Characters resisting the reader: "The Imagination Resettlement Program" by Eli Barrett

I try on this blog to break down stories in contemporary literature and make them accessible to others by revealing meaning. There is, however, a philosophical question, one I usually try to usually avoid on this site, of how meaning is communicated in a story. If you're not a professional literary critic, professor, or theorist, you might be surprised by how contentious questions about how to find meaning in a story are among the pros. In fact, a good number of professionals make a living questioning whether stories really "mean" anything in the way lay people think of something having a meaning.

One tension in trying to find meaning is whose meaning we are talking about. It used to be we all assumed the author had a meaning, that he knew what he meant and put elements into the story for us to find what he meant, and the reader's job was to dig through the clues to find the author's meaning. But there are two other kinds of meaning we have to consider with a story. One is the meaning of the text. An author might try to create a story with one meaning, but unintentionally put elements into the text that make the text say things the author never intended. Then, there is the intent of the reader. All of us bring our own strengths and weaknesses to the text of a story, and we can each find meaning in it that nobody has ever found before.

When I was in grad school, the intent of the text was considered the proper concern for most serious-minded literary folks, with intent of the reader a sort of interesting and cutting-edge field of study but not one that was totally trusted. Nobody really was interested in the intent of the author, which was thought to be a busted way of looking at a story.

I think, however, that it's better to consider all three intents: the intent of the writer, the intent of the text, and the intent of the reader, and to keep them in a dynamic tension while reading a story.

There is a similar three-way war of meaning in Barrett's story

Eli Barrett's "The Imagination Resettlement Program" presents us with a plot that's not totally unfamiliar. It's kin to stories like "Six Characters in Search of an Author," or "The Truman Show," stories where there is blurring between the imaginary, fictional world and the "real" world. In "Imagination," imaginary characters have suddenly started sprouting up in the real world. For example, a fire-breathing tiger shows up on the narrator's lawn and scorches his Bermuda grass. A government spokesperson explains that the world of imagination has become overpopulated from years of humans creating characters, causing a crisis of overpopulation. Characters are coming from imaginary-land to the real world like refugees go from one country to another in our own world.

The government decides to try to help the imaginary characters by resettling them. They offer subsidies to people in the real world willing to take an imaginary character into their homes. Our narrator Carl volunteers, hoping to subsidize his disability checks.

At first, I expected the characters from fantasy land would be characters from well-known fictional stories. But "Imagination" plays off of a characteristic of literary theory of the last 100 years: many literary theorists have claimed that interpretive strategies for high art can also be applied to a range of narratives outside high art, including pop culture or advertisements. So it's not surprising, maybe, that instead of getting Tom Sawyer, Carl gets "Mary the Bridal Detective," an marketing prop who, according to her magazine ads, "searches for the best deals in bridal fashions."

Carl had to do some detective work of his own to find this out, because Mary was part of a very minor advertising campaign some time ago, so Carl didn't even know who she was. She is a prim and proper woman, concerned with making the house look nice and serving the kind of finger foods that would go well at a stylish bridal party. She's a bit of an anachronism, coming from a world when following the correct social codes for events was more important.

It's unclear if she is interested in marrying Carl, and Carl isn't entirely sure what he feels about her. It's illegal to marry an imaginary person, and even sex--which Carl think might "satisfy at least some of what (he) feels," would get him kicked out of the program. He toys with the notion of daring to do it anyway, but he can't get a clear answer from Mary if this is even what she wants. His own feelings toward her seem to be a mix of lust and a desire to protect her.

In other words, Carl is having a hard time interpreting Mary. He doesn't know who she is or what she means to him. Carl is a fictional character is a story called "The Imaginary Resettlement Program" who is portrayed as a real character in a universe that has fictional characters just like the "real" world we readers are in has fictional characters like Carl. 

The fictional "real" characters of the story keep trying to change what the "fictional" characters in their world signify, and we, the readers in our "real" world, struggle to interpret the same thing as the "real" people in the story keep changing how they interpret their "fictional" characters. The imaginary characters started out being a seeming commentary on how imaginary worlds interact with the real world, but the characters within the "real" world of the story have their own way of looking at them. The characters quickly become to them what refugees or other outsiders are to immigration hardliners in our world. Carl hears on the news where soon after the resettlement programs has begun, citizens are already complaining about what "dirty freeloaders" the imaginary characters are, how they should be "forced to work for their benefits."

Later on, the imaginary characters start to go beyond being like a refugee population in our world, and become more like marginalized groups that become targeted for persecution, like Jews in 1930s Germany. There is enormous prejudice among the real toward the imaginary. The government is talking of rounding them up into work camps. One "man on the street" tells the interviewer he hopes all that free labor will get the economy going again.

