The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion 0367409151, 9780367409159

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND EMOTION

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion shows how the “affective turn” in the humanities applies to literary studies. Deftly combining the scientific elements with the literary, the book provides a theoretical and topical introduction to reading literature and emotion. Looking at a variety of formats, including novels, drama, film, graphic fiction, and lyric poetry, the book also includes focus on specific authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. The volume introduces the theoretical groundwork, covering such categories as affect theory, affective neuroscience, cognitive science, evolution, and history of emotions. It examines the range of emotions that play a special role in literature, including happiness, fear, aesthetic delight, empathy, and sympathy, as well as aspects of literature (style, narrative voice, and others) that bear on emotional response. Finally, it explores ethical and political concerns that are often intertwined with emotional response, including racism, colonialism, disability, ecology, gender, sexuality, and trauma. This is a crucial guide to the ways in which new, interdisciplinary understandings of emotion and affect—in fields from neuroscience to social theory—are changing the study of literature and of the ways those new understandings are impacted by work on literature also. Patrick Colm Hogan is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, USA. Bradley J. Irish is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA. Lalita Pandit Hogan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, USA.

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

Also available in this series: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities Edited by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown and Andrea Charise The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction Edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability Edited by Alice Hall The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Neil Murphy, and W. Michelle Wang The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature Edited by Jessica Gildersleeve The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen Edited by Cheryl A. Wilson and Maria H. Frawley The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class Edited by Gloria McMillan The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine Edited by Tim Lanzendörfer The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion Edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish and Lalita Pandit Hogan For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-LiteratureCompanions/book-series/RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND EMOTION

Edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish and Lalita Pandit Hogan

Cover image © Getty Images First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish and Lalita Pandit Hogan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish and Lalita Pandit Hogan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40915-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-21922-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80984-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In lieu of a dedication, the editors wish to recall those who have died and those who have been bereaved during the recent (continuing) pandemic: “people were made desperate through the anguish of their souls, and the terrors of death sat in the very faces and countenances of the people” (Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments List of Figures Notes on Contributors

xi xii xiii

Introduction. Literary Feelings: Understanding Emotions Patrick Colm Hogan and Bradley J. Irish PART 1

Teoretical Perspectives

1

13

1 Affective Neuroscience: The Symbiosis of Scientific and Literary Knowledge Laura Otis

15

2 Affect Theory Wendy J. Truran

26

3 Cognitive Linguistics: A Perspective on Emotion in Literature Zoltán Kövecses

38

4 Cognitive Science: Literary Emotions From Appraisal to Embodiment Marco Caracciolo

50

5 Embodiment: Embodied Simulation and Emotional Engagement With Fictional Characters Hannah Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese

vii

61

Contents

6 Empirical Approaches to Studying Emotion in Literature: The Case of Gender Chantelle Ivanski, Marta M. Maslej, and Raymond A. Mar

74

7 Evolution: How Evolved Emotions Work in Literary Meaning Joseph Carroll

85

8 The History of Emotions and Literature Andrew Lynch

98

9 Philosophy, Literature, and Emotion Noël Carroll

110

PART 2

Emotions of Literature

121

10 Aesthetic Emotions Sibylle Baumbach

123

11 Paradoxes of Literary Emotion: Simulation and The Zhào Orphan Patrick Colm Hogan

134

12 Sympathy and Empathy Derek Matravers

144

13 Tragedy and Comedy: Emotional Tears and Trust in King Lear and Cymbeline Lalita Pandit Hogan PART 3

155

Literature and Emotion in the World

167

14 Colonialism and Postcolonialism Suzanne Keen

169

15 Disability, “Enslavement,” and Slavery: Affective Historicism and Fletcher and Massinger’s A Very Woman David Houston Wood

180

16 Ecology and Emotion: Feeling Narrative Environments Alexa Weik von Mossner

192

17 Morals: The Ethical Gangster Blakey Vermeule

203

viii

Contents

18 Gender, Emotion, Literature: “No Woman’s Heart” in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Cora Fox

214

19 Race and Ethnicity Christopher González

225

20 Sexuality Tiffany Diana Ball

236

21 Trauma and Its Future: Revisiting Aesthetic Debates About Trauma E. Ann Kaplan PART 4

247

Elements of Literary Structure and Experience

259

22 Authors: Cognitive Patterns and Individual Creativity Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas

261

23 Character and Emotion in Fiction Keith Oatley

272

24 Language, Style, and Texture Peter Stockwell

283

25 Narrative and Plot: Unreliable Feelings and the Risks of Surprise Vera Tobin

294

26 Readers Richard J. Gerrig

305

27 Social Reception Bradley J. Irish

317

28 Stories: Particular Causes and Universal Genres Patrick Colm Hogan

328

PART 5

Modes of Literature

341

29 Drama: Shakespearean Apostrophe and the History of Emotions Gail Kern Paster

343

ix

Contents

30 Film: The Affective Specificity of Audiovisual Media Jens Eder

354

31 Graphic Fiction: BIPOC Teen Comics Frederick Luis Aldama

366

32 Lyric John Brenkman

383

33 Prose Fiction Bartosz Stopel

395

PART 6

Literary Examples

407

34 Geoffrey Chaucer: Reading with Feeling Stephanie Downes

409

35 William Shakespeare: Anxieties About Trust in The Tempest Lalita Pandit Hogan

421

36 Jane Austen and the Emotion of Love Keith Oatley

433

37 Virginia Woolf’s Development of a Sociology of Emotion in the Composition of The Years (1937) Emily Ridge

445

38 Helon Habila: Structural Helplessness and the Quest for Hope in Oil on Water Donald R. Wehrs

456

39 Viet Thanh Nguyen: Navigating Anger and Empathy in The Sympathizer Sue J. Kim

467

Index

478

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors are very grateful to Polly Dodson of Routledge for suggesting the project initially and for her invaluable support. We are also very grateful to Zoe Meyer, also of Routledge, for her help throughout the process.

xi

FIGURES

6.1 31.1

Empirical methods and the continuum from realism to control Splash page of Vee’s shock at the sight of Jessica in The Low, Low Woods (2020) 31.2 Splash page of Jessica’s mother in The Low, Low Woods (2020) 31.3 Alfonso rides confidently through the city in I Am Alfonso Jones (2017) 31.4 The Chicago skyline in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) 31.5 The building where Karen Reyes lives in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) 31.6 Karen Reyes transforming into a monster in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) 31.7 Chuck with Uncle Matt in Superman Smashes the Klan (2020) 31.8 Ramona with her father Dr. Lee who rejects the help of the Black community in Superman Smashes the Klan (2020) 31.9 Clark Kent/Superman’s discovery of his own alienness in Superman Smashes the Klan (2020) 31.10 Jake/Aqualad filled with self-doubt in You Brought Me the Ocean (2020)

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75 369 370 372 373 373 374 377 378 379 381

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Frederick Luis Aldama is an award-winning author and the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and Affiliate Faculty in Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas, Austin, USA, as well as Adjunct Professor and Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He is editor and co-editor of nine academic press book series. He is the creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes as well as founder and director of UT’s Latinx Pop Lab. Tiffany Diana Ball is a postdoctoral fellow in the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She has a PhD in English and women’s studies from the University of Michigan and is the author of several forthcoming articles on affect, sexuality, and modernism. Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research areas include Shakespearean drama and literary attention. She is the author of Literature and Fascination (2015) and Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy (2008) and (co-)editor of several volumes, including Victorian Surfaces (2021). John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English, City University of New York Graduate Center and Baruch College, USA, is the author most recently of Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect (University of Chicago Press, 2020). You can find more on his website johnbrenkman.com. Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium. He is the author of several books, including most recently Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (University of Virginia Press, 2021) and With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (co-authored with Karin Kukkonen; Ohio State University Press, 2021). Joseph Carroll, Curators’ Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Missouri–St. Louis, USA, is the author of several books on evolutionary literary theory and criticism, including Evolution and Literary Theory (1995) and xiii

Notes on Contributors

Reading Human Nature (2011). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. Noël Carroll teaches philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA. His most recent books are Philosophy and the Moving Image and Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art: Essays. He has worked as a journalist and is the author of five documentaries. Stephanie Downes, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, La Trobe University, Australia, has published variously on late medieval literature and the history of emotions, including coediting the volumes Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Palgrave, 2016) and Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History (Oxford University Press, 2018). Jens Eder, Professor of Dramaturgy and Aesthetics of Audiovisual Media, Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Germany, has authored four scholarly monographs (in German) and co-edited seven books, some of them in English, including Image Operations (Manchester UP, 2016, with Charlotte Klonk) and Characters in Fictional Worlds (de Gruyter, 2010, with Fotis Jannidis and Ralf Schneider). Cora Fox, Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA, works on early modern culture and in the interdisciplinary health humanities. She is the author of Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Palgrave, 2009) and co-edited Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition (MLA, 2010) and Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester, 2021). Vittorio Gallese is Professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy. A cognitive neuroscientist, his research focuses on the relation between the sensory-motor system and social cognition by investigating the neurobiological grounding of intersubjectivity, psychopathology, language, and aesthetics. He is the author of more than three hundred scientific publications and three books. Richard J. Gerrig, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, USA, is the author of more than one hundred publications focused on language use and readers’ experiences of narratives. His research has detailed the processes and products of readers’ cognitive and emotional participation in narrative worlds. Christopher González is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Latinx Cultural Center at Utah State University, USA. His most recent book, Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film & TV, won the 2020 International Latino Book Award. He is a scholar of Latinx literary and cultural production, and narrative theory. Lalita Pandit Hogan, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, USA, is the author of A Country Without Borders: Poems and Stories of Kashmir (2Leaf Press, 2017), as well as professional articles on Shakespeare, Webster, postcolonial literature, and other topics. She has co-edited books on psychoanalytic literary theory, Indian literature, and the Bengali author, Rabindranath Tagore, and special issues of journals treating Indian film, non-European traditions of literary theory, and cognitive approaches to Shakespeare (which received the Best Special Issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals). xiv

Notes on Contributors

Patrick Colm Hogan, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Department of English and Program in Cognitive Science, University of Connecticut, USA, is the author of 25 scholarly books, including Literature and Emotion (Routledge, 2018) and a two-volume study of American Literature and American Identity (Routledge, 2020 and 2022). Bradley J. Irish is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he studies emotion in the early modern period. He is the author of Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Northwestern UP, 2018) and the co-editor of Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester UP, 2021). His next book, Shakespeare and Disgust, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Chantelle Ivanski received her MA from York University, Toronto, Canada, where she is now working on completing her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Raymond A. Mar. Her research focuses broadly on the experiences of women with a specific interest in gender inequality and parenting. E. Ann Kaplan is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Stony Brook University, USA, where she founded and directed the Humanities Institute. She is Past President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Kaplan’s work has been translated into seven languages. Her earlier books concerned feminism, colonialism, and film (e.g., Women and Film [1983], Looking for the Other [1987], Motherhood and Representation [1992]). Her recent books concern trauma (e.g., Trauma Culture [2005], Climate Trauma [2015]). She is currently writing on trauma, dementia, and the politics of care, and on the Coronavirus pandemic. Suzanne Keen, VPAA, Dean of Faculty, and Professor of Literature, Hamilton College, USA, writes about narrative empathy. Her books include Empathy and the Novel (Oxford, 2007) and the forthcoming Routledge volume Empathy and Reading, a selection of her essays and chapters on the topic. Sue J. Kim is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA. She is the author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, and Narrative and Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race, and co-editor of Rethinking Empathy Through Literature. Zoltán Kövecses is Professor Emeritus, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He is the author of several books on metaphor and emotions, including Metaphor and Emotion (Cambridge, 2000); Metaphor. A Practical Introduction (Oxford, 2002/2010); Metaphor in Culture (Cambridge, 2005); Language, Mind, and Culture (Oxford, 2006); Where Metaphors Come From (Oxford, 2015); and Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Cambridge, 2020). Andrew Lynch is Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow, English and Literary Studies, at the University of Western Australia. His recent publications include two co-edited collections: The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700 (2019) and A Cultural History of Emotions, 6 vols. (Bloomsbury, 2019). Raymond A. Mar is a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander xv

Notes on Contributors

von Humboldt Foundation and the Tom Trabasso Award from the Society for Text and Discourse. Marta M. Maslej is a postdoctoral fellow with The Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada. Her research involves using methods from natural language processing to analyze various types of unstructured data, from works of fiction to clinical notes in electronic health records. Derek Matravers, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University and an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, UK, is the author of four books and numerous articles in aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. He edits, with Paloma Atencia-Linares, The British Journal of Aesthetics. Keith Oatley is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto, Canada. He has published seven books on psychology, three novels, and a novella with psychological commentaries. He is co-author of the textbook Understanding Emotions. His main recent research has been on human emotions and the psychology of fiction. Laura Otis is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English at Emory University, USA. She is the author of the academic books Organic Memory, Membranes, Networking, Müller’s Lab, Rethinking Thought, and Banned Emotions, and of six novels. Her interdisciplinary studies of literature and science have been supported by MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas is a Ramón y Cajal Assistant Professor and co-director of the Daedalus Lab: Murcia Center on Cognition, Communication, and Creativity, at the University of Murcia, Spain, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and a member of the Red Hen Lab™ for multimodal communication research. Gail Kern Paster is Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library and Editor Emerita of Shakespeare Quarterly. Her publications include The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. She was named to the Queen’s Honours List in 2011. Emily Ridge, Lecturer Above the Bar, Discipline of English, School of English and Creative Arts, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, is the author of Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Jeffrey Clapp) of Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2016). Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK. His books include Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Cognitive Poetics (Routledge, 2020), and The Language of Surrealism (Palgrave, 2017); and he co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Bartosz Stopel is Associate Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia, Poland. He has published on cognitive and affective approaches to literary and cinematic xvi

Notes on Contributors

narratives, as well as on literary and cultural theory. His most recent book is From Mind to Text (Routledge 2018). Vera Tobin, Associate Professor, Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, USA, studies cognitive bias; viewpoint in language; and problems of cooperation in literature, film, and conversation. She is the author of Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot (Harvard University Press, 2018). Wendy J. Truran is a visiting lecturer in writing and communications at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Her scholarship focuses on modernism and affect, and she has published work on May Sinclair, James Joyce, and W. B. Yeats. She is one of the founding editors of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. Blakey Vermeule is the Albert Guerrard Professor of Literature at Stanford. She is the author of three books, one on eighteenth-century moral psychology and literature, one on the theory of literary characters, and one on the ancient debate between the active life and the contemplative life (co-authored with Jennifer Summit). Her current project is about the post-Freudian conception of the unconscious mind. She has abiding research interests in evolutionary moral psychology and in moral philosophy. Donald R. Wehrs is Hargis Professor of English Literature at Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA. He is editor or co-editor of four collections, most recently The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism (2017); author of three books on twentieth-century African fiction; and has published on eighteenth-century British literature, Shakespeare, medieval romance, and comparative literature. Alexa Weik von Mossner, Associate Professor of American Studies, Department of English, University of Klagenfurt, Austria, is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds (U of Texas P, 2014) and Affective Ecologies (Ohio State UP, 2017) and has published articles in venues such as Poetics Today, MELUS, ISLE, Environmental Communication, and Environmental Humanities. Hannah Wojciehowski, Thaman Professor of English, Department of English and Program in Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin, USA, is an early modernist and theorist specializing in the history of subjectivity and group-identity formation. She is the author of Group Identity and the Renaissance World (2011). Her current research explores the intersections between literary theory, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. David Houston Wood, Professor, Department of English, Northern Michigan University, USA, is the author of a monograph, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2009), and the co-editor of two volumes, both with Allison Hobgood (Willamette University), including Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Ohio State UP, 2013).

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INTRODUCTION. LITERARY FEELINGS Understanding Emotions Patrick Colm Hogan and Bradley J. Irish Abstract: This introductory chapter begins by locating the volume in the “affective turn,” the recent growth of interest in emotion across the humanities as well as the social and psychological sciences. The next section addresses the difficulty of defining emotion and related terms, focusing particularly on the different ways in which affect is understood in the two main theoretical orientations—affective science and affect theory. Having begun with the ways in which theories of emotion and affect contribute to thinking about literature, the authors turn to the ways in which the study of literature may contribute to our understanding of emotion. In connection with this, the third section analyzes parts of Apollonius’s Argonautica and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. On the basis of these analyses, it articulates several principles of emotion processing. The final section explains the structure of the volume.

For more than two decades, it has been common to refer to an “affective turn” in the humanities and social sciences, a new engagement with emotion, which has become increasingly central to a range of disciplines since the dawn of the twenty-first century. During this time, there has been a virtual explosion of research on emotion as scholars and scientists, authors, and political activists find that earlier inattention to emotion has left us with a distorted understanding of human behavior and inadequate means of explaining, or even describing, social and psychological phenomena. This affective turn in literature and other fields has resulted in part from a change in cognitive and affective science, especially neuroscience, over the past 30 years or so. This change has involved a shift away from modeling the human mind and brain as computer-like information processors, a shift toward emphasizing their biological nature and its relation to motivational systems and the complex evolution of those systems. Of course, the precursors to the affective turn have not been confined to affective neuroscience, particularly in literary study. Humanists and some social scientists have also been influenced by post-structuralist and related psychoanalytic developments that have in some respects paralleled changes in cognitive science and neuroscience. Rather than being affected principally by new techniques in, for example, neuroimaging, this strain of emotion-related research has drawn on the legacy of such social theorists as Michel Foucault and post-Lacanians, prominently Gilles Deleuze—though they have also made reference to neuroscientific and related work. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-1

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Patrick Colm Hogan and Bradley J. Irish

Both strands of emotion-focused literary study involve a range of approaches and apply to diverse objects. Within affective science (the tradition developing out of cognitive science and neuroscience), there are different accounts of just what constitutes an emotion, to what extent emotions are universal or culturally variable, how we might understand our emotional response to fiction, and other matters. Within affect theory (the tradition developing out of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis) there is also diversity in theoretical principles and targets of analysis. Though no single book can cover the entire field, the following chapters constitute a representative sample of this diversity, a sample that is systematic in its organization of the field as it relates to literature. Of course, that relation to literature is itself diverse as well. As should already be clear, the theoretical background for the study of literature and emotion would be too varied and extensive to outline in a brief introduction. We have therefore set ourselves the somewhat less hubristic task of sketching some preliminary points about the definition of emotion and about some of the most important issues raised by the relation between emotion and literature. (We have left the theoretical backgrounds for the following chapters, primarily those in the first section.)

What Do We Mean When We Say “Emotion”?1 As with many areas of inquiry, there are some definitional issues that trouble the study of emotions in literature. It is no easy thing to settle on a suitable definition of emotion—indeed, the term has been called “one of the fuzziest concepts in all of the sciences”—and the problem is compounded when we also consider the constellation of related concepts (such as affect, feeling, mood, sentiment, and disposition) that may be of interest to literary scholars (Frijda and Scherer, “Emotion Definitions,” 142). Any attempt to offer such a definition must thus be tentative, and there’s no doubt that the contributors to this collection will all have slightly (or perhaps even largely) different understandings of what, exactly, it means to study emotion in literature. Despite this challenge, it is still possible to offer a few general points that may help anchor such a discussion. The first thing to say is that a distinction must be made between the folk concept of emotion—which tends to understand emotion as simply another word for conscious, subjective feeling—and the ways that emotion has been theorized by affective scientists and philosophers, who tend to understand the experience of emotion as a wider, “multicomponential phenomenon” (Frijda and Scherer 142). Despite its undeniable broadness, there is thus some value to Ralph Adolphs’s declaration that “emotions are functional states that cause feelings and behavior”—a good start for a definition, which can subsequently be refined by clarifying the nature of the emotional response (Adolphs 6). To this end, David Matsumoto notes that “[m]any theories of emotion suggest that when emotions are elicited, they recruit a host of responses, which include expressive behaviours, physiological reactions, certain types of cognitions, and subjective experience” (175). The components of an emotional episode can be delineated even further, but the important point for now is simply that emotions should be considered in terms of the suite of conscious and unconscious responses that they elicit; they are multifaceted phenomena, comprised of many parts, each of which might be more thoroughly emphasized depending on a researcher’s particular focus. Taking up some of these points, Patrick Colm Hogan suggests that one way of beginning to define emotion would be as follows (in his words): An emotion is fundamentally a system of the mind, with a neural and somatic substrate, that motivates motor or cognitive behavior. The concept has a prototype 2

Introduction. Literary Feelings

quality, such that a motivation system is more prototypically emotive to the extent that it allows us to distinguish enduring dispositions (e.g., cowardliness, to take the highly prototypical emotion of fear), shorter-term inclinations or moods (e.g., apprehensiveness), and intense episodes that are much briefer still (e.g., fright), with the last involving eliciting conditions that also commonly define an external target (e.g., a perceived danger), along with expressive outcomes (e.g., screaming), actional outcomes to sustain or alter the eliciting conditions (e.g., running away), a characteristic physiology and feeling or phenomenological tone (e.g., racing heartbeat), selective attention (e.g., to danger cues), as well as other cognitive processing preferences (e.g., bottom-up versus top-down). In contrast with fear, thirst is a motivation system relatively low in prototypicality, usually lacking disposition, external elicitors, expressive outcomes, or cognitive processing preferences (except selective attention). (For more on the components of emotion, see Hogan, Literature and Emotion, Chapter 3.) This is a perfectly reasonable definition and it will serve some purposes well. Nonetheless, such a complicated view of emotion seems unlikely to be accepted as a basis for inquiry by other writers in the field. While it may be impossible to settle on a precise definition of emotion, it is helpful to say a bit more about its relationship to affect, a term with tremendous currency in contemporary literary studies. It must first be noted that many humanists use the terms emotion and affect synonymously; for this reason, anything whatsoever dealing with the stuff of emotion and feeling is sometimes said to fall under the umbrellas of “affect theory,” “affect studies,” or “the affective turn.” But, despite this broad usage, there is a more specific genealogy of Deleuzian post-structuralist thought that is also labeled “affect theory,” in which the distinction between affect and emotion matters absolutely: in this paradigm, affect generally refers to a nonlinguistic energy reflecting a body’s capacity to be affected, while emotion refers to the specific, temporary fixation of that energy with a linguistic term. (See “Affect Theory” in this volume.) For this reason, when a literary scholar refers to affect or affect studies, more information is usually needed to know whether they are speaking broadly, or whether they mean to refer to this specific strand of contemporary theory. Things are further complicated in an interdisciplinary context, as affect has different meanings in the affective sciences—though in these disciplines the term is “generally used in an overarching generic sense,” to refer to “a category of mental states that includes emotions, moods, attitudes, interpersonal stances, and affect dispositions” (Frijda and Scherer, “Affect,” 10). Speaking of interdisciplinarity, there is a further matter, beyond that of strict nomenclature, which must be addressed: an issue that gets to the heart of how different disciplines fundamentally understand the nature of emotion. For the most part, thinkers in humanist fields (whether they be literary scholars or historians of emotion) tend to believe that emotions emerge from a process of strict social construction, viewing each as a contingent product shaped by the particularities and peculiarities of a specific time in history and a specific place in the world. The commitment to this approach is such that these scholars overwhelmingly dismiss the notion that we might, in our analysis of literary and historical emotion, usefully speak about aspects of emotion that are transhistorical, transcultural, or meaningfully “universal.” (This outlook, of course, reflects the general disposition of the humanities—which have, for several decades now, largely viewed the concept of universality as an antiquated relic of a problematic past, an idea that is to be treated with anything from intense suspicion to outright hostility.) Unsurprisingly, this fact significantly frames how 3

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humanists working on emotion approach interdisciplinary engagement with the affective sciences: they largely reject scientific models that believe in aspects of emotional universality (such as Basic Emotion Theory, epitomized by the work of Paul Ekman, the related work of Dacher Keltner [see Joseph Carroll’s discussion of Keltner in Chapter 7], or the account of emotion systems developed by Jaak Panksepp [see Panksepp and Biven]); in contrast, they largely embrace scientific models that discount universality in favor of constructivist approaches (such as Psychological Construction theory, epitomized by the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett). There is obviously nothing wrong with a literary scholar or historian adopting a constructivist approach to emotion. But there are, nonetheless, a few problems with how this outlook has manifested in current humanities research. The first is that the humanist hostility to “universality” generally fails to designate between bad-faith, pseudo-universalist claims— the kind that have historically been used in the service of discriminatory and oppressive practices—and good-faith, value-neutral claims about genuine patterns of cross-cultural regularity (such as those that emerge in the study of literary universality). In their well-meaning and justified opposition to the former, humanists have largely discounted the existence of the latter, despite the ample theoretical and empirical evidence that attests to the concept’s viability (see Hogan, “Literary Universals”). For this reason, it is not good theoretical practice to dismiss the possibility of emotional universality (or the science that advocates for it) on the basis of a priori political or ideological principle, as this seems an irresponsible way to engage scientific evidence. But the larger problem is that humanist resistance to universalist emotion science has hindered the prospect of interdisciplinarity, by greatly restricting the pool of available research from which to borrow. Because while there is much to learn from anti-universalist, constructivist theories of emotion, their approach is distinctly not the norm in the affective sciences: indeed, in a recent survey of nearly 150 active empirical researchers on emotion, 88% of respondents agreed that there is “compelling evidence for universals” in some aspect of emotion (Ekman 32). Accordingly, by insisting on strict anti-universality, humanists have essentially yielded the ability to learn from the bulk of the affective sciences—a consequence that seems far from optimal, especially because it is possible to utilize the insights of universalist approaches without assenting to the viability of emotional universality per se (see Irish). Finally, firm opposition to universalist emotion science becomes especially unnecessary when we recognize that even the most hardline theories of emotional universality still readily acknowledge the role of social construction in the manifestation of affective experience; they just maintain that universal, species-typical emotions give the raw affective material that is then shaped by cultural conditions. Alternatively, as Patrick Colm Hogan would propose, cross-cultural emotion systems manifest principles that give general eliciting conditions for an emotion (e.g., danger), actional outcomes (e.g., escape), and so on; those principles are not rigid reflexes, but allow for particularization through peoples’ experience of and creative interaction with social and material environments. As Michelle N. Shiota has recently demonstrated, many critics of universalist science like Basic Emotion Theory are not in fact responding to the scientific claims that scholars such as Ekman, Keltner, Panksepp, and others have proposed, but are instead poking holes in a caricatured model that is not actually endorsed by any serious proponent of the theory; for this reason, humanists borrowing from the emotion sciences must be especially careful not to replicate the misleading stereotype that emotional universalism is a rigid, strict, or vulgar conceptualization (Shiota).

4

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Medea’s Ambivalence, and the Binding of Furor: Literature Understanding Emotions2 But, of course, the relation between literature and emotion is not solely a matter of literary scholars drawing on the work of psychologists, sociologists, and historians. Literary works address emotion in their own terms as well. In connection with this, literary study should be able to make its own contribution to the study of emotion, not merely applying, but advancing our (interdisciplinary) comprehension of human motivation. Consider Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica (third century BCE). Like many longadmired works of fiction, it includes passages that depict emotion in affecting and insightful ways. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the extended treatment of young Medea’s infatuation with Jason, who has come to Colchis with the aim of taking the revered Golden Fleece from her father. Apollonius represents Medea as pierced by the sweetly painful dart of Eros, and so falling rapturously in love with Jason. At first, she puzzles over her feelings. Fretful about the dangers to Jason’s life, nearly suffocating with the sorrow of his imagined death, she asks herself, “why do I feel this grief ?” Objectively, she considers it all a matter of indifference “[w]hether he will die as the very best of all heroes or quite worthless.” But then she sighs, “Ah, if only he could have escaped safe” (77). Even this little part of the Argonautica begins to suggest some significant aspects of the relation between literature and emotion. Two points are worth mentioning. Both are a matter of literature drawing our attention to aspects of emotion we might otherwise have missed. First, Medea needs to make sense of what she is feeling. To some extent, this involves verbalization or labeling; indeed, this element of emotional understanding is one reason why an impoverished emotion vocabulary (“alexithymia”) may have dysfunctional consequences (see Dalgleish). But such self-understanding more generally involves a sense of how one’s various, interrelated experiences of a current emotion fit together—what sources or “eliciting conditions” triggered them, what “actional outcomes” would respond to them most effectively and productively (extending or intensifying pleasure and ending or attenuating pain), and so on. Second, falling in love is not anything like a rational calculation. This is not to say that it is irrational or opposed to reason. It is just to say that it is not produced by an appraisal of a change in one’s prospects for well-being, as one prominent account of emotion would have it (see, for example, Oatley 39 and Chapter 1 of Nussbaum; see also Chapter 4 in this volume). Of course, Medea is likely to judge that her well-being will increase if she is (securely) united with Jason and decrease if she is separated from him. However, it seems clear that this judgment derives from her feelings of romantic love; it does not cause those feelings. What follows in Apollonius is more detailed and more powerful. In a remarkable series of passages, Apollonius traces Medea’s shifting attitudes, depicting her complex, dynamic ambivalence about her condition, and the no less complex and dynamic relations between her emotions (romantic love for Jason, attachment to and trepidation before her parents, fear for Jason, pity for herself, and so on). Lying awake at night, reflecting on a deadly challenge Jason must undergo, “she feared the mighty strength of the bulls, which were bound to destroy [Jason]” and determines to “give him the drugs as charms against the bulls.” But then she worries, “if I devised aid with my drugs, how could my parents fail to notice? What could I say?” This thought too she rejects, imagining that he will escape with her aid, then depart; after that, she will “find death . . . hanging myself from the ridge-beam” (84). Some current emotion theorists might be struck particularly by Apollonius’s sensitivity to aspects of emotion that are generally discussed today in terms of situated cognition, specifically embeddedness, the particularity and mutability of emotional response in the context of 5

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changing circumstances, particularly the person’s social relations (e.g., in this case, Medea’s relation to Jason and to her parents; on the embeddedness of the human mind, see Robbins and Aydede). But what is equally remarkable about the passage is that Medea’s emotional dynamics are entirely internal, a matter of her inner experience. After all, she does not leave her room or encounter anyone else in the course of the scene. This is possible because Apollonius develops Medea’s memories and memory-based, concrete simulations of possible future events (such as being faced by her parents’ hurt and anger over her—also simulated—collaboration with Jason). This careful, detailed portrayal of emotional experience is just the sort of thing literary works often do well. Moreover, such portrayals are inseparable from something else that they do well: they inspire emotions in readers. The care and precision that characterize Apollonius’s depiction of Medea’s internal, emotional experience contrasts with his typically far more externally focused treatment of Jason, whom we are much more likely to observe at a distance, engaging in manly acts, such as the contest with bulls dreaded by Medea. Later, when we read Jason’s profession of love and his promise of loyalty, we know what Medea feels for him, and we know what she will sacrifice to leave with him. But we have no similar sense of Jason. He is almost as inscrutable to us as to Medea. In addition to having an occasional, brief glimpse into Jason’s thoughts, we—unlike Medea—know the future, a future that includes Jason’s abandonment of Medea and her own vengeful murder of their children (as Hunter notes [xx]). This knowledge casts Jason’s profession of devotion and fidelity in a different light and makes Medea’s youthful trust poignant. Like Medea’s emotional response to Jason, then, the reader’s emotional response to this dialogue is a function of simulations and of associated memories—memories about the story of Medea, as well as memories of the reader’s own, personal experiences of romantic love, betrayal, and grief. The simulations derive from, but also vary past experiences, adjusting parameters to capture differences in people’s dispositions and circumstances. Indeed, what we vary in simulation and how we do so are perhaps the most important aspects of our response to other people’s (or literary characters’) emotions (for an account of parameters and their operation in empathy, see Chapter 1 of Hogan, Literature and Moral Feeling; on simulation, see Markman, Klein, and Suhr). The preceding, literary reflections suggest several points about emotion. Perhaps the most significant of these concern the many sorts of emotion understanding. More exactly, we saw the following: (1) We must come to understand what we ourselves are going through in an emotion episode. (2) We empathically understand what others are going through in an emotion episode, based on our own experiences, having subjected these experiences to parametric variation. The parameter settings are guided by our understanding of dispositional and/or circumstantial differences between ourselves and the empathic target (e.g., Medea, who is in love with Jason, not whomever a given reader happens to be in love with—hence the change in this parameter setting). (Note that the target of this empathy may be oneself, as when Medea imagines herself at a later time, faced with her father’s anger.) (3) Though our skills are not equal, we all have the ability to translate memory, simulation, and empathy into communicable representations—stories or parts of stories, such as Apollonius’s passages on Medea. This capacity of tellers is, of course, paired with the ability of recipients (e.g., readers) to retranslate representations into memories and simulations of their own, as when we come to understand Medea in relation to our own experiences of romantic love. When recorded (e.g., in writing), a communicable representation 6

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allows us to revisit aspects of the emotion episode in question, thereby facilitating far more extended analysis and fuller understanding. Indeed, the availability of such representations as books or films encourages us to go beyond spontaneous response and to undertake a more systematic and self-conscious scrutiny of the text (e.g., a novel or a film) and the emotions it depicts. This is one of the main reasons that the study of literature may contribute valuably to the study of emotion. Of course, not all literary treatments of emotion are akin to Apollonius’s depiction of Medea. Most obviously, many are not as subtle or revealing. But others may be insightful even as they approach the manner of representing emotion very differently. Consider, for example, Edmund Spenser’s treatment of “Furor” in The Faerie Queene (Book II, canto iv). Temperance meets a madman, Furor, dragging and torturing a helpless youth. Furor is continually provoked by the reproaches of a hag, Occasion. Temperance tries to combat Furor, who strikes with great strength, but wildly, often harming himself. Temperance learns that he cannot defeat Furor without first dealing with Occasion. After silencing Occasion, he binds Furor. The youth revives and tells his story. He was filled with rage in response to what we would call attachment betrayals (real in one case; falsely imagined in another). This led him to act against reason. With Occasion now muted and Furor bound, the youth may begin to be affected by temperance. Once the youth revives, we have for the most part a particular story, the sort of thing that we considered in the case of Apollonius. However, prior to that, we do not really have a particular emotion episode. Though presented as a particular story, we have, rather, a generalization, a comment on how a certain form of anger operates. Literary authors are not necessarily successful at this sort of generalization. However, Spenser seems to be better at it than many others. The basic idea of his claim would appear to be something along the following lines. One cannot simply try to overcome rage. Rather, one must first treat the situation that caused the rage, the Occasion or what affective scientists today refer to as the eliciting conditions; only once one has altered those eliciting conditions will one be able to control one’s anger. Still more generally, this implies that pressing situational factors need to be addressed first, with matters of a person’s disposition (such as the cultivation of temperance) taken up subsequently and in the longer term. The main point, regarding a further type or level of emotion understanding, may be summarized as follows: (4) Beyond representing particular emotion episodes, we have the ability to articulate valid generalizations about the nature of emotions. Spenser’s representation of such generalizations (in this case, regarding a species of anger) suggests some further nuances as well. First, it is clear that Spenser does not phrase his claims in the way that, say, a treatise on anger would phrase them. Simply put, his representation is not literal, but metaphorical or, more precisely, allegorical. There are three points to make regarding metaphorical/allegorical representations of generalizations about emotions. First, as is probably obvious, they are more special to fiction than are literal abstractions. Second, it seems likely that allegories are often oriented toward norms regarding emotions, particularly ethical norms, rather than toward pure description. (Spenser is clearly aiming to teach his reader how to act; he is not merely describing anger for scientific reasons.) Finally, metaphor/ allegory is a special case of a more widespread practice in formulating generalizations about emotion (or, really, anything else). We may refer to the encompassing practice as modeling. 7

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Indeed, as writers on conceptual metaphor have shown (see, for example, Lakoff and Johnson), much of what we conceive of as literal is in fact pervaded by implicit models. Since these models are often developed in unusual ways in literary works (see Lakoff and Turner), this is another area in which fiction is likely to have significance for the study of emotion. Beyond the difference between literal and metaphorical or allegorical representations, another distinction we might draw from the analysis of Spenser is that between explanations that derive from folk psychology and those that derive from scientific psychology. Had Spenser chosen to make literal claims, he would not have formulated them in precisely the way I have just done. That is not merely a matter of preference in word choice, but of a broader difference in psychological presuppositions. Folk psychology is the set of unreflective presuppositions we have about how the mind works or, as Andrews puts it more simply, “our commonsense understanding of other people” (4)—and, indeed, of ourselves. To a certain extent, these commonsense presuppositions about the mind are probably innate. But they are also affected by objective patterns in the world, cultural practices, idiosyncrasies of individual experience, and other factors. Scientific psychology, in contrast, is a set of self-consciously articulated principles regarding the way the mind works, thus, how we can describe it and how we should explain it. (Scientific psychology is most often based on, but not constrained by folk psychology.) Spenser drew on a folk psychology that was not appreciably different from ours. But there were differences between the scientific psychology of his time and ours, in addition to differences between folk and scientific psychology (on which I to some extent rely in referring, for example, to cognitive modeling, eliciting conditions, and so on). Thus, our fourth level or principle of emotion understanding may be more fully articulated as follows: (4) Beyond representing particular emotion episodes, we have the ability to articulate valid generalizations about the nature of emotions. (4a) This articulation may be literal or metaphorical/allegorical, though even apparently literal articulations may include extensive modeling. Allegorical works frequently examine emotions in a normative (especially ethical) context. (4b) The generalizations may rely on folk psychology or may be part of the development of a scientific psychology. At each of these four levels of emotion understanding, there are potentially consequential links between the study of literature and the study of emotion. Moreover, these links go in both directions, with the study of emotion serving to illuminate literature and the study of literature serving to illuminate emotion. The basic aim of the present collection is to systematically outline such links as they are understood in the diverse programs of research that are active in literary study and the study of emotion today. (These include programs in both affective science and affect theory, as already mentioned.) Our further hope is that this outline will help to advance the most promising of these programs, aiding students of literature and of emotion in their efforts to illuminate each field with the help of the other.

Sketch of the Chapters We have sought to make the organization of the volume transparent and systematic, covering the most important topics and approaches in the study of literature and emotion. Specifically, there are six main sections. The first section, on contemporary theory, establishes key 8

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elements of the theoretical work that is prominent in the study of emotion and literature today. The chapters in this section include the broad category of “affect theory” as well as the three main sources of affective science—“cognitive science,” “affective neuroscience,” and “evolution.” Due to their particularly strong influence in literary study, there are also chapters on two more specific strands of theory, those of “embodiment” and “cognitive linguistics” (the latter, prominently including work on metaphor). Any study of literature and emotion will necessarily be concerned with what evidence we have for our claims about literature, the “data” as it would be phrased in affective science. There are most obviously two sorts of data that bear on literature—experimental and historical or cultural. This section therefore includes chapters on “Empirical Approaches to Studying Emotion in Literature” and “The History of Emotions and Literature.”3 Finally, writers in philosophy have addressed a range of theoretical issues, drawing on empirical research, but maintaining a critical awareness of the limitations of both theoretical reflection and empirical research. This section therefore also includes a chapter on approaches to emotion study in philosophy. (As in all but the final section, the order of the chapters is alphabetical.) The second section turns to the sorts of emotion that play a special role in literature. The first chapter in this section treats aesthetic emotions, such as the enjoyments of beauty and sublimity. The third chapter considers the crucial role of sympathy and empathy. The final chapter addresses the emotions of story trajectory, specifically the emotions of tragedy—such as fear and pity—and comedy, such as happiness. While aesthetic emotions need not rely on the reader’s relation to characters, sympathy, empathy, fear, and pity typically do. In preparation for the discussions of sympathy, empathy, tragedy, and comedy, the second chapter of this section takes up the “paradox” of feeling emotion for characters whom we know perfectly well are not real, and thus cannot possibly experience, for example, any suffering that we might pity. It is a commonplace since at least the time of Horace that literature aims not only to produce emotional effects but also to have ethical and political consequences in the real world. One of the most important reasons for exploring emotion in literature is to better understand the motivational effects of literary works, and thus their social and political implications. Within literary study today, ethico-political concerns prominently include colonialism, disability, ecology, gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and trauma. The third section includes chapters on each of these topics, along with a more general chapter on ethics. The fourth section turns to the components of literature, both those that are external to the literary work and those that are internal to it. Externally, students of literature have been deeply concerned with authors, individual readers, and broader patterns of social reception. Internally, we commonly distinguish character, story (or event sequence), plot (or presentation of the story), narration (the voice and perspective through which the plot is presented), and language (commonly in relation to style). All these external and internal components are connected with emotion and are productive topics for emotion-based analysis. All these are covered in separate chapters in this section (except that plot and narration are combined in one chapter, as is common in discussions of narrative “discourse,” as it is called [see Chatman]). The fifth section addresses the different formats or modes of literary presentation. These obviously include prose fiction (such as novels and short stories). However, they also include drama, film (or, more broadly, audiovisual media), graphic fiction, and lyric poetry. This section devotes chapters to each of these modes. The final section of the book takes up literary examples. In order to make the examples more accessible and useful to readers, we have chosen to confine them to English-language authors (though chapters in other sections do take up non-Anglophone—indeed, non-Europhone—works as well). Shakespeare is undoubtedly the most influential and most widely revered author in 9

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English. Chaucer is perhaps second only to Shakespeare; moreover, Medieval literary study is an area in which emotion analysis has figured particularly prominently. Thus, we have included chapters on both authors. Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf are two writers who have inspired considerable attention from critics interested in psychology, including the psychology of emotion. A chapter is devoted to each. The final chapters leave England to treat a recent Nigerian novelist and a Vietnamese-American novelist—Helon Habila and Viet Thanh Nguyen, respectively. (This section does not order the chapters alphabetically by topic, but chronologically by the author examined in the chapter.) There are very few aspects of literature that are not influenced by emotion. In organizing this companion, we have attempted to account for the major points of connection, with hopes that it will provide a convenient overview for scholars and students interested in literary emotion. There is, of course, always more work to be done. We equally hope, therefore, that the chapters collected here will inspire others to pursue their own inquiry in this vital interdisciplinary field.

Notes 1 This section was written by B. J. I. 2 This section was written by P. C. H. 3 It is important to note that none of the chapters in this volume can provide anything approaching a comprehensive overview of their (often very broad) topics. Almost all authors have briefly outlined the main features of two or three prominent views on their topic. At the same time, however, most have— of necessity, and with the editors’ blessings—focused their discussion on one exemplary approach, which they are in consequence able to treat in greater depth.

Works Cited Adolphs, Ralph. “Emotions Are Functional States That Cause Feelings and Behavior.” The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, edited by Andrew S. Fox et al., Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 6–11. Andrews, Kristin. Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology. MIT Press, 2012. Apollonius of Rhodes. Jason and the Golden Fleece. Translated by Richard Hunter, Oxford UP, 1993. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell UP, 1980. Dalgleish, Tim. “Alexithymia.” Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, p. 23. Ekman, Paul. “What Scientists Who Study Emotion Agree About.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 11, no. 1, 2016, pp. 31–34. Frijda, Nico H., and Klaus R. Scherer. “Affect (Psychological Perspectives).” The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus R. Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, p. 10. ———. “Emotion Definitions (Psychological Perspectives).” The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus R. Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 142–144. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Literary Universals.” Poetics Today, vol. 18, 1997, pp. 223–249. ———. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. ———. Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy. Cambridge UP, forthcoming. Hunter, Richard. “Introduction.” Jason and the Golden Fleece, Oxford UP, 1993, pp. ix–xxxiii. Irish, Bradley J. “A Strategic Compromise: Universality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Case for Modal Emotions in History of Emotion Research.” Emotions: History, Culture, Society, vol. 4, no. 2, 2020, pp. 231–251. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. U of Chicago P, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. U of Chicago P, 1989. Markman, Keith, William Klein, and Julie Suhr, editors. Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation. Psychology Press, 2009.

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Introduction. Literary Feelings Matsumoto, David. “Facial Expression of Emotion.” The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus R. Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 175–176. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge UP, 2001. Oatley, Keith. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories. Oxford UP, 2012. Panksepp, Jaak, and Lucy Biven. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. Norton, 2012. Robbins, Philip, and Murat Aydede, editors. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge UP, 2009. Shiota, Michelle N. “Basic and Discrete Emotion Theories.” Routledge Handbook of Emotion Theory, edited by Andrea Scarantino, Routledge, forthcoming. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Thomas Roche, Penguin, 1978.

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PART 1

Teoretical Perspectives

1 AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE Te Symbiosis of Scientifc and Literary Knowledge Laura Otis

Abstract: A review of neuroscientific and psychological emotion models from William James’s peripheral feedback theory to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s constructed emotion theory indicates how greatly scientific models that ground emotion in human bodies coincide with fiction writers’ advice on how to craft moving scenes. Perhaps because of the strong evidence for emotions’ embodiment, many literary scholars inspired by neuroscience have thus far approached emotions indirectly, examining how literary texts cue readers to simulate characters’ sensations or alter their basic functions such as breathing. Future research promises to be most fruitful if creative writers’ craft analyses, literary scholars’ interpretive skills, and scientists’ experimental designs can be combined as equally valid tools for examining how human emotions work. Literary craft analysis, which explores how writers create artistic effects, offers a rich resource for neuroscientists who study emotions.

“If you want to show that someone is angry,” said novelist Jim Grimsley, “don’t write ‘he was angry.’ Write that he did this.” Grimsley slammed his hand on the table, crushing the empty plastic bottle he was holding. In the class “Images, Metaphors, and the Brain” that I was team teaching with neuroscientist Krish Sathian, the students from English, Comparative Literature, and Neuroscience got Grimsley’s point immediately. Emotions described in language feel real when they are expressed through characters’ bodies. By learning what characters’ bodies are feeling and doing, readers can draw on their own diverse bodily experiences to imagine characters’ emotions. Since the mid-1990s, public and scholarly attention has fixed itself on emotions, thanks to innovative studies and popular science books such as those of Antonio Damasio and Daniel Goleman. Fortunately for the knowledge of emotions that is emerging worldwide, this attention has crossed fields, and no single discipline “owns” emotions. As neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp writes, “we must use many sources of knowledge to reveal the nature of emotionality” (Panksepp viii). I use a metaphor of symbiosis to describe the relationship between literary and scientific knowledge of emotions because knowledge is dynamic and growing, and literary and scientific ways of knowing can nourish and cleanse one another. Neuroscientists like Sathian, authors like Grimsley, and literary scholars like myself know about emotions in different ways. The question is how to integrate our knowledge so that it can emerge as something more vital than its component parts. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-3

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N. Katherine Hayles’s model of feedback loops still provides one of the most useful ways to think about the relationship between scientific and literary knowledge. In discussing chaos theory, Hayles proposed that both literary and scientific representations of chaos influence cultures, which in turn shape scientific studies and literary creativity (Hayles xiv). The same can be said for literary and scientific depictions of emotions. As Hayles and other founders of the Literature and Science field have emphasized, scholars need to study how art has shaped science as well as how science has shaped art, since the latter process is better documented and easier to track. Some literary scholars question whether a neuroscientific understanding of emotions, which explains affective changes through the fluctuating activity patterns of neuronal populations, can ever contribute to literary knowledge. I contend that analysts and creators of stories should care about what neuroscientists are finding. As interdisciplinary literary scholar Paul Armstrong argues, knowledge of neuroscience may suggest how—with cross-cultural variations—stories “organize time” and use metaphors to convey internal states (Armstrong 199–200). At the same time, neuroscientists studying emotions, sensations, and consciousness should note the techniques of fiction writers, who expertly activate readers’ imaginations. Writers’ insights may suggest new hypotheses to test, and scientists’ models may offer new ways to represent emotions. In this review of recent work linking the neuroscience of emotion with literary studies, I will introduce a little-explored element: the craft knowledge of fiction writers. Writers’ advice on how to represent emotions can speak volumes about how emotions work. I will begin by reviewing psychological and neuroscientific theories of emotion from the late nineteenth century to the present day. I will then relate some prominent novelists’ craft insights to some of the most thought-provoking recent studies that combine literary analysis with the neuroscience of emotions. I will conclude by showing how an evocative description by fiction writer Edwidge Danticat speaks to current neuroscientific models of how emotions work.

Emotion Is an Interpretation of Bodily Experience American psychologist William James is often credited with offering the first “modern” scientific theory of emotion (Kandel et al. 1081). In 1884, James proposed that people’s conscious experiences of emotions result from their bodily reactions to external events, not the other way around: “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble. . . . Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth” (James 13). Through extended metaphors of warmth and color, James made his case that “a purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity” (James 18). Physiologist Carl Lange agreed with James that emotions resulted from bodily feedback and argued that the heart drove emotional experiences (Purves et al. 329). James’s and Lange’s idea that bodily responses cause emotions, not vice versa, is now known as the peripheral feedback theory (Kandel et al. 1081). James believed that emotions varied with individuals and contexts, but both his and Lange’s theories relied on consistency across individuals in their bodily responses to environmental stimuli (Purves et al. 329). In the 1920s, physiologists Walter Cannon and Philip Bard questioned whether bodily arousal alone could generate the variety of emotions humans experienced (Purves et al. 329– 30). Experiments revealed that animals whose brains were transected above the hypothalamus could exhibit “sham rage” (making threatening sounds and assuming attack postures), whereas those whose brains were transected below the hypothalamus could not (Kandel et al. 1081; Purves et al. 330). The hypothalamus coordinates the neural and endocrine systems in response to a body’s biological needs, and it seemed to play a vital role in emotions. Cannon and Bard 16

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theorized that emotions involve more than physiological arousal, and that when the thalamus (a major processing center for sensory inputs) receives information, it transmits signals to the neocortex and hypothalamus in parallel, so that both cerebral interpretations and bodily responses contribute to emotional experiences (Kandel et al. 1082; Purves et al. 330). In the late 1930s, anatomist James Papez adapted Cannon’s and Bard’s proposal to include brain regions that seemed involved in generating emotions: the anterior thalamus, active in learning and memory; the hippocampus, instrumental for encoding new memories; and the cingulate gyrus, involved in behavioral motivation (Kandel et al. 1082; Purves et al. 331). In another model refined from the 1940s through the 1970s, neurophysiologist Paul MacLean proposed that a “visceral brain,” which he later called the “limbic system,” enables emotions in humans. In this system he included the hippocampus and the evolutionarily oldest parts of the cortex, as well as the amygdalae and orbitofrontal cortex, which he later added (Kandel et al. 1082–83; Purves et al. 332–33). Animal experiments and clinical observations indicated that human emotions emerged from cross-talk among many brain regions, those that assessed bodily feedback and those that evaluated its meaning in context. In the mid-1980s, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues discovered a neural pathway linking sensory processing areas in the thalamus with the amygdalae, twin structures (one in each hemisphere) deeper in the brain (LeDoux et al., “Topographic Organization” 1043). In fear conditioning experiments, animals with damage to the central and lateral nuclei of the amygdalae could not learn to pair a conditioned stimulus, such as a tone, with an unconditioned stimulus, such as a mild electric shock to the foot (Kandel et al. 1084–85; Purves et al. 337). Clinically, people who have suffered damage to their amygdalae have difficulty recognizing facial expressions associated with fear and do not respond physiologically to images that increase many people’s heart rates and make them sweat (Kandel et al. 1085). Since the mid-1990s, neuroimaging experiments have added evidence that the amygdalae are involved in fear conditioning (Kandel et al. 1087). No mental activity as complex as an emotion can be localized in any single brain region, and hardly any region performs just one function (Purves et al. 333). Still, converging behavioral, clinical, and neuroimaging evidence indicates that the amygdalae play a vital role in emotion processing by charging incoming sensory information with meaning so that animals can respond accordingly. The amygdalae are important but not sufficient for producing the survival behaviors of animals and the emotions of humans. LeDoux, whose group has provided some of the most persuasive evidence for the role of the amygdalae in fear conditioning, warns that a mouse’s association of a tone with a shock can’t be equated with human fear (LeDoux, “Rethinking the Emotional Brain” 653). LeDoux stands by the results of his team’s animal studies and their relevance to human emotions, but he argues that calling a mouse’s response to a threat “fear” misrepresents what the mouse’s nervous system is doing and distorts our view of how emotions have evolved (LeDoux, Anxious 23–24). Humans and other animals share brain circuitry for threat detection and survival, but human fear can be experienced consciously and involves additional dimensions of interpretation. Some of the most popularized scientific models of emotion have emphasized the common ground in the behavior of humans and other animals. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Paul Ekman and his colleagues have sought to identify some “basic” human emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, happiness, and sadness, which they claim have distinct physiological patterns and facial expressions that can be recognized across cultures. Ekman’s controversial, cross-cultural studies of facial expressions have been challenged by researchers who question the existence of emotion categories that transcend cultural and individual context (Barrett et al., “Emotional Expressions Reconsidered” 1). Currently, most supporters of Ekman’s basic emotions theory accept that 17

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biologically grounded basic emotions are influenced by cultures, and they are now focusing on how cultures and individual life contexts shape the expression of emotions to create variations on themes (Keltner and Ekman 413). Jaak Panksepp founded the field of affective neuroscience “to clarify the interrelations between brain and mind as expressed in the fundamental emotional processes that all mammals share” (Panksepp vii). Approaching emotions from an evolutionary perspective shatters the outdated notion that humans are inherently different from (or superior to) other animals, but as LeDoux has warned, a phylogenetic approach brings risks. In considering the evolutionary roots of human emotions, it is vital not to project human experiences onto animals or to justify human behavior through fanciful prehistoric scenarios. Since the 1920s, some scientists have argued that human emotions involve cognitive as well as physiological elements. In the early 1960s, psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer repeated a 1924 experiment conducted by physician Gregorio Marañón, which demonstrated that participants artificially aroused by a shot of adrenalin labeled their emotions variably, either accepting an interpretation suggested by the experimenters or, in the absence of a suggestion, finding a meaning in their own life contexts (Schachter and Singer 398). Psychologist Magda Arnold proposed the appraisal theory of emotions, which characterizes emotions as evaluative processes in which individuals interpret physiological changes in light of their surrounding circumstances (Arnold 2: 34). The constructed emotion theory of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues shares the view that emotions involve cognitive interpretation, which need not be conscious. Her theory differs from Arnold’s in claiming that the interpretative process looks inward for familiar patterns that have been triggered by an external situation (Gendron and Barrett 318). Barrett argues that emotion categories known in popular cultures come from folk traditions and don’t correspond to what brains do (Barrett, “Theory of Constructed Emotion” 1). Based on a historical literature review as well as a systematic scrutiny of recent studies, Barrett disagrees that basic emotions such as anger have characteristic facial expressions, physiological arousal states, and neuroimaging patterns identifiable across cultures, individuals, and situations (Barrett, “Solving the Emotion Paradox” 23). Instead, her constructed emotion theory posits that in maintaining “allostasis” (representing their “internal milieux”), human brains encountering novel sensory inputs ask, “What is this new sensory input most similar to?” (Barrett, “Theory of Constructed Emotion” 7). Emotion concepts form in individuals as people learn to identify sensory activity patterns based on their past experiences, the languages they learn, and their interactions with others (Barrett, “Solving the Emotion Paradox” 34–35). One learns what anger is as one learns what yellow is, by observing and comparing one’s experiences with those of others (Barrett, “Solving the Emotion Paradox” 20). Barrett’s constructed emotion theory takes individual variation and cultural input as fundamental conditions to be explained, but she rejects cultural constructivism, which regards emotions as the products of language and culture (Barrett et al., “Of Mice and Men” 304–5). Like the basic emotions theorists she challenges, Barrett views emotions as physiological, evolutionary phenomena grounded in human brains and bodies. As she sees it, a model that accounts for cultural and individual variability best fits the physiological and neuroimaging data.

Literary and Scientifc Accounts of Emotion Can Nourish One Another Neuroscience, literary studies, and creative writing share the question of how stories, composed in language, can activate the imaginations of diverse readers and consequently arouse their emotions. In the past two decades, literary studies of how stories evoke emotions have focused on (1) how readers respond emotionally to literary language and what neural mechanisms 18

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may enable their responses; (2) how literary language can evoke mental imagery, which often brings emotions; and (3) how writers structure their stories to invite emotional responses. As long as fiction has been written and read, its admirers have praised its ability to open readers’ minds to new perspectives. Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction argues that readers explore fictive worlds and their characters to exercise their Theory of Mind, or ability to imagine what other people think and feel (Zunshine 17). Some initial, well-meaning attempts to produce data on how literary representations can teach readers about emotions have evoked criticism from literary scholars. In 2013, education scholar David Comer Kidd and social psychologist Emmanuele Castano offered quantitative evidence that participants asked to read literary fiction (innovative in its language and narration) subsequently performed better on Theory of Mind tests than those who were asked to read popular fiction (more formulaic in its language and narration), nonfiction, or no text (Kidd and Castano 377). Interdisciplinary health sciences scholar Lindsey Grubbs pointed out that working with a literary scholar to design the study would have helped Kidd and Castano to avoid simplistic assumptions (such as that of a clear distinction between popular and literary fiction) (Grubbs 85–86). Dialogue with a humanities scholar might also have helped them formulate more interesting questions— inquiries that cut across fields, not just those tied to the methods of one discipline (Grubbs 93). Like many humanities scholars of the past decade, Grubbs criticizes “neurohype,” the celebration of neuroscience in the media without an accompanying, rigorous investigation (Grubbs 85). Melissa Littlefield and Jenell Johnson have warned against the uncritical embrace of neuroscientific methods, especially neuroimaging, by scholars from other fields who lack the training to apply these techniques cautiously (Littlefield and Johnson 1–25). Neuroscience offers riches, however, to literary scholars who can invest the time to learn its methods, guiding questions, and preliminary knowledge. In a recent neuroimaging study co-directed by interdisciplinary literary scholar Natalie Phillips, a team of neuroscientists and humanists compared the activity patterns of 30 PhD students who read a Jane Austen novel in alternating sections either closely (as though analyzing it to write an essay) or for pleasure (Phillips 58–59). In a surprising result, Phillips’s group found complex, significantly different activity patterns for close and pleasure reading, some common to the subject pool and some differing among individuals (Phillips 61). Knowing how focused and leisurely reading overlap and how their historical reputations have changed with time, Phillips observes that “pleasure reading has its own cognitive demands; close reading, its own pleasures” (Phillips 63). The work of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab Phillips leads holds great promise because of her dedication to historically contextualized, bidirectional projects. Her work shows that historical studies of cognition can suggest new experiments, and neuroscientific findings can offer new ways to understand cognition. At their best, neuroscientifically oriented studies of how literature evokes emotions presume diverse readers with varied responses rather than an ideal, normative “reader.” Ralph Savarese, who worked for a year with researchers at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, challenges inaccurate generalizations that people on the autism spectrum lack inner emotional lives and can’t appreciate literature. Savarese worked closely with six autistic readers, documenting their creative responses to novels such as Moby Dick. “Literature is our linguistic lifeline to the body,” Savarese asserts, and in See It Feelingly, he demonstrates why people “liv[ing] in the sensory” (each in their own, unique ways) may be the “perfect readers of literature” (Savarese 72–73). To support his observations made in teaching, Savarese cites neuroimaging studies indicating that readers on the autism spectrum respond to written texts with visual mental imagery even when the phrasing doesn’t invite it (Savarese 72). Rather 19

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than hindering autistic readers, their ways of processing sensory information may give them an interpretive advantage. The ability to imagine sensations matters because when authors encourage readers to share characters’ emotions, they often invite readers into characters’ bodies. Through evocative descriptions, they inspire readers to simulate: to represent in their minds what a character may be sensing by reactivating and recombining activity patterns from their own past sensory experiences. Cognitive scientist Lawrence Barsalou has proposed that “we represent other people’s minds using simulations of our own minds” (Barsalou 623). Simulations never exactly reproduce the patterns of past sensory experiences because they are influenced by subsequent experiences and the present context. Barsalou warns that “simulations are typically partial recreations of experience that contain bias and error” (Barsalou 620). Because each person has a unique history, the simulations activated by literary descriptions will vary, and they may not reach consciousness at all. As readers use their own past sensations to imagine characters’ sensations, their brains may ask Barrett’s question: “What is this new sensory input most similar to?” (Barrett, “Theory of Constructed Emotion” 7). Processing simulated sensations can awaken emotions in ways unique to each reader. The notion that imagined sensations can arouse emotions is no news to fiction writers. Since the discipline of creative writing emerged in the late nineteenth century, skilled writers have advised their students through craft books, which analyze well-written stories or poems to show how they function as works of art. In examining a particular effect in a Flannery O’Connor story, a craft writer might ask, “How did she do it?” Unfamiliar to most scientists and literary scholars, craft books offer advice that could inspire new experiments or interpretive theories. Experienced writers often tell beginners to convey the abstract through the material; the emotional, through the sensory. Don’t write what a character feels; write what she sees, what she does. Flannery O’Connor told fledgling writers: The nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. (O’Connor 67) A friend of O’Connor’s “had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; . . . . If you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present” (O’Connor 69). As a seasoned writer, O’Connor knew that a reader had to combine sight, sound, and smell, for example, to feel as though she were in a hayloft with a character. Readers would vary in the haylofts they created because the sensory memories on which they drew would differ, but most readers needed three sensory modalities to get their imaginations going. Because passages that encourage readers to simulate sensations often lead them to feel emotions, literary scholarship on the evocation of mental imagery has created a foundation for studies linking literature with the neuroscience of emotion. Interdisciplinary literary scholar Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book (1999) opened new paths for cognitive literary studies because it works like a craft book, analyzing how gifted writers cue readers to form and transform mental imagery. In response to psychologist Stephen Kosslyn’s imagery studies, which indicate that mental images are processed like sensory percepts, Scarry offers close readings to argue that “imaginary vivacity comes about by reproducing the deep structure of perception” 20

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(Scarry 50, 9). As virtuoso observers who know intuitively how human sensory systems work, poets and fiction writers create art that offers “a set of instructions for mental composition” (Scarry 244). Scarry reveals patterns in these instructions, such as describing reflected flashes of light, moving a gauzy surface over a denser one behind it, and encouraging readers to imaginatively bend, fold, or stretch a fine texture (Scarry 83, 89, 111). What readers make of these instructions depends on their life experiences and their ways of processing sensations; most writers aim not to elicit a given response but to inspire intense imaginative activity. If Scarry is right that literature “duplicate[s] the phenomenology of perception,” her work and the studies it has inspired offer a valuable resource for neuroscientists studying sensations and emotions (Scarry 23). Mental imagery can occur in every modality and like perception is usually multisensory (Auyoung 22; Starr, Feeling Beauty 78). Whereas Scarry focused on visual mental imagery, more recent studies of how literature elicits imagined sensations have examined tactile and motor imagery as well. Scholars are now analyzing how authors can lead readers to combine visual, tactile, auditory, motor, and other information to simulate multisensory experiences. In When Fiction Feels Real, interdisciplinary literary scholar Elaine Auyoung argues that “novelists strategically select verbal cues that are maximally effective at activating their readers’ existing experiential traces” (Auyoung 13). Knowing how greatly people’s experiences can vary, writers of realist fiction seek simple, physical actions and sensations likely to be shared by many readers. In a close reading of Anna Karenina, Auyoung points out how often Tolstoy’s characters grasp “small, round objects” such as “buttons, mushrooms, and pieces of chalk” (Auyoung 24, 33). These actions have no great significance, but as readers recall similar experiences of grasping and touching, Tolstoy’s verbal descriptions help them join in the scenes and bond with the characters. Anna and Kitty come alive in part because their bodily experiences resonate with readers’ interactions with the world. Interdisciplinary literary scholar G. Gabrielle Starr has collaborated with neuroscientists to investigate viewers’ emotional responses to art. In a neuroimaging study of brain regions involved in aesthetic reactions to paintings, Edward A. Vessel, Starr, and their colleagues found that the default mode network, “associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment,” appears to play a significant role in intense, personal responses to paintings (Vessel et al. 9). In her studies of poetry and fiction, Starr has focused on multisensory imagery, especially the ability of imagery in one modality—such as motor—to evoke and integrate associated imagery in others. “Motor images are involved in many kinds of imagery that appear primarily to belong to other senses,” she observes. “Equally, imagining motion often involves multiple kinds of imagery” (Starr, “Multisensory Imagery” 282). Starr examines the sound and rhythm of language as part of a reader’s sensory experience, not just a means of evoking mental images. She makes the distinction that “multisensory imagery gives access not to something like the ‘real’ complexity of experience but to aspects of the ways our minds internally represent experiences and objects” (Starr, “Multisensory Imagery” 288). Her observations of how imagery in one sensory modality can create imagery in others could prove useful for neuroscientists studying sensory systems. My own recent work builds on Starr’s by using craft analysis to examine fiction writers’ evocations of multisensory imagery. In vivid descriptions, which sensory modalities are most often combined? How does imagery in one modality “pull up” imagery in another? How does multisensory imagery vary with literary context, such as chapter openings, conclusions, or stretches of dialogue? In Banned Emotions, I examined the sensory associations of metaphors for complex, socially discouraged emotions such as self-pity (wallowing), fear (paralysis), and spite (holding on and refusing to move forward). Because emotions emerge from bodily 21

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experiences, these embodied metaphors are apt, although they are also shaped by political ideologies. Craft analysis by skilled writers indicates that metaphor plays a key role in evoking emotions. Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have shown how much of human thought relies on conceptual metaphors grounded in bodily experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 56–60). Novelist Charles Baxter believes that “fiction involves a conversion: a conversion of information into experience” (Baxter, Burning Down the House 178). Engaging readers requires showing how characters behave in richly developed contexts rather than spelling their feelings out. Baxter notes that in Robert Frost’s “Home Burial,” where the characters’ eyes are looking reveals their “unspoken thoughts” (Baxter, Art of Subtext 21). He observes that “how a person sees the things that surround him usually tells us more than an explicit description of his mood” (Baxter, Burning Down the House 73). Novelist Peter Turchi points out that in animated sequences, “character is expressed through the way a character moves” (Turchi 180). Envisioning what characters see and how they move through space helps readers to share their emotions by imaginatively entering their bodies. Still, there is no one-to-one correspondence between sensations and emotions, and creating effects that astound readers rarely involves direct reporting. Novelist Stacey D’Erasmo cautions against “muffling the emotions that might be more complex, more resistant, more ambiguous” (D’Erasmo 85). Baxter agrees that “the fallacy of much fiction is that in any particular moment we are feeling one emotion, when in fact we are feeling many emotions at once, many of them contradictory” (Baxter, Burning Down the House 36). Descriptions of complex, blended sensations may suggest emotions but don’t aim to show them definitively. When a writer is conveying an emotional mess, metaphor can help. In Kirstin Valdez Quade’s story, “Canute Commands the Tides,” a woman who has moved from Connecticut to Santa Fe confronts cartons of her possessions: Why had she never noticed how much fabric she’d been surrounded by in her old life? The plush towels, the brocade and rugs, all the throw pillows and merino afghans, all meant to swaddle and muffle. And her clothes—heels, tailored jackets, stiff leather handbags—boxes and boxes of the stuff. (Valdez Quade 233–34) The series of textures helps a reader feel the suffocating layers the protagonist is trying to shed—layers that she has mailed to herself in her new life. As her new self, she reacts to the fabric of her old self, allowing readers to sense her repulsion with a past life she can’t leave behind. Better than any dissection of her emotions, the unpacking of her “stuff ” helps readers imagine what she feels but doesn’t know. Not all readers experience mental imagery, and emotional responses to fiction need not rely on sensory images evoked by a story. Interdisciplinary communication and media scholar Ellen Esrock makes the valuable point that “this imitative experiencing of a fiction through the production of multimodal imagery—a simulation—is not the only way in which readers might engage a literary text” (Esrock 79). An emotional response can be embodied without using a person’s own sensory experiences to reproduce what characters are doing. Alternatively, readers might react through their “somatic-viscero-motor system (SVM),” for instance, by changing the rhythm of their breathing (Esrock 79–80). Such visceral responses, which Esrock calls “reinterpretation[s],” are not consciously controlled and may not reach consciousness (Esrock 79). As people read, Esrock hypothesizes, an “attentional spotlight” continually shifts between information in the text and feedback on bodily states until readers may begin to associate their 22

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SVM responses with what they’re reading (Esrock 86). Esrock’s idea of reinterpretation syncs well with Barrett’s constructed emotion theory, which defines emotions as learned interpretations of bodily states. Vividly imagining characters’ sensations may evoke emotions, but we can’t presume that imitative imagery is needed for emotional responses to occur. Whether literature evokes emotion through mental imagery or complex, subliminal bodily engagement, neuroscientists who study emotion can learn from authors’ techniques. Interdisciplinary literary scholar Patrick Colm Hogan examines how stories created by diverse cultures share features that suggest how emotions work. Hogan seeks “not an application of cognitive principles to literary works, but a development of cognitive principles through the study of literature” (Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories 15). He agrees with Scarry that “verbal art . . . typically involves an elaborate set of ‘instructions’ . . . for simulating an emotional experience” (Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us 22). Hogan goes a step further, however, in asking why people want to read, especially if a description stirs painful emotions. Like Zunshine, he proposes that “we experience some sort of pleasure in simulation as such” and that, given emotions’ role in social communication, “our emotion systems may require something like calibration” (Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us 29, 31). Guided by neuroscientific and cognitive studies of emotions, he seeks common elements in emotionally evocative stories worldwide, with an eye for what literature can teach scientists about emotion.

Conclusion: Complementary Ways of Knowing In the second chapter of Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, 12-year-old Sophie watches her aunt closely: Tante Atie opened the front door and let the morning sun inside. She ran her fingers along the grilled iron as she looked up at the clear indigo sky. (Danticat 18) This unassuming description makes no direct reference to emotion, but it enlivens an emotionally intense moment. Sophie will soon leave to join her mother (Atie’s sister), and Atie will lose the child she has been raising for 12 years. The narrator is an older Sophie, now a mother herself and aware of what Atie must have felt. Sophie’s quick, pragmatic description moves beyond memories of her own sensations to offer a glimpse of Atie’s. Her aunt perceives the warmth and brightness of sunlight, the rough coolness of iron grillwork, and the blue of the sky. If one takes Charles Baxter’s advice and follows Atie’s eyes, one sees her looking toward the painful parting. The next day, Sophie will be in the sky, in an airplane headed for New York. Atie also senses a door opening for Sophie, a way out of a society that has restricted Atie like iron bars. Emotionally, the feel of the sun, iron, and sky matter more than anything they might symbolize. A unique blend of vision and touch defines this emotionally charged moment. Vision and touch have a special relationship. Neuroscientists Simon Lacey and Krish Sathian, who study how the visual and tactile systems interact, have found that “the visual and haptic modalities are deeply intertwined at almost every level of object processing” (Lacey and Sathian 172). Gabrielle Starr’s studies of multisensory imagery also indicate that “vision and touch are closely related for most people” (Starr, “Multisensory Imagery” 287). A writer struggling to depict the pain of two women’s life transitions need not study the neuroscience of sensory processing. Using a blend of vision and touch makes intuitive sense, and it is likely to stir readers’ imaginations in different ways. What catches the attention is how closely the 23

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writers, neuroscientists, and literary scholars agree: to convey complex emotions, offer an evocative, multisensory mix, and let readers make of it what they may. Future research linking literature with neuroscientific studies of emotion will be most fruitful if it is truly symbiotic, with acknowledgment of writers, scientists, and literary scholars as equal partners. Phillips’ and Starr’s work holds special promise because it is genuinely collaborative. The craft knowledge of fiction writers and poets offers riches for scientists studying how senses and emotions work. The question of “how”—How does Danticat show Atie’s anguish? How are visual and somatosensory processing interconnected?—drives both neuroscience and literary craft analysis. Knowledge of emotions promises to thrive if scientists and scholars can bond through their shared curiosity.

Works Cited Armstrong, Paul. Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative. Johns Hopkins UP, 2020. Arnold, Magda B. Emotion and Personality. Vol. 2: Neurological and Physiological Aspects. Columbia UP, 1960. Auyoung, Elaine. When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind. Oxford UP, 2018. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. “Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 10, no. 1, 2006, pp. 20–46. ———. “The Theory of Constructed Emotion: An Active Inference Account of Interoception and Categorization.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2017, pp. 1–23. ———, Ralph Adolphs, Stacy Marsella, Aleix M. Martinez, and Seth D. Pollak. “Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion from Human Facial Movements.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol. 20, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–68. ———, Kristen A. Lindquist, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Seth Duncan, Maria Gendron, Jennifer Mize, and Lauren Brennan. “Of Mice and Men: Natural Kinds of Emotions in the Mammalian Brain? A Response to Panksepp and Izard.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 2, no. 3, 2007, pp. 297–312. Barsalou, Lawrence W. “Grounded Cognition.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 59, 2008, pp. 617–645. Baxter, Charles. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Graywolf Press, 2007. ———. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. 2nd ed., Graywolf Press, 2008. Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Harper Collins, 1994. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. Soho Press, 1994. D’Erasmo, Stacey. The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between. Graywolf Press, 2013. Esrock, Ellen. “Embodying Literature.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 11, no. 5–6, 2004, pp. 79–89. Gendron, Maria, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. “Reconstructing the Past: A Century of Ideas about Emotion in Psychology.” Emotion Review, vol. 1, no. 4, 2009, pp. 316–339. Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ. Bantam, 1995. Grubbs, Lindsey. “The Arts and Sciences of Reading: Humanities in the Laboratory.” American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience, vol. 7, no. 2, 2016, pp. 85–94. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Cornell UP, 1990. Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2003. ———. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2011. James, William. “What Is an Emotion?” The Emotions, edited by Carl Georg Lange and William James, Hafner, 1967 [1922], pp. 11–30. Kandel, Eric R., James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell, Steven A. Siegelbaum, and A. J. Hudspeth. Principles of Neural Science. 5th ed., McGraw Hill, 2013. Keltner, Dacher, and Paul Ekman. “Introduction: Expression of Emotion.” Handbook of Affective Sciences, edited by R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, and H. H. Goldsmith, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 411–414. Kidd, David Comer, and Emmanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science, vol. 342, 2013, pp. 377–380. Lacey, Simon, and K. Sathian. “Visuo-Haptic Object Perception.” Multisensory Perception: From Laboratory to Clinic, edited by K. Sathian and V. S. Ramachandran, Elsevier; Academic Press, 2019.

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Afective Neuroscience Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. U of Chicago P, 2003. LeDoux, Joseph. Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. Penguin, 2015. ———. “Rethinking the Emotional Brain.” Neuron, vol. 73, 2012, pp. 653–676. ———, C. F. Farb, and D. A. Ruggiero. “Topographic Organization of Neurons in the Acoustic Thalamus that Project to the Amygdala.” Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 4, 1990, pp. 1043–1054. Littlefield, Melissa M., and Jenell M. Johnson. The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain. U of Michigan P, 2012. O’Connor, Flannery. “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1969. Otis, Laura. Banned Emotions: How Metaphors Can Shape What People Feel. Oxford UP, 2019. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford UP, 1998. Phillips, Natalie. “Literary Neuroscience and History of Mind: An Interdisciplinary fMRI Study of Attention and Jane Austen.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Oxford UP, 2015. Purves, Dale, Roberto Cabeza, Scott A. Huettel, Kevin S. LaBar, Michael L. Platt, and Marty G. Woldorff. Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2nd ed., Sinauer Associates, Inc., 2013. Savarese, Ralph James. See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a NoGood English Professor. Duke UP, 2018. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999. Schachter, Stanley, and Jerome E. Singer. “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State.” Psychological Review, vol. 69, no. 5, 1962, pp. 379–399. Starr, G. Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. MIT Press, 2013. ———. “Multisensory Imagery.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Trinity UP, 2004. Valdez Quade, Kirstin. Night at the Fiestas: Stories. Norton, 2015. Vessel, Edward A., G. Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin. “The Brain on Art: Intense Aesthetic Experience Activates the Default Mode Network.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 6, 2012, pp. 1–17. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

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2 AFFECT THEORY Wendy J. Truran

Abstract: Affect theory is not a settled method nor neatly delineated discipline. It is a dynamic field of scholarship that explores bodies, worlds, and forces that move and motivate things into relational existence. The multiplicity of conceptual arrival and departure points enrich its intellectual vibrancy, yet the diversity of approaches can also contribute to confusion (or even conflict) over basic questions such as, “what is affect theory and what can it do?” This chapter explores the rhizomatic terrain of affect theory and offers definitions of some key terms. This introduction discusses two major trajectories—the Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory and the Feminist/Queer/Cultural trajectory. Each approach pays attention to, and takes account of, bodies, their capacities and potentialities, and “thinks-with” affect in order to create encounters, interpret events, attune to this world and embody new ones. Affect theory may refuse the singularity of an origin story but affect and literature have always been entangled and this chapter aims to give literary scholars and those new to affect theory a guide to the major approaches in affect theory, as well as an overview of current and emerging trajectories of thought.

Affect theory is not a settled method nor neatly delineated discipline. It is “notoriously,” and I would add gloriously, “undisciplined” (Snaza, Animate Literacies, 1). Affect theory is a dynamic field of scholarship with shifting inter- and intra-disciplinary approaches that pay attention to bodies, worlds, and the forces that move and motivate them into relation and existence. Traversing and transforming disciplines as diverse as literary, cultural, media, trans, critical race, and disability studies and contributing to and drawing upon philosophy, psychology, and feminist, political, and queer theory, there is no single overarching theory of affect. Neither do the theories that develop have a single traceable history nor future. So much so, that the concept of affect has “gradually accrued a sweeping assortment of philosophical/ psychological/ physiological underpinnings, critical vocabularies, and ontological pathways” (Seigworth and Gregg, “Shimmers,” 9).1 The openness and multiplicity of conceptual arrival and departure points contribute to its intellectual vibrancy, creating “affective bloom-spaces” of inquiry (Seigworth and Gregg, ibid. 9).2 Yet the diversity of ways to engage with affect and emotion can also contribute to confusion and even conflict over basic questions such as, “what is affect theory and what does it do?” With multiple imbricated theories, ideas, and problematics, affect theory seeks to hone, nuance, amplify, and interrogate existing critical analysis ideas and tools and imagine and DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-4

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develop new ones. Generally, theorists of affect attend to the other-than-conscious forces that make subjects and worlds, and the entangled materiality of both. A key engagement between affect theory and literary studies is the characterization of affect theory as a critical response to post-structuralist emphasis on linguistic models of subjectivity. Rather than considering the body as peripheral to an understanding of consciousness, cognition, subjectivity, emotion, and society, affect theory makes the material and visceral central to it. Affect theory asks, “what bodies do—what they want, where they go, what they think, how they decide—and especially how bodies are impelled by forces other than language and reason” (Schaefer, Evolution, 1, italic in original). Seeking to understand the forces of relation that create bodies (not only or primarily human) that enmesh and connect us to and within the world; theories of affect emphasize an embedded and embodied relationality. Donovan Schaefer offers a succinct summation of affect theory’s scope as “an approach to history, politics, and all other aspects of embodied life that emphasizes the role of nonlinguistic and non- or par-cognitive forces” (ibid. 1). Put simply, affect theory crosses the theoretical humanities and considers, “the sensual qualities of being, [and] the capacity to experience the world in ways that are profoundly relational” (Liljeström, “Affect,” 1). This means that theorists often call into question “the taken-for-granted status of the human and the body in science, theory, literature, and media” (Arthur, “Affect,” 1). Though the animating logics of the field are wide-ranging, certain concerns are held in common. Affect theories gravitate towards a set of shared concerns that encompass questions of materiality, politics, gender, sexuality, race, and class in order to understand and, often, change them. In this short introduction I give a brief exploration of two major trajectories within affect theory, namely the Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory and the Feminist/ Queer/Cultural trajectory. The “blurry snapshot” that I offer will help readers understand individual theorists from literary and cultural studies and the broader streams in which they theorize. By necessity, many fascinating avenues of research such as affective sciences or the history of emotion will be given short shrift here, but some are discussed in other chapters in this volume.3 Often posited as a critical response to post-structuralism’s overemphasis on linguistic models of subjectivity, affect theorists are concerned that “a whole range of intellectual questions can be thought as bypassed or lost if the focus is solely on the semantic and symbolic” (Liljeström, “Affect,” 3). Yet many affect theorists emerge from the post-structuralist tradition of feminist and literary studies and look to affect as a means of more fully incorporating biology or embodiment (existing bodies rather than The Body of post-structuralism) and language and culture. For many affect theorists literature and language are foundational, either as a problem to address or as an object of analysis. My discussion focuses on the theorists who draw on literature to construct their theories, or who are literature “friendly” in terms of the ideas and concerns with which they engage.

Defning Afect(s) The definition of affect can be mercurial, taking its shape from the intellectual and disciplinary commitments of the scholar.4 I will linger on definitions as they help to identify and describe the emerging contours of contemporary affect theory. Many theorists draw on philosopher Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics and use his work to form a basic definition of affect as the capacity to affect and be affected.5 Gilles Deleuze, touchstone philosopher for one trajectory of affect theory, draws on Spinoza to define affect, as “prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another implying an augmentation 27

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or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Thousand Plateaus, xvi). Key here is that the force of affect is manifest in the passage from one state to another. Similarly, Seigworth and Gregg define affect as, “the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement” (“Shimmers,” 1, italics original). Movement can mean physical action in the world, but can equally mean an idea, a change of mood, a reorientation, or a totally imperceptible shift in body-world relations that has yet (or ever) to manifest. This makes affect a part of an always ongoing process or event rather than an endpoint or result.

Spinoza/Deleuze: Afect and Be Afected In the knot of scholars who draw upon Spinoza and Deleuze affect is considered pre-personal, pre-linguistic, non-representational, and a-signifying. The “pre-” Seigworth suggests, is a signal for the emergence of particular capacities of bodies and their materialization through the co-participation of their contexts (“Capaciousness,” iii). Rather than before a coherent consciousness, discourse, or subject, the “pre-,” “points to the co-constitutive nature of particular things such as consciousness, the individual, the discursive [etc.] along with what is supposed to fall out or recede into the background as the context/conditions of emergence” (Seigworth, “Capaciousness,” iii). This ontology of affect means that affect must be understood in its transitions, as movement, as an always unfolding event rather than a thing. If we conceive of bodies as assemblages of “complex constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning” (Livesey, “Assemblage,” 18) then “this movement-slip gives new urgency to questions of ontology” that “bumps ‘being’ straight into becoming” (Massumi, Parables, 5). In a world that is becoming an increasingly surveilled networked digital ecology, technology and data are an inevitable part of affective event spaces (see posthumanism later in the chapter). As the scholars in the edited collection Affects, Interfaces, Events, point out “the proliferation of digital and interfacial technologies produces an intensified distribution of affect in most aspects of our daily lives . . . [that] modulates our very existential conditions” (1).6 The utility of seeing such ongoing and complex affective assemblages, including the digital and technological, as “becomings” is in the possibility for infinite variation (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 256). Affective assemblages are not necessarily predetermined by cultural, historical, or political forces, and therefore structures and worlds might be changed. To “affect and be affected” means that our capacity is changed in some way by the impact of an encounter with something: a body, an object, an idea, or an emotion. Capacities, Ben Anderson proposes, are “always collectively formed” and because “capacities are dependent on other bodies, they can never exhaustively be given in advance” (Encountering Affect, 9–10). Change is therefore inherent to affect, it carries potentiality in its emergent relation, and so, Massumi claims, it has a political orientation: “There is always a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption” (“Microperceptions,” 4). Affect, in the Deleuzian strain is “proto-political” (Parables, ix), “it concerns the first stirrings of the political, flush with the felt intensities of life” (ibid. 70). In order to have tangible change—not merely the rearrangement of the same conceptual furniture—one must become realigned with a “logic of relation” and embrace “the unfounded and unmediated in-between of becoming” (ibid. 70–71). For Massumi, affect offers the potentiality of micropolitical changes of the body in culture rather than the “rupture” of a “discursive body” of culture (ibid. 1). Since the formations of relations and those affected are never fully 28

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known in advance, so affect has the potential to assemble into something other than the normative, predictable, or currently existing political structures. This, Spinoza/Deleuze aligned theorists claim, opens the potentiality for change, including sociopolitical change. This potential for variation, rather than the determinism of social construction, is part of what affect can do.

Diferent Camps but Fellow Travelers—Feminist/Queer/Cultural Trajectory The second trajectory, grounded in Feminist/Queer/Cultural studies seeks to make change more immediate and tangible through scholarship and activism.7 Clare Hemmings suggests that feminist theories that use affect pay attention to everyday experience and cultivate political accountability, community, and change (“Invoking Affect,” 558). Theorizing affect in and besides existing social and cultural phenomena the Feminist/Queer trajectory defines affect more capaciously. Ann Cvetkovich, for example, defines affect “in a generic sense . . . as a category that encompasses affect, emotion, feeling, and that includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways” (Depression, 4). She continues, “I favor feeling in part because it is intentionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences” (ibid. 4). This ambiguity allows for a more textured and rich accounting of lived experiences, both individual and collective. Sara Ahmed’s definition of affect traces specific emotions through a phenomenological orientation, “the affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace” (Cultural Politics of Emotion, 6); this connects lived experience, emotion, and affective contact. She points out that “we are affected by ‘what’ we come into contact with” (Queer Phenomenology, 2), thereby emphasizing the press of impression, “feelings do not then simply reside within subjects and then move outward toward objects. Feelings are how objects create impressions in share spaces of dwelling” (Happiness, 14). The forces of affect are interwoven into and co-create the dynamic composition of life. Lauren Berlant’s definition of affect, for example, accounts for the “multiple affective registers of collective life” (“Conversation,” 183). Wishing to produce a “materialist context for affect theory” (Cruel Optimism, 14) Lauren Berlant draws on Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feelings” (Marxism and Literature, 132) and the ongoingness of social structures and forms to explain power and power shifts.8 In Cruel Optimism, Berlant’s definition of optimism is very close to affect as a Deleuzian force, “all attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moved you out of yourself and into the world” (1). She provides “ways to encounter and produce an account of the multiple affective registers of collective life that keep people loosely knotted together (attached to themselves and to the social)” (“Conversation,” 183). Meaning that, like many others in this trajectory, Berlant looks to theorize how emotional life and affective forces form part of political, social, and cultural life. Unlike the Spinoza/Deleuze strain, feminist and queer studies scholars question the notion that emotion and affect are distinct, and that emotion is purely personal. Massumi claims, for example, that “emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (Parables, 28). In contrast, Sara Ahmed, states that “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’ but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds” (“Affective Economies,” 117). She is interested in the way “emotions involve subjects and objects, but without residing positively within them,” imaging instead the slippage of emotion between bodies and world, some emotions gathering, or “sticking” on certain bodies (“Economies,” 120). Rather than seeing emotions as “psychological dispositions,” she states, “we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between psychic and the social, 29

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and between individual and the collective” (“Economies,” 119). Concepts, ideas, attitudes, are “sticky” with emotions and affects, so that we inherit or incorporate ideas that are not fully conscious and not our “own.” In the Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed points out the (highly gender biased) value judgments that “stick” to discussions of emotion and affect and that form a hierarchy, “this hierarchy clearly translates into a hierarchy between subjects: whilst thought and reason are identified with the masculine and Western subject, emotions and bodies are associated with femininity and racial others” (170). The answer, in Ahmed’s view, is not to claim emotion as rational but to “contest this understanding of emotion as ‘the unthought,’ just as we need to contest the assumption that ‘rational thought’ is unemotional, or that it does not involve being moved by others” (ibid. 170). Emphasizing the mediated form of emotion and affect, Ahmed reminds us that knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation; knowledge is bound up with what makes us sweat, shudder, tremble, all those feelings that are crucially felt on the bodily surface, the skin surface where we touch and are touched by the world. (ibid. 171) These ideas of affect are not Deleuzian becomings but rather an articulated expression of the impact and construction of self and world.

Afect or Afects Affect may also be referred to in the plural as well as singular—affects versus affect. This signals two main shifts in definitional focus; first, a move toward particular emotions and feelings rather than pre-personal forces. Discussions of specified feelings are mainly found in the Feminist/Queer/Cultural studies trajectory. Theorists that research singular affects seek to trace the psycho-socio-political impacts of specific feelings, emotions, or moods such as happiness, melancholy, shame, zaniness, or compassion.9 Sianne Ngai, in her first book Ugly Feelings for example, considers the “aesthetics of negative emotions” and “negative affects” that signal a “general state of obstructed agency” (3). Drawing on contemporary theories of emotion and affect theory, she seeks to revitalize the discourse of aesthetics and to expand the category of aesthetic emotions to include “ugly feelings” such as envy, irritation, anxiety, stuplimity, and paranoia (ibid. 6). For Ngai the difference between affect and emotion is one of degree not kind and so she uses the terms almost synonymously: my assumption is that affects are less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less “sociolinguistically fixed,” but by no means code-free or meaningless; less “organized in response to our interpretations of situations,” but by no means entirely devoid of organization or diagnostic powers. ( ibid. 27, italics in original) Like feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, Ngai emphasizes the socially constructed nature of emotion and feeling. The second way that individual affects are discussed in the Feminist/Queer trajectory is linked to psychology and the influential recuperation of psychologist Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affect by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank in Shame and Its Sisters. The attraction for queer theorist Sedgwick in Tomkins’ ideas was as a means of accounting for human beings and culture that 30

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was able to encompass materiality, biology, and affect that does not rely on structuralist symbolization, and thereby producing an alternative set of relations to critique subjectivity. Drawing on Darwin’s work on the evolutionary nature of emotion, Tomkins suggests that affects are hardwired “affect programs” and are both universal and innate.10 Tomkins posits that nine basic affects are fundamental to human emotional response and motivation. Pre-rational and preconscious affects, he suggests, are the precursors to emotion and the power system for cognition: “Reason without affect would be impotent, affect without reason would be blind” (Tomkins cited in TF 37). Sedgwick and Frank find that Tomkins’s cybernetically inflected writing and theory of affects, allows them to start somewhere different when engaging in criticism.11 Moving beyond Tomkins, contemporary affective neuroscience has taken up the task of interrogating affects by examining the nature and mechanisms of affect, emotion, brain, body, and culture.12 Yet, to separate affect (singular, pre-personal forces) and affects (plural, inclusive of emotion) too strenuously would be a mistake. Theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart, and Eugenie Brinkema, to name a few, trace specific forms of affect while also putting to use Deleuzian concepts, or while thinking of affect as processual ongoingness. For example in Touching Feeling Sedgwick develops her ideas on affect to explore, “promising tools and techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy” (1). Paranoid critical reading, Sedgwick argues, may have begun as a radical form of analysis, but had become an expected and normative approach to criticism; therefore such a dualistic approach forms a part of the normative systems that scholars sought to interrupt in the first place. Drawing on Deleuze’s concept of “planar relations” she posits a spatial conception of relation that embraces affect’s lateral relations of “beside”: “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, aggressing, warping, and other relations” (Touching Feeling, 8). This approach avoids reductive binaries, “there is nothing very dualistic about beside—many things can be beside (but not infinitely)” (Touching Feeling, 8). Suggesting a reparative rather than a paranoid approach to critical analysis, Sedgwick seeks to offer an alternative to dualistic thinking and reified critical approaches, because such conformity “creates a positive feedback loop, it becomes self-reinforcing as opposed to self-fulfilling” (Touching Feeling 12). Thus, she explains the importance of creating alternative critical approaches besides the ones already in use.

Critiquing Afect Teory One of affect theory’s best known and most prolific critics is Ruth Leys. Leys critiques what she claims is the “anti-intentionalism” of affect theory which, she suggests, rejects judgment or cognition as part of its formation. Such non-intentionalism, she claims, places affect and therefore the body as primary and prior to the mind, thus reproducing a body-mind dualism. Her article, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique” (2011), sparked lively debate in the journal Critical Inquiry and most recent work, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique, collects her thinking and criticism of affect together.13 A different critique of affect theory is discussed by Claudia Garcia-Rojas. She suggests that affect theory is overly reliant on white, male philosophers which runs the risk of creating “white affect studies” (“Undisciplined Futures,” 254). Affect theory, she argues, prioritizes Western European theories of affect and perpetuates an analytic philosophical subjectivity. This citational habit, she points out, occludes alternative epistemic economies, such as the queer Black feminisms tradition: “Although women of color feminists were theorizing embodied feelings and social emotions before the emergence of White affect studies, their theories are either denigrated or excluded altogether” (256). Garcia-Rojas seeks to create an alternative genealogy that places queer women of color feminists at the center of scholarship, citing Moraga and Anzaldua. 31

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There is certainly a predominance of white, Western philosophical genealogies in affect but, as Garcia-Rojas acknowledges, this is not the entire affective terrain. Intersectional philosophies and positionalities are developed in the Feminist/Queer trajectory. Scholarship that combines affect studies and post-humanism or new materialism also create other-than (white, male, cis) -human narratives. Yet First Nations and Indigenous peoples point out that they have long established traditions of more-than-human relations that have been claimed as new by post-humanism.14 Scholars such as Kyla Wazana Tompkins also express concern that new materialism and affect studies sideline issues of race and difference (“Limits”). These are important concerns to address and Chad Shomura offers a persuasive argument for the potentiality of new materialisms and affect to address questions of “undoing the subject and the human; interrogating liberal personhood; investigating bodily affect as an avenue toward political collectives” (“Exploring New Materialisms,” n.p.).15 Colin Patrick Ashley and Michelle Billies also argue that race in affect studies is under theorized and that “questions of race and racial matterings are often demonized as inherently nonmaterial and sidelined to the field of representation” (“Affective Capacity,” 64). They address this problem by theorizing an “affective capacity of blackness” for the “potential circulations of black affective resistance” (ibid. 63). There is important and influential scholarship on and from critical race studies but clearly “racial matterings” needs, and deserves, a greater profile in affect studies and affect theory in all trajectories.

Lively Bodies, Lively Forces To close the chapter, I will briefly discuss an approach that incorporates the concerns of both trajectories previously discussed via an interest in emerging ontologies and complex assemblages as well as a commitment to “situated knowledges,”16 namely feminist science studies (FSS). Post-humanism has been a key engagement for literature and the theoretical humanities. FSS incorporate affect to radically redraw current relational scales and scopes, while proposing speculative new worlds, often via speculative fictions. Jane Bennett explains that “contemporary theory has taken a nonhuman turn that locates the human on a continuum of lively bodies and forces—continuum that elides conventional dichotomies of life and matter, organic and inorganic, subjective and objective, agency and structure” (influx and efflux, xi). Not only theoretical, Rosi Braidotti points out that “Posthuman subjectivity is a practical project. It is a praxis” (Posthuman Knowledge, 73). This communal feminist praxis, she states, “promotes action and critical self-knowledge, by working through negativity and pain. This pro-active activism manifests the living beings’ shared ability to actualize and potentiate different possibilities” (“In This Together,” 468). Feminist science studies teaches us that “perspectives are partial and embedded within situations” and that the sciences, like culture, are “discourses not untouched fact” (Snaza, Animate Literacies, 25, 107). Theorists such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Mel Y. Chen engage with decentering the human and placing human subjects with a continuum of existence with no special privilege and so we must take the more-than-human into our ethical accounting.17 Founding figure in feminist science studies Donna Haraway insists that we must stay with the trouble of “a dangerously troubled multispecies world” and acknowledge that we are kin to the critters or “chthonic ones” with whom we share this world (Staying With the Trouble 6, 2). Particularly useful for the articulation of affect and literature is her notion that “bounded individualism in its many flavors in science, politics, and philosophy has finally become unavailable to think with” (ibid. 5) and that imagination and storytelling is central to thinking otherwise. For Haraway storytelling is vital to theorizing, so that she draws upon the companionship and “tentacular thinking” (ibid. 5) of human scientists, artists, and science fiction writers as 32

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well as multispecies activisms. In the best intersectional, anti-racist, proqueer feminist traditions she claims, “storytelling and fact telling” (ibid. 31) are necessary—and I would add necessary to theorize affect. Haraway goes on to say, “it matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what stories tell stories” (ibid. 35). Nathan Snaza’s Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism is a good example of a critic who combines storytelling and fact telling to offer new thoughts on literature and affect. He offers a “nonhumanist reconceptualization” of the practices that typically fall under the auspices of the humanities (ibid. 3). Refusing the expected boundaries of literature while still incorporating close textual analysis, Snaza seeks to rethink the humanities, and particularly literature, as part of a more-than-human assemblage that offers “a significantly enlarged sense of affective participation in the events of literacy” (ibid. 3). Tracking literature, literacy, the human, and humanities, Snaza shifts from a dualistic relation of reader-to-text, to a processual one. Literacy, Snaza points out, is not only a cognitive exercise nor an individual or even only a social one, literacy, he argues is, “primarily about affects and no conscious events of meaning making or representational constructions” (ibid. 17). Through reading texts such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and by discussing philosophers such as Sylvia Wynter, Snaza expands and reconceives reading and literature to become an assemblage of energies “across a wide variety of actants” that include the nonhuman that contribute to what he calls “literacy situation” (ibid. 4). Rather than literature being something that is written and received, and literacy as something learned and acquired, he proposes a speculative project of taking literacy as an “animate practice” (ibid. 4). It is a rich ecology of entangled political and educational relations that forms “affective attunement politics” (ibid. 6, italics in original)—following gut attractions, how you are touched and touch things. So, with Snaza and Haraway, both use literature and storytelling to bring the Spinoza/Deleuze and Feminist Queer trajectories together to think “besides” current critical tools and assemble new ones. Reading, after all, is a critical act and interpretation can be a form of critical world making.

Conclusion Affect theory may refuse the singularity of an origin story but affect and literature have always been entangled because storytelling is the way that worlds are made. Affect theory for the Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory, by following forces besides language and reason, opens the potentiality to events becoming otherwise; it is the change when bodies collide. For the Feminist/ Queer/Cultural trajectory tracing the affects that circulate as public feelings or within sociopolitical power structures affect theory can give form to affective registers that may have been occluded, precarious, or violently repressed. Each trajectory pays attention to and takes account of bodies, their capacities and potentialities, and “thinks-with” affect in order to create encounters, interpret events, attune to this world, and embody new ones.

Notes 1 Seigworth and Gregg, in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, give “brief and blurry snapshots” of eight ways to approach the theorization of affect, see pp. 6–8. 2 The transdisciplinary nature of affect theory can be thought of as a hindrance or an help. For some, the lack of consensus on definition, terminology, methodology, and objective can form too large a chasm between knowledge fields. For others, it is the entangled and unsettled cross-disciplinary fertilization that allows theorists to address complicated onto-epistemological issues and imagine new concepts.

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3

4 5 6 7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14 15

For discussions of some of these tensions see Greg Seigworth, “Capaciousness,” pp. i–v, and Andrew Murphie, “Fielding Affect: Some Propositions,” pp. i–xiii. There is an immense amount of scholarship in philosophy, history of emotions, and affective sciences that engage with what each would consider “affect.” In this volume see history of emotion (Chapter 8) and philosophy of emotion (Chapter 9). Affective sciences are represented in this collection by chapters on affective neuroscience (Chapter 1), cognitive science (Chapter 4), and empirical approaches to emotion (Chapter 6). Across the immense scholarship on the history and philosophy of emotions affect has encompassed emotions, moods, attitudes, bodily states, judgments, or sensory data. In this volume see the chapters on history of emotion (Chapter 8) and philosophy of emotion (Chapter 9). See Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, 2001, and Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1988. For scholars that work on affect, media, and digital cultures, see Megan Boler, Wendy Chun, Patricia Clough, Rebecca Coleman, Tero Karppi, Adi Kuntsman, Andrew Murphie, Zizi Papacharissi, Dominic Pettman, Amit Rai, Tony Sampson, and Greg Seigworth to name but a few. Queer theory’s concern with identity, aesthetics, and cultures that cultivate non-normative approaches to being, knowing, and existing is a key player in affect(s)’ theorization. Other key queer theorists of affect include José M. Muñoz; see especially Disidentifications, Cruising Utopia, “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect” and “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down.” Important work with affect is emerging from Trans studies scholars; see Hilary Malatino (queer embodiment, side affects, trans care), Aren Aizura (mobile), Eliza Steinbock (shimmering), and Eli Clare (disability). Many affect theorists begin with Raymond Williams’ notion of social structures of feeling. Williams posited the concept of “structures of feeling” that calls for a new affect inflected “cultural hypothesis” that might understand “a social experience which is still in process” (132, italics original) by designating “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (132). The “structures of feeling” have a special relation to art and literature since “the idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions—semantic figures—which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming” (133). Ann Cvetkovich points out in her own exploration of depression as a public feeling, queer theory has been important in depathologizing negative feelings such as shame (Sedgwick), failure (Halberstam), backwardness (Love), and melancholia (Flatley). For more “positive” affects, see Sara Ahmed (happiness), Sianne Ngai (zany, cute), Lauren Berlant and Jay Prosser (compassion), Wendy J. Truran ( joy). Silvan Tomkins trained as a psychoanalyst but disagreed with Freud’s notion that the drive system was the greatest motivational force, positing instead the affect system. See Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, Vols I, II, III. Basic emotion theories (BET) such as Tomkins’ is contested in psychology; see Ruth Leys discussion of the history of basic emotion theory in The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique, pp. 1–76; see also Schaefer, Evolution, for a short explanation of BET and his rebuttal of Leys’ critique, Evolution, pp. 40–42, 42–53. In this volume, see chapters on affective neuroscience (Chapter 1), cognitive science (Chapter 4), and empirical approaches to emotion (Chapter 6). See also Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain; Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain; The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness; Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life; Panksepp et al. “The Philosophical Implications of Affective Neuroscience.” For discussion the cross-pollination of affect theory and psychoanalysis, see Patricia Clough and Jacob Johanssen, “By the Skin of our Machine”; José E. Muñoz (ed.), “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project”; Gregory J. Seigworth, “Fashioning a Stave, or, Singing Life.” To read Leys’ original essay in Critical Inquiry and the responses from William E. Connolly, Adam Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson, and Charles Altieri, see https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/affect_ an_exchange/. For other critical engagements with affect, see Linda Zerilli “The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment,” Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,” and Clare Hemmings, “Invoking Affect.” See Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015), pp. 230–35. For two insightful responses to Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ original critique of new materialism, that also offer useful bibliographies of scholars that are interested in affect and the “refashionings of the

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Afect Teory materiality of race,” see Chad Shomura and Michelle N. Huang. For scholars who engage with affect theory and race, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, A. G. Weheliye, Jasbir Puar, Neetu Khanna, Omar Kasmani, and Juliette Singh. 16 See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” 17 Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter for example, explores the philosophical and political possibilities of challenging human exceptionalism and taking into account the “active powers of nonsubjects” (ix). She imagines an ethical ontology that recognizes the vitality of non-human materialities and that takes account of affect as central to any consideration of politics. A more computationally inflected posthumanism can be found in the work of N. Katherine Hayles. She proposes a definition of “distributed” cognition that might apply “to technical systems as well as biological life-forms” (Unthought 3). She argues that “most human cognition happens outside of consciousness/ unconsciousness” and that thinking and being are assemblages that incorporate non-human entities (ibid. 5).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text, vol. 22, no. 4, 2004, pp. 117–139. ———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. ———. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010. Aizura, Aren Z. Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment, Duke UP, 2018. Anderson, Ben. Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Ashgate Publications, 2014. Arthur, Mathew. “Affect Studies.” Oxford Bibliographies in Literary Critical Theory, Oxford UP, 2021. Ashley, Colin Patrick, and Michelle Billies. “The Affective Capacity of Blackness.” Subjectivity, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017, pp. 63–88. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007. Bennett, Jane. Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman. Duke UP, 2020. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. ———, and Jay Prosser, editors. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Routledge, 2004. ———. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 180–187. Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Polity Press, 2019. ———. “‘We’ Are in This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same.” Bioethical Inquiry, vol. 17, 2020, pp. 465–469. Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Duke UP, 2014. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke UP, 2012. Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke UP, 2017. Clough, Patricia, and Jacob Johanssen. “By the Skin of Our Machine: Psychoanalysis Beyond the Human: A Dialogue.” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 1–2, 2019–2020, pp. 118–140. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Duke UP, 2012. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. G.P. Putnam, 1994. ———. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt Books, 1999. ———. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Harcourt Books, 2003. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: Definitive Edition [1872]. 3rd ed. Oxford UP, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley, City Light Books, 1988. ———, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Harvard UP, 2008. Garcia-Rojas, Claudia. “(Un) Disciplined Futures: Women of Color Feminism as a Disruptive to White Affect Studies.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, 2017, pp. 254–271. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP, 2011.

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Wendy J. Truran Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconsciousness. U of Chicago P, 2017. Hemmings, Clare. “Invoking Affect. Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.” Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 5, 2005, pp. 548–567. Huang, Michelle N. “Rematerializations of Race.” Lateral, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017. Iman Jackson, Zakiyyah. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York UP, 2020. Kasmani, Omar. “Thin, Cruisy, Queer: Writing Through Affect.” Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing, edited by Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy L. Zinn, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Khanna, Neetu. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Duke UP, 2020. LeDoux, E. Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, Simon & Schuster, 1996. Leys, Ruth. The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique. U of Chicago P, 2017. ———. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 3, 2011, pp. 434–472. Liljeström, Marianne. “Affect.” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, Oxford UP, 2018. Livesey, Graham. “Assemblage.” The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr, Edinburgh UP, 2010, pp. 18–19. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard UP, 2007. Malatino, Hilary. Trans Care. U of Minnesota P, 2018. ———. Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience. U of Nebraska P, 2019. ———. Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad. U of Minnesota P, forthcoming 2022. Massumi, Brian. “Foreword.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, edited by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987. ———. “Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics.” Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, no. 3, Oct. 2009, n.p. ———. “Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview between Brian Massumi and Joel McKim.” Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, no. 3, Oct. 2009, pp. 1–20. ———. Politics of Affect. Polity Press, 2015. Muñoz, José M, editor. “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project.” Special issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 19, no. 2, 2009. ———. Cruising Utopia. New York UP, 2010. ———. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. U of Minnesota P, 1999. ———. “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, pp. 675–688. Murphie, Andrew. “Fielding Affect: Some Propositions.” Capacious: Journal of Emerging Affect Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 3, 2018, pp. i–xiii. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard UP, 2012. ———. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotion. Oxford UP, 1998. ———, et al. “The Philosophical Implications of Affective Neuroscience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 19, nos. 3–4, 2012, pp. 6–48. Papoulias, Constantina, and Felicity Callard. “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect.” Body and Society, vol. 16, no. 1, 2010, pp. 29–56. Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke UP, 2017. ———. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP, 2007. Schaefer, Donovan O. The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power. Cambridge UP, 2019. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003. ———, and Adam Frank, editors. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Duke UP, 1995. Seigworth, Gregory J. “Capaciousness.” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. i–v. ———. “Fashioning a Stave, or Singing Life.” In Animations of Deleuze and Guattari. Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2003, pp. 75–105.

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Afect Teory ———, and Melissa Gregg. “Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke UP, 2010. Shomura, Chad. “Exploring the Promise of New Materialisms.” Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities, Lateral, vol. 7 no. 1, 2017. Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Duke UP, 2018. Snaza, Nathan. Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism. Duke UP, 2019. Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Translated by W. H. White, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001. Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Duke UP, 2019. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP, 2007. TallBear, Kim. “An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human.” GLQ, vol. 21, nos. 2–3, 2015, pp. 230–235. Thomsen, Bodil Marie Stavning, Jette Kofoed, and Jonas Fritsch, editors. Affects, Interfaces, Events. Imbricate! Press, 2021. Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness. Springer. Vol I, 1962; Vol II, 1963; Vol III, 1991. Truran, Wendy J. “Affective Alchemy: W.B. Yeats and the Transformative Heresy of Joy.” Irish Modernism, edited by Maud Ellmann, Siân White, and Vicki Mahaffey, Edinburgh UP, 2021. Wazana Tompkins, Kyla. “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy.” Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities, Lateral, vol. 6 no. 1, 2016. Weheliye, A. G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke UP, 2014. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977. Zerilli, Linda. “The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgement.” New Literary History, vol. 46, 2015, pp. 261–286.

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3 COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS A Perspective on Emotion in Literature Zoltán Kövecses

Abstract: The study of emotions is one of the key areas of research in cognitive linguistics from the inception of this branch of linguistics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One reason for this is that emotion language is characterized by figurative expression, which is also a staple feature of literature in general and poetry in particular. Figurative conceptualization relating to specific emotion concepts was studied in various literary contexts by several cognitive linguists. The studies on figurative conceptualization made it necessary for scholars to rely on and work with attendant cognitive devices and ideas, such as context, prototype, frame, embodiment, image schema, mental space, and so on. In the chapter, I present a flavor of this kind of work on emotion concepts in literature.

Some Background to the Study of Literature and Emotion in Cognitive Linguistics The study of literature started early in cognitive linguistics with Lakoff and Turner’s work (Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason). Lakoff and Turner showed that poetic language is commonly based on the same conceptual metaphors that everyday people use in their day-to-day communicative interactions. Gibbs (The Poetics of Mind) provided a large amount of psycholinguistic evidence that conceptual metaphors have psychological reality and that, in addition, novelists and poets do make use of everyday conceptual metaphors in the course of creating literary works. As many of his examples reveal, he also demonstrated that the use of conceptual metaphors is closely tied to various emotion categories, such as love and anger. This close relationship between literature and emotionality is further emphasized in Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics, in his introductory text to cognitive poetics. In the realm of prose, Hogan’s The Mind and Its Stories is an extensive study of the relationship between literature and emotion that relies on the conceptual tools of cognitive science. Further in-depth studies of emotionality in literature expressed through metaphor include D. Freeman (Catching the Nearest Way) and Barcelona (Metaphorical Models), who examined the metaphorical structure of dominant emotions in some of Shakespeare’s plays. Most recently, the topic of emotion figures importantly in M. Freeman’s book, The Poem as Icon, where she embeds the issue of emotion in the complex process of constructing poetic meaning.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-5

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Needless to say, the works mentioned here are just a small sample of the large body of work devoted to the intimate relationship between emotion and literature from a cognitive linguistic point of view. In this chapter, I focus on the nature of emotion categories as studied in cognitive linguistics, the key role of metaphor in the conceptualization of emotions, and the framelike mental representation of emotions. Throughout the chapter I try to illustrate my claims with examples taken from literary works and show the relevance of the cognitive linguistic approach to emotions to the study of literature.

Metaphorical Conceptualization of Emotions in Conceptual Metaphor Teory In previous work, I suggested that emotion concepts are largely metaphorically and metonymically constituted and defined and that emotion concepts are composed of four distinct conceptual ingredients: conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, related concepts, and cognitive models (see Kövecses, Metaphors of Anger, Pride, and Love; The Language of Love; Emotion Concepts; Metaphor and Emotion). Furthermore, my proposal was that conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, and related concepts converge on and constitute cognitive models. It is cognitive models, or conceptual frames, that we assume to be the mental representation of particular emotions, such as happiness, anger, love, fear, and others (see, e.g., Lakoff and Kövecses).

Metaphor By conceptual metaphor, I mean a set of correspondences between a more physical source domain and a more abstract target domain (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Kövecses, Metaphor). Some of the most typical generic-level conceptual metaphors that characterize emotions include the following: (filled with emotion) (burn with emotion) EMOTION IS A NATURAL FORCE (be overwhelmed by an emotion) EMOTION IS A PHYSICAL FORCE (be struck by an emotion) EMOTION IS A SOCIAL SUPERIOR (be governed/ruled by an emotion) EMOTION IS AN OPPONENT (be overcome by an emotion) EMOTION IS A CAPTIVE ANIMAL (let go of an emotion) EMOTION IS A FORCE DISLOCATING THE SELF (be beside oneself with an emotion) EMOTION IS BURDEN (be weighed down by an emotion) EMOTION IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER EMOTION IS HEAT/FIRE

The overall claim concerning such conceptual metaphors was that they are instantiations of a general force-dynamic pattern (see Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion), in the sense in which this was first discussed by Leonard Talmy (Force Dynamics). In that pattern, a forceful entity (a cause or an emotion) affects another forceful entity (the rational self ) with a certain outcome. Given the force-dynamic character of these conceptual metaphors and given that they can be said to make up a large part of the conceptual structure associated with emotions, it can be suggested that emotion concepts are largely force-dynamically constituted (Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion, Metaphor and Emotion, 2008).

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Metonymy In the domain of emotions, conceptual metonymies can be of two general types: CAUSE OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION, and EFFECT OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION, with the latter being much more common than the former. (For a cognitive linguistic viewpoint on metonymy, see Kövecses and Radden, Metonymy; Barcelona, On the Plausability.) Following are some specific representative cases of the general metonymy EFFECT OF EMOTION FOR THE EMOTION: (being a hothead) (getting cold feet) INCREASING ONE’S APPARENT SIZE FOR PRIDE (puffing one’s chest out with pride) RUNNING AWAY FOR FEAR (fleeing the scene) WAYS OF LOOKING FOR LOVE (looking at someone amorously) FACIAL EXPRESSION FOR SADNESS (having a sad face) BODY HEAT FOR ANGER

DROP IN BODY TEMPERATURE FOR FEAR

These specific types of conceptual metonymies correspond to physiological, behavioral, and expressive responses associated with particular emotions. Thus, BODY HEAT FOR ANGER and DROP IN BODY TEMPERATURE FOR FEAR are conceptual representations of physiological responses; CHEST OUT FOR PRIDE and RUNNING AWAY FOR FEAR are those of behavioral responses; and WAYS OF LOOKING FOR LOVE and FACIAL EXPRESSION FOR SADNESS are those of expressive responses.

Embodiment I pointed out in several publications (first with George Lakoff, see Lakoff and Kövecses, The Cognitive Model of Anger) that there are important conceptual and bodily connections between some of the emotional responses people produce and the emotion concepts that the responses characterize. Consider the following responses and emotion concepts: BODY HEAT AND ANGER LACK OF BODY HEAT AND FEAR PHYSICAL CLOSENESS AND LOVE UPWARD MOTION AND HAPPINESS CHEST OUT AND PRIDE BLUSHING AND SHAME

As shown earlier, such close connections between emotion concepts and the responses that are characteristic of them are metonymic in nature. Additionally, I claimed that several conceptual metaphors of emotions are based on the metonymic connections between the preceding elements. Thus, for example, the metaphor ANGER IS HEAT is based on the BODY HEAT FOR ANGER metonymy, FEAR IS COLDNESS on the LACK OF BODY HEAT FOR FEAR metonymy, LOVE IS CLOSENESS on PHYSICAL (BODILY) CLOSENESS FOR LOVE, and so on. Essentially, we can think of such conceptual connections between the metonymies and metaphors as providing the bodily basis of the metaphors and the cognitive models that the metaphors help constitute. This is how we can capture the embodied nature of emotion concepts in the language-based folk theory of emotions (Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion). (For an account of embodiment in general, see Gibbs, Embodiment.) A major advantage of this assumption is that it can explain why many emotion metaphors are shared by various languages and cultures. This is, briefly, because shared embodiment can lead to universality in metaphorical conceptualization (see Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture, for details). 40

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Abstract concepts have very little “real” (perceivable) content, but a large figuratively construed aspect to them (i.e., they are for the most part figuratively understood) (see Kövecses, Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory). But they do have some “real” content. This is what we call the bodily basis, the embodiment, of abstract concepts (such as the body heat of anger). It is interesting to note in this regard that several researchers consider emotion concepts as somewhat different from other abstract concepts (see, e.g., Borghi, et al., The Challenge of Abstract Concepts; Altarriba, et al., The Distinctiveness of Emotion Concepts). They suggest that emotion concepts are more embodied than other abstract concepts. I believe, however, that this claim is too strong and needs to be qualified. It seems to me that it is only prototypical emotion concepts (such as anger, fear, sadness, joy) that are more embodied (that is, have a great deal of bodily basis). Nonprototypical ones often lack embodiment completely—at least if we limit embodiment to external signals of emotion states. (But as Anna Borghi remarked in personal communication, email message, February 26, 2019, we should consider not only exteroceptive signals of embodiment but also interoceptive ones, which would further refine the picture. This is a complex issue that I cannot go into here.) On the “cruder” view of the embodiment of emotions, hope, friendship, respect, contempt, and several others (i.e., the nonprototypical ones) do not appear to be characterized by embodiment. Instead, they are entirely figuratively construed. The conceptual metaphors used for this purpose come from outside the range of typical conceptual metaphors that characterize prototypical emotion concepts (see Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion).

