Speaker: Jacob Wilson @JacobWilson
Affiliation: Cardiff University
Title: Before Interpretation, Experiencing the “Real” Text: Shadow Imagery and Memory Misattribution as an Affective Technique in Murakami’s “Barn Burning”
Abstract (long version below): For a definition of experience, I turn to a strange book titled A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science. Considered in terms of Hurlburt’s concept of pristine experience, Roland Barth’s seme isn’t a theme, but what Hurlburt refers to as salient characteristics, ‘features of the form or pattern of how experience occurs.’ By applying Bathe’s concepts of semes to pristine experience—that is, experience ‘before the footnotes of consciousness’, before interpretation (broad experience)—a better understanding of the affect of a text may be achieved. By looking at DES studies of the reader, an intriguing new stylistic technique, which I call shadow imagery, is revealed. By considering ‘Barn Burning’ by Huruki Murakami in terms of a reader’s pristine experience, Murakami’s division of a reader’s attention to exploit misattribution errors in memory shows how affective arcs function when meaning is replaced by feeling.
Long abstract
Considered in terms of pristine experience, Roland Barth’s concept of the seme isn’t a theme, but what Russel Hurlburt refers to as salient characteristics, ‘features of the form or pattern of how experience occurs.’ These salient characteristic categories are made up of phenomenon that are apprehended by the self. By applying Bathe’s concepts of semes to pristine experience—that is, experience ‘before the footnotes of consciousness’, before interpretation—a better understanding of the affect of a text may be achieved.
For a definition of experience, I turn to a strange book titled A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science. The book is a compilation of an ongoing email debate between Marco Caracciolo, a literary scholar, and Psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt, who researches what he calls pristine inner experience. Hurlburt defines pristine inner experience as such, ‘By inner experience I mean directly apprehended ongoing experience, that which directly presents itself before the footlights of consciousness…at some particular moment…[and]…by pristine I mean naturally occurring in natural, everyday environments, not altered, colored, or shaped by the specific intention to apprehend it’.
Hurlburt and Caracciolo conduct an informal experiment, having grad students read an excerpt from The Metamorphosis while wearing a DES beeper and note their experience at the moment of the beep. Lynn’s DES beeped at the line: “He was especially fond of hanging from the ceiling.” In her interview, Hurlburt describes Lynn as ‘innerly sees a dimly lit room with a bat…hanging from the ceiling over a bed with white sheets’. And, in his response to the experiment, Caracciolo suggests that ‘this hesitation reflects the text’s indeterminacy of as to the exact nature of Gregor’s body after the metamorphosis.’
Caraccioli’s follow up was framed in terms of the text, that is, the entirety of The Metamorphosis. He was thinking in terms of broad experience, after interpretation, or in Roland Barthe’s terms, the plural version of the text. As Barthes wrote in S/V, ‘rereading draws the text out of its chronology…and allows a reader to read not the real text but a plural text: the same and new’. However, what is being measured at the moment of the beep isn’t the collective whole of the text, but merely one sentence, being read by one reader at a specific moment in time. In other words, it is an expression of the real text.
Kafka doesn’t lean into the bat imagery anywhere else in the novel, and therefore, the effect of Lynn seeing a bat is likely an unintended effect of the language. But just because Kafka didn’t intend to conjure a bat, doesn’t mean that creative writers can’t use that to their advantage. Think about how many images are evoked in a single text. A reader can’t remember them all, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Lynn saw a bat. Would the bat influence her overall reading of the text? Probably not, and if she hadn’t been paying close attention to her experience, would the bat have even been consciously noticed?
What about unconsciously?
To be a bit propagandistic, what Lynn’s reading of Kafka has revealed is the ability to suggest an image to a reader without a lasting conscious awareness of said image. In other words, it allows a writer to evoke the feeling of an image, much like Hemingway’s iceberg theory works on the subtext of plot. This isn’t a classical dialectic like Kuleshov effect in film, it is not a juxtaposition of two images—where the reader synthesizes the meaning—but closer to a subliminal image. By reconsidering this style of imagery, which I call shadow imagery, in Haruki Murakami’s “Barn Burning,” the affective arcs of his story can be deconstructed. Murakami once says, ‘I want to leave blanks…mandala-like things, in which another story is connected by a mysterious tunnel’. By considering the real text in terms of how Murakami divides a reader’s attention to exploit misattribution errors in memory, the underlying structure of how his affective arcs work is revealed.