The primacy of feelings

The recent turn to an embodied conception of cognition brings with it several significant implications for understanding literature and the processes of reading. I will begin with three important points made by Ralph Ellis (Reference Ellis2005) in Curious Emotions, who puts these forward as foundational. First, he emphasises the primacy of emotions: ‘fully intentional emotions, whether conscious or not, actually ground and shape all other conscious states’ (Reference Ellis2005: 4). Emotion is thus not, as it is commonly understood, a reaction to a prior cognitive appraisal of a situation, but an already functioning stance towards the world, interpreting the environment in pursuit of our existing aims – such as the insights we often gain about ourselves from the emotional experience of empathising with a character in a narrative. Second, beyond the pervasive functioning of homeostasis, Ellis develops the concept of ‘extropy’: this, as he puts it, is ‘the maintenance of a suitably complex and higher-energy pattern of overall activity for the organism’ (Reference Ellis2005: 4). Through extropy we pursue and may realise our aims, enabling us to identify and benefit from more elaborate conceptions – through the aroused process of literary reading, for instance, when we enjoy the complexities of bringing together setting, character, and narrative stance. Third, the cognitive system seems primarily designed for action. As Ralph Ellis points out, the occipital lobe that processes vision only begins to do so some 200 milliseconds after the mid-brain and cerebellum have already triggered the motor cortex. ‘When we then reflect on why we feel the way we do, the feeling reveals itself as already having been intentionally directed to the action affordances of an object or environmental situation’ (Reference Ellis2005: 25). While we are reading there is, of course, no possibility of realising the movement called for by a description of action, but this has potential literary implications for a reader: in Ellis’s account, ‘when we actually perform an action, we do not pay much if any conscious attention to the action imagery. It is when we inhibit the motor command that we are most fully conscious of the action image as a mental image’ (Reference Ellis2005: 42–3). This helps to account for the vividness of narratives that present themselves through the reader’s mental imagery for action.

These three issues – primacy of emotion, extropy and images of action – do not supersede cognition as vehicles for understanding the processes of literary reading – that is, cognitive concerns such as deixis, worlds theories or conceptual metaphor – but they do appear to argue for revising our set of priorities in seeking to understand the processes of response in literary reading, and how the literary may differ in significant ways from other forms and modes of reading. These three issues also effect a significant change in the discourse about a literary text: where this has been dominated until now by the insistence on interpretation – for example, Stanley Fish’s (Reference Fish1980: 355) comment that ‘interpretation is the only game in town’ – a shift has been taking place towards our experience of literature; that is, its impact on our feelings, imagery, autobiographical memory, self-concept issues and the like. Among the aims of the present chapter is to remind readers of the experiential resources that they can bring to bear on a literary text, and to outline ways in which an awareness of these and an ability to articulate them can facilitate appreciation of a text.

To provide an illustration of some of these possibilities, I will offer brief comments on the following well-known poem by Blake, from Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794):

To begin with the metre, there is a striking contrast in pace of movement, if we compare the first line with the following three or four lines: at first the Rose, devoid of movement, is immobile and stately, although this is soon qualified by the term sick. This first line, which obliges us to pronounce it slowly, has three evident stresses (O Rose, thou art sick!), but also has a fourth, unvoiced stress, at the end of the line. Here in this apparently blank moment the feelings that are generated create a space for all the (so far) unnamed implications of sickness to be guessed at. The feelings this calls into play seem ahead of our ability to understand the predicament of the Rose. The next line is pronounced much more rapidly – to be precise, twice as fast. Where the first line has four stresses, the next line has only two but accommodates six syllables, as does the first if the unvoiced stress is counted. This gives the worm a striking rapidity in its transit through the night.

