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Henry Bacon:
Cognition and the aesthetics of reexperience
There have been artist who have made bold attempts to insure that their work could be
encountered only once as a single fresh experience. Antonin Artaud for one even
suggested that if a poem was to be read at all, it was to be read once and once only,
then quickly burned.1 Less drastically, in performing arts improvisation has sustained
the ideal of spontaneity. As a whole, however, making works of art which can be and
often are encountered repeatedly is by far the dominant cultural practice. Aesthetic
reexperience is not only extremely common, it is a basic category of aesthetic
experience as a whole.
There are many interrelated reasons why stories are retold, books reread, films
re-viewed. In order to sort them out we must first of all make a distinction between
rereading soon after the first reading and rereading after a longer time lapse.2 Even
more importantly, in both cases we must make the further distinction between
rereading for the pleasure of the familiar and for the gains awarded by a more
reflective approach driven by intellectual curiosity in the face of potential for new or
enriched meaning. These two should not be seen in opposition as they often function
in a complementary fashion in aesthetic re-experience.
Motivations for rereading can be grouped under the headings sameness and
novelty thus:
Sameness
 Pleasure of repetition per se
 Comfort of the familiar
 Assurance granted by knowledge of plot development
 Persistence of narrative excitement
Novelty: the pleasure of refined observation and reinterpretation due to
 (enhanced) awareness of the whole
 secondary information gained after first experience
 greater aesthetic sensibility due to encountering other works of art
 matured outlook on life
 new historical and cultural conditions
The lower threshold or aesthetic reexperience is the almost infantile pleasure of
repetition as such, while the upper threshold is the cultural historical process, where in
the words of the opera producer Götz Friedrich, history acts as a “ghost writer”,
offering ever new horizons of expectation and prospects for meaning. While at the
one end we have something that verges on the psychologically regressive, at the other
we have our bold aspiration of developing ever more subtle ways of appreciation of
texts and their relation to our historical and cultural experience. Whereas the former
may most satisfactorily be explained in terms of psychology, the later belongs
primarily to the sphere of art and cultural studies. I will seek to demonstrate that
cognitivism together with formalist poetics have considerable explanatory power in
exploring the ground between these framing aspects of aesthetic reexperience.
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Reading vs. rereading
Most accounts of the actual process of reading a book or seeing a film are implicitly
accounts of a hypothetical, not to say idealised, first reading. It is tacitly assumed that
the reader or spectator does not know what will happen in the course of the narration.
Wolfgang Iser in his the Act of Reading emphasizes the contribution the reader brings
into constructing the narrative world of the text: “Any successful transfer [of text to
reader]… depends on the extent to which this text can activate the individual reader’s
faculties of perceiving and processing.”3 Unfortunately Iser does not here discuss how
a text might activate these faculties in the process of rereading.4 If there is, as he
suggests, throughout the reading “a continual interplay between modified expectations
and transformed memories”,5 if switches of perspectives constitute “an inseparable
combination of differentiated perspectives, foreshortened memories, present
modifications, and future expectations”,6 and if grasping a text requires a
“hermeneutic schema of anticipation and fulfilment in relation to the connections
perceived between the signs,”7 then how do all these function in rereading?
Inasmuch as rereading is even mentioned in accounts about reading, a first
reading is typically expected to be above all pleasurable, rereading in turn more
critical and more focused on the means of storytelling. The latter might also be
expected to involve a more structured scrutiny of broader social, cultural or existential
concerns. In addition to implicitly addressing the question of rereading only certain
types of texts this distinction is all too clear-cut as it fails to address many of the most
interesting questions about rereading – and reading itself! Already the first reading of
a book or viewing of a film has two components, one immediate, involving and
affective, the other critical and reflective. Readers or spectators go through the
narrative material simultaneously seeking to work out the content of the narrative, its
aesthetic qualities and its relevance to their lives and perceptions of the world.
Rereading contributes immensely to this process, and of course the mere willingness
to reread indicates that the work of art has had an effect on the mind of the reader,
probably revising her related schemata while putting them into good use.