Conceptual Categories and Frames Following Lakoff (Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), we can think of a category as constituted by a large number of members, with some members being central. The mental representation of such central members can be given in the form of prototypical cognitive models, or frames. Emotions are conceptually represented in the mind as cognitive or, more precisely, cognitive-cultural models. A particular emotion can be represented by means of one or several cognitive-cultural models that are prototypical of that emotion. This emerges from the Roschean idea that categories have a large number of members, one or some of which being prototypical and many of which being nonprototypical (see, for example, Rosch, Principles of Categorization; Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things). Prototypical members of emotion categories are represented by prototypical cognitive-cultural models, whereas nonprototypical members are represented as nonprototypical models; that is, as deviations from the prototypical model (or models). Prototypical cognitive-cultural models can be thought of as folk theories (as opposed to expert theories) of particular emotions (Kövecses, Emotion Concepts). As I have suggested previously (Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion), the most schematic folk theory of emotions can be given as follows: cause of emotion → emotion → (controlling emotion) → response In other words, we have a very general idea of what emotions are like in our language-based folk theory: there are certain causes that lead to emotions, and the emotions we have make us (i.e., the self ) produce certain responses. Commonly, there are certain social constraints on which responses are socially acceptable. Societies may impose different sets of control mechanisms on emotions. This general and schematic folk theory of emotions derives from the application of the generic-level conceptual metaphor CAUSES ARE FORCES (see Lakoff, The Contemporary Theory). 41

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The metaphor applies to both the first part and the second part of the preceding model. In the model, whatever leads to an emotion is conceptualized as a cause that has enough “force” to effect a change of state in the self (i.e., to become emotional), and the emotion itself is also seen as a cause that has a “force” to effect some kind of response (physiological, behavioral, and/or expressive). As a matter of fact, it is the presence and double application of this generic-level metaphor that enables a force-dynamic interpretation of emotional experience we saw earlier. (On force dynamics in language, see Talmy, Force Dynamics.) In the prototypical cognitive-cultural model, a situation is conceptualized as a forceful entity that leads to the emotion and the emotion itself is conceptualized as another forceful entity that produces some kind of action or set of actions. Thus, we conceptualize the emotions in terms of one of our most fundamental image schemas: the FORCE schema, in which two forceful entities are in interaction. My overall claim concerning emotions has been that the most fundamental component of our understanding of the emotion domain is this force-dynamic pattern that derives from our early preconceptual experiences and that is constantly reinforced in our everyday living (see Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion).

Embodied Emotion Metaphor and Poetry Let us now see an initial example of how conceptual metaphors relating to emotions can be employed in poetry. When Lakoff and Turner (More Than Cool Reason) claim that poets and non-poets (everyday people) share conceptual metaphors, they do not mean that poets use such metaphors in the conventional ways that are typical of a language. Lakoff and Turner suggest four ways in which poets commonly modify conventional metaphorical language: this can happen by means of what they call extension, elaboration, questioning, and combining. Let us take elaboration as an example to see how the concept of anger can be creatively reconceptualized in poetry. Given a conventional conceptual metaphor, such as ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER (see Lakoff and Kövecses, The Cognitive Model of Anger), a poet can elaborate on an existing element of the source domain in an unusual way, thereby achieving a novel linguistic expression that is based on a modified everyday conceptual metaphor. A good example of this is provided by Adrienne Rich’s “The Phenomenology of Anger.” Let us take a part of this poem, first analyzed by Gibbs (The Poetics of Mind), where anger is conceptualized by the poet as acetylene that bursts out of the body. This image is based on one of the most conventional conceptual metaphors for anger—ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER (see Lakoff and Kövecses). But the metaphorical creativity of the poet can turn the conventional image into a novel one. The hot fluid gets elaborated as acetylene and the passive event of explosion is replaced by directing the dangerous substance of acetylene at the target of anger. This is an example of how a conventional conceptual metaphor is given new form by the creative process of elaboration.

Context in Poetry and many of the conceptual metaphors relating to the emotions are based on embodied experiences, such as that between anger and body heat. But not all of them are. This apparent lack of embodiment can often happen in the use of poetic metaphors that depend on contextual information, rather than universal embodiment. I now turn to the issue of how the context can create a conceptual metaphor. Context can, essentially, be used in poetry in two ways:

ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER

Poets may describe the context in which they create poetry. They may use context as a means of talking about something else. 42

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When the former is the case, we get straightforward examples of describing a scene, such as in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach: The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits,—on the French coast, the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! (retrieved from www.artofeurope.com/ arnold/arn1.htm) However, from the perspective of poetic metaphors and the study of particular poems, much more interesting are the cases where this more or less literally conceived context is used metaphorically to express meanings that are not normally considered part of the meaning of the context as described. Using conceptual metaphor theory (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; Kövecses, Metaphor), we can say that the context can function as the source domain and the meanings to be expressed by means of the source domain function as the target domain of the metaphor (i.e., as the abstract meaning to be conveyed). The exciting question in such cases is: what is the meaning (or, what are the meanings) that the dominantly literally conceived source (i.e., the context) is intended to convey? Consider the continuation of the Arnold poem: Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! You hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. (retrieved from www.artofeurope.com/ arnold/arn1.htm) Although the description of the context continues, there is a clear sense in the reader that the poem is not primarily about depicting the physical location and events that occur around the poet/observer. Indeed, the last line (“and bring the eternal note of sadness in”) makes this meaning explicit; the coming in and going out of the waves convey an explicitly stated sadness. And of course we know that waves cannot actually bring in sadness or notes of sadness—they can only be metaphorically responsible (through CAUSES ARE FORCES) for our sad mood when we hear the tremulous cadence slow. And this sense of sadness is reinforced in the next stanza: Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. (retrieved from www.artofeurope.com/ arnold/arn1.htm) 43

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In sum, then, a poet can describe a context (scene) in which s/he writes a poem, or s/he can use the context (scene) (which functions as a source domain) to talk about things that go beyond or are outside (the meanings evoked by the description of ) the context (scene) s/he is involved in (which functions as the target domain) (see comments on the first stanza). My concern here is with this second application of context (or scene). The notion of context is a complex one due to its qualitative variety, on the one hand, and to its space and time dimensions, on the other. The kind of context that was considered so far was the physical context, or environment, but there are several others. The notion of context additionally includes the linguistic, intertextual, cultural, social contexts, and the main entities of the discourse, such as the speaker, hearer, and the topic (see Kövecses, Where Metaphors Come From, Chapter 4). As regards the space dimension of context, we can distinguish between local and global contexts that indicate the endpoints of a continuum from local to global. Finally, we can distinguish between contexts that apply to the present time at one end and those that reach back in time, on the other. Let us focus on this most immediate context, as exemplified by the following stanza from the Arnold poem: The sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. (retrieved from www.artofeurope.com/ arnold/arn1.htm) At work in this stanza are two conceptual metaphors: HEALTH IS WHOLENESS and PERFECTION/ as indicated by the expressions “at the full” (wholeness) and “and round earth’s shore” (roundness). The stanza, we understand, is about the health and perfection of the human condition until the coming of the changes that were happening at the time of writing the poem: the changes to the established order of the world in which religion had played a major role. These two extremely general metaphors can be instantiated (and could be instantiated by Arnold) in many different ways. The question arises why they are made conceptually–linguistically manifest in the particular way they are; that is, by the metaphor “the sea of Faith.” This metaphor assumes the conceptual (sub)metaphors (CHRISTIAN) FAITH IS THE SEA and PEOPLE ARE THE LAND. The sea was once full and covered the land all around, and in the same way Christian faith provided people with a spiritual health (HEALTH IS WHOLENESS) and a perfect state of the human condition (PERFECTION IS ROUNDNESS), unlike the situation in which Arnold wrote the poem. In addition, the full cover of faith protected people from the dangers of the new times that now threaten a faithless world. These ideas were given expression in these particular ways, we can safely assume, because of what Arnold saw before him at the time of creating the poem: the ebb and flow of the sea. As the sea retreats, that is, as faith disappears, the world becomes a less healthy and less perfect place, unprotected by faith. But the body (not necessarily the universal body) can also function as a contextual factor and can trigger the use of unconventional metaphors by poets (see Kövecses, Where Metaphors Come From). The idea that the general physical, biological, mental, emotional, etc. condition, or situation, of a poet can influence the way a poet writes poetry is well known and is often taken into account in the appreciation of poetry. Dickinson is a well-studied case, as COMPLETENESS IS ROUNDNESS,

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discussed, for example, by M. Freeman (see, e.g., M. Freeman, Metaphor Making Meaning, Poetry and the Scope of Metaphor, Cognitive Linguistic Approaches) and Guthrie (Emily Dickinson’s Vision). Guthrie has this to say on the issue: I propose to concentrate on the fact of illness itself as a governing factor in Dickinson’s development as a poet. We are already accustomed to thinking about ways in which illness or deformity modulate the registers of expression we hear while reading Milton, Keats, Emily Bronte, Lord Byron. For Dickinson, illness was a formative experience as well, one which shaped her entire poetic methodology from perception to inscription and which very likely shook the foundations of her faith. Reading Dickinson’s poems in the full knowledge and belief that, while writing them, she was suffering acutely from a seemingly irremediable illness renders many of them recuperable as almost diaristic records of a rather ordinary person’s courageous struggle against profound adversity. (Guthrie, Emily Dickinson’s Vision, pp. 4–5) Along similar lines, I suggest that a poet’s physical condition, especially poor health, can have an effect on the way he or she metaphorically conceptualizes the subject matter he or she writes about. In my terminology, this is how self-knowledge of one’s situation as a contextual factor can often lead to the creative use of metaphors by poets. Let us take one of Dickinson’s poems as a case in point. “I reckon—when I count it all—” begins with a list. Poets are first, followed by the sun, summer, and heaven. The second stanza explains that poets appear to encompass all this. She goes on to explain that the summer of poets continues for the entire year. She concludes by considering the place of heaven in relation to the poet.1 The question that I’m asking here is how Dickinson’s optical illness is transformed into metaphorical patterns in her poetry in general and in this poem in particular. I would propose the following analysis that fits my interpretation of the poem. (However, others may have a very different interpretation that may require a very different conceptual analysis.) In my interpretation, the poem is about poetic creativity—the issue of what inspires a poet to write poetry. On my reading, Dickinson uses the following conceptual metaphor to talk about it: POETIC CREATIVITY IS A NEW WAY OF SEEING (AS A RESULT OF THE SUMMER SUN). The mappings, or correspondences, that make up the metaphor are as follows (the mappings go from source to target): summer → productive period sun → inspiration new way of seeing → being poetically creative (i.e., coming up with a poem) An interesting property of the first mapping is that the literal summer stands metonymically for the literal year and the metaphorical summer stands for “always.” Thus, poets are always creative; they have a year-long summer. A second metaphor that Dickinson relies on is POEMS ARE HEAVENS. In this metaphor, the mappings are: further heaven → poem worshippers → people reading poetry God → poet As an important additional mapping in this metaphor, we also have: God’s grace → poet’s inspiration 45

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Unlike the previous metaphor, where poetic inspiration is metaphorically equated with the sun, it is God’s grace that corresponds to the poet’s inspiration in this second metaphor. Dickinson’s inspiration, however, is a difficult one: it is her optical illness. She writes her poetry by relying on, or making use of, her illness. This is a difficult grace to accept. In other words, her bodily condition of having impaired vision is put to use in an extraordinary way in this poem by Dickinson. Other poets may make use of their physical condition, or selfknowledge, in different ways. I believe it would be difficult to generalize about the precise ways in which self-knowledge of this kind is used by poets. At the same time, this contextual factor may explain some of the apparently “strange” but creative uses of metaphor in the works of poets.

Literature, Emotion, and Frames The notion of frame as defining and mentally representing prototypes can be put to good use in the study of literary texts. For example, drawing on a wide range of literary traditions, Hogan has argued that a few story prototypes recur again and again (see Hogan, “Stories,” Chapter 28 in this volume). One of these is the romantic structure, in which two people fall in love, live together, get married, have children, etc., and ultimately attain happiness. This obviously occurs literally in many, many stories. However, in some ways, it is more interesting as a frame for stories where something else happens. Consider, for example, Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story.” We can note several points in connection with the story. First, the story reflects the prototypical goal that people pursue in their lives: personal happiness. It is the attempt to achieve this goal that organizes much of the story. Second, the goal of happiness can be achieved through romantic union between a man and a woman. In the present story the romantic union is given as marriage. In many cases, romantic union is a chief (prototypical) condition for enduring happiness. Third, the man and the woman are in love with each other. Romantic love functions as a sustaining emotion in the story. Fourth, eliciting conditions for romantic love include sexual attraction. The story begins with the (explicit and implicit) description of sexual attraction between the man and the woman. Because of this structure, Hemingway’s story can be regarded as a romantic tragi-comedy. The happiness-based sequence would be something like the following: sexual attraction → romantic love → romantic union (marriage) → enduring happiness In the sequence, the chief eliciting condition for enduring happiness is romantic union, the chief eliciting condition for romantic union is romantic love, and the chief eliciting condition for being in romantic love is sexual attraction. This is the idealization that underlies the story. However, the actual story that is based on the idealized happiness frame is very different. In it, we find that the main goal of enduring happiness is not achieved by either the man or the woman. The romantic love between the man and the woman does not lead to marriage and hence to happiness. More than that, the woman’s plans to marry an Italian major are not fulfilled and the man contracts gonorrhea. Thus, instead of achieving enduring personal happiness, the story ends in complete disappointment for both characters. The main point of this brief analysis was to show that a story may evoke an underlying idealization—a schematized frame with respect to which the actual story can be said to belong to a particular genre. The underlying idealized frame and the actual story may be very different from each other. The reality of the story’s world is set against the idealized version of reality. This difference may be responsible for much of esthetic and emotional effect that a story can have on readers. 46

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Te Emotional Efect of Literature Explained Trough Mental Space Teory Mental spaces are closely related to frames, in that they are small conceptual packets that are based on frames and are used online, that is, in actual discourse (Fauconnier, Mental Spaces). One obvious way to make use of mental space theory is to apply it to complex literary texts. Semino (Possible Worlds) looked at Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story” that we briefly dealt with in the previous section. Semino demonstrates the usefulness of mental space theory with respect to several issues, two of which will be briefly considered here: the issue of the kinds of mental spaces making up a story and the issue of how to account for the literary effect of stories. First, as Semino points out, the first two paragraphs of “A Very Short Story” consist mostly of temporal spaces introduced by such space builders (see Fauconnier, Mental Spaces) as “One very hot evening in Padua,” “After a while,” and “After he got on crutches.” These spaces are related to a base space defined by the unspecified context of narration. In the story, these temporal spaces are anterior to the base space; they take place before the time of the narration. Beginning with the third paragraph, however, an increasing number of other kinds of spaces appear in the story. They are not simply temporally related to the base space but also in several different ways; for example, as a wish space, hypothetical spaces, various speech act spaces (such as agreement), and so on. The temporal spaces of the story characterize the “reality,” that is, what we can take to be the “facts,” of the fictional world, whereas the other types of spaces represent what is not “real” in the story (i.e., only wished, hypothetical, spoken about, etc.). This latter type of spaces forms an important part of the story, in that such spaces are concerned with what the romantic dreams of the male protagonist and Luz are and the conditions that would have to be met in order for the dreams to come true. Second, Semino raises the issue of how the story achieves its literary effect on readers. She sees a major role performed by mental spaces in this regard. In particular, she analyzes several sentences of the story in terms of their mental space structure. One of them is the sentence: “They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates.” This sentence occurs in the third paragraph of the story. The first part of the sentence has the following mental space structure: there is a base space in which the story is told. There is also a separate reality space that precedes the time of the base space. It is with respect to this reality space that “they” have a wish—a wish, or want, space in which they get married. However, as indicated by the second part of the sentence, the conditions that are necessary for the wish space to come true are absent in the reality space of the fictional world. Further complications are detailed by other sentences that Semino analyzes from paragraph five; in particular: “After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married” and “Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her.” The sixth paragraph continues with further details of reality space. Most importantly, we find out that the major of the battalion stationed in Pordonone made love to Luz. This event is followed by an account of mainly Luz’s mental spaces in the sixth paragraph: She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best. 47

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The passage contains a large number of mental spaces, introduced by space builders like know, expect, realize, hope, know (again) on Luz’s side and would and might on the male protagonist’s side. These mental spaces have to do with Luz’s and the male protagonist’s new thoughts and ideas concerning their relationship—not with how reality space develops further in the story. By contrast, the last paragraph contains no such “epistemic” mental spaces, but gives additional and highly negative further developments of reality space, such as the male protagonist contracting gonorrhea and Luz never getting married to the major. The sequencing of and interplay between different types of mental spaces may contribute to the powerful emotional effect that a literary work such as “A Very Short Story” has on its readers.

Conclusions In the chapter, I suggested that emotion is an integral part of literature, and figurative conceptualization is an integral part of both. A further suggestion I made was that literary discourse is based on the schematization of experience that derives from the schematization of emotional experience. Figuration, or figurative thought, and schematization are crucial areas of study in cognitive linguistics. More specifically, I attempted to show that what we know about these two processes in cognitive linguistics can be helpful in understanding the close connection between literature and emotion. As regards the conceptualization of emotions in literary discourse, I proposed that, to a great extent, it is happening by means of the figurative device of metaphor. The poetic effects that poets want to achieve in readers are commonly emotional effects. Such effects can arise from the poet employing a conventional emotion metaphor that is based on some embodied experience. But poets also commonly employ novel, creative metaphors for this purpose. Often, instead of being based on bodily experience (embodiment), such novel, creative metaphors are triggered by some contextual factor. As regards the structure of literary works, in many cases it is based on certain schemas, which can be image schemas or frame-like conceptual structures. Image schemas, like container, source-path-goal, or force, structure emotion concepts, which, in turn, structure the meaning of a literary work or their narrative composition. Finally, the processes of schematization and figuration of emotional experience can also work jointly; they can provide meaning and compositional structure for a literary piece together.

Note 1 Due to complications regarding copyright, my ability to quote from the poem has been severely restricted. The complete poem (#569) is, however, widely available on the internet.

Works Cited Altarriba, J., and L. Bauer. “The Distinctiveness of Emotion Concepts: A Comparison between Emotion, Abstract, and Concrete Words.” The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 117, 2004, pp. 389–410. doi:10.2307/4149007. Arnold, M. Dover Beach, www.artofeurope.com/arnold/arn1.htm. Barcelona, Antonio. “Metaphorical Models of Romantic Love in Romeo and Juliet.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 24, 1995, pp. 667–688. ———. “On the Plausibility of Claiming a Metonymic Motivation for Conceptual Metaphor.” Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, edited by A. Barcelona, Mouton de Gruyter, 2000, pp. 32–58.

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Cognitive Linguistics Borghi, A. M., F. Binkofski, C. Castelfranchi, F. Cimatti, C. Scorolli, and L. Tummolini. “The Challenge of Abstract Concepts.” Psychological Bulletin, 16 Jan. 2017. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/bul0000089. Fauconnier, G. Mental Spaces. Cambridge UP, 1994. Freeman, D. “Catch[ing] the Nearest Way: Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 24, 1995, pp. 689–708. Freeman, M. “Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Dirk Geraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 1175–1202. ———. “Metaphor Making Meaning: Dickinson’s Conceptual Universe.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 24, 1995, pp. 643–666. ———. The Poem as Icon. Oxford UP, 2020. ———. “Poetry and the Scope of Metaphor: Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literature.” Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads, edited by A. Barcelona, Mouton de Gruyter, 2000, pp. 253–281. Gibbs, R. W. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge UP, 2006. ———. The Poetics of Mind. Cambridge UP, 1994. Guthrie, J. Emily Dickinson’s Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry. UP of Florida, 1998. Hogan, P. C. Mind and Its Stories. Cambridge UP, 2003. Kövecses, Z. Emotion Concepts. Springer-Verlag, 1990. ———. Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Cambridge UP, 2020. ———. The Language of Love: The Semantics of Passion in Conversational English. Bucknell UP, 1988. ———. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge UP, 2005. ———. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford UP, 2010. ———. Metaphor and Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2000/2003. ———. “Metaphor and Emotion.” The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, edited by R. Gibbs, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 380–396. ———. Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love: A Lexical Approach to the Structure of Concepts. John Benjamins, 1986. ———. Where Metaphors Come From. Oxford UP, 2015. ———, and G. Radden. “Metonymy: Developing a Cognitive Linguistic View.” Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 9, no. 7, 1998, pp. 37–77. Lakoff, G. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought, edited by A. Ortony, Cambridge UP, 1993, pp. 202–251. ———. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. U of Chicago P, 1987. ———, and M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. U of Chicago P, 1980. ———, and Z. Kövecses. “The Cognitive Model of Anger Inherent in American English.” Cultural Models in Language and Thought, edited by D. Holland and N. Quinn, Cambridge UP, 1987, pp. 195–221. ———, and M. Turner. More than Cool Reason. U of Chicago P, 1989. Rosch, E. “Principles of Categorization.” Cognition and Categorization, edited by E. Rosch and B. B. Lloyd, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978, pp. 27–48. Semino, E. “Possible Worlds and Mental Spaces in Hemingway’s ‘A Very Short Story.’” Cognitive Poetics in Practice, edited by J. Gavins and G. Steen, Routledge, 2003, pp. 83–98. Stockwell, P. Cognitive Poetics. Routledge, 2002. Talmy, L. “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition.” Cognitive Science, vol. 12, 1988, pp. 49–100.

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4 COGNITIVE SCIENCE Literary Emotions From Appraisal to Embodiment Marco Caracciolo

Abstract: This chapter sketches out some of the main trends in emotion research in cognitive science and how they have shaped the field of cognitive literary studies. I start by identifying a historical shift from so-called appraisal to embodied models of emotion in cognitive science. The latter approach has had a significant influence on humanities scholarship investigating the role of emotions in literary experience, as I show by examining a number of representative contributions. This discussion also brings into view some of the gaps in current approaches to emotion in cognitive literary studies. In the final part of the chapter I draw on research in the area of “enactive cognition” to address those gaps. I argue that enactivism can help develop a comprehensive account of how emotions are mobilized and, potentially, reconfigured by literary engagements.

Literary writing and baby talk—the highly repetitive speech with which caregivers address preverbal children—seem worlds apart. The primary purpose of baby talk is to engage an infant in an affective exchange. Developmental psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen uses the metaphor of the “dance” to describe the rhythmic back-and-forth between the caregiver (typically, the baby’s mother) and the child: “Even in the first weeks after birth mother and child can achieve such coordination of expressions and movements in a sort of circular dance of mutually completing and inter-woven bodily motions” (24). This kind of coordination is, of course, dramatically different from the cultural sophistication and highly mediated nature of the practices that surround what we call “literature”; yet evolutionary scholar Ellen Dissanayake convincingly argues that this patterning of vocalizations provides the basis for the experience of both poetic and narrative rhythm: our appreciation of poetry or stories may require advanced linguistic and cultural competencies, but it has its roots in simple, affective, and largely preverbal interactions experienced during childhood. Consider, for instance, the classic game of peekaboo: as soon as the adult hides his or her face, reveals it, and then hides it again, an expectation is created in the spectating infant; the adult may manipulate that expectation by delaying the “peekaboo” moment. For Dissanayake, this structure of arousal and resolution generates what we may think of the “prelinguistic substrates” of suspense and surprise—two emotional effects that are central to literature. Dissanayake’s argument converges with the account presented by a philosopher, David Velleman, for whom literary experience is fundamentally affective and deeply grounded in the body, particularly through the creation and management of arousal. The goal of this chapter DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-6

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is to discuss how cognitive science can illuminate the role of specific emotional responses within the general affective framework of literary experience highlighted by Dissanayake and Velleman. In literature, emotions exist at multiple levels: they can be verbally referenced through emotion terms (e.g., “melancholic,” “nostalgia,” “saddened”); they can be implied by characters’ actions and utterances (in narrative genres) or by the lyric I’s words (in poetry); they can underlie the progression of story or the prosodic rhythm of poetry; lastly, they can drive the reader’s affective involvement in a plot or poetic text.1 Clearly, I cannot hope to offer a comprehensive mapping of these levels and how they have been conceptualized by the many scholars working at the intersection of cognitive science and literary studies (within the field of cognitive approaches to literature).2 The idea of the embodied and embedded nature of emotions in literary experience will provide a through-line that will be picked up by various other contributions to this book: emotions tap into the embodied repertoire of affect, and they are always embedded in specific contexts of human interaction. I will start by offering a sketch of developments of emotion research in cognitive science; in a second step, I will turn to cognitively inspired work on literary emotions and survey some of ways in which it has investigated the various levels listed here; finally, I will home in on a significant paradigm in contemporary cognitive science, the so-called enactive approach, which foregrounds the intersubjective coordination behind emotional experience in literature.

Emotion in Cognitive Science: A Short History Cognition, write Edward Smith and Stephen Kosslyn in a cognitive psychology textbook, “occurs when you derive implications or associations from an observation, fact, or event” (3). Cognitive science is an umbrella term for a number of disciplines (psychology, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, etc.) that study how those “implications or associations” are derived by the mind. Unlike the earlier school of behaviorist psychology, which focused solely on externally observable behavior, cognitive science posits that “invisible” mental events play a central role in guiding action. Like behaviorist psychology, cognitive science uses experimental methods to test its hypotheses and models. It is customary to trace the history of cognitive science to the emergence of the field of Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s (see Lakoff and Johnson, Chapter 6). As a model for understanding the mind, this first wave of cognitive science presupposes a fundamental analogy between human psychology and information processing in computational devices—more simply put, between the mind and computers. The human mind is seen as an input-output system, with perception providing the input and behavior constituting the output of internal mental operations (see Horst). Just as computers handle strings of binary code, the mind is thought to process mental states that are propositional—that is, language-like—and fundamentally abstract. These mental states or representations cannot be observed directly; rather, they are inferred from cycles of perception and overt action. Of course, this is a rough and somewhat caricatural portrayal of AI-inspired cognitive science, but the computational model of the mind did inflect the vocabulary and assumptions of early cognitive theories. David Marr’s study of visual perception—Vision—is often hailed as one of the landmark achievements of computational cognitivism. It will come as no surprise that emotions did not figure prominently in this strand of cognitive science. Surely, emotion and computers don’t mesh well, and cognitive scientists were led to prioritize mental functions that can be more easily accounted for within a computational paradigm: perception, motivation, the abstract knowledge of so-called frames and scripts. Significantly, the journal Cognition and Emotion only launched in 1987, well after the heyday 51

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of computational cognitivism. In one of the articles collected in the first issue, psychologists Keith Oatley and P. N. Johnson-Laird develop a “cognitive theory of emotions” based on the insight—couched in typically cognitivist language—that emotions “are a form of internal communication that sets cognitive processors into one of a small number of characteristic modes” (48). For Oatley and Johnson-Laird, emotions are instrumental in planning action and in guiding social relations. While they don’t deny that emotions have a certain phenomenology (i.e., experienced qualities), what interests them is “the cognitive evaluation of the situations that create such junctures” (48). Evaluation denotes the unconscious computational processes through which an organism comes to assess a certain situation as, for instance, dangerous or beneficial to its well-being—an assessment that triggers, respectively, fear or happiness. Oatley and Johnson-Laird link this idea to Paul Ekman’s (e.g., Ekman and Friesen) work on basic emotions, which—while not framed in explicitly cognitivist terms—allows them to posit the universality of emotional evaluations.3 For most of the history of cognitive research on emotion, evaluation has been discussed under the heading of “appraisal.” One of the leading psychologists associated with this concept is Richard Lazarus. In a widely cited article in American Psychologist, Lazarus argues—in line with how Oatley and Johnson-Laird discuss “evaluation”—that “emotion is the result of appraisals of the significance of what has happened for personal well-being” (353), with appraisal being defined as “an evaluation of the significance of knowledge” (354). Consider, for instance, a situation in which I am driving on a busy highway, miss the right exit for my destination, and then become stuck in traffic for two hours before I can turn around. The frustration I experience is the emotional outcome of my cognitive appraisal of the situation, which involves knowledge (I will be late; I could have been on time if I had paid more attention to the signs), short-term goals (whatever I was going to do at my destination), and of course social pressure that reflects long-term goals (I do not want to be seen as unpunctual or distracted). For appraisal theorists like Lazarus—as well as Nico Frijda—the appraisal and the emotion are two distinct stages in the emotional process: while we can be conscious of our emotional responses, the underlying appraisal is cognitive in that it doesn’t involve consciousness. Of course, a different combination of situation, motivations, and goals can result in a different appraisal, and therefore in an emotional response other than frustration: for instance, if I am driving to what promises to be a tedious meeting, I could feel relieved at the fact that the traffic jam gives me a perfect excuse not to attend it. The bifurcation of cognitive evaluation and emotional response is the centerpiece of appraisal theories, and also the assumption that embodied accounts of emotion are most likely to resist. The so-called embodied approach to the mind developed in the wake of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch’s seminal The Embodied Mind, a work based on a highly original fusion of cognitive science, phenomenology, and Buddhist thinking in the Mahayana tradition. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch argue forcefully against the computational analogy that, as we’ve seen, has been the guiding model of cognitive science. Mind is regarded as intimately bound up with life, and as reflecting in multiple ways our nature as embodied and experiencing beings; from that perspective, cognition is not an abstract process of computation or mental representation, but the embodied and social interactions through which organisms “enact” a world, as the authors of The Embodied Mind put it (151). While emotion was not one of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s chief concerns, their account—along with work in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson) and other areas of the mind sciences—paved their way for closer engagement with the embodied component of emotion. This trend saw the return of an earlier, pre-cognitive conceptualization of emotion, which can be traced back to an essay by William James, “What Is an Emotion?” (1884). James’s 52

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approach frontloads the physiology of emotion—the external blushing and twitching but also the inner feelings of (for instance) light-headedness or stomach churning that define emotional experience. For James, these “bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and . . . our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion” (189–90; italics in the original). This seemingly modest statement contains a radical understanding of emotion, one in which the separation of appraisal and emotion proper vanishes. The key word is “perception”: one can perceive a situation as dangerous (or as frustrating, relaxing, etc.), without the need for an appraisal that is separate from the perceptual act; emotion is, simply, the experience of how our body responds to this perception. Antonio Damasio and Jesse Prinz—respectively, a neuroscientist and a philosopher—are among the researchers who have revamped James’s theory of emotion, grounding it in experimental research and philosophical arguments and setting it up as an alternative to appraisal theory. Let us go back to the traffic jam example to see how embodied theories of emotion would account for my frustration. From that standpoint, my emotion is not the result of a cognitive judgment or inference (I am stuck in traffic equals I will be late, therefore I feel frustrated). Rather, the frustration arises directly from the experience of being stuck in traffic: my perception of the cars not budging, the long line of vehicles ahead of me, the exit I was supposed to take still ironically visible in the rearview mirror. There may be inferences and judgments, of course, but they are not the primary cause of the emotion: it is the body, and more specifically the feeling of being stuck, that takes center stage. This is what Prinz calls an “embodied appraisal” (Chapter 3). It is important to understand how this embodied theory of emotion differs from standard appraisal-based accounts. First, while emotional experience may still be said to involve an “evaluation” in some sense of the word, it is nothing like the computational, inferential, or abstract processing of appraisal theory: we perceive a situation to be frustrating just as we perceive a clear sky to be blue, without any intervening abstract reasoning. Second, while appraisal theory tends to downplay the body and the lived experience of emotion and distinguish them dualistically from appraisal, the embodied approach ties them very closely together. Also within the embodied camp, Giovanna Colombetti has developed a model of emotion in the “enactivist” tradition of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind. Colombetti departs from Prinz’s model in that her view of emotions doesn’t involve any kind of internal, mental representation (a concept that plays an important role in Prinz’s theory). We will return to this enactivist understanding of emotion and experience in the final section of this chapter. Of course, there are other important nuances and disagreements within both appraisal and embodied theories that I won’t be able to discuss here. But with these basic ideas at hand, we can turn to work that seeks to bring the cognitive science of emotion to bear on literary experience.

Perspectives on Literature, Cognition, and the Emotions Emotions in literature, as argued earlier, exist at many levels. Perhaps most fundamentally, there have been attempts since the late 1980s to link the concept of literariness—the defining features or qualities of literary discourse—to emotional experience. Writing in the third issue of Cognition and Emotion (1989), David Miall—one of the key figures in the field of empirical literary studies—argues that schema theory cannot fully explain why readers are drawn to literary texts. Along with frames and scripts, with which it is frequently associated, schema theory was one of the staples of computational cognitive science: simply put, schemata are abstract representations that organize knowledge within a certain domain (for example, the schema “driving” involves a car, a road, a steering wheel, etc.). Psychologists like Arthur 53

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Graesser had applied the concept of schema to the expectations that structure narrative comprehension. However, as Miall argues, the primary interest of literature is an emotional one: it has to do with the subversion of these expectations—a process of defamiliarization, to use the conventional English translation of Viktor Shklovsky’s “ostranenie.” Further, according to Miall, defamiliarization is closely correlated with affect: when literature departs from an established schema (be it a pattern of poetic meter or a convention regarding genre), it generates a feeling of surprise that is widely regarded by readers as essential to literary experience (hence the link with literariness). Miall was able to confirm this intuition in a series of empirical studies conducted in collaboration with Don Kuiken: by measuring reading times in conjunction with self-reported emotions, Miall and Kuiken demonstrated that, unlike ordinary discourse, literary language slows down reading (an important element of Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization) and increases emotional involvement. Also of interest in Miall’s 1989 article is the fact that the focus on literary experience and affect results in a significant challenge to the appraisal model of emotion. Referring to Oatley and Johnson-Laird’s article, discussed earlier, Miall writes: It may be true that emotion often functions as an appraisal mechanism. . . . But these models of emotion seem less able to account for the affective components of the response to complex narratives of the kind studied in this article. (75) Well before the rise of embodied accounts of emotion, Miall’s thinking on literature leads him to reassess the significance of appraisal, shifting the emphasis from the cognitive to the affective and embodied components of emotional responses. The centrality of affect in reader response explains why appraisal theories have never fared well—at least not in an undiluted form—in the field of cognitive approaches to literature. Patrick Colm Hogan is the scholar who has most consistently investigated the role of emotion in literary experience, with particular focus on literary narrative from a cross-cultural perspective. The cognitivist concept of schema still plays a role in Hogan’s The Mind and Its Stories (The Mind and Its Stories 61), but mostly as a foil to Hogan’s interest in the much more concrete idea of “prototype.” While a schema is fixed and abstract, a prototype is a matter of probability and (potentially embodied) experience: “prototypical” is what we are most likely to encounter in a given context. Hogan builds on Oatley and Johnson-Laird’s work, but he doesn’t foreground the inferential nature of appraisal; rather, he develops a different aspect of Oatley and Johnson-Laird’s model—namely, how emotional experience is organized around prototypical sequences that fall into “what is, in effect, a narrative structure” (The Mind and Its Stories 76). For instance, we tend to associate frustration with quotidian mishaps (such as a traffic jam), not life-defining events (a close friend’s death); likewise, frustration is likely to result in verbal and nonverbal expressions of annoyance, not in extreme violence. The usual scenario linking together a situation, a feeling, and a behavioral response is the prototype of an emotion. Cross-fertilizing cognitive science with the theory of “rasa” (or aesthetic emotions) developed in ancient Sanskrit texts, Hogan argues that prototypes of emotional experience are mirrored in narrative structure, and more specifically in the genres of romantic and heroic tragicomedy. Hogan shows that, cross-culturally, “there are two prominent structures of literary narrative, romantic and heroic tragicomedy, derived respectively from the personal and social prototypes for happiness” (The Mind and Its Stories 98). Put otherwise, there are two emotional prototypes for happiness, focusing on personal life and social status (gaining political 54

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power, etc.); through their implicit narrative structure, these prototypes form the basis for two highly significant narrative genres that can be identified across cultures. Hogan’s approach has developed significantly in his later study Affective Narratology, and his inventory of prototypes conveyed by stories has expanded. The concept of appraisal makes several appearances in Hogan’s 2011 book, but he presents perceptual processes and their literary representation as more fundamental than cognitive or belief-based appraisal. Throughout Hogan’s work, it is the sociocultural embeddedness of emotion that takes center stage via the link between emotional experience and ideology. Most of the scholars who work on emotion within cognitive literary studies—for instance, Suzanne Keen (Empathy) and Blakey Vermeule—share Hogan’s and Miall’s assumption that abstract appraisal is not enough to explain the role emotions play in literary reading.4 By its very nature, literature destabilizes clear-cut distinctions between rational or abstract thinking—cognition in the narrow sense—and bodily affects. Remember Dissanayake’s argument about the affective “substrate” of literary experience: in various ways, literary texts tap into a repertoire of embodied interactions that predate, in developmental terms, the acquisition of linguistic skills and cultural competencies, and yet provide the emotional structures of expectation and surprise that underlie literary reading. Further, while many literary scholars argue that emotions are grounded in our biology and evolutionary history, they tend to see them as situated in a sociocultural context that modulates the evocation, experience, and expression of emotion. Literature enjoys a privileged position vis-à-vis that context, being both a reflection of and a reflection on broader dynamics in a given culture and society. Necessarily, then, literary emotions are the result of complex interactions between biological predispositions and cultural knowledge and evaluations—the kind of interaction that Nancy Easterlin theorizes in her “biocultural” theory of literary interpretation. So far we have encountered literary emotions as affect produced by the literary deviation from schematic knowledge (in Miall’s work) or as more particularized templates defining the main literary genres (in Hogan’s studies). Of course, there are other kinds of emotional responses intersecting with these broad emotional structures, and they have also been approached from a cognitive angle. In literary narrative as well as poetry, readers are confronted with fictive personas—the poet, a protagonist, a set of minor characters. As we relate to these figures, sympathy as well as empathy may emerge, complicating and enriching our emotional engagement with other levels of a literary text. While often used interchangeably in everyday discourse, sympathy and empathy are distinct responses (see, e.g., Coplan). Sympathy is best defined as “feeling-for,” or experiencing emotions in response to another person’s (or character’s) feelings: someone’s sorrow may elicit compassion, for instance. Empathy, by contrast, involves “feeling-with” or a partial overlap of feelings, such as when I feel sad while comforting a grieving friend. Empathy is related to what we commonly refer to as “identification”—a form of imaginary perspective-taking that, as scholars such as Frank Hakemulder have argued, is central to literary experience. Empathy and sympathy are not mutually exclusive, which explains why in everyday language (and also in many psychological theories; see Davis) empathy is seen as involving “empathic concern,” which is essentially a form of sympathy. However, keeping empathy and sympathy distinct at a conceptual level brings into view the complexity of emotional responses to literature, which frequently asks readers to move back and forth between a sympathetic and an empathetic stance toward a character, or even obstructs sympathy while encouraging empathetic perspective-taking—for instance, when we engage with a morally deviant character.5 Readers’ emotional responses to characters and situations in both literary poetry and prose tend to build on memories of their own emotions. This is the last level of emotional engagement 55

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with literature I will draw attention to: in Such Stuff as Dreams, Keith Oatley discusses it as “relived emotion” (124–26). We never approach literature as a blank slate, but tend to link it to our identities, personalities, and emotional memories—what I called the reader’s “experiential background” (Experientiality 55–71). This implication of past experiences is part of the reason why some texts will resonate more than others with a certain reader, but it also explains why literary emotions are so effective at shaping readers’ past emotions into something new. Kuiken, Miall, and Sikora’s empirical work on “self-modifying feelings” in reading confirms the idea that the evocation of emotion in a literary context can prompt readers to gain novel perspectives on personal memories and identity.

Toward an Enactivist Account As a final step, I will present an account of literary emotions inspired by work on so-called enactive cognition, particularly Colombetti’s already discussed book as well as the arguments advanced by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Marieke Rohde, and Hanne De Jaegher (Di Paolo et al.; De Jaegher and Di Paolo). This enactivist model is not meant to supersede the approaches to literary emotions outlined in the previous section; rather, it intends to offer an integrative framework whereby literary engagements—including emotional responses—are grounded in a view of cognition that offers a strong alternative to traditional cognitivism. Indeed, more than any other contemporary theory of the mind, enactivism resists the mind-body and cognitionaffect split that underlies first-wave, computational cognitive science. The starting point of enactivism, as discussed earlier, is that an organism’s embodied interaction with its physical and sociocultural milieu is inherently evaluative, without any need to posit a mechanism of abstract appraisal distinct from bodily engagement. This does not imply that so-called higher cognitive functions such as abstract reasoning and language production play no role in cognition; but even these advanced skills are grounded in more basic modes of physical interaction with the world. For Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher, who extend Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s groundbreaking work, a living organism enacts a world through embodied, explorative interactions that are guided by bioculturally defined values. When, for instance, a mouse scurries into a hiding place to escape a cat, the rodent’s movements express the biologically basic value of self-preservation. The emotional response that is evidently bound up with the mouse’s behavior involves no high-level cognitive appraisal but only an embodied, perceptual evaluation of danger. The problem, of course, is how this account of basic values can be extended to the level of culturally mediated engagements in human communities. Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher argue that intersubjectivity and cultural practices multiply the values available in a given milieu, from mere survival to the sophisticated evaluations involved in (for instance) family life, politics, and the arts. Nevertheless, the negotiation of values remains modeled after an embodied engagement, just “scaled up” to account for the complexity of the human value landscape. Interacting with other individuals, and with cultural practices more generally, is seen as a process of intersubjective coordination: [Patterns] of coordination can directly influence the continuing disposition of the individuals involved to sustain or modify their encounter. In this way, what arises in the process of coordination . . . can have the consequence of steering the encounter or facilitating (or not) its continuation. (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 492) 56

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Particular values can be introduced into this structure of coordination and affirmed, rejected, or reconsidered on the basis of the ensuing intersubjective dynamic. Storytelling is an excellent example of social coordination at this level. For example, the plot of the animated series Tom and Jerry revolves around the proverbial enmity of cats and mice. Repeatedly, Tom attempts to catch and kill Jerry, but the latter always manages to escape through cunning and physical agility. The fundamental values at stake here is, again, survival, but it is much more mediated than in the real-world example of the mouse scurrying to safety. The storyteller—in this case, not a single individual but the result of the creators’ collective work—dangles certain values before the audience, generating suspense on the basis of expectations established by previous narrative experiences as well as familiarity with the Tom and Jerry franchise: how is Jerry going to survive Tom’s nth assault? How are Tom’s carefully premeditated attacks going to backfire on him? Ultimately, who is going to have the upper hand in this quasi-epic struggle? These questions are here expressed propositionally (that is, as verbal sentences); but in the thick of the audience’s coordination with the story—and with the storyteller behind it—these questions are much more likely to register as a patterning of affective states. These states will include a sequence of what Meir Sternberg would call “suspense, curiosity, and surprise,” which may, in turn, build on specific emotions such as fear of Jerry’s death or satisfaction at Tom’s inevitable comeuppance. In this way, as I argue in The Experientiality of Narrative, narrative is an intersubjective practice that allows storytellers and audiences to introduce and negotiate non-actual values: we can sit back and laugh at the struggle between Tom and Jerry because the values that emerge in our engagement with the show do not bear on our well-being directly. Thus, Yanna Popova’s enactivist theory of narrative posits that “the interaction between narrator and reader is best captured as a kind of rhythmic coordination between tension and release in the narrative pace itself ” (83). This “rhythm,” as we know from Dissanayake, derives from the affective structure created in infancy by the caregiver’s interactions with preverbal children, but language and culture make it possible to involve within the rhythmic coordination of storyteller and audience a much wider gamut of values. Such values are responsible for the literary emotions discussed in the previous section. Think about Hogan’s theory of emotion prototypes and literary genres: ideas of personal fulfilment through romantic love or social realization through political power are culturally shared values that steer, like emotional tracks, the storyteller– audience coordination in certain directions. Importantly, while this coordination is mediated by language, concepts, and cultural knowledge, it is rooted in an intersubjective context that is fundamentally embodied and affective. The emotional prototypes embedded in romantic and heroic plots thus function as “dynamical patterns”—in Colombetti’s (69–70) terminology— that guide, without determining completely, the coordination between authors and audiences. The audience’s past experiences are also part of this intersubjective encounter, as Kuiken, Miall, and Sikora’s empirical work on self-modifying feelings in reading demonstrates. This idea is in line with the enactivist tenet that the organism’s past history always shapes its present interactions, defining its horizon of meanings and values. When we approach literature, we build on our experiential background to work out the text’s significance. The interaction between our personal values and those brought into play by a text further influences the overall patterning of our coordination. The traffic between the reader’s background and literature moves in both directions, though: through a process of defamiliarization, the emotions generated by reading may create new memories that leave a mark on our core values and reshape our self-concept (see Hakemulder 84–95; Caracciolo, Experientiality 70)—typically, in subtle ways, but more pronounced effects may be possible, too. Although defining literature is a complex matter and falls well beyond the scope of this chapter, there is a clear correlation between 57

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judgments of literariness and a text’s capacity to leave an imprint on our background in both personal and societal terms. The affective coordination between author and audience highlighted by the enactivist approach always involves more than these two agents. At one level, literary reading is shaped by institutions and practices that influence the overall coordination by making certain values more readily accessible. For example, we may approach the same text as leisure reading or for the purposes of scholarly analysis: these broad interpretive frames, in Erving Goffman’s sense, will steer readers’ evaluation of the text, including their emotional engagement, which is likely to become more salient in reading for pleasure. Scholarly analysis, by contrast, has a long history of backgrounding emotional responses in favor of more conceptually or historically oriented reading strategies.6 These sociocultural frames, and the institutions that disseminate them, also participate in the coordination as part of the author’s and readers’ background. Finally, fictional characters complicate the emotional patterning of reader–author coordinations through the already mentioned interplay of empathetic perspective-taking and sympathetic concern. In all kinds of narratives values tend to cluster dynamically around characters, as the discussion of Tom and Jerry demonstrates, but literary texts may create particularly complex arrangements of sympathy and empathy where, for example, different sets of values become attached to the author and to an unreliable narrator or morally transgressive protagonist. These intricacies can be easily accommodated within an enactivist account that focuses on emotional evaluation and coordination in the intersubjective practice of literary reading.

Conclusion To borrow Colombetti’s (54–56) dynamical systems theory-inspired vocabulary, enactive cognition offers a view of literary engagements in which the emotional “topology” of the coordination between readers and authors is shaped by several “attractors” (that is, factors that impinge on and orient the reader’s evaluations): first, the general affectivity involved in the manipulation of expectations and schemata through literary language; second, the reader’s experiential background and the emotionally charged memories it contains; third, the emotional pathways provided by established generic forms and how they bring into play socioculturally shared values; fourth, the way in which fictional characters refract the reader’s emotions. The interactions between these attractors are complex and only partially understood. The main takeaway of the enactive approach is that the embodied model of emotions can be extended to a practice as distant from basic perception as literary reading. This is a theme already emerging from the work of most cognitive literary scholars, as we have seen, who resist—more or less explicitly—the theoretical positions of computational cognitive science, with its strict focus on abstract and inferential appraisals at the expense of the experiential and bodily underpinnings of emotion. Enactivism serves as a unifying framework for existing approaches while offering a robust alternative to the binary distinctions of appraisal theories of emotions. Such binaries include cognition proper vs. emotional experience and abstract mental processes vs. bodily feelings. The enactivist framework also allows us to reduce the divide between affect— understood as bodily arousal, which is relatively undifferentiated and often intersubjectively shared—and more targeted emotional responses to literature. Literary emotions tap into an affective structure of coordination with deep biological and developmental roots: the complexity of the resulting emotional patterning and the variety of sociocultural values it sets in motion explain much of literature’s power to influence readers and their culture at large. 58

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Notes 1 Patrick Colm Hogan offers a comprehensive account of these emotional levels in literature in his book Literature and Emotion. 2 See the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, for a helpful overview. 3 More specifically, Oatley and Johnson-Laird see emotions as an inbuilt mental mechanism or “module” (another cognitivist key word). The modular theory of mind was introduced by Jerry Fodor in 1983 and has had substantial influence on AI-inspired cognitive science. 4 For a particularly lucid articulation of this position, see Keen (“Introduction” 6, note 5). 5 For further discussion of the multidimensionality of character engagement, see Eder and Caracciolo (Strange Narrators). 6 See Korthals Altes for a Goffman-inspired discussion of frames and cognition in literary interpretation.

Works Cited Bråten, Stein, and Colwyn Trevarthen. “Prologue: From Infant Intersubjectivity and Participant Movements to Simulation and Conversation in Cultural Common Sense.” On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy, edited by Stein Bråten, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007, pp. 21–34. Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. De Gruyter, 2014. ———. Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters. U of Nebraska P, 2016. Colombetti, Giovanna. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. MIT Press, 2013. Coplan, Amy. “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 62, no. 2, 2004, pp. 141–152. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. William Heinemann, 2000. Davis, Mark H. “Measuring Individual Differences in Empathy: Evidence for a Multidimensional Approach.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 44, no. 1, 1983, pp. 113–126. De Jaegher, Hanne, and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 6, no. 4, 2007, pp. 485–507. Di Paolo, Ezequiel A., et al. “Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play.” Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science, edited by John Stewart et al., MIT Press, 2010, pp. 33–87. Dissanayake, Ellen. “Prelinguistic and Preliterate Substrates of Poetic Narrative.” Poetics Today, vol. 32, no. 1, 2011, pp. 55–79. Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Eder, Jens. “Ways of Being Close to Characters.” Film Studies, vol. 8, 2006, pp. 68–80. Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen. “Constants Across Cultures in the Face and Emotion.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 17, no. 2, 1971, pp. 124–129. Fodor, Jerry A. The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press, 1983. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harper and Row, 1974. Graesser, Arthur C. Prose Comprehension Beyond the Word. Springer, 1981. Hakemulder, Frank. The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept. John Benjamins, 2000. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. U of Nebraska P, 2011. ———. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2017. ———. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2003. Horst, Steven. “The Computational Theory of Mind.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2011, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/. James, William. “What Is an Emotion?” Mind, vol. 9, 1884, pp. 188–205. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007. ———. “Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions.” Poetics Today, vol. 32, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–53. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Narrative Fiction. U of Nebraska P, 2014.

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Marco Caracciolo Kuiken, Don, et al. “Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 2, 2004, pp. 171–203. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books, 1999. Lazarus, Richard S. “Cognition and Motivation in Emotion.” The American Psychologist, vol. 46, no. 4, 1991, pp. 352–367. Marr, David. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. Freeman, 1982. Miall, David S. “Beyond the Schema Given: Affective Comprehension of Literary Narratives.” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989, pp. 55–78. ———, and Don Kuiken. “Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect: Response to Literary Stories.” Poetics, vol. 22, no. 5, 1994, pp. 389–407. Oatley, Keith. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Wiley, 2011. ———, and P. N. Johnson-Laird. “Towards a Cognitive Theory of Emotions.” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 1, no. 1, 1987, pp. 29–50. Popova, Yanna. Stories, Meaning, and Experience. Routledge, 2015. Prinz, Jesse J. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford UP, 2004. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, U of Nebraska P, 1965, pp. 3–24. Smith, Edward E., and Stephen M. Kosslyn. Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain. Pearson, 2006. Sternberg, Meir. “How Narrativity Makes a Difference.” Narrative, vol. 9, no. 2, 2001, pp. 115–122. Varela, Francisco J., et al. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, 1991. Velleman, J. David. “Narrative Explanation.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 112, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–25. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. Zunshine, Lisa, editor. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford UP, 2015.

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5 EMBODIMENT Embodied Simulation and Emotional Engagement With Fictional Characters Hannah Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese

Abstract: In this chapter, we analyze our emotional engagements with fictional characters using embodied cognitive theory. The theory of embodied simulation holds that when reading fictional texts, readers reuse the brain-body mechanisms employed in daily life. There are, however, also key differences between the ways we relate to humans, animals, and other beings in real life, and the ways we engage with such entities when they are represented in fiction. Specifically, we propose that fiction broadens and enhances our capacity for identification and emotional attachment, even to transgressive characters whom we would be reluctant to approach or bond with in real life. We may also bond deeply and quickly with fictional characters, simulating friendship with them or love for them as the narrative progresses. Those emotional attachments are separate from the story yet serve as a key inducement to continue reading and constitute a sort of parallel narrative experience. We argue that the vicarious experiences induced by fiction and the strong emotional attachments to fictional characters— especially protagonists—enable readers to explore vicariously forbidding and forbidden territories in a protected, parallel space.

Introduction The portrayal of fictional characters, together with our emotional engagements with them, has fascinated and perplexed critics since antiquity.1 Why do we care about literary characters, as literary theorist Blakey Vermeule asks in her 2009 book of the same title? What draws us to them so insistently? The cognitive turn in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy in the late twentieth century, and the emerging research paradigm of embodied cognition have provided ample opportunities to return to old questions in search of new answers and insights. This chapter presents an ongoing dialogue and collaboration between a neuroscientist (Gallese) and a literary scholar (Wojciehowski) aimed at a transdisciplinary analysis of embodied cognition and narrative. In this brief space we will explore readers’ identifications with and emotional attachments to literary characters, while incorporating recent discoveries in the sciences of mind, as well as contemporary theories of character attachment and identification. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-7

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In our 2011 essay “How Stories Make Us Feel,” we proposed that the activity of reading fictional narratives activates the same neural circuits that we use in everyday life—circuits that underpin all of our own actions, emotional and sensory experiences. In that essay we focused on narrative empathy and the Mirror Neuron Mechanism (MNM), a key aspect of embodied simulation (ES)—i.e., the activation of the brain-body during the reading or viewing of fictional narratives. In the present chapter we will expand our research framework to include other sub-personal brain-body networks that subtend ES. Additionally, we will synthesize diverse bodies of research on engagement with fictional characters—research that hails from literary and narrative theory, communications, media studies, psychology, and other social sciences. In his essay “Cognitive Narratology,” David Herman writes of the “mind-narrative nexus” (§ 2). In the present chapter, we posit a “brain-body-narrative nexus,” giving embodied cognition a place of greater prominence. Though we are far from providing a unified field theory of ES, this chapter is a small step toward that goal. When we navigate the parallel world of fictional narrative, we basically rely on the same brain-body resources shaped by our relation to mundane reality. These resources provide the functional scaffold and the building blocks that our engagement with fictional characters rearranges by means of different forms of framing. As Herman contends, cognitive narratology reveals that readers make sense of complex narratives by relying on very few textual or discourse cues (§ 3.1). These cues, which fiction creatively reconfigures, are the expression of social practices that readers recognize because they are part of readers’ lives. Reading mobilizes our capacities for empathic co-feeling with others, a co-feeling that registers within our own bodies. The expression “registers within our body” requires qualification. Indeed, it has been argued that our experience of fiction characters does not lead readers to “experience muscular activity and other vivid motor imagery every time they read about a boy picking up a textbook from a desk” (Kuzmičová 279). We believe that this, together with similar arguments raised by phenomenologists (e.g., Zahavi, who equates simulation with contagion), misrepresents ES as the actual bodily mimicking of what is being witnessed in real life or learned about fictional characters, as when reading a novel, or watching a movie or TV series. This is not the case. Empirical evidence clearly shows that when we witness actions performed by others, when we imagine them, when we hear discussion about those actions or read about them, all these conditions lead to the activation of part of the cortical motor system, without producing any overt movement. The activation of the motor system in the absence of movement likely defines the experiential backbone of what we perceive or imagine perceiving. The same logic applies to sensations and emotions. The case of the embodiment of emotions, however, is particular, as it often reveals that simulation of others’ emotional experience, particularly when very intense, can easily give way to emotional contagion and re-enactment. When engaged with fictional characters, we can be so emotionally involved as to be moved to tears. The tears we weep when we are moved by a fictional narrative clearly are not “quasi-tears.” Similarly, the strong feelings of anguish and compassion for characters we experience when reading their fictional misgivings and misadventures are not “quasi-emotions,” as they aren’t less real than those we experience when engaged with real others; they can, in fact, sometimes be much stronger. This phenomenal quality is accompanied by the activation of part of the same brain circuits that underpin our real-life experiences. ES consists of the suspension of the actual application of a neurophysiological process: in the domain of action, part of the cortical motor system activates, but movement is not 62

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produced. The same brain circuits that determine movement are “exploited” or “reused” (see Gallese, “Mirror Neurons,” and Anderson) to map the movements of others, both the real and the fictional ones. When sensorimotor systems, which originally evolved to guide our interactions with the world, are decoupled from the common final motor pathway and dynamically reconnected with other cortical areas, they can serve newly acquired cognitive skills, such as understanding others, both in real life and fictional narrative. The border separating real and imaginary worlds appears much less sharp and clear when viewed from a neuroscientific perspective. Reuse of the neural sensorimotor maps in social and parasocial interactions can be conceived of as a case of “paradigmatic knowledge” (see Gallese and Cuccio). The display of the rule, exhibited at each occurrence, accomplishes its ruling role because of preexisting biological norms and constraints, which make it possible. This happens every time a given behavior or social interaction is performed, observed, or even imagined, regardless of its real or fictional character. Our brain-body expresses the range of potential relationships with the world that lead to the establishment of a relational self, modeling and delimiting the horizon of its world. We know and understand our Umwelt by virtue of the relational potentialities instantiated by our body, which in turn shape and model the brain’s sensorimotor schemas. ES is the recall of the implicit bodily knowledge we acquire during our life experiences. We recruit this knowledge in several different situations, as when mapping events within our peripersonal space, when confronting manipulable objects, when witnessing others’ actions, emotions and sensory experiences, as well as when remembering past experiences, planning future actions, and when engaging in fictional experiences. ES does not consist of stereotyped and undifferentiated responses. It is context-dependent and idiosyncratically linked to individuals’ personal, historical, social and biological identities. All of our experiences are mediated by our relational body. Our engagement with fictional characters is cognitively—and bodily—premediated (see Grusin) by our life engagement, which provides the basic framing to navigate the world of fiction. On the other hand, fiction premediates life experience, as our engagement with fictional characters provide clues and perspectives that can affect how we cope with life’s challenges. Engaging with others’ experiences, be they real or fictional, also enables a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Identifcation and Attachment: Te Hamlet Problem Narratologists and media theorists often describe our relationships with fictional characters as based on identification and/or attachment. Attachments that continue beyond the immediate reading or viewing experience, and that may feel like friendship or love, are known as parasocial relationships (PSRs). Negative PSRs are possible, as well. Identification and PSRs are two processes that may co-occur, yet they remain conceptually distinct (Broom et al. 541). These concepts are slippery, since they are used differently by theorists working across a wide range of fields. In this section we will discuss several approaches to character identification and attachment before turning to Shakespeare’s Hamlet for additional insights. Identification has been defined as “a form of narrative transportation whereby one is transported into the first-person psychological perspective of a character, adopting his/her viewpoint, goals and mental states within the narrative” (Broom et al. 542, following Oatley, “Meetings”; Green and Brock; and Cohen). Fotis Jannidis notes that identification is a confusing term for which there is no agreed-upon definition. Identification may mean sympathy with a character whom one perceives to be similar to oneself. It may instead mean empathy for a character in a given situation. Identification can also refer to the attraction one feels for a 63

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character who is a role model or ideal (§ 3.8). Similarly, Amy Coplan discusses the confusion around identification, noting that the term is often used interchangeably with empathy and at other times with emotional contagion (147). The term attachment, as distinct from identification, is generally used to describe an imagined interaction or relationship with a character in which self-other distinctions remains intact, even though degrees of identification may co-occur, as in real-life friendships. As a reader or viewer attaches to a character, she may begin to feel less like an observer or bystander and more like a companion, friend, or lover. The psychologist John Bowlby developed a system for classifying optimal and suboptimal ways that an infant attaches to its mother or caregiver (Attachment and Loss). A child’s style of attachment (secure, anxious, or avoidant) generally carries over into adulthood and inflects later relationships (see, e.g., Ammaniti & Gallese). Readers and viewers may, in fact, bring their particular attachment styles to bear on their experiences of fictional characters (Oatley, “Meetings”; Djikic et al.; Bàlint and Kovàcs)—a complicated subject that we cannot address here. In interactive media such as computer games, attachment may refer to the degree of control one has over a character’s actions, identification with the character, or responsibility for the character’s safety and interactions with others (Bowman et al.). In the gaming context, the overlap between identification and attachment is particularly pronounced. What is at stake in all of these definitions is (1) the degree to which self and imagined other can be said to merge, (2) the question of which parts of the fictional other might overlap with those of the self, and (3) the nature and duration of the experience in question—whether it occurs during reading, viewing, gaming, etc., or outside of/alongside of/after the narrative experience, however defined. Let us consider a literary character familiar to most readers—Shakespeare’s Hamlet—in order to put these various explanations of identification and attachment to the test. When we watch or read the play, what feelings does the fictional protagonist evoke in us? In what ways might viewers identify with Hamlet? If we are enjoying a particularly good production of the play, for example, we might very well feel transported into the storyworld of medieval, “rotten” Denmark. We adopt Hamlet’s perspective on the action and events, particularly since he is the only person in the play who sees the ghost of Hamlet Sr. His is not the only perspective that we adopt, but it is probably the most significant. We may also co-feel Hamlet’s angry and distraught mental state—for example, as sympathy for his predicament at having his mother marry his father’s murderer (self-other distinction remains intact; emotional states of viewer and character do not align), as empathy for that situation (self-other distinction intact; emotional states of viewer and character align), or as emotional contagion (self-other distinction collapses to a degree as emotional states of viewer and character converge) (cp. Coplan 143–146). Might Hamlet serve as a role model for audience members, or perhaps as a fantasy friend or companion? Viewers might admire his passion, intelligence, cunning and courage in facing his own death. Yet there are also less admirable qualities and actions to take into account. Viewers might wish that Hamlet had treated Ophelia more humanely, or that he didn’t accidentally kill Polonius, and deliberately send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. Hamlet may be the first modern antihero because of the complex identifications he invites, despite or because of the repellent and amoral sides of his character.2 How we might “identify” with Hamlet is an open question and a highly individual one that may change from moment to moment, and from one textual micro-expression of emotion to the next. Ironically (and delightfully) it is Hamlet himself who offers astonishing insights into the phenomena of identification, empathy, and emotional contagion with fictional characters. In Act II, Scene 2, of the play he meets a travelling troupe of actors who have just arrived at Elsinore 64

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Castle. Together they plan the evening’s entertainment: a play called The Murder of Gonzago. This is no random choice, as Hamlet explains in a rambling, slightly unhinged monologue: Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? (II.2.550–560) Hamlet has just seen one of the visiting male actors perform the choice role of the Trojan queen Hecuba in extremis. How, Hamlet muses, is it possible for an actor to turn pale and weep real tears in response to a fictional character whose husband has just been brutally murdered—a character whom the actor channels into his mind and body. What could be more trivial, more absurd, Hamlet asks, than crying for a fictional character: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her?” This is, of course, exactly what Gertrude, widow of the murdered Hamlet Sr. does not do, much to Hamlet’s rage and disgust. It is also what young Hamlet fails to do. He remains paralyzed, unable to manifest and project his rage as vengeful action against the usurper Claudius— perhaps because the situation is not a fictional one, nor is Hamlet’s identification with his violated father, who suffers the ultimate paralysis. So Hamlet devises a trap for Claudius: Hum, I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks; I’ll tent him to the quick. If ‘a do blench, I know my course. (II.2.589–599) After watching the fictional murder of Gonzago on stage, the usurping king should prove unable to conceal his guilt—or so Hamlet hopes. Why? Because Claudius, an actual murderer, cannot avoid identifying with the stage murderer. In that moment of identification, Claudius also realizes that Hamlet, who has chosen the play, knows that he has committed the crime. Through this double process of recognition, Claudius is forced to proclaim his malefaction via an involuntary, automatic process of mind-body arousal—turning pale (“blenching”) or outright confession—that can and will be “read” by Hamlet and Horatio as incontrovertible proof 65

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of guilt. That arousal is not mimetic, since the stage murderer feels no remorse or shame. Nevertheless, Claudius appears to fuse with the stage murderer and completely lose his composure—markers of identification-as-emotional contagion (Coplan 145). At that moment private guilt becomes public shame, as well as dangerous exposure. “The play’s the thing,” Hamlet states, “Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (II.2.605–606). On a meta-level, the actor playing the half-mad Dane self-consciously imagines and channels the feelings of the immobilized prince, consumed with sadness, rage, uncertainty and perhaps even guilt, so that we can see, hear and feel not Hecuba, but Hamlet. “As the play nears its end,” Keith Oatley proposes, we the audience are profoundly moved by Hamlet’s death. Our sadness on his behalf then transforms to a compassion for all of us, humankind, subject to such fits of anger and vengefulness in which by identification we have willingly taken part, and by which destruction occurs that we do not will. (Emotions 144) To the extent that we identify with Hamlet’s desire for revenge, we may also feel complicit, even as bystanders, in its devastating effects. In Oatley’s view, our sadness at Hamlet’s death opens out to a broader, generalizable sympathy for other humans, especially Hamlet-like humans, among whom we count ourselves.

Te Neuroscience of Mentalizing Self and Others Having discussed identification and attachment at the personal level, we will now discuss these and other aspects of ES at the sub-personal level. The competence of intersubjectivity cannot be entirely reduced to the sub-personal activation of neural networks in the brain, hypothetically specialized in mindreading, as too many neuroscientists still think. Indeed, neurons are not epistemic agents. However, neuroscience can investigate the experiential dimension of intersubjectivity through the study of the underlying sub-personal processes and mechanisms expressed by the brain-body when people engage with others. What does it mean to engage phenomenally with the self and with others from the point of view of the brain-body? How different is it for the brain-body when others are fictional characters? Empirical research has demonstrated the embodied quality of the self: affecting the body in turn affects self-identity and self-other differentiation. Indeed, the core dimension of the self, the bodily self, is highly plastic and malleable, as it is prone to several illusions like the “rubber-hand illusion” or the “Enfacement Illusion” that can temporarily change our body experience (e.g., Botvinick and Cohen; Lenggenhager et al.), or our face representation (Sforza et al.; Tsakiris). Thus, both our body and face experiences and the related feelings of self-identity and ownership are porous and malleable, as they can be easily fooled by playing with the body. Mitchell et al. (“Dissociable”) showed that when participants ascribed mental contents to themselves as well as when they judged the potential mental states of others thought to be similar to themselves, in both conditions the very same region within the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) was activated. On the basis of this evidence these authors concluded that “perceivers make selective use of simulation in the original sense, plumbing their own possible—but not necessarily concurrently experienced—thoughts and feelings for clues to those of others.” How does our brain-body react when we read about or watch Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull? Very recently, Broom and colleagues studied whether identification with fictional characters is associated with increased neural overlap between the self and fictional others. They selected 66

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19 fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones and asked them to perform trait evaluations for the self, nine real-world friends, and nine fictional characters during functional neuroimaging. The results showed a larger response for self than for friends and fictional others in the vMPFC, a brain region normally activated when thinking about the self or close others. Furthermore, the participants who scored higher in trait identification, “the tendency to inhabit the first-person experiences of fictional characters during narrative engagement,” showed greater neural overlap in the vMPFC between self and fictional characters: the magnitude of this correlation was greater for the fictional characters that participants felt closest to/liked the most as compared to those they felt least close to/liked the least (“Becoming”). The same study revealed that midline brain regions belonging to the so-called Default Mode Network (DMN), implicated both in self-referential and social cognition, and a supposedly mindreading-related area, the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), responded more strongly to the self than to close friends and fictional characters. These results show that also in a more cognitively focused engagement, self and others—both real and fictional ones— activate overlapping brain networks, though with different intensities, the strongest being related to the self. One could hypothesize that the systematic activation of these brain regions during mindreading tasks does not depend upon the fact that they contain mindreading-specific neurons, but because self-other differentiation at the bodily level is a necessary ingredient of any mentalizing activity (see Ammaniti and Gallese). How can the same functional mechanism—ES—be at the basis of the radically different experiential qualities we entertain when engaging with real people and fictional characters? We posit that the scaffolding functional architecture of neural reuse and ES is always at work: it accompanies us also within the world of narrative. The experience of fictional others at the level of the brain-body translates into the reuse of brain circuits normally implicated in our transactions with real others. In both cases, self and others activate similar brain regions, including sensorimotor, visceromotor and mindreading-related networks, with decreasing intensity when moving from self to real and fictional others. Another aspect specific to our engagement with literary worlds is the voice we are listening to when we read about a fictional character, a still poorly investigated phenomenon. Scholars in literary studies have focused their attention almost exclusively on the referential aspects of simulation and imagery triggered by narratives, displaying the “referential bias” (Kuzmičová), that is, neglecting or downplaying the verbal aspects of imagery. The truth is that when we read silently—a recently acquired capacity within the limited time-span of human literacy—we mobilize neural resources strikingly similar to those we activate when we speak. Indeed, inner monologue activates the motor system. McGuigan and Dollins (“Patterns”) demonstrated by Electromyography (EMG) that the muscles of the tongue and lips are activated in inner monologue in the same way as in spoken language. An fMRI study by Wildgruber et al. (“Functional”) showed activation of the primary motor cortex during inner monologue. Finally, a study by Aziz-Zadeh et al. (“Covert Speech”) showed arrest of inner monologue after transient inactivation with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the left primary motor cortex and left premotor cortex, including the posterior part of Broca’s region. In sum, as readers we not only simulate what the fictional narrative describes but also the inner voice by means of which we move within the narrative landscape. A final aspect worth mentioning deals with the idiosyncratic quality of individuals’ engagement with fictional narratives. Recent studies showed that people fare differently with their capacity to fantasize and make use of imagination: at one end of the spectrum are individuals characterized by a lack of imagery termed “aphantasia,” while at the other are people whose 67

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imagery is “as vivid as real seeing,” a condition termed “hyperphantasia” (Zeman et al. 2015; Zeman et al. 2020). Recently, Adam Zeman and colleagues showed by means of fMRI that individuals with hyperphantasia activated the left sensorimotor cortex to a greater degree than aphantasic and control participants, suggesting a potential relationship between the vividness of their mind’s eye and the intensity of their simulative embodiment, in spite of the purely visual imaginative task they were submitted to (Milton et al., “Behavioral”). These and other recent discoveries (see Gallese and Guerra) have revealed surprising new aspects of embodied cognition that will, in turn, help narratologists and others to create more nuanced models of ES. New patterns and commonalities are being defined, as are individual differences and variabilities in how we simulate experiences.

Can Our Imagined Relationships With Characters Change Us? When we read a narrative—one that we find powerful for any number of possible reasons— can that narrative change us in an enduring way? If so, is it our imagined relationships with fictional characters that produce changes in perspective, in behavior, in relationships with actual people in our daily lives? Many large claims have been made about the power of narratives to effect change and transformation in readers, some of which we will discuss and evaluate here. For the past three thousand years at least, the commonsense or folk assumption has been that stories can and do change us. Religious traditions, for example, are predicated on the idea that by reading or hearing about exemplary lives—divinities, patriarchs, prophets, saints, heroes, and heroines, whom we are invited to emulate—our moral and social identities can be shaped and transformed for the better. Repeated exposure to such narratives through scriptures, commentaries, spiritual exercises and handbooks, biographies and autobiographies, rituals, sermons, etc. have been used to transmit and form individual and group subjectivities through the medium of stories. Similar assumptions have been made within more recent secular traditions about the power of stories to expand the emotional and intellectual capacities of those who hear them, and to elicit prosocial behaviors. For example, stories about out-group characters, their rejection by or struggles with members of in-groups, are often thought to foster empathy and understanding across ethnic, religious, political, linguistic, age, gender, and/or sexual divides. Literary works, and novels in particular, have been credited with properties that were once largely within the purview of religious teaching, and are used to inculcate empathy and understanding in classroom curricula ranging from daycare to graduate school. Regarding the educational value of literature to induce compassion, understanding, and prosocial or altruistic behaviors, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that “in a curriculum for world citizenship, literature, with its ability to represent the specific circumstances and problems of people of many different sorts, makes an especially rich contribution” (86). Nussbaum gives fictional characters and our relationships with them a great deal of credit for inducing positive changes in readers. She writes, “It is impossible to care about the characters [e.g., of Sophocles, Eliot, or Dickens] and their well-being in the way the text invites, without having some very definite political and moral interests awakened in oneself ” (104). The literary theorist Suzanne Keen pushes back hard—correctly, in our opinion—on the humanistic assumptions of Nussbaum and others who promote the concept of storytelling as a “moral technology” (Pinker 48, qtd. in Keen xviii). In her book Empathy and the Novel, Keen offers various counterarguments to the folk narratology just described. Identifying with fictional others and their struggles does not guarantee real-world altruism, she argues. In fact, it may do the opposite. Keen asks, 68

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might not novel reading [in the 18th or 19th centuries] enable individuals living on incomes from the investment funds that profited from the slave trade to feel moral indignation on the behalf of imaginary others brought near by fiction, while indirectly exploiting the suffering of real people far away? (xx) In a still more disturbing example, Keen discusses the Holocaust: “Given that less than one half of one percent of people living in Nazi-occupied Europe demonstrated their altruism by rescuing Jews, the impact of novel reading, even if it were to be positively established, might well be statistically insignificant” (25–26). She wonders whether the technology of fictional worldmaking is always used for good ends—could it in fact have been used to stir up hatred? (26). Keen concludes “A society that insists on receiving immediate ethical and political yields from the recreational reading of its citizens puts too great a burden on both empathy and the novel” (168). Yet, like Nussbaum, Keen believes that teaching fiction, together with discussion and reinforcement of its messages, may bring society closer to the desired prosocial outcomes (145 ff.). Cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley and his research team have conducted empirical studies that attempt to determine how or whether fiction can change readers’ personalities. In one experiment, they asked 166 people to read Anton Chekhov’s story “The Lady With the Toy Dog” (1899) in two forms: an English translation close to the original (art condition) and a revised, documentary version of the story cast as divorce proceedings (control condition). Readers self-reported trait-changes in the so-called Big Five Inventory and stronger emotional reactions to the art condition vs. the control condition (Djikic et al.). Oatley theorizes, With a single story, any changes that occur in one’s sense of self are usually small and temporary. What may happen with the reading of a lot of fiction, however, is that they can accumulate, and the reader can become more flexible. (Passionate Muse 125) Experiments like this one are becoming more common, though there are many confounds and challenges to measuring individuals’ experiences of literature, especially across a lifetime. There may be other kinds of changes effected by the reading of literature and identification or imagined relationships with characters. Cognitive literary theorist Lisa Zunshine has proposed that well drawn literary characters help readers to develop theory of mind—the ability to imagine what others are thinking without their telling us. Characters present puzzles regarding theory of mind that readers enjoy solving (Why We Read Fiction). Similarly, Blakey Vermeule suggests that fiction reading may promote the development of Machiavellian intelligence—that is, the ability to know what others are thinking, to outwit them, and to keep track of social alliances (30). Identifying with fictional characters has had many additional uses throughout history, including some that we moderns would not expect. The rhetorician Marjorie Woods has provided a new perspective on the pedagogical uses of fictional characters in the classrooms of medieval Europe. Schoolboys were often asked to write speeches in the voice of Dido, Andromache, Hecuba, and others. (Shakespeare may also have received this grammar school training in the 16th century [2003, 288].) By identifying with and giving voice to emotionally distraught female characters, boys were trained to expand their rhetorical repertoire, writing skills, and memory abilities (2019). It is essential to note that many of the current claims about our relationships to fictional characters are both medium- and discipline-specific. There is a striking difference, for example, 69

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between the body of scholarship around literary fiction and our relationships with its characters on the one hand and, on the other, our relationships to characters in films, television, celebrity culture, games, and other forms of popular culture. While literary critics are inclined to explore the empathy, sympathy, altruistic, prosocial, and other positive effects generated by the reading of literary fiction, scholars in the fields of communication, social psychology and media theorists have taken a more problem-oriented approach to what they call “parasocial phenomena” (Brown, 2015) —that is, our attachments to media characters who may be fictional, real, or a combination thereof. In their survey of 250+ studies on this subject, a tiny percentage of which relate to print media, Nicole Liebers and Holger Schramm notice a great deal of negative psychology within this body of research, which dates back to 1956 and exploded in the 2010s. They observe that researchers of parasocial phenomena identify loneliness, dissatisfaction, emotional instability and lower intelligence as factors contributing to the formation of PSRs, yet they rarely explore the possibility of positive traits or motivations behind them (“An Inventory” 16–17). It is fascinating to observe the overall valorization of imagined relationships within the high cultural domain of literature, along with the stigmatization of such relationships in popular culture. Perhaps popular media are more immersive, or they elicit different forms of attachment. More comparative research is needed. It is hard to imagine that today’s critics would attribute loneliness, mental instability, or a lack of intelligence to a novel reader (though readers of popular genres like romance have received similar criticisms in the past), any more than television critics might attribute altruism or prosocial behavior to a binge-watcher of Breaking Bad, Narcos, or Orange Is the New Black. Or would they? It could be argued that new media such as streaming television serials are increasingly taking the cultural place of honor long occupied by literary works, especially canonical novels and dramas. The audiovisual textuality of the streaming TV series introduces a novel form of mediality, in which the role of spectators is greatly empowered with respect to novels’ readers. As Francesco Casetti proposes, the proliferation of transmedia storytelling, generated by the original series’ narrative, transforms the viewer into an experience user, “a true performer, someone who constructs his own viewing conditions, bringing himself to bear directly upon them” (189). It should be clear that this new mediality produces a new gaze, hence a different and more active form of engagement with respect to standard novel reading. The enhanced performative quality of engagement with the fictional characters populating the serial narrative ecosystems likely contributes to an increase in viewers’ attachments to those characters, boosting their affective quality and intensity, by means of the increased intensity of the embodied simulation they generate. Our parasocial relationships with television serial antiheroes have prompted critics to investigate the moral conundrum of our collective attachments to problematic protagonists who commit transgressive, criminal or taboo actions (Vaage [2016]; Mittell [2015]). Liebers and Schramm raise an interesting series of questions in their meta-analysis of scholarship on parasocial phenomena. Do such attachments, fantasies, desires, etc. vary from medium to medium? Do these phenomena develop in the same ways if one is relying on an audiovisual or simply auditory medium? Is the physical attractiveness of a novel character as significant for a parasocial relationship as it would be for a film or television character? Which medium provides the ground for the most intense or vivid attachments to characters? If one acquires a new friend in real life, does that friendship diminish a parasocial relationship (16–17)? These questions and more guarantee that the study of parasocial relationships has a bright future ahead of it. It is also clear that literary scholars and media/communications theorists need to compare notes and possible biases, whether positive or negative. 70

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Conclusion In the present chapter, within the given space limitations, we addressed from a transdisciplinary perspective our emotional engagements with fictional characters. Our main points are the following: (1) In fictional narratives, when engaging with their characters, we exploit many of the very same brain-body resources we normally employ when confronting real others, since both realms are characterized by similar social practices and performative acts. (2) Fiction, however, broadens and enhances our capacity for emotional attachment, even to transgressive characters whom we would be reluctant to approach or bond with in real life. (3) Many conversations about fictional characters and our attachments to them are presently taking place across a wide range of fields. More transdisciplinary conversations and research are needed in order to bridge the divides between research fields and advance our collective understanding. In this short chapter we have only been able to gesture toward the many breakthroughs in brain research and highlight their relevance to the phenomena of intersubjectivity in life and art, and encourage continued dialogue across disciplines.

Notes 1 The canonical Western analysis of tragic protagonists and emotional catharsis in the viewer is Aristotle’s Poetics. In the East, the text known as the Nāṭyaśāstra, attributed to Bharata Muni, developed a theory of rasas, or emotional responses to theatrical and musical performances. Rasa theory remains seminal today and has been taken up by theorists such as Patrick Colm Hogan (The Mind and “Rasa”). 2 Why we are able to identify with antiheroes is the subject of Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s excellent study The Antihero in American Television.

Works Cited Ammaniti, Massimo, and Vittorio Gallese. The Birth of Intersubjectivity. Psychodynamics, Neurobiology and the Self. Norton, 2014. Anderson, Michael L. “Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Reorganizing Principle of the Brain.” Behavioral Brain Sciences, vol. 33, no. 4, 2010, pp. 245–266. Aziz-Zadeh, L., L. Cattaneo, M. Rochat, and G. Rizzolatti. “Covert Speech Arrest Induced by rTMS over Both Motor and Nonmotor Left Hemisphere Frontal Sites.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 17, no. 6, 2005, pp. 928–938. Botvinick, Matthew, and Cohen Jonathan. “Rubber Hands Feel Touch That Eyes See.” Nature, vol. 391, no. 6669, 1998, pp. 756–756. www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/35784 Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. 3 vols. Basic Books, 1969. Broom, Timothy W., Robert S. Chavez, and Dylan D. Wagner. “Becoming the King in the North: Identification with Fictional Characters is Associated with Greater Self—other Neural Overlap.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, vol. 16, no. 6, 2021, pp. 541–551. Brown, W. J. “Examining Four Processes of Audience Involvement with Media Personae: Transportation, Parasocial Interaction, Identification, and Worship.” Communication Theory, vol. 25, no. 3, 2015, pp. 259–283. Casetti, Francesco. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come. Columbia UP, 2005. Cohen, Jonathan. “Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences With Media Characters.” Mass Communication and Society, vol. 4, no. 3, 2001, pp. 245–264. Coplan, Amy. “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 62, no. 2, 2001, pp. 141–152. Djikic, Maja, Keith Oatley, Sara Zoeterman, and Jordan B. Peterson. “On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self.” Creativity Research Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 2009, pp. 24–29. Gallese, Vittorio. “Mirror Neurons and the Social Nature of Language: The Neural Exploitation Hypothesis.” Social Neuroscience, vol. 3, nos. 3–4, 2008, pp. 317–333. ———, and Guerra Michele. The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience. Translated by F. Anderson, Oxford UP, 2020.

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Hannah Wojciehowski and Vittorio Gallese Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 79, no. 5, 2000, pp. 701–721. Grusin, Richard. Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Herman, David. “Cognitive Narratology.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al., Hamburg UP, 2012, rev. 2013, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/cognitive-narratology-revisedversion-uploaded-22-september-2013. Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2003. ———. “Rasa Theory and Dharma Theory: From the Home and the World to Bandit Queen.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 20, no. 1, 2003, pp. 37–52. Jannidis, Fotis. “Character.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al., Hamburg UP, 2012, rev. 2013, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/character. Kuzmičová, Anežka. “Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition.” Style, vol. 48, no. 3, 2014, pp. 275–293. Lenggenhager, Bigna, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger, and Olaf Blanke. “Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-consciousness.” Science, vol. 317, no. 5841, 2007, pp. 1096–1099. Liebers, Nicole, and Holger Schramm. “Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters—An Inventory of 60 Years of Research.” Communications Research, vol. 38, no. 2, 2019, pp. 4–31. Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 3, no. 3, 2008, pp. 173–192. McGuigan, F. J., and A. B. Dollins. “Patterns of Covert Speech Behavior and Phonetic Coding.” The Pavlovian Journal of Biological Science, vol. 24, 1989, pp. 19–26. Milton, F., Jon Fulford, Carla Dance, James Gaddum, Brittany Heuerman-Williamson, Kealan Jones, Kathryn F. Knight, Matthew MacKisack, Crawford Winlove, and Adam Zeman. “Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes: Aphantasia versus Hyperphantasia.” Cerebral Cortex Communications, vol. 2, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–15. Mitchell, Jason P., C. Neil, and Mazharin R. Banaji. “Dissociable Medial Prefrontal Contributions to Judgments of Similar and Dissimilar Others.” Neuron, vol. 50, 2006, pp. 655–663. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York UP, 2015. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Harvard UP, 1997. Oatley, Keith. Emotions: A Brief History. Blackwell, 2004. ———. “Meetings of Minds: Dialogue, Sympathy, and Identification, in Reading Fiction.” Poetics, vol. 26, nos. 5–6, 1999, pp. 439–454. ———. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotions in Stories. Oxford UP, 2012. Pinker, Steven. Interview. “The Seed Salon: Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldsmith.” Seed, vol. 10, 2004, pp. 44–49, 97–99. Sforza, Anna, Ilaria Bufalari, Patrick Haggard, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti. “My Face in Yours: VisuoTactile Facial Stimulation Influences Sense of Identity.” Social Neuroscience, vol. 5, no. 2, 2010, pp. 148–162. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th edition, edited by David Bevington, Pearson Longman, 2004, pp. 1091–1149. Tsakiris, Manos. “Looking for Myself: Current Multisensory Input Alters Self-Face Recognition.” PLoS ONE, vol. 3, no. 12, 2008, p. e4040. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. The Antihero in American Television. Routledge, 2016. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. Wildgruber, D., H. Ackermann, U. Klose, B. Kardatzki, and W. Grodd. “Functional Lateralization of Speech Production at Primary Motor Cortex: A fMRI Study.” NeuroReport, vol. 7, 1996, pp. 2791–2795. Wojciehowski, Hannah, and Vittorio Gallese. “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2011, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2. Woods, Marjorie Curry. Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton UP, 2019. ———. “Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a Premodern Rhetorical Exercise in the Postmodern Classroom.” Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, edited by Carol Dana Lanham, Continuum, 2003, pp. 284–294.

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Embodiment Zahavi, Dan. “Empathy and Mirroring: Husserl and Gallese.” Life, Subjectivity & Art, edited by R. Breeur and U. Melle. Phaenomenologica, vol. 201, Springer, 2012. Zeman, A., M. Dewar, and S. Della Sala. “Lives without Imagery—Congenital Aphantasia.” Cortex, vol. 73, 2015, pp. 378–380. Zeman, A., F. Milton, S. Della Sala, M. Dewar, T. Frayling, J. Gaddum, A. Hattersley, B. HeuermanWilliamson, K. Jones, M. MacKisack, et al. “Phantasia—The Psychological Significance of Lifelong Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes.” Cortex, vol. 130, 2020, pp. 426–440. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

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6 EMPIRICAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING EMOTION IN LITERATURE Te Case of Gender Chantelle Ivanski, Marta M. Maslej, and Raymond A. Mar

Abstract: The empirical study of literature involves leveraging a wide range of scientific methodologies in order to better understand how literary texts are created, comprehended, and understood. This includes methods that rely on observing and measuring behavior, analyzing large corpora of texts, and sometimes manipulating some element of interest in a laboratory. Researchers engaged in the scientific study of literature have succeeded in uncovering a large number of insights regarding the role of emotion during reading. This includes the importance of emotional content in literary texts, demonstrations of the various ways that readers engage with the depictions of emotions, and a useful taxonomy of the types of emotions elicited by literary texts. We close our discussion of empirical approaches with an in-depth case study of gender and women, as both creators and consumers of literature. In doing so, we delve into women and their reading habits; the depiction of women and their emotions within literature; how and what women are perceived to read, including the phenomenon of the romance genre; and the challenges faced by women writers.

There are many ways to examine the role of emotion in literature, with one broad approach being to adopt empirical methodologies. In this chapter, we survey various empirical methods, give examples of how these methods have been employed to study emotion in literature, and close with an in-depth case study of gender issues in literature, namely the role and representation of women.

Empirical Approaches to Studying Literature Empiricism is most closely linked to the scientific method, and understanding the process of science is an undertaking that requires lengthy study. Although we intend to do our best to provide a broad overview of various empirical methods, our overview will be necessarily incomplete and woefully lacking in detail. For readers interested in adopting empirical approaches to studying literature, our recommendation is to begin by collaborating with experienced empiricists. Embedding yourself in a lab or, ideally, several different labs employing DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-8

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different methods, will rapidly expose you to the scientific mindset and necessary procedures. In addition, it would be helpful to read an introductory textbook on research methods (for our perspective, see Cozby et al.). The basic principle behind science, and empiricism, is that in order to make sense of the world, we must engage in systematic observation. This means that when observing the world, we should employ a set of procedures that are concrete, explicit, transparent, and repeatable. Not surprisingly, there is an enormous variety of ways in which we can engage in systematic observation. One useful way to organize these different approaches is to lay them along a continuum, with minimal interference in the real-world behaviors under study and an accompanying lack of control over extraneous factors on one end, and maximal control over extraneous factors but gross intervention in real-world phenomena on the other end. There are no good or bad empirical approaches. Rather, all empirical approaches have tradeoffs, typically with respect to observing real-world phenomena in their untouched and most representative form (but giving up control over the situation), versus gaining control over extraneous factors not of interest in order to make stronger causal inferences (but giving up the realism of our situation under study). It is worth noting, however, that this is a simplification and, in practice, both field and lab studies can vary in ecological validity based on their specific design. Figure 6.1 shows how different types of empirical methods fall on this continuum, from realism (and lack of control) at one end to control (and lack of realism) at the other. Beginning on the end that favors realism over control, we have qualitative approaches. Qualitative approaches attempt to observe behaviors systematically, while preserving their meaning and context. Rather than transform observations into numbers that can be subjected to statistical analyses, qualitative approaches prefer to present the actual words, pictures, videos, or sounds of interest. A systematic approach is still adopted, however, in how this information is categorized and arranged. Interviewing several authors about their writing process, then looking for consistent themes that emerge is one example of taking a qualitative approach. Another way we can observe the real world and look for patterns is to rely on computerized methods for summarizing large amounts of existing information in the world. With respect to the study of literature, this information often takes the form of the text for many, many published books. In order to summarize these books, we can use software to represent some aspect of the text that we find interesting as numbers (e.g., word frequencies or scores), which can then be analyzed statistically. For example, we could see if the incidence of an emotion word like “shame” is associated with the decade of publication. Examining how scores on one variable (e.g., frequency of “shame”) relate or covary with those on another variable (e.g., publication year), is an example of a correlational analysis. Such an analysis can also be applied to data that is collected to answer a particular research question, rather than analyzing preexisting data like books published in a particular year. Moving further along this continuum toward control and away from realism, we have correlational survey studies. These studies rely on quantitatively measuring real-world phenomena,

Qualitative Computerized Correlational Quasi-Experimental Experimental Text Analysis

Figure 6.1 Empirical methods and the continuum from realism to control

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transforming observations into numbers that can then be analyzed statistically. In a correlational survey study, we examine whether higher scores on one variable are associated with higher or lower scores on some other variable: whether the two things we are interested in correlate or covary. An example would be surveying authors about their writing habits, and seeing if the number of hours spent writing predicts the number of books published. At the very far end of this continuum, with the greatest amount of control and the lowest level of realism, we have the scientific experiment. In an experiment, we manipulate or change the variable we believe to be the cause of some outcome, and then measure possible changes in this outcome that result from our manipulation. All the while, we attempt to control for everything else that we are not interested in. For example, imagine a study on whether caffeine helps writers to be more productive. To conduct this experiment, we could bring authors into the lab and randomly determine whether they will participate in one of two possible conditions: (1) drinking regular, caffeinated coffee before a writing session, and (2) drinking decaffeinated coffee before writing. The outcome here would be some aspect of what is produced during the writing session, such as the number of words written. Note here that we have controlled for several things that we are not interested in, such as the context (i.e., everyone writes in our controlled laboratory, in the same surroundings, with the same computer) and the unimportant aspects of the drink (i.e., decaffeinated coffee looks and tastes similar to coffee, but without the caffeine). By randomly determining who will participate in which condition, we also aim to control for how the individual writers differ from one another, allowing random chance to make our two conditions approximately equal with respect to things like author age, whether the author prefers to write in the morning or the evening, their genre of preference, and so forth. If an experiment is designed and conducted properly—appropriately controlling for all the things that are not of interest—we can use the results to make inferences regarding causality: whether caffeine makes writers more productive, in this case. If we want to study the individual differences associated with each writer specifically, we will have to conduct what is known as a “quasi-experimental” study. Since we cannot randomly assign people to be older or younger, to examine how age relates to productivity we will have to split people into groups based on their age and then compare how much they write in a given time period in our lab. In this case because we are not manipulating the predictor variable, we do not have random assignment (i.e., you cannot assign people to be older or younger). As a result, this is not a “true experiment,” which is why it is called a “quasi-experiment.” This fact also means that we shift a bit closer toward realism and away from control, as we are now studying an actual aspect of the writer that we have not artificially manipulated (i.e., their age). That said, we lose a key aspect of experimental control (i.e., random assignment), we can no longer use these results to support inferences regarding causality.

Empirical Research on Emotion and Literature The adoption of empirical methods to study literature has yielded many insights into the key role of emotion. In this section, we provide a brief overview of this work, with the aim of conveying its breadth and diversity, if not its depth.

Emotional Content in Literature One approach to studying emotions in literature has involved using computerized methods to analyze the emotional content of large collections of texts. A popular method in this category is sentiment analysis, which identifies the degree to which parts of the text are positive or 76

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negative in terms of emotional valence. In one example, by graphing sentiment throughout a narrative, one researcher was able to generate “plot shapes” for more than forty thousand novels (Jockers). This study found that the novels could be clustered into six or seven fundamental shapes, which roughly corresponded to the plot structures proposed by writer Kurt Vonnegut many years before (Vonnegut). Another commonly used method for computerized analyses is topic modeling, which can identify themes in texts based on the co-occurrences of words (Blei et al. 996–997). Topic modeling has been applied to examine the themes in more than one thousand best-selling contemporary novels, and this analysis highlights the role of emotions (Lundy 12). For example, embodied emotions were more prominent in romance and young adult fiction compared to other genres; these included references to emotions as well as their associated bodily or physiological responses (e.g., using words such as feeling, relief, heart, stomach). However, embodied emotions were prominent across all genres compared to other themes, pointing to the importance of emotions across different genres of popular fiction.

Responses to Emotional Content Because the content of literature is often emotional, researchers have also examined how readers respond to that emotional content. In one study from our own lab, for example, we performed a sentiment analysis of short stories and character sketches and examined whether sentiment was related to evaluations of the quality of these stories and characters (Maslej et al. 275, 279). We found that negative emotions were associated with higher perceived quality for short stories and greater interest in characters, as well as greater complexity of these characters. To understand why negative content appeals to readers, Emy Koopman asked people about their reasons for reading sad books in a qualitative study (“Read Sad Books” 22). People reported that they enjoyed feeling negative emotions while reading, and that reading sad books promoted reflection, allowing them to gain insight into their lives and other people (25). Koopman followed up on these findings with a study that examined how personal experience affects the tendency to engage in reflection while reading sad stories (“Texts about Suffering” 432). Participants who had experienced depression or grief read stories about these same experiences. When reading a story that matched their personal experience, participants tended to reflect more, suggesting that sad stories elicit more reflection when they are personally relevant (437, 438). Another study investigated the appeal of negative emotions in literature by examining a different type of response: brain activation, as measured with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). In a correlational design, one group of participants rated 80 short stories on their sentiment, and a second group read the stories in an MRI scanner. Stories with more negative content tended to engage brain regions associated with the ability to infer the mental states of others, including emotions (Altmann et al. 5). This link may reflect a tendency for sad stories, or those characterized by negative emotions, to inspire reflection about other people (“Read Sad Books” 25).

Emotional Responses to Reading Emotion is not just important with regards to the content of literary texts, but also in the experience of reading (Mar et al. 830). One way researchers have studied emotional responses while reading is by asking people to “mark up” a text, indicating in the margins whenever they experience an emotion, thought, or memory (Miall and Kuiken 225). It is then possible 77

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to explore how features of the text are related to these different types of responses. With this approach, researchers have found that different emotions occur when reading different parts of text. Passages appearing early in a story, or those that are descriptively dense, tend to evoke relived emotions (i.e., emotions felt when recalling a personal experience), whereas passages toward the end of stories evoke fresh emotions (i.e., emotions felt when readers are surprised by a new realization) (Cupchik et al. 370). Researchers have also measured emotional responses to literary texts by using peripheral psychophysiology: measuring how the body responds while reading. In one study, Nell noted increases in heart rate, respiration, and facial muscle activity when people read passages they reported enjoying (39). In another study, researchers identified the emotional passages of a story based on ratings provided by one group of participants (Wallentin et al. 965). These passages were associated with activation in brain regions thought to process emotional responses, as well as increased heart rate variability, in a different group of participants who listened to the story (968). The researchers interpreted this increase in heart rate variability as a physiological sign of emotional arousal in response to hearing the emotional passages. With so many psychophysiological indicators of emotion, there are many opportunities to examine the various aspects of emotional responses to reading literature with these methods.

Emotions and Writers An overview of empirical work on emotion and literature would not be complete without a brief mention of writers. Many correlational studies suggest a higher incidence of emotional disorders in writers or poets, such as depression and bipolar disorder (Andreasen and Glick 210; Ludwig 1652; Post 26). For example, a novel study analyzed interviews with writers using computerized text analysis and compared the results with those for interviews with physicists. What they found was that writers used more words related to emotions, and negative emotions in particular (Djikic et al. 194). Interestingly enough, this focus on negative emotions may actually help writers create compelling literary texts and characters, given the results of our study on how emotions relate to evaluations of quality for stories and characters (Maslej et al. 280). One fascinating study of emotion in literature also incorporated an analysis of the author’s gender (Jockers and Mimno 751). This study looked at whether the themes in more than three thousand nineteenth-century novels differed based on whether the author was a man or a woman (752). Based on this sample, novels written by women contained a higher proportion of emotional content than novels by men (762). It is unclear, however, whether this same difference would emerge with more contemporary texts.

Gender and Emotions in Literature We close with an in-depth case study of how gender relates to emotion in literature. Gender is closely related to the role of emotions in literature, based on how women participate as creators, consumers, and characters in fiction. Emotions are key to how women read, how they create, and how they are portrayed in literature. Gender is also important in determining what emotional expressions are acceptable, for both women and men, as creators and consumers of literature. We start with an overview of how reading habits differ for women and men, and from where these differences might stem. From there we examine how women are portrayed in fiction, and then how female authors differ from male ones, with a focus on the role of emotions. Finally, we end by looking at romance novels, as romance is a genre that is governed by its relationship with emotionality and seen as being both by and for women. 78

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Reading Habits of Women In general, women read more than men, with 77% of women reporting they had read at least one book in the last year compared to 67% of men (Perrin). It is not surprising, therefore, that women tend to read more fiction than men. There are many different reasons for this, with one being that reading is seen as a feminine activity. The stereotype that reading is for girls starts in early childhood. Women are far more likely to report that their parents encouraged them to read as children, compared to men (Tepper 263). Women are also more inclined toward empathy than men (Toussaint and Webb 680) and display a wider range of emotions, which might make fiction and its portrayal of characters and their emotions more appealing. Combined, these differences might explain why women are more attracted to fiction than men (Tepper 264). Gender differences appear not just in whether people read, but also in what they tend to read. These differences in what women and men read are partly reflected in how they recommend books to others. In a qualitative study, for example, women were found to recommend books to other women that they themselves enjoyed (Jarvis 272). In comparison, men are more likely to make recommendations to their female partners of books they deem as aspirational, or “more worthy” than the books their partner is already reading (Jarvis 266). In this way, men see their role as a “teacher,” whose job it is to introduce their female partners to more intellectually stimulating works, whereas women are more interested in sharing their enjoyment of reading with others. This difference parallels how women and men are expected to express themselves: in many societies, women are allowed to express their emotions and men are allowed to express their knowledge, but not vice versa. This parallel can also be observed in the types of characters men and women like to read about. When it comes to characters, women have no preference concerning the gender of the protagonist, whereas men report preferring to read about male protagonists (Summers 247). There are several possible reasons for this. This could stem from the fact that women are more inclined toward empathy than men (Toussaint and Webb 680), with empathy allowing them to more easily imagine the experiences of protagonists of a different gender. In comparison, men might have a harder time understanding the experiences of female protagonists. This difference in character preference could also be a result of the fact that female characters are often portrayed in relation to their emotions (Wolff ), with men being less interested in this emotional content. This could mean that men are more interested in books with male protagonists who engage in intellectual endeavors, although to our knowledge this has not been tested empirically.

Women as Characters In general, women are often portrayed as emotional and irrational characters in fiction, unable to make logical decisions (Wolff ). However, over time, we have seen a change in how both male and female characters are depicted. Different labels have been used to describe how female characters are typically portrayed. In the eighteenth century, as described by Wolff, there was the “sentimental woman” who was only allowed to express certain emotions, like love, betrayal, and suffering, but never moral outrage. This sentimental woman progressed into the “liberated woman,” who was allowed to be rational, intelligent, and not entirely ruled by her emotions (213). This depiction then became the “American girl” who was educated, intellectual (215), and expected to carry morality forward (216). She was bossy and feared by her husband (215) and therefore, despite being intelligent and educated, was still often defined 79

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and ruled by her emotions. The evolution of these labels suggests that although the depiction of female characters has changed over time, stereotypes regarding emotionality persist. A fascinating empirical study of the words associated with male and female characters in more than one hundred thousand fiction books (written between 1780 and 2007) documents these gender differences in how characters are depicted (Underwood et al. 3). This study, which used natural language processing (i.e., computerized text analysis), also found some interesting consistencies in these portrayals. For example, both male and female characters are portrayed to “read” relatively equally, which is in contrast to reality (18). Distinct differences in portrayals do exist, however, with female characters often associated with having “felt” things, whereas male characters are associated with having “got” things. (Whether the latter refers to “received” or “understood,” or both, is unfortunately not knowable with this technique.) Except for a period in the 1960s when male characters actually “felt” more than female ones, these associations have remained fairly constant over time (Underwood et al. 18). As another example of how emotionality is more closely tied to female characters than male ones, female characters also tend to “smile” and “laugh,” whereas male characters “grin” and “chuckle” (Underwood et al. 22). This seemingly small difference clearly highlights how female characters are allowed to be more emotionally expressive than male characters. Although these depictions do seem to be changing a bit over time, female characters are still depicted in a stereotypical fashion. It is important to note that the female characters we have discussed so far are representations of white women. Although we lack the space to properly discuss how race intersects with gender, Black women and women of color are portrayed quite differently from white women. Black women tend to be given the role of a healer or mother, often of children that are not their own (Davies 41). In fact, they are often portrayed as being more of a mother than the child’s biological mother (41).

Women as Creators Gender differences also exist with respect to how authors write, and how that writing is evaluated. For example, an empirical analysis of 10,287 books reviewed by the New York Times between 2000 and 2016 found several differences based on the gender of the author (Piper and Jean So). In this study, words used in the reviews of each book were analyzed using computerized text analysis in terms of odds ratios, which describe the probability of a given outcome given a preceding event. In this case, it was the likelihood that a certain word was used, given that the author was a man or a woman. Between 2000 and 2009, the words used most frequently in reviews of books by female authors included: mother, woman, marriage, child, family, love, beauty, sex, and emotion. In comparison, for male authors, these words included: president, government, theory, economy, leader, unit, hero, and market. This analysis was then repeated for books reviewed between 2010 and 2015, with quite similar results. Since reviews are likely to describe the dominant themes in a book, these findings suggest that female writers are more likely to write about emotions and families, whereas male writers are more likely to write about politics, war, and history (Piper and Jean So). Historically, and even in the present day, many women feel the need to write under a male or gender-neutral pseudonym in order to be published (Armitage). However, this pressure could stem from a bias against female authors on the part of publishing companies, and not necessarily from consumers. That is, publishers might think that audiences are less likely to buy books written by women than by men, regardless of reality. This belief may stem from the tendency for women to write about emotional content, which may not have as wide of 80

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an appeal, particularly among male readers. Given the clear differences between literature written by male and female authors, and the bias toward male authors perceived by many female authors, it is perhaps surprising that not much work has examined how readers evaluate authors of different genders. In one experiment, participants read the same fictional narrative and were either told that the author was male or female or were given no information about author gender (Ciechanowicz 108). When told the author was female, participants rated the author as being more intelligent, credible, nice, and sophisticated, compared to when they were told the author was male. However, when they were not told the author’s gender, they were more likely to guess that the passage was written by a man (109). Recent experimental research from our own lab found that people’s evaluations of fictional passages do not differ very much based on whether they are told it is written by a male or female author (Ivanski et al. 45). In this experiment, participants were each shown four passages (of a possible 12) and told that two were by male authors and two were by female authors. Importantly, however, the passages remained identical across conditions: only the author gender differed, as indicated by their name (10). Participants then rated the passages on several different dimensions related to quality. These evaluations of the passages were found not to differ based on whether participants were told it was by a male or female author (Ivanski et al. 45). Interestingly, however, there are some genres where we see a potential bias against publishing male authors. Specifically, male authors are more likely to use female pseudonyms when writing true crime or romance, as compared to other genres, perhaps because readers of these genres are primarily women (Romance Writers of America; Vicary and Fraley 82). Women report reading true crime to learn how to act in the situations being described (Vicary and Fraley 84), so they may feel more comfortable reading about dark crimes when they believe the author shares their gender and perspective on the situation. Additionally, women tend to use true crime as a way to explore scary situations (Vicary and Fraley 84). Thus, they may feel safer when reading these details if they believe they are written by another woman. This is likely because the main focus of the true crime genre has been domestic crimes, going back to at least the 1970s (Browder 936). Because these crimes tend to be committed against women by men they know, it makes sense that female readers would feel that female authors are better able to describe these scenarios, as another woman is likely more able to empathize with their perspective in such a situation. A similar phenomenon might be at play when male authors write under female pseudonyms for the romance genre. Because men are seen as less emotional than women, female romance readers might trust women authors more to deliver the emotionally fulfilling content that is expected when reading a romance novel.

Te Case of Romance Novels Discussing romance novels is a good way to end this chapter as this genre brings together everything we have talked about with regard to women, emotions, and literature. There are two kinds of romance novels: strong and soft romance. Soft romance novels are short and simple to read and typical of what comes to mind when thinking of a romance novel. In comparison, strong romance novels focus on a strong, capable, female protagonist (Owen 537). To be classified as a romance, a book must meet two requirements: (1) there must be a central love story, and (2) the story must have an “emotionally satisfying” ending (i.e., a happy ending) (Romance Writers of America). Emotion plays a central role in both of these requirements. Romance novels grew in popularity in the 1970s, when the Canadian publishing company Harlequin began to successfully distribute these books in the United States (Brackett 348). 81

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Since then, it has grown into a billion-dollar industry that makes up the largest proportion of book sales in America (Costanza). Given the emotional content of romance, it is not surprising that it is largely written by, and for, women. It is estimated that 99% of romance authors are women (Lois and Gregson 464), although this estimate may be slightly inflated as men will occasionally write romance under female pseudonyms (Readers Entertainment). Readers of romance are also predominantly female (82% of readers; Romance Writers of America). Despite the popularity of romance novels, there is a seemingly universal negative view of this genre. Readers themselves know that romance is viewed poorly by the public and will try to hide the fact that they are reading a romance novel (Brackett 350). Romance readers also feel that they need to justify why they enjoy these books or distance themselves from other romance readers. In one qualitative study, every reader interviewed said some version of “I’m not like most romance readers” (Brackett 355). Some women see reading romance as an indulgence and a way to escape life (Jarvis 266). However, reading romance novels can be a point of conflict between partners, as women feel guilty for reading them and male partners often feel irritated that their partners are not reading something more intellectually stimulating (Jarvis 266). Romance novels are often described as being “trashy” or “porn for women” (Lois and Gregson 466), which exemplifies the negative stereotype of them. But this characterization does not seem to match up with the true content of romance novels, with sexually explicit material not being a requirement for the romance genre. So why is romance viewed so negatively by the general public? It may be a combination of factors, but the stereotype that the material is trashy and lacks intellectual value is likely a contributing factor. Another reason why readers and writers of romance may feel embarrassed and judged is that content that is emotionally stimulating, like romance novels, is not seen as being as valuable as intellectually stimulating content. As an example of this, when men write romance novels, they are often derogated for being feminine: writing about romance is seen as a women’s activity and thus of lesser value (Lois and Gregson 469).

Conclusion As demonstrated in this chapter, there are many ways people can, and have, studied literature. These methods vary in the amount of control and realism, with qualitative research providing the most realism and least control. On the other end of the continuum is experimental research, which has the most control, but the least amount of realism. Of the different methods that can be used to study literature, there is no one right method. Rather, the researcher needs to decide what is best for their topic of interest and particular goals. The use of these different methods has provided valuable insights into the role of emotion in literature. For example, the computerized analysis of texts has uncovered the importance of embodied emotions across various genres of fiction. The appeal of negative emotions, in particular, has also been confirmed using a variety of qualitative and correlational methods. These methods have helped us to better understand the types of emotions elicited by literary texts, either by asking readers about their emotions or measuring psychophysiological responses during reading. The emotional content of literature, however, may differ by gender, with women including more of this content in their novels compared to men (Jockers and Mimno 762). As creators of fiction, there seems to be a disparity in the number of male and female authors, although this gap may be narrowing. Despite the fact that many publishers seem to think that readers prefer the work of male authors, some research has shown that this is not actually the case (Ivanski et al. 45). As readers, women’s interests in emotional content are seen as being somehow inferior to the interests of their male peers. And as characters, women 82

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are often defined by their emotions. It is thus unsurprising that emotional literature such as romance fiction is a female domain and, therefore, less important than “intellectual” or stereotypically male content. Empirical approaches have proven useful in exploring these complex interactions between gender, emotions, and literature. We hope that our overview of various empirical methodologies helps to motivate more academics with an interest in the role of emotion in literature to consider these approaches.

Acknowledgment We would like to express our great appreciation to Javeria Shahid and Jeswin Paul for their help in preparing this chapter.

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7 EVOLUTION How Evolved Emotions Work in Literary Meaning Joseph Carroll

Abstract: For more than two millennia, literary scholars and critics have used intuitive folk psychology to characterize the motives and tonal qualities in individual literary works and literary genres. Evolutionary research on motives and emotions can now improve significantly on the insights available to folk psychology. It can provide scientifically valid categories for analyzing the subjects depicted in literature and the emotional configurations that make them meaningful. The dozens of emotions identified in empirical research can be organized and explained by an evolutionary understanding of human motives, developmental phases, neurological systems, and specifically human forms of cognitive and social development. This chapter organizes emotions in eight categories and uses those categories to outline several sets of genres characterized by the emotions they contain and evoke. Commentary on Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” illustrates the interaction of emotions in characters, authors, and readers.

Introduction Literature evokes the subjective quality of experience—what the novelist Henry James calls “felt life,” and what the psychologist Carroll Izard calls “a particular quality of consciousness, primarily feeling or affective tone” (Izard “Connections” 359; James 6). Meaning in literature depends largely on the emotions it expresses, depicts in characters, and evokes in readers. Fictional characters engage in emotionally modulated interactions with one another. Writers adopt an emotional stance toward their own characters and toward their imagined readers. Readers respond emotionally to fictional characters and also to the emotions implied or directly expressed by authors. The emotions involved in all these literary relationships are the same emotions people experience in real life (Hogan Minds; Mar and Oatley). Those emotions have evolved through natural selection. They regulate behaviors such as avoiding danger, forming friendships, negotiating social hierarchies, finding and keeping mates, parenting, bonding with siblings and other kin, and identifying with social groups (Al-Shawaf et al.; Nesse; Sznycer et al.; Tooby and Cosmides “Emotions”). Those evolved behaviors are also the central subjects with which literature occupies itself (Carroll “Minds”). For more than two millennia, literary scholars and critics have used intuitive folk psychology to characterize the motives of fictional characters and the tonal qualities of literary works. They have also used folk psychology as a DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-9

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basis for theorizing about the emotions that characterize literary genres. Evolutionary research on motives and emotions can now improve significantly on the insights available to folk psychology. It can provide scientifically valid categories for analyzing the subjects depicted in literature and the emotional configurations that make them meaningful. Darwin initiated research into the coevolution of motives and emotions (Descent; Expression), but the evolutionary understanding of emotions became a cumulative research program only in the 1960s. Working with cross-cultural recognition of facial expressions, Paul Ekman and his colleagues concentrated on identifying a few “basic” universally recognizable emotions ( joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise). In that same period, evolutionists in anthropology and psychology were creating a cumulative research program about human motives. In the past 20 years, evolutionary research on emotions has been developing very rapidly. Affective neuroscience has probed the underlying neurological processes that humans share with other mammals (Panksepp and Biven). Cross-cultural research has identified dozens of emotions recognizable in facial expressions, body language, touch, music, and responses to video clips. Just in the past few years, researchers have made a breakthrough in understanding how emotions cluster into distinct groups that are closer to or more distant from other distinct groups. While expanding the number of emotions and refining our knowledge of their relationships to one another, empirical researchers have also been developing a more nuanced understanding about the way different cultural ecologies influence the combination and expression of emotions (Keltner and Lerner; Keltner et al. Emotions). Developmental psychologists have been refining our knowledge of how social emotions interact with a child’s emerging cognitive capacities for simulation, self-reflection, perspective taking, and mental time travel (Harris et al.; Lewis; Shiner “Stability”). Emotions are psychophysiological events that inform an organism of some actual or possible harm or benefit and prepare the organism to respond. The major components of emotion studied in psychology include autonomic nervous system reactions producing physiological changes; interactions among neural networks, neurotransmitters, and hormones; cognitive processes of appraisal and regulation of emotions; communication, or the expression and perception of emotion; and subjective experience. For literary study, the most important aspect of emotions is subjective experience: the awareness of some important change in the quality of feeling. Quality of feeling is the basis of “tone” in literature. In literary meaning, emotional tone intertwines both with themes and with verbal form to produce a total structure of meaning (Carroll “Minds”; Hogan Literature; Oatley). After summarizing the history and current state of evolutionary research on emotions, this chapter uses an evolutionary model of human nature to organize emotion terms within eight categories. Those categories serve as the framework for understanding emotions in individuals (authors, characters, and readers), literary genres, and literary periods. Commentary on a short story by Jack London illustrates how emotions in characters, authors, and readers help produce meaning. The conclusion identifies ways literary scholars can benefit from assimilating empirical psychological research on emotions.

Evolutionary Research on Emotions The current evolutionary understanding of emotion derives from the confluence of multiple streams of research, especially from evolutionary psychology, cross-cultural ethological research on emotional expression, affective neuroscience, and evolutionary developmental psychology. Evolutionary psychologists identify emotions as superordinate coordinating programs for other programs: perception, attention, memory, goals, motivational priorities, 86

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information-gathering, conceptual frameworks, cognitive inference, communication and expression, learning, reflexes, mood, energy, effort, physiology, and behavior (Al-Shawaf et al.; Sznycer et al.; Tooby and Cosmides “Emotions”). As a distinct school within the evolutionary human sciences, evolutionary psychology combines a computer-modeled idea of human cognition with a sociobiological reduction to inclusive fitness. As a result, evolutionary psychologists sometimes give the impression that humans are automata operating on algorithms that maximized fitness in the forager ecology of the Pleistocene and that, in the post-agricultural world, humans continue to function as robotic vehicles mindlessly executing once adaptive programs. That perspective enables a systematic specification of basic human motives but fails to register specifically human imaginative powers or evoke specifically human forms of subjective experience. Jaak Panksepp, who pioneered research into the neurological systems from which emotions emerge, emphasized subjective feeling states. His work on mammalian limbic structures has been massively influential, but most of his research was done on rodents, and he gave little attention to the specifically human emotions that emerge after infancy and develop all the way through the juvenile period in humans. Like non-evolutionary socialconstructivist theorists of emotion (Barrett), Panksepp regarded the neocortex as essentially a blank slate in which all content and structure is provided by social learning (Panksepp and Biven). Paul Ekman, who pioneered the modern cross-cultural study of emotional expression, was arguably the most influential psychologist regenerating evolutionary emotional research after the behaviorist interregnum of the early twentieth century. Like Darwin and Panksepp, Ekman emphasized continuity between humans and other mammals. That emphasis limited his ability to explain specifically human emotions that depend on higher human cognitive capacities (Ekman Emotions). That limitation is being dissolved by evolutionary developmental psychologists and by neuroscientists who study the imagination (Buckner and DiNicola; Harris et al.; Horikawa et al.; Lewis; Margulies et al.; Shiner “Stability”; Taylor). A thoroughgoing evolutionary understanding of emotions would, like evolutionary psychology, use adaptationist logic as an encompassing explanatory framework; like Ekman’s emotional ethology and Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, it would register the special status of the mammalian emotions, conserved deep within the limbic system of the brain; like evolutionary developmental psychology, it would recognize the specifically human emotions that emerge in the course of cognitive and imaginative development; like emotional ethology, affective neuroscience, and developmental emotional psychology, it would identify the origin of emotion in spontaneous affective processes in the brain; it would recognize that emotions can be unconscious but that human emotions are often and importantly filtered through reflection and imagination (Keltner and Lerner; Keltner et al. Emotions). To a degree unparalleled in animals of other species, humans build an imaginative virtual reality that influences their behavior. Simulation, mental time travel, the awareness of other minds, and shared mental contents provide the capabilities for constructing an imaginative virtual reality (Carroll “Imagination”). Imaginative virtual realities are populated by myth, religion, ideology, and the arts, including literature and its oral antecedents (Carroll et al. Culture). Emotions modulate values in all these forms of imagination (Horikawa et al.), and values influence behavior. For several decades, Dacher Keltner has been one of the most wide-ranging and influential psychologists in the field of evolutionary emotion research. (Understanding Emotions, coauthored by Keltner, Keith Oatley, and Jennifer Jenkins, is the most widely used textbook on emotions.) Like Ekman, Keltner concentrated on emotional expression, but he also expanded the scope of cross-culturally recognized emotional expression to the voice, touch, body language, dance, and music. As a result, he increased the number of emotions cross-culturally 87

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recognizable in emotional expression (Keltner et al. “Expression”). He also integrated research on emotional expression with research from multiple other fields of psychology: cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, personality psychology, social psychology, cultural psychology, and neuroscience. He was a leading figure in integrating evolutionary concepts of conserved emotions with “appraisal theory,” the idea that spontaneously generated emotions undergo a secondary process of evaluation and contextualization (Keltner and Lerner; Keltner et al. Emotions). At the highest level of theoretical debate, two main schools now contend for primacy in emotion research: the evolutionary school that leads from Darwin through Ekman, Izard, and Panksepp to Keltner and his associates, and the constructivist school most prominently identified with the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett. Constructivists regard the brain as a general-purpose learning organ and reject the idea that distinct emotions have any identifiable universal characteristics in neurological activation or forms of expression. From that perspective, two main dimensions—valence and arousal—form the biological basis for emotions; all more specific attributes are the result of concepts and beliefs generated through social learning (Barrett; Barrett et al.; Cowen and Keltner “Clarifying”). The constructivist theory of emotions is thus a variant of the Standard Social Science Model of human behavior that serves as the chief foil for evolutionary psychology (Tooby and Cosmides “Psychological Foundations”). The bulk of the research done now on the psychology of emotions is at least implicitly evolutionary. It acknowledges that emotions arise spontaneously from dedicated neural circuits, that these circuits display a complex functional structure produced through evolution by means of natural selection, and that, accordingly, they are in basic ways homologous with the neural circuits of other mammals (Fox et al.). Most psychologists of emotion recognize that emotions display a species-typical pattern of emergence and have cross-culturally recognizable manifestations in expression, behavior, physiological correlates, and subjective experience. Since the post-structuralist revolution of the 1970s and 80s, most humanists have aligned themselves with constructivist views of human nature. They have accordingly been hostile to the work of evolutionary social scientists who argue for the evolved basis of human motives and emotions (Carroll et al. “Survey”). Scholars in literature who have been receptive to the idea of evolved emotions include “literary Darwinists” and some scholars affiliated with “cognitive” literary theory (Carroll “Theory”; Hogan Literature; Jonsson; Oatley).

