The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies 9780199978069, 0199978069

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

COGNITIVE L I T E R A RY ST U DI E S

The Oxford Handbook of

COGNITIVE LITERARY STUDIES Edited by

LISA ZUNSHINE

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland  Cape Town  Dar es Salaam  Hong Kong  Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies / edited by Lisa Zunshine. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–997806–9 1. Psychology and literature. 2. Cognition in literature. 3. Literature—Psychology—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Zunshine, Lisa, editor. PN56.P93O93 2015 809'.93353­—dc23 2014016655

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Contents

Acknowledgments About the Authors

ix xi

Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies Lisa Zunshine

1

PA RT I   NA R R AT I V E , H I STORY, I M AG I NAT ION Cognitive Historicism 1. Cognitive Historicism: Intuition in Early Modern Thought Mary Thomas Crane

15

2. The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge Ellen Spolsky

34

3. Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind: An Interdisciplinary fMRI Study of Attention and Jane Austen Natalie M. Phillips

55

Cognitive Narratology 4. Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor Peter J. Rabinowitz

85

5. How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read?: Shadow Stories and Permanent Gaps H. Porter Abbott

104

6. Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif ”: From Parallel Play to Productive Collaboration James Phelan

120

vi   Contents

7. “Listen to the Stories!”: Narrative, Cognition, and Country-and-Western Music Alan Palmer 8. Blending in Cartoons: The Production of Comedy Monika Fludernik 9. From the Social to the Literary: Approaching Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng 紅樓夢) from a Cognitive Perspective Lisa Zunshine

136 155

176

Cognitive Queer Theory 10. Sex on the Mind: Queer Theory Meets Cognitive Theory J. Keith Vincent

199

Neuroaesthetics 11. Imagination: Literary and Cognitive Intersections Alan Richardson

225

12. Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States G. Gabrielle Starr

246

PA RT I I   E M OT ION S A N D E M PAT H Y Emotions in Literature, Film, and Theater 13. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion: Synthesizing Affective Science and Literary Study Patrick Colm Hogan

273

14. Facing Others: Close-ups of Faces in Narrative Film and in The Silence of the Lambs Carl Plantinga

291

15. Theater and the Emotions Noël Carroll

313

Contents   vii

Cognitive Postcolonial Studies 16. The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: Cognitive Approaches to Identity and Empathy Patrick Colm Hogan

329

17. Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion: Postcolonial Fiction Suzanne Keen

347

Decision Theory and Fiction 18. Reading and Bargaining William Flesch

369

Cognitive Disability Studies 19. What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry: A Neurocosmopolitan Approach Ralph James Savarese

393

Moral Emotions 20. On the Repulsive Rapist and the Difference between Morality in Fiction and Real Life Margrethe Bruun Vaage 21. Empathic Sadism: How Readers Get Implicated Fritz Breithaupt

421 440

PA RT I I I   T H E N E W U N C ON S C IOU S 22. The New Unconscious: A Literary Guided Tour Blakey Vermeule 23. Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists: How Filmmakers Exploit Cognitive Biases as an Aspect of Cinematic Narration, Characterization, and Spectatorship Jeff Smith

463

483

viii   Contents

PA RT I V   E M P I R IC A L A N D Q UA L I TAT I V E ST U DI E S OF L I T E R AT U R E 24. The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies Laura Otis

505

25. Transport: Challenges to the Metaphor Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon

525

26. Fluctuations in Literary Reading: The Neglected Dimension of Time 541 Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi

PA RT V   C O G N I T I V E T H E ORY A N D L I T E R A RY EXPERIENCE 27. Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction Joshua Landy

559

28. Rethinking the Reality Effect: Detail and the Novel Elaine Auyoung

581

29. Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience: The Prelude Mark J. Bruhn

593

30. Thick Context: Novelty in Cognition and Literature Nancy Easterlin

613

Index

633

Acknowledgments

In developing this Handbook, its editor has had many occasions to appreciate the creativity and patience of its contributors; it’s a privilege to work with this group of scholars. For their advice at different stages of preparing this manuscript for publication, the editor is particularly grateful to Ellen Spolsky and Ralph James Savarese. Also, she would like to thank Brendan O’Neill, at the Oxford University Press, for his support, flexibility, and expertise; Joel Kniaz, who provided conceptual feedback and built the website that enabled the authors to read each other’s drafts; and the anonymous readers, whose suggestions have been invaluable for shaping the volume.

About the Authors

H. Porter Abbott is Research Professor Emeritus in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His authored publications include The Fiction of Samuel Beckett (1973), Diary Fiction:  Writing as Action (1984), Beckett Writing Beckett:  The Author in the Autograph (1996), The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002; second edition, 2008), and Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable (2013). He is the editor of On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001). Elaine Auyoung  is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, the history and theory of the novel, and cognitive and aesthetic approaches to the arts. She is completing a book about how nineteenth-century realist novels bring readers into relation with fictional worlds. Her essays have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Style, and an edited collection on Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Marisa Bortolussi  is a Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, where she teaches Hispanic literatures and cultures. With Peter Dixon she applies methods of cognitive psychology to the investigation of literary response. Together they coauthored Psychonarratology:  Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response, as well as numerous articles on a variety of reader response-related issues. Fritz Breithaupt  is Professor and Chair of Germanic Studies at Indiana University and Affiliated Professor of Cognitive Science. His current scholarship focuses on empathy, narrative, and moral reasoning. Among his recent publications are Kultur der Empathie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009); trans. as Culturas de la Empatía (Madrid: Katz Editores, 2011), and Kulturen der Ausrede. Eine Erzähltheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012). A new book is forthcoming, The Dark Sides of Empathy. In his current work, he asks how narrative thinking influences moral choice. Mark J. Bruhn  is Professor of English at Regis University. He is co-editor, with Donald R. Wehrs, of Cognition, Literature, and History (Routledge, 2014), and guest editor of a special double-issue of Poetics Today  on “Exchange Values:  Poetics and Cognitive Science” (2011). His work on romanticism and cognition has appeared in European Romantic Review, Poetics Today, Studies in Romanticism, and, most recently, the Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth.

xii   About the Authors Noel Carroll  is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY.  His recent books are:  Living  in an Artworld, Art in Three Dimensions, Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture and Motion Pictures, and Humour: A Very Short Introduction. Mary Thomas Crane  is the Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English and the Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College.  She is the author of Shakespeare’s Brain:  Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, 2000)  and of Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Peter Dixon  is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta. Along with Marisa Bortolussi, he is an author of Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. In addition to his work with Bortolussi on readers’ processing of literature, he conducts work on a wide range of topics in cognitive psychology, including motor control, attention, memory, and problem solving. Nancy Easterlin is a Research Professor of English and a Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Orleans. She is author of A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation and Wordsworth and the Question of “Romantic Religion” as well as numerous essays on cognitive-evolutionary literary criticism and theory. Recently, she guest-edited “Cognition in the Classroom,” a special issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies focused on teaching cognitive approaches to literature. Easterlin is a former Guggenheim Fellow (2008). William Flesch teaches English and Philosophy at Brandeis. He is the author of Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Harvard, 2008), and is at work on a sequel to his arguments there, of which the piece here is a part. He reviews regularly for the TLS and The LA Review of Books, and blogs on the Stanford Arcade Website. Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg/ Germany and the Director of the graduate school “Factual and Fictional Narrative” as well as Fellow at the Institut des Etudes Avancées in Paris. She is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993), An Introduction to Narratology (2009), and the award-winning Towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996). Work in progress includes a monograph on prison metaphors and studies on description and collective minds. Patrick Colm Hogan  is a Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of seventeen books, including Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (Routledge, 2003)  and What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His book-length, narrative poem, The Death of the Goddess is forthcoming in 2014 from 2Leaf Press. Suzanne Keen  is the Thomas Broadus Professor of English and Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University. The author of Empathy and the Novel and the recent

About the Authors    xiii book Thomas Hardy's Brains, she works at the intersection of narrative theory and cognitive, affective, and literary studies. She is currently at work on a special issue of Style with co-editor Monika Fludernik. Joshua Landy is the Andrew B.  Hammond Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature. His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How to Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and (as coeditor) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009). Laura Otis  is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English at Emory University. With an MA in Neuroscience and a PhD in Comparative Literature, she compares the creative thinking of scientists and literary writers. Otis is the author of Organic Memory, Membranes, Networking, and Müller’s Lab; the translator of Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Vacation Stories; and the editor of Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. For her interdisciplinary studies of literature and science, she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Alan Palmer  is an independent scholar living in Weardale, County Durham. His first book Fictional Minds (University of Nebraska Press, 2004) was a co-winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars and also a co-winner of the Perkins Prize (awarded by the International Society for the Study of Narrative). A special issue of the journal Style (45:2, Summer 2011) was devoted to the subject of his second book, Social Minds in the Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2010). James Phelan,  Distinguished University Professor of English at Ohio State University, is the editor of Narrative, the co-editor (with Peter J. Rabinowitz and Robyn Warhol) of The Ohio State University Press Series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, and the author of numerous books on narrative theory, including Reading the American Novel, 1920–2010 (2013), Experiencing Fiction (2007), and Living to Tell about It (2005). His book-in-progress has the working title, Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetoric of Narrative Communication. Natalie M. Phillips, Assistant Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Cognitive Science Program at Michigan State University, specializes in eighteenth-century literature, history of mind, and cognitive approaches to narrative. She is also a leading figure in the emerging field of literary neuroscience, pioneering interdisciplinary experiments that use neuroscientific tools to explore the cognitive dynamics of literary reading. She is co-founder of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab and Lead Faculty for Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind. Carl Plantinga  is Professor of film and media at Calvin College. His two books as author are Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (2009) and Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (1997). He is co-editor with Greg M. Smith of Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (1999), and with Paisley Livingston of

xiv   About the Authors The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (2009). Plantinga is past president of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. Peter J. Rabinowitz  is the Carolyn C. and David M. Ellis ’38 Distinguished Teaching Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Before Reading:  Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, co-author (with Michael W. Smith) of Authorizing Readers:  Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature, and co-author (with David Herman, James Phelan, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol) of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Alan Richardson  is Professor of English at Boston College. His books include British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001) and The Neural Sublime:  Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (2011). He is co-editor, with Francis Steen, of a special issue of Poetics Today on “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution” (2002) and, with Ellen Spolsky, of The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity (2004). His current research concerns literary and scientific conceptions of imagination from Romanticism to the present. Ralph James Savarese teaches American literature, creative writing, and disability studies at Grinnell College. The author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption and the co-editor of “Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity,” a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, he spent the academic year 2012–2013 as a neurohumanities fellow at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences. Jeff Smith  is a Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music and Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds. He is currently at work on a study of music in Hollywood films of the 1930s. Ellen Spolsky,  Bar-Ilan University in Israel, is a literary theorist interested in embodied interpretive processes as they produce and respond to texts, pictures, and performance in history and culture. She is the author of Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind, a founding text in cognitive literary studies, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World, Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England, and Saving Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. G. Gabrielle Starr  is Professor of English and Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science at New York University. She is the author of Lyric Generations (Hopkins 2004)  and Feeling Beauty (MIT 2013), and is at work on a book about imagination, Embodied Images, as well as being head of an international research group exploring the neural underpinnings of the effects of music, painting, and poetry. Margrethe Bruun Vaage  is Lecturer in Film at the University of Kent. Her main area of research is the spectator’s engagement with fictional films and television series, and more specifically the imagination, the emotions, and the moral psychology of fiction.

About the Authors    xv She has published papers in journals such as the British Journal of Aesthetics, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, and Screen. She is currently working on a book exploring the spectator’s engagement with antiheroes in recent American television series. Blakey Vermeule  is Professor of English at Stanford University. She has written books on eighteenth-century moral psychology and on the question of why we care about fictional characters. She is at work on a book about the post-Freudian unconscious. J. Keith Vincent is Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Boston University. He is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction. His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He is currently at work on Haiku in Prose, a book on techniques of description in the modern Japanese novel. Lisa Zunshine  is Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky and a former Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author or editor of eleven books, including Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (2005), Why We Read Fiction (2006), Acting Theory and the English Stage, 1700–1830 (2008), Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible (2008), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (2010), and Getting Inside Your Head: What Popular Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (2012).

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

COGNITIVE L I T E R A RY ST U DI E S

I ntrodu ct i on to C o gnitive Li t e ra ry Studi e s Lis a Zunsh in e

The best definition of cognitive literary studies was offered by Alan Richardson in 2004. Richardson starts by pointing out that “cognitive” is a broad term, referring to “an overriding interest in the active (and largely unconscious) mental processing that makes behavior understandable.” Given the tremendous variety of research programs that investigate mental processing, “cognitive science,” too, is a broad umbrella term. It signifies an interdisciplinary venture, “rather like ‘feminist studies’ or ‘cultural studies,’ ” that is “loosely held together by a set of common interests, allegiances, and reference points rather than a coherent discipline unified by shared paradigms and methodologies.” It is fitting then that the definition of cognitive literary studies should focus not on the boundaries, goals, or methods of the field but on its dynamic, relational nature. Richardson sees it as “the work of literary critics and theorists vitally interested in cognitive science. . ., and therefore with a good deal to say to one another, whatever their differences.”1 This dialogic, decentralized view has shaped the trajectory of cognitive approaches to literature over the last decade. On the one hand, cognitive literary scholars actively seek professional venues for talking to one another (for instance, the membership in the Modern Language Association official discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature has grown from 250 in 1999, the year it was organized, to 700 in 2009, and to 2,000 in 2013).2 On the other hand, because they don’t see themselves as working on a puzzle whose pieces must fit neatly together, they feel no need to iron out differences3 among their “potentially conflicting aims and methodologies.”4 Indeed, given what a messy proposition the human mind/brain is and how little we still know about it, striving toward a grand unified theory of cognition and literature is to engage in mythmaking.5

2    Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies Resistance to unified theories informs cognitive literary studies in yet another way. Though “vitally interested” in cognitive science, cognitive literary critics work not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies.6 For all it takes is to attend a couple of talks—however wonderfully exciting—in cognitive science to realize that there is a reason that literature departments are distinct from departments of psychology and neuroscience. There is a reason, as Laura Otis, professor of English and recipient of a MacArthur fellowship for creativity, writes in this volume, that twenty-nine years ago, she had to either “withdraw [from a PhD program in neuroscience] or die.” The division between the sciences and the humanities, far from ideal in many ways, reflects meaningful differences in ways of thinking about the world. Consilience with science, moreover, though an attractive ideal theoretically, in practice often comes down, as Nancy Easterlin has observed, to “assimilating literature to [the] epistemic prerogatives” of science,7 while “the very nature and diversity of literary artifacts, which are themselves only fully constituted via a complex cognitive process of production and consumption, a process itself inherently interpretive, militate against a programmatically scientific approach to literature.”8 So while cognitive literary scholars draw on insights from cognitive science, they approach them critically and pragmatically, thinking through them on the terms of their own discipline. In doing so, they differ from “Literary Darwinists”—a small but vocal group of critics who practice scientism in the name of “scientific” literary analysis,9 believing that science today can already explain literature better than the benighted and fraudulent English studies. To quote one of their leading players, Brian Boyd, without consilience with sciences, “English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world.”10 The distinction between cognitive literary critics and Literary Darwinists is worth emphasizing because, while both draw on some of the same research in cognitive science (e.g., evolutionary theory), their views on the role of this research for literary studies are diametrically opposite. As Ellen Spolsky, a cognitive literary critic whose work integrates the evolutionary perspective and cultural studies, puts it, The Literary Darwinists’ view of the adaptive powers of evolution is seriously compromised. . . by their rejection of cultural construction. By failing to recognize the power of symbolic communications to influence behavior—to influence even the genome11—they overlook the subject of literary study itself. Their failure to notice that conclusions drawn from the empirical data are never prima facie facts, but are always the result of interpretation, as well as their relative lack of interest in the specifics of individual literary texts, encourages me to distance myself from those literary scholars who have taken up the Darwinian argument precisely to separate themselves from the traditions behind the last fifty years of literary theory.12

In contrast to the Literary Darwinists, who turn to science to “separate themselves from the traditions behind the last fifty years of literary theory,” cognitive literary critics are committed to issues animating literary and cultural studies. This commitment means that, more than ever before, cognitive approaches to literature today flourish at

Lisa Zunshine   3 unexpected intersections, drawing into their orbit fields that used to be perceived as irrelevant or even inimical to a cognitivist inquiry. For instance, ten years ago, it was difficult to imagine the emergence of the new field of cognitive disability studies, represented by Ralph James Savarese’s “neurocosmopolitan” studies of poetry (this volume) and novels,13 or of the work in the “neuro-divergent aesthetic,” spearheaded by Nicola Shaughnessy’s studies of autism and theater.14 Today, their groundbreaking research makes us realize not only how untenable the currently prevalent (even within the cognitive sciences themselves) view of autism as “mind-blindness” is15 but also how radically open to revision our assumptions about the “neurotypical” engagement with poetry, prose, and drama may yet turn out to be. Perspectives opening at the intersection of disability studies and cognitive approaches are truly breathtaking, and there is no predicting today where this research will take us in the next decade. The same openness and unpredictability characterizes other areas of cognitive literary criticism, be they cognitive queer studies, cognitive postcolonial studies, cognitive historicism,16 cognitive narratology,17 or studies of the new unconscious, as well as cognitive ecocriticism18 and cognitive approaches to poststructruralism19 and feminism.20 When one draws on two fields that are already heavily interdisciplinary (i.e., literary criticism and cognitive science), the outcome will be inevitably represented by a broad variety of paradigms and approaches.21 The latter point cannot be stressed enough. Several contributors to this volume have had the experience of being asked, by friendly interlocutors wishing to learn more, for just one key publication in cognitive approaches to literature (and, along the same lines, for one publication in cognitive science that serves as a “master” text for everyone doing cognitive approaches). To come up with a title or two in response to this question is to misrepresent the field, for its practitioners “hold different views about such fundamental matters [as] the utility of specific interpretive and theoretical models for literary studies [and] the areas of psychology most fruitfully explored in interdisciplinary research.”22 For instance, neuroaesthetics,23 cognitive narratology, and the new unconscious have little in common, either in terms of areas of research in cognitive science that they draw on, or in terms of theoretical paradigms that they develop. To focus on what they do have in common and to present that as an “essential” feature of cognitive approaches to literature would be reductive. Just so, the essays in Part V of this volume (“Cognitive Theory and Literary Experience”), while grappling with such difficult issues as self-reflexivity of literature (Joshua Landy), its referentiality (Elaine Auyoung), its embodied temporality (Mark Bruhn), and its ambivalent relationship with novelty (Nancy Easterlin), approach them from very different theoretical angles, none of which are reducible to others. Or consider the volume’s selection on emotions and empathy (Part II). While the nine essays that make up this part reflect the centrality of the study of emotions to a cognitivist inquiry, their authors work with a widely diverse set of paradigms, ranging from the role of intertemporal bargaining (the concept used in decision theory) in fiction (William Flesch), and the difference between moral emotions in television series and in real life (Margrethe Bruun Vaage), to the relationship between narrative empathy and human rights discourse (Suzanne Keen).

4    Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies What shall then one say in response to a query about just one “key” text in cognitive approaches? The best answer is to turn the question around and ask the interlocutor what area of literary studies she works in and then suggest the research that corresponds to her interests. At this point, cognitive literary studies have something to offer to a scholar of almost any theoretical persuasion; the entry point into the field can be as individualized as one wishes. (Just so, can be a culture under consideration. Literary traditions represented by this volume alone include South Asian, postcolonial anglophone and francophone, Chinese, Japanese, English, Iranian, Russian, Italian, French, German, and Spanish.) Like other volumes in this series, this Handbook offers “a representative rather than exhaustive coverage of the field.”24 For instance, although it features a selection of exciting essays about visual arts, theater, film, and television, the reader would do well to use them as starting points for learning more about the thriving fields of cognitive approaches to visual arts,25 to drama/performance,26 and to film. (The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image alone has 150 members, annual international conferences, and an award-winning journal.)27 Similarly, the respective essays by Monika Fludernik and Mark Bruhn, engaging, in very different ways, the theory of blending and conceptual integration, introduce the reader to the influential school of thought arising at the intersection of literary criticism and cognitive linguistics;28 while the essays by Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon (an interdisciplinary team of researchers, hailing, respectively, from Spanish literary/cultural studies and cognitive psychology) are meant to whet the reader’s appetite for the work coming out of the rich discipline of empirical studies of literature.29 It is the ambition of this volume that its readers will delve deeper into these fields while looking for new points of intersection that reach beyond already established areas of inquiry. We hope that diversity and dialogue will continue to define cognitive literary studies in the next decade.

Notes 1. Alan Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition:  A  Field Map,” The Work of Fiction:  Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 2. 2. In December 2012, the discussion group was promoted to a division within the MLA, a promotion spearheaded by Michael Sinding, the chair of the discussion group executive committee for 2010–11. Other important venues include the international research network “Cognitive Futures in the Humanities” (http://coghumanities.com/), convened by Peter Garratt, Vyv Evans, and Matt Hayler, and “Cognitive Theory and the Arts” seminar, convened at Harvard University by Anna Henchman, Alan Richardson, and Elaine Scarry (http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/cognitive-theory-and-arts). 3. Nor do they feel a pressing need to give their differences sharper definition. For an important discussion of the advantages accruing to cognitive literary studies due to their “lack of a rationally articulated model or set of directives” and a “subsequent subdivision into various schools, each with its own mission statement and paradigm for interpretation,” see

Lisa Zunshine   5 Nancy Easterlin, “Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism,”  Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2.2 (2001), 64. 4. Ellen Spolsky, “Preface,” The Work of Fiction:  Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2004), vii. Other important edited collections published in the last five years include Theory of Mind and Literature, ed. Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert, and Jennifer Marston (West Lafayette, IN:  Purdue University Press, 2010), Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), The Emergence of Mind:  Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, eds. Isabel Jaén and Julien Jacques Simon (University of Texas Press, 2012), Mark J.  Bruhn and Donald R.  Wehrs, Cognition, Literature, and History (New  York:  Routledge, 2013), and Stories and Minds:  Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative, eds. Lars Bernaerts, Dirk De Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). 5. To witness one such myth in the making—the argument about the “adaptive function” of literature—see the work of “Literary Darwinists.” As Jonathan Kramnick observes in his important recent rejoinder to Literary Darwinism, its “major players assert, in the words of Brian Boyd, that ‘every part of our brain’s design’ must have ‘served an adaptive function’ of some sort or other. . . . The presiding assumption is therefore a kind of holdover [in light of the critique of a strong adaptationist position by evolutionary theorists themselves], and yet at the same time it is wildly more ambitious, as it aims to include the creation or enjoyment of literary works among the many adaptations of the mind” (“Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37 [Winter 2011] 319–320). 6. See Lisa Zunshine, “What Is Cognitive Cultural Studies,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010): 1–33. 7. Easterlin, “Voyages in the Verbal Universe,” 62. See also Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), especially 11–20 (“What is Consilience?”). 8. Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach, 6. 9. Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition,” 12. 10. Brian Boyd, “Getting It All Wrong,” The American Scholar, 2006. Commenting on Literary Darwinists’ stringent rejection of literary theory in favor of science—which is at odds with their own purported stance on creativity—Michael Bérubé observes that, “Boyd never stops to consider that maybe, just maybe, the clever human minds responsible for literature are the same clever human minds responsible for literary theory” (“The Play is the Thing,” American Scientist, 98.1 [January–February 2010]: 70–73). For an example of the difference between the Literary Darwinist and cognitive literary takes on literary theory, see one of Patrick Colm Hogan’s essays in this volume: Literary Darwinists dismiss “postcolonial theory as one of the ‘minor’ components of postmodernism, an encompassing movement fated to ‘crumble from within,’ ” while cognitive literary critics, such as Frederick Luis Aldama and Suzanne Keen, “have considered the important questions raised by mainstream postcolonial theories and sought to formulate answers to those questions that are better grounded in our current understanding of human cognition and emotion” (Hogan, “The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” this volume). 11. See Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolutions in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT

6    Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies Press, 2005); Peter Hammerstein, ed. Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2003); and Peter J.  Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Joseph Henrich, “Gene-Culture Coevolution in the Age of Genomics,” PNAS 107, suppl. 2 (2010): 8985–8992. 12. Spolsky, Saving Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community (New  York:  Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2015). 13. Ralph James Savarese, “River of Words, Raft of Our Conjoined Neurologies,” Fourth Genre 14.1 (2012): 43–52; “Toward a Postcolonial Neurology: Autism, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and a New Geo-poetics of the Body,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4.3 (2010): 273–289; and You Travel in Your Chair: Autism and the Literary Imagination. Reading Six Classic Novels with Six Classical Autistics, in progress. 14. See Nicola Shaughnessy, “Perceiving Differently: The Neuro-Divergent Aesthetic and Contemporary Performance,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Special Edition: Experiments in Theatre: New Directions in Science and Performance 38.4 (December 2013): 321–334, and Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), especially 233–255. See also Melissa Trimingham, “Touched by Meaning: Haptic Effect in Autism,” in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science:  Body, Brain and Being, ed. Nicola Shaughnessy (Methuen, 2013):  229–240. For more information on “Imagining Autism,” a collaborative project “between the disciplines of drama and psychology,” led by Shaughnessy, “that seeks to remediate the difficulties that autistic children have with communication, social interaction and imagination,” see http://www.imaginingautism.org/ 15. See Ralph James Savarese and Lisa Zunshine, “The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies.” Narrative 22.1 (January 2014): 17–44. 16. Other researchers working in cognitive historicism, besides those represented in this volume, include Anna Henchman (The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in the Victorian Literature [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014]); Isabel Jaén Portillo (e.g., “Cervantes on Human Development: Don Quixote and Renaissance Cognitive Psychology,” Don Quixote:  Interdisciplinary Connections, eds. Matthew D. Warshawsky and James A. Parr [Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2013]: 35–57), Vanessa Ryan (Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012]), and Tony E. Jackson (The Technology of the Novel: Writing and Narrative in British Fiction [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009]). 17. Other researchers working in cognitive narratology, besides those represented in this volume, include David Herman (e.g., Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind [Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013; Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004]); Marco Bernini (e.g., “Supersizing Narrative Theory: On Intention, Material Agency and Extended Mind-Workers,” Style, forthcoming); Karin Kukkonen (e.g., “Navigating Infinite Earths: Readers, Mental Models, and the Multiverse of Superhero Comics, StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 2 [2010]: 35–58; Marco Caracciolo (e.g., “The Reader’s Virtual Body: Narrative Space and Its Reconstruction,” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3.1 [2011]: 117–138); and Merja Polvinen, “Affect and Artifice in Cognitive Literary Theory,” Journal of Literary Semantics 42:2 [2013]: 165–180). 18. See Nancy Easterlin, “Cognitive Ecocriticism:  Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation,” in Lisa Zunshine ed., Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010): 257–274.

Lisa Zunshine   7 19. See Ellen Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida:  Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-structuralism,” Poetics Today 23.1 (2002): 43–62. 20. See Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation, especially 217– 272 (“Endangered Daughters”). 21. Among fields outside the purview of the present volume, but nevertheless important to the project of cognitive literary studies, are cognitive approaches to composition studies. See particularly the work of Joseph Bizup, e.g., “The Uses of Toulmin in Composition Studies,” College Composition and Communication 61.1 (Sep 2009): W1-W23. 22. Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach, 11. 23. Other researchers working in neuroaesthetics, besides those represented in this volume, include Elaine Scarry (e.g., Dreaming by the Book [Princeton University Press, 2001]), Kay Young (e.g., Imagining Minds:  The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010]), and Ellen J. Esrock (e.g., The Readers’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994]). 24. John T.  Cacioppo and Jean Decety, “An Introduction to Social Neuroscience.” In Jean Decety and John T.  Cacioppo, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7. 25. See Ellen Dissanayke, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), Kendall L.  Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1993), Arthur P. Shimamura, Stephen E. Palmer, eds., Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 26. See Rhonda Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action:  Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (Routledge, 2007); Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay:  Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Angus Fletcher, Evolving Hamlet:  Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural Selection (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Laurie Johnson, John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble (editors), Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre:  The Early Modern Body-Mind (Routledge, 2014); Rick Kemp, Embodied Acting:  What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance (Routledge, 2012); John Lutterbie, Toward a General Theory of Acting:  Cognitive Science and Performance (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and “Shakespeare, Perception and Theory of Mind,” Paragraph 37 (March 2014):  79–95; Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences:  A  Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Theatre and Mind (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and, co-edited with F. Elizabeth Hart, Performance and Cognition:  Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (Routledge, 2007); Naomi Rokotnitz, Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Evelyn B.  Tribble, Cognition in the Globe:  Attention and Memory in Shakespeare's Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 27. Projections, published jointly by SCSMI and the Forum for Movies and Mind, won the 2008 AAP/PSP Professional and Scholarly Excellence award for the best new journal in the social sciences and humanities.

8    Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies 28. For the foundational work on blending and conceptual integration, see Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New  York and Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996) and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending And The Mind's Hidden Complexities (New  York:  Basic Books, 2002). See also, Mark Turner, ed., The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Barbara Dancygier, The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Michael Sinding, Body of Vision: Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); and Margaret H.  Freeman, “Poetry and the scope of metaphor:  Toward a cognitive theory of literature,” in Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective, ed. Antonio Barcelona (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000): 253–281. 29. See, for instance, Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Anthony J. Sanford and Catherine Emmott, Mind, Brain and Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David S. Miall, Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2006); Willie van Peer, Frank Hakemulder, and Sonia Zyngier, Muses and Measures: Empirical Research Methods for the Humanities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing (October 1, 2007); Max Louwerse and Don Kuiken, eds., The Effects of Personal Involvement in Narrative Discourse, special issue of Discourse Processes, 38.2 (2004); and Yeshayahu Shen and Efrat Biberman “A Story told by a picture,” Image & Narrative, 11.2 (2010): 177–197. For more information on IGEL (International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media), see http://www. psych.ualberta.ca/IGEL/

Works Cited Bérubé, Michael, “The Play is the Thing,” American Scientist, 98.1 (January–February 2010): 70–73 http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-plays-the-thing Boyd, Brian. “Getting It All Wrong,” The American Scholar (Autumn 2006) http://theamericanscholar.org/getting-it-all-wrong/#.U0fjxseVG9c Dancygier, Barbara. The Language of Stories:  A  Cognitive Approach. New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2011. Easterlin, Nancy. “Voyages in the Verbal Universe:  The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism.”  Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2.2 (2001): 59–73. ———. Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation,” in Lisa Zunshine ed., Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 257–274. ———. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Kramnick, Jonathan, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Winter 2011): 315–347. Lyne, Raphael. Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Richardson, Alan. “Studies in Literature and Cognition:  A  Field Map,” in The Work of Fiction:  Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 1–29.

Lisa Zunshine   9 Spolsky, Ellen. “Preface,” Saving Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community, eds. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. vii–xiii. ———. Saving Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community. New  York:  Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2015. Shaughnessy, Nicola. “Perceiving Differently:  The Neuro-Divergent Aesthetic and Contemporary Performance,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Special Edition: Experiments in Theatre: New Directions in Science and Performance 38.4 (December 2013): 321–334. ———. Applying Performance:  Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Pa rt I

NA R R AT I V E , H I STORY, I M AG I NAT ION

Cognitive Historicism

Chapter 1

C o g nitive Hi stori c i sm Intuition in Early Modern Thought Ma ry Thomas C r an e

I have been trying to combine cognitive and historicist approaches to early modern literature for some years, but I recognize that the attempt to meld cognitive science with historical and cultural studies is potentially problematic, both theoretically and in practice. As Natalie Phillips notes in her chapter in this volume, much current cognitive criticism emphasizes the extent to which the structure of the human brain has remained more or less the same over time, potentially rendering historical cognitivism problematic; however, she also argues that the brain is altered and shaped by its environment, and that ways of understanding, discussing, and therefore experiencing brain function have changed over time. It is the interaction of human brains with historically specific circumstances that produces literary and cultural artifacts, so a criticism that attends to both the cognitive and the historical can, in theory at least, provide an illuminating account of those artifacts (Phillips, ­chapter 3 in this volume). I want to first briefly clarify what I mean by “cognitive,” and then address some of the theoretical implications of a cognitive approach to historical texts. I will then briefly discuss the problems of translating theory into a hermeneutic practice and, finally, I’ll try to give an example of the kind of cognitive/historicist criticism that I practice, applying the concept of “intuitive science” to the scientific revolution in sixteenth-century England as reflected in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. As we all know, “cognitive” can mean a lot of different things, and some very different theoretical assumptions and critical practices are called “cognitive,” as this volume attests.1 Currently in the United States, as in Europe, there are a number of scholars doing very interesting work using cognitive concepts like theory of mind, simulation, possible worlds, and conceptual integration to study various aspects of fictionality and narrativity:  how and why does the mind create fictional narrative worlds, how and why do readers process them?2 There are also scholars who use evolutionary psychology to make arguments about why literary texts necessarily take the forms they take.3 There are some other scholars working on the history of neuroscience (especially in the

16   Cognitive Historicism nineteenth century) and the ways in which historical ideas about the brain influenced literature.4 Finally, there are scholars who are interested in applying linguistic theories about conceptual metaphor to literary texts.5 I share a theoretical grounding with this group, but my critical practice tends to differ from that of scholars who focus largely on identifying conceptual metaphors that appear in literary texts. Some scholars today resist cognitive approaches to literature because they view the cognitive movement as dismissive of accepted theoretical paradigms. I believe that it is crucially important to work out the relationship between cognitive theories of thought, language, and subject formation with other theoretical models. When scholars turn to cognitive approaches as a way to avoid engagement with theory, as so-called Literary Darwinists sometimes do, replacing the insights of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory with what can seem like a naive empiricism, essentialism, and universalism— they risk blindly falling into the very assumptions that theory taught us to question.6 Cognitive science may well provide alternatives to some theoretical concepts, but cognitive theory needs to be read alongside, not in place of, other theory.7 And those who use a cognitive approach need to be cautious about claiming that its status as “science” raises it above other kinds of theory.8 As literary scholars we are usually not qualified to make judgments about the validity of scientific arguments—we have to take them on faith. So we’re really judging them in the same way that we evaluate any theory: does it make sense? Does it seem coherent and rigorous? Does it provide useful insights? For me, cognitive psychology and linguistics offer some compelling theoretical ideas about the nature of thought and the relationship between thought and language. I have been especially interested in cognitive theories of categorization, embodiment, and conceptual metaphor.9 This cognitive approach to language is derived from work in cognitive science that sees thought as massively parallel, complex, and ambiguous, imbued with emotion, necessarily embodied, and deeply metaphorical. Although early work in cognitive science hypothesized a brain that worked according to logical rules in ways that were thought to be analogous to the processing of digital computers, more recent work holds that mental functions are shaped by their evolution in the human body and are not carried out in accordance with rule-based formal logic, nor are they analogous to computer programs.10 Some of the most important work in cognitive linguistics and psychology has established the complex ways in which categorization is fundamental to human thought and also the ways in which it works differently than rule-based or classical logical systems. This work on categorization has also called into question the binary system of Saussurean semiotics, in which meaning is based on difference.11 The work of Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, and Eleanor Rosch in particular has suggested that we conceive of categories as structured by resemblance to a prototype or “best example.”12 We don’t recognize a chair as a chair because it matches a list of features that all chairs must have, or because it is different from a table. We recognize it as a chair because it resembles our intuitive idea of a prototypical chair. Like Wittgenstein’s work on the category of “game,” such prototypical categories have “fuzzy” boundaries: there will be instances (student desk, chaise longue) that cannot

Mary Thomas Crane    17 be definitively included in or excluded from the category.13 The category has a radial or gradient structure, with some members closer to and others farther away from the prototype.14 Meaning is not produced, as Saussure argued, by a system of differences within a linguistic system but along a gradient of resemblance to a prototypical example and with reference to what Taylor calls extralinguistic “patterns of knowledge and belief.” Polysemous words form categories that are similarly structured by prototype effects, and categories can be extended by metaphor or metonymy.15 Cognitive theories of categorization see meaning as produced by complex unconscious processes: we aren’t aware of the ways in which we use our prototypical image of a chair to structure the category. Categorization theory also emphasizes that meaning is contextual and ambiguous. The work of Antonio Damasio has established that even rational thought is crucially dependent on emotion. Because thought is embodied, it cannot be separated from the somatosensory centers of the body.16 Some cognitive linguists have also suggested that meaning is fundamentally metaphorical. George Lakoff and others have argued that another consequence of the embodied brain is the dependence of thought on kinesthetic and spatial experiences of embodiment. Infants develop the ability to think and use language based on prelinguistic and preconceptual “image schemas,” based on spatial structures like inside/ outside, up/down, containment, movement toward a goal, and so on.17 According to Jean Mandler, these preconceptual schemas are unconscious, and are not concrete, picture-like images but rather “dynamic analog representations of spatial relations or movements in space” that form a kind of “architecture” of thought: “its meaning resides in its own structure,” which can be mapped onto conscious thought and then language.18 More complicated linguistic structures and rational concepts are built up on these basic spatial schemas. Mandler provides as an example the basic image schemata of “containment” and “support,” which, she argues, allow early acquisition of the prepositions in and on in English-speaking infants.19 According to Lakoff, all thought is fundamentally “imaginative” in that concepts that are not directly grounded in experience employ metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery—all of which go beyond literal mirroring or representation, of external reality.20 We can only think about abstract things because we can understand them in terms of concrete spatial experience. Thought itself—conceptualization, interpretation, reasoning—is just such an abstraction, which can only be thought about through metaphor: we imagine our mind as a space within which ideas are created and housed; we imagine it as a conduit through which ideas are conveyed to other people; we imagine ideas as buildings that are constructed, we imagine ideas as people, plants, products, and commodities; we imagine understanding as seeing or grasping.21 Thought is conceptualized in terms of a number of different concrete spatial metaphors, and we cannot conceive of it without them. This conceptualization of language resembles poststructuralist theory in its view that language is not a transparent and rational medium that conveys intentional content. Eleanor Rosch, one of the primary theorists of prototype effects, seems Derridean when she insists that one cannot speak of “a prototype” at the center of a category, but rather

18   Cognitive Historicism must talk about “prototype effects” that emerge around a center that can’t be definitively located. Cognitive linguistic theory differs from a poststructuralist view, arguably, in emphasizing constitutive structures of meaning other than difference or binary opposition, in positing forms of thought that are prelinguistic, in arguing that the relationship between some signifiers and signifieds is motivated rather than arbitrary, and in emphasizing the bodily origins of thought and language.22 Language emerges partly from the human subject, partly from its surrounding culture, so culture still has a role in constructing the subject, but the brain also has a role in forming culture. Cognitive linguistic theory resembles psychoanalysis in positing a large role for the unconscious, but differs in arguing that we are not conscious of most brain function not because of repression, but because the processes in the brain that subtend language are so complex, simultaneous, and rapid that we can’t register them in real time. To me, the theoretical appeal of a cognitive approach is that it acknowledges that language is a product of the human body as well as of an external and disembodied culture. It leaves room to imagine not human agency, exactly, because we don’t control the mental processes that produce language, but to see the brain as a space where the person, culture, and the environment intersect to produce meaning. It also allows us to focus on metaphor and affect as constitutive features of language. However, this approach to language runs into difficulties when we try to apply it to the interpretation of specific historically embedded texts, for several reasons. I would argue that a cognitive approach to texts is more problematic in practice than in theory, if by practice we mean a hermeneutic practice. Work on the nature of fiction and narrative has produced many compelling theoretical arguments about why and how we process fictional narratives. But examples of compelling cognitive-historicist readings of texts are more difficult to come by, if by “reading” we mean an extended interpretive engagement with a text rather than relatively brief examples produced to illustrate a theoretical point. As I’ve argued elsewhere, a cognitive hermeneutic is potentially a weak form of reading because of the commonplace nature of the universal cognitive functions that it uncovers.23 Historicist criticism usually employs, whether explicitly or not, some form of the “symptomatic reading” outlined by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. This is the so-called hermeneutic of suspicion that reads texts for symptoms of ideological conflict or incoherence that they attempt to hide or repress. Jameson based his theory of reading on a psychoanalytic model, in which the analytical reader searches for signs on the surface of what lies repressed in the textual unconscious. Both psychoanalysis and Jameson’s symptomatic reading offer compelling hermeneutics, because both uncover things that are secret, hidden, dangerous, shameful, and therefore have been repressed. These methods give the analyzer an illusion of power to unmask, and what is unmasked is often scandalous in some way. I think this is why, despite questions about their theoretical legitimacy, many critics are unable to give them up. Cognitive readings, on the other hand, uncover signs of normal brain function in texts. Cognitive science suggests that most of what the brain does is unavailable to consciousness, not because the content has been repressed, but because too much is going

Mary Thomas Crane    19 on too quickly for us to be conscious of it. As a result, we aren’t able to dredge up hidden secrets: we’re largely offering illustrations of the ways in which literary texts are structured by cognitive functions, such as theory of mind, analogy, facial recognition, modularity, and so on. These readings are interesting to the extent that they make a theoretical point: literary and cultural texts are informed by identifiable cognitive paradigms and we can better understand how they work, and why they exist, if we can see their cognitive underpinnings. But as readings they may fall short, at least in comparison with the more scandalous unmaskings offered up by other hermeneutic methods. Are there kinds of cognitive reading that don’t involve pointing out the obvious? In my book Shakespeare’s Brain I looked at the spatially inflected configurations of polysemic words, words that were changing in meaning in concert with cultural changes of various kinds.24 Most scholars in the early 1990s would have viewed such words— for instance, the change in meaning of the word “villain” from a status term to a moral term—as showing the power of language to construct the subject, and would have seen Shakespeare’s use of these words as symptoms of his interpellation within early capitalism. Certainly that is part of the story. But there also seemed to me to be a kind of questioning play on this very shift in meaning in his text: in As You Like It, where brothers call each other “villain,” for instance, challenging the imbrication of class and ethical status. By looking for traces of spatial metaphors in words like “villain,” “suit,” or “pinch,” I argued that the structures of their meaning reflected cognitive as well as cultural pressures: registering feelings of loss, uncertainty about upward mobility, insecurity about the formation of the individual desiring subject. These spatial metaphors that shape linguistic forms give us access not so much to what Shakespeare thought about cultural forms, but to how he felt them—in terms of both perception and affect. My new book, Losing Touch with Nature, looks at the history of cognitive concepts of the “intuitive” and the “counterintuitive,” hoping among other things to shed some light on the relationship between “knowledge,” “science,” and what is obvious or banal.25 I am investigating the cognitive implications of the epistemological rupture that occurred near the beginning of the seventeenth century—the so-called scientific revolution, Losing Touch with Nature, Renaissance to Enlightenment. This rupture—described in different ways by Bachelard, Foucault, Kuhn, and many others—has been studied largely from the perspective of a genealogy of rationalism, and as part of a larger history of science whose purpose has been to understand how modern structures of scientific thought emerged from premodern irrationality and superstition.26 But from a literary perspective, it is more important to understand how people perceived, experienced, and felt about this change—those are the traces that show up in literary texts. And I believe that people felt strongly about it because it marked one of the most significant cognitive ruptures in human history. Both Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, among others, have argued that a significant epistemological shift occurred around the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth centuries, marking a sharp break between “paradigms,” or “epistemes.” Foucault, in The Order of Things, identified a Renaissance episteme structured by “resemblance,” which in the seventeenth century “relinquish[ed] its relation with knowledge” and

20   Cognitive Historicism “disappear[ed], in part at least, from the sphere of cognition,” to be replaced by the rigorous analysis of identity and difference.27 From a cognitive perspective, we can perhaps better understand why Foucault, following Saussure, characterized modern thought as based on difference. But cognitive theories of categorization must cause us to question whether “resemblance” did, in fact, disappear from the sphere of cognition in the seventeenth century, if categories are meaningfully structured by resemblance to a prototype. What actually happened in this period was slightly different: the analysis of difference and other techniques of modern empirical science replaced an intuitive, embodied approach to understanding the world that had been given official status by Aristotelian natural philosophy. Before this rupture, official science had its roots in intuition; after it, science became increasingly abstract, counterintuitive, and distant from embodied human perception. The birth of empiricism required, first, a separation from direct embodied experience of the world. A branch of cognitive psychology has focused on the power of “intuitive” theories of the world, especially as a barrier in teaching science.28 “Intuition” here is defined as concepts that seem “self-evident,” that are held with great confidence and persevere in the face of evidence to the contrary, and that allow alternative views only with difficulty. Studies have shown that even students who have taken a year of college physics still fail to grasp basic Newtonian laws of force and motion and retain their incorrect intuitive ideas about the behavior of objects in the world.29 Susan Carey has identified the dilemma of science educators: “our scientific heritage has provided us with deep and counterintuitive understanding of the physical, biological, and social worlds,” and it is very difficult to get students to replace deeply intuitive understanding of the world with counterintuitive models.30 Efraim Fischbein has written a very useful book that tries to account for the persistence of incorrect intuitive concepts in abstract mathematical thinking (for instance, a tendency to visualize geometric points and lines as having a concrete existence in space that corresponds to visual images of them).31 He argues that intuitive thinking will never be eradicated from the thinking of even highly advanced mathematicians because intuitions are “an integral part of any intellectually productive activity.”32 Fischbein’s sense that intuitive mathematical thinking derives from our experience of external reality has been linked with Lakoff and Johnson’s argument that human capacity for abstract thought is built up from “image schemas,” structures mapped onto abstract concepts from our kinesthetic experiences of embodiment.33 So the cognitive view that we can only conceive of abstract concepts through metaphors derived from concrete experience explains the power and persistence of intuition. Even though a mathematician knows that a geometric point is an abstract concept with no physical instantiation, he nevertheless imagines it as a dot on a page. There is just no other way to think about it. A number of contemporary historians of science have noticed that Aristotelian naturalism is in many respects coincident with “intuitive science.” Steven Shapin has noted that Aristotelian theories of matter and motion coincided with “common sense”: “the resonance between traditional accounts of natural motion and the texture of human experience is evident.”34 I’m arguing that premodern Aristotelian science met

Mary Thomas Crane    21 deep-seated cognitive needs in several ways because it coincided to a great extent with intuitive science. What I’m calling, anachronistically, Aristotelian science is really the tradition of Aristotelian naturalism that was the dominant paradigm in England for understanding the natural world for most of the sixteenth century.35 “Aristotle” here is in scare quotes: by it I mean a subset of Aristotle’s writings: the Meteorology, On Generation and Corruption, and On the Heavens, supplemented by Galen (and the related medical corpus), Ptolemy (and astronomical writings in that tradition), and medieval elaborations of all these writers. This tradition boils down to the theories of the elements and humors, the physical separation (but influential interrelationship) of the sublunar and celestial realms, an understanding of the large set of meteorological phenomena, and a focus on the manifest qualities of matter, including the elements and humors. There is, of course, a lot more to Aristotle than this. In France, the more theoretical works of Aristotle like the Physics and Metaphysics remained more influential than in Italy or England. But in England, this intuitive subset of ideas constituted a core that was assumed even by people who, later in the century, were vocal critics of Aristotelian authority. The epistemological underpinnings of this body of knowledge are most important to my argument. Aristotelian naturalism coincides with intuitive science because it is based on the assumption that ordinary common perceptual experience of the natural world gives us access to the truth about how it works. The manifest qualities of the elements, humors, and spheres, provide access, over time and in the experience of multiple observers, to causal phenomena. The key terms here are “experience,” not experiment, and “manifest,” not hidden. The crucial concept is the idea that ordinary sensory experience is necessarily adequate to reveal the truth about nature. Experiments can’t reveal the truth about the natural world because they depart from ordinary experience: they force nature to do unnatural things.36 In theory at least, all real knowledge about nature is “manifest”—clearly perceptible by unaided human sense. In theory. But from antiquity there were always phenomena that couldn’t be easily explained according to this paradigm: these include the so-called occult phenomena. It is very wrong to think of ”occult” in our modern sense as meaning “supernatural.” In the context of this Aristotelian naturalistic tradition, “occult” just means hidden, rather than manifest. “Occult” phenomena were assumed to have natural explanations of some kind, but they were exceptions to the general rule of nature because they weren’t “manifest.”37 Magnetism is a good example of an occult phenomenon, because the visible and sensible qualities of magnetic stones, their hardness and coldness, don’t explain their ability to attract iron. Partly in response to the existence of “occult” phenomena, some late medieval and early modern thinkers turned to alternative systems for explaining nature: Some scholars group these together under the tradition of “secrets of nature”—also called “prisca scientia” “prisca sapientia,” and so on—various practices that offered arcane access to the hidden phenomena of nature—as the things that naturalism couldn’t easily explain.38 “Secrets” traditions include alchemy, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, natural magic, astrology, and other practices that bridge natural and supernatural explanations for mysterious phenomena. But tropes and

22   Cognitive Historicism language associated with “secrets” can also be found in “respectable” works on mathematics and on astronomy. In sixteenth-century England, then, there was early in the century widespread acceptance of naturalism, although also always discussion about aspects of nature that eluded sensory experience, emphasizing, as in John Rastell’s “Interlude of the Four Elements,” the role of the elements “whose effectis dayly appere here at eye,” but also questioning phenomena like the roundness of the earth where the unlearned “can no maner wyse parceyve nor see” the evidence for this.39 In the course of the century educated people in England began to gain access to knowledge that increasingly unsettled the evidence that the senses provided about nature: the Copernican universe, atomic theories of matter, contagious disease, the supernova of 1572 all in different ways suggested that ordinary experience did not provide reliable knowledge about the universe. After 1570, natural philosophical writers in England made increasing reference to various branches of the “secrets” tradition. Sixteenth-century natural philosophical treatises in English repeatedly discuss the fact that nature presents “signs and tokens” to be read—but signs and tokens of what? Of the transparent causal phenomena of the Aristotelian system? Or of secret knowledge that needs to be decoded? Note that I’m not talking primarily about the trope of the “book of nature,” where nature was thought to yield moral and ethical truths relevant to human life. This trope is subsumed by a larger set of issues involving questions about whether these “signs and tokens” offer manifest and direct knowledge about the natural world, or whether they need to be interpreted in order to yield access to hidden knowledge about the natural world. Discussions about how to read “signs and tokens” show up repeatedly in astronomical, mathematical, and medical treatises published in sixteenth-century England. In these treatises there are two tropes that recur to depict access to knowledge about Nature: In the naturalistic tradition, a figure like Nature or Scholar explains phenomena that aren’t immediately manifest; in the “secrets” tradition, the author often describes the knowledge provided as enabling the reader to travel to some previously inaccessible place to view hidden knowledge directly. Two questions may come to mind at this point. The first might be how this emphasis on reading “signs and tokens” differs from Foucault, who emphasized the role of “signatures,” or signs in nature that indicated how apparent visual resemblances pointed to deeper correspondence. The difference lies in Foucault’s sense that visible signatures allowed observers to perceive that “this marvellous teeming abundance of resemblances” was “prepared by the order of the world, for our greater benefit.”40 Foucault relies heavily on Paracelsus for this view—an approach that came to England relatively late in the sixteenth century, as the belief in an intuitive grasp of transparent signs was falling apart. The other question might be how this epistemological gap differs from what people talk about as “skepticism.” It’s important to emphasize that these early modern English writers derive their doubts about their perceptions of the world not from reading ancient texts, or even Montaigne for that matter, but from observation of the world. They don’t believe that human senses in general are inadequate to attain accurate knowledge so much as that accurate knowledge, which was available in the past, seems

Mary Thomas Crane    23 newly inaccessible. They also don’t accept this lack of access as a fact of life, but work to overcome it. In my current project, I trace reactions to the loss of intuitive knowledge of the world in treatises on mathematics, astronomy, optics, and medicine. I don’t have space to summarize that material here, so in conclusion I’m going to briefly follow a strand through medical treatises on “temperance” and sketch out how I use this to read a literary text, book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Galenic medicine clearly embodies the epistemology of Aristotelian naturalism. This approach to medicine takes the manifest symptoms of disease: fever, and the excessive excretion of bodily fluids, and reads these as the disease itself, arguing that sickness is caused by an imbalance of humors and their perceptible qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry. In Galenic medicine, health is state of Temperance where humors are balanced. But humoral medicine can’t account very well for contagious disease, since, as we now know, the agents of contagion are too small to be seen with the naked eye: therefore, contagion is “occult.” Humoral medicine relied on a theory that corrupt air, manifested by its bad odor, was a source of contagion. But the early modern period saw epidemics of obviously contagious disease like bubonic plague and syphilis that could not always be explained by “miasma,” and some writers did begin to speculate about a germ theory of disease. Medical treatises published in sixteenth-century England begin with almost complete confidence about interpreting the “signs and tokens” of disease on the body, but by the end of the century increasingly acknowledge that the real causes of disease may be hidden.41 Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Health (1539) offers straightforward advice about how to read signs of disease and health on the body. Elyot explains that “distemperature” of the humors causes disease, “wherefore to know the distemperature these sygnes following shold be concydered” (3r). A few years later, Robert Recorde’s Urinal of Physicke (1548) acknowledges that since we have no direct access to the inside of a living body, physicians have to read indirect signs and tokens in urine. He explains that urine reflects “humours it cummeth from” (12r) so that if the blood is corrupt, “then shal the urine declare certain tokens of the same” (13v). Levinus Lemnius, a continental writer translated into English in 1576, is described by his English translator as having traveled “into the very bowels of nature” to bring back knowledge of the body.42 The title page promises that the book contains “most easie rules and ready tokens wherby one may perfectly try and thoroughly know, as well the exact state, habite, disposition, and constitution of his own body outwardly” as well as “inclinations, affections, motions, and desires of his mynd inwardly.” Later Lemnius identifies the “notes or markes of a body perfectly temperate”: “in the outward shew, shape, and behavior of the bodye there is evidently descryed and perceived a comely grace and portly dignity” (34). He further notes that “in the countenance, which is the image of the mynde, in the eyes, which are the bewrayers and tokens of the inward conceipts. . . there appeareth a kind of heroicall grace and amyablenes” (34). However, early modern medicine also had a “secrets” tradition developed largely in the writings of Paracelsus. Paracelsan medicine (complicated and internally contradictory)

24   Cognitive Historicism argued in part that disease was not caused by imbalance of humors but by “seeds” from the stars that cause a chemical imbalance in the body. The Paracelsan practitioner needed special distilling apparatus and training to read “signatures” to locate medicines in nature and to prepare medicines purged of their manifest “accidents” and reduced to the pure “seeds” that could counter the seeds of disease. Paracelsan medicine came late to England, with its first comprehensive explanation of theory in English in Richard Bostocke’s treatise of 1585.43 This treatise offers “the true and auncient phisicke which consisteth in searching out the secrets of nature,” largely through distillation. Bostocke argues that the true art of medicine was lost because “it was covered under divers parables and darke kinde of speech,” associating this tradition with allegorical writing. For Bostocke, Aristotelian “humours and qualities” are “conditions, signs, tokens, and as it were only flowers and colours of diseases, and not the very matter, cause, substance or nature of the disease” (c6v). He argues that true anatomical knowledge doesn’t come from cutting the body open but through distillation, which reveals that each thing in nature “hath two natures, that is, occultum and manifestum and that manifestum is commonly contrarie to occultum” (d7r). Many poems hide “the secrets of this arte” in “secret speeches and darke tales.” So the English poet Edmund Spenser inherited a natural philosophical tradition that was conflicted. On the one hand, there was an established belief that nature revealed the truth about itself on the surface through obvious and transparent signs, which we can intuitively grasp. On the other hand, there was an increasing belief that its real truth was hidden, available only to people with special knowledge, or special ability to read its tokens. Spenser, at odds with most English writers of his time, chose to write his poem as an extended allegory. Allegory is, of course, literally in the tradition of the “book of nature” where the surface of the world provides moral edification. But I believe that epistemological questions raised in discussions of the natural world underlie the troubling inconsistencies of his allegorical method and that these tensions are the engine that drives his poem. In book 2 of the Faerie Queene, Temperance is of course an ethical concept based on the Nicomachean Ethics. But, as Michael Schoenfeldt and others have noted, it is also a medical concept based in the idea that a balance or temperament of humors grew out of, and contributed to, temperance in the ethical sense.44 The Proem to book 2 immediately raises the issue of manifest as opposed to secret knowledge, running through issues and tropes familiar from the treatises I have just discussed: Faerie Land is a place that we don’t have access to: something that the narrator can “no where show” and that “no body can know” directly (Pr. 1.8, 9). The narrator evinces a late sixteenth-century awareness that not everything that exists is known: “let that man with better sence advize, / that of the world least part to us is red” (Pr.2.1–2). “Better sense” here is awareness that the senses are not always adequate to provide knowledge about the world. The narrator then brings up the discovery of the new world, a common example from the period of something that hadn’t been manifest before but nevertheless exists. The narrator warns that it is incorrect to believe that “nothing is, but that which he hath seene” (Pr. 3.5). Things in nature have been “hidden”—and the narrator’s speculation that there may be worlds on the moon and stars stands in for astronomical discoveries that unsettled the evidence of the senses. Nevertheless, an alert reader can find Faerie Land by “certain

Mary Thomas Crane    25 signes” (Pr. 4.2). People who can’t find it by the signs have sense that is “too blunt and bace”—suggesting, like the secrets tradition, that the adept can attain hidden knowledge that escapes others (Pr. 4.4). The narrator will, like the writers of medical secrets, “enfold in covert vele, and wrap in shadowes light” his descriptions of Faerie Land (Pr. 5.2). Spenser’s poem thus imitates nature by concealing its most important truths beneath a “couert vele,” providing signs on the surface that readers need to interpret in order to gain access to the truth. However, many readers have noticed that the poem does not always provide clearly legible signs, creating a situation where the reader’s interpretive struggles mirror the characters’ difficulties in interpreting the characters and situations they encounter. I’m arguing, then, that Spenser chose to write an allegorical poem in part because it provided a way to explore the most pressing epistemological questions of his time, and that the emotional energy of The Faerie Queene is largely generated by his obsessive need to stage and restage scenes where the observed surface of the world has a complex relationship with some underlying truth. Book 2 seems at first to accord with Lemnius in suggesting that truly temperate people reveal manifest signs of their temperate state on their bodies. Guyon is initially described in terms that could come straight from Lemnius: His carriage was full comely and upright, His countenance demure and temperate. (2.1.6.1–2)

“Comely” seems at first to function in book 2 as a verbal sign of a temperate complexion, and for most of the book only good characters appear comely: the Palmer is “A comely Palmer clad in black attire” (2.1.7.2); Medina is “a sober, sad, and comely courteous Dame” (2.2.14.5); she “comely courted” Guyon “with meet modestie” (2.2.15.2); Guyon addresses Medina with “comely gravitie” (2.2.39.7); Elissa’s table manners are “unworthy of faire Ladies comely governaunce” (2.2.35.9); in Alma’s castle Diet is “a comely personage” (2.9.27.6). But as usual in Spenser, this clear distinction based on appearance eventually breaks down—bad characters also seem comely and in the course of the book the balance shifts from mostly associating comeliness with temperate characters, to mostly associating it with the intemperate: Furor’s attack on Pyrochles “fowly battered his comely corse” (2.5.23.5), the bad Genius of the Bower of Blisse is “a comely personage of stature tall” (2.12.46.4); Excesse is “a comely dame” (2.12.55.7). To complicate this issue of whether, as the Narrator puts it, “by looks one may the mind aread” (2.1.7.6) Guyon, who reveals his temperate nature on his body, is completely covered from head to toe by armor: “all armed in harness meet. / That from his head no place appeared to his feete” (2.1.5.8–9). Guyon and Redcrosse are recognized by their “cognizance,” by reading the signs on their shields rather than by their physical appearance. (2.1.31.5). In a typically Spenserian redoubling, book 2 seems to be trying to show that the exterior of the body provides a manifest indication of its inner state of humoral balance, but, as if unable to trust this belief, adds on another layer of signs to the body, in this case the religious imagery of the knights’ armor that can be “read aright” by those with proper religious training. Temperance, however, plays a role in human ability to read even these artificial signs, since Guyon’s cognizance of Redcrosse’s shield was delayed by his intemperate state of

26   Cognitive Historicism wrath, unlike the Palmer, whose temperate state affords immediate “perfect cognizance” of Redcrosse’s identity. And, of course, flawed characters like Braggadocchio and Cymochles cannot be judged by their superficial knightly appearance: “Yet gold all is not, that doth golden seeme, / Ne all good knights, that shake well speare and shield” (2.8.14.5). The false Florimell is herself another example of Spenser’s interest in surfaces that conceal the truth. A cyborg created by a witch out of snow, wax, golden wire, and an animating “spright,” the false Florimell presents a beautiful appearance that repeatedly fools everyone who sees her. We are told in book 4 that “that Florimell her selfe in all mens view / She seem’d to passe so forged things do fairest shew” (4.5.15). Although her bodily appearance can deceive everyone (except Britomart), her falsity is revealed by the girdle of the real Florimell when it refuses to be fastened around her waist (4.5.17–19). It is at this point that she chooses Braggadocchio over other more worthy knights, but despite the doubts afforded by the girdle, the others (Satyrane, Blandamour, Paridell) continue to pursue her. Book 5 canto 3 presents several instances where “signs” or “tokens” of bodily proof are adduced in an attempt, yet again, to reveal the truth about Braggadocchio and the false Florimell. Spenser seems to be trying, like Artegall and Nature, to prove without a doubt that certain knowledge can be attained from manifest signs. When Braggadocchio tries to claim credit for feats of arms actually performed by Marinell wearing Braggadocchio’s armor, Marinell insists that the body and not its covering armor can provide the only true signes” or “proof ” of true knightly prowess: “shew thy wounds, which unto thee befell; / Or shew the sweat, with which thou diddest sway / So sharpe a battell” (5.3.21). Marinell then reveals his own body: “and these the signes, (so shewed forth his wounds) / By which that glorie gotten doth appeare” (4.3.22). Immediately after Braggadocchio is unmasked, the false Florimell is set alongside the true Florimell “to make paragone. / And trial, whether should the honor get” (4.3.24). The human beings present are not allowed to attempt this distinction: as soon as the true Florimell appears the false one “vanisht into nought: / Her snowy substance melted as with heat, / Ne of that goodly hew remayned ought, / But the’emptie girdle, which about her wast was wrought” (4.3.24). Definitive proof of the false Florimell’s false appearance is finally offered, although we learn at the same time that the previous proof (the refusal of the girdle to fasten about her waist) has in the meantime been voided. Spenser uses the word “token” as a noun in only one episode of the Faerie Queene, and it is not a surprise that it appears in this scene where proofs and signs are being obsessively redoubled. After the false Florimell melts away, Guyon recognizes his horse, which Braggadocchio had stolen back in book 2. Although Braggadocchio’s inability to “menage” the horse was noticed back in book 2 both by the horse itself (“He had not trained bene in chevalree. / Which well that valiant courser did discerne” (2.4.46) and by the narrator (“But chiefly skill to ride, semes a science / Proper to gentle bloud; some others faine / To menage steeds, as did this vaunter, but in vaine” (4.4.1), Guyon needs to present multiple proofs of the horse’s true identity. Artegall asks Guyon if the horse has any “privie tokens” of his identity, and Guyon identifies a secret signature mark, a “blacke spot” inside the horse’s mouth “shapt like a horses shoe” (5.3.32). Like a Paracelsan signature, the sign resembles the thing of which it is a token: the horse’s ownership is revealed

Mary Thomas Crane    27 by a mark shaped like a horseshoe. When two bystanders attempt to look for this secret mark, the horse kicks one in the ribs and bites the other. Guyon’s true ownership is doubly revealed, then, when the horse recognizes his voice, allows him to open his mouth, “and suffred all his secret marke to see” (5.3.34). The horse then provides further signs that he recognizes Guyon: he “follow’d him with gladfull glee, / And friskt, and flong aloft, and louted low on knee” (34). After the multiple signs and tokens, Artegall “did plaine arreed, / That unto him the horse belong’d” and orders Guyon to ride off on the horse while “that losell, plainely now displayd, Hence fare on foot” (35). When Braggadocchio protests, Artegall has his false signs of knighthood destroyed; “then from him reft his shield, and it renverst, / And blotted out his armes with falsehood blent, / And himself baffuld, and his armes unherst, / And broke his sword in twaine, and all his armour sperst” (37). Braggadocchio has been “displayd” as a losel from his first appearance in the poem. Guyon’s true ownership of the horse has never really been in question. At this point in the poem, though, the question of whether any sign, whether bodily or man-made, whether manifest or occult, can reveal the truth is so fraught that it must be doubled and redoubled, and then destroyed with equal fervor. Before rational empiricism could develop, then, we had to lose touch with our intuitive, emboded grasp of the world. This intuitive view of nature didn’t involve a mystical web of resemblances—although it came to do so as people increasingly realized that their intuitive sense of the world did not adequately explain how it worked. My book goes on to show how language and tropes associated with this rupture shaped central early modern English literary works, from Spenser’s Faerie Queene (its obsession with reading and interpreting signs and tokens), Shakespeare’s King Lear (its obsession with the new possibility of void space and abstract mathematics), Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (its awareness of changing views of the material world). A recent book called Rethinking Intuition uses cognitive theories of categorization to question the procedures of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which proceeds by subjecting intutions about abstract concepts to testing by counterexamples. This book argues that continental philosophy differs from the analytic tradition by basing itself on counterintuitive insights.45 This seems right to me, and part of the appeal of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory has been its resemblance to modern science in providing access to counterintuitive truths: to highly educated people, things don’t seem likely to be deeply true unless they’re counterintuitive. Cognitive approaches to literature and culture are perhaps less appealing to us (thought perhaps more appealing to the general public) because they are intuitive and often seem like an elaboration of common sense. By rethinking the origins of modern science from a cognitive perspective, we can better understand early modern reactions to it, and perhaps our own relation to competing explanations of the world.

Notes 1. For a useful guide to the full range of cognitive approaches, see Alan Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map,” in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, ed. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 1–30.

28   Cognitive Historicism 2. In this volume see Palmer and also Rabinowitz. See also Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction:  Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2006); David Herman, ed., The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2011); David Herman, “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories:  Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,” PMLA 112 (1997): 1046–59. 3. There are less and more successful versions of evolutionary approaches. For a problematic example, see Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995). For a more sophisticated example, see Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), especially ­chapter 5, and her chapter in this volume. 4. See Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime:  Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and also British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) as well as his chapter in this volume; David Miall, “Wordsworth’s ‘First-Born Affinities’:  Intimations of Embodied Cognition,” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 693–714. 5. In this volume see Bruhn. See also Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Donald C. Freeman, “ ‘Catch[ing] the Nearest Way’: Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor,” Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995):  689–708; Margaret Freeman, “Metaphor Makes Meaning:  Dickinson’s Conceptual Universe,” Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 643–66; Amy Cook, Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance through Cognitive Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 6. See Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37.2 (Winter 2011): 315–46. 7. F. Elizabeth Hart has written several excellent articles that trace the relationship between cognitive theory and other theoretical approaches to literature and culture; see “Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics,” Configurations 6 (1998):  311–43 and “The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Study,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 314–34. 8. For a good recent account of the relationship between cognitive literary study and “science,” see Mark Bruhn, “Introduction: Exchange Values: Poetics and Cognitive Science,” Poetics Today 32 (2012): 403–54. See also Hart, “Epistemology,” 314. 9. On embodiment, see the work of Antonio Damasio, including Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New  York:  Avon Books, 1994); on categorization theory, see John R.  Taylor, Linguistic Categorization:  Prototypes in Linguistic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); on metaphor, see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and also Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 10. For an account of this historical trajectory in cognitive science, see Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). See also the introduction to Mary Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially 10–13. 11. See Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 5–8. 12. See Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms:  Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1969) and Eleanor Rosch, “Principles

Mary Thomas Crane    29 of Categorization,” in Cognition and Categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B. B.  Lloyd (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978). 13. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 38–40, relates cognitive theories of categorization to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas about “family resemblance” in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), 31–33. 14. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 40–47. 15. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 83, 99–130. 16. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 78–79, 170–75. 17. See Jean Mandler, “How to Build a Baby: II Conceptual Primitives,” Psychological Review 99 (1992): 587–604; and Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 271–86. 18. Mandler, “How to Build a Baby,” 591–92. I’m paraphrasing from Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 8. 19. Mandler, “How to Build a Baby,” 598; quoted from Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 9. 20. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, xiv–xv; Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 9. 21. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 46–48, 101–5. 22. For a discussion of the relationship between deconstruction and cognitive linguistics, see Hart, “Matter, System.” 23. Mary Thomas Crane, “Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious,” Representations 108 (2009): 76–97. 24. Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain. 25. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, eds., The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 575–79, discusses intuitive sciences under their alternate names, “naïve mathematics,” “naïve physics,” and “folk biology.” See also Nancy Nersessian and Lauren B. Resnik, “Comparing Historical and Intuitive Explanations of Motion: Does Naïve Physics Have a Structure,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2001): 412–20. 26. Gaston Bachelard, Le Materialisme Rationel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 207–24; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:  An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New  York:  Vintage, 1970), especially 17–42; Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 27. Foucault, The Order of Things, 17. 28. See Bortolussi and Dixon in this volume for the ambiguous role of “intuitive” metaphors in science: “they can be either valuable heuristic tools or impediments to further progress.” 29. See John Clement, “Students’ Preconceptions in Introductory Mechanics,” American Journal of Physics 50 (1982):  66–71; Lillian McDermott, “Research on Conceptual Understanding in Mechanics,” Physics Today 37 (1984):  24–32; A. B.  Champagne, R. F. Gunstone, and L. E. Klopfer, “Naïve Knowledge and Science Learning,” Research in Science and Technology Education 1 (1983): 173–83. 30. Susan Carey, “Cognitive Science and Science Education,” American Psychologist 41 (1986): 1123. 31. Efraim Fischbein, Intuition in Science and Mathematics:  An Educational Approach (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987). 32. Fischbein, Intuition in Science, 21. 33. See Paul Cobb, “A Double-Edged Sword: Intuition in Science and Mathematics by Efraim Fischbein,” Journal for Research in Mathematics and Education 20 (1989):  214, who

30   Cognitive Historicism cites Mark Johnson’s The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Reason and Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 34. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 29. 35. On Aristotelian naturalism in England, see Hilary Gatti, “The Natural Philosophy of Thomas Harriot,” in Thomas Harriot:  An Elizabethan Man of Science, ed. Robert Fox (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2000), 70. For the generally understudied role of meteorology in the period, see Craig Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 36. See Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience:  The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13–15, 21–24. 37. See Keith Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” in The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe:  Readings from Isis, ed. Peter Dear (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 86–91. 38. See William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 39. John Rastell, “A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the four elementis,” in Three Rastell Plays, ed. Richard Axton (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1979), l. 125, l. 336. 40. Foucault, The Order of Things, 26. 41. See Vivian Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History 27.1 (1983): 1–34. She argues that in Galenic medicine, “contagion was discussed in terms of what could be observed, but the temptation was always there to seek for its invisible causes” (2). 42. The Touchstone of Complexions. Generallye applicable, expedient and profitable for all such, as be desirous & carefull of their bodylye health. Contayning Most easie rules and ready tokens, whereby every one may perfectly try, and throughly know, aswell the exacte state, habite, disposition, and constitution, of his owne Body outwardly: as also the inclinations, affections, motions, & desires of his mynd inwardly. First written in Latine, by Levine Lemnie, and now englished by Thomas Newton (London, 1576), accessed April 11, 2011, http://eebo. chadwyck.com/. 43. Richard Bostocke, The difference betwene the auncient phisicke, first taught by the godly forefathers, consisting in unitie peace and concord: and the latter Phisicke proceeding from Idolaters, Ethnicks, and Heathen: as Gallen, and such other consisting in dualitie, discorde, and contrarietie. And wherein the natural Philosophie of Aristotle doth differ from the trueth of Gods worde, and is injurious to Christianitie and sounde doctrine (London, 1585), accessed August 5, 2010. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/. On the place of this work in the history of Paracelsan writings in England, see Allen G. Debus, “The Paracelsan Compromise in Elizabethan England,” Ambix 8 (1960): 77. 44. See Michael Schoenfeldt, “The Construction of Inwardness in The Faerie Queene, Book 2,” in Worldmaking Spenser, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 234–43. See also Harry Berger Jr., The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 66–67, who argues that krasis or proper blending of humors is important in book 2. James W. Broaddus, “Renaissance Psychology and the Defense of Alma’s Castle,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 135–58 focuses on the role of the heart within an “Aristotelian-Galenic body-soul relationship,” in which “temperament, temperance, temperature, and temper are closely related concepts of mixture and balance with both psychic and physiological application” (137).

Mary Thomas Crane    31 45. Michael R.  DePaul and William Ramsey, eds., Rethinking Intuition:  The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. Le Materialisme Rationel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972. Berger, Harry, Jr. The Allegorical Temper:  Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms:  Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Bostocke, Richard. The difference betwene the auncient phisicke, first taught by the godly forefathers, consisting in unitie peace and concord: and the latter Phisicke proceeding from Idolaters, Ethnicks, and Heathen: as Gallen, and such other consisting in dualitie, discorde, and contrarietie. And wherein the natural Philosophie of Aristotle doth differ from the trueth of Gods worde, and is injurious to Christianitie and sounde doctrine. London, 1585. Accessed August 5, 2010. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/. Broaddus, James W. “Renaissance Psychology and the Defense of Alma’s Castle.” Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 135–58. Bruhn, Mark. “Introduction: Exchange Values: Poetics and Cognitive Science.” Poetics Today 32 (2012): 403–54. Bruhn, Mark. “Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience: The Prelude.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Carey, Susan. “Cognitive Science and Science Education.” American Psychologist 41 (1986): 1123. Carroll, Joseph. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Champagne, A. B., R. F. Gunstone, and L. E. Klopfer. “Naïve Knowledge and Science Learning.” Research in Science and Technology Education 1 (1983): 173–83. Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Clement, John. “Students’ Preconceptions in Introductory Mechanics.” American Journal of Physics 50 (1982): 66–71. Cobb, Paul. “A Double-Edged Sword:  Intuition in Science and Mathematics by Efraim Fischbein.” Journal for Research in Mathematics and Education 20 (1989): 213–18. Cook, Amy. Shakespearean Neuroplay:  Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance Through Cognitive Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillin, 2010. Crane, Mary Thomas. “Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in SixteenthCentury England.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Crane, Mary Thomas. Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Crane, Mary Thomas. “Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious.” Representations 108 (2009): 76–97. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books, 1994. Dear, Peter. Discipline and Experience:  The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Debus, Allen G. “The Paracelsan Compromise in Elizabethan England.” Ambix 8 (1960): 71–97.

32   Cognitive Historicism DePaul, Michael R., and William Ramsey, eds. Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature:  Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Fischbein, Efraim. Intuition in Science and Mathematics:  An Educational Approach. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things:  An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1970. Freeman, Donald C. “ ‘Catch[ing] the nearest way’: Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor.” Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 689–708. Freeman, Margaret. “Metaphor Makes Meaning: Dickinson’s Conceptual Universe.” Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 643–66. Gatti, Hilary. “The Natural Philosophy of Thomas Harriot.” In Thomas Harriot: An Elizabethan Man of Science, edited by Robert Fox, 64–92. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Hart, Elizabeth F. “The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Study.” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 314–34. Hart, Elizabeth F. “Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies:  Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics.” Configurations 6 (1998): 311–43. Herman, David, ed. The Emergence of Mind:  Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Herman, David. “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories:  Elements of a Postclassical Narratology.” PMLA 112 (1997): 1046–59. Hutchison, Keith. “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” In The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe: Readings from Isis, edited by Peter Dear, 86–106. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind:  The Bodily Basis of Reason and Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Kramnick, Jonathan. “Against Literary Darwinism.” Critical Inquiry 37.2 (Winter 2011): 315–46. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lemnie, Levine. The Touchstone of Complexions. Generallye applicable, expedient and profitable for all such, as be desirous & carefull of their bodylye health. Contayning Most easie rules and ready tokens, whereby every one may perfectly try, and throughly know, aswell the exacte state, habite, disposition, and constitution, of his owne Body outwardly: as also the inclinations, affections, motions, & desires of his mynd inwardly. First written in Latine, by Levine Lemnie, and now englished by Thomas Newton. Translated by Thomas Newton. London, 1576. Accessed April 11, 2011. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/. Mandler, Jean. “How to Build a Baby:  II Conceptual Primitives.” Psychological Review 99 (1992): 587–604. Martin, Craig. Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Mary Thomas Crane    33 McDermott, Lillian. “Research on Conceptual Understanding in Mechanics.” Physics Today 37 (1984): 24–32. Miall, David. “Wordsworth’s ‘First-Born Affinities’:  Intimations of Embodied Cognition.” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 693–714. Nersessian, Nancy, and Lauren B. Resnik. “Comparing Historical and Intuitive Explanations of Motion:  Does Naïve Physics Have a Structure.” Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2001): 412–20. Nutton, Vivian. “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance.” Medical History 27.1 (1983): 1–34. Rastell, John. “A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the four elementis.” In Three Rastell Plays, edited by Richard Axton, 29–68. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1979. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Richardson, Alan. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Richardson, Alan. “Studies in Literature and Cognition:  A  Field Map.” In The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, edited by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, 1–30. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Rosch, Eleanor. “Principles of Categorization.” In Cognition and Categorization, edited by E. Rosch and B. B. Lloyd, 27–48. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978. Schoenfeldt, Michael. “The Construction of Inwardness in The Faerie Queene, Book 2.” In Worldmaking Spenser, edited by Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, 234–43. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Sweetser, Eve. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Taylor, John R. Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Turner, Mark. Reading Minds:  The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Wilson, Robert A., and Frank C. Keil, eds. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E.  M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1948. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Chapter 2

The Biolo gy of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equit y of Revenge E lle n Sp olsk y

Erwin Schrödinger, in 1944, described life as open to what he called forcings, embodied in genes, and open, also, to feeding. Life is sustained by a contextualized, integrated, and self-organizing network of processes that incorporate nourishment from outside the body in order to produce and expend energy.1 Human life is supported, additionally, by a dense set of evolved and embodied cultural constructions, also contextualized, integrated, and self-organizing, to provide the different kinds of nourishment needed, from roast mushrooms to reading matter. Although life tends continually toward entropy, it also possesses the resources to maintain homeostasis. By signaling disorganization and increased indeterminacy, gaps and failures invite compensatory repair. Because human life is porously receptive to all kinds of representations—to verbal urgings in sermons and poems, to paintings that prompt memory or desire, dramatized models of action—works of imagination are included in the feedback loops that maintain cognitive homeostasis. Quite independent of authorial intentions, a culture’s most valued works of imagination can just occasionally be caught in the act of responding to structural failure by re-representing difficult issues in locally significant forms—forms that themselves evolve to adumbrate new possibilities. The potential power of creative work may be gauged by attempts to discredit it as “mere” fiction, or “mere” entertainment. The biological perspective, however, includes the agency of fiction among the social contracts that stabilize communities by their elastic responsiveness and their power to re-energize old forms by encouraging change. Claims for the cultural influence of any single work of art fall apart on close examination. The argument here is that only an onslaught of similar works has a chance of breaking

Ellen Spolsky   35 through cultural defenses that denigrate works of imagination as inert. I have been investigating whether the large number of revenge tragedies staged in London from the late sixteenth through the early seventeenth century2 might have mounted a response to the widespread difficulties caused by an obsolescent judicial system. The plays all display the impossibility of satisfying an individual’s need to right the wrongs of personal injury without undermining the larger need of a community for the stability derived from the rule of law. The cognitively hungry problems the plays display by their outrageous, often parodic, theatricality were just those problems the English courts were having as they lurched toward an accommodation with the needs of a changing community. Revenge plots, enlivened and empowered by Italian grotesque displays, did not solve the problems of the courts—they are tragedies, after all, not comedies. But the genre looks to have been a flamboyant way of signaling danger, and because they attracted large audiences, to have been a way of raising awareness of the need for reform. The debate among jurists was already underway. The grotesque form seems to have been particularly well suited to intervene in it by its lively representations of error.

The Cognitive Model of Learning as a Model of Historical Change The neuroscientist Gerald Edelman won a Nobel Prize in 1972 for describing the way immune systems recognize the invasion of threatening foreign bodies and produce appropriate antibodies. He elaborated a distinction between perception and the more powerful process of learning: only the latter generates adaptive behavior.3 All cells are potential learners linked into dynamic feedback loops. The cognitive defense of artistic agency, on this view, depends on the viability of the claim that failures of understanding resulting from confrontations with disorienting forms can be painful enough to force their way into already-in-place loops. By providing an encounter with new and interesting matter in a context familiar enough to make it understandable, some fictions may just be able to disrupt habit and open a space for learning when changed circumstances turn the entrenched beliefs and behaviors of that particular circuit into liabilities. Morse Peckham argued just this in his 1965 study of “the adaptational function of art.”4 It is not the message, he claimed, but the forms of art that stimulate us to organize chaos: A primary drive of human beings is towards order, that is, to perceive the environment as comprehensible and to make successful predictions about the future..  .  . Every successful use of [the orientation to order] reinforces the tendency to use it again. . .. Thus arises the paradox of human behavior: the very drive to order which qualified man to deal with his environment disqualifies him when it is to his interest to correct his orientation. . . . The drive to order is also a drive to get stuck in the mud. There must. . . be some human activity which serves to break up orientations, to weaken and frustrate the tyrannous drive to order. . ..That activity, I believe, is the activity of artistic perception.5

36    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge Peckham could not find, in midcentury psychology, a “sound physiological basis” for his contention that the adaptive value of art lies in the “oddity of the formal aspect of art and its stylistic dynamism,”6 and the demands it makes upon audiences to compensate for perceived disorder. In music, painting, poetry, and architecture, he claimed, audiences are “enraged” by disorienting forms of art, and thereby stimulated to make creative inferences. Peckham’s use of the word “rage” was perspicuous. Visionary, or re-visionary, thinking doesn’t easily permeate deeply embedded beliefs. Rage may be what is needed to break through the familiar assumptions produced by deeply embedded cognitive circuits. The evidence Peckham sought seems now to be at hand. Findings from several ongoing cognitive and biological projects converge in suggesting that organisms from proteins to neurons to minds have evolved to turn what looks at first like disorganization or failure into productive indeterminacy. They suggest the existence of functional homologies among biological, neurological, physiological, and cognitive processes. A homology is a shared form and/or function. It may suggest a common descent, as the homology between an arm and a wing. In the examples I’ll discuss, a homology is a common method of dealing with a messy or indeterminate biological situation, a method that can be seen to have provided a solution, and, thus, to have had evolutionary success, at other points in animal evolution. To claim that the processes of production and consumption of works of imagination are homologous to other embodied processes that manage complex and unpredictable states of disorganization, that make order out of chaos, is thus to claim that works of art feed their cultural habitus in a way that is not metaphorical, or analogical. The argument from biological homology is that like arms or chemical catalysts (see below), works of art, if they come in large enough doses, may be seen to provide the energy needed to spur a community to overcome habitual ways of thinking, and notice failure they might otherwise not be unaware of.

Grotesques In the revenge plays, it is specifically the intensely theatrical grotesques that by their outlandish, irrational mixes, by their uncontrollable, unpredictable outcomes, threaten just those crucial cognitive abilities that people develop as they grow in experience, namely, the making of robust categorization judgments and inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. A grotesque, according to Geoffrey Galt Harpham, is a “confusion,” a “civil war of attraction/repulsion” “a metaphor of co-presence. . . in which things that should be kept apart are fused together.”7 The word “grotesque” records the sense that though our attention has been arrested, our understanding is unsatisfied. Grotesqueries both require and defeat definition: they are neither so regular and rhythmical that they settle easily into our categories, nor so unprecedented that we do not recognize them at all. They stand at a margin of consciousness between the known

Ellen Spolsky   37 and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world, of dividing the continuum of experience into knowable particles.8

Grotesque images, from their fifteenth-century discovery in Rome to their postmodern computer-graphic incarnations, are deliberate category mixes of emotionally evocative sensory images, horribly shocking or just delightfully surprising. Even when delightful, however, they are recognized as “stuff in the wrong place,” as categorization errors. Anthropologist Edmond Leach named them “non-things.”9 On the walls of the Piccolomini library in the Duomo of Siena, one can see babies whose bottom halves are fowl with tails that sprout vegetation (figure 2.1). The grotesques in the revenge plays wed boundary-crossing actions to whirling words in disorienting displays. The protagonist of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy,10 Hieronimo, begs the King for justice following the murder of his son: Hieronimo:  Justice! O justice, justice, gentle king! King:  Who is that? Hieronimo? Hieronimo:  Justice, O justice! O my son, my son!   My son, whom naught can ransom or redeem!

FigUre.  2.1  Pinturiccio in the Piccolomini library in the Duomo of Siena. (Photograph by the author.)

38    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge Hieronimo, even as he recognizes that there is no remedy because his son cannot be returned to him, is now committed “To be avenged on you for all this.” The King ignores the request, but not his frenzy: King: 

What means this outrage? Will none of you restrain his fury? (3.12.63–66, 79–80)

Although responsible for law, the King fails the bereaved father by simply calling for his bodily restraint. Hieronimo’s response is to plot revenge. He arranges an entertainment for the royal family and their guests, some of whom are asked to take parts in a play. The audiences watching Kyd’s play thus watch actors playing spectators slipped into the play-within-the-play as actors by the actor/director/revenger. Like Hamlet’s inset play, intended to reveal Claudius’s guilt, Hieronimo understands his contrivance as a trial, or oracle. It will achieve equity, that is, it will reveal the truth by letting the punishment fall on the heads of the guilty, because it will somehow, he trusts, be directed by a righteous God. These volunteer players effect Hieronimo’s revenge by killing other volunteers by means of real weapons Hieronimo has substituted for stage props. Hieronimo has also promised a “strange and wondrous show besides, / That I will have there behind a curtain” (4.1.179–80), and that show turns out to be the corpse of his dead son dangling from a tree. The deaths on stage, assumed to be play-acting, go unrecognized for one hundred lines. Got it? It’s “strange and wondrous” and also confusing—that’s what grotesque boundary crossings are. The revenge play, furthermore, in ways not yet specifiable, but perhaps engaging mirror neurons, induces an embodied identification with the bodies of the actors. Viewers observe mutilation (knowing, in part, that it is staged), and listen to the revenger’s ranting—exaggerated, nightmarish, and disjointed interpretations of what has already happened—and illogical and frightening justifications of his actions. As it turns out, the “onstage” audience of Hieronimo’s theater loses track of the difference between reality and illusion.

Revenge as a Grotesque The grotesque form is well suited to display the mismatch of the good intentions and bad outcomes at the heart of the revenge genre. The actions of revenge are undertaken in a society in which the rule of law is not working: often, the person responsible for delivering justice may himself be the guilty party. The revenger usually attempts to pursue justice through the established system (as, above, Hieronimo’s call for justice), deciding to take the law into his own hands only when that fails. The metaphor of hands is apt for the switch from the failure of an abstract legal standard to a performance that promises embodied justice. Ignoring the law yet acting in the name of justice, the desperate revenger produces a plan driven by strong emotion and unrestrained by reason. The outcome is predictably grotesque. The arithmetic of bodies

Ellen Spolsky   39 and body parts strewn across the stage at the end never balances with the good and evil performed by the dead. At the height of the rape scene in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,11 Lavinia tries to curse: she cries out “Confusion fall—” before the villain stops her mouth. It is the confusion that appears just where there are gaps in the mind’s schemes of understanding that explains why grotesques have a chance of countering the biases of habituation and social stability and thus of stimulating new ideas. Grotesques, on this view, have motors. They create cognitive disturbances that audiences can neither ignore nor explain. The recent empirical projects I will now discuss suggest a homology between the grotesque and biological disorganization: malformations and misunderstandings teach, and we learn.12 Peckham would presumably agree that a raging revenger on stage, mirrored by disequilibrium in the very bodies of its audiences, together with the reoccurrence of ever wilder grotesques as the revenge genre gained importance and its practitioners vied to outdo each other, unsettled accepted understandings by embedding the impossibility of finding legal redress in plays whose theme is injustice. The argument describes an indirect causality; stimuli for social change pass through the bodies of artists, actors, and audiences by the power of their imaginative forms. In spite of learned resistance (“It’s only a play”), audiences respond to the chaos Peckham argued to be immanent in creative work.

Evidence That Disorder Works As imaging techniques get more powerful, scientists learn more about how human bodies make use of what may first appear to be disorder to repair and sustain life. Several otherwise unconnected studies suggest a generalization: what looks at first like disorder, ambiguity, or indeterminacy, turns out to signal the need for and to initiate corrective response. The analogy suggested here is between, on the one hand, the work of the grotesques within revenge plays, and, on the other, the physiological processes researchers describe as allowing something new to emerge. One project investigates the chemistry of metabolism, another, cortical management of semantic memory, and a third looks at human cognitive development, finding an important use for failure in the proprioceptive-vestibular system. All three suggest that Peckham was prescient in claiming the adaptive value of chaos.

Enzyme Catalysis Most enzymes are protein molecules found floating within cells. When they bind to other molecules (called substrates) they act as catalysts; they intensify the thousands of chemical reactions that support metabolism, that is, that transform food to energy. You probably remember learning that catalysts change without being changed themselves. That turns out to be almost true: catalysts do modify themselves, but temporarily. They

40    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge change shape slightly in order to be useful, and then return to their previous state after the work is done. Metabolism, and thus life itself, could not continue without catalysis. But an enzyme is specific—it binds only to its matching substrate. How do the two, floating around in a cell, recognize each other? In 1894, chemist Emile Fischer, noting that the enzyme and substrate have complementary shapes, suggested that when they find each other they fit together like a lock and key. Daniel Koshland, in 1958, proposed a revision called the induced fit model (figure 2.2). Note that the shape of the active site on the gray enzyme in the first drawing on the left does not exactly match the shape of the substrate hovering above it. But once the enzyme and the substrate bind, the enzyme assumes a shape that allows an exact fit. Koshland also found that there are attractors in the enzyme that pull the substrate toward it. In the third drawing the enzyme does the work of catalysis, and when in the last drawing the products separate from the enzyme, the active site returns to its former shape.13 Recent work by A. Keith Dunker (2002) adds some specificity to the story of how the enzyme adapts. Dunker has shown that about 40% of human proteins contain at least one segment that is “intrinsically disordered—meaning that they do not fold spontaneously into a unique three-dimensional shape. . .. And some 25% are likely to be disordered from beginning to end” (Chouard 2011:151). Structural biologists in their labs had been in the habit of simply clipping off these raveled edges as they studied them through their microscopes, until Dunker discovered that far from disqualifying the protein molecule, the disorganized edges actually facilitate on-the-spot matching between the enzyme and its substrate. But how can a protein function if it has no fixed shape? “We all accept flexibility,” says structural biologist Joël Janin. The question is: how can you get recognition with flexibility? The whole concept of disorder seems incompatible with the lock-and-key model. You might as well try to open the door with cooked spaghetti. Kenji Sugase found an answer: “the spaghetti uses the lock to mold itself into the shape of the key, rather than forming the key beforehand” (Chouard 2011:152).

The revised hypothesis is that disorder draws attention to its willingness to change: it invites filling, signaling that mutual accommodation will be rewarded. Disorder that looks Substrate Active site

Substrate entering active site of enzyme

Enzyme changes shape slightly as substrate binds

Enzyme/substrate complex

Enzyme/products complex

FigUre  2.2  Induced fit diagram (Wikipedia Commons)

Products

Products leaving active site of enzyme

Ellen Spolsky   41 like failure turns out to be a functional come-on: by its openness to on-site structuration, a protein can interact as needed with any one of its potential mates. Evidence suggests that even when bound to its partner, the adapting protein retains its disorder: “The complex seemed to be a mixture of different conformations shifting around in constant, dynamic equilibrium” (Chouard 2011:152). Chouard concludes that “a fundamentally new picture of the relationships between protein sequence, structure, and function is. . . emerging: a continuum. . . spanning all degrees of structural ambiguity” (153). That the intrinsic disorder of proteins facilitates their modification, making binding easier and quicker, is additional evidence that the processes of metabolism and cognition share the design principle of dynamic equilibrium: both have discovered a way living organisms use disorder to allow fortuitous matching of mutually needy components. Rigidity would be a disadvantage. Here’s another example.

Connecting Abstractions and Sense Information A project investigating memory formation and recall reveals how closely the physiological structure of the mind is tied to its functions. Jeffrey Binder and Rutvik Desai14 find evidence in neuroimaging studies supporting Antonio Damasio’s 1989 hypothesis that “the human brain possesses large areas of cortex that are situated between modal sensory-motor systems and thus appear to function as information ‘convergence zones.’ ”15 This arrangement enables increasingly abstract, supramodal representations of perceptual experience that support a variety of conceptual functions including object recognition, social cognition, language, and the remarkable human capacity to remember the past and imagine the future.16

They propose a concept of “embodied abstraction,”17 a process that uses this brain colocation to explain how sensory, motor, and emotional input can coalesce to disrupt habitual or embedded constructions. The result is a picture of dynamic flexibility similar to that displayed by protein binding catalysis in cells. In this view, conceptual representation consists of multiple levels of abstraction from sensory, motor, and affective input. All levels are not automatically accessed or activated under all conditions. Rather, this access is subject to factors such as context, frequency, familiarity, and task demands.. . . In highly familiar contexts, the schematic representations [abstractions] are sufficient for adequate and rapid processing. In novel contexts or when the task requires deeper processing, sensory-motor-affective systems make a greater contribution in fleshing out the representations.18

Novel contexts, then, unfamiliar situations that cannot be understood by already-inplace abstractions, can draw in, in fact require, new attention to just the kind of sensory and emotional input that certain kinds of creative work provide. Binder and Desai continue: Some conceptual tasks place strong demands on creativity, a term we use here to refer to flexible problem solving in the absence of strong constraining cues. Creative invention

42    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge through technological innovation, art, and “brainstorming” are uniquely human endeavors that require fluent conceptual retrieval and flexible association of ideas.19

These conceptual, that is, abstract, endeavors are fueled by, are made meaningful, by immediately proximate sense data. The claim is that repeated exposure to sense data produces concepts—that is, abstractions that can be manipulated as knowledge, but, crucially, without reference to the data from which they were originally constructed. They are allowed to drift, so as to be reused in similar situations. This is an advantageous efficiency (“use what’s at hand”), except when it isn’t; that is, when the concepts no longer correspond to real needs so that reusing them may now endanger the life they were evolved to support. In that case, the neural proximity of alternative sense evidence allows and may encourage revision of the abstraction. Our brains’ cognitive processes have evolved, apparently, to recruit compensatory material or rearrange refractory material in order to make sense of newly occurring challenges to its ordinary ways of working as needed, and to do this, it draws up contingent—that is, nearby—sense images to connect fragments of sense data, to fill gaps so as to make a pattern good enough to predict what the organism needs to know in order to meet immediate challenges.20 Gaps will be routinely filled unless something else competes for connection to that site, something powerfully world-entangled that demands a novel response. Imaginative work of fictions, stage plays, indeed, the grotesque bursting forth at the critical moment in a revenge play can be just what’s needed: disturbing, even enraging, world-entangled events in the lives of their audiences. If they’re present at the right moment, they are ready to be involved, to fill a gap, or answer a call for a revision. The revenge plays, as I will detail further on, were timely in this way.

Feeling Imbalance, Scaling Up A third example of the force of failure is suggested by Victor Smetacek (2002, 2004), who hypothesizes that the body’s proprioception, anchored in the vestibular and visual systems, and providing our sense of balance, scales up to an understanding of abstraction and of fairness.21 It is our ability to sense imbalance, and the anxiety thus awakened, he claims, that is the source of universal reactions to unfairness: Balance is so central to every activity, both of the body and the mind, that it is simply taken for granted. It is imbalance (disturbance, perturbation) that captures attention, be it fear of falling, the mental struggle to balance an equation, or the moral urge to right an injustice.22

Smetacek’s hypothesis thus also hinges on dynamic equilibrium, recognizing that understanding works in two directions at once, so that change can emerge from failure. What the infant body learns, then, taking its first steps, is not just how to walk but how to avoid falling. Smetacek here suggests that balance in relation to gravity is the most basic level at which the ability to recognize failure or error activates mechanisms of correction with survival value. If this was sufficient, cats would be judges. Humans, however, use language

Ellen Spolsky   43 and thought as the scaffolding by which their evolved sensitivity to imbalance scales up to support judgments of equity in interpersonal relations. With the increase in complexity, of course, the performance of moral and judicial balance can no longer be automatic. Taken together, these studies confirm Peckham’s expectation that science would find ways of showing how disorder itself incubates the emergence of new understanding. They display some of the many ways in which bodies, including brains/minds, have evolved the resources to profit from disorder, using it as a signal that repair and adaptation are needed. The revenge plays, by displaying the distress of characters in grotesque situations, expose their audiences to the power and danger of categorical chaos and failure. The grotesques are both material representations of the loss of clarity, of gaps, and of the flouting of previously functional knowledge. But more important, they induce a response to all of these in their audiences.

Imbalance on Stage Stage grotesques open their audience’s proprioceptive senses to learning in a situation in which conventional balance has been disrupted. The revenge plays work thematically, witnesses to a community’s anxiety about the availability of justice. But insofar as spectators can recruit a mature theory of mind, and a working mirror neuron system,23 they also display the situation of characters acting to correct an imbalance felt within their bodies, even if they thereby offend the rules of religious and civic law, producing new imbalances rather than correction. Bodies on stage are easily and unmetaphorically thrown or knocked off balance by the actions of others. The Elizabethan theater provided a special space for this, and that was the trap door in the center of the stage opening to the below-stage “cellarage,” presumably used for the entrance and exit of the ghost of King Hamlet, or as Ophelia’s grave, or as the pit into which the corpse of the murdered Bassianus is thrown in Titus Andronicus. These scenes are all grotesques in which words and actions interweave death and life, mixing black comedy and tragedy. Comedy, in Hamlet, is provided by the patter of the gravediggers punning and joking about death. “Custom,” as Horatio explains, “hath made. . . a property of easiness” so that [they] “sing in grave-making (5.1.54–55).”24 Somewhat grimmer are their gloating addresses to the dead as they toss around bones. They ask a skull: where are all thy lawyer’s pretensions of superiority now? Talking down to, even kicking around the remains of those who would have been their superiors in life turns the reversal of status effected by death into a critique of the imbalances of the class system. Hamlet voices the same theme in a higher social register; his address to the skull of Yorick is a classic ubi sunt, and his version of the memento mori is delivered in rhyming iambic couplets. The most painful grotesque is Laertes’s leap into the grave, by this action illustrating the confusion between places of rest Gertrude names: “I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, / And not t’have strewed thy grave” (212–13). Hamlet grapples with Laertes about who is the most bereaved, both

44    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge unbalanced physically and mentally, rehearsing their final duel to the death. Neither son of a murdered father manages to right the balance.

Making Grotesques Work for Change The closing scene of most revenge plays displays the failure of the dead or dying revenger to produce the restorative balance he sought. The audiences’ responses can be located anywhere along a gradient from discomfort to horror, but even a weak and subliminal recognition of this failure, like the awareness of physical imbalance, opens a process of sensitizing large parts of the audience to the need for reform. Note, however, that while the stage situation is signaling a need for corrective response directly to the body, the audiences’ fundamental stability is protected by the playhouse itself, the genre of the play, the improbability of the events, the exotic settings, all of which ask the audiences not to confuse what they have seen with real life. The audience’s learned awareness that what they are watching is play-acting stimulates resistance to any such world-connected understanding. The inventive playwright, then, doesn’t wait until the end: he frontloads grotesques so that the play’s horrific denouement is not the audience’s first or only encounter with grotesque disorganization. Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus, mixes punning humor and a dash of literary parody with horrific actions at a comic pace. By the rape scene in act 2, Tamora, Queen of the defeated Goths, has sworn revenge against Titus, the victorious Roman general who has murdered the youngest of her three sons, and against Bassianus, the younger brother of the new Roman emperor, who has refused to marry her, being already engaged to marry Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. The relevant players come together in a forest for a ghastly hunt that is no game. In the painted grotesque in figure 2.1, parts of wild animals are linked to parts of human bodies; here the hunters are beasts and the human victims of their desire for revenge are their prey. Outrageous actions are entangled with grotesque rhetorical displays. Tamora’s sons respond to her explicit command to “revenge . . . as you love your mother’s life” (2.2.114–15) by murdering Bassianus, as his new wife, Lavinia, watches. Although pleased, Tamora grabs the dagger to stab Lavinia as well, expressing the twisted situation in her language: “Give me the poniard. You shall know, my boys,/ Your mothers’ hand shall right your mother’s wrong” (120–21). But the “boys” will be her boys, indeed, as they demonstrate by stopping her hand and suggesting that Lavinia should first be raped. Chiron proposes a grotesque array from the visual elements at hand: “Drag hence her husband to some secret hole / And make his dead trunk pillow to our lust” (129–30). Mother agrees after extracting their promise to kill their victim afterwards. Shakespeare doesn’t miss the chance to emphasize the unnaturalness of a mother teaching her sons cruelty as, in extremis, Lavinia pleads with Tamora and her sons: ’Tis present death I beg. . . And tumble me into some loathsome pit. . . . Do this and be a charitable murderer.

Ellen Spolsky   45 The speech calls attention to itself as a grotesque by the implied conditional and oxymoron in the last line: if you consent to my request, I would (were I still alive) call you a “charitable murderer.” Tamora responds to the hint of money by responding that she won’t “rob my sweet sons of their fee. / No, let them satisfy their lust on thee” (2.2.179-80). She encourages them again as she exits, and the men drag their victim off stage. Modern productions don’t spare audiences the screams of the victim. After a macabre scene in which two of Titus’s sons discover Bassianus’s body when they fall into the stage pit and have difficulty climbing out, the clowning turns darker as the two are framed for the murder of Bassianus. The First Folio stage direction then describes the reentry of Lavinia dragged by her rapists onto the stage 120 lines after their exit: “Enter the Empresse [Tamora]’s Sonnes, with Lavinia, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished.” Always a shocking entrance, Lavinia usually clothed in white with copious blood flowing, the sons taunt her in the same twisted grotesque style as seen earlier. Demetrius: “So, now go tell, and if thy tongue can speak, / Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee.” Chiron: “Write down thy mind, betwray thy meaning so, / And if thy stumps will let thee, play the scribe” (2.3.1-4). This joking continues until they exit, leaving her collapsed and silent on the stage. A different register of horror is now displayed as the mutilated Lavinia is discovered by her uncle, Marcus. His address describes her injuries by parodying the conventional conceits of Petrarchan love poetry: Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips, Coming and going with thy honey breath. (2.3.22–25)

Marcus is the audience here, expressing shock in a mix of horror and honey, blood and rosy lips, imaging the impossibility of understanding what he sees.25

From Chaos to Change It seems likely that grotesques are the more disturbing the closer they come to violating just those boundaries that audiences need to maintain if their own beliefs are to remain intact. The grotesques in the revenge plays repeatedly and painfully confound theater and reality, performance and justice as they represent the chaotic effects of broken bonds between kinsmen or between parent and child, and the attempts of the injured to balance accounts. Titus, instead of being the giver of life, condemns his own son to death, a category abuse repeated in the last act when he breaks his daughter’s neck. Tamora and her sons have been disguised, she as “Revenge.” Titus pretends to acknowledge the sons as Rape and Murder, while planning his own revenge theater. He captures and kills the sons, invites Tamora to a banquet, announcing, “I’ll play the cook,” and feeds her a meat pie made of the ground flesh of her murdered sons. Similarly, in The Spanish Tragedy, civil bonds are broken as

46    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge Hieronimo, although an officer of justice (a “knight marshall”), renounces his position, and himself becomes a stage director, then a murderer, and soon a suicide. The grotesques deliver the chaos resulting from failures of law, but suggesting solutions isn’t their job. Tragedies make a mess but don’t clean it up. Notice what has been accomplished by this argument: by attending to how forms act on the bodies of their audiences, we’ve been able to see them actively overwhelming conventional judgments about their fictionality, at least for the space of the playtime. Their agency, thus, is on a par with that of other forces swirling around within a community, connecting people within their environment by direction and by indirection. Though wildly, even comically implausible, the grotesques are not, as has been suggested, “decoupled” or exempted from the evaluations we must be making, day-to-day, about the reliability of information encountered.26 The power of minds mirroring the actions of bodies on stage (even more so in movies), and our difficulties in making sense of what we see, differently, for different people, counterbalance an automatic dismissal of the performance as fiction.

If It Works, Reuse It Evolution repeats successful configurations. Structural and functional arrangements such as ways of managing chaos or disorganization found at one level of biological organization will be found in other places and at other levels.27 The good trick of the grotesques is that by speaking directly to our sensing bodies as they confound our understanding, they may evade conventional resistance. They can be used to take advantage of the disorganization and the failures they themselves produce. Binder and Desai might well be talking here about the cognitive work demanded by grotesques: Some conceptual tasks place strong demands on creativity, a term we use here to refer to flexible problem solving in the absence of strong constraining cues.28

As with enzymes finding their proper substrates, the absence of constraining cues allows the emergence of new ideas or new combinations of old ones, as when we produce and understand original metaphors.29 That chaos, underorganization, and failure are useful stimuli is the assumption Smetacek makes in proposing that our embodied sense of balance grounds our understanding of fairness. These studies, then, confirm Peckham’s expectation that science would find ways of showing how innovative forms of art allow the emergence of new understanding.

Revenge Tragedies in Their London Context Although the continued popularity of revenge narratives testifies to our permanent discomfort in the face of unfairness, literary historians have made several converging

Ellen Spolsky   47 suggestions about what specific abuses might have resonated in the early modern playhouse. James Shapiro connects Tudor and Stuart drama to the threat to authority from the relationship of staged violence to the state-sponsored “high drama on scaffolds before crowds of spectators.” The state, he asserts, would have had an interest in “keep[ing] these two kinds of performances distinct,” but didn’t always manage it.30 He cites a particular boundary-crossing grotesque in The Spanish Tragedy, in which Pedringano, a character about to be hanged, enacts all the familiar preliminaries to a “real” hanging (confession, contrition, prayer). Expecting to be pardoned at the last minute, he must be thinking that his actions are a performance, but no pardon appears, and the hanging occurs on stage. Shapiro argues, on the basis of other contemporary confusions of theater and violence, such as bearbaiting, where injury and death are very real, that “the spectators who witness the execution cannot be entirely sure that the violence is not real.”31 Linda Woodbridge details the ways in which individuals within the revenge plays’ audiences might have suffered from the disruptive economic imbalances that resulted from the failures of government regulation.32 Describing what she understands to have been widespread and widely resented social inequality produced by the inadequate court system, she suggests, as does Shapiro, the vulnerability of real bodies to representations of chaos. Confirming this social dysphoria, Euan Cameron notes a contribution to the crisis of confidence in the workings of justice resulting from the English church’s break with Rome. Unsettled beliefs about reward and punishment, he argues, would have followed the abolition of the Catholic “penitential cycle,” which was a “rhythmic progress through sin, confession, absolution, penance, grace, and further sin.”33 Church reforms, furthermore, forced changes in the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, with secular courts now competing to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of Rome’s authority over such matters as debt and property transfer. Yet the continued credibility of the legal system depended on its being seen as faithful to its own historical principles. Nor could changes contradict common notions of fairness if they were to provide the desired stability. Confusion resulted, thus, not only from the very real inadequacies of the court system, but also from efforts to repair it. Brooks and Sharpe discuss a marked increase in litigation from circa 1580 and many accompanying changes in law and procedures, “an important consequence [being] a growing anxiety about the uncertainty of the law.”34

The Court of Chancery and Equity A closer look at civil imbalance in early modern England suggests that the problems between the competing jurisdictions of the common-law courts and the Chancery Court, also referred to as the equity court, were particularly threatening, even chaotic, even grotesque. The problems caused by the inflexible procedures of the centuries-old common-law courts—for example, they were not allowed to call witnesses—had traditionally been softened by the possibility of appeal to the king. As the holder of the Great Seal, and thus with the power of the monarch himself, the chancellor had, since King

48    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge Edward I in 1300, been delegated to hear pleas from plaintiffs to whom the common law had been unfair. A commonly cited example was the poor fool who had repaid a debt but failed through ignorance or carelessness to take back his cancelled bond; the common-law courts could not prevent the holder of the bond from collecting it again. By the sixteenth century, Chancery, or equity court, had come to be the place where allowances for individual cases could be made, where, as it was said, “facts” not “laws” could be the basis of judgments. Note the dilemma here: since there will always be extenuating circumstances, the focus of the equity court was the contingent, the one-off, the unruly “facts” or events that did not properly fit the written law. The chancellor, operating without a jury and explicitly forbidden from acting on precedent, was said to act on his conscience. Like the stage grotesques, this lack of constraint was disturbingly subversive: he could, and regularly did, overturn common-law judgments. The paradox at the heart of equity is described by Christopher St. German in his widely circulated treatise of 1530, Doctor and Student: Equytye is a ryghtwysenes that consideryth all the pertyculer cyrcumstaunces of the dede/ the whiche also is temperyd with the swetnes of mercye. . . . . And the wyse man sayth: be not ouer moch ryghtwyse for the extreme ryghtwysenes is extreme wronge / as who sayth yf thou take all that the words of the law gyueth the thou shalte sometyme do against the lawe.35

Room must be found in the system for equity, because the law itself, since it must be written in generalizations, can produce “extreme wronge.” Like the revenger who makes himself the law, and like the grotesques, the equity court operates without conventional restraints. In the interests of restoring balance, however, the unrestrained nature of equity court judgment endangers the stability of the larger community. The problem of equity was argued in jurisprudential writing over three centuries. The debates were particularly painful during the reign of James I, when the issue entangled James’s absolutist claims, and his insistence that the decisions of his chancellor could be limited only by himself or God.36 The comment of John Selden (1689)—that “Equity is a Roguish thing”—recognizes its lack of a truth standard: “for Law,” he says, “we have a measure, know what to trust to, Equity is according to Conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity.”37 The Chancery Court, distinguishing public law from the conscience of an individual, was equal, in its deconstructive powers, to revenge and to grotesque. The internal contradictions of equity law were widely recognized; Mark Fortier finds echoes of the controversy in “many, perhaps even most, of the major voices in the period. . . the writings of Elizabeth and James, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Bacon and Ellesmere, Perkins and Laud, Milton and Hobbes.”38

Conclusion I have been defending the claim that works of the imagination play their part in the biological dynamic of life, holding entropy at bay. Considering the early modern revenge

Ellen Spolsky   49 plays from a historically and biologically contextualized perspective, I have suggested that imaginative exchanges can do more than help maintain social homeostasis, as Stephen Greenblatt39 has noted they can: they may also foster adaptation, building a community aware of the need for and receptive to change. The homology between grotesque forms and other apparently chaotic life processes that foster what Schrödinger called negative entropy is the basis for this claim. The evidence is still fragmentary, but the homology itself is defended by the widely accepted assumption that evolution reuses biologically efficient processes. Insofar as grotesques produce mental confusion, bodily discomfort (perhaps via the mirror neuron system), and interpretive failure, they seem to have found an embodied path that can evade learned resistance to fictional genres. Sometimes you cry at the end of a movie even though it’s just a movie. Individuals are different, plays are different, and yet in a set of generically recognizable ways, a cluster of works can be seen to collude in displaying intractable conflicts between individual and public interests so as to allow them to be recognized and perhaps even articulated by at least some members of their audiences. Stage plays in London in the decades on both sides of 1600 had a chance of being widely influential because they were attended by people of all social strata from royalty to groundlings. There was nothing equivalent until the movies. The claim is that the brain’s dynamic flexibility eventually empowered a new consensus about what constitutes fairness. Eventually enough people “got it” because they had bodies that reacted to imbalance. Cultural historians have drawn our attention to an accumulation of major changes in religious, economic, and political life that could surely have increased uncertainty and raised anxiety about crime and punishment. Cameron points out the loss of specific religious rites, Shapiro notes the overlaps between stage violence and real scaffolds, and Woodbridge suggests that experiences of injustice in life outside the wooden O would surely have conditioned theater audiences to recognize the unfairness of a system in which social status trumped the facts—those very facts that the equity courts were set up to take into account. The examples of how a variety of biological systems make use of failure and disorder support Peckham’s hypothesis that the adaptability provoked by specific forms of art is grounded in the rage that goads both artists and their audiences toward change.40 Smetacek would describe that rage as sensitivity to imbalance, while Sperber and Barrett would call it a reaction to disorganization. Their view converges with Binder and Desai’s hypothesis that brains correct dysfunctional abstractions by consultations with contiguous new sense data. Peckham’s emotional language is, of course, closer to the dramatic rage of the injured parties in the plays. The grotesque scenes and the disjointed language—most playwrights show their revengers to be mad at some point—flout conventional category distinctions and display the failure of bonds between people whom audiences expect to be mutually responsible. By these incitements the playwrights tumble and disorganize their audiences, taking advantage of their sympathy with the injured bodies on stage. The crucial claim about the agency of the grotesques, then, learned from the biological homologies described above, is that they awaken our bodies’ discomfort by their fantastic and violent category mixing. They induce an inarticulate pain by their displays of the failure of contracted expectations of satisfaction. The imaginative

50    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge performances we call art, thus, keep us—or enough of us—flexible. They help us to continually adjust not only to what we know but how we represent it to ourselves and among ourselves. But recognizing the danger of entrenched understanding and the pain needed to dislodge it is only the first step. Change doesn’t happen quickly because the necessary coalition for change is built slowly and against all kinds of resistance, including the resistance of the art forms themselves. It may be, furthermore, that the best and most creative minds are working on the hardest problems.41 The community in trouble is lucky if it is fed by reinforcing encounters with revisionary understanding from many sources so that it eventually self-corrects. Not all communities do, of course. The forms of art win permission to be as suggestive as they are by promises that they can’t do any harm since they aren’t real, but cognitive literary historians are beginning to be able to articulate the ways in which they get around that barrier. The desire for revenge along with the satisfaction it affords and the problems it causes are very real, and audiences recognize those realities within the stage fictions. How to manage the individual need for the restoration of balance with the needs of the larger community is a cognitively hungry problem that may not have a satisfactory solution. I presume the revenge genre remains popular to this day because we are still seeking it.

Notes 1. See Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), sec. 11F, or Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), for discussion. 2. Linda Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4–5, details the number of plays on revenge themes and illustrates their popularity from surviving records. 3. Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1989). For an update on current work on immunology and homeostasis see Nature 481 (7381), January 19, 2012. 4. Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts (New York: Schocken, 1967). 5. Ibid., xi. 6. Ibid., x–xi. 7. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 9, 11. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. Edmund Leach, “Anthropological Aspects of Language:  Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse,” in Reader in Comparative Religion, ed. William Lessa and Evon Vogt (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 10. J. R. Mulryne, ed., The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, 2nd ed. (London: A & C Black, 1989). 11. Jonathan Bate, ed., Titus Andronicus, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1995). 12. On the necessity of mistakes see Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations:  The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1962) and William C. Wimsatt, Reengineering

Ellen Spolsky   51 Philosophy for Limited Beings:  Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2007). See also http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/12/01/wheredoes-innovation-come-from-2/. 13. See Daniel E.  Koshland Jr., “The Key-Lock Theory and the Induced Fit Theory,” Angewandte Chemie International Edition/ English 33 (1994) for a summary. 14. Jeffrey R. Binder and Rutvik H. Desai, “The Neurobiology of Semantic Memory,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 11 (2011). 15. Antonio Damasio, “Time-Locked Multiregional Retroactivation:  A  Systems Level Proposal for the Neural Substrates of Recall and Recognition,” Cognition 33 (1989). 16. Binder and Desai, “Neurobiology of Semantic Memory,” 527. 17. Ibid.,, 531. 18. Ibid.; italics mine. 19. Ibid.,, 528. 20. See Daniel L. Schacter, Scott A. Guerin, and Peggy L. St. Jacques, “Memory Distortion: An Adaptive Perspective,” Trends in Cognitive Science 15, no. 10 (2011), on adaptive memory distortions. 21. Victor Smetacek, “Mind-Grasping Gravity,” Nature 415 (2002); Victor Smetacek and Franz Mechsner, “Making Sense,” Nature 432 (2004). 22. Smetacek, “Mind-grasping gravity,” 481) 23. Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People:  The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 24. Philip Edwards, ed., Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 25. D. J. Palmer, “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus,” Critical Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1972). 26. See Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Consider the Source: The Evolution of Adaptions for Decoupling and Metarepresentations,” in Metarepresentation, ed. Dan Sperber, Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ellen Spolsky, “Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff,” SubStance 94–95, nos. 1–2 (2001). 27. Uri Alon, “Simplicity in Biology,” Naure 446 (2007). 28. Binder and Desai, “Neurobiology of Semantic Memory,” 528. 29. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 30. James Shapiro, “ ‘Tragedies Naturally Performed’:  Kyd’s Representation of Violence in The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587),” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kasten and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991). 31. P. J. Klemp, “ ‘He That Now Speakes, Shall Speak No More for Ever’: Archbishop William Laud in the Theater of Execution,” Review of English Studies 61, no. 249 (2009), 103, provides evidence that public executions contained unpredictable, even carnivalesque, irruptions. 32. Woodbridge, English Revenge Drama, 4–5. 33. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 34. Christopher Brooks and Kevin Sharpe, “History, English Law and the Renaissance,” Past and Present 72, no. 1 (1976).

52    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge 35. T. F. T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton, eds., St. German’s Doctor and Student, vol. 91, Selden Society (London: Selden Society, 1974). 36. See legal historians Stuart E.  Prall, “The Development of Equity in Tudor England,” American Journal of Legal History 8, no. 1 (1964); J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 2nd ed. (London: Butterworth, 1979); John H. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England: 1483–1558, ed. John H. Baker, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert A.  Greene, “Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 2 (1991); James S. Hart Jr., The Rule of Law, 1603–1660:  Crowns, Courts and Judges (Harlow:  Pearson, Longman, 2003); Dennis R. Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England (Burlington:  Ashgate, 2010). On equity in early modern drama see Peter G.  Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009) and Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2006). 37. John Selden, Table-Talk: Being the Discourses of John Selden Esq.; or his Sence of Various Matters of Weight and High Consequence Relating Especially to Religion and State (London, 1689). 38. Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 39. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations:  The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 40. Nature 7299, “Plasticity,” June 10, 2010, 709–35. 41. See Ellen Spolsky, “Women’s Work Is Chastity:  Lucretia, Cymbeline, and Cognitive Impenetrability,” in The Work of Fiction:  Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, ed. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) and Spolsky, “Making “Quite Anew”: Brain Modularity and Creativity,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

Works Cited Alon, Uri. “Simplicity in Biology.” Nature 446 (March 29, 2007): 497. Baker, John H. An Introduction to English Legal History. 2nd ed. London: Butterworth, 1979. Baker, John H. The Oxford History of the Laws of England: 1483–1558, edited by John H. Baker. Vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bate, Jonathan, ed. Titus Andronicus. Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning, 1995. Binder, Jeffrey R., and Rutvik H. Desai. “The Neurobiology of Semantic Memory.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 11 (2011): 527–36. Brooks, Christopher, and Kevin Sharpe. “History, English Law and the Renaissance.” Past and Present 72, no. 1 (1976): 133–42. Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Chouard, Tanguy. “Breaking the Protein Rules.” Nature 471 (March 9, 2011): 151. Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. “Consider the Source:  The Evolution of Adaptions for Decoupling and Metarepresentations.” In Metarepresentation, edited by Dan Sperber. Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Damasio, Antonio. “Time-Locked Multiregional Retroactivation: A Systems Level Proposal for the Neural Substrates of Recall and Recognition.” Cognition 33 (1989): 25–62.

Ellen Spolsky   53 Dunker, A.  Keith et  al. “Intrinsic Disorder and Protein Function.” Biochemistry 41, no. 21 (2002): 6573-82. Edelman, Gerald. Neural Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Edwards, Philip, ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fortier, Mark. The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations:  The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Greene, Robert A. “Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 2 (1991): 195–219. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Hart, James S., Jr. The Rule of Law, 1603–1660: Crowns, Courts and Judges. Harlow: Pearson, Longman, 2003. Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People:  The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Klemp, P. J. “ ‘He That Now Speakes, Shall Speak No More for Ever’: Archbishop William Laud in the Theater of Execution.” Review of English Studies 61, no. 249 (2009): 188–213. Klinck, Dennis R. Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language:  Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” In Reader in Comparative Religion, edited by William Lessa and Evon Vogt. 206–10. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Mukherji, Subha. Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama. New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2006. Mulryne, J. R., ed. The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. 2nd ed. London: A & C Black, 1989. Palmer, D. J. “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus.” Critical Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1972): 320–39. Peckham, Morse. Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior & the Arts. New York: Schocken, 1967. Platt, Peter G. Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009. Plucknett, T. F. T., and J. L. Barton, eds. St. German’s Doctor and Student. Vol. 91, Selden Society. London: Selden Society, 1974. Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1962. Prall, Stuart E. “The Development of Equity in Tudor England.” American Journal of Legal History 8, no. 1 (1964): 1–19. Rosen, Robert. Essays on Life Itself. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Schacter, Daniel L., Scott A.  Guerin, and Peggy L.  St. Jacques. “Memory Distortion:  An Adaptive Perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Science 15, no. 10 (2011): 467–74. Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944. Selden, John. Table-Talk: Being the Discourses of John Selden Esq.; or His Sence of Various Matters of Weight and High Consequence Relating Especially to Religion and State. London, 1689.

54    The Biology of Failure, the Forms of Rage, and the Equity of Revenge Shapiro, James. “ ‘Tragedies Naturally Performed’: Kyd’s Representation of Violence in the Spanish Tragedy (c.1587).” In Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, edited by David Scott Kasten and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routledge, 1991. Smetacek, Victor. “Mind-Grasping Gravity.” Nature 415 (January 31, 2002): 481. Smetacek, Victor, and Franz Mechsner. “Making Sense.” Nature 432 (November 4, 2004): 21. Spolsky, Ellen. “Making “Quite Anew”:  Brain Modularity and Creativity.” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. ———. “Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff.” SubStance 94–95, nos. 1–2 (2001): 178–98. ———. “Women’s Work Is Chastity: Lucretia, Cymbeline, and Cognitive Impenetrability.” In The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, edited by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Wimsatt, William C. Reengineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Woodbridge, Linda. English Revenge Drama: Money, Resistance, Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

CHAPTER 3

Literary Neu ro s c i e nc e and History of Mi nd An Interdisciplinary fMRI Study of Attention and Jane Austen Nata li e M. Ph illips

I. Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) begins with a distinctive scene of absorption. We find Sir Walter Elliot lost in the Baronetage, raptly reading the story of his ancestry: Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one. . . [and] there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: elliot of kellynch hall1

Austen was deeply interested in the different degrees of focus one could bring to a book. As early as Catherine of the Bower (1792), we find the young writer comparing her heroine, “a great reader” of lengthy novels who remembers precise details about plot and scenery to Camilla Stanley, a young woman who has “missed them all” and complains her friend’s favorite novel “is so long.”2 By Pride and Prejudice (1813), Austen has begun crafting complex webs of such comparisons—what Alex Woloch calls “character-systems”— framed around contrasting characters’ habits of attention.3 Mr. Bennet is “with a book. . . regardless of time,” while Elizabeth reads even as she sustains an acute awareness of her social environment.4 Mary is inevitably engrossed, “deep in the study of thorough-bass and human nature”; Lydia has an attention span of “half a minute.”5 Austen’s curiosity about different styles of concentration grew out of a larger fascination with focus during the eighteenth century, the topic of my current book project, Distraction.

56    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind It offers a literary history of the attentive and inattentive mind between 1700 and 1830, tracing key debates over concentration in modern neuroscience back to their Enlightenment roots. This essay will focus on an interdisciplinary experiment in neuroscience that emerged alongside my historical research. Our study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technology for acquiring brain images of neural activity, to explore the cognitive patterns that emerge when we read a literary work with different kinds of focus. Talking about both projects lets me put two key subfields in cognitive literary studies—the history of mind and the neuroscience of reading—in conversation to discuss a topic central to both: the nature of attention. As I will suggest, the style and degree of focus we bring to a work of art (be it a novel, a poem, a piece of music, a play, a painting, or a film) can radically change our engagement with it, not only at the level of subjective aesthetic experience, but at the level of cognition, expressed through unique patterns of neural activation. Discussing our fMRI study alongside distraction’s eighteenth-century history, moreover, allows me to address two key methodological challenges in cognitive approaches to literature: (1) how to appreciate historical and cultural context more richly in scientifically informed literary scholarship; and (2) how to maintain ongoing reciprocity in the exchange between cognitive science and literary studies. As I explain our experiment and early results, my chapter also traces points of connection and productive conflict between the history of distraction and the neuroscience of attention. Though our study draws on contemporary technologies for brain imaging, thinking about different levels of attention in reading was a profoundly eighteenth-century concern. According to Robert DeMaria, Samuel Johnson spent much of his life mapping out the distinctive modes of focus we bring to a book, distinguishing between study—or what he called “hard reading”—and reading for pleasure, which included light “perusal,” “curious reading,” and “mere reading.”6 The fact that I turn to Johnson and Austen to historicize an fMRI study on attention embodies what, for me, is the most interesting part of bringing together research in history of mind and literary neuroscience. As Jonathan Kramnick notes, cognitive literary studies can risk a unidirectional model of interdisciplinary scholarship. Despite “all the excitement. . . generated,” Kramnick contends, cognitive approaches to literature often involve “one-way application[s]‌of work from the sciences to the humanities.”7 Here, I join a group of cognitive critics seeking to develop more reciprocal models of cross-field exchange, working to create a powerful balance of literary-historical and cognitive methodologies in the emerging field of literary neuroscience. On a concrete level, working simultaneously on a literary-historical book about distraction and a neuroscientific study of attention enriched both projects. Reading cognitive studies of attention while researching eighteenth-century theories of concentration helped me see crucial subtleties in the period’s literature that would have been obscured using traditional frameworks for understanding the Enlightenment mind, such as associationism or sensationalism. Working on distraction’s eighteenth-century history, in turn, generated new questions for neuroscientific research. For much of the eighteenth century, writers defined attention as a voluntary stretch or reach of mind, an act of will or effort. Being immersed in these historical models of concentration helped to produce an experiment that departed in important ways from previous cognitive studies of focus. Whereas past experiments tended

Natalie M. Phillips   57 to separate attention studies and the neuroscience of reading, our fMRI study integrated them, investigating the levels of concentration we could bring to a book. Finally, our group was organized in a way that facilitated richer interplay and exchange between humanities and sciences. The experiment brought together an interdisciplinary group of literary critics, neuroscientists, and experts in MRI to explore the cognitive dynamics of reading. At the beginning, one of my collaborators noted, we were all “working at the edge of our capacity just to understand even 30% of what each other were saying.”8 One of my favorite moments in the process, however, was when our group—three humanists and two scientists—met one evening to discuss the project. Something happened: the literary critics got excited about experimental variables; the scientists started waxing poetic about Jane Austen’s style. Now, this kind of crosstalk has become part of our everyday lives. This opening exchange across disciplines has become integral to our fMRI’s structure of collaboration as well as our ongoing data analysis. I (a literature professor) am the primary investigator, or PI, with Bob Dougherty (research director at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging) as co-PI. I believe such interdisciplinary frameworks have the power to create more reciprocity in cognitive literary studies. Neuroscientific tools can provide humanists with a richer picture of how our minds engage with art—or, in our case, the cognitive complexity of literary reading. Work in literature, music, history, art, and so on, can add a crucial qualitative element as well as cultural-historical dimensionality to experiments in neuroscience.

II. Our experiment on Jane Austen used fMRI and fMRI-compatible eye tracking to explore cognitive differences between two modes of literary attention:  pleasure reading and close reading. We defined pleasure reading as a more relaxed mode of focus that allowed readers to become immersed in a novel. Melanie Green, a leading cognitive theorist of absorption, describes this feeling of being lost in a good book as a “melding of attention, imagery, and emotion” where a reader is deeply “focused on story events” and often “los[es] track of time” while absorbed in the “story unfolding before them.”9 Literary close reading, by contrast, asks us to look more rigorously at a novel’s form, analyzing structures such as plot, characterization, setting, voice, and mood that give that work its narrative power. As Elaine Showalter argues, close reading means self-consciously adjusting the pace of our narrative engagement. She calls close reading “slow reading,” a deliberate attempt to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to language, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax, and form. . .. In a sense, close reading is a form of defamiliarization we use in order to break through our habitual and casual reading practices. It forces us to be active rather than passive consumers of the text.10

Close reading, here, is carefully distinguished from pleasure reading. In practice, however, the two often intermix. John Guillory argues that both modes of focus “are to be

58    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind found at the scene of humanist reading, which required the scholar to slow down or speed up at different moments, for different purposes.”11 We were particularly interested in the cognitive patterns that emerge alongside these shifts; as we will see, readers do far more than speed up or slow down. In our experiment, we asked subjects—Ph.D. candidates highly trained in literary analysis—to switch between close reading and pleasure reading as they read a novel by Jane Austen. (In our pilot study, it was Persuasion. For the final experiment, we chose Mansfield Park). To cue reading for pleasure, we asked our subjects to read “as you normally would. . . as though you just picked up this book off the bookshelf, and are reading in your favorite place.” For close reading, we prompted them to read as if they were preparing a formal literary essay, “[paying] attention to how the story’s structure is constructed, or crafted, noticing literary details such as setting, narration, tone and characterization. . . [as well as] literary themes and patterns, word choice, syntax and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold.” By investigating the cognitive changes that emerge when we actively direct our attention to literary structure, our experiment thus seeks to illuminates an element of close reading that often goes unnoticed. While many still define close reading as a formalist technique, or as an act of writing, our experiment calls attention to the modulations of focus in reading that precede essay writing. We define close reading not merely as an act of interpretation, but as a style of focus—a mode of noticing details about literary form—that serves as a springboard for later analysis, writing, and criticism. Asking people to move between these two modes of reading, moreover, allowed us to explore the neural complexity of a core skill trained in the English classroom. “Teaching literature,” writes Barbara Johnson, “is teaching [students] how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away.”12 By taking literary Ph.D. candidates as our subjects, we also tapped a contemporary debate currently raging over the value of humanistic training. While our data analysis remains at an early stage, preliminary results show unexpectedly widespread changes in brain activity when subjects moved between close reading and pleasure reading, pointing toward the cognitive complexity of this core skill in the liberal arts.

III. To understand these early results, it’s easiest to go through the study step by step and explain the technologies we used. fMRI gives us a dynamic picture of blood flow in the brain—basically, where neurons (which need oxygenation) are firing, and when. As neuroscientist Scott Huettel explains, fMRI lets us “characteriz[e]‌the patterns of brain activation associated with [cognitive] processes” and build intricate “maps that link brain activation to mental function,” locating these regions noninvasively with high spatial specificity.13 Our study also incorporated fMRI-compatible eye tracking, a technology that visualizes how subjects’ eyes are moving as they read.14 We can thus track patterns of visual attention, including saccades (micro-jumps the eye makes in reading),

Natalie M. Phillips   59 fixation points, and moments when people speed up, linger, or slow down. As the data analysis progresses, we will correlate this information from the eye tracking with the brain activations to provide a more detailed picture of attention and reading over time. Our project brought together 30 Ph.D.  candidates in English and Comparative Literature from Stanford, Berkeley, and San Jose State (12 in the pilot, and 18 in the final study). Because our focus was on differences between close reading and pleasure reading, we chose a population that we knew could do both reliably. First, students read the opening chapter of Mansfield Park outside the scanner and recorded the time it took them from start to finish (fig. 3.1). This not only gave us a sense of how fast subjects were reading, but also gave participants a chance to get used to Jane Austen’s style before the official experiment began. Next, the students went into the MRI scanner (fig. 3.2). Lying on their back, they read the entire second chapter of Mansfield Park as we gathered data about brain activation,

Figure  3.1  A  subject reads the first chapter of Mansfield Park outside the scanner

Figure  3.2  A  student enters the MRI scanner to read a chapter of Persuasion in our pilot. Participants read a digital version of the text through a mirror above their eyes, which reflects the text on a screen at the back of the scanner.

60    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind recorded eye movements, and monitored heart rate and respiration. Each subject moved through the text at his or her own speed, paragraph by paragraph, pushing a button in his or her hand when ready for the next bit of text. Each subject completed two sections of pleasure reading and two sections of close reading, alternating between these modes as they read Chapter two. Each block (about eight paragraphs) was preceded by a set of instructions, which told them when to read for pleasure or to close read. The color of the box surrounding the text alerted participants when to move into the next style of attention (fig 3.3): pleasure reading or close reading.

The little girl performed her long journey in safety; and at Northampton was met by Mrs. Norris, who thus regaled in the credit of being foremost to welcome her, and in the importance of leading her in to the others, and recommending her to their kindnesss. Fanny Price was at this time just ten years old, and though there might not be much in her first appearance to captivate, there was, atleast, nothing to disgust her relations. She was small of her age, with no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty; exceedingly timid and shy, and shrinking from notice; but her air, though awkward, was not vulgar, her voice was sweet, and when she spoke her countenance was pretty. The grandeur of the house astonished, but could not console her. The rooms were too large for her to move in with ease:  whatever she touched she expected to injure, and she crept about in constant terror of something or other; often retreating towards her own chamber to cry; and the little girl who was spoken of in the drawing-room when she left it at night as seeming so desirably sensible of her peculiar good fortune, ended every day's sorrows by sobbing herself to sleep. A  week had passed in this way, and no suspicion of it conveyed by her quiet passive manner, when she was found one morning by her cousin Edmund, the youngest of the sons, sitting crying on the attic stairs. Figure  3.3 Two sample paragraphs, or “chunks” from Mansfield Park marked for pleasure reading or close reading. In the experiment, these sections were continuous, the text-box marked for pleasure reading in green or close reading in red. We sustained this color-coding for all sections of the text to follow, providing subjects with a subtle memory prompt as they moved sequentially through the chapter.

Natalie M. Phillips   61 At the end, the students left the scanner and drafted a short essay on the sections they read closely. They also completed a survey on narrative transport (Green’s Transportation Scale, 2000) and answered questions about their fiction-reading practices, their relative ease of close reading and pleasure reading in the scanner, and their previous exposure to and present taste for Jane Austen.15 We chose Austen because we needed a literary work that could both invite pleasure reading and sustain literary analysis. While we started with Persuasion in the pilot study, we chose Mansfield Park for the final experiment because the latter is the least frequently read, providing the highest chance of an unbiased engagement.16 To randomize the study, we alternated the sections marked for close reading and pleasure reading. We thus verified that changes in blood flow came primarily from the focus students brought to the text, not from specific sections of the novel—that is, particular linguistic, stylistic, or narrative details that caught readers’ attention. Data analysis is in progress, but the study’s early results have far surpassed expectations. In both our pilot and the final experiment, individuals are demonstrating strong cognitive differences between close reading and pleasure reading—more significant and widespread differences than expected. Quite reasonably, most neuroscientists had predicted we would see changes only in specific, local regions associated with directed attention, if changes in blood flow were visible at all. Their rationale was that the stimulus presented remained stable; everyone was reading the same thing, a novel by Austen. They were simply reading it in two different ways. Thus, the biggest surprise to date has been the following: blood flow seems to be transforming dramatically across the brain as subjects move between close and pleasure reading. Close reading, in particular, activates diverse—almost global— regions, reaching areas far beyond those associated with attention and executive functions. Though one might have expected the activation of pleasure centers for relaxed reading, and areas associated with attention and cognitive load engaged during literary analysis, what we are actually seeing in the scans is a far more complex picture. As we can see in fi ­ gure 3.4, the images for close reading—cross-sections of one subject’s brain—demonstrate truly widespread changes for literary analysis. Since blood is always moving through the brain and fMRI tracks neuronal activity via blood flow, fMRI images do not depict areas of activation in general, that is, places where things “light up” Instead, activated regions always show us results in comparison—that is, places where there is not just more neuronal activity, but a significant rise in average blood flow as compared to another cognitive state. Figure 3.4 shows brain regions with increased activity for close reading as compared to pleasure reading, a contrast with striking breadth. Examining an individual case can help explain what is so intriguing about these early results.17 During close reading, the participant shown in ­figure 3.5 activates unexpected regions of the brain (lighter shading), including the somatosensory cortex, an area we engage to place ourselves spatially in the world, and the motor

62    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind

Figure  3.4  This subject (s4) demonstrates widespread activity across multiple regions of the brain while close reading Mansfield Park. This image depicts areas of increased blood flow across horizontal axial slices from the top of the brain to its base. Regions in darker gray represent statistically significant areas of increased blood flow for all sections of close reading as compared to pleasure reading.

Figure  3.5 A  brain image of a single subject (s4) from our pilot study of Persuasion that shows close reading and pleasure reading activating a number of distinct brain regions. Sections of the brain (in white) represent regions of heightened activity for close reading, while darker regions (in black) identify increased neural activity for pleasure reading. See note on interpreting individual results.

cortex, a region dedicated to physical activity. Our results, however, revealed yet another layer. It is not just the heightened attention of close reading that activates widespread response in the brain; this participant, like many, also displays regions of activity for pleasure reading (darker shading) that are elevated in comparison to close reading. For this participant, pleasure reading activates a number of distinctive regions, including portions of the temporal cortex associated with language processing (fig 3.5).

Natalie M. Phillips   63 These early results clearly suggest that close reading does not merely describe an elevated attention to literature, with pleasure reading a “lesser” mode of focus—or, as Showalter put it, “active” versus “passive” reading. Instead, each style of literary engagement has its own cognitive demands and produces its own neural patterns. Pleasure reading and close reading activate overlapping, but distinctive, sets of brain regions to create what cognitive scientists call discrete “neural signatures.” Most importantly, though close reading stimulates a truly broad set of regions, the best scenario for activating the most parts of our brain would be to sustain cognitive flexibility and read with both kinds of attention. Cross-group analysis is necessary to finalize our results; yet current data analysis already shows trends that emphasize the complexity and value of attention in literary study. Scholars have long spoken about the value of the humanities—about reading difficult philosophical and literary texts—as a way to develop critical thought. If these trends in analysis hold, the results will suggest something more: it is not only the books we read, but thinking rigorously about them that is of value, with literary study engaging diverse regions across the brain. Indeed, teaching close reading may train us to move more flexibly between modes of focus. Finally, distinguishing these styles of attention means something more difficult than simply demarcating between relaxed and studious reading. Not only does reading move through a spectrum of intensities, but pleasure reading has its own cognitive demands; close reading, its own pleasures.

IV. “Always historicize!” Lisa Zunshine urges in Why We Read Fiction, citing Frederick Jameson.18 Yet when, where, and how to do so remains an open question in cognitive literary studies. One of the key conversations in our field over the last five years has thus revolved around the idea of “cognitive historicism.”19 Thinking through connections between our fMRI experiment and the history of distraction has led me to support and develop models of cognitive historicism that emphasize reciprocity between literary history and neuroscience, particularly when considering historical applications of contemporary cognitive studies. To present our experiment to interdisciplinary audiences, I discuss Austen’s representations of attention (and their historical context), and I use her novel’s complexity to suggest new solutions in neuroscience for testing natural reading in the scanner. Yet I also emphasize the challenges of applying our study to Austen’s original readers, using examples from eighteenth-century pedagogy and the history of the book to illuminate key differences between these historical audiences and those of today. I find such moments of dissonance between literary and scientific methods valuable, able to create a more nuanced view of attention in both fields. Exploring the cultural factors that shaped the focus of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers raised a series of important questions regarding how best to historicize neuroscience. One of the first questions I think we need to ask is: what kind of—and which—neuroscientific studies can be most reliably applied backwards? Certain

64    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind cognitive structures have been shown to be more stable than others. In Reading in the Brain, for instance, Stanislas Dehaene has shown that brain regions associated with reading—in particular, with dyslexia—remain remarkably consistent across languages and cultures.20 Attention, however, is distinctive from reading as a cognitive faculty, and possesses a more flexible neurobiology.21 As scientist L. D. Selemon explains, the regions associated with attention—particularly the prefrontal cortex, or PFC—is “the last brain region to mature,” with “adolescent brain maturation. . . characterized by the emergence of executive function,” or higher-order attentional networks.22 Unlike the brain’s visual systems for reading, which develop early and thus are more likely to remain stable in various cultures and contexts, the environmental stimuli impacting attention continue to shape the brain well into our teenage years. Because the brain develops different faculties at different ages, and different cognitive regions range in plasticity, it makes sense that not all neuroscientific studies will be equally historically applicable. Studying attention requires us to delve more deeply into history and culture; not only does it develop later into life, its central function is to link mind and world. Environment shapes focus, producing habits of concentration that shape the connections and neural networks involved in attention, as well as how and what we focus on in future situations.23 Certain cognitive limits on focus, such as inherent limitations on the number of items we can attend to and actively process, are likely more stable, determining what elements (and how much) of our surroundings we take in.24 Still, in thinking about our fMRI study, the historical conditions surrounding reading and focus in Austen’s day have changed radically—practices for teaching literacy, what and how often people read, and what they were trained to pay attention to—in ways that would influence neural pathways before the brain’s executive functions have developed fully. 25 Changing historical beliefs about mental states may also impact how individuals experience cognition. As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park note in their history of wonder and curiosity from 1150 to 1750, “the felt substance of an emotion depends to a significant degree on the company it keeps.”26 Classical and early modern authors, they show, linked wonder to “reverence,” praising it as the height of philosophical inquiry; simultaneously, curiosity was degraded and associated with “lust and pride.” By the eighteenth century, however, this cognitive hierarchy had flipped. Enlightenment writers cast curiosity as the spur of scientific advancement while wonder “migrated to the pole of dull stupor.”27 In such moments of shifting meaning, Daston and Park argue, not only the definition but the subjective experience of these mental states changed: What might be called the dynamic of an emotion changes with its neighbors—not beyond all recognition, but enough to create new possibilities for the objects and attitudes that give an emotion outlet and outline. . .. Early modern curiosity was not simply Augustinian curiosity with a reversed moral charge; its emotional texture had also been altered.28

Ideas about a state of mind—in our case, eighteenth-century theories of attention— influence emotion, and thus cognition.

Natalie M. Phillips   65 The Enlightenment was a period fascinated by rapt engagement, a preoccupation with absorption so deep that Michael Fried calls it “a master trope” of the eighteenth century.29 In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt argues that eighteenth-century print in fact allowed for a new kind of narrative immersion: “Mechanically produced. . . letters,” he claims, “can be read much more automatically: ceasing to be conscious of the printed page. . . we surrender ourselves entirely to the. . . world which the printed novel describes.”30 Writers of the period vacillated between praising and deriding this phenomenon of becoming lost in fiction. Isaac Watts, for instance, criticized pleasure reading. He claimed such readers “skim’d over the Pages like a Swallow over the flowry Meads in May” and thus missed key “Advances in the Pursuit of Truth” garnered by those who could “undergo the Fatigue” of study.31 Jane Austen, by contrast, satirized such dismissive views of pleasure reading.32 In Northanger Abbey, she criticizes novelists who refuse to show their heroines fiction-reading or apologize for them when caught: “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels,” her narrator quips. “Such is the common cant.” Reading novels for pleasure, in Austen, is a subversive (and implicitly valuable) engagement. Her heroines enjoy fiction, a genre she claims is able to convey “the greatest powers of the mind.”33 Such Enlightenment discussions about attention and reading had a deep influence on our study as it emerged. The earliest experiment design, in fact, grew out of conversations with Franco Moretti that were as much about the history of reading as about cognition. They revolved, to a large part, around book historian Rolf Engelsing’s claim that eighteenth century experienced a “reading revolution,” in which shifts in literacy and book buying around the 1750s radically altered reading practices. Before the Enlightenment, supposedly, “intensive” reading was the norm, involving close repetitive readings of the few (often sacred) works families owned, such as the Bible. During the eighteenth century, however, rising literacy and decreasing publication costs gave people access to a far wider range of texts. The public, practicing what he calls “extensive reading,” raced from one book to the next, skimming, devouring, and discarding numerous works in an increasingly ephemeral print culture.34 Thinking about the complex historical phenomena behind Engelsing’s binaries (“intensive” and “extensive reading”) was particularly valuable; it started to illuminate—from a humanist perspective—the very range of reading styles we wanted to investigate in our fMRI study. Our historical engagement with such questions encouraged us to take a new approach to cognitive studies of focus. Most previous experiments on attention explored the neural challenges presented by a stimulus: usually, a series of shapes to look at, sounds to listen to, or individual words to read. By necessity, few researchers tackled more than a word, phrase, or sentence. Core experiments in the field thus included: (1) the Stroop test of directed attention (in which the word “green,” for instance, appears in red and subjects are asked to focus on either the color or the meaning);35 (2) tests of “reading span” and working memory (where participants focus on the final word in a series and are tested on how well they remember these terms as the reading task becomes more difficult);36 and (3) linguistic studies of cognitive load (experiments that explore sentence structures more likely to tax or capture focus, either through difficult vocabulary, syntactic density,

66    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind or unexpected phrase arrangements).37 While the Stroop test isolated the ability to direct attention to one thing (color) as opposed to something else (content), and tests of working memory and cognitive load explored what might stress or ease attention, none of them examined the attention we actually bring to reading, especially not to a complex literary text. Our study is one the first to use fMRI to explore how the brain responds to literature, as well as one of the first experiments to investigate our cognitive responses to reading an actual novel—here, a full chapter by Jane Austen.38 This more natural reading task allowed us to investigate more subtle modulations of focus, something difficult (indeed, impossible) to explore in experiments based on single words or phrases.39 In the process, our work seeks to make a broader contribution to the neuroscience of reading by revealing the importance of how we concentrate. Dehaene describes the neural networks involved in reading as a web of “bi-directional. . . cortical connectivity,” which activate not only expected regions (Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, the visual cortex) but also more extended webs (the anterior temporal, the anterior fusiform, and the inferior frontal regions) that work together to link meaning, pronunciation, and articulation.40 Investigating the brain regions involved in different degrees of focus, our study aims to reveal a still broader network of connectivity, pointing toward the wide system of neural exchanges involved in reading literary works. Furthermore, returning to the eighteenth-century history of focus discouraged us from embracing a traditional positivist view of distraction as solely a condition of modernity. Complaints about audiences’ decreasing attention spans, increasing multitasking, and diverted minds already concerned writers of the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century poets and artists from Swift to Hogarth describe reading in London as occurring in an environment of high cacophony: chamber pots sloshing, street-noises and hubbub, wailing street criers “screeching” to advertise their wares.41 Gay’s Trivia describes London’s street noise, for instance, as a surreal mixture of industrial and vocal tumult: “Now Industry awakes her busy Sons, / Full charg’d with News the breathless Hawker runs: / Shops open, Coaches roll, Carts shake the Ground, / And all the Streets with passing Cries resound.”42 In addition to these environmental factors, Enlightenment authors also worried deeply about the toll print overload was taking on audiences’ focus. In The Dunciad of 1729, Alexander Pope describes a world in which “paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of Authors covered the land.”43 Samuel Johnson and Eliza Haywood similarly imagine that, even for short essays, readers will only “look into the first pages” before losing focus altogether.44 This historical context discourages any false nostalgia about an idyllic past of easy attention and encourages a richer view of distraction: both ever present and culturally fluid. Attention’s complex Enlightenment history returns us to the methodological questions raised when considering historical applications of neuroscientific studies. As we know from research on neural plasticity, habits of concentration are both cognitively hard-wired and learned. According to Ira Black, “plasticity, the collective mechanisms underlying brain adaptability, emerges at multiple levels of the neuraxis” and includes “the genesis of new neurons and glia throughout life.”45 The brain, that is, is capable of generating new neural connections, as well as new growth, new cerebral tissue, and new

Natalie M. Phillips   67 myelination. While attention has clear cognitive limits, the brain regions associated with focus are also unusually environmentally sensitive, which requires increased caution for using our experiment to think about the attention of historical readers. Brain images of Ph.D. students reading Persuasion or Mansfield Park today would differ in important ways from those of nineteenth-century readers, in no small part because “close reading” novels was not part of their cultural practice. We may share certain cognitive patterns with this historical audience: emotional responses to a well-written character, increased cognitive load facing a difficult (or simply ambiguous) sentence, and the activation of core neural networks for reading. Yet enough has changed in terms of cultural references, literacy, print technology, and education to make the more intricate networks surrounding the neurobiology of literary attention more flexible than at first might be acknowledged. Engaging these challenges, particularly when thinking about the backward application of an fMRI study of attention and reading (including complex depictions of brain anatomy, neural networks, and blood flow), urges us to ask new questions when thinking about the relationship between cognition and history. Current work in cognitive historicism, quite reasonably, emphasizes similarities in human brain structure over time, using this as a stable framework for more local neural variation. As Alan Richardson wryly notes in The Neural Sublime: [T]‌he (scientific) fact of the mind’s embodiment is [far from] trivial. Avoiding the relativistic extreme (which might hold that, for cultures that do not locate the mind in the brain, a serious head injury would not affect mental functioning), we can reliably assume that human minds have always and everywhere been instantiated in brains and required reasonably intact brains in order to function reasonably well. . .. The most refined idealistic philosophy could, in theory, always be challenged by a good blow to the head.46

Historical beliefs about the connection between mind and brain, Richardson argues, are always in flux; however, the brain’s structure as a whole remains stable enough to act as a “counter” to various “idealistic philosoph[ies]” that separate the mind and brain, with “brain-based conceptions of mind [emerging].  .  . throughout history in many times and places.”47 Ellen Spolsky argues, moreover, that “cognitive literary study must be embedded within the hard-won recognition of the historical imperative,” urging cultural-historical critics, in turn, to “acknowledge the history of the human body and its mind.”48 As Spolsky emphasizes, cognition is both historical and embodied, “produced by the dynamic interactions among bodily structures and the world outside.” The mind is deeply shaped by environment, and our development of neural pathways is profoundly responsive to local and cultural context. Recognizing that neural processes are essentially embodied, as Spolsky does, and that cognition varies with changing environments and contexts is the first key step in historicizing cognition. Working in interdisciplinary neuroscience and on the history of distraction has led me to build on this model of cognitive historicism. Much work in the history of cognition, like Spolsky’s, stops here—and reasonably so considering the challenges it

68    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind presents. Yet a key question remains: when, how, and how much should we emphasize environmental and cultural impacts for historical research on the brain? Addressing these queries requires additional neuroscientific and historical investigation. The second step is to determine which neuroscientific studies can hold most reliably across history. An important component of this step involves understanding the developmental timeline and relative plasticity of the brain regions involved with the specific cognitive processes one wishes to investigate. Cognitive activities associated with brain regions that develop early in life may remain more stable, with less time to be impacted—at least anatomically—by the surrounding environment; later developed regions are more likely to be shaped by specific historical context.49 Such questions about historicizing neuroscience urge us, in addition, to investigate existing cross-cultural experiments on the aspect of cognition we are studying. Though we always need to pay attention to plasticity and relevant historical context, neuroscientific studies that have demonstrated stable brain activations across cultures and languages are more likely to translate historically. Finally, cognitive historicism asks us to delve into relevant historical forces that may have impacted the neural pathways associated with a mental state. In addition to considering how tangible physical stimuli shape (and reshape) brain structures by producing new myelination, variations in local-global connectivity, and dynamic neural networks, I suggest a final step: to consider the impact that historical definitions of a mental state can have on neurobiology.50 The eighteenth century, for example, witnessed the emergence of two competing definitions of distraction. In the older, more traditional paradigm, distraction carried a negative valence, signifying sin, wandering, or madness. Later in the century, distraction was redefined as a positive (even, sometimes, essential) quality of mind. As Diderot put it in his Encyclopédie of 1754: La distraction a sa source dans une excellente qualité de l’entendement, une extrème facilité dans les idées de se réveiller les unes les autres. [Distraction has its source in an excellent quality of the understanding, an extreme facility in allowing the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another.]51

For those raised according to the first model, the term (and thus the experience of) distraction would have carried strong negative connotations. Individuals exposed to more positive Enlightenment theories of distraction, by contrast, are more likely to have associated a valued creativity and innovation with moments of mind wandering. As Jonathan Posner demonstrated in a recent fMRI experiment on the neurophysiology of emotion (2009), our brains process words denoting emotion differently according to their positive or negative connotation, or valence. Words with a higher emotional charge, be it good or bad, activated a wide network that included “the left DLPFC [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex], bilateral medial PFC [prefrontal cortex], amygdala, cingulate gyrus, insular cortex, and precuneus.” In addition, “increasing activity in the left insula accompanied increasing valence (increasingly pleasant stimuli), whereas increasing activity in the right DLPFC and right precuneus accompanied decreasing valence (increasingly aversive stimuli).”52 In other words, associations with displeasure for a state of mind (“distressed,” “depressed,”

Natalie M. Phillips   69 or “bored,”) activated different regions than those with pleasurable connotations (“happy,” “content,” and “excited”). Moreover, the more intensely positive or negative the emotional term was, the more extended, numerous, and varied the neural networks involved became. Such considerations play a crucial role in integrating cognitive historicism and literary neuroscience, opening new doors to acknowledging the brain’s richest levels of plasticity in response to changing environments. Using these tools, we can build on existing models for historicizing cognition to emphasize the cognitive and neuroscientific importance of environmental impact, accounting for stages of brain development, the presence of cross-cultural studies, and relevant historical meanings attached to mental states. Rather than suggesting that the brain can be infinitely rewired,53 this careful re-emphasis on neural plasticity brings cognitive historicism closest to the ideal “horizontal traffic” essential to all interdisciplinary work; it adds neuroscientific power while giving history a value of its own, allowing us to produce more rigorous models of the mind for both fields.54

V. Returning to literature and its historical context also opens up increased room to appreciate individual differences in reading. As Austen reminds us, individual readers can have radically different responses to the same book. Though Persuasion begins with Sir Elliot immersed in the Baronetage, the narrator quickly sets Walter’s infatuation with this particular text against his daughter, Elizabeth’s, disaffection for it. She can scarcely bear to pick up the book because it reminds her that she is unmarried—in particular of “a [marital] disappointment. . . which that book. . . must ever present the remembrance of.”55 Austen’s rendering of how a character’s relationship to a book can change his or her affective engagement drew our attention to a final point of interest for the study. Students, like the characters of Austen’s novel, bring unique perspectives to their reading. One of our most important goals for future data analysis is to acknowledge these individual variables and how they are reflected at a neural level. Fortunately, the combination of technologies we used, fMRI and fMRI-compatible eye tracking, have the potential to provide unique insights into individual differences in reader response. Moreover, methods for analyzing fMRI data have advanced significantly in the last five years, reaching a new height for appreciating the complexity of aesthetic response. An fMRI study from Japan in 2009, for example, found researchers could predict just from reconstructed brain images whether a student had been viewing an artwork by Picasso or Dalí.56 In addition, the most exciting recent advance for literary neuroscience is a new method for analyzing fMRI data known as functional connectivity. Rather than seeking to isolate cognitive experience to a single brain region, functional connectivity examines synchronous patterns that emerge in parallel across the brain and investigates how these connections change as we engage with a stimulus over

70    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind time. Functional connectivity studies are particularly applicable to the neuroscience of narrative, storytelling, and film. One fMRI study from Princeton used this method to explore how we tell and listen to stories, revealing that the more someone listened to (and comprehended) a narrative, the more that listener’s brain activities became aligned with that of the storyteller—that is, the more attention one paid, the more “neurocoupling” occurred.57 It is this dynamism and multiplicity that motivates our next steps for our fMRI study of Austen. First, we hope to add this kind of complexity to our analysis of readers’ engagement with Persuasion and Mansfield Park. As mentioned, brain images from both our pilot study and the final experiment reveal striking differences between close reading and pleasure reading averaged together. The next task, however, is to create more sensitive methods for assessing subtle temporal changes in the brain as subjects read. Because our experiment uses fMRI (data about blood flow over time), fMRI-compatible eye tracking (data about changing points of focus), and ends with a final essay (intricate maps of what students noticed and remembered), we can begin to track these evolving patterns in attention— word by word, paragraph by paragraph—working to match them with the text being read. The essays provide a particularly fascinating picture of participants’ consciously recalled experience—a written record of what each person paid attention to. Amazingly, considering they have just left a loud scanner and no longer have the text at hand, many students actually quote specific words and phrases from Mansfield Park. Since the essays refer to particular passages in the text, we hope to combine the essays with the eye-tracking data to construct a richer moment-by-moment sense of readers’ patterns of engagement.58 Tracing these references in the essays and correlating them back to the brain data will reveal two important patterns. First, we can locate themes noticed by multiple subjects, and thus track moments of shared attention. A number of participants, for example, were drawn to moments in which the impoverished heroine, recently adopted by the rich Bertrams, is derided for her supposedly poor intelligence and education. One participant remembers a specific section where Fanny is derided for being “ignorant” in comparison to the Miss Bertrams’ educated “accomplishments”; another describes a distinctive scene in which Lady Bertram says that Fanny is “stupid, [but] must take more pains,” and then compares the heroine to her pug.59 Narrative patterns in Mansfield Park may guide these trends in joint attention; even the repetition of simple words or phrases can cue a reader’s heightened focus. (“Stupid,” we found, appears six times in c­ hapter 2; “Ignorance” or “ignorant” appear four times.) By creating intricate maps of keywords and themes and matching them with the eye tracking, moreover, we hope to use shared points of focus in the essays to provide a more intricate view of what captured subjects’ attention in reading and correlate these moments back to the brain images. As we trace links between the essays, eye tracking and brain images, our second goal is to begin mapping individual differences in focus. This work adds to the findings of Gabrielle Starr and coauthors, who used fMRI to investigate cognitive responses to visual art. Their experiment identified neural patterns for heightened artistic engagement across the group; they also tracked “individual differences in. . . aesthetic experience” and “emotional response.” These distinctive aesthetic processes for individuals, they found, were being

Natalie M. Phillips   71 “integrated by the same route,” creating a shared “neural signature”—one that reveals the unexpected role of the default network for intense aesthetic experience (G. Gabrielle Starr, ­chapter 12 in this volume). Our study of Austen translates these questions about individual responses to visual art into the literary realm. The experiment’s final essays will allow for the mapping of still more nuanced personal shifts in attention and engagement. Take for instance, these two examples from close readings of Mansfield Park. Subject 1 It’s Edmund who [first] notes to himself, after their heartwarming encounter upon the stairs, that Fanny had become “an object of interest.” It is as an object, particularly a class object-lesson, that she has become useful to the family. Lady B’s curious and equivocating defense of the girl “she was stupid, [but] must take more pains” but Lady B had always found “her useful in” suggests a barbed comparison between Fanny’s value and that of Pug [the Bertram’s dog], also good at “fetching” things, presumably, and “carrying.” Subject 2 Fanny’s position as a member of the lower classes is marked primarily by her lack of education, or, as the text calls it, her “ignorance.” The narrative emphasizes that Fanny can read and write, but does not have many skills beyond this, while her cousins are able to speak French, play music, and paint, making them “accomplished” young women.

Both readers focused on class politics and on the family’s denigrations of Fanny’s intelligence, a pattern we see emerging across the essays. Yet participants’ responses also reveal important individual differences in attention for literary close reading. Subject 1, for example, noticed Austen’s use of sibilance in describing a visit from Fanny’s brother, recently gone to the navy: “(sea, sister, sailor, serious).” Subject 2 instead analyzed a moment when the narrator describes the Bertram children playing with “artificial flowers.” As we gather data about blood flow, brain regions, and eye movements across the group, we also will be identifying these unique individual styles of focus. Each student may share patterns of attention—in their brain activation, in eye tracking, and writing—yet each response will reflect that person’s distinctive engagement with Mansfield Park; no reading will be the same. By investigating these more nuanced patterns of attention, our study draws out two points of complexity raised by Bortolussi and Dixon in their retheorization of immersive reading, “Transport:  Challenges to the Metaphor” (­chapter  25 in this volume). First, rather than being two completely distinct states of attention, close reading and pleasure reading ebb, flow, and intermingle. Readers transition naturally through these different kinds of focus as they move through a literary work, adjusting (often unconsciously) to the text at hand.60 Second, as Bortolussi and Dixon note, individual differences play a strong role in how we experience literary transport and immersion. (They quote de Graaf et al., who emphasize that “paying more attention to a story. . . does not necessarily mean [all] readers feel as if they are in the narrative world.”) Thus far, our study reinforces this finding. Some

72    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind readers responded more to the visual imagery and spatial detail that Green associates with being “transported into another world,” some less so; participants also varied in how strongly they emotionally identified with characters. “Neither imageability nor emotional reactions of sympathy or empathy are necessary features of a transport-like experience,” continue Bortolussi and Dixon: “If such a state exists, it must come in different stripes, and different texts induce different forms.” A final example from our experiment reinforces this idea and adds complexity, revealing the unexpected importance of visualization to literary analysis. One student’s essay, for instance, focuses on the moment when the heroine first enters the Bertram house, analyzing Austen’s use of language to convey Fanny’s feeling of smallness amid the mansion’s vastness. “As Fanny arrives at the estate, Austen. . . allows her syntax to recall the immensity of the space:  listing the many reasons for Fanny’s fears, joining them with semicolons and colons, Austen suspends a block of text like a gothic vault over the ‘little’ girl” (Subject 9). Here, attention to the spatial language of Mansfield Park becomes a central part of the student’s critical analysis. That said, the student is also clearly “immersed” in the story’s themes and structures. Its architectural metaphors extend into the student’s own writing: narrative arching over the heroine “like a gothic vault.” The attention demanded by close reading, that is, may encourage just as much visualization as pleasure reading. At times, and for certain individuals, literary analysis may demand more. Literary neuroscience is just emerging as a field, and what is most exciting lies ahead. Our Austen study has become a central project within our new lab in the Department of English at Michigan State University, Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition (DHLC), a space devoted to cultivating a range of interdisciplinary projects in literary neuroscience, digital humanities, and the history of mind. Here, our neuroscientific research on literary attention has springboarded a series of future projects, including an fMRI experiment on empathy and trauma narratives (MSU, Duke); an emerging study of poetry and cognitive rhythm (MSU); and a final project investigating patterns of distraction in fiction reading on an iPad or Kindle as opposed to a traditional book (MSU, Stanford, and Umea University in Sweden). Importantly, these new experiments are emerging in tandem with a series of important research projects in the history of mind. One of our Ph.D. candidates, whose research focuses on empathy and philanthropy in nineteenth-century literature, is using this work to help design our emerging fMRI experiment on trauma narratives, empathy, and service learning.61 Another student is investigating eighteenth-century representations of artificial memory systems—that is, the historical equivalents of the iPad and Kindle—in literature from Robinson Crusoe to Tristram Shandy, rethinking intersections between attention and reading that will be important to our study of distraction and digital technology.62 Institutional spaces such as the DHLC make it possible to integrate literary neuroscience and history of mind more rigorously, creating what Peter Galison calls “trading zones,” or moments of “local coordination” and specialist translation, here exchanges between science and humanities.63 In particular, the lab is facilitating conversations

Natalie M. Phillips   73 among faculty and students in English, Cognitive Science, Biology, Education, Neural Engineering, Radiology, and Linguistics, working to generate a new language for interdisciplinary research on the brain. Clearly, such work faces challenges. Things will be lost in translation, and these “trading zones” come with an extensive learning curve. While we might be tempted to focus on the smoother moments of disciplinary translation in our experiment, I believe it is the very gaps between humanities and sciences—the moments of productive dissonance—that provide the most important opportunities for cross-disciplinary work. In the back-and-forth between the neuroscientific and the narrative, between the literary historical and the cognitive, and the friction that emerges in the process, we find real space for reciprocity in cognitive literary studies. Most broadly, my goal is to demonstrate that there is a way for literary scholars to enter into a productive dialogue with cognitive science—not by raw importing or by applying its insights, but in fact shaping its studies; reshaping its methods; and producing a more reciprocal conversation about the history of science, reading, and mind.

Acknowledgments Many thanks go to Erin Beard, Nathan Leaman, Austin Gorsuch, Katie Grimes, Devin McAuley, Laura McGrath Paige Fouty, and Craig Pearson for their assistance with this chapter, as well as to the Stanford Literary Lab, the Duke Neurohumanities program, and the Stanford Humanities Center. I also would like to thank collaborators Bob Dougherty, Samantha Holdsworth, and Franco Moretti, as well as Stanford’s Neuroventures program, the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University, and the Wallenberg Foundation for their support.

Notes 1. Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1998), 5. 2. Jane Austen, “Catharine, or the Bower,” in Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 241–95 (my italics). 3. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 27. 4. For a fuller discussion of these comparisons of attention, see my article on focus and characterization in Austen. Natalie Phillips, “Distraction as Liveliness of Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Characterization in Jane Austen,” in Theory of Mind and Literature, ed. Paula Leverage (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011), 105–22. 5. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Robert P. Irvine (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 51, 95, 238. 6. Robert DeMaria Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4.

74    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind 7. Jonathan Kramnick, “Neuroaesthetics:  Prospects and Problems,” lecture, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, September 2011, 7. 8. Samantha Holdsworth, as cited in Mackenzie Carpenter, “How Reading Jane Austen Stimulates Your Brain,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, PA), March 3, 2013, http:// www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/science/how-reading-jane-austen-stimulatesyour-brain-677726. 9. Philip J. Mazzocco, Melanie C. Green, Jo A. Sasota, and Norman W. Jones, “This Story Is Not for Everyone:  Transportability and Narrative Persuasion,” Psychological and Personality Science 1:361 (2010):  361. See also Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds:  The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism,” Discourse Processes 38.2 (2004):  247–66; and Green and J. M.  A. Carpenter, “Transporting into Narrative Worlds: New Directions for the Scientific Study of Literature,” Scientific Study of Literature 1.1 (2011): 113–22. 10. Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 98. 11. John Guillory, “How Scholars Read,” ADE Bulletin 146 (Fall 2008): 11. 12. Barbara Johnson, “Teaching Deconstructively,” in Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, ed. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995), 140. 13. Scott A. Huettel, Allen W. Song, and Gregory McCarthy, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2009), 4. 14. Our ability to use a relatively new technology, fMRI-compatible eye tracking, allowed us to develop a more complex experiment design for investigating literary attention. Joined with a subject-based design participants could read at their own speed, something essential for comparing pleasure reading and close reading, as both are innately self-timed. For more on eye-tracking technologies and their integration with MRI, see M. Mele and S. Federici, “Gaze and Eye-Tracking Solutions for Psychological Research,” Cognitive Processing 14 (2012): 261–65. 15. M. C. Green and T. C. Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79.5 (2000): 701–21. 16. Rereading, as one might expect, is a different experience than reading something for the first time. In the United States, Mansfield Park is one of the least frequently assigned Austen novels, and the least frequently viewed in film adaptation, lowering this risk. We collected extensive information about subjects’ readings of Austen, particularly Mansfield Park. 17. Such individual results must be interpreted cautiously, as readers’ experiences can vary day-to-day. Only group analysis (or repeated individual testing) can provide robust statistical significance. For more on interpreting fMRI results, see Martin A. Lindquist, “The Statistical Analysis of fMRI Data,” Statistical Science 23.4 (2008): 439–64. 18. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 153. 19. For a sample of recent criticism on cognitive historicism, see Lisa Zunshine, “Lying Bodies of the Enlightenment:  Theory of Mind and Cultural Historicism,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 115–33; Blakey Vermuele, “Machiavellian Narratives,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 214–30; and Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

Natalie M. Phillips   75 20. Despite strong differences in linguistic rules and characters, Dehaene notes, in comparisons of Japanese and English subjects the “brain scans of Japanese readers show[ed] that visual recognition of Kanji and Kana also relies on the left occipito-temporal area.” For a more detailed discussion of these experiments, as well as cross-cultural studies of dyslexia, including Italian, French, English, and Chinese populations, see Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking Press, 2009), 98, 244–45. 21. See E. R. Sowell, D. A. Trauner, A. Gamst, and T. L. Jernigan, “Development of Cortical and Subcortical Brain Structures in Childhood and Adolescence: A Structural MRI Study,” Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 44 (2002): 4–16; J. R. Best and P. H. Miller, “A Developmental Perspective on Executive Function,” Child Development 81 (2010): 1641– 60; and Y. Goto, C. R.  Yang, and S. Otani, “Functional and Dysfunctional Synaptic Plasticity in Prefrontal Cortex: Roles in Psychiatric Disorders,” Biological Psychiatry 67 (2010): 199–207. 22. L. D. Selemon, “A Role for Synaptic Plasticity in the Adolescent Development of Executive Function,” Translational Psychiatry 3 (2013): 1. 23. For more on attention’s responsiveness to environmental and social context in early stages of development, see Mark H. Johnson, “Developing an Attentive Brain,” in The Attentive Brain, ed. Raja Parasuraman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 427–43. 24. For a study of limits on our ability to multitask and its resistance to training, see Eyal Ophira, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D.  Wagner, “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” PNAS (2009): 15583–87. 25. Even reading’s supposed neurobiological stability needs to be complicated when we turn to history, however. As Spolsky points out, “Children growing up in late sixteenth-century England—if they learned to read at all—learned from books without pictures. Those children’s brains were simply not the same as the brain of the child who learned to read in Italy at the same time, and also different from the brains of rural English children who were not taught to read at all.” Ellen Spolsky, Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgrave, 2001), 3. 26. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature:  1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 305. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 305–6. 29. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 7. 30. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, ed. W.B. Carnochan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 198. 31. Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind:  or, a Supplement to the Art of Logic (London: Printed for J. Brackstone, 1743), 68–69. 32. For more on Austen’s depictions of absorption see Adela Pinch, “Lost in a Book:  Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion,’ ” Studies in Romanticism 32.1 (1993): : 97–117. 33. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1892), 26. 34. See Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser:  Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche and A. E. Poeschel, 1974). Engelsing’s theorization of intensive and extensive reading need not rely on his argument about a precise “shift” around the 1750s. (For more on extensive reading in the Renaissance see Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age [New Haven: Yale University

76    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind Press, 2010].) As John Brewer rightly suggests, this change was probably not from ‘intensive’ to ‘extensive’ reading, but “to more varied reading.” John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 170–71. 35. For more on the Stroop test and other experiments on attention, see Raja Parasuraman, The Attentive Brain (Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2000); Michael I.  Posner, ed., Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention (New  York:  Guilford Press, 2004); and Harold Pashler, The Psychology of Attention (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 36. For more on working memory and reading, see J. C.  McVay and M. J.  Kane, “Why Does Working Memory Capacity Predict Variation in Reading Comprehension? On the Influence of Mind Wandering and Executive Attention,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 141 (2011): 302–20. 37. See C. S.  Pratt, T. A.  Keller, and M. A.  Just, “Individual Differences in Sentence Comprehension:  A  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of Syntactic and Lexical Processing Demands,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12 (2007): 1950–63. 38. To my knowledge, our experiment is the first to use fMRI to investigate continuous natural reading , much less novel reading or literary training. Other scholars working on such collaborative experiments include Gabrielle Starr, Lisa Zunshine, Angus Fletcher, and Deborah Jenson. See also the fMRI study of reading by Nicole Speer, Jeremy Reynolds, Khena Swallow, and Jeffrey Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science  20.8 (2009):  989–99. They selected and adjusted four narratives from the book One Boy’s Day: A Specimen Record of Behavior (Barker and Wright, 1951) that described psychological observations of “the everyday activities of a seven year-old boy.” Unlike our study, which had students read Austen’s chapter as a whole at their own rate, “each narrative was presented one word at a time, with each word remaining on the screen for 200 ms, followed by a 150 ms/syllable blank delay” (991). 39. See also Raymond Mar, Maja Djikic, and Justin Mullin, “Emotion and Narrative Fiction: Interactive Influences before, during, and after Reading,” Cognition and Emotion 25.5 (2011): 818–33. 40. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 63. 41. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: Printed for John Nutt, 1710); William Hogarth, The Enraged Musician (1741) Tate Britain, London; and Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 42. John Gay, Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (London: Printed for Bernard Lintot, 1716), 22–23. 43. Alexander Pope, 1729, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, vol. 5, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961). 44. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, vol. 3 in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 16. 45. Ira B.  Black, “Plasticity:  Introduction,” in Cognitive Neurosciences III, ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 107. 46. Richardson, The Neural Sublime, 13–14. 47. Ibid., 14.

Natalie M. Phillips   77 48. Ellen Spolsky, “Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross,” Poetics Today 24.2 (2003): 164. 49. For more on periods of development for different brain regions as well as on intersections between brain structure and cognitive function, see P. R.  Huttenlocher and A. S.  Dabholkar, “Regional Differences in Synaptogenesis in Human Cerebral Cortex,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 387 (1997): 167–78; J. N. Giedd et al., “Brain Development during Childhood and Adolescence: A Longitudinal MRI Study,” Nature Neuroscience 2 (1999): 861–63; and N. Gotay et al., “Dynamic Mapping of Human Cortical Development during Childhood through Early Adulthood.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 101 (2004): 8174–79. 50. This approach builds, of course, on important work historicizing theories of the mind and brain. See here Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 51. Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, vol. 4 (Paris, 1754), s.v. “Distraction.” 52. J. Posner et al., “The Neurophysiological Bases of Emotion: An fMRI Study of the Affective Circumplex Using Emotion-Denoting Words,” Human Brain Mapping 30 (2009): 888. 53. See Alan Richardson, “Of Heartache and Head Injury:  Reading Minds in Persuasion,” Poetics Today 23.1 (2002): 141–60. As Richardson notes in his reading of Louisa’s fall in Persuasion, Enlightenment debates over the mind’s relationship to the brain—including the mind’s possible location in the chest or stomach—did not keep Jane Austen from articulating a clear relationship between a head injury to the skull and a sudden change in personality. 54. Jonathan Kramnick, “Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My Critics,” Critical Inquiry 38.2 (Winter 2012): 25. 55. Austen, Persuasion, 9. 56. Hiromi Yamamura, Yasuhito Sawahata, Miyuki Yamamoto, and Yukiyasu Kamitani, “Neural Art Appraisal of Painter: Dali or Picasso?” NeuroReport 20.18 (2009): 1632. 57. G. J. Stephens, L. J. Silbert, and U. Hasson, “Speaker-Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 107.32 (2010): 14425–30. 58. The eye tracker records subjects’ physical patterns of attention as they read (e.g., places in the text where their gaze returns, patterns of eye movement, and moments when we tune out or look away). Patterns in the eye tracking will reveal crucial information about how close reading’s patterns of visual attention differ from reading for pleasure. 59. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17, 16. 60. Readers will not remain in a strict mode of attention for the entirety of any block of close reading or pleasure reading in our study. As Bortolussi and Dixon note, even when “readers. . . report that they ‘couldn’t put the book down until they finished it,’ it is improbable that their attention remained entirely focused on the text during the entire reading episode.” See Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, “Transport: Challenges to the Metaphor,” ­chapter 25 in this volume. 61. Erin Beard is Lead Graduate Researcher in History of the Mind in the DHLC. Her dissertation project, “Empathy and Philanthropy: The Ethics of Realism in Nineteenth-Century Literature” is in progress in the Department of English at Michigan State.

78    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind 62. Austin Gorsuch’s honors thesis, “Artificial Memory: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Theories of Extended Mind,” is in progress, sponsored by an undergraduate fellowship supporting interdisciplinary research in literature, neuroscience, and the history of mind. Another honors student, Paige Fouty, recently completed a thesis on intersections between neuroscience and education growing out of the study. 63. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 46–48.

Works Cited Austen, Jane. “Catharine, or the Bower.” In Juvenilia, edited by Peter Sabor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006: 241–95. ———. Mansfield Park. Edited by James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. Northanger Abbey. London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1892. ———. Persuasion. Edited by Claire Lamont. London: Penguin, 1998. ———. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Robert P. Irvine. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002. Best, J.  R., and P. H.  Miller. “A Developmental Perspective on Executive Function.” Child Development 81 (2010): 1641–60. Black, Ira B. “Plasticity:  Introduction.” In Cognitive Neurosciences III, edited by Michael S. Gazzaniga. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004: 105–8. Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination:  English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Carpenter, Mackenzie. “How Reading Jane Austen Stimulates Your Brain.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, PA), March 3, 2013. Cockayne, Emily. Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature:  1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain:  The Science and Evolution of Human Intelligence. New York: Viking Press, 2009. DeMaria, Robert, Jr. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading. Baltimore:  John Hopkins University Press, 1997. Diderot, Denis. Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert. Vol. 4 (Paris, 1754). s.v. “Distraction.” Engelsing, Rolf. Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche and A. E. Poeschel, 1974. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality:  Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Gay, John. Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London. London: Printed for Bernard Lintot, 1716.

Natalie M. Phillips   79 Giedd, J. N., J. Blumenthal, N. Jeffries, F. Castellanos, H. Liu, A. Zijdenbos, T. Paus, A. Evans, and J. Rapoport. “Brain Development during Childhood and Adolescence: A Longitudinal MRI Study.” Nature Neuroscience 2 (1999): 861–63. Gotay, N., J. Giedd, L. Lusk, K. Hayashi, D. Greenstein, A. Vaituzis, T. Nugent, D. Herman, L. Clasen, A. Toga, J. Rapoport, and P. Thompson. “Dynamic Mapping of Human Cortical Development during Childhood through Early Adulthood.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 101 (2004): 8174–79. Goto, Y., C. R.  Yang, and S. Otani. “Functional and Dysfunctional Synaptic Plasticity in Prefrontal Cortex:  Roles in Psychiatric Disorders.” Biological Psychiatry 67 (2010): 199–207. Green, M. C., and T. C. Brock. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79.5 (2000): 701–21. Green, M. C., and J. M. A. Carpenter. “Transporting into Narrative Worlds: New Directions for the Scientific Study of Literature.” Scientific Study of Literature 1.1 (2011): 113–22. ———. “Transportation into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism.” Discourse Processes 38.2 (2004): 247–66. Guillory, John. “How Scholars Read.” ADE Bulletin 146 (Fall 2008): 8–17. Huettel, Scott A., Allen W.  Song, and Gregory McCarthy. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2009. Huttenlocher, P. R., and A. S. Dabholkar. “Regional Differences in Synaptogenesis in Human Cerebral Cortex.” Journal of Comparative Neurology 387 (1997): 167–78. Johnson, Barbara. “Teaching Deconstructively.” In Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, edited by Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995: 140–48. Johnson, Mark H. “Developing an Attentive Brain.” In The Attentive Brain, edited by Raja Parasuraman. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000: 427–43. Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler. Vol. 3. In The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Kramnick, Jonathan. “Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My Critics.” Critical Inquiry 38.2 (Winter 2012): 431–60. ———. “Neuroaesthetics: Prospects and Problems.” Lecture, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, September 2011. Lindquist, Martin A. “The Statistical Analysis of fMRI Data.” Statistical Science 23.4 (2008): 439–64. Mar, Raymond A., Maja Djikic, and Justin Mullin. “Emotion and Narrative Fiction: Interactive Influences before, during, and after Reading, Cognition & Emotion.” Cognition and Emotion 25.5 (2011): 818–33. Mazzocco, Philip J., Melanie C. Green, Jo A. Sasota, and Norman W. Jones. “This Story Is Not for Everyone:  Transportability and Narrative Persuasion.” Psychological and Personality Science 1.361 (2010): 361–68. McVay, J.  C., and M. J.  Kane. “Why Does Working Memory Capacity Predict Variation in Reading Comprehension? On the Influence of Mind Wandering and Executive Attention.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 141 (2011): 302–20. Mele, Maria, and Stephano Federici. “Gaze and Eye-Tracking Solutions for Psychological Research.” Cognitive Processing 13 (2012): 261–65.