Reflecting the distinction between these two components a further distinction is
made in literary theory between involvement and absorption. In Matei Calinescu’s
words:
[Involvement] implies a definite if not always evident emotional commitment, as a
result of which one is transported to another world. An involved reader thus
participates in the experience of fictive people through some sort of fantasy and
may identify with them or empathize with them or, at the least, be there to watch
them (always taking sides, favoring some, opposing others): Absorption, on the
other hand, is a state of high concentration of attention; and though it may display
some of the appearances of involvement (such as obliviousness to the immediate
surroundings), it lacks the sense of personal immersion so characteristic of
involvement. Absorption, then, would be more imaginatively detached and more
intellectual.8
Involvement and absorption may well be in operation simultaneously both in reading
and rereading. This is partly because even a basic narrative experiences evokes a
double foci: On the one hand, we focus on the characters at the narrative point in the
story which we have reached together with them; on the other, we view them and the
story as a whole from the outside, aware of the intricacies of syuzhet construction and
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of the relevance the story might have for us. The former calls for involvement, the
latter for absorption. Both are required in any reading or viewing, and presumably on
repeated readings or viewings the balance shifts from involvement to absorption, from
story excitement to the enhanced appreciation of the aesthetic qualities and wider
implications.
Aesthetics of rereading
Certain texts beg to be reread. Books and films can be both narratively and texturally
too rich to be processed at a single encounter. Calinescu begins his study with an
analysis of Borges’ The Aleph, pointing out that the work does not call for an “implied
reader”, but rather for a “rereader, someone who would feel the need to read it over
again and would enjoy it more fully on rereading.”9 A book, Calinescu argues – can
be eminently either readable or rereadable. There are narrative strategies which make
the text particularly rewarding on a first reading (e.g. a detective story of the puzzle
type), but this may to some extent be at the cost of the possibility of an interesting
rereading. On the other hand there may also be “calculated, strategic textual obstacles
(…) that are designed to make the first reading harder and ‘messier’ while
mysteriously persuading the reader that a second reading of the work would be more
revealing and rewarding than the first.”10 Certain films, say, most of Peter
Greenaway’s, seem to offer such a promise.
In the very best of cases a text may be both highly readable and rereadable. In
this case the rereading is not just a “repetition of a previous act of reading, but more
importantly it is the rediscovery of an already known text from a different vantage
point, for example its reconsideration within intertextual frames whose relevance has
become clear only after the completion of a first reading.”11 A lot of the story
information as well as various textural features will gain new relevance when viewed
in terms of the work as a whole. Thus seeing a film again (and again) can be an
extremely rewarding experience as familiarity mingles with novelty. Presumably, in
re-viewing a film less mental effort is spent in constructing the diegetic world than
during the first viewing. Our observational capacity is thus likely to be directed
elsewhere. In any re-viewing there will surely be at least a heightened sensitivity for
diegetic details as we are much more able to relate them to the whole than on the first
viewing. Greg Smith discusses in passing why seeing Casablanca repeatedly might
award certain new pleasures:
… the opportunity to observe the faces once again in light of what you know has
happened in the diegetic past and what will happen in the film’s denouement. Can
you see the hints of what is to come in the actor’s faces? In subsequent viewings
one can look for cues about how the past impinges on the present, knowing how
important that information is to driving the plot.12
One might also expect that the mental construction of the pattern characters-goalattempts-outcome-resolution would be different in re-viewing. David Bordwell points
out that the earlier during the course of narration the character’s goals become
apparent the easier it is for the spectators to fill in causal and temporal connections.13
As regards re-viewing films that could be classified as instances of classical narration
this challenge would be further alleviated, if not abolished entirely in re-viewing. The
knowledge about the goals would then function as another frame which would give
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new significance to character traits and various activities. In art film this could
conceivably function as a new interpretational frame. The question is, how do
procedural schemata, “those operational protocols which dynamically acquire and
organize information”,14 function in re-viewing. Again, if the initial challenge has
been great, the re-viewing must obviously be somehow different. Of course, if the
work is eminently rereadable the challenge might remain quite considerable, perhaps
even acquire new dimensions. These may relate to the narrative and stylistic features
of the film but more interestingly to thematic, philosophical and existential concerns.
These cannot be separated from extra-textual factors that are likely to influence
rereading.
