I.
Why do people like reading fiction? Presumably, because it is interesting. But what makes it interesting? What makes anything interesting, for that matter?
Well, for a start, we might guess that people find things interesting when those things are meaningful. The best stories, then, are those with a clear narrative, where all details fit into a greater whole, and all threads come together into an overarching, unified message. After all, don’t most successful novels fit this pattern?
This theory appears all well and good, until one considers that there are novels – quite popular novels, too – that have no message, and make no sense.
What?
No, I’m not pulling your leg. In fact, I can think of two prominent examples just off the top of my head.
II.
For a modern example, take The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and its sequels.
These books do not make ‘sense’ in the normal sense of the term. Their plots are nonsense. Their details are nonsense. There is no theme or message, events happen almost entirely at random, and anyone who attempts to discern order out of it all might as well go searching for numerological Bible codes, which at least has a longer tradition behind it. And yet, people loved these books anyways, in spite of all of this – or, rather, because of it?
For those who have not read it, here is a representative excerpt:
Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it. Arthur blinked at him. He wished there was something simple and recognizable he could grasp hold of. He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrassis’ underwear, the piles of Sqornshellous mattresses and the man from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of cornflakes. But he couldn’t, and he didn’t feel safe.
And another:
Trillian punched up the figures. They showed two-to-the-power-of-Infinity-minus-one to one against (an irrational number that only has a conventional meaning in Improbability Physics).
“It’s pretty low,” continued Zaphod with a slight whistle.
“Yes,” agreed Trillian, and looked at him quizzically.
“That’s one big whack of Improbability to be accounted for. Something pretty improbable has got to show up on the balance sheet if it’s all going to add up into a pretty sum.”
Zaphod scribbled a few sums, crossed them out and threw the pencil away.
“Bat’s dos, I can’t work it out.”
“Well?”
Zaphod knocked his two heads together in irritation and gritted his teeth.
“Okay,” he said. “Computer!”
The voice circuits sprang to life again.
“Why, hello there!” they said (ticker tape, ticker tape). “All I want to do is make your day nicer and nicer and nicer…”
“Yeah, well, shut up and work something out for me.”
“Sure thing,” chattered the computer, “you want a probability forecast based on…”
“Improbability data, yeah.”
“Okay,” the computer continued. “Here’s an interesting little notion. Did you realize that most people’s lives are governed by telephone numbers?”
Yes, by their very nature as excerpts, these are necessarily removed from context. No, they do not make particularly more sense in context. The whole novel – the whole series of novels, really – runs on jumping from point to point in not-quite-logical leaps that nevertheless feel like they somehow follow, as if the logic in the sequence lies just beyond the edge of understanding. And this is clearly by design. In fact, if they did make sense, they would not be half as entertaining.
And enjoyment of this type of literature is no modern phenomenon. Another obvious, famous example comes from the 1800’s. I refer, of course, to Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, by Lewis Carroll.
Like Hitchhiker’s Guide, Alice in Wonderland does not have a coherent plot, or a unified message or theme. And again, this is no mistake on Carroll’s part. This is a choice made with purpose and design, to write without purpose and design. And despite what one might expect, this choice was made, at least in these two cases, successfully.
The recent movies made of Alice in Wonderland only accentuate this point – in contrast to the books, in the movies, the creators added in themes and meaning. But did this make their movies better? Carroll did not think such things necessary – but then, perhaps the movie creators did not fully understand how he managed this and chose to go with what they knew. Perhaps this choice was even wise.
But if you look back at the original text, you see that these movie themes are additions out of whole cloth to an original story devoid of theme or plot. In the original, there is no evil to be defeated. There is no message about escapism from the demands of modern life, about believing in yourself, about feminism (obviously, recall that Carroll was writing in the 1800’s, friends), or anything like that. The novel very explicitly, in fact, drained the meaning out of its content.
Consider the poems Alice keeps attempting to recite as she travels through wonderland. If you look back at the original versions of the poems Carroll is parodying, as memorized by 1800’s schoolchildren, you see they are all moralistic poems teaching Christian values. Carroll’s versions, on the other hand, are clearly not. It is not that they are mocking Christianity, precisely. Nor is it that Carroll has twisted them to teach some other set of values. Rather, Carroll has altered them to keep their structures while removing their messages, so that as a result his versions teach no values at all. They have the form of poems meant to convey a lesson, but then instead of a lesson there is no lesson, just a blank – and therein lies the heart of what makes them entertaining.
Here is one of the 16th century poems Carroll parodies, “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” by Isaac Watts:
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
How skilfully she builds her cell!
How neat she spreads the wax!
And labors hard to store it well
With the sweet food she makes.
In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.
And here is Carroll’s parody:
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
Or, to take another of my favorites, first here is a couple stanzas of the original, “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them,” By Robert Southey:
You are old, Father William, the young man cried,
And life must be hastening away;
You are chearful, and love to converse upon death!
Now tell me the reason I pray.
I am chearful, young man, Father William replied,
Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remember’d my God!
And He hath not forgotten my age.
And here is Carroll’s version, which I quote in full despite its length because it’s both out of copyright and hilarious:
“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”
“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”
“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
Pray, what is the reason of that?”
“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
“I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
Allow me to sell you a couple.”
“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
Pray, how did you manage to do it?”
“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.”
“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
What made you so awfully clever?”
“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”
What is it that makes Carroll’s versions funny and entertaining, especially in comparison to the originals? Part of it is the content, true – Carroll knows how to make a joke. But his versions are funny beyond that, especially to one who has read the original and takes note of Carroll’s additions and selective retentions.