Mapping Emotions A central challenge for evolutionary literary scholars is to build a bridge from the most basic evolved features of human nature to the most refined and complex forms of literary meaning— from brute instincts for survival and reproduction to theme, tone, and style in imaginative verbal constructs. Research on mapping emotions can help evolutionary literary scholars build that bridge. Mapping has vastly enriched the vocabulary of emotions available within an evolutionary framework, and it has begun to demonstrate how that vocabulary is structured. In an article published in 2017, Keltner joined forces with a younger colleague, Alan Cowen, to produce a study that made a major methodological breakthrough. They developed a statistical technique that enabled them to map emotions relative to one another in two-dimensional space, thus indicating by physical proximity whether specific emotions are closely related to one another, or, by contrast, widely separate and affectively antithetical. This technique also enabled them to determine that emotions have “fuzzy boundaries”; they blend into one another by insensible degrees. In the first study using this technique, Cowen and Keltner had thousands of respondents identify emotions, 27 in all, elicited by brief video clips (“Gradients”). That 88

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first article was followed by a series in which Cowen, Keltner, and their colleagues used their mapping technique to study relationships among emotions elicited by brief human vocalizations (Cowen et al. “Vocalization”), speech prosody (Cowen et al. “Speech Prosody”), emotion words (Cowen et al. “Mapping the Passions”), facial expressions (Cowen and Keltner “Face Displays”), facial expression in art of the ancient Americas (Cowen and Keltner “Art”), and music clips (Cowen et al. “Music”). Their most extensive map of emotion words so far, in “Mapping the Passions” (2019), identifies 49 emotion words that have distinct meanings but blend into other words to produce complex, subtle, and even paradoxical combinations. The emotion words in “Mapping the Passions” can be used to illustrate the way spatial contiguity and distance reflect similarity or dissimilarity among emotions (https://s3-us-west-1. amazonaws.com/emotionwords/map49.html). For instance, the words lust, romance, love, caring, and sympathy are contiguous. Lust is contiguous to romance; romance to love; love to caring; and caring to sympathy. Lust can of course be isolated, divided from romance, to say nothing of caring and sympathy. Nonetheless, lust often intermingles with romance, and romance with love. A successful marriage would typically include lust and romance, at least for the first years, and those emotions would ripen into love, caring, and sympathy (Fisher; Sternberg). The cluster of emotions centering on romance and love is antipodal—on the opposite side of the map—from a different cluster of contiguous words: anger, hate, contempt, and repugnance. So also, the words shame, humiliation, and disappointment form a cluster antipodal to the cluster formed by the words pride, confidence, and triumph. Sadness, melancholy, and despair are antipodal to joy, amusement, laughter, and elation. Understanding that emotions cluster in specific ways that correlate with evolved human motives and concerns provides a basis for understanding genre in literature. A map of emotion words makes it possible for critics to define large governing structures of meaning that depend on emotion, to discern the sequences of emotion that produce distinct patterns of reader response, and to distinguish fine shades of emotional meaning by reference to systematic relationships among emotion words and the emotions they represent. Subsequent sections on emotion categories and on genres defined by emotions aim to support these claims and demonstrate the relevance of emotional mapping to literary analysis. The emotion words in “Mapping the Emotions” include most of the smaller numbers of emotion words in maps derived from responses to video clips, vocalizations, facial expressions, speech prosody, ancient American art, and music. The topographical relationships of words in the various maps are not perfectly consistent with one another, but the level of consistency is high enough to provide a robust emotional vocabulary for the systematic analysis of emotional configurations in literature. The precision and consistency in the results of emotional mapping will almost certainly increase as researchers refine the techniques, expand and differentiate respondents, and increase the range of emotion-eliciting stimuli. Refinement and development will also come from convergent work in neuroimaging (Horikawa et al.; Koide-Majima et al.).

Eight Emotion Categories The recent proliferation of empirically grounded emotion terms will be more useful for evolutionary literary scholars if these terms are organized within a model of human nature. That organization makes it easier to connect emotions with the evolved structure of human life history—its developmental phases, crucial situations, and reproductive and social relationships (Carroll “Minds”). If we take account both of the emotions humans share with other mammals and the emotions that arise out of specifically human cognitive and social adaptations, the emotional vocabulary offered in the work of Cowen, Keltner and their colleagues can 89

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be organized within a set of eight categories. These eight categories are composed of emotions that cluster together because (1) They are simple bodily sensations (for example, pain, pleasure, thirst, hunger, fatigue, queasiness); (2) They reflect different levels of arousal (for example, boredom, tranquility, excitement, anxiety, stress, strain); (3) They are “basic” in that they either appear in infancy or (for reproductive and parenting emotions) after puberty; they reflect mammalian adaptations that have been conserved in humans; they do not depend on the specifically human cognitive and social capacities that emerge in childhood (for example, joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, lust, love, and amusement/laughter); (4) They are responses to results of anticipated outcomes (for example, relief, satisfaction, frustration, disappointment, and despair); (5) They are social emotions that emerge in childhood, reflect specifically human capacities for self-awareness, and are directed inward toward the self (for example, self-pity, embarrassment, shame, humiliation, confidence, pride, and triumph); (6) They are social emotions that emerge in childhood, reflect specifically human capacities for self-awareness, and are directed outward toward other people or social groups (for example, sympathy, gratitude, admiration, fairness, respect, trust, commitment, loyalty, pride in family, pride in social group, envy, contempt, indignation, defiance, and hatred); (7) They are primarily cognitive and reflective—rational or imaginative—in character (for example, interest, curiosity, contemplation, entrancement, rumination, realization, epiphany, inspiration, and pensiveness); or (8) They are aesthetic and/or spiritual in character (for example, reverence, awe, adoration, marveling, and transcendence). The emotions identified in categories one through four are shared with other mammals and do not depend on specifically human powers of cognition and sociality such as shared attention, simulation, mental time travel, perspective taking, and identification with a social group. The emotions identified in categories five through eight emerge only after infancy, appear minimally or not at all in other mammals, and only gradually ripen during childhood and adolescence (Carroll “Imagination”; Taylor; van Mulukom). The emotions in category three include both the “basic emotions” on which Ekman and Izard focused and the “primary process” emotion systems Panksepp identified. Basic emotions have a primal status; they pervade all human relationships and concerns, even those that depend also on specifically human cognitive and social capacities. They set the dominant tone in major genres such as comedy, tragedy, and satire. Identifying the clusters of emotions that appertain to basic animal life, human self-awareness, social interactions, cognitive processes, and aesthetics would enable evolutionary literary scholars to situate the study of emotional tone in literary works and genres in relation to empirical research on each of these aspects of human behavior and experience.

Using Evolutionary Emotion Teory in Literary Study: Individuals, Specifc Literary Works, Genres, and Periods Emotion words can be used to characterize individual persons, specific literary works, literary genres, and literary periods. When applied to individual persons, they can be used to describe fictional characters, authors, and readers. Specific literary works produce an orchestrated 90

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sequence of emotions. Hence the use of emotionally evocative musical scores in films; music suggests the emotional state of characters and directs the emotions of readers. The orchestrated sequence of emotions among characters in fictional narratives is encompassed by the emotional attitudes of the author. The interaction of emotions among characters, authors, and readers operates at the highest level of meaning in individual literary works. At that level, emotions also interact with subject matter, theme, and verbal form (Carroll “Minds”; Oatley). For organizing multiple literary works, genre and period commonly serve as the highest levels of classification. Interpretation also frequently takes account of the way genre conventions constrain the organization of meaning in individual works. Virtually all literary scholars invoke genre terms, but genre theory has long lacked a principle through which to identify natural kinds (Fowler). Natural kinds are structures that occur in nature and that can be discovered through scientific research. From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are natural kinds (Izard “Kinds”). They thus offer a natural basis for organizing genres in a meaningful way. Several literary genres are essentially defined by their emotional qualities. Except for genres defined solely by verbal form (the novel, the lyric poem, the play), all genres can be usefully discussed in terms of their emotional qualities. Literary periods are complex and often heterogeneous, involving socioeconomic, political, religious, and intellectual history, developments of verbal form, and qualities of mood. As with genre, emotion provides a natural basis on which to compare the diverse features of periods.

Individuals Discussion of emotions in individuals—characters, authors, and readers—involves a range that extends from emotions proper to moods to temperament (Ekman “Argument”; Keltner and Lerner; Keltner et al. Emotions; Shiner “Differences”). Emotions proper are relatively brief, lasting seconds or minutes, usually have some distinct cause, and prepare the organism to respond in some definite way. Moods last longer, for hours, days, or even weeks, often have no clear precipitating event, and are more likely to influence cognition than to produce a specific action. Emotions can be orchestrated in sequences of responses for characters and readers. Moods can distinguish an author’s overarching attitude. Few readers, for example, would regard Thomas Hardy’s novels as generally cheerful in mood, or Jane Austen’s as generally gloomy. Mood shades into temperament—a disposition to feel one way rather than another. Temperament is the psychophysiological basis of personality. Young infants already display distinct temperamental differences. Some infants are timid, others fretful, still others buoyant, energetic, and cheerful. Personality intertwines with life goals and self-narratives to produce individual identity (McAdams Personality; McAdams “Stories”; Shiner “Differences”). One can hardly talk about characters or authors without tacitly invoking some concept of personality. In literary meaning, the personality of individual readers interacts with the personalities of characters and authors.

Genres The following lists group literary genres into a few large clusters that have overlapping emotional components. The emotion words used to describe the genres are taken from the emotional maps produced by Cowen, Keltner, and their colleagues, especially the semantic field map from “Mapping the Emotions” (that map has their largest number of emotion terms). Emotions that seem clearly central to a given genre are boldfaced. The emotions identified here are at times felt more by characters than by readers, or vice versa, but sympathetic or vicarious 91

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participation in characters’ experience means that in most cases, the stipulated emotions are felt by both characters and readers. A main exception is satire, in which the author and reader share hostile emotions directed at characters. Sex, Love, and Amusement Pornography (sexual desire, arousal, lust, ecstasy, orgasm, satisfaction) Romance (sexual desire, romantic attraction, ecstasy, love, satisfaction) Comedy (happiness, amusement, relief, surprise) Romantic comedy (sexual desire, romantic attraction, love, happiness, satisfaction, amusement) Cringe comedy (embarrassment, awkwardness, amusement) Satire (anger, disgust, contempt, irony, amusement, doubt, distrust, suspicion) Pain and Sorrow Horror (anxiety, fear, disgust, pain) Tragedy (anxiety, distress, fear, realization, pain, sadness, shame, guilt, sympathy, compassion, pity, disappointment, regret, frustration, despair, awe, satisfaction) Elegy (sadness, love, sympathy, admiration, reminiscence—a combination that could be summed up as “grief ”) Aesthetic Moods Pastoral (contentment, aesthetic appreciation, calmness, contemplation) The Romantic Sublime (awe, wonder, amazement, aesthetic contemplation, entrancement, elation, epiphany) Contention and Struggle Heroic adventure (excitement, fear, relief, triumph, pride, admiration, satisfaction, elation, glory) Propaganda (ingroup/outgroup emotions: pride, camaraderie, fierce loyalty; anger, envy, resentment, doubt, distrust—the negative emotions altogether making up hatred) Cognition and Refection Mysteries, detective fiction (interest, curiosity, concentration, surprise, satisfaction) Philosophical poems and novels (interest, curiosity, urge to explore, earnestness, contemplation, rumination, pondering, pensiveness) Pornography is perhaps the simplest genre, taking only one subject matter (sex), aimed at exciting only one main emotion (lust), and tending to only one conclusion (orgasm). Tragedy is perhaps the most complex genre, exciting a contradictory range of emotions that are centered on sadness but also provide a sense of grandeur and satisfaction. Heroic adventure offers an example of emotions moving along a smooth gradient to an unequivocal conclusion. The culminating emotion of heroic adventure is triumph. In responses to music clips, “scary, fearful” music blends into “anxious, tense” music, and anxious, tense music culminates in “triumphant, heroic” music (Cowen et al. “Music”): www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~acowen/music. html#modal. The horror genre offers a slightly more complex example. Horror is defined by anxiety, fear, and disgust (Clasen). In responses to video clips, horror is bordered on one side 92

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by fear and on the other by disgust. Anxiety shades into fear, which shades into horror, but disgust and anxiety do not blend with one another (Cowen and Keltner “Gradients”): https:// s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/uncensored.html. In satire, disgust blends not with fear but with contempt and anger to produce a feeling of alienation, disapproval, and moral superiority. These genre categories could be used descriptively, with no reference to their evolutionary origins or functions, but that use would forego an essential advantage of an evolutionary understanding of emotions—the intertwining of emotions with motives. Our best understanding of human motives comes from “human life history theory”—the theory of the structure of the human life cycle, with all its developmental phases and species-typical forms of reproductive and social relationships (Carroll “Minds”). The genres associated with sex and reproduction—pornography and romantic comedy—offer the most obvious cases for the intertwining of emotions with evolved human motives (Salmon and Symons; Saunders). But the same kind of argument can be made for all the genres. Consider heroic adventure. Protagonists do not set off in quest of just any random goal; heroic adventure most often involves a quest for romance, love, status, wealth, or power. Or consider tragedy—Oedipus Rex, King Lear. Tragedy most often rips apart the most intimate kin relationships. The pathos of tragedy typically depends on violating evolved human dispositions for family bonds (Carroll “Violence”).

Literary Periods Any given literary period contains multiple genres, but some genres are more characteristic and central to the period than others. Jacobean tragedy and metaphysical poetry are the predominant genres of the early seventeenth century in England. The eighteenth century is dominated by irony and satire in poetry, the novel, and drama. The novel is defined in the first place by form (a long prose fictional narrative), but the Victorian novel, at least until about 1880, is almost exclusively in the mode of romantic comedy (Carroll et al. Graphing Jane Austen). Modernism has no clearly dominant genre, but much of modernism can be characterized by its repudiation of the romantic comedy mode. Modernists sought alternative sources of value, finding resolutions in genres as diverse as the pornographic fantasias of Henry Miller, the quasi-pornographic exuberance of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the ruminative inner monologues of Joyce, the reverential religious poems of the later T. S. Eliot, and the ethereal associative meditations of Virginia Woolf.

Emotion in Characters, Authors, and Readers: An Example From Jack London The preceding sections in this chapter deal mostly in abstract generalizations about emotions in characters, authors, and readers. An example from literature should make these general ideas more vivid and particular in the reader’s imagination. The narrator in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” stands apart from the emotions of the main character, a relative newcomer to the Yukon who sets out on a long journey on foot, alone except for a dog, in a spell of cold so severe that his spittle freezes and splinters before it reaches the ground. The man has been warned not to travel alone in such weather, but has failed to heed the advice. He steps through snow into fast-running water, then tries to start a fire to thaw his frozen feet. A series of mishaps leaves him unable to escape the consequences of his imprudence. His hysteria gradually builds, then sinks into exhausted resignation as he 93

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lies down and waits to freeze to death. Readers can’t help but be caught up in the man’s rising terror, but at the same time they stand back with London, coolly appraising the man’s state of mind, judging his folly, and reflecting philosophically on the distinction between the man and his dog, who knows instinctively that one should not be out in such cold. The man lacks the dog’s instinct but also lacks the “imagination” that would enable him to foresee the kind of danger the cold presents. The story London tells enables him to articulate his vision of humans as creatures partially disconnected from instinct, depending on imagination to guide them, but confronting the same mortal dangers that excite primal passions in other animals. Competent and sensitive readers do not read the story only to experience the terror and despair of the protagonist; it is not a horror story, or not that only. Nor do they read it only to take away a lesson in prudence, even if that lesson is generalized beyond the particular circumstances of traveling alone in severe weather. Whatever general conclusions capable readers might ultimately derive from the story, at the highest level of sympathetic participation in London’s own imaginative experience, they occupy a world view polarized between primal animal passions and detached reflective consciousness about the human condition. That is London at his best. Experiencing the story’s meaning on this level depends on a certain kind of emotional intelligence: the intelligence to register the reality of confronting death, what it feels like, and simultaneously to inhabit the region of cool, dispassionate contemplation evoked by the narrator’s emotional tone. Experiencing the story on this level can permanently alter a reader’s own outlook on life, strengthening the reader’s mind, making it tougher, but also enriching the reader’s emotional repertory and coloring the range of possible emotional response to all experience.

Conclusion Literary meaning depends crucially on emotion—not just the emotions of characters, but also the emotions of authors as they respond to the characters they depict, and the emotions of readers as they respond to the emotions both of those characters and of their authors. Good literary critics intuitively understand this. Their criticism aims at capturing the feeling tones of the works they analyze and evaluate. But working intuitively with emotions is like playing by ear in music. Musicians who have no formal training, no matter how talented they are, make mistakes, hit wrong notes, and become baffled by the limitations in the formal conventions they have internalized through practice. For literary critics, making use of the current range of empirically derived and theoretically rationalized knowledge about emotions could be like talented but untrained musicians taking a course in music theory. Interpretive critics would have their intuitive perceptions expanded and sharpened by an abundance of emotion concepts set into systematic relationship with one another. That kind of improvement in practical knowledge would also provide the necessary basis for developing genre theory, a level of theory that enables literary scholars to speak meaningfully about large classes of literary works. The study of literary periods, like the study of genre, has been endlessly controversial. Having a firm basis in fact limits the scope of controversy, shrinking the space of possible explanation, and giving guidance in weighing plausibility among alternative explanations (Gottschall). The same benefits would apply, perhaps even more forcefully, to empirical literary study. Emotions mapped to music and video clips can also be mapped to literary texts. Empirically grounded ideas about the structure of emotions in genres and periods can give stimulus and constraint— the two requisites of productive research—to experimental research and to the digital/computational humanities. Machine analysis of emotion words over vast numbers of texts could make literary theory and literary history scientific in ways that scholars have only just begun to 94

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imagine (Jacobs et al.). Current evolutionary research on emotion has broken through barriers that have existed since the very beginnings of literary study. It is time for literary scholars to start harvesting this rich field.

Works Cited Al-Shawaf, Laith, et al. “Human Emotions: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective.” Emotion Review, vol. 8, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1–14. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. “Emotions Are Constructed with Interoception and Concepts within a Predicting Brain.” The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, edited by Andrew S. Fox et al., Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 33–38. ———, et al. “Nature of Emotion Categories: Comment on Cowen and Keltner.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 97–99. Buckner, Randy L., and Lauren M. DiNicola. “The Brain’s Default Network: Updated Anatomy, Physiology and Evolving Insights.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 20, no. 10, 2019, pp. 593–608. Carroll, Joseph. “Evolutionary Literary Theory.” The Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory, edited by David H. Richter, Wiley, 2018, pp. 425–438. ———. “The Extremes of Conflict in Literature: Violence, Homicide, and War.” The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, edited by Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 413–434. ———. “Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts.” Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, edited by Joseph Carroll et al., Springer, 2020, pp. 31–52. ———. “Minds and Meaning in Fictional Narratives: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 135–146. ———, et al., editors. “A Cross-Disciplinary Survey of Beliefs About Human Nature, Culture, and Science.” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–32. ———. et al., editors. Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture. Springer, 2020. ———. et al., editors. Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford UP, 2017. Cowen, Alan S., and Dacher Keltner. “Clarifying the Conceptualization, Dimensionality, and Structure of Emotion: Response to Barrett and Colleagues.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 22, no. 4, 2018, pp. 274–276. ———. “Self-Report Captures 27 Distinct Categories of Emotion Bridged by Continuous Gradients.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 114, no. 38, 2017, pp. E7900–E7909. ———. “Universal Facial Expressions Uncovered in Art of the Ancient Americas: A Computational Approach.” Science Advances, vol. 6, no. 34, 2020, p. eabb1005. ———. “What the Face Displays: Mapping 28 Emotions Conveyed by Naturalistic Expression.” American Psychologist, vol. 75, no. 3, 2020, pp. 349–364. Cowen, Alan S. et al. “Mapping 24 Emotions Conveyed by Brief Human Vocalization.” American Psychologist, vol. 74, no. 6, 2019, pp. 698–712. ———. “Mapping the Passions: Toward a High-Dimensional Taxonomy of Emotional Experience and Expression.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol. 20, no. 1, 2019, pp. 69–90. ———. “The Primacy of Categories in the Recognition of 12 Emotions in Speech Prosody across Two Cultures.” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 3, no. 4, 2019, pp. 369–382. ———. “What Music Makes Us Feel: At Least 13 Dimensions Organize Subjective Experiences Associated with Music across Different Cultures.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117, no. 4, 2020, pp. 1924–1934. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton UP, 1981 [1871]. John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May. ———. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. J. Murray, 1872. Ekman, Paul. “An Argument for Basic Emotions.” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 6, nos. 3–4, 1992, pp. 169–200. ———. Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. 2nd ed., Owl Books, 2007.

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Joseph Carroll Fisher, Helen E. Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. 2nd ed., Norton, 2016. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Harvard UP, 1982. Fox, Andrew S. et al., editors. The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2018. Gottschall, Jonathan. Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Harris, Paul L. et al. “Understanding Emotion.” Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett et al., 4th ed., Guilford, 2016, pp. 293–306. Hogan, Patrick Colm. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge UP, 2013. ———. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. Horikawa, Tomoyasu, et al. “The Neural Representation of Visually Evoked Emotion Is High-Dimensional, Categorical, and Distributed across Transmodal Brain Regions.” iScience, vol. 23, no. 5, 2020, p. 101060. Izard, Carroll E. “Basic Emotions, Natural Kinds, Emotion Schemas, and a New Paradigm.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 2, no. 3, 2007, pp. 260–280. ———. “Intersystem Connections.” The Nature of Emotions: Fundamental Questions, edited by Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson, Oxford UP, 1994, pp. 356–361. Jacobs, Arthur M., et al. “10 Years of Bawling into Affective and Aesthetic Processes in Reading: What Are the Echoes?” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, no. 714, 2015. James, Henry. “Preface to the New York Edition of Portrait of a Lady.” The Portrait of a Lady, edited by Robert D. Bamberg, Norton, 1975 (1908), pp. 3–15. Jonsson, Emelie. “Evolutionary Literary Theory.” The Sage Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Volume 2: Integrations with Other Disciplines, edited by Todd K. Shackelford, Sage, forthcoming. Keltner, Dacher, and Jennifer S. Lerner. “Emotion.” Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske et al., vol. 1, Wiley, 2010, pp. 317–352. Keltner, Dacher et al. “Expression of Emotion: New Principles for Future Inquiry.” The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, edited by Andrew S. Fox et al., 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 246–250, https://dare.uva.nl/personal/pure/en/publications/expression-of-emotion-new-principles-for-futureinquiry(a507e7cc-f6f0-4ae5-81b7-fe82f9bf2444).html. ———. Understanding Emotions. 4th ed., Wiley, 2019. Koide-Majima, Naoko, et al. “Distinct Dimensions of Emotion in the Human Brain and Their Representation on the Cortical Surface.” Neuroimage, vol. 222, 2020, p. 117258. Lewis, Michael. “The Emergence of Human Emotions.” Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett et al., 4th ed., Guilford, 2016, pp. 272–292. London, Jack. “To Build a Fire.” The Century Magazine, vol. 76, no. 4, 1908, pp. 525–534. Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 3, no. 3, 2008, pp. 173–192. Margulies, D. S., et al. “Situating the Default-Mode Network Along a Principal Gradient of Macroscale Cortical Organization.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 113, no. 44, 2016, pp. 12574–12579. McAdams, Dan P. The Art and Science of Personality Development. Guilford Press, 2015. ———. “‘First We Invented Stories, Then They Changed Us’: The Evolution of Narrative Identity.” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–18. Nesse, Randolph M. “Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions.” Human Nature, vol. 1, no. 3, 1990, pp. 261–289. Oatley, Keith. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories. Oxford UP, 2012. Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. Norton, 2012. Salmon, Catherine, and Don Symons. “Slash Fiction and Human Mating Psychology.” Journal of Sex Research, vol. 41, no. 1, 2004, pp. 94–100. Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Academic Studies Press, 2018. Evolution, Cognition, and the Arts. Shiner, Rebecca L. “Personality as Lasting Individual Differences in Emotions.” The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, edited by Andrew S. Fox et al., 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 61–64. ———. “Stability and Change in Emotion-Relevant Personality Traits in Childhood and Adolescence.” The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, edited by Andrew S. Fox et al., 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2018, pp. 379–382.

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Evolution Sternberg, Robert J. “A Triangular Theory of Love.” Psychological Review, vol. 93, no. 2, 1986, p. 119. Sznycer, Daniel, et al. “Adaptationism Carves Emotions at Their Functional Joints.” Psychological Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2017, pp. 56–62. Taylor, Marjorie. “Imagination.” The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology, edited by Philip David Zelazo, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 791–831. Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables.” Handbook of Emotions, edited by Michael Lewis et al., Guilford, 2008, pp. 114–138. ———. “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, edited by Jerome H. Barkow et al., Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 19–136, http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=1992-98504-001&site=ehost-live. van Mulukom, Valerie. “The Evolution of Imagination and Fiction through Generativity and Narrative.” Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, edited by Joseph Carroll et al., Springer, 2020, pp. 53–70.

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8 THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS AND LITERATURE Andrew Lynch

Abstract: Studying emotions through literature leads us to read the history of emotions, and the broader course of history, in new ways. Literature, through the specific and contingent nature it has given emotions over place and time, foregrounds the “history” in emotional understanding and experience. Yet although literature reveals much of the historically situated terms of reference within which emotions have been expressed, there is no simple correlation between the representation of emotion in a text and its historical period. Rather, emotional performances in literature show a tendency to period “anachronism” and “mosaicism.” Much past literature in the Western tradition is linked to overtly didactic views on emotions, but the aesthetic qualities of literature retain the power to give readers other kinds of emotional and cognitive experience. Similarly, emotional reactions to past literature and art may challenge present-day intellectual traditions with alternate forms of cognition that demand new creative expression.

This chapter reflects partly on how the history of emotions looks if we read it through literature, and partly on how thinking about emotions articulates the relationship of literature and history to each other. Purely for reasons of space it is limited to Western traditions. It takes the view that emotions are historical in that “many human emotional dispositions are highly susceptible to education, and thus to culture and historical traditions” (Roberts 491). The utterance of emotions in literature is affected by its involvement in historically varied and contingent apprehensions of what emotions are, where they come from, and how they operate in and on people. These apprehensions need not necessarily work at the level of conscious “theory” or “ideas,” but they provide “differential associations” that “color the experience of the emotion” (Roberts 8). Without careful attention to these differences, terms like “anger,” “fear,” “joy” and so on are simply “emotion-names,” “without a stable transhistorical referent” (Dixon 1). Literature, by the specific and developed nature of the “differential associations” it has given emotions, and through the differing “clusters of conceptual features” (Hurtado et al. 667) with which it has delineated them over place and time, foregrounds the “history” in emotional understanding and experience. At the same time, studying emotions through literature can lead us to read the emotions, the history of emotions, and the broader course of history in new ways. However they operate, scholars seeking access to past emotions through literature strike a simple procedural problem. Emotions exist in living beings, and the beings of the past are no longer here. Furthermore, the written texts they left behind are not direct records of lived DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-10

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emotions, but necessarily mediated through multiple mixed factors in utterance and reception. How do we know what people felt as opposed to what was written (and then read) about it? This matter preoccupies emotions historians, and is a challenge for all scholars who regard emotions as culturally influenced to some extent. Amongst those emotions scholars whose approach relies principally on the analysis of text, reactions to the problem of mediation vary. Barbara Rosenwein is not bothered about the “sincerity” of emotions found in literature, and suggests we find instead evidence of “prevailing emotional norms”: “insincerity tells us about how people are supposed to feel” (Rosenwein 2006, 29). William Reddy proposes the “performative” terms “efficacious” or “inefficacious” as better standards to apply to emotions, and sees “sincerity” itself as a socially and historically contingent value (Reddy 108–10, 178, 210). Others limit themselves to noting in literature the “attitudes or standards” of emotional expression that a society or a group upholds (Stearns and Stearns 813). Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet, seeking “to analyse norms, . . . cultural products and performances,” try to avoid any distinction between felt emotion and expressed emotion. . . . The emotions that were voiced, expressed by an action, or displayed by the body . . . are in any case the only emotions to which we have access. (Nagy and Boquet 7) It is clear that emotions historians do not think they are directly reading the emotional “life” of the past through its literature, and yet the same is true of reading the literature of our own times. The big difference is the much greater gap in historical information of all kinds that we need to fill in order to be able to read past emotions with greater insight. We all know we have to avoid simply imposing our own emotion categories on the past. Yet we also know from many sources that literature has always made an emotional appeal to audiences, so that to ignore our own emotional responses to past literature in the pursuit of historicist objectivity—if that were possible—would belie the true nature of the material we are studying, and the nature of the reading process. We therefore face the challenge that Louise D’Arcens describes, of identifying how literature’s aesthetic-emotional features are . . . shaped by, and in turn shape, the emotional discourses and practices particular to their own place and time, yet with an awareness of how they continue to participate in a longer and larger history of human emotion. (D’Arcens 124) In relation to our ability to read that longer and larger history, recent research on emotions from the fields of psychology and neurology is encouraging. Even when denying the existence of universal “basic emotions,” it suggests that there is an “underlying intuition . . . that something significant is shared, that some commonality reaches across the differences between cultures and species” (Parrott 18). At the same time, emotions historians are increasingly looking for useful accommodations between their approaches and those of the affective sciences (Boddice 132–167; Irish). The area is very much a work in progress.

Reading Emotions Historically in Literature “Literature” and “history” are names commonly given to separate “disciplines” of study, notionally and institutionally. Nevertheless, the boundary between them is very uncertain. Whatever the sources and methods that are involved, both historians and literary scholars 99

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present their findings as arguments in language. Historiography is written “story,” open to analysis of its structural and discursive tendencies, and how these may reveal its ideology and influence its findings. What is called “literature,” even if it “nothing affirms,” as Philip Sidney wrote (Sidney 52), is in one sense as “historical” as anything else from the past. A text does not have to “represent” history consciously for it to be steeped in history, just as family photos from, say, the 1970s, will speak of the clothes, haircuts, furniture, and cars of their time and place. Literature (within which I include developed forms of discursive writing, not only imaginative fiction) does that, and more, on a bigger scale. It reveals much about the terms of reference within which it was conceived and uttered: thematic preoccupations; models of behavior; versions of human character, motivation, and interaction; systems of belief; appropriate narrative arcs and conclusions, and so on. Above all, literature has the capacity to elicit complex emotional and affective responses in its audience, to “move” people. In Peter Holbrook’s words, it “is at some fundamental level committed to the passions” (Holbrook 410), as an agent in the history of emotions, not merely a symptom. It provides “literal scripts that vigorously enlist literariness as a means of generating feelings and putting them into play in history” (McNamer 1435). Literature is “affective”—something that “[t]hat touches the emotions; [is] moving.”1 Wordsworth wrote: Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings . . . the interest which the mind attaches to words . . . [is] not only as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are themselves part of the passion. (Wordsworth 200) More cautiously, to say that literature simply “represents,” “elicits,” or “moves” emotions would be misleading, since readers—“the mind[s]” Wordsworth refers to—are crucial to that process. There is no “pure,” unmediated reading of emotion in literature; it always happens in the context of a particular historical situation. How a text “feels,” like what it “says,” will depend on the reader, who is also a historically contingent emotional agent, bringing a host of variable life influences into play. Furthermore, when the texts we read originate at some distance from the time, place, language or culture of our encounter with them, the project meets another complication: the emotions of the text as written relate to a different world, “there” and “then,” but our feelings relate to the text as read, “here” and “now,” in some version of the “present,” which is itself, in any case, like the “period” or “the reader,” a fiction of perfect coherence and unity that never actually obtains. Also, we often read in company, with a consciousness of what others have felt, including past readers.2 Our responses, however personal and keenly felt, occur within and help create a dynamic history of literature as a continuing emotional and social culture. How do we “read” emotions historically? Clearly, historical and cultural differences, including vital questions of language difference, impose many limitations on our ability simply to identify what the emotions “are” in a piece of literature (Wierzbicka; Boddice 214–15). On the other hand, acknowledging these and other differences is vital to the project of understanding how literature might realize emotion in and through the experience it offers readers. The current ways of doing that are very various. They including, by no means exhaustively: Readings that analyze emotion expression in individual texts; Studies of emotional terms, themes or “styles” in the literature of particular historical periods, institutions or genres, e.g., convents, confessional groups, sermons,3 and/or 100

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through particular materialities and technologies of writing: marginal comments, notebooks; websites; Particular aspects of emotional performance in literature: affects, gestures, facial expressions; “History of ideas” studies of the influence on literature of prevailing philosophical, physiological, and psychological theories of emotion, e.g., Galenic humoral theory or postCartesian body/mind dualism; Data searches of various sizes in larger bodies of literature to note the long-term prevalence, rise, and fall of emotion terms, and to show these terms’ broader societal involvements. This last category would include Barbara Rosenwein’s emotions “dossiers” (Rosenwein 2006, 26) and the evidence about emotions and literature (among many other sources) derived from “big data” researches.4 All of these approaches can be valuably informative. In the context of this volume, my emphasis falls on how emotions seem to “work” and be “made” through past literary texts, which I try to demonstrate through analysis of a series of examples. I concentrate less on what past texts may tell us about emotions per se in their particular historical periods or across time. Yet the two projects are inseparable in operation, because emotions in literature are necessarily conceptualized and written according to forms and resources that are available at the time. All the same, as I discuss later, there is no simple correlation between the nature of emotion in a work of literature and an idea of its “times.” One of the most informative aspects of reading past or otherwise culturally distanced literature is the friction between the forms of emotional understanding and expression it employs and those that later readers have commonly internalized. Equally, emotions in past literature may be amenable to understandings in terms not formulated until later, as exemplified by modern gender readings of Chaucer and Shakespeare. In addition, like other arts, literature can create and propagate new emotional moods. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) led a European craze credited with inspiring many suicides, while “modern psychiatric research suggests the existence of a so-called Werther effect of suicide contagion,” provoking calls for caution in media reports (Jack 18–19). This is to say that literature does not simply reflect the influence of emotional theories and understandings over the course of history: it also suggests them, because literature tells complex, situated, intersubjective narratives that can “provide frameworks for synthesizing the otherwise somewhat fragmented research findings on any given emotion” (Hogan 2011, 6). Philosophical and theoretical treatments of the emotions, from Plato and Aristotle to Freud, Roland Barthes, and beyond, have often taken their cues from literature. Following Aristotle, Roger Scruton suggests that literature and theater can teach “emotional knowledge” and “affective competence”—“knowing what to feel”—by inspiring imitation of “the right emotion, towards the right object, in the right circumstances, and to the right degree”; “you can acquire the motive [to do the right thing] in time, by imitating its outward expression” (Scruton 97–98). Aristotle asserts that worthy actions are voluntary, therefore subject to choice, not merely arising out of natural urges: “What is choiceworthy is good, and what is choiceworthier is a greater good” (Aristotle 72). In line with that very long-running influence, one of the most striking features of emotion in Western literary history is the prescriptive and exemplary nature of its depiction, in parallel with ethical and religious traditions of vice and virtue, sin and grace. Post-Romantic readers may tend to think of spontaneity as the core value in their emotional lives, but literary instances from the Iliad and the Aeneid onwards show that the control of emotion and its direction to a right end have often been considered the most important things about it, and a central concern in literary aesthetics and ethics. 101

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Prescribed Emotions and Literary Aesthetics A classic instance where emotion transgresses against a prescription is the fall of Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Cognitively and summarily, the meaning of the Fall is clear—“foul distrust, and breach/ Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,/ And disobedience” (Milton, ix, 7–9)—but emotionally it “feels” different. When he hears that Eve is “lost,” Adam is first stunned and mute in “horrour,” but he takes it as given that he too is “ruin’d, for with thee/ Certain my resolution is to die:/ How can I live without thee!” (ix, 896–908). He knows clearly that Eve’s action is wrong, “against the strict forbiddance,” but is drawn by what he calls “the link of Nature” to follow her: “flesh of flesh,/ Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state/ Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe” (ix, 904–16). In the extreme emotion of the moment, a conscious Aristotelian “choice” whether to leave Eve or stay with her would seem ignoble. Adam apparently follows a generous and irresistible motion of the loving heart, through a “habit” of love that validates his true marriage. And yet, shadows of doubt are cast on the mood of this exchange. We have already been primed to resist arguments based on an appeal to “Nature” (viii, 560–67): God has given humans discretion and free will. Adam’s preemptive rejection of a second wife—“Should God create another Eve, and I/ Another rib afford” (ix, 911–12)—may seem rather self-enhancing in its twinned emphasis on “God” and “I,” even faintly absurd. We read that after this speech Adam seems “calm,” “as one from sad dismay/ Recomforted, and after thoughts disturbed/ Submitting to what seemed remediless” (ix, 917–19). His apparently self-sacrificial decision has been undertaken, in part, for his own sake, to avoid an intolerable tension within him between obedience to God and love of Eve. Since he feels Eve is so close to him—“flesh of my flesh”; “to lose thee were to lose myself ”; “we are one” (ix, 914–16)—it seems very hard for him to distinguish her interests from his. One unacknowledged motive for his actions may be the desire to taste the apple himself, as she has. His next speech, praising her act as “adventurous,” a “[b]old deed” that she has “dared” to do (ix, 921–24), deepens that impression, along with the sibilance and inverted sentence constructions the poem has taught us to associate with Satan. And from then on, each time, when Adam eats the fruit, when he wakes afterward, when he speaks to Christ, when he leaves Paradise, and so on, he will be in a different emotional state, and he and Eve will have a different emotional connection, better or worse. Emotional variance, the lot of humankind, part of our fallen “nature,” accompanies the loss of innocence. Part of the interest that literature gives to the depiction of emotions is the situational and temporal complexity it can create, in comparison to direct propositions. In Adam’s case, the proposition is simple, to obey God’s commandment, but his emotions mislead him to act otherwise. But propositions exist in an ideal present tense, whereas in literature we are often unsure whether the successive emotional impressions we receive indicate causes, accompanying symptoms, or effects. Is the ineluctable emotional oneness with Eve that Adam expresses a pre-condition of his fall, allowing him to prefer life with her to obeying God? Or is his decision rather, or also, a consequence of fallenness, or of a falling state, in which his emotions already show a tendency, not just to wrong-headedness, but to specious self-deception? Is the sympathy readers have very often felt for what seems a “natural” and “human” emotional response in him mainly a sign of our own misguided (or worse) fallenness? We may get various overall answers from the poem to those questions, and some of them seem very inadequate5—but none of them can or should replace our running read-out of what is happening emotionally line-by-line and moment-to-moment, in conjunction with our developing sense of the overall work. We are called on, as a main task, to experience and evaluate a continuing generation of emotional processes within and from the text, matching Stanley Fish’s remark that “there is no 102

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cause of the Fall as it has been sought: merely an ever-expanding description of what is comprehended in the act” (Fish 258). Far from what might have been expected, Milton’s suspicion of uncontrolled emotion and of the dangers of emotional rhetoric greatly expands, rather than represses, the importance of emotion in the poem, not only for its personages but as a responsibility for him as poet and for his readers. Literature is not simply a platform for staging interesting emotional situations like those that occur in real life. It also “pleases,” “moves,” and “draws” us emotionally with beauty, wit, delight, and all kinds of sensuous and intellectual attractions. That distinction has been variously theorized as one between “fiction emotions” and “artefact emotions” (Kneepkens and Swaan), but in the complex experience of reading it is hard to disassociate them (Hogan 2017, 99–100): as Wordsworth said, the words of “poetry” (imaginative literature) are not simply references to emotions (“symbols”) but “part of the passion.” In Sidney’s terms, literature ideally has the power both to “move” readers to “goodness” and “teach” them what the goodness is (Sidney 27). Yet aesthetic responses may also modify, or even oppose, emotional responses formed according to other criteria, such as what readers may feel is right empathically in regard to the general situation depicted in the fiction. For example, Oscar Wilde is said to have remarked about Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop that “[o]ne must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing” (Leverson 42). What Wilde (presumably) regarded as Dickens’s crude sentimentality was judged a travesty of the feelings that would be due to the death of a child in reality, or in better writing. Hence the satirical switch in terms: to laugh, not to cry, becomes the humane response. A more complex instance is a passage in Jane Austen’s Persuasion about Mrs. Musgrove’s “large fat sighings”: [a] large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain,—which taste cannot tolerate,—which ridicule will seize. (Austen 66) “Fair” as “just” and “fair” as “beautiful” are different things. Both have claims on the emotions. How should this be resolved? Further ethical complication comes from the narrative context: we are told that Mrs. Musgrove’s grief is for an object only a mother could think worthy, her dead son Dick, “whom alive nobody had cared for” (66). Captain Wentworth, when the emotional appeal is made, reacts instinctively with ironic disdain, but then, we are told, “entered into conversation with her, in a low voice, about her son, doing it with so much sympathy and natural grace, as shewed the kindest consideration for all that was real and unabsurd in the parent’s feelings” (66). A balance is reached between the impulse of taste and the demands of sympathy, putting a brake on ridicule. Yet the aesthetic contrast persists, in the description of Mrs. Musgrove’s “comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and good humour, than tenderness and sentiment,” that “very completely screen[s]” “the agitations of Anne’s slender form, and pensive face” (66). One may assume that Anne’s unseen agitation and pensiveness (though seen by the reader) are also partly caused by her tantalizing closeness to/distance from Captain Wentworth, as he appears in a very good light, on a crowded sofa. Dick Musgrove’s own claims on the emotions may even enter here, against the apparent heartlessness of the description—how did he feel to have no one care for him alive, might one ask? The discourse is dotted with seemingly confident abstractions—“reason,” “taste,” “nature,” the “real”—but the strongly perspectival manner of 103

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the narration—exactly who sees, hears, knows, and feels what is crucial to the effect—keeps emotion dynamic, one might say, “agitated.” Many readers do not “know what to feel” about it, or resent what they think they are being asked to feel or not to feel, as a large number of later reactions suggests (Kosemetatou). My final, and most extensive, example of the “fiction emotion”/“artefact emotion” relationship is from the fifteenth-century Arthurian romance, The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne. I use it to think through how the “meaning” as well as the “feeling” of a text may be established for readers through pleasurable effects of literary form. Literary pleasure is more commonly discussed as an “affect,” but it can also be considered an emotionally and cognitively informative process, combining both “sensory enjoyment . . . i.e., to enjoy the stimulus or the consequences of behavior” and “aesthetic enjoyment”—meaning “to strive for a better understanding” (Cabanac 74). Because the literary “aesthetic” or the “artefact” has this role, then readers can be said to “understand” literature, at least in part, through the pleasures (or displeasures) it gives, even when these may not seem what the text is, or should be, “about.” To reconfigure Sidney’s terms, the “delight” of the text can make readers “know” more meaning in it than the doctrine it apparently proposes to “teach.” The Awntyrs falls into two halves, of which I discuss only the first. Arthur goes hunting in Inglewood Forest. All the party except Guinevere, with Gawain in attendance, follow the chase. Those two rest in an arbor where the ghost of Guinevere’s mother appears to them, lamenting her extreme purgatorial sufferings, and warning Guinevere that the same await her. She also warns that Arthur and his men will be punished for his arrogant conquests by Mordred’s future rebellion, in which Gawain himself will die. After long conversation, the ghost is somewhat mollified by the promise of masses to be said for her release from Purgatory, and departs. Ralph Hanna writes of the poem: the speeches of the returned spirit to her interlocutors are not simply limited to a request for commemorative masses but attack the entire Arthurian life style . . . [the] ample physical description of Guenevere’s mother brings . . . horror . . . into the realm of human experience. Guenevere must watch in terror the gradual approach of the apparition, the emergence of each frightful detail. And the queen must remain with the ghost to hear the threatening explanation of such bodily torments. (Awntyrs 27–28) Hanna is absolutely right in terms of the content of the poem that seems most relevant to include in a summary of it, privileging the memento mori theme and noting the unusually developed critique of court life and Arthurian imperial ambition. Relying on readers’ knowledge of the already famous Arthurian story, this version is one of the most unequivocal attacks on the values it represents. As an aesthetic-emotional reading event, nevertheless, the poem presents differently. Its poetic form is complex, both rhyming and intensely alliterative, often with four alliterating stresses in the line. Each stanza has a concluding four-line “wheel” in a different measure. Each stanza begins by echoing the conclusion of the preceding stanza. The effect is to slow down readerly reception and perception, encouraging appreciation of the descriptive moments as they come, not encouraging us to feed them directly to a summary narrative bottom line. There come a lowe [fire] of the loughe [lake]—in lede is not to layne [it can’t be denied]— In the lyknes of Lucyfere, layetheste [loathliest] in Helle, 104

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And glides to Dame Gaynour Þe gates full gayne [to block her path], Ȝauland ȝamerly [howling and wailing], with many loude ȝelle. Hit ȝaules [howls], hit ȝameres [cries out], with wannynges wete [tearful lamentations]. ... Then gloppenet [grew fearful] and grete [wept] Gaynour Þe gay And asked Sir Gawen, “What is Þi good rede [advice]?” “Hit ar Þe clippes of the son [eclipse of the sun], I herd a clerk say.” And Þus he confortes the Quene for his kniȝthede [out of his knightliness]. ... “Of Þe goost,” quod Þe gome [man], “greue [grieve] you no mare, For I shal speke with Þe sprete [spirit]. And of the wayes I shall wete [know]— What may Þe bales bete [relieve the torments] Of Þe bodi bare.” (Awntyrs 67–68) The verse offers both pleasure—one might even say “fun”—in its energetic soundscape here, but also a direction in meaning: first the appalling sounds made by the ghost; then the weeping complaint of Guinevere that registers and prolongs the ghost’s fearful effect; and then the graceful and courteous speech of Gawain, which changes the mood from helpless reaction into purposeful activity, from howling and weeping into a comprehensible conversation, one that will end, as Gawain wishes, in finding a remedy for the ghost’s pains. His reply to Guinevere that it is an eclipse of the sun—a benign invention—related with no prefatory “he said,” emerges in a relaxed, offhand way, suggesting that courtesy and consideration are a “second nature” in him. His next speech, extending over several lines, begins with a syntactical inversion that controls the ghost’s fearful effect—“Of the gost,” quod the gome, “greve you no more.” That direction of mood from fearfulness to calm first comforts Guinevere, and is then developed to show the ethical dimension of Gawain’s courtesy and emotional attentiveness. He treats the appalling apparition as fully conversable, and in relation to its own troubles, rather than as a being fearfully troubling to others, and he has no primary regard to his own role. He will “speke with the sprite”—the phrase civilly links the earthly to the otherworldly—to find out from it what may help, not to dictate terms or to say how he can help it. In what follows, the spirit, once established through Gawain’s agency as a person—a former queen—recognizes his courtesy, and states her wish: to see Guinevere. Gawain immediately brings Guinevere to her, as a sign of honor, and his instinct is again appropriate, as it turns out, since we find it is a daughter showing respect to the mother. Gawain’s knightly and Christian conjuring of the ghost to speak, sword in hand, is bracketed within an established expectation that the normal rules of courtesy apply and will work, even in this context. Similarly, Guinevere’s initial horror at the ghost’s appearance develops emotionally from helpless fear into the wish to help her mother out of her sufferings. The point is made, central to the poem’s late medieval doctrine, that those on earth and in Purgatory remain in communion, with their family ties and social bonds intact, however different their forms of life are in other ways. The poem certainly has an impulse to teach an overt doctrine—to terrify and warn readers against sin by contrasting, while proleptically likening, the ghost’s tormented bare body to Guinevere’s pleasure-filled clothed body. But it also sustains a confident counter-impulse, centered in Gawain, that treats the frightful events of the story as coming within the competence 105

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of traditional courtly values and ordinary human interactions. That has its own didactic and emotional effect, bound up in the poem’s aesthetic form, whose quality remains potentially operative in the experience that the text still offers to readers and hearers. Of course, in an age when readers’ fears of death rarely center on Purgatory, the aesthetic-emotional effect of the poem will be different, but still not wholly different.

Emotions, Literature, and Historical Periodization One advantage of thinking about the history of emotions through literature is to free discussion of the subject from the idea that emotions march in lockstep with other perceived historical developments. Reading emotions in literature gives us a different relation to ideas of historical period, because of the unpredictable persistence of past forms of feeling as they form new combinations with later influences. In Rosenwein’s words, we observe “emotional mosaicism”: “new generations take bits and pieces from old emotional vocabularies, sequences, and styles, while combining them in new ways” (Rosenwein 2016, 320). Literary and cultural products— books, buildings, artworks, theater—and the genres and forms in which they are produced often stay around a long while so that they cross traditional historiographical or sociological period divisions. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “modernity” of capitalism and consumerism (Stearns 2013) was also a time when Shakespeare packed the popular theater, and, with the Bible and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, reached a mass readership in a huge number of editions. It has been said that “Bunyan . . . [was] not only endlessly quoted by the Victorians, he also haunts the plot-lines, pedagogies and affective subtexts of their literature” (Mason 159–60). Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot invoke The Pilgrim’s Progress to create protagonists who have been called “the secular pilgrims of Victorian literature” out of a mixture of the recent German Bildungsroman and the seventeenth-century English religious tradition (Qualls). Obviously, reading The Pilgrim’s Progress in the time of industrialization, Romanticism, and the bourgeois novel was not the same experience as reading it in the 1670s, but it still carried aspects of its first nature into its formative capacity for a new present, even while that capacity was altered within the new context by its new environment and admixture with other influences. In Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, young Maggie Tulliver reads Bunyan alongside Æsop’s Fables, “a book about Kangaroos and things,” and an 1819 illustrated edition of Daniel Defoe’s A Political History of the Devil (1726), amongst others (Eliot 15). These were all books that Eliot herself read as a child. The novel famously creates a deep and detailed historical consciousness of the period and place that it depicts, but Maggie is not shown as emotionally shaped by that period alone. Rather, her reading across mixed literary resources, and in untutored, independent ways, makes her emotional life within this society anachronic, hybridized, incipiently futuristic, and lonely, yet also widely and deeply sympathetic to others. Overall, while literary texts are as “historical” as anything else surviving from their time and place, they have no one-to-one relationship to other forms of history. Rather, as historical agents of emotion they may often seem to deny their “times,” for example, by emphases and omissions that occlude contemporary historical factors. The modes of literature are more flexible and better resourced than those of intellectual history, or much literary history, for supporting emotional regimes that are retrospectively understood as outmoded for their “times.” This function is often undertaken by literature that rarely appears in long-term literary histories but has much influence. Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot feature in accounts of literary modernism. Enid Blyton and J. R. R. Tolkien, their near contemporaries, do not qualify, but have sold more 106

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than 300 and 200 million copies, respectively, and still keep selling. Exactly what one reads will to a fair extent define the “times” one lives in, and the cast of one’s emotional resources.

Literature as a Challenge to the History of Emotions In the first book of his novel series, My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard describes the effect on his younger self of looking at prints of Constable paintings: what they [the pictures] possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility, and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can’t explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility. . . . Contemporary art, in other words, the art which in principle ought to be of relevance to me, did not consider the feelings a work of art generated as valuable. . . . But the moment I focused my gaze on the picture again all my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go? (Knausgaard 207) As an intellectual of his time, what Knausgaard calls his “thoughts and reasonings” tell him one thing, but something powerful yet obscure tells him something else. The point of this passage (for me) is not that Constable (or any art) holds a “timeless” value untouched by history, but that what we, in history, “think” or “know” about art or literature is not the same as the emotional experience we may get from it: we are not just historically and ideologically “programmed” in this respect. Knausgaard writes of what he “heard” from his emotions when he looked at the pictures, so as to distinguish the experience from a purely intellectual one. What he “hears” then demands new, or at least newfound, terms for its articulation—ultimately, the novel that we are reading. What Knausgaard suggests is that emotion, when attended to, creates a drive toward cognition and the search for expression, imagined as a place where the self must “go.” Yeats once wrote something similar about his youth: “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is” (Yeats 348). In both cases the intensity of emotion is understood as heuristic and potentially declarative of something new. For Yeats a level of “belief ” in emotion must be reached before the emotion can be known and uttered, an effort over “many years.” For Knausgaard, the strong belief is immediate—“Yes, yes, yes”— but still inchoate: “What?” Where?” He finds it bewildering, yet his sense of the “inexhaustibility” of the art that moves him shows the latent potential in his future relation to it. For both writers, emotion is at once a theater for realization of identity, an intimate form of precognition, and a main driver of creativity. As we have repeatedly seen in the preceding pages, literature offers us a complex history of emotions that is both highly culture specific and resistant to categorization, whether by abstract emotional taxonomies, notions of cultural “relevance,” or other indices of historical period. As a mediator between past and present feelings, it always operates both “then” and “now.” “Inexhaustability” might be a helpful way of thinking about the emotional potential offered to readers in succeeding times by their access to past literature, understood as a resource that will continue to be read differently according to all the changing circumstances of those who encounter it, but whose specific nature and form will also be active partners in the emotional exchange, and factors that drive and illuminate historical inquiries. What we give and get in the exchange will tell us who we are and where we need to go. 107

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Notes 1 OED, “affecting, adj2, 2.” 2 Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare, p. 102: “And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” 3 An example is Boquet and Nagy, which has chapters on monastic, aristocratic, political, and mystical expressions of emotion, along with broader temporal categories. 4 See, e.g., Whitehouse et al., “Complex societies,” p. 226: “we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality.” One conclusion (p. 227) is that “evidence for moralizing gods is lacking in the majority of non-literate societies—[which] suggests that such beliefs were not widespread before the invention of writing.” 5 See e.g., Milton’s description of Adam’s eating the apple, “not deceiv’d / But fondly overcome with female charm” (ix, 988–89), which Fish, p. 258, calls “lamentably weak.”

Works Cited Anon. The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn. Edited by Ralph Hanna, Manchester UP, 1974. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin., 2nd ed., Hackett, 1999. Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Edited by Juliette Wells, Penguin, 2017. Boddice, Rob. The History of Emotions. Manchester UP, 2018. Boquet, Damien, and Piroska Nagy. Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages. Translated by Robert Shaw, Polity Press, 2018. Cabanac, Michel. “What is Emotion?” Behavioural Processes, vol. 60, no. 2, 2002, pp. 69–83. D’Arcens, Louise. “Emotions in Fiction.” Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, edited by Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, and Peter Stearns, Routledge, 2020, pp. 114–125. Dixon, Thomas. “What Is the History of Anger a History Of ?” Emotions: History, Culture, Society, vol. 4, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–34. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by A. S. Byatt, Penguin, 1979. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2017. ———. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2011. Holbrook, Peter. “Literature: The Solicitation of the Passions.” The Routledge History of Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700, edited by Andrew Lynch and Susan Broomhall, Routledge, 2020, pp. 406–418. Hurtado de Mendoza. A., J. Fernández-Dols, W. G. Parrott, and P. Carrera. “Emotion Terms, Category Structure, and the Problem of Translation: The Case of Shame and Vergüenza.” Cognition & Emotion, vol. 24, no. 4, 2010, pp. 661–680. Irish, Bradley J. “A Strategic Compromise: Universality, Interdisciplinarity, and the Case for Modal Emotions in History of Emotion Research.” Emotions: History, Culture, Society, vol. 4, no. 2, 2020, pp. 221–251. Jack, Belinda. “Goethe’s Werther and Its Effects.” The Lancet, Psychiatry, “Insight,” 2 May 2014, pp. 18–19. Johnson, Samuel. Preface to Shakespeare: Johnson on Shakespeare. Edited by Walter Raleigh, Oxford, 1908. Knausgaard, Karl Ove. A Death in the Family. Translated by Don Bartlett, Vintage, 2013. Kneepkens, E. W. E. M., and Rolf A. Zwan. “Emotions and Literary Text Comprehension.” Poetics, vol. 23, 1995, pp. 125–138. Kosmetatou, Elizabeth. “What’s in a Name? Jane Austen’s Persuasion and the Puzzle of Poor Richard (Miscellany).” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, vol. 23, 2001, pp. 215–218. Leverson, Ada. Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde with Reminiscences of the Author. Duckworth, 1930. Mason, Emma. “The Victorians and Bunyan’s Legacy.” The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, edited by Anne Dunan-Page, Cambridge UP, 1990, pp. 150–161. McNamer, Sarah. “The Literariness of Literature and the History of Emotion.” PMLA, vol. 130, 2015, pp. 1433–1442. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Milton, Poetical Works. Edited by Douglas Bush, Oxford UP, 1969.

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Te History of Emotions and Literature Parrott, W. G. “Ur-Emotions and Your Emotions: Reconceptualizing Basic Emotion.” Emotion Review, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 14–21. Qualls, Barry V. The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction. Cambridge UP, 1982. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge UP, 2001. Roberts, Robert C. “Emotions Research and Religious Experience.” The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, edited by John Corrigan, Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 491–506. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Cornell UP, 2006. ———. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700. Cambridge UP, 2016. Scruton, Roger. “Feeling Fictions.” A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 93–119. Sidney, Philip. A Defence of Poetry. Edited by Jan Van Dorsten, Oxford UP, 1966. Stearns, Peter N. “Modern Patterns in Emotions History.” Doing Emotions History, edited by Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, U of Illinois P, 2013, pp. 17–40. ———, and Carol Z. Stearns. “Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.” The American Historical Review, vol. 90, no. 4, 1985, pp. 813–836. Whitehouse, Harvey, et al. “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History.” Nature, vol. 568, 20 Mar. 2019, pp. 226–229. Wierzbicka, Anna. Emotions across Languages and Cultures. Cambridge UP, 1999. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802. Edited by Fiona Stafford, Oxford UP, 2013. Yeats, W. B. Reveries Over Childhood and Youth: The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. Collier, 1965.

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9 PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, AND EMOTION Noël Carroll

Abstract: This article canvasses some of the most significant moments in the Western philosophical tradition of the relation of emotion to literature. Beginning with the apparent debate between Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, we move to the emergence of expression theories of art in response to Romanticism, focusing especially on the work of R. G. Collingwood. Resistance from the New Critics in the form of the so-called Affective Fallacy caused a momentary hiatus in the discussion of the relation of emotion to literature, but as philosophers in general became increasingly interested in the emotions, aestheticians in particular followed suit as exemplified in the work of Kendall Walton and Jenefer Robinson, among others.

As pointed out by Patrick Colm Hogan, the importance of the emotions to literature has been explicitly recognized across a number of major literary cultures. In Indian poetics, the way in which clusters of word associations give rise to sentiments (rasas) is matter of close attention (Lalita Pandit Hogan). In Muslim literary aesthetics, the emotions of compassion and piety are of especial concern (see Cantarino). In his The Literary Mind and the Craving of Dragons, the fifth-century Chinese literary theorist Liu Hsieh examines the five emotions that he believes constitute the essential nature of literature. And Lady Murasaki in the Japanese masterpiece Tale of Genji identifies the storyteller as one so moved by emotion that he can no longer keep it to himself. In the Western tradition, it can be said that the philosophy of literature itself emerges in fifth-century (BCE) Greece as a sustained examination of the relation of poetry to the emotions in Plato’s writings: in his Ion, where he identified the source of poetic creativity in divine madness; and in his Republic, where he considers the emotionality of literature in relation to the needs of the ideal commonwealth. In Books 2 and 3 of his Republic, Plato is concerned with the education of the future rulers of his ideal polis, often referred to as “philosopher kings,” and the military/police class that will protect the city state both internally and externally. He is very concerned that the poetry they read not provide them with what we would call bad role models. The gods, demi-gods, and heroes who feature in the stories they read should not dissemble or fight among themselves lest the future rulers of the state lie and wage civil war. But Plato is not only concerned about the content of the poems that these children will read. He is also troubled by their mode of presentation because of the effect it will have upon them. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-11

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What worries Plato is that much of the way in which the material is presented is via mimesis— narration by imitation of what the characters say, i.e., through dialogue as in plays—which is itself invidious. Why is Plato wary of mimesis and what does it have to do with the emotions? Greek students learned to read by reading aloud, specifically by reading poetry aloud. Thus, Plato’s future rulers would be reciting the words of the characters in the stories they would be reading audibly. And if those characters were venting the kinds of emotions that Plato believed ill suited his students, Plato suspected the students would take on those emotions. In other words, Plato worried that by speaking out loud the words of the characters, the students would, as we say, identify with the characters to the point of taking on their emotions, including, most alarmingly, the dubious ones. Which ones were those? Pity and fear. Why? Because it would ill-fit the rulers and their troops to fear death, since they had to be ever ready to go to war; nor should they be susceptible to pity for their enemies or for themselves, lest their martial spirit be compromised. Because Plato thought that poetic mimesis put his students at risk of identifying with bad role models and dysfunctional emotions, he argued that poetry had to be scrupulously regulated to assure that his future philosopher kings and their military/police forces only identify with good role models and upright emotions and that works that invited identification—through the mechanism of mimesis—with bad role models and questionable emotions be censored. In Book X of the Republic, Plato’s misgivings about the emotions excited by mimetic poetry expand. In Book X, he is no longer just discussing the education of children. He is talking about the consumption of poetry by the population at large. Plato maintains that in order to attract the audiences that the poet needs to support himself, he will have to appeal to the lowest and most unruly emotions and appetites of the viewers, listeners, and readers of his productions because the bulk of his audience is incapable of deeply understanding matters of state or war. Instead, they will be fed a diet of flashy surface details— like the general’s sexy appearance—rather than insight into strategy. As a result, this appeal to the lower precincts of our psyche will encourage—Plato says “irrigate”—our irrational parts, thereby undermining the rule of reason in the souls of the populace, which, in turn, will potentially subvert the authority of those rulers of reason, the philosopher-kings, thereby imperiling the security of the state. Given the gravity of the threat that the poetic stoking of emotions poses to the state, Plato goes so far as to suggest that the poets might be banished from the ideal republic, although he allows that they could be repatriated if it could be demonstrated that the pleasure poetry engenders can also be shown to be beneficial to the good city. What is important in Plato’s thinking about the relation of literature to the emotions is that he thinks that it works by identification and that it is potentially dangerous because it fosters irrationality. So, although it might be said that Plato may be called “the founder of the philosophy of literature,” it would be even more accurate to call him a philosopher against literature, specifically because of his conviction that poetry’s essential relation to the emotions presents a clear and present danger to the individual as well as to the republic.1 Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, in his Poetics arguably takes up Plato’s challenge to demonstrate that the pleasure afforded by poetry is also beneficial. He maintains that first and foremost, the pleasure poetry has to offer is that of learning. Humans naturally take pleasure in learning and a primary channel of learning is imitation (or mimesis). In this, Aristotle certainly gains support from contemporary theory. Humans unlike other animals are not born with instinctual programs. In the beginning, children must be taught how to navigate the world, both social and natural. As children, we do this by imitating our caregivers. And poetry, and 111

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the arts in general, continue to provide us with exemplars throughout life whom we recognize and from whom we can learn. What does this have to do with the emotions? Tragedy—the major type of poetry discussed in what remains of Aristotle’s Poetics—is identified as the imitation of an action that engenders pity and fear (and other such emotions) that undergo simultaneously the process of called catharsis. The meaning of this term catharsis is not defined in his Poetics. It could mean “purgation,” “purification,” or “clarification.” The meaning that best fits Aristotle’s claim that the central pleasure derivable from tragedy is that of learning is the notion that catharsis is a matter of clarification. That is, tragedy, the imitation of an action, clarifies emotions like pity and fear. But what does this mean and how does it address Plato’s concerns? First, it claims that tragedy educates the emotions—that it is a sentimental education, if you will. Emotions have objects toward which they are directed. I admire Socrates; he is the object of my admiration. Furthermore, in order to be admired, the object of admiration must meet certain criteria. To be the appropriate object of admiration, it must deserve my admiration; I must perceive it as excellent and, therefore, worthy of my respect. Thus, emotions can be educated—we can learn, in the first instance, to recognize perceptually what are the appropriate objects of a given emotion and then, upon reflection, some of us can also be able to articulate and understand intellectually the reasons that govern the relevant emotion. With respect to tragedy, it can help train us to recognize the appropriate objects of pity and fear and, in some cases, the experience of the tragedy may put some viewers in the position to comprehend cognitively what makes the objects we recognize as pitiable and fearful affectively worthy of those responses. Furthermore, tragedy cannot only train audiences about which objects are the appropriate targets of the pertinent emotional states. It can also train us about the right occasions for mobilizing those emotions, for the right kind of reasons, and at the exact level of intensity. Admittedly, this is very abstract. What is the appropriate object of what we might call the “tragic affect”—that particular composite of pity and fear? It is what Martha Nussbaum has called “the fragility of goodness.” In other words, bad things can happen to standardly good people. People through no fault of their own can become the victims of irreparable catastrophe at any moment without warning. That is why, Oedipus Rex ends with the admonition “Call no man (sic.) happy until he is dead.” For only after we are dead are we finally out of harm’s way once and for all. Oedipus Rex, Aristotle’s paradigmatic tragedy, teaches us what to recognize as the appropriate object of tragic fear is random, undeserved disaster that can strike anyone at any time. This is a worthwhile lesson, since we so often forget how precarious our well-being is as we carry on our daily affairs. Moreover, probing this experience, we can come to understand why this prospect merits our utmost terror. That the blameless can suffer calamity strikes us primordially as the utmost cosmic injustice. Furthermore, this sentimental education is chastening. It warns against arrogance and the recklessness that it encourages and it recommends prudence, a virtue to be valued by the good citizen and the good ruler alike and that it advises against overly adventurous policies, like wars of conquest. So, against Plato, Aristotle believes that the sort of emotions that poetry arouses can be beneficial. For arousing those emotions can be educative. They can train up the audience’s capabilities for recognizing the appropriate objects for the relevant emotions and provide the conditions for philosophically grasping the necessary criteria governing those emotions (Carroll “Oedipus”). In this way, poetry can clarify the emotions in ways that can make for a better citizenry. 112

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Contra Plato, the emotions are not essentially irrational. They are governed by reason; they are subject to criteria of appropriateness. Thus, the emotions will not undermine the rule of reason in the individual or the state. Indeed, the emotions as cultivated by poetry implement rule of reason and to that extent should command Plato’s approval. Of course, the emotions can be irrational, but that occurs when they are applied to objects that are not appropriate relative to their criteria. Plato need only worry about those cases, rather than being suspicious of the emotional address of poetry tout court. One thing, however, upon which Plato and Aristotle agreed was that the arts that concerned them were matters of imitation. And, on the view that the arts were essentially a matter of imitations, the emotions that were aroused in audiences were most typically responses to the emotions of characters and the situations that gave rise to those affective states. But with the emergence of Romanticism especially, another source of the emotional arousal received increasing emphasis, namely the emotions of the poet as revealed in and by the poem. In 1798, in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of power feelings.” That is, the role of the poet is not essentially to mirror the action and feelings of other people, but to explore his or her own feelings. Romanticism placed premier value on the self and its experiences. Where the poet contemplates some outward scene—like passing clouds—the scene is not presented for its own sake, but as a stimulus for the poet to disclose and articulate his or her own emotional responses to it. The primary aim of poetry was not imitation but expression. This emphasis on expression came at a historical juncture when the idea that imitation was the hallmark of art was already in crisis. For the rise to prominence of pure orchestral music seemed to be an obvious counterexample to the conception of art as imitation. Thus, the proposal that art was the expression of emotion offered a promising alternative, which eventually came to be known as the expression theory of art. Two of the most influential expression theorists were Leo Tolstoy and R. G. Collingwood. But, although they agreed that art was the expression of feeling, they diverged significantly in their understanding of the nature of expression. In his book, What Is Art?, Leo Tolstoy thinks of expression as a form of communication (see also Carroll, Classics). Needless to say, not all communication is art. Tolstoy differentiates artistic communication from other sorts by specifying that what art communicates is emotion in contrast to language that communicates ideas. The artist externalizes an internal emotional state and transmits the self-same feelings to viewers, readers, and listeners. Here, transmission is a matter of transferring the artist’s feeling to the audience. To say “The poet expresses joy” means she has a feeling of joy that she instills or conveys or engenders to her readers by her words. For Tolstoy, this feeling of joy must be sincere, i.e., the poet must have genuinely felt it. If it is truly sincere, he believes that it will be individualized, growing out of the poet’s unique experience, while Tolstoy also thinks the effort to capture the uniqueness of the poet’s experience will dispose its expression toward clarity. The expression will be intentional and deliberate, not the result of a reflex or an uncontrolled outburst. And it will infect with or arouse in its reader or listener exactly the same type of feeling that the poet has experienced or undergone. Insofar as the preceding account proposes a theory of either art in general or literature in particular it fails. Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is indisputably literature, but it is not intended to engender emotions in the audience, but rather to invite them to contemplate an apparent philosophical incongruity. But Tolstoy’s notion of expression also seems controversial insofar as it identifies expression with communication. Must the poet intend to communicate her feelings to an audience. 113

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Might not the poet write her poetry for herself and herself alone? That is, why suppose the poet intends to move an audience? Might not she write in order to explore her feelings as a matter of self-cultivation? In his Principles of Art, R. G. Collingwood answers the preceding question affirmatively. Collingwood draws a distinction between art and craft. For Collingwood, the aim of arousing emotion—as we’ve encountered in Plato, Aristotle, and others—is a product of craft. That is, there are certain reliable strategies or techniques, of the sort that Aristotle sketches in his Poetics, that will arouse the predetermined emotions that the poet intends in the audience. In contrast, Collingwood argues that authentic artistic expression, properly so called, is not aimed at eliciting a preordained affective result in audiences by means of tried-and-true techniques; but rather is involved with the artist’s interrogation of her own feelings for the purpose of clarifying them for herself. Poetry is a way for the poet to get in touch with her feelings, as they say. For Collingwood, the poet begins when she experiences an insistent, albeit vague, feeling about which she is compelled to get clear. She strives to bring this feeling into sharp relief. She works on it, determined to bring into sharper focus. Unlike Aristotle’s poet, who knows from the get-go the emotions he means to provoke, Collingwood’s poet will only have a true grasp of what’s she’s feeling at the end of the process. How does Collingwood’s poet clarify her initially vague feeling? Partly by externalizing it—by experimenting with different ways of expressing it. The poet tries this word, but then discards it. It doesn’t sound right where “not sounding right” means that it does not capture that elusive feeling that the poet is after. The poet keeps modifying the verbal configuration, testing different words and word sequences, trying to meld the sound and the sense until the emotive content of the poem has found its adequate or appropriate form of articulation. At each point in this search, the poet asks herself whether her choices are “right”—where “right” means “do they feel right.” This process clarifies the emotion the artist is attempting to embody as the same time that the initially vague but insistent feeling inspires and informs the poet’s choices by providing serviceable although ultimately indistinct standard or corrective. On Collingwood’s account, the poet does not begin with an agenda—to arouse pity and fear, for example. The poet intends to discover exactly what she is feeling in the process of creating her poem. She doesn’t know precisely what she feels until she is satisfied that she has embodied it perfectly. Indeed, given the exploratory nature of the poet’s process under this conception it is natural to predict that the feeling the poet finally articulates is one that we do not antecedently have a name for. Afterall, there are more emotions in heaven and earth than are to be found in any of our dictionaries. For expression theorists, poetry in particular and literature in general contributes to making up for those lacunae. It gives us works that can stand for feelings for which language lacks words as Kafka’s The Trial can serve as an affective label for the disorienting experience of bureaucracy. Like Tolstoy’s identification of expression with communication, Collingwood’s theory of expression does not afford an adequate characterization of all literature. It too must confront the existence of exclusively cognitive, literary works like Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Moreover, Collingwood’s apparent denial that works like Sophocles’ Theban trilogy are properly expressive seems stipulative and revisionist. In Collingwood’s favor, it can be granted that he has clarified a kind of expression distinct from audience arousal that had not been previously theorized as thoroughly heretofore. But that hardly supports the bracketing of the topic of emotional arousal from the philosophy of literature altogether. 114

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And yet, something like that happened in the precincts of the Anglo-American philosophy of literature in the middle of the twentieth century due to the influence of the New Criticism (rather than to Collingwood, even though in some respects, his views were compatible with it). The New Critics argued that the literary text itself was the sole legitimate object of literary appreciation, to be engaged properly by the exercise of close reading. In part, this entailed that the factors that caused the text and the consequences that the text caused were not the legitimate subject of genuinely literary concern. Of course, the emotions aroused in the audience in response to the literary work were outside the text on this view and not within the jurisdiction of close reading. Indeed, it was argued that attention to the emotional effects of a text constituted a fallacy, named The Affective Fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley). Moreover, despite the philosophical challenge of successfully demarcating the boundary between what is inside versus outside a literary text, the idea of The Affective Fallacy was persuasive enough to wave off substantial philosophizing about the relation of emotional arousal and literature for several decades. Undoubtedly this avoidance by Anglo-American philosophers of sustained study of the relation of the emotions to literature was reinforced by their general philosophical neglect of the emotions in general for much of the twentieth century. But in the 1960s and 70s this began to change and as thinking about the emotions began to re-emerge in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of literature eventually followed suit, especially in terms of the issue known as the paradox of fiction. The paradox of fiction revolves around the question: “How can we be emotionally moved by fictions, when we know the people, places, and events in fictions do not exist?” To see what is at stake in this question, consider the following three propositions: (1) In order be emotionally moved by something, we must believe it exists. (2) We are emotionally moved by fictions. (3) We know (and thus believe) that the people, places, and events in fictions do not exist. If we contemplate each of these propositions apart from the others, each of them appears intuitively acceptable. However, when we combine them, we get a contradiction. This is a paradox. How does one get rid of a paradox? By removing one or more of the propositions that comprise the offending triad. In his seminal article, “Fearing Fictions,” Kendall Walton proposed a solution to the paradox of fiction that made the question of the relation of the emotions to literature a central question in aesthetics. Boldly, Walton proposed that to disarm the paradox, that the second proposition be abandoned—in other words, that we deny that we are emotionally moved by fictions. Walton justified this apparently counterintuitive move on the basis of his strong cognitivist understanding of what is involved in having a genuine emotion. Specifically, Walton holds that in order to have an emotion, one must believe that the object of the emotion exists. To fear that a very hungry, very mean ogre is in the neighborhood, I must believe that there is an ogre in the vicinity. However, if we read a fiction that says there is an ogre in the vicinity, we do not believe it. Rather, Walton contends that we only make-believe it, just as children do not believe that their mud pies are real pies, but only make-believe that they are. Like the children, we are playing a game with the fiction; the mud pieces are props in their game of make-believe; the story is a prop in our game. But make-believe does not generate genuine emotions, but only quasi-emotions. 115

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The predictable response to Walton’s proposal is to protest that it must be wrong because it is undeniable that reading about the hungry ogre can generate palpable phenomenological and/or physiological reactions in us. Our spine chills and our heart rate quickens. Such is undeniable. And Walton does not deny it. He only denies that these feelings are genuine emotions. Rather they are what he calls “quasi-emotions,” psycho-physical states with the same phenomenology as the emotions they resemble, but which are nevertheless not genuine emotions because they are not generated by beliefs, but only by make-beliefs. Nor does it pay to argue that the feeling states engendered by games of make-believe cannot be so intense; feelings can run very high when playing a game. Walton’s original article and his subsequent modifications have provoked a large and complicated conversation. One line of thought, which proposed a different solution to the paradox of fiction, is what we might call moderate cognitivism. In his article, Walton is a strong cognitivist; he maintains that certain existence-beliefs are necessary in order to be in a genuine emotional state (where to believe x is to hold the proposition x in the mind as asserted). A moderate cognitivist, in contrast, maintains that cognitive mental states other than belief can also support genuine emotional states. For example, genuine emotional states can also be generated by imaginings (where to imagine x, is to hold the proposition x in the mind as unasserted—i.e., to merely entertain or to suppose x). One can stand on the edge of a precipice, imagine walking forward, and thereby send a shock of vertigo through your system. Likewise, when we read fiction, we imagine, rather than believe, what is recounted in the story, and imagining that as it is mandated by the author is sufficient to genuinely move us emotionally in response to the plight of the protagonist as it unfolds. The moderate cognitivist thus accepts the premise that we are genuinely emotionally moved by fiction, but, unlike Walton, rejects the claim that belief is a necessary condition for having an emotion. Other cognitive states, such as imagining are also cable of generating genuine emotions. The emotions in question are not merely quasi-emotions. They are real emotions since real emotions can be generated by imaginings and not, as the strong cognitivist asserts, only by beliefs. Thus, the moderate cognitivist solves the paradox of fiction by denying the proposition that genuine emotions require beliefs. But how does the moderate cognitivist explain that emotions are aroused by literary works? As we have seen, emotions have objects toward which they are directed. Moreover, the objects of a given emotion must meet certain conditions of appropriateness in order to count as an emotion of that sort. In order to be an instance of fear, the object of that state must be perceived to be dangerous or threatening to me or mine (where mine may encompass the fictional protagonists in a story). Fictions are constructed. In order to elicit the emotions intended by the fiction, the persons, places, and events in the fiction need to be constructed in such a way that certain of their salient aspects satisfy the conditions of appropriateness for the state in question. For instance, the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein horrifies because he/it has been noticeably described as being dangerous and disgusting, thereby satisfying the criteria of appropriateness for that state. Shelley, that is, has in the process of constructing her fiction prefocused our attention on the very attributes whose appearance is requisite for being horrified. Call this process criterial prefocusing. According to the moderate cognitivist, the literary fiction engenders emotions in readers by prescribing that they imagine the people, places, and events described in the story in light of the ways in which they have been criterially prefocused affectively (Carroll, “Art”; Carroll, “Literature”). 116

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Whereas much of the renewed philosophical interest in the emotions in the last quarter of the twentieth century was cognitively oriented, a noncognitive, neo-Jamesian line of thinking also began to emerge, often in explicit opposition to the more cognitivist persuasion. This viewpoint gradually made its way into the philosophy of literature in Jenefer Robinson’s book Deeper Than Reason, which, among other things develops probably the most comprehensive philosophical theory of the relation between the emotions and literature presently available. Unlike most philosophers of literature, Robinson pays close attention to the psychology of the emotions. Given her study of that research, she is convinced that emotions are noncognitive—that the emotional processing of stimuli begins before the object is identified cognitively and classified. There is a movement in the bushes. We make an immediate, perceptual, affective appraisal, which instructs us “Be cautious.” This gives rise to certain behavioral repercussions including motor preparations. Only after the process has begun do we start to cognitively monitor our state with an eye to identifying the particular object of emotions and to possibly modifying it. For example, if we identify the movement in the bush as the result of the wind, we “stand down,” so to speak. Robinson embraces this elementary picture of the emotions on the basis of experiments that show we can acquire affective dispositions subliminally and by neuroscientific evidence that shows that with certain emotions, such as fear, the stimulus reaches and activates an emotional center of the brain (the amygdala) before it reaches the frontal cortex. Given this, Robinson thinks the initial emotion appraisal of the stimulus is more like a perception. Indeed, at one point, she suggests that being startled is the paradigmatic emotional response.2 On Robinson’s basic account of the emotions, cognition is the last stage of the emotional process. But aren’t many emotional episodes preceded by cognition? It might take weeks of deliberation, of mulling over the evidence before I become jealous of the way in which my co-worker is being treated by my boss. In order to accommodate cases like this—which are particularly relevant to the apparently cognition-led experience of reading literature affectively—Robinson introduces a variation of her basic account of the emotions. According to Robinson when cognition appears to give rise to an emotional response it is that the cognizing the stimulus elicits emotionally significant memories or memory types and they activate the affective appraisals that give rise to the phenomenological/physiological sensations that prepare certain behavioral dispositions, etc. That is, the memory types rather than the cognizing propone the affective appraisals. Whether this model is convincing is not a matter that can be pursued at length here. Nevertheless, several questions can be briefly noted. First, why is it necessary to postulate the intercession of memories or memory types between cognizing the stimulus and activating the affective appraisal. Why can’t the cognition do it alone? Afterall, cognition can interact causally with the affective appraisal when it monitors and sometimes modifies the initial affective appraisal at the end of the emotion process. Why can’t it do so at the beginning of the process? It seems as though hypothesizing these memory intervals across the board may be ad hoc. Furthermore, does the neuroscientific evidence Robinson adduces really fit the phenomenon of reading literature? Reading is a cognitive activity that occurs in the frontal lobes of the brain, putatively before the reader’s emotion center is activated. Thus, the interaction between these two regions of the brain would appear to be more temporally/causally complicated than Robinson suggests. The preceding questions are probably best adjudicated by empirical scientists. More germane to the philosophy of literature are the claims Robinson makes about the importance for the understanding—both the understanding of literature and the understanding of life more generally—of the emotions engaged by literature. Here, Robinson’s claims are qualified. She 117

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does not maintain that all literature engages the emotions; some literature is primarily cognitive. The literature that she has in mind is roughly realist novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including those of Tolstoy, James, and Wharton. Of those, Robinson says that our emotional engagement with them contributes to our understanding. First it contributes to our understanding of the works in question. Here Robinson makes stronger and weaker claims. Sometimes she says that our emotional engagement with these works can help with understanding these works—something I think is undeniable insofar as often our emotional responses help us identify which characters to align ourselves with and against. But at other times, Robinson seems to suggest that our emotional engagement is required in order to understand such works—that we could not access the information made available to us by the emotions by exclusively cognitive means. Robinson appears to advance two arguments on behalf of the strong reading of her thesis. Call them the Understanding Argument and the Attention Argument. The understanding argument goes like this: (1) Understanding fictional characters is like understanding real people. (2) Understanding real people is impossible without emotional engagement. (3) Therefore, understanding fictional people is impossible without emotional engagement. This argument has at least two flaws. First, understanding fictional characters is not always like understanding real people. Often in order to understand why fictional people behave as they do, we need to consider the needs of the narrative. Wimps become courageous when the damsel is in distress because that’s what the narrative calls for. The second premise of the argument also appears to pass muster because of its vague scope. Sometimes our emotional responses help understand others. But the emotions are not always necessary. Sometimes the situation speaks for itself. The Attention Argument is similar to the Understanding Argument: (1) The emotions focus our attention on the aspects of things that are significant to our understanding. (2) Without the emotions we could not focus our attention of the aspects of things that are significant to our understanding. (3) Therefore, without the emotions, our attention would not be focused on the aspects of the fiction that are significant for our understanding. Again, the problem is with the overly ambiguous scope of the premises. The emotions do focus our attention, but they are not the only things that do so. Often, we can focus our attention on the relevant aspect without affective recourse. With reference to literature, knowledge of the genre might be sufficient to focus on everything that is relevant to understanding the text. That is, sometimes we may know where to focus our attention on exclusively cognitive grounds. Robinson not only thinks that emotional engagement with the kinds of realist texts that concern her enables us to understand those texts, but also life outside of literature. For example, our amusement in response to the character Lambert Strether in Henry James’ The Ambassadors enables us to recognize a certain character trait for which we otherwise have no label— call it “American silliness,” perhaps, a mix of good natured-ness with priggishness. Robinson dubs this kind of enriched understanding a sentimental education. Once again, the problem with Robinson’s position is her shifting between a stronger and a weaker claim. Of course, our emotional responses may give rise to insight. But must they? That is what Robinson occasionally suggests. And that, of course, would be a very ambitious philosophical claim. But it is hard to credit. Can’t we understand the comic awkwardness of a character—due, for example, to our understanding of the etiquette of the context—without being comically amused ourselves. For example, consider a scene when he, say, uses the wrong spoon? Of course, one might say that we don’t really understand it, unless we feel the mirth. But that would simply beg the question. 118

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Robinson is certainly right to say that we can learn about the emotions from literature, both by reflection on the author’s depiction of the inner lives of characters and by reflecting on our own responses to them. We can learn, for example, about the fluidity of emotional lives—how our emotions are constantly changing, mutating. But again: the question is whether this understanding is only available to us by experiencing our own emotional vicissitudes while reading. Robinson gives good examples of the way in which this sort of affective understanding could happen; but no decisive argument for why it must happen. Another aspect the emotions in literature that Robinson discusses is the relation of the emotions to formal devices. On her view, formal literary devices are coping mechanisms. The powerful emotional material in the poem Arnold’s “Dover Beach” engenders feelings of insecurity that need to be managed by formal strategies like symbolization. Yet even supposing that that is an adequate account of “Dover Beach,” it won’t generalize across all literature. Much literature does not evoke painful or threatening material. Yeats’ “Fiddler of Dooney” doesn’t. Presumably all or nearly all literature employs formal structures. Yet not all literature contains the sort of disturbing emotional material that would require coping in the sense of dealing with something difficult or challenging that taxes my resources, like stress.3 Although I have raised questions about some of Robinson’s findings, I do think her approach is significant because it foreshadows a salutary direction for ambitious philosophical research into the relation of literature and the emotions. Her willingness to incorporate empirical findings into her analyses has pioneered a new way of doing the philosophy of literature, which will be of growing importance in the years to come. In summary, in the course of this chapter we have traced the trajectory of philosophical views regarding the relation of the emotions to literature. Plato thought the emotions were essential to poetry but suspected it; his student Aristotle, in contrast, argued that poetry could perform the salutary service of clarifying the emotions. The Romantics likewise regarded the emotions as essential to poetry and thus eventually influenced the formulation of expression theories of art, like that of R. G. Collingwood. Although reference to the emotions was frowned upon by the New Critics, contemporary philosophers, including Kendall Walton and Jenefer Robinson have reopened the discussion of the relation of literature and the emotions in such a way that it is one of the dominant conversations among philosophers of art today.

Notes 1 The Platonic suspicion of the emotions continued throughout the Western tradition in authors like Augustine, Rousseau, and Brecht, for example (Carroll, “Theater”). 2 Given this view, Robinson has no difficulty dissolving the paradox of fiction since she does not hold that the emotions are the result of beliefs. 3 Robinson tends to use “manage” and “cope” interchangeably. And though it may be true that formal devices manage emotions in the sense of “guiding” them, it is not true that all formal devices manage them in the sense of “coping” with them where what one copes with are challenges. Robinson seems to me to have the latter sense in mind throughout.

Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath, Penguin Books, 1996. Cantarino, Vincente. Arabic Texts in the Golden Age: A Selection of Texts Accompanied by a Preliminary Study. Brill, 1975. Carroll, Noël. “Art, Narrative, and Emotion.” Beyond Beauty: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Cambridge UP, 2001.

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Noël Carroll ———. Classics of the Western Philosophy of Art. Hackett, forthcoming. ———. “Literature, the Emotions, and Learning.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, Apr. 2020, pp. 1–18. ———. “Oedipus Tyrannus and the Cognitive Value of Literature.” The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles, edited by Paul Woodruff, Oxford UP, 2018. ———. “Theater and the Emotions.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Oxford UP, 2015. Hogan, Lalita Pandit. “Dhvani and Rasa.” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan, Cambridge UP, 2011. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. Liu, Hsieh. The Literary Mind and the Craving of the Dragon. Translated by Vincent Shih, Columbia UP, 1959. Murasaki, Lady. The Tale of Genji. Translated by Arthur Waley, Modern Library, 1960. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge UP, 1986. Plato. Republic. Translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford UP, 1993. ———. Two Comic Dialogues: Ion and Hippias Major. Translated by Paul Woodruff, Hackett, 1983. Robinson, Jenefer. Deeper Than Reason. Oxford UP, 2005. Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Translated by Almyer Maude, MacMillan, 1985. Walton, Kendall. “Fearing Fictions.” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 75, no. 1, 1978, pp. 5–27. Wimsatt, W. K. with Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meanings of Poetry. U of Kentucky P, 1954.

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PART 2

Emotions of Literature

10 AESTHETIC EMOTIONS Sibylle Baumbach

Abstract: Not all emotions experienced in the encounter with literature are “aesthetic.” As suggested by the seeming paradox inherent in the term “aesthetic emotions,” the latter embraces reactive and reflective responses, combining emotional and cognitive processes in the appreciation of a literary text, and includes some conceptual tension. Following a brief survey of recent research in the field, this chapter explores fascination as aesthetic emotion, proposing that aesthetic emotions can be conceived as mixed emotions that push our emotional repertoire to its limits, create instances of emotional and cognitive disorientation, and prompt temporary in/securities of attachment that ultimately contribute to the pleasure arising from coping with these complex emotions in the process of reading. It further suggests that due to its focus on mixed emotions and the sublime, the Gothic genre in particular affords aesthetic emotions.

Approaching Aesthetic Emotions: Coming to Terms With a Paradox Considering that our classification systems are binary in nature, the simplest way to define aesthetic emotions would be to oppose them to “non-aesthetic” emotions. As such, they would denote emotions that are aesthetically generated, meaning that they emerge in the appreciation of aesthetic objects or textures, including artworks, design objects, literary texts, or music. With recourse to Immanuel Kant’s concept of “a disinterested [...] satisfaction” (Kant 95), aesthetic emotions might be further specified as a non-utilitarian sensual pleasure felt particularly in the experience of beauty, including beauty in nature. One might also conceive of “aesthetic emotions” as the opposite of “ethical” or “moral” emotions, connecting to the key principle of Aestheticism, l’art pour l’art, which aims at uncoupling the appreciation of beauty from any moral considerations, as propagated, for instance, in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel À Rebours (1884) or the writings of Oscar Wilde. Further, “aesthetic” emotions might be juxtaposed to “real” emotions, in that they are imagined, even irrational. There are several limitations to these binary classifications. First, they lack precision: “aesthetic emotions” in the sense just outlined seems to be interchangeable with “aesthetic pleasure” or “aesthetic experience,” which, in classical aesthetic theory, is associated with a sense of pleasurable fulfilment. Aesthetic responses to literature, however, include a variety of emotions that are not necessarily pleasurable. Furthermore, the opposition of “aesthetic” and “nonaesthetic” emotions, such as “boredom” or “frustration/anger” (Hogan 113), might suggest that DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-13

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aesthetic emotions are “refined emotions” (Frijda and Sundararajan 231). This notion has been challenged by Jenefer Robinson who argues that “refined emotions aren’t emotional at all,” as they are “perceptual rather than emotional” (“Aesthetic Emotions,” 210). Second, if restricted to the experience of “disinterested” sensual pleasure or morally neutral emotions, the category of aesthetic emotions is suitable only to a limited extent for a deeper investigation of the complex emotional landscape elicited by literature. It would fail to account for “negative” aesthetic emotions such as disgust (Robinson “Aesthetic Disgust?”) or “knowledge emotions,” such as confusion, interest, surprise and awe, which “stem from goals associated with learning” (Silvia 75) and include metacognitive processes. It would also fail to accommodate mixed emotions, such as feelings of the sublime or fascination, and emotions related to the moral disapproval of fictional characters or events, as experienced, for instance, in tragedy (Feagin). Furthermore, aesthetic emotions might arise from morally questionable aesthetic experiences provoked, for instance, by narratives that draw on readers’ fascination with moral transgression to seduce them into storyworlds filled with taboo topics, such as incest, pedophilia, rape, or pornography, which is a key strategy of Ian McEwan’s aka Ian Macabre’s early narratives (cf. Baumbach 240–251). Third, as research in the context of “the paradox of fiction,” especially with regard to simulation theory, has shown (see Hogan, “Paradoxes of Literary Emotion,” Chapter 11 in this volume), the emotions we feel in response to fictional events and characters are genuine (Oatley “Why”) even if, as part of literary thought experiments, they might differ from real-life emotions with regard to their cognitive base. Defining aesthetic emotions remains a challenge. While in recent years, a number of studies have attempted to conceptualize aesthetic emotions from the perspective of philosophy (Robinson, esp. “Aesthetic Emotions”), psychology (Beermann et al.), neuroaesthetics (Zeki), and empirical aesthetics (Menninghaus et al.), they are still often “neglected” (Elpidorou) in emotion theory. One of the reasons for this neglect might be the conceptual tension inherent in the term. Combining two highly complex concepts, perception (the core meaning of the Greek term “aesthetics”) and emotion, an “aesthetic emotion” is ultimately a paradox, even “an oxymoron” (Robinson, “Aesthetic Emotions,” 205). As noted by Robinson, “[t]he paradox of aesthetic emotions” is that “the aesthetic is defined by Kant and his many successors as contrasting with practical goals” (“Aesthetic Emotions,” 208). Whereas practical goals and desires might vary between different people, Kantian aesthetics regards aesthetic pleasure as universal, which is why it must be “disinterested.” Though one could argue that aesthetic emotions are non-utilitarian to the extent that they are “produced by the appreciation of the intrinsic qualities of the beauty of nature, [. . .] of a work of art or an artistic performance” (Scherer 706), emotions are essentially subjective and “may be oriented to good, bad, or indifferent ends” (Hogan 5). As further observed by Robinson, if “the most valuable aesthetic experiences are often perceptually or cognitively demanding, [. . .] aesthetic emotions would presumably follow after the cognitive analysis of an artwork is complete but not contribute in any substantive way to the analysis itself ” (Robinson, “Aesthetic Emotions,” 205–206). In this understanding, however, aesthetic emotions would merely serve as an (unnecessary) add-on, or, as Robinson remarks, “[t]he aesthetic emotions would be otiose” (206). To further conceptualize aesthetic emotions, especially in connection with literature, I will first offer a brief survey of current research in this field, which confirms that aesthetic emotions are anything but “otiose,” before focusing on fascination as aesthetic emotion and proposing a multidimensional approach to the concept, which also opens up new areas for future research. 124

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Conceptualizing Aesthetic Emotions In recent scholarship, aesthetic emotions have been defined as “full-blown discrete emotions that, for all their differences in multiple emotion components, always include an aesthetic evaluation/appreciation” (Menninghaus et al., “What,” 171), as “blends of emotion terms with additional meanings of aesthetic evaluation” (Menninghaus et al., “Aesthetic Emotions,” 651), and as comprising “emotional complexity (or ambivalence)” (Hogan 232). Recent studies in empirical aesthetics have proposed various tools for future research on aesthetic emotions, such as the Aesthetic Emotions Scale (AESTHEMOS) developed by Schindler et al. to assess aesthetic emotions based on 75 emotion terms. Though rather broad in scope, covering not only the arts but also experiences in nature and other contexts of aesthetic appreciation, Schindler et al.’s definition is the most comprehensive to date: they conceive of aesthetic emotions as emotions that (1) “recipients actually feel”; (2) are non-utilitarian in that they are elicited through “the intrinsic aesthetic appeal of a stimulus”; (3) are triggered through “the distance senses,” i.e., “vision, hearing, and cognitive processing in response to such input”; (4) are “intertwined with aesthetic judgement” (Schindler et al. 2–3); and (5) are “distinct from pleasing emotions, epistemic emotions [i.e., what Silvia calls “knowledge emotions”], and negative emotions” (Schindler et al. 28). Based on this taxonomy, they identify four “prototypical aesthetic emotions”: “(1) the feeling of beauty/liking,1 (2) fascination, (3) being moved, and (4) awe” (28). For the study of literature or film, they also suggest to consider feelings of suspense or thrill, even though one could argue that these are to some extent covered by the AESTHEMOS “fascination” subscale (cf. Schindler et al. 33). What is a crucial in Schindler et al.’s conceptualization of aesthetic emotions, which was confirmed by studies of the semantic profile of aesthetic emotion terms (Beermann et al. 16), is the observation that aesthetic emotions are complex emotions, which “often involve mixtures of positive and negative valence and can be experienced as both arousing and relaxing” (Schindler et al. 26). This finding, which corresponds to the paradox inherent in the term, suggests that the combination of seemingly contrastive components is no obstacle to defining aesthetic emotions, but rather marks their core. It is particularly due to these recent studies in empirical aesthetics as well as to Jenefer Robinson’s work that research on aesthetic emotions has been gaining traction. Robinson classifies aesthetic emotions as “positive, pleasurable, consummatory emotions [. . .] of appreciation” (“Aesthetic Emotions,” 205), which are non-instrumental to the extent “that they have specific types of intentional object, namely the formal interrelationships in an artwork as well as the relationship between form and content” (219) and “do not motivate any specific behavior, except continuing to engage in the pleasurable contemplation of the artwork” (213). Furthermore, she claims that aesthetic emotions are to some extent self-sustaining, as they “motivate us to seek further sources of such satisfaction in other artworks” (219). This is in line with both Kantian aesthetics and recent empirical findings that suggest that aesthetic emotions “may motivate a wish to seek prolonged and repeated exposure [. . .] to a beautiful stimulus” (Menninghaus et al., “What,” 185), even though the term “beautiful” in this context seems too restrictive. Though too narrow to define the concept, the role of “formal interrelationships in an artwork” in eliciting aesthetic emotions, as maintained by formalist art theory, is an important notion to consider. It was first proposed by Clive Bell in his influential monograph Art (1914), which introduced the term “aesthetic emotion”2 and is still an important reference point for contemporary approaches on aesthetic experience. Bell suggested that aesthetic emotion is “a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art” (6–7) through “Significant 125

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Form” (8). The latter refers to “aesthetically moving forms,” i.e., “relations and combinations of lines and colours” (8), which have been devised by the artist following “certain unknown and mysterious laws” (11). Opposing the premises of realism, such as “accurate representation” (22), “significant form,” which can be found in “primitive art” (22) or Post-Impressionist art, is “free from descriptive qualities” (22). However, beyond “significant form” Bell does not identify any specific configurations that trigger aesthetic emotions. Further, he concedes that “aesthetic emotions vary with each individual” (9). Countering Bell’s notion that aesthetic responses are largely subjective, neuroaesthetic studies have tried to isolate mechanisms in “the emotional brain” (Zeki 11) that are activated in the experience of beauty and universal insofar as they are “to a large extent biologically determined” (Zeki 5). Identifying specific patterns or features that arouse aesthetic emotion, however, remains a challenge for art history, musicology, and (cognitive) literary studies. A purely formalist approach is unproductive for the study of literature since form and content are intimately intertwined and aesthetic emotions are contingent on one’s cognitive grasp of a work (Robinson, “Aesthetic Emotions,” 212). And yet Bell’s approach raises the question of whether there are any specific literary “forms” or techniques that afford aesthetic emotions. Considering that Bell was part of the Bloomsbury group, the narratives by Virginia Woolf might come to mind not only because she shared Bell’s deep interest in aesthetic theories, but also because her stream-of-consciousness technique connects to the “aesthetically moving forms” and the “relations and combinations” in Bell’s theory. Furthermore, Woolf’s narratives are concerned with feelings of beauty and sublimity (Hogan 25), which are or involve “prototypical aesthetic emotions ”, such as “awe” (Schindler et al. 33). The “terror of existential loneliness” (Hogan 45) expressed in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for instance, is represented and, to some extent, also contained by both sublimity and the unity across individual minds in the experience of beauty. As a result, the narrative creates securities and insecurities about attachment that Hogan has identified as “the most important emotion component” (45) in aesthetic response. In terms of form, these in/securities about attachment seem to be most effectively evoked through techniques of psychological realism, including stream of consciousness and first-person narration, which might therefore be regarded as especially effective in fostering aesthetic emotions. If we broaden our understanding of literary form to include literary genre as “bounded whole” (Levine 23), the Gothic seems a particularly apt “form” to elicit aesthetic emotions: Gothic literature combines a variety of positive and negative emotions while building on tensions between beauty and sublimity, which create various attachment in/securities. These tensions characterize the complex emotional landscape of the Gothic, which revolves around the prototypical aesthetic emotion of fascination.

Fascination as Aesthetic Emotion As suggested by Schindler et al. and earlier studies in literature (Baisch) and psychology (Marcović), fascination is a key aesthetic emotion. It belongs to the category of mixed emotions that arise in “the simultaneous or nearly simultaneous co-occurrence of relatively brief positive and negative affective states” (Larsen et al. 2) in the experience of a complex event. These mixed or complex emotions are particularly prominent in the realm of the aesthetic, afforded by the potentialities of literature and art. As suggested by Korsmeyer in relation to aesthetic emotions, “[w]ith certain emotions [. . .] aesthetic transformation is so profound that an entirely new affective experience is brought into being” (Korsmeyer 130). In the experience of the sublime, for instance, terror is “transmogrified into powerful and transportive aesthetic delight” (133). Something similar can be claimed for fear or repulsion in the context of 126

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fascination, insofar as these negative emotions are coupled with knowledge emotions such as curiosity or attraction, producing aesthetic pleasure. By creating an arena for mixed emotions, therefore, literary works “enlarg[e] our repertoires of emotional states” (Robinson, “Aesthetic Emotions,” 81). In this context, fascination is particularly productive. Fascination has been associated with admiration and awe (Scherer 714) and placed on the emotional spectrum between admiration and stupor (Degen 38). In this sense, it is deeply connected to the sublime, which, following Edmund Burke’s definition, “is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 33–34), insofar as the sublime includes the experience of awe that arises from a combination of “terror and at the same time admiration or reverence for its ‘terribleness’” (Robinson, “Aesthetic Disgust?,” 74). Connecting to the crucial role of attachment in aesthetic response, one could conceptualize fascination as the tension between simultaneous desires for de- and attachment that arise from conflicting responses, such as attraction and fear or repulsion. This conflict creates cognitive disorientation, which upsets familiar attachment strategies, but ultimately—by involving self-reflexive elements and distancing that enable cognitive coping (cf. Lazarus 112f.)—intensifies the attachment to a specific narrative. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818/1831) is a case in point. In the narrative, the tension between de- and attachment, underscored by allusions to (pseudo-) scientific powers of magnetism and mesmerism (cf. Baumbach, 158–160), contributes significantly to eliciting feelings of fascination and is played out on several levels. First and foremost, it characterizes the relationship between Victor Frankenstein, the lone scientist, and his creation. Whereas Victor tries to become and stay detached from his creation, the latter, abandoned by his creator and shunned by the world, is desperately seeking attachment to other human beings, the cottagers, his creator, and his own species, assuming that “one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me” (Shelley 146). Victor’s refusal to create this “companion” leads to tormenting “terror of existential loneliness” both on the part of the creature and Frankenstein, culminating in Victor’s loss of his wife Elizabeth (cf. 200–201). This attachment-detachment scenario is underscored by the frame narrative, which features another lone scientist, the “deeply affectionate” explorer Robert Walton, who is enticed by a quest for “wonders and [. . .] beauty” and “undiscovered solitudes” (15), while longing for “the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine” (19), which he does and does not find in Victor and his reader(s), be it his sister Margaret or readers of the novel. Shelley’s narrative is deeply invested in eliciting and also exploring aesthetic emotions. Frankenstein’s initial reaction to the request of creating another being that might resemble the “creature of fine sensations” that he experiences his creation to be, after the latter’s emotional plea for a companion, denotes a prototypical aesthetic emotion: “I was moved” (Shelley 148)—an emotion that leads to both attachment (“I compassioned him,” 149) and repulsion (“but when I looked upon him, [. . .] my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred,” 149). This mixed reaction that Victor himself deems “strange” (149) creates the fascination with the creature, which is shared by both Victor and Shelley’s readers. The “strangeness” Victor experiences is a crucial component of aesthetic emotions. As suggested by Keith Oatley, art and literature tend to focus on emotions that are “the most difficult to understand, which therefore need the most exploration, and which can have the most farreaching implications for us” (Oatley “Art,” 37). They are also the most difficult emotions to manage. Emotional exploration and management are tasks that are intimately connected with aesthetic emotions. As noted by Robinson, “the greatest artworks [. . .] encourage their audiences to monitor their emotional responses cognitively” (Robinson “Aesthetic Disgust?,” 82) 127

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and guide us “in how to reflect on the emotions we are experiencing, whether they are justified or not, and what it is about the work that has made us react in this way” (82). In the narrow definition proposed in this chapter, aesthetic emotions often push our emotional repertoire to its limits, augmenting our knowledge particularly of mixed emotions. At the same time, they include metacognitive nudges in that they motivate readers to reflect upon and monitor their emotional experiences. This is achieved by creating a sense of safe readership, which, unlike “psychical distance” (Bullough 95), requires and, to some extent, also enables intense emotional engagement. In the case of Frankenstein, distancing is facilitated through the epistolary form and the Chinese-boxstructure of the narrative, which reveals the creature’s story as thrice removed (retold by Victor and Walton). Both measures of distancing intensify our fascination with the narrative. From its outset, we as readers are breaking a taboo in engaging in a story that, communicated in private letters by Walton to his sister, we are not meant to read. This suggested distance, however, is compromised in the course of the narrative, as the epistolary form becomes increasingly backgrounded, leaving readers more exposed to experiences of the sublime mediated by Victor, and especially to the fascination exerted by the creature. However, it is (re-)established at the very ending: the narrative closes with the term “distance” (Shelley 225), as if to release readers from their intense engagement in this narrative. This mode of distancing, which connects to the distancing–embracing model by Menninghaus, Wagner et al. insofar as it enables readers “to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions” (“Distancing-Embracing,” 1) is a crucial component of “narratives of fascination.” As I have argued elsewhere (Baumbach esp. 24–35), these narratives involve readers cognitively and emotionally in intense emotional (and often morally ambiguous) tensions and revolve around fascination. Fascination can be defined as a mixed emotion that combines feelings of attraction and fear or of attraction and repulsion—a combination that is best represented in the figure of the Medusa, which is why I have also referred to narratives of fascination as medusamorphoses (Baumbach 67–70). Insofar as these narratives guide readers’ fascination, display examples of emotional excess (but also coping strategies), and disclose key mechanisms of fascination, they offer tools for emotion management, which support readers’ understanding of key strategies involved in narrative seduction and of fascination as aesthetic emotion, its arousal, sustainment, and release. It is by means of strategic distancing that readers can enjoy the “terror of existential loneliness” (Hogan 45) that drives Shelley’s Frankenstein. As epistolary novel, the narrative presents, enacts, and overcomes this loneliness: it puts the reader into the position of a silent (and lonely) witness of private accounts, allowing them to (cognitively and emotionally) engage in letters written by the solitary Walton to his sister, which include confessional tales by Frankenstein and his creature. These accounts in turn display the “terror of existential loneliness”— experienced by the eccentric scientist and the abandoned creation respectively—a terror that is both acknowledged and overcome by feelings of the sublime and fascination. Victor not only experiences but comments on aesthetic emotions that arise in his encounters with both the creature and the grandeur of the Alps, with man-made “artwork” and nature respectively. Experiences of the sublime, such as the “beautiful yet terrific” tempest (Shelley 77) or “the sight of the awful and majestic in nature” (100), help prepare Victor for the appearance of the creature (77; 102–103). The creature, on the other hand, though (conceptually) a product of the sublime (i.e., born out of Victor’s experience of awe when observing the power of natural electricity during a thunderstorm [Shelley 42]) emerges as an object designed as “beautiful” but met with “breathless horror and disgust” (58) when it first comes to life. This seemingly contradictory response foreshadows the mixture of attraction and repulsion that will 128

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be associated with the “monster” (61) once he tells his own story—a story presented in such delicate and beautiful manner that even Victor is moved (148). Though Victor unmistakably experiences feelings of the sublime, the sublime itself is not explicitly identified as such until the second volume of the narrative where its effect is explained: These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling [. . .], gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy. (99–100) Such instances of reflected aesthetic appreciation appeal to readers’ emotional (and cognitive) response-ability while exposing the reactive and reflective aspect (Cupchik) of aesthetic emotions. They further suggest that emotions are precognitive, but need cognitive work to be fully savored (and to become aesthetic emotions), which makes “coping” with these complex emotions and their “reward” all the more pleasurable. This is confirmed in the creature’s account, which reiterates the initial, reactive state of experiencing “sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature: [. . .] a mixture of pain and pleasure” (Shelley 111) and, in a reflective mode, connects them to “the science of words or letters” (112), to literary works, which “opened before me a wide field for wonder and delight” (122) and caused “strange feelings” (122). What is hinted at here is literature’s ability to expand our emotional repertoires by eliciting (and also reflecting upon) awe-inspiring, often ambivalent emotions, such as fascination. Furthermore, as suggested by the creature who spends his days “in close attention” (121), fascination might help (re-)calibrate one’s attentional focus, which is needed for coping with mixed emotions and experiencing aesthetic pleasure. Extrapolating from these observations regarding fascination, aesthetic emotions can be defined as emotions that are carefully monitored and managed by narrative or poetic strategies that often operate on the verge of emotional excess while offering a sense of safe readership to open up a space for experimenting with “strange,” i.e., predominantly mixed, emotions.

Toward a Multidimensional Model of Aesthetic Emotions in Literature Part of the difficulty of defining aesthetic emotions lies in the different levels upon which they are experienced in the encounter with literary texts. In this final section, I propose a multidimensional framework for conceptualizing aesthetic emotions, which also considers the aesthetics of production and the need for historicizing aesthetic emotions. In addition to reader-oriented perspectives, production-oriented perspectives can offer important insights into the way in which specific forms or literary genres afford aesthetic emotions. First studies in this direction have suggested that there are six emotional arcs that underlie conventional plot developments, including “‘Tragedy,’ or ‘Riches to rags’ (fall)” or “‘Icarus’ (rise-fall)” (Reagan et al. 5). Interestingly, only one of them, “Rags to riches (rise),” shows a sustained focus on the emotion happiness. This finding corroborates the notion that, more often than not, aesthetic emotions involve negatively valanced emotions, which “secure attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability” (Menninghaus et al., “Distancing-Embracing,” 3). To some extent, we should regard aesthetic emotions as genre-dependent. Considering that particularly the Romantic era saw a heightened interest in the ability of literature and art to express emotions, literary forms and genres popular at the time are fruitful starting points for 129

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investigating aesthetic emotions in literature. Furthermore, according to Romantic aesthetics, it is by expressing emotions that they can be brought into consciousness, which enables their understanding, monitoring, and mastery both in the process of reception and poetic creation. This is suggested in William Wordsworth’s often-cited aesthetic credo that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction 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. (Wordsworth 266) It was Wordsworth, therefore, who offered one of the earliest definitions of aesthetic emotions. While he is specifically referring to aesthetic emotions in connection with poetry—and popular poetic forms in Romanticism, such as the elegy or ode, would lend themselves to a deeper analysis in this context—, in my view it is the Gothic genre that most affords aesthetic emotions, such as fascination, induced by terror, horror, or feelings of the sublime. Like all emotions, aesthetic emotions are “socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical” (Scheer 193). Insofar as they are shaped by “emotional communities” (Rosenwein) and conventions of “emotional styles” (Gammerl) established by authors, literary works, and their readers at a particular time, aesthetic emotions show historical variations. This is confirmed by the shifting meanings of fascination, which developed from contexts of black magic (from Latin fascinare—“to becry, bewitch”) to predominantly positive connotations in contemporary culture. Even though as aesthetic emotion fascination might show little variation across time and has largely retained its complexity and ambivalent tension, to understand the nuances in its literary use and effect it is essential to consider the sociocultural and aesthetic discourses surrounding “fascination” in a specific period. Thus, it is quite likely that an Early Modern audience of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), which associated fascination with the evil eye, pseudo-scientific theories of love, or the spreading of diseases by invisible spirits that traveled through the air, responded differently to the attachment, emotion management, and coping strategies offered by the play than a twentyfirst-century audience. In a similar vein, literary fascination around 1900 was deeply embedded in the shift from the moral, epistemic, and educational function of literature to a focus on aestheticism and decadence. This background is important for an analysis of fascination as aesthetic emotion in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), for instance. Finally, readers acquainted with prospects of the posthuman (recently explored in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein [2019]), and (potentially) less familiar with the aesthetics of the sublime, might experience the creation scene and simulations of the sublime in Shelley’s Frankenstein differently than early nineteenth-century readers who eagerly followed the progress of Galvanism. While it is impossible to revive historical readers, we have to be aware of the historical embeddedness of aesthetic emotions and their historical emplotment within narratives. In addition to considering the affordances of specific literary forms and genres as well as individual and historical variabilities of aesthetic emotions, an analysis of aesthetic emotions in literature needs to distinguish between paratextual, textual, intratextual, and intertextual or intermedial aesthetic emotions to acknowledge the different levels at which they are triggered. Though often excluded in the consideration of aesthetic emotion, the presentation of a text and its material design influence its haptic and visual experience. A serial publication presented 130

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in a monthly magazine or a text interspersed with drawings that prompt a multimodal reading will be experienced differently than a narrative read from a website, such as Gutenberg.org, which lacks illustrations and does not even require digitally turning a page. Though the differences might not be of quality but of degree, to do justice to the aesthetic experience, we need to consider paratextual aesthetic emotions, which might either serve or inhibit reader engagement, depending on the pleasure they take in the specific medium. In the engagement with the text itself, it would be beneficial to distinguish more carefully between textual, intratextual, and intertextual or intermedial aesthetic emotions. Textual aesthetic emotions connect to the design of a text, its rhythm, style, and structure and are elicited by the recognition of “(non-habitual) thematically defined pattern[s]” (Hogan 13). This notion exceeds a formalist approach by acknowledging the pleasure and gratification readers take in gap-filling (following Wolfgang Iser), which Hogan refers to as “implicit beauty” (Hogan 14). Taking into account that gap-filling is shaped by readers’ personal experiences, openness to experience (Silvia et al.), mood or Stimmung when encountering an aesthetic object, familiarity with specific genres, and historically, culturally, or socially determined “emotional communities,” aesthetic emotions are, to some degree, variable and will be experienced differently by different individuals. Contrary to Menninghaus et al. (“What”) and Schindler et al. (2), an analysis of aesthetic emotions in literature should also include emotions that are represented in literary works. However, I do not propose including all “art-represented emotions” (Menninghaus et al., “What,” 14), but only those related to aesthetic experiences, i.e., characters’ experiences of an artwork, an aesthetic object, an event, or nature. The (reflected) existential loneliness compensated for by feelings of the sublime, experienced by Walton, Frankenstein, and his creature, or the portrait of the handsome Dorian Gray that is perceived as fascinating by its creator Basil but never presented to the reader, mark important instances in which aesthetic emotions are not only prebut also configured. These intratextual aesthetic emotions engage readers in their refiguration while also creating a sense of distancing, which allows us to reflect upon the aesthetic-emotion scaffolding of a text. Insofar as the aesthetic object responded to corresponds to a (real or literary) artwork or objects that exist beyond the narrative, I would propose to further distinguish intermedial or intertextual aesthetic emotions: aesthetic emotions can be “imported” into a narrative, drama, or a poem by referring to familiar dual-valence objects that activate readers’ emotional knowledge. This would apply, for instance, to images of the Medusa, which transport notions of both attraction and fear or repulsion, or intertextual references used by adaptations, such as Winterson’s Frankissstein, which evoke aesthetic emotions through the association with the Gothic genre in general and Shelley’s novel in particular. A final example from Gothic fiction, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), shall serve to illustrate the interconnections of these different levels. Determined to escape Dracula’s castle where he is held prisoner, Jonathan Harker notes in his diary “a wild desire took me” (Stoker 53) shortly before he describes how he searched Dracula’s undead body for the key to the castle’s doors. This passage alludes to the fascination and phobia surrounding Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned for gross indecency in 1895 when Stoker was writing Dracula. However, the “wild[e] desire,” which points to transgressive and, at the time, forbidden desires—“to feel another man’s body” (Schaffer 399)—is presented within a safe space: Harker’s experience is recollected in his diary, which is indicated by the date written above each entry in italics. It is told in retrospect, and apparently not meant for the curious eye of the reader. This notion of safe readership, however, makes the attraction to the taboo and the forbidden—represented on the intratextual level in the luring figure of the vampire, heightened by the intertextual link to Oscar Wilde’s supposedly immoral 131

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writings, and intensified by first-person narrative (textual)—all the more enjoyable. Furthermore, it secures the ongoing attraction of Stoker’s narrative. Interweaving these different levels, Stoker’s Dracula, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, succeeds in engaging readers in complex experiences of aesthetic emotions, which are especially characteristic of Gothic literature. As suggested in this chapter, the Gothic genre is particularly invested in the emplotment and stimulation of aesthetic emotions in both a reactive and reflective mode. It builds on, exposes, and reflects upon the tensions that are constitutive of mixed emotions, such as fascination, by involving instances of emotional and cognitive disorientation that create temporary in/securities of attachment, which ultimately make coping with these complex emotions all the more pleasurable. Considering aesthetic emotions’ ability to “motivate us to seek further sources of such satisfaction in other artworks” (Robinson “Aesthetic Emotions,” 219), this might explain why the Gothic genre in particular continues to remain “undead.”