The delight of ever new frames
After some distance has been gained from the first encounter with a story, new factors
are likely to influence a rereading. Our aesthetic sensibility has developed, perhaps
partly as a result of how the first encounter with the film has opened up new
questions: it may have modified the relevant schemata in our mind. The work might
have opened up issues or posed questions for which we either consciously or
unconsciously have sought for answers. Often we have consulted critical or scholarly
accounts or studied other works which we relate or associate with this work which has
challenged us, and thus we have been influenced by the interpretive community. We
might even have perceived our environment, human relationships or social structures
with different eyes. Thus we will have enhanced the relevant schemata in our minds
allowing us to experience the film anew. At best there is a loop between the
perception and understanding of a work of art and the perception and understanding
of life and oneself.
All this is a part of growing older and hopefully also more mature: Our
interpretative horizons expand, our sensitivity to meaning develops and grows more
refined, our sense of relevance becomes ever more subtle. In cognitive terms we could
say that our ways of classifying and cross referencing of information of all sorts
become ever more elaborate, or, that we develop ever more refined schemata. Such
schemata develop to a significant extent in the chiasmic relationships between life and
art. Together with the heightened awareness of the part-whole hermeneutic these new
interpretative frames give rise to new patterns give rise to new top-down processes
which in turn evoke new bottom-up processes on all levels: construction of the
diegetic world, awareness of stylistic patterns, appreciation of meaning. We observe
more when we have a richer framework into which we can integrate our perceptions.
The aspects of rereading mentioned so far are about the novelty value that a
rereading or a reviewing offers. But what about that aspect of sameness, of repetition
which also awards it pleasures?
Immediate pleasures of rereading
Apparently all repetition awards certain infantile pleasure, connected with a feeling of
security, possibly deriving from a sense of mastery, at least if we accept Freud’s
analysis of what he called the Fort/Da game as an explanation as to why a child
should enjoy throwing away a wooden reel and then pulling it back by a string fixed
round it: the reel stands for the absent mother who can not always we pulled back
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quite so easily. By analogy, it has been suggested that the pleasure of rereading comes
from the sense of mastery which emerges from the knowledge of what is to happen.
On this level the pleasure of rereading connects closely with the assurance granted by
stories with clearly defined good and bad characters as well as with heroes who are
easy to identify with while the may gradually acquire anything up to a superhero
status in fighting the baddies. Going through a story in these terms can, no doubt, be
emotionally pleasurable and that pleasure is effortlessly repeatable, offering ever
more assurance by fortifying comforting imaginary scenarios through repetition – an
age old device of political rhetoric.15 Going through the story with the knowledge of
how the plot develops can even increases the sense of superiority of the hero whose
fundamental invincibility is even more obvious to the reader, as well as the sense of
superiority of the reader herself, who is even more in the position of an omniscient
intelligence than the first time reader of even the most formulaic popular fiction.16
Furthermore, the familiar work which seems to touch the very core of our sensitivity,
our basic orientation in life, is always there, however painful the vicissitudes of life.17
There is also the formal aspect of repetition, which has always been put into
great use first in play, then in art. Both music and narrative works can give rise to
certain physiological reactions, arousal, tensities and emotivities, and apparently these
can work out well, sometimes even better when the work is familiar. It is almost as if
we trained our system to award us a certain pleasurable reactions which connect with
such important issues as identity formation and sense of belonging to a community. A
story, film or a piece of music may function as a means of identity construction in a
community as repetition awards the imaginary sense of assurance.
However, rereading may also be something for which we have an innate need
for in a way which can be seen in much more positive light. Rereading or reviewing is
a return to a cherished experience in a way which is not only uncritical but which may
involve, sometimes quite involuntarily, taking distance from the easy comforts of
returning to the familiar. This may function all the more so if that familiarity connects
with one’s self-image. As Sven Birkerts writes, while novels may be “where we store
our fantasies and ambitions” they may on reencounter equally well turn out to be “like
running into an old lover on the street: the flat plane of the present gets a hole
punched through it.” And as books, unlike ex-lovers, do not change, we have to
admit that we ourselves have changed.18
But all this does not explain some of the most astonishing feature of going
through the same stories repeatedly. If making hypothesis and having them confirmed
or disconfirmed is an integral part of the cognitive process of going through a
narrative, is this aspect simply abolished in rereading where hypothesizing should
really be unnecessary? And above all, how can the excitement usually associated with
novelty be a distinct part of the pleasure of rereading?19
Calinescu suggests that children like to hear stories repeatedly because
familiarity allows them to play the game of involvement skilfully. Anticipation gives
a sense of reassurance if the story is almost too frightening on the first hearing.20
Calinescu refers to what C.S. Lewis calls “ideal surprisingness” as opposed to “the
shock of actual surprise” in order to make the distinction between “the quality of
unexpectedness” as opposed to the actual fact of something being unexpected.