Enter Little Joe

In order to pay for all the ways he likes to spoil Mary, Carl has to take on another border. He ends up with Tommy Lee, a character from a Western TV show. Tommy Lee idolizes his father, who has learned much wisdom through suffering. Tommy Lee has an obsessive-compulsive need to be given a life lesson at the end of every day, and Carl has to take on the responsibility of giving it to him. Mostly, Carl just teaches Little Joe that he should stay away from Mary, because Carl is jealous of how Tommy Lee shows affection for her.

Most literary analysis used to be as straightforward as Pa passing wisdom to Little Joe in a Bonanza episode. Not so anymore. 

Tommy Lee interprets the world like a fictional character from a show like Bonanza would. He sees the world in black-and-white. He thinks suffering in life has value, because it gives wisdom, and wisdom can be passed on in the form of life lessons. Carl, however, rejects this interpretation. He tells Tommy Lee that, "Not every day in the world will bring you a lesson...Most days you're just here and that's that." Tommy Lee has tried to import the logic of his world into the real world in order to understand it, but Carl has resisted Tommy Lee's attempt to interpret the world according to his rules. Meanwhile, Carl cannot understand Tommy Lee, because he cannot accept a world in which suffering has meaning or life lessons can be learned.

So we have readers in our real world reading a real fictional story with imaginary characters who are real within the context of the fictional universe we are reading about, and those "real" characters are interacting with characters who are fictional or imaginary within the context of their world. And the imaginary characters are trying to interpret the fictional "real" world according to the laws of their imaginary worlds, which are real to them. Meanwhile, the fictionally "real" citizens are trying to both force their meaning onto fictional characters and also to force those characters to have utility according to the rules of their world. And we, the readers in our real world, are trying to understand both sets of characters in the story "The Imagination Resettlement Program" according to our own rules. That's a lot of interpretations working against each other.

A story that doesn't resolve itself

Rather than let one of the interpretative sides "win," the story ends with uncertainty. The government has learned that if people merely start to imagine the fictional characters again, the characters will go back to where they came from.  There are campaigns to get people to do just this thing in order to solve the crisis. Carl finds himself watching Hamlet and trying to pay enough attention to get Hamlet back "to a world where people can understand the way he talks."

It's telling that Carl is watching Hamlet, of all things. A hundred years ago, when the old way of reading literature began to change, Hamlet was often used as a way of framing a debate. Some asked if it was appropriate to think of the character of Hamlet continuing on after the play ended. Could we attempt to draw meaning by trying to fill in details about Hamlet's life that the play did not openly share with us? One school of thought said no, that it was a moot question to try to imagine Hamlet off the pages of the script. Hamlet only existed in the words of the script. He was not a real person, and once the words stopped, so did his independent existence. But Carl is working off the opposite notion. Hamlet does exist in some universe somewhere, and until Carl can help get Hamlet back there, both our universe and the alternate universe will be marred.

The characters from the world of imagination, then, both exist independently in another plane but also are dependent on people from our world to imagine that existence for it to happen. But if they are subject to the cruel fate of relying on people to imagine them, they also are able to exact a bit of revenge by resisting interpretation. Hamlet needs us to imagine him in order to exist, but we do not control him. We cannot summon him into our world and make him mean whatever we want. Hamlet will still continue being Hamlet, operating off Hamlet's own logic, no matter how much we try to make him mean what we want him to mean. We may try to fit characters from fiction of the past into the political landscape of whatever moment we are living in, but the imaginary characters themselves do not have to cooperate. Tommy Lee will continue to be an anachronism, believing in the efficacy of suffering to build wisdom, trusting in his father to teach him important life lessons. The world can put him back where he came from, but we cannot change him by bringing him here. We have to submit ourselves to doing the detective work to understand their existence in order to understand them; we cannot force them to understand us.

In the end, Carl tries to change Mary, to make her fit to be his wife, but he finds that she resists his attempts to change her nature to the last. "She was never meant to be a bride, just a bridal detective." Having been dreamed up by some advertiser "two minutes before a deadline," her nature is now immutable.

Carl realizes Mary would never make it being put into a work camp in which she'd be forced to serve the economic needs of the moment. The best anyone can do for her is to get her back where she came from. Carl ends up bribing someone in a third-world country to imagine Mary exactly as she once was, enabling her to continue to exist as she once did.

It's a weird, wonderful story. Not all of it makes sense, and it's not really supposed to. Generally, I don't like stories that are too referential to literature itself or where the themes have more to do with what it even means to have a theme than just developing a theme. I think a lot of editors have a similar bias, which means Barrett had to overcome a lot of prejudice to get this story published. He did it by acting like one of the fantasy characters in his own story: he made the story unapologetically exactly what it was, not what he thought we'd want it to be.