80    Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind Ophira, Eyal, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D.  Wagner. “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009): 15583–87. Parasuraman, Raja. The Attentive Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Pashler, Harold. The Psychology of Attention. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Posner, J., J. Russell, A. Gerber, D. Gorman, T. Colibazzi, S. Yu, Z. Wang, A. Kangarlu, H. Zhu, and B. Peterson. “The Neurophysiological Bases of Emotion: An fMRI Study of the Affective Circumplex Using Emotion-Denoting Words.” Human Brain Mapping 30 (2009): 883–95. Posner, Michael. Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention. New York: Guilford Press, 2004. Phillips, Natalie. “Distraction as Liveliness of Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Characterization in Jane Austen.” In Theory of Mind and Literature, edited by Paula Leverage. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011: 105–22. Pinch, Adela. “Lost in a Book: Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” Studies in Romanticism 32.1 (Spring 1993): 97–117. Pope, Alexander, 1729. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope. Gen. ed. John Butt. Vol. 5, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. Pratt, C.  S., T. A.  Keller, and M. A.  Just. “Individual Differences in Sentence Comprehension: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of Syntactic and Lexical Processing Demands.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12 (2007): 1950–63. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “Cognitive Historicism.” In The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic T exts, 1–16. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010. ———. “Of Heartache and Head Injury:  Reading Minds in Persuasion.” Poetics Today 23.1 (2002): 141–60. Selemon, L. D. “A Role for Synaptic Plasticity in the Adolescent Development of Executive Function.” Translational Psychiatry 3 (2013): 1. Speer, Nicole, Jeremy Reynolds, Khena Swallow, and Jeffrey Zacks. “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences.” Psychological Science 20.8 (2009): 989–99. Spolsky, Ellen. “Cognitive Literary Historicism: A Response to Adler and Gross.” Poetics Today 24.2 (2003): 161–83. ———. Satisfying Skepticism:  Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ashgrave, 2001. Showalter, Elaine. Teaching Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2003. Sowell E.  R., D. A.  Trauner, A. Gamst, and T. L.  Jernigan. “Development of Cortical and Subcortical Brain Structures in Childhood and Adolescence:  A  Structural MRI Study.” Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 44 (2002): 4–16. Stephens, G.  J., L. J.  Silbert, and U. Hasson. “Speaker-Listener Neural Coupling Underlies Successful Communication.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 107.32 (2010): 14425–30. Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub. London: Printed for John Nutt, 1710. Vermeule, Blakey. “Machiavellian Narratives.” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010: 115–33. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Edited by W. B. Carnochan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Watts, Isaac. The Improvement of the Mind:  or, a Supplement to the Art of Logic. 2nd ed. London: Printed for J. Brackstone, 1743.

Natalie M. Phillips   81 Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Yamamura, Hiromi, Yasuhito Sawahata, Miyuki Yamamoto, and Yukiyasu Kamitani. “Neural Art Appraisal of Painter: Dali or Picasso?” NeuroReport 20.18 (2009): 1630–33. Zunshine, Lisa. “Lying Bodies of the Enlightenment: Theory of Mind and Cultural Historicism.” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010: 115–33. ———. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Cognitive Narratology

Chapter 4

Toward a Narratol o g y of C o gnitiv e Fl avor Pete r J. Rab in ow itz

From the depths of what universe did she discern me?.  .  . I  knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time You’d like to share her dreams and sniff the roses of her memories. Roger Wade to Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye “I was beginning to think you worked in bed like Marcel Proust” “Who’s he?” “A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.” Exchange between Vivian Regan and Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Reading for the Spot: Narratology of the Moment About a decade ago, I contributed an editorial to International Record Review, part of a series taking off from a remark of Stravinsky about musical experiences that are “beyond the point at which criticism makes any difference.” I had been asked to choose a work and a recording of it that mattered so much to me that it transcended criticism; but ignoring the instructions, as I do too often, I decided to resist our intellectual preference for treating works as artistic wholes. Instead, I explored my frequent gut preference for particular moments that give me guilty pleasure, moments

86    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor to which I return again and again, even without listening to the whole work. I suspect that we all have those moments, not only in music but in literature and film, too, moments that might be called “We’ll Always Have Paris Moments”—moments that stand out as something special even in an already special film, as Casablanca surely is. Certainly, when I ask my students to choose their favorite passages in Proust, the final lists include—besides many expressions of sharp philosophic insight—what some of them call “OMG” moments of special intensity. Nabokov, rarely accused of being an aesthetic softie, writes about discrete moments in Lolita that serve as entryways into “aesthetic bliss.”1 Even with Nabokov as a model, though, many of us are squeamish about discussing such favorite spots, in part because when we try to confront why we love them, we often end up falling into a sentimentality that we don’t like to confess to. Stress on such isolated moments seems especially problematic with narrative. It’s generally, although not universally, agreed that some kind of temporality or sequence is essential to narrative. There are, of course, different kinds of sequence. We can (and most commonly do) think of narrative as a sequence of events; Kenneth Burke, in “Psychology and Form,” described form as a sequence of appetites and satisfactions; rhetorical narrative theorists, inspired by James Phelan, talk increasingly about progression, a complex sequence of relations among reader, author, narrator, and characters. Still, whatever the ingredients of that sequence, few critics like to theorize about narrative without putting sequence at or near the center—and analysis of moments therefore seems narratologically incorrect.2 In this chapter, I want to make two interlocking suggestions that go against the grain. (1) Yes, sequence is crucial; but we read and enjoy narrative for other reasons, too, reasons often obscured by the stress on sequence. Among those reasons are the special pleasures granted by those favorite spots. Note that I am not suggesting that such moments can be appreciated entirely out of context. The Marseillaise scene by itself won’t stir people who have never seen Casablanca, since its effect depends on knowledge gained earlier in the film. Nor am I suggesting that these moments do not have a functional role in the formal development of the narrative. The Marseillaise scene has important consequences on the level of story. But that function could have been performed by a different scene entirely—and this particular scene (like all of those I’ll be addressing here) has an emotional pull far in excess of its formal role. (2) To the extent that we do read for sequence, there may be types of sequence that are not widely recognized—types of sequence that are, in fact, tied to those special spots. Among other things, as I argue at the end of my chapter, attention to favorite moments can reveal previously unrecognized alternative structures that exist in contestatory counterpoint with the more familiar structures we usually see in our favorite texts. In saying this, I am not referring to what Porter Abbott, in ­chapter 5 in this volume, aptly calls “quantum narrativity,” where “multiple incompatible stories, together with their incompatible worlds, reside in. . . gaps, but only as possibilities.” Rather, I will be addressing superimposed forms that are not necessarily incompatible, but that serve to refine or comment on or test or trouble one another in evocative ways.

Peter J. Rabinowitz   87 Of course, there are different kinds of special moments, and different reasons for liking them. The Marseillaise scene, for instance, gives many normally nonpatriotic viewers a chance to relish the joys of patriotism through a moment that’s mediated in so many ways that it gets around their normal scruples. Here, I’m going to limit myself narrative moments that get a special “cognitive flavor” from the way they play with cognitive capacities, specifically from the acts of interpretation they call upon as we come to terms with the cognitive activities of the literary characters involved. Flavor? I realize that flavor is a problematic metaphor. But it is appropriate in an essay partly grounded in In Search of Lost Time, where taste sets the plot in motion. And it is useful as a way of wrenching ourselves free from the sight (focalization) and sound (voice) metaphors that are so common, especially in work growing out of Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, one of the cornerstones of narratology. My argument has two anchors, theoretical and literary. To begin with theory: as a pragmatic pluralist, I am not interested in defining narrative or making observations about all narrative—as Alan Palmer does, for instance, when he says “fictional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of mental functioning.”3 Rather, I am offering one possible way of talking about narrative, a way that I hope is useful and productive under at least some circumstances. More specifically, as is appropriate for a book on cognitive issues, I’m offering a thought experiment, an admittedly quirky and schematic “what if ” scenario. What happens to our sense of particular texts if we look at them from the perspective of cognitive flavor? If my argument turns out to be valuable, it will be not because it clinches conversations but because it begins them by illuminating new angles and giving us a new purchase on the texts we read. Since I’ll be considering the way we come to terms with the cognitive activities of literary characters, it’s no surprise that I’m heavily indebted to the prior work of cognitive narrative theorists. In particular, the work of George Butte, David Herman, Patrick Hogan, Alan Palmer, and Kay Young haunts this chapter.4 But my primary starting point is Lisa Zunshine’s work on mind-reading, “our ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires.”5 Of particular importance for my argument is the activity of “ascrib[ing] to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable action,” which could include the uttering of particular words in particular circumstances.6 My literary anchor, as I’ve suggested, is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust is an obvious choice for both thematic and historical reasons. Thematically, problems of access to the minds of others is central to the novel—perhaps as central as the interconnected issues of time and sexuality. Indeed, love and its partner jealousy are for Proust as much a matter of epistemology as they are of sexual attraction. There would be no point, our narrator tells us (and for convenience, I’ll follow custom and call him “Marcel”)7 in desiring a girl whose eyes were merely “sequins of mica.” What matters is coming to terms with the “dark shadows. . . of the ideas” beyond their material qualities; and it’s only a slight hyperbole to say that Marcel’s philosophical quest is largely an elaboration of his search for what is in Albertine’s eyes. As he recognizes after her death, “Albertine had been no more to me than a bundle of thoughts.”8 Historically, of course, Genette’s

88    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor Narrative Discourse centers on Proust, so choosing this novel gives us a chance to see how a different perspective throws light on different aspects of a single text. At the same time, however, I’ll be counterpointing In Search of Lost Time with other novels as well, especially with Chandler’s The Long Goodbye because. . . well, I’d like to say that it’s the second greatest modernist novel, but instead I’ll just say that it seems sufficiently different (no one writes on the two) that observations drawn from experiences with these texts ought to apply, if not universally, at least to a few others. Let me begin with a Proustian example:  when Marcel brings his grandmother home after her stroke, there’s a poignant flash: “Not once did [my mother] raise her eyes and look at the sufferer’s face. Perhaps this was in order that my grandmother should not be saddened by the thought that the sight of her might have alarmed her daughter.”9 What gives this moment its special flavor? Obviously, the situation is painful, and it gets additional power from what we know about the affective relationships among the three characters. Yet there’s something more here. My goal here is to provide a way in which we might talk about that “something more” in such a way as to explain its effect on us. Zunshine has demonstrated that much of the pleasure we get from reading fiction comes from the exercise of our mind-reading abilities—and she has articulated in detail the particular readerly activities called upon by particular genres and particular novels, which “engage to a higher degree one cluster of cognitive adaptations associated with our [theory of mind] than another cluster of such adaptations.”10 I’d like to return to her discussion from a slightly different perspective, offering a loose taxonomy of the ways that particular configurations of cognitive interactions can give flavor to textual moments. To keep my argument within manageable limits, I’ll be emphasizing the configurations that we find in representations of mind-reading (that is, the mind-reading activities of narrators and characters) rather than in the mind-reading activities of the actual reader of the narrative in question. Obviously, though, looking at the activities of readers would add another dimension to the analysis. To begin, I’d like to offer a new term to the equation: for every act of mind-reading, there has to be at least one equivalent act of mind-writing. Take Marcel’s description of the lesbians in the Casino: “Often, in the hall of the Casino, when two girls were smitten with mutual desire, a sort of luminous phenomenon occurred, as it were a phosphorescent trail flashing from one to the other. . . [T]‌hese. . . astral signs. . . set a whole section of the atmosphere ablaze.”11 Surely, what matters here, even more than Marcel’s mind-reading, is the parallel act of mind-writing—in this case, a legible, nearly material, expression of inner thoughts. I am going to be arguing that the cognitive flavor of any narrative moment is largely dependent on (although not fully determined by) the configuration of exchange between mind-reader and mind-writer. What are the features that make up the particular configurations we find? Let’s begin with a default moment: when you’re sitting with your friends outdoors in the early evening, and someone runs in to get a sweater, you assume that she’s feeling chilly. This common form of mind-reading shows up in literature, too. When, in The Long Goodbye, the bartender at Victor’s nods to Marlowe,

Peter J. Rabinowitz   89 Marlowe knows that the bartender is asking for his order—and the bartender knows that he knows it.12 But acts of mind-reading are, especially in literature, often accompanied by “something else” that complicates them.13 It’s not easy to chart out these complications, in part because there are so many of them, in part because they overlap. But here is an initial sketch of the ground. Emotional valence: acts of mind-reading are not always simply transfers of neutral information; much of the time (perhaps most of the time), that transfer has an emotional charge, explicit or implicit. It’s not simply that one may “know” what someone else is thinking: that knowledge can be accompanied by joy, anxiety, fear.14 Depth, the number of steps involved in an act of mind-reading: This quality is discussed in detail by Zunshine, who puts it in terms of levels of “embedded intentionality.” In his childhood, Marcel tells us, whenever he brought home a Jewish friend, his grandfather would usually “start humming the ‘O, God of our fathers’ from La Juive, or else ‘Israel, break thy chains,’ singing the tune alone, of course.” Hearing the song, Marcel would know that his grandfather—who had a selective anti-Semitism—was thinking that his friend was “not. . . the best type” of Jew. That’s not especially deep— Marcel knows what his grandfather is thinking. But the depth is immediately increased by a second level, one that not only goes deeper but also changes emotional valence: “I used to be afraid that my friend would recognise it.” Marcel is here worrying about what his friend will think that his grandfather is thinking. 15 A similar depth, with an entirely different emotional valence, is found in Marcel’s admission of his aims when determining the truth about Albertine’s activities, “the need to know having always been exceeded, in my love for Albertine, by the need to show her that I knew.”16 How deep can a single moment go? In Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine analyzes a passage in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway with six levels of embedded intentionality.17 I believe that there’s a moment in The Long Goodbye that goes deeper—we’ll get to that vertiginous situation later in the chapter. Reciprocity:  Tied to depth is the matter of reciprocity:  to what extent is there an exchange? To what extent do mind-readers and mind-writers flip positions with respect to one another? It’s no coincidence that the two most famous antagonists in the Sherlock Holmes canon are Irene Adler and Professor Moriarty, the two who most successfully read Sherlock’s mind as he tries to read theirs. Multiplicity: Sometimes, mind-reading involves only two people. But as we saw in the description of Marcel, his grandfather, and his Jewish friends, a scene may include multiple parties mind-writing and mind-reading at once, as we (the readers of the narrative) watch a contrapuntal display. Multiplicity can be linear: when Eileen hires Marlowe to find her missing husband, he believes that she believes that Roger may be in an “unnatural” state of mind.18 Multiplicity can also be overlaid: when Marcel is anxious about his Jewish friend’s feelings, those (possible) feelings are not transmitted through Marcel’s grandfather, but are superimposed on his mind-reading of his grandfather. Superimposition of all kinds is central to Proust. Angle: A writer can be aiming at someone other than the reader who picks up the text—and the same is true for mind-writing. This is particularly important where

90    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor multiplicity plays a role, for instance the scenes of voyeurism (broadly construed to include auditory as well as visual surveillance) that are numerous in (even endemic to) In Search of Lost Time. A fairly straightforward case is Marcel’s shock when he realizes that, while he’s been talking to Albertine in the ballroom of the casino, she’s been engaged in a silent exchange with Mlle Bloch and her cousin via the mirror.19 More crucial and complicated are the Montjouvain scene and the scene where Marcel overhears the first encounter between Charlus and Jupien.20 A neat variation on this kind of voyeurism, of mind-reading at an angle, is the passage where Marcel watches Albertine in bed. He believes that by watching her asleep, when she is in essence mind-writing to herself, he can get to the real core of her, because she can’t observe him observing her: “By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance.”21 The Long Goodbye plays interestingly with angle, too—most troublingly when Marlowe is drawn into Eileen’s bedroom. Eileen is in a state of heightened erotic concentration; she believes that she is mind-writing to the person in the room, while Marlowe believes her thoughts are directed to her dead first love. Only later do we learn that she is really thinking about someone who is not (quite) either of them. Note that angle is not directly related to degree or accuracy of information. Sometimes, as in the Montjouvain scene, characters who are observing from the outside know less than characters directly involved in an exchange; but sometimes—for instance, sporadically during Marlowe’s observation of the by-play between the cops Dayton and Green—the outside observer knows more.22 Occlusion:  Marcel’s reading of his grandfather is easy because his grandfather is transparent—at least to him. But mind-writers, like other writers, can be more or less difficult, either by accident or by intention. As I’ve suggested, Albertine’s opacity, the difficulty of discovering what is in her eyes, generates much of In Search of Lost Time. Likewise, Marlowe’s attempt to get to what Terry Lennox and Eileen Wade are thinking fuels The Long Goodbye, certainly more than any attempt to find out what really happened to Sylvia, who barely appears in the novel. Sometimes, opacity is simply a matter of a mind-writer’s refusal to write anything at all. Our first vision of Sylvia is of a “girl” with “a distant smile on her lips,” someone who simply refuses to broadcast her thoughts.23 But it is usually more complicated. The particular opacity of any moment is often tied to the interaction of two factors, sincerity and perspicacity, which are twinned on a four-part grid. When the mind-reader accurately reads a mental event that a mind-writer is expressing—and expressing with the hope or expectation that it will be read accurately—we have what I am going to call a “Klopstock moment.” I take my term from that cheesy moment in Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther where, inspired by a the aftermath of a storm, Lotte utters the word “Klopstock!” and Werther joyously understands the reference—a moment that appears to represent, at least momentarily, reciprocity and the union of their souls.24 But a writer’s sincere attempt to communicate can be misunderstood: Marcel completely misapprehends the gesture that Gilberte makes when he first sees her. She offers an invitation

Peter J. Rabinowitz   91 to join in their pleasures (“as I had only a moment in which to make you understand what I wanted, at the risk of being seen by your people and mine, I signalled to you so vulgarly that I’m ashamed of it to this day”); he misreads it as a sign of disdain.25 As for deceptive thoughts: they often succeed in trapping the mind-reader (the Odette/Swann relationship is full of such moments)—but good mind-readers can often read through deception, as Sam Spade reads through everything that Brigid tells him in The Maltese Falcon. Since there are shades of sincerity and shades of perspicacity, a given moment can fall anywhere on this grid. The factors of sincerity and perspicacity give a further turn of the screw to the scene where Marcel observes the sleeping Albertine—for over and above any questions of Marcel’s sensitivity here, we don’t know whether Albertine is really asleep or only pretending to be asleep; and if the latter, whether she is trying to reveal herself to Marcel or trying to deceive him. Mode: Any cognitive exchange is complicated by another quality that (with some discomfort) I will call mode. Not all exchanges are “actual”; we can have various kinds of hypothetical and counterfactual instances of mind-writing and mind-reading as well.26 “It was impossible for me to thank my father; he would have been exasperated by what he called mawkishness.”27 Rather more knotted is Marlowe’s attempt to interpret Elaine’s refusal to do anything to help her drunken, injured husband when he stumbles, bloody, out of the house: “It still bothered me, but I had to leave it at that. I had to assume that when she had been up against the situation often enough to know there was nothing she could do about it except to let it ride, then that would be what she would do. Just that. Let it ride.”28 One key modal variant is fictionality. Writers can write not only at various points along the true/false spectrum; there is also the fictional/nonfictional spectrum, which differs through its introduction of the notion of pretense. Specifically, as I’ve argued elsewhere, fiction is a type of writing calling on the reader to inhabit multiple audience positions (in particular, to read simultaneously as authorial and as narrative audiences). What’s key is the contract between writer and reader that they both understand that the narrative audience is imaginary, hypothetical.29 The Guermantes are especially prone to mind-writing fiction: “ ‘But you are our equal, if not our superior,’ the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, in order to be loved and admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.”30 Flirting (as opposed to seduction) could be defined as an instance of fictional exchange. Of course, one party can be mistaken, or can pretend to be. Lisa and Stavrogin’s “morning after” conversation in Dostoyevsky’s The Demons clearly casts their (at least implicit) declarations of love as a kind of fiction for the moment. Stavrogin claims to be shocked that the affair is suddenly over; but Lisa calls him on it, and he has to admit that he knew the truth all along. Consistency: does a character write transparently to one mind-reader, opaquely to another? Does a character read some minds well, others barely adequately? Do characters’ abilities vary according to situation? It is no surprise when Jason, in Faulkner’s The

92    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor Sound and the Fury, misreads the younger Quentin so dramatically; but Marlowe’s misreading of Eileen Wade the first time he sees her is inconsistent with his mind-reading abilities elsewhere, and hence revelatory of a weak spot in his character.31 This is just a list of possible spices that might be called upon to flavor a moment. How do they show up in a particular recipe? Let’s return to the passage I cited above, when Marcel brings his grandmother home after her stroke: “Not once did [my mother] raise her eyes and look at the sufferer’s face. Perhaps this was in order that my grandmother should not be saddened by the thought that the sight of her might have alarmed her daughter.”32 Here Marcel obliquely mind-reads a scene between his mother and his grandmother, interpreting his mother’s failure to look as an anxious attempt to avoid a reciprocal act of mind-reading by his grandmother, a reciprocal act which—were it to occur—would subsequently lead his grandmother to interpret his mother’s look as alarm, an alarm that (he believes his mother believes) would consequently sadden her. Whence the poignance? In part, it comes from Marcel’s position as a bystander, helpless to communicate anything of his own; in part, it comes from the psychological weight of an act of mind-reading of a gesture that, out of love, does not occur; in part, it comes from the reciprocity of reading and writing between mother and grandmother, each of whom is trying to avoid alarming or saddening the other, and both of whom (unintentionally) are saddening Marcel; in part, it comes from our own entanglement in this cognitive web. A great deal of highly charged cognitive exchange is compressed into a few words here.33 Earlier in my chapter, I suggested that cognitive flavor, including the presence of the kind of highly charged cognitive exchange we find in this scene, was just one of the factors that might make a moment special—and thus implied that a full narratology of the moment would have to handle more than purely cognitive issues. I believe that to be true—some scenes are wonderful, for instance, simply because of their verbal virtuosity or because (like some scenes in Catch-22) of their humor. But in her commentary on an earlier draft of this chapter, Lisa Zunshine asked whether, for narrative fiction, moments of complex mind-reading configuration might not have a special importance. My first reaction was to say no. After all, my first venture into narratology of the moment—the place where I coined the term—was a paper, delivered at the Narrative Conference in 2012, that didn’t deal with mind-reading at all. It centered, rather, on issues of memory—in particular, a vertiginous scene in Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time where the protagonist Pechorin tries to control his future memories of the present by creating a falsified version of the past. Yet as I reread that paper, I see that that scene—and the other key scenes from Turgenev, Chekhov, and Proust that I used as background—could just as well, and perhaps even better, be explained in terms of their mind-reading configurations. So perhaps complex mind-reading configurations are of special importance—and it might well be that, more often than not, entryways into novelistic aesthetic bliss are lined by complex mind-reading. In any case, the phrase “lined by” brings us back to the issue of sequence and raises the question: how might cognitively flavored moments relate to narrative’s temporal dimension?

Peter J. Rabinowitz   93

Des Esseintes’s Mouth Organ: Sequence of Flavors As I’ve said, our basic narrative terminology encourages us to think of sequence primarily in terms of events, what David Herman calls “time- and place-specific transitions from some source state. . . to a target state.”34 A few years ago, I introduced the term “path” as a counterpart to “story” and “discourse,” path being the order in which a character experiences things. I’d like to take a different tack here, moving from experiences on the level the narrative audience (where path exists) to experience on the level of the authorial and actual audiences. I’m partly inspired here by Kenneth Burke’s analysis of form in terms of creation and satisfaction of appetites; but I’m also inspired by a passage in Against the Grain (À Rebours) where Huysmans describes the mouth organ treasured by his protagonist, des Esseintes. It’s a series of small liquor-filled barrels connected in such a way that by pulling out various “stops” he can combine liquors as he chooses, allowing a way of “enjoying the inner symphonies. . . [by] procuring sensations in his throat analogous to those which music gives to the ear.” By linking of particular instrumental timbres and particular liquors (“dry curacoa, for example, to the clarinet whose tone is sourish and velvety”), des Esseintes can transcribe works of music into sequences of flavors (82). Even if there weren’t a strong family connection here (the supposed model for des Esseintes is Robert de Montesquiou, also the supposed model for Proust’s Charlus), such synesthesia seems entirely in tune with Proust and his times, especially if you think metaphorically rather than literally. Debussy’s music is often organized more around tonal color than traditional thematic development; Scriabin’s Prometheus, although it has a musical structure, has a literal color structure to go with it, intended to be played by a color organ; and, of course, Marcel sometimes uses color to describe Vinteuil’s music, especially the septet. “If you think metaphorically”: actually, we have a three-pronged metaphor here, one that relates narrative, flavors, and music. What do they have in common? Sequence, or the potential for sequence, obviously. But in addition, they have the potential for a certain kind of contrapuntal structuring, for superimposition. For years, I’ve been interested in the various ways in which literature can be contrapuntal, over and above the kind of polyphony made popular in the wake of Bakhtin. I’ll end this chapter with a discussion of just one way that study of cognitive flavor can reveal one kind of narrative counterpoint—but before we can get to that, I need to step back and ask a more general question: what happens if we consider the way flavor works over time? I’d like to sketch out, very briefly, three aspects of a flavor’s temporal dimension that a narrative can exploit: extensions, the slow recognition of a flavor within an expanded moment; revisions, the problem of aftertaste; and patterns, large-scale sequence of flavors over the course of a narrative.

94    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor

Extensions When Marcel first tastes the madeleine, it takes him some time to come to terms with its flavor. That slow recognition—part of what Genette would term “duration”—occurs with narrative flavor as well, both on the level of the narrative’s reader and on the level of the narrative’s characters. We see it, for instance, in what we might call “it slowly dawned on him” moments—like, the exchange, at the beginning of The Long Goodbye, between Philip Marlowe and the unsympathetic parking lot attendant. The attendant recommends dropping Terry “in the gutter” and continues, “I got a philosophy about them things. The way the competition is nowadays a guy has to save his strength to protect hisself in the clinches.” “I can see you’ve made a big success out of it,” I said. He looked puzzled and then he started to get mad, but by that time I was in the car and moving.35

Slightly more extended, Marcel’s growing recognition of what Charlus and Jupien are thinking during their first meeting shapes the scene in which it occurs. And a much longer span of narrative time is involved as we look at the extension of Marcel’s voyeuristic experience at Montjouvain.

Aftertaste In slow-recognition scenes, it takes time for the flavor to register. In what I’m calling “aftertaste” situations, the sense of a flavor, which we thought we had fully captured, changes significantly with the passage of time, usually with the accumulation of new evidence. As The Long Goodbye moves on, we have to reconsider the taste of Marlowe’s first experience of Eileen. Dashiell Hammett, in The Maltese Falcon, does something similar, but in an even more dramatic way. To the extent that we think of the plot in terms of the relationship between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessey, rather than in terms of figuring out who killed Archer, the novel cadences into a disorienting aftertaste. Throughout, we’ve been engaged in acts of multileveled mind-reading of their interactions, especially their erotic valence: what is Sam thinking? What is he thinking about what Brigid is thinking? What is he thinking about what she is thinking about what he is thinking? And we’ve done so based on what we believe is all the information at our disposal. At the climax, when Sam “solves” the murder of Archer, he does so with obvious evidence he’s had from the first pages—he’s known all along that Brigid is the killer. This new understanding leads us, in turn, to resavor virtually every act of mind-reading in the novel—but especially those intense scenes with Sam and Brigid. Not as global, but far more intricate, is the “tiger trap” scene in The Long Goodbye. To summarize—and if Monty Python had had their wits about them, they would have had a Summarize Chandler rather than a Summarize Proust Contest—Lieutenant Bernie

Peter J. Rabinowitz   95 Ohls lets Marlowe steal a photostat, knowing that Marlowe will turn it over to the press as a matter of principle. Ohls, we later learn, is hoping that the publication will anger mobster Mendy Menendez sufficiently that he will seek revenge on Marlowe, and that in doing so, he’ll admit to being behind the beating of a police officer. Marlowe is bait in a trap. He’s warned by Linda Loring: “ ‘Do you know how they shoot tigers?. . . They tie a goat to a stake and then hide out in a blind. It’s apt to be rough on the goat.’ ”36 But he ignores her metaphor, and, shortly after that conversation, he returns to his house to find himself facing Menendez and a trio of “hard boys.” Marlowe, looking directly at Mendy, can read the situation, even though it goes deep. He knows that Mendy is going to kill him—and knows, further, that Mendy knows and gets pleasure out of Marlowe’s knowledge. In other words, Marlowe anxiously recognizes that Mendy is sadistically enjoying knowing that Marlowe knows that Mendy is going to kill him. There’s a quick aftertaste here. Marlowe is punched and pistol-whipped, but just as he thoughtlessly starts to fight back—and before things get out of hand—Ohls appears, like a deus ex machina, to confirm the tiger-shooting scenario. Menendez’s apparent henchmen, he tells Marlowe, are in fact Nevada cops supplied by casino operator Randy Starr who is just as angry at Menendez as Ohls is. When Menendez is led away, Marlowe predicts that he’ll be killed in the desert—and Ohls tacitly agrees. Marlowe’s confrontation with Mendy takes on a different flavor now that we add the extra depth of our mind-reading of Ohls to the mix. Ohls has been watching the scene from an angle, as a voyeur whose presence is unknown. And as he is watching, he is getting a double revenge. He gets some of his pleasure from payback to Marlowe: he enjoys thinking that Marlowe anxiously recognizes that Mendy is sadistically savoring the knowledge that Marlowe is thinking that Mendy is going to kill him. That pleasure in reading Marlowe’s anxiety, which might normally be considered morally questionable, is justified in Ohls’s eyes by his knowledge that his voyeuristic presence means that Marlowe is not in any real danger (although he may get bruised). At the same time, Ohls gets pleasure, too, from knowing that the pleasure he can read in Mendy’s mind will be short-circuited. Ohls may be right in his reading of Marlowe—but it turns out that Mendy’s relevant thoughts are well beyond the mind-reading capacity of either Ohls or Marlowe. For a good 25 pages after this scene, there’s a further twist: Menendez has not been killed in the desert, but is alive and well in Acapulco. Yes, the “hard boys” have in fact been ordered by Ohls. But under Starr’s command, they double-cross Ohls by rescuing Mendy rather than to killing him. In other words, Starr has set up Ohls just as Ohls has set up Marlowe, planning the whole event as a way to spirit Menendez away from the police.37 From Mendy’s perspective, Ohls was not an “unseen presence,” and Mendy was in fact getting pleasure not only out of his mind-reading of Marlowe, but (even more?) out of knowing that Ohls was falsely enjoying thinking. . . As for Randy Starr’s thoughts: I leave it up to you to try to count the levels, but as I suggested earlier in this chapter, I believe it goes deeper than the scene in Mrs. Dalloway. This is just a sketch of the cognitive complexity of the tiger trap, but I hope that even this brief analysis shows how radical reflavoring can give a scene its character.

96    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor Less tangled, but more emotionally wrenching, is the moment when Marcel returns unexpectedly from Doncières and enters the drawing room before his grandmother knows he is back. “I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence,” he notes. “Into the forehead and cheeks of my grandmother, I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind”38—but he discovers that he has been mistaken. He thought he and his grandmother had a sincere, mutually perspicacious Klopstock relationship—but, seeing her obliquely, he now realizes that her mind-writing has increasingly been intended, not to express the truth of her feelings, but to protect him from the truth of her aging. When she doesn’t know he is present, she becomes a “red-faced, heavy,. . . vulgar [and] overburdened old woman I did not know.”39 The shock is immediate and powerful—but its retroactive reflavoring of their interactions for the past hundreds of pages is more powerful still.

Patterns Extensions and aftertastes involve shorter or longer periods of time, but they are still, temporally speaking, on the local level, sections rather than full texts. How about the macro-level: what would our favorite novels look like if we considered them as musical patterns of flavors rather than as sequences of events? There’s not enough space here to list, much less to deal with, even the most common patterns, so I’d like to limit myself to a single “genre,” with the understanding that I’m using the term in a loose sense to group together works that have a similar shape, as opposed to works that have (among other things) a similar purpose (Aristotle) or works that require similar rules of reading (the notion of genre I propose in Before Reading). The class I’d like to explore is what I’m going to call fusion texts. By fusion, I mean a Klopstock moment (or extension of a Klopstock moment) of more or less total reciprocal exchange, where two people become what Palmer would call an “intermental unit”—and I use the term “fusion” because alternative terms, like “marriage of minds” (used by, among others, Rachel Ablow), come preloaded with prior theoretical baggage. And a fusion text is one that follows a very general flavor trajectory, beginning with a gap between mind-writer and mind-reader and aiming toward (or moving toward) fusion. Obviously, fusion texts bear some similarity to romances, in the modern sense—texts that, viewed in terms of events, work from introduction through (generally difficult) courtship, usually ending in marriage. Popular romances have a mind-reading element governing their structure, too: Janice Radway’s excellent analysis of romance structures uncovers a psychological trajectory of “leaning how to read a man properly,” moving from misinterpretation of the hero’s “ambiguous behavior” to reinterpretation.40 But fusion texts make up a broader genre, in at least five ways: 1. Fusion texts can begin in many different kinds of gap between mind-reader and mind-writer, gaps that need not involve misinterpretation. One could argue

Peter J. Rabinowitz   97

2.

3.

4. 5.

that Darcy and Elizabeth “misinterpret” one another when they first meet in Pride and Prejudice; but Marlow’s journey in Heart of Darkness is a journey of discovery from ignorance to understanding, not from misinterpretation to understanding. Although it may center on the desire to “sniff the roses of [each other’s] memories,”41 the content of a fusion-text need not be erotic. Yes, experienced interpreters can always provide an erotic reading of any move toward cognitive fusion, and grouping texts under this rubric may well encourage us to do so. Still, that kind of lumping should be resisted. The kind of fusion Marlow seeks with Kurtz is significantly different from what his near-namesake Marlowe seeks with Terry Lennox; and neither of those fusions has much in common with the kind of fusion Elizabeth seeks (or, more accurately, we wish for) with respect to Darcy. To seek a homoerotic subtext in the move toward fusion in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust runs the risk of diluting the sociopolitical force of the novel. The narrative may be veering toward a fusion that readers do not desire and/or that may be harmful to some or all of the characters involved. An archetypal example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”: Holmes believes that Moriarty is incapable of the kind of mind-reading that is necessary to read his mind. “There are limits, you see, to our friend’s intelligence. It would have been a coup-de-maître had he deduced what I would deduce and acted accordingly.”42 And we hope that Holmes is right. Alas, he is not. That the (presumed) deaths of both characters coincide with their reciprocal cognitive fusion is part of what gives this narrative its special force. The Doyle example reminds us that while the fusion in romances is conventionally tied to sympathy, fusion can be antagonistic as well. Finally, and most important, fusion texts, although aiming toward a Klopstock moment, need not succeed. In this regard, fusion texts are the literary equivalent of common-practice musical works that we expect or desire to move, through a variety of harmonic terrains, to eventual closure on a tonic. Those expectations and desires may or may not be met, which has a significant impact on our reading experience. Certainly, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach has the effect it does in part because it chronicles the non-fusion of characters who want to get together, and who we want to get together—a nonfusion that is so embarrassing in the moment that (in contrast to the embarrassing first encounter of Gurov and Anna in Chekhov’s “Lady with a Dog”) it can never be surmounted. It’s important to remember, though, that while the ending of a fusion text is crucial to its effect, the total experience has as much, or more, to do with the route of flavors along the way as it does with the flavor on which the book ends, just as the experience of a Mahler symphony is more than the resolution on the final page.

The positive and negative poles here do not map neatly against our traditional comedy/noncomedy notion of closure by marriage—and recognizing that can help explain why some texts affect us the way they do. Measure for Measure leaves us with a bitter

98    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor taste, even though it ends in multiple marriages—and one can argue that it is, at least in part, the dissonance between the neat closure on the event level and the failure of fusion on the mind-reading level that creates this effect. “Lady with a Dog” represents an opposite (and rarer) paradigm. It ends entirely without closure on the event level: “They both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was just beginning.”43 But its flavor is less depressing than that of many of Chekhov’s works because the failure of Anna and Gurov to create the situation they want is counterpointed against their total fusion: in fact, the story closes with a multiple point of view. These conflicts between event structure and flavor structure are instances of what I  meant when I  suggested above that attention to moments of cognitive flavor may reveal multiple superimposed structures that were previously obscured. To elaborate, let’s look briefly at Nabokov’s Lolita. Calling on a narratology of events, perhaps inspired by Propp, we might well point to the killing of the adversary as the climax/resolution of the text. A narratology based on ethics might well locate the climax in Humbert’s recognition that he has destroyed Dolores’s childhood.44 A narratology of cognitive flavor might well see it in his realization that he knew nothing about her: “It struck me. . . that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me.”45 Although Lolita is profoundly influenced by (one might even say “obsessed with”) In Search of Lost Time, Humbert’s failure to get at what is in his own young cyclist’s eyes is—in terms of reaching the tonic—quite different from Marcel’s failure to possess Albertine, not only because of the pedophilia involved, but also because his style, rather than make us think he will be able to succeed, has totally obscured the problem from us. In any case, our sense of the whole book depends heavily on the superimposition of these three structures (and others besides) in a counterpoint that challenges our cognitive abilities. Given the centrality of multiplicity and superimposition in the world of In Search of Lost Time, it’s not surprising that we find competing structures here, too. Let me point to just two. Viewed in traditional terms, as a plot of event (centering on the search for and finding of a vocation), the compressed version is, famously, the only half-facetious description of Genette, “Marcel becomes a writer”46—and our experience of the novel is our experience of watching (and sharing) Marcel’s success as he surmounts the obstacles in his way. But that coexists with an entirely different mind-reading trajectory, “Marcel does not possess (or even learn) what is in Albertine’s eyes.” Our experience of this second trajectory is markedly different from our experience with most standard “romance” plots, because we’re centering neither on what “happens” (if they ended up married, it would not change the overall sequence) or even on whether they “love” each other (which there is good reason to believe they do). At its core is neither a situational nor a (purely) emotional issue, but an epistemological one. In particular, much of the feeling created by the text comes from the way that Marcel’s cognitive distance—and the flavor of his cognitive exchanges—keeps fluctuating. Moments of

Peter J. Rabinowitz   99 near-communion (even if with a slightly creepy flavor, as in the scene where he watches Albertine sleeping) alternate with moments of increasingly frustrating separation, created in part by layers of mind-writing deception (or, at least, by what he believes, perhaps mistakenly, may be deception). The flavor trajectory is further inflected by variations in consistency: Marcel’s aesthetic taste and philosophical wisdom, and the general sensitivity of the novel as a whole, seem to suggest that he ought to have some special ability to “penetrate” her mind, certainly to read it. Yet frustratingly (and he mirrors Dostoevsky’s Myshkin in this regard) he’s more successful at mind-reading people who, from the point of view of the primary fusion plot, don’t really matter. The trajectory is nuanced even more because, while fusion is generally desired by Marcel, he knows (and we know) that he will probably suffer from it—so that desire is (as it is so often when people seek other minds in this book) tinged with fear and anxiety. Then, too, we have Marcel’s misguided attempts to read Albertine’s mind through intermediaries and even after her death (certainly, one of the greatest causes of opacity). This reliance on postmortem intermediaries reaches its climax (indeed, one of the climaxes of their relationship, period) in the letter from Aimé, where Marcel’s anxious desire to know what Albertine felt when she engaged in lesbian embraces has to travel through Aimé’s oddly punctuated prose (its sincerity and accuracy ambiguous, since we don’t quite know what his motives are, or how much he is influenced by pay), in which Aimé claims to be reading the mind of the laundry girl (whose own sincerity, and even existence, is in doubt), partly as a semivoyeur as she acts out (or claims to act out) remembrances of past scenes with Albertine, partly through the ambiguous bite-marks (that, implausibly, she still claims come from Albertine)—all of it further occluded by what seems a modal shift, as the laundress tries to communicate the cognitive experience of lesbian activity by hypothetically engaging in what she claims to be (but most certainly cannot be) equivalent heterosexual activity.47 A densely flavored moment! But its power is greater still coming near the end of the troubling trajectory of Marcel and Albertine’s cognitive relationship throughout the novel. To return to my initial comments: My aim here has not been to provide an alternative to classical narratology, nor to “prove” interpretive claims by grounding them in scientific psychological research, nor to offer new interpretations of either Proust or Chandler. Rather, I hope that I’ve been able to offer a new (or newish) way of talking about and sharing our experiences of reading these and other texts. And if in so doing, I’ve also encouraged readers—not only of Proust, but of “lesser” texts as well—to slow down and savor the momentary flavor of particular passages, even removed from context, so much the better.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Corinne Bancroft, Emily Delbridge, Caroline Grunewald, David Richter, and Lisa Zunshine for help with this chapter, as well as to all the Hamilton students who have

100    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor taken on Proust with me over the past decade or so and profoundly shaped my thinking about the novel. Thanks, as well, to the Christian A. Johnson Foundation, Hamilton College, and Hamilton’s Dean of Faculty Patrick Reynolds for their research support during this project.

Notes 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955), 316. 2. One exception is Monika Fludernik, whose stress on “experientiality” results in “the radical elimination of plot” from her notion of narrative (Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology [London: Routledge, 1996], 13). 3. Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus:  Ohio University Press, 2010), 9 (emphasis added). 4. See, for instance, George Butte, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from “Moll Flanders” to “Marnie” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004); David Herman, Story Logic:  Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (New York Routledge, 2003); Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010); and Kay Young, Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). 5. I prefer the term “mind reading” to theory of mind because it stresses both activity and interpretation. 6. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 6. 7. This is not the place to work through the enigmatic treatment of his Christian name in the text. Suffice it to say that Proust plays games with the issue, using the name “Marcel” only twice in the novel—once in a declaration that Marcel is not his name. 8. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Andreas Mayor, and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright, 6 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 1992–93), II: 510–11, V: 869. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose approach to Proust is radically different from mine, makes a similar point: “Sexual possession of another person is precisely equated with a conquest of the otherness of another mind.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 152. 9. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, III: 433. 10. Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 153. 11. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, IV: 339. 12. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (New York: Vintage, 1992), 160. 13. Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 39. 14. Sedgwick suggests that theory of mind generally avoids issues of affect, and points out that Proust’s theory of mind, presumably in contrast to Zunshine’s, is “deeply imbricated with affect” (Weather in Proust, 154). Although I have no intention of working out the relationship between theory of mind and affect theory, I hope my discussion of emotional valence will make clear that affect is crucial to a mind-reading analysis. 15. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, I: 125, emphasis added. 16. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, V: 700. 17. Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 31–33.

Peter J. Rabinowitz   101 18. Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 104. 19. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, IV: 273–74. 20. My thinking on Marcel’s voyeurism—and indeed, the novel as a whole—has been significantly influenced by Corinne Bancroft. For an interesting discussion of the Montjouvain scene, see Harry Shaw, “Marcel at the Window, or There’s No Need to Be Ashamed of the Natural, Just Because It’s Learned,” paper presented to the International Conference on Narrative, Austin, Texas, May 2008. 21. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, V: 84. 22. In a sense, of course, the reader of the text is always reading at an angle—and often knows more than the characters. A clear example, cited by Genette, is our first vision of Charlus at Balbec—we are (or may be) in a better position to understand his interest in Marcel than Marcel is. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 197. 23. Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 3. 24. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2013), 20. 25. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, VI: 5. 26. As Genette points out, some “openings onto the psychology of characters” take a “more or less hypothetical form.” Genette, Narrative Discourse, 202. My notion of mode bears some relationship to what David Herman’s calls “hypothetical focalization.” But Herman is primarily interested virtual focalizers (HF is “hypotheses, framed by the narrator or a character, about what might be or might have been seen or perceived—if only there were someone who could have adopted the requisite perspective on the situations and the events at issue”), whereas my center of concern is the cognitive experience of actual focalizers. David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 303. 27. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, I: 48, emphasis added. 28. Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 201. 29. For more detail, see my “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 121–41. 30. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, IV: 84. 31. Note that this is not quite the kind of “metarepresentational readjustment” that Zunshine rightly points out as central to detective stories; it is, rather, an example of Marlowe’s inconsistency when faced with female beauty (Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, 129). 32. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, III: 433. 33. To make the scene richer still, this “perhaps” is followed by several other hypotheses about the meaning of his mother’s gesture. See also Sedgwick’s discussion of the pretenses and projections earlier in the day (Sedgwick, Weather in Proust, 28). 34. David Herman, “Events and Event Types,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 151. 35. Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 6. 36. Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 342. 37. In one central way, the tiger-trap scene remains vague—how much has Starr shared with Menendez? This, of course, has a great deal of impact on what is going on in Menendez’s mind at the moment. Given their closeness, it’s likely that he has let him in on the plot, and my analysis is based on that assumption. The scene, though, has a very different flavor if

102    Toward a Narratology of Cognitive Flavor we assume that Mendy doesn’t learn until later that his life is not really in danger. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume Mendy’s knowledge in this analysis—although the tremor of uncertainty on this score only adds to the flavor of the scene. For an analysis of the scene in very different terms, see my “They Shoot Tigers, Don’t They? Narrative Counterpoint in The Long Goodbye,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 181–91. 38. Proust, In Search of Lost Time III: 184. Under the circumstances, the mind reading of the translation is fortuitous, but not entirely accurate: “(“Le front, les joues de ma grand’mère, je leur faisais signifier ce qu’il y avait de plus délicat et de plus permanent dans son esprit” (Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. [Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954] II: 140). Still, the image is close. 39. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, III: 185. 40. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 148, 134. 41. Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 184. 42. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1930), I: 257. 43. Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories, ed. Ralph E.  Matlaw (New  York:  W. W. Norton, 1979), 235. For more analysis of this ending, see Corinne Bancroft and Peter J.  Rabinowitz, “Cats, Dogs, and Social Minds:  Learning from Alan Palmer—and Sixth Graders,” Style 45, no. 2 (2011): 333–38. 44. Nabokov, Lolita, 310. 45. Nabokov, Lolita, 286. 46. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 30. 47. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, V: 695–96.

Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds:  Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Bancroft, Corinne. “Marcel’s Mistake:  The Problems of Knowing the World through Voyeurism.” BA thesis, Hamilton College, May 2010. Bancroft, Corinne, and Peter J. Rabinowitz. “Cats, Dogs, and Social Minds: Learning from Alan Palmer—and Sixth Graders.” Style 45, no. 2 (2011): 333–38. Burke, Kenneth. “Psychology and Form.” In Counter-statement, 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Pp. 29–44. Butte, George. I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from “Moll Flanders” to “Marnie”. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage, 1992. Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories. Edited by Ralph E.  Matlaw. New  York:  W. W. Norton, 1979. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1930. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse:  An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E.  Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Peter J. Rabinowitz   103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sufferings of Young Werther. Translated by Stanley Corngold. New York: Norton, 2013. Herman, David. “Events and Event Types.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. Pp. 151–52. ———. Story Logic:  Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts. New York: Routledge, 2003. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against the Grain. Translated by John Howard. [New York]: Albert & Charles Boni, 1922. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955. Palmer, Alan. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. 3 vols. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954. ———. In Search of Lost Time. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Andreas Mayor, and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. 6 vols. New York: Modern Library, 1992–93. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. ———. “They Shoot Tigers, Don’t They? Narrative Counterpoint in The Long Goodbye.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J.  Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. 181–91. ———. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 121–41. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance:  Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Weather in Proust. Edited by Jonathan Goldberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Shaw, Harry. “Marcel at the Window, or There’s No Need to Be Ashamed of the Natural, Just Because It’s Learned.” Paper presented to the International Conference on Narrative, Austin, Texas, May 2008. Young, Kay. Imagining Minds: The Neuro-aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Chapter 5

How D o We Re a d What Isn’t There to Be Re a d ? Shadow Stories and Permanent Gaps H. P orte r Ab b ot t

Henry James wrote in his notes for The Portrait of a Lady that “the whole of anything is never told.”1 Technically this could be taken to mean that, in Lubomír Doležel’s words, “It would take a text of infinite length to construct a complete fictional world.”2 In James’s approach to his craft, however, what he meant is that, given the demands of artistic unity, the whole story is never told: that is, there will always be more details that, if told, would change the story in significant ways. In this view, there are always gaps in the telling where more story lurks. And here James differs from Doležel, who argued that, in fiction, where there is “zero texture” there is a gap that is absolute—a gap in which nothing happens.3 If you split the difference between the two positions, what you might get is a revised perspective on narrative as perceptible tracks on the surface of a universe of possibility. The common currency of narrative, then, would not be its signifying marks but its gaps—openings that at one and the same time do and do not contain story material. You might call this quantum narrativity, in that multiple incompatible stories, together with their incompatible worlds, reside in these gaps, but only as possibilities. Narrative gaps, in other words, open on a vast arena of virtual events that are never realized but rather exist like a kind of dark, weightless energy, hidden under the words and images that actualize a story. Yet, to pursue the conceit, such possible narrative threads with their intimations of possible worlds, can be twitched into indistinct life in the reader-viewer’s consciousness. One of my contentions in this chapter is that these unrealized, generally transient fragments are an active part of the narrative experience. Unnarrated, they are tendrils of story that generally hook onto parts of the text. Could we X-ray the mind of the reader as it reads, this cloud of fleeting event sequences would show up. They are what I have called elsewhere “shadow stories.”4 They are not “disnarrated”; that is, they are not references within the text to “what does not take place.”5 They are rather sensed possibilities of what might be the case, what might link the dots, however likely or unlikely. Some

H. Porter Abbott    105 are borne out by the narrative and thus come out of the shadows to become parts of the story, but unless and until that happens over the course of reading or viewing a narrative, they lack sufficient explicit or implicit textual evidence to allow one to say with confidence: This is part of the story. As these virtual event sequences occur solely in the consciousness of the reader, and as no two readers can be counted on to read in the same way, shadow stories fall into a great range of shape, content, and credibility. But, as long as one can only say This is likely to be what happened, rather than This is what happened, then whatever This is likely to be lies in the shadows of a gap. In the reading of both fiction and nonfiction, shadow stories can arise by chance as incalculable epiphenomena of any reader/viewer’s experience, but they can also be intentionally catalyzed to serve a variety of different functions in a variety of different contexts and in a variety of different narrative discourses: religious, political, legal, admonitory, therapeutic, poetic, prose fictional, dramatic, cinematic. When I first introduced the concept, my example was the use of shadow stories in legal discourse, and specifically as a weapon of defense deployed in the form of an indefinite set of overarching shadow stories of murder carried out by a person or persons other than the accused.6 Such alternative stories of alternative killers equipped with alternative plots are constantly hovering over the trial in a state of necessary indistinctness. Their possibility is what gives them their value in maintaining a “probability of reasonable doubt” regarding the narrative that the prosecution is trying to construct. Electoral politics is also a domain teeming with shadow stories that float within simpler stories, many of them prophetic, such as “I will cut taxes and reduce the deficit at the same time.” The simplicity of this narrative is directly proportional to its compression as a story. The decision to decompress segments of this narrative, that is, to fill gaps by bringing more details of the story out of the shadows is generally a calculated trade-off of political advantages and disadvantages. As this example shows, shadow stories can be possible elaborations of explicit or implicit textual narrative—that is, more detailed, and hence more complex, narrative accounts of simpler narrative versions of a story. One visual device that has helped me to think about the general issue of complexity in narrative progression is the diagram in figure 5.1 charting the inverse ratio of narrative complexity to narrative compression. When I first designed this diagram, it arose from the assumption that in nonfiction any actual historical sequence of events is a compressed version of more detailed actual sequences, each fitting within the other. In other words, within the brief narrative, “The Giants beat the Tigers, winning the 2012 World Series,” is a possibly infinite set of potential nested accounts, each more detailed than its more compressed version. But these are all versions of what really happened, given sufficient evidence. Thus, the tapes and commentary of the four games of the 2012 World Series will get us to a certain degree of complexity or decompression, after which we will need finer and finer discriminations to give, among many other things, an exact accounting of the internal mechanics and hormonal changes that take place in each of the players as they perform their various acts. Within this account there are still more detailed accounts reaching on down into the level of subatomic fermions and bosons, and still further beyond if such a beyond there is.7

Complexity

106    How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read?

Threshold of Tellability

Process of Infinite Complexity Threshold of Narratability

Threshold of Causal Disconnection

Causal Singularity

Compression

Figure  5.1  The ratio of compression to complexity in the representation of events

What my diagram does not show is what happens when shadow stories are included in the progression of events, for they do so not as actual event sequences (what really happened) but rather as consciously entertained possible event sequences (what might or might not have happened). These are the hypothetical sequences that multiply as one tries to decompress beyond known narratable certainties. If we were to include these sequences in the progression of events, they would increase the complexity of the process of decompression by several orders of magnitude, since, as possibilities, they jostle together in a widening third dimension of my diagram. But it is important again to distinguish, as I did above, between all possible event sequences and those possible event sequences that enter the mind of a reader/viewer at any particular point of a narrative, whatever its degree of compression. It would, of course, require a mind of great and inhuman capability to entertain more than a fraction of all possible event sequences together with all the exponentially increasing numbers of possible event sequences nested within them. In short, what creates the gaps of narrative is narrative itself. There is always more to tell, so that even the finest crevices of the narrative progression are open to a world of further possibility. To stretch the term Genette used for narrative gaps, narrative is always elliptical. Whether or not it is therefore a general rule that narrative is always generating a penumbra of shadow stories is not a case I am in any position to make. In what follows, I focus more narrowly on what happens in what have been called, variously, “permanent narrative gaps” (Sternberg 1978), “zero degree of ellipsis” (Genette 1980: 106), or “zero texture” (Doležel 1998).8 These are the gaps in narrative for which there is neither explicit nor implicit evidence in the text of anything that happened within them that can be taken as an actual part of the narrative’s series of events. What gives a permanent gap its distinct visibility and affective power is when it makes you think that James is right: we’re not getting the whole story. How did the wedding go when Isabel Archer married Gilbert Osmond? What happened in that first year of

H. Porter Abbott    107 marriage to bring about the subtle changes in her look and bearing when we meet her again? The effect of such a gap can be, in Anthony Lane’s apt phrase, “a pleasurable ache of dissatisfaction.”9 Or it can pique curiosity: did Becky Sharp kill Jos Sedley? Did Heathcliff intentionally kill Hindley Earnshaw? Or it can fill you with dread: what is it that lurks behind the door in the north wall of the house on Ash Tree Lane in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and what is it trying to do? By their nature as permanent fictional gaps, they contain no answers to these questions, even though we read them as if they do. In what follows, I will examine three different examples of permanent narrative gap, each of them in its way the opposite of the others. The first two illustrate two very different ways in which shadow stories can occupy a space where nothing happens in the actual world of the text. The third illustrates how a permanent gap can best work when it excludes the production of shadow stories altogether.

Binding the Gap A permanent gap can acquire a shadow story that in turn can hover over the unfolding of a narrative and even play a key role in the way we read the text as written. A good case in point is the common reading of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” according to which Nick’s experiences in the war bear directly on what is recorded in the text, even though there is no reference to those experiences in the text. Hemingway said as much himself about an unnamed fishing story he was writing in Paris in 1924: “The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.”10 Most readings of “Big Two-Hearted River” are anchored to this statement along with supporting paratextual evidence from other Nick Adams stories and Hemingway’s own war experiences, so that the textual story is necessarily read as part of a longer story of cause and effect. In these readings, the beginning of the long story, a shadow-sequence involving a traumatic experience (or set of experiences) suffered by Nick in war, is a critical component of the short story. Indeed, Hemingway wrote elsewhere that the lack of reference to the war is part of the symptomology of the war’s effects.11 Where for the reader the shadow story of causation is necessarily fuzzy and highly compressed, the text itself is highly decompressed in its sequencing of narrative detail. Together with its repetitions, the text is a case of what Doležel called “an oversaturated sequence of minimal actions” or “macroactivity.”12 As such, Nick’s detailed and repetitive narration has often been included as a stylistic consequence of trauma. All the same, Nick’s war experience can only be a likely part of “Big Two-Hearted River,” not a certifiable part. This is because, as noted above, without explicit or implicit evidence in the text, the permanent gaps of any particular textual version of a fictional story can never be filled with certainties. In our nonfictional lives, of course, there are also gaps that will never be filled because the actual events that lie in these gaps are obscured by time or circumstances or the failure of memory. This happens all the time.

108    How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read? What is different is that in our world, the assumption is that there must be many actual series of events that occurred in the gaps we cannot fill. By contrast, in a storyworld, where there is zero texture, there are absolutely no further events waiting to be found. Readers may imagine a host of different narrative connections lurking in a permanent gap, but none of these can ever be converted to a certainty. They have a virtual presence yet remain permanently in the dark. But does this absolute difference of gaps in fiction correspond to a difference in the way we read them from the way we read those in our experience of the actual world? Probably not. Our response to them still bears out Richard Gerrig’s first principle that to be transported into a world of narrative fiction all the reader needs is “to have in place the repertory of cognitive processes that is otherwise required for everyday experience.”13 That is, we read these gaps as if there are real connecting threads inside them, despite the fact that there is no thread, nor anything else, there to be known. I’m guessing this holds true even for those sophisticated readers who read with a full awareness somewhere in their minds that there is no fuller actual story lying in the gap. The leverage gained by the shadow story of Nick’s (presumably) frightening experience of war is that it can be projected back as both an initiating condition and continuing prompt for the ways in which Nick conducts himself. The shadow story of war situates the short story as a collocation of effects in a much longer story of cause and effect. It gives depth to Nick’s need to be where “Nothing could touch him,”14 to his carefully ritualized approach to the business of making camp and fishing, and to the fear that seems to be a constant presence: “Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right.”15 This take on the story is so familiar to us that it is hard to think of it in any other way. It has become a canonized reading. Yet there is no law requiring the reader to see a common traumatic cause binding all a character’s behavioral tics into a single syndrome of effects. Since when is human behavior so reducible? Why not read the story as the tale of a particular kind of a guy who goes about fishing alone in his own particular way? Doležel, who does not accept the standard reading of “Big Two-Hearted River,” has done us all a favor by providing a counterinterpretation of this story relying entirely on textual evidence, implicit or explicit. This is a reading without any shadow story that would explain why Nick might want to “choke” his mind when it starts to work.16 In this reading, Nick has “no urgent needs.”17 Nor is there “much about Nick that is sick. The ‘damage’ to his personality structure is done by the severe restrictions reigning in the fictional world of this short story.”18 This reading does not deny that the story is superbly crafted, rising to a climax with Nick’s battle with the big fish—a very Hemingway kind of elemental struggle that anticipates The Old Man and the Sea. But Nick’s “main activity, fishing, is for pleasure and thrill, not for satisfying need,” and as an expert fisher, he necessarily “lacks self-reflection and imagination.”19 Indeed, “the semantic structure of Nick’s acting reveals. . . the mental poverty of pure expertness.”20 This is all well and good as a kind of experiment in reading and may well capture the impact of Hemingway’s tale on a reader unacquainted with the paratext that has driven so many readings. But is it really possible to erase the paratext, once it is in your mind?

H. Porter Abbott    109

Jamming the Gap The standard critical response to “Big Two-Hearted River” is an example of how an entirely unreferenced, undetailed event sequence with only a shadowy virtual existence in a permanent narrative gap can acquire control over a story, determining readers’ response to almost all the details that are actually referenced in the story. My next example is an opposite case: a permanent gap that is strategically packed with multiple conflicting shadow stories. My specimen gap opens up with the final scene of A Separation, the brilliant Iranian film that won the 2012 Oscar for best foreign film. The scene is shown in figure 5.2. This is also the last of many scenes of separation in A Separation, with Simin and Nader, whose marital separation is the central focus of the film, now seated on opposite sides of a hall and further separated by the glass panel of a door. Where we are in the narrative timeline can be framed as a micro-story: Termeh, their daughter, who suffers the most through the separation of her parents, has just responded to the judge’s question: Have you chosen which parent you will live with? Yes, she says, weeping, but may she speak with the judge in private before declaring her choice? Her wish is granted, and her parents leave the room. We see them now, awaiting their daughter and her decision. After a while the credits roll upward through this scene. They continue to wait, and their daughter still fails to appear even as the credits finish rolling. Figure 5.3 is our last view of them before the screen goes black. In this permanent gap, there are at least two conflicting shadow stories that share the same beginning and middle, but end differently. We have seen the beginning as it unfolds in its tellable fullness. It features Termeh announcing that she has made her choice and the judge affirming that she must tell it now. The middle, which is unfolding

Figure  5.2  First frame of the final scene of A Separation

110    How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read?

Figure  5.3  Last frame of the final scene of A Separation

as we watch but hidden from view, can only be formulated in a highly compressed version: Termeh speaks with the judge. The end of the story, which is yet to come, can go one way or the other after Termeh appears in the hallway: she either walks up to her mother or walks up to her father. She could also walk past them both, though this is less likely. These two virtual endings crowd the cognitive space of this hallway, coexisting with what we actually see there. But they coexist also with the second part of the story, a sequence of events unfolding right now behind a door. The story behind the door lengthens with the lengthening of real time and grows thicker with fragmentary shadow bits. Termeh continues to plead for time. Or she doesn’t. She cries. Or she doesn’t. She asks what choosing one parent means in terms of the time spent with the other. The judge grows impatient. The judge softens in sympathy. The judge simply repeats that she must choose. The acute feeling of uncertainty and unknowing the viewer experiences at this point is not new to the film. From the film’s ingenious opening, with Simin and Nader stating their cases directly to us (their unnamed interlocutor present only as a voice), the writer/director, Asghar Farhadi, repeatedly creates spaces bristling with shadow stories, generating aches of “pleasurable dissatisfaction.” As this earnest attractive couple tries to explain where they stand in their dispute, the story of their marriage, like the missing texture of Nick’s war experience with its many possibilities, bulks up in the shadows. It is the first of many lacunae, dense with shadow stories (the texture of Razieh and Hodjat’s marriage; Razieh getting hit by the car; where she went and what happened when Razieh left Nader’s father tied to his bed). But the film also has been satisfying us, over and over. This is important because it has established a pattern of puzzlement and revelation, even as each revelation brings with it new puzzlement. This pattern gives the end of the film its bite, for there will be no further revelation, no story, either compressed or decompressed, from the moment we and our protagonists leave the judge’s office—only puzzlement, with its attendant shadow stories.

H. Porter Abbott    111 I have been making the case in this section that, if you adopt cognitive lenses, the event structure of narrative can appear far busier than what is determined to be its actual sequence of events in its actual world. But there is an ancillary point of interest about the quality of the situation we find ourselves in as we wait in this hallway with Simin and Nader. It is a paradoxical quality of, on the one hand, knowing that the narrative is a finished artifact, now concluding, with its inevitable quality of having already happened and, on the other hand, remaining in the filmic present with Simin and Nader, our time matching theirs second by second. We have joined them in a relationship to events that they have been experiencing all through the story but that, up to now, we have been only observing from their future. The effect is the sense of story in the absence of story and, with it, a weird conjunction of two kinds of relationship to time that may put a strain on the sufficiency of Gerrig’s “repertory of cognitive processes that is otherwise required for everyday experience.” In this regard, the stills that slice through time at the end of films like Thelma and Louise or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Grey have a much different effect. For one thing we can, in these cases, formulate a highly credible, if compressed, account of what comes next for these people. For another, to end with a still is to end with a photograph—a moment of action, assuredly, but a fixed memoir of a moment now firmly in the past. Of course, it is the case that film lacks (with the occasional exception of voiceover) the continual tense reminders of the pastness of events that is almost inevitable in prose fiction. It unfolds with a degree of “presentness” that arguably surpasses the effect of the “historical present” or even “simultaneous narration” in prose fiction.21 Be that as it may, we must also know somewhere in our minds that the film we watch is an artifact, made and packaged in the past, and in this sense already concluded. A Separation is no exception to this rule. As it concludes, we are increasingly aware that this film, as artifact, is a finished product and this is its ending. But what the conclusion of A Separation also captures in the same stretch of time is what Joan L. Bybee has described as the “inherently imperfective” aspect of the present tense.22 In prose by contrast, even the present tense of simultaneous narration is a kind of present perfect. If I am right about this, a unique effect that this scene captures, as the credits roll, is the “unbounded” character of the present.23 It captures the constant condition of waiting amid a plurality of possible futures threaded in shadow stories. By its failure to conclude, or even to freeze, the ending of this film captures the quintessential condition of the present as both “coming to be” and “yet to be.” Viewers now experience the condition of presentness that has weighed on the characters at every point in the film, just as it weighs on us in our lives. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon argue in c­ hapter 25 in this volume that significant modes of “cognitive elaboration [have] been excluded in most transport research.” In this light, what I have suggested here regarding the concluding sequence of A Separation may contribute its own relevant complication to their argument. Under the heading of transportation, it is I think undeniable that the threads of shadow stories that accompany the slight movements of Simin and Nader in this scene are a rich continuation of the transport we have experienced throughout the film. That is, right up to our last

112    How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read? glimpse we continue to feel a combination of anxiety, tension, hope, and fear that has tracked the evolving fortunes of three sympathetic characters from the start. But, if I am right, this immersion in the story is complicated in two ways. One is the move from the narrative condition of pastness to a combined filmic and real-world present. The other is a clear understanding that the film is indeed a packaged artifact from the past and in fact is now coming to its end. Somehow these layers of awareness coexist. There are, of course, all kinds of different imaginings in different mixes that are always going on in the different individual minds of reader/viewers. This is a fact that makes ours a very imperfect “science.” But even if we can in some way filter out all the idiosyncratic irrelevancies of viewers’ thoughts and feelings, what this scene helps us see is how rich a process narrative is when we include in our account of it the ways in which its action is diversified by our narrative neurology.24

When Narratives Collide My third and last case is yet another opposite: the gap that occurs when a narrative abruptly intrudes on another, cutting it off in a seemingly random redirect. Most commonly these occur in poetry. Here’s one by a master of the art of gaps.                    The hot water at ten, And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. When Lil’s husband got demobbed. I said— I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself. . .25

Much has been written about Pound’s and Eliot’s technique of juxtaposition or montage, designed to reach, in Eliot’s words, “frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist.”26 Here the abrupt switch of voice, rhythm, and social class presses together two highly contrasting versions of the spiritual emptiness that is the overarching theme of the poem. At the same time it is a collision of two distinctly different narrative fragments in two distinctly different narrative modes (prophetic/repetitive, conversational/colloquial). Different people, different worlds, different stories coming in at right angles to each other. It is the collision of narratives in this instance (and many others in the poem) that has a special productivity for Eliot’s ends in “The Waste Land” because one of those ends is to intimate the presence of yet another story within which these fragments abide. It is a story that can only be read by breaking up the illusory coherence of these mundane stories, which, as it were, pass time that were better spent. In short, there is another story in progress in which this collision of story fragments plays its part, unbeknownst to the actors as they play theirs. This invisible story rides along with the other stories, but carried by a pacing and rhythm of the voices as they speak. You can make it out when the languid

H. Porter Abbott    113 cataleptic octameter line that ends the first fragment with its suspenseful “waiting for a knock upon the door” is abruptly answered by the harsh, spondaic rapping of “Whén Líl’s húsband gót demóbbed, I sáid—.” It’s stunning. But for the intended impact to work you cannot insert a shadow story in the gap. You cannot mess with it without messing with the effect that requires, on the one hand, the absolute void conveyed by the white space and, on the other, the crash of the narrative redirect, with the knocking on the door coming through on another plane. In short, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Matt. 13:9, Mark 4:9, Rev. 13:9). The gap is where action stops and, by extension, nothing lives. It conveys Eliot’s dominant theme of the vacancy of souls dying of thirst, but it is also a space in which those who might be listening might be ready to hear what really comes next. And now for something not quite completely different, I want to look at a permanent gap in a ballad by Lead Belly. Here I am indebted to Alan Palmer’s contribution in c­ hapter 7 of this volume and particularly his very interesting and suggestive commentary on a case of the crossing of narrative fragments in Lead Belly’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Palmer reads the ballad with his characteristically deft precision, which persuades me up to a point. What follows, then, is a kind of friendly rejoinder, using my own theoretical lenses and imperfect ear. The specific narrative disconnect comes with the third verse: My girl my girl don’t lie to me Tell me where did you sleep last night In the pines in the pines Where the sun don’t ever shine I would shiver the whole night through My girl my girl where will you go I’m going where the cold wind blows In the pines in the pines Where the sun don’t ever shine I will shiver the whole night through [Repeat first verse] My husband, was a hard working man Just about a mile from here His head was found in a driving wheel And his body hasn’t ever been found [Repeat first verse]

Somewhere in “[t]‌he odd and confused background to the song,” Palmer writes, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” with its four different titles and 150 known versions and seemingly interchangeable parts, was spliced with lines from another ballad, “The Longest Train I Ever Saw,” that tells of “the decapitation of a man in an accident involving a train with many carriages.” The narrative disconnect between fragments of the two ballads is of a piece with the song’s history of “contingent, accidental and random” creation out of recombinant parts. As Palmer shrewdly observes, the song and many others of the sort

114    How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read? are like the “found objects” that crowded the sculpture studio of Henry Moore and were often “indistinguishable from his actual sculptures.” But since we are dealing with narratives, not rocks, we have the problem of developing the causal relationship between what happens literally and emotionally in one stanza and what happens in the next. And so, Palmer, as it were, mines the gap, producing a clutch of what I have been calling shadow stories:  Is she shivering in the pines because of the death of her husband? If so, what is the nature of this causation? Is there some element of guilt involved on the part of the woman? It seems unlikely that she was in any way responsible for his death in a train crash, so the most satisfying explanation is that her sense of guilt arises from her being unfaithful to her husband, presumably with the narrator, at the time of his death. In turn, his anxiety may arise from the depth of her feelings of guilt and his concern that she may harm herself. There are no definite answers to these questions, but the intensely “gappy” variant of the song that Lead Belly sings certainly prompts the listener to ask them.

Nevertheless, he continues, “a satisfying and coherent artistic whole results, because it is still perfectly possible to construct plausible minds from its heavily attenuated narrative.” And it is here that I differ insofar as I am contending that the gap itself is important. It has its own counternarrative impact, importing into the formal order of music, gaps of narrative disconnection from a world where, as they say, “shit happens.” What the singer does is bind these disparate events into the powerful and insistent order of music. Add to this the spell of a singular voice, going his own road, “loyal to his eccentricities,”27 and you have a way of living with a world over which one has little control. But it is also a way of declaring the inimitable signature of the artist that binds the whole thing together. This, after all, is the same poet who could with the same sublime insouciance throw Moses “smotin’ the water with a two-by-four” into surprising junctures of at least two different ballads (“Lining Track” and “Rock Island Line”). Among other things, it’s fun.

Concluding Remarks My main object in this chapter has been to begin, at least, to open up the subject of permanent narrative gaps and to indicate something of its nuance and variety, while at the same time indicating something of the flexibility of cognitive response. As these highly contrasting examples of aesthetic success via modes of narrative absence show, we are cognitively resourceful in ways that have not been fully credited. This is important, given how broadly scholars and scientists have cast the narrative net as that which “constructs the content of conscious thought.”28 To some, narrative is our very first act of making sense. In Antonio Damasio’s view, for example, before there is language or interpretation, there is narrative activity in the mind that generates the “feeling of knowing” and with it “the core self.” This precedes the interpreting or

H. Porter Abbott    115 “autobiographical self.” It is a self that “comes to mind in the form of images, relentlessly telling a story” of our engagements with “causative objects” (italics in original).29 This is an attractive theory. I like it myself. But how, then, can the felt absence of narrative enable the satisfactions of aesthetic success in minds that work by relentlessly making connections by telling stories? I also think my observations should inflect how we frame the subjects of the event and eventfulness in narratology. If an event is by definition marked by a “change of state” (Hühn), then shadow stories don’t qualify as events insofar as they play no verifiable part of a narrative. Yet the vague shadow story “Nick was in the war” can color all the events and micro-events of a short story. Nor would the term “eventfulness” (Hühn) seem to apply. And yet the production of shadow stories is an eventfulness of mind, a cognitive busyness, often full of transient event structures. Where would all this belong, if at all, in our narratology? Is there a cognitive, or neurological, framework within which narratology can gain useful, nonreductive insight into effects that shadow stories or their absence arouse in reader/viewers’ response? Through the modest analyses I have made in this chapter, I have sought to bring a few aspects of nonpathological narrative failure or narrative collapse in under the umbrella of narratology: in part, to resist definition-creep whereby the idea of event-based narrative is made to absorb larger and larger swathes of communication and cognition, and in part, because the study of narrative is incomplete without the study of the limits of narrative.

Notes 1. Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiesen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Brasiller, 1955), 18. 2. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998), 169. 3. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 169–84. 4. H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative , 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 182–83. 5. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology, rev. edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 22. 6. At the time, I also applied the term “shadow story” to parts of a story that might, if told, accompany fragmentary evidence from witnesses and other peripheral players. I would now say these are hidden stories rather than shadow stories. During the course of a trial, parts of these hidden stories may prove to be relevant to the case for the defense or prosecution and consequently brought out into the light. But by and large, details of these hidden stories are sequestered to maintain focus and efficiency. 7. Figure 5.1 reprinted with permission from H Porter Abbott, “Conversion in an Age of Darwinian Gradualism,” Storyworlds 2 (2010), 11. 8. The subject of permanent gaps, which I seek to open up in this chapter, is a neglected part of the broader and much-discussed issue of narrative gaps. For contributions to this broader issue see, chronologically, Menahem Perry and Meir Sternberg,

116    How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read? “The King through Ironic Eyes: Biblical Narrative and the Literary Reading Process” [1968], Poetics Today 7.2 (1986):  275–322; Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse:  An Essay in Method [1972], trans. Jane E.  Lewin (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1980); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett [1972] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response [1976] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Humberto Eco, The Role of the Reader:  Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs:  Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1981); Peter J.  Rabinowitz, Before Reading:  Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1987); Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Doležel, Heterocosmica (1998); Rabinowitz, “ ‘A Lot Has Been Built Up’: Omission and Rhetorical Realism in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler,” Narrative 9.2 (May 2001):  203–9; David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); and H. Porter Abbott, Real Mysteries:  Narrative and the Unknowable (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). 9. Anthony Lane, “Out of the Frame,” New Yorker, September 3, 2012, 71. 10. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner’s, 1965), 76. 11. “ ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ is about a boy coming home beat to the wide from the war. Beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had it were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted.” “The Art of the Short Story,” ed. Jackson J. Benson, New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 3. 12. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 43. 13. Richard Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 239. 14. Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1972), 184. 15. Hemingway, Nick Adams, 185. 16. Hemingway, Nick Adams, 187. 17. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 43. 18. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 239 n. 10. 19. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 43, 47. 20. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 239 n. 14. 21. For more on whether or not narrative is always a recounting of what has already happened in the past, see Christian Paul Casparis, Tense without Time: The Present Tense in Narration (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1975); Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 175; James Phelan, “Present Tense Narration, Mimesis, the Narrative Norm, and the Positioning of the Reader in Waiting for the Barbarians,” in Understanding Narrative, ed. Phelan and Peter J.  Rabinowitz

H. Porter Abbott    117 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 222–45; Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); H. Porter Abbott, “The Future of All Narrative Futures,” in The Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 235–36. 22. Joan L. Bybee, “The Grammaticization of Zero,” in Perspectives on Grammaticalization, ed. William Pagliuca, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vol. 109 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994), 237. 23. Bybee, “The Grammaticization of Zero,” 235–36. 2 4. Two of the most widely cited boosts to the idea that the narrative function has a deep neurological component are accounts of what happens when it fails: Oliver Sacks’s on the effects of Korsakov’s Syndrome (1985) and Kay Young and Jeffrey Saver’s on four types of dysnarrativia (2001). My effort in this chapter has been to indicate ways in which narrative “failure” is not only nonpathological but a positive operation of a healthy mind. 25. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), 68. 26. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), 23. 27. I’ve adapted this happy phrase from Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song from the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 96. My thanks to Alan Palmer for connecting me with this excellent book. 28. Ronald Kellogg, The Psychology of Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 42. 29. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind:  Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 203.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. “The Future of All Narrative Futures.” In Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory. Edited by James Phelan & Peter J. Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, 529–41. ———. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Bybee, Joan L. “The Grammaticization of Zero.” In Perspectives on Grammaticalization. Edited by William Pagliuca. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vol. 109. Philadelphia:  John Benjamins, 1994: 235–54. Casparis, Christian Paul. Tense without Time: The Present Tense in Narration. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1975. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Constantine, Mary-Ann, and Gerald Porter. Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song from the Blues to the Baltic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica:  Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

118    How Do We Read What Isn’t There to Be Read? Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader:  Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems: 1909–1962. London: Faber, 1963. ———. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method [1972]. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Gerrig, Richard. Experiencing Narrative Worlds:  On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner’s, 1965. ———. The Nick Adams Stories. New York: Scribner’s, 1972. ———. “The Art of the Short Story.” In New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Edited by J. Benson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990: 1–16. Herman, David. Story Logic:  Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Hühn, Peter. “Event and Eventfulness.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology. Edited by Peter Hühn et al., Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index. php?title=Event and Eventfulness​&oldid=753. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett [1972]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. [1972]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. ———. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response [1976], Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. James, Henry. The Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by F. O.  Matthiesen and Kenneth B. Murdock. New York: Brasiller, 1955. Kafka, Franz. The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces. Translated by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1961. Kellogg, Ronald. The Psychology of Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Lane, Anthony. “Out of the Frame.” New Yorker, September 3, 2012, 70–75. Perry, Menahem, and Meir Sternberg. “The King through Ironic Eyes: Biblical Narrative and the Literary Reading Process” [1968]. Poetics Today 7.2 (1986): 275–322. Phelan, James. “Present Tense Narration, Mimesis, the Narrative Norm, and the Positioning of the Reader in Waiting for the Barbarians.” In Understanding Narrative. Edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Columbus: Ohio State University Press: 222–45. ———. Reading People, Reading Plots:  Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Revised edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. ———. “ ‘A Lot Has Been Built Up’:  Omission and Rhetorical Realism in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler.” Narrative 9.2 (May 2001): 203–9. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

H. Porter Abbott    119 Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. New York: Summit Books, 1985. Spolsky, Ellen. Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Young, Kay, and Jeffrey L. Shaver. “The Neurology of Narrative” [2001]. In Young, Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetic of Austin, Eliot, and Hardy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010: 185–94.

Chapter 6

Rhetorica l T h e ory, C o gnitive T h e ory, a nd Morrison’s “ Re c i tat i f” From Parallel Play to Productive Collaboration Ja me s Phe l an

As a rhetorical narrative theorist interested in the flourishing subfield of cognitive narrative theory, I have been struck by a significant and surprising gap in narrative studies. Rhetorical and cognitive narrative theory share several fundamental commitments and interests, but, for the most part, rhetorical theorists and cognitive theorists have engaged in parallel play rather than productive collaboration. On those occasions when they have engaged with each other’s work, they have emphasized differences and disagreements more than what they share and how they might join forces.1 In this chapter, I would like to demonstrate one way that the two approaches can effectively collaborate as I take up the task of interpreting Toni Morrison’s provocative short story “Recitatif.” I select Morrison’s tale about race, class, disability, and their effects on a female friendship extending over approximately thirty years, because Morrison employs a narrative strategy of great interest to both rhetoricians and cognitive theorists. Morrison invents joint protagonists, Twyla and Roberta, of different races (one white, one black) and has Twyla tell the tale. Twyla’s narration makes it clear that the two characters know each other’s race and that their racial difference strongly influences their relationship, but Twyla never explicitly identifies herself or Roberta by race. In addition, Morrison frustrates our ability to use other cultural markers as a way to assign racial identities to her co-protagonists. As the critical conversation to this point demonstrates, the very salience of Morrison’s withholding of her characters’ racial identity for the story’s thematic explorations of race and class2 can lead us to overlook other striking aspects of Morrison’s design, including her handling of other aspects of the character narration and her management of the overall progression. In this chapter I want to analyze these elements of Morrison’s story by drawing on Lisa Zunshine’s insights about

James Phelan   121 metarepresentation, Alan Palmer’s work on social minds, and some of my own previous work on character narration and on progression—and by remaining open to the ways in which Morrison’s design may require some refinements of these theoretical constructs. In my conclusion I shall briefly reflect on my way of bringing cognitive and rhetorical theory together. I begin by elaborating on my sense of the gap in narrative studies this chapter wants to fill. Rhetorical and cognitive narrative theory share at least two important principles and one important mode of inquiry. Principle 1:  Narrative is a purposeful communicative exchange between authors and readers. Rhetorical theory defines narrative as somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened. Furthermore, it views the ultimate somebody who tells as the implied author and the ultimate somebody else who listens as those actual readers who seek to enter what Peter J. Rabinowitz has called the authorial audience.3 This conception gives far more weight to authors and audiences than do most other contemporary critical approaches. Where those approaches tend to foreground texts, history, and ideology (in some combination), the rhetorical view subordinates these matters to the author-audience exchange. It regards the elements of narrative (events, characters, narration, and so on) as resources that the implied author, situated in her historical context, deploys in some ways rather than others in order to communicate her purposes to her audience.4 These purposes are likely to have ideological dimensions but those dimensions may or may not be central to the overall communication. Although I am not aware of any cognitive theorist explicitly endorsing this larger vision of narrative, cognitive theory does assume that there is a mind behind the text and that interpreters will attempt to read that mind (often by reading the minds of characters). David Herman argues that the interpretation of narrative needs to be built on the assumption that “stories are irreducibly grounded in intentional systems.”5 Lisa Zunshine contends that even poststructuralist proclamations about the death of the author and the birth of the reader implicitly assign some agent as the begetter of the communication and thus indicate “the tenaciousness with which we cling to the idea that there must be some source (e.g., an author, a reader, multiple authors, multiple readers) behind a narrative.”6 In other words, regardless of where we locate the source, we assign it an authorial function. Principle 2: One important task of narrative theory is to offer insights into the general conditions and mechanisms governing that exchange between authors and readers. Thus, to take just one example, Rabinowitz’s identification of the authorial audience is part of his broader taxonomy of audiences relevant to the writing and reading of fictional narrative. Cognitive narrative theory is full of similar efforts. Again to take just one example, Palmer analyzes differences between internalist and externalist views of consciousness as part of his effort to explain the ways authors construct and readers understand fictional minds.7 More generally, both rhetorical and cognitive theorists often seek to transform tacit understandings that underlie our experience as writers and readers into articulate knowledge that in turn can enrich our appreciation of those experiences. Common Mode of Inquiry:  Both approaches conduct interpretations in order to demonstrate how individual narratives deploy those general conditions and mechanisms and, where appropriate, to show how those deployments can lead to revisions in

122    Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif” our understanding of those general conditions and mechanisms. Thus, for example, Rabinowitz’s efforts to understand the details of different kinds of passing in Nella Larsen’s Passing led him to propose the initially counterintuitive idea that some narratives have multiple authorial audiences.8 Zunshine’s efforts to analyze source monitoring in the detective story led her to offer a much more nuanced view of the dictum that detective plots and romance plots don’t mix. To be sure, narrative theorists with different projects from those of rhetorical and cognitive theorists also engage in this mode of inquiry, so my claim is not that rhetoricians and cognitivists are unique in this practice. Instead, my claim is that this shared practice provides another reason why the two groups should be looking to each other’s work more than they have so far. Indeed, in light of what the approaches have in common, we ought to pause and consider why there has not yet been much collaboration. I identify four main reasons. (1)  As cognitive narratology has emerged over the last two decades or so, it has understandably been focused on how it is distinct from other approaches to narrative, especially what Herman has dubbed classical narratology.9 (2) Cognitive theory’s chief way of establishing that distinctiveness has been to focus on the consequences of various findings of cognitive studies—findings ranging from research on theory of mind to Daniel Dennett’s philosophical work on consciousness—for the way we understand narratives themselves. In other words, the work moves from cognitive studies to generalizations about narrative and then to testing and exemplification in relation to individual narratives. Those moves neither require nor encourage engagement with rhetorical theory. (3) Rhetorical theory, meanwhile, has been concerned with revising and extending work in its tradition in order to establish its own distinctiveness among other approaches. Indeed, the contributions that Rabinowitz and I make to Narrative Theory primarily seek to stake out rhetorical theory’s place in the landscape of contemporary narrative studies. (4) Narrative theorists have been emphasizing the point that their field now contains multiple approaches, and this emphasis has worked against efforts to integrate those approaches. I acknowledge at the outset that cognitive theory and rhetorical theory are themselves multifarious enterprises and that a single chapter cannot demonstrate all the ways in which the two approaches may productively collaborate. My modest goal, then, is to carry out one such collaboration, and my immodest hope is that it will spur other researchers both to respond to it and to explore additional ways of bringing the subfields together.

Metarepresentation, Character Narration, and the Ethics of Morrison’s Telling Since Morrison’s decision to withhold the racial identity of Twyla and Roberta is central to understanding her communication, I begin with it. In terms of the story’s

James Phelan   123 progression, the withholding functions as a global tension of unequal knowledge that is never resolved. Both Morrison and Twyla know the characters’ racial identities but neither reveals them. Twyla’s withholding is inadvertent: she assumes that her narratee knows her race and therefore knows Roberta’s as well. Morrison’s withholding, by contrast, is deliberate, and it invites questions about the ethics of her telling. Why shouldn’t we regard her relation to her audience as the high-culture equivalent of a Mean Girl taunting someone with chants of “I know something you don’t know”? A close look at the nature and effects of Morrison’s withholding will lead us to an answer, and the well-known duck/rabbit figure and Zunshine’s work on metarepresentation will aid our vision.10 In ­figure 6.1 the artist provides signals that can be construed as forming the image of a duck or of a rabbit, but not both at the same time. The artist does not provide any signal that, if we could only see better or deeper, we could determine that the image was actually that of a duck or that of a rabbit. In other words, the figure is not just a duck and not just a rabbit but rather a duck/rabbit. Morrison’s ambiguity is significantly different, because she signals that (a) Twyla and Roberta are either black or white not black/white (duck or rabbit not duck/rabbit); (b) they know each other’s race and therefore so does she; and (c) the audience cannot know which one is which. 11 As Zunshine explains, metarepresentation is a term referring to our cognitive ability to keep track of the sources of information. Thus, an act of metarepresentation has two parts, one concerned with the source of the information and one concerned with the content of the information. The first sentence of this paragraph provides a handy example: it provides a content (the definition) and a source for that content (Zunshine). Your understanding of my sentence adds an additional source: “Phelan writes that Zunshine says that metarepresentation is . . .” When we monitor sources as well as content, we remain open to the possibility that the content is unreliable or otherwise limited, as the expression “consider the source” indicates. When we lose track of sources, we are susceptible of mistaking lies, distortions, and other unreliable messages as accurate reports, interpretations, or evaluations. Zunshine impressively shows how a focus on source tracking can illuminate our experience of unreliable narrators (her main examples are Richardson’s Robert Lovelace and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert) and of detective stories.

Figure  6.1  Duck/rabbit figure

124    Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif” As a rhetorician, however, I am struck by Zunshine’s relatively weak commitment to the implied author as the ultimate source of fictional communication. By a weak commitment, I mean that Zunshine recognizes this point in theory but does not give much weight to it in her interpretive practice. In her discussions of Clarissa and Lolita, Zunshine focuses not on the choices made by Richardson and Nabokov but rather on the character narrators’ own failures in monitoring themselves as sources and their consequences for readerly decisions about unreliability. In this way, Zunshine effectively treats unreliable narration as if it works primarily along a single communicative track running from narrator to reader. Zunshine’s summary of her analysis illustrates this point: [Some narratives with unreliable narrators] portray protagonists who fail, on some level, to keep track of themselves as sources of their representations of their own and other people’s minds, and, by doing so, they force the reader into a situation in which she herself becomes unsure of the relative truth-value of any representation contained in such a narrative.12

As a rhetorician, I want to adapt Zunshine’s work by strongly committing to the implied author as the ultimate source of narrative communication. This commitment highlights the dual-track nature of unreliable narration, with one track proceeding from narrator to narratee and the other going from implied author to authorial and actual audiences.13 More generally, this adaptation highlights the point that the art of character narration depends on the implied author’s ability to use the single text of the narrator’s overt communication to the narratee simultaneously as a covert communication to her audience. I would then revise Zunshine’s summary statement this way: Implied authors of narratives often employ character narrators who fail, on some level, to keep track of themselves as sources of their representations of their own and other people’s minds. By depicting these failures, these implied authors typically signal to their audiences that these character narrators are unreliable, though the exact nature and degree of that unreliability will vary from case to case.

The practical advantages of this adaptation become clear when we turn to the metarepresentation in “Recitatif ”—even as Morrison’s practice adds at least two additional turns of the communicative screw governing character narration. First, by withholding Twyla’s racial identity, the implied Morrison gives us one text that simultaneously has three tellers and three purposes. The withholding means that we must give each sentence of Twyla’s narration and each line of dialogue from Twyla and from Roberta a triple reading: one that assigns the content to a white speaker; a second that assigns that content to a black speaker; and an all-encompassing third that assigns both readings to the implied Morrison and asks what effects she creates through the juxtaposition of the first two readings. The specific effects of the triple sourcing vary along a broad spectrum. At one end, the implied Morrison uses the first two readings to generate substantially different understandings of Twyla’s narration, differences that highlight links between an audience’s

James Phelan   125 assumption about a speaker’s race and the meaning of her utterances. At the other end, the implied Morrison uses the first two readings to show that some situations transcend race. As an example of the first set of effects, consider Twyla’s confession about not knowing how black-white relations were “in those days” (the 1960s) when Roberta snubbed her after they met at the Howard Johnson’s where Twyla was working. But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. Busloads of blacks and whites came into Howard Johnson’s together. They roamed together then: students, musicians, lovers, protestors. You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.14

In both of the first two readings, the passage is an example of unreliable interpretation based in naiveté. Morrison expects her audience to recognize that what Twyla observed at Howard Johnson’s hardly reflects the state of race relations in the 1960s. Indeed, Morrison’s depiction of the meeting between Twyla and Roberta functions as evidence of Twyla’s unreliable interpretation. Rather than being happy to see each other for the first time since they were together at the orphanage, they are wary of each other, and Roberta is particularly unwilling to show affection in the presence of her two friends who are of her same race. If Twyla is white, then the unreliability reflects her white privilege: it is easy for her to think that blacks and whites were so friendly because she did not have to experience the pervasive effects of white racism. But if Twyla is black, then the naiveté reflects both her personal good fortune in not having felt those effects and her lack of awareness of what so many who shared her skin color had to endure. Now consider Twyla’s report of her feelings about Roberta leaving St. Bonaventure’s. “I thought I would die in that room of four beds without her and I knew Bozo had plans to move some other dumped kid in there with me” (248). Here the first two readings produce the same effect. Whether this narration is from a white girl speaking about the effects of losing her black friend or vice versa, it powerfully conveys the speaker’s regret about her friend’s departure and her feeling of being left behind—and these emotions, in turn, indicate not that race is irrelevant in this situation but that Twyla and Roberta have forged a genuine friendship across their racial divide. Our need to engage in this triple source-tracking leads to the second turn of the communicative screw: Morrison makes us aware of the various ways in which we make identifications of race on the basis of markers of class and culture—including, as Elizabeth Abel points out, ways rooted in our own racial identities. For example, Roberta’s knowledge of Jimi Hendrix and Twyla’s ignorance of him will incline many white readers to assume, as Abel did, that Roberta is black and Twyla is white, until someone points out, as Abel’s black friend Lula Fragd did, that Hendrix was more popular with whites than blacks. Similarly, many black readers might assume, as Fragd did, that Roberta’s antibusing stance and her affluence mark her as white, until they learn, as Abel did from Morrison herself, that Morrison gives Roberta’s husband a position with IBM because that company had a program for recruiting black executives in the 1970s. (Morrison does not regard this information as definitively indicating that Roberta is black but rather as helping to keep the question of her race open.)15

126    Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif” We can now answer the question about the ethics of Morrison’s telling. Morrison is far from the high-culture equivalent of a Mean Girl because the effects of her withholding are to engage us more fully in this process of unpacking the multiple, inescapable, and yet unstable markers we use to assign race and class in American culture. This engagement makes the reading experience not fruitless and frustrating but deeply rewarding.

Narrative Progression, Social Minds, and a Technical Glitch in “Recitatif” Progression, as I have argued elsewhere, is a synthesis of textual dynamics (the principles underlying the movement of both plot and narration from beginning through middle to ending) and of readerly dynamics (the trajectory of the authorial audience’s responses to the textual dynamics). Textual dynamics are rooted in the introduction, complication, and resolution, often only partial, of instabilities and tensions. Instabilities are unsettled relationships between and among characters, or characters and their environments, or, indeed, a single character and herself, and tensions are unsettled relationships between and among authors, narrators, and readers. Thus, textual dynamics can themselves be subdivided into plot dynamics (governed by instabilities) and narratorial dynamics (the site of tensions). Readerly dynamics stem from our interpretive and ethical judgments about characters and their situations as well as about narrators and their relationships to those characters and to their audiences. In a traditional realist novel such as Pride and Prejudice, the progression consists of the synthesis of the instabilities and complications of the Elizabeth-Darcy relationship as shaped within the ironic narrator’s presentation with the audience’s judgments of each character and the audience’s subsequent expectations about and desires for the eventual union of the couple. Thus, when Elizabeth and Darcy become engaged, the satisfaction and happiness they feel is mirrored in the satisfactions and happiness of Austen’s audience. As I noted above, Palmer distinguishes between internalist and externalist perspectives on the mind, with the internalist perspective emphasizing “those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached” and the externalist emphasizing “those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged” (39). Palmer notes that the perspectives are complementary not competing, but also contends that previous work on fictional minds has been far more influenced by the internalist perspective than the externalist. He sets out to redress the balance, paying special attention to representations of “social minds” characterized by “intermental thought,” that is, “joint, group, shared, or collective” cognition (41). Palmer maintains that such representation “looms large as a technique and as a subject matter” in the history of the novel. Significantly, from the perspective of rhetorical theory, Palmer goes on to add that “techniques and subject matters are parts of novels, not purposes of them. They are means rather than

James Phelan   127 ends. What matters, ultimately, is the purpose to which a particular sort of consciousness representation is put” (63).16 Morrison’s use of social minds in “Recitatif ” nicely exemplifies this last point. Much of her story traces the formation, the fragility, the breakdown, and possible re-formation of the social mind shared by Twyla and Roberta. But for Morrison that tracing is one means toward her larger purposes, which include (1) at the thematic level, heightening her audience’s awareness of the myriad personal and cultural factors that influence the trajectory of Twyla’s and Roberta’s efforts to bridge their racial divide; (2) at the mimetic level, guiding her audience’s ethical judgments and affective responses so that we desire their success and understand their failures and can take genuine satisfaction in the story’s bittersweet ending; and (3) at the aesthetic level, constructing a narrative that rewards our attention not only to the nuances of the relationships between the characters but also to those between herself and us. In this section, then, I will draw on Palmer’s work for insights into some aspects of Morrison’s construction of the progression, especially its beginning and ending, but I shall also consider one aspect of that character narration that is crucial for the progression and seems to me best understood from the perspective of rhetorical theory. Morrison builds the plot dynamics around a global instability and its complications: Twyla’s and Roberta’s struggles to relate across their racial difference, struggles complicated by their relationships to their neglectful mothers and by broader cultural issues affecting race relations in the United States from the 1950s to the early 1980s. (Strikingly, Twyla’s and Roberta’s fathers are never mentioned and do not function as absent presences.) Morrison divides the story into five parts. In the first, set in the 1950s at an orphanage, the girls are eight years old and they bond; in the second, set in the 1960s at the Howard Johnson’s where Twyla works, they cannot bridge their divides; in the third, set in the early 1970s in a suburban shopping center, they are in their late twenties;17 at first they effortlessly reconnect but conflicting memories of their time at the orphanage limit their bond; in the fourth, set a few months later, primarily outside a school at the center of a busing controversy, they are on opposite sides in the controversy; and in the fifth, set primarily in a coffee shop, they are in their forties and move back toward each other. Morrison begins to develop the global instability in the story’s first two paragraphs. My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s. . . . There were four to a room, and when Roberta and me came, there was a shortage of state kids, so we were the only ones assigned to 406 and could go from bed to bed if we wanted to. And we wanted to, too. We changed beds every night and for the whole four months we were there we never picked one out as our own permanent bed. It didn’t start out that way. The minute I walked in and the Big Bozo introduced us, I got sick to my stomach. It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning—it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race. And Mary, that’s my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of

128    Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif” the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean. So when the Big Bozo (nobody ever called her Mrs. Itkin, just like nobody ever said St. Bonaventure)—when she said, “Twyla, this is Roberta. Roberta, this is Twyla. Make each other welcome.” I said, “My mother won’t like you putting me in here.” (243)

The first two sentences introduce the instability of the girls having absent mothers, and the second paragraph ties that instability to the relationship between the girls: Twyla’s response to Roberta’s racial difference stems from her having assimilated her mother’s racist attitude. But since Twyla does not directly voice her racist judgment, Roberta does not take serious offense. Indeed, as the first paragraph indicates, the two girls do bond sufficiently to become a “we” and to function as a social mind: they act together (going from bed to bed) and they desire together (“we wanted to”). By juxtaposing the two paragraphs, Morrison shows that what threatens the ongoing functioning of their social mind is less the basic instincts of the two girls than the ways those instincts get distorted by other forces. Twyla and Roberta bond more fully in response to the hostile behavior of the adolescent girls, who, as I’ll discuss below, function as a rival social mind, but Morrison also shows the fragility of Twyla and Roberta’s intermental unit, especially when their mothers get involved. When their mothers come to visit for Easter (time of hope and change), Twyla is so happy at receiving Mary’s initial expressions of love that she “forgot about Roberta” (247). But after Roberta’s mother offers a racist and classist rejection of Mary (and Twyla)—she looks them over and without saying a word grabs Roberta and walks away—Twyla takes on Roberta’s mother’s negative view. Prior to this interaction, Twyla minimizes the things about Mary that she doesn’t like because she feels loved. But in the wake of Roberta’s mother’s snub, all Twyla can focus on are Mary’s limitations: indeed, she has murderous thoughts, “I could have killed her” (248). Morrison’s triple sourcing here highlights the differences in our understanding of the scene as we assign different racial identities to the characters. If Roberta and her mother are white, then Twyla’s response primarily shows how white racism influences her sense of her and her mother’s racial inferiority. If Roberta and her mother are black, then Twyla’s response primarily shows her sense of her and her mother’s class inferiority. Furthermore, in noting the difference between her meager lunch of mashed jelly beans and Roberta’s ample one, Twyla herself falls into her own kind of racist thinking: “Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people” (248). By having Twyla imply that she should have Roberta’s lunch and Roberta hers, Morrison not only underlines her thematic point about the contagious nature of racist thinking but she also shows how easily Twyla and Roberta’s intermental unit can dissolve. But their bond is not so fragile that it breaks, and, after the visit, Roberta and Twyla re-establish it through their mutual mind-reading. Roberta, aware that Mary did not bring lunch, gives Twyla “a stack of grahams” when the visit is over, and Twyla reads the motives behind the gift: “I think she was sorry that her mother would not shake my mother’s hand. And I liked that and I liked the fact that she didn’t say a word about Mary’s groaning all the way through the service and not bringing any lunch” (248).

James Phelan   129 Morrison uses Twyla’s narration about the older girls to show a contrasting social mind in operation, one whose hostility brings Twyla and Roberta closer together (though they balk at sharing their fears): They were put-out girls, scared runaways most of them. Poor little girls who fought their uncles off but looked tough to us, and mean. . . . [S]‌ometimes they caught us watching them in the orchard where they played radios and danced with each other. They’d light out after us and pull our hair or twist our arms. We were scared of them, Roberta and me, but neither of us wanted the other one to know it. So we got a good list of dirty names we could shout back when we ran from them through the orchard. (244)

Even as the passage overtly emphasizes hostility and fear, Morrison’s use of the iterative covertly indicates that Twyla and Roberta are also attracted to these girls. Despite their fear, they repeatedly return to the orchard to watch the “gar girls” dance (the nickname itself—Roberta’s distortion of “gargoyles,” which are simultaneously grotesque and appealing—reinforces their mixed feelings). This approach/avoidance conflict also plays out in Twyla’s and Roberta’s ethically deficient response to the older girls’ treatment of Maggie, the old, “sandy-colored” “kitchen woman with legs like parentheses,” who could not speak and who wore a “stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with ear flaps” (245). Twyla reports that when Maggie fell while walking across the orchard, “the big girls laughed at her. We should have helped her up, I know, but we were scared of those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencil” (245). Morrison uses Twyla’s focus on the “lipstick and eyebrow pencil” in conjunction with her description of Maggie’s “stupid little hat” to convey Twyla and Roberta’s underlying attraction to the older girls. Morrison more strongly indicates that attraction by showing that they imitate their meanness to Maggie. With one voice they call her “Dummy! Dummy!” and “Bow legs! Bow legs!” (245). Morrison has Twyla follow up her report of this name-calling with narration from her perspective at the time of the telling: “I think she could hear and didn’t let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us” (245, my emphasis). I highlight the phrase “even now” because it implies that Twyla felt shame even then. At the same time, Morrison uses the presence and power of the social mind of the gar girls to mitigate our negative ethical judgment of these eight-year-olds. In parts  2 through 4 Morrison shows how the cultural pressures of Twyla’s and Roberta’s individual situations and their shame about how they treated Maggie prevent them from re-establishing their bond. In part 3 Roberta contends that Maggie didn’t fall in the orchard but was pushed by the gar girls—a situation that makes their failure to help her more ethically deficient. In part 4 Roberta insists that Maggie was black and that they joined with the adolescents in kicking Maggie when she was down. Twyla is vulnerable to Roberta’s accusations because they had been an intermental unit. Roberta in effect says, “I know what you did because I know what I did and you and I were a single unit.” Twyla is also vulnerable because of her shame. Our triple source-tracking, in turn, allows us to follow the consequences of Roberta’s insistence

130    Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif” that Maggie was black. Morrison leads us to infer that, if Twyla is white, then her kicking a black woman is a sign of her racism. And if Twyla is black, then her kicking is evidence of some self-hatred. Twyla’s angry, defensive response—she calls Roberta “liar!,” which leads Roberta to hurl the accusation back at her—shows both that the accusation stings and that their former dyad has almost completely come apart. At the end of part 4, however, Morrison has Twyla reflect on Roberta’s memories and accusations. After concluding that she cannot be sure about Maggie’s race, Twyla goes on and achieves a remarkable epiphany: it dawned on me that the truth was already there, and Roberta knew it. I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything important that you could use. Rocking, dancing, swaying as she walked. And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me—and I was glad about that. (259–60)

Twyla can know that Roberta already knows the truth because of their experience as a social mind. But the rest of the passage highlights Twyla’s internalist perspective, her individual mind, and her realization that Maggie was a stand-in for her mother. In part  5, Morrison gives Roberta a speech that strongly echoes this passage as it reveals Roberta’s own internalist perspective on Maggie. Roberta admits that although she really did think Maggie was black, she now cannot be sure. And she goes on: And because she couldn’t talk—well, you know, I thought she was crazy. She’d been brought up in an institution like my mother was and like I thought I would be too. And you were right. We didn’t kick her. It was the gar girls. Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her. I said we did it, too. You and me, but that’s not true. . . . It was just that I wanted to do it so bad that day—wanting to is doing it. (261)

Roberta’s perspective parallels but does not merge with Twyla’s, and that parallel emphasizes both their similarity (each displaced her feelings about her mother onto Maggie) and their separateness (each came to the recognition of her feelings on her own). Roberta’s withdrawal of her accusation and Twyla’s recognition of the parallel prepares the way for the story’s ending in which they take steps back toward re-forming their intermental unit. But before I examine those steps, I want to examine a curious feature of the passage revealing Twyla’s epiphany. There is a revealing glitch in that passage, but it is one that most readers are not likely to notice—or to be bothered by when it is pointed out. The glitch is a logico-temporal one that becomes visible once we notice that Twyla has now, without comment, replaced her earlier report that “Maggie fell down” with the account that the gar girls pushed Maggie down and then kicked her. Since Twyla the character comes to accept this account before Twyla the narrator begins telling, and since Twyla the narrator is a retrospective non-self-conscious narrator, Twyla the narrator ought never to have reported that Maggie fell.18 Morrison’s use of the present tense at the time of reporting only

James Phelan   131 magnifies the glitch: “I think it was the day before Maggie fell down. . .” (246). Twyla the narrator should either give her perspective at the time of the telling or her perspective at the time of the action—or indicate how her perspective has altered over time. Here she purports to be giving her perspective at the time of the telling (“I think”) but it turns out that she is actually giving a perspective she adopted at some unspecified point between the time of the action (when she witnessed what happened) and the time of the telling (when she accepts what she witnessed). Why are readers likely not to notice the glitch, and why does Morrison need it? Readers are not likely to notice the glitch primarily because when we come upon Twyla’s report that Maggie fell in the course of the progression we do not know that Twyla is distorting what she knows. Moreover, when Twyla silently shifts to the new account, Morrison directs our attention to the content of her epiphany about the relation between her mother and Maggie. In other words, Morrison directs our attention away from one aspect of source tracking (does the source tell a consistent story?) by supplying especially crucial content. Morrison needs the glitch because it is crucial to the way she constructs the progression. Both the textual and readerly dynamics derive much of their power from the way Morrison constructs Twyla’s epiphany as the story’s first climax. If Morrison let Twyla’s narration be guided by a strict temporal and mimetic logic, she would have had Twyla report, “I think it was the day before Maggie got pushed down and kicked by the older girls, while Roberta and I watched, wanting to join in because we each saw our mothers in Maggie—I think it was that day that we found out our mothers were coming to visit.” Such a passage would show Morrison sacrificing effective storytelling on the altar of mimetic logic, because it would spoil not only the climactic nature of the epiphany but also the readerly suspense surrounding Twyla’s and Roberta’s contested claims about what happened to Maggie in the orchard. No reader would want Morrison to make that trade, and therefore no rhetorical theorist would either. After Roberta’s confession, Twyla reaches out to her and Roberta responds once more: “Did I tell you? My mother, she never did stop dancing.” “Yes. You told me. And mine, she never got well.” Roberta lifted her hands from the tabletop and covered her face with her palms. When she took them away she really was crying. “Oh shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened to Maggie?” (261)

The close juxtaposition of Twyla’s epiphany and Roberta’s confession and then this final interchange show that the two women have taken steps toward forming a new, more mature dyad. By repeating what they already know about their mothers, they each reaffirm their shared vulnerability. Then Roberta’s moment of what Zunshine calls embodied transparency19—Roberta’s tears, her swearing, and her final question give Twyla clear access to her anguish and regret—has the potential to take them to the next step. Roberta is willing to show even more vulnerability as she seeks guidance from Twyla in a way that she has never done before. Morrison adds to the significance of Roberta’s embodied transparency by implicitly contrasting it with her attempt to hide her mental state at the end of the scene in Howard Johnson’s. Twyla responds to Roberta’s disrespect by asking about her mother and Roberta lies by saying “Fine” with a “grin that cracked

132    Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif” her whole face” (250). Furthermore, Morrison builds multiple layers into Roberta’s final question. It is a genuine question about Maggie because Roberta can think of her as someone with her own distinct identity. But it is also a question about their mothers, about why they could not take care of their children. And, given the way Maggie has come to be so significant to their dyad, it is a question about what happened to their friendship, a question that invites a commitment to improve it. Still, Morrison does not take them beyond these first few steps, and, given their fraught history, offering only partial resolution to the global instability is an appropriate choice. How does Twyla respond now and in the future? Will Twyla share her epiphany with Roberta or keep it to herself? Will the women perhaps succeed in re-establishing their social mind for only a short time? Is this moment the closest they will ever get? Such is the difficulty of the divide that they are trying to bridge that Morrison’s decision to leave these questions open seems just right. A final reflection: while I staunchly believe that combining the cognitive and rhetorical approaches has offered insights into “Recitatif ” that neither approach could have offered alone, I also realize that I have deployed cognitive theory as a very helpful Robin to my rhetorical Batman. I  have done so not because I  think cognitive theory must always be the junior partner in any collaboration with rhetorical theory but because the issues and problems I identified in “Recitatif ” seemed to respond best to such a relationship. I have no doubt that my identification of those issues and problems was influenced by my rhetorical commitment. But this recognition also leads me to expect that cognitive theorists—or rhetorical theorists!—will identify issues and problems in narrative texts that respond best to relationships in which cognitive theory plays the role of Batman and rhetorical theory the role of Robin. In my view, Peter J. Rabinowitz’s essay for this volume (­chapter 4) is just such a case. And as rhetorical and cognitive theorists continue to engage with each other’s work, I expect that on some occasions they will form a social mind whose separate parts cannot be so easily distinguished.

Notes 1. See the exchange between Alan Palmer and me (“Attributions of Madness in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love,” Style 43 [2009]:  291–308, and “Cognitive Narratology, Rhetorical Narratology, and Interpretive Disagreement:  A  Response to Alan Palmer’s Analysis of Enduring Love,” Style 43 [2009]: 309–21) and the one between David Herman, on the cognitive side, and Peter. J. Rabinowitz and me, on the rhetorical side, in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012) (where both approaches are also juxtaposed to a feminist approach, advanced by Robyn Warhol, and an antimimetic approach, advanced by Brian Richardson). These exchanges are respectful, but the participants focus on where they diverge. For a recent essay that works with the compatibility of rhetorical and cognitive approaches, see Peter J. Rabinowitz and Corinne Bancroft, “Euclid at the Core: Re centering Literary Education,” Style 48.1 (2014): 1–35. See my comment on Rabinowitz’s chapter for this volume at the end of this chapter. 2. Elizabeth Abel’s excellent “Black Writing, White Reading:  Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 470–98, highlights this feature of the

James Phelan   133 story, and many subsequent essays explore its thematic consequences. See especially Marie Knoflíčková, “Racial Identities Revisited: Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” Litteraria Pragensia 21.41 (2011):  22–33, and David Goldstein-Shirley, “Race/[Gender]:  Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif,’ ” Journal of the Short Story in English 27 (1996): 83–95. Howard Sklar, “ ‘What the Hell Happened to Maggie?’: Stereotype, Sympathy, and Disability in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif,’ ” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5.2 (2011): 137–54, takes up the worthwhile question whether the disabled Maggie functions as what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call a “narrative prosthesis,” that is, the use of a disabled character (and negative stereotypes associated with the disability) as a device by which a narrative accomplishes its effects. See their Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 3. Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Truth in Fiction: A Re examination of Audiences,” Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): 121–41. 4. For a fuller statement of this view, see James Phelan, “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication: Or, from Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences,” Soundings 94.1–2 (2011): 55–75. 5. David Herman, “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance,” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 240. 6. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 67. 7. Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 39–42. 8. Peter J. Rabinowitz, “ ‘Betraying the Sender’: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Fragile Texts,” Narrative 2 (1994): 201–13. 9. While Herman’s distinction between classical and postclassical narratologies (“Introduction,” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999], 1–13) has provided a useful shorthand for discussing the history of the field, it has had the unfortunate side effect of suggesting that the narratology of the French structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s is the fountain from which all subsequent narrative theory flows. Among other things, this view either omits or discounts the Aristotelian tradition out of which contemporary rhetorical theory has grown. 10. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 11. One might take the duck/rabbit figure as a closer analogue to “Recitatif ” by contending that Morrison simultaneously constructs Twyla and Roberta as white and as black. In this view, rather than creating a single storyworld and impeding her audience’s access to one of its crucial features, Morrison simultaneously creates two distinct storyworlds and thus two distinct narratives: in one Twyla is white and Roberta black and in the other their racial identities are reversed. One could make the analogy even tighter by contending that Morrison makes it impossible for us to determine whether there is one storyworld or two. I find some merit in both hypotheses but ultimately find them less compelling than the view that Morrison constructs a single story world and denies our access to part of it. These hypotheses foreground the synthetic component of Morrison’s characters and her storyworld and thus emphasize their fictionality, when every other feature of the narrative points to Morrison’s interest in minimizing the difference between her fictional world and the actual world—and the realities of its racial politics. 12. Zunshine, Why We Read, 124.

134    Rhetorical Theory, Cognitive Theory, and Morrison’s “Recitatif” 13. See my Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) for a development of the theoretical consequences of this view. 14. Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, Confirmation:  An Anthology of African American Women (New York: William Morrow, 1983), 255. 15. Abel, “Black Writing, White Reading,” 470–77. 16. Full disclosure: Palmer included these qualifications in response to my reader’s report on the manuscript of Social Minds. Here’s the relevant passage: “It seems to me that the representation of consciousness looms large as a technique and as a subject matter in all the novels Palmer discusses but techniques and subject matters are parts of novels not purposes of them, means rather than ends. Palmer doesn’t have to agree with this position, but I do think it would be helpful if he addressed it.” I stipulated that Palmer didn’t have to agree because I didn’t want to impose my views on Palmer. I do regard Palmer’s agreement as an additional warrant for the project of this chapter. 17. Twyla says that the when they meet as married women “twenty years” have passed since they were at the orphanage and “twelve years” have passed since they met at Howard Johnson’s. Since they are eight when they’re at St. Bonny’s, they would be 16 and 28 at these subsequent meetings. But Twyla implies that she has to drive to Howard Johnson’s (“Kind of a long ride” [249]), and Roberta is on her way from New York to “the coast” with two male friends, and, thus, they seem to be closer to 20 than to 16. If they are 20, then the “twelve years” would capture the interval between their time at St. Bonny’s and their meeting at Howard Johnson’s rather than the interval between the two later meetings. (I can’t help but note that this is the second time I’m finding fault with Morrison’s time-tracking. For the first, see my discussion of the temporal problems in the opening pages of Beloved in Experiencing Fiction [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007], 59. Whether I’m a good close reader or just a pedant is a judgment I leave to my audience.) 18. She also ought not to have reported that fear of the gar girls kept her and Roberta from helping, since fear is only part of the story. For the sake of clarity, however, I will focus just on her report of the event itself. I have examined similar glitches in Ernest Hemingway’s “My Old Man” in Narrative as Rhetoric (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 87–104, where I call it a “paradoxical paralepsis,” and in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in Living to Tell about It (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 32–38. In “Implausibilities, Crossovers, Impossibilities:  A  Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Mimetic Code of Character Narration,” ed. Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 167–84, I offer a theoretical explanation of why readers are not likely to notice such glitches. 19. Lisa Zunshine, Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 21–25 and passim.

Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth. “Black Writing, White Reading:  Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation.” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 470–98. Goldstein-Shirley, David. “Race/[Gender]:  Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif.’ ” Journal of the Short Story in English 27 (1996): 83–95. Herman, David. “Introduction: Narratologies.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. 1–30.

James Phelan   135 ———. “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance.” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 233–60. Herman, David, James Phelan, Peter J.  Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. Narrative Theory:  Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2012. Knoflíčková, Marie. “Racial Identities Revisited:  Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif.’ ” Litteraria Pragensia 21 (2011): 22–33. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. ———. “Recitatif.” Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, eds. Confirmation:  An Anthology of African American Women. New York: William Morrow, 1983. 243–61. Palmer, Alan. “Attributions of Madness in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love.” Style 43 (2009): 291–308. ———. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Phelan, James. “Cognitive Narratology, Rhetorical Narratology, and Interpretive Disagreement: A Response to Alan Palmer’s Analysis of Enduring Love.” Style 43 (2009): 309-21. ———. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. ———. “Implausibilities, Crossovers, and Impossibilities:  A  Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Mimetic Code of Character Narration.” Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson, eds. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 167–84. ———. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. ———. Narrative as Rhetoric: Techniques, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. ———. “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication:  Or from Story and Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences.” Soundings 94.1–2 (2011): 55–75. Rabinowitz, Peter J. “ ‘Betraying the Sender’:  The Rhetoric and Ethics of Fragile Texts.” Narrative 3 (1994): 201–13. ———. “Truth in Fiction: A Re examination of Audiences.” Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): 121–41. Rabinowitz, Peter J., and Corinne Bancroft. “Euclid at the Core:  Re centering Literary Education.” Style 48.1 (2014): 1-35. forthcoming). Sklar, Howard. “ ‘What the Hell Happened to Maggie?’: Stereotype, Sympathy, and Disability in Toni Morrison’s Recitatif.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 5.2 (2011): 137–54. Zunshine, Lisa. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press University, 2012. ———. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Chapter 7

“ Listen to th e Stori e s !” Narrative, Cognition, and Country-and-Western Music Al a n Pa lm e r

The great black modern-jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (nicknamed “Bird”), considered by many to be one of the geniuses of twentieth-century American music, used to hang out in Charlie’s Tavern, a musicians’ bar in midtown New York. To the dismay of his acolytes, he liked to play country records on the jukebox. There was reluctance to question the taste of the mighty Bird, but finally a brave jazzman asked him, “How can you stand that stuff?” Bird looked at him and said, “the stories, man. Listen to the stories!”1

This was good advice. Country music is full of compelling stories that repay listening to with care. My purpose here is to adopt a cognitive and narratological perspective on some of the stories told in three country songs and a traditional ballad, paying particular attention to the minds of their narrators and what we learn of them from their very different forms of self-attribution of mental states. As the blues and gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson sang in “Soul of a Man” in 1930: “Well, a man ain’t nothing but his mind.” Narrative theory has been extended into several new subject areas in recent years. Brian McHale’s work on narrative poetry is a good example.2 However, as far as I know, very little attention has been given within narratology to the role of narrative in the various American popular music genres such as country and western, blues, soul, folk, and gospel music. At the risk of committing myself to the narrative imperialism that James Phelan warns against,3 I want to try to extend some of the tools of cognitive narratology that I have developed for the analysis of novels into this new field. After briefly describing these tools, I will apply them to four examples—two narrative country songs, a traditional ballad featuring a minimal narrative, and a nonnarrative country song—before drawing some general conclusions. I’m conscious of McHale’s excellent advice not to treat narrative poetry as though it were prose narrative. His solution is to focus on the notion of segmentation: the division

Alan Palmer   137 of poems into lines and stanzas. This approach obviously applies equally well to song lyrics, but with the addition of music. In what follows, I’ve tried to pay as much attention as I can to both segmentation and music. This reminds me that I implore anyone reading this chapter to listen to the songs discussed below on YouTube; lyrics on the page are not poems and don’t mean much without their music.

Fictional Minds In my two books, Fictional Minds and Social Minds in the Novel,4 I outlined a theory for the study of the novel. The purpose of this essay is to argue that the ideas contained in that theory are equally applicable to the narratives contained in country songs. I argued that, in order to understand a novel, we have to try to follow the mental functioning of the characters who operate within the storyworld created by that novel. The constructions of the minds of fictional characters by narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novels work, because readers enter storyworlds primarily by attempting to follow the workings of the fictional minds contained in them. Fictional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of mental functioning. These storyworlds are aspectual. As the philosopher John Searle explains, “Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do it under some aspects and not others,”5 and this is equally true of fictional characters. Like real people, characters experience the same events in different ways. A key tool for analyzing the process of recovering and reassembling fictional storyworlds is the application of attribution theory: the study of how we ascribe states of mind to others and also to ourselves. In relation to fictional minds, attribution theory can be used to formulate tentative answers to questions such as these: How do readers attribute states of mind such as emotions, dispositions, and reasons for action to characters? How do heterodiegetic (or third-person) and homodiegetic (or first-person) narrators attribute states of mind to their characters? How do characters attribute mental states to themselves and to other characters? With regard to the issue of characterization, how does an attribution of a mental state help to build up in the reader a sense of the whole personality of that character? And, finally, how do readers, narrators, and individual characters attribute mental functioning to groups? Social minds is the term I use for mental functioning that becomes visible through an externalist perspective on the mind that stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged. More specifically, it refers to our capacity for intermental thought. Such thinking is joint, group, shared, or collective, as opposed to intramental, or individual or private thought. It is also known as socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity. Intermental thought is a crucially important component of novels because, just as in real life, where much of our thinking is done in groups, much of the mental functioning that occurs in fictional narrative is done by large organizations, small groups, work

138    “Listen to the Stories!” colleagues, friends, families, couples, and other intermental units. My argument is that intermental units are to be found in nearly all novels. It could plausibly be argued that a large amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development, maintenance, modification, and breakdown of these intermental systems. In addition, the study of social minds sheds a good deal of light on the workings of individual minds. Characters’ thought processes can only be fully understood as elements in complex social networks.

Four Songs Extending these ideas to song lyrics, I propose that it is only possible to understand a narrative song by following the mental functioning of the narrator and the other characters who inhabit the storyworld created by that lyric. In the examples discussed below, we understand the song by following what the narrator is telling us about the working of his mind, his thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and also the workings of the minds of the other characters in the song. The first three songs are first-person narratives. The last one is not a story but has plenty of the concrete detail that is often associated with the typically narrative country song. The first and third examples have strongly delineated narratees, the one in the first addressed throughout as “you.” (I wonder, in passing, if this highly noticeable feature of popular music may have influenced or even inspired the growth of second-person narration in the contemporary novel.) All of the following examples illustrate different levels of information available to the listener regarding the attributions of mental states and the reasons for those states. The first is a modern (i.e., 1960s) country song written by two journeyman Nashville songwriters. Like the next one, it contains plenty of factual detail, but it is characterized by a large attributional hole at its center. The second is less typical and was written in the 1970s by a rather quirky though still mainstream country songwriter. Belying its unpromising title, it is a convincingly detailed and beautifully constructed portrait of memory and identity. The last two songs introduce fascinating uncertainties into the process of mind-construction in songs. The third example is a traditional ballad, recorded in the 1940s, which arose in an arbitrary and contingent way out of the amalgamation of two entirely separate songs. Nevertheless, it is still possible to construct coherent and understandable fictional minds out of these strangely casual and unpremeditated origins. I analyze the final song, written in the late 1960s, to show how the social minds portrayed in it are constructed differently by the various real social minds comprising all of its audiences. It should be stressed that, because these are song lyrics, the narratives contained in them are necessarily attenuated, minimal, and sketchy. The songs are brief (all three to four minutes long) and some contain repeated choruses, thereby cutting down further the room available for narrative development. As can be seen from table 7.1, the stories

Alan Palmer   139 Table 7.1  Simple Narration in Four Songs Nonrepeated words “Tell Me My Lying Eyes are Wrong” “Good Ole Boys Like Me” “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” “Okie from Muskogee”

One syllable

Two syllables

Three or four syllables

115

 101

 12

 2

229

200

26

3

78

 68

10

0

133

 107

 23

 3

are tiny. To emphasize the simplicity of the narration, I’ve also included information on the large proportion of one- and two-syllable words in the lyrics.

“Tell Me My Lying Eyes are Wrong”: Composed by D. Frazier and S. Shafer and Performed by George Jones in 1970 Although this is a mainstream country song, it has a fairly atypical construction. It consists in the standard way of two verses followed by a chorus, but, unusually, it ends on the chorus with no final verse. The singer is regarded as having the finest voice in modern country music. I love this song. The night shift got off early because of major repairs And I stopped off for a drink on my way home I didn’t know that you’d loaned out the dress that I bought for you to wear Sweetheart, tell me my lying eyes are wrong Then I thought I saw him kissing you as you danced across the floor But I knew that you were with the kids at home Then I thought I saw the babysitter meet me at the door Sweetheart, tell me my lying eyes are wrong Chorus: Tell me that there’s another girl identical to you And that she’s the one who rambles all night long Tell me that your old used-to-be didn’t bring you home at dawn Sweetheart, tell me my lying eyes are wrong Sweetheart, tell me my lying eyes are wrong

140    “Listen to the Stories!” The song is a study in the epistemology of pain. It is an examination of a mind in action: how it functions while it is experiencing that pain. The narrator doesn’t want to accept what he sees and so finds ways to rationalize the events into alternative, acceptable narratives. There is a very clearly designated narratee, his wife, and the perlocutionary function of the address is an appeal to her to contradict the evidence of his own eyes and to tell him that she isn’t being unfaithful to him. However, it is couched in highly indirect terms. The implied listener has to read the narrator’s mind as he is trying to read the mind of his wife or, more accurately, trying to avoid doing so. However, to do so, this listener has to fill in some of the substantial gaps left by the narrator. It is noteworthy that at no point in the story does the song make explicit what every listener will effortlessly understand is going on. It is never actually said that the husband has discovered by accident that his wife is having an affair with an ex-boyfriend and is using the opportunity afforded to her by him working night shifts to meet her lover in the local bar. Because he can’t confront the awful reality, the narrator searches for other explanations, other reasons for her actions: his wife has loaned one of her dresses to another woman; she wouldn’t have left the kids at home alone; there’s another woman who looks identical to her. This cognitive disjunct is particularly obvious in the apparent non sequitur of the third line. Construed literally, it makes no sense for the narrator to be sitting in a bar and then to start talking about his wife’s dress. His reaction reminds me of the famous scene in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which Marlowe can’t bring himself to say directly that he sees from the boat a line of shrunken human heads stuck on poles along the shore. He talks around the horror of it until the reader finally comes to realize what he is seeing. What is also missing from this highly elliptical song is an account of the narrator’s actions and movements. What does he do when he sees his wife dancing with her lover? How long does he watch her? When does he decide to go home? What does he say to the babysitter? How long does he sit alone, at home, with the children upstairs? Again, though, the implied listener is easily able to join up the dots. For this reason, despite the cognitive evasions, the narrator’s mind is transparent to the audience. This transparency of the mental functioning is due in large part to the implied listener’s reliance on the conventions of country songs, including the well-known cheating song. This convention will, as background, also give the listener a strong sense of the probable workings of his wife’s mind: she is dissatisfied with being a housewife; she keeps remembering her old boyfriend; she’s seized the opportunity afforded by her husband’s night-shift work to enjoy herself, and so on. Several factors contribute to the huge emotional impact of the song. The narrative is intensely and exclusively focalized through the narrator and, unlike the next example, there is no distance between the experiencing “I” and the narrating “I,” thereby giving the song great immediacy. The construction of the song, ending on the chorus, gives a strong sense of climax to the concluding words. As I said, George Jones is famous in country music circles for having a particularly beautiful tenor voice. In this song, the plaintive, tragic grandeur of his delivery leads inescapably in my mind

Alan Palmer   141 to an image of the narrator, sitting alone with his thoughts, silent in an empty room, his life irreparably damaged, waiting for his unfaithful wife to return home at dawn.

“Good Ole Boys Like Me”: Composed by Bob McDill and Performed by Don Williams in 1979 Don Williams has a reputation, somewhat unfair in my view, for appealing only to mums ’n’ dads with safe, cozy, middle-of-the-road songs. His delivery of this song is, as always, careful, soft, and mellifluous. The warmth, compassion, and wistfulness in his dark-brown baritone voice perfectly match, and give great weight to, the intelligence of the words. Bob McDill is a particularly interesting and gifted songwriter. The country singer Bobby Bare recorded a whole album of his songs entitled Me and McDill in 1977. V. S. Naipaul has written about McDill and “Good Ole Boys Like Me” in particular,6 although I was unaware of this when I chose the song, which I have loved for thirty years, for this chapter. When I was a kid Uncle Remus he put me to bed With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head Then Daddy came in to kiss his little man With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand He talked about honor and things I should know Then he’d stagger a little as he went out the door Chorus: I can still hear the soft southern winds in the live oak trees And those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me Hank and Tennessee I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be So what do you do with good ole boys like me Nothing makes a sound in the night like the wind does But you ain’t afraid if you’re washed in the blood like I was The smell of cape jasmine through the window screen John R. and the Wolfman kept me company By the light of the radio by my bed With Thomas Wolfe whispering in my head Repeat chorus When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street And I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed But I was smarter than most and I could choose Learn to talk like the man on the six o’clock news When I was eighteen, Lord, I hit the road But it really doesn’t matter how far I go Repeat chorus

142    “Listen to the Stories!” It might help non-US readers if I explain some of the intensely resonant cultural references with which this song is packed. A good ole boy is a white southerner characterized by a relaxed and informal manner, strong loyalty to family and friends, patriotic and conservative values, and, when the phrase is used pejoratively, an anti-intellectual bias, intolerance, and even racism. It has some overlap in meaning with the term “redneck.” The words to “Okie from Muskogee” (see below) describe typically good-ole-boy attitudes. Uncle Remus was the title character of a collection of African American folktales set in the South that featured a character called Br’er Rabbit. (By 1979, this mention of Uncle Remus would have evoked awareness of a fierce controversy—some defending him as a good man and others reviling him as a racist—and so instantly created some ambivalence in the mind of the implied listener.) Stonewall Jackson was a famous Confederate general during the American Civil War who, as his name suggests, came to symbolize Southern defiance and pride. Hank Williams is considered to be the greatest singer/songwriter in country music history. John R. and the Wolfman (or Wolfman Jack) were two of the disc jockeys who, in the 1950s, introduced white, middle-class American teenagers to rock and roll and rhythm and blues. The playwright Tennessee Williams was born and brought up in Mississippi (and not Tennessee as his name suggests). Thomas Wolfe:  As the song is set in the 1950s, this is more likely to be the major American novelist of the early twentieth century who was born and lived in North Carolina than the later novelist and journalist, Tom Wolfe. Live oak trees and cape jasmine are characteristic features of the southern landscape. The implied listener is, therefore, someone who will catch all of these cultural references: that is, someone who will be as familiar with Tennessee as with Hank Williams. In reality, I suspect that most real listeners might not catch all of the references but will recognize enough of them to make sense of the song. The purpose of the song is to explore a mind—in particular, the formation of the narrator’s mind during his youth and, as important, the workings of that mind in action as he remembers the past in later life. The momentum of the narrative is achieved through the successive presentation of the mental states associated with the different stages of his young life. “Good Ole Boys Like Me” is a kind of Bildungsroman in song, not a description of a single traumatic event like the previous song or the next one. The temporal progression of the different stages in the formation of the narrator’s mind is beautifully constructed. Each of the three verses represents a different stage. In the first, the young boy is a passive recipient of his cultural background, elements of which are vividly picked out: fictional tales of the South (Uncle Remus), stories of the history of the South (Stonewall Jackson), religion (the Bible), and alcohol (the bottle of gin). (Incidentally, the conjunction of religion and alcohol is clearly still a sensitive

Alan Palmer   143 subject: in the lyrics reproduced on my LP cover sleeve [Portrait], the fourth line is missing.) In the second verse he is a little older. While still feeling the weight of the continuing burden of the religious upbringing (“washed in the blood”), he is beginning to find himself and thereby construct his own identity. Together with the chorus, this verse reveals that he is listening to rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music, and reading Thomas Wolfe and Tennessee Williams. In the final verse, older still, he learns how to try to escape his upbringing by not destroying himself with drink and drugs, by losing his southern accent, and by leaving home. The self-attribution of mental states is subtly done, and conveyed through indirection. The first verse tells us nothing directly about precisely what sensations, feelings, and emotions the boy is experiencing. Nevertheless, we do know how the little boy feels as he watches his sententious father stagger drunkenly to the door. Again, there are no direct attributions of mental states in the second verse. The nearest to one is the nonattribution of fear. Still, though, many emotions are evoked in the listener, as well as the suspicion that the narrator protests too much about not feeling afraid. The second verse and the chorus also vividly and powerfully convey the same sense of intellectual exhilaration and belonging that many of the readers of this chapter will have felt in their youths when discovering literature and music. The third verse is much more active. It consists of actions that the narrator performs (doing things with his friend, watching the friend destroy himself, learning to talk differently, leaving home). With regard to the presentation of causation, it is noticeable that the song does not say explicitly why he leaves home. The listener knows that his desire to escape the deadening effect of his culture and to create his own identity is the reason why he reads novels, listens to rock and roll, and runs away, but the song does not actually say so. The repetition of the chorus after each verse provides a comment (or chorus in the dramatic sense) on all of the three stages. In effect, it creates a fourth stage—the older man looking back, knowing that he chose freedom because he was smarter than most, but who can still hear the soft southern winds and who is not as free from his past as he had supposed he would be. He can attempt to escape his upbringing but he will never entirely succeed because he is still, at least in part, a good ole boy. At its final repetition, the fatalism and resignation of the chorus undermines the new life affirmed in his decision to hit the road. He was stifled by the South while he was there, but the old identity of the South continues to reassert itself within him even after he has left. At its conclusion, “Good Ole Boys Like Me” brings to my mind the famous closing words of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The song is highly introspective. It is about an individual mind and the incommunicable experiences or qualia that are part of that mind and that live on in memory. The focalization through the narrator is intense (watching his father stagger while drunk, watching his friend burn himself up, etc.). Like many great novels, it conveys the huge distance that has developed over time between the experiencing “I” and the narrating “I.” But, in addition to these internalist features, the song is also externalist in the sense that these mental events are all tied to the physical, cultural objects featured in the song. The narrator’s mental functioning is strongly intentional in the technical, philosophical

144    “Listen to the Stories!” sense of being directed at or about external things or events. His mind functions within the social and cognitive context of other minds such as his father’s and that of the kid down the street. This song and my final example, “Okie from Muskogee,” are clear examples of identity construction and positioning. In fact, this is explicit in both their titles. In this case, the narrator is explicitly saying that his identity has been formed in and by the South. However, the song demonstrates that the formation of identity is a complex and difficult matter. A simple affirmation of a new one is not enough. The workings of his mind are mysterious to himself. He doesn’t know why he still hears the soft southern winds and why his memories are still so vivid and so completely dominate his thoughts. Also, his continued self-attribution of the term good ole boy is problematic. It stands for a group of people who think and behave in certain shared ways but good-ole-boy behavior would not typically include reading Thomas Wolfe or Tennessee Williams. So he’s clearly not the average good ole boy in the ways that he thinks and acts and there is some irony in his loose use of the term. In addition, the repeated final line of the chorus, “So what do you do with good ole boys like me,” conveys defiance, defensiveness, and some resentment of the need for that defensiveness. The narrator is balancing two implied listeners. He is aware that nonsoutherners may disparage him, without knowing him, as stupid, racist, and uneducated. But he also knows that, while southerners themselves may at first grant him special inclusion as a crony, they may also, by the end of the song, find his literary allusions and disapproval of his former friend to be alienating. And he may resent both reactions. However, despite his discomfort, there is a part of his mind in which he clearly feels that he is, in some sense, still a good ole boy.

“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”: Traditional, Performed by Lead Belly in 1944 The famous black blues and folk singer Lead Belly (real name Huddie Ledbetter) sang many songs such as this one, which span the country, blues, and folk traditions. For a valuable alternative perspective on this song, see Porter Abbott’s ­chapter  5 in this volume. My girl my girl don’t lie to me Tell me where did you sleep last night In the pines in the pines Where the sun don’t ever shine I would shiver the whole night through My girl my girl where will you go I’m going where the cold wind blows In the pines in the pines

Alan Palmer   145 Where the sun don’t ever shine I will shiver the whole night through [Repeat first verse] My husband, was a hard-working man Just about a mile from here His head was found in a driving wheel And his body hasn’t ever been found [Repeat first verse]

The strange history of this traditional ballad has an important bearing on an understanding of Lead Belly’s version of it. It raises interesting questions regarding the role of intention in the creation of an artistic artifact and the resulting construction of the minds presented in the lyrics. The development of the song into the form in which Lead Belly sings it appears to be entirely contingent, accidental, and random. Nevertheless, a satisfying and coherent artistic whole results, because it is still perfectly possible to construct plausible minds from its heavily attenuated narrative. The odd and confused background to the song is indicated by the fact that it is known by at least four different titles: “In the Pines,” “The Longest Train I Ever Saw,” “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” and “Black Girl.” Research has identified over 150 variants. The earliest date back to at least the 1870s and are from the southern Appalachians. The ones that occur under the titles “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” and “Black Girl” are particularly associated with Lead Belly, who recorded several versions in the 1940s. The songs called “In the Pines” and “The Longest Train I Ever Saw” have become standards in the bluegrass and mainstream country traditions, mainly due to the famous white bluegrass musician Bill Monroe. Lines from the song appear in the well-known Cajun (i.e., French language) songs “Pine Grove Blues” and “Ma Negresse.” A pop version of “Black Girl” was a UK top twenty hit in 1964 for the British group the Four Pennies. The American grunge band Nirvana’s reinterpretation of Lead Belly’s version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” was notable for a screamed delivery of the last verse by Kurt Cobain that may be to some tastes. At some point in the past, a song called either “In the Pines” or “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” about a woman shivering in the pines and being asked where she slept last night became attached, for no obvious reason, to another song, “The Longest Train I Ever Saw,” about the decapitation of a man in an accident involving a train with many carriages. The earliest versions of this latter song contained very specific detail about the train serving the coal mines owned by Georgia governor Joseph Emerson Brown, but the lyrics gradually became more and more generalized and nonspecific. The composite that resulted from this amalgamation of the two ballad sources typically consists of three elements: a girl shivering in the pines, a long train, and an accidental decapitation. However, not all elements are present in all versions. Lead Belly does not mention the longest train, but he does include the girl in the pines and the decapitation, while Monroe’s versions (and therefore most country versions) feature the pines and the longest train but leave out the decapitation. Early renditions usually mention the head in the “driver’s wheel” (as Lead Belly’s does), thereby making it clear that the decapitation

146    “Listen to the Stories!” was caused by the train, while some later versions omit the train and reattribute the cause. The theme of a woman caught doing something wrong is, importantly, common to many variants. The historical process described above makes mind construction by the listener very difficult. It is not possible in this case to talk of the purpose of the song as it simply emerged from its historical circumstances. The two previous examples are works of art that were created to inspire particular aesthetic effects in the listener, and so the construction of the minds contained in them is relatively straightforward, despite the complexity of those effects. It is fairly clear how the implied composers and implied performers wish the implied listener to receive the narrators’ stories. Here, though, there is no implied composer. The only agency involved is Lead Belly’s decision to record this particular version of the song and his treatment of it. Ballads of this sort resemble the sort of found object such as a stone or a piece of wood with which the British sculptor Henry Moore filled his studio and which, in many cases, became indistinguishable from his actual sculptures. Nevertheless, it is still eminently possible to treat the whole performance as an aesthetic object. Although there is no real composer, the finished product can still be regarded as though produced by an implied composer. It is certainly elliptical (a good example is the frequent unmarked change in focalization), but, as the music theorists Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter point out with regard to this song, “new narrative meaning can leap across the spaces between stanzas like electricity between two points.”7 Constantine and Porter show that the “flux and interchangeability of stanzas” that I’ve described above is very common: “floating verses, usually couplets or a single stanza, are the very essence of the ‘blues’ ballad.’ ”8 They say of such song groups generally, in words that fit “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” particularly well, that they take us “into a territory of truly minimal narrative, evoked in an extremely indirect style: not by directly relating that story but by celebrating it; not by following a chronological sequence, but by creating a sequence of concepts and feelings about it.”9 These songs “have locatable roots in real events, but rather than narrate those events they refer to them, invariably foregrounding emotion at the expense of plot.”10 According to Constantine and Porter, many ballads “are only incomplete by outside standards:  to the singers and informed listeners they are perfectly sufficient.”11 As a result, “In ballads especially, ‘meaning’ (in contrast to a simple plot line) does not reside primarily in a text, or in a simple performance, but rather in the minds of those in a community in which ballad performances take place.”12 For example, such a listener to Lead Belly’s recording will be aware of the many variants that concern a woman caught doing something wrong and their understanding of the words will be informed by that context. In my terms, it is a social mind to which the implied listener must belong. In this context, I feel that this term is an appropriate description for the ideal audience for this ballad. It is, in a sense, a redescription in cognitive terms of the aggregate of implied listeners for this recording. (The concept is even more applicable to the various audiences of the next song.) The construction of identity in this song is fragmented and mysterious. Like “Tell Me My Lying Eyes are Wrong” it is an address to a female narratee, this one referred to as

Alan Palmer   147 “my girl.” Its immediate purpose is to ask where she slept last night. In her answer she refers to the death of her husband. What else do we know or can plausibly surmise? What precisely is the relationship between the narrator and the girl? What was the girl doing in the pines? What’s the connection between her being in the pines and the death of her husband? The listener can either safely or tentatively attribute certain states of mind to the narrator (anxiety, possessiveness) and the girl (fear) and can guess at others (guilt). The uncertainty relates to mental causation, in particular. Is she shivering in the pines because of the death of her husband? If so, what is the nature of this causation? Is there some element of guilt involved on the part of the woman? It seems unlikely that she was in any way responsible for his death in a train crash, so the most satisfying explanation is that her sense of guilt arises from her being unfaithful to her husband, presumably with the narrator, at the time of his death. In turn, his anxiety may arise from his awareness of the depth of her feelings of guilt and his concern that she may harm herself. There are no definite answers to these questions, but the intensely “gappy” variant of the song that Lead Belly sings certainly prompts the listener to ask them. I should also mention that the musical elements in this performance contribute to the impression of darkness, isolation, and anguished anxiety and reinforce the explanation outlined above. Lead Belly’s immensely powerful performance creates a sinister atmosphere and an oppressive sense of foreboding. There is great emotional depth in the high pleading voice accompanied only by his slow, mournful, and somber twelve-string guitar. The structure is very simple—three verses with two repeats of the first verse—and the lack of a sense of release that the chorus supplies in the three other songs lends it a claustrophobic feel. The 3/4 time and the strangely casual and abrupt ending both add to its uneasy, disorienting, and slightly nightmarish quality. There is no sense of any meeting of these opaque minds.

“Okie from Muskogee”: Composed by Merle Haggard and Roy Burris and Performed by Merle Haggard in 1969 The background to this song, the best known of my four examples, is that an Okie is a native of Oklahoma, Muskogee is a city in that state, pitching woo means courting, and white lightning is hooch or illicit liquor. Merle Haggard is my favorite country singer and songwriter. He was born in 1937 in a boxcar (a railway carriage) in Bakersfield, California. His parents were Okies: they were part of the “dustbowl” exodus dramatized by the folk singer Woody Guthrie and by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee We don’t take our trips on LSD We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street

148    “Listen to the Stories!” We like living right and being free Chorus: I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee The place where even squares can have a ball We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse And white lightning’s still the biggest thrill of all We don’t make a party out of loving; We like holding hands and pitching woo We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy Like the hippies out in San Francisco do [Repeat chorus] Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear Beads and Roman sandals won’t be seen Football’s still the roughest thing on campus And the kids here still respect the college dean [Repeat chorus] We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse In Muskogee Oklahoma USA

The complex story of this song’s reception is told below in five (not necessarily chronological) stages. Since its release in 1969, there has been some uncertainty and even controversy regarding the intentions behind it and its reception by different audiences. The composer has said different things at different times about his reasons for writing the song. Stage 1. The original story was that the song arose from Haggard and Roy Burris (his drummer) trading one-liners as their tour bus passed through the city. It might have been along these lines:  “Hey, I  bet they don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee!,” “and they certainly don’t take their trips on LSD!” and so on. The resulting composition was a lighthearted effort, and was certainly not originally intended to be taken seriously. Care should be taken here, though. It would be misleading to call the song a “satire” on the social attitudes described in it. It was a joke, but one originally intended for a country-music audience that would tend to endorse many of these values. In effect, it was an invitation for people to laugh, albeit gently, at themselves. There was, therefore, right at the beginning, some ambivalence even in the composer’s original intentions. Stage 2. The song was a number one country hit for four weeks, and it quickly became clear that many in Haggard’s core audience appeared to take the song seriously as a positive endorsement of conservative, small-town values. They adopted it as a kind of redneck anthem. Haggard saw the way things were going and said: “We wrote it to be satirical originally. But then people latched onto it. . . My dad’s people. He’s from Muskogee” (my emphasis). Of course, we also have to be careful about this stage too. It seems to me that it’s difficult to miss the joke in lines such as “leather boots are still in style for manly footwear,” so I wonder whether people were, at some level, aware of the original joke but, given the social tensions at that time particularly relating to the Vietnam War, simply decided that the song would serve anyway as a timely and forceful expression of their social values.

Alan Palmer   149 Stage 3. Haggard shifted his position further in response to the audience reception in stage 2 and claimed that he wrote the song to support the troops in light of the Vietnam War protests. He said: “During Vietnam, there were all kinds of protests. Here were these [servicemen] going over there and dying for a cause—we don’t even know what it was really all about. And here are these young kids, that were free, bitching about it. There’s something wrong with that and with [disparaging] those poor guys. . . I wrote the song to support those soldiers.” Stage 4. Then something completely unexpected happened. Merle Haggard became very popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s with hippies and progressive rock musicians. At about this time country music was championed by significant and influential artists such as Bob Dylan, the Band, Gram Parsons, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead. An affectionate tribute to Haggard called “I’ll Change Your Flat Tire, Merle” (“Now I heard all them records you did / Making fun of us long-haired kids / And now you know we don’t care what you think, Merle”) was recorded by the Pure Prairie League and also by Big Brother and the Holding Company. An answer song to “Okie” called “Hippie from New York City” was written by David Peel. The prototypically hippie band the Grateful Dead, the left-wing folk singer Phil Ochs, and even, rather improbably, the Beach Boys all covered “Okie from Muskogee.” Stage 5. The position for several years has been that these various interpretations and audiences peacefully coexist: the wider country audience who generally go along with the song’s sentiments; a core within that who took it up as an anthem; the hippies who, somewhat surprisingly, adopted and parodied it in an entirely affectionate and positive way; and the wider audience consisting of people like me who like country music and enjoy the song a lot but without endorsing its surface message. People in this last group would not describe themselves as politically conservative, but they sing along to it with gusto as though they really are squares who have a ball. You could say that they are pretending to be the implied listener, as long as you bear in mind that there appear to be several implied listeners. It’s noticeable that in live performances of the song (several are available on YouTube), Merle Haggard’s delivery is nearly always rather enigmatic—he’s deadpan, watchful, and cagy. He doesn’t belt it out as a redneck anthem, but neither does it play it for laughs. He performs it completely straight, staying balanced between all the different audiences and allowing them all to enjoy it. Haggard has said that, with the passing of time, he has reconsidered the politics that became associated with the song in stages 2 and 3 and no longer agrees with them. Like “Good Ole Boys Like Me” but on an apparently more superficial level, this song is an obvious exercise in explicit identity construction and positioning. However, there are some complexities and uncertainties regarding the real and implied composer/performer and listener that arise from the five stages. Who is the implied composer/performer and what is the relationship with the real composer/performer in the light of the latter’s various statements on the meaning of the song? Is it the one who intended it to amuse a country audience? The one who ended up writing a song that that audience took seriously as a political statement? The one who then claimed to have intended this effect? The one who wrote a song that another audience (for rock music) found

150    “Listen to the Stories!” enjoyable in an entirely unexpected way? The one who now adopts a broad and inclusive approach to the song? Is the implied composer/performer all of the above? Or, as the purposes of the song have changed over time in response to the different stages of its reception, did the implied composer/performer change at the same time? And all of these questions can be asked of the similarly complex relationship between the implied listener and the various classes of real listeners. It may be that we should talk not of right or wrong answers to these questions, but of how the conceptual framework of implied listeners and composers has to be flexible enough to take account of challenging and unusual cases such as this one. In any event, an awareness of the various and shifting relationships between these implied and real elements in the communication model for song lyrics makes listening to what may seem on the surface to be an apparently trite and obvious song a complex and satisfying experience. I refer to this point again in the next section in the discussion on listener reception generally. The song is also worth considering from a more specifically cognitive perspective. While the other three examples are, in their very different ways, concerned with very personal, private, or what I call internalist aspects of the mind, this song, by contrast, is not about an individual but about groups. The tendency of the song is externalist because it is concerned with the creation of one social mind (the Okie) in opposition to another (the hippie). As Naipaul comments, “country music created a community, and was the expression of a community.”13 The most important word in “Okie from Muskogee” is “we.” It’s the first word and it’s frequently repeated. This song has a first-person narrator but only just: the word “I” is used only once, in the first line of the chorus, and it proclaims its membership of a social group. The Okies and the hippies are both considered from an externalist perspective. Both are distinguished in terms of actions: nearly all of the attributions relate to what the two groups typically do. The only exception is the more general and abstract line, “We like living right and being free.” But social minds are also involved in the more general context of the reception of the song. Since different audiences construct the Okie and hippie minds in different ways, the reality is that there are several different social minds existing within the stages outlined above.

Country, Narrative, and Cognitive Narratology Having discussed these songs individually, it might now be worth taking them together to see what general conclusions emerge from a cognitive analysis of their lyrics. 1. In all three narrative songs there is an intense focus on the inner cognitive functioning of the narrator. None of them contain any objective descriptions of the storyworld. The first sentence of the George Jones song may look like one but it

Alan Palmer   151 isn’t—it functions as a reason for the action of the narrator in stopping off for a drink on his way home. This is not his usual custom and it leads to his discovery of his wife’s infidelity. The second line isn’t either because it contains within it his feelings about stopping off for a drink—pleasure at a rare treat, ambivalence perhaps about not going straight home instead, and so on. The same is even truer of the Don Williams song. A line like “Nothing makes a sound in the night like the wind does” may look, in isolation, like an objective description of an aspect of the song’s storyworld but, within context of the next line (“But you ain’t afraid if you’re washed in the blood like I was”), it’s clear that its primary function is to convey the experiences, sensations, and feelings of a small boy. In “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” the pines are important only insofar as they shed light on the state of mind of the woman sleeping in them. (Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that a byproduct of the detail in the first two examples is the creation of a convincing, concrete, and specific storyworld. The nightshift and the major repairs mentioned in the first line of the first song are typical of the intensely satisfying representation of blue-collar life to be found in many country songs.) 2. Another way to put this point is to say that these song-storyworlds are aspectual. They are presented to the listener under some aspects and not others, and these aspects are of value primarily as they illuminate the minds of the narrators. The storyworlds as experienced by the nonnarrator characters are completely different from the ones actually realized in the songs. One example is the wife in “Tell Me My Lying Eyes are Wrong.” It would be a very different song indeed if it were focalized as a standard “cheating song” through her. Although other characters such as her boyfriend, the babysitter, and the kids are marginal, they are still important because of their impact on the narrator’s mind (e.g., how he felt when he saw the babysitter, how he feels about what, if anything, he will say to the kids). Other examples include the father and the kid down the street in “Good Ole Boys Like Me.” “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” is different because it is focalized through two characters—the initial narrator and the woman. It is worth making this change of focus explicit because it is easy to ignore it even though she, in fact, has most of the lines in the song. 3. Incompleteness or “gappiness” is a characteristic of all narratives, even long and apparently densely detailed novels. It is inevitable that these necessarily pared-down narrative songs are particularly “gappy.” It is therefore tempting to see the characterization, as a result, as minimal and slight. However, although these terms may apply to the Lead Belly song, I’m not sure that they are appropriate for either of the other narrative songs. In the first case, we’re not told much about the narrator and his wife, but what we are told, together with George Jones’s heartfelt delivery of the song, gives me at any rate, a vivid sense of the sort of person that he is—a simple, straightforward, hard-working, trusting, and not particularly intelligent man who feels his wife’s betrayal deeply. I would say that the same is true of the other narrative song: the characterization of a complex, troubled, highly intelligent person is completely convincing.

152    “Listen to the Stories!” 4. It may seem rather obvious to point out that emotions form a vital and indispensable part of the mental functioning of the characters in these song-storyworlds, but it is still worth saying because phrases such as “mental functioning” can sound so cold and “overcognitive” as to appear to exclude emotions. That is absolutely not the case. It would be impossible to understand the thought processes of these narrators without being aware that strong emotions are an integral part of their thought processes. 5. The cognitive functioning presented in all four songs takes place within social cognitive networks. The first two relate to social minds within the storyworld created by the song: the small unit of the marriage in “Tell Me My Lying Eyes are Wrong,” and the much larger unit of the good ole boy in the Don Williams song. Social minds are also relevant to the other two songs in terms of the role of the implied listener: the one for “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” who can only fully appreciate the song by being aware of its strange history; and the various implied listeners for “Okie from Muskogee” who understand it in radically different ways. 6. Finally, I  hope to have shown in the discussions of the Lead Belly and Merle Haggard songs that a study of the minds presented in country songs and traditional ballads is enriched by an awareness of the rich cultural contexts and reception histories of these songs. These factors affect songs and novels differently. It seems to me that, as a general rule, the songs discussed above are more deeply embedded in specific and complex social contexts and shifting, evolving, and fluid patterns of reception than are mainstream literary novels. I feel that the usual forms of literary analysis do not appear to offer the kind of case studies discussed above. I don’t want to push this point too far and I certainly don’t wish to appear to be denying that a mainstream literary novel has a cultural context and a reception history too. But I would still, nevertheless, argue that there is something genuinely unique about the construction of minds in songs that are as embedded as these in their evolving cultures. This is what I meant when I said that listening to an apparently uninteresting song such as “Okie from Muskogee” becomes such a rich experience once its reception history is known. When I showed a draft of this chapter to a folk musicologist, he said of the song: “I have never really known what to make of it—but I think I understand why now.”

Conclusion In his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture in Stockholm in 1993, the biology laureate Kary Mullis, said: “There is a general place in the brain, I think, reserved for ‘melancholy of relations past.’ It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your grain, to listen to country music.” These, apart from that rather unnecessary reference to being forced against the grain, are wise words. The music theorist Richard Crawford provides some possible reasons for the appeal of this music: “Country musicians have

Alan Palmer   153 been praised for tackling such subjects as adultery, divorce, and drunkenness when other traditions were avoiding them, for writing about the world in which people live from week to week and are given to drowning their sorrows.”14 This, however, is a rather curmudgeonly way of putting it. Country music is not all about drunkenness. (Typically, in Crawford’s book of 859 pages on the history of American music, only five are devoted to country music, and three of the five are given to the admittedly important subgenre of bluegrass.) Country music confronts such themes as aging, work, class, identity, love, friendship, and a sense of place (the South, a particular state or area, a rural community, etc.); marital breakdown, betrayal, and reconciliation; feelings of disappointment, temptation, regret, and disillusionment; the celebration of the intense pleasure of music; and much more besides. These are all important matters. And it treats these matters with a good deal of painful honesty and soul. Or, as a character in Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet puts it: “But for a’ that, ye will play very weel wi’ a little practice and some gude teaching. But ye maun learn to put the heart into it, man—to put the heart into it.”15 Country musicians play very well and certainly put the heart into it. Consider this line from a Bobby Bare song about the end of a relationship: “First it’s always, then it’s never” (“I Hate Goodbyes” by Jerry Foster and Bill Rice). Six very simple words, but standing for so much: I’ll always love you; I never want to see you again. Most people who have been through a breakup will feel the force of each one of those six words. It may appear odd, on the face of it, to claim as I do in this chapter that country songs are a rich resource for cognitive studies. But what other musical genre has so many stories that, carefully and respectfully listened to in the way that Charlie Parker did, speak so directly to the lives that people actually lead?

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Porter Abbott, Vic Gammon, Trevor Jackson, Kate Nash, and Lisa Zunshine for their very helpful and perceptive comments on this chapter.

Notes 1. Nat Hentoff, quoted in From Where I  Stand:  The Black Experience in Country Music (CD boxed set by various artists, produced by the Country Music Foundation, Warner Brothers, 1998). 2. Brian McHale, “Beginning to Think About Narrative in Poetry,”  Narrative  17.1 (2009), 11–30. 3. James Phelan, “Editor’s Column,” Narrative 13.5 (2005), 205–10. 4. Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004) and Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). 5. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 156–157.

154    “Listen to the Stories!” 6. V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (New York: Knopf, 1989). 7. Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 118. 8. Ibid., 119. 9. Ibid., 115. 10. Ibid., 115. 11. Ibid., 3–4. 12. Ibid., x, my emphasis. 13. Naipaul, A Turn in the South, 227. 14. Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life: A History (New York: Norton, 2001), 740. 15. Walter Scott, Redgauntlet, ed. G. A. M. Wood and David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 82.

Works Cited Constantine, Mary-Ann, and Gerald Porter. Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Crawford, Richard. America’s Musical Life: A History. New York: Norton, 2001. McHale, Brian. “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry.” Narrative 17.1 (2009): 11–30. Naipaul, V. S. A Turn in the South. New York: Knopf, 1989. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Palmer, Alan. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Phelan, James. “Editor’s Column.” Narrative 13.5 (2005): 205–10. Scott, Walter. Redgauntlet. Edited by G. A. M. Wood and David Hewitt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Searle, John R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Various artists. From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music. Produced by the Country Music Foundation. Warner Brothers, 1998. CD boxed set.

Chapter 8

B l ending in C a rto ons The Production of Comedy Moni ka F lude rn ik

This chapter explores the concept of blending in the visual medium of the cartoon and discusses whether and, if so, how humor is generated by the process of blending incongruous scenarios. I start with an introductory section that is designed to ease the reader into the topic, illustrating the issues that I will be concerned with on the example of a cartoon used by Mark Turner in his recent work on blending. This is followed by a few remarks on the cartoon as a genre among visual media (section 2) and an introduction to blending theory as one of the major players within cognitive studies (section 3). I then turn to metaphoric cartoons without a verbal component and discuss the processes of blending in these, using two illustrative examples (section 4). Section 5, by contrast, analyzes two cartoons that do have a verbal subscript and text within the cartoon. Finally, section 6 draws together the results of my analyses. I argue that although blending constitutively underwrites the semiosis in cartoons of types (those that are merely visual and those that also have textual elements), humor in cartoons relies more on the clash between, than on the overlap or blending of, incompatible frames or scenarios. I also devote some reflections on the narrativity of cartoons, thereby contributing to scholarly debates about the links between narrative and blending in the work of Fauconnier and Turner as well as Dancygier.

1. Introductory In the literature on blending, cartoons have frequently been resorted to as illustrative material. Thus, Mark Turner talks about the “World Food Crisis” cartoon1 (figure 8.1) and explains how the scenario of a Westerner filling his car with rice or grain-based ecological fuel as depicted in that cartoon is juxtaposed with the world of the hungering masses from Africa and Asia in the figures of two small

156   Blending in Cartoons

Figure  8.1 “World Food Crisis” © Patrick Chappatte, http://public.globecartoon.com. Permission to reprint this cartoon is gratefully acknowledged.

individuals clamoring for the food that they have lost to ecology. By putting the African and Asian individuals within the same “world” as the fuel-guzzler, the cartoonist reminds us of the fact we are all too prone to forget, namely that the plants used to produce bio-ethanol are missing on the food market and are literally taking the rice or grain out the mouths of needy people in other parts of the world. By blending the consumer of grain-generated fuel with those deprived of their sustenance, the cartoon literalizes the deprivation, creating a scenario that does not in fact exist, namely the physical co-presence and communication between the hungry and Western consumers. Besides calling attention to the market economy subtending this outrage (feeding one’s car by condemning people to starvation), the blend tells an implicit story about Western fashions (“Go Green” on the car’s bumper sticker), the production of ecological fuel, and the Western consumer’s blindness to the origins of bio-ethanol. Cartoons often exceed signification by pictorial representation. Turner’s example is a cartoon with a subscript “World Food Crisis” and texts within the cartoon world— the sign indicating that the fat man is using biofuel to fill his car. It moreover conveys its meanings by cartoon-internal (“diegetic”) signaling, for instance in the supplicatory gestures of the two representatives of poverty and hunger. As Turner describes the cartoon, “The vaguely Asian character is lifting a rice bowl with both hands in a classic gesture of supplication. The edemic character, lethargic, dangles his hands at his side and watches wide-eyed. The American says, casually, one hand in his pocket, ‘Sorry, I’m busy saving the planet.’ ”2 We therefore have a blend in which the two worlds are

Monika Fludernik   157 superimposed, but where that scenario would not be easily comprehensible without the texts inside the cartoon (though the subscript might be dispensed with): the driver’s “Sorry, I’m busy saving the planet,” the bumper sticker, and the petrol pump’s sign of “Bio Ethanol. Pure Corn.” In my examples that I will discuss later, cartoons with or without text will be distinguished. A second feature to be noted is the cartoon’s implied narrative. The cartoon tells a story in which the fuel has been taken from the hungry at an earlier point in time and is now, later, used by the man in the center of the cartoon. The begging Asian and African subjects are therefore both contemporary as well as anterior to the present moment (they have gone hungry for a long time). If one focuses merely on a sequence of events, the full implications of the juxtaposition do not necessarily emerge; however, by foregrounding experientiality as a narrativity marker, the link between the complacent unawareness of the fuel-guzzler and the wretchedness of the deprived becomes more pointed. Note also how the driver is not only big but also fat and clearly affluent and how the two figures on the left signal their poverty by the scantness of their clothing, their boniness and, above all, their minimal size. In fact, they have the size of children. (Perhaps a hint at the colonial infantilization of the colonized?) While the motorist looms large and takes up most of the space in the picture, the two beggars are marginalized and appear as alien intrusions on the scene. Their clamor is nearly elided by the big fuel sign. This takes me to the third important narrative constituent of the cartoon blend, its message, ideology or “point”: the merging of the two input spaces of the blend is deliberate; it is engineered by the cartoonist for a very specific purpose. Although the food crisis subtext is not a metaphor in the strict sense of the term (unlike the “Life without parole” cartoon depicting, possibly, an unhappy marriage),3 the blend does share an ideological thrust. It is, in short, a condemnation of the Western lack of awareness of the consequences of following Western priorities or concerns without first checking on possible repercussions elsewhere—elsewhere being either nonexistent or at the furthest margins of Western consciousness. Finally, a fourth aspect of the cartoon that should be noted is its humor. Despite the critical tone of the message, the cartoon is funny. In this instance, the very blend could be argued to contribute to the humor, since the actual “meeting” of the two starved individuals with the motorist is not only impossible but a kind of exaggeration. The deprivation does not result from the motorist’s taking the food away from the hungry, but from food prices skyrocketing and thus making it impossible for the poor to buy sufficient food. The scenario of the destitute turning up on the doorstep of the fuel-guzzler is comic because it is fantastic. The Asian and African indigents would not arrive to beg in America or Europe but in Asian or African towns; they would not get across our borders or be allowed to show up at our gas stations. Moreover, there is another blend within the blend in the cartoon depicting a starving person from Africa meeting one from Asia. Taken literally or realistically, the fictional world of the cartoon is a spoof, a counterfactual fantasy. As Turner notes:

158   Blending in Cartoons It is geographically impossible that two impoverished and hungry people who are on different continents can be standing next to each other. It is strictly impossible that the American could utter (without distance technologies) a spoken expression in English that would be heard by them on separate continents, neither of which is North America. The American moreover has no rice, certainly no cooked rice to put into a rice bowl.4

The comedy therefore resides in the clash of depicted elements, in the incongruity of the blended worlds. This poses the question why metaphoric blends are not invariably comic (or not primarily comic). One of the conundrums I will try to trace in the following will be the sources of humor in blends and the reasons for a suspension of humor. For readers unfamiliar with the technical aspects of cognitive blending theory, some basic explanations will be delivered in section 3 below. There are, thus, four features of visual cartoon blends that I have noted in reference to Chappatte’s “World Food Crisis” cartoon: (1) the distinction between images with or without text; (2) the generation of an implied story; (3) the purpose, message, or ideology transmitted by the cartoon; and (4) the comic quality of the cartoon. What I want to do in this chapter is to analyze two cartoons each of an image without and with (sub) text, to examine how an implicit story is generated in these four cartoons, and to contrast critical cartoons with a “political message” with merely comic cartoons in an effort to elucidate the sources of the comic.5 My approach is narratological and imports findings from cognitive blending theory (or conceptual integration theory) to deal with issues relevant to literary and cultural criticism.

2.  The Cartoon as Genre Surprisingly, there is very little theoretical criticism on the cartoon, although extensive work on caricatures, predictably focusing on the political and ideological implications, can be found.6 Narratology, for obvious reasons, has mostly concentrated on the telling of stories by means of picture series, therefore discussing comic strips rather than single cartoons.7 Besides comic strips, photos by themselves and in sequence8 as well as paintings9 have been the focus of narratological analysis. Cartoons, but also films, have served as the illustrative material used to explicate visual metaphor (see especially the work of Charles Forceville), and some of these studies discuss cartoons,10 though they also deal with sequences of images in commercials.11 (I refrain from citing any of the very numerous studies on film narratology.) When there is only one picture or a piece of sculpture, the narrativity of the situation represented is usually aligned with the story which the picture is meant to illustrate. The moment that the photo, painting, or drawing captures as in a snapshot derives its significance from the framework within which it is to be set. Thus, the famous Laocoön statue—an older and two younger men fighting with snakes—makes narrative sense

Monika Fludernik   159 for the viewer on the basis of its denomination (Laocoön referring us to the Iliad) and its placing within a sequence of events described in the epic.12 The experientiality of the sculpture thus depends on our grasping of the scene as one of the crucial stages in the plot, as being the tragic climax of Laocoön’s fruitless warning against the Trojan Horse. It is also connected with our knowledge that the three protagonists will soon be dead. Identification of the story underlying an image occurs often through attributes of the protagonist, especially in portraits of saints (Catherine’s Wheel), or contextually through the knowledge that the represented moment must be an illustration of a biblical scene or an episode from Greek mythology. A woman bathing with two old men peeping on her is thus easily identified as Susanna from the Book of Daniel, ­chapter 13; or a representation of two Greek fighters, one of whom is a woman, as a retelling of Achilles’s battle with the queen of the Amazons. (In fact, even Greek vases often add the names of the represented figures, thus enabling the viewer to identify which story has been depicted on the vase.) When we get to the cartoon, similar rules apply. I am here using the term cartoon to refer to a drawing, usually published in a newspaper or magazine, that does not have an exclusively mimetic purpose of illustration. (A drawing of a court scene where no cameras are allowed would not be a cartoon, nor a drawing of one’s own daughter.) Typically, a cartoon abstracts from mimetic illusionism to reduce the represented objects and people to mere outlines emphasizing some features more than others for the purpose of humorous exaggeration or in order to highlight functional elements.13 Although there is a gray area, and the boundary between cartoons and drawings remains fuzzy, exaggerated portraits of known people are clearly not cartoons but caricatures. Historically, the delimitation of what is a cartoon may be even more difficult to determine. The Renaissance emblem, for instance, resembles the cartoon in many ways, including the fact that the scene it represents is fictional. Allegory and metaphor, important elements of the cartoon, are also constitutive of emblems. Much eighteenth-century graphic art hovers between the cartoon and the caricature. Whereas James Gillray’s prints of the French Revolution and William Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” (1751) could be treated as cartoons, eighteenth-century representations of Edmund Burke as an emaciated Catholic and of Warren Hastings as a nabob on an elephant are clearly caricatures. Yet Hogarth’s caricature of religious enthusiasm in his “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism” (1762),14 in which a church congregation is shown to pay little if any attention to the preacher, who in turn is presented as a rather despicable and ridiculous specimen of that guild, can be read as a cartoon. The print depicts an exaggerated fictive scene of religious nonobservance and near-demonic, enthusiastic sermonizing, thus making fun of religious fanaticism in the preacher and hypocrisy in his listeners. However, in view of the depiction of George Whitefield (1714–70) in the picture and due to the contemporary relevance and critical intention of the piece, one can also see the print as a caricature, taking it to lampoon current mores—it would then be a merely exaggerated quasi-realistic depiction of the world. (If, as I suspect, some of the people in the print are actually historical figures, then the print would need to be treated as a caricature.)

160   Blending in Cartoons One can, therefore, add to the definition proposed above that cartoons are a fictional genre of visual art and that they may, but need not, share with caricatures a strategy of exaggeration or detractive distortion for the sake of ridicule or censure. More importantly for our present purposes, cartoons and caricatures both can, but need not, display metaphoricity in the graphic delineation of their subject, nor do they have to be based on a blend of two (or several) input spaces. Having provided a brief introduction to the cartoon, it is now time to turn to a condensed account of cognitive blending theory for those readers unfamiliar with the concepts and terminology of cognitive metaphor theory and its recent developments.

3.  Blending as a Cognitive Resource What is a blend? Blends in cognitive studies refer to conceptual overlay; a functional joining of two “mental spaces”15 that helps to create innovative meaning potential and facilitates mental reorientation. As Dancygier puts it, citing Deacon, blending is an interpretive process which relies on our generic symbol-processing and referential capacities. That is, the ability to use linguistic symbols in new combinations, to juxtapose them or compose them into new configurations opens our capacity for coining new meanings to nearly limitless possibilities. One might read this to mean that the potential for our linguistic abilities to be used in the construction of new meanings is not inherently limited and relies on the fact that manipulation of symbolic concepts is the daily bread of our cognition. . . . The composition process of this blend creates a concept not available in the component expressions, and, even more important, evokes an emotional response opposite to the original. This is also one of the points Deacon makes when he stresses the fact that emergent reference may involve conflicting emotions.16

Blending theory, as an expanded model of accounting for metaphoric transfer, has become a familiar tool in literary and linguistic criticism. It is also still most easily explained in reference to metaphor. When George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and Mark Johnson first evolved cognitive metaphor theory,17 they replaced traditional terminology of vehicle, tenor, and the ground with the concept of a transfer from a source domain (the former vehicle) to a target domain (the former tenor) and argued that the ground (or, rhetorically speaking, the tertium comparationis) was not a static, essentialist pool of attributes shared by source and target but a semiotic interpretative construction generated by the very process of metaphoric transfer. To use Barbara Dancygier’s example: In the phrase emotional roller-coaster,18 the source domain is a feature from amusement parks that is transferred to the target domain of emotional instability, highlighting the nauseous, abrupt up-and-down mood swings veering from exhilaration to depression and back (or oscillating between anxiety and overconfidence). The implication of the metaphor is less to indicate that there is a similarity between amusement parks and our psychic landscape than to foreground that,

Monika Fludernik   161 surprisingly, abrupt changes of feeling may leave the patient as exhausted and emotionally depleted as a trip on the roller coaster, which typically induces a queasiness in one’s stomach (though it is also experienced as intoxicating rather than annihilating). The access to the source domain therefore opens an appreciation of the psychic experience as passively endured violence, as being flung about without the chance to stop the process; though, unlike the trip in the roller coaster, the experience is involuntary, not sought for its thrill.19 Although Lakoff, as a linguist, moved into metaphor theory via the more general cognitive insights of frame theory and saw metaphor as a problem of conceptualization, the more literary offshoots of literary metaphor theory were more interested in elucidating the generation and comprehension of metaphors than in the transfer process itself. Blending theory arose from the collaboration of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner and extended the focus on metaphor to the consideration of larger intermental processes that allow humans to manipulate frames and become creative, discovering new perspectives, combinations, and alternative solutions to problems.20 According to Turner, blending provides us with an eminently successful mechanism of survival and with the intellectual capacities of invention and analytical thinking that have resulted in human evolutionary advantagement over animals. For our purposes, it is important to note that blending theory has recently modulated into what is now called conceptual integration theory, to which the process of blending is central on account of the purported innovativity engendered by the process. Blends produce new meanings that exceed those that would naturally arise from the combination of input spaces. These recent extensions of blending theory now treat the more traditional source and target domains as input spaces, with the resulting blended space, or simply blend, allowing for interpretations that are genuinely insightful. A typical example given for the usefulness of a blending analysis is the phrase My surgeon is a butcher, where the added implication of incompetence is generated from the confrontation of the two input domains. Blending theory moreover allows for more than two inputs, and it retrieves the attribute of similarity between input spaces that the source-target domain model had discarded. By noting that the blend operates on the basis of a particular structure that collapses and analogizes elements from both of the input spaces, a so-called generic space is hypostatized that contains this basic structure. In the case of the surgeon as butcher, this generic space would hold the person treating a dead(ened) object on a table and attacking it with a sharp, potentially lethal instrument. This structure then analogizes the butcher and surgeon, the ax and scalpel, and the animal carcass and anesthetized patient as well as the butcher’s block and operating table. The implied message that the surgeon might turn the patient into a piece of meat, that he is unskilled, adds a new perspective to the scenario. In what follows I will be concerned with blending because humor arises from incongruities, and comic cartoons are funny because they contain clashes of frames that generate the humor. The issue of frame overlap and the semantic conjunction of incompatible input spaces is therefore fundamental to the workings of cartoons.

162   Blending in Cartoons

4.  Blending in Metaphoric Cartoons As we have seen above, cartoons and caricatures both can, but need not, display metaphoricity in the graphic delineation of their subject, nor do they have to be based on a blend of two (or several) input spaces. We have, thus, largely nonmetaphoric blends (as in the “World Food Crisis” example) or in the commercial that Fauconnier and Turner discuss,21 in which the children of today are blended with the future doctors performing a bypass. On the other hand, visual metaphor does involve a blend (since metaphor is a basic subcategory of blending), but the blend need not be pictorial, since one input space can be linguistic and only the other visual. In the already mentioned “Life without parole” cartoon depicting a couple in their flat, the image itself is nonmetaphoric; it becomes metaphoric when the subscript is added to it. Since metaphor inherently relies on blending, with two input spaces (source and target domains) imposed on one another, metaphoric cartoons are clearly instances of visual blending. What I want to look at in this section are two cartoons that have no title or subscript and therefore generate the blend entirely by pictorial means. (The title of ­figure 8.2 is my own and was added for easier reference.) The first of these cartoons, ­figure 8.2, shows two fish at their wedding. The animals are rendered by means of anthropomorphic metaphors. Thus, the two fish are clearly distinguishable as bride and groom, “dressed” appropriately (for humans) in wedding veil and top hat, bow tie and cane. The “bride” holds a bouquet in her pelvic fin and smiles seductively (notice the exaggerated “lips” and elongated eyelashes) in the manner of females of our own species, while the “groom” has his mouth open as if he were holding forth.

Figure  8.2  “Fish Wedding.” Clipart by Dennis Holmes Designs, http://clipartof.com/65405. Permission to reprint this cartoon is gratefully acknowledged.

Monika Fludernik   163 The image is markedly incongruous. The piscine wedding has to occur out of the water (with a pool forming between the two fish) but it does not take place inside or outside a church. The fishiness of bride and groom is underlined by their dorsal fins, which emerge from behind the veil (and would have made wearing a frock coat impossible for the “groom”). And of course the whole idea of marriage for fish is absurd since animals have no legal or religious commitments. What does the cartoon effect? One can read the cartoon satirically as an image for possible excesses of (human) wedding ceremonies. On the other hand, in praise of matrimony, its message could be “Even fish do it”—thus helping us to see a common human ritual as universal. Outside any context, the cartoon engenders comedy by means of the incompatibility of source and target domains and draws attention to the ingenious choices of the artist, who has managed to put two fish into a recognizable wedding scenario by presenting them in upright position (using the caudal fin as feet and the pelvic fins as hands) and providing them with the insignia of bride and groom. On the other hand, the image does not allow one to forget the incompatibility between the human and piscine worlds—the pool of water and the dorsal fins clash with the human source domain. This incongruity generates the humor of the cartoon. The idea of marriage is defamiliarized by being transferred to an absurd referent, the world of fish. The incongruity subtending the cartoon becomes even more striking when one remembers that fish, for us humans, are primarily edibles. Thus what the image stages is the marriage of seafood. The next cartoon, ­figure 8.3, is of a clearly more satirical nature, and it takes a while to realize what is going on. In this image we see a convict behind bars looking out at us.

Figure  8.3 “Prison.” Miguel Herranz, http://freekhand.blogspot.com.es/2013/04/prisonprison.html. Permission to reprint this cartoon is gratefully acknowledged.

164   Blending in Cartoons However, we then notice that the convict seems to be outside the prison since he is located in a landscape with mountains, whereas we, the viewers, are seemingly the ones located inside the prison—we are looking at the walls framing the barred window. One way of interpreting this image is to argue that we are inside prison, but that those outside are also prisoners, as indicated by the convict dress. Without taking the viewer position into account, but focusing on the prisoner clasping the bars—a gesture typical of the incarcerated—one can also interpret the cartoon as demonstrating that those that believe themselves to be in freedom are actually in prison. (It makes little sense to assume that the image presents the incarcerated to be free agents who merely believe themselves to be in jail, although—given a particular context—such an interpretation could be convincing.) The most logical way to characterize the cartoon out of context is therefore in the freedom is prison metaphor.22 How does the blend work here? The image signals freedom as a landscape with mountains, resorting to the associations of horizons with the liberty to travel or range abroad. Landscapes can of course evoke different associations (mountains as barriers, ecological utopias, etc.); here it is the juxtaposition with a wall and barred window plus convict that pushes the interpretation in this direction. The barred window is more clearly focused on one specific meaning, the source domain of the metaphor. For this reason, it takes the viewer a while to figure out how to deal with the perspective and the landscape in the background. The humor of the cartoon in this instance does not derive from the juxtaposition per se, but from the uncanny and unexpected way in which the spatial setup has been manipulated. If we had had a beach scene with people swimming, cruising about on yachts, sitting in deckchairs sipping cocktails, and the cartoon had superimposed a series of bars over this scene, the same freedom is prison metaphor might have been read off the image; and there would not really have been any humorous element in this cartoon. Here, however, the initially perceived incompatibility of the inside of the prison being like a landscape introduces an incongruity in the blend that can be exploited for the sake of comedy. There is an exaggerated opposition between the “prison” of the bars, the wall, and the convict dress (redolent of obsolete forms of incarceration) on the one hand and the tourist-poster-like landscape in the background on the other. One first conclusion we can draw from the discussion of fi ­ gures 8.2 and 8.3 is the fact that blending per se does not cause humor, but that for comic effects to arise from blends some incongruity needs to be particularly foregrounded, though that foregrounding can consist in the absurdity of the imposed source domain.

