Fishing for controversy - Spoilers and scholars

Eminent scholar and literary critic Stanley Fish said something dumb on Monday, and the great thing about eminent scholars and literary critics is what good exercise disagreeing with them can be. In this case, Dr. Fish mounted a defense of his column from two weeks ago, in which he gave away a plot point of the Hunger Games trilogy.* In response to a flurry of frustrated comments, he made the following claims:

1. We actually enjoy stories more after they’ve been spoiled.

2. The only books that can truly be “spoiled” are ones whose only value is suspense, i.e. inferior ones.

Tacit corollary: If you have a problem with knowing the ending of a book in advance, you’re either reading the wrong books or you’re reading the books wrong.

If you know me you might be surprised that I’m staking out my opposition to spoilers. Wasn’t it I who casually read about the ending of The Usual Suspects** mere days before the culmination of my friend’s years-long quest to find a copy to show to me? Did I not come to fantasy by paging through a companion encyclopedia to The Lord of the Rings, pausing with particular enjoyment at the entry for Gollum, which described his character arc in full? Well, yes. But we shouldn't always do unto others as we do unto ourselves.

Fish argues that the pleasure of rereading is greater than the pleasure of reading something the first time. I don’t disagree with this point. Many times has it been said that the difference between serious readers and the rest of humanity is that serious readers will read the same book more than once. I may not, as Girlfriend does, reread The Lord of the Rings ever year, but I know the pleasure of coming back to something and reading it more deeply, with more knowledge.*** If nothing else, we get better at understanding a story with each pass. But because one pleasure is greater is no reason not to have both, says I.

Fish even brings Science! to bear in defense of his first point, which in a literary argument is a little like bringing a shotgun gun to a knife fight. But, like a consummate knife-fighter holding a shotgun, he’s more assailable here than he ought to be. One preexisting opinion and one study do not combine to form a fact, or even a consensus, and it’s beyond ambition to suppose that modern psychology is able to comparatively measure two disparate kinds of enjoyment.

Are they disparate? Fish admits as much, but he dismisses the entire value of a spoiler-free read as “suspense,” and he argues that suspense can be recaptured on subsequent readings. What he is describing, though, is one form of tension, and not the whole pleasure of experiencing a story for the first time.

With foreknowledge, we can enjoy dramatic irony in knowing from the beginning, say, that our hero is really a tomato. We appreciate the double-meanings and ambiguities that allow this fact to exist in the story alongside an impression that the hero is a human being. We may even wish, caught up in the emotional tide of the story, that it were not so that the hero was a tomato. But having been told in advance, perhaps by an eminent scholar and literary critic, that the hero is a tomato, we will never—not once—wonder as the tension mounts if the hero is really a pineapple, or an automobile. We cannot have uncertainty.

I was only recently introduced as an adult to serious mystery writing—Dorothy Sayers’ novels—and I found that a great deal of the pleasure came from trying to outguess the novel. Often I was wrong, or only partly right (never completely right), but the novels were rich with possibilities in that first reading. For a moment, everyone could be the killer, in every possible way, and not in a winking “or so it seems but we know better” sense.

Having had and enjoyed that experience, I can go back and read the books again. Knowing the truth of the story I can enjoy hints and ironies and depths that I hadn’t seen before, and that is in no way diminished by my having read the book once before in ignorance.

There's been argument about the authority of the author and the reader's freedom to interpret, but nowhere do those two factors coexist in such perfection as before the story is finished. The million possibilities the reader brings, and the winnowing of those possibilities by the author into the complete text, are a part of any story. For Fish, though, it seems the story might as well be over before it's begun.

You can’t write an academic paper about how you had the wrong idea about what was going on in a book, at least not if you hope to be an eminent scholar and literary critic. However I would feel sorry for anyone who had become so good at rereading that they had forgotten how to read a book for the first time. I would resent someone who casually damaged someone else’s ability to enjoy what they no longer could. I would lose respect for anyone who purported to be a scholar of reading and displayed such ignorance of—or contempt for—the way most people experience most stories.

It’s been observed that writing is like sex: first you do it by yourself, then you do it with a few close friends, and finally you do it for money. I would say that reading is as well: the first time you do it wrong, then you get better with experience, but it would be sad to skip the first time.

* Full disclosure: I have not read the article in which he does this, because I have not read The Hunger Games, and, as you will see, I take the issue of spoilers more seriously than Fish does.

** On a forum thread called “The Ultimate Spoiler Thread,” where each new post spoiled a different book or movie.

*** Tangent: Watch Arrested Development twice. It’s ridiculous.