In Culler’s “Literary Theory” I’d like to focus on the last section of ‘What Stories Do’. He stated that stories give pleasure – “Plots tell of desire and what befalls it, but the movement of narrative itself is driven by desire in the form of ‘epistermophilia’, a desire to know” (Culler 91). I found this section interesting because it perfectly describes that intense feeling/urge of wanting to know what happens next when reading a story. In the same light, Culler also mentions this intense urge of knowledge is also followed by exposure. We seek knowledge and to know more than what we should because knowledge exposes “the hollowness of worldly success, the world’s corruption, it’s failure to meet our noblest aspirations. They expose the predicaments of the oppressed” (Culler 92).
When looking back at the story so far, this intense need of knowledge and the reasoning behind seeking this knowledge personally manifested for me when reading about Lucy’s death and her subsequent ‘resurrection’ shortly afterwards. That feeling of wanting to know how A lead to B and why it lead to there is something Culler described perfectly. That almost perverse feeling of wanting to see every detail of Lucy’s demise, no matter how cruel it is portrayed in the story, is also strong. As strange as it sounds, this feeling in particular spoke to me because as a reader, we are always enraptured by the things that should be horrifying or we should feel shameful towards. Instead, we flock to it like a moth to light.
This same mentality reminded me of the lecture on the decline of culture. I related Culler’s mentality on the subject to people’s shifting views at the time. People were fearful of their crumbling social structure but there was still enough people curious enough to push the boundaries, no matter how odd or taboo it may have seemed at the time.
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