5.  Blending by Means of Textual Source or Target Domains Figure 8.4, another prison cartoon, is entitled “American Debtor’s Prison.” There are various credit card brand names depicted on the “wall” surrounding the barred window. Thanks

Monika Fludernik   165

Figure  8.4 “American Debtor’s Prison.” Andrew Wahl, Off the Wahl Productions. http:// www.offthewahl.com/editorialcartoons/2005/0502.htm Permission to reprint this cartoon is gratefully acknowledged.

to these brand names, the cartoon could probably work without the explicit title. It blends the image of a credit card with the typical prison image of a person behind bars, using the prison metaphor as source domain: being in debt is being behind bars. By specifically visualizing debt as caused by credit card overuse, the cartoon introduces another type of exaggeration or rational incompatibility. Using one’s credit card is a sign of unlimited freedom—at least in terms of credit card marketing. That overuse of credit freedom may push one into debt and hence into “prison,” that is, the inability to pay and therefore to afford buying anything at all (notice the nakedness of the figure behind the bars in the cartoon). The title “Debtor’s Prison,” however, adds an additional allusion, namely a reference to the historical institution of debtor’s prison, an allusion that enhances the comic incompatibility between the credit card as prison metaphor. Traditionally in Britain, until the late nineteenth century (1867), debtors could be imprisoned by their creditors in order to coerce them into paying their debts. Though paying up rather than actually going to prison was the intended effect when creditors sent their defaulters to jail, in practice those too broke to pay ended up in prison without any chance of getting out, since they were unable to procure the money to pay off their debts while incarcerated and because

166   Blending in Cartoons they accumulated further debts for fees inside prison. Pre-Victorian prisons housed the families of debtors alongside the defaulters themselves because the rent for a room in prison was so horrendous that families could not afford to pay for accommodation both inside the prison (for the father) and outside (for the wife and children). With these historical facts in mind, the comic quality of the cartoon emerges forcefully, since it suggests that the credit crunch is a modern-day type of debtor’s prison. There are indeed several structural parallels that subtend the blend. Thus, the historical debtor’s prison affected the debtor and his whole family, as does the wage earner’s credit crunch today. Since the creditor has his flat impounded and his TV and car seized by the credit card company, his family will be sufferers with him. Moreover, getting into debt due to overconsumption was a common cause of imprisonment for debt in the eighteenth century in Britain (as witness numerous literary instances); hence, if debtor’s prisons still existed, those defaulting on their credit card payments would most likely see themselves incarcerated. Just as, historically, many debtors had little chance of liberating themselves by their own efforts, those affected by personal debts today find it hard to escape from their predicament. One can, therefore, construct a generic space for the blend in which spending too much money and, as a result, being deprived of liberty constitute the core framework that then plays out in both input spaces and merges in the image of the credit card as jail space. My final example returns to the marriage topic. Figure 8.5 presents a cartoon that is not readable without its subscript, the utterance of the bride on the wedding night. The cartoon itself does not visually constitute a blend; it simply sets up the honeymoon suite with the couple in bed. Only through the utterance of the recently wedded wife do we blend two contexts with one another, and—by the sheer clash of expectations—introduce the humor into the blend. Not believing in sex after marriage is clearly a contradiction in terms since marriages are supposed to be consummated, with weddings traditionally giving couples the license to have intercourse (blocked before the ceremony by expectations of virginity for women) and legally binding the partners to afford each other sexual access, thus treating intercourse as an entitlement. (Only recently has this entitlement been limited by the prohibition of marital rape.) Marriages that had not been consummated could be annulled since the primary purpose of marriage (canonically and judicially) was the conception of children, though companionship and the avoidance of “fornication” were treated as additional legitimate arguments for the institution of marriage. Thus St. Augustine in De bono coniugali (On the Good of Marriage) argues for friendship between married couples, the procreation of children, the “natural companionship. . . between the sexes” and the “moderation of lust” or the avoidance of “youthful incontinence.”23 As Lawrence Stone puts it, “an incapacitating state of mind or body—such as lunacy or male impotence (and, very rarely, female frigidity, or physical deformation of the vagina)—which prevented the essential purpose of marriage, namely sexual intercourse”24 could result in the annulment of marriage in the ecclesiastical courts. Even in the twentieth century, annulment or “voidance” based on lack of consummation was legally included in section 12 of the English Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973.

Monika Fludernik   167

Figure  8.5  “I Don’t Believe in Sex after Marriage.” Andrew Exton, www.CartoonStock.com. Permission to reprint this cartoon is gratefully acknowledged.

The marriage suite honeymoon scenario hence includes a script of wedding → honeymoon = consummation of marriage. Though this script is independent of any requirements of virginity on the side of the female partner, the whole aura of the wedding night clearly derives from its being the first sexual experience for the woman—the mystique of that event evaporates if both partners have had sex before that moment. The second script that relates to the bride’s comment could be seen as a supportive modern variant of the wedding night ritual—not believing in sex before marriage underwrites the special nature of the wedding night, complementing the wedding → sex structure by a prequel: no sex → wedding → sex. A blend of these two scenarios is therefore almost no blend since both input spaces belong to versions of the same script. When the bride breaks her part of the bargain by refusing consummation, one is hard put to find a scenario or input space that could serve for a blend, although the situation is a recurrent one in saint’s legends, where female saints like St. Cecilia, St. Aethelthryth, or Catherine of Sweden25 declare to their husbands that they are wedded to Christ and intend to practice sexual continence even during their married lives. In the legendaries, the husbands’ mundane script of marriage as sexual congress is replaced by a divine script of the saint’s spiritual marriage to Christ, with the woman sacrificing her sexuality, not to a secular husband but to God, who wishes for its transformation or suspension. The comedy in the cartoon could, therefore, be said to arise from the incongruity between the secular setting of the honeymoon suite and the inappropriate behavior of the bride, who adopts the abstemiousness of a female saint but does not look and behave like a saint at all. The blend results in a contradiction, which we find funny because we recognize the pun with the common “I don’t believe in sex before marriage” motto. We also assume (the bride not being a latter-day saint) that she has trapped the groom into marriage without wanting to fulfill her part of the contract and wonder why she would have wanted to marry at all. One can also picture a naive bride who had not

168   Blending in Cartoons realized about the nexus between marriage and sex (perhaps someone raised by radical Christians who fail to give their children a sex education). This last cartoon raises a number of interesting questions about blending. In the now almost canonical my surgeon is a butcher or my job is a jail metaphoric blends, one can easily see how generic space and input spaces converge into the blend, which preserves the same structure and merges the semantics of the input spaces. Figure 8.5, by contrast, cannot be handled so easily. It is possible to say My surgeon behaves like a butcher, which will give one more or less the same sense as the metaphor; but My wife behaves like a saint will not capture the problem (and refuses to have sex is merely literal). Though this may be a linguistic problem, the structural conundrum consists in the replacement of action by nonaction. The contradiction between the two scenarios is fundamental—can one have a blend of black and white? Are we to picture a reconception of marriage as sexless? Or a modern-day reinterpretation of Christian notions of sainthood as absurd? (Yet the Christian correlates are nowhere explicit in the cartoon.) Metaphors like the surgeon as butcher already encourage us to invoke a scenario and even a ministory, but this cartoon is much more insistent in generating explanatory narratives (Is she sane? Does she want to get at his money? Is she naive?). On the one hand, such questions relate to theory of mind—we take these fictive personae in the cartoon to be “like” humans and wonder about their emotions, intentions, and possible reactions. On the other hand, this additionally implies that we fully attribute experientiality to the scene: we ask, “What would it be like if. . .?” My last example cartoon therefore clearly displays narrativity. My final section is devoted to elucidating this phenomenon of implied narrativity more fully.

6.  Implied Narratives In an essay for a proceedings volume,26 I first introduced the term implizites Erzählen (implied narration) in discussing another wedding cartoon. In that cartoon (“Didn’t You Get My Email?”),27 the newly married groom, exiting from the church with his wife on his arm, confronts a second lady in wedding dress who has just arrived. This cartoon shares with “I Don’t Believe in Sex after Marriage” the quality of eliciting an implied narrative and speculative engagement with the motives and feelings of the cartoon characters. Both cartoons direct us to a story rather than merely a “message.” Why do these cartoons elicit the reconstruction of a story and therefore produce an implied narrative? Does that narrative arise from the blending process or is it separate from it? Why do the other cartoons not elicit a story in the same way (except perhaps the “Debtor’s Prison” cartoon)? To start with: it seems to me that the “Didn’t You Get My Email?” cartoon does not necessarily involve a blend, or, rather, what one could conceive of as a blend is very similar to a pun. Yet one could also argue that the wedding frame is blended with the “missed email” scenario. However, these do not share a common structure. The comedy emerges

Monika Fludernik   169 precisely from the incongruity of the wedding scenario with the missed email frame, especially since it is not common for decisions about one’s marriage to be made in the electronic medium. A blend can, however, be posited to underlie the cartoon if one focuses not on the wedding but on the jilting of the second lady. The cartoon presents an egregious case of jilting that is condensed into the scene before the church. Instead of promising marriage to one woman, then calling it off and (much later) marrying somebody else, in this story the groom has been operating on the model of ordinary business or private appointments that are canceled by email. In fact one can easily imagine the case where somebody calls off a meeting with his or her partner in order to have illicit sex with a lover and is surprised in flagranti by the entry of the partner, to whom he/she then says “Didn’t you get my email?” This, too, would be considered funny and incongruous but not because of the use of email as a medium for the lie but because the cheating partner does not show any guilt and puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the victim of the deceit. My conclusion from these arguments is that blending is not necessarily the cause of the humor in cartoons. It is not the case that the incongruity of input spaces is necessarily responsible for the comedy, although that may be the case. Other types of incongruity may also be operative. A complementary question might be whether and in what manner blends can be dynamic and process-oriented rather than static. Most of the blends analyzed by cognitive studies scholars in work that I am familiar with are static: the blends impose one input space on the other according to a common structure in generic space. I have not seen any discussion of a narrative structure, a script, in generic space. In the analysis of the “Didn’t You Get My Email” cartoon, the jilting scenario would provide a script that could be posited as the generic space structure common to “normal” jilting and the hilariously contracted impertinence pictured in the joke. Although dynamic blends are possible sources of humor, the cartoon does not necessarily require the presence of a blend in the conceptual integration theory meaning. It can be conceived of as a juxtaposition of incompatibles whose conjunction in the picture— that is to say, whose ostensible blending—is in fact belied by the “deep structure” of that “blend,” which demonstrates the incompatibility between the scenarios. This takes me to a much more radical reanalysis of blending in cartoons. While the surgeon as butcher or job as jail blends are treated as valid arguments in terms of which some “metaphoric truth” is being conveyed, the cartoons that we have looked at in fact foreground the incongruity between scenarios since this is the source of the humor they generate. Rather than merging the two input domains into a blend that then serves an argumentative purpose, the cartoons highlight the clash between input spaces and underline the absurdities of the juxtapositions of incompatible scenarios. That this should be the case is, however, due to the visual nature of cartoons. Much that linguistic metaphor seriously proposes becomes sheer comedy when subjected to the pen of a cartoonist. One can easily imagine Achilles pictured with a lion snout and mane, holding his shield with lion paws, but this is not condign to arguing for his courage or ferocity but will likely elicit (unintended) humor as if Achilles had joined the Walt Disney set of The Jungle Book. Likewise, picturing a surgeon with a cleaver in an

170   Blending in Cartoons operating theater might either be frightening or extremely humorous, but it would fail to make the intended point of bungling. There are, however, cartoons whose blends are not primarily funny; the comedy in these serves the message of irony as it does in the “World Food Crisis” cartoon, the “Debtor’s Prison” cartoon or the “freedom behind bars” cartoon. When there is a serious topic or the cartoon has a political message, its comic potential is backgrounded or comes to support the message. Put differently, if the incongruity is emphasized and there is no serious message to be extracted from the cartoon, then the comic effect wins out and the blend is perceived to be a juxtaposition of incompatibles. What about implied narratives? As we have seen, narratives can be elaborated on the basis of cartoons. These narratives may focus on a series of connections in temporal order (in the “World Food Crisis” cartoon the use of plants to produce fuel and the resulting famine) or on a real sequence of events or actions on the part of the cartoon characters: the debtor using his credit card and getting into debt; the bride refusing sex before marriage and then reiterating her repugnance after the ceremony; the groom jilting one of his flames and doing so on too short notice and by email, thus producing the scene before the church. We have also observed that the more narrativity a cartoon elicits, the more speculation there is about the motives of the protagonists, thereby establishing narratives via experientiality. In the lost email cartoon, such speculations will elaborate on the obvious cowardice and perfidy of the groom (who did not have the common decency of personally confronting his fiancée to call off the wedding) or on the fiancée’s inability to handle the electronic medium (or both). These speculations, too, are cognitively based since they depend on scripts and cultural models of behavior that we rely on in our interpretations of the world. Cartoons, one can therefore argue, are a very happy hunting ground for an analysis of blending, humor, and narrative. And all three of these are determined by our cognitive frames and processes.

Notes 1. Mark Turner, “The Mind Is an Autocatalytic Vortex,” in The Literary Mind, ed. Jürgen Schläger and Gesa Stedman (Tübingen: Narr, 2008), 13–43. See Patrick Chappatte, “World Food Crisis,” International Herald Tribune, April 11, 2008, accessed March 26, 2013, http:// public.globecartoon.com. 2. Turner, “The Mind,” 17. 3. See Jim Swan, “ ‘Life without Parole’:  Metaphor and Discursive Commitment,” Style 36.3 (2002):  446–65, and Monika Fludernik, “The Metaphorics and Metonymics of Carcerality: Reflections on Imprisonment as Source and Target Domain in Literary Texts,” English Studies 86 (2005): 226–44. 4. Turner, “The Mind,” 19. 5. I  dispense with a general introduction to the comic. There is too much literature on this subject and no agreed-upon model or definition. Major works on this subject are Henri Bergson, Laughter:  An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Los Angeles:  Green Integer, 1999); Simon Critchley, On

Monika Fludernik   171 Humour (London:  Routledge, 2002); Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” in Narrative Dynamics:  Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2002), 102–9 and Helga Kotthoff ’s linguistic exploration of the comic in conversational narratives in Humour in Context: Perspectives on Sociolinguistic Dimensions of Conversational Joking (Konstanz:  Fachgruppe der Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz, 1994). 6. See, e.g., Werner Busch, “Die englische Karikatur in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 40 (1977): 227–44; David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip:  Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet 1450–1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and Jürgen Döring, Kunstgeschichte der frühen englischen Karikatur (Hildesheim:  Gerstenberg Verlag, 1991). See also Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (London:  Associated University Press, 1981); Dietrich Grünewald, ed., Politische Karikatur: Zwischen Journalismus und Kunst (Weimar: VDG, 2002); and Christina Oberstebrink, Karikatur und Poetik:  James Gillray, 1756–1815 (Berlin: Reimer, 2005). 7. See, for instance, Martin Schüwer, “Erzählen in Comics: Bausteine einer Plurimedialen Erzähltheorie,” in Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (Trier:  Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002); Jeanne Ewert, “Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Graphic Narrative,” in Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 178–94; Brian McHale, “Narrativity and Segmentivity, or, Poetry in the Gutter,” in Intermediality and Storytelling, ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 27–48; Karin Kukkonen, “Comics as a Test Case for Transmedial Narratology,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 40 (2011): 34–52 and “Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels,” in Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 213–31. The recent standard study on comics in German is Stephan Packard’s Anatomie des Comics (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006). 8. See Markku Lehtimäki, “The Failure of Art: Problems of Verbal and Visual Representation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” in Intermediality and Storytelling, ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 183–207; and Jan Baetens and Mieke Bleyen, “Photonarrative,” in Intermediality and Storytelling, ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 165–82. 9. See Werner Wolf, “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik:  Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie,” in Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (Trier:  Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), 23–104; and Wendy Steiner, “Pictorial Narrativity,” in Narrative across Media:  The Languages of Storytelling, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004), 145–77. 10. Charles Forceville, Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising (New York: Routledge, 1996). 11. Forceville, Pictorial Metaphor; Charles Forceville, “Metaphor in Pictures and Multimodal Representations,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 462–82; Charles Forceville, “Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor in Commercials,” in Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric, ed. Edward F.  McQuarrie and Barbara J.  Phillips (Armonk, NY:  ME Sharpe, 2008), 272–310. Note also on film metaphors:  Jan Alber, “Cinematic Carcerality: Prison Metaphors in Film,” Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 217–32.

172   Blending in Cartoons 12. The statue is called “Laocoön and His Sons” and, according to Pliny the Elder, was sculpted by three artists from Rhodes. The date of creation remains controversial (late second to mid-first century b.c.). The statue was found buried in 1506 and was acquired by the Vatican. 13. Compare Ken Smith, “Laughing at the Way We See:  The Role of Visual Organizing Principles in Cartoon Humor,” Humor:  International Journal of Humor Research 9 (1996): 19–38. 14. See William Hogarth, “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism,” (1762), available at http:// www.apocalypsepress.co.uk/other/hogarth/credulity.htm. 15. The terminology was coined by Gilles Fauconnier in his 1994 study Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 16. Barbara Dancygier, The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7. She refers to Terence Deacon, “The Aesthetic Faculty,” in The Artful Mind:  Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21–56. 17. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1980); George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 18. Dancygier, The Language of Stories, 7. 19. Funnily, on the day I was adding this section to the chapter, the horoscope in the supermarket newsletter suggested that my feelings were currently taking a roller-coaster ride (a faulty prediction) and that this was an opportunity for future happiness: “Ihre Gefühle fahren Achterbahn. Endlich können Sie wieder ausgiebig das Leben genießen. Viel Spaß dabei!” (Edeka diese Woche 19/2013: 31). 20. See Fauconnier, Mental Spaces; Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language [1997] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Mark Turner, ed., The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); as well as Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “A Mechanism of Creativity,” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 397–418; and Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 21. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, ­figure 4.2, 65–67. 22. However, one can also—perhaps counterintuitively, given the convict’s glum expression— read the cartoon as a happy prison image: the convict is in prison but has turned his incarceration into a locus amoenus. The metaphoric reading would then be “Prison is happiness / freedom of mind.” 23. Augustine, “De bono coniugali and De sancta virginitate,” Oxford Scholarship Online, April 2004. 24. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 191. 25. See Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage:  Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Monika Fludernik   173 26. Monika Fludernik, “Erzählung aus narratologischer Sicht,” in Erzählen in den Wissenschaften: Positionen, Probleme, Perspektiven, ed. Balz Engler (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2010), 5–22. 27. Cartoon available at http://weddingmarketing.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/emailcartoon.jpg.

Works Cited Alber, Jan. “Cinematic Carcerality: Prison Metaphors in Film.” Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 217–32. Augustine. “De bono coniugali and De sancta virginitate.” Oxford Scholarship Online, April 2004. Baetens, Jan, and Mieke Bleyen. “Photonarrative.” In Intermediality and Storytelling, edited by Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan, 165–82. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Bergson, Henri. Laughter:  An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [1899]. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999. Busch, Werner. “Die englische Karikatur in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 40 (1977): 227–44. Chappatte, Patrick. “World Food Crisis.” Cartoon. International Herald Tribune, April 11, 2008. Accessed March 26, 2013, http://public.globecartoon.com. Critchley, Simon. On Humour. London: Routledge, 2002. Dancygier, Barbara. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Deacon, Terence. “The Aesthetic Faculty.” In The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, edited by Mark Turner, 21–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. “Didn’t You Get My Email?” Available at http://weddingmarketing.net/wp-content/ uploads/2007/12/email-cartoon.jpg. Döring, Jürgen. Kunstgeschichte der frühen englischen Karikatur. Hildesheim:  Gerstenberg Verlag, 1991. Edeka diese Woche No. 19/2013. Elliott, Dyan. Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Ewert, Jeanne. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Graphic Narrative.” In Narrative across Media:  The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 178–94. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Exton, Andrew. “I Don’t Believe in Sex after Marriage.” Cartoon. http://www.cartoonstock. com/directory/s/sex_after_marriage.asp. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces:  Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mappings in Thought and Language [1997]. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. “A Mechanism of Creativity.” Poetics Today 20.3 (1999): 397–418. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

174   Blending in Cartoons Fludernik, Monika. “The Metaphorics and Metonymics of Carcerality:  Reflections on Imprisonment as Source and Target Domain in Literary Texts.” English Studies 86 (2005): 226–44. Fludernik, Monika. “Erzählung aus narratologischer Sicht.” In Erzählen in den Wissenschaften:  Positionen, Probleme, Perspektiven, edited by Balz Engler, 5–22. Fribourg: Academic Press, 2010. Forceville, Charles. Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. New York: Routledge, 1996. Forceville, Charles. “Metaphor in Pictures and Multimodal Representations.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, edited by Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., 462–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Forceville, Charles. “Pictorial and Multimodal Metaphor in Commercials.” In Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric, edited by Edward F. McQuarrie and Barbara J. Phillips, 272–310. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2008. Frye, Northrop. “The Argument of Comedy” [1948]. In Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, edited by Brian Richardson, 102–9. Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2002. Grishakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. Intermediality and Storytelling. Narratologia, 24. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. Grünewald, Dietrich, ed. Politische Karikatur:  Zwischen Journalismus und Kunst. Weimar: VDG, 2002. Herranz, Miguel. “Prison.” Cartoon. http://freekhand.blogspot.com.es/2013/04/prisionprison.html. Hogarth, William. “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism.” 1762. Available at http://www. apocalypsepress.co.uk/other/hogarth/credulity.htm. Holmes, Dennis. “Fish Wedding.” Cartoon. Clipart by Dennis Holmes Designs. http://clipartof.com/65405. Kotthoff, Helga. Humour in Context:  Perspectives on Sociolinguistic Dimensions of Conversational Joking. Konstanz: Fachgruppe der Sprachwissenschaft Universität Konstanz, 1994. Kukkonen, Karin. “Comics as a Test Case for Transmedial Narratology.” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 40 (2011): 34–52. Kukkonen, Karin. “Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels.” In Metalepsis in Popular Culture, edited by Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek, 213–31. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip:  Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet 1450–1825. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Lehtimäki, Markku. “The Failure of Art: Problems of Verbal and Visual Representation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” In Intermediality and Storytelling, edited by Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan, 183–207. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. McHale, Brian. “Narrativity and Segmentivity, or, Poetry in the Gutter.” In Intermediality and Storytelling, edited by Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan, 27–48. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010.

Monika Fludernik   175 Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning, eds. Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. Oberstebrink, Christina. Karikatur und Poetik: James Gillray, 1756 – 1815. Berlin: Reimer, 2005. Packard, Stephan. Anatomie des Comics. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006. Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. Narrative across Media:  The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Schüwer, Martin. “Erzählen in Comics:  Bausteine einer Plurimedialen Erzähltheorie.” In Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, edited by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, 185–216. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. Smith, Ken. “Laughing at the Way We See: The Role of Visual Organizing Principles in Cartoon Humor.” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 9 (1996): 19–38. Steiner, Wendy. “Pictorial Narrativity.” In Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, 145–77. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004. Stone, Lawrence. Road to Divorce. England 1530–1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Swan, Jim. “ ‘Life without Parole’:  Metaphor and Discursive Commitment.” Style 36.3 (2002): 446–65. Turner, Mark. Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Turner, Mark, ed. The Artful Mind:  Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Turner, Mark. “The Mind Is an Autocatalytic Vortex.” In The Literary Mind, edited by Jürgen Schläger and Gesa Stedman, 13–43. Tübingen: Narr, 2008. Wahl, Andrew. “American Debtor’s Prison.” Cartoon. http://www.offthewahl.com/editorialcartoons/2005/0502.htm. Wolf, Werner. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie.” In Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, edited by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, 23–104. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002.

Chapter 9

From the S o c ia l to the Lite ra ry Approaching Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng 紅樓夢) from a Cognitive Perspective Lis a Zun sh in e

An old tree next to my house needs to be cut down, yet the contractor keeps postponing, and I am worried that yet another dead branch will fall on my neighbors’ car. I don’t know how they explain to themselves that I haven’t yet taken care of it. I want them to know that I am thinking about this issue. I shall email them. I want them to know what I think—a mental state within a mental state within a mental state—three nested mental states. As I survey my day, more examples of such nestings from different occasions come to mind. She thought that I meant the opposite of what I actually meant. He didn’t want me to know what he was really thinking. I don’t want her to realize that I am trying out this new communication strategy that I just learned from a book. When he’s older, do you think he’ll forget how he felt when he was four? It’s difficult to say how much of our daily functioning involves nesting mental states within each other in this recursive fashion (particularly since we don’t stop and think about it consciously the way I just did.)1 It seems to me that we do it often, though not constantly. Involved social situations call for at least some triply nested thoughts and feelings. Or, perhaps, involved social situations are created by our ability to entertain such nestings. Emotions play a crucial role in nesting.2 To use just one example, it is possible that we nest mental states more actively in situations conducive to social anxiety. In fact, social anxiety may be viewed as an archetypal triple nesting: our awareness of our uncertainty about other people’s feelings in response to their perception of our actions. That cognition should thus be tied with emotion is not surprising given the fraught nature of theory of mind—our evolved cognitive adaptation for attributing mental states to ourselves and others. To stay just with social anxiety, theory of mind comes all but preloaded with it because it makes us interpret all observable behavior as caused by

Lisa Zunshine   177 underlying thoughts, feelings, and intentions, yet our interpretations are often wrong, and we know that they can be wrong. Social failures, large or small, are thus always just around the corner. We may nest aggressively to forestall them, but it’s also possible that by doing so we give shape to our social anxiety and intensify it. I am unhappy that the contractor is not here yet. Oh, but what I am actually unhappy about is that I am afraid that my neighbors will think that I don’t care about their (very real) concerns. And I am sure that they don’t want to remind me because they don’t want me to think that they don’t trust me to take care of it. . . Am I being socially astute or am I overthinking it? Fiction is where it gets really interesting. Nested mental states suffused with strong emotions are everywhere in fiction. Yet writers can construct them by referring to other mental states or without mentioning mental states at all. Hence Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji 石頭記) also known as Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢), a beloved Chinese novel written around 1760 and first published in 1792: And now suddenly this Xue Bao-chai had appeared on the scene—a young lady who, though very little older than Dai-yu, possessed a grown-up beauty and aplomb in which all agreed Dai-yu was her inferior.3 (不想如今忽然來了一個薛寶釵, 年歲 雖大不多, 然品格端方, 容貌豐美, 人多謂黛玉所不及.)4

What’s going on in this sentence? Here is one way to spell out the mental states that we infer as we make sense of it: the narrator wants his readers to realize that Dai-yu feels distressed because she is certain that everyone around her considers her inferior to Bao-chai. That’s at least four recursively nested mental states (and some serious social anxiety), but to articulate them, we have to take in subtle cues, such as the unhappy tone with which Dai-yu refers to her cousin (“this Xue Bao-chai”: 一個薛寶釵) and our previous awareness of Dai-yu’s near-paranoid self-consciousness. If we look for explicit references to mental states this sentence contains, we notice the word rendered by the translator as “agreed” (謂).5 This word may describe an attitude of some people around Dai-yu, but the meaning of the passage does not reside with it. Instead, as we’ve seen, that meaning is expressed through nested mental states implied but not stated by the text. Literary critics have long known that fiction can represent mental states without referring to them. To quote Haun Saussy, “That thoughts can be represented even if unspoken is a commonplace of universal literature.”6 Here is what’s new about the cognitive approach that I propose here. I focus on nested mental states as units of meaning in fiction, including situations when these nested mental states are implied rather than described. Viewed from this perspective, fiction emerges as both continuous with our everyday cognition and distinct from it.7 Building on theory of mind and mimicking patterns of our everyday social functioning, fiction nests mental states within mental states. Yet fictional nestings are not merely crude transcriptions—along the lines of, “I think that he thinks that I think”—of the myriad subtle cues (particularly those conveyed by body language) that make up our social life. Instead, fiction creates complex mental states by

178    From the Social to the Literary stylistic means unique to specific genres and authors. Fictional nestings of thoughts and feelings have their own history—a literary history—not reducible to social cognition (however complex that is). To talk about nested mental states in fiction, I introduced, elsewhere, the term sociocognitive complexity.8 I have argued that prose fiction, drama, narrative poetry, as well as memoirs concerned with imagination and consciousness (such as Nabokov’s Speak, Memory) routinely operate on at least the third level of sociocognitive complexity: a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state. In this, they differ from our daily social interactions, which feature third-level nestings only sporadically, as well as from other ostensibly nonfictional discourses, such as newspaper articles (which operate comfortably on the second level) or science textbooks (which can get by without nesting any mental states). Once you start reading a work of fiction, you encounter third-level nestings very soon and after a while are immersed in them. Different authors achieve this by different stylistic means, focusing primarily on mental states of either characters or of narrators, implied authors, and implied readers.9 For example, the sociocognitive complexity of Zamyatin’s We or McCarthy’s Blood Meridian depends on the nested mental states of their implied authors and readers to a much greater degree than does the sociocognitive complexity of J. K. Rowlings’s “Harry Potter” series, which mainly nests the mental states of its characters. Some writers operate on the fourth level of sociocognitive complexity, and some reach even to the fifth and sixth, though there is no clear correlation between those higher levels of sociocognitive complexity and the aesthetic value of the work. Cognitive literary analysis thus brings into the open an important aspect of our engagement with fiction: we make sense of complex social behavior, inevitably present in fiction, in terms of nested mental states. But whose and where are those mental states? Are they objective, immutable, permanently ensconced in the text, ready to be discovered by whoever opens the book? Once more, a parallel with real-life social interactions is illuminating here. In real life, understanding behavior as caused by nested (and thus complex) thoughts, desires, and intentions, always involves interpretation of those mental states. There may be no such thing as an objective, correct interpretation, unless the social context is drastically simplified.10 Similarly, in fiction, understanding what we read in terms of our own, the characters,’ and the (implied) author’s thoughts and feelings, inevitably involves constructing nestings that are subjective and context-sensitive. Take The Story of the Stone. If it’s true that Red Inkstone and Odd Tablet, the influential early commentators who read Stone in manuscript, were indeed personally familiar with people and events described by Cao, then the way they constructed the author’s and characters’ nested thoughts and feelings is different from the way any other reader would construct it, and it is lost to us. And when later-day scholars of Stone discuss Odd Tablet’s recorded response11 to a particular scandalous episode (a suicide of the main protagonist’s niece) and Cao’s subsequent incomplete revision of that episode, these scholars construct nested thoughts and feelings of the characters involved in that episode differently from lay readers.12

Lisa Zunshine   179 Or—to dip into a different interpretive tradition—when the nineteenth-century commentator Zhang Xinzhi writes that the “entire text of [The Story of the Stone] can be summed up in one phrase from the [fourth century BC Commentary of Zuo], ‘condemnation for failure to instruct,’ ” he constructs a nesting involving Cao’s intentions, mental states of characters from Stone, and his own attitude toward the events described in ancient historical narrative (which themselves feature a complex nesting of mental states).13 So, on the one hand, any interpretation of Stone that aspires to be plausible and nonreductive must function on a high level of sociocognitive complexity. On the other hand, at any given point in the novel, Odd Tablet’s sociocognitive complexity is not Zhang Xinzhi’s; a native Chinese speaker’s sociocognitive complexity is not the same as someone’s who reads Stone in translation; and my students’ sociocognitive complexity is not mine. To speak the language of a novel (i.e., to explain to someone who hasn’t read it what is special about it) we have to nest mental state within mental state within yet another mental state, but the configuration and content of such nestings will differ from one reader to another. Some nested interpretations may gain wider acceptance among particular groups of readers in particular cultural milieus. Since I am about to offer a close reading of several passages from Stone, I hope that some readers will find my nestings compelling, yet I will judge the effectiveness of my argument along different lines. I will consider it effective if, while disagreeing with my interpretations, you notice that your alternative interpretations still nest mental state within mental state within yet another mental state. The first part of my chapter (sections 1 through 4)  explores contrasts between explicit and implied nested mental states in Cao’s novel. Here my goal is to see if a text as overanalyzed as Stone14 may open up in new ways if we focus squarely on how it nests mental states. In the second part (sections 5 and 6), I take a different approach, thinking further through the concept of sociocognitive complexity and using Stone merely as a case in point rather than a focal point of analysis. Thus section 5 considers the possibility of a computer program that would count mental states in fiction (a spoiler: I believe that such a program will fail, but fail selectively and hence instructively); while section 6 brings in research of cognitive scientists who study mental states in stories for young children. I conclude with a brief discussion of my decision to use Stone—as opposed to a work that may be more familiar to most readers of this volume—as a case study.

1.  “I Think I Know What You Meant”: Explicit Mental States All novels build on our theory of mind,15 but some novels also make thinking about thinking their overt theme. The Story of the Stone is one of those. Its characters spend

180    From the Social to the Literary most of their waking hours in other people’s heads. This leads to some spectacular instances of explicit discussions of nested mental states. Many of those discussions originate with the Stone’s main protagonists: a boy named Jia Bao-yu and his cousin, Lin Dai-yu. Bao-yu is afflicted with the “lust of the mind” (意淫). He wants to understand and share the emotions of girls, dozens of them, servants, cousins, and young aunts, populating the Jia’s sprawling aristocratic households (an ambition hardly compatible with his position as the male heir on whom the family’s hopes of future prosperity are pinned).16 Dai-yu, on the other hand, always worries about what other people think about the propriety of her behavior. Brilliant poet and astute observer, she uses her formidable intellect to plumb ever-new heights of social paranoia. Dai-yu and Bao-yu are in love, but instead of bringing them together, their intense emotional bond drives them apart. Dwelling on the beloved’s thoughts turns out to be grist for the mill of the fate that long decreed their separation. Here are two typical examples of explicit nested mental states that involve Dai-yu’s overreading of others. Dai-yu and Bao-yu are visiting their cousin, Xue Bao-chai (whom Dai-yu considers her rival for Bao-yu’s affections). As they are sitting there, chatting and drinking tea and wine, Dai-yu’s maid, prompted by another maid, brings her a hand-warmer, and Dai-yu scolds her for it. Neither Bao-yu nor Bao-chai say anything, though for different reasons. Bao-yu knows “perfectly well” that Dai-yu’s intricately-phrased rebuke was “really intended for him,” but he makes “no reply, beyond laughing good-humoredly,” whereas Bao-chai, “long accustomed to Dai-yu’s peculiar ways,” simply ignores her words. However, Bao-chai’s mother, Mrs. Xue, is deaf to such intricacies and takes Dai-yu’s complaint at its face value. She points out to Dai-yu that it was “nice” of Dai-yu’s maids to think of her, because she often feels chilly. Dai-yu responds thus: You don’t understand, Aunt.  .  .  . It doesn’t matter here, with you; but some people might be deeply offended at the sight of one of my maids rushing in with a hand-warmer. It’s as though I thought my hosts couldn’t supply one themselves if I needed it. Instead of saying how thoughtful the maid was, they would put it down to my arrogance and lack of breeding.17

Dai-yu is imagining people who’d think that she thinks that they are not taking good care of her. That’s bad enough, yet Dai-yu apparently goes easy on her aunt, who, after all, can only respond with the head-scratching “you are altogether too sensitive, thinking of things like that. . . . Such a thought would never have crossed my mind.”18 It gets worse when Dai-yu’s audience is Bao-yu alone. Then Dai-yu can really spread her wings. Bao-yu’s “lust of the mind”—that is, his sympathetic interest in girls’ feelings— makes him a particularly inviting audience for Dai-yu’s paranoid nestings. At Bao-chai’s birthday party, while the family is watching a play performed by a group of professional child actors, her aunt, Wang Xi-feng, observes smilingly that the way the boy who plays the main heroine “is made-up makes him look so like

Lisa Zunshine   181 someone we know.” Bao-chai and Bao-yu merely nod without responding (they know better), but another young relative, Xiang-yun, is “tactless enough” to blurt out that the actor looks like Dai-yu. Bao-yu shoots “a quick glance in [Xiang-yun’s] direction; but [it’s] too late,”19 for now the other guests catch on to the resemblance and start laughing. Shortly after the party breaks up, the offended Xiang-yun orders her maid to start packing. Bao-yu overhears it and attempts to make her change her mind, explaining that the only reason he gave her that look is that he “was worried for [her] sake.” He knew that Xiang-yun didn’t know how sensitive Dai-yu can be and “was afraid that [Dai-yu] would be offended with [Xiang-yun].” Xiang-yun won’t have any of it. To her, Bao-yu’s glance implied that he thinks that she is “not in the same class” as Dai-yu and hence mustn’t make fun of “the young lady of the house.”20 I condense their conversation here, but you can see even from this condensed version that it consists of a series of third-level nestings all involving Xiang-yun’s perception of Bao-yu’s intentions regarding Dai-yu feelings. But then it turns out that Dai-yu overheard Bao-yu’s conversation with Xiang-yun, so the real fun begins. First Dai-yu “coldly” explains to Bao-yu that even though he didn’t compare her with the child actor and didn’t laugh when others did, his secret thoughts, of which she’s apparently the best judge, implicate him severely. In the long quote that follows, the italics are in the original: “You would like to have made the comparison; you would like to have laughed,” said Dai-yu. “To me your way of not comparing and not laughing was worse than the others’ laughing and comparing!” Bao-yu found this unanswerable. “However,” Dai-yu went on, “that I could forgive. But what about that look you gave Yun? Just what did you mean by that? I think I know what you meant. You meant to warn her that she would cheapen herself by joking with me as an equal. Because she’s an Honourable and her uncle’s a marquis and I’m only the daughter of a commoner, she mustn’t risk joking with me, because it would be so degrading for her if I were to answer back. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? Oh yes, you had the kindest intentions. Only unfortunately she didn’t want your kind intentions and got angry with you in spite of them. So you tried to make it up with her at my expense, by telling her how touchy I am and how easily I get upset. You were afraid she might offend me, were you? As if it were any business of yours whether she offended me or not, or whether or not I got angry with her!”21

Bao-yu responds to this by becoming dejected at his incapacity to translate his “good intentions” into effective communication. Then he writes a poem “in imitation of a Buddhist gāthā,” wishing for the ability to know and convey one’s feelings without words. Then he “fear[s]‌that someone reading his gāthā might not be able to share his enlightenment” and adds “another set of verses after it to explain his point.”22 When Dai-yu later comes across the gāthā and the second poem, she adds to it another gāthā that parodies Bao-yu’s praise of wordless communications. And so it goes on—nesting upon nesting of involved discussions of feelings and of the futility of involved discussions of feelings.

182    From the Social to the Literary

2.  Implied Mental States Bao-Yu and Dai-Yu’s private mind reading travails are but one instance of the malady afflicting all the Jias. The clan’s daily life is a complex network of social manipulation. Characters seek to anticipate and control the emotional responses of others, yet in the long run, their plans backfire. People do not respond as their would-be manipulators hoped they would. The craftiest mind readers, such as the beautiful and ambitious Wang Xi-Feng (who is in “charge of household management” because the male and female elders have abdicated their responsibilities),23 come to pitiful ends. Striving to read minds yet lacking self-awareness, the clan crumbles. Here’s a typical Xi-feng moment, involving her philandering husband, Jia Lian, and her trusted maid, Patience. One day, as Xi-feng and Jia Lian are talking together about Jia Lian’s recent long trip, they hear voices in the next room. When Xi-feng asks who it is, Patience comes in to explain that “Mrs. Xue sent Caltrop [her maid and her son’s “chamber-wife,” i.e., concubine] over to ask [Patience] about something,” and that Caltrop has already received her answer and is gone. “Apparently pleased” by the mention of Caltrop, Jia Lian recollects that he saw her earlier that day and that she looks “most attractive.”24 Xi-feng then suggests that if Jia Lian likes Caltrop, Xi-feng will exchange Patience for her, so that Caltrop will become Xi-feng’s new maid and Jia Lian’s chamber-wife. At this point, Jia Lian is called away, and, once he leaves the room, Xi-feng asks Patience “what on earth did Mrs. Xue want, sending Caltrop here like that.” “It wasn’t Caltrop!” said Patience. “I had to make something up and hers was the first name that came to mind. [A woman who owes Xi-feng money came over to pay the interest.] It’s lucky I was in the outside room when she came, otherwise she might have blundered in here and Master would have heard the message. And we all know what Master is like where money is concerned. . . . Once he found out that you had savings, he’d pluck up courage to spend them in no time. Anyway, I took the money from her quickly and gave her a piece of my mind—which I am afraid you must have heard. That’s why I had to say what I did. I’d never have mentioned Caltrop in the Master’s presence otherwise!” Xi-feng laughed. “I was going to say! Why, for no apparent reason, should Mrs. Xue choose a chamber-wife to send here the moment Master gets back? So it was you up to your tricks, you little monkey!”25

Here Jia Lian comes back and the husband and wife resume their conversation, but neither mentions Caltrop again. If you look for references to mental states, you notice that Jia Lian thinks that Caltrop is attractive and that he likes money; that Xi-feng is surprised that Mrs. Xue would send in Caltrop while Jia Lian is in; and that Xi-feng is willing to get a new chamber-wife for her husband. These are explicit mentions of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, and they describe isolated mental states. The meaning of the scene, however, resides not with

Lisa Zunshine   183 them, but with the complex nestings that are implied rather than explicitly referred to by the narrator. For instance, why is it that neither Xi-feng nor Jia Lian returns to their discussion of Caltrop once Jia Lian comes back? It must mean that Jia Lian has known all along that the madly jealous Xi-feng would never allow him to bring in Caltrop as a chamber-wife,26 and that she was merely playing with him, pretending to be a dutiful wife who wants her husband to have a new concubine and hence another shot at a son.27 Moreover, Xi-feng knows that Jia Lian knows that Xi-Feng merely pretends to be magnanimous about a concubine, just like she knows that he knows that she would never want to part with Patience, who is smart and loyal, more a friend that a servant. In fact, we have just seen the amazing Patience in action. Because she knows that Jia Lian shouldn’t find out about the money, she figures that the best way to distract him is to make him think about a pretty girl. She also knows that if Jia Lian starts thinking about the girl, Xi-feng will be unhappy, yet that she will be more unhappy if Jia Lian finds out about the money. Patience counts on Xi-feng’s appreciating her “Caltrop” ruse upon finding out that it was meant to protect her purse, and she knows that Xi-feng will be able to use her husband’s lustful musings about Caltrop to remind him who’s really in charge in their family. At the same time, Xi-feng’s talk about trading Patience for Caltrop has a certain edge. It is as if Xi-feng were reminding Patience that she could exchange her for another maid if she wanted. Because Xi-feng doesn’t know what happened in the next room and suspects that Mrs. Xue would not send her son’s beautiful concubine with a message to Xi-feng at the time when Jia Lian is sure to be around, she knows that something is up with Patience’s mention of Caltrop. We thus can only guess if she is playfully teasing Patience when she proposes to Jia Lian, in Patience’s hearing, to trade her for Caltrop, or if she is quietly warning her that her position of trusted confidante is only as secure as Patience’s latest demonstration of absolute loyalty. Though not a stupid man, Jia Lian is always at least one step behind both Xi-feng and Patience in their mind games. His relative cluelessness is consistent with the pattern we find elsewhere in the novel. Cao correlates his characters’ sociocognitive complexity with their age, gender, and class. That is, his young women of any class standing are much more likely to be capable of contemplating complex nested mental states than are rich men (such as Jia Lian) and older rich women (such as Mrs. Xue). In fact, that’s yet another insight made possible by the cognitive perspective: we’ve always known that the author’s sympathies lay with his young female characters, but now we see just how he makes his young women sympathetic. Not that readers automatically sympathize with any character who is more sociocognitively complex than others. While such a character comes across as more interesting, she may also seem unpleasantly Machiavellian.28 To remain appealing, she has to be somewhat of an underdog. Think of Austen’s Fanny Price, who at any given point is more likely to be aware of other people’s feelings about other people’s feelings than anyone else in Mansfield Park, but who is also downtrodden, “timid, and exceedingly nervous.”29 Similarly, Cao keeps his highly sociocognitively complex young women sympathetic by making them sick, powerless, or doomed.30

184    From the Social to the Literary Wang Xi-feng is an interesting case in point. She comes across as fun but also manipulative and dangerous. When I teach Stone to undergraduates, she is the one they hate to love. It’s open to debate to what extent her character is “redeemed” by marital unhappiness, illness, and eventual sad demise.

3.  Gaps and Groans When there is a gap between mental states explicitly mentioned in the text and mental states that we have to construct in order to make sense of what’s going on, no such construction is ever final. Take Xi-feng’s suggesting, in Patience’s hearing, that she should be traded for Caltrop. Xi-feng’s stated intention makes sense only if we simultaneously process a complex implied nesting that flatly contradicts that stated intention. But such nestings are always speculative. For instance, I just offered two possible interpretations of Xi-feng’s behavior. I don’t know which one of them is one is correct—or if both are correct—or if there is another, equally convincing interpretation. What’s important is that, if a speculative interpretation is to be plausible, it must exhibit high sociocognitive complexity. The extremely involved social situation created by Cao cannot be understood and appreciated without nesting a mental state within a mental state within another mental state. “Xi-feng wants to trade Patience for Caltrop” captures exactly nothing. “Xi-feng wants to scare Patience” captures little. “Xi-feng wants Patience to be amused about the cat-and-mouse game she’s playing with her husband” or “Xi-feng wants Patience to remember that she would not forgive her a disloyalty” begin to get there. Observe the contrast with scenes that are equally sociocognitively complex, but in which the gap between explicitly described and implied mental states is minimal, as it is in the two earlier episodes involving Dai-yu. My students groan in exasperation—and so do I—as we attempt to disentangle a Dai-yu argument. By and large, however, what she says usually coincides with our own sociocognitive map of the scene. It’s as if there were nothing left for us to interpret. We are lucky just to be able to follow Dai-yu’s torturous reasoning about what she thought Bao-yu wanted Xiang-yun to think about Dai-yu. Cao’s novel features both kinds of high sociocognitive complexity; between gaps and groans the story gets told.

4.  Sociocognitive Complexity across Chapters So far we focused on implied nestings limited to a single sentence or to a couple of adjacent paragraphs. But, of course, sociocognitive complexity works across chapters, too.

Lisa Zunshine   185 Local implied nestings enter into implied nestings that span the length of the whole novel. Take again Dai-yu’s annoyed reference to her cousin as “this Xue Bao-chai.” Five hundred pages later, in ­chapter 32, Dai-you reflects that if she and Bao-yu were destined for each other, why “did there have to be a Bao-chai. . .?”31 This is essentially the same phrase (“this Xue Bao-chai” and “a Bao-chai”:  “一個薛寶釵” and “一寶釵”), and it reflects Dai-yu’s anguished sense of propriety. She can’t say anything harsh or vulgar, so a reference to Bao-chai preceded by the vaguely dismissive “this” or “a” becomes a signature expression of her irritation and unhappiness. On both occasions, the phrase “this [Xue] Bao-chai” introduces a separation of Dai-yu and Bao-yu. In c­ hapter 5, we first learn that, sharing Grandmother Jia’s quarters as children, Dai-yu and Bao-yu developed “an understanding so intense that it was almost as if they had grown into a single person.32 Then “this Xue Bao-chai” appears on the scene, and it becomes clear that Dai-yu and Bao-yu don't have a perfect understanding.33 Specifically, the narrator explains that Dai-yu was “put out” by Bao-chai’s popularity, but, as for Bao-yu, he remained unaware of the complexities of the situation and, moreover, that he and Dai-yu had “occasional tiffs and misunderstandings that are usual with people who have a great deal to do with each other.” Finally, we have a brief account of one such quarrel, with Dai-yu “crying alone in her room and Bao-yu feeling remorsefully that perhaps he [has] spoken too roughly” and going in “to make his peace with her,” after which, “gradually, very gradually, Dai-yu’s equanimity [is] restored.”34 In ­chapter 32, we once more start with the image of Dai-yu and Bao-yu together— Bao-yu is viewed as Dai-yu’s “true friend,” or “soul mate”35—and end with Dai-yu’s crying alone. Haun Saussy’s interpretation of this latter episode applies equally well to the one we just discussed. As he explains (operating, here and elsewhere, on at least the third level of sociocognitive complexity), “falling back from the eager hypothesis of a ‘we’ to the harsh fate of an ‘I’ leaves a dejected [Dai-yu] in tears, which the narrator uses as a way to bring the focus of the story back into the external world of visible actions and reactions.”36 Still more sociocognitive complexity: Saussy considers this episode an example of free indirect discourse particularized through the context of Chinese literary history. As he puts it, “ambiguity about the source of narration riddles the whole scene. For the sequence purporting to convey [Dai-yu’s] intimate unspoken thoughts is quite literally a self-commentary on the narrator’s own wording, a gesture that draws attention to the medium in all its artifice.”37 The repetition of “this [Xue] Bao-chai” thus creates a dialogue between the two scenes. Becoming aware of this dialogue means constructing cross-novel implied nestings that involve the narrator and his implied readers. We may say, for instance, that the narrator wants to draw his readers’ attention to Dai-yu’s tortured commitment to propriety even in the midst of anguish. Or we may say that the narrator wants us to be aware of the intentions of fate. Because Dai-yu and Bao-yu’s separation has been predestined, it’s only fit that most of their interactions must end in her tears and his disappointment. “This Xue Bao-chai” is but a tool used by fate—but also by the narrator.

186    From the Social to the Literary

5.  Can a Computer Program Count Nested Mental States in The Story of the Stone? If, as I claim, works of fiction always function on at least the third level of sociocognitive complexity, can one design a computer program that will count mental states in a given sentence, paragraph, or chapter? The possibility of such a program has been mentioned to me on several occasions, with cautious enthusiasm by cognitive scientists and computer scientists and with dread by my colleagues from literary studies. I would love to see a computer trying to count mental states in fiction because I believe that its failure would be as illuminating as was the failure of various artificial intelligence projects in the 1950s–1970s. The latter, as you may remember, alerted scientists to the untold complexity of evolved human cognition. The machines could not replicate cognitive processes that came so easily to people that they hadn’t even been aware of them. Just so, by failing to register nested mental states in fiction, a computer program would illuminate cognitive processes that make reading fiction possible and that we take completely for granted, such as a constant attribution of nested mental states to characters, readers, (implied) authors, and narrators. What will be particularly instructive in this case is that the failure might be selective. I believe that a computer would be able to count mental states in many works of mainstream popular fiction, but would fail miserably with more complex texts. The reason for that is that works of popular fiction create high sociocognitive complexity by nesting mental states of their characters and by describing these mental states explicitly. A computer program can count those. In contrast, works of fiction that we call literature and tend to teach in college, nest, to a much greater degree, mental states of narrators and implied authors and readers. They also make us work harder at figuring out mental states of both characters and narrators because they often imply, rather than explicitly name these mental states. Consider this passage from John Irving’s novel The 158-Pound Marriage (1974): “I am going to get a lover,” she said, “and I’m going to let you know about it. I want you to be embarrassed when you make love to me wondering if I am bored, if he does it better. I want you to imagine what I say that I can’t say to you, and what he has to say that you don’t know.”38

You can indeed design a computer program that would count mental states in such a novel. Make it pick such words as “want,” “embarrassed,” “wonder,” “bored,” “can’t say,” “imagine,” and you will have a fairly accurate map of a given sentence’s sociocognitive complexity. “I want you to be embarrassed because you wonder if I am bored”—that’s fourth-level sociocognitive complexity, and a computer may just be able to perform this calculation.

Lisa Zunshine   187 In contrast, faced with “And now suddenly this Xue Bao-chai had appeared on the scene—a young lady who, though very little older than Dai-yu, possessed a grown-up beauty and aplomb in which all agreed Dai-yu was her inferior,” a computer will have nothing to go by except the word “agreed” (謂). But, as we’ve already seen, that word contributes little to the sociocognitive complexity of that sentence. A computer program can’t register implied mental states, much less figure out context-specific relationships that organize these mental states into nestings. Because in The Story of the Stone, any word—including “a” and “this”—can create an implied nested mental state, only a human mind, with its infinite sensitivity to contexts, can follow it. But what about such passages from Stone that nest mental states of characters and spell those out? After all, Dai-yu’s speech about the look that Bao-yu gave to Xiang-yun (i.e., “I think I know what you meant”) is not terribly different from Irving’s “I want you to be embarrassed when you make love to me wondering if I am bored.” It seems that Cao uses mixed techniques for creating sociocognitive complexity, that is, that he uses both the techniques that we may associate with “more sophisticated”39 works of fiction (i.e., implied mental states of not just characters but also of the narrator, the implied author, and the implied reader) and those that we may associate with mainstream, popular fiction (i.e., explicit descriptions of characters’ mental states). In fact, one wonders if this may not contribute to the peculiar dual position of The Story of the Stone in Chinese culture. As Dore J. Levy puts it, to appreciate this position, “we must imagine a work with a critical cachet of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the popular appeal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.”40 Of course, the mixed pattern of creating nested mental states is by no means a sufficient explanation of Stone’s iconic status. Still, it suggestively complements other critical explanations that grapple with various dualities at the heart of the novel and with its simultaneous appeal both to literary cognoscenti and to popular audiences. Cognoscenti, though, may have the last laugh because even the scenes that seem straightforward in their explicit attribution of mental states to characters can be read in terms of implied mental states of the narrator, the implied reader, and the implied author. We only need to remember that Dai-yu’s explicit nestings are framed by the narrative as means to a very particular end (in contrast, for instance, to the straightforward nestings in Irving’s The 158-Pound Marriage, which are ends in and of themselves). Worrying about what others are thinking makes Dai-yu anxious and distressed. And she must be kept anxious and distressed because it enables her to pay to Bao-yu the “debt of tears.” Dai-yu incurred this debt in her previous existence as the “Crimson Pearl Flower,” whom Bao-yu—back then the “Divine Luminescent Stone-in-Waiting”— watered “daily with sweet dew, thereby conferring on her the gift of life.”41 Neither Dai-yu nor Bao-yu know about their past lives, but the reader is free, or encouraged to contemplate the intentions of fate (and of its various stand-ins) every time Dai-yu and Bao-yu interact with each other. This is yet another aspect of the novel that a computer program counting mental states will miss. It may count explicit references to thoughts and feelings in Dai-yu’s tirades, but it won’t be able to register the layering of mental states that occurs when the

188    From the Social to the Literary reader notices herself stopping in her tracks and asking if it’s been intended all along that Dai-yu must overthink Bao-yu’s thinking about Xiang-yun’s thinking. That reader may ultimately decide, together with Anthony C. Yu, that the solitary, enigmatic girl in the narrative becomes a person who has so powerfully laid claim to the care and concern of readers down the ages that no aetiological myth of predestined suffering can remove the authenticity stamped on her private grief and public despair.42

Yet note how this conscious resistance of the reader to the “aetiological myth of predestined suffering” is itself a complex nesting of implied mental states. We can map it, very crudely, along the lines of, I refuse to think that when Dai-yu overthinks Bao-yu’s thinking about Xiang-yun’s thinking, she is being but a toy in the hands of destiny that drives her to her preappointed end. Given Stone’s framing as a meditation on predestination and memory, no explicit nestings of its mental states remain immune to being wrapped in implied nestings—and then rewrapped in implied nestings that resist the original implied nestings.

6.  What Rosie Knew43 How early does it start? Would computers be able to count mental states in stories for very young children? As it turns out, if they would, you wouldn’t want to read such stories to your children. In 2004, developmental psychologists Joan Peskin and Janet Wilde Astington decided to explore further the connection between the acquisition of vocabulary in young children and development of theory of mind.44 It’s been shown that children attending schools in low-income neighborhoods “demonstrate substantial lags in their theory-ofmind understanding” and that at six years old, they know only half the number of words as do children from higher socioeconomic groups: Children whose parents do not provide a rich lexicon for distinguishing language about perceiving, thinking, and evaluating might make important gains from hearing and talking such talk in their everyday story reading. . . . A rich vocabulary, more than any other measure, is related to school performance.45

Peskin and Astington wanted to test whether exposure to an explicit discussion of mental states (they call it metalanguage) “will result in a greater conceptual understanding of one’s own and other people’s beliefs or whether this understanding develops more implicitly.”46 They rewrote kindergartners’ picture books “specially for the study so that the texts were rich in explicit metacognitive vocabulary, such as think, know, remember, wonder, figure out, and guess, in both the texts and text questions.”47 Thus Pat Hutchins’s classic Rosie’s Walk (1968)—which features a chicken on her daily walk, unaware that a hungry fox is right behind it—was altered to include such

Lisa Zunshine   189 descriptions of the chicken’s thoughts as, “does Rosie know that Fox has been following her? No, Rosie doesn’t know. She doesn’t even guess.” The children in this “explicit metacognitive condition were compared with a control group that received the identical picture books, with a similar number of words and questions, but not a single instance of metacognitive vocabulary.” What Peskin and Astington found was that “hearing numerous metacognitive terms in stories is less important than having to actively construct one’s own mentalistic interpretations from illustrations and text that implicitly draw attention to mental states.”48 Children exposed to explicit metacognitive terms did start using them more, but they used them incorrectly. These results support earlier studies, one of which found that “children exposed to more metacognitive terms of certainty (think, know, and guess) in a television show later displayed a poorer understanding of certainty distinctions than those exposed to episodes containing fewer of these terms.” Two other studies, “which compared children whose teachers used more metacognitive vocabulary to those whose teachers used less, found superior performance on theory-of-mind tasks for children whose teachers used fewer metacognitive terms.”49 To explain such counterintuitive findings, Peskin and Astington suggest that “the teaching of information does not automatically lead to learning.” What is required instead is a “constructive, effortful process where the learner actively reorganizes perceptions and makes inferences. . . . These inferences lead to an understanding that may be all the deeper because the children had to strive to infer meaning. Ironically, the more direct, explicit condition may have produced less conceptual development precisely because it was explicit.”50 What do Peskin and Astington recommend for fostering constructive learning? Reading fiction. Dramatic tension in stories is created when the various characters have disparate knowledge with regard to the action. This may be through error: The reader knows that Romeo does not know that Juliet lies drugged, not dead. Or it may be through deception:  Pretending his assigned chore is an adventure, Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into whitewashing the fence.51

The examples chosen by Peskin and Astington are chock-full of implied third-level nestings. To stay just with the action that they describe above (and thus ignoring, for instance, complex, and, perhaps, more interesting, implied nestings created by the tone of Twain’s narrator), Tom didn’t want his friends to realize that he hated whitewashing the fence. Just so, Romeo didn’t know that Juliet wanted some people to think that she is dead. Neither Shakespeare nor Twain spells out those mental states for his readers; we have to deduce them ourselves in order to make sense of what we read. Think about it. Works of fiction that do not spell out nested mental states may enrich understanding of mental states,52 foster the ability for constructive learning, and improve vocabulary in preschool and school-age children. I wouldn’t claim that the effect is exactly the same for grown-ups. After all, theory of mind goes through

190    From the Social to the Literary some major developmental milestones in young children and adolescents, so the impact might be more pronounced for those age groups. (Nor am I discussing here the proximate effect of reading fiction at any age: pleasure.)53 Still, it seems to me that the difference between fictional narratives that require readers to work harder to deduce implied nested mental states, on the one hand, and fictional narratives that spell out mental states, on the other, emerges as a fascinating and underexplored topic.54 As such it certainly warrants a closer look from literary scholars (particularly those who are concerned about the diminishing role of the humanities and wish to argue for the importance of sustained exposure to challenging literary texts on every educational level). Peskin and Astington’s examples are firmly ensconced in Western literary tradition and as such don’t need much context. Most readers of this volume will immediately recognize the relevant scenes from Romeo and Juliet and Tom Sawyer. In contrast, some of them may not have heard of The Story of the Stone, for it is, alas, still not as widely known as it deserves to be. Thus, as I conclude my chapter, something must be said about my decision to try out a new idea—nested mental states as units of meaning in fiction—on a novel that is itself new to some readers. I am thinking of Haun Saussy’s comment on something that David Hawkes, the novel’s translator, wrote in 1973. In the introduction to the first volume of Stone, Hawkes offered a brief yet compelling Freudian reading of Bao-yu’s behavior on a particular occasion.55 Here is Saussy reflecting on it in 2012: The gesture is double: it advances a claim both for the importance of the novel (that it anticipated Freud; that it thereby resembles other masterworks, by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci; that it offers insights into universal human nature) and for the importance of the interpretation (that Freudian theory applies not only to Western literary works but also to works from [different] times and places).56

I can’t say it better, so I will adapt it. I chose Cao’s novel as my case study because it brilliantly anticipated cognitive literary theory. I also wanted to show that cognitive literary theory applies not only to Western literary works but also to those from different times and places. (In fact, the roots of cognitive literary theory are in comparative and world literature.)57 So if you want to see how the social becomes the literary and how the literary plays games of hide-and-seek with mental states, read The Story of the Stone.

Acknowledgments I thank J. Keith Vincent for introducing me to Honglou meng and David L. Rolston for his thoughtful and detailed suggestions (some of which I couldn’t fully implement, alas, due to length limitations). I am also grateful to Elaine Auyoung, Ellen Spolsky, and Paul L. Harris for their helpful comments.

Lisa Zunshine   191

Notes 1. On the history, limitations, recent return, and perspectives of introspectionism in metacognition, see John Dunlosky and Janet Metcalfe, Metacognition (Los Angeles:  Sage, 2009), 9–34. 2. I am indebted to Elaine Auyoung for reminding me how crucially emotions in general and social anxiety in particular are implicated in our nesting of mental states. 3. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, Volumes 1–3, translated by David Hawkes (London: Penguin, 1973–1980), 1.5.124. 4. 紅樓夢, 第五回, http://cls.hs.yzu.edu.tw/hlm/read/text/body.ASP?CHNO=005. Accessed September 6, 2013. 5. Note that in the original, even that mental state is not present in this explicit form. The word 謂 implies a verbal agreement rather than a mental state. 人多謂is “all said” rather than “all agreed”—although this is a situation in which the boundary between the two is blurry. 6. Haun Saussy, “Unspoken Sentences: A Thought-Sequence in Chapter 32 of Honglou Meng 紅樓夢,” in Christoph Anderl and Halvor Eifring, eds., Studies in Chinese Language and Culture in Honour of Christoph Harbsmeier (Oslo: Hermes, 2006), 428. 7. Compare to David Herman’s influential discussion of the “Exceptionality Thesis” in his “Introduction” to David Herman, ed., The Emergence of the Mind:  Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 8–18. For a suggestive rejoinder to the “Exceptionality Thesis,” see Stefan Iversen, “Broken or Unnatural? On the Distinction of Fiction in Non-conventional First Person Narration,” Studies in Narrative 18 (2013): 141–62. 8. For a discussion of sociocognitive complexity, see Zunshine, “Theory of Mind as a Pedagogical Tool,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 16.1 (2014): 89–109, and “Style Brings in Mental States,” Style 45.2 (2011): 349–56. 9. A  cognitive perspective explored in this study thus builds on the classic argument of narrative theory, that in “any example of narrative art there are, broadly speaking, three points of view—those of the characters, the narrators, and the audience. As narrative becomes more sophisticated, a fourth point of view is added by the development of a clear distinction between the narrator and the author” (Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellog, The Nature of Narrative: Revised and Expanded, 40th anniversary edition [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 240). For a pioneering application of the study of narrative irony, emerging from the distance among the “four different points of view, namely those of the character, the narrator, the reader, and the implied reader” to The Story of The Stone, see Wong Kam-Ming, “Point of View, Norms, and Structure: Hung-Lou Meng and Lyrical Fiction,” in Andrew H. Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 203–10. 10. See Zunshine, Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 26–28. 11. See Hawkes, “Introduction,” 42. 12. See Wai-Yee Li’s discussion of Red Inkstone’s invoking an “inner circle” of people who “know” how to read particular parts of Honglou meng (Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature [Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1993], 198.)

192    From the Social to the Literary 13. Chang Hsin-chih [Zhang Xinzhi], “How to Read the Dream of the Red Chamber,” translated and annotated by Andrew H. Plaks; additional annotation by David L. Rolston, in David L. Rolston, ed., How To Read The Chinese Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 326. See also Rolston’s note 15. 14. In China, Stone is both a revered masterpiece and a living source of daily cultural references. The profusion of publications on the novel has led to the creation of a dedicated scholarly discipline, “Redology” (Hongxue 紅學). Those less academically inclined can visit Beijing and Shanghai theme parks based on the novel, argue the relative merits of its numerous televised versions, and buy “playing cards, teapots, CDs, stamps, comic books, pottery, snuff bottles, lanterns, vases, figurines, coins, and ashtrays, merchandise of every quality,” featuring its characters and settings (Andrew Schonebaum, “Introduction,” in Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu, eds., Approaches to Teaching “The Story of the Stone” [New  York:  Modern Language Association, 2012], 6). The popular feeds back into the scholarly: “The Journal of Stone Studies devoted more than 150 pages” of one of its issues to the 1987 television miniseries based on the novel (Xueping Zhong, “The Story of the Stone on Television,” in Schonebaum and Lu, Approaches to Teaching, 427). 15. See Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 16. In David L. Rolston’s apt characterization, Bao-yu is “less the central actor than the reflector or center of consciousness of the narrative” (Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 197). 17. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:193. 18. Ibid. 19. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:436. 20. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:437. 21. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:438. 22. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:442. 23. Dore J. Levy, Ideal and Actual in “The Story of the Stone” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 47. For an invaluable analysis of Jia family dynamics, see Levy’s chapter “Family Togetherness.” 24. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:308. 25. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:310. 26. Xi-feng wouldn’t want to bring in a new chamber-wife for Jia Lian even if, as David Rolston reminds me, “the reader would also assume that as with the case of Patience, Xi-feng would do her best to make sure she is chamber-wife in name only” (email communication, June 6, 2014). 27. Jia Lian and Xi-feng only have a daughter, and Xi-feng doesn’t seem to be able to have more children (later in the novel, she has a miscarriage). 28. Evil masterminds tend to be highly sociocognitively complex. Compare to Blakey Vermeule’s important discussion of masterminds in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 86. See also my discussion of students’ perception of Mrs. Roby from Wharton’s “Xingu” in “ ‘Theory of Mind’ as a Pedagogical Tool.” 29. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 289.

Lisa Zunshine   193 30. For a striking list of the young women’s “physical and familial flaws,” see Angelina C. Yee, “Self, Sexuality, and Writing in Honglou meng,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55.2 (1995): 383. 31. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 2.32.132. For the purposes of this discussion, I am omitting Dai-yu’s thoughts about “gold and jade” and Bao-chai’s “golden locket.” 32. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:124. 33. Compare to Andrew H. Plaks’s argument about “subtle ironic undertone” in The Story of the Stone, that “forces us to ponder very disturbing questions about the impossibility of unimpeded communication through love” (“The Novel in Premodern China,” in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006], 212). 34. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:125. 35. It’s “true friend” in Hawkes’s translation and “soul mate” in Saussy’s “Unspoken Sentences,” 432. 36. Saussy, “Unspoken Sentences,” 432. 37. Ibid., 433. 38. John Irving, The 158-Pound Marriage [1974] (New  York:  Ballantine Reader’s Circle, 1997), 123. 39. Scholes, Phelan, and Kellog, The Nature of Narrative, 240. 40. Levy, Ideal and Actual, 1. 41. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1:53. 42. Anthony C. Yu, Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in “Dream of the Red Chamber” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 224. 43. Parts of this section have appeared in Zunshine, “Why Fiction Does It Better,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9, 2013. 44. See, for instance, Janet Wilde Astington and Jodie A. Baird, eds., Why Language Matters for Theory of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 45. Joan Peskin and Janet Wilde Astington, “The Effects of Adding Metacognitive Language to Story Texts,” Cognitive Development 19 (2004): 256. 46. Ibid., 254. 47. Ibid., 255. 48. Ibid., 253. 49. Ibid., 265. 50. Ibid., 266. 51. Ibid., 267. 52. Of course, “the exact interpretation of [Peskin and Astington’s] results needs more research” (Paul L.  Harris, email communication, April 18, 2014). To begin with, the emphasis on the importance of reading fictional stories that make children work hard at deducing mental states does not mean to downplay the crucial role of talking to children about thoughts and feelings, and it may shed an interesting light on the underlying structure of those conversations. See, for instance, the recent study by Harris and his colleagues, who looked at children’s attribution of emotions, attendant upon their attributions of false beliefs, and found that while the four- to six-year-olds may judge correctly that Red Riding Hood doesn’t know that the Wolf is waiting for her in her grandmother’s cottage, they may still say that she is afraid rather than happy as she approaches the cottage. While thus positing a lag between “children’s understanding of a protagonist’s mistaken beliefs and

194    From the Social to the Literary their grasp of the emotions that flow from such beliefs,” this study also found that “children with mothers who use more mental-state language make more correct attributions” of emotions (Harris et al., “The Mysterious Emotional Life of Little Red Riding Hood,” in Kristin H. Lagattuta, ed., Children and Emotion: New Insights into Developmental Affective Sciences [Basel: Karger, 2014] ). Moreover, as Harris observes elsewhere, “a simple count of mental-state terms [used by mothers] may not be the most sensitive measure of effective maternal input even if it is a useful correlate. [It’s possible] that is is the mother’s pragmatic intent, notably her efforts to introduce varying points of view into a given conversation, that is the underlying and effective source of variation” (“Conversation, Pretense, and Theory of Mind,” in Astington and Baird, eds., Why Language Matters, 77.) 53. I talk about pleasure at length in my Why We Read Fiction, even though that pleasure still falls into a suspect less pure category of pleasure, described in a conversation reported by Michael Bérubé, as “a form of pleasure that is good for you, and good for your brain” (“How We Got Here,” PMLA 128.3 [2013]: 537). 54. It would be interesting to see, for instance, how this difference maps onto works of traditional Chinese fiction. A tantalizing hint that this difference might have been present and theorized as a pedagogical strategy emerges from the work of Rolston, who points out that although “use of direct psychological description in fiction increased throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was never popular or influential.” One important reason for it was that “the main justification for reading [fiction was] to develop the ability to judge human character; easy access to the inner life of characters would defeat this pedagogical purpose.” As traditional commentators saw it, “the author who is presented as the most subtle in his laying down of [. . . ] clues that raise suspicions about a gap between an inner state of the character’s mind and his or her actions or words [. . .] becomes the author most worthy of praise” (Traditional Chinese Fiction, 217). 55. See Hawkes, “Introduction” page 32 and note 8. 56. Saussy, “The Story of the Stone and World Literature,” in Schonebaum and Lu, Approaches to Teaching, 476. 57. See in particular Patrick Colm Hogan’s groundbreaking “Literary Universals,” Poetics Today 18:2 (Summer 1997): 223–49. and “Toward a Cognitive Science of Poetics: Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, and the Theory of Literature,” College Literature 23 (1996): 164–78.

Works Cited Astington, Janet Wilde, and Jodie A. Baird, eds. Why Language Matters for Theory of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Auyoung, Elaine. Email communication, February 7, 2014. Bérubé, Michael. “How We Got Here.” PMLA 128.3 (2013): 530–41. Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone. Volume 1, “The Golden Days.” Translated by David Hawkes. London: Penguin, 1973. ———. The Story of the Stone. Volume 2, “The Crab-Flower Club.” Translated by David Hawkes. London: Penguin, 1977. ———.紅樓夢, 第五回, http://cls.hs.yzu.edu.tw/hlm/read/text/body.ASP?CHNO=005. Accessed September 6, 2013.

Lisa Zunshine   195 Dunlosky, John, and Janet Metcalfe. Metacognition. Los Angeles: Sage, 2009. Harris, Paul L. “Conversation, Pretense, and Theory of Mind.” In Janet Wilde Astington and Jodie A. Baird, eds., Why Language Matters for Theory of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 70–83. ———. Email communication, April 18, 2014. Harris, Paul L., Marc de Rosnay, and Samuel Ronfard. “The Mysterious Emotional Life of Little Red Riding Hood.” In Kristin H. Lagattuta, ed., Children and Emotion: New Insights into Developmental Affective Sciences. Basel: Karger, 2014. 106–18. Herman, David. “Introduction.” In David Herman, ed., The Emergence of the Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 1–40. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Toward a Cognitive Science of Poetics:  Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, and the Theory of Literature.” College Literature 23 (1996): 164–78. ———. “Literary Universals.” Poetics Today 18.2 (Summer 1997): 223–49. Irving, John. The 158-Pound Marriage. New York: Ballantine Reader’s Circle, 1997. Iversen, Stefan. “Broken or Unnatural? On the Distinction of Fiction in Non-conventional First Person Narration,” Studies in Narrative 18 (2013): 141–62. Levy, Dore J. Ideal and Actual in “The Story of the Stone”. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Li, Wai-Yee. Enchantment and Disenchantment:  Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature. Princeton University Press: 1993. Peskin, Joan, and Janet Wilde Astington. “The Effects of Adding Metacognitive Language to Story Texts.” Cognitive Development 19 (2004): 253–73. Plaks, Andrew H. “The Novel in Premodern China.” In Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, volume 1, History, Geography, and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 181–213. Rolston, David L., ed. How to Read the Chinese Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. ———. Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. Email communication, June 6, 2014. Saussy, Haun. “Unspoken Sentences: A Thought-Sequence in Chapter 32 of Honglou Meng 紅樓夢.” In Christoph Anderl and Halvor Eifring, eds., Studies in Chinese Language and Culture in Honour of Christoph Harbsmeier. Oslo: Hermes, 2006. 427–33. ———. “The Story of the Stone and World Literature.” In Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu, eds., Approaches to Teaching “The Story of the Stone”. New  York:  Modern Language Association, 2012. 475–78. Scholes, Robert, James Phelan, and Robert Kellog. The Nature of Narrative:  Revised and Expanded. 40th anniversary edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Schonebaum, Andrew. “Introduction.” In Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu, eds., Approaches to Teaching “The Story of the Stone”. New York: Modern Language Association, 2012. 5–69. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Wong, Kam-Ming. “Point of View, Norms, and Structure:  Hung-Lou Meng and Lyrical Fiction.” In Andrew H.  Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative:  Critical and Theoretical Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. 203–26. Yee, Angelina C. “Self, Sexuality, and Writing in Honglou meng.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55.2 (1995): 373–407.

196    From the Social to the Literary Yu, Anthony C. Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in “Dream of the Red Chamber”. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Zhong, Xueping. “The Story of the Stone on Television.” In Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu, eds., Approaches to Teaching “The Story of the Stone”. New  York:  Modern Language Association, 2012. 427–41. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. ———. “Style Brings In Mental States.” Style 45.2 (2011): 349–56. ———. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. ———. “Why Fiction Does It Better.” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9, 2013, B4–B5. ———. “Theory of Mind as a Pedagogical Tool.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 16.1 (2014): 89–109.

Cognitive Queer Theory

Chapter 10

Sex on th e Mi nd Queer Theory Meets Cognitive Theory J. Ke ith Vin c e n t

In this chapter I want to explore some ways in which the cognitive approach to literature may enter into a productive dialogue with queer theory. I recognize that such a pairing might seem odd at first. The commitment of queer theorists to textured close readings and attention to cultural and historical specificity may make them skeptical of cognitivism’s scientistic and universalizing claims about the way the human mind works.1 At the same time, while much productive work has been done at the intersection of queer theory and narratology, cognitive narratology has so far shown little interest in questions of gender and sexuality.2 Given this situation, queer theorists might be forgiven for thinking, in the spirit of Monique Wittig’s 1980 proto-queer essay “The Straight Mind,” that if the work of cognitivists is about “the mind,” it too often goes unsaid that the mind in question is “straight.”3 The prevalence in some branches of queer theory of psychoanalytic understandings of sexuality is another reason that queer theory may not play well with cognitive approaches. Early queer theorists especially, caught up in the urgency of the AIDS epidemic, felt the need to pin down, analyze, and somehow disarm the kind of thinking that held that same-sex desire was a disease and an abnormality. The psychoanalytic model of the self worked well for this purpose because it made it possible to describe antigay rhetoric and actions as a form of projection outward of disavowed or repressed aspects of the self. In the late 1980s and early 1990s theorists as different in other ways as Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, and Leo Bersani all relied on Freud’s thesis that all human beings start out “bisexual,” but that modern heteronormative “civilization” has forced the repression of the same-sex-loving half of our desiring selves, leading inevitably to more or less violent returns of the repressed. This return could take various forms, including homosexual panic, gay self-hatred, and what Judith Butler called “heterosexual melancholia.”4 If the “homophobe,” read psychoanalytically, was someone who was unable to countenance that part of him or herself that might be attracted to the same sex, there was something deeply satisfying about turning the tables in this way

200    Sex on the Mind and diagnosing homophobia as a form of self-ignorance. But this line of analysis also flirted with a kind of essentialism insofar as it left intact the assumption that “sexuality itself ” was something that resided on the “inside” of the individual. As Lynne Huffer has recently argued, the psychoanalytic approach may have been especially important in the early days of queer theory as a way of getting back “the thickness of our own existence as sexual beings” even as Michel Foucault and others were busy demystifying sexuality as a historical construction.5 But as queer theory has “aged,” over the last two decades it has become increasingly clear that the psychoanalytic model, for all its other benefits, can also endorse a highly internalized and often paranoid understanding of sexuality that has tended to overshadow or even preclude efforts to elaborate alternative queer understandings of subjectivity and sociability. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued, affect theory provides one such alternative model.6 In this chapter, I want to suggest that cognitivism, in combination with an attention to affect, may also provide a useful alternative to psychoanalytically based queer theory. I argue that cognitive theory and queer theory share a concern with overcoming mind-body dualism and with the strict divide between self and other. At the end of the chapter, I briefly consider how a shift of focus to non-Western, specifically Japanese literature might help to facilitate thinking about, and through, this odd coupling of cognitive and queer theory.

The Inside/Out Question The most striking commonality that I have identified between queer theory and cognitive theory is their preoccupation with variations of what might be called “the inside/out question.” In the case of queer theory, this is the question of how to understand sexual orientation and sexual desire. Are they, on the one hand, primarily internal phenomena, originating deep within the self (or the history of the self) and accessible to others only through confession, coming out, psychoanalysis, outing, or other modes of externalization? Or are they better characterized as intersubjective both in their origins and in their immediacy, while also being more legible from the outside than we might (want to) think. Of course these questions are likely to have very different answers depending upon whether the sexuality in question is normative or not, but in general it may be said that in most modern cultures today the view that sexuality is inherently interior and tied to individual identity is the more commonly held. Queer theory works to problematize that assumption. While we moderns tend to think of sexuality primarily as something that exists inside us and that globally determines disparate aspects of our personality, queer theorists question the putative internality and the unity of “sex.” One way of doing this is to historicize our understanding of sexuality as internal and coherent by looking at historical moments when things may have worked differently. This is to ask, as Peter Coviello does in a recent book on nineteenth-century sexuality in the United States, “What does sex even look like if it is somehow removed from the idea of sexuality as

J. Keith Vincent    201 a thing within us, a thing that somehow sweepingly binds together all these scattered attributes and fuses them into a definitive sense of who we are?”7 Queer theorists like Coviello are of course working in the tradition of Michel Foucault, who argued in the first volume of his History of Sexuality that sexuality was not a vital force emerging from the interior of the self only to be repressed by bourgeois norms, but rather an exteriorized discourse, a “very real historical formation.” “Sex” was not the natural substrate of sexuality but a kind of fiction; it was the system of sexuality that “gave rise to the notion of sex as a speculative element necessary for [sexuality’s] operation.”8 For Foucault, then, both sex and sexuality come from the outside in and not the other way around. Once the historical “deployment” of sexuality has taken hold, however, sexuality not only appears to be internal and intrinsic to the self, but also to hold the key to the irreducible “truth” of selfhood. Thus Sedgwick’s 1990 book The Epistemology of the Closet, another foundational text of queer theory, begins with “Foucault’s demonstration, whose results I will take to be axiomatic, that modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctly privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge.”9 Sedgwick’s response to this, like Foucault’s own, was to ask how and why it is that we think we know so much about other people’s desires, why we think this tells us so much about them as people, and what this desire to “know” other people has to do with our knowledge and ignorance of our own desires. Like many queer theorists who would follow later, Sedgwick and Foucault worked to shift the focus away from uncovering the “truth” of other people’s sexuality and towards an examination of how both expert knowledge and everyday thoughts about it get produced, how they circulate, and whose interests are served by their propagation. The question that Sedgwick and Foucault were asking was, then, in an important sense, a cognitive one. It was less about the content of sexuality (indeed it was suspicious of any claim that sexuality per se could be known objectively) than about the thoughts that people have about it. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that although Sedgwick does not engage with cognitive studies directly in Epistemology, the word “cognitive” does come up repeatedly throughout the book—we hear of relations of “cognitive mastery,” “cognitive wattage,” “cognitive maps,” “cognitive privilege,” “cognitive bite,” “cognitive hyperstimulation,” “cognitive hiatus,” and “cognitive exemption.”10 Of course the mere use of the term “cognitive” does not entail a cognitive approach. Its many appearances do however, like the word “epistemology” in the title itself, signal the intensity of Sedgwick’s—and queer theory’s—interest in what it means to know, to have the power to know, to enjoy knowing, to want to know, and even to want not to know, what someone else is thinking and desiring. The emphasis in Sedgwick’s early work, and that of most early queer theorists, was on the negative aspects of this knowledge about the thoughts and desires of others, particularly queer others. Their chief concern was how such knowledge could be used against the person in question—or simply expropriated from them, making it impossible for them to speak with authority of their own desires. Thus the knowledge of medical “experts” about the “invert,” could be, as Sedgwick put it “placed in an ironclad

202    Sex on the Mind epistemological receivership. . . [such that] not only the medical expert but anyone who witnesses and identifies the invert feels assured of knowing more about him than he knows about himself.”11 David Halperin theorized this as “knowingness” in contradistinction to “knowledge.”12 For Halperin, the desire to know for certain who is gay and who is not was never innocuous and, especially in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, was often accompanied by acts of violence such as gay bashing and the equation of homosexuality with the “contagion” of AIDS. Lee Edelman, in another important early work of queer theory, noted how the same “brutal insistence on a specific and legible homosexual identity” was at the root of “the escalating frequency and violence of assaults upon gays and. . . can illuminate the persistent counterfactual belief in the metonymically contagious dissemination of ‘AIDS.’ ”13 If all of these early queer theorist were interested, then, in what cognitivists would call the “theory of mind,” exercised by a heteronormative culture on queer subjects, they saw its operations overwhelmingly as punitive, projective, and paranoid. But having a theory of mind about someone else’s desire is not always a paranoid projection—nor is it always motivated by a desire to gain what Sedgwick calls “cognitive mastery” over that person. In one of the last essays she wrote, Sedgwick addressed cognitive literary theory explicitly and proposed a more positive reading of the potential of theory of mind as a concept. Having a “theory of mind” about other people, after all, is not only crucial to our ability to read literature, but is also the first and most crucial step towards understanding what Sedgwick had called many years earlier, in The Epistemology of the Closet, “Axiom #1” for anyone engaging in “anti-homophobic inquiry” (later known as “queer theory”). Axiom number 1 stated, with deceptive simplicity, that “People are different from each other.” “It is astonishing,” she continued, “how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact.”14 In this late essay Sedgwick wrote that she was initially attracted to the work being done on theory of mind because it seemed to be just such a conceptual tool. At the same time, she described her frustration with a tendency among the theorists of theory of mind to think of it as something that you either “have” (as “normal” human beings past the age of four or so apparently do) or don’t have. For Sedgwick, I think, there was too much epistemological hubris in the breezy assertions of some cognitive theorists that we are able to know the minds of others. And while literature surely did both presuppose and promise an ability to read other people’s minds, understanding the vagaries of actually doing so, the power relations involved, and the ways in which mind reading happens in a given literary text or real-life situation required a much more finely tuned set of tools than was offered by a lot of work on theory of mind.15 But these caveats aside, this preoccupation with what other people are thinking, and whether or not it is possible to find out (which I am calling “the inside/out” question) has been a central one in queer theory from its earliest iterations. Indeed, one of the earliest collections of essays that might retroactively be called “queer theoretical” was a 1991 volume titled Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. As the editor, Diana Fuss, wrote in the book’s introduction, “The philosophical opposition between ‘heterosexual’ and

J. Keith Vincent    203 ‘homosexual,’ like so many other conventional binaries, has always been constructed on the foundations of another related opposition: the couple ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ ”16 Cognitive studies have also been preoccupied with the “inside/out” question. In his introduction to a recent volume on cognitive narratology David Herman explains that much of what some call “classical” narratology—(that is to say, not cognitive, but “precognitive” narratology) from around the 1960s to the 1990s assumed that literary fiction was distinguished by its ability to give us entry into the minds of others.17 The narratologist Dorrit Cohn is perhaps the best-known proponent of this view. In her 1999 book The Distinction of Fiction Cohn described third-person fiction as being characterized by “a distinctive epistemology that allows a narrator to know what cannot be known in the real world and in narratives that target representations of the real world: the inner life of his figures.”18 “Virginia Woolf ’s characters,” Cohn writes in a later passage, “are given life by a narrator who knows them in magically intimate ways in which no real person can ever know another.”19 This notion that only novelists are able to see into other people’s heads, with its corollary that only fiction can give us access to them, was not new to narratologists like Cohn. It was memorably and beautifully expressed, for example, by E. M. Forster, in his 1927 book Aspects of the Novel. In one of two sections on “People” in novels, Forster addressed what he saw as the most crucial difference between fictional characters and “real people.” We get from [novels]. . . a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life. . . For human intercourse. . . is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in real life.. . . And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and power.20

Cohn’s and Forster’s understanding of literary fiction as a sort of magical “compensation” for the dimness of real life makes intuitive sense to anyone who has ever gotten lost in a book. But for cognitive narratologists such as David Herman and Alan Palmer, it is problematic because it makes too strong a distinction between fictional and “real” minds. Herman calls this idea the “exceptionality thesis” because it claims that what goes on when we read about fictional people is “exceptional” and unrelated to what happens when we interact with people in real life. One consequence of this “exceptionality thesis,” as Herman points out, is that our belief in the “interior view” being afforded uniquely by the magic of literature comes at the cost of reinscribing a kind of Cartesian dualism between self and other, and inside and out. This dualism brings with it two equally problematic assumptions. These are, as Herman writes, “first, that because the mind is ‘inside’ and the world ‘outside,’ in contexts of everyday interaction others’ minds remain sealed off from me in a separate, interior domain; and second, that this sealed-off-ness of actual minds means that it is only in fictional contexts that I can gain direct access to the subjectivity of another.”21

204    Sex on the Mind For Herman and others who subscribe to what is called the “externalist” position on “mind,” then, it is not true that minds exist only locked up inside our heads and that literature provides us with the only, albeit “fictional” access to something that looks like another’s mind.22 Using insights from cognitive psychologists who study theory of mind in real life, they argue that there is not such a great difference between what we do when we read a novel and what we do when we infer what other people are thinking in daily life based on what they say (or don’t say), the expressions on their face, the gestures they make, and so on. It turns out that human beings find it difficult not to attribute a “mind” to almost anything that seems to be alive and/or can be even minimally anthropomorphized—even three dots on a wall that might remind them of a human face. Once we recognize that our theory of mind is activated in the same way by fictional characters as it is by real people, “a binarized model that makes fictional minds external and accessible and actual minds internal and hidden gives way to a scalar or gradualist model, according to which minds of all sorts can be more or less directly experienced—depending on the circumstances.”23 I want to argue that Herman’s critique of the “binarized model” of “inside/out” resonates in useful ways with the queer theoretical critique of sexuality as an interiorized phenomenon as discussed above. The “externalist” perspective of cognitive studies may help us to rethink the “internalist” perspective on sexuality that views “the closet,” for example, as the interior space in which sexual identities of all kinds are thought to be contained, unseen by and unshareable with others. It may also shed new light on the fact that, historically speaking, this “internalizing” understanding of sexuality emerges at roughly the same time as the privileging of what is called “interiority” as the hallmark of modern(ist) literature. If queer theory has challenged the modern equation of sexuality with interiority, cognitive literary theory has begun to challenge the historical narrative that identifies “interiority” with the modern.

The “Discovery of Interiority” In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss this history in the Japanese context. I do this because as a specialist in Japanese literature this is the area I know best, but also because I am interested in rethinking a powerful consensus among scholars of Japanese literature that sees an increasing focus on psychic and sexual interiority as Japanese literary culture moved towards modernity. Because this same consensus can be seen in many other national contexts, I hope it might help to begin the process of problematizing the relationship between literary interiority and the “internalist” model of sexuality for scholars working in other areas as well.24 At the same time, I hope that it will begin to flesh out my sense that cognitive and queer theory have a lot to say to each other. Anyone who has studied Japanese literature will have heard of the influential and by now virtually axiomatic thesis that modern literature in Japan was distinguished by what the critic Karatani Kōjin famously called, in a phrase that has been quoted perhaps more

J. Keith Vincent    205 than any other in the field, the “discovery of interiority [naimen no hakken].”25 Whereas the lavishly illustrated, woodblock-printed popular fiction known as gesaku that flourished in the Edo period (1600–1867) was, as Masao Miyoshi put it, “engrossed in the thick texture of verbal surface, and thus. . . inhospitable to [both] characterization and emplotment,” the modern Japanese novel as it emerged in the Meiji period (1868–1912) marked its departure from its predecessors by foregrounding characters possessed of a newly “discovered,” psychic depth.26 According to Karatani, it was in the modern (late nineteenth century) Japanese novel, most paradigmatically represented by the work of the novelist Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), that this depth, or “interiority,” first appeared. It is thanks to this interiority, Karatani wrote, that in Doppo’s work, “The illusion that there is something like a true self has taken deep root. The psychological person, who begins and ends in interiority, has come into existence.”27 Karatani’s work, very much under the spell of Yale school deconstruction, provided a much needed corrective to the biography-heavy, modernizationist approaches to the study of Japanese literature that dominated the field until the 1970s and 1980s.28 His influence has been so powerful that it has become virtually obligatory to cite him in studies of modern Japanese literature. This influence has even extended to East Asian literature more generally. To cite just one example, Michael Shin has recently characterized the beginning of Korean literary modernity in the works of the pioneering novelist Yi Kwang Su (1892–1950) in terms that are borrowed virtually verbatim from Karatani’s thesis. By narrating the discovery of interiority as if it has a real and objective existence, literature is able to obscure its origins as an effect of language. Through such narration, literature seems to become a transparent medium that allows direct access to interior life, thus giving it the illusion of realism. The discovery of interiority allows the transformation of literature from technique into art form, and this process, in part, can be seen in Yi Kwang-su’s writings from the 1910s.29

For Karatani and Shin, the interiorized self was a product of the rhetorical strategies of the modern novel rather than a kind of “soul” that had been there all along but was only recently liberated thanks to the heroic efforts of modernizers like Doppo or Yi Kwang-su. In the world of Japanese literary studies, where the emergence (or more often the nonemergence) of the “modern self ” had preoccupied modernizationist critics since at least Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, this was nothing short of revolutionary. I myself studied with Karatani in the 1990s and can vividly recall the frisson of radical skepticism that accompanied his argument that the vaunted “modern self [kindai jiga]” that Japan thought it needed so badly in order to take its place among modern nations was nothing more than an “illusion,” the result of a “semiotic inversion” whose arbitrary origins had been obscured in the mists of history and which now appeared before us as something deceptively, oppressively natural. As a budding queer theorist I remember finding it particularly congenial to the extent that this much ballyhooed “modern self,” especially as it appeared in naturalist novels written by men (i.e., the most canonical texts of early twentieth-century Japanese fiction), was so resolutely heteronormative.

206    Sex on the Mind If this masculine self inscribed at the heart of modern Japanese literature was actually just an “illusion,” I thought, it had to be open not just to a poststructuralist critique like Karatani’s, but to queer and feminist critiques as well. But despite this exciting potential, Karatani’s claim for the illusory nature of the modern, interiorized self was also, looking back on it now, both wildly overstated and somehow deflating. It was wildly overstated because it had no way of accounting for all of the ways in which interiority was in fact represented in premodern literature long before Kunikida Doppo and Yi Kwang-su. It was deflating because, having done its debunking work, it could only discount as an illusion the emotional force and psychological insight that readers have in fact found in works of modern literature and that their authors have strived to create. To put it rather bluntly, after Karatani, scholars of modern Japanese fiction were left with two provocative and critical, but also impoverishing and depressing, insights: namely, that there was no interiority before modernity and that the interiority that was “discovered” in the modern novel was nothing but an ideological construct. If the whole notion of “interiority” as it was expressed in modern literature was a modern invention and an ideological illusion, it could never pay to do as old-fashioned literary critics like Forster were wont to do—to trace the contours of other people’s most intimate thoughts as they were shown to us through the magic of fiction. To do so was to assume, as Karatani has put it in a recent article, that “modern literature was natural and self-evident.”30 Fiction could not really tell us anything, in other words, about Sedgwick’s Axiom 1: that “people are different”—because it was not about real people. To think that it could tell us something was just to give in to the “illusion” of interiority in fiction.” Perhaps not surprisingly, once Karatani himself reached this conclusion he stopped writing about literature and switched to philosophy instead. At the same time, I recall that many of my fellow grad students studying premodern Japanese literature found the notion that interiority only came about with the modern novel a little hard to swallow. The result was round after round of debates about whether one could find any evidence of “interiority” in Japanese literature before the late nineteenth century. In addition to Doppo’s work, Futabatei Shimei’s 1886 novel Ukigumo [Floating Clouds] provided the chief evidence for the modernity of “interiority.”31 The broodings of that novel’s protagonist Bunzō, isolated in his room and miserable with unrequited love, did indeed seem “deep” next to the jokey, pun-filled prose of Edo-period popular fiction. But the modernists in these arguments were inevitably stymied when confronted with an even older text, namely the tenth-century classic The Tale of Genji [Genji monogatari]. As Amanda Meyer Stinchecum put it in a brilliant analysis (coincidentally also published in 1980—the same year as Karatani’s book cited earlier), the Genji as a whole, but especially its last ten so-called Uji chapters, is characterized by an extraordinary attention to the inner psychic worlds of its characters. As Stinchecum explains, The shifting narrative voice. . . in the Uji chapters as a whole has its closest counterpart in the novels of Virginia Woolf, particularly in To the Lighthouse. The inner life of the characters plays a central role in both works, an inner life revealed to the reader not by means of the so-called stream of consciousness technique (which depicts less

J. Keith Vincent    207 organized levels of consciousness) but by means of a flowing prose style which often exhibits a high degree of literary self-awareness.32

Obviously, if one is arguing that interiority was only “discovered” by the modern novel in the late nineteenth century, it becomes a little difficult to account for its presence a thousand years earlier in the Tale of Genji. This is especially true if Stinchecum is right that Murasaki’s work has not only the “less organized levels of consciousness” associated with a relatively monologic stream-of-consciousness technique, but downright pyrotechnic displays of multilayered consciousness attribution to rival no less a figure than Virginia Woolf. There is much to be said about the exact nature of the interiority presented in The Tale of Genji and how it differs from what we find in modern novels. Its undeniable presence there, however, is much less surprising when viewed through the lens of cognitive theory, which posits a universal human capacity for exercising theory of mind, and thus for “discovering interiority,” than it is from the perspective of “rupture” theories like Karatani’s, which posit a radical epistemological break with the coming of modernity. Woolf, of course, is the modernist author who perhaps more than anyone else has been associated with a similar discourse about the sudden emergence of interiority in European modernist literature. In his essay “Re-minding Modernism,” David Herman cites Woolf herself as having had an active hand in her critical writing in promoting the idea that her work and the work of other modernist novelists was about interiority in a way that was utterly new and that made a radical departure from what she called the “materialism” of nineteenth-century authors who “write of unimportant things,” fixating on descriptions of external reality and relying on traditional plot mechanisms to create “an air of probability embalming the whole.”33 Against this moribund tradition of “plausible” realism, she positioned a writer like James Joyce, with whom she also clearly identified herself. Joyce, she wrote, Is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of the reader. . . for the moderns. . . the point of interest. . . lies very likely in the dark places of psychology.34

So just to take stock here for a moment, Karatani Kōjin tells us that with the modern Japanese novel, “the psychological person, who begins and ends in interiority,” is born, but that this is nothing more than an illusion. Virginia Woolf tells us that she and her modernist contemporaries are bravely exploring “the dark places of psychology” undeterred by such considerations as plausibility, or—in the case of Joyce, she adds, even “coherence.” Both Karatani and Woolf insist on the radical newness of their versions of interiority, although Karatani debunks his as ideology while Woolf makes hers into the very stuff of great fiction. Amanda Stinchecum, for her part, writes of the Genji that its depiction of deep interiority creates a powerful impression of “the basic isolation of one human being from another” that may reflect “a Buddhist view of the universe that

208    Sex on the Mind sees all human relationships as ultimately empty, salvation as a final rejection of such entanglements.”35 All of these approaches to “interiority” or “mind,” whether as ideological “illusion,” as the hallmark of the modernist novel, or the result of a Buddhist-inflected sense of the vanity of human connection, have something in common. They give us powerful insights into other minds in literature, but only at the cost of an equally powerful conviction of our final separation from and ignorance of the minds of others in life. They are all, in other words, under the sway of the “exceptionality thesis” as discussed above in the work of Dorrit Cohn, for whom “Virginia Woolf ’s characters are given life by a narrator who knows them in magically intimate ways in which no real person can ever know another.” But coming back to Sedgwick and to the relation of queer theory to cognitive narratology, it is time to ask, how does all of this help us with Axiom 1? Does access to “interiority” in literature, whether in the modernist novel or in The Tale of Genji, give us a tool with which to understand better the ways in which “people are different from one another?” Or does it just remind us, by contrast, how impossible it is to know other people in “real life?” Might this obsession with interior views reinforce ideas about sexuality and gender as being intrinsic and internal to selfhood, as something that is either in or out of the “closet?” Seen in this light, the passage from E. M. Forster cited earlier may sound different when we consider that he wrote it from deep within his own famous closet. “We cannot understand each other,” he wrote, “except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.” By 1927 Forster had already written his last novel, even though he would live until 1970. The consensus among gay critics is that he gave up writing novels out of what he described in his diary in 1911 as a “weariness of the only subject I both can and may treat—the love of men for women and vice versa.”36 But it may be useful to consider whether the reason for this had to do not only with the heteronormative bias of the topics that Forster felt he could treat (“the love of man for woman and vice versa”), but also with the predominantly internalist bias of his understanding of the novel itself, as a genre that provides a privileged and indeed unique means of access to the interiority of others. Might it be that Forster’s adherence to the “exceptionality thesis” was tied to his view of sexuality as the deepest, darkest “place of psychology,” that place that we have come to call “the closet?” If Forster’s view is very much under the sway of the “inside/out” dichotomy that we have come to associate with closetedness, Marcel Proust (or at least his narrator in À la recherche) seems to have had a similarly bleak view of the possibility of fully knowing other people in real life, although he perhaps more than Forster believed in the power of fiction to compensate. “A real human being,” writes Proust’s narrator in the first volume of his great novel, “however profoundly we sympathize with him, in large part is perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, offers a dead weight that our sensibilities cannot lift. . . . The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate.”37

J. Keith Vincent    209 If the cognitive approach helps us to get beyond Cartesian dualism, it also might help us with the dualism suggested in this passage between the “opaqueness” and “dead weight” of materiality and the “immaterial parts” that can pass unhindered directly into our soul. It might, relatedly, help us to rethink sexuality as well. What is sexuality, after all, if not a prime example of a phenomenon that confounds the borders between inside and out, and between the material and psychic? As Diana Fuss wrote in Inside/out, “The problem, of course, with the inside/outside rhetoric, if it remains undeconstructed, is that such polemics disguise the fact that most of us are both inside and out at the same time.”38

Cognitive Queer Theory One way to get outside of what I have been calling the “internalist” view of sexuality and narrative that Proust and Forster seem to have held is to look at cultural and historical contexts in which it does not obtain with the same force as it does in Western modernism. Early twentieth-century Japanese literature may be one such context. While something similar did characterize novels belonging to the global trend of naturalism and focusing on heterosexual desire, it is hard to find anything like “the closet” for male-male desire at least, until the second half of the twentieth century in Japan, with the publication of Mishima Yukio’s Confessions of a Mask in 1949. Before that moment, male-male sexuality was understood not according to the “epistemology of the closet” but what Sedgwick described as the “homosocial continuum.” In works by writers such as Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai, sexuality was almost never located “inside” a single character but was more typically splayed out across love triangles, and thereby produced “intermentally” and “intersubjectively.” I have recently published a book in which I call the mechanism by which such desire was mediated the “male homosocial narrative.”39 In reading texts in this homosocial vein in particular, I have found that something like the externalist, cognitive perspective is quite useful for a number of reasons. The following is a partial, exploratory list of what I see as some advantages of the cognitive approach for queer readings of literature. While there is no space here to discuss each individually, I offer them in the hope that they might inspire further thought and research. The cognitive approach could be helpful for queer theorists because it gets us past inside/out distinctions and Cartesian dualism (and therefore the logic of the closet); gives us a way of talking about how desire is mediated and/or simulated by narrative rather than simply being “expressed” “in” it; deontologizes the distinction between fictional and “real” minds, making them both accessible and perceivable, if imperfectly—and not just through verbal language but through gestures, the body, facial expressions, clothing, and so on; gets us beyond specious distinctions between “real” versus “vicarious” sexuality. This may be useful, for example, for thinking about the desires aroused by fictional

210    Sex on the Mind characters, the passion that courses through fan culture and otaku and yaoi desire in Japanese popular culture.40

The Queer Grammar of Desire in The Tale of Genji In closing I want to discuss two examples of how bringing non-Western—specifically Japanese—literary texts into the picture may be a particularly fruitful way of integrating queer theory with cognitive studies. If “sexuality” is one of the most “interior” of all aspects of the self (at least in the modern world), classical narratology tells us it lends itself to narration either by an “omniscient” or “heterodiegetic” narrator capable of looking inside the heads and hearts of the characters, or by a first-person narrator who presumably knows what he or she is thinking, feeling, and desiring “on the inside.” First or third person, then, “I” or “he” or “she.” These are our only choices. In the case of a first-person narrator we might imagine the text to be autobiographical (and therefore not fictional), but any third-person text, if it tries to depict other people’s minds, must be fictional. In this grammatical split between the first and third person, then, we see reenacted the split between fiction and nonfiction and between self and other. That is how the story goes, in English, at least, and according to classical narratologists like Dorrit Cohn. Increasingly, however, cognitive narratology is suggesting that this strict divide between first and third person may be more an artifact of English (and French and German) grammar than a universal feature of human cognition. In his book Social Minds in the Novel, for example, Alan Palmer argues that consciousness in fiction, even English fiction, is not necessarily locked up in the minds of individual characters, but often splayed out in the “intermental” space between and among them.41 Such an understanding of what Palmer calls “social minds” in literature will be quite familiar to anyone who has studied Japanese literature, particularly premodern Japanese literature. I mentioned earlier that the Tale of Genji is remarkable for its sophisticated portrayal of psychic interiority. One of the reasons that this is possible in the Genji, besides of course the uncanny genius of Murasaki Shikibu herself, has to do with the way the Japanese language works. In Japanese (especially the classical Japanese that Murasaki wrote) the words that we sometimes call “pronouns” don’t really function as pronouns do in English. As Tomiko Yoda has noted, for example, the word ware (typically translated as “I”) is glossed in standard classical Japanese dictionaries as “(1) the subject pronoun ‘I,’ (2) the second-person reference ‘you,’ and (3) the third-person reflexive pronoun ‘oneself.’ ”42 Since verbs do not conjugate according to person either, classical Japanese is a language in which the boundaries between one person and another—between one mind and another—are significantly more fluid than in a language, like English, that does have unambiguous pronouns and verbs that conjugate according to person. As Yoda puts it,

J. Keith Vincent    211 in premodern Japanese you have a situation in which the voice is not “anchored to a consistent spatio-temporal and thematic coordinate of a singular speaking subject.”43 This means, among other things, that the same sentence in classical (and often in modern) Japanese can be read as third-person omniscient narration, as a first-person “psycho-narration,” or as third-person “free-indirect discourse.” One way of grasping this is to realize that, in translating a single Japanese sentence from the Tale of Genji into English, one may well have the choice of making it sound like a sentence written by Charles Dickens, by James Joyce, or by Virginia Woolf.44 Since the Genji was in fact translated for the first time into English by Virginia Woolf ’s friend and admirer Arthur Waley, it is perhaps not surprising that Amanda Stinchecum noted a similarity between Murasaki’s and Woolf ’s styles. In a recent study of Waley’s translation, John Walter de Grouchy has suggested that Waley’s attraction to the Genji and to Woolf ’s style had to do with his “unorthodox” sexuality. For de Grouchy, the connection was primarily thematic: Prince Genji was a sort of androgynous, polyamorous, and bisexual hero with exquisite taste who appealed to Waley and his friends in the Bloomsbury group such as Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey.45 But the “queerness” of the Genji, I would argue, has to do not only with the sexual exploits or dandified personality of its protagonist, but also with the way the text’s narrative technique allows for the interpenetration of multiple centers of consciousness and for what might be called the “deindividualization” of desire. The Tale of Genji is an enormous and complex work and I can only begin to scratch its surface here. But let me give just one example of how an “externalist” cognitive approach might help us to see how it deindividualizes desire and challenges our “internalist” understanding of sexuality. As readers of the novel will know, Genji loses his mother, the Kiritsubo Lady, a low-ranking consort to his father the Emperor, right as the Tale begins. She dies as a result of mistreatment by other consorts jealous of the favor the Emperor has shown her, and Genji spends the rest of his life in the search for women—and men—who remind him of her. The first of these women, Fujitsubo, is the woman who takes the place of his mother in his father’s affections. Another is Fujitsubo’s niece Murasaki, whom Genji meets when she is a young girl. The novel’s author is conventionally known by the name “Murasaki” by association with this character, who turns out to be the most dear to Genji of the many women he loves. It is primarily from the perspective of these various women, and from that of the narrator herself, that we get to know Genji over the course of the novel. This perspectivalism accounts in some part for the complex layering of minds that the novel affords. As Virginia Woolf put it (sounding a bit like a feminist cognitive literary critic) in her 1925 review of Waley’s translation, To light up the many facets of [Genji’s] mind, Lady Murasaki, being herself a woman, naturally chose the medium of other women’s minds. Aoi, Asagao, Fujitsubo, Murasaki, Yūgao, Suyetumuhana, the beautiful, the red-nosed, the cold, the passionate—one after another they turn their clear or freakish light upon the gay young man at the centre, who flies, who pursues, who laughs, who sorrows, but is always filled with the rush and bubble and chuckle of life.46

212    Sex on the Mind It must be said that Genji does “get around.” But one way of reading his fabled “promiscuity” is less as an individualized trait for which he might be morally condemned than as a narrative strategy that allows Murasaki Shikibu to show him to us from multiple perspectives, while also naturalizing the text’s attention to so many fascinating female characters. This is a world in which desire is not contained within the dyadic couple, but rather pulses through a whole community, fueled by Genji’s initial loss of his mother. The young Murasaki has also lost her mother at an early age, and this common loss is one reason why she and Genji grow so close so quickly. In the chapter “An Autumn Excursion” [Momiji no ga], Genji finds himself at a banquet seated next to Prince Hyōbu, the father of the young Murasaki, whom he has only recently taken to live with him, having abducted her from where she was living with her elderly nurse maid.47 He has carried out this abduction unbeknownst to anyone, including her father. Here is how Lady Murasaki describes the thoughts on this occasion of Genji and Murasaki’s father (here referred to as “His Highness”): Elegant and romantically languorous as His Highness was, Genji speculated privately about the pleasures of his company if he were a woman and, having a double reason to feel close to him, engaged him in intent conversation. His Highness, for his part, noted how much more open and easy Genji was than usual, liked his looks a great deal, and, being unaware that Genji was his son-in-law, indulged his roving fancy in the pleasure of imagining him, too, as a woman.48

What Peter Rabinowitz would call the cognitive “flavor” of the desire being enacted in this passage is as complex as a long-simmering winter stew. Its “mode” is counterfactual insofar as neither man actually wants to sleep with the other, but they both note that they would if only their genders were different. What is the status, one might ask, of such a desire? It is not at all “repressed,” in a Freudian sense, just suspended like liquid in a solution thanks to the counterfactual mode. It is also clearly “homosocial” in Sedgwick’s sense. The “double reason to feel close to him” that the text mentions so economically (in Japanese it takes only two words: katagata mutsumashū) is the Prince’s connection both to his own daughter Murasaki and to Fujitsubo, who is his sister, thus Murasaki’s aunt and Genji’s step-mother. Genji loves both of these women because they remind him of his dead mother, and the incestuous affinity has spread here to the Prince as well.49 Genji looks at the Prince “privately [hito shirezu],” so the latter is unaware both of the presence and of the particular intensity of his gaze, thus setting the scene of Genji’s cognitive mastery over him. Genji’s awareness of the Prince’s ignorance of his own abduction of the other man’s daughter seems to enhance the Prince’s appeal for Genji. It is thus an attraction and also, perversely, a sort of rivalry and a power play. If this were a European novel, a scene like this might portend an eventual showdown between the two men. But this never happens in Murasaki’s tale. The Prince is “feminized” here with little protest—although as a man he remains only(?) the virtual object of Genji’s affections. To map this out in terms of cognitive embedment, the reader knows that Genji knows that the Prince is ignorant of his own relationship to the Prince’s daughter. To add one further level, Murasaki Shikibu, in showing us all of this, has something very complicated in

J. Keith Vincent    213 mind not just about Genji’s character, but about the whole system of “traffic in women” as it played itself out in the male homosocial world of the Heian court. I have cited this passage in Royall Tyler’s translation, which renders the Prince’s observation of Genji’s good looks from an exteriorized third-person perspective (“He. . . liked his looks a great deal”), but because there are no pronouns in the Japanese, and classical Japanese grammar makes no distinction between direct and indirect discourse, it would be just a correct to render it as Edward Seidensticker does, in free indirect discourse, “How very handsome Genji was!” In other words, while we are obligated in English to decide whether the feeling in question is being shown to us from the outside or narrated from Genji’s own perspective, the Japanese allows it to float somewhere in between. Quite literally, then, the Japanese text allows for a different relation between inside and out, enabling a depersonalized, less individuated enactment of desire. My point here is not to argue that classical Japanese texts like this one are unique or that they convey a kind of sexuality that cannot be represented in English or in modern Japanese using other techniques. What I am saying is that looking closely at texts like the Genji with a cognitivist tool set might help us to think beyond the “inside and out,” and beyond the internalist understanding of mind and of desire. In this passage, desire seems not to emerge from the inside out, but to spread laterally from one character to another in a way that the cognitive approach, it seems to me, is well equipped to describe. In 1950 the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō published a story with the title “Captain Shigemoto’s Mother” while he was in the process of translating The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese for the second time. “Captain Shigemoto’s Mother” is written in modern Japanese but set in the Heian period when the Genji was written. As Aileen Gatten has argued, it can be read as a sort of miniature version of Murasaki’s tale and thus as Tanizaki’s “act of homage” to his famous predecessor.50 Like the Genji itself, “Captain Shigemoto’s Mother” thematizes forms of passionate longing that cannot be contained “inside” discrete individuals but seem to spill over from one character into another. It is also deeply indebted to Heian modes of narration, including the sort of blurring of first and third person mentioned earlier, which work to reinforce the sense of a sort of generalized state of desire.51 The desire that male characters experience for women in this novella is powerful and obsessive, and always described not as originating within the romantic heterosexual dyad, but as the product of mediation through other men. In other words, it is also a good example of what Sedgwick has termed “male homosocial desire.”52 Unlike in most of the British texts that Sedgwick analyzes, however, the male homosocial rivalries here are not structured by homophobic panic, nor are they zero-sum games of winner-take-all. In fact, the “losers” in the game seem to get as much or more pleasure out of it as the winners do. In the most dramatic scene in the book, an old man hands over his own (much younger) wife to his higher-ranking nephew, who has had the audacity to ask for her as a present during a party. The old man is devastated by the loss of his wife and he suffers for it the rest of his life. At the same time, however, in giving his wife away he not only assuages his own guilt for having married her despite the enormous difference in their

214    Sex on the Mind ages, but he triumphs paradoxically over his nephew: he may have yielded his own wife to the younger man but the more pain he feels over the loss, the more keenly he feels the value of what he was able to “give away.” Early on in the novel a character named Heijū, who at first appears to be the novel’s protagonist, is discussing a certain beautiful woman with his friend, a much higher ranking courtier named Shihei. Shihei is the high-ranking nephew who will later take the old man Kunitsune’s wife from him, but at this point in the text, he appears as a friendly rival for her affections with Heijū. Shihei asks Heijū to tell him more about the woman. Heijū refuses at first, but eventually obliges. This is how the narrator describes their interaction: It was common for the two men to go back and forth in this way. Whenever Shihei began to tease him, Heijū would stubbornly insist that he knew nothing, and then, as he was questioned more deeply, he would allow that he was not completely in the dark. Questioned still further, he would say, “We only exchanged letters’; then, “I made love with her once”; and then, “Actually, five or six times”; and finally he would admit everything. To Shihei’s amazement, Heijū had been with virtually all the famous ladies of the time. Tonight, too, when pressed by Shihei, Heijū stammered some words of denial; but presently the look on his face confirmed Shihei’s suspicions, and when Shihei probed even further, Heijū began to open up.53

It is hard to say who exactly is desiring whom in this scene. The conversation between the two men plays out like a scene of seduction, escalating from question to question until the information is finally discharged in an almost orgasmic release. It is a scene of highly eroticized mind reading, moving from ignorance to knowledge, and from darkness into light, from a closed state to an open one. And yet what is being “released” here has not necessarily been there all along. If Heijū thought that he could keep his pleasures to himself, he is powerless to resist Shihei’s request to share them; indeed one has the sense that the sharing of the secrets is what makes them so delicious. Desire here is not only legible on the men’s faces, as “the look on his face” betrays Shihei. It does not emerge solely from inside the two men individually, nor in response to the external attractions of the women they pursue. The very distinction between “in” and “out” is here less an impenetrable barrier than a kind of sex toy—a way of generating a sort of depersonalized erotic desire between men. Tanizaki’s text might be effectively described by the queer theorist Michael Moon, who in the following passage happens to be writing about Henry James and David Lynch, but might just as well be describing “Captain Shigemoto’s Mother.” Reading James and watching the films of David Lynch, Moon writes, we are forced to realize that “what most of us consider our deepest and strongest desires are not our own, that our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audio- and video-tapes of the desires of others and our utterances of them lip-synchings of these circulating, endlessly reproduced and reproducible desires.”54 The externalizing logic of Moon’s description, where desire seems not to emerge from the inside out, but to spread laterally from one character to another, is an example of

J. Keith Vincent    215 a queer reading that plays well with the cognitive approach. I have only just begun to sketch the possibility of such a connection here, but my sense is that much more can be said at the intersection of queer theory and cognitive theory. I close with a passage from Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse in which Lily Briscoe asks a question that figures with equal importance for queer theorists and for cognitive narratologists, a question that further work in both might help us to answer: What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through to those secret chambers?. . . How then, she asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.55

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Miri Nakamura, Matthew Fraleigh, Kristin Sivak, and Edward Mack for giving me the opportunity to speak about this work on four separate occasions and for their useful feedback. Thanks also to Michael Moon for his encouragement and advice, and to Lisa Zunshine for her enthusiasm, her input, and her patience.

Notes 1. The tension here is not unlike what Patrick Colm Hogan and Suzanne Keen describe in this volume (­chapters 16 and 17) with regard to cognitive approaches to postcolonial theory, which has also had a strong bias toward psychoanalytic views of the relation between colonizer and colonized, and remains skeptical of the universalizing tendencies in the cognitive approach. 2. My own somewhat idiosyncratic list of useful work in the area of queer narratology includes Lynne Huffer, “Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited,” Foucault Studies 0.14 (2012):  20–40; S. S.  Lanser, “Queering Narratology,” Ambiguous Discourse:  Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 250–61; Matsushita Chikako, Kuia monogatari-ron: kindai Amerika shōsetsu no kurōzetto bunseki (Tokyo:  Jinbun Shoin, 2009); Jesse Matz, “Maurice in Time,” Style 34.2 (2000):  188–211; D. A.  Miller, Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kathy Mezei, “Who  Is Speaking Here?  Free-Indirect Discourse, Gender, and Authority in Emma, Howard’s End, and Mrs. Dalloway,” in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); 66–92; and Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 3. See Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

216    Sex on the Mind 4. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New  York:  Routledge, 1990); Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 197–222. 5. Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault:  Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 137. 6. For Sedgwick’s discussion of the usefulness of affect theory for queer theory, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling:  Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2003). 7. Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 24. 8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality:  An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 157. 9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 3. 10. These phrases appear in Epistemology on pages 98, 7, 97, 152, 25, and 97. 11. Ibid., 225. 12. This is how Halperin describes “knowingness” (writing very much within the context of 1990s homophobia and AIDS-phobia): “what our culture typically produces, or recognizes, as the ‘truth’ about gay men and gay sex is not a disengaged, serene, or politically innocuous ‘knowledge,’ but an array of contradictory and, it would now seem, murderous knowledge-effects: an illusory knowingness, that is, which is not only distinct from ‘knowledge’ but is actually opposed to it, is actually a form of ignorance, insofar as it serves to conceal from the supposedly knowledgeable the nature of their own personal and political investments in the systematic misrecognition and abjection of homosexuality.” David Halperin, St. Foucault:  Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 16. 13. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essay in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 22. 14. Quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Affect Theory and Theory of Mind,” The Weather in Proust (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 144. 15. Peter Rabinowitz’s chapter in this volume on “cognitive flavor” (­chapter 4) begins to offer such a finely tuned set of tools and strikes me as very much in the spirit of Sedgwick, who wanted to know not just whether we know things, but also to pluralize and complicate our understanding of “knowing.” See the last essay in The Weather in Proust, where she uses the Buddhist concept of “realization” to critique what she calls the claim of “any Western psychology of knowledge” that “can’t stop claiming mastery of reality as the flat, propositional object of a single verb, shivering in its threadbare near transparency: the almost fatally thin: ‘to know.’ ” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Reality and Realization,” The Weather in Proust, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 213. 16. Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1. 17. David Herman, ed., The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 18. Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 16. 19. Ibid., 55. 20. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), 63–64. 21. Herman, The Emergence of Mind, 8–9.

J. Keith Vincent    217 22. It is important to note that the notion that we access real minds using the same cognitive mechanisms that we use when we access fictional minds does not imply that there is no difference between fictional and nonfictional narrative. For a useful critique of Herman that clarifies the different ways in which minds are “mediated” in fictional and nonfictional narratives, see Stefan Iversen, “Broken or Unnatural: On the Distinction of Fiction in Non-conventional First-Person Narration,” The Traveling Concepts of Narrative, ed. Mari Hatavara, Lars-Christer Hydén, and Matti Hyvärinen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013), 141–62. 23. Herman, The Emergence of Mind, 9. 24. This consensus is beginning to fray at the edges in English literary studies—partly at least as a result of both queer and cognitive critiques. Two recent critiques of the idea that modernism was all about interiority, one queer and one cognitive, are David Kurnick’s Empty Houses:  Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2011), and Annalee Edmonson, “Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway,” Journal of Modern Literature 36.1 (2012): 17–36. 25. Karatani Kōjin, “The Discovery of Interiority,” Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 45–75. In Japanese, see Karatani Kōjin, “Naimen no hakken,” in Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1980), 45–84. 26. Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 18–19. 27. Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 69 (translation modified). 28. By “modernizationist” I refer to those readings of the novel, for example, that posit a single trajectory already traced, say, by the modern novel in Britain or France, and which the Japanese (or other non-Western) novel will always be struggling to “catch up” with. 29. Michael Shin, “Interior Landscapes:  Yi Kwangsu’s ‘The Heartless’ and the Origins of Modern Literature,” Colonial Modernity in Korea, ed. Michael Robinson and Gi-Wook Shin (Cambridge: Harvard Universit Asia Center, 2001), 253. 30. Karatani, “Rethinking Sōseki’s Theory” Japan Forum 20.1 (2008): 9. 31. For the modernizationist account of Futabatei, see Marleigh Grayer Ryan, Japan’s First Modern Novel: “Ukigumo” of Futabatei Shimei (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1965). For a more critical (and interesting) view, see Maeda Ai, “Nikai no geshuku,” in Toshi kūkan no naka no bungaku (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1989), 177–200. 32. Amanda Mayer Stinchecum, “Who Tells the Tale? ‘Ukifune’: A Study in Narrative Voice,” Monumenta Nipponica 35.4 (1980): 385–86. 33. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” cited in David Herman, “Re-minding Modernism,” in Herman, The Emergence of Mind, 250. 34. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” cited in Herman, The Emergence of Mind, 251. 35. Stinchecum, “Who Tells the Tale?” 388. 36. Cited in Jesse Matz, “ ‘You Must Join My Dead’: E. M. Forster and the Death of the Novel,” Modernism/Modernity 9.2 (2002): 304. 37. Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2002), 87. 38. Diana Fuss, “Inside/Out,” in Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 5. 39. J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012).

218    Sex on the Mind 40. On “otaku” desire, see Saitō Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl, trans. J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). On “yaoi,” see James Welker, “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: ‘Boy’s Love’ as ‘Girls’ Love’ in Shōjo Manga,” Signs 31.3 (2006): 841–70. For a similarly respectful and imaginative treatment of the erotics of the aesthetic imagination in the work of the recluse artist Henry Darger, see Micheal Moon, Darger’s Resources (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 41. Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). 42. Tomiko Yoda, Gender and National Identity: Heian Texts in the Construction of Japanese Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 193. 43. Ibid., 152. 44. See Valerie Henituik’s comparison of two translations of a Heian woman’s diary (Kagerō nikki) for a good example of how different translations from classical Japanese can be, and the gendered politics of these differences. Valerie Henitiuk, “Translating Woman: Reading the Female through the Male,” Meta: journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal 44.3 (1999):  469–84. See also Yoda’s chapter on the same text in Gender and National Identity. 45. “[Genji] challenges the Victorian-Edwardian masculine ideal, explores the moral consequences of multiple sexual partners (as do some of the female characters), eagerly embraces nature and the arts, and offers at least the suggestion that civilization would not go to pieces were there no Judeo-Christian monogamous ideal of marriage. Waley had found in Genji an ideal ever youthful male hero, far removed from the despised manly type, and yet equally self-assured in his masculine identity. Attractive and attracted to both sexes, Genji is both a homosexual and heterosexual Western ideal or fantasy in an age when such literary men were sorely wanted.” John Walter de Grouchy, Orienting Arthur Waley (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 146. 46. Virginia Woolf, “The Tale of Genji: The First Volume Mr. Arthur Waley’s Translation of a Great Japanese Novel by the Lady Murasaki,” Literature East and West 11.4 (1967): 424–27. Originally published in British Vogue, July 1925. 47. There has been quite a lot of debate over how to read Genji’s abduction of Murasaki. For two differing approaches see Margaret Childs, “The Value of Vulnerability: Sexual Coercion and the Nature of Love in Japanese Court Literature,” Journal of Asian Studies 58.4 (1999): 1059–79, and Valerie Henitiuk, “Going to Bed with Waley: How Murasaki Shikibu Does and Does Not Become World Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 45.1, East-West Issue (2008): 40–61. 48. The Tale of Genji, trans. Royall Tyler (New York: Penguin, 2002), 138. For the Japanese, see Genji monogatari 1., ed. Abe Akio et  al. Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, vol. 20 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1994), 318–19. 49. Seidensticker’s version is more explicit here and Waley’s even more so. Seidensticker has “he felt very near this prince so near the two ladies” and Waley that “his connection with Fujitsubo and Murasakai [was] at once uppermost in the mind of his observer.” Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Edward Seidensticker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 135–36. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley (New  York:  Modern Library, 1960), 132. 50. On the similarities with the Genji, see Aileen Gatten, “What’s So Classical about Tanizaki’s Neoclassical Fiction?” in Adriana Boscaro, Luisa Bienati, and Bonaventura Ruperti, The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition: Essays on Tanizaki Jun’ichiro in Honor of Adriana Boscaro (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2009), 53–69.

J. Keith Vincent    219 51. Tanizaki’s first translation of the Genji, done together with the classical scholar Yamada Yoshio beginning in 1939, was in fact inspired by Waley’s translation in English. On this connection, see Brian Hurley, “Toward a New Modern Vernacular: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamada Yoshio, and Showa Restoration Thought,” Journal of Japanese Studies 39.2 (2013): 359–96. Tanizaki would eventually translate the Genji three times into modern Japanese. 52. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 53. Tanizaki, Juni’ichirō, “Captain Shigemoto’s Mother,” in The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto’s Mother:  Two Novellas by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, trans. Anthony H.  Chambers (New  York:  Knopf, 1993). 77. For the Japanese text, see “Shōshō Shigemoto no haha,” Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1968), vol. 16, 172–73. 54. Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 21. 55. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 55.

Works Cited Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. 197–222. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Childs, Margaret. “The Value of Vulnerability:  Sexual Coercion and the Nature of Love in Japanese Court Literature.” Journal of Asian Studies 58.4 (1999): 1059–79. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Coviello, Peter. Tomorrow’s Parties:  Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 2013. de Grouchy, John Walter. Orienting Arthur Waley. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. Edmonson, Annalee. “Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.1 (2012): 17–36. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Fuss, Diana, ed. Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 1991. Gatten, Aileen. “What’s So Classical about Tanizaki’s Neoclassical Fiction?” In Adriana, Boscaro, Luisa Bienati, and Bonaventura Ruperti, The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition: Essays on Tanizaki Jun’ichiro in Honor of Adriana Boscaro. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2009. Halperin, David. St. Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Henitiuk, Valerie. “Translating Woman: Reading the Female through the Male.” Meta: journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal 44.3 (1999): 469–84. ———. “Going to Bed with Waley: How Murasaki Shikibu Does and Does Not Become World Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 45.1, East-West Issue (2008): 40–61. Herman, David. The Emergence of Mind:  Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Huffer, Lynne. Mad for Foucault:  Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

220    Sex on the Mind ———. “Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited.” Foucault Studies 0.14 (2012): 20–40. Hurley, Brian. “Toward a New Modern Vernacular: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamada Yoshio, and Showa Restoration Thought.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39.2 (2013): 359–96. Iversen, Stefan. “Broken or Unnatural:  On the Distinction of Fiction in Non-conventional First-Person Narration.” The Traveling Concepts of Narrative. Ed. Mari Hatavara, Lars-Christer Hydén, and Matti Hyvärinen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. 141–62. Karatani, Kōjin. “The Discovery of Interiority.” Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. 45–75. In Japanese, see Karatani Kōjin, “Naimen no hakken,” in Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1980). 45–84. ———. “Rethinking Sōseki’s Theory.” Japan Forum 20.1 (2008): 9–15. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses:  Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2011. Lanser, S. S. “Queering Narratology.” Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 250–61. Maeda Ai. “Nikai no geshuku.” In Toshi kūkan no naka no bungaku. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1989. 177–200. Matsushita, Chikako. Kuia monogatari-ron:  kindai Amerika shōsetsu no kurōzetto bunseki. Tokyo: Jinbun Shoin, 2009. Matz, Jesse, “Maurice in Time.” Style 34.2 (2000): 188–211. ———. “ ‘You Must Join My Dead’: E. M. Forster and the Death of the Novel.” Modernism/ Modernity 9.2 (2002): 303–17. Miller, D. A. Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Mezei, Kathy. “Who Is Speaking Here? Free-Indirect Discourse, Gender, and Authority in Emma, Howard’s End, and Mrs. Dalloway.” Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Ed. Kathy Mezei. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. 66–92. Miyoshi, Masao. Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Moon, Michael. A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. ———. Darger’s Resources. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Murasaki, Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Arthur Waley. New York: Modern Libary, 1960. ———. Genji monogatari 1. Ed. Abe Akio et  al. Nihon koten bungaku zenshū. Vol. 20. Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1994. 318–19. ———. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Royall Tyler. New York: Penguin, 2002. ———. The Tale of Genji. Trans. Edward Seidensticker. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Palmer, Alan. Social Minds in the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Proust, Marcel. The Way by Swann’s. Trans. Lydia Davis. London: Penguin, 2002. Roof, Judith. Come as You Are : Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. Japan’s First Modern Novel:  “Ukigumo” of Futabatei Shimei. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1965. Saito Tamaki. Beautiful Fighting Girl. Trans. J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men:  English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

J. Keith Vincent    221 ———. The Epistemology of the Closet. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. ———. “Affect Theory and Theory of Mind.” The Weather in Proust. Ed. Jonathan Goldberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 144–65. ———. “Reality and Realization.” The Weather in Proust. Ed. Jonathan Goldberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 213. Shin, Michael. “Interior Landscapes: Yi Kwangsu’s ‘The Heartless’ and the Origins of Modern Literature.” Colonial Modernity in Korea. Ed. Michael Robinson and Gi-Wook Shin. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. Stinchecum. Amanda Mayer. “Who Tells the Tale? ‘Ukifune’:  A  Study in Narrative Voice.” Monumenta Nipponica 35.4 (1980): 375–403 Tanizaki, Juni’ichirō. “Captain Shigemoto’s Mother.” In The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto’s Mother:  Two Novellas by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Trans. Anthony H.  Chambers. New York: Knopf. 1993. ———.“Shigemoto Shōshō no haha.” Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū. Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1968. Vol. 16, 172–73. Vincent, J. Keith. Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012. Welker, James. “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: ‘Boys’ Love’ as ‘Girls’ Love’ in Shōjo Manga.” Signs 31.3(2006): 841–70. Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. “The Tale of Genji: The First Volume Mr. Arthur Waley’s Translation of a Great Japanese Novel by the Lady Murasaki.” Literature East and West 11.4 (1967): 424–27. Originally published in British Vogue, July 1925. ———. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Yoda, Tomiko. Gender and National Identity:  Heian Texts in the Construction of Japanese Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Neuroaesthetics

Chapter 11

Im aginat i on Literary and Cognitive Intersections A l a n Richa rd son

“Imagination” names a mental faculty or (perhaps better) an interrelated set of mental capacities and activities concerned with modeling entities and events that are not immediately present to perception and that may or may not have counterparts in the lived world. I can close my eyes right now and imagine a red, ripe apple, even if none is present. Or I can blend stored images of apples with those of gold statues and jewelry and imagine a golden apple, even if I’ve never seen one. Further, I can imagine something physically impossible: a solid apple made of cool, lambent flames that, when eaten, gives me just the magical powers I need to rescue my daughter from the lunar cavern where extraterrestrial zombies have imprisoned her. Given its close associations with creativity and fiction, imagination has long been a key topic within literary and cultural theories of many kinds, although literary theoretical interest in imagination seems to have peaked during the Romantic era and to have fallen off in recent years.1 In contrast, imagination has only recently emerged as a serious topic for research within the cognitive sciences, following two centuries of scientific disregard if not outright “fear and loathing.”2 The rapidly ebbing scientific attitude of distrust can be related to a much older philosophical tradition going back to Plato, reminding us that philosophers too have been concerned with imagination for millennia. The surprising rise to prominence of imagination within twenty-first-century mind and brain science, along with its rich literary and philosophical pedigree, make imagination one of the most promising areas to date for interdisciplinary engagement within the growing zone of contact between literary studies and cognitive research. On the cognitive side, imagination has been construed in three basic ways, each of which can be related to a distinct area within cognitive literary studies. First, imagination has been investigated in terms of mental imaging (the formation of visual and other kinds of sensory images, such as the red apple I was imagining a moment ago and the opening bars of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” I’m playing in my head right now). Second, imagination has been understood in terms of the conceptual “blending” operations

226   Imagination that produce the never-perceived golden apple. Third, and only quite recently, mind and brain research has placed imagination prominently within a larger suite of mental abilities and procedures collectively termed the brain’s “default mode network,” relating imagination to memory, prospection into the future, theory of mind, mind wandering, and even navigation. I will briefly consider cognitive literary work in the first two areas before moving to the third, which represents an important and rapidly developing new field for cognitive literary research.

Imagination, Imaging, and the Hidden Work of Literary Response I’m again imagining that red apple, which now has a white nick precisely in the center of my (simulated) visual field. Still with eyes closed, I slowly rotate the apple until the nick disappears to the right. I keep rotating at exactly the same pace until the nick reappears, this time, of course, on the left. One moment more and the nick comes back to center. I open my eyes and let the apple disappear. I found this exercise in mental rotation simple enough to perform, but there is a complex, fractious, and perhaps irresolvable debate going on among cognitive scientists as to what precisely I just did.3 Was my brain processing stored visual information in a manner analogous to (and perhaps dependent on) actual visual perception? Or was my experience of “seeing” the apple rotate in my “mind’s eye” an illusory artifact of a process involving instead coded representations, in some language-like propositional form, about such things as redness, spherical shapes, orbits, occlusion, and object permanence? The stakes of the “imagery debate” turn out to be quite high indeed: are all mental processes, at bottom, computational manipulations of propositional code that could, in principle, be run on a machine? Or does our mind’s instantiation in a physical brain, nervous system, body, and sociophysical environment enable and constrain our cognitive “architecture” and its workings in pervasive and crucial ways? The “imagists”—those who hold that the brain manipulates spatial (not propositional) representations with properties directly analogous to their real-world counterparts—tend to see the human mind as fundamentally embodied, less software than “wetware.”4 The rise of increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging techniques has given some additional traction to the imagist camp: fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) studies, in “almost every study,” have shown that “mental imagery activates modality-specific visual cortex areas.”5 In other words, when I mentally picture a red apple, brain regions associated with the perception of color and of round contours show activation in the absence of any actual visual input. Whether or not the imagery debate can ever be resolved to the satisfaction of all, it has already inspired a significant body of work on the relation between imaging as understood within cognitive science and imagination as long construed by philosophers and literary theorists. Eva Brann,

Alan Richardson   227 a philosopher, produced a weighty survey and reappraisal of over two thousand years of speculation regarding imagination, culminating in a critical review of the imagery debate as it stood in 1992.6 Two years later Ellen Esrock, a literary scholar, noted that the activity of forming mental images while reading, once a standard element of literary response, had become disregarded when not actively disprized over the course of the twentieth century.7 This major shift in literary theory had palpable consequences for the literature classroom: students were now more likely to be discouraged from visually imagining the scenes and actions described in literary texts, rather than encouraged, much less trained, to do so. The most significant literary critical response to the imagery debate to date remains Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book.8 Taking her bearings from the imagist side of the debate but relying on her own considerable powers of readerly introspection and inventing her own critical terminology, Scarry shows in ingenious and compelling detail how the “great sensory writers” endow their visual images with the vivacity of live perception. Or rather, their readers mentally produce images with unusual vivacity “under the instruction” of the same writers. A tradition of poets and novelists going back to Homer and forward to the present have learned, through their own introspective investigations and through studying the great sensory writers that have gone before, how to reproduce the “structure of perception,” conveying in detail how it is a wall comes to look solid rather than just telling us to imagine a solid wall. This process often involves the addition of motion: imagine a white wall in dim light, and then imagine the same wall with shadows moving across it as a car’s headlights sweep by in the night outside. If under the second condition the wall does seem more solid, more vivid to you, then Scarry has made her own original contribution to the cognitive study of images. Ordinarily readers would not become aware of all the mental exercises writers put them through as they describe shadows moving over the side of a barn or the sun glinting off the spear tips of a Homeric army on the march. One of the merits of Scarry’s book is that she does train the reader in enhancing the process of “imagining-under-authorial-instruction,” perhaps in the process giving us a better sense of how at least some readers visualized in the past. As I have argued elsewhere, not only has visualizing while reading fallen off since the end of the nineteenth century, but certain authors whose popularity rested in part on their gift for conveying vivid sensory descriptions have fallen out of favor as well: James Thomson and Walter Scott, for example, once considered giants among poets, now appeal mainly to specialists.9 As a novelist, Scott has left us a telling description of how one of his protagonists, Edward Waverley, visualizes as he reads and daydreams, engaging for hours on end in “that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary events are presented in action, as it were, to the eye of the muser.”10 Scott, the “Wizard of the North,” seems to have understood the principles of such mental sorcery better than most. Just as visual perception dominates our sensory experience (claiming “nearly half of the brain’s cortex” for its processing needs), so visualizing has dominated the study of sensory images, scientific and literary alike.11 Other sensory modalities engender their own kinds of imagery, however: auditory (that song running in your head), haptic

228   Imagination (imagine the heft of a granite paperweight in your upturned palm and the feel of its smooth, cold surface), motoric (now imagine hurling that granite chunk against a wall and notice how you subtly “feel” the appropriate bodily movements). Some sensory images prove difficult to produce at will—many people have difficulty forming images of tastes and smells—and test subjects show pronounced individual differences in visual and other imaging tasks (Laura Otis, c­ hapter 24 in this volume). Literary writers have found ingenious ways to convey images in a number of modalities, however, and, as G. Gabrielle Starr has shown, writers often recruit more than one imagined sense at a time.12 Motor imagery (as Scarry’s work had already suggested) seems to play an especially important role in esthetic experience across the arts.13

The Synthetic Imagination: Metaphor, Blending, and the Literary Mind Literary artists have long been prized for their ability to find likeness in difference: Aristotle, in his Poetics, makes “command of metaphor” the ultimate mark of a strong poetic imagination, since the “ability to use metaphor well implies a perception of resemblances.”14 The Romantic poet and theorist S. T. Coleridge characterized imagination as a “synthetic and magical power” (my emphasis) and his fellow Romantic, P. B. Shelley, contrasted the analytic and discriminating functions of reason from the “principle of synthesis” informing imagination: “Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.”15 In consequence, imagination for Shelley becomes the driving force behind not just poetry but any creative endeavor whatsoever, including innovations in law, government, science, and philosophy; even Plato, the ancient enemy of poets, becomes “essentially a poet.”16 Imagination creates our sense of meaningfulness as well, uniquely able to discern the “value” of things, and proves indispensable to ethical conduct. However unexpectedly, the synthetic, creative imagination of high romanticism has returned to prominence in recent cognitive theory. In The Way We Think (2002), their overview of conceptual blending theory, Gilles Fauconnier (a cognitive linguist) and Mark Turner (a founder of cognitive literary studies) argue for the “rehabilitation of the imagination as a fundamental scientific topic,” placing the “fundamental cognitive operation” of conceptual integration or “blending” at the very “heart of imagination.”17 In Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (2003), the social psychiatrist Arnold Modell locates the “uniquely human” aspect of the mind-brain in both language and “our capacity for generative imagination, which in turn relies upon the use of metaphor as a cognitive tool.”18 Drawing on the cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Turner, Modell makes a “recombinatory metaphoric process” (that is, a “mapping or transfer of meaning between dissimilar domains”) essential to imagination.19 Although the full scientific “rehabilitation” of imagination had to wait until the twenty-first

Alan Richardson   229 century, the ethical function of imagination insisted upon by the poet Shelley—for whom a “man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively”—had already been restated by Johnson in his 1994 book The Moral Imagination, which develops a “view of moral reasoning as imaginative through and through.”20 Significantly, these cognitive theories of metaphor and imaginative “blending” have fostered interdisciplinary connections across the sciences/humanities divide from the start. Turner, a literature professor, began contributing to the “conceptual metaphor” theory of Lakoff, a linguist, and Johnson, a philosopher, early on, and had coauthored a book with Lakoff by 1989.21 Conceptual integration or “blending” theory grew directly out of the collaborative efforts of Turner and Fauconnier. The less surprising, then, that a familiar literary sense of imagination should eventually have emerged out of their collective work. Especially familiar, as Mark Bruhn has noted, to scholars of Romantic literature, who may “frequently experience a strong and gratifying sense of déjà-vu” in reading conceptual metaphor and blending theory.22 No student of Coleridge, for example, “will be surprised to hear that blending is a prime operation of the imagination: to the function of consciousness ‘that blends and as it were) fuses’ representations and concepts, Coleridge famously and ‘exclusively appropriated the name imagination.’ ”23 What cognitive theorists may miss in ignoring or making light of their Romantic inheritance, Bruhn insists, concerns the finer-grained “differentiations” made by the earlier set of writers and the limit cases and “systematic deviances” found in Romantic theory and practice with their potential to “test and improve” the cognitive theorists’ accounts of what Fauconnier and Turner call the “hidden complexities” of their subject.24 Bruhn’s intervention offers not so much a corrective to conceptual metaphor and blending theory as an invitation to make greater and more systematic use of a highly relevant body of sophisticated imaginative speculation and poetic illustration. Consider, for example, how a seemingly casual metaphor in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” poem both gains illumination from and serves to complicate any schematic account of conceptual integration that assumes “transfer of meaning” between two “domains” or “input spaces.”25 I am thinking of the brief passage, “These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild.” Unless one has become sensitized through conceptual metaphor theory to the pervasiveness of metaphor in everyday discourse, one might miss entirely the analogy posed here between (concrete and organic) planted rows of vegetation and (abstract and ideal) geometrical lines. (A second rhetorical figure, the more blatant personification of the hedgerows as playfully running wild, may also distract attention from the unobtrusive metaphor it immediately follows.) Yet as one “runs the blend” of hedgerow and line, one finds rich material emerging: underscoring the opposition between abstract, artificial modes of parsing and organizing the world with the unruly tendencies of organic nature, this figure embodies a key contrast in the poem. More than that, the metaphor shows how nature resists human attempts to impose order, as hedgerows deliberately planted to mark field or property boundaries reassert their innately “sportive” character. In the process, the figure softens the very opposition it announces: geometrical order relaxes into a sweet disorder before our very eyes, and the hedgerows “hardly” count as rows anymore. Among

230   Imagination the many emergent meanings percolating within this blend, one can list as well the tacit acknowledgment that even the best-laid human schemes will eventually break down, and a Romantic and proto-“green” faith that the wildness of the natural world will inevitably find ways to rebound in the face of human efforts to contain and tame it. So far, so good; yet the blend becomes much richer still and much harder to diagram when one notices the faint but unmistakable connotation of metrical “lines” harbored within and complicating the same figure. In a poem insistently concerned with its own creation, the “little lines. . . run wild” also evoke the highly enjambed, studiously casual blank verse in which this very poem is written. And in this way the complex network of meanings arising from the opposition of nature and culture—and the partial erasure of that opposition—inherent in the lines of “sportive wood run wild” now merges with a second network involving such (tentative) oppositions as verse and conversation (critics regard “Tintern Abbey” as a “conversation poem”), artifice and spontaneity, metrical organization and the free play of thought. The complexity of densely figurative, often self-referential literary discourse remains an important challenge to the analytical schemas proposed by conceptual metaphor theory, as F. Elizabeth Hart argued some years ago, and to blending theory today, as the work of Bruhn demonstrates.26

Natural Born Dreamers: Imagination and the Brain’s Default Network I have recruited you, patient reader, into performing several mental tasks, along with me or on your own, in the course of reading this essay: imagining a fresh, a golden, and an impossibly fiery apple; playing a tune in your head; putting said apple through a 360-degree rotation; visualizing a wall under two conditions; and then mentally hurling a hunk of granite at it. Now I invite you to close your eyes for up to a full minute and do. . . nothing. Just relax. You’ve earned it. If you are like nearly every other human subject, while you were resting your mind was anything but a blank: it was just as active as it was when on task, but it was active in a quite different way. Unfocused and left to its own devices, the human mind tends to default towards a group of mental activities—ruminating on the past, planning for the near or distant future, fantasizing about unlikely or even impossible events, dwelling on what other people “really meant” in saying or doing or not saying or not doing this or that. For more than fifteen centuries, Buddhist meditators have called this our “monkey mind.” For the past dozen years, neuroscientists have been calling it the brain’s “default mode.”27 The existence of the default mode and the neural system behind it came as a surprise to the neuroscientific investigators who discovered it.28 In order to properly interpret neuroimaging studies, brain researchers needed to compare the activation patterns shown by the brain when engaged in various tasks with baseline levels found when test

Alan Richardson   231 subjects were at rest, simply relaxing in the scanner. Intriguingly, overall levels of neural activity were not that much different when subjects were resting than when they were mentally rotating tricky three-dimensional figures or working equations. More than that, certain areas showed a decrease in activity once subjects turned to the task at hand. So, the question was, what had their brains been so busy with in the absence of perceptual stimulation and directed activity? The brain’s default mode system resides in time as well as in space. A network, rather than a single location in the brain, the default system “consists of spatially distributed, but functionally linked” brain regions, “functional connectivity” implying “temporal correlations”: regions that are wired together tend to fire together.29 Researchers have disagreed on just what role the default mode system plays in the brain’s larger economy, but one thing is clear: the “brain is intensely active during rest.”30 And the patterns of brain activation have proved “remarkably consistent” rather than, as one might have guessed of unfocused mental activity, random and sporadic. The linked regions in question—the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate/retrosplenial cortex, the left and right inferior parietal lobules, and the medial temporal lobe—also show activation patterns during certain well-recognized mental activities.31 Not surprisingly, given our phenomenological experience of what happens when we let the mind drift, these activities include recalling the past, envisioning the future, daydreaming, and “theory of mind” (gauging the intentions and mental states of other people). Daydreaming is almost another name for imagining, although of a casual, quasi-random sort. Thinking about possible future scenarios sounds a good deal more practical (unless, say, that scenario involves winning the lottery or dating Antonio Banderas), yet by nature future events are imaginary ones: they only become real when and if they happen. Memory seems quite far from imagination, a matter of hard facts rather than airy nothings. Yet remembering has been linked quite tightly to imagining by neuroscientific memory researchers.32 Still another mental activity making significant use of the default mode system—navigation—would seem to be the real outlier here, although its links to memory make a good deal of intuitive sense. Narrative has been described as forming a common thread among various default mode activities— and neural areas involved in narrative overlap significantly with the areas known to be involved in the default network.33 We seem to be converging from a new, unexpected direction on a claim made by researchers associated with conceptual metaphor and blending theories: that the human mind could well be called a fundamentally “poetic” or “literary” mind.34 The mind’s natural tendency to drift away from the here and now when not otherwise occupied had been explored in literary works centuries before its discovery by cognitive neuroscience. Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated writers of the eighteenth century, roundly stated in a famous passage of his novella Rasselas that “no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.”35 He made much the same point in his widely read periodical essays: the second number of the Rambler informs us that the “mind of man is never satisfied with the objects before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment and losing

232   Imagination itself ” in fanciful “schemes.”36 And in a later essay from the same periodical, specifically devoted to the moral need for disciplining one’s thoughts on the past, present, and future, Johnson defines the mind’s habitual condition as one of “incessant cogitation.”37 Johnson also has a name for the mind’s native tendency: not “the default mode,” not “monkey mind,” but “imagination.”38 The Romantic poets and theorists who grew up reading Johnson did not share his dour views on the dangers of imagination. They did, though, share his appreciation for the pervasive and crucial role of imagination in human mental—and moral— life. Literary writing of the Romantic era—a half-century of sustained and unusually sophisticated thinking about imagination, its functioning and, at times, its malfunctioning—provides a rich mine of theories, representations, and critiques of imagination. Although no single Romantic poet or critic sketched out anything quite like today’s default mode network, key connections among various default mode activities recently proposed within experimental neuroscience had been worked out some two hundred years in advance by Romantic writers. Arguably, the Romantics left us a fuller and more nuanced account of the full spectrum of imaginative acts than those the new science of imagination has yet proposed. Bringing early nineteenth- and early twenty-first-century theories of imagination into juxtaposition can lead to a renewed appreciation for the Romantic imagination (which over the course of the 1980s and 1990s had lost a good deal of its purchase as a literary critical concept). It can also suggest ways that cognitive neuroscience might arrive at a more adequate working concept of imagination and at more productive research agendas. Imagination thus becomes a key site for the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive literary studies. What follows provides only a sketch of the many possibilities for two-way exchange between literary and scientific research on imagination. Memory and thinking about (that is, imagining) the future could well strike one as opposed and mutually exclusive mental activities. One deals with the past and with the factual; one with the future and with the merely potential. And yet cognitive neuroscience had already posited a dual memory-imagination cognitive system in advance of widespread recognition of the larger default mode network.39 Initially, memory researchers began noticing how deficits in episodic memories (rich, detailed, largely autobiographical memories, like the time you fell off your bike in your grandmother’s driveway and chipped your front tooth) went along with deficits in imagining comparably detailed future events. Numerous studies, including dedicated neuroimaging studies, confirmed that prospection into the future relies on an intact episodic memory and recruits many of the same neural areas. Prominent memory experts such as Daniel Schacter now speak of “remembering the past to imagine the future”: a prime reason that our memories are as demonstrably decomposable as they are (and therefore so famously subject to error and distortion) lies in the usefulness of memory fragments for piecing together scenarios for possible future action.40 Although Schacter and others present it as a novelty, the notion of a single system for remembering and for envisioning possible futures is in fact the rediscovery of connections well understood by the Romantic era. For the associationist tradition in

Alan Richardson   233 psychology that romanticism both grew out of and reacted against, the identity of memory and imagination was axiomatic: “imagination and memory are but one thing,” as Thomas Hobbes puts it.41 Future thinking relies on re-presenting the images stored in memory, either as originally encountered or as disassembled and recombined. This latter possibility causes some anxiety in rationalists like Hobbes and Locke: fanciful conjunctions might result, Hobbes notes, in “but a fiction of the mind.”42 For Romantic theorists like Coleridge, however, this same decomposability of stored images made possible the creative imagination and thus all real conceptual innovation as well as all lasting art. Sounding uncannily like an early proponent of the “remembering to imagine” view of episodic memory, Coleridge writes that imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create” (compare Schacter, for whom a “constructive” memory system can “draw on the elements” of the past, “recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred” in that form).43 The “conversation poems” of Coleridge and Wordsworth beautifully illustrate the future-oriented character of memory. So strong is the pull of memory in some of these poems that the future orientation centrally concerns future acts of remembering. So in “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” Coleridge, after recounting a series of especially rich memories of his idyllic rustic cottage, concludes by imagining how he will return to it in waking dreams: “My spirit shall revisit thee, dear Cot!”44 Wordsworth builds on Coleridge’s example in one of his defining lyrics, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” a poem pervasively concerned with acts of memory, as many critics have noted. A “default mode” approach, however, underscores how readily memory becomes future directed: the speaker not only compares his memories of a visit five years past to his present perceptions, but notes how memories being laid down in the present will provide mnemonic “life and food / For future years.” The relation of remembering the past to imagining a future in these poems does not always, of course, take such a self-regarding, circular path. At the end of “The Nightingale,” for example, Coleridge recounts a memory of taking his wailing son outdoors to see the moon, which transforms the infant’s tears to smiles; turning to the future, he promises to expose his son to nightingales’ songs, so that “with the night / He may associate joy.” That is, a program of repeated associations between night and beauty (association being the building block of memory) will change his son’s future experience of nature, robbing night of its reputed, and undeserved, gloominess. Wordsworth, toward the end of his “Tintern Abbey” poem, turns to his younger sister, at first only to see in her (problematically enough) a reflected image of his own past. Projecting into the future, however, the speaker succeeds in envisioning a developmental process for her that at first continues to mirror his own trajectory, but that may eventually leave him behind, as she outlives her brother and keeps him with her through memories, including the same memories they are forming together at the moment of poetic speaking. In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge moves from present to boyhood memories (of Christ’s Hospital school in London) to projecting a future for his infant son (named Hartley, after the great associationist psychologist). Hartley’s future inverts and redeems his father’s own dreary childhood, the “stern preceptor” of his schooldays, for example,

234   Imagination giving place in Hartley’s case to God, the “Great universal Teacher,” whose lessons will be conveyed not through books in dead classical languages but through the “eternal language” of nature.45 Neuroscientific accounts of a memory-imagination system looking both backward and forward in time—the “Janus hypothesis”—tend to emphasize the utility of such an arrangement, which provides an “adaptive” rationale for the otherwise perplexing fragility of episodic memory. (Wait, I wasn’t at my grandmother’s house, it was my aunt’s, and it was my wrist that got fractured—I chipped my tooth on that trip to Yellowstone.) Yet however attractive they may prove to literary scholars, neo-Darwinian arguments on behalf of “selection for imagination” tend to underplay many features of imagination taken for granted by humanists, including those that seem downright maladaptive.46 There are good reasons, in other words, for the anxieties toward imagination exhibited by moralists like Samuel Johnson, however overstated they may be, and comparable anxieties have played out in countless fictional works. Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the first in a long line of fictive dreamers who confuse remembered images with those encountered in books and whose “prospective thinking” spectacularly miscarries as a result. The novel of the Romantic era features a number of Quixote-like heroes—and heroines: Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote helped make the confusion of memory and fantasy, real and “romantic” (in the sense of “like a fictional romance”) a special pitfall for young women first entering the world. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, whose heroine overlays modern England with the plots, character types, and scenarios she has absorbed from Gothic fiction, is only the best known of many. Yet novels like William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (an early political novel) and Walter Scott’s Waverley (the prototypical, though not altogether the first, historical novel) demonstrate how a fictionally compromised memory-imagination system comes to mark male characters as well, and features across a broad range of novelistic genres. Both Godwin’s Falkland and Scott’s Waverley share Quixote’s penchant for romance reading, and his inability to keep “information” provided by chivalric romances from insidiously blending with their memories of real-world events. Hobbes had built the potential for just such malfunctioning into his early theory of a memory-imagination system, noting that “when a man compoundeth the image of his own person with the image of the actions of another man, as when a man imagines himself a Hercules or an Alexander, which happeneth often to them that are much taken with reading of romances, it is a compounded imagination, and properly but a fiction of the mind.”47 Twenty-first-century neuroscientific accounts of “remembering the past to imagine the future” have been slow to recognize the potential for fictional contamination that Hobbes theorized and the Romantic novel illustrates; at times, neuroscience seems to offer us an imagination stripped of the imaginary.48 The cognitive scientist’s frequent insistence on an “adaptive,” functional theory of imagination can also lead to distinctions that do not hold up to critical scrutiny. Introducing the term “episodic future thinking” to describe what memory researchers sometimes term “prospection” or, more simply, “imagining,” one group of cognitive psychologists stresses that “in episodic future thinking the imagination is not

Alan Richardson   235 given free reign, but rather, the projection is constrained.”49 Yet detailed, vivid daydreaming about statistically implausible lottery winnings, unlikely sexual conquests, unlooked-for inheritances, improbable job promotions, and the like remain realistically possible while sharing many features with unconstrained fantasy. Consider, say, an hourly digit-by-digit announcement of a winning Powerball number that gradually brings one’s odds of winning from one in 175 million to one in ten—at what point (if any) does fantasizing about the winnings become “episodic future thinking”? Would the odds have to go down to one in two? Three in five? Analogous attempts to discriminate a “recreative” imagination (useful for running mental simulations and counterfactual reasoning) and a fully “creative” imagination (relied upon in inventing fictions and fantasies) seem unable to account for such literary phenomena as the creation of believably “round” yet entirely fictional characters, which would seem to recruit the very same “theory of mind” capacities we rely upon in mentally simulating the minds of other people in the actual world (an allegedly “recreative” rather than “creative” activity).50 For neuroscientists who see the default mode network as primarily “intrinsic” or “self-referential” (we turn away from external perception and activity in the world to concentrate on our own thoughts) the inclusion of theory of mind among the default mode activities has proved something of a puzzle.51 One hypothesis for why a key aspect of “social cognition” should show significant overlap with the default mode network concerns the possibility that “thinking about other minds involves a sort of simulation of the same processes that are engaged in thinking about oneself.”52 Here, again, cognitive science seems to be rediscovering an old connection: the Romantic critic William Hazlitt proposed over two hundred years ago that thinking about other people involved the same mental capacities as thinking about one’s own future self. “I can only abstract myself from my present being and take an interest in my future being,” Hazlitt writes, “in the same sense and manner, in which I can go out of myself entirely and enter into the minds and feelings of others.” These mental acts involve “one and the same process,” a process that cannot take place “in any way but by means of the imagination.”53 Theory of mind overlaps not just with imagination in general but with the literary imagination in particular. Zunshine has shown how literary fiction “pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates theory of mind mechanisms evolved to deal with real people”; in fact, “theory of mind makes literature as we know it possible.”54 Vermeule argues that “literariness” itself, at least in relation to narrative fiction, may involve the recruitment of a given reader’s theory-of-mind capacities.55 Thanks to the pioneering work of Zunshine in particular, theory of mind is one default mode activity that has already been well integrated into literary studies. And cognitive science has noticed: Zunshine’s work on fiction and theory of mind has been cited in at least one neuroscientific review and meta-analysis of the default mode network.56 Daydreaming would seem to be another default mode activity with obvious connections to fiction, narrative, and the literary imagination. In a prescient PET (positron emission tomography) study of “random episodic silent thinking” that preceded widespread recognition of the brain’s default mode by a decade, Nancy Andreason and colleagues linked daydreaming to creativity, meditative and other religious states,

236   Imagination and nocturnal dreaming.57 A “mixture of freely wandering past recollections, future plans,” and loosely connected “personal thoughts and experiences”—a description that patently evokes the default mode—random episodic silent thinking had been represented in the stream-of-consciousness writing of early twentieth-century novelists such as James Joyce and William Faulkner. For Andreason, the brain’s default mode had both literary significance and a distinguished literary pedigree. Yet more recent studies have attempted to find an adaptive, utilitarian function even for daydreaming, apparently on the assumption that any habitual brain activity must contribute in some obvious way to fitness.58 Not surprisingly, such claims have not proved very convincing, and relative frequency of daydreaming (or mind wandering) across individuals has been linked both to clinical depression and to ordinary unhappiness.59 Literary writers have long cultivated states of reverie in their pursuit of creative inspiration, sometimes through alcohol, opium, and other neurotoxins, and not without a certain cost. As the long history of literary and philosophical ambivalence toward imagination should make clear, narrowly adaptive rationales for mind wandering and other default mode behaviors do scant justice to the complexities of imaginative mental life. Of the various mental faculties included in the default mode network, navigation has garnered the least attention. Studies of the default mode continue to be dominated especially by the mirror activities of remembering and imagining, sometimes referred to together as “mental time travel” into the past and future.60 Yet navigation has been included in several major surveys of the default network and one can readily see why traveling through space might well interact pervasively with the brain’s capacities for traveling backwards and forwards through time. Navigating involves projecting oneself forward both in space and time; especially in relation to foot travel through unpredictable environments, calculating times (such as sunrise and sunset) along with routes can prove indispensable to survival. The potential need to backtrack—and the eventual need to return—would involve forming and maintaining episodic memories along the route (“leave the stream for higher ground at the split boulder near the big hemlock, stay on the ridge till the head-shaped outcropping where you saw the eagle”). Storing the entire route in long-term memory for future use would entail creating a future-oriented narrative incorporating scenes, episodes, and vivid imagery. And recounting this narrativized route for other travelers to follow would mean as well taking their perspectives into account (keeping in mind, for example, that they wouldn’t have seen the eagle). Looked at in this way, we could see why navigation (a critical ability for human beings throughout “deep history”) might in fact form the heart of the default mode network. In a fascinating, speculative essay, “Evolution of Imagination,” Steven Mithen notes how navigation (“travelling longer distances and returning. . . with knowledge of unfamiliar places”) would have played a significant role within early human societies.61 The rise of imagination, he hypothesizes, might have been partly driven by the “demands of communication among pre-linguistic humans” in conveying navigational information: “Those who were able to imagine the new places being described” (perhaps through gesture and mime), and “hence have the opportunity to exploit new resources, are likely to have been at an advantage.”62 And among language-using but nonliterate

Alan Richardson   237 humans, oral travel narratives would have harnessed the same capacities for a “narrative” imagination.63 Even modern-day humans traveling well-marked footpaths, such as the Appalachian Trail, continue to make extensive use of narrative in oral exchanges of information (say, about water sources, trail relocations, or trail towns up ahead), in leaving information-rich anecdotes for future hikers in the logbooks at trail shelters, and in trail journals intended to help maintain their memories of the hike. A book that both analyzes and exemplifies the narrativization of the “AT” carries the apt title Story Line.64 Nancy Easterlin has written persuasively about the implications for literary studies, with particular reference to narrative, of the human cognitive predisposition for “wayfinding.”65 Her approach has obvious relevance (although she goes well beyond the obvious) to travel narratives, picaresque and romance narrative modes, poems and novels structured around journeys through space, from Homer’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses. If the cognitive work involved in navigation indeed proves to significantly overlap with the memory-imagination network, then one can readily see how such an approach might be considerably enriched. Returning to the Romantic conversation poem, for example, Coleridge’s “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” presents a complex, vividly detailed picture of the poet’s imagination rapidly oscillating among memory, prospection, navigation, and theory of mind (crucial for “social navigation”) as well.66 Temporarily lamed and left at home thanks to an accident, the poet begins by imagining the rural walk his friends are taking without him and, in a reversal of “Tintern Abbey,” the future memories he stands to lose: “I have lost / Beauties and feelings, such as would have been / Most sweet to my remembrance.” This typically Romantic fusion of memory and future thinking then transitions into navigation, as the speaker details the route he has recommended to his friends, who Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, To that still roaring dell, of which I told; The roaring dell o’erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun.

We can notice here how the poet has given his friends a narrativized itinerary (“of which I told”), how his sense of their movement through space blends with movement through time (they will reach the dell at “mid-day”), and how navigation draws on vivid episodic memories of spots along the way: and there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight!) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone.

As the speaker continues to mentally follow the others through space and time (“Now, my friends emerge. . .”) he begins to engage more fully his theory-of-mind capacities in order to imagine the perspective and emotional reactions of one particular friend, Charles, who lives removed from natural beauty in urban London.

238   Imagination but thou, methinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined And hungered after Nature, many a year, In the great City pent.

This movement of empathy allows the speaker at last to lose any remaining sense of exclusion and to imaginatively fuse with Charles, living in memory what Charles is living in the present moment: So my Friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense.

Through the interlaced activities of what we can begin to perceive as a complex imagination system—memory, prospection, navigation, theory of mind, and reverie (“Silent with swimming sense”)—the poet succeeds in turning loss into gain, aloneness into communion, as what begins in a small-minded sense of exclusion becomes the occasion for great poetry.

Concluding Remarks Self-trained, tireless, and ingenious introspectors that they were, gifted with a rich tradition of imagination theory running from Hobbes through Johnson to Hazlitt, Romantic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth were well positioned to appreciate the multiple overlapping and the restless oscillation among the mental capacities that make up the brain’s default mode network. (So, in their own way, were Romantic-era novelists like Scott, Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft.)67 I concur, then, with Mark Bruhn’s statement that Romantic-era theory provides a “storehouse” of “issues and distinctions” relevant to empirical work on imagination today, and that Romantic poetry offers a “corresponding wealth of prototypical examples and revealing limit cases,” which may help “clarify, further specify, and even experimentally verify evolving theories of imagination” within cognitive science and neuroscience.68 The Romantic era proves especially rich in theories and representations that resonate with the new science of imagination—or, at least it seems that way to those, like Bruhn and myself, trained as Romantic scholars. However, Romanticists have no monopoly in this regard. Promising work on memory and imagination, for example, has already been outlined in relation to literary periods and movements ranging from medieval representations of mind to modernist novels and autobiographies.69 As the memory researcher Yadin Dudai and the cultural historian Mary Carruthers declare, past models and representations of episodic memory and other default mode capacities are not just so many quaint literary curiosities but can prove highly “relevant to neuroscience today.” Ignoring the past may “limit the creativity” of scientific research programs and “bias the interpretation of their outcome.”70

Alan Richardson   239 At the same time, literary investigators can make use of the new science of imagination to better discriminate or appreciate distinctions and interconnections in the past literary theories they study and in the poetic and fictional texts they teach and interpret. Just as the imagery debate within cognitive science has helped revive literary theoretical interest in the work of imaging performed by readers and guided by writers, and work in conceptual metaphor and blending has revitalized literary studies of metaphor, so neuroscientific investigation of the default mode network can now open up literary perspectives on an extensive, multifaceted, and functionally dynamic imagination system. The wealth of opportunities presented by the resurgent interest in imagination for active collaboration among literary and scientific researchers should not be passed up: a great deal stands to be gained on both sides.

Notes 1. Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination:  Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 2. Lorraine Daston, “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science,” Daedalus 127.1 (Winter 1998): 73–95. 3. Michael Tye, The Imagery Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 4. Stephen Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig, Wet Mind:  The New Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Free Press, 1992). 5. Martha J.  Farah, “The Neural Bases of Mental Imagery,” in The New Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 965–74. 6. Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991). 7. Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imagining as Reader Response (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 8. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 9. Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime:  Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 38–57. 10. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. Andrew Hook (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 53. 11. Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New York: Norton, 1998), xi. 12. G. Gabrielle Starr, “Multi-sensory Imagery,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 275–91, and “Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States,” in this volume. 13. Starr, “Theorizing Imagery,” and Feeling Beauty: The Sister Arts and the Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 14. Aristotle, Poetics, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 65. 15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 2: 16; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Prose, or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), 277. 16. Shelley, Shelley’s Prose, 280.

240   Imagination 17. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think:  Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 15, 89. 18. Arnold H. Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), xiii. 19. Modell, Imagination, 27. 20. Shelley, Shelley’s Prose, 283; Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 11. 21. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 22. Mark Bruhn, “Romanticism and the Cognitive Science of Imagination,” Studies in Romanticism 48.4 (2009): 543. 23. Bruhn, “Romanticism,” 548. 24. Bruhn, “Romanticism,” 544 and Bruhn, “Harmonious Madness: The Poetics of Analogy at the Limits of Blending Theory,” Poetics Today 32.4 (2011): 620. See also Bruhn, “Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience: The Prelude,” ­chapter 29 in this volume. 25. William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings, ed. William Richey and Daniel Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 110–15; Modell, Imagination, 27. 26. F. Elizabeth Hart, “Cognitive Linguistics:  The Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor,” Mosaic 28 (1995): 1–23. 27. Marcus E. Raichle, Ann Mary MacLeod, Abraham Z. Snyder, William J. Powers, Debra A. Gusnard, and Gordon L. Shulman, “A Default Mode of Brain Function,” PNAS 98.2 (January 2001): 676–82. 28. Marcus E. Raichle and Abraham Z. Snyder, “A Default Mode of Brain Function: A Brief History of An Evolving Idea,” NeuroImage 37 (2007): 1083–90; Randy L. Buckner, Jessica R.  Andrews-Hanna, and Daniel L.  Schacter, “The Brain’s Default Network:  Anatomy, Function, and Relevance to Disease,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (2008): 1–38. 29. Martijn P.  van den Heuvel and Hilleke E.  Hulshoff Pol, “Exploring the Brain Network:  A  Review on Resting-State fMRI Functional Connectivity,” European Neuropsychopharmacology 20 (2010):  519–34; Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and Judith M. Ford, “Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity in Psychopathology,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 8 (2012): 49. 30. Whitfield-Gabrielli and Ford, “Default Mode,” 51. 31. Whitfield-Gabrielli and Ford, “Default Mode,” 52. 32. Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 773–86. 33. Robert Stickgold, “Memory in Sleep and Dreams: The Construction of Meaning,” in The Memory Process:  Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Nalbantian Paul Matthews, and James L.  McLelland (Cambrdige:  MIT Press, 2011), 90–91; R. Nathan Spreng, Raymond A. Mar, and Alice S. N. Kim, “The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the Default Mode: A Quantitative Meta-analysis,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21.3 (2008): 501–3. 34. Raymond W.  Gibbs Jr., The Poetics of Mind:  Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1994; Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Alan Richardson   241 35. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abisinnia [and] Ellis Cornelia Knight, Dinarbas: A Tale, ed. Lynne Melocarro (London: Everyman, 1994), 60. 36. Johnson, Selected Essays from the “Rambler”, “Adventurer”, and “Idler”, ed. W. J. Bate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 3. 37. Johnson, Selected Essays, 22. 38. Johnson, Selected Essays, 24. 39. See, for example, Schacter and Addis, “Cognitive Neuroscience”; and Demis Hassabis and E. A.  McGuire, “Deconstructing Episodic Memory with Construction,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 299–306. 40. Daniel L. Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, and Randy L. Buckner, “Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future:  The Prospective Brain,” Nature Reviews:  Neuroscience 8 (September 2007): 657–61. 41. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan:  Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier, 1962), 23–24. 42. Hobbes, Leviathan, 24. 43. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. J. Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 1: 304; Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Ghosts of Past and Future,” Nature 445 (January 4 2007): 27. 44. Quotations follow the text in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1997). 45. These readings of “Tintern Abbey” and “Frost at Midnight” are developed in more detail in my essay, “Defaulting to Fiction: Neuroscience Rediscovers the Romantic Imagination,” Poetics Today 32.4 (Winter, 2011): 663–92. 46. Yadin Dudai and Mary Carruthers, “The Janus Face of Mnemosyne,” Nature 434 (31 March 2005): 567. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, 24. 48. Schacter, Addis and Buckner, “Remembering the Past,” 657–61. 49. Christine M.  Atance and Daniela K.  O’Neill, “Episodic Future Thinking,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5.12 (December 2001): 533–39. 50. Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds:  Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 1. 51. Raichle and Snyder, “Default Mode”; Edward A.  Vessell, G. Gabrielle Starr, and Nada Rubin, “The Brain on Art:  Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6.66 (2012): 1–17. 52. Whitfield-Gabrielli and Ford, “Default Mode,” 54. 53. William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action and Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius (1805), ed. John R.  Nabholtz (Gainesville:  Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969), 3, 22, 113–14. 54. Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness,” in Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 198. 55. Blakey Vermeule, “Machiavellian Narratives,” in Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 214, 221. 56. Spreng, Mar, and Kim, “Common Neural Basis,” 501. 57. Nancy C. Andreason, Daniel S. O’Leary, Ted Cizadlo, Stephan Arndt, Karim Rezai, G. Leonard Watkins, Laura L. Boles, and Richard D. Hichwa, “Remembering the Past: Two Facets of Episodic Memory Explored with Positron Emission Tomography,” American Journal of Psychiatry 152.11 (1995): 1576–85.

242   Imagination 58. Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W.  Schooler, “The Restless Mind,” Psychological Bulletin 132.6 (2006): 956. 59. Smallwood and Schooler, “The Restless Mind,” 952; Matthew A.  Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330 (November 12, 2010): 932. 60. Daniel L. Schacter, Donna Rose Addis, Demis Hassabis, Victoria C. Martin, R. Nathan Spreng, and Karl K.  Szpunar, “The Future of Memory:  Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain,” Neuron 76 (November 2012):  677–94; Thomas Suddendorf and Michael C. Corballis, “The Evolution of Foresight: What Is Mental Time Travel, and Is It Unique to Humans?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30.3 (2007): 299–351. 61. Steven Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective,” SubStance 30.1–2 (2001): 28–54. 62. Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination,” 41. 63. Mithen, “The Evolution of Imagination,” 50. 64. Ian Marshall, Story Line:  Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). 65. Nancy Easterlin, “Cognitive Ecocriticism:  Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation,” in Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 257–73. 66. Spreng, Mar, and Kim, “Common Neural Basis,” 490. 67. Richardson, “Defaulting,” 679–85. 68. Bruhn, “Romanticism,” 548–49. 69. Dudai and Carruthers, “Janus Face of Mnemosyne”; Suzanne Nalbantian, “Autobiographical Memory in Modernist Literature and Neuroscience,” in The Memory Process:  Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews, and James L. McLelland (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 255–75. 70. Dudai and Carruthers, “Janus Face of Mnemosyne,” 567.

Works Cited Andreason, Nancy C., Daniel S. O’Leary, Ted Cizadlo, Stephan Arndt, Karim Rezai, G. Leonard Watkins, Laura L. Boles, and Richard D. Hichwa. “Remembering the Past: Two Facets of Episodic Memory Explored with Positron Emission Tomography.” American Journal of Psychiatry 152.11 (1995): 1576–85. Aristotle. Poetics. In Classical Literary Criticism, ed. T. S. Dorsch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Atance, Christine M., and Daniela K. O’Neill. “Episodic Future Thinking.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5.12 (December 2001): 533–39. Brann, Eva T. H. The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. Bruhn, Mark. “Harmonious Madness:  The Poetics of Analogy at the Limits of Blending Theory.” Poetics Today 32.4 (2011): 619–62. Bruhn, Mark. “Romanticism and the Cognitive Science of Imagination.” Studies in Romanticism 48.4 (2009): 543–64. Buckner, Randy L., Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, and Daniel L. Schacter. “The Brain’s Default Network: Anatomy, Function, and Relevance to Disease.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (2008): 1–38.

Alan Richardson   243 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Edited by James Engell and W. J. Bate. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poems. Edited by William Keach. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. Currie, Gregory, and Ian Ravenscroft. Recreative Minds:  Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Daston, Lorraine. “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science.” Daedalus 127.1 (Winter 1988): 73–95. Dudai, Yadin, and Mary Carruthers. “The Janus Face of Mnemosyne.” Nature 434 (March 31, 2005): 567. Easterlin, Nancy. “Cognitive Ecocriticism:  Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” In Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 257–73. Esrock, Ellen J. The Reader’s Eye:  Visual Imagining as Reader Response. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Farah, Martha J. “The Neural Bases of Mental Imagery.” In The New Cognitive Neurosciences. Edited by Michael S. Gazziniga. 2nd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 965–74. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hart, F. Elizabeth. “Cognitive Linguistics: The Experiential Dynamics of Metaphor.” Mosaic 28 (1995): 1–23. Hassabis, Demis, and E. A. McGuire. “Deconstructing Episodic Memory with Construction.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 299–306. Hazlitt, William. An Essay on the Principles of Human Action and Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius (1805). Edited by John R. Nabholtz. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Edited by Michael Oakeshott. New York: Collier, 1962. Hoffman, Donald D. Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. New York: Norton, 1998. Johnson, Mark. Moral Imagination:  Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Johnson, Samuel. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abisinnia [and] Ellis Cornelia Knight, Dinarbas: A Tale. Edited by Lynne Melocarro. London: Everyman, 1994. Johnson, Samuel. Selected Essays from the “Rambler”, “Adventurer”, and “Idler”. Edited by W. J. Bate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Kearney, Richard. The Wake of Imagination:  Toward a Postmodern Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Killingsworth, Matthew A., and Daniel T. Gilbert. “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 330 (November 12, 2010): 932. Kosslyn, Stephen, and Olivier Koenig. Wet Mind:  The New Cognitive Neuroscience. New York: Free Press, 1992. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Marshall, Ian. Story Line:  Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.

244   Imagination Mithen, Steven. “The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective.” SubStance 30.1–2 (2001): 28–54. Modell, Arnold H. Imagination and the Meaningful Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Nalbantian, Suzanne. “Autobiographical Memory in Modernist Literature and Neuroscience.” In The Memory Process:  Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives. Edited by Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M.  Matthews, and James L.  McLelland. Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2011. 255–75. Raichle, Marcus E., and Abraham Z.  Snyder. “A Default Mode of Brain Function:  A  Brief History of an Evolving Idea.” NeuroImage 37 (2007): 1083–90. Raichle, Marcus E., Ann Mary MacLeod, Abraham Z.  Snyder, William J.  Powers, Debra A.  Gusnard, and Gordon L.  Shulman. “A Default Mode of Brain Function.” PNAS 98.2 (January 2001): 676–82. Richardson, Alan. “Defaulting to Fiction:  Neuroscience Rediscovers the Romantic Imagination.” Poetics Today 32.4 (Winter 2011): 663–92. Richardson, Alan. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Schacter, Daniel L., and Donna Rose Addis. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 773–86. Schacter, Daniel L., and Donna Rose Addis. “The Ghosts of Past and Future.” Nature 445 (January 4 2007): 27. Schacter, Daniel L., Donna Rose Addis, and Randy L. Buckner. “Remembering the Past to Imagine the Future:  The Prospective Brain.” Nature Reviews:  Neuroscience 8 (September 2007): 657–61. Schacter, Daniel L., Donna Rose Addis, Demis Hassabis, Victoria C. Martin, R. Nathan Spreng, and Karl K. Szpunar. “The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain.” Neuron 76 (November 2012): 677–94. Scott, Sir Walter. Waverley. Edited by Andrew Hook. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley’s Prose, or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy. Edited David Lee Clark. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954. Smallwood, Jonathan, and Jonathan W. Schooler. “The Restless Mind.” Psychological Bulletin 132.6 (2006): 946–58. Spreng, R. Nathan, Raymond A. Mar, and Alice S. N. Kim. “The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the Default Mode: A Quantitative Meta-analysis.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21.3 (2008): 489–510. Starr, G. Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty: The Sister Arts and the Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Starr, G. Gabrielle. “Multi-sensory Imagery.” In Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 275–91. Stickgold, Robert. “Memory in Sleep and Dreams:  The Construction of Meaning.” In The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives. Edited by Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul Matthews, and James L. McLelland. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. 73–95. Suddendorf, Thomas, and Michael C.  Corballis. “The Evolution of Foresight:  What Is Mental Time Travel, and Is It Unique to Humans?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30.3 (2007): 299–351. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Alan Richardson   245 Tye, Michael. The Imagery Debate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. van den Heuvel, Martijn P., and Hilleke E. Hulshoff Pol. “Exploring the Brain Network: A Review on Resting-State fMRI Functional Connectivity.” European Neuropsychopharmacology 20 (2010): 519–34. Vermeule, Blakey. “Machiavellian Narratives.” In Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 214–30. Vessell, Edward A., G. Gabrielle Starr, and Nada Rubin. “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6.66 (2012): 1–17. Whitield-Gabrieli, Susan, and Judith M.  Ford. “Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity in Psychopathology.” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 8 (2012): 49–76. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings. Edited by William Richey and Daniel Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Zunshine, Lisa “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness.” In Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, 193–213.

Chapter 12

T heorizing I mag e ry, Ae sthetics, and D ou bly Directed Stat e s G. Gab rie l le Starr

Imagery is a key element in much aesthetic experience across the arts of music, painting, and poetry.1 However, it is certainly true that not everyone encounters literature vividly. Even very sensitive readers of poetry may not produce brightly colored or intricately detailed images as, for example, they read Milton’s description of the building of Pandaemonium in Paradise Lost. The fallen angels call forth molten earth, and create    within the ground A various mold and from the boiling cells By strange conveyance filled each hollow nook, As in an organ from one blast of wind To many a row of pipes the soundboard breathes. Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple, where pilasters round Were set and Doric pillars overlaid With golden artchitrave; nor did there want Cornice or frieze with bossy sculptures graven; The roof was fretted gold.2

One might argue that the aesthetic power of this passage comes in large part from the virtuoso ekphrasis, the extraordinary sensory detail in description, which carries an imaginative power that might lead readers to see and hear the flow of molten earth into a titanic shell and a palace being built from the sound of music. This is not to say that there is no aesthetic power, no power of pleasure and emotion and appreciation, that comes from admiring the intellectual virtuosity of Paradise Lost, nor from, for example, knowledge of allusion, theology, or literary form, or even the pleasures of contemplation. This

G. Gabrielle Starr    247 chapter touches on these aesthetic capacities, but primarily explores aesthetic responses by taking the study of mental imagery as its starting point, and I  will argue that by exploring how imagery may function in aesthetic responses, we may learn how aesthetic experience more broadly—experience that reaches past (or altogether eschews) images in favor of, say, appreciation of epic form or the beauty of argument—may move us. In this chapter I will be making some predictions, based on the state of current experimental work, about both imagery and broader brain processes surrounding aesthetic experience, and I will offer a hypothesis about the kinds of material conditions that might ground aesthetic experience, with implications for aesthetic theory broadly put. While there are multiple components to and varieties of aesthetic experience, I argue here that aesthetic experience involves a special instance of a bidirectional state—one that blends internally and externally focused modes of cognition.