Notes 1 “Beauty” and “liking” were combined, as the study was conducted in German, and the German term schön both denotes something beautiful and indicates liking (Schindler et al. 29). 2 Some critics have suggested that Bell’s use of the term is “unfortunate,” as his theory of aesthetic experience follows a perceptual rather than an emotive model (Gould, 126; Zeki).

Works Cited Baisch, Martin. “Faszination als ästhetische Emotion im höfischen Roman.” Machtvolle Gefühle, edited by Ingrid Kasten, De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 139–199. Baumbach, Sibylle. Literature and Fascination. Palgrave, 2015. Beermann, Ursula, Georg Hosoya, et al. 2021. “Dimensions and Clusters of Aesthetic Emotions: A Semantic Profile Analysis.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12. Bell, Clive. Art. Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1914. Bullough, Edward. “Psychical Distance.” Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays. Bowes and Bowes, 1957, pp. 93–130. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, edited by Paul Guyer, 1757. Oxford UP, 2015. Cupchik, Gerald C. “Emotion in Aesthetics: Reactive and Reflective Models.” Poetics, vol. 23, 1994, pp. 177–188. Degen, Andreas. Ästhetische Faszination: Die Geschichte einer Denkfigur vor ihrem Begriff. De Gruyter, 2017. Elpidorou, Andreas. “Neglected Emotions.” The Monist, vol. 103, no. 2, 2020, pp. 135–146. Feagin, Susan L. “The Pleasures of Tragedy.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1, 1983, pp. 95–104. Frijda, Nico H., and Louise Sundarajan. “Emotion Refinement: A Theory Inspired by Chinese Poetics.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 2, no. 3, 2007, pp. 227–241. Gammerl, Benno. “Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges.” Rethinking History, vol. 16, no. 2, 2021, pp. 161–175. Gould, Carol S. “Clive Bell on Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Truth.” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 34, no. 2, 1994, pp. 124–133. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts. Cambridge UP, 2016. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgement, edited and translated by Paul Guyer, Cambridge UP, 2000. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Savouring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford UP, 2011. Larsen, Jeff T., et al. “Varieties of Mixed Emotional Experience.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, vol. 15, 2017, pp. 72–76. Lazarus, Richard S. Emotion & Adaptation. Oxford UP, 1991. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015.

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Aesthetic Emotions Marcović, Slobodan. “Components of Aesthetic Experience: Aesthetic Fascination, Aesthetic Appraisal, and Aesthetic Emotion.” i-Perception, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–17. Menninghaus, Winfried, et al. “Aesthetic Emotions Are a Key Factor in Aesthetic Evaluation: A Reply to Skov and Nadal (‘Aesthetic Emotions’).” American Psychological Association, vol. 127, no. 4, 2020, pp. 650–654. ———. “The Distancing-Embracing Model of the Enjoyment of Negative Emotions in Art Reception.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 40, 2017, pp. 1–63. ———. “What Are Aesthetic Emotions?” Psychological Review, vol. 126, no. 2, 2019, pp. 171–195. Oatley, Keith. “Art as Emotional Exploration.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 40, 2017, pp. 37–38. ———. “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 3, no. 2, 1999, pp. 101–117. Reagan, Andrew J., et al. “The Emotional Arcs of Stories Are Dominated by Six Basic Shapes.” EPJ Data Science, vol. 5, art. 31, 2016, pp. 1–12. Robinson, Jenefer. “Aesthetic Disgust?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, vol. 75, 2014, pp. 51–84. ———. “Aesthetic Emotions.” The Monist, vol. 103, no. 2, 2020, pp. 205–222. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Cornell UP, 2006. Schaffer, Talia. “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me.’ The Homoerotic History of Dracula.” ELH, vol. 61, no. 2, 1994, pp. 381–425. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory, vol. 51, no. 2, 2012, pp. 193–220. Scherer, Klaus R. “What Are Emotions? And How Can They Be Measured?” Social Science Information, vol. 44, no. 4, 2005, pp. 695–729. Schindler, Ines, et al. “Measuring Aesthetic Emotions: A Review of the Literature and a New Assessment Tool.” PLoS ONE, vol. 12, art. 6, 2017, pp. 1–45. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, edited by Maurice Hindle, Penguin Books, 2003. Silvia, Paul J. “Confusion and Interest: The Role of Knowledge Emotions in Aesthetic Experience.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 4, no. 2, 2010, pp. 75–80. ———, et al. “Openness to Experience and Awe in Response to Nature and Music: Personality and Profound Aesthetic Experiences.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 9, no. 4, 2015, pp. 376–384. Stoker, Bram. Dracula, edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, Norton, 1997. Wordsworth, William. “Preface.” Wordsworth & Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, Routledge, 1991. Zeki, Semir. “Clive Bell’s ‘Significant Form’ and the Neurobiology of Aesthetics.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 7, art. 730, pp. 1–14.

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11 PARADOXES OF LITERARY EMOTION Simulation and Te Zhào Orphan Patrick Colm Hogan

Abstract: Our emotional response to literature poses apparent paradoxes. The paradox of fiction arises because we respond emotionally to events that we believe are unreal. The paradox of tragedy arises because we enjoy ordinarily aversive feelings (such as empathic grief ). This chapter argues that both paradoxes are explained by the adaptive operation of simulation (the imagination of particular causal sequences, real or counterfactual). That adaptive operation requires that simulations produce precisely the emotional results of these paradoxes. However, our simulations commonly involve the seeking component of our reward system. As such, they are oriented toward achieving a stable condition in which the pursuit of a particular goal stops. In literary terms, simulation seeks resolution. This raises the question of why some literary simulations are apparently unresolved. The chapter explores these issues in relation to a widely read, Yuán dynasty drama—Jì Jūnxiáng’s The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhào.

In the sixth century BCE, Tu Angu, a Jìn official, had the entire Zhào clan assassinated; however, he accidentally left one unmurdered newborn, who grew up to avenge his family. At least that is one version of the story. Numerous versions have appeared at different times and in different media. Arguably the most canonical form is found in the Yuán dynasty drama by Jì Jūnxiáng (紀君祥), The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhào (Zhàoshì gū’ér dà bào chóu; 趙氏孤兒大報仇). The enthusiasm suggested by this history of adaptations is perhaps not surprising. My students are fairly consistent in finding Jì’s version engaging. They also have more specific emotional responses, most often finding it sad. Like reactions to any literary work, these raise questions about the nature of our emotional response to literature. In the case of a work with many versions, there are also more specific questions that we might wish to consider. For example, Jì’s play itself has different versions. As Idema notes, in the Yuán dynasty version, the play ends with the orphan “filled with a desire to take revenge” (Idema 804). In the (subsequent) Míng version, the orphan “requests [the ruler’s] permission to take revenge. . . . When this permission is granted, he proceeds . . . to capture and execute [Tu Angu]” (804). Here we might wonder both why the Míng editors provided a narrative resolution and why Jì initially did not. It is also important to note that the play is about revenge, which may provoke questions related to genre. Revenge is nearly always complicated. In a range of traditions, revenge is DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-14

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represented as giving rise to a cycle of violence in which innocent people are almost invariably caught up (see Chapter 4 of my Affective Narratology). This is one reason why revenge stories are often tragedies. When they are comic, this may be the result of revenge being abandoned, as in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In contrast, Jì’s play is apparently a comedy due to the success of the revenge. This is one reason that my students find the play sad. There is something tragic about it, despite its apparently happy ending (clear in the Míng version, presumably hoped for in the Yuán version). It might seem that this issue of ambivalence arises only for Western readers. For example, we find the following passage in the Classic of Rites: “With the enemy who has slain his father, one should not live under the same heaven” (I:70; the Classic of Rites [礼记, Lǐjì] is one of the foundational texts of Rújiā [Confucianism]). Does this suggest that, while Europeans reject revenge, Chinese embrace it? As to Europe, it is true that the paradigmatic, Western revenge drama, Hamlet, is a tragedy. However, the critical hand-wringing over Hamlet’s much-discussed “delay” would seem to suggest that many readers are rooting for revenge. More significantly, it seems clear that nonfictional westerners undertake revenge with great regularity. Indeed, that may be one reason why they need anti-revenge literature. As to China, Anne Cheng explains that “Murder carried out by vengeance is problematic and has, in fact, never ceased to give food for thought to experts both on classical sources and on legal texts” (29). Indeed, “Imperial law . . . prohibits murder” for reasons of “social order” and thereby conflicts with “canonical sources such as the ritual treatises,” which “present an apology for vengeance as a fundamental obligation” (38). This suggests that the supposed Chinese attitude toward revenge is likely to be no less diverse and contradictory than the European attitude—or, rather, that there isn’t really a “Chinese attitude” or a “European attitude.” The case of Jì’s play is rendered even more complicated by the way in which the story is developed. As it happens, the Zhào orphan is jointly raised by Cheng Ying (a physician loyal to his parents) and by Tu Angu (his parents’ murderer). He develops a close relation to both and refers to them as his two fathers, saying, “On this side is my father Cheng Ying, on that side, no less my father Tu Angu” (43). The justification for revenge in Confucian tradition derives from filial piety. But the precise obligations of that filial piety are unclear in this case. The orphan certainly owes loyalty and devotion (zhōng, 忠) to his biological parents. But doesn’t he owe zhōng to his “father,” Tu Angu, as well? In a famous passage in the Lún Yǔ (Analects), Kǒngzǐ (Confucius) says that a son should protect his father if the latter has committed a crime (13.18). Is it in fact consistent with Confucian teaching, then, that someone should kill an adoptive father after learning that the latter has committed a crime? In short, the play and the story more generally have been and remain popular. But, the more we consider it, the stranger that might seem. Moreover, to a great extent, this strangeness is not special to The Zhào Orphan, but is a recurring feature of literary fiction and emotion.

Te Paradoxes of Fiction and Tragedy The first, very general issue raised by audience response to the Zhào orphan story—or any other literary work—is called “the paradox of fiction” (Feagin 149; for illuminating, critical overviews of philosophical debates on this topic, see Noël Carroll’s “Philosophy, Literature, and Emotion” [Chapter 9 in this volume], and Chapter 8 of Matravers). This is the problem that we respond emotionally to literary people and events despite the fact that we know they are not real. Why be concerned about the life of a particular character who is not made of suffering flesh, but merely of words? Admittedly, the issue is not so sharply defined in this particular 135

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case because there is some historical precedent for the story. However, first, many readers are not aware of that. Second, of those who are, many (such as my students and myself ) know that the precise trajectory of the play, including many elements that would seem emotionally central, either have no basis in the historical record or even contradict that record. Thus, the key point of the paradox of fiction holds anyway. The situation becomes even more baffling when it comes to tragedy. At least some of my students simultaneously enjoyed the play and found it sad. But this is strange. We ordinarily don’t like being sad. In real life, we try very hard not to be sad. When we feel sad, we try to change our situation. But we can be entranced by a literary work or a film that makes us weep. This is the “paradox of tragedy” (see Ridley 413). In fact, I believe that both the paradox of fiction and that of tragedy are open to relatively simple and straightforward solutions (as I have argued in How Authors’ and “The Paradox”). To understand this, we need to take up the cognitive process of simulation. Simulation is the process whereby someone, so to speak, internally mimics perceptual processes bearing on particular causal sequences that he or she does not actually perceive. Simulation applies to hypothetical future scenarios, current events that one is not directly witnessing, and counterfactual alterations of the past. Thus, I might simulate how the associate department head would react if asked to change my teaching schedule only weeks before the beginning of the semester, or how she would have reacted had I approached her months ago. Simulation is a fundamental cognitive process in our understanding of other people’s thoughts or emotions, thus in both cognitive and emotional empathy. It is also perhaps the most important process involved in the creation and reception of fiction. Fictional stories are, fundamentally, just simulated, particular causal sequences. For example, the story of Hamlet is simply the simulated, particular causal sequence of the actions and experiences of Hamlet and other characters in the play. (This entails that the story varies with the person doing the simulating, though we are free to prefer some simulations to others, to argue that some simulations are more consistent with the information given in the language, etc.) It seems clear that hypothetical simulation generally operates in the same way as fiction in the paradox of fiction. When I say this, what I mean specifically is that when we envision possible, but not actual sequences of events, we respond to them emotionally. We find positive simulated outcomes to be appealing and feel encouraged to pursue them. We find negative simulated outcomes to be distressing and feel discouraged from engaging in courses of action that might lead to such outcomes. This correlation is unsurprising, since (again) the production and reception of fiction appear to be cases of simulation. Therefore, to account for our response to fiction, and to dispel its feeling of paradox, all we need to do is account for our response to simulation. (Matravers argues similarly that what we need to account for in treating the “paradox of fiction” is not our emotional response to fiction as such, but our emotional response to representation.) The obvious way of doing this is by reference to the adaptive function of simulation. It is a commonplace of evolutionary psychology that simulation is adaptive because it allows us to avoid dangers and seize opportunities by simulating them “off-line.” For this to work, however, the simulation must produce some version of the relevant emotion. Imagine an early hunter-gatherer who envisions going down to the river and encountering alligators, as he did when he went there before. He will be discouraged from going there again only if he has some emotional response to the imagination, most obviously fear. If he feels nothing whatsoever, the simulation will not have motivational consequences. Thus, the evolution of simulation requires that it provoke emotions parallel to those of actual experience—or at least emotions of the same positive or negative valence. Since literature relies centrally on 136

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simulation, this predicts that literature will produce the same sorts of emotion in recipients as would real situations. (For further discussion of simulation, see Markman, Klein, and Suhr.) Due to limitations of space, I cannot fully explain the mechanisms by which emotional response operates. I will simply note that I have argued for a particular sort of “embodied” emotional response (see Chapter 2 of my What Literature and Chapter 3 of my Literature and Emotion). In that account, the eliciting conditions of emotions are broadly perceptual or experiential. Specifically, they derive from bodily sensitivities (e.g., to other people’s emotion expressions) as well as a range of “emotional memories” (i.e., memories that, when activated, lead one to feel an emotion parallel to that of the remembered experience [see LeDoux, Emotional, 180–181]). Such memories and perceptual sensitivities clearly come into play in the (quasi-perceptual) process of simulation, and thus in fiction. So, this evolutionary account would seem to resolve the paradox of fiction, making it no longer paradoxical, most clearly when combined with an embodied account of emotion. But there is another problem. In solving the paradox of fiction, the evolutionary view seems to make the paradox of tragedy even more intractable. If we really do feel a parallel emotion in simulation, that means that, in some cases, we really do feel something akin to sadness, which apparently sharpens the conflict with our usual, hedonic inclinations. In fact, the adaptive function of simulation points us toward a solution to the paradox of tragedy also. Specifically, for simulation to operate adaptively, it cannot give us only parallel emotions. If simulating sad outcomes only made us sad and imagining threatening outcomes only made us fearful, we would presumably just stop doing that simulating. At the first hint of an aversive outcome, we would shut down our simulation. But, if we shut down the simulation before it could motivate us to avoid the danger, it would not be nearly as adaptive. If it is going to be adaptive, there must be something appealing about simulating aversive situations, some pleasure along with the fear, sadness, or other aversive emotion, something to keep us engaged in the simulation. The point is not merely theoretical. It is indicated also by empirical research showing that compassionate responses to other people—based, we may infer, on simulation— involve the reward system (see Kim and colleagues). This is the system that drives us to continue a particular line of action, what Panksepp calls the “SEEKING” system (see Chapter 3 of Panksepp and Biven), as well as the system that gives us enjoyment (see Chatterjee 309). Of course, many details need to be filled in. But it seems clear at least that the appeal of tragedy is no more paradoxical than the simulation of aversive experiences generally. To the contrary, the evolutionary function of simulation requires just this sort of simultaneously pleasurable and painful experience, integrated with seeking behavior.

Resolution, Irresolution, and the Anomaly of Ambivalence But these solutions to our paradoxes lead us to another question. We contentedly put down a literary story when the dilemmas it presents are resolved. The same thing may occur in real life. But we may also respond to an unresolved series of real events by taking action. In other words, in adaptive, real-world cases of simulation, we seem to pursue the goals of a “story” until there is some sort of resolution. In short, simulation tends toward either story resolution or action to produce story resolution. What do we do, then, about the fact that many literary tales do not give us a clear resolution and, indeed, may leave us ambivalent? Admittedly, this is not the sort of complete contradiction that we seemed to face in the two paradoxes. Moreover, it is a localized phenomenon; it does not span all fiction or even an entire mode (such as tragedy). However, it is still puzzling and does not appear to fit with the general processes of simulation. In this section, I wish to consider if fiction may be congruent with real life simulation 137

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in this respect as well. Specifically, in real life, we find resolution either in the “story” itself or in our actional response to an (unresolved) sequence of events. Can we find the same sort of thing in fiction, thus making sense of this apparent anomaly? The first point to make in this connection is that a story is a particular causal sequence. But there is something peculiar about it as such. In the world, as it is in itself, causal sequences are continuous. They do not have beginnings and endings. Every event, in given conditions, produces new events and new conditions. Considered in itself, the world of causes and effects has no such thing as resolution. In contrast, as for example Aristotle famously noted, stories (commonly) have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We select certain causes as initiating the particular causal sequence of a story and we select certain effects as concluding that sequence, even though the “initial” causes did not appear ex nihilo and the “final” effects are not lacking their own consequences. This point applies not only to prototypical, literary stories. It applies to everything we discuss in the world, from political history to medical cases. In each such story, we segment the causal continuum. For instance, the causes of events leading to a war had sources that predate the beginning of the story a historian tells about the war, and the consequences of the war do not stop with the last events the historian mentions. In all these cases, “resolution” does not arise from the world itself, though it might initially appear to do so. Thus, the very idea of resolution already poses something of a puzzle. We tacitly treat a story as a “complete” causal sequence. The obvious way of explaining this “completeness” is cognitive, in the narrow sense, where cognition is a matter of the ways in which our minds process information, selecting, segmenting, and structuring it. This is in part the case. For example, I may tell the “story” of a recent airplane ride. The concept of “airplane ride” selects a rough time frame for what I will tell—for example, if there was turbulence, or if I watched a movie, or if my seatmate emitted noxious fumes. But the narrowly cognitive part of story organization seems to be limited and often of only secondary importance. Consider, in contrast, the precise sorts of thing that I might recount, such a turbulence, watching a movie, or the smell of the person next to me. What makes them possible choices for a story is that they are eliciting conditions for emotion. If turbulence becomes severe, it may give me a fright. Watching a movie may lead me to experience compassion with the tragic heroine. Sniffing the unwashed ripeness of my neighbor is likely to foster disgust. In keeping with this, I have argued in Affective Narratology that our selection and segmentation of particular causal sequences in stories is, first of all, a matter of emotional response. Our emotion systems generally habituate to recurring conditions (see LeDoux, Synaptic, 138), thereby establishing a sense of routine or normalcy. In consequence, they respond most readily to novel events or conditions, whether as threats or opportunities. These novel events or conditions draw attention or interest and may activate particular emotion systems. The activation of an emotion system initiates a cascade of memories, attitudes, and behaviors, including the establishment of goals to sustain or intensify current conditions (if they are pleasurable) or to end or attenuate those conditions (if they are aversive). On seeing a bat in my kitchen, I feel fright and disgust, form a goal of ridding the house of vermin, and take steps to effect that outcome (e.g., calling pest control). The story reaches its resolution when I find my kitchen enduringly chiroptera-free—or, in a tragic version, when I die from some bat-borne illness. Particular causal sequences are, by this account, simply those parts of the causally continuous world that have emotional consequences for us, the parts that stand out against the background of habituated normalcy and thus activate emotion systems. A story is just a representation of such a—non-habitual, emotion-activating—particular causal sequence, prototypically the verbal or enacted representation aimed at a recipient. This explains why stories 138

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can have a beginning. The beginning is just what activates emotion systems. Or, rather, the beginning is what a speaker or author probably experiences as emotion-eliciting and almost certainly believes his or her interlocutor will experience as emotion-eliciting. The effect of a nonfictional story on a recipient—for example, the effect of me telling you about an encounter with a bat—is a function of three things.1 First, it is a function of what is depicted in the story (here, me seeing the bat). Second, it is a function of one’s “interpersonal stance” (Frijda and Scherer 10) regarding the relevant person or character (here, your attitude toward me). The interpersonal stance is one’s attitude toward the other person, insofar as this governs one’s response to that person’s emotions. Specifically, one’s interpersonal stance may be either parallel or complementary, thus a matter of responding empathetically or antipathetically. Finally, a recipient’s response is guided by the degree of congruence between his or her own emotional experience and the emotional experience of the target (here, the degree to which you are or are not frightened and disgusted by bats). These factors govern a recipient’s emotional engagement with and response to a nonfiction story. Again, the situation with fiction is largely the same as with nonfiction, because both are a matter of simulation. This covers beginnings, but what about endings? A recipient’s empathic engagement with a target’s emotion mimics the concerns of that target. (For ease of exposition, I will focus on the more common, empathic case. The antipathetic case, where we want the main character to fail rather than succeed, operates in a similar, but inverse manner.) In consequence, it involves the same sorts of concern. Specifically, the protagonist of the story wants to establish some goal as an enduring condition, thus a new normalcy. To take a more common literary example (rather than bats), he or she may be in love and thus wish to establish enduring union with the beloved as normal, an idea represented by the formulaic ending, “and they lived happily ever after.” An empathic reader shares this wish. Resolution is simply an establishment of some sort of normalcy. That normalcy can occur either through the protagonist’s achievement of his or her goals (in a comedy) or through the foreclosing of the possibility of achieving those goals (in a tragedy). So, if the lovers marry and live happily ever after, their union establishes a new, comic normalcy. If they die, in contrast, a tragic normalcy results. In a fictional story, then, the resolution—for example, the lovers marrying and living happily ever after—is provided by the author. The timelessness of the ending, whether tragic or comic, in effect disables the SEEKING system and the goal pursuit defined by the relevant emotion systems (here, romantic love). This includes both the egocentric emotions of the agents (e.g., Romeo and Juliet) and the empathic emotions of a reader. This emotion-system deactivation is in effect what we mean by resolution. Whether comic or tragic, our sense of an ending is a relative quiescence of the emotion-motivation systems that had been (nonhabitually) activated and therefore defined the (non-routine) goals at issue. In real life, we often face unresolved sequences of events. When that occurs, when there is no resolution and our emotion-motivation systems are still active, we engage in action to try to produce resolution. Indeed, in real life, there is almost always some degree of irresolution and thus some ongoing action. But what happens when a fictional work is not resolved? And why would such a thing ever occur (leaving aside authorial failure)? I would suggest that it is often—perhaps always—because such works involve a relation to real life concerns, and thus to the ordinary operation of simulation. We commonly do not feel that there is anything we can do about the outcome of a fictional work. Suppose Romeo and Juliet had ended with Juliet entering the tomb. We could imagine various outcomes, but we generally would not feel that we could do anything to realize one of those possibilities, producing a resolution. Put differently, we cannot act on a fictional world (except, of course, as authors). But we can act on the real world. Given that, irresolution in 139

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fiction may sometimes be resolved just as it is resolved in nonfiction. Specifically, irresolution—the continued (non-habitual) activation of prominent emotion-motivation systems— may prompt readers to create a resolution in real life. Most obviously, a politically oriented work may end without resolution precisely to foster active political engagement by readers. This leads us to the question of ambivalence. I have argued in How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (40–42) that our emotional responses to all targets are best thought of as in some degree ambivalent. However, we generally find ambivalence disquieting, in part because it produces contradictory motivations and inhibits behavioral response. As Ito and Cacioppo explain, “The affect system has evolved to produce bipolar endpoints because they provide both clear bivalent action tendencies and harmonious and stable subjective experiences” (69). Ambivalence results from situations in which we do not feel capable of single-mindedly pursuing our emotional goals, because those goals are in some degree mutually exclusive. In consequence, our emotion systems evolved to generate valenced responses, cycling through contradictory eliciting conditions to produce attitudes that are less aversive and are more conducive to clearly defined, practical actions. Fictional stories sometimes reduce ambivalence. But they can do just the opposite as well, pressing ambivalence to an extreme. In some cases, this ambivalence can operate through a sort of gestalt shift. In these cases, looking at the work in one way will produce one, valenced response; then, with only a slight shift in perspective—like the one where we no longer see a duck, but a rabbit—we experience a differently valenced response. What is most important here is that such a gestalt shift may itself operate to enable the sort of real-world action that may yield a (real-world) resolution to an emotionally incomplete fiction. Such active, engaged pursuit of resolution would be in keeping with the evolved, adaptive operation of simulation. I do not know if this account applies to all or even most ambivalent and unresolved fictions (I suspect it applies to only some of them—though that number may include the most successful cases). In any event, it does, I believe, apply quite well to Jì’s play.

Te Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhào The Yuán dynasty was established by the Mongols in the late thirteenth century, CE. The Mongols’ conquest included the defeat of the Jīn kingdom and culminated in the defeat of the Southern Sòng Dynasty, the latter ruled by the Zhào (趙) family. The new rulers faced strong Sòng loyalist opposition (on Sòng loyalism, see Jay). During the initial conquest, this resistance was military and often resulted in cruel retributions, as when Khubilai Khan beheaded twenty thousand rebel soldiers (Rossabi 476). Subsequently, the new rulers altered the legal system, undermining the at least partially meritocratic examination system, based on Confucian principles, and institutionalizing discrimination against Chinese (and in favor of Mongols [see Rossabi 428, Mote 631, and Liu 8–9]). These developments are important not only because of the anger and sense of injustice that they inspired in many Chinese, prominently Confucian scholars who expected to benefit from the examination system. They are important also because they speak to the issue of the legitimacy of the new regime. Traditional Chinese political philosophy maintained that the legitimacy of a ruling dynasty was a function of whether or not it had received the “Mandate of Heaven” (see, for example, Lewis 62 and Perry 9). In some ways, this concept merely rationalized a shift in loyalty from a defeated ruler to a newly victorious ruler. But it was not simply that. The Lún Yǔ and other foundational texts of Rú Xué (Confucianism)—composed in a period of political disunity (the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods), and looking back nostalgically on the early days of the preceding, Zhōu dynasty—indicate that there are specific conditions in which a 140

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dynasty might lose the Mandate of Heaven. These prominently include violating ritual practices, traditional hierarchies, and ethical principles. The legal system of the Mongols necessarily appeared to many Confucian scholars to be exemplary, not of the rectitude of a ruling dynasty, but of the moral violations characteristic of illegitimate usurpers. Far from receiving the Mandate of Heaven, the behavior of the Yuán rulers seemed to flout the requirements for that Mandate. To some extent in keeping with this view—but mostly as a matter of practical possibilities— after the conquest, loyalist resistance was predominantly ideological. According to one school of critics, a key outlet for ideological opposition to Mongol rule was the drama of the period, which arguably often followed the loyalist practice of using “historical analogies to express their thoughts about foreign conquest” (Jay 73). Consistent with this, figurative and allegorical interpretation have had an important place in Chinese hermeneutic tradition from at least the time of early Rú Xué discussions of the Shījīng (詩經, Classic of Poetry) through at least the Cultural Revolution (which was initiated by an allegorical interpretation of a then-contemporary play; see Dikötter 47–49). The Zhào Orphan is a play that fits this profile and interpretive orientation very well. It concerns the conflict between a military commander—the villain of the piece—and a “civil minister” (20). At the time, most Chinese audience members would have been likely to associate the latter with (now disenfranchised) Confucian scholars. Moreover, the events unfold in the Jìn kingdom (sixth century BCE [Li 17–18]). Though the tone and written character are different, it is hard to imagine that Chinese at the time were impervious to the near homophony of “Jìn” and “Jīn,” the northern Chinese kingdom conquered by the Mongols before they attacked the Sòng. Most strikingly, the surname of the play’s civil minister and his murdered clan is “Zhào,” which was also the surname of the Sòng Imperial family. Readers might reasonably be skeptical of too great a tendency to interpret Yuán dramas allegorically. But it seems difficult to deny the plausibility of such a reading in this case. The references to the Jìn kingdom and the killing of the Zhàos seem almost guaranteed to have primed associations with the Mongol conquest in the minds of many members of the original audience. Moreover, the play appears to have been written about 20 years after the Mongol conquest and in the play the conflict between Tu Angu and the Zhàos reaches back the same two decades (43). More significantly, Tu Angu is explicitly presented as seeking to usurp the position of the ruler. The allegory, then, is roughly that, like Tu Angu, the Yuán rulers have illegitimately sought to establish themselves as emperors, despite the fact that they lack the Mandate of Heaven. The orphan grows up thinking that he owes filial devotion to the fatherlike figure of Tu Angu, just as many Chinese would have grown up believing that they owe loyalty to the Yuán emperor. In Confucian thought, this connection is particularly close as the relation of a subject to the ruler is founded upon the relation of a child to a parent; filial piety is the necessary source and model for loyalty to one’s sovereign. For instance, the second quotation from Kǒngzǐ in the Lún Yǔ links filial piety with loyalty to superiors (I.2). In keeping with this, we read in the Dà Xué (大學, The Great Learning) that “Wishing to order well their states, [the ancients] first regulated their families. . . . Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed” (section 2). Learning his familial history, the orphan takes up the job of revenging his family. Just so, the play encourages Chinese audience members to remember the national history and to rise up against the Yuán dynasty. Indeed, the allegory arguably makes more psychological sense than does the literal sequence of events in the work. It is not terribly plausible that a young man with longstanding attachment bonds to a father figure would so quickly shift from filial devotion to murderous 141

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hostility. It is, however, more plausible that a person trained to be loyal to a particular ruler could quickly come to reject that ruler and support revolutionary change. What is more important, this makes sense of the apparent ambivalence and irresolution in the play. Specifically, there is a sort of genre ambiguity about the work. At the literal level, it is a revenge story. As tends to be the case with revenge stories cross-culturally, it is ambivalent. However, it is peculiar in apparently ignoring that ambivalence and treating the orphan’s killing of a father figure as wholly positive. In contrast, the allegorical suggestion of the story has a very different genre—the usurpation and restoration plot of a heroic work. In that genre, the rightful social ruler has been displaced by a usurper. The comic resolution comes when that rightful ruler is restored or the appropriate heir ousts the usurper. The heroic story prototype usually has relatively little ambivalence. Jì’s play is, then, highly—indeed, disturbingly— ambivalent or not ambivalent at all, depending on whether one sees the gestalt as personal harm and revenge or as political usurpation and restoration. Finally, we can now make sense of the difference between the Yuán and Míng versions. The Yuán version may be understood as stopping short, not resolving the action in the manner of the Míng version (as outlined by Idema) precisely because the Yuán rulers were still in place. The resolution of the play was, so to speak, in the hands of the audience, urged to action by the playwright. The Míng dynasty restored a Chinese (non-Mongol) emperor, reinstituted the examination system, and could generally be seen as meriting the Mandate of Heaven. As a result, there was no longer any need for the audience to resolve the play through action in the real world.

Conclusion The pleasure of experiencing aversive emotions in response to fictional events appears to derive from the evolution of simulation. Specifically, simulation must motivate the pursuit of opportunities and the avoidance of threats. To do this, it needs to foster positive emotions in the former case and negative emotions in the latter case. But the simulation itself needs to be pleasurable enough that one does not avoid simulation that produces negative emotions. A further issue arises concerning our response to fictional works that are highly ambivalent and, related to this, unresolved. In at least some cases, such ambivalent irresolution may suggest possibilities for the reader’s own actions in the real world, in keeping with the usual, behavioral implications of simulation. In this way, the apparent paradoxes of fiction and tragedy, as well as the more limited anomaly of ambivalent irresolution, may be explained by the emotional functionality of simulation. Indeed, the preceding analyses suggest that literature may be more closely connected with real-world, simulation-based action than we are generally inclined to think. These points are well illustrated by Jì’s Yuán dynasty drama.

Note 1 I am referring here only to the story, thus what happens, not to the “discourse,” which is to say the way in which the story is presented. Aspects of discourse certainly involve emotion as well (on discourse and emotion, see Chapter 9 of Hogan Literature and Emotion).

Works Cited Analects (論語 [Lún Yǔ]). Translated by James Legge, https://ctext.org/analects. Accessed 12 April 2020. Chatterjee, Anjan. “Neuroaesthetics: Growing Pains of a New Discipline.” Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, edited by Arthur Shimamura and Stephen Palmer, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 299–317.

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Paradoxes of Literary Emotion Cheng, Anne. “Filial Piety with a Vengeance: The Tension Between Rites and Law in the Han.” Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History, edited by Alan Chan and Sor-hoon Tan, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, pp. 29–43. Classic of Rites, The. (禮記 [Lǐjì]). Translated by James Legge, https://ctext.org/liji. Accessed 12 Apr. 2020. Dikötter, Frank. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976. Bloomsbury, 2016. Feagin, Susan. “Empathizing as Simulating.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 149–161. Frijda, Nico, and Klaus Scherer. “Affect (Psychological Perspectives).” The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, p. 10. Great Learning, The. (大學 [Dà Xué]). Translated by James Legge, https://ctext.org/liji/da-xue. Accessed 12 Apri 2020. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. U of Nebraska P, 2011. ———. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge UP, 2013. ———. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. ———. “The Paradox of Tragedy and Emotional Response to Simulation.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 40, 2017, pp. 31–32. ———. What Literature Teaches us About Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2011. Idema, Wilt. “Traditional Dramatic Literature.” The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, edited by Victor Mair, Columbia UP, 2001, pp. 785–847. Ito, Tiffany, and John Cacioppo. “Affect and Attitudes: A Social Neuroscience Approach.” Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition, edited by Joseph Forgas, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001, pp. 50–74. Jay, Jennifer. A Change in Dynasties: Loyalism in Thirteenth-Century China. Western Washington University Center for East Asian Studies, 1991. Ji, Junxiang. “The Zhao Orphan.” The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama, edited by C. T. Hsia, WaiYee Li, and George Kao, Columbia UP, 2014, pp. 20–54. 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, vol. 47, 2009, pp. 2073–2081. LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Touchstone, 1996. ———. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Penguin, 2002. Lewis, Mark Edward. The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han. Harvard UP, 2007. Li, Wai-Yee. “Introduction.” The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama, edited by C. T. Hsia, Wai-Yee Li, and George Kao, Columbia UP, 2014, pp. 17–19. Liu, Jung-en. “Introduction.” Six Yüan Plays, edited and translated by Liu Jung-en, Penguin, 1972, pp. 7–35. Markman, Keith, William Klein, and Julie Suhr, editors. Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation. Psychology Press, 2009. Matravers, Derek. Fiction and Narrative. Oxford UP, 2014. Mote, Frederick. “Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215–1368.” The Cambridge History of China: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368, edited by Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, Cambridge UP, 1994, pp. 616–664. Panksepp, Jaak, and Lucy Biven. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. Norton, 2012. Perry, Elizabeth. Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China. Routledge, 2015. Ridley, Aaron. “Tragedy.” The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson, Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 408–420. Rossabi, Morris. “The Reign of Khubilai Khan.” The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368, edited by Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, Cambridge UP, 1994, pp. 414–489.

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12 SYMPATHY AND EMPATHY Derek Matravers

Abstract: This chapter discusses aspects of readers’ engagement with characters represented in literature where those engagements have been claimed to be sympathetic or empathetic. Current accounts hold sympathy to be a more limited phenomenon than empathy, thus the chapter deals mostly with the latter. The scientific bases of claims about the role of empathy in literature are examined at two levels: the deeply sub-personal (conclusions drawn from readers’ neuronal changes) and the sub-personal (conclusions drawn from the structure of readers’ representation of the content of what they are reading). The chapter advises caution in drawing conclusions from these studies. It argues that, if they are to play a role in critical judgments on literature, sympathy and empathy need to be part of the readers’ conscious engagement with the text and examines two aspects of this: the need to balance “fiction emotions” and “artifact emotions” and the need for critical reflection on the arousal of sympathy and empathy.

It is a commonplace thought that literature provokes a reader to both sympathise and to empathise with characters. It is, however, quite difficult to state this thought in a way that is, at the same time, precise, interesting, and supported by the evidence. Attempting to do so reveals a range of claims of a very different nature, some of which are not so commonplace after all. There is no consensus on exactly what mental phenomena are picked out by the words “sympathy” and “empathy.” However, we have to start somewhere so I will begin by giving some definitions. These are somewhat stipulative but fairly standard in the philosophical and psychological literature (Maibom). Sympathy: X feels sympathy for Y when X feels sad as a result of believing that something bad has happened to Y, or X feels happy as a result of believing that something good has happened to Y. Empathy: X feels empathy for Y when X has mental states that match Y’s mental states as a result of X taking on, in imagination, Y’s perspective. That is, I would be sympathizing with you if I feel compassion toward you following the death of your dog, but I would be empathizing with you were I too imagine the death of your dog from your perspective coming, as a result, to feel the way that you feel about the event. Let us put aside the issue that characters in books do not have real psychologies—at least not real occurrent psychologies.1 The facts being what they are (that people are justified in the tears they shed for Anna Karenina) we can assume this problem can be sorted out. To take one DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-15

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popular option, we make-believe the world of the book, and within the scope of the makebelieve, the characters have real psychologies (Walton). Granting all this, it is plausible to the point of being platitudinous that readers can feel sympathy or empathy for characters.2 A more interesting claim can be formulated by considering the epistemological role of one of our two emotions—empathy. Because of this, I will for the moment put consideration of sympathy to one side. According to our definition, empathy is a matter of X imagining the world from Y’s perspective (or, more problematically, imagining being Y) and as a result experiencing tokens of the same type of mental states experienced by Y. In short, empathy is the mechanism by which X comes to feel what Y feels or think what Y thinks; empathy is the short-cut to X understanding Y from Y’s perspective (a capacity known as “mindreading”).3 If we add to this the thought that, when reading books we come across characters wrestling with interesting situations, such understanding will have two major benefits. The first is that such understanding might expand our cognitive horizons to either help us understand ourselves (if we can identify with the character or situations) or to understand others (who might be in similar situations to the characters in the books). The second is that such understanding might be the key to understanding whatever it is we are reading. A brief example will illustrate this distinction. In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady Henry James claims that he intended the book to be the exploration of the character of “a certain young woman affronting her destiny” (James xxii). James gives his readers much to go on; his heroine, Isabel Archer, is described through the eyes of others and, to an extent, her motives and intentions are recounted from her own point of view. Empathizing with Isabel may help us understand ourselves or others. Early in the novel, Isabel turns down an offer of marriage from the very eligible Lord Warburton and the reader is given ample opportunity to reflect on why. In empathizing with Isabel, a reader might gain an insight into what this person did in these circumstances; perhaps making it easier for him or her to gain insight into an actual person’s motives (whether that is him or herself or not) for appearing to walk away when a chance of fulfilment and happiness presents itself. As for the second purported benefit, empathizing with Isabel might be the key to understanding why this character acts as she does—which, in the case of this particular novel, is notoriously difficult to grasp. With such an understanding, we understand The Portrait of a Lady; without it, we do not. There is some doubt, however, whether empathy really is the mechanism by which we understand characters. The case against has been put by Noël Carroll: We do not typically emote with respect to fictions by simulating a character’s mental state; rather . . . we respond emotionally to fiction from the outside. Our point of view is that of an observer of a situation and not . . . that of a participant in the situation. When a character is about to be ambushed, we feel fear for her; we do not imagine ourselves to be her then to experience “her” fear. (Carroll “Simulation” 311–312)4 Authors present characters to us; they describe their appearances, their behaviors, and the events that befall them. As Carroll says, the prose usually comes to us in the third person and, unless we come across locutions such as “imagine what so-and-so is feeling at that moment,” the reader is in the position of an outside observer. It will be clear from what has been said earlier that such a dismissal of any role for empathy is too abrupt. The fact that we are an outside observer of a character in a situation, rather than a participant in that situation, does not exclude our empathizing with that character. Indeed, empathy is held to be the mechanism by which we understand people from the third-person 145

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perspective. That is, we understand them by imagining, from the third-person perspective, what the world is like from their first-person perspective. Even if Carroll has not refuted the claim that empathy works as an epistemological tool for the reader, what reason do we have to think it is true? Some have claimed to find positive arguments for the claim in the scientific literature. It is to that claim I shall now turn.

Mirror Neurons In the early 1990s, a group of neurophysiologists who were investigating the motor area of the brains of Macaque monkeys discovered certain neurons had a surprising property: they exhibited a certain pattern of activation not only when the monkey performed a particular action but also when a monkey saw another monkey performing that same action. That is, the neurons in the head of the observer monkey “mirrored” those in the head of the actor. This would appear to have a direct bearing on empathy; if the neurons in the head of the observer mirror the neurons in the head of the actor, that would seem to be a good basis for the claim that the observer’s mental states match the actor’s mental states (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 190). Given the preceding claim, that our face-to-face engagements are continuous with our engagement with represented characters, the extension of the point to our engagement with characters seems obvious (Clay and Iacoboni). Indeed, literary humanists have seized on mirror neurons as something that can provide the basis of more-or-less uncontrolled speculation about literature and empathy. However, for mirror neurons to be the basis of our empathy with characters, two things would have to be true. First, that the exercise of empathy in human beings is, in fact, underpinned by mirror neurons. Second, that the mirroring mechanisms that were in place for faceto-face encounters transferred to encounters with characters. The best we can say about both claims is that they are unproven. Let us examine the first. I shall simply assume that claims in humanities should be consistent with claims made in our best scientific endeavors; to believe otherwise is to court the danger of irrelevance. This brings with it the need to take the science seriously; as David Davies has pointed out, we ignore at our peril the diversity of views within the brain sciences community concerning mirror neurons. There are challenges to the interpretation of the original work on the macaques (Hickok); challenges to the extension of the conclusions of that work to human beings (Turella et al.); and challenges as to whether any such system could underpin mechanisms of empathy (Heyes).5 Furthermore, once we move outside the brain science community the issues become even less clear. Mirror neurons are—at best—only one of a gamut of items in the tool bags we have to underpin our capacity for mind reading. As Shannon Spaulding has said Mirror neurons’ contribution to mindreading is that mirror neurons are one amongst many sub-personal mechanisms, the outputs of which serve as inputs to a mindreading mechanism (or mechanisms). Both lower-level cognitive processes (e.g., visually processing behaviour, recognising body language, detecting voice intonations) and higher-level cognitive processes (e.g., semantic knowledge about the target’s personality, knowledge about a target’s recent personal history) serve as input into an information-rich mindreading mechanism. Each bit of information on its own is not necessary or sufficient for mind-reading, but together this rich body of information helps us construct and elaborate folk psychological models of other people. (Spaulding 531) 146

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The additional information Spaulding mentions will all be available in any well-filled-out character. Hence there is simply no easy route (or, in Spaulding’s view, no route at all) from mirror neurons (whatever they might turn out to be) to claims about empathy. The second claim is pressed in a paper by Zanna Clay and Marco Iacoboni (Iacoboni has done important work on mirror neurons in monkeys) who argue that “the same neural mechanisms we use to empathize with real people make us also empathize with fictional characters” (Clay and Iacoboni 313). A problem with this paper is that its claims are largely promissory; the authors admit that “there is no direct data in support of our claim” (326). Their conclusion is equally speculative: When we read about a fictional character experiencing a powerful emotion, neural mechanisms of mirroring may reinvoke the neural representation of the facial gestures and bodily postures typically associated with that emotion, and trigger activity in emotion brain centres such that we end up experiencing the emotion associated with those facial gesture and bodily postures. (Clay and Iacoboni 317) Given that the claim the link between written representations and the activation of mirror neurons is speculative, and that the link between the activation of mirror neurons and empathy is, at best, unproven, the work on mirror neurons provides no direct support for the epistemological role of empathy in reading.

Situation Models and Improving Teory of Mind The standard view in the psychology of text processing is that readers represent the content of books to themselves in “situation models”; representations of the content of the book that draw from both the words on the page and the reader’s background knowledge (Zwaan and Radvansky). Situation models will certainly encode information in propositional form such as the information that Lord Warburton proposed to Isabel Archer. There is also general agreement that situation models encode spatial information. Readers “build” their situation models from the perspective of the protagonist. Readers are, for example, able to recall information available from that perspective more quickly, and more accurately, than information not available from that perspective (for an overview, and philosophical commentary on the empirical literature, see Coplan). In short, the situation model that results from a book that presents a consistent point of view will encode the content of the book from that point of view. Let us grant that this is true; the question for us is whether this has any bearing on what deserves to be called “empathy for a character.” I shall look, briefly, at two studies that attempt to prove that it does. In a widely cited and influential paper David Kidd and Emanuele Castano claim to have shown that “literary fiction,” defined as “narratives that focus on in-depth portrayals of subjects’ inner feelings and thoughts,” can improve “theory of mind” (by “theory of mind” they mean roughly what I mean by “mindreading”) (Kidd and Castano). What is particularly interesting about Kidd and Castano’s paper is that it endeavors to show a causal connection rather than merely a correlation. That is, others have attempted to show that people who have had a long-term exposure to literary fiction tend to be more able mindreaders. However, this leaves it open as to whether reading literary fiction makes better mindreaders, or more able mindreaders are drawn to literary fiction, or that there is an underlying common factor: people with a reasonable level of sophistication are likely to be both readers of literary fiction 147

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and better mindreaders. Kidd and Castano gave their subjects a single passage of narrative and tested them immediately afterwards. Their claim is that those people who read literary fiction performed better on tests of mindreading (the false belief test and the “reading the mind in the eyes” test) than those who read other forms of narrative. If Kidd and Castano’s approach has the advantage of trying to prove a direct causal connection, the disadvantage is that their claim is limited: that immediately following reading a single passage of literary fiction subjects are better empathizers than they would have been than if they had not read that passage of literary fiction. Even if this were substantiated, it is difficult to see what conclusions one should draw about such immediate, short-term, effects. It certainly does not warrant the claim, reported by the New York Times and others, that reading literary fiction improves social cognition.6 Furthermore, researchers have been unable to replicate their results. Marie Panero and her colleagues conclude that “after a careful study of three independent research groups based on a large number of observations, we are not confident that reading a short text of any kind can reliably improve theory of mind” (Panero et al. e53). The second is a study by Melissa Mulcahy and Bethany Gouldthorp (Mulcahy and Gouldthorp). Mulcahy and Gouldthorp’s experiment was designed to see whether narrative point of view, and the reader’s prior experience of the content of a story, influenced reading engagement, monitoring a character’s emotions, and empathy. Participants read 80 short story passages, with systematically different features, and were then asked several questions. Mulcahy and Gouldthorp did not rely on the kinds of tests employed by Kidd and Castano to test for empathy; instead, they asked the subjects directly “How well were you able to enter into the protagonist’s emotion?” (Mulcahy and Gouldthorp 105). A problem such a way of going about things is that, in common parlance, “entering into an emotion” (or the term “empathy” for that matter) can be used to refer to a vast range of phenomena from merely being sensitive to another’s emotion to the kind of specific epistemological mechanism we are investigating. This, I speculate, would exaggerate results as subjects may have had quite different grounds for answering in the affirmative. Despite this, Mulcahy and Gouldthorp’s were negative; they conclude that “embodying an actor’s perspective during comprehension did not have an overall effect on readers’ empathy with protagonist emotions” (Mulcahy and Gouldthorp 116). Thus, the fact that situation models encode spatial information again provides no direct report for the role empathy in reading. I have only sampled a few of the available empirical studies on the connection between reading and empathy. Someone more enthusiastic about the connection might complain that a different selection would have yielded a different conclusion. There is clearly something in this. A recent meta-analysis of a range of studies concluded that reading fiction led to a “small . . . but statistically significant improvement in social-cognitive performance”—a slightly broader category that the one we are considering, but significant nonetheless. The result comes with an important caveat, however; “it is not clear whether improvements in social cognition from fiction reading represent a short-term change, along the lines of a priming effect, versus an enduring change in social-cognitive ability” (Dodell-Feder and Tamir 1724). This is one of the findings covered in a survey of a wide range of empirical studies by Gregory Currie. Currie concludes It is certainly plausible that exposure to fiction has consequences for empathy: for the intensity and the amount of empathy a person displays on occasion. Some fictions, sometimes and for some people, will result in increased empathy; sometimes the effect could well be a decrease. It may even be that the same fiction, on the same occasion and for the same person has effects in both directions, with the net effect 148

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being something like a resultant of forces. Beyond this there is little we can say with confidence given the present state of evidence and argument. (Currie Imagining 215) Empirical studies, then, provide no sure conclusions about the capacity of reading to arouse empathy and improve our capacities for empathy. However, it would be too hasty to conclude that empathy has no place in the experience of the reader. To see a way forward we need to follow a distinction drawn by Currie “between two kinds of purposes for which we work on our skills and capacities.” Some skills quickly arrive at an adequate steady state, as with my bike riding: barely passable, but able to get me to the village shop. With other purposes in mind a skill may require maintenance of a higher-level control even though individual components of the action are performed so quickly as to be beyond rational deliberation, as with the piano playing of an aspirant concert artist. The pianist’s behavior never becomes automated in the way my bicycleriding so obviously has. The pianist cannot let her mind wander; she must be constantly assessing and modulating her performance (Currie Imagining 205). In considering the role of empathy, we cannot simply consider the text acting on the reader as a passive party; we need to consider the reader’s active, and conscious, engagement with the text. For the rest of this chapter, therefore, I shall leave the endeavor of starting with subpersonal mental mechanisms to demonstrate a role for empathy and instead look directly at the experience of the reader—what it is like to read a book—and investigate whether there is a worthwhile role for empathy there.

Te Experience of the Reader There are several reasons why a reader should be self-conscious about their empathetic, and, for that matter, sympathetic, reactions when reading a text. Central to this is that, unless they do so, such reactions cannot contribute to the value of literature as literature. Putting aside such things as instruction manuals, shopping lists, and projects of self-improvement, we do not take to reading for the same reasons as we take to medicine; we read because we value the experience—in short, we enjoy it. There will be many aspects to this enjoyment—the thrill of a good story, the vicarious pleasure of being in exotic locations, the appreciation of the literary art being among them. Some aspects have to do with the arousal of sympathy and empathy. Perhaps the most salient aspect of our appreciation of literature as literature, is the appreciation of what we are reading as an artifact that has been skillfully crafted to a certain end. It is a matter of some regret that many psychological experiments on reading neglect to take account of the fact that reading—particularly reading literature—is a skill. Of course, assessing the reaction of naïve readers to gobbets of text can provide insight into the mechanics of text processing provided we are working with the assumption that the reader has the single goal of “identifying the apparent point or message of the narrator” (Bortolussi and Dixon 243). Lessons can be learned about all manner of matters, such as the role of working memory versus episodic memory and the ways in which the content of the text is represented. All this can be done by testing subjects (whether physics majors or literature majors) reading gobbets of text written by the experimenters. Nonetheless, to be able to read King Lear—or any other work of literature—in a way that enables one to access the distinctive literary value of that work will require a reader to operate with a great deal more than the single goal of “identifying the apparent point or message.” 149

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To show this, let us start with one of the best-known philosophical accounts of the value literature has for us. Martha Nussbaum argues that literature provides “emotional as well as intellectual activity” that gives us a better insight into ethical understanding than philosophical discussion of abstract rules (Nussbaum ix). Talking of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, she holds that it is, in fact, not possible to speak about the moral view revealed within this text without speaking at the same time of the created text, which exemplifies and expresses the responses of an imagination that means to care for and to put itself there for us. (140–141) Nussbaum articulates the crucial point: for us to be investigating a reader’s reaction as a reaction to literature (rather than simply a reaction to something or other) the reader needs to be aware of “the created text” and the role of “the created text.” This has a direct bearing on our aroused sympathy and empathy. We can borrow a distinction from Ed Tan between “fiction emotions” and “artifact emotions” (Tan). Patrick Colm Hogan distinguishes them as follows: Fiction emotions are the emotions we experience in response to the fictional world— its events, situations, and characters. They are fundamentally immersive emotions, emotions that we experience when, for example, we are caught up in a story. They are roughly the sorts of emotion that we experience in relation to events and situations in the real world. Artifact emotions, in contrast, are not immersive but reflective. They are emotions that we experience when we become conscious of the way in which a certain series of events has been shaped and directed. In consequence, rather than responding to the events themselves, we respond to the shaping and directing. (Hogan Literature 98) Fiction emotions are the result of us taking a perspective internal to the events in the narrative and artefact emotions are the result us taking a perspective external to the narrative. In taking an internal perspective we (with a caveat I will come to shortly) regard the events much as we would actual world events; if we want to explain them we seek causal and rational explanations for events and react, if we do react, with an emotion appropriate to the event. In taking an external perspective we regard the events in terms of the contribution they make to the plot or structure of the work and, if we react at all, react with an emotion appropriate to the way the event has been shaped and directed by the writer (Lamarque 75). If we take an internal perspective on King Lear’s paroxysms on the heath, we will explain them in terms of his character and recent events. The fiction emotion is likely to be one of shock; the plight is so desperate, the events so appalling, a reader is likely to begin to feel some sympathy and possibly even the glimmerings of empathy for a man who has fallen so low. Taking the external perspective, a reader will be wondering why the episode occurs as it does, and what contribution it makes to the completed artistic structure. The artifact emotion is likely to be awe as the way in which Shakespeare has contrived to produce an affect so powerful as the narrative, emotional, and (one might say) pedagogical center of the play. Attending to both perspectives, feeling both emotions, and being able to track and understand how the one informs the other, is a skill that requires active engagement rather than passive reception. As Eileen John says, being an adequate reader is being able to “enhance the personshaped perspective with story-shaped significance and awareness” (John 311). Any sympathy or empathy provoked by the text must be assessed by the reader, distinguished into (at least) 150

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fiction emotion and artifact emotion, and then the relation between the two examined. Doing this is a skilled, and self-conscious, activity. It is a great pity that there is little theoretical work on the nature of this relation and our experience of it—in marked contrast to the theoretical work on the nature and experience of the relation between the representational properties and the surface properties of paintings.7 I have been arguing that one aspect of our enjoyment of (our valuing) literature as literature is our grasp of the relation between the fiction emotions and the artifact emotions. One might think that there is an even simpler point to be made. One aspect of our enjoyment is simply that the appropriate exercise of distinctive human capacities is part of what makes reading valuable for its own sake (Budd 5). One of the joys of reading a Dickens novel (any Dickens novel) is the roller coaster of a ride our emotions go through in our sympathy and empathy for the various characters. We enjoy, we get something out of, the exercise of our capacity to feel these emotions—this explanation of the value of literature goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics. The simplicity of this point is undermined, somewhat, by the claim that what is valuable is the appropriate exercise of these emotions. That is, the mere exercise of empathy and sympathy, unconnected to truth and understanding, may be fun but it is not a particularly valuable activity. The problem begins with the fact that the arousal of emotions when reading is not subject to all the constraints that guide the arousal of our emotions outside of reading. It is not true that the emotions aroused in reading about a state of affairs are the same as the emotions that would be aroused were we in a face-to-face confrontation with that same state of affairs. Consider the following examples from Anne Eaton:8 I do sometimes bear a strong affection for characters whom I consider plainly blameworthy. I am charmed by Humbert Humbert and revere Bonnie and Clyde and their contemporary incarnations, Mickey and Mallory, rooting for them as they flee the police. I am enamoured of Tyler Durden and admire Hannibal Lecter, even in their darkest moments. (Eaton 281) The emotions readers typically feel for these characters differs markedly from the emotions it would be appropriate for those readers to feel for those characters were they to encounter them in the actual world. Emotions have certain functions with respect to narrative—for example, in organizing attention and in priming future expectations (Carroll “Art” 217); for a full exploration of this, see (Hogan Narratology). Thus writers exercise care and skill in guiding the reader’s emotions for specific purposes. Hence, the problem for the reader is knowing whether any sympathy or empathy they feel is appropriate; I sympathize with Humbert Humbert, but should I? Should I not rather simply feel disgust at his desires, and the steps he takes to fulfill those desires? The worry, then, is this. I claimed that one aspect of the value of reading was that it involved the appropriate exercise of the human capacities for sympathy and empathy. However, narratives are (in part) machines for manipulating such feelings—how do we know the ones that we do have are the ones we ought to have? In part we can rely, again, on the fact that reading is a skill. Skilled readers will realize they are being aroused to sympathy and empathy for certain characters. Part of what it is to interact appropriately with a narrative is to be aware of these feelings and—if necessary—pass judgment on them. Joshua Landy, also talking of Humbert Humbert, reminds us that The ideal reader is not one who gives herself lovingly to the character but, on the contrary, one who continually stands back from her empathy. Indeed, the peculiar power 151

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of the work derives from the perpetual feeling of unease generated by the oscillation between disgust, connivance, and disgust at our connivance . . . It is dangerous to empathise indiscriminately. (Landy 224–225) Landy is surely right that this is the activity of the ideal reader which reinforces the point made earlier about skill. The degree, if at all, that empathy is aroused and the difference that might make to a reader’s capacity to feel emotion is, at most, one factor that needs feed into our judgments about the value of literature. More important is what the reader does with the emotion; how they balance it with literary concerns, and what judgments they make about the fact that such emotions are aroused, that is where work on the value of the arousal of empathy by narratives needs to take place (cf. Currie Imagining 206). We are left, then, with a rather ambivalent view of the link between a narrative’s capacity to arouse sympathy and empathy and judgments about the value of that narrative. As Landy says, an ideal reader will stand at one remove from these emotions and feed them into a more complicated judgment. However, which of us can be counted on to be ideal? Empathy and sympathy are notoriously fickle emotions, prone to easy manipulation and in-group biases (Prinz 2011). Given that the arousal of a reader’s empathy and sympathy is not appropriately constrained, how do we know we are in Aristotle’s camp rather than Plato’s? Plato, in the Republic, argued that the link between the arts and our emotions is too loosely controlled so as to be a positive danger.9

Conclusion The discussion of empathy and sympathy as a component of the value of literature is one step removed from the mere measurement of the levels of affect caused in readers by narratives. To repeat the point made earlier, what is important is not that the emotions are aroused, but what the reader does with them once they are aroused. This is not to claim that an understanding of the mechanisms of arousal is irrelevant; an insight into those mechanisms will provide an insight into the skill of the writer and a better grasp, by the reader, of their own experience. However, the value of sympathy and empathy comes from the role they play in the whole reading experience, if experience is based in an appropriate understanding. What of the question as to whether such an experience can help aid our understanding outside the context of reading? We have seen that the empirical evidence is inconclusive. However, what might help here is a sharpening of what exactly we are trying to show. I began with the thought that it is plausible books are good for us because they enable us to empathize and sympathize with characters we would not usually meet in the course of our quotidian lives. It was not for nothing that Abraham Lincoln said to Harriet Beecher Stowe that she was “the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war”; Uncle Tom’s Cabin provoked its readers to sympathy for, and empathy with, its characters and thus sympathy for, and empathy with, their actual world equivalents. However, as Greg Currie remarks, this is an unambitious thesis. We do not need to understand anything much about the details of thinking and feeling to come to see, from . . . fiction, how unpleasant it would be to be a concentration camp or to be abused for the color of one’s skin. It may also be that children’s moral and psychological development is helped by their exposure to simply moral tales; perhaps stories at this level assist their development of their folk psychological/moral understanding. (Currie “Creativity” 46) 152

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The thesis is unambitious for two reasons. First, the acquisition of such knowledge is independent of the quality of the literature involved. Things can be learned from all stories, whether good or bad (and Uncle Tom’s Cabin has not always fared well in judgments of literary merit). Second, the knowledge that is acquired is elementary and could be acquired by means other than reading books. Claims that great literature arouses sympathy and empathy for characters, which teaches us things that cannot be taught by other means or provides special and deep insight into the human condition should not be made without consideration of the evidence. As we have seen earlier, when one does look at the evidence, one finds that these more ambitious claims are not supported.

Notes 1 The considerations in this chapter apply, mutatis mutandis, to both fictions and nonfictions. Hence, I shall use “character” and “narrative” to refer, respectively, to a represented person and a written text— whether fictional or nonfictional. This point has no direct bearing on the subject of the chapter and I shall not be careful to attend to it if either brevity or clarity suggests otherwise. 2 See “Paradoxes of Literary Emotion: Simulation and the Zhào Orphan” (Chapter 11 in this volume). 3 This goes under the name “simulation theory.” See the papers in (Davies and Stone). 4 I have used the condensation of Carroll’s text quoted in Coplan (147). 5 Davies has written on this in several places including (Davies). 6 For a more sympathetic, but still sceptical, discussion of Kidd and Castano (see Hogan Literature 125–128). 7 See, for example, Wollheim and the literature that followed thereafter. 8 For the record, there is much I disagree with in Eaton’s paper. She thinks the phenomenon applies to fictional characters, although it applies equally to nonfictional historical characters. Also, the use of the point to criticise certain “moralist” philosophical views seems to me wide of the mark. 9 I shall put aside the controversy as to whether Plato’s condemnation of the arts included the written word (at that time, poetry) (Halliwell).

Works Cited Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon. Psychonarratology. Cambridge UP, 2003. Budd, Malcolm. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, Music. Penguin, 1995. Carroll, Noël. “Art, Narrative, and Emotion.” Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 215–235. ———. “Simulation, Emotions, and Morality.” Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 306–316. Clay, Zanna, and Marco Iacoboni. “Mirroring Fictional Others.” The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, edited by Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 313–329. Coplan, Amy. “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fiction.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2004, pp. 141–152. Currie, Gregory. “Creativity and the Insight that Literature Brings.” The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, edited by Samuel Paul Elliot and Scott Barry Kaufman, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 39–62. ———. Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. Oxford UP, 2020. Davies, David. “‘This is Your Brain on Art’: What Can Philosophy of Art Learn from Neuroscience?” Aesthetics and the Sciences of the Mind, edited by Gregory Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Jon Robson, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 65–74. Davies, Martin, and Tony Stone. Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate. Blackwell, 1995. Dodell-Feder, David, and Diana I. Tamir. “Fiction Reading Has a Small Positive Impact on Social Cognition: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2018, pp. 1713–1727. Eaton, A. W. “Robust Immoralism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2012, pp. 281–292. Halliwell, Stephen. “The Importance of Plato and Aristotle for Aesthetics.” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy [V: 1989], edited by J. Cleary, Routledge, 1991. pp. 321–348. Heyes, Cecilia. “Where to Mirror Neurons Come From?” Neuroscience and Biobheavioral Reviews, 2010, pp. 575–583.

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Derek Matravers Hickok, Gregory. “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009, pp. 1229–1243. Hogan, Patrick C. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. U of Nebraska P, 2011. ———. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. The Folio Society, 1994. John, Eileen. “Empathy in Literature.” The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, edited by Heidi L. Maibom, Routledge, 2017, pp. 306–316. Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science, 2013, pp. 377–80. Lamarque, Peter. “On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real Life Narratives.” The Opacity of Narrative. Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, pp. 67–82. Landy, Joshua. 2010. “Passion, Counter-Passion, Catharsis: Flaubert (and Beckett) on Feeling Nothing.” A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost, WileyBlackwell, 2010, pp. 218–238. Maibom, Heidi L. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Routledge, 2017. Mulcahy, Melissa, and Bethanie Gouldthorp. “Positioning the Reader: The Effect of Narrative Pointof-View and Familiarity of Experience on Situation Model Construction.” Language and Cognition, 2015, pp. 96–123. Nussbaum, Martha C. “James’s The Golden Bowl: Literature as Moral Philosophy.” Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford UP, 1990, pp. 125–147. ———. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford UP, 1990. Panero, Maria Eugenia, Jessica Black, Jennifer L. Barnes, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Thalia R. Goldstein, Hiram Brownwell, and Ellen Winner. “Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2016, pp. e46–e54. Prinz, Jesse. “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 211–229. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience. Oxford UP, 2008. Spaulding, Shannon. “Mirror Neurons Are Not Evidence for the Simulation Theory.” Synthese, 2012, pp. 515–534. Tan, Ed. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996. Turella, Luca, Andrea C. Pierno, Federico Tubaldi, and Umberto Castiello. “Mirror Neurons in Humans: Consisting or Confounding Evidence?” Brain and Language, 2009, pp. 10–21. Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard UP, 1990. Wollheim, Richard. “Seeing as, Seeing in, and Pictorial Representation.” Art and Its Objects. Cambridge UP, 1980, pp. 205–226. Zwaan, Rolf A., and G. A. Radvansky. “Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory.” Psychological Bulletin, 1998, pp. 162–185.

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13 TRAGEDY AND COMEDY Emotional Tears and Trust in King Lear and Cymbeline Lalita Pandit Hogan

Abstract: The first part of the chapter gives an overview of emotion in tragedy based on features identified by Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche; it addresses questions raised about the death of tragedy, concluding with some recent reflections on modern tragedy, its continuity with the classical models and the relevance of the genre for emotion studies. The overview of comedy foregrounds not only the saliency of laughter and humor, but of the “the comic rhythm,” as Susanne Langer elaborates that idea in Feeling and Form. Langer ties comedy to the festive celebration of biological life, as the origin of the genre in fertility rituals anticipates. The second section explores the trope of emotional tears in conjunction with concepts derived from the cognitive theory of trust, applying these concepts to King Lear, arguing that tears, often regarded as honest signals of distress, are elicited by the expectation of sympathy. Since the tragic genre is oriented toward eliciting sympathy, the focus on tears (and trust) is the narrow lens used in discussing examples. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion, conversely, of the redemptive function of tears at moments of restored trust in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, where reconfigured relationships create harmony that is conducive to the festive celebration of biological life.

Tragedy and Comedy, unlike many other genres of literature, directly link to two discrete emotions, mirth and sorrow. Hypothetically, one is desirable to us; the other is undesirable. In life as in literature, however, choosing sadness over happiness is more complicated than it seems. Sometimes we make decisions that thwart our goals, or the world thwarts them. Comedy, and/or tragi-comedy depict situations where it is possible to recalibrate, and redirect our seeking and reward systems (on emotion systems and how they impact decision making see Panksepp on 41–58). Conversely, in tragedy this kind of recalibration is not possible because knowledge that would help this process surfaces belatedly. In the following discussion, I will (1) map highlights of what has been said about emotion in tragedy and comedy; (2) use examples from King Lear to illustrate tragic emotion; and (3) conclude with a brief discussion of the happy ending in Cymbeline in light of the play’s tragi-comic dramaturgy. A tragedian, for Aristotle is not simply a versifier but “must be a poet of the plot,” and tragedy, is “imitation not only of a complete action, but also of incidents arousing pity and fear” (2323). “Pity” is “occasioned by undeserved misfortune” of someone who is neither wholly good, nor wholly bad, but “an intermediate kind of personage, a man not preeminently DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-16

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virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some fault” (Aristotle 2325). These definitional constraints show that what is perceived as “vice” or “depravity” would block pity, and our reluctance to identify with such a person would block fear. Emotional arousal, as is widely known in neuroscience, involves change in the environment. Aristotle’s identification of reversal and discovery as parts of the tragic design, we can see prioritizes feeling states and discrete emotions as drivers of plot and meaning. Reversal is often from good to bad, giving rise to distress, anger, disgust, fear, and so forth. Discovery of what was unknown before can elicit shock, surprise, remorse, grief, and so forth. The third part is “suffering, which we may define as an action of destructive or painful nature, such as murders on stage, tortures, woundings, and the like” (Aristotle 2324). In light of these possibilities, catharsis of emotion can best be understood in relation to our imaginative journey through another’s pain and suffering, thus through emotion sharing that gives rise to intimacy between representational subjects and real people. Cross-culturally, the Sanskrit tradition conceives of eight aesthetic emotions that include fear and pity, and the theorists make a distinction between aesthetic emotion, rasa, and real feeling, bhava (see Bharatmuni 75; 86–113). This ancient treatise, Natyashastra, was scripted as a handbook for actors and their teachers, while the discussion of emotion in Aristotle’s Poetics occurs in the context of Plato’s widely known objection to tragedy’s power to elicit strong emotion. Aristotle’s justification of pity and terror is determined by Plato’s isolation of these two passions for critique. In actual dramaturgical practice, tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—that Aristotle and Plato base their insights on—journey through a range of emotions, with one emotion being dominant for affective cohesion, as the Sanskrit theorists also stipulate. The Chorus in Greek tragedies that Nietzsche regards as the locus of emotion, engages in a range of discrete emotions as well as moods, feelings, sentiments, proverbial wisdom recruited for mood repair, and so forth. This suggests a broader affective repertoire. As classical tragedy’s affective formats continue their influence though the centuries—not only in Euro-America but the rest of the world, either through direct influence via colonial education or due to shared properties across unrelated traditions—various questions arise.1 Is the depiction of raw suffering tragedy? Does a tragic fall have to be from a position of greatness? Is the suffering of a common person not worthy of the tragic genre? In the absence of belief in gods, their limitless power and immunity to accountability, without one’s being able to imagine a metaphysical realm, without engagement in a communal ritual, can the tragic protagonist reflect on his/ her suffering? In Death of Tragedy (1961), George Steiner asks some of these questions, and considers Greek tragedy “pure” because in it “man is taken to be an unwelcome guest in the world.” In his view, “absolute tragedy” can “exist only where substantive truth can be assigned to the Sophoclean statement that ‘it is best never to have been born’” (xi). Though he considers King Lear also that kind of a tragedy, Steiner does, admit that there is a “radical shift” from the Greek model to Shakespearean tragedy, where he finds “cross currents of repair” and “of public and communal restoration” (xiii). Some of the challenges to the affective model of tragedy come from Hegel’s view of tragedy where individuals are instruments of world historical forces in conflict, due to collision “between two differently constituted regimes of society” (112). The conflict is a “violation, which is unable to maintain its character as such and is compelled to find a new principle of unity” (113). The “function of art” is to carry this “breach of unity” to a point “in which harmony may again be recovered as the result of such a conflict” (114). Important as Hegel’s conflict theory of tragedy is, he also considers emotion necessary, asserting that “pathos moves us because it is that which is essentially the vital force of our existence” (148). However, he 156

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warns: “neither in comedy nor in tragedy ought pathos to be that which is only folly or personal idiosyncrasy” (149). Hegel attributes idiosyncratic emotion to Phaedra, whose love is a “criminal aberration of blood” (Hegel 197). In contrast, he attributes vital emotion to Romeo and Juliet, praising Romeo as “a worthy man of deep emotion,” and in awe of Juliet’s capacity for love—which, he says, “is deep and broad, as unbounded as the sea, so that it is but a simple truth when she exclaims, ‘The more I give, the more I possess, both are infinite’” (157). In a similar vein, Bertolt Brecht’s objection to the aesthetics of identification in favor of an alienation effect, does not prevent him from depicting authentic emotion. In the context of Brechtian epic theatre, Steiner’s telling account of a performance of Brecht’s Mother Courage, with the lead performed by Helene Weigel, is noteworthy. He refers to the moment when Mother Courage does not acknowledge her son’s corpse, and faces the police with a “dead stare,” but as “the body was carried off,” he says, “Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth wide open.” Though no sound came out, Steiner compares this dry scream to the screams of Cassandra: “The same wild and pure lament over man’s inhumanity and waste of man,” concluding that “the curve of tragedy is perhaps unbroken” (Steiner 353–354). Of course, tragedy deals with conflict of ideas and ideologies and mixes with politics, but that does not dissociate it from emotion. Nor do tragic protagonists have to be royal and heroic characters whom gods envy. In a “democratized vision of suffering the soul of a bank clerk or a shop girl becomes a battleground on which momentous and incalculable forces play out” (see Felski 9). Getting to raw suffering caused by history, Eagleton states, “The inmates of Belsen and Buchenwald did not have to die hallowed by their suffering,” because “the human spirit itself is invincible”; they “simply had to be men and women in an intolerable situation” (33). In light of these insights on what is tragic emotion, the most inspiring vision comes from Nietzsche. At the beginning of his Birth of Tragedy, he declares: We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have succeeded in perceiving directly, and not only through logical reasoning, that art derives its continuous development from the duality of the Apolline and Dionysiac; just as reproduction of species depends on the duality of sexes, with its constant conflicts and only periodically intervening reconciliations. (14, emphasis added) Nietzsche makes a distinction between dream (Apollo) and intoxication (Dionysus). Apollo, he considers a “god of plastic forces,” who “is also a soothsaying god” (16), the god of order, while Dionysus represents heightened cognition and affect, disruptive chaos that shatters artificial barriers, taking tragic suffering to a point where, “not only is the bond between man and man symbolized by Dionysiac magic; alienated, subjugated and hostile nature too embraces her reconciliation with her lost son, man” (17). Nietzsche embraces the notion of emotional violence and its allure to conclude that “enchantment is the precondition of all dramatic art” (43). This is so well illustrated by how the storm in King Lear allows nature to claim the king who divided a kingdom, tested love beyond its endurance, felt loyalties crumble like dust, leading him to form a new bond with the “the bare, forked animal,” the “unaccommodated man,” through the enchantment of a Dionysiac madness. Dionysus, the god of “wine, pleasure, and festivity” is implicated in Comedy as well, as is the deity of fertility, Comus (see Bevis 8; Langer 331). When it comes to mirth and men, Aristotle says, comedy represents men, “as worse, and Tragedy as better than in actual life,” with the qualification that comedy is “imitation of persons inferior—not, however, in the full sense of the word bad,” but exhibiting some “ugliness which is not painful” or “destructive” 157

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(2317; 2319). The fault is a vice that is amusing, because “Laughter always—without exception—betokens a sudden sense of superiority” over the person one laughs at (see Langer 339). Freud’s construal of the superiority thesis is more nuanced. He says that we find someone comic, and our laughter is pleasurable if he “makes too great an expenditure on bodily functions and too little on mental ones,” and if a comedian performs self-comedy of this type, we still find it amusing. However, since we know he is “pretending” our amusement does not come from our own sense of superiority (255). Humor nevertheless, is “not the essence of comedy, only one of its elements” (Langer 346). More essential than laughter is what Susanne Langer calls the “comic rhythm” of life which she defines as a “surge of vital feeling” (327). Northrop Frye evokes this vitality of comedy environmentally as the “mythos of Spring” (141) and C. L. Barber associates the comic impulse with the festive, and considers “saturnalian pleasure as a release from normal limitation” (364–65). In all these dimensions of comedy the emphasis is on celebrating life and communal sharing. The “green world,” though envisioned physically, is a dream world, ushering us into a holiday reality, where through the carnivalesque freedom of the festival social hierarchies are temporarily reversed. The comic rhythm as felt life associates comedy with mirth that allows for group solidarity and formation of “happy communities” that share a mood by setting up “boundaries to outsiders,” and can, though positive, enable (and sustain) factionalism in politics, as in the case of “solidarity rituals in the late Elizabethan court” (see Bradley J. Irish 124–135). Susanne Langer’s tying comedy to fertility rites, to biological life, not just social life, is consistent with evolutionary approaches to emotion and genre, though it predates them. Placing nature, body, and brain in the foreground, she says: What justifies the term “Comedy” is not that the ancient ritual procession, the Comus, honoring the god of that name, was the source of this great art form—for comedy has arisen in many parts of the world, where the Greek god with his particular worship was unknown—but that the Comus was a fertility rite and the god it celebrated a fertility god, a symbol of perpetual rebirth, eternal life. (331) She adds further that, the same impulse that drove people, even in prehistoric times, to enact fertility rites and celebrate all phases of their biological existence, sustains their eternal interest in comedy. It is in the nature of comedy to be erotic, risqué, and sensuous, if not sensual, impious, and even wicked. (349) Ahead of others in committing to an embodied idea of “feeling” and aesthetic “form,” Langer explains: “organism maintains its equilibrium amid the bombardment of aimless forces that beset it,” resulting in the biological rhythm being disturbed that gives rise to struggle. The organism exerts resources in “overcoming and removing the obstacles,” to restore its equilibrium—like the tree, that, smothered by other trees is not getting enough sunshine, “grows tall and thin until it can spread its own branches in the light”; or the fish that “has most of its tail bitten off ” regrows tissue (328). Survival, no doubt; yet, survival is not just a matter of “defense and accommodation,” Langer reminds us, but of opportunity: “all creatures live by opportunities, in a world fraught with disaster” (329). Her biological analogy is, interestingly, anticipated by Aristotle. In Parts of Animals and Physics Aristotle speaks of inanimate parts 158

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of the body being animated by the action of the soul, comparing the structure of “tragedy to the structure of living things,” because the plot “has within it a principle of movement and rest” (cited in Belfiore 56–57). Thus, we see that Aristotle’s much talked about notion that plot is the soul of drama comes from his science writing. Together, these affective exegeses acknowledge a biological source to pleasure that arises from cerebral engagement with tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy and the cross currents of this mixed energy causes blurring of borders between negative and positive emotion as well as laws of genre.2 “Laughter and crying,” as Jaak Panksepp, a prominent neuroscientist, reminds us, “are intimately related in the brain” (288) though crying, as “distress vocalization” came first, because laughter, as well as mirth, had to wait for the “social bond” and the “evolution of play,” after separate registers for friends, family and strangers had developed (263–88).

Tragic Emotion, Tears, and Trust My examples of tragic emotion in King Lear focus on emotional tears that result from pain caused by violated trust. As Hegel in the nineteenth century considered honor and love as the most common motifs in tragedy (196), Russell Hardin, a prominent trust theorist, in the twenty-first century says, “Trust may be only second to love as a plotline and motivator, and even half the power of love as a plot line is in the betrayal of it.” Thus, “the importance of trust in ordinary life, can be read in the massive role it plays in great literature—or, rather, the role that betrayal of trust plays.” “Betrayal,” he says, “is not failure of trust but of trustworthiness” and “Poets, playwrights, and novelists get it right, but academics often miss it” (28). By “academics,” he means philosophers and social scientists who write on trust. On the face of it, trustworthiness seems tied solely to moral sentiment and virtue, but “Legal and other institutional constraints can give us strong incentives for trustworthiness” (Hardin 29). More importantly, the concept of reciprocal altruism, an innate tendency toward amelioration of the distress of others and its dependence on reciprocity, establishes not only a deeper foundation for trust, but also for an organism’s alertness to this biologically oriented psychosocial phenomenon (see Hawley 23–5). In The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum, challenges the stoic notion of goodness as an absolute. In one chapter, she does this through a close reading of Euripides’s Hecuba, where Hecuba’s goodness that stood firm through destruction of her city, deaths of her sons and husband, execution of her daughter, Polyxena (to appease Achilles’s ghost), finally breaks down at the end, at her son Polydore’s murder by Polymestor, the Thracian king to whom the child had been entrusted for safe keeping (Nussbaum 406). In retaliation, Hecuba tricks Polymestor into the slave quarters of the departing ship, where, with the help of her women she pulls out Polymestor’s eyes and kills his children. Though Nussbaum’s focus is on how “humanness is not inexhaustible—repetitive acts of brutality can exhaust it” (407), her isolation of what exhausts it, in Hecuba’s case, is relevant to my inquiry into how betrayal of trust and emotional tears configure tragic emotion. Research in neuroscience divides the adaptive function of tears as follows: (1) biological, to lubricate and cleanse the eye from harmful toxins; (2) psychological, to relieve stress; (3) social, based on learned rules of reciprocal altruism. The principle of cooperation and its adaptive benefits form the basis for the dynamics of trust, as well as of tears. Consequently, emotional tears, as opposed to biological tears, which we share with animals, are considered (1) uniquely human, (2) reliable signals of distress, and (3) important for social bonding and group interaction. In addition, emotional tears are a proof of interiority and facilitate trustworthiness judgments. Because of these features, it is assumed that emotional tears would have evolved later when social groups were formed and tears could lead to the support of others 159

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in amelioration of distress. This means that distress by itself is not a sufficient condition for emotional tears; rather the expectation that crying would change something in the environment to ameliorate suffering is a necessary condition (see Dylan Evans 30–31). Tragedy, as well as various mixed genres, do not only foreground moments of weeping, thus expectation of sympathy, but also the failure of tears indicative of failure of trust and expectation of sympathy. Since tears occur in many instances and not all fit into tears motivated by the need for sympathy, I divide their function as, expressive, tears that express a mood, externalizing interiority of feeling; tears that are expressive and communicative; and tears that are primarily communicative. Indeed, communicative tears can be deliberate and manipulative, but that use of them in certain situations does not disprove their being motivated by an expectation of sympathy.

Broken Trust and Tears in King Lear King Lear is, in the Aristotelian sense, “a man not preeminently virtuous and just,” nor is he full of depravity and vice, and his suffering exceeds his fault. Reception history of the play does not uniformly see Lear as sympathetic, and charges of a masculine entitlement and misogyny are not infrequent.3 My focus on tears brought on by the anguish of betrayal does not excuse the faults of this larger than life figure, but is motivated by what we can learn from the play about tragic emotion. The opening situation in the play, as we know, is a voluntary distribution of material resources and political power, with the expectation that in his old age Lear can “crawl unburdened,” and safely, toward death.4 Several features of the trust dynamics unfold almost immediately. First, the one who trusts makes possible some action from the trustee which would not be otherwise possible. This means that Goneril and Regan’s betrayal would not be possible without Lear’s extension of the resources. Since there is some time lag between “extension” of trust and the “consequence of trust,” the trustworthiness or the untrustworthiness of the trustee is a belated discovery. If the outcome is positive, the trustor will flourish. Conversely, if the trustee proves untrustworthy, the trustor will come to harm.5 Lear’s action of placing trust involves a “voluntary commitment of resources to the trustee’s disposal” (Feher and Zehender 392), and thus, making himself vulnerable. Apparently, Lear trusts that Cordelia’s language of (filial) love will exceed her sisters’ and she will “draw a third more opulent” share (1.1.84). Cordelia’s refusal to say how much she loves him results in her exile and disinheritance, and redistribution of her portion between the two sisters. Despite recurrent references to contracts, debts, and bonds, in absence of a legally binding agreement Lear is unable to keep his hundred retainers. Goneril promptly reduces “half of his train” (2.4.180) and Regan slashes another “half of [his] train” (2.4.237). When he tries to renegotiate 50 retainers, Regan questions the need for “twenty and five” (285), upon which Lear reminds her, “I gave you all” (286). The phrase is echoed by Regan’s uncanny “And in good time you gave it” (287), even as she cuts the train from five to zero. At this juncture, the trust experiment is complete, the trustor has lost. The trustees have gained more than they expected because of an underlying conflict between different kinds of trust. Goneril and Regan’s trust went far enough to fulfill a ritualistic demand for professions of love because they had an incentive to inflate the language of love, knowing their father will do what he said he will. This kind of trust is not motivated by attachment, not even by terms of reciprocal altruism that sees the benefit of cooperation over competition. Goneril and Regan’s short-lived alliance with each other is similar; its only function is to dismantle Lear’s authority and dismiss his train. This kind of trust is a closed system, based on encapsulated interest of the trustees (see Hardin 7–9). Lear’s own trust is based on an open system of attachment, authority, and love. In the opening scenes we see how the two systems come into a violent conflict. In the 160

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aftermath of this collapse of trust, a pattern of reversals and discoveries constituting the main plot and the subplot depict bodily and psychological harm and foreground an affective crisis where emotional tears don’t elicit sympathy, and/or they are held back. One of the grids for contextualizing early modern and medieval tropes of tears classifies them as (1) contra natural tears, tears that are brought on by thwarted goals, such as anger, shame, humiliation and frustration; (2) natural tears, of grief, separation, suffering, compassion, and physical pain; and (3) supra-natural tears, related to religious devotion.6 Tears that Lear struggles against are contra natural tears of anger, shame, humiliation. He is “ashamed” that Goneril has the “power to shake [his] manhood” so that “these hot tears break from [him] perforce,” and he wishes her “blasts and fogs” (1.4.279–82). These are not communicative tears brought on by the expectation of sympathy. Due to culturally learned gender norms, Lear’s ambivalence impels him to fight them back, and draw attention to his blood when he says, “Th’untented wounding of a father’s curse/ Pierce every sense about thee” (1.4.284–85). Anguished cursing is communicative in a more convoluted sense than tears. Envisioning interiority of Goneril’s female body (a gesture that invites charges of invasive misogyny), he first wishes that nature should, “into her womb convey sterility” (1.4.261), but then changes his mind, and wishes her a “child of spleen,” who would cause similar hurt so that “cadent tears” would “fret channels in [her] cheeks” (1.4.265; 268). In other words, tears at filial ingratitude will be more suitable for her, than for him. Transition to a more sympathy-inducing affective state occurs when Lear threatens his own eyes with punishment: “Old fond eyes,/ Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out/ And cast you with the waters that you lose/ To temper clay” (1.4.285–88). In an uncanny reiteration of tears, eyes, faces being foregrounded at sites of ruptured trust, Gloucester is blinded for treason by Regan and Cornwall. What is treason to their newfound authority in Gloucester is trustworthiness and loyalty to Lear. Blinding is not only depriving someone of sight, but also depriving him of tears, disabling the agency that seeks sympathy and gives redress. It renders his face opaque, which can no longer seek sympathy and signal distress. Articulating this lack, Lear says to Gloucester: “If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes” (4.6. 170). Stanley Cavell reads this line as Lear’s avoidance of “Gloucester’s sympathy, his love” (60), because Lear “feels unworthy of love” (61). More concretely, Lear’s offer of his eyes (that he wanted to pluck out) to Gloucester is a helpless gesture of reciprocal altruism, reminding one of research on blood donating vampire bats, “vomiting up some of the blood they have harvested, to feed hungry colleagues” (Hawley 21). Donation of eyes, hence tears, would restore agency, virtue and identity to Gloucester. Lear consoles him: “Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;/ Thou know’st the first time we smell the air/ We wail and cry” (4.6.172–73). As metaemotion, whether Lear is able to console Gloucester or not, his reference to an infant’s distress vocalization anticipates Lear’s final sense that Cordelia’s death invites “howling,” because weeping has become impossible. Even though Gloucester cannot see, or weep, tears are suggested by his body posture, bleeding eye sockets that motivate the “Third Servant” to promise healing substances like “flax and whites of eggs/ To apply to his bleeding face” (3.7.105–6). The encounter between Lear and Gloucester does not resolve the affective crisis that began in Act 1, but it modulates bitterness and rage. The trope of tears in this, and myriad other ways, enfolds traces of affect throughout the play where eyes, faces, wounds, blood, and water intensify cumulative distress that requires amelioration.7 When Lear cries out, “O, me, my rising heart!,” the sardonic Fool says, “Cry to it, Nuncle, as the Cockney did to the eels when she put ‘em i’th’ paste alive” (2.4.116–17). Lear crying to his “rising heart” as the pastry cook cries for the eels that rise from half-done dough, underscores a desensitizing role of tears, introducing ambiguity as the Fool’s words consistently do. 161

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In contrast to the moments of Lear’s struggle with tears in the beginning and middle of the play, natural and communicative tears configure Edgar’s pity for the father who distrusted and exiled him, as well as Lear’s remorse at seeing Cordelia. What this means is that when damaged trust is repaired in strong attachment relationships emotional tears consecrate the moment. At one such moment Lear says to Cordelia, “Be your tears wet? Yes, faith, I pray weep not/If you have poison for me, I will drink it” (4.7.71–72). Wet tears are natural and expressive tears, while his own contranatural tears, that are expressive and communicative, “Do scald like molten lead” (4.7.47). Lear had cursed Goneril to bear a child of spleen who would make her shed cadent tears that would fret channels in her cheeks, like rain wears out stone, while his own tears at seeing his lost child are hot like molten lead. Why? Tears associated with what Othello calls the “melting mood” mark admission of sin and need for expiation; they are supra-natural tears. Though no deity is involved, Lear imagines himself bound on a “wheel of fire,” and Cordelia “a soul in bliss” (4.7.46). He asks forgiveness not of a deity, but an interpersonal other whom he has wronged. Underscoring the earthliness of the adaptive function of trust and tears, Cordelia, before her father has been found, says to her supporters: All blest secrets, All you unpublished virtues of the earth, Spring with my tears: be aident and remediate In the good man’s desires. Seek, seek for him. (4.4.15–18) She has come, because “great France” hath “pitied” her “mourning and importuned tears”; she has returned for “love, dear love, and our aged father’s right,” and her armies are not incited in “blown ambition” (4.4.20–29). Cordelia has used what her father would call, “women’s weapons, water-drops” (2.4.273), to persuade her husband to permit this fraught venture, and her words, most accurately, capture the ameliorative function of emotional tears and networks of trust. When his trust in Regan was intact, Lear had said to Goneril that he has another daughter, who, when “she shall hear this of thee/With her nails she’ll flay thy wolvish visage” (1.4.288–91). When he arrives at Regan’s home, with “the/ Sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture” (2.4.129) lodged in his heart, calling her “Beloved Regan,” he is, at first almost smarmy, referring to Goneril’s “fierce eyes,” and Regan’s gentle eyes that “do not burn” (2.4.166–67). This uncharacteristic tone reveals desperation and distress. After Regan is done with him, Lear cries out: You think I’ll weep. No. I’ll not weep, I have full cause of weeping, Storm and tempest But this heart shall break into a thousand flaws Or, ere I’ll weep—O Fool, I shall go mad. (2.4.278–81) As he vows not to weep, Lear also realizes the cost of not weeping. Tears are a reliable signal of distress, which he is trying to suppress with his culturally learned will to power. The sounds of storm and tempest punctuating this speech suggests that these water drops are not only a Dionysiac clarification of chaos, as pointed out earlier, but more importantly, the storm, I conclude, is an inversion of the tears Lear fights back so fiercely. 162

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Yet, the plenitude of the storm as substitution for Lear’s tears, contrasts, ironically, with the failure of tears encapsulated in his famous utterance, “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones” (5.3.256), when he appears on stage with Cordelia’s corpse, who has been killed in prison. Displacement of tears with revenge leads to the transformation of Hecuba, the wife, mother and queen into a dog, as the blinded Polymestor, walking on all fours, curses her. That ending may suggest an exhaustion of goodness, as Nussbaum claims, but the exhaustion of tears at the end of King Lear, does not. Lear’s “men of stones” are three good men—Kent, Edgar, and Albany. To them Lear says, “had I your tongues and eyes, I would use them so./ That heaven’s vault should crack” (257–58), as it does in fact, in the storm scene, where Lear sees the vault of the sky cracking so that the “Great gods,/ That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads” can “Find out their enemies now” (3.3.49–51). Though at first he calls the rain and thunder “you servile ministers/ That will with two pernicious daughters join” (3.2.21–22), in a meta-emotional moment he thinks he is not their enemy, but “a man/More sinned against than sinning” (3.3.58–9). Rain drops flowing down his face are not the bitter tears that Lear would not allow to stain his cheeks, but tears sympathetic to his cause.

Trust and Tears in Cymbeline Limitations of space do not allow me to fully explore a more comic case. I will therefore close with a brief example of trust and tears in Cymbeline, considering how Belarius and Cymbeline’s prehistory of betrayal is resolved in emotional tears when trust is restored between two father figures who are also king and subject. Reception history has been unkind to this play, starting with Samuel Johnson’s impatient dismissal due to its “unresisting imbecility,” mixed in with other complaints, though he praises the “just sentiments,” and “some natural dialogue” (see Nosworthy, xl). Alternative perspectives, and reassessments, have restored the play’s riches, as evidenced by Martin Butler’s detailed introduction to the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play, which begins thus: Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s longest and richest plays. Its capriciousness is its great virtue. It ranges from the nightmare claustrophobia of Innogen’s8 bedroom to the epic violence of Romano-British battle, it juxtaposes the innocent prude Posthumous, the refined brute Cloten; it accommodates Iachimo’s corrosive cynicisms and Jupiter’s transcendental affirmations. Its stage craft is multi-leveled, and its texture is densely allusive, reflecting the bewildering array of sources it draws on; its generic affinities link it with all parts of the canon. (1) Though a tragi-comedy, which the first editors categorized as a tragedy, the central story of the stolen princes encodes a vital comic motif: the separation and reunion of family members, interspersed with tragic themes of marital jealousy, and the motifs of death and rebirth. The theft and violation of trust is enfolded in Belarius’s banishment, though he had been a brave soldier and a favored Lord. According to his own report, he is betrayed by “two villains” that “swore to Cymbeline” that “[he] was confederate to the Romans” (3.3.66–8). Belarius’s emotional reaction is revenge by stealing the princes (a toddler and an infant), whom he raises for 20 years as his own sons in the Welsh countryside. Though this locale is not the typical green world of comedy, it is an alternative reality where the three live like hunting-gathering mountain men. The play-ending war with the Romans, where “Cymbeline is taken” and “Britons fly,” is triggered by the king being persuaded by his queen and stepson not to pay tribute; 163

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and it is won by a “strange chance” of Roman forces being rebuffed by “a narrow lane, an old man, and two boys” (5.3.51–2). Before realizing who they are, the king compliments them as “the liver, heart, and brain of Britain” (5.5.14), using an embodiment trope for national defense. It is later revealed that the men are Belarius whose assumed name is Morgan, and the princes Guiderius and Arvigarus. Interestingly, Guiderius’s mountain man name is Polydore. In an intertextually resonant, affective irony, while Hecuba’s Polydore was murdered by the Thracian king to whom the child had been entrusted for safe keeping, Belarius/Morgan stole the princes to injure their father but did not harm him, or them. Belarius’s action shows how revenge that does no harm can be a working through of repairable violations of social trust, one of Shakespeare’s preoccupations in the late plays. It is rather striking that in the recognition scene, Belarius, as Morgan, foregrounds nurture and the trust it requires between the biological father and the foster parent, when he begins thus: “First pay me for nursing of thy sons.” To Cymbeline’s intrigued: “Nursing of my sons?” (5.5.322), Belarius recounts their past in language that is both repentant and self-exculpating, as he weeps on stage (5.5.33–53). It is Cymbeline who supplies the performance cue for communicative and expressive emotional tears of his former associate when he says: “Thou weep’st, and speak’st” (354), and acknowledges: “I lost my children/ If these be they, I know not how to wish/ A pair of worthier sons” (355–57). Earlier in the scene, when he recognizes the daughter whom he, the harsh father, and her jealous husband,9 have caused to wander away from home, Cymbeline too weeps and says: “My tears that fall/ Prove holy water on thee, Imogen,/ Thy mother is dead” (5.5.268–70). The news of her evil step-mother’s death delivered in the same passage enables a step back from too much sentiment. This happens frequently, as the play combines Brechtian alienation effect with Aristotelian affectivity. Not afraid to show older men shedding natural tears, the play inverts imperatives of masculine pride that dominate Lear, as other gendered concepts are also inverted, for instance when Cymbeline exclaims: “O! what am I?/ A mother to the birth of three?,” adding, “Ne’er mother/ Rejoic’d deliverance more” (5.5.368–71). This meta-emotional nativity moment testifies to the “comic rhythm” as celebration of biological life that Susanne Langer considers essential to a life affirming comic vision. Tears in King Lear, shed and unshed, serve only to clarify tragic emotion, not to prevent tragedy. In Cymbeline, on the other hand, due to intelligent trustworthiness judgments made by minor characters, story structure works out to remove obstacles to personal happiness and recuperation of trust as social capital. After triggering a war by not paying the tribute, Cymbeline wins the war, but pays the tribute, making peace even with the Romans. The emotional tears, discussed earlier, testify to pain that individual characters have endured, and the affective crisis resolves in a shared emotion, akin to joy.

Notes 1 Felski, in Rethinking Tragedy, notes that classical tragedy has “proved a fertile source of inspiration for writers on the African continent” (13), such as Athol Fugard and Wole Soyinka, to name two among many. 2 See Patrick Colm Hogan’s discussion of mixed emotions due to a combination of aversive and attractive valence of affect, that gives rise to emotional ambivalence and blurring of genres (“All’s Well” 200). 3 See Grace Ioppolo’s account of how the depiction of cruelty harmed an understanding of the play in the nineteenth century, tracing the shift in reception to Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary and seminal films of Peter Brooks and Kozintsev who claim the brutality as, of our times as well and acknowledge the play’s affective quality (x–xiv). All citations to the play refer to this edition. See also Linda Boose’s erudite reading of why Cordelia returns. Boose comments on how (unnaturally) Lear

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4 5 6 7 8 9

rejoices at the “father-daughter merger” in prison (207–208). Stanley Cavell says, “It can be said that what Lear is ashamed of is not his need for love and his inability to return it, but the nature of his love for Cordelia” (70). In Preti Taneja’s recent retelling, set in India, Devraj (Lear) is implicated in incestuous feelings, as well as the brutal murder of Sita (Cordelia). Jennifer Hamilton draws attention to the early modern notion of two bodies of the monarch, natural and political, arguing that Lear’s shame is caused by his drawing attention to his mortality in the court, as he refuses to perform “immortality” (157–159). See David Sander and Klaus Scherer (392–393). See Vingerhoets, for classification of tears, which is by “St. John Climacos, a seventh century Christian Monk at the monastery on Mt, Sinai” (244). Speaking of historical specificity of emotions, White says, “in the early modern world where privacy was neither considered desirable nor even practical, the sight of person giving signs of inner distress . . . must have been alarming” (33). Different editions of Cymbeline spell this character’s name differently, as Innogen, or Imogen. For citations from the play I use the Arden edition of Cymbeline, edited by J. M. Nosworthy. He spells it as Imogen. Commenting on the wager plot, which subjects Imogen to a Desdemona like near-tragic fate Clara Rawnsley says, “On one level, Cymbeline may be one of Shakespeare’s most unrealistic plays in terms of its narrative elements, but on another, emotional level, it is one of his most true to life” because it deals with the “terrifying truths of the inner life,” such as “sexual fear involved in married life” (46).

Works Cited Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Vol. V II, Princeton UP, 1984, pp. 2316–2340. Barber, C. “Saturnalian Pattern in Shakespearean Comedy.” Comedy: Meaning and Form, edited by Robert Corrigan, Chandler, 1965, pp. 363–377. Belfiore, Elizabeth. Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton UP, 1992, pp. 56–57. Bevis, Mathew. Comedy. Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 6–18. Bharatmuni. The Natya Sastra. Translated by A Board of Scholars, Satguru Press, n.d., pp. 70–85. Boose, Linda. “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare.” King Lear, edited by Grace Ioppolo, Norton, 2008, pp. 194–209. Butler, Martin. “Introduction.” Cymbeline, edited by Martin Butler, Cambridge UP, pp. 1–74. Cavell, Stanley. “Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 39–123. Eagleton, Terry. Tragedy. Yale UP, 2020, pp. 1–39. Evans, Dylan. Emotion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 30–31. Fehr, Ernest, and Christian Zehender. “Trust.” Oxford Companion to Emotion and Affective Sciences. Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 392–393. Felski, Rita. “Introduction.” Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski, John Hopkins UP, 2008, pp. 1–25. Freud, Sigmund. “Jokes and the Comic.” Comedy: Meaning and Form, edited by Robert Corrigan, Chandler Publishing, 1965, pp. 253–262. Frye, Northrop. “The Mythos of Spring: Comedy.” Comedy: Meaning and Form, edited by Robert Corrigan, Chandler Publishing, 1965, pp. 141–178. Hamilton, Jennifer. “Lear in the Storm: Shakespeare’s Emotional Exploration of Sovereign Mortality.” Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies, edited by R. White, Mark Houlahan, and Katrina O’Loughlin, Palgrave, 2015, pp. 155–163. Hardin, Russell. Trust and Trustworthiness. Russel Sage, pp. 7–9. Hawley, Katherine. “Evolving Trust and Cooperation.” Trust. Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 21–32. Hegel, Wilhelm. “Dramatic Action and Character.” Hegel on Tragedy, edited by Anne Paulucci and Henry Paulucci, Harper and Row, pp. 97–163. Hogan, Patrick. “All’s Well That Ends Well? Happiness, Ambivalence and Story Genre.” Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, edited by Cora Fox, Bradley Irish, and Cassie Miura, Manchester UP, 2021, pp. 199–214. ———. Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature. UP of Florida, 2000. Ioppolo, Grace. “Introduction.” King Lear, edited by Grace Ioppolo, Norton, 2008, pp. vii–xvi.

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Lalita Pandit Hogan Irish, Bradley. “Solidarity as Ritual in the Late Elizabethan Court: Faction, Emotion, and the Essex Circle.” Positive Emotions. Manchester UP, pp. 121–135. Langer, Susanne. “The Great Dramatic Forms: The Comic Rhythm.” Feeling and Form. Scribner, 1953, pp. 326–350. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited by Michael Tanner, Penguin, 1993, pp. 14–45. Nosworthy, J., editor. Cymbeline. Arden, 2000. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundation of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 266–268. Rawnsley, Clara. “Once Upon a Time: Cymbeline, Fairy Tales and ‘The Terrifying Truths of the Inner Life.’” Shakespeare and Emotion. Palgrave, 2015, pp. 39–46. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. Oxford UP, 1961, pp. xi–xiv; 353–354. Taneja, Preti. We That Are Young. Knopf, 2018. Vingerhoets, Ad. “A Cultural Historical Perspective of Tears.” Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mystery of Tears. Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 237–259. White, R. “Language and Emotions.” Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, edited by Susan Broomhall, Routledge, 2017, pp. 33–35.

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PART 3

Literature and Emotion in the World

14 COLONIALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM Suzanne Keen

Abstract: An exploration of the role of emotion in colonialism and postcolonialism recognizes that dynamics of conquest, dominion, and exploitation (in the case of colonialism) and resistance, revolution, decolonization, and nation-building (in the case of postcolonialism) condition both their literary production and responses by audiences. Colonial and postcolonial literary representations embed structures of feeling and evoke responses that run the gamut of human emotions. Criticism of colonial literature and postcolonial rejoinders to appropriative or racist precursors participate in a generational dialogue fraught with indictment, judgment, and correction, as “the Empire Writes Back.” The persecution of writers indicates the power of imaginative writing, including its strategic invitation to empathize. This chapter places contested readings, including the response of persecution, within a framework of affect and emotion studies.

Emotion, affect, and empathy are not among the common set of theoretical keywords for the study of colonialism and postcolonialism, despite the foundational work of Patrick Colm Hogan on empathy, cognition, and emotion and literature.1 Likely a consequence of postcolonial theory and criticism’s assiduous avoidance of essentialism, emotion’s omission does not preclude its discussion within criticism of individual works or genres (such as Gillian Whitlock’s work on postcolonial testimonio or the chapters on emotion in Frederick Luis Aldama’s Analyzing World Fiction [2011]). And it certainly does not mean that colonial and postcolonial literatures eschew emotion or avoid affect. To set the stage for an exploration of the role of emotion in colonialism and postcolonialism requires first an understanding that dynamics of conquest, dominion, and exploitation (in the case of colonialism) and resistance, revolution, decolonization, and nation-building (in the case of postcolonialism) condition the categories under discussion here. Each of these historical conditions, called up by representations in literature, evokes strong feelings that run the gamut of human emotions. Teasing out the role of emotion in colonial and postcolonial literature and readers’ responses to it is a complicated project. It helps to settle on two definitions, of colonial literature and postcolonial literature, before delving deeper into the affective tenor of postcolonial critique. Colonial literature is usually understood to be the writing of colonial subjects and of settler colonists and their descendants, as regarded from the vantage point of the imperial center. Ordinarily colonial literature is written in the language of the colonizer, and may be lent its DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-18

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status by publication in the empire’s capital (e.g., works in English, published in London). A profound legacy of the British Empire, at one point in the early twentieth-century covering 25% of the globe, shows in the diversity of English-speaking nations in the twenty-first century. From the point of view of a contemporary nation that still retains its relationship with its former imperial power through membership in the Commonwealth of Nations, its “colonial literature” typically enjoys a more privileged status as the earliest works of its own national literary tradition. Successful writers, especially those from predominantly white settler colonies, may be claimed by more than one tradition, as for example Katherine Mansfield, whose celebrated short fiction enjoys canonical status in both twentieth-century British fiction and New Zealand literature. Many colonial subjects, even those who never set foot in England and including those who spoke languages in addition to English, received educations in the English literary tradition. Both boon and bane, the acquisition of English by subjects under the dominion of the British opened up opportunities for individual advancement and threatened cultures and traditions with eradication along with languages. Indeed, the imposition of English literacy and the sometimes violent suppression of native tongues or Creoles as the price of education in the British Empire is a topic freighted with the pain of loss.2 Yet the use of English was not the only choice for literary writers of colonized nations, and some chose to write anticolonial works in their own languages (e.g., Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, and Urdu), as Lalita Pandit Hogan observes. The choice of English, she argues, does “not demonstrate either colonial conformity or anti-colonial dissent” (Hogan 110). Colonial literature written in English has sometimes been regarded as derivative, imitative, and unoriginal, especially if it employs the forms and modes that are especially valued by the imperial tastemakers of the time. Success might be measured by being taken for the real thing. Some writers who were colonial subjects attempted to shed that identity and take on the status of writers born and bred in the imperial center, sometimes relocating permanently to Great Britain. Other colonial literature emerges from the agents of empire, as for example, Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913), which was based on his experience as a civil servant in Ceylon. Though Sri Lankan literature includes writing in English as well as in the older Tamil and Sinhala traditions, Woolf’s novel has an ambiguous status in the nation of its setting, sometimes regarded as anti-colonial (Boehmer) or uncolonial (Glendinning), but inescapably associated with the period of imperial dominion.3 Regardless of his critical political attitudes, this Bloomsbury-group white male English author was indisputably an agent of Empire in Ceylon. The ethnic, sometimes hybrid identity of the writer can make a difference as to whether a work is considered a colonial work or part of an emergent canon of a new national literature in English. Finally, the passing of time makes a difference as to whether a work of literature retains its colonial label or sheds it. Few scholars would consider the early American literature written in the seventeenth-century “colonial” in any way more than a period designation, indicating the time of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Jamestown, Virginia. Similarly, it is unusual to regard the American writings after 1776 as “postcolonial.” However, early American literature resembles later colonial literatures in English in many ways, including its orientation toward London, its adoption of forms and fashions of British writing, its nascent articulation of a distinct identity, and its eventual participation in resistance leading to revolution and independence (as for example, Tom Paine’s Common Sense [1775–76]). Over and over again in the history of decolonization, literature authored in the language of the educated class of colonial subjects becomes the site of resistance and rebellion against the empire. To make matters more complicated, anticolonial writing of a nation’s colonial period is often assimilated to the postcolonial literature that follows it, after decolonization. The boundaries 170

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between the colonial and postcolonial may be stark and clear or blurry and broad, depending on the historical experience of a former colony’s separation from or continued relationship with the Crown. When postcolonial literature is styled post-colonial with a hyphen, the punctuation can indicate a more historically strict interpretation of the division of colonial from the post-colonial period, with a before and after fixed by dates of wars of decolonization, withdrawals of occupying troops, or declarations of independence. The experience of dominion across the British Empire included colonial periods that began as early as 1556, with the Tudor plantations in Ireland, ended as recently as 1997 with the return of Hong Kong to China, and lasted as briefly as three years (British Cameroon) or as long as four centuries. Many nations that gained independence in the period between 1947 (Indian Independence and the Partition of India and Pakistan) and 1997 had only been a dominion, protectorate, or colony for one or two generations, and the degrees of disruption experienced by their people varied dramatically. Depending on whether a possession of Great Britain endured a colonial administration, occupation, large-scale settlement, extraction of resources, plantation, population displacement (or forced migrancy), serfdom, enslavement, or genocide, the legacy of colonialism to be reckoned with by postcolonial authors varies dramatically from one context to another. These differences also inflect the emotional tones and metanarratives that typify the structures of feeling for each individual national context. Postcolonial writers excoriate the empire for its crimes against humanity, but they also describe military dictatorships or kleptocracies that sometimes succeeded the exiting British. Nostalgia for a British past is not an unknown tone in the writing of the postcolonial period; Schadenfreude is common, but hostility and anger are not ubiquitous, or at least not uniformly directed toward the former imperial masters. Some colonies never left the empire: 14 overseas territories, mostly islands, remain possessions of the United Kingdom, along with three island Crown dependencies. The former dominions that after 1931 became the sovereign international members of the Commonwealth of Nations (now numbering 54 states and 16 Commonwealth realms) tend to retain affectionate ties with the British monarchy and British traditions, as well as trade relations with the United Kingdom and one another. This sense of connection extends to the relation of national literatures to British literature, especially in former settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Anglophone parts of the Caribbean. Long after independence in many former colonies, the continuation of a British mode of education ensured that the descendants of the colonized and the colonizers alike were steeped in Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, and the great Victorian novelists. Those connections with a great tradition can animate a proud sense of literary continuity, an equally intense revisionist imagining of canonical imperial texts, the pleasures of hybrid invention, the creative satisfactions of satirical mimicry, or a set of strong precursors against which to define an entirely new literary trajectory. Literary texts in various genres can be regarded as scripts or blueprints for re-creating emotional experience. Lyric poetry is an affective art, distilling emotion into verse. Drama harnesses the responsiveness of live audiences to staged experience (and does not require literacy for participation). The affective elements that drive the reading of prose fictional narrative involve curiosity, surprise, and suspense (core elements of narrativity). Further, the representation of human-like fictional characters can invite empathy and/or identification. It stands to reason that the literary works associated with periods of colonialism and postcolonialism would take advantage of the affective capacities of these and other literary genres to record what a time and place felt like, to create occasions for expression of emotions, and to evoke aesthetic emotions. Yet it is also the case that individual works have generated polarized 171

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interpretations that deny any direct relation between representations and responses. I follow here Meir Sternberg, who argues that literary techniques evoke protean responses,4 with no one-to-one correspondence between a representation or strategy and its effect. By situating the phenomenon of contested readings of colonial and postcolonial literature within a framework of emotion and affect studies, I hold to these principles of diverse and variable impacts. We need to be able to account for texts that make some readers laugh and others wince, characters that seem familiar or alien depending on who you are, representations that push outsiders away in order to empower an in-group, or invite all comers to transcend material differences and connect. This last strategy can be seen in postcolonial authors’ evident efforts to script readers’ responses by employing literary empathy strategically. Affect and the emotions can be studied from many different angles in literary study. In Sara Ahmed’s useful conception of the cultural politics of emotion, emotion means something different than one of a fixed set of basic emotions (psychological theories sometimes list six or eight of them)5 that all humans possess, transhistorically, as a result of their evolved biological inheritance. In this scientific view favored by emotion studies, cultures may differ in how they name, foreground, value, or diminish the basic emotions, but human beings possess and experience them by virtue of being human. Affect studies tends to adapt either psychoanalytic or materialist alternatives to more contextual and individualized understandings of the topic. For Ahmed, emotion forges social relationships of inclusion or exclusion by placing bodies inside or outside communities: “Emotions align some bodies with others, as well as stick different figures together, by the way they move us” (Ahmed 195). This means that the way individual people experience their emotions becomes both interpersonal and historically situated. Using Ahmed’s contextual and ideological definition of emotion for the literary works that come out of colonial and postcolonial contexts can illuminate the dynamics of othering documented there. For example, Ahmed sees emotionally charged naming as interpellation, with potentially harmful impact on its targets: “The important question is: What effects do such encounters have on the bodies of others who become transformed into objects of hate?” (60). As Edward Said argued in Orientalism (1978), the sort of othering that establishes the West’s positional superiority over the East in Orientalist discourse operates not only through hatred and dehumanization but also through apparently more positive romanticizing, exoticizing, and idealizing. Said’s seminal work of postcolonial theory contains an extraordinary genealogy of the motives of imperial desire, expressed in Orientalism’s association of the West with rationality and the East with a range of unruly terrors and pleasures. Seeing feelings of attraction and repulsion as two sides of the same coin can reveal complications of interpersonal relationships in real life and as depicted in literary works. Affect theory helps critics identify the flow of emotion as a regulatory force that shapes our experiences of culture, institutions, and processes, and with the potential damage inflicted on targets of repetitive or systemic emotion-driven exclusion or denigration. It is thus especially apropos for criticism of colonialist and postcolonialist works, and fits with the cultural materialist and psychoanalytic strands of postcolonial theory. For example, the psychoanalytic theorist and medical practitioner Frantz Fanon wrote eloquently on the impact of racist colonialism on the human psyche, out of a French colonial context, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Employing affect theory can bring to light how emotional experience informs all lived experience; when affect theory has been brought to bear on the reading of literary texts, it tends to highlight difference more often than commonalities or human universals. Literary artists of the colonial and postcolonial world have availed themselves of diverse representational opportunities to move readers and audiences, with kaleidoscopic results with respect to the emotional spectrum of represented experience. The processes of conquest, dominion, 172

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exploitation, as well as resistance, revolution, and self-determination involve emotions that certainly undergird bias, warp perceptions, and motivate harm, but that also help bind communities of care, underscore common humanity, resist violence and exploitation, and invoke empathy. Relying on developmental psychology and the neuroscience of the emotions, a theory of narrative empathy explores how literary texts can open up invitations to share feelings and perspectives across boundaries of difference by cultivating the role-taking imagination.6 That writers retrospectively assigned to categories of “colonial” or “postcolonial” engage for their own reasons with the representation of emotion and invitations to a broad range of feelings I take as a given, with acute awareness that critical confirmation bias can lend canonicity to literary works that happen to fit favored critical or theoretical models. We can find antipathy and rejection of appeals to sensibility just as readily as we can find bids for empathy and emotional connection in the broad swath of modern and contemporary writing that can be regarded as colonial or postcolonial. A subject so vast and various requires ruthless delimiting of the topic. I refer here only to the colonial and postcolonial literature of the former British Empire, by honoring the variety of literary genres and their different audiences, by zeroing in on the distinctive affective tenor of postcolonial theory, and by suggesting how colonial and postcolonial authors have invited emotional engagement of their audiences by deploying varieties of strategic narrative empathy. It is more than enough for one brief chapter to suggest how strong feelings are involved in the production, dissemination, reception, and in some cases canonization of colonial and postcolonial literature, and in reading practices that emphasize contestation and resistance, on the one hand, and recruitment to more capacious allegiances with previously unfamiliar people and cultures, on the other hand. The Satanic Verses (1988) affair can be regarded as one of the times when strong feelings evoked by a work of postcolonial literature made (literary) history, when the Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran issued a fatwa condemning author Salman Rushdie to death and calling upon all zealous Muslims to execute him and those associated with the novel’s publication.7 Though Rushdie went into hiding for a period of years and survived, his Italian translator was knifed and his Japanese translator was slain by stabbing, his Norwegian publisher was shot in the back, bookstores were firebombed, and an attempt to assassinate his Turkish translator by burning down a hotel killed dozens of others. Many also died in violent protests against the novel.8 The form of contestation that involves threats and punitive actions against writers whose representations offend illustrates with extreme examples the motive force of feelings in the reception of colonial and postcolonial literature. Thus, although this chapter has a narrower focus than all of colonialism (centering on the British Empire alone) and cannot account for postcolonialism in all of Britain’s former imperial possessions, it understands the anglophone literature of colonialism and postcolonialism as arising from specific political and historical contexts that map onto periods of literary production. These, in turn, each generated what Raymond Williams describes as “structures of feeling,” or the characteristic approaches and tones of a place and time, which, alongside its “cultural work, its social character, its general patterns of activity and value” (The Long Revolution 70), can be discerned in the documents of a period: for our purposes, in its literature. These texts embed the dominant, residual, and emergent forms that Raymond Williams theorized (Marxism and Literature 121–7); literary works of any given moment may show signs of affiliation or affinity with the dominant forms and the structures of feeling that they embed, or with residual or emergent forms and their structures of feeling. Just as an illustration, a core sample of the literary production of a colonized nation on the verge of achieving independence might include E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (published in English translation in 1924), and the lyric poems 173

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of Sarojini Naidu, written in 1927 (though not published in book form until 1961 in The Feather of the Dawn).9 Written by an English novelist, a Bengali poet-writer-philosopher, and an Indian poet and political activist, these works employ historical settings, philosophical and political themes, psychological stances, and formal strategies that can be read as emergent (e.g., the revolutionary feminism of Naidu), residual (e.g., the historical recreation of the British Raj in the 1880s by Tagore), and dominant (e.g., a prescient popular novel about AngloIndian society by Forster). Though they are of the same period, their evocation of atmospheres and moods differs markedly, and the way we respond to them today is conditioned by our uneven knowledge of their authors and of subsequent history. Even to start down this path is to open up rich possibilities of recovering, a century later, the complex structures of feeling that each work preserves, in addition to their direct representation of the emotional lives of their characters and lyric speakers and personae. But to gesture back to Ahmed’s ideas about emotions, these works document not only the values of their time, but they speak to the motive forces driving exclusions and inclusions, in-groups and out-groups, and the pleasures and costs of encounters between individuals of contrasting status or identity. Though individual authors were not Williams’ primary concern, for affect theorists and literary scholars of the emotions (especially those working in a rhetorical tradition), literature involves not only texts but also their makers and their communicative contexts. We proceed with caution, not overestimating the sway exerted by the intentions of the authors, if we can even recover them. Just as literary texts cannot exist without authors, the full imaginative transaction of literature cannot be completed—or fully understood—without audiences. Readers are even trickier to generalize about than authors, and we should strive to recall that our own reactions, including intense empathetic experiences, are unlikely to be shared by all or even most other readers. Here, audiences should be understood as encompassing immediate readerships who share the structure of feeling of the original author(s), more distant audiences characterized by their different attitudes, and temporally remote readerships.10 These posterity audiences (including us) may have to work hard to recover the original colonial or postcolonial work’s context, or may find ourselves vibrating with intensities of shared emotion across expanses of time and place. Out of a welter of different responses experienced by a variety of readers, the traces of connection across boundaries of difference animate readers’ responses to the colonial and postcolonial texts that continue to reach global audiences. Indeed, the invitation to experience narrative empathy is a predictable, though not inevitable ingredient of colonial and postcolonial literature that has remained in print and sustained the interest of an international community of readers over the decades. Using a wide variety of representational techniques, narrative artists have reached out to their audiences near and far by employing strategic narrative empathy (Keen “Strategic” 478–80). We may distinguish three uses of strategic empathy, as I have earlier defined it. When authors use bounded strategic empathy, they can be observed relying on familiar tropes intended to activate the concerns of in-groups. Authors employing ambassadorial strategic empathy address members of audiences further away—in the case of colonial and postcolonial literature, often in the imperial center, seeking support or affiliation to causes. When authors use broadcast strategic empathy, they call upon all readers (near and far, now and in the future) to experience emotional fusion through empathetic representations of universal human experiences. A single work may contain emotional appeals evincing the use of all three strategies. All forms of strategic narrative empathy show an effort to garner specific sympathetic responses to particular situations, some with explicit calls to action that make their intentions plain. For example, Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What (2006), a testimonio of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achack Deng, concludes with a direct address to the reader and a recommendation 174

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of where those roused to sympathy can send their money in support of Deng and his displaced compatriots (Eggers 474–75ff ). Yet even the most efficacious efforts to tether reading experiences to matters of human rights that could stir prosocial or political action do not evoke altruistic responses in all readers. How many readers or viewers of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or its adaptations have donated to women’s shelters or worked to end human trafficking? The failure of narrative empathy to instigate action in the real world most of the time is one of the indictments against it.11 Readers also routinely misunderstand invitations to empathy, projecting their emotions inaccurately and drawing conclusions far from those intended.12 However, these common outcomes should not prevent us from noticing the more unusual cases when failed empathy and false empathy do not short-circuit a feeling response, and generate intensities of connection, character identification, and rooting interests. Those empathic sensations of recognition and fellow feeling may occur in audiences close at hand, or separated by great gulfs of distance and time. Readers tend to notice and remember these relatively rare reading experiences, which may lead in turn to writers’ resolve to garner such responses. A resonant empathetic response may especially occur when a political or contextual similarity makes a literary work emerging from a distant time and place immediately relevant once again. For example, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), set during the aftermath of the Mau Mau revolution in the time leading up to Kenya’s independence and addressing the challenges of self-governance, might have been felt to have become a bit dated. A teacher of literature might reasonably fear that it would not seem sufficiently relatable. Yet it depicts resistance to police violence directed against a community of color, retaining potential to be released by readers bringing their emotional and political sensitivities to its discussion. Ngũgĩ’s adroit depiction of archetypal human situations invites readers 50 years on to empathetic resonance with the struggles of anticolonial revolution and nation building. The immediate pertinence of police violence and Black Lives Matter enlivens a reading of A Grain of Wheat today, but so does Ngugi’s exercise of broadcast strategic empathy in his original imaginative writing a half century ago. An author’s strategic use of narrative empathy can impact how traces of the structures of feeling from a work’s original context meet with readers bringing their own preoccupations, commitments, and concerns to the reanimation of its textual emotion cues. Where and when you read a work of colonial or postcolonial literature makes a difference to whether it feels like an immediate call to action, a fossilized slice of life, an exhibit for an historical account of “how it really was” (back then) or a shockingly fresh representation that transcends barriers of time and space to speak to your immediate concerns. When and where and who you are when you encounter the work sets limits on the emotional potentialities of a work just as its formal qualities, its narrative shape, its characterization, its genre, and its mode of delivery impact what it invites us to feel. As a reader, you bring a great deal to the reanimation of a work of literature. Who you are matters to your responsive stance, and a related set of dynamics can also be observed about the impact of spatial distance and cultural differences on the emotional resonance of literature. Since readers bring themselves to tasks of imaginative co-creation of fictional worlds, their intersectional identities and how they feel about things also inform the communicative transaction, and can certainly block it altogether. To be sure, you cannot unleash all the imaginative potential of a work without an author who has set out worldmaking cues for you to follow, and you certainly need the text to invite, script, and pace the experience, but consciousness of how much you contribute, as a reader, helps a sensitive critic avoid the pitfall of assuming that all readers will respond similarly to a work. Indeed, some of the most celebrated early salvoes fired by postcolonial literary theory 175

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and criticism took the form of demonstrating that canonical classics, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) or Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) can and do elicit dramatically different interpretations and emotional responses from colonial or postcolonial readers than from the tradition-bound audience of the imperial center.13 This sort of revisionist critique can be linked, as a fundamental postcolonial counter-textuality (Gandhi 151) to literary reimaginings of canonical classics from a postcolonial standpoint. The emotional satisfactions of corrective rejoinders suffuse works that make a virtue of difference and opposition, laying claim to characters from canonical works by English authors. For example, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) recasts Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason, a woman of the Caribbean, more sympathetically by emphasizing her identity. Many other poets, novelists, dramatists, directors, and writers in hybrid modes have extended the project by which the “Empire Writes Back,” in Salman Rushdie’s much-quoted phrase (Rushdie 8). The full title of Rushdie’s original 1982 article in The Times was “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance,” which in addition to its topical allusion to Star Wars and its evil empire, underscores one potent emotional driver of postcolonial rejoinders: the desire for revenge, pay-back, and having the last word. The affective tenor of postcolonial critique, ranging from righteous indignation at mis- or missing representations, to gleeful revelation of imaginative malfeasance, affords a striking instance of a scholarly sensibility described by Rita Felski as possessing the aesthetic pleasures of detective fiction (Felski 215). Though Felski writes about critics of many theoretical affiliations, the postcolonial critic (who is often also a feminist, Marxist, or post-structuralist theorist) fits her description of an oppositional investigator. Bringing superior intelligence and correct politics to bear on an object of suspicion, the postcolonial critic reveals suppressed voices, and deplores the malign motives of bumbling generations of earlier critics and readers, some of whom appear in the dock as naïve enthusiasts for (say) the poetry of Rudyard Kipling or the novels of Conrad or Austen. As Felski writes, extrapolating from Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, “The literary critic, like the detective, interprets clues, establishes causal connections, and identifies a guilty party: namely, the literary work accused of whitewashing or concealing social oppression” (215). As I have earlier suggested, criticism of colonial literary texts, and postcolonial rejoinders to appropriative or racist precursors participate in a generational dialogue fraught with recrimination and correction. These strategies possess their own emotional drives and satisfactions; Felski’s work draws attention to “criticism’s own affective registers” (Felski 215). She observes: Suspicious reading inscribes itself in the psyche as a particular mode of thought and feeling, a mindset equipped with distinct qualities: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact. (222) Operating in this fashion empowers critics to “enact a temporary triumph over the sovereignty of authors” (228) and perform their own creative work, in Felski’s view, which describes without denouncing a mode of engagement with literature that is not only analytical but also affective (232). One demerit of suspicious reading, for Felski, is its predictability: Unchecked by counterforces, locked into a complacent and self-confirming circle of argumentation, a hermeneutics of suspicion dissipates its problem-solving powers and loses much of its allure. It no longer tells us what we do not know; it singularly fails to surprise. (231) 176

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In the meantime, real authors all over the world, and older writers recovered for contemporary audiences, deliver to diverse audiences works across a broad spectrum, eliciting emotional responses that do surprise and compel critical attention. A salutary effect of over 30 years of postcolonial critique lies in a tremendously broadened range of available texts for reading and teaching. Even a limit on works originally written in English brings in world anglophone literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, drama, and emergent hybrid forms) from a dizzying variety of perspectives. This enormous and diverse body of work, with its huge range of representational strategy and technique, invites an equally multifarious audience reaction. Though world writers in English are warmly appreciated, winning literary prizes, selling well, and earning places on school, college, and university syllabi, pleasure and admiration are not the inevitable responses to postcolonial literature. Sometimes the reception of literary works emerging from distinct reading communities takes the form of violent reprisals, legal action, and threats against writers. PEN International documents the cases in an annual report, from which we may conclude that nonfiction writers, specifically journalists, are most often targeted. But dramatists, poets, and novelists, are not rendered immune to persecution by the higher status of their writing. If journalists pose a threat because they may place a spotlight on matters a regime or community prefers to keep in the shadows, dramatists can alarm because the performance of their work can reach illiterate audiences that, prior to social media, could be kept unaware. High-profile poets and novelists with readerships in metropolitan centers might seem safer from imprisonment or violence, but PEN International records threats and violence against them as well. The PEN International Case List (e.g., Dondo, Georges, Sheerin, and Wadsworth-Jones, 2018) makes for sobering reading. Fear, anger, and the frustration of thwarted authoritarians speak through the case studies; often the author who has elicited negative attention has exercised strategic empathy on behalf of a suffering or repressed community or individual. Fictionality is no defense, for the critics who seek violently to silence postcolonial writers give great credence to literature’s power, regardless of its genre. To censor, imprison, kidnap, attack, or kill a writer (or a publisher or translator) implies an emotional response to literature’s capacity to change minds, to elicit empathy, and to move readers into action on behalf of suffering others. Thus literary works, their makers, and their readers have been recruited into global struggles for human rights. If postcolonial theory and criticism have been slow to embrace emotion studies and affect theory, it is not because literature’s capacity to document structures of feeling and engage the feelings has been neglected by colonial and postcolonial writers. The potency and potential of emotion as a matter of aesthetics, genre, rhetoric, persuasion, testimony, and empathy in responses to colonial and postcolonial literature demand our respectful attention.