But look again: the worm is invisible. Not only is the imagery of our response to the worm’s action inhibited in representing its flight, which makes it the more vivid, but where it should be on the inner mental radar it cannot be seen, giving it an uncanny presence. Note that, in the case of negatives, the brain creates the object in question first, then cancels it, just as the worm is both there and not there. The potency of this uncanny worm is increased, of course, by its ascendency over night and storm, a power through which its threat to the Rose is portended. The impact of this power is the greater for the main verb in this sentence, ‘Has found out’, being delayed until the second verse. The emotions in play by now are likely to be complex and conflicting. A principle part of extropy is the active nature of our current emotions: as Ellis notes, ‘Emotions are not responses to stimuli, but instead are ongoing, holistically motivated processes that attempt to use environmental affordances to further their self-organizational aims’ (Reference Ellis2005: 47). Thus by now the individual reader has probably already experienced, although perhaps not in full consciousness, feelings both for the predicament of the Rose and feelings of threat due to the worm’s affordances as antagonist – and found that these embody conflict. Extropy includes the monitoring of such threats, which for a given reader may envisage the worm as an identity for Satan, as a representation of a plague, or one or other of the individual’s acquired or invented meanings for such a portentious worm. But with the arrival of the main verb, ‘Has found out’, the poem baulks at stating a clear meaning to the conflict, since ‘found out’ can mean either an act of discovery (e.g. I have found out where you keep your money) or an attribution of guilt (e.g. I have found out that you stole the money). Such an ambivalence develops the affordances of Rose and worm; in particular it projects back to the status of the Rose and the worm, and forward to the ‘bed / Of crimson joy’, which raises its own conflicts of feeling: is the bed the site of a rape by the worm; or is it the site of an illegitimate desire to which the worm has found its way? Our sense (driven by the conflicts of feeling) is that large issues are at stake, but that now, and perhaps for all time, they are unresolvable. The ‘dark secret love’ works its destruction, but whether this is due to the Rose being sick with desire or whether the worm is the prime agent in introducing the sickness, we cannot decide – and, given the issues at stake, this is evidence of the power of this poem as a literary text.

Thus we note how the poem, through evoking conflicts in feeling, projects several possible larger meanings – meanings that seem uncountable and inexhaustible. The emphasis I have placed on feelings is due to several factors: first, the evidence (Griffiths Reference Griffiths1997; Panksepp Reference Panksepp1998) that emotions do not comprise one large system, but that each emotion is active through its own neural circuits. This finding is evident in many literary texts where a given feeling may often conflict with a subsequent feeling. We have previously noted (Miall and Kuiken Reference Miall and Kuiken2002a) that Aristotle’s model of catharsis, where pity and fear conflict, is one example of a conflict between feelings. Second, feelings project a state of emotion that brings with it its own history of individual and socially situated meanings, and as a central organising principle a state that can be regarded as a prototype (e.g. Hogan Reference Hogan2003: 86–9) – that is, how a given emotion is typically felt. In this respect feelings embody narrative-like scripts that inform us where a feeling has emerged and what it has meant in the past, as well as anticipatory intuitions about what the feeling might mean in the future. In this respect emotions seem likely to play a primary role in our experience as literary readers, shaping response, staging conflict, marking the limits of understanding. Third, depending on context, emotions are to some degree distinctive to the individual. As readers we bring to bear our own emotion prototypes and the links they have forged to the concerns of the self-concept, our autobiographical memories, and how emotions serve to recall a given memory as Bartlett (Reference Bartlett1932: 53–4) showed; and how, based on these, the narratives about our progress through life that we compile explain ourselves to ourself and to others. In various ways literary reading draws upon, and may help to reorganise, our arrays of feelings, memories and concerns.

In reading ‘The Sick Rose’ we paid attention to certain words or phrases that seemed important to shaping response to the poem: the significance of some of these can be restated as follows. The term ‘sick’ forms a striking conclusion to the first line, helping to personify the Rose (a stance already suggested by the initial apostrophe, as though the Rose was capable of understanding if spoken to). The ‘worm’ that is ‘invisible’ intimates a dimension of the universe beyond the mundane (especially when tracked through a ‘howling storm’), a dimension that already seems to connote a threat. To have ‘found out’ the Rose, in either sense of the term, signals a feat of navigation that further develops the uncanny resources of the worm. I point these terms out in particular, because they seem among the most striking words or phrases in the poem for two reasons: first because they play a central role in developing the cluster of feelings that dominates at least a first reading of the poem; and second because they demonstrate a pattern of foregrounding in the poem that is important for motivating the reader’s sense of significance, shaping experience of the poem as a whole. The motivation to read the poem through the network of feelings and foregrounding can be termed extropic, defined by Ellis as a ‘preference for high-energy states’ (R. D. Ellis Reference Ellis2005: 14); a will, we can say in the present case, to pursue the indefinable fate of the Rose, wherever that might lead, and to whatever degree we might find that pursuit uncomfortable or troubling.

