What Does Reading Imply?
On consensual (and potentially nonconsensual) acts of imagination.
In What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund demonstrates the importance of imagination in the reading process. He explains, “Even if an author excels at physical description, we are left with shambling concoctions of stray body parts and random detail (authors can’t tell us everything). We fill in the gaps. We shade them in. We gloss over them.” This is part of the magic of reading: working in concert with an author’s language to paint a picture in our minds.
Recently, I’ve been thinking differently about what it means to engage in this process after a provocative discussion with a student in one of my classes. For the last couple years, I’ve been teaching Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. Her final novel, Fledgling tells the story of Shori, a member of a species called the Ina, who share many characteristics with vampires. The Ina survive on human blood. They cannot go out at night. And they have some superhuman powers: they’re strong, hypersensitive, and long lived, though not immortal.
At the beginning of the novel, Shori wakes up in a cave suffering from amnesia, and as the story unfolds, we learn that Shori is the result of a genetic experiment to mix human and Ina DNA to take advantage of melanin so that the Ina might go outside while the sun is up. Shori is the first Black Ina (though not the first Black vampire), and she is also very young.
Even though we later learn she’s in her fifties, young for the Ina but not immature, Shori presents as a preteen girl. Somewhere around thirteen. And here’s where many readers, most even, start to get uncomfortable: The Ina don’t kill their victims but instead turn them into symbionts, and they maintain those symbiotic relationships with sex. Before learning anything about Shori’s race and biology, Butler confronts readers with a depiction of her engaged in a sexual relationship with a human adult called Wright who calls her jailbait and emphasizes his knowledge that he’s engaging in forbidden (and he believes potentially abusive) sex.
As the story unfolds, though, it becomes clear that Wright has never been in control of Shori. A venom in her saliva addicts her symbionts to her, and before they ever have sex, Shori feeds on Wright. She also talks him into the relationship when he falters. This complicated and upsetting dynamic is precisely why I continue to assign the novel: It asks students to explore the meaning of consent, to confront difficulties in human relationships, and to grapple with how much of our morality is built upon assumptions about others’ race, sex, class, age, and so on. But it makes for uncomfortable reading.
Last semester, I received the usual mix of feedback from students who were horrified or enthused by the book. The supporters appreciate the challenge to explore disturbing literature and real-world conflicts. When I mentioned I intended to drop the novel, more than a few encouraged me to keep teaching it. The detractors usually can’t get over the weird sex stuff. Some of them feel ambushed by the novel, even though I give repeated warnings that the content is disturbing and includes depictions of young adult sex and sexuality. It’s disturbing, they say, it’s unnecessary, it’s just gross. And they’re not wrong.
But last semester, a student presented their objections in a way that I’m still thinking on. Even with the warning, they said, we can’t really know what to expect from the text. And then, when you’re reading it, you’re being asked to imagine something that’s very disturbing without your consent. The author, they claimed, is essentially assaulting readers with this content because the reader doesn’t have a choice to avoid the content unless they’ve already read the book and know it’s there.
I suspect many will balk at the idea of accusing authors of assault, but the underlying assertion that reading involves consensual (and potentially nonconsensual) acts of imagination really intrigued me. And, though my student didn’t know it, they were actually pursuing a thread of argument that’s become really productive in the study of romance literature.
For the last twenty years or so, romance novels have taken a term for the steamy. The extremely steamy. Okay, the downright violent, abusive, exploitative, disgusting, toxic, and steamy steamy. If you think I’m kidding, check out Navessa Allen’s Lights Out: An Into Darkness Novel, a stalker romance that features a kink friendly masked stalker and includes “blood and gore, mass shootings, home invasion, unintentional cannibalism, breath play, knife play, gun play, fear play, primal play, mask play, and consensual dubious consent” on its list of potential triggers. Or how about H. D. Carlton’s Does It Hurt, which features a sex scene on a boat that occurs while the man shoves the woman’s face into shark infested waters mid coitus. And those are just the tip of the dark fantasy iceberg.
