Trust Your Audience to Process and Respond
I really enjoy the book group I’m in. We started meeting just as the pandemic was making its impact known in the spring of 2020, and we’re still going strong. We choose the books we read with a round-robin method: a few days before we meet, one of us is in charge of making several recommendations for our next book. Then, at the end of the meeting, we discuss and select the book we’ll all commit to reading for the next month.
We approach the decision in a Quaker-meeting way, seeking consensus. If I’m familiar with a proposed title, sometimes I will veto a perfectly good book, because it gives me a bad feeling. I mean, how vague is that? The others tolerate this, I’m grateful to say, and we find a book we can all agree to read. Meanwhile, I’ve tried to define exactly what the qualities are that push the meter into the red zone for me.
To be clear, this isn’t only about entire categories, like horror and suspense, which I avoid because they disturb me. Let’s get those out of the way first, in multiple art forms.
When a painting is too violent for you to take in
You can stop looking and walk away if your first glance at a work of visual art is too much. (And you can go back another day to try again.) Time plays a role here, I think. Picasso painted his monumental Guernica (1937) almost 90 years ago now. In April of 1937, as part of their co-option of the Spanish Civil War to test out methods of terror, the Nazis bombed the Basque town Gernika, killing mostly women and children. The artist produced the painting quickly for an international art exhibition that summer in Paris. When we look at it now, a veneer of history and fame distances us from its once-immediate impact. The work may have affected its first viewers more viscerally than its museumgoing onlookers today. An equally affecting artwork made today, concerning ICE treatment of immigrant children, or Russian bombings of civilians in Ukraine, might be more likely to hit us directly before our psychic scar tissue had time to form over the raw wounds.
When a movie sends you running for the exit
Long ago, watching Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) in a movie theater with a friend, she left suddenly, for a bathroom break, I assumed. A few minutes later, someone called out from the back, “Anyone here with the lady in the blue sweater? Please come to the box office.” I realized this might be my friend. It was. She had collapsed. An ambulance was on the way. She’d had a stroke. She was young, fit, and hardworking, taking time off on a weekend afternoon to see a movie. But the dramatic tension in that film expressed itself in her brain’s physiology. Was it the movie’s fault? No. But her system could not handle the very high tension in that movie’s narrative, which created a perfect storm that exploded in her brain. She eventually recovered and modified her life to reduce daily stress. Accompanying my friend through that experience gave me a healthy respect for the impulse to leave the room when things get gnarly. (I never did see the end of that film.)
When a song fries your nervous system
I know people who welcome the all-encompassing activity, energy, and noise of death metal music. The explosiveness frees them. To me, it’s overwhelming in a very bad way. I must escape from it. Some listeners run screaming from banjos twanging, others from the anodyne horror that is “cool jazz.” We all have our no-tolerance zones.
When a story beats up on a passive protagonist
A friend who’s an avid reader explained to me the other day that, if a woman protagonist takes too passive a stance, lets abuse roll over her, and doesn’t stand up for herself, “After a while I’m just $%^& no! Life’s too short.” She does not have the time to take in this toxicity. She went on to clarify, “Sure, they can start out with problems, but sooner or later, characters need to take responsibility for their lives.”
For me, maybe it’s the daily dose of awful that the news delivers, but I don’t have much capacity for horribleness these days. Not when it’s up to me, as it is with the voluntary reading of fiction. Reading a picaresque novel – where one bad thing after another interferes with the protagonist’s ability to move ahead on their journey – has become a challenge. Those DNF books can pile up, and it’s okay by me because I’m protecting my equanimity.
Some adventure stories work for me, though, while others do not, and I’m really curious to discover the distinction between those that do and don’t. In her recent novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, author Annie Hartnett throws terrible obstacles at her characters on a shambolic road trip, and yet I read happily through it all. How? Hartnett has said she always keeps hope in the picture. I agree that’s a factor. She also uses a light touch, dots humor throughout, and paces events deftly. The reader encounters devastation, as well as comic relief, in a satisfying rhythm.
Something else
I’m still exploring this, so consider the following as a draft of an idea, please. I’d love to know your thoughts, and invite you to write back about it. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.
Is the audience in charge of their responses or is someone else pulling the strings?
Image by Martine Auvray from Pixabay
Did the author of the novel you’re reading plot gratuitous injuries, one after the next, for the sake of dramatic tension? The novel-writing manual may say that more and more doses of pain will amp up the protagonist’s narrative arc, but there are ways to inflict that pain that are genuine, not fabricated to suit the spec.
I’m not insisting on happy-clappy placidity, rainbows, and unicorns. Characters can die, be attacked, make lousy decisions, suffer setbacks, meet unlikely unpleasantness, and I’ll keep reading, as long as I feel the author is with me in good faith. But throw in any unearned crisis, I’m out of there and my DNF pile just got one book taller.
A side note about sentiment, which can feel welcome or unwarranted, depending on my mood. I can watch or read a scene – or listen to a passage of music – that was obviously intended to wring tears from my eyes, and go ahead and weep on cue, even though it’s obviously manipulative. Maybe at that moment my body craved the detox that crying can provide. Maybe I just felt like a good cry. At other times, I reserve the right to skip over the tearjerker part, or stop reading/listening if that was the last straw in a series of manipulations.
Bottom line: Does the artist trust their audience?
Recently, a memoirist shared a related concern with me about their work in progress. They didn’t want the narrator to show up on the page as derivative, or insincere, or better-than, when describing events in the story. We talked about keeping the language spare and clear, not larded down with adjectives instructing the reader how to respond. Leaving the reader in charge of coming to their own conclusions about the subject matter. Letting the reader discover their emotions. Basically, trusting the reader, not pulling their strings, or telling them how to feel.
I’m grateful to my fellow book-group members for their grace accepting my low tolerance for cruelty, violence, and authorly manipulation. And I’m grateful to all the writers, visual artists, musicians, choreographers, dramatists, screenwriters, animators, game designers, filmmakers, et al. who find ways to express themselves while trusting their audiences to manage their own responses.
Luna Project update
In this year’s full-moon project, Bony Moon and Wolf Moon are now up on YouTube. The music is also available to buy as high-quality audio downloads from BandCamp. Coming next, Sleepy Moon, on Tuesday 3 March!
Thanks, as always, for reading
~ Anne