Notes 1 For a sampling from over two decades of contributions, see Hogan, “The Epilogue of Suffering” (2001), “Stories and Morals” (2004), What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (2010), and “The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: Cognitive Approaches to Identity and Empathy” (2015). 2 See Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind 10–13. 3 See Ranasinha, “The Shifting Reception of The Village in the Jungle.” 4 Sternberg introduces both concepts as early as the 1970s, but elaborates on them usefully in the 2003 essay “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II).” 5 See, for example, Robert Plutchik’s “A General Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion,” in Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, 3–33.; in sympathy with this approach but arriving at a different number of basic emotions, see Paul Ekman, “An Argument for Basic Emotions,” 169–200.

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Suzanne Keen 6 For a more elaborate discussion of these opportunities and their limitations, see Keen “Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion” 347–65. 7 See Appignanesi and Maitland, The Rushdie File (1989), 84–98. 8 See Pipes, The Rushdie Affair (1990). 9 The Feather of The Dawn consists of poems written in 1927 by Naidu, edited and published posthumously in 1961 by her daughter, Padmaja Naidu. 10 On audiences, readerships, and reception, see Hans Robert Jauss (1982; see also Chapter 27 of the present volume), Peter Rabinowitz (1987), and Brian Richardson (2007). 11 High profile critiques of empathy as a poor basis for decision-making (e.g., Paul Bloom) or motive force for morality (e.g., Jesse Prinz) often focus on its inefficacy, or what I call failed empathy. False empathy, which does more harm than good when mistaken empathizers do act upon their feelings, is a separate basis for criticism. Critical race theorist Richard Delgado argues against empathy for its falsity in The Coming Race War? And Other Apocalyptic Tales of America After Affirmative Action and Welfare 4–36; celebrated novelist Michael Ondaatje depicts the perils of false empathy in his book, Anil’s Ghost (2000). 12 See Keen “Empathic Inaccuracy” 819–25. 13 See, for example: Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” 1–13; Edward Said on Austen and other English authors, Culture and Imperialism, esp. 59–61.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–87. Heinemann, 1988, pp. 1–13. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. Aldama, Frederick Luis, editor. Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory. U of Texas P, 2011. Appignanesi, Lisa, and Sara Maitland. The Rushdie File. Fourth Estate, 1989. Atwood, Margaret. A Handmaid’s Tale. 1985. Rpt. Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. Rpt. Penguin Classics, 2003. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. HarperCollins, 2016. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. Rpt. Penguin Books, 2012. Delgado, Richard. The Coming Race War? And Other Apocalyptic Tales of America after Affirmative Action and Welfare. New York UP, 1996. Dondo, Aurélia, Nael Georges, Cathal Sheerin, and Emma Wadsworth-Jones. The PEN International Case List 2018. Edited by Sara Whyatt, https://pen-international.org/who-we-are/case-lists. Accessed 30 August 2020. Eggers, Dave. What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. 2006. Rpt. Vintage, 2007. Ekman, Paul. “An Argument for Basic Emotions.” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 6, 1992, pp. 169–200. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. 1968. Rpt. Pluto Press, 2008. Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today, vol. 32, no. 2, 1 June 2011, pp. 215–234, doi:10.1215/03335372-1261208. Accessed 30 August 2020. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Columbia UP, 1998. Hogan, Lalita Pandit. “Agency and Emotion: R. K. Narayan’s The Guide.” Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory. Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, U of Texas P, 2011, pp. 109–133. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “The Epilogue of Suffering: Heroism, Empathy, Ethics.” SubStance, vol. 30, nos. 1–2, 2001, pp. 119–143. ———. “The Psychology of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: Cognitive Approaches to Identity and Empathy.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 329–346. ———. “Stories and Morals: Emotion, Cognitive Exempla, and the Arabic Aristotelians.” The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, edited by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, Ashgate, 2004, pp. 31–50. ———. What Literature Teaches us About Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2010. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti, U of Minnesota P, 1982. Keen, Suzanne. “Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction.” Topoi, vol. 39, no. 4, Sept. 2020, pp. 819– 825, doi:10.1007/s11245-018-9622-9. Accessed 30 August 2020.

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Colonialism and Postcolonialism ———. “Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 347–365. ———. “Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy.” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 82, no. 3, Sept. 2008, pp. 477–493. Naidu, Sarojini. The Feather of the Dawn. 1961. Sarojini Naidu: Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Makarand R. Paranjape, Rupa, 2010, pp. 186–194. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Heinemann, 1986. ———. A Grain of Wheat. 1967. Rpt. Heinemann, 1983. Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Paine, Tom. Common Sense. 1775–76. Rpt. Modern Library, 2003. Pipes, Daniel. The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah, and the West. Birch Lane, 1990. Plutchik, Robert. Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience: Vol. 1. Theories of Emotion. Academic, 1980, pp. 3–33. Prinz, Jesse. “Against Empathy.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 1, 2011, pp. 214–233. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Cornell UP, 1987. Ranasinha, Ruvani. “The Shifting Reception of The Village in the Jungle (1913) in Sri Lanka.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 33–43, doi:10.1177/0021989414557166. Accessed 30 August 2020. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Rpt. Penguin, 2001. Richardson, Brian. “Singular Text, Multiple Implied Readers.” Style, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007, pp. 257–272. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Yale UP, 1965. Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” The Times (London), 3 July 1982, p. 8. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Knopf, 1993. ———. Orientalism. 1978. Rpt. Vintage Books, 1979. Sternberg, Meir. “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (II).” Poetics Today, 2003, pp. 517–638. Tagore, Rabindranath. Gora. 1924 (Trans.). Rpt. Rupa & Co., 2002. Whitlock, Gillian. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford UP, 2015. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. 1961. Rpt. Parthian, 2011. ———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977. Woolf, Leonard. The Village in the Jungle. Edward Arnold, 1913.

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15 DISABILITY, “ENSLAVEMENT,” AND SLAVERY Afective Historicism and Fletcher and Massinger’s A Very Woman David Houston Wood

Abstract: The recent scholarly turns toward disability and emotion as discrete categories of analysis in English Renaissance drama have revealed the crucial role each frequently plays within the politics of dramatic representation; this chapter explores their intersectional value. I scrutinize Fletcher and Massinger’s A Very Woman (1619–21) through the lens of affective historicism: first, analyzing the emotions of its early modern characters; and second, charting the play’s emotional effects on various audiences. These effects have changed over the centuries: while earlier audiences stress the sentimental charm of its nobles, modern audiences observe a cast of characters variously stigmatized by physical disability, mental illness, and habituated alcoholism. Based on the thematic link Fletcher and Massinger establish between metaphorical “enslavement” by the passions and actual depictions of slavery, the chapter finally considers the emotional effects the play’s staging of slavery has on its audiences, from the birth of the Anglo-American slave trade through to today.

The recent scholarly turns toward disability and emotion as discrete categories of analysis in English Renaissance drama have revealed the crucial role each frequently plays within the politics of dramatic representation. Both lines of inquiry have extended our understanding of the spectrum of characterization to be found in the drama of this period, that is, in all sorts of incisive ways.1 But rather than examine these topics in isolation, this chapter explores their intersectional value. Where Disability Studies takes as its purview the interrogation of the psycho-physiological category of the “norm(al),” it has also revealed the unstable and fleeting nature of this term, centering on what the field refers to as Temporary Able-Bodied-ness (TAB). TAB acknowledges that most, if not all, human lives will eventually assume forms of disability difference: whether as congenital (derived from birth), acquired (generated during one’s life-span), or temporary (from which an individual phases in and out). Recent early modern disability scholarship has been especially attentive to such thinking: while disability can seem self-evident, for example, in William Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III (including the “mountain” he details on his back, his “withered arm,” and his “halt,” or limp), early modern scholarship has also perceived disability in seemingly non-disabled characters affected by powerful emotion events.2 Simply put, the early modern humoral theory’s fluid DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-19

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explanatory model of health and emotion suggested the instability and volatility of all bodies. Toward that end, this chapter employs reading strategies drawn from the field of Disability Studies to engage a powerful example of English Renaissance drama that can help us understand the ways such texts once employed emotion to make meaning and how they continue to do so. John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s A Very Woman (c. 1619–21) was written by two masterful and highly productive playwrights: Massinger (1583–1640) served as author or coauthor for some 40 popular plays, for example, while Fletcher (1579–1625) co-wrote perhaps 50, at least three alongside Shakespeare (1564–1616). Though all but unknown today, once A Very Woman found its way onto the stage and the page, various audiences found it aesthetically masterful. William Gifford, editor of The Plays of Philip Massinger, wrote in 1813, for example, that it is surely “one of the most delightful compositions in the English language”; and renowned poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed in 1833 that it is “one of the most perfect plays we have.”3 Set in Palermo, Sicily, A Very Woman presents the interpersonal vicissitudes that result in the marriage of Lady Almira, daughter to the Viceroy of Sicily, and Don John Antonio, the Prince of Tarent. But the play’s cast of characters, and the mechanics of their dramatic representation, also overlap in key ways with more urgent, identity-driven concerns. The play ultimately comes to serve, in some sense, as a Jacobean meditation on character identity differences, veering far afield of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson refers to as portrayals of the normate, “the veiled subject position of the cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the [normate’s] normative boundaries.”4 In its depictions of its various characters’ emotional extremes, A Very Woman extends a thematic bridge between metaphorical “enslavements” by the passions and a series of striking depictions of actual, embodied slavery. That is, the play stages numerous enslaved characters, and even features, at its core (3.1), an active Sicilian slave market in which middle class figures socialize and make sport of those being sold; in which a Slave Master prompts saleable behaviors for those on the auction block. A Very Woman thus provides for its London audiences, starting in 1619, an historical link between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic slave trades. Centered on the play’s London staging, Mediterranean setting, and powerful portrayal of character emotions, A Very Woman offers an ideal, if deeply problematic, text upon which to explore the concept of affective historicism. This term refers most broadly to revealing the various histories of human emotion, but it also encourages us to consider, as Patrick Colm Hogan suggests, “the view that emotions are not uniform across time periods but in some sense change historically, along with the related view that emotions are not uniform across cultures but vary culturally.”5 This chapter will pursue an affective historicist strategy to examine A Very Woman’s engagement with affect and emotion in two ways: first, regarding the emotionally volatile, disabling passions depicted by characters within the work; and second, regarding the various affective responses such depictions generate in various audiences of whatever time and place. In other words, the contrast between Gifford and Coleridge’s aesthetic encomia regarding A Very Woman, on one hand, and reactions today to the play’s various character depictions, on the other, keenly reflects an historical slippage Hogan highlights regarding art and emotional response. Where the goal of literary reading once centered squarely upon “aesthetic education” or the “training of sensibility,” he writes, current critical literary strategies are “most often treated as a matter of cultivating empathy” (118). I propose with this chapter both to excavate and to assess a powerful example of a play that challenges us on both fronts. 181

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Noble Sufering—Disability, the Passions, and “Enslavement” Refutation of the passions consistently serves as a key feature in Massinger’s works. According to Roma Gill, Massinger’s plays, throughout his oeuvre, dependably challenge his characters to subdue their passions in place of reason.6 Accordingly, A Very Woman reads on one level as a series of explosive emotion episodes that characters struggle to bring to temper. The authors bookend the passionate terrain of the play, for example, with scenes featuring the respective rages of two senior noblemen, the Viceroy of Messina and the Duke of Sicily. When in Act 1 the Viceroy learns of his son’s severe injury in a swordfight, he bellows to the Duke: “Revenge . . . I must, and will have/ If my Martino die” (21). In Act 5, however, it is the Duke whose anger manifests just as powerfully when he believes his daughter, Lady Almira, has betrothed herself to an enslaved Turk: “Degenerate monster!” he screams, threatening her death (96). But as emotionally volatile as these scenes are, it is with the younger generation that the play places its main interest. Wounded in the brutal sword-fight he undertook for the sake of Lady Almira, the haughty Don Martino Cardenes, son of the Duke of Messina, nearly perishes (12–13). While his incapacitating physical injury, inflicted by Don John Antonio, eventually heals, the experience leaves Martino in an expansive, and thoroughly disabling, depressive malaise that persists nearly the length of the play. To cure this illness, his father secures Doctor Paolo, Palermo’s leading physician, who offers his diagnosis: Though his hurts, I mean his outward ones, do promise fair,/ There is a deeper one, and in his minde/ Must be with care provided for. Melancholy,/ And at the height, too near of kin to madness,/ Possesses him; his senses are distracted,/ Not one, but all. . . . (23) Nobility suffers in A Very Woman, in other words, and does so through that most entitled of early modern maladies: melancholy. Fortunately, Doctor Paolo implements a recuperative plan. Rightly observing of Martino’s illness that “By degrees ’twill lessen” (47), the Doctor’s cure involves fresh air and a series of staged interludes, an empathetic form of talk therapy, in which Martino interacts with the Doctor who dresses first as a friar, then as a soldier, and finally as a philosopher; he is aided, as well, by both a good and an evil spirit (58–65).7 Through this curative plan, we see Fletcher and Massinger adopting what Allison Hobgood refers to as the proto-medical model of disability, and consequently refusing what Edward Wheatley refers to as the religious model of disability, which might hope only for a sudden, divine cure for Martino’s malady.8 As Doctor Paolo observes, “I am no God Sir,/ Nor a holy Saint that can do miracles,/ But a weak sinful man” (21). By the play’s end, his cure complete, Martino thanks the doctor; Paolo responds with stoical advice—“Who fights/ With passions, and orecomes ’em, is indu’d/With the best virtue, passive fortitude” (63). This refutation of the passions in favor of a non-affective regime of reason defines the disabling dangers the passions present to the nobility in this play, and Martino even comes to refer to his excessive passion as a metaphorical enslavement. When asked by his father, Messina, about his final refusal of Almira, Martino responds he has done so “To shun captivity, sir./ I was too long a slave, I’ll now be free” (83). Martino’s period of debility thus highlights his TAB: acknowledgment that human psychophysiological “normalcy,” such as it is, is but a temporary state. Indeed, as if to highlight human frailty, Almira also manifests a temporary “madness,” featuring hallucinations, sleepwalking, and the threat of suicide (24–27). A servant observes: 182

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She started up, her hair unbound, and with Distracted looks, staring about the Chamber, She asks aloud; where is Martino? Where Have you conceal’d him? sometimes names [Don John] Anthonio, Trembling in every joynt, her brows contracted, Her fair face as ’twere chang’d into a curse, Her hands held up thus, and as if her words Were too big to finde passage through her mouth. She groans, then throws her self upon her Bed, Beating her Brest. (24)

When she finally comes to, she utters “O my brain! . . . I have had the strangest waking dream, of Hell/ And heaven, I know not what” (26). Doctor Paolo’s eventual “cures” of both Martino and Almira, too, evoke a traditional tension identifiable in many disability narratives: that such characters are so often, by story’s end, either cured of their disabilities or killed off altogether.9 The illnesses portrayed in these powerful emotion episodes link Martino and Almira’s periods of disability with ennobled suffering, heightened emotional susceptibility, and, metaphorically, to passion-induced “enslavement.” In doing so, the play also establishes the emotion culture that governs the nobles’ emotion expression by denigrating and medicalizing all displays of passion. It’s possible, as well, for audiences (as do Gifford and Coleridge) to engage in cognitive empathy with these noble characters—to recognize the power of Martino and Almira’s initial felt passions for each other, that is, and to lament the waning of those passions. But Fletcher and Massinger proceed to present depictions of disabling passions among commoners, as well.

Comedy and Cognitive Empathy: Habituated Alcoholism, “Enslavement,” and Slavery A Very Woman casts the overtly passionate drama of its nobility, that is, against more problematic comedic material set among the middling sort. Its bourgeois plotline features the activities of Doctor Paolo and others, including an Apothecary, a Citizen, a Slave Master, and a Sicilian couple named Borachia and Cuculo. The play details the class presumptions of Borachia (her name signifies “wine bottle” in Italian), whose promotion to serve the Lady Almira goes to her head. She proceeds to taunt her long-suffering husband, Cuculo (his name signifies “cuckold”), though his emotional pain seems to stem less from her ridicule than from his concern for her habituated alcoholism and the disabling emotional extremes to which it leads her: “Keep her from Wine,” he warns others, “Wine makes her dangerous” (44). Borachia’s drunkenness manifests in the play as inherently affective, and boldly flouts her culture’s emotion display rules—in this case, the implicit social rules that govern emotion expression, regulation, and display. Her stigmatized portrayal as alcohol-dependent thus presents her engaged in a series of shameful public behaviors: mocking her husband’s sexual abilities and attempting to cuckold him; denouncing his efforts to restrain her from her bottle; awakening from one of her stupors in a gutter; and, ultimately, receiving a final rebuke from the Viceroy as a “drunken beast” (96). As A. Lynn Martin has shown, female public drunkenness in late medieval and early modern Europe often came at a significant social cost: Traditional Europe had a sexual double standard and a drinking double standard. Just as women were expected to maintain their chastity so also were they expected 183

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to maintain their sobriety. The two double standards were linked because of the widespread opinion that a sober woman was chaste while a drunk woman was promiscuous.10 Martin observes that, in contrast with anthropological views of this period, which suggest that alcohol served as a generally cohesive social activity, abnormal drinking behavior could result in antisocial activity such as adultery and violence that threatened social cohesion and integration. . . . The mechanism that triggered antisocial drinking are unclear, but the widespread belief that the consumption of alcohol could stimulate sexual and violent behavior established a cultural construct that ultimately had an effect on behavior. In other words, beliefs about the effects of alcohol influenced drinking behavior and drunken comportment. Whatever the precise mechanisms, a proportion of the drinking in traditional Europe did not contribute to social cohesion and integration, but led instead to social tension and division, especially in gender relations. (5) Borachia’s antisocial drunkenness, accordingly, leads to the social stigmatization through which Fletcher, Massinger, and her fellow characters deride her as a comic buffoon. In this way, as Lerita Coleman has observed, all stigmatization, at its root, serves as a manifestation of the deployment of power.11 The authors single out Borachia as the butt of numerous jokes based largely upon what Noël Carroll refers to as the “superiority theory” of mirth.12 Carroll suggests that people frequently find humor in condescension; that is, one often laughs due to “the pleasure of finding oneself superior to others” (8). As Hogan aptly notes: “we laugh at the drunk falling down because we remain upright” (108). It is precisely this uncomfortably comedic light in which the play presents Borachia’s TAB. Alerted to her problems with alcohol by Cuculo, for example, Pedro, Almira’s brother, prompts Borachia’s slave, the disguised Don John Antonio, to procure for her “Two or three bottles of your best Greek Wine;/ The strongest, and sweetest” (49). As she approaches, John opens a bottle: “Now to begin my sacrifice,” he says, “she stirs, and vents it.” Borachia: ’Tis wine; I [am] sure ’ tis wine; strong wine! Excellent strong wine! I’th must I take it: Very wine: this way too. . . . Stronger, and stronger still! Still blessed wine! . . . O, if I could but see it! O, what a pretious scent it has! but handle it! (50–51) Borachia accepts the bottle as a “present” (51), starts to imbibe, and proceeds to woo the enslaved John: “Come now kiss me, I’ll be a mother to thee, Come, drink to me” (52). When her husband Cuculo enters, he observes, sadly: “O me she is perish’d!/ She has gotten wine! She is gone forever” (56). The drunken Borachia continues to fulfill the precise cultural anxieties Martin suggests link female public drunkenness with unlicensed sexuality and violence. Indeed, Borachia expresses awareness of these faults even as she commits them: “Take heed of being overtaken with too much drink,” she drunkenly cautions John, “For it is a lamentable sin and spoils all: . . ./ Heaven cannot endure it.” Suddenly, she demands that he “Knock my husband on the head as soon as may be,/ For he is an arrant Puppy, and cannot 184

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perform—[sexually]” (53). When Cuculo arrives, pleading with her to cease her drinking, she continues her verbal abuse: Borachia:

Cuculo: Borachia:

. . . hang thee dog-whelp, Thou shadow of a man of action; Thou scab o’th’ Court, go sleep you drunken Rascal, Ye debauch’d Puppy, get you home and sleep, sirrah, And so will I son slave [Don John Antonio], thou shalt sleep with me. Prethee look to her tenderly. No words sirrah Of any wine, or any thing like wine, Or anything concerning wine, or by wine, Or from, or with wine: Come lead me like a Countess.

(56)

Here Borachia projects her own socially deviant behavior onto the sober Cuculo while highlighting the stigma she attaches to the stable identity category of the drunkard. Cuculo, however, citing her TAB, vows his revenge: “[W]hen she is well again, I’ll trick her for it” (56). He makes good on this promise by publicly facilitating the Viceroy’s shaming of her at the play’s end. Even so, through Borachia’s social stigmatization by the play’s other characters, Fletcher and Massinger diligently maintain a comedic framework for her portrayal. They do so by establishing that her actions are beyond both her community’s emotion display rules and its behavioral norms. As Carroll observes, the “socialization theory” of mirth suggests that in order to enable comedy, people often categorize others either as members of an “in-group” or an “outgroup.” The act of stigmatizing those individuals in the “out-group” binds together those in the “in-group”: “When we laugh together,” Carrol observes, “we are in effect acknowledging our membership in a community . . . bound together by shared assumptions.” He continues: [W]here there is an us there is typically also a Them, against whom the rest of us define ourselves. These them, then, are those who deviate (or are alleged to deviate) from the norms commemorated by the comic amusement in which the us participate. (emphasis in original, 77) A Very Woman ubiquitously relies upon this “out-group” comic logic with regard to Borachia— notably, for example, when Almira and her friend Leonora mock Borachia for her public drunkenness: “She is here, and drunk, very fine drunk, I take it./ I found her with a Bottle for her Boulster” (66). As Borachia awakes with a hangover headache she refers to as her “Tiego” (66), the noblewomen diagnose that she requires still more wine, and comically prescribe it for her at all hours of day: “You must drink wine. . . . ’Tis a raw humor blows into your head;/ Which good, strong wine will temper,” observes Almira (66). Borachia’s responses suggest that she relishes their advice: “I thank your Highness,/ I will be rul’d, though much against my nature: For wine, I ever hated from my Cradle.” . . . “How much wine must I drink, an’t please your Ladyship?” (67). Soon enough, Leonora and Almira observe, with a giggle, “She’s mad drunk” (68). However, while Borachia’s “out-group” status serves for the other characters, and the play’s early modern target audience, as ripe material for comedy, might Borachia’s depiction, on the contrary, also stir cognitive empathy in an implied audience? That is, if it is possible to read the play’s plotline centering upon the nobility, Don Martino and Lady Almira, with such cognitive empathy, is doing so possible with regard to Borachia? Not so fortunate as these 185

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nobles, Borachia is not cured at the play’s end. Rather, she is banished: in narrative terms, effectively killed off. When the Viceroy denigrates her at play’s end, commanding “Take hence this drunken beast” (96), Cucolo, too, makes a curious request of Doctor Paolo: “Can you cure/ [Borachia’s] living drunkenness?” The Doctor’s response is alarming: “Go home with her, I’ll send you something that/ Shall once again bring her to better temper,/ Or make her sleep for ever” (97). That is, she just might be killed off, after all. The consistent comedic framing of Borachia’s dramatic representation thus seems to foreclose empathetic readings of her. But all audiences, of course, are not the same. Where Fletcher and Massinger’s early modern target audience appears to register Borachia’s antics as comedic, that is, it is surely possible for an implied audience—readers today, for example—to view Borachia with empathy and even sympathy. Regardless, the play’s comedic foreclosure on generating audience empathy toward specific characters is not limited to Borachia’s portrayal. Far from it: it is Borachia, it turns out, who introduces us in this play to actual, embodied slaves. She does so by directing her husband to a local slave market: Borachia: This day the markets kept for slaves, go you And buy me a fine timber’d one to assist me. I must be better waited on.

(31)

Cognitive Empathy and Afective Historicism—Race, Subjection, and Slavery The most problematic representation in A Very Woman involves its depiction of a mundanely functioning, Mediterranean slave market. That is, while the play works as a traditional disability narrative in terms of two nobles, Martino and Almira, and even in terms of the commoner, Borachia, the play’s thematic treatment of these characters’ metaphorical “enslavements” yields, finally, into the stage depiction of characters who are truly enslaved. Here the nonaffective regime of reason and the valorization of the normative social self that Fletcher and Massinger have established within the play leads to a cruel substitutive logic. The authors present a way to justify slavery to their early modern target audience by means of a stigmatizing sleight of hand: having defined disability as a non-normative category in opposition to the play’s regime of reason, that is, they proceed to position enslaved human beings within this non-normative category. The result is that, for its target audience, Fletcher and Massinger depict embodied stage slavery within the generic register of comedy. The scene (3.1) begins with the entrance of bourgeois consumers aiming to purchase slaves from a Maltese Slave Master. As we encounter him, he is arranging his slaves for sale: Come rank yourselves, and stand out handsomly, Now ring the Bell that they may know my Market. Stand you two here, you are personable men, And apt to yield good sums, if women cheapen. Put me that Pig-complexion’d fellow behinde, He will spoil my sale else; the slave looks like famine. . . . (36)

The Master prompts the slaves to dance and sing (to “chaunt merrily” [36]) in order to facilitate their sale, even as Doctor Paolo observes: “We come to look upon your slaves, and buy 186

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too/ If we like the persons and the prices.” Cuculo admires the Slave Master’s ability to procure such slaves: He never fails monthly to sell his slaves here; He buys them presently upon their taking, And so disperses them to every market.

Examining them, Cucolo adds: “They show fine active fellows” (37). Fletcher and Massinger next set out to detail the mercantile mechanics of the slave market. Bustling consumers comment convivially upon one another’s purchases; Doctor Paolo, for example, addresses his chum: “How now, Apothecary,/ Have you been buying too?” The Slave Master also denotes the qualities of each slave. His efforts to market the disguised Don John Antonio notably singles out his worth: he’s lusty/ And of a gamesome nature, bold, and secret,/ Apt to win favor of the man who owns him/ By diligence, and duty; Look upon him. . . . Mark but his limbs. . . ./ An easie price; turn him about, and view him. (38) The Slave Master also makes careful note of the slaves’ various skin pigmentations. He shunts to the back of the group the otherwise sickly, “Pig-complexion’d” slave, who displays, perhaps, the skin disease today termed vitiligo. Subsequently, he makes another observation, a striking one, which correlates darker skin pigmentation with greater monetary value: My Sorrel slaves are of a lower price, Because the colours faint. (37)

Turning then to two “Black” Moorish children, he brusquely directs a subordinate to “sell the Moors there.” The Citizen takes an immediate interest in them: “I’ll have ’em,” he says, “if it be to sing in Cages.” The Master retorts with a breezy wit: “Give ’em hard Eggs, you never had such Black birds” (37). The Citizen expresses special delight in the Moorish girl, whom he desires, euphemistically, as “a housewife” (38): “Is she a Maid [virgin], do’st think?” The Slave Master responds: “I dare not swear, Sir,/ She is nine years old, at ten you shall finde few here.” “A mery fellow,” concludes the cheery Citizen: “thou say’st true. Come children.” They follow their new owner offstage: “Exit With the Moors” (40). Fletcher and Massinger’s decision to frame this scene comedically denies these slaves the pity and compassion that Northrop Frye suggests “suppliant” depictions generally ought to produce for audiences.13 Indeed, the staging of this slave market scene offers a powerful example of the limits of the universalist approach to human emotions, and demonstrates the value of a constructivist affective approach. In its depiction of the Black-skinned Moorish children, especially, the play appears to offer a pedagogic verisimilitude essentially designed to normalize the slavery it depicts rather than to interrogate it. Here, too, we see the disjunction between the comedic emotional effect Fletcher and Massinger fashion for their target audience, and the very different emotional effects the scene can inflict upon other implied audiences, such as readers today. As Hogan suggests, “a work that appeals to the empathic response of one group may operate very differently from a work that appeals to a different group” (118). The painful fact, of course, is that this play was actively conditioning its early modern target audience to 187

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perceive Black enslavement as comedy on the London stage in the formative decades of the Anglo-American slave trade. As Michael Guasco observes, enslavement offered a range of conceptual associations to the early modern English, spanning from the theological to the philosophical to the legal.14 Following Daniel Vitkus, he notes that a paramount concern for the early modern English involved the tens of thousands of Englishmen who were themselves enslaved during this period across the Mediterranean (19). A Very Woman presents us, accordingly, with additional depictions of slavery, including an Englishman, purchased by Doctor Paolo and famous for his “tricks,” as well as the disguised Don John Antonio. The latter’s subsequent feats of romantic derring-do at play’s end, in fighting off pirates attempting to kidnap Almira, even enable him to cast off his enslavement, to reveal his true identity, and, ultimately, to win her hand in marriage. But as thrilling as these romantic revelations and swordplay may be, A Very Woman’s depiction of slavery is more historically insidious than these romanticizations suggest. This slave market scene provides a constructive response to Elizabeth Spiller’s stated focus in Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance, that she is “interested in what is essentially a historic question: how did people learn about, and experience, the difference that became race?” While Spiller explores the ways that reading influenced the embodied selves of early modern readers, it is clear that we can grant drama a comparable transformative function.15 Doing so allows us to grant a pedagogic function to drama, and to sense the way in which the slave market scene in A Very Woman performs cultural work that places racial/ gender/class otherness on display in the most frank of ways. Fletcher and Massinger’s scene, after all, stages informational, prescriptive, and prurient access to slavery’s relationship to theories of skin color and the production of race; to gender, via jokes about enslavement and sexuality; and to class, in its depiction of an embodied stage slavery that assigns monetary value to human beings. Following Daniel Hershezon, I acknowledge, of course, that the practice of slavery in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic spheres differed significantly, and for a variety of reasons. But surely a slave market scene like this one, set in Sicily but staged in London in 1619 and the ensuing decades, presents the effect of collapsing these two spheres in key ways. It does so, first, by strategically depicting the Black-skinned characters enslaved within this play as a comedic “out-group.” The play’s othering of the Moorish children, in other words, actively encourages the citizens at the slave market—and, through them, the play’s target audience— to deny the possibility of establishing cognitive empathy with them. The “superiority” and “socialization” theories of mirth, accordingly, facilitate this stage depiction of Black skin and enslavement in a way that strives to instill in audiences a powerful “out-group” logic. Doing so also brutally normalizes the stark factuality of early modern slave markets themselves. This scene showcases, as well, the material mechanics of slave market spectacles, which Saidiya V. Hartman has examined as they were soon to develop in the North American context.16 She presents the autobiographical report of a former American slave named Stephen Dickinson, for example, who “remembered being paraded about the streets for an hour by an auctioneer who compelled one [enslaved man] to carry a red flag and the other to ring a bell” (37). Hartman observes: “The body of the slave, dancing and on display, seemingly revealed a comfort with bondage and a natural disposition with servitude. . . . True to form, this theater of the marketplace wed festivity and the exchange of captive bodies” (37). Hartman also notes the preparatory work employed to stage such markets, citing the memoir of James Curry, who observes the disarray of slaves on the coffle until “the driver has clothing prepared for them to put on, just before they reach the market, and they are forced to array themselves with studied nicety for their exposure at public sale” (qtd. in Hartman 37–38). In a painful link to the 188

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Citizen’s interest in the Moorish girl’s sexuality in A Very Woman, as well, Hartman explains the sexualization of enslaved women demarcated for sale in the American context (40). The correlation that the Slave Master makes between darker skin-pigmentation and greater monetary value, too, performs crucial cultural work. Recent scholarship on race and ethnicity in English Renaissance drama, including key works by Lara Bovilsky, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Sujata Iyengar, observe that the correlation between Black skin and enslavement for the early modern English was not natural, nor was it universal. It was learned. Bovilsky suggests, for example, that darker skin-pigmentation in early modern England was not firmly established as a signifier of enslaved status: “Nor was it inevitable that the English would systematically enslave Africans” (19). Iyengar, too, acknowledges a range of early modern English sentiments regarding Black skin and slavery, and Floyd-Wilson observes a variety of “prior geohumoral beliefs” among the English that ennobled Africans in contrast with what she refers to as the burgeoning “racist stereotypes of the slave trade.”17 Guasco, further, suggests that “early English impressions of slavery as it existed beyond England’s borders were not determined by racial—or even proto-racial—conceits” (6). The connection Fletcher and Massinger make between darker skin pigmentation and enslavement, therefore, appears to be designed to normalize this connection. A Very Woman thus survives as a chilling cultural artifact, encouraging its various audiences to link Black skin with slavery and to associate such slavery with the generic conventions of comedy, not tragedy. While recent scholarship on enslavement in A Very Woman has restricted itself to treating slavery as mere metaphor pertaining only to the play’s nobles, it seems clear that ignoring the actual slave market scene in the play is a mistake.18 By encouraging audiences to adopt “superiority” and “socialization” theories of “out-group” logic, that is, the play encourages its audiences to laugh at “out-group” others rather than to engage in cognitive empathy with them. Where for the early modern target audience, the slave market scene was designed to elicit comic laughter, for other implied audiences, like my university students today, the slave market scene elicits a profound sense of empathy, discomfort, and pain. A Very Woman’s various character depictions serve as potent material for any discussion of affective historicism, in that they reveal how the play deliberately treats as comedy what many implied audiences emphatically respond to as tragedy. Originating soon after the play’s first 1619 staging, of course, the Anglo-American slave trade would rely upon this “out-group” logic to spur its burgeoning business and American enslavement practices over the next two centuries and beyond.

Conclusion Reading this play in the twenty-first century beyond the bounds of a constructivist affective historicist methodology, simply put, seems impossible. But more than that, I hope to have shown that an affective historicism that is alive to the culturally specific emotional content of its character portrayals must also be alive to the effects its character portrayals can generate within the emotional lives of its audiences, both targeted and implied. To come full circle, it’s worth re-acknowledging that certain implied audiences have celebrated this play based purely upon claims for its masterful aesthetics. Coleridge observes of A Very Woman, for example, that There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and his master, Cuculo; and can anything exceed the skill and sweetness between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story? . . . Massinger is always entertaining. (201–02) 189

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The play’s 1813 editor, Gifford, too, thrills to the stirring beauty of certain passages within it: The remainder of this speech, and, indeed, of the whole scene is beautiful beyond expression. The English language does not furnish so complete a specimen of sweetness, elegance, and simplicity, of all that is harmonious in poesie, tender in sentiment, and ardent in affection, as the passage beginning This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, &c.19 But such a focus on the play’s ostensible aesthetic achievements, of course, ignores altogether the value of the other lives staged within the play and the cognitive empathy through which audiences might access them. It seems clear that A Very Woman’s problematic comedic material raises important questions about universalist accounts of the emotions. How else do we account for the pedagogical effect in the play that pairs Black skin with enslavement? How else do we account for the sexual jokes the Citizen makes about the Moorish children as he chuckles and leads them offstage? As revealed through the disability reading strategies I have pursued here, the emotional terrain staged in A Very Woman can lead us to consider whether such literature can ever be understood to serve the ends of broad and universal human principles, or whether the play offers cogent proof of the absolute validity of a constructivist affective approach.

Notes 1 Regarding disability, see, for example, Iyengar, Disability, Health, and Happiness in Shakespearean Drama, and Hobgood and Wood, Recovering Disability in Early Modern England; regarding emotion, see, for example, Paster and Schoenfeldt. 2 See Hobgood and Wood, “Early Modern Literature and Disability Studies.” 3 See Massinger, The Plays of Philip Massinger 234, and Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 201. All references taken from the play’s original printing: Massinger and Fletcher, Three new playes. . . . 4 See Garland-Thomson 8. The normative baseline for stigmatizing practices in the contemporary USA she identifies can prove valuable in acknowledging a similarly rare, even illusory, normative baseline within English Renaissance drama. See Hobgood and Wood, “Early Modern Literature and Disability Studies” 33, 37–39. 5 See Hogan 62. 6 See Gill 140. 7 See Gill on the role Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy plays within the work 145–48. 8 See Hobgood, “Teeth Before Eyes” 23–40; and Wheatley. 9 See Longmore, and Mitchell and Snyder 55–56, 164–70. 10 See Martin 134. 11 See Coleman 216–231. 12 See Carroll 8–16. 13 See Hogan on Northrop Frye, 145. 14 See Guasco, who notes five ways the early modern English might envision slavery: biblical sources; classical sources; English traditions of manorial villeinage; contemporary thought on galley slavery; and as a contemporary solution to many social ills 19. 15 See Spiller 15. See also Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England. 16 See Hartman. 17 See Bovilsky 19; Floyd-Wilson, and Iyengar, Shades of Difference. For more on this subject, see The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, which was printed just as this essay was going to press. 18 See Gill. 19 See Massinger, The Plays of Philip Massinger 317, note 6.

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Works Cited Bovilsky, Lara. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Carroll, Noël. Humour: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2014. Coleman, Lerita. “Stigma: An Enigma Demystified.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard Davis, 1st ed., Routledge, 1997. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by T. Ashe, London: George Bell, 1888. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern England. Cambridge UP, 2003. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies. Columbia UP, 1996. Gill, Roma. “Collaboration and Revision in Massinger’s A Very Woman.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 18, no. 70, May 1967. Guasco, Michael. Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. U of Pennsylvania P, 2014. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford UP, 1997. Hershezon, Daniel. The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean. U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. Hobgood, Allison. Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England. Cambridge UP, 2014. ———. “Teeth Before Eyes.” Disability, Health, and Happiness in Shakespeare, edited by Sujata Iyengar, Routledge Press, 2015. ———, and David Houston Wood. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ohio State UP, 2013. ———. “Early Modern Literature and Disability Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 32–46. Hogan, Patrick Colm Hogan. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. Iyengar, Sujata, ed. Disability, Health, and Happiness in Shakespearean Drama. Routledge, 2015. ———. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Longmore, Paul. Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. Martin, A. Lynn. Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Massinger, Philip. The Plays of Philip Massinger, in Four Volumes, edited by G. Nicol and W. Nicol, 2nd ed., William Gifford, 1813. ———, and John Fletcher. Three New Playes; viz. The Bashful Lover, Guardian, Very Woman. . . . Humphrey Moseley, 1655. Mitchell, David, and Susan Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies in Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2001. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body. U of Chicago P, 2004. Schoenfeldt, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton. Cambridge UP, 1999. Spiller, Elizabeth. Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance. Cambridge UP, 2011. Thompson, Ayanna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge UP, 2021. Wheatley, Edward. Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind. U of Michigan P, 2010.

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16 ECOLOGY AND EMOTION Feeling Narrative Environments Alexa Weik von Mossner

Abstract: From its inception, the study of literature and the environment has been interested in how ecologically oriented texts represent and provoke emotions in relation to the natural world. This chapter argues that the concept of liberated embodied simulation can help us better understand how literary texts engage readers emotionally in their narrative environments. To this purpose, it differentiates between emotions that a text might cue directly in relation to the depicted storyworld and empathetic character emotions, which allow readers to feel along with the people who populate the storyworld and are thus physically exposed to it. The chapter explores these issues in relation to a widely read climate change novel, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, combining narratological analysis with the insights gained from a published survey of readers of the novel.

Just a few decades from now, the American Southwest has deteriorated into a parched and sun-burned place, the people struggling for survival in an environment that has become hostile to human life. The southwestern states are entrenched in a brutal fight over the remaining shares of the life-giving waters of Colorado River. Those who can afford it have long left for more temperate climates. The less privileged hold out as long as they can and then become domestic climate refugees: environmental migrants that aren’t welcome anywhere. This is the American future according to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), a dystopian climate change novel that draws part of its imaginative strength from its skilled use of typical science fiction tropes such as cognitive estrangement—the introduction of a strange “novum” (Suvin 4) into an otherwise recognizable world—and extrapolation, the projection of current ecological problems into the future (Otto 3). And apparently, this estranged storyworld has a terrifying effect on those who recognize in it a feasible future version of presentday ecologies in drought-prone states like California, Nevada, Arizona, and, more recently, Oregon. As several reviewers have noted (e.g., Hamilton; Tobar), Bacigalupi’s speculative novel is likely to resonate with anyone who follows the news or has been personally affected by the dust storms, water shortages, and wildfires in the region. A recent reception study conducted by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson shows that the emotions experienced by actual readers of the novel were “intensely negative” (343) precisely because the storyworld resonated with their own experiences—direct and mediated—of the endangered ecology of the American southwest. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-20

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From the perspective of cognitive narratology, such affective resonance between readers’ personal experiences and the storyworld of a literary text is unsurprising. As the psychologist Richard J. Gerrig has observed, readers engage in acts of simulation during which “they must use their own experiences of the world to bridge the gaps in texts” and must invest their own emotions in order to “give substance to the psychological lives of characters” (17). The same is true for the storyworlds that surround and sustain those characters. Although they have received much less attention from narratologists over the decades, these narrative environments—or settings, as they have often been called—are likewise enlivened by readers’ own experiences and emotions (see Chapter 1 of my Affective Ecologies). Ecocriticism—the study of “the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty xviii)—has long been interested in how literary texts represent and provoke emotion in relation to the natural world, and in the real-world repercussions that such an affective engagement can have during and after reading. The first part of this chapter highlights the most important concerns and concepts in the ecocritical study of emotion. The second part then zooms in on readers’ affective experience of narrative environments and argues that this experience is the result of liberated embodied simulation (Gallese & Wojciehowski) cueing emotions directly toward the environment itself and indirectly as a result of character empathy. The third part will return to Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife to explore these issues in a novel that has been shown to engage reader emotions in relation to ecologies within and beyond its speculative storyworld.

Ecology, Emotion, and Ecocriticism That our relationships with our natural and built environments are infused with affect and emotion is an issue that has been explored in a wide range of disciplines, among them environmental psychology (Lertzman), human geography (Tuan; Smith et al.), urban studies (Burns), and social anthropology (Milton). As Antonio Damasio has shown, this makes good sense also from a neuroscientific point of view since mental phenomena such as cognition and emotion “can be fully understood only in the context of an organism’s interacting in an environment” (xxvii). The same holds true when we interact with literary representations of such environments. In their introduction to Affective Ecocriticism (2018), Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino observe with reference to the “compelling” neuroscientific evidence that “we process stories with a cognitive apparatus that is not wholly distinct from our bodies, our feelings” (2). This is the case not only when we process characters’ intentions, actions, and emotions, but also when we engage with the storyworlds that surround these characters. As the econarratologist Erin James has observed, the emotional inhabitation of a storyworld is “an inherently environmental process” (1) and narrative comprehension therefore an affect-driven virtual form of environmental experience. Given this interlinkage between environment, emotion, and narrative comprehension, it is unsurprising that ecocritical research has been interested in how narratives represent and provoke emotions in relation to the natural and built environments they evoke as part of their storyworlds. What literary representations of the natural environment might do to the feelings of readers was a keen interest already for the proponents of so-called first-wave ecocriticism, which, according to Greg Garrard, was marked by a tendency to celebrate nature and humannature relationships rather than necessarily querying them as concepts (1). Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology (1991) is a typical example for ecocriticism’s long-standing engagement with the romantic tradition, as is Lawrence Buell’s claim in The Environmental Imagination (1995) that for American nature writers such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir “a deeply personal love and reverence for the nonhuman led, over time, to a deeply protective feeling for 193

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nature” (137). Another pioneering ecocritic, Scott Slovic, draws on environmental psychology to support the argument that American nature writers tried to immerse readers sensually and affectively into the natural environments they depicted to engender ecological “awareness” (352). Published in the early to mid-1990s, these studies share not only a keen interest in how writers, characters, and readers develop attachments to narrative environments but also the hope that such feelings will lead them to care more about the actual natural world around them. This sustained interest in place attachment was challenged in the early 2000s. Under the impression of multiple interlocking environmental crises that cannot be reduced to a single cause or location, Buell called for extending the ecocritical imagination “from local to global” (The Future 62). Citing Yi Fu Tuan’s insight that “places are centers of felt value” (4), Buell concedes that we tend to get emotionally attached to relatively small and bounded areas, and that such topophilic feelings inevitably “thin out as the territory expands” (The Future 68). But he nevertheless sees the need for a more “global sense of place” (69) that might enable us to engage with global environmental problems without getting trapped in a debilitating feeling of placelessness, of disconnect and detachment. Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) takes Buell’s argument one step further, arguing that ecocriticism must come to terms with postmodern processes of deterritorialization and thus with the very fact of placelessness (10). If that is a difficult endeavor emotionally, because our attachments beyond the local are too thin, then it becomes a pressing question what cultural texts can do to enliven our imagination of the global and thus thicken our feelings toward it. In this context, it bears mentioning that the rising interest in the affective dimensions of global and deterritorialized ecologies has not subsumed ecocriticism’s longstanding commitment to place and place attachment. Jennifer Ladino’s work on eco-nostalgia, for example, shows that certain forms of ecological nostalgia anticipate future feelings of loss and regret in the face of global ecological crises such as climate change and the species extinction (38). The biocultural scholar Nancy Easterlin draws on evolutionary psychology in her rebuttal of Heise’s call for the deterritorialization of ecocriticism, reminding us that humans are a “wayfaring” species that has “evolved to explore new domains but whose felt attachment to given locals is nevertheless adaptive” (228). Rather than leaving place attachment behind, ecocriticism has thus widened its circle of concern while remaining sensitive to the continued importance of the deep feelings characters develop for the local places that have personal meaning to them. After all, as will become clear in my analysis of The Water Knife, even literary texts that do engage with global environmental problems such as climate change tend to focus on individual characters who live out their lives in specific local environments. Living in a local place or environment, however, must not necessarily engender feelings of attachment or any other positive emotions, neither in fact nor in fiction. And so narrative environments can also evoke a wide range of negative feelings, not only in characters but also in readers who inhabit those storyworlds imaginatively. Ecocritics such as Simon Estok have explored this “dark side” of human-nature relationships, reminding us that, historically, human feelings toward nature have often been negative and that such feelings crystalized in literary production. Estok investigates literary representations of “ecophobia,” a form of phobia that “has largely derived from humanity’s irrational fear of nature” and in which “humans view nature as an opponent” (1). From here it is a small step to the related concepts of ecohorror and ecogothic. As Stephen Rust and Carter Soles have noted, ecohorror is often defined as the moment “when nature strikes back against humans as punishment for environmental disruption,” but it can also include “texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world” (509). However, even as such texts both represent and invite negative feelings of fear, disgust, and horror in relation to the depicted human-nature relationships, we must not forget that, for 194

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many readers, there is also a distinct element of pleasure involved in the engagement with them. As the philosopher Noël Carroll has shown, the “paradox of fiction” allows audiences “to find pleasure in what by nature is distressful and unpleasant” (128; on the “paradoxes of literary emotion,” see also Chapter 11 in this book). Instead of fleeing from a monstrous nature, as we presumably would in real life, our engagement with its literary (or filmic) representation might allow us to enjoy the thrill of the emotional upheavals caused by it (see Yılmaz). This, too, is an aspect I will come back to. As is clear by now, there’s a longstanding interest within ecocriticism in the emotional dimensions of narrative environments and readers’ engagements with them. It is only in recent years, however, that such engagements have been considered through a narratological lens and with a more sustained attention to the underlying psychological mechanisms. James’s The Storyworld Accord, published in 2015, introduced an econarratology that is informed by cognitive and contextual narrative theory and considers the role of empathy in readers’ virtual environmental experiences. My own Affective Ecologies, which came out two years later, continued that ecocritical dialogue with cognitive narratology but focused more extensively on empathy and emotion. In 2018, Bladow and Ladino’s Affective Ecocriticism collected a whole range of approaches drawing on affect theory, material ecocriticism, phenomenology, and affective narratology. What unites all these approaches is the conviction that if we want to better understand our engagement with the environmental and ecological dimensions of literary texts, then we must pay attention to the emotional dimensions of that engagement. With that in mind, I will employ the analytical tools I personally know best—borrowed from cognitive and affective narratology—to explore in more detail how narrative environments cue emotional responses in readers.

Afective (Eco)narratology, Embodied Simulation, and the Direct and Indirect Cueing of Emotions One of the central insights of econarratology is that narrative environments cannot be reduced to the narratological function of a “setting” that merely serves as backdrop for the foregrounded action. If we take seriously Damasio’s claim that mental phenomena emerge in the context “of an organism’s interacting in an environment” (xxvii), this quite simply means that characters’ thoughts, emotions and actions must be understood as a consequence of their interaction with their narrative environments. In Literature and Emotion, Patrick Colm Hogan reminds us that the “setting” might “foster emotions either directly or indirectly. For example, a landscape might directly invite aesthetic delight, whatever its place in the story” (135). This would be an example of how a narrative environment—in my terms here—can directly cue an emotional response in readers. However, as Hogan also points out, “the emotional consequence of a setting may be a function of its relation to the story. For example, a place that is neutral in itself may indirectly provoke fear through the dangers it poses to the hero” (135). In this case, our emotional response to the narrative environment takes the detour via our concern for a character, our sympathy and what Murray Smith has called “moral allegiance” (84), along with our resulting hope that the character will not be harmed. I have argued, however, that characters play an even more fundamental role in readers’ affective relationship to narrative environments: it is in part through the character’s cognitive, sensual, and emotional relationship to that environment that they understand it in the first place (Affective 28). So not only does readers’ sympathy for a character play a role in their affective relationship to the surrounding narrative environment, but also their cognitive and affective empathy through processes of liberated embodied simulation. 195

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Our engagement with sensory and motor imagery in a literary text, argue the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese and the literary scholar Hannah Wojciehowski in a co-written article, is a liberated form of embodied simulation, since it implies “re-using our motor or visual neural apparatus to imagine things and situations we are not actually doing or perceiving” (see also chapter 5 in this book). While the reader’s body is not ever subjected to the environmental conditions of the narrative, the character’s body is. And it is through the mechanism of embodied simulation—and thus the mirror neuron system—that readers map the sensations, emotions, and movements of that fictional body onto their own, thereby understanding, and literally feeling, its interaction with the environment, its pleasures and its pain. The simulation is embodied because it re-uses parts of the brain that would also be active in actual physical movement of the reader’s body and in her sensory and emotional interactions with the environment. It is liberated because it is independent from actual stimuli and movements. As Gallese and Wojciehowski put it, during the immersive experience of a literary world our cognitive faculties are to a large degree “freed from the burden of modeling our actual presence in daily life”. By way of example, let’s take a look at David Herman’s brilliant definition of story by comparing it to scientific truth claims: Science explains how in general water freezes when . . . its temperature reaches zero degrees centigrade; but it takes a story to convey what it was like to lose one’s footing on slippery ice on a late afternoon in December 2004, under a steel-grey sky. (3) Conveying what it is like to undergo that specific experience under those specific conditions involves what cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind call qualia. As the neuroscientist Janet Levin explains, the term is “most commonly used to characterize the qualitative, experiential or felt properties of mental states” (693). The story in Herman’s example thus must convey to readers both the look and feel of a wintery environment and the subjective experience of losing one’s footing on slippery ice. And to make the narrative immersive, both of those narrative components must be sensually and emotionally engaging. Central for such sensual and emotional engagement is what Elaine Scarry has called “vivacity.” In some verbal art, Scarry argues, images “acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects” despite the fact that such works of art “are almost wholly devoid of actual sensory content” (3). What is simulated in literary reading is not only the sensory outcome (the way something looks or sounds or feels beneath the hands) but the actual structure that gave rise to the perception; that is, the material conditions that made it look, sound, or feel the way it did. (Scarry 9) While the first is indirect simulated sensual perception (via a narrator or character), the second is direct simulated sensual perception. What Scarry calls “non-actual, mimetic perception” (9) is thus literally all in our heads, fed by descriptions that are evocative enough to give some elements of the narrative environment the vivacity of perceptual objects. It is important to understand, however, that what readers experience when reading about a character slipping on ice is a highly personal version of that experience, a performance, as Gerrig has called it (17), that is cued by the words on the page but staged in a highly individual and idiosyncratic way. Readers’ embodied simulation of a character’s experience of an environment and his or her physical interaction with it is thus guided, though not determined, by the structure and narrative strategies of a given text. 196

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While all narrative texts “offer up virtual environments for their readers to model mentally and inhabit emotionally” (James 54), such worldbuilding is of particular importance to science fiction because of its speculative and futuristic nature. As Tom Moylan has shown (5), the transportation into an alternative world is one of the main pleasures provided by science fiction texts. Readers familiar with the genre may be less interested in character development or even plot than they are in the detailed description of a place they have never imagined before. Dystopian climate change fiction belongs to the larger genre of environmental science fiction, which, as Eric Otto has pointed out, “often employ[s] a rhetoric of estrangement and extrapolation that compels readers toward critical reflection on seemingly invisible attitudes and habits” (7). This rhetoric is at the heart of what Moylan calls an “enlightening triangulation between an individual reader’s limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society” (xvi–xvii). Both Moylan and Otto thus locate the transformative potential of speculative fiction in its capacity to make things strange and thus different from readers’ lived reality in ways that are enlightening. Such enlightenment may have real-world consequences on the affective, attitudinal, and even behavioral level. As Hogan points out in Chapter 11 of this book, as readers we cannot act on the storyworld presented to us in a novel, “but we can act on the real world” (139). It is precisely this potential real-world action that writers of politically engaged dystopian fiction are hoping for when they tell their tales of upcoming doom and destruction. They extrapolate the potential consequences of our current actions as a society—as a species—into a speculative future to shock readers into awareness and, ideally, to action. Although The Water Knife is first and foremost a genre novel, Paolo Bacigalupi has said that one of his goals in writing his eco-dystopian thriller was to put readers “in the skin of a climate refugee” and in that of other characters who “live with the consequences of our present moment’s decision, those future people—they’re living inside of that broken future that we manufactured for them” (quoted in Urry). In the final section, I want to take a closer look at how, exactly, the novel cues emotions toward this dystopian storyworld, putting that analysis in conversation with the results of Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s survey of American readers.

Ecology and Emotion in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Te Water Knife The Water Knife is told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of three different characters, each of them influencing our understanding of, and emotions toward, their drought-ridden environment. I have analyzed the novel in great detail in an earlier publication (“Sensing”); here, I want to highlight only a few passages that illustrate the important role played by characters in readers’ visceral understanding of an estranged speculative ecology. Moreover, I want to show that a characters’ interaction with their narrative environment also bears on readers’ emotional engagement with those characters. The first of the novel’s three focalizers is the “water knife” Angel Velasquez, an ex-convict released from prison by the powerful head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Catherine Case. In exchange for that favor, she “own[s] his ass” (3). Angel’s job is to subvert and sabotage the water supplies of other states in the region, securing the lion share of the Colorado River for Case. That makes him a transgressive figure, just as familiar with places marked by social, economic, and ecological misery as he is with sites of vast privilege. Cutting off an entire town from its water supply leaves him as indifferent as the threatening, torturing, or killing of those who dare to challenge Case’s reign as the “Queen of the Colorado” (4). The novel opens in Cypress1, the enormous arcology that is one of Case’s prestige projects, with Angel “perched high above” as he watches a sweating lawyer “lumber[ing] up the Cascade 197

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Trail” to meet him (3). With its closed water cycle and climate-controlled air, Cypress1 is sheltered by a glass dome from the surrounding city of Las Vegas and its desperate struggle against the encroaching desert. Angel, however, barely notices the arcology’s lush imitation of nature, his mind focused on human sweat, which he believes he can read like a story. Using Theory of Mind (ToM), he attributes emotional states to the sweating lawyer, deciding that his “sweat meant he still had fear” (3) and judging coolly that this in turn means “he was still reliable” (3). When the exhausted man asks him to “come down,” and meet him in the middle, Angel pretends not to understand. It is only when the lawyer gives in and continues to climb up, sweating even more profusely, that Angel finally “enjoyed the view. Sunlight to filtered down from above, dappling bamboo and rain trees, illuminating tropical birds and casting pocketmirror flashes on mossy koi ponds. Far below, people were smaller than ants” (4). Research on the power dynamics involved in such an “imperial gaze” goes back at least to Mary Louise Pratt, and the fact that readers are bound to Angel’s commanding and controlling perspective not only in this opening scene but through the entire first chapter has important consequences for their understanding of the storyworld even before he drives an expensive Tesla down to the derelict city of Phoenix, Arizona, where much of the plot takes place. Angel’s words and thoughts tend to be emotionally distanced and sarcastic, conveying how much the possession of water has become a merciless business operation in a time of enduring drought. The novel’s second focalizer is Lucy Monroe, who works as a journalist in Phoenix. Lucy knows that in the eyes of others, she is “a collapse pornographer . . . hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit being swallowed by nature” (24). There is some truth to that, but she knows that she has long ceased to be a distant observer of Phoenix’s ecological and social collapse. In her daily life, she is as much exposed to the horrific environmental conditions as the poor people still holding out in the city and the thousands of climate refugees. And thus, it is through Lucy’s eyes that readers get their first taste of what it is like to live in the American southwest of the future. After strapping on her REI filter mask and grit goggles she presses open the door of her apartment and tries to orient herself in the middle of a dust storm: Sand blasted her skin raw as she ran toward the memory of her truck. She fumbled with its door handle, squinting in the darkness, and finally got it open. Slammed it closed behind her and sat hunched, feeling her heart pounding as wind shook the cab. Grit hissed against glass and metal. . . . She switched on storm lights and pulled out, bumping down the potholed street more by memory than by sight. (26) Packed with visual and other sensory imagery, this passage cues readers to simulate the feeling of sand blasting against one’s skin, of squinting one’s eyes, of one’s heart pounding out of fear and exertion. They are invited to imagine the sound of grit against glass and metal, the sight of red dust, the confusion of trying to orient oneself without eyesight. There is no information in the passage that would be external to Lucy’s perception and cognition, and readers cannot help but share her experience of the storm as well as her response to it. In Scarry’s terms, the passage invites embodied simulation of both the “sensory outcome” and “the material conditions that made it look, sound, or feel the way it did” (9). It also cues readers’ parallel emotional responses along with some sympathy for the exposed character. Readers may nevertheless pass judgment on Lucy’s behavior, deciding that it is crazy to go outside during a severe storm. Moreover, they may actually enjoy the passage despite its cueing of negative sensations such as empathetic pain and ecophobic emotions such as fear. 198

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As Gregory Currie has argued, character desires—our empathetic suffering with a protagonist and our sympathetic hope that things will turn out well for her—are often in conflict with our narrative desires, i.e., the desire for a suspenseful, exciting story (183). Breithaupt even detects “empathetic sadism” in readers as they both suffer with characters and enjoy the reading experience at the same time (440). Thriller plots invite such conflicting desires as they put their characters through (environmental) hell in the service of an action-packed story. In this early passage of The Water Knife, however, Bacigalupi uses sensory imagery to give readers a visceral sense of the dangerous environmental conditions in Phoenix. The character most affected by these conditions is the novel’s third focalizer, Maria Villarosa. A young Latina and a climate refugee from Texas—a state that is now uninhabitable due to climate change—Maria is unwelcome wherever she goes. She starts out as the most disenfranchised character of the novel, vulnerable both to the hostile environment and the cruel schemes of other humans. She is also the one who is most determined to survive. Both her underdog status and her constant struggle invite sympathy, and Schneider-Mayerson’s empirical research suggests that many readers accept that invitation. He reports that in his survey, which draws on the responses of 86 American readers of The Water Knife recruited online through Amazon’s online crowd-sourcing service Mechanical Turk (AMT), “many respondents reported identifying with Maria because of her vulnerability and (graphically described) suffering, the result of her youth, poverty, and immigrant status, exacerbated by the collapse of Texas and disintegration of Phoenix as a result of climate change” (349). These responses are in line with Howard Sklar’s argument that readers’ sympathy for a literary character often involves “the awareness of the character’s suffering as something to be alleviated” and “the judgment that the suffering is undeserved or unfair” (Sklar 53). Clearly, the narrative environment has contributed to Maria’s suffering as much as the human characters she interacts with. The ecologically devastated environment also plays a role in readers’ emotional responses to the novel as a whole. As mentioned earlier, Schneider-Mayerson’s survey shows that readers overall had “intensely negative emotional responses” to The Water Knife: The most prevalent negative emotion was “worry” (52.3%) followed by sadness (33.7%) and fear (27.9%); the most frequently selected positive emotions were “hopefulness” (11.7%) and “joy” (3.5%). When asked why they selected these particular emotions, the majority of respondents referred not to isolated textual elements (such as character, plot, or style) but to the relationship between Bacigalupi’s world and the real world, in which climate change is accelerating and a catastrophic future seems increasingly likely. (343) The worry, sadness, and fear experienced by readers—at least as remembered at the time of the survey—thus seem to be a result of the “enlightened triangulation” that Tom Moylan believes is at the heart of science fiction’s political and social impact. This is in keeping with the responses by professional readers, such as Denise Hamilton who reviewed The Water Knife for the Los Angeles Times. “Reading the novel in 93-degree March weather while L.A. newscasts warned of water rationing and extended drought,” writes Hamilton, “I felt the hot panting breath of the desert on my nape and I shivered, hoping that Bacigalupi’s vision of the future won’t be ours”. But clearly, the narrative environments of literary texts also engage readers whose personal experiences do not match their virtual experience during the reading process quite as closely. Schneider-Mayerson reports that 199

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many respondents affirmed that The Water Knife “made the consequences of climate change more imaginable,” as a teacher in Rochester, New York, put it. It did so largely by making visceral and proximate what can otherwise seem like an abstract and spatiotemporally distant issue (344). This viscerality is likely the result of readers’ embodied simulation of the focalizers’ subjective experience of and affective response to the novel’s estranged narrative environment.

Conclusion Experiencing emotions in response to a narrative environment appears to be a result of liberated embodied simulation. Characters play an important role in such simulation processes, especially in cases when the narrative is focalized through them, allowing readers to share their perception of that environment and their emotional responses to it. The affective and attitudinal impact of such simulation processes, however, appears to be quite multifaceted. Schneider-Mayerson’s survey of American readers of The Water Knife also produced somewhat unsettling results that are odds with both Bacigalupi’s explicit goal in writing the novel, which was to put readers “in the skin of a climate refugee” (cited in Urry) and the hopes of ecocritics such as myself regarding the real-life consequences of that empathic engagement. Not only did the survey show that readers’ selective identification with the novel’s three protagonists seems to have been strongly influenced by their own age, gender, ethnicity, and political orientation (Schneider-Mayerson 349). Bacigalupi’s thriller plot, which pits these protagonists against each other in a desperate fight for survival, also led some readers—both conservative and liberal—to conclude that in an ecologically deteriorated world everyone else is a potential enemy and one should thus trust no one (355). This suggests that reading dystopian climate fiction can indeed impact and even increase what ecocritic Sarah Jaquette Ray calls climate anxiety (1), but that such anxiety might not lead to more solidarity or even a desire to prevent the worst ecological and social impacts of climate change. Rather, some readers might feel so afraid that they want even more guns and stronger borders to protect themselves against an expected flood of environmental refugees. If we are interested in the relationship between emotion and ecology on and beyond the pages of a literary text, we thus need additional ecocritical research, both theoretical and empirical.

Works Cited Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Water Knife. Orbit, 2015. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Routledge, 1991. Bladow, Kyle, and Jennifer Ladino. “Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene.” Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, U of Nebraska P, 2018, pp. 1–22. Breithaupt, Fritz. “Empathetic Sadism: How Readers Get Implicated.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 440–461. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Harvard UP, 1995. ———. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Burns, Aušra. “Emotion and Urban Experience: Implications for Design.” Design Issues, vol. 16, no. 3, 2000, pp. 67–79. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1996.

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Ecology and Emotion Currie, Gregory. “Narrative Desire.” Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion, edited by Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, Johns Hopkins UP, 1999, pp. 183–199. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Vintage, 1995. Easterlin, Nancy. “Ecocriticism, Place Studies, and Colm Tóibín’s ‘The Long Winter’: A Biocultural Perspective.” The Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 226–248. Estok, Simon. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Routledge, 2018. Gallese, Vittorio, and Hannah Wojciehowski. “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2011. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2. Garrard, Greg. Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford UP, 2014. Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Westview Press, 1998. Glotfelty, Cheryl. “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. xv–xxxvii. Hamilton, Denise. “Amid a Real Drought, Thriller ‘Water Knife’ Cuts to the Quick.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 2015, www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-paolo-bacigalupi-20150524-story.html. Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008. Herman, David. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 3–21. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. U of Nebraska P, 2015. Jaquette Ray, Sarah. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. U of California P, 2020. Ladino, Jennifer. Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. U of Virginia P, 2012. Lertzman, Renee. Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. Routledge, 2015. Levin, Janet. “Qualia.” The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, MIT Press, 1999, pp. 693–694. Milton, Kay. Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. Routledge, 2002. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Westview, 2000. Otto, Eric. Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. Ohio State UP, 2012. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Rust, Stephen A., and Carter Soles. “Ecohorror Special Cluster: ‘Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We’ll All Be Dead.’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 21, no. 3, 2014, pp. 509–512. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton UP, 2001. Schneider-Meyerson, Matthew. “‘Just as in the Book’? The Influence of Literature on Readers’ Awareness of Climate Injustice and Perception of Climate Migrants.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 27, no. 2, 2020, pp. 337–364. Sklar, Howard. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013. Slovic, Scott. “Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology: The Interiority of Outdoor Experience.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 351–370. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford UP, 1995. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale UP, 1979. Tobar, Hector. “Imagining a Thirsty Future in Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Water Knife.’” The Washington Post, 25 May 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/imagining-athirsty-future-inpaolo-bacigalupis-the-water-knife/2015/05/28/40689c74-fa60-11e4-9ef4_1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Prentice Hall, 1974. Urry,Amelia. “Can Fiction make People Care about Climate? Paolo Bacigalupi Thinks So.” Grist, 9 July 2015, https://grist.org/living/can-fiction-make-people-care-about-climate-paolo-bacigalupi-thinks-so/.

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Alexa Weik von Mossner Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2017. ———. “Sensing the Heat: Weather, Water, and Vulnerabilities in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.” Meteorologies of Modernity: Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene, edited by Sarah Fekadu, Hanna Strass-Senol, and Tobias Döring, Narr, 2017, pp. 173–189. Yılmaz, Zümre Gizem. “Ecophobia as Artistic Entertainment.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 26, no. 2, Spring 2019, pp. 413–421.

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17 MORALS Te Ethical Gangster Blakey Vermeule

Abstract: What can the Godfather craze tell us about the moral emotions? In this chapter I explore recent developments in experimental and evolutionary moral psychology, specifically the work of Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene. Both thinkers are producing genuinely new knowledge in our understanding of how the moral emotions work. They have illuminated such topics as political tribalism and the difference between utilitarian and deontological moral judgments (essentially Bentham/ Mill vs. Kant). I will argue especially that the modern fascination with Hollywood gangsters can tell us something about the odd interplay between moral intuitions and moral reasoning in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) modern societies.

This is a story about a group of people who developed some odd habits and quirks. They started doing things ever so slightly differently than their neighbors. They passed these odd habits and quirks down to their children. At first the changes were small, mere drops of water pooling on solid ground. They pooled into a trickle and the trickle became a stream and the stream became a mighty river as long and powerful as the Amazon itself. Over thousands of generations, their newfound habits and quirks made them rich, long-lived, and healthy. Whether they became happy is another question altogether. So what were these small but mighty changes? Most of the changes were in ethics, or the field that would come to be called ethics—a field as subtle and variegated as an ancient and wild meadow. Over time the habits became norms, as people began to feel as though they ought to act in some fashion or another. The norms became rules about how to relate to the close inner circle of kin, the porous middle circle of acquaintances, and the outer lands of strangers. The rules became a branch of ethics, in short. These strange people became more honest and more righteous, more judgmental, more censorious, more monogamous, more self-denying, more uptight, and infinitely harsher toward themselves. They ran from the bright hot chanting circle of shame and dove into the lonely dark waters of guilt. They started to care about fairness not just to their families, but toward people they’d never met. They disciplined themselves not to cheat strangers. They even (strange point and new!) took the word of strangers as their bond. They installed an umpire in their minds called conscience. Conscience grew mighty and tyrannical. It didn’t stop at merely calling balls and strikes. It occupied more and more inner space, growling and shrieking and whining and judging and flying like an immortal mosquito inside the mind’s ear all day and DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-21

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night. The strike zone got smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter until it was a pinpoint. Errors were swiftly punished. A few souls were born without conscience and found it delightfully easy to take advantage of their fellow creatures. Soon they were diagnosed as sociopaths or psychopaths or even just garden-variety narcissists and labeled deviant but also celebrated and lionized and occasionally even elected to the highest political offices in the land. The ones suffering from excess of conscience turned to making elaborate and gripping fictions about sociopaths and criminals and they obsessed about the lucky few who had no conscience. In fact, most of their stories were crime stories. But we’ll get to that a bit later. Eventually they became lonely. The thick webs of obligation thinned and thinned and thinned until the ties that bind became wisps. They drifted from their families, they drifted from their friends, they lost track of each other. They drifted farther and farther apart, each person riding on her own silent but luxurious star. Into their lives came deep never-ending sense of anomie, but also wild and thrilling freedom—freedom from place, freedom from tribe, freedom from domestic drudgery, freedom from most unchosen obligations. Let’s give these people their proper name: they are WEIRD. WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic. Denizens of the WEIRD world are, by most global measures, psychologically extreme and peculiar. Joseph Henrich did the research and can explain it best: Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves—our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. Like everyone else, we are inclined to go along with our peers and authority figures; but we are less willing to conform to others when this conflicts with our own beliefs, observations, and preferences. We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time. When acting, we prefer a sense of control and the feeling of making our own choices. When reasoning, WEIRD people tend to look for universal categories and rules with which to organize the world, and mentally project straight lines to understand patterns and anticipate trends. We simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discrete constituents and assigning properties or abstract categories to these components—whether by imagining types of particles, pathogens, or personalities. We often miss the relationships between the parts or the similarities between phenomena that don’t fit nicely into our categories. That is, we know a lot about individual trees but often miss the forest. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification—in financial rewards, pleasure, and security—well into the future in exchange for discomfort and uncertainty in the present. In fact, WEIRD people sometimes take pleasure in hard work and find the experience purifying. Paradoxically, and despite our strong individualism and self-obsession, WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others. In fact, relative to most populations, we WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do. We

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think nepotism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships, and expediency. (Henrich 21–22) Let’s imagine for a moment that some time has passed and the WEIRD habits have settled in. They’ve more than settled in, they’ve become the basic “operating system” of governance throughout the Western world. Their norms of commerce, trading, economy, spread across the globe, causing massive disruption to ecosystems, both animal and human. At the crest of the WEIRD wave, the now extremely wealthy but singular people became obsessed with stories about gangs of criminals. In a sense this wasn’t too much of a surprise. WEIRD people loved crime stories. True crime, forensic crime, foreign spying, and bloody crime sprees had always been wildly popular fare. One of their favorite kinds of stories was about killers without conscience, those infamous psychopaths and sociopaths who could cause infinite mayhem to others without breaking a sweat. But this was different—the interest seemed more pointed. Gangster fiction mocked every single WEIRD value, creating a fantasy world in which WEIRD values appear in a fun-house mirror, odd and distorted and freakish. (The Sopranos, for example, made a running joke about the liberal intelligentsia—how they talk all tough and in fact are obsessed with mobsters but run hiding under the couch when a real mobster comes calling.) To the mob movie ethos, WEIRD values are bizarre. Be kinder to strangers than to kin? Do favors for people who won’t do favors for you in return? Disrespect your own family? Get a swelled head and stop visiting your grandmother? Go to the police for protection? What kind of lousy bum does that? Mafia movies date from the pre-Code period in Hollywood. Along with fight films they bloomed in the new moving picture era like thick green algae. But the genre had to wait until the youth revolution in the late 1960’s to get its superpowers. The Godfather, it is often said, famously “created the game”—of course that means Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film, the one with the dialogue that everyone can quote, the one with Marlon Brando stuffing his cheeks with big wads of cotton. But the Godfather craze began in 1969 to be precise. Even Mario Puzo was taken aback by the success of his novel. By the time Marlon Brando took the Oscars by storm in 1972, the outlines of the fantasy were clear. The Godfather, both the book and the films, took a strong, sharp stand against modernity. As every stable norm and familiar mode of life gave way to ferment and disruption in the later 1960s, The Godfather offered a traditional psychic palette—a strong father, gender roles so old-fashioned as to be both comic and tragic at once, and masculine-inflected Aristotelian virtues like loyalty, self-command, and courage. Inside the family is order. Outside the family is chaos—a truth so universally acknowledged that it became a running gag: Meadow Soprano: It’s the 90s. Parents are supposed to discuss sex with their children. Tony Soprano: Yeah, but that’s where you’re wrong. You see out there it’s the 1990s but in this house it’s 1954. [points to the window] Tony

Soprano: 1990s.

Tony Soprano:

1954. So now and forever, I don’t want to hear any more sex talk, OK? (“The Sopranos” Nobody Knows Anything (TV Episode 1999)—IMDb)

[points to the floor]

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In mafia movies, there’s the family and then there’s business. The family is tight, but the world of business is also tight. You do business with your family, against other families. These humans have faces and families and histories you know going way back, maybe even back several generations. Sometimes you have to kill them, but that’s “just business” and everyone more or less understands the rules. And yet, the hierarchy is brutal and sexist. “Be a Man!” Vito Corleone growls at the singer Johnny Fontaine as he slaps him across the face at the wedding of his daughter. Is Vito Corleone too old-school even in 1945, when his daughter’s wedding takes place? What does it mean to “be a man”? And why is this even a question—is “being a man” something you even have to debate? Well, yes. The Godfather is a fairy tale about an aging king who has three sons. The king is harsh and demanding but just and he takes great care of his people. His kingdom grows rich but is threatened by ruthless enemies. Which of his three sons will prove himself worthy of defending the kingdom? The oldest, Sonny, is the heir apparent. But Sonny has a vicious temper and can’t control himself. He gets in hair-trigger fights. He disrespects his father’s associates. One day he gets killed in a gangland ambush. The second son is Fredo. Fredo was called slow by his father and he never made his father proud. Worse, he was driving his father when his father was killed. The family sent him to Vegas to run the operations, but Fredo is self-indulgent and wants all the perks of a being a family prince without having to work. He comes to a bad end at the hands of his younger brother, Michael Corleone, a baby-faced war hero turned violent, psychotically angry, moneyobsessed Las Vegas heroin dealer. His betrayal of his father is by far the worst. Francis Ford Coppola famously said “the movie was always a metaphor—Michael is America.” America is corrupting and harsh. The Godfather’s traditional values are under assault not from peaceniks, hippies, civil rights movements, or feminism but from the three sons. Three sons who each is a bit WEIRD-er than their father. The family can’t control any of them. The old ways mean little. They are selfish and greedy. Other fairy tales are afoot too—mainly Robin Hood. Robin Hood steals from the rich and gives to the poor, and he exposes the ruling classes as rotten to the very core. The Godfather (and his descendants) may not be the sort of shining moral avatars you would choose for yourself, but the conventional alternatives are far worse because they operate behind a thick layer of pretense and hypocrisy. “Capitalism,” remarked Al Capone, “is the legitimate racket of the ruling classes.” (Too bad he didn’t hire a good tax lawyer.) On the corruptions of courts, laws, police, and officers of all kinds, gangster fiction is predictably scathing and endlessly creative. A key move in the game is mocking the corporate suits and the lithe cloud of invincibility on which they glide. An iconic bit of dialogue from the legendary Baltimore crime drama The Wire captures the ethos: a courtroom conversation between a prosecutor and a drug dealer: LEVY:

OMAR LITTLE: LEVY:

You are amoral, are you not? You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You’re stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off— Just like you, man. —-the culture of drugs . . . Excuse me, what?

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OMAR LITTLE:

I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game, though, right? —-The Wire: All Prologue (Season 2 episode 6)

David Chase, Sopranos creator and mafia movie connoisseur, knows how to play this fantasy for great comic effect. Just watch Tony and his muscleman Furio come flying across the greensward in a golf cart looking like bulked up cartoon characters to remind Uncle Junior’s oncologist about the finer points of professional etiquette—and eventually to shove him into the mud. This is Robin Hood for the bureaucratically oppressed, justice for the person who craves a tiny bit of clarity and control in a multipolar world, a helping hand for the person drowning in lying privacy notices, sinister end-user license agreements, endless peremptory demands to update your nagware, and cascades of fine print that you hope don’t mean anything until it turns out they really, really do. Dr. Kennedy won’t forget to return Uncle Junior’s calls again. But here’s the biggest wish fulfillment of all: the fantasy of having somebody in your corner, somebody who will have your back. The fairy tale goes like this: In the middle of the journey of your life you find yourself in a dark wood. The wood is called Customer Relations. Customer Relations is a nether region of a vast economic world order that came into being in the 1980s, but whose roots lie deep in the mists of European history. It stretches across the North American continent, Northern Europe, most of Southern and Central Europe, the urban centers of the global south, and down to the Antipodes. You haven’t taken a wrong turn to get here—you’ve simply been born in a particular place and time, one in which some people get very rich by offering a range of conveniences and comforts to other people who are willing to accept a quietly diabolical bargain. Let’s call it an offer you can’t refuse. Here’s the bargain. You can recline on your couch like a Roman Emperor gorging on the sweetest fruits of a global consumer revolution. You can browse for whatever you want, whenever you want it, from the comfort of your bed and have the most bespoke goods sourced from anywhere on the planet and delivered to you anywhere else on the planet. Ordinary goods like toasters and tech can break and be replaced the next day. A few clicks, a bit of sitting around, ding goes the doorbell, and you can have whatever your heart desires. You enjoy the comfort, the convenience, the freedom, the low prices, the ease of being able to buy anything from anywhere at the touch of a button—a consumer Eden where things appear magically to hand and every desire is instantly fulfilled. Sounds great right? It is great until you inspect the fine print. With hope in your heart, you signed up for a monthly service from a service provider—perhaps something in communications, or cable television, or internet. Or maybe you purchased a large home appliance, a shiny temple to multiple functions all seamlessly entwined under the word “smart.” A few days in, the service becomes glitchy and unreliable. Or the appliance flashes a big blinking red error code in the main console. Your heart sinks: you need to contact customer service. Good luck. The “ownership society” means you are on your own. When you need to talk to a real live employee of the company with which you have transacted business, you may come to realize that you have been played—or at least that a game is afoot, and the playing field is a

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tilt-a-whirl. Or to put it more academically, the low-cost equilibrium breaks bad, turning suddenly like a cobra and striking at your jugular. Back you teeter and before you gapes the mouth of hell with various circles stretching out below you. In the upper circles are the phone trees. The phone trees spout minor lies, plausible enough and fairly benign: “Your call is extremely important to us.” “Please continue to hold.” “Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” “Your estimated wait time is . . . five minutes.” “A customer service associate will be with you shortly.” Further down you come to the stony telephone gatekeeper. Here the lies grow more brazen, the tone just ever so slightly hard and patronizing. “I’ll transfer you . . . but first I need a little bit more information so I can connect with you with the right service associate.” “Is your call related to ‘buy a new service?’” “To ‘investigate new products? ‘Billing?’” “I didn’t quite get that. Is your call related to ‘buy new service’ ‘hear about new plans and offers’ ‘make a payment,’ ‘update your account information?” Below the phone trees, you enter a vast floodplain of the miserable. For now you leave customer service and enter the lower depths of neoliberal hell. First you come to the airline boarding tiers. While you stand helplessly in line with your roller-board hoping to be able to make it onto the plane so you can just squeeze it into the overhead compartment, past you swan the big rich, the little rich, the points hoarders, and everyone else who seem to have scored a tier-one boarding spot. It is called gaming the system, and the game is exhausting, a constant Darwinian struggle against an ever-changing faceless opponent. To borrow a joke from the novelist Jenny Offill, Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism? A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. “You can’t outrun a bear,” the other whispers. “I just have to outrun you,” he says (Offill 44). Further down the stakes get higher. Your child develops a mental illness in college. You are advised to reach out to “resources,” which turn out to involve phone trees and, once you get past those, watching videos and possibly several sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy with a bot who gives you phrases to repeat. The in-network therapists aren’t taking new patients. The out of network therapists costs 250 dollars an hour. But good luck getting an appointment. Then you come to medical billing, a circle in itself. In the upper tiers, the mistakes are minor but confounding. Your insurer authorizes a test at its own testing facility but doesn’t recognize that the doctor who reads your results is “in-network” and so sends you a bill for seven hundred dollars. As you fly down the circles, the bills get bigger and the charges get more obscure and the path to reversing them like climbing up a sandy cliff. In order to exit medical billing, you will be given the chance to settle your enormous bill for half of what you owe. 208

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Below medical billing comes geriatric care. A dear old uncle of yours gets sick. He’s terrified. The doctor won’t return his calls but will prescribe more OxyContin to keep him sedated and docile. And finally, peering way down into the abyss, you see a widening gyre called economic inequality, spinning the workers and the profiteers apart like a centrifuge. Every hour you spend trying to extract some customer service buys a tiny piece of a yacht or a mansion or a Caribbean Island retreat for the company’s executives. And as for those “customer service associates,” well, they are used like mere tools to extract the maximum profit for the managers: inflexible hours, high targets to meet, low hourly wages, and for benefits, instead of company health insurance, well there’s always disappearing public assistance. An existentialist would say that the modern world strands people without help. When you arrive in the modern world, you are on your own. The police won’t protect you. The courts won’t do you justice. Even the consumer advocate on the local TV station won’t return your calls. Wouldn’t it be great to have a fixer? Somebody powerful enough to make everything turn out alright for you and your family and also to exact revenge on the suits? Wouldn’t it be great to have a Godfather? Of course, the Godfather will exact his price. Someday—and that day may never come— The Godfather will ask you to render him a service in return. But when you are trapped in the lower of depths of customer service, that risk may be worth running. As difficult as that price may be to accept, at least you’ll get a bit of justice. And a bit of justice, however rough, may feel more satisfying than taking your chances with the corrupt, feeble, and hypocritical institutions of the modern world where sanctioning is slow, indirect, uncertain, and comically inefficient. Customer relations is grim. But is the alternative really any better? Suppose a portal opens up during your sojourn in customer service and whisks you into the fictional world of the Godfather—should you take it? Would you be any better off ? On the one hand, your life would be brutish and short. Forget standing behind a veil of ignorance:1 who you are matters. Are you in the right family? What is your rank, capo or soldier? Where are you in the pecking order, way down low or high up? As for working conditions, you’ll spend a lot of time in smoky backrooms in warehouses or riding out to the New Jersey pine barrens with a hacksaw. Sure, you’ll eat well. But you’ll smoke enough cigars and drink enough scotch to kill a thoroughbred stallion, whose severed head will then appear tangled in the sheets of a big Hollywood producer. Your fate might or might not be grisly. You might end up being fed into a meat grinder in back of the local butcher’s shop. If you are a made guy, well that’s like getting tenure—but if you cross somebody big, you can still get whacked. And if you don’t end up getting bound in duct tape and getting stuffed into the trunk of a car, there’s a good chance you’d be forced into witness protection where you’d have to live in a drab suburb outside of Phoenix with a few sad cacti in the yard instead of a lawn. Well, that is, if you are a man. Gender also matters quite a bit. If you are a woman, you have a choice of five roles: wife, mother, daughter, mother-in-law, mistress. Whichever role you pick, you’ll be fighting constantly with the other four women. Cooking will be a blood sport. If you are a mafia wife, you have to share your husband with other women. You have to socialize with other mafia wives even though you hate them, and they hate you. Should these frenemies ever once hear you joke that you want to murder your husband’s mistress, and should the mistress turn up dead, the red fingernail of suspicion will point like a dagger to your heart. So what about being the mistress? Your life doesn’t seem all that happy. 209

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You would get to live in a nice high-rise apartment with big white furniture, but you’d be extremely lonely and angry. On the other hand? Your moral emotions will thicken and become robust. You will draw on and be able to articulate a much wider range of moral intuitions. Most WEIRD people have moral intuitions that have narrowed and constricted down to two: care/harm and fairness/ unfairness. But as Jonathan Haidt has argued so persuasively, “there’s more to morality than harm and fairness” (Haidt et al. 110). Specifically, we have six “moral taste buds”: care/harm, fairness/unfairness, justice/injustice, loyalty/betrayal, sanctity/degradation, and authority/ subversion. In gangster fiction, the name of the game is Omertà—the code of honor. Omertà runs deep. An evolutionary psychologist would call it reciprocal altruism—you scratch my back, I scratch yours. An economist or philosopher would remind us about the moral dilemma faced by a prisoner who is being held in a cell away from his partner. How does the prisoner know his partner isn’t going to rat him out to save his own skin? Should he rat first? Everybody is better off if nobody rats. But can you trust your partner? You can if your partner is part of your tribe and if your tribe has very strong penalties for defecting. They will track you down even decades later and rub you out. Or as the experimental moral psychologist Joshua Greene puts it, Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage. (Greene 24) Furthermore, you’ll end up with a PhD in moral psychology. You’ll be bombarded by ethics talk. It will be like the graduate seminar that never ends. Fire up almost any gangster film—from the earliest days of the genre until now—and you will be struck by how explicitly the genre traffics in overt moral talk and indeed moral dramas. Like a babbling and hyperconscious neurotic, the genre overshares about its moral angst. Over and over again characters wonder out loud what is the right thing to do. And they deliberate endlessly. As thorny and extended as they can become, moral dilemmas almost always have right answers, and the right answer is whatever the tribe demands. One of my favorite examples of comes from Reservoir Dogs. The opening scene is eight minutes long—what kind of a gangster film begins like My Dinner With Andre? A group of men is sitting around the breakfast table at a pancake house, talking. They have a few mock disagreements but all in good fun—nothing rises even to the level of a low growl. Until it comes time to pay the bill. There’s a bit of side-drama—the old boss is being challenged by a young boss. The young boss is clearly in charge now, but the old boss needs to pretend he’s in control. The old boss says that everyone has to put in a dollar for the waitress. Everyone puts in a tip except for Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi). Before becoming a gangster, Mr. Pink might easily have gotten a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, so closely do his arguments track standard Chicago school reasoning about the irrationality of tipping and the awesome, cascading power of the free markets. Arguments like: If she doesn’t like the money she makes, she can just quit! “The words ‘too busy’ shouldn’t be in a waitresses vocabulary.” She refilled my cup three times; I expected at least six refills. He can practically quote chapter and verse from the manual of WEIRD economics, a fusion of individualism and contempt for moral concern. I don’t tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip. When somebody really puts forth an effort, they deserve a little something extra. But this 210

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tipping automatically, that shit’s for the birds. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just doin’ their job. (https://imsdb.com/scripts/reservoir-dogs.html) Mr. Pink is a rational man. He has a highly rational story to tell about why he doesn’t tip. Rational choice theory sounds so good: tipping is inefficient and irrational! Why would you tip for good service if you won’t ever be coming back to the same restaurant? Isn’t that just throwing money away? But the other guys get pissed off by his rationality. They want him to leave a dollar for the waitress. In the end the old boss makes him cough up a buck and he agrees—“but only because you are paying for breakfast.” Not only doesn’t he get whacked, he’s a man ahead of his time! He’s the WEIRD-est member of the group, an individualist down to his scuffed brown brogues. The genre started out being fairly preachy. Early gangster films—from Scarface to Public Enemy—were morality plays of the old school. The gangster had to die in a hail of bullets while the cops stood around chomping on cigars. Often there was a disclaimer at the end: gangsters really are bad! Over time the genre got more subtle. Mafiosi developed a heightened ethical sense, which they spend hours talking about, sometimes with their therapists. You’d think that ethics was a collective mafia obsession. Why would a genre that features criminals doing truly heinous things be so obsessed with the knowledge of good and evil? It seems positively Biblical. Here’s my hypothesis. WEIRD cultures love gangsters because WEIRD moral psychology is exhausting. Like Mr. Pink in the diner, sometimes it is easier to go along to get along. WEIRD moral psychology requires a lot of arguing and reasoning and abstraction. Wouldn’t it be easier, in fact more pleasant, just to relax into the comfy couch of your buddies and their moral judgments? Well yes it would be. WEIRD morality requires a lot of strenuous selfreflection and prodding from that old brute conscience. You have to reflect and reflect again— looking backwards and forwards and inwards. How exhausting. WEIRD moral psychology is odd. The interplay between moral intuitions and moral reasoning is highly indirect and curious. Moral philosophers have a saying: to reason is to rationalize. We produce moral reasons to justify our intuitions and to persuade other people that our intuitions are correct. “Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for the truth” (Haidt et al. 89). The big headline from the last 20 years of experimental moral psychology is that David Hume was right! (Haidt et al. 58). Reason really is the slave of the passions. Reason is puny, weak, and tiny, and powerless compared to the vast motivational and processing circuitry that we have at various points called “the passions”—a name that covers far too much terrain but has come to mean not just the emotions but what Freud and others meant by the dynamic unconscious. The standard terminology is now “the dual-process brain” and it is easily “one of the most important ideas to emerge from the behavioral sciences in the past few decades” (Greene 132–33). The “dual process brain” has been an object of human curiosity since Plato, but only in the past few decades have experiments given us a deeper insight into the “dual” and the “process.” What are the two parts of the dual process brain? The most commonly used terms are autonomous and analytic, automatic and controlled, implicit and explicit, fast and slow, system 1 and system 2. I prefer unconscious and conscious. The unconscious is fast, efficient, immediate/easy, and automatic. Consciousness is controlled, flexible, slow, and effortful. When it comes to moral psychology, this view has a name: the social intuitionist model of moral reasoning. The social intuitionist model is that moral intuitions come first, moral 211

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reasoning afterwards (Haidt). And reasoning is not only hard but when people try, they often retrofit explanations of to rationalize those intuitions to ourselves, and especially to others. So in a series of fascinating experiments, Jonathan Haidt gave people morally sticky situations that would be likely to trigger a strong disgust reaction. For example, Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother, are traveling together in France. They are both on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other. So what do you think about this? Was it wrong for them to have sex? (Haidt et al. 45) A similar sort of story is about a morgue worker who decides to cut off a bit of human cadaver and take it home and cook it and eat it. In both cases, people couldn’t quite put their finger on what was wrong with the situation, so they invented victims. When that didn’t work, they fell into a kind of “moral dumbfounding”: SUBJECT: Um . . . well . . . oh, gosh. This is hard. I really—um, I mean, there’s just no way I could change my mind but I just don’t know how to—how to show what I’m feeling, what I feel about it. It’s crazy! (Haidt et al. 47) Haidt say: “These subjects were reasoning. They were working quite hard at reasoning. But it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.” The moral equivalent of confabulation is rationalization. The confabulator perceives himself doing something and makes up a rational-sounding story about what he’s doing and why. The moral rationalizer feels a certain way about a moral issue and then makes up a rational-sounding justification for that feeling. (Greene 300) But think about how many decisions we have to make every day—every decision increases our cognitive load. And reasoning is “easily disrupted by cognitive load” (Haidt 50). The constant flow of decisions—not just big or medium life decisions, but constant micro-decisions about the infinite variety of choices on offer in a world of choice, choice, and more choice. And not just choice but complexity. And tribes (and their breakdown in the modern world) are an especially fruitful background for the sorts of fictional scenarios that prime our ethical intuitions.

Note 1 See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971; revised ed., 1999) [ed.].

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Works Cited Greene, Joshua David. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between us and Them. Penguin, 2013. Haidt, Jonathan, and Vintage Books (Nowy Jork). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage Books, 2013. Haidt, Jonathan, et al. Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Free Library of Philadelphia, 2012. Open WorldCat, http://libwww.freelibrary.org/ podcast/media/20120421-jonatha.mp3. Henrich, Joseph Patrick. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Https://Imsdb.Com/Scripts/Reservoir-Dogs.Html, https://imsdb.com/scripts/Reservoir-Dogs.html. Accessed 18 July 2021. Offill, Jenny. Weather. Granta Books, 2020. “The Sopranos” Nobody Knows Anything (TV Episode 1999)—IMDb. www.imdb.com, www.imdb.com/ title/tt0705269/characters/nm0797464. Accessed 18 July 2021.

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18 GENDER, EMOTION, LITERATURE “No Woman’s Heart” in Shakespeare’s Twelfh Night Cora Fox

Abstract: Emotions and genders are culturally maintained through representations that are both historical and formal. In the areas of literary emotion studies most influenced by feminist and queer theory—and particularly in affect studies—instantiations of affect and practices of emotion are revealed to be based in cultural scripts and repetitions that are simultaneously engaged in the formation of the sex/gender system. These processes are often intertextual, so this chapter traces the ways early modern gender is constructed through emotion in a key moment in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night alongside the underlying structural models of gendered desire and bodily difference announced in Petrarch’s Rime Sparse. Tracing the ways emotion and gender are represented in these texts reveals how they intersect to define normative masculinity (and with it, femininity) and its associated emotions through enmeshed representational processes. As this case study in intertextuality reveals, gender and emotion operate through performance, repetition, and adaptation, and both define the lived experience of the self. Literature, therefore, occupies a privileged role as a site for these definitions of the gendered and emotive body in social contexts.

There is no woman’s sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart. No woman’s heart So big, to hold so much. They lack retention. Alas, their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt. But mine is all as hungry as the sea And can digest as much. Make no compare Between that love a woman can bear me And that I owe Olivia. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 2.4.90–99)

This explicitly gender-defining moment from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night addresses a seemingly timeless and persistent question: are women or men more emotional? The speaker, Duke Orsino—the heart-sick and comically conventional type of the male lover from Renaissance European stage comedies and sonnet sequences—argues that men are, at least when it comes DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-22

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to love. Specifically, he argues that female love is weaker, more temporary, superficial, and fickle, first because no woman’s heart could be as big as his, and second because for women love arises from the mouth (the palate) rather than the liver, a reference to the role those two particular organs played in some contemporary Galenic notions of the embodied self. In humoral medical writings of the period, the palate was generally the location of sensual as well as sexual and other kinds of appetites, whereas the liver was often the seat and center of the humors themselves, and sometimes the location of the soul. Women’s inferior love as an emotion is here defined both as a manifestation of an organ—the smaller heart—as well as a consequence of its weaker location in the humoral body common to both genders. Men’s love resides in a stronger heart and is more interior and central, and therefore superior. The distinction being made about the emotion of love itself, though associated with organs found in both female and male bodies, therefore, performs some rather laborious work of gendering the selves occupying those bodies. It is in such moments that the definitional processes structuring gender and emotion, always occurring in literature, rise to the surface as co-constitutive systems. As this speech from an early modern comedy reveals, literature serves as a cultural construction zone for the body. Although some basic physiological differences may exist in bodies named at birth or transitioned to a particular gender, much of what is considered gender difference is the result of cultural formations, which have been shown to influence the physiology of the body itself. Considering the cultural characteristics of both gender and emotions, feminist, queer, and affect theorists have shown that both gender and affect are performative, repetitive, and structural, so in exploring the nature of the link between emotion and gender in literature, such processes should be considered side-by-side constitutive cultural phenomena.1 To account for the relationship between the processes defining gender and those producing and maintaining emotions, this chapter will explore Orsino’s and his addressee, Viola’s, highly intertextual literary debate in some depth. Focusing on two familiar and canonical early modern texts—Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Petrarch’s Rime Sparse—provides access to a transitional moment in the development of the modern self in Europe that becomes paradigmatic for its literature and that of many other cultures influenced by European expansion. Both texts are explicitly invested in mapping the gendering of emotions in their own time, and both record the ambivalent and shifting nature of this definitional process, revealing the ways literature speaks differently from other kinds of texts (such as medical or legal) through its formal and imaginative properties. These literary representations of emotional exchange—between Orsino and Viola and between Petrarch’s speaker and Laura—also represent explicitly the politics of love in the cultures of which they are products. They operate as particularly clear case studies for reading the constellation of emotions associated with early modern desire and courtship, which Monique Scheer uses as a primary example of the ways emotions can be considered practices that “do things” like defining the sex/gender system. As Scheer points out, courtship is a social ritual that is grounded in emotional practices: “[it] is not just a behavior but has performative effects on the constitution of feelings and the (gendered) self ” (209). Focusing on Orsino and Viola and Petrarch’s speaker in love reveals the ways literature operates as a site for the cultural repetitions of gendered emotions that have effects in the social world of intimate relationships in early modern Europe and beyond. Because love occupies a complicated position within taxonomies of emotions in twentyfirst-century cognitive and behavorial sciences, it is worth noting that Shakespeare’s character places it firmly in the ecosystem of early modern emotions by referring to it as a “passion.”2 215

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This passion that Orsino is experiencing is powerfully, and ironically, represented as highly gendered as well as highly metatheatrical. Shakespeare is deliberately commenting on his own culture’s ideas about—or at least their clichéd and inherited literary representations of—sex, gender, and the emotions.3 As a product of these circulating discourses, Orsino perceives the nature and particularly the scale of his emotional experience as linked to his masculinity. The assumption his character represents is that emotions are embedded in the binary social categories of “masculine” and “feminine,” and that these are more or less stable, built into Galenic notions of gendered bodies. Gail Kern Paster refers to this model of the self and the emotions as “this totalizing theory of human agency and affect, masquerading as the facts of sexual difference” (78). Although his description of the physiological processes that produce emotion is primarily humoral in this scene—and therefore historically foreign to modern ideas about the nature of feelings—the idea that gender difference undergirds or circumscribes differences in the experience of emotions has remained naturalized in understandings of the everyday experience of gender that survive into the present. Beginning with Aristotle, the notion that men and women feel differently is central to defining gender itself. In cultures that inherit in some form these Aristotelean and Galenic commonplace understandings of the body, the differentiated emotions of those gendered bodies are reflected and constituted in literary texts and then in the study of literature itself. The everydayness of this literary gendering of the emotions meant that it remained fairly underexamined until gender studies, feminist and queer theory, and social history aligned in the 1980s through the early 2000s.4 In fact, many important early developments in the fields of emotion and affect studies have been either explicitly or implicitly indebted to feminist and queer theory, as well as cultural studies where they are focused on the complex intersections of the personal and political.5 Scholarly interventions in the field of emotion studies explicitly informed by feminist and queer modes of inquiry include such foundational works as Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997) and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008); Ann Cvetkovich’s Mixed Feelings; Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Elspeth Probyn’s Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Culture Studies (1993) and Blush: Faces of Shame (2005). Judith Butler’s work outlining the ways that sex and gender are performative and constituted through cultural repetitions has been particularly important in developing notions of the “sociality of emotions,” as Sara Ahmed has called the strain of affect theory for which her own work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), is foundational. Queer and feminist theory—invested in probing the lived experience of sex and gender and accounting for structures of identity that are both constitutive of and consequential for the sex/gender system in cultural spaces outside traditional seats of power—have had profound effects on emotion and particularly affect studies. Many influential historical studies of gendered communities have also been explicitly accounts of emotion and particularly its politics. For instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s groundbreaking Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) anticipated some of the more recent studies of emotion in her focus on what she terms early modern “homosociality” in literary representations of desire. Her work outlines the ways in which narratives of feeling stabilize and maintain both gender and power relationships in complex and historically situated ways. Similarly, Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) outlines the ways cultural scripts about the family and the gendered division of labor in the contemporary US and UK—drawn mainly from literature and film—are directly tied not just to notions of happiness, but to happiness as the affective object, idea or person to which attachment is encouraged. In 216

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these cultural structures, value is disproportionately attached to masculine (and white) bodies and their affects. Bradley J. Irish’s recent study of emotion in the Tudor court (2018) explicitly brings cognitive studies of emotion into dialogue with historical analyses to recreate the historical conditions of life specifically for courtiers operating within the highly gendered space of the Renaissance court. In these and similar works of historical and cultural analysis, critical inquiry into what constitutes gendered subjectivity is directly tied to reading emotional life. As these examples of scholarship focused on both gender and the emotions reveal, attention to how they operate together to define the embodied self is essential to understanding lived experience. In the case of Twelfth Night, gendered norms of emotional behavior for those eligible for marriage are at stake for every character. The plot is driven by the tropological device of identical male/female twins who are the structural focal points of desire in the play, which repeatedly calls into question through dramatic irony the gender binary itself. The moment cited earlier in which Orsino addresses his speech to Viola is particularly ironic because Viola, the female twin who would have been played by a young man in Shakespeare’s theater, is dressed in male clothing as Orsino’s page, Cesario, so they look like the male twin, Sebastian. I begin with this famous interchange as a convenient place to call attention to the ways gender and emotion are thematized through performance in early modern literature. As I have argued earlier, however, the relationship between gender and emotion in cultural texts goes beyond such a thematic examination of each gender’s intrinsic emotional nature or value. Instead, I will investigate how the structuring practices of language that constitute the gendered body also define its affects, and vice versa. This analysis reveals how the embodied self is formed in literature through both the repetition of its gender and the naturalization and naming of its affects. As Ahmed has pointed out, the contours of the body are defined by an accretion of historical texts and practices, and generally in European texts “emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement” (Cultural Politics, 3). But Orsino makes the case for his greater emotionality as a man by seemingly denying that women can be more emotional than himself. This contradiction reflects the local nature of these cultural negotiations, and it points to the ways these ideas are solidified through repeated performances that constantly refine and redefine emotional differences in the genders. As Paster points out, in fact, Orsino’s intervention is not unconventional. In many texts of the early modern period, female emotions are represented as less powerful but at the same time less mastered than those governing the male self, so men are characterized as both more emotional and more in control of those feelings, leaving women to be less developed selves, more at the mercy of their fickle and less powerful animal spirits (Humoring, Chapter 2). Orsino, created within this tradition but also speaking back to it, argues that women’s encasing physical weakness (their weaker “sides”) makes them unable to bear strong emotions such as the love he feels for Olivia. This idea that the female body is a weaker vessel for emotions than the male body is an allusion to debates about the nature of women going back to Aristotle and consolidated in such textual locations as those directly invested in the tradition of the querelle de femmes. Montaigne reveals this assumption of female inferiority in emotional social bonds when assessing marriage, comparing it to his idealized vision of the “lively affection” of male intimacy in “Of Friendship”: Concerning marriage besides that it is a covenant which hath nothing free but the entrance, the continuance being forced and constrained depending else-where than from our will, and a match ordinarily concluded to other ends: A thousand strange 217

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knots are therein commonly to be unknit, able to break the web, and trouble the whole course of a lively affection; whereas in friendship there is no commerce or busines depending on the same, but it selfe. Seeing (to speake truly) that the ordinary sufficiency of women cannot answer this conference and communication the nurse of this sacred bond: nor seeme their mindes strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard so fast, and durable. And truly, if without that, such a genuine and voluntarie acquaintance might be contracted, where not only mindes had this entire jovissance, but also bodies, a share of the alliance, and where a man might wholly be engaged: It is certaine, that friendship would thereby be more compleat and full: But this sex could never yet by any example attaine unto it, and is by ancient schooles rejected thence. (Essays of Michel de Montaigne, 1580, trans. John Florio, 1603; emphasis mine) Montaigne makes the case here that marriage cannot generate the ideal attachment of friendship firstly because it serves other ends, those investments in “commerce” and “business” that define the marriage market in his time. He goes on, however, to offer a casual and conspiratorial negative assessment of women’s “sufficiency” at communication as well as their “minds” that must sustain the bond. Admitting that if the sexes were equal in their ability to feel the emotional bond of marriage, marriage might be superior to male friendship, Montaigne invokes historical and philosophical textual precedent (the “ancient schools”) to determine that they are not, thus solidifying their emotional weakness through textual repetition. This passage is an excellent example of how a gender is defined by its emotions as represented in textual authorities. Emotions other than love are similarly gendered through recursive processes of repetition that are fundamental formal elements of literary representation. Emotions such as anger, for instance, or sadness are valued differently when they present in bodies expressing different genders. As first outlined by Elizabeth Spelman, anger is often a particularly clear intervention into gender politics, because the individual who expresses it assumes they have the right to be angry. It is therefore inherently gendering because it reflects a position of privilege that was valorized for men and dangerous and threatening for women through much of European and American history. Similarly, as Julianna Schiesari has revealed, melancholy has a complex affective and gender history, moving from an often enobled marker of male intellect through Freud to a condition of inherent female inferiority. Perhaps the most recognizable way in which binary gender and affect are mutually constitutive in these varying cultural formations of the self rests in genre. Literary genres take on and form gender as part of the shaping of their formal characteristics, characteristics that often include the elicitation of affects in gendered readers and audiences. Comedies, for instance, have historically been associated with femininity and tragedies with masculinity. Epics are male and romances female. The limit case in this simultaneous gendering and constituting of embodied emotions might be the sentimental novel, in which the excessive emotionalism of women inherited from Aristotle by way of the Renaissance gives rise to a genre defined by the femininity of its audience, protagonists and feminized interests and concerns. As these broad historical shifts record, the gendering of emotional life operates through subtle and local representations, negotiations that can be traced in complex literary moments. Returning to Twelfth Night, in fact, reveals the ways normative ideas about gender in the early modern period are constantly reassessed and qualified on the Shakespearean stage. After asserting female physical weakness as the cause of their emotional inferiority, Orsino continues to argue for his own superior love through an accumulation of other stereotypes about the 218

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differences between male and female desire. Orsino makes the case for his love as emotionally bigger and hungrier, like the sea—a common topos for it being more expansive as an emotional experience—than female love (Paster, Humoring). What Orsino expresses in this speech, therefore, is a litany of complex and sometimes contradictory ideas about the gendered differences of emotional selves. His description of this gendered difference is, however, not fully commonplace and quite contested in the period in which Twelfth Night was first performed. These lines of the play construct a notion of female emotional weakness in contrast to various traditions of humoral theory, influenced by stoicsm, that argued for precisely the opposite idea: that women were the more emotional gender, their humoral selves leaky and uncontrolled in opposition to men’s more rational humoral nature. Orsino’s character is, finally, a deliberate if contradictory intervention into pressing debates that work to construct the gender binary through the emotions and the emotions through the gender binary. Within the social world represented by the play and experienced through the imaginations of the audience, this exchange between Orsino and Viola is only one example of the ways Twelfth Night negotiates not only embodied genders themselves, but the networks of association and attachment that solidify and valorize the heterosexual unions that are the generic endgame of Renaissance comedy. Among the many discourses of love and marriage interrogated by the play, the prototypical desiring and emotive lover-self, established by Petrarch and positioned firmly at the center of Renaissance humanism, is the repeated target of the most explicit critique. Orsino, as the most powerful male character in the play, is the legitimate heir to that very binary system of gender politics influenced by Petrarch and his foundational collection of poems that defined elite masculinity in the early modern period through its performances and repetitions. Malvolio is tricked and humiliated because he imagines himself occupying the class position of this Petrarchan lover in union with Olivia, and Olivia repeatedly critiques this Petrarchan poetry in her resistance to Orsino’s wooing. References to this tradition, therefore, saturate the play. Petrarch’s Rime Sparse constructs the emotional self through that most seemingly intimate of genres, the lyric. As Thomas Greene outlined in The Light in Troy and others have explored, Petrarch’s sequence established a fundamentally performative poetics of imitation that became the intertextually archetypal site of an authentic masculine self. Petrarch’s sonnets in the Rime Sparse were so influential in the development of lyric and love poetry that they have an outsized influence on how emotion was gendered and linked to the sex/gender system in periods following their explosion of significance in England and continental Europe. The imagery of these sonnets as repetitive performances of gender and emotion functions as a model for considering how emotion and gender intersect and solidify through literature that inherits this tradition into the present day.6 Petrarch’s famous sequence begins in rime 1 with a call to the reader for pity and an expression of shame: ove sia chi per prova intenda amore spero trovar pietà, non che perdono. Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me medesmo meco mi vergogno; et del mio vaneggiar vergogna è ‘l frutto, e ‘l pentersi, e ‘l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno. 219

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Where there is anyone who understands love through experience, I hope to find pity, not only pardon. But now I see well how for a long time I was the talk of the crowd, for which often I am ashamed of myself within. And of my raving, shame is the fruit, and repentance, and the clear knowledge that whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream. (1.7–14) In this opening lyric, Petrarch constructs the emotional experience of both the reader and the speaker of the poem. The imagined reader is asked to offer pity, a faith-based gestural practice in the Christian humanist tradition to which Petrarch’s work belongs. In contrast, the speaker of this poem describes his own experience as initially shame, revealing it to be the product of social forces and discourse as well as his own “raving” (vaneggiar). Famously, the lyrics in this sequence work through both narrativized progression and the dilations of the lyric to produce the type of a male self. His difference from his beloved, Laura, is the main investment of the poem, and most of the included lyrics operate as emotional parables, capturing the many facets and narratives of emotion caused by his distant and mostly unrequited courting of her. Within the sequence, Petrarch often expresses commonplace notions about the emotionality of women. For instance in rime 183, the speaker asserts femina è cosa mobile per natura, ond’ io so ben ch’ un amoroso stato in cor di donna picciol tempo dura.