These suppositions about reading the poem, however, call for empirical verification with real readers: one procedure would be to ask readers to identify the words or phrases that seem the most important in the poem, or that seem the most striking or evocative. These are not the same question: importance points to the words that lead most convincingly to an understanding of the poem; those that are striking or evocative make the greatest contribution to the reader’s felt experience of the poem. Would readers, given either question, point to the words that I have been discussing and which I have found the most striking?

To return to the question of the extropic is to approach an answer to the question why we read literary texts such as ‘The Sick Rose’ and find them both important and troubling. In Ellis’s terms ‘we need to have novelty, because novelty affords extropic activity’; to read a poem is to ‘find ways to further concretely embody our conscious states so as to amplify them, which entails symbolization’ (Reference Ellis2005: 125). Hence the symbols of the Rose and the invisible worm, which function so as to elicit that sense of the uncanny and to elaborate it, giving rise to perspectives that we seem only to half-comprehend however often we reread the poem. And central to this experience is the role of feelings and emotions. How are we to understand more systematically what feeling contributes, when and how it acts as a principal vehicle for the literary experience? In the next section I describe several studies that give some purchase on a particular aspect of feeling and how it supports a literary response.

Three empirical studies of feelings and texts

The first study I describe (Miall Reference Miall2006: 60–5) was with readers of a short story by Virginia Woolf (Reference Woolf and Dick1989), ‘Together and Apart’. It showed how feelings play a primary role in developing readers’ understanding, in particular how feelings contrast or at times conflict. In this brief story Miss Anning and Mr Serle are introduced at a party and try to engage in conversation. In the opening section of the story (about one page) the phrases of the story can be placed in one of two categories: either indicating a possible relationship of the two characters, or describing the setting (which includes the sky and the moon). In the study, all the readers read the opening section of the story first; they then received a version of the opening divided into phrases (fifty-six in all) for the purpose of rating. One group of readers rated the phrases for intensity of feeling on a six-point scale; then they attempted to recall as many phrases as they could. A second group of readers rated the phrases for importance (also on a six-point scale), then went on on to read the rest of the story, after which they rated the opening set of phrases for importance a second time. Readers also made written comments about their responses before completing the ratings.

Results showed that the understanding of the first group was dominated by the prospect of a relationship between the two characters. These readers, who rated for feeling, recalled an average of 14.65 phrases, but ‘relationship’ phrases were recalled significantly more frequently than ‘sky and setting’. In contrast, the sky and setting phrases were generally recalled by only half or fewer of these participants. For the second group, however, who rated for importance before and after reading the whole story, the ‘relationship’ phrases, also rated as more significant at first, declined in rated importance at a second reading. Yet several of the sky and setting phrases rated for feeling by the first group received ratings as high as those for the relationship phrases. It seems likely that the intensity of feeling in such phrases became available to readers later in their reading: as the relationship faltered so readers were able to draw upon the sky and setting phrases for their felt potential in re-construing the meaning of the story. The strong feeling attached to such phrases, in other words, tended to predict their subsequent importance in understanding the story. Some readers showed an awareness of an undercurrent created by references to the sky and setting, which might either support or cut across the relationship. As one put it, having only read the opening section, ‘the introduction of the idea of futility, insignificance. Although only shown so far in relation to the vastness of the sky, I feel the author may well take this further, bring it down to a more internalised level with all its attendant dangers.’ By the end of the story the failure of the potential relationship has become the main concern for readers, and some refer back to the setting phrases to bring this into focus: for example, ‘Moon and sky – awesome, tend to show the unimportance of people’s lives. They are not particularly romantic symbols – emotion is stunted and undeveloped.’