Apparently, it is the “quality of unexpectedness” that actually delights us: the surprise
is even better when you know it is coming. We may also account for this phenomenon
in terms of make-believe. Kendal Walton tells about one Charles, avid consumer of Bhorror films, who is make-believedly afraid when watching these films. Calinescu is
intrigued by this and treats Charles as a kind of an “actor impersonating himself in the
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imaginary situation presented in the movie.”21 He thinks a similar pattern can be
perceived in rereading as the reader is engaged once again in the same game of makebelieve and now further pretends that she does not know what will happen.22 But how
is it that we can pretend to ourselves being ignorant about a story outcome?
Resurprising music
We can find an interesting alternative way of looking at the question of aesthetic
reexperience, or, at least an intriguing and illuminating metaphor for aesthetic
reexperience, in Peter Kivy’s Osmin’s Rage – Philosophical reflections on Opera,
Drama, and Text. Kivy is one of the few musicologists who have addressed the
question of why repetitions and repeated hearings are such an integral part of out
musical experience and musical culture. He notes that Haydn often creates
sophisticated musical effects by going against the expectations of an educated listener.
But what about after one has heard the piece several times, when “all surprise has
been dissipated by familiarity”? The paradox here being, of course, that Western
culture cultivates both aesthetics of surprise and aesthetics of repetition. “How can
surprise survive the ordeal of familiarity”, Kivy asks.23
Answering this question Kivy refers to the Müller-Lyer Lines and The Fraser
Spiral. In the former we tend to see to lines of equal length being different because of
the arrows pointing either inwards or outwards, in the latter we perceive a spiral,
although the figure actually displays perturbed concentric circles. We may follow one
of the circular lines with our finger and realize this, but we will not stop thus
perceiving a spiral. Kivy writes about two beliefs, the “epistemic” and the
“perceptual”. He then uses these terms to account for the delights of the frequently
unexpected
… once we have become familiar with the work through rehearing, although we
epistemically believe (and expect) the aesthetically unexpected [in actual fact
familiar] musical event to occur, we nonetheless continue to perceptually believe
that the more “expected” (i.e. more common) event will transpire, and therefore are
“perceptually” surprised when it does not.24
Kivy admits that this does not really explain why this phenomenon takes place. He
even suggests that it might not be possible to explain the perceptual mechanisms
involved in either the optical illusions or the experience of rehearing musical
surprises. He concludes by noting that “music has form, and that part of the aesthetic
vocabulary of musical form is the building up and frustrating or perceptual
expectations: in other words, ‘surprise.’”
Drama as virtual form
It would appear, then. that the delight of surprise is a formal effect that a temporal
work can have on us, and that it might somewhat paradoxically function even better
when there is a tantalizing tension between our cognitive re-processing of material as
it enfolds once again, and our enhanced awareness of how all that we see and hear
builds up into an aesthetically more or less satisfying whole which we already master
to a considerable degree. Suspense is even more obviously such a formal device. For
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Susan Langer “art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.”25 In Feeling
and Form she quotes an essay by Charles Morgan called “The Nature of Dramatic
Illusion.” He writes:
This suspense of form, by which is meant the incompleteness of a known
completion, is to be clearly distinguished from common suspense – suspense of
plot – the ignorance of what will happen … for suspense of plot is a structural
accident, and suspense of form is, as I understand it, essential to the dramatic form
itself … What form is chosen … matters less than that while the drama moves a
form is being fulfilled.26
Langer points out some ways in which the narrative mechanism in drama functions,
e.g. that “like the distribution of figures on a chessboard, the combination of
characters makes a strategic pattern.”27 Even more importantly, a strategic pattern can
be perceived in a drama as a whole, because an “indivisible piece of virtual history is
implicit in it, as a yet unrealized form, long before the presentation is completed.28
Arguably, this form in suspense is effective irrespective of the spectator’s
knowledge of the outcome as it is based more on an innate need to experience
completion of a pattern – just like when listening to tonal music, we have a need to
hear a cadenza leading back to the tonic. To reemploy Kivy’s concepts, this desire is
by nature perceptual rather than epistemic, i.e. it is not a question of knowing what is
to follow but of having been aroused to wanting to perceive it. Inasmuch as this
feature in our mental design is based on such tensities as described by Torben Grodal
in his Moving Pictures, we could at least hypothesize that we are effective trained to
having these tensities aroused in certain ways which relate to cultural and
psychological issues that are important to us. According to Langer, in a tightly knit
drama everything serves the purpose of depicting the functioning of destiny.