A woman is a changeable thing by nature, and I know well that a state of love lasts little time in the heart of a woman. (Rime Sparse 183, ll. 12–14) La donna è mobile. This platitude about women’s love is the same one uttered by Orsino two centuries later. In general, however, the emotional life of the female beloved is narrowed in Petrarch’s sequence to her capacity for anger, pity or pride, while the speaker weaves a long and complicated tale of his own emotionality, generating various parables of love as personified both externally and internally as Cupid. In rime 140, for example, Love is famously compared through an implied metaphor to a monarch leading a military campaign encamped in the speaker’s face: Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna e ‘l suo seggio maggior nel mio cor tene, talor armato ne la fronte vene; ivi si loca et ivi pon sua insegna. Quella ch’ amare et sofferir ne ‘nsegna e vol che ‘l gran desio, l’accesa spene ragion, vergogna, et reverenza affrene, di nostro ardir fra se stessa si sdegna. Onda Amor paventoso fugge al core, lasciando ogni sua impresa, et piange et trema; ivi s’asconde et non appar più fore. 220

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Che poss’ io far, temendo il mio signore, se non star seco infin a l’ ora estrema? chè bel fin fa chi ben amando more.

Love, who lives and reigns in my thought and keeps his principal seat in my heart, sometimes comes forth all in armor into my forehead, there camps, and there sets up his banner. She who teaches us to love and to be patient, and wishes my great desire, my kindled hope, to be reined in by reason, shame, and reverence, at our boldness is angry within herself. Wherefore Love flees terrified to my heart, abandoning his every enterprise, and weeps and trembles; there he hides and no more appears outside. What can I do, when my lord is afraid, except stay with him until the last hour? For he makes a good end who dies loving well. The story of emotion Petrarch’s speaker tells is one of military service and loyalty to Cupid, his internalized military commander. He thus generates a community of male figures—distinctly male because they serve together in a military campaign—through whom the speaker defines both the affective experience of love and his male body. His physiology is overtly fictionalized, and in fact is linked to the interior life of Laura, who is experiencing an anger identified by his own internalized and personified figures for desire. Petrarch’s sonnets, and particularly this one, are repeated by Wyatt and Surrey and spawn the Renaissance craze for sonnet sequences. They define the lover-self in the hundreds of sequences published in the Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan traditions, and they naturalize the location of the emotional drama of love in the male body. In fact, Shakespeare draws attention to the narrativized (and overtly fictionalized) gendered and emotional body in Viola’s response to Orsino’s declaration. Viola—a male actor wearing a page’s male clothing, and therefore playing the role of a woman disguised as a man—fabricates her own tale about a fictional sister to stand in for her description of her own desire for Orsino. In doing so, Viola crafts a story about her embodied emotion that draws attention to the instability of her body’s gender. In this moment of effective dramatic irony created by cross-dressing his heroine, Shakespeare describes Viola’s longing for Orsino as a potentially deadly excess of emotion, one even stronger than the love Orsino has declared: Orsino: What dost thou know? Viola: Too well what love women to men may owe. In faith, they are as true of heart as we. My father had a daughter loved a man As it might be perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship. Orsino: And what’s her history? Viola: A blank, my lord. She never told her love But let concealment, like a worm I’ th’ bud, Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought, And, with a green and yellow melancholy, She sat like Patience on a monument, Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? 221

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We men may say more, swear more, but indeed Our shows are more than will. For still we prove Much in our vows, but little in our love. (TN, 2.5.101–115)

Viola’s fiction here may be exemplary of the way literature itself, and particularly everyday storytelling, are often associated with women, an association that does not disappear in later periods of literature written in English (Callaghan). More specifically, Viola says men and women are equally “true of heart,” but that their inability to express their emotions is more damaging than men’s freedom to declare theirs. Viola’s rebuttal to Orsino’s self-interested notions regarding the innately physical emotional weakness of women is to assert an equality of emotion that is hampered by the social inequality of gender roles—roles that determine their ability to speak their feelings: “Was not this love indeed?” This is a striking departure from conceptions of feminine humoral, philosophical, and social insufficiency or lack that have been outlined earlier and are often central to medical treatises, conduct books, and vernacular writings on the nature of women. Her tale of her emotions framed as a silent statue reflects an investment in theorizing feeling beyond such texts and discourses. The story Viola tells reveals quite a lot about how bodies—of the actor playing Viola and the gendered bodies of the audience outside the text—are formed through emotions. Viola tells Orsino that her sister withered (and possibly died, since her story is a “blank”) of her lovesick melancholy. The melancholy, however, is green and yellow, not the colors most associated with the dominant understanding of masculine melancholy, which was primarily produced by black bile. Green and yellow are associated instead with greensickness, a feminized type of suffering produced at sexual maturity with many of the same symptoms as male melancholy, and choler, produced by yellow bile and associated with disordered anger and rage.7 As Viola ironically describes her own emotions in these highly gendered ways in this fabricated tale, the play subtly suggests that the emotion she describes is far more complex than the categories suggested by its literary representation. To capture just the outlines of Viola’s emotional life requires reference to multiple discourses and traditions of humoral medicine, multiple artistic modes of representation and intertextual repetitions. The passage also ironically represents Viola’s true emotions as operating below the surface, where she assumes the exterior hardness of the statue of Patience, which can stoically smile at grief. The irony inheres in the fact that the true emotions Viola claims to have mastered are represented through an inherently crafted, and therefore “untrue,” art. The allegorical figure of Patience that she likens her unspoken desire to in this tale is a reference to such figures on Renaissance funerary monuments, so she compares the suffering of her disguised passion for Orsino to the emotions surrounding death. In telling this tale of emotions—expressed and unexpressed, superficial and true—Viola genders herself and constructs her emotions simultaneously, and Shakespeare highlights the ways both of these components of the character embodied on the stage operate together to form the literary representation of embodied experience, which draws on but transcends multiple textual sites where emotion and gender are formed. As Viola’s tale of her fake sister reveals, it is literature’s capacity for creative repetition— its intertextuality, adaptability, and self-referentiality—that makes it a privileged cultural site for constructing bodies that both reflect cultural formations of gender and outline the emotions of the social self. Concealing the emotions of her gender makes Viola vulnerable to “withering,” a decidedly material form of suffering. Taking a cue from Viola’s parable, attention should be paid to the constructed aspects of both gender and emotion, focusing on how culture and physiology continuously interact to produce the experience of the body as both 222

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gendered and emotional. The fact that the question of which gender is more “emotional” persists (although in modern representations it is almost always women who are both more emotional and less in control of their passions) reflects the ways both gender and the emotions are entrenched in the politics of successive eras of Euro-American culture. Viola’s model of silent and self-destructive passion might be the limit case and the spur for future literary inquiry into the intersections of gender and emotion in other silenced and silencing figures. Gender and emotion are both bodily, and as outlined earlier, discursive and intertextual. The recent turn in cultural studies toward “embodiment” as an analytic and critical stance that can include the insights of feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, as well as studies of disability and the health humanities, might also be the interdisciplinary space where emotion studies and gender studies can be combined to account for the ways both are constitutive of the social self.

Notes 1 Susan Broomhall in the introduction to Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England refers to gender and emotions as “mutually informing ideologies and expressions,” and this collection and her scholarship overall have captured the many complex and local ways gender and emotions constitute each other in medieval and early modern texts (5). 2 For an example of an entry in this controversy that argues that love is a not an emotion but a syndrome, see Pismenny and Prinz. In his 1630 Passions of the Mind in General, for instance, Thomas Wright defines a “passion” as akin to a modern expansive or colloquial notion of emotion, somewhere between sensory experience (closer to affect) and rational thought (cognition) (7). 3 David Schalkwyk reads this exchange also for its theorizations of emotions. He asks if love is an emotion and decides that it is not: “Twelfth Night embodies love through dedicated behavior and action, rather than the causal interiority of bodily heat or humor” (110). Susanne Wofford argues that Orsino’s highly intertextual representation in the play overall allows for a translation of the foreign emotions associated with his character in the play’s continental sources into his English subjectivity. She also suggests that his role in the play might be a model for a translational understanding of emotion itself. 4 For an overview of how the developments in emotion studies intersect with the various waves and debates in feminist and queer theory, see Ruberg. 5 See Kristyn Gorton’s 2007 review of many of these texts in Feminist Theory. 6 For two different methodological interventions and examinations of the repetitive force of Petrarch’s lyric constructions of the masculine self and its influence on later literatures, see Roland Greene and Heather Dubrow. 7 The most popular treatise on lovesickness in the period was the translation of Jacques Ferrand’s On Lovesickness. For a discussion of the gendering of love in that text, see Ian Moulton. For an extended discussion of greensickness as virgin melancholy, see Paster, Humoring the Body, Chapter 3.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. ———. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Duke UP, 2008. ———. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Duke UP, 1997. Broomhall, Susan. Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Palgrave, 2015. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Callaghan, Dympna. “Beguiling Fictions.” Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance, edited by Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Bloomsbury, 2014.

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Cora Fox Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke UP, 2003. ———. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. Rutgers, 1992. Dubrow, Heather. Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses. Cornell UP, 1995. Gorton, Kristyn. “Theorizing Emotion and Affect: Feminist Engagements.” Feminist Theory, vol. 8, 2007, pp. 333–348. Greene, Thomas. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. Yale UP, 1982. Greene, Roland. Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence. Princeton UP, 1991. Irish, Bradley. Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History and Early Modern Feeling. Northwestern UP, 2018. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais (1580). Translated by John Florio, 1603, Renascence Editions, www. luminarium.org/renascence-editions/montaignesearch.html. Accessed 10 June 2021. Moulton, Ian. “Monstrous Teardrops: The Materiality of Early Modern Affection.” Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater, edited by Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker, Routledge, 2015. Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespeare Stage. Chicago, 2004. Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling, Harvard UP, 1976. Pismenny, Arinna, and Jesse Prinz. “Is Love an Emotion?” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, edited by Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts, Oxford Handbooks, Online, doi:10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199395729.013.10. Accessed 7 June 2021. Ruberg, Willemijin. “Introduction.” Sexed Sentiments: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender and Emotion. Brill, 2011. Schalkwyk, David. “Is Love an Emotion? Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Anthony and Cleopatra.” Symploke, 2010, pp. 99–130. Scheer, Monique. “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” History and Theory, vol. 51, 2012, pp. 193–220. Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Cornell UP, 1992. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 3rd ed., Norton, 2016. Spelman, Elizabeth. “Anger and Insubordination.” Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, Unwin Hyman, 1989, pp. 263–274. Wofford, Susanne. “Foreign Emotions on the Stage of Twelfth Night.” Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, edited by Eric Nicholson and Robert Hencke, Routledge, 2008, pp. 141–157. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1630). Illinois, 1971.

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19 RACE AND ETHNICITY Christopher González

Abstract: Works of literature that foreground racial and ethnic marginalization routinely traverse narrative paths that lie squarely in histories of trauma and violence. Such works are predisposed to engage with and trigger emotions in the inscribed storyworld and, through the process of storyworld reconstruction, within readers. Invoking work of Stephanie Fetta, Christopher González, Patrick Colm Hogan, Suzanne Keen, Sue J. Kim, and Việt Thanh Nguyễn, this chapter explores the myriad challenges inherent in literature that foregrounds racial and ethnic dimensions and the interplay of emotion. Authors from marginalized communities must navigate and mitigate the anger and outrage their communities have experienced throughout history. These authors, who must often break prior expectations or establish a new baseline expectation, use creative narrative solutions that will enhance the likelihood that the emotions they convey within their narratives will resonate within the minds of readers.

Writers from historically marginalized communities have had, as a rule, a more difficult path toward publication and reception. This fact is unsurprising no matter what part of the world and what time in history we agree to examine. The power disparity inherent in the publishing industry reflects similar incongruities in equitable access to the rights and privileges easily afforded to majority communities, irrespective of nation or culture. When a group is marginalized by state authority and political power, resentment, anxiety, frustration, annoyance and other such negative emotions often drip thickly from the quills of these oppressed and thwarted writers, and understandably so. In a cruel turn, hegemony makes it impermissible for such marginalized communities to express these negative emotions, which are summarily dismissed as proof of their unworthiness. As such, the figurative deck is stacked against such marginalized storytellers. If we consider, for example, writers who began life in the abject state of slavery—writers such as Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass—the raw emotions rooted in the humiliations heaped on them by their masters and an entire slave economy had to be tamped down. Jacobs, in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ponders the hopeless case of the slave in terms that highlight the capacity for the slave to love and to be broken: “Why does the slave ever love? Why allow the tendril of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence?” (36). Yet these slave narratives also had to have the eloquence of even the best orators of the time if they were to be taken seriously. Douglass was certainly up to this task. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-23

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Of course, the sublimity of their prose gave ammunition to any detractors who might have claimed that former slaves could not possibly have written the things attributed to them. These writers who helped establish the tradition of the slave narrative demonstrated the power of their firsthand accounts while also showing the narrow rhetorical path to which they had to hew. One must then acknowledge the caveat that narratives created in antagonism to hegemony and oppression must negotiate many more constraints than the writings of majority authors. Even Anglo women who have written lasting, meaningful works of literature such as the Brontë Sisters (Anne, Charlotte, Emily), spring readily to mind in this respect. They had to employ subterfuge and pose as men within the imaginations of the publishers and their readers lest their narratives be constrained to what we might call approved subjects for women, or to engage emotional content stereotypical to the women of the time. As Acton Bell, her fictional male persona, Anne Brontë was liberated to write the kinds of things that were generally permissible to the male authors of her day. Though the issues concerning feminism and the problems that arise concerning race and ethnicity are not the same thing, and as Kimberlé Crenshaw has demonstrated with the concept of intersectionality, they often intersect and must be considered (140). This chapter is concerned with the capacious convergence of the topics of race and ethnicity, literature, and emotion, and no single chapter can do that. Instead, I proceed with the hope that my reader will already have a basic knowledge of the issues surrounding race and ethnicity in literature and, if they wish to read further on the topic, they are welcomed to seek it out, for it is readily available. But a chapter like this provides an excellent opportunity to bring together these related matters in a way that often does not get discussed in circles where race and ethnicity get examined regularly. This to me is a bit of a paradox because identity, narrative, and emotion can be expressed along a host of permutations and in consequential ways, as I aim to show here. Further, I recognize that, though I suggested the existence of hegemonies basically anywhere humans congregate in clusters, the truth is that these hegemonies are expressed to varying degrees from nation to nation, and even within specific regions in each country. Race and ethnicity are constructs, that is, “race and racism are the result of historical events and power arrangements” (Zack), and the construct of say, blackness, is not made manifest in universal ways. Blackness in the southern regions of the United States is not constructed nor embodied in the same way it is in South Africa or Nigeria. That said, this chapter will concentrate on prominent research and relevant examples that adopt the localized racial and ethnic ecosystems of the United States, and it underscores the fact that these findings, while broadly applicable, may also differ in notable ways from any given racial-ethnic paradigm on the global stage. To be sure, emotion ought to be an expected variable to be found in the narratives of writers who inhabit expressions of racial and ethnic identity within a hegemonic societal structure that has historically empowered certain people and disenfranchised others along these identity lines. Understanding the relationships among the vectors of race, ethnicity, literature, and emotion allows for a more nuanced knowledge of identity and narrative.

Te Problem of Permissibility In Permissible Narratives, I began to give serious consideration to the majority-dominated gatekeepers of publishing in the United States, specifically, and how they had the ability to shape or squelch literatures written by authors from historically marginalized groups: What is permissible when it comes to narrative form? The aim of narrative theory has been to determine how narratives are made, how they work, and how they 226

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are consumed. An author’s syntagmatic and paradigmatic choices when creating a narrative reveal one type of narrative permissibility. Syntagmatic considerations in narrative are often more inflexible by definition, while paradigmatic considerations both create an expectation yet also provide the opportunity for upending expectations. (González, Permissible Narratives 2) It seemed a natural consequence that a nation such as the United States, with such a deepseated devotion to segregation and privilege, would allow for capitalistic enterprises—publishing, for example—to dictate the terms for marginalized writers and the things that they wrote. I envisioned this as a structure of permissibility, with the empowered publishers, represented by agents and publishing executives, bestowing approval for certain kinds of works, the kinds that would generate sales among readers. It made sense that there were likely works of literature by marginalized writers that were daring, genre bending, or expectation exploding, but nevertheless ones that did not fit within the conception of what the publishing gatekeepers thought of as permissible (i.e., profitable). The implications of this were potentially explosive. Marginalized writers were often if not always at the whim and mercy of a publishing structure that could not understand their artistic vision or refused to see the profitability of their work because it was without precedent. These writers would write not from their own, lived identity position, but rather, would be compelled to see themselves as America, that is, white America, would see them. It is exactly the paradox first articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois and his extraordinary and oft-cited concept of “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness” (11). This twoness is quite often in play when authors from marginalized communities work to achieve publication through a system that was not built with them in mind. I think it is vital to emphasize the pressure marginalized writers must confront on their way to publication because it exposes a general urge by the hegemony to scrub and shape these literatures on their way to being born, just as it is crucial to understand the pathways to inscribing and expressing emotion by these same authors who do not benefit from the privilege afforded to white, male authors in the United States. What might be described as “courageous” or “bold” in a majority writer can easily be seen as “shrill” or “melodramatic” in the work of a marginalized writer. Thus, when we examine emotion along the lines of racial and ethnic literature, we must understand the power structures that impinge on these areas of cultural production. To do otherwise is to buy in to the idea that works of literature by these marginalized writers sprang forth free from compromise and external pressure. One should not confuse this reality with the structure of the publishing industry that is concerned with qualitative aspects. However, racial and ethnic prejudices are at times justified by the cloak of quality and the supposed objectivity of literary form. A given society’s tenacious and seemingly indelible stereotypes loom large in a marginalized writer’s path, and such writers must confront and overcome these stereotypes at some point in their career or else be defeated by them. In the United States, Black men must face the “shucking and jiving” caricature, a buffoon and clown with a desire to abase himself for the entertainment of whites. Black men must also deal with the associations of crime, violence, and illegal drugs. Black women must remain quiet and composed, their stoicism in the face of countless outrages a token of their character, of their goodness and civility. They may never 227

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express heightened emotion, or they are summarily dismissed as “angry black women.” As Trina Jones and Kimberly Jade Norwood put it: This so-called “Angry Black Woman” is the physical embodiment of some of the worst negative stereotypes of Black women—she is out of control, disagreeable, overly aggressive, physically threatening, loud (even when she speaks softly), and to be feared. She will not stay in her “place.” She is not human. Importantly, the “Angry . . . Woman” label is assigned almost exclusively to Black women. The salience of this trope comes from the combination of blackness and non-conforming femininity. (2049) Native peoples, too, must remain stoic and serious. Latinxs have their stereotypes to bear as well, as does the Asian American/Pacific Islander, or AAPI, community. These stereotypes already block specific avenues and encourage more well-trod but harmful tropes in literature. How then does a marginalized writer express and engage emotion when certain expressions are permissible (almost always to the detriment of their identity position) and others are not? The answer is to be found in the publication record of marginalized writers in toto, and it operates as a kind of asterisk that ought to be tethered to every published work by a marginalized writer within a society. Richard Wright, in lustrous prose, seemed to write in blood when he depicted the events of his life as a young Black child and then man in his autobiography. His prose, in righteous indignation that at times seems to threaten to choke him, seethes in almost animalistic characterizations. It gives credence to the idea that his original title to the longer autobiography, American Hunger, was a much more incisive one precisely because it articulated a broad-ranging and voracious appetite for recognition and equity and humanity. Black Boy, the title to which he agreed, is ladened with the burden of representing and depicting Wright’s own embodiment of American blackness while being simultaneously aware that his narrative might be in danger of emboldening the conception of the young Black man as a menace to society. What inoculates Wright from such a dangerous proposition is his incendiary prose and superlative style that gave the lie to the idea that Black men could not reach such artistic heights. Wright is an intriguing exemplar for these issues because his writings, from his identity position as a Black man in the US, foregrounded the rage experienced by many in the Black community. His creation of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the novel Native Son, resonates powerfully thanks to the ease with which Wright explores the nature of Black rage and racial injustice. In it, Wright takes the well-established stereotype of the Black man as a beast and savage and inverts it to explore the savagery of a society that would help create someone like Bigger Thomas at all. Because of the acceptability and permissibility of the societal conceptions of the violence-driven nature of Black men, Wright can claim the stereotype for himself—to appropriate it—and bend it to his will. If Wright had envisioned Bigger Thomas as a Black college student at the top of his class at an Ivy League university, it may have met with a publisher’s reticence because of its so-called improbability. In other words, marginalized writers must confront the issue that their literary works are held to a standard of realism and believability that majority writers often do not have to deal with. There is one more consideration concerning narrative permissibility to consider, as it relates to the emotion of the reader on behalf of the narrative world inculcated by the marginalized writer. Suzanne Keen theorized the concept of “narrative empathy,” which is the notion that specific emotions of affinity and solidarity might arise when a reader engages with a literary work—and specifically a novel. Keen states, 228

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I posit that fictional worlds provide safe zones for readers’feeling empathy without experiencing a resultant demand on real-world action. This freedom from obligation paradoxically opens up the channels for both empathy and related moral affects such as sympathy, outrage, pity, righteous indignation, and (not to be underestimated) shared joy and satisfaction. (4) Keen, in a later chapter of Empathy and the Novel, explores the situation that arises when a reader of a hegemonic identity position reads (or worldbuilds) a narrative by or about a person or community that has been historically marginalized and fails to empathize. In defining empathy, Keen states that it is “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect [that] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading” (4). Yet the identity positions of the people in question, say, the subject and the person who empathizes, must surely complicate matters of empathy. Patrick Colm Hogan identifies this problem with empathy and gives this phenomenon the term of “categorial empathy,” which is a distinct kind of empathy that operates along identity categories or groups (The Mind and Its Stories, 141). This point, which is only a part of the purview of Keen’s work, seems crucial to an understanding of the intersection of race, ethnicity, literature, and emotion. Identity position is relative, and it is a simple fact that a given person in one identity position can never truly be able to empathize—that is to say, to truly know what it is like at a level of qualia—with a distinct and different identity position. In lay terms, I, as a Latino man from the United States who grew up in Texas, can never fully understand what it is like to be a Black woman from Savannah, Georgia. Narrative empathy certainly has its limitations, even if it creates stronger bonds and affinities across cultures and identity groups. I often mention this to my students when we read so-called racial and ethnic literature, that my non-Black students can never say that they know what it is like to be a Black man in the United States after reading, say, the essay “Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin. When a white waitress refuses to serve him in a restaurant, Baldwin recounts: She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I felt I had to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands. (112) As much as we want to empathize with Baldwin here, and his compelling narrative style makes that process as easy as it might be using only words, a reader cannot truly empathize with Baldwin, to know what it’s like, unless we, too, are a Black man who has repeatedly been refused service by a White server at a restaurant. The permissibility of marginalized literatures and the empathy that is possible when reading these texts undoubtedly influence how we understand emotion in literary texts that are steeped in issues concerning race and ethnicity. Certainly, it is plausibly helpful to read narratives about the experiences of others who have different identity positions than our own, but it undoubtedly has limitations. More important, however, is having narratives written by authors of non-majority communities to help disrupt narrow conceptions and to open pathways to emotion and understanding.

Pathways to Emotion Keen’s theory of narrative empathy is a fruitful place to begin because it foregrounds the emotional transaction that often occurs between the reader and the text. Marginalized literatures 229

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have the burden of working to express the sorts of indignities and experiences of their communities to readers who may belong to the hegemony, or at least readers who have a greater degree of racial or ethnic privilege than the author of the text. Put simply, and as a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts reveals, most readers of literature generally skew as white (51.4% of readers) and from higher socioeconomic situations ($75k/year income comprised 60.8% of readers), which potentially complicate matters when the author and literary content are racial and ethnic minorities (“Reading at Risk,” 9). The reader demographic breakdown of the United States can be generally described as majority white, with non-white readerships increasing over time, albeit slowly and still at a low level relatively speaking. The same NEA report showed a “percent distribution of literary readers by ethnicity and race shows that 80 percent are white, 9 percent are African American, and 6 percent are Hispanic American” (10). As these statistics suggest, while such authors may be writing for a majority white readership, it is probable that they are writing with an audience of similar identity position in mind even if those readers are fewer in overall number. Empathy and emotional pathways, then, must operate differently depending on the identity positions of reader and author. I, for instance, may engage with a narrative by and about a Latinx man in the US in a very different way than a woman from Minsk or a man from Istanbul might. However, that does not preclude the woman from Minsk or the man from Istanbul from working to empathize with a Latinx narrative, finding shared ground, and indeed they may experience significant emotions in such a reading. But they will never be able to say with accuracy that they know what it is like to be a Latinx man in the US. Inherent in such proclamations when readers note their “understanding” of what it is like to be of a given marginalized community is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called the “danger of a single story,” wherein the story somehow becomes a heuristic for unlocking the mysteries of a given group and is then repeated. In a TED talk, Adichie relates her own experiences with the stories that she read as a child in Nigeria. She explains how most of the stories she encountered were “British and American children’s books.” And, because all of the children in the stories she consumed were “white and blue-eyed” who participated in activities foreign to a Nigerian-born child, her own efforts to create stories were populated by the kinds of things she read about—things that did not exist in her own lived reality. She later discusses how the single story of Africa is given life thanks to Western literature, one in which the African story is populated with racist, stereotypical conceptions that are wildly inaccurate but maddeningly influential to the racial and ethnic thinking of the masses (Adichie 0:36–2:07). In many ways, the single story is a model for understanding the affordances and constraints of empathy but also of how narrative permissibility functions. The propagation of the single story is an argument for its own existence and perpetuation. The single story becomes familiar to audiences and may also give comfort to and confirm prior notions majority readers may have of misrepresented groups. But because single stories have precedent and prior success, they are continually given new life even if they inflict real damage to minority groups. While certain stories have the privilege of spreading wildly like a virus, other stories that run counter to the viral single story are not nurtured in the same way. This inequitable dynamic is what Việt Thanh Nguyễn has termed narrative plenitude and scarcity, a paradigm of racial and ethnic literatures that follows a kind of economic model. I quote Nguyễn’s position at length: White Americans experience this inequity from the side of the narratively wealthy, for they control the production of stories, with literature as one key industry of memory. The airwaves and the pages are full of stories about Americans of the dominant 230

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class, discussed in all their Whitmanian diversity and individuality. And when these Americans want to know about their others, they can usually find stories they want to consume, written to cater to their expectations. But while dominant Americans exist in an economy of narrative plenitude with a surfeit of stories, their ethnic and racial others live in an economy of narrative scarcity. Fewer stories exist about them, at least ones that leave their enclaves. Not surprisingly, both the larger American public and the ethnic community then place great pressure on those few stories and those few writers who emerge to stand on the American stage. (203) Minority writers rarely enjoy narrative plenitude, which creates the conditions for a single story to be much more pervasive that it should. These conditions also help us to understand how complex are the processes involved when accounting for emotions from a racial or ethnic narrative valence and why it is that emotion as seen through this specific lens yields markedly different results that, say, majority-identified readers with narratives that concern majority communities with which the reader can easily and readily identify. The limitations and restrictions complicate any easy understandings of emotion and literature. They help make the argument that one cannot really understand how literature and the process of “worlding the story,” what David Herman calls “using textual cues or affordances to explore storyworlds” (179), can be discussed outside of the effects of race and ethnicity, which is what Herman describes as “using storyworlds to make sense of experience, and in particular the conduct of persons” or, naturally, “storying the world” (179). A reader’s ability to engage in interpretation with the capacity for empathy is a direct function of their own identity position, which will affect the reader’s emotion systems and may preclude them from deeper emotional engagements. Their identities and lived experiences simply limit access to these specific emotional triggers that can be activated in other in-group readers. Because anger has particularly pejorative and pernicious connotations associated with it, as Sue J. Kim has examined, it is unsurprising that this emotion is often associated with historically marginalized communities as a means of dismissing concerns, to ridicule, mock, or infantilize, or to discredit or raise a caveat of warning. This impulse is exactly the thing Kim warns about in her book, On Anger, when she states, “we have to be very careful about generalizing fundamental, innate, and/or universal cognitive structures based on observable human behaviors” (4). While anger may be, as Kim notes, one of the five universal emotions, it would be myopic to claim that the anger a Black woman feels, and expresses is inhabitable by a nonBlack woman. Kim emphasizes that “anger is not only physiological and cognitive but also social and historical and, therefore, ideological. Anger is not just individual but also social, collective, and historical” (6). Anger is both a collective, societal emotion and a privately shared state. It is a phenomenon that functions differently depending on the specific social contexts in which it manifests. Further, anger is racialized and weaponized in varied ways among diverse groups and communities. This idea that emotions (or at least some emotions) are at once universal and historically particular makes an understanding of how they operate vis-à-vis literature a productive area of exploration. In fact, it is easy to see why so many in cultural studies rail against the idea of the universal and universality as proposed in certain expressions of culture that are claimed to be universal. Patrick Colm Hogan, in The Mind and Its Stories, attempts to counter, if not neuter, this supposition by arguing that, indeed, there are things such as literary universals (see Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories, Chapter 1). For instance, it is a universal that all humans who ever lived spent significant time gestating in their mother’s womb or that all humans require 231

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copious amounts of breathable oxygen to stay alive. Similarly, there are literary universals that have appeared across human civilization throughout history. Nevertheless, there are clear differences in an emotion that manifests so broadly among human beings, namely, anger. The anger experienced and expressed by a Black person in the US at the news of a Black person’s death at the hands of a law enforcement officer cannot be equated to what a white person or Latinx person in the US feels at the same news. Or, as referenced earlier, a person who reads Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” cannot inhabit the same sort of outrage and anger Baldwin intimates when he is refused service in a restaurant unless the reader is a Black man. Thus, though anger is a wide category of human emotion, it is also narrowly specific. Hogan calls this an “ethical-political response,” an invitation to read within the identity position that is different from one’s own: One form of ethical—political training of sensibility comes with the practice of “reading as”—for example, reading as a woman . . . one self-consciously seeks to respond to a work from the perspective of a person in a particular group, with that group identification made salient. (Literature and Emotion 30) Any attempt to “read as” will always, necessarily, fall short because the experiences that have shaped a person who embodies a given identity position cannot be simulated by reading a given narrative, no matter how well written or compelling. This argument may help explain why there may or may not be a corresponding response to so-called real-world empathy when a text stirs empathy within a reader (see Hogan, Literature and Emotion, Chapter 7). For instance, reading a text such as Damon Young’s What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays would, in an ideal situation, give readers who are not Black men in the US some in-group context to help the reader be more empathic toward the experiences of Black men writ large. Our own anecdotal evidence, however, informs us that it is wishful thinking at best to believe that understanding, compassion, and empathy could be improved in certain groups if only the right works of literature are read. On the other hand, just because we cannot guarantee such responses every time and across the board does not mean it cannot and does not happen sometimes. Speaking of Young, I have used his memoir in essays in an undergraduate class that explored Black masculinities in the US. One of my students obstinately refused to give Young (both as implied author and as real author) any sense of understanding or empathy in her written responses to his essays, and specifically his essay titled, “Living While Black Killed My Mother.” The essay is a powerful indictment of power structures and disparities, such as those found in the US healthcare system, and Young makes the argument that his mother’s blackness precluded her from receiving the type of treatment that might have helped her Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and cancer diagnosis thanks to a white supremacist healthcare system. Among the emotions he expresses are grief, anger, bewilderment, sarcasm, and others, and his essay can easily be read as an excoriating indictment of white hegemony. When I provided feedback to my student and her written response to Young’s essay, stating that she seemed determined to bring her preconceived notions (which were hardly positive) of Black men and the Black community and instead balked at giving Young and his viewpoint any benefit of the doubt, she accused Young of being a racist, and charged that I, too, was a racist because I had included Young’s writings in my course as required readings. This student, visibly coded as white, was ill-positioned to engage with the emotions Young deploys in his essay. Intriguingly, his writings were highly effective in eliciting anger in my student, but it 232

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was anger that was in opposition to his subjective position rather than in support of or empathy for. Again, this example is a reminder of how the anger experienced by an author can be in many ways very different from the anger experienced by a reader. So crucial is the affective nature of reading narratives on race and ethnicity that one might convincingly argue that missing the emotional concerns of a novel such as, say, Toni Morrison’s Beloved—a novel that forces readers to confront the merits of infanticide in the face of the horrors of slavery—means that one has failed in the reconstruction of the narrative blueprint Morrison created. My student certainly failed to even acknowledge Young’s righteous and arguably justified anger because, in doing so, it would force her to confront many of her own ignorant viewpoints in matters of race and marginalization—a result too cognitively dissonant for her to permit. Indeed, for many readers, especially those who are triggered by topics that are generally entwined with negative emotions or, perhaps for religious, moral, or ideological reasons, reading narratives concerning race and ethnicity creates an insuperable barrier for them, as it did for my student.

Identity, Embodiment, and Emotion Stephanie Fetta has examined shame, another prominent emotion as it affects marginalized literatures. In Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature, Fetta invokes the Greek notion of the soma as “the intelligent, communicative body” and “a pervasive yet unexpected site of subjectivity, and pertinent to understanding racialization” (16). Fetta goes on to reveal a poignant anecdote about reading Piri Thomas’s autobiography Down These Mean Streets (1967) and realizing that, at some deeper level that had now become foregrounded, she was feeling the text more than she was reading it. Thomas’s somatic account of the racism he experienced, recounted as his urinating on himself due to his fear of the threats made at him by menacing Italian boys, causes Fetta to “suddenly grasp the degree of the threat [Thomas] feels” (16). Expressions of shame and the things that cause one to feel shame, particularly within a racial and ethnic context, are powerful and inexorable realities for many writers from marginalized communities. For Fetta, the process of racialization is a great contributor to the experience of shame within racialized communities, and she argues that the task of reading employs our minds in an embodied way, beginning with the most obvious—yet overlooked and underanalyzed—fact that we use our eyes to read words, but we also use our senses and other somatic faculties to process actions and images. (21) The very act of reading, per Fetta, is a corporeal, somatic experience. However, this process is, as I have argued earlier, not always a neat correspondence. Not every reader will respond to Thomas’s somatic fear in such a visceral way as Fetta. Indeed, Fetta is primed to be moved emotionally by Thomas’s account because, as she notes in the opening lines of her preface, “I write from my subject position as a Chicana woman born to a dark-skinned Chicana mother.” [. . .] “More than bloodlines or cultural ties, the pain I have suffered from somatic violence has led me, like my mother before me, to claim my Chicana identity” (10). Though she is not within the same identity intersection or categorial identity, per Hogan, that Thomas inhabits, she clearly expresses an affinity for his marginalized, as she would say, racialized status. This alignment enhances the capacity for Fetta to feel when she reads Down These Mean Streets, which to me sounds very much like empathy. 233

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In a response to Kay Young published in the journal Narrative, Robyn Warhol, who has written extensively on the intersections of gender, narrative, and emotions, summarizes her position succinctly: “There is no physiology outside of culture—or, at least, there is no place we could stand outside of culture to perceive what that physiology would feel like” (227, emphasis mine). As Warhol would have it, it is difficult for me to perceive or relate what it feels like to be a Latinx man in the US divorced from the cultural, ideological, political, and societal constructs that inform that very interpretation. This assertion may seem controversial to many narrative theorists who maintain that the reception of narratives can be observed and remarked upon in ways that ignore cultural contexts—that an embodied experience, bound to a given identity expression, can be wrenched from the very things that have worked for so long to establish the condition by which that given identity position must negotiate. Like telling a person who is paraplegic to critique their world in a manner that separates their own embodied subjectivity from their critique, it is both unfair and impossible. One final consideration before the close of this chapter, which has to do with who has permissibility to write stories about a given marginalized or racialized community. Issues concerning appropriation and cancel culture have become more prominent in the 2020s, and it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, coincided with a rise in social media. Telling the stories of those who by and large have little access to platforms where they may be heard, to literary agents and the gatekeepers of those periodicals of record such as the New Yorker and the New York Times, to the lenses of the documentarian’s camera, to the reporter’s microphone, is an endeavor fraught with exquisite and frustrating difficulties. Undocumented peoples in the United States, by way of example, many of whom do not speak English as their first language, are largely an invisible class of exploitable workers, though in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, suddenly found themselves exalted in the media, hailed as “essential workers.” If these people—these fellow human beings—do not have the chance or ability to tell their stories in their own way, how then do we give their narratives amplitude and reach and engage with them? And how do we do so without detracting, caricaturing, simplifying, and stereotyping? How do we do it without ventriloquizing into maudlin sentimentalism? The short answer is that it is near impossible to do successfully. There will always be someone to criticize even the best of intentions of getting out such stories. The example of Jeanine Cummins (who does not identify as Latinx) and her novel American Dirt, the Oprah’s Book Club selection for 2020 and a New York Times bestseller despite the controversy that her book has purportedly plagiarized the works of author Luis Alberto Urrea and reveled in base, cartoonish stereotypes, emphasized the problem of who gets to tell certain stories. In an interview with journalist Maria Hinojosa, all of this was brought to light (Hinojosa, “Digging”). As a result, books about refugees and the undocumented are now under greater scrutiny, deservedly so. Yes, it matters who tells another, lesser privileged group’s story. Yes, it helps to have a personal connection with the group. Yes, it helps to spend significant, substantive time with the group whose story you will ultimately profit from—both monetarily and career-wise. And even if you manage to tic all the right boxes, you still must prepare for the scrutiny to come. Did you appropriate? Did you exploit? Did you commodify? All these questions and considerations matter when it comes to race and ethnic representations in literature and the emotions with which they engage.

Conclusion Emotion and affect are ingrained in literary works that arise from subjective identity positions shaped and marginalized by hegemonic forces that help construct conceptions of race and 234

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ethnicity. The stakes of such literary expressions are consequential, for they go a long way in allowing racist and stereotypical caricatures to be born and to persist for decades if not centuries. Getting these works published may be an insurmountable task for many marginalized writers, a longstanding legacy of the thin strips of permissible narratives available to them. The emotions that often impel and motivate authors from marginalized communities to write in the first place are the fruits of frustration and anger and resentment, and they tend to lay out uncomfortable truths about a given society and nation. As such, these works may be an affront to a reader who belongs to the hegemony that is criticized in a given work. Above all, there is not always alignment of emotions when a reader is presented with a narrative written by and about a different identity position than their own. Narrative empathy is likely a slippery slope, but it is perhaps the best path for positive, lasting engagements with literatures that help form a tradition of literary examination of race and ethnicity.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of the Single Story.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, July 2009, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. With a New Introduction by Edward P. Jones, Beacon Press, 2012. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 139, 1989. Cummins, Jeanine. American Dirt. Flatiron Books, 2020. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. Norton, 1999. Fetta, Stephanie. Shaming Into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature. Ohio State UP, 2018. González, Christopher. Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature. Ohio State UP, 2017. Herman, David. “Approaches to Narrative Worldmaking.” Doing Narrative Research, edited by Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire, and Maria Tamboukou, 2nd ed., Sage, 2013, pp. 176–196. Hinojosa, Maria. “Digging Into American Dirt.” 30 Jan. 2020, www.latinousa.org/2020/01/29/ americandirt/. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2018. ———. The Mind and Its Stories. Cambridge UP, 2003. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Child: Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin, Harvard UP, 2000. Jones, Trina, and Kimberly Jade Norwood. “Aggressive Encounters & White Fragility: Deconstructing the Trope of the Angry Black Woman.” Iowa Law Review, vol. 102, no. 5, 2016, pp. 2017–2070. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007. Kim, Sue J. On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative. U of Texas P, 2013. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage, 1987. Nguyễn, Việt Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Harvard UP, 2016. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. National Endowment for the Arts, 2004. Thomas, Piri. Down These Mean Streets. Knopf, 1967. Warhol, Robyn R. “Physiology, Gender, and Feeling: On Cheering Up.” Narrative, vol. 12, no. 2, 2004, pp. 226–229. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. 75th Anniversary ed., Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2020. Young, Damon. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays. Ecco, 2019. Zack, Naomi. “Introduction to Part VII.” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, Oxford UP, 2017.

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20 SEXUALITY Tifany Diana Ball

Abstract: What does affect theory bring to queer readings of literature, particularly by unseating the prominence of the libido in definitions of sexuality? How does a focus on affect question some of the key parameters of queer theory, including its antinormativity, anti-essentialism, and commitment to post-structuralism? And how does affect shape the way we think about and make sexual knowledge? Focusing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel, this chapter considers how the affective turn in queer studies can be characterized as a move from discourse to phenomenology, from questions about sexual identity to questions about attachment both within our objects of study and within queer theory’s own methodological relationship to its objects of study. It argues that attention to affect pulls us out of familiar binaries we use for knowing sexuality and deepens queer theory’s sexual literacy.

Queer theory privileges the indeterminate and the incoherent, especially when it comes to sex, gender, and sexuality. It grew out of post-structuralist, feminist, and antihomophobic inquiry and activism to critique the stability of identity categories, historicize modern forms of sexual orientation, and denaturalize the modern experience of sexuality. Since its academic genesis in the early 1990s, queer theory has become known for its stance against gender and sexual normativity and essentialism, extending its anti-identitarian reach to other areas of interdisciplinary analysis including but not limited to race, ability, class, and the human.1 Given queer theory’s fidelity to subverting metanarratives and circumventing “proper” disciplinary objects and methods of inquiry, I approach this account of the “affective turn” in queer studies with some trepidation. Queer theory has taught me to be suspicious of origins, to question the usefulness of canons, and to expose the hidden assumptions of keywords like sexuality, emotion, and literature. Even setting aside these deconstructionist impulses, I can think of several compelling ways to approach the story of queer theory’s relationship to affect, including but not limited to (1) a review of work on gay shame and other “bad” or “backward” affects that have defined the queer affective turn toward negativity or the anti-social thesis;2 (2) a consideration of the relationship between and the “defensive separation of sex from friendship,” focused on the history of emotions such as love, rivalry, and envy; (3) a focus on how gender does or does not drop out of queer analysis, considering the “gendering of propriety, emotion, and sensibility”; or (4) an essay on how trans studies challenges queer/feminist paradigms of the body and materiality through phenomenological methods (Traub 95; 97).3 DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-24

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Considering the definitional slipperiness of both “affect” and “queer,” the possibilities are myriad. With these caveats in mind, I approach this chapter not with a strong theory about the relationship between sexuality, affect, and literature but with some key questions that I’ll pursue. What does affect theory bring to our queer readings of literature, particularly by unseating the prominence of the libido in definitions of sexuality? How does a focus on affect question some of the key parameters of queer theory outlined earlier, including its antinormativity, antiessentialism, and commitment to post-structuralism? And how does affect shape the way we think about and make sexual knowledge? Overall, I use this chapter to show how the affective turn in queer studies can be characterized as a move from discourse to phenomenology, from questions about sexual identity to questions about attachment both within our objects of study and within queer theory’s own methodological relationship to its objects of study. To make these points, I’ll focus on the academic work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and responses to it because Sedgwick usefully illustrates these changes and is one compelling place to locate the beginning of queer theory’s affective turn. ... In her introduction to Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), Sedgwick records several motivations for placing affect theory in conversation with queer theory and queer literary studies.4 One reason is that Sedgwick wants to emphasize the role that emotion plays in making sexuality move. A definition of “sexuality” that has been influential in Western culture is crystallized by Sigmund Freud’s notion that sexuality is part of the drive system, like hunger or thirst. This serves to naturalize sexuality as innate, biological, and the “truth of human motivation, identity, and emotion” (Sedgwick 17–18). Within this framework, affect is secondary to this drive and results from the expression or repression of libidinal energy. Under the assumed primacy of the libido, Sedgwick quips, “The nature or quality of the affect itself, seemingly, is not of much more consequence than the color of the airplane used to speed a person to a destination” (18). For Sedgwick, affect theory, specifically that of Silvan Tomkins, is an impactful tool for undoing this hierarchical positioning and for recognizing, as Tomkins did, that sexuality is the least drive-like of the drives due to its lack of object, aim, and time constraints. To put it in layman’s terms, people are “turned on” by various things (other people, shoes, the Eiffel Tower), want to do various things with those objects (orgasm, hold hands, tie them up, choke them), and don’t necessarily need to have sex every day, every year, or even every lifetime. This stands in stark contrast to the human drives to sleep, breathe, defecate, and urinate.5 Of course, Sedgwick and Tomkins aren’t the only ones to critique the psychoanalytic mythology of the sex drive. Questioning the relevance of the libido for understanding the complexity of human sexuality was an early intervention made by radical forms of sexuality studies in the humanities and social sciences. Discussing the need for constructivist accounts of sexuality within her influential essay “Thinking Sex” (1984), Gayle Rubin writes, This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms. Human organisms with human brains are necessary for human cultures, but no examination of the body or its parts can explain the nature and variety of human social systems. The belly’s hunger gives no clues as to the complexities of cuisine. (146–7)6 237

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Rubin’s comparison of sexuality to hunger emphasizes the need for attention to human motivation, varieties of satisfaction, object choice, and cultural/historical context when it comes to both eating and having sex. However, Rubin allows for sexuality as a historical, cultural, and biological object of study, thus, lacking the “antibiologism” that Sedgwick locates in many accounts of gender, sexuality, and the body in queer/gender theory after post-structuralism (101). In the wake of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (1976) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), the central insight of much theory is the “exposure of residual forms of essentialism,” so much so that “theory” as a body of knowledge becomes synonymous with anti-essentialism (Sedgwick 8). Within queer theory, Sedgwick argues, sexuality retains the same explanatory power it has in Freud’s account of human sexual life, this time not as a drive but as a human-constructed, language-produced disciplinary system that governs bodies, identities, and pleasures in the modern era. To put it simply, if Freud says sexuality is natural and omnipresent, his detractors sought to argue that sexuality is omnipresent but not natural. In contrast to this trend, Sedgwick’s move toward affect can be thought of as a move away from antibiologism in queer theory, though she is careful to state that she does not mean to “devalue such critical practices” as anti-essentialism (8). Her focus on touch and texture in several chapters of Touching Feeling offers an alternative to the explanatory supremacy of language, a change from her analysis of discourse in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) to a focus on phenomenology and experience. This is a turn toward the body and an argument for adding “qualitative” nuance to our understanding of the bonds between people (18); it emphasizes that which cannot be explained fully by recourse to power structures and the disciplinary quality of sexual identity categories. It is also an argument for attending to the emotional valences of our sexual lives, the way that affects like shame, interest, and disgust play primary roles in our attachment. However, Sedgwick’s affective turn is not an abandonment of her earlier work. If the affective turn in queer theory marks a methodological and theoretical shift from “Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic models of the subject” that were de rigueur when queer theory was born to “looser, more descriptive accounts” of embodied experiences, those investments are present at least as early as Epistemology of the Closet (Love, interviewed by Chinn 126). Across Sedgwick’s career, she valued what she called “particularity”: the human individuality that large-scale discursive categories of identity fail to fully capture (Epistemology 23). One of her often-quoted axioms in Epistemology, “People are different from each other,” is an unpretentious statement in favor of human sexual variation that deconstructs the boundary between homo- and heterosexuality and captures queer theory’s interest in anti-identitarian modes of thinking, being, and reading. Sedgwick supplies a lengthy list of differences between people that do not depend on our usual “crucial axes of difference” such as “gender, race, nationality, class, and ‘sexual orientation’” (25). This list of “nonce taxonomies” includes differences in the meanings that people attach to sex, the strength of attachment to having sex, and what people simply “like”: “Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none,” and “Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do” (25). If Sedgwick is deconstructing our assumptions here about sexuality as primarily defined by differences in object choice, she is also offering what I would call a phenomenological account of the affective life of sex. These descriptions occasionally “rub up” against norms, structural discourses, and power differentials. “Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none,” for instance, calls to mind the recent emergence of asexuality as a publicly available identity category or the pathologization of women’s “frigidity” in mid-century America. But such a list extends from the confidence that people can be trusted to 238

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produce knowledge about individual experiences of sex, sexuality, and gender, something that both psychoanalysis and post-structuralism distrust.7 Sedgwick’s list also gestures toward the way that phenomenological work tropes on and values the “ordinary” or the “everyday.” These terms get at the parts of sexual life that cannot be solely accounted for in terms of power, discourse, or norms; life is sometimes lived in excess of these explanations. Although Sedgwick relies on deconstruction as her methodology, she simultaneously criticizes how deconstruction as a theory has “fetishized the idea of difference” and, in doing so, “vaporized its possible embodiments” (22). We shouldn’t just say that people are different from each other but rather elaborate on precisely how they are so. Not to mention how they might be similar. Sedgwick locates these phenomenological descriptions of differences within literature, art, and culture. She mentions the work of Marcel Proust and Henry James as places to seek nonce taxonomies, to find “the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world” (Epistemology 23). While some nondualistic queer literary readings have focused on finding the homoerotic at the heart of the heteronormative or otherwise questioning the coherence of identity and sexual orientation, affective differences also offer a way to understand attachment alongside familiar identity taxonomies organized around the relevance or irrelevance of gender. For instance, consider the case of the sapphic literary explosion in modernism that clustered around the year 1928 in the UK and includes, amongst other texts, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel.8 Many readers have considered these novels in terms of their relationship to the “emergence” of lesbianism as an available public category of modern sexual identity, emphasizing the way that lesbianism as a literary device and psychoanalytic case study tropes on “insignificance, unaccountability, invisibility, and inconsequence” (Traub 10).9 These are important anti-homophobic analyses that emphasize the power dynamics and discursive (im)possibilities that structure lesbian identification and public culture. However, to talk about, for instance, The Hotel primarily in terms of Freudian developmental “stuckness,” libidinal blockage, or even as a text about trauma is to overlook the novel’s smaller-scale representation of affect, specifically the everyday difficulties of attachment and its importance for sustaining queer life.10 The novel focuses on the relationship between Sydney Warren and the widow Mrs. Kerr, who comes across as a complicated combination of lover/teacher/mother to the younger Sydney. Vacationing at the same hotel on the Italian Riviera, they seem pretty into each other at the beginning of the novel, spending rainy days together that remind Sydney of couples “living . . . for one another” in “Russian plays,” but then Mrs. Kerr’s son Ronald shows up, causing Sydney to feel neglected (Bowen 64). Mrs. Kerr finally makes some time for Sydney, taking her out for cake one afternoon, but it goes sour. The conversation becomes increasingly heated and obscure as Mrs. Kerr implies that (1) Sydney has been acting childish, (2) Sydney has a crush on Ronald, (3) Sydney and Ronald should either get married or be “friends,” and (4) Sydney has misread their attachment as being Mrs. Kerr’s priority. Sydney leaves the pâtisserie in a tailspin that Patricia Juliana Smith calls a “lesbian panic” or “the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character—or, conceivably, an author—is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire” (569). Read at a structural level, this interpretation makes sense given the “impossibility” of lesbianism within heteronormative marriage plots and developmental discourses like psychoanalysis. But do structural explanations like lesbian panic, particularly its emphasis on identity and signification, obscure other explanations? Read for smaller-scale differences in affect and attachment, Bowen gives us a scene of breakup and its emotional upheaval. In short, Sydney is upset because Mrs. Kerr has just 239

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dumped her: “You see, I’m so fond of you, but . . . . There is nothing else there. . . . Perhaps I am cold” (133–4). To let Sydney down easy and fault her own lack of emotional availability, Mrs. Kerr seems to be saying, “It’s not you. It’s me.” After this, Sydney runs back to the hotel in a post-break up affective soup of shock, denial, and humiliation, looking “distracted, mechanical, and at a standstill,” and asks if Milton, whom she was disinterested in before, wants to marry her (139). To put it in everyday affective parlance, I smell a rebound and so does Mrs. Kerr, who later informs Milton that Sydney is just using him to get over her, calling it a “pat little retaliation” (156). It is true that sometimes we break up with people because of existential or structural reasons. We cannot come to terms with our nonnormative desires. We don’t want to deal with the problems presented by the homophobic world that surrounds us. Sometimes we break up because the world lacks the interpersonal and/or imaginative infrastructure for building and maintaining a relationship; it is difficult to imagine Bowen ending her 1928 novel with Mrs. Kerr and Sydney marrying each other (though, of course, there were numerous real life queer couples who cohabited such as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas). Other times, however, we break up with people for interpersonal reasons, perhaps because we don’t share their idea of what an attachment should look like. During their breakup scene, Mrs. Kerr tells Sydney, “You’ve expected much more of me, and . . . I’ve been taking and taking without so much as a glance ahead or a single suspicion of what you would want to have back” (133–4). Mrs. Kerr tends to speak in elliptical sentences worthy of a Henry James villainess, but this seems to point clearly to a lack of balance and synchronicity in their relationship. Sydney expects a monopoly on Mrs. Kerr’s time. Even before Ronald shows up, Sydney is already envious of anyone that Mrs. Kerr likes, wishing to erase “the friends of her friend” so that they can exist in an exclusive community of two (18). Read through the framework of attachment, Sydney doesn’t seem like she is looking for (or repressing) an identity or sexual desire; she is looking for a girlfriend, a constant companion with whom she can share a world and feel a sense of belonging. In contrast, Mrs. Kerr prefers the looser, more diffuse affective bond crystalized by “liking”: “It had always seemed to me simple to like people and right to be liked” (134).11 This is a difference in attachment, a Sedgwickian “nonce taxonomy” for understanding the different ways people organize their intimate lives. Some people like to spend lots of time with their partners; others prefer to maintain some distance and cultivate looser bonds. This type of affect-focused reading of queer bonds further enables a deconstruction of our usual methods for categorizing sexuality, a move away from the importance of gender in defining “sexual orientation.” We could divide Mrs. Kerr and Sydney along these lines of attachment dissimilarity rather than emphasize the similarity of their represented gender or imagined biological sex. Given the limited availability of lesbian or “female invert” as a public category of identification, this might be more historically in sync with the way that people organized their everyday sexual lives in the early twentieth century.12 An affective focus also enables thinking about narrative and genre. The Hotel has been categorized as a modernist bildungsroman, which, telling stories of “frozen youth,” emphasizes “failure” and “impasse” instead of mastery, development, and truth (Esty 2). But to emphasize failure is to overlook the ready-at-hand lessons that Sydney gains from her tumultuous relationship with Mrs. Kerr. While Bowen’s novel doesn’t end with a marriage or “sexual closure,” it illustrates how Sydney has, in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s phrase, grown “sideways,” which is the way that queer children and young adults develop contrary to normative developmental pathways (Esty 3; Stockton 11). By emphasizing the trials of gaining emotional competencies, we can see The Hotel and other novels like it as sexual literacy narratives. Rather than equate knowledge with mastery 240

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or development with the “achievement” of identity, sexual literacy narratives are about our capacity to “read” (understand, interpret, and reflect upon) all areas of sexual life, including but not limited to attachment styles, desires, fantasies, and emotions.13 Sexual literacies enable queer survival, emphasizing the skills and competencies necessary for “good enough” erotic lives rather than the narrative drive toward finding out sexual secrets and identity truths.14 While The Hotel affirms Sydney’s suffering at the hands of Mrs. Kerr, Bowen also foregrounds how Sydney develops affective competences through the process of their breakup. At the beginning of the novel, Sydney struggles with what neuroscientists call Theory of Mind and what Bowen calls “imagination” or “sympathy”: Sydney “was accustomed to stare at people. . . . They had thoughts, too (with these she often forgot to credit them)” (21). Her breakup and Mrs. Kerr’s explanation of her personal perspective on their relationship, however, is an effective lesson in understanding that other people have mental and affective lives, though like many important lessons it takes some time to sink in. By the end of the novel, Sydney breaks off her engagement with Milton because she “understand[s]” that their marriage would not work and returns a “pile of books” to Mrs. Kerr, signifying that their pedagogical relationship has come to an end (182; 190). She thanks Mrs. Kerr for her affective lessons: “If there’s one thing one might hope to learn from you it would be to be sickened and turned cold by cruelty and unfairness. . . . I am very grateful to you; you have done a great deal for me” (191–2). Although it seems that Sydney is still bitter about the breakup, she talks about her relationship with Mrs. Kerr in terms of suffering and affect theory. Sydney has learned that “people are different from each other.” If sexual literacy enables queer survival, what exactly does this queer world of survival look like? If we permit ourselves the pleasure of thinking “outside” Bowen’s text, we might imagine that Sydney went off with her new-found sexual literacy to find a girlfriend (or maybe a boyfriend) better suited to her or maybe she learned a lesson about giving other people “space.” Although she didn’t get exactly what she seemed to want, an exclusive intimacy with Mrs. Kerr, she also managed to avoid what she knew that she didn’t want, being married to Milton: “Nothing will ever crystalize out of our being together; not so much as a notion” (91). And sometimes when it comes to the difficulties and confusions of sexual knowledge, knowing what you or your partner doesn’t want can be a real boon. Overall, what I’ve learned from both reading sexual literacy narratives like Bowen’s novel and from being a person in the world with a commitment to fostering queer life is this: it takes much more to create queer worlds of survival than simply knowing the “truth” of your identity or desire. There are many more things to know. Just to name a few: how to make sustainable attachments, how to be open-minded about difference, what kind of sex you want to have (or don’t want to have), when you want to have sex (or not), when you want to be alone and when you want to be together, how to sustain love over time and place. What’s so terrible and exhilarating about this aspect of sexual knowledge, its phenomenological contours rather than its discursive existence, is that your desires and attachments are contingent, relational, and social. Just because Sydney wants to be with Mrs. Kerr all the time doesn’t mean that she will want to be with someone else all the time; if she only wanted that, Milton would have made a pretty good partner. She might even find that she’s turned off by the very idea of people who would want to be with her all the time. She seems to like, at least somewhat, the thrill and drama of wanting someone who doesn’t always want her. Sexual literacy, thus, doesn’t just involve the contents of knowledge—how to avoid pregnancy, disease, knowledge of positions, various affects—it also involves what Valerie Traub has called “the cognitive, affective, and bodily competences to experience and enjoy sex; the possession of a toolbox of concepts available to handle sexual questions, frustrations, and crises; and the cognitive capacity to think about and 241

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reflect critically upon those experiences” (306). While the “text” you are “reading” is bound to change, being sexually literate can give you the proficiency to “read” it and tolerate discomfort, distress, trauma, and pleasure. In so emphasizing Sydney’s feelings and her lessons in attachment from Mrs. Kerr, I am underscoring the importance of the affective contents of sexual literacy.15 I am also drawing on reading methods that place affect and cognition side-by-side in order to resist the occasional separation of affect from epistemology in definitions that refer to affect as somehow “precognitive.” As Sedgwick turned her attention to the emotional bonds in literature, this shift to affect also provoked methodological questions about the attachments between literary critics and their objects of analysis. In a metacritical turn, Sedgwick outlines what she calls paranoid reading and reparative reading, a designation that has inspired much discussion and debate concerning the emotional life of scholarship and literary critical methodologies.16 Paranoid reading cultivates or stems from suspicion toward one’s objects of analysis and tends to seek out unsavory power dynamics, exposing and demystifying systemic oppression in the name of unpleasant truths. (Think, for instance, as Sedgwick does, of how Judith Butler’s pervasive concept of gender performativity emphasizes the way that language/discourse creates gendered subjects.) Sedgwick is not advocating an abandonment of these kinds of paranoid reading practices nor is she saying that paranoid reading doesn’t offer access to important forms of knowledge. Her point is that paranoid reading doesn’t have to be our only method because paranoia “knows some things well and others poorly” (130). In seeking out other affective motivations for queer methodology, Sedgwick proposes reparative reading, which involves loving and caring for one’s objects of analysis. One of the thickest descriptions of this methodology appears in the essay “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes” (2011), in which Sedgwick discusses the differences between Freud’s drive-oriented vision of human motivation and Klein’s more affect-laden description. Freud’s scene of object relations grows out of a fantasy of a human infant desirous of total control over their environment and every object within it. When the Freudian infant realizes that they cannot sustain this omnipotence, “everything after that is the big, disillusioning letdown called reality” (130). The Freudian infant uses defense mechanisms, primarily repression, to cope with this disillusionment because the central power struggle is between an individual and the outside world—families, bosses, governments, state power, the police. Klein doesn’t dismiss repression. These are real power struggles, but for Klein, there are internal struggles within the infant because “bad” affects complicate the infant’s initial power grabs. Thus, we develop coping mechanisms other than repression to externalize these “bad affects” and occupy what Klein calls the paranoid position. An infant in the paranoid position cannot tolerate ambivalence—everything must be either good or bad—and any bad object must be projected outside the self onto someone or something else. Sedgwick-via-Klein says, however, that one can also learn to inhabit a depressive or reparative position. The reparative position is the state in which the subject can realize that good and bad are foundational to one another. This is the position from which one can “repair” the self, take the various objects and incorporate them into a “compromised” whole. The key, then, to Sedgwick’s reparative reading, as it is built from her own generous reading of Klein, is the ability to sustain ambivalence when confronting an object of desire, whether that be a text, a person, or a world. While some readers have seen Sedgwick’s reparation as “envision(ing) the possibility of a universe of good,” Lauren Berlant points out that Sedgwick’s reparative reading is “training in being in the room with . . . ambivalence” (Berlant and Edelman 58; 61). So, while repair commonly means to fix or mend and Sedgwick emphasizes positive emotions like joy, it is actually the case that this ambivalent reading practice enables mixed feelings in scene of object relations. 242

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Many have taken up Sedgwick’s call for different types of reading. One of the most interesting aspects of her critique, however, is how she accentuates the role that emotion plays in knowing. As a “theory of negative affects,” she writes, paranoia feels true because it feels painful but “disavows its affective motive” to look like truth without affect; in contrast, it is “inconceivable to imagine joy as a guarantor of truth” (Touching Feeling 138). This phenomenological description of knowledge production questions the body/mind distinction we might make between affect and epistemology, placing feelings at the crux of scholarly work and prompting an investigation of attachment in the scene of intellectual rigor. Some readers have seen Sedgwick’s affect work as “antiepistemological”—even Sedgwick herself perpetuates this narrative of her career trajectory in Touching Feeling—but the phenomenological aspect of her account of knowledge is a place where the felt and the known rub up against each other (Wiegman, “Eve’s Triangles” 259).17 The point here isn’t that knowledge is subjective but that attending to the affective stakes of reading enables us to see our own historical moment as affectively laden, thus, allowing us to diversify the emotional impact our theory is supposed to have. So, while Sedgwick is offering other methods for queer theory, her metacritical attention to the way we do textual analysis likewise opens opportunities for thinking historically about queer theory as a field. Where are we now, some 30 years after “Thinking Sex,” Epistemology of the Closet, Gender Trouble, and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality? Obviously, that is a question of some scope and cannot be answered here, but Robyn Wiegman argues that queer inquiry has made “antinormativity the single most resonant feature of the field’s depiction of its own political, critical, and epistemological achievements” (“Eve’s Triangles” 244). To be queer, to do queer work, is to position oneself against norms—heteronormativity, homonormativity, even the “familiar disciplinary protocols that would designate proper objects of study and methodological guarantees” (244).18 Wiegman’s work historicizes the radicality of this antinormative positioning and, in so doing, questions the “ahistorical presumption that [normativity itself ] is always regressive and constraining—in short, that it is always politically bad” (248). Wiegman and others have started the project of thinking queer theory without antinormativity, but it seems that one avenue would be attention to antinormativity as an affective position as well as an epistemological one. What would an affective history of queer theory as a field look like? Wiegman notes that many readers erroneously date Sedgwick’s affective turn to later than it occurred, which Wiegman locates in a four-page introduction to a special issue of Studies in the Novel (1996) and then more fully in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997).19 This longer account of reparative reading was later revised and used as the introduction to Touching Feeling, the version that scholars interested in the reading debates typically cite. Sedgwick herself dates her move away from paranoia to reparation in personal terms that are simultaneously publicly oriented and historically salient. She says that a “nodal point” in her thought was the summer of 1996, when news from the Eleventh International AIDS Conference in Vancouver indicated for the first time that for many, HIV could plausibly be treated as a chronic disease through the use of cocktails of newly developed drugs. The brutally abbreviated temporality of the lives of woman and men with HIV seemed suddenly, radically extended if not normalized. (“The Difference” 138) This moment of grace for some people living with HIV changed Sedgwick’s “affective framework,” meaning that reparative reading grew out of a personal response to historical change. 243

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Though some might question the usefulness of reparative reading due to its lack of objectivity or its idiosyncrasy, Sedgwick’s account of its genesis comes out of a moment of tuning in to public feelings and changes in the “infrastructures of belonging” for queer people in the United States (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 27). Reparation as a methodological practice grew out of the historical feeling that there might be something salvageable for queers in this world, that there were public health systems that cared to sustain queer life, after living with the paranoia bred from the horror of AIDS and the US government’s (non)response. Overall, then, affect has been with queer theory from the start. Attention to affect furthers what early work in queer theory has already done for us, pulling us out of the familiar binaries we use for knowing sexuality—men and women, hetero and homo, straight and gay, queer and normative—but the difference affect makes is that it attempts to describe what is happening when we fall out of ready-at-hand dynamics of power. Affect is also useful for pushing against the more entrenched aspects of queer theory—its antinormativity, antibiologism, and adherence to the power of language. It can help us to think about our emotional bonds to our cognitive work, locating these bonds in both history and the present. In short, affect expands the sexual literacy of queerness.

Notes 1 For an overview of queer theory’s institutional history, methodological commitments, and contributions to thinking about sex, gender, and sexuality, see Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction. Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons offers a critique of queer theory’s commitment to antinormativity and an overview of the field. Some people date the anti-identitarian foundations of queer theory earlier than 1990 with Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. For example, see David Halperin’s Saint Foucault. 2 For a helpful review of queer negativity, see Wen Liu’s “Queer Theory and the Affective Turn.” 3 Valerie Traub’s Thinking Sex With the Early Moderns has a list of themes in queer historiography from which I draw two of these ideas. Notable texts that focus on literature, homosociality, and friendship include Eve Sedgwick, Between Men; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men; Alan Bray, The Friend; and Sharon Marcus, Between Women. For a consideration of trans studies and materiality, see Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon. 4 Sedgwick first published her work on Silvan Tomkins with Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters, in 1995. I am using the 2003 version because it is the most recent and often referenced when discussing queer theory’s affective turn. 5 For a full discussion of this, see Sedgwick’s introduction to Touching Feeling. 6 I am grateful to Joseph Gamble for reminding me of this moment in Rubin’s essay. 7 For a critique of the transparency of experience, see Joan Scott’s “The Evidence of Experience.” 8 See Susan Lanser’s “1928: Sapphic Modernity and the Sexuality of History” for a full list of lesbian novels published in 1928. 9 For literary studies of lesbianism’s lack of signifying power, see Annamarie Jagose’s Inconsequence and Valerie Rohy’s Impossible Women. 10 Maud Ellmann’s Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page provides one of the most provocative readings of Bowen’s first novel and suggests that The Hotel is about desire’s failure. She argues that Bowen characterizes Sydney as “a living embodiment of impasse,” an observation that speaks to both the irresolution of the novel’s close and the sense that something is wrong with Sydney (71). 11 For a book-length consideration of “liking,” see Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol. 12 See Laura Doan’s Fashioning Sapphism for a history of the emergence of lesbian as a public identity. 13 On sexual literacy narratives, see Jonathan Alexander’s Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy. On the need for better forms of sexual justice, see Joseph Fischel’s Screw Consent. 14 I take this phrasing of “good enough erotic lives” from Valerie Traub’s Thinking Sex With the Early Moderns (306). 15 Joseph Gamble’s “How to Do the History of Homoeroticism” in his book-manuscript-in-progress, Sex Lives of the Early Moderns, likewise explores what he calls the “affective literacy” necessary for attaining “a good sexual life” (11; 2).

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Sexuality 16 For example, see Heather Love’s Feeling Backward and Rita Felski’s “After Suspicion.” 17 Ramzi Fawaz likewise notes that “Sedgwick sees feelings as genuine sources of knowledge, as places where we might intuit something about ourselves and the world in which we live that traditional mode of humanistic inquiry would ignore or overlook as mere subjective experience” (26). 18 By “antinormativity,” I mean that queer theory has set itself against regulatory regimes and “domineering social practices” that reproduce structures of power (Wiegman and Wilson 11). Of course, it is impossible to be against all norms, so the antinormativity of queer theory is limited. For instance, Wiegman and Wilson discuss how antinormativity has itself become a norm within queer theory in “Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” breaking down the use of the term “norm” within queer theory and considering other possible definitions. 19 See Wiegman’s account in “The Times We’re In.”

Works Cited Alexander, Jonathan. Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies. Utah State UP, 2008. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. ———, and Lee Edelman. “What Survives.” Reading Sedgwick, edited by Lauren Berlant, Duke UP, 2019, pp. 37–62. Bowen, Elizabeth. The Hotel. 1928. U of Chicago P, 2012. Bray, Alan. The Friend. U of Chicago P, 2003. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Chinn, Sarah E. “Queer Feelings/Feeling Queer: A Conversation with Heather Love about Politics, Teaching, and the ‘Dark, Tender Thrills’ of Affect.” Transformations, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 124–131. Doan, Laura. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. Columbia UP, 2001. Ellmann, Maud. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh UP, 2003. Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford UP, 2011. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. Morrow, 1981. Fawaz, Ramzi. “‘An Open Mesh of Possibilities’: The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times.” Reading Sedgwick, edited by Lauren Berlant, Duke UP, 2019, pp. 6–33. Felski, Rita. “After Suspicion.” Profession, 2009, pp. 28–35. Fischel, Joseph J. Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice. U of California P, 2019. Flatley, Jonathan. Like Andy Warhol. U of Chicago P, 2017. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990. Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. Routledge, 1990. ———. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford UP, 1995. Jagose, Annamarie. Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence. Cornell UP, 2002. ———. Queer Theory: An Introduction. ‎New York UP, 1996. Lanser, Susan. “1928: Sapphic Modernity and the Sexuality of History.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, vol. 1, no. 3, 2016, doi:10.26597/mod.0016. Accessed 11 August 2021. Liu, Wen. “Feeling Down, Backward, and Machinic: Queer Theory and the Affective Turn.” Athenea Digital, vol. 20, no. 2., 2020, https://atheneadigital.net/article/view/v20-2-liu. Accessed 11 August 2021. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard UP, 2007. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007. Rohy, Valerie. Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature. Cornell UP, 2000. Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Duke UP, 2011, pp. 137–181. Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia UP, 2010. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 4, 1991, pp. 773–797. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985.

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Tifany Diana Ball ———. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. U of California P, 2008. ———. “Melanie Klein and The Difference Affect Makes.” The Weather in Proust, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Duke UP, 2011. ———, and Adam Frank. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003. ———, and Irving E. Alexander. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Duke UP, 1995. Smith, Patricia Juliana. “‘And I Wondered If She Might Kiss Me’: Lesbian Panic as Narrative Strategy in British Women’s Fictions.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 41, nos. 3/4, 1995, pp. 567–607. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke UP, 2009. Traub, Valerie. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. Wiegman, Robyn. “Eve’s Triangles: Queer Studies Beside Itself.” Reading Sedgwick, edited by Lauren Berlant, Duke UP, 2019, pp. 243–273. ———. Object Lessons. Duke UP, 2012. ———. “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative ‘Turn.’” Feminist Theory, vol. 15, no. 1, 2014, pp. 4–25. ———, and Elizabeth A. Wilson. “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions.” Differences, vol. 26, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–25.

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21 TRAUMA AND ITS FUTURE Revisiting Aesthetic Debates About Trauma E. Ann Kaplan

Abstract: This chapter challenges prior Trauma Studies’ predelections regarding which aesthetic style is most appropriate for representing traumatic experiences. Following Cathy Caruth’s pioneering post-structuralist research, avant-garde, experimental, and indirect modalities were said to best convey trauma in literature and film. I’ll argue that this insistence on indirection speaks only to certain trauma phenomena, leaving aside the realist narrative modes through which trauma clinicians address their patients’ traumatic events. But in an attempt to move beyond what looks like an unhelpful binary (i.e., indirection/realism), I turn to a genre not much theorized by trauma scholars, namely graphic narrative. Despite the work on Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which inspired other comics dealing with weighty subjects, the vast possibilities for graphic narrative to represent trauma have not been sufficiently studied. After briefly rehearsing what is unique about comics as an aesthetic form for trauma, I offer a close reading of Alison Bechdel’s second graphic nonfiction, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. I argue that being able to move easily between indirection (relying on objects in the background of panels to provide meaning) and the realist strategies of a therapeutic narrative, offered by the heroine’s therapists, provides a way out of the familiar trauma binary. Arguably, the heroine’s ability to work through the traumas hindering her life from moving forward was achieved via combining indirection and realism.

Trauma Studies in the Humanities emerged at a propitious moment in the mid 1990s. The confluence of public concern about Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome in Vietnam War Veterans, an awareness that Holocaust survivors, whose testimonies needed recording, were rapidly aging, increasing revelations about sexual abuse, and later the devastating catastrophe of 9/11, all alerted especially literature and cinema studies scholars to a need to explore Trauma, long theorized and discussed by psychologists and psychoanalysts. The teaming up of literary scholars and psychoanalysts at Yale University provided the spark that gave rise to Humanities Trauma Theory at a moment when the “high theory” of the 1980s had perhaps become uncomfortably abstract (see Kaplan, 2005:24–41). Cathy Caruth’s influential edited volume (1995) brought to humanists the fruit of collaborations at Yale between Post-Structuralist scholars (herself, Geoffrey Hartman, and Shoshana Felman), and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, a principle investigator for “The Fortunoff Archives,” which produced testimonies of Holocaust survivors.1 Essays in Caruth’s volume by influential Trauma psychologists, like Laura S. Brown (one of the first to deal with gender and trauma), Robert J. Lifton, Bessel Van der Kolk, and Onno van der Hart, DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-25

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among others, and film director Claude Landsman, added much to this interdisciplinary effort to highlight the importance of trauma in modern life and culture. Caruth’s own theories about trauma, developed fully in her 1996 monograph, gained tremendous traction with literary and arts humanists. Trauma, in this view, in its devastating impact, overwhelms a subject’s cognitive capacities. The event is registered in the amygdala but not consciously “known.” It returns in symptoms (hallucinations, flashbacks, nightmares, phobias) whose origins may be obscure but which are familiar as Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Later events can trigger the original symptoms years later. Trauma is, then, unrepresentable just because not brought to consciousness. While for some time this Trauma theory was used productively by literary and film scholars interpreting experimental and avant-garde texts (such texts were understood to fit trauma’s modalities indirectly), objections soon arose. The increasing critiques by Trauma Studies scholars themselves include (1) objection to the Caruthian disassociation model for trauma with its claims as to trauma’s unrepresentability; (2) the theory’s post-structuralist, paradoxical, relationship to history; (3) its favoring an avant-garde aesthetic; and, most importantly, (4) its heavy Western bias and neglect of trauma’s difference across cultures and nations.2 The critiques provided an important check on the proliferation of Caruthianstyle Trauma Studies,3 but the often very narrow focus of criticism on symptoms for PostTraumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) left aside critique of more crucial aspects related to neglecting the long history of traumatic catastrophes in nations worldwide. This long view (which Ban Wang and I addressed in 2004) gets sidelined in the presentist and individual focus on PTSD.4 From my point of view, Trauma Studies still has a lot to offer as we think about appropriate new areas to take into account and, relevant for my project here, revisit the question of aesthetic form pertinent to communicating trauma in literature and the arts.

Trauma’s Future in Graphic Fiction: Avoiding a Binary in Aesthetic Form In describing possibly productive directions for future trauma studies research, Lucy Bond and Stef Craps include work pertaining to going “beyond the canon” (112–116).5 This includes critiquing a tendency in humanities Trauma Studies to favor experimental/avant-garde literary aesthetics as the ones appropriate to (or correlative for) the Caruthian concept of trauma’s unrepresentability.6 But Roger Luckhurst (they note) offers a curious split over the value of narrative between cultural theory and what he calls therapeutic discourse. According to Luckhurst, Cultural Theorists view narrative with suspicion, while therapeutic discourse paradoxically embraces narrative as a form of healing—something rarely noted. I assume Luckhurst has in mind the concept of a “therapeutic narrative” that goes back to Pierre Janet: Janet suggested that encouraging traumatized patients to create a coherent story of their experiences would enable them to move forward. As Stef Craps puts it, agreeing with Janet, for the traumatized subject, “story-telling is an existential necessity” (40). While the issue regarding aesthetic form and trauma has already drawn attention [e.g., Wulf Kansteiner (2004); Jeffrey Alexander (2004); E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang (2004)], it has not been situated in terms of a specifically therapeutic narrative understood, fairly enough, as realist and opposed to the nonlinear, experimental techniques deemed to fit trauma’s modalities. One concern, then, has to do with whether nonlinearity is required for communicating trauma, or whether realist strategies work as well. To help answer this question, I turn to a second meaning one could apply to the concept of a therapeutic narrative, namely a narrative about the very process of psychotherapy (or 248

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psychoanalysis) itself. Perhaps this kind of narrative can communicate trauma through realism. Freud of course initiated the realist “case study” model for psychoanalytic writing, and his work is available in book form. But for the most part, in recent years, contemporary case studies have often been confined to disciplinary journals difficult for humanists to access. In the wake of a veritable explosion of books by clinicians, largely (but not limited to) those trained in so-called Relational Psychoanalysis, there are many such narratives, now readily available in book form.7 These offer a fitting moment in which to revisit the question of aesthetic form and traumatic experiences.8 The clinicians’ (usually but not exclusively) realist narratives show how the therapist/client relationship works to unravel complex dynamics common in trauma, and, as is possible, heal the sufferer through understanding the origins of the trauma experience. In so doing, clinicians co-create with clients a kind of therapeutic narrative that is about the process itself as well as about the patient constructing a healing story. In the case study document, the dominating voice and perspective is that of the analyst. Even though this voice naturally includes describing what a patient has said, the entire study is from the analyst’s overall perspective, as it has to be. The analyst is reflecting on the therapeutic process, interpreting the patient’s contributions and often addressing his/her own emotions, mistakes, theories, and more (see, for example, Lynne Layton, Chapters 7 and 11). Clearly the analysts’ realist narration offers readers deep insight into their patients’ traumatic experience and memories, belying claims that only nonlinearity or experimental form is able to get close to trauma. This discussion of “realist” clinical therapeutic narrative is pertinent to my literary case study as regards aesthetic form and trauma theory. Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2010) offers (as a predominant strand in the text) a realist clinical therapeutic narrative combined with a heroine seeking to create her own healing via indirection. In this, Bechdel proves how well graphic fiction, with its primarily visual form, can represent trauma indirectly. Let me dwell on this for a moment: Bechdel in effect contributes to debates in Trauma Theory as regards the most effective way to treat PTSD. Her text combines the two approaches to dealing with trauma already discussed offering a way out of the familiar debates we saw in Trauma Studies between cognitively inclined clinicians and other theorists and practitioners. The former group (in a way, they follow Janet) claim that having the patient reconstruct the traumatic event, creating a coherent narrative, is the best route to healing. Reliving the pain and suffering is seen as a kind of working through, upsetting as it might be. Others claim that bringing back the pain and suffering directly hurts rather than heals; it triggers the original event and thus keeps it fresh, always present, preventing a gradual (helpful) forgetting or acceptance. Graphic fiction may offer its own method of healing, along with a way through this binary. Bechdel is able to include the “Janetian” approach, in which Alison talks through her childhood traumas with her therapists, and at the same time, using the unique kind of indirection that graphic fiction offers, to bring about self-healing. The subject here is not actually reliving her trauma. The visual complexities (such as the placement in the background throughout of a little pink dress, relevant to the heroine’s trauma; or images of Alison’s father also in the background of frames and later on a teddy bear) point indirectly to her pain, and gradually enable healing to take place. The dreams, presented in dramatic visual terms, are not analyzed or interpreted as they would be in ordinary therapy, but they point indirectly to Alison’s traumas. Viewers are left to interpret if we so desire, but the drawings say it all beyond the few words offered. Andrés Romero-Jodár was the first, I believe, to claim the graphic form as a good fit for trauma’s modalities in his 2017 The Trauma Graphic Novel. As he puts it, traumatic graphic 249

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novels “delve into traumatic memories and mimic the forms and symptoms of traumatic neurosis” (22). The graphic authors Romero-Jodár deals with move into the playfulness of Postmodernism as they problematize the boundaries between fiction and reality.9 Much as I earlier argued about the emergence of Trauma Studies (Kaplan, 2005), Romero-Jodár goes on to show how graphic fiction responded to the so-called ethical turn in the Millennium aimed at “restoring [theory’s] lost relevance to the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘humanism’” (167), characterized especially by deconstruction. However, while noting how graphic fiction’s “confessional and deeply subjective stories turn into memories and emotions” (167), often directly dealing with trauma, Jodár does not mention whether this turn involves changing aesthetic techniques. Rather, he ignores the issue; the dissociative narrative techniques he considers natural to the graphic form, he notes, emphasize “the structural fragmentation, indirection and simultaneity that are proper to trauma narratives” (172), as several of us had earlier argued in relation to film (Kaplan, 2005; Schwab, 2010). However, especially in cases where clinical process is included, trauma may be expressed through realist strategies, while, paradoxically, as in Bechdel’s case, the healing story may be told through indirect means. With its combination of multiple drawings on one page, including diverse spaces, and with words not only in “bubbles,” but taking shape in boxes as commentary too, Are You My Mother? has the required complexity and multilayered capability for a new representing of trauma.10 Bechdel was already well-known for her earlier project, Fun Home (2006), about her Father’s complicated bi-sexuality and probable suicide, when starting the new memoir that became Are You My Mother? Since writing Fun Home created a new friction between Bechdel and her mother, Helen, Bechdel needs to return to her earlier process as she begins creating Are You My Mother? Helen did not want the family’s dirty laundry exhibited in public through her daughter’s memoir. Bechdel was left to wrestle with needing to heal herself, this time by writing the second memoir not only addressing childhood traumas linked to her mother, but including select sessions with therapists Bechdel turned to for help; this deepened an already complex and fraught relationship with Helen. Are You My Mother?, then, combines a therapeutic narrative with one that involves a series of clinical encounters that Bechdel re-enacts from her long years in therapy with two different clinicians, Jocelyn and Carol. But first a word about the status, as it were, of this narrative. Trauma graphic fiction often involves a blurring of fiction and reality—a situation that problematizes the author/character relationship, making things ever more complex. In the case of Are You My Mother?, Bechdel writes as if the main character in the comic drama is herself, telling what actually conspired between her mother, father and her. And yet this is a work of art, with Bechdel taking herself as a persona in a fictional world. Some of the time this persona comments on herself as a “character,” taking a position almost as analyst; this is a major feature of what Bechdel is up to. Fittingly, the breaking through of the ontological boundaries between fiction and reality characterizes trauma in the sense that “fiction” (often in the shape of a fantasy story or dream) stands in for a past event imagined into the subject’s present situation. To help clarify my analysis, I’ll designate the heroine as “Alison” to ensure a certain distance between Bechdel as author, and the character in the nonfiction novel. “Alison” periodically steps aside from forwarding the story to provide commentary and reflection in boxes dotted everywhere on or above panels. I’ll indicate the author of the text by writing, simply, Bechdel.

Realism and Indirection in “Breakthrough” Sessions The opening sections of the text reveal our heroine caught between her two memoirs, and between her two parents. Are You My Mother? is Bechdel’s way of freeing herself from her 250

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dysfunctional family by investigating that very dysfunctionality, now mainly in regard to her mother. As Lisa Diedrich puts it, in an illuminating essay, Bechdel in a sense, follows the “shifting preoccupations in the history of psychoanalysis,” as she “moves from an Oedipal struggle vis-à-vis her father in her first Memoir to the pre-Oedipal realm with her mother in Are You My Mother?” (185), albeit via very different textual strategies in each case. The color coding for each memoir perhaps carries a comic reference to old-fashioned ideas about gendered colors appropriate for babies: Bechdel uses blue-wash for Fun Home, with black pencil lines. and varieties of pink (light, dark and slipping into purple) for much of Are You My Mother? Only rarely, and then with impact, are there other colors, as when the therapists are shown wearing white (perhaps indicating clarity?) instead of a dull pink. The very structure of the entire book encourages indirection rather than linearity since each chapter opens with a specific dream and bears the title of an essay by Donald Winnicott (the influential British psychoanalyst), announcing the theme [as, for example, “The Ordinary Devoted Mother” (with which the memoir opens) or “Hate,” or “The Use of an Object” (with which it closes)]. The nature of the dream sets the theme for the chapter. But central across the book is the clinical therapeutic narrative that emerges in the reenacted sessions with “Alison’s” two therapists. Indeed, when one looks closely, it’s clear that the therapy sessions drive the story forward. “Alison” constantly has her work with the two therapists over a long time front and center in her mind. As part of her overall nonlinear creative process, Bechdel leaps across time and space, bringing up therapy sessions via association with any particular struggle that arises in connection with “Alison’s” mother. These then do not arrive in chronological order (as often in realist case studies) but in association with memories and events regarding her mother. As part of her own healing narrative (the “realist” part) “Alison” picks and chooses psychoanalysts and modernist literary authors whom she’s found illuminating as these relate to, or are relevant for, her own and the family’s, experiences. The first therapy sessions occur in the opening chapter, significantly (partially ironically) titled, following a Winnicott essay, “The Ordinary Devoted Mother.” The opening pages reveal just how far her mother is “inside” “Alison’s” head. Following a dream about being trapped in a dark watery place, we find “Alison” (in a series of “realist” panels”) driving in her car while having fantasies of how a conversation with her mother, about the memoir “Alison” is writing, would go. In the course of this, “Alison” nearly crashes into a truck. When “Alison” finally gets up courage to tell Helen about her father-memoir, she gets the cold response she’d feared. Readers may understand links between the cold place of the dream and her mother’s coldness, but “Alison” makes no comment. The dream and its imagery will be repeated as the text moves forward: readers understand how they deeply echo “Alison’s” traumatic anxieties about being loved, given attention, and feeling safe, but for “Alison” it’s indirect healing. Since this book traces a psychic journey rather than being a story about external events, the looseness as regards precise timing of sessions with her therapists is deliberate. What’s going on in “Alison’s” head, and how her psychic state changes, is of the essence here. It’s a history of a psychic journey—one taking place via work with psychotherapists as well as via the protagonist’s effort to heal herself through not only studying psychoanalysis and modernist literature but using family archives in photos and journals—often clearly displayed in “Alison’s” study. Striking in the first therapist panels, following upon the talk with her mother, is how vividly the drawings enact “Alison’s” desperate plight—her conflicts over writing the memoir about her father’s apparent suicide; her feeling that her life is a mess, that she can’t stay faithful to her gay partners, and that it’s her fault; her fraught relationship to her mother, her professional anxieties and jealousies. One panel shows Carol, her second therapist, and “Alison” in 251

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the contemporary therapy norm (as against the psychoanalytic one) of therapist sitting opposite patient, taking notes. “Alison’s” body is all hunched up and tight, showing her pain, and in following panels she’s shown with a troubled face surrounded by her hands, her fingers widespread, looking like spikes, at the side of her head, or they cup her face in pain. But (again in nonlinear fashion) there’s an abrupt switch to years earlier, when, at age 26, “Alison” was with her first therapist, Jocelyn. It’s in this session that “Alison” first mentions the “crippled child” game she and her mother used to play and that becomes a kind of metaphor throughout the book for both “Alison’s” trauma and her strategies for dealing with it. (I’ll explore this game and its role in dealing with the second indirect therapy—that of “Alison” healing herself.) There’s another abrupt switch, as “Alison” returns to a later session with Carol, and notes the change in positioning of herself and her therapist: now she’s lying on the couch because while “Alison” was away, Carol became a psychoanalyst. “Alison” explains the difference between therapy and psychoanalysis in the boxes above the drawings. Carol is now behind the prostrate “Alison” in classic fashion, still taking notes. Strangely, for the first time, “Alison” is wearing dark-rimmed glasses, and her very black hair is arranged in peaks. This all gives her an ominous, almost fearsome appearance, conveying indirectly her inner turmoil. There are seven panels on these two pages (20–21), showing patient and therapist together, realistically, but then smaller panels where each one’s body is only partially shown (Carol’s knees and “Alison’s head, for example); or a strange overhead top-down image where, as it were, “Alison” looks at herself from this superior position, above both therapist and herself as patient. It’s at this point that “Alison” notes her interest in Winnicott and in what psychoanalysts “do for their patients,” as if trying to work that out for herself—being her own analyst almost. She also admits she wishes Winnicott was her mother! Carol gently presses her on this wish in a series of panels a page or so later. Now “Alison” is so agitated by the question that she sits up from the couch and tries to look at Carol. Drawings again portray “Alison’s” fingers as thin spikes, her pink sweater ruffled by her movements and agitation. She suggests that her mother’s being “in her head” is why she can’t write her memoir. It wouldn’t be a problem, she says, if Winnicott were her mother; we can presume this is because Winnicott would provide the safe holding environment Helen was unable to reliably provide. The sequence ends gracefully first with “Alison” mentioning again her envy of Virginia Woolf being able to “get her mother out of her head” through “her involuntary torrent of words and images” that became To the Lighthouse; and finally (after a fictional imagining of Woolf, Winnicott and others meeting in Tavistock Square), we have a single drawing of Winnicott in analysis with James Strachey, recounting a dream about his mother.11 An important breakthrough takes place across several distinct but, in terms of “Alison’s” psychic growth, linked, sessions, such as those on pages 102–106 and 216–217. Now, instead of the theme being professional jealousy and aggression, which “Alison” had dealt with earlier, the issue is being able or not to express loving feelings. In “Alison’s” family, no one usually talked about love. Readers have already had a glimpse of these difficulties, especially in the “crippled child” game. While, as this game shows, “Alison” yearned for her mother’s love and attention, her mother was only able to be normally demonstrative in showering love and hugs and kisses on her brothers, but not on her. “Alison” remembers one remarkable evening when her mother, Helen, watching a TV version of The Forsythe Saga, asks “Alison” if she loves her. This seems a strange request: it terrifies “Alison” for fear of answering it the wrong way until she realize there was no way of “doing it right.” Much later, she realizes that her mother was only able to show her love via the indirection of the crippled child game, as we will see.12 252

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The sessions dealing with loving feelings are imaged quite differently from others so as to convey the depression, melancholy and loneliness “Alison” is experiencing. For once, Jocelyn is drawn wearing a stark white dress, signifying perhaps that this is the moment for facing truths. The drawings are far from “realist” in this sequence: each drawing shows Jocelyn and “Alison” facing one another, shoulder height, with a flowery bush showing through the window between them. On the following page, the two are further apart and the bush larger, its blooms prominently visible. Jocelyn tries to get “Alison” to think about how she sees the universe since, she notes, people from turbulent families often see the universe as dangerous. “Alison” is unable to respond, mainly sitting hunched over, looking miserable, unable to move forward. Time passes: Bechdel draws two more pages with the same image of the two still shoulder height, sitting with a big space between them. The bush that was covered in flowers is shown step by step losing them, as Fall and then Winter evidently come and go. The bleakest image shows snow and a wind storm outside. But shortly, we find Jocelyn imaged with a neck brace since she experienced an accident while shopping. This shakes up “Alison,” as she realizes her dependency on Jocelyn, but is unable to express it. After a session in which “Alison” cries, Jocelyn hugs her and expresses her caring for “Alison.”13 This provides a breakthrough, since “Alison” has so much trouble accepting and expressing loving feelings. During the next sessions, the tree regains its flowers as spring arrives.14 “Alison” continues to grapple with her desperate need for attention and her feeling unworthy once she gets it. It takes several more months before “Alison” is able via another powerful therapy session to grow further in terms of loving and accepting love. In one session, Jocelyn tells “Alison” that she must have been a wonderful kid, and that, in fact, as an adult, “You’re really adorable,” words “Alison” realizes she had been longing to hear all her life (216–217). The session reverberates in later sessions (e.g., 271–73), where “Alison” has to learn, not only to enjoy being loved but in turn declare her love for others. Jocelyn’s unorthodox gesture of the hug (later refused because she’s following stricter psychoanalytic protocols) does the trick. The groundwork has here been laid for “Alison’s” ability to move forward in her psychic and professional lives.

“Alison’s” Narrative of Self-Healing The largely (but not exclusively) realist presentation of this therapeutic narrative in no way prevents the reader from engaging powerfully with “Alison’s” traumatic experiences, belying prior theories insisting on indirection as the only aesthetic mode for trauma. Turning now to the second meaning of a therapeutic narrative, namely “Alison” creating a healing story for herself, we find it happens in two ways: unconsciously and consciously. The unconscious healing evolves through the image of a pink dress with white stripes, ultimately found to be connected with her mother’s caring for “Alison.”15 The conscious attempt at healing emerges in the crippled child game, introduced early on and returned to periodically. The pink dress appears regularly (but is not remarked on) through the first half of the text. In this way, Bechdel suggests “Alison’s” unconscious is working on a healing narrative, in tandem with what her therapists are giving her. A page of panels (p. 109), showing the pink and white dress, follows closely on the breakthrough session about accepting love from Jocelyn; in one panel, we find “Alison” talking to her mother, who is, significantly, repairing old clothes for a fashion show, using mother-daughter models (p. 109). (Parentethically, we may wonder if Helen is unconsciously re-evaluating her relationship to her daughter in deciding on the mother-daughter theme.) In any event, we find “Alison” holding up a pink dress with 253

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white stripes that her mother had dropped off “recently.” As “Alison” listens to her mother talking about repairing clothes, Bechdel draws her examining this little pink and white dress. Turning it inside out, “Alison” finds an iron-on patch her mother had put on at some point. As “Alison” puts it: “This evidence of my mother’s care is wrenching” (109). Readers infer this is “wrenching” because “Alison” hadn’t known that her mother all along cared for her without being able to show it directly but only through, as here and elsewhere in the text, looking after “Alison’s” clothes. Readers may now recall seeing the dress in panels showing “Alison’s” study following the memoir’s opening discussion between “Alison” and her mother about her father-memoir (12). The dress is strewn across a little book shelf; next to the shelf there are photographs of a man (her father, readers assume), and thick books with dates on them ( journals being used along with photos, for archival purposes). The dress is visible again on page 15 where now there’s a close-up of “Alison’s” father’s face right next to the pink dress. There’s a bubble pointed to the pink and white dress and coming from “Alison,” which reads “I have to start over . . . I feel like I’m writing around something.” Well, of course, that “something” is her mother. It’s as if, again, “Alison” is doubly caught between her mother (signified by the pink dress) and father (in the photos) since, as often she’s listening to her mother on the phone and looking at the pictures of her father. (Chestopalova in an illuminating essay suggests the frequent images of phone conversations featuring the curling phone cord mimic the umbilical cord once literally binding mother and child.) On page 28, when “Alison” is in a heated discussion with her mother over her “need to tell a story” and figure out what it is, we see the dress close up, again strewn over the same shelf. Following the breakthrough session, on page 30 we find three different panels showing the dress, two with “Alison” holding it up, while continuing to talk to her mother. The pink dress continues to be visible in panels later on (e.g., p. 115) showing “Alison” in her study, and, significantly, linked to the teddy bear, a classic object in theories of transitional objects (see Diedrich, 193–196). It is here that its relevance to “Alison’s” “cure” emerges. Along with the teddy bear, the pink dress functions as a transitional object linking her to her mother but also allowing “Alison” able now to know herself as a subject distinct from her mother. “Alison” is beginning to realize, and create a narrative about, her mother indeed loving her daughter while being unable, perhaps via overidentification, to show her love other than in ways like putting on the iron-on patch. Another way Helen indirectly shows her caring for “Alison” is in playing along with the crippled child game, “Alison’s” clever way to self-heal. This is first mentioned in an early session with Jocelyn (19), when “Alison” tells how she envied children she’d see with “braces, crutches and stuff—really disabled,” when having her own feet examined.16 Not getting any attention from her mother, “Alison” devises this game in which she lies on the floor and pretends that her legs are paralyzed. She’s unable to get up on her own. Helen, significantly, instead of ignoring or belittling what “Alison” is doing, actually joins in, and helps her daughter to stand up. This indicates that even if only subconsciously, Helen is aware of “Alison’s” needs. The game is a brilliant way for “Alison” to heal herself via indirect means. As noted earlier, “Alison” is not reliving the trauma so much as moving beyond it to get what she needs indirectly through the game. In addition to the pink and white dress, always close to where “Alison” is working, bearing unconscious knowledge of her mother’s love, we see how determined “Alison” is consciously to heal herself via reading diverse writings by psychoanalysts, from Freud and Winnicott to Lacan and Alice Miller. While grateful for what her psychoanalysts indeed “do” for her, we find her using her reading of Winnicott to “situate” what’s going on in her therapy. In the 254

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session on p. 97, “Alison” uses Winnicott’s essay on true and false selves to situate where “Alison” now is in regard to working with Jocelyn. The text in the box above an image of “Alison” in a therapy session includes the statement that “Winnicott talks about patients who in the transference experience ‘serious regression to dependence.’” She continues to situate herself vis-à-vis the therapist in telling readers how analysis “works,” especially when, as in this case, it’s a “second round,” with an unexpected return to Jocelyn. Now the “analyst has a chance to ‘feed’ the patient the thing that was missing first time around” (97). And indeed we see how Jocelyn “feeds” to “Alison” the love and dependability missing in “Alison’s” childhood. Part of “Alison’s” self-healing has also been gradually understanding, from her research in the family’s archives, that her mother also was not well-mothered and had a difficult childhood and marriage.17 “Alison” realizes that her own trauma is in fact inter- (or trans-) generational. Earlier snippets about her mother’s childhood (which included the Depression, World War II, a father damaged by his war experience, the slow awkward recovery, and more) show that her mother also was neglected. “Alison” now speculates that the crippled child game alleviated some of her mother’s own trauma and also perhaps guilt at not being there for her daughter. At any rate, at the end of the graphic memoir, “Alison” now sees that through the game her mother showed her something valuable: she showed her that she could get up and get out. The opening dream, then, takes on even more resonance as demonstrating “Alison’s” courage to take the risk, and squeeze out into the world.

Conclusion As we can now see, the trauma graphic memoir focusses on showing the reader the mind of the main character; we are able to grasp her inner realities and fantasies, along with the visuality of dreams and hallucinations prevalent in traumatized subjects. In terms of trauma aesthetics, options are multiple, and far from the original binary of nonlinearity, indirection versus realist address. In the two kinds of therapeutic narrative—the first being a narrative of therapeutic sessions bringing insight and productive change, the second indicating a story “Alison” creates from family archives and reading literature and psychoanalysis—both realist and nonlinear or indirectional strategies are used. Understanding and coming to terms with trauma is communicated equally well with both techniques. The graphic text is able to combine techniques due to its unique form. Different levels of experience—dream, memory (the past), action (in what might be called “the present” of the text [e.g., “Alison” driving the car]), commentary, can all be displayed on pages close together or even on the same page. The concept of a “nonfiction graphic memoir” fits well. Trauma comes in many guises: sometimes performing it releases emotions otherwise locked up; sometimes words and realist strategies do the trick; sometimes metaphor, dreamscape, seemingly incidental objects carry emotions and meanings. Subjects may heal in a variety of ways, from self-reflexivity to clinical support, and beyond. Graphic fiction is arguably the form that has the required complexity and multilayered capability for a new representing of trauma.

Notes 1 See Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 1996), and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (Routledge, 1992). 2 The list of scholars who have contributed to debates about Humanities’ Trauma Studies is long. Critique by Ian Hacking in “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna and David Wellbery

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3 4

5

6 7

8

9 10

(Stanford UP, 1986), 226–36 and Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton UP, 1995) started early, and was continued by Ruth Leys Trauma: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2000). A host of other humanities scholars including Susannah Radstone Memory and Methodology (Berg, 2000); E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (Hong Kong UP, 2004); Stef Craps Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Alan Gibbs Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (Edinburgh UP, 2014); Gert Buelens, et.al. The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (Routledge, 2013). As the authors note, Caruth herself offers expansions on her positions in her updated version of Unclaimed Experience (2019). For example, in our co-edited collection, Trauma and Cinema, Ban Wang and I frame our discussion of multiethnic and intergenerational trauma through the long lens of modernity, stretching back about two hundred years. Modernity, and its shocks and disorientation to tradition, was originally a Euro-American project, expanded, via Western imperialist striving, to other cultures. This produced decimation of Indigenous Americans and the implementation of a catastrophic slavery system. The disasters that followed are well-known: Their horrendous traumatic legacies by now are welldocumented, even as systemic racism persists. Critiques of Humanities Trauma Theory continue, as evident in a 2021 New Yorker essay, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” (December 27) The author re-engages with many humanities scholars’ earlier objections to Trauma Theory (as noted above) only now indeed throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It seems to me that while Trauma theory indeed requires reworking, trauma is still an important tool for understanding American (and indeed world) cultures today. Their volume includes a detailed history of the emergence of trauma as a mental health category, and in-depth studies of each Post-Structuralist scholar whose trauma research shaped the field in the humanities and cultural studies. The discussion of critiques of trauma studies and of the future and limits of trauma is one of the best yet. I succumbed to this practice in my 2005 Trauma Culture but only in regard to expanding the kinds of text that can create a witnessing experience for viewers. Actually, clinicians in this area prefer to call their practice a “Relational Tradition,” so as to indicate that many other influences and developments flow into their work—a perspective not shown by the term “Relational Psychoanalysis.” See especially Routledge’s Relational Perspectives Book Series, co-edited by Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, with Steven Kuchuck and Eyal Rozman as associate editors. The book series started in 1990 and in 2017 published volume 83. Thus, there is an impressive body of clinical case histories, theoretical discourse, and more. See, for example, Adrienne Harris, Ghosts (Routledge, 2017); Sue Grand, The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude (Routledge, 2010); Sue Grand and Jill Salberg, eds., Transgenerational Trauma and the Other (Routledge, 2017); Lynne Layton, Toward a Social Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2020). Romero-Jodár’s case studies include Paul Hornschmeier’s Mother, Come Home, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, and Art Spiegelman’s and Moore/Gibbons’ works. Let me just note, before moving forward, that many scholars have brilliantly analyzed Bechdel’s text, as is evident in Janine Utell’s edited anthology, The Comics of Alison Bechdel (UP of Mississippi, 2020). Several scholars approach the text via various psychoanalytic theories and practices: they work with Freud and Lacan, of course, but primarily D. W. Winnicott, who clearly spoke to Bechdel’s specific mother/daughter issues. Bechdel situates D. W. as part of an intellectual conjuncture in London’s Bloomsbury locale, which included Virginia Woolf, James Strachey, and others. Natalja Chestopalova focuses on generational trauma and “afterwardness,” while a psychoanalyst, Rebecca Chaplan, writing about Are You My Mother? studies Bechdel’s heroine’s process as if she were Chaplan’s patient, illuminating and admiring changes that Bechdel details, such as “moments that register (her heroine’s, ed.) deflated hopes, and show her relying on narcissistic, isolative defenses” (2017, p. 228). Others, like Shoshana Magnet (2016), see the text as an example of feminist therapy, while Tammy Clewell, in “Beyond Psychoanalysis” (PMLA, 2017), similarly argues for the text’s “therapeutic aims.” Lisa Diedrich, meanwhile, provides an exhaustive study of ways Bechdel uses D. W.’s theories, focusing especially on his concept of transitional objects as it applies to Bechdel’s process in the text. Diedrich performs her own “graphic analysis” “drawing out ways to enact holding environments” of many kinds “that allow for creativity and/as healing” (p. 187). It’s an informative and illuminating, in-depth interpretation of Bechdel’s text. It moves in directions other than mine—indeed, I was forced to find

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11 12 13

14 15 16

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alternate perspectives since Diedrich (along with scholars like Chaplan and others) covers so much— but our approaches are orthogonal, not competing. Bechdel evidently delved into the Winnicott archives to find some of the details of Winnicott’s personal life that she brings up in her text. For more on the role this game plays in the memoir, see Lisa Diedrich. It’s interesting that later on Jocelyn, who also becomes a psychoanalyst in between seeing “Alison,” regrets having stepped over a boundary that psychoanalysis insists on regarding patient-therapist physically touching. Therapeutic methods other than psychoanalysis do not have such a strict boundary, and a therapist may decide on giving a hug, instinctively knowing the patient yearns for it. But debates of course continue about this in the literature. While Bechdel uses a well-worn metaphor here, it really works and seems less conventional on the page than in this description! There are other images showing “Alison” indirectly looking to heal (e.g., images of her father in the background; the teddy bear), but the pink dress is the one that carries through across much of the text. There’s a panel representing for the first of many times this “crippled child” game “Alison” has just mentioned to Jocelyn. As Diedrich notes, the panel immediately to the right of this one, shows Jocelyn and “Alison” in precisely the same configuration, linking Jocelyn to her mother, helping now “crippled” “Alison” get up (201–203). Readers who know Fun Home, Bechdel’s first memoir about her father, will have seen how abusive Bechdel’s father was to both his children and his wife. Their fierce arguments haunted and traumatized Alison and her siblings, even as Bechdel developed a close relationship to her father, somewhat linked in very complicated ways to their shared homosexuality at a time when being gay was still culturally derided and had to be hidden.

Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C., et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. U of California P, 2004. Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. ———. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Bond, Lucy, and Stef Craps. Trauma. Routledge, 2020. Caruth, Cathy, editor. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. ———. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Chaplan, Rebecca. “Two Graphic Novels Portraying Psychoanalysis.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 62, no. 2, Apr. 2014, pp. 345–357. Chestopalova, Natalja. “Generational Trauma and the Crisis of Après Coup.” The Comics of Alison Bechdel, edited by Janine Utell, UP of Mississippi, 2020, pp. 119–133. Clewell, Tammy. “Beyond Psychoanalysis: Resistance and Reparative Reading in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 51–70. Diedrich, Lisa. “Graphic Analysis: Transitional Phenomena in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?” Configurations, vol. 22, no. 2, Spring 2014, pp. 183–203. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Genealogy of a Category Mistake.” Rethinking History, vol. 8, no.2, June 2004, pp. 193–221. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. Rutgers UP, 2005. ———, and Ban Wang, editors. Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong UP and U of Washington P, 2004. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2014. Magnet, Shoshana. “Are You My Mother? Understanding Feminist Therapy with Alison Bechdel.” Women & Therapy, vol. 40, 2017, pp. 207–227. Romero-Jodár, Andrés. The Trauma Graphic Novel. Routledge, 2017.

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PART 4

Elements of Literary Structure and Experience

22 AUTHORS Cognitive Patterns and Individual Creativity Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas

Abstract: This chapter seeks to expose individual traits and recurrent trends in how authors exploit the universal creative capacities of the human mind for their particular aesthetic goals. The focus will be on the figurative language of emotions in the lyric, where, despite the daunting variety, crosscultural meaning construction patterns arise from the cognitive operations underlying spatial schemas and the mapping and integration of mental structures. To model these templates across examples from different authors in Western literary traditions, I will combine image schemas and blending theory into a model that goes beyond the sheer understanding of one thing in terms of another. The model will also allow for theoretical claims about how individual creativity takes advantage of the patterns arising from these cognitive skills, thus suggesting some initial steps to explain the great variety in emotion imagery that we observe across authors, but with a basis on structural similarities.

Individual creativity, the personal process that gives rise to a specific literary work or expression, raises one of the big questions in literary studies, if not the big question. The diversity of literary products across individuals and traditions is daunting, even more so when it comes to the expression of emotions, the archetypical function of the lyric but also one of the major goals of literature in general (Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion). Emotion, emotion concepts, and their expressions vary enormously across historical periods, cultures, and of course individuals (Wierzbicka; Rosenwein). How can we make meaningful generalizations? For any scientific discipline, the strategy would be straightforward: find the patterns. All these individuals belong to the same species. Their minds are shaped by the same operations, in interaction with diverse cultural and material environments. Only by understanding the basic cognitive abilities, alongside the patterns that arise from their use in relation with particular contexts and goals, will it be possible to assess the contribution of the individual. However, despite solid efforts to show that the relation between cognitive or literary universals and the specificities of person or culture is not a matter of exclusive dichotomy but of mutual need (Turner, Literary Mind; Hogan, “Literary Universals”), the majority of literary studies is still dedicated to analyzing individual authors in isolation or, at most, influences from individual to individual or from culture to culture (Turner, Reading Minds). It is a little bit like doing biology without evolutionary theory or the principles of biochemistry: we run the risk of ending up with an ever-growing mass of compartmentalized knowledge that does not take us much further as the generations go by. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-27

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This chapter takes the alternative road. I use blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner), and image schemas (Johnson) to model a relatively simple pattern that recurs across the representation of emotions in love poetry. Blending theory seeks to model the unrivalled human capacity for integrating disparate experiences and knowledge structures into novel conceptual wholes, which is also known as bisociation (Koestler), cognitive fluidity (Mithen), or combinational creativity (Boden). Blending theory hypothesizes that all meaning construction in human cognition, from the most basic communication to mathematical abstractions or to the intricate representations of art and literature, is driven by this higher-order cognitive ability. Consider the most basic version of fictivity. Other mammals show communicative behavior that seems to involve fictive entities. Vervet monkeys, for example, have developed specialized alarm calls, with distinct vocalizations signaling the presence of their main predators. They appropriately respond to these acoustic cues, with no need to directly perceive the predator. However, they are unable to interpret even the most obvious indirect cues of a predator’s presence. Upon seeing the track that a python left in the sand, vervet monkeys will carelessly walk toward the bush where the trail leads. Human beings, on the other hand, connect the track to the motion event, and come up with the idea that the agent that caused the track went where the track leads. No other species can deduce an event without the support of a direct perceptual cue: a sound, a scent, or at least some real motion in the bush. Imagining the motion along the track requires more than merely associating the imaginary snake with the perceived trail in the sand. In principle, any other mammal could do that. But we also need to bring both snake and trail into the same mental space and then imagine the snake’s motion causing the track. Motion, causation, and a dangerous, hidden predator are unavailable from the visual cues. They emerge from a mental simulation that recombines the present scenario with our knowledge of snakes (Pagán Cánovas and Turner). Once we have fictive motion, we reuse it in ways that are more and more detached from perception. A mountain range can “run” from British Columbia to New Mexico. A term can “extend” from September to January. A passion can “go” deep into the soul or “reach” high into the heavens. These patterns are particularly productive when they retain basic structures of sensorimotor information, generally known as image schemas. Image schemas are generalizations across perceptual experiences (e.g., CONTAINMENT, MOTION FROM A TO B, OBSTACLE, BLOCKAGE, EMISSION)1 that provide the basic structures to get meaning construction started during the first months post birth (Mandler), and then influence the conceptual system throughout the life span (Mandler and Pagán Cánovas). I call schematic integrations those patterns of conceptual integration that rely on image schemas to structure a conceptual blend where non-perceptual meanings arise (Pagán Cánovas, “Rethinking Image Schemas”). For example, expressions such as having Spain in your heart make sense because human beings across cultures find it easy to build a mental network in which almost any element may be turned into a container, almost anything can be contained, and what matters is whether something is inside or outside the container, not—at least primarily—borders, relative size, and so forth. The appropriate combinations of containers and thing contained are very productive for creating inferences about emotions, in both everyday life and literature. The case study for the present chapter is the integration of a schema of EMISSION (an agent emits or sends something toward a typically passive receiver) with a situation in which two people interact (Pagán Cánovas, “Erotic Emissions in Greek Poetry”). Among other contexts, this pattern is extremely productive for expressing emotions in poetic imagery related to love in the lyric. The lover receives an arrow of love, or the sound of the beloved’s voice, or a mysterious drop of water that makes a deserted soul blossom . . . and a powerful emotion arises. The possibilities are so many that it could seem that the generalization of the blending pattern 262

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is just a reduction with little to say about individual creativity. I seek to show that such generalizations are in fact a necessary beginning for explaining the diversity across authors and for gaining insight into the particulars of individual creative processes.

Schema Instantiation and Individual Creativity When comparing across multiple instances of poetic imagery that share a schematic integration pattern, the specification of the schema stands out as the most obvious creative choice. The options are endless. A CONTAINMENT schema can be realized as an immense variety of objects going in or out of many different containers; there are innumerable types of PATH–GOAL events, and so forth. In our case study, the possibilities for instantiating the EMISSION schema are indeed manifold: light, object throwing, scent, sound, and many more. Some of these choices will be better than others for blending with a certain interaction scene, or for constructing causal meanings, or for highlighting particular emotions in a specific passage or moment. The goals of the specific expression as well as those of the general composition, alongside the meanings already constructed or planned for the rest of the text or performance, will all be influencing how the schema is instantiated, within a complex dynamic system where innumerable choices are defining the “cognitive footprint” or individual style of the author. However, before going any further, I must clarify that this is not a top-down process where the author simply fleshes out a generic structure, picked up from a repository of abstract templates stored in a mysterious part of memory. On the contrary, the process is extremely dynamic. The mind is always doing conceptual integration work, and the building of an integration network can get started anywhere, with multiple choices probably being made and discarded on the fly, until the author reaches a representation that works—or perhaps does not work so well: there is also great variation in this. Terms such as “instantiation,” “choice,” and “specification” may be misleading. Here they are used from the perspective of the comparatist who is considering many similar examples, not from that of the author who is working on the next sentence. Quite often, the integration of specific elements (e.g., a beautiful face + light + erotic feelings in a love poem) will expose opportunities for recruiting generic structure that was not there until the connection was made (e.g., the face emits light that causes the observer to fall in love). The process is opportunistic and presents great variation depending on individual skill. The discovery of structures, such as an image schema or a cultural frame, that may guide the integration of disparate elements into a novel network of meanings, is usually accomplished on the go, as T.S. Eliot already suggested: When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. (Eliot 287) Of course, what cognitive science tells us is that Eliot was only partially right. All human thought proceeds, at least to a considerable extent, through the integration of disparate thoughts (Fauconnier and Turner). True, this everyday creativity is taken to its limits by poetic imagery and other literary phenomena. Literary authors and oral performers are indeed experts—though by no means the only ones—in exploring the possibilities of this capacity 263

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for meaning construction, and quite often seek to push its boundaries. Aristotle had already called metaphor a mark of genius (εὐφυΐας σημεῖον), but he added that, rather than being a separate skill, it results from mastering the general capacity for “seeing similarities” (Poetics 1459a, 5–8). An author’s individual skill for detecting integration opportunities leading to a felicitous expression often involves the recruitment of sensorimotor or cultural structures that, once built into the conceptual blend, create a similarity that seems to have always been there. As in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the evening may be spread out against the sky, although an evening is a part of the day and therefore it lacks the physical properties that would permit it to be spread, and even if that were possible, the sky is not exactly a surface to be spread against, and of course gravity would be on the wrong side; then this image can be compared with that of a patient etherized upon a table, prompting the reader to focus on the spatial schema of BEING LAID ON A SURFACE, despite the many obvious mismatches and incongruencies, and adding the unconsciousness, helplessness, and other elements that come from the etherized patient scenario rather than the evening image. Although the connection may seem to be based on an existing similarity that has now been discovered, that similarity was created ad hoc through an intricate conceptual network, to serve the specific goals of the poem. On the other hand, within a rich cultural medium, immersed in either one tradition only or with access to several traditions, either textual or oral, an author inherits knowledge from numerous “recipes,” that is, motifs and patterns of figurative language that have worked before. This knowledge is, once more, dynamic. It may be used as a general know-how for creating a very original image, but also for replicating one of these recipes in great detail. Think, for example, of uses of the PATH-GOAL schema to compress a great variety of narratives and causeeffect relations into a journey from A to B, such as the ship-of-state motif. From Archilochus of Paros onwards, and quite probably well before him, authors in the Western tradition have found this motif ready from their culture. They can go ahead and use its many appropriate mappings (captain-head of state, ship-nation, destination-national goals, etc.). But they can also learn interesting “lessons” from this use: how to find a novel meaning for an element in the conceptual frame, such as the harbor as a place where the nation is stuck because there is a storm out there (a pandemic or some other crisis?), which may provide an opportunity to rethink its general course; or the learning can be about applying the whole ship-frame to some other story, such as an individual human life and the choices it faces, or about incorporating some idea from other frames that share the same schema, such as a path (and now we can have pathways on the sea representing various choices toward different goals), or about introducing more than one agent (ship/traveler), and so forth. Once more, the possibilities are endless, to a great extent unpredictable (though not random), and, even when quite narrowly defined by culture, still strongly dependent on individual skill and preferences.

