Le Guin on Reading vs Viewing Stories

In the same transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin that I talked about yesterday (“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”; see my discussion here), Le Guin also has a lot to say about the differences between reading fiction, and the experience of watching TV or movie adaptations of that same material.

In it, she says, following on from her discussion of fantasy existing in a literary ghetto:

Another way we show our distrust of the imagination, our puritanical lust to control it, is in the way we tell stories on TV and in video or online games.

Reading is active. To read a story is to participate actively in the story; to read is to tell the story to yourself by reliving it and rewriting it with the author, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. If you want proof, just watch an eight-year-old reading a story she likes. She is concentratedly, tensely, fiercely alive. She is as intense as a hunting cat.

Reading is a mysterious act. It absolutely has not and cannot be replaced by any kind of viewing, because viewing is an entirely different undertaking, with different stakes and rewards. Viewing is passive. A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, by translating the arbitrary symbols, printed letters, into an inward, private reality. A viewer watching a film does not make the film. To watch a film is to be taken into it—to participate in it—be made part of it. Absorbed by it. Readers eat books, but film eats viewers. This is fine. It’s wonderful to be eaten by a good movie, to let your eyes and ears take your mind into a reality you could never otherwise know. However, passivity means vulnerability, and that’s what a great deal of media storytelling exploits.

Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader. The text is under the control of the reader—she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story or refuse to go along with it, make judgments, revise her judgments— she has time and room to genuinely interact with it. A novel is an active, ongoing collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Viewing is not a transaction. It isn’t collaborative. The viewer, consenting to participate, hands over control to the filmmaker or programmer. Psychically there is no time or room outside an audiovisual narrative for anything but the program. For the viewer, the monitor screen temporarily becomes the universe. There’s very little leeway, and no way to control the constant stream of information and imagery unless one refuses to accept it and detaches oneself emotionally and intellectually, in which case it appears essentially meaningless. Or one can turn the program off.

Although there’s a lot of talk about transactional viewing and “interactive” is a favorite word of programmers, electronic media are a paradise of control for programmers and a paradise of passivity for viewers. There is nothing in so-called interactive programs except what the programmer put in them; the so-called choices lead only to subprograms chosen by the programmer, no more a choice than a footnote is—do you read it or don’t you. The roles in role-playing games are fixed and conventional; there are no characters, only personae. (That’s why teenagers love them; teenagers need personae. But they have to shed those personae eventually, if they’re going to become persons.) Hypertext offers the storyteller a wonderful complexity, but so far hypertext fiction seems to be like Borges’s garden of forking paths that lead only to other forking paths—fascinating, like fractals, and ultimately nightmarish. Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel. If you don’t like the end of Moby-Dick you can change it. You can make it happy. Ahab kills the whale. Ooowee.

Readers can’t kill the whale. They can only reread until they understand why Ahab made it kill him. Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it. Viewers are either controlled by the program or try to control it. Different ballgames. Different universes.

A 3-D animated version of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, appeared this year and was presented as offering “more than just the story of the Little Prince. You can, for example, catch an orbiting planet in the Little Prince’s universe and learn all about the planet’s secrets and its inhabitants.” But in the book, doesn’t the prince visit several planets, with extremely interesting inhabitants, and doesn’t his own tiny planet have an immense secret—a rose—the rose he loves? Do the makers of this version feel that Saint-Exupéry was stingy with his planets? Or are they convinced that stuffing irrelevant information into a work of art enriches it? Maybe they’ll give us a version of The Tempest, and when Miranda says, “O brave new world, that has such creatures in it!” the viewer can press a button and on the screen there will be information about a genuine virtual new world with all kinds of weird creatures in it.

We are told that the viewer can interact with the animated version of The Little Prince. You can “enter the Fox Training Game and after you’ve ‘tamed’ the fox that the Little Prince meets, he will give you a gift.”

Do you remember the fox in The Little Prince? He insists that the little prince tame him. Why? the prince asks, and the fox says that if he is tamed he will always love the wheat fields, because they’re the color of the little prince’s hair. The little prince asks how to tame him, and the fox says by being very patient, sitting down “at a little distance from me . . . in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . .” And it should be at the same time every day, so that the fox will “know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites.” And so the fox is tamed, and when the little prince is about to leave, “‘Ah,’ said the fox, ‘I shall cry.’” So the little prince laments that being tamed “has done you no good at all!” but the fox says, “It has done me good . . . because of the color of the wheat fields.” And when they part, the fox says, “I will make you a present of a secret . . . It is the time you wasted for your rose that makes your rose important. . . . You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

So, then, the child viewing the program “tames” the fox by pressing buttons until the food pellet drops into the food dish—no, no, sorry, that’s how we train rats. We train children by teaching them to select the “right” choice from the choices offered until the program tells them that the fox is “tamed.” Somehow this doesn’t seem the same as imagining doing what the book describes: coming back every day at the same time and sitting silently while a fox looks at you out of the corner of its eye. Something essential has been short-circuited, falsified. What do you think the fox’s “gift” to the child viewer will be? I don’t know, but I don’t really see how it can top the fox’s gift in the book: just the words “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

The “gift” The Little Prince gives its readers is itself. It offers them absolutely nothing but a charming story with a few charming pictures, and the chance to face fear, grief, tenderness, and loss.

Which is why that story, written in the middle of a war by a man about to die in that war, is honored by children, adults, and even literary critics. Maybe the animated version isn’t as ghastly as it sounds; but it’s hard not to see it as an effort to exploit, to tame something that, like a real fox, must be left wild: the imagination of an artist.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did crash-land in the desert once, in the thirties, and nearly died; that is a fact. He did not meet a little prince from another planet there. He met terror, thirst, despair, and salvation. He wrote a splendid factual account of that experience in Wind, Sand and Stars. But later it got composted, transmuted, transfigured into a story of a little prince. Imagination working on experience. Invention springing like a flower, a rose, out of the desert sands of fact.

I thought these were interesting views, and her references to The Little Prince were spot on. However, it is interesting to note that some of the more popular video games available today (like Minecraft) are popular because they allow for the player to express their individuality. Even those games based on movies tend to allow the player to depart from the script of the movie, and so express their own imagination (albeit within the limits of the game).