Romance scholars like Katie Deane attribute this turn to extremity to the rise of self-publishing. For decades, traditional publishers worked to sanitize romance fiction for the mainstream market, discouraging descriptions of risqué sex encounters and favoring traditional relationships. Freed from those constraints, self-published romance writers began to push the boundaries, exploring darker topics like mafia romance, violence, incest, and so on.
Another contributing factor is the growth of online fan communities and cultures of readerly care. In these communities, readers are able to share their desires, explore how authors respond to them, and discuss ways of engaging challenging content. The emergence of trigger and content warnings facilitated the pushing of boundaries by allowing authors to forewarn readers of what they might encounter in their texts. It also allowed readers to avoid books that might offend them and select for things they might enjoy. It also doesn’t hurt that absurdities like drowning/shark sex make for good social media content, which also encourages authors to get weird with it.
In this culture, scholars argue, the authors and readers have developed systems of consent that allow for boundary pushing. Deane asserts that, in some ways, to read is to consent to the experiences imagined by the reader: “The dark romance paratext makes explicit the contract of consent between the author and reader.” She points to a blogger who pioneered this discussion who argues, “the reader consents on behalf of the character, while retaining the power to end the imaginative experience.” In a system of warnings, reviews, fan culture discussions, the argument goes, the reader, by virtue of interpreting paratextual materials like summaries and trigger warnings, agrees to undergoing the experiences imagined by the author, however extreme.
Which brings us back to my student and their assertion that Octavia Butler asked them to imagine things they didn’t agree to experience. Things that they now can’t excise from their minds having already had that experience. The student, I think, is correct to point out that the balance of power between author and reader is unequal in this circumstance. We can’t know what a book will ask us to do until it asks us to do it, and if it’s imagine something abhorrent, we might have to imagine it to know how it affects us.
The reader can choose to never begin the book. And, no matter how well informed, no matter how willing to play along, the author can entrap the reader in imaginings of their choosing without the reader’s foreknowledge or consent. You can’t know what a sentence says until you’ve read it, and if that sentence is a graphic depiction of bestiality, rape, or child abuse, it might be too late to withdraw readerly consent until after the act has been imagined. Until the reader has already allowed the author to evoke those images in their mind’s eye.
I don’t think we’re owed a life free from challenge or offense. I certainly don’t believe in censorship, and I’m on the fence about trigger warnings. As my student points out, unless the warning is so explicit it becomes a spoiler, it can’t take the place of the actual experience of a text. And recent scholarship on warnings suggests they do almost nothing, or perhaps even some harm, in terms of protecting readers from psychological distress.
But I still think the student has a point. To read well is to be vulnerable, to trust an author to guide us through an experience with a variety of goals in mind. Some of those goals might run counter to our expectations, might be undesirable or even repulsive. I heard the student out, but if I had it to do again, I think I’d say that reading requires us to be brave, to recognize the difference between imagination and real life, and to dissociate from the aesthetic object enough to see how the author manipulates ideas like age, race, and sexuality in order to explore the thorny questions that make us human.
I’d ask the student to consider that what can be imagined out of the fragments of a descriptive language an author gives us is only the beginning of a reading experience that might transform us into someone brand new. I’d ask the class to look closely at that challenging passage to see how much we’re reading into the text to find the offense we’re looking for, and I’d argue that as good readers, we owe it to authors to trust them, to believe that they have a reason for whatever they ask us to imagine, and to indulge them in those imaginings before tossing the book away.
Being a good reader isn’t about protecting ourselves from nonconsensual imaginings. It’s about allowing the imagination to guide us through the experience of reading to the lives of others. The author, perhaps, but more importantly the lives of characters, especially those who might have endured the unimaginable, so that we might find in their experience empathy and understanding. So that we might better know ourselves.
What a fascinating article.