Light Emission Therefore, in the EMISSION+EROTIC INTERACTION pattern, our case study, the poet could, in principle, have a goal such as expressing love causation and its consequences, identify the EMISSION image schema as the right structure for what that particular passage wants to say, and then instantiate it in a way that suits certain specific purposes, or simply follow a traditional way of specifying the pattern with which the poet is familiar, or come up with the only instantiation that the poet could think of at that particular moment. But this can also happen, and quite probably will, in a much less organized way, with the poet connecting concrete experiences and then recalling familiar imagery patterns or recruiting specific schemas or frames to serve the poem’s representational goals. And these goals will also become redefined along the 264

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way, depending on the opportunities offered by the network being formed. Let us see some examples. In love poetry, we find many instances in which the erotic emotions are expressed as the result of an irradiation of light from the beloved. This light irradiation could also be a sign of beauty or of the divine in ancient Greek culture. In many European languages there is also a stock of EMISSION expressions of praise for more ordinary uses: radiant, bedazzling, and so forth. All these linguistic expressions are based on the integration of the EMISSION schema, instantiated as light irradiation, with a scene of direct perception of the beloved or admired person, optionally also involving interaction, but never at an equal level. This “choice” for light irradiation is already providing a particular set of possibilities. For example, it is very appropriate for further integrations with conceptions of vision as light emission (Cairns), for attributing quasi-supernatural properties that make the beloved stand out among others, and for many more purposes, which can also be redefined along the way. Many more indeed, but not any. There are things that an author cannot do with light, just like there are others that do work with light much better than with other instantiations. For example, light offers the possibility of selecting the body part that irradiates. This is a basic choice that can then be exploited for different effects. Pindar (Snell & Maehler fr. 123) uses this possibility when he sings “the glowing rays flashing from Theoxenus’ eyes” (τὰς δὲ Θεοξένου ἀκτῖνας πρὸς ὄσσων μαρμαρυζοίσας).2 He who sees those rays and is not shaken by waves of desire (δρακείς ὃς μὴ πόθῳ κυμαίνεται) must have a black heart of steel or iron, forged with a cold flame (ἐξ ἀδάμαντος ἢ σιδάρου κεχάλκευται μέλαιναν καρδίαν ψυχρᾷ φλογί). Pindar’s cultural background is pushing toward the association between light and the faculty to see and know, as well as that of light and beauty (Cairns). But the conventionality of the pattern only offers a partial explanation of Pindar’s “choice.” There are also other convenient affordances. For one, the EMISSION–INTERACTION integration pattern dictates—and this is consistent across all examples—that the engagement with the thing emitted must be what causes the emotional reaction. As a result, it is by seeing the light from the eyes that the waves of desire arise. By locating the origin of this light in the eyes of the young ephebe, the poet is suggesting a gaze scenario, where a direct exchange of glances produces the emotional effect, through visual contact with the eye-beams—if the eye beams touch you but you are not looking, that will not do. For Pindar, who is here quite probably singing an encomium within a symposiac context, the frank and direct engagement with the young athlete in a semi-public setting works toward his rhetorical goal of praising not only the ephebe but also the homoerotic feelings that he awakens, as opposed to the emotions of those who are slaves of “female cheekiness” (γυναικείῳ θράσει). It is therefore a public declaration addressed to those present, not particularly to Theoxenus, and what is said about the light irradiation of the EMISSION–EROTIC INTERACTION network is modulated accordingly. Everyone can see Theoxenus’ eye-beams, and everyone should feel the same desire as the speaker, that is, if one is part of the aristocratic fellowship that shares the sexual preferences made explicit by Pindar, which come attached to further social and political views that he does not mention but all contemporary listeners knew were there. Now compare with the use that Shakespeare makes of the eye-beam motif in this passage: So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not To those fresh morning drops upon the rose, As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote The night of dew that on my cheeks down flows: Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright Through the transparent bosom of the deep, 265

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As doth thy face through tears of mine give light: Thou shin’st in every tear that I do weep: (Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV, 3, 1345–1353) Instead of a public toast, there is intimacy. The passage is all about the personal relation between two people. The eye-beams of the beloved are intertangled in a skillful comparison with those of the sun. The compressed blended scenario also adds the consequences of the emotion caused by the eye-beams, that is, the tears, which are also integrated with the illuminated landscape. And then we move to a moonlit scene, viewed from this side of “the transparent bosom of the deep.” Now it is the lover who looks. The experiencer of the emotion is never the emitter—another core constraint of the EMISSION–LOVE pattern—and therefore the lover cannot emit, but there is also no longer the beloved’s gaze to justify emission from her eyes. As a result, light irradiation shifts to the face. Opportunistically, the poet makes it a light-giving face seen through tears, which allows him to keep the imagery based on the impact of light on water. As we see, a schematic integration pattern, such as the blend of EMISSION with erotic interaction, does not function as a mold but as a loose recipe, an attractor emerging from complex dynamics. Rather than a fixed template stored in generic form and instantiated according to context, it is an emergent system that arises when developing sets of expressive goals and resources cross their paths during the creative process. At its core there are a number of rules that are hard to break, such as “the emitter causes the feeling rather than experiencing it,” mainly because complying with those demands as much as possible greatly facilitates meaning construction, providing the minds of the readers or listeners with indications to build a familiar perceptual structure as the basis for the representation. At the same time, the whole point of conceptual integration, including the evolutionary advantage that it creates for the human species, is its flexibility. Indeed, if an author has gone for light imagery and the EMISSION–EROTIC interaction recipe, it is hard to shift gears in the middle of the process and to make expressive choices that are incompatible with its core properties. Nevertheless, that still leaves a vast landscape of integration possibilities to be explored. The interplay between verbal solutions and rhetorical goals, always influencing one another, will push the author to exploit the opportunities arising along the way. The opportunities specifically offered by light are many. For instance, it facilitates praise by picturing the emitter as someone who outshines typical sources of light, such as the sun and the moon; it also makes it possible to bring in those other light sources for a more detailed comparison, evoking scenes in which light has an impact on a variety of objects, which also provides the possibility of projecting inferences from that impact back to the lover. We see both exploitations in the Shakespearean passage. So far, we have taken a glimpse at the variety afforded by a very specific choice within the light instantiation, that of the eye-beams. We now move to different parts of the body and also to different instantiations. First, let us stay with light for one more example. In an anonymous modern Greek narrative song (Politis 97), a noble dame has come to the seashore to wash her clothes, accompanied by her slaves. A soft northern wind lifts her hemline, showing her ankle (κι αντιφάνηκε το ποδοστράγαλό της, line 7). And then, “the sea glittered, and the seashores glittered” (Έλαμψ’ ο γιαλός, λάμψαν τα περιγιάλια, line 8). Immediately drawn by the light, a captain on a passing ship orders the seamen to sail toward its source. The unveiling of a typically covered—and therefore erotically attractive—part of the body causes the emission. The author therefore needs to limit the emission to this body part, thus presenting the act of unveiling or showing the ankle as the cause of the emission. The emission needs to be sustained in time, so that the ship can follow it and locate its source. A different instantiation, such as object throwing (for instance, shooting an arrow of love) would not work 266

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as well as light, since it could only offer iteration (repeating the action of arrow shooting) rather than sustained emission. The narrative development would also be less fluid. But why not wind or scent? They can be sustained and be just as powerful. They could indeed, but the source would be less easy to track for the captain. Of course, as we said, the author does not pick up the EMISSION schema from a stack, go over the different possible instantiations, and select light after careful consideration. But we can see that, underlying the development of the motif by an individual author or, more probably in this case, its diachronic shaping by the oral tradition, there are complex dynamics driven by the pressure to create the blend that best adjusts to the purposes at hand. The author’s interpretation of this interplay of goals and processes acts analogously to natural selection, producing an adequate representation or, if the author fails to do so, an ineffective one that the tradition will discard soon enough. The expressions that finally reach the page or the performance get there for a reason, and examining the cognitive choices for every set of possibilities allows us to build a detailed map of the author’s motivations and capacities. The noble dame’s ankle example is from a narrative song, which focuses on actions and events rather than on emotional expression. The text moves directly from the perception of the emission to the captain’s reaction, taking the affective outcome of the light for granted. As we have seen, lyric passages may tend to dwell more on the outcomes of the erotic emission. Now, if we compare this with similar scenes, we can find that other instantiations of the schema may provide different opportunities for creating representations that project inferences about effects. In any schematic integration that seeks to frame cause-effect relations, emotional effects can be represented as an extension of the schema, as the result of the interaction without the spatial event, or as an integration of both. Perhaps the most straightforward, although also the less cohesive representation is to directly project the emotional results from the mental space containing the interaction scene. We see this in Pindar’s Theoxenus example, where the eyebeams cause waves of desire, which is not an effect that belongs to the conceptual frame of light. But most examples will be located in a more or less central area of the possibility space created by these three options, without going exclusively for one of them. Shakespeare, in the Love’s Labour’s Lost example, seizes the opportunity of expanding on the effects of the schematic event and linking them to emotional outcomes. Thus the tears, an effect of the emotion, are turned into a night of dew smitten by the light irradiated from the beloved. Closer to a sheer development of the outcomes of the emission, another Greek folksong depicts the beloved as coming out to her balcony and withering both plants and men with a heat more powerful than that of the sun (Politis 98). Although the simulation is run in quite a realistic way, the love poetry context tells us that the heat and the withering have an emotional value.

Wind and Scent Emissions We have been approaching a possibility set in the system, the expression of the erotic effects of the interaction through the development of the outcomes from the spatial schema, where there is considerable overlap among several instantiation possibilities. Light is not necessarily the best option for including schema expansion to frame the emotional consequences on the lover. In this example from twentieth-century Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, the speaker is watching a girl behind her window: Κάθε που το ’να γόνατο σηκώνει μια μυρωδιά κανέλας με λιγώνει Και κάθε που το χέρι του γυρίζει 267

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στο μέρος που σγουραίνει και μαυρίζει Με παίρνει τ’ αεράκι και πηγαίνω στου Παραδείσου τα περβόλια μπαίνω. Every time she lifts her knee a scent of cinnamon makes me faint And every time she turns her hand into the place that curls and blackens The breeze catches me and there I go I enter the gardens of Paradise. (The Veranda and the Window [Η ταράτσα και το παράθυρο], from The Rs of Love [Τα Ρω του Έρωτα], 1972) Here the instantiations are first scent and then wind. In both cases, a mental simulation is suggested where the intensity of the effects is heightened beyond what is typical of those emission events, thus creating a hyperbolic effect that goes well with the playful tone of the poem/ song. Two motions of the girl provoke two different emissions, which reach the observer—a good-humored voyeur watching from his veranda—and cause erotic effects on him, both built using the outcome slot of the emission frame. First the lifting of the knee sends a scent of cinnamon (μυρωδιά κανέλας) that makes him faint. This “fainting” from a sweet scent with the sensual connotations of cinnamon provides the reader with cues that clearly point toward the erotic effect. The second emission is a breeze (αεράκι) that takes the voyeur away. The hyperbole is even more transparent; a soft wind that, paradoxically, blows the observer away is a cue pointing at the pleasure that he finds in this experience. It is quite different, for example, from the violent wind that darts downhill falling upon the oaks, which we find compared to Eros’ shaking of the lover’s senses in a simile by Sappho (Ἔρος δ’ ἐτίναξέ μοι φρένας, ὠς ἄνεμος κὰτ ὄρος δρύσιν ἐμπέτων, Voigt 47). And now comes yet another example of the dynamicity and opportunism of conceptual integration: since we have the half-bemused, half-delighted voyeur in midair, he could now be taken to a place that suits the rhetorical purposes of the composition. This idea prompts the author to recruit yet another image schema, MOTION FROM A TO B, in this case motion impelled by the wind. In the standard integration pattern involving this schema, we find a recurrent mapping between states (emotional, physical, social, and so forth) and destinations. Reaching a location is “moving” to that state, that is, the culmination of a causal chain into an outcome. This is all perfectly conventional. For instance, in the example of the ship-of-state that we discussed earlier, wherever the ship is going—if we want, also impelled by the wind—represents a relevant consequence for the nation. Here the speaker is taken to . . . the gardens of Paradise. Once more, it is not that the author is looking at his stacks of image schemas and decides that now is a good time to bring in PATH–GOAL and the identification of consequences and destinations. Instead, and independently of whether Elytis first imagined being carried away by the wind or entering Paradise, which is something we cannot know, we see mutually attracting goals and expressions—the focus on the emotional effects and the choice of either breeze or entering Paradise to depict the pleasant passivity of the experiencer—creating a conceptual space of opportunity where the additional PATH–GOAL schema happens to provide an adequate solution. This range of representations of the erotic emission’s effects cannot be built with the light instantiation of the EMISSION schema. Some aspects of them might be possible, for instance, 268

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the light can mysteriously carry the receiver of the emission away to Paradise, but why go for light when there are better fits? Optimality drives toward variety of instantiation, and this is what the comparatist can expect to see across examples of this pattern from different traditions, not because of abstract rules in the template itself, but because of the dynamics of conceptual integration from which the template arises. We could now open another chapter on how the dynamicity and opportunism of conceptual integration exploit the scent or wind instantiations of the EMISSION schema in this network. Since we have no space for that, let us at least briefly say something about the possibilities of scent. Many are shared with light. For instance, heightened intensity produces sensitive and cognitive impairment in both cases, which leads to the bedazzled or fainted lovers that are typical in so many examples of poetic imagery. Both emissions can be sustained or sent in a flash as well as emitted from both near and far, which makes them very likely choices. But while light opens frames involving landscape scenes and spiritual metaphors, scent can bring in very specific memories, experiences, or symbolic objects. The beloved can thus evoke any smells—from childhood, from cherished experiences, from rich perceptual scenes—that can trigger an emotional reaction that suits the aesthetic goals at hand. Also, the straightforward syntax of smellrelated verbs can provide a bridge between the scent emitted by the beloved and anything that the poet finds interesting as an outcome, even if it does not actually have a smell. Again, this pattern is present in everyday expressions (e.g., “I smell victory”), but in the hands of a skillful poet and within the erotic emission context, it can lead to arresting imagery. Here Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) goes from scents that evoke personal olfactory memories to experiences that no longer have a smell but are nonetheless accessed through the beloved’s scent emission: Βηματίζεις μέσα στα σκονισμένα δώματά μου μ’ ένα πλατύ ανοιξιάτικο φόρεμα που ευωδιάζει πράσινα φύλλα φρεσκοπλυμένο ουρανό και φτερά γλάρων πάνω από θάλασσα πρωινή. You tread on my dusty chambers with a wide spring dress that has a scent of green leaves freshly-washed sky and wings of sea gulls over a morning sea. (IV, Spring Symphony [Εαρινή Συμφωνία], 1938) Given these properties, the option of scent seems more productive for focusing on the outcomes on the lover, especially in authors, periods, or aesthetic movements that highlight personal feelings and experiences over more widely shared social conventions and ideas; for instance, it comes as little surprise in Ritsos but perhaps it would be less expected in Pindar. An extreme example of the expansion of this part of the frame is Pablo Neruda’s Oda a su aroma, a lengthy poem in short, evocative lines, almost all of which are meant to propose different answers to the question of what the beloved smells like. These scent identifications provide 269

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strong affective connotations that allude to personal experiences, erotic or vital, or to important symbols in Neruda’s imaginarium. The poem starts mostly with connections to existing smells, and then moves on to identify the beloved’s scent with a multitude of experiences reflecting the richness of emotional nuances in the love relation: earth, air, wood, apples, smell of light upon the skin, scent of the leaf, the tree, of life with dust from the road and morning shadow on the roots (es tierra,/ es/ aire,/ maderas o manzanas, olor/ de la luz en la piel, aroma/ de la hoja/ del árbol/ de la vida/ con polvo/ de camino/ y frescura/ de matutina sombra/ en las raíces), and many more.

Conclusion We have merely taken a glimpse at the immense dynamicity and richness offered by just one very specific integration pattern, which, in this case, recurs across contexts in which authors are striving to express analogous emotional meanings. There are many, many more such patterns, and many of them more complex than this one, constantly arising in both the poetic and the everyday imagination. Many, but not any: of the infinite possibilities, a much smaller set of particularly productive or effective templates is selected. In literature, these patterns arise from the operations of conceptual integration and their optimization for aesthetic and rhetorical goals in the author’s medium, whether it is a textual literary tradition (Elytis, Ritsos, Neruda), an oral tradition (the Greek folksongs) or a hybrid one where writing is instrumental for sustaining a partially oral and performative composition (Pindar, Sappho, Shakespeare). The study of individual creativity, perhaps the biggest challenge in both literary studies and the cognitive sciences, needs to be tackled by examining the universal cognitive operations and their interplay with particular contexts, cultural backgrounds, and rhetorical and communicative goals that may also evolve as the composition process unfolds. The dynamic network models proposed by blending theory, image schemas and other constructs from 4E cognition (i.e., embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition), and the disciplines involved in the theory of complex dynamic systems are pointing us in the right direction. The interdisciplinary study of literature, emotion, and cognition can now flesh out those models and produce insights that are not only relevant for our understanding of the author’s mind during the creative process and its related affective experiences, but that also illuminate the general cognitive abilities that sustain creativity itself.

Notes 1 Following the convention, I use small caps to refer to conceptual entities. 2 All translations are my own.

Works Cited Boden, Margaret A. “Computer Models of Creativity.” AI Magazine, vol. 30, no. 3, 2009, pp. 23–34. Cairns, Douglas. “Looks of Love and Loathing.” Métis, vol. 9, Dec. 2011, pp. 37–50. Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” Times Literary Supplement, 20 Oct. 1921, cited from T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays. 3rd ed., Faber and Faber, 1951, pp. 282–290. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Basic Books, 2002. Hogan, Patrick C. “Literary Universals.” Poetics Today, 1997, pp. 223–249. ———. What Literature Teaches us about Emotion. 1st ed., Cambridge UP, 2011. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. U of Chicago P, 1987.

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Authors Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. Macmillan, 1964. Mandler, Jean M. The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought. Oxford UP, 2004. ———, and Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas. “On Defining Image Schemas.” Language and Cognition, vol. 6, no. 4, Dec. 2014, pp. 510–532. Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. 1st Paperback ed., Thames & Hudson, 1999. Pagán Cánovas, Cristóbal. “Erotic Emissions in Greek Poetry: A Generic Integration Network.” Cognitive Semiotics, vol. 6, 2010, pp. 7–32. ———. “Rethinking Image Schemas: Containment and Emotion in Greek Poetry.” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 45, no. 2, 2016, pp. 117–139. DeGruyter. ———, and Mark Turner. “Generic Integration Templates for Fictive Communication.” The Conversation Frame: Forms and Functions of Fictive Interaction, edited by Esther Pascual and Sergeyi Sandler, John Benjamins, 2016, pp. 45–62. Politis, N. G. (Ν. Γ. Πολίτης). Εκλογαί από τα τραγούδια του ελληνικού λαού. 1st ed., Bagionaki, 1914. Rosenwein, Barbara H. “Worrying about Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 3, June 2002, pp. 821–845. University of Chicago. Snell, Bruno, and H. Maehler. Pindarus I-II. Teubner, 1975, 1980. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford UP, 1996. ———. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton UP, 1991. Voigt, E. V. Sappho et Alcaeus: fragmenta. Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 1971. Wierzbicka, Anna. Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals. Cambridge UP, 1999.

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23 CHARACTER AND EMOTION IN FICTION Keith Oatley

Abstract: Fiction is based on narrative in which characters’ intentions meet vicissitudes. One mode of literary theorizing, which derives from Aristotle, has a center in mimesis, meaning “imitation” or “simulation.” Another mode, which derives from Bharata Muni, is based on rasa, literary emotion. With the first of these it has been argued that character is the center of fiction while, with the other, emotion comes foremost. We understand character in fiction and in everyday life by making mental models, simulations. In psychology this process is called theory-of-mind. Some novelists, such as George Eliot, have been effective in depicting character. Others, such as Leo Tolstoy, have been less involved in this, but have excelled at writing of emotions of people in their stories and in provoking emotions in readers. Rasa is generally accompanied by dhvani, meaning suggestion so, in fiction that employs both of these, character and emotion can accompany each other.

Narrative Jerome Bruner proposed that narrative is a distinctive mode of thought that “deals with the vicissitudes of human intentions” (16). He contrasted it with paradigmatic thought, which consists of arguments based on explanations of how the physical world works. Narrative occurs in conversation, in anecdotes and gossip as well as in plays, novels, short stories, films, and television series. “A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds,” says Bruner, “arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness” (11). “Lifelikeness” is often based on depictions of human or human-like characters. If someone acts on an intention this person hopes that something in the world will change in a way that is desired. But, when this happens, it isn’t much of a story. It’s someone getting on with what she or he wants to do. A story can be told when an outcome of an intention is unwanted: a vicissitude. In Poetics, Aristotle (330 BCE/1970) called this peripeteia, reversal of fortune. Typically, then, stories concern how one or more characters cope with such eventualities. Different kinds of character cope in very different ways. In her far-reaching survey Margaret Doody wrote of how character has been at the center of novels since ancient times. In 1884, Henry James published an essay entitled the “The art of fiction,” in which he said: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (405). DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-28

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In Europe and America, the question of what character is in fiction has continued to occupy writers. In her influential essay of 1924, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” Virginia Woolf wrote “I want to make out what we mean when we talk about ‘character’ in fiction” (319). In 1983, John Gardner, published The Art of Fiction, in which he said, “character is the emotional core of all great fiction” (56). In 1993, Richard J. Gerrig argued that understanding character in fiction occurs in the same kind of way that we understand people whom we know in everyday life. Influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics, a central issue in understanding fiction has been mimesis, translated as “imitation,” “copying,” or “representation.” But as Stephen Halliwell has shown, in Aristotle’s time mimesis had two families of meaning. One was indeed “imitation” and its cognates, which have been followed by the cliché: “Art imitates life.” A second was “worldbuilding” or “simulation.” When one comes to know this, is it clear that it was this second family of meanings that Poetics was about. In the twenty-first-century research on simulation, and on how we build imagined worlds, has become critical in the understanding of stories, and their relation to how we understand each other and ourselves (Oatley; Tamir et al.). Approaching from this direction, let’s consider Murasaki Shikubu’s (1000) The Tale of Genji. It starts in the Emperor’s court in what is now Kyoto, Japan. Here’s a translation of its first sentence: “In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty’s Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor.” This is Kiritsubo, the mother of Genji. On page three of this thousand-page novel, when Genji is still a child, she dies. When he is an adult, Genji has love affairs with various women. The first is Fujitsubo, whom his father (His Majesty) took as a consort when Kiritsubo died. Genji falls in love with her because she reminds him of his mother. Being a consort of His Majesty, properly speaking she is unattainable. Genji does attain her, but only in part. Then after Fujitsubo, he falls in love with Murasaki, because she reminds him of Fujitsubo, and also of his mother. Each of the women with whom he has an affair offers some aspect of his lost mother, but his vicissitude is that he finds only images and reminders. In these episodes, we build a sense of Genji’s character based on his, partly unconscious, yearning for his mother, nine hundred years before Freud. Three hundred years later, in Italy, came Dante. Erich Auerbach (1929) suggested that it was he who introduced the idea of character into Western literature. Previous depictions, says Auerbach, for instance by Greek poets and playwrights, tended, by way of mimesis, to depict protagonists in long sequences of actions. Then, for minor characters who were jealous or were gluttons or were nuisances, the narrator, unconcerned with anything else about them, would offer just instances of the person being “jealous, gluttonous, or importunate” (141–142). Auerbach writes that, in The Divine Comedy, particularly in its first part (Dante, 1308–1320, L’Inferno, “Hell”), by means of what people say about themselves, Dante makes the first modern depictions of character. In the circumstance of Inferno, it is especially important for the souls he meets to speak to their visitor, Dante, of their inmost essence. Perhaps the most famous of these is Francesca da Rimini who, for political reasons, entered an arranged marriage with the deformed Gianciotto. Later she fell in love with Paulo, the handsome younger brother of Gianciotto, who surprised them and stabbed them both to death. Here is some of what Francesca says, followed by a reply by Dante who is accompanied by Virgil, known here as “Doctor” (i.e., teacher). “Love, that no loved heart remits love’s score, Took me with such great joy of him, that see! It holds me yet and never shall leave me more. 273

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Love to a single death brought him and me; Cain’s place lies waiting for our murderer now.” These words wafted to us plaintively . . . Then she to me: “The bitterest of woes Is to remember in our wretchedness Old happy times; and this thy Doctor knows; Yet if so dear desire thy heart possess To know that root of love which wrought our fall, I’d be as those who weep and who confess” (99–101) This story occurs in 54 lines. Francesca and Paulo had been reading together, of the love affair of Lancelot and the Queen then they, too, found themselves kissing each other. Following Auerbach, we might say that this story offers us a sense of Francesca’s character, with its basis in how close she felt to Paulo. Also, as he listens to Francesca, Dante resonates with the story and—perhaps because of his own love of Beatrice—he “swooned,” that’s to say fainted. Dorothy Sayers, who translated these verses, writes that although Francesca speaks thoughtfully, gracefully, she is in hell because she cannot emerge from self-pity. So here we get a sense of Francesca’s character. In literary understandings of India and Kashmir the center has been rasa, “literary emotion.” This line of theory began with Bharata Muni (200 BCE) and was developed by the tenth-century Sanskrit writer Abhinavagupta (Ingalls et al., Pandit). Rasas, literary emotions, correspond to everyday emotions, bhavas. There are nine of them, as follows. Bhava

Rasa

Sexual passion Happiness or amusement Sadness or sorrow Anger Perseverance Fear Disgust or disillusion Awe Serenity

The erotic or love story The comic The compassionate or tragic The furious The heroic The terrible or horrific The loathsome The wonderful The peaceful

A rasa is not an everyday emotion. At its center there is an emotion, but of a literary kind, which in the West gives rise to a genre. So, for the first three rasas in this list, the genres would be “love story, comedy, tragedy.” A well-conceived literary work concentrates on just one of these, although it is sometimes approached by transient emotional states such as apprehension or discouragement. Abhinavagupta stressed that in everyday life we often don’t understand our emotions because we are blinded by a thick crust of egoism. For an audience member or reader, a rasa gathers together our experiences and memories of a particular kind of emotion, such as love, happiness, or sadness in a way that enables us more deeply to understand its significance. 274

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Psychology and Character In psychology, character has been approached in two steps. The first is personality. The bestknown approach is that each of us has a certain amount of each of five traits, as follows. Extraversion: outgoingness, with an opposite of introversion, Emotional stability: with an opposite of neuroticism, Openness: mental acceptance of new experiences, Agreeableness: friendliness with other people, Conscientiousness: orderliness and perseverance. Each trait is a set of proclivities, motivations, or goals, that endure throughout life (Costa & McCrea). Although this approach has been helpful in some respects, its drawback is the idea that character persists regardless of context. The next movement on from this was Kenny et al.’s (2001) Social Relations Model. It has three aspects. The first is called the “Actor Effect.” It is similar to the idea of “personality,” how a person is seen by most other people, most of the time. An example is a man who is narcissistic; he acts to be the center of attention, interrupting others, talking all the time. The second is the “Partner Effect”: what someone tends to elicit from other people. So a woman who wants to be helpful may elicit others’ exploitation. Third is the “Dyad Effect”: who a person is differently with each distinctive other person (in dyads), with a spouse, a parent, or child, friend, colleague, or antagonist. This advance in conceptualization has been important. It includes contexts of other people, with findings that show that much of how to think of human character occurs not with everyone, but with particular others, in dyads (Sokolovic et al.). Even so, something is still left out. It is how people interact with events, misfortunes, vicissitudes. For this we have to move to literary stories. J. Peder Zane asked 125 American and British writers to name what for them was the best book of all time. First in the top ten was Leo Tolstoy’s (1878) Anna Karenina. Then, at numbers eight, nine, and ten, came Marcel Proust’s (1913–1927) À la recherche du temps perdu, Anton Chekhov’s (1883–1903) Stories, and George Eliot’s (1871–1872) Middlemarch. George Eliot was an important innovator in the depiction of character. In Middlemarch, the 19-year-old Dorothea Brooke is courted by Edward Casaubon, a 45-year-old cleric and scholar who is writing a book called The Key to All Mythologies. She believes that, by marrying him, she will be able to assist him in his work and, by this means, be able to become more knowledgeable, more educated. Rather subtly, George Eliot has Casaubon call his proposed book The Key to All Mythologies. ALL mythologies? An impossible task. Here, at the beginning of Chapter 20 of this novel is Dorothea, on her honeymoon in Rome, with Casaubon, who has gone off somewhere, to conduct his researches. Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina. I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly. . . . But was not Mr Casaubon just as learned as before? Had his forms of expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable? O waywardness of womanhood! Did his chronology fail him, or his ability to state not only a theory but the names of those who held it? Mr Casaubon . . . had not assisted in creating any illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with strong stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had 275

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dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? (224) And here, from the middle of this chapter: Poor Mr Casaubon himself was lost . . . in an agitated dimness about the Cabieri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to those labours. . . . “And all your notes,” said Dorothea. . . . “All those rows of volumes . . . will you not . . . begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world? I will write to your dictation.” . . . this cruel outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife . . . who instead of observing his abundant pen scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference . . . “My love,” he said, with irritation reigned in by propriety, “you may rely upon me for knowing the times and seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers.” (229–233) Dorothea’s sobbing, and the later conversation, indicate a recognition of her new husband’s character, which we readers also come to realize. So Dorothea’s aspiration to become more knowledgeable doesn’t happen. Neither does any companionship. In terms of psychology, George Eliot said this about her novels. But my writing is simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of—what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive.” Letter to Dr Joseph Payne, 25 January 1876 The novel that came second in in Zane’s survey of writers’ favorite books was Gustave Flaubert’s (1857) Madame Bovary, with a focus on character. Flaubert portrays Emma Bovary both as others see her and how she inwardly experiences herself. This enables readers to identify with her and affords a thoughtful understanding both of her character and, in reflection, also the readers’ own. In this novel Flaubert was an important progenitor for George Eliot, who as D. H. Lawrence said, was the first who “started putting all the action inside” (Wood, 182).

Emotion in Fiction In a worldwide survey Patrick Colm Hogan (What) found that, “millennia of storytelling present us with the largest body of works that systematically depict and provoke emotion, and do so as a major part of human life” (1; see also Hogan Literature). A novelist who was particularly good at both depicting and provoking emotion was Leo Tolstoy, perhaps especially in Anna Karenina. Oatley and Jenkins have shown how this comes over in Tolstoy’s three main strengths as a writer, as follows. 276

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The first was identified by Viktor Shklovsky (1917). He called it ostranenie, which means “making strange,” taking the reader emotionally by surprise, to realize something as if for the first time. In an example, Shklovsky cites Tolstoy’s short story of a horse “Kholstomer” (Strider, 1885). Here is the horse thinking to himself: I found it impossible to understand how and why I could be called a man’s property. The words my horse, referring to me, a living creature, struck me as strange, just as if someone had said, my earth, my air, my water. (86) The words in italics (which are in the original) are ostrananie: we are unlikely to have thought previously in this kind of way. Empirically this has been studied as “foregrounding” (van Peer), which attracts and directs readers’ attention. Emy Koopman asked participants to read an excerpt from a literary work that included foregrounding (ostrananie) or a control text, which was the same excerpt with foregrounding removed. The original enabled readers to experience more emotion-based empathy for its characters than did the control text. The second of Tolstoy’s strengths is that, instead of characterization we see the six main people in this novel as taking on roles, presenting themselves to others in the way about which Goffman (1959) would later write in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Here is an instance, near the beginning of Anna Karenina. Count Vronsky has gone to the railway station to meet his mother. Although he doesn’t want to see her, he will do so anyway, in an action that is proper for someone in his social position. By chance, his mother has travelled to Moscow in the same compartment as Anna. Vronsky followed the guard to the carriage, and at the door of the compartment he stopped short to make room for a lady who was getting out. With the insight of a man of the world, from one glance at this lady’s appearance Vronsky classified her as belonging to the best society . . . he felt he must glance at her once more. (72) Vronsky is polite, but a man who evaluates other people. Then “he felt he must”—an emotional urge—“glance at her once more”—an action. He ogles at a woman he likes the look of. These are perhaps pointers to his personality, but without much sense of inwardness. Really, these are ways that Vronsky presents himself in certain kinds of role, that can be discerned emotionally by others. The third of Tolstoy’s strengths is yet more striking. It occurs in the way that, as an incident occurs in the novel, the character to whom it happens first experiences one emotion in relation to it, then an opposite. This starts in the novel’s opening with Stepan Oblonsky, Anna’s brother. He has been having an affair with his children’s former French governess. His wife discovers this and is outraged. She has banished him. In this episode he wakes up thinking of a dream he has just had: there were some sort of little decanters on the table, and they were women too. . . . Stepan Arcadyevich’s eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile “Yes it was nice, very nice” . . . he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife’s 277

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room but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face: he knitted his brows. “Ah, ah, ah! Oo! . . .” he groaned, recalling everything that had happened. (4) First one emotion, as his “eyes twinkled gaily,” then an opposite as “the smile vanished” and “he knitted his brows.” Similarly, Vronsky usually presents himself as proud and disdainful. But later, when he dances with Anna at a ball, we read this: Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, held that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong. (96) Anna is the novel’s main protagonist. She, too, is taken up in opposite emotions. She both wants to have an affair with Vronsky, and also she doesn’t. What is so effective about this is how the reader, thinking first about one emotion then an opposite, can come to wonder: “How might I feel here?” The emotion that readers feel is not the character’s. It is the reader’s own emotion in the situation. What seems so effective about this technique is how it suggests alternatives. We have to make up our own minds. As to a deepening sense of character in Anna or Vronsky, rather little comes over. Vronsky is attracted to Anna. She is an elegant, upper-class, woman. But, for him, what is this attraction about? And Anna, too. She is bored with her husband, but then becomes attracted to Vronsky. He is a recognizable type, who looks down on other people: a man of a kind she must have met many times. Again, Tolstoy doesn’t give us any insight into her inner character in choosing him, or of the reason why, at the ball in Moscow, she flaunts herself (another role), when she dances with him. It is known that Tolstoy wanted to write this novel about a woman of a kind he found immoral and corrupt, but he seemed unable to offer us, his readers, much in the way of insight into deeper aspects of her character, or that of the other people in the novel. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster (1927) made a distinction between flat and round characters. The distinction depends on the complexity of their behavior. Of the six main characters in Anna Karenina, Vronsky is the flattest. As the love affair proceeds, he elopes with Anna to Italy. Here is what Tolstoy writes of his experience. Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand of the mountain of happiness that he had expected. (528) As readers we never come to know why Anna was important to him. But in these two sentences comes yet another reversal of emotion. In her essay of 1925, “The Russian point of view” Virginia Woolf calls Tolstoy “the greatest of all novelists” (244). She, too, writes of opposites in Russian fiction, and ends her essay by saying that in reading Tolstoy “fear mingles with pleasure . . . it is Tolstoy who most enthralls us and most repels” (246). Tolstoy probably didn’t know of Abhinavagupta, but it is as if he concentrated on emotion in the kind of way that is theorized in understanding rasas. In his own theory of art (1898), he said that in fiction the writer transmits emotions to readers as a kind of infection. Tolstoy did 278

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this without bothering much about character. He wasn’t subtle. He was explicit, with ostranenie, roles, and emotional opposites. In their discussion of the depiction of emotion in Anna Karenina, Oatley and Jenkins review the life of Tolstoy. He made many visits to prostitutes; he indulged this proclivity then experienced revulsion with himself (an emotional opposite). He became obsessed with getting drunk, obsessed with gambling, losing everything he had and more. It was only with the help of his wife, Sofia, that he was able to write Anna Karenina, with its focus on emotion. Oatley and Jenkins conclude that in novels the depiction of emotion has an importance that is comparable to that of character.

Combining Character and Emotion There seem to be two kinds of motivation for the writing and reading of novels. One is based on a human need to understand other people—character. This seems likely to derive from an evolutionary change that started several million years ago. Michael Tomasello explains how it was based in a new ability, which was to cooperate with each other, and says that this happened in two phases. The first of these he calls “joint intentionality,” the human ability to make joint arrangements, such as gathering and sharing food together. The second he calls “collective intentionality” in which, within societies, people agree to act and interact in certain ways. At the center of both is the need for us humans to understand each other, which psychologists call “theory-of-mind.” We do this by making mental models of each other, in a process that was explained by Kenneth Craik (1943). We can call a mental model of a person “character” (Schneider, Dunbar, Oatley, Mar). As Lisa Zunshine has argued, much of fiction is based in theory-of-mind. She says we are quite good at it. Because we like doing what we are good at, this is one of the reasons we enjoy fiction. So when two people meet and move toward friendship, they tell each other about themselves. This enables each to start to construct a mental model of the other. This gets supplemented in joint arrangements, and attitudes to culture as the friendship grows. For a person with whom we become close, our mental model of her or his character can become elaborate, but with many others it is often incomplete, composed from bits and pieces of interaction, and of gossip. Works of fiction can then enable this making of mental models to occur better than often occurs everyday life. In the first book of À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust put it like this. However deeply we sympathize, a real human being is perceived mainly by our senses. This means that the person remains opaque to us, and offers a dead weight that our perceptions cannot lift. If a misfortune should strike this person, it is only in a small part of the total understanding we have that we can be moved by this. . . . The discovery of the novelist is the idea of replacing those parts that are impenetrable to the mind by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say parts that our minds can assimilate . . . and within an hour set free states of happiness and unhappiness of kinds that would take years of our ordinary life coming to know. (Proust, 1913, Du Côté de Chez Swann, 84, my translation) In empirical terms it has been found that the more fiction, as compared with explanatory nonfiction, that people read the better become both their theory-of-mind and emotion-based empathy (Oatley, Mar). It has also been found that, in reading a literary story, Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady With a Little Dog,” people were enabled to change within themselves—their 279

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personality, their character—by significant amounts (Djikic et al.). People who read a control text that depicted the same individuals with all the information about them, which readers found just as interesting but not as artistic, did not change their character. These changes happened not by persuasion, in which readers come to prefer or to act in a way that an author wants. With Chekhov’s short story—as a function of art—each person changed in her or his own way, with the amount of change mediated by the intensity of emotion that participants experienced while reading the story. What is going on here is generally called identification. It is somewhat like meditation, in which one sets aside one’s own concerns, and goes to be quiet. As one does this while reading, one can take on a protagonist’s concerns and goals. We then seem able to insert these into what may be called our own “planning processor,” the means we use mentally to arrange what we shall do during the day. So rather than our own plans, as we read, we come mentally to follow and realize outcomes of the plans of the story’s protagonist. Thinking back to Aristotle’s Poetics, identification of this kind seems to be based on mimesis, with its idea of simulation being extended to the construction of mental models of characters in a story; taking, within ourselves, aspects these people. A second kind of motivation for reading fiction is a desire to understand emotions more deeply. So as Collingwood (1938) argued, a work of art is an externalization of an aspect of the artist’s mind: a translation into what he calls a “language.” The artist does this because of a preoccupying emotion that she or he doesn’t yet understand. The translation into an external form, for instance of words, enables the artist to understand it better. In parallel, says Collingwood, other people who engage with the work are enabled better to understand their own comparable emotions. These two kinds of motivation, then, are important, but for different reasons. Rather than just thinking of just one as fundamental we might, perhaps, regard both as inherent in what literary novels and short stories are about. Some writers of fiction are better at the depiction of character, with invitations to identify and extend readers’ theory-of-mind. Others are better with emotions as such. Both of these can then prompt us to reflect on those whom we know, and on our own selves. Western literary theory has one central topic: mimesis. Eastern theory has two: along with rasa there is also dhvani (suggestion). They often occur together. In Abhinavagupta’s theory (introduced earlier) instead of a focus on how a piece of art can be an imitation (mimesis) of something in the world, the principal focus of this approach is on writers along with experiences of readers and audience members. With dhvani, the writer offers suggestions to those who engage with the work, who can then make imaginative constructions of people and emotions in the story. Here is one of Abhinavagupta’s examples. It is a verse that occurs in a play in which, accompanied by her mother-in-law, a young woman is at home while her husband is away. Then comes a visitor, who asks if he can stay overnight. Here’s what the young woman says: Mother-in-law sleeps here, I there: Look, traveler, while it is light. For at night when you cannot see You must not fall into my bed (Ingalls, et al., 98) This play is based on the rasa of sringara, love story. But it is conjoined with dhvani, so that what is subtly suggested is that an emotion-based attraction has occurred between the young woman and the traveler. The woman speaks openly before her mother-in-law: a 280

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prohibition, “you must not.” But to the traveler (which members of the audience may also understand), it’s an invitation. Another suggestion is, “at night when you cannot see.” This also has an implication: “When you may not quite know what you are doing.” Then there’s another suggestion: “fall.” In response to dhvani, audience members and readers have to make inferences. In an experimental study by Maria Kotovych et al., in the research group of Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, it was found that when a story called “The Office” by Alice Munro invited a reader to make an inference in response to an emotion-based suggestion, a deeper insight into the protagonist’s character occurred than when, in a control condition, the reader was simply told how to think of the protagonist. So, in this way, if in the story of the young woman whose husband had gone off somewhere we had been told, “she’s fed up,” or “she’s frustrated,” the result would have been more superficial. So rather than thinking that just one of these—character or emotion—is essential, perhaps they both are. As you may see from the example we gave from Middlemarch, George Eliot was able to combine the two. In modern times Alice Munro is one of the modern authors who is able to do this. Now empirical research on literature may also be coming to explore how character and emotion can interact together in stories.

Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by G. E. Else. U of Michigan P, 1970. Auerbach, E. Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Translated by R. Mannheim. New York Review of Books, 2007. Bharata Muni. Natyasastra; English Translation with Critical Notes. Translated by A. Rangacharya, IBH Prakashana, 1986. Bruner, J. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard UP, 1986. Chekhov, A. Anton Chekhov: Stories. Translated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky, Bantam, 2000. Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. Oxford UP, 1938. Costa, P. T., and R. R. McCrae. “Mood and Personality in Adulthood.” Handbook of Emotion, Adult Development, and Aging, edited by C. Magai and S. H. McFadden, Academic Press, 1996, pp. 369–383. Craik, K. J. W. The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge UP, 1943. Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy: Hell (L’Inferno). Translated by D. Sayers, Penguin, 1949. Djikic, M., K. Oatley, S. Zoeterman, and J. Peterson. “On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self.” Creativity Research Journal, vol. 21, 2009, pp. 24–29. Doody, M. A. The True Story of the Novel. HarperCollins, 1997. Dunbar, R. I. M. The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution. Faber and Faber, 2004. Eliot, G. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Penguin, 1965. ———. Selections from George Eliot’s Letters. Edited by G. S. Haight, Yale UP, 1985. Flaubert, G. Madame Bovary. Translated by L. Davis, Penguin, 2011. Gardner, J. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Knopf, 1984. Gerrig, R. J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Yale UP, 1993. Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday, 1959. Halliwell, S. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton UP, 2002. Hogan, P. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2017. ———. What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2011. Ingalls, D. H. H., J. M. Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan. The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Harvard UP, 1990. Kenny, D. A., C. D. Mohr, and M. J. Levesque. “A Social Relations Variance Partitioning of Dyadic Behavior.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 127, 2001, pp. 128–141. Koopman, E. M. E. “Effects of ‘Literariness’ on Emotions and on Empathy and Reflection after Reading.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 10, 2016, pp. 82–98. Mar, R. A. “Stories and the Promotion of Social Cognition.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 27, 2018, pp. 257–262. Munro, A. “The Office.” Dance of the Happy Shades. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1988, pp. 59–74.

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Keith Oatley Murasaki, S. The Tale of Genji. Translated by R. Tyler, Viking Penguin, 2001. Oatley, K. “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 618–628. ———, and J. M. Jenkins. “Art as Expression of Emotion Explored in Anna Karenina.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 23, 2021, pp. 190–203. Pandit, L. “Dhvani and the ‘Full Word’: Suggestion and Signification from Abhinavagupta to Jaques Lacan.” College Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, 1996, pp. 142–163. Proust, M. Du côté de chez Swann. Gallimard, 1987. ———. In Search of Lost Time. Penguin, 2003. Schneider, R. “Towards a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-model Construction.” Style, vol. 35, 2001, pp. 607–640. Shklovsky, V. “Art as Technique.” Translated by L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis. Modern Criticism and Theory, edited by D. Lodge, Longman, 1988, pp. 16–30. Sokolovic, N., G. Leckie, D. T. Browne, and J. M. Jenkins. “What Makes for Responsive Family Interactions? Disentangling Individual, Family-level, and Socio-economic Contributions.” Journal of Family Psychology, 2021, Online First Publication, 18 Mar 2021. Tamir, D. I., A. Bricker, D. Dodell-Feder, and J. Mitchell. “Reading Fiction and Reading Minds: The Role of Simulation in the Default Network.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, vol. 11, 2016, pp. 216–224. Tolstoy, L. Anna Karenina. Translated by C. Garnett; translation revised by L. J. Kent and N. Berberova, Modern Library, 2000. ———. “Strider.” Leo Tolstoy: Master and Man, and Other Stories, edited by R. Wilks and P. Foore, Penguin, 2005, pp. 67–107. ———. What Is Art? Translated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky, Penguin, 1995. Tomasello, M. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Harvard UP, 2019. Van Peer, W. Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding. Croom Helm, 1986. Wood, J. C. D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. Barnes & Noble, 1965. Woolf, V. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” Collected Essays. Volume 1. Chatto and Windus, 1966, pp. 319–337. ———. “The Russian Point of View.” Collected Essays. Volume 1. Chatto and Windus, 1966, pp. 238–246. Zane, J. P. Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. Norton, 2007. Zunshine, L. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

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24 LANGUAGE, STYLE, AND TEXTURE Peter Stockwell

Abstract: The emotional possibilities for a reader of literature are evidently conditioned by matters of language and style. A key issue, in considering how style tends toward emotion, is in locating and characterizing style as a feature of text, or authors, or perception. This chapter considers the role of style in the generation of emotional engagement, exploring style as a pattern involving creative choice, as an objective patterning, and also as an effect of text and mind combined. This last combination involves the concept of texture. Several brief examples are presented of subtle emotional effects in literary texts and readings. The chapter argues that emotion should be as much a part of the linguistic exploration of literary style as meaningfulness or formal structures.

Style as Choice The potential for emotional engagement with a literary work is a matter of language. This is true only if we recognize that language means not only the material words on the page or screen, but all of the patterns, meanings, memories, expectations, feelings, and emotions that, I argue, are the proper domain of language and its study. The central discipline for the study of language is, of course, linguistics, but we must recognize that the linguistic exploration of a literary work needs to draw to itself the insights gained by other fields. This is not so much a move toward interdisciplinarity as a requirement that linguistics broadens itself again, rediscovering its own older foundations in enterprises such as rhetoric, philology, aesthetics, and poetics. All of these frames for language study involved a recognition that patterns in language are inextricably embedded and involved in systems, social settings, and culture. Modern linguistics has often restricted itself to formal matters of syntax, for example, as if sequence could exist independently or autonomously of its component parts or its situated use. However, if we include syntactic knowledge as linguistic knowledge, then we must also include cultural and emotional knowledge and experience in the same way. We can know that a certain phrasestructure is well-formed; or we can know that a particular metrical pattern has a conventional cultural significance; or we can know that certain combinations of sentences can evoke feelings of nostalgia, joy, or empathy: all of these forms of knowledge are brought to mind by an encounter with a linguistic pattern in a text. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-29

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Patterns, in this sense, are perceptual phenomena that, in themselves, have no material existence. We could, perhaps arbitrarily and subjectively, take a word as the default material unit of language: how words are assembled from smaller components (sounds and morphemes) and how they are combined into larger structures both involve a sense of a pattern that requires an observing consciousness. Words clearly have certain functions depending on how they are sequenced; they also have meanings that we think of as denotational—these are both equally matters of linguistic knowledge. However, the associations that are generated even by individual words are also matters of linguistic knowledge, I argue, even if those associations are personal to your life, memory and experience, or your mood right now. Think of what the following words do to you when you read them here: “coffee,” or “hawk,” or “Narnia.” Almost certainly, there is more going on in your mind and body right now than simple mental pictures of these things, or dictionary-style definitions. The meaning of “coffee” is also your memory of it, the taste of it, personal associations that you have, situations in which you would place a coffee, and the people involved, and the age you were, and the feelings you had at the time, and so on. In this chapter, I consider the emotional effect of language as style. This is a useful term because it places the concept of patterning as the main focus, and can be used across all levels of language. So we can talk about metrical style, prosody, turn of phrase, syntactic style, chaining of sentences, tone, register, genre, or mind-style, and so on. Traditionally, the study of style especially in literary works has been the domain of Stylistics, where style has been defined as a matter of choice. (See, for example, Short, Stockwell and Whiteley, Sotirova, Wales.) The notion of choice as an organizational parameter in a text relies on the presumption that a text is like a grid of possibilities, with several options available to fit each co-ordinate. Foundationally in the work of Jakobson, there are sequential slots to be filled (syntagmatic choices) as well as different options within each position in the sequence (paradigmatic options). In this scheme, the job of the linguist is to identify the constraints operating along both of these axes: What are the conventions of syntax? What are the possibilities for semantic choice? For example, I could choose to say, “the dilemma for me is whether to carry on or not,” or switch the syntax around while still conforming to the conventions of English by saying, “carrying on or not—that’s the dilemma for me.” Alternatively, I can spin each paradigmatic slot in this latter sequence with different comparable words and phrases: “Whether to carry on or not—that’s the question,” or, of course, “to be or not to be, that is the question.” There is something rather mechanistic and unsatisfying about this, however. Thinking about style as a set of two-dimensional axes does not explain how some sequences seem to work better than others, and some word-choices generate certain effects—for example, there appear to be different senses of both colloquiality and seriousness in the four versions. And of course there are effects arising from the fact that the feeling of despair expressed in these sentences is emotionally charged, and also culturally significant (though only if you do recognize that the final version is a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet). There is clearly a lot more going on in strings of language like this than simply determinations of well-formedness judged against rules that we do not even now fully understand, or the resolution of a denoted meaning that will vary from person to person and does not include feeling, situation, and culture. These issues apply to all language use, but they are especially pertinent when language is used for literary purposes. While all language comes with a presumption that there was a creator of the words and an intended audience, literary uses of language foreground such authorial creativity, readerly effectiveness, and of course a sense that creative and receptive minds can also be embedded within the literary world as narrators and characters (see Leech, Simpson Language, Ideology and Point of View, Toolan). 284

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This presumption of mind behind an utterance seems an obvious fact, but in literary theory the issue has become bound up with considerations of authorial intention. The difficulty of pinning down the precise intention behind a text, or arguing that meanings cannot be pinned down at all in language, has slipped into a theoretical prohibition on thinking about creative intention altogether, in some parts of literary thinking. In other parts, authors and their biographies and contemporary locations have become the main area of discussion, often leading to the sidelining of the actual literary text and its patterning. And in creative writing areas within literary studies, there is a different way again of thinking about imagination, intention, design and whether the world of the text and its characters have a metaphorically autonomous life of their own. Stylistics has tended to describe style as choice, but of course this is framed in a rather disembodied and dispassionate way, as if the choice is somehow an abstract matter of the language system, rather than an effect of human agency. The issue, of course, is whether the author’s choice is intended and carefully designed or accidental and fortuitous. It may also be the case that authors do not know their own minds either in the moment of composition nor reflectively afterwards. Some authors write in a highly intuitive way; others write in a highly informed and self-conscious way. And both authors and reader are entirely capable of reconstructing speculations about authorial intention at a later point in time. No one denies the material fact that a text was created at some point by someone. The issue is the extent to which the meaning and significance of that text can be attributed to that creator, to the role played by the language system itself, or to the input of readerly work (see Stockwell, “The Texture of Authorial Intention”). Crucial to this issue—which lies at the heart of almost all theorizing about literature and culture—is a sense of how the communicativeness of literature works, and how the minds of author, reader, and fictional people like narrators and characters engage emotionally with each other (see Hogan, Literature and Emotion, and Style in Narrative). In the rest of this chapter, I will consider the notion of style—and particularly its role in the emotional engagement of literature—as an object, as an effect, and as an experience. In each of these cases, respectively, I will be thinking about text, textuality, and texture. Throughout, it is difficult to explore style without engaging in some stylistic analysis, however brief, so examples of these will be included too.

Style as an Object There is a sort of purity in viewing the text itself as a contained idealization of its meaning, emotion and significance. There are also advantages in bracketing off the messy business of authorial capriciousness and readerly contextual knowledge and feeling, in order to focus only on the text itself. In this way, the style of a literary work can be described by the patterned features that are evidentially and observably there. Although it would perhaps be odd to locate the text as the place where literary emotion resides, this formulation does make sense if we treat the text as a sort of programming code with which humans can run their emotions. Just as I. A. Richards declared “A book is a machine to think with” (1), a book is a program to feel with. If we cannot give a systematic account of the nuances of emotional responses evoked by a text’s patterns, at least we can identify which describable features are the ones that evoke an emotional reaction. If we view the text as a structure, then the particular style of any given work is a bundle of its characteristic features. Different configurations of stylistic features allow the style to be given a name, and these can be applied at a range of different levels (see Burke, Csabi, Week and Zerkowitz, and Gibbons and Whiteley). So we could speak of a telegrammatic style, such 285

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as W. H. Auden often used in his early poetry, and we can pinpoint this very precisely to his omission of definite articles: Who will endure Heat of day and winter danger, Journey from one place to another, Nor be content to lie Till evening upon headland over bay, Between the land and sea; Or smoking wait till hour of food, Leaning on chained-up gate At edge of wood? (Auden 53, composed 1930) The effect of this simple omission is a sense of a plain style, archaic sounding, almost like a translation from Middle English; it feels stripped out and sparse, and the missing determiners turn their noun phrases toward the status of abstract qualities, which can be felt thematically as something more socially significant missing. The pattern continues in the rest of the poem, which portrays a landscape empty and waiting for something catastrophic to happen. The emotion generated by this style is subtle rather than melodramatic: mild dread, ill-defined anxiety, the initial stirrings of an anticipated but ambient fear. The question format also points forward, but it remains rhetorically unanswered. In both cases, the readerly involvement in the style fills in what is ellipted. In this case, the style is particular to this and a few other poems, rather than all of Auden’s work, so it cannot be described as an “Audenesque” style (though in fact it was so striking that Auden was parodied for it). By contrast, we can speak of “Miltonic style” (reversal of the usual word order that carries a portentous Latinate feel—see Agari), or a “Kafkaesque style,” featuring ambivalence, vagueness, and odd logical connections in the cohesion between sentences (see Simpson, Language, Ideology and Point of View), or the characteristic non-evaluative and low-adjectival content of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver, for example. These writers, though, have a distinctive style that is authorial, and which they carry across different literary works. It is easy to identify a passage of Henry James, Ray Bradbury, or Jane Austen, because the styles of these authors retain a recognizable authorial feeling across different narrators, situations and characters, almost regardless of the particular world being evoked in each literary work. If style is viewed as a describable object, then a decision has to be made as to whether style itself is detachable, an independent dimension of the text. Such a dualist view of form and content regards style as merely an ornament to the sense, suggesting the same meaning can be communicated in a variety of ways. The Hamlet example shows this. However, this position only makes sense if the concept of the contentful meaning of the text is very loose. Certainly the four versions of the “To be or not to be” line communicate a broadly similar proposition, but they also convey differences in tone, register, attitude, commitment, and a sense of despair in each case. I would not regard these differences as trivial, and differences in emotional articulation are part of the meaning, I think. A dualist position also has to deal with the fact that, if style is a detachable feature, then what would a text without any style look like? There is no such thing as a neutral text, since every word has to be placed in relation to every other word. 286

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The opposite view, a monist one, argues that style and content are inseparable in a text: if you alter the style, even minimally, you change the meaning. Leech and Short (9–33) discuss these two approaches to style, suggesting broadly that a dualist view works generally for extended prose fiction but a monist view works generally for the more intensive nature of poetic texts. Dualism rests on the possibility of a paraphrase of a text, and you might argue that it is easier to give a paraphrase of, say, D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers than of his poem “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through.” Of course, the notion of a paraphrase is a broad concept, ranging from the most general gist to a detailed plot synopsis. A paraphrase of the novel would still need to leave out almost everything that makes the text a literary novel at all: plot summaries of Sons and Lovers available online in book reviews give only the bare propositional bones of the story, and reviews of the multiple movie versions of the novel often focus on what has been left out. By contrast, a paraphrase of the poem does not work. My point is that style does not simply convey meaning. Along with meaningful propositions, the style of a text is responsible for the shifting of attention, the engagement in empathy, all the emotional and expressive aspects of the text. These are not secondary to the meaning. A dualist view of style requires a very narrow view of content as denotational meaning only. A monist view that style and content are inseparable is a more attractive position, though its defenders have not helped the cause. Some defenses can be discarded. As Leech and Short point out, some authors (Coleridge, Leo Tolstoy, David Lodge) take an almost religious view of the sacredness and integrity of literary objects, as if altering only one phrase would make the inviolable text a fundamentally different work. This is clearly extreme. Coleridge talked of the “untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning” (162) of poetry (he was thinking in particular of metaphor), and Leech and Short (22) raise the issue of translation as an argument against monism: if style and meaning cannot be separated, how is translation possible at all? These objections to both the dualism and monism of style rest on the equivalence of the content of the text with its meaning. Along with most linguistics, they bracket off feeling, emotional articulation, modal commitment, and disposition as if these expressive matters were nonlinguistic. It is clearly a tricky matter to translate a short poem, especially if the poetic text relies on prosodic, metrical, and other sound patterns. Samuel Beckett translated his own poems in a parallel-page layout, claiming that he was translating the poetic effect, rather than the literal denotation. One such parallel translation begins: Poème 1974

Something There

hors crâne seul dedans quelque part quelquefois comme quelque chose

something there where out there out where outside what the head what else something there somewhere outside the head

crâne abri dernier pris dans le dehors

Source: (Beckett 62–3)

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A literal translation of the French here might be: outside skull alone inside some where sometimes as some thing skull final shelter caught within the outside Clearly, Beckett’s own English version is not a translation of the denotational meaning, or only very loosely. It is also laid out more expansively, and has a completely different title that might orientate the reader radically differently. My own translation, though, involved some decisions that would have rendered this literal version quite different: “skull” for crâne where Beckett has “head,” treating abri dernier as a single phrase in the French equal to the English “final shelter.” I am clearly influenced by the nihilistic drama here in selecting “final,” rather than “last,” for dernier, and possibly also “caught” for pris, rather than “taken.” Also, Beckett’s English version reads like a playtext dialog, which is not apparent in the French version. The English has a question-answer pattern, the French is more monologic and streamed—both generate vagueness, and thus an unspecified non-articulation of paranoia and anxiety. What Beckett has translated here is the feeling of both versions: the sense of paranoia, panic, existential fear, rather than the narrow “meaning.” This is not an argument countering monism in itself, but an argument against extreme monism. Clearly texts—even highly poetic ones like Beckett’s, as well as more prosaic texts—can be translated in some way, while recognizing that different elements are lost and gained along the way. What is lost and gained is not meaning, alone, but all of the other aspects of expression that are carried by style. There is a difference between what we might call this textual holism and an extreme monism. It is important to recognize the multifunctionality of text, especially a literary text: expression of emotion and disposition, social interaction, ideological commitment, as well as meaning. This is the position that Leech and Short finally adopt, which I think supports textual holism rather than a refutation of monism itself. If you change the style then you do change the text’s content, because the content is more than just the propositional meaning. The degree to which the effect of the text is changed is often a complex, multifunctional matter that is peculiar to the text in hand. In all of this, however, we have been treating style as an object and property of text rather than as a readerly process. The question of how emotional engagement is effected by a literary text is the subject of the next section.

Style as an Efect The textuality of the text requires an observing consciousness to engage with it. Texts are material, but textuality is a sense of cohesion, coherence, and interaction based on a readerly presumption that there is a consistent mind behind the creation of the text. This presumption is a cognitive default of the natural language situation, where all utterances are imputed to a speaker. The displacement involved in writing, including literary works, does not remove this basic fact of cognitive embodiment. Since humans are not robotic message-processors, our interactions in language are always emotionally and socially slanted, to a greater or lesser degree. So we really ought to think of style as an observed phenomenon that emerges out of the readerly progression through a text. Given the fundamental importance of the presumption of a mind in what readers read, all style is mind-style. Originating in the work of Fowler (Linguistics and the Novel, see also 288

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Linguistic Criticism), this term captures the notion that a particular characteristic set of features in a text can index the worldview of an author, narrator, or character. Since all text is ascribable to one of these minds (even if the ascription is uncertain), the stylistic patterns associated with the view of the world in a text constitute its mind-style. This is necessarily a readerly pattern rather than an objective text pattern, however. The mind-style in a text is always noticed and evaluated in relation to the reader’s position. This means that we tend to notice a mind-style only when it is rather idiosyncratic—and idiosyncrasy is of course a judgment based on your own sense of what is normal. Semino (“Mind Style 25 Years On”) views mind-style and ideological point of view as being on two ends of a continuum where the former is individual and idiosyncratic and the latter is social and culturally shared. Again, all of these judgments are not absolute but can only be made relative to the reader’s sense of their own orthodoxy. Here, for example, is a fictional narrator who we later discover is named Raoul, introducing himself in Katharine Mansfield’s 1918 short story, “Je ne parle pas français”: I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. It’s dirty and sad, sad. It’s not as if it had anything to distinguish it from a hundred others—it hasn’t; or as if the same strange types came here every day, whom one could watch from one’s corner and recognize and more or less (with a strong accent on the less) get the hang of. But pray don’t imagine that those brackets are a confession of my humility before the mystery of the human soul. Not at all; I don’t believe in the human soul. I never have. I believe that people are like portmanteaux—packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them onto the Ultimate Train and away they rattle. . . . Not but what these portmanteaux can be very fascinating. Oh, but very! I see myself standing in front of them, don’t you know, like a Customs official. (Mansfield 63, original 1918) Raoul has an identifiable style that expresses his view of the world. It is set up here, assembled phrase-by-phrase by the reader into a mental model of the mind of the character-narrator. He is self-regarding and self-conscious, unfeeling for others, rather pompous and boastful, also seedy and objectionable. His style is rambling in the repetitions and the long trailing clauses in the sentences, with digressions, appositions and interjections. He mixes his conversational register with overblown turns of phrase, and is supercilious and lacking in empathy. He is not at all likable. All this is derivable as a consequence almost entirely of the mind-style in which this excerpt is composed. The major studies of mind-style, unsurprisingly, bear out Semino’s observation that deviant personal viewpoint is the more interesting (see Semino and Swindlehurst, McIntyre, Semino “A Cognitive Stylistic Approach,” and Nuttall). However, even more “neutral” styles of mind can be analyzed too, especially if we remember that “neutral” here always means aligning with the reader’s own ideological viewpoint. For an example, we can look to a passage of narrative realism. Here is the opening to Flora Thompson’s novel, Lark Rise to Candleford, documenting rural English life at the end of the nineteenth century: The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which 289

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made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn. All around, from every quarter, the stiff, clayey soil of the arable fields crept up; bare, brown and windswept for eight months out of the twelve. Spring brought a flush of green wheat and there were violets under the hedges and pussy-willows out beside the brook at the bottom of the “Hundred Acres”; but only for a few weeks in later summer had the landscape real beauty. Then the ripened cornfields rippled up to the doorsteps of the cottages and the hamlet became an island in a sea of dark gold. To a child it seemed that it must always have been so; but the ploughing and sowing and reaping were recent innovations. Old men could remember when the Rise, covered with juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a furzy heath—common land, which had come under the plough after the passing of the Inclosure Acts. [. . .] Going from one part of the hamlet to another was called “going round the Rise,” and the plural of “house” was not “houses,” but “housen.” The only shop was a small general one kept in the back kitchen of the inn. The church and school were in the mother village, a mile and a half away. (Thompson 17–18, original published 1939) Aside from one metafictional clause (“We will call it Lark Rise”) where the authorial voice briefly intrudes to signal that this is an imagined, fictionalized landscape, the excerpt here does not seem to have as striking nor deviant a voice as, for example, the Mansfield passage, nor the voices of psychopaths, murderers, aliens, as well as those with neuro-atypical conditions who have been represented in literary fiction in the mind-style studies mentioned earlier. However, I am arguing that the Thompson passage does have a mind-style; it is simply less deviant in the stylistic sense and more subtle. The lexical range of the excerpt of course represents a focused domain of word-choices, which a reader might recognize as a lyrical description of the English countryside of the sort you might find in reflective writing in newspaper columns such as extracts from a country diary. All of the worldbuilders are consistent for coherence, drawing a highly visual picture of nature and seasonal cycles. However, there is a voice, one that might be described as literary or novelistic, in the metaphor of the village as “an island in a sea of dark gold,” in the fictive motion of “the soil of the fields crept up” and “the cornfields rippled up to the doorsteps,” and in the light personification of “Spring brought a flush.” There is also the literary viewpoint switch “To a child” and “Old men could remember,” that allows the narrative voice to combine imagined and real history and historical dialectal variation. And of course there is judgment in evidence in the evaluative modifiers throughout (“gentle rise,” “stiff, clayey soil”) and the description “real beauty.” The narrator also places expectations in a simulated alignment with the reader, so the “only shop” sets aside any expectation that there would be more than this, and the definite articles in “the inn,” “The church,” and “the school” refer to the reader’s already-present schematic expectations of those places in the prototypical village that is being evoked. All of this still constitutes a mind-style, one that is semi-autobiographized by Flora Thompson (the main character is “Laura Timmins”), but it is important to recognize here that a readerly engagement with the narrative voice occurs not so much at the denotational, propositional level as at the level of emotional and empathetic connection with the viewpoint. The evocative tone, the vivid remembrance, and the clearly sympathetic perspective are articulated through a particular mind that automatically generates a sympathetic emotional resonance in a reader. An emotional connection is thus also a function of an authentic-sounding mind-style. This itself is effected by those stylistic means briefly itemized earlier. 290

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Style as an Experience It is clear, I think, that style is an experience of a text, rather than exclusively the material patterns in a text. Indeed, patterning itself is a perceptual and cognitive matter, without denying that perception and cognition are still working on an actual material object. Literary reading is not self-generated. However, the location for all literary activity is indeed in the mind and body of the reader (apart from historical reconstructions of authorial production, of course). In other words, it is the texture of the text that is crucial in understanding how text and textuality can be so emotionally affecting for a reader (Stockwell, Texture). The key question for me throughout this chapter has been: how does the style of the text provide the conditions for a reader to participate in an emotion? Discovering the answer to this lies in an approach that treats a reading of a text as a process in which the texture emerges from the engagement between the reader’s experience and the text. Deciding exactly which stylistic features at which levels and at which degrees of intensity are the most pertinent on each occasion will alter with different readings of literary works, though of course there are conventional patterns and communal cultural experiences that mean there are shared readings in common. The key to answering the textural problem with any given literary work lies in tying in all of the stylistic pattern-analysis briefly exercised in this chapter so far with an overall understanding of mind-modeling. This is the process by which a reader (or in fact any receiver of language from any source) draws on the texture of the text to build up a mental representation of the speaker’s or writer’s or narrator’s or character’s mind (see Zunshine Why We Read Fiction, and Stockwell Cognitive Poetics, 176–193). It is through mind-modeling that the literary author can creep back onto the stage, not as a historical rejuvenation, but as an imputed person that a reader builds up actively from their engagement with a text and their wider knowledge, experience and emotional capacities. The mind-modelled author is readerly, derived from style as an experience. Crucially, mind-modeling is active on the part of the reader, and the model of the authorial, narratorial or character mind that is assembled is a richly imagined person, which means they are (often) a source of emotional engagement. For a final brief example in this chapter, here is a poem with a complex layering of mind-modeling in my reading of it.

Ветер

The Wind

Я кончился, а ты жива. И ветер, жалуясь и плача, Раскачивает лес и дачу. Не каждую сосну отдельно, А полностью все дерева Со всею далью беспредельной, Как парусников кузова На глади бухты корабельной. И это не из удальства Или из ярости бесцельной, А чтоб в тоске найти слова Тебе для песни колыбельной.

I have died, but you live on. And the wind, moaning and crying, Rocks forest and cabin. Not each pine one by one, But all the trees together To all the boundless distance, Like hulls of sailboats rise In the slack water of the bay. And it is not out of boldness Nor out of aimless force, But to find words in grief For your cradle-song.

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The text in Russian was written by the novelist and poet Boris Pasternak, but this is a poem imagined to have been written by the eponymous character Yuri Zhivago, whose poems are collected at the end of Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago. The English translation here is my own. So my reading here is of my translation of an imagined poet’s poem within a narrative by a novelist, published in 1957 in Italy but not allowed officially to be read in Russia until more than 30 years later. As a reader of the translation, I have to model the minds of each of these real and fictional people, while also modeling the mind of the poetic persona who speaks in the poem, and the “you” who is addressed. There is thus a complex embedding of mind-modeling (though, as Zunshine [The Secret Life of Literature] argues, several layers of such “embedment” are a key characteristic of literature). In discussing the English version, I am also aware that there is a complexity in addressing the style of a translated text, even though it is just another text as well. Beginning within the level of the poem, there is instantly a paradox in that the first line cannot have been written by someone who is dead, so the expression must be assumed to be an imagined state, or the death is metaphorical for an emotional state. This means that even the “I” of the first line is not straightforward. And the “you” (ты is the singular familiar and intimate form) who lives on seems at the end to be either a baby or the singer of a lullaby. In between, the wind itself almost constitutes another mind, “moaning and crying,” and assuming to itself all the agency across the whole poem, acting on the natural and human-made landscape equally. The spatial viewpoint moves with the wind, from the existential first line quickly to the tangible landscape, so that even the sailboats in the bay—unreal because introduced within the simile—seem tangible too. This onward-moving trajectory finally reveals itself to have a purpose and objective “to find words in grief.” And of course those words by the end are the poem itself. Moving out a level, this is a poem written by Yuri Zhivago, the doctor and poet caught up in the Russian revolution, who approves of it in an idealistic and romantic manner, but whose attachment to nature, art and life (Жив in “Zhiv-ago” means “life”) puts him at odds with the social changes around him. In the novel, he constantly reflects on the presence of death, and how art is its only form of defeat. This modeling of the apparent author of the poem throws its trajectory across nature to death, almost in reverse from grave to cradle, into another perspective. Of course, at a level above this is my sense of Boris Pasternak, mainly known as a poet and translator, whose life is also encapsulated in the publishing history of his novel. “The wind” appears in a collection of imagined poems at two levels below the real author, and I imagine Pasternak himself creating a persona to distance himself from these poems that were not social-realist enough, were too Christian, and too individual and romantic for official approval. At all of these levels, there is a cross-world connection of empathy and understanding, I think, that can be seen overall and also traced through the particular stylistic patterns of the text and its texture. In summary, we have come to the point of arguing that style and language and emotion in literature are experiential, as well as textually coherent, as well as patterned by the text. The immediate consequences of this are that scholars of literature need to be linguistically trained, and linguists interested in literature need to encompass emotion and affect within their concept of language. (To this extent, Jakobson’s [“Closing Statement”] call to linguists and literary scholars to accommodate toward each other still stands and is required.) We now know that matters of meaning are also and inextricably matters of feeling, and memory, and we relive or simulate emotional connections between the minds that we build when we read literature. 292

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Works Cited Agari, Masahiko. Inversion in Milton’s Poetry. Peter Lang, 2001. Auden, Wystan Hugh. The English Auden. Faber, 1977. Beckett, Samuel. Collected Poems in English and French. Calder, 1977. Burke, Michael, Szilvia Csabi, Lara Week, and Judit Zerkowitz, editors. Pedagogical Stylistics. Continuum, 2012. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, Vol II. Rest Fenner, 1817. Fowler, Roger. Linguistics and the Novel. Methuen, 1977. ———. Linguistic Criticism. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 1996. Gibbons, Alison, and Sara Whiteley. Contemporary Stylistics: Language, Cognition, Interpretation. Edinburgh UP, 2018. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, 2017. ———. Style in Narrative: Aspects of an Affective-Cognitive Stylistics. Oxford UP, 2020. Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, MIT Press, 1960, pp. 350–377. ———. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance.” Fundamentals of Language, edited by Roman Jakobson and Morris Hallé, Mouton, 1956, pp. 55–82. Leech, Geoffrey N. Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Pearson, 2008. ———, and Mick Short. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. 2nd ed., Pearson Longman, 2007. Mansfield, Katherine. Bliss and Other Stories. Penguin, 1962. McIntyre, Dan. Point of View in Plays. John Benjamins, 2006. Nuttall, Louise. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2018. Pasternak, Boris. До́ктор Жива́го [Dr Zhivago]. Feltrinelli, 1957. Richards, Ivor A. Principles of Literary Criticism. Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1924. Semino, Elena. “A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Mind Style in Narrative Fiction.” Cognitive Stylistics, edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, John Benjamins, 2002, pp. 95–122. ———. “Mind Style 25 Years On.” Style, vol. 41, no. 2, 2007, pp. 153–203. ———, and Kate Swindlehurst. “Metaphor and Mind Style in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Style, vol. 30, no. 1, 1966, pp. 143–166. Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. Longman, 1996. Simpson, Paul. Language, Ideology and Point of View. Routledge, 1993. ———, editor. Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language. John Benjamins, 2019. Sotirova, Violeta, editor. The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. Bloomsbury, 2016. Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2020. ———. Texture—A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh UP, 2009. ———. “The Texture of Authorial Intention.” World Building: Discourse in the Mind, edited by Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 147–164. ———, and Sara Whiteley, editors. The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge UP, 2014. Thompson, Flora. Lark Rise to Candleford. Penguin, 2008. Toolan, Michael. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2001. Wales, Katie. A Dictionary of Stylistics. 3rd ed., Longman, 2011. Zunshine, Lisa. The Secret Life of Literature. MIT Press, 2021. ———. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

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25 NARRATIVE AND PLOT Unreliable Feelings and the Risks of Surprise Vera Tobin

Abstract: Unreliable narration has historically received attention in literary studies primarily as an element of narrative discourse, as part of the “rhetoric of fiction.” Creative writing manuals and film studies have both been more alert to uses of unreliability as a device in service of plot, particularly as a tool for engineering credible sources of surprise. This chapter surveys the historical use and reception of deceptive unreliability as a conventional element in surprise narratives, together with findings in the cognitive science of emotion, predictive processing, and social interaction, to propose a unified analysis of unreliability as a device for both incurring and managing emotional risk.

One way to analyze narrative strategies and plot devices is in terms of the “design problems” (Ryan 59) they are supposed to solve. Meir Sternberg has been a particularly influential advocate of this functional approach, arguing that we can explain narrative devices in terms of three core “interests” they pursue: the feelings of curiosity, suspense, and surprise (Expositional; “Universals I”). In this view, narrative structures can be best understood as a kind of machinery built to produce, by hook or by crook, certain effects in the audience. And, like any machine, these devices can sometimes break down. Some “narrative engineering” (Bordwell 125) fails gracefully, simply falling short of its aimed-at emotional effects. But quite often, misfiring narrative machinery produces a strongly felt emotional response of its own—laughter instead of pathos, aversion instead of sympathy or concern, anger instead of delight. The design problems of narrative are not just problems of how to induce particular effects, but also of how to avoid pitfalls, and devices that guard against one kind of emotional blowback can heighten the risk of others. For instance, people “highly appreciate” (Hoeken and van Vliet 277) the inclusion of surprising events in a story. But some sorts of surprises are more appreciated than others. The greatest pleasure comes from surprises that seem well motivated and even inevitable in retrospect (Tobin), those sorts of surprises that feel like “payoffs” of material “planted” (Berliner) earlier in a story. Building a narrative machine that will produce this specific kind of surprise is a more challenging design problem. How can a story introduce surprise-relevant information early in a narrative without spoiling the surprise? How can it generate expectations that will be overturned without being inconsistent or incoherent? This chapter takes up a common, but risky, approach to these design problems of narrative surprise: the introduction of a deceptively unreliable narrator whose testimony lays the groundwork for a later reversal. How these unreliable feelings play out is a source of narrative DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-30

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energy but also a source of emotional trouble. When unreliable narration serves as a tool in service of the machinery of plot, it works both to manage and to incur emotional risks in three areas: trust (via unreliability), surprise (via expectation), and concern (via emotional investment). When those risks go wrong, audiences may find that a single failed gambit spoils the narrative whole, as we will see in several examples that follow.

Unreliable Narratives Let’s begin with trust, the sense that we can rely upon someone or something to behave in a predictable and cooperative way. Trust is an epistemic position, but it is also a feeling: “the pleasant feeling that others are with us in our endeavors,” as Annette Baier puts it (111). Trust is also emotionally charged. When trust is violated, it hurts; even relatively small betrayals of trust commonly elicit negative emotions, including anger, indignation, and a withdrawal of concern (Mikula et al.). In the case of narrative fictions, the situation is complicated by multivocality—toward whom should we feel trust or distrust?—as well as the many different dimensions along which a character or narrator can be unreliable. There is a substantial literature examining these parameters of narrative unreliability. Wayne Booth coined the term “unreliable narrator” in his 1961 Rhetoric of Fiction, but the phenomenon far predates the name. Ansgar Nünning (“But Why”) nominates Maria Edgeworth’s 1800 novel Castle Rackent as one of the earliest possessors of a “full-fledged” (91) example in English, and arguments can be made to place the unreliable narrator’s birthdate earlier yet. In English alone, characters whose accounts of their own tales seem not entirely trustworthy appear as the first-person narrators of eighteenth-century English novels such as Tristram Shandy (1759) and Moll Flanders (1722), the tellers of various of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1388–1392), and on stage as early as 1684 in John Lacy’s play Sir Hercules Buffoon. Once we allow ourselves to consider cases of stage narration and tale-tellers, we find unreliable narrators stretching back to antiquity. In dramatic traditions where the action on stage is conventionally or frequently accompanied by narrative commentary, as with the Greek chorus, or what Richardson (197) calls “generative narrators” whose diagetic remarks “engender” ensuing staged action, as with Aphrodite in Euripedes’ Hippolytus and the Stage Manager of Wilder’s Our Town, there is also much opportunity for creative stagings to render those narrating voices unreliable, by directing events on stage to diverge from the account presented by the narrative. All this unreliability has provided plenty of material to occupy theorists. Since The Rhetoric of Fiction, narratologists have debated the question of whether unreliable narration is properly a quality of a text or of a reading, and whether we need to postulate the existence of an implied author in order to account for the existence of unreliable narrators (see, for example, Yacobi; Wall; Nünning, “Unreliable”; Booth, “Resurrection”). They have asked whether only homodiegetic narrators (that is, narrators who participate in their stories) can be unreliable (Cohn; Yacobi), and what might constitute “the minimal conditions of unreliable narration” (Zerweck 152). Theorists have also offered several taxonomies of unreliability. For instance, William Riggan’s monograph Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First Person Narrator groups unreliable narrators into four different stock character types, as enumerated in the title. James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin argue persuasively (95) that it is more productive to divide things up according to what a narrator is being unreliable about, and how: are they “underreporting,” “underreading,” or “underregarding,” and are they doing so with respect to facts and events, understanding and perception, or ethics and evaluation? Monika Fludernik (76–77) offers a slightly different distinction between narrators who are unreliable because 295

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they lack objectivity, those who unreliable by virtue of being ideologically defective, and those who are simply “factually inaccurate.” Others (Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction; Olson) draw distinctions between “unreliable” and “fallible” narrators. Any of these varieties of unreliable narration can be deployed strategically, even deviously, in service of plot.1 Shifting viewpoints, narrative ambiguity, and unreliability are common sites of literary experimentation and subtle characterization. But they are also productive devices for managing the release of information in service of surprise. In mysteries and thrillers, especially, unreliability offers an opportunity to suppress information, elide critical facts, and deflect attention, in order to pave the way for twist endings and shocking revelations later on. These are risky maneuvers, however, because they bring issues of audience trust to the fore. The risk was particularly acute in the days when these strategies were relatively new. The aforementioned seventeenth-century drama Sir Hercules Buffoon is an early example from the English stage: a character confesses her part in engineering the tragic demise of the two heiress sisters whom she and her sister have been impersonating. But this confession is later revealed, in an exciting twist, to have been false; the impersonating sisters were too tender hearted to kill their cousins, after all. Juan Antonio Prieto Pablos (66) points out that this arrangement, familiar though it may be to modern audiences, was not typical of its period. While Restoration drama is well stocked with liars, Buffoon is unusual in presenting a character whose lie deceives not only another character but also the audience. Prieto Pablos argues that these layers of unreliability produce a “very serious situation” with potentially devastating “possible consequences” for audience sympathy and even comprehension, suggesting that Lacy must have seen “certain advantages in it which outweighed the risks” (71). Indeed, the advantages of this kind of narrative deception are sufficient to have made it a commonplace of many genres, despite the danger of losing audiences’ trust. It may once have been rare and exceptional, deployed only in daring experiments that could be expected to alienate and disconcert. But today it offers a rather reliable solution for a recurring problem facing writers who would like to bedeck their stories with reversals and revelations. Deceptive unreliability is endemic to twisty plots across media, cropping up again and again in novels, plays, television, and cinema. Perhaps the most famous example in English-language fiction appears in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), in which the solution to the whodunnit turns out to be the Watson-like narrator Dr. Sheppard—a bold move that provoked controversy but also a great deal of admiration. Yet for all the notoriety that Ackroyd still enjoys, gambits of unreliable narration and even of the narrator-culprit are far from played out. Films from Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) to Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995) and Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) have kept up a lively tradition of building twists on the back of unreliable, character-narrated flashbacks. Literary thrillers, too, remain well stocked with deceptive character narration. One reason this gambit is so popular is that it provides a way of avoiding betraying audiences’ trust in more fatal ways. As Prieto Pablos says (66), “one of the main principles of fictional communication” is that “the author must provide a ‘truthful’ rendition of the events and situations” of a tale. In his famous “Twenty rules for writing detective stories,” S. S. Van Dine warns similarly (129) that “no willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader,” but continues, “other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.” How can a narrative suggest one version of its events and situations at one point and a different version later on, without undermining informational integrity of the baseline narrative? Unreliability offers one answer: characters can omit information, mislead, and deceive, while the author’s2 hands remain clean, theoretically preserving our trust. 296

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Because it is so useful and so widely used, audiences today are well acclimated to deceptive narration and the emerging agreement that it does not run afoul of rules prohibiting authorial deceit. Restoration theater-goers might have been bewildered by the gambit in Lacy’s Buffoon. Readers of the current chapter, steeped as we are in the conventions of realist fiction, whodunnits, and thrillers, would never be confused by such a trick. These developments, however, do not mean that deceptive unreliability is no longer a risky proposition. In particular, when audiences feel their narrative trust has been violated, the emotional effects can extend beyond annoyance or frustration directed at the source of deception. Just as violations of trust in everyday life can result in a loss of interest and decreased empathic concern, so too can narrative deceptions undermine our general interest in a story and its characters. We can see an illustrative example of this effect in critic Roger Ebert’s reaction to The Usual Suspects. A brief recap: the film opens, as a caption reports, “last night,” when some shadowy figure approaches Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) on the deck of a burning ship. The figure shoots Keaton and sets off an explosion that consumes the ship in a ball of fire behind him as he escapes. From there, many more scenes in flashback unfold, taking us first to “six weeks ago” and working their way forward. Between them, in the present, Detective Kujan (Chazz Palmineri) is doing his best to extract the truth about what happened from the sole remaining witness, a low-level criminal called Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) undergoing questioning in Kujan’s cramped and cluttered office. Each of Verbal’s reports launches a fresh flashback to the complicated story of a mysterious, convoluted heist, populated with a colorful array of miscreants. We learn many things about their misadventures, including the fact that their assignment allegedly came from the terrifying and perhaps mythical criminal mastermind Keysar Söze. Ultimately, we also learn that Verbal’s testimony, and the flashbacks that dramatized it, have been fabrications from start to finish. Kujan sees the truth moments too late. He rushes into the street, but Verbal, now revealed as Söze, is gone. The end. All this business is in keeping with Van Dine’s diktat that the only deceptions in which a mystery may indulge are “those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.” But even though it plays by the rules, Ebert found that the film’s “blinding revelation, which shifts the nature of all that has gone before” filled him not with delight but with the feeling that the writer, Christopher McQuarrie, and the director, Bryan Singer, would have been better off unraveling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters—those that are real, in any event. (41) Ebert knew perfectly well that none of the characters in this fiction film were ever real, but his interest in them was nonetheless deflated by the discovery that only a few of them had been “real.” The twist undermined something critical to his enjoyment. It drained the film of some crucial “reality” and, in doing so, vitiated its appeal. “To the degree that I do understand, I don’t care,” Ebert wrote, then, worse, realized, “I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests” (41). The film did provide a coherent, “carefully knit” explanation of its mysteries. But as for caring about any of it, that ship had sailed—and sank. For Ebert, while The Usual Suspects successfully navigated the problem of how to deceive without actually lying, in doing so, it failed him as a viewer in other, more important ways. These failings, too, are a matter of trust. A look at how expectations and predictive processing in a social context lead to affectively charged affiliative and moral judgments will help to explain why. 297

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Risky Business I: Norms and Consequences Narrative surprises carry special social-emotional risks by virtue of the way they invite, and then flout, expectations about what is to come. Humans are so focused on, and so quick to identify, deviations from fair play in social situations that evolutionary psychologists have speculated we have a specialized “cheater detection” module (Tooby and Cosmides 180, inter alia) dedicated to sniffing out bad actors of this variety. The question of whether our cognitive systems have an evolved, domain-specific mechanism for reasoning about social exchange in this way is not settled (see, for instance, McKinnon and Moscovitch). But there is no doubt about the basic fact that, while human beings are often ready to be uncooperative, sneaky, and combative to advance our own interests, we are also on high alert against such behavior from others. If we have a rapid and deeply felt inclination to reject and eject cheaters in real life, it stands to reason that we may also experience strong, immediate feelings of aversion when we feel we have been cheated by our fictions. All primates, and many other animals, too, form expectations about what their conspecifics are likely to do. Recent research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that much and perhaps all of our cognitive and perceptual experience is organized through some measure of predictive processing.3 The central thesis of the predictive processing paradigm is that our brains are continually engaged in a process of generating, testing, and updating predictive models, with the goal of minimizing error. Our perceptual system is in this view a sort of Baysean inferencing machine, attempting always to anticipate what will happen, learning from mismatches between prediction and experience to update its priors and fine tune future predictions. Many scholars have noticed the relevance of predictive processing to aesthetic experience. Karen Kukkonen, for example, eloquently discusses how literary texts capitalize on predictive processing to craft a “designed sensory flow” (5) that gratifies us in ways that go far beyond the random permutations of everyday life. Along related lines, Todd Berliner writes of stories that “orchestrate our expectations” (Berliner 193) through a combination of “plants”—material early in a story that can either prompt audiences to anticipate certain outcomes, or turn out to admit those outcomes in retrospect—and “payoffs,” which resolve those expectations at storyline’s end. As Berliner explains, this pattern takes advantage of the relentless human tendency to anticipate future events. There is evidence that the predictive processing cycle incorporates rewards for the confirmation of accurate predictions, for the resolution of incongruity through the revision of disconfirmed predictions, and for the generation of hypotheses in the first place, making all of these permutations into potential sources of pleasure. With such ample opportunities for gratifying payoffs, it is well worth going to some trouble to avoid triggering feelings of social impropriety that might short circuit audiences’ receptivity to the experience. Being cooperative pays dividends, and being uncooperative carries a penalty, in many animal species (see Kurzban and Leary; Melis et al.). Where human beings really go above and beyond is in the energy we devote to the issue of whether we appear to be playing by the rules ourselves, doing what the sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management” (80). What the rules are will vary from culture to culture and situation to situation, but they are sure to exist. In addition to generating predictions about what will happen, humans also have normative ideas about what other people ought to do. As the primatologist and psychologist Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish write, “If the glue of primate societies is social relationships, the superglue of human societies is social norms” (238). The prospect of gaining a reputation for violating those norms—especially as a cheater who has flaunted a norm for one’s own benefit, without regard for the distress it will cause others—is a serious danger that 298

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we will go to significant trouble to avoid.4 Even preschoolers are sensitive to what other people around them will think of their behavior and act accordingly (see studies by Engelmann et al.; Rapp et al.). Narratives, it seems, do much the same. As Patrick Colm Hogan has observed, by sheer virtue of saying anything at all, narrators—even zero-focalization narrators—may be endowed with emotional standing. “Put in the most basic way—if it talks, it feels” (Hogan 77), or at least seems to do so. We can say, too: if it talks, it is subject to social judgments. Unreliable narrators serve as a useful scapegoat for that judgment. Detective fiction in particular has historically put much stock in the idea that a story should play fair with its readers, who are in turn expected to embrace a gamelike approach to the plot. As the back cover of one paperback series boasts: “Midnite Mysteries are brain teasers of the first order, and yet, we play fair with the reader, according to the rules laid down by mystery classics of recognized technique.” Fair play is called for, but what exactly that means has been subject to some disagreement. Members of the Detection Club, founded in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, and Ronald Knox, pledged to follow Knox’s published “Ten Commandments” of detective fiction, which extend considerably beyond any prime directive of straight dealing to include a prohibition on “Chinamen” (194) and a rule limiting authors to just one secret room or passage per story. By contrast, the American writer Rex Stout, creator of the detective Nero Wolfe, took issue even with “the most frequently repeated rule” of fair play, the decree that in the course of the narrative the reader must see and hear everything the detective sees and hears. I don’t know why people like S. S. Van Dine and R. Austin Freeman and Dorothy Sayers have insisted on it, since every good writer of detective fiction, including them, has violated it over and over again. (64) But even Stout allowed that “if the rule that you must play fair with the reader is restricted merely to this, that you mustn’t lie to him, then of course it holds for detective stories as it does for all stories” (64); it simply comes up more often for mysteries and thrillers, because they must also play a game of concealment and revelation as they do it. Managing that “technical problem,” Stout continues, “sounds simple but heaven help us” (65). And it cannot be avoided. As we’ve seen, unreliable characters can provide one solution to this social problem, so that the story as a whole can mislead while also performing compliance with the fair-play imperative for honesty. But honesty isn’t the only way an interlocutor can fail to hold up their end of the fair-play bargain, nor is it the only way someone can fail to be cooperative. When it comes to impression management, trust, and betrayal, whether I feel that I have been lied to is not the only issue at hand. I care about whether my fellow humans are being cooperative in other ways, too. Are they doing their share of the work for their share of the benefit, for instance? When they have a surplus, are they inclined to share? Do they care about the welfare of those around them, or only their own well-being? It may not be intuitively obvious that these latter concerns apply to the case of unreliable narration, but they do. The philosopher H. P. Grice influentially observed (26, inter alia) that quite a lot of what happens in language arises out of speakers’ mutual recognition of some basic ideas of what counts as cooperative in conversation. We certainly don’t always hew to these principles, but we do generally recognize them as ideals of cooperative behavior in conversation. Among these desiderata are the imperative to be accurate and honest (“try to make your contribution one that is true” and “do not say what you believe is false”). But there are others. The norms of cooperative conversation involve also brevity, clarity, orderliness, and relevance. In short, it is distinctly uncooperative 299

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to waste my time and attention. If a story offers a “payoff,” will it be sufficient to repay the effort expended to get there? The example of Gillian Flynn’s tremendously successful 2012 thriller Gone Girl will illustrate.

Risky Business II: Emotional Investments The first half of Gone Girl alternates between sections narrated by Nick Dunne and excerpts from the diary of his missing wife Amy. Nick’s narrative moves day by day through Amy’s sudden disappearance and the investigation that follows. The diary entries begin years before the events in Nick’s narration, beginning with the couple’s courtship several years ago. Amy’s diary depicts an escalating pattern of Nick’s abuses and her growing suspicion and fear, culminating in a final entry in which she writes outright: “This man might kill me” (205). Meanwhile, in his account, Nick is being investigated for her murder. We learn that he was having an affair. He tells his sister, the police, and his attorney that he didn’t kill Amy, but never quite says as much in the narrative itself. He spends most of his time in the past tense, using it perhaps suspiciously thoroughly when it comes to Amy. He is self-conscious, thinking often of how his reactions will appear to onlookers—“I told myself, Act correctly, don’t blow it, act the way a man acts when he hears this news” (129)—while revealing to the reader his more conflicted inner response. Gone Girl in this way cleverly plays with the fact that modern thriller readers can be expected to be savvy enough to expect unreliability and misdeeds from both first-person narrators and perfidious male partners: from the initially innocent-seeming narrator of Jim Thompson’s Pop 1280 (1964) to Patricia Highsmith’s never-in-doubt Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), murderous sociopaths have been narrating their own twisty tales for some time. Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994) combines a did-he-or-didn’t-he story of a secretive husband and vanished wife with a variety of unreliable sources, including an unnamed narrator whose connection to the case is never made clear. Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying combines viewpoint trickery with several other themes in common with the story that seems to emerge in the first half of Gone Girl: a charming suitor whose threatening intentions become slowly more apparent over time, an unexpected pregnancy, and a window into the killer’s hidden thoughts. By chiming with all of these precedents, Nick’s narration in Gone Girl supplies a tempting garden path for sophisticated readers. His apparent trajectory over the course of the novel’s first half is not only genre-congruent, but a positive commonplace of psychological thrillers. Meanwhile, Amy’s diary itself invokes related staples of the genre, building up an apparent record of a wife’s slowly dawning realization that she is in terrible danger, much like the imperiled screen heroines of Gaslight (1944), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), or Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). The twist is that Amy is the villain and the liar. At novel’s midpoint, Nick realizes that Amy has set him up. Then the diary entries come to an end, replaced by Amy’s unmediated voice in the present. “I’m so much happier now that I’m dead,” she reports, and briskly explains how she has faked her disappearance in order to engineer Nick’s punishment. The story we had built up, of a violent husband and imperiled wife, is replaced in a single stroke with a spider woman and her prey. This twist delighted readers with its boldness. One editor called it “an incredible, extraordinary hammer blow,” (qtd. in Rainey 28)5 while reviewers agreed that the novel’s “ingenious . . . structure” delivered a true “coup de grace” (Clark 2), though many of the story’s ingredients, both structurally and thematically, were nothing new. Even the pride Amy takes in her schemes is not so different from the gloating of Roger Ackroyd’s Dr. Sheppard. But the way the twists unfold made it feel fresh and exciting. That excitement, and the substantial financial success that Gone Girl enjoyed, sent publishers off in search of more. 300

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Reviewers, too, treated it as a touchstone: “‘The Girl on the Train’ has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since ‘Gone Girl,’” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times (C1). What makes the deceptions of Gone Girl different from those of The Usual Suspects? The Usual Suspects did very well for itself at the time, both at the box office and on the award circuit. But why does Usual Suspects provoke, at least for some viewers, the sort of response we saw from Roger Ebert? Here the issue of audiences’ emotional investment comes into play. By placing its unreliability revelation at the midway point, as a pivot rather than as a shocking conclusion, Gone Girl has time to do something substantial with that twist. The second half of the novel pays back the investment the reader has made in the first half, playing out the implications for both Amy’s and Nick’s characterization and building further plot developments on the foundation of Amy’s revealed character and revealed schemes. Revelations near the end of a story can achieve something similar, but the risk that they will fail to do so is greater. In Elements of Surprise, I show a number of illustrative cases where twists of unreliability that come late in a narrative strike people as more or less fair, well-earned, and satisfying, depending on whether the reader or viewer in question partakes in an extended period of reflection upon the story-world ramifications of the revelation (and finds those ramifications to be both substantial and of interest). Relatedly, James Phelan has argued (Phelan 95), in the course of criticizing the ending of Edith Wharton’s short story “Roman Fever,” that surprise stories do wrong when they ask audiences to “invest themselves” in characters and their actions without providing sufficient reward for that investment. Phelan analyzes these narrative flaws as a species of genuine ethical lapse: the error is not just one of aesthetics but of virtue. This strong judgment reflects the fact that these gambits toy with matters very close to our cheater-hating hearts. People feel not only interested in, but invested in, and attached to, the objects of their attention and concern. We nurture the things we care about, but also care about the things we nurture. As Harry Frankfurt says, “love is a species of caring about things” (129). This is why Dale Carnegie advised readers of How to Win Friends and Influence People (261) to follow the example of Benjamin Franklin by asking would-be mentors and allies for favors, rather than doing favors for them, to secure their esteem. At the same time, investments of time and attention can also be burdens and sources of resentment. Many schools give middle-grade students an assignment in which they are required to look after some baby analogue—a doll, a sack of flour, an egg—for a week or more, with the idea that it will teach them something about the work and attention babies require. The deck is stacked, of course. The “flour babies” are all (tedious) work and little reward. Even so, according to one report (Swain 5), some students do find themselves moved to lavish attention on their charges. But others respond with active hostility, finishing out the project by tearing the sack to pieces and even trampling on the remains. Some do both. Few end up merely indifferent. Whether the experience is positive or negative, to devote time, attention, and care to something easily becomes an emotionally charged, high investment act. As we know, audiences are very willing to care about fictions and the characters that inhabit them (see Hogan, “Paradoxes,” Chapter 11 in the present volume, for an overview of how and why that should be). The resulting emotional investment is a double-edged sword. A charm of fiction is that it can cast off the shackles of everyday life while still arousing the same kinds of embodied emotional responses that real life evokes. But if a narrative tells us that some significant portion of a story was mere invention even with respect to the fiction, a promised baby is revealed to be a mere flour sack. That too can evoke a visceral response. When people feel that their social trust has been misplaced, they are often moved to feel not only disappointed but righteously indignant: someone ought to be punished. The risk, then, is that audiences will find such stories not only narratively deficient, but, as James Phelan had it, ethically defective—or, as Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish might say, they have failed to fulfill their crucial social obligations. 301

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Conclusion Accounts from predictive processing have been able to tell us quite a bit about the structural sources of narrative pleasure. Those pleasures can be disrupted when audiences are pushed too far in one direction or another. The overall emotional response we have to a work informs our evaluation of that work, and vice versa. People seem particularly prone to reject stories that they judge to have violated their trust in some way. The case studies surveyed in this chapter show that when we look closely at “unreliable feelings,” we gain a richer understanding of the sorts of problems that narrative structures may be designed to solve, and how those solutions generate new problems in their turn. In these examples, the epistemic pleasures of anticipation and surprise are in continual danger of running up against social feelings, displeasures sparked by violations of trust. Meanwhile, narrative strategies that shore up trust in one direction put it at risk in another. And if, in the end, we feel our trust has been misplaced, the emotional consequences not only affect our evaluation of the work and its creator; they also frequently undermine our interest in and concern for the fictional characters and events that went before.

Notes 1 Showing that taxonomies are always with us, Malcolm Turvey points out that narrative deception in the service of surprise can be sorted into two broad types: narration that turns out to have been deceptively uncommunicative, and narration that has been deceptively communicative. Here I have mainly concentrated on the latter, but both straddle the types of risk inherent to the strategy. 2 It is not always accurate or appropriate to describe this relationship in terms of an “author” whose integrity is at stake. But narrative fictions of all kinds tend to have some base level narrative source that conventionally ought to be consistent if the narrative itself is to count as coherent and well formed. 3 The literature on predictive processing, in fields from philosophy to perceptual neuroscience, is too vast to do proper justice to here, but interested readers may begin with some reviews from different disciplinary moments and vantages, such as Jakob Hohwy’s 2013 book The Predictive Mind, Karl Friston’s 2005 “A Theory of Cortical Responses,” or Andy Clark’s 2015 “Radical Predictive Processing.” 4 Much depends on whose opinion we care about, and whose norms are in play. The tactical flouting of the wrong people’s norms is itself a powerful tool for impression management with respect to others. 5 Thanks to David Bordwell for pointing me to this quotation.

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Narrative and Plot Frankfurt, Harry G. “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love.” Necessity, Volition, and Love, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 129–141. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday, 1959. Grice, H. P. “Logic and Conversation.” 1975. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard UP, 1989, pp. 305–315. Hoeken, Hans, and Mario van Vliet. “Suspense, Curiosity, and Surprise: How Discourse Structure Influences the Affective and Cognitive Processing of a Story.” Poetics, vol. 27, no. 4, 2000, pp. 277–286. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “A Passion for Plot: Prolegomena to Affective Narratology.” Symplokē, vol. 18, nos. 1–2, 2010, pp. 65–81. Knox, Ronald A. “A Detective Story Decalogue.” 1929. The Art of the Mystery Story, edited by Howard Haycraft, Grosset and Dunlap, 1946, pp. 194–196. Kukkonen, Karin. Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing, Oxford UP, 2020. Kurzban, Robert, and Mark R. Leary. “Evolutionary Origins of Stigmatization: The Functions of Social Exclusion.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 127, no. 2, 2001, pp. 187–208. Maslin, Janet. “Another Girl Gone in a Tale of Betrayal.” New York Times, New York, 5 Jan. 2015, p. 1. McKinnon, Margaret C., and Morris Moscovitch. “Domain-General Contributions to Social Reasoning: Theory of Mind and Deontic Reasoning Re-Explored.” Cognition, vol. 102, no. 2, Feb. 2007, pp. 179–218. Melis, Alicia P., et al. “Chimpanzees Recruit the Best Collaborators.” Science, vol. 311, no. 5765, 2006, pp. 1297–1300. Mikula, Gerold, et al. “The Role of Injustice in the Elicitation of Differential Emotional Reactions.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 24, no. 7, 1998, pp. 769–783. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘But Why Will You Say That I Am Mad?’ On the Theory, History, and Signals of Unreliable Narration in British Fiction.” AAA: Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, vol. 22, no. 1, Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH Co. KG, 1997, pp. 83–105. ———. “Unreliable, Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses.” Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie Im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context. Narr Tübingen, 1999, pp. 53–73. Olson, Greta. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative, vol. 11, no. 1, Ohio State UP, 2003, pp. 93–109. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2007. ———, and Mary Patricia Martin. “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day.” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman, Ohio State UP, 1999, pp. 88–109. Prieto Pablos, Juan Antonio. “Audience Deception and Farce in John Lacy’s ‘Sir Hercules Buffoon.’” Atlantis, vol. 27, no. 1, 2005, pp. 65–78. Rainey, Sarah. “The Female Noir That Puts ‘Fifty’ in the Shade; Farewell Chick Lit, Hello Psychological Thriller. Sarah Rainey Reads the Latest Publishing Sensation ‘Gone Girl’—and Can’t Put It Down.” The Daily Telegraph, 28 Mar. 2013, p. 28. Rapp, Diotima J., et al. “Young Children’s Reputational Strategies in a Peer Group Context.” Developmental Psychology, vol. 55, no. 2, 2019, pp. 329–336. Richardson, Brian. “Point of View in Drama: Diegetic Monologue, Unreliable Narrators, and the Author’s Voice on Stage.” Comparative Drama, vol. 22, no. 3, 1988, pp. 193–214. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design.” Narrative, vol. 17, no. 1, 2008, pp. 56–75. Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. ———. “Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I).” Poetics Today, vol. 24, no. 2, 2003, pp. 297–395. Stout, Rex. “The Mystery Novel.” The Writer’s Book, edited by Helen R. Hull, Barnes & Noble, 1956, pp. 63–67. Swain, Harriet. “So, Babies Aren’t Self-Raising . . .” The Guardian, 19 Dec. 2006, p. 5. Tobin, Vera. Elements of Surprise. Harvard UP, 2018. Tomasello, Michael, and Amrisha Vaish. “Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 64, no. 1, 2013, pp. 231–255. Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange.” The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 163–228.

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26 READERS Richard J. Gerrig

Abstract: This chapter explores the forces that give rise to consistent and distinctive features of readers’ narrative experiences. The first section of the chapter reviews cognitive science research on the processes that scaffold readers’ experiences. I consider how those processes (attempt to) provide readers with coherent experiences of narrative texts. I describe how readers’narrative experiences are individuated as a product of the particular samples of memory that become accessible as narratives unfold. The second section of the chapter explores how readers are transported to narrative worlds and how they participate in those worlds. I discuss how narrative events and character attributes may produce instances in which readers’ experiences are consistent. In addition, I suggest that readers’ assessments of their similarity to characters will yield variability in their responses.

Station Eleven, a novel by Emily St. John Mandel, opens with a crisis. Arthur Leander, an actor playing King Lear, appears to be unwell. An audience member, Jeevan Chaudhary, hurries to Arthur’s assistance although, at first, ushers try to prevent him from climbing onto the stage. Jeevan perceives more quickly than others that there is an emergency afoot. The episode’s urgency grows as Jeevan and then a cardiologist attempt to save Arthur’s life by administering CPR. What might be said about the experiences readers have in response to these narrative events? Let’s define readers’ experiences to be the products of the cognitive and affective processes that underlie narrative understanding. The question becomes what forces shape those experiences. As a first step toward answering that question, imagine a dimension that ranges from “the text” at one end to “the reader” at the other. At the extreme text end, readers’ experiences would be completely controlled by features of the text: every reader would have an identical emotional experience. At the extreme reader end, the reader’s experience would be completely controlled by features of the reader: each reader would have a unique emotional experience. I propose this dimension as a useful heuristic for organizing a discussion of the reader, inflected by research from cognitive and affective science. In fact, both ends of the dimension permit a deeper understanding of what it means to be a reader. From the text end, we learn how the cognitive and affective processes with which all readers are endowed lead to consistent responses. From the reader end, we learn what differences among readers are most relevant to their narrative experiences. This chapter aspires to illuminate both ends of the dimension by reviewing both commonalities and relevant differences. To be clear, narratives almost certainly present a complex accumulation of moments that produce strong and weak consensus. The DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-31

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hope is that cognitive science research can provide some insight into what occurs at distinct narrative moments. In the first section of this chapter, I review the cognitive science tradition of text processing research. I describe how individual differences in readers’ experiences emerge in the context of processes that readers all share. In the chapter’s second section, I discuss transportation and participation. I provide analysis to suggest why narrative events and character attributes influence the consistency of readers’ affective experiences. Please note that, although this chapter focuses on readers, I will also draw upon research in which people listened to stories or viewed filmed material. There may be experiences that are special to written narratives. However, I focus this chapter on concepts and conclusions that should apply across the diversity of narrative experiences.

Cognitive Processes in Readers’ Narrative Experiences Cognitive scientists have defined a number of models to characterize how readers achieve coherent representations of narrative texts (for a review see McNamara and Magliano). I will focus on a model known as Resonance-Integration-Validation (RI-Val) (O’Brien and Cook, “Separating”). This model has obtained extensive empirical support. The RI-Val model characterizes how processing unfolds as readers encounter each new segment of text. My goal for reviewing the three components of this model (i.e., resonance, integration, and validation) is to describe how variation in readers’ experience might be accommodated within a theory that articulates cognitive and affective processes that apply to all readers. Station Eleven opens with these two sentences: “The King stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored. This was act 4 of King Lear, a winter night at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto” (p. 3). The RI-Val model indicates that, for all readers, this initial sample of information sets off a search of memory through a process known as resonance (Gillund and Shiffrin; Myers and O’Brien; Ratcliff; Ratcliff & McKoon). Resonance is a fast and passive process that provides a parallel search of information in the readers’ long-term memory. The resonance process reactivates information both from earlier in the narrative (as soon as some progress has been made) and from the readers’ general world knowledge. Of critical importance, resonance is not a goal-directed process. Information emerges by virtue of the cues the text provides to access extant memory representations. Resonance plays a critical role in the inferences readers encode. In fact, the RI-Val model, represents the endpoint of an evolution in the way in which researchers on text processing have conceptualized how readers encode inferences. Early in the field’s history, research on inference-making was largely focused on categories of inferences. Researchers sought to determine, for example, if readers regularly encoded inferences about characters’ emotions (likely yes; see Gernsbacher and colleagues) or inferences about the instruments characters used to complete actions (likely no; see Dosher and Corbett). Some theorists endowed readers with higher-order goals to bring order to the disparate results (e.g., Graesser and colleagues). However, McKoon and Ratcliff defined a “minimalist approach” and argued persuasively that inference-making was constrained by information that was easily available from memory. On this view, readers only encode inferences when the resonance process yields sufficient prior memory traces to permit those inferences. The RI-Val model captures the insight that resonance is the engine that drives inference-making. All readers have the resonance process in common. However, each reader will have a unique collection of memories. With respect to the dimension of text to reader, the consistency of readers’ experiences will depend on the consistency of memories across a population of 306

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readers. For example, in the opening pages of Station Eleven, Jeevan tries to locate his girlfriend once his moment attempting to save the actor has passed. He tries her cellphone. He tries the ladies lounge, but is told it is empty. He visits the coat check. His coat is there, “but Laura’s blue coat was gone” (p. 9). At this moment, the text does not state Jeevan’s emotion directly. Still, it seems likely that the resonance process would bring forth populations of memories that, across readers, were highly overlapping in their affective content. As such, we could quite confidently predict that readers’ narrative representations would include an inference of distress (see Gernsbacher and colleagues). However, other moments from the opening episode of Station Eleven provide instances in which readers’ personal collections of memories may very well prompt their experiences to diverge with particular consequences for their affective responses to the narrative. For example, as the scene unfolds, readers will experience an automatic rush of memories that will affect how they look into Arthur Leander’s future. If the bulk of a reader’s personal memories point to CPR as a successful remedy for a heart attack, they will likely encode a predictive inference that is relatively optimistic. Not so readers whose memory traces converge on more ominous outcomes. In addition, readers’ predictions would likely have an impact on how they assimilate the actor’s fate (Rapp and Gerrig, “Readers’” and “Predilections”). Consider readers whose memory traces prompt the inference that Arthur will survive. Suppose he dies. Those readers will be in a different emotional state than readers who had encoded a more pessimistic inference. The second process in the RI-Val model is integration. The RI-Val model brought the concept of integration forward from an earlier model, known as the construction-integration model, originated by Kintsch. The major function of integration is to create a “coherent whole” (Kintsch 164) from the products of construction processes. Recall that the resonance process in not goal directed. As such, resonance is likely to yield a collection of active memory representations “without regard to the discourse context, and many of them are inappropriate” (Kintsch 168). Construction processes bear the burden of forging a coherent representation from the disparate elements that become active. Given that the construction process operates on the products of resonance, those representations will parallel the diversity of those products. Again, we would predict that readers’ representations would converge or diverge as a function of the consistency across people’s experiences. In addition, readers will apply their own “standards of coherence.” O’Brien and Cook noted that standards of coherence are variable as a “level of attention, the reader’s domain knowledge, individual differences in reading skill, task demands, text factors, or any combination and/or interaction of these factors” (O’Brien and Cook, “Coherence” 327). The final element to the RI-Val model is validation. Validation processes validate current elements of the text against the readers’ background knowledge (i.e., information stored in long-term memory) as well as against information earlier in the text. Validation processes monitor texts for inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Because validation processes make use of readers’ background knowledge, we arrive at another point of convergence or divergence. Again, because validation makes reference to readers’ own background knowledge, the processes permit diversity with respect to readers’ experiences. Let’s briefly review empirical research that explores some properties of validation. Consider a story that introduces Mary as a vegetarian: “Mary, a health nut, had been a strict vegetarian for 10 years” (e.g., Albrecht and O’Brien; Cook and colleagues; O’Brien and colleagues, “Updating”). Later in the story, participants obtain this new information: “Mary ordered a cheeseburger and fries.” Readers take more time to assimilate this sentence than they do when Mary, earlier, had been introduced as someone who “ate at McDonalds at least three times a 307

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week.” Validation processes detect the inconsistency between those two pieces of text. In fact, participants are even slowed down when they learned earlier that Mary is a former vegetarian (O’Brien and colleagues, “Accessibility”; O’Brien and colleagues, “Updating”). They must expend extra effort to ensure a coherent representation of the entirety of the information the text provides. I cite these particular results for two reasons. To begin, they offer insight into the process of validation. In addition, they offer a reminder about the methods of cognitive science. The RI-Val theory provides a conceptualization of narrative processing that unambiguously specifies an important locus for individual differences in readers’ experiences: readers’ individual collections of long-term memories create great opportunities for experiences to diverge. However, researchers in cognitive science test their theories by recruiting random samples of readers. To obtain research results, they must create texts that are robust in the presence of individual variation. In that sense, the history of cognitive science research on text processing provides abundant examples of the types of information that most readers hold in common (e.g., that vegetarians typically do not order cheeseburgers). Still, the RI-Val model enables us to understand how identical processes can lead to both consistency and inconsistency in readers’ responses to a particular narrative moment. I have reviewed the RI-Val to locate the reader within a representative cognitive science theory. We can think of the elements of the RI-Val model as the processes that function automatically as readers’ experiences unfold. Still, despite the RI-Val’s model successes in characterizing moment-by-moment processes of text comprehension, it is not equipped to explain how readers become immersed in the crisis that spills out over the first episode of Station Eleven. I turn now to the concepts of transportation and participation, which help characterize how readers might respond as Jeevan Chaudhary rushes on stage.

Transportation and Participation The opening pages of Station Eleven, are wholly engaging. As Jeevan Chaudhary attempts to save Arthur Leander’s life, it is hard not to feel cognitively and emotionally immersed in the narrative. Researchers have conceptualized this experience of immersion as transportation (Gerrig; Green and Brock), narrative engagement (Busselle and Bilandzic), and story world absorption (Kuijpers and colleagues). Each conceptualization emphasizes different aspects of readers’ experiences. However, for the purposes of this chapter, it is possible to gloss over those distinctions. I will use the term transportation. Much of the literature on transportation has focused on individual differences. For example, Green and Brock developed their transportation scale with the explicit goal of measuring variation in the extent to which individuals were transported by the same text. They achieved their research goal to demonstrate that individual differences on their transportation scale were positively correlated with the extent to which readers were persuaded by facts and opinions exemplified by a text. Broad research evidence has accumulated that greater transportation is associated with greater belief and attitude change as well as greater enjoyment (e.g., Appel and Richter; Green and colleagues; Murphy and colleagues, “Involved,” Tal-Or and Cohen; van Laer and colleagues). In addition, readers who are strongly transported may manifest changes in their beliefs about themselves (Isberner and colleagues; Richter and colleagues). My goal for this chapter is to provide a broader context in which these individual differences might be nested. Transportation to narrative worlds creates a context for reader participation. The concept of participation emerges from the participatory perspective on narrative experiences (Allbritton and Gerrig; Gerrig; Gerrig and Jacovina). The participatory perspective conceptualizes readers 308

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as participants in narrative worlds in parallel to how people function as side-participants to real-world events. Real-life side-participants are cognitively and affectively engaged without the privilege of being protagonists in the unfolding situation. The participatory perspective assigns this same role to readers. A central claim of this perspective is that readers encode participatory responses that have the same types of mental content as real-world responses. Specifically, participatory responses are expressions of peoples’ emotional reactions to information that is inferred from or given by a narrative. To provide evidence for participatory responses, Bezdek and his colleagues (“Run”) asked participants to speak aloud while they watched brief clips from Hollywood movies. They conducted content analyses to create a taxonomy of participatory responses. One excerpt came from Alfred Hitchcock’s film, “Marnie.” In a scene from early in the film, Marnie has hidden herself away to rob a safe once the office in which she works is safely empty for the night. She is ready to flee when she realizes she is not, in fact, alone. To avoid detection, Marnie opts to remove her shoes and tiptoe toward the doorway. She tucks her shoes into the pockets of her trench coat. As she tiptoes along, Hitchcock presents close-ups so that the viewer becomes aware of something that remains outside Marnie’s awareness: her shoes are working their way out of her pockets. Participants in Bezdek and colleague’s experiment often spoke aloud an inference they had encoded: I feel like the shoe is going to fall off . . . shoe’s going to fall out of her pocket ’cause she put it in her pocket and it’s going to fall out and make a noise and then the janitor will know that she was trying to run. That inference arises as a consequence of resonance processes prompting retrieval of information from viewers’ collections of memories. Such inferences do not count as participatory responses. However, viewers often expressed more: Oh that’s cool . . . OH NO THE SHOE . . . the freakin shoe. Why did she have to put it in her pocket why couldn’t she just hold the shoe? Other viewers offered Marnie explicit advice: The shoe’s going to fall out your pocket—just hold them. Told you your shoe’s going to fall out your pocket. Your shoe’s going to fall out your pocket . . . there it goes . . . ha! Those latter two examples count as participatory responses. The viewers are expressing emotional responses to the narrative events that suggest they have been transported to the narrative world. I have offered brief introductions to the concepts of transportation and participation. I now discuss how the extent of readers transportation and participation may be shaped by narrative events and readers’ responses to characters.