The study shows that feelings in response to the Woolf story were driven by two major perspectives. At first most readers gave prominence to only one – the prospective relationship. But, after the possibility of this declines on the second or third page, responses by the end of the story showed that readers had turned to the sky and setting descriptions to provide an alternative construal of the story. At the same time the traditional romantic associations of the moon have had to shift: the sky and moon now signified emptiness and the impossibility of genuine communication. The feelings central to the two perspectives have been found to conflict, and the second essentially cancels the first, or (depending on the reader) modifies it in such a way that its familiar meanings, while still in play, are rendered ineffectual. Readers who began by investing in the relationship perspective were likely to find themselves troubled by its evacuation as the story progresses. And, for some, it was this sense of conflict unresolved that remained: as one reader put it, ‘Story is about communication and the rejection of it, or inability to accept it and its implications. Love akin to dislike – preconceived notions being destroyed.’ This suggests one way of approaching the literariness of a text: through the conflicts or ambiguities of feeling that it makes evident.

The second study I will describe is based on the premise that words or phonemes have a relatively stable affective meaning, if this is examined over a large enough corpus of text. In her work Cynthia Whissell (Reference Whissell2001) compiled a Dictionary of Affect in Language by obtaining ratings of words on a scale of 1 to 3 from several participants, where ratings were for pleasantness, activation and imagery. The resulting Dictionary, consisting of 8,700 words, provides a score of the words in a given text based on an emotional space in which all words can be placed. The space is defined by two dimensions: Pleasantness-evaluation and Activation. Whissell made a study of Blake’s volume Songs of Innocence and Experience (1798/1794). She predicted that the Blake poems would evoke more imagery than materials relating to standard English (comparisons were made to a sample of English from a number of media consisting of 350,000 words), and she predicted that there should be emotional differences as measured by the Dictionary when comparing the Innocence with the Experience poems. She found that Innocence was significantly more pleasant than Experience (1.94 to 1.88), and both were higher than the normative corpus (1.85). Also, Innocence was higher on activation (1.69 to 1.67). Imagery scores (1.67, 1.68) did not differ, but were significantly higher than the corpus (1.53). Overall, words high in emotion constituted 33 per cent of the normative corpus, but were 40 per cent of Blake’s writing. For example:

The method is effective in drawing attention to the relative emotionality of a text. One limitation of the dictionary approach, as Whissell notes, is that ‘the meaning of a word cannot be modified by the context in which the word occurs’ (Reference Whissell2001: 466). ‘Rose’ may mean the flower; or it may be a verb, as in ‘He rose to the surface.’ Over a large sample, however, the problem of multiple meanings is unlikely to seriously skew the findings.

In another, recent study (Whissell Reference Whissell2011), Whissell develops a wider range of categories: pleasant–unpleasant, cheerful–sad, active–passive, nasty, soft. These are used to score passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost; but now resorting to counting phonemes where these are reckoned to convey a particular affective meaning derived from the words in which they occur. This is to suggest that words may have an intrinsic meaning, which has not been a popular view among scholars who, following Saussure, argued for the arbitrariness of the sound of words. But Whissell suggests some counter-examples: the long-e (phonemically /i:/) that occurs in words for happiness (happy, peace); the /ɘʊ/ sound of sad words (lonely, low); the /ɡ/ that characterises a sense of disgust (grasp, guilty). The plosives /p/ and /t/ occur more often in words judged to be active. With this extended scheme Whissell demonstrates how poems can be scored in terms of their distinctive usage of the different classes of sound (Reference Whissell2011: 258). In this way, as A. Pope (Reference Pope and Dobrée1980: 67) puts it, ‘The sound’ will ‘seem an echo to the sense’.