Imagery Is Not a Unitary Phenomenon, but There Are Coherent Principles Milton’s elaborate description of Pandaemonium, with its rich texture of sight and sound, is a wonderful starting point for exploring the multiple routes available for aesthetic engagement by way of imagery, for only a few of us will “hear” the sound of exhalations, of choruses and symphony in imagination; and while more might “see” a golden roof or simple pillars, relatively few will envision the square abacus, the capital, or the grooves that are implied by the Doric name.3 Some of these differences have to do with a reader’s competence at decoding Milton’s language; her willingness to envisage primarily the details that are fully described as opposed to merely implied; or her own personal history or predilections that might enable or predispose her to fill in some details while leaving others aside. Moreover, the fundamental ability to have vividly imagined enactments of literary works is also not uniform. Not only are some people simply not very adept at it, but even for readers who imagine vividly, there are key differences. For example, while visual imagery is most commonly engaged while reading (based on what is known about imagery in general, both spontaneous and “under instruction”), for a smaller number of people, auditory imagery, or imagery of taste, texture, or smell may be easily accessible to the imagination, while for others these forms of imagery are exceedingly rare.4 Equally, there are not just differences in how fully individual senses might be imagined by different readers, but there are also differences for any given reader, from one encounter with a text to another. I will turn to questions of individual differences further on in this chapter, but it is crucial first to understand something about the general principles of the neural organization of imagery. It is a fundamental characteristic of mental imagery across sensory modes that it shares a number of the properties of sensory experience and engages brain structures similar, and at times identical, to actual sensation; this gives us insight into

248    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States the ways imagery functions with other brain systems, as we will see.5 However, while it might seem intuitive to approach imagery on a sense-by-sense basis, imagery is in fact better understood as multisensory and multimodal. Rarely will we encounter descriptions that speak only to a single sense. So, for example, imagining a scene may draw not just on sight, but on sound, too, as in a fully imagined experience of Pandaemonium. Even representations that seem primarily to call on a single sense, though, may engage broader sensory awareness or integration. Take a further few lines of Milton’s description: The ascending pile Stood fixed her stately height, and straight the doors, Opening their brazen folds, discover wide Within her ample spaces o’er the smooth And level pavement; from the arched roof, Pendant by subtle magic, many a row Of starry lamps and blazing cressets fed With naptha and asphaltus yield light As from a sky.6

Leaving aside the stench (mothballs and asphalt) that might accompany the visual enactment of this scene, imagery here that might seem simply visual integrates multiple kinds of sense data because it is imagery of motion. Motion matters here not just with the opening doors, but because the trajectory of the imagery invites readers to travel through the portal and deeper into the interior darkness, lit by moving—twinkling, “starry”—lights. Milton organizes visual details here in such a way that, were they available to perception (not just to imagination), seeing them would require not just our eyes to rove about the scene, but our bodies, too, and with “the hasty multitude” to “admiring enter” (l. 731). Our daily experience of all of the senses is in fact biased toward motion: we track the movement of objects, animals, people, and sources of light in our field of vision; sound gives us information about position and movement (both of our own bodies and of objects around us); scents may prompt desires to move towards or away from their sources; touch relies on grasping; taste engages touch and motion of the tongue; and embodied sensation itself is about proprioception—our awareness of where our bodies are in space—and of our bodily movements. We use our senses to map the world for motion.7 We might predict that just as motion dominates sensory experience, it dominates imagined experience, too. There is room for empirical work to show this in precise detail, but it is likely that imagined scenes call with greatest frequency on motor imagery. Elaine Scarry argues that “vivacity”—vividly imagined emotion—is a key dimension of literary aesthetics, and that not only is imagined motion a source of pleasure, but it is what makes visual imagery accessible to us (static images are harder to produce than moving ones).8 If for Stanley Fish literature is a “kinetic art,” it is true in more ways than he intended.9 Motor imagery appears particularly important for encounters with poetry. Why is this the case? Imagined speech is fundamentally multisensory: it often, for many of us, involves auditory imagery, as our minds “hear” the words we read; however, as we read

G. Gabrielle Starr    249 metrical writing, readers use a combination of motor strategies to identify, decipher, and experience meter. Many readers, even in silent reading, imagine making the sounds they read, and in addition to activating auditory cortex, they employ areas of motor cortex, corresponding to imaged motion of tongue or throat. However, encountering and understanding metrical writing fundamentally involves motor processes in other ways, for it is necessary to keep track of the timing of spoken words and syllables, a brain function carried out by motor systems and structures including the cerebellum.10 William Empson maintained that we must get the “muscular image” of poetry in order to understand it; I argue, further, that if we are to encounter metrical poems as linguistic structures with sensory properties that are part of their potential for eliciting aesthetic enjoyment— their ability to enter our lives as pleasure or displeasure—we have to have at very least an imaginative or physical engagement with rhythm.11 For silent reading, however, rhythm is dependent on motor imagery and motor processes at base. That is, even when readers engage in varying levels of imagery in response to description (whether that representation draws on the senses of vision, sound, taste, touch, or smell), and even if they eschew the reproduction of any sensory scene, they engage images of sound and motion whenever they follow the rhythmic path that is meter, or whenever they mimic the sounds they read or “speak” these sounds in silence as they read. So what is the aesthetic force of such imagery—not just “depictive” images (belonging to a text) but “enacted” imagery (belonging to the reader)? Why might it matter that one get a muscular image of a poem or of any linguistic object? And is it possible not just that we “like” imagery in some special way, but that the neural processes underlying imagery function in a way that is particularly powerful in aesthetic terms? To begin, I think the answer to this last question is yes. First, let’s look for a moment at what imagery does. Imagery has epistemic value. Neuroscientists Samuel Moulton and Stephen Kosslyn argue that we use imagery to “make available or generate knowledge.”12 It calls on multidimensional kinds of information and a range of brain systems and processes, drawing together semantic knowledge, sensory data, episodic and working memory, emotional experiences and evaluations. It is synthetic, thus connecting varying modes of knowing and relies on varying systems of mental representation.

Vivid Imagery and Pleasure While there are multiple routes though which imagery may be created and manipulated, imagery enables us to feel pleasures and displeasures in part by calling on systems for reward. Reward is a concept crucial to understanding emotional cognition, as well as to understanding and modeling the motivations that guide our engagement with the world around us. A reward is anything an organism will work to achieve, whether it is food, sex, or shelter (primary reinforcers, with basic survival value encoded by evolution), or even the pleasure of looking at a painting or reading a book (secondary reinforcers, without such evolutionarily determined survival value).13 Reward and its inverse, punishment,

250    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States are intricately connected to emotion, and are crucial to cognitive neuroscience models of emotional life. We have subjective, felt responses to obtaining or being denied what we desire or abhor—joy, excitement, love, anger, fear, and so on, and indeed, it would be nearly impossible to have an emotion without feeling positively or negatively about the emotion state and what caused it, as well as to wish to avoid, obtain, or continue it—and hence assigning it a reward value.14 Imagery can engage reward processes (as well as evoke emotion) outside of any aesthetic context.15 The clearest evidence of reward activity comes from studies of classical conditioning (learning based on pairing a neutral stimulus with a primary reinforcer like food, pain, etc.), where researchers have shown that the rewards associated with imagined circumstances can measurably change behavior.16 Practice with mental imagery may enhance other kinds of reward-based learning, showing again that imagery can influence changes in behavior through reward signaling.17 Imagery may have intrinsic rewards, too. As Scarry and others have argued, for most of us: it requires work both to create and to maintain mental images. Success in doing so ought to deliver a reward upon completion. However, one of the great pleasures of literary imagery also occurs when vivid images emerge in a way that seems effortless—as if the text is doing the work for you. There is evidence for the intrinsic pleasure of full imagery in memory from a series of studies by Jason Leboe and Tamara Ansons. By studying the effects of remembering vivid imagery, they sought to determine if one contributor to nostalgic pleasure was successful recall itself.18 The initial question that arises is whether the production of mental images carries its own pleasures—if there is, to paraphrase Addison, a pleasure of imagination discoverable at a very basic level. Building on a body of literature that indicates fluid, efficient cognitive processes are pleasurable, Leboe and Ansons carried out a series of six behavioral experiments aimed to explore the pleasures of recall.19 In the first, participants were asked either to read a set of words (e.g., “bread,” “tiger,” “jam”) silently or to generate a mental image that associated two target words (like “jam” and “bread”); participants were then tested on their recall and asked to rate the vividness of the images. As expected, vivid imagery enhanced recall.20 In two further experiments, in addition to an initial phase in which subjects were asked to read silently or vividly imagine a single word, in a second phase subjects were given target words (again, like “tiger”) paired with affectively valenced words (“angel,” etc.), and were asked either to read the words silently or to create a mental image associated with the paired words. These experiments were designed to determine if the very fact of creating mental imagery might itself predispose subjects to believe they had encountered the words in a positive context, essentially misattributing the pleasure of imagining to the semantic context of the images. It turned out that imagery alone had no such effect. However, it appears that there are inherent pleasures—and contagious or misattributable ones—to the recall of vivid imagery. Indeed, by comparing results for recall of the target words immediately after imagining them to results for recall at a later point, Leboe and Ansons determine that “the mere generation of vivid recollections can cause the past to acquire associations that are emotionally positive.”21 This is certainly not a summative answer about the roots of nostalgia (and the authors of the study do not claim that it

G. Gabrielle Starr    251 is); however, we do learn convincingly that recall of vivid imagery (not just making vivid images) has surprising hedonic effects. This is an intriguing finding, for it suggests that something happens to particularly vivid imagery when it emerges in memory. The participants in the Leboe and Ansons study were being tested on recall, and in theory there would be a payoff and sense of success from correctly remembering, which would place the task in the context of reward processing (no behavioral rewards were given). The baseline condition for Leboe and Ansons was simple recall of words that were read and not imagined. While there ought to be a reward payoff for successfully retrieving target words alone, there was no pleasurable recall of simple (unimagined) words. This does not indicate that there was no reward associated with the baseline case, but rather that any hedonic effect of the reward had no effect of misattribution: in Leboe and Ansons’s paradigm, if people felt pleased they remembered a word, they attributed it to simply remembering correctly. Instead, then, of arguing that the Leboe and Ansons study gives us specific insight into our memory of words, events, or objects, I think it is better to argue that these findings tell us something about the relationship between memory and imagination, and especially something about the way that vivid images are associated with pleasure. It is probable that the reward assigned to images and the reward associated with their successful retrieval is what is at stake (not the successful retrieval of a memory full stop). What is special, then, about remembering vivid imagery? We don’t yet know, exactly. Remembering vivid imagery could somehow reinforce pleasures of vividness. Perhaps vivid images are encoded more durably and completely than others. Given that positive affect tends to lead to better consolidation of memories, it is possible that the strength of encoding may be taken computationally as a proxy for past pleasure.22 It is also possible that the work and/or the pleasure of successfully creating a vivid image make(s) the image seem special—less mundane—as well as more particularly belonging to and the property of the person who created it. A vivid image may seem more fully the product of one’s own imagination—an achievement peculiarly one’s own. What might this mean for the way we understand the role of imagery in aesthetics? This wasn’t an experiment on literature, and people were generating their own imagery, not imagining under instruction (again borrowing Scarry’s terms). However, there are important clues for how aesthetic experience might work here nonetheless. The potential for vivid imagery to enter into memory as personal pleasure has some analogue in what we know about aesthetics to date.

Intense Aesthetic Response: Balancing External and Internal Cognition In a behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, Edward A. Vessel, Nava Rubin, and I found that powerful aesthetic response to visual art shows

252    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States a unique and surprising profile in brain response, calling on not just emotion, reward, semantic, and visual processes but also selectively engaging central components of the default mode network.23 The default mode network (sometimes called the core network) is an integrated set of brain regions that form the neural basis for a number of important and interrelated activities—daydreaming, imagining the future, autobiographical memory, self-description, monitoring our own bodily condition, and imagining the minds of others.24 It integrates social and more personal data, and it does so through coordinated efforts. That is to say, it is not just that these brain areas are involved in these activities, but that they work together to enable them. Typically, in fMRI experiments, the default mode network deactivates when participants focus on a task, whether it is, for example, making an evaluation of an object, ascribing traits to other people, making a decision, or even something so simple as tapping one’s fingers. For most of the artworks our subjects saw, that is exactly what happened. When we asked participants to evaluate the strength of their aesthetic responses to most of the artworks in our study, we found increases in blood oxygen level dependent signal (BOLD—the key metric linked to brain metabolism and neural activity in fMRI) in areas linked to reward processes (striatum and thalamus) and emotion (orbitofrontal cortex), as well as decreases in areas serving auditory processes and increases in some areas serving visual and semantic processing. We also found what should be expected: decreases below baseline in the default mode network. However, for those works—and those works alone—that were judged to be the most aesthetically powerful by our observers, elements of the default mode network rebounded toward baseline activation.25 A wide range of emotional responses accompanied this rebound toward baseline. There are several things that are particularly important here. The first is that the default mode network selectively activated for intense aesthetic response in this experimental paradigm. Second, while most people would easily agree that a range of emotional responses contribute to intense aesthetic experiences, we were able to measure individual differences in how those emotional responses feed into aesthetic experience for different people.26 Still, even with this diversity of response, the default mode network “signature” of intense aesthetic experience was generalizable across subjects. Individual differences in the emotional palette of aesthetic experience (and in which artworks drove that experience) may well be integrated by the same route. Indeed, areas of the default mode network that rebounded toward baseline are also engaged by and sensitive to emotional processes that contribute to powerful aesthetic experience, particularly the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and the substantia nigra.27 The particular engagement of the default mode network in aesthetic response to visual art may thus involve the integration of reward (substantia nigra) and emotional responses (medial prefrontal cortex), semantic and visual analysis (inferotemporal sulcus) with an evaluation of the personal or subjective context of the images (anterior medial prefrontal cortex).28 The most convincing explanation so far for the engagement of the frontal regions of the network involves, in fact, questions of personal relevance. There is a significant

G. Gabrielle Starr    253 body of experimental results that shows that these regions underlie concepts of self as well as serve to track the degree to which objects, ideas, people, and places are connected to oneself. They for example, track fine distinctions between self, close relatives, friends, and strangers, and the broader default mode network may organize and enable access to social information, with “self ” being one subset of the range of socially pertinent constructs.29 The frontal regions of the default mode network are also flexible, and as self-concept changes over time or across cultures, they code people and places differently. Vessel, Rubin, and I interpret this frontal component of default mode activity (other regions of the network were also engaged in a similar pattern of activity, along with the frontal regions) as reflecting, in part, the way in which a powerfully moving work of visual art may elicit a sense that there is a “harmony between the external world and one’s internal representation of the self.”30 Such an idea has a long history in aesthetic thought. In Kantian terms, this might be understood in reference to cognition, as when for both the beautiful and the sublime, our “liking is connected with the mere exhibition or power of exhibition, i.e., the imagination, with the result that we regard this power, when an intuition is given us, as harmonizing with the power of concepts, i.e., the understanding or reason”: aesthetic judgment is about the harmony of what we see with our ability to think, imagine, and see it.31 I am not claiming that the default network is the agent of Kant’s cognitive harmonies. Such a claim would be problematic for many reasons (not least because Kant’s claim is not framed to be testable behaviorally, and in fact, by Kant’s own definitions his claim is not empirically verifiable, as it is about the powers of cognition, not the world, which acts as if it conforms with those powers). Rather, I argue that there is something peculiar about aesthetic experience in that, in its powerful forms, it makes the external world and internal world seem to be in privileged contact. Another version of this intuition comes in Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, where a character muses: “You can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But. . . if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, “oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.” “I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.” That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper. . . . An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. . . [A]‌really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you.”32

In other words, the powerful artwork isn’t just painted to be seen (a trivial acknowledgment that there must always be a viewer)—it is painted to be seen, and you have found just the right way of looking. Obviously, such a sense of connection between subject and aesthetic object has multiple interpretations, but what matters is that rather than narrowing it to a definitive account as our next step, we ought recognize two things. First, we are talking about a complex phenomenon that feels differently to different people—rushing to determine exactly what we might mean by

254    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States “self ” or “subject” in this case seems less important than testing out the borders of the phenomenon (investigation, that is, happens recursively alongside definition). The phenomenon also goes far beyond brain networks and deep into history and social life. This means further experimental work, but it also means that we might begin to relate this sense of an internal-external, almost binocular vision to what we already know about aesthetics from the history of criticism and philosophy, on one hand, and to a new range of experiences and questions, on the other. This is a moment for expansive inquiry. First, though, the focus for me here is on the neural implications, for the moment. What I think is intriguing neurally is that in moments of intense aesthetic experience we are able to attend internally and externally simultaneously, recruiting networks that are often in opposition. Indeed, I call this an immersive and externally focused state not just because of the known functions of the default mode network or because this has been a consistent theme in aesthetic theory over time. There is other evidence of immersion in the visual artwork. As visual systems stay constant or increase, we find that auditory cortex (even in a noisy fMRI scanner) is suppressed as aesthetic intensity rises.33 As I wrote above, intense aesthetic experience calls on emotion, reward, semantic, and visual processes, too. None of these kinds of processing alone is enough to trigger the responses we found for powerful visual art—and that includes, I believe, a sense of self-relevance that might come from a narrow, identity-based sense of “kinship” between the self and the object of aesthetic perception. Further experimentation should help resolve this question, but, for example, given the variety of artworks that people found to be powerfully moving (a range of genres including landscape, abstract, portrait, and still life, as well as a variety of periods and styles) any likeness to self based on particular characteristics of the object (resemblance to a loved one, memory of a similar place, etc.) would be unlikely to be generalizable across the artworks individuals identified as highly moving. Activation of the default mode network in aesthetic experience is thus about more than a narrow definition of self-relevance alone could give an account. Default mode network activation is one part of the neural substrate of an emotionally valenced immersion in an external object—the artwork—and simultaneously in inner life, with all its complexity and difference. As I argue elsewhere, we have good reason to suspect that the involvement of the default mode network in aesthetics is not limited to works of visual art.34 We know that music can modulate default mode connectivity.35 More broadly, areas of the posterior cingulate cortex as well as the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus show both emotional sensitivity and responsiveness to aesthetic evaluations in a number of studies.36 We also know that some narratives engage the default mode network, and theory of mind does too.37 Further work will be needed to demonstrate not just that similar areas of brain function are involved but that they respond in similar ways—a return to or deflection toward baseline—but I think it is a good bet that this will be the case.

G. Gabrielle Starr    255

Why the Neural Networks Matter If I am right, all of this begins to suggest a special role for the evocation of imagery in response to works of art—whether it is the visual imagery of brazen doors opening to show a sulfurous chamber filled with starry lights, or the imagery that is crucial to the experience of meter. We may have a way of understanding, ultimately, why imagery may carry such swift aesthetic power, and why imagery so insistently returns to prominence across the class of objects we think of now under the rubric of art.38 Imagery works, in short, to achieve something special. It enacts a bidirectionally focused state of experience, where internal representations and external perceptions call on us simultaneously. The brain processes that underlie imagery call on processes for memory, semantic knowledge, sensation, and perception. More than this, imagery networks involve regions of the default mode network, too. However, just because a particular task engages these regions does not mean that a coordinated, network-level return toward baseline in the default mode network will occur because of the presence of imagery. However, in certain cases we do see such a coordinated, network level response.39 Imagining the future and remembering the past—together, commonly called “mental time travel”—are closely related because, as Østby and coauthors argue: Reconstruction of memories based on impoverished bits of information represents an economical way of storing information and may also be able to facilitate anticipation of the future. A reconstructive memory system enables mental time travel by use of previous experiences as a basis for construction of imagined future situations. Thus, there is a theoretical and empirical connection between the ability to reconstruct and re-experience our own personal past and the ability to imagine new experiences.40

A number of scientists have argued that this connection is mediated by the default mode network, and Østby and her colleagues give further weight to this argument by showing that children’s ability both to imagine the future and to retrieve episodic memories is correlated with the functional connectivity of areas in the default mode network.41 It is worth asking a further question about imagery—whether (and how) the activation of imagery networks might interact with the default mode network. We already know that self-relevant imagining (autobiographical memory, for example) engages the default network. The Leboe and Ansons behavioral study gives us a further clue, as it points to a link connecting successful imagining and recollection of images with reward. While Leboe and Ansons did not carry out tests of brain activation, we are on firm ground in assuming that regions of the default mode network were involved in their task. I begin to suspect one way that functionally coordinated default mode network activity (not just activity in separate areas) around autobiographical memory might be engaged specifically in pleasurably recollecting imagery.42 We would need behavioral and fMRI (or other imaging) experimentation to be sure, but a fuller study exploring vivid autobiographical recollection, in contrast with vivid and aesthetically pleasing

256    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States imagery, might offer a test case for exploring the relation between imagery, default network activity, and aesthetic experience. In such a case, default mode network activity in personal recollection might correlate not just with pleasure in successful remembering, but with the way in which that pleasure colors the memory, the way in which it seems to belong to the experience and to the self. This pleasure in such a memory is about immersive experience. Studies of personal memory and pleasure, then, might offer a way of beginning to delineate, more fully, what is distinct about aesthetic responses by giving us a similar class of experiences—anatomically and perhaps even phenomenologically—to help refine our understanding of both. It is not possible in this chapter fully to explore the ways that the immersive pleasures of memory might offer a window onto aesthetic life—but from the Victorian period onward, the discourse surrounding recollection of the past has coevolved with the discourse of aesthetics to suggest that a particularly contemplative set toward past experience (whether we call it nostalgia or not—think Proust here, most certainly) shares a phenomenal link with aesthetic life. I don’t believe they are the same: indeed, the key point and the key difference is that the immersiveness of memory does not necessarily involve the bidirectional perspective that I think is key to intense aesthetic response.43 When it comes to aesthetic experience, we do not yet know for sure if there is an alternating, perhaps tonic, relation or a true mutual activation of perceptual and default mode networks. Cela-Conde and coauthors suggest that the default mode activation comes online after an initial period that may correspond with sensory appraisal, and I think they are right. In general terms, a region called the dorsal nexus acts as a switching point between a variety of networks, including the default, affective, and cognitive control networks. In major depression, for example, the dorsal nexus functions differently, so that hyperconnectivity across networks results in a range of cognitive, emotional, and attentional changes.44 What is at stake thus in a bidirectional state like that of intensive aesthetic experience, which strikes a balance between internally and externally focused cognition, is not, I think, just the default mode network but its interaction with other systems. This means we need to investigate more fully the interaction of systems, and the ways we might arrive at coactivation of the default mode with other networks. Imagery is a key candidate for such an exploration, and I think we are well suited to begin to hypothesize why, when imagery occurs (and again, it need not occur in response to description, but in response to reading, and especially, for example, reading metrical writing), it might help drive aesthetic pleasures. In intense aesthetic responses, processes that normally conflict with one another—introspection and outward, perceptual focus—cease to be in competition. The Vessel, Starr, and Rubin experiment revealed that many of the regions that make up the default mode response in intense aesthetic experience are sensitive to emotion and reward, giving rise to the possibility this positive activity helps drive the coordinated involvement of the network in intense responses. With powerful aesthetic experience, as I argued above, default mode activity emerges because an object calls to us emotionally, hedonically, and personally. Something similar may be true about imagery, too. My hypothesis—that activation of default mode regions through emotional and reward engagement as well as via the

G. Gabrielle Starr    257 production of imagery interacts with the default mode network to promote aesthetic pleasure—is speculative, but there is good prior evidence, and the hypothesis is testable. Let me be clear, however: I am not arguing that pleasurable recall of imagery is aesthetic; I do not argue that pleasurable imagery is necessarily aesthetic; I am also not arguing that imagery is necessary to aesthetics. Rather, I hypothesize that the experience of vivid, hedonically inflected imagery gets us closer to and may enable us readily to achieve intense aesthetic pleasures because it engages networks that integrate external and internal sensation, as well as drawing on the machinery of reward and of emotion. Neural activity in the default mode network, or indeed any other set of brain areas, is not the same thing as aesthetic experience (first, neural activity itself is not a conscious state, and second, the material basis of aesthetic response includes the broader body, and the material world of objects and other people, not just the brain), but it does show us some of the systematic components that underlie our experience.

Bidirectionally Focused States I suggest that vivid imagery might offer privileged access to and a fast route for aesthetic engagement because it involves a bidirectionally focused state, one in which perceptual activity is both self-generated and sparked by external presentation—for example the words that carry rhythm and rhyme, or the textual details that drive description. Now, all of human experience has at least some bidirectional cast. The world in which we live requires such a twinned focus of us, and as we move through it, our perceptions and actions constitute the self in relation to the material world (both as the concrete matter in front of us and as the social, historical, world too).45 In general, though, our awareness of that double focus is weak. But powerful aesthetic experiences involve a heightened awareness of such dual focus, and they involve the felt perception of internally and externally constituted experiences.46 This is Wordsworth’s description of such a heightened state:    And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world

258    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive.47

Wordsworth goes on to describe this as a moral state, as well as an experience of the sublime, both revealing the variety of such bidirectional states and marking out the historical close proximity between aesthetics and ethics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.48 There is thus much to learn about such double focus. Recognizing the role of the default mode network in aesthetic experience is a beginning, helping us to understand why imagery may help drive aesthetic experience and pointing toward a route for seeing how other kinds of engagements drive aesthetic experience, too—if I  am right. Processes that emphasize a bidirectional set—one both inwardly and outwardly focused—ought to be able to facilitate—though not automatically produce—aesthetic responses. Imagery represents one of them, but not the only one. Indeed, beyond the potential of the pleasures of achieved imagery to offer a gateway to default mode engagement and intense aesthetic response, the connection of the default mode network to aesthetic experience may point us toward another way in which intense aesthetic response may come to life: theory of mind. Theory of mind is the umbrella term for the variety of assumptions, inferences, and behaviors that enable much of social life—theory of mind is what underlies our awareness of other people as feeling, thinking, motivated and moral actors. It plays an indispensible role in normal social interactions, and even in basic survival—we can (imperfectly) predict the behaviors of other people and their responses to us because of it. Theory of mind is also important for engaging and understanding fiction, where we follow the strands of emotion, motive, and thought as we imagine characters’ lives, as Lisa Zunshine points out.49 Theory of mind enables human interaction, but in fiction it can be used even to make demons seem knowable—seem like us, charming, wounded, noble, vulnerable. Theory of mind even works as we imagine other consciousnesses, only to know they are forever alien, forever not our own (see especially Zunshine’s work on embedded consciousness and its limits).50 Milton’s Satan, for example, is plausible, convincing, a damaged beauty. Milton in many ways makes Satan as human as possible, drawing attention to his frailty, corruptibility, vulnerability to sin and desire, while Milton simultaneously is at pains to remind us that we are fooling ourselves (or allowing Satan to take advantage of our frailty) when we psychologize a demon. We project our own humanity onto him, but the truth of the epic is more sinister. Not even the angel Uriel, “the sharpest-sighted spirit of all heaven,” can detect Satan’s utter falsity: “For neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone.”51 The representation of other minds—whether in fiction of reality—requires activity in two regions in the default mode network, the temporo-parietal junction and the posterior cingulate cortex (a region particularly implicated in intense aesthetic experience).52 Again, we could predict (and further experimentation should bear this out) that fiction, in drawing on theory of mind, may enjoy a kind of privileged access to the default mode network, to a bidirectional state, and ultimately to aesthetic life. Again, let me be clear.

G. Gabrielle Starr    259 This is not an argument that neural activity in the default mode network is, simply put, the cause of aesthetic experience—indeed, there are many situations in which default mode activity has no relation to aesthetics at all. Rather, I am suggesting that events that contribute to default mode network activation, under conditions of intersection with other systems (which will need experimental elucidation), may contribute to the curious state that is both immersive and intently focused on the exterior world so that an object, idea, or image draws us so strongly it enters our lives as beauty, the sublime, and their kin. I don’t argue that it is simply the neural activity in particular regions that does this, but rather that it is engagement of the cognitive processes these regions serve that brings aesthetically powerful experience to the fore. As more and more of these cognitive processes are engaged, they set the stage for the deeply associative immersive state that is part of intense aesthetic experience. The known functions of the default mode network suggest one route for exploring how this might be achieved. I do not claim that it is the only one. Aesthetic experience requires the integration of the perceptual, more externally focused, experience of a work of art with the variety of internal evaluations we make of it and the transformations we carry out on it: semantic assessments, emotional and reward responses, categorizations and links to broader concepts, images created from it. Given what we know about aesthetics and the default mode network, my hypothesis about the role of bidirectionally focused states can now help, I hope, lay out a path for discovering not just how imagery might drive aesthetic experience, but how aesthetic experience even without imagery may work. There are multiple routes of access to intense aesthetic experience. Imagery is only one of them. While we are not yet able to completely understand or model aesthetic life, or the bidirectional focus at the heart of much aesthetic experience, as we move forward, we should be better able to understand how those processes might come together for an individual at a given time—perhaps as you savor the strange beauty of a handful of lines of verse.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Nava Rubin and Ed Vessel for the collaboration that began this work.

Notes 1. On imagery across the arts, see G. Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Sister Arts and the Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 2. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), Book 1, ll. 705–17. 3. P. W. Sheehan, “A Shortened Form of Betts’ Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 23 (1967).

260    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States 4. See Hitoshi Okada, Kazuo Matsuoka, and Takeo Hatakeyama, “Individual Differences in the Range of Sensory Modalities Experienced in Dreams,” Dreaming 15, no. 2 (2005). I  borrow the phrase “under instruction” from Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 5. See, for example, Andrea R.  Halpern, “Mental Scanning in Auditory Imagery for Songs,” Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition 14, no. 3 (1988); Andrea R.  Halpern and Robert J.  Zatorre, “When That Tune Runs through Your Head: A P.E.T. Investigation of Auditory Imagery for Familiar Melodies,” Cerebral Cortex 9, no. 7 (1999); Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Stephen Kosslyn, William L. Thompson, and G. Ganis, The Case for Mental Imagery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Richard J. Stevenson and Trevor I. Case, “Olfactory Imagery: A Review,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12, no. 2 (2005); Stephen Kosslyn et al., “Imagining Rotation by Endogenous versus Exogenous Forces: Distinct Neural Mechanisms,” NeuroReport 12 (2001). 6. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, ll. 722–30. 7. On the way that sensation offers motor “affordances” or possibilities for action, see James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting, Knowing, ed. Robert Shaw and John Bransford (New York: Wiley, 1977). Some of the key insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind in this regard, with respect primarily to vision, have come from J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë, “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2001). 8. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book. Scarry identifies categories of moving images, including images that are built on processes of unfolding, “radiant ignition” (twinkling stars and other lights), “stretching, folding, tilting,” passing one object in front of another, and many more. 9. Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” in Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), xx. 10. Andre Aleman and Mascha Van’t Wout, “Subvocalization in Auditory-Verbal Imagery: Just a Form of Motor Imagery?” Cognitive Processing 5 (2004); Hermann Ackermann, Klaus Mathiak, and Richard B. Ivry, “Temporal Organization of ‘Internal Speech’ as a Basis for Cerebellar Modulation of Cognitive Functions,” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 3, no. 1 (2004). 11. William Empson, “Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry,” British Journal of Aesthetics 2 (1962). 12. See, for example, Samuel T. Moulton and Stephen Kosslyn, “Imagining Predictions: Mental Imagery as Mental Emulation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 264 (2009): 1274. 13. On reward findings across the arts, see, among others:  Halpern and Zatorre, “When That Tune”; Andrea R.  Halpern et  al., “Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Perceived and Imagined Musical Timbre,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004); Isabelle Peretz and Robert Zatorre, eds., The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Isabelle Peretz and Robert J. Zatorre, “Brain Organization for Music Processing,” Annual Review of Psychology 56 (2005); Edward A. Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin, “The Brain on Art:  Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012). Some theorists argue that aesthetic pleasures are evolutionary adaptations, but I think that this is unlikely to be true for several reasons. Aesthetic experiences are dynamic: the range of pleasures is continually changing

G. Gabrielle Starr    261 and (with the exception of responses to faces and landscapes) show high cultural variation in comparison to food, sex, shelter and water. For a good analysis of many evolutionarily inflected claims about the arts, see J. Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011). 14. Emotions may work in opposition to rewards, too. For example, in the case of depression, we may continue to carry out self-destructive behaviors because of our emotional state. The same holds for pathological addictive responses, where the emotional high is not reinforced positively outside of the circuit of addiction. See, for example, A. Verdejo-Garcia, M. Perez-Garcia, and Antoine Bechara, “Emotion, Decision-Making and Substance Dependence:  A  Somatic-Marker Model of Addiction,” Current Neuropharmacology 4 (2006). 15. There is a broad literature on this, but see, for example, Emily A.  Holmes, Anna E. Coughtrey, and Abigail Connor, “Looking at or through Rose-Tinted Glasses? Imagery Perspective and Positive Mood,” Emotion 8, no. 6 (2008); Emily A. Holmes et al., “The Causal Effect of Mental Imagery on Emotion Assessed Using Picture-Word Cues,” Emotion 8, no. 3 (2008). 16. Mark R. Dadds et al., “Imagery in Human Classical Conditioning,” Psychological Bulletin 122, no. 1 (1997). 17. Elisa M.  Tartaglia, Laura Bamert, Fred W.  Mast, and Michael H.  Herzog, “Human Perceptual Learning by Mental Imagery,” Current Biology 19, no. 24 (2009). 18. Jason P. Leboe and Tamara L. Ansons, “On Misattributing Good Remembering to a Happy Past: An Investigation into the Cognitive Roots of Nostalgia,” Emotion 6, no. 4 (2006). 19. The idea of “processing fluency”—that information our brains process easily is conducive to pleasure—was promoted as a way of understanding Zajonc’s “mere exposure effect”: that very brief exposures to images (in times beneath the threshold of conscious awareness) can lead to preferences for simple stimuli. See Robert Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph Supplement 9 (1968); Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman, “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004); L. L. Jacoby and K. Whitehouse, “An Illusion of Memory:  False Recognition Influenced by Unconscious Perception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 118 (1989); B. W. A. Whittlesea and L. D. Williams, “Why Do Strangers Feel Familiar, but Friends Don’t? A  Discrepancy-Attribution Account of Feelings of Familiarity,” Acta Psychologica 98 (1998). 20. See the long history of visually enhanced memory:  Frances A.  Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1974); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 21. Leboe and Ansons, “On Misattributing Good Remembering,” 607; Carruthers, The Book of Memory. 22. F. Gregory Ashby, Alice M. Isen, and And U. Turken, “A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition,” Psychologial Review 106, no. 3 (1999) gives a good account of the influence of positive affect on memory, among other cognitive processes. 23. Vessel, Starr, and Rubin, “The Brain on Art.” See also subsequent confirmation of this finding in Cela-Conde et al. “Dynamics of Brain Networks in the Aesthetic Appreciation,” PNAS (2013).

262    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States 2 4. On the discovery of the default mode network, see Debra A.  Gusnard and Marcus E.  Raichle, “Searching for a Baseline:  Functional Imaging and the Resting Human Brain,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (2001) and “Functional Imaging and the Resting Brain,” in The Cognitive Neurosciences III, ed. Michael Gazzaniga (Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2004). For work on its functions:  J. R.  Simpson et  al., “Emotion-Induced Changes in Human Medial Prefrontal Cortex: I. During Cognitive Task Performance,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 (2001); J. R.  Simpson et  al., “Emotion-Induced Changes in Human Medial Prefrontal Cortex:  II. During Anticipatory Anxiety,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 (2001); Arnaud D’Argembeau et al., “Self-Referential Reflective Activity and Its Relationship with Rest:  A  PET Study,” NeuroImage 25 (2005); Arnaud D’Argembeau et  al., “The Neural Basis of Personal Goal Processing When Envisioning Future Events,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, no. 8 (2009); R. Nathan Spreng, Raymond A. Mar, and Alice S.  N. Kim, “The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the Default Mode:  A  Quantitative Meta-analysis,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21, no. 3 (2009); J. M. Moran et al., “Neuroanatomical Evidence for Distinct Cognitive and Affective Components of Self,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, no. 9 (2006).On default-mode connectivity, see Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna et al., “Functional-Anatomic Fractionation of the Brain’s Default Network,” Neuron 65, no. 4 (2010); Marwan N. Baliki et al., “Beyond Feeling: Chronic Pain Hurts the Brain, Disrupting the Default-Mode Network Dynamics,” Journal of Neuroscience 28, no. 6 (2008); J. Geday and A. Gjedde, “Attention, Emotion, and Deactivation of Default Activity in Inferior Medial Prefrontal Cortex,” Brain and Cognition 69, no. 2 (2009); Michael D.  Greicius and Vinod Menon, “Default-Mode Activity during a Passive Sensory Task: Uncoupled from Deactivation but Impacting Activation,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16, no. 9 (2004); Michael D.  Greicius et  al., “Resting-State Functional Connectivity Reflects Structural Connectivity in the Default Mode Network,” Cerebral Cortex 19, no. 1 (2008); Hassabis, Kumaran, and Maguire, “Using Imagination”; H. Laufs et  al., “Electroencephalogaphic Signatures of Attentional and Cognitive Default Modes in Spontaneous Brain Activity Fluctuations at Rest,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 100, no. 19 (2003); Lucina Q. Uddin et al., “Functional Connectivity of Default Mode Network Components:  Correlation, Anticorrelation and Causality,” Human Brain Mapping 30 (2009); Stephen M.  Smith et  al., “Correspondence of the Brain’s Functional Architecture during Activation and Rest,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 106, no. 31 (2009). 25. See http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnins.2013.00258/full, ­figure 2. 26. In particular, we found significant differences in brain activations for participants who privileged awe or pleasure over other affective evaluations in aesthetic response (in the pontine reticular formation and inferotemporal sulcus, respectively) (ibid.). 27. See http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066/full, ­figure 6. 28. On the substantia nigra in reward: J. N. Reynolds, B. I. Hyland, and J. R. Wickens, “A Cellular Mechanism of Reward-Related Learning,” Nature 413, no. 6851 (2001); K. A. Zaghloul et al., “Human Substantia Nigra Neurons Encode Unexpected Financial Rewards,” Science 323, no. 5920 (2009). On the substantia nigra and a resting-state network anti-correlated with the default network, see S. Robinson et al., “A Resting State Network in the Motor Control Circuit of the Basal Ganglia,” BMC Neuroscience 10, no. 137 (2009). On the role of the default

G. Gabrielle Starr    263 mode network with assessments of personal relevance, see, for example, Simpson et al., “Emotion-Induced Changes I” and “Emotion-Induced Changes II.” On personal relevance and aesthetics see Vessel, Starr, and Rubin, “Art Reaches Within,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 7 (2013). 29. Todd Heatherton, Carrie L. Wyland, C. Neil Macrae, Kathryn E. Demos, Bryan T. Denny, and William M. Kelley, “Medial Prefrontal Activity Differentiates Self from Close Others,” Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1, no. 1 (2006), doi:10.1093/scan/nsl001. On the idea that “self ” is one form of social knowledge that the default network tracks, see J. M. Moran, W. M. Kelley, and T. F. Heatherton, “What Can the Organization of the Brain’s Default Mode Network Tell Us about Self-Knowledge?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7, no. 391 (2013), doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00391. Such a broadly social idea of self is not incompatible with much discussion about subjectivity from Montaigne through (at least) Starobinski. 30. Vessel, Starr and Rubin, “Art Reaches Within.” 31. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 97. 32. Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (New  York:  Little Brown, 2013), 758. Thanks to Christina Ciambriello for this citation. 33. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066/full, ­figure 3. 34. Starr, Feeling Beauty, chap. 2. 35. Benjamin Kay, Xiangxiang Meng, Mark DiFrancesco, Scott Holland, and Jerry Szaflarski, “Moderating Effects of Music on Resting State networks” Brain Research 4. no. 1447 (2012). 36. See for example:  Thomas Baumgartner et  al., “The Emotional Power of Music:  How Music Enhances the Feeling of Affective Pictures,” Brain Research 1075, nos. 151–64 (2006); Anne J. Blood and Robert Zatorre, “Intensely Pleasureable Responses to Music Correlate Activity in Brain Regions Linked to Reward and Emotion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 98 (2001); Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki, “Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty,” PLos ONE 6, no. 7 (2011); Hideaki Kawabata and Semir Zeki, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2004). 37. Hassabis, Kumaran, and Maguire, “Using Imagination.” 38. See Starr, Feeling Beauty, chap. 2. 39. On spatial and functional relationships between imagery and the default mode network, see Moulton and Kosslyn, “Imagining Predictions”; Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, and Eleanor A. Maguire, “Using Imagination to Understand the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 27, no. 52 (2007); Demis Hassabis et al., “Patients with Hippocampal Amnesia Cannot Imagine New Experiences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 5 (2007). 40. Ylva Østby et  al., “Mental Time Travel and Default-Mode Network Functional Connectivity in the Developing Brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 109, no. 42 (2012): 16800. 41. See, for example, Randy L. Buckner and Daniel C. Carroll, “Self-Projection and the Brain,” Trends in Cognitive Science 11, no. 2 (2007). 42. On the relation of the imagery of recall and imagination more broadly to the default mode network cf. Østby et al., “Mental Time Travel.” On the tracking of affective charged personal information and the default mode network, see Moran et  al., “Neuroanatomical Evidence for Distinct Cognitive and Affective Components of Self,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, no. 9 (2006).

264    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States 43. See Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), and the work of Suzanne Nalbantian, especially Memory in Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2004). 44. Yvette I.  Sheline, Joseph L.  Price, Zhizi Yan, and Mark A.  Mintun, “Resting-State Functional MRI in Depression Unmasks Increased Connectivity between Networks via the Dorsal Nexus,” PNAS 107, no. 24 (2010): 11020–25. 45. See Alva Noë, Action and Perception (Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2006) and Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 46. Michael Clune argues that everyday experience is in fact less vivid than powerful aesthetic experience in Writing against Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 47. William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” ll. 93–106. 48. See G. Gabrielle Starr, “Ethics, Meaning and the Work of Beauty,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 361–78. 49. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 50. Lisa Zunshine, “Sociocognitive Complexity,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 1 (2012). 51. Paradise Lost, Book 3, l. 691, pp. 82–85. 52. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066/full, ­figure  6; Jason P. Mitchell, “Activity in Right Temporo-Parietal Junction Is Not Selective for Theory-ofMind,” Cerebral Cortex 18, no. 2 (2008); Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher, “People Thinking about Thinking People: The Role of the Tempero-Parietal Junction in ‘Theory of Mind,’ ” NeuroImage 19 (2003); R. Saxe and A. Wexler, “Making Sense of Another Mind: The Role of the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction,” Neuropsychologia 43, no. 10 (2005).

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G. Gabrielle Starr    267 Moran, J. M., C. N. Macrae, T. F. Heatherton, C.L. Wyland, and W. M. Kelley. “Neuroanatomical Evidence for Distinct Cognitive and Affective Components of Self.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18, no. 9 (2006): 1586–94. Moran, J. M., W. M. Kelley, and T. F. Heatherton. “What Can the Organization of the Brain’s Default Mode Network Tell Us about Self-Knowledge?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7: 391 (2013): doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00391. Moulton, Samuel T, and Stephen Kosslyn. “Imagining Predictions: Mental Imagery as Mental Emulation.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 264 (2009): 1273–80. Noë, Alva. Action and Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. O’Regan, J.  Kevin, and Alva Noë. “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2001): 939–1031. Okada, Hitoshi, Kazuo Matsuoka, and Takeo Hatakeyama. “Individual Differences in the Range of Sensory Modalities Experienced in Dreams.” Dreaming 15, no. 2 (2005): 106–15. Østby, Ylva, Kristine B.  Walhovd, Christian K.  Tamnes, Hakon Grydeland, Lars Tjelta Westlye, and Anders M. Fjell. “Mental Time Travel and Default-Mode Network Functional Connectivity in the Developing Brain.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 109, no. 42 (2012): 16800–804. Peretz, Isabelle, and Robert J.  Zatorre. “Brain Organization for Music Processing.” Annual Review of Psychology 56 (2005): 89–114. ———, eds. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman. “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure:  Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004): 364–82. Reynolds, J. N., B. I. Hyland, and J. R. Wickens. “A Cellular Mechanism of Reward-Related Learning.” Nature 413, no. 6851 (2001): 61–70. Robinson, S., G. Basso, N. Soldati, U. Sailer, J. Jovicich, L. Bruzzone, I. Kryspin-Exner, H. Bauer, and E. Moser. “A Resting State Network in the Motor Control Circuit of the Basal Ganglia.” BMC Neuroscience 10, no. 137 (2009): 19-21. Rolls, Edmund T. Emotion Explained. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Saxe, R., and A. Wexler. “Making Sense of Another Mind:  The Role of the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction.” Neuropsychologia 43, no. 10 (2005): 1391–99. Saxe, Rebecca, and Nancy Kanwisher. “People Thinking about Thinking People: The Role of the Tempero-Parietal Junction in ‘Theory of Mind.’ ” NeuroImage 19 (2003): 1835–42. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Sheehan, P. W. “A Shortened Form of Betts’ Questionnaire upon Mental Imagery.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 23 (1967): 386–89. Simpson, J. R., A. Z. Snyder, D. A. Gusnard, and M. E. Raichle. “Emotion-Induced Changes in Human Medial Prefrontal Cortex: I. During Cognitive Task Performance.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 (2001): 683–87. ———. “Emotion-Induced Changes in Human Medial Prefrontal Cortex:  II. During Anticipatory Anxiety.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 (2001): 688–93. Smith, Stephen M., Peter T.  Fox, Karla L.  Miller, David C.  Glahn, P. Mickle Fox, Clare E. Mackay, Nicola Filippini, Kate E. Watkins, Roberto Toro, Angela R. Laird, and Christian F. Beckmann. “Correspondence of the Brain’s Functional Architecture During Activation and Rest.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 106, no. 31 (2009): 13040–45. Spreng, R.  Nathan, Raymond A.  Mar, and Alice S.  N. Kim. “The Common Neural Basis of Autobiographical Memory, Prospection, Navigation, Theory of Mind, and the

268    Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States Default Mode: A Quantitative Meta-analysis.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21, no. 3 (2009): 489–510. Starr, G. Gabrielle. “Ethics, Meaning, and the Work of Beauty.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 361–78. ———. Feeling Beauty:  The Sister Arts and the Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Stevenson, Richard J., and Trevor I. Case. “Olfactory Imagery: A Review.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12, no. 2 (2005): 244–64. Tartaglia, Elisa M., Laura Bamert, Fred W. Mast, and Michael H. Herzog. “Human Perceptual Learning by Mental Imagery.” Current Biology 19, no. 24 (2009): 2081–85. Uddin, Lucina Q., A. M.  Clare Kelly, Bharat B.  Biswal, F. Xavier Castellanos, and Michael P. Milham. “Functional Connectivity of Default Mode Network Components: Correlation, Anticorrelation and Causality.” Human Brain Mapping 30 (2009): 625–37. Verdejo-Garcia, A., M. Perez-Garcia, and Antoine Bechara. “Emotion, Decision-Making and Substance Dependence:  A  Somatic-Marker Model of Addiction.” Current Neuropharmacology 4 (2006): 17–31. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Vessel, Edward A., G. Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin. “Art Reaches within Aesthetic Experience, the Self and the Default Mode Network.” Frontiers in Neuroscience 7 (2013). ———. “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012). Whittlesea, B. W. A., and L. D. Williams. “Why Do Strangers Feel Familiar, but Friends Don’t? A  Discrepancy-Attribution Account of Feelings of Familiarity.” Acta Psychologica 98 (1998): 141–65. Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1936. Zaghloul, K. A., J. A. Blanco, C. T. Weidemann, K. McGill, J. L. Jaggi, G. H. Baltuch, and M. J.  Kahana. “Human Substantia Nigra Neurons Encode Unexpected Financial Rewards.” Science 323, no. 5920 (2009): 1496–99. Zajonc, Robert. “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph Supplement 9 (1968): 1–27. Zunshine, Lisa. “Sociocognitive Complexity.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45.1 (2012): 13–18. ———. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

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Emotions in Literature, Film, and Theater

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Chapter 13

What Literatu re T e ac h e s U s ab ou t E mot i on Synthesizing Affective Science and Literary Study Patri ck C olm H o gan

The cognitive study of literature—like its psychoanalytic, linguistic, sociological, or other study—commonly proceeds from the (non-literary) theory (e.g., neuroscience) to a literary text. However much researchers may tweak the theory in question, most often the direction of understanding is from cognitive science to literature. Nonetheless, a few researchers have argued that valuable insights may be derived by moving in the opposite direction, from literature to cognitive science. More precisely, a number of writers have argued that, in the words of neuroscientist Semir Zeki, “there is one vast area of evidence that neurobiology has not yet tapped.”1 That area is “art,” prominently including literature. It is important that Zeki refers to “evidence” here, not merely raw data. Presumably everyone would agree that neurobiology should in principle explain the data of art. Joyce’s Ulysses or Vermeer’s Girl With Pearl Earring was the product of a brain. So neuroscience should be able to tell us something about its production. But Zeki is saying more. He refers what is represented in literature, along with the effects it has, and the activity of its production—in short, the complex of products and processes that comprise a work of literature. This complex, he maintains, tells us something directly about the nature of cognition—prominently, perception and emotion. This chapter makes an extended argument for this point, specifically in connection with emotion. (Zeki’s treatment of perception focuses on visual art. It is therefore less relevant here.) The general idea is in keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science. Arguably, the flourishing of cognitive science is due precisely to its embrace of theoretical and empirical research from a range of formerly insular fields of study. Computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and philosophy contributed to the initial formulation of the field. Soon anthropology, dynamic systems theory from physics, social psychology, neurobiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other

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274    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion fields began to contribute. The continual growth of cognitive science, its remarkable advancement, has been due to the fact that researchers from these different fields not only accepted the previous findings of cognitive science, but became active participants in cognitive science research programs, contributing the expertise of their own fields. Zeki’s and my arguments simply continue this general trend, extending it to literature and the arts. This chapter begins with an outline of my general argument for the place of literature in affective science. From there, it overviews some key points in the emotion analyses of Zeki and myself, as well as the related work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum and psychologist Keith Oatley (along with his research colleagues). These four authors represent the diverse disciplinary backgrounds of theorists interested in what literature teaches us about emotion. They also represent different approaches and attitudes. For example, Zeki and I largely confine ourselves to understanding particular emotions, based on a strongly neurological model of affect. In contrast, Nussbaum and Oatley argue for practical emotional benefits produced by literature. Specifically Nussbaum stresses moral training and Oatley points toward refinement of emotional intelligence. In connection with this, both rely on a much more deliberative account of emotion. Zeki and I differ as well. While Zeki emphasizes innate concepts, I focus on multicomponent affective relations and critical period experiences. In order to give greater coherence to the discussion, the outline of these various accounts focuses on romantic love. The final section takes up a specific poem, a devotional love poem attributed to the sixteenth-century Hindi-language poet Mīrābāī.

Literature as Discovery and Justification Perhaps the first point to make here is that the experience of emotion is fundamental to research on emotion. In connection with this, it is important to distinguish between explanation and interpretation. Specifically, neurobiology may explain emotion, but our experience of emotion serves to interpret the neurobiology. For example, there is evidence that certain sorts of stimulus can activate the anterior insula. But we cannot understand that anterior insula activation as emotional or motivational unless we interpret it by reference to disgust.2 Ultimately, neurocognitive explanations of emotion are explanations of emotional experience. We are interested in explaining anterior insula activation precisely because that gives us an explanation, or a partial explanation, of disgust. But, in research, we do not have direct access to the emotional experience at issue. Of course, in rare cases, a researcher may also be the test subject. In that case, we might say that the researcher has something like direct access to the emotion. However, that is not typically the case. In any event, no one else in the research team has access to the

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Patrick Colm Hogan    275 emotional experiences of that researcher, nor do readers of the resulting publication. Rather, in research, we are typically dealing with representations—representations of the predispositions (e.g., statements about mood), the emotional experiences themselves (e.g., statements about punctual emotional response), and so on. Thus, at a fundamental level, research on emotion requires some way of producing accurate representations of emotional experience. There are commonly two ways of eliciting such representations. The first involves the labeling of emotional experiences by test subjects in highly controlled laboratory conditions. This is, of course, a valuable procedure. It helps us to isolate the operations of neuroanatomical regions or circuits. Moreover, it is likely to be very accurate. When faced with a picture of feces or an appropriate odor, a test subject can readily judge that he or she feels disgust. There is presumably not much emotional complexity, ambivalence, or nuance involved. The test conditions are designed precisely to eliminate such complexity, ambivalence, and nuance. However, the benefits of laboratory research are also its drawbacks. The extreme artificiality of the circumstances and the extreme simplification of the resulting emotional responses limit the applicability of such studies to real emotional life—except in cases where real emotional life mimics laboratory conditions (e.g., if one unexpectedly comes upon feces). In short, as is well known, laboratory research on emotions often falls short on ecological validity. A second form of research takes up diaries or related records of real-life emotion. But this is perhaps more problematic. First, the experimental conditions undoubtedly interfere with the test subject’s experiences, as well as his or her memories and interpretations. Thus the ecological validity of such research is imperfect. Second, this sort of research commonly relies on test subjects’ highly fallible memories of the experience. As Gilbert and colleagues point out, “the ability to remember one’s emotional experiences accurately is so prone to error and distortion that inaccurate theories about the affective consequences of ordinary events may persist indefinitely.”3 In addition, the complexity of the emotions at issue makes it less likely that the verbal representation will be precise and valid. It is one thing to describe one’s emotional response to a bad smell, but quite another thing to describe the response to one’s spouse getting a promotion that one anticipated for oneself. The problem is compounded by the fact that, not only the subjective feelings, but the eliciting conditions too are highly complex and difficult to represent. Literature has considerable advantages in this context. As I have explained elsewhere, “When successful, a literary work produces a complex emotional experience in the reader. This experience is inseparable from the depictive content of the narrative.”4 Specifically, the emotional experience is an empathic response to the characters, their goals, conditions, successes and failures, and so on. In this way, the emotional experience of literature is of the same general sort as we have in real life. It involves the same kinds of aspirations, frustrations, conflicts, and so on. Moreover, we have a clear record of the eliciting conditions—just as we have a clear record in the case of laboratory research, with the difference that a story, play, poem, or novel is far more complex than a photo of a pleasant or

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276    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion aversive stimulus. Finally, we need very little in the way of experiential representations in such cases, for the experiences are presumably empathic versions of the emotions represented in the work. Of course, there is variation in individual readers’ responses to works. However, if we take works that are successful over many historical periods and, even better, different cultures, it is very likely that those idiosyncrasies will balance themselves out. Enduringly successful tragedies (bearing on grief), farces (communicating mirth), and romantic comedies (engaging interest in lovers) are likely to suggest properties of grief, mirth, and romantic love—for it is precisely these properties that engage audience members empathically. Given this, it seems that the depictive content of enduringly successful literary works should have a significant place in the study of emotion. Of course, this is not to say that we should simply accept literary depictions as valid accounts of how emotions operate. Here, as elsewhere, we should continually subject hypotheses to qualification or rejection by reference to various sources of data. We do not simply accept the most obvious interpretations of anthropological, linguistic, psychological, or other research. Rather, we place that research in the context of other research, seeking to discern any convergent trends as well as incompatibilities. The same point holds for literary study. It too may contribute (fallibly) to research programs in emotion, relying on convergence with research from other sources. Indeed, every form of research has its own characteristic weaknesses. The point holds no less for literary study. It is important to isolate three. First, literary works may present explicit statements about emotions. Such statements may be set out to explain the nature of the emotions in question. In any given case, it is possible that the author was unusually insightful and thus able to explain the emotion accurately. However, this is rarely the case. Far more commonly, such overt explanations are simplifications or even simply false. The emotional value of the work comes in its depiction of the complex trajectories of emotion episodes, not in its explicit claims about emotions. Of course, even the depictions may be inaccurate. Such inaccuracy may be emotionally effective or emotionally ineffective. We may leave aside the latter since such errors are unlikely to be repeated across literary works. In other words, if a particular novel misrepresents romantic love in a way that does not engage readers emotionally, it seems unlikely that this same misrepresentation will recur in other works treating romantic love. The situation with emotionally effective errors is, obviously, different. This leads to the second characteristic problem with emotion depictions in literature. Literary works seek to produce enhanced empathic responses on the part of readers. In consequence, they are likely to alter the depiction of emotions in ways that will serve that end. If certain sorts of accurate depiction would produce an undesirable ambivalence in readers, then those sorts of depiction are likely to be altered. In other words, the depiction is likely to be idealized. For example, lovers may be made impossibly single-minded in their devotion to the beloved, if stray attractions to other people (however realistic) would inhibit the reader’s empathy. Finally, literary works are social artifacts that serve many functions. They are not simply governed by emotional effectiveness. Or, rather, their emotional effectiveness may be more relevant to some groups than others and it may be involved with political and social hierarchies and preferences. In consequence, literature is inseparable from

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Patrick Colm Hogan    277 political and social ideologies. The most obvious effect of this bears on group divisions and the relation of group divisions to emotions. For example, a literary work is prima facie untrustworthy insofar as it depicts gender and emotion in stereotypical ways. More precisely, it is untrustworthy as a depiction of natural emotional propensities. It may provide good evidence of ideological preferences. These characteristic weaknesses necessarily qualify the value of literature for the study of emotion. But that only means that literature will be, again, a fallible contributor to such a research program. In short, it is comparable to all other contributors.

Zeki: Constancy and Innate Concepts Zeki does not offer a detailed argument for the importance of literature and art in understanding emotion. However, as a practicing neuroscientist, he affirms that importance from his own experience. That experience comes from Zeki’s sense of the limitations of neuroscience as well as his experience of the insights of literature and art. Zeki’s account of literature and emotion is of a piece with his general account of the operation of the human brain. For Zeki, “a central and primordial function of the brain is the seeking of knowledge,” which it does “through the formation of concepts.”5 There are two sources for such concepts in Zeki’s account. Some concepts are innate. Others are acquired through processes of abstraction from particulars. In both cases, the brain seeks constancy in a world of flux. The point bears on concepts ranging from “tree” (we abstract what is constant even though our experience of trees is continually changing) to “love.” Indeed, in all cases, our concepts combine innate and acquired concepts. (Zeki’s terminology is somewhat confusing here. It may have been more felicitous to speak of, say, innate categories and acquired concepts.) In relevant cases, these concepts establish ideals. Slightly extending Zeki, we may say that concepts commonly involve emotional preferences. These preferences are functional. One’s concept of a table, for example, involves preferences based on the use of a table (e.g., a table generally should not slope). In other cases, the functions may be more directly emotional (e.g., the color coordination of components in a room may not bear on the use of the room; its function is aesthetic). Some concepts bear on objects with multiple functions. An ideal is formed when the concept includes the highest degree of preference across functions. This is what leads to the “splendors and miseries of the brain” mentioned in Zeki’s title. Specifically, “The splendor of the brain is that it is capable, seemingly effortlessly, of generating so many concepts and thus acting as a very efficient knowledge-acquiring or, if one prefers, knowledge-generating system.” But “this splendid machinery entails” a degree of “misery.” He explains that “The incapacity of our daily experience to live up to and satisfy the synthetic concepts that the brain generates commonly results in a state of permanent dissatisfaction.”6 These points bear on emotion, particularly romantic love, and on art—both separately and together. As to art, Zeki contends that, since the ideal is impossible in life, we strive

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278    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion for it in art. The production of art is a process of approximating the ideal in one’s mind. But, as it turns out, this too is impossible. This leads Zeki to see incompleteness, not as a fault in art, but as an almost inevitable technique, a way of dealing with this creative impossibility. Though the fragment is stereotypically associated with romanticism, Zeki finds what might be called productive incompleteness in pre-Romantic art as well. For example, he argues that “Michelangelo brought his sculptures to a certain finish, which he judged to be adequate to convey as well as he could the concept in his brain, leaving it to the viewer to complete the unfinished.”7 In a separate line of analysis, Zeki contends that a key concept in art is the innate concept of ambiguity. As Zeki explains, this is “an inherited brain concept, which dictates that more than one group of cells or more than one area is engaged when viewing a scene that cannot be definitively resolved into one stable and unchanging entity, regardless of viewing conditions.”8 Zeki finds ambiguity in art to be particularly crucial. This idea seems to be somewhat in tension with his view of art as expressing an ideal. Moreover, it is not entirely clear how ambiguity as such makes art pleasing. In some cases, it seems that Zeki is not speaking so much about ambiguity proper as about the leeway a reader has in “concretizing” a work (as Ingarden would put it),9 that is to say, filling in indeterminate details, such as the appearance of a minimally described character. Such concretizing could potentially respond to individual interests on the part of readers, thus giving concretization ambiguity (as we might call it) an emotional function. Indeed, Zeki’s distinction between innate and acquired concepts could fit here. A work of art might involve striving for an ideal. Insofar as that ideal is innate, it would be constant across people, Zeki emphasizes. However, insofar as it is acquired, it would vary. Thus the artist would strive to produce a work that is fixed for the constant ideal, but concretization ambiguous for the variable ideal. This brings us to romantic love. Zeki maintains that “the fundamental concept behind the emotion of love” is “unity-in-love.”10 This concept is innate and constant. However, he maintains, people have various acquired concepts of the type of person they would love. Though Zeki does not state this, we might construe his theory in the following way. The artist strives to communicate the constant, innate concept, “unity-in-love.” At the same time, he or she leaves the work concretization ambiguous, thereby allowing various acquired preferences to enter in the reader’s concretization of the work. Combining the two lines of Zeki’s analysis, we may say that the fragmentary or incomplete work provides one way of accomplishing this.

Hogan: Three Levels in the Literary Understanding of Emotion My approach is somewhat different. It begins by distinguishing three levels at which the study of literature may contribute to affective science. The first concerns general

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Patrick Colm Hogan    279 features of literature. We may consider two examples. The first concerns tragedy and melodrama. Though not as frequent as comedy, sorrowful works do occur in distinct traditions and are prized in those traditions. Even comic works often have sorrowful moments. Thus we may ask, “Why is it that we engage in simulation of emotionally aversive situations?”11 The obvious answer is that we simulate emotionally aversive situations in tragedies because we enjoy it. But this raises the further question of why we enjoy simulating aversive situations. We may explain such enjoyment in two steps—one functional, one mechanical. First, simulation would have no evolutionary function if we simply felt aversion at negative imaginations. The whole point of simulation is that it allows us to avoid potentially harmful outcomes. If I go hunting in a place where there are lions, I will be eaten. If I imagine going hunting there and envision this possibility, I will avoid going, thus preserving my life. The deterrent effect of the imagination relies on the negative emotion. But if there were only a negative emotion, then we would simply avoid imagining the scenario—and thereby lose the benefits of such imagination. The second part of the explanation ties this enjoyment to the reward system. As the case of literature makes clear, simulation of aversive situations is often empathic. This may seem to add a further complication. However, real-life egocentric simulations (such as the imagination of hunting, just mentioned) are in fact empathic, since we are not directly experiencing what our hypothetical self will go through. Consistent with this, neuroscientific research gives us evidence of the involvement of the brain’s reward system in compassion.12 The second example concerns emotion sharing. Readers’ enjoyment of literature is not only connected with sharing the emotions of authors. It is also bound up with sharing emotions with other readers. This is noteworthy because we most often want to share works that we enjoy. Rimé has recently demonstrated the importance of emotion sharing.13 However, Rimé’s studies focus on negative emotions (such as sorrow). Moreover, they treat recounted emotions. The sharing of literature (as well as film and other arts) involves positive emotions and what is in effect the recreation of the initial experience. In this sense, it is far more fully a case of emotion sharing. When I recount a trauma to a friend, my purpose is not to give him or her the same traumatic experience. However, when I share a tragic play with a friend, my purpose is in fact to provoke the same sorrowful joy as I felt. We may refer to these as, first, “communicative” and, second, “experiential” or “simulative” sharing, respectively. We seem to be particularly prone to engage in simulative sharing with attachment figures. This is in keeping with other research that shows a link between empathic joy and attachment.14 There are evolutionary functions for these propensities as well. First, experiential emotion sharing generally enables emotion calibration. One can evaluate one’s own emotional response to a situation relative to that of others. Second, experiential emotion sharing bears on attachment bonding. On the one hand, it helps to build a set of common experiences, thus shared memories, that may serve to enhance mutual understanding and ease of communication, along with a sense of intimacy, in a developing attachment bond. On the other hand, experiential emotion sharing may render more

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280    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion accurate one’s sense of another person’s emotional similarity or difference. Difference is perhaps particularly important in existing attachment relations, where we may have an inclination to overestimate uniformity of emotional response. In short, the study of general literary properties leads to new insights regarding aversive simulation and positive emotion sharing. The insights bear on literature, of course. But they also bear on aspects of emotional response that are of great importance outside literature. In addition to these general literary features, there are also features that recur across types of literary work, such as genres. This is the second level at which I see literature as contributing importantly to the understanding of emotion. Here, we may consider narrative universals. In The Mind and Its Stories and Affective Narratology, I have argued that certain story structures recur with disproportionate frequency across traditions of verbal art. These include romantic tragicomedy in which two people fall in love, encounter social obstacles (commonly from familial, social, or religious authority) and are separated (often through exile, frequently with hints or imagery of death), but are ultimately reunited. A full account of literary universals requires separate treatment. However, it is important to note that such patterns have potentially important consequences for our understanding of the emotions that animate these genres. To take one small example, the case of romantic tragicomedy suggests that, to a perhaps surprising degree, romantic love is constant across cultures and historical periods. Moreover, people in different times and places empathize with attachment bonds over social authority. On the one hand, this suggests that the widely asserted social and historical “construction” of romantic love and of people’s understanding of romantic love is, at best, very much overestimated. At the same time, the existence of such cross-cultural patterns leads to questions about just how and why historically and culturally specific constraints on attachment are established and sustained. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, I  consider the value of particular literary works in extending our knowledge about emotion. Specifically, it appears that social emotions of the sort treated in literature are most often not a matter of single emotion systems. Rather, they are the product of interacting emotion systems. The interactions are both excitatory and inhibitory. Thus romantic love, for example, involves arousals of the systems for attachment, sexual desire, and endogenous reward, along with inhibitions of disgust and fear.15 Literary works help to give us a sense of precisely what systems are involved in any given emotion, how those systems interact, how the excitations or inhibitions of these systems fluctuate, what consequences those fluctuations have, and so on. In connection with these particular analyses, I  offer a general account of emotion operation. This account is too complex to outline here. However, a few points are worth noting. First, it includes three components for the eliciting conditions of emotions:  innate triggers, critical period particularizations, and emotional memories. Innate triggers are inborn predispositions to respond in certain ways to types of environmental or bodily conditions. Emotion expressions appear to be particularly important innate emotion triggers. We are sensitive to the facial expressions, touch, posture,

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Patrick Colm Hogan    281 tone of voice, and other means by which people express emotions. These tend to trigger parallel emotions in us. In this account, sensitivity to other people’s emotions is fundamental to the development of emotions in critical period experiences. Those experiences most importantly involve caregivers. Moreover, they are based on and intensified by attachment relations. For this reason, attachment relations have a key role in all complex social emotions. While innate triggers are largely constant across the species (with some individual variations), critical period particularizations vary; however, they do so within limits. For example, in attachment relations, there are various degrees and kinds of attachment security or insecurity. Thus individuals may vary in specifiable ways in their attachment propensities. The proportions of such propensities may differ culturally (e.g., one society may have greater overall attachment security than another). However, the kinds of propensities should be the same across cultures. Emotional memories vary more widely and idiosyncratically. Thus this account, though based on universal principles, is sensitive to cultural, historical, and individual variation—as well as the limits of that variation.

Nussbaum and Oatley: Emotion, Literature, and the Training of Sensibility Martha Nussbaum is perhaps the most influential writer on literature and emotion. In contrast with the very neurological models of emotion assumed by Zeki and myself, Nussbaum adopts a highly intellective account. Moreover, she makes moral issues central to her treatment of emotion. Specifically, for Nussbaum, emotions are “intelligent responses to the perception of value.” As such, “emotions include in their content judgments that can be true or false, and good or bad guides to ethical choice.”16 Nussbaum particularly emphasizes human vulnerability to “uncontrolled external objects” that have “salience for our well-being.”17 In connection with this, she claims that emotions are not simply motivational. They are “parts” of the human “creature’s reasoning itself.”18 That reasoning is both prudential and ethical. As such, the interrelation of emotion and reasoning requires “painful self-examination.”19 How, one might ask, should that reasoning proceed? To answer this, we need to know something about the nature of emotion in relation to reason. The involvement of emotion in human reasoning is, Nussbaum tells us, “in part narrative in form.”20 As such, she suggests, the examination of literary narratives provides a particularly valuable means of entering into emotional self-evaluation. More precisely, Nussbaum separates out three components of emotion. First, “cognitive appraisal.” This is simply an evaluation, performed self-consciously or unself-consciously. Second, there are the objects of evaluation, or more precisely the salience of such objects.

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282    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion The objects of evaluation in this case are “uncontrolled” things or conditions. Finally, there is “one’s own flourishing.”21 Emotions are a function of the way we appraise things or conditions as facilitating or inhibiting the goals that we see as contributing to our general well-being. Nussbaum holds to a basically Aristotelian account of human flourishing that is not merely prudential, but ethical as well. A central part of Nussbaum’s account here concerns the “morally subversive combination of love and resentment” that extends all the way back to early childhood attachment relations, where the child recognizes that he or she needs his or her parents, but cannot “control” them.22 In Nussbaum’s view, then, there is a complex conflict between our fragility in need of others and our affection for others, which presumably involves a recognition of their fragility in need. This conflict works its way out in a range of emotions. For example, for Nussbaum, disgust is not primarily a primitive gustatory/ olfactory reaction. It is, crucially, a response to our own animal nature and things that make that animal nature salient.23 In connection with this, social disgust is an unusually harmful emotion. Shame too is highly problematic, for it also operates against our moral impulses of affection and associated empathy. Shame is inseparable from our sense of our own frailty and need. Nussbaum indicates that, as we engage in moral development to achieve flourishing, it is crucial that we come to accept our animal nature and our neediness and that we make peace with our dependency on others. These are not only morally necessary, but important for “psychological health.”24 In Nussbaum’s view, literature can play a key role in developing our emotional responses such that they are both more moral and more prudent. Though she is not entirely explicit about the point, this function of literature—what is sometimes called “the training of sensibility”—appears to operate at two levels. First, literature appeals to our empathic feelings. We are not directly, egocentrically involved with the events depicted in a literary work. Our engagement is, rather, a function of our mirroring of characters’ responses or our more elaborated imagination of how they might or should feel. In Nussbaum’s terms, our response to literature involves our concern for the flourishing of other people. This possibility is particularly important when the targets of our empathy are members of out-groups, particularly groups we think of as disgusting. Empathic responses may be spontaneous or effortful, but they tend to occur with reading, rather than with self-conscious analysis of literary works. The second level at which literature enters into the training of sensibility is that of analysis. Literature presents us with morally complex situations that may provoke our reflection. Such situations may lead us to realize self-consciously that certain processes of appraisal are problematic, that some goals do not conduce toward flourishing, and so on. Nussbaum values both sorts of literary effect. However, her focus in Upheavals of Thought tends to be on critical reflection, as suggested by her comment on “painful self-examination,” which may be provoked by “a text such as Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.”25 Before continuing with Nussbaum, therefore, we might turn briefly to Oatley, who has worked on the emotionally formative consequences of literary reading, rather than literary analysis.

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Patrick Colm Hogan    283 Oatley has a long career of examining literature and emotion. Indeed, his Best Laid Schemes is a foundational work in the field. For present purposes, however, his most significant work is perhaps his recent empirical research, along with several collaborators, on the effects of literary reading.26 Using a short story by Anton Chekhov and a revised version of that story, Oatley’s team tested subjects to ascertain the effects of reading a more clearly literary work over reading a less literary version of the same content. They subsequently found “greater change in self-reported experience of personality traits” in the literary group.27 Moreover, drawing on test subjects’ name recognition, Oatley’s team judged more extensive versus less extensive literary readers outside the test situation. His results indicate that the former group has greater emotional intelligence than the latter group. It is difficult to tell precisely what Oatley’s results mean. Self-report data on personality traits do not seem trustworthy. Moreover, the name recognition test seems to be a problematic way of evaluating literary reading (particularly given the precise names involved—e.g., Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins).28 Perhaps more significantly, it is not clear why there was a correlation between literary reading and some facets of emotional intelligence, but not others. For example, readers of literature were not better at interpreting people’s relationships in conversations. They were most strikingly superior at interpreting emotions from eyes presented in isolation from face.29 It is hardly clear how literature could produce such an effect. In any case, the research of Oatley and his colleagues is clearly suggestive and may at least serve as a valuable starting point. Nussbaum is deeply concerned with these consequences of literary reading, specifically in their effects on empathy or compassion. However, in Upheavals of Thought, her focus is, again, primarily on the consequences of critical scrutiny in relation to self-examination. In connection with this, she presents a complex and detailed account of emotion, including extensive responses to alternative views. She also treats a range of literary and religious topics, proposing a sort of Hegelian teleological history. Clearly a brief chapter cannot cover all this material. Fortunately, however, one key emotion in her analysis is love. Indeed, what she calls “the ascent of love” plays a central role in her account of “the intelligence of emotions” (to cite the subtitle of her book). Very briefly, the ascent of love is the “attempt to reform or educate erotic love, so as to keep its creative force while purifying it of ambivalence and excess, and making it more friendly to general social aims.” Nussbaum identifies three types of ascent. In each case, “erotic love is characterized as involving an intense attachment to and longing for a particular person; this attachment may transform itself to take on more general objects.” The first type of ascent “focuses on contemplation of the good and beautiful.” The second takes up Christian principles, stressing “the role of humility, longing, and grace.” The third is a Romantic view that “striving itself is love’s transcendence.” Finally, Nussbaum adds a version “in which human desire sets itself the task of embracing the imperfect human world with love.”30 In each type, it is clear that emotional appraisal is at least partially narrative. Moreover, it is clear how each type of narrative appraisal may be affected by literary works that treat the ascent explicitly and in detail. (Nussbaum draws examples from, among others, Proust, Dante, Emily Brontë, and James Joyce.)

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284    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion

Mīrābāī on Love In conclusion, we might consider how Zeki, Nussbaum, and I might treat a particular literary work. Given Zeki’s and my interest in South Asian literature, an appropriate case may be found in a devotional love lyric of Mīrābāī. I have sought to translate the poem in a way that suggests its complex resonances.31 Even if you break off, beloved, I would not; Broken off from your love, Krishna, with whom could I be joined? You are the tree, I am the birds. You are the lake, I am the fish. You are the mountain, I am the pasture. You are the moon, I am the partridge thirsty for moonlight. Even if you break off, beloved, I would not; Broken off from your love, Krishna, with whom could I be joined? You, Lord, are a pearl, we are the ties that bind the necklace. You are gold, we are what the jeweler adds to make a wedding band. Lord of lady Mīrā [bāī Mīrā], who lives in Brij— Listen here, cowherd!32 You are my idol, I am your girl in the temple. Even if you break off, beloved, I would not; Broken off from you, Krishna, love, with whom could I be joined?

The poem fits Zeki’s approach well. It is a love poem that represents a continual striving for unity. Yet, at the same time, the poem insistently moves from apparent unity to separation. The refrain makes this explicit, where Mīrā laments the possibility of “breaking” with Krishna. More strikingly, the imagery moves from the immersive interrelation of the bird in the tree and the fish in the pond, to the contiguity of the mountain and the pasture, to the great distance of the moon and the partridge (which, in myth, survives on moonlight).33 There is increasing separation and distance across the various images of the lovers. This culminates in the image of the “girl in the temple” (or temple prostitute)34 and the idol, a mere thing with which the girl can never be united. In the context of Zeki’s account, this suggests the innate concept of unity-in-love, but also the inevitable recognition that this ideal cannot be realized. Thus the poem illustrates both “splendor” and “misery.” At the same time, the work is highly ambiguous. The ambiguity is not only a matter of the ways in which readers can concretize the lovers. It is also a matter of the idea of unity-in-love and its possible realization. The opening image of Krishna as the tree and Mīrā as the birds in some ways suggests greater separation than the fish/water and partridge/moonlight relations, where Krishna enters into Mīrā as water or moonlight. Moreover, if Mīrā takes up the role, not only of servant but of temple prostitute (as ambiguously suggested at the end), the poem may be seen as culminating in an allusion to carnal union, perhaps signaling the greatest intimacy of the four relations. Thus ambiguity contributes to the poem’s effects in numerous ways.

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Patrick Colm Hogan    285 My approach also suggests the importance of the opening unity. But, by this account, the image of Krishna “breaking off ” from Mīrā may indicate not so much an innate concept of unity-in-love as a sort of fluidity in what counts as self and what counts as other. Our understanding of the self varies with conditions. Sometimes it is smaller than one’s body (“I couldn’t control my hunger”); sometimes it is larger (“We were so hurt by what he said”). This fluidity seems to be connected with a sense of continuity in feeling and absence of conflict. Romantic love fosters such a sense of continuous feeling, probably through its attachment component. Interestingly, Mīrā’s romantic love has other self-definition effects as well. While she in some ways expands her sense of self to include Krishna, she either fragments her sense of self distinct from Krishna or, what is perhaps more likely, expands her sense of self to include others, at least others like her in loving Krishna. Thus she is not one bird, but birds; not one fish, but many. In the fourth stanza, she is not “I” but “we.” This malleability in the sense of self may be a peculiar feature of Mīrā’s love or it may suggest something generalizable. Either way, it asks us to consider further the nature of self-definition in relation to romantic love. These lines also remind us that attachment inhibits such ordinary aversive responses as disgust for the attachment object. At the same time, the poem hints that romantic love may enhance such aversive feelings with regard to other people. Mīrā’s sense that she could not be joined with anyone other than Krishna to some extent suggests such an intensified distaste for any other possible intimacy. The point is particularly poignant in its biographical context, since Mīrā herself was married. Moreover, as already noted, the poem hints at a link between the speaker and temple prostitution. Of course, temple prostitutes are repeatedly “joined” with other men. In both cases, the poem suggests that there is no feeling of continuity between Mīrā and these men. The point is particularly clear in the Hindi, where the word for “join” is saṁga, which may suggest saṁgam, the confluence of two rivers. This connects with the subsequent lake/fish image. For Mīrā, Krishna is the element in which she moves. This suggests two points about romantic love. First, love involves a sort of working memory preoccupation with the beloved that makes him or her appear ubiquitous. Everything is an occasion to think about the beloved. Second, there is a bodily component to this. The images of fish swimming in water or waters flowing together suggest a particular sort of physical contact. This is not simply the relaxed embrace of attachment. It is a dynamic and active tactile experience. This is presumably related to the bonding effects of oxytocin release, which is fostered by touch.35 But the types of caress and their emotive functions seem to be underresearched—despite early work on the importance of studying “the meaning of different tactile modalities as applied to different body areas.”36 The images of water make this more salient as a component of romantic love. These points all suggest the arousal of attachment and sexual desire, along with the modulation of disgust. These are precisely the sorts of dense emotional interactions that are necessarily absent from laboratory research. But there is more. The poem also points to involvement of the reward system, as well as emotion systems of pride and shame, and a perhaps surprising degree of egocentric cognitive bias.

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286    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion It is well known that the lover idealizes the beloved and feels a need for him or her. But it is striking that, in this poem, the lover suggests a reciprocal need in the beloved, if a need of a somewhat different sort. The speaker’s need is a fundamental, physical need. In keeping with reward system involvement, the lover represents her need for the beloved as an acute physical craving. (The reward system governs, for example, drug addiction.) In contrast, the beloved needs the lover as an expression of life (fish in a lake) or to fulfill his potential (pearls forming a necklace, gold made into jewelry). Without Mīrā, Krishna is just a cowherd. She makes him a “lord.” (Thākur may be translated as “idol” or “lord.”) These points suggest an involvement of pride in love, or more generally self-esteem. The lover not only feels that he or she must be appreciated by the beloved. He or she feels, at least sometimes, that the beloved too has no meaning alone. In other words, the poem suggests that the value of the beloved is not simply overestimated; it is also underestimated, as mere potential that only the lover can actualize. This goes along with a cognitive bias by which the lover is keenly aware of his or her own subjectivity, but tends to view the beloved as an extension of that subjectivity. This is, so to speak, the underside of “unity” or the sense of emotional continuity between the self and the beloved. We see this in Mīrā’s images, which make Mīrā herself living and active while making Krishna a mere inanimate thing. This occurs most prominently when he is the idol and she is the devotee. Finally, her being a dāsī, thus a servant or a temple prostitute, hints that there is an element of humiliation in this relationship also (which, in this respect—as in its egocentric bias—is not precisely idealized). The power Krishna has over Mīrā is humiliating for her. Her insistence that she will not break off from him is ambivalent, as well as ambiguous. It suggests both that she will remain loyal to him—an almost prideful reassurance to him. But it also indicates that she has no other hope. One may detect a sense of anger over this domination in her command that Krishna listen. At the same time, even within all this, there is an element of make-believe. It is as if nothing she or Krishna says should be taken quite seriously. This brings in yet another element—the playfulness that is so crucial to attachment relations, though often forgotten in discussions of romantic love. The mention of humiliation leads us, in conclusion, to Nussbaum. The vulnerability of love is keenly evidenced in the poem. So is the resentment that goes along with such vulnerability. In Nussbaum’s framework, a poem such as this may be explored as part of a painful self-examination in which we consider our own resentment at vulnerability and our own egocentric biases in love. Moreover, the poem explores these in the context of an ascent of love. Mīrā’s devotion to Krishna is, indeed, a devotion to God. But, despite Nussbaum’s denigration of nonmonotheistic traditions, this is a devotion that combines the putatively “Christian” ascent to God with the Romantic valorization of striving and, indeed, Nussbaum’s ultimate form of ascent, the transfiguration of the ordinary. Since Krishna is God, the basic point of the religious ascent is clear. However, the Christian self-abnegation in the face of divine grace is absent from the poem. This may be a fault in Nussbaum’s eyes. However, the simultaneous pride and humility of the

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Patrick Colm Hogan    287 poem are what allow Mīrā to combine different levels of ascent. The Romantic level is manifest in Mīrā’s insistence that she will persist in her devotion, whatever Krishna may do. Here, the striving is enabled by the pride and the absence of an emphasis on grace. Finally, there is the valuing of the everyday in the apotheosis of the cowherd and the celebration of the prostitute, who is part of what makes Krishna not merely an idol, but also a god. The key point in all this is that the preceding analyses are not merely observations about the poem. They are, at the same time, observations about our emotional lives. As such, they contribute to our understanding of the highly complex operation of romantic love.

Conclusion We have known for a while that affective science can help us to understand literature. Recently, however, researchers have come to recognize that literature can help us to understand emotion. Specifically, the study of literature may train our spontaneous emotional response and inference in everyday life (Oatley); it may contribute to our self-conscious adjudication of moral and prudential aspects of emotional reasoning (Nussbaum); and it may be part of our developing theoretical comprehension of emotion (Zeki and myself). In each area, the convergence of literary implications with empirical research from other sources provides great promise for future understanding. At the same time, the conclusions drawn from this work react back on our understanding of individual literary texts, potentially deepening our interpretations and enhancing our appreciation.

Notes 1. Semir Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 3. 2. On anterior insula and disgust, see David Husted, Nathan Shapira, and Wayne Goodman, “The Neurocircuitry of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Disgust,” Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 30 (2006): 389–99. 3. D. Gilbert, E. Pinel, T. Wilson, S. Blumberg, and T. Wheatley, “Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting,” in Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, ed. Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 294. 4. Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22. 5. Zeki, Splendors and Miseries, 1. 6. Zeki, Splendors and Miseries, 48, 49. 7. Zeki, Splendors and Miseries, 109. 8. Zeki, Splendors and Miseries, 63.

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288    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion 9. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and the Theory of Literature, trans. George Grabowicz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 10. Zeki, Splendors and Miseries, 47. 11. Patrick Hogan What Literature Teaches, 29. 12. See Ji-Woong Kim et al., “Compassionate Attitude toward Others’ Suffering Activates the Mesolimbic Neural System,” Neuropsychologia 47 (2009): 2073–81. 13. See Bernard Rimé, Le partage social des émotions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005). 14. See Edward Royzman and Paul Rozin, “Limits of Symhedonia:  The Differential Role of Prior Emotional Attachment in Sympathy and Sympathetic Joy,” Emotion 6.1 (2006): 82–93. 15. For relevant neurimaging data, see Zeki, Splendors and Miseries, 138–40. 16. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. 17. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 2. 18. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 3. 19. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 2. 20. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 2. 21. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 4. 22. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 13. 23. See, for example, Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 203. 24. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 13. 25. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 2. 26. See Keith Oatley, “Communications to Self and Others:  Emotional Experience and Its Skills,” Emotion Review 1.3 (2009):  206–13; Raymond Mar, Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, and Jordan Peterson, “Bookworms versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction Versus Non-fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds,” Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006): 694–712; and Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley, Sara Zoeterman, and Jordan Peterson, “On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self,” Creativity Research Journal 21.1 (2009): 24–29. 27. Djikic et al., “On Being Moved,” 24. 28. See Mar et al., “Bookworms versus Nerds,” 109. 29. See Mar, et al., “Bookworms versus Nerds.” 30. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 469, 470. 31. For the Hindi original, see Krishna Bahadur, ed., Mīrā Bāī and Her Padas (New Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2002), 44. I am grateful to Lalita Pandit Hogan and Philip Lutgendorf for help with the translation, which first appeared in Patrick Colm Hogan, Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). 32. This line, not in Bahadur (Mīrā Bāī), is taken from the version sung in V. Shantaram, dir. Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje, Rajkamal Kalamandir (India), 1955. 33. R. S.  McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (New Delhi, India:  Oxford University Press, 1993), 297 34. On temple prostitutes, see Sukumari Bhattacharji, “Prostitution in Ancient India,” Social Scientist 15.2 (1987): 32–61; and Amrit Srinivasan, “Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance,” Economic and Political Weekly (India) 20.44 (1985): 1869–76.

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Patrick Colm Hogan    289 35. See Waguih IsHak, Maria Kahloon, and Hala Fakhry, “Oxytocin Role in Enhancing Well-Being: A Literature Review,” Journal of Affective Disorders 130 (2011): 1–9. 36. T. Nguyen, R. Heslin, and M. Nguyen, “The Meanings of Touch: Sex Differences,” Journal of Communication 25 (1975): 92.

Works Cited Bahadur, Krishna, ed. Mīrā Bāī and Her Padas. New Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2002. Bhattacharji, Sukumari. “Prostitution in Ancient India.” Social Scientist 15.2 (1987): 32–61. Djikic, Maja, Keith Oatley, Sara Zoeterman, and Jordan Peterson. “On Being Moved by Art:  How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self.” Creativity Research Journal 21.1 (2009): 24–29. Gilbert, D., E. Pinel, T. Wilson, S. Blumberg, and T. Wheatley. “Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting.” In Heuristics and Biases:  The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. Ed. Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001, 292–312. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011. Husted, David, Nathan Shapira, and Wayne Goodman. “The Neurocircuitry of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Disgust.” Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry 30 (2006): 389–99. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and the Theory of Literature. Trans. George Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. IsHak, Waguih, Maria Kahloon, and Hala Fakhry. “Oxytocin Role in Enhancing Well-Being: A Literature Review.” Journal of Affective Disorders 130 (2011): 1–9. Kim, Ji-Woong, S.-E. Kim, J.-J. Kim, B. Jeong, C.-H. Park, A. Son, J. Song, and S. Ki. “Compassionate Attitude toward Others’ Suffering Activates the Mesolimbic Neural System.” Neuropsychologia 47 (2009): 2073–81. Mar, Raymond, Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, and Jordan Peterson. “Bookworms versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction versus Non-fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds.” Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006): 694–712. McGregor, R. S. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1993. Nguyen, T., R. Heslin, and M. Nguyen. “The Meanings of Touch: Sex Differences.” Journal of Communication 25 (1975): 92–103. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oatley, Keith. “Communications to Self and Others:  Emotional Experience and Its Skills.” Emotion Review 1.3 (2009): 206–13. Rimé, Bernard. Le partage social des émotions. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005. Royzman, Edward, and Paul Rozin. “Limits of Symhedonia:  The Differential Role of Prior Emotional Attachment in Sympathy and Sympathetic Joy.” Emotion 6.1 (2006): 82–93.

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290    What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion Shantaram, V., dir. Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje. Rajkamal Kalamandir (India), 1955. Srinivasan, Amrit. “Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance.” Economic and Political Weekly (India) 20.44 (1985): 1869–76. Zeki, Semir. Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

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Chapter 14

Facing Ot h e rs Close-ups of Faces in Narrative Film and in The Silence of the Lambs Carl Pl an tin ga

In a striking scene from Jonathan Demme’s brilliant and disturbing The Silence of the Lambs (1991), FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) has craftily made her way past authorities into the cavernous hall where Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) is being held under tight security, in a barred cage.1 Only Lecter can provide needed information about the identity and location of the serial killer known as “Buffalo Bill.” Starling has previously formed an association with Lecter, who has been toying with her but seems to genuinely appreciate her company. Thus she makes one last effort to obtain this vital information. Starling combines remarkable strength with vulnerability. She proves her mettle as an agent not only by facing down dangerous criminals such as Lecter and Buffalo Bill, but also by maintaining her professionalism in a milieu dominated by men who continually leer at her, comment on her looks, and/or suggest unwanted intimacies. Among these men is Lecter himself, who during this last encounter with Starling says archly, “People will say we’re in love.” He also suggestively touches her finger (as we are shown in an extreme close-up) as he hands her the case file on Buffalo Bill. But most importantly, Lecter has insisted that in return for the information he provides, Starling must reveal intimate details about her past, and her “therapy” becomes most intense during this scene. Lecter suggests that her motivation to become an FBI agent is to mitigate past trauma, such as the death of her father (a police officer), and her inability to help the screaming lambs on an uncle’s ranch as they were led to slaughter. In this way, Starling finds herself engaging in intimate therapy with an insane and murderous cannibal, albeit one who provides Starling with information that will help capture the serial killer and advance her career. These intimate scenes occur in a series of shot/reverse-shot sequences of remarkable power. On the one hand we are shown Jody Foster’s face as she plays Starling—uncomplicated, sincere, honest, and remarkably

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292   Facing Others expressive. She must maintain Starling’s professionalism by suppressing outward signs of her fear and apprehension; yet Starling’s emotions are palpably communicated through subtle facial expressions revealed in a series of close-ups (figure 14.1). Lit with a flat lighting scheme that clearly displays her face, none of it is hidden in shadow. In these close-ups nothing distracts the viewer from the face of Starling; there is little makeup, no hat, and only simple pearl earrings for jewelry. She is the picture of tough, uncomplicated sincerity and innocence. On the other hand, we see Lecter’s face as he stages his inquisition with a troubling intensity. Lecter is a figure of some inscrutability. He kills and eats people, yet he is outwardly mannered, well-spoken, and creative (he has a gift for painting). His face hints at depth and intelligence, but also suggests threat, mystery, and the grotesque (figure 14.2). Anthony Hopkins expresses this in part through his acting. Lecter is wide-eyed in his intense stare. When he does blink, the eyelids close slowly, like those of a large reptile. In earlier scenes strange flicks of the tongue and flares of the nostrils provided hints of his malevolence. Now the camera moves ever closer through cuts and slow tracks in, or “push-ins.” In this, his last face-to-face conversation with Starling, he is lit from behind, his face in partial shadow as though his words emerge from the depths

Figure  14.1  Jody Foster’s expressive face:  Starling reacts to Lecter’s personal questions.

Figure  14.2  Hannibal Lecter up close

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Carl Plantinga   293 of an unfathomable darkness. This deeply disturbing teacher/pupil, therapist/patient, lover/beloved, rapist/victim relationship is at the heart of the film, and is given its central expression through dialogue and by a series of close-ups of the faces of Lecter and Starling. As is often the case with intimate conversations on film, the camera moves steadily closer to the faces as the conversation becomes more intense. Filmmakers, critics, and scholars have long realized the importance of close-ups of the human face to the dramatic power of narrative film. Psychologists, likewise, understand the centrality of the face in human social interaction. Our brains are wired for facial recognition and interpretation. Infants begin to notice and track face-like representations just minutes after birth.2 As Ben Austen notes in an essay on caricature, “An adult brain knows it is seeing a face within 100 milliseconds, and it takes just over a second to realize that two different pictures of a face, even if they’re lit or rotated in very different ways, belong to the same person.”3 Indeed, facial expression is one of the dominant ways human beings communicate and express emotion, whether honestly or deceptively. Darwin believed that our ancestors, before they could use natural language, conveyed threats, greetings, and submission through facial expressions. It is not surprising, then, that narrative films, which communicate largely through realist photographic representations, would make extensive use of close-ups of the human face. One of the fundamental activities of the viewer of a narrative film is “mind reading,” and then responding. In other words, spectators come to understand the intentions, motivations, desires, and behavior of fictional characters in the context of narrative situations.4 Spectators also respond, of course, with emotions (e.g., anticipation, curiosity, anger, admiration), sympathies and antipathies, and myriad other affects. Fictional characters, literally speaking, have no actual minds. But we respond to them (in part) as though they do, and their (fictional) mental lives are “fashioned” by writers, directors, and actors to be more or less consistent and understandable.5 In this chapter I argue that studies of conventional uses and effects of faces in narrative film will be most fruitful when film and media studies incorporate what psychology, neuroscience, and other disciplines show about the role of the human face in social life. To make this case, I first argue for what has been called a cognitive cultural approach, then review existing research on facial expression in narrative film, and finally examine the use of represented faces for figures of narrative opposition. The represented face has most often been discussed in relation to empathy; but what about its opposite? I use The Silence of the Lambs as a case study for its remarkable and instructive uses of the represented face in presenting its story.

A Cognitive Cultural Approach The represented face has been an occasional topic for film and media theorists since the early twentieth century, as I will describe below.6 The lack of interaction between cultural studies and cognitive approaches to film and media has hindered progress, however.

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294   Facing Others Not many scholars have attempted to examine the relationship between human cognition, affect, and embodied spectatorship, on the one hand, and the cultural and historical contexts in which media artifacts are produced and consumed, on the other.7 Many film theorists are reluctant to mention human psychology in relation to facial expression, while others who do reference psychological research seem unfamiliar with the contributions of cognitive film and media theorists.8 In an attempt to address the lack of attention to viable theories of mind and cognition in film theory, some cognitive theorists advocate a naturalistic turn. David Bordwell writes that cognitive film theory, or cognitivism, might more accurately be called “naturalistic research into the spectator’s activities.” The naturalistic label, Bordwell writes, suggests the effort to “draw on evidence and research frameworks developed in domains of social science: psychology, but also linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience.”9 The philosopher Noël Carroll, who along with Bordwell is one of the leading proponents of cognitive film theory, argues that the clarity and emotional power of Hollywood-style movies derives in part from elements they employ that conform well to natural human perception and cognition.10 Although I embrace such studies, I prefer to call this approach “cognitive cultural” rather than “naturalistic,” because the focus on human biological capacities replicates an unhealthy nature-versus-culture debate, and both Bordwell and Carroll clearly respect the role of culture in the production and reception of films.11 It is too easy to see naturalistic approaches as in competition with attempts to understand film from a socioeconomic perspective, when in fact they ought to be brought together whenever beneficial. It is legitimate, depending on the research question, to bracket cultural considerations and take a naturalistic approach, or to take a cultural approach that brackets questions of human biology and psychology. One requirement of good research, after all, is a manageable question or project. In relation to photographic close-ups of faces, for example, we might note Carroll’s argument that a realist photographic representation of any familiar object, such as a body or a face, is immediately accessible to humans who can see and recognize such objects. Nearly all sighted humans have the capacity to recognize familiar objects in realist photographic representations.12 Yet at the same time, a full understanding of the close-up of a face should also take into account film history and various socioeconomic factors, for example, the history of film style and the display rules at work within particular genres and/or cultures. The difficulty of extricating culture from nature in relation to representations of the face is apparent in the case of facial caricature and animation, for example. The caricature artist and animator cannot be said to replicate the look of the face naturalistically; she or he intentionally exaggerates various facial features in accordance with style or effect. We all understand that styles of representation will differ not only from culture to culture but from artist to artist. Yet many caricatures have been shown to facilitate quicker and more accurate facial recognition in viewers than realist photographs of the face. Thus there is a sense in which the caricature distorts various features of the face in a way that conforms to and assists face recognition capacities.13 Caricaturists and film animators have individual styles that derive from artistic traditions, institutional constraints, and individual idiosyncrasies. Viewers’ dispositions to understand and respond

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Carl Plantinga   295 to caricatures and animations, moreover, may derive in part from acclimation to such artistic and institutional conventions. Yet all such representations of the face, if they are to facilitate understanding and response, must conform to universal human capacities to perceive the facial features that allow for understanding and response.14 Ultimately research will need to consider both nature and culture. As Carroll writes, naturalistic and socioeconomic theories are not in conflict, and theorists should ideally combine the best of both approaches.15 If our goal is to understand the conventional uses and effects of the represented face, then the history of film style, socioeconomic factors, and human capacities all play a role in this understanding. Any given film device, Bordwell suggests, has varied effects rooted in the dispositions of film spectators. Any viewer’s response to a close-up or caricature depends on what she or he brings to the encounter. These dispositions range on a continuum from those that come naturally to viewers to those which require patient learning and may in fact be next to impossible to acquire. Devices may rely on a variety of dispositions that are employed simultaneously. Our understanding of and response to a facial caricature or close-up, for example, may depend on a mixture of innate sensory triggers, “contingent universals” (skills or responses widely present in human societies), and skills or dispositions that are culturally specific and/or difficult to learn.16 Only a cognitive cultural approach has the capacity to account for this mixture of dispositions at work in the viewer’s experience of the facial close-up, since it is interested in both the universal and the culturally specific.

The Represented Face in Early Film Theory The importance of represented faces in narrative film was recognized early on, and it is worth considering this early work not only for its intrinsic value, but also because it prefigures many of the issues and debates that are pertinent today. By 1916, just over twenty years after the first movies were projected, Harvard psychologist and philosopher Hugo Munsterberg had introduced sophisticated ideas about the represented face in this new art form he called the “photoplay.” Munsterberg wrote The Photoplay: A Psychological Study at a time when film was widely considered to be merely an inferior form of theater (“canned theater”), and thus much of his effort is invested into differentiating the two art forms and defending film as both unique and uniquely powerful. He notes that the close-up “has objectified in our world of perception the mental act of attention and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power of any theater stage.”17 The use of the close-up has been a staple throughout film history, and its use by filmmakers has increased in recent years. David Bordwell finds this contemporary use of close-ups to be in part characteristic of “intensified continuity,” the baseline style for contemporary Hollywood filmmaking.18

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296   Facing Others The ubiquity of narrative fiction (in various media) rests on the human fascination with stories about other humans. Munsterberg states that the picturing of emotions must be “the central aim of the photoplay” because the emotional experiences of the characters “give meaning and value to the play.”19 The close-up of the face, Munsterberg writes, is vital in this regard: “The face alone with its tensions around the mouth, with its play of the eye, with its cast of the forehead, and even with the motions of the nostrils and the setting of the jaw, may bring numberless shades into the feeling tone.”20 In this insistence on the centrality of the human face and human emotions Munsterberg prefigures narrative theories that posit mind reading, or theory of mind, to underlie our fascination with fiction. On this rests our capacity to understand fictional characters. The close-up of the human face, then, is a powerful, sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious means of expressing a character’s mental states, both thoughts and emotions.21 An understanding of the changing emotions of the characters is often essential to understanding the story itself. Elia Kazan, director of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), puts it this way: above all [the close-up] keeps the story’s progress clear. We see in close-up that a person is undecided: the “tight shot” shows the indecision on the person’s face, we can read it as clearly as if it were spelled out in words—but with all the values of ambivalence. Then we see the decision being made and the new course of action taken. Except for that close-up, the change of intent or direction would be inexplicable. Because of it, the progression of the story, the “inner line,” is kept clear.22

While the close-up has the advantage of displaying the intricacies of facial expression, it presents special difficulties for the actor. Munsterberg worries that the play of natural emotion on the face is so complex that few actors will be able to successfully replicate actual emotion. He also anticipates what psychologists now call the “facial feedback hypothesis,”23 and notes that “the going through of the motions will shade consciousness sufficiently so that some of these involuntary and instinctive responses may set in” and the actor “really experiences something of the inner excitement which he imitates and with the excitement the automatic reactions appear.”24 Munsterberg also writes that the expression of emotion in a film is accomplished by means other than the actors’ face, body, and gestures. He notes the importance of setting, costume, shot composition, and editing; he even mentions music, although since he writes before sound film he must mean the musical accompaniment typically offered at screenings. The functions and effects of the close-up of the human face must also be gauged in context. Several years later in the Soviet Union, filmmakers demonstrated the so-called Kuleshov effect in a purported experiment in which the same shot of the actor Ivan Mosjoukine was edited together with shots of a plate of soup, a girl, and a coffin. In each case audiences were reported to have interpreted the expression on Mosjoukine’s face in relation to the affect suggested by the shot: hunger, erotic attraction, or sadness. The experiment might work in the case of the close-up of an expressionless face. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that an audience viewing such a sequence of shots would mistake the facial expressions associated with grief for those of happiness, for

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Carl Plantinga   297 example, or disgust for relief. In other words, meaning depends in part on the content of the shots. While Munsterberg’s important contributions are sometimes neglected, Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs is the best-known early theorist of the face in cinema. Writing several years after Munsterberg, Balázs echoes his predecessor in claiming that the “lyrical element” of a narrative film, or in other words, its expression of emotions or feelings, is central to the film experience. The close-up is a peculiar and powerful convention because it displays the face in a way that is uncommon in everyday life. It renders the face large on the screen, such that the viewer’s experience of it is often longer, more detailed, and more intense than our typical experiences of faces outside the movie theater. The play of facial expression, which he calls “visible speech,” is central to this.25 As Balázs notes, representations of the actor’s body “can express every shade of feeling far more precisely than a description” for two reasons.26 The first is that the close-up can display organic changes in facial expression (and thus emotion) in a natural tempo. The second is that the face can display the most varied emotions simultaneously, like a musical chord. Balázs anticipates contemporary understandings of emotional contagion when he writes that in seeing and understanding each other’s faces and gestures, “we also learn to feel each other’s emotions,” since the “gesture is not only the outward projection of emotion, it is also its initiator.” Balázs echoes Darwin in calling facial expression “the aboriginal mother tongue of the human race.”27 Although Balázs has much to teach us, other aspects of his theory are archaic and/ or troubling. For one, Balázs was enamored of physiognomy, the pseudoscience (or as Daniel McNeill calls it, “taradiddle”) that holds that people’s personalities or moral character can be assessed by a study of their facial features.28 Although physiognomy has been discredited, people nonetheless do make assumptions about each other based on facial appearance. For example, people tend to associate “baby-faced” persons and lack of intelligence, low social status, and lack of physical strength. We also tend to assess a person’s trustworthiness on the basis of facial appearance.29 Although physiognomy is a pseudoscience, persons make all sort of unwarranted social judgments on the basis of facial appearance. To what extent do filmmakers make use of facial stereotypes in casting narrative films? To what extent do filmmakers presume a common “folk psychology” that governs responses to facial types?30 These are research questions that, to my knowledge, have not been addressed. Balázs also makes the unlikely claim that the advent of written language had caused humanity to forget how to interpret gestures and facial expressions, and that “the art of film seems to hold out the promise of redemption from the curse of Babel,” projecting the “first international language” of gestures and facial expressions.31 It is counterintuitive, however, that written language rendered obsolete the use of the face and gesture in social interaction. The invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles did not threaten walking, though perhaps we don’t walk as much as we used to. Similarly, written language hardly replaced facial expression and gesture in social interaction, though it may well have altered their use in some as yet unknown fashion.

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298   Facing Others Most troubling, however, is Balázs’s claim that this new international language to be established by film, this language of facial expression and gesture, “contains the first living seeds of the standard white man who will one day emerge as the synthesis of the mix of different races and people.” The cinema, he argues, will create a living, concrete internationalism: “the unique, shared psyche of the white man.”32 Balázs’s meaning is somewhat ambiguous, but his mention of the “goal of selective breeding” seems to imply a view that the psyche of the “white man” should be the norm to which the world should aspire, and that this new form of communication represented and practiced by men of the white race will eventually become the international standard. Whatever he had in mind by this, it is clearly problematic in its implications and should be remembered only as a warning against this sort of racist (and perhaps gender-biased) presumption.33

Faces, Mind Reading, and Empathy The close-up of the face on film, as we have seen, has been the subject of study for nearly one hundred years. More recent scholarship has turned to psychology and neuroscience to assist in a “reverse engineering” that attempts to understand the functions of film techniques used to represent the face. Close-ups of faces in film have many uses; the most obvious is to express and communicate the thoughts and emotions of characters. Narrative films, obviously enough, are about fictional persons, and the viewer’s attitudes and responses to characters are central to their interaction with narrative. Throughout The Silence of the Lambs, Starling’s looks of concern, anxiety, determination, and even terror (as she is stalked by Buffalo Bill) provide audiences with stark evidence of her thoughts and emotions. The represented face is among the important cues for the viewers’ exercise of their capacity to read minds and understand characters. Such understanding is fostered in part by the use of facial close-ups in the context of point-of-view structures—series of shots alternating between characters looking, point-of-view shots, and characters reacting. When we see a shot from the character’s point of view, we see what the character sees. When the point-of-view shot is followed by a reverse shot of the character’s reaction, in close-up, this provides not only information about the face and reaction, but of what the character is reacting to. As Noël Carroll notes, point-of-view structures can provide precise information about not about only character response but also the object of that response.34 Per Persson engages in an extended study of point-of-view structures in his Understanding Cinema, finding the capacity for viewers to make sense of such structures in the ubiquity of the deictic gaze in human social life, that is, the tendency and ability to follow the gaze of others to gather information about what they see. Point-of-view structures, of course, also have a history, and Persson covers that as well. Persson claims that point-of-view editing is a basic element of narrative immersion, enabling the spectator “to attribute emotions, beliefs, goals, and knowledge to characters [which] is the first step toward the processes

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Carl Plantinga   299 of alliance, empathy, and identification, all of which lie at the core of all narrative art forms.”35 If The Silence of the Lambs succeeds in developing strong allegiances for Starling, Starling’s emotional responses become guideposts for viewers, cueing congruent viewer responses. Starling is concerned; we should be too. Starling is brave and determined; we admire her gumption. Starling experiences terror; we experience fear and suspense. The valence of the viewer’s affect is cued in part by the affect of a sympathetic protagonist. In many narratives, the viewer’s allegiance or identification with a protagonist is a central strategy for directing moral evaluation, emotional response, and the viewer’s desires for future outcomes. The represented face both communicates emotion and thought and provides directionality for viewer emotions, desires, and judgments.36 Narratives elicit varied responses toward characters, including opposition, dislike, sympathy, strong allegiances, and/or the desire to emulate characters and take them as role models. In this regard, the represented face has the capacity not only to communicate, but to elicit affects such as mirror responses rooted in affective mimicry, facial feedback, and emotional contagion. What I call a “scene of empathy” typically occurs (if at all) well into a narrative, after audiences have had time to develop allegiances to a main character.37 At a dramatically climactic moment of joy or sorrow, for example, the pace of the scene slows and viewers are shown an extended close-up of the main character’s face in the throes of emotion. Think of the embarrassed smile of the Little Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) at the end of City Lights (1931), the expression of combined joy and sadness on the face of Stella (Barbara Stanwyck) in the last shots of Stella Dallas (1937), or the dying soliloquy of Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner (1982).38 The sorts of mirror responses elicited by represented faces are largely automatic and unconscious, though tempered and framed by cognitive perspectives developed over the course of the narrative. Although the complexities of character engagement, including identification, empathy, sympathy, and mirror responses, are beyond the scope of this chapter, I will make a few observations. First, full-blown empathy, depending on how we define the term, may require a cognitive understanding and an allegiance for the character that are assisted by primitive and automatic mirror responses, but for which mirror responses by themselves are not sufficient determinants. Second, I am here writing of these sorts of responses only in the context of film viewing, and not in relation to the broader issue of the long-term ethical and political implications of empathizing with fictional characters.39 Moreover, nothing guarantees that the filmic techniques designed to elicit mirror responses or empathy for characters will actually do so. Many factors may enter into the success or failure of such techniques, including the characteristics of individual viewers and the viewing context. Yet filmmakers have devised ingenious devices to maximize the probability of such responses. One of these is the close-up itself, of course, which focuses attention on the face and may put into effect all of the psychological processes at play in the perception of and response to the actual human face. We might call this sustained attention, since these close-ups are typically held for much longer than the average shot length for the film overall. Allegiance and narrative context are also important.

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300   Facing Others Viewers are more likely to respond to the faces of characters with whom they have developed strong allegiances, and for this reason, scenes of empathy most often occur toward the end of a film narrative, after viewers have become thoroughly acquainted with favored characters. (Note that in The Silence of the Lambs, the most intimate and extended exchange between Lecter and Starling occurs toward the end of the film). Empathic and mirror responses also depend on the mood of the relevant scene; filmmakers may use music and sound, sets and locations, costume, lighting, and cinematography to create a mood that is fitting with the evocation of empathy and sympathetic mirror responses, thus creating a kind of affective synergy.40 To return to the nature/culture distinction, we ought to note that all uses of the represented face to communicate and elicit emotion are rooted in psychological processes that occur in human social life. But this does not imply that representations of the face are transparent or that viewer responses are wholly “natural.” Like caricaturists, filmmakers use various techniques to clarify, exaggerate, distort, or otherwise manipulate the representation of faces for particular ends. The close-up itself, as Balázs reminds us, is a convention that displays the human face with an intimacy and duration longer than we typically experience faces in social life. In addition, the filmmaker can influence perception and response through composition, angle, lighting, camera movement, and a hundred other ways. The actor Peter Lorre described film acting as “face making,” but the face of the actor is also made by the filmmakers; it can be heavily made up to highlight, exaggerate, or distort lips, eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows, the nose, and the chin, or it can be wholly or partially masked, as we will see below in my discussion of The Silence of the Lambs.41 The actor’s faces are subject to prosthetic noses, jewelry, eyeglasses, eye patches, tattoos and other marks, hats, and hairstyles. Then the actor’s work also influences response. Acting in film differs from quotidian behavior in that varied levels of ostensiveness indicate differences between lead players, supporting roles, and extras.42 Acting styles themselves derive from various cultural-aesthetic traditions. For example, some features of acting in a Hong Kong film such as John Woo’s The Killer (1989) can be traced to the Peking Opera, in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) to Bollywood and Sanskrit drama, and in Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) to the Noh theater of Japan.43 Here is another reason that cognitive approaches to the represented face must take into account conventions of filmmaking and reception: twofoldedness. As Murray Smith explains it, twofoldedness is a dual response that takes film characters as simultaneously “real” in some sense (they are assumed to have bodies, intentions, goals, desires, and feelings) but also as fictional constructs (they are played by actors and famous movie stars, are costumed, read lines from a script, etc.). This twofoldedness is a central ingredient of viewer response to cinema.44 Viewer affect elicited by cinematic narrative is clearly analogous in some ways to emotions outside the movie theater. A threat to the protagonist’s safety and the fearful face of the protagonist may elicit fear. Yet the nature and quality of the fear response inside and outside the movie theater will differ, sometimes markedly. Our awareness of the fictional nature of what we see tempers the fear and makes it potentially manageable and even pleasant. Responses to the human face

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Carl Plantinga   301 on film, then, are elicited not only by responses to the face as a natural human face, but also tempered by an awareness that it is a representation of a face, for example, or that it is the face of such and such an actor, or that it is being presented for various conventional purposes.45

Faces of Opposition in The Silence of the Lambs Most of the research on faces in film has considered empathy and mirror responses. But what of the faces of those who oppose or threaten the protagonist? How is the face of opposition represented? One of the remarkable characteristics of The Silence of the Lambs is the palpable sense it provides of what it is like to be a young woman in a profession dominated by men. As Clarice Starling makes her way through her FBI training and investigates the leads provided by Hannibal Lecter, she encounters many men, all of whom pose some kind of threat or unwanted advance. The threats range from the relatively innocuous, such as being hit on by a harmless, cross-eyed lepidopterist, to the potentially lethal, for example, her armed confrontation with Buffalo Bill at the film’s end. Even her relationship with her FBI superior and mentor, Jack Crawford, contains hints of unwanted intimacy, as Lecter suggests that Crawford may secretly want to sleep with her. The fact that Clarice is a young woman in a patriarchal environment is made abundantly clear in the sheer number of glances and stares she receives from men (figure 14.3). Her three chief opponents in the film are Dr.  Chilton, Buffalo Bill, and Hannibal Lecter. Examining the use of the face in representing each of these characters will illuminate the constructions of villainy. We begin with Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), head of

Figure  14.3  Clarice under the scrutiny of state troopers

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302   Facing Others the asylum in which Hannibal Lecter is imprisoned. Starling must go through Chilton to see Lecter. Chilton is portrayed as a self-serving and vain man who devises various means to discomfort and annoy Lecter, from which Chilton derives perverse pleasure. For example, he leaves a television playing fundamentalist religious programming in front of Lecter’s cell, and turns the volume way up. When Chilton meets Starling, he immediately makes sexual overtures: “You know we get a lot of detectives here but I must say I don’t ever remember one as attractive.” Then he smiles, and what a smile it is! (figure 14.4) Psychologists distinguish between felt smiles and false or masking smiles. As Paul Ekman and his colleagues write, “the face is equipped to lie the most and leak the most,” and the trained eye can in many cases detect such deception.46 While deception may be difficult to discern in social life, in a film the filmmaker and actor can communicate deception explicitly. A masking smile does not communicate genuine pleasure at someone’s company, but is meant to deceive. The deceptive smile can be innocuous, for example, the social smile that masks boredom at meeting someone, or it can hide bad intentions and hostile emotions. A masking smile can sometimes be detected because along with the smiling, micro-clues to the underlying emotions can be detected in the face. In other words, the masking smile may include facial movements conventionally associated with smiling, but also traces of such movements associated with the masked emotions. Dr. Chilton’s smile in his meeting with Clarice, suffice it to say, is designed to send shivers of revulsion through viewers. Exactly what it masks is unclear, though it is clearly unpleasant. It could plausibly be interpreted as embarrassment tinged with self-consciousness about his lustfulness, and an ugly self-satisfaction. The viewer’s first impression of Chilton is strongly negative, such that when Lecter at the film’s end reveals his intention to have Chilton for supper (i.e., eat him), this may engender schadenfreude. Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb (Ted Levine) is the serial killer pursued by the FBI in the film. One might think that he fits a transsexual or homosexual stereotype, since he is a cross-dresser, is said to have killed a male lover, and has a small poodle named “Precious.” We see extreme close-ups of his face as he applies eyeliner and lipstick

Figure  14.4  The revolting, masking smile of Dr.  Chilton

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Figure  14.5  Extreme close-up:  Buffalo Bill applies lip paint

(figure 14.5). At one particularly bizarre point in the film, Buffalo Bill dances in front of a video camera, his penis tucked between his legs. As Lecter explains to Starling, he thinks he is a transsexual but is actually not. This explanation was not enough to stop GLAAD (The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) from protesting the film for its depiction of Buffalo Bill as a pernicious homosexual stereotype. Director Demme insisted that Buffalo Bill is not gay or transsexual, but in making his next feature film, Philadelphia (1993), Demme seemed to be offering an unofficial apology. Though The Silence of the Lambs is in other ways brilliant, GLAAD had a point. In gauging the potential harm this representation might cause, the issue is not whether Buffalo Bill actually was or was not transsexual or gay in the fictional world of the film, but rather how the real-world audience understood him. Buffalo Bill is portrayed as a monster, and part of his “monstrosity” derives from his interstitial nature, his mixing of male and female characteristics. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s Danger and Purity, Noël Carroll defines the monster of the horror genre as a being that is both lethally dangerous and “categorically impure,” that mixes elements, for example, of life and death, inside and outside, human and machine, and so on. Thus the monster violates or transgresses schemes of cultural categorization.47 Carroll claims, like Douglas, that such transgressions may elicit disgust, and that the “art horror” characteristically elicited by the horror genre is a combination of fear and disgust directed toward a monster. To the extent that The Silence of the Lambs elicits both fear and disgust in relation to Buffalo Bill’s gender mixing, it can be said to reify and strengthen categorical schemas of male and female purity, and to encourage harmful cultural patterns of emotional response that take gender mixing as both disgusting and fearful. The monster in many horror films has a disfigured or otherwise grotesque face that bespeaks of this categorical impurity. Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) features a face that appears to have no skin, confusing the categories of inside and outside. The Borg of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) is a species of cyborgs that mixes the biological with the mechanical, and moreover have a collective consciousness that confuses the individual with the species. Borg faces and heads are combinations of misshapen biological features unpleasantly melded with

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304   Facing Others technological prosthetics. In light of Carroll’s claims about categorical impurity, then, it comes as no surprise that disfigured, misshapen, or otherwise grotesque faces in social life, unfortunately, tend to elicit the disgust response.48 Buffalo Bill’s represented face is associated with monstrosity in more subtle ways as well. He holds a young woman captive in a pit in his basement. Point-of-view shots from the pit show him from below, providing the classic low-angle view of the monster that shows him from an unusual perspective (making the face appear grotesque or alien). His monstrosity is further emphasized when he mimics the girls’ screams in emotionless tones and with a blank facial expression. At the film’s climactic moments, he stalks Clarice in his dark lair while wearing infrared goggles, making his face appear cyborg-like in its lethal repulsiveness. Thus Buffalo Bill becomes the classic monster of the horror movie, both fearsome and categorically impure. While Clarice Starling clearly wins most viewers’ sympathies, it is Hannibal Lecter who audiences have found to be intensely fascinating. In fact, to add categorical inappropriateness to impurity, Lecter is both a monster and a kind father to Clarice, and not merely father figure but also a therapist and potential suitor. The violation of normally separate cultural categories and proprieties is in this case extreme and complex, making Starling’s relationship with Lecter both frightening and comforting, disgusting and attractive, just as Lecter himself is not only a vile serial murderer but also a man of sophistication, intelligence, and manners. Starlings’ supervisor had warned her not to “let Lecter into her head,” and we see Lecter’s powers when he causes the death of the prisoner Miggs in the next cell merely by suggestion, causing him to swallow his own tongue. Yet it is Lecter who provides Starling with the clues she requires to discern the whereabouts of Buffalo Bill, and Starling’s “therapy” with Lecter leads to genuine progress in their examination of her deepest motives for becoming an FBI agent. It is Lecter’s essential inscrutability and complexity that make him one of the most frightening and fascinating film villains of all time. Lecter’s lethality and monstrosity are well demonstrated partly through representations of his face. Above I mentioned his steady stare at Starling, rarely blinking and when doing so, blinking slowly like a humanoid reptile. Staring itself is widely associated with threat. Research on both human and nonhuman primates demonstrates that the gaze is associated with dominance, power, and aggression,49 and Starling is at the receiving end of Lecter’s intense stare. Before Lecter decides that he likes Starling, he attempts to intimidate and frighten her when he famously tells of having eaten a former associates’ liver “with fava beans and a good chianti.” After speaking these lines he cocks his nose upward and mimics the savoring of fine aromas by gruesomely sucking in air in rhythmic bursts. This is the same man who engages in a quid pro quo with Starling, demanding that she provide him intimate details of her past in return for information about Buffalo Bill’s identity or whereabouts. Carroll’s theory of horror posits fascination as the viewer’s motivation for abiding the fear and disgust elicited by the monster. Viewers are fascinated by this categorically impure being and want to learn more about him despite his repulsiveness. The

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Figure  14.6  Lecter in a face cage with his prison attendant

Figure  14.7  Lecter’s monstrous mask

narrative structures of horror play on this fascination and curiosity with tales of the confirmation of the monster’s presence and investigation of its nature.50 In this regard the mystery of Hannibal Lecter plays into this fascination, and the filmmakers play this up by partially hiding his face behind masks on two separate occasions. The first mask, a kind of brace really, is put on him by Dr. Chilton, and crimps his nose and distorts his face (figure 14.6). The second mask, which has vertical bars over the hole for Lecter’s mouth, makes him appear particularly fiendish (figure 14.7). Both hide crucial features of Lecter’s face but not his eyes, which seem to burn with a fierce hatred at the indignity of the mask and his very captivity. McNeill describes “face hunger,” the urge to see the faces of those we come into contact with.51 A mask can serve to exaggerate face hunger, causing intense curiosity as viewers attempt to discern Lecter’s reactions. Thus the use of the mask not only emphasizes Lecter’s monstrosity but deepens his inscrutability and spurs dramatic questions. The psychological drama of the film is centered on the interactions between Lecter and Starling, often played out in shot/reverse-shot scenes that feature alternations between their two faces. Starling is innocent, sincere, vulnerable, and expressive. On the other hand, aside from his few overt displays of gruesome ugliness, Lecter’s face is expressionless, itself a kind of mask that preserves his essential inscrutability. The face is both the

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306   Facing Others site of expressive communication and a tool of deception. It is often hidden or partially hidden not only by masks but by shadows. In the case of Lecter, the viewer can never quite tell what is going on. If audiences develop an allegiance with Starling (as most do), then her conversations with Lecter become highly suspenseful. Lecter has the potential to shut her out or to harm her; obviously, it is in his nature to do either. Instead he chooses to help her. Starling’s intelligence and courage eventually result in her capture of Buffalo Bill; she proves her mettle and becomes an FBI agent. Along the way, however, she also receives the assistance of a madman who is both attractive and repulsive, threatening and nurturing.

Conclusion This chapter points to some of the potential benefits of a cognitive cultural approach to film narrative, and in particular to the study of the human face as represented in narrative film. Yet there is much else to say. We could examine facial stereotypes as they are used in films, as I mentioned above in relation to Béla Balázs. We could discuss the relationship between mirror effects (rooted in neurological processes dependent on mirror neurons) and film style. To what extent have conventional techniques to represent the face been designed to manipulate audience response in relation to such effects? We might also discuss display rules, cultural rules or practices governing the expression of emotion through face, gesture, and posture (Matsumoto). To what extent do cultural display rules alter acting styles and representations of the face on film between and among different cultures? To what extent do differing display rules influence viewer interpretation and response? A cognitive cultural approach to narrative film will ideally find ways to incorporate knowledge of human psychological and biological capacities, socioeconomic factors, and film history into the study of the roles of close-ups of the face in film narrative.

Notes 1. The Silence of the Lambs won five major Oscars in 1991, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and was later selected to be preserved in the US National Film Registry. Yet it also drew strong condemnation for its gruesomeness and use of gay stereotypes, as I will discuss below. 2. Mark H.  Johnson, Suzanne Dziurawiec, Hadyn Ellis, and John Morton, “Newborns’ Preferential Tracking of Face-Like Stimuli and Its Subsequent Decline,” Cognition 40 (1991): 1–19. 3. Ben Austen, “What Caricatures Can Teach Us about Facial Expression,” Wired 19 (2011): http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_caricature/. 4. On mind reading and fiction, see, for example, Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2006).

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Carl Plantinga   307 5. When filmmakers and viewers employ a shared intuitive or “folk” psychology in the design and then interpretation of characters, I call this the “filmmaker-audience loop.” See my “Folk Psychology for Film Critics and Scholars,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 5, 2 (2011): 26–50. 6. In addition to Hugo Munsterberg and Balázs, whom I discuss below, book-length treatments of the face on film and media include Jacques Aumont, Du visage au cinéma (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1992); Krista Blümlinger and Karl Sierek, eds., Das Gesicht im Zeitalter des bewegten Bildes (Vienna:  Sonderzahl, 2002); and Therese Davis, The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition, and Spectatorship (Bristol: Intellect, 2004). Also see a dual-focus issue of the German journal montage/av (13, 2, 2004), of which one of the foci is the face on film. 7. The rift originated when film scholar David Bordwell and philosopher Noël Carroll challenged the then-reigning Marxist-psychoanalytic paradigm of film theory in Carroll’s Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and Carroll and Bordwell’s edited volume Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). While the Marxist-psychoanalytic paradigm has lost its appeal, hard feelings still exist, and adherents to the cultural studies approach to film and media have not typically been sympathetic to cognitive film and media theory. 8. Examples include Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory:  An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010) and Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2008). Both books reference mirror neurons, thus recognizing the potential contributions of neuroscience and psychology to film and media studies, but neither mentions nor cites the work of cognitive film scholars on the represented face in film and media. 9. David Bordwell, “The Viewer’s Share:  Models of Mind in Explaining Film,” in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition in Film, ed. Arthur Shimamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44. 10. Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80–83; Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 14–25. 11. Lisa Zunshine describes what she calls “cognitive cultural studies” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 1–33. Bordwell’s research on the historical development of film style, for example, argues against the contention that stylistic changes in the cinema have the capacity to significantly alter the human perception apparatus in the short term. Bordwell argues against what he calls the “history of vision” approach, granting that in the short term the media can alter the human perceptual skills and habits of certain individuals and groups, but not the basic perceptual capacities of humanity generally. Though he denies such sweeping claims for the relationship between short-term cultural developments and the human sensorium, he pays careful attention to the particular histories of film institutions and filmmaking conventions as largely determinative of the development of film style. See his On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 139–49. Carroll, moreover, writes that the naturalist and culturalist should not be seen as in competition, but that their work should be seen as complementary. See “Engaging Critics,” Film Studies: An International Review 8 (Summer 2006): 164. 12. Not only humans but also various animal species, including pigeons and dolphins, have this capacity. See Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 54–56.

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308   Facing Others 13. Austen, “What Caricatures Can Teach.” 14. For a useful discussion of the concept of universals as it applies to literature and the arts, see Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003), 133–35. 15. Carroll, “Engaging Critics,” 164. 16. David Bordwell, “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision,” in Carroll and Bordwell, Post-theory, 87–107. For a discussion of human dispositions, culture, and nature in relation to film viewing, see Per Persson, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–18. 17. Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Dover, 1970 [1916]), 38. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically within the text. 18. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It:  Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 129–34. Another element of this contemporary style—shorter average shot lengths and increased use of camera movements— arguably interferes with the spectator’s capacity to read and understand the represented face in contemporary films. Thus the new style provides more close-ups of faces, but provides more brief and moving shots of faces, perhaps diminishing the spectator’s capacity to understand and respond to the face. 19. Munsterberg, The Photoplay, 48. 20. Ibid. 21. Colin McGinn has also noted this in his The Power of Movies:  How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 51–52. 22. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 381. 23. On the facial feedback hypothesis in relation to film, see Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 239–55. 24. Munsterberg, The Photoplay, 49. 25. Béla Balázs:  Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 25. 26. Ibid., 33. 27. Béla Balázs, Theory of Film:  Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 40, 44. 28. Daniel McNeill, The Face (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 168. 29. Barbara Von Eckardt, “The Empirical Naivete of the Current Philosophical Conception of Folk Psychology,” in Mindscapes, ed. Martin Carrier and Peter Machamer (Pittsburg:  University of Pittsburg Press, 1997), 23–51. For a general overview of the social science literature on faces, see Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces: A Window to the Soul? (Boulder:  Westview Press, 1997). Alex Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, has done numerous studies of the social dimensions of facial appearance. See, for example, A. Todorov, C. P. Said, A.D. Engell, and N. N. Oosterhof, “Understanding Evaluation of Faces on Social Dimensions,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (2008): 455–60. 30. On intuitive psychology as it relates to narrative film, see my “ Folk Psychology for Film Critics and Scholars.” 31. Balázs, Early Film Theory, 14. 32. Ibid.

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Carl Plantinga   309 33. Editor Erica Carter claims that Balázs later revised these passages to reflect a “Marxist-inflected cultural determinism” and a “cultural relativism” that allows for differing cultural viewpoints. See Balázs, Early Film Theory, 15 n. 8. 34. See Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 125–38. 35. Persson, Understanding Cinema, 66. 36. For more on character engagement in film, see Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2009), 87–91, 97–111. Also see Carl Plantinga, “The Affective Power of Movies,” in Psychocinematics:  Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur Shimamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 94–122. 37. Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” in Passionate Views:  Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M.  Smith (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See also Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 98–102; and Murray Smith, “Darwin and the Directors: Film, Emotion, and the Face in the Age of Evolution,” in Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 38. The scene of empathy bears an interesting relationship to what Lisa Zunshine calls “embodied transparency,” “the moments in fictional narratives when characters’ body language involuntarily betrays their feelings, particularly if they want to conceal themselves from others.” Zunshine holds that embodied transparency is one important source of the pleasure readers and viewers take in narrative fiction. See Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 23. While embodied transparency plays an important role in many narratives, the scene of empathy sometimes functions differently in the means by which it displays emotions. In some scenes of empathy, as I describe it, the character’s body reveals his or her emotions involuntarily, as does that of the Little Tramp at the end of City Lights. In other cases, however, the revelation is unobserved by others and occurs in social settings where there is no attempt to conceal the emotion from others, as is the case with Stella in Stella Dallas (who has no reason to believe that anyone is watching her) or Batty in Blade Runner (who is dying and thus not much interested in “performing” his emotions). The scene of empathy, occurring as it does at extreme and sometimes private moments, is often marked by the sincere and open expression of emotion. 39. On empathy in relation to mirror responses and cognition, see Amy Coplan, “Empathy and Character Engagement,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 97–110. A more comprehensive source for understanding narrative empathy in literature is Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Keen’s “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative 14, 3 (October 2006): 208–36. In addition to a theory of narrative empathy, Keen provides a useful discussion of the conditions that may lead to the success or failure of “strategic empathizing,” and of the ethical and ideological implications of the reader’s empathy for characters. A definitive book on empathy in relation to mind, art, and morality is Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 40. Plantinga, “Scene of Empathy,” 247–54. 41. Lorre is quoted in James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1988), 63.

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310   Facing Others 42. This is James Naremore’s point, referenced in Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, 17. 43. Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, 139. 44. Murray Smith, “On the Twofoldedness of Character,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 277–94. 45. On the inhibition of affective responses to fictions, also see Hogan, Cognitive Science, especially 185–87. 46. Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Maureen O’Sullivan, “Smiles When Lying,” in What the Face Reveals, ed. Paul Ekman and Erika L.  Rosenberg (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 201–4. 47. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31–32. 48. Stephen Ryan, Megan Oaten, Richard J.  Stevenson, and Trevor I.  Case, “Facial Disfigurement Is Treated Like an Infectious Disease,” Evolution and Human Behavior 33 (2012): 639–46. 49. McNeill, The Face, 228–34. 50. Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 178–95. 51. McNeill, The Face, 155–56.

Works Cited Aumont, Jacques. Du visage au cinéma. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1992. Austen, Ben. “What Caricatures Can Teach Us about Facial Expression.” Wired 19 (2011). http:// www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_caricature/. Balázs, Béla. Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. Translated by Edith Bone. New York: Dover Publications, 1970. ———. Béla Balázs:  Early Film Theory. Edited by Erica Carter. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. Baron, Cynthia, and Sharon Marie Carnicke. Reframing Screen Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Blümlinger, Krista, and Karl Sierek, eds. Das Gesicht im Zeitalter des bewegten Bildes. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2002. Bordwell, David. “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision.” Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 87–107. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. ———. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. ———. “The Viewer’s Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film.” In Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, edited by Arthur Shimamura, 29–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll. Post-theory:  Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Carroll, Noël. Mystifying Movies:  Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University, 1988. ———. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Carl Plantinga   311 ———. “The Power of Movies.” In Theorizing the Moving Image, 78–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Film, Attention, and Communication: A Naturalistic Account.” In Engaging the Moving Image, 10–58. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ———. “Engaging Critics,” Film Studies: An International Review 8 (2006): 161–69. Coplan, Amy. “Empathy and Character Engagement.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 97–110. New York: Routledge, 2009. Coplan, Amy, and Peter Goldie, eds. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Davis, Therese. The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition, and Spectatorship. Bristol: Intellect, 2004. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Ekman, Paul, Wallace V.  Friesen, and Maureen O’Sullivan, “Smiles When Lying.” In What the Face Reveals, edited by Paul Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg, 201–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts:  A  Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge, 2003. Kazan, Elia. A Life. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Keen, Suzanne. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative 14, 3 (October 2006): 207–36. ———. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Johnson, Mark H., Suzanne Dziurawiec, Hadyn Ellis, and John Morton. “Newborns’ Preferential Tracking of Face-Like Stimuli and Its Subsequent Decline.” Cognition 40 (1991): 1–19. Matsumoto, D. “Cultural Similarities and Differences in Display Rules.” Motivation and Emotion 14 (1990): 195–214. McNeill, Daniel. The Face. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Montage/av. Special dual-focus issue on Juri Lotman and the Face in Film. 13, 2 (2004). Munsterberg, Hugo. The Film: A Psychological Study. New York: Dover, 1970 (1916). Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film.” In Passionate Views:  Film, Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Carl Plantinga and Greg M.  Smith, 239–55. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ———. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. ———. “Folk Psychology for Film Critics and Scholars.” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 5, 2 (2011): 26–50. ———. “The Affective Power of Movies.” In Psychocinematics:  Exploring Cognition at the Movies, edited by Arthur Shimamura, 94–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Ryan, Stephen, Megan Oaten, Richard J. Stevenson, and Trevor I. Case. “Facial Disfigurement Is Treated Like an Infectious Disease.” Evolution and Human Behavior 33 (2012): 639–46. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. ———. “Darwin and the Directors: Film, Emotion, and the Face in the Age of Evolution.” In Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, edited by Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, 258–69. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

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312   Facing Others ———. “On the Twofoldedness of Character.” New Literary History 42 (2011): 277–94. Todorov, A., C. P. Said, A. D. Engell, and N. N. Oosterhof. “Understanding Evaluation of Faces on Social Dimensions.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (2008): 455–60. Von Eckardt, Barbara. “The Empirical Naivete of the Current Philosophical Conception of Folk Psychology.” In Mindscapes, edited by Martin Carrier and Peter Machamer, 23–51. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1997. Zebrowitz, Leslie A. Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2006. ———. “Introduction:  What Is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, 1–33. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. ———. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

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Chapter 15

Theater a nd t h e Emot i ons Noë l Carroll

1.  A Brief History As research indicates, a great many people today attend the theater primarily for “the emotional pay-off.”1 Nor is this merely a contemporary fashion. For theater and the emotions are two phenomena that have been linked together in the earliest writings on drama in both the Eastern and the Western traditions. The Natya Shastra, which was allegedly written by Bharata, was produced somewhere between 200 b.c.e. and 200 c.e. It regards the arousal of emotion as a primary function of theater.2 The text delineates the repertory of emotions to be performed by actors via imitation (bhavas) and the corresponding emotional responses they are intended to arouse in audiences (rasas). These rasas included initially love, pity, mirth, disgust, horror, admiration, and awe. Later, serenity, parental love, and spiritual devotion were added to the list. Although a given performance would arouse a mix of these emotions, Bharata recommends that one should dominate, as mirth would in comic performances. Virtually every aspect of theater art, as well as dance and music, is canvassed in the Natya Shastra, which dispenses an immense amount of craft knowledge, including information about the techniques best suited to engendering this or that emotional state in viewers. In this respect, the Natya Shastra is sometimes to Aristotle’s Poetics. The conviction that the function of performance is the arousal of emotion would appear to lie very deep in the Sanskrit tradition, since the Natya Shastra itself was probably based on an older document—the Gandharva Veda Gandharva, which no longer exists. Indeed, it is likely that the conviction is even more ancient, having been sustained in the oral tradition prior to writing. But if the Eastern tradition treated the connection between theater and the emotions as unproblematic, things stood differently in the early writings on drama in the West. In ancient Athens, Plato (427–347 b.c.e.) examined drama in several works, including his

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314    Theater and the Emotions Republic and Laws.3 Especially in the Republic, Plato argued that drama was a highly suspect practice, primarily because of the ways in which it engaged the emotions. Plato’s arguments against dramatic poetry occur in Books 2 and 3 of the Republic and in Book 10. In Books 2 and 3, Plato is concerned with the education of the future rulers of his ideal city state, his Republic. He does not think that works of poetry that represent action through the speech of characters (i.e., by imitation, or mimesis) should be included in the education of these prospective philosopher kings. This, of course would include almost all theater, as we know it, since theater typically represents human events by means of dialogue. But what, for Plato, is the problem with mimesis? Namely this: when students read plays aloud, such as those of Aeschylus, in their classes—a common pedagogical practice among the Greeks—they will recite the lines of various characters. And this, Plato fears, will induce the students to actually take on the traits of those characters in such a way that it will influence or shape their own development. If students recite lines in which Achilles laments dying, this, Plato worries, will encourage the cultivation of a capacity for self-pity in these fledging rulers. And since Plato intends these students to grow into brave leaders, he does not want them exposed to bad role models, whose character defects they will assume in the process of speaking their lines. Plato here is presuming a very direct sort of identification between the audience and the characters. By reciting a character’s dialogue, on this account, one quite literally becomes accustomed to the sentiments expressed and thus disposed to indulge them. Because of this, Plato urges that extreme care be exercised regarding the material included in the students’ curriculum. Plato argues that the students should not be given stories in which the gods lie, since the rulers-in-training should not be encouraged to believe that the gods lie because it might incline them to dishonesty (if the gods do it, why shouldn’t I?). Nor should students be introduced to poetry that involves wars between the gods, because this might lead them to think that civil war—wars among the ruling class—are acceptable. In short, what frightens Plato is his concern that his pupils with identify with bad role models. But Plato’s worries about identification include his fears not only that the prospective rulers may adopt dubious behaviors; he also fears that they will introject questionable emotional dispositions, such as fear of death and pity, where neither of these affects is conducive to being an effective soldier-ruler. Compassion, for example, is the last emotion that the ideal warrior should bear towards his or her enemy. Nor are self-pity and fear of death attributes that make for successful war-making. Instead warrior-rulers should be fearless and merciless. They should not be reciting speeches expressing fear of death and pity inasmuch as this is apt to infect them and undermine their resolve. Consequently, in the early books of his Republic, Plato advocates that poets be censored so that only good role models be presented to his future philosopher kings. The emotionally infectious processes of identification that underwrite mimesis were, Plato feared, too powerful to go unregulated in the ideal state. However, in Book 10, the finale of his Republic, Plato’s suspicion of the emotions with respect to drama escalates. Plato is no longer merely worried about the deleterious

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Noël Carroll   315 effects that poetry may have on students. Plato fears that theater is most likely to corrupt citizens of all ages. For he argues that the emotions, by their very nature, are opposed to reason—that they invariably contribute to subverting the rule of reason in the soul. By arousing the emotions, theatrical spectacles inevitably lead to destabilizing the rule of reason in each of us, which, in turn, is a recipe for disorder in the state as a whole. For an ordered state requires citizens whose souls are in order—that is, subservient to reason. Moreover, Plato maintains that it is not possible for drama to exist except by arousing the unruly emotions. Plato argues, in what must be the first economic theory of art, that poets cannot but roil the emotions of their audiences. For poets must make a living by giving their customers what they want, and, since the majority of theatergoers are an ignorant lot, what they crave is sensation. Thus, in order to survive, poets must trade in provoking gut reactions in their audiences. The paying clientele are putatively incapable of appreciating any form of address that aims higher than pandering to the emotions. So drama must be inescapably tied to emotional arousal Consequently, since theater is economically destined to traffic in the emotions and since this is a clear and present danger to the social order, theater must not simply be regulated in Plato’s Republic. It must be banished altogether. It is not just that certain emotions are problematic. By this point in Plato’s argument, the emotions as such are dangerous to civil order. Thus, since theater is an instrument of emotional arousal, it must be ostracized. Plato, of course, admits that drama is pleasurable; that is what makes it so dangerous. Therefore, if drama is to be permitted a place in the ideal city, Plato stipulates, the pleasure it affords must be shown to be beneficial. That is, if the proponents of poetry can show that poetry and, by extension, drama are socially beneficial, then Plato allows that poetry and drama may be readmitted into his Republic. Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), in his Poetics, takes up Plato’s challenge.4 He attempts to show that drama is not only pleasurable, but that it is socially useful as well. Like Plato, Aristotle agrees that drama is essentially involved with arousing the emotions; he specifically mentions pity and fear, two emotions that vexed Plato particularly. Aristotle famously maintains explicitly that tragedy provokes pity and fear. Nevertheless, Aristotle maintains that drama also does something to the emotions it arouses. Specifically, Aristotle claims, that tragedy subjects the pity and fear it arouses to a process called catharsis. Unfortunately, Aristotle is not very illuminating about what this process involves. Presumably, it is some sort of transformation. It may be a matter of purging these emotions or of purifying them or of clarifying them. If catharsis is a matter of purging these emotions—of getting rid of them—then that suggests a social role for theater that should please Plato. But, even if the transformation involves purifying or clarifying pity and fear—calibrating them to their proper objects—then that should also satisfy Plato, since that will place these emotions under the rule of reason. More broadly, under an expansive interpretation of Aristotle, we may understand him to be advocating an educative role for drama as a tool for clarifying the garden variety emotions in general (and not just pity and fear). That is, drama contributes to training

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316    Theater and the Emotions viewers about the right objects of the emotions, about the right times and circumstances for mobilizing the emotions, about the right level of emotional intensity in said circumstances, and about the right reasons in behalf of releasing those emotions. Thus, by showing that drama serves to organize the otherwise potentially unruly emotions in light of reason, Aristotle, pace Plato, arguably finds a place for drama in society as a means of rationally harnessing the passions. Nevertheless, despite Aristotle’s ministrations, philosophy of a more Platonic stripe continued to scorn theater, in particular for the ways in which it engaged the emotions. In Book 3 of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo (354–430 c.e.) admits to his youthful love of theater.5 Yet upon reflection, he has come to regard the manner in which theater stirs the emotions, most notably pity, as a kind of perversion, or, as he puts it, “a loathsome mange.” Augustine notes, that when one feels pity, properly so called, for the distress of others, that experience should include, as a constitutive element, the desire that there be no cause for their suffering. The suffering of others should dispose us to want it lifted. Often pity moves us to remove that suffering ourselves. However, with respect to theater, we enjoy our sorrows and tears. We take pleasure in crying over the plight of Romeo and Juliet. As theatergoers, we do not wish their suffering evaporated. Indeed, we may want it to be protracted in order to sustain our exquisite emoting. And, in any event, we make no move to alleviate the suffering of those young lovers. Yet this distorts the proper functioning of pity by connecting it to the wrong desire— in fact, a desire that contradicts the natural purpose of pity—and which, in addition, may incline us to avoid occasions in which pity in the normal sense might call us to action. Instead, perversely enough, we may prefer to seek out situations—such as theatrical spectacles—where pity has been decoupled from its natural or appropriate, concomitant, conative component. Although Augustine does not extend his observations beyond pity, one can cull from them a suspicion of the engagement, across the boards, of the emotions by fiction. Emoting with respect to fictions—to persons and events that do not exist—is a perversion of the natural purpose of the emotions. Especially with regard to the negative emotions, the distress component of the emotions is compromised by our enjoyment of the causes of our feelings in a way that a moralist like Augustine is likely to fear undermines our natural capacity for right action. In his Letter to M.  D’Alembert on the Theatre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) also waxes Platonic.6 Among his many criticisms of theater, he worries that the ways in which theater recruits the emotions are ultimately pernicious. He offers two interrelated charges that are of especial interest. The first is that we are more readily moved by situations represented in the theater than we are by comparable events encountered in the course of everyday life. There are obviously many reasons for this. Theatrical representations, for instance, focus our attention on the emotively pertinent variables in the situation more sharply than “unframed reality” does, through filtering out anything that might distract or obscure

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Noël Carroll   317 our emotional response; and, as well, we typically have no interest in the fictional case and, therefore nothing to conflict with or to dilute robust feeling. Thus we may be blinkered when it comes to emotively appraising everyday situations. Although our hearts may go out to the saintly homeless person on stage, that very theatrical stereotype may blind us to the less than perfect homeless people we meet on the way to work. In addition, Rousseau is concerned that when we emote at the theater, we congratulate ourselves for our sensitivity in a way that may have socially unhappy consequences. At a theatrical performance, we often convince ourselves of our righteousness, since we have wept for the injustice portrayed in the theatrical production of Les Miserables. Thus, we need not do anything further to substantiate our moral worthiness. As Rousseau asks In the final accounting, when a man has gone to admire fine actions in stories and to cry for imaginary miseries, what more can be asked of him? Is he not satisfied with himself? Does he not applaud his fine soul? Has he not acquitted himself of all that he owes to virtue by the homage which he has just rendered it? What more could one want of him: That he practice it himself?7

In other words, to adapt the excuse “I gave at work,” for Rousseau’s purposes, the idea is that having been morally sensitive at the show, one supposes that there is no further pressure to be compassionate outside it—or, “I gave at the theater.” Both of Rousseau’s complaints about the way in which theater engages the emotions converge on the same point. Indulging in our emotions at the theater will have a tendency to warp the natural operation of the emotions in everyday life. On the one hand, theater will present us with such perfect emotional objects that we will not recognize the imperfect but deserving objects of the emotions met in the ordinary course of events. And, on the other hand, theater will persuade us that we are so virtuous—at least from our own perspective—that we need not prove it day by day. In either case, theater’s enlistment of the passions imperils our emotional capacities to be good neighbors and good citizens. Nor does Rousseau accept Aristotle’s suggestion that the emotions can be rehabilitated dramatically by means of catharsis. For Rousseau maintains that “The only instrument that can purge them (the emotions) is reason, and as I have already said, reason has no place in the theater.”8 The philosophical suspicion of theater, rooted in the relation of drama to the emotions, continues into the twentieth century in the tremendously influential theoretical writings of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s aim is to create a new form of theater, suitable for advancing the cause of socialism. He calls his new form of theater “the epic theater,” which he contrasts with traditional theater, which he labels dramatic or sometimes, rather unfairly, Aristotelian, theater. That theater, the dramatic theater, is allegedly predicated upon arousing the feelings of spectators, especially the feeling of empathy. Brecht writes: “It is well known that contact between the audience and stage is normally made on the basis of empathy. Conventional actors devote their efforts so exclusively to bringing about this psychological operation that they may be said to see it as the principal aim of their art.”9 Furthermore, Brecht finds this to be extremely problematic,

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318    Theater and the Emotions because, as he says: “The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too— just like me—It’s only natural—It’ll never change—The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable—That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world—I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.”10 Here, of course, Brecht’s notion of empathy recalls Plato’s version of identification. The actor exhibits certain emotional states that are then supposedly duplicated in the spectator. Moreover, this is a highly questionable effect not only because the emotions cloud one’s judgment in general, but also because the audience believes that it is sharing the same, generic emotions with the character/actor, and additionally comes to believe that those emotions and their concomitant sufferings are part and parcel of human nature— that, therefore, they cannot be surmounted—and that, hence, they are inescapable. That is, if the predicaments that bring about our sorrows are natural—are ingrained in human condition—then people will come to believe that those conditions cannot be altered. The fear here is that emotional identification of the sort allegedly aimed at by the dramatic theater will thereby undercut our capacity for action, specifically for the kind of progressive or revolutionary action needed to redress the status quo. Dramatic theater, relying upon the mechanics of identification, Brecht fears, will make the audience feel that things cannot be otherwise. Like Augustine and Rousseau, Brecht maintains that traditional theater erodes our will to act in the world as we ought. Although Brecht is alert to certain putative dangers that he associates with dramatic theater, this, in contrast to Plato, does not prompt him to reject theater tout court. Rather, as already mentioned, Brecht aspires to design a new kind of theater—which he calls epic theater—on the basis of a scientific methodology that he intends to address reason, rather than the emotions. Central to this theater is what Brecht refers to as “alienation effects” (or A-effects, for short). These are meant to derail the emotional address of dramatic theater. Examples could involve caricature rather than naturalistic acting in the portrayal of characters, or actors stepping out of character and addressing the audience directly, or disrupting the flow of the narrative with songs or film projections, or breaking down the “fourth wall” by inviting the audience to interact with or even to participate in the play. Whereas, according to Brecht, dramatic theater emotionally immerses the spectator in the spectacle by means of identification or empathy, Brecht recommended a theater that neutralizes or reverses emotional immersion in a way that enables the audience to secure a critical distance on the action. Instead of being convinced by the affective momentum of the spectacle that things could not be otherwise—that is, feeling that change is impossible—the spectator, distanced by the A-effects, would be placed in a position where she could judge not only that things could be changed, but that they must be changed, notably politically. If Brecht represented one of the major poles of theater theory in the twentieth century, another pole can be found in the writings of Antonin Artaud (1895–1948) who championed what he called the theater of cruelty. Where Brecht called for distance from the spectacle in order to allow reason to analyze what was being shown, Artaud agitated for immersion, for the abolition of reasoning distance, and for “a theater that induces

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Noël Carroll   319 trance, as the dances of the Dervishes induces trance, and that addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal cures.”11 In contrast to Brecht, Artaud did not aim at buffering or insulating the audience from powerful emotions but instead proposed that every aspect of production be designed to release passions that Artaud believed were suppressed by the ruling culture. To this end, Artaud eschewed text-dominated theater in favor of sensational effects. For Artaud, theater is meant to function as a form of ritual purification whereby repressed feelings are discharged. One thinks of the notion of catharsis here—which Aristotle himself alludes to with reference to various ancient rituals—but in Artaud’s case, the emotions are liberated from the suspect rule of reason and not placed under its guidance. In terms of precedents, the thinker closest to Artaud in this regard was probably Nietzsche, although Artaud’s theory would appear to acknowledge only the Dionysian aspect of theater and to have no room for the Apollonian. Artaud says, “I propose then a theatre in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces.”12 This is a theater predicated upon arousing the emotions on the assumption that setting the emotions free will be salutary, a form of heroic regression. Extreme affective states and heightened mental states, including madness, plumb deeper truths for Artaud. Perhaps, needless to say, this made Artaud appear especially prophetic in the 1960s and 1970s, not only to proponents of the cultural revolution in the United States, Europe, and Japan but to the performance groups, like the Living Theater, that emblematized it. Undoubtedly, Artaud’s position on the relation of theater to the emotions seems at odds with most everyone else canvassed in this brief review. However, interestingly, he does bear one similarity with his predecessors. He thinks that theater’s engagement of the emotions should be placed in the service of the community. His difference from the others rests importantly in his desire for a different kind of community from the sorts envisioned by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Rousseau, and even Brecht.

2.  How Theater Engages the Emotions Perhaps the oldest, or, at least, the most enduring idea about the way in which theater influences the feelings of spectators was set forth by Socrates in Plato’s Ion.13 There Socrates analogizes the effect of writing to the operation of a magnet, called “the stone of Heraclea.” That magnet not only attracts iron rings to it, but magnetizes those rings, imbuing them with the capacity to attract other iron rings to themselves. Similarly, Socrates suggests, is the power of the Muse. She inspires the poet, including the dramatist, who inspires those who recite their words, such as actors, who, in turn, transmit that same enthusiasm to the spectator who, Socrates says, “is the last of the rings I spoke of.” Of the dramatic speaker, Ion, Socrates asks, “Does not your soul in ecstasy conceive herself to be engaged in the actions you relate, whether they are in Ithaca, or Troy, or wherever the story puts them?”

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320    Theater and the Emotions That is, the Muse ignites some feeling in the writer who imparts the same feeling in, for our purposes, the actor, whose magnetic performance inflames the audience with the self-same passion. Stripped of its metaphorical vestments, the notion is that there is a circuit of feeling that moves from the author through the actor to the audience, where each node in the network relays the selfsame feeling to the next node. Or, to put this concept in language familiar to us, emotion is conveyed by a process of identification. As we saw earlier, Plato thought of this process as transpiring when the students of his guardian class read aloud the lines of various characters expressing emotions of questionable merit, such as fear of death. But as the preceding citation from the Ion shows, Plato also believed that this process could occur less directly through the efforts of an intermediary, like an actor, singer, rhapsodist, or dancer who, possessed by certain emotions, could infect audiences with the identical feelings. This model of the way in which theater engages our emotions by relayed identification has been handed down by theorists since Plato—from the cleric Jacques-Bénigne Bousset in the seventeenth century14 to the philosopher Bruce Wilshire in the twentieth15—and this hypothesis is probably the most frequently invoked cliché regarding the theatrical engagement of emotions today. Method actors, in the Stanislavskian tradition, for example, are told to recreate the feelings of the characters they enact in their own breasts, by what is called emotion memory, so that audiences will experience the same affect themselves. And like Plato, many contemporary moralists, especially with respect to the movies, are afraid that spectators will take on the emotions, notably violent and aggressive ones, of onscreen characters and behave badly in consequence. The idea that theater works on our emotions primarily through identification is commonplace. But it is also open to question, especially when stated in its strongest form— namely, (1) that identification is the explanation of how in general theater engages the emotions of spectators and (2) that it involves engendering the selfsame emotion in the audience that, in the fiction, the characters are undergoing. In addition, it is often taken for granted that the actor is able to ensure this effect insofar as the actor is experiencing the selfsame emotion that the character is feeling through the process of the aforesaid emotion memory. In other words, the emotional states of the characters, the actors, and the spectators are all type-identical. That’s why it is called identification. Yet each tenet in the identification thesis is contestable. As Denis Diderot (1713–1784) pointed out, it is immensely unlikely that an actor like the one playing Othello could be in the same actual state of jealous, murderous rage as his character is and still remember his lines and his blocking.16 And if he were really in the same emotional state as Othello, what would keep him from killing the actress playing Desdemona? Clearly, it is at best an exaggeration to claim that actors assume the emotional states of their characters. Among other things, they must be conscious of how their efforts are affecting the audience; if the play is melodramatic, they do not want to turn up the heat too far for fear of risking ridicule. Thus, they must exert a level of control and self-awareness not mirrored in the mental states of their characters. If the relation of the actor’s emotions to the character’s is not one of identity—not a symmetrical relation—the same is often, maybe even most often, the same regarding the

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Noël Carroll   321 emotions of the characters with respect to the emotions of spectators. When Oedipus is stricken with remorse, the audience is not remorseful. We haven’t killed our fathers nor slept with our mothers. Rather we feel pity for Oedipus. In this case, as in many others, the audience knows more than the characters do about their plight and this accounts for our being in a different emotional state than theirs. When Oedipus presses ahead so confidently with his investigation, we are apprehensive for him, for we know where this line of questioning is headed. Nor is this asymmetry between the emotions of the character and those of the audience just an artifact of tragedy. When Alceste vents his anger at humankind we are comically amused by his naiveté. Another reason that so often our emotions differ from those of the characters is that they are directed at different objects. Juliet grieves for the death of Romeo; Romeo is the focus of her emotional state. But the object of our emotion is the entire situation in which two loves are lost. We feel pity. Similarly, we Romeo fell in love with Juliet and vice versa, we feel love for neither of them, but rather joy for their relationship. If what Romeo feels is love for Juliet, that is not what the male spectator feels. He is happy for Romeo’s good luck. Emotions are directed towards objects; for two numerically distinct emotional states to be type-identical, they need to be aimed at the same objects. Since this is so often not the case in theater, the emotional states of the characters and the spectators are usually asymmetrical. Indeed, if they were not asymmetrical, paradoxical consequences would often ensue. With respect to Much Ado about Nothing, if the male spectator were in the same emotional state that Benedict bears to Beatrice, would not such a viewer be jealous of Benedict? After all, it is he, Benedict, who has won her heart. For the rest of the boys, their supposed love has gone unrequited. Yet they are not jealous, since the object of their emotional state is not, like Benedict’s, Beatrice, but rather the loving couple reconciled. The recurring problem of emotional asymmetry shows that identification cannot afford a perfectly general account of the way in which the emotions are engaged in the theater. Too often the emotions of the characters and the emotions of the spectators do not line up in the way that the theory of identification predicts. However, even if identification is not the general or even the major mechanism for arousing spectator-emotion, might it provide an account for those cases where the spectators and the characters appear to share the same emotions? Here too there are reasons to be skeptical. When the wife is startled by the appearance of the assistant she thought dead at the end of the first half of Deathtrap, the audience is also startled. Nevertheless, it does not seem as though the explanation for the audience being startled is that the character was startled. We are startled by the same unexpected movement, lighting, and narrative eruption that startles the wife. There seems little pressure to hypothesize that we have been startled because the wife is startled. Our being startled is not, so to speak, routed through her being startled. Rather the same set of factors gave rise to the jolt the play delivered both to the character in the fiction and to the viewers in the audience. In fact, given that time is of the essence with being startled, it is most likely that we are startled before we would have had time enough to undergo some process of identification with the wife.

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322    Theater and the Emotions Of course, some might argue that the startle-reaction is not a helpful example here, since it may be argued that it is more of the nature of a reflex than an emotion. However, what the startle-reaction illustrates is that two or more percipients can be in the same affective state because they have been subject to the same precipitating factors without anyone’s state being caused by the mental state of someone else. In the preceding case, the startled states of the audience and the wife were coincident. Often, with respect to theater, when characters and spectators share the same emotional states, the explanation is that the states are coincident, brought about by the same factors, and not that they are a function of some process of identification whereby the character’s state has caused the viewer’s state. Emotional states are appraisals. They size up situations in terms of the values and desires of the percipient. Often these appraisals are immediate, although they sometimes derive from more protracted deliberations. Inasmuch as the emotions appraise situations, they do so in accordance with criteria. For example, the criterion of fear is danger; the criterion of anger, is wrongdoing. That is, in order to provoke fear, all things being equal, the situation must be perceived to be harmful; in order to be angry, one must perceive that a wrong has been done to you or yours. What playwrights, directors, and actors do is to make salient the features of situations that are criterially relevant to the arousal of the pertinent emotions. Shakespeare and every production of Richard III make the loathsome characteristics of Richard stand out. In consequence, we viewers come to hate Richard on our own, and not because certain other characters hate him. Our hatred is coincident with their hatred. It is not a product of identification, but of the fact that we have been forcefully alerted by the playwright and the production to the same hateful characteristics of Richard with which characters in the play are already familiar. In life, as opposed to theater, our emotions organize affairs for us in accordance with vital human themes or interests—as fear does with respect to harm, as sorrow does with respect to loss, and as anger does to injustice. That is, the relevant emotion gestalts situations in light of certain evaluative criteria. For the sake of economy, let us say that it criterially focuses things, selecting and emphasizing features of the situation that are significant in terms of the abiding emotion. However, in the theater, the playwright, the director, the actors, and so on have already done a great deal of the selection necessary in order to sculpt the scenes before us emotionally. Much of the selection that the emotions do for us in daily life has been done by the dramatist and the production team. That is, they have criterially prefocused 17 the fictional events before us in such a way that the emotions the scene calls for—the emotions the creators of the play desire—emerge smoothly and reliably, at least in the ideal case. One might think of the criterial prefocusing here as a matter of jump-starting the audience’s emotions. The playmaking team has already foregrounded the kinds of considerations that shift us into and encourage us to enlarge the relevant emotional states. Not only has Molière already laid out the interpersonal relationships in such a way as to indignantly highlight Tartuffe’s hypocrisy, but the actor will accentuate our disdain by heaping as much smarminess upon Tartuffe’s personal demeanor as he can.

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Noël Carroll   323 Criterial prefocusing is the most general mechanism for engaging the emotions of the theater audience. Whether the audience shares its emotions with characters or not, emotional engagement is brought about by criterial prefocusing scenes. This, of course, primarily has to do with the ways in which the characters are constructed by the author and enacted by performers. But costuming, lighting, scenography, music, and so on can also contribute to the criterial prefocusing of scenes. In a comedy, for example, a character’s vanity can be signaled by his clothing and by his habitat. Or the dark side of a character or a scene can be emphasized by dark lighting and musical underscoring in a minor key. All these factors may come into play in disposing the arousal of the emotions the creators of the performance intend. Moreover, the notion of criterial prefocusing makes clear how the phenomenon of the emotional coincidence between the audience and the cast of characters transpires. Scenes are criterially prefocused for the audience in the way in which those situations are criterially focused emotively for the pertinent characters in the context of the fiction. In Corneille’s Cid, the audience does not admire Don Rodrigue because it identifies with Elvire’s (Chimene’s lady in waiting) admiration for him, but because it, the audience, has been criterially prefocused on the same noble qualities of Don Rodrigue’s that Elvire has observed. In virtue of criterially prefocusing, we can explain how it is that spectators and characters can share the same emotional states without enlisting the concept of identification. Identification presumes a causal relation between the character’s inner states and that of the viewer. However, by means of criterial prefocusing, we can elucidate how the shared states can be related coincidently rather than causally. Yet, the friend of identification might ask, don’t the inner states of characters sometimes causally affect viewer’s emotional condition in a like manner? The answer here is yes, although this is not a concession to the notion of identification. Oedipus is in a state of remorse, and his being in agony, through no fault of his own, contributes to our feeling pity for him. His remorse and our pity, of course, are not identical emotional states, although they are of a similar—shall we say—negative quality. They are both dark or distressful, or dysphoric emotions. If we plot emotional states in terms of positive or euphoric ones at one pole and dysphoric ones at the other, it is evident that one way in which emotions may be similar is with respect to possessing the same valence. In this respect, our pity and Oedipus’s remorse both converge vectorially toward the dysphoric pole of the emotional polarity. This condition of vectorially converging emotions is not literally a case of identification, since pity is different from remorse. However, our pity has been caused by Oedipus’s remorse, and our mental state, like Oedipus’s, is one of distress. Both of our emotions converge on the distressful pole of affect without every becoming identical. That is, in this case, the character and the audience share the same kind of (dysphoric) emotion, and the character’s emotion is an ingredient in the formation of the viewer’s without their emotions being identical. Likewise the emotions of the characters and those of the audience may converge vectorially toward the euphoric feeling pole. When the servant girl, Grusha Vashnadze, in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle is awarded possession of the boy, Michael, she

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324    Theater and the Emotions feels a kind of maternal joy for being reunited with a child she has raised as only a mother would, whereas the joy the spectator feels is connected to our sense that justice has been done. Both the character and the audience are happy, but happy in different, albeit related ways. Both feelings are euphoric, although in one case the euphoria is over reunion and the other it is over justice. Admittedly the two emotions are causally related. The servant girl’s euphoria is a contributing factor to the audience’s. Were she not so happy about the judge’s decision, we would not feel so satisfied with its aptness. Nevertheless, even though there is this causal relation, the audience’s affect is not identical with the character’s, but only similar in valence, or vectorially convergent.18 At this point, one might be tempted to call the preceding kind of emotional relationship between the audience and the character “empathy.” Unfortunately, “empathy” is a very ambiguous and contested word. For some it means identification—the sharing of identical emotions—whereas for others it may merely signal the occurrence of causally related, similar emotions. Consequently, rather than quibble over words, it may be more advisable to label the latter state by the awkward technical locution of vectorially converging states. The reason such states are not examples of identification is that although they are similar, they are not identical. Obviously, emotions can share the same valence without being the same emotion. Moreover, these emotions are unlikely to be identical since the object of the character’s emotion and the object of the spectator’s emotion are different. The object of Grusha’s joy in The Caucasian Chalk Circle is her reunion with her adopted son, whereas the object of the viewer’s emotion encompasses not only that but also the servant girl’s joy and the boy’s. Even though the joy of the servant girl and that of the audience may be broadly described by the same words—“joy” or “happiness”—it is easy to see that the joy at issue is different when we elaborate a more fine-grained account of the pertinent objects of emotions. That reveals that the emotions are different, and entails, therefore, that the relation is not one of identification. So, in summary, if we are want to account for what generally it is that brings about the audience’s similarly valenced feelings toward the character, we need not invoke some mysterious process of identification. Once again, the audience’s mental state is due to criterial prefocusing. The creators of the drama foreground those features of the situation that are likely to provoke the emotions they want to engender. The emphasis on Oedipus’s anguish elicits pity from us. The servant girl’s joy contributes to our satisfaction. In the case of vectorially converging emotions, criterial prefocusing rather than identification offers us a better model of explanation Indeed, it is to be hoped that this section has demonstrated that if anything provides a general account of the way in which theater engages the emotions, it is not the notion of identification that will get the job done, but rather that of criterial prefocusing.

Notes 1. Erin Hurley, Theatre and Feeling (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 1.

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Noël Carroll   325 2. Bharata, The Natya Shastra of Bharatamuni (Dehli, India:  Sri Satguru, 1987). See also Patrick Colm Hogan, “Toward a Cognitive Science of Poetics:  Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, and the Theory of Literature” College Literature 23 (1996): 164–78. 3. Plato, The Collected Works of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). 4. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961) 5. Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, in Politics and Art, trans. and ed. Allen Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). 7. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 25. 8. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, p. 18. 9. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 136. 10. Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in Brecht on Theatre, p. 71. 11. Antonin Artaud, “No More Masterpieces,” in Dramatic Theories and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), p. 766. 12. Artaud, “No More Masterpieces,” p. 766. 13. Plato, Ion, in Collected Works. 14. Jacques Benigne Bousset, Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie in L’église et le théâtre, ed. Ch. Urbain and E. Levesque (Paris: B. Grasset, 1930), p. 212. 15. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity:  The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1982). For a related discussion of recent approaches to empathy in narrative see Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative 14, 3 (October 2006): 207–36. 16. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting:  Masks or Faces, trans. William Archer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957). 17. Noël Carroll, “Art, Narrative and Emotion,” in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 18. Noël Carroll, “On Some Affective Relations between Audiences and Characters in Popular Fictions,” in Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. “No More Masterpieces.” In Dramatic Theory and Criticism:  Greeks to Grotowski, edited by Bernard E. Dukore. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008. Bharata. The Nāṭya Śāstra of Bharatamuni. Delhi, India: Sri Satguru, 1987. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Translated by John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957. Carroll, Noël. “Art, Narrative and Emotion.” In Beyond Aesthetics. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. “On Some Affective Relations between Audiences and Characters in Popular Fictions.” In Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Diderot, Denis. The Paradox of Acting:  Masks or Faces. Translated by William Archer. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957.

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326    Theater and the Emotions Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Toward a Cognitive Science of Poetics: Anandavarhana, Abhinavagupta and the Theory of Literature.” In College Literature 23 (1996): 164–78. Hurley, Erin. Theatre and Feeling. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Keen, Suzanne. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative 14, 3 (October 2006): 207–36. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Letter to D’Alembert in Politics and the Arts. Translated by Allen Bloom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Urbain, C., and E. Levesque. L’Église et théâtre. Paris, 1930. Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity:  The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

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Cognitive Postcolonial Studies

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Chapter 16

The Psych ol o g y of C ol onia l i sm a nd P ostc ol onia l i sm Cognitive Approaches to Identity and Empathy Patri ck C olm H o gan

Since at least the 1950 publication of Psychologie de la colonisation by Octave Mannoni, writers and activists have been deeply interested in the psychology of colonialism. Such works as Albert Memmi’s 1957 Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur extended this interest. Most significantly, the place of psychology in colonial and postcolonial studies was guaranteed by the important and widely influential writings of Frantz Fanon, beginning with the 1952 Peau noire, masques blancs and extending through Les damnés de la terre (published in 1961, the year of his death). Indeed, at least within literary study, the mental aspect of colonizer/colonized relations has been theorized almost as intensively as the economic and political aspects. This work has been almost entirely psychoanalytic in orientation. The pattern has been continued by recent theorists, who integrate psychoanalysis with different strands of poststructuralism. For example, Homi Bhabha, perhaps the most influential postcolonial theorist writing today, has argued for “reading the racial stereotype of colonial discourse in terms of fetishism” with attention to “castration.”1 It should come as no surprise that cognitive theorists have had a largely critical attitude toward mainstream postcolonial theory. Relations between cognitive science and psychoanalysis have been uncomfortable at best. Indeed, many literary theorists have been drawn to cognitive science as an alternative to what they see as psychoanalytic and poststructuralist dogmas. Thus we find the prominent evolutionary critic Joseph Carroll dismissing postcolonial theory as one of the “minor” components of postmodernism, an encompassing movement fated to “crumble from within.”2 A few cognitivist writers have taken the time to examine and criticize postcolonial theory in detail. Perhaps more significantly, several cognitivists have considered the

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330    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism important questions raised by mainstream postcolonial theories and sought to formulate answers to those questions that are better grounded in our current understanding of human cognition and emotion. The following pages will first sketch Frederick Luis Aldama’s cognitive-Marxist critique of specifically Latin American postcolonial theory. It will then go on to consider some positive alternatives offered by cognitivist theorists.3

A Critique of Mainstream Postcolonial Theory Like some other cognitivists, Aldama is a materialist critic in two senses. First, he is a materialist in the, so to speak, “traditional” or Marxist sense. To explain social phenomena he looks to the history of material conditions, particularly the history of class conflict. Aldama’s understanding of class conflict is also traditional in that he recognizes the importance of ideology for stabilizing exploitative class relations. The most obvious form of class ideology is one that justifies the position of the dominant group, most obviously by appeal to merit. In his work on ethnic, postcolonial, and gay and lesbian literature, Aldama has been active in opposing such ideologies. Aldama’s analyses also suggest another form of ideology. Though it is never fully explicit, Aldama’s work points toward what we might call an ideology of illusory liberation. When progressive forces are deterred into innocuous activities, their political effectiveness is undermined. This occurs most obviously with various forms of idealism in which revolutionary activities bear, not on material conditions, but on ideas divorced from the concrete practices of political economy. (We will consider cases of this when we turn to Aldama’s specific critique of mainstream postcolonial theory.) This brings us to the second type of “materialism” (sometimes called “physicalism”)—that of neurobiology, a form of materialism shared, in some version, by most cognitivists. Given his recognition of the importance of ideology, Aldama can hardly claim that changing people’s minds is inconsequential for social change. Indeed, there would hardly be any point in Aldama critiquing mainstream postcolonialism if human thought were merely epiphenomenal, a trivial byproduct of historical dialectics. Moreover, Aldama’s repeated invocation of narrative and other universals of the human mind would be either senseless (in contradiction with some sort of historicism) or insignificant (without implications for anything practical). Yet this hardly means that Aldama rejects the traditional Marxist opposition to “voluntarism,” the view that revolutionary volition is all that is important, independent of concrete material conditions, and it hardly means that Aldama rejects the more general Marxist opposition to idealism.4 In contrast with voluntarism and idealism, neurobiological materialism understands the human mind as a complex of embodied structures, processes, and contents.5 This complex is both inferential and affective or motivational. Like everything else in the

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Patrick Colm Hogan    331 material world, it operates through isolatable physical causes. To a great extent, the structures (e.g., long-term episodic memory) and processes (e.g., visual encoding) are universal. The contents (e.g., actual memories) have parallels across individuals, but they necessarily vary. Thus there is both uniformity and diversity across minds. Both the uniformity and the diversity yield constraints on possible “voluntaristic” actions. For example, we are constrained by the limits of our (largely shared) motivational systems, as well as by the diversity of our individual emotional experiences. At the same time, individual action and collective action are enabled by precisely these same material structures. Insofar as we are able to do anything, alone or in coordination with others, we are able to do this because of our shared and diverse cognitive and affective properties. (As theorists of distributed cognition have shown,6 our diversity is as important to accomplishing collective tasks as is our uniformity, in part because we divide tasks according to interest and expertise.) In this way, the cognitivist concern with embodied minds opposes idealist as well as voluntaristic tendencies. Finally, it is important to note that minds are not only embodied, but also “situated.” There is considerable diversity in the precise understanding of situatedness.7 But the general idea is that humans are continually thinking and acting in concrete conditions. In order to understand human action at any given moment, one must take into account both the psychological preconditions and the material circumstances. Like the human mind and brain, the situations in which people act are to some extent peculiar or unique, but also to some extent patterned. From a Marxist perspective, such as that of Aldama, perhaps the most socially important pattern is that thoughts and actions regularly take place within situations of (nonmeritocratic) class hierarchies defining unequal access to goods and services. Here, too, both the universal patterns and the idiosyncratic contingencies inhibit some individual and collective actions while enabling others. In sum, we may formulate a cognitivist Marxism that is opposed to both voluntarism and idealism, but that recognizes the function of ideology and the importance of ideological critique. This cognitive Marxism stresses the embodied and situated nature of cognition and motivation. In connection with this, it seeks to isolate both general principles (e.g., cognitive universals) and particular social and historical conjunctures. For cognitivists who are particularly strict Marxists, the most important general principle is class hierarchy. Social transformation in this view involves altering material conditions of class exploitation. But that transformation is inseparable from cognitive and motivational changes. Those cognitive and motivational changes must respect prior constraints—as Semir Zeki writes, when will struggles against biology, biology always wins.8 Moreover, insofar as cognition and motivation are alterable, the alterations must be concrete and particular to human mental operation. Again, a number of cognitive writers share a view along roughly these lines. An account of this sort implicitly underlies Aldama’s critique of mainstream postcolonial theory. Aldama’s fundamental claim about mainstream postcolonial theory today is that, whatever diverse forms it may appear to take, it commonly if often tacitly accepts the “idea that literature somehow not only represents (and distorts) reality but creates it.” Thus literature “is given the tremendous power once assigned to social classes.”9 Aldama

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332    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism is here alluding to the Romantic and idealist doctrine that literature is not merely imitation but also world making—and not merely the making of imagined worlds, but the making of the world in which we actually live and act. It is a form of the canonical Marxist error that Lukács called “Romantic anti-capitalism.”10 Though the idea is rarely stated in this blatant form, Aldama indicates that it underlies and lends apparent plausibility to many strands of postcolonial theory today. It is a primary case of the sort of ideology that diverts the attention of progressives from material conditions, thus rendering their efforts innocuous for the status quo. Indeed, one could take the critique a step further and note the motivational reward of this ideology. In a period when the humanities are underfunded and devalued, transforming literature—and thus literary critics—into “the Gnostic Demiurge”11 may have not insignificant consequences for humanists in mood repair and self-esteem.12 Of course, Aldama’s criticism of mainstream postcolonial theory is not confined to isolating this recurrent, if largely unstated premise. He considers a number of theories in detail. Indeed, he focuses not on explicitly poststructuralist theories, but on theories that criticize poststructuralism “as using the Third World subject and text as static objects that articulate a theoretical difference at a distant remove from the local social, political, and cultural discourses that shape individual Latin American bodies and texts.”13 The problems with such post-poststructuralist theories are twofold. First, epistemically, they stress the local without an adequate understanding of the translocal principles that make localism comprehensible. Thus such theories are inadequate in both descriptive and explanatory terms.14 Moreover, such theories are to some extent theoretically self-undermining, for to engage in their own analyses, they must invoke nonlocal principles. Indeed, post-poststructuralists ultimately revert to something like structuralism, lacking cognitive or other alternatives. Thus, Aldama explains that “for the local to be articulated. . . theorists must fall back on that very procedure they claim to have banished: structural analysis, which allows one to identify, compare, and contrast independent features and even realize a transnational universal-gesturing analysis.”15 A key difference between the universalism of the post-poststructuralists and that of cognitivists is that the former is covert, thus not open to evaluation and rejection or refinement. The second problem with post-poststructural postcolonial theories is political rather than epistemic. Such theories greatly overestimate the practical consequences of literature and, even more, literary theory. Both problems are bound up with a cognitive model shared by the post-poststructuralists and the poststructuralists they critique. This is a bidirectional model according to which “the world” is “a text and the text a world.”16 This model, Aldama suggests, guides the analyses and arguments of a wide range of writers. The result is a conflation of “the political sphere and the space of cultural production.”17 This leads to something like a moralizing of criticism, an insistence that everyone conform to a certain way of reading and theorizing, since that is (supposedly) the liberatory way. As Aldama concludes, “here we see what happens when politics no longer has as its subject matter an analysis of the class struggle: it turns into ethics.” In consequence, criticism and theory become simplistically organized “into ethical divisions of good and bad and/or into quasi-moral categories.”18

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Patrick Colm Hogan    333 Aldama indicates that the solution to the first, epistemological problem is a critical integration of cognitive science into postcolonial theory. This is, then, bound up with psychological materialism—embodiment and situatedness. He indicates that the solution to the second, political problem is a reinvigorated Marxism, thus social and historical materialism. Needless to say, the latter is not simply a matter of theory. It is, more importantly, a matter of “independent organizations” of the “working class,” both “trade unions and political parties nationally and worldwide.” It is a vision in keeping with such radical postcolonial works as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood.

Topics in Postcolonial Theory Whatever its weaknesses, however, the history of postcolonial or anticolonial theory raises specific issues that call for principled response. Insofar as cognitivists wish to address the epistemological weaknesses of poststructuralist and post-poststructuralist postcolonial theories, it is important not to stop with critique. It is necessary to articulate more plausible and effective descriptive and explanatory accounts of the relevant phenomena. In order to do this, one must, of course, have some sense of just what is at issue in postcolonial theory. Clearly, there is a great deal that requires theoretical treatment in the context of colonialism. There are complex relations of economic advantage and disadvantage, both gross and subtle forms of political subordination, intensifications and attenuations of customary practices in both the colonial metropolis and the colonized society, and so on. Thus there are economic, political, social, and other theories that bear on colonialism. In invoking cognitive science, we are concerned primarily with the psychology of colonialism. In connection with this, we may schematically organize the key issues posed by postcolonial theory into two broad categories: (1) the more or less spontaneous psychological relations that underlie the economic, political, and social dynamics of colonizer and colonizer and (2) the more self-conscious or “strategic” psychological practices that bear on challenging—and ultimately undoing—colonial hierarchies. In other words, colonial hierarchies both rest on and produce certain psychological relations. It is important to understand those psychological relations. At the same time, changing the hierarchies necessarily to some extent involves changing the psychological relations. It is equally important to understand the psychology of that alteration—how it operates and what makes it possible. Colonial psychological relations may be further subdivided into a part that bears on one’s own group and a part that bears on the opposed group. Put simply, in a colonial context, colonizers and colonized people understand themselves and respond to members of their own group in patterned ways; they also understand and respond to members of the other group in patterned ways. We might say, then, that there are two central topics in this area. Self-focused colonial psychology is fundamentally a matter of identity formation (e.g., national self-definition). Other-focused colonial psychology is

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334    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism fundamentally a matter of differentiation. In its most extreme form, that differentiation appears as racism—or parallel biases based on religion, nationality, or other properties. (Hereafter, I will use “racism” as shorthand for bias based on racial categorization and for comparable biases in other areas.) The following sections will consider colonial relations of identity and racism. The final section will turn to empathy. A concern for empathy has been a recurring feature of anticolonial literary practice. Moreover, it has been treated extensively in a cognitive context.

