How Stories Affect IndividualsPre-literate children in our own and other cultures spontaneously compose songs,
chants, monologues and other forms of ‘phatic’ expression, often to the accompaniment
of motor play, and apparently in rough imitation of adult talk, song and story. Children
who grow up with television emulate its manner and matter in their compositions
(Sutton-Smith et al. 1981); those brought up on oral stories are influenced by that
mode, and print-soaked children imitate the mode of print (Crago and Crago 1983).
There are, however, distinctive structural principles in children’s compositions which
mark them off from adult models, and which suggest some innate paradigm that
modifies direct imitation.
Later in life, such spontaneous story-making ‘goes underground’, taking the form of
the ‘inner newsreel’ discussed by Becker (1972) and Klinger (1971). Adults do not
normally chant aloud as they make beds, tee off on the golf course or type at their
computer station, but their minds do run an endless stream of loosely arranged images,
thoughts and inner dialogues—a waking version of dreaming.
All of this evidence suggests that story-telling, or at least, arranging the raw material
of experience into some sort of pattern, is a process almost as fundamental to human
life as breathing. In these ur-narratives, we are both ‘creators’ and ‘audiences’, both
‘participants’ and ‘spectators’: the roles are not substantially distinguished.
‘Absorbed’ or ‘ludic reading’, as investigated by Victor Nell (1988) is virtually a trance
state, where readers willingly become oblivious to the world around them. Normal
consciousness is put on hold and the print seems to guide the ‘inner newsreel’s’
production of highly personalised images. Thus the reader ‘merges’ with the characters
and events of the work. Nell, one of the few mainstream psychologists to offer anything
useful on the affective dimension of reading, points out that it is useless to distinguish
fiction from non-fiction or popular fiction from ‘good literature’ where ludic reading is in
question. However, it is unlikely that ludic reading would normally occur unless in
response to narrative material. It is as if there is something intrinsically consciousness-
altering about the narrative form itself. Ludic readers are skilled in seeking out texts
which will offer them the experience they desire, and can often successfully select on the
basis of only small samples of writing (a process akin to that by which we ‘instinctively’
assess strangers after a few minutes’ acquaintance).
If deep absorption in narrative has nothing to do with literary quality, then adult ludic
readers are probably functionally identical with child readers/listeners, for whom
aesthetic sophistication has little to do with enjoyment. Schlager (1977) found that
children’s preferences among award-winning children’s books had more to do with
‘matching’ between the themes of the books and the developmentally appropriate themes
of middle childhood than with literary sophistication or level of textual difficulty.
Together, these findings suggest that the optimal conditions for ‘bibliotherapy’ would
be when a reader (child or adult) already capable of ludic reading (many readers do not
read in this deeply absorbed manner) encounters a text (fiction or non-fiction, pot-boiler
or classic) which matches his or her personal criteria for ‘a good read’, and where the
themes are in some way appropriate to his or her developmental stage and inner world.
But whereas the bibliotherapists have proposed a fairly crude model in which the
reading therapist seeks for a literal correspondence between the content of the text and
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