For the study of Paradise Lost, phonemes are separately scored for occurrences of previously coded feelings (such as the presence of pleasant phonemes, /ɵ/, /v/, /ɪ/, etc.), and the presence of each feeling is then compared to the norms for the poem overall. In this way, a sample of lines can, for example, be judged less pleasant and more active (Whissell Reference Whissell2011: 259). The pattern of pleasant and passive sounds reveals three successive narratives within the poem, derived from marked changes in the frequencies of a class of feelings from high to low or low to high. For instance, she notes that ‘The central narrative [Books IV to IX] has an unhappy ending and is tragic in form. It begins with Adam and Eve in the Garden and descends to a trough for the use of Pleasant sounds in Book IX, where the two succumb to temptation’ (Whissell Reference Whissell2011: 264). Such results ‘confirm that the sound narrative of Paradise Lost enhances the poem’s story narrative, and that those listening to a verbal rendition of the poem would be exposed to appropriate emotional sounds at various points of the narrative’ (Reference Whissell2011: 265). The value of being able to identify the shifts of feeling inherent in such patterns of sound is suggested by T. S. Eliot (Reference Eliot1964). In his definition of the ‘auditory imagination’ he describes it as ‘a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten and returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end’ (Reference Eliot1964: 118–19).

Whissell’s work employing these and related techniques includes study of a Dickens novel, Pope’s translation of Homer, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the lyrics of the Beatles (Whissell Reference Whissell2006, Reference Whissell2004a, Reference Whissell2004b, Reference Whissell1999). Each of her studies depends on one form or another of the Dictionary of Affect, which presupposes that words and phonemes have a fixed affective meaning.

A third study of feelings to be outlined here is based on the observation that certain classes of words connote an affective stance or attitude. Biber and Finegan (Reference Biber and Finegan1989b) looked at various linguistic indicators of speaker’s affect (i.e. feelings, emotions or moods) and signs of evidentiality, as they termed it (i.e. a speaker’s attitude, its reliability or adequacy). Markers of evidentiality and affect were counted in four grammatical categories – verbs, adjectives, adverbs and modals – where these showed affect (positive or negative) or evidentiality (certainty or doubt). The texts studied were restricted to those presented in the first person. One other restriction noted was that, in the case of the spoken sample, intonation and other paralinguistic features were not included in the analysis. Among the categories of words included were: doubt verbs (disbelieve, expect, feel), certainty adjectives (impossible, true, undeniable), positive affect expressions (enjoy, hope, prefer), negative affect adjectives (alarmed, irritated, shocked), hedges (almost, maybe, sort of), possibility modals (may, might, could), and predictive modals (will, would, shall).

The occurrences of these words in a wide sampling of texts in twenty-four different genres were counted by computer. The counts were then subjected to cluster analysis, which brings together texts where the same features tend to co-occur in several larger clusters. Among their findings, analysis showed that overt expressions of affect were largely confined to one cluster: these include ‘frequent emphatics, certainty verbs, doubt verbs, hedges, and possibility modals’; and the genres of texts primarily involved were personal letters, face-to-face conversations and telephone conversations. Otherwise just one romance fiction occurred in this grouping, but no other fiction. Fiction more generally occurred in a second cluster, which they termed the ‘Faceless stance’, since stance features were markedly absent: 90 per cent of general fiction was grouped as faceless, also 92 per cent of adventure fiction, 85 per cent of mystery fiction, 100 per cent of science fiction, and some romance fiction (38 per cent). The reason for the faceless finding is said to be that fiction is expressed largely in an expository mode, emphasising the information being presented as if it were factual – that is, demonstrating a largely neutral style without markers of affect or stance (romance fiction being marginally different).

I describe this study here not only to present some of its findings, which seem surprising, but also as an example of a valuable methodology that might be adapted for other types of inquiry. The ‘Faceless’ finding seems at odds with the common assumption that reading literary fiction will usually be an emotional experience. Recall, however, that the fiction sampled was limited to first-person narratives: a different profile might emerge from extending the sampled texts to those in the third person (a follow-up study by Watson (Reference Watson1999) included second- and third-person texts and found increased affect as a result). The present approach misses examples of free indirect discourse, which typically conveys affective experiences by merging character and narrator points of view. It must also miss the evaluative comments typical of many third-person narrators (as in the fiction of Jane Austen or George Eliot).