Identity Current reflections on identity in postcolonial studies are largely guided by the work of Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler,19 both of whom challenge traditional concepts of identity. Specifically, there seems to be a sort of common-sense position on identity. By this account, each of us simply has his or her identity—as male or female, as English or Indian, and so on. One may reject one’s identity, as when an Indian tries to be English. But there is always something false about this, and one’s true identity continues to exert a pull, which one may ultimately recognize in “finding one’s roots.” This common-sense view of identity was cultivated, in different forms, by both colonial and anticolonial politicians and writers. Depending on the precise nature of one’s identifications, such a view has obvious benefits for both forms of nationalism. Appeals to identity by political groups often involve associated appeals to “authenticity.” The idea of authenticity is itself based on further presumptions. Specifically, in this view, there are true and false forms of identity. In a colonial context, the false forms of identity derive from the insidious changes produced by the colonizer—changes in social customs, religious beliefs, cultural practices, and so on. One may recognize that one is truly Indian, but still inadvertently follow British principles. Authentic identity involves a rejection of those colonial distortions. Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, though initially introduced to refer to a very different phenomenon, has been taken up as a response to the idea of authenticity. Specifically, the idea of hybridity is used to oppose any notion that there was or could be a pure culture. Cultures are always already mixed. Thus inauthenticity is impossible. This at least partially undermines the idea of a true identity in that it makes the content of identity imprecise and mixed. Butler’s challenge to the common-sense view is more radical. It rejects the notion of any prior condition that defines what a person is. No one simply is a particular sex, nationality, race, and so on. Rather, one engages in a certain performance of sex, nationality, race, and so on. That performance does not derive from any prior identity. While rejecting the common-sense idea that we have a natural national or other identity, I have argued that there are problems with Bhabha’s and Butler’s accounts.20 These problems arise at two levels—one with respect to their theoretical development;

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Patrick Colm Hogan    335 the other with respect to their precise object of analysis. As to the theoretical development, Bhabha is undoubtedly correct that all cultures and so forth are “hybrid” in some sense. However, that only responds to the most simplistic view of identity—the view that there is a single, eternal, and somehow racially or ethnically pure set of practices that one should follow because of one’s identity. In fact, very few people accept this idea, including very few advocates of identity. A more common, if implicit view is the following. Some cultural change results from force (e.g., through the imposition of laws by the colonizer), economic power (e.g., through the distribution of American films due to economic control of distribution networks), prestige (e.g., through racism), and similar factors. Other cultural change results from noncoercive contact or internal reform. There is no reason to see “hybridity” of the two sorts as equivalent. “Authenticity” could be compatible with freely chosen cultural betterment while at the same time rejecting coerced cultural imitation. As to Butler’s views, it is very hard to say just what is involved in performance. If performance is not guided by some prior disposition, it would seem to be guided by some sort of ideology. But Butler does not seem to have that in mind. If she did, it would largely reduce the theory to a variant on ideological analysis. As it is, the account seems to be irresolvably vague on the causal precedents (or even precise consequences) of gender or other performance. As such, it seems to be inadequate as both a description and an explanation. The more significant problems concern the nature of the object, identity. Neither Bhabha nor Butler takes account of the fact that there is a fundamental difference between one’s “practical identity” and one’s “categorial identity” (or, more properly, identities). The term “identity”—in common parlance and in Bhabha and Butler—is ambiguous between the two. Specifically, practical identity a complex of propensities and competencies that enable one’s interaction with others in the social world. It is the integrated interrelation of cognitive structures and processes—semantic prototypes, procedural schemas (or skills), and so on. By this account, culture is largely an abstraction from coordinated practical identities, just as a national language is an abstraction from coordinated idiolects. Note that one consequence of this is that no two people’s practical identities will be precisely the same. However, sets of people’s practical identities will be more or less coordinated, integrating them into real or potential social networks. The networks will then share features that define culture. Simple cases would include, for example, competence in responding to a police siren when driving. Categorial identity, in contrast, is a sort of labeling with a very minimal definition. The labeling can be a matter of race or nationality (e.g., “black” and “white”) or of some ephemeral category (“group a” and “group b”). There is extensive research on the cognitive and affective operation of group division. That research indicates that in-group and out-group definition results, not from differences in practical identity, but from oppositions in categorial identity. Specifically, labeling two sets of people differently produces a wide range of discriminations. Categorial group division leads people to judge their in-group more favorably on a range of properties, even when the assignment to groups

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336    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism is explicitly arbitrary and the group members do not know other people in their stipulated group.21 This basic distinction suggests that one part of the common-sense view of identity is partially correct. We do have our own practical identities. However, the more crucial part is not correct. These practical identities are not in any sense natural (e.g., racial). Moreover, the assignment of categorial identities is itself largely arbitrary or meaningless—meaningless because there is no particular linkage with practical identity. This account thus indicates that there is no reason for someone of Indian origin to believe that his or her “true identity” involves Indian philosophy, religion, clothing, language, or any other matter of practical identity. His or her practical identity is precisely what he or she has learned and internalized—and it is open to change as he or she desires. At the same time, since practical identity is real, it suggests that one may reasonably condemn cultural imperialism and the related forms of identity destruction. But it does not in any way require that any individual adhere to particular cultural practices. As to Butler, this account indicates that there is truth to the view that a (categorial) identity has social impact because it is “performed” in the sense of being worked out in a practical identity, to which it is only arbitrarily connected. However, that practical identity is open to standard sorts of cognitive and motivational explanation. The account has further advantages as well. We may isolate different relations between practical identities, on the one hand, and in-group and out-group definitions, formed by categorial identifications, on the other. For example, one may have a practical identity formed in a colonized society, but adopt a categorial identification with the colonizer. Since practical identity is malleable, it is possible to change one’s practical identity, thus assimilating into the colonizer’s society. However, one may fail to understand and internalize the other culture, relying for example on stereotypes of that culture, rather than lived interactions. This is what is commonly called mimicry. Other configurations may lead to “reactionary traditionalism” (roughly, fundamentalism), syncretism, and other results.22 In short, this cognitive account of identity allows for the clarification of common varieties of cultural identification. In contrast, accounts based on hybridity or performance seem to reduce all varieties to a single type, which is itself perhaps not very clearly formulated. There are, in addition, many categorial identities available to each of us, frequently leading to conflicts in identity categorization. For example, in a war someone may himself or herself identify with one nation for reasons of ethnic category and another nation for reasons of religious category. We may isolate a number of social conditions that make one of these categories become prominent at a particular time and place. These are (1) salience, the degree to which the property is obtrusive; (2) functionality, the degree to which the property has social consequences; (3) durability, the degree to which a property may change; (4) opposability, the number of groups defined by alternatives to the property; and (5) affectivity, the emotional consequences of the property.23 In this way, the cognitive account suggests why, for example, certain racial divisions are so easy to initiate and sustain. In the United States, one’s identity category as “white” or “black” is perceptually salient; functional in, for example, treatment by the police; durable;

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Patrick Colm Hogan    337 nearly binary; and often highly emotional. In contrast, one’s identity category as, say, a “Wisconsinite” has no perceptual salience, very limited functionality, little durability, one-fiftieth opposability, and probably little emotional consequence. Here again a cognitive account of identity proves fruitful. Theories of hybridity and performance would seem to have nothing to say about why Americans commonly identify more strongly by race than by, for example, state citizenship. By way of illustration, we might briefly consider Rabindranath Tagore’s story “The Divide.”24 Many works of postcolonial literature treat the varieties of identity that arise in colonial contexts, developing and giving nuance to the main types—mimetic, reactionary traditional, and so on. Indeed, Tagore’s novel Gora presents the entire spectrum of such types, elaborated with the complexity and human sympathy that one would expect from Tagore. However, some works treat the issue more broadly, in a way that in effect applies across times and places. “The Divide” is a work of this sort. Though it of course concerns specific characters in specific conditions, it is generalizable across colonial and noncolonial situations. The story concerns two friends, Banamali and Himangshu. The two are very different, particularly in education and educational disposition. While Himangshu read aloud, Banamali listened to Himangshu; while Banamali practiced gardening, Himangshu learned about botany and agriculture. In short, their practical identities interwove perfectly. But a dispute broke out between the two families. Their fathers went to court over ownership of a lime tree. As a result, Himangshu stopped visiting his friend. The dispute was not between the friends, but between groups to which the two friends belonged. It may seem that one’s family is one’s “real” group. But it is a categorial identity too. Indeed, it is a key categorial identity, since it serves as an important model for other categorial identities, such as nationhood.25 With the lawsuit, the familial identity category became salient, functional, and opposable in the relation between the friends. It was already more durable (one remains a child of one’s father no matter what; friendships, in contrast, may dissipate). It was also already affective. The result of the lawsuit, then, was a shift on Himangshu’s part. A bond of friendship based on the mutual integration of practical identities was broken by the development of categorial identification. The beauty of the story is that it applies anywhere—for example, the Indian Hindus and Muslims who may live in integrated communities, but then violently attack one another during communal riots when religious identity categories become prominent.

Racism As the preceding example already begins to suggest, the cognitive account of identity has the further advantage of treating racism in the same explanatory framework. Bhabha does have a psychoanalytic account bearing on the castration complex, as already noted. However, there does not appear to be much in the way of evidence for Bhabha’s theory in particular or the more general psychoanalytic principles on which it rests.

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338    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism A cognitive account of identity may begin by understanding racism as a form of out-group definition. This is important for two reasons. First, out-group definition involves both inferential and affective or motivational components, as we would expect from observing racism in life. Second, in-group/out-group divisions occur across different sorts of prejudice, thus establishing continuities that allow the analysis of racism to be extended to bias based on religion, nationality, and so on. Of course, it is important to recognize that not all forms of prejudice are identical. But this is not simply because, say, national antagonism is different from racial antagonism. Rather, it is because different forms of racial bias are not identical. For example, anti-Semitic racism is not the same as anti-African racism. In other words, the crucial differences are not in the domains of in-group/out-group divisions (nation, race, and so on), but in the precise cognitive operations that develop those divisions in thought and action. More exactly, once an out-group is formed by the definition of identity categories, people using those categories necessarily think about and have attitudes toward the out-group. The categorization is relatively abstract. For example, it is not about Joe and Sam, whom one knows, but about, say, “Africans.” In consequence, thoughts and emotions about the out-group are likely to rely on some addition to the mere categorization. Typically, when faced with abstraction, the human mind invokes mental models (as Johnson-Laird would say)26 or conceptual metaphors (as Lakoff and Johnson would put it).27 The same point holds in this case. But just what models? An answer to this question is suggested by the work of the prominent Indian postcolonial theorist Ashis Nandy. Though Nandy is not drawing on cognitive science, his analyses are very compatible with a cognitive approach. Specifically, Nandy argues that discrimination in England itself provided the rationalization for discrimination in the colonies. In England, age and sex were the main axes of institutionalized social hierarchization. Nandy explains that “Western colonialism invariably used” the “homology” between sex or age hierarchy and colonial hierarchy.28 For example, drawing on the homology of age, colonialists assimilated Africans and African culture to childhood and Indian culture to senility, with English culture taking the adult position. Nandy’s argument may be extended in four main ways.29 First, this homology is best thought of as a cognitive model or a conceptual metaphor, with the usual source/target relations, the usual cognitive processes, and so on. Second, these models are not confined to sex and age. Indeed, sex discrimination itself requires the rationalization of cognitive modeling. In connection with this, we may isolate the two main models for in-group/out-group division as age and animacy, the latter extending from subhuman animals to superhuman spirits. (Age and animacy modeling are often mediated by sex modeling, in which the age or animacy categories are combined with sex categories.) Third, there are positive and negative versions of such models. Thus there are models of innocent children and violent adolescents, wise elders and senile fools, pets and predators, angels and demons. Any of these may be used for discriminatory purposes, as the “angel in the house” model of for women suggests. Finally, the models shift not only with large target groups (e.g., African and Indian), but with the political attitudes of colonizers. Thus liberal colonialists tend to prefer childhood models, while fascists are more

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Patrick Colm Hogan    339 likely to rely on demonization. Moreover, several models may be used simultaneously to distinguish subcategories of out-group members (“Some members of group X are innocent children, but others are gross, oversexed adolescents”). These need not be the only models operating in colonialist or other out-group definition. However, they are prominent and recurring. Of course, these models are subject to further, cultural specification. Thus, in the Indian context, demonization may be connected with the rakshasas of Hindu mythology. Consider, for example, the film Roja.30 It concerns the separatist movement in Kashmir. Though the situation is complex, in many respects the Indian presence in Kashmir faces us with what might be called derivative colonialism. “Derivative colonialism” may be understood as form of colonial domination in a former European colony. Domination of this sort is the result of colonial history—in this case, history that led to the incorporation of Kashmir into the independent Indian state. The main character in Roja explicitly refers to the militants as rakshasas or demons. Their leader is presented as singularly repulsive, with a large, witch-like growth on his nose. Moreover, the most prominent story of rakshasas’ demonic behavior concerns the rakshasa king Rāvaṇa, who kidnaps Sītā, separating her from her beloved Rāma. Roja takes up this narrative sequence as well, focusing on the militants’ kidnapping of a government employee and the separation of the loving couple. The modeling of the separatist or anticolonial movement and the militants themselves clearly draws on the cross-cultural demonic model, while doing so in a culturally specific way. What is perhaps most interesting about the film, however, is that the attitude toward the militants changes in the middle. At this point, the militant leader’s younger brother, a young boy, is introduced. Moreover, there is increasing stress on the degree to which the Kashmiri militants are not acting on their own, but are told to engage in certain actions by their Pakistani leaders. For our purposes, the crucial point about this development is that the increasing sympathy with the militants—and the increasing sense that they can be reincorporated into India—results from an implicit shift in cognitive models. In the second model, the militants are no longer rakshasas. Rather, they are children, misled by another adult (Pakistan), but potentially open to reform through interaction with (adult) India. (The childhood model becomes more prominent in other works, such as Sikandar,31 which treats a young boy who gets mixed up in the political violence.)

Anticolonialism and Empathy Clearly, a film such as Roja is designed to foster certain thoughts, emotions, and even actions regarding the situation in Kashmir. Specifically, the film sets out to affect viewers’ understanding of and attitude toward policies in Kashmir. In this case, the purposes are procolonial. Indeed, the film repeatedly emphasizes that independence for Kashmir is not an option. But the general cognitive processes at issue are the same in pro- and anticolonial works.

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340    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism Postcolonial critics have been very concerned with the anticolonial implications and consequences of postcolonial literature. (They have been much less concerned with the procolonial implications in relation to derivative colonialism.) One of the main objections raised by Aldama is that mainstream postcolonial critics at least appear to believe that literature is somehow operating directly on language, which in turn somehow operates on the world (or, worse still, constitutes it). However, language does not exist separately from speakers. If postcolonial literature is to have political effects, it must have those effects through speakers. Suzanne Keen has taken up this issue, specifically exploring the topic of empathy. Keen’s treatment of empathy is based on the extensive research on the topic undertaken by cognitive and affective scientists. Her analysis is not confined to postcolonial studies. However, Keen pays special attention to that area and her arguments are perhaps particularly valuable there. Specifically, Keen outlines the different attitudes authors and critics have toward empathy, noting the values and drawbacks of appeals to empathy. The values of empathy are perhaps more obvious. If a literary work invites empathic identification with victims of famine, then it may inspire some ameliorative action (e.g., charitable donations) on the part of readers. If a literary work presents the conditions of colonized people in such a way that a reader to some degree mirrors their sense of humiliation and deprivation, then it may affect that reader’s attitudes toward colonial policies. Since all this seems almost self-evident, Keen’s treatment of the case against the advocacy of empathy is perhaps more interesting. Drawing on both literature and empirical research, Keen isolates three primary ways in which the value of empathy may be contested. She finds the first in depictions of what she calls “hyperempathy.” Drawing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, she explains that, for some writers, extreme empathy may potentially lead to the empathic person’s “incapacitation, exploitation, even enslavement.”32 The point is important. On the other hand, advocates of empathy would be right to respond that the problem here is primarily with emotion contagion or spontaneous mirroring. One problem with empathy is that it is readily provoked by immediate experience. Thus we are more likely to empathize with the person we see than with the person we do not see—for example, the soldier on “our side” who is wounded, not the bereaved family of a dead “enemy.” One response to this problem is the effortful extension of empathic imagination beyond immediate experience and spontaneous emotion mirroring. This effortful extension should include imagination of one’s future self, the case that Octavia Butler’s novel suggests. “Failed empathy” is a second problem, specifically the problem of “the inefficiency of shared feelings in provoking action.”33 It is difficult, however, to see this as a problem with empathic goals as such. It is important to recognize that leading someone to cry over the fate of political prisoners will not in itself change the condition of political prisoners. Political movements of the sort stressed by Aldama are crucial, as are institutions and other facilitative social and physical conditions. Even if the only action aimed for is writing letters on behalf of political prisoners, it is necessary to have an organization such as Amnesty International to collect the information about political prisoners

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Patrick Colm Hogan    341 and provide addresses for letters. Of course, as Keen rightly emphasizes, the question remains as to whether empathy inspired by literature has any real-world motivational effects at all. A potentially worse problem is “false empathy.” False empathy occurs when readers “incorrectly believe that they have caught the feeling of suffering others from a different culture, gender, race, or class.”34 This is an issue that requires much more examination. However, it seems likely that false empathy enters primarily into empathic emotions relevant to the empathizer himself or herself. For example, if a literary work presents someone as starving or as being separated from his or her family, it seems unlikely that readers will be mistaken about the empathic feeling. In the former case, the person in question will be feeling the pain of hunger; in the latter case, the pain of attachment loss. Leaving aside pathological cases, few readers are likely to get these feelings wrong. However, when white readers encounter a beneficent white character generously patronizing a black character, those white readers may be more likely to misunderstand the black character’s response. Some works may deal with this issue more or less explicitly. This is at least in part the case with Richard Wright’s Native Son. On the other hand, sometimes it may not matter. In some cases, white readers may falsely empathize and the political consequences of the work may be unaffected. If a work succeeds in, say, fostering charitable donations, it may not matter that the givers falsely imagine the resulting love of famine victims. This leads us to the key, practical analysis of Keen’s work. In treating the literary cultivation of empathy—or, indeed, any other political goal of a work—it is crucial to consider the target audience of the work. Keen argues that a wide range of authors seek to develop a “strategic” form of empathy in readers. The strategy concerns particular political and social goals. Those goals necessarily differ with respect to different audiences. They differ particularly with respect to the authorial in-group and relevant out-group. For example, the sorts of empathy that a colonized author might wish to develop—and the associated politics he or she may wish to foster—will vary depending on whether he or she is primarily addressing the liberal segment of the colonial society or traditional and reactionary segments of the colonized society. This is why empathy is strategic. In appealing to the colonial society, writing in English, an Indian or African author may stress suffering that results from colonialism. In contrast, when appealing to traditional and reactionary segments of the home society, writing in Bengali or Swahili, an Indian or African author may stress suffering that results from indigenous practices. Of course, the precise opposite may happen as well. In order to get published and receive accolades in the West, an Indian or African author may depict the most stereotypical sufferings that (in fact or in ideology) result from indigenous practices. This too is strategic, though not anticolonial. In either case, the crucial point is that the strategy is incomprehensible in isolation from the target audience. In order to clarify the types of audience appeal made by postcolonial and other works, Keen proposes a threefold division. First, there is “bounded” strategic empathy. This has the in-group—or, one might say, some segment of an in-group—as its target. Second, there is “ambassadorial” strategic empathy. This has the out-group—or, again, some

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342    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism segment of the out-group—as its target. Finally, there is “broadcast” strategic empathy. This “calls upon every reader” independent of group membership. It seems likely that undifferentiated broadcast empathy is relatively less common in postcolonial writing. This does not mean that postcolonial works are confined to either the in-group or the out-group. Rather, it means that such works are most likely to involve both audiences, but to keep them to some degree separate. An author may aim some sections of his or her work at in-group members while aiming other sections of the work at out-group members—or aiming the same sections at the two groups, but in somewhat different ways.35 This is almost unavoidable, given the fact that works treating colonialism are likely to make categorial differences very salient, thus difficult to simply ignore in a reader’s response (unless the reader falls outside the relevant division). Tagore’s “The Divide” would seem to be a story that genuinely involves an undifferentiated target audience. Thus it seems to foster a sort of broadcast empathy. Indeed, this is suggested by the reapplicability of the story to a wide range of divisions in categorial identity. However, this is not typically the case in anticolonial literature. Here we might consider Kamala Markandaya’s novel Nectar in a Sieve.36 The novel has sometimes been criticized for inaccurately portraying some aspects of peasant life in India. It might also be objected that the novel says little about the way peasants might work together to improve their conditions. However, criticisms of this sort are misdirected in that they misunderstand the target audience of the work. Markandaya wrote her novel in English in the 1950s. This was over thirty years before Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize. In those decades, a number of factors converged to greatly expand the readership of Anglophone Indian fiction. But in the 1950s, the choice of writing in English was largely a choice of writing for English readers, as well as a very small Anglicized stratum of Indian readers. Many aspects of the novel develop directly from this audience orientation. Most obviously, the novel repeatedly stresses the inability of the peasants to do much of anything on their own to better their conditions. If the novel were addressed to the rural poor of India (in parallel with, for example, some of Ngũgĩ’s work in Kenya), then this could be a political problem. However, the point of portraying Indian peasants as relatively helpless is to combat the view that they are instances of the “blameworthy poor.” In other words, Markandaya does not wish to communicate the sense that the Indian peasants are starving because they have failed to take advantage of means readily available to them. Nor does she wish to alienate liberal English readers with the specter of peasant rebellion. She specifically wishes to appeal for the support of medical aid to India. In connection with this audience sensitivity, Markandaya nicely addresses the problem of false empathy. One problem with the main white character, Dr.  Kennington, is that he is often verbally demeaning toward the main Indian character, Rukmani. Rukmani is a dignified and extremely hard-working peasant woman who shows remarkable perseverance in the face of relentless waves of misery. She makes excuses for Kennington’s outbursts (while still maintaining her own independence of mind). However, only a completely insensitive reader would not be bothered by this clear flaw

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Patrick Colm Hogan    343 in the doctor. The purpose, I take it, is to make European readers sensitive to their own possible arrogance, while not alienating them. The novel’s address to Indian readers is more subtle and primarily concerns conflicts between Nehurvian industrial policy and Gandhian ideas, with empathy being recruited largely in support of the latter.

Conclusion In sum, cognitive postcolonialism offers a critique of mainstream postcolonial theory, with its basis in psychoanalysis. Specifically, cognitive postcolonial theory stresses the embodied and situated nature of the human mind, as well as its constrained structures and processes. Its critique of mainstream postcolonial theory may be integrated with a form of historical materialism that incorporates cognitive and affective universals. Positively, cognitivism offers a more complex and better-grounded account of identity. It does this based on a fundamental distinction between practical and categorial identity. This enables an account of varieties of cultural identity, as well as a systematic treatment of how some identity categories come to predominate over others. In connection with this, a cognitive approach offers a more precisely differentiated account of racism, which clarifies and systematizes the insights of earlier postcolonial theorists. Finally, cognitivism offers an expanded and deepened understanding of empathy, its possibilities and limits, and its inseparability from different target audiences based on in-group/ out-group divisions.

Notes 1. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 74. 2. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism:  Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), xi. 3. One common practice of postcolonial critics and literary historians is recovering colonial literary works. As for example Njogu notes, “It is part of the postcolonial ethical imperative to dig out, retrieve, and make visible and audible undervalued and/or disparaged sites of knowledge” (Kĩmani Njogu, “Gĩcandĩ and the Reemergence of Suppressed Words,” Drama Review 43 [1999]: 56). Cognitive critics have contributed to this also, prominently in reviving and re-evaluating non-Western, precolonial literary and aesthetic theories in a cognitive context. For cases of this sort, see, for example, V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain:  A  Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 2011), and Lalita Pandit, “The Psychology and Aesthetics of Love:  Śringāra, Bhāvanā, and Rasadhvani in Gora,” in Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 141–74. 4. On voluntarism, see Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 4, 124, 134, 191, 318, and 322.

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344    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism 5. Here I am explicating one possible account of such materialism. Aldama’s specific views on the topic are not fully explicit in his discussion of postcolonial theory and may differ in details from the present account. However, Aldama’s understanding of the human mind is undoubtedly of this general sort. 6. See, for example, Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). 7. For some approaches, see Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 8. Semir Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 132. 9. Frederick Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter: A Commonsense Approach (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 261. 10. See Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 47. 11. Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter, 261. 12. On the nature of mood repair, see Joseph Forgas, “Affect and Information Processing Strategies: An Interactive Relationship,” in Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. Joseph Forgas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 258 and citations. 13. Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter, 195. 14. To use a common distinction, important in cognitive science, deriving from Chomsky; see Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 26–27. 15. Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter, 206. 16. Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter, 203. 17. Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter, 204. 18. Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter, 210. 19. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 20. See Patrick Colm Hogan, Colonialism and Cultural Identity:  Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean, (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2000), 24–42, and Empire and Poetic Voice: Cognitive and Cultural Studies of Literary Tradition and Colonialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1–18. 21. John Duckitt, The Social Psychology of Prejudice (New York: Praeger, 1992), 68–69. 22. See Hogan, Colonialism and Cultural Identity, 9–24, and Empire and Poetic Voice, 13–17. 23. See ­chapter 2 of Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Nationalism: Narrative, Identity, and Cognitive Science (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). 24. Rabindranath Tagore, “The Divide,” in Selected Short Stories, ed. and trans. William Radice (New York: Penguin, 2005), 65–69. 25. See Hogan, Understanding Nationalism, 154–62. 26. Philip Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 27. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 28. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1983), 4. 29. See ­chapter 4 of Patrick Colm Hogan, The Culture of Conformism: Understanding Social Consent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 30. Mani Ratnam, dir., Roja, written by Mani Ratnam, Madras Talkies (India), 1992. 31. Piyush Jha, dir., Sikandar, written by Piyush Jha, Reliance Big Pictures (India), 2009.

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Patrick Colm Hogan    345 32. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 149. 33. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 159. 34. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 159. 35. On multiple audiences and strategic empathy, see Suzanne Keen, “Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy,” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift 82.3 (2008): 477–93. 36. Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve (New York: Signet, 2002).

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick. Why the Humanities Matter: A Commonsense Approach. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism:  Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965. Duckitt, John. The Social Psychology of Prejudice. New York: Praeger, 1992. Forgas, Joseph P. “Affect and Information Processing Strategies: An Interactive Relationship.” In Feeling and Thinking:  The Role of Affect in Social Cognition. Ed. Joseph P.  Forgas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 253–80. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Culture of Conformism:  Understanding Social Consent. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Empire and Poetic Voice:  Cognitive and Cultural Studies of Literary Tradition and Colonialism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Understanding Nationalism: Narrative, Identity, and Cognitive Science. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Jha, Piyush, dir. Sikandar. Written by Piyush Jha. Reliance Big Pictures (India), 2009. Johnson-Laird, Philip. Mental Models. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Keen, Suzanne. “Strategic Empathizing:  Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy.” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift 82.3 (2008): 477–93. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lukács, Georg. Essays on Realism. Ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. New York: Signet, 2002. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy:  Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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346    The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism Njogu, Kĩmani. “Gĩcandĩ and the Reemergence of Suppressed Words.” Drama Review 43 (1999): 54–71. Pandit, Lalita. “The Psychology and Aesthetics of Love: Śringāra, Bhāvanā, and Rasadhvani in Gora.” In Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition. Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003, 141–74. Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Ratnam, Mani, dir. Roja. Written by Mani Ratnam. Madras Talkies (India), 1992. Robbins, Philip, and Murat Aydede, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tagore, Rabindranath. “The Divide.” In Selected Short Stories. Ed. and trans. William Radice. New York: Penguin, 2005, 65–69. Zeki, Semir. Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

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Chapter 17

Hum an Righ ts Di s c ou rse and U niv e rs a l s of C o gnition a nd E mot i on Postcolonial Fiction Suz ann e K e e n

In this chapter, which orbits around Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat’s work, I revisit my theory of strategic narrative empathizing1 with a view to considering the multiple audiences a postcolonial fiction writer such as Danticat seeks to reach and move. As a practice and aim of fictional representation, narrative empathy has been a core element of postcolonial (and anticolonial) fiction in English, capitalizing on a shared language and generic traditions (such as bildungsroman)2 to reach readers near and far, to work on and with their feelings. Although first-wave literary cognitivism’s basis in computational models for cognition discouraged consideration of the emotions and other aspects of embodied consciousness, the theorizing of narrative empathy can now be considered an aspect of literary cognitivism’s project. Understanding narrative empathy involves the psychology of intersubjectivity, and sensitivity to context, as well as universals of cognition and emotion: all facets of contemporary cognitivism. Yet even as critics of the new literatures in English push back against what has been described as a “ ‘neocolonialism’ of the third world’s cultural production” by postcolonial theory steeped in European sources,3 their compensatory seeking of local or indigenous frames for interpretation may also rebuff cognitivism, indicting it for totalizing impulses. Recognition of writers’ simultaneous or alternating outreach to multiple audiences at different removes from the representational point of origin illuminates how narrative empathy in a postcolonial text can function differently for readerships close at hand than for the world market. The literary cognitivism illustrated by a theory of narrative empathy is thus attentive to cultural contexts. Furthermore, it may point to a potential relationship between human rights discourse and literary cognitivism as an alternative to postcolonial theory and discourse.

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348    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion

Postcolonial Theory and Criticism

Literary Cognitivism

Postcolonial Fiction

Narrative Empathy

Figure  17.1 Postcolonial Theory and Criticism does not overlap with Literary Cognitivism, Narrative Empathy, or Postcolonial Fiction that seeks to engage the emotions of a wide range of readers.

From the vantage point of postcolonial theory and criticism, the Venn diagram of relationships among literary texts, empathetic techniques and effects, and the theoretical frame provided by literary cognitivism will not serve, for postcolonial theory and criticism does not comfortably overlap with literary cognitivism, suspects narrative empathy, and is motivated by different aims and audiences than fiction by writers from the postcolonial Anglophone world. A distrust on the part of many postcolonial theorists in human universals4—including common human experiences, cognitive abilities enabled by human’s psychobiological inheritance, and core human emotions—coexists in the contemporary literary field of practice with strategic empathizing in narratives by anti-colonial and postcolonial fiction. Some postcolonial fiction is fully in concord with postcolonial theory on the vicissitudes of fictively elicited narrative sympathies. Yet many postcolonial poems, plays, short stories, memoirs, and novels overtly seek feeling responses and offer opportunities for readerly emotional fusion with fictional characters and their situations. That is, literary practice in a variety of genres has sought out audiences whose feelings, attitudes, and commitments it might sway by means of strategic narrative empathy. Cognitive literary study can begin to account for the functioning of narrative empathy in that narrative transaction, but the philosophical clash between postcolonial theory and criticism and cognitive literary study interferes with the application of insights from cognitivism to postcolonial literary texts. Using matters of human rights and capabilities to address the universal affordances of postcolonial letters may run afoul of postcolonial theory’s distrust of the tacit neocolonialism of human rights discourse. However, the shift in approach may be rewarding, for the emergent literary critical project of human rights discourse5 offers theoretical compatibilities with literary cognitivism, the theorizing of narrative empathy, and the rhetorical aims of much postcolonial fiction. This is not to suggest that human rights discourse is to be preferred to postcolonial theory simply because it conveniently embraces narrative empathy as a precursor to altruism. Human rights discourse offers just as robust a critique of real-life empathy and

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Suzanne Keen   349

Literary Cognitivism

Postcolonial Fiction

Human Rights Discourse

Narrative Empathy

Figure 17.2  Human Rights Discourse overlaps with Literary Cognitivism, Narrative Empathy, and Postcolonial Fiction.

to a lesser degree, narrative empathy, as postcolonial theory does.6 For instance, Schaffer and Smith write that the personal narratives they study in Human Rights and Narrated Lives “encourage empathetic identification, [but] that identification comes at the potential cost of reducing differences to sameness.”7 Whereas a postcolonialist might be more likely to suspect readers’ empathy as an imposition of a privileged perspective on or condescension to postcolonial subjects, human rights advocates more often lament the effects of empathy fatigue, and empathy experts from the social sciences more often acknowledge barriers to empathic responding such as bias, prejudice, diffusion of responsibility, and innate cruelty.8 For example, evolutionary psychologist Allen Young writes that “Mind reading, perspective-taking, hormonal responsiveness and mental time travel were likewise responsible for psychological altruism, the propensity to adjust one’s desires and intentions to the perceived needs or wishes of others. . . . Human nature [is] likewise prepared for cruel pleasures.”9 A view that acknowledges both prosocial and antisocial impulses seems most likely to capture the push-me, pull-you representational effects that can contribute to efforts on behalf of human rights, as Lynn Hunt argues in Inventing Human Rights (2007), but can also impede them by indulging in cruel humor based on prejudice, as Simon Dickie has recently shown in Cruelty and Laughter (2011).10 From the outlook of postcolonial literary theory, critiques of false empathy dominate, whereas in the distinct approach of human rights discourse, failed empathy is more often described or deplored. The resources of several disciplinary contexts assist in moving towards a workable treaty between the universalizing, generalizing aims of cognitivism and the persuasive goals of much postcolonial literature. The lens of narrative empathy focuses a review of the psychological, cognitive, and affective research on attitudes towards universal human rights, cross-cultural studies of human affect, and the postcolonial critique of the limits of human universals. It reveals the usefulness of a human rights framework for apt and sensitive responding to the challenges of postcolonial novels that engage in

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350    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion strategic narrative empathizing to reach their various audiences. Literary cognitivism’s critique of postcolonial theoretical discourse is ably analyzed by Patrick Colm Hogan (­chapter 16 in this volume); I work from the opposite direction to suggest why postcolonial theory regards literary cognitivism with wariness. I juxtapose to that attitude the rhetorical aims of one postcolonial writer, Edwidge Danticat, in a preliminary case study of the appropriate place of narrative empathy in postcolonial literary studies. Before turning to Edwidge Danticat, I suggest how it came to be that literary cognitivists began to make inroads into a discursive field whose founding premises might seem to repel the insights of cognitivism absolutely. Literary applications of cognitive science, affective science, and social neuroscience depend to a large degree on generalizations about how human minds and bodies work. This does not mean, as humanists sometimes suspect, that scientists seek to boil human nature down into a single data point, illustrative brain scan, or predictable behavior. Indeed, the sciences of brain and behavior more often represent ranges of response, and scales that admit high, low, or no levels of the phenomena under study. Yet humanists often judge scientists for erasing all sorts of human behavior and varieties of bodily, affective, and mental experience in the interest of discerning generalizable patterns. The concern is not limited to the humanities. Even in its own self-criticism and calls for change, psychological science admits that “generalization can be insidious,” as the eminent developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan puts it in an opinion piece published in the Chronicle Review, “Psychology’s Missing Contexts.”11 As Kagan puts it, psychology “has been woefully blind to issues of experimental context, undermining both the field’s impact and its reputation.”12 Of particular concern to Kagan is the overuse of male lab rats and American college students as experimental subjects in studies with fewer than 50 participants.13 The large numbers, diverse subjects, and long time periods favored by longitudinal medical studies set a standard that experimental psychology, let alone empirical literary study, struggles to meet.14 A postcolonial literary theorist with commitments to understanding cultural differences would be inclined to agree with Kagan’s observation that “It is not at all obvious that most of the results reported in published [psychology] papers with college-age, white American participants would be the same if the same studies were done with 50-year-olds from a rural village in Ghana, the center of Beijing, a New Guinea forest, or a suburb of Quito.”15 But this is not the only reason that postcolonial theory resists and distrusts the findings of psychology and cognitive science. Postcolonial literary theorists have ardently critiqued not only the kind of hidden biases that Kagan points out, but also the very notion of human universals, including the shared set of basic emotions that apparently undergird transactions of narrative empathy. Generally speaking, postcolonial theory and criticism emerge from the worldview that sees the human mind as socially constructed and regards feelings, thoughts, and experiences of individuals in a given location and period as incomparable with others in different places and times. As Fredric Jameson recently characterized it in a lecture at University of Helsinki, the resistance to universals is a struggle against hegemonic norms, which are thereby suppressive and exclusionary:  “The Doctrine of Universal

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Suzanne Keen   351 Human Rights is still a doctrine of universals.”16 To the degree that postcolonial theory absorbs psychoanalytic thinking, it sees human behavior as context specific:17 and the relevant context from Fanon onwards includes the variable legacy of colonization, imperial dominion, resistance, and the aftermath of decolonization. Postcolonial literary studies, as distinct from the discourse of human rights and capabilities, criticizes human universals for historicist reasons. Neuroscientists and neurohumanists have taken notice: as Deborah Jensen and Marco Iacoboni observe, “Any area of human capacity celebrated as confirming what is best about the human. . . turns out to be involved in excluding, or dividing and conquering human populations by the measure of their circumstantial performance of this capacity cum standard.”18 Western political thought has occupied the default position of the universal, obscuring both its own particularity and situatedness and casting alternative understandings as provincial or barbaric. All too often have the traits of a supposedly shared humanity featured fungible binaries that leave the oppressed out of the circle of the civilized or even the human family. Literary cognitivists treating postcolonial texts run the risk of unwittingly participating in the exploitation of the colonized or condescension towards postcolonial subjects by effacing the particularity of representations of emotional experiences under what appears to postcolonialists a presumptuous and potentially damaging belief in a common human psychobiological inheritance. Postcolonial theory’s case against universalizing deserves attention, for definitions of the human and discussions of intrinsically human traits, let alone putative universals of civilization, have often been used to justify exclusion, dispossession, and displacement. Even when treading carefully and evoking sensitivity to contexts and differences, few literary cognitivists can sidestep the universalizing premises of cognitivism and psychology more generally. The situation does not get simpler when we come to matters of affect and shared feeling, the physiological ground for imaginative experiences of narrative empathy. Postcolonial theorists typically regard the expression of emotions as culturally constructed and distrust assertions of biological commonalities among human beings. They rightly point out the dearth of cross-cultural comparative study in cognitive science, as in psychology overall. Cognitivism in particular has sought to theorize and verify empirically the workings of the mind by hypothesizing mental structures, internal processes, and their neurological substrates in the human species. To refer to a cognitive postcolonial literary studies implies that generalizable qualities, functions, and physiological substrates of human minds and emotions can be discerned in the writings of an extraordinarily diverse group of authors whose only experience in common may be that their forebears were at one time colonized. It may appear to expunge the differences whose elucidation and dramatization are at the heart of postcolonial literature. The practice of cognitive postcolonial studies has centered on affect since the earliest essays of Patrick Colm Hogan, whose work on narrative universals, literary empathy,19 and aesthetic feelings in Sanskrit theorists and ethical emotions in the Arabic Aristotelians has established a practice of cross-cultural research for literary cognitivists. Hogan’s work, exceptionally among literary cognitivists, focuses on emotion as much as cognition. Uniquely among cognitivists, Hogan draws his illustrations from

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352    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion world literature, ancient and contemporary, in diverse genres and languages of origin. Hogan’s work is also atypical from the vantage point of postcolonial literary criticism in its pursuit of universals of form and impact. Even the very recent “turn towards the human” (as Dipesh Chakrabarty calls it)20 in postcolonial thinking emphasizes the local and culturally specific. Postcolonial theory and criticism rarely engage with theories of universal human traits, since universality is itself a sticking point. The emergence of a contextual cognitivism sensitive to historically contingent expressions of human experience encourages projects that could bridge the divide. Literary cognitivist work on contemporary writers of the postcolonial world deserves credit for its cross-cultural comparisons, such as that carried out by Patrick Colm Hogan, Frederick Aldama, and Shameem Black.21 However, as Alan Richardson warns, “this pursuit will fare badly if it becomes a matter of simplistically mapping the human universals posited by evolutionary psychology or sociobiology onto the content of fictive texts.”22 The handling of empathy, real and literary, illustrates the impasse. When postcolonial theorists discuss empathy, they disapprove of it: most postcolonial literary criticism distrusts narrative empathy for imposing, through perspective taking, an illusion of understanding of subaltern experience (false empathy). While no one novel or story evokes empathy in all its readers, some texts are widely regarded as inviting empathetic responses from many readers. Several such examples can be found in Krik? Krak! (1996), a book of stories by the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969).23 Danticat was born in Haiti and emigrated to the United States when she was 12 years old. Educated at Barnard College, where she majored in French, and Brown University, where she studied creative writing, Danticat has been publishing stories since the early 1990s. She is the author of several novels, one a hybrid novel in stories, several works of serious literary nonfiction, and a picture book for children that came out in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010, 7.0 Haitian earthquake. Danticat is unusual among Haitian writers because her literary work is written in English, the language of her adoptive country, though many of her characters are represented as speakers of the French Creole of Haiti. The consciousness of multiple audiences for her work is inscribed in her stories, novels, and nonfiction. The stories in Krik? Krak! explore the circumstances of Haitian individuals of a variety of ages and walks of life, and they include two stories towards the end of the volume set in the United States among immigrants from Haiti and their children. Danticat herself represents what sociologist Rubén Rumbaut has dubbed the 1.5 generation of immigrant, bringing with her knowledge and experience of her home culture in Haiti, but arriving in her new home young enough (age 12) to assimilate to its culture and complete her education here.24 The 1.5 generation immigrants’ identity combines the cultures and traditions of both the new and old culture (Rumbaut 1166–67). Danticat self-identifies as an immigrant artist25 (Create Dangerously), but she is not confined by that label. Her work appears on the syllabi of courses in African American literature, Caribbean fiction, postcolonial literature, memoir, and contemporary American fiction. With no one single delimiting context governing the academic discussion of Danticat, her readership is not primarily academic. Because her first novel, Breath,

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Suzanne Keen   353 Eyes, Memory (1994),26 was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, she has had a popular readership in the United States since the start of her career. Since that novel features three generations of Haitian women, each one traumatized in its own way, for instance by invasive virginity testing, Danticat has been criticized by Haitians for representing Haitian women in an unfavorable light—to a broad audience.27 She has not shrunk from the difficult or even dangerous representations that can evoke controversy and criticism, preferring to risk writing “dangerously, for people who read dangerously.”28 Danticat announces her vocation to write for those who take risks to read imaginative literature, perhaps far off in a posterity audience: “Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone’s life, because they have given us a passport, making us honorary citizens of their culture.”29 One test for that passport that admits a writer’s work into an alien culture is the work’s capacity to invite narrative empathy: emotional fusion with a fictional world and its characters. Danticat uses a number of strategies and techniques that have been demonstrated to enhance the potential for empathic responses to fictional narratives. Some of these are representational choices: picking young children and vulnerable teenagers as central characters; focusing attention on the creative capacities of individuals in hopeless circumstances; telling the tales of victims of persecution or exploitation. Danticat’s topics matter, and for some members of her audience, they prime empathetic responses. Yet when it comes to a world audience, relatively unfamiliar with the requirements for survival in Haiti during the Duvalier regime, for instance, the barriers of distance, lack of familiarity, and marked forms of difference (including race, ethnicity, nationality, and deficits in shared experiences) can all contribute to an unemotional, disengaged response. Aversive, disgusted reactions are rare but still possible. As a teacher I have seen Danticat’s stories overcome the here-and-now and familiarity biases that reduce empathic response, so that students who are very far from the circumstances of the prostitute who narrates “Night Women,” or from the teenaged refugees of “Children of the Sea,” report being taken by surprise by the intensity of their shared feeling with her characters, even when they also report disapproving of the behavior of those characters. Danticat provides one avenue for narrative empathy through her use of bridge characters:  literate, creative children and teenagers whose very bookishness or eloquence invites a book-reader on the other end of the narrative transaction into the story world. Yet she does not court easy sympathy through pitiable representations. Her characters are complex and often flawed. One of her most impressive accomplishments is her depiction of an escaped torturer in The Dew Breaker (2004).30 There she confronts directly the potential that the artist will improperly diagnose suffering in the subject who has actually caused others’ suffering, an illustration of the grave risks of false empathy. Yet she invites not just a feeling response but humanitarian or political action: both her memoir and social criticism Brother, I’m Dying (2007)31 and her children’s book Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010)32 position themselves as works that hope to elicit real-world responses.

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354    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion Efforts empirically to test the efficacy of narrative empathy’s capacity to increase awareness of a group’s needs and successfully solicit altruistic action on its behalf are only now in development. Narrative empathy may enhance the illusion of immersion in a fictional world by deepening the felt connection of the reader with the imaginary denizens of the narrative, without persuading that reader to take action in the real world. It is not yet known whether these two possibilities, the immersive and the other-directed responses, constitute alternatives that rarely coexist, or complementary effects that enhance narrative impact. We may hypothesize that the deeper the immersion and the stronger the empathetic connection, the greater the chance of prosocial responding. Or we may predict the opposite—the deeper the immersion in a fictional world and the stronger the empathy for fictional characters, the weaker the connection to any real-world situation will be. Empirical verification of claims made by narratologists about narrative empathy has been investigated in collaboration with specialists in discourse processing33 and psychologists who study persuasion and narrative impact.34 Research into narrative empathy in cognitive science has investigated the role of emotions, including empathy, in narrative processing.35 Narrative empathy has also been theorized in relation to experientiality in Monika Fludernik’s Towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996),36 immersion in Marie Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001),37 and mental imaging and subsequent altruism in work by cognitive scientist Dan R. Johnson (2011).38 Long-term effects of empathetic narratives on readers’ behavior have proven more difficult to study (and to disentangle from confounding influences). An intermediary goal of changing readers’ attitudes toward despised out-groups by representing them sympathetically has, however, been examined empirically; transportation, or a reader’s immersion in a fictional world, has been shown to enhance both empathy and subsequent prosocial behavior, at least in the short term.39 Three queries about the relationship of narrative empathy and altruism persist, and trouble the effort to demonstrate a predictable link between strategic empathizing and altruistic outcomes. First, critics inquire, does every writer seek empathic responses? Clearly not. Some postcolonial writers employ strategic narrative empathy to reach distant audiences and to shift their beliefs about and behaviors toward suffering others, but not all writers pursue these persuasive goals. Some postcolonial writers work in a Brechtian tradition and prefer intellectual engagement over invitations to emotional fusion. Edwidge Danticat’s strategic empathizing contrasts, for example, with Jamaica Kincaid’s resolute refusal to court or cajole her readers. In novels such as The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)40 and Mr. Potter (2002),41 Kincaid rebuffs easy connections and invites disgust and dismay, pursuing antipathetic representational goals in gorgeous prose. Kincaid’s work better illustrates the austerities of postcolonial literary theory, resistant to offering opportunities for ready character identification, while Danticat’s work better fits a cognitivist model that (at least in its aspirations) links experiences of narrative empathy with real life altruism. Many postcolonial writers reveal their designs on their readers’ beliefs and behavior through paratextual gestures or extratextual comments. This brings me to the second query, since those announced intentions do not uniformly correlate with empathetic

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Suzanne Keen   355 responses, nor with the altruistic civic behavior that is often their declared goal. A postcolonialist skeptical about narrative empathy asks whether it imposes an inaccurate and oppressive understanding of subalterns on silenced or misunderstood subjects. Unique, authentic, and possibly unmatched sensations are lost. A false empathy critique would regard the sensation of shared feeling that my white, affluent 19-year old American student described in her reading of Danticat’s “Night Women” as an outbreak of harmful self-delusion. At best such readers’ empathy is an egoistic projection, calculated to make the empathizer feel virtuous for feeling with another. Even some works of testimonio (generally regarded as the gold standard for authenticity) are charged with evidencing a shaping hand that falsifies empathy. Postcolonial theory and criticism suspects narrative empathy of exhibiting at best patronizing “drive-by feeling” rather than genuine concern evoked by feeling with another. Distrust of emotion labels and universals of human nature undermines the possibility that writers’ and readers’ testimony could verify the emotional fusion of narrative empathy. False empathy critics are unpersuaded by neuroscience, by empirical study of human emotions, by laboratory demonstrations that empathy jiggers prosocial responses, or indeed by any description of human experience that could be recognized across barriers of language and culture. As for narrative empathy’s potential to induce real-world altruism, an article of faith in today’s varieties of moral sentimentalism, false empathy critics are aghast that anyone would fall prey to such a delusion.42 These views of do-gooding were the drivers of the civilizing missions that have done so much damage in the past. The failed empathy critic offers the third challenging query. Does not a bid to evoke readers’ empathy often fail or miss its mark? For example, Schaffer and Smith write, “Channeled through the interests of global capital, some sites [of storytelling] augment the coffers of advertisers; some make witnesses into spectacles of suffering; some address their audiences through emotive confrontation, setting in motion affective appeals that have a ‘feel good’ effect for their far-flung advocates, but may not further recognition, ethical judgment, or redress.”43 This criticism holds that narrative empathy transcending boundaries of difference could occur and regards prosocial outcomes favorably. It worries that narrative empathy does not effectively perform its work as a link in that ethical transaction. The failed empathy critic requires evidence that my students’ sensations of empathy with Danticat’s Haitian refugee teenagers actually accomplished anything substantive in the world. Did my students’ attitudes toward border patrols change? Did they take action by volunteering, donating, participating in advocacy, or traveling to Haiti on a human rights mission themselves? Or did they feel fleeting emotional fusion with a fictional character, shake that feeling off, and move on? The failed empathy critique typifies a human rights and capabilities orientation, discussing forthrightly varieties of empathy failure in the form of compassion fatigue, the marketing of disasters, and the ethical dilemmas of artists working with victims of human rights abuses. Possibly carers are especially vulnerable to these effects. McFarland’s research into the impact of personality on support for universal human rights shows that dispositional empathy (as assessed on an empathy scale such as Mark Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index) correlates with supportive attitudes towards human rights. But attitudes by themselves

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356    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion are not actions. McFarland goes on to suggest that a subject’s “identification with all humanity,” a globalized form of role- and perspective-taking, correlates with active commitment to human rights.44 The interference that occurs between the disposition to care and the inclination to act is a matter of failed empathy. The gravest concern for those who study commitment to human rights worldwide is the most dramatic form of “failed empathy,” where fellow-feeling is displaced by disgust and disdain. This response been shown to correlate with beliefs in social dominance, authoritarianism, and nationalism. When empathy fails and disgust replaces it, Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske have shown, dehumanized perception that can facilitate perpetration of atrocities and human rights abuses becomes more likely.45 Though narrative ethics avoids dwelling on this possibility, preferring to focus on the cultivation of virtue rather than the attractions of vice, dehumanizing representational strategies can push readers and audiences towards disgust and even towards genocide. While false empathy critics distrust the empathy of shared humanity as a basis for concern or justice, failed empathy critics see empathy as a helpful though not always essential element of concern and commitment to improved lives around the world. This suggests that the strategic narrative empathy exercised by postcolonial writers of fiction and other literary forms may contribute to the advancement of a human rights agenda that has been subjected to critique by postcolonial literary theory. For despite empathy’s theoretical disrepute among false empathy critics, postcolonial novelists and writers in literary genres have assiduously cultivated empathetic responses by employing rhetorical techniques of strategic empathizing.  The elaboration of these techniques calls upon rhetorical narrative poetics’ capacity to explore the modes and dynamics of narrative situation without oversimplifying their effects. It helps to bridge the chasm between the cognitive and the postcolonial. Theorizing narrative empathy elaborates the uses to which real authors and narrative artists put their human empathy to work in imaginative character-creation and in other aspects of worldmaking, as well as accounting for varied readers’ responses.46 Rhetorical narratology takes an interest in effects on readers, especially with regards to persuasion. While no narrative text consistently inspires empathy in all its readers, who vary in dispositional empathy47 and in their official and unofficial positions with respect to the text (as Goffman would have it),48 study of the responses of readers belonging to different audiences reveals narrative empathy in action. Narrative empathy involves “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition. Narrative empathy plays a role in the aesthetics of production when authors experience it, in mental simulation during reading, in the aesthetics of reception when readers experience it, and in the narrative poetics of texts when formal strategies invite it.”49 Narrative empathy and the neuroscientific research into our human shared manifold for intersubjectivity deserve a place in cognitive postcolonial literary studies because many postcolonial texts cultivate empathetic responsiveness through an array of representational tactics that I have described under the terms bounded, ambassadorial, and broadcast strategic narrative empathy.

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Suzanne Keen   357 A subset of narrative empathy,  readers’ empathy  leads to differentiation of readers in terms of belonging to in-groups and out-groups addressed directly by authors hoping to evoke empathy. Strategic narrative empathy50 on the part of authors indicates their intention to move potential target audiences through deliberate representational choices designed to sway the feelings of their readers (though actual readers’ responses vary). Bounded strategic empathy addresses members of in-groups, the easiest audience because less subject to the biases that drive empathic responding off line (here-and-now bias and familiarity bias). When emotional fusion within an in-group occurs, stemming from experiences of mutuality, and leading to feeling with familiar others, we can recognize the successful rhetorical operation of bounded strategic empathy. Ambassadorial strategic empathy addresses members of more temporally, spatially, or culturally remote audiences. An author using it attempts to reach readers outside the boundaries of the local readership or the depicted social world in an effort to change attitudes and even solicit assistance in the real world.51 Typically, an author employing ambassadorial empathy addresses chosen others with the aim of cultivating their empathy and at least implying an appeal for justice, assistance, or recognition.52 Broadcast strategic empathy calls upon all readers to experience emotional fusion through empathetic representations of universal human experiences and generalizable responses to particular situations.53 It asks every reader to feel with members of a group, whether those addressed share time-space with the author and depicted characters, or belong remotely to a posterity audience. Broadcast narrative empathy is often observed at work in classics that have stood the test of time. It emphasizes our common human experiences, feelings, hopes, and vulnerabilities, overcoming huge differences in geography, historical period, cultural identity, and daily experience. This theory assumes that narrative fictions have multiple potential readerships, often discernible within a single text (as Brian Richardson has argued),54 and that different rhetorical strategies in the texts reveal this. For instance, Edwidge Danticat’s children’s book Eight Days, narrated in first person by a boy buried in rubble, bears the dedication, “For the children of Haiti.” This can and does mean children in Haiti, though they are more likely to speak Haitian creole and French than the text’s English. The beautiful illustrations transcend language barriers and are dedicated “to all living in Haiti,” not just children.55 The text becomes a gift to Haitians. Supporting that charitable direction, the publisher, Scholastic Inc., reports that it “has donated $10,000 in connection with the publication of this book to a charity that provides humanitarian aid to people all over the world in their times of need.”56 This expands the audience to include the purchasers, and places the text’s humanitarian errand within a world context: not just for Haitians. The first-person narration, which begins with the rescue and explains what the buried boy dreams about for eight days, only addresses the narratee, you, a single time, in the last sentence of the story: “I tell you, I hugged them so tight I thought I would never let go.”57 This “you” of the narratee seems equally to embrace an adult and a child audience, with different but simultaneously available emotional valences of reassurance and relief. Danticat’s special concern for children shows not just in the form of the picture book, but also in the framing paratexts. A note from the author mentions the large

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358    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion number of children in Haiti (“Nearly half of Haiti’s population is under fifteen”)58 but redirects attention to the children of diaspora, English-speaking kids like her own who feared for relatives in Port-au-Prince. In just 14 pages of text and image, this austere brief narrative embeds awareness of at least five distinct audiences, and we may add the literary audience of Danticat’s readers to that count. She certainly also communicates with us about her intentions and values, as underscored by her comments on being an immigrant artist in Create Dangerously. Danticat’s Eight Days shows signs of all three forms of emotional invitation to engage, employing bounded, ambassadorial, and broadcast strategic empathy, with more open gestures of inclusion and embassy balancing the unusual features of the narrator’s experience. This goes beyond character identification, though Danticat emphasizes the commonalities of children’s embodied experiences, dispositions, and circumstances. Especially in cases where fictional appeals for sympathy dovetail with real-world campaigns for assistance, such as the response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the ethics and efficacy of narrative empathy demand attention. Danticat’s work fits a literary cognitivist model that (at least in its aspirations) supports narrative ethics by linking experiences of narrative empathy with real life altruism. The disdain of many postcolonial literary theorists for any putative human universal, including empathy, is vigorously contradicted in practice by the novelists, especially those hoping to reach a readership in the large Anglophone world fiction market. An approach less inimical to the universals of human feeling implied by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)59 is human rights discourse, which provides an alternative theoretical frame for considering the impact of imaginative literature and the potential role of empathic responses to literary texts.60 Yet we should still take care in applying the empathy-altruism hypothesis to experiences of narrative empathy and the formation of good world citizens. It is difficult to disentangle novel reading from a host of other formative experiences that might encourage altruism or the lighter standard of prosocial behavior in individuals or whole societies. Many writers and readers, including writers such as Edwidge Danticat, believe that there ought to be a connection between narrative empathy and moral civic behavior, and this has led to an emphasis on the necessity of both empathy and fiction.61 Failed empathy critics link experiences of narrative empathy with the development of what Martha Nussbaum calls “good world citizens,”62 even if they doubt its universal efficacy. Nussbaum’s evocation of psychology’s empathy-altruism hypothesis63 in the context of reading fictional narratives promises a beneficial yield also embraced by philosophers of moral development.64 Among moral philosophers, the debate about the status of emotional responsiveness to narrative typically centers on the question of whether it should be cultivated (to encourage recognition of other minds, enhance comprehension, or form morality) or distrusted, as a potentially misleading capitulation to a frame of reference warped by bias or, in a Platonic vein, as an incitement to unruly behavior. Ironically, the argument in favor of aesthetic emotions (cultivation through narrative) results in a more proscriptive, narrower list of valued narratives, while the suspicious argument (advocating dispassion) is much more willing to admit the potentially deleterious impact of narrative as encouraging escapism, time-wasting, and vicious habits.

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Suzanne Keen   359 This latter side admits a broader range of narrative, including comic books, video games, and romance novels, but does so to warn against the dangers of emotionally engaged reading practices. The stress marks between the two positions about narrative impact reveal different attitudes to reading itself, one admitting a broad range of narrative in an array of media (and fearing the impact of reading on people and society) and the other emphasizing the special benefits of reading canonical or at least celebrated and complex literary narratives (and promising the development of good world citizens and improved societies). Humanists routinely confound the impact of imaginative literature on people with the impact of people on other people. But questioning the causal link between altruism and narrative empathy—such as intense character identification, though there are other forms—devalues neither narrative empathy nor the widespread hope in the socially beneficial yield of novel-reading. It shifts the emphasis to what people choose to do with their reading experiences, how they share them, and how they encourage themselves and others to act on feeling responses. In this respect the broadcast and ambassadorial strategic empathizing built into the rhetoric of many contemporary literary texts in the world book market makes a strong case for the relationship of human rights appeals, cognitive literary studies, and postcolonial literature.

Notes 1. Suzanne Keen, “Strategic Empathizing:  Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy,” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift 82.3 (2008): 477–93. 2. See Feroza Jussawalla, “Kim, Huck and Naipaul: Using the Postcolonial Bildungsroman to Re(define) Postcoloniality,” Links and Letters 4 (1997): 25–38, and Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc:  The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), especially the chapters on bildungsroman (86–139) and romans à clef (270–316). See also the brief treatment of the postcolonial bildungsroman and detective fiction in Julie Mullaney, Postcolonial Literatures in Context (New York: Continuum, 2010) 30–46. 3. Jussawalla, “Kim, Huck and Naipaul,” 25. 4. On the baleful consequences of this attitude, see Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) 278–301. 5. Among the best of the emergent literary critical works are Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., and James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a capable survey of the field, see Kerry Bystrom, “Literature and Human Rights,” Handbook of Human Rights, ed. Thomas Cushman (New York: Routledge, 2012) 637–46. 6. See, for example, Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights, 51, Cohen, States of Denial, 72, and Elaine Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” For Love of Country? ed. Martha Craven Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) 98–110. 7. Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights, 47. 8. See, for example, Sara DeTurk, “Intercultural Empathy: Myth, Competency, or Possibility for Alliance Building,” Communication Education 50.4 (2001): 374–84; Stephanie Echols

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360    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion and Joshua Correll, “It’s More Than Skin Deep: Empathy and Helping Behavior across Social Groups,” Empathy:  From Bench to Bedside (Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2012) 55–71; Morton Ann Gernsbacher, “On Not Being Human,” Presidential Column, APS Observer 20.2 (2007):  5, 32; Douglas Hollan, “Emerging Issues in the Cross-Cultural Study of Empathy,” Emotion Review 4.1 (2012):  70–78; Sam McFarland and Melissa Mathews, “Who Cares about Human Rights?” Political Psychology 26.3 (2005): 365–85; and Allen Young, “Empathy, Evolution, and Human Nature,” Empathy:  From Bench to Bedside (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012) 21–37. 9. Young, “Empathy, Evolution,” 32. 10. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007) and Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011). For a thoughtful examination of the issues as they pertain to the novel, see Sarah Winter, “The Novel and Prejudice,” Comparative Literature Studies 46.1 (2009): 76–102. 11. Jerome Kagan, “Psychology’s Missing Contexts:  Why Researchers Should Design and Report Experiments in a More Precise Way,” Chronicle Review, Web, accessed April 8, 2012. 12. Kagan, “Psychology’s Missing Contexts.” 13. Kagan, “Psychology’s Missing Contexts.” 14. The development of online participant pools for Internet-based data collection in cognitive science promises to diversify participants in some psychological studies. 15. Kagan, “Psychology’s Missing Contexts.” 16. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism Today,” Helsinki International Prose Conference: Means and Devices of Prose, Helsinki Collegium, (May 10, 2012) 17. Albert E.  Scheflen, “Psychological Terms and Some Problems of Semiotics,” Essays in Semiotics, ed. Julia Kristeva, Josette Rey-Debove, and Donna J.  Umiker (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) 269. 18. Deborah Jensen and Marco Iacoboni, “Literary Biomimesis:  Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation,” California Italian Studies 2.1 (2011), Web, accessed April 10, 2012. 19. See, for example, the groundbreaking suggestions of Patrick Colm Hogan, “The Epilogue of Suffering:  Heroism, Empathy, Ethics,” SubStance  30 (2001):  119–43, and “Literary Universals,” Poetics Today 18.2 (1997): 223–49. 20. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Thinking and the Turn towards the Human,” Keynote Address, The State of Postcolonial Studies, New Literary History Conference, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, December 3, 2010. 21. See Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Frederick Luis Aldama, A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); and Shameem Black, Fiction across Borders:  Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 22. Alan Richardson, Alan, The Neural Sublime:  Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) 114. 23. Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! (New York: Random House, 1996). 24. Rubén Rumbaut, “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts:  Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States,” International Migration Review, Fall 2004, 1160–205.

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Suzanne Keen   361 25. Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 26. Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Soho Press, 1994). 27. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 32–33. 28. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 10. 29. Danticat, Create Dangerously, 10. 30. Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (New York: Knopf, 2004). 31. Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (New York: Knopf, 2007). 32. Edwidge Danticat, Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (New York: Orchard Books, 2010). 33. For an overview of more than a decade of experimentation, see David S. Miall, Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). 34. See, for example, Philip J. Mazzocco, Melanie Green, J. A. Sasota and N. Jones, “This Story Is Not for Everyone: Transportability and Narrative Persuasion,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 1 (2010): 361–68. 35. For an expert overview, see Raymond A.  Mar, Keith Oatley, M. Djikic, and J. Mullin, “Emotion and Narrative Fiction:  Interactive Influences before, during, and after Reading,” Cognition and Emotion 25 (2011): 818–33. 36. Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996). 37. Marie Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 38. Dan R.  Johnson, “Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Perceptual Bias toward Fearful Expressions,” Personality and Individual Differences 52 (2012): 150–55. From a philosophical angle, see E. Ann Kaplan, “Empathy and Trauma Culture: Imaging Catastrophe,” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 255–76. 39. For the psychology of transportation, see Melanie C. Green, Timothy C. Brock, and Geoff F. Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14.4 (2004): 311–27. For a useful critique of the metaphor and disentangling of the elements of readerly transportation, see Bortolussi and Dixon, ­chapter 25 in this volume. The classic study of immersion reading remains Victor Nell, Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 40. Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). 41. Jamaica Kincaid, Mr. Potter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). 42. Among literary cognivitists treating empathy and altruism or political activism, we can find more examples of the moral sentimental position represented by failed empathy critiques than false empathy critiques, but examples of both stances exist. 43. Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights, 51. 44. For a standard empathy scale, see Mark H.  Davis, “A Multidimensional Approach to Individual Differences in Empathy,” JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology 19 (1980): 85. The psychological study of the personality types that contribute to support for universal human rights tends to emphasize dispositional empathy of subjects and those who are prone to identify not just with family or nation but also with all humanity. See Sam McFarland, “Personality and Support for Universal Human Rights: A Review and Test of a Structural Method,” Journal of Personality 78.6 (2010): 1735–63. 45. Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske, “Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 219.3 (2011): 175–81.

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362    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion 46. On readers’ empathy, see Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2007) 65–100. On author’s empathy, see 121–44. 47. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 89. 48. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh:  University of Edinburgh Press, 1956). 49. Suzanne Keen, “Narrative Empathy,” The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2012), Web, accessed March 12, 2014. 50. Keen, “Strategic Empathizing,” 478–93, for an elaboration of this theory, earlier broached in Empathy and the Novel, 142–43. 51. Keen, “Strategic Empathizing,” 478–80. 52. Keen, “Strategic Empathizing,” 483. 53. Keen, “Strategic Empathizing,” 488. 54. See Brian Richardson, “The Other Reader’s Response:  On Multiple, Divided, and Oppositional Audiences,” Criticism 38 (1997): 31–53. 55. Danticat, Eight Days, unnumbered dedication page. 56. Danticat, Eight Days, copyright page. 57. Danticat, Eight Days, unnumbered penultimate page. 58. “A Note from the Author,” Danticat, Eight Days, unnumbered final page. 59. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), The United Nations, Web, accessed April 10, 2012. 60. See Joseph R. Slaughter, “Humanitarian Reading,” Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D.  Brown (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 88–107. 61. For an intelligent critique of the underlying premise, see Jesse Prinz, “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 211–29. 62. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 90. 63. C. Daniel Batson, “Altruism and Prosocial Behavior,” The Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2., ed. D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey (New York: McGraw Hill, 1998) 282–316. 64. See Lawrence A.  Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1994) 46–48, Martin L.  Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development:  Implications for Caring and Justice (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Hoffman, “Empathy, Justice, and the Law,” Empathy:  Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011) 230–54.

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Batson, Daniel C. “Altruism and Prosocial Behavior.” The Handbook of Social Psychology. Ed. D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw Hill, 1998. 282–316. Becker, Florian, and Brenda Werth. “Theater and Human Rights.” Handbook of Human Rights. Ed. Thomas Cushman. New York: Routledge, 2012. 647–58. Black, Shameem. Fiction across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

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Suzanne Keen   363 Blum, Lawrence A. Moral Perception and Particularity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Butler, Judith. “Afterword.” PMLA 125.5 (2006): 1658–61. Bystrom, Kerry. “Literature and Human Rights.” Handbook of Human Rights. Ed. Thomas Cushman. New York: Routledge, 2012. 637–46. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Thinking and the Turn towards the Human.” The State of Postcolonial Studies. New Literary History Conference. December 3, 2010. University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press, 1994. ———. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Knopf, 2007. ———. Create Dangerously:  The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010. ———. The Dew Breaker. New York: Knopf, 2004. ———. Eight Days: A Story of Haiti. New York: Orchard Books, 2010. ———. Krik? Krak! New York: Random House, 1996. Davis, Mark H. “A Multidimensional Approach to Individual Differences in Empathy.” JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology 19 (1980): 85. Dawes, James. That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. DeTurk, Sara. “Intercultural Empathy: Myth, Competency, or Possibility for Alliance Building.” Communication Education 50.4 (2001): 374–84. Dickie, Simon. Cruelty and Laughter:  Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Echols, Stephanie, and Joshua Correll. “It’s More Than Skin Deep:  Empathy and Helping Behavior across Social Groups.” Empathy:  From Bench to Bedside. Ed. Jean Decety. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. 55–71. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Gernsbacher, Morton Ann. “On Not Being Human.” Presidential Column. APS Observer 20.2 (2007): 5, 32. Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Rpt. Harden City: Doubleday, 1959. Harris, Lasana T., and Susan T. Fiske. “Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide.” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 219.3 (2011): 175–81. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development:  Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. “Empathy, Justice, and the Law.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 230–54. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “The Epilogue of Suffering: Heroism, Empathy, Ethics.” SubStance 30 (2001): 119–43. ———. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hollan, Douglas. “Emerging Issues in the Cross-Cultural Study of Empathy.” Emotion Review 4.1 (2012): 70–78. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: Norton, 2007. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism Today.” Helsinki International Prose Conference: Means and Devices of Prose. Helsinki Collegium. May 10, 2012.

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364    Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion Jensen, Deborah, and Marco Iacoboni. “Literary Biomimesis:  Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation.” California Italian Studies 2.1 (2011). Johnson, Dan R. “Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Perceptual Bias toward Fearful Expressions.” Personality and Individual Differences 52 (2012): 150–55. Jussawalla, Feroza. “Kim, Huck and Naipaul:  Using the Postcolonial Bildungsroman to Re(define) Postcoloniality.” Links and Letters 4 (1997): 25–38. Kagan, Jerome. “Psychology’s Missing Contexts: Why Researchers Should Design and Report Experiments in a More Precise Way.” Chronicle Review. April 8, 2012. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Empathy and Trauma Culture: Imaging Catastrophe.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011. 255–76. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “Narrative Empathy.” The Living Handbook of Narratology.  Ed. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2012. ———. “Strategic Empathizing:  Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy.” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift 82.3 (2008): 477–93. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. ———. Mr. Potter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Lauren, Paul Gordon. The Evolution of International Human Rights:  Visions Seen. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Mar, Raymond A., Keith Oatley, M. Djikic, and J. Mullin. “Emotion and Narrative Fiction: Interactive Influences before, during, and after Reading. Cognition and Emotion 25 (2011): 818–33. Mazzocco, Philip J., Melanie Green, J. A.  Sasota, and N. Jones. “This Story Is Not for Everyone: Transportability and Narrative Persuasion.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 1 (2010): 361–68. McFarland, Sam. “Personality and Support for Universal Human Rights: A Review and Test of a Structural Method.” Journal of Personality 78.6 (2010): 1735–63. McFarland, Sam, and Melissa Mathews. “Who Cares about Human Rights?” Political Psychology 26.3 (2005): 365–85. Miall, David S. Literary Reading:  Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New  York:  Peter Lang, 2006. Mullaney, Julie. Postcolonial Literatures in Context. New York: Continuum, 2010. Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Prinz, Jesse. “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 211–29. Richardson, Alan. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Richardson, Brian. “The Other Reader’s Response: On Multiple, Divided, and Oppositional Audiences.” Criticism 38 (1997): 31–53. Rumbaut, Rubén. “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the Immigrant First and Second Generations in the United States.” International Migration Review (Fall 2004): 1160–205. Ryan, Marie Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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Suzanne Keen   365 Scarry, Elaine. “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People.” For Love of Country? Ed. Martha Craven Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen Coston. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. 98–110. Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Scheflen, Albert E. “Psychological Terms and Some Problems of Semiotics.” Essays in Semiotics. Ed. Julia Kristeva, Josette Rey-Debove, and Donna J. Umiker. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. 267–76. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. ———. “Humanitarian Reading.” Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy. Ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 88–107. Winter, Sarah. “The Novel and Prejudice.” Comparative Literature Studies 46.1 (2009): 76–102. Young, Allan. “Empathy, Evolution, and Human Nature.” Empathy: From Bench to Bedside. Ed. Jean Decety. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. 21–37.

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Decision Theory and Fiction

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Chapter 18

Reading and Ba rg a i ni ng W i llia m F le sc h

In Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men the charismatic, unstoppable villain Anton Chigurh likes subjecting his potential victims to a Pascalian coin toss. “Il faut parier. Cela n’est pas volontaire, vous êtes embarqué,” says Pascal. The first time, it’s a harmless gas station owner who must bet: You need to call it, Chigurh said. I cant call it for you. It wouldnt be fair. It wouldnt even be right. Just call it. I didnt put nothin up. Yes you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it. . . I don’t know what it is I stand to win. In the blue light the man’s face was beaded thinly with sweat. He licked his upper lip. You stand to win everything, Chigurh said. Everything. You aint makin any sense, mister. Call it. Heads then. Chigurh uncovered the coin. He turned his arm slightly for the man to see. Well done, he said.1

We are relieved by this outcome (I am) but we are inevitably aware that this early in the book the coin is a Chekhovian loaded gun, even if we prefer not to acknowledge it. The coin hasn’t dealt death—yet. But it has two sides, and when we root for the proprietor to live, we’re uneasy. We understand (even if we don’t know we understand) that we are radically lowering the odds of a good outcome in whatever climactic scene this incident is setting up. In the reverse-Bayesean wonderland of fiction, past outcomes do affect the future odds of independent events. They’re independent in the fictional world, but (as Stoppard’s Guildenstern knows) coin tosses are not diegetically independent of each other. Life here spells terrible death 200 pages later. When Chigurh kills Carla Jean, we’ll regret the Faustian bargain we’ll feel we accepted, which saved the gas station owner. Had he died, Carla Jean might have lived. I want to explore some features of our cognitive engagement with narrative (and with literature more generally) at work here. The outcome of this scene depends on a

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370   Reading and Bargaining gamble, so (we feel) we don’t know, and can’t know, what will happen. At some level of realistic processing we care what happens. We’re thinking of these events as possibly real, real in some possible world; we’re following the story, we follow fiction, as though it’s true. On that level, it’s a gamble. But at the same time we know that the outcome is in someone’s control. Not God’s (McCarthy will make clear later) and not Chigurh’s either: McCarthy’s villains (Chigurh, Judge Holden) are masters of chance, not exempt from it. But it’s certainly in the fictionist’s control. So the outcome of the coin toss is uncertain just to the extent that we’re uncertain about what McCarthy will do. That’s what makes the later coin toss so certain. We know what he’ll do then. Narrative understanding here entails a mild contradiction: we treat the coin toss as random despite our unacknowledged knowledge that it’s not. It has a predetermined—and predetermining—narrative function. That function gives us hope here. In embracing it we consent to a bargain the story offers. We don’t want the innocent man to be murdered, and we accept the risk of a likely worse outcome later, to forestall a bad outcome now. But these events are already written, and our bargaining can’t affect the outcome. We want something to happen, and are willing to give up something to get what we want—but our desires and concessions are irrelevant. And yet it feels as though we’re actively bargaining with the narrative. Some kind of bargaining is behind all emotional intensity. Emotions actively express desire. The fact that they’re expressive action is central to what they are.2 Emotions are, simultaneously and seamlessly, actions and the experience of those actions. They are purposeful signals to others that we are genuinely having the experience they express. They aim at communication. The general communicative force of an emotion is not simply: this is how I feel; but rather: look how this this state of affairs makes me act—makes me make myself feel, so that I plead with you to interact with me accordingly. In this way an emotion offers to bargain, and it offers itself as its part of the bargain. A positive emotion is my expression of an offer to continue to feel this way; a negative emotion is a promise or at least a hope that I won’t. What am I bargaining for from you? Variously, depending on the emotions, such things as comfort, nourishment, freedom, love, apology, shame about what you’ve done; indulgence, even hate. I want you to act in such a way as to offer me some return for my emotion. Since that return is also an action, it may sometimes be paid in the currency of emotional reaction (e.g., love, shame, indulgence, hate, perhaps apology)3—an emotional response might be what I am looking for. This is the reason for the sometimes intense element of willfulness and desire in our emotional expression; they’re a kind of body English—or mind English—trying to change the world they perceive through the emotional intensity of that perception. Because we’re hypersocial animals, we have a default assumption that others will empathize (and a default tendency to empathize). An emotion is the felt expression of a plea for something in return for expressing it, an expression-experience we offer to relinquish or to share. Emotions are their own bargaining chips. Thus a crucial and underappreciated, part of any emotional experience is that it just is the experience of bargaining for the thing it wants. So a crucial and underappreciated part of how literature works is that it targets this central feature of its audience’s

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William Flesch   371 emotions. Our emotions are sometimes complex bargains we make with the literature we read. Literature isn’t only the depiction of emotion: it’s a dynamic negotiation with the emotions it arouses in its audience. Literary emotions are wishful bargains with narratives, narratives purporting to be fixed accounts of past events. What will happen, in a narration, is what in fact has already happened, in the fictional world. Our bargains (as in Newcomb’s paradox)4 take place in this—appropriately enough—unreal region between past fictional events and their “activation” in our own future-oriented experience of the narration of those events. Our emotional experience of narrative is an experience of bargaining, an experience of getting some but not all the things we want. A puzzle then arises about the psychic economics of this experience: why would we prefer narrative to daydreaming, when in daydreaming we don’t have to bargain? Everything is there for the taking! Answering that question requires further investigation into the temporal nature of our desires, and into the ways that our desires sometimes take themselves as objects, especially when they come into conflict with one another. Expert narratives evoke and manipulate such conflicts in an audience’s desires (we want the gas station owner to live; but we also want Carla Jean to live). “Emotions caused by fiction” arise from and are the experiences and the expressions of the bargains we continuously make in attending to a story. Any narrative (any literary event, I would argue) is an unfolding dynamic, a scrolling, ever-changing experience of a series of such bargains, each bargain affecting the values we place on other outcomes, values that may change radically depending on their temporal distance from the moment of bargaining. Literary experience is the (necessarily emotional) experience of noncausal, “intertemporal bargaining,” to use George Ainslie’s central idea for explaining the complexities of human motivation.5 I have a complex argument to make here, so let me outline my approach. Decision theory and evolutionary game theory have shown the extent to which our ways of seeing and feeling about the world develop out of our multidudinous strategic interactions, both with ourselves and with others. Evolutionary game theory describes self-evolving strategic interactions among different genes, individuals, populations, and species; decision theory models the dynamic way that individuals assess and reassess competing options for action (including emotion). Central to both theories are their recursive properties, properties that in decision theory lead to the important idea of subjective probability, the idea that probability is often—perhaps always—subjective.6 A  (necessarily emotional) element of wishfulness goes into evaluating the moves we’re considering within games and decisions. This wishfulness affects our rolling sense of the odds of various outcomes in a fictional world, in a world (unlike the real world) where events and probabilities are ordered so as to manipulate our wishfulness. We respond to the interim events and final outcomes a particular fiction or genre of fiction offers with a running sense of the changing odds of the alternatives we wish for. Those odds affect what we’ll do, which in literary experience mainly means a particular kind of action: what emotions we’ll feel. This on-the-fly, dynamic management of emotion and desire is central to one of the deepest insights in quantitative behavioral science and behavioral economics, the idea

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372   Reading and Bargaining of hyperbolic discounting of future value, an idea that relates the conflicts and inconsistencies that characterize our emotional lives to the various temporal horizons of our experiences and expectations. Since literature is a temporal art, the dynamics of hyperbolic discounting (which I’ll describe below) help to characterize the various, divergent temporal horizons of our emotional investment in literary experience, more particularly in narrative,7 and to show how the temporal pressures of such experiences affect what we bargain for from a literary work and therefore what emotions it makes us feel.

I I’ll begin with the recursive character of game theory and decision theory. These are contiguous disciplines: game theory is about deciding what your best move is when your decision will affect another player’s assessment of her own best move. Thomas Schelling aptly calls it “vicarious problem solving.”8 You must price in the fact that she will play her best move, given that she’ll price in the fact that you’ve priced in her best move. Although this can lead to indeterminacy about what anyone’s best move is (as in Rock, Paper, Scissors)9 or to an unquestionable best move for both sides (as when a team down by two points with seconds to play goes for a field goal from the twenty-yard line: the defenders know that won’t be a trick play), games are particularly interesting when they’re recursive, when you have to decide what move to make when another player’s decision about what to do will take into account what your best move is given that you’re anticipating what her best move is in just this recursive situation. Decision theory is a kind of singularized game theory: what should I do given a hierarchy of desires, a hierarchy of probabilities that I can fulfill those desires, and a hierarchy of values that I would set on the success or failure of my fulfilling them? Game theory is by its nature recursive; it is internal to some of the situations that it handles that it will be recursive. Decision theory doesn’t have to be, but it is an empirical psychological fact that it is, an empirical fact that is a consequence of mental conflict. We have desires and second- and third- and nth-order desires. I want a cigarette but I want to quit smoking. My desire to quit smoking is a desire not to desire a cigarette, and those two desires are in conflict with each other. Or to modify an example from Donald Davidson,10 I have a long drive tomorrow and for safety’s sake it’s important to get a good night’s sleep. It’s already late and I would like to go right to bed, but I have a second-order desire never to yield to my frequent desires to go to sleep without bothering to brush my teeth, and a third-order desire for once to put aside my puritanical inability ever to allow myself a moral holiday from brushing. Decision theory can therefore be described as the internalization of game theory. Mental conflict affects not only my inner experiences but my own reactions to those experiences and my interactions with them, yielding still further experiences for me to react to and interact with. The subdiscipline of evolutionary biology called evolutionary game theory (in its modern form pretty much the invention of William Hamilton and George R.  Price,

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William Flesch   373 with R. A. Fisher as an important precursor) provides a lot of insight into the fundamental dynamics of biological interaction, among species, individuals, and genes. It has illuminated the evolution of cooperation11 and the theory of costly signaling,12 most spectacularly visible in the processes of sexual selection but with far wider application. The theory of noncooperative games shows how cooperation and the reliable signaling cooperation depends on may arise under plausibly recursive conditions.13 The basic idea is that since cooperation is costly and difficult (because cooperating means giving up opportunities for self-dealing), the very fact that it’s difficult signals the fitness of a cooperator, allowing him or her to accrue the benefits of respect and sexual attention that manifest fitness attracts—especially since the costs of allying with a cooperator shows you are a fit cooperator yourself (which is why we like Edmund for liking Fanny in Mansfield Park; cf. any Austen novel).14 It’s important to avoid a cynical view here. In the evolutionary marketplace competition and cooperation are not opposed to each other; cooperation isn’t disguised zero-sum competition. As a costly signal, cooperation can sometimes be the best competitive strategy, yielding the most reproductive success. This may look like simple self-dealing, but it only works when genuine cooperation is genuinely valued: the norm that prefers to invest in and ally with other altruists and cooperators and not with self-dealers is itself cooperative and irreducible to self-dealing. This seems to be preeminently the case among human beings. Cooperation is attractive, not least because cooperation is attractive, so humans compete to cooperate. Noncooperative game theory, which seems the best theory to apply to a Darwinian world, shows how cooperation can evolve spontaneously. Noncooperative game theory is a theory of self-enforcing agreements. Because I play my best move in response to what your best move will be if I play my best move, we can often each have confidence in what the other will do. (Such a circumstance is called a Nash Equilibrium.) In certain situations I can strategically limit my options: I can alter your best move by irretrievably discarding what would have otherwise been my best move. The standard example is throwing the steering wheel out of the car in a game of chicken, so that you know I can’t turn aside at the last second, and you’ll have to. At the end of The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), Eddie Mars tells Philip Marlowe why Marlowe can’t shoot him; Mars’s minions will come rushing in and Marlowe will be killed. Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) realizes this is true, and shoots anyhow (into the air), destroying his best move (restraint) but also Mars’s (stalemate). Likewise at the end of The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), San Spade (Bogart) calls the cops on Gutman and his minions, then impresses on Bridget O’Shaugnessy that she has to tell him the truth immediately because the cops are on their way and they might both be hanged if he doesn’t know the whole situation he’s dealing with. In both cases Bogart does what he does best: ratchets up the danger and urgency of the situation even at his own risk. These were not his best moves, from a purely self-interested perspective, but by making them he constrains the possible moves that the other players can make. Eddie Mars and Bridget O’Shaugnessy are both forced (in similar ways) into doing things they would not have done had Bogart not thrown away his own relatively secure position.15 Likewise, the Zahavis argue, predators and

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374   Reading and Bargaining prey will force actions on each other by similar strategies of commitment, ruling out their best moves and making them impossible. If a nervous dog growls to show that it is ready to attack, it is also renouncing the possibility of hiding from you, and now you can’t any longer hope that hiding rather than attacking will be its best strategy as you sneak down the hallway, just as you can’t hope that keeping mum will be Bogart’s. If game theory goes a long way towards explaining the evolution of complex behavioral interactions among different organisms, decision theory helps capture the complex negotiations that occur among different impulses within the individual mind. Decision theory attempts to describe how we weigh and balance the various different factors that go into making a decision. Those factors primarily include the relative values of various outcomes and their relative probabilities. In human psychology these values are not independent variables but are liable to change when we succeed or fail at achieving certain outcomes. Emotions, as we’ve seen, are self-referential actions. We bargain with them in order to try to get others (or ourselves) to respond. They’re not only incentives to pursue or avoid certain outcomes; they are or may be part of the outcomes themselves. This recursive property is central to human feeling. It is what leads, for example, to the conundrum F. Scott Fitzgerald describes in The Crack-Up: “I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy.”16 Neither what you could call homogenous emotions (“loving to love,” as Augustine puts it) nor heterogeneous ones (“loving to hate”) guarantee coincidence or even harmony between incentive and goal. Fitzgerald’s emotions display a recursive, self-intensifying dynamism. Sadness, you could say, is a sad attitude towards sadness, which, by a strange and natural antithesis both threatens and strengthens the vocation of a writer whose goal is thinking out attitudes towards sadness. In its most subtle and psychologically acute varieties, decision theory takes seriously the fact that even the most basic estimation of values and probabilities is not straightforward. In real life we probably evolved to (objectively) overestimate our chances because all that matters in evolutionary competition is winning. It doesn’t make any difference if nice guys finish ninth (Leo Durocher) or last (as he’s always misquoted). Every winner in the lottery played the game. Even if the losers come our slightly behind the rational nonplayers, the nonplayers are just as much nonwinners as the losers are (il faut parier). It therefore makes evolutionary sense that we overestimate unlikely probabilities both ways, thanks to an enabling paranoia derived from an overestimation of our own significance (this is the reason we also fear unlikely scenarios like plane crashes),17 but certainly that we overestimate our chances of winning (all our ancestors won and winners’ history is written in our genes). The nature of probability, at the very least our retrospective judgment of the odds, is also complicated by the philosophical problem of the inscrutability of what we are measuring. Imagine that someone rolling a pair of dice gets this sequence: 3, 5, 7. What are the odds that the sequence will continue on the next roll? That depends on what counts as continuing the sequence. Is the sequence 3, 5, 7, 9? Then the odds of continuing this sequence are 1/9 (four out of 36 rolls yield a 9). But what if the sequence is 3, 5, 7, 11? Both

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William Flesch   375 sequences are equally “legitimate,” the first comprising odd numbers starting with 3; the second primes starting with 3. But there’s only a 1/18 chance of continuing the sequence of primes on the next roll. So the odds that “the sequence will continue” depend on how you’re defining the sequence. You could argue, maybe, that the odd numbers are somehow a more basic or primitive concept. Or that the primes are. The point is that the likelihood of the sequence’s continuing change depending on what the sequence is.18 Probability is in part determined by specifying what the thing is whose probability you’re measuring, but nothing can be specified completely enough to fix its probability objectively beforehand. There will always be an element of judgment. That element allows for recursive, and constructive, changes in our assessments of probability, often with the benefit of hindsight (as we superstitious readers of auguries know); this is what in her chapter Vermeule is calling post facto confabulation. Considering only the two sequences of odd numbers or odd primes, we could predict that there is a, let’s call it, future perfect probability of one out of three that the sequence will have continued, since both a 9 or an 11 will have counted as continuing it. We may have expected a 9 and got an 11 instead, but now we can see, now we can get ourselves to see, how 11 might be preferred more justly, as a sequence worthier of the gods (as Milton’s Satan says of Earth). Because the probability of a-not-fully-specified, indeed of a necessarily inscrutable, event cannot be measured accurately beforehand, a potentially infinite array of outcomes can count as fulfilling it19 if we rethink or recalibrate what counts as fulfilling it. The result that we get gives us a strong incentive to recalibrate our preferences so that we’ll want it. We can prefer to prefer the outcome we get to the outcome we don’t, so that outcomes affect preferences and don’t just fulfill or disappoint them. (The fox decides the grapes are sour; Swann is glad to free himself of obsession for a woman not his type.) Now, it may well be that we would still prefer the outcome we didn’t get to the outcome we did, but it helps balance our loss that our gain is actual, whereas our loss was only potential.20 In literature as in life this is the incentive to the reality principle: you can’t get the optimal ending you originally proposed to yourself, but you can tutor yourself to prefer the realistically acceptable ending you do get—to prefer it because it’s true, because it’s adult. Neither Alice Vavasor nor Glencora MacCluskie marries the man of her dreams in Trollope’s Palliser novels, but both learn to love the men they have married. They learn to love them because they have married them. They buck the odds against marrying the person they love best in the world by loving the person they marry best in the world, and so each does marry the man she loves best, as she wanted to do from the start. Given these rules for recursive change, the odds that you’ll marry the person you love best go way up in Trollope’s universe. These rules are his moral point. The reader experiences this change vicariously, and takes satisfaction in the defeat of a tawdry daydream, the bodice-ripper story Trollope might have been writing, on behalf of a preferable, that is to say now-preferable, story of marital stability and mutual respect. As with Trollope so with Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990). Quaid/Hauser (Arnold Schwarzenegger) doesn’t know whose side he’s on. Not that he doesn’t know who the two sides are. He doesn’t know who he is. His memory has been erased and then erased

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376   Reading and Bargaining again, so that when he recovers it he first believes himself to be a (virtuous) rebel, until he finds out that he was supposed to believe this in order to infiltrate the ranks of the telepathic rebels that he was actually fighting. The brilliance of the movie is that he prefers his later preference for the rebel cause to his initial preference for the cause of the totalitarian oppressors. His initial preference motivated his plan to deceive himself (through false memories) into an opposite preference that was supposed to be temporary. He didn’t anticipate how much he would prefer that opposite preference, the preference that makes him the hero of the movie. Although preferences among preferences are legion in real life, the ordering of preferences can usually and inconspicuously be ranged along an axis in which every possibility is unobjectionable. I prefer the fish, but if there’s only chicken left, well, that’s okay too. Most of the time I don’t see getting my second choice as a loss. I still do okay. But in fiction the assessment of preferred outcomes will be seen almost always to involve a possible loss as well as a possible gain. Because, as the poker maxim has it, losing feels worse than winning feels good, what makes fictional situations gripping is the jeopardy (as movie writers call it), the loss to which characters are exposed. Fiction is always about a significant change in status, either for the better or for the worse. This is indeed our second-order preference about fiction: that things should end at a significantly different hedonic level from the way they begin, whether as tragedy or as comedy: that things should change. Accordingly (for reasons I’ll go into a little more deeply below), we will sometimes want to see our own preferences balked. An overruling desire for elemental change, so that we may paradoxically prefer the outcome we prefer less, is central to experiences of the sublime, and is behind Gilles Deleuze’s ringing claim, which should be set as motto to every urgent exhortation to read, that “There is always an indescribable joy that springs from great books, even when they speak of ugly, desperate, or terrifying things.”21 This will be true even of a return to the status quo, if that return makes the status quo more meaningful, as with the sublime or with prodigal son stories: Max returns home from where the wild things are, but now he knows to prefer home, and home has become his preferred goal, when at first it wasn’t; or, even more, if the celebratory judgment that one’s achieved something is the achievement, as with the dog at the end of Pynchon’s Vineland: “It was Desmond, none other, the spit and image of his grandmother Chloe, roughened by the miles, face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home.”22 Because (effective) fiction always meets a running desire for significant change, even change against our overall preferences, every local desire, whether constructive or destructive, comes entangled in a second-order preference ambivalent between endorsing and condemning the local desire.23 Here is a simplified list of the sometimes recursive and self-conflicting preferences among preferences experienced by Alice and Glencora, and vicariously by the reader, along with the loss to which each preference is preferred: First-order preference:  marry the charismatic romantic male. Corresponding loss: fail to do so.

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William Flesch   377 Second-order preference: do not learn to prefer the more reliable but duller figure, as Trollope may want you to. That is: continue to prefer the first order preference. Corresponding loss: learn to prefer the more reliable, but duller figure. Third-order dynamic: see why learning to prefer the more reliable figure is actually to be preferred to our second-order preference not to learn this, and why the reliable figure makes for a happy ending. Corresponding loss: feel that this ending is unhappy. Fourth-order dynamic: feel a sense of depth in one’s own moral being for preferring the outcome Trollope pushes through the third-order dynamic. Corresponding loss: fail or miss a chance to be able to assert this depth in oneself.

Naturally these levels aren’t strictly separate: each merges into the next. But even this crude discrimination shows how the book tutors you to read it, tutors you in its own morality. The sense that your emotional responses give you that you’re making progress in understanding it is part of the point. I don’t mean this as a moral point, though Trollope does. I mean only that the fact that we have such marked, multiply nested preferences about our own preferences allows a lot of narrative divagation. You can see that this is not a moral issue if you compare Trollope with Howard Hawks’s movie His Girl Friday (1940). There the sane, stable person is Bruce (Ralph Bellamy), Hildy’s new fiancé, who reminds her ex-husband, the dashing romantic scoundrel Walter Burns (Cary Grant), of the nondescript film actor. . . Ralph Bellamy. Hildy (Rosalind Russell) is glad that she’s learned to prefer a normal and moral life to life as a newspaperman. But we’re not. We want her to remarry Walter, not bury herself alive in Bruce’s genuine but clueless loving care. We’re made to feel wrong to want this, partly because there is something wrong with Walter: his failure to understand why Hildy might prefer the loyal and devoted, Trollopian Bruce to him. If only Walter really sympathized with Hildy’s preference, his preference for her preference would save him and make us less ambivalent about wanting him to win. But when he finally does come to prefer Hildy’s happiness to his own, that saving preference leads to a tricky trap in the plot: we want Walter to win, now, only because he doesn’t want to. Charles Lederer’s brilliant screenplay escapes this impasse by showing us that Hildy in fact prefers Walter to be the scoundrel who will do anything to get her back. His saving decency appalls her. But he adroitly convinces her that he was only playing another trick (we know better) and so reassures her that he would never give her up. We get what we want—him to be decent and therefore to deserve her—and she gets what she wants: the rascal that we also want. His last act of rascality is to trick her into thinking that he isn’t decent after all, and so all our preferences converge. Let me offer one more example of the general literary tendency to negotiate among and sometimes to meditate on preferences among preferences, Samuel Beckett’s superb poem “I would like my love to die”:24 I would like my love to die and the rain to be falling on the graveyard and on me walking the streets mourning the first and last to love me

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378   Reading and Bargaining Why would he prefer mourning to having? This is a common human experience, but I think the final answer in Beckett is that preferring mourning is preferring to be the lyric I, the speaker of a poem of mourning. There, loving and writing and mourning would all come together and establish his preferred identity as a permanent one, just as her death is permanent. One way to talk about preferences among preferences is to say that they seem to define who or what we are. It’s not what we want, but what we really and in good faith want to want, that makes us ourselves.25 This can play out in very subtle ways, as in this poem, where he wants her to die, but wants to regret her death, to mourn it and wish that she were alive, which would make him a better person, and a truer poet, than wanting her to die could otherwise do. What makes the poem work is that these conflicting desires—that she be dead, that she not have died—don’t in fact contradict each other here. The poetic self is fully integrated; it is the sad self that wants her to die so as to be the sad self that it is. I don’t mean this as a psychological point so much as a tonal one: the sadness of the poem is appropriate. Part of that sadness is over the fact that only she could have loved someone like him, knowing what he wants, and knowing that he wants it out of love. There is an odd alliance established between these two contradictory desires, and differing preferences and differing levels of preference can become integrated with each other. This sort of integration of contrary desires takes place over the course of almost every literary work. Divergent vectors of plot, character, and audience hopes and fears criss-cross the work and impel it towards its ending. We’ll only know how they all finally pan out at the end, and only then will we come to a final preference about the changing preferences we’ve been experiencing, the preferences the work elicits and modifies.

II Literature is a temporal art. Poetry, prose, drama, film present their events sequentially, and their ordering is important. Sequence matters, which is why Aristotle stresses what might seem obvious:  the trajectory from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. Each has its own characteristic preferences. In Aristotle that end has an emotional valance: tragedy leaves us purged of emotion, “calm of mind, all passion spent” as Milton puts it. The end of the story and the end of our emotional engagement in the story converge. Narrative and emotional resolution are coterminous. This point may seem debatable, but there’s an obvious way that it’s true: narratives and emotions are by their nature dynamic, and we use the word resolution to describe both narratives and emotions when they reach equilibrium (or equanimity). The fact that these arcs are coterminous is interesting but perhaps not surprising if we consider that emotional and literary interest both aim at some reward or satisfaction. Both kinds of interest represent a desire on the part of the audience or consumer of the literary work. Emotions can always be analyzed into desires, or characterized by the

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William Flesch   379 desires that elicit them. Literary works satisfy or reward these desires (not necessarily the same thing) through their temporal structure. So, what do we desire from a narrative? Usually, at least three things: to be interested in the things that happen, to take pleasure in those events, and to be emotionally engaged. Although these desires are conceptually and perhaps empirically independent, they can obviously come into conflict with one another, and when this happens we may experience continuously changing preferences among these preferences. Stories orchestrate such changes: beginnings, middles, and ends offer, and ought to offer, different experiences. I think that there are two main types of reward we anticipate from the completed narrative work, and that the affective experience of narrative is of an internal competition within ourselves for which reward to prefer. The vicarious satisfaction of having things work out according to what Freud called the pleasure principle? Or our own second-order epistemological pleasure in the reality principle, the Aristotlean pleasure of knowing what happened (even in a fiction), tragic though such knowledge may be—knowing the kind of deeper truth that is accessible to our knowledge but not to our will. In comedy, we could say, the first kind of reward is more prominent, in tragedy the second kind. Comedy relieves us; tragedy empowers us. Preferring tragedy, when we do, is costly to our first-order pleasures and preferences, and so signals our capacity to prefer it. The end of a work is also the termination of a competition among our preferences:  now whatever contrapuntal trajectories of desire the work has orchestrated resolve themselves with its resolution. A similar kind of convergence seems to structure literary attention and literary interest at widely different scales. The reward or satisfaction that meter or rhyme afford is similar to the reward or satisfaction that narrative offers. (Reward and satisfaction are not the same thing. Reward is a more general term describing the aim of any voluntary activity, and can include negative experiences; satisfaction is a possible reward.) Prosody, grammar, rhetoric, and narrative all alternate between eliciting and fulfilling desire or appetite. That process is recursive: to experience fulfillment we have to experience desire first, so we have a second-order desire for our appetite to increase. At the very least, the alternation is one in which our desires shift and change: from desiring desire to desiring the fulfillment of desire, to desiring desire again. In prosody we want arousal and fulfillment, as we wait for metrical and rhymed line-endings; in narrative we want alternations of jeopardy and rescue or security. We read or listen or watch because we want the excitement of risk or danger or conflict, but we also want a resolution to that excitement, with the danger or conflict disarmed or undone. Our emotional investments in events and characters vary and shift over the course of a narrative. If there’s an obvious way that narratives end with emotional resolution, it’s equally obvious that the emotional arcs narratives and characters trace will have various trajectories and various durations. A good story intertwines trajectories of desire and fulfillment with different temporal profiles, different durations of arousal and different refractory periods after fulfillment before arousal returns.

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380   Reading and Bargaining Describing narrative experience this way shouldn’t be very controversial but it helps explain and predict two related and prima facie puzzling features of literary experience. We’ve already glimpsed how it might illuminate a preference for a negative or tragic outcome, for Shakespeare’s King Lear rather than Tate’s (to take a notorious example). And it can also help explain why we will so often prefer consuming a fixed narrative whose outcome we can’t control to daydreaming. We can daydream anything we want, and therefore one might expect that we should be able to induce in ourselves any narrative emotion we want simply by daydreaming the proper narrative events and outcomes. These issues are related because we might ordinarily prefer to daydream in such a way as to induce happy or positive emotions in ourselves, and yet we seem to value narratives that don’t do that, or don’t guarantee to do that, more than our own daydreams. I suggest a novel description of the relation of temporality to emotion in narrative. My thinking derives from the work of the psychiatrist George Ainslie on what he calls the hyperbolic discounting of our future preferences, and from some insights of Robert Frank’s based on Ainslie’s argument.26 Ainslie’s basic but powerful discovery is that humans (and apparently most animals) discount the future in a rationally self-contradictory way. Given a choice of $100 right now or $110 a week from now, most people prefer the immediate $100. Given a choice between $100 a year from today and $110 fifty-three weeks from today, most people choose $110 a week later. We do this despite the fact that exactly a year from today we would switch preferences if we could, and despite the fact that we know that we would. So our attitude towards our future preferences is different from what we know our future preferences will be. We prefer a different preference for ourselves now from the preference that we know we will prefer later.27 Not only are our preferences inconsistent with each other: we prefer not to make them consistent, even though doing so would lead to maximizing our satisfactions. Being able to be rational about far-off decisions is no more help in the near term than knowing what someone else should do in our situation ever helps us to do it. This widely demonstrated, apparently universal pattern of choice—in pigeons and rats as in humans—raises some evolutionary questions. Evolution should tend towards choices with the highest payoff for survival (ultimately measured as reproductive success). Why the inefficiency of hyperbolic discounting? Why don’t hyperbolic discounters get out-competed by self-serving maximizers, the credit-card company gougers of the biological world? Ainslie and Frank suggest a few reasons. Ainslie thinks that hyperbolic discounting may be a byproduct of vertebrates’ perceptual processes, which are tuned to changes in the environment. Such changes are, so to speak, over perceived,28 and perhaps temporal changes are overperceived as well, in environments regular enough for this to be harmless. An alternative possibility involves the conflict between genes and organisms:  what’s good for the genes is not necessarily good for the individual, and vice versa. Genes and individuals operate at different levels, and so genes prompt us to sudden glories (especially those of a sexual nature) that may counteract our individual longer-term interests. Genes induce us to take a much shorter-term

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William Flesch   381 perspective on the future. Evolution is about survival plus reproductive success. We individuals wish to survive for quite some time, our genes wish us to reproduce as soon as possible, and these two time frames differ. The general experience of this difference would be expressed in our empirically confirmed propensity for hyperbolic discounting.29 Ainslie offers an extremely sophisticated theory of what he calls intertemporal bargaining between our shorter- and longer-term interests. To give a brief summary: Ainslie’s idea is that some long-term and therefore overly discounted outcomes ($110 next week) can ally themselves with certain overinfluential short-term desires in ways that allow them to counterbalance other short-term outcomes ($100 immediately) that might otherwise dominate them and make all long-term valuation ineffective. For example: I want to lose weight but I want to eat a candy bar. The goal of being ten pounds lighter in a month can’t really compete with candy right now. But if I can give myself another shorter-term goal that short-term goal can ally with my longer-term goal. One immediate gratification can hold off another. So I might go brush my teeth. Now if I eat the candy bar I’ll have to brush again, and my short-term desire to avoid this chore allies with my long-term desire to lose weight and helps balance my short-term desire to eat the chocolate. There are other strategies and other trade-offs that help us improve the desirability of longer-term goals. One that seems to offer considerable evolutionary advantage is the sad fact that we become jaded in our appetites; becoming jaded may be an incentive to an advantageous taste for novelty. “Tout le trouble du monde vient de ce qu’on ne sait pas rester seul dans sa chambre,” to quote Pascal again, and the reason one can’t remain in one’s room is that (like daydreaming) the easy satisfaction of every appetite fails to satisfy our near-term but second-order desire to have hard-to-satisfy appetites, even as they also instantiate a second-order hard-to-satisfy appetite. The appetite for novelty is hard to satisfy. It is urgently near term, unlike its antonyms, ennui and boredom, and not in our control, since it does not belong to the familiar world we know how to operate in. The appetite for novelty, for novel satisfactions of novel appetites, is therefore something both desired and frustrating—the perfect matrix for narrative experience.30 Ainslie stresses the fact that satisfaction requires appetite, and appetite, once satisfied (“calm of mind, all passion spent”), needs time to build up. An appetite for novelty is one of humanity’s major evolutionary advantages (as Easterlin argues in this volume). Without such an appetite our learning about the world would be severely limited, so that as a mechanism and incentive to learning, novelty provides learners an obvious evolutionary advantage over nonlearners. But how did it evolve? It’s important to remind ourselves that the usefulness of an adaptation is never a sufficient evolutionary explanation: adaptation adapts. It adapts features evolved for other reasons. Our generally inconsistent assignments of market value to rewards might provide a clue. Appetites always overvalue near term-satisfactions. But we can balance off near-term satisfactions. The evolution of a strong near-term appetite for novelty outweighs other,

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382   Reading and Bargaining risk-aversive near-term appetites with lower potential payoffs in reproductive success. Thus the near-term taste for novelty can ally with longer-term goals (learning to cope with unknown dangers, exploring difficult terrain) we might otherwise discount too steeply. To follow the dynamics of narrative—and of human psychology—it’s crucial to understand how short-term appetites can counter others in order to achieve long-term goals, in intertemporal bargaining. A whole range of emotions, not just the desire for novelty, form shifting alliances with each other, with an effect on long-term outcomes ultimately arbitrated by evolution. You might think that strong, brief, soon-calmed squalls of emotion are instances of high-risk, low-payoff hyperbolically short-term reactions, but Robert Frank argues that some emotions or emotional responses evolved in order to counteract hyperbolic discounting. Consider anger. It’s usually more prudent in the short run to turn the other cheek. You’re more likely to survive if you don’t get into an unnecessary fight. You have a long-term interest, though, in avoiding a reputation for predictable prudence (even cowardice). Your short-term preference for prudence is likely to trump your longer-term, more important preference for the higher value goal of minimizing the number of such potentially violent confrontations. Paradoxically anger is more far-sighted than prudence. Rage puts you at short-term risk, against the preference hyperbolic discounting gives you to avoid immediate costs and to defer the problems of such avoidance till later. But the fact that you get enraged acts to your long-term benefit, since over time you’ll be challenged less if rage gives you a reputation for reacting forcefully to those challenges. Of course rage is a short-term appetite, but it looks like it evolved as a homeopathic solution, with long-term benefits, to the problems that other short-term appetites would cause. Or consider Ainslie’s erotic example. Our genes’ long-term interests, and perhaps our own longer-term interests as well, seem served by erotic failures of self-control. Thus immediate gratification of an emotion can ally itself with long-term interests that we might otherwise discount too steeply. Rage and desire offer short-term rewards that we would otherwise avoid if we took a somewhat longer perspective, in order to avoid injury, or pregnancy or childbirth or years of childcare—but that midterm perspective itself overly discounts the value of longer term rewards, like avoiding future exploitation or reproducing or being taken care of in old age. (I hasten to say that these are simplified examples.) Ainslie’s argument for the role novelty or unexpectedness plays in our psychic economy is like Frank’s argument about emotions like rage. Novelty offers the incentive of a short-term reward—an alternative to the same old same old short-term rewards with respect to which we are jaded—but yields a long-term payoff in knowledge of the world.31

III Now we’re in a position to see how this plays out in the most basic kinds of literary experience, in experiences like rhyme or meter no less than in experiences of plot

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William Flesch   383 and character. The basic idea is that we can’t daydream the unexpected, any more than we can tickle ourselves. The satisfactions daydreams offer are too quick and too predictable, too much in our own jaded control, to satisfy our desire for novelty. They’re so predictably disappointing because they offer gratifications that are too immediate, too discounted. (Ainslie compares daydreaming to cheating at solitaire.) We prefer other preferences than those we can offer ourselves immediately, but our propensity towards immediate gratification means that we fail to achieve our preferred preferences for novelty, or for emotions whose long-term values is sweetened with short-term incentives (like rage or desire). Desire and satisfaction (as Plato and Milton most vividly insisted) are contradictory to each other, and without “sweet, reluctant amorous delay” not in your own control, you risk losing sweetness and amorousness. Thus we could speculate that short-term emotional rewards—the negative reward of feeling appetite or need—frequently outweigh short-term satisfactions you control. Narrative (or any temporal art that awakens your desires but doesn’t meet them immediately and easily) gives novel satisfactions. By definition, novel satisfaction is not in your own control. A writer’s expertise consists in satisfying you in a surprising way (think of the punch line of a joke or riddle), and so not in the stale way you would have thought to prefer before. Any interesting narrative changes your preferences for how satisfaction will come. Of course we’ve all been disappointed by endings other than the ones we thought we (or a character) earned or deserved. Ainslie’s work on intertemporal bargaining focuses on the alliances made between, among, and against different temporal orientations within a single psyche or psychology. Likewise, we can notice the phenomenon of what I call noncausal bargaining, the bargaining we engage in with a narrative. We desire and demand certain outcomes. We are willing to undergo certain losses in exchange for other gains. Young Paul Dombey may die, much against our will, but we who have suffered Paul’s death feel we have a right to demand a good outcome for Florence in return. Hector may die, but Achilles (whose rage has protected his reputation) had better now do the right thing by Priam. We’ll accept a bargain in which we must change our preferences as long the story fulfills our new ones. We bargain with our later selves, and our later selves bargain with us. We yield some control to the fictionist in return for some gratifications we could not have managed for ourselves. Those gratifications always involve some change in our preferences, and in our preferences about what preferences we want. We have no control over those changes (except to stop reading). I prefer the fan-fiction outcome in which Dumbledore lives, but the rules of the game require me to accept J. K. Rowling’s story—picking among fan-fiction outcomes is only sophisticated daydreaming. I want Rowling to make me want the outcome she offers, make me see it as a maximized combination of both knowledge and surprise, both immediate and delayed gratification, both confirmation of my own insight and a conjuror’s trick that completely blindsides me. What incentives or motivations can make me change my preferences, prefer novel preferences to my original wish-fulfillments? I think we can list at least three basic and

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384   Reading and Bargaining related psychological incentives to novelty, incentives that evolved variously and in tandem to manage, resist, and exploit hyperbolic discounting. A desire for novel satisfactions. Novel satisfactions trump familiar ones when the familiar ones are readily available. Human appetite always has as one of its components an appetite for the new, so that appetite is in part an appetite for a new kind of appetite, for change in preference, for novelty. This feature of appetite evolved because readily available satisfactions will always be preferred if we have complete freedom to choose our satisfactions; we will too heavily discount later, harder-tocome-by satisfactions. Becoming jaded, wanting a new experience, is a psychological mechanism evolved to counteract our proclivity for immediate gratification. We don’t daydream well.32 We want satisfactions that come from elsewhere, that are not under out control, satisfactions that by their nature we do not have complete freedom to choose. A desire to know new things, or curiosity. The reason our appetites delight in variety is that such delights give us an incentive to learn more about our environments (Easterlin). Desire for knowledge is important to our survival, and that desire is furthered by our desire for novelty and our contempt for the familiar. A desire for status. The test for the novelty in points 1 and 2 is its unexpectedness. If we can daydream it, it’s not sufficiently new (it’s Coleridge’s fancy, not imagination). Yet learning about the new makes it familiar. A taste for novelty always risks being self-defeating. The biological goal is to familiarize yourself with what’s novel, which means that the novelty is consumed. That seems to lead to the self-defeating triumph of jadedness, but jadedness can itself be a dearly bought and so powerful signal of fitness. It signals knowledge, experience, and survival. You can see it in the charisma of noir heroes. They’re attractive because nothing surprises them, nothing excites them. They have to be fit to have survived all they’ve gone through, and so we want to ally our genes with theirs. This is why storytelling has a riddling quality about it that allows its hearers to prove themselves. I try to guess what will happen before you tell me and before other audience members do. I want to show that the story is less novel to me than to the other members of the audience I am competing with, by guessing the outcome first. I am predicting what they cannot predict. Novelty, paradoxically, allows me to prove myself by overcoming it, and so I may prefer damping my satisfaction in novelty. One final example: Austen’s famous joke at the end of Northanger Abbey, which is all about the final convergence of different temporal expectations and the preferences they dictate. With only four paragraphs to go, it looks like Catherine and Henry Tilney are not in fact going to get together, because of the unalterable refusal of Henry’s father, General Tilney, and Henry’s and Catherine’s equally unalterable refusal to go against his wishes. Austen’s arch narrator comments:

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William Flesch   385 The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity. The means by which their early marriage was effected can be the only doubt: what probable circumstance could work upon a temper like the general’s? The circumstance which chiefly availed was the marriage of his daughter with a man of fortune and consequence, which took place in the course of the summer—an accession of dignity that threw him into a fit of good humour, from which he did not recover till after Eleanor had obtained his forgiveness of Henry, and his permission for him “to be a fool if he liked it!”33

The joke here is in the recursive justification for the happy ending. We are all hastening towards the end of the book, which means towards some artistic felicity. But experienced readers will imagine, with the telltale compression of the pages before them, that this felicity will have to be the achieved and sober-colored felicity of wisdom (cf. the first version of Great Expectations). We would prefer not to prefer this mature realism, but if we cannot prefer our own preferences—the probability that there’s time left for a happy ending is too low—well at least a good reader will see he must choose realism a little sooner than Austen compels him to, a little sooner than the book’s other readers. But then Austen pulls the great trick of affecting to presume her readers will be quick to see that she’ll have to conform her story to our preferences. The means are in doubt, because: how can it happen? And the answer is: it happens very quickly, because there’s no other choice, given the imminent conclusion. Austen has tricked us into preferring not to hold on to our atavistic preference for a happy ending, and then has tricked us into returning with renewed appetite to our original preference. Everything is short term now, so we don’t have time for preferences to change. But Austen does, and makes them change anyhow. We thought we’d accepted a Faustian bargain, and she gives us a novel, unexpected gift. Austen’s ending is a great exposition of how comic writing effects multiple changes in our preferences. But what about tragedy? Can this theory of noncausal intertemporal bargaining, where your preferences are themselves part of the bargaining, explain tragedy? Hegel’s view of tragedy as the conflict not between right and wrong but between right and right is central here.34 By its very nature tragedy cannot gratify our preference that the right always come out victorious. Instead we have to teach ourselves or let ourselves be taught a different preference: the preference for truth, let’s say, instead of for a happy ending. We may achieve this preference by coming to prefer, under the influence of tragedy’s inexorable grandeur, the clarity of tragedy to the wishfulness of comedy. We may prefer, that is, a work that doesn’t meet our wishes or preferences. Such changes in preference are all part of the game we evolved playing, and all of them, in one way or another, allow for what we call aesthetic satisfactions, a good (indeed Kantian) definition of which might be: satisfactions that we learn to prefer to what we would have preferred.

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386   Reading and Bargaining

Notes 1. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (New York: Vintage, 2005), pp. 55–56. 2. Darwin and William James essentially agree that emotion is an active experience. See Darwin’s On The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Penguin, 2009), and, in James’s Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), the chapters on “The Emotions” (II: 442–85) and “Will” (II: 486–592). 3. My argument here is very much in keeping with J.  L. Austin’s view of performative utterances, e.g. in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). 4. See William Flesch, “Narrative and Non-causal Bargaining,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45:1 (2012): 6–9. 5. George Ainslie, Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Breakdown of Will (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6. This argument is related to philosophical ideas about the inscrutability of reference (see W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969]) and propositional attitudes (see Quine, “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes” in his The Ways of Paradox [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], pp. 185–96). An assignment of probability is always the representation of a judgment, and it is always a subjective—indeed evolved—intelligence that judges. No finite subjective intelligence could wholly characterize any event whose probability it is assessing. Language cannot achieve absolute precision, so there’s no way to say with absolute certainty what counts as fulfilling a probabilistic prediction. (Cf. Wittgenstein’s related argument about the indeterminacy of rule following in Philosophical Investigations.) The best and most lucid exposition of subjective probability (and its relation to decision theory) is Richard Jeffrey’s Subjective Probability: The Real Thing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7. For a cognitive account of the temporality of such experience consistent with mine see Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi’s “Fluctuation in Literary Reading:  The Neglected Dimension of Time,” ­chapter 26 in this volume. 8. Thomas Schelling, “What Is Game Theory?” in Choice and Consequence: Perspectives of an Errant Economist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 215. 9. For a fascinating account of metastrategies in Rock Paper Scissors, see Dan Egnor, “Iocaine Powder,” ICGA Journal 23:1, pp. 33–35, http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/iocaine.html. 10. “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in his Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 30. 11. See R. Axelrod and W. D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science 211: 448927 (March 1981): 1390–96. 12. See Amotz Zahavi and Avishag Zahavi, The Handicap Principle:  A  Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle (New York: Oxford University Press 1997), Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000), and William Flesch:  Comeuppance:  Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) 13. In game theory, cooperation can arise in noncooperative games, but only as a consequence of the dynamics of the game, not through any contract enforceable outside of the game itself. (This means that one player can punish another for not cooperating, but

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William Flesch   387 punishing [or not], is a move within the game. Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy [New  York:  Scholastic, 2008–10] provides a beautiful fictional exposition of the ways cooperation can arise in noncooperative games.) 14. That fitness is recursive too: Fisher’s “attractive sons” argument is that a female will be attracted to a mate likely to give her sons whom the next generation of females will be attracted to. See R. A. Fisher’s 1930 exposition in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition, ed. Henry Bennett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 136. 15. See the work of Thomas Schelling, for example “An Essay on Bargaining,” American Economic Review 46: 3 (1956): 281–306 and Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2008). 16. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1993), pp. 80–81. 17. For a brief critical survey of different theories of emotions, as appraisal and incentive and as experiential content and goal, see Patrick Colm Hogan’s contribution to this volume (­chapter 13), as well as his “On Being Moved: Cognition and Emotion in Literature and Film,” in Lisa Zunshine, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 237–56, where he gives a somewhat different explanation for fear of flying, but one consistent with my own. 18. This is a very rapid summary of one of the central claims of Richard Jeffrey’s Subjective Probability. 19. On the inscrutablity of reference see Quine’s Ontological Relativity; on numerical sequences see Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations cited above, and Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Whatever you think about whether reference is inscrutable and probability subjective in reality, they certainly are in fiction, where there is no reference. 20. In Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, Caspar Gutman observes that actual money has far more nominal value than notional money does, when he offers Spade “actual money, genuine coin of the realm, sir. With a dollar of this you can buy more than with ten dollars of talk” (Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon [New York: Vintage, 1992], p. 174). 21. Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” trans. Jacqueline Wallace, Semiotext(e) 3: 1 (1977): 19. 22. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), p. 385. 23. To bring our preferences into such stark contrast with each other, fiction must be freer and more mobile in its ranking of preferences than real life generally is. Margrethe Bruun Vaage argues in her chapter in this volume, “On the Repulsive Rapist, and the Difference between Morality in Fiction and Real Life” (­chapter 20), that our fictional and real-life evaluations of immoral behavior diverge for reasons that might have to do with divergences between fiction and reality in our preferences for what we want our moral preferences to be. 24. An accurate transcription of this, the first version Beckett published in English, is available here:  http://www2.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/sc/3poems.htm. Later editions of Beckett’s poetry quote it inaccurately. 25. See Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1987) and J. David Velleman, Self to Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and “Narrative Explanation,” Philosophical Review 112: 1 (2003): 1–25. 26. See Robert Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988), and my articles “Intertemporal Bargaining and Narrative Theory,” in Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 199–217, and “Narrative and Non-causal Bargaining.”

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388   Reading and Bargaining 27. Ainslie calls this hyperbolic discounting because the formula by which we inconsistently discount the future is captured by a hyperbolic curve. 28. See Easterlin’s chapter (­chapter 30) in this volume. 29. Ainslie, Breakdown of Will, pp. 45–46. 30. And for an addiction to gambling, as Ainslie argues in “Money as MacGuffin: A Factor in Gambling and Other Process Addictions,” forthcoming in Neil Levy, ed., Addiction and Self-Control (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 31. See Ainslie’s “Money as MacGuffin.” 32. On the dissatisfactions of daydreaming see Schelling’s essay “The Mind as a Consuming Organ,” in his Choice and Consequence, pp. 328–46. 33. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (New York: Dover, 2000), p. 178. 34. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), I: 220–21 and 464.

Works Cited Ainslie, George. Breakdown of Will. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. “Money as MacGuffin: A Factor in Gambling and Other Process Addictions,” forthcoming in Neil Levy, ed., Addiction and Self-control. New York, Oxford University Press, forthcoming. ———. Picoeconomics:  The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. New York: Dover, 2000. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. Axelrod, R., and W. D. Hamilton. “The Evolution of Cooperation.” Science, 27 March 1981, Vol. 211, no. 4489: 1390–1396 Beckett, Samuel. “I would like my love to die.” http://www2.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/ sc/3poems.htm, accessed August 22, 2013. Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games Trilogy. New York: Scholastic, 2008–10. Darwin, Charles. On The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: Penguin, 2009. Davidson, Donald. “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” Essays on Actions and Events. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001: 21–42. Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought.” Trans. Jacqueline Wallace. Semiotext(e) 3:1 (1977): 12–21. ———. “Pensée Nomade.” http://lesilencequiparle.unblog.fr/2012/09/17/pensee-nomadecolloque-nietzsche-aujourdhui-gilles-deleuze/, accessed August 22, 2013. Egnor, Dan. “Iocaine Powder.” ICGA Journal 23:1 (2000): 33–35. Fisher, R.  A. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection:  A  Complete Variorum Edition. Ed. Henry Bennett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. New York: New Directions, 1993. Flesch, William. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. ———. “Intertemporal Bargaining and Narrative Theory.” Theory Aside. Ed. Jason Potts. Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2014. ———. “Narrative and Non-causal Bargaining.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45:1 (2012): 6–9. Frank, Robert. Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions. New York: Norton, 1988.

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William Flesch   389 Frankfurt, Harry. The Importance of What We Care About. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage, 1992. Hawks, Howard. The Big Sleep. 1946. ———. His Girl Friday. 1940. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics. Trans. T. M. Knox. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “On Being Moved:  Cognition and Emotion in Literature and Film.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010: 237–56. Huston, John. The Maltese Falcon. 1941. James, William. Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover, 1950. Jeffrey, Richard. Subjective Probability: The Real Thing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Johnson, Samuel. Rambler No. 196. February 1, 1752. The Rambler. London: J. Payne: 1753) 2:1169–74. Available at http://books.google.com/books?id=KioTAAAAQAAJ, accessed August 22, 2013. Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. New York: Vintage, 2005. Miller, Geoffrey. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Quine, W. V. Ontological Relativity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. ———. “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes.” The Ways of Paradox. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976: 185–96. Schelling, Thomas. Arms and Influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. ———. Choice and Consequence:  Perspectives of an Errant Economist. Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. “An Essay on Bargaining.” American Economic Review 46:3 (1956): 281–306. ———. “The Mind as a Consuming Organ.” Choice and Consequence: 328–46. ———. “What Is Game Theory?” Choice and Consequence: 213–42. Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Velleman, J. David. “Narrative Explanation.” Philosophical Review 112:1 (2003): 1–25. ———. Self to Self. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Verhoeven, Paul. Total Recall. 1990. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Zahavi, Amotz, and Avishag.Zahavi The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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Cognitive Disability Studies

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Chapter 19

What Some Au t i st i c s C a n T each U s ab ou t P oet ry A Neurocosmopolitan Approach Ra lph Jam e s Savare se

1.  Different Sensory-Perceptual and Social Worlds My subject is admittedly counterintuitive—poetry and autism?—unless by “teach” I mean the kind of instruction that someone with a brain lesion, say, offers to scientists interested in typical functioning. As many familiar with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) know, the idea of an obdurate literality persists in the scientific literature. Indeed, the inability to comprehend figurative language, particularly metaphor, is frequently cited as a debilitating aspect of this condition,1 and it is thought to be especially severe in those labeled “low functioning.” Because autistics cannot discern the mental states of others, experts claim, the undisclosed and indirect meaning of metaphor eludes them. This view has become so prevalent that a popular novel—The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime—makes metaphoric and social bafflement a central aspect of the protagonist’s characterization. In a series of publications over the last six or seven years,2 I have tried to demonstrate the need to modulate the prevailing view, arguing that many autistics possess both enormous sensitivity to figurative language and keen theory of mind.3 Focusing on the writings of those believed to be most impaired by the disorder and who generally communicate with letter boards or text-to-voice synthesizers, I proposed something even more audacious: with rigorous training in literature and creative writing, autism can actually facilitate poetic expression. A central tenet of disability studies holds that physiological distinction becomes disabling in a society that refuses to welcome and accommodate difference—indeed that

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394    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry aggressively, if obliviously, privileges its own physiological requirements. Building on this fundamental insight and borrowing from the work of Arthur Frank, who likens medical patients to colonized peoples—the former’s bodies have been rationally conquered, he maintains, and their indigenous experience of illness has been haughtily disregarded—I put forward the idea of a postcolonial neurology.4 “The subaltern has learned to write,” I proclaimed. “He is a cross-cultural, cross-sensorial migrant, a neurocosmopolite armed with metaphor in a world that is often quite hostile to the neurological other.”5 In addition to their long history of oppression, I wanted to evoke the more recent journeying of classical autistics, a group that Oliver Sacks once derided as “creature[s]‌ for whom very little future lies in store.”6 I wanted to emphasize their efforts in learning the cognitive and cultural habits of neurotypicals, and I explicitly appealed for an equivalent commitment on the part of the neuromajority. I situated these arguments squarely within the neurodiversity movement, contending that the relentlessly pathological view of autism almost always misses undeveloped potential.7 As problematic, it cannot imagine another way of doing things. In this essay I once again adopt a “neurocosmopolitan approach.” By “neurocosmopolitan” I mean not just an openness to neurological difference but, rather, a denaturalization, even a dethronement, of privileged neurotypicality. In his book Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy advocates “methodic[ally] cultivati[ng].  .  . a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history”8 so as to forestall unfavorable judgments about the Other. Traveling to autism, we must do the same. By “neurocosmopolitan” I mean as well the effect on autistics of the journeying I mentioned—what might be termed neurohybridity or mobility. If postcolonialism, as Jahan Ramazani maintains, is “the movement, transference, or alienation of discourse from one place to another, a movement that involves not only a one-way shift but inevitably a bidirectional hybridization,”9 then neuropostcoloniality is the bidirectional hybridization of neurological processing proclivities. Accumulating in print and on the Web for the last twenty years, the rich, autobiographical literature by autistics is precisely the record of such evolving hybridization or neurocosmopolitan journeying. Memoirs and films by autistics across the spectrum—from Temple Grandin to Donna Williams to Dawn Prince to John Elder Robinson to Sue Rubin to Amanda Baggs to Larry Bissonnette to Tito Mukhopadhyay—attest to what slowly but surely can be learned. Indeed, Williams’s two memoirs, Nobody, Nowhere and Somebody, Somewhere, nicely map the cognitive, political, and existential distance that these neurocosmopolites have traversed. But what are the different processing proclivities that end up being hybridized? Referring, in her book Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct, to autistics and neurotypicals respectively, Williams remarks, “At every level, the sensing creature is different from the interpretive one.”10 The latter “filter[s]‌out information by tuning in only to what it considers self-significant”; the former “tunes in to pattern, having the feel of this wash over. . ., mapping it out without the discrimination of interpretation.”11 While all of us begin with “sensory knowing,”12 neurotypicals, for instance, very quickly learn to

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Ralph James Savarese    395 privilege human speech over all other sounds in the environment and, in the process, to turn these sounds into signifiers. “The ability to attend selectively to meaningful stimuli while ignoring irrelevant ones is essential to ‘normal’ cognitive functioning,”13 writes Olga Bogdashina. The result, however, is that neurotypicals miss much of the actual world—both with respect to what they attend to and how they attend to it.14 In contrast, autistics generally do not attend selectively to human stimuli; nor do they automatically impose a linguistic frame.15 Hence, they perceive much more of the world and in a much more direct fashion. Because irreducible particularity does not lend itself to abstraction and because “most words do not relate in any direct way to sensory experiences,”16 autistics, too, pay a high price for their particular processing: conceptual and linguistic acquisition are often thwarted or delayed. Put simply, experience does not congeal into categories. And yet, as I’ve noted, for many autistics the “switch from sensing to interpretation”17 does indeed occur, and it may in part explain the confusing picture of literary capability that has emerged. While the autobiographical literature often laments the switch—the hold of the sensory, according to Williams, was “completely compelling and addictive. . . ; by comparison the call of. . . interpretation seemed pale, weak insignificant, foreign, and of little reward”18 —it testifies to the possibility of doing both. Crucially, Williams believes that neurotypicals can relearn sensing and, in so doing, serve, like their autistic counterparts, as neuroambassadors: Those who live primarily by the system of interpretation live, effectively, in the same physical world as those who are primarily sensory beings. . .. However, they move in different sensory-perceptual and social worlds or “cultures.” Just as each can be “bilingual” in terms of “language,” each could be “multicultural,” able to move between culture-worlds as needed and able to interpret for those more proficient in one system than the other.19

The poet is just such a “bilingual” and “multicultural” ambassador, presenting an arena in which the two orientations to experience play an essential role. In poetry, of course, language behaves less like a dutiful mule than a prancing show horse:  something to behold as much as to unpack (or decode). The different processing proclivities not only complement, but also bidirectionally hybridize, one another. “Words are form[ed]. . . through the senses,”20 as Michel Serres might say, and they are experienced by the reader or listener in this manner, too. If, according to Williams, the sensory is “the art in life,”21 then poetry may constitute an ideal meeting place for autistics and neurotypicals. What is a poem, after all, but patterned sound whose embodied pleasures exceed that sound’s symbolic or representative function? In what follows I explore the neurocosmopolitan character of poetry, focusing in particular on how the art form purposefully calls attention to the sensuous materiality of its signifiers. Citing research in audiology, I show that whereas autistics excel at processing the perceptual aspects of speech sounds, neurotypicals excel at processing the semantic ones. While scientists interpret the former exclusively in a negative light—as a sign of underconnectivity in autistic brains—I emphasize its poetic value. In fact, I tie this

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396    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry perceptual talent to attentional differences in autism generally and to patterning pleasures specifically: each reflects a kind of attunement that is crucial for the typical infant’s development but that is relegated to a secondary role as the infant matures. Poetry recuperates this earlier form of attunement, I argue; indeed, it seems to project the intermingled fruition of two developmental trajectories, the autistic and the neurotypical. Elaborating on Reuven Tsur’s notion of “precategorical sensory information”22 and his belief that poetry mounts a continuous rebellion against the rigid differentiation and abstraction of language, I then look at the phenomenon of synesthesia. Synesthesia especially reveals a perceptual relationship to experience: by refusing to behave categorically, the senses do not operate in a strict utilitarian manner. Noting how synesthesia can exacerbate the difficulty of attending to language semantically and make autistics appear incompetent, I take up the issue of empathy. I distinguish between emotional, cognitive, and motor empathy, citing research that reveals autistic capacity in the first and relative incapacity in the second two. Emotional empathy, which neuroscientists tend to denigrate as lower-order processing, functions in autism the way that Tsur’s precategorical sensory information functions in a poem: it has not been fully tamed by meaning—in this case, by the deliberate delineation of empathetic roles or by its cognitive translation into words and actions. Poetry seeks to preserve some portion of this unbounded and contagious feeling. Here, too, a kind of neurocosmopolitanism rapprochement is possible. Before discussing any of these issues, however, I examine the preference for concrete diction in poetry. I cite studies in which literate autistics rely disproportionately on posterior regions of the brain and the right hemisphere when performing higher-order tasks that do not typically demand them—in this regard they resemble illiterate nonautistics and, I conjecture, poets. Using Julie Kane’s work on the relationship between cerebral lateralization and poetic language23 and more recent work showing that not only concrete nouns and adjectives but also metaphors activate sensory cortices, I suggest that poetry can be understood as a paradoxical language of illiteracy, even a paradoxical language of autism. As many scholars have pointed out, poetry spans a good deal of our recent evolutionary history, including the long period of orality; literate autistics allow us to see the prominent role of the sensing body in that history. I will use the work of Tito Mukhopadhyay to make my points. Arguably the world’s most well-known nonspeaking autist, Mukhopadhyay has appeared on a range of national news programs, including 60 Minutes, to challenge stereotypes about the “severely autistic,” and he has published four books, the first at age eleven.24 Despite his talent, Mukhopadhyay has never been allowed in a regular school.25 (He once responded to an interviewer’s question about the essential attributes of an ideal learning environment by typing, “My school is the doubt in your eyes.”)26 Instead, his mother taught him at home—both literature and science, disciplines in which he has become quite proficient. Six years ago, I began, at his request, to Skype him into my classes at Grinnell College and to conduct private tutorials with him. We spent last year reading and discussing Moby-Dick by Skype, two chapters a week over the course of seventeen months. Ishmael,

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Ralph James Savarese    397 of course, missed out on an education, and at one point in the novel he quips, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”27 The image of Ishmael and Queequeg in bed together—Melville describes them as a “cosy, loving pair”—can serve as a figure for neurocosmopolitan possibility. Just as Ishmael must question received wisdom about cannibals,28 so we must question received wisdom about autistics. Such intimate cooperation lies at the heart of my conception of neurocosmopolitanism, and it is sorely needed in the many fields conducting autism research. Anyone interested in discoursing on the disorder would do well to follow the example of Laurent Mottron. Honoring the old disability rights adage “Nothing about us without us,” he has included autistics on his research team at the University of Montreal. One autist, Michelle Dawson, served as the lead author for a study that radically revised rates of intellectual disability in autism.29 Mottron became identified with the neurodiversity movement by insisting that autistics were “just of another kind.”30 The lens of pathology, he concluded, made it very difficult to see autistic ability. In these pages, I adopt a similar perspective, presenting the poetic fruits of working with and alongside Mukhopadhyay.

2.  A Paradoxical Language of Illiteracy It would be a mistake to juxtapose the semantic and nonsemantic elements of poetry too starkly. All language is abstract to one degree or another, yet concrete words retain their connection to the sensing body. As the authors of a 2011 study put it, “Neuroimaging data support a greater involvement of sensory (e.g. visual) areas in concrete word processing. . . and a more focal activation of perisylvian ‘language’ areas for function words as well as abstract nouns.”31 Poetry, of course, purposefully favors concrete diction so as to evoke, and not merely describe, experience. What Serres calls “trembl[ing] within the flesh of language”32 and what the study terms “a greater involvement of sensory areas” are partly the effect and the registration of poetry’s customary diction. Even as autistics make the switch from sensing to interpretation, one can see why they might be drawn to concrete, rather than abstract, words. A recent study found that processing metaphors also requires “greater involvement of sensory areas.”33 In the study, sentences containing textual metaphors—“I had a rough day”—activated the parietal operculum, a region responsible for sensing texture, whereas literal sentences of the same meaning—“I had a bad day”—did not. In an interview, one of the authors appealed to Aristotle to explain his team’s results: “It’s an old idea. . . that we understand complex things, abstract concepts, by reference to simpler things, concrete concepts.”34 In fact, the study purports to confirm a central premise of conceptual metaphor theory: “that knowledge is structured around metaphorical mappings derived from physical experience.”35

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398    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry Significantly, Bogdashina understands the recourse to figurative language in autism as a difficulty “translat[ing] abstract ideas into mental images.”36 Autistics, she says, “have to employ the vocabulary available to them”37—concrete, sense-based words. As a result, “they may develop a highly poetic language, full of beautiful metaphors and similes.”38 If, as Julian Jaynes has written, “language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even. . . created the abstract on the bases of metaphors,”39 then autistics reflect how knowledge is perpetually born out of the sensing body and neurotypicals, how it is perpetually freed from it.40 Temple Grandin reminds us, however, that, for many autistics, language is almost an afterthought. As the title of her second memoir makes clear, she thinks in pictures, which only then does she labor to translate into words. In contrast, neurotypicals, she believes, are “abstractified in their sensory perception as well as their thoughts.”41 We long ago lost the ability to engage directly with the world because we reduce what we perceive to a set of general linguistic categories. “Animals and autistic humans don’t see their idea of things,” Grandin stresses. “They see the actual things themselves.”42 Although Grandin overstates the predicament of neurotypical perception—and, by implication, language—she usefully points to the preservation of the visual in poetry. In her remarks, Grandin almost sounds like William Carlos Williams in “Paterson”: “Say it, no ideas but in things.” For Williams, ideas must reside in concrete particulars. The poet must palpably evoke “things themselves”—“a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens”—while nonetheless allowing the representative or conceptual aspect of language to do its work. A study from 2006 appears to support at least one aspect of Grandin’s claim: that autistics remain obdurately committed to sensory knowing.43 Comparing how autistics and neurotypicals process high- and low-imagery sentences, the study found that the former activated parietal and occipital brain regions for both kinds of sentences, whereas the latter did so only for the high-imagery ones. Autistics, in other words, relied on visuospatial processing for “sentences that did not refer to spatial objects or relations.”44 The study from 2006 is believed to corroborate a study from 2005, which found that autistics possess a “non-verbal, visually oriented processing style”45 and, even after literacy, remember printed letters as if they were shapes and not the meaningful signs that literate neurotypicals automatically take them to be.46 Put simply, there is too much seeing in autistic reading, just as, I will soon show, there is too much hearing in autistic listening to speech. The study from 2005 speaks of autistics as engaging in “lower level visuospatial feature analysis,”47 and it cites the attachment to such analysis as confirmation of a 2004 study’s claim of underconnectivity in autistic brains,48 something the 2006 study then reconfirmed by showing that autistics generally do not rely on frontal regions when faced with linguistic abstraction. Even with the image-rich examples, autistics failed to fully resemble neurotypicals because their thinking did not integrate frontal and parietal regions. And yet, significantly, there was no difference between the two groups in either error rate or reaction time. The 2005 study contends that autistic cognition is “shifted toward the right hemisphere as well as toward the posterior part of the brain.”49

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Ralph James Savarese    399 Neurotypical cognition—in particular, higher level working memory and language—is “shifted” toward the left hemisphere and anterior part. A similar portrait of sensory knowing emerges in another population, one whose cognitive habits Julie Kane directly ties to poetry. A  study from 1999,50 comparing how literates and illiterates judge the magnitude of numbers within a familiar context, reported that the two groups performed equally well but that the former used the left hemisphere exclusively, while the latter “activated both hemispheres. . ., specifically the temporal. . . and the occipital lobes bilaterally.”51 Once again, a shift was detected toward the right hemisphere and posterior parts of the brain. According to the study’s authors, “95% of the illiterates reported having used visual images, which may explain the activation of the occipital lobe.”52 The illiterates, in other words, like the literate autistics in the low-imagery setting of the aforementioned 2006 study, thought in pictures. Although for decades scientists attributed the process of cerebral lateralization to a child’s acquisition of speech and customary maturation, we now know that “verbal working memory, verbal abstraction, long term semantic memory and calculation are [all] significantly affected by literacy.”53 Noting a “more bilateral representation among illiterates than literates not only for linguistic, but probably also for visuospatial abilities,”54 a literature review from 2010 concluded, “Apparently, literacy does not change the direction of laterality in the brain organization of cognition, but the degree of this lateralization.”55 Even as it championed the greater connectivity and hemispheric specialization associated with literacy, this same review cautioned against condescension: “It is not totally accurate to assume that people with low levels of education are somehow ‘deprived.’ It may be more accurate to assume that they have developed different types of learning, more procedural, pragmatic and sensory oriented.”56 In the aforementioned studies of autism, that caution was not heeded. None considered the potential downside of typical processing, even though enhanced visuospatial abilities have been tied to intelligence generally and to creativity in autistics.57 Grandin, after all, is famous for having revolutionized the cattle industry by advocating the replacement of rectilinear chutes with rounded ones, which calm the animals’ anxiety on the way to slaughter and which she, in a moment of insight, suddenly pictured in her head. That “visually oriented processing” is consistently referred to as “lower level” reveals an important bias. A  meta-analysis by Laurent Mottron’s team58 confirmed that autistics evince comparatively more activity in the temporal, occipital, and parietal regions and less activity in the frontal cortex than nonautistics, but it interpreted this tendency differently from most scientists:  “A stronger engagement of sensory processing mechanisms. . . may facilitate an atypically prominent role for perceptual mechanisms in supporting cognition.”59 Mottron’s model of “enhanced perceptual functioning” holds that autism “is more accurately described as an entirely different processing system, rather than as a collection of negative cascade effects resulting from one or many major impairments (excesses or deficits).”60 Tasks that for neurotypicals require vigorous engagement of the frontal cortex may instead be performed by disproportionately recruiting posterior parts of the brain. In short, there is more than one way to skin a higher order cognitive cat.

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400    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry According to the conventional view, we should forget that neurotypicals look more like autistics when processing high-imagery sentences because such language is less reflective of neurotypical capacity—indeed, such language is primitive because so concrete. Moreover, we should forget that autistics respond to language semantically as well as visuographically because the latter can impede quick and efficient decoding. (We might say that, for neurotypicals, literacy commandeers sight, making it abstract.) The extra of perception is considered solely an impediment to reading. While only concrete or visual poetry will elicit the processing of language as shapes in neurotypicals, the abundance of seeing that autistics regularly practice—to the point that graphic marks on the page become images or things—suggests the complete fulfillment of W. C. Williams’s dictum. Something like this fulfillment can be discerned in a passage from Mukhopadhyay’s first book, The Mind Tree. In it, a young Mukhopadhyay is being turned away from yet another school: “Here we go again,” I told myself and pushed aside the words by wiping the air. . . Why should boys like me need schools? After all how can we be taught, since we have lost our minds?. . . I watched the words toss in the air like bubbles of soap all around me. They arranged and rearranged themselves. . . and I laughed aloud. “See why I told you,” the teacher [said]. . . pointing towards me.. . . I walked out of the school, with a tail of words following me. Words made of letters, crawling like ants in a disciplined row.61

Mukhopadhyay not only concretizes disappointment, he also ironizes it. His extraordinary potential as a student, which the passage makes plain, goes unrecognized; comportment is sadly paramount in education. “Without writing,” Walter Ong once remarked, “words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds.”62 By giving them a visual presence, Mukhopadhyay both gestures at the education he was denied and reveals the extra of autistic perception. He also seems to reconcile, or at least to merge, a literate and illiterate sensibility. Kane proposes that we think of poetry in precisely this way: as a stubborn holdover from oral culture, a holdover now practiced and consumed in private written form. “To view inanimate objects, plants, and animals as endowed with conscious agency and will,” she explains, “to grasp abstract ideas in the form of concrete images which embody them, is to inhabit the mythic world of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Native Americans, and countless other cultures prior to the introduction of phonetic alphabetic print literacy.”63 Investigating the role of the nondominant right hemisphere in the production of poetic language, Kane links poets (who, she believes, partially inhibit the left hemisphere when they write), young children (who have not yet fully lateralized to the left), and preliterate peoples. It is a group to which I would add autistics, who also exhibit atypical lateralization.64 In fact, pushing Kane’s point a bit further, I would propose that we conceive of poetry as a paradoxical language of illiteracy or autism—one disproportionately engaging the sensing body.

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Ralph James Savarese    401 Kane shows that nearly all of the elements that comprise poetic discourse, but especially novel figures of speech, depend on significant right-hemispheric activity. According to her, “The degree of right-hemispheric involvement in language is what differentiates ‘poetic’ or ‘literary’ from ‘referential’ or ‘technical’ speech and texts.”65 The speech of young children becomes increasingly abstract with age, she notes: in one study “sixty-seven percent of the nouns in children’s speech were concrete, while only sixteen percent of the nouns in adult speech could be classified as such”;66 in another “preschool-aged children produce[d]‌many more spontaneous figures of speech, including metaphors, than children aged eight to ten.”67 Poetry seems to remember an earlier set of cognitive proclivities, swimming conspicuously against the current of literacy’s “abstractifying” effects. At one point in her essay, Kane reminds us that when the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria interviewed illiterate peasants in the 1930s, “they referred to geometrical shapes using concrete rather than abstract terms (plate or moon for circle, door or house for square, etc.)”; in contrast, “subjects with only a few years of schooling were able to produce abstract geometrical terms for the same shapes with ease.”68 In Autism and Sensing, Donna Williams uncannily echoes Luria’s observation about illiterate difficulties with mathematical words and proposes, in effect, a poetic approach to naming and knowledge: “The word ‘concave’ is used to describe the internal shape of a spherical object but it says nothing of the sensory experience.. . . If you asked me the name of something within the system of sensing, I’d ask you to ask it. . . through the interaction between it and your body.”69 As a boy, Mukhopadhyay struggled with the system of interpretation, often having to compensate for its disembodied character. When receiving from his mother a “science lesson on simple pendulums and the harmonic motions,”70 he would sit on a swing and “rock, to and fro. [He] would put words to every to and fro movement until they resounded in [his] ears like a poem. He would go home and write down those words.”71 The passage reveals what autistics seem to need, at least at the beginning of their interpretive journey, and what poetry, loosely understood, provides: a perceptual foundation for knowledge. In the absence of such a foundation, Mukhopadhyay had to set these abstractions to a kind of meter and become himself a simple pendulum. Ong has described how “primary oral culture. . . solve[d]‌. . . the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought”72: it gave that thought shape and motion. “Thought must come into being,” Ong writes, in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions.  .  .  . Protracted orally based thought, even when not in formal verse, tends to be highly rhythmic, for rhythm aids recall, even physiologically. Jousse. . . has shown the intimate linkage between rhythmic oral patterns, the breathing process, gesture, and the bilateral symmetry of the human body in ancient Aramaic and Hellenic targums, and thus also in ancient Hebrew.73

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402    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry With the shift to print culture, patterning simply yielded aesthetic pleasure, having lost its other functions. For the young Mukhopadhyay, however, the written word required such support. Even now, as an accomplished author, he regularly breaks into verse in his books of prose—a habit that Kane has identified as a key feature of the pastoral romance, “which developed in western Europe (Italy, then France) at a time when literature (and its audience) was transitioning from orality to literacy, from the early 16th to the early 17th century.”74 In a published interview with me, Mukhopadhyay explains the habit this way: “I use verse when I get bored of writing a dragging paragraph.. . . I get nagged by this boring state that the topic holds for me. Because of that, I seek a way out to recharge my senses. A verse makes me free. A verse recharges my senses.”75

3.  An Ambition to Please the Ear Let us now turn to the nonsemantic aspects of poetry—in particular, the kind of patterning to which autistics attend before they make the switch from sensing to interpretation and of which they remain quite fond. While such patterning may facilitate the retrieval of “articulated thought,” it is also a source of pleasure—and perception—in its own right. Indeed, the impulse to pattern far predates any of its linguistic manifestations. For every child, the world of language is preceded by the world of primary sensation. “ ‘Sensory knowing,’ ” writes Bogdashina, “starts with the recognition of patterns [that] are less accessible to conscious. . ., rational thought. Memories of very early experiences (before the appearance of verbal language) become stored and expressed as sensations rather than in highly elaborate form.”76 “Cognition,” Bogdashina continues, following L.W. Barsalou and Daniel Stern, “is inherently perceptual, sharing systems with perception at both the cognitive and neural levels. This type of attunement serves as the basis of amodal experiences in which incoming information is translated from one sensory modality into another while maintaining the underlying pattern.”77 Art, which Brian Boyd defines as “cognitive play with open-ended pattern,”78 harkens back to this earlier form of attunement. “Our compulsion, from infancy, to play with patterns in the domains of sound, sight, and social information,” Boyd contends, “gives rise to music, the visual arts, and fiction, from pretend play to Homeric or Hollywood epic.”79 While Boyd stresses the continuation of infant proclivities into adulthood, especially in the domain of art, autism and neurotypicality suggest different developmental trajectories: one generally away from patterned pleasure (and toward symbolic meaning), the other more deeply into it. For autistics whose primary means of engaging with the world is sensing, “words have no meanings,” Bogdashina reminds us. “They are just sound patterns and may serve as ‘auditory toys.’ ”80 As a young boy, Mukhopadhyay treated language in this way, reducing it to its material properties. When his mother recited poems, Mukhopadhyay would invent his own rhymes and acoustical patterns. Although he obviously learned how to use language symbolically, he still thinks of poetry as “an ambition to please the ear.”81

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Ralph James Savarese    403 “Designs can be visual,” he has remarked, “and designs can be formed in sound”—the pattern makes it “more than a thing to ignore.”82 Mukhopadhyay even compares repeatedly reciting his favorite poems to “self-stimulating action,”83 as if the musical properties of language could induce the kind of autistic absorption and pleasure that Amanda Baggs celebrates in her well-known YouTube video In My Language.84 Like Mukhopadhyay, Williams related to language as strictly “sensory material.”85 “[Words] didn’t have a use,” she explains. “They were just there. You could map their strings, their shifts and replay them.”86 They were like a chandelier: that “collective of interactive, seemingly playful sparks of color, the image of which would trigger the associated sense of the chink-chink sound that would be made if the smooth hard pieces from which the colors emanated were touched together.”87 Emerging into spoken language much later than other children, Williams suddenly had to give these things names and to recognize them not through her “database of [sensory] patterns”88 but through a system of arbitrary and largely abstract signifiers. Here, the failure to attend to “socially relevant stimuli” (language) becomes, the experts would tell us, a failure to attend to such stimuli appropriately. Semantic decoding loses out to pure perception, which, like the tendency to process written language as shapes, scientists view in negative terms: they simply cannot imagine how a perceptual relationship to speech sounds might be of value. Objecting to the politics of such a bias—including the unacknowledged cost of neurotypical attention generally—we may nevertheless make use of recent research in audiology to flesh out the special case of poetry. A study from 2008 confirmed that autistics exhibit “superior perceptual processing of speech relative to controls,”89 meaning that they actually hear speech sounds more precisely and robustly than neurotypicals, but inferior semantic processing, meaning that they do not interpret those sounds as well phonemically. The study also showed that for autistics “semantic-level processing is not the primary, or ‘default,’ speech-processing mode.”90 With respect to neurotypicals, the authors speculated that “increased attention to content information result[ed] in poorer perceptual than comprehension performance.”91 In other words, the instrumental use of language seems to depend on ignoring, at least to a degree, the sensuous materiality of the signifiers. Studies from 1997 and 2006 found that autistics possessed “enhanced discrimination skills” that made “extracti[ng]. . . the common, invariant features characterizing all exemplars of a given phoneme” difficult.92 In short, “overly focused auditory processing”93 produced too much acoustical difference. As in the domain of the visual, a penchant for detail inhibited generalization. Put simply, autistics are Derrideans of linguistic sound. As Reuven Tsur notes, in the ordinary mode of speech perception “only an abstract phonetic category (such as [a]‌[b] [i]) is perceived”94; what he calls “precategorical auditory information” is lost—in large part because phonemic conversion requires a reductive distortion of the sound wave. In poetry, however, “some of the rich precategorical auditory information may reach consciousness,” Tsur contends, “strongly affecting the emotional or poetic qualities of the speech sounds.”95 For Tsur, poetry’s patterning techniques preserve a portion of the precategorical auditory stream—what autistics hear

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404    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry naturally—even as they work to reshape it. The acoustically variant does not fall away in the interest of efficient decoding but, rather, becomes part of the elaborate, morphing, aural arrangement. In this way, each neurotype brings a particular set of processing strengths and weaknesses to poetry.96 Just as neurotypicals might labor to recover the perceptual, so autistics might labor to construct the semantic. In fact, some autistics, including my son, DJ, have suggested that hearing poetry read aloud helped to lure them into semantics.97 The acoustical patterning may have not only compelled their attention but also redirected their “enhanced discrimination skills,” allowing them to devote this energy, this auditory focus, to the project of making meaning, though meaning wedded to the musical grammar, the reverberating word strings, in which it was delivered. The rhyming sounds that Mukhopadhyay so loved as a boy, along with the rhythm of the verse that his mother regularly recited,98 may have prompted the emergence of phonemic generalizations. By overriding perceived acoustical difference, the exaggerated, musical arrangement of the words may have allowed these autistics to grasp what typical children immediately and effortlessly pick up. In sum, they may have found in poetry a language that is closer to what they hear, a language at once retaining the precategorical yet facilitating the categorical.99 The idea is less preposterous than it might seem. Experts have long advocated the use of nursery rhymes as a way of aiding the typical child’s transition from speech to reading. “Tucked inside ‘Hickory, dickory dock, a mouse ran up the clock’ and other rhymes,” Maryanne Wolf explains, “can be found a host of potential aids to sound awareness— alliteration, assonance, rhyme, repetition.”100 These things “teach the young ear that words can sound similar because they share a first or last sound.”101 With heightened sensitivity to phonemes, the child can more effectively ascertain phoneme-grapheme correspondence.102 Rhythm “may also enhance phoneme awareness and other precursors to reading development,”103 Wolfe contends. Such interventions, she notes, are now being used to treat reading disabilities like dyslexia, but might they also treat oral comprehension difficulties in autism? Whatever the case, it is telling that, for reading experts, sound awareness serves a strictly instrumental purpose: the easy conversion of graphemes into meaning. While children begin to read with their ears, they very quickly learn to rely on their eyes, and, as they mature, they generally abandon the medium that helped them, along with the embodied pleasure it afforded. As Ong once said of primary orality, “All you can do is walk away from it into literacy.”104 And yet, poetry can, at least to a degree, recuperate this earlier pleasure. As patterned signification bedecked with sound jewelry, poetry brings perception and semantics into closer relation, thereby undoing the strict either/or dilemma of linguistic attention. The point is never to master what a poem says but rather to feel its effects, which have been colored by emotion, as they “wash over.” Said another way, in poetry the symbolic function of language almost seems hitched to the palpable design. However much it might be a verbal art, poetry does not, in the words of Donna Williams,

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Ralph James Savarese    405 “interpret beyond the sensory.”105 In fact, it tries to give the reader a coordinated and fully holistic experience. As an example of such an experience, consider the following poem by Mukhopadhyay, which is entitled “Orange”: It was orange as always, when I heard the wind. Orange it is—the sound of the wind in spring. It made the branches swing. It colored every little thing. It smelled in orange—that sound of wind in spring. Orange it is—as always—the sudden wind. It kept getting wilder—its orange on everything.106

Notice the poem’s patterning: how it plays with expectation—from the order of the end words, which changes from stanza to stanza, to the order of the beginning words, which does not. The rhymes are both true and slant; words and phrases reappear, though often in different slots. The blend of alliteration, consonance, and assonance suggests an acoustical fabric, one that can almost be touched by the ear. Put simply, there is nothing rigid about the patterning: it evolves, as the wind evolves. Such a form seems to present itself as a linguistic translation of a nonlinguistic propensity:  “a type of attunement,” as we have already seen, “in which incoming information is translated from one sensory modality into another while preserving the underlying pattern.” To the infant, as Daniel Stern reminds us, perceptions “are not sights and sounds and touches and nameable objects, but rather shapes, intensities and temporal patterns.”107 If such a little being could write poetry, it would sound a lot like this poem: higher-order thinking as pure synesthetic relation. We might even say of Mukhopadhyay’s poem that it preserves both the autist’s and the neurotypical’s developmental trajectories. Although the diction is quite simple and although the poem foregrounds concrete sensory perception, we are unmistakably in the realm of meaning. And yet meaning, at least in part, seems beside the point.

4.  Long Apple Green and Yellow Strings There is much more to say about synesthesia. In Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue, Tsur contends that “poetry in general, and figurative language in particular, [seek]. . . to overcome the tyranny of highly differentiated linguistic categories.”108 Part of what delights us in poetry is precisely the plastic approach to both sound and sense. Synesthetic metaphors, Tsur believes, especially “convey. . . an impression of their undifferentiated pre-categorical sensory aspects.”109 They do so by blurring what language makes discrete. While the orange sound of the wind functions as a metaphor in his poem, Mukhopadhyay is himself a synesthete, as neuroimaging has confirmed.110

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406    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry Touch activates sight; hearing activates both sight and smell. Accordingly, when he listens to speech, yet another processing proclivity threatens to undermine semantic understanding. Consider the following passage in which he tries to prove his competence to a researcher who doubts that the “severely” autistic can master language. He has been asked to listen to something being read aloud by an aide, but he finds himself attending to the man’s voice, not to the meaning of his words: Claude read. . .. I saw the voice transform into long apple green and yellow strings, searching under the table for who knows what? Threads like raw silk forming from Claude’s voice. Claude read. I watched those strings vibrate with different amplitudes as Claude tried to impress the silent beholders and serious researchers of autism with the varying tones of a near-to-perfection performance. Claude read. I watched those strings with stresses and strains, reaching their own elastic limits and snapping every now and then, when his voice reached a certain pitch. I saw those snapped strings form knots like entangled silk, the color of apple green and yellow.111

When the neurologist asks, “So, what was he reading?” Mukhopadhyay responds with a sentence about “the beauty of the color green, when yellow sunshine melts its way through newly grown leaves.”112 The expert interprets his answer as a failure to comprehend what was read to him—not as a lucid and indeed artful description of the voice’s alternative registration. It is as if the precategorical aspects of spoken language had been translated into painting. Using visual images to convey the auditory stream emanating from Claude’s mouth,113 Mukhopadhyay provides a semantic—yet highly patterned—approximation of perceptual awareness. (Notice the anaphora—“Claude read,” “Claude read,” “Claude read”—and the varied yet resolved internal repetition—“I saw,” “I watched,” “I watched,” “I saw.”) If poetry is all about overcoming the tyranny of linguistic differentiation, then here such differentiation unravels or at least loosens considerably. As Mukhopadhyay points out in his book, he has had to teach himself not to respond to spoken language in this fashion, but when emotions run high, as in this scene where his very competence is at stake, ordinary comprehension proves exceedingly difficult. Now consider how Mukhopadhyay takes up this habit of synesthetic perception in a poem, cleverly deploying Ishmael’s failure to look for whales on the mast-head of the Pequod as a metaphor for his own failure to listen for meaning on the mast-head of human speech:114 I Kept But Sorry Guard There might have been shoals of them in the far horizon. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick His voice was a mere frequency of sound. Like any other voice, it carried a wave in sound.

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Ralph James Savarese    407 I saw the wave come bouncing around. There might have been words moving along that wave, Moving past me, sailing down that wave, Lingering a little before they escaped. The voice before me—its frequency was blue. Light as the light, the spreading of that blue. Lulled into listlessness, I was lulled into blue. He asked me questions—maybe one or two— as I manned the mast-head but failed to pursue those shoals of meaning in a far away blue.

Melville’s phrase—“keep[ing] sorry guard”—memorably expresses the cost of each approach to language, each form of whale hunt. That Mukhopadhyay can step back from his own processing proclivities and wittily contrast them with the proclivities of neurotypicals testifies to a kind of understanding that nonautistics generally lack. Indeed, it suggests a form of theory of mind that neither presumes a similar neurology nor considers difference a problem. That he can use strikingly original figures of speech to communicate his “apple green and yellow” orientation to speech sounds testifies to his gifts as a writer and to the great distance he has traveled as an atypical thinker. When I pointed out in an interview that his body seems to gift him metaphors115 and when I then asked about his ability to imagine or invent metaphors that have no clear organic basis, Mukhopadhyay replied, Some associations are natural and others are not. For example, when I write, “She walked away from the bus stop, and the sun descended behind the television tower, promising to be back some time. . .,” I do not really see anything naturally. . .. But when I write, “Mr. Blake’s voice felt like a squished tomato smell,” there is a natural process involved. . . because every time I have to hear Mr. Blake’s voice, I recognize it by the squished tomato smell. After that, I know there ought to be Mr. Blake somewhere around carrying his voice with him.116

The second example, it must be emphasized, is not entirely “natural”: classical autism’s facial recognition and proprioceptive challenges, which cause Mukhopadhyay to “fe[el] that his body [is] scattered and [that] it is difficult to collect it together,”117 have been given a witty inflection. While the physiological antecedent for many of Mukhopadhyay’s sentences can be identified, their literary effect is more complicated. Clearly he is doing something with the impressions that his body gives him, and clearly that something has been shaped by his encounter with neurotypical culture. The concept of neurocosmopolitanism crucially resists both reductive understandings of artistic production and static notions of disability. Oliver Sacks has belittled the extraordinary art of savants—some scientists have mistakenly labeled Mukhopadhyay a savant— because it does not, in his judgment, develop; rather, it arrives on the scene fully formed and then, immune to influence, reproduces itself automatically.118 This is simply not true with respect to the classical autistics I have tutored, and it may not be true of savants.

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408    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry Mukhopadhyay revises his work, and he has unmistakable perspective on his growth as an artist: “When I look back at my writings from 5 or 6 years ago, they look ridiculously immature. And when I will look at my writings of today 5 or 6 years from now, they will also look ridiculously immature. It’s just a thing to make better with practice.”119 We can see the fruits of such practice in another literary evocation of synesthesia. In this passage, Mukhopadhyay is listening to a news report about a coalmining disaster:  I see these stories, sometimes in vermillion or indigo, the richness depending upon the intensity of the stories. Sometimes they smell like vitriol and sometimes they smell like boiling starch in a pot of clay. And sometimes they have the essence of the twilight sky. As I feel my worries for the trapped coal miners, I can smell the boiling starch, frothing on the brim of the clay pot, then spilling out with the smell of burning rice. My worries grow as the voice of the newsreader continues to say that the miners are still trapped. I smell burning rice spread across the room as more starch spills out. . . . My body begins to itch as though tiny black tickle ants have been set free from a box. They can smell the burning rice from the spilling starch, and they rush around to find the source with a collective ant hunger. My worry now accumulates in and across my itching skin, as the voice of the newsreader comes from far away, like a blue floating balloon. I have no hold on it because it floats away, leaving me with itchy skin.120

Here, too, Mukhopadhyay keeps sorry guard of meaning, though in the context of trying to manage his concern for the miners, which traditional accounts of autism would deny. Alternative sensory processing completely overruns his ability to process what he hears, at least during the period of its registration. Later, of course, he is able to chronicle his response. Whatever aesthetic advantage autism might potentially confer, Mukhopadhyay must be able to evoke his experience in carefully controlled and imaginative language. Said another way, to be linguistically communicated, the experience itself requires sensory-rich figurative language. Hence, the invention of “black tickle ants [that] smell the burning rice. . . and rush around to find the source with a collective ant hunger.” It is as if he were crossing a cognitive creek stone by associative stone. A final analogy—the blue, floating balloon—effectively conveys the breakdown of ordinary consciousness, including the loss of receptive language skills. How to reconcile divergent insider and outsider views of autistic empathy? As R. J. R. Blair has demonstrated, empathy is “not a unitary system” but rather three “partially dissociable systems”: emotional, cognitive, and motor. Autistics have little difficulty with the first but struggle, on average, with the second two.121 That neuroscientists tend to denigrate emotional empathy as “lower-order processing” because other mammals such as rats experience it or as “contagion” because it can spread quickly, disrespecting boundaries and enveloping discrete organisms, should not discourage us from identifying it as an autistic strength.122 The autobiographical literature boasts innumerable accounts of autistics “fusing” with the pain of others, so completely do they experience it, or needing time to organize their thoughts and bodies in the face of such an emotional onslaught.123 In the passage about the coal miners, the precategorical is feeling itself—feeling that refuses to resolve itself into distinct empathetic roles or thoughts. After all, Mukhopadhyay synesthetically registers the miner’s predicament on his body. In

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Ralph James Savarese    409 contrast, cognitive empathy appears to require the purposeful diminishment of feeling through a kind of distancing effect. We might even say that, like nonsynesthetic sensory processing, it depends on the reassertion of traditional boundaries: sight/sound, empathetic agent/person in pain. Recently a new form of synesthesia was discovered called mirror-touch synesthesia, in which “individuals experience tactile sensations on their own body when simply observing touch to another body.”124 Interestingly, mirror-touch synesthetes showed “significantly higher levels of emotionally reactive empathy compared to controls. . . but did not differ in their levels of cognitive empathy.”125 While Mukhopadhyay doesn’t offer an account of mirror-touch synesthesia per se—he hears about the miners—perhaps in autism there are additional synesthetic pathways for registering the pain of others. In contrast to the actual experience of listening to the news report, which resulted in a meltdown, Mukhopadhyay’s writerly account of autistic empathy must strike a balance. As Robert Frost once remarked, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Of course, the words that are found must feel at once like the sturdiest of containers and like a liquid that could never be contained—this is the game that lyric writing plays. It is a tenably untenable blend of the perceptual and semantic, the emotional and the cognitive, the precategorical and the categorical. As such, it may constitute a linguistic meeting place for neurotypes that each privilege a different way of being in the world. Understood as a neurocosmopolitan medium, poetry moves us past the notion of deficiency, asking us to recognize and to extend the guard that we all do keep.

Notes 1. See, for example, Gabriella Rundblad and Dagmara Annaz, “The Atypical Development of Metaphor and Metonymy Comprehension in Children with Autism,” Autism 14.1 (2010). See also Francesca G. Happe, “Understanding Minds and Metaphors: Insights from the Study of Figurative Language in Autism,” Metaphor and Symbol 10.4 (1995). 2. See, for example, Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (New York: Other Press, 2007); “The Lobes of Autobiography: Poetry and Autism,” Stone Canoe 2 (2008); “More Than a Thing to Ignore: An Interview with Tito Mukhopadhyay,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30.1 (2010); “Toward a Postcolonial Neurology: Autism, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and a New Geo-poetics of the Body,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.3 (2010); “Gobs and Gobs of Metaphor: Dynamic Relation and a Classical Autist’s Typed Massage,” Inflexions 5 (2012); “From Neurodiversity to Neurocosmopolitanism: Beyond Mere Acceptance and Inclusion,” in Ethics and Neurodiversity, ed. C.  D. Herrera and Alexandra Perry, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2013); “The Critic as Neurocosmopolite: What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies,” Narrative 22.1 (2014); and “I Object:  Autism, Empathy, and the Trope of Personification,” in Rethinking Empathy through Literature, ed. Sue Kim and Meghan Marie Hammond (New York: Routledge, 2014). 3. I am not alone in questioning the prevailing view. For a comparison of autistic and nonautistic poetry, see Ilona Roth, “Imagination and the Awareness of Self in Autistic Spectrum

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410    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry Poets,” Autism and Representation (London: Routledge, 2008). “The picture of the autistic mind suggested by these data,” Roth concludes, “seems far from the rigid, repetitive, rule-bound thinking and lack of reflexivity of the autistic stereotype” (157). For evidence of autistic amenability to figurative language instruction, see Angela Persicke et  al., “Establishing Metaphorical Reasoning in Children with Autism,” Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 6 (2012). “Multiple exemplar training” not only increased metaphoric understanding but it also enabled “generalization to untrained metaphors” (913). 4. See Savarese, “Toward a Postcolonial Neurology.” 5. Savarese, “Toward a Postcolonial Neurology,” 276. 6. Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Knopf, 1995), 246. 7. For a discussion of the neurodiversity movement, see Emily Thornton Savarese and Ralph James Savarese, “The Superior Half of Speaking:  An Introduction,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30.1 (2010). 8. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New  York:  Columbia University Press), 67. For an extended treatment of this concept, see Savarese, “From Neurodiversity to Neurocosmopolitanism.” 9. Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 73. 10. Donna Williams, Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998), 107. 11. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 81. 12. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 68. 13. Olga Bogdashina, Autism and the Edges of the Known World (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2010), 30. 14. As Bogdashina explains, “With maturation, there is a strategy to suppress [“raw sensory information”]. The maturing mind becomes increasingly aware only of concepts to the exclusion of the details that comprise these concepts” (84). 15. A number of studies have shown that autistics do not privilege speech sounds over environmental sounds. See, for example, Patricia Kuhl et  al., “Links between Social and Linguistic Processing of Speech in Preschool Children with Autism,” Developmental Science 8.1 (2005). In this study, autistic preschoolers preferred computer generated nonspeech analog signals to “motherese” speech samples. The greater the preference for analog signals, the weaker the autistic children’s phonetic discrimination skills. 16. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 80. 17. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 29. 18. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 15. 19. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 117. 20. Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (New York: Continuum, 2009), 192. 21. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 17. 22. Reuven Tsur, “The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception Revisited:  What Our Ear Tells Our Mind,” lecture, 2010, http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/Poetic_Mode_Revisited.pdf; “Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics,” http://cogprints.org/735/1/rhymegestalt_2.html; Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue: Precategorical Information in Poetry (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012). 23. Julie Kane, “Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language,” PSYART (2007), http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/kane-poetry_as_right_hemispheric_language.

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Ralph James Savarese    411 24. On the back cover of The Mind Tree, Oliver Sacks exclaims, “Amazing, shocking too, for it has usually been assumed that deeply autistic people are scarcely capable of introspection or deep thought, let alone of poetic or metaphoric leaps of the imagination. . . . Tito gives the lie to all these assumptions, and forces us to reconsider the condition of the deeply autistic.” 25. Relatively few classical autistics enjoy an inclusive secondary education, and only a handful is currently enrolled in institutions of higher learning. 26. Douglas Biklen, Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 135. 27. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition, ed. John Bryant and Haskell S. Springer (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 114. 28. Ishmael famously observes, “What’s all this fuss I have been making about. . . —the man’s a human being just as I am” (40). 29. See Michelle Dawson et al., “The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence,” Psychological Science 18 (2007). 30. David Wolman, “The Truth about Autism:  Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know,” Wired Magazine 16.3, http://www.wired.com/print/medtech/health/ magazine/16-03/ff_autism. 31. Frida Martensson et al., “Modeling the Meaning of Words: Neural Correlates of Abstract and Concrete Noun Processing,” ACTA Neurobiologiae Experimentalis 71 (2011): 456. 32. Serres, The Five Senses, 128. 33. Simon Lacey et  al., “Metaphorically Feeling:  Comprehending Textural Metaphors Activates Somatosensory Cortex,” Brain and Language 120.3 (2012). 34. Steven Cherry, “This Is Your Brain on Metaphor,” IEEE Spectrum (2012), http://spectrum. ieee.org/podcast/biomedical/imaging/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphor. 35. Lacey et al., “Metaphorically Feeling,” 416. 36. Olga Bogdashina, Communication Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome: Do We Speak the Same Language? (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2004), 110. 37. Bogdashina, Communication Issues, 110. 38. Bogdashina, Communication Issues, 110. 39. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 51. 40. “Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use” (51), writes Jaynes. Whereas literate neurotypicals fill their pockets with such coins, autistics seem to crave freshly minted currency. 41. Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism To Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Mariner, 2006), 30. 42. Grandin and Johnson, Animals in Translation, 30. 43. Rajesh Kana et  al., “Sentence Comprehension in Autism:  Thinking in Pictures with Decreased Functional Connectivity,” Brain 129 (2006). An example of a high-imagery sentence, to which subjects were asked to respond “true” or “false”: “The number eight, when rotated 90 degrees, looks like a pair of glasses.” 44. Kana et al., “Sentence Comprehension in Autism,” 2488–89. 45. Hideya Koshino et al., “Functional Connectivity in an fMRI Working Memory Task in High-functioning Autism,” NeuroImage 24 (2005): 818–19. 46. The experiment asked subjects to remember individual letters presented to them on a screen. Whereas the control group “used the expected verbal strategy. . . to facilitate

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412    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry memory. . . the autism group processed the letter stimuli as nonverbal, visualgraphical codes” (Koshino et al., “Functional Connectivity,” 818). 47. Koshino et al., “Functional Connectivity,” 819. 48. See Marcel Just et  al., “Cortical Activation, Synchronization During Sentence Comprehension in High-Functioning Autism: Evidence of Underconnectivity,” Brain 127 (2004). 49. Koshino et al., “Functional Connectivity,” 819. 50. Gerard Deloche et  al., “A Calculation and Number Processing Battery for Clinical Application in Illiterates and Semi-literates,” Cortex 35 (1999). 51. Alfredo Ardila et al., “Illiteracy: The Neuropsychology of Cognition without Reading,” Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 25 (2010): 695. 52. Ardila et al., “Illiteracy,” 695. 53. Alexandra Reis et al., “A Sociodemographic and Neuropsychological Characterization of an Illiterate Population,” Applied Neuropsychology 10.4 (2003): 191. 54. Ardila et al., “Illiteracy,” 710. 55. Ardila et al., “Illiteracy,” 710. 56. Ardila et al., “Illiteracy,” 710. 57. For a discussion of visually supported autistic creativity without the presumption of pervasive deficits see Laurent Mottron et  al., “Enhanced Perception in Savant Syndrome:  Patterns, Structure and Creativity,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364.1522 (2009). 58. Fabienne Samson et al., “Enhanced Visual Functioning in Autism: An ALE Meta-analysis,” Human Brain Mapping 33.7 (2012). 59. Samson et al., “Enhanced Visual Functioning,” 1553. 60. Mottron et al., “Enhanced Perception,” 1385. 61. Tito Mukhopadhyay, The Mind Tree (New York: Arcade, 2003), 158–59. 62. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), 31. 63. Kane, “Poetry.” 64. Many studies support this view. See, for example, M. R. Herbert et al., “Brain Asymmetries in autism and Developmental Language Disorder: a Nested Whole-brain Analysis,” Brain 28 (2005): 213–26. 65. Kane, “Poetry.” 66. Kane, “Poetry.” 67. Kane, “Poetry.” 68. Kane, “Poetry.” 69. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 80. 70. Tito Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? (New York: Arcade, 2008), 185–86. 71. Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk, 186. 72. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 34. 73. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 34. 74. Julie Kane, personal correspondence. 75. Savarese, “More Than a Thing.” 76. Bogdashina, Edges of the Known World, 68. 77. Bogdashina, Edges of the Known World, 68. 78. Brian Boyd, “Verse: Universal? Adaptive? Aversive?” Evolutionary Review 2.1 (2011): 186.

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Ralph James Savarese    413 79. Boyd, “Verse,” 187. 80. Bogdashina, Edges of the Known World, 88. 81. Savarese, “More Than a Thing.” 82. Savarese, “More Than a Thing.” 83. Savarese, “More Than a Thing.” 84. Amanda Baggs, In My Language, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc. 85. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 86. 86. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 86. 87. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 86. 88. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 80. 89. Anna Jarvinen-Pasley et  al., “Enhanced Perceptual Processing of Speech in Autism,” Developmental Science 11.1 (2008): 109. 90. Jarvinen-Pasley et al., “Enhanced Perceptual Processing,” 117. 91. Jarvinen-Pasley et al., “Enhanced Perceptual Processing,” 117. 92. Tuulia Lepisto, “Cortical Processing of Speech and Non-speech Sounds in Autism and Asperger Syndrome,” dissertation. University of Helsinki, 2008, 40. 93. Jarvinen-Pasley et al., “Enhanced Perceptual Processing,” 117. 94. Reuven Tsur, “Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics,” http://cogprints.org/735/1/rhymegestalt_2. html, 95. Tsur, “Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics.” 96. Tsur writes of literature professors who “prefer to rely on the meanings rather than the sounds of poetry. The plain fact seems to be that even at this level. . . there are persons who do not seem to feel at ease with phonetic representation, and seek to fall back as frequently as possible on semantic coding” (“Poetic Mode,” 16). 97. Personal correspondence. 98. Mukhopadhyay listened to poetry, much of it metrical, constantly: “Mother read, and still recites, poetry most of the time as a background to my sound environment. It gives me a secured feeling because of the predictability formed by the pattern in the words” (Savarese, “More Than a Thing”). 99. My son reports, “For me, poetry is more natural than spoken language. Maybe because so many years were spent hearing spoken language without understanding it, trying to understand it only through its intonations and rhythms.” 100. Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid:  The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 99. 101. Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 99. 102. Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 175. 103. Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 100. 104. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 53. 105. Williams, Autism and Sensing, 14. 106. Tito Mukhopadhyay, I’m Not a Poet But I  Write Poetry (Bloomington:  Xlibris Corporation, 2012), 10. 107. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant:  A  View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (London: Karnac Books, 1985), 51. 108. Tsur, Playing by Ear, 227. 109. Tsur, Playing by Ear, 58. 110. Savarese, “More Than a Thing.” 111. Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk, 200–201.

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414    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry 112. Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk, 201. 113. Mukhopadhyay almost seems to produce a kind of spectrogram or picture of speech waveforms. Attending to elements of prosody (rhythm, stress, intonation, and voice quality) as though they were pure acoustical properties (variation in syllable length, loudness, pitch, and the frequencies of individual speech sounds), he behaves like a deeply poetic (and ironic) audiologist. 114. As Ishmael frankly admits, “I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving around in me, how could I . . . but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, ‘Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time’ ” (153). 115. For a discussion of how synesthesia may have given rise to metaphor in our species, see Vilayanur S.  Ramachandran and David Brang, Scholarpedia 3.6 (2008). The authors write, “Diffuse cross-wiring would confer a propensity to link seemingly unrelated concepts represented in far-flung brain areas. . . (‘Sharp cheese’ or ‘Juliet is the sun’),” “Hence, the higher incidence of synesthesia in artists, poets and novelists who all have the ability to link unrelated ideas.” 116. Savarese, “More Than a Thing.” 117. Mukhopadhyay, The Mind Tree, 28. 118. See Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Knopf, 1995), in particular the chapter called “Prodigies.” An aggressively pathological understanding of neurological difference—about the artist Stephen Wiltshire, Sacks writes, “He still seemed clearly retarded and defective” (229)—cannot discover the full potential of that difference. 119. Savarese, “More Than a Thing.” 120. Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk, 113–14. 121. R. J.R. Blair, “Responding to the Emotions of Others: Dissociating Forms of Empathy through the Study of Typical and Psychiatric Populations,” Consciousness and Cognition 14.4 (2005): 699. 122. See Adam Smith, “The Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism:  A  Theoretical Approach to Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Autistic Development,” Psychological Record 59 (2009). 123. See Emily Savarese, “What We Have to Tell You: A Roundtable with Self-Advocates from AutCom,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30.1, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1073/1239. 124. Michael Banissy, “Synesthesia, Mirror Neurons, and Mirror-Touch,” The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, ed. Julia Simner and Edward M.  Hubbard (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 584. 125. Bannisy, “Synesthesia,’ 596.

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416    What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry Martensson, Frida, M. Roll, P. Apt, and M. Horne. “Modeling the Meaning of Words: Neural Correlates of Abstract and Concrete Noun Processing.” ACTA Neurobiologiae Experimentalis 71 (2011): 455–78. Majmudar, Amit. “The Art That Bears Repeating.” Kenyon Review Blog. http://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/01/the-art-that-bears-repeating/. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick:  A  Longman Critical Edition. Ed. John Bryant and Haskell S. Springer. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Mottron, Laurent, M. Dawson, and I. Soulieres. “Enhanced Perception in Savant Syndrome:  Patterns, Structure and Creativity.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364.1522 (2009): 1385–91. Mukhopadhyay, Tito. How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? New York: Arcade, 2008. ———. I’m Not a Poet but I Write Poetry. Bloomington: Xlibris Corporation, 2012. ———. The Mind Tree. New York: Arcade, 2003. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982. Persicke, Angela, J. Tarbox, J. Ranick, and M. St. Clair. “Establishing Metaphorical Reasoning in Children with Autism.” Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 6 (2012): 913–20. Ramachandran, Vilayanur, and David Brang. Scholarpedia 3, no. 6 (2008). http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Synesthesia. Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse:  Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2001. Reis, Alexandra, M. Guerrreiro, and K. M.  Petersson. “A Sociodemographic and Neuropsychological Characterization of an Illiterate Population.” Applied Neuropsychology 10.4 (2003): 191–204. Roth, Ilona. “Imagination and the Awareness of Self in Autistic Spectrum Poets.” In Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen. London: Routledge, 2008: 145–65. Rundblad, Gabriella, and Dagmara Annaz. “The Atypical Development of Metaphor and Metonymy Comprehension in Children with Autism.” Autism 14.1 (2010): 29–46. Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Knopf, 1995. Samson, Fabienne, L. Mottron, I. Soulieres, and T. A. Zeffiro. “Enhanced Visual Functioning in Autism: An ALE Meta-analysis.” Human Brain Mapping 33.7 (2012): 1553–81. Savarese, Emily T. “What We Have to Tell You: A Roundtable with Self-Advocates.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30.1. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1073/1239. Savarese, Emily T., and Ralph J. Savarese. “The Superior Half of Speaking: An Introduction. Disability Studies Quarterly 30.1 (2010). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1062/1230. Savarese, Ralph J. “From Neurodiversity to Neurocosmopolitanism: Beyond Mere Acceptance and Inclusion.” In Ethics and Neurodiversity, ed. C. D.  Herrera and Alexandra Perry. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013: 191–205. ———. “Gobs and Gobs of Metaphor:  Dynamic Relation and a Classical Autist’s Typed Massage.” Inflexions 5 (2012). http://www.inflexions.org/n5_t_Savarese.pdf. ———. “I Object: Autism, Empathy, and the Trope of Personification.” In Rethinking Empathy through Literature, ed. Sue Kim and Meghan Marie Hammond. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2014. ———. “The Lobes of Autobiography: Poetry and Autism.” Stone Canoe 2 (2008): 61–78. ———. “More Than a Thing to Ignore:  An Interview with Tito Mukhopadhyay.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30.1 (2010). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1056/1235. ———. Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. New York: Other Press, 2007.

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Ralph James Savarese    417 ———. “Toward a Postcolonial Neurology:  Autism, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and a New Geo-poetics of the Body.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 4.3 (2010): 273–89. Savarese, Ralph J., and Lisa Zunshine. “The Critic as Neurocosmopolite:  What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies. Narrative 22.1 (2014): 17–44. Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. New York: Continuum, 2009. Smith, Adam. “The Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism:  A  Theoretical Approach to Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Autistic Development.” Psychological Record 59 (2009): 273–94. Stern, Daniel. The Interpersonal World of the Infant:  A  View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. London: Karnac Books, 1985. Tsur, Reuven. Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue: Precategorical Information in Poetry. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. ———. “The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception Revisited:  What Our Ear Tells Our Mind.” Lecture, 2010. http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/Poetic_Mode_Revisited.pdf. ———. “Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics.” http://cogprints.org/735/1/rhymegestalt_2.html. Williams, Donna. Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct. London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998. Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid:  The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Wolman, David. “The Truth about Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know.” Wired Magazine 16.3. http://www.wired.com/print/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ ff_autism.