It is what makes the present action seem like an integral part of the future, howbeit
that future has not unfolded yet. The reason is that on the stage, every thought
expressed in conversation, every feeling betrayed by voice or look, is determined
by the total action of which it is a part – perhaps an embryonic part, the first hint of
the motive that will soon gather force. Even before one has any idea of what the
conflict is to be (i.e. before the exposition has been given), one feels the tension
developing.29
Arguably, in rereading the sense of destiny seeps into the very act of reading. As
Birkerts beautifully puts it: “Reading takes place in the order of free choice, rereading
in the order of destiny … The second time around, our desires are set into play against
our knowing.” Because of this, one added value in rereading is the increased sense of
pity we might feel for the characters, who we with increased certainty know to be at
the mercy of the fate, in one way or the other.30 The really intriguing thing here is that
our desires concerning the narrative outcome which the drama or the film might
evoke more often than not go against this sense of destiny. In their Recreative Minds
Currie & Ravenscroft discuss Shakespeare’s Othello and the way we respond to this
tragedy: “We have the desire-like imagining that Desdemona live, but also the (real)
desire for a narrative according to which she does not.31 They then discuss tragic
emotion as “a quasi-perceptual sensitivity”, in which
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The relevant parts of the world – the parts that determine the satisfaction of our
desire – are the work itself, which has to end a certain way, and my own
psychology, which has to respond in a certain way to the play. A tragic response is
thus as much a response to our own responses as a response to the work itself.32
It is as if what Kivy called perceptual belief was spurred by our desire for a positive
narrative outcome resulting in a tantalizing tension with our knowledge of the
inevitable tragic outcome. This feature of the tragic experience is likely to be as
compelling on multiple viewing as on the first. In a sense this is due to the formal
effect the tragedy has on us.
Neither Calinescu nor Kivy nor Langer appears to have seen the light of
cognitive psychology. With the advantage we have over them we can say things such
as that there are perceptual phenomena which are cognitively impenetrable. Or, as
regards reexperiencing stories, perhaps we should say that the excitement is
cognitively only semi-penetrable, as for most of us there is a limit as to how many
times we are able to feel really excited about the same old story. In any case, we still
need a more developed account of the cognitive functions that allow for such
experience.
Anomalous reactions
In his Experiencing Narrative Worlds Richard Gerrig argues that every time we go
through a narrative we can be possessed by it to the extent that our knowledge of
solutions to narrative complications does not inhibit us from getting involved and
excited. Apparently, the “once upon a time”, or, the “as if” effect, has a degree of
cognitive autonomy. Gerrig calls the experience of suspense which tends to come
about while going through a story even when we know what will happen anomalous
suspense. The way he sees this phenomenon is that when undertaking a “performance
of the narrative world” the information previously gained about what will happen
somehow becomes inaccessible.33 In other words, our “knowledge from outside a
narrative world fails to influence the moment-by-moment experience of the
narrative.”34 The narrative triggers in our mind some such cognitive schemata, that it
gains certain autonomy even though we might not entirely forget our physical
presence in our living room or the auditorium. And most importantly: “Rather than
requiring special-purpose cognitive structures, anomalous suspense emerges as an
automatic consequence of the time-course advantage schematic expectancies enjoy
with respect to veridical expectancies.35
This chimes with an explanation Ray Jackendoff offers for the persistence of the
sense of musical surprise in the face of familiarity. Musical structures have to be
processed and this takes place in terms of expectations about those structures. We
may hypothesize an “informationally encapsulated” processor which is innocent of
the knowledge the listener may have of how the piece will develop and thus separate
what Kivy called perceptual and epistemic belief. Or, as Jackendoff puts it: “The
conscious knowledge that a deceptive cadence is coming thus does diminish one’s
surprise, but it does not diminish the affect that comes from the activity of the
processor deriving the structure autonomously.” 36 One may still assume that the
balance between the knowledge and the affect may vary on each listening, thus further
altering the aesthetic re-experience, capitalizing on the resources and possibilities
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offered by the parallel processing of complementary temporal structures, one attached
to the more immediate stimuli, the other (or others) to the emerging structures.