The empirically based studies reviewed so far were based on the premise that affect plays an important role in reading. In the study of Miall (Reference Miall2006) it was suggested that two contrasting sources of feeling were a key to the development of a literary response to the Woolf short story. The several Whissell studies and that of Biber and Finegan (Reference Biber and Finegan1989b) demonstrated top-down methods for identifying and classifying the presence of feeling, and, in the examples of Whissell, also providing insights into the structure of a literary text. The emphasis on the affective colouration of words and phrases in each of these studies is intended to draw attention to the primacy of feeling while reading; feeling appears to form a key part of the response to the verbal experience that is prior to its cognitive construal (the given-new construct, the installation of a schema, the drawing of inferences, and so on). This is supported by studies in evoked response potentials (ERP) studies that track the brain’s first responses to a word or phrase: studies have shown that the detection of feeling occurs 150–200 milliseconds following the encounter with verbal prosody; the valence of feeling (i.e. whether positive or negative) is detected at 130–180 milliseconds (see Miall Reference Miall2011 for a review). These findings, while not based on literary reading, present the possibility that feeling originates and helps determine the subsequent course of a literary response, including the selection and shaping of cognitive resources. This will be examined in the last section of this chapter.

Feelings in ‘The Innocent’

A fourth study will now be presented in more detail, one that is currently under way, which aims to investigate the place of feeling in response to the discourse of an unreliable narrator. In brief, the argument to be pursued is whether the indeterminacy experienced in relation to the narrator’s conflicting account of himself and the events of the story necessitates the reader’s recourse to feeling as a mode of understanding. An initial report on this project has recently been published in the Italian journal Fictions (Miall Reference Miall2012), which outlined the theoretical issues raised by the unreliable narrator and presented a report of an empirical study focusing in particular on the responses of readers to the first-person narrator of a short story by Graham Greene, ‘The Innocent’ (Reference Greene1973). This first contribution to the study will be summarised next, followed by a more detailed analysis of one reader’s responses to the story and how far this casts light on the role of feeling and the question of its primacy in response.

That literary texts contain alternative perspectives is a common observation (see, for example, Schmidt’s Reference Schmidt and de Beaugrande1982 polyvalence thesis); the reader’s response may be characterised by uncertainty, in which reflections on different possible meanings are indexed by feeling. The unreliable narrator contributes to this by providing, for instance, conflicting versions of an event, more than one way of accounting for the behaviour of a character, or an inadequate meaning for an action; these uncertainties occur as a consequence of a narrator whose understanding of what he or she relates appears to be limited or deficient. Thus a reader is impelled to attempt a framework for the narrative which accounts for its disparities. Critical discussions of the unreliable narrator have suggested that readers achieve such a frame by recourse to the supposed norms of an implied author, or by importing an interpretative frame of their own. The unreliable narrator, however, is motivated by the implied author, and may be a symptom of some larger problem that the implied author sets out to present. Resolving such issues by appeal to norms implies an objective world, which it may be the object of the text to challenge. The implied author can also be seen as the origin of decisions such as whether to present the narrative in first or third person, what style of discourse (e.g. ironic) is to be used, whether to include interior views of a character’s subjective states, and the like. Such issues as they are first encountered by readers, given the uncertainties they raise, are likely to be installed as feelings – feelings that evolve and become more complex as the narrative progresses.

Readers will have resort to their feelings when encountering further uncertainties, seeking analogies in their own experience, memories or other texts to generate insights. At times, perhaps, the frame brought to bear proves inadequate and is itself modified in the light of the current narrative. Thus, I suggest, the issues raised by the unreliable narrator ‘represent a class of problems whose larger significance it is the peculiar facility of the literary text to present’. The text is not designed to resolve such problems by resort to norms: ‘Norms are what the literary text puts in question’ (Miall Reference Miall2012: 44).

This is the main question raised by our empirical study with the Greene story: to what extent readers notice norms and their violation in the discourse of the unreliable narrator, and what role feelings appear to play. To specify this in terms of textual features and readers’ responses to them, we look particularly at ambiguities, plurisignations, vagueness and other modes of uncertainty, whether present in the text or created by the reader. For the reader, in Iser’s terms, response to such features is central: ‘the vital process of consistency-building is used to make the reader himself produce discrepancies, and as he becomes aware of both the discrepancies and the processes that have produced them, so he becomes more and more entangled in the text’ (Reference Iser1978: 130).