This added aspect to the humor comes from the very lack of meaning, in the place where meaning was expected to go. The structure carried over from the original versions leads the reader to expect some moralizing lesson – but then, in Carroll’s versions this lesson never materializes, leaving the reader feeling the presence of a gap in place of the lesson. But instead of disappointing or annoying, the blank is entertaining. The little skip the mind makes over it makes it more humorous – because it is silly, but also because it is surprising. And this is that within the poems and the novels that generates their interest – their form and structure contain all the suggestion of meaning, but then have none, and thus the meaning appears to hide just past the edge of understanding.
III.
But it is not the simple fact of lack of meaning which causes a story to become interesting. People are not inherently interested in meaningless things. In general, in fact, perhaps it is the opposite. For the opposite of interest is not boredom, but –
To illustrate this, consider another writer famous for the lack of meaning in her work. Her books, however, are nothing anyone sane would pick up for fun. I refer, of course, to Gertrude Stein. As an example, we will take her book (not a novel – Wikipedia calls it a ‘collection of poems,’ but I feel this stretches the definition even of ‘poem’ too far), Tender Buttons.
Necessity requires that I give an excerpt to make the point, for which, friends, I must apologize. Out of compassion and mercy, I will at least attempt to keep it brief:
The time came when there was a birthday. Every day was no excitement and a birthday was added, it was added on Monday, this made the memory clear, this which was a speech showed the chair in the middle where there was copper.
Alike and a snail, this means Chinamen, it does there is no doubt that to be right is more than perfect there is no doubt and glass is confusing it confuses the substance which was of a color. Then came the time for discrimination, it came then and it was never mentioned it was so triumphant, it showed the whole head that had a hole and should have a hole it showed the resemblance between silver.
Unlike with the Adams excerpts above, where any additional context adds to the excerpts even if it doesn’t necessarily clarify them, for this excerpt, context does nothing whatsoever. The entire book is without context, without connection between one word and another, much less one section and another. It is, as best I can tell, as close as Stein could artificially come to random noise displayed through language.
While both the former examples and this latter are in a way ‘nonsensical’, the contrast between them could not be greater. Carroll and Adams are writing nonsense, true, but it’s nonsense that is meant to almost seem like it makes sense, nonsense that draws on the fundamental patterns people expect in stories, but breaks them in small but profound ways that put cracks in the meaning that become the source of the humor.
But Stein’s purpose is to actively display a lack of meaning – to write something no meaning could possibly be gleaned from, that no one sane could even think of looking for meaning in. Something actively painful to read, because the mind does not want to parse such chaos. To read Stein is to gaze into the void – Chaos and Primordial Night – and there is a reason even Satan hesitated to jump out into that, because it is terrible and ugly and diametrically opposed to all that makes us human.
Because it is the nature of humans to seek patterns – this is what they find beautiful – and thus, an utter emptiness of pattern is unpleasant if not outright appalling to the sight and to the mind.
IV.
In this gap between interesting nonsense and uninteresting nonsense lies the key to what it is that divides the interesting from the uninteresting. People like to read nonsense when it suggests meaning – when it makes one feel that meaning lies just beyond the horizon of comprehension. When people feel there is no meaning to discern in a thing, they will no longer feel interest in that thing.
Why is this so?
People inherently want to discover meaning. But what is meaning, but recognizable patterns? And what are patterns, but structure – order? Thus we see, what people truly desire is to find hidden order in the world. For something to be interesting, it must suggest to the viewer that it contains some part of this hidden order which they did not previously expect or know – a surprising hidden order. The Truth’s surprise is superb.
This is why communism was always doomed to fail, as was the idea of equality. These ideas seek to level human society. They seek to break down the hierarchy – the order – and to create an amorphous mass of equals. But people are built to want more order, not less, so like dandelions, aspects of order will spontaneously spring up again no matter how many times they are cut down. The existence of hierarchy requires no conspiracy – hierarchy exists because it is created by people, who keep it because they like it – because they are built for it – and because they find it interesting. Equality is simply too boring.
This fundamental aspect of human nature is also the basis of Kellhus’s strategy, in Bakker’s The Darkness that Comes Before, to attract the attention of the men and women he encounters – caste-nobility and caste-menials alike. He does not rely on luck – rather, he catches and holds men’s interest by generating a very specific and structured type of revelation. Since he can read faces and hence knows the nature and extent of his victim’s beliefs, and since he also understands the larger worldview the victim’s beliefs are embedded in more clearly than the victim himself, Kellhus can discover or manufacture connections between the victim’s beliefs that the victim had not noticed or conceived previously. Whether these connections are false or true is irrelevant, only that they are surprising and compelling to the victim. By doing this, Kellhus makes it appear as if he has knowledge of secret and surprising patterns in reality (since to the victim, his own beliefs just look like reality), and the victim feels unconsciously drawn to Kellhus by the implied hope that he will reveal more. This is what makes Kellhus fascinating to people, and what tricks them into thinking they love him, when what they really love is rather the sense of knowledge and meaning that he tricks them into feeling.
But why do people inherently desire patterns in the first place? Why do they find order interesting? We could make up some evolutionary argument, evolution creates order because evolution is an ordering principle, etc. But I think the more interesting question is, why do they find discovery interesting? Why not just want order? Because even order gets boring if it brings no surprises. Why do people desire surprise, and the new?
This, I think, is because all people are, by their fundamental nature, cultivators. And as cultivators, they want to ascend. But to ascend, one must obtain enlightenment, and one needs discovery to catalyze this enlightenment. The nature of the world is to change, as is the nature of men – humans are creatures of becoming and not of being. Theirs is a nature of eternal transformation, eternal ascension.
This is why certain nonsense can be compelling – because when the meaning is just beyond the line of sight, it pulls our focus into the distance, into infinity, where we all most desire to go.
Literal Explanation Required 