The Paradox of Suspense

Writing of a reader who’d complained that, in an earlier post, he’d included spoilers about a book (The Hunger Games), Stanley Fish cites evidence that spoilers do not in fact spoil a story. On the contrary:

In August 2011 two researchers at the University of California at San Diego reported (in the journal Psychological Science) that in a controlled experiment, “subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both … ironic twist stories and … mysteries.” In fact, it seems “that giving away … surprises makes readers like stories better “perhaps because of the “pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character.”

The suggestion is that there is a trade-off in the pleasures available to first-time readers or viewers on the one hand, and “repeaters” (as they are called in the scholarly literature) on the other. First-time readers or viewers, because they don’t know what’s going to happen, have access to the pleasures of suspense — going down the wrong path, guessing at the identity of the killer, wondering about the fate of the hero. Repeaters who do know what is going to happen cannot experience those pleasures, but they can recognize significances they missed the first time around, see ironies that emerge only in hindsight and savor the skill with which a plot is constructed. If suspense is taken away by certainty, certainty offers other compensations, and those compensations, rather than being undermined by a spoiler, require one.

Fish goes on to suggest that suspense “survives uncertainty.” He cites A. R. Duckworth on the paradox of suspense (Part II in a multipart article in The Motley View):

The problem for accounts of suspense then is that familiarity with a fiction seems to preclude uncertainty yet, we still seem able to experience suspense. This issue is called the paradox of suspense. The paradox of suspense can stated like this:

1. Suspense requires uncertainty.

2. Knowledge of the outcome of a narrative, scene or situation precludes any uncertainty

3. We feel suspense in response to fictions we know the outcome of

All of the individual elements are acceptable in isolation; however, in conjunction, they pose a problem for the traditional account of suspense requiring uncertainty.

In resolving the paradox Fish favors a proposal by Richard J. Gerrig:

He notes that while viewing replays of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, he found himself “watching the first few seconds of lift-off and crying out mentally, “Make it!” (“Is There a Paradox of Suspense? A Reply to Yanal,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 1997). He poses the obvious question: “Why root — strenuously — for something that I know is not going to happen?” His answer is to posit a distinction between the knowledge one has in the abstract — if you are asked, did the space shuttle Challenger explode, you will unhesitatingly answer “yes” — and the knowledge available to one’s consciousness while processing the representation of a complex, multilayered event.

This makes sense to me. One’s foreknowledge simply doesn’t impinge (strongly) on the processes taking up the movie or novel moment-by-moment.

I note that a similar problem has arisen in dealing with music. Some years ago Leonard Meyer argued that much of our enjoyment of music comes from anticipating things to come where sometimes we’re surprised and sometimes note. This view has been widely accepted, but it leads to the problem of the second and subsequent hearings, where there can be no surprises. One proposal is imply that the “modules” dealing with the incoming sounds are not tightly linked to the modules containing one’s memory for the music. Hence musical suspense can still be active.