‘The Innocent’ by Graham Greene (Reference Greene1973) consists of approximately 1,900 words. In it the narrator describes arriving back in the town where he grew up. He is with Lola, evidently an escort he had picked up in a bar and had paid five pounds to accompany him for the night. On an impulse, wanting to visit the country, they have come to this town, but the memories of his childhood are so strong that the narrator regrets having brought Lola here with him. He leaves her at the hotel bar and goes out to revisit the streets he used to know. Seeing a group of children coming down one street after dancing lessons he is reminded that he too took lessons at the same house when he was eight, and formed an intense love for the girl who partnered him. Convinced that she also loved him, but unable to get close to her, he recalls leaving a message for her in a hole in the garden gate. He finds the paper is still there, and to his surprise the message turns out to be an obscene picture of a man and a woman. Later that night he convinces himself that the picture is innocent. In his last comment in the story, he says ‘I had believed I was drawing something with a meaning and beautiful; it was only now after thirty years of life that the picture seemed obscene.’

The story was reviewed for ambiguities in the strict sense as defined by Shlomith Rimmon; that is, two opposing propositions that ‘remain equitenable and copresent’ (Rimmon Reference Rimmon1977: 9). We found three. Firstly, in describing his childhood the narrator remarks, ‘they had been ordinary years’; whereas later he claims in reference to the girl that he knew from the dancing lessons, that ‘I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since.’ Secondly, speaking of the birthday parties they both attended, he says ‘she always kept out of my way’; yet he also states that ‘She liked me too.’ Finally, perhaps the major ambiguity of the story, he remarks later that night that ‘I began to realize the deep innocence of that drawing.’ Do readers become ‘entangled’ in these ambiguities, and if so do they play a significant part in developing their sense of an unreliable narrator and an overall meaning for the story? And to what extent do readers respond in terms of feelings evoked by the unreliability of the narrator?

To collect responses to the story we solicited volunteers from senior classes in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. We obtained responses from over thirty readers in all. Readers were asked to read the Greene story on computer, one section at a time (the story was divided into twenty-two sections), and to think aloud as they did so. Their comments were recorded on tape for later transcription and analysis. In addition, readers were asked to respond to a questionnaire. First, before reading, they were given the title of the story and asked to suggest what the story might be about. After reading they were asked to choose three passages for specific comments. Finally they were asked several questions about their view of the characters and of the drawing that the narrator finds.

In the analysis that follows I focus on the comments of one female reader (I will call her J). J responds first to the title, ‘The Innocent’. Her opening comments show her bringing to bear several quite complex concepts that might provide a first perspective on the story: she suggests a trial of someone as guilty who is actually innocent; she refers to pre-war persecution of Jews; and she says ‘he’ will accept the verdict ‘along with all the others’ because of his innocence. The use of such a term as ‘The Innocent’ as the title is certainly auspicious; but her comments already suggest several potential themes involving a life story, inflected in part by a sense of history. At the same time her comments are fraught with uncertainty, such as the odd locutions ‘obviously maybe’, ‘he never really wanted to maybe save himself’, ‘it almost seems like’, and a single reference to ‘all the others’. J’s resort to history also indicates her sense that the term ‘innocence’ lacks present-day currency except in carefully framed legal contexts.

So far, however, J’s comments elaborate potential frames for the story; no feelings are mentioned. In response to the story itself, however, she comments on all but one of the twenty-two sections; of these, 20 of her comments mention feeling (12 refer to feelings of the reader, while 14 refer to feelings of the narrator, and of these 5 refer to both), and, among her 20 feeling comments, 13 specify ambiguities or uncertainties of some kind. In the earlier part of the story the feelings of the reader predominate: J feels that the two characters are running away from something, but finds it ambiguous whether in running to this small town they are starting anew or have come somewhere familiar. This sets up for the reader a central contrast of the story, since it turns out that for the narrator the town is familiar: he grew up here. For Lola the almshouses are ‘grim’; for the narrator they are like ‘music’. Yet for the narrator the visit is problematic, since he begins to recover some forgotten memories and wishes that Lola was not with him to distract him, especially, as the reader puts it, ‘he remembers that that’s the time that he felt innocent and didn’t do anything wrong’. That the reader has some trouble here points to what will be the central ambiguity of the story: the reader is building on this remark of the narrator, ‘I thought I knew what it was that held me. It was the smell of innocence.’ Since in response to the next section she says, it ‘now makes me think that he doesn’t feel so innocent anymore being back to this place where he was before, or brings him back to an innocent time when everything seemed to make sense.’ This begins to ask what the feelings of the narrator mean, and seems to bring into question his sense of innocence. Following her remarks on the title the reader has been alerted to ask this wider question, which represents perhaps the first indication of the unreliability of the narrator.