Narrative Events and Readers’ Experiences At the outset of this section, I claimed that readers would be wholly engaged by the events that open Station Eleven. That claim embodies the assumption that there are some types of narrative events that will prompt consistent responses across readers. In fact, neuroscience research provides strong evidence that narrative features may exercise control over readers’ 309

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experiences. Neuroscientists have assessed the synchrony in viewers’ responses to filmed narratives. Research with fMRI (e.g., Hasson and colleagues, “Reliability” and “Intersubject”), and EEG (Dmochowski and colleagues) has demonstrated strong correlations in viewers’ brain responses over the course of extended filmed narratives. The moments of greatest synchrony have been characterized as “emotion laden.” For example, Schmälzle and Grall reported that the moments of greatest “brain coupling” were found when the narrative was most suspenseful. Let’s consider in greater detail a study conducted by Yeshurun and colleagues. In the experiment, participants listened to one of two texts adapted from the Salinger short story “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” Salinger’s story leaves ambiguous the whereabouts of Arthur’s wife, Joannie. The researchers’ two versions of the story eliminated that ambiguity. In one version, which they called the cheating context, the text made the explicit case that Joannie was having an affair. By contrast, the paranoia context specified that Arthur’s wife was not unfaithful. The researchers noted, “The two contexts were intended to affect the interpretation of the characters’ beliefs and emotions throughout the story” (308). While participants listened to a professional actor reading the cheating or paranoia version of the story, they underwent fMRI scans. Those scans captured patterns of brain activation over the full course of the narrative experiences. The brain responses of the individual readers were quite similar within the two groups (i.e., those who experienced the cheating context vs. those who experienced the paranoia context) and distinct between the groups. Those similarities and differences were localized, for example, to the default mode network, a functional brain network that has been implicated in the processing of others’ mental states. The researchers were also able to demonstrate that the interpretations governed by the cheating and paranoia contexts were correlated with the brain differences. That is, the groups’ brain responses were most different for moments at which the contexts produced greater divergences in readers’ inferences about characters’ beliefs and emotions. The researchers concluded, “Our results demonstrate that a change in the prior context (four lines of text before the beginning of the story) . . . resulted in interpretation-based group-selective neural alignment while processing that narrative” (318). This project allows the strong conclusion that features of narratives may lead readers to have highly consistent responses. The results are, perhaps, most striking for this project because the consistency emerges in many moments spread across the text. Let’s return to the particular power of the affective response of suspense to influence readers’ responses. There is reasonable evidence to support the claim that suspense has a positive impact on transportation (Bezdek and Gerrig; Krakowiak and Oliver; Tal-Or and Cohen). Consider research by Bezdek and Gerrig (see also Bezdek and colleagues, “Neural”). In Bezdek and Gerrig’s project, participants viewed excerpts from films. As they viewed the films, occasional audio probes sounded from the computer. When participants heard the probes, they were meant to respond by pressing a key on the computer. Bezdek and Gerrig used previous viewers’ ratings to identify hot spots and cold spots within each film excerpt. The hot spots were defined as moments at which negative outcomes seemed likely and imminent. The cold spots were neutral moments that did not have that character. Bezdek and Gerrig predicted that viewers’ attention would be more captured by the narrative at hot spots versus cold spots. As such, they expected that viewers would be slower at hot spots to respond to the audio probes and more likely to miss them altogether. Those predictions were borne out. These attention data serve as a credible proxy for transportation. The data generate the conclusion that suspense will increase transportation. In addition, the data suggest that the extent of people’s transportation will change dynamically across a narrative as a function of particular narrative events. 310

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Research on participatory responses also calls attention to the importance of suspense and emotional arousal in generating consistent responses among readers and viewers. Bezdek and colleagues (“Run”) manipulated viewers’ suspense by writing text introductions that either highlighted or downplayed potential negative outcomes. Viewers produced more participatory responses as they experienced more suspense. Note that there was still great variability with respect to the content of viewers’ responses. Suspenseful events affected the frequency of participation but did not provide strong constraints on exactly what viewers said. In this section, I have noted that some narrative events appear to evoke consistent responses from readers. That suggests, of course, that there remains a large number of moments at which readers may respond variably to events. In the next section, I explore ways in which readers’ responses to characters may also help determine the extent to which experiences are consistent or inconsistent among readers.

Readers’ Responses to Characters How do readers respond to Jeevan Chaudhary when they first meet him? His initial introduction is indirect: The actor portraying Edgar was watching [Arthur] closely. It was still possible at that moment that Arthur was acting, but in the first row of the orchestra section a man was rising from his seat. He’d been training to be a paramedic. (Mandel 3) Thus, readers are given no immediate indication that Jeevan will be an important protagonist in what ensues. To discuss readers’ responses, it would be traditional to make use of the concept of identification. However, that concept is used inconsistently and, often, imprecisely by different theorists (for a review, see Armstrong). For that reason, I am going to focus on a single dimension of reader response that I will call goal alignment. I define goal alignment as the extent to which a reader embraces a particular character’s goals. I find this concept useful for at least three reasons. First, it provides a concrete focus for discussion. We can be concrete about a character’s goals and ask to what extent readers hope the character will fulfill those goals. Second, it makes plain that readers have the option to embrace or reject characters’ goals. Third, it makes it possible to differentiate among goals and expect that readers might embrace some but not others. For example, when Jeevan rushes to the stage, we can hope that he will evade the ushers or we can hope that they will turn him back. We can hope that he will succeed at saving Arthur Leander or we can hope that his efforts fail. Our responses to these goals may be independent of each other (i.e., we may wish for Jeevan to have the opportunity to be heroic but we may prefer that Arthur die). What narrative features are likely to prompt consistency in readers’ alignment with characters’ goals? One likely dimension is the characters’ valence: hero versus villain. Research suggests that readers tend to identify more with positive than with negative characters (Tal-Or and Cohen; see also Chory; Krakowiak and Oliver). Furthermore, readers prefer positive outcomes for good characters and negative outcomes for bad characters (Rapp and Gerrig, “Readers’” and “Predilections”). We can interpret both those findings as suggesting that global appraisals of characters’ valence will affect the likelihood that readers will align with their goals. However, narratives often present characters who muddy the easy division into good and bad. For example, Shafer and Raney examined readers’ responses to antiheroes: characters 311

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who “display qualities of both heroes and villains” by “acting in morally ambiguous, and at times unjustifiable ways, if even to reach noble goals” (1029). Shafer and Raney measured viewers’ responses to a filmed narrative in which the antihero was the main protagonist. They found that viewers’ liking for the antihero increased as the film unfolded. However, the viewers still deemed the antihero’s actions to be immoral. We could well imagine that the way in which viewers individually weighted their liking for the character versus their moral concerns would affect the extent to which they aligned with the antihero’s goals. As we move beyond easy divisions such as “hero” versus “villain,” it becomes much more difficult to define why and when certain characters might provoke consistent or inconsistent responses among readers. In fact, readers’ own characteristics become highly relevant to understanding how their narrative experiences unfold. Let me illustrate this claim at the level of the group and at the level of the individual. At the group level, we know that people’s real-world interactions with others are highly influenced by the determinations they make about whether someone counts as an in-group or out-group member (for a review, see Hewstone and colleagues). We might imagine, for example, that readers’ alignment with Jeevan Chaudhary’s goals would be determined by their appraisal of Jeevan’s group identity. There is abundant evidence that suggests that people respond to same- and other-race individuals in quite different ways. For example, Bagnis and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of studies that have examined people’s responses to same-race and other-race faces. They surveyed a large functional neuroimaging (fMRI) literature and performed statistical analyses that included more than 2,000 Black, White, and Asian participants. The researchers provided a conceptual interpretation of their fMRI results: Same-group perception is characterized by empathetic and self-referential processes, whereas classification of other-group stimuli enhances attentional, visuo-perceptual and emotional processes. . . . Classification of other-group members tends to recruit more attention demands, because the stimuli are less familiar and potentially threatening, thereby leading also to greater involvement of affective areas. These analyses center on studies in which people view photographs of faces. Research has demonstrated that visual mental imagery activates the same neural mechanisms involved in visual perception (e.g., Kosslyn and colleagues). For that reason, it seems reasonable to suggest that the same processes would be at work when people read. If people create mental images of characters who they deem to be same-race and other-race, we might expect that the same automatic differences in processing (e.g., empathy vs. threat) would ensue. In fact, neuroscience evidence supports the conclusion that people process information differently across a range of social categories with broad implications for empathic responding (for a review, see Molenberghs). The general conclusion is that readers may respond differently to characters as a function of how they parse the social world. At the individual level, we can start with the reasonable claim that readers are more likely to experience empathy toward characters when they are similar to those characters (e.g., Hogan; Keen, “Theory” and “Empathy”). As such, it seems likely that readers will be more likely to align themselves with characters’ goals as a function of similarity. However, that assertion masks the complexity of how people’s assessments of similarity may change in a dynamic fashion. Consider Tversky’s (1977) classic analysis of similarity. In his model, the similarity between any pair of items emerges from a weighted combination of common and distinctive features. Moreover, the salience of individual features affects the assessment of similarity. 312

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Let’s consider the assessment of similarity in the context of Station Eleven. In the novel’s opening pages, readers learn quite a bit about Jeevan Chaudhary: “He’d been training to be a paramedic.” (p. 3) He had a brief career as an entertainment journalist. (p. 5) He shows a kindness toward a distressed child. (pp. 6–8) His girlfriend has left the theater without him. (p. 9) He was once a paparazzo. When he is confronted by his former colleagues, he misleads them about the actor’s status. (pp. 9–10) He explains why he is training to be a paramedic: “I want to do something that matters.” (p. 10) Jeevan is in a conflictual relationship with his girlfriend. (pp. 11–12) These pieces of information will function as common and distinctive features for different readers. In addition, readers may weigh the importance of each feature differently. Thus, readers will each perceive different similarity to Jeevan. Moreover, readers’ assessments of similarity will likely change dynamically as they accumulate new information. More generally, readers’ alignment with characters’ goals might also shift in response to those fluctuations in perceptions of similarity. Let’s return the discussion to transportation and participation. As I noted, researchers regularly make successful predictions based on the variability in readers’ self-reports of transportation. To explain the variability in readers’ self-report, researchers have often focused on readers’ similarity to characters (e.g., Murphy and colleagues, “Involved”; see also Murphy and colleagues, “Narrative”). The general expectation is that readers will be more transported when they engage with characters with whom they perceive similarity. As such, we might expect transportation to change dynamically in the same way that similarity changes dynamically. We would also predict that readers’ participation would be conditioned on their perceptions of similarity. Readers should be motivated to participate when they have a strong stake in the characters’ goals. They might expend particular (mental) effort to help characters achieve their goals or to block progress toward those goals. In fact, consideration of the emotional reactions signaled by participatory responses can add some nuance to consideration of what it means for readers to align themselves with characters’ goals. In their research, Bezdek and colleagues (“Run”) used a scene from Steven Spielberg’s film “Munich” in which a young girl wishes to answer a telephone. Viewers believe that, if she succeeds, a bomb will detonate. Here’s how one viewer responded: Noo, no, Oh my god please, no no no don’t get that. Don’t get it don’t get it don’t get it. We can see here that the viewer is ignoring the girl’s proximal goal (to answer the phone) and privileging a distal goal (to preserve her life). To provide a satisfying account of what goal 313

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alignment might mean, it would be necessary to understand how readers make use of information to align themselves with a hierarchy of characters’ goals. Let me end this section by identifying an interesting ambiguity. With respect to the claim that some narrative features will drive readers’ experiences toward consistency, I have reviewed narrative events and character attributes separately. However, there are instances in which the two forces appear to be put in opposition. Recall the examples I provided of viewers’ participatory responses as they viewed Marnie’s escape. Viewers have just witnessed Marnie robbing a safe. Given their responses, it seems that the viewers were rooting for her to succeed at committing a crime. If viewers were able to take a step back, they might decide that they wished Marnie to be caught. However, as they are transported in the moment, viewers responses seem to be dictated by the situation rather than the character. Researchers have offered a variety of analysis for why people “root for bad guys” (e.g., Smith). In this instance, it seems that narrative events dominate viewers’ responses.

Conclusion The goal of this chapter has been to explore what forces act to generate consistency or inconsistency across different readers’ cognitive and affective responses to narratives. I began the chapter by imagining a dimension that ranges from the text to the reader as a locus of control over readers’ responses. In the two sections of this chapter, I reviewed research that explains why consistency might arise. I suggested, for example, that readers have fundamental cognitive processes in common that help explain emotional responses. In addition, I suggested that particular narrative events and character attributes likely produce parallel responses. At same time, I located sources of variability in readers’ individual collections of memory and their assessments of their similarity to particular characters. Those sources of variability help explain how and why readers’ affective experiences diverge. As they read a brilliant novel such as Station Eleven, readers may relish the mixture of common and distinctive experiences.

Works Cited Albrecht, Jason E., and Edward J. O’Brien. “Updating a Mental Model: Maintaining Both Local and Global Coherence.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 19, 1993, pp. 1061–1070. Allbritton, David W., and Richard J. Gerrig. “Participatory Responses in Text Understanding.” Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 30, 1991, pp. 603–626. Appel, Markus, and Tobias Richter. “Transportation and Need for Affect in Narrative Persuasion: A Mediated Moderation Model.” Media Psychology, vol. 13, 2010, pp. 101–135. Armstrong, Paul B. Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative. Johns Hopkins UP, 2020. Bagnis, Arianna, Alessia Celeghin, Matteo Diano, Carlos Andres Mendez, Giuliana Spadaro, Cristina Onesta Mosso, Alessio Avenanti, and Marco Tamietto. “Functional Neuroanatomy of Racial Categorization from Visual Perception: A Meta-analytic Study.” NeuroImage, vol. 217, 2020, in press. Bezdek, Matthew A., Jeffrey E. Foy, and Richard J. Gerrig. “‘Run for It!’: Viewers’ Participatory Responses to Film Narratives.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 7, 2013, pp. 409–416. Bezdek, Matthew A., and Richard J. Gerrig. “When Narrative Transportation Narrows Attention: Changes in Attentional Focus During Suspenseful Film Viewing.” Media Psychology, vol. 20, 2017, pp. 60–89. Bezdek, Matthew A., Richard J. Gerrig, William G. Wenzel, Jaemin Shin, Kathleen Pirog Revill, and Eric Schumacher. “Neural Evidence That Suspense Narrows Attentional Focus.” Neuroscience, vol. 303, 2015, pp. 338–345. Busselle, Rick, and Helena Bilandzic. “Measuring Narrative Engagement.” Media Psychology, vol. 12, 2009, pp. 321–347.

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27 SOCIAL RECEPTION Bradley J. Irish

Abstract: This chapter explores the emotional dynamics of how groups and categories of readers respond to creative works. It begins by reviewing the German school of Reception Theory, characterized by the enormously influential scholarship of Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997); Jauss’s work reveals that the consuming audience is equally important in establishing historical meaning as the author and the text itself, and that texts have different meanings in different contexts of reception. The chapter then reviews scholarship indebted to Jauss that touches upon the affective dynamics of reception, before concluding with a case study of how emotion is deployed in the sixteenth-century literary reception of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530), the infamous minister to King Henry VIII.

The previous chapter considered the role of emotion in how individual readers process a text. This chapter will broaden that focus, by exploring more expansively the emotional dynamics of how groups and categories of readers respond to creative works. The theoretical lens most suited for this analysis is the German school of Reception Theory, an approach of considerable influence in the 1970s and 80s, but somewhat lesser known today. I will begin by introducing Reception Theory, to establish a theoretical anchoring, and then go on to suggest how its general principles might help us interrogate the emotional process of social reception.

Te Background of Reception Teory Reception Theory, as it is formally known in literary studies, emerged from research undertaken at the University of Constance in West Germany in the late 1960s and 70s; this “School of Constance” developed an approach that “advocated turning to the reading and reception of literary texts instead of to traditional methods that emphasize the production of texts or a close examination of texts themselves” (Holub “Reception Theory,” 319).1 Called “The Aesthetics of Reception” (Rezeptionsästhetik), this mode emerged in response to the conservative, textcentered methods that ruled post-war scholarship in Germany. Studies of reception quickly became the premier paradigm of German literary theory in the 1970s, and, in the next decade, the School of Constance eventually came to prominence in the English-speaking world via a series of influential translations.2 Reception theory, according to one of its founding practitioners, “explores reactions to the literary text by readers in different historical situations,” as it “tries to grasp prevailing attitudes that have shaped the understanding of a literary work in a DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-32

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given period of time” (Iser How To Do Theory, 57). In other words, “reception functions as a divining rod for tracing the recipients’ taste at a particular historical moment”; by “delineating the historical conditionality of readers’ reactions, an aesthetics of reception turns literature into a tool for reconstituting the past.” It thus has clear affinity with American forms of readerresponse criticism, but with something of a wider scope, as it tends to focus on broad patterns of reception, rather than the response of individual readers. The two most notable Constance scholars are Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. While Iser “occupies himself with the microcosm of response,” Jauss is more “dealing with the macrocosm of reception”; accordingly, I will focus on Jauss’s contribution in what follows, as his approach is most relevant to a chapter on “social reception” (Holub “Reception Theory,” 327). The birth of Reception Theory may be dated to April 1967, in Jauss’s widely celebrated talk “What is and for what purpose does one study literary history”—an opening salvo that has been called “perhaps the most celebrated inaugural lecture in the history of German literary criticism” (320). This piece, which was revised into essay form as “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” is widely considered “the single most important document for the movement which came to be known as reception theory” (Holub “Reception Theory,” 321). Lamenting that previous generations of scholarship have resorted to “cutting the thread between history’s past and present,” Jauss argues (in the words of Robert Holub, his most prominent English explicator) that “the present age needs to restore vital links between the artefacts of the past and the concerns of the present” (Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 8; Holub “Reception Theory,” 320). In the “most general sense,” Holub suggests, Jauss seeks to reestablish this connection via a “shift in the study of literature from a preoccupation with authors and texts to a concern with reception and reading” (Holub “Reception Theory,” 321). In doing so, he attempts to navigate between (and synthesize) the two dominant modes of literary criticism at the time: Marxism—which importantly recognized the historicity of texts, but which sacrificed intrinsic, aesthetic concerns—and Russian Formalism—which honored the aesthetic features of texts but largely ignored historicity. Jauss thus sees his work as an “attempt to bridge the gap between literature and history, between historical and aesthetic approaches,” by foregrounding in the study of literature “a dimension that inalienably belongs to its aesthetic character as well as to its social function: the dimension of its reception and influence” (Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 18). For Jauss, we must recognize a “triangle of author, work, and public,” in which the third element is “no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but rather an energy formative of history” (19). Because “the historical essence of the work of art lies not only in its representational or expressive function but also in its influence,” the reading public is a crucial aspect of the equation: The relationship of work to work must now be brought into [the] interaction between work and mankind, and the historical coherence of works among themselves must be seen in the interrelations of production and reception . . . literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject—through the interaction of author and public. (15) By tending to the historical process of audience mediation, we can therefore unite the historical sensitivity of the Marxist critics with the aesthetic sensitivity of the Formalists. The relationship between literature and its audience thus “has aesthetic as well as historical implications,” and in 318

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fact “history and aesthetics are united” by carefully delineating the history (and aesthetics) of audience reception (Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 20, Holub Reception Theory, 58). For Jauss, it follows, the “historicity of literature rests . . . on the preceding experience of the literary work by its readers,” because “a literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period” (Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 20; 21). At the level of the individual reader, this literary experience is assessed via a novel concept called the “horizon of expectations” (Erwartungshorizont). As Holub notes, the term is somewhat tricky, and never receives precise definition, but Jauss nonetheless saw it as the “methodological centerpiece” of his theory of reception (Holub Reception Theory, 59). In general, this horizon refers to the system of literary expectations with which an individual engages a text, based on their previous reading history, and prompted in some part by the literary work itself. Jauss explains: A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the “middle and end,” which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading according to specific rules of the genre or type of text. (Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 23) Furthermore, a “process of the continuous establishing and altering of horizons also determines the relationship of the individual text to the succession of texts that form the genre,” insofar as the new text evokes in the reader “the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced.” This alteration of the horizon of expectations is most obviously apparent in texts that explicitly ironize their genre; Jauss uses the example of Don Quixote, which subverts the generic expectations of the knighthood tale. But the process applies to literature more broadly, and becomes for the critic a tool for assessing aesthetic value: “the [aesthetic] distance between the horizon of expectations and the work, between 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” (25). In his later writings, Jauss somewhat revises this position, finding that he was too strict in his assessment that literary works of value must break or upend their audience’s horizons of expectations (Holub Reception Theory, 72–73). For our purposes, however, it is enough to recognize that sensitivity to the process of reception “brings to view the hermeneutic difference between former and the current understanding of a work,” because the establishment of literary meaning (and value) is always an ongoing process: it entails “the successive unfolding of the potential for meaning that is embedded in a work and actualized in the stages of its historical reception as it discloses itself ” to readers (Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 28; 30). The takeaway of Reception Theory, as Holub puts it, is that “the meaning and form of a literary work are no longer considered static or eternal entities, but rather as potentialities unfolding in a historical process” (Holub “Reception Theory,” 325).

Te Reception of Emotion As noted earlier, the theory of reception inaugurated in Jauss’s “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” was enormously influential in West German literary criticism, and 319

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the writings of both Jauss and Iser did gain some traction in the English-speaking world. In general, however, the Constance school of reception theory does not wield a tremendous amount of critical power in the twenty-first century; indeed, it has been recently observed that “among the many branches of postmodern criticism, reception theory was one of the first to fade” (Martin 79). (This is partly because, in 1981, Stanley Fish gave a devastating critique of Constance-school reception, in a review of Iser’s The Act of Reading [Fish, “Why No One Is Afraid”].) Nonetheless, an investigation of emotion in audience reception can be grounded in the three basic principles of Jaussian theory: (1) that the consuming public—or more accurately, consuming publics—is equally important in establishing historical meaning as the author and the text itself; (2) that aesthetic experience generated by a text is shaped in part by its relationship to the aesthetic experience generated by other texts; and (3) that texts have different meanings, and generate different aesthetic experiences, in different contexts of reception. While scholars indebted to Jauss have not spent much time explicitly considering the emotional component of reception, much work in this area broadly circulates around affective matters—especially because emotion, in the most basic sense, plays an obvious role in how audiences respond to aesthetic experiences. An example of Jaussian reception may be seen, for example, in studies of Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, a twelfth-century French treatise on the art of courtly love. (Jauss himself was a noted medievalist.) In a celebrated monograph called De Amore in Volkssprachlicher Literatur, Alfred Karnein examined how the De amore was both translated and alluded to in manuscripts from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries; he found a substantial “change in paradigm” in how the text was understood by later audiences, who interpreted it “in a way that separates it radically from the meaning that it had for Andreas’s own contemporaries” (Karnein; Monson “Andreas Capellanus and Reception Theory,” 1). Don A. Monson, one of the leading English-language scholars on Capellanus, offers a useful summary of Karnein’s findings. Karnein argues that the text originated “as a clerical reaction to and condemnation of contemporary secular love literature”; this seems to be supported by its early reception in the Latin tradition, where “De amore appears primarily as a source of quotations in works of a pious, Christian nature” (Monson “Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony,” 548). Late in the thirteenth century, however, vernacular poets began to radically reinterpret the text, finding in it instead “a positive summa on sexual love”; this became a dominant view as the centuries progressed, and eventually came to inform the standard twentieth-century interpretation of De amore. Accordingly, in Karnein’s account, “Andreas’s contemporaries . . . saw in the De amore a treatise against love, whereas the modern tendency to interpret it as a handbook on courtly love can be traced to the secularizing trends of the late Middle Ages.” The recognition of this shift in audience interpretation— around an affective phenomenon like love, nonetheless—is a splendid illustration of Jaussian reception theory. But, as Monson explains in a related study, the process of reception can also be analyzed in the other direction—because the De amore itself “makes significant use of poetic material drawn not only from the didactico-erotic poetry of Ovid, which provides its general structure, but also from medieval vernacular love literature, which furnishes much of its substance” (Monson “Andreas Capellanus and Reception Theory,” 2). With its subversive engagement of these sources, Monson argues, Capellanus’s treatise “embodies a manifest transgression of genre resulting in a corresponding creation of aesthetic distance and change in the horizon of expectation.” In this way, the affective content of De amore—that is, what it is said to say about the experience of love—becomes meaningful on the basis of both how the text relates to its literary predecessors and how the text itself has been experienced by successive generations of readers. 320

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The study of Biblical reception is another area of concentrated interest. In recent monographs, David Paul Parris, Robert Evans, and Ormond Rush have explicitly adopted a Jaussian approach to consider how a series of scriptural and doctrinal case studies have been received in different interpretative contexts (Parris; Evans; Rush). Unsurprisingly, there are many specific studies of scriptural reception; Yvonne Sherwood, for example, shows that the historical understanding of the Jonah tale is “paradoxically . . . a story both of radical deviation and of endless repetition” (Sherwood 10). But, in terms of emotional content, Duc Dau’s analysis of the twentieth-century reception of the Song of Songs provides a useful example of how different audience communities find unique affective connection to a textual source. Indeed, the Song of Songs “has a long history of being interpreted and appropriated in a highly politicized manner by different interpretive communities”; Elizabeth Clarke, for example, records how “the struggle over the identity of the Church of England in the seventeenth century is a conflict over the meaning of the Song of Songs,” because of the traditional association between the text’s female lover figure and the notion of the true church (Dau 114; Clarke 3).3 Dau, however, focuses on how the text has been engaged more recently by two distinct audiences: Black liberation theology and feminist theology. For both groups, unique features of the texts were found to speak to their respective political commitments—a correspondence of obvious affective import. In Black theology, Dau explains, interest in the Song of Songs “revolves around racism and methods of affirming the essential worth of blackness”—an interpretation grounded in the fact that it is “the text with the most fully portrayed self-identified black woman in the Bible” (Dau 119; Sheppard 173). In a related, though distinct tradition, feminist theologians have focused on the need to “recover female perspectives and voices from the Bible, wresting the sacred text away from male-centric perspectives and ensuring its relevance for women today”—and for this goal, the Song of Songs has also proven a fruitful text (Dau 120). (Of course, though Black theology and feminist theology are distinct traditions, intersectional research makes clear that the social identities of the poem’s Black female figure are mutually constitutive.) For both groups, characteristics of the text spoke, in an affective sense, to the lived experience and political goals of the audience, for whom the Song of Songs has liberatory possibilities. Even when Jauss is not invoked explicitly, the principles of his theory nonetheless inform other attempts to assess how different audiences respond to aesthetic experience. Theater scholar Willmar Sauter, for example, describes a simple, yet illustrative experiment that he and his colleagues conducted on the matter of audience reception, concerning the central character of Carmen, the George Bizet opera based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella. To assess the cultural understanding of this character, Sauter prepared 20 slides containing photographs of actresses portraying Carmen—from the first performance in 1875 to Peter Brook’s stage and film productions in the 1980s—and showed them to students from Utrecht, Stockholm, and Munich. After viewing the images, the students were asked first to numerically rate how well each actress “fulfill[ed] your expectations of what Carmen is like”; they then were told to assess on another scale the extent to which each actress could be described by a series of adjectives, taken directly from Mérimée’s original text (Sauter 252). Importantly for our purposes, many of the descriptors (words like temperamental, guilty, sympathetic, hot-blooded, pitiable, passionate, and uninhibited) had an emotional component. By correlating the two measures, the researchers were able to develop a picture of how audiences understand the “ideal” version of this iconic character: one that, interestingly enough, is based both on the student’s affective response to the images and on the affective characteristics that Carmen is thought to exhibit. The results of this experiment were surprising to the researchers, who found that while “there were almost no differences between male and female students,” the “differences between the 321

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three countries were considerable” (253). This suggests that the reception of a literary work is not merely idiosyncratic, but is instead largely shaped by a broader social context, which varies from place to place: “The ideal picture of Carmen is not an individual choice, but reflects culturally established attitudes towards sex, love, and violence, coupled with prejudices concerning Spain, bullfighting and gypsies (as Romani are called in the libretto).” So while reception theory has not necessarily framed its inquiry in terms of emotion, there are many ways that scholarship in this mode touches on issues of emotionality—and indeed, one could say that the reception of a literary work is inherently an emotional process, insofar as there is a necessary affective component to how an audience responds to aesthetic experience. Furthermore, it is easy to imagine how scholars of literary emotion could utilize reception theory to investigate aesthetic practices further. Taking a cue from Sauter’s study, we could ask how the emotional content of a work—say, King Lear’s expression of grief—is understood differently when the play is performed in different cultural contexts, or in different places across the world. Thinking diachronically, we might equally ask how emotional responses to a particular literary work (or an element of that work, like a particular character) have changed over time; utilizing things like reviews, commentary, or criticism, we could track affective response across history, with an eye for how contemporary reception has shifted in subsequent ages. On a similar note, we might ask how an audience’s emotional attachment to a particular source text has inspired any number of offspring texts, both in the formal literary tradition and more casually in fan communities. Finally, looking in the other direction, we might investigate how the emotional content of a text measures against generic expectations, and against precursor texts—how a work, to put it in Jaussian terms, interacts with a horizon of emotional expectations. Directors, for example, capitalize on the affordances of changing emotional contexts by staging plays like The Trojan Women, Lysistrata, and King Henry V during times of war—each instance, of course, drawing upon a unique affective atmosphere, informed by not only the current cultural moment but also by the production history of the play of in question.

Te Reception of Wolsey: A Case Study To conclude, I’d like to look at one example of literary reception that has an explicit connection to emotion, drawn from my own research on early modern England: literary portrayals of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530), the infamous royal minister to King Henry VIII.4 It is difficult to overstate the influence that Wolsey had on the first half of the Henrician period; he virtually ran the kingdom for the young Henry (who largely preferred to devote his attention to more pleasurable pastimes), to the extent that he became referred to by some onlookers as England’s “other king” (Calendar 2:565). Though more recent efforts, such as those of Peter Gwyn, have done some work to rehabilitate the cardinal’s reputation, Wolsey has been a muchmaligned figure throughout the centuries; he has been customarily portrayed as a conniving, self-serving, and overly ambitious politician, which is itself of course an interesting case of reception (Gwyn). But I will focus on how Wolsey was characterized by authors during his life and in the period immediately after, as there is an even more specific story there about how the features of Jaussian reception theory intersect with matters of emotion. Because of his unrivaled influence in the Henrician political scene, Wolsey inspired many detractors during his time in power—and these critics sometimes put pen to paper, creating a rather notable body of what may be termed anti-Wolsey satire. John Skelton is the premier poet of this genre; he may have first attacked the cardinal in the allegorical interlude Magnyfycence (c. 1516–19), but unquestionably did so in a trio of poems released in the early 1520s 322

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(Speke, Parott; Collyn Clout; and Why Come Ye Nat to Court?). But Skelton is not the only anti-Wolsey poet. There was apparently a populist tradition of attacking the cardinal, preserved in several surviving ballads; “Of the Cardnall Wolse” (c. 1521), for example, is presented as a direct complaint to King Henry himself, while “An Impeachment of Wolsey” (c. 1528) offers a prophecy of Wolsey’s eventual fall. Emerging from a very different social context, Godly Queene Hester is an anonymous morality drama from the period that seems to lampoon Wolsey in the depiction of a wicked royal adviser. And the most elaborate of the anti-Wolsey poems is Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe (1527), a four-thousand-line assault penned by the Lutheran exiles William Roy and Jerome Barlowe. This poem is known for its elaborate paratextual elements, including a mock-display of Wolsey’s alleged coat of arms; it culminates in a two-part dialogue between a pair of humble serving men, who come to skewer the cardinal for his personal and ecclesiastical faults. As part of an investigation of emotion in the Tudor courtly sphere, I had occasion to study the body of anti-Wolsey satires, and it became immediately apparent that they shared a remarkably similar affective mode: they all display an intense interest in what may be called the poetics of disgust. To understand what I mean by this, it is necessary to first briefly describe how disgust is thought to work. Disgust is a ubiquitous emotion; though the specific things that elicit disgust are culturally (and historically) contingent, most scholars in the affective sciences maintain that the disgust system is, for all meaningful purposes, a universal feature of human affective experience.5 Disgust is thought to have originated as a mechanism to prevent organisms from consuming dangerous food—for this reason, the stereotypical disgust response involves nausea and vomiting, as a means to expel harmful substances from the body. While disgust may have begun as a safeguard against oral contamination, it seems to have soon expanded its function, and came to guard the human body more generally against foreign substances that might cause it harm. Accordingly, scientists believe, there are some relatively stable categories of elicitors that can trigger disgust, because of their proximity to potentially harmful agents—that is, besides food, items associated with things like disease, animals, bodily fluids, sex, or corpses. But that’s not all that disgust entails: it is theorized that the emotion, in a process of further development, eventually evolved to protect not only the physical body from material contaminants, but also the social body from symbolic contaminants. Indeed, things that seem to violate the social or moral order are able to trigger feelings of visceral disgust; this so-called moral disgust, for example, is why someone might find themselves “disgusted” by an act of racism. Of course, because what constitutes a violation of the social order is subjective, this moral disgust is highly variable; one person might be disgusted by the legalization of same-sex marriage, while another might be disgusted by opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage. (Indeed, invocations of moral disgust have historically been used to justify any number of dehumanizing and discriminatory practices.) But whatever the case, it seems that disgust indeed functions as a policing mechanism at both the material and symbolic levels, leading it to be known as “the gatekeeper emotion,” “the exclusionary emotion,” or the “body and soul emotion” (Miller; Buckels and Trapnell 772; Valtorta and Volpato). While disgust-based rhetoric is often a conventional feature in satire—displayed, for example, in the genre’s regular deployment of scatological tropes—the anti-Wolsey poets are remarkably consistent in utilizing imagery that aligns with the various general categories of disgust elicitors mentioned earlier. In other words, they anchor their critique of the cardinal in literary expression drawn from the lexicon of disgust, with the effect that Wolsey is ultimately portrayed as both physically and morally repulsive. There is, for example, a prevalent interest in Wolsey’s infamously large culinary appetite, as poets denounce his “bely-joye,” 323

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“wastefull banketyng,” and “banketynge braynlesse”; the fact that he was low-born, it was suggested, indicated that he should be more rightly eating a disgusting meal of “moulde brede” and “mammockes [for] meate” (Skelton 245; 280; 263). (A mammock is a scrap or shred of food.) Indeed, Wolsey’s genealogy activated both food and animalistic associations; because his father was a butcher, the cardinal came to be known as the “Bochers Curre,” a loathsome beast who “gnaw[s] hys pepyll as a dogge doth a Catte” (Ballads 1:334; 358). The domains of food and animals are equally evoked in Skelton’s description of Wolsey as “So fatte a magott, bred of a flesshe-flye/Was nevyr suche a fylty gorgon, nor suche an epycure”—a couplet that activates images of, appetite, orality, corporality, animality, rottenness, and excrement (246). Other categories of disgust are similarly activated. The cardinal was rumored to suffer from the effects of syphilis, so the satires also attack him in terms of both sex and disease; Roy and Barlowe, noting that “whoares . . . be his lovers,” gleefully report that Wolsey could not “escapeth the frenche pockes” (88). But, as we have seen, disgust regulates not only the sanctity of the physical body, but the sanctity of the symbolic body as well—and the poets insistently express the notion that Wolsey, by means of his extraordinary power, was a kind of social pathogen, a foreign agent that usurped the rightful authority of King Henry. Skelton particularly explores this idea, noting that the cardinal was With pryde inordynate, Sodaynly upstarte From the donge carte, The mattocke and the shovll, To reygne and to rule. (262) In locating Wolsey’s origins in the “donge cart,” here Skelton triggers associations of both material and symbolic disgust. But Wolsey’s undue influence throughout the kingdom is perhaps most explicitly registered in Why Come Ye Nat to Courte, via the passage that gives Skelton’s poem its name: Why come ye nat to court? To whyche court? To the kynges courte? Or to Hampton Court? Nay, to the kynges court! The kynges courte Shulde haue the excellence; But Hampton Court Hath the preemynence! (289) By suggesting that Wolsey’s court at Hampton actually surpasses the king’s royal court, Skelton indicates the extent to which the social order has been violated by the cardinal’s rise to power. The disdain that he feels for this upheaval recalls the dynamics of moral disgust, a compliment to the extensive imagery of physical disgust with which he (and the rest of the anti-Wolsey poets) paint the cardinal. In terms of social reception, then, we may say that Cardinal Wolsey, as a literary subject, was received by his contemporaries in a thoroughly consistent affective mode. But we can also 324

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look at how he was portrayed by subsequent generations of writers after his death—and here, disgust is once again a typical feature of the presentation. For example, half a century after the cardinal’s death, Thomas Churchyard’s depiction of Wolsey’s in The Mirror for Magistrates (1587) relentlessly invokes the rhetoric of disgust: Pryde is a thing, that God and man abores, A swelling tode, that poysons euery place, A stinking wounde, that breedeth many sores, A priuy plague, found out in stately face, A paynted byrd, that keeps a pecocks pace, A lothsome lowt, that lookes like tinkers dog, A hellish hownd, a swinish hatefull hog That grunts and groanes, at euery thing it sees, And holds vp snowt, like pig that comes from draffe. (507) In the same period, the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, no fan of the cardinal, similarly takes great pleasure in reporting the disgusting details that are alleged to surround Wolsey’s death: It is testified by one, yet being aliue, in whose armes the sayde Cardinall dyed, that hys body being dead, was blacke as pitch, also was so heauie, that sixe coulde scarse beare it. Furthermore, it did so stinke aboue the grounde, that they were constrayned to hasten the buriall thereof in the night season, before it was daye. At the which buriall, such a tempest, with such a stinch there arose, that all the torches went out, and so he was throwne into the tombe, and there was layde. (Foxe 1020) The anti-Wolsey poets of the 1520s thus set an emotional agenda for considering Wolsey that would persist throughout the rest of the sixteenth century, and beyond. But the most interesting case of early modern emotional reception of Wolsey comes in Shakespeare’s rendition of the cardinal in King Henry VIII. In his primary source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Wolsey is routinely associated with the language of disgust, especially in his downfall; the cardinal is compared to a “rotten” and “scabb[ed]” sheep poisoning England’s flock, is condemned for “breath[ing] on the king” when he allegedly had “the French pockes,” and is subjected to a host of digestive bodily horrors at the time of his death, including “excoriation of the intrailes” (Holinshed 3:743; 747; 755). And on the surface, Shakespeare seems to endorse the notion of the disgusting Wolsey: his adversaries in the play, for example, describe the “butcher’s cur” as “such a keech [that] can with his very bulk/Take up the rays o’th’ beneficial sun” (Shakespeare 1.1.120; 1.1.55–56). (A keech is a lump of congealed fat.) The story, however, is much more complicated: as Gavin Schwartz-Leeper has recently argued in his splendid study of Wolsey’s afterlife, Shakespeare’s depiction of the cardinal can be read as surprisingly positive: with careful analysis, Wolsey is revealed to actually be “a hard-working and long-suffering agent of a capricious king” (Schwartz-Leeper 186). Shakespeare, in other words, greatly “undercut the generally accepted and dominant sixteenth-century characterization of Wolsey”—in Jaussian terms, he upended the audience’s horizon of expectations when it comes to portrayals of the cardinal. But, because audience response is not monolithic, Shakespeare’s innovation does not mean that this reversal of expectations permanently altered the understanding of the character: as late as 2010, 325

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the Globe Theatre production of Henry VIII reverted to the traditional portrayal of the cardinal, staging a “grotesque Cardinal Wolsey, who hisses out his lines like a poisonous snake and slithers across the stage like a disgustingly plump slug” (quoted in Schwartz-Leeper 187). It is thus clear that the first generation of anti-Wolsey poets set an emotional agenda when talking about the infamous cardinal, and it is one that can be tracked throughout reception history. Though reception theorists have not generally paid particular attention to matters of emotion, there is no doubt that this area of inquiry provides ripe opportunity for further study. And though Jaussian reception theory is not in vogue today, its basic premise—that the consuming audience is equally important in establishing historical meaning as the author and the text itself, and that texts have different meanings in different contexts of reception—can be equally provocative for scholars working on literary emotion. The emotional meaning of literary texts is always shaped by the affective response of the receiving audience, and the insights of reception theory have much to offer our analysis.

Notes 1 For overviews, see Holub Reception Theory, Holub “Reception Theory,” Regan, Iser How To Do Theory, Rush. 2 See Iser The Implied Reader, Iser The Act of Reading, Jauss Aesthetic Experience, Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. 3 In this quotation, Dau alludes to Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities,” a theory of Reader Response criticism with some affinity to the reception theory discussed in this chapter. Though Fish, it is noted earlier, critiqued the Constance school, it has been said that “Jauss’ notion of horizon of expectations corresponds closely to Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities” (Strehle 250). See Fish Is There a Text. 4 The following is drawn from Irish Emotion in the Tudor Court; see also Irish “‘Not Cardinal, but King.’” 5 For research on disgust, see, for example, Rozin, Lowery, and Ebert, Rozin and Fallon, Olatunji and Sawchuk, Curtis, Tybur et al., Chapman and Anderson, Haidt et al.

Works Cited Ballads from Manuscripts, edited by Frederick J. Furnivall. 2 vols., 1868–73. Buckels, Erin E., and Paul D. Trapnell. “Disgust Facilitates Outgroup Dehumanization.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol. 16, no. 6, 2013, pp. 771–780. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy, edited by Rawdon Brown et al., 38 vols., 1864–1947. Chapman, Hanah A., and Adam K. Anderson. “Things Rank and Gross in Nature: A Review and Synthesis of Moral Disgust.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 139, no. 2, 2013, pp. 300–327. Churchyard, Thomas. “Thomas Wolsey.” The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell, Barnes and Noble, 1960. Clarke, Elizabeth. Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Curtis, Valerie. “Why Disgust Matters.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 366, no. 1583, 2011, pp. 3478–3490. Dau, Duc. “Reception.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, edited by Mark Knight, Routledge, 2016, pp. 113–123. Evans, Robert. Reception History, Tradition and Biblical Interpretation: Gadamer and Jauss in Current Practice. Bloomsbury, 2014. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard UP, 1980. ———. “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser: A Review of The Act of Reading by Wolfgang Iser.” Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 1, 1981, pp. 2–13.

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Social Reception Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO. 1583 ed., HRI Online Publications, 2011, www.johnfoxe.org. Gwyn, Peter. The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey. Barrie and Jenkins, 1990. Haidt, Jonathan, et al. “Body, Psyche, and Culture: The Relationship between Disgust and Morality.” Psychology and Developing Societies, vol. 9, no. 1, 1997, pp. 107–131. Holinshed, Raphael. Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols., 1808. Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. Methuen, 1984. ———. “Reception Theory: School of Constance.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 8: From Formalism to Post Structuralism, edited by Raman Selden, Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 319–346. Irish, Bradley J. Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling. Northwestern UP, 2018. ———. “‘Not Cardinal, But King:’ Thomas Wolsey and the Henrician Diplomatic Imagination.” Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare, edited by Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter, Ashgate, 2013, pp. 85–99. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. ———. How to Do Theory. Blackwell, 2006. ———. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction From Bunyan to Beckett. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Jauss, Hans Robert. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics. Translated by Michael Shaw, U of Minnesota P, 1982. ———. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti, U of Minnesota P, 1982. Karnein, Alfred. De Amore in Volkssprachlicher Literatur. Carl Winter, 1985. Martin, Catherine Gimelli. “Reception Theory, Religion, and Reading a Milton Sonnet: Historicizing ‘Undecidability.’” The Review of English Studies, vol. 67, no. 278, 2015, pp. 79–102. Miller, Susan Beth. Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion. The Analytic Press, 2004. Monson, Don A. “Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony.” Speculum, vol. 63, no. 3, 1988, pp. 539–572. ———. “Andreas Capellanus and Reception Theory: The Third Dialogue.” Medievalia et Humanistica, vol. 31, 2005, pp. 1–13. Olatunji, Bunmi O., and Craig N. Sawchuk. “Disgust: Characteristic Features, Social Manifestations, and Clinical Implications.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, vol. 24, no. 7, 2005, pp. 932–962. Parris, David Paul. Reception Theory and Biblical Hermeneutics. Pickwick Publications, 2009. Regan, Stephen. “Reader-Response Criticism and Reception Theory.” A Handbook to Literary Research, edited by Simon Eliot and W. R. Owens, Routledge, 1998, pp. 137–147. Roy, William, and Jerome Barlowe. Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe. Edited by Douglas H. Parker, U of Toronto P, 1992. Rozin, Paul, and April E. Fallon. “A Perspective on Disgust.” Psychological Review, vol. 94, no. 1, 1987, pp. 23–41. Rozin, Paul, Laura Lowery, and Rhonda Ebert. “Varieties of Disgust Faces and the Structure of Disgust.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 66, no. 5, 1994, pp. 870–881. Rush, Ormond. The Reception of Doctrine: An Appropriation of Hans Robert Jauss’ Reception Aesthetics and Literary Hermeneutics. Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1997. Sauter, Willmar. “Thirty Years of Reception Studies: Empirical, Methodological and Theoretical Advances.” About Performance, vol. 10, 2010, pp. 241–263. Schwartz-Leeper, Gavin. From Princes to Pages: The Literary Lives of Cardinal Wolsey, Tudor England’s ‘Other King’. Brill, 2016. Shakespeare, William. King Henry VIII. Edited by Gordon McMullan, Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Sheppard, Phillis Isabella. Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology. Palgrave, 2011. Sherwood, Yvonne. A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture. Cambridge UP, 2000. Skelton, John. The Complete English Poems. Edited by John Scattergood, Penguin Books, 1983. Strehle, Ralph. “Jauss, Hans Robert.” The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, edited by Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, Routledge, 2013, p. 250. Tybur, Joshua M., et al. “Disgust: Evolved Function and Structure.” Psychological Review, vol. 120, no. 1, 2013, pp. 65–84. Valtorta, Roberta Rosa, and Chiara Volpato. “‘The Body and Soul Emotion’: The Role of Disgust in Intergroup Relations.” TPM, vol. 25, 2018, pp. 239–252.

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28 STORIES Particular Causes and Universal Genres Patrick Colm Hogan

Abstract: To understand the structure and function of stories, we need to understand emotion. Stories are fundamentally particular causal sequences. But the part of causal sequences that constitutes a prototypical story is determined by the sensitivities and organization of our emotion systems. For instance, our sense of what constitutes an event in a story is in part a function of the processes involved in the development and experience of an emotion episode. Literary stories (as opposed to, say, an engineer’s account of how a radiator cracked) are characterized by their stress on agents pursuing (emotion-defined) goals, as well as their manipulation of the reader’s interpersonal stance toward those agents (roughly, empathic, antipathetic, or ambivalent; literary stories also take up the reader’s other emotional responses, such as interest). Cross-culturally recurring story genres (romantic, heroic, sacrificial, and so forth) are generated from the protagonists’goals, which are defined, in their general properties, by human emotion systems. Recurring features of story development result from ordinary psychological processes that intensify the emotions elicited by the outcome of the story (e.g., joy at the reunion of lovers).

Since at least Aristotle, writers have explored emotion in story structure, often in connection with genre. Generic and other recurring story patterns may be isolated at different levels. Perhaps the most obvious level is historically and culturally specific. For example, in film study, it is common to isolate such genres as the screwball comedy and the gross-out comedy (see Paul). Both genres are based on a simple, emotional—though also logical or conceptual— distinction between comedy and tragedy, thus between stories that are happy and stories that are sad. That broad division is not, in itself, historically and culturally specific; however, the specifications of two comedy genres as “screwball” and “gross-out” are more historically and culturally particular. As Gehring explains, screwball comedy developed in the 1930s; it was “[b]ased upon the old ‘boy-meets-girl’ formula turned topsy-turvy” and “generally presented the eccentric, female-dominated courtship of an upper-class couple” (43). “Gross-out” comedy, in contrast, mixes a high proportion of disgust with the mirth of comedy, and we find it with greater frequency in Hollywood films of the 1990s (see Bordwell and Thompson 98). Another obvious level is more particular still—the writings of an individual author. Thus, Shakespeare’s plays exhibit recurring features that are to some extent distinctive of Shakespeare (see Chapter 3 of Hogan How).

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-33

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Just as there are more specific patterns than those of a period in cultural history, there are more encompassing patterns. Though less fully studied by literary critics, these are arguably the most important patterns, as they are the most pervasive and have the broadest explanatory value. They are the patterns that tell us most about the psychology—perhaps even the politics and sociology—of stories. For instance, Shakespeare’s treatments of foreign invasions (in, say, King Lear or Coriolanus) are variations on the cross-cultural and trans-historical genre of heroic narrative (see Chapter 3 of Hogan, How). Similarly, Hollywood screwball comedies are commonly variations on the cross-cultural and trans-historical genre of romantic comedy. Moreover, it is at this most encompassing level of genre patterning that emotion plays the clearest structural role, in effect defining the trajectory of cross-cultural genres by algorithmic processes that derive from the nature of human emotion systems. Still, there is something more encompassing than the universal genres—that is, what makes something a story at all. Before turning to universal genres, then, we should consider what constitutes a story as such. We also need to address the extent to which such basic story formation already derives from emotion processes. In fact, emotion is crucial at this level too. The following discussion begins with the question of what a story might be, both in itself and in relation to emotion. It turns from there to the definition of universals generally, then to the empirical isolation of story universals. It concludes by examining how emotion processes may generate—and thus explain—story genre universals.

What Stories Might Be Stories may be implicit or explicit. Minimally, an implicit story is a particular causal sequence that guides cognitive processing. We find evidence of such particular causal sequences in, for example, expectation and attention (as indicated by work on the neuroscience of time; see, for example, Finnerty, et al.). To take an extremely simple case, if I hear a loud crack and turn around quickly, I am implicitly attributing the sensation to some unexpected event occurring behind me. An explicit story, in contrast, is a particular causal sequence that is the object of cognitive processing; an explicit story is therefore represented, usually through language.1 (Sloman and Fernbach similarly observe that “stories are about the causal relations in the world” [67].)2 Both implicit and explicit stories involve the selection and ordering of events along with processes of simulation and inference. They are also bound up with emotion and with the preemotional response of interest. The selection of events is first of all a matter of salience relative to normalcy or relative to specific emotion/motivation system engagement. For example, violations of expectation become targets of attention (see Frijda 272–73, 318, and 386) and thereby may lead to curiosity about the precedents and consequences of the unanticipated event. As I walk along the side of the street, I pay no attention to the (expected) sounds of passing cars. It is only due to the (unanticipated) crack that I turn. A striking feature of both implicit and, even more, explicit stories is that they are temporally bounded. In the world, particular causal sequences are unending. Some confluence of factors gave rise to the cracking sound. Some other confluences of factors gave rise to that confluence of factors, and so on, stretching infinitely back in time. Moreover, the cracking sound itself is part of a subsequent series of particular effects that continues to ramify endlessly into the future. But my attention to the implicit story, and my recounting of the events in an explicit story, are not endless. Specifically, stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Though not always satisfactory, beginnings and endings do often give us the sense that a particular causal sequence has been initiated and resolved and that there is nothing more to it. But that makes 329

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no objective sense. What, then, leads us to respond to stories in that way? In Understanding Nationalism and Affective Narratology, I have argued that it is the engagement of emotion systems. A salient, unanticipated event—whether experienced or recounted—activates the preemotional system of interest. That orients one’s attention. Once one’s attention fixes on the relevant event, further emotion systems may or may not be engaged. Emotional engagement determines the scope of story relevance—what precedents of the event I need to infer, what consequences I need to simulate or attend to. For example, suppose the crack turns out to have been the university grounds people breaking a damaged branch from a tree. I probably will not pay any more attention. In the unlikely event that I recount the story, I will stop with the discovery of the source’s sound. I do not care about where the grounds people went with the branch, because this engages no emotion system. In contrast, suppose the “crack” turned out to be a shot from a revolver. With the fear system engaged, I would be concerned about my distance from the shooter and whether or not he or she had seen me. After fleeing, I would not feel that the story was resolved until I knew that the shooter was captured; this would bear on my fear of going someplace where I might still encounter an at-large shooter. I would also want to know what had given rise to the event, specifically insofar as this would bear on my anxiety about the likelihood that such an event would recur. The actual, particular causal sequence would stretch out endlessly both before and after the crack of the pistol shot. But my emotional response would select a part of that infinite sequence as “the story.” Another important factor in our selection and construal of stories is the construal of temporal order. As a default case, we take the order of experience to be the order of causation. I hear the crack, then I see someone run by; I infer that the runner is fleeing the gunshot. However, in many cases the information order is different from the causal order. Perhaps the shooter hates joggers, so that the person’s running caused the gunshot, not the reverse. Thus, even in implicit, minimal stories, we find the narratological distinction between the story proper (thus, the actual causal sequence) and the plot (the manner in which the story events are given). Part of what occurs in both implicit and explicit stories is that we place selected incidents into what we take to be causal relations. This is not directly emotional, but it bears importantly on emotion as the precise causal sequence I construe will be a function of the threats and opportunities to which I am sensitized by my emotional response and the actional outcomes it fosters (e.g., freezing or flight). Part of causal construal is distinguishing between causally related and causally unrelated events. As a default case, we take causes as operating on effects through contact, thus contiguity in space and time. However, contiguity has some degree of flexibility, and not only regarding the sorts of temporal ordering issues just mentioned. Thus, we may recognize a causal sequence of eating a certain food and feeling nausea, even though the nausea does not immediately follow the eating. Such long-distance causal dependency presumably results in part from salience in memory substituting for contiguity in perception. Salience in memory produces a sort of mental contiguity. Here, too, we are not dealing with a wholly emotional development. But our recollections are strongly affected by “mood congruent processing,” which is to say, the differential activation of memories that are affectively similar to our current emotional state (here, for example, memories of disgust). Selection and ordering are refined and long-distance dependency extended by the acquisition of episodic and semantic memories or concepts. The concepts are of the usual sorts— exemplars, prototypes, and rules (see Murphy and Hoffman 166). The concepts in turn provide structures with variable features, which allow for different sorts of selection and ordering process—exemplar similarity, prototype approximation, and parameter variation for rules. For 330

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example, I will construe the crack sound and the person holding the pistol differently if I categorize the events as a school shooting as opposed to, say, street theater. Such categorization is largely a matter of information, but it too is subject to mood congruency effects. For example, if I am already apprehensive, I am more likely to construe the events as a real shooting, even if my apprehensions have a very different initial source. These conceptual operations bear not only on the causal sequence we take to be factual, but on our simulations of or inferences about counterfactual and hypothetical causal sequences. For example, rules allow us to alter variables and imagine alternative scenarios. Thus, I will simulate different likely outcomes, and different possible responses on my part, if I categorize the shot as theater. Here again, my understanding and response are intertwined with emotion. My information processing systems give me ideas about what is happening, what has happened, and what will happen. But, first, they do so in part on the basis of orientations defined by emotion system arousal—fear, anger, or whatever. Second, these information systems do not, in themselves, motivate me to act. Rather, the information they provide impacts my implementation of motivations. It is emotion systems—such as fear—that supply those motivations. But what about stories outside this minimal sense? The basic cognitive processes of particular causal understanding appear to be a natural kind shaped by evolution and open to fairly strict definition. But one can hardly say the same thing for more robust developments of stories in, say, literary narratives. One problem with terms such as “story” is that they are part of ordinary language. As such, they work well enough in informal conversation. But they are vague and ambiguous, thus problematic for theoretical discussions. Here, then, we need to set out some of the key properties that we might consider prototypical for stories—in the (non-minimal) elaborated sense of explicit sequences of particular causes communicated by storytellers, paradigmatically in literature. The first, partially distinguishing feature of prototypical stories is that they necessarily involve agents. Moreover, the main interest of prototypical stories concerns the experience of agents—with their emotional responses—not the purely objective material events in a particular causal sequence. Take Hempel’s widely discussed case of a radiator cracking. Considered as an engineering problem, isolating the causal sequence would involve, say, attention to internal pressure and flaws in the metal, points consistent with Hempel’s approach (as Megill, Shepard, and Honenberger summarize, Hempel’s account “consists . . . of statements of initial and boundary conditions combined with statements of empirical laws” [69]). Considered as a prototypical story, however, isolating the causal sequence would crucially involve the impact on people. Moreover, that impact is principally a matter of emotion (e.g., how the cracked radiator caused someone empathy-provoking harm), not a matter of, say, knowledge or inference. Finally, the impactful events are, prototypically, part of larger, intentional trajectories of an agent’s actions in active pursuit of some goal (e.g., someone’s attempt to drive home, when the radiator cracks). Of course, the social sciences, most obviously psychology, focus on human agents. The obvious way of distinguishing storytelling from psychology is through the mental structures and processes they presuppose. Storytelling tends to rely on folk psychology. Though usually spoken of as belief-desire psychology, this is better characterized as a loose explanatory system in which thought and action are accounted for by reference to character, emotion, (emotion-based) goals, beliefs, and circumstances, both material and social. (Here, Theory of Mind enters importantly, as stressed by Zunshine.) The goals are hypothetical simulations, and the trajectory of the story prototypically involves a character’s ongoing, though usually tacit comparison between current conditions and the simulated goal (as Keith Oatley’s account of emotion indicates). 331

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Mental architecture is a real, but limited difference between literature and psychology, as the latter remains almost entirely within the general structure of folk psychology as just outlined. The key features differentiating literary from scientific stories seem rather to be of four sorts. Three are connected with the recipient’s (e.g., the reader’s) relation to the characters’ emotions; one concerns the recipient’s own (real-world) emotions more directly. First, our basic emotional aim in composing prototypical stories (e.g., literary stories) is to foster emotional engagement. The nature of that emotional engagement is governed by the literary manipulation of interpersonal stance, thus our attitude toward the emotions of the agents involved (on interpersonal stance, see Frijda and Scherer 10 and Hogan, Literature, 41). That attitude may be either parallel or complementary, which is to say, based on empathy or antipathy. (For simplicity of exposition, I will leave aside the common case where it is a partially ambivalent combination of the two.) Second, prototypical, literary stories tend to rely on and foster simulation more than inference (though this varies somewhat with genre; for example, it is less true in criminal investigation stories). In contrast, any scientific isolation of particular causal sequences is likely to foster the reader’s self-conscious inference (or reasoning) over his or her simulation. This is related to the affective focus of prototypical, especially literary stories, as our theory of mind processes appear to rely more regularly on simulation in the case of emotion understanding (see Doherty 206). This is not to say that inference is irrelevant to literary stories; in fact, it often plays an important role in the third difference. Specifically, bare causal sequences and prototypical stories both frequently suggest larger generalizations—covering laws (of the sort emphasized by Hempel) in the former case and the “point” of the story, its thematic bearing on real life, in the case of literature. Commonly, we expect literary stories to provide practical implications for human life, specifically regarding our (real-world) well-being as a matter of significant emotional concerns. The well-being at issue may be purely hedonic, but it is more often a matter of prudence or ethics. For example, this sense of having learned something practical about life is probably part of the reason that turning traumas into coherent stories can be therapeutic (see Nisbett 167, citing Pennebaker). Finally, the narrative structure of prototypical, literary stories is regularly a function of genres. Indeed, genres are closely related to both the emotional and thematic concerns of stories. The genres at issue include, most importantly, the cross-cultural or universal genres. These genres are based on the pursuit of goals defined by emotion systems and the elaboration of that pursuit through the intensification of recipient emotion (e.g., by separating the lovers in the middle of a romantic story, thereby increasing the joy of their union at the end). These are complex, prototype-based structures that organize both implicit and explicit story construction in literary contexts. In contrast, the structures that guide particular, agentive, causal sequences in psychology are (or should be) derived from empirically based, algorithmically articulated hypotheses and theories that serve to isolate psychological patterns (e.g., processes of cognitive bias).

On Literary Universals In the preceding paragraph, I referred to “the cross-cultural or universal genres.” When I use a phrase such as this at a meeting of humanists, I can be fairly confident that some members of the audience will react as if I had said something absurd and quite possibly offensive. But I am only saying that there are genre patterns that recur across separate literary traditions. As this suggests, it is rather an understatement to say that the idea of universals is widely 332

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misunderstood in literary study. For example, when I mention literary universals, a surprising number of people seem to think I have in mind some sort of fascistic assertion of group superiority—despite the fact that every such assertion, of racial, sexual, or other superiority, is based on claims of difference, not universality. (To take an obvious case, defenders of American slavery did not seek to justify the practice by saying that blacks and whites share universal psychological properties, but rather by saying that they differed in such properties as intelligence.) Thus, some preliminary clarification of the idea of universals is needed. The first principle, drawn from the study of language universals, is that a research program on literary universals must be based on a study of traditions that are distinct in origin or “genesis” and that have had little “areal” interaction. Since areal distinctness is difficult to obtain in literary study, we may allow some interaction when neither tradition is hegemonic, especially when the properties at issue are of low salience. For example, we would not count Indian and English traditions as areally distinct after England came to dominate India politically, though they do count as distinct before that. A second basic principle is that the study of universals is likely to proceed in stages, isolating more limited patterns and building up to more encompassing patterns. For this reason, linguists refer to statistical, implicational, typological, near absolute, and absolute universals (see, for example, Comrie). For instance, statistical universals are patterns that occur significantly more frequently than we would expect from a random distribution of alternatives. We study various sorts of non-absolute patterns because they are consequential in themselves and because they contribute to the formulation of absolute universals. For example, every large, written tradition appears to tell prototypical love stories, even when the surrounding culture disapproves of love marriage. Perhaps there are traditions that do not tell such stories and the genre of love stories is a statistical rather than absolute universal. However, that would not make the cross-cultural recurrence of such stories insignificant. It would not even make them irrelevant to the study of absolute universals. For example, it would lead us to ask what conditions differentiate the traditions at issue. To illustrate, it might be that love stories do not arise in conditions where love marriage is socially rejected and potential authors of love stories have no way of evading censorship, as might be the case in small, non-literate societies. An account of this sort would suggest that love stories might arise spontaneously in all traditions, but be suppressed in some. A common misconception about the study of literary universals is that universals are normative. Many people appear to think that universals make claims about what is good or bad, aesthetically or ethically. Literary universals may address what cultures think of as aesthetically or ethically good or bad. For instance, many, perhaps all literary traditions produce stories that celebrate in-group loyalty as ethically good. But, in claiming this, I am not advocating in-group loyalty. I am merely describing a normative belief that recurs across cultures; indeed, in this case, it is a belief that is largely at odds with my own ethical views. Another common misconception is that the study of universals contradicts the study of history and culture. Obviously, some specific universal claims contradict some specific historical and cultural claims. But that is trivial, since some historical and cultural claims contradict other historical and cultural claims as well. In fact, the study of universals and the study of historical and cultural particularity are complementary to one another. As Donald Davidson argued, we cannot make sense of another culture or historical period—even to claim some difference from it—unless we have a very large foundation of commonality. Conversely, we cannot recognize patterns across traditions without knowledge of those traditions. To take an example I have cited before (see “Beauty” 26), we cannot recognize the cakravāka bird in Abjñānaśākuntālam as foreshadowing the separation of the lovers—and thus as an instance of the cross-cultural 333

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technique of foreshadowing—unless we know the cultural significance of cakravāka birds (see Dave 450–453; in folklore, the pair-bonded cakravāka birds are separated due to a curse, just what happens with the lovers in this play, hence the foreshadowing). A third common misconception is that universals are necessarily evolved features. Evolution is centrally important in the study of universals. But the distinctive explanation for a universal may involve any number of other factors—principles of group dynamics or political economy, developmental contingencies (e.g., bearing on attachment security), or a configuration of factors that cannot be spoken of as itself an evolved trait.3 For example, my account of cross-cultural story genres does not indicate that such genres have evolved as such. Rather, my account indicates that emotion systems, processes of semantic prototyping, processes of simulation, and processes of tracing particular causal sequences (including those of folk psychology) all evolved. The cross-cultural recurrence of literary genres is explained by these factors, along with some environmental factors, such as recurring features of group dynamics. We do not have an evolved “heroic story” module, nor do we have anything akin to an archetype. Rather, the heroic prototype arises from other evolved features placed in interaction with a social and physical environment. That is all well and good, one might say, but why bother? What are the purposes of a research program in literary universals? I would suggest that there are three chief goals of such a program. First, it should help us to better understand literature generally, particular literary traditions, and individual literary works. For example, isolating cross-cultural patterns in story structure may lead us to identify potentially illuminating differences in cultural traditions or historical periods—in, say, the predominance or rarity of heroic or sacrificial genres— differences that we would not have seen otherwise. Second, such a program should enhance our comprehension of the human mind as it produces or responds to literature. For example, understanding common features of literature should help us to articulate the relation of literary imagination to social ideology more usefully and to explain that relation more rigorously. Third, research in literary universals should contribute to more general accounts of the human mind. All three goals prominently include the study of human emotion.

Universals of Story Genre Given this understanding of literary universals generally, we may now turn to story universals specifically, considering what they might be and how we might explain them. It may be useful to begin with a prominent example of literary research that many people might think of as a study of story universals, but that does not in fact fit into a research program in literary universals—the story structures discussed by Christopher Booker in his widely read The Seven Basic Plots. Booker’s work is learned and informative. Researchers in literary universals may read it with profit. However, it has a number of problems. As to data, Booker draws almost entirely on European literature. As to descriptions, he sets out his plots in ways that partially overlap and that shift in logical type. His categories—comedy, tragedy, rebirth, rags to riches, overcoming the monster, the quest, and the voyage and return—are not all the same sort of structure. The quest and the voyage and return overlap and treat the spatial aspect of a story (or more generally the setting in which the story occurs). Comedy and tragedy focus on emotional quality. Overcoming the monster concerns the nature of a character. Rags to riches considers one sort of goal for the protagonist. Rebirth, as he develops it, is a loose (metaphorical) grouping of various losses and restorations. As to his explanations, these do not connect algorithmically with any well-articulated system of structures and processes—psychological, social, economic, evolutionary, or other. For example, he states that stories address “the central 334

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problem posed by that component in human nature which . . . [is] symbolically represented in stories of all kinds as the ‘dark power’” (216). Such a claim may convey something like “wisdom about life,” but it is not an explanation. By way of contrast, consider the account of universal story prototypes developed in The Mind and Its Stories, Affective Narratology, and other works. It takes as data, works not only from Europe, but also South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific islands, and pre-Columbian America—though it is definitely stronger on the major written traditions of Europe, South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, as opposed to the largely oral traditions from elsewhere. This resulting account isolates a number of story genres that recur widely across cultures—romantic, heroic, sacrificial, family separation, revenge, and so on. More exactly, this account takes up the idea of prototypes from the cognitive psychology of categorization and seeks to describe stories as hierarchies of more or less central properties. Again, stories are most centrally particular causal sequences. They become more prototypical when the causal sequence involves agents pursuing goals and insofar as the goals have significance for a recipient (e.g., a reader) in relation to a particular interpersonal stance toward the characters (typically a parallel stance toward the protagonist). Goals can have such significance because they are driven by emotion-motivation systems. Specifically, different emotion systems define different types of goal (e.g., fear has, roughly, escape from danger as its goal; attachment has, roughly, access to the attachment object—parent, spouse, friend—as its goal). On the basis of the cross-cultural research, and in keeping with this account of story prototypicality, we can isolate and describe universal story patterns in terms of agents pursuing goals, goals that are themselves a function of our specific emotion systems. Thus, the genres at issue are not defined by strict, necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather by a gradient of approximation to prototypical cases. Moreover, the universality of human emotion systems (such as attachment and fear) provide the groundwork for an explanation of story universals. Take, for example, the romantic plot. Two people fall in love and set out to be united; they encounter social opposition, typically from family members; they are separated, with one often exiled. In part through the aid of some helping figure, they are eventually able to rejoin one another, and their reunion commonly involves some sort of social reconciliation as well. Many stories will have some of these features, but not others; they will vary some of the features in ways that are more or less limited or extensive. This is part of their prototype organization. Or consider the heroic plot. It involves two components. First, there is the invasion-defense sequence, in which the home society is threatened and for a time defeated by an enemy before “our” side (i.e., the side toward which we are expected to have a parallel interpersonal stance) triumphs enduringly over that enemy. “Our” side in this part of a heroic story is commonly crystallized in one or more prominent characters, who serve as individual heroes of more specific sub-stories. The second part of the heroic genre is the usurpation-restoration sequence. Here, the legitimate leader of the society (typically, the main hero of the threat-defense sequence) is overthrown, often by a relative, and often resulting in exile. Subsequently, he or she overcomes the usurper and regains his or her position, commonly by defeating the enemy from the invasion-defense sequence. Across a wide range of genetically and areally unrelated literary traditions, we find prominent stories that manifest structures of the romantic and heroic types, as well as sacrificial, etc. How do we explain these recurring patterns? The fundamental principles of the explanations involve the particularization and algorithmic application of well-established processes of human cognition and emotion. First, the goals of the protagonists (e.g., the lovers) are specifications of the types of goal defined by human emotion-motivation systems or combinations of such systems. The goal of the protagonists in a romantic story is defined by the combination 335

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of attachment, sexual desire, and reward seeking that defines romantic love. The heroic plot is driven principally by pride-motivated status seeking (including shame avoidance). The two plot strands of the heroic plot are defined by two sorts of pride—pride bearing on in-group (e.g., national) identity and individual or personal pride. But the recurring pattern is more specific than merely the recurrence of the types of goal (romantic union, and personal and in-group dominance, in the romantic and heroic cases). These aspects too are explicable within the framework of affective science. The “tragi-comic” trajectory of the prototypical story—the way it shifts from the possibility of happiness, to temporary sorrow, and back to happiness—is explained by a simple feature of our emotion systems. The intensity—and even valence—of a final emotional state are in part a function of change from the prior emotional state. We see this when, for example, the same objective condition can be experienced as emotionally neutral (if experienced as routine and predictable), as joyful (due to relief after fear of harm), or as sad (due to disappointment after hope for benefit). Thus, the happiness of the lovers’ reunion is intensified by their prior separation. Moreover, that separation is itself made more unhappy—and more relevant to the final reunion—by the protagonists’ alienation from their family, thus their loss of that important attachment bond as well. The exile from home extends attachment loss from person attachment to place attachment, our feeling of being bonded with particular places as “home” (see Panksepp 407n.93). The points about attachment figures and exile apply to the usurpation-restoration plot as well, which commonly involves betrayal by family members and exile. There is also a recurring love triangle sequence in romantic stories, commonly a sequence in which the parents of one of the lovers try to force another spouse onto their unwilling child. To a great extent, this simply derives from the logic of the social opposition to the lovers’ union. However, it is complicated by its bearing on attachment insecurity and by other emotions (such as jealousy), often intensifying the contrast between the “tragic” middle and the “comic” resolution.4 In short, the various recurring story genres may be explained in terms of the different emotion categories of the protagonists’ goals, along with processes of emotion intensification aimed at enhancing the experience of recipients (e.g., readers) of the story. Some readers may have remarked on the fact that the discussion to this point has concerned only comic versions of the recurring genres, versions with happy endings. In fact, cross-culturally, tragedy is very much less frequent than comedy. (For example, on the relative paucity of tragedy in Sanskrit drama, see Hogan, “Beauty,” 18–19, and citations therein.) But it does occur, and it occurs with the same genres. In this case, there is sometimes a reversal of the tragi-comic structure, into a sort of “comi-tragedy,” as we might put it. In other words, instead of things looking bad before they turn out well, we sometimes find things looking good, but then turning out badly. However, this is less pronounced in tragedy, where we sometimes find a consistently grim (e.g., sorrowful) tone (commonly termed “melodrama”). (On the other hand, “farcical” comedies sometimes forego any significant tragic middle.) In any case, it is not difficult to explain the goals of tragedies. Romantic and heroic tragedies involve the same goals—thus the same derivation from emotion systems—as their comic counterparts. The fact that we prefer happiness over sadness, plus the fact that we commonly have a parallel interpersonal stance toward the protagonists in a literary work, would seem to explain the cross-cultural predominance of comedy over tragedy. But what is left unaccounted for is why we would have tragedy at all. That topic goes beyond the scope of the present chapter.5

Conclusion To understand the structure and function of stories, we need to understand emotion. Stories are fundamentally particular causal sequences. But the part of ongoing causal sequences that 336

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constitutes a prototypical story is determined by the sensitivities and organization of our emotion systems. For instance, the sensitivities of emotion systems appear to guide our selection of a beginning, middle, and end from the unbounded causal sequences that constitute the world. Literary stories are distinguished by their stress on agents pursuing (emotion-defined) goals, as well as their manipulation of the recipient’s interpersonal stance toward those agents (and the recipient’s other emotional responses—first, simple interest). Cross-culturally recurring story genres (romantic, heroic, sacrificial, and so forth) are generated from goals defined, in their general properties, by human emotion systems. Recurring features of story development result from the operation of ordinary psychological processes that, in general, intensify the emotions elicited by the outcome of the story.6

Notes 1 One of the referees for this chapter agreed that there is a relation between the representation of causal sequences (in storytelling) and one’s tacit response to such sequences in experience, response that includes perceptual orientation, selective memory activation, and so on. However, he or she objected that, for something to count as a story, it needs to be incorporated into some semiotic system, such as a natural language. I am sympathetic with this view. There is a tendency among some scholars to see narrative everywhere. For example, I have had disagreements with people over whether a basketball game (i.e., the game itself ) is a story. I take it that the game is a highly complex set of causal sequences; elements of this set are tacitly selected, simulated, and partially organized by observers; and sometimes that selection, etc., is elaborated, altered, and recounted explicitly (e.g., on the sports page of a newspaper). To say that the game itself is a story seems to me to stretch the idea of “story” so far as to make it useless. I have therefore confined the word “story” to the second and third processes (i.e., the tacit selection, etc., and the explicit recounting). Some readers may wish to refer only to the third process as a story. Ultimately, this seems to me a mere terminological preference without theoretical consequences. The crucial thing is to be clear and consistent regarding the distinctions and relations among the three processes, however we name them. 2 Enrico Terrone argues that a story cannot be reduced to a causal sequence as it may include important non-causal relations. In connection with this, he cites Aristotle’s example of “design,” where the person who murders Mitys is later killed when the statue of Mitys falls on him. (I should note that I have only had access to the abstract for Terrone’s unpublished essay.) The argument appears to apply only to selfconscious causal beliefs. We may not self-consciously believe in divine retribution or karma, but we act on a wide range of “intuitive beliefs” that we would not adopt as “reflective beliefs.” (On this distinction, see Mercier 152. This difference provides one reason for isolating implicit causal sequences underlying explicit ones.) Thus, for example, we regularly do take it that a character’s “comeuppance” was the causal outcome of his or her prior misbehavior. This is facilitated in fiction, where we can assume that the storyworld simply operates differently from the real world in that respect. But it seems clear that we frequently treat poetic justice as (implicitly) causal in real life also. Indeed, Aristotle himself seems to suggest as much. “Such events,” he comments, “seem not to be due to mere chance” (39). On the other hand, this does raise the issue of precisely how our intuitive sense of causality operates, what it includes, and so on. Fortunately, that is beyond the scope of the present chapter. One further point is relevant here, however, as it bears on the central concern of this chapter. The scope of our causal attention, here as elsewhere, is a function of emotional engagement. We are interested in the fate of a murderer because we feel angered by the murder—or perhaps enthusiastic and hopeful for the murderer’s success, or merely curious. 3 Rottschaefer explains that evolutionary psychologists often take complex, behavioral tendencies to have evolved as specific adaptations. However, he argues, such a straightforward account is often inadequate. Such tendencies frequently need to be examined through what Kitcher calls “developmental decomposition.” Rottschaefer illustrates the point by reference to Bateson’s account of incest avoidance as the result “of several biologically based capacities rather than of a single evolutionary capacity” (75). Literary theorists sometimes presume that any broad tendency is a straightforwardly evolved trait with a singular mechanism. This leaves aside both developmental decomposition and environmental factors. Moreover, writers often assume that environmental factors contribute only to divergence; however, many environmental factors—from laws of physics to patterns in group dynamics—foster convergence across societies.

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Patrick Colm Hogan 4 For research bearing on this point, see Han and Lerner 111 and Ortony, Clore, and Collins 73. 5 However, I address this issue in Chapter 11 of this volume. 6 Earlier versions of parts of this chapter were presented at the conference on “Narrative in the Natural Sciences and Humanities,” Columbia University (2019); the “Literary Universals Workshop,” University of Connecticut (2019); and the “Human Universals” conference, Southern Regional College, Newry, Northern Ireland (2020). I am grateful to the participants for their questions and comments.

Works Cited Aristotle. Poetics. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art with a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics. Edited and translated by S. H. Butcher, 4th ed., Dover, 1951. Bateson, P. “Does Evolutionary Biology Contribute to Ethics?” Biology and Philosophy, vol. 4, 1989, pp. 287–302. Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. Bloomsbury, 2005. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art. 6th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2001. Comrie, Bernard. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. 2nd ed., U of Chicago P, 1989. Dave, K. N. Birds in Sanskrit Literature. Motilal Banarsidass, 1985. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 183–198. Doherty, Martin. Theory of Mind: How Children Understand Others’ Thoughts and Feelings. Psychology Press, 2009. Finnerty, Gerald, Michael Shadlen, Merhdad Jazayeri, Anna Nobre, and Dean Buonomano. “Time in Cortical Circuits.” Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 4, 2015, pp. 13912–13916. Frijda, Nico. The Emotions. Cambridge UP, 1986. ———, and Klaus Scherer. “Affect (Psychological Perspectives).” The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, p. 10. Gehring, Wes. “Screwball Comedy.” Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film. Vol. 4, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Schirmer Reference, 2007, pp. 43–47. Han, Seunghee, and Jennifer Lerner. “Decision-Making.” The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 111–113. Hempel, Carl. “The Function of General Laws in History.” Aspects of Scientific Explanation. Free Press, 1965, pp. 231–243. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. U of Nebraska P, 2011. ———. “Beauty, Politics, and Cultural Otherness.” Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture, edited by Hogan and Lalita Pandit, State U of New York P, 1995, pp. 3–43. ———. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge UP, 2013. ———. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2003. ———. Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Identity, and Cognitive Science. Ohio State UP, 2009. Kitcher, P. “Developmental Decomposition and the Future of Human Behavioral Ecology.” Philosophy of Science, vol. 57, 1990, pp. 96–118. Megill, Allan (with contributions by Steven Shepard and Phillip Honenberger). Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2007. Mercier, Hugo. Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe. Princeton UP, 2020. Murphy, Gregory, and Aaron Hoffman. “Concepts.” The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science, edited by Keith Frankish and William Ramsey, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 151–170. Nisbett, Richard. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Oatley, Keith. Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions. Cambridge UP, 1992. Ortony, Andrew, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins. The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge UP, 1988. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford UP, 1998. Paul, William. “The Rise and Fall of Animal Comedy.” Velvet Light Trap, 1990, pp. 73–86. Pennebaker, James. “Putting Stress into Words: Health, Linguistic and Therapeutic Implications.” Behavioral Research and Therapy, vol. 31, 1993, pp. 539–548. Rottschaefer, William. The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency. Cambridge UP, 1998.

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Stories Sloman, Steven, and Philip Fernbach. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Riverhead Books, 2017. Terrone, Enrico. “Philosophy of the Screenplay.” Introduction to Screen Narrative: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension, edited by Catalina Iricinschi and Paul Taberham. Routledge, forthcoming. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

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PART 5

Modes of Literature

29 DRAMA Shakespearean Apostrophe and the History of Emotions Gail Kern Paster

Abstract: Inherited from classical rhetoric, apostrophe is a trope of direct address shared between dramatic and lyric poetry. In early modern drama, apostrophe functions to highlight moments of heightened emotion when characters reach out to invoke the aid of an external force or idea. It functioned as a powerful tool for investigating the wellsprings of human emotion in a lexicon of emotions made available by public theater. Apostrophe is an ideal focus for historicist investigation because it reveals the period-specific shape of emotions in the still-enchanted cosmos of premodernity. This chapter considers four famous Shakespearean apostrophes: Juliet’s address to “fiery footed steeds” to speed Romeo’s arrival; Lear’s address to the storm to “blow winds and crack your cheeks”; Lady Macbeth’s invocation to spirits to “unsex me here”; and Edmund’s apostrophe in King Lear to the goddess Nature to “stand up for bastards.” Shakespearean apostrophe constitutes an occasion for the expression of trans-historical emotions such as rage, fear, and jealousy within dramatic contexts of great historical resonance.

In dramatic literature, the rhetorical figure of apostrophe names a moment when characters— often but not always alone—turn away from their immediate circumstances in order to address something or someone not physically present onstage. The term comes from the Greek ἀποστροφή (“turning away”) and was translated directly into Latin as aversio (OED, s.v. apostrophe, n.1). Using the second-person pronoun (you or thou), sometimes opening with a vocative “O,” apostrophe hails “another hearer,” usually a natural force or an abstraction, occasionally someone absent or even dead (Hutchinson 96). Apostrophe signals intense emotion—emotion that propels speakers to deliver their outbursts and engages the emotions of listeners. Quintilian declares, apostrophe is “wonderfully stirring” (Quintilian 9.2.38). Sister Miriam Joseph agrees: “Apostrophe . . . is an effective means to heighten feeling” (Joseph 247). Here are four famous examples: Juliet expresses her longing for the advent of night by imploring the sun god Phaeton’s “fiery-footed steeds” to “gallop apace” and bring her Romeo “untalked of and unseen” (3.2.1,7); King Lear asks the winds to blow and “crack your cheeks!” (F 3.2.1) only then to absolve them from responsibility for his suffering: “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness” (16); Lady Macbeth, uncertain about her ability as a woman to be cruel enough to murder, addresses “you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex me here” (1.5.38–39). I will return to these set-piece moments (and one more) in detail later. Taken

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-35

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together, they constitute significant signposts for the representation of emotions in dramatic literature, and therefore a powerful lens for studying the history of emotions. Inherited from classical rhetoric, apostrophe is a trope shared between drama and lyric poetry, but apostrophes in early modern drama function to highlight moments when characters reach out beyond themselves to invoke the attention and aid of an external force or idea, often but not always personified. Though Renaissance rhetoricians linked apostrophe and prosopopoeia, the two figures are not the same, apostrophe being the figure of address (Alexander, 107). The object of address can be a natural force (like sun, wind, and night) or a supernatural one (like attendant spirits). It can be an abstraction, as we will see in Edgar’s apostrophe to Nature considered later. In comparison with soliloquy with its attention to representing internal states of mind and feeling, dramatic apostrophe has received little attention (Cousins and Derrin). To modern ears, it may seem even more artificial as a speech-act than the internal address of soliloquy where a character is alone onstage talking to himself or the audience. Jonathan Culler has called apostrophes in lyric poetry “embarrassing” (Culler 1977, 59), a sentiment that might be shared by scholars of early modern drama.1 For early modernists, the “turn to affect” in the last decade has largely meant interest in impassioned embodiment rather than the history of tropes. But in a volume devoted to emotions in literature, this is an excellent moment to focus on dramatic apostrophe—not only to suggest how lyric and drama work differently to shape shared rhetorical figures, but also because of a renewed interest in formal features among scholars hitherto intent on the historical contextualization of emotions at the expense of their formal expression (Bailey and DiGangi 1–6, 13–16). In my view, apostrophes as used by early modern dramatists represent a significant point of convergence for historicist and formalist hermeneutics. This is true because of rhetoric’s centrality in early modern thought. Benedict Robinson argues, “for much of the early modern period rhetoric was seen as a mode of inquiry, not just a set of rules for expression” (Robinson 3). For dramatists, apostrophe was a recognizable trope of address; it functioned in their rhetorical toolkit as a powerful instrument for investigating the wellsprings of human emotions and for deploying a lexicon of emotions that public theaters made available for expressing them. In historicist terms, apostrophe in early modern drama highlights moments when characters turn outward to address a spirit-filled universe constitutively different from the void of modern space-time (Clark 472–88; Walsham 509, 527–28; Floyd-Wilson 1–27; Scribner passim). Apostrophe is thus an ideal formal focus for historicist investigation because it reveals the period-specific shape of powerful emotions expressed by characters who hail the external forces, figures, or ideas they identify as dispositive in their worlds. ... I want to demonstrate apostrophe’s heuristic potential by concentrating on four Shakespearean apostrophes that reveal characters in the grip of intense emotion. I have chosen apostrophes familiar to most readers of this chapter, but I believe Shakespeare’s apostrophes generally are eloquent representatives of this trope in the early modern dramatic canon. What moves Shakespeare’s characters to direct address is a desire for change—external or internal—which they cannot accomplish by themselves. What Jonathan Culler says about apostrophes in lyric is also true of apostrophes in early modern drama: “To apostrophize is to will a state of affairs, to attempt to call it into being by asking inanimate objects to bend themselves to your desire” (Culler 1981, 139). The characters’ desire confronts a lack or obstacle in themselves or their circumstances, and their turn to apostrophe gives desire embodiment. It expresses a wish for change that the plenitude of the cosmos might be capable of accommodating or reflecting. Perhaps their desire expresses distance from an object or person that forceful address seems 344

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to diminish. For early modern characters, the formal availability of apostrophe is, in effect, a part of a divinely sourced, cosmological endowment, an endowment no longer available to playwrights and characters in later drama. In the early modern theatrical space, moreover, this endowment is shared between speakers in the drama and their overhearers within the audience. There is a complex emotional transaction at work at such moments: the playwright’s imagination gives voice to the speaking characters’ imaginations and stirs the imaginations of the overhearers. For the audience, too, apostrophe is world-creating because the world to which it reaches out is shot through with appetites and desires so like their own. It is important to recognize not only the cosmological differences between early modern characters and their modern counterparts, but also their different conditions of embodiment. To point out the permeability of the early modern body and its reciprocal engagement with its impassioned world is now familiar (Paster 1993, 8–10). The conditions of embodiment are shared between characters and their overhearers in the theater. As we will see with Lear, the moments of passion that trigger apostrophe are represented as meteorology—analogically, the winds and waves blowing through and altering a character’s internal state (Paster 2004, 65–66). While the early moderns postulated a reason-passion binarism, they believed in the passions’ great volatility. As the English Jesuit Thomas Wright noted, “the most part of men resolue themselues neuer to displease their sense or passions, but to graunt them whatsoeuer they demand” (Wright 10). These claims are apparent in the three apostrophes from which I quoted at the opening and in Edgar’s apostrophe introduced later in the chapter. Juliet’s address to the “fiery-footed steeds” of day is sign of her transformation from the maiden who told her mother, “no more deep will I endart mine eye/Than your consent gives strength to make it fly” (1.3.100–01). Having fallen in love, she is now a bride heated by desire and emboldened to speak it aloud to the listening air. Juliet’s address here takes the lyric for of an epithalamion (McCown 150). She adopts the subject position of the impatient bridegroom and constructs herself—against convention—as a desiring subject.2 But Juliet’s epithalamion addresses figures beyond Phaeton’s steeds. She invokes not only the metonymies of daylight but also night, whom she personifies in several guises—“civil night, /Thou sober-suited matron all in black,” “gentle night,” “loving, blackbrowed night.” Romeo himself—paradoxically “thou day in night” (3.2.10, 20, 17)—is the figure whose arrival can resolve the day-night dialectic by lighting up the night with his presence. Aware of the defiance in her secret marriage to a Montague and longing for a semblance of respectability and celebration, she seeks to temper her impulsiveness by deploying the imaginary attendance of a matronly “civil” night, personified as assuming responsibility of sexual tutelage from Lady Capulet and the Nurse. Apostrophe allows her to speak not only her desire for Romeo but also her fears about sexual initiation by populating her imagination with figures of comfort and celebration—attendants she would have had as a bride. As George Puttenham notes, the outer room of the bridal chamber held “(besides the musicians) good store of ladies or gentlewomen of their kinfolk and others who came to honor the marriage” (Puttenham 139). But for theatergoers, this apostrophe is deeply ironic because we know—and as Juliet is about to learn—Romeo has been banished from Verona after killing Tybalt. Her wedding night will be overshadowed by a tragic turn of events. Her longing for a conventional marriage, signaled by personifying night, becomes more poignant because her hopes for a joyful wedding night and the beginning of a union with her new husband will be dashed. When she exclaims, “Oh, I have bought the mansion of a love,/ But not possessed it; and though I am sold,/ Not yet enjoyed” (26–28), her words reflect the reality of an unfulfillable desire. This love will have no sheltering mansion, this night no sequel. With Juliet’s apostrophe turning us from the impending news, we see the power of apostrophe to slow time and momentum, even to offer 345

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an alternative point of view from a new reality whose outline the charismatic personifications of apostrophe may force temporarily into the background. For King Lear, the storm becomes an occasion for direct address because he uses its passions to mirror his own meteorological subjectivity (Paster 2016, 202–05). Out in wild weather with the Fool, the king uses a series of apostrophes to try to remake his world; eventually he finds in the storm a way to exculpate himself as a man “more sinned against than sinning” (F3.2.59). At first, apostrophe allows Lear to speak as a still-powerful figure “minded like the weather,” as a Gentleman tells Kent, “Contending with the fretful elements” (F3.1.2, 4). Because he cannot command the winds to cease, he commands them to keep on blowing. Apostrophe allows him to imagine the winds listening and obeying—minded like himself, especially if—as the stage direction Storm still (F3.4.96 S.D.) implies—sound effects produced by a cannonball in the tiring house would seem to answer him (Jones 36–37). He reverses the direction of force in this cosmic contention so that he can represent himself in a mimetic transaction—trading passion for passion, rage for rage—rather than having to see himself merely as the storm’s victim. Such grandiose victimhood seems both personal and willed: “Singe my white head,” he cries, “Let fall/ Your horrible pleasure” (F3.2.6, 18–19). This imaginary transactionality lies behind Lear’s otherwise absurd absolution of the winds from moral responsibility for his suffering: “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness” (16) (Paster 2016, 203). But Lear’s image of the storm changes, perhaps because he is no longer able to see himself in binary terms as its master or victim, perhaps because direct address allows him to discover in this violence remedy for psychological distress. Remember that Lear’s world remains one defined by service. Because the wind and rain cause him pain, he can’t really regard them as his servants. They must therefore be servants—vile and ser-vile—of his daughters, and thus he can insult them as he has done Goneril’s servant Oswald: “But yet I call you servile ministers,/ That will with two pernicious daughters join/ Your high-engendered battle ‘gainst a head/ So old and white as this” (21–24). It is because the storm is so various that he can customize its elements to suit his own narrative. Kent, coming onstage to rescue Lear and the Fool, finds the storm to be unendurable: “Man’s nature cannot carry/ The affliction, nor the force” (49–50). But to Lear, this ferocity becomes another way for him to moralize the storm (Martin 7–9; Jankovic 19). In a final twist, he imagines the storm as a fearful instrument of revelation, its flashes of “thought-executing fires” (4) exposing sinners caught outdoors—“thou wretch,” “thou bloody hand,” “thou perjured,” “thou simular of virtue/ That art incestuous.” He commands the host of sinners to “cry/ These dreadful summoners grace” (51–59). Here, just as apostrophe has allowed Lear’s identification with the storm, so it now delivers the conditions for self-blame and blamelessness—terms for a moderate amount of victimhood—that Lear, exhausted, can accept. And it is this contrast with imaginary sinners far worse than he that moves Lear to his notorious self-exculpation: “I am a man/ More sinned against than sinning” (59–60). Only by arriving to this emotionally satisfying conclusion, can he then admit that his “wits begin to turn.” And he finally can address the suffering of another: “Art cold?,” he asks the Fool, “I am cold myself ” (67–69). The urgency of apostrophe, for both Juliet and Lear, becomes a way to trope worlds mimetic of their desires—for Juliet, daylight’s horses speeding away and tutelary wedding attendants taking their place; for Lear, a violent storm whose cruelty is conveniently chargeable to daughters or “the great gods/ That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads” (F3.2.49–50). In turning to Lady Macbeth, we note that the emotional impetus for direct address is no less urgent than it was for Juliet or King Lear but, in purpose and trajectory, her twinned apostrophes early in 1.5 are meant to enact almost the reverse: she does not ask cosmic forces to provide her with a world mimetic of her desire but with a new kind of self, mimetic of her desire. Instead of 346

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self-projection on a monumental scale as with Lear, she wants an internal transformation coming violently from without and she needs two apostrophes coming one after the other to give this shape. The first occurs at the very opening of 1.5, when Lady Macbeth enters reading her husband’s letter with its news of the witches’ prophecies. The turn from the letter to an apostrophe signals the intensity of her desire to respond to him immediately. She addresses him first by the titles he has, Glamis and Cawdor, and then by the ominously periphrastic “What thou art promised” (14). Here as she thinks about her husband and what she wants to say to him, the rhetoric of apostrophe clearly proves itself a mode of inquiry as much as a mode of expression. Lady Macbeth describes Macbeth to himself in candid and disparaging terms, made stronger perhaps by his absence: Yet I do fear thy nature; It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great, Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, Thou wouldst holily; wouldst not play false, Yet wouldst wrongly win. (1.5.14–20) It is the action of apostrophe here to make something happen cognitively and emotionally in Lady Macbeth when she addresses her absent husband in order to present him with the uncomfortable truths of his moral self-division, his kingly ambition sapped at the outset—in her view—by conscience. She wants him quickly with her so “that I may pour my spirits in thine ear/And chastise with the valor of my tongue /All that impedes thee from the golden round” (24–26). But this confidently phallic assertion of the fullness and strength of her nature (her spirits, her valorous tongue) only leads to her own self-questioning when she hears the unexpected news of Duncan’s impending arrival and the opportunity it presents. It is a selfquestioning that intensifies into the outburst of her second apostrophe, when she calls for violent transformation from spirits beyond her own: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief. (1.5.37–48) Like her overhearers in the audience, Lady Macbeth believes in a cosmos filled with “sightless substances” (47), invisible but nevertheless material spirits. (Spirit, says Francis Bacon in Sylva Sylvarum, is “a natural body, rarefied to a proportion and included in the tangible parts of bodies” [Bacon, 2: 381].) The spirits’ tending means waiting for, listening, expecting, as if 347

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tending to mortals’ desires were their primary function. Lady Macbeth turns from fearing the “milk of human kindness” in her husband’s nature to fearing it in her own—what she calls “compunctious visitings of nature.” In part, what is interesting about this second apostrophe is that it is brought about by the cognitive-affective discoveries of the first apostrophe; no less important, it offers an opportunity for formalist and historicist inquiry alike. Though Lady Macbeth’s deeply gendered emotions here need not be described in period-specific terms, her bodily self-image does need to be. Like the early moderns generally, she imagines herself as a semi-permeable container laced with irrigated pathways of humor, blood, and spirits capable of altering the mind and body which they nourish (Paster 1993, 8). This is why she can ask the spirits to “take my milk for gall,” that is, to exchange milk for gall, change milk into gall, or take milk as gall (Adelman, 135). Gall—the bitter hot-dry humor of choler synonymous in the period with wrath and cruelty (Paster 2004, 35–38)—will “make thick my blood;/Stop up th’access and passage to remorse.” To understand her request literally is to understand it as a call for a transformation of will and flesh, where will calls upon flesh, where flesh meets and changes will. Yet, despite the image of this newly masculinized self, Lady Macbeth concludes her apostrophe by changing its terms of address. She invokes a night as dark in purpose, as “thick” in spirit as she wishes her embodied, willful self to be even as she is unable to banish entirely the prospect of guilt and remorse for a murder that she knows heaven would wish to prevent: Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry, “Hold, hold!” (48–52) Having told the spirits what kind of self she needs to be, Lady Macbeth concludes by telling the night what kind of world her remade self wants to operate in. This is a co-conspiratorial night— the sinister opposite to Juliet’s civil, sober-browed matron, a thick night like the thickened self she wishes to become. This night reflects its speaker’s desire for a world remade by apostrophe to suit her objectives, with an almost personified knife (keen as in sharp, keen as in eager) that finds its target but does not see the damage that it inflicts, with a thick darkness that cannot make murder acceptable to heaven but may make it too hidden to be stopped. But, as we come to know, apostrophe does not work; the milk in her breasts becomes the blood she cannot wash from her hands. Though she can shame her husband into committing the regicide, she cannot kill Duncan herself: “Had he not resembled/ My father as he slept, I had done’t” (2.2.12–13). ... The gift of these famous set-pieces is to suggest apostrophe’s function to construct a world or set of conditions expressive of speakers’ desires. What unites these three apostrophes is that each personifies material objects or times of day available to the senses—day, night, storm, or attending spirits—that are invisible but nevertheless material “substances.” Apostrophe populates the stage with these forces and the speakers’ desire for connections to them. In other apostrophes, those to the dead, especially, reveal the desire for an ongoing connection, a “desire to overcome the distance between the quick and the dead” (Barootes, 741). When Antony addresses the corpse of Caesar, for example, apostrophe not only demonstrates the intensity of his grief and his desire to bring Caesar back to life, but it also foreshadows the intense power 348

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Caesar’s body will have to “let slip the dogs of war” (3.1.275) when Antony returns it to the stage for the funeral oration. But there is another class of apostrophe addressed to an abstract idea rather than to a material object. Some—such as the perplexed Viola’s appeal, “O time, thou must untangle this, not I” (Twelfth Night, 2.2.39)—are so brief that they hardly qualify as apostrophes and seem more like exclamations, or wishing out loud. They are too brief, in effect, to imaginatively construct the world and self that the speaker wishes this speech-act to create. The apostrophes we have considered thus far describe the objects of address and ask for specific services toward the goal of personal transformation. But several of Shakespeare’s famous apostrophes are addressed to abstractions—Leontes’ address to Affection in The Winter’s Tale, Henry V’s address to Ceremony, Edmond’s address to Nature in King Lear. Thus, while the rhetorical status of such apostrophes as direct address obtains, it is possible to question the intensity of the emotions that propel them, to ask why Shakespeare at such moments turns to apostrophe with its outward turn rather than to the inward focus of soliloquy. What I will argue is that when a speaker addresses an abstraction, apostrophe helps to focus and intensify emotion, even perhaps to produce it against the dismaying prospect of emotional lack or personal insufficiency. Rhetorically, the turn to apostrophe draws the audience’s attention to the speaker’s emotional investment in the idea they are addressing. And—in a way similar to soliloquy—apostrophe at such moments problematizes the speaker’s state of mind because it calls into question their emotional attachment to the idea being brought on stage. (At such moments, perhaps, Culler’s term “embarrassing” may come to mind.) This ambivalence is felt sharply in Edmond’s address to the goddess Nature in King Lear. In considering this apostrophe, I am less interested in the historical roots of Edmond’s idea of Nature (Danby, Watson, Marcus, Bauer) than in the relationship with Nature that his direct address is meant to reflect or create. At this early point in the play, we have been introduced to Edmund as Gloucester’s bastard son only in Gloucester’s opening dialogue with Kent, where Kent has praised the young man as “proper” issue (F1.1.17). (The legitimate Edgar will not come onstage until later in F1.2.) At the beginning of the apostrophe, then, we have no foreknowledge of Edmond’s villainy and no inkling until near its close of his desire to claim Edgar’s lands. What we have is, perhaps, a prejudice against bastards and an association of them with the “unnatural” (Neill, 270–92). But, in our view, it might also be appropriate for a bastard, a son of the mother (Adelman, 105), to call on the great female goddess and imagine her as his to address. We might, then, begin to overhear his apostrophe objectively as Edmond, in a daring rhetorical move, explains to goddess Nature the basis of his allegiance to her, the nature of his affinity to her “law,” and why she should accept him as her servant: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Why “bastard”? Wherefore “base,” When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true, As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us With “base”? With “baseness,” “bastardy”? Base? Base? Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition, and fierce quality 349

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Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops Got ‘tween a sleep and wake?

(F1.2.1–15)

The antagonist here is not Nature herself but her opposite—the “plague of custom” and “curiosity of nations,” curiosity in a now obsolete usage denoting an undue regard for a trivial matter (OED, curiosity, 4: “Care or attention carried to excess, bestowed on matters of inferior moment”). It is an emphatic move—to set aside the laws of primogeniture as mere custom and curiosity. With such a move, this apostrophe takes the form and force of argument; it stakes out a subversive position in a pathway we would now label as deconstructive. Edmund structures his apostrophe around a set of oppositions through which his self-portrait and selfinterest emerge—oppositions between law and custom, gifts of nature and gifts of fortune, bastards and honest madam’s issue, babies conceived in “lusty stealth” and the “tribe of fops” conceived in a “dull, stale, tired bed.” In the first set of terms, Edmond elides the customary opposition of natural law and human law by giving law tout court over to Nature (as nomos [Bauer, 360]), and defining her opposite as mere human practice—“custom” enshrined over time and metaphorized as a disease. The familiar opposition between gifts of Nature and gifts of Fortune also perfectly suits his turn. As both a bastard and younger son—“some twelve or fourteen moonshines/Lag of a brother”—he is no recipient of the gifts of Fortune (though even if he were the elder brother, he would still stand outside the lines of inheritance). This deprivation allows him then to claim for himself the authentic, non-contingent gifts of Nature—compact dimensions, generous mind, true shape, rhetorical eloquence.3 Since bastardy has not deprived him of natural gifts, he says, why then should it stigmatize “us” with the permanent mark of a branding and deprive him and other bastards of the gifts of Fortune granted to “honest madam’s issue.” He doubles down on the argument—in a recurrent, positive trope of bastardy (Neill 75)—by granting himself qualifications of person not merely equal to those of honest madam’s issue, but actually superior, contrasting his own vitality as the product of urgent sexual desire with the foppishness of those conceived in the “dull, stale, tired bed” of marital duty. He claims the status not only of Nature’s bond servant but also of her favorite, the exemplar of ample gifts of mind and body. He asks her to remedy his social injury and repays her favor with partisan devotion. With a set of terms slyly made equivalent, the apostrophe is brilliant both rhetorically and strategically, designed not only to make goddess Nature his patroness but to gain the sympathy of his overhearers in the audience as well—younger sons, anyone blessed more with nature’s gifts than fortune’s, anyone receptive to a claim of injured merit, perhaps anyone of humble origin, hence baseborn (OED, 1). Apostrophe exploits a theater audience’s tendency to identify with the speaker of direct address, especially perhaps those who, like Edmond, begin as attractive villains. For Edmond here, the tropological urgency of apostrophe makes his claims for “composition and fierce quality” virtually self-evident (even if law-abiders or legitimate offspring bridle at his disparaging characterization of marital coupling and children conceived in wedlock). It is only then—after he may have won over the goddess and his overhearers—that Edmond reveals his plans to subvert custom, usurp brother Edgar’s lands, and upend the primacy of legitimate over illegitimate: Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmond As to th’legitimate. Fine word: “legitimate”! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed 350

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And my invention thrive, Edmond the base Shall to th’legitimate. I grow, I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards! (F1.2.16–22) Edmond’s final turn in this apostrophe, then, is to assume the success of its transgressive argument and escalate his worshipful declaration of service to one deity into an invocation—virtually a command—to all the gods to stand up for him, just at the moment his credulous father walks onstage and his plot against father and brother takes on traction. The source of our ambivalence about this apostrophe, I would argue, is our attraction to its audacity and our growing dismay as we hear Edmond’s plans to usurp the inheritance of his legitimate brother—“legitimate” having taken on the ironic overtone that marks the word “honest” in Mark Antony’s description of Brutus during his funeral oration in Julius Caesar. Audacity is a quality generally admired in theatrical contexts until it turns, as it is does here upon Gloucester’s entrance, into something morally more suspect. But, in a sense, early modern apostrophe—designated as the trope expressive of emotional intensity—is always marked by audacity, an audacity made desperate perhaps when speakers are moved by their circumstances to ask some part of the cosmos (day, night, storm, attendant spirits) or some personified abstraction larger than themselves (here, Nature) to pay attention, to enact a change within or without, to validate their desires, to rationalize their distress, or to justify their objectives. The artificiality of apostrophe as a speech-act signifies less in the context of early modern dramaturgy than does its capacity to underline emotional intensity and demonstrate the emotional connection between a speaker’s desire and particular aspects of the early modern cosmos. It should be clear by now that the Shakespearean apostrophe, at its most powerful and memorable, constitutes a formal occasion for the expression of transhistorical emotions such as sexual desire, rage, fear, jealousy, and ambition within dramatic contexts of great historical resonance and specificity. As such, apostrophe offers a meeting ground for scholars to see how formalist and historicist approaches to emotions can inform one another. This is clear in the case of the apostrophes considered earlier: Juliet desires not only the arrival of her bridegroom but also the comfort and reassurance of the female attendants appropriate for a bride of her social standing. Lear, an absolute monarch in distress, expects the weather to mirror his outrage. Lady Macbeth’s astonishing call for her milk to be taken for gall relies upon Galenic humoralism and impassioned embodiment. And the bastard Edmond’s sense of injured merit leads him to denigrate legitimacy and the laws of inheritance on which the early modern English social structure was based. For Shakespeare, apostrophe is a demonstrably reliable rhetorical tool not only for signaling emotional extremes but also for introducing ideas relevant to a character—ideas troped as personification—that could not be introduced otherwise with such focus, energy, imagination, and commitment. Here indeed rhetoric is a mode of inquiry and mode of expression at one and the same time. This is so because characters at such moments are engaged in an intense, ambitious transaction not with themselves—that is the job of soliloquy—but with circumstances given to them by the early modern cosmos itself. At the height of such transactions, apostrophe’s stirring contribution to the emotional richness of early modern drama—rivaling that of lyric poetry—stands clear.

Notes 1 For replies to Culler, see Alpers and Kneale. 2 McCown does not register the shock value of Juliet’s speech, calling it a soliloquy in the optative mode rather than the bolder apostrophe. This misnaming has the effect of blunting the force of direct address. Such an apostrophe registers an extraordinary moment for engenderment in theatrical

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Gail Kern Paster history—even if we remember (though we are not at this moment invited to do so) that this desire is being articulated by a young man in woman’s weeds. 3 On the two kinds of gifts, see As You Like It when, in a theoretical discussion about suitors, Rosalind tells Celia, “now thou goest from Fortune’s office to Nature’s. Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature” (1.2.40–42).

Works Cited Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest. Routledge, 1992. Alexander, Gavin. “Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure.” Renaissance Figures of Speech, edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber. Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 97–112. Alpers, Paul. “Apostrophe and the Rhetoric of Renaissance Lyric.” Representations, vol. 122, 2013, pp. 1–22. Bacon, Sir Francis. Sylva Sylvarum. Works. 7 vol., edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, Longmans, 1857–74. Bailey, Amanda, and Mario DiGangi. “Introduction.” Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecology and Form, edited by Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 1–24. Barootes, B. S. W. “‘O Perle’: Apostrophe in Pearl.” Studies in Philology, vol. 113, no. 4, Fall 2016, pp. 739–764. Bauer, Robert J. “‘Despite of Mine Own Nature’: Edmund and the Orders, Natural and Moral.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 10, no. 3, Fall 1968, pp. 359–366. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford UP, 1999. Cooke, John. Greene’s Tu Quoque, or, The Cittie Gallant. London, 1614. Cousins, A. D., and Daniel Derrin, editors. Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge UP, 2018. Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 4, 1977, pp. 59–69. ———. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Cornell UP, 1981. Danby, John F. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature. Faber, 1961. Day, Richard. A Book of Christian Prayers. London, 1590. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge UP, 2013. Hutchinson, G. O. “Deflected Addresses: Apostrophe and Space (Sophocles, Aeschines, Plautus, Cicero, Virgil, and Others.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 1, 2010, pp. 96–109. Jankovic, Vladimir. Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820. U of Chicago P, 2000. Jones, Gwilym. “Storm Effects in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 33–50. Joseph, Sister Miriam. Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language. Columbia UP, 1947. Kneale, J. Douglas. “Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered.” ELH, vol. 58, no. 1, 1991, pp. 141–165. Marcus, Leah S. “King Lear and the Death of the World.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk. Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 421–436. Martin, Craig. Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011. McCown, Gary. “‘Runnawayes Eyes’ and Juliet’s Epithalamium.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 27, 1976, pp. 150–170. Neill, Michael. “In Everything Illegitimate.” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 23, 1993, pp. 270–292. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 1993. ———. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. U of Chicago P, 2004. ———. “‘Minded Like the Weather’: The Tragic Body and Its Passions.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk. Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 202–217. ———, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Katherine Rowe, editors. Reading the Early Modern Passions. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesie. Edited by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Cornell UP, 2007.

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Drama Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Edited and translated by H. E. Butler. 4 vols., Harvard UP, 1976. Robinson, Benedict. Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson: Literature and the Sciences of Soul and Mind. Oxford UP, 2021. Scribner, Robert W. “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World.’” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 23, 1993, pp. 475–494. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare 3E. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., Norton, 2015. Totaro, Rebecca. Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation. Routledge, 2020. Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed.” Historical Journal, vol. 51, 2008, pp. 497–528. Watson, Robert. Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. Wright, Thomas. The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Edited by Thomas O. Sloan, U of Illinois P, 1971.

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30 FILM Te Afective Specifcity of Audiovisual Media Jens Eder

Abstract: Affective media structures are partly transmedial and partly media-specific. Film shares many features with literature: for instance, both often tell stories and convey meanings connected to certain emotions. But the specific mediality of film also leads to characteristic ways of representing, expressing, and eliciting emotions. Two factors are crucial. First, films are audiovisual and multimodal: their multilayered sign systems and audiovisual techniques present worlds and stories in perceptual concreteness and in a fixed temporality, which makes temporal developments of sensual affects a basis of understanding and complex emotions. Second, films are formed by their position in the media system and corresponding practices: typically, they are produced and watched collectively, cater to large audiences, and offer certain stars and genres. Film’s multimodality and its established practices, again, influence more specific affective structures on the levels of filmic style, narrative, meanings, and communicative relations.

The film begins with an old woman’s voice singing a melancholic lullaby. A sequence of brief shots: a gray sky, heavy with clouds, trailers and huts scattered on brown hills among leafless trees. Two children, poorly dressed, jumping on a trampoline in front of a wooden cabin. Acts of tenderness: the little girl caressing a kitten, helping her teenage sister (or mother?) to hang the laundry, the boy showing the girl how to skateboard on the rubble. A shot from below: black tree skeletons frame the film’s title: Winter’s Bone. The young woman washes her face at a kitchen sink in front of a window, a lighting reminiscent of Vermeer. During the following minutes, we will learn that she struggles to care for her younger siblings and her demented mother, that her father cooked meth and has jumped bail, and that if she is not able to find him, the family will lose their home and be split up. The film tells the dark story of her search. Debra Granik’s award-winning film Winter’s Bone (2010) is an adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same name (2006), which begins quite differently: Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. . . . Snow clouds had replaced the horizon, capped the valley darkly, and chafing wind blew so the hung meat twirled from jigging branches. Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again. (1) DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-36

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Despite their similarities concerning theme, setting, characters and plot, and despite mutual strategies such as setting touching acts of care against harsh surroundings, there are also considerable differences between medium, form, and affective structures of film and novel. The film uses music, images and sounds to create its bleak atmosphere and mixed affects. It presents the Ozark location in all its detail and shows the protagonist from the outside, through the bodily actions of actress Jennifer Lawrence. In contrast, the novel directly tells us Ree’s name and age, describes her thoughts and sensations (how could a film show the smell of “coming flurries”?), brings up the metaphor of her face being “smacked” by the environment, and suggests the setting through meaningful details (the meat). Film, literature and other arts share a common ground in the ways how they express and evoke emotions. But at the same time, the “medium blindness” (Hausken 392) of approaches that use the same theories to deal with different media has rightly been criticized. Film and literature express and evoke emotions differently, and film studies and literary studies have each developed their own theories to deal with their subjects. Differences between film and literature have been discussed extensively in studies on adaptation, inter-, and transmediality, and medium theories have stressed the different affordances of audiovisual media and print media. However, a media-comparative perspective that systematically examines the affective differences between film and literature is still missing. Moreover, existing comparisons are often based on mistaken ideas. Literature, for example, is frequently equated with high art, imagination and reflection, while film, in contrast, is equated with mere entertainment, perception and immersion. Such ideas neglect the fact that there are many kinds of film and literature, including dime novels and art films. This chapter will offer a first outline of how affective structures in films differ from those in literary texts, proceeding in three steps from the general to the particular. I will start with film as a medium and outline its medium-specific properties and their relations to emotions. I will then turn to films as media texts or artworks and distinguish between four structural levels on which artworks can represent, express and evoke emotions, in order to identify differences between film and literature on those levels. Finally, I will focus on selected textual structures and consider some more specific characteristics of how filmic narrative and style evoke emotions in viewers.

How Mediality Impacts Afectivity Film and literature have much in common in regard of the emotions they depict, express, and evoke. For example, the emotions of both viewers and readers are mostly allocentric “witness emotions” (Tan 182) that develop in bodily passive reception, freed from necessities of active intervention (in contrast to everyday life or interactive computer games). Emotions in both film and literature are influenced by an implicit awareness of communicative intentions and meanings, of fictionality or factuality (Eder et al.). Moreover, both films and works of literature are “criterially prefocused” texts (Carroll 30) that purposefully focus attention on certain emotional stimuli. Both often tell prototypical stories like those of romantic or heroic struggles, centered on the same emotional goals (see Hogan, Chapter 28 in this volume). Both include many similar genres defined by dominant emotions, for instance, thriller, horror, or comedy (Carroll), and conventional situations of love confessions, battles, chases, etc. Both evoke sympathy for their protagonists by stressing their positive traits and actions. And in both, there is a perceived polarity between entertainment, which aims for effortless, pleasant emotions, and art, which tolerates also unpleasant emotions in order to change values and world views. At the same time, affective responses to film and literature also markedly differ because of their specific mediality. Films as audiovisual texts are typically conveyed through audiovisual 355

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media (cinema, television), literary texts through print media (books, magazines), and both through different digital media (online video, e-books). Emotions in film and literature are partly “scaffolded” by the specific affordances of the respective medium and its “affective niche” in the media system (Hven). Media can be understood as tools, technologies, or organizations for communication, that is, for creating, storing, transmitting, and processing texts that convey meanings and experiences (cf. Schmidt)—for instance, films and works of literature. In the words of Marie-Laure Ryan, media make “a difference as to what kind of narrative content can be evoked (semantics, or story), how these contents are presented (syntax, or discourse), and how they are experienced (pragmatics)” (290). Each medium shows a unique combination of features such as its spatio-temporal extension (e.g., music is temporal, painting spatial), its kinetic properties (statues vs. moving images), its sensory and semiotic modality, its priority of sensory channels, its technological basis, its cultural role and methods of production and distribution (Ryan 291). Many further features concern media practices, such as durability, portability, cost, scope of dissemination, or control over reception (Meyrowitz). More precisely, each medium is characterized by a specific set of semiotic, technological and organizational properties. Semiotically, media address sensation, cognition and emotion through certain materially based stimuli and sign systems: literature through written language, films through a combination of images and sounds. Technologically, media are based on the use of certain artefacts such as books, cameras, or computers. Organizationally, media function as systems of technologies, social roles, practices, and institutions: of publishing houses or television stations; of production and reception practices (reading, watching); of professions, legal regulations, industry norms, and audience expectations. The specific set of such features influences the representation, expression and elicitation of emotion in a certain medium, and contributes to forming media-specific emotion cultures. In these respects, the specific affectivity of films as audiovisual media is influenced predominantly by the following features: Multimodal combination of sign systems: As multimodal texts (Bateman), films directly address the visual and acoustic senses and evoke emotions through multi-layered sign systems including moving and still images, spoken and written language, sounds, and music. This means, for instance, films can use different semiotic modes simultaneously in order to evoke mixed, conflicting, or mutually reinforcing affects (like the melancholic lullaby and the bleak landscape in Winter’s Bone). Some filmic genres depend on sensory modes that literature cannot address—for instance, musicals. Moreover, film’s multimodal sensuality unfolds in a fixed timeframe, which viewers usually follow, while readers more easily slow down reception, skip boring parts or turn back to earlier passages. This fundamentally alters the temporal flow of emotion processes: think of the timing in comedies, the rhythms of fights or dances, or the development of complex metaphors. Audiovisual devices: Films foreground their affective cues through specific audiovisual tools and techniques, such as set design, acting, camerawork, editing, visual effects etc. From this follow, for instance, specific strategies of affective involvement or distancing, as well as genre-specific conventions (the camera creeping closer toward the victim in a horror movie, the close-up on tears in a melodrama). The analytical editing of Winter’s Bone, for instance, leads us step by step closer to the cabin and its inhabitants, gradually focusing our emotions on their traits and behavior.

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Film-specific practices and organizations: Films are produced, distributed, and used differently than literature. Typically, books are read alone, films watched collectively. This brings forth shared emotional responses (e.g., contagious collective laughter), disturbances (others’ noises), displays of socially desired emotions, or hiding undesired tears from seat neighbors (Hanich). Most films are also produced collectively, sometimes by directors and actors with star appeal (such as Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone), while most literary works are ascribed to individual authors and their emotional expressivity. The business models of film and literature are also different: since films are more expensive to produce, they usually try to reach a larger paying audience, whose affective dispositions also tend to differ from the on average older and better educated readers of literature. Accordingly, the relative share of certain genres is also different