The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [67]
What David gets from these books is not just a bit of mental cheesecake, a chance for a transient fantasy in which all his own wishes are fulfilled. What he gets is lively and powerful images human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It through this kind of contact with a sense of human possibility that he is enabled to escape from the degrading limitations own local environment. He is not escaping from reality; he escaping from an impoverished reality into the larger world healthy human possibility . . . He directly enhances his own fitness as a human being, and in doing so he demonstrates the kind of adaptive advantage that can be conferred by literature.
Anyone might be forgiven for questioning a theory of fiction that uses fictional characters to support itself. But it would be wrong to criticize Carroll for this. After all, whatever the melodramatic character novels, Dickens is a most penetrating observer of human nature, and portraits of children are especially complex and insightful. Even Dickens is unfair with Mill and the utilitarians, there is nothing ideologically driven in what he says about childhood and youth. And the and cultivation of the emotions that Carroll finds in Dickens goes on today worldwide when children turn on televi sions or slip video discs into players to see—not once, but for the twentieth time— animated version of a Dr. Seuss classic or a Disney animal fable.
The meaning of a literary work is not in the events it recounts. It is how events are interpreted that makes meaning. Interpretation, in turn, involves necessary reference to a point of view, which Carroll defines the locus of consciousness or experience within which any meaning takes place.” Following the critic M. H. Abrams, he argues that an interpretive point of view is constituted by three elements: the author, represented character, and the audience. These three elements come in the experience of the reader. It follows that part of the significance for David Copperfield of discovering his father’s books is that youth is being introduced, as Carroll says, to “the astonishingly capable complete human beings who wrote them.” The importance of fiction depends in part on a sense of a communicative transaction between reader and author—understood as a real, not an implied or postulated, author. Zunshine and other more cognitively oriented theorists have described mind reading and distinguishing levels of nested intentionality transaction between the reader and the characters of a story, since within a story there will be multiple points of view. But there is also transaction between reader and author—the latter understood reader as an actual person, the creator of the story, who negotiates between the various points of view of fictional persons (the characters), author’s own point of view, and the point of view of the reader. These three elements are present in every experience of fiction; in fact, they exhaust the list of operative elements.
This isn’t to deny that audiences change (hence, as we shall see chapter 8, our interest in recovering the meanings and values of author remains the prime mover, the one who is trying to control the show—the interpretation of characters, their actions, and the events befall them. Authors attempt this by persuading, manipulating, wheedling, planting hints, adopting a tone, and so forth: what ever will appeal to the reader and create a convincing interpretation, including of ambiguous events. This makes the experience of a story inescapably social. The story is not just about an imaginary social life: rather, the author’s palpable presence means that stories are essentially communicative, and therefore social, events.
An example adduced by Carroll for a slightly different purpose can my point: the