There are some obvious parallels between the expectation of development of
tonal structures in music and the way we construct characters when watching a film.
In addition to genre based expectations, on the first viewing the first impressions we
get, say, of a character, tends to hold to the extent that we make an effort to interpret
subsequent information so as to make it fit into that frame. When re-viewing a film of
which we know that the character is not what he seems, we may take delight in
simultaneously observing how the change is being hinted at and yet in an anomalous
way enjoy the pleasure of being fooled once again. Gerrig proposes that this
experience of anomalous suspense emerges because of an expectation of uniqueness.
We are geared to this because “life presents repeated types, but not repeated tokens”.
Rereading is such an anomalous phenomenon that we are not cognitive sufficiently
equipped to deal with it as a repetition of the same.37
Noël Carroll is somewhat displeased with this account as it implies that there is
something irrational in this experience.38 In his view, “we gauge the relevant
probabilities relative to the information available in the story preceding and during the
interlude of suspense but bracket the information available after and including the
moment when one outcome emerges victorious.”39 This connects with Carroll’s
notion that an integral part of suspense is that the fiction offers saliently two logically
opposed outcomes, one morally correct but improbable, the other morally incorrect of
evil, but probable.40 In assessing these probabilities the spectator is guided by the
structural features of the fiction. These are designed so as to give rise to certain
tensities in us while giving definition to the moral issues involved by guiding us into
getting involved with the characters. Psychologically this feature connects with our
ability to become emotionally involved even in purely hypothetical narratives. In
Carroll’s view, suspense experienced in re-viewing a film derives from our ability to
willingly entertain emotionally engaging hypothesis, by thoughts rather than just
beliefs.41 This has an evolutionary advantage as it enables us to train our ability to
cope with emotionally involving situations and to train our tunedness for others.
However, one may well ask whether getting excited about fictional events is any more
rational than getting excited about already familiar plot developments because on
some level they are experienced as unique. While the former surely has the ecological
advantage Carroll suggests, arguably in the uniqueness experience of Gerrig’s
description there might emerge a both aesthetically and heuristically rewarding
experiences of being able to apprehend the familiar afresh, avoiding the pitfall of
experiencing various kinds of phenomena as merely instances of the same. This too
has ecological and social advantages.
Whatever the most apt description of the cognitive process involved, this
enormously useful faculty may in strange ways get the better of us: fiction may affect
real-world judgments even under entirely transparent situations. Gerrig discusses how
even lifeguards had to force themselves back into the water after having seen
Spielberg’s film Jaws although they knew that the risk was minimal. Thus fictional
narratives may affect real-world judgements even against knowledge about the state
of affairs.42 It is a bit like with perceptual illusions: knowledge does not necessarily
suffice for overcoming the effect.
There is evidence that disbelieving actually requires more mental effort than
believing. Anyone who has studied how uncritical television audiences are in the face
of news broadcasts is only too aware of this. Retaining constant critical scepticism
might be taxing even for a media scholar. It appears that “information becomes tagged
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as fictional only as a function of readers’ conscious scrutiny.” Gerrig even suggests
that we should replace the notion of “willing suspension of disbelief” with a “willing
construction of disbelief.” 43 This is not all that surprising considering how flexible
our mind is in imagining. According to Currie & Ravenscroft:
When we imagine P, the tendency is for any belief that contradicts P, or which
stands in substantial probabilistic tension with P, to fall into the background for the
duration and purposes of imagining. The imagining then combines inferentially
with those relevant beliefs that don’t contradict or stand in tension with it.44
This capacity may be fundamental, not only for aesthetic appreciation, but in making
sense of other people and all sorts of strange situations in which we may find
ourselves in real life: “Placing yourself, in imagination, in another’s position requires
the capacity to make use of appropriate imaginative states; temporarily, one puts aside
some aspect of one’s own mental economy – some belief or desire – and substitutes
for it a thought content you actually don’t believe, or don’t want.” 45Correspondingly,
it requires less mental effort to go along with a narrative flow than it is to observe the
narrative as if from the standpoint of an outsider, without involvement. Perhaps
complete detachment would even be a symptom of a lack of narrative comprehension
as narratives requires an understanding of the mental situation of the characters.
