“Talking Brought Me Here”

Abstract

This essay considers the role that the literary experience may play in furthering fiction readers’ self-understanding. Although not everyone reads literary fiction, and fewer may claim to have been highly influenced by a literary work, the psychological phenomenon could reveal something about the reflexivity of self-construction that would not be detected by theorizing about the self solely on the basis of analysing self-narratives. Three main propositions are stated and expanded: (a) defining “narrative” for the purpose of analysing self-narratives understates features central for the literary experience; (b) certain aspects of the “feeling” response apply to the literary experience but not to autobiographical telling—for example, Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny’” and the Jungian concept of the numinous are instructive here; and (c) the literary experience can have special liminal affordances for the narrative self, enabling the channelling of subsequent self-narratives.