The Lived Reader: A Phenomenological Approach to Contemporary Literature
An avid reader often thinks about what it’s like to be a writer, but writers spend a significant amount of their professional time thinking about readers. What do they think?
Modern writing pedagogy centers around the posthuman classroom. Academians say they’re not teaching humans anymore because technology’s taken over culturally, physically and socially. Cyber theory brings a third arm into the picture, one that reaches between electronically-generated identity on-screen and the live, flesh and blood being interacting with that screen. Humanists who also happen to be idealists take what’s called a phenomenological approach to writing, which means they think of the ‘lived’ readers and writers as more than their bodies. The ‘lived’ reader, for example, is the reader, the couch he/she reads on, the book he/she clutches, the highlighter he/she uses, and the background music that’s adding to the atmosphere.
The phenomenology of art is the experience of it—the psychological reality where something has been captured, but what? Readers fill-in-the-blanks from their own experiences. Why do you think torture scenes in movies, not even shown, only staged, are the most uncomfortable things? Flesh memory. The body sees itself in pain. The body can go there. The mind is watching, internalizing what’s going on onscreen, and suddenly the body is jolted into the consciousness of the mind. Oh, we’re two, not one. Oh, I could be the one that breaks first. Oh, this is scary.
When I watch movies, I often find myself shifting uncomfortably when I see people pulling rope with their hands or strumming piano keys with ten flying fingers. I am so absorbed in this world that’s not my own, that when I suddenly hit a snag in the plan my body can’t connect any memory to, I feel I’ve been launched out. With congenital limb deficiency, I don’t have any flesh memories of ten-fingered or two-handed activities my body can draw upon to pull my imagination along. I’m not talking about the imagination that’s used when identifying with characters who are a different age, from another religion or culture, sexual orientation or gender. I can pull myself into that, physically, because only the periphery of my being has changed.
This is the same with other arts, of course, because their very being is imitation, reconstruction, and totemic objectification of reality. Others’ physical reality is always problematic. They operate under certain presumptions with certain audiences in mind. Take writers. I like picking on them. You can make fun of your own, did you realize? If you make fun of any other ‘group,’ you’re terrible, but yours...
Writers operate under the assumption the space they inhabit is the space the reader inhabits. Two hands, let’s say. When there’s a scene with pulling a rope, for example, I’d like, as a reader, for a writer to describe what that feels like. But they won’t because they believe I as reader know exactly what they’re referring to. This is fine. I am expecting this as a person, as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being.
The problem for me comes in where there is no reciprocal conceit. I write what I know. I write with my body, and my computer, and my chair, and my lamp, and my highlighter, and any other mechanical representation of the ‘lived body’ I am utilizing to construct. I write, then, about people just like everyone who happen to also have limb deficiencies.
This bothers readers. A lot. They tell me they can’t identify with the narrator and that they aren’t invested in the story the narrator tells because it’s so different. I was under the assumption one read to inhabit another person’s space and to see the world from a different vantage point and see how someone else thinks. This repeated experience makes me step back as both writer and aspiring writing instructor to question, why the discomfort?
Reading is a voyeuristic activity. We all want to secretly be that person who goes from rags to riches or saves that person from the tower and becomes the hero of the hour. We want to travel to exotic lands we can not go to on our own and learn things we wouldn’t be able to find out at the jobs we have or in the lives we live. We can handle a little reality in our reading, but the real is not what makes us read.
While a Boston broker does not often become an Assyrian prince and a Tulsa trainer isn’t usually carted off to sixteenth century Venice, their bodies do live in a constant state of deterioration. There is always the real possibility one will wake up ill, injured, or otherwise more seriously challenged in the vessel we all rely on to get us through our days. The physical reminder of our rawest vulnerability may not be enough to turn our eyes away or close the page on the book, but I do believe that vulnerability is the biggest reason why people squirm in their chairs while reading of an armless protagonist.
It does not have to be that way. Just as I would like to read of what life is like with two hands, I think a lot of people would benefit from the other way around. I do not think our literature in its current state allows for that, however. If one opens a contemporary fantasy novel, in particular, it is easy enough to pinpoint the manipulation.
A common theme for fantasy is to draw protagonists into another world because they are disabled, ill, or seriously injured in their own and must escape to find peace and happiness. When they eventually die, as they often do in young adult literature, their journey is a beautiful thing to the reader as the reader watches them transition smoothly into a more fulfilling life in the fantasy world.
I have been hospitalized many times in my life, and I do know what it’s like to be a child battling with mortality, but I can genuinely say I never wanted to escape my life. The more you have to fight for something, the more you appreciate it while its there. We as humans quickly forget we aren’t entitled to anything—money, health, or limbs. We do, however, have the privilege to enjoy what we have in the time we have to appreciate it in. All of us do have one sense, and it’s not the common. We all can touch and feel each other through a warm embrace in person, on screen, or through the pages.
The message I would give, if I ever stumble upon some New York literary agent in downtown Milwaukee who agrees to publish my own fantasy book, is keep reading. How can you know what’s wrong with this world if you never imagine a utopia? How can you fill in the holes when you don’t realize they’re there? Don’t ever be afraid of what life still has in store for you to handle because the odds are, someone else out there does know and they’re just fine, chilling out, waiting to tell their story.
Karen Aschenbrenner is a graduate fellow at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She spends the majority of her time trying to wrap her PC-oriented mind around the new Mac in her life, finishing a thesis on embodied writing, amd looking for a home for her first novel, Lallymaen, a farcical fantasy.
SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #003 |