Stanley Fish is in trouble. He wrote a piece for the New York Times (Warning! Spoiler alert!) about how much he liked the Hunger Games books, and unfortunately happened to go into details of the trilogy's later plot development: cue widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth. "I haven't even read book III yet. Thank you Mr Fish for RUINING it for me. Haven't you heard of a spoiler alert?!" wrote one poster. And "Shame on Fish! Trying rapidly to withdraw my forward of the article to my wife who's in the midst of the second book," said another.
Leaving aside the image of a bunch of adults bemoaning the fact that the ending of a series of books for young teenagers has been ruined for them, Fish has clearly touched a nerve here, so much so that he came back to defend himself last week, and to argue the positive case for spoilers. Citing an academic study, as well as Milton, to bolster his position, he finds that "first-time readers or viewers, because they don't know what's going to happen, have access to the pleasures of suspense", but what he calls "repeaters" – who, it could be argued, are different from those who have had the story spoiled – "can recognise significances they missed the first time around, see ironies that emerge only in hindsight and savour 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."
Far from calming people down, though, he's actually fanned the flames – particularly with his dismissal of "works which deliver to the reader or viewer suspense and only suspense", which he says lose their pull "when the cat has been let out of the bag and there may not be much point to re-experiencing them".
Mystery writers, unsurprisingly, are not happy, and have responded in a chorus over at Mulholland Books. "This is the silliest defence for spoiling stories for those of us who don't want them spoiled that I have ever heard," writes Joe R Lansdale. And Megan Abbott takes Fish on over suspense: "The subtext is: if we are feeling the thrill of 'what next? what next?' it can't be good literature … but what could be more significant about the reading experience, about stories themselves, than that sensation of: 'What happens next? How will it end?'"
I've said before that I'm a sucker for spoilers, always giving myself a quick glimpse of the end of books, googling what's going to happen next in my favourite television shows and loving Game of Thrones on television in large part because I've read the books and know what's about to happen (spoiler alert: nothing good). So even though Fish's second column looks a bit like after-the-fact justification – when he realised what he'd done and how many people he'd annoyed – I tend to agree with him, and anyway I can't feel too sorry for all his Hunger Games spoilees. Over here, people: Harry Potter lives, Bella chooses Edward, Susan doesn't get to go to heaven. Now go and find some grown-up books to read, and stop whining.