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Moral Emotions

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Chapter 20

On the Repul si v e Ra pi st and the Di ffe re nc e bet ween Mora l i t y i n F iction and Re a l L i fe Ma rgrethe B ruun Vaage

Recently, I was interviewed about my research for a magazine at my university. Over a photograph of me read the headline “Murdering Favourites.” I explore the spectator’s sympathy for morally transgressive main characters, or antiheroes, in recent television series, such as mobster Tony Soprano in The Sopranos (1999–2007), drug dealer D’Angelo Barksdale in The Wire (2002–2008), and serial killer Dexter in the series of the same name (2006–2013). The interview is humorous, playing with the popularity of the characters I write about. Can you imagine a lighthearted interview with me under the headline “Raping Favourites”? I think such a headline would be perceived as repulsive. The aforementioned television series challenge us as spectators morally in many ways. Nevertheless, rape marks one moral limit we seem unwilling to cross. In relation to fiction, we seem to accept that the main character is a murderer—but not a rapist. Focusing on the attitude of moral disgust towards the rapist, I suggest there is an asymmetry between fiction and real life in this issue. Rape is typically used to mark a character as clearly villainous in fiction—and more villainous than a murderer—while legally, in real life, rape is not in the same way clearly marked as being worse than murder. In Norway, for example, murder is typically punished more severely than rape is. I suggest that the explanation for this asymmetry between fiction and real-life morality is that we rely more heavily on moral emotions when engaging in fiction, and that rape is emotionally disturbing in a way that murder need not be. Our attitude towards the rapist as repulsive becomes more evident when we engage in fiction. This points to a difference between the morality activated by fiction and the morality activated by real-life events.

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422    On the Repulsive Rapist

Rape in The Wire The Wire is a celebrated television series, part police procedural and part contemporary gangster drama. In numerous interviews, creator David Simon emphasizes that The Wire’s portrayal of Baltimore city life is true. Part of the background for the show is found in Simon’s and cowriter Ed Burns’s nonfiction writing after spending a year with African American drug dealers and addicts in Baltimore, which was published as a book entitled The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997), later also made into the docudrama miniseries The Corner (2000), The Wire’s closest predecessor. However, in an interview, Jason Mittell warns that one ought to be aware that The Wire is a fictional narrative, and that choices have been taken concerning what to portray—and what not to portray. He points out that one telling example of an issue that The Wire only rarely and to a very limited degree touches upon is rape. When portraying crime-ridden environments—and when the goal is that the reader or spectator should understand and sympathize with the criminals—depiction of rape is especially problematic. Faced with a choice between verisimilitude and drama’s demand that the audience identify with the characters, the show's creators, Mittell believes, went with the latter. “It could be that with the specific types of dealers and users that Simon and Burns spent time with, rape was not really part of their culture. The other explanation, which I think is more probable, is that if you portrayed these people as rapists you would lose the ability to make them at all sympathetic and human,” says Mittell. Viewers are willing to sympathize with murderers, whether it’s Stringer Bell, Avon Barksdale, or Omar, because there’s a sense that they still have a certain code. Portraying them as rapists would make that much harder, Mittell argues. “Rape is a more taboo and emotionally volatile crime to portray on-screen than murder,” he says. “Imagine the show Dexter, except instead of being a serial killer, he was a serial rapist.”1

Mittell argues that taking scholarly research on similar communities into consideration, it is perhaps unlikely that rape is uncommon in this environment. For example, in an anthropological study of a crack-dealing community in New York’s “El Barrio,” Philippe Bourgois unwillingly and disappointedly testifies to the commonality of rape.2 It is worth quoting the anthropologist at length: Despite the almost three years that I had already spent on the street at the time of this particular conversation, I was unprepared to face this dimension of gendered brutality. I kept asking myself how it was possible that I had invested so much energy into taking these “psychopaths” seriously.. . . They had engulfed me in the common sense of street culture until their rape accounts forced me to draw the line. From an analytical and a humanistic perspective, it was too late for me to avoid the issue or to dismiss their sociopathology as aberrant. I had to face the prevalence and normalcy of rape in street culture and adolescent socialization. In any case [the two main informants] would not let me escape it, and over the next year, as if peeling off layers from an onion’s core, they gave dozens of accounts and versions of their direct

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    423 participation in sexual violence during their earliest adolescent years. Few people talk about rape—neither the perpetrators nor the victims. In fact, rape is so taboo that I was tempted to omit this discussion, fearing that readers would become too disgusted and angry with the crack dealers and deny them a human face.3

Again, Bourgois was reluctant to report about rape because he wants us as readers to understand the challenges these crack dealers face. He wants us to see things from the perpetrators’ point of view. But we do not willingly engage with all kinds of perpetrators. Then again, perhaps Simon’s informants did in fact not rape. In The Corner, the book-length journalistic reportage, rape is only on the agenda once. The daughter of one of the main informants, Miss Ella, was brutally raped and murdered by a man not from the neighborhood, a man just released from a sentence for sexual assault. Simon and Burns write: These were by no means crimes of the corner. You look at [the rapist] and you saw nothing but an ugly hunger behind hollow, empty eyes—that otherworldly stare to which [their corner regulars] could never pretend. At their worst, the corner regulars were petty and larcenous and tragic; [the rapist] was evil.4

It is thus made clear that rape is an evil crime, a world apart from the crimes committed by the corner regulars. Nonetheless, rape is not fully omitted in The Wire. I suggest that rape has a function in the construction of the spectator’s sympathy in this series. Let us take a brief detour into the history of depictions of rape in American prime-time series in order to explore this function. As Lisa M. Cuklanz argues in her study of the portrayal of rape in American television series from 1976 to 1990, rape is typically used to focus on what is considered acceptable (or, in her terminology, hegemonic) masculine behavior. Rape is most often portrayed in detective or cop drama in what she labels the “basic plot.” Here, a very violent stranger rape is typically used to contrast a thoroughly evil and sick rapist with the compassionate, understanding police detective, who is righteously angered and disgusted by the rape, and who often seeks revenge for the victim. She sums up the basic plot as follows: The victim is attacked by an unseen rapist who clamps a hand over her mouth, grabs her forcefully or throws her to the ground, and speaks lines filled with threats, sexist stereotypes, and outmoded ideas about women and sexuality.. . . The beginning of the attack often emphasizes the rapist’s intense depravity, which is condemned by the (male) protagonist and contrasted with his own actions, belief and character.. . . Rapists are depicted as identifiably outside the mainstream. . .. The detective’s sense of morality, and often his need for revenge on the criminal, thus culminate in a successful triumph of the “good guy,” which is often accomplished through violence against the rapist.5

As part of her critical feminist approach, Cucklanz points out that the individualistic explanations these series give for rape—the rapist as pathological and crazy—downplay how masculine gender role socialization in general may cause rape. Leaving aside this

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424    On the Repulsive Rapist critical feminist aspect of Cuklanz’s discussion, it is the polarizing function of rape that interests me here.6 Traditionally, we as spectators are either sided with the policemen or the gangsters (in the police procedural and gangster genre, respectively). But in The Wire, we are encouraged to sympathize with some drug dealers and murderers in the African American community, but not all, and, likewise, to loathe some of the police officials (the corrupted ones, for example), but root for others (the “good police”). However, probably for dramaturgical reasons, a “goodie-baddie” axis is still useful.7 There is a moral ambivalence and complexity in The Wire that is rarely seen in American television series, but even in these morally murky waters something is needed to separate the good from the bad. Rape is one narrative technique used to effect such a separation. Let us look more closely at the first instance of rape in The Wire to illustrate. D’Angelo Barksdale is born into a drug-dealing family, and his uncle Avon Barksdale is in control of the drug trade in the Western district. D’Angelo runs his own crew of dealers in what is known as “the Pit.” Nonetheless, D’Angelo is increasingly troubled by his way of life, and tells his girlfriend that sometimes it feels as if he cannot breathe. When a witness to a murder he committed (but was acquitted for) is killed, he asks his uncle whether violence is really necessary. When detectives Moreland and McNulty have him believe that the witness has left behind two children—now orphaned—D’Angelo weeps and shows signs of truly feeling guilty. D’Angelo is one of the criminals we are narratively aligned with, and we are given access to his doubt and guilty conscience. In this way, sympathy for D’Angelo is encouraged. D’Angelo is invited to a party with Barksdale “soldiers” Little Man and Wee-Bey, a party especially advertised as offering strippers from uncle Avon Barksdale’s strip club.8 It turns out that the party is also well supplied with cocaine, which the women present are offered in generous quantities. Wee-Bey carries a woman, Keisha, half unconscious, over to one of the bedrooms and throws her on the bed, despite her muffled complaint that she is not feeling well. There is a cut to another scene. When D’Angelo returns to the party after picking up more alcohol, the party is already over and all the girls are gone. Wee-Bey and Little Man are sitting on the sofa and watching TV when D’Angelo spots Keisha still lying naked in the bedroom. He asks Wee-Bey about her, who replies nonchalantly that he had indeed “Fucked her silly. What can I say?” D’Angelo walks over to her, and discovers that she is dead. He is shocked, and shouts over to Wee-Bey again. In a close-up shot of Wee-Bey, we see him turn his head half indifferently, half annoyed for being disturbed, to brush D’Angelo off. In the background of the shot, we see a horrified D’Angelo. In contrast to D’Angelo’s reaction of horror and repulsion, Wee-Bey is portrayed as cold blooded and remorseless. Although it could very well be said that D’Angelo did little to help the woman, when he saw Wee-Bey carry her into the bedroom, D’Angelo’s reaction gives him more human dignity than Wee-Bey has. It corroborates the sympathetic impression we have of D’Angelo. In parallel, the scene adds to an already antipathetic portrayal of Wee-Bey. The main point here is that it is Wee-Bey (and, as revealed later, several other men) who rapes Keisha and leaves her in the bedroom to die.

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    425 D’Angelo is shocked. Portrayal of rape in The Wire is uncommon, and only characters who are already portrayed as unsympathetic, or characters whom we as spectators are not specifically aligned with, commit rape. Even when a main, protagonistic character is a criminal, such as D’Angelo, he is not a rapist. Cuklanz’s study shows that traditionally, rapists are portrayed as villainous9—and this basic fact is preserved even in the complex moral structure in The Wire.

The Narrative Function of Rape Furthermore, this observation seems to be applicable to other recent television series, such as The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy (2008–present), The Shield (2002–2008), and Dexter.10 As a rule, the antiheroes in these series murder (to focus on the gravest moral transgression they have in common), but they do not rape. I suggest that rape has predominantly two narrative functions in these recent television series. First, rape marks some characters as antagonists. The raping characters are used as what we can call contrast characters—unsympathetic characters with the main function of making the antiheroes morally preferable.11 Second, rape is used as justification for vigilante revenge, and to make the spectator applaud such revenge. This pattern of rape-revenge is not very prominent in The Wire. If we turn to another recent television series, The Shield, however, this picture changes. The Shield is a vigilante narrative—the main plot is about the “Strike Team,” a group of police detectives in the most crime-ridden part of Los Angeles, fictional Farmington, who are allowed to do some pretty unconventional police work in order to hold at bay the rivaling gangs in the district, and the violence between them. The Strike Team leader, Vic Mackey, refrains from nothing to keep his power in the district, and his crimes include murder—even of fellow police officers. As the series’ seven seasons progress, the plot slowly spirals downwards as Vic and the Strike Team are entangled in their own web of crimes, and forced to face the consequences. As a narrative about the Strong Man taking the law into his own hands, what is most interesting for my purposes here is the commonality of rape. While there were only a few instances of rape in The Wire, there is a lot of rape in The Shield. Again, this resonates with Cuklanz’s study of older television series: The detective’s revenge for rape figures prominently in the basic plot portrayals of rape. Cuklanz writes that the extreme evil and brutality of rape also serve as a clear contrast to the detective’s behavior and legitimize his use of force. In most episodes rapists are shot to death, verbally condemned, or physically beaten by outraged detectives. Although such violence is not always condoned by other characters, it is presented as understandable and is common enough to be considered a basic element of hegemonic masculinity as constructed in these programs.12

The Shield seems to fit neatly into Cuklanz’s description of basic plot depictions of rape,13 perhaps deviating from it most prominently in the extreme vigilante nature of

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426    On the Repulsive Rapist the policeman. What is important for my discussion here is again the clearly polarizing effect (basic plot) rape has narratively. Vic Mackey’s methods are amoral and mostly self-serving, but every so often the TV series enhances sympathy with and acceptance of Mackey’s methods, and encourages the spectator to see them as warranted; when it comes to rape and sexual abuse of women and children especially, our intuitive and emotional reaction seems to be that (almost) anything goes. We sympathize with the devil when his opponent is a rapist. The two narrative functions of rape are also evident in the second season of Sons of Anarchy. Here, the main characters are, in their own words, “mechanics and motorcycle enthusiasts”—but they are in fact operating on the wrong side of the law, mostly making a living through trading with illegal weapons. Through rivalry with other motorcycle gangs, murder is also common. Among the main characters are the leader of Sons of Anarchy, Clarence Morrow, his wife Gemma Teller Morrow, and her son Jackson Teller. Gemma is a strong woman who is in no way blind to their criminal lifestyle, but embraces it, and who does not hesitate to use violence herself to remain in position. She is not altogether easy to like, as she is highly manipulative—and the whole motorcycle gang are a brutish lot. However, in line with theory presented earlier in this paper, in the second season a group of neo-Nazis are introduced to serve as contrast characters. The neo-Nazi group wants to squeeze the Sons of Anarchy out of business. They kidnap Gemma and three of them gang rape her.14 The rape is brutal and the portrayal of it is graphic. The narrative dwells on Gemma’s emotional reaction to the rape, and her difficulties in dealing with its aftermath. She refuses to tell her husband and her son what has happened. The Nazis intend to get to the Sons of Anarchy by destroying the matriarch— they rely on her telling her husband about the rape, hoping that it will stir him into to such a rage that he will want to retaliate immediately and walk right into the trap they have set for him. The function of rape again seems to be clear: The neo-Nazis come out as monstrous, clearly morally worse than the Sons of Anarchy. As spectators, we long to see them punished. Although the Sons of Anarchy are murderers, they are morally preferable to the neo-Nazis. The most obvious conclusion to draw is that rape is one of the crimes that we perceive as most unsympathetic, and that arouse our desire for revenge most easily. There is a much-discussed instance of rape in The Sopranos that supports this too—the rape of Dr. Melfi. Dr. Melfi is the antihero Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, and when she is brutally attacked and raped in a parking garage when leaving her office, the narrative arguably plays with our desire as spectators that she tells her patient Tony, the mobster boss, what has happened. The legal system is unable to deal with the perpetrator; although he is found and identified as the rapist, he is let go because some bureaucratic rule was not followed during his arrest. As Jessica Baldanzi points out in her analysis of the rape of Dr. Melfi, the complaints about the violence in The Sopranos in the press had never, up to that point, been as many as after the airing of the episode in which Dr. Melfi is raped.15 She speculates that this is because Dr. Melfi is not part of the Mafia—thus, she does not “deserve” what is coming her way, as the many other victims of violence, themselves violent mobsters, in the series arguably do. Perhaps the audience was also frustrated

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    427 because Dr. Melfi finally refuses to tell Tony about the rapist,16 and we as spectators do not get the revenge that we desired. In any case, rape is used narratively to ensure that the spectator desires revenge.

The Repulsive Rapist To sum up, depiction of rape is a powerful narrative strategy to evoke feelings of antipathy, and stir up desire for revenge. This is not to suggest that narratives cannot depict rape with the intention that spectators will enjoy it, and that spectators may indeed enjoy it—such narratives would be controversial, however, and in all likelihood be judged as obscene because they encourage enjoyment of something we find not just morally wrong, but repulsive.17 In the series I have discussed, it makes more sense to claim that rape is typically used to clearly mark some characters as all bad, and to make us dislike them so much that they can be dispersed with (sent to jail, or killed) and that we will enjoy their punishment—rather than primarily encouraging us to enjoy rape in a perverse manner. Commercial television typically tries to stay on the right side of controversy, and to ensure that most spectators can and will enjoy engaging and find the story pleasurably entertaining. For this reason, commercial products such as television series are especially useful if we wish to say something about what we as spectators are willing to imagine. Alternative film, on the other hand, may often seek to provoke its spectators, and will thus willingly and deliberately take us as spectators outside of our “comfort zone.”18 What is particularly interesting about the recent boom of television series with antiheroes after The Sopranos, then, is how they manage to keep their antiheroes sympathetic, to keep the series pleasurable and enjoyable—and not thoroughly disturbing. As suggested by the present analyses, we seem to draw the line at rape. The observation that rape in particular stirs up feelings of antipathy is supported in a study conducted by Arthur A. Raney. He investigated how different individual’s sense of moral judgment influences evaluation of, and enjoyment of, justice outcomes in crime drama. In so-called justice sequences in crime drama, justice is restored through punishment of a criminal who has caused an injustice. The crime-punishment dyad in the narrative, and the spectator’s reaction to such dyads, can be read as a statement about what is considered fair and appropriate retribution.19 Raney’s informants completed a survey intended to identify their attitudes towards social justice, specified as their attitudes toward vigilantism (how favorably the respondent evaluates retribution and punishment enacted by private citizens) and punitiveness (how severe the respondent thinks a punishment should be).20 Then they were shown an edited portion of a motion picture, Rob Roy.21 One group of respondents was shown the physical abuse of Rob Roy’s wife Mary, and the burning and destruction of their home and livestock (no-rape condition). The other group of respondents were in addition shown a 30-second rape sequence from the original motion picture (rape condition). For both groups, the

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428    On the Repulsive Rapist retribution scene where Rob Roy kills the villain is included. The respondents’ views on vigilantism and punishment predicted their enjoyment of the retribution in the no-rape condition—but not in the rape condition:  “All viewers thought that the act was deplorable, thus eliminating any variance on the deservedness factor even between participants with quite different social-justice beliefs,” Raney concludes.22 This empirical investigation does not compare attitudes towards rape and murder, but nonetheless shows that at least compared to physical abuse only, sexual abuse makes the spectator’s condemnation of the crime, and enjoyment of the retribution, near universal, independently of his or her attitudes toward punishment and vigilante action. A question-begging contrast is found between fiction and real life in this matter. Mittell describes rape as more taboo and emotionally volatile on screen than is murder. But as pointed out in the beginning of this chapter, if one takes real-life law in Western societies into consideration, murder is typically considered a graver crime than rape is—a murderer is typically punished harder than a rapist in our Western legal systems. I also assume that this reflects a real-world attitude; that we typically also perceive murder as worse than rape. In the fictional context, however, this seems to be reversed. We accept murder, but rape is crossing the line. Video games are another example that comes to mind: Shooting other characters in the game is quite common, and it would be strange to say that the players of these games do not enjoy this—but the few instances of rape in video games gave rise to massive player protests.23 Why are we willing to sympathize with murderers in a fictional context (e.g., Tony Soprano, D’Angelo Barksdale, or Jackson Teller), but not rapists, when in real life we punish murder more severely than rape? Why the asymmetry between fiction and real life? In order to propose an explanation, I will first suggest that rape is considered morally disgusting, while murder need not be.

Rape and Moral Disgust Building on a model known as the CAD hypothesis (originally proposed by anthropologist Richard Shweder), Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Prinz, and others have developed a theory about (real-life) moral disgust that may shed light on the narrative role of rape.24 According to this theory, morality builds on basic emotions that are cultivated and expanded to include trespassing of moral rules. Three basic emotions give rise to three different kinds of moral emotions, each to a different kind of moral trespass. The three basic emotions are contempt, anger, and disgust (CAD). Feelings of contempt point to virtues such as respect, duty, and hierarchy being violated in an ethics of community; feelings of anger arise when individual rights and autonomy are violated according to an ethics of autonomy; and finally, feelings of disgust are prompted when the perceived natural order is violated. I  follow Jesse Prinz here, as according to Shweder’s original theory, disgust belongs to an ethics of divinity, and arises when what is perceived as divine or pure is violated. Prinz suggests that “violations of divine

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    429 nature elicit disgust because they are violations against nature, not conversely. Such violations are first, and foremost, unnatural acts.”25 Feelings of moral disgust thus signal that something is perceived as an unnatural act—morally disgusting acts are violations against nature. It is this latter category I wish to look at here. The basic emotion of disgust, or core disgust, originates in food rejection, and protects us from bacteria and infections by making contaminated food repulsive. Spoiled food, feces, vomit, bodily fluids, and decaying bodies are commonly found disgusting. These researchers point out, however, that we do not restrict the label disgusting to these things, but can also say, for example, that we find incest disgusting. A more cultivated emotional response, labeled moral disgust, is derived from core disgust and includes violations of moral norms with only an associative link to core disgust. Jesse Prinz writes: Sexual mores are obvious candidates for moral disgust because sex is a carnal act that saliently involves the transfer of bodily fluids. Since these things can elicit disgust on their own, it is unsurprising that violations of sexual rules are regarded as disgusting. Moral disgust is also directed at mass murderers, perhaps because they are associated with mutilation and death, which are primitive elicitors of disgust.26

I propose the following. We find morally disgusting those moral trespasses where we find that the perpetrator behaves subhumanly, where we perceive the perpetrator’s acts to be unnatural and impure in some way, and where the moral trespass has an associative link to some of the things that elicit core disgust. Jonathan Haidt argues in a similar manner: We feel moral disgust when someone does something that seem “monstrous— lacking in some basic human sentiment.”27 We would commonly say of a rapist that he is “an animal.”28 Having sex against someone’s will is perceived as unnatural, as the natural way to have sex is consensual. Now, the bodily fluids that in themselves can be perceived as disgusting can explain why rape is found morally disgusting. Rape is not just a violation of someone’s autonomy, triggering anger, but is also perceived as an unnatural act. We find the rapist disgusting because he seems to enjoy, and perhaps also be sexually aroused by, the victim’s pain and humiliation. To the observer, there is something fundamentally sick and suspect about this. It is far from the way most normal adults experience sexual lust. This is echoed in what Bourgois writes about his unwillingness to report about his crack-dealing informants in New York: he is worried that portrayals of rape will make the reader “too disgusted and angry with the crack dealers and deny them a human face.”29 This is also mirrored in Cuklanz’s choice of words, when she writes that, in the basic rape plot, rape “is the result of sick, perverted, and even psychopathic individuals.”30 What about murder then? According to the criteria for moral disgust outlined above, a gory murder is surely morally disgusting because we find the flesh and blood of human bodies disgusting and the murder as subhuman and violating nature. This is in line with what Torben Grodal suggests in a similar analysis of crime fiction drawing on the CAD model.31 Grodal writes that mutilation of bodies is morally disgusting, but also points to the prominence of sex crimes in eliciting moral disgust. I propose that the degree of

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430    On the Repulsive Rapist moral disgust is determined by the degree of pleasure the perpetrator finds in tormenting his victim. We find it disgusting to take pleasure in evicting horror and pain. This could perhaps explain why even antiheroes do not rape, and why rape is used to clearly mark some characters as unsympathetic.32 When Tony Soprano kills a competing mobster, or an unruly subordinate, we do not find these acts as morally disgusting (unnatural, perverse, and sick) as we would if he had tracked innocent people down in order to enjoy slowly tormenting them. With some narrative stage setting, these murders can appear as legitimate, and they do not seem to trigger moral disgust to the same degree as rape does. If Tony Soprano had committed rape, I propose this would have been morally disgusting, and, for a commercial television series, crossing the line. An obvious counterargument at this point would be to point to the serial killer Dexter Morgan in the television series Dexter. Dexter surely enjoys his killings. Whenever Dexter has hunted down one of his carefully chosen victims, strapped him onto a table covered in plastic and woken him up from the tranquilized sleep Dexter has induced until he is ready to kill, his facial expression clearly signals the immense pleasure he finds in taking someone’s life. Furthermore, we as spectators are encouraged to sympathize with him as the series’ antihero.33 Nonetheless, a high degree of very careful stage setting is done to make spectators go along with this. Dexter works as a blood splatter analyst in the Miami police force, and he only kills other serial killers. Dexter is thus morally preferable to his victims. As Raney notes, spectators of crime drama seem to “expect (and perhaps even demand) a retribution that is greater than what is morally acceptable in reality.”34 Again, there seems to be a difference between our morality in relation to fiction and real life. In real life, we would probably not applaud taking the law into one’s own hands in this way, but in relation to fiction, as long as Dexter kills other serial killers, we seem to find it acceptable.35 Furthermore, the black humor in the series is important for us as spectators to accept its basic premise—sympathy with a serial killer. In every episode we hear Dexter commenting on himself in voice-over. Typically, he views himself with pitch-black humor, ironically pointing out his own monstrosity to the spectator, personalizing the murderer within him as “the dark passenger.” Humor is a well-known distancing technique. Another narrative technique used to encourage sympathy for Dexter is that we learn of his childhood trauma of seeing his mother being slaughtered in a veritable bloodbath. His stepfather Harry taught him to channel his fascination in death and killing (animals) to what Harry sees as the greater good, namely vigilante killings of serial killers. It is thus suggested that the dark passenger was planted in Dexter at a young age, and coached by the Code of Harry until adulthood. Dexter’s awareness of the monstrosity of this dark passenger is troubling for him, and almost seems like an aspect of his personality he is not fully responsible for. Dexter struggles with his dark side. This also adds to our sympathy for him. Finally, as Mittell rightfully points out in the interview quoted above, it is harder to imagine us accepting Dexter raping his victims. This could demonstrate that, when it comes to what is morally disgusting, rape is perhaps perceived as worse even than serial murderers. Dexter himself encounters a group of men who rape, torture, and kill

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    431 women in the series’ fifth season. Although these men are not only rapists, their torture rape, recorded by themselves, disgusts Dexter—and the series’ spectators probably with him. Struggling with his own dark passenger, he is reminded by these serial rapists of what monstrosity really is: “Despite having considered myself a monster for as long as I can remember, it still comes as a shock when I’m confronted with the depth of evil that exists in this world,” he reflects in voice-over.36 In conclusion, there is quite a lot of stage setting required to make us as spectators sympathize with a serial killer in Dexter, and in this context too, rape marks a limit. Another counterargument at this point could be that we do commonly find disgusting things in fiction thrilling and exciting. Think of the popularity of splatter films (the Norwegian Dead Snow is an enjoyable example with zombie Nazis),37 where the attraction is precisely the gore that ordinarily is a sure candidate for disgust. Why is it that splatter film is not found thoroughly unbearable? Again, the comical aspect seems important, as does the lack of realism in the genre: the liters of blood that squirt out of any open wound in a splatter film go well beyond naturalism. Kieran’s analysis of the way we might find obscene transgressions pleasurable may shed light on the splatter genre as well, and I will not go into details on the pleasure we might find in these kinds of moral transgressions here. Nevertheless, these cases of finding pleasure in core disgust or moral disgust in a comical and distancing context are not real counterexamples to the thesis about the role of moral disgust in more realistic series such as The Wire and The Sopranos.

On the Asymmetry between Fiction and Real Life Finally, we can now return to the asymmetry question. Why is there not sympathy for rapists in fiction, when we are encouraged to sympathize with murderers, and murder is considered a graver moral trespass in real life? The asymmetry between fiction and real life in this case suggests that the moral system activated by fiction may not be activated in the same way as in real life. I suggest that rape is perceived as a graver moral trespass than is murder in a fictional context because we evaluate trespasses in fictional contexts more solely based on moral emotions. In order to explain this idea, let us briefly survey the terrain of moral theory. In Western societies, our real-world laws build on reason-based moral evaluation. As Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir point out, the dominating moral theories in our Western societies (after the Enlightenment) have in common an emphasis on parsimony (ethics can be derived from a single rule), an insistence that moral decisions must be reasoned (by logic or calculation) rather than felt or intuited, and a focus on the abstract and universal, rather than the concrete and particular.38

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432    On the Repulsive Rapist This is true both of Kantian deontology and Millian consequentialism, to mention only briefly the two most important moral theories coming out of the Enlightenment. By defining morality as reasoning about abstract principles of right and wrong, however, the dominant moral philosophies of Western societies may define morality in such a way that it excludes other societies’ moral systems. Haidt and Kesebir label the emphasis on reason, impartiality, and universalism “the great narrowing” in moral theory, and argue for a new synthesis in moral psychology that builds on evolutionary psychology. Haidt suggests that cognitive mechanisms underlying our moral sense may have evolved hundreds of thousands years ago. Their purpose was to secure cooperation when we lived in small social groups (in stark contrast to the vastly larger communities in which many of us live now). We still find these mechanisms at work today, although expressed differently in different cultures. Haidt argues that in Western societies, we have narrowed the criteria by which we measure morality to merely two—harm and fairness—which is why we might fail to understand that people in other societies may see respect for hierarchy, or purity, for example, as moral criteria too.39 Similarly, authority and sanctity (which can be seen as indispensable for enforcing cooperation and thus inherently moral) are downplayed in the West. For simplicity, and in order to explain my argument, I will stick to the CAD  (contempt, anger, and disgust)  hypothesis, and not the more complex theory that Haidt develops later. Haidt and his colleagues wanted to investigate cultural differences in moral assessment, building on the CAD hypothesis. They presented to respondents in the United States and Brazil a series of harmless taboo violations, offensive stories intended to produce a flash of disgust although no humans are actually harmed. One of these stories reads as follows: A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.40

Is what the man does morally wrong? When investigating how the respondents reason about this case, Haidt and his colleagues found cultural differences. To take the two groups with the greatest difference, respondents high in socioeconomic resources in the United States would reason that as long as it does not harm anyone, is it not morally wrong. Respondents low in socioeconomic resources in Brazil, however, would say that it is indeed morally wrong, because it is repulsive. There was, for Haidt and his colleagues, a surprising class effect on the responses to the harmless taboo violation—educated, urban Brazilians were more similar to educated, urban Americans than to their rural, lower-class neighbors (and likewise in the United States). The respondents high in socioeconomic resources demonstrate the kind of reasoning typical for moral questions in the moral philosophies of Western societies: restricting a moral question to issues of harm. If it violates no one’s autonomy or individual rights, it is not a moral violation. The second group demonstrates a different view of what counts as a moral violation: Finding something disgusting, perceiving it as a violation of the natural order, makes it morally wrong. Restricting morality only to questions of harm and fairness may be an educated response, most typical perhaps for a specific group in Western societies.

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    433 The reason for bringing in Haidt’s research is that it suggests that morality can be varyingly dependent on emotions and intuitions, and need not only be based in reasoning about abstract principles. I suggest that even in our Western societies, where at least our laws have been made through deliberate reasoning about abstract principles, a more purely intuitive, emotion-based morality is sometimes activated. I propose that engagement in fiction is one such instance. The reason for this is, as Raney has explained elsewhere, that first and foremost, we seek out fiction for enjoyment—and that deliberate, rational moral evaluation is cognitively taxing.41 So, while enjoying ourselves with escapist narratives, we tend to keep deliberate reasoning at a minimum. Although a Westerner high in socioeconomic resources might not report eating a chicken carcass one has just masturbated with as morally wrong on reflection, while engaging with fiction, portraying a character as doing just that is probably an effective way of blocking sympathy for that character. It is hard to imagine any of the antiheroes in recent American television series masturbating with, and then eating, a dead chicken. Tony Soprano would not; neither would Dexter Morgan nor D’Angelo Barksdale. While we do not find it morally wrong on reflection, intuitively we too will probably feel there is something genuinely wrong with such a character, and this keeps feelings of sympathy towards or moral allegiance with such a character from arising. One matter is whether we see this as a moral violation while reasoning why; another is what we intuitively feel when we are not encouraged to reflect. Furthermore, Haidt’s research also suggests that there might be more to morality than merely rational evaluation of questions related to harm and fairness. While we are not encouraged to think of morality in terms of purity, for example, finding incest and rape disgusting does suggest that even in our Western moral psychological makeup, evaluations relating to purity and a perceived threat of the natural order give rise to feelings other than mere anger (as violations of a person’s autonomy triggers). While Haidt emphasizes how moral intuitions in Western societies are shaped socially (and, one might add, through education) to be restricted to questions of harm and fairness, I would argue that the research I referred to above on moral disgust supports the idea that when we react intuitively, other criteria for moral sense are activated too. Moral disgust is triggered when something is considered a violation of the natural order. In real life, we might feel we should be able to give fully rational arguments relating to harm and fairness to explain why a moral trespass is more or less grave. When we engage in fiction, however, I suggest we relieve ourselves of this perceived obligation, and rely much more intuitively on moral emotions. Feelings of disgust as morally relevant become more obvious when relating to fiction, because we do not feel that we must evaluate a fiction’s morality rationally and deliberately according to principles relating only to harm and fairness. Haidt argues for a position he calls social intuitionism. There are two routes to morality: One through rational and deliberate reasoning, and the other through emotional and intuitive processes. His main argument is that even in Western societies, our moral evaluation is much more dependent on emotions than we are willing to admit. We probably rely on the very same two-route morality both in reality and in relation to fiction,

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434    On the Repulsive Rapist and perhaps the main difference is that, in the real world, my morality will be more reason-based in the sense that I will more often pause and deliberately consider the consequences of actions I observe, for example, or the abstract principles involved, while in fiction I typically allow myself to bracket these deliberations and rely more heavily on moral emotions and intuitions. When rationally considering a moral violation solely in relation to the harm it causes, it makes sense that taking someone’s life is among the worst crimes one can commit. Emotionally speaking, however, I think rape is just as disturbing because in addition to the harm it causes the victim, it is morally disgusting (as already discussed), and this makes the rapist repulsive. The repulsion felt towards the rapist is evident in our engagement with fiction.

Concluding Remarks Rape has a polarizing function in fiction, separating the enjoyable transgressions of the antiheroes in recent American television series from the truly evil antagonists’ misdeeds. Rape serves such a vilifying function more prominently than does physical violence and even murder. The antiheroes may murder, but do not rape. This raises a series of questions that I have not addressed in this chapter. Is rape perceived as less acceptable than murder is all fictional narratives? Or only in some genres? In some epochs? Is it an attitude specific to Western culture, or are rapists perceived as repulsive cross-culturally? Furthermore, I have argued that the narrative function of rape in recent American television series shows that we rely heavily on moral emotions while engaging in fiction. Repulsion towards the rapist is probably something we feel in real life, too. I do not argue that our moral emotions in relation to fiction and in real life are different; rather, I argue that our moral emotions become more evident when we engage in fiction. If this is correct, one would expect our reliance on moral emotions and intuitions when engaging in fiction to become evident in other ways than through the asymmetry between the attitude towards rape and murder in relation to fiction and in real life. For example, why is it that we seem to prefer greater retribution and harder punishment in relation to fiction than what we would find acceptable in real life? Perhaps it is because, intuitively, we find watching a deserved punishment emotionally rewarding, probably more than most of us would be willing to admit in real life. In relation to real-life moral trespassers, we would likely overrule such pleasures—perceived as primitive perhaps— by rational evaluation, and think of the rule of being innocent until proven guilty, for example, or be concerned about a humane penal system. In relation to fiction, however, we typically do not rationalize in such a way, and enjoy Dexter’s murders of serial killers, for example—even if, in real life, we are opposed to capital punishment or vigilantism. Another basic question is why we like and sympathize with morally transgressive main characters, such as Dexter and Tony Soprano, in the first place, when most of us would find such characters reprehensible in real life?42 Future research may reveal how, if I am

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    435 right, our moral responses in relation to fiction are mostly intuitive and emotional, and shed more light on the moral psychology of fiction.

Acknowledgments This chapter was presented at the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies in London in June 2011, and at the Symposium on the Moral Psychology of Fiction in Trondheim in September 2012. I  thank everyone present on both occasions. Thanks also to Steffen Borge, Anne Gjelsvik, Dan Hassler-Forest, Jason Mittell, Francis X. Shen, Rikke Schubart, and the editor for comments on written drafts and discussions.

Notes 1. Drake Bennett, “This Will Be on the Midterm. You feel me? Why So Many Colleges Are Teaching The Wire.” Last modified March 24, 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2245788/. 2. Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect:  Selling Crack in El Barrio, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 3. Ibid., 207. 4. David Simon and Ed Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010), 565. 5. Lisa M.  Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time:  Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 6. 6. To point to only one of several important lines of critique in the feminist film-theoretical literature on rape that I will not explore further here, in American film and television little attention is given to rape victims or survivors of other ethnicities than Anglo-American. See, e.g., Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape:  Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2001), 154ff., and Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (London: Routledge, 2004), 91ff. In recent American television series, one exception is found in Treme, also created by Simon, where one of the main African American characters is raped in the second season and where the narrative does give access to the stress and trauma she experiences afterwards. 7. See Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2008), 147ff, and Murray Smith, Engaging Characters:  Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),187ff. 8. The Wire, season 1, episode 8. 9. Projansky, Watching Rape, emphasizes the versatility of rape in fiction film historically: However, her analysis seems also implicitly to confirm that despite variation in terms of who rapes, the rapist is indeed typically the villain. A study of rape in daytime soap opera in the mid-1960s and 1970s found much more ambivalent portrayals of rape, where the rapist is not always villainous; see Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Other counterexamples are also to be found in film history, for example in High Planes Drifter (1973). The question of historical and genre variations in the portrayal of rape is in need of more research.

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436    On the Repulsive Rapist 10. See also Dan Hassler-Forest’s analysis of The Walking Dead in “The Walking Dead: Quality Television, Transmedia Serialization, and Zombies,” in Serialization in Popular Culture, ed. Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (New York: Routledge, 2014). 11. Murray Smith proposes that making a character morally preferable, intrinsically in the fiction, is commonly sufficient to make us as spectators sympathize. See Murray Smith, Engaging Characters; “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and “Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?” in Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time, 20. 13. This is not to say that there are not deviating portrayals of rape in The Shield—for example, one of the lead male police officers is raped, and rape of male characters is rare on American prime-time television (again, see Cuklanz, Rape in Prime Time, 132–35). 14. Sons of Anarchy, season 2, episode 1. 15. Jessica Baldanzi, “Bloodlust for the Common Man: The Sopranos Confronts Its Volatile American Audience,” in Reading “The Sopranos”, ed. David Lavery (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 16. See also my analysis of this in Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Fictional Reliefs and Reality Checks,” Screen 54 (2013). 17. See Matthew Kieran, “On Obscenity: The Thrill and Repulsion of the Morally Prohibited,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, no. 1 (2002) for an analysis of obscenity along these lines. 18. See, e.g., Asbjørn Grønstad on the new extremism in European art film in “On the Unwatchable,” in The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, ed. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 19. Arthur A. Raney, “Moral Judgement as a Predictor of Enjoyment of Crime Drama,” Media Psychology 4, no. 4 (2002). 20. These definitions are from Arthur A. Raney and Jennings Bryant, “Moral Judgment and Crime Drama: An Integrated Theory of Enjoyment,” Journal of Communication 52, no. 2 (2002). 21. Rob Roy (1995). 22. Raney, “Moral Judgement,” 319. 23. See, e.g., Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 401. 24. Jonathan Haidt, Silvia Helena Koller, and Maria G. Dias, “Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 4 (1993); Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt. and Clark R.  McCauley, “Disgust,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993); Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada, and Jonathan Haidt, “The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes (Community, Autonomy, Divinity),” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 4 (1999); Richard A. Shweder, “In Defence of Moral Realism: Reply to Gabennesch,” Child Development 61 (1990); Jesse J. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 25. Prinz, Emotional Construction of Morals, 73. 26. Ibid., 71.

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    437 27. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 104. 28. See also Rozin et  al., “Disgust”, 584–85. In the current theoretical landscape, this view may increasingly seem dated, as animal morality is now hotly debated. For an overview of research on animal morality or pro-morality, see, e.g., Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 29. Burgeois, In Search of Respect, 207, my emphasis. 30. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time, 69, my emphasis. However, Cucklanz criticizes basic plot portrayal of rape for not depicting rape as connected to structural elements such as socialization and patriarchy. 31. Torben Grodal, “High on Crime Fiction and Detection” Projections 4, no. 2 (2010). 32. Without exploring the rapist as morally disgusting, Carl Plantinga also points out that disgust is often used in film to create antipathy towards and promote condemnation of antagonists. See Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 198ff. See also how feelings of disgust are elicited in relation to the rapist in Hitchcock’s Frenzy in Paul Elliott, Hitchcock and the Cinema of Sensations: Embodied Film Theory and Cinematic Reception (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 103ff. 33. For an empirical investigation of engagement with Dexter, see Ed Tan, Monique Timmers, Claire Segijn, and August Bartholomé, “Does Dexter Morally Entertain His Viewers?” (unpublished manuscript). 34. Raney, “Moral Judgement,” 320. 35. See also Vaage, “Fictional Relief,” where I propose that when engaged in a fiction, we allow ourselves not to consider consequences; e.g., we allow ourselves not to problematize what the consequences of a real-life vigilante like Dexter would be. 36. Dexter, season 5, episode 10. 37. Tommy Wirkola (2009). 38. Jonathan Haidt and Selim Kesebir, “Morality,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed., ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 798. 39. See Haidt, The Righteous Mind. 40. Haidt, Koller, and Dias, “Affect, Culture, and Morality,” 617. 41. Arthur A.  Raney, “The Role of Morality in Emotional Reactions to and Enjoyment of Media Entertainment,” Journal of Media Psychology 23, no. 1 (2011). 42. I explore one possible answer, namely how our engagement in fiction is shaped by partiality with those we know well, in “Blinded by Familiarity:  Partiality, Morality, and Engagement in Television Series,” in Cognitive Media Theory, ed. Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Works Cited Baldanzi, Jessica. “Bloodlust for the Common Man:  The Sopranos Confronts Its Volatile American Audience.” In Reading “The Sopranos”: TV Hit from HBO, edited by David Lavery, 79–89. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.

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438    On the Repulsive Rapist Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Bennett, Drake. “This Will Be on the Midterm. You Feel Me? Why So Many Colleges Are Teaching The Wire.” Last modified March 24, 2010. http://www.slate.com/id/2245788/. Bourgois, Philippe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Cuklanz, Lisa M. Rape on Prime Time:  Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Elliott, Paul. Hitchcock and the Cinema of Sensations: Embodied Film Theory and Cinematic Reception. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. Grodal, Torben. “High on Crime Fiction and Detection.” Projections 4, no. 2 (2010): 64–85. Grønstad, Asbjørn. “On the Unwatchable.” In The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, edited by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, 192–205. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Haidt, Jonathan, and Selin Kesebir. “Morality.” In Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed., edited by David T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey, 797–832. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. Haidt, Jonathan, Silvia Helena Koller, and Maria G. Dias. “Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 4 (1993): 613–28. Hassler-Forest, Dan. “The Walking Dead: Quality Television, Transmedia Serialization and Zombies.” In Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg, 91–105. New York: Routledge, 2014. Horeck, Tanya. Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film. London: Routledge, 2004. Kieran, Matthew. “On Obscenity:  The Thrill and Repulsion of the Morally Prohibited.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, no. 1 (2002): 31–55. Levine, Elana. Wallowing in Sex:  The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature:  The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. London: Allen Lane, 2011. Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers:  American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Prinz, Jesse J. The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape:  Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Raney, Arthur A. “Moral Judgement as a Predictor of Enjoyment of Crime Drama.” Media Psychology 4, no. 4 (2002): 305–22. Raney, Arthur A. “The Role of Morality in Emotional Reactions to and Enjoyment of Media Entertainment.” Journal of Media Psychology, 23, no. 1 (2011): 18–23. Raney, Arthur A., and Jennings Bryant. “Moral Judgment and Crime Drama: An Integrated Theory of Enjoyment.” Journal of Communication 52, no. 2 (2002): 402–15. Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark R.  McCauley. “Disgust.” In Handbook of Emotions, edited by Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland, 575–94. New York: Guilford Press, 1993.

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Margrethe Bruun Vaage    439 Rozin, Paul, Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada, and Jonathan Haidt. “The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes (Community, Autonomy, Divinity).” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 4 (1999): 574–86. Shweder, Richard A. “In Defence of Moral Realism: Reply to Gabennesch.” Child Development 61 (1990): 2060–67. Simon, David, and Ed Burns. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Smith, Murray. “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 217–38. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Smith, Murray. “Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?” In Ethics at the Cinema, edited by Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice, 66–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Tan, Ed, Monique Timmers, Claire Segijn, and August Bartholomé. “Does Dexter Morally Entertain His Viewers?” (unpublished manuscript). Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. “Blinded by Familiarity:  Partiality, Morality, and Engagement in Television Series.” In Cognitive Media Theory, edited by Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham, 268–284. New York: Routledge, 2014. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. “Fictional Reliefs and Reality Checks.” Screen, 54, no. 2 (2013): 218–37. Waal, Frans de. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

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Chapter 21

Empath i c S a di sm How Readers Get Implicated F ritz Bre ithaup t

A good book draws you in, makes you feel involved in the story, makes you care about the characters. It’s a sign of a successful story when the struggles of the characters affect you—but do readers always feel the same emotions as the characters they are reading about? Of course not. For one thing, readers often know more or less than characters. They see the danger lurking while the character is still perfectly happy, or they are in the dark about a character’s happy thoughts. Readers will react to the behavior of the character. For instance, when a character makes a morally suspect move, a reader may say: “Oh no, don’t do that!” and feel anger toward the character.1 Readers also may side with one particular character, making them less likely to share the emotions of another. These examples show that we are entering a complex field of possibilities when dealing with reader emotions and empathy.2 Some scholars may simply shrug and leave reader emotions outside of their investigation, but this is not a possibility for me. For me, narrative is not simply a textual phenomenon, but takes place in the mind of the reader. Hence, I need to face the question of how affective reader reactions come about. This chapter focuses on one specific aspect of the discrepancy between character emotion and reader emotion, namely the happiness that readers can derive from the suffering of characters (as well as real people). To be more precise, the chapter will examine cases where the positive emotions of the reader are derived from experiencing empathy with a suffering character. We will call this form of empathy “empathic sadism.” The examples listed above, however, would not usually fall into this category; although they may invoke sympathy for a character, that is, wishing the character well without necessarily understanding his or her emotions, they do not involve empathy.3 The premise of this chapter may thus sound paradoxical: because readers empathize with a character who is suffering, they can feel good themselves. Maybe it is a paradox, but it is one that can be explained, as evident in the following example. Families of

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Fritz Breithaupt   441 victims of violent crime in the United States often wish to witness the execution of the criminal. The satisfaction they feel watching the execution, even as it seems that they want to see and feel the pain of the perpetrator,4 could be regarded as a form of empathic sadism. It seems reasonable that “feeling the pain” of the offender helps them to feel the sweetness of revenge. We will consider later how these sweet feelings may also arise in cases where the suffering person deserves our support. On a general level, this chapter contends that the paradoxical emotions involved in empathic sadism are not rare for readers of literary texts, and are moreover a key motivation for reading many literary texts, including certain canonical ones. More specific to the context of narratology, the chapter argues for a differentiation between the implied reader and an implication of the reader in the process of reading. The implied reader is a location in the narratological model of the text: the set assumptions the text (or the author) makes about who will be reading it, and how readers will or should evaluate it. But what I am calling the implicated reader is stronger: a reader whose involvement in the text draws him or her into the moral constellation of the text, perhaps even making the reader somehow guilty for the suffering of a character. I begin by first classifying different phenomena of empathic sadism, before moving to literary works and considering two examples of late nineteenth-century fiction, namely La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas, alias Clarín (1884/85) and Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane (1896).

Empathic Sadism or Empathy for Empathy’s Sake In his influential essay “These Things Called Empathy:  Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” Daniel C.  Batson catalogs what various thinkers and various scholars have called empathy.5 Curiously, these definitions indicate that empathy is not always focused on the object of empathy, the empathizee, but rather on its subject, the empathizer. In fact, Batson notes that the original meaning of empathy, coined in English by Titchener in 1909 as the translation of Theodor Lipps’s German word Einfühlung, is an observer-/empathizer-focused process. Accordingly, he defines this form of empathy as “the process whereby a person imagines what it would be like to be some specific person or some inanimate object, such as a gnarled, dead tree on a windswept hillside.”6 Obviously the tree in this example has little to gain from the empathizer, even if it were not already dead. In fact, such exercises of the imagination could encourage aestheticists to cultivate gnarly trees growing in forbidding environments. Well, a tree is a tree, but most people nowadays would agree that empathy with other people is a key feature of humanity. Feeling like others (Batson, concept 3) and coming to an understanding of what they are feeling or thinking (Batson, concept 1) allows us to be truly social beings. Thus it seems that we have and use empathy for morally good reasons: We help a person drowning in a pool, we often share food (unlike most other

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442   Empathic Sadism primates), we are good at determining the needs of our young, and we can judge not simply what someone did, but with what intentions he or she acted. When we relate to the suffering of others (Batson concepts 7 and 8), we usually aim to eliminate that suffering. However, the case of the gnarly tree and self-focus inherent in many or all of these concepts may give us pause. When does the observer’s interest in the experience of empathy trump the well-being of the empathizee? When does empathy transform into a paradoxical mode of self-focus? Put differently, when does empathy begin to serve only the empathizer, becoming something like empathy for empathy’s sake? In what follows, we will examine the self-focused forms of empathy that risk causing its object misery, or perhaps even desire the suffering of the other. In particular, we will distinguish different phenomena called empathy that involve the suffering of the other. Our emphasis will be on forms related to fiction, but not exclusively so.

Self-Focused Vicarious Empathy One of the common explanations of why we enjoy fiction is that it expands the horizon of our experiences. While we probably do not have the experience of being an explorer in Africa in the eighteenth century, enduring the hardships of the Napoleonic wars, being a bullied and abused servant in the Victorian age, or rescuing ourselves from an army of zombies, we may still enjoy imagining how it would feel to be in these situations. We are “going for a ride,” as Blakey Vermeule characterized this reading experience.7 In this process, we share and yet do not share the feelings of the characters. We see and recognize the suffering and dangers of the characters, but we are still able to enjoy them because they involve excitement, change, and resolution. Here, the well-being of the other (the character) may be something we wish for, but only in the long run. Before the level of long-term happiness is reached, we need the character to go through these hardships like the gnarly tree. Oh, did it die? What a pity! It is obvious that this concept is widely applicable to the reading of fiction and might in fact be most common there. Readers participate vicariously in characters and their situations, without having to fear that the fictional characters will turn around and ask them for money.8 Participation is especially enhanced when there are changes, developments, and solutions expected in temporal sequences.

Predictive, Self-Empowering Empathy or Sadistic Empathy Instead of simply going along for a ride with another person (or character), we might also setting the other person up for that very ride, manipulating their situation in order to enjoy our own correct predictions of his or her emotions and states. These manipulations make it easier for the observer to anticipate the affective and other cognitive results in the other. Sadistic or predictive empathy is a manipulation of another that allows one

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Fritz Breithaupt   443 to predict or anticipate the other’s feelings in order to more easily simulate or understand him or her. Such empathy is pleasurable regardless of whether or not we “care” for the other and wish him or her well. Sadistic or predictive empathy ranges from knowing that the other will have an emotional reaction to a precise estimation or simulation to predicting exactly what he or she will feel. The emphasis here is on what one could call a self-affirming effect. Three real-life practices in particular come to mind: Retributive pain empathy. When punishing someone else, we desire the pain of the other. To be sure, the punisher’s vicarious feeling of the other’s pain is not necessarily part of all punishments. We may understand punishing a child as an act of education, for instance. In many cases, however, the punisher may want to feel the other’s pain as a way of getting back at him or her. Even our seemingly modern penal code of law seems to acknowledge the desire to get even, as evident in the fact that family members who wish to watch the perpetrators be killed are often allowed to do so. Knowing that someone finds “justice” behind bars, on the gallows, or by being singled out in court may still carry the emotional knowledge of the criminal’s pain, and even simulate it in some instances. The satisfaction of seeing justice served may result from a transformation of other-focused empathy into self-gratification.9 Sadism. Many human acts can be labeled sadistic, even when leaving the question of psychopathy out of this discussion. Sadists enjoy inflicting pain on others or watching the pain of others. Now, where does this enjoyment come from? Even if a sadist’s attitude is to say: “Your pain does not move me,” he or she will still seem to have desired this very pain, perhaps simply to assert his superiority over the other. Or perhaps this sense of superiority depends on feeling that very pain and thus being able to say with certainty: “I can cause these feelings in you!” Manipulative predictive empathy. Sadism, as we just characterized it, is certainly not an attractive form of empathy. Yet I would like to suggest that a small dose of empathetic sadism is part of everyday behavior. There are multiple forms of negative behavior that may be undertaken for the sake of enabling empathy. When one criticizes someone else, it can be to correct bad behavior, or to get even with this person. It can also be to make the other feel bad in a predictable way, which allows the criticizer to “tune in” to his or her emotions. In general, many manipulations can bring about and intensify those situations and scenarios that allow one to predict, know, and feel someone else’s emotions. Examples of acts that facilitate the prediction of another person’s feelings include embarrassing, shaming, teasing, disappointing, testing, moralizing, mistreatment of subordinates in the workplace, sexual domination, playing devil’s advocate in moral situations, and so on, often in quite subtle or ironic forms. This predictive quality can also include positive feelings, ranging from the joy of giving a gift and anticipating the reaction of the receiver, to learning situations, where the observer is happy about an insight of the learner. Of course, readers of fiction do not usually manipulate actual texts (leaving digital fiction aside). They are however, constantly entertaining expectations of what will, might, or should happen in a given situation. What is more, it seems likely—though I would not even begin trying to prove this—that without expectations, predictions,

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444   Empathic Sadism and preferences in the reader’s mind, narrative fiction would be impossible.10 The correctness of these expectations matters. Some of the most significant moments in my personal reading experience have come when what I expected or wanted to happen did not. These expectations can come in various forms: suspense,11 predictions, preferences,12 or suspicion. It can be noted that already Aristotle built his theory of poetics on the central notion of a temporal development toward a catharsis. According to his theory, the cathartic moment is the moment of a “forking” whereby the logical expectations of a character split from the actual events driven by another logical development.13 Even what seems to be a possible exception, namely the dead, gnarly tree, might fit in here. In that case, to empathize might mean to understand the past forces that have made the tree into what it is now.

Empathic or “Sadistic Benefactor” A related but distinct pleasure in the negative emotions of the other has recently been identified by Lisa Zunshine as the “sadistic benefactor.” A sadistic benefactor wants to “force others into revealing their feelings through body language.”14 This would seem to correspond with the predictive, self-empowering empathy described above. However, Zunshine adds a twist by giving a positive bend to the motivation of the empathizer. Ultimately, these empathizers intend to do good. They force others into a state of misery or suffering, only to then uplift them into a state of happiness made even more intense by the prior misery. It is not clear in retrospect whether the prior negative feelings of the empathizee served the sadistic pleasures of the empathizer and the final positive twist is only a cover-up, or whether the prior negative feelings served to heighten the happiness of the character even more. (Zunshine’s examples, such as Sarah Fielding’s Lord Dorchester or Rousseau’s Jean-Jacques as educator of Emile either leave this question open or lean toward the latter). Hence, in contrast to the predictive, self-empowering empathy, the sadistic benefactor ultimately focuses on the extreme turn of emotions of the other from bad to good. And in contrast to the self-focused vicarious empathy, the sadistic benefactor already knows and predicts the positive feeling of the empathizee (the victim). So far, our examples have concerned the plot of stories and our sadistic benefactors have been characters, such as Jean-Jacques. But we may also ask whether the attitude of a sadistic benefactor may also be present in the reader-character relation, or reader’s contract. I believe that it is. I suspect that this attitude can represent the reader’s emotional side in what has been called the “trial narrative,” one of the two kinds of basic plots for fiction distinguished by Vivasvan Soni (the other being the tragic plot).15 In the trial narrative, a hero is put to a test and must suffer greatly for the sake of the ultimate reward. Examples for this story type are the temptation of Jesus in the desert, most bildungsromans, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740). Why do readers enjoy these trial narratives? One part of the answer may be that the reader is a

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Fritz Breithaupt   445 kind of empathic or sadistic benefactor: because we expect that the trial may be for the ultimate good, we like to feel more suffering and misery.

Advocative Exploitative Empathy It is certainly a good thing to have sympathy for and empathy with someone who is suffering. Even better is to be the sufferer’s advocate, the voice of the voiceless. Be that as it may, it is fair to ask what the mental rewards for the advocate are. The knowledge of doing good can be one. However, there may also be a more complicated emotional mechanism at work. Similar to the sadistic benefactor, the advocative exploitative empathizer (or: the empathic exploitative advocate) may use his or her morally good advocacy to cover up some empathic reveling in the pain of others. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and his Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1748) famously single out innocent suffering characters. What is “attractive” for the reader about these suffering women is probably neither simply the predictive quality of understanding the misery of the suffering character, nor simply the feeling of wishing for a good end (as in the empathic or sadistic benefactor), though both are likely to come into play. Rather, the specific mechanism here might be the observed misery that awakens and arouses the reader to decry the injustice or cruelty. Turning the reader into an advocate has an obvious and good moral effect when the reader takes the correct side in a conflict and stands up for the innocent suffering character. However, turning the reader into an advocate may also make the advocate-reader dependent on the very misfortune or injustice. The reader can only fashion him- or herself into an advocate so long as the injustice and suffering continue. As a consequence, a perverse duality is at work: the reader wishes for the good but simultaneously wishes to prolong the suffering.16 (This dynamic will be further developed below.) These four forms of empathy all share the self-focus of the empathizer. These forms of sadistic empathy can all be termed empathy for empathy’s sake in analogy to art-for-art’s-sake, a means of stressing that this empathy does not directly benefit its object. On the lower levels of the pyramid, the empathizer merely tracks the states of the empathizee (“going for a ride”). On the higher levels, suffering of the empathizee becomes a source of enjoyment for the empathizer (see figure 21.1). To be sure, this list is not complete and among other things does not consider psychoanalytic categories or aesthetic feelings, such as the sublime, that may include empathy. The list nevertheless provides a good starting point for discussing the dark sides of reader empathy, for it allows us to pinpoint the odd state of reader involvement that goes beyond “going for a ride” and mere prediction to deriving pleasure from actual manipulation (as sadistic benefactor) or advocacy. This is what we will discuss in the following. In particular, we will ask how readers can get drawn into texts and get “implicated.”

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446   Empathic Sadism

Advocative, exploitative Sadistic benefactor Predictive, selfempowering, or sadistic

Self-focused vicarious

Figure  21.1  Degrees of sadistic empathy

La Regenta and Sadistic Empathy In the previous section, we discussed how the observation of a character’s suffering might be desirable for a reader.17 In the following, we will look into a striking literary technique that draws readers into a specific form of sadistic empathy. To that end, we will examine the portrayal of adultery in two works of late nineteenth-century fiction, namely La Regenta (1884/85) by Leopoldo Alas, alias Clarín, and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1896). These works stem from a lineage of adultery texts that prominently include Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Both are representative of the historical period of realism, whose strategic focus on depicting the intricate minutiae of everyday life allows and denies insights into the characters. That being said, the strategies we will examine can be found in other periods as well. For the present purpose, I do not presuppose prior knowledge of these novels. It is perhaps no wonder that La Regenta has only in recent decades achieved the fame it deserves.18 Not only does the novel address the scandalous topic of adultery, and paint a scathing portrait of its setting, the Spanish city of Oviedo, but it also places an unreasonable demand on the reader: It gives us no positive or even compelling figure to identify with. The novel portrays a nearly hopeless situation. Donna Ana Ozores, the Regenta and wife of a retired judge, is the “pearl” of the provincial capital “Vetustas,” a fictional Oviedo.19 She is the “most beautiful woman in the city” and a most desirable prize for both the leading priest, the ambitious canon Don Fermín de Pas, and the local Don Juan–like womanizer and leader of the progressive party, Don Alvaro. Prior to the action of the novel, Ana Ozores has led a life unfulfilled in every way. Her parents died young, her education left her isolated, and her husband, a harmless eccentric, is an old and impotent but mostly well-meaning man completely devoid of any passion for his wife. She has every reason to want a change in circumstances. She has no children, and because of her husband’s impotence (or closeted homosexuality) she has little cause for hope. Over the course of many hundred pages the novel describes the tug of war

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Fritz Breithaupt   447 between Don Fermín and Don Alvaro as the two men vie for Donna Ana. Don Fermín des Pas offers Donna Ana spiritual awakening, while Don Alvaro offers bodily, erotic fulfillment, but each does so for his own selfish aims. The tides of war keep turning. At first one will have the upper hand, then the other. Both are counting on a victory. Two unknown voices summarize this struggle as follows: “But which one is going to get the cat to wet its feet?” “What cat?” “Its feet or her feet?” “The canon theologian.” “Alvaro.” “Or both of them.” “Or neither.”20

It is this conflict between the suitors, rather than the psychological nuance, social criticism, and analysis of gender roles, that brings the novel to life. Without this suspense, the novel would not exist. Readers of the novel will most likely ask themselves what will happen (probability) and what ought to happen (preference) to Ana.21 In the course of the novel, something strange occurs. In observing how Don Fermín and Don Alvaro launch their “attacks” on Ana, the reader figures out the self-interested game the men are playing. During each of their respective “assaults” on Ana, the reader will be unlikely to side with the aggressor, be it Fermín or Alvaro. Although the narratives are usually told from the perspective of the two men, especially Fermín, the implied preference is against the male attacker. Of course that doesn’t mean readers could not root for the aggressor, but because the narration is interspersed with reminders of the selfishness of the two men, it seems likely that most readers will root against them. So far, this side-taking is not strange at all. In order to describe this preference, it makes sense to speak of the implied reader (or authorial audience), who develops a moral preference for Ana. The implied reader is, in a classic definition by Wayne Booth, “the reader who the implied author writes to.”22 This definition involves knowledge, since the implied reader needs to have a degree of historical and cultural understanding in order to make sense of the text.23 This knowledge component is sometimes described as a contextual anchoring of a narrative text.24 Yet narratologists such as James Phelan have taken the concept of the implied reader farther, suggesting that the implied reader also evaluates the characters and events emotionally as well as ethically. This evaluative function of the implied reader comes into play especially in cases of unreliable narrators; that is to say, when it appears that the narrator cannot be trusted. In these instances, the implied readers “reject those words [by the narrator] and, if possible, reconstruct a more satisfactory account. . . or. . . accept what the narrator says but then supplement the account.”25 This account echoes the earlier definition of the implied reader as formulated in 1972 by Wolfgang Iser, who proposed that the task of the implied reader is to bring unconnected narrative elements, such as narrative voice, perspective, or plot elements, into a relationship with each other when the text fails to provide clear connection or evaluation.26

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448   Empathic Sadism This function of the implied reader may at first seem sufficient to explain what happens here. However, as we will shortly see, the concept of the implied reader cannot fully explain what happens with actual audiences and readers of these texts. In a step-by-step discussion first of La Regenta then of Effi Briest, we will trace how these novels bring the implied reader into a paradoxical situation with moral implications. To be sure, the concept of the implied reader seems well suited to describe the readers’ reservations regarding Fermín and Alvaro. On the one hand, the Catholic Fermín de Pas wants to make Donna Ana into his “slave.” This would increase his influence in the city since Ana, the “pearl of the city,” has such a symbolically elevated status.27 And indeed, his stock in the city moves up when Ana Ozores prominently participates in a Catholic ritual, proceeding through the city barefoot in the Easter parade. In addition, he has, without quite admitting it, fallen in love with Ana. Unfortunately for Fermín, becoming the lover of a Catholic priest is simply not an option for Ana. To this we should perhaps add that Fermín is not only a manipulative, predictive empathizer who reads and controls people around him for selfish purposes, but as we learn later in the novel, also already has and mistreats a mistress.28 On the other hand, a victory for the seducer Alvaro doesn’t have much to offer Ana either. Don Alvaro is a consummate trophy-hunting ladies’ man. He wants to win Ana and enjoy her for the simple reason that he has always gotten what he wanted, and wants to convince himself that he will be able to keep getting what he wants even as he grows older. He does not care that the stigma of adultery would destroy her. At first he refrains from physical intimacies, but only strategically, because he knows that he could lose her if he is too aggressive. Instead he strikes up a friendship with her husband, deploys his friends as spies to get closer to her, and feigns tears in his false confession of love. Given this setup of the novel, one might think that readers would lean toward identifying with Donna Ana or at least side with her empathetically. And certainly, this is what we could expect in most works of fiction since the eighteenth century, such as in the aforementioned novels of Samuel Richardson. The case of La Regenta, however, is different. It is different because empathizing with Ana would mean accepting and taking on the gamut of her unattractive qualities: her blindness and naiveté, her religious sentimentality, her arrogance, and her self-deceit. For example, she is dishonest to herself when she indulges in a spiritual love with Alvaro,29 she has easily exploitable prejudices,30 and she pities herself and glorifies her life as “martyrdom” simply because her husband is a bit grumpy.31 Still, fiction is full of cases where readers identify gladly with naive or self-deceiving characters, ranging from Don Quixote to Jane Austen’s characters. The difficulty here is that Ana has no goal, not even an implied one. Without a trajectory, it is hard to empathize with her. In the first section of this chapter, we suggested that reader empathy is usually connected with the expectation of change, development, and solutions. Without such future expectation, projection, or development, and without a mind that focuses on her own interest and intention, Ana Ozores is sealed off from most forms of empathy from the reader. As a result, it is hard to care for her. It is much

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Fritz Breithaupt   449 easier to relate to someone with a trajectory, outlook, or goal, even if it is an evil one, as in slasher movies32 or in a film like Silence of Lambs,33 than with someone who has none, such as Ana. This lack of goal-driven behavior, a state almost without dreams, seems to rob Ana of an identity. Of course, this does not mean that actual readers have not identified with her. Those readers who do identify or empathize with Ana, though, probably do not affirm the hopelessness of her situation, but either invent fantastic new paths for her or are forced to ignore parts of the novel. As much as most readers may want the best for her, it is nevertheless difficult to see things from her point of view for long enough to develop empathy since there is nothing to see in her future. Ana’s unavailability for reader empathy is also stressed in her distance from the narrator, who even scolds her a few times.34 To be clear, the majority of readers as well as the implied reader will in most places be morally on Ana’s side, due in no small part to her innocence, her status as a victim, and her complete lack of malevolence. At the same time, it seems more precise to say that readers are not so much directly siding with her, as they are morally siding against her attackers. After all, she is the victim of the intrigues of these two men as well as others. This rooting against her attackers, however, does not transform into a lasting perspective-taking and full empathy. Actual readers may find themselves in an odd position; on the one hand, they adopt the perspective of the implied reader (who is against the attackers and thus is morally for Ana), while also taking the perspective of and perhaps even identifying with her attackers for short periods of time (for they at least have ambitions for the future). If we recall the cathartic moment of “forking” described by Aristotle, Clarín’s novel would appear to offer a “fork” between reader preference (or sympathy) by the implied reader and perspective-taking (a step toward full empathy). What effect does this “fork” have in this novel? Again, Clarín’s narrative invites readers to take the cognitive and affective perspective of many characters, mostly of the goal-driven Fermín, but also Alvaro and many minor characters such as Obdulia, Visita, Petra, and so on, without however siding with them. Still, the implied reader’s preference for Ana, the innocent, naive victim, creates a conflict. Transforming the perspective-taking with the attackers into a lasting identification and full empathy would in effect affirm their selfish aims and the destruction of Ana. As we well know, these attackers are no heroes, and when Ana resists, both male protagonists try to punish her for her hesitation.35 Nevertheless, the slope from focalization to perspective-taking and identification is slippery. The tension between the implied reader and perspective-taking does not lead to a clear solution, despite our assumption that actual readers want to empathize with someone. But because the subtleties of the novel rule out every possible candidate (the only good person appears as a mere witness on the last pages of the thousand-page novel), there is no strong narrator to identify with and no clear implied author other than perhaps a sarcastic puppeteer who mostly remains in the background. In the end, neither perspective-taking nor the implied reader leads to full empathy. More than the others, Ana resists attempts at identification or full empathy. As things stand in her current state (mentally, spiritually, psychologically, physically, sexually,

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450   Empathic Sadism etc.), she is unbalanced and unsatisfied. The novel repeatedly describes her hang-ups through metaphors involving the blocked circulation of fluids.36 Ana never does what the well-wishing implied reader hopes she will, even though she does possess a certain, albeit limited, room for maneuvering. Yet for hundreds of pages Ana takes no action. What happens, then, to the reader looking to empathize when there is no one left to identify with? If literature were created for the simple game of identifying with characters, for experiencing their emotions, sharing their perspective and, in essence, caring for them, then one would have to conclude that this novel is not very successful, because it does not allow perspective-taking beyond the duration of single episodes. It is always temporary and always with the wrong person. Nevertheless, the reader remains active and actively searching for an orienting point of view. Here I would like to suggest that readers become creative and invent a position for empathy when there is no point of view that the reader can simply morally adopt. Instead of simply choosing from the existing characters, the reader becomes productive. This productivity takes the form of inventing possibilities and positions that are not present in the text, but which ought to exist. The creative potential inherent in side-taking comes to light in Clarín’s creative and experimental setup, which goes significantly farther than its grand predecessor, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. What does the reader who supports Ana make of her inactivity and resistance? One possibility is that such a well-meaning reader succumbs to frustration with Ana for not cooperating with what he or she imagines will save her. This leaves one option: In order to be saved, Ana must fall, must be sacrificed. Thus the reader is put in a position similar to that of her pursuers, whose attraction transforms directly into fantasies of punishment. Even her so-called friend Visita enjoys “the pleasure of seeing her friend fall where she herself had fallen.”37 Neither the preferences of the implied reader nor perspective-taking give the novel its form. Rather, something outside the narrator’s and perhaps even the author’s control occurs. In order to have empathy with Ana, it is necessary to force her into a predictable pattern of affects, which in this case seems to be possible only in a negative, violent way. The paradox of the novel lies in the reader’s alignment with Ana, an alignment that for some readers will lead them to identify with her attackers: those characters intent on criticizing her (Fermín, Petra, Visita) or taking advantage of her (Alvaro). In this three-person scenario (Ana, attacker, and reader), the reader’s preference for Ana may be transformed into an alignment with those characters whose actions will do her harm, because these very actions enable readers to predict Ana’s misery and thus finally facilitate reader empathy with her. In other words, we may adopt the attacker’s desire to destroy Ana in order to empathize with her, and this desire for empathy transforms into empathetic sadism. The very lack of a future for Ana, which served as to block empathy, now gives way to an acceptance of a dark future, but one that allows for change and predictive sadistic empathy. (Following the pattern of degrees of sadistic empathy above, we note that no figure of a sadistic benefactor is visible, at least not in the plot. This might present an opportunity for readers to engage with the text as sadistic benefactors, thinking that Ana’s suffering

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Fritz Breithaupt   451 and fall could eventually lead to a better future, even though the novel does little to support this vague hope. Likewise, the impulse of reader advocacy for Ana seems too limited. Certainly, the impulse to side against her attackers will turn many readers into advocates for her. Ultimately however, her social position as well as her naive arrogance may prove too strong for her to be a good candidate for long-term side-taking.) This hypothetical reaction of readers to desire Ana’s suffering goes beyond what the concept of implied reader suggests. But how shall we then describe it? Before we jump to conclusions, I would like to point to a second related case.

Effi Briest and the Implication of the Reader The ensuing argument will be conducted through a reading of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, in order to further elaborate on the mechanism outlined above, the three-person alignment without identification.38 Though like La Regenta, Effi Briest constitutes another reaction to Madame Bovary, it is unlikely that Fontane was aware of Clarín’s novel. What is remarkable about the figure of Effi Briest is how much we know about her compared to how little information we gather directly from her and her inner states— much less than from Emma Bovary or Ana Ozores. Indeed, the other characters in the novel regularly speculate and make assumptions about the real Effi, how she feels, and what she is really like. Whether from her mother, her older husband Innstetten, or her lover Crampas, these assumptions are not harmless speculation, but convey in a more or less subtle manner how these people expect Effi to act. The speech Effi’s mother gives her early in the novel, when Effi asks her advice about Innstetten’s marriage proposal, is as telling as it is disastrous: It’s not the kind of thing to be joked about. You saw him the day before yesterday, and I think you liked him. Of course, he is older than you, which is a good thing all in all, and he is a man of character, position and sound morality, and if you don’t say no, which I would hardly expect from my clever Effi, then at twenty you’ll have a position others don’t reach until they’re forty. You’ll go far further than your mamma.39

The mother’s speech seems to usurp her daughter’s free choice, and yet right away she claims to understand her daughter. This belief comes across in the suggestive parenthetical phrase, “which I would hardly expect from my clever Effi.” The statement preempts Effi’s choice, so that the image of the free Effi appears only as a phantom against the backdrop of her usurped freedoms of choice and love. We do not see who Effi is, what she desires, or what she thinks—we only see how her own choices are withheld from her. Her mother’s manipulation keeps Effi from putting her own feet on the ground, and instead lodges them firmly on her mother’s own path: “You’ll go far further than your mamma.” And we should not be surprised to discover that Effi’s future husband is in fact her mother’s former lover. Her mother identifies with her daughter in such a way as to

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452   Empathic Sadism strip Effi of her free will. This is an illustrative scene in a novel where identification only figures as the violent act of stealing an identity. Whoever identifies with someone else forces that person into conformity with him- or herself. Michel Foucault would have called such identificatory assumptions about Effi “discourses”; they try to dominate their object (Effi) through their language such that she only takes shape as a dominated figure under the control of the discourse. Rather than reveal who Effi is or what she wants, the novel only conveys what others think about her. Particularly telling are those moments in the novel when others aim to control Effi’s actions by means of their “discourse.” These discourses often take the form of narratives, such as the tale of the Chinese servant, a ghost story Effi’s husband concocts to confine her to the home. Or they materialize as a form of assigning an identity to her—like that of a “little lamb, white as snow” at the same time that evidence of her affair is piling up. One can easily imagine that Effi is trying to hide something significant, namely her affair. Yet this is not quite correct; it is not that Effi necessarily wants to hide something, she simply never manages to express herself. In addition, the affair seems to arise not out of a true desire, but of desperation or boredom.40 Effi tries to tell her parents that she has changed, but they ignore or misunderstand her. Her mother, her husband Innstetten, her cousin, and so many others fail to consider the possibility that Effi does not conform to their idea of her and as a result, never acknowledge the power their assumptions have over her. At the very end of the novel, her parents finally do go so far as to admit that they might possibly have made a mistake in choosing Effi’s course in life. However, we do not learn whether they think that they might have misunderstood her. The distanced narrative voice offers no assistance to our heroine either, working instead to expose the discrepancy between what people assume about Effi and in what ways she might have been different. Exactly how she might have been different, if she was, is left unknown, and even her affair is just a clichéd escapade. Effi is, presumably, not what people think she is. But what she actually is, is not revealed. This may well be the key difference between Theodor Fontane’s novel and Clarín’s: Ana may in reality be as empty as she fears,41 while Effi is an “empty space,” for the other characters as well as the readers who do not have insight into her thoughts (even the affair is only reported years afterwards when the love letters emerge). Still the novel keeps pointing to the possibility that she is being misunderstood, and this misperception is tantamount to an act of violence against her. Effi shares this alienation or strangeness with the spectral Chinese servant, another character with a mysterious “nonpresence” in the novel.42 Because no one in the novel takes the side of Effi (whom we only know in the distorted images of others), there is a call for someone to do what no one else does. Enter the reader. At first it seems that the concept of the implied reader (the authorial audience) is sufficient to capture the preference most readers will feel. In the case of this novel, the implied reader will likely be on Effi’s side and against that of her oppressors. The implied reader is a marker of dissonance, marking that which no one names but which should happen. In this sense, the implied reader is an archivist of discrepancy between what is and what could be. Since the reader is the only one pointing to the injustice and the

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Fritz Breithaupt   453 necessity of noting it, he or she is drawn into the text and gains a presence in the novel as if he or she were a character. This needs some explanation. On some basic level, the implied reader’s tasks in Effi Briest and La Regenta are similar:  to mentally defend the female heroine against attackers and assumptions (controlling discourses) about her.43 This task can develop into advocacy, though as noted above, this impulse is more limited in La Regenta. Advocacy (from ad-vocare) in these novels means first of all to articulate the speech that the characters do not utter, either because they do not speak (Effi) or say the wrong things (Ana). Since Effi herself seems to only partially understand the violence being done to her and does not speak about it, and since it is unknown whether or how she registers that violence, it is up to the reader “to jump in,” that is, to be the deus ex machina and to act instead of her and on behalf of her. The reader takes note of the injustices Effi suffers, and by marking the discrepancy, becomes a presence. In short, the reader becomes implicated. The best evidence for this effect may be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s famous movie adaption Effi Briest (1974) in which he has Effi give an inflammatory speech exposing all the wrongs of the society. It is a speech Fontane’s Effi could never have given, but one that the implicated reader would very much wish to give. And does give in my opinion, for I would suggest that it is in fact the implicated reader who speaks through Effi in this movie. This involvement of the reader due to a lack of a proper voice from the maligned protagonist has two seemingly contradictory effects: on the one hand, the reader sides with the oppressed, misunderstood, and mistreated character by preserving the knowledge of her suffering, even if such a character as Effi does not recognize the suffering herself. In fact, the reader’s preference becomes so strong that the reader may feel as if he or she were just as much a part of the novel as in Fassbinder’s movie, and thus can intervene on Effi’s behalf; seeing the world through her eyes, actually feeling her suffering, the reader advocates on her behalf and takes action for her. On the other hand, the force that drives the reader into the story as if he or she were a character can produce the effect that this reader develops the self-interest to preserve his or her presence in the novel. That is to say, for the reader to be quasi-present in the novel as an advocate, that reader must also affirm the suppression of the female protagonist. Without such a scene of suppression or violent misunderstanding, the reader would not intervene in the story, because there would be no reason for doing so. And this is the other, apparently contradictory effect: the affirmation and reduplication of the very misunderstanding that makes the involvement of the reader possible. I refer to this effect as the “implication of the reader” or the “implicated reader,” a wholly different entity than the implied reader. The implied reader (authorial audience) sides firmly against the attackers and is for the heroine, as was the case in both of the novels we discussed. In contrast, the implicated reader is involved to such a degree that he or she develops choices that are serving himself or herself first and are not directly prefigured by the author. In the case of La Regenta, the reader gets implicated in the moment he or she wishes for one of the attackers to succeed for the reason that this would allow for a prediction of Ana’s suffering (and thus reader empathy). In the case

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454   Empathic Sadism of Effi Briest, the reader gets implicated once the preference for the heroine causes the reader to accept and require her suppression. In effect, the implicated reader begins to act and behave like an independent character. In Effi Briest, the implicated reader must “want” a character to be misunderstood, since only this allows the reader to make the leap, to be involved and enter the text. Only thanks to this unjust misunderstanding does the implicated reader come into existence. In other words, the reader must want the female protagonist (or the child, the underdog, etc.) to be misunderstood and mistreated, since the reader’s involvement and existence depend on it. Here empathy (and side-taking) is perverted into a form of advocative, exploitative empathy such as was described in the first section of this chapter. This regression of the morally superior witness into the role of punisher experiencing either predictive, sadistic empathy (Clarín) or advocative, exploitative empathy (Fontane) is less a psychological tendency in actual readers than a structural effect of the implicated reader as third party.44 The reader must seek to prolong that which enables his or her emotional involvement. Without it, he or she would not be implicated and thus not exist. The process of implication has three parts: 1. Recognition of injustice (discrepancy between what is and should be) 2. The wish to set things straight, or for compensation (involvement) 3. Desire for a scene of violence (oppression) that calls the reader into action This implication of the reader also has an effect for the protagonist as well. For example, Effi remains herself only because she cannot take on her own identity. This means that the scene in which she is misunderstood is constitutive of her identity: she is most true to herself when she is not allowed to be herself. The reader who observes this inability of Effi to be herself feels called upon to act and take Effi’s side. In doing so, the newly implicated reader simultaneously repudiates and affirms her oppression, and through this process experiences both sympathy and hidden pleasure at her suffering. Precisely because no one can identify with them (and because identification is staged as a form of violent misunderstanding), Ana Ozores and Effi Briest become objects of a perverse and sadistic empathy. The lack of empathy within the novel subsequently forces the reader into a divided, contradictory position. As a result, the reader’s interest in the text becomes more than merely hermeneutic or psychological, it is self-affective: it is the implication of the reader that brings the reader into being.45 Clarín’s La Regenta and Fontane’s Effi Briest reveal a technique of implicating the reader via a mechanism that combines an other-focused empathy with a self-focused one. The simultaneity of the recognition of injustice, the criticism of it, and the desire for the punishment or oppression to continue characterizes canonical works of narrative fiction. It builds upon a long English-American tradition of suppressed female protagonists from Clarissa and Pamela in Samuel Richardson’s novels to Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; as well as a continental European tradition ranging from the mysterious Ottilie in Goethe’s Elective Affinities to the ironic treatment Madame Bovary receives. This technique is prominent in the period of realism with its “poetics of observation,”46 but is not limited to it.

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Fritz Breithaupt   455 Within the particular context of continental European realism a gender-specific pattern emerges. Like Madame Bovary, La Regenta and Effi Briest stand between the poles of turning a woman completely into an object, as in the works of de Sade, and of putting a woman on a pedestal, as in Sacher-Masoch.47 The ways in which Ana and Effi are oppressed demonstrate to the reader that these characters are entitled to full personhood, and yet they only awake the empathy of the reader when that personhood is withheld from them. La Regenta and Effi Briest give us an insight into the complex reader emotions involved in sadistic empathy. The triggering of empathy, at least here, comes at the price of the suffering of another person. Thus our empathy (and sympathy) with another negotiates the extremes of positive involvement on the one hand, and negative sentiments on the other. It is caught in this tension, oscillating between the affirmative experiences of sympathy, advocacy, and side-taking and the destructive desires for dominance, punishment, and exploitation. In these texts, empathy implicates the reader as though he or she were a character within the novel; a character who draws his life blood from the continued suffering of the victim.

Acknowledgments This chapter has immensely profited from the many comments by Lisa Zunshine. I also wish to thank Andrew Hamilton and Andrea Meyertholen for their careful reading, and for editing and partly translating the chapter. Finally, I owe some formulations to Elizabeth Magill.

Notes 1. In fact, William Flesch has argued that our desire for fair rewards and punishment may be our ultimate interest in fiction. See William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2. For some more complex cases of this relation, see also Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, “Transport: Challenges to the Metaphor,” ­chapter 25 in this volume. 3. Douglas Chismar, “Empathy and Sympathy: The Important Difference,” Journal of Value Inquiry 22 (1988): 257–66. 4. Jody Madeira, Killing Timothy McVeigh (New York: NYU Press, 2012). 5. Daniel C.  Batson, “These Things Called Empathy:  Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. Jean Decety and William Ickes (Cambridge: MIT Press), 3–16. For an overview of different aspects of empathy, see also Susanne Leiberg and Silke Anders, “The Multiple Facets of Empathy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence,” in Progress in Brain Research 156 (2006): 419–40. 6. Batson, “These Things Called Empathy,” 6. 7. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

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456   Empathic Sadism 8. See Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28–35 9. Tania Singer and colleagues may have described a case of such transformation. They did an fMRI study in which they had participants watch the physical punishment of cheaters in a game. The fMRI readings showed that female participants showed signified patterns of empathy with the suffering cheater, while the male ones did not. The fMRI readings of the male participants suggest the absence of empathy and the activation of reward instead (if there was an unfair punishment, both males and females showed similar patterns of empathy). Whereas the mechanism behind the male absence of other-focused empathy is unclear, it can be assumed that males also fully recognized the pain of the cheater, but are either blocking it entirely or transforming it into a different, self-focused affect. See Tania Singer, B. Seymour, J. P. O’Doherty, K. E. Stephan, R. J. Dolan, and C. D. Frith, “Empathic Neural Responses Are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others,” Nature 439 (2006): 466–69. 10. My personal definition of narrative builds on the assumption that narratives take place in the head of the recipient in a process of considering alternative explanations of events, intentions, and motivations. Narrative thinking involves considering or suspecting alternative versions of what has already happened or will happen. Narrative, in my view, is thus always more than a given sequence of events, but involves different, even contradictory ways to make sense of these very events. To use a famous example: “The King died and then the Queen died” becomes a narrative only when we consider various linkages between both events, including possibilities such as “The King died and then the Queen died, nevertheless.” The arguments of this chapter do not rest on these considerations. For a full definition, see Fritz Breithaupt, Kultur der Ausrede (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2012). 11. Donald Beecher, “Suspense.” Philosophy and Literature 33 (2009): 255–27. 12. David N.  Rapp and Richard J.  Gerrig, “Predilections for Narrative Outcomes:  The Impact of Story Contexts and Reader Preferences,” Journal of Memory and Language 54 (2006): 54–67. 13. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newbury Port: Focus Publishing, 2006), 33 (1452a). 14. Lisa Zunshine, Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 45–53. 15. Vivasvan Soni, “Trials and Tragedies: The Literature of Unhappiness (A Model for Reading Narratives of Suffering),” Comparative Literature 59.2 (2007): 119–39. 16. William Flesch describes certain split emotions in reading as an emotional bargaining. Preferences and compromises are part of the dynamic of reading, with readers “bargaining” for a good outcome and thereby also tolerating (or expecting) some negative emotional results. William Flesch, “Reading and Bargaining,” ­chapter  18 in this volume. 17. An earlier, now fully rewritten version of this section appeared in Spanish in Fritz Breithaupt, Culturas de la Empatía, trans. Alejandra Obermeier (Madrid: Katz, 2011). 18. The novel remained largely unknown outside of Spain, in spite of the 1975 film version by Gonzalo Suárez. The first English translation appeared in 1984. 19. Leopoldo Alas, La Regenta, trans. John Rutherford (London: Penguin, 2005), 590. 20. Alas, La Regenta, 468. 21. See above and Rapp and Gerrig, “Predilections for Narrative Outcomes.” 22. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 422.

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Fritz Breithaupt   457 23. This aspect is stressed by Dan Shen, “Implied Author, Authorial Audience, and Context:  Form and History in Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory,” Narrative 21.2 (2013): 140–58. 24. For some of the complexities of contextual anchoring, see David Herman, Story Logic:  Problems and Possibilities of Narratives (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 331–71. 25. James Phelan, Living To Tell about It:  A  Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 50–51. 26. Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (Munich: UTB, 1972). 27. Alas, La Regenta, 581. 28. Estela Vieira, The Spatial Poetics of Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 101–60. 29. Alas, La Regenta, ­chapter 16. Likewise, she keeps her love for Alvaro secret from her confessor Fermín, without recognizing this as an outright lie (Alas, La Regenta, 392). 30. Alas, La Regenta, 634. 31. Alas, La Regenta, 438. 32. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws:  Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 33. See the chapter by Carl Plantinga in this volume (­chapter 14). 34. See, for example: “The spirit of imitation was taking hold of Ana; she did not realize how presumptuous she was being,” Alas, La Regenta, 474. See also ­chapter 27. 35. See ­chapters 18 and 20, as well as Fermín’s fantasies of Ana as his “slave” in ­chapter 26. 36. Gumbrecht observes that the novel can be described along two symbolic axes, namely nature vs. society and sexuality vs. sterility. Each character can be positioned along these axes. Notably in this regard, the combination of sexuality and nature remains unoccupied; see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Lebenswelt als Fiktion / Sprachspiele als Antifiktion. Über Funktionen des realistischen Romans in Frankreich und Spanien,” in Funktionen des Fiktiven (Poetik und Hermeneutik X), ed. Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), 239–75. 37. Alas, La Regenta, 355. 38. An earlier, now much revised version of this section appeared in German in Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009). 39. Fontane, Theodor. Effi Briest, trans. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers (London: Penguin, 2000), 36. 40. Brian Tucker, “Performing Boredom in Effi Briest:  On the Effects of Narrative Speed,” German Quarterly 80 (2007): 185–200. 41. Ana thinks “that inside her. . . was nobody who was she, Ana, essentially, really—and after this came vertigo.” Alas, La Regenta, 606. 42. Russell Berman has described this solitary Chinese figure as the repressed remains of the Romantic past. Innstetten is drawn to the ghost because his love for Effi’s mother was also repressed, and the Chinese servant’s own love story came to a similar end when his beloved married someone else. Innstetten’s inability or unwillingness to deny the existence of the ghost is indicative of his inability to come to terms with his own past, which is thus made to come between him and Effi, and is ultimately the cause of his inability to forgive. See Russell A. Berman, “Effi Briest and the End of Realism,” in A Companion to German Realism, ed. Todd Kontje (Rochester: Camden House, 2002), 339–63.

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458   Empathic Sadism 43. In contrast to La Regenta, the reader cannot side, or will have great difficulty siding, with the oppressors of Effi since they are not offered as a perspective of focalization. Many empirical readers seem to have identified with Effi, which, however, implies filling a gap since her perspective is not given. Again, La Regenta is different since we do get, from time to time, insights into Ana’s mind, though insights that prove to be disappointing because of her shallowness. 44. See also Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from “Clarissa” to “Rescue 911” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 45. This division of a character would complicate Iser’s concept of the Leerstelle (“empty space”); see Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich: Fink, 1976), 302. While Effi’s identity could well be described as an empty space in Iser’s sense of the term, at the same time the positing of an identity is staged as an act of violence that implicates the reader. 46. Andreas Kablitz, “Realism as a Poetics of Observation:  The Function of Narrative Perspective in the Classic French Novel:  Flaubert—Stendhal—Balzac,” in What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller (New York: de Gruyter, 2003), 99–136. 47. In the case of La Regenta, James Mandrell describes how her objectification changes from the enigma of the woman whom no one can understand (“who knows?”), to a conscious suppression (“who cares?”). See James Mandrell, “Malevolent insemination:  Don Juan Tenorio in La Regenta,” in “Malevolent Inseminations” and Other Essays on Clarín, ed. Noël Valis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 1–28.

Works Cited Alas, Leopoldo. La Regenta. Translated by John Rutherford. London: Penguin, 2005 (1884/85). Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newbury Port: Focus Publishing, 2006. Batson, Daniel C. “These Things Called Empathy:  Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena.” In The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, edited by Jean Decety and William Ickes, 3–16. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Beecher, Donald. “Suspense.” Philosophy and Literature 31.2 (2007): 255–79. Berman, Russell A. “Effi Briest and the End of Realism.” In A Companion to German Realism, edited by Todd Kontje, 339–63. Rochester: Camden House, 2002. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Breithaupt, Fritz. Kulturen der Empathie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009. Breithaupt, Fritz. Culturas de la empatía. Translated by Alejandra Obermeier. Madrid: Katz, 2011. Chismar, D. “Empathy and Sympathy. The Important Difference.” Journal of Value Inquiry 22 (1988): 257–66. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chainsaws:  Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Flesch, William. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Fontane, Theodor. Effi Briest. Translated by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers. London: Penguin, 2000 (1896).

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Fritz Breithaupt   459 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “Lebenswelt als Fiktion / Sprachspiele als Antifiktion. Über Funktionen des realistischen Romans in Frankreich und Spanien.” In Funktionen des Fiktiven (Poetik und Hermeneutik X), edited by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser, 239–75. Munich: Fink, 1983. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Hinton, Laura. The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from “Clarissa” to “Rescue 911”. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Iser, Wolfgang. Der implizite Leser:  Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. Munich: UTB, 1972. Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. Munich: Fink, 1976. Kablitz, Andreas. “Realism as a Poetics of Observation: The Function of Narrative Perspective in the Classic French Novel: Flaubert—Stendhal—Balzac.” In What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, 99–136. New York: de Gruyter, 2003. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Keen, Suzanne. “Narrative Empathy.” In Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, edited by Frederick Aldama, 61–93. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Leiberg, Susanne, and Silke Anders. “The Multiple Facets of Empathy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence.” Progress in Brain Research 156 (2006): 419–40. Madeira, Jody. Killing Timothy McVeigh. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Mandrell, James. “Malevolent Insemination: Don Juan Tenorio in La Regenta.” In “Malevolent Inseminations” and Other Essays on Clarín, edited by Noël Valis, 1–28. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It:  A  Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Rapp, David N., and Richard J. Gerrig. “Predilections for Narrative Outcomes: The Impact of Story Contexts and Reader Preferences.” Journal of Memory and Language 54 (2006): 54–67. Shen, Dan. “Implied Author, Authorial Audience, and Context:  Form and History in Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Theory.” Narrative 21.2 (2013): 140–58. Singer, Tania, B. Seymour, J. P.  O’Doherty, K. E.  Stephan, R. J.  Dolan, and C. D.  Frith. “Empathic Neural Responses Are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others.” Nature 439 (2006): 466–69. Vivasvan, Soni. “Trials and Tragedies: The Literature of Unhappiness (A Model for Reading Narratives of Suffering)”. Comparative Literature 59.2 (2007): 119–39. Tucker, Brian. “Performing Boredom in Effi Briest: On the Effects of Narrative Speed.” German Quarterly 80 (2007): 185–200. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Vieira, Estela. The Spatial Poetics of Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013. Vignemont, Frédérique de, and Jacob Pierre. “What Is It Like to Feel Another’s Pain.” Philosophy of Science 79 (2012): 295–316. Zunshine, Lisa. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

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Pa rt I I I

THE NEW U N C ON S C IOU S

Chapter 22

T he New Unc ons c i ou s A Literary Guided Tour B l akey Ve r m e ule

In the past decade the unconscious mind has attracted intense interest from academic psychologists and the interest has spread to philosophers and science writers as well. The so-called new unconscious is aggressively antipsychoanalytic.1 A very brief definition catches the most important elements: “The cognitive unconscious includes all the mental processes that are not experienced by a person but that give rise to a person’s thoughts, choices, emotions, and behavior.”2 The key here—and the key to my chapter—is these mental processes are “not experienced” by us—and because they are not, they cannot be seen directly. Whether they can be seen indirectly is a trickier question. I offer these pages as a tentative guide. I stress the tentativeness. More knowledgeable guides than I exist and will be cited in the pages that follow. More confident guides can certainly be found on every street corner of the intellectual world, and I confess to having been mesmerized by their noisy pitches. But I have found that these guides almost always have an agenda that goes well beyond an interest in science. The agenda might be to score a moral point, to intervene in some ongoing intellectual debate, to sell books, to produce better, more rational employees and citizens, to help maximize shareholder returns, or even just to get a gee-whiz effect from some fascinating and mildly counterintuitive psychology experiment. These agendas are almost always normative. Usually such guides are well-meaning, even when they smuggle in the biases of our moneyobsessed culture. But they tend to conflate scientific progress with progress in social, economic, and moral spheres of life. I am all in favor of progress in these other spheres of life—but science experiments are almost certainly not the way to achieve it. Science experiments are ends in themselves, often very messy and inconclusive ends, not some first step on the royal road to a desirable telos. For instance, it seems unlikely that even the most watertight account of human irrationality is going to do much to bring that irrationality to heel. Several fields have claimed a stake in studying the unconscious mind:  social psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and behavioral economics. Inside

464   The New Unconscious experimental psychology, the hot fields have been subliminal perception, priming, and decision-making—specifically the study of heuristics and biases. Outside of experimental psychology, the heuristics and biases research has found an enthusiastic audience among economists and financiers: Daniel Kahneman, one of the field’s founding thinkers, won the Nobel Prize for economics despite having never formally studied or taught economics. Priming research such as the “Florida effect”—an experiment in which subjects asked to read a list of words about old people tend to walk more like old people on the way out of the room—has been widely reported, although it has proven very controversial since the results can only rarely be replicated.3 Meanwhile journalists such as Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, and David Brooks have tried to turn the findings into guides for living and for interpreting ourselves, but their efforts have been met with (at best) skepticism.4 Popular science writing, meanwhile, has fallen in love with the idea that we are “moist robots” (the phrase is Dilbert’s) and that what we take to be our rationally derived intuitions are riddled with errors. Our seemingly transparent mental states are illusory. The smooth surface of our conscious experience can be easily fluffed and tricked. The list of titles that remind us of that seems to grow larger every day: The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us,5 How We Know What Isn’t So:  The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life,6 Brain Bugs:  How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives,7 Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking,8 You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself,9 and many more. Often written by academic psychologists, these books take as their emblem the “invisible gorilla” that wanders through a game of basketball, unseen by most people who have been instructed to count the number of passes a certain team makes. (The invisible gorilla is an example of change blindness). The gorilla shows that the apparently truth-tracking bubble of our attention is riddled with blind spots—or as Daniel Kahneman puts it, that “we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”10 We hold to a powerful sense that our experience is a continuous whole and that we have unmediated access to things as they are. We believe in the smooth casing of consciousness up until the moment that the casing shatters. Experimental psychologists have gotten extremely good at conjuring scenes that give our illusions a hard shove. Perhaps because of that success, the public voice of the new unconscious sounds markedly different—more triumphalist, more scientistic, far more antiseptic—than the popular Freudianism of the 1950s and 1960s whose noirish fictions were lurid and overblown. (A brief note: not to be confused with scientific, scientism is the fantasy that science can explain everything. It can’t. Scientists are far more humble about science’s limits than are the carnival barkers who stand outside their tents.) The psychoanalytic unconscious was, writes John Kihlstrom, the psychologist who first described the cognitive unconscious in 1987, “hot and wet; it seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive, and irrational. The unconscious of contemporary psychology is kinder and gentler than that and more reality bound and rational, even if it is not entirely cold and dry.”11

Blakey Vermeule   465 I am often struck by the thought that the sudden rise of the neuro-explanations scratches the same intellectual and emotional itch as other distinctly modern genres of writing—especially those that feature masterminds solving puzzles that the rest of us only dimly make out. I love reading psychology experiments the way some people love reading true crime or the way my mother used to love detective fiction—sitting on her couch, devouring book after book like popcorn. My pleasure is the same. I enter a world in which causes and effects are not what they seem. Crime fiction is like an anatomy display at the science museum. Flick a switch and limbic system goes red; flick another and the neural pathways turn green. In crime fiction, you flick a switch and every paranoid fantasy you’ve ever had turns out to be real. Your suspiciously beautiful neighbor really is Russian spy. Your emotionally secretive girlfriend is running a counterfeiting ring. Your withholding but clearly humanly pained therapist is also Tony Soprano’s therapist. And so on. Like crime fiction, psychology experiments paint a strange alternate reality in which you can see all kinds of new and meaningful connections rise to the surface. A student assistant meets you in the hall on your way to participate in what you think is an experiment on personality types. The assistant fumbles with her clipboard. She hands you her cup to hold as she takes down your details. Inside the lab you read a description of a personality and rate that personality as either cold or warm. But unbeknownst to you, your rating will be determined not by what you read in the experiment but by the temperature of the liquid in the cup that the student assistant has handed you beforehand.12 Both psychology experiments and crime fiction show us a world almost exactly like our own but governed by secret principles—principles invisible to the eye. And like Freud’s case histories, they give us the delicious pleasure of the reveal. Their narrative structure follows the classic pattern “I once was blind but now I can see.” So where does all this newfound interest in the unconscious leave literary studies? The dynamic unconscious or psychoanalytic unconscious has been so tightly woven into the history and ethos of our field that rejecting it out of hand seems both unduly hostile and perverse. Yet insofar as the new unconscious has an identity outside of psychology, it seems geared towards decision-making rather than towards the creative imagination (much less the life of the soul). “In some ways, this situation is regrettable,” writes Kihlstrom. “It seems doubtful that there will be too many novels written or too many movies made about semantic priming effects. But then again, the plot lines of both Spellbound and The Manchurian Candidate rely on implicit memory; so perhaps a nonpsychoanalytic formulation of the psychological unconscious still can be pretty interesting, even to artists, writers, and other nonpsychologists.”13 In several respects he is right. Semantic priming and implicit memory are fascinating topics—and they can make for fantastic literary material (see for example the 2000 Christopher Nolan film Memento, a highly accurate portrayal of anterograde amnesia). Yet the new unconscious is, by its very nature, nonrepresentational. This makes it rather difficult to find obvious literary correlates. I will go into this subject in more detail in the next section. But for now I offer as an emblem of the new science this skeptical, tactful, and highly resonant passage from David Foster Wallace’s graduation speech at Kenyon College:

466   The New Unconscious A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. . .. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real—you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue—it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.14

Most simply Wallace is describing how we stumble along inside various egoistic biases. We have a monstrously difficult time seeing beyond them or correcting for the distortions.15 But we could take his words to heart in a larger sense too: they remind us to be patient and tactful in the face of this embryonic line of inquiry. The media’s tendency to make heavy weather over preliminary results has grossly inflated small and tenuous findings.16 In this chapter I will take some tentative steps towards opening up the new unconscious to literary study. First though, partly to draw a contrast with the new unconscious, let me acknowledge how important the psychoanalytic unconscious has been to our field. I remember—or perhaps I only think I remember—when the unconscious was a Northwest Passage to the intellectual world. The humanities graduate students I looked up to in college were obsessed with its power. Like alchemists of old, they knew arcane techniques for hunting its subtle traces. I sat dumb and enthralled as they teased apart the manifest from the latent content in some episode in their lives. Or worked out the ratio of condensation to displacement in a dream or a poetic metaphor. Everyone wanted to understand Lacan’s dense seminars. Heidegger’s fierce critique of Western metaphysics hung about our shoulders like a cloak of power. The campus bar was sacred space. These graduate students wanted to know whether the unconscious was structured like a language (the answer would later turn out to be no). The ones whose families could afford it were in analysis—some for years at a time. Our professors talked openly about transference and countertransference. Everybody seemed passionately launched on an inner journey, well armed with small sharp scalpels for cutting through thick membranes of social webbing. We felt like wild experimentalists, sucking the marrow out of life. I now see that this interest was, as the saying goes, overdetermined. Graduate students the world over match wits with their professors. All this talk of repression and symptoms was court gossip, a witty way of bringing secret motives to light. Perhaps a

Blakey Vermeule   467 better metaphor is nautical. These students were protecting themselves by squirting out an inky language—cloudy and distracting—for controlling a world in which they felt themselves to be vulnerable. Yet the defense was culturally sanctioned, even admired. In those days, humanistic psychotherapists still practiced the talking cure. The wider intellectual culture was awash in grand psychoanalytic ideas. Devotion to psychoanalysis was only to be expected, too, because the graduate students’ mentors admired it so much. Literary theorists in the twentieth century warmly embraced the notion of a robust and directing unconscious. Intellectuals of many stripes battened on the idea that we are cast about by hidden forces—forces that determine our choices, dispositions, and life stories. Most of these forces were thought to originate from within. The picture of the unconscious had been drawn largely from Freud but also from Lacan. Ever since Freud’s theories began to be known, they have cast a wide net among the literati (for example the Bloomsbury group) and an even wider net among those whose writerly beat is to offer up ever more surprising explanations of social issues. Few readers need to be told that, nowadays, psychoanalysis stands in much the same relation to academic mind science as paganism once stood to early Christianity. The new gods have built gleaming cathedrals on the ruins of the old gods’ temples and the old gods have been made into the new devils. The decline of psychoanalysis is by now a familiar story. Freud called himself a scientist. Yet he shied away from evidence that might cast doubt on his theories. In fact to many doubters, psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience. In a pseudoscience, hypotheses count when they are confirmed but not when they are disconfirmed.17 We now know enough about confirmation bias to recognize that Freud vaccinated his system against evidence that might disconfirm parts of it. Scientific hypotheses do not count unless they can be tested. None of Freud’s particular theories have been falsified or verified. Worse, the complexity of his system, with its interlocking parts held together by hydraulic pressures, seems more like wishful model building than science. His theory seems to require inner homunculi, the id, superego, ego each pulling its own levers.18 Psychoanalysis is hardly alone committing this sin. Many science papers truck not just in confirmation bias but also in outright deceit.19 Fortunately the deceivers tend to be caught quickly and brought to heel. Freud, however, actively dissuaded researchers from exploring points of view other than his own. “It may be tempting,” he wrote in an essay on infantile sexuality, “to take the easy course of filling up the gaps in a patient’s memory by making enquiries from the older members of the family: but I cannot advise too strongly against such a technique.... One invariably regrets having made oneself dependent on such information. At the same time confidence in the analysis is shaken and a court of appeal is set up over it. Whatever can be remembered at all will anyhow come to light in the course of further analysis.”20 Freud seems to have violated Pierce’s fundamental maxim: “do not block the way of inquiry.”21 The psychoanalytic unconscious barely seems unconscious at all. Far from being a darkly echoing cavern measureless to man, Freud’s unconscious is more like a garrulous sea captain running at the mouth after a drop too much whiskey. Freud’s unconscious

468   The New Unconscious tells tales and spins yarns. Perhaps its stories don’t entirely make sense at first. But the work of the analyst is less like diving in technical gear in three hundred feet of black water than it is like sitting the captain up in his chair and giving him a few strong slugs of coffee to help him sober up. In Freud’s vision, chains of thought are closely anchored to a fully available psychic life. Slips of the tongue, jokes, intrusive thoughts, fleeting memories, and other bits of mental static can be explained by image patterns lying just beneath the surface. Freud in fact denies any real difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. The real difference, he says, lies in the sort of processing that mental content undergoes: It would put an end to any misunderstandings if, when describing the various kinds of psychic acts from now on, we were to disregard whether they were conscious or unconscious and to classify and correlate them solely in terms of their relation to drives and aims, their composition, and their location in the hierarchy of psychic systems.22

Freud thought that what mattered was less whether a thought was conscious or unconscious than its place in the “hierarchy of psychic systems.” Repression is a violent force, whose “essence consists in turning and keeping something away from consciousness.” The action itself is harsh and controlling, like stopping an unwanted guest from trying to get into one’s house: “I also have to put a permanent guard on the door that I have forbidden the guest to enter, otherwise he would force it open.”23 The unconscious arrives over and over again with its demands. Meanwhile Jung’s unconscious is brimming with totems, living images of “archaic psychic components that have entered the individual psyche.”24 In both traditions, the analyst’s task is to translate—to take a foreign and incoherent stream of images and give them a sort of narrative shape. And yet, a paradox. Even though research scientists have rejected the particulars of Freud’s theory, his greatest prophecies have turned out to be true. The unconscious is both a feature of our brains and far more powerful than psychoanalysis envisioned. The unconscious consists of a wide array of automatic processes and activities of which we are not and cannot become consciously aware. Our automatic processing capacities are vastly larger than the cluster of representations in consciousness. The going metaphor used to be that reason is merely the tip of the iceberg, but now the metaphor is that conscious reason is the snowball or perhaps even the snowflake perched on top of the tip of the iceberg.25 The unconscious includes all of the “internal qualities of mind that affect conscious thought and behavior, without being conscious themselves.”26 This means all the electrical activity generated by neurons; the baroque networks in which those neurons connect; the chemical transmitters moving across synapses; and the stew of hormones in which everything bathes. Neuroscience has started to map the contours of this hidden continent—which is really just the brain itself. The project is enormous. None of us may live long enough to see it completed. Most brain activity is unconscious. Our senses deliver around eleven million pieces of information to our brains every waking moment—of which our eyes deliver ten million. Of those eleven million pieces of

Blakey Vermeule   469 information, we are aware of roughly forty.27 Exponentially more neural signals are processed from our peripheral nervous system than ever reach the threshold of conscious awareness. The degree and number of cognitive process that run outside our conscious awareness are beyond what anybody can imagine, even the researchers who work on it all the time. We literally know not what we do. We are probably lucky that we do not. Automatic processing is a boon to our abilities to get things done without the scourge of meddlesome thought. After all, what good does introspecting about finely tuned adaptations do for us? Evolution hasn’t designed our brains so that we can tinker with them. Thinking would just muck up the works. So runs a prominent line of argument, put recently by David Eagleman: The specialized, optimized circuitry of instinct confers all the benefits of speed and energy efficiency, but at the cost of being further away from the reach of conscious access. As a result, we have as little access to our hardwired cognitive programs as we do to our tennis serve. This situation leads to what Cosmides and Tooby call “instinct blindness”: we are not able to see the instincts that are the very engines of our behavior. These programs are inaccessible to us not because they are unimportant, but because they’re critical. Conscious meddling would do nothing to improve them.28

Most mental processes go on outside of conscious awareness. The inward eye cannot see them. No amount of introspecting will show us the parts of our visual system that, say, help us detect edges or the sizes of objects at a distance. But the same principle applies to most so-called higher-order mental processes as well, processes that we would almost surely take to be integral to who we are. It isn’t just that consciousness is a poor and uncertain guide to the automatic brain—it is rather that consciousness has little actual contact with nonconscious brain processes. Consciousness, to paraphrase Milton’s Satan, is its own space. Consciousness tells stories, giving shape and order to our experience. One of its key tools for ordering experience is explanation, the reliable swinging pendulum of cause and effect. But explanation is its own mechanism—“the phenomenological mark of a particular kind of cognitive system,” writes Alison Gopnik—our cognitive system.29 Explanation may be somewhat self-enclosed, encapsulated off from other brain processes. David Hume was the first philosopher to allege this. He intuited that the metronome-like regularity of cause and effect has its own logic. Furthermore, that structure—let’s call it reason—has only the flimsiest ties to the world around it. Nevertheless reason represents itself as taking an accurate compass heading. Here is how Hume puts the matter (he is discussing the question of how we know, when one billiard ball strikes another, that the second ball will not just go flying crazily off in some random direction): The utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the principles, productive of natural phenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their discovery, nor shall we ever be able to satisfy ourselves, by any particular explication of

470   The New Unconscious them. These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry.30

“These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry”: thus, in a single stroke, Hume put down the pretentions of what has come to be called System 2 (namely slow conscious deliberative rationality, as distinct from System 1, our fast heuristic-based way of taking mental shortcuts) and anticipated the main stance of cognitively inflected social psychology.31 Views like Hume’s began to be worked out systematically in the 1960s and 1970s. In a now-classic paper from 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson asked how well people are able say why they act as they do. Nisbett and Wilson showed that while people firmly believe that they know their own minds, their reasons for behaving or choosing can easily be manipulated by experimenters. Even when we believe we know why we have chosen something very simple, such as a certain pair of stockings laid out on a table in front of us, our choice is driven almost entirely by accidental factors such as where the stockings are placed—factors that the experimental subjects then refuse to believe could have played any part in their choice. These sorts of effects may seem small, but the underlying principle is robust. It has guided the field of unconscious studies for thirty-five years. Essentially Hume was right: our reason gives us an account of why we act as we do, but the story it tells us is usually just that—a story. And evidence is mounting that the story comes online rather late in the deliberative process—it takes a great deal of neuronal activity to crest into a signal that we can recognize. But ever since Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments showing just how late that signal arrives, neuroscientists have debated what role consciousness plays in decision-making.32 For a certain hard reductionist cadre, consciousness plays very little role in decision-making. Tom Wolfe captured this view perfectly in his parable of “the conscious little rock.” A professor at Dupont University (a fictional mash-up of Duke and Stanford) gives a lecture in which he describes an email he’s gotten from a neuroscientist: She said, “Let’s say you pick up a rock and you throw it. And in midflight you give that rock consciousness and a rational mind. That little rock will think it has free will and will give you a highly rational account of why it has decided to take the route it’s taking.” So later on we will get to “the conscious little rock,” and you will be able to decide for yourself: “Am I really . . . merely . . . a conscious little rock?” The answer, incidentally, has implications of incalculable importance for the Homo sapiens’ conception of itself and for the history of the twenty-first century. We may have to change the name of our species to Homo Lapis Deiciecta Conscia—Man, the Conscious Thrown Stone—or, to make it simpler, as my correspondent did, “Man, the Conscious Little Rock.”33

Among neuroscientists, the “conscious little rock” view of humanity is far from universal, but it is certainly widespread. Cognitive science has never been as impressed by the inner world as have those of us who, like Ferdinand Pessoa, listen intently to the music in our soul and try to discern the hidden orchestra. By introspecting, we often

Blakey Vermeule   471 take ourselves to getting at some sort of better, truer, deeper story. Neuroscientists, however, believe that our actions are driven by factors that lie far outside of conscious awareness—social cues, inferences from our contexts, and subliminal suggestions. And by now the orchestra’s handmaidens, self-reports and introspection, are widely viewed as unstable and unreliable. So how can we humanists and inveterate introspectionists make sense of the new science of the unconscious? Here are some suggestions. They are speculative and tentative, as befits a very young field with many different growing parts and robust controversies.34 I will use literary examples to illustrate them. My thesis has several parts. First, the very simplest part. The so-called new unconscious has by definition no ready-made phenomenology, no language in which to unfold its tales (indeed there may simply be no story to tell yet about the relationship between phenomenology and the unconscious). Its very silence stands in sharp contrast to the endlessly nattering unconscious of psychoanalysis. Its silence also challenges a longstanding humanist desire to practice the psychoanalysis of texts. Thus, insofar as humanistic study seeks to be minimally in touch with scientific knowledge, we must abandon our notions of a literate, speaking unconscious. We must do so in the face of a great deal of uncertainty about what sorts of pictures of the hidden brain might come into view. And even more, we must do so not knowing how the hidden brain gives rise to the rich phenomenology of consciousness. Some glimpses have been given of fabulous voyages into uncharted lands, but these are still hazy. For instance, the neural connection between literal and metaphorical now appears to be so tight that symbolic thought might be less a numinous realm of experience than a thin film on our physical beings. Consider just one of many studies showing how close the relationship is between psychic and physical pain. Nathan DeWall and his colleagues at the University of Kentucky have shown that regular doses of Tylenol can relieve hurt feelings from social rejection.35 Evolution is thrifty and makes dual use of the neural correlates of physical and social pain. (For a fascinating take on the relationship between figurative language and neural substrates, see Ralph Savarese, “What Some Autistics Can Teach Us about Poetry: A Neurocosmopolitan Approach,” c­ hapter 19 in this volume.) Second, the speculative part. The unconscious cannot be seen directly or even indirectly. The way to catch it is slant, by noticing how consciousness makes patterns and to try to figure out what motivates those patterns. Consciousness makes patterns but it also leaves noticeable gaps. Consciousness confabulates—it tells stories. To look for the unconscious is to try to understand what those patterns are and why they take shape. What sorts of patterns do our minds intuitively reach for and why? What motivates the stories we tell? When does the smooth surface of consciousness break down, perhaps blowing apart temporarily and then coalescing again? And finally, how do storytellers and fiction makers make use of or resist those intuitive patterns? The tricky part is this: understanding and storytelling are, of course, conscious. Thus it is doubly important not to attribute phenomenological patterns to an inherently nonphenomenological state. Fortunately the range and spread of literary examples that can help us explore these questions is infinite. Consider the matter of consciousness as sheer confabulation. An

472   The New Unconscious author, Leo Tolstoy, mocks his main character, Pierre Bezukhov, for essentially being a “conscious little rock”—for having no idea why he acts the way he does, even though a welter of reasons rush through his mind: “It would be nice to go to Kuragin’s,” he thought. But at once he remembered the word of honor he had given Prince Andrei not to visit Kuragin. But at once, as happens with so-called characterless people, he desired so passionately to experience again that dissolute life so familiar to him, that he decided to go. And at once the thought occurred to him that the word he had given meant nothing, because before giving his word to Prince Andrei, he had also given Prince Anatole his word that he would be there; finally he thought that all these words of honor were mere conventions, with no definite meaning, especially if you considered that you might die the next day, or something so extraordinary might happen to you that there would no longer be either honor or dishonor. That sort of reasoning often came to Pierre, destroying all his decisions and suppositions. He went to Kuragin’s.36

Tolstoy sees his feckless hero as a world-class rationalizer. His desire to go to the party at Kuragin’s lead his reasons around like a mule on a string. The mule, being good natured and obliging, supports what its master tells it to do. Consciousness, Tolstoy implies, turns out to be little more than a clever way of justifying the sorts of things Pierre wants to do anyway. Here are two brief literary glimpses into the unconscious mind. The first is from neuroscience: a visual illusion called the flash lag effect. When a flash is overlaid on a quickly moving object, we see the flash as lagging slightly behind the object. In fact the flash and the moving object never diverge—they just seem to do so because our visual system waits something like eighty milliseconds to integrate all the stimuli it perceives. (A fascinating upshot of this research is that we actually live a few microseconds in the past—and tall people live even more in the past than short people do.) Because the flash surprises us, we don’t integrate it with other stimuli so it lags behind.37 I listened to David Eagleman talk about his research into the flash lag effect in October 2012. It struck me that Milton had worked the same effect into the beginning of Paradise Lost, and indeed for some of the same reasons that neuroscience has gotten interested in it. Eagleman tells the story about falling off a roof when he was a boy and noticing that time seemed to slow down. That was when he started to wonder how the brain constructs time. What he discovered is that physical time and subjective time can easily come apart. Sights and sounds arrive in a syncopated fashion. Subjective time filters and smooths the stuttering mass of sensory data and binds it all up into a coherent story. The brain makes predictions about where moving objects are likely to be and retrospectively gives order to incoming stimuli. In synchronizing incoming information, the brain gives us the illusion that space and time are one continuous whole. Think of a film where the soundtrack and the images are slightly uncoupled: consciousness effectively couples them again. But clever designers of visual effects can puncture the illusion, and so Eagleman has designed elaborate experiments that involve throwing his graduate students off high towers to measure how freefalling uncouples their sense of time.

Blakey Vermeule   473 Milton designed an imaginary cosmos rather a science experiment, but some of his insights into time and space are similar to Eagleman’s. For Milton, Satan is the great disrupter of time and space. In a scene from Book 1 of Paradise Lost, the devils are talking. One of them stops. “He scarce had ceas’t when the superiour Fiend” (namely Satan) “was moving toward the shoar.” Milton mixes his tenses—the past together with the durative. But then Satan turns out to be moving so quickly that language can’t capture his speed and he gives off the flash lag effect, its light following behind in Satan’s wake: “his ponderous shield / Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, / Behind him cast.” Into this sudden breach rush a flood of similes: the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views At Ev’ning from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe. His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand, He walkt with to support uneasie steps.38

Readers of Milton will know that these elaborate similes—Galileo with his telescope, a tall Norwegian pine the size of a mast but here reduced to a mere wand—are Satan-scaling machines—or to put it another way, the poet’s attempts to show what Satan looks like to puny human faculties. Milton believes that poetry, particularly an epic poetry rich in similes, can best pull off this feat (similes are thus an especially Satanic mode). But the feat is inherently impossible, and so the reader hops on board a simile only to find herself slipping through trap doors (the simile makes no sense) and hidden portals into further similes, all of which are designed to put pressure on our ability to form analogies (“to compare great things to small”). Even epic poetry stumbles against Satan’s size—hence Milton’s almost manic need to pile on simile after simile. Satan is the unknown, that which cannot be apprehended by the puny capacities of human beings. In his presence, meaning and categories break down—a process that begins with that rather simple visual illusion, the flash lag effect. The next example, from the world of heuristics and biases, is more ambiguous— because it is conscious, or can become so. Indeed heuristics and biases research relies on a fluid boundary between the unconscious and the conscious mind, or in their jargon, Systems 1 (the fast automatic effortless mind) and 2 (the slow effortful attentive and conscious mind). Systems 1 and 2 engage in constant crosstalk. When we learn any new skill—typing or driving, for example—the effort we put in feels enormous. We have to focus painstakingly on every part of the skill until it becomes automatic. Kahneman writes: The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance. The arrangement works well most of the time

474   The New Unconscious because System 1 is generally very good at what it does: its models of familiar situations are accurate, its short-term predictions are usually accurate as well, and its initial reactions to challenges are swift and generally appropriate. System 1 has biases, however, systematic errors that it is prone to make in specified circumstances.39

One such bias in System 1 is the “I knew it all along” effect, otherwise known as reading the outcome of an event back into the details of its unfolding. Its official name is the “hindsight bias” and it seems to be a fairly universal feature of how we come to terms with surprising events.40 A few vignettes: my hairdresser says that she must have intuited that her husband was having an affair. Although it shocked her terribly to find out, suddenly a number of niggling little details made sense. The distant look in his eye, the furtiveness about his cell phone, the sudden need for out-of-town trips. But when he handed her his iPhone with a message from his girlfriend (an apparent accident, though of course not one), a story that could be sidestepped living forward could not be sidestepped understood backwards. The feeling flashed through her that she had known it all along. The circus barker on the stock channel makes a 1%-style living by exploiting the hindsight bias. He puts on a big red nose and holds up an air horn and throws chairs around the set. He touts stocks in a rapid-fire patter. He stuns everyone with a wall of sound. Later on he will say, “See? My stock picks were correct,” only mentioning the ones that went up. He forgets to mention the ones that went down. The glaring eye of the Internet makes it harder for him to run away from his earlier sayings. Nonetheless his detractors find it devilishly hard to pin anything on him. He just surfs away on the information tide. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, suddenly discovers that she is in love with a man she has known since childhood. The feeling “darted through her, with the speed of an arrow.”41 But rather than admit that she was wrong about what she felt before (which was hard to gauge), rather than be chastened, she quickly retells the story of how she felt to bring the story of her life into accord with how she feels now. She knew it all along. The hindsight bias was named by Baruch Fischhoff in 1975—who also dubbed it, in this magical phrase, “creeping determinism.”42 Fischhoff was a graduate student in psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an American deeply immersed in Zionist politics. Those were heady days for the heuristics and biases crowd. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had begun an ambitious research program that—we can now say with perfect hindsight—would yield the most consequential fruit—inventing a new academic field, turning out new research agendas across the social sciences, and garnering a Nobel Prize. But well before any of that was in the works, Baruch Fischhoff needed a topic. All the talk around him was about only a few key heuristics—availability, representativeness, anchoring, and adjustment.43 But really the talk was about our “sense-making heuristic.”44 From his study of politics, he knew that people were much more often wise after the fact than before (“If we’re so prescient,” he remembers wondering, “why aren’t we running the world?”)45 His first experiments were about politics.

Blakey Vermeule   475 He began with a simple before/after questionnaire about Nixon’s visit to China, testing whether people were likely to misremember their former predictions in the light of how things turned out. Then he fictionalized several battles from the history of the British in India—battles with the Gurkas, a group of Nepalese Hindus who clashed repeatedly with the British East India Company army in the early nineteenth century. Fischhoff wrote up stories in which the Gurkas won and in which the British won, and found that people were more likely to retrospectively pick out certain features of the battles as being explanatorily salient based on the outcome.46 So what is the hindsight bias exactly? Simply put, it is the tendency to detect a pattern in light of the most recent turn of events. So for instance, if I believe that my destiny was to have been an English professor, I’m more likely to remember the parts of my childhood spent reading books than I am to recall all the years I tried to sell Goldman Sachs– style derivatives to the other children in the neighborhood. But the hindsight bias goes deeper than that. Here is Daniel Kahneman: A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.47

I think he’s right about this. I remember very clearly when I was a child thinking that adults didn’t understand my perspective, that they imposed arbitrary and unfair rules. More importantly, I remember very explicitly pledging to myself that I would always remember how I felt then and take any child’s side no matter what. But once I began to have some actual responsibility for children, I instantly broke my pledge. Try as I might I can’t think my way back into the righteous child’s point of view, just as I cannot think my way back into the point of view of any of the many younger versions of myself who had different values and beliefs from the ones I hold now. Kahneman also has this cautionary tale about the social costs of hindsight bias: Hindsight bias has pernicious effects on the evaluations of decision makers. It leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad. Consider a low-risk surgical intervention in which an unpredictable accident occurred that caused the patient’s death. The jury will be prone to believe, after the fact, that the operation was actually risky and that the doctor who ordered it should have known better. This outcome bias makes it almost impossible to evaluate a decision properly—in terms of the beliefs that were reasonable when the decision was made. Hindsight is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others—physicians, financial advisers, third-base coaches, CEOs, social workers, diplomats, politicians. We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. There is a clear outcome bias. When the outcomes are bad, the clients often blame their agents for not seeing the handwriting on the wall—forgetting that it was written in invisible ink that became legible only afterward. Actions that seemed prudent in foresight can look irresponsibly negligent in hindsight.”48

476   The New Unconscious All this explains why if you’ve ever had the Schopenhauer-style intuition that the world is converging on a state where all decisions are massively processed through the guts of a bureaucracy and served up to us by the bureaucracy’s fiendish agent “the committee” (though I myself have never had such an intuition), you are probably right. As Kahneman goes on to explain, the surest way to inoculate yourself against the easy-tomake but impossible-to-refute charge that you should have known it all along is to adhere to something called “standard operating procedure”—or to use less Orwellian language, groupthink: Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions—and to an extreme reluctance to take risks. As malpractice litigation became more common, physicians changed their procedures in multiple ways: ordered more tests, referred more cases to specialists, applied conventional treatments even when they were unlikely to help. These actions protected the physicians more than they benefited the patients, creating the potential for conflicts of interest. Increased accountability is a mixed blessing. Although hindsight and the outcome bias generally foster risk aversion, they also bring undeserved rewards to irresponsible risk seekers, such as a general or an entrepreneur who took a crazy gamble and won. Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak. A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness.49

Our own hindsight bias is an apparently enlightened state of mind from which it is always tempting to moralize about things that other people should or should not have done. Kahneman rightly points out that “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S”—the President’s Daily Brief from August 6, 2001—looked like a red glaring siren of a signal a mere thirty-six days later. But at the time she received the briefing, the national security advisor could not have seen the warning as anything other than one piece of data among many.50 Thus Monday morning quarterbacking, however tempting, is almost certainly misguided. A further point: Jane Austen was having a bit of a laugh at Emma’s Don Quixote–like penchant to weave her own romantic fantasies. But when Emma suddenly discovers that she loves Mr. Knightly and then reorients her past to support her new point of view, she is in fact acting rationally. For the mind makes inferences according to the best evidence it has—indeed the mind is brutally rational in all the ways it needs to be, if not rational by mathematical standards. The cognitive biases that are so easy to second-guess are almost certainly byproducts of perfectly adaptively rational cognitive strategies.51 The hindsight bias is a perfect case in point. Our memories are notoriously imperfect. When we recall past events, we largely reconstruct our experience after the fact and incorporate our current knowledge into the story we tell. This means that we weight the story of our experience towards its ending. This procedure is almost perfectly rational in an evolutionary sense: after all, “Remembering the real state of affairs (e.g., whether something is true or

Blakey Vermeule   477 really happened) is generally more important than remembering what one thought about it before learning the truth.”52 As our environment changes, we do better to pay closer attention to more recent developments than to maintain a perfectly accurate record of all the things we used to think.53 Unfortunately for us, other people aren’t as charitable towards the evolution in our beliefs—as anybody who has even very loving siblings can testify, families don’t update our old files as quickly as we might like. Thus the unwitting tone of many of these new unconscious books verges on triumphant assertion that our brains are really idiots, that we are easily fooled. And they are right. We are easily fooled, but not so much in real time. Rather we are fooled in artificial situations—such as laboratory experiments—that slow time down and watch us think. A final example. The English literary canon starts off with a joke about automaticity. Automaticity is one of the most sensitive topics to arise out of unconscious research. And it isn’t hard to see why: “Automaticity refers to control of one’s internal psychological processes by external stimuli and events in one’s immediate environment, often without knowledge or awareness of such control; automatic phenomena are usually contrasted with those processes that are consciously or intentionally put into operation.”54 This definition is just understated enough to deflect the obvious discomfort: the prospect of “one’s internal psychological processes” being controlled by “external stimuli and events in one’s immediate environment, often without knowledge or awareness of such control” is the stuff of endless horror movies featuring zombies, parasites, space aliens, germs. Yet decades of social psychology research has shown us that ordinary healthy individuals can easily be controlled by external stimuli and events. These examples range from the innocuous (just pasting the blurred image of a pair of eyes over a jar where people leave money for coffee and tea will prompt a good deal more honesty) to the tragic (the instinct to coordinate with other people in a disaster turns out to have been a fatal part of the reason people didn’t leave their desks after the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11).55 Geoffrey Chaucer makes automaticity into a joke. In the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, spring comes, nature goes into overdrive, and small birds start to sing. Lust runs through their veins like electric sap. Once the sap hits their feathered little nervous systems, they make melodies and sleep all night with their eyes open. (How uncomfortable.) Then people long to go on pilgrimages to seek the holy blissful martyr who had helped them when they were sick. The joke rests in that tiny conjunction “then.” The people are just like the birds, only they don’t know it. The season is the reason. Religious desire is bird lust served up with a giant helping of theology. If the pilgrims were like most other humans, they would vigorously reject the analogy. Very few humans can even entertain it. After all, the pilgrims have reasons, values, and higher motives. They are seeking the unseen, the ineffable. But the invisible is certainly a strange thing to want. At least the birds, stiff and open-eyed though they are, can find feathered partners to tread on all night. Their desires hook pretty comfortably onto the world they are in. Humans, by contrast, seem weirdly misaligned. They want something they cannot see or touch, such as a long-dead martyr. Instead of running straight to their goal, they gather together in a group and set off on a meandering journey. What’s worse,

478   The New Unconscious they tell stories. Many of the stories are about sex. A few of the pilgrims are drunk. Others are uncooperative. From time to time, they pick on each other—one drunken fellow even tells another that he wishes he could rip off his balls and stuff them in a barrel of pig shit. When I was first teaching Chaucer I used to think that this kind of joke, which will be repeated again and again throughout English literature, was an instance of the sort of satire at which British writers excel. Satire rubs our noses in our animal nature. Not only are we animals but we are animals who don’t seem to fit as neatly into our ecological niche as other animals do. But I now think that the questions about automaticity are not merely snarky play, though satire may serve as a defense. English writers strike me as genuinely posing questions about how much free will we have, how much of our behavior is determined by our circumstances, and whether character is fixed or malleable. Questions, in short, about our own individuality and its relation to our circumstances. One of the sweetest and saddest moments in Paradise Lost is when Satan finds himself becoming good almost by accident. He sets off to encounter Eve, who is working alone. When he sees her, he is so overwhelmed by her beauty that he goes into a kind of trance: That space the Evil one abstracted stood From his own evil, and for the time remaind Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm’d, Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge.

Of course however good Satan might stupidly be, he is in fact not a character but a personification—hence he can never move too far from the line of his own evil. But the hot Hell that alwayes in him burnes, Though in mid Heav’n, soon ended his delight, And tortures him now more, the more he sees Of pleasure not for him ordain’d: then soon Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites.56

How far are we able to move from our own line? How much of a role do we play in our own choices? Literature, it turns out in hindsight, got there first.

Notes 1. The term “new unconscious” refers, in part, to a volume of the same title: Ran R. Hassin, James S.  Uleman, and John A.  Bargh, eds., The New Unconscious (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2006). 2. Daniel L.  Schacter, Daniel T.  Gilbert, and Daniel M.  Wegner, Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2010), 188. 3. Tom Bartlett, “Power of Suggestion,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2013, http://chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/.

Blakey Vermeule   479 4. Gary Greenberg, “The Dumbest Story Ever Told: On David Brooks,” The Nation, May 18, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/article/160752/dumbest-story-ever-told-david-brooks. 5. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (London: HarperCollins, 2011). 6. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So:  The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991). 7. Dean Buonomano, Brain Bugs:  How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives (New  York:  W. W. Norton, 2012). 8. Thomas E. Kida, Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking (New York: Prometheus Books, 2006). 9. David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself, Reprint (New York: Gotham, 2012). 10. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 24. 11. John F. Kihlstrom, Terrence M. Barnhardt, and Douglas J. Tataryn, “The Psychological Unconscious: Found, Lost, and Regained,” American Psychologist 47, no. 6 (1992): 789. 12. Lawrence E.  Williams and John A.  Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth,” Science 322, no. 5901 (October 24, 2008): 606–7. 13. Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, and Tataryn, “The Psychological Unconscious,” 789. 14. “David Foster Wallace on Life and Work,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008, sec. Books, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html. 15. Delroy Paulhus and Oliver John, “Egoistic and Moralistic Biases in Self-Perception: The Interplay of Self-Deceptive Styles with Basic Traits and Motives,” Journal of Personality 66, no. 6 (1998): 1025–60. 16. For an excellent overview of this issues see Gary Gutting, “What Do Scientific Studies Show?” Opinionator, accessed May 9, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2013/04/25/what-do-scientific-studies-show/. 17. Frank Cioffi, “Claims without Commitments,” in Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, ed. Frederick Crews (New York: Viking, 1998), 118. 18. Timothy D.  Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves:  Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 6–7. 19. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “Diederik Stapel’s Audacious Academic Fraud,” New  York Times, April 26, 2013, sec. Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/ diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html. 20. Cioffi, “Claims without Commitments,” 118. 21. I am grateful to Lanier Anderson for teaching me about this maxim. 22. Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious (New York: Penguin, 2005), 55. 23. Freud, The Unconscious, 45. 24. C. G.  Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989), 23. 25. Timothy D.  Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves:  Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 6. 26. Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh, New Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 27. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, 24. 28. David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 88.

480   The New Unconscious 29. Alison Gopnik, “Explanation as Orgasm,” Minds and Machines 8, no. 1 (February 1, 1998): 101. 30. David Hume, Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings, ed. Stephen Buckle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 32. 31. For an overview of Systems 1 and 2, see Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. 32. Roy Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and Kathleen Vohs, “Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?” Social Science Research Network, December 8, 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/ abstract=1722018. 33. Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 283. 34. Bartlett, “Power of Suggestion.” 35. C. Nathan DeWall et  al., “Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain Behavioral and Neural Evidence,” Psychological Science 21, no. 7 (July 1, 2010): 931–37. 36. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2008), 31. 37. David M.  Eagleman and Terrence J.  Sejnowski, “Motion Signals Bias Localization Judgments: A Unified Explanation for the Flash-lag, Flash-drag, Flash-jump, and Frohlich Illusions,” Journal of Vision 7, no. 4 (March 13, 2007); and David M. Eagleman, “Time and the Brain” (presented at the Stanford Grand Rounds Lecture, Stanford Medical Center, October 4, 2012). 38. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 3rd ed., ed. David Scott Kastan, and Merritt Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 18. 39. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 25. 40. U. Hoffrage, R. Hertwig, and G. Gigerenzer, “Hindsight Bias: A By-product of Knowledge Updating?” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26, no. 3 (2000): 2. 41. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Fiona Stafford (New York: Penguin, 2010), 382. 42. Baruch Fischhoff, “Hindsight ? Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment under Uncertainty,” Quality & Safety in Health Care 12, no. 4 (2003): 304. 43. Baruch Fischhoff, “An Early History of Hindsight Research,” Social Cognition 25, no. 1 (2007): 10. 44. Fischhoff, “Early History,” 11. 45. Fischhoff, “Early History,” 10. 46. Fischhoff, “Early History,” 10. 47. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 202. 48. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 203. 49. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 204–5. 50. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 204. 51. Martie G. Haselton et al., “Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary Perspective on Cognitive Bias,” Social Cognition 27, no. 5 (2009): 733–63. 52. Hoffrage, Hertwig, and Gigerenzer, “Hindsight Bias,” 24. 53. Hoffrage, Hertwig, and Gigerenzer, “Hindisght Bias,” 24. 54. John A. Bargh and Erin L. Williams, “The Automaticity of Social Life,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 1 (2006): 1–4. 55. Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain:  How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 26, 126–28. 56. Milton, Paradise Lost, 279.

Blakey Vermeule   481

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Emma. Edited by Fiona Stafford. New York: Penguin, 2010. Bargh, John A., and Erin L. Williams. “The Automaticity of Social Life.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 1 (2006): 1–4. Bartlett, Tom. “Power of Suggestion.” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2013. http:// chronicle.com/article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907/. Baumeister, Roy, E. J.  Masicampo, and Kathleen Vohs. “Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?” Social Science Research Network, December 8, 2010. http://papers.ssrn.com/ abstract=1722018. Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit. “Diederik Stapel’s Audacious Academic Fraud.” New  York Times, April 26, 2013, sec. Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/ diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html. Buonomano, Dean. Brain Bugs:  How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives. New  York:  W. W. Norton, 2012. Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. London: HarperCollins, 2011. Cioffi, Frank. “Claims without Commitments.” In Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, edited by Frederick Crews, 116–28. New York: Viking, 1998. “David Foster Wallace on Life and Work.” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008, sec. Books. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html. DeWall, C.  Nathan, Geoff MacDonald, Gregory D.  Webster, Carrie L.  Masten, Roy F.  Baumeister, Caitlin Powell, David Combs, et  al. “Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain Behavioral and Neural Evidence.” Psychological Science 21, no. 7 (July 1, 2010):  931–37. doi:10.1177/0956797610374741. Eagleman, David M. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Eagleman, David M. “Time and the Brain.” Presented at the Stanford Grand Rounds Lecture, Stanford Medical Center, October 4, 2012. Eagleman, David M., and Terrence J.  Sejnowski. “Motion Signals Bias Localization Judgments: A Unified Explanation for the Flash-Lag, Flash-Drag, Flash-Jump, and Frohlich Illusions.” Journal of Vision 7, no. 4 (March 13, 2007). doi:10.1167/7.4.3. Fischhoff, Baruch. “Hindsight? Foresight:  The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment under Uncertainty.” Quality and Safety in Health Care 12, no. 4 (2003): 304–12. doi:10.1136/ qhc.12.4.304. Fischhoff, Baruch. “An Early History of Hindsight Research.” Social Cognition 25, no. 1 (2007): 10–13. doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.1.10. Freud, Sigmund. The Unconscious. New York: Penguin, 2005. Gilovich, Thomas. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press, 1991. Gopnik, Alison. “Explanation as Orgasm.” Minds and Machines 8, no. 1 (February 1, 1998): 101–18. doi:10.1023/A:1008290415597. Greenberg, Gary. “The Dumbest Story Ever Told: On David Brooks.” The Nation, May 18, 2011. http://www.thenation.com/article/160752/dumbest-story-ever-told-david-brooks. Gutting, Gary. “What Do Scientific Studies Show?” Opinionator. Accessed May 9, 2013. http:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/what-do-scientific-studies-show/. Haselton, Martie G., Gregory A.  Bryant, Andreas Wilke, David A.  Frederick, Andrew Galperin, Willem E. Frankenhuis, and Tyler Moore. “Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary

482   The New Unconscious Perspective on Cognitive Bias.” Social Cognition 27, no. 5 (2009):  733–63. doi:10.1521/ soco.2009.27.5.733. Hassin, Ran R., James S.  Uleman, and John A.  Bargh, eds. The New Unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hoffrage, U., R. Hertwig, and G. Gigerenzer. “Hindsight Bias: A By-product of Knowledge Updating?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26, no. 3 (2000): 566–81. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings. Edited by Stephen Buckle. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Edited by Aniela Jaffe. Translated by Clara Winston and Richard Winston. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1989. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Kida, Thomas E. Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006. Kihlstrom, John F., Terrence M.  Barnhardt, and Douglas J.  Tataryn. “The Psychological Unconscious: Found, Lost, and Regained.” American Psychologist 47, no. 6 (1992): 788–91. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.47.6.788. McRaney, David. You Are Not So Smart:  Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself. New York: Gotham, 2012. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 3rd ed. Ed. David Scott Kastan and Merritt Yerkes Hughes. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005. Paulhus, Delroy, and Oliver John. “Egoistic and Moralistic Biases in Self-Perception:  The Interplay of Self-Deceptive Styles with Basic Traits and Motives.” Journal of Personality 66, no. 6 (1998): 1025–60. Schacter, Daniel L., Daniel T.  Gilbert, and Daniel M.  Wegner. Psychology. 2nd ed. new York: Worth Publishers, 2010. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 2008. Vedantam, Shankar. The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. Williams, Lawrence E., and John A.  Bargh. “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth.” Science 322, no. 5901 (October 24, 2008):  606–7. doi:10.1126/ science.1162548. Wilson, Timothy D. Strangers to Ourselves  :  Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Wolfe, Tom. I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Chapter 23

F ilm makers as Fol k Psychol o g i sts How Filmmakers Exploit Cognitive Biases as an Aspect of Cinematic Narration, Characterization, and Spectatorship Je ff Smi th

In a particularly powerful scene from season 3 of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, a young Bugsy Siegel shoots up the inside of a hotel in an attempt to kill Nucky Thompson’s rival, Gyp Rosetti. Thompson’s boss, Arnold Rothstein, has hired Siegel as a “hit man,” and although he kills several of Rosetti’s bodyguards as well as a diner waitress who indulges Rosetti’s passion for autoerotic asphyxiation, the attack leaves Rosetti naked and bloody, but essentially unharmed. Although we do not see Rothstein and Thompson plotting this attack, the audience surmises that they believe that Siegel can get past Rosetti’s security if he disguises himself as an adolescent boy. Rosetti is protected by a phalanx of bodyguards, but they don’t blink an eye when Siegel walks past them since they don’t anticipate such a lethal attack coming from such an apparently young and small assailant. Rothstein and Thompson’s ruse nearly works because Rosetti’s bodyguards are guilty of fundamental attribution error. Fundamental attribution error is a particular kind of cognitive bias that encourages people to infer behaviors from underlying internal traits and dispositional attributes rather than from external, situational factors.1 Rosetti’s bodyguards know that his rivals might mount an attack. Indeed, that is the very reason that they’ve been hired to protect him. But these bodyguards ignore these situational factors as they watch Siegel walking down the hallway toward them. They see a young boy, and, on the basis of immediately perceived dispositional attributes, they unthinkingly conclude that he poses no threat. In fact, the fundamental attribution error is so strong in this instance that it simply overrides certain situational elements that should tip them off to the impending assault. Although it is true that the bodyguards expect

484    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists a young newsboy to deliver newspapers directly to Rosetti’s room, they don’t detect Siegel’s intent, even when they recognize that he is not the same boy that Rosetti had hired earlier in the diner. One of the bodyguards even asks Siegel where the other boy is. The assassin responds that the boy is sick and that, as his cousin, he agreed to take over his route for the night. This brief interchange should signal to the bodyguards that something is amiss. But Siegel’s youthful appearance and diminutive stature act as apparent attributes that lull the protection team into a false sense of security. Yet it is not just Rosetti’s bodyguards that are taken in by Rothstein and Thompson’s ruse. The viewer, too, is misled by fundamental attribution error. When the bullets start flying, we are just as surprised as Rosetti’s protection team. Undoubtedly, some of the surprise stems from the fact that viewers are prone to the same biases and fallacies as the characters on screen, but the audience’s error in judgment is nudged along by particular storytelling and stylistic conventions that are utilized by the episode’s director, Timothy Van Patten. Two aspects of the sequence prove to be of particular importance here. First, in the diner scene early in the episode, when Rosetti engages the services of the newsboy, it establishes an appointment between them, a common tactic used by screenwriters to strengthen a story’s temporal structure and causal sequence. Thus, when we see Siegel approach the Kinneret Lodge where Rosetti is hiding out, we assume that this is simply the resolution of a dangling cause established earlier. (It is, in fact; it’s just not the same dangling cause that we think.) Similarly, as Siegel approaches the Lodge’s entrance, the camera tracks with him, framing him from the back. This type of camera movement is frequently used to maintain a character’s position within the frame as he passes through long, labyrinthine spaces. Consequently, the camera’s movement and position appear to be quite conventional as they follow Siegel’s path toward the door of Rosetti’s room. The decision to frame Siegel from behind, however, plays an additional strategic role by denying us visual access to the character’s face. The camera position, thus, nudges us toward seeing Siegel as a particular social type based on the visual cues evident from his costume and the prop newspaper that he carries. Like the bodyguards, we see “newsboy” rather than “mobster.” To be sure, Van Patten relies on the fact that the viewer will make a quick and dirty assumption based on the limited information provided by the character’s appearance. But Van Patten also influences our inferential processes by denying us the opportunity to recognize Siegel as an individuated character. This sequence from Boardwalk Empire is a brief, but telling example of the way that filmmakers sometimes act as folk psychologists, anticipating the kinds of responses that viewers are likely to have to their work. Filmmakers design their products to produce particular kinds of cognitive and emotional responses from spectators, and in doing so, they assume that audiences will employ certain types of inferential routines when they engage with the film’s characters and situation. Filmmakers make guesses about how viewers will respond to their work, not on the basis of scientific knowledge about the way individuals process information, but rather through more commonsensical assumptions regarding the mental habits that people have when they try to understand another person’s thoughts, motivations, intentions, and emotions.

Jeff Smith   485 Thus, when making a film, a director literally makes dozens of different creative decisions that ultimately impact viewer comprehension of the story that it tells. As the aforementioned example from Boardwalk Empire illustrates, filmmakers sometimes rely on such mental habits to temporarily mislead viewers, confident that they will later surprise them when the characters’ real situation or circumstance is revealed. Such movie moments are of particular interest to film scholars in that they show how filmmakers can exploit particular types of cognitive biases in order to create effects of curiosity, suspense, and surprise among audience members. These cognitive biases have long been an important research topic among social psychologists and, more recently, have garnered the attention of popular science writers. David McRaney, for example, has created a blog called “You Are Not So Smart” that catalogs about twenty-five of these cognitive biases and heuristics, offering a user-friendly introduction to the way that these shape people’s thoughts and behavior in unexpected, and even irrational, ways.2 Although McRaney treats the topic comically, calling his website a “celebration of self-delusion,” filmmakers draw upon this repertoire of mental habits and heuristics to create the kinds of pleasures that audiences more generally associate with the experience of fiction. As the extensive literature on the topic indicates, the role of cognitive biases in film characterization and spectatorship is much too large to be adequately covered in a single chapter. For that reason, this chapter focuses on “peak-end rule” and duration neglect as a particular aspect viewer’s experience of film’s temporality. The remainder of this chapter is broken down into three sections. After a brief discussion of previous scholarship on folk psychology in film studies, the chapter summarizes the literature on the “peak-end rule,” especially the way that experiences, including the viewing of films, are encoded into memory according to the rubrics of peak emotional intensity and the recency effect. The last section of the chapter features an analysis of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1981) that discusses it in relation to the “James Dean effect,” a cognitive bias that suggests the importance of duration neglect in individual judgments about total life happiness.

Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists In an excellent overview of the role played by folk psychology in filmmaking, viewing, criticism, and scholarship, Carl Plantinga argues that the application of intuitive or common-sense psychology is “not only pervasive, but should be acknowledged as a necessary and important source of insight into films.”3 At its most basic level, audiences employ folk psychology to understand narratives insofar as they rely on such principles to comprehend character psychology and behavior. In other words, when viewers try to make sense of why characters do what they do, they rely on an intuitive sense of their thoughts, desires, motivations, and intentions. Traditionally, Hollywood has structured its stories around goal-oriented protagonists because they know that audiences readily

486    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists understand the way that particular aims and predispositions bear on a character’s articulation of explicit or implicit goals. Yet, although folk psychology is unquestionably central to the way audiences understand characters, Plantinga also notes that folk psychology proves to be a vital wellspring of insight for filmmakers and critics, both of whom maintain an intuitive sense of how audiences respond to movies. Film directors and screenwriters, for example, have developed a significant body of craft knowledge and tradition around their shared understanding of the way particular techniques and devices generate effects in spectators. Relying on an intuitive sense of a viewer’s inferential processes and emotional responses, filmmakers design their stories with the expectation that certain moments in them will make audiences laugh, cry, or clutch their armrests until their knuckles become white. More important perhaps, filmmakers also anticipate the way audiences make inferences and draw conclusions about the characters and situations they see in a film, enabling directors and screenwriters to create effects of suspense and surprise. Critics, too, speculate about the particular kinds of effects that films have on audiences, sometimes conjecturing about the way a viewer’s sympathies and concerns are directed toward one character or another. As Plantinga points out, certain strands of film scholarship elevate critical conjecture about spectatorial responses into broad generalizations about film’s role within larger social and cultural ideologies.4 Plantinga argues that the viewer’s deployment of folk psychological principles in their engagement with films can be grasped from an evolutionary perspective. Citing the work of Brian Boyd and Lisa Zunshine, Plantinga contends that “one of the fundamental uses of narrative fiction is to consider and learn from the situations of persons in relation to their beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and behavior.”5 Plantinga’s account of folk psychology in the cinema offers a thorough overview of the role it plays in a wide array of mental activities performed by characters, filmmakers, viewers, and critics. This chapter, however, focuses on a particular type of relation between filmmakers and audiences, namely the way that the former exploits the cognitive biases and heuristics of the latter in order to shape and influence their judgments about the cinematic experience. Although Plantinga does not specify the degree to which folk psychology relies on top-down or bottom-up perceptual and cognitive processes, his description of it at the end of his chapter as “a talent, a sensitivity, and a learned skill” implies that the application of folk psychological principles are at least partly dependent upon the viewer’s self-conscious awareness of others’ actions and motivations. This chapter considers an aspect of the viewer’s activity that might be neglected or overlooked by the construal of folk psychology within a cognitivist account of film spectatorship. When filmmakers strive to fool or mislead audiences, they must anticipate the specific kinds of judgment errors that viewers are likely to make. In doing so, filmmakers themselves function as folk psychologists, relying on an intuitive sense of the biases and heuristics that are part and parcel of our cognitive makeup in order to nudge the viewer toward particular kinds of inferential missteps. Such unconscious mental operations, thus, provide an important source of insight regarding how viewers gauge their own level of interest in a film and how they evaluate characters’ success or failure in achieving their goals.

Jeff Smith   487 In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman discusses a number of ways in which the brain’s processing of information depends upon such cognitive biases and heuristics.6 For Kahneman, because our conscious attention is a limited resource, automatic and involuntary mental activities serve an important function in the way we parse and process perceptual data. These unconscious activities are efficient in that they furnish a set of default assumptions that govern our perceptions, actions, and behaviors, but they also have a kind of built-in error rate in the way that they function. Whereas these unconscious processes produce fast and accurate judgments much of the time, these biases can be nudged toward certain occasional miscalculations that are, to say the least, counterintuitive. In his discussion of cognitive biases and heuristics, Kahneman highlights myriad factors that can influence our judgments in predictably irrational ways, including several types of framing and anchoring effects. The remainder of this chapter analyzes one particular unconscious heuristic described by Kahneman, namely the role of the “peak-end” rule in film narration and spectatorship.

Peak-End Rule and Duration Neglect This section argues that viewers’ experience of time in the cinema might be usefully understood in relation to a phenomenon that psychologists refer to as the “peak-end” rule. Don Redelmeier, a physician and researcher, and Daniel Kahneman, a social psychologist, coined the term “peak-end” rule to explain statistical findings from an experiment the pair conducted using patients undergoing colonoscopy procedures.7 Nowadays, colonoscopies are performed both with anesthetic and with amnesic drugs so that patients do not even remember the pain they experience during the procedure itself. But Redelmeier and Kahneman conducted their experiment in the early 1990s, a time when colonoscopies were thought to be a particularly unpleasant diagnostic test. Redelmeier and Kahneman’s study involved 154 patients, who were prompted to evaluate their level of pain every 60 seconds. The duration of the colonoscopies varied wildly from patient to patient with the shortest duration lasting only four minutes and the longest lasting for more than an hour. When the procedure was over, patients were asked to rate “the total amount of pain” they experienced overall. Redelmeier and Kahneman’s wording of this question was designed to encourage patients to assess the total level of pain in terms of a hedonimeter—that is, an imaginary instrument that measures an individual’s levels of pleasure or pain at any given moment. Redelmeier and Kahneman expected that the patients’ real-time and retrospective assessments of their levels of pain would more or less match up. But the statistical analysis showed nothing of the sort. Instead, the retrospective reports of patients tended to highlight and weight two singular moments from their experience: the peak—that is, the highest level of pain the patient experienced during the procedure—and the end. Moreover, Redelmeier and Kahneman’s analysis showed that the level of pain patients experienced at the end of their procedures was more significant to their retrospective

488    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists assessments than was the duration of the procedure itself. Redelmeier and Kahneman illustrate this through the experiences of two patients, who experienced the same peak levels of pain (an 8 on a 10-point scale), but experienced different levels of intensity at the end of their colonoscopies. Patient A had a relatively short procedure (less than 10 minutes), but because it ended badly, the patient’s final report of pain level was a 7. In contrast, Patient B had a much longer colonoscopy (about 25 minutes), but ended the procedure with a pain level that was only 1. Due to the phenomena of peak-end rule and duration neglect, Patient A retrospectively reported a higher overall level of pain and had a much worse memory of the episode even though Patient B experienced a greater quantity of pain from a real-time perspective.8 This study, along with several others, has led Kahneman to conclude there are important differences between the “experiencing self ” and the “remembering self ”: Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions.9

As Kahneman’s quote indicates, our memories of experiences play a powerful role in future decisions that we make, even though the way that memory is encoded may be flawed or even wrong. Although the experiment described above involved mostly the pain side of the “hedonimeter,” Kahneman’s work has important implications for our memories of pleasurable experiences, especially those arising from our engagement with aesthetic objects, including films. In applying the “peak-end” rule to the way we watch movies, we might formulate the following hypotheses: Viewers will weight those moments of a film that are experienced as hedonic peaks more heavily in their retrospective assessment of the movie’s entertainment value. Viewers will not be bothered by a movie’s length if there are enough hedonic peaks sprinkled throughout its running time and if there is a strong peak experience at the film’s end. Viewers will weight the climaxes of films inordinately, relying on the film’s final resolution of the plot to shape their overall experience. Although each of these hypotheses is, in principle, testable, there appears to be enough anecdotal evidence to support the assertion that each contains at least a grain of truth. For example, let’s examine more closely the notion that viewers will weight hedonic peaks more heavily in their judgments about a film’s entertainment value. Perhaps this claim is so obvious as to be uncontroversial. Certainly, it stands to reason that viewers will have easier recall of the funniest scenes in comedies, the scariest scenes in horror films, and the most thrilling stunts and chases in action films. For viewers of The Godfather, it seems a safe assumption that the scenes of Sonny’s grisly death at the

Jeff Smith   489 tollbooth and Michael’s murder of Solozzo and Captain McCluskey are more readily available to recall than, say, the dialogue-heavy scene in which the Corleones discuss their strategy to avenge the attempted murder of Don Vito. Moreover, if Kahneman is right about the peak-end rule, then an important component of these hedonic peaks is the affective charge that is delivered to viewers at these moments. The emotional surge that is felt becomes a part of the way that these peak moments are stored in our memory, and, in turn, strongly colors the viewer’s overall retrospective experience. Of course, critics and audiences frequently capture this aspect of Hollywood-style cinema in their descriptions of a movie as a “rollercoaster ride.” As a metaphor, the analogy between films and rollercoasters beautifully captures the sense of the motion picture experience as one structured around particular hedonic peaks. Filmmakers themselves also reinforce this idea by describing the ways in which films are designed to have these kinds of emotional peaks and valleys. In Storytelling in the New Hollywood, Kristin Thompson highlights the importance of “bumps” and “whams” in Hollywood narratives. These terms refer to plot twists or brief action scenes that are primarily designed to elicit the viewer’s excitement irrespective of whether or not they advance the plot.10 Additionally, many of the Hollywood screenwriting manuals that preach the virtues of three-act structure emphasize the importance of the protagonist’s reversal of fortunes from the end of act 2 to the end of act 3. Patrick Keating refers to this aspect of screenplay craft as the character’s “darkest moment,” noting that it should roughly coincide with the conclusion of act 2 or the beginning of act 3 at the three-quarters point in the film.11 By highlighting the enormous obstacles that the protagonist faces in achieving his or her goals, the “darkest moment” provides for maximal expressive contrast when the hero triumphs at film’s end. By placing the hero in an emotional valley, the screenwriter has designed the film in such a way that the hedonic peak provided by the film’s plot resolution is felt more strongly than it would be otherwise. The emphasis on the character’s reversal of fortune has a long history in Western dramaturgy and can be traced back to the classical dramas of the ancient Greeks. In his Poetics, Aristotle highlighted the importance of such reversals in Greek tragedies through his elaboration of the principle of peripeteia. For Aristotle, the finest examples of tragic plot-structure combine recognition (anagnorisis) with reversal (peripeteia) in ways that engage the spectator’s wonder and produce emotional catharsis. A reversal of the character’s fortunes is most effective, according to Aristotle, when it is sudden and unexpected, but nonetheless the outcome of events linked together in a clear, causal sequence.12 Moreover, the emotional effect of peripeteia is heightened when it is accompanied by recognition—that is, the character’s and spectator’s flash of insight regarding the underlying actions that result in misfortune. As Stephen Halliwell puts it, “The moment or process of recognition and reversal represents the turning point of the tragedy, the juncture at which ignorance has knowledge revealed to it, or at which action is confronted with its own unintended outcome.”13 It is worth noting that contemporary screenwriters tend to downplay Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis as an aspect of dramatic structure. After all, the whole point of the character’s “darkest moment” is her self-awareness that she has reached a point of personal crisis. Yet the importance of plot

490    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists reversals in the craft of screenwriting attests to the importance of peripeteia as something widely recognized to be an eternal verity of a well-constructed story. The second of my three hypotheses concerns the way in which the presence of hedonic peaks is correlated with the phenomenon of duration neglect. The “peak-end” rule predicts that viewers will be insensitive to the overall duration of the film experience if the film contains enough dramatic peaks, including a particularly salient peak at film’s end, such that the “remembering self ” displaces the “experiencing self.” Here again, although the evidence is anecdotal, the list of all-time box-office champs seems to provide prima facie support for this claim. For example, when receipts are adjusted for inflation, five of the top ten grossing films—Gone With the Wind (1939), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Sound of Music (1965), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Titanic (1998)—have running times that are around or above the three-hour mark.14 Obviously, the average running time of a feature film has varied considerably across Hollywood’s history. During the studio era, the average running time of an “A” feature was roughly about 90 minutes. Today, a film’s average running time is closer to 110 minutes.15 Yet, by almost any measure, the five films listed above have much longer than average running times, and still entertained millions of viewers worldwide.16 By contrast, many mainstream viewers describe art films as “long and boring” even though they have much shorter running times than the blockbusters listed above. Contemporary practitioners of “slow cinema,” like Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa, and Apichatpong Weerathesakul, strive to capture the “dailiness” of ordinary human experience. Frequently described as “austere” or “minimalist,” these directors tend to use long takes to depict characters engaged in work routines or performing commonplace activities, such as walking or eating. As Matthew Flanagan points out, slow cinema is “achieved by a process of direct reduction, a sustained emptying out of deeply entrenched dramatic elements.”17 This approach flattens out the kinds of emotional peaks and valleys that are common in Hollywood cinema, producing an exaggerated form of the kinds of dedramatization more commonly associated with European modernist cinema. Far from fostering duration neglect, these films encourage viewers to actively contemplate the nature of time as an aspect of aesthetic experience. For viewers whose expectations are attuned to the much subtler modulations of emotion found in these films, slow cinema can be quite moving. For viewers more accustomed to multiplex fare, though, even an 82-minute film like Tsai Ming-Liang’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn (2003) can feel like a lifetime. The third hypothesis proposed above suggests that the “peak-end” rule might be an important explanatory factor in the ubiquity of the Hollywood happy ending. The happy ending is by no means universal. Many Hollywood films, like Rebel Without a Cause (1956), Vertigo (1958), Terms of Endearment (1983), and Moulin Rouge (2000), end tragically, resolving their plots through the death of one of the film’s main characters. Other films—many of them made outside of the Hollywood system—resist narrative closure altogether, withholding information from the viewer about the fates of the film’s main characters. Like the traits of “slow cinema,” the absence of narrative closure tends to be associated with European modernist films, like The 400 Blows (1959) and L’eclisse (1962),

Jeff Smith   491 but it can be found in many other traditions, including contemporary Asian cinema and American indie film. Yet these exceptions more or less prove the rule insofar as these traditions implicitly define themselves against the norms of Hollywood cinema. For nearly a century, the happy ending has been a feature of the vast majority of Hollywood films, so much so that the two terms have become almost synonymous, inextricably bound to the public perception of the “magic” of movies. The “peak-end” rule would seem to predict this normative dimension of the Hollywood happy ending in that the “remembering self ” places much more weight on the last part of an aesthetic experience. More specifically, the “peak-end” rule explains why filmmakers can subject their protagonists to any number of trials, travails, and torments as long as the audience’s sympathies are rewarded through the hero’s ultimate triumph at film’s end. Take, for example, John McTiernan’s 1988 action classic, Die Hard. At the start of the film, its protagonist, John McClane, is already experiencing major turmoil in his personal life. He and his wife, Holly, have been separated for months due to marital conflicts about her professional ambitions. John also has been separated from his kids for several months and feels distinctly out of place as a rugged New York cop plunked down in the “la-la land” of California. But over the course of the film, things get progressively worse for John. Holly is among a group of people taken hostage by terrorists who want to steal millions of dollars’ worth of negotiable bearer bonds that are located in the safe of the Nakatomi Corporation. John is beaten bloody in fights with two of the terrorists, Tony and Karl. He nearly falls down an elevator shaft in his efforts to escape from a small band of terrorists searching for him. His children are badgered by an unscrupulous reporter looking for an opportunity to grab the media spotlight. John nearly dies in an explosion, saved only by a death-defying leap off the top of a skyscraper, tethered to an emergency fire hose that itself nearly pulls him to his death. During a deadly gunfight with Hans and Karl, John is forced to run barefoot over broken glass in an effort to escape a small explosive that Karl slides across the floor toward him. Finally, in the film’s climax, Holly is abducted by Hans and then nearly falls to her death when Hans is left dangling outside the window of the Nakatomi Building, clinging to the Rolex watch worn by Holly that she had earlier received as a Christmas bonus. Yet despite the myriad physical pains and psychological stresses visited upon John McClane in Die Hard’s 135-minute running time, I’ve never met anyone who said, “Gee, that movie is so unpleasant to watch. John only seems happy in the last five minutes of the film.” Our willingness to watch John undergo these trials and travails not only derives from the fact that we recognize Die Hard as a fiction, but also because we anticipate the happy ending that is a consistent feature of most Hollywood films. In the case of Die Hard, John’s eventual triumph is signified by the kiss he shares with Holly in the back of Argyle’s limousine, which is accompanied by Vaughn Monroe’s jaunty rendition of “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” This brief moment not only signals John’s success in defeating the terrorists, but also the couple’s reconciliation. As the “peak-end” rule anticipates, the happy ending that viewers already anticipate in Die Hard plays an inordinately large role in shaping their memories of watching the film. This pattern

492    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists of expectation and fulfillment is perhaps a key element of Hollywood film’s genius as an extraordinarily successful mass art form. Hollywood fictions are designed to make viewers emotionally desire plot resolutions that they already know intellectually are the likely outcomes of the film’s central conflicts.

“The James Dean Effect” and Blind Chance The “peak-end” rule, though, not only captures important features of the way spectators remember the movies that they see; it also informs the way spectators assess individual character’s relative happiness. In an experiment supervised by psychologist Ed Diener, subjects were asked to evaluate short, schematic biographies of a fictitious person, Jen, who dies suddenly and painlessly in an automobile accident. After reading the biography, subjects were asked to answer two questions: “Taking her life as a whole, how desirable do you think Jen’s life was?” and “How much total happiness or unhappiness would you say that Jen experienced in her life?” In one scenario, Jen was extremely happy with her life, which lasted either 30 years or 60 years, depending upon which version of Jen’s biography the subject received. During that time, Jen lived a life that most people would see as very fulfilled. She enjoyed her job, took vacations, and spent her leisure time meeting with friends or doing hobbies. In a second scenario, though, Diener added five more years to Jen’s life such that she now died either when she was 35 or 65. In these variants of Jen’s biography, the additional five year period was described as “pleasant, but not as good as before.”18 The results of Diener’s experiment showed strong evidence of the “peak-end” rule and of the duration neglect that often accompanies it. Doubling Jen’s life from 30 years to 60 years appeared to have no effect on the way subjects rated the desirability of her life or the total amount of happiness that she experienced. As one might expect in situations that trigger the phenomenon of duration neglect, people’s ratings of Jen’s happiness suggested a happy life is a happy life no matter how long it lasts. In a striking contrast, though, the addition of five slightly happy years to Jen’s life caused a significant drop in their ratings of her overall happiness. These results suggested evidence of a “less is more” ethos among the experiment’s participants that Diener dubbed “the James Dean effect.” According to Daniel Kahneman, he urged Diener to collect additional data in a within-subject experiment that asked participants to consider the two scenarios in immediate succession. As Kahneman put it, “In spite of my long experience with judgment errors, I did not believe that reasonable people could say that adding 5 slightly happy years to a life would make it substantially worse. I was wrong. The intuition that the disappointing extra 5 years made the whole life worse was overwhelming.”19 Although it was not intended as such, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1981) is almost a cinematic version of Diener’s experiment. Blind Chance was produced nearly

Jeff Smith   493 two decades before Diener’s experiment was published, but thanks to the film’s unusual narrative structure, it asks viewers to compare different versions of a fictitious character’s life in a manner that shares some important similarities with the prompts used for the participants in Diener’s study. An early example of what David Bordwell has dubbed the “forking-path narrative,” Blind Chance tells three different stories about the life of a young Polish man, Witek, each of which changes as the result of whether or not he is able to board a departing train for Warsaw.20 Blind Chance is an early exploration of one of Kieslowski’s central themes, namely the way that the metaphysics of random occurrences and interlocking lives provide insights into the meaning of human existence.21 Yet the way that Kieslowski has ordered the three stories that make up Blind Chance suggests that he also may have intuited the effect of the “peak-end rule” on viewers’ judgments about the nature of human happiness. In the first of the three stories, Witek makes the train and travels to Warsaw. On the train, Witek meets Werner, a university professor who eventually introduces Witek to Adam, an important official in the Communist Party. During a walk in a park, Witek reconnects with his first love, Czuszka. Witek and Czuszka become involved sexually. After one of their trysts, Czuszka finds Witek’s application to become a member of the Communist Party. Rising quickly through the ranks, Witek becomes a member of the Party’s National Committee. He is asked to intervene in a protest at a medical facility at Miodora Gowa. The protestors, many of whom are undergoing drug rehab, have taken control of the hospital and jailed their doctors. Witek frees the doctors, and then volunteers to serve as a hostage in their place to prevent them from burning the hospital to the ground. Witek brings the hospital crisis to a successful resolution, but is criticized by some of the other Party leadership for siding with the protestors. Witek and Czuszka continue their relationship, but Witek inadvertently implicates her to Adam in the sale of illegal literature that is published by an underground resistance movement. Czuszka is detained and questioned. When she is released, Witek follows Czuszka to her apartment. But she breaks off the relationship, telling Witek that he should marry the daughter of a Politburo hack. The first story concludes with a scene at the Warsaw airport. Witek prepares to go to Paris with other Communist Party officials. They are informed, though, that they will be unable to leave due to a workers’ strike. Witek slams his luggage down in disgust, a gesture that foreshadows a similar situation at the start of story 3 when Witek tries, but fails to reach the train to Warsaw. Story 2 begins just as story 1 did with Witek rushing to catch the train. In this version of Witek’s story, though, he misses the train and runs smack into a policeman on the station platform. The pair briefly struggle and Witek is arrested as a result. During Witek’s trial, the station policeman testifies that he also caught Witek urinating in public the week before. Witek is found guilty and sentenced to 30 days of community service. While doing landscaping work as part of his sentence, Witek meets Marek, who invites him to come to one of the underground resistance meetings that Marek hosts in his apartment. Witek attends a meeting, and reconnects with an old childhood friend, Daniel, and his sister, Vera. Witek also meets with a priest involved with the underground resistance. With the priest’s assistance, Witek converts to Catholicism and prays

494    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists to God for guidance in his life. The priest encourages Witek to accompany him on a trip to France where they hope to meet with other members of the resistance movement. Witek tries to get a passport to make the trip abroad. The passport official confronts Witek with his illegal activities as a member of the underground. The official says he will only approve the passport if Witek agrees to report back on the people he meets in France. Witek begins seeing Daniel’s sister, Vera, romantically, even though she is married to an airplane mechanic. After hooking up with Vera, Witek discovers that the police have ransacked the small office where the underground prints its illegal literature. One of the other members of the resistance voices his suspicion that Witek informed on the group to police. Witek goes looking for Vera, but is informed by her husband that Vera has gone to Lodz, presumably to look for Witek. The last scene of story 2 shows Witek visiting his landlady in her apartment. She listens to Radio Free Europe for information about the various strikes going on around Poland. Witek’s landlady also reassures him that it is probably for the best that his passport was denied and that he didn’t make the trip to France. Like story 2, story 3 begins with Witek missing the train to Warsaw. Unlike story 2, though, in this version, Witek does not run into the station policeman. Instead Witek simply throws down his bag in anger. Although the station cop approaches Witek and even looks at him suspiciously, the policeman does not arrest Witek, who just walks away in disgust. As he turns to go home, Witek notices Olga, one of his colleagues from the medical school, standing on the platform. When Witek asks Olga what she is doing there, she says she came down to the station to see him off. Witek and Olga go back to his apartment where they have sex. Witek then asks the dean of the medical school to be reinstated as a student. Witek and Olga get married, and just before the ceremony takes place, she informs Witek that she is three months pregnant. When Witek graduates with the rest of his class, the dean asks him to stay on at the Medical Academy so that he can practice his specialization for a few hours a week. When the dean learns that his son has been arrested for selling illegal literature published by the underground movement, he asks Witek to fill in for him for some lectures he is scheduled to give in Libya. Witek changes his flight to Libya so that he can spend Olga’s birthday with her. The airline officials approve the change, but note that Witek will now travel with a foreign carrier and will have a stopover in Paris. On the day of his flight, Witek says goodbye to his wife and son. Olga informs them that she is pregnant again and that they will have a daughter. In the film’s final shot, we see Witek’s plane take off, but it explodes once it is airborne. The film ends with a kind of bitter irony. The flight that Witek doesn’t take in the first and second versions of the story becomes the cause of his untimely death. Although these three stories of Blind Chance take wildly different turns as a result of dissimilar outcomes in the story’s initial situation, Kieslowski unifies the film’s narrative structure by developing a web of connections and parallels that exist across the three different stories. Like other “multiple draft” narratives, such as Groundhog Day (1993), Run Lola Run (1998), and Source Code (2011), Blind Chance repeats several small incidents that occur as Witek runs to catch the train, mostly to signal to the viewer the beginning of each new iteration. In Blind Chance, these incidental details include Witek’s near

Jeff Smith   495 collision with an old woman, his brief stop at the ticket window to purchase his train fare, and a man’s fortuitous discovery of a coin on the platform, which he subsequently uses to buy a beer that then gets knocked out of his hand as Witek rushes past him. Besides these initial details, however, there are more global patterns that one discerns in the three stories. Perhaps the most salient involves the romantic subplots that are present in each of the three stories. In each version of his tale, Witek becomes sexually involved with a woman he has known previously: Czuszka in the first story, Vera in the second, and Olga in the third. Moreover, all three stories make reference to the underground movement that becomes a focal point of Communist Party surveillance. In the first story, Witek becomes aware of the movement due to his involvement with Czuszka. In the second story, Witek joins the resistance movement himself. And in the third story, Witek is asked to sign a petition on behalf of the dean’s son when Party officials persecute the son for selling the movement’s illegal publications. Lastly, each iteration of Witek’s story establishes a plane trip to Paris as one of his eventual goals. In a clever parallel to Witek’s initial situation, just as his narrative fate depends upon whether or not he is able to catch his train to Warsaw, the final outcome of each story hinges on the question of whether or not he boards the plane to Paris. Aside from these similarities that cut across each of the three stories, Kieslowski also includes recurrent characters that sometimes serve to link the stories together. Witek’s landlady, for example, plays an important role in the second and third versions of Witek’s story. In the second, she warns Witek that he is being followed, and in the third, she serves as a nanny to Witek and Olga’s son. Similarly, the priest who advises Witek to join the church and who functions as a conduit for information within the underground also plays a recurrent role in the film. In the second version of the story, the priest serves as a causal agent in Witek’s religious and political conversions. In the third version of the story, the priest appears in the airport, presumably preparing to make the trip to Paris that was described in story 2. Moreover, in the first and second versions of Witek’s story, Kieslowski creates parallels by having Witek meet up with old childhood friends: Czuszka in the first story and Daniel in the second. The consistency of these details across stories is important not only in terms of providing a uniform narrative spine to each, but also in encouraging the viewer to adopt a “compare and contrast” attitude to the stories as a whole. Indeed, the “multiple draft” structure of Blind Chance invites the viewer to make judgments about Witek’s life that are similar to the questions asked of participants in the Diener study, namely, how desirable is Witek’s life in each of the three stories and what is his overall level of happiness? By developing parallels and recurrent characters across the film, Kieslowski enables the viewer to see Witek’s fate in each story as something determined both by circumstance and by Witek’s choices regarding his relation to the three major institutions depicted in Blind Chance: the Polish Communist Party, the underground resistance movement, and the medical academy. In arranging the three stories in Blind Chance, Kieslowski creates a continuum in which Witek progresses from being relatively unhappy at the end of the first story to relatively happy at the end of the third. Although the first story begins promisingly

496    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists for Witek with him achieving his goal of traveling to Warsaw and then rising swiftly through the ranks of the Communist Party, the conflicts between his professional life and his personal life boil over by the end of it. Czuszka firmly rejects Witek’s attempt to reconcile with her, and his frustration with his life becomes manifest at the end of the first story when his plane trip to Paris is delayed by striking workers. Kieslowski expressively enhances Witek’s feelings of frustration through the use of slow motion in the last shot of story 1, which shows Witek enraged and throwing his baggage to the ground in anger. As a kind of inversion of the arc seen in story 1, the second of the three stories depicts a more promising personal relationship between Witek and Vera, but a more dubious dimension to Witek’s public life. At the end of story 2, Witek and Vera appear to still have feelings for one another, but their situation is clearly complicated by the fact that Vera is married to an airplane mechanic. More importantly, though, Witek’s political activities have placed him in a kind of limbo, suspected by police due to his involvement with the underground, but also suspected by the underground as a possible source of information to police. By the conclusion of the second story, Witek does not seem to have achieved any personal goals, but, in a clever bit of foreshadowing, we see Witek’s landlady reassuring him that it was probably best not to take the planned trip to Paris. The third story very clearly shows Witek achieving a kind of harmony between his personal and professional goals. This version of Witek’s story depicts him as a political pragmatist, aligning himself neither with the Communist Party nor with the underground resistance. Moreover, by returning to his earlier goal of becoming a doctor, Witek develops a kind of balance between his public and personal lives. He marries his fellow medical student, Olga, and becomes a father. Just before Witek leaves on his fateful trip to Paris, Olga informs him that they have another child on the way. Although his life is far from extraordinary, Witek achieves the kind of ordinary bliss that most people take to be a fulfilled and purposeful life. As a successful young doctor and as a man who deeply loves his wife and children, this third version of Witek’s life emerges as a kind of fictional counterpart to Jen’s biography in the Diener experiment, especially when, like Jen, Witek dies suddenly and unexpectedly in the fiery plane crash that concludes story 3. Although Kieslowski ends the film quite tragically with the fated plane to Paris bursting into flames in midair, my hunch is that there is still something like the James Dean effect at work in people’s responses to the film’s resolution. On the one hand, Kieslowski quite clearly thwarts the expectation of the happy ending that story 3 seems to be building toward and which is a common feature of much mainstream filmmaking. Indeed, Kieslowski goes considerably beyond the standard of an “unhappy ending” by concluding story 3 with the kind of horrific mass tragedy that dominates news cycles within the media landscape. Yet by showing the viewer two alternative versions of Witek’s life, which themselves serve to anchor our judgments of the third, Kieslowski’s narration in Blind Chance likely activates the “peak-end” rule for most viewers. The evidence presented in the findings of Diener’s experiment indicate that viewers will not only show evidence of duration neglect—that is, they won’t be bothered by the fact that Witek dies quite young in story 3—but that viewers also will inordinately weight Witek’s overall life

Jeff Smith   497 satisfaction in the last version of his story such that its tragic resolution still emerges as the happiest ending of the three. Yet if the narrative structure activates peak-end rule in this way, it likely does so because Kieslowski also counts on a slightly different cognitive limitation of the average viewer, namely that when we see the plane crash at the end of the film we won’t remember the film’s beginning.22 Kieslowski starts Blind Chance with a shot of Witek sitting in his seat on the plane, screaming in terror in an image whose existential horror recalls Edward Munch’s famous painting Der Schrei der Natur. When we first see this shot, its meaning escapes us, precisely because we do not yet have a clear narrative context within which we can understand its significance. It is only when we rewatch Blind Chance that we realize that this moment of terror is likely the result Witek’s realization that his plane will go down in flames. By beginning the film with this first shot rather than ending with it, Kieslowski not only preserves the impression of Blind Chance as something of a narrative puzzle, but he also allows the viewer to maintain our belief that Witek’s life was short, but happy. By adopting the perspective of a distant, disinterested observer for the final shot, Kieslowski essentially reinforces the James Dean effect seen in Diener’s study, subtly indulging the viewer’s unconscious bias that defines “total happiness” as the happiness in a typical period in Witek’s lifetime rather than as the sum or integral of happiness experienced over the complete duration of his life.23

Conclusion Thanks to its “multiple draft” narrative structure, Blind Chance offers an unusual instance of the way the viewers apply the principle of the James Dean effect to film characters. More commonly, viewers default to the “die young, be happy” ethos of the James Dean effect for films that lack Blind Chance’s “compare and contrast” plot patterns. I suspect, though, that the emphasis on recency and duration neglect that are features of the “peak-end” rule also influence film viewer’s judgments about the fates of characters whose lives are cut short. Although in several films, the death of a major character provides a resolution to the plot that is the very antithesis of the Hollywood happy ending, the sadness occasioned by such an outcome is might be leavened by our awareness that the character was happy or personally fulfilled before they died. In American Beauty (1999), Lester Burnham achieves a moment of bliss in resolving his midlife crisis, just before his homophobic neighbor shoots him. Similarly, The Sessions (2012) closes with Mark O’Brien’s funeral, where we learn that the protagonist spent the last 11 years of his life in a loving, happy, and sexually fulfilling relationship with Susan, a woman he meets after his painful emotional entanglements with a sex surrogate. Such an outcome seemed nearly impossible at the film’s start, where we are introduced to Mark as a quadriplegic, who must spend each night in an iron lung to help him breathe. Moreover, I also suspect that viewers implicitly apply the hedonimeter principle and “peak-end” rule to situations where the character’s death ends his or her physical suffering or psychological

498    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists torment. In Sophie’s Choice, for example, the title character’s circumstance undoubtedly seems tragic, but our sadness at Sophie’s death is likely mollified by the knowledge that her suicide has ended years of guilt and anguish. The “Peak-end” rule, though, is but one of several cognitive biases and heuristics that filmmakers exploit in order to elicit certain kinds of responses from audiences. As Daniel Kahneman and other social psychologists point out, our judgments and inferences are influenced by so many different factors that an astute, perceptive screenwriter or director might use any one of them to produce a particular type of dramatic effect. Further research may discern the role played by cognitive biases and heuristics in the way viewers engage with characters or deploy their understanding of genre conventions. Film scholars have only just begun to investigate the ways that framing and anchoring effects influence our judgments about characters’ motivations and behaviors or the force of availability bias in our comprehension of salient genre elements. As we gain a better understanding of the way the mind works, film scholars will not only acquire greater insights into the creative process, but we also may learn some reasons why the movies were the most successful mass art form of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. Fundamental attribution error is discussed in a wide variety of publications and websites. Perhaps the classic study of the importance of situational factors is John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson’s “’From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27, no. 1 (1973): 100–108. Darley and Batson conducted an experiment that tested whether or not forty theology students would stop to help a shabbily dressed person who appears to be in distress after they’d just heard the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. Only 40% of the seminarians stopped to offer help, but more importantly, the prospect that they would help was strongly influenced by the degree to which the subjects thought they would be late for an appointment. Darley and Batson concluded that situational factors, determined by the high-hurry, medium-hurry, or low-hurry condition of the experiment would be far more predictive of the subject’s likelihood to provide assistance than would underlying personality traits. 2. See David McRaney’s website at http://youarenotsosmart.com. Not only do McRaney’s posts analyze the causes and effects of these cognitive biases by surveying the relevant academic literature that discusses them, but the site also contains video interviews with leading social psychologists and brain researchers, like Daniel Simons and V.  S. Ramachandran. 3. Carl Plantinga, “Folk Psychology for Film Critics and Scholars,” Projections 5, no. 2 (2011): 46. 4. Plantinga, “Folk Psychology,” 40–44. 5. Plantinga, “Folk Psychology,” 39. For more on narrative fiction from an evolutionary perspective, see Bryan Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); and Lisa Zunshine, Why

Jeff Smith   499 We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 6. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 7. Donald A. Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman, “Patients’ Memories of Painful Medical Treatments:  Real-Time and Retrospective Evaluations of Two Minimally Invasive Procedures,” Pain 66 (1996): 3–8. 8. Redelmeier and Kahneman, “Patients’ Memories.” See also Barbara L. Frederickson and Daniel Kahneman, “Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 45–55. 9. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 381. 10. Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 305–6. Thompson identifies the James Bond films, Alfred Hitchcock, and the films of überproducer Joel Silver as important progenitors of this trend toward “bumps” and “whams.” Thompson notes that Silver even kept a “Whammo Chart” for his action films, which required the screenplay to have a big-action set piece every ten pages. 11. Patrick Keating, “The Plot Point, the Darkest Moment, and the Answered Question: Three Ways of Modeling the Three-Quarter-Point,” Journal of Screenwriting 2, no. 1 (January 2011): 85–98. 12. See Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1998), 76–77. 13. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 213. 14. The Sound of Music is the shortest at 174 minutes. Gone with the Wind is the longest at 238 minutes. 15. The figure for the average running time of modern films was calculated using a sample of thirty Hollywood and American independent features playing in the Madison area during the week of July 11–17, 2014. The actual mean for this sample was 113 minutes, slightly higher than the estimate of 110 minutes I used to characterize the period as a whole. 16. It is also worth noting that a number of historically contingent cinematic conventions can influence a film’s running time. For example, many big-budget spectaculars made during the fifties and sixties were road-show attractions that featured musical overtures and interludes before and after an intermission. These purely graphic and musical intermezzos in a film, which are rather uncommon in contemporary cinema, will slightly inflate its running time, even though the intermissions themselves are not counted. On the other hand, running times in modern films are slightly distended by the ever-growing length of end credit sequences, which frequently run anywhere between six and ten minutes. (By contrast, the end credits of classical Hollywood films typically ran less than a minute.) To be sure, current films credit a lot more production personnel than in the studio era. Today, production assistants, personal assistants, dialogue coaches, camera crew members, sound recorders and mixers, drivers, stuntmen, and even craft services routinely receive credit for their contributions in a way that was not true during Hollywood’s Golden Age. But a good deal of this increase can be traced to modern cinema’s emphasis on computer-generated imagery. It is not unusual to see five or six different visual effects companies being used on a particular project with every animator, 3-D modeler, and digital matte artist listed in the end credits roll. For more on the differences between modern and classical–era end credit sequences, see David Bordwell, The Way

500    Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 47–48. 17. Matthew Flanagan, “16:9 in English:  Toward an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema,” 16:9 29 (November 2008), http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm. Accessed December 5, 2012. 18. Ed Diener, Derrick Wirtz, and Shigehiro Oishi, “End Effects of Rated Life Quality: The James Dean Effect,” Psychological Science 12 (March 2001): 125. 19. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 388. 20. See David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” Poetics of Cinema (New  York:  Routledge, 2008), 171–88. 21. For more on the persistent themes of Kieslowski’s films, see Annette Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (New York: Hyperion, 1999), especially 49–68. 22. David Bordwell explores a somewhat similar phenomenon in the two iterations of Monty Beragon’s murder in Mildred Pierce (1945). Monty’s death is the first thing shown to the viewer after the film’s credits. It is shown again in flashback toward the end of the film. There are several noticeable differences in the way Monty’s murder is depicted, but they escape most viewers thanks to the temporal gap in the film’s running time that separates the two scenes. See Bordwell’s “Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred Pierce,” Poetics of Cinema, 135–50. 23. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 388.