Following this opening phase of the story, which has established for the reader a tentative frame for understanding it, I will mention two other moments that develop this response. The narrator mentions leaving Lola at the hotel and setting out on his own to explore the town in the light of his memories. He remembers the girl he loved at dancing class as he stands outside the same house and hears a dancing lesson in progress. The narrator remarks, ‘There is something about innocence one is never quite resigned to lose.’ He then mentions how he aimed to leave a message for her in a hole on the gate outside, but that she never retrieved it and it was forgotten. The complex of feelings here is troubling for the reader, as shown by the broken syntax of her comments: ‘I get a sense of regret now because the speaker didn’t really get to express his feelings even though he was so young because there was really – you’re not supposed to really, at that age, it seems like, so I get this feeling of regret.’ It is as if the story at this point has expressed something too complex for the reader to articulate.

Finally the paper is retrieved by the narrator, and to his intense surprise he sees that it is an obscene picture of a man and a woman. The story now raises the question of its innocence. How is it to be judged? The reader appears to find particularly interesting the lack of a definite conclusion on the part of the narrator, since she seems to accept that the picture is open to alternative understandings. The ending shows, she says:

The term ‘nice’ in this comment suggests an aesthetic response, a feeling for the shape of the story as a whole; that despite the unreliability she has indicated in a number of her comments, the story is not just confusing, but that it intrigues her by offering alternative meanings. The reader has oriented herself through feeling at many points of the story where she has encountered or expressed uncertainty, among the most frequently occurring evidence for this being her empathy for the narrator. This can often be identifed through the use of the second-person pronoun, which seems to refer to both the reader and the narrator. For instance, when referring to the narrator’s childhood love for the girl, the reader says: ‘you know they [the girl] feel the same way about you but you just can’t express it at such a young age so you can’t really say anything but just go with it.’

We have analysed just a few of the comments of one reader here, and suggested how feeling underlies a sense of the narrator’s unreliability in ‘The Innocent’. This is shown in several ways. For example, feeling is implicated in the three conflicting perspectives that help to motivate the issues of the story: that of the narrator in the present; that of the narrator of the past, when he was a child growing up in the town; and that of Lola, who dislikes the town. We have already mentioned some of the conflicts that occur in the narration. Other problems of intepretation are also raised by the question whether the young girl liked the narrator, whether his love was returned – the boy and the girl seem to have had differing understandings of this that creates contradictions in the narrative over how they regarded each other. In addition, at the end of the story we are faced with the narrator’s hesitations over whether the drawing is innocent or not. What if the narrator’s boyish interest in picturing human mating was known to the young girl? That would account for her keeping her distance. At a number of other points in the story other ambiguities occur which contribute to the sense of the narrator’s unreliability – too many to mention here. Beyond the comments of the reader that we have reviewed we might also consider the figure of the implied author as a way of asking what issues are raised by the design of the unreliable narrator in this story, how far the language of feeling in the story seems likely to frame the reader’s response, and what ‘entanglements’ occur in a reader’s responses to the ambiguities of the story and in what ways are these productive. Further research would triangulate on these questions about literary reading: how far ambiguity is characteristic or even essential to a literary text such as this; or, more specifically, whether the reader’s concept of the unreliable narrator is an agent for the feelings of the reader. There is much more to learn about the role of feelings in literary response. One aim of this chapter has been to show how empirical study of feelings offers an important vehicle for research on this topic.