes no sense would be pointless and arbitrary. Assuming that readers do not interpret purposelessly or arbitrarily, this means that a reader will make her best effort to interpret fiction in a way which makes sense to her. The reader does not imagine that Naoe is suspended from the

28 _{To Beardsley, for example, the activity I describe is a combination of explication (interpreting the}

contextual meaning of words) and elucidation (interpreting the features of the world of the text which are suggested but not stated by those words) (Lamarque 2010: 291).

78

ceiling—part of her impression is that Naoe is in bed, because that is where people are usually wrapped in blankets. When Mrs Sommers is hungry in Kate Chopin’s ‘A Pair of Silk Stockings’, the reader’s impression is that Mrs Sommers hasn’t eaten recently (Chopin 1897). If a character lets go of an object, then, unless given a reason to think otherwise, the competent reader’s impression is that the object falls. The reader recognises a causal relation between Inigo Montoya’s desire to kill the Six-Fingered Man, and the fact that the Six-Fingered Man killed Inigo’s father—she does not think the two are merely coincidental. Fiction is constantly interpreted and decoded by the reader in order to turn the words on the page into an impression of a unified narrative.

When the reader forms impressions of a fiction in this way, I claim that she is generally guided by three qualities of fiction: (1) coherence, (2) consistency and (3) rationality.

(1) Coherent fiction is broadly unified in tone, style and subject. The reader’s impression is not that Mrs Sommers is hungry because she is secretly a bear disguised as a human. This would not be coherent with the rest of Chopin’s short story. The existence of aliens is a coherent aspect of The X-Files but would be incoherent in Fraiser. This should not be confused with logical coherency—a logically impossible fiction may still be coherent, and a logically possible fiction can be incoherent.29

(2) A consistent fiction contains events and characters which, however unlikely, could have really occurred. That is to say, it could feasibly be discovered that a consistent fiction was mistakenly classified and is actually a work of nonfiction. Consistent fictions are logically possible, containing no internal contradictions. The characters and events of Jane Eyre are all compossible, making it a consistent fiction. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, where various fictional characters drug their own author, is an inconsistent fiction.

(3) A rational fiction contains events which relate to one another in sensible ways, rather than in arbitrary ways. The reader’s impression is that Naoe is laughing because of what Shinji says, rather than coincidentally. This is because that interpretation maximises the rationality in Chorus of Mushrooms. An irrational fiction, such as Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand, features non-sequiturs and suspension of typical rules of cause-and-effect (the same desert contains an American Football team out training,

29 _{Matravers deals with a similar concept in Fiction and Narrative (2014: 80). His notion of ‘global}

79 a used car dealer, a Civil War-era Confederate army, a gramophone with records which conjure the object which they have recorded, and a beach—complete with killer shark).

These three qualities are not present in every fiction, nor are they always present in equal amounts. Some fictions, authors, genres or movements challenge one or more of these qualities. Surrealism challenges the quality of rationality; M.C. Escher challenges the quality of consistency; Steve McCaffery’s non-narrative fiction Panopticon challenges all three. Sometimes an interpretation will privilege one quality over another: frequently, a reader may favour coherency over rationality in cases of magic realist fiction, or consistency over coherency in cases of historical drama. Generally, however, all three are the rubrics which guide how the reader forms her impression of a fiction. An interpretation which maximises these three qualities is generally preferred to one which diminishes them. Usually, they are deployed without conscious effort—an interpretation which satisfies all three principles seems more right than interpretations which do not—but this is not the only way that they guide our interpretive activity.

Sometimes readers must actively interpret fictions which are harder to resolve than the ones suggested above. These are cases where there are genuine competing explanations to choose between. This active interpretation is not low-level or unconscious, unlike the type of interpretation I have discussed until now. It is interpretation in the sense which Lamarque discusses, and it requires conscious thought to conduct. However, it too aims towards maximising coherency, consistency and rationality, as an example shows. While watching the ending of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the reader must interpret the sequence in which Bowman passes through a vortex of colour near Jupiter, awaking in a stylish bedroom. In order for the reader to understand this scene, she must actively interpret what is taking place in the film. The direct content alone is not enough to provide a coherent, consistent and rational impression of the scene. If the reader does not exercise conscious, active interpretation, then the scene will not make sense. When performing this interpretation, the reader still aims to maximise the three qualities. For this reason, a common interpretation is that Bowman has made contact with an alien race. This interpretation is coherent (Bowman learns earlier in the film that his mission is to investigate an alien artefact on one of Jupiter’s moons). It is consistent (there is nothing logically impossible about the existence of aliens). It is also rational (the kaleidoscopic vortex is explained as alien technology, and Bowman wakes up in a bedroom because the aliens have constructed it for him), eliminating the non-sequitur appearance of the bedroom. In this example, coherence, consistency and rationality can be seen to guide our interpretive behaviour at both unconscious and explicit, conscious levels.

80

This section has established that readers form their impressions by interpretation of fiction (or, if we are cautious about labelling this interpretation, by an interpretation-like activity). When interpreting fiction in this way, readers are guided by three principles: coherence, consistency and rationality. The following section defines normalisation and shows that it is an extension of this activity.