L’Engle on Reader as Co-Creator

Just some preliminary thoughts.

Part of the co-creation, I think, is the ability of the reader to picture or form in their minds an idea of who the characters are, not just a physical description although that’s included, but also an idea of who the characters are, what they might be like in situations not immediately described in the book, almost like getting to know a real person & knowing how they’d respond or react to things. Also being able to imagine or picture the world in which the action is taking place.

I think this is where both fanfic & fan art play a big role in helping people express their conception or ideas about a work they’ve read. They do become, in a sense, if not just for themselves but perhaps for others, sub-creators in a created world done by another creator who was themselves influenced by other creators all the way back to the one Creator!

This is why film adaptations of novels are maddeningly disappointing. The author and you have created a rich, fully realized and visualized world. The film intrudes upon that world in creating another version which will not resonate with millions of individual author/reader creations of the same work. I rarely see film adaptations because of this.

I had the blessed opportunity to meet L’Engle at a book-signing in the mid ’90s. I had her sign Walking on Water, which I gave to a young English major friend, and The Weather of the Heart (I’ve done readings of her poems), even though A Ring of Endless Light and A Swiftly Tilting Planet are my favorite of her novels.

During a brief chat with this gracious lady, I asked her if we would ever find out what kind of an adult the amazing Charles Wallace became, as some of her teen lit characters appear as adults in her adult novels. She looked surprised, thought a minute, and said whimsically, “If I find out, you’ll know!”

Alas, we’ll never know.

One of the interesting ramificiations of L’Engle’s thesis is that different readers will “create” a book in different ways. We become aware of these differences when we start discussing these books, and have some very clear examples of these differences in how we at this site view the main characters from Harry Potter.

Possibly the clearest example of all is the Half-Blood Prince himself, Severus Snape. For a period of time he was simultaneously a mean-spirited, sadistic villain, a misunderstood victim of childhood abuse, an opportunistic self-serving turn-coat, and Dumebledore’s man through and through. We argued endlessly over these interpretations. After DH came out some of the controversies were resolved, but not all. Snape generates strong disagreement to this day. Other examples include Dumbledore (master manipulator or compassionate uniter), Hermione (the voice of reason or the shrill voice of self-righteousness), and maybe Harry as well (self-sacrificing hero or cardboard cut out, the boy who never had the choice to be other than Good).

Fanfiction, I think, is in a separate category together, not entirely creative, nor entirely reactive. It’s purely derivative, where one takes existing characters, settings and backgrounds, and plays around with them. The analogy here is to a video-game: the game player takes pre-created characters but proceeds to have original adventures with them. To argue that there is a continuum between someone who writes an original work of fiction and someone who writes fanfiction confuses the nature of the creative process.

Arabella, I never had a chance to meet Madeleine (I came tantalizingly close once to spending part of a day with her, but that’s a story for another time) but I corresponded with her several times over a good number of years. I had to chuckle when I read about your exchange with her over Charles Wallace. The first letter I ever wrote her (many many years ago, while in high school) I asked her if she knew what ever happened to Vicky Austin as an adult. Her response was “If I find out what happened to Vicky, surely I’ll write a book about it.” Alas, she never did write a book about Vicky as an adult, though there was one more book with Vicky as a young protagonist after that (“Troubling a Star,” not one of her best overall efforts, though still a real pleasure for Austin fans.)

Madeleine’s work has been a major part of my life for a long time, so I’m straying from the point I meant to make which is that it always seemed that Madeleine felt her characters had very dynamic lives. You get the impression from her answers about them that she had a sense that they’d sneaked off for a while and were doing their own thing, but that if they every rang up her imagination and clued her in, she’d write the story down and let the rest of us know.

revgeorge, I really like your notion of the layers of creativity going all the way back to the first Creator. The way I’ve often expressed it is that all of art is like a very long conversation or a dance, every bit of made it response to the first Word (who started the whole conversation/dance) and but often too in response to a specific piece of art that came before it. Anyone who creates a poem or story is part of this conversation or dance. The deeper the art, the easier it is to pick up on echoes of earlier conversations or to see how an artist has put a unique twist on an old dance step. Yes, I know, I’m using two different metaphors, but they both seem to fit in different ways!

Red, I think the one significant difference that sits within your analogies is that the two activities you mention involve externalized manifestations of the audience’s reactions. In other words, the golf-swing example may involve mirror neurons in which their are physiological similarities in the brains of that person swinging the club and that person watching, but it is not a collaborative act because the second person takes no part in the swing’s creation unless they physically act on it. (I’m curious, do any psychological studies suggest that such mirror neuron activity can lead to false memories?)

I think the same thing is true with the paint-by-numbers example, as well.

What differentiates reading is that the act of reading language into a mental construct is a primarily internal process, taking place within an organ (the brain) over which people have very little control. Aside from this, my field operates under the assumption that semiotics and grammar are very messy operations. The standard semiotic triad is this:

sign = the mental image a person has in their head.
signifier = the collection of symbols (words, pictures, etc.) that point to the object being signified.
signified = the thing itself that is the object of scrutiny.

