| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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- 6. The conclusion is surprising in terms of this particular story but is part of an orderly component in the convention of fairy tales, where improbabilities in the story become possible as summaries of those depicted events. The moral is straightforwardly given and gathers the entire story to that point into itself, leaving no residue of discoveries yet to be made.
The reader responding to the story in this manner is not primed to delve beneath plot events as given. The story will seem to mean what it says. Its articulations of description and event seem ‘logical’, and these articulations lead inevitably to the moral of the story at its conclusion.
The questions which a reader reading in this manner might put include the following:
- 1. What is shown of my commitment to an openness of natural sequence and my acceptance of the surface appearance of things?
- 2. Is this in force to the extent that I am willing to deny an obvious invitation in the story to plumb uncanny depths (in details of Little Red-Cap’s immediate feeling of the strangeness of the room upon entering it, for instance)?
- 3. Having consented to be led without further investigation to the end moral of the story, what do I feel about that moral and my response to it and to all such maxims set out in this way (i.e., to stories which use the apparent inevitability of a story line to coax the reader to assent to a moral position)?
- 4. What is it about (a) the story or (b) me which leads me to take the story in the way I have?
5. Co-Opting Theorists
The Surface-to-Depths Pattern
The ‘surface-to-depths’ pattern might embrace theories of reading as diverse as those associated with Norman Holland and Jacques Lacan. Lacan can be brought into play under this heading because the ‘outer conceptualizations’ foregrounded in the literary work are ‘mapped’ from the ‘inner structure’ of the unconscious which are considered to underlie it in Lacanian approaches.4