Works Cited Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It:  Story and Style in Modern Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. ———. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. Boyd, Bryan. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Darley, John M., and C. Daniel Batson. “ ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27, no. 1 (1973): 100–108. Diener, Ed, Derrick Wirtz, and Shigehiro Oishi. “End Effects of Rated Life Quality: The James Dean Effect.” Psychological Science 12 (March 2001): 124–28. Flanagan, Matthew. “16:9 in English: Toward an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema.” 16:9 29 (November 2008). Web. http://www.16-9.dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm. Accessed December 5, 2012. Frederickson, Barbara L., and Daniel Kahneman. “Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 45–55. Halliwell, Stephen. Aristotle’s Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Insdorf, Annette. Double Lives, Second Chances:  The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski. New York: Hyperion, 1999. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Keating, Patrick. “The Plot Point, the Darkest Moment, and the Answered Question: Three Ways of Modeling the Three-Quarter-Point.” Journal of Screenwriting 2, no. 1 (2011): 85–98.

Jeff Smith   501 McRaney, David. You Are Not So Smart. Web. October 2009. http://youarenotsosmart.com. Accessed on January 28, 2013. Plantinga, Carl. “Folk Psychology for Film Critics and Scholars.” Projections 5, no. 2 (2011): 26–50. Redelmeier, Donald A., and Daniel Kahneman. “Patients’ Memories of Painful Medical Treatments:  Real-Time and Retrospective Evaluations of Two Minimally Invasive Procedures.” Pain 66 (1996): 3–8. Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in the New Hollywood:  Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Pa rt I V

E M P I R IC A L A N D QUA L I TAT I V E ST U DI E S OF L I T E R AT U R E

Chapter 24

The Valu e of Qua l i tat i v e Re search for C o g ni t i v e Literary St u di e s L aura Otis

Nearly everyone has known the frustration of being told, “You’re not thinking. Use your head!” All too often, unfamiliar ways of thinking are mistaken for the absence of thought. What occurs in other people’s minds is a mystery, and often we presume that other people’s experiences match our own. Usually they don’t. The felt experience of thinking varies greatly from one individual to another, and each head houses a distinct mental world. I’ve always been fascinated by people whose thoughts differ strikingly from mine. When I studied organic chemistry, I used to stare miserably at twin, candy-like pictures, amazed that people could see them as three-dimensional molecules. Images and movements don’t stick in my mind. I couldn’t tell you which way to turn the key to enter the apartment where I’ve lived for ten years. Each time I bring the key to the lock, it’s a fifty-fifty chance. Clockwise? Counterclockwise? Which way does a clock turn again? Instead, my mind revels in words and sounds. I remember melodies, phrases, and stories with ease. Voices matter to me, and I absorb their nuances. My mind works like an iTunes library of remembered conversations. It’s not surprising that 29 years ago, I left a PhD program in neuroscience and a budding thesis project on membrane proteins. Deeply ashamed, I knew I’d turned down the wrong path, and I had to withdraw or die. The question is why I worked so hard for so many years developing skills that didn’t come naturally. Individuals vary greatly in their abilities to form visual mental images, and their ways of thinking affect their reading experiences.1 Individual mental styles differ from mental abilities and designate preferred ways of processing information. They vary with context and evolve as individuals learn, but in adulthood they often remain stable enough to be characterized.2 When people read fiction or poetry, their visual mental imagery influences the meanings they construct from texts’ nuances.3 Many individuals read

506    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies specifically for the rich, visual worlds that fiction stimulates them to create. Others, who don’t consciously visualize while reading, enjoy the resonances of patterns among words. These experiences are not mutually exclusive, and neither verbal sensitivity nor visual mental imagery can be ignored in studies of how texts make meaning. In the past two decades, scholars from multiple fields have pointed out the relevance of visual mental imagery to literary analysis, and the need to consider individual variations in mental experiences. Ellen Esrock, Elaine Scarry, and most recently, G. Gabrielle Starr have shown how scientific knowledge of visual processing can help reveal the ways that literary texts work.4 Starr joins cognitive linguist Raymond W. Gibbs in arguing that individual differences in aesthetic experience should be studied by scientists as well as humanists. The era has passed in which laboratory researchers focus only on widely shared human experiences. “Individual variation is not something that can be pushed aside,” Gibbs asserts. Researchers need to consider “what all people are doing” when they read literature, not generalize based on most people’s habits.5 Starr, who collaborates with cognitive neuroscientists Edward A. Vessel and Nava Rubin, emphasizes that laboratory studies can help literary scholars understand how “cognitive architecture enables a variety of [reading] experiences.”6 In the quest to understand how texts, cultures, and diverse brains create these wide-ranging experiences, qualitative research can complement laboratory and text-based studies. All three modes of research have their strengths and weaknesses: neuroscientific studies provide useful data, but laboratory environments rarely reproduce the ripe chaos of lived experience. Close readings of texts can offer brilliant insights but usually rely on a single mind’s perspective. Interview-based research presents introspections from a variety of mental worlds. Of course, people lack conscious access to most of their thought processes, and they may not know their minds as well as they think they do. Psychological test results often contradict self-reports. The stories that emerge from personal experiences can have great epistemological value, however, as Kathryn Montgomery Hunter and Rita Charon have argued in their studies of medical learning.7 Personal insights may not create pillars of knowledge, but they can change the blueprints, suggesting new experiments to try. In the qualitative research described in this essay, interviews revealed amazing variation in what words stimulate people to see. The insights reported in this essay stem from a larger, qualitative study examining how people’s conscious experiences of thought vary.8 One aim of this project has been to learn how people differ in the visual mental images they form in response to spoken and written words. The 34 participants in this narrative study included scientists, novelists, poets, artists, scholars, designers, and a broad range of other creative professionals. Among them were Temple Grandin, Salman Rushdie, and poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. I selected the interviewees for the diverse ways in which they’d chosen to use their minds. In the spectrum of human thought, they represent only a small sliver. Most are American, educated, economically well off, and successful in some creative or professional endeavor. Still, the differences in their mental experiences are striking. If individuals in this narrow band of humanity varied so greatly in their relationships with words and images, the differences worldwide must be extraordinary.

Laura Otis   507

Literary and Scientific Studies of Visual Mental Imagery In the 1990s, two interdisciplinary studies united literary, philosophical, and cognitive research on visualization. In The Reader’s Eye (1994), Ellen Esrock showed how literary critics followed analytic philosophers and behavioral psychologists, regarding visual mental images as personal and unworthy of scholarly attention.9 As a result, analyses of visual mental images became scarce in the humanities and social sciences for much of the twentieth century. New Critics feared that discussions of what readers saw when they read (dancing palm trees, their mothers’ faces) would divert the analytic lens from literary works to the readers’ idiosyncratic minds.10 Esrock disagreed and demonstrated through astute readings how literary knowledge could be built by examining readers’ mental images. Her study pays heed to individual, cultural, and historical variations in visual mental imagery.11 While Esrock argues that readers’ images can reveal the ways texts and human minds work, she acknowledges that no two minds respond to a text the same way. The individual differences that made mental imagery suspect to twentieth-century psychologists, philosophers, and critics make images all the more intriguing in the twenty-first. Elaine Scarry’s highly original Dreaming by the Book (1999) broke ground by calling attention to the ways novelists and poets inspire visualization. Using her own visual mental imagery as a starting point, Scarry probed the texts of writers from Homer to Heaney to determine how they evoked vivid internal scenes. Scarry relied on psychologist Stephen Kosslyn’s evidence that the same brain regions enable visual mental imagery and visual perception. She argued that “imagination produces a mimesis of sensation by miming the deep structure that brings the sensation about.”12 Through perceptive close readings, Scarry discovered literary techniques that stimulate readers to create dynamic images. Poets and novelists often describe the play of light over surfaces, for instance, or invite readers to move diaphanous images across others so that the background images appear more solid. Skilled writers evoke imagery so vividly, Scarry proposed, because they intuitively understand human brains. Literary and scientific scholars can benefit equally from writers’ knowledge, because finely crafted literature offers “a set of instructions for mental composition.”13 Epistemologically, Dreaming by the Book draws on Scarry’s own visually rich mental experiences, but it does not stop there. Like the literature she explores, it invites readers to conduct mental experiments and try each technique she describes.14 Although her work is introspective, she has spoken with scientists, writers, and other readers to compare visualization experiences. Dreaming by the Book excels not just in its determination to learn how writers inspire mental images but in its insistence on plasticity. While Scarry does, at times, seem to presume that others will respond visually to literature just as she does, she tries to make readers more aware of their imagery and to practice manipulating it. My qualitative research supports Scarry’s finding that experiences

508    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies with visual mental imagery can change depending on how one uses it. Since my failed attempts to picture organic molecules, I have learned that individual ways of thinking are not destinies. Francis Galton’s surveys in the early 1880s suggested the vast range of the human visual imagination.15 When asked to visualize the table where they had eaten breakfast that morning, some individuals claimed to see it as vividly as they had while eating; others, more dimly; and some pictured nothing at all.16 Galton suspected that his participants—many of whom were scientists—had been stripped of an inherent human ability by an educational system that favored abstract, verbal analyses. “Our bookish and wordy education,” he argued, “tends to repress this valuable gift of nature.”17 From 1900 to 1910, the German Würzburg School psychologists explored individual variations in visual mental imagery despite their claim that people could experience “imageless thought.”18 From the 1910s until the early 1960s, however, behavioral psychologists’ rejection of imagery as a research topic and introspection as a research method slowed the investigation of inner, conscious visual experiences. Shifts in cultural values and the emergence of cognitive science led to fresh studies of mental imagery in the 1970s. Psychologist Allan Paivio proposed that human minds encode experiences in parallel, largely independent verbal and nonverbal pathways. He developed a “Ways of Thinking” questionnaire to indicate whether individuals preferred one mode or the other.19 Paivio’s survey contained 86 true-false items such as “I do not form a mental picture of people or places when reading of them.”20 Psychologist Alan Richardson chose 15 of Paivio’s most revealing prompts—such as “I don’t believe that anyone can think in terms of mental pictures”—to form a “Visual Verbal Questionnaire” to evaluate cognitive style.21 Doubting that the true-false format revealed individuals’ abilities, psychologist David Marks asked participants to visualize spontaneously to prompts such as “a storm blows up, with flashes of lightning.”22 In Marks’ “Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire,” participants rated their images from 1 (“perfectly clear and vivid as normal vision”) to 5 (“no image at all, you only ‘know’ you are thinking of the object”).23 Results of these 1970s questionnaires aligned with people’s notions of themselves as “visual” or “verbal,” but they failed to correlate with psychometric test results. It made no sense that people who considered themselves “visual” performed so badly when asked to rotate imaginary blocks. What was wrong? In the early 1980s, neuroscientists discovered that human brains process visual information in two parallel, largely independent streams: a dorsal pathway, which analyzes distances, dimensions, directions, and speeds, and a ventral one, which examines colors, textures, patterns, and shapes in a more holistic way.24 It occurred to cognitive neuroscientist Maria Kozhevnikov that people might vary in their tendencies to process visual information spatially or pictorially, relying more on the dorsal or ventral streams, respectively. In behavioral and neuro-imaging experiments conducted since 2002, Kozhevnikov and her colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis.25 There is no single, unified “visual” cognitive style as opposed to a verbal one—a category that may also harbor multiple cognitive trends. Rather than a linear spectrum from “visual” to “verbal,” human cognitive styles might be imagined as occupying a three-dimensional

Laura Otis   509 space ruled by spatial, “object” (pictorial), and verbal axes. An individual’s cognitive habits might be represented as a mobile point, which drifts through a sector of this space defined by spatial, object, and verbal coordinates. In the 1970s, questionnaire and test results had failed to align because Richardson’s and Marks’s surveys emphasized object preferences, whereas psychological tests were measuring spatial abilities. Kozhevnikov’s explorations of the spatial and object styles have led to some surprising discoveries. She and her team have noticed a “trade-off ” between spatial and object skills, and between the corresponding cognitive styles. Individuals may be very good at schematic thinking, which requires judging distances, dimensions, and speeds; they may excel at holistic, pictorial cognition, which demands that they recall visual details or recognize hidden forms. But people rarely do extremely well at both, perhaps because of a “bottleneck” in visual attention.26 Those who prefer to think visually fall into “spatial” and “object” groups, whose experiences of thought can differ greatly. Interestingly, people who consider themselves “verbal” and excel on verbal tests often have average spatial and/or object abilities.27 To a large extent, my qualitative research has supported Kozhevnikov’s finding. When asked to describe what they see when they read, verbally inclined people often reveal penchants for object or spatial imagery. By thinking of themselves as “verbal,” they may fail to develop potentials to exercise their minds in other ways.

Visual Responses to Spoken Language W. J. T. Mitchell has shown that “image” has no clear, unified definition and that cultural pumps maintain the word/image binary.28 Sign languages, idiographic characters, and the reading of written texts all indicate how visual and verbal processes blend into one another. Mitchell believes that for millennia, Western religious views that contrast visually perceived images with imperceptible, divine wisdom have cast suspicion on visual representations.29 Jacques Derrida has proposed that Western philosophy favors oral transmissions over written texts, so that images conjured by written words are doubly suspect.30 In the past decade, cognitive science experiments have supported the poststructuralist claim that Westerners respond differently to written and spoken language. French scientist Michel Denis and his colleagues, who study the interactions of visual mental imagery and verbal language, noticed in a 2009 investigation how differently participants described the same route when offering written or spoken directions.31 Visual/verbal and image/word fail as clear-cut dichotomies, since both visual imagery and verbal language can assume and share so many different forms. There is no reason to believe, therefore, that people’s visual responses to single, spoken words will indicate the visual mental imagery they’ll form when reading written texts. I will describe some responses to individual words, however, because they suggest the variety of people’s inner visual experiences. I have noticed a correlation—though not a

510    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies quantifiable one—between the visual mental imagery evoked by conversations and that inspired by reading literature. Unsurprisingly, asking people, “Do you see anything when you hear a word spoken?” elicited a complex array of answers. Two participants, literary scholar Katherine Hayles and attorney Diana Richmond, initially thought I was asking whether they pictured a written word.32 Nobel Prize–winning biologist Elizabeth Blackburn explained that her visualizations depend on the words she hears. If I said “elephant,” she would probably picture an elephant, but if I said “and,” she would see the word “and.”33 Eventually I settled on “bridge” as a cue because it was concrete but suggestive, though it brought some surprises.34 When neuroscientist Tony Movshon heard “bridge,” he thought of people playing the card game.35 The choice of “bridge” as a prompt also revealed the workings of visual culture. The Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges emerged from so many minds that I suspected “bridge” was summoning popular images as well as lived experiences— if the two can be distinguished. Several participants warned me that the interview process was driving them to visualize when they normally wouldn’t. Hayles and interdisciplinary scholar David Krakauer indicated that by directing their attention to visual mental imagery, I  was urging their minds to behave in ways they ordinarily didn’t. Krakauer at first saw nothing for “bridge,” but he envisioned a stone bridge when he tried to picture one. “I feel I ought to be visual,” he laughed, “But this is very dangerous, because I think I’m through language creating this thing.”36 By calling people’s attention to visualization, I evoked some images that either wouldn’t have existed or might not have reached consciousness. Still, the “bridge test” revealed an extraordinary range of experiences with visual mental images and words. Like Hayles and Krakauer, several other participants said that they don’t normally picture anything when they hear a single word, unless they’re prompted and actively trying. Salman Rushdie commented, “Words are themselves, as far as I’m concerned. You can put them together in such a way that you can see things. . . . Words for me are the tool of the trade. . . they’re like the jeweler’s gold. They’re the thing you have to mold and shape into the thing that you’re making.”37 Rushdie visualizes when he combines words but not when he encounters one alone. Several of the people who didn’t spontaneously visualize bridges leaped quickly to metaphor. These included epidemiologist Venkat Narayan and literary scholar Michael Holquist. Narayan pictured “a kind of bridge connecting two things” such as the one linking Emory University’s public health and humanities buildings. When I asked him for more detail, Narayan said only that he was imagining “some sort of connection between unrelated parts.”38 I interviewed Holquist in his Lower East Side apartment overlooking the Manhattan Bridge. “If I say ‘bridge,’ do you see anything?” I asked. “Sitting where you are, you would understand why I would.” “What does it look like?” “It looks like the Manhattan Bridge.” Holquist’s eyes were not directed toward the window.

Laura Otis   511 “And what does the Manhattan Bridge look like?” I pressed. “An attempt to come to grips with the Brooklyn Bridge.”39

Maybe if Holquist had wanted to, he could have described blue-gray towers and cables in vivid detail. But the bridge’s relationship to other bridges interested him more than its visual appearance, which his mind may or may not have registered. Other participants cared deeply about the visual details of their imagined bridges. In some cases, their voices conveyed the excitement of visual mental imagery. “Immediately a bridge comes to me. . . a picture of a bridge, soon as you said bridge!” exclaimed cell biologist Barry Shur. He envisioned a “beautiful picture” that his daughter took for him of “an aqueduct looking, beautiful, old medieval bridge in Scotland over some water.”40 Painter Mary Welty saw a covered wooden bridge: “Shade in the middle. Sun on the outside. Stream underneath.” I asked her if the wood had color, and she said it was red, then specified, “It’s falling off the bridge red.”41 Welty’s description gives the impression of a full-fledged, internal scene complete with reflections and shadows. Shur pictured a photograph, and Welty, an actual bridge, but both described their mental pictures vividly and holistically. They experienced images in that moment that might just as well have been real. Other participants saw schematic images more akin to drawings or models than perceived scenes. Banking software salesperson Jane von Seggern pictured something like “an erector set” with metal girders.42 Geoscientist Lynn Margulis envisioned “something spanning water,” and when I pressed, “What does it look like?” she responded, “I don’t have those details.” She later saw the nearby Coolidge Bridge over the Connecticut River, but only after she’d been pondering bridges for several seconds.43 Neuroscientist Hugh Wilson imagined “an abstract truss bridge, fairly long.” He quickly added, “it was a particular sort of bridge—can I name where it was, probably not.”44 Participants such as these three tended to say what kinds of bridges they were seeing rather than naming specific bridges they had viewed. These schematic mental images of bridges differed from detailed, colorful representations, and the people who experienced them didn’t always think of themselves as visually sensitive or skilled. Some of my participants even seemed unaware that their mental diagrams counted as visual mental imagery. Because the visual/verbal questionnaires of the 1970s emphasized object visualization, the keen, active imaginations of many who prefer spatial imagery have gone unnoticed. A tendency toward spatial cognitive processing opens ways to use mental imagery, however, that can enhance the reading experience. Poet Kate Thorpe spontaneously described the angle from which she was viewing her imagined bridge. “It’s in front of me, as if I’m going to cross it,” she said. “It looks wider closer to me than in the middle.”45 This was her first response to my question, “What does it look like?” I hadn’t asked her where she was standing relative to the bridge, but she thought that I needed to know. Hugh Wilson’s and Temple Grandin’s descriptions of their mental worlds suggest the dynamic nature of spatial visualization, which Scarry has identified as vital for fiction-reading.46 In Oliver Sacks’s 1995 narrative about Grandin, he noted her “constant

512    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies reading” and quoted an article in which she declared, “I have little interest in novels with complicated interpersonal relationships. . . . Detailed descriptions of new technologies in science fiction. . . are much more interesting.”47 When I asked Grandin, “Do you see anything when you read?” she responded that she does. When reading a science fiction novel in which a whole world is created, she finds that “I’m making a movie of it in my head.”48 The rewarding work of manipulating visual mental images seems to drive her reading. Both Wilson and Grandin compared their mental processes to Photoshop, describing how they can move individual parts of images and substitute or selectively color components.49 With their sensitivity to angles, motions, and the relationships among parts, thinkers such as Thorpe, Grandin, and Wilson make adept, creative readers who can contribute to literary discussions. They may detect implications of physical descriptions that many other readers fail to notice.

Visual Mental Images Formed While Reading What an individual pictures in response to the spoken word “bridge” doesn’t reliably predict what she or he will see while reading fiction. Among my 34 participants, however, I noticed the same kinds of descriptions that people reported for the word “bridge”: (1) little or no visual mental imagery; (2) vivid, detailed imagery; or (3) schematic imagery focused on spatial arrangements. Some readers don’t consciously experience imagery, or it is so dim and vague that they can’t describe it. If they do form visual mental images, they tend not to regard these internal pictures as essential for appreciating the story. Michael Holquist said that his visualization depended on the novel he was reading and mentioned Dostoevsky as an author who made him visualize. “What do you see when you read Dostoevsky?” I asked, and he answered, “Embarrassment.” He then specified, “It’s layered. The first level. . . you see the scene as he gives it. . . . And then the expressions. . . that come with the. . . subtle interchange of misprisions that indicate that everybody’s getting it wrong.”50 As he did with the Brooklyn Bridge, he moved quickly from the literal level of visual perception to the metaphoric one of “seeing” thoughts, feelings, and relationships, maybe because he found it more compelling. Not all fiction readers are aware of forming visual mental images, and not all who form images value them. Several participants indicated that they experience some imagery, but other aspects of fiction intrigue them more. Interdisciplinary scholar David Krakauer responded, “I think I probably form very vague, statistical representations of scenes and people. . . I couldn’t. . . draw for you the actor or the protagonist. . . . I think my internal representation is not that exact.” He loves to read finely crafted novels, but he explains: “I’m interested in permutations of symbols, and science does it; mathematics does it; novel-writing does it, good novel-writing.”51 A novel’s play of symbols interests him much more than his visual representations of its events. Neuroscientist

Laura Otis   513 Tony Movshon also forms visual images but pays more attention to the characters’ mental worlds. “When I’m involved in a novel,” he specifies, “It’s more about characters and events and sort of cognitive structures than the images that I usually get.”52 Epidemiologist Venkat Narayan experiences visual mental imagery, but the resonances of a novel’s language intrigue him more. “When I come across interesting language, that excites me a lot, and I tend to. . . relive that language a lot,” he said. “So then I read a few pages and I wander away thinking about the sentences.” I asked him what it means to “relive language,” and he explained, “I like the construction of sentences, particularly when there’s allegory involved, or there’s poetry involved. . . the language animates the person for me.”53 As the insights of these three scholars suggest, visual mental imagery, characterization, and creative use of language combine as motives for reading that can’t easily be distinguished. Yet visualization isn’t always a key part of the process. For some readers, it arises like noise in a restaurant, where the real business at hand is savoring language. For other readers, visual mental imagery offers the food that sustains the reading process. “It’s one of the pleasures of reading,” says attorney Diana Richmond, who also writes novels.54 Painter Rigoberto A Gonzalez loves to read fiction because of the images it makes him form. His mental pictures give him ideas and develop his imagination.55 Musician and office manager Barbara Zettel finds that the visual images evoked by novels give her a chance to travel. “Sometimes I guess my visual [imagery] is more a curiosity,” she reflects. “If I’ve not been a lot of places. . . it’s the curiosity of understanding, for instance, what does Seattle look like in the mountains, in the rain, and. . . the fog and the smell of the ocean, and I feel I’m there. . . . The visual helps me because then I get a sense of a place where I’ve never been.”56 No map would ever let her see Seattle in this detail.

Object Imagery Evoked by Literary Texts Readers do not fall neatly into categories; certainly they didn’t in my qualitative study. It is worth asking whether the spatial, object, and verbal cognitive style categories developed by cognitive scientists even serve a purpose in building knowledge about literature. I have found the work of Kozhevnikov and her colleagues valuable, however, for indicating the range of visual responses to written texts. It complements Scarry’s introspective, text-based study by indicating how greatly individuals vary in their relationships with imagery before they try her mental exercises. Olessia Blajenkova, Michael Motes, and Kozhevnikov have found that those who tend toward object visualization “prefer to construct colorful, high-resolution, picture-like images of individual objects and to encode and process images holistically.”57 Those inclined toward the spatial style “prefer to construct schematic representations of objects and spatial relations among objects, generate and process images part by part, and are capable of performing complex spatial

514    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies transformations.”58 If one understands the object and spatial styles as tendencies rather than absolute categorizations, reading becomes an experience that can vary enormously depending on how individual minds respond to writers’ invitations to visualize.59 With radiant enthusiasm, several participants told me that when they read, they see “everything!” “What’s everything?” I asked geoscientist Lynn Margulis, and she specified, “Well, the people, their interactions. I do have this graphic imagination.”60 Web designer Harriet Goren said, “I guess I see the whole—novel. It’s always a very visual experience for me. It always has been. Whatever the setting is, whatever I imagine the people look like.”61 Flamenco dancer and choreographer Linda Richardson said, “I actually just envision the entire story. As I’m reading. . . I actually have visual images of what’s going on with the characters, the plot.”62 When I asked painter Mary Welty what it means to see everything, she explained, “Whether you say it or. . . I read it, it comes visually. I guess I create my own characters.” Still, her visualization depends on the writer’s skill. “If a writer is very good at explaining in detail, the feeling, the smell, if it’s windy out,” she qualified, she sees “the whole description of a scene that I could paint.” Like these four gifted visualizers, participants who reported seeing the whole novel often emphasized the characters and setting. Based on the phrasing and emotional expression of my participants, I suspect that those who say, “I see everything!” tend toward the object style. This hypothesis is speculative and cannot be confirmed without behavioral experiments. These readers often referred to the characters’ appearances and actions and the details of their immediate environment. Novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein reported, “Oh, I see a lot, actually. . . . I’ve formed a picture of the characters—[a]‌very, very precise picture often, of the characters, and. . . I’m seeing them doing what they’re doing.” She specified, however, that “It’s not like watching a movie. . . because. . . you’re also so involved with the words and the language, and I’m processing that as well.”63 As Kozhevnikov’s group has found, individuals can combine verbal and object tendencies, and responding visually to a text does not exclude sensitivity to its linguistic patterns. When biologist and cartoonist Jay Hosler reads fiction, he finds that his visual mental imagery has “a dreamlike quality, an incompleteness to it.” He reports that The images that I focus on tend to be the objects that the text is focusing on. . . I tend to be able to see when people are in stressful situations. I tend to imagine faces during an emotional moment. . . . If someone’s stressed out,. . . those are the faces that I can see, because. . . I find myself empathizing with them, and so that sort of internal face of my own stress gets projected in my brain.64

In the human brain, the fusiform face area—involved in facial recognition—is associated with the ventral stream that supports object processing.65 A reader such as Hosler— who focuses on facial expressions when writing his own graphic novels—may make more extensive and efficient use of this processing due to both inclination and practice. Cell biologist Barry Shur’s responses to neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s writing suggest the joy and excitement of object visualization. Shur first told me that he visualizes less when he reads than when he hears spoken language, maybe because

Laura Otis   515 “the words are visual enough for me when I’m reading.” Then he described his experience of reading Cajal’s Advice to a Young Investigator. “I’m seeing myself holding the Kindle, OK? As we’re talking!” he exclaimed. When Shur reads Cajal’s book, he explains, “I see an old 1900 laboratory with. . . Ramón y Cajal sitting there. . . talking to some students. . . . I picture him at a podium.” His level of engagement made me think he saw detailed images, so I asked, “What color is the podium?” and his visual world opened up: Oh,. . . it’s dark wood, and he’s in. . . a velvet robe. . . . I’m thinking of. . . the Renaissance almost,. . . not nineteenth century at all,. . . much more Galileo-like. . . . It’s sort of. . . romanticism. . . .Now that we’re talking about it,. . . flashes are coming in, more of. . . a Sherlock Holmes kind of look,. . . kind of a high collar, and sort of that style.66

Shur’s description evolves as it unfolds, revealing details that probably didn’t coexist in a given instant. In the moment of the interview, these images were very real, though his description may differ from what he experienced while reading. Shur’s report also indicates how greatly visual mental worlds draw on cultural images from films, advertisements, textbooks, and websites. In Shur’s mind, Cajal’s lab is “everything you want a lab to be. It’s dark and dingy, and it’s high ceilings with gothic windows.” “Where are you getting this?” I asked, and he identified the source as a black-and-white film about Marie Curie.67 Undoubtedly, readers who experience rich visual mental imagery construct it from a hodgepodge of sources, so that it constitutes a cultural collage as well as a response to a specific writer’s cues. It is likely, however, that fiction writers anticipate readers like Shur—and that some writers process visual information just as he does. Although some of his imagery has been brought to the text, his creativity and excitement indicate what fiction’s visual cues can stimulate some minds to do.

The Feel of Text-Driven Spatial Imagery Not every fiction reader visualizes characters or the details of rooms or landscapes. “I don’t have a visual image of the main characters. . . it occurs to me,” reflected literary scholar Jonathan Culler.68 He doesn’t usually “have any idea what color hair they have, or anything like that.” Culler does experience visual mental images when he reads, but they often involve the locations of characters and the architectural layouts through which whey move. “Occasionally I . . . visualize spatial relationships,” he said. “I don’t. . . actually visualize the main character particularly, but I do. . . sort of have some images. . . where was the building that was under surveillance, and where did the two people meet in front of it?” Rather than picturing faces, he imagines “the layout of the building” or “the directional sense of a street scene at the building.” He savors patterns in the text’s language, and simultaneously he visualizes, keeping track of where the characters are.

516    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies Culler’s descriptions of visual mental imagery suggest the experience of readers with spatial tendencies. Because questionnaires probing cognitive styles have emphasized object skills, many spatially inclined readers may not have realized that their mental experiences while reading qualify as visual mental images. Many spatially inclined people don’t consider themselves “visual,” although they inhabit image-rich mental worlds. As in Culler’s case, they may combine spatial and verbal processing in creative ways, forming mental representations that map what texts are doing. When mathematician and philosopher of science Sabine Brauckmann reads a novel, she sees “a movie script.”69 She considers whether a story would make a good movie, or whether it has “too much thinking in it” that is not easily translatable into images. Rather than viewing characters and landscapes, she envisions “more like a kind of flux.” She specified, “I see the whole story, the plot, maybe, more than I see words. Or the logics behind that.” As she reads, she envisions the novel’s overall structure as one might visualize the blueprint of a building. Poet Kate Thorpe first told me that she envisions characters when she reads novels, but then she reconsidered. “I don’t really imagine characters,” she qualified. “I see them, but.  .  . I  couldn’t describe them to you afterwards. . . . I guess I see rooms. I see architecture and directions towards things and places in a city. . . very architectural. . . very structural.”70 Brauckmann’s and Thorpe’s responses raise the issue of what it means to “see” when you read. As they move through texts, their minds construct representations that seem to differ from those visually perceived. “Flux” and “structural” suggest diagrams rather than detailed reconstructions, but producing these images is a creative process. Game designer Jason Rohrer has wondered for years how the images in his mind’s eye relate to those visually perceived. He describes them as “halfway between pictures and. . . symbols. Almost like icons.”71 Since Rohrer creates visual displays for players, he often compares his visual mental images to onscreen representations and describes his imagery in those terms. A strawberry he sees in his mind’s eye is “almost like a cartoon of a strawberry. . . . It doesn’t have. . . as many details to it. . . it doesn’t have all the subtle shading and highlighting and. . . specular highlights that a regular strawberry would have.” His mental imagery differs greatly from painter Mary Welty’s, which includes shadows and reflected colors. Rohrer does picture characters when he reads novels or stories, but like Culler and Thorpe, he focuses on the spaces through which they move. Culler has noticed that he envisions architectural layouts even when novels offer no “spatial indications,”72 and Rohrer describes his reading experience the same way: Even if the room is not really described that the characters are operating in, I sort of construct a room for them and keep that consistent. . . . Stories are very nonspatial. . . [so] I do sort of fill in a lot of that spatial stuff. . . . Then later on in the story if there’s something that.  .  . actually describes those spatial relations explicitly, sometimes they’ll kind of clash, and I’ll have to refactor.

Rohrer’s, Culler’s, and Thorpe’s descriptions of fiction-reading suggest the active, creative aspects of spatial processing. Approaching literature with a spatial cognitive style does not exclude responding to it verbally or feeling its language acutely. Spatially driven

Laura Otis   517 reading does involve sensitivity to structures, perspectives, and positions that may matter less to other readers. Whether spatially inclined readers work with fiction or nonfiction, their schematic approach helps them to construct meanings. “When I’m reading.  .  . I’m not aware that I’m seeing things. . . if things mean colors, forms, shapes,” says psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. “It’s more like putting puzzles together. It’s more a meta-thing.”73 Visualization helps him to interpret texts, but he experiences it as an abstract, schematic process. “It’s not that you see a puzzle in front [of you],” he explains. “But it’s more the image of what I’m doing. [A]‌meta-image.” Constructing mental representations such as these may not feel like a visual experience. When Kate Thorpe reads philosophy, she reflects, “I think I do see things, but they’re not necessarily images. . . . They’re often more structural. . . more like a network outline.”74 Literary scholar Katherine Hayles visualizes when she reads fiction, picturing the protagonist if she’s immersed in a novel. As she moves through nonfiction, however, she’s aware of a different process, one that she doesn’t experience as visual. “It’s as if my internal landscape is rearranging itself,” she reflects, “to make room for this new insight or approach. And that’s not particularly a visual process, but it’s a highly meditative process. . . . It’s more like a sensation than it is a visualization.”75 Hayles regards herself as a verbally inclined person, but like Gigerenzer’s and Thorpe’s metaphors, her figurative language reveals the spatial aspects of her interpretive process. The insights of Hayles, Culler, and Thorpe indicate how some readers combine verbal and spatial cognitive tendencies to make sense of literary texts. If there’s a visual/verbal spectrum, Hayles puts herself at the “extreme verbal end of it,” but she describes learning in terms of rearranging an internal landscape.76 Literary scholar Mark Bauerlein pictures nothing when he hears spoken words, and he visualizes “only dimly” when he reads novels.77 He describes reading Heidegger’s philosophy, however, in spatial terms, saying, “you need to think things through, and around, and over, and above.” For Bauerlein, understanding a complex thought means, “I can put my arms around the idea now.” When he comprehends a system of ideas after a long period of intense study, “a spatial positioning clicks. . . and I see [it] in spatial terms.” Culler, who confessed at one point, “I’ve never been particularly interested in the visual,” defines thought as “seeing connections that will produce a structure.”78 Readers with formidable verbal skills may not realize that they also approach texts spatially. If they developed the spatial processing toward which their minds also incline, their reading experiences might be even more powerful.

Poets’ and Novelists’ Experiences with Visual Mental Imagery If one wants to understand the role of mental images in literary interpretation, it is worth listening to writers as well as readers. Poets and fiction-writers vary in their relationships

518    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies with visual mental images, and their mental pictures shape the works they create. “It’s a picture that haunts me,” says poet laureate Natasha Trethewey, thinking about the ways her poems emerge.79 Each one comes to her differently. Sometimes she hears a line in her head, as though a voice were speaking, but she reflects, “I think [a poem] always begins in a visual image.” Trethewey knows that she’s visually oriented, since as a schoolgirl she entertained classmates by describing every detail of her grandmother’s house. Trethewey’s self-descriptions suggest that she inclines toward object visualizing, and that her combined gifts for verbal and visual processing make her extraordinary poems possible. Poet Kate Thorpe, who may incline more toward spatial visualization, values visual mental imagery just as much. Thorpe fills notebooks with what she calls “the music,” interesting words and phrases that resonate when they combine. Thorpe’s poems often originate from “the music,” but she doesn’t trust her writing until it elicits visual images. She always envisions something “if the poem is working,” and she adds, “If I’m writing nonsense, that’s kind of how I know, because it’s just based on music, and it’s not based on meaning.” Sometimes she’ll write for “pages and pages,” laughs Thorpe, until she’s forced to ask herself, “What is [this poem] doing?” At these times she steps back and asks, “Is this saying anything?” The best way to answer this question is to ponder, “Can I see something from it?”80 For Thorpe, visualization and meaningfulness go together, so much so that poems that don’t evoke images feel nonsensical. Although visual mental imagery enters her creative process late and shapes Trethewey’s from the start, both poets rely on images to craft language. My qualitative study suggests that novelists vary as much as poets in their use of visual mental images. Diana Richmond envisions characters while reading fiction, and she does the same when writing her own. “If I’m plotting something I’m writing,” she describes, “I’m watching what the person’s doing and figuring out what will happen next—what the obstacles will be, or the conversation will be,. . . so it’s a moving picture. I’m seeing my character.”81 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein told me her novels sometimes start with a visual image, but after reflecting, she corrected herself. “You know what? I think that that’s wrong. I think that the images come afterwards.” Most often, Goldstein’s stories emerge from a “conflicted feeling.” She explains, “I have to divide this conflict into various characters, and then, boom. The characters will come to me.” If she does visualize before her story coalesces, she’ll see “a particular type of character.” She specifies, “I see this character very strongly, and a kind of person. And I’m trying to discover who he is and what his story is.”82 For Richmond and Goldstein, both of whom form vivid images of characters while reading, writing fiction often involves picturing the people it’s about. Object visualization may drive their fiction, at least in part, since close observation of their imagined characters tells them who these people are. Visual mental imagery can guide fiction-writing even when the images are more schematic and abstract. Salman Rushdie’s descriptions of his creative process suggest the ways that spatial imagery can shape novels. Like Goldstein, Rushdie can experience vivid, detailed, colorful images from which novels emerge as he determines what he’s seeing. He recalls that

Laura Otis   519 When I was thinking about. . . Shalimar the Clown, I initially had this very strong image of a murder scene,. . . where there was an elderly man dead on the floor with a man standing over him with a knife. . . . This was the scene that kept recurring, and I didn’t know who they were even, these people. . . . I really had to sit around for quite a while and decide who these people were.83

Rushdie, who has a strong visual memory, consulted his image as he formed narratives to explain what was happening. Other introspections of this versatile author indicate that he uses imagery to shape his novels’ structure. Thinking about what his stories have in common, he reflects, “There’s usually quite a strong image or series of images near the center of the book.” As a series, his visual images can pattern the work as a recurring motif unifies a piece of music. According to Rushdie, each one “accrues meaning because of the number of situations in which it finds itself. . . . It becomes the sum total of all its appearances.” At the same time, Rushdie specifies, “I see a book as a shape, and I’m trying to understand always what kind of shape it is.” As he writes, he envisions the novel’s structure in three dimensions. “I do actually have in my head an actual physical shape,” he explains. “The book looks like this. . . . It looks like concentric circles, or it’s got stories within stories. . . . I have to understand in each section of the book what shape it is, and how. . . those parts connect to the larger shape.”84 His description brings to mind Gigerenzer’s “meta-image,” Thorpe’s “network outline,” and Hayles’s rearrangement of an internal landscape. Spatial imagery formed from a need to understand may be as essential for creating fictive worlds as for reading difficult philosophy.

Conclusion Regardless of readers’ cognitive styles, all reading experiences depend on the language of literary texts. Whether people tend toward verbal, object, or spatial processing or any combination of these, they complain about bad writing and notice how differently they respond to fiction depending on how it is written. “I love language,” declares neuroscientist Hugh Wilson. “I get very annoyed when I have to read something that isn’t well written, but that’s because it gets in the way of my visualizing. A poorly written novel doesn’t cause me to visualize. . . very effectively.”85 Wilson’s claim points toward the interdependence of visual mental imagery and verbal language. Readers’ minds create images, but texts’ phrases evoke them. Any analysis of imagery elicited by reading needs to address the unique structures, figurative systems, and nuances of verbal texts. To generate useful knowledge about how texts and minds interact, we need to pool our epistemological resources. Qualitative studies give voice to the lived experience of text-inspired mental imagery in ways that behavioral and neuro-imaging experiments cannot. Interview-based research offers a complement to laboratory data, and it reinforces interdisciplinary work such as Scarry’s and Starr’s, which combines literary

520    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies scholarship with cognitive neuroscience. The qualitative research reported here supports Starr’s contention that neural structures make possible a range of aesthetic experiences,86 and Scarry’s notion that dim visual worlds can bloom if people listen to gifted writers’ instructions. Kozhevnikov’s and Blazhenkova’s finding that individuals tend toward spatial, object, or verbal processing has great importance for literary scholars, but it should not be reduced to categorization. These cognitive neuroscientists’ experiments indicate how verbal, spatial, and object skills can coexist even if an individual’s cognitive style emphasizes one mode of processing. The insights of my participants suggest that they do have preferred mental styles, but also curiosity and willingness to learn. Looking back on my experiences with molecules, I suspect that I survived biochemistry because I made my mind form images, although it would have preferred musing about language. Literary studies often ignore the joys of reading, but in the case of visual mental imagery, these joys can be instructive. The pleasures that motivate minds to read can reveal how those minds work.

Notes 1. G. Gabrielle Starr, who uses fMRI to investigate responses to literature, music, and art, has found that “the fundamental ability to have vividly imagined enactments of literary works is. . . not uniform.” Visual representations constitute only one form of mental imagery, which occurs in multiple modalities and is usually mixed. Starr emphasizes the close relationship between mental imagery and aesthetic experiences in c­ hapter 12 in this volume, “Theorizing Imagery, Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States.” 2. Maria Kozhevnikov, “Cognitive Styles in the Context of Modern Psychology: Toward an Integrated Framework of Cognitive Style,” Psychological Bulletin 133.3 (2007): 464. Starr warns, however, that “there are also differences [in mental imagery] for any given reader, from one encounter with a text to another.” Starr, ­chapter 12 in this volume. 3. Starr also maintains that “imagery has epistemic value.” Starr, ­chapter 12 in this volume. 4. See Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999); and G. Gabrielle Starr, “Multi-sensory Imagery,” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 5. Raymond W. Gibbs, “The Individual in the Scientific Study of Literature,” Scientific Study of Literature 1.1 (2011): 97, 101. 6. G. Gabrielle Starr, “Evolved Reading and the Science(s) of Literary Study: A Response to Jonathan Kramnick,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012):  424. See also Edward A.  Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin, “The Brain on Art:  Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Modal Network,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012): 9. 7. See Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Doctors’ Stories:  The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1991), and Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 8. This study was approved by the Emory University IRB in July 2009 and was rated “exempt.” The full results will be published in my forthcoming book, The Narrative Study of Individual Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Laura Otis   521 9. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye, 2–3. 10. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye, 49–51. 11. Alan Richardson points out Esrock’s attention to individual and historical differences in “Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map,” in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, ed. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 17. 12. See Stephen M.  Kosslyn, Image and Brain:  The Resolution of the Imagery Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 17, and Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 256 n. 6. 13. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 191, 244. 14. Alan Richardson believes that Scarry’s thought experiments give her introspective work “something like an empirical warrant.” Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition,” 18. 15. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883). 16. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 89–91. 17. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 113–14. 18. Martin Kusch, “The Politics of Thought: A Social History of the Debate between Wundt and the Würzburg School,” in The Dawn of Cognitive Science: Early European Contributors, ed. Liliana Albertazzi (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 61–62. 19. Allan Paivio, Imagery and Verbal Processes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 9, 495. 20. Allan Paivio and Richard Harshman, “Factor Analysis of a Questionnaire on Imagery and Verbal Habits and Skills,” Canadian Journal of Psychology 37.4 (1983): 473. 21. Alan Richardson, “Visualizer-Verbalizer: A Cognitive Style Dimension,” Journal of Mental Imagery 1 (1977): 114. 22. David F. Marks, “Visual Imagery Differences in the Recall of Pictures,” British Journal of Psychology 64.1 (1973): 24. 23. Marks, “Visual Imagery Differences,” 18. 24. Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell, Principles of Neural Science, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000), 500–502. 25. See Maria Kozhevnikov, Stephen Kosslyn, and Jennifer Shephard, “Spatial vs. Object Visualizers: A New Characterization of Visual Cognitive Style,” Memory and Cognition 33.4 (2005): 710. 26. Maria Kozhevnikov, Olesya Blazhenkova, and Michael Becker, “Trade-off in Object versus Spatial Visualization Abilities: Restriction in the Development of Visual-Processing Resources,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 17.1 (2010): 30. 27. Kozhevnikov, Kosslyn, and Shepard, “Spatial vs. Object Visualizers,” 712. 28. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1–3. 29. Mitchell, Iconology, 32. 30. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 31. Marie-Paule Daniel, Edyta Przytula, and Michel Denis, “Spoken versus Written Route Directions,” Cognitive Processes 10.2 (2009): 201–3. 32. N. Katherine Hayles, interview by the author, May 5, 2010; Diana Richmond, interview by the author, June 16, 2010. 33. Elizabeth Blackburn, interview by the author, April 30, 2010.

522    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies 34. I owe my “bridge” test to Temple Grandin, who told me that when she wants to assess someone’s visual skills, she asks him or her to visualize a church steeple. She has found that people vary greatly in this ability, and that the most visually oriented people refer to specific steeples they have seen rather than generic structures. Temple Grandin, interview by the author, March 18, 2010. 35. Tony Movshon, interview by the author, May 18, 2010. 36. David Krakauer, interview by the author, June 25, 2010. 37. Salman Rushdie, interview by the author, March 2, 2010. 38. Venkat Narayan, interview by the author, June 11, 2010. 39. Michael Holquist, interview by the author, May 20, 2010. 40. Barry Shur, interview by the author, April 1, 2010. 41. Mary Welty, interview by the author, June 29, 2010. 42. Jane von Seggern, interview by the author, May 7, 2010. 43. Lynn Margulis, interview by the author, May 30, 2010. 44. Hugh Wilson, interview by the author, June 2, 2010. 45. Kate Thorpe, interview by the author, March 27, 2011. 46. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 81. 47. Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Vintage– Random House, 1995), 260–61. Sacks does not indicate which article by Grandin he is quoting. 48. Grandin, interview. Grandin’s report that she experiences intense visual mental imagery while reading science fiction speaks to Katrina Fong’s, Justin Mullin’s, and Raymond Mar’s studies comparing how reading different literary genres can affect interpersonal sensitivity. Katrina Fong, Justin Mullin, and Raymond Mar, “Fiction and Interpersonal Sensitivity:  Exploring the Role of Fiction Genres,” International Society for Empirical Research on Literature, Montreal, Canada, July 9, 2012. 49. Grandin, interview; Wilson, interview. 50. Holquist, interview. 51. Krakauer, interview. 52. Movshon, interview. 53. Narayan, interview. 54. Richmond, interview. 55. Rigoberto A Gonzalez, interview by the author, February 6, 2011. 56. Barbara Zettel, interview by the author, June 14, 2010. 57. Olessia Blajenkova, Maria Kozhevnikov and Michael A.  Motes, “Object-Spatial Imagery:  A  New Self-Report Imagery Questionnaire,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 20 (2006): 243. 58. Blajenkova, Kozhevnikov, and Motes, “Object-Spatial Imagery,” 243. 59. Gabrielle Starr has also noticed that “even for readers who imagine vividly, there are key differences” in the kinds of mental images that people form, and these differences shape their reading experiences. Starr, ­chapter 12 in this volume. 60. Margulis, interview. 61. Harriet Goren, interview by the author, February 4, 2011. 62. Linda Richardson, interview by the author, May 11, 2011. 63. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, interview by the author, May 28, 2010. 64. Jay Hosler, interview by the author, February 3, 2011.

Laura Otis   523 65. Gunter Loffler, Grigori Yourganov, Frances Wilkinson, and Hugh R.  Wilson, “fMRI Evidence for the Neural Representation of Faces,” Nature Neuroscience 8.10 (2005): 1386. 66. Shur, interview. 67. Shur, interview. 68. Jonathan Culler, interview by the author, May 31, 2010. 69. Sabine Brauckmann, interview by the author, May 13, 2010. 70. Thorpe, interview. 71. Jason Rohrer, interview by the author, June 28, 2010. 72. Culler, interview. 73. Gerd Gigerenzer, interview by the author, December 10, 2009. 74. Thorpe, interview. 75. Hayles, interview. 76. Hayles, interview. 77. Mark Bauerlein, interview by the author, November 4, 2009. 78. Culler, interview. 79. Natasha Trethewey, interview by the author, February 15, 2010. 80. Thorpe, interview. 81. Richmond, interview. 82. Goldstein, interview. 83. Rushdie, interview. 84. Rushdie, interview. 85. Wilson, interview. 86. Starr, “Evolved Reading,” 424.

Works Cited Blajenkova, Olessia, Maria Kozhevnikov, and Michael A.  Motes. “Object-Spatial Imagery:  A  New Self-Report Imagery Questionnaire.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 20 (2006): 239–63. Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Daniel, Marie-Paule, Edyta Przytula, and Michel Denis. “Spoken versus Written Route Directions.” Cognitive Processes 10.2 (2009): 201–3. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Esrock, Ellen J. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Fong, Katrina, Justin Mullin, and Raymond Mar. “Fiction and Interpersonal Sensitivity:  Exploring the Role of Fiction Genres.” International Society for Empirical Research on Literature. Montreal, Canada, July 9, 2012. Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London: Macmillan, 1883. Gibbs, Raymond W. “The Individual in the Scientific Study of Literature.” Scientific Study of Literature 1.1 (2011): 95–103. Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery. Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

524    The Value of Qualitative Research for Cognitive Literary Studies Kandel, Eric R., James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell. Principles of Neural Science. 4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2000. Kosslyn, Stephen M. Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Kozhevnikov, Maria. “Cognitive Styles in the Context of Modern Psychology:  Toward an Integrated Framework of Cognitive Style.” Psychological Bulletin 133.3 (2007): 464–81. Kozhevnikov, Maria, Olesya Blazhenkova, and Michael Becker. “Trade-off in Object versus Spatial Visualization Abilities:  Restriction in the Development of Visual-Processing Resources.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 17.1 (2010): 30. Kozhevnikov, Maria, Stephen Kosslyn, and Jennifer Shephard. “Spatial vs. Object Visualizers: A New Characterization of Visual Cognitive Style.” Memory and Cognition 33.4 (2005): 710–26. Kusch, Martin. “The Politics of Thought: A Social History of the Debate between Wundt and the Würzburg School.” In The Dawn of Cognitive Science:  Early European Contributors. Edited by Liliana Albertazzi. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Loffler, Gunter, Grigori Yourganov, Frances Wilkinson, and Hugh R. Wilson. “fMRI Evidence for the Neural Representation of Faces.” Nature Neuroscience 8.10 (2005): 1386–90. Marks, David F. “Visual Imagery Differences in the Recall of Pictures.” British Journal of Psychology 64.1 (1973): 17–24. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Paivio, Allan. Imagery and Verbal Processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Paivio, Allan, and Richard Harshman. “Factor Analysis of a Questionnaire on Imagery and Verbal Habits and Skills.” Canadian Journal of Psychology 37.4 (1983): 461–83. Richardson, Alan. “Studies in Literature and Cognition:  A  Field Map.” In The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Edited by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Richardson, Alan. “Visualizer-Verbalizer:  A  Cognitive Style Dimension.” Journal of Mental Imagery 1 (1977): 109–26. Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars:  Seven Paradoxical Tales. New  York:  Vintage– Random House, 1995. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999. Starr, G.  Gabrielle. “Evolved Reading and the Science(s) of Literary Study:  A  Response to Jonathan Kramnick.” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 418–25. Starr, G. Gabrielle. “Multi-sensory Imagery.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Edited by Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Vessel, Edward A., G. Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin, “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Modal Network.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012): 1–17.

Chapter 25

Transp ort Challenges to the Metaphor M ari sa B ortolussi a n d Pete r Dixon

Introduction Metaphors are by no means the exclusive property of literature; they pervade all communication. We use them regularly in daily conversations and hear them often in political speeches. Perhaps a little less obvious is the fact that metaphors play as important a role in science as they do in literature or other forms of speech. As Kuhn1 and others have understood, in the realm of science they can be either valuable heuristic tools or impediments to further progress; in particular, they can sometimes be misleading and “constrain our reasoning and knowledge.”2 Remembering the common dictum that you do not really understand anything until you can explain it to your grandmother, metaphors can successfully communicate the main gist of complex details. But Kuhn and others have noted that they often come to be accepted as unquestioned truths rather than simply illuminating analogies. As Carroll succinctly put it, “metaphors are invariably literally false.”3 A metaphor may be intuitive, easy to grasp, and compelling, but that in itself does not mean it is accurate or correct. One metaphor that has gained significant attention in the fields of psychology and the empirical study of literature is that of “transportation” or “transport.” Gerrig relied on this travel metaphor to capture the occasionally reported experience of feeling immersed in the story world.4 Intuitively, it appears to be an apt way of talking about some reading experiences; most readers can probably recall some very engrossing work of fiction that has something of this character. But how valid or useful is the metaphor? What is it really intended to explain? And does the research on transport contribute new insights into and advance our current knowledge of literary processing? In the present chapter, we address these questions. Although we are willing to grant that the transport metaphor captures important aspects of a prototypical reading experience, we conclude that the metaphor by itself is insufficiently precise to serve as a basis for theoretical

526   Transport advances. This conclusion is based on the following observations: (1) many of the processes and effects attributed to a prototypical instance of transport are unlikely to occur in any given reading session; (2) the concept seems to exclude many processes that are arguably related to that prototypical reading experience; (3) some of the processes and effects attributed to transport can also be explained by other concepts in discourse processing; and, (4) transport seems to be associated with a form of processing that is peripheral to the literary experience. Green first developed the concept of transport by elaborating a working definition of transport and formulating some hypotheses about its features and effect; she then tested some of these in a series of seminal experiments.5 She proposed a scale for measuring transport based on reader reports corresponding to an intuitive analysis of its components.6 Subjects were first given a story to read and then completed the transport and other questionnaires. The data were used to establish the relationship between reported transport and effects such as greater story-consistent beliefs (i.e., “logical implications of the story events”)7 and the evaluation of characters (discussed in a subsequent section of this chapter). Results showed a correlation between reported transport and these effects: the more transported the readers, the more likely they were to endorse story-consistent beliefs, and “greater knowledge predicted higher levels of transportation into the story.”8 Green’s pioneering work paved the road for future development by identifying important aspects of the transport phenomenon. Subsequently, several researchers have attempted to replicate or advance her methods and results.9 While it is reasonable to begin this initial work with intuitive assumptions and definitions, it is also reasonable to expect further research to reassess and revise the initial premises. However, many uses of the term “transport” seem to refer to the transport metaphor in an uncritical fashion, and to date there has been little evaluation of the utility of that metaphor. In what follows, we begin with a review of some limitations of the term, demonstrating that some researchers seem to assume the psychological reality of transport; in other words, the metaphor has been accepted as a reality. This is followed by an analysis of the effects assumed to follow from the metaphor. Finally, we discuss some issue in the methodology used in studies of transport.

Definition of “Transport” Metaphors have a range of connotative implications, at least some subset of which are activated by readers. When we say that a reader is transported into a fictional world, we are not speaking literally, of course, for no physical displacement occurs; rather, the metaphor invites us activate some of its connotations. The expression “being transported into the story world” conjures up the stereotypical image of a reader seated on a comfortable couch, novel in hand, concentrating intensively, obviously following the story with great interest to the point of being oblivious to the immediate environment.

Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon    527 Thus, some of the connotations include attention, active cognitive processing, emotional engagement, and (metaphorical) absence from or distance with respect to the world one leaves behind. Another connotation is a correlative of sightseeing: rich imagery. When one travels, one is captivated by the sights of the new environment. In the context of reading, this suggests that readers form a vivid picture of the story-world setting and events. Interestingly, Green’s description of transport is in fact predicated on these connotative implications of the metaphor. In her own words, “transportation is defined as an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings, focused on story events.”10 To these processes she adds that “readers of compelling stories may lose track of time, [and] fail to observe events going on around them.”11 The most typical feelings, she maintains, are empathy and sympathy. While Green develops these features as a hypothetical construct, this conceptualization of transport has sometimes been accepted as a unitary and established phenomenon. Although some researchers, such as Busselle and Bilandzic12 and de Graaf and coauthors,13 further subdivide the concept and investigate the relationship of the components, the net result is to better describe, rather than question, the concept. In other words, the metaphor of transport is accepted at face value, albeit in need of clarification.

Features of Transport That Are Not Necessary One of several problems with a conceptualization of transport based simply on the metaphor is ambiguity concerning which components are necessary and sufficient features. In particular, one may acquire the sense that transport is a unitary and stable condition in that all of the listed processes and mental states—attention, imagery, emotional and cognitive engagement, and disconnect from one’s surroundings—are experienced for the duration of the reading. An alternative perspective, though, is that such a comprehensive description should be regarded as a hypothetical prototype rather than a real-world possibility. Moreover, to the extent that these mental processing states do co-occur, it seems unlikely that they would all last throughout the reading of any extended text, as anyone who has read a novel or lengthy and/or complex short story can attest. In fact, as we discuss elsewhere in this volume psychological research corroborates this intuition. For example, it has been clearly demonstrated that attention to the task of reading is not complete even in the best of cases. Even though readers may report that they “couldn’t put the book down until they finished it,” it is improbable that their attention remained entirely focused on the text during the entire reading episode. Further, as de Graaf and coauthors discovered, even when attention seems uncompromised, “paying more attention to a story (and less attention to the actual world) does not necessarily mean readers feel as if they are in the narrative world.”14 From their findings, de Graaf and coauthors concluded that focus of attention and transport can be independent processes. Based on common experience and scholarly research, then, the attention feature needs to be qualified.

528   Transport It is also necessary to think critically about the imageability and affect features of transport. Students of literature and lovers of fiction in general know that literary texts vary enormously in the intensity of their descriptive, emotional, or intellectual content. If we posit imageability as a condition for transport, then the lack of it should predict a low degree of transport. However, this is not necessarily the case. Reactions are in part a function of the text. Green acknowledged that, in her experiments, only texts likely to produce vivid images were used, and she openly recognized the need for further research on imageability. Thus, one may be left with the impression that transport should not occur for texts that are not highly imageable. In contrast, a reader may have only a rough, schematic mental image of the protagonist of “A Rose for Emily,” but may recall emotional, personal situations that make the protagonist’s plight deeply meaningful and engrossing. Further, a story that is almost pure dialogue and devoid of narrative description, while not necessarily conducive to vivid mental images, might be emotionally gripping and for that reason hold the readers’ attention. By the same token, not all texts produce sympathetic or empathetic feelings. Readers of Mother Courage and Her Children may not sympathize with any of the characters, but the lack of affective engagement may be compensated by other forms of engagement. Perhaps the reading or viewing of this drama elicits in readers, as the Brecht had hoped, “a clearer understanding of the societal forces that condition their destinies—and to a responsible choice of their own roles.”15 As these examples suggest, the lack of one feature of transport does not preclude other forms of engagement. Therefore, we can conclude that neither imageability nor emotional reactions of sympathy or empathy are necessary features of a transport-like experience. Indeed, as Laura Otis illustrates in c­ hapter 24 in this volume, the ability to visualize aspects of literary texts, as well as the effects of that experience, can vary significantly across readers. Her qualitative results suggest that imageability and engagement are not correlated for all readers. Consequently, if such a state exists, it must come in different stripes, and different texts induce different forms of it. An all-or-none, unitary approach to transport is simplistic and misleading. Indeed, Green and Brock16 seem to be aware of the potential multidimensional nature of transport in their analysis of their transport scale results. Thus, a simple definition of a unitary transport state is too broad in that it includes mental states that are not always involved. It would be more precise to conclude that any combination of these processes may be present in any given reading.

Definition Excludes Relevant Features If, on the one hand, the definition of transport is too broad, on the other hand, it is also too narrow, in that it does not incorporate other important processes that we could reasonably assume to be present during an engaged reading experience. Good literature, as the age-old maxim goes, makes us think. Therefore, deep intellectual processing would seem to make for an intellectually stimulating reading experience. Good literature is also considered such by virtue of its style. The appreciation of innovative, interesting, or

Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon    529 effective stylistic features and techniques should also make for an engaging experience, for at least some readers. Thus, we argue that meaning and discourse style are reasonable candidates for features of a transport experience. However, Green and others do not seem to be interested in this form of transport. When Green states that “a transported individual is cognitively and emotionally involved in the story,”17 cognitive is not understood as intellectual, deep processing. In fact, based on theoretical perspectives in social-persuasion research, she maintains that “transportation and cognitive elaboration are hypothesized to be distinct constructs.”18 “Cognitive elaboration,” in her usage, may refer to the kinds of mental processes used to rationally analyze a persuasive argument rather than to deep processing of a difficult literary text. To her credit, the rationale that readers who encounter unfamiliar situations “may be more distanced from the reading experience because of the work needed to create an understanding of the events”19 is not unfounded; discourse-processing researchers know well that attention is limited, and whatever attentional resources are devoted to one aspect of a discourse cannot be focused on another.20 The crucial question is what kind of attention constitutes transport; that is, to what aspects of the text must a reader’s attention be devoted in order for us to conclude that the reader is transported? For Green, three kinds of attention produce low transport: (1) attention to surface structure, (2) attention to “symbolic meaning,” and () critical thinking.21 It is worth examining each of these in turn. Surface structure refers to the actual words on the page. In literary parlance, that would include stylistic features of the discourse. As students of literature, we have been taught that reading for plot is superficial reading, and we are trained to perceive and appreciate not only the story but the discourse as well. Research on transport privileges story at the expense of discourse. For Green, transport is associated rather with attention to events: “we conceived of transportation as a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities become focused on events occurring in the narrative.”22 In many works of good literature, though, the plot is anything but easy to follow, and attention may be impaired; for example, embedded plot structures can be a genuine challenge to a reader’s attention. Obviously, action-oriented thrillers keep our attention riveted on the plot events, and the suspense of sensationalist fiction produces emotional tension. However, good literature need not be predominantly plot-oriented; as narratologists have understood, the telling, or discourse, can be as important as the “told,” or story. One of the most interesting aspects of the narration, or telling of the story, is the temporal organization of the events; often the linear chronology is replaced by cyclical structures or a fragmented temporality that includes numerous jumps in time, and many flashbacks. A classic example is Homer’s Odyssey, in which the protagonist starts and ends his journey at home. Another is García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the plot is presented in terms of the continual recurrence of cycles. The handling of time in such narratives is suggestive of themes, often mythical. In the case of García Márquez, it suggests that history is not progressive, but a vicious circle. Storytellers can choose to focus on events, on characters, or on settings. Regionalist novels, such as the ones produced in Latin America, often privilege setting over characters, creating the

530   Transport impression that the characters are mere puppets buffeted by the winds of potent geographical factors. Thus, to the extent that these works produce transport, the manner of telling needs to be included as a critical component. Sometimes the way a passage is written strikes the reader as so exquisite that she or he rereads it several times to savor its beauty. Other times the metaphors are so apt and ingenious as to produce admiration. Sometimes a part of a character’s speech is so poetic as to be experienced as moving or inspiring. Such writing may not be a trait of works such as The DaVinci Code,23 but to exclude appreciation of the discourse is to ignore one of the important components of literary reception, and one aspect of engagement. Unlike Green, who suggests that attention to discourse is incompatible with transport, other researchers have a different understanding of absorption during literary processing. For Schooler, Reichle, and Halpern being “lost in a novel” implies attention to different aspects of the story world, not just the events: Consider the case of readers deeply absorbed in a novel. Such people are extremely mindful of what they are reading, appreciating the language, visualizing the scenes, and often experiencing the emotions of the characters. Yet, at the same time, they may be said to be lacking in metaconsciousness of what it is that they are doing, which is why we refer to such situations as being “lost in a novel.”24

Thus, for these researchers, absorption includes attention to language, and “being lost in a novel,” another phrasing of the transport metaphor, is equated with lack of awareness of one’s own mental processing rather than mere attention to story world events. For Tal-Or and Cohen, involvement, which can be understood as comparable to transport, “is the degree to which we invest emotional and mental efforts in decoding the text and making sense of the story.”25 As another example, deciphering symbolic meaning may be one of the most rewarding levels of literary engagement, producing a uniquely rewarding form of pleasure. For example, understanding that in Hedda Gabler, Tesmann’s slippers epitomize his mediocrity and bourgeois complacency and that the wilted leaves outside the window mirror Hedda’s inner life leaves the reader feeling clever for having drawn important inferences that help the story cohere at a deeper semantic level. Finally, Green and colleagues argue that transport is incompatible with critical thinking. This is related to the role of “elaboration” in the social-persuasion literature. According to research on this problem, belief change can be a result of either high or low elaboration. In a high-elaboration condition, the message recipient carefully considers “the central arguments of the message,” whereas in a low-elaboration condition, “attitude change results from either shallow processing of cues or reliance on simple rules.”26 For Green, transportation, or “immersion into a text,” precludes “logical consideration and evaluation of arguments.”27 Rather, she argues, partly because the experience related in the story seems more real and evokes stronger emotions towards the characters, transported readers are less likely to disbelieve story claims. Therefore, it appears, transported readers are more gullible and naive. What a blow to the egos of avid readers of literature who read for intellectual pleasure! For such readers, the claim that

Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon    531 transport precludes intellectual involvement is counterintuitive. Rather, it would seem that Green’s description is limited to the logical analysis of certain arguments and ideas embedded in the story world and does not seem to apply to the use of more intellectual capacity in the appreciation of literature. Green’s skepticism concerning deep cognitive processing in transport is consistent with an overly literal interpretation of the transport metaphor. One might think that highly transported readers are so focused on the events of the story world that they have no need to bring knowledge and experience to bear on their reading. However, there is an abundance of evidence in discourse processing that making sense of text necessarily entails constructing a mental model and that such mental models rely on the integration of schemas, experiences, and general world knowledge.28 Similarly, in keeping with existing accounts of discourse processing, Smallwood and Schooler argue that “when reading it is often helpful for readers to elaborate on the textual information” and that “elaborative reading is often crucial for maximum comprehension.”29 In our view, it is difficult to imagine how readers could understand a narrative of any complexity without the recruitment of extensive amounts of personal knowledge. Busselle and Bilandzic acknowledged the role of mental models in the comprehension of media and observed that the relation of the components of Green’s model are insufficiently clear.30 Although their study was based on data from viewers of film and television, their analysis of the nature of transport is relevant. Drawing in part from existing scales, they develop a different scale for measuring transport that assumes that mental models are involved in comprehension. They maintain that this approach provides a framework for disentangling different aspects of the narrative experience. Their scale includes questions related to four dimensions of engagement (which they equate with transport):  narrative understanding, attentional focus, narrative presence, and emotional engagement. Of particular interest to our purposes is that inclusion of the narrative understanding component recognizes the role of cognitive processes that is absent from Green’s model. In particular, they argue that if one understands a narrative, one may attend to it more, and consequently be more transported. Furthermore, by stressing the fact that readers combine textual and world knowledge in making sense of a narrative, they implicitly question Green’s view that transport precludes the application of previous experience in understanding. Our conclusion then is that the comprehension of literary narrative requires of necessity demanding, knowledge-driven cognitive processes and that highly transported readers must engage in a high degree of elaboration. In fact, the metaphor of transport suggests another, unactivated connotation that captures some aspects of this type of involvement. When one travels, or is transported, to a very different place, one is faced with novelty. In the face of that novelty, one has to readjust and elaborate one’s concept of reality, a challenge that requires the strategic use of one’s cognitive faculties. To figure out, make coherent sense of, and explain the new situation, one has to not only draw on, but also alter previous schemas and expectations, as one grasps for new contextual cues to redefine signs and relationships, decide which aspects of previous experience are still applicable, and construct a new representation of

532   Transport the new world or situation. It is precisely this kind of cognitive elaboration that has been excluded in most transport research.

Effects of Transportation In addition to the conditions that have been posited as constituents of transport, Green and others also described the effects that may ensue from this state.31 Two of these are the positive evaluation of characters and belief changes. We argue that the explanations relating to these effects reveal the same problems as the definition of transport. In particular, they would seem to presume a unitary experience involving the co-occurrence of processes that do not necessarily obtain in any given reading experience. Further, it is unclear whether these effects must always occur with transport. For example, can we still say that a reader who neither evaluates characters positively nor experiences any change of beliefs was transported? This ambiguity underscores the tenuous theoretical status of the transport metaphor. The first of these effects, the positive evaluation of characters, has often been associated with identification and/or sympathetic or empathic feelings towards the characters.32 Identification, in turn, is sometimes understood in the naive sense of perceived similarity between the reader and the character.33 However, the positive evaluation of characters, whether that means empathetic or sympathetic reactions or identification, cannot be a sine qua non of literature. In fact, some of the most valued and memorable works of fiction develop very controversial, if not unmistakably nasty, characters, and it is difficult to argue that these cannot produce transport for some readers. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is hardly an appealing character with whom one can easily identify (although an interested reader might adduce good reasons to explain his behavior). Poe’s Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado” is utterly grotesque. It would be very strange if subjects in an experimental setting reported responding positively to such characters, yet their negative assessment could not alone be held as proof of lack of engagement or “transport.” In the case of the former work, the language and style might diminish the work’s interest value for uninitiated readers, but it is unlikely that descriptions of the character’s behavior would fail to elicit interest or strong reactions. Not all characters are easy to like or dislike; much good literature deliberately thwarts facile reactions to protagonists. Novels of multiple, contradictory perspectives of the same story world, such as the classic Japanese film Rashomon, or novels told by unreliable narrators, such as Cela’s Pascual Duarte, make it difficult to know what to believe about whom and leave the reader in a kind of emotional limbo. Such narratives are designed to foreground the subjective nature of reality and thwart identification. It seems to us, however, that engagement and a transportation-like experience is entirely possible in such cases. Good literature can prompt readers to take on the perspective of characters with whom they have very little in common in terms of life experience. This idea is supported by a study conducted by de Graaf and coauthors. Their subjects reported empathizing

Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon    533 with a character even though they could not identify because the character’s plight as a persecuted asylum seeker was entirely foreign to them.34 This research supports our argument that not all of the presumed effects of transport necessarily ensue from any reading experience. Research conducted by the media specialists Tal-Or and Cohen provides empirical evidence that transportation and identification are different processes. On the assumption that identification and transportation are different processes, they manipulated two kinds of information about the main character: valence, by presenting the hero in a positive or negative light, and “time of deeds,” leading viewers to change their assumptions about what preceded (past deeds) or what follows (future deeds).”35 They found that these two variables had independent effects on identification and transport. For Green, a critical effect of transport is that readers are more likely to adopt beliefs that are consistent with the story conclusions or suppositions. In her account, such effects are produced because readers process the story events in an uncritical fashion without integrating them with other experience or knowledge. This mechanism is difficult to maintain if transport-like experiences can also include the extensive recruitment of real-world knowledge and can involve deep cognitive processing, as argued above. However, it is important to note that the evidence for these effects was only correlational. The relationship between transport and the adoption of story-consistent beliefs was examined in two experiments in which Green first had subjects first read an adapted version of a true story called “Murder in the Mall,” in which a little girl is stabbed to death in a mall by a psychiatric patient, and then complete a number of questionnaires. One of these was the transport questionnaire devised by Green and her collaborator; another included statements inferred by the experimenters from the story, for example, that malls are not safe places and that psychiatric patients should be supervised. The experiments sought to determine “whether people who reported higher transportation would have beliefs more consistent with the story,” in other words, whether subjects who read the story were more likely to believe that malls were dangerous places than other readers.36 As the experimenters expected, results indicated that “transportation is associated with story-consistent beliefs.”37 But can we really conclude from this experimental work that readers actually changed their real-world perception of malls? An alternative explanation is that subjects’ responses merely indicate their comprehension of the story and the activation of relevant knowledge. If a realistic story recounts the murder of a child in a mall, readers will understand that in the story the mall is a dangerous place. Whether or not the effect of the story is potent enough to override subjects’ long, personal experience with malls as relatively safe places and result in any behavior change, such as the avoidance of malls out of fear, is something for which there is simply insufficient evidence. Another explanation is that in reading the story, subjects activated relevant prior knowledge. Presumably, most subjects will have experienced some at least potentially frightening or dangerous episode in a mall, and such episodes may be retrieved in the service of understanding the story. Having activated such knowledge, it may be used in answering the questions about beliefs about malls, and, as a consequence, subjects’ responses

534   Transport to those questions could shift. In their study on engagement and narrative persuasion, de Graaf and coauthors arrived at a related conclusion, stating that it was not necessarily the sense of being in the story world, nor attentional focus, that affected readers’ beliefs, but rather “the information contained in the story may have changed attitudes compared to the control group who had not yet read the story.”38 From our discussion of both the conditions and effects associated with transport in the extant research, it is clear that (a) the prototypical ideal is unrealistic; (b) literary engagement can include any combination of the posited conditions and effects; and (c) discussions of the effects of transport excludes relevant processes involved in making sense of the story.

Transport and Literary Processing As we have suggested throughout this chapter, a simplistic interpretation of the transport metaphor fails to capture important aspects of literary processing. Given the kinds of materials typically used in laboratory settings, this is not surprising. These kinds of texts would seem to invite naive forms of reading in which attention is directed to superficial aspects of the story world—plot and emotions—at the expense of deeper thinking and appreciation. Green has apparently selected these kinds of texts intentionally, under the assumption that they are more likely to elicit the transport experience. For example, Green writes: “Best-seller status could be a mark of transportingness. Detective thrillers or romance novels may not be ‘great’ literature, but thousands eagerly devour such books. Indeed, these books may be explicitly designed to elicit transportation.”39 Thus, for Green, transport does not seem to be a property of literary reading. The apparent irrelevance of Green’s concept of transport to literary processing is demonstrated by her acknowledgment that the effects of transport are also characteristic of nonfiction: “Transportation is a convergent mental process, a focusing of attention, that may occur in response to either fiction or nonfiction.”40 Thus, on this analysis, any moving story could produce transport—a tragic news report, a friend’s personal narrative, a horrific scene described in a history book. One interpretation of this position is that transport is a property of the story events rather than the text per se. In contrast to this perspective, we believe that important aspects of the prototypical transport experience can occur with literary texts. Moreover, our intuition is that the form of the text—the quality of the writing for the lack of more precision—is crucial in eliciting this experience. That is, it is not simply the sequence of events (as depicted in a news story, for example) but the manner in which they are told that is crucial to creating the engrossing mental state that is suggested by the transport metaphor. Although we do not have a complete characterization of the transport experience, it is clear to us that the concept needs to be broad enough to include these kinds of experiences. Our view is that beyond the intuitive metaphor of “transport,” researchers have not not advanced very far in a conceptual understanding of what is important about this

Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon    535 prototypical experience. Perhaps it may be more useful to simply identify what kinds of mental processes might be involved in the experience of how those processes vary with readers texts, and context. Over and above these conceptual issues concerning the definition and implications of transport, there are important methodological limitations in much of the research on transport.

Evidence Is Typically Correlational Johnson found increased prosocial behavior as a result of being transported into story, but he acknowledged that his evidence was correlational in nature and argued that “as a result, it cannot be concluded that the effects of transportation, empathy, and perceptual bias on helping behavior are causal.”41 Green and Brock measured transport across individuals and found that the extent of rated transport correlated with the endorsement of ideas consistent with the theme of the story.42 It is tempting to infer that the amount of transport had a causal role in changing readers’ beliefs. However, one should also consider the possibility that the direction of causation is the opposite: Those with beliefs more consistent the theme of the story become more involved with the narrative and report higher transportation. To counter this possibility, Green and Brock briefly report a study in which a pretest of those beliefs did not correlate with subsequently rated transportation. Although this type of evidence is relevant to establishing the direction of correlation, the failure to find a significant correlation in this instance may not be convincing for several reasons. First, the study had a substantially smaller sample size than some of the other studies showing a relationship between transportation and (post-tested) beliefs; second, the pretest and the transport rating were done in different contexts and separated by a month or more; and finally, simply the lack of a significant effect (as reported in the Green and Brock article) provides at best weak evidence for a null effect. More generally, Green and Brock43and Green44 failed in several attempts to manipulate transportation by instruction readers were given. Being able to do so would allow one to vary transportation experimentally and then examine the concomitant changes in outcome variables (such as the endorsement of statements consistent with the story theme). Such a design would eliminate many possible alternative interpretations of the effects of transportation.45 Green and Brock were able to show manipulated effects on transportation only with a dramatic change in the nature of the text or with strong instructions to attend to the surface structure combined with a large degree of statistical power.

Evidence Is Sometimes Weak Another problem with the research on transport is the lack of strong evidence for many of its hypothesized conditions and effects. For example, although it is assumed that “readers of compelling stories may lose track of time, fail to observe events going on around them,

536   Transport and feel that they are completely immersed in the world of the narrative,”46 no experiments have been conducted to determine how often this kind of lack of response to environmental stimuli really occurs. Although readers do vary in the extent to which they endorse items on Green’s transportation scale, the range is sometime small. For example, in Green and Brock, completely changing important aspects of the plot that were assumed to be instrumental in transportation led to a decrease in rated transportation of only 13% of the range of the scale.47 Thus, the evidence that a clearly identifiable “transport experience,” with all of the assumed features and correlates, occurs with some frequency and reliability is weak. Rather, the results of these studies suggest that some approximation occurs to some degree and that such a tendency is related, sometimes weakly, with other features of reading the text. In our view, it would be unjustified to generalize from such evidence to the existence and importance of a singular transport experience.

Introspective Reports An important limitation in much of the research on transport is the use of retrospective rating scales to measure the degree of transport. Retrospective protocols are often susceptible to other influences since they are removed in time from the actual experience. In other words, subjects must reconstruct how they felt, on average, while reading the story, and this reconstruction could be affected by related features of their reaction, such as whether they appreciated the story’s ending, whether they agreed with the thematic implications, and so on. Moreover, there may be inherent limitations in the ability of subjects to make accurate assessments of the transport experience using such measures.48 Online reports, while reading the story, might be more indicative of the immediate experience, particularly if they were designed to assess the immediately available contents of working memory rather than a metacognitive assessment of the reader’s mental state.49 The data reported by Green and Brock in fact suggests that transport is not a unitary phenomenon.50 Using a factor analytic approach, they suggested that their transport scale has at least three components: an affective component (exemplified by items such as “The narrative affected me emotionally”), a cognitive component (with items such as “I could picture myself at the scene of the events”), and an imagery component (with items such as “While reading I had a vivid image of Katie [the story protagonist]”). While these components were moderately correlated, the factor analysis provided at least some evidence that they should be regarded as distinct. Thus, from the analysis of the scale items, there is no reason to think of transport as a single, unitary state.

Conclusions In this chapter, we have described the shortcomings of using the transport metaphor as a naive analysis of the reading experience. Although we do not deny the validity of

Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon    537 that experience as an occasionally achieved prototype, this does not mean that all of the properties that have been attributed to the concept of transport are necessary or sufficient. Moreover, the “transport experience” may occur in a variety of ways and to varying degrees. Thus, our view is that there is no advantage to conceptualizing the concept as an all-or-nothing state. Rather, we argue that it is much more appropriate to consider each of the features that might be attributed to the prototypical transport experience and consider when and why that feature occurs. This kind of analysis could benefit from many of the concepts and theories that have been developed in discourse processing. It may turn out that simply identifying how readers direct their attention during the course of processing a text may be sufficient to account for nature of the transport experience.

Notes 1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1962) 2. Diego Fernandez-Duque and Mark L. Johnson, “Attention Metaphors: How Metaphors Guide the Cognitive Psychology of Attention,” Cognitive Science 23, no. 1 (1999): 83–116. 3. David W.  Carroll, Psychology of Language (Belmont, CA:  Thompson Wadsworth, 2008): 141 4. Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 5. Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 5 (2000): 701– 21; see also Melanie C. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism,” Discourse Processes 38, no. 2 (2004):  247–66; Melanie C.  Green, Timothy C.  Brock, and Geoff F.  Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 311–27. 6. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation.” 7. Ibid., 705. 8. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” 257. 9. Rick Busselle and Helena Bilandzic, “Measuring Narrative Engagement,” Media Psychology 12, no. 4 (2009): 321–47; Anneke de Graaf and others, “The Role of Dimensions of Narrative Engagement in Narrative Persuasion,” Communications 34, no. 4 (2010): 385–405; Nurit Tal-Or and Jonathan Cohen, “Understanding Audience Involvement:  Conceptualizing and Manipulating Identification and Transportation,” Poetics 38, no. 4 (2010):  402–18; Dan R. Johnson, “Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Perceptual Bias toward Fearful Expressions,” Personality and Individual Differences 52, no. 2 (2012): 150–55. 10. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation,” 701. 11. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” 247. 12. Busselle and Bilandzic, “Measuring Narrative Engagement.” 13. de Graaf et al., “Role of Dimensions.” 14. Ibid., 398.

538   Transport 15. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, ed. Maynard Mack (London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 2816. 16. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation.” 17. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” 247. 18. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation,” 704. 19. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” 251. 20. Marcel Adam Just and Patricia A.  Carpenter, “A Capacity Theory of Comprehension:  Individual Differences in Working Memory,” Psychological Review 99 (1992): 122–49. 21. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” 249–51. 22. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation,” 701. 23. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 24. Jonathan W.  Schooler, Erik D.  Reichle, and David V.  Halpern, “Zoning Out While Reading:  Evidence for Dissociations between Experience and Metaconsciousness,” in Thinking and Seeing:  Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children, ed. Daniel T Levin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 218. 25. Tal-Or and Cohen, “Understanding Audience Involvement,” 214. 26. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation,” 702. 27. Ibid. 28. John D.  Bransford and Marcia K.  Johnson, “Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding:  Some Investigations of Comprehension and Recall,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11, no. 6 (1972): 717–26; Walter Kintsch and Edith Greene, “The Role of Culture-Specific Schemata in the Comprehension and Recall of Stories,” Discourse Processes 1, no. 1 (1978): 1–13. 29. Schooler, Reichle, and Halpern, “Zoning Out While Reading.” 30. Busselle and Bilandzic, “Measuring Narrative Engagement.” 31. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation”; Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds.” 32. Green, Brock, and Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment,” 311. 33. Michael D.  Slater and Donna Rouner, “Entertainment-Education and Elaboration Likelihood:  Understanding the Processing of Narrative Persuasion,” Communication Theory 12, no. 2 (2002): 173–91. 34. de Graaf et al., “Role of Dimensions,” 399. 35. Tal-Or and Cohen, “Understanding Audience Involvement,” 407. 36. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation,” 705. 37. Ibid., 707. 38. de Graaf et al., “Role of Dimensions,” 401. 39. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation,” 703. 40. Ibid. 41. Johnson, “Transportation into a Story,” 154. 42. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation.” 43. Ibid. 44. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds.” 45. Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi, “Textual and Extratextual Manipulations in the Empirical Study of Literary Response,” in Directions in Empirical Literary Studies, ed. Sonia Zyngier, Marisa Bortolussi, Anna Chesnokova, and Jan Auracher (New York: John Benjamins, 2008).

Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon    539 46. Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” 247. 47. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation,” 404, 405. 48. Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson, “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231. 49. K. Anders Ericsson and Herbert A. Simon, “Verbal Reports as Data,” Psychological Review 87, no. 3 (1980): 215–51. 50. Green and Brock, “Role of Transportation.”

Works Cited Bransford, John D., and Marcia K Johnson. “Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding: Some Investigations of Comprehension and Recall.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11, no. 6 (1972): 717–26. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Busselle, Rick, and Helena Bilandzic. “Measuring Narrative Engagement.” Media Psychology 12, no. 4 (2009): 321–47. Carroll, David W. Psychology of Language. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Thompson Wadsworth, 2008. Dixon, Peter, and Marisa Bortolussi. “Textual and Extratextual Manipulations in the Empirical Study of Literary Response.” In Directions in Empirical Literary Studies. Edited by Sonia Zyngier, Marisa Bortolussi, Anna Chesnokova and Jan Auracher. New York: John Benjamins, 2008. Ericsson, K. Anders, and Herbert A. Simon. “Verbal Reports as Data.” Psychological review 87, no. 3 (1980): 215–51. Fernandez-Duque, Diego, and Mark L. Johnson. “Attention Metaphors: How Metaphors Guide the Cognitive Psychology of Attention.” Cognitive Science 23, no. 1 (1999): 83–116. Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. de Graaf, Anneke, Hans Hoeken, José Sanders, and Hans Beentjes. “The Role of Dimensions of Narrative Engagement in Narrative Persuasion.” Communications 34, no. 4 (2010): 385–405. Green, Melanie C. “Transportation into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism.” Discourse Processes 38, no. 2 (2004): 247–66. Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 5 (2000): 701–21. Green, Melanie C., Timothy C.  Brock, and Geoff F.  Kaufman. “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds.” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (2004): 311–27. Johnson, Dan R. “Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Perceptual Bias toward Fearful Expressions.” Personality and Individual Differences 52, no. 2 (2012): 150–55. Just, Marcel Adam, and Patricia A. Carpenter. “A Capacity Theory of Comprehension: Individual Differences in Working Memory.” Psychological review 99 (1992): 122–49. Kintsch, Walter, and Edith Greene. “The Role of Culture-Specific Schemata in the Comprehension and Recall of Stories.” Discourse Processes 1, no. 1 (1978): 1–13. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Mack, Maynard, ed. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. London: W. W. Norton, 1997. Nisbett, Richard E., and Timothy D.  Wilson. “Telling More Than We Can Know:  Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231–59.

540   Transport Schooler, Jonathan W., Erik D.  Reichle, and David V.  Halpern. “Zoning Out While Reading:  Evidence for Dissociations between Experience and Metaconsciousness.” In Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children. Edited by Daniel T. Levin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Slater, Michael D., and Donna Rouner. “Entertainment-Education and Elaboration Likelihood: Understanding the Processing of Narrative Persuasion.” Communication Theory 12, no. 2 (2002): 173–91. Tal-Or, Nurit, and Jonathan Cohen. “Understanding Audience Involvement: Conceptualizing and Manipulating Identification and Transportation.” Poetics 38, no. 4 (2010): 402–18.

Chapter 26

F luctuations i n L i t e ra ry Readi ng The Neglected Dimension of Time Pet er Dixon a nd Marisa B ortolussi

Our premise in this chapter is a simple, well-established fact: What the mind does varies over time. Because reading is a complex activity, this means that any account of literary reading must consider how the multiple components of comprehension and interpretation dynamically interact over the course of a text. However, in a broad range of scholarship, reading has been described as if there were an unlimited capacity to analyze the text. The scholarship often seems to presuppose error-free perceptual, memorial, inferential mechanisms that can be applied uniformly throughout the course of reading. Certainly, narratologists in aggregate have provided strong evidence that everything in a text is important—from the details of the narratorial identity, to modes of representing speech and thought, shifts in focalization, and the technical handling of time. In contrast to this common approach, in the present analysis, we begin with the assumption—well known in cognitive psychology—that mental capacity has striking limitations. (Indeed, we have only to think of an engaging novel we have read to realize just how much is missed or forgotten upon completion of the reading.) Further, we pursue the implications of assuming that one’s strategies for coping with these limitations varies dynamically while one is reading. In particular, we develop a theoretical framework, which we call the online-prominence model, for describing such strategic fluctuations and how they are controlled over time. The chapter is organized as follows:  First, we define the notion of processing resources. This concept is common in cognitive psychology but is not often found in literary studies. As we discuss below, processing resources provides critical insights into the act of reading. Second, we develop a new analysis of how processing resources are controlled in reading. We refer to this analysis as the online-prominence model. Finally, we use the model to characterize some aspects of how and why reading varies over time in two different texts.

542    Fluctuations in Literary Reading

Resources in Reading Limitations and fluctuations in mental capacities have been overlooked in literary studies largely due to the persistent supposition of an “ideal reader.” For Culler, the ideal reader was one who possessed the competence required to properly understand and interpret a literary work. In his Structuralist Poetics, he confessed to being interested not in “what actual readers happen to do [but rather] what an ideal reader must know implicitly in order to read and interpret works.”1 Broadly speaking then, the term “ideal reader” refers to a hypothetical reader who could construct all aspects of the textual meaning. The ideal reader is similar to Iser’s notion of an implied reader, that is, the reader implied by the text.2 For Iser, the reader’s activity is limited to, and mandated by, the text. For both Culler and Iser, reading is a form of competent decoding. Implicitly, the ideal reader, unlike an actual reader, has no attention or memory limitations, is not constrained by events in the world while reading, and unfailingly makes appropriate inferences as licensed by the text. The net result from such a perspective is that the reader is “conscious of contextual information all of the time” and can “keep track of continuity and change within a fictional world.”3 Analysis underlying much of narratological theory seems to presuppose this notion of reading. Narratologists have identified and described many possible features of the narrative text that are important indices of meaning, and that trained readers could presumably perceive, track, process, and retain. However, this perspective is unreasonable as a description of real readers: We know from a vast array of research on cognition that the capacity of the mind is limited in a variety of ways and that these limitations can have dramatic consequences for how people undertake complex mental activities such as reading. It follows that if there are limitations, then there must be tradeoffs— variations in the allocation of limited capacity to the components of the task. This implication is the focus of the current chapter. Iser understood the dynamic nature of reading.4 His concepts of “theme” and “horizon” capture the crucial insight that the human mind does not keep all textual elements (e.g., “authorial comment, dialogue between characters, developments of plot”5) in focus at once. “Theme” refers to “the view [the reader] is involved with at any one particular moment,” while “horizon” consists of “the other perspective segments in which he had previously been situated.”6 To illustrate the reading mechanism involved: “if the reader is at present concerned with the conduct of the hero—which is therefore the theme of the moment—his attitude will be conditioned by the horizon of past attitudes toward the hero, from the point of view of the narrator, of the other characters, the plot, the hero himself, etc.”7 Thus, for Iser, the process of interpretation of a text evolves over the course of reading, making use of whatever preceding information is needed in the analysis of the current theme. The limitation of this conceptualization, though, is that it fails to incorporate the essential notion that mental capacities are limited. For example, Iser seems to assume

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi     543 that during reading, readers fully process, retain in memory, and retrieve at will all the information provided for the constitution of any given theme. Iser’s processing model suggests that upon completion of the reading, readers will have in their minds all the textual information that constitutes the work’s multiple themes. Our position, based on decades of knowledge accumulated in discourse processing and cognitive psychology, is that these assumptions are incorrect: Readers cannot consistently devote their full attention to the text, nor perceive all the information contained in it, even that which relates to a given “theme” (in the sense of Iser), nor store all that they do perceive in memory. Thus, not only does reading vary over time, but the limited mental capacities that can be brought to bear on the text must be rationed in different ways over time. In order to analyze the use of mental capacities in reading, we adopt the concept of mental “resources.”8 Resources include all of the memory, attentional, perceptual, and inferential capacities that can be flexibly devoted to different aspects of mental processing. Strategies for the allocation of resources to aspects of reading are critical for understanding the processing of literary as well as other texts. In the field of discourse processing, the pioneering work of LaBerge and Samuels is based on the idea that readers’ ability to process different aspects of the text varies with the allocation of such limited mental resources.9 LaBerge and Samuels were largely concerned with reading acquisition and the development of word decoding skills. Hence, they argued that resources might be allocated to, for example, the visual, phonological, or semantic aspects of words. More generally, though, reading involves the coordination of processing on a variety of different levels. For example, Dixon and Bortolussi argued for a distinction between the allocation of resources to constructive processes that develop representations of sentence meaning and integrative processes that develop representations of the story world.10 In the present analysis, we will not attempt to differentiate the relevant mental capacities involved in reading. Rather, we adopt the simplifying assumptions that mental resources, whatever they are, are limited and that the components of reading will proceed more effectively with more resources. These twin assumptions that resources are limited and that resources are essential lead to the need for a resource allocation strategy. In particular, because reading consists of different components, one must parcel out resources to each of those components so that each component can do its work effectively. For example, resources need to be allocated to sentence processing when faced with difficult syntactic structures, allocated to memory retrieval when prior knowledge and autobiographical episodes are relevant to interpreting the text, and allocated to inferential processing when connections and relationships among aspects of the story are critical for understanding. Thus, an efficient reading process depends on the allocation of resources to the components that are most in need at any given time. Resource allocation in this sense is largely an unconscious mechanism that responds to the reader’s current goals and circumstances. Although allocation can be influenced by conscious intent, there are many aspects of resource allocation (including the mechanisms described below) that are unavailable to conscious introspection.

544    Fluctuations in Literary Reading The total amount of processing resources, although limited, need not be constant. Indeed, Kahneman’s account of resource allocation incorporated the idea that the amount of resources available may vary with arousal.11 For example, arousal may be high when the task is important or of high priority. Resources may also vary with physiological state. For example, resources may be low due to lack of sleep or may be high with stimulants. Emotion may act to increase arousal and thus resources.12 Thus, in reading a story, emotional content may lead to an increase in the available resources that can be devoted to reading. Further, available resources may not all be allocated to the actual act of reading. Research on mind wandering indicates that readers may devote resources to thoughts unrelated to the text.13 For example, Reichle, Reineberg, and Schooler argued that when mind wandering, readers may continue to move their eyes over the text and access some information about the word meanings.14 However, they may fail to integrate that information into a coherent representation of the events of the story world.15 Based on the ideas developed thus far, it is natural to suggest that the allocation of resources to different levels of textual processing should vary over time. Indeed, several researchers have made related arguments for how the allocation of limited resources (notably working memory) over time produces differential activation and retention of elements of the text. For example, Fletcher examined several models of how information was maintained in short-term memory and used the pattern of activation over time to predict subsequent recall.16 Each of these models was an approach to addressing the capacity limitations in short-term memory outlined by Kintsch and van Dijk.17 The results indicated that the best-fitting model involved allocating working memory resources to character goals and plans, suggesting that (for these materials, at least) processing of the events of the story world were important. Building on these ideas, the “landscape model” of van den Broek provides an analysis of how the activation levels of concepts from the text vary over time.18 In this model, limited mental resources are distributed among the concepts activated by the text based on the processing of the current information, previously activated concepts, and background knowledge. In turn, the activation a concept receives over the course of reading predicts subsequent recall. Although these approaches capture the notion of dynamic allocation over time, they are based primarily on an analysis of the structure of the text. Thus, they are relatively insensitive to differences across readers in what in the text might be salient or engaging or how reading may vary with a particular reader’s priorities and strategies. More generally, purely text-based approaches do not readily account for interactions between the text and a host of reader and situational variables. In contrast, the framework developed in the present chapter is designed specifically to incorporate variables such as the knowledge and interest of the reader, the reading goals, and the circumstances of the reading. In summary, applying the idea of resource allocation to reading leads to several conclusions: First, literary reading cannot be complete and effective (in the sense of the ideal reader) but must be constrained because of limited processing resources. Second, there are different aspects of reading (as well as other concurrent, nonreading tasks) that must compete for those resources. Third, the optimal allocation of resources to reading

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi     545 components varies over time as a function of the text as well as the particular details of an individual readers’ knowledge, mental capacities, and sensibilities. All of these constraints and variations pose a critical problem for the reader: How should resources be allocated on a moment-by-moment basis? This is the problem addressed below.

The Online-Prominence Model In our account of the allocation of resources, we believe it is useful to distinguish three processing components in reading. The first two correspond to the narratological distinction between the telling and the told. Story processing is the understanding and interpretation of the told, that is, the comprehension of the settings, characters, and events in the story world. In the field of discourse processing, this would be correspond to the construction of a situation model.19 The second processing component concerns the telling or the discourse, that is, the language and style in which the story is conveyed. Processing the language of the text is, of course, essential for comprehension, and, in the field of discourse processing, this is commonly identified with the construction of a “text base” that describes the meaning of the sentences.20 However, in the processing of literature, the discourse component is critical whenever an appreciation of the text depends on the way in which the story is related or described. Evocative or metaphorical text might be one such situation. Finally, we believe it is useful to distinguish both story and discourse processing from personal reactions. Reactions include a wide range of processes that might unfold for different readers in the course of interpreting, appreciating, and evaluating a text. Under some circumstances, reactions might include the retrieval of personal episodes related to the story; under other circumstances, reactions might include aesthetic appreciation of the story or the discourse; and under still other circumstances, reactions might include evoked emotions such as suspense. Although reactions are often linked to particular features of the text, they are potentially idiosyncratic in that different readers may react to the same text differently based on their personal knowledge.21 In keeping with a variety of theoretical accounts of reading in discourse processing, we assume that these three components are semiautonomous. This means that, under most circumstances, they can proceed in parallel without directly interacting with one another. In a similar analysis, Just and Carpenter argued that various reading processes communicate via a common workspace in which the products of each component are represented and available for further work by other components.22 In order to understand how these ideas apply in the current framework, consider the processing that might unfold when encountering the following sentence while reading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley's face.

546    Fluctuations in Literary Reading We assume that the discourse component would identify the meaning of the sentence and potentially register the evocative nature of the sentence structure. Subsequently, the story component would update the representation in the workspace of the events of the story world, indicating that the door knocker changed into an apparition of Marley’s face. Finally, the reaction component would process the personal or emotional implications of this event. For example, the reader may generate some suspenseful anticipation of further supernatural events. This interplay of different processes unfolds quickly in skilled reading and without conscious direction. Some results of processing will be available to introspection; one may, for example, note the aspects of language that contribute to suspense. Nevertheless, in general, a great deal of this work is embedded in skilled and automatic reading components and will not intrude into consciousness. Critically in this conception, the discourse, story, and reaction components can often do their work in parallel, so that the discourse component can be working on one sentence even while the reaction component is working on another. For example, suspense may be building even as the discourse component identifies the meaning of subsequent sentences. Indeed, parallel processing of this general form is implicated by a wide range of research on reading.23 Allocating resources optimally to these parallel, largely independent processing components becomes a difficult problem in cognitive control. The allocation strategy needs to be efficient (so that potentially scarce resources are not wasted), flexible (to match the specific demands of the situation and the reader’s goals), and dynamic (so that it can change with varying properties of the text, the reader’s understanding of the material, and the environment). In order to analyze how such control can be achieved, we make a careful distinction between three aspects of resource allocation. First is the resources themselves. Additional resources, when they are needed, allow a given processing component to proceed more effectively and efficiently. Second is what we refer to as the prominence of a processing component. Prominence, in our usage, refers to an assessment of the resource requirements of any of the three components. Thus, to the extent that resources are available, they will be allocated to components based on their relative prominence. Finally, we use the term signals to refer to the information or evidence that is used to determine prominence. Signals, prominence, and resources are often tied together. For example, in many cases, evidence that a component requires further resources (a signal) will lead to an assessment that resources should be allocated (component prominence), and this in turn will lead to the allocation of those resources. However, distinguishing signals, prominence, and resource is essential because it allows us to analyze the dynamics of processing over time, to understand the interaction of the semiautonomous reading components, and to provide a theoretical account for those situations in which resources do not directly follow from processing requirements. We also note that the signals, prominence, and allocation are elements of automatic and rapid mental processes that unfold without deliberate intervention. As discussed below, we can direct the allocation of resources intentionally, and we may often be aware of the results of different kinds of processing, but we would not normally be conscious of the details of how the allocation proceeds.

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi     547 A rough analogy may help clarify our distinction among these three aspects of resource allocation. Imagine that you are a general contractor engaged in building a house. At different points in the project, you would need to hire various tradespeople to carry out different aspects of the construction. These trades correspond to the three processing components we identified earlier, and, just as in the case of reading, there are many situations in which the trades can proceed with their work in parallel even though they are all working on the same house. For example, external painting can be done while electrical work is done in the interior; kitchen cabinets can be installed while flooring is done in other parts of the house, and so on. As general contractor, you would be in charge of allocating resources to the trades doing the work; these resources might consist of building supplies, additional workers, consultations with the house designer, and so on. As in reading, the allocation of such resources needs to be efficient, flexible, and dynamic for analogous reasons. To accomplish this allocation, you might, at each point in time, form a general assessment of how the ongoing work of each trade is proceeding. This assessment would then be used in making a judgment of whether further resources are needed to best accomplish the work in the most efficacious manner. In many cases, the allocation of resources based on the assessment would involve trade-offs: Additional resources for one trade would mean that they would not be available for another. The assessment corresponds to the notion of component prominence that we introduced in reading and similarly represents a judgment of how scarce resources might be allocated to maximize effectiveness. To arrive at the assessment of the trades, you would use a variety of different kinds of information. This would include communications from the tradespeople, independent evaluations of the work accomplished so far, and other, external constraints on the construction process. Each of these pieces of information corresponds to a signal in our analysis of reading. While the role of the general contractor would be largely unconscious in the case of reading, this analogy makes it clear that a complete analysis of the resource allocation process requires these distinctions among signal, prominence, and resources. An analysis of signals and when they occur provides the basis for understanding how the components of reading interact dynamically over time in the use of limited resources. Signals, prominence, and resources provide the elements of a resource allocation schema. An event or circumstance provides the evidence for a signal. Such signals can be of different types based on the kind of information they embody. Based on the signal, resources may be reallocated. That reallocation can be characterized in terms of which component is involved and whether resources are made available to or removed from that component. Although we do not provide an exhaustive list, table 26.1 provides an illustrative set of examples of the signals that might be generated based on events in the environment or the processing of the text over the course of reading. Each signal listed in the table is classified in terms of the type of signal (external, diagnostic, or reallocation, as defined below), the source of the evidence for that signal, the target of the adjustment (i.e., whether the prominence of story, discourse, or reactions should be changed), and whether the signal is positive (i.e., increases prominence) or negative (i.e., decreases prominence). Each of the examples in the table will be described in turn.

548    Fluctuations in Literary Reading External signals refer to circumstances that are external to the reading process. Thus, an external signal is a mechanism by which real-world events can affect the allocation of resources. Two types of external signals are listed in the table. An interrupting-event signal occurs when circumstances in the external environment impinge on the reading process and lead to a decrease in prominence (at least temporarily). For example, if one were reading an engaging novel on a plane, an announcement that landing was imminent would lead to the reduction of resources allocated to the reading components in order to fasten seat belts and make other preparations. A goal of performing a particular kind of reading analysis provides another instance of an external signal that can affect the prominence of the various components. Phillips’s (­chapter 3 in this volume) distinction between “close reading” and “pleasure reading” provides a good example. Presumably, for close reading, the reader would increase the prominence of the discourse component because this is the processing that would identify and analyze this aspect of the text. In contrast, pleasure reading might involve increasing the prominence of the reaction component. As Phillips notes (­chapter 3 in this volume), these two types of reading lead to the activation of different brain areas, lending credence to the distinction among the reading components described here. While such signals may be chronic over the course of reading, they may also wax or wane while reading based on the moment-to-moment salience of the reader’s intentions. Diagnostic signals are those based on an evaluation of the processing within each component. In effect, a diagnostic signal is an evaluation of the progress a processing component is making and whether that component would or would not profit from additional resources. Two examples of diagnostic signals are listed in table 26.1. An uninteresting-description signal can arise when the results of story processing is deemed to be unnecessary or unfruitful. For example, Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick has an entire chapter on cetology (the study of whales), but the reader may not be interested in this information and, as a consequence, decrease the prominence of the story processing that builds the corresponding representation. Rumination is a diagnostic signal that increases the prominence of reaction processing in which the reader continues to think about related episodes from his or her memory. For example, while reading Leo

Table 26.1  Signal Examples Example

Type

Source of evidence Targeted component

Direction of change

Interrupting event

External

Environment

Negative

Analysis reading Uninteresting description Rumination Emotional suspense Appreciation

External Diagnostic

Goal Story

Story, discourse, reaction Discourse Story

Diagnostic Reallocation Reallocation

Reaction Reaction Discourse

Reaction Story Reaction

Positive Positive Positive

Positive Negative

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi     549 Tolstoy’s description of the argument between Anna and her husband Alexei Karenin in Anna Karenina, reaction processing may identify a similar or related episode in the reader’s own life. This may lead to increased prominence of the reaction processing as the details of that episode are recounted and potentially compared to the situation in the story. A reallocation signal is evidence from the processing of one component that the prominence of some other component should be increased or decreased. For example, story or discourse processing may produce remindings of prior experiences that are relevant to the current representations and that should lead to further processing of reactions.24 The processing of such reactions, in turn, may lead to a reallocation signal to increase the processing of the story because the events are personally relevant or emotional. In general, we assume that such signals enable a complex interplay of story, discourse, and reaction processing depending on the text and the reader’s reactions. The table includes two examples of reallocation signals. Emotional suspense would occur when the reader’s reaction generates suspense, which in turn leads to increased prominence of the story component so that the events of the plot can be processed more fully or more quickly. For example, in John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People, readers may react to Smiley’s discovery of the General’s cached negative and increase the prominence of story processing to discover the contents and implications. Appreciation, on the other hand, is a signal based on reactions that increases the prominence of the discourse component. For example, in Miguel Angel Asturias’s The President, the reader’s reaction to the evocative language may provide a signal to increase the prominence of discourse processing so that this aspect of the text can be processed more fully and savored. While this illustrative analysis can be useful in understanding in principle how signals are generated and how they can affect prominence, it is clear that in a real reading situation, the nature of the signals that occur will vary greatly depending on the reader, the circumstances of the reading, and how the reader and the circumstances interact with the text. For example, training in literary studies may lead to different types of chronic signals or greater sensitivity to reallocation signals.25 In general, skilled or experienced readers may be more adept at efficiently allocating resources to the reading components. Signals may also be more complex than the simple examples described here. For instance, when reading Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the language may be sufficiently problematic as to generate a reallocation signal from the discourse component that leads to reading stopping entirely. More generally, it would be difficult to identify with any certainty what signals will be important for a given text based on an a priori or logical analysis. Consequently, in order to understand variations in prominence while reading, one must carefully examine real readers and how their processing varies over time. A methodology for conducting this kind of investigation is presented in the next section. We have not addressed in this analysis the extent to which any of these mechanisms are under intentional control and are available to conscious introspection. Of course, the results of processing will, in general, be consciously available in working memory since these are effectively the products of comprehension: representations of story characters and events, reactions, images, and so on. Further, as outlined above, at least some

550    Fluctuations in Literary Reading signals have their source in conscious, intentional goals. However, we also envision that the framework we outline here spans a range of other representations and mechanisms over which we have little direct control and which unfold automatically and quickly. The moment-to-moment changes in resource allocation needed, for example, to parse a syntactically difficult sentence would be expected to happen spontaneously without conscious intervention. Thus, we are describing a resource allocation system that includes both conscious and unconscious mechanisms.

Measuring Online Prominence Here, we describe a research methodology that we believe can illuminate how prominence varies over the course of reading a text. The method builds on the probe technique developed by Schooler and Smallwood26 for understanding mind wandering. In turn, the procedure builds on the experience sampling approach to understanding variations in mental states over time.27 The particular form of this technique was developed by Dixon and Bortolussi.28 In this approach, research subjects read a text one sentence at a time on a computer screen; the keyboard spacebar is pressed to move on from one sentence to the next. Periodically, though, rather than showing the next sentence, the computer displays a question asking about the reader’s current processing. Subjects then answer the question by clicking a mouse on scale describing a range of possible alternatives before continuing with their reading. If the question is carefully designed, this technique can provide valuable information about the relative prominence of the story, discourse, and reaction components. As an illustration of this technique, we describe data below that we regard as an index of the prominence of the story component. In this study, subjects were probed ten times (approximately every three to five minutes of reading) and asked, “Do you feel like you’re experiencing the story as if you were there or are you just reading superficially?” Points along the response scale were labeled with the alternatives, “Definitely reading superficially,” “Reading superficially to some extent,” “Not sure,” “Experiencing the story to some extent,” and “Definitely experiencing the story.” We measured the location of subjects’ responses in screen pixels, with larger numbers representing higher degrees of engagement. The working assumption is that the responses to the question indicate the prominence of story-world processing just prior to the probe question. In particular, we argue that this form of engagement with the events of story requires the development of a detailed representation of the story world, which in turn implies that story processing is high priority for the reader. This index of prominence depends on the ability (and inclination) to provide accurate reports of their processing. Although self-reports of this general sort are subject to a variety of influences,29 there is also clear evidence that they have some validity. For example, self-report of mind wandering in reading predicts subsequent recognition memory,30 and engagement ratings predict readers’ ability to recall the story.31 As well, the results

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi     551 described below confirm that more interesting stories are generally more engaging. We assume that self-report measures can provide valid indices of processing when there is a clear strategy for identifying a response that is adopted consistently by readers. For the present probe question, our interpretation is that readers will select a response based on the current contents of working memory. When these representations provide a detailed and elaborate depiction of the story world, readers can reasonably infer that they were engaged with the story. Thus, although self-reports need to be interpreted carefully, in this instance we believe they can provide some insight into the details of ongoing processing and, in particular, can be plausibly interpreted as an index of story prominence. Results from this study are described below. Figure 26.1 shows the variation in prominence across the ten probe points in a (to our subjects) fairly tedious text, the initial part of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis. In this depiction of the data, the solid line indicates the median, or middle score; the dark gray indicates the range of the middle 20% of the responses; and the light gray area indicates the range of the middle 60% of the responses. Thus, the graphical representation shows how the prominence of story processing varies across story section on average as well as the distribution of ratings at each point. The median engagement is generally low for most of the story, in keeping with the uninteresting (for our subjects) nature of the text. There is, however, rather substantial variation, and some readers were moderately engaged at many points in the text. The most striking feature of this profile, though, is the substantial uptick in engagement at section 8. This corresponds to an important and salient plot event: Pendennis’s father dies. Thus, the pattern of results show that the prominence of story-world processing varies with the nature of the events in the story, but that some readers may give prominence to story processing even for those sections that do not have generally compelling story events.

Engagement Rating

200 100 0 −100 −200 1

2

3

4

5 6 Section

7

8

9

10

Figure  26.1  Engagement rating (i.e., the location of the mouse click measured in pixels) as a function of story section for Pendennis. The solid line indicates the median, the dark gray band indicates the middle 20% of the responses, and the light gray band indicates the middle 60% of the responses.

552    Fluctuations in Literary Reading In contrast, ­figure 26.2 shows the variation in prominence for a much more engaging text, the first portion of Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. In this case, there appear to be no clear events that cause prominence to vary over sections on average. Instead, the median prominence is relatively high and unchanging. What is noticeable, though, is that the distribution of ratings changes for certain sections. For example, sections 5, 7, and 9 have a few readers very highly engaged with the text, even if the median (and the lower half of the ratings) are relatively unaffected. This suggests that the events in these sections warrant prominence for some people. These results allows us to make several conjectures about the nature of signals and how they are involved in the control of prominence. The low level of engagement for Pendennis could have arisen from diagnostic signals that indicated that the content of the story was uninteresting. However, more likely, reallocation signals derived from the discourse component and based on the tedious nature of the language may have led to a general disengagement from the text, including story processing. It is clear, though, that something like a diagnostic signal led to an increase in prominence of the story component at section 8, as described above. Variation in the engagement rating over readers suggests the involvement of reaction processing: Different readers had different reactions to the text and, under some circumstances, these lead to the reallocation of resources to the story component. This is likely the cause of the changes in the distribution of ratings in Interview at sections 5, 7, and 9. Thus, there are two general properties of the online-prominence model that are illustrated by these results. First, the interaction between reactions and story processing occurs because reactions can produce reallocation signals that increase or decrease the prominence of story processing. In broad terms, the story events become important for some readers because those readers react to them. Second, in some cases, prominence of story processing varies for most readers because of clearly important story

Engagement Rating

200 100 0 −100 −200 1

2

3

4

5 6 Section

7

8

9

10

Figure  26.2  Engagement rating (i.e., the location of the mouse click measured in pixels) as a function of story section for Interview. The solid line indicates the median, the dark gray band indicates the middle 20% of the responses, and the light gray band indicates the middle 60% of the responses.

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi     553 events. This can be explained by relatively consistent story processing, determined largely by text content, and the diagnostic signals that this processing generates. These data are only a glimpse of the information needed to provide a reasonably complete description of the variations in prominence. In addition to these results that index the prominence of the story component, one would also need to find suitable questions for assessing the prominence of the discourse and reaction components. For example, to assess the prominence of the discourse component, one might ask, “To what extent were aware of the author’s writing style?” Or, to assess the prominence of reaction processing, one might ask, “To what extent does the story remind you of events from your life?” Further, since the extent to which the probe questions actually index the associated reading component is unknown, one may also need to use several different probe questions to provide converging evidence about the variations in prominence. For example, to assess story prominence, one might ask whether the events are clear, whether readers understand story-world relationships, or whether they appreciate character motivations, in addition to the engagement question used here. All of such questions would be expected to relate to the prominence of story processing.

Conclusion Although our analysis of processing fluctuations is preliminary in important respects, we believe there are several conclusions that are evident. First, the results demonstrate that prominence is not purely a function of the text: Each reader reacts in some ways like everyone else but in other ways unlike anyone. Thus, any theoretical analysis of reading needs to incorporate variations in interactions between reader and text. Second, because the amount of work that is done in understanding a story depends on prominence, the final representation that one generates must, in some sense, be a function of the accumulated prominence across the story. This idea was anticipated in important respects by the work of Iser.32 However, the present analysis builds on the processing limitations of real readers (as opposed to an “ideal reader”) and highlights the importance of variations in reader-text interactions and the reading context. Indeed, such variables are the principle force driving the dynamics described here. This orientation fits with the idea that the text is constructed by the reader. As is often noted in reader-response theories, one cannot simply provide an analysis of the text that exists on the page; rather, one must provide an analysis of the text that exists in the mind of the reader. This, in turn, varies in a complex manner with the prominence that different components of processing enjoyed over the course of reading.

Notes 1. Jonathan D.  Culler, Structuralist Poetics:  Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1975), 123–24.

554    Fluctuations in Literary Reading 2. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader:  Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction From Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 3. Catherine Emmott, Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 4. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 5. Ibid., 96. 6. Ibid., 97. 7. Ibid. 8. Daniel Kahneman, Attention and Effort (Englewood, NJ:  Prentice-Hall, 1973); D. A.  Norman and D. G.  Bobrow, “On Data-Limited and Resource-Limited Processes,” Cognitive Psychology 7, no. 1 (1975): 44–64. 9. D. LaBerge and S. J. Samuels, “Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading,” Cognitive Psychology 6, no. 2 (1974): 293–323. 10. Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi, “Construction, Integration, and Mind Wandering in Reading,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 67, no. 1 (2013): doi:10.1037/a0031234. 11. Kahneman, Attention and Effort. 12. H. Schlosberg, “Three Dimensions of Emotion,” Psychological Review 61, no. 2 (1954): 81. 13. Jonathan W.  Schooler, Erik D.  Reichle, and David V.  Halpern, “Zoning Out While Reading:  Evidence for Dissociations between Experience and Metaconsciousness,” in Thinking and Seeing:  Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children, ed. Daniel T.  Levin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). 14. Erik D. Reichle, Andrew E. Reineberg, and Jonathan W. Schooler, “Eye Movements during Mindless Reading,” Psychological Science 21, no. 9 (2010): doi:10.1177/0956797610378686. 15. See also Jonathan Smallwood, Merrill McSpadden, and Jonathan W.  Schooler, “When Attention Matters: The Curious Incident of the Wandering Mind,” Memory and Cognition 36, no. 6 (2008): doi:10.3758/MC.36.6.1144. 16. C. R.  Fletcher, “Strategies for the Allocation of Short-Term Memory during Comprehension,” Journal of Memory and Language 25, no. 1 (1986): 43–58. 17. W. Kintsch and T. A. Van Dijk, “Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and Production,” Psychological Review 85, no. 5 (1978): 363. 18. P. van den Broek et al., “A ‘Landscape’ View of Reading: Fluctuating Patterns of Activation and the Construction of a Stable Memory Representation,” Models of Understanding Text (1996): 165–87. 19. E.g., R. A. Zwaan, M. C. Langston, and A. C. Graesser, “The Construction of Situation Models in Narrative Comprehension,” Psychological Science 6, no. 5 (1995): 292–97. 20. E.g., W. Kintsch and T. A.  Van Dijk, “Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and Production,” Psychological Review 85, no. 5 (1978): 363. 21. One mechanism for such personal reactions is described by M. Kotovych et al., “Textual Determinants of a Component of Literary Identification,” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 2 (2011): doi:10.1075/ssol.1.2.05kot. 22. Marcel Adam Just and Patricia A. Carpenter, “A Capacity Theory of Comprehension: Individual Differences in Working Memory,” Psychological Review 99 (1992): 122–49. 23. E.g., K. Rayner, “Eye Movements and Cognitive Processes in Reading, Visual Search, and Scene Perception,” in Eye Movement Research: Mechanisms, Processes, and Applications, ed. John M.  Findlay, Robin Walker, and Robert W.  Kentridge (Amsterdam:  North-Holland, 1995); J. M.  Henderson and F. Ferreira, “Effects of Foveal Processing Difficulty on the

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi     555 Perceptual Span in Reading: Implications for Attention and Eye Movement Control,” Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16, no. 3 (1990):  417–29; K. Rayner and S. A. Duffy, “Lexical Complexity and Fixation Times in Reading: Effects of Word Frequency, Verb Complexity, and Lexical Ambiguity,” Memory and Cognition 14, no. 3 (1986): 191–201. 24. E.g., S. F.  Larsen and U. Seilman, “Personal Remindings While Reading Literature,” Text: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 8, no. 4 (1988): 411–30. 25. Cf. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, “The Effects of Formal Training on Literary Reception,” Poetics 23, no. 6 (1996): 471–87. 26. Schooler, Reichle and Halpern, “Zoning Out While Reading”; J.  Smallwood and J.  W. Schooler, “The Restless Mind,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 6 (2006): doi:10.1037/0033-29 09.132.6.946. 27. M. Csikszentmihalyi, R. Larson, and S. Prescott, “The Ecology of Adolescent Activity and Experience,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 6, no. 3 (1977): 281–94; M. J. Kane et al., “For Whom the Mind Wanders, and When: An Experience-Sampling Study of Working Memory and Executive Control in Daily Life,” Psychological Science 18, no. 7 (2007): 614–21. 28. Dixon and Bortolussi, “Construction, Integration.” 29. Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson, “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231. 30. Schooler, Reichle and Halpern, “Zoning Out While Reading.” 31. Dixon and Bortolussi, “Construction, Integration.” 32. Iser, The Act of Reading.

Works Cited Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. “The Effects of Formal Training on Literary Reception.” Poetics 23, no. 6 (1996): 471–87. Csikszentmihalyi, M, R Larson, and S Prescott. “The Ecology of Adolescent Activity and Experience.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 6, no. 3 (1977): 281–94. Culler, Jonathan D. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1975. Dixon, Peter, and Marisa Bortolussi. “Construction, Integration, and Mind Wandering in Reading.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 67, no. 1 (2013): doi:10.1037/a0031234. Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension:  A  Discourse Perspective. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1997. Fletcher, C. R. “Strategies for the Allocation of Short-Term Memory during Comprehension.” Journal of Memory and Language 25, no. 1 (1986): 43–58. Henderson, J. M., and F. Ferreira. “Effects of Foveal Processing Difficulty on the Perceptual Span in Reading:  Implications for Attention and Eye Movement Control.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16, no. 3 (1990): 417–29. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ———. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Just, Marcel Adam, and Patricia A. Carpenter. “A Capacity Theory of Comprehension: Individual Differences in Working Memory.” Psychological Review 99 (1992): 122–49.

556    Fluctuations in Literary Reading Kahneman, Daniel. Attention and Effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Kane, M. J., L. H. Brown, J. C. McVay, P. J. Silvia, I. Myin-Germeys, and T. R. Kwapil. “For Whom the Mind Wanders, and When: An Experience-Sampling Study of Working Memory and Executive Control in Daily Life.” Psychological Science 18, no. 7 (2007): 614–21. Kintsch, W., and T. A. Van Dijk. “Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and Production.” Psychological Review 85, no. 5 (1978): 363–94. Kotovych, M., P. Dixon, M. Bortolussi, and M. Holden. “Textual Determinants of a Component of Literary Identification.” Scientific Study of Literature 1, no. 2 (2011):  doi:10.1075/ ssol.1.2.05kot. LaBerge, D., and S. J.  Samuels. “Toward a Theory of Automatic Information Processing in Reading.” Cognitive Psychology 6, no. 2 (1974): 293–323. Larsen, S.  F., and U. Seilman. “Personal Remindings While Reading Literature.” Text: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 8, no. 4 (1988): 411–30. Nisbett, Richard E., and Timothy D.  Wilson. “Telling More Than We Can Know:  Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231. Norman, D.  A., and D. G.  Bobrow. “On Data-Limited and Resource-Limited Processes.” Cognitive Psychology 7, no. 1 (1975): 44–64. Rayner, K. “Eye Movements and Cognitive Processes in Reading, Visual Search, and Scene Perception.” In Eye Movement Research:  Mechanisms, Processes, and Applications. Edited by John M. Findlay, Robin Walker, and Robert W. Kentridge. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1995. Rayner, K., and S. A. Duffy. “Lexical Complexity and Fixation Times in Reading: Effects of Word Frequency, Verb Complexity, and Lexical Ambiguity.” Memory and Cognition 14, no. 3 (1986): 191–201. Reichle, Erik D., Andrew E. Reineberg, and Jonathan W. Schooler. “Eye Movements during Mindless Reading.” Psychological Science 21, no. 9 (2010): doi:10.1177/0956797610378686. Schlosberg, H. “Three Dimensions of Emotion.” Psychological Review 61, no. 2 (1954): 81–88. Schooler, Jonathan W., Erik D.  Reichle, and David V.  Halpern. “Zoning Out While Reading:  Evidence for Dissociations between Experience and Metaconsciousness.” In Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children. Edited by Daniel T. Levin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Smallwood, J., and J. W. Schooler. “The Restless Mind.” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 6 (2006):  doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.946. Smallwood, Jonathan, Merrill McSpadden, and Jonathan W Schooler. “When Attention Matters: The Curious Incident of the Wandering Mind.” Memory and Cognition 36, no. 6 (2008): doi:10.3758/MC.36.6.1144. van den Broek, P., K. Risden, C. R. Fletcher, R. Thurlow, B. K. Britton, and A. C. Graesser. “A ‘Landscape’ View of Reading: Fluctuating Patterns of Activation and the Construction of a Stable Memory Representation.” Models of Understanding Text (1996): 165–87. Zwaan, R. A., M. C. Langston, and A. C. Graesser. “The Construction of Situation Models in Narrative Comprehension.” Psychological Science 6, no. 5 (1995): 292–97.

Pa rt V

C O G N I T I V E T H E ORY A N D L I T E R A RY EXPERIENCE

Chapter 27

Mental Calisth e ni c s a nd Sel f-Reflexiv e Fi c t i on Joshua L a n dy

Works of fiction are wonderful at creating imaginary universes in which we immerse ourselves: barely aware that our bodies are still stuck in (say) twenty-first-century America, with its codes and its customs and its understandings of physics, we fling ourselves heart and soul into nineteenth-century England, where young women can barely go on a date with a soldier without causing a scandal; or into eighteenth-century France, where the slightest insult is going to lead to a duel; not to mention into twenty-third-century Ceti Alpha VI, where travel by transporter beam is an everyday occurrence. But not all novels and plays and films are content with leaving us comfortably ensconced in the illusions they create. Some of them like to wake us up from time to time, bringing to the forefront our dim residual awareness that what we are imagining is not real. Maybe a narratorial voice reminds us that everything we have just read is made up. (“In this book,” insists Marcel Proust’s narrator after three thousand pages’ worth of events, “there is not a single incident which is not fictitious.”) Maybe the voice reminds us that we are reading a work of fiction. (The very first words of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler are “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler,” and there’s plenty more where that came from.) Maybe it pushes things even further by claiming that we are not reading a work of fiction. (“It is quite obvious,” claims the pesky “author” in Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, “that I am not writing a novel.”) Or maybe it engages in full-throated arguments with “us”: “reader, you’re treating me like an automaton” (Diderot); “be quiet and let me go on with my story” (Proust). Then again, sometimes a character starts writing a book suspiciously similar to the one we are reading, as in André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (whose protagonist Edouard is writing a book called The Counterfeiters), André Gide’s Paludes (whose protagonist Tityre is writing a book called Paludes), Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (whose protagonist “Charlie Kaufman” ends up writing a screenplay about himself writing a screenplay), or Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (whose protagonist Philip Quarles is writing a book

560    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction about an author writing a book about, perhaps, an author writing a book). Or, more generally, a character takes on characteristics suspiciously similar to those of the author, as when Vladimir Nabokov’s creepy commentator Kinbote warns us “I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile.” Let’s not forget, either, all those characters who start complaining about their authors (as Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters” famously do), complaining to their authors (as Augusto does in Miguel de Unamuno’s Mist), apologizing to their authors (as Gabriel does when he calls Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro “the typewritten delirium of an idiotic novelist (oh! sorry)”), begging their authors to stop (as Molly Bloom does in James Joyce’s Ulysses, interrupting her monologue to plead “O Jamesy let me up out of this”), or even planning an attack on them (as, in unrecountable ways, do various characters in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds). And then, finally, there are characters who straightforwardly admit to being creatures of fantasy, as when Samuel Beckett’s Hamm announces, in Endgame, “I’m warming up for my last soliloquy”; when a fictional Goethe, in Milan Kundera’s Immortality, chides a fictional Hemingway “you know perfectly well that at this moment we are but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist”; when Eugène Ionesco’s King, in Exit the King, is told “you are going to die at the end of the play”; or when Raymond Queneau’s Queen, in Le Chiendent, admits to having stolen an idea from this book, “the one we’re in now, which repeats everything we say as we say it and which follows us and tells about us, a sure piece of blotting paper that’s been stuck on to our lives.”1 Not to mention those who, like Irma in Jean Genet’s The Balcony, look us right in the eye and, disconcertingly, address their words to us. What are all these fictions, and the many others like them, up to? Why do their authors not just leave us alone in our cozy cocoons of fantasy? What I’m going to suggest here is that at least some of them have a very specific intention: namely, to give us the opportunity to flex a vital mental muscle. By periodically interrupting the action to remind us that what we are seeing is not real, they are deliberately giving us practice in stepping back from our own beliefs. In what follows I’ll explain why this might seem like a valuable thing to be able to do; I’ll also explain why recent developments in cognitive science appear to support the idea that it might be a feasible and sensible ambition. In the end, I’ll be arguing that Diderot, Proust, and company were on to something really important about what fiction can do for us, just as long as it’s a particular kind of fiction, combining the right kind of form with the right kind of content.

1. Let’s start with a powerful example from the world of film:  Federico Fellini’s 8½. Fellini’s protagonist, Guido Anselmi, is a middle-aged filmmaker suffering from writer’s block, spiritual emptiness, and crippling self-doubt. Critics call him a has-been and a failure; he himself worries he will never create anything again; his female friends

Joshua Landy   561

Figure  27.1  “A series of completely gratuitous episodes”

accuse him (not without reason, it should be admitted) of being incapable of love; his life feels devoid of anything that would justify it, lift it up above the merely physical, endow it with some kind of higher significance. What is more, the sequence of events he has experienced fails to hang together, to produce anything remotely resembling a story: his memories, as presented in the early scenes, constitute what his French collaborator Daumier rightly calls a “series of completely gratuitous episodes” (fig. 27.1), and his present-day exploits are little better. (These two problems may well be related, since—if Jean-Paul Sartre is right—having a “fundamental project” gives every single event a coherent meaning, whether as a step toward the goal, a setback, or a regrettable diversion. Without a fundamental project, our experience shatters into a thousand senseless fragments.) Over the course of two hours or so, the film presents us with a number of attempted remedies—remedies via the body (pointless spa treatments), remedies via the heart (fruitless encounters with women), remedies via the soul (unhelpful interviews with members of the church)—each of which comes to nothing. What finally changes everything for Guido is a simple realization:  that instead of shooting the absurd piece of science fiction he had initially planned, he should turn his own life into a movie. Miraculously, all the discordant elements within him now begin to harmonize (fig. 27.2). Saraghina, the symbol of physical love, trades places with Claudia, the symbol of spiritual love (Saraghina now appears in white, Claudia’s trademark color; Claudia now appears on the beach, formerly the domain of Saraghina), as though the division between them no longer makes any sense.2 And soon the other figures come to join them as, hand in hand, father, mother, wife, lover, muse, friends, and everyone else of note begin to dance together in a huge circle, in front of the abandoned set (fig. 27.4). “Why piece together the tatters of your life, the vague memories, the faces, all the people you never knew how to love?” asks Daumier, in what he takes to be an

562    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction (a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure  27.2A–D  Saraghina and the woman in white exchanging places

(a)

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Figure  27.3A–B  Childhood transfigured

unanswerable rhetorical question. There is, however, an excellent answer available. For the very piecing-together is what allows Guido for once to love all these people; not in the ordinary sense, to be sure, but in the special sense of appreciating them for the place they have in the totality that is his life, one which he now understands as having a certain aesthetic power to it. Is his life a constant frenetic motion turning in circles? Yes; but from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Has his life contained its share of disenchantment, on the way to this triumphant re-enchantment? Yes, but that only makes it a better story. The film closes on the figure of young Guido, the black-clad schoolboy whose life was such misery, now dressed in white and leading the band (fig. 27.3). Noise has given way to music, and music is about to give way to a new, perfect silence. Thanks to the magic of art, then, suffering has been transfigured into aesthetic bliss. Guido’s painful mess of a life turns out to have a beautiful shape to it; and each of its

Joshua Landy   563

Figure  27.4  Aesthetic redemption

inhabitants turns out to have a necessary place within that shape, like tiles within a mosaic, or daubs of paint on a canvas. It is not that all conflicts can actually be resolved; it is just that all conflicts can be seen as vital contributors to a thing of beauty, and hence given a justification, and hence, in a special sense, redeemed.3

2. It should, I hope, already be apparent that Fellini is playing a Gide-like trick in the closing sequences, with his character on the verge of making a movie suspiciously similar to the one we have been watching. But in fact Fellini has been playing analogous tricks throughout. Although Guido is officially working on some kind of science-fiction picture, in which survivors of a nuclear holocaust flee to another planet, what he has actually shared with Daumier is the screenplay for a film about his own life. And so when Guido reviews the screen tests of actors hoping to star in his movie (fig. 27.5), what we see are women playing his wife and mistress, men playing cardinals, and boys playing Guido. Not an alien or spaceman in sight. This frequently puts us in a rather odd position, unable to decide whether a given event depicted on screen is supposed to belong to Guido’s reality—what he is currently seeing, remembering, experiencing—or to his script. Did he really just have a vision of a woman in white, for example, or was he just inventing it for cinematic purposes? When we first see this mysterious figure, we take her to be a hallucination that Guido is actually seeing before him; a few short scenes later, however, we learn that she is merely (or also) a character in the screenplay. “And the capricious appearances of the girl,” asks Daumier in his notes to Guido (fig. 27.6), “what are they supposed to mean? An offer of purity?

564    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction

Figure  27.5  The screen tests

Figure  27.6  “Of all the symbols that abound in your story, this one is the worst.”

A tender gesture to the hero? Of all the symbols that abound in your story, this one is the worst.”4 And what about the scene involving Carla’s high fever? Carla has drunk too much of the spa water, and Guido is not impressed (fig. 27.7a). “What do you expect?” retorts Carla. “You leave me alone all the time.” Again, this seems for all the world to be something that is actually happening to Guido. But when we come to see the screen tests (fig. 27.7b), we find various actresses pronouncing a virtually identical line: “You know it’s dangerous to leave me alone [è pericoloso lasciarmi sola].” Given that the screen tests have been prerecorded, and that we are watching them a mere day after Carla’s high fever, we are once again in a quandary: did we witness something “real”5—something actually present, right now within Guido’s mind or world, like the spa and the sunglasses and Daumier—or something invented?

Joshua Landy   565 What, too, of the truly bizarre conversation between Guido and Carla in which she asks him whether he could “choose one single thing, and. . . make it the one thing that gives your life meaning,” and he replies “No, the character I’m thinking of couldn’t” [no, questo tipo no, non è capace—literally, “no, not that guy, he couldn’t do it”]? Has Guido himself shrunk—in his own mind, if that makes sense—to the status of a fictional character? In all three of the instances I’ve mentioned, an event or character suddenly loses its status as something “real” in order to become something fictional. There are also, however, occasions on which things move in the other direction, with figments of imagination oddly making their way into reality (fig. 27.8). All Guido has to do, for example, is tell his sister-in-law that he’s “putting everything in [his movie], even a sailor who does the soft-shoe,” and a soft-shoeing sailor suddenly appears out of nowhere. And even after Guido is told that it would be the height of absurdity to expect an audience with a cardinal in a spa, that impossible audience with a cardinal is exactly what we see on the screen before us.6 Over and over again, then, 8½ reminds us that it is just a film. Over and over again, we are forced to oscillate between engagement and detachment. Just when we become absorbed in the story, we are reminded that it’s only a fiction; just when we become used to treating it as unreal, along comes something emotionally laden, and we return to caring deeply about the characters. Everything we believe is subject to doubt—but everything we doubt can, conversely, become something to believe.

(a)

(b)

Figure  27.7A–B  “It’s dangerous to leave me alone.”

(a)

(b)

Figure  27.8A–B  The soft-shoeing sailor and the cardinal in the spa

566    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction

3. What does this formal feature have to do with the themes of chaos, conflict, and redemption we started with? Many, I am sure, would be tempted to answer that question by invoking some kind of message, some kind of deep Truth about the World, the point of all formal features being (they assume) to mean something. This, however, would be a big mistake. It is true that any number of film theorists have taken the idea for granted (I’ll come back to them later), and that any number of critics—including their fictional brethren in 8½!7—have followed suit, but truly astute fiction-makers have always understood that they have more important things to do than say things (which they do, in any case, far less efficiently than writers of nonfictions).8 Instead, at their best, they do things; and what a self-reflexive fiction like 8½ does is to give us practice in believing what we don’t believe.9 We saw a moment ago that 8½ forces us to shuttle continually from engagement to detachment. One moment we are worried about Carla’s high fever; the next moment Carla is just a character in a screenplay. One moment we are laughing at the pretentious device of a woman in white; the next moment we see her again, and have our breath taken away (fig. 27.9). Now in sending us on this relentless rollercoaster ride, 8½ gives us two hours’ worth of practice at doubting what we believe, two hours’ worth of practice at believing what we doubt—practice, in other words, in entertaining an illusion and knowing that it is not true. Why is this so important? Because the kind of redemption Guido achieves—and the kind of redemption available to us, too—depends to some degree on illusion. Guido’s mother and father are dead, yet here they are alongside the living; Guido’s wife and mistress don’t exactly get along, yet here they are dancing in a ring together. Human flourishing,

Figure  27.9  Known illusions can retain their force

Joshua Landy   567 as Nietzsche understood so well, requires a certain degree of self-deception. At the same time, only one kind of self-deception is dignified: the kind that knows itself for what it is. The good life, for Fellini, is not pure escapism; if it were, then the science-fiction movie would be just as satisfactory as the fictionalized story of a life. Rather, the good life is as much truth as one can stand, coupled with the illusion one cannot do without, at the same time as an awareness that the illusion is illusion.10 And that is precisely where self-reflexive fictions begin to do their work.

4. There is, as far as I know, no concrete evidence (as yet) that what I have said so far is true. As most cognitive scientists will tell you, their own field is in its infancy; in fact, one of the most delightful features of talking to cognitive scientists is the number of times you will hear a famous expert saying “I just don’t know.” (How often have you heard those four words from a literary theorist?) And if cognitive science is in its infancy, cognitive literary criticism is scarcely out of its swaddling clothes. We are sure, at this point, of almost nothing. Do the ideas above hold water? To borrow the language of cognitive science, I just don’t know. That said, I believe there are a number of findings that make my hypothesis at least plausible, the most important of which is what is sometimes referred to as “informational encapsulation.”11 Many scientists now think of the brain as being organized into a set of functionally specialized systems: a system for seeing, a system for hearing, a system for memory encoding, and so on. This does not mean that each system is confined to a single physical area within the brain; specialization is not the same as localization.12 It also does not mean that the data are never combined—that the left hand is always in the dark about what the right hand is doing—let alone that there is no central controller.13 What it does mean, however, is that the brain is capable of performing multiple tasks simultaneously.14 (The brain, as some like to put it, is a massive parallel processor.)15 And what it also means, most crucially for our purposes, is that the various systems do not always have to be in agreement, or even in communication.16 Optical illusions are an excellent example of this. When a straight straw looks bent once it’s placed in a glass of water (fig. 27.10), what’s happening is that two separate systems are operating on the same sense data and delivering opposite verdicts. Perception is telling you the straw is obviously crooked; inference is telling you it is still as straight as it was when you put it in the glass. And neither side entirely carries the day. Perception doesn’t entirely win, since you don’t act as though the straw is bent (by, say, going and getting another straw); inference doesn’t entirely win either, since you can’t helping seeing the straw as bent, no matter how certain you are that it is straight. (Telling yourself that something is an optical illusion makes no difference to what you perceive. Try it!) At a higher level, it is possible to inspect the deliverances of the two systems—to say to

568    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction

Figure  27.10  The bent straw illusion

yourself “goodness, I see the straw as bent but infer it to be straight”—but down in the trenches, the two systems are operating completely autonomously.17 What we know about informational encapsulation suggests three things that are relevant for our purposes: first, it is entirely possible to hold two conflicting attitudes towards a single state of affairs (the straw is bent, the straw is straight); second, it is entirely possible to become aware of having those two attitudes (using, presumably, a third subsystem); and such awareness, finally, need not affect our experience (even when we know that the straw is straight, we still continue to see it as crooked). This ability to entertain competing attitudes simultaneously comes on line remarkably early in life. At the age of three or four, children hosting make-believe tea parties are easily able to keep track of the fact that Susie’s cup already has tea in it, whereas Johnny’s cup does not—even though, in reality, both cups are empty. (The children, in other words, are simultaneously holding in their mind the proposition “Susie’s cup has tea in it” and the proposition “Susie’s cup has no tea in it.”)18 It does not take long, either, for the demarcations to be come even more sophisticated. In an ingenious experiment designed by Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom, children aged four to six were just as good at adults in answering the question “Does Batman think that Spongebob is real?”19 (Similarly, and equally surprisingly, Marjorie Taylor found that children with imaginary friends tended to be perfectly aware that the latter did not exist.)20 Most significantly for our purposes, children playing make-believe are perfectly capable of renegotiating the rules mid-game (“now you’re the crocodile”), a fact that surely suggests some kind of

Joshua Landy   569 double consciousness on their part. All of this is not to say, of course, that children make no mistakes; they do better, however, than we often suspect.

5. The relative autonomy of mental systems—our capacity to compartmentalize, to “quarantine” beliefs from one another21—explains, then, how it is possible to maintain conflicting attitudes at the same time. In itself, however, that does not explain why it might be desirable. This is where the work of Shelley Taylor comes in. Taylor, a psychologist at UCLA, discovered that overly optimistic views of our qualities, circumstances, and prospects actually promote mental health.22 It is of course possible to go too far—acting on the belief that one is impenetrable to bullets is probably not the best idea, for example, when entering battle—but within certain limits, we are just going to be happier if we get it a little bit wrong about how smart we are, how much people like us, and how bright our future is going to be. Researchers have also discovered a correlation between athletic success and propensity for self-deception.23 Correlation is not causation, but is it not at least possible that William James was right in thinking that the only way to leap across an abyss is to fool ourselves into thinking that there is absolutely no chance of falling?24 Perhaps the strongest single piece of evidence, however, is the “mirror box,” that wonderful invention designed to provide relief to amputees suffering from phantom pain. A patient who has lost an arm, for example, can place the other arm next to the mirror, giving herself the illusion of still having both; somehow, miraculously, the phantom pain dissipates. From which we can learn, again, two important things. First, illusions can be highly beneficial; second, and counterintuitively, they can continue to be beneficial even after we know them to be illusions. The parallel layering of mental activity not only makes genuine self-deception possible (whatever people like Sartre may have said) but also makes conscious self-deception possible. And the nature of human existence makes both kinds of self-deception desirable, at least under certain conditions.

6. Do self-reflexive fictions actually have anything to do with all this, however? As I acknowledged earlier, we don’t yet know for sure. But what we do know is that, in a general sense, people get better at what they practice (thanks to the strengthening of neural pathways and more efficient organization of strategies); this can be true, what is more, even when the practice takes place in their imagination. Flight simulators are excellent training for handling real-life aeroplanes, and video games are sometimes made use of by the military: skills are often “transferable” from imaginary to actual contexts.25 There

570    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction is even an example that comes very close indeed to what I take Fellini to have in mind. That example is lucid dreaming. As its name suggests, a lucid dream is one in which the dreamer knows she is asleep, an awareness that is sometimes accompanied by a degree of control over what she experiences. However strange it may sound to non-lucid dreamers, the phenomenon is a real one, as a growing body of research has established. In one series of studies, for example, subjects agreed in advance to count, draw, or make a fist in their dream; later, with the subjects in REM sleep, researchers detected increased activity in the relevant brain areas and/or parts of the body.26 Another study found differences in brain activity—in particular, an increase in beta-1 activity in the parietal areas—between lucid and non-lucid dreamers.27 So here we have another situation, confirmed by experiment, in which (as counterintuitive as it may appear) our senses are deceiving us, and we know they are deceiving us, yet we continue to let them do so. Now the fascinating thing is that it is actually possible to cultivate this capacity. There are certain techniques we can use, in other words, to make it more likely that we will develop a degree of awareness and control over our dreams, including—most crucially for our purposes—the practice of asking ourselves repeatedly during the day whether we are awake or asleep.28 What this means is that we can train ourselves to enter one state of divided consciousness by deliberately entering another state of divided consciousness; being reminded that everything we are experiencing might be an illusion can carry over into other activities, presumably because different states of divided consciousness work more or less the same way. And this in turn means that engagement with self-reflexive fictions could well strengthen our ability to sustain all those illusions that are so favorable to our flourishing.

7. It might still, of course, be objected that even if such strengthening is feasible, and even if it is desirable, I still haven’t shown that it is likely. After all, isn’t it the case that for any formal feature one can mention, there are a variety of effects it can generate, depending on the context?29 A long, tender, ornate speech between lovers might be designed to produce tears, or it might be designed to produce laughter; free indirect discourse can be employed to offer the vision of a world with weaker ego-boundaries (Woolf), but it can also be employed to skewer characters more cruelly (Flaubert).30 Why assume that Fellini’s self-reflexivity will be put, so to speak, to good use? It has to be admitted that there is no guarantee of the intended uptake. (That, of course, is the fate of every aesthetic object.) But again, artists can at least increase the chances of the desired result taking place. And they do so by means of priming. What any number of psychological researchers have discovered is that an initial stimulus makes us more sensitive to related stimuli; certain concepts, thoughts, and attitudes become more salient, more accessible, more likely to affect our judgment and action. If,

Joshua Landy   571 for example, we are hungry (or have just been shown the word “food”), we will be more likely to read the letter sequence SO_P as “soup”; if, on the other hand, we are in need of a shower (or have just been shown the word “wash”), we will be more likely to see it as “soap.”31 That, I think, is precisely how content works in cases like Fellini’s 8½. In itself, the formal device of self-reflexivity tells us nothing about what it wants us to do with it. But when it is coupled with a plot involving the necessity of life-affirming illusions, everything changes. We have a hard time, I think, not connecting the two—not thinking that the happy ending and the repeated breaking of the fourth wall are intimately linked. The content of a literary work primes us, I am claiming, for a particular way of taking up its form. We are left, then, with the following overall picture, consistent with many results from the world of cognitive science. The content of 8½ serves as priming, making thoughts of necessary illusions more accessible and salient to us; this in turn leads us to understand the form—the self-reflexivity—as an opportunity to hone our capacity for conscious self-deception; conscious self-deception is possible because of the modular structure of the mind, involving a number of mutually encapsulated systems; conscious self-deception is desirable because illusions are sometimes good for us; and fictions can be a venue for its training because we get better at what we practice, even when the practice is only in our head.

8. This still leaves room, of course, for self-reflexive fictions to have other plausible ambitions, primed by different kinds of content.32 All that Verfremdung in Brecht, for example, is almost certainly designed to make it easier for us to detach ourselves from our rash assumptions, easier to turn the bright light of critical thought onto what we had previously taken as “natural” and immutable.33 All that metaleptic craziness in Unamuno’s Mist, similarly, may be part of what the prologue-writer calls “Don Miguel [Unamuno]’s campaign against public gullibility” (assuming, of course, that this prologue-writer is to be trusted). And again along similar lines, Queneau’s Chiendent may perhaps aim to strengthen our capacity for putting everything in doubt—even what we currently take to be true—as a spur to ever deeper philosophizing. (That, more or less, is Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of Romantic irony.)34 In each of these cases, reflexivity still has the function of fine-tuning our capacity to hold two attitudes at once; here, however, the ultimate goal is not to maintain our beneficial illusions but rather to loosen their grip of their malevolent cousins, to make sure those ones are never completely in control. Or again, the divided state that self-reflexivity cultivates may provide a vital protective shield against crippling internal division: when one finds oneself holding two contradictory beliefs—or indeed feeling two contradictory feelings—and when it is simply not possible to jettison one of them, the only solution may be to step back from both, identifying oneself with the system that inspects them as though from without. (I take

572    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction this to be Diderot’s ambition in Jacques le Fataliste.)35 And then, finally, there are fictions (like Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, perhaps) whose self-reflexivity is a way of entitling themselves to a little heartfelt emotion in a world saturated with cynicism, and others (like Gide’s Counterfeiters, perhaps) whose self-reflexivity simply serves a way to explore the resources of the medium. Still, Fellini was not alone in wanting to put reflexivity in the service of conscious self-deception. Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Marcel Proust, and Luigi Pirandello had preceded him; Woody Allen and Milan Kundera would follow him.36 There is, after all, no substitute for the maintenance of necessary illusions, and no substitute for self-reflexive fictions as a venue for their training.

9. In a way, of course, all fictions put us in a divided state of mind. (Readers may wish to consider the contributions of Elaine Auyoung and William Flesch, c­ hapters 28 and 18 in this volume.) There is always a part of us lurking around to register that what we are reading or watching is not real: as Kendall Walton so memorably pointed out, horror movies cause our pulses to race and our hearts to pound. . . but not our legs to carry us out of the theater, or our fingers to dial our friends to warn them of the impending danger.37 What is more, while we generally root for the protagonist, we also rather like the idea of him or her getting into trouble (no trouble, no plot!).38 Finally, our empathetic suffering for Clarissa Dalloway finds itself strangely tempered by our enjoyment of the artistry with which her travails are crafted and rendered by Virginia Woolf. So we believe and do not believe, at once; we want and do not want, at once; we feel and do not feel, at once. This is a truly extraordinary triple fact about the experience of (interesting) fiction, one that lies at the heart of its peculiar power.39 What self-reflexive fictions do is to ratchet up, and make blatant, that generalized double-consciousness.40 In the standard case, our sense of the work’s fictionality is a background awareness, the kind of awareness we have, while driving, of the steady hum of the engine. With Fellini, by contrast, we are forced to place it at the center of our conscious attention, while also being invited to maintain somehow the referential illusion, to continue the make-believe game, to keep playing along. By gradually increasing the size of the cognitive weights we have to lift—by putting additional pressure on our simultaneous ability to have and to stand back from a given mental attitude, whether belief, desire, or feeling—reflexive fictions like Fellini’s give an intensive workout to our capacity for simultaneous trust and distrust, readying us for the difficult business of life.41 Yes, that difficult business often involves knowing the truth. But at times it requires us to be ignorant or even frankly mistaken. And when that happens, it is generally better for us to maintain an awareness of what is going on. And for that I think it helps if we have watched a little Fellini.

Joshua Landy   573

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Stephen Kosslyn for a tremendous amount, not least the numerous hours he was so generously willing to devote to conversations about literature and cognitive science. A better interlocutor simply could not be imagined. Thanks, too, to Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé for inviting me to deliver some of this as a talk at the Modernist Studies Association conference in 2011, and to Neil van Leeuwen for planting, all these years ago, the vital germ of the central idea.

Notes 1. Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Terence Kilmartin, D. J. Enright, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 225 (translation modified); Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harvest, 1982), 3; Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, trans. Michael Henry (London: Penguin, 1986), 30, 74; Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1999, 70; André Gide, Les faux-monnayeurs (Paris:  Gallimard, 1972); André Gide, Paludes (Paris:  NRF, 1920), 12; Charlie Kaufman (w.), Adaptation, dir. Spike Jones, Sony Pictures, 2002; Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996), ch. 22; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New  York:  Vintage, 1989), 300–301; Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Mark Musa (London: Penguin Classics, 1996); Miguel de Unamuno, Mist, in Novela/Nivola, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 4; Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Penguin, 2001), 72; James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 769; Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two Birds (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998); Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 78; Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 215; Eugène Ionesco, Le roi se meurt (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 22 (“tu vas mourir à la fin du spectacle”); Raymond Queneau, Witch Grass, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003), 309; Jean Genet, Le Balcon (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 153. 2. Cf. to some extent Marilyn Fabe, Closely Watched Films:  An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 164–65. 3. See R. Lanier Anderson, “Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration,” in The Re-Enchantment of the World:  Secular Magic in a Rational Age, ed. Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 225–58. 4. Similarly, when we first see Saraghina, we take this to be a memory Guido is having, triggered by the sight of a woman who resembles her. But in the very next scene, Daumier discusses this “memory” as though it were actually an episode in the screenplay Guido has given him to read. (“What does it mean?” he asks. “If you want to denounce Catholicism, you need less nostalgia and more logic!”) 5. To be more precise, one should say “true within the fiction” (borrowing Kendall Walton’s terminology); I’m just trying to keep my vocabulary as untechnical as possible. 6. Fellini also plays with editing and sound to illusion-undermining effect; see Fabe, Closely Watched Films, 166–71.

574    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction 7. Toward the end of the movie, Guido finds himself surrounded by hostile critics. “You has-been,” shouts one, “what do think you can teach?” “Do you have anything to say?” asks another. “He is lost. He has nothing to say!” laughs a third, in English. The more astute Daumier, by contrast, realizes that an author’s intention can be (among other possibilities) “to make us think” or even “to make us afraid.” 8. See Joshua Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions (New York: Oxford, 2012), ­chapter 1. 9. I have made similar arguments with respect to Mallarmé in How to Do Things with Fictions, 9–92. 10. I am paraphrasing Nietzsche, who wrote both that “the falsest judgements are the most indispensable to us” (Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1966], sec. 4) and that “the real measure of value” is “how much truth. . . a spirit [can] endure” (Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1969], Preface, sec. 3). In an important article, R. Lanier Anderson refers to the will to truth and the will to illusion as “mutually regulating ideals” in Nietzsche: see “Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption,” European Journal of Philosophy 13.2 (2005): 185–225. For a list of pro-illusion passages in Nietzsche (giving the lie, among other things, to Richard Rorty’s claim that Nietzsche has a pragmatist theory of truth), see Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (New York: Oxford, 2004), 209 n. 37. 11. The connection between self-deception and informational encapsulation was first suggested to me by Neil van Leeuwen. I subsequently read something like it in Danica Mijović-Prelec and Drazen Prelec, “Self-Deception as Self-Signalling:  A  Model and Experimental Evidence,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 365 (2010): 227– 40, and then in Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), where the idea is more developed but also accompanied by some rather shady arguments about agency. Caveat emptor. 12. On this point, see Kurzban, Hypocrite, 47; Paul Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000), 119; Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New  York:  Norton, 2009), 30. On functional specialization, see also Ellen Spolsky, “Making ‘Quite Anew’: Brain Modularity and Creativity,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 86–89. 13. For the combination of inputs in a “global conscious workspace,” see Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain:  The New Science of How We Read (New  York:  Penguin, 2010), 318–23 and Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 20. For the confident claim that there is no central controller, see Kurzban, Hypocrite, 10, 22, 60–62. When faced with the question of how coordination happens, Kurzban helpfully tells us “I don’t know” (67). 14. Edward E.  Smith and Stephen M.  Kosslyn, Cognitive Psychology:  Mind and Brain (New York: Prentice Hall, 2006), 42; Pinker, How the Mind Works, 26 and 77; Spolsky, Gaps in Nature, 32. 15. On parallel processing, see for example Pinker, op. cit., 26. 16. Theorists who have argued for at least some degree of informational encapsulation include Jerry Fodor, in The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983 (see, e.g., 67–72); Donald Davidson, in “Deception and Division,” in The Multiple Self, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 79–92; and Marvin Minsky, in Society of Mind (qtd. Spolsky, Gaps in Nature, 24).

Joshua Landy   575 17. A variety of additional phenomena, such as blindsight, hemispatial neglect, alien hand syndrome, and self-outwitting, all confirm the independent activity of systems. See Kurzban, Hypocrite, 9–18. This is not to say, of course, that “top-down” processes never influence “bottom-up” processes. 18. I am referring to a classic series of experiments by Alan Leslie. See, e.g., Alan M. Leslie, “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind,’ ” Psychological Review 94.4 (1987): 412–26. For discussion, see Shaun Nichols, “Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code,” JAAC 62.2 (2004): 129. 19. Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom, “The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds,” in The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun Nichols (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–86. 20. Taylor is very forthright: “young children,” she says, “do not think their imaginary companions are real.” (Marjorie Taylor, Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 90.) She found that when children were interviewed at length about their imaginary companions, they would often end up warning the interviewer, “it’s just pretend, you know!” (112) There is of course a great deal of variation here, as Taylor herself admits. In general, children do better (a) the older they are; (b) the more control they have over the imagining; and (c) the less other people are actively trying to convince them that something is real (as in the case of Santa Claus). Most two-year-olds are already able to recognize certain acts as pretense (89); most three-year-olds will be shocked if, during a game involving Playdough “cookies,” you actually put one in your mouth (“yuk, do you always eat that Playdough?”) (105); most four-year-olds are agile enough to handle rule changes in mid-game (104); most five-year-olds know that what they see on TV and read in fictional books is not real (96); and by the age of eight, most children know that cultural myths like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are imaginary (96). Mistakes continue to be made periodically at all levels, but as Taylor points out, adults too are liable to be affected by their dreams (111), to care about fictional characters (113), to conflate an actor with his or her role (97), and to be unwilling to drink from a perfectly harmless bottle that happens to be marked “cyanide” (101). All in all, “children’s mastery of fantasy is impressive” (116). 21. The term is Leslie’s (“Pretense and Representation,” 415). 22. See Shelley E.  Taylor, Positive Illusions:  Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Shelley E. Taylor et al., “Psychological Resources, Positive Illusions, and Health,” American Psychologist 55 (2000):  99–109; Shelley E.  Taylor and Jonathon D.  Brown, “Illusion and Well-Being:  A  Social-Psychological Perspective on Mental Health,” Psychological Bulletin 103 (1988): 193–210. See also Kurzban, Hypocrite, 101–19. 23. Joanna E. Starek and Caroline F. Keating, “Self-Deception and Its Relationship to Success in Competition,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 12.2 (1991): 145–55. 24. “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll into the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous

576    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction class), the part of wisdom. . . is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled.” William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956 [1897]), 59. 25. Anecdotally, Jim Holt reported that memorizing a series of lyric poems improved his capacity to store information—not just poetry, but other things as well—in working memory. See Laura Miller, “Make Kids Learn Poetry,” http://www.salon.com/2012/06/13/ make_kids_memorize_poetry/. 26. Morton Schatzman et al., “Correspondence during Lucid Dreams between Dreamed and Actual Events,” in Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, ed. Jayne Gackenbach and Stephen LaBerge (New York: Plenum Press, 1988), 155–79. 27. Brigitte Holzinger et al., “Psychophysiological Correlates of Lucid Dreaming,” Dreaming 16.2 (2006): 88–95. 28. This was Paul Tholey’s discovery. See Stephen LaBerge, Lucid Dreaming (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 21. 29. This is what Meir Sternberg calls the “Proteus principle.” See “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes,” Poetics Today 24.3 (2003): 552. 30. Free indirect discourse, says the inimitable Blakey Vermeule, is “a technique whose main virtue seems to be to slice the character’s head off more effectively.” Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 44. 31. See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 52. 32. For fuller discussion of the following theories, see Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions, 69–92, 90–92. 33. Before the action gets going in The Exception and the Rule, the chorus enjoins us: “Findet es befremdend, wenn auch nicht fremd. . . damit nichts unveränderlich gelte” (“find it alienating, albeit not alien. . . so that nothing should appear immutable”). Die Ausnahme und die Regel, in Fünf Lehrstücke (London: Methuen, 1969), 94; my translation and emphasis. See also Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 136–40. It is worth pointing out that this ambition—the ambition of training audience members to step back from their own beliefs—is very different from the ambition to inform them of something. Quite a few theorists have, unfortunately, decided that it is entirely reasonable to use the device of reflexivity to send some kind of message about the constructedness of (social) reality. See, for example, Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 115; Christian Quendler, From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction (Frankfurt am Main:  Peter Lang, 2001), 160; and Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 18–19. This, it seems to me, is a decidedly odd view to hold. If a novel by Gide is enough to convince us that everything is constructed, might not a novel by Balzac be enough to restore our original opinion? What kind of person would one have to be to allow one’s mind to be changed on such a fundamental point by a formal device in a work of fiction? 34. “Étienne. . . plunged into a series of considerations relative to the necessity of preliminary doubt in all philosophical inquiry” (Queneau, Witch Grass, 233). On Schlegel’s position, which is much more complex than I am able to explain here, see D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1967), 200. 35. See Landy, How to Do Things, 90–91; J. Robert Loy, Diderot’s Determined Fatalist: A Critical Appreciation of “Jacques le Fataliste” (New  York:  King’s Crown Press, 1950), 151; Lloyd

Joshua Landy   577 Bishop, Romantic Irony in French Literature from Diderot to Beckett (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989), 2. And compare Nietzsche: “At times we need a rest from ourselves by looking upon, by looking down upon, ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing over ourselves or weeping over ourselves... we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us.” (The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1974], sec. 107; emphasis removed.) 36. For an explanation of how this works in Proust, see Landy, Philosophy as Fiction, 143; for Mallarmé, see Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions, 87–89. For Pirandello, key evidence comes from his play Enrico IV. In Woody Allen’s oeuvre, the clearest example is Broadway Danny Rose. Kundera is not an entirely clear-cut case, but there are suggestions (see Immortality, 12, 341, and especially 344) that he is in the Fellini camp. 37. Kendall L.  Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978):  25. Compare to some extent Bortolussi and Dixon, ­chapter 25 in this volume. 38. Compare Gregory Currie, “Narrative Desire,” in The Philosophy of Film:  Introductory Text and Readings, ed. Thomas E.  Wartenberg and Angela Curran (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2005), 139–44; Amy Coplan, ”Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62.2 (2004): 147. 39. By “interesting” I do not mean “canonical.” The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is hardly canonical, contains elements of reflexivity; the crucial distinction is not between “elite” and “popular” but between challenging and facile. To be sure, Fellini, Proust, and Mallarmé are arguably more likely to have the desired effect, since the device is more central in them and since their readers and viewers tend to arrive expecting to contribute a relatively high degree of mental effort. But where a work is sufficiently ambitious, and where its appreciators are sufficiently diligent, its commercial appeal should never be counted as a strike against it. 40. Compare Jean-Marie Schaeffer: “même si la scène implique une ‘transgression paradoxale des frontières,’ cette transgression, loin d’être une anomalie, n’est qu’une exemplification particulièrement explicite de ce qui constitue la caractéristique définitionnelle centrale de l’immersion fictionnelle, à savoir le fait qu’elle implique un état mental scindé.” “Métalepse et immersion fictionnel,” in Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, ed. John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2005), 325. 41. On fiction as space for “cognitive workout,” compare Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 161.

Works Cited Anderson, R. Lanier. “Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration.” In The Re-enchantment of the World:  Secular Magic in a Rational Age, ed. Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009: 225–58. ———. “Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption.” European Journal of Philosophy 13.2 (2005): 185–225. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove, 1958. Bishop, Lloyd. Romantic Irony in French Literature from Diderot to Beckett. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989.

578    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction Brecht, Bertolt. Fünf Lehrstücke. London: Methuen, 1969. ———. Brecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harvest, 1982. Currie, Gregory. “Narrative Desire.” In The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings, ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. New York: Penguin, 2010. Davidson, Donald. “Deception and Division.” In The Multiple Self, ed. Jon Elster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 79–92. Diderot, Denis. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. Trans. Michael Henry. London: Penguin, 1986. Ehrlich, Paul. Human Natures:  Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000. Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Fabe, Marilyn. Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Fodor, Jerry. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Genet, Jean. Le Balcon. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Gide, André. Les faux-monnayeurs. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ———. Paludes. Paris: NRF, 1920. Holzinger, Brigitte, et al. “Psychophysiological Correlates of Lucid Dreaming.” Dreaming 16.2 (2006): 88–95. Huxley, Aldous. Point Counter Point. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996. Ionesco, Eugène. Le roi se meurt. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. James, William. “Is Life Worth Living?” In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover, 1956 [1897]. Joyce, James. Ulysses, New York: Vintage, 1990. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Kaufman, Charlie. Adaptation. Dir. Spike Jones. Sony Pictures, 2002. Kundera, Milan. Immortality. Trans. Peter Kussi. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Kurzban, Robert. Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite:  Evolution and the Modular Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. LaBerge, Stephen. Lucid Dreaming. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Landy, Joshua. Philosophy as Fiction:  Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust. New York: Oxford, 2004. ———. How to Do Things with Fictions. New York: Oxford, 2012. Leslie, Alan M. “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind.’ ” Psychological Review 94.4 (1987): 412–26. Loy, J. Robert. Diderot’s Determined Fatalist: A Critical Appreciation of “Jacques le Fataliste”. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1950. Miller, Laura. “Make Kids Learn Poetry.” http://www.salon.com/2012/06/13/make_kids_ memorize_poetry/. Mijović-Prelec, Danica, and Drazen Prelec. “Self-Deception as Self-Signalling: A Model and Experimental Evidence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 365 (2010): 227–40. Muecke, D. C. The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen, 1967. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage, 1989. Nichols, Shaun. “Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62.2 (2004): 129–39.

Joshua Landy   579 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1966. ———. Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1969. ———. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. O’Brien, Flann. At Swim Two Birds. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Pinker, Stephen, How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 2009. Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author. Trans. Mark Musa. London: Penguin Classics, 1996. Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 1999. ———. Time Regained. Trans. Terence Kilmartin, D. J.  Enright, and Andreas Mayor. New York: Modern Library, 1993. Quendler, Christian. From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001. Queneau, Raymond. Zazie in the Metro. Trans. Barbara Wright. London: Penguin, 2001. ———. Witch Grass. Trans. Barbara Wright. New York: NYRB Classics, 2003. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Métalepse et immersion fictionnel.” In Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation, ed. John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2005, 323–34. Schatzman, Morton, et  al. “Correspondence during Lucid Dreams between Dreamed and Actual Events.” In Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain, ed. Jayne Gackenbach and Stephen LaBerge. New York: Plenum Press, 1988, 155–79. Skolnick, Deena, and Paul Bloom. “The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds.” In The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, ed. Shaun Nichols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 73–86. Smith, Edward E., and Stephen M.  Kosslyn. Cognitive Psychology:  Mind and Brain. New York: Prentice Hall, 2006. Spolsky, Ellen. Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. ———. “Making ‘Quite Anew’: Brain Modularity and Creativity.” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine, Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 84–102. Starek, Joanna E., and Caroline F. Keating. “Self-Deception and Its Relationship to Success in Competition.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 12.2 (1991): 145–55. Sternberg, Meir. “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes.” Poetics Today 24.3 (2003): 517–638. Taylor, Marjorie. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Taylor, Shelley E. Positive Illusions:  Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Taylor, Shelley E., and Jonathon D. Brown. “Illusion and Well-Being: A Social-Psychological Perspective on Mental Health.” Psychological Bulletin 103 (1988): 193–210. Taylor, Shelley E., et al. “Psychological Resources, Positive Illusions, and Health.” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 1365–93. Unamuno, Miguel de. Mist. In Novela/Nivola, trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

580    Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction Walton, Kendall L. “Fearing Fictions.” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 5–27. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction:  The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Chapter 28

Rethinkin g t h e Realit y Effe c t Detail and the Novel E l a ine Auyoun g

From cotton stockings in Madame Bovary to umbrellas in Bleak House to oysters in Anna Karenina, realist novels have long been distinguished for the abundance of empirical details that they contain.1 Roland Barthes argues that many of these insignificant details do nothing more than signal that a literary text operates within the discursive convention of “realism.”2 According to this structuralist perspective, the “reality effect” produced by circumstantial detail is purely rhetorical rather than phenomenological. Barthes goes so far as to dismiss the “referential illusion,” or the realist novel’s capacity to create the impression of a vibrant and expansive fictional world. For him, there is no “world”; there are only words. Yet empirical findings on text comprehension suggest that it is impossible for readers not to think of a novel in terms of the world it creates. In fact, even when readers have been instructed to attend only to the formal features of a text, they cannot help conceiving of some referential content.3 According to psychological studies of discourse processing, readers comprehend sentences in a novel, such as “Oblonsky crumpled his starched napkin and pushed a corner of it inside his waistcoat, then, with his arms comfortably on the table, attacked the oysters,” in much the same way that they comprehend sentences in a newspaper, postcard, spoken anecdote, or any other form of narrative discourse.4 John Searle reasons that, if this were not the case, readers could not “understand a work of fiction without learning a new set of meanings for all the words” contained in it.5 Just as readers readily attend to secondhand narrative accounts to find out about actual persons and events that they cannot access firsthand, they attend to the text of a novel to find out about fictional persons and scenes that are not immediately present to their senses. Literary critics and discourse psychologists alike propose that readers rely on the words of a literary text as a set of instructions for building mental models of text content that are more conceptual than linguistic in nature.6 As a result of this process, readers come away from a text with mental content

582    Rethinking the Reality Effect that is more like the scenario described by the text and less like sentences on a page.7 Although a description of Oblonsky at dinner technically cannot refer in the strict sense of identifying objects that actually exist, it still retains a referential effect. Yet while novel readers may comprehend the sentences of Anna Karenina in the same way that they comprehend sentences in a nonfictional account of nineteenth-century Russian life, the relationship that Tolstoy’s novel forges between readers and the fictional persons and places it implies is complicated in ways that a reader’s relationship to the actual world is not. On the one hand, readers of both fictional and nonfictional texts occupy a limited position with respect to the persons and scenes being described. As comprehensive as a novel like Anna Karenina seems to be, it cannot document every feature of the fictional world, just as a nonfictional narrative cannot fully capture the plenitude of the actual physical world.8 On the other hand, a novel is distinguished by the fact that, although it seems to describe persons and scenes in a necessarily limited way, those implied objects in fact possess no ontological extension at all. The asymmetric effect that realist writers achieve is to create the impression of a vibrant, expansive fictional landscape simply by laying down ink strokes on a blank page. In order to create this effect, novelists like Tolstoy rely on the capacity for fragmentary details to suggest much more than themselves. At the same time that Anna Karenina contains an abundance of information about the implied fictional world, any given passage in the text presents readers with only a fragmentary selection of information about it. For instance, Tolstoy’s description of Stiva Oblonsky at dinner (“Oblonsky crumpled his starched napkin and pushed a corner of it inside his waistcoat, then, with his arms comfortably on the table, attacked the oysters”) identifies several aspects of the scene (napkin, waistcoat, arms on the table, oysters), but leaves many components unrepresented. The verbal sketch that Tolstoy does provide serves to suggest more than itself in a surprisingly elegant way, and with an economy that is at odds with the representational excess that critics typically associate with literary realism. By cueing readers to conceive of a larger, incompletely represented scene, novelistic details thus perform important phenomenological work. As the Victorian critic George Henry Lewes observed, the “art of novel-writing, like the art of painting, is founded on general principles” that are “derived from tendencies of the human mind.”9 The cognitive tendency that realist writers particularly seek to engage is the reader’s everyday readiness to recognize what fragmentary cues imply. In fact, this economical strategy of world-creation lies at the heart of any attempt to evoke an illusory world without reproducing it in its entirety. For example, in a production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a light installed backstage can serve to suggest sunlight streaming through a drawing-room window. The real ray of light that the audience perceives is a cue that is sufficient to imply an outdoor landscape when no such space actually exists. Just as a set designer relies on suggestive cues to create the impression of more that extends beyond the boundaries of the stage, the novelist selects details that create the impression of a world that exists beyond the pages of the text. Recognizing that fragmentary details serve as cues or building blocks for creating implied fictional worlds opens up a different way to approach gaps in literary

Elaine Auyoung   583 representation. From reader-response theorists to cognitive narratologists, critics have examined various ways in which readers contend with deficits of representation. Their work focuses primarily on moments when a narrative withholds information that affects the reader’s interpretation of character and action. For example, Porter Abbott’s analysis of shadow stories (­chapter 5 in this volume) calls attention to significant events within a narrative that are deliberately omitted and therefore open up multiple possibilities for what might happen or multiple ways to account for what has happened already. One shadow story that we might identify in Anna Karenina is Oblonsky’s affair with his children’s governess, which precedes the starting point of the narrative but precipitates its opening scene. Engaging readers in a plot that unfolds across time, however, is not a novelist’s only artistic commitment. A realist writer like Tolstoy also seeks to create the illusion of a world that seems to possess ontological solidity. In this regard, empirical details such as the ones that are used to describe Oblonsky in his study serve as a means of tethering readers synchronically to a world that is absent and implied. At the same time that novel readers experience the drama presented by the story itself, they also undergo the drama of aesthetic illusion: of being seduced into feeling as if the persons and scenes possess a reality of their own. The struggle that results, between knowing that nothing in the story really exists and being unable to help recognizing the promise of something more, is a reality effect generated by the reader’s sensitivity to suggestion. We can attribute this cognitive sensitivity to the fact that, within ordinary perceptual experience, we frequently have only fragmentary access to the objects in our environment. As a result of these commonplace deficits of information, cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner says that inference, or the ability to go “beyond the information given,” is implicated in almost all acts of perception.10 Bruner argues that if he is given “a very good look at an object, under full illumination and with all the viewing time necessary, and end by calling it an orange,” this does not involve a different perceptual process from “one in which the same object is flashed for a millisecond or two on the periphery” of his retina under poor illumination.11 Although the cues permitting identification of the object are “superabundant” in the first example and extremely limited in the second one, the two conditions differ only in degree. Elsewhere, I have described several empirical studies of visual object recognition that demonstrate that perceivers readily recognize words, objects, and scenes composed of many parts even when presented with just one or two components.12 Such perceptual acuity is assisted by what cognitive psychologists generally refer to as “bottom-up” and “top-down” processing.13 Bottom-up or stimulus-driven processing refers to a perceiver’s reliance on immediately available sensory information, while top-down processing refers to the perceiver’s ability to retrieve stored knowledge about the world.14 In other words, our attempts to contend with a deficit of available information are assisted by the fact that information always flows in two directions: we bring our preexisting knowledge and expectations to bear on the stimulus presented to us. As vision psychologist Patrick Cavanagh explains, “The highly accurate guesses and inferences that we make rapidly and unconsciously are based on a wealth of knowledge of the world and our expectations for the particular scene we are seeing.”15 The ability to recognize more than meets the eye not only enables perceivers to make do

584    Rethinking the Reality Effect with extremely limited access to objects in our environment, but also translates into the ability to get away with attending to only a few cues even when more abundant information is available. Within Anna Karenina, Tolstoy himself dramatizes numerous occasions when a few perceptual cues are sufficient to indicate something more that is only implied. For example, when Levin spends the day mowing alongside the peasants, the narrator describes “little boys and girls approaching from all sides along the road and through the long grass, hardly visible above it, carrying jugs of kvas stoppered with rags, and bundles of bread which strained their little arms” (299). At the same time that an observer working in the field must contend with the fact that these children are largely occluded by the long, not-yet-mown grass, readers must similarly contend with the limited information about these figures that the printed page provides. The only distinguishing feature of the approaching children is that they bear in their “little arms” jugs of kvas and bundles of bread. Later, at the end of the same workday, Tolstoy foregrounds Levin’s ability to take a few perceptual cues to recognize what remains withheld from view. As Levin walks away from the field, the narrator reports, “He could not see the men, for the mist rising from the hollow hid them; but he heard their merry rough voices, laughter, and the clanking of the scythes” (303). If an opaque veil of mist divides Levin from the peasant men out in the field, Tolstoy also dramatizes a number of indoor occasions in which characters effortlessly rely on fragmentary acoustic cues. For example, when Dolly hears “soft steps and the rustle of petticoats already in the doorway,” she turns to anticipate the entrance of Anna Karenina (78). And when Levin visits his brother Nikolai, the narrator describes his approach by means of the limited perceptual cues available to him: “The door of No. 12 was ajar, and from within, visible in the streak of light, issued dense fumes of inferior and weak tobacco. Levin heard a stranger’s voice, but knew at once that his brother was there, for he heard him coughing” (100). The associative path by which Levin moves from the sound of a cough to the recognition of his brother’s presence and by which Dolly moves from the sound of rustling petticoats to Anna’s approaching person not only highlights the centrality of partial perception within everyday experience, but also self-referentially models the phenomenological impact of realism’s technical reliance on empirical details. Formally, realist writers deploy fragmentary cues that prompt readers to recognize the implied extension of persons and scenes that remain incompletely represented and absent from the senses. Throughout Anna Karenina, Tolstoy relies on the suggestiveness of partial cues again and again. On the day of Vronsky’s steeplechase, the narrator represents Vronsky’s trainer as a “lean Englishman in top boots and a short jacket, with only a tuft of beard left under his chin” (214). By specifying just three components of the trainer’s person (top boots, short jacket, and tuft of beard), Tolstoy engages the reader’s everyday cognitive readiness to take a few perceptual cues to indicate something more: the trainer’s implied physical extension. The narrator then sets this figure into motion by noting the awkward way in which he sways “from side to side with his elbows sticking out.” In an even more economical manner, Tolstoy distinguishes the

Elaine Auyoung   585 “wife of an ambassador” as “a beautiful woman with black sharply-outlined eyebrows, in a black velvet dress” (157). And, early in the novel, when Anna has stepped off a train, the narrator describes two gentlemen who “passed her with glowing cigarettes between their lips” (121). Tolstoy similarly relies on partial cues to imply the physical extension of animal bodies. A scene in which Levin inspects his cattle includes the description of a calf, which “fumbled about, pushing its nose under its mother’s belly and swinging its little tail” (111). The calf ’s acts of pushing with its nose and swinging its tail accentuate two points in space that imply the body extended between them. When the narrator turns his attention to Laska, Levin’s hunting dog, the verbal cues he provides are not tail and nose, but tail and ear: “one ear erect, wagging her fluffy, high-arched tail” (194). Tolstoy’s reliance on partial cues is not limited to the representation of animals or anonymous strangers that are incidental to the story. The narrator also speaks of “Varenka with the white kerchief over her black hair” and describes the Princess Shcherbatsky sitting “in a cap with lilac ribbons handing out cups of coffee and sandwiches” (663, 275). A beribboned cap subsequently becomes the main component used to describe Kitty Shcherbatsky herself when Levin catches a glimpse of her in a carriage: “a young girl who had just wakened and was holding the ribbons of her white nightcap with both hands” (328). Later in the novel, when Kitty converses with Levin on the evening of their engagement, the narrator reports: “You have killed a bear, I hear?” said Kitty, vainly trying to catch a wayward, slippery pickled mushroom with her fork, and so shaking the lace of her sleeve through which her arm gleamed white. (454)

The representation of Kitty that this sentence provides consists of a handful of components: her speaking voice (“You have killed a bear, I hear?”), the slippery mushroom, a fork, and the white arm visible beneath her lace sleeve. Tolstoy’s attention to Kitty’s arm, along with Varenka’s kerchief, Laska’s ear, and the glowing ends of two cigarettes provide abundant evidence for Roman Jakobson’s observation that Tolstoy “is fond of synecdochic details.”16 Each of these physical details works in a similar way, focusing the reader’s attention on one component of a larger physical body or scene that is implied but otherwise unspecified. There are of course many other categories of suggestive cues that novels contain, such as social and affective cues that engage the reader’s capacity for theory of mind, cultural cues that engage the reader’s preexisting knowledge about a particular historical moment, and rhetorical cues that engage the reader’s familiarity with storytelling conventions but are less directly implicated in the specific project of world-creation. Making a case for what a particular social or behavioral cue signifies, however, is more often a matter of debate than claiming that a fragmentary physical detail like a swinging tail or a shaking sleeve indicates the extension of a larger scene. Because my aim is to illuminate the unique effects of literary suggestion instead of interpreting what a social or cultural cue implies, my analysis focuses on cues that evoke the physical extension of the fictional world.