There is no argument that conclusively shows these three nodes of meaning as interminably linked because the process is largely an internalization of both personal prejudices and external constraints. Thus, the very act of reading anything, in postmodern thought, involves at least some level of creativity on the part of the reader. Some might argue that the extent or degree of creativity demanded on the part of the reader is determined by the nature of the text: how literal or figurative, or how logical or mythical.

Now, what complicates this even more is when the audience starts to externalize their reactions in different ways. THH or HogPro are both good examples. Rhetorically speaking, we tend to refer to a collective like ours as a “discourse community” — a collection of interested parties that all agree, at least tacitly, to some commonalities in language and interest. Reading here is different than reading Rowling’s work. In the HP books, I look for metaphor and literary devices; here, I look for logical argument, evidence, and rhetorical techniques. We even tended to position our “creations” analytically, as speculations about characters and plot details, when we still could offer such ideas.

But another example of externalized audience reaction is the fanfic you mentioned, or something like the Potter Puppet Pals on Youtube. They point to a different reaction from our own, a need to somehow participate in the HP world rather than analytically extrapolate HP’s implications into our own. I think that’s one reason we (at THH) tend to ignore the fanfic, aside from assertions about it’s literary quality. We’re more interested in the analytical angle rather than creatively participating in Rowling’s fiction.

In my opinion, both represent a similar audience impulse — to participate in the HP fiction, somehow. Henry Jenkins would refer to the blog as a “participatory culture”. But, both positions I outlined above are generated from separate rhetorical stances. And in some cases, that might imply a valuation of one stance over another…

… it sure can in my professional world…

I know plenty of writers who think critics are just incompetent or frustrated poets. I’ve met a number of critics who think that poets and writers are too undisciplined to fully explicate their own work. And I’ve met plenty of examples that prove both of them right!

Dave, the golf swing was meant to be an analogy, as in the viewer, like the reader, is reacting internally to something created by another person, either the golf swing or the book. I can see that the analogy doesn’t completely hold, because mainly motor neurons are involved with the golf swing (although I believe some visual and proprioceptive neurons are activated too) and (I would expect) more language receptors would be involved with the book. So different parts of the brain are activated with each activity. But the point, that they are both reactive processes, stands.

I can accept that the sign, signifier and signified are not 100% linked. But that does not imply to me that there is an act of creation involved in converting the signifier into a sign, and interpreting the sign as the signified. In my field, we would call this a mental process. An automatic mental process. I am more comfortable talking about schema than signs and signifiers; a schema is mental construct which incorporates all the things we know about a given object or concept. It is a particularly dynamic construct: it organizes information; it filters information in; it screens information out. But the process is not a conscious one; it is in fact very difficult to change schema once they’ve been formed because they are self-perpetuating. To call the process whereby the mind “creates” schema” and information is sorted into similar categories a “creative” process does not appar, to me, to reflect the true meaning of the word “create”.

As you point out, there are different types of reading. Both the types you mention – reading for metaphors and literary devices, and reading for logical arguments and evidence – are what I would consider examples of active reading or analytic reading. In both instances the reader is actively scanning for something – trying to find the signifiers that describe the sign, in your terminology. There is also passive reading – the type that I do when I read for pleasure, where the schema glom onto the words and phrases and images. I would not consider this second type of reading “creative”. Analytic reading perhaps comes closer to creativity. But I would reject that too: the creative part of what critics do is to synthesize their analyses into convincing logical arguments.

I think ultimately the difference between our two positions is not a disagreement over whether reading is creative, but a disagreement over what we mean by the word “creative”.

Good thoughts, miles365. I would also say, though, that imagination is a conscious creating, although perhaps drawing on subconscious thoughts.

Red, I like the schema example quite a bit. It’s very close to what I had in mind discussing semiotics. What’s a good source on that subject?

And, I think you’re right on one other thing — we’re disagreeing about the nature of creativity. I don’t think that the act of creating needs a conscious agency on the part of the creator. I like the happy accident!

From this discussion, I think I understand what L’Engle was saying, except that the way she worded it, it sounds like she is placing the responsibility on the reader to create the book and make it come to life.

I know it’s a quibble, but if the author’s choice of words or choice of characters and plot don’t trigger something in the reader’s imagination, then the reader won’t create anything. But that’s not the fault of the reader; in the last several years (thanks mainly to John Granger asking us questions about books I should have read but had avoided), I’ve been reading books by authors I either hadn’t found interesting or didn’t think I liked.

So when I picked up A Tale of Two Cities I did so with the attitude of obligation that a 16 year old has about an assigned book in a lit class. Not only did I find myself completely engrossed in the book, but I was also so fascinated with the images that Dickens painted that I’ve read more of his books – also things I should have read but had avoided.

My reaction to Wuthering Heights, which I forced myself to read, also because I thought I should, turned into an even more negative view of the book than I’d had before I read it; there was nothing in the story, the characters, or the writing that made me like it. Perhaps I was able to “create” the characters along with Bronte too well, and I didn’t like any of them. Well, that’s not entirely true. I remember when I read it that I found it hard to believe that people would really be so nasty to others, especially when they said they loved them.

But there does have to be some sort of connection between what the author has written and the reader for the story to come to life. It’s up to the author to create a story that captures our imagination. If a reader has to work on the creating part of it, then I think the author has missed the boat.

Pat