From involvement to possession
There may be yet another reason why we may be possessed by rereading. Recalling
the distinction between involvement and absorption, we may now notice how
dynamically the two may be in operation in rereading. To quote Iser once more:
While we are caught up in a text, we do not at first know what is happening to
us…. The more ‘present’ the text is to us, the more our habitual selves – at least for
the duration of the reading – recede into the ‘past’. … The literary text relegates
our own prevailing views into the past by itself becoming a present experience, for
what is now happening or may happen was not possible as long as our
characteristic views formed our present.46
For Iser reading is clearly a matter of very deep absorption and involvement, possibly
amounting in a radical switch of schemata, as we might say. Iser studies “grasping a
text” as a process of forming gestalts in one’s mind. This calls for consistencybuilding from the part of the reader, i.e. trying organize narrative information into a
meaningful experience. It takes place in a dynamic interaction between the text and
“our own projections, which are our share in gestalten which we produce and in
which we are entangled.” Iser emphasizes that this entanglement is never total,
because the gestalten may be challenged by all the excluded possibilities which the
text offers. Going through this process the reader is effectively suspended between
total entanglement and latent detachment. Iser sees this resulting in a dialectic
between gestalt forming and gestalt breaking, leading into the “reader constantly
oscillating between involvement and observation” and experiencing the text as a
living event, constantly provoking the reader to react not only to the text but to what
she herself has produced on the basis of earlier parts of the text.47
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For someone exploring the mysteries of rereading, it is astonishing that Iser
discusses these notions entirely in terms of an idealized first reading. Would not the
kind of text that requires constant revising of gestalten cry for a rereading? Would it
not give rise to wholly new kind of texts as events? Iser actually ends up in a
formulation of the reading experience which would without a single alternation fit to
describe the experience of rereading:
The new experience emerges from restructuring of the one we have stored, and this
restructuring is what gives the new experience its form. But what actually happens
during this process can again only be experienced when the past feelings, views,
and values have been evoked and then made to merge with the new experience.
The old conditions the form of the new, and the new selectively restructures the
old. The reader’s reception of the text is not based on identifying two different
experiences (old versus new), but on the interaction between the two.48
Through these various processes of aesthetic reexperience, of forming and reforming
meaning binding gestalten, in a dialectic between indulging in the familiar and
relishing the novel, we appropriate works of art by allowing them to become parts of
our own way of perceiving, understanding and relating to the world. Aesthetic
reexperience is a fundamental aesthetic category because it has deep resonance in our
mental architecture. It is linked with issues such as being suspended between
repetition compulsion and neophilia, the need to find constant reaffirmation to our
sense of self as well as our orientation into the world and being equally compelled by
a desire to find something new, to ever refine our perception and understanding of
whatever has caught our imagination.
Base on a presentation held at the CCSMI Conference, on July 20, 2006, at the
Konrad Wolf Film and Television Academy, Pottsdam-Babelsberg. I wish to thank
my colleague Heta Pyrhönen for important hints concerning works on rereading as
well as all those colleagues at the conference who gave me feedback and helped me in
further developing my ideas.. I am particularly grateful to Richard Allen for his
perceptive comments.
Bibliography
BORDWELL, DAVID Narration in the Fiction Film. London, Routledge, 1985.
CALINESCU, MATEI Rereading. New Haven & London, Yale University Press,
1993.
CURRIE, GREGORY & RAVENSCROFT, IAN Recreative Minds. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2002.
GALEF, DAVID Second Thoughts – A Focus on Rereading. Detroit, Wayne State
University Press, 1998.
GERRIG, RICHARD J: Experiencing Narrative Worlds – On the Psychological
Activities of Reading. Boulder, Westview Press, (1993) 1998.