586    Rethinking the Reality Effect Like criticism that demonstrates how novels engage our capacity for theory of mind, focusing on how fragmentary details activate our sensitivity to suggestion helps to explain why literature affects us in such real ways. By emphasizing the continuities between a reader’s response to literary and nonliterary cues, however, cognitive literary critics have left themselves vulnerable to the charge that their work renders aesthetic response indistinguishable from any other category of cognitive response. To answer this charge, I want to turn to the fact that, as much as our sensitivity to literary cues extends from our sensitivity to nonliterary cues, literary experience is not simply an extension of nonliterary experience. There is something atypical about the phenomenology of reading realist fiction in what makes it interesting.17 After all, the critical impulse to account for why literary narratives can affect us in real ways reflects an implicit assumption that, because fictional worlds possess no real ontological existence, they ought not to have any impact at all. It is this aesthetic conflict, which we find already folded into the self-contradictory phrase “realist fiction,” that distinguishes the effect of novelistic cues from that of everyday perceptual cues. The more that literary cues succeed in prompting readers to recognize the promise of implied persons and scenes that exist beyond the text, the more they bring readers into conflict with the fact that suggestion is in fact all there is. Paradoxically, the effectiveness of novelistic details ultimately exposes the limits of the illusion they are deployed to create. These limits take the form of two tensions: an epistemological one and an ontological one. Epistemologically, it is commonplace for novel readers to speak of creatively “filling in the gaps” left by a text. Yet by equating a complex cognitive response to a basic physical act, the metaphor of “filling in” obscures the true range of epistemological effects generated by suggestive literary cues. While partial cues in a novel can be sufficient to prompt readers to recognize something that is only implied, they do not necessarily lead to a straightforward act of what Roman Ingarden calls “concretization,” in which the reader imaginatively supplies what the text leaves out.18 Recall, for example, Tolstoy’s intricate description of Kitty’s arm, which perfectly illustrates Elaine Scarry’s account of how verbal artists use transparent surfaces to “confirm the solidity” of the objects layered beneath them. Kitty’s shaking lace sleeve “works to verify the density” of her white arm.19 By providing such a vivid description of a single arm in just over a dozen words, Tolstoy in fact throws into relief the vacuity of all that remains unrepresented. The attention that Tolstoy devotes to the slippery mushroom at the end of Kitty’s fork prompts readers to recognize the promise that this vivacity extends to the rest of implied scene, but the impression that something more exists is not the same as a fully determinate conception of what that “something” is like. Empirical findings on discourse comprehension in fact suggest that readers make very limited inferences about unspecified parts of the storyworld.20 Thus Marie-Laure Ryan reports that her initial reading of a text leaves her with “a vivid, though spotty visualization of the setting.”21 Yet it remains tempting to presume that we “fill in the blanks” in response to Tolstoy’s description of Kitty’s arm because the components of any human figure come so readily to mind. Readers might readily

Elaine Auyoung   587 conceive of a torso, head, and limbs that are only implied without making additional elaborative inferences about Kitty’s person. Similarly, when Tolstoy’s narrator uses a “tuft of beard” to indicate the face of Vronsky’s trainer, it is easy to conflate one’s ability to know the attributes of a prototypical face (such as a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth) with one’s ability to construct a determinate conception of Vronsky’s trainer (a specific configuration of eyes, nose, and mouth). As much as readers may feel as if they fill in the trainer’s face for themselves, just how little they actually determine during the reading process becomes apparent when pressed to specify, say, the color of his beard or of his eyes. The degree to which readers typically do not fill in the blanks left by a text becomes even more apparent when we consider Tolstoy’s construction of scenes that extend beyond the perimeter of a single body. While the suggestion of a single implied person or animal body delimits the contours of what could be “filled in,” novelistic details that direct the reader’s attention to a larger portion of the implied fictional landscape exponentially increase the possibilities of what this wider world could be like. Consider, for example, this description of Vronsky and Betsy Tverskaya at the opera: “ ‘Excuse me!’ he added, taking from her hand the opera-glasses, and he set to work to scan across her bare shoulder the row of boxes opposite” (151). This sentence directs the reader’s attention first from Vronsky’s voice to Betsy’s hand to the opera glasses, and then from Betsy’s bare shoulder to the row of boxes across the theater. The hand, pair of glasses, single bare shoulder, and row of boxes are stopping points along the path of Vronsky’s gaze, and they provide the reader with fragments from a larger scene that largely remains unknown. While this set of cues (shoulder, hand, pair of glasses) may prompt some readers to retrieve a few features that they strongly associate with the theater (dimmed lights or the hum of voices in the audience), most of the implied scene remains undetermined. The specified details are sufficient to create the impression that there is more to the theater scene, but provides no way to know more about what that extended scene is precisely like. Similarly, on the day of Vronsky’s steeplechase, Anna is “upstairs standing in front of a mirror pinning, with Annushka’s help, a last bow to her dress, when she heard the wheels of a carriage grating on the gravel at the entrance” (242). Again, Tolstoy directs the reader’s attention to two separate points in space: the point where the bow is being pinned to the dress and the edge where the carriage wheels meet the gravel. Because the distance between these two points extends far beyond a single human body, however, the given cues prompt recognition of more that cannot easily be filled in. While readers may claim to generate a vivid conception of Anna standing in front of a mirror, it is a much more difficult task to specify exactly what lies between her dressing room and the carriage outside. To insist on the limited extent to which novel readers fill in unspecified components of an implied fictional world seems at first merely to state the obvious. A reader’s mental model of Anna in her dressing room is simply not the same kind of thing as seeing that scene projected onto a movie screen. Reading about the streets of St. Petersburg is not the same as walking down Nevsky Prospekt. For most readers, the fact that many properties of fictional worlds are unspecified is unproblematic. Marie-Laure Ryan

588    Rethinking the Reality Effect even proposes a principle of minimal departure, in which readers readily assume that unspecified features of the fictional world are no different from their analogues in the actual world.22 Nevertheless, by recognizing that mental models of novelistic content are fragmentary rather than fully determinate, we come face-to-face with the limits of literary suggestion. While empirical details like the sound of wheels on gravel or a single bare shoulder cue readers to recognize that there is more to the implied scene, this top-down cognitive response only brings readers up against the fact that they are not in a position to gain further access to what has been implied. Throughout Anna Karenina, Tolstoy provides fragmentary glimpses of the theater, of a calf with its mother, of a train station, of Oblonsky eating oysters. What distinguishes the literary cues from which these scenes take shape is that no matter how suggestive they may be, the reader always remains arrested at the stage of suggestion. The cues that a novelist deploys to create implied persons and scenes have been selected because they are so effective at implying more than themselves, but this same suggestiveness ultimately leads readers to push against what the text provides. In a physical expression of the impulse to push against the boundaries of the text, Vladimir Nabokov was moved to research “the layout of the railway car that Anna traveled in from Moscow to St. Petersburg” in order to find out for himself “information that Tolstoy neglected to include” about the scene when Anna dozes off with a novel in her hands.23 This extreme attempt to get beyond the limits of what Tolstoy’s empirical cues imply reflects the novel reader’s epistemological condition of feeling as if there is something more while being unable to gain access to it. Nabokov’s literal attempt to overcome the divide between himself and Tolstoy’s fictional world brings out the second tension generated by literary suggestion, which has to do with the ontological status of the objects implied by novelistic details. We find a vivid illustration of this conflict inscribed into the opening pages of Anna Karenina, when Stiva Oblonsky awakens from his pleasant dream. The narrator says that Oblonsky “gaily let down his legs and felt about with his feet for his slippers finished with bronze kid (last year’s birthday present, embroidered by his wife); and from nine years’ habit he stretched out his arm, without rising, towards where his dressing-gown usually hung in their bedroom” (2). But instead of coming into touch with his dressing gown, Oblonsky finds himself grasping at thin air: he has spent the night not in his bedroom but on the sofa in his study. His automatic impulse to reach out for a dressing gown that is not actually present, and the resulting cognitive dissonance that he momentarily undergoes, models in miniature the effect produced by the novel in which he himself appears. Novel readers who succumb to the narrative’s suggestion that Oblonsky and his study are “there,” who are temporarily led to feel as if an implied fictional person and scene seems to exist beyond the printed page, ultimately meet with the limits of Tolstoy’s illusion. Whereas Oblonsky recalls that he is simply in the wrong room and can carry himself to the right one, readers who are led to feel as if there is more to the fictional world can only come face-to-face with the fact that the implied objects of their sustained interest and attention are nowhere to be found. Nabokov seeks out additional information about the interior of actual

Elaine Auyoung   589 nineteenth-century Russian railway cars in an effort to bring his mental model of Anna on the train closer to a fully determinate version of the implied scene. This is a quest, however, that will continually elude his approach. His attempt to gain further access to the “something more” that Tolstoy’s novelistic cues seem to suggest only throws into relief the top-down ontological fact that there is nothing more. Nabokov is caught in the act of trying to bring himself into touch with something that does not exist at all. And novel readers cannot overcome the ontological divide between themselves and a novelistic universe that is only implied. The contemporary Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk calls attention to the affective consequences of this impasse in his recent account of reading and writing fiction, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist. Pamuk says that the “more powerful and persuasive the novel we are reading, the more painful the feeling of insufficiency. The more the naïve side of our soul has believed in and been enthralled by the novel, the more heartbreaking our disappointment at having to accept the fact that the world it describes is merely imaginary.”24 Far from being a complaint about the limits of literary representation, this statement attests to the skill with which realist writers create the impression of worlds that seem to extend beyond the printed page. Literary artists who succeed in producing this illusion make it difficult for readers to reconcile their vivid impression with the “merely imaginary” status of those persons and scenes. Whereas Roland Barthes’s insistence that novels are nothing more than words on a page can be seen as his attempt to eliminate this conflict, it is precisely this cognitive dissonance that makes the experience of reading realist fiction so compelling and complex. On the one hand, the fact that novel readers so readily take fragmentary cues to suggest what remains absent and implied accounts for the ease with which Tolstoy gets readers to feel as if there’s something in place of nothing. On the other hand, because there is in fact nothing more to the novel than what actually appears on the printed page, the experience of reading Anna Karenina is bound up with a wistful sense of longing. Besides changing the way we think about the work that novelistic details perform, a cognitive approach to the reality effect complicates our fundamental conception of literary experience. Although readers of Anna Karenina conceive of Anna on the train or Oblonsky dining with Levin by enlisting the same cognitive habits that they use to conceive of actual persons and scenes, the response to literary suggestion leads to complications that distinguish the experience of aesthetic illusion from that of everyday cognitive life. Even though readers know that nothing in the novel really exists, they still cannot help feeling as if a world extends beyond the text. By offering a means to account for this struggle, a cognitive approach to the reality effect helps us put our finger on a major source of realism’s aesthetic power. At the same time that the text suggests something more to which readers can have no further access, this “something” is always under threat of being extinguished. The suggestiveness of fragmentary details allows readers to experience the pleasure of recognizing the promise of more, but that pleasure is circumscribed by a kind of wistfulness—even pathos—because as soon as readers are moved by their belief to reach out for what seems to be implied, it dissolves into thin air.

590    Rethinking the Reality Effect

Notes 1. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel:  Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), 32. 2. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 142. 3. Gert Rickheit and Lorenz Sichelschmidt, “Mental Models:  Some Answers, Some Questions, Some Suggestions,” in Mental Models in Discourse Processing and Reasoning, ed. Gert Rickheit and Christopher Habel (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1999), 13. 4. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Knopf, 1992) (hereafter cited in text). 5. John Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” New Literary History 6 (1975): 319–32. 6. See Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Catherine Emmott, Narrative Comprehension:  A  Discourse Perspective (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1997); and Arthur C.  Graesser, Murray Singer, and Tom Trabasso, “Constructing Inferences during Narrative Text Comprehension,” Psychological Review 101 (1994): 371–95. 7. Accounts of discourse comprehension present a simpler way to understand how readers come to conceive of fictional worlds than possible worlds theory, which brings with it a complex logical apparatus. In Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Ruth Ronen points out that, in contrast to fictional worlds, possible worlds are not autonomous worlds, but exist in relation to the actual world as alternatives to how that world might have turned out. While possible worlds theory provides a logical justification for our ability to conceive of worlds that don’t exist, discourse comprehension accounts for the ease with which readers achieve this in practice. 8. For example, Ruth Ronen points up that all the characteristics of a fictional object “cannot be specified in every detail” (Possible Worlds, 114). See also Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica:  Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 169; and Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 50. 9. George Henry Lewes, “The Novels of Jane Austen,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 86 (1859): 108. 10. Jerome Bruner, Beyond the Information Given:  Studies in the Psychology of Knowing (New York: Norton, 1973), 219. 11. Ibid., 12. 12. See Elaine Auyoung, “The Sense of Something More in Art and Experience,” Style 44 (2010): 550–51. 13. See Patrick Cavanagh, “Top-Down Processing in Vision,” in The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 844–45. 14. See Mark J. Bruhn’s account of top-down and bottom-up processing in “Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience: The Prelude,” ­chapter 29 in this volume. 15. Cavanagh, “Top-Down Processing,” 845.

Elaine Auyoung   591 16. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague:  Mouton, 1956), 92. 17. I am indebted to Leah Price for first calling this important distinction to my attention. 18. Ingarden, Cognition of the Literary Work, 50. 19. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 19, 12. 20. Richard Gerrig, “Readers’ Experiences of Narrative Gaps,” StoryWorlds 2 (2010): 19–37. 21. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford, CA:  CSLI, 2003), 218. 22. Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 50–52. 23. See Orhan Pamuk’s account in The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, trans. Nazim Dikbas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 126. 24. Ibid., 128.

Works Cited Auyoung, Elaine. “The Sense of Something More in Art and Experience,” Style 44 (2010): 547–65. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” In The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Bruner, Jerome. Beyond the Information Given:  Studies in the Psychology of Knowing. New York: Norton, 1973. Cavanagh, Patrick. “Top-Down Processing in Vision.” In The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica:  Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension:  A  Discourse Perspective. Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1997. Gerrig, Richard. “Readers’ Experiences of Narrative Gaps.” StoryWorlds 2 (2010): 19–37. Graesser, Arthur C., Murray Singer, and Tom Trabasso. “Constructing Inferences during Narrative Text Comprehension.” Psychological Review 101 (1994): 371–95. Herman, David. Story Logic:  Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Ingarden, Roman. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. Lewes, George Henry. “The Novels of Jane Austen.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 86 (1859): 99–113. Pamuk, Orhan. The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist. Trans. Nazim Dikbas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Rickheit, Gert, and Lorenz Sichelschmidt. “Mental Models: Some Answers, Some Questions, Some Suggestions.” In Mental Models in Discourse Processing and Reasoning. Edited by Gert Rickheit and Christopher Habel. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1999. Ronen, Ruth. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994.

592    Rethinking the Reality Effect Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space.” In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Edited by David Herman. Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Searle, John. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History 6 (1975): 319–32. Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude. New York: Knopf, 1992. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.

Chapter 29

Time as Spac e i n t h e Structu re of ( L i t e ra ry) Experie nc e The Prelude Mark J. B ruh n

The Past as Prologue Each moment of cognition is, in a psychological if not a Platonic sense, a re-cognition. Though we’re seldom aware of it, present experience is pervasively mediated by past experience, as we literally feel in those surprisingly rare moments of mis-re-cognition, when a shadow seems a someone, or a mere noise a meaningful name. Such mistakes reveal that even simple perception—of a three-dimensional object, say, or of a word token—is never a matter only of a moment but always of at least two moments or times: the present instant, in which light or sound waves strike the eye or ear, and the instance of the past, that is, consolidated foregoing experience that interprets these sensory impulses according to preestablished and therefore anticipated ideas. These anticipatory ideas or “psychological sets” include not just semantic concepts and linguistic signs but also embodied feelings, for example, the muscular and vestibular “memories” that unconsciously “know” where and when the landing of a familiar staircase falls and are alarmingly destabilized if, by a miscalculation of a single step, it doesn’t. Most of the time, however, the foot lands as expected and the shadows lay where they ought, so the predictive aspect of ongoing experience rarely comes—or rather jolts—to consciousness. That the mind thinks before and beyond immediate sensation is perhaps most clearly seen in language use, which involves the processing of aural or visual stimulation, instantly and transparently, according to categorical presets. That irritating character we all know, the completer-of-other-people’s-sentences, simply gives voice to the

594    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience grammatical and lexical predictions that any competent auditor would silently be making. The linguist’s Cloze test likewise illustrates our normally unconscious anticipation of where strings of words are heading. Take, for example, “a bird in the ______.” Reading the first four words of the phrase leads one to predict what the fifth will be, and unsurprisingly most people readily fill the blank with “hand,” “oven,” “tree,” “air,” or another high-frequency collocate. These linguistic prepossessions are confirmed by subjects’ rapid processing of phrases with expected collocates but significantly slower and more uncertain processing of phrases with unexpected or “deviant” collocates. Deviant answers are measurably more or less so, but still always on account of preconditioned expectations: for example, “a bird in the bird” is semantically deviant but not grammatically, since the prepositional phrase beginning “in the” leads us to predict that the open syntactic slot will be filled by a noun, whereas “a bird in the of” is deviant both semantically and grammatically.1 Linguists speak of this duality at the heart of language in terms of a dynamic interface between “bottom-up” and “top-down” processes of cognition. “Bottom-up” processes are the “peripheral” operations of sense that transmit sound waves from a voice or light waves from the surface of a printed page; “top-down” processes are the “central” operations of the brain that recognize the transmitted waves as language forms and predictively decode their sequence and substance. This hierarchical metaphor has been extended in cognitive science to characterize our perceptual and cognitive operations in general. Thus, the Dictionary of Cognitive Science from University of Alberta defines “top-down processing” in terms of a feedback loop between interrelated cognitive systems, with the “most basic” sensory-motor systems feeding data “upward” to the “most complex” systems, such as “memory” and “problem-solving,” which superimpose in a “downward” direction “information about past experiences” that is “stored in the higher levels of the system.” Instead of using a “top-down” metaphor for such past-to-present processing, however, linguists and cognitive scientists might better speak of “back-to-front” processing.2 Both metaphors are spatial, but only the second captures the temporal signature of cognition, our compelling sense that time flows along a horizontal line and not up or down a vertical one. Based on our embodied, “forward-looking” or prospective orientation in space, the “back-to-front” metaphor likewise improves upon conventional conceptualizations of time as something that “goes by” or that we “get through.” Where these conventional metaphors represent future time as standing before or coming toward us and past time as disappearing behind us, the “back-to-front” metaphor captures a salient fact about the direction of time in the actual process, as opposed to the conceptual products, of cognition. In cognition as distinguished from conceptualization, time flows forward, with past informing present, and past-informed present prefiguring the future. One of the earliest and still one of the most compelling expositors of the forward-going nature of temporal experience is the poet William Wordsworth. From Tintern Abbey’s reviving “picture of the mind” to the Immortality Ode’s “master-light of all our seeing” to The Prelude’s “spots of time, / Which with distinct preeminence retain / A renovating virtue,” Wordsworth’s best and most enduring poetry not only thematizes

Mark J. Bruhn   595 the presentness of the past but literally re-presents it. Indeed, for Wordsworth, the re-presenting of the past constitutes the essential activity of the poet and, accordingly, of his reader. Poetry may originate in “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but those powerful “influxes of feeling” must be, as Wordsworth immediately insists, “recollected in tranquillity,” which is to say, “modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings.”3 As he put it in a verse fragment penned two years earlier, The original impression of delight . . . by such retrospect [is] recalled To yet a second and a second life, While in this excitation of the mind A vivid pulse of sentiment and thought Beat[s]‌palpably with in us, and all shades Of consciousness [are] ours.4

Retrospection is not a “looking back” upon the past but rather a reversion of that past, in which the memorial return to a former state, belief, or interest “reverses direction” and becomes, in present conscious experience, a return of that former state, belief, or interest, or at least a version of it.5 Wordsworthian retrospection is thus a form of resurrection or reanimation, bringing an “original impression” to “a second and a second life” and thereby “exciting” the mind to a “vivid,” “palpable” apprehension of its own temporal complexity, figured as multiple “shades of consciousness.” Anatomizing this retrospective process in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth underscores its reversionary effect of re-presenting the past. Poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till. . . the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”6 Because the poet is endowed with “a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present,” he is able to “conjur[e]‌up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet. . . do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves.”7 Wordsworth here identifies two significant obstacles to the scientific study of the mind and at the same time intimates the logic of an approach by which they may be overcome. Notoriously, recollection is not recovery but recreation: actual experience, even of a moment ago, is inescapably altered when it is reframed and reproduced for introspective or retrospective reflection.8 Accordingly, when it “revives” in the present, the recollected emotion is only “similar to” the emotion originally experienced, not least because the original was immediately “produced by real events,” while the re-version is “gradually” or mediately produced by the mental “events” of recollection and contemplation. This necessary difference between immediate perception and memorial reflection means that the individual cannot consciously access a “pure” or temporally single moment of cognition. But of course, given the pervasive reality of top-down or

596    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience back-front processing even in the simplest acts of object or language recognition, there is no such thing as a temporally “pure” moment of cognition. And here the second obstacle crops up. While all cognition is temporally complex, involving the prospective recreation of past or “absent things as if they were present,” most humans are “unaccustomed” and “indisposed” to “feel” this “in themselves.” Indeed, the brain-mind being adapted for habituation, even routines acquired with effortful conscious supervision (e.g., brushing teeth, driving a car) become automated to the point where they are rendered “cognitively impenetrable.” For most people most of the time, the preconstruction of present experience in terms of past learning is simply not perceived, nor can it be brought to awareness by “the motions of their own minds merely.” If individuals, generally speaking, have direct access neither to “pure” nor to “complex” temporality in their own everyday cognition, how is the temporal structure of cognition to be investigated? Wordsworth’s answer is through poetic or artificial cognitive experience, which operates by analogy to the ordinary or natural kind and yet produces states of awareness that are difficult to achieve in everyday cognition. The poet’s recreative activity produces artificial passions that yet “more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events” than does any emotional experience remembered or conjured by most other individuals. While they cannot move themselves into such passionate states through their own conscious efforts, Wordsworth suggests that the poet may so move them through his. In the circular economy of poetic feeling, the poet converts a real emotional memory into an analogous emotional experience and then converts that analogous emotional experience into a verbal re-presentation; when read, the reader converts this representation into an emotional experience that is analogous to the poet’s and therefore likewise analogous to the reader’s own real emotional experience, with the key difference that the poetically induced one is legible in its temporal complexity. Thus, while we may be hard-put to access directly the cognitive structure of everyday experience, we can access an articulated model (“imitation,” “mimesis”) of that structure in literary experience. Since all cognition is phenomenologically factual, such literary experiences have as much and arguably more to tell us about the structure of our minds than does the time-worn cognition of everyday, shrouded in the veil of familiarity.9

The Supplement of the Past: Spatial Form in Theory Wordsworth’s Prelude is well known for its powerful representations of spatialized “spots of time,” remembered experiences from early life that, despite the “wide. . . vacancy between me and those days, /. . . yet have such self-presence in my mind / That sometimes when I think on them I seem / Two consciousnesses—conscious of myself, / And of some other being.”10 These lines figure intervals of time as intervals of space (“wide,” “vacancy,” “between”), preserving the distance of “those days” while simultaneously

Mark J. Bruhn   597 converting them to spatial “presences” in these. The first and still the most perceptive analyst of this spatial poetics is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who noted, just days after hearing these lines read aloud, that “Mental Space [is] constituent of Genius,” especially Wordsworth’s.11 The editor of Coleridge’s Notebooks glosses this observation with a notion Coleridge had spelled out a few months earlier, concerning that “state of mind” in which there “is a transmutation of the succession of Time into the juxtaposition of Space.”12 This is a precise characterization of the Wordsworthian spot of time, which likewise seeks to transform chronological disjunction into topological conjunction or, in Coleridge’s phrase, “co-existent Multitude.”13 Coleridge here defines in so many words what has since come to be called (without reference to Coleridge) “spatial form in modern literature.”14 According to Joseph Frank’s influential but admittedly “idealized” argument,15 spatial form attempts to counteract the constitutive temporality of language, where word follows word in grammatical sequence and meaning-making is necessarily a function of time. For Frank, spatial form thus involves deformation of the sequential relations of grammar, chronology, causality, and the like, in favor of “simultaneous” or pattern-based relations of repetition, association, likeness, contrast, and so on, that are perceived “in a moment of time.”16 Poems like Eliot’s Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos most closely approach “pure” spatial form, in which “syntactical sequence is given up,” “frustrating the reader’s normal expectation of a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of the poem juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time.”17 Such poetry, Frank claimed, “demands a complete reorientation in the reader’s attitude towards language” and “asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.”18 This is clearly overstated; more plausibly, Frank suggests that “the struggle towards spatial form in Pound and Eliot resulted in the disappearance of coherent sequence after a few lines; but the novel, with its larger unit of meaning, can preserve coherent sequence within the unit of meaning and break up only the time-flow of the narrative.”19 Yet this still overreaches by drawing too thick a line between poetry and novel, lyric and narrative, space and time. Compounding problems, Frank persistently implies that spatial form is the product and exponent of modernism, even though he derives his terminology from Gotthold Lessing’s eighteenth-century essay on spatial and temporal forms in the verbal and visual arts, Laokoön (1766). Lessing wrote in opposition to the spatial poetics that was newly flourishing in eighteenth-century descriptive poetry and that derived from the ancient ut pictura poesis tradition in aesthetics, holding that a poem may be conceived of as “a speaking picture” (and a painting, in turn, as “a dumb poem”). Lessing urged the inescapable temporality of the linguistic medium as a strong argument against the spatializing objectives of verbal description as opposed to narration, for description sets itself the counterintuitive and technically impossible task of representing immobile objects or static figures. According to Lessing, these essentially spatial objectives can be more easily and effectively realized in the atemporal media of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Writing 50 years after Lessing but nearly 150 before Frank, Coleridge has already complicated their neat distinctions by insisting upon the spatialization of time as a general

598    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience (if regularly concealed) feature of human cognitive experience and so likewise of literary structure and cognition. Literary structure works not to replace sequence with simultaneity, but rather to superimpose or fuse those opposite sensations, preserving the sense of temporal “distance” in the midst of spatial “connection.”20 Spatial form in literature does not replace temporal, sequential, or narrative form but depends on it (and vice versa); spatial form is therefore neither exclusive to lyric genres nor peculiar to modernism, as Wordsworth’s Prelude amply demonstrates. With its greater scope and inclusiveness, Coleridge’s analysis looks beyond Frank’s theory of spatial form to Roman Jakobson’s all-embracing theory of a “poetic function” in language, according to which “literariness” may be gauged by the extent to which patterned or parallel structures predominate in the verbal sequence.21 As Frank himself later acknowledged,22 Jakobson’s more comprehensive analysis proposes that all utterances, literary and nonliterary, lyric, narrative, or otherwise, necessarily involve both spatial (paradigmatic, metaphoric) and temporal (syntagmatic, metonymic) relations, and that “literariness” and “periodicity” are therefore matters of degree rather than of absolutely distinguishable kinds. Likewise, lyric and narrative are not rigid generic categories but scalar possibilities within all literature. What Coleridge found distinctive in Wordsworth was his coordination of tendencies that had been understood and represented (for example by Lessing) as mutually exclusive. In the words of a contemporary critic (formulated with reference to Frank and Jakobson but not to Coleridge), Wordsworth “lyricizes narrative and gives lyric a narrative form,” thereby inaugurating the “dominant modern convention” in verbal art.23 Monique Morgan has recently developed this point, emphasizing the psychologically as well as historically prospective quality of The Prelude. Adapting Paul Ricoeur’s distinction of “episodic” (temporal, chronological) and “configurational” (spatial, topological) dimensions in narrative discourse, Morgan argues that, by biasing the story of his life through a variety of structural means toward the configurational dimension, “Wordsworth constantly directs his readers to process the text prospectively. . . . Prospective reading allows the series of short lyrics to function together as one long lyric, restructures the presentation of time, and creates a more equal distribution of knowledge between the author and his audience.”24 Morgan captures a good deal about Wordsworth’s spatial poetics—its psychological effect of reducing a series to an impression of unity, its representation of time as prospective rather than retrospective, its circulation of recreative effort and awareness from poet to reader—and she implies a crucial further point. As episodes accumulate along the sequence according to the reversionary logic of spatial configuration, significance also gathers, not by increments or mere addition, but by being continuously refreshed in working memory and (re)integrated in the reader’s developing model of the discourse situation. Like others before her, however, Morgan was anticipated and surpassed by Coleridge, who recognized that the augmented significance is not, in the first place, conceptual but instead affective, a matter of feeling before it becomes (recollected in tranquility) a matter of thought. Through the “transmutation of the succession of Time into the juxtaposition of Space,” Coleridge writes, “the smallest Impulses, if quickly & regularly

Mark J. Bruhn   599 recurrent[,]‌ aggregate themselves—& attain a kind of visual magnitude with a correspondent Intensity of general Feeling.”25 To illustrate, Coleridge offers the striking image of “the circle of Fire made by whirling round a live Coal,”26 which involves the “aggregation” of discrete visual sensations into a coherent spatial “magnitude” whose unified appearance is more intensely affecting than that of any of its temporally distinguishable parts. Coleridge faults the illustration, however, because the mind remains “passive” in the face of the illusion and cannot bring itself to experiential awareness of its own prospective contributions to the wondrous effect. In truth, with each succeeding moment of visual stimulation, the mind refreshes and integrates the last impression (which had refreshed the one before that, and so on) and looks forward to the next impression, which refreshes and integrates the compound image of the moment before and again looks forward to comprehend the next instant in terms of the persisting past. This automatic activity of mind generates the phenomenal appearance of a spatial whole composed of temporally disjunct parts, whose aggregation into unity is literally felt as augmented wonder. To cultivate awareness of this active and pleasurably affecting quality of mind, Coleridge turned to works of poetic genius that deploy spatial form (or Jakobson’s poetic function) to produce, artificially but nonetheless revealingly, the psychological “effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant.”27 Coleridge supplies a deft illustration in Shakespeare’s simile describing Venus’s lingering view of the departing Adonis: “Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky! / So glides he through the night from Venus’ eye.” Like the phenomenal image of a wheel of fire in its conversion of sequence to simultaneity, the simile nevertheless differs insofar as it juxtaposes two images of temporal duration, one long and therefore replete with the idea of succession (Adonis’s departure, as watched by Venus), the other ever-so-brief and therefore replete with the idea of instantaneousness (the shooting star). The two measures are incommensurate, yet the distich, with its metaphoric logic reinforced by internal and end rhymes,28 yields the distinct “sensation” of their spontaneous “connection” and interpenetration, despite and without destroying their essential difference.29 Visualizing the simile, we seem to perceive, almost miraculously, the “co-modification” of succession to simultaneity, time to space.30 Habituation blinds us to this miracle of everyday experience, but in poetry’s spatial form, it stands, or at least feels, revealed.

Critical Evidence: Spatial Form in Effect In a note to the lyrical ballad “The Thorn,” Wordsworth defends what is certainly the structural backbone and signature aspect of his own spatial poetics:  sheer repetition. Repetition involves and occasions re-cognition; it is the simplest or at least most obvious variety of spatial form. Though as readers we may be prone to say that a present instance

600    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience of a repeated term “looks back” to a past instance or instances, as experiencers or processors of the text we should rather insist with Wordsworth that the present instance “recalls” that or those of the past. In terms of its cognitive effect, verbal repetition refreshes semantic traces that were previously activated in working memory but that are no longer focalized and are therefore in process of “decaying,” until by repetition they are “recalled / To yet a second and a second life.” Verbal doubling produces a cognitive redoubling with an accompanying “intensification,” to use Coleridge’s terms, in “general Feeling.” In his note, Wordsworth puts this point as he does in the foregoing Preface, in terms of our ordinary difficulty in understanding or communicating passion as it is produced by real events. In the actual moment of feeling, “every man” is “conscious of the inadequateness of our own power, or the deficiencies of language.”31 Naturally weak in understanding and articulating feeling, the average individual sustains his passion as he struggles to communicate it by repeating “the same words, or words of the same character.”32 Still, though it is a sign of conceptual and linguistic weakness in real life, such repetition becomes a sign of impassioned verbal power when reproduced in poetry. Here, “apparent tautology” becomes “the highest kind of beauty,” not merely symbolizing passion (as actual tautology does in real life) but “active[ly] and efficient[ly]” producing it in the reader.33 So Wordsworth claims; the proof is in the readings. One of the most sensitive on record is Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, in which Geoffrey Hartman recapitulates Wordsworth’s psychological point: In a note on “The Thorn” appended to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth justifies certain tautologies in principle. His note bears out at least one point concerning his style. . . : its redundancies, some times beautifully appropriate, have a direct psychical function, being at once “symbols” of a passion, i.e. expressing the clinging or craving mind of the speaker, and “things,” i.e. expressions that do release the mind and allow the passion to broaden into words, or the words, by psychical transference, to take on a life of their own.34

Hartman identifies a rich variety of stylistic redundancies in Wordsworth’s verse (e.g., anaphora, chiasmus, hendiadys, etc.) and precisely characterizes (his experience of) their cognitive effects. Though he does not refer to “spatial form” per se, his phrasing indicates that he is responding to it, in just the ways predicted by Wordsworth. For example, he characterizes Wordsworth’s verbal (re)doublings as “gradual expansions that blend thought with thought, link feeling with feeling,” so that “we now feel the presence of two loci. . . that produce in blending a deeper and milder thing than each in isolation.”35 Attesting to the reactivation or refreshment of items in his own working memory, Hartman speaks of “the renewal of the image” and “the renewal of the past in the present,” “despite time.”36 He analogizes from visual experience to epitomize his reading experience in terms of “after-images” and, anticipating my title as well as my argument, concludes that Wordsworth “depicts the after-image as a formal part of the structure of experience.”37 Isobel Armstrong gives an equally nuanced account of how Wordsworth uses lexical and grammatical form to induce a “palimpsestically layered” experience equivalent to

Mark J. Bruhn   601 his own, in which “earlier expectation” and its associated feelings infuse a “second qualitative experience,” persisting “under the new experience which is superimposed [spatially] and which supersedes it [temporally].”38 To anchor Armstrong’s commentary, I provide here an extract from the first of the two spots of time Wordsworth names as such, in which he recounts that, as a mere child of only four or five years, he lost his way and guide while horseback riding, stumbled to a valley “bottom” where a murderer’s gibbet-post still stood, and then, reascending the bare common, saw A naked pool that lay beneath the hills, The beacon on the summit, and more near, A girl who bore a pitcher on her head And seemed with difficult steps to force her way Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth, An ordinary sight, but I should need Colours and words that are unknown to man To paint the visionary dreariness Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide, Did at that time invest the naked pool, The beacon on the lonely eminence, The woman, and her garments vexed and tossed By the strong wind. When, in blessèd season, With those two dear ones—to my heart so dear— When, in the blessèd time of early love, Long afterwards I roamed about In daily presence of this very scene, Upon the naked pool and dreary crags, And on the melancholy beacon, fell The spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam— And think ye not with radiance more divine From these remembrances, and from the power They left behind? So feeling comes in aid Of feeling, and diversity of strength Attends us, if but once we have been strong.39

In his first presentation of the scene, Wordsworth focalizes objective details: “bare common,” “naked pool,” “the beacon on the summit,” “a girl who. . . seemed with difficult steps to force her way / Against the blowing wind.” As Armstrong observes, the initial “construction is nakedly literal and marks bare circumstantial and spatial relationships, making great use of the force of prepositions and adverbs.”40 Having staked out a spatial topography and populated it with a “co-existent multitude” of objects, Wordsworth pauses to reflect on this memorial sketch and his need of “Colours and words unknown to man / To paint the visionary dreariness” of the remembered scene. The painterly metaphor discloses Wordsworth’s spatializing intention, but meanwhile our attention has been for several critical moments distracted from the topographical image of the foregoing lines, which must to some extent have begun to decay from working memory. With

602    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience exquisite timing, Wordsworth then “revives” our now past impressions of the scene by repeating the words that first evoked them, only now endued with new emotional coloring. Here’s Armstrong: “Appropriate to the word ‘visionary,’ the second account of the scene constructs itself out of the first. It fuses and transfigures its elements. . . moving out of space and time but still dependent on ‘that time’ and on the naked pool, the beacon, the woman, which now share the solitary power and symbolic feeling of the ‘lonely eminence’ on which the beacon stands.”41 As for the writer “at that time” of real passionate experience, so for the reader at this time of felt poetic experience:  the immediate images are “invested” with “colours” not formerly their own. “The summit” becomes, through transferred epithet, “a lonely eminence,” and the dynamic image of the girl struggling against the wind is likewise elaborated and enriched. Within a structure of repetition involving “the same words, or words of the same [denotative] character,” we find semantic augmentation (girl à woman); the fleshing of abstract terms into concrete images (“seemed. . . to force” à “vexed and tossed”), metonymic expansion (the singular “girl” parsed into “The woman, and her garments”), amplifying parallelism (“vexed and tossed”), sound-symbolic resonance (“garments vexed and tossed”; cf. “invest”), and rhythmic redoubling (the spondaic substitution on “strong wind” where before we had contractual iambs in “the blowing wind”). Collectively, these augmentations create a more powerful image than originally presented, yet the original is not thereby erased but rather reduplicated in another key. Playing the scene a second time creates the effect that Hartman calls the “after-image,” halting the temporal unfolding of the narrative sequence for a moment of spatial concatenation and redoubled lyric concentration. The repeated conjunction “when” restores the narrative flow of time, yet the discourse situation remains the same, but then some. With a third iteration of the passionately invested symbols of “naked pool,” “beacon,” and now doubled female form (“those two dear ones”), The concrete forms become [further] abstracted into or fused with forms of emotion—“dreary crags,” “melancholy beacon.” They are derived out of the words and feelings which went before and yet they are new forms, new feelings, ready to be aided by and come in aid of further feeling, “the spirit of pleasure and youth’s golden gleam.” In all the descriptions.  .  . only the “naked pool” remains as a resistant, unchanged element as the passages evoke experience out of experience, compounding and recompounding it.42

Though he would need “Colours and words that are unknown to man / To paint” the actual “visionary dreariness” he experienced as a child or the actual “spirit of pleasure” he experienced as a young man, testimony like Armstrong’s and Hartman’s confirms that Wordsworth’s use of spatial form can induce analogous experiences in the reader. Repeated and carefully modulated patterns of words and images (not to mention sounds, rhythms, syntactical structures, etc.) effectively spatialize time, producing forward-going networks of self-amplifying relations.43

Mark J. Bruhn   603

Spatial Poetics and Blending Theory Stylistic investigation of the linguistic strategies by which Wordsworth’s spots of time accomplish the prospective transmutation of time into space, chronology into topology, may be of particular value to the “mental spaces” or “blending” theory of cognitive processing recently proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.44 As powerful as the blending model is—and it has been especially productive in literary studies45— researchers are only now beginning to conceive ways of putting its hypothetical underpinnings to empirical test.46 Carefully analyzed, Wordsworth’s spatial poetics could provide blending theorists with templates of linguistic conditions that prime “mental space” construction and blending. As indicated in the preceding sections, the record of literary-critical responses to Wordsworth’s poetry, beginning with Coleridge’s, stands as a matchless resource for this analytical project, and it comes complete with detailed accounts of correlated cognitive effects. These well-documented correlations may be more or less readily translated into specific experimental predictions (schematically: in processing linguistic stimuli structured in x way, subjects will report/display y experience/reaction). Though credited in cognitive circles to Fauconnier’s ground-breaking Espaces mentaux,47 the theory of mental spaces was, as we’ve seen, originally proposed and uniquely articulated by Coleridge. As Coleridge and many subsequent critics have attested, Wordsworth is especially gifted in stimulating the cognitive activity that Fauconnier and Turner have dubbed “conceptual blending,” whereby different “input spaces” of information (percepts, images, ideas, specific and schematic memories, etc.) are imaginatively “blended” to create a new, more or less unified conceptualization with “emergent” properties that can be found only in the blended space, not in the original input spaces. Wordsworth formulated a strikingly similar conception of imaginative processing, right down to the name he gives it: “The imagination,” he claimed, “is that chemical faculty by which elements of the most different nature and distant origin are blended together into one harmonious and homogenous whole.”48 Like Coleridge in his famous definition of primary imagination in Biographia, Wordsworth understands imaginative blending to be the origin and essence of human consciousness. “Blending” is thus the first note of the first draft of The Prelude, representing the first creative act of the infant mind: “Was it for this / That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song. . .”49 Here, two different and distant streams of sound, one natural, the other lyrical, blend not in the objective space of physical reality but in the mental space of (imagined) infant perception. To represent this perceptual blending50 by analogy, Wordsworth uses spatial form, the subtle but effective internal rhyme of “murmurs” and “nurse’s,” in which the already redoubled sound-image of the first term looks forward to and literally resounds within, thereby amplifying, the sound-image of the second term. The compound perception evoked by the repetition “reduces” multitude to unity and, insofar as it unfolds in syntactic sequence, succession to simultaneity.

604    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience The aesthetic pleasure attending such reduction (not the right word: “co-amplification” would be better) is emergent, that is, it would not be produced by either of the inputs, “murmurs” or “nurse’s,” perceived in isolation. In just this way, perception and recollection, time present and time past, though different and distant (even if only by the “space” of syllables), “become blendings.”51 This capacity and quality of Wordsworthian blending may serve to refine the conceptual but not yet fully cognitive52 analysis of time available in the blending theory of today. Fauconnier and Turner and their followers have abundantly demonstrated that “time as space is a deep metaphor for all human beings,” “common across cultures, psychologically real, productive, and profoundly entrenched in thought and language.”53 But while blending theory models this psychological reality, it hardly conveys a sense of it. For, as Coleridge well understood, the ongoing experience of consciousness may differ fundamentally from its conceptualization: “The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence. (I mean per se, as contradistinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which as the contrary of time, is therefore its measure).”54 Here we return to my opening distinction of temporal conceptualization and temporal experience, of time “going by” or “gotten through” as opposed to time present. Conventional time-as-space metaphors signify but do not re-present the lived experience of time, in which the past flows invariably forward, “back-to-front,” to inform the prospect of the present. This lived experience of time is essentially lacking in blending theory’s analysis of time conceptualizations, even though it is the cognitive ground from which they spring. Fauconnier and Turner analyze the genus of time concepts into two species, distinguished according to the (conceptual) stasis or motion of the conceptualizer: “Metaphor theory recognizes that motion of the ego through time as space has a dual [i.e., counterpart], namely, time as objects moving along a path past a stationary observer.”55 Though they don’t mention it, the motion conceptualization involving “a stationary observer” further subdivides according to the direction in which “time as objects moving along a path” is conceived to flow. As their wording implies, Fauconnier and Turner focus on the flow of time “past” the stationary observer, from before to behind (e.g., “The lecture went by effortlessly”). But time can equally be conceived flowing in the reverse direction, from behind to before, or from past toward present and future (cf. “I was flooded with memories” or “My past caught up with me” or indeed “The child is father of the man”). More importantly, regardless of how it is conceived, time in the structure of cognitive experience is always forward flowing (even when that experience includes a conceptualization involving one or both of Fauconnier and Turner’s “duals”). Fauconnier and Turner approach but do not capture the experiential structure of time in their analysis of expressions that measure the distance of the past relative to the present, as for example, “Our wedding was just yesterday” or the distinctly Wordsworthian “The days of my youth are so close and yet so far away.”56 Fauconnier and Turner analyze the first of these expressions as follows: “the subjective feeling in R/S [the “recall-space” of memory] that the wedding is very accessible, very close, is mapped onto the

Mark J. Bruhn   605 subjective feeling about the events of yesterday,” that is, onto the abstract idea that what happened yesterday is “closer” in time than what happened years ago. “So,” conclude Fauconnier and Turner, “the blend endows R/S with a metric using the notion of time. Accordingly, in the. . . blend, the word ‘yesterday’ provides an adequate indication of distance in memory.”57 Conspicuously missing from this account is the “space” of the present, verbally cued in the example by the deictic “yesterday” and indispensable to the relative measure of proximity (the memory is “close to” or “far from” what?—the here and now of the speaker).58 Consequently, the actual cognitive experience underlying the expression, which the expression but feebly symbolizes, remains out of view. In cognitive experience, recollection is always the re-presenting of the past, and its real bearing is always upon the present state of mind. Fauconnier and Turner speak of the resolution of “clashes” between “objective” or clock-time and subjective or experienced time in terms of the projection of a governing topology from either one or the other of two input spaces, as in “The days of my youth are so close and yet so far away,” which vacillates between the two.59 But while an either-or choice of topologies may constrain the conceptualization underlying these everyday expressions, it does not constrain the passionate psychological reality such utterances strive to express. As we’ve seen, Wordsworth contrives through spatial form to hold two governing topologies simultaneously in mind, a time-respecting one that preserves the sense of the past’s temporal distance and a space-contriving one that collapses intervening intervals or “vacancies,” yielding the phenomenal sensation of spatial coexistence in the present. What contemporary blending theory desperately needs—experimental paradigms that put its hypotheses to the test60—Wordsworth’s blending theory and practice may well supply. Blending is a cognitive process, whereas expressions are conceptual products, that is, artifacts of the process that, in most discourse situations, neither preserve nor prime it. For the purposes of cognitive-scientific experiment, what’s required are discourse prompts that predictably—not only dependably, but also in specifiable and therefore falsifiable ways—generate the process(es) of blending, so that it/they can be introspectively analyzed and physically measured, to the further improvement of the theory. Given the evidence of literary-critical history, barely skimmed here, we know empirically that Wordsworth’s spatial poetics represents the psychological experience of blending by reproducing it in the reader. How otherwise can we explain the continuous witness to this effect, using the very metaphor of “blending,” starting with Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves and echoed and amplified by Hartman, Armstrong, and countless other Wordsworthians? Guided by these poets and critics, we can identify the passages that most potently prime blending effects—the spots of time being obvious first candidates—and formulate hypotheses about which specific structural features in the selected passages are contributing to which specific effects. Especially when coordinated with a more general theory of spatial poetics—incorporating the insights of Coleridge, Frank, Jakobson, and others—predictions may then be converted into psychophysical experiments that control and systematically manipulate the variables of verbal structure at play in Wordsworth’s verse.

606    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience

Conclusion This chapter has offered a cognitive update on mid-twentieth-century theories of spatial form and poetic function. These theories hold that verbal patterning of various kinds counterbalances, complicates, and otherwise resists the inescapable temporality of the linguistic medium, which necessarily delivers its message over time. To the extent that such verbal patterns are “re-cognized,” the sequential text unfolds in the reader’s experience not as a simple succession or chronology of meanings but as a complex conceptual topography, composed of “re-presented” images and ideas and colored by their affective correlates. This ideational-affective topography is structured as a palimpsest, both literally and thematically. A parchment on which earlier writing remains legible behind more recent writing, palimpsest has come to mean by metaphoric extension any object, place, or area that reflects or imaginatively incorporates its own history.61 In either sense, the palimpsest’s legibility, whether actual, reflective, or imaginative, is key. Cognition is throughout deeply and mysteriously palimpsestic, but it is plainly so in response to literature’s multiply layered spatial forms. Wordsworth therefore defines poetry as “the history and science of feeling.”62 In his own case, the coordinate terms of this general claim should be more tightly related: Wordsworth’s poems, The Prelude chief among them, articulate a science of the history of feeling. Wordsworth means “science” not in a technical sense but in the earlier, more general sense of “knowledge or cognizance” of a particular subject.63 At its best, poetry gives us, not a rational explanation of felt experience, but an impassioned analogy of it, an acknowledgment on the pulses that can lead, as literary criticism has so often demonstrated, to an enriched understanding of the mind. Poetry helps us to cognize the “history” or “historicity” of our own cognitive experience, conveying not just the feeling of feeling, but a feeling of feeling’s temporal composition.64 Poetry that enables us to experience and reflectively understand the temporal composition of feeling may well be termed a science of the history of feeling. Wordsworth’s poetic science thus presents in little one of literature’s largest prospects upon futurity: its potentially critical role in the “new” cognitive neuroscience of mind, which seeks to understand as he did The Feeling of What Happens.65 In advancing this specific argument about Wordsworth, I have pursued three more general objectives. First, I  have outlined a cognitive approach to spatial poetics that would investigate how temporally distributed linguistic forms can prime more or less integrated “mental space” configurations (Coleridge’s phrase). Invoked by repeated sounds, words, images, figures, and so on, such mental configurations instantiate what I’ve called back-to-front processing and render it susceptible to introspective analysis and experimental verification. Second, I have correlated the specific notion of spatial form with the more general theory of “literariness” or “the poetic function.” The correlation suggests that there may be good cognitive grounds for the generic discrimination of literary from other kinds of discourse, as well as of narrative and lyric subspecies within

Mark J. Bruhn   607 the literary kind.66 Third, the chapter intimates the critical role that cognitive literary studies may play in the broader interdisciplinary endeavor of cognitive science. Because many questions and issues confronting today’s mind science have a storied history in literature and literary criticism, that history deserves cognitive study not only on its own account, but likewise for the insights and instigations it may offer for ongoing research in conceptual blending and related domains of cognitive science.

Acknowledgment Research for this chapter was supported by a visiting fellowship to the Center for Advanced Study, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

Notes 1. In the right context, of course, the deviance of either phrase may be unmarked: “a bird in the bird” makes perfect sense when one is cooking turducken, the American Thanksgiving dish in which a chicken is stuffed into a duck which is stuffed into a turkey; “a bird in the of ” would be sensible in a context where a bird was sitting in a sculptural representation of the word “of.” These examples indicate that pragmatic context forms an integral part of the predictive structure of cognition. 2. “In-out” and “out-in” have the horizontality of “back-front” and “front-back” but lack their temporal implications (derived from the fact the human movement is forward, “frontal,” or, if you like, “prospective”). 3. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads:  1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Toronto: Broadview, 2008), 175, 183. 4. William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 5.344. 5. American Heritage College Dictionary, s.v. reversion, senses 1 and 2. 6. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 183. 7. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 420. 8. See Gerald M.  Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness:  How Matter Becomes Imagination (New  York:  Basic Books, 2000); Daniel L.  Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,” in Mental Processes in the Human Brain, ed. Jon Driver, Patrick Haggard, and Tim Shallice (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008), 27–47; and Alan Richardson, “Defaulting to Fiction:  Neuroscience Rediscovers the Romantic Imagination,” Poetics Today 32.4 (2011): 663–92. 9. See the related discussion in Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 66ff. and 193ff. 10. William Wordsworth, The Prelude:  1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.  H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New  York:  Norton, 1979), 1805 2.28–33. Wordsworth’s phenomenological point is garnering renewed attention in contemporary cognitive

608    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience neuroscience: “In memory an object appears in the present but as belonging to the past. It is thus an aspect of inner consciousness that mixes past and present without collapsing their temporal distance. Thus it is as if consciousness doubles itself ” (Francisco Varela and Natalie Depraz, “Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation,” in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, ed. B. Alan Wallace [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 211). 11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 1823 16.206. 12. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1823 16.206n. 13. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1771 16.157. 14. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature:  Part I,” Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 221–40. 15. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form: Thirty Years After,” in Spatial Form in Narrative, ed. Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 204. 16. Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 239. 17. Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 227, emphasis added. 18. Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 229–30. 19. Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 232. 20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2  vols., ed. John Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1.52. 21. In Jakobson’s words, the extent to which “the principle of equivalence is projected from the axis of selection to the axis of combination,” as in the political slogan “I Like Ike” (“Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 350–77. 22. Frank, “Spatial Form: Thirty Years After,” 229ff. 23. Robert Langbaum, “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature,” New Literary History 14 (1983): 336, 346. 24. Monique R. Morgan, Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2009), 19. Easterlin presents a very similar argument in explicitly cognitive terms: “By divorcing causality from chronology. . ., Wordsworth reveals the epistemic limitations of basic narrative, which in habitually aligning causality and temporality in observable sequence leads away from the achronological, invisible processes of self- and fellow-knowledge” (Biocultural Approach, 74). 25. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1823 16.206n. 26. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1823 16.206n. 27. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2.16. 28. Also a metrical parallelism created by spondaic substitutions: as a “bright star shooteth” “so glides he.” 29. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1.52. 30. See Coleridge, Notebooks, 1620. 31. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 288. 32. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 288. 33. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 288. 34. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 150. 35. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, 178, 207.

Mark J. Bruhn   609 36. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, 69, 270. 37. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, 207. See Colin Clarke’s very similar argument (advanced two years prior to Hartman’s) about the “effect of double exposure” that is “prepared for by everything that has gone before” (Colin C. Clarke, Romantic Paradox: An Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth [London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962], 50). Anticipating my study as well, Clarke emphasizes Wordsworth’s “habit of referring to mental events in spatial terms” and his ability to create “a strange blend of past and present” (16, 65). 38. Isobel Armstrong, “Wordsworth’s Complexity:  Repetition and Doubled Syntax in The Prelude Book VI,” Oxford Literary Review 4 (1981): 22. 39. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 11.302–27. 40. Armstrong, “Wordsworth’s Complexity,” 32. 41. Armstrong, “Wordsworth’s Complexity,” 32–33. 42. Armstrong, “Wordsworth’s Complexity,” 34. 43. See the related analyses of multisensory imagery in G. Gabrielle Starr, “Multi-sensory Imagery,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 275–91. 44. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think:  Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 45. See, e.g., the 1999 special issue of Poetics Today on metaphor, the 2006 special issue of Language and Literature on literary applications of blending theory, and Barbara Dancygier, The Language of Stories:  A  Cognitive Approach (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012). But see also Easterlin, Biocultural Approach, 171ff, for a general critique of blending theory. 46. For discussion, see Monica Gonzales-Marquez, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson, and Michael J. Spivey, eds., Methods in Cognitive Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007). 47. Gilles Fauconnier, Espaces mentaux: Aspects de la construction du sens dans les langues naturelles (Paris: Les Editions des Minuit, 1984). 48. Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2  vols. (London:  Edward Moxon, 1851), 477; emphasis added. 49. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799 1.1–3. 50. So far as I know, Francis Steen was the first to read these opening lines in terms of blending theory (“ ‘The Time of Unrememberable Being’: Wordsworth’s Autobiography of the Imagination,” A/B: Autobiography Studies 13 [1998]: 7–38). 51. Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814, 167. 52. It should be clear by this point that I mean “cognitive” in the broadest sense, as involving and integrating sensation, emotion, memory, attention, conceptualization, etc. 53. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Rethinking Metaphor,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 54. 54. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1.87; see also Vyvyan Evans, The Structure of Time: Language, Meaning, and Temporal Cognition (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003). 55. Fauconnier and Turner, “Rethinking Metaphor,” 60; see also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 137–69. 56. Fauconnier and Turner, “Rethinking Metaphor,” 62.

610    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience 57. Fauconnier and Turner, “Rethinking Metaphor,” 62. 58. See Mark J. Bruhn, “Place Deixis and the Schematics of Imagined Space: Milton to Keats,” Poetics Today 26 (2005): 387–432. 59. They figure this resolution process in terms of bistable imagery: “Subjective experience can vary quickly for a single experiencer, vary depending on the focus, and even toggle back and forth like a Necker cube, as in the following attested piece of data: ‘Time goes by really slowly. At the same time, it goes by really fast.’ (CNN, said by a man waiting for word on an American named ‘Michael’ missing in the bomb detonations in London in July 2005)” (Fauconnier and Turner, “Rethinking Metaphor,” 61). But the truth is that there’s no going back: colored by the preceding one(s), a next impression of the “same” thing necessarily differs from the first. Moreover, while Fauconnier and Turner treat the attested data (which is still not speaking of the fusion of forward-going subjective experiences) as something of an exception to more routine ways of cognizing time, the redoubled subjectivity it implies is, at the experiential level, the regular state of affairs. Cf. the West African proverb: “L’eau chaude n’oublie jamais qu’elle a été froide.” 60. See Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., “Making Good Psychology Out of Blending Theory,” Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2000): 347–58. 61. American Heritage College Dictionary, s.v. palimpsest. 62. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 288. 63. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. science, n. 1a. 64. A phrase that means to imitate what it describes: the foregoing adjective “temporal” modifies the subsequent and spatial substantive “composition.” 65. To put it in terms of Antonio Damasio’s representative title (The Feeling of What Happens:  Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness [New  York:  Harcourt Brace, 1999]). For further discussion of why and how romanticism in particular may factor in cognitive science, see Mark J.  Bruhn, “Romanticism and the Cognitive Science of Imagination,” Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009):  543–64; “Harmonious Madness: The Poetics of Analogy at the Limits of Blending Theory,” Poetics Today 32.4 (2011): 619–62; “Mind Out of Time: Wordsworth and Neurophenomenology,” European Romantic Review 24 (2013):  421–36; David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); “Melodies of Mind: Poetic Forms as Cognitive Structures,” Cognition, Literature, and History, ed. Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs (New York: Routledge, 2014), 17–38; Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Romantic Texts and Cognitive Theories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Richardson, “Defaulting to Fiction”; and Steen, “Time of Unremembered Being.” 66. See Vladimir E.  Alexandrov, “Literature, Literariness, and the Brain,” Comparative Literature 59 (2007):  97–118; Reuven Tsur, “Deixis and Abstractions:  Adventures in Space and Time,” Cognitive Poetics in Practice, ed. Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen (London: Routledge, 2003), 41–54.

Works Cited Alexandrov, Vladimir E. “Literature, Literariness, and the Brain.” Comparative Literature 59 (2007): 97–118. Armstrong, Isobel. “Wordsworth’s Complexity: Repetition and Doubled Syntax in The Prelude Book VI.” Oxford Literary Review 4 (1981): 20–42.

Mark J. Bruhn   611 Bruhn, Mark J. “Harmonious Madness:  The Poetics of Analogy at the Limits of Blending Theory.” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 619–62. ———. “Mind Out of Time:  Wordsworth and Neurophenomenology.” European Romantic Review 24 (2013): 421–36. ———. “Place Deixis and the Schematics of Imagined Space: Milton to Keats.” Poetics Today 26 (2005): 387–432. ———. “Romanticism and the Cognitive Science of Imagination.” Studies in Romanticism 48 (2009): 543–64. Clarke, Colin C. Romantic Paradox: An Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 2  vols. Edited by John Shawcross. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. ———. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 1.  Edited by Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens:  Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Dancygier, Barbara. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Duff, David. “Melodies of Mind:  Poetic Forms as Cognitive Structures.” In Cognition, Literature, and History, edited by Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs. New York: Routledge, 2014. 17–38. ———. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Edelman, Gerald M. and Giulio Tononi. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Evans, Vyvyan. The Structure of Time:  Language, Meaning, and Temporal Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Fauconnier, Gilles. Espaces mentaux: Aspects de la construction du sens dans les langues naturelles. Paris: Les Editions des Minuit, 1984. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. “Rethinking Metaphor.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, edited by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 53–66. ———. The Way We Think:  Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature: Part I.” Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 221–40. ———. “Spatial Form:  Thirty Years After.” In Spatial Form in Narrative, edited by Jeffrey R. Smitten and Ann Daghistany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. 202–43. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. “Making Good Psychology Out of Blending Theory.” Cognitive Linguistics (2000) 11: 347–58. Gonzales-Marquez, Monica, Irene Mittelberg, Seana Coulson, and Michael J.  Spivey, eds. Methods in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. 350–77. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh:  The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

612    Time as Space in the Structure of (Literary) Experience Langbaum, Robert. “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature.” New Literary History 14 (1983): 335–58. Morgan, Monique R. Narrative Means, Lyric Ends:  Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Richardson, Alan. “Defaulting to Fiction:  Neuroscience Rediscovers the Romantic Imagination.” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 663–92. ———. The Neural Sublime: Romantic Texts and Cognitive Theories. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Schacter, Daniel L., and Donna Rose Addis. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory:  Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future.” In Mental Processes in the Human Brain, edited by Jon Driver, Patrick Haggard, and Tim Shallice. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008. 27–47. Starr, G.  Gabrielle. “Multi-sensory Imagery.” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 275–91. Steen, Francis F. “ ‘The Time of Unrememberable Being’: Wordsworth’s Autobiography of the Imagination.” A/B: Autobiography Studies 13 (1998): 7–38. Tsur, Reuven. “Deixis and Abstractions: Adventures in Space and Time.” In Cognitive Poetics in Practice, edited by Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen. London: Routledge, 2003. 41–54. Varela, Francisco J., and Natalie Depraz. “Imagining:  Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation.” In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, edited by B. Alan Wallace. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 195–230. Wordsworth, Christopher. Memoirs of William Wordsworth. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1851. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967. ———. The Prelude:  1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H.  Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1800. Edited by Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Toronto: Broadview, 2008.

Chapter 30

Thick C ont e xt Novelty in Cognition and Literature Na ncy E ast e rlin

Innovations in style, form, and content have been persistently valued in literature: Ezra Pound is legendary for issuing modernism’s most famous call for novelty in literary art, presumably enjoining writers to “make it new.”1 However, today, socially conscious literary critics are somewhat justly suspicious of the endorsement of literary originality, noting that Pound’s prioritization of novelty reflects a cultural milieu characterized by rapid change. Undoubtedly, the advent of modernization with the Industrial Revolution accelerated the pace of socioeconomic and cultural change, and thus ideologically oriented criticism may reasonably espy a causal relationship between base and superstructure in modernism’s aesthetic preference for originality. But while the Marxist viewpoint has much to commend it because it places literary values in material, lived context, it is not necessarily a complete or sufficient explanation for the celebration of literary novelty, and I would like to suggest that the sense of context undergirding it is somewhat thin. In a contrasting explanation, moreover, the psychologist Colin Martindale proposes that art changes even in a relative social vacuum, and that novelty is a robust, built-in rule in the arts.2 And as Willi van Peer furthermore argues, the canonization of literary works is not only a robust process but one based on a sense of novelty (in language, form, and/or ideas) sustained over time.3 In the present chapter, I will demonstrate how cultural and biopsychological factors together constitute lasting features of literary originality. As Lisa Zunshine points out, a cognitive perspective does not replace cultural explanation but supplements it in a way that enriches the study of culture.4 Cognitive-evolutionary explanation in combination with cultural understanding establishes a thick context, so to speak, for the analysis of cultural phenomena. Is there a cognitive-evolutionary argument for the propensity to be attracted to the new and the rare? Humans are unusual among animal species in their knowledge-dependent, and therefore knowledge-seeking, orientation, according to the environmental psychologist Stephen Kaplan.5 Based on studies of present-day Kalahari Bushmen, whose lifestyle roughly approximates that of ancestral humans,

614   Thick Context anthropologists theorize that ancestral hunter-gatherers were extremely adept at collecting new information and “[carrying out] such information-based processes as recognition, prediction, evaluation, and action.”6 Attending to new information, then, aided ancestral humans in the evaluation of environments, in planning, and in extending their territorial reach as wayfinders. At the same time, the very knowledge-based evaluation of territory that frees humans from both instinctive, automatic response and strictly geographically delimited habitats inevitably resulted in the experience of new environments about which knowledge might be limited. For ancestral humans, a change in environment entails potential dangers, as one might have too small a fund of existing knowledge and face too many new and unfamiliar aspects of the present place to thrive there. While new environments are welcome because they afford unexpected opportunities, they also hold potentially fatal dangers. As a result, humans exhibit an ambivalent nature, simultaneously “seeking knowledge and avoiding what is new and hard to comprehend.”7 This ambivalence in the face of novelty and knowledge is characteristic of the human orientation to life in general, including art. The status of literary works as cognitive objects especially equips them as media for novel experience, for though written works can be offensive, confusing, or even incomprehensible, no work of art poses direct dangers equivalent to those pressing on ancestral foraging wayfinders in unfamiliar territory. Indeed, even though modernized culture affords humans the protections of a settled lifestyle, many new experiences in contemporary life are still far more dangerous, or simply more costly, than imaginative experience. Thus, if our predilection for the new and for the knowledge that it can provide is tempered by a contrary disposition to avoid the unfamiliar, reading a literary work offers the experience of encountering novelty without imminent threat. At the same time, literary cognition is not dramatically different from or other than action-directed (performative) cognition, for it engages our paradigmatic mode of processing reality. Just as actual environments and situations challenge our basic epistemic processes with new affordances and actions that cannot be readily assimilated to a coherent, cognitive model unfolding in time, literary works frequently test our habits of organization and processing. As an exploratory rather than an instrumental mode of cognition, literature perhaps expresses its true distinctiveness when it embraces the confrontation with novelty: when, for instance, it tests our penchant for narrative organization, our preference for an established subject position, our almost-unconscious ability to process familiar environmental phenomena (or affordances), and our established sense of social relations.8 If, as human animals, we are healthily ambivalent about the new, literary experience as an exploratory activity encourages encounters with novelty. The present chapter seeks to provide a thick context for our understanding of the preference for the unusual, rare, and new in literature, and it extends this conception of the value of innovation to a biocultural discussion of some of William Wordsworth’s most experimental ballad-form poems published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, focusing especially on “The Mad Mother,” but commenting as well on “The Thorn,” “Simon Lee,” and “The Idiot Boy.”9 Literary scholarship since 1970 provides sophisticated analysis of Wordsworth’s departures from contemporaneous practitioners of the form. Now,

Nancy Easterlin   615 a cognitive-evolutionary perspective of literary processing can theorize why these texts retain a perpetual sense of newness when their subject matter is no longer shocking and outrageous.

The Cognitive Conception of Novelty in Theoretical Context A cognitive-evolutionary theory of literary novelty builds on and extends the hypotheses of twentieth-century literary theorists, supporting existing critical insights and providing a psychobiological explanation for the human attraction to the new and the rare. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the reader-response theorist Hans Robert Jauss both emphasized the importance of novelty in literature.10 Although the two are typically grouped within different schools of theory (formalism and reader response, or reception theory, respectively), they both frankly stress the role of the reader in the literary process and the importance of novelty in durable literature. Since a literary work is a cognitive object only fully instantiated in the reading process, I share the view that this focus on the reader is indispensable to literary theory. In the process of reading, an unavoidably interpretive process, the reader brings the text into being. A cognitive ecological model of literary reading, which bases its conception of reading on the mental procedures of wayfinding humans, thus offers a causal explanation for Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” and Jauss’s notion of “horizon of expectations.” In “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky claims that literature evinces a distinctive use of language that results in atypical effects. Shklovsky argued against the assumption of contemporaneous theorists that literary art follows the rules of everyday discourse, contending instead that “ideas about the economy of energy, as well as about the law and aim of creativity, are perhaps true in their application to ‘practical’ language. . . [but] do not distinguish properly between the laws of practical language and the laws of poetic language.”11 Accepting the psychological view that “as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic,” Shklovsky asserts that “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”12 While habituation provides efficient processing of everyday reality, it renders existence automatized and semiconscious unless broken up by novel experience. The purpose of literary art, then, is to make the familiar strange, to defamiliarize the everyday. In Shklovsky’s view, “defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found.”13 Like Pound (and like Martindale later), Shklovsky is asserting that novelty is an integral part of literature. Of course, his argument, like those of the American New Critics, that special uses of language set literature apart from everyday discourse, was to become minority opinion with the rise of cultural studies in the 1970s, but the view that the literary not only has distinctive characteristics but also prioritizes pleasing forms of novelty never exactly died out.

616   Thick Context Jauss also emphasizes the importance of novelty as a feature of genuine literature, but whereas Shklovsky stresses change in individual perception, Jauss focuses primarily on the sociohistorical dimension of artistic change. Criticizing both formalist and Marxist theory for their failure to attend to reception and their lack of a dialectical model, he asserts that over time the activity of the public is constituted in a gradual move from “simple reception to critical understanding,” because understanding is enriched and value determined in “a chain of receptions from generation to generation.”14 A literary work situates itself in a context, and that context includes a process of directed perception, manifested in the horizon of expectations. In Jauss’s conception, The way in which a literary work, at the historical moment of its appearance, satisfies, surpasses, disappoints, or refutes the expectations of its first audience obviously provides a criterion for the determination of its aesthetic value. The distance between the horizon of expectations and the work, between the familiarity of previous aesthetic experience and the “horizonal change” demanded by the reception of the new work, determines the artistic character of a literary work, according to an aesthetics of reception: to the degree that this distance decreases, and no turn toward the horizon of yet-unknown experience is demanded of the receiving consciousness, the closer the work comes to the sphere of “culinary” or entertainment art.15

Jauss here assumes that a literary work’s anticipation of “the horizon of yet-unknown experience” is a desired good, and he therefore privileges the new and rare in literature, as does Shklovsky. Writing over a hundred years before either of these theorists, the poet William Wordsworth expressed similar views about what constitutes a lasting poem, both in his brief introductory note (the Advertisement) to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and in his much lengthier Preface to the second edition (1800). In the Advertisement, Wordsworth enjoins readers to set aside their “pre-established codes of decision” about what constitutes poetry and to consider instead whether the volume contains “a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents.”16 Two years later, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he seeks to disabuse his readers of the view that, in writing poetry, “an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association, that he not only apprizes the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded.”17 Trying to avert reader’s preconceptions, Wordsworth employs phraseology that touches first on the socially constituted and second on the internally manifest dimension of expectations (“codes of decision” and “known habits of association”). However, the examples of Wordsworth, Jauss, and Shklovsky alone are not enough to suggest that the endorsement of novelty is not simply a cultural phenomenon that emerges with the accelerating processes of modernization. Saying doesn’t make it so, and, after all, as theorist-poet, Wordsworth is motived by self-interest: he is attempting to persuade readers to be open-minded about his unusual approach to the ballad and, admittedly, attempting to do so in the Preface certainly smacks of self-justification, since some of his more experimental ventures were roundly condemned on the publication

Nancy Easterlin   617 of the first edition in 1798. By the same token, neither Shklovsky nor Jauss can explain precisely why defamiliarization and horizontal change are crucial aspects of literature. Since all three authors are undoubtedly influenced by their cultural milieus, perhaps their endorsements of novelty merely evince the conscious statement of internalized and unconscious cultural values—perhaps they are, in other words, the emanation of a superstructure expressed at the level of the individual. As it happens, there is a long tradition of research in psychology that recognizes the predisposition—in humans, certainly, but across a comprehensive range of species— to attend to the new and unusual, and it comes into relief against the evidence of its obvious counterpart, habituation. The importance of habituation in animal behavior was first recognized in the 1930s and 1940s, and research in this pervasive psychological phenomenon expanded in the mid-twentieth century. As Richard F. Thompson and Dennis L. Glanzman explain in an essay published in Habituation, an early collection on the topic, Habituation is appealing in large part because it is so simple. If a moderate stimulus to which an organism initially responds is repeated, the organism ceases to respond. It is perhaps the simplest form of learning—learning not to respond. . . . Habituation is also ubiquitous—invertebrates do it, humans do it, and the human infant does it very well indeed.18

Research since the publication of this 1976 essay further documents the phenomenon of habituation and notes its ubiquity across species as well as a variety of perceptual and cognitive modes:  “Habituation effects have been observed in a wide range of neural systems from simple sensory responses, to higher order neural representations. . . [and include] regions responding to written and spoken language.”19 For example, in vision, “the retinal cells themselves, without even having recourse to the brain, grow inured to their environment and lose focus when exposed to consistent patterns, but respond strongly to the unexpected.”20 At first blush, habituation—learning not to attend—sounds like a dangerous idea. Not so, however: learning to respond to the commonplace without conscious reflection is, in fact, of central importance to the human species. Antonio Damasio explains the functionality of “nonconscious skill execution” in everyday living: that sensorimotor skills can be deployed with little or no conscious survey is of great advantage in the performance of numerous tasks, minor and not so minor, in our daily lives. The lack of dependence on conscious survey automates a substantial part of our behavior and frees us in terms of attention and time—two scarce commodities in our lives—to plan and execute other tasks and create solutions for new problems.21

Think about it:  if organisms were required to process their total environments (the physical world and other creatures, including other humans) in moments of consciousness and activity, they would be immobilized by the number of sensations and thoughts impinging on consciousness. Habituation, therefore, enables focused cognitive orientation toward novelty. Enabling the production of new knowledge through focused

618   Thick Context attention on the unfamiliar, habituation enables human beings to make the most of new opportunities and to avoid unexpected dangers. But can such a basic function as habituation—“learning not to attend”— really tell us anything about the role of novelty in a complex literary artifact? Remarkably, the answer appears to be yes. If the startling experience of stepping out of bed into foot-deep water prompts attention, so does the experience of literary novelty. Studies conducted by the literary scholar David Miall indicate that cognition is slowed and, correspondingly, feeling engaged in the processing of unusual language in literary texts, a cognitive phenomenon observed irrespective of the literary training of the subject.22 Drawing on neuropsychological research that points to the role of feeling and emotion in generating and sustaining anticipation, Miall proposes that novel stimuli surmount the gating system of the frontal cortex, engaging the prefrontal cortex, which synthesizes various stimuli and sustains direction over time. As Miall points out, a problem for traditional reader response theory has been that it cannot explain how “local details. . . project [the work’s] larger meanings.”23 Miall maintains that, in comparison to cognizing everyday discourse, literary processing is special, bringing about transformation in perception or in the self.

Biocultural Dimensions of Horizonal Change in Lyrical Ballads A biocultural perspective not only illuminates the long trajectory to horizonal change for many of the poems in Lyrical Ballads but also reveals the capacity for literary works to retain an effect of novelty once they are within the readers’ “horizon of experience.” In Jauss’s theorization, a significant degree of unfamiliarity correlates with the degree of aesthetic value. As he puts it, “the familiarity of previous aesthetic experience and the ‘horizonal change’ demanded by the reception of the new work, determines the artistic character of a literary work. . . . [T]‌o the degree that this distance decreases, and no turn toward the horizon of yet-unknown experience is demanded of the receiving consciousness,” the work will only satisfy a superficial taste.24 Since scholarship articulating Wordsworth’s strategies for prompting readers to “yet-unknown experience” in poems including “The Mad Mother,” “Simon Lee,” “The Idiot Boy,” and “The Thorn” dates only to the mid-twentieth century, over 170 years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads, the journey to the experiential horizon appears to have been a sufficiently lengthy one to have met Jauss’s criteria for aesthetic value. One question that arises, however, with respect to Jauss’s theory is how readers resist habituation to some aspects of aesthetic novelty. In other words, once Wordsworth’s poems have been brought within the horizon of experience, do the methods employed therein comprise the now-operant “pre-established codes of decision,” the “known habits of association,” the excessively familiar that Shklovsky identifies with unconscious and

Nancy Easterlin   619 automatic processing? To what extent and by what means are literary works able to retain an effect of the new and the rare, even when their methods have become more familiar over time? Jauss addresses this by contrasting the staying power of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Ernest-Aimé Feydeau’s Fanny, published two years after Bovary and enormously popular in Feydeau’s day. While both books initially caused offense, Bovary became a classic and Fanny faded, Jauss maintains, because of its “flowery style, his modish effects, and his lyric-confessional clichés.”25 Jauss, however, does not explore how language or another feature of a literary work might retain the effect of novelty. Martindale provides a clue to the relationship between enduring aesthetic pleasure and novelty, claiming that meaning is an important component of liking, and that works with single meanings simply don’t endure. The properties of novelty, unpredictability, ambiguity, and surprise increase arousal potential for a species that prefers moderate to low or high arousal. In Martindale’s assessment, “meaningfulness habituates slowly.”26 This chimes with Miall’s findings, which suggest that the engagement of emotion and the prospective, constructive activity of the prefrontal cortex are triggered by linguistically unusual words or combinations of words. It is probable that “meaningfulness habituates slowly” precisely because clear denotative significance cannot be attributed to metaphors, descriptions, and formal manipulations that are atypical. In other words, the perception and feeling of significance (“meaningfulness”) always entails some degree of ambiguity. Thus, in the read-aloud protocols that Miall and his colleague Don Kuiken conduct employing the first lines of Coleridge’s “The Nightingale”—“No cloud, no relique of the sunken day / Distinguishes the West”—readers are struck by the presentation of the day as “sunken” and by the archaic word “relique.”27 On the other hand, Feydeau’s linguistic choices in Fanny constitute a low register on the scale of meaningfulness, because clichés and trite language likely rely on conventional meanings and ideological positions outside the text. In other words, they constitute specific linguistic usages that refer to habituated forms of cultural response.28 By the time Wordsworth and Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, the ballad revival was in full swing, and its sources of inspiration were multiple and varied. However, the motivation for revival, the development of specifically literary manifestations of the form, the attractions of the folk form, and the mission to shift subject matter to humble folk by no means constituted overlapping or integrated phenomena. Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in 1765, greatly expanded on earlier anthologies. Like other collectors of his time, Percy never engaged in actual fieldwork, and his project was problematically motivated by a nationalistic impulse to define a distinctly English ballad culture, literary in its inclinations though arising from oral tradition, in opposition to Celtic ballad culture.29 The translation of Gottfried Bürger’s ballads in the 1790s accelerated the popular taste for ballad poetry and expanded its range thematically, demonstrating the form’s adaptability to sensational and supernatural subject matter.30 In addition to the emergence of ballad as a specifically literary, as opposed to oral, form before Wordsworth began his experiments, the turn in some poetry to a less decorous subject matter than was previously expected in cultivated verse was well underway

620   Thick Context before the 1790s. Whereas Wordsworth is conventionally viewed as the initiator of verse about “low and rustic life” in England, his ballads were in fact written in the context of a tradition of peasant poetry that dated from the early eighteenth century and included such figures as Stephen Duck, Ann Yearsley, Robert Burns, and James Hogg.31 But while poems like Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour devoted themselves to common subjects, they also often advertised the writer’s social aspirations through the adoption of neoclassical artifice: Duck displays his learning and sense of decorum by writing in heroic couplets and employing classical allusions. Finally, the scope, diversity, and editorial arrangement of late eighteenth-century poetry suggests not so much that Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads was a radical departure from current trends but, in many ways, an extension of one of them. As Gamer and Porter explain, Both [Wordsworth and Coleridge] were avid readers of the Monthly and European magazines, whose pages were stocked with popular tales of shipwrecked mariners, abandoned mothers, and world-weary hermits. Anthologies published at the turn of the nineteenth century reprinted these contemporary ballads, elegies, odes, and epitaphs intermingled with extracts from canonical poets such as Alexander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, and Matthew Prior. Like the title Lyrical Ballads itself, these miscellanies regularly juxtaposed different poetic forms to achieve an effect of variety and novelty. . . . In short, the orphans, convicts, mariners, forsaken women, beggars, and talking plants populating Lyrical Ballads found ample company in the work of other contemporary poets. (33)

All in all, since many of these poems took common or outcast persons as their subject matter, and since many were in ballad form, Wordsworth’s basic subject matter and humble form were not, in a general sense, outside the horizon of experience of the middle-class audience he cultivated. How is it, then, that Wordsworth’s most experimental ballads retain the effect of significant novelty, circumventing the effects of habituation that, if too prevalent, deaden both lived and literary experience, and limit the lifespan of some literary artifacts? In the eighteenth century, many other people were writing literary ballads. Many others were selecting “low and rustic life” as a poetical topic. Moreover, anyone who teaches Romantic literature today knows that the subject matter and form of Wordsworth’s poetry is well within the horizon of experience of contemporary readers, and that to fully appreciate Wordsworth’s poetry professors and students must in fact dehabituate to the acceptability of writing about old huntsmen, impoverished mothers, superstitious sea captains, and mentally challenged children in a simple form from a lyric oral tradition. In other words, it may now be commonplace to write short poems about the poor and downtrodden, but it wasn’t always so. If, then, the subject matter and basic form of Wordsworth’s poems accords with the “known habits of association” of today’s readers, do the poems habituate slowly because of a perception of meaningfulness, as Martindale suggests? Do they, in fact, offer types of novel experience to which readers in any cultural milieu cannot habituate? And in so doing, do they elicit a change in perception or the self that corresponds to our experience in actual environments as we ambivalently confront novelty?

Nancy Easterlin   621 A hypothesis about what constitutes novelty—whether in experience or literature— requires a theory of our habitual mode of orienting in and knowing both the world and a literary work. Unlike other species, Homo sapiens sapiens, a uniquely wayfinding species, organizes experience via a loose, ongoing thought-and-action mode that is fundamentally narrative. Cognizing the relationships between entities and events within a continuous temporal frame is essential to survival for a species that, in expanding beyond a delimited habitat, regularly confronts the unfamiliar and needs to track physical locales. Despite dramatic changes with the evolution of culture, narrative mentation is still largely functional, and it has several central components. For human beings, basic sense-making is organized around the subjective experience of the observer, and it entails the disposition of events into a temporal, causal frame and the identification of agents and actions within that frame. Additionally, in keeping with the narrative approach to the organization of external action, humans also organize their psychological understanding of other persons temporally and causally. Because humans beings only exist and survive in time and through their relations to other persons, the prioritization of narrative construal evinces a strong adaptive logic, effecting the disposition of the self in an ongoing relation to the total environment. This loose-knit, narrativic way of being and coping with reality probably has its basis in an innate causal rule.32 It is certainly reliably developing throughout early childhood, and it is reliably developing, presumably, because the construal of thoughts, actions, and events within a dynamic temporal framework corresponds to external events and the thoughts and actions of others with enough epistemic accuracy to have kept the human species alive.33 Literary form builds on our bias for day-to-day narrativity as a mode facilitating the individual self in relation to its world. In particular, oral forms, which are constrained by the limits of short-term memory, cannot deviate from our narrative predispositions as readily as written forms, which take advantage of external mind (in the form of written text).34 Indeed, chronological folk stories like the ballad and the fairy tale typically heighten and streamline the story-like mode of wayfinding cognition, extracting single stories from the overlapping, embedded, and branching dynamic of narrativized experience, and present them in simply plotted narratives that typically emphasize story events over character development. Ballads in the oral tradition employ numerous structural and rhetorical devices such as repetition, question and answer, simple meter, rhyme, and music that mnemonically support the primary aim of presenting narrative action.35 I have suggested elsewhere that the highly formulaic, action-oriented quality of the oral ballad explains why it is particularly malleable for conventional and ideologically conservative literary uses.36 How is it that Wordsworth manages to transform this tradition so that readers cannot fully habituate to the experiences the ballads provide? Like Flaubert’s narrative perspective and language, Wordsworth’s manipulation of narrative structure in poems including the experimental ballads can never be completely accommodated within the horizon of our contemporary experience and, as a consequence, they retain the excess of meaningfulness that Martindale claims is allied to the significant forms of novelty signaling literary greatness. A primary means of achieving this is through the disruption or subversion of

622   Thick Context our cognitive propensity for narrative—that is, for consecutive, causally related events or for a similarly organized view of character psychology. Since chronological narrative is so indispensably functional, habituating to its disruption is difficult, for the ordering of mental and material events in dynamic, sequential, and causal frameworks goes hand in hand with the disposition of the self and other persons into a comprehensible perceived reality. Underlying Wordsworth’s disruption of chronological story is the intuitive recognition that the aspects of persons represented in literary fictions, such as narrators and characters, are not only dynamically related to narrative structure but also a crucial device for reader orientation toward the literary world and the meanings it elicits. The reader’s predisposition to simulate an unfolding story necessitates the placement of characters within the event frame, usually under the guidance, but sometimes against the guidance, of a narrator. In other words, narrators provide an orientational point from which readers attempt the sense- and meaning-making construction of the storyworld. Readers require narrators and characters as the features in relation to which they will establish proxy selves that enable orientation within the literary environment, and in the most straightforward fictions, readers track and construct stories from single orientational points identified with narrators or characters. Although experienced readers can switch from one proxy self to another with great facility in the reading process, they cannot be without a point of reference from which to organize their construction of that world. Thus, although unreliable narration leaves readers ambivalent about the narrator as a guide to and interpreter of events, readers nevertheless develop a stance in relation to the dubious narrator’s perspective, which they track even if they are judging simultaneously.37 Wordsworth goes beyond manipulation of narrative reliability in many of the major experimental ballads of the 1790s. In “The Mad Mother,” “Simon Lee,” and “The Idiot Boy,” for instance, he employs narrators who do not retain a stable identity or function in relation to the text. Since readers’ proxy selves are established in relation to the literary equivalent of persons—that is, narrative perspectives and characters—and since these proxy selves provide fundamental points from which simulation of narrative may begin, the problematic nature of Wordsworth’s narrators stymies narrative construction, with the ultimate goal of frustrating habituated response and eliciting an excess of meaning. Moreover, the disjunction between the information readers are left to construe and the author’s refusal to guide the reader toward an orientating perspective only gradually dawns on readers, for in their opening lines these poems deviously promise to conform to narrative protocols. Taking into account the prevalence of poetry about humble and distressed persons as well as the reading public’s developing taste for simple poetic forms, the narrative protocols to which the poet initially gestures in poems like “Simon Lee” and “The Mad Mother” provide readers with orientational positions that fall well within their horizon of expectations (or, as Wordsworth would have it, their “known habits of association”). In the first stanza of “The Mad Mother,” Wordsworth adopts a narrator whose language positions him as an observer and reveals his conventionality :  Her eyes are wild, her head is bare, The sun has burnt her coal-black hair,

Nancy Easterlin   623 Her eye-brows have a rusty stain, And she came far from over the main. She has a baby on her arm, Or else she were alone; And underneath the hay-stack warm, And on the green-wood stone, She talked and sung the woods among; And it was in the English tongue.38

Wordsworth uses the narrator here to create distance from the subject matter of the poem, thus providing readers with a conventional, orientational point of observation of the distressed woman.39 First, the narrator, presumably on the scene, presents the woman from a distance, describing her appearance and providing some information, like her foreignness, that confers a veneer of omniscience. The somewhat elevated tone resulting from tetrameter couplets, syntactic inversion, and cryptic description additionally distances the poem itself from the folk conventions of the ballad tradition, raising the narrator above and thus separating him from his subject both socioeconomically and affectively. Moreover, the shift in the last lines of the stanza from present to past tense accentuates the initial distance between the narrative perspective and subject matter by reversing the common narrative device of filling in past information to set up an event in the present. This provides a subtle but distinctively telescoping effect, suggesting that lines 1–8 redramatize a past observation, since the narrator adopts the historical present tense—an affectation in English-language discourse—but that he is now further away (perhaps having retired to his room to write). Finally, the narrator’s somewhat clichéd diction not only reinforces his distance from the woman he imagines observing but invites readers to see a ready-made image of female suffering—the wild eyes, the disordered “coal-black hair,” and the “baby on her arm”—rather than to identify with the woman with the specificity such affective connection requires. Astute readers may well wonder at the narrative strategy after reading this stanza; nevertheless, they cannot avoid being temporarily aligned with the narrator’s quasi-objective, observational perspective, simply because they have no other perspective to occupy.40 However, Wordsworth effectively abandons this narrative perspective in the second stanza, for at this point the direct speech of the mad mother takes over and dominates the poem through to the conclusion, for nine full stanzas. The poet’s decision to abandon impersonal narration entirely—rather than, for instance, present a framed narrative around the mad mother’s monologue—ultimately casts doubt on the very narratorial stance he has elected at the outset, prompting readers to ask, ultimately, why this narrator has been introduced at all—a question to which I’ll return. Because Wordsworth has effectively eliminated the impersonal narrator by the second stanza, readers cannot continue to adopt his distanced and quasi-objective perspective to construct the story and must instead establish a proxy self in relation to the character of the mad mother. However, constructing a coherent and causally related sequence of events— a narrative simulation—based on her discourse is not possible, for it quickly becomes clear that either the woman is hysterical and possibly delusional (the narrator having

624   Thick Context presumably overheard the speech he reports) or the narrator imagines her as hysterical and delusional. The obstacles to constructing a coherent account of the woman’s state of mind and the events that have led her into such extremity are made plain by the themes introduced in the second stanza, themes that are disconcertingly recurrent in later stanzas. Here she addresses herself directly to her baby, conveys a mental state of hysterical happiness, and claims three times that she will not hurt her son: Sweet babe! They say that I am mad, But nay, my heart is far too glad; And I am happy when I sing Full many a sad and doleful thing: Then, lovely baby, do not fear! I pray thee have no fear of me, But, safe as in a cradle, here My lovely baby! Thou shalt be, To thee I know too much I owe; I cannot work thee any woe.41

The subsequent stanzas express an extreme emotional dependence on and overidentification with the child, who has, the mother claims, soothed “a fire [in her] brain,” and replaced “fiendish faces one, two, three / [that] Hung at my breasts, and pulled at me.”42 Because she claims she awoke to the sight of “[her] little boy of flesh and blood” and maintains that “he was there, and only he,” readers are left with a variety of possibilities about the connection of the fiendish faces to the woman’s actual previous experience. Did she lose several children in childbirth? Was she previously employed as a wet nurse—a theory that explains the image of these infant fiends as a weight and drain on the woman?43 Or does this delusion from which she claims she “waked” have no such direct connection to her experience? Furthermore, on the basis of the remaining stanzas, there seems to be little reason to credit that, in the metaphorical sense, she “waked,” that is, was cured of her madness by the birth of her child. In the penultimate stanza of the poem, when the baby has presumably finished feeding (which the mother claims “cools [her] brain” [l. 32]), she asks, —Where art thou gone my own dear child? What wicked looks are those I see? Alas! alas! that look so wild, It never, never came from me: If thou art mad, my pretty lad, Then I must be for ever sad.44

The woman’s apparent overidentification with the child reaches an extreme at this point, as she projects her own madness onto an infant who is too immature neurophysiologically to be insane. Her questions to the child in lines 84 and 85, coupled with her repeated assertions early in the poem that his presence saves her from leaping for the cliff and that she would never harm the child, raise a host of possibilities in the minds of skeptical

Nancy Easterlin   625 readers: Is the child already “gone”—that is, dead? Is he alive, but in danger of being hurt by his mother, because in her delusional state she sees in him the source of madness and thus the countenance of evil (“wicked looks”)? More radically, does the woman have an infant in her arms at all? Why, in short, should readers believe her, and if they should, what aspects of her story are they to take at face value and what suspect? Because readers cannot identify a position between the distant, disappearing narrator and the mad mother from which to construe the affordances (opportunities for knowledge) that the poem supplies, they construct narrative possibilities rather than a definitive sequence of events. These possibilities, which cannot be sorted and construed as relative certainties, in turn enhance the perception of meaningfulness. Since readers cannot determine how seriously she has considered suicide or infanticide, since they do not know why her husband (or lover) has abandoned her, since they cannot determine the health of the infant, and since they suspect her plan for the future, living in the woods, is not a viable option, the narrative gaps sustain the feeling of uncertainty that, as Kaplan explains, motivates the quest for knowledge and meaning. Left to mediate between the disjunct perspectives of a removed and quasi-objective narrator on one hand and an unstable and hysterical character on the other, readers cannot construct a definitive story. As a result, in their efforts to resolve uncertainty, readers then turn to its source, this very disjunction in perspectives, to discern the dimensions of meaning. It is meaningful that the narrator reports his observation of this woman, and it is meaningful that her monologue conveys a distress that, in the context of Wordsworth’s oeuvre, seems purposefully extreme. This somewhat sensational representation of the mad mother through her self-report combined with the fact that the narrator never comments further about where he saw her, what his reaction to his act of witnessing was, or whether he ever spoke to her raises a more radical possibility: that the poet intends readers to see the mad mother as wholly the creation of the narrator’s imagination rather than the literary representation of a real woman the narrator had at one time encountered. After all, her presumed utterances constitute 99 poetical lines, and the amount of time required for a real person to deliver all of the information she provides would be considerable, so that it seems likely even a delusional person would note and address a bystander; alternatively and more certainly, the observer, the narrator poet himself, might address and attempt to aid the distressed woman.45 Were the irresolution of perspectives in “The Mad Mother” and the corresponding lack of narrative certainty atypical of Wordsworth’s 1798 poems, readers might reasonably conclude that uncertainty in the production of meaning is merely the result of the poet’s faulty conception and execution. In fact, frustrating readers’ efforts at narrative construction is a signature feature of not only “The Mad Mother” but also “The Thorn,” “The Idiot Boy,” and “Simon Lee.” As John Danby observes, Wordsworth formal experimentation entails combining the modes of straight narrative and dramatic monologue.46 The incorporation of dramatic monologue into narrative need not cause the epistemic dilemmas that result in these poems but, as Danby points out, Wordsworth exploits the leeway the shift in mode enables to disable a unified sense of the narrator, who wears a mask, or sometimes several different ones, for the duration of a short poem. In “The

626   Thick Context Mad Mother,” the narrator simply disappears; in “Simon Lee,” Wordsworth gradually dispenses with his initial comic narrator; and in “The Idiot Boy,” the comic narrative perspective shifts pointedly from the characters to the readers, making it apparent that the reader has been an object of fun all along.47 At the same time, shifts or limitations in narrative perspective complicate the reader’s grasp of central characters. The superstitious and befuddled narrator of “The Thorn” hinders understanding of the distraught and pathetic Martha Ray, and the narrator of “The Idiot Boy” flaunts the inaccessibility of the boy’s mental state—yet it is Johnny’s mind and reflections, ostensibly, that are the culmination of a long and fairly disjointed series of events or, as one of my students put it, a rather idiotic story (narratively considered). Thus, although the poet’s procedure of narrative disruption is in keeping with an inward turn toward character and psychology in romanticism and literary modernism, his decision to undermine the assurances we would seek to find in characters simultaneously subverts readers’ capacity to produce sequential, narrative explanation.48 As I have suggested in my recent full-length reading of “Simon Lee” in A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation, Wordsworth eschews the ideological entrainment to which tales, or simple narrative forms, are susceptible. He disliked the fad of his times for tales and reacted against the emphasis on sensation and incident in Bürger’s ballads. As he notes in the 1800 Preface, “I should mention one other circumstance which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling.”49 But what feeling? David Bromwich convincingly argues that Wordsworth rejected the principle of reciprocity that was central to Adam Smith’s theory of the moral sentiments. Wordsworth’s contemporaneous critics, including Coleridge and John Wilson, saw Betty Foy, Johnny’s mother in “The Idiot Boy,” as an inappropriate focus of the story, because her feelings could not be reciprocated by Johnny.50 But Johnny is only perhaps the extreme case among these poems. In Wordsworth’s view, according to Bromwich, genuine sympathy rests on distance rather than participation in the feelings of the other person.51 Placing readers at an appropriate distance and compelling them to care about others, then, results from the inhibition of the narrative impulse and the epistemic certainty it provides. In the case of “The Mad Mother,” this is effected by the disjunction of two perspectives astute readers ultimately reject: one that is too distant and one that is too immediate, offering together the twin but ultimately meretricious pleasures of sentimentality and sensationalism. The problem of sympathy and concern is, simultaneously, a key feature of each of these poems emphasized by the dismantling of story. The mad mother speaks giddily of surviving with her infant in the woods at the end of the poem. If the narrator observed her rather than simply inventing her, is it unreasonable to ask what he has done to alleviate the distress of a person to whom he consciously attends? If Simon Lee is initially treated as an object of fun and perhaps subject to ostentatious sympathy in the poem’s resolution, one thing remains certain: an overriding neglect of an aging servant and his wife who eke out their days in poverty. In “The Thorn,” the most extreme example of epistemic uncertainty and lack of care among these poems, the

Nancy Easterlin   627 narrator, even when pressed by his auditor, refuses to draw conclusions from the mound of moss (speculated to be the infant’s grave), the distraught Martha Ray, the gossip of the villagers, and other factors. He is attached to incidents and situations, not the specter of someone suffering before his very eyes. In contrast to these three ballads that frustrate the epistemic certainty that narrative is designed to provide, “The Idiot Boy” celebrates an excess of care in a story where better decisions would have saved Betty and her friend Susan Gale from a series of hapless adventures and anxious overconcern. Since the goal for Wordsworth was that “the feeling.  .  . [in these poems] gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling,” the central consideration in the writing process was how to generate that feeling. Wordsworth’s solution, as his revisions over time suggest, was to deny readers the flattering illusion that they can know humble persons and the events that cause them distress, and the most effective means of refusing comfortable knowledge is to disrupt the causally integrated character-and-time model of narrative thought. Moreover, in “The Mad Mother,” “Simon Lee,” and other poems, the decision to foreground the problematic perspective of a narrator-poet who seems rather like the implied author William Wordsworth aligns the speaking voice with dubious conventionality, thus underscoring that poet and readers alike are linked in their socioeconomic separation from rustic life. Since emotion is the primary source of human motivation, the difficulty of construing events, whether in material, social, or cognitive environments, generates feelings that prompt further exploration. In taking the ballad apart at the seams, so to speak, Wordsworth defamiliarizes it, employing a novel structure that meets Jauss’s criteria for the truly aesthetic. In “a chain of receptions from generation to generation,” audience appreciation evolves in the imagination of discerning readers from “simple reception to critical understanding.”

Notes 1. It is, nonetheless, somewhat more difficult to find the bold assertion of this aesthetic in the poet-critic’s writing. See Ezra Pound, Make It New (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938). 2. Colin Martindale, The Clockwork Muse:  The Predictability of Artistic Change (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 3. See Willi van Peer, “Two Laws of Literary History: Growth and Predictability in Canon Formation,” Mosaic 30, no. 2 (1997): 113–32, and “Canon Formation: Ideology or Aesthetic Quality?” British Journal of Aesthetics 36, no. 2 (1996): 97+, Literature Resource Center, January 12, 2012. 4. Lisa Zunshine, “Introduction:  What Is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 1–33. 5. Stephen Kaplan, “Environmental Preference in a Knowledge-Seeking, Knowledge-Using Organism,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 581–97.

628   Thick Context 6. Kaplan, “Environmental Preference,” 583. 7. Kaplan, “Environmental Preference,” 585. 8. For more detailed theorization of my dynamic model of knowledge and literary reading, see “Remembering the Body: Feelings Concepts, Process,” in A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 152–216. 9. All references to Wordsworth’s poems and prefaces refer to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2008). 10. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism:  Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J.  Reis (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 11. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 10. 12. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 11, 12. 13. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 18. 14. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 19. 15. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 25. 16. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, 47. 17. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, 172. 18. Richard F.  Thompson and Dennis L.  Glanzman, “Neural and Behavioral Mechanisms of Habituation and Sensitization,” in Habituation: Perspectives from Child Development, Animal Behavior, and Neurophysiology, ed. Thomas J.  Tighe and Robert N.  Leaton (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976), 49, 49–93. 19. Jason D.  Zevin and Bruce D.  McCandliss, “Dishabituation of the BOLD Response to Speech Sounds,” Behavioral and Brain Functions 1, no. 4 (2005): n.pg., PsychINFO, January 18, 2012. 20. Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 94. 21. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens:  Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 300. 22. David S. Miall, “Anticipation and Feeling in Literary Response: A Neuropsychological Perspective,” Poetics:  Journal for Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts, 23, no. 4 (1995), 275–98. Also see “An Evolutionary Framework for Literary Reading,” in Literary Reading:  Empirical and Theoretical Studies (New  York:  Peter Lang, 2006), 189–202, and David S.  Miall and Don Kuiken, “What Is Literariness? Three Components of Literary Reading,” in “Empirical Studies of Literature: Selected Papers from IGEL ’98,” ed. David S. Miall, special issue, Discourse Processes 28, no. 2 (1999): 121–38. 23. Miall, “Anticipation and Feeling,” 278. 24. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 25. 25. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 28. 26. Martindale, The Clockwork Muse, 53. 27. Miall and Kuiken, “What Is Literariness?” 122–23. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Selected Poems, ed. Richard Holmes (London: Penguin, 1994), ll. 1–2, p. 56. 28. For a discussion theorizing how sentimental language inhibits engagement in the cognitive environment because it relies on generalized and conventional meanings external to

Nancy Easterlin   629 the literary text, see Nancy Easterlin, “Aesthetics and Ideology in Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary: A Biocultural Perspective,” Style 46, nos. 3–4 (2012): 461–78. 29. Nick Groom, “ ‘The Purest English’: Ballads and the English Literary Dialect,” Eighteenth Century, 47, nos. 2–3 (2006): 179–202. 30. Important discussions of Wordsworth’s response to Bürger include Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1976) and John K. Primeau, “The Influence of Gottfried Augustus Bürger on the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ ” Germanic Review 50, no. 3 (1983): 89–96. 31. See Scott McEathron, “Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 1 (1999): 1–26. 32. E. O. Wilson identifies causal cognition an epigenetic rule, defined as one of a number of “regularities of sensory perception and mental development that animate and channel the acquisition of culture.” See Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 157. That human mentation is primarily narrative has broad support today in cognitive psychology. See Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Roger C. Schank, Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory (New York: Scribner’s, 1990); Dan Edward Lloyd, Simple Minds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). 33. For a perspective from developmental ecological psychology, see Eleanor J.  Gibson and Anne D.  Pick, An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Because ecological psychology focuses on the dynamic relationship of the organism to the environment, its practitioners emphasize flexibility of response and shy away from proposing any built-in features of human psychology. Though understandable, this is also somewhat ironic, since the very emphasis on situated cognition and action is based firmly on Darwinian principles. 34. For a seminal discussion of the limitations of human short-term memory and the consequent importance of the development of symbolic systems, which actualize external mind, see Merlin Donald, The Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 35. Judith Page, “Style and Rhetorical Intention in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads,” Philological Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1983): 293–313. 36. Nancy Easterlin, “ ‘It Is No Tale’:  Narrative, Aesthetics, and Ideology,” in Biocultural Approach, 39–89. 37. For an earlier discussion of how manipulation of narrative point of view confounds readers’ ability to construe information, see my essay “ ‘Who Was It If It Wasn’t Me?’ The Problem of Orientation in Alice Munro’s Trespasses’: A Cognitive Ecological Analysis,” special issue, “Biological Constraints on the Literary Imagination,” ed. Katja Mellman and Anja Mueller-Wood, Studies in the Literary Imagination 42, no. 2 (2009): 79–102. 38. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ll. 1–10. 39. For a discussion that places the narrator’s observational perspective within the mode of contemporaneous case histories that sought to demystify witches and to alternatively explain the psychology of the hysterical woman, see Alan Bewell, “A ‘Word Scarce Said’: Hysteria and Witchcraft in Wordsworth’s ‘Experimental’ Poetry of 1797–98,” English Literary History 53, no. 2 (1986): 357–90. 40. John E. Jordan discerns contradictory directives in the critical standards of Wordsworth’s time, which call for both correctness and feeling (or passion). See Why the “Lyrical Ballads”? The Background, Character, and Writing of Wordsworth’s 1798 “Lyrical Ballads”

630   Thick Context (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1976), 53–83. I  believe that Wordsworth is indirectly commenting on this desideratum of elegant simplicity in his depiction of the narrator-poet here as well as in the slightly later poem “Resolution and Independence” (composed 1802), which employs the Spenserian stanza and recounts the interaction of the narrator-poet with a leech gatherer. 41. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, 11–20. 42. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ll. 21, 23–24. 43. Rich Goode suggests this possibility in “Beloved Mother! Wordsworth and ‘Tracing the Maternal Passion through Many of Its More Subtle Windings,’ ” seminar paper, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, November 2012. 44. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ll. 84–90. 45. In his Bakhtinian reading of the poem, Stephen Bidlake observes that the narrator’s presence serves to emphasize the lack of exchange between him and the woman and to accordingly emphasize her isolation. See “ ‘Hidden Dialog’ in ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,’ ” Wordsworth Circle 13, no. 4 (1983): 188– 93. For a discussion of the changes in punctuation to and title of the poem between 1798 and 1836, which progressively separate the narrator from the woman, see Robert Hale, “Wordsworth’s ‘The Mad Mother’: The Poetics and Politics of Identification,” Wordsworth Circle 39, no. 3 (2008): 108–14. 46. John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems, 1797–1807 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 36–38. 47. See R. F. Storch, “Wordsworth’s Experimental Ballads: The Radical Uses of Intelligence and Comedy,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 11, no. 4 (1971): 621–39. 48. Andrew L. Griffin pointed to Wordsworth’s central concern in Lyrical Ballads with telling and listening to tales. See “Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story: The Case of ‘Simon Lee,’ ” PMLA 92, no. 3 (1977): 392–409. 49. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, 176. 50. For a discussion of these critical assessments in light of contemporaneous ideas about the difficulty of incorporating a congenital (as opposed to a “teachable”) idiot into a progressive narrative, see Joshua Gonsalves, “Reading Idiocy: Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy,’ ” Wordsworth Circle 38, no. 3 (2007): 121–30. For a more extensive discussion of the influence of empiricist discourse surrounding idiot and wild child on Wordsworth’s ballads, see Alan Bewell, “Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages,” English Literary History 50, no. 2 (1983): 321–46. 51. David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory:  Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15–38.

Works Cited Bewell, Alan. “A ‘Word Scarce Said’: Hysteria and Witchcraft in Wordsworth’s ‘Experimental’ Poetry of 1797–98.” English Literary History 53, no. 2 (1986): 357–90. ———. “Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages.” English Literary History 50, no. 2 (1983): 321–46. Bidlake, Stephen. “ ‘Hidden Dialog’ in ‘The Mad Mother’ and ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman.’ ” Wordsworth Circle 13, no. 4 (1983): 188–93. Bromwich, David. Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Nancy Easterlin   631 Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Selected Poems. Edited by Richard Holmes. London:  Penguin Group, 1994. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800. Edited by Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2008. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens:  Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Danby, John F. The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems, 1797–1807. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Donald, Merlin. The Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Easterlin, Nancy. “Aesthetics and Ideology in Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary: A Biocultural Perspective.” Style 46, nos. 3–4 (2012): 461–78. ———. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. ———. “ ‘Who Was It If It Wasn’t Me?’ The Problem of Orientation in Alice Munro’s Trespasses’: A Cognitive Ecological Analysis.” Special issue, “Biological Constraints on the Literary Imagination.” Edited by Katja Mellman and Anja Mueller-Wood. Studies in the Literary Imagination 42, no. 2 (2009): 79–102. Gibson, Eleanor J., and Anne D.  Pick. An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Gonsalves, Joshua. “Reading Idiocy: Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy.’ ” Wordsworth Circle 38, no. 3 (2007): 121–30. Goode, Rich. “Beloved Mother! Wordsworth and ‘Tracing the Maternal Passion through Many of Its More Subtle Windings.’ ” Seminar paper, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, November 2012. Griffin, Andrew L. “Wordsworth and the Problem of Imaginative Story: The Case of ‘Simon Lee.’ ” PMLA 92, no. 3 (1977): 392–409. Groom, Nick. “ ‘The Purest English’:  Ballads and the English Literary Dialect.” Eighteenth Century 47, nos. 2–3 (2006): 179–202. Hale, Robert. “Wordsworth’s ‘The Mad Mother’: The Poetics and Politics of Identification.” Wordsworth Circle 39, no. 3 (2008): 108–14. Jacobus, Mary. Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Jordan, John E. Why the “Lyrical Ballads”? The Background, Character, and Writing of Wordsworth’s 1798 “Lyrical Ballads”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Kaplan, Stephen. “Environmental Preference in a Knowledge-Seeking, Knowledge-Using Organism.” In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1992. 581–98. Lloyd, Dan Edward. Simple Minds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Martindale, Colin. The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Massey, Irving. The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific Approaches to the Arts. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

632   Thick Context McEathron, Scott. “Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 1 (1999): 1–26. Miall, David S. “An Evolutionary Framework for Literary Reading.” In Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. 189–202. Miall, David S. “Anticipation and Feeling in Literary Response: A Neuropsychological Perspective,” Poetics: Journal for Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts, 23, no. 4 (1995), 275–98. Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. “What Is Literariness? Three Components of Literary Reading.” In “Empirical Studies of Literature: Selected Papers from IGEL ’98.” Edited by David Miall. Special issue, Discourse Processes 28, no. 2 (1999): 121–38. Page, Judith. “Style and Rhetorical Intention in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.” Philological Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1983): 293–313. Pound, Ezra. Make It New. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938. Primeau, John K. “The Influence of Gottfried Augustus Bürger on the ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ ” Germanic Review 50, no. 3 (1983): 89–96. Schank, Roger C. Tell Me a Story: A  New Look at Real and Artificial Memory. New  York: Scribner’s, 1990. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Storch, R.  F. “Wordsworth’s Experimental Ballads:  The Radical Uses of Intelligence and Comedy.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 11, no. 4 (1971): 621–39. Thompson, Richard F., and Dennis L.  Glanzman. “Neural and Behavioral Mechanisms Habituation and Sensitization.” In Habituation:  Perspectives from Child Development, Animal Behavior, and Neurophysiology. Edited by Thomas J. Tighe and Robert N. Leaton. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976. van Peer, Willi. “Canon Formation: Ideology or Aesthetic Quality?” British Journal of Aesthetics 36, no. 2 (1996): 97+. Web. Literature Resource Center. January 12, 2012. ———. “Two Laws of Literary History: Growth and Predictability in Canon Formation.” Mosaic 30, no. 2 (1997): 113–32. Wilson, E. O. On Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. Zevin, Jason D., and Bruce D. McCandliss. “Dishabituation of the BOLD Response to Speech Sounds.” Behavioral and Brain Functions 1, no. 4 (2005): n. pg. Web. PsychINFO. January 18, 2012. Zunshine, Lisa. “Introduction:  What Is Cognitive Cultural Studies?” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Index

8 1/2 (Fellini) film within a film in, 563–565 Guido’s memories as “series of completely gratuitous episodes” in, 560–561 Guido’s redemption in, 566–567 photo stills from, 561–566 priming and, 571 suffering transfigured into aesthetic bliss in, 562–563 The 158-Pound Marriage (Irving), 186–187 The 400 Blows (film), 490 Abbott, Porter, 86, 144, 583 Abel, Elizabeth, 125 Ablow, Rachel, 96 Adaptation (Kaufman), 559 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain), 189–190 Advice to a Young Investigator (Rámon y Cajal), 515 Aeschylus, 314 aesthetic experience bidirectionally focused states and, 253–254, 257–259 brain’s default model network and, 252–259 memory and, 254–255 physical manifestations of, 252 sensory detail and, 246–247, 252 Wordsworth’s description of, 257–258 Affective Narratology (Hogan), 280 Against the Grain (Huysmans), 93 Ainslie, George, 371, 380–383 Alas, Leopoldo. See La Regenta (Alas) Aldama, Frederick Luis cross-cultural comparisons conducted by, 352 illusory liberation and, 330 materialist critique of mainstream postcolonial theory by, 330–333, 340 allegory cartoons and, 159

definition of, 24 Spenser’s Faerie Queene as, 24–26 Allen, Woody, 572 American Beauty (film), 497 “American Debtor’s Prison” (Wahl), 164–166, 168, 170 Amnesty International, 340 Andreason, Nancy, 235–236 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) Anna’s argument with her husband in, 549 Anna’s railway car described in, 588–589 Kitty Shcherbatskya described in, 585–587 Levin’s animals in, 585 Levin’s mowing scene in, 584 Nabokov and, 588–589 Oblonsky awakening from a dream in, 588 Oblonsky’s affair with the governess in, 583 Oblonsky’s dining on oysters in, 581–582, 588–589 opera house scene in, 587–588 reality effect and, 581–589 Vronsky’s steeplechase scene and, 584–585, 587–588 Ansons, Tamara, 250–251, 255 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 27 Appalachian Trail, 237 Aristotle anagnorisis (recognition) and, 489 catharsis and, 315, 317, 319, 444, 449 On Generation and Corruption and, 21 On the Heavens and, 21 on imagination and command of metaphor, 228 Metaphysics and, 21 Meteorology and, 21 natural philosophy of, 20–24 Nicomachean Ethics and, 24 “occult” phenomena and, 21, 23

634   Index Aristotle (cont.) peripeteia (dramatic reversals), 489–490 Physics and, 21 Poetics and, 228, 313, 315–316, 489 on theater and emotion, 315–317, 319 on tragedy and sequencing, 378 on understanding of complex things through simple things, 397 Armstrong, Isobel, 600–602, 605 “Art as Technique” (Shklovsky), 615 Artaud, Antonin, 318–319 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 203 Astington, Janet Wilde, 188–190, 193n52 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 549 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 19 At Swim Two Birds (O’Brien), 560 attribution theory, 137 Augustine on “loving to love,” 374 on marriage, 166 on theater and emotion, 316, 318 Austen, Ben, 293 Austen, Jane Catherine of the Bower and, 55 cognitive historicist readings of, 63 concentration represented by, 55–56 decision theory analysis of fiction by, 384–385 Emma and, 474, 476 game theory interpretations of, 373 hindsight bias and, 474, 476 literary neuroscience study of, 56–64, 66–67, 69–72 Mansfield Park and, 58–62, 66–67, 70–72, 183, 373 naive characters depicted by, 448 Northanger Abbey and, 65, 234, 384–385 Persuasion and, 55, 58–61, 63, 66–67, 69–70 pleasure reading represented by, 65 Pride and Prejudice and, 55, 97, 126 autism disability studies and, 393–394, 397 empathy and, 396, 408–409 perceptual processing of speech and, 403–404 poetry and, 393–396, 398, 402–405, 409 switch from sensing to interpretation and, 395, 397, 401 synesthesia and, 396, 405–406, 408–409

visuospatial processing and, 398–400 Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct (Donna Williams), 394, 401 The Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid), 354 Auyoung, Elaine, 3, 572 Bachelard, Gaston, 19 back-to-front processing of time, 594, 596, 604, 606 Bacon, Francis, 48 Baggs, Amanda, 394, 403 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 93 Balázs, Béla, 297–298, 300, 306 The Balcony (Genet), 560 Baldanzi, Jessica, 426 The Band (music group), 149 Bare, Bobby, 141, 153 Barsalou, L.W., 402 Barthes, Roland, 581, 589 Batson, Daniel C., 441–442, 498n1 Bauerlein, Mark, 517 The Beach Boys, 149 Beckett, Samuel, 377–378, 560 Before Reading (Rabinowitz), 96 Bellamy, Ralph, 377 bent straw illusion, 567–568 Berlin, Brent, 16 Berman, Russell, 457n42 Bersani, Leo, 199 Bérubé, Michael, 5n10 Best Laid Schemes (Oatley), 283 Bhabha, Homi, 329, 334–335, 337 Big Brother and the Holding Company, 149 The Big Sleep (Chandler), 85 The Big Sleep (film directed by Howard Hawks), 373 “Big Two-Hearted River” (Hemingway), 107–109, 115, 116n11 Bilandzic, Helena, 527, 531 Binder, Jeffrey, 41–42, 46, 49 Bin Laden, Osama, 476 Bissonnette, Larry, 394 Black, Ira, 66 Black, Shameem, 352 Blackburn, Elizabeth, 510 “Black Girl” (song), 145. See also “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (Lead Belly) Blade Runner (film), 299, 309n38

Index   635 Blair, R.J.R., 408 Blajenkova, Olessia, 513 Bleak House (Dickens), 581 blending in cartoons, 155–158, 160–170 as a cognitive resource, 160–161 definition of, 160 dynamic versus static forms of, 169 humor and, 164, 169 imagination and, 225–226, 228–230 incongruity and, 158, 164, 169 input spaces and, 161–162, 168, 603 metaphors and, 160–162, 168, 229 spatial poetics and, 603–605 Wordsworth and, 603–605 Blind Chance (Kieslowski), 492–497 Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 178 Bloom, Paul, 568 Boardwalk Empire (television program), 483–485 Bogart, Humphrey, 373–374 Bogdashina, Olga, 395, 398, 402 Booth, Wayne, 447 Bordwell, David, 294–295, 307n11, 493 Bortolussi, Marisa, 4, 71–72, 77n60, 111, 543, 550–553 Bostocke, Richard, 24 bottom-up processes of cognition, 486, 583, 594 Bourgois, Philippe, 422–423, 429 Bousset, Jacques-Bénigne, 320 Boyd, Brian, 2, 5n5, 5n10, 402. See also Literary Darwinists Brann, Eva, 226–227 Brauckmann, Sabine, 516 Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat), 352–353 Brecht, Bertolt alienation effects and, 318 The Caucasian Chalk Circle and, 323–324 epic theater and, 317–319, 354 readers’ engagement with, 528 Verfremdung and, 571 Brock, Timothy C., 528, 535–536 Bromwich, David, 626 Brooks, Christopher, 47 Brooks, David, 464 Brother, I’m Dying (Danticat), 353 Brown, Dan, 530 Brown, Joseph Emerson, 145

Bruhn, Mark, 3–4, 229–230, 238 Bruner, Jerome, 583 Bürger, Gottfried, 619, 626 Burke, Edmund, 159 Burke, Kenneth, 86, 93 Burns, Ed, 422–423 Burns, Robert, 620 Burris, Roy, 147–148 Busselle, Rick, 527, 531 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (film), 111 Butler, Judith, 199, 334–336 Butler, Octavia, 340 Butte, George, 87 Bybee, Joan L., 111 The Byrds (music group), 149 Caleb Williams (Godwin), 234 Calvino, Italo, 559 Cameron, Euan, 47, 49 The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 477–478 Cantos (Pound), 597 Cao Xueqin. See The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin) “Captain Shigemoto’s Mother” (Tanizaki), 213–214 Carey, Susan, 20 Carpenter, Patricia A., 545 Carroll, David, 525 Carroll, Joseph, 329 Carroll, Noël, 294–295, 298, 303–304 Carruthers, Mary, 238 cartoons allegory in, 159 allusion in, 165 blending in, 155–158, 160–170 caricatures compared to, 159–160 definition of, 159 drawings compared to, 159 as genre, 158–160 humor in, 157–158, 161–162, 164–166, 167–170 ideology in, 157–158 implied narratives in, 157–158, 168–170 metaphors and, 160, 162–165 narratology and, 158 semantic conjunction and, 161 signaling in, 156 Casablanca (film), “La Marseillaise” scene in, 86–87

636   Index “The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe), 532 Castel of Health (Elyot), 23 Catch-22 (Heller), 92 categorization theory, 17, 20, 27 catharsis, 315, 317, 319, 444, 449 Catherine of the Bower (Austen), 55 The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht), 323–324 Cavanagh, Patrick, 583 Cela-Conde, Camilio, 256 Cervantes, Miguel de, 234, 448 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 352 Chancery Court, 47–48 Chandler, Raymond. See The Long Goodbye (Chandler) Chaplin, Charlie, 299 Chappatte, Patrick, 155–158, 162, 170 character narration, 121–122, 124, 127 Charon, Rita, 506 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 477–478 Chekhov, Anton, 92, 97–98, 283, 369, 582 “Children of the Sea” (Danticat), 353 children’s acquisition of metacognitive concepts, 188–189, 193n52 Chouard, Tanguy, 41 A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 545 Cid (Corneille), 323 City Lights (Chaplin), 299, 309n38 Clarín. See La Regenta (Alas) Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (Richardson), 123–124, 445, 454 Cloze tests, 594, 607n1 Cobain, Kurt, 145 Coetzee, J.M., 572 cognitive hermeneutics, 18 cognitive historicism Aristotelian natural philosophy and, 20–22, 24 “book of nature” trope and, 22 categorization theory and, 17, 20, 27 cognitive hermeneutics and, 18 cognitive linguistic theory and, 17–18 early modern medicine and, 23–24 epistemological shifts and, 19–20, 22–27 polysemic words and, 17, 19 reciprocity between literary history and neuroscience and, 63, 69, 72–73 symptomatic reading and, 18 on “Temperance” concept in Spenser’s

Faerie Queene, 23–26 cognitive linguistic theory, 17–18 cognitive literary studies cognitive disability studies and, 3 “computer” model of the brain and, 16 consilience with science and, 2 early modern literature and, 15 Literary Darwinists and, 2, 5n5, 5n10, 16 resistance to, 16 resistance to unified theory in, 1–2, 4–5n3, 4n3 Richardson’s definition of, 1 cognitive model of learning, 35–36, 46, 49–50 Cohen, Jonathan, 533 Cohn, Dorrit, 203, 208, 210 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor blending theory and, 229 circle of fire illustration of, 599 on consciousness and its conceptualization, 604 conversation poems of, 233, 237–238 “Frost at Midnight” and, 233–234 on imagination as a “synthetic and magical power,” 228 Lyrical Ballads and, 595, 600, 614, 616, 618–627 “The Nightingale” and, 233, 619 Notebooks and, 597 “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” and, 233 spatial poetics and, 597–600, 605–606 “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” and, 237–238 on the “transmutation of the succession of Time into the juxtaposition of Space,” 598–599 Wordsworth and, 597–598, 603, 626 Collins, Jackie, 283 concentration Austen’s representation of, 55–56, 63 Enlightenment notions of, 64–66, 68 fMRI readings and, 56–57, 70 Samuel Johnson on, 56, 66 conceptual integration theory. See blending Confessions (Augustine), 316 Confessions of a Mask (Mishima), 209 Conrad, Joseph, 97, 140 Constantine, Mary-Ann, 146 contempt, anger, and disgust (CAD) hypothesis, 428–429, 432

Index   637 Corneille, Pierre, 323 The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (Burns), 422–423 Costa, Pedro, 490 The Counterfeiters (Gide), 559, 572 country-and-western music. See also specific songs cheating songs and, 140, 151 cognitive narratology and, 150–152 fictional minds approach to, 137–138 Naipaul on, 150 Charlie Parker on, 136, 153 segmentation and, 136–137 social mind approach to, 146, 152 Coviello, Peter, 200–201 The Crack-Up (Fitzgerald), 374 Crawford, Richard, 152–153 Create Dangerously (Danticat), 352, 358 “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism” (Hogarth), 159 Cruelty and Laughter (Dickie), 349 Cuklanz, Lisa M., 423–425, 429 Culler, Jonathan, 515–517, 542, 553 curiosity, Enlightenment notions of, 64 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (Haddon), 393 Damasio, Antonio, 17, 41, 114–115, 617 Danby, John, 625 Dancygier, Barbara, 155, 160 Danger and Purity (Douglas), 303 Danielewski, Mark Z., 107 Danticat, Edwidge Breath, Eyes, Memory and, 352–353 Brother, I’m Dying and, 353 “Children of the Sea” and, 353 Create Dangerously and, 352, 358 The Dew Breaker and, 353 Eight Days: A Story of Haiti, 353, 357–358 Haitian characters and subjects of, 352–353, 355, 357–358 Krik? Krak! and, 352 narrative empathy and, 347, 350, 353–355, 357–358 “Night Women” and, 353, 355 Darley, John M., 498n1 Darwin, Charles, 293, 297, 386n2

Daston, Lorraine, 64 Davidson, Donald, 372 The Da Vinci Code (Brown), 530 Davis, Mark, 355 Dawson, Michelle, 397 Deacon, Terence, 160 Dead Snow (film), 431 Dean, James. See James Dean Effect Deathtrap (Levin), 321–322 De bono coniugali (Augustine), 166 Debussy, Claude, 93 decision theory appetite satisfaction and, 379, 381–385 game theory and, 371–374, 386–387n13 hyperbolic discounting and, 372, 380, 382 intertemporal bargaining and, 3, 370–371, 380, 382–383, 385 literary emotions and, 370–371 Newcomb’s paradox and, 371 No Country for Old Men and, 369–370 preference ordering and, 376–385, 387n23 recursive nature of, 372, 375 relative probabilities and, 374–376 subjective probability and, 371, 386n6 de Graaf, Anneke, 71, 527, 532, 534 de Grouchy John Walter, 211, 218n45 Dehaene, Stanislas, 63, 66 Deleuze, Gilles, 376 DeMaria, Robert, 56 Demme, Jonathan. See Silence of the Lambs The Demons (Dostoyevsky), 91 Denis, Michel, 509 Dennett, Daniel, 122 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 509 Der Schrei der Natur (Munch), 497 Desai, Rutvik, 41–42, 46, 49 DeWall, Nathan, 471 The Dew Breaker (Danticat), 353 Dexter (television program) murder and, 421, 425, 430–431, 434 rape and, 422, 430–431 revenge in, 430–431, 434 Diary of a Bad Year (Coetzee), 572 Dickens, Charles, 545, 581 Dickie, Simon, 349 Diderot, Denis on distraction, 68

638   Index Diderot, Denis (cont.) on the emotional state of actors, 320 engagement with reader in Jacques the Fatalist of, 559, 572 “Didn’t You Get My Email?” (cartoon), 168–170 Die Hard (film), 491 Diener, Ed, 492–493, 495–497 Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition (DHLC) lab, 72 The Distinction of Fiction (Cohn), 203 Distraction (Phillips), 56 “The Divide” (Tagore), 337, 342 Dixon, Peter, 4, 71–72, 77n60, 111, 543, 550–553 Doctor and Student (Saint German), 48 Doctor Zhivago (film), 490 Doležel, Lubomír, 104, 106, 108 Dombey and Son (Dickens), 383 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 234, 448, 476 Doppo, Kunikida, 205–206 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 512, 532 Dougherty, Bob, 57 Douglas, Mary, 303 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 97 drama. See theater Dreaming by the Book (Scarry), 227, 507–508 Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin). See The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin) Duck, Stephen, 620 duck/rabbit figure, 123, 133n11 Dudai, Yadin, 238 The Dunciad (Pope), 66 Dunker, A. Keith, 40 duration neglect, 487–488, 490, 492, 496–497 Durocher, Leo, 374 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” 353 Dylan, Bob, 149 dynamic equilibria, 42–43 Eagleman, David, 469, 472–473 early modern medicine, 23–24 Easterlin, Nancy, 2–3, 237, 381, 384 Edelman, Gerald, 35 Edelman, Lee, 199, 202 Effi Briest (Fontane) advocative exploitative empathy and, 454 empathic sadism and, 451–455, 457n42

Fassbender’s film adaptation of, 453 implicated reader and, 448, 453–454 Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (Danticat), 353, 357–358 Ekman, Paul, 302 Elective Affinities (Goethe), 446, 454 Eliot, T.S., 112–113, 597 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 48 Ellesmere, Lord, 48 Elyot, Thomas, 23 embodied abstraction, 41–42 Émile (Rousseau), 444 Emma (Austen), 474, 476 emotion aversive simulation and, 279–280 cognitive science and, 273–274 critical period particularizations and, 280–281 diary records of, 275 emotionally effective errors in literature and, 275 emotional memories and, 280–281 film close-ups and, 292–294, 296–297 functional preferences and, 277 group divisions in literature and, 276–277 innate triggers and, 280–281 laboratory experiments measuring, 275 literary tragedies and, 279 literature’s ability to increase knowledge of, 280 literature’s explicit statements about, 275 literature’s representations of, 274–277 narrative universals and, 280 sharing of, 279–280 theater and, 313–324 empathy. See also narrative empathy advocative exploitative empathy and, 445–446, 454 autism and, 396, 408–409 definition of, 441–442 Effi Briest and, 451–455 empathic sadism and, 441–455, 457n42 “empathy for empathy’s sake” and, 441–442, 445 failed empathy and, 340, 349, 355–356, 358 fMRI studies of, 456n9 implicated reader and, 441, 453–454 La Regenta and, 446, 448–451, 453 manipulative predictive empathy and, 443

Index   639 postcolonial theory and, 339–343, 347–349, 352–355, 358–359 predictive (self-empowering) empathy and, 442–444, 446, 454 retributive pain empathy and, 443 “sadistic benefactor” and, 444–446 self-focused vicarious empathy, 442, 446 theater and, 324 victims’ families viewing of executions and, 440–441 Empson, William, 249 Encyclopédie (Diderot), 68 Endgame (Beckett), 560 Engelsing, Rolf, 65 English Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973, 166 The Enlightenment concentration and, 64–66, 68 curiosity and, 64 distraction and, 66, 68 moral theories and, 431–432 neuroscience and, 56 “reading revolution” in, 65 scientific revolution and, 19–20 entropy, 34, 48–49 enzyme catalysis, 39–41, 46 The Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick), 201–202 equity court. See Chancery Court Espaces mentaux (Fauconnier), 603 Esrock, Ellen, 227, 506–507 “Evolution of Imagination” (Mithen), 236 exceptionality thesis, 203–204, 208 Exit the King (Ionesco), 560 Exton, Andrew, 165–168, 170 facial feedback hypothesis, 296 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 15, 23–27 failed empathy, 340, 349, 355–356, 358 Fanny (Feydeau), 619 Fanon, Frantz, 329, 351 Farhadi, Asghar, 110 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 453 Fauconnier, Gilles blending theory and, 155, 161–162, 228–229, 603–605 mental spaces and, 603 on time as space, 604–605

Faulkner, William, 91–92, 97, 236 The Feeling of What Happens (Wordsworth), 606 Fellini, Federico. See 8 1/2 (Fellini) Female Quixote (Lennox), 234 Feydeau, Ernest-Aimé, 619 Fictional Minds (Palmer), 137, 153 Fielding, Sarah, 444 film theory cognitive cultural approach to, 293–295, 306 facial expressions and, 293–302, 305 filmmakers as folk psychologists and, 484–487 forking-path narratives and, 493–495 James Dean effect and, 492–493, 496–497 mind-reading and, 293, 296, 298, 306 monsters and, 303–304 peak-end rule and, 488–493, 497–498 peripeteia (dramatic reversals) and, 489–490 point-of-view structures and, 298–299 “scenes of empathy” and, 299 twofoldedness and, 300–301 “The Final Problem” (Doyle), 97 Fischbein, Efraim, 20 Fischer, Emile, 40 Fischhoff, Baruch, 474–475 Fish, Stanley, 248 Fisher, R. A., 373 “Fish Wedding” (cartoon), 162–163 Fiske, Susan, 356 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 143, 374 Flanagan, Matthew, 490 Flaubert, Gustav free indirect discourse in the work of, 570 Madame Bovary and, 446, 450–451, 454, 581, 619 narrative perspective of, 621 Flesch, William, 3, 572 Fletcher, C.R., 544 “Florida effect,” 464 Fludernik, Monika, 4, 354 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resolution Imagery) blood flow to the brain detected by, 58–59, 61–62, 67, 70–71 cognitive historicism and, 64–65 concentration and, 56–57, 70 empathy and trauma narratives and, 72 eye tracking and, 57, 59, 69–71, 77n60 functional connectivity studies and, 69–70

640   Index fMRI (cont.) literary neuroscience and, 56–59, 61–62, 64–65, 67–72, 77n60 neuropsychology of emotion and, 68 folk psychology, 297, 307n5, 484-498 Fontane, Theodor. See Effi Briest (Fontane) Forceville, Charles, 158 Forster, E.M. Bloomsbury Group and, 211 internalist view of sexuality and, 209 on the minds of fictional characters, 203, 206 on understanding others, 208 Fortier, Mark, 48 Foster, Jerry, 153 Foster, Jodie, 291–292 Foucault, Michel discourses and, 452 on epistemological shifts of early modern era, 19–20 on sexuality as a historical construction, 200–201 on “visible signatures” in nature, 22 The Four Pennies (music group), 145 Foy, Betty, 626 Frank, Arthur, 394 Frank, Joseph, 597–598, 605 Frank, Robert, 380, 382 French Revolution, 159 Freud, Sigmund confirmation bias and, 467 on heteronomativity and civilization, 199 hierarchy of psychic systems and, 468 literary theory and, 190 pleasure principle and, 379 the repressed and, 212, 468 unconscious mind and, 465, 467–468 Fried, Michael, 64 Frost, Robert, 409 “Frost at Midnight” (Coleridge), 233–234 fundamental attribution error, 483–484, 498n1 Fuss, Diana, 202–203, 209 Futabatei Shimei, 206 Galen, 21, 23 Galison, Peter, 72 Galton, Francis, 508 Gamer, Michael, 620

game theory, 371–374, 386–387n13. See also decision theory Gandharva Veda, 313 gaps in storytelling. See narrative gaps García Márquez, Gabriel, 529 Gatten, Aileen, 213 Gay, John, 66 Genet, Jean, 560 Genette, Gérard, 87–88, 94, 98, 106 Gerrig, Richard, 108, 111, 525 gesaku (printed woodblock fiction of Japan’s Edo period), 205 Gibbs, Raymond W., 506 Gide, André, 559, 563, 572 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 517, 519 Gilbert, Daniel, 275 Gilray, James, 159 Gilroy, Paul, 394 “Gin Lane” (Hogarth), 159 Girl with the Pearl Earring (Vermeer), 273 GLAAD (The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), 303 Gladwell, Malcolm, 464 Glanzman, Dennis L., 617 The Godfather (film), 488–489 Godwin, William, 234 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 446, 454 Goffman, Erving, 356 The Goldfinch (Tartt), 253 Goldsmith, Oliver, 620 Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger, 514, 518 Gone with the Wind (film), 490 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 187 Gonzalez, Rigoberto A., 513 Good Bye, Dragon Inn (Tsai), 490 “Good Ole Boys Like Me” (Don Williams) aspectual story world in, 151 Bildungsroman quality of, 142–143 full lyrics of, 141 identity construction in, 144, 149 narrator’s mental state in, 143–144, 151 nonrepeated and monosyllabic words in, 139 social cognitive networks in, 152 summary of cultural references in, 142 temporal progression in, 142–143 Gopnik, Alison, 469 Gora (Tagore), 337

Index   641 Goren, Harriet, 514 Grandin, Temple cattle industry and, 399 memoirs of, 394, 398 Sacks on, 511–512 visualization of mental imagery and, 398, 506, 511–512, 522n34, 522n48 Grant, Cary, 377 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 147 The Grateful Dead, 149 Great Expectations (Dickens), 385 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 143 Green, Melanie on cognitive and emotional features of transport, 529 on effects of transport, 532 factor analytic approach of, 536 on feeling of being lost in a book, 57 on multidimensional nature of transport, 528 “Murder in the Mall” case study and, 533 on transport and critical thinking, 530–531 on transport and readers’ adoption of beliefs, 533–535 on transport and surface structures, 529 on transport and visual imagery, 71 transport defined by, 527 transport experiments of, 526, 528, 533–536 Greenblatt, Stephen, 49 The Grey (film), 111 Grodal, Torben, 429 grotesques definition of, 36–37 in early modern Italy, 37 in revenge plays, 37–39, 43–49 in Shakespeare’s plays, 43–44 Groundhog Day (film), 494 Guillory, John, 58 Guthrie, Woody, 147 Haggard, Merle, 147–149, 152. See also “Okie from Muskogee” (Haggard) Haidt, Jonathan, 428–429, 431–433 Haiti earthquake (2010), 352, 358 Hallwell, Stephen, 489 Halperin, David, 202, 216n12, 530 Hamilton, William, 372–373 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 38, 43–44

Hammett, Dashiell, 91, 94, 373 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 36 Harris, Lasana, 356 Harry Potter series (Rowling), 178, 383 Hart, F. Elizabeth, 230 Hartman, Geoffrey, 600, 602, 605 Hastings, Warren, 159 Hauer, Rutger, 299 Hawkes, David, 190 Hawks, Howard, 373, 377 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 454 Hayles, Katherine, 510, 517, 519 Haywood, Eliza, 66 Hazlitt, William, 235, 238 Heald, Anthony, 301 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 97, 140 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 530 Hegel, G.W.F., 385 Heidegger, Martin, 466, 517 Hemingway, Ernest, 107–109, 115 Hendrix, Jimi, 125 Hentoff, Nat, 153 Herman, David on classical narratology, 122, 133n9, 203 exceptionality thesis and, 203–204 hypothetical focalization and, 101n26 on intentional systems of stories, 121 Rabinowitz and, 87 on transition from source state to target state, 93 on Woolf, Joyce and interiority, 207 A Hero of Our Time (Lermontov), 92 Herranz, Miguel, 163 hindsight bias, 474–477 His Girl Friday (film), 377 The History of Pendennis (Thackeray), 551–552 Hobbes, Thomas, 48, 233–234, 238 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 87, 278–281, 284–285, 350–352 Hogarth, William, 66, 159 Hogg, James, 620 Holmes, Dennis, 162 Holquist, Michael, 510–512 homeostasis, 34, 49 Homer, 159, 227, 237, 383, 529 homologies, 36, 39, 49, 338 Hopkins, Anthony, 291–292

642   Index Hosler, Jay, 514 House of Leaves (Danielewski), 107 Huettel, Scott, 59 Huffer, Lynne, 200 Hühn, Peter, 115 Human Rights and Narrated Lives (Schaffer and Smith), 349 human rights discourse as a doctrine of universals, 350–351, 358 false empathy and, 356 literary cognitivism and, 347–348 narrative empathy and, 3, 347–350, 355–356, 358–359 postcolonial theory and, 348–349 Hume, David, 469–470 Hunt, Lynn, 349 Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery, 506 Huston, John, 373 Hutchins, Pat, 188–189 Huxley, Aldous, 559–560 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 93 hyperbolic discounting, 372, 380, 382 Iacoboni, Marco, 351 Ibsen, Henrik, 530 The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), 99 “The Idiot Boy” (Wordsworth), 618, 622, 625–627 “I Don’t Believe in Sex after Marriage” (Exton), 165–168, 170 If on a winter’s night a traveler (Calvino), 559 “I Hate Goodbyes” (song), 153 The Iliad (Homer), 159, 383 “I’ll Change Your Flat Tire, Merle” (song), 149 imagery. See also aesthetic experience brain’s default model network and, 252–253, 255–258 “bridge test” and, 510–512, 522n34 coherent principles of, 247–249 fMRI studies of responses to, 251–252, 520n1 individuals’ varying visualizations of, 505–520, 520n1 intense aesthetic response to, 251–257 memory and, 251, 255 mere exposure effect and, 261n19 motion and, 248–249 multisensory nature of, 248–249, 255

neuroscience of processing, 508 neuroscience of reading and, 249 object imagery from literary texts and, 513–515 pleasure and, 249–251, 256–258 poets’ and novelists’ experiences with, 517–519 text-driven spatial imagery and, 515–517 visual responses to read words and, 512–513 visual responses to spoken language and, 509–512 imagination blending and, 225–226, 228–230 brain’s default mode network and, 226, 230–239 daydreaming and, 235–236 definition of, 225 deterrent effect of, 279 episodic future thinking and, 234–235 literary theory on, 226–227 memory and, 232–234, 236–238 mental imaging and, 225–228, 230 navigation and, 236–238 neuroscience studies of brain anatomy and, 226, 231, 234–236, 239 Romanticism and, 225, 232–235, 237–238, 332 synthetic imagination and, 228–230 Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Modell), 228 Immortality (Kundera), 560 “Immortality Ode” (Wordsworth), 594 induced fit model, 40 Industrial Revolution, 613 Ingarden, Roman, 278, 586 In My Language (Baggs), 403 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) access to the mind represented by, 85, 87–92, 96, 98–99 cognitive flavor and, 87, 94, 99 discussions on knowing others in, 208–209 internalist view of sexuality and, 209 Judaism and, 89 on knowing others, 208 linkage between memory and aesthetics in, 256 Lolita and, 98 narratology of the moment and, 85–92, 94, 98–99 Nussbaum on, 282 reference to fictiousness of events in, 559

Index   643 synesthesia and, 93 voyeurism represented in, 90 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Bourgois), 422–423, 429 Inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, 202–203, 209 “Interlude of the Four Elements” (Rastell), 22 intertemporal bargaining. See under decision theory Interview with the Vampire (Rice), 552 “In the Pines,” 145. See also “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (Lead Belly) Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), 97 intuition, 20–21, 27 Inventing Human Rights (Hunt), 349 Ion (Plato), 319–320 Ionesco, Eugène, 560 Irving, John, 186–187 Iser, Wolfgang, 447, 542–543, 553 “I would like my love to die” (Beckett), 377–378 Jackson, Stonewall, 141–142 Jacques the Fatalist (Diderot), 559, 572 Jakobson, Roman, 585, 598–599, 605 James, Henry, 104, 106–107, 214 James, William, 386n2, 569, 575–576n24 James Dean effect, 492–493, 496–497 James I (king of England), 48 Jameson, Fredric, 18, 63, 350–351 Janin, Joël, 40 Jauss, Hans Robert, 615–619, 627 Jaynes, Julian, 398, 411n40 Jensen, Deborah, 351 Johnson, Barbara, 58 Johnson, Blind Willie, 136 Johnson, Dan R., 354, 535 Johnson, Mark cognitive linguistic theory and, 228 cognitive metaphor theory and, 160, 229, 338 on image schemas, 20 Johnson, Samuel on anticipation, 231–232 on concentration in reading, 56, 66 imagination and, 234, 238 Johnson-Laird, Philip, 338 Jones, George, 139–140, 150–151. See also “Tell Me My Lying Eyes are Wrong” (George Jones)

Joyce, James Molly Bloom character of, 560 stream of consciousness writing of, 236 Woolf on, 207 Jung, Carl, 468 Just, Marcel Adam, 545 Kagan, Jerome, 350 Kahneman, Daniel cognitive resources allocation and, 544 on “experiencing self ” and “remembering self,” 488 groupthink and, 476 hindsight bias and, 475–476 James Dean Effect and, 492 on “our blindness to our blindness,” 464 peak-end rule and, 487–489, 498 on System 1 and System 2 thinking, 473–474, 487 Kalahari Bushmen, 613–614 Kane, Julie, 396, 399–402 Kant, Immanuel, 253, 432 Kaplan, Stephen, 613, 625 Karatani Kōjin, 204–207 Kashmir, 339 Kaufman, Charlie, 559 Kay, Paul, 16 Kazan, Elia, 296 Keating, Patrick, 489 Keen, Suzanne, 3, 5n10, 340–341 Kesebir, Selin, 431–432 Kieran, Matthew, 431 Kieslowski, Krzysztof. See Blind Chance (Kieslowski) Kihlstrom, John, 464–465 The Killer (Woo), 300 Kincaid, Jamaica, 354 King Lear (Shakespeare), 27, 380 Kintsch, W., 544 “Klopstock moments,” 90, 96–97 Koshland, Daniel, 40 Kosslyn, Stephen, 249, 507 Kozhevnikov, Maria, 508–509, 513–514, 520 Krakauer, David, 510, 512 Krammick, Jonathan, 5n5, 56 Krik? Krak! (Danticat), 352 Kuhn, Thomas, 19, 525

644   Index Kuiken, Don, 619 Kuleshov effect, 296 Kundera, Milan, 560, 572 Kurosawa, Akira, 300, 532 Kyd, Thomas, 37–38, 45–47 LaBerge, D., 543 Lacan, Jacques, 466–467 “Lady with a Dog” (Chekhov), 97–98 Lakoff, George cognitive linguistics and, 228 cognitive metaphor theory and, 160–161, 229, 338 on image schemas, 17, 20 Landy, Joshua, 3 Lane, Anthony, 107 “Laocoön and His Sons” (sculpture), 158–159 Laokoön (Lessing), 597 La Regenta (Alas) catharsis and, 449 competition of suitors depicted in, 446–449 Don Alvaro character in, 446–450 Don Fermín character in, 446–448, 450 Donna Ana Ozores character in, 446, 448–451, 454 empathic sadism and, 446, 448–451, 453 implied reader and, 447–449, 453 predictive (self-empowering) empathy and, 454 Larsen, Nella, 122 Latin America, 330, 332, 529–530 Laud, Archbishop William, 48 Laws (Plato), 314 Leach, Edmond, 37 Lead Belly, 113–114, 144–147, 151–152. See also “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (Lead Belly) Leboe, Jason, 250–251, 255 Le Carré, John, 549 Le Chiendent (Queneau), 560, 571 L’eclisse (film), 490 Ledbetter, Huddie. See Lead Belly Lederer, Charles, 377 Lehrer, Jonah, 464 Lemnius, Levinus, 23, 25 Lennox, Charlotte, 234 Lermontov, Mikhail, 92 Les damnés de la terre (Fanon), 329

Lessing, Gotthold, 597–598 Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre (Rousseau), 316–317 Levine, Ted, 302 Levy, Dore J., 187 Lewes, George Henry, 582 Libet, Benjamin, 470 “Lining Track” (song), 114 Lipps, Theodor, 441 Literary Darwinists, 2, 5n5, 5n10, 16. literary neuroscience Austen and, 56–64, 66–67, 69–72 brain physiology and, 64, 66 close reading versus pleasure reading and, 57–63, 66–67, 70–72 cognitive historicism and, 63–69 “cognitive load” processing and, 65, 67 concentration and, 56–58, 61, 64, 68, 70–71 fMRI readings and, 56–59, 61–62, 64–65, 67–72, 77n60 neuroplasticicty and, 66, 68–69 Stroop test of directed attention and, 65 Living Theater, 319 Locke, John, 233 Lolita (Nabokov), 86, 98, 123–124 “The Longest Train I Ever Saw” (song), 113, 145–146. See also “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (Lead Belly) The Long Goodbye (Chandler) narratology of cognitive flavor and, 85 representations of mind-reading in, 88–90, 94–95, 97 tiger trap scene in, 94–95, 101–102n37 Lorre, Peter, 300 lucid dreaming, 570 Lukács, Georg, 332 Luria, Alexander, 401 Lynch, David, 214 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) preface of, 616, 626 re-presenting the past in, 595 “The Thorn” included in, 600 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) adultery depicted in, 446 cotton stockings in, 581 Effi Briest and, 451

Index   645 ironic treatment in, 454 La Regenta and, 450 staying power of, 619 “The Mad Mother” (Wordsworth), 622–627 The Making of Americans (Stein), 549 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 572, 577n39 The Maltese Falcon (film directed by John Huston), 373 The Maltese Falcon (Hammett), 91, 94, 387n20 The Manchurian Candidate (film), 465 Mandler, Jean, 17 “Ma Negresse” (song), 145 Mannoni, Octave, 329 Mansfield Park (Austen) class politics in, 70–71 Fanny Price as sympathetic character in, 183, 373 literary neuroscience study of, 58–62, 66–67, 70–72 opening chapter of, 59 second chapter of, 59–60, 70–72 Margulis, Lynn, 511, 514 Mark, Gospel of, 113 Markandaya, Kamala, 342–343 Marks, David, 508–509 Martindale, Colin, 613, 615, 619–621 Matsumoto, D., 306 Matthew, Gospel of, 113 McCarthy, Cormac, 178, 369–370 McEwan, Ian, 97 McFarland, Sam, 355–356 McHale, Brian, 136–137 McNeill, Daniel, 297, 305 McRaney, David, 485 McTiernan, John, 491 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 97–98 Melville, Herman, 396–397, 406–407, 548 Memento (film), 465 Memmi, Albert, 329 memory formation physiology, 41–42 metabolism. See enzyme catalysis metaphors Aristotle on, 228 blending and, 160–162, 168, 229 cartoons and, 160, 162–165 category extension and, 17 cognitive metaphor theory and, 160–161, 229–230, 338

communication of complex phenomena and, 525 of transport, 525–537 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 21 Meteorology (Aristotle), 21 metrarepresentation, 120–121, 123–124 Miall, David, 618–619 Michelangelo, 278 Michigan State University Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition lab, 72 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 342 Mill, John Stuart, 432 Milton, John on desire and satisfaction, 383 equity law and, 48 flash lag effect and, 472–473 Satan depicted by, 258, 375, 469, 473, 478 sensory quality of descriptions by, 246–248 similes and, 473 on tragedy and purging of emotion, 378 The Mind and Its Stories (Hogan), 280 mind-reading. See also theory of mind film theory and, 293, 296, 298, 306 narratology of the moment and, 88–92, 94–99 representations of in The Long Goodbye, 94–95, 97 In Search of Lost Time in, 5-17 “Recitatif ” in, 128 psychological altruism and, 349 Zunshine on, 87–89, 92 The Mind Tree (Mukhopadhyay), 400, 411n24 Mīrābāī, 284–287 mirror boxes, 569 Mishima Yukio, 209 Mist (Unamuno), 560, 571 Mitchell, Margaret, 187 Mitchell, W.J.T., 509 Mithen, Steven, 236 Mittell, Jason, 422, 428, 430 Miyoshi, Masao, 205 Moby-Dick (Melville), 396, 406–407, 414n114, 548 Modell, Arnold, 228 Modern Language Association, 1, 4n2 Molière, 322 Molton, Samuel, 249 Monroe, Bill, 145

646   Index Monroe, Vaughn, 491 Monsoon Wedding (Nair), 300 Montaigne, Michel de, 22 Moon, Michael, 214 Moore, Henry, 113–114, 146 The Moral Imagination (Mark Johnson), 229 Moretti, Franco, 65 Morgan, Monique, 598 Mori Ōgai, 209 Morrison, Toni racial difference represented by, 120, 122–130, 133n11 social minds represented by, 127–132 “triple source” reading and, 124–125, 128–129 unreliable representation by narrators of, 125 Mosjoukine, Ivan, 296 Motes, Michael, 513 Mother Courage and Her Children (Brecht), 528 Mottron, Laurent, 397, 399 Moulin Rouge (film), 490 Movshon, Tony, 510, 513 Mr. Potter (Brecht), 354 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 89, 95, 572 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 321 Mukhopadhyay, Tito coalmining disaster recounted by, 408–409 conversion of verse into prose by, 401–404 Moby-Dick and, 406–407 poetry by, 405 Savarese’s interaction with, 396–397, 402, 407 synesthetic perception and, 405–406, 408–409 visualization of language by, 400, 406–408, 414n113 Mullis, Kary, 152 Munch, Edward, 497 Munsterberg, Hugo, 295–297 Murasaki Shikibu. See The Tale of the Genji (Murasaki) “Murder in the Mall” (Green case study), 533 Nabokov, Vladimir Anna Karenina and, 588–589 on Lolita and moments of “aesthetic bliss,” 86 Proust and, 98 similarity to Pale Fire narrator of, 560 sociocognitive complexity in the work of, 178 unreliable narrator in Lolita and, 123–124

Naipaul, V.S., 141, 150 Nair, Mira, 300 The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist (Pamuk), 589 Nandy, Ashis, 338 Narayan, Venkat, 510, 513 Narrative as Virtual Reality (Ryan), 354 Narrative Discourse (Genette), 87–88 narrative empathy altruism and, 354–355, 358–359 bounded strategic empathy and, 357 bridge characters and, 353 broadcast strategic empathy and, 357 definition of, 356 human rights discourse and, 3, 347–350, 355–356, 358–359 literary neuroscience and, 356 strategic narrative empathy and, 357 narrative gaps binding of, 107–108 colliding narratives and, 112–114 Doležel on, 104, 106, 108 ellipsis and, 106 Henry James on, 104, 106 jamming of, 109–112 narrative compression and, 105–106, 111 quantum narrativity and, 104 shadow stories and, 104–108, 110, 114–115, 115n6 stills at the end of films and, 109–111 trauma and, 107–108 narratology of the moment aftertaste situations and, 94–96 angle and, 89–90, 95 cognitive flavor and, 87–88, 92–98, 216n15 consistency and, 91–92 counterpoint and, 93 depth and, 89 emotional valence and, 89 extensions and, 94, 96 fusion texts and, 96–98 “Klopstock moments” and, 90, 96–97 mode and, 91 multiplicity and, 89 occlusion and, 90–91 “OMG” moments and, 86 patterns and, 96–99

Index   647 polyphony and, 93 reciprocity and, 89, 92, 96 representations of mind-reading and, 88–92, 94–99 sequence and, 86, 93 “We’ll Always Have Paris” moments and, 86 Nash Equilibrium, 373 Native Son (Wright), 341 Natsume Sōseki, 209 Natya Shastra, 313 Nectar in a Sieve (Markandaya), 342–343 nested mental states in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 189–190 computers’ attempts to detect, 186–188 in Romeo and Juliet, 189–190 sociocognitive complexity and, 178 in The Story of the Stone, 177, 179–188, 190 summary description of, 176–177 The Neural Sublime (Alan Richardson), 67 neurobiological materialism, 330–331 neurocosmopolitan approach to poetry, 3, 394–397, 407, 409 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 333, 342 “Nick Adams stories” (Hemingway). See “Big Two-Hearted River” (Hemingway) Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 319, 566–567, 574n10 “The Nightingale” (Coleridge), 233, 619 Nightmare on Elm Street (film), 303 “Night Women” (Danticat), 353, 355 Nirvana (music group), 145 Nisbett, Richard, 470 Njogu, Kĩmani, 343n3 Nobody, Nowhere (Donna Williams), 394 No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), 369–370 Nolan, Christopher, 465 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 65, 234, 384–385 Norway, 421 Notebooks (Coleridge), 597 Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky), 532 novelty cognitive conception of, 615–618 defamiliarization and, 615, 617, 620–621, 627 disruption of cognitive propensity for narrative and, 621–622 formalism and, 615–616 habituation and, 617–622

“horizontal change” and, 616–617 literary work’s offering of, 614 Marxist perspective on, 613, 616 meaningfulness and, 619, 621 new environments’ impact on, 614 Pound’s call for, 613 reader response theory and, 615 Nussbaum, Martha on disgust, 282 on emotions as “intelligent responses to perceptions of value,” 281 on emotions’ role in reasoning, 281, 287 on “good world citizens,” 358 on literature and emotion, 274, 282–283 on love and resentment, 282 Mīrābāī and, 284 “painful self-examination” and, 281–283, 286 on “the ascent of love,” 283 Oatley, Keith, 274, 282–283, 287 object imagery from literary texts, 513–515 O’Brien, Flann, 560 Ochs, Phil, 149 Odd Tablet (commentator on The Story of the Stone), 178–179 The Odyssey (Homer), 237, 529 Oedipus, 321, 323–324 “Okie from Muskogee” (Haggard) five stages of cultural reception to, 148–149, 152 full lyrics to, 147–148 good ole’ boy attitudes in, 142 group identity and, 150 identity construction in, 144, 149 “implied composer” of, 149–150 nonrepeated and monosyllabic words in, 139 summary of cultural references in, 147 Vietnam War and, 148–149 The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway), 108 On Chesil Beach (McEwan), 97 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 529 Ong, Walter, 400–401, 404 On Generation and Corruption (Aristotle), 21 online-prominence model cognitive resources in reading and, 542–545, 547, 553 conscious introspection and, 549–550

648   Index online-prominence model (cont.) diagnostic signals and, 548, 552–553 discourse processing and, 545–546, 549, 552–553 fluctuations in mental capacity over time and, 541–544 “ideal reader” model contrasted with, 542, 553 measuring online prominence and, 550–553 personal reactions and, 545–546 prominence of processing components and, 546–547 reallocation signals and, 548–549, 552 signals determining prominence and, 546–549, 552 story processing and, 545–546, 552–553 On the Heavens (Aristotle), 21 optical illusions, 567–568 “Orange” (Mukhopadhyay), 405 The Order of Things (Foucault), 19–20 Østby, Ylva, 255 Otis, Laura, 2, 228, 505, 520, 528 Paivio, Allan, 508 Pale Fire (Nabokov), 560 palimpsests, 606 Palliser novels (Trollope), 375–377 Palmer, Alan on crossing narrative fragments in Lead Belly, 113–114 on fictional narrative and mental functioning, 87 intermental units and, 96, 126, 137–138, 210 on internalist and externalist views of consciousness, 121, 126 relationship between fictional and real minds and, 203 on social minds in fiction, 126–127, 134n16, 137 Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (Richardson), 444–445 Pamuk, Orhan, 589 Parable of the Sower ( Octavia Butler), 340 Paracelsus, 22–24, 26 Paradise Lost (Milton) flash lag effect and, 472–473 Pandemonium described in, 246–248 Satan depicted in, 258, 375, 469, 473, 478 Park, Katherine, 64

Parker, Charlie, 136, 153 Parsons, Gram, 149 Pascal, Blaise, 369, 381 Passing (Larsen), 122 “Paterson” (William Carlos Williams), 398 peak-end rule film theory and, 488–493, 497–498 Kahneman on, 487–489, 498 unconscious mind and, 487–493, 497–498 Peau noire, masques blancs (Fanon), 329 Peckham, Morse on adaptive value of chaos in art, 35–36, 39, 46, 49 on disorder’s incubation against new understanding, 35–36, 43 on the human drive for order, 35–36 Peel, David, 149 Percy, Thomas, 619 Persson, Per, 298–299 Persuasion (Austen) concentration represented in, 55 literary neuroscience study of, 58, 60–61, 63, 66–67, 70 opening scene in, 55, 69 Peskin, Joan, 188–190, 193n52 Pessoa, Ferdinand, 470 Petals of Blood (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), 333 Phelan, James, 86, 136, 447 Philadelphia (Demme), 303 Phillips, Natalie, 15, 548 The Photoplay (Munsterberg), 295–297 Physics (Aristotle), 21 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 467 “Pine Grove Blues” (song), 145 Pinturiccio, 37 Pirandello, Luigi, 560, 572 Plantinga, Carl, 485–486 Plato on desire and satisfaction, 383 imagination and, 225 Ion and, 319–320 Laws and, 314 mimesis and, 314 on the Muse, 319–320 Republic and, 314–315 Shelley on, 228 on theater and emotion, 313–316, 318–320

Index   649 Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue (Tsur), 405 Poe, Edgar Allan, 532 Poetics (Aristotle), 228, 313, 315–316, 489 poetry. See also specific works concrete diction in, 396–397 neurocosmopolitan approach to, 3, 394–397, 407, 409 as “paradoxical language of illiteracy,” 397–402 patterning techniques and, 403–405 Point Counter Point (Huxley), 559–560 The Political Unconscious (Jameson), 18 Pope, Alexander, 66, 620 Porter, Dahlia, 620 Porter, Gerald, 146 Portrait (Don Williams), 143 Portrait du colonisé, précédé par portrait du colonisateur (Memmi), 329 The Portrait of a Lady (James), 104, 106–107 Posner, Jonathan, 68 Postcolonial Melancholia (Gilroy), 394 postcolonial theory cognitive literary studies and, 3, 329–331, 333, 337–338, 343, 350–352, 358 cognitivist Marxism and, 331 critique of mainstream version of, 330–333 derivative colonialism and, 339 empathy and, 339–343, 347–349, 352–355, 358–359 hybridity and, 334–337 identity and, 334–337, 343 in-group and out-group dynamics and, 335–336, 338–339, 341–342 Latin America and, 330, 332 Literary Darwinists and, 5n10 performance and, 334–337 postcolonial neurology and, 394 poststructuralism, post-poststructuralism and, 332–333 psychology and, 329, 333–334, 337 race and, 329, 334, 337–339, 343 resistance to universals and, 350–351 “turn toward the human” and, 352 poststructuralism, 17–18, 27 Pound, Ezra, 112, 597, 613, 615 prefronal cortex, 64, 68

The Prelude (Wordsworth) creative process discussed in, 603 historically prospective nature of, 598 preface of, 600 science and history of feeling and, 606 spatial form and, 598 spots of time in, 594, 596–597, 601–603 The President (Asturias), 549 “President’s Daily Briefing” (August 6, 2001), 476 Price, George R., 372–373 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 55, 97, 126 Prince, Dawn, 394 Prinz, Jesse, 428–429 Prior, Matthew, 620 “Prison” (Heranz), 163–164 Prometheus (Scriabin), 93 Propp, Vladimir, 98 Proust, Marcel. See In Search of Lost Time (Proust) psychoanalysis, 18, 27, 199–200 psychoanalytic unconscious, 463–468 Psychologie de la colonisation (Mannoni), 329 “Psychology and Form” (Burke), 86 “Psychology’s Missing Contexts” (Kagan), 350 Ptolemy, 21 Pure Prairie League, 149 Pynchon, Thomas, 376 quantum narrativity, 86, 104 Quarles, Philip, 559 queer theory AIDS epidemic and, 199, 202 “Axiom #1” (Sedgwick) and, 202, 206, 208 cognitive queer theory and, 3, 199–200, 202, 208–210, 213, 215 on desire as the copying of the desires of others, 214 homophobia and, 202, 303 inside/out question and, 200–204, 208–209, 213–215 interiority in Japanese literature and, 204–207, 209–210 psychoanalysis and, 199–200 Queneau, Raymond, 560, 571 Rabinowitz, Peter J., 121–122, 132, 212, 216n15 Radway, Janice, 96

650   Index Ramazani, Jahan, 394 The Rambler (Samuel Johnson), 231–232 Ramón y Cajal, Santiago, 514–515 Raney, Arthur A., 427–428, 430, 433 rape. See also under specific works Bourgois on the normalcy of rape in street culture and, 422–423 contempt, anger, and disgust (CAD) hypothesis and, 428–429 in detective and cop fiction, 423–425 masculine gender role socialization and, 423, 425 moral disgust and, 421, 427–431 narrative function of in antihero dramas and, 422–427, 430–431, 434 real life versus fiction and, 421, 428, 431, 434 repulsive rapist figure and, 421, 427–428, 434, 435n9 revenge and, 426–428 Rashomon (Kurosawa), 532 Rasselas (Samuel Johnson), 231 Rastell, John, 22 The Reader’s Eye (Esrock), 507 Reading in the Brain (Deheane), 63 reality effect in Anna Karenina, 581–589 Barthes on, 581, 589 discourse comprehension and, 586–587, 590n7 epistemological tension and, 586–588 fragmentary clues and, 582–588 ontological tension and, 588–589 Pamuk on, 589 shadow stories and, 583 structuralist perspective on, 581 visual object perception and, 583–584 Rebel without a Cause (film), 490 “Recitatif ” (Morrison) character narration and, 121–122, 124, 127 “glitch” in, 130–131 mothers represented in, 127–128, 131–132 narrative progression in, 127–132, 134n17 racial difference represented in, 120, 122–130, 133n11 social minds represented in, 127–132 “triple source” reading of, 124–125, 128–129 unreliable representation in, 125 Recorde, Robert, 23

Redelmeier, Don, 487–488 Redgauntlet (Scott), 153 Red Inkstone (commentator on The Story of the Stone), 178 “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement” (Coleridge), 233 Reichle, Erik D., 530, 544 Reineberg, Andrew E., 544 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Percy), 619 “Re-minding Modernism” (Herman), 207 The Renaissance, 19–20, 159 Republic (Plato), 314–315 Rethinking Intuition, 27 Revelation, Book of, 113 revenge plays early modern English court system and, 35, 46–48 failure of dying revenger in, 44–45 grotesques in, 36–39, 43–49 rhetorical narrative theory cognitive narrative theory and, 120–122, 132 narrative progression and, 126 “Recitatif ” (Morrison) and, 122–132 unreliable narration and, 124 Rice, Ann, 552 Rice, Bill, 153 Richard III (Shakespeare), 322 Richardson, Alan cognitive literary studies defined by, 1 on embodiment of the brain, 67 on human rights discourse, 352 on visualization of mental imagery, 508–509 Richardson, Brian, 357 Richardson, Linda, 514 Richardson, Samuel Clarissa and unreliable narrator in, 123–124 Pamela and Clarissa as trial narratives and, 444–445, 448, 454 Richmond, Diana, 510, 513, 518 Ricoeur, Paul, 598 Rimé, Bernard, 279 The Rise of the Novel (Watt), 64–65 Robinson, John Elder, 394 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 72 Rob Roy (film), 427–428 “Rock Island Line” (song), 114 Rohrer, Jason, 516

Index   651 Roja (film), 339 Romanticism. See under imagination Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 189, 316, 321 Ronen, Ruth, 590n7 Rosch, Eleanor, 16–17 “A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner), 528 Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 369 Rosie’s Walk (Hutchins), 188–189 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 316–318, 444 Rowling, J.K., 178, 383 Rozin, Paul, 428 Rubin, Nava, 251–253, 256, 506 Rubin, Sue, 394 Rumbaut, Rubén, 352 Run, Lola, Run (film), 494 Rushdie, Salman, 342, 506, 510, 518–519 Russell, Rosalind, 377 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 354, 586–588 Sacks, Oliver on the art of savants, 407 on classical autism, 394 on Grandin, 511–512 on Mukhopadhyay, 411n24 on Wiltshire, 414n118 Sade, Marquis de, 455 Saint Aethelthryth, 167 Saint Catherine of Sweden, 167 Saint Cecilia, 167 Saint German, Christopher, 48 Samuels, S.J., 543 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 561, 569 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 16–17, 20 Saussy, Haun, 177, 185, 190 Savarese, DJ, 404, 413n99 Savarese, Ralph James, 3, 471 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 454 Scarry, Elaine on artists’ uses of transparent surfaces, 586 imagining under instruction and, 251 on mental imaging and imagination, 227–228 on the rewards of imagery, 250 on spatial visualization and fiction reading, 511 on visualization of mental imagery, 506–508, 513, 519–520 on vivacity and literary aesthetics, 248

Schacter, Daniel, 232–233 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 577n40 Schelling, Thomas, 372 Schlegel, Friedrich, 571 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 24 Schooler, Jonathan, 530–531, 544, 550 Schrödinger, Erwin, 34, 49 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 375 Scott, Walter, 153, 227, 234, 238 Scriabin, Alexander, 93 Searle, John, 137, 581 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky affect theory and, 200 Axiom #1 and, 202, 206, 208 homosocial continuum and, 209, 212 on knowledge and desire, 201–202, 216n15 male homosocial desire and, 213 on Proust and sexual possession of another person, 100n8 Seidensticker, Edward, 213 Selden, John, 48 Selemon, L. D., 64 self-reflexive fiction characters complaining about authors and, 560 characters who admit to being creatures of fantasy and, 560 cultivation of divided state of mind by, 571–572 Fellini’s 8 1/2 as example of, 560–567, 571–572 fictional characters becoming part of reality and, 565, 568–569 lucid dreaming and, 570 narrators’ engagement with readers in, 559 priming and, 570–571 semiotics, 16 sensory imbalance physiology, 42–43, 46 A Separation (film), 109–112 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 476–477 Serres, Michel, 395, 397 The Sessions (film), 497 The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), 300 shadow stories. See under narrative gaps Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra and, 27 cognitive historicist readings of, 19, 27 equity law and, 48 grotesques in the plays of, 43–45 Hamlet and, 38, 43–44

652   Index Shakespeare, William (cont.) King Lear and, 27, 380 Measure for Measure and, 97–98 Much Ado about Nothing and, 321 nested mental states depicted by, 189–190 Richard III and, 322 Romeo and Juliet and, 189, 316, 321 Titus Andronicus and, 39, 43–45 Venus and Adonis and, 599 As You Like It and, 19 Shakespeare’s Brain (Crane), 19 Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie), 519 Shapin, Steven, 20 Shapiro, James, 47, 49 Sharpe, Kevin, 47 Shaughnessy, Nicola, 3 Sheldon, Sidney, 283 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 228 Sherlock Holmes stories, 89, 97 The Shield (television show), 425–426 Shin, Michael, 205 Shklovsky, Viktor, 615–619 Showalter, Elaine, 57–58, 62 Shur, Barry, 511, 514–515 Shweder, Richard, 428 Sidney, Philip, 48 The Silence of the Lambs (Demme) Buffalo Bill character in, 291, 298, 301–304, 306 Clarice Starling character in, 291–292, 298–306 close-ups in, 292–293, 298, 302–305 Dr. Chilton character in, 301–302 Hannibal Lecter character in, 291–292, 300–306, 449 homphobia and, 303 Jack Crawford character in, 301 photo stills from, 292, 301–303, 305 shot-reverse shot sequences in, 291–293, 298, 305–306 Simon, David, 422–423 “Simon Lee” (Wordsworth), 618, 622, 625–627 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 560 Skolnick, Deena, 568 Smallwood, Jonathan, 531, 550 Smetacek, Victor, 42, 46, 49 Smiley’s People (Le Carré), 549 Smith, Adam, 626

Smith, Murray, 300 Smith, Sidonie, 349, 355 social anxiety, 176–177 social intuitionism, 433–434 social minds Morrison’s representation of, 127–132 Palmer on, 126–127, 134n16, 137, 210 Social Minds in the Novel (Palmer), 137, 210 The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, 4 sociocognitive complexity definition of, 178 different from one reader to another as, 179 correlated with characters’ age, gender, and class as, 183 literary interpretations and, 184 popular fiction and, 186 Socrates, 319 Somebody, Somewhere (Donna Williams), 394 Soni, Vivasvan, 444 Sons of Anarchy (television program), 425–426, 428 Sophie’s Choice (film), 498 The Sopranos (television program) murder in, 425, 430 rape of Dr. Melfi character in, 426–427 Tony Soprano character in, 421, 426–428, 430, 434 “Soul of a Man” (Blind Willie Johnson), 136 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), 91–92 The Sound of Music (film), 490 Source Code (film), 494 The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 37–38, 45–47 spatial form blending theory and, 603–605 in effect, 599–602 palimpsest structuring and, 606 temporal distance and, 598 in theory, 596–599 ut pictura poesis poetry tradition and, 597 Speak, Memory (Nabokov), 178 Spellbound (film), 465 Spenser, Edmund, 15, 23–27, 48 Sperber, Dan, 49 Spolsky, Ellen, 2, 4, 67, 75n25 Stanwyck, Barbara, 299

Index   653 Starr, G. Gabrielle on authors’ use of multiple senses, 228 on cognitive responses to visual art, 70 on visualization of mental imagery, 506, 519–520, 520n1 on visual responses to aesthetic art, 251–253, 256 Star Trek: The Next Generation (television program), 303–304 Stein, Gertrude, 549 Steinbeck, John, 147 Stella Dallas (film), 299, 309n38 Stern, Daniel, 402, 405 Sternberg, Meir, 106 Stinchecum, Amanda Meyer, 206–207, 211 Stone, Lawrence, 166 Stoppard, Tom, 369 Story Line (Marshall), 237 The Story of the Stone (Cao Xueqin) author’s revisions to, 178 computer analysis of mental states depicted in, 179, 186–188 explicit mental states in, 179–181 Freudian reading of, 190 gaps between explicit and implied mental states in, 184 implied mental states in, 182–183 mind-reading attempts in, 182 nested mental states in, 177, 179–188, 190 Odd Tablet commentary on, 178–179 position within Chinese culture of, 178, 192n14 Red Inkstone commentary on, 178 Saussy on, 185, 190 sociocognitive complexity in, 179, 183–187, 192n14 Zhang Xinzhi commentary on, 179 Storytelling in the New Hollywood (Kristin Thompson), 489 Strachey, Lytton, 211 strategic narrative empathy. See under narrative empathy Stravinsky, Igor, 85 Stroop test of directed attention, 65 Structuralist Poetics (Culler), 542 Sufferings of Young Werther (Goethe), 90 Sugase, Kenji, 40 Swift, Jonathan, 66

Tagore, Rabindranath, 337, 342 The Tale of Genji (Murasaki) interiority depicted in, 206–208, 210 queer grammar of desire in, 210–213, 218n45 translation idiosyncrasies and, 210–211, 213 Tal-Or, Nurit, 530, 533 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 213–214 Tarr, Bela, 490 Tartt, Donna, 253 Tartuffe (Molière), 322 Taylor, John R., 17 Taylor, Marjorie, 568, 575n20 Taylor, Shelley, 569 “Tell Me My Lying Eyes are Wrong” (George Jones) aspectual story world in, 151 epistemology of pain and, 140–141 full lyrics of, 139 narrative gaps in, 140 narrator’s inner cognitive functioning and, 150–151 nonrepeated and monosyllabic words in, 139 social cognitive networks in, 152 The Ten Commandments (film), 490 Terms of Endearment (film), 490 text-driven spatial imagery, 515–517 Thackeray, William, 107, 551–552 theater. See also specific works alienation effects and, 318 catharsis and, 315, 317, 319 coincident emotional states and, 321–322 criterial prefocusing and, 322–323 emotions and, 313–324 empathy and, 324 identification and, 314, 318, 320–321, 323–324 method acting and, 320 mimesis and, 314 pity and, 315–316, 321, 323–324 theater of cruelty (Artaud), 318–319 Thelma and Louise (film), 111 theory of mind. See also folk psychology The Story of the Stone and, 179–181 cognitive function as, 19 revenge plays and, 42 cartoons in, 168 queer theory and, 202-207 imagination and, 226, 231

654   Index theory of mind (cont.) literary imagination and, 235, 258 nested mental states and, 176-179 “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” in, 237-238 the default mode network and, 254 close-ups of the human face and, 296 not presuming a similar neurology, form of, 407 novels and, 585, 586 “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena” (Batson), 441–442 “The Straight Mind” (Wittig), 199 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 487 “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (Coleridge), 237–238 Thompson, Kristin, 489 Thompson, Richard F., 617 Thomson, James, 227 “The Thorn” (Wordsworth) novelty of, 618, 625–627 repetition in, 599–600 spatial poetics and, 599–600 Thorpe, Kate, 511–512, 516–519 Three Sisters (Chekhov), 582 The Thresher’s Labour (Duck), 620 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 229–230, 233, 594 Titanic (film), 490 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 39, 43–45 Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina and, 548–549, 582–589 consciousness depicted by, 472 reality effect and, 582–589 War and Peace and, 472 Tooby, John, 469 top-down processes of cognition, 486, 583, 588, 594–596 Total Recall (Verheoven), 375–376 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 206, 215 Towards a “Natural” Narratology (Fludernik), 354 transport attention and, 527, 529 cognitive processing and, 530–531, 533 correlational nature of evidence of, 535 definition of, 526–528 discourse style features and, 528–529 effects of, 532–534

empathizing with characters and, 532–533 imageability and affect features of, 528 introspective reports and, 536 involvement and, 530 literary processing and, 534–536 meaning features and, 528–529 metaphor of, 525–537 narrative understanding and, 531 nonfiction and, 534 novelty and, 531–532 prosocial behavior and, 535 readers’ adoption of beliefs, 533 surface structure and, 529–530 unnecessary features of, 527–528 weak nature of some evidence of, 535–536 Trethewey, Natasha, 506, 518 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 72 Trivia (Gay), 66 Trollope, Anthony, 375–377 Tsai Ming-lai, 490 Tsur, Reuven, 396, 403, 405, 413n96 Turgenev, Ivan, 92 Turner, Mark blending theory and, 155–158, 161–162, 228–229, 603–605 cognitive metaphor theory and, 160, 229 on time as space, 604–605 “World Food Crisis” cartoon and, 155–158 Tversky, Amos, 474 Twain, Mark, 189–190 Tyler, Royall, 213 Ukigumo (Futabatei Shimei), 206 Ulysses (Joyce), 187, 237, 273, 560 Unamuno, Miguel de, 560, 571 Uncle Remus character, 141–142 unconscious mind automaticity and, 477–478 change blindness and, 464 confirmation bias and, 467 duration neglect, 487–488, 490, 492, 496–497 filmmakers’ exploitation of, 483–498 flash lag effect and, 472 fundamental attribution error and, 483–484, 498n1 groupthink and, 476 heuristics and biases in, 464, 473–475

Index   655 hindsight bias and, 474–477 neuroscience and, 468–472 overoptimism bias, mental health and, 569 peak-end rule and, 487–493, 497–498 phenomenology and, 471 popular guides to, 463–464 priming effect and, 464–465 psychoanalytic unconscious and, 463–468 reason and, 469–470 System 1 and System 2 thinking and, 470, 473–474 Understanding Cinema (Persson), 298–299 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 358 Upheavals of Thought (Nussbaum), 282–283 Urinal of Physicke (Recorde), 23 ut pictura poesis poetry tradition, 597 Vaage, Margrethe Bruun, 3 Valéry, Paul, 572 van den Broek, P., 544 Van Dijk, T. A., 544 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 107 Van Patten, Timothy, 484 van Peer, Willi, 613 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare), 599 Verhoeven, Paul, 375 Vermeer, Johannes, 273 Vermeule, Blakey, 235, 375, 442 Vertigo (film), 490 Vessel, Edward, 251–253, 256, 506 Vietnam War, 148–149 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste, 572 Vineland (Pynchon), 376 visual responses to read words, 512–513 visual responses to spoken language, 509–512 von Seggern, Jane, 511 Wahl, Andrew, 164–166, 168, 170 Waley, Arthur, 211, 218n45 Wallace, David Foster, 465–466 Walton, Kendall, 572 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 472 The Waste Land (Eliot), 112–113, 597 Watt, Ian, 64–65 Watts, Isaac, 65 Waverly (Scott), 234 The Way We Think (Fauconnier and Turner), 228

We (Zamyatin), 178 Weerathesakul, Apichatpong, 490 “We’ll Always Have Paris” moments, 86 Welty, Mary, 511, 514, 516 “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (Lead Belly) focalized story world in, 151 full lyrics of, 113, 144–145 identity construction in, 146–147 “implied composer” of, 146 narrative gaps and, 113–114, 147, 151 nonrepeated and monosyllabic words in, 139 “The Longest Train I Ever Saw” and, 113, 145–146 Whitefield, George, 159 Why We Read Fiction (Zunshine), 63, 89 Williams, Don, 141–143, 151–152 Williams, Donna, 394–395, 401, 403–405 Williams, Hank, 141–142 Williams, Tennessee, 141–144 Williams, William Carlos, 398, 400 Wilshire, Bruce, 320 Wilson, Hugh, 511–512, 519 Wilson, John, 626 Wilson, Timothy, 470 The Wire (television program) D’Angelo Barksdale character in, 421, 424–425 rape and, 422–425 Wee-Bey character in, 424 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 16 Wittig, Monique, 199 Wolf, Maryanne, 404 Wolfe, Thomas, 141–144 Wolfe, Tom, 470 Wolfman Jack, 141–142 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 238 Woloch, Alex, 55 Woo, John, 300 Woodbridge, Linda, 47, 49 Woolf, Virginia ego boundaries in the fiction of, 570 embedded intentionality represented by, 89, 95 on Joyce, 207 To the Lighthouse and, 206, 215 Mrs. Dalloway and, 89, 95, 572 multilayered consciousness represented by, 207–208 narrators in the fiction of, 203, 206–208

656   Index Woolf, Virginia (cont.) on The Tale of the Genji, 211 Waley and, 211 Wordsworth, William bidirectionally focused state described by, 257–258 blending theory and, 603–605 cognitive metaphor theory and, 229–230 Coleridge and, 597–598, 603, 626 conversation poems of, 233, 238 The Feeling of What Happens and, 606 “The Idiot Boy” and, 618, 622, 625–627 on the imaginative process, 603 “Immortality Ode” and, 594 Lyrical Ballads and, 595, 600, 614, 616, 618–627 “The Mad Mother” and, 618, 622–627 narrators with no stable identity in work of, 622–623 novelty in the poetry of, 616–617, 620–627 “palimpsestically layered” experience and, 600–601 on poetry as “the history and science of feeling,” 606 The Prelude and, 594, 596–598, 600–603, 606 re-presentation of the past by, 594–597, 600–602 “Simon Lee” and, 618, 622, 625–627 spatial poetics of, 598–603, 605 stylistic redundancies of, 600, 602–604 “The Thorn” and, 599–600, 618, 625–627 “Tintern Abbey” and, 229–230, 233, 594 “World Food Crisis” (Chappatte), 155–158, 162, 170 Wright, Richard, 341 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë), 107

Yearsley, Ann, 620 Yi Kwang-su, 205–206 Yoda, Tomiko, 210–211 “You are Not So Smart” (blog), 485 Young, Allen, 349 Young, Kay, 87 Yu, Anthony C., 188 Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag, 373–374 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 178 Zazie in the Metro (Queneau), 560 Zeki, Semir ambiguity in art and, 278, 284 on art and neurobiology, 273–274 on biology and the will, 331 brain’s search for constancy and, 277 incompleteness in art, 278, 284 innate versus acquired concepts and, 277–278 on literature and emotion, 277 Mīrābāī and, 284 unity-in-love and, 278, 284 Zettel, Barbara, 513 Zhang Xinzhi, 179 Zunshine, Lisa on cognitive perspectives and cultural explanations, 613 on embedded consciousness and its limits, 258 on embodied transparency, 131, 309n38 on historicization, 63 on metarepresentation, 120–121, 123–124 on nested mental states and mind-reading in fiction, 87–89, 92 on the “sadistic benefactor,” 444 on the source behind a narrative, 121 on source monitoring in the detective story, 122 on theory of mind and literature, 235 on unreliable narrators, 123–124