Meaning and Pleasure:
What We Get Out of Texts

December 23, 2006

Imitation gives pleasure. This means laughter when it involves a Saturday Night Live skit in which some well known figure is imitated. We know that sense of tickled recognition when we think: Yes, that is exactly how so-and-so acts and talks! Comics find imitation useful because they do not even have to say anything funny; they imitate somebody successfully and the audience is in stitches. The pleasure of imitation can also be less overtly comic.. as in the experience of watching, say, a movie that catches the language and experience of some place we know well: Yes, that is exactly what grad school is like! Exactly what going to church is like! In this case we don't laugh, but we are pleased.. another way of saying that we feel pleasure.

Narrative arts (as opposed to the lyrical) are engaged in the effort of imitating something about the world. The novel, plays, movies.. all are engaged in imitation. Even when the work imitates a world completely foreign to me.. an array of small details can build authenticity and draw my interest with the promise that this is a genuine representation. In this case I leave the theater or put down the book having enjoyed a closely observed world. (note: this can be true even of a work that takes a fantasy world as its setting.. since I take fantasy genres as cloaked or exaggerated versions of the present world.. in which case what we get is the pleasure of caricature.)

If imitation was all there was to it, then directors would throw real life up onto the screen.. unadulterated experience. But we would get bored. There is the need for narrative to keep our attention. Narrative is the product of our own cognitive processes.. and not something that is really out there in the world to be imitated. Let me try that again.. Our minds take in countless details and select out of them a linear version of events that is used to make sense of experience. This is the way we process the world. Movies and books approximate that cognitive process of selection.. and present us with an edited possible version of life which are mind intuitively grasps.

Narrative is obviously responsible for the interest generated by a plot.. but I think it is also important to recognize the power of narrative to give meaning to a work. The details of a work may give flashes of pleasure as we see a world reflected.. but the meaning of a work is determined by its ability to plug-in to a cultural script. Movies as different as Narnia and Superman Returns work to evoke the story of Christ's death and resurrection.. which I find endlessly annoying. But that must do something for a lot of people.. it must give them a new version of an important cultural script.. and therefore feel meaningful. It must cause pleasure to see the same story worked out in a different time and place.

This last week Emily and I went to see the new Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happyness.. mostly forgettable. Afterwards Emily commented that it reminded her of business success narratives she has heard from people connected to Primerica. There the stories all have a certain arc of hardship overcome and success through hard work. It is not a biblical story, but a separate cultural script.. which we find recognizable. Part of the appeal of this movie will be for people who have already internalized that narrative.

The last thing I want is to be mistaken for some crazed follower of Joseph Campbell with these musings. The narratives I am talking about are not floating out there in space.. neither archetypes nor supracultural scripts. I find that unsupportable. These narratives are generated by cultures.. and that is exactly why it is so interesting to think about texts moving from culture to culture.. and to speculate about how the meaning changes. Try watching Superman Returns in Cairo! Try watching a French noir film!

Meaning can perhaps be called a basic-level narrative. If we interviewed people walking out of a theater and asked them to summarize what they saw, they would say: character X runs away, then struggles, then comes back. Those highly stripped down versions of a narrative, I would argue, are the places where we find the meaning of a work.. but the immediate pleasure of the film is more connected with the imitation of multiple details. My tendency.. which I might as well admit.. is to love films and books that are very high in details.. thick with another world. But that does not mean I don't appreciate the ways that narrative coalesces those details into something bigger than I could have anticipated.