GRODAL, TORBEN Moving Pictures – A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings,
and Cognition. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997.
12
ISER, WOLFGANG The Act of Reading – A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore
and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, (1978) 1987
Jackendoff, Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge, Mass., The MIT
Press, 1987.
KIVY, PETER Osmin’s Rage – Philosophical reflections on Opera, Drama, and
Text. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988
LANGER, SUSANNE K. Feeling and From – A Theory of Art Developed from
Philosophy in a New Key. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, (1953) 1963.
ROACH, JOSEPH R. The Player’s Passion – Studies in the Science of Acting.
London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985.
SMITH, GREG M. Film Structure and the Emotion System. New York and
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
VORDERER, PETER, WULFF, HANS J,, & FRIEDRICHSEN, MIKE (eds.)
Suspense – Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations.
Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1996.
References
Roach, The Player’s Passion, p. 222.
For the sake of convenience I will use rereading as a general term to refer to going
through a book, a film, or any from of narrative for a second, third or umpteenth time.
This is also because I will be adopting ideas from literary theory. By re-viewing I will
be referring more specifically to the activity of seeing a film repeatedly.
3
Iser, The Act of Reading, p. 197.
4
Elsewhere Iser refers to an active interweaving of anticipation and retrospection,
which on a second reading may turn into a kind of advance retrospection.” (The
Implied reader, p. 282. Quoted in David Galef. “Observations on Rereading”,
published in Galef, Second Thoughts, p. 19)
5
Iser, The Act of Reading, p. 111.
6
ibid, p. 116.
7
ibid, p. 120.
8
Calinescu, Rereading, p. 164.
9
ibid, p. 3-4.
10
ibid, p.32.
11
ibid, p. 8.
12
Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System, p. 164.
13
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 35.
14
ibid m, p. 36.
15
Karen Odden argues in her “Retrieving Childhood Fantasies” (published in Galef,
Second thoughts) that “we reread popular literature in order to return to childhood
dramas that may not have been acted out as we wished or that were not worked
through appropriately (and therefore become traumas) in order to recover our belied
in the fantasies before they were destroyed.” (p. 132)
16
Odden, “Retrieving Childhood Fantasies”. Published in Galef, Second thoughts, p.
142. Odden elaborates this in her Freudian analysis: “Rereading fulfils a fantasy that
no first reading of any text ever can: I am all-knowing and can avoid the negative
effect of trauma by anticipating frightening events perfectly, every time.” (p. 146.)
1
2
13
17
ibid, p. 140.
Sven Birkerts: “Some Thoughts on Rereading.” Published in Galef, Second
thoughts, p. 341.
19
Assuming that the stories are remembered, that is; reencountering a work which has
already been sinking behind the horizon of one’s memory is a wholly different kind of
pleasure
20
Calinescu, Rereading, p.191.
21
ibid, p. 189.
22
ibid, p. 190.
23
Kivy, Osmin’s Rage, p. 54.
24
ibid, p. 56.
25
Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 40
26
ibid, p 309. Quotation from Charles Morgan: “The Nature of Dramatic Illusion”, p.
70-72. Published in Essays by Divers Hands, a volume of Transactions of the Royal
Society of Literature, N.S. Vol. 12, ed. by R.W. Macan, 1933, p. 61-77.
27
ibid, p. 311.
28
ibid, p. 310
29
ibid, p. 308.
30
Sven Birkerts: “Some Thoughts on Rereading.” Published in Galef, Second
thoughts, p. 343.
31
Currie &Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds, p. 40.
32
ibid, p. 203.
33
Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, p. 80.
34
ibid, p. 176.
35
ibid, p. 238.
36
Jackendoff, Consciousness and the Computational Mind, p. 245.
37
Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, p. 238.
38
Carroll, “The Paradox of Suspense”, published in Vorderer, Wulff & Friedrichsen
(eds.), Suspense, p. 90.
39
ibid, p. 82.
40
ibid, p. 78.
41
ibid, p. 87.
42
Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, p. 198.
43
ibid, p. 230.
44
ibid, p. 16.
45
Currie &Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds, p. 147.
46
Iser, The Act of Reading, p. 131.
47
ibid, p. 127-128.
48
ibid, p. 132.
18