So interesting to link back to these stories from childhood and the experience of reading/being told a story in those formative years. Maryanne Wolfe in her Proust and the Squid (on science of reading and learning to read) talks about how for some the very first experience of reading is of sitting with a parent or grandparent to sing/rea…
So interesting to link back to these stories from childhood and the experience of reading/being told a story in those formative years. Maryanne Wolfe in her Proust and the Squid (on science of reading and learning to read) talks about how for some the very first experience of reading is of sitting with a parent or grandparent to sing/read along together. She says (if I remember correctly) that such an experience which connects the act of reading with feelings of love, safety and warmth is not something that can be provided by schooling. Not everyone is lucky.
I wonder, after reflecting on your ideas about these early stories with frames, whether there is something deep about the act of reading which is a frame in itself: this time is important to me, it is nourishing, this chair I sit in and this lamp's familiar light are echoes of that grandmother and her musical voice, framing what it is to be a story worth hearing.
Do, then, written frames such as the prologue/epilogue in An Incident draw on these same responses? Perhaps, for me, they do, though I will need to think further on this. Perhaps also there is an implicit frame in every act of reading or choices made in sending out a piece of writing.
I suppose what I wonder is can I stop thinking about framing as a device that is either present or not present, but rather as something that is always present and either spoken or unspoken?
This is such an interesting train of thought. I like the idea that all stories are externally framed. It rings true - we come to them all with a mood or emotion in us (sometime we have that Princess Bride/memories of childhood warmth, sometimes the frame is less nostalgic and more current (bad day/i'm tired/i've just binged three hours of horror, etc) - which colour the text and the juxtapositions and the symbolism (at least in the beginning, until we get our bearings, depending on how much the text echoes our mood or pulls us out of it). So, perhaps, Lu Hsun's framing is a way to manipulate that mood before we begin - he's positioning us in that old armchair in preparation of the story to come.
It kind of reminds me how eating food in a fancy restaurant changes the taste of the food in the way that if I ate the same food presented differently on cheap plates sitting on plastic chairs in a fluorescent-lit and crowded diner, it would 'taste' different. Which makes sense, because taste isn't an objective experience - it's a translation of all (some dominant, some subtle) stimuli by the brain. And maybe reading is the same - it's not just the words on the page that affect our reading experience (although the more immersive a text is, the more we can shut out external stimuli and get drawn into the story (despite the lingering internal stimuli of memories and mood)).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in this sense, framing is a very useful device for manipulating the reader to be in a certain mood or frame of mind (ha! (terrible pun)) before they approach the meat of the story and its transformative elements.
So interesting to link back to these stories from childhood and the experience of reading/being told a story in those formative years. Maryanne Wolfe in her Proust and the Squid (on science of reading and learning to read) talks about how for some the very first experience of reading is of sitting with a parent or grandparent to sing/read along together. She says (if I remember correctly) that such an experience which connects the act of reading with feelings of love, safety and warmth is not something that can be provided by schooling. Not everyone is lucky.
I wonder, after reflecting on your ideas about these early stories with frames, whether there is something deep about the act of reading which is a frame in itself: this time is important to me, it is nourishing, this chair I sit in and this lamp's familiar light are echoes of that grandmother and her musical voice, framing what it is to be a story worth hearing.
Do, then, written frames such as the prologue/epilogue in An Incident draw on these same responses? Perhaps, for me, they do, though I will need to think further on this. Perhaps also there is an implicit frame in every act of reading or choices made in sending out a piece of writing.
I suppose what I wonder is can I stop thinking about framing as a device that is either present or not present, but rather as something that is always present and either spoken or unspoken?
This is such an interesting train of thought. I like the idea that all stories are externally framed. It rings true - we come to them all with a mood or emotion in us (sometime we have that Princess Bride/memories of childhood warmth, sometimes the frame is less nostalgic and more current (bad day/i'm tired/i've just binged three hours of horror, etc) - which colour the text and the juxtapositions and the symbolism (at least in the beginning, until we get our bearings, depending on how much the text echoes our mood or pulls us out of it). So, perhaps, Lu Hsun's framing is a way to manipulate that mood before we begin - he's positioning us in that old armchair in preparation of the story to come.
It kind of reminds me how eating food in a fancy restaurant changes the taste of the food in the way that if I ate the same food presented differently on cheap plates sitting on plastic chairs in a fluorescent-lit and crowded diner, it would 'taste' different. Which makes sense, because taste isn't an objective experience - it's a translation of all (some dominant, some subtle) stimuli by the brain. And maybe reading is the same - it's not just the words on the page that affect our reading experience (although the more immersive a text is, the more we can shut out external stimuli and get drawn into the story (despite the lingering internal stimuli of memories and mood)).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in this sense, framing is a very useful device for manipulating the reader to be in a certain mood or frame of mind (ha! (terrible pun)) before they approach the meat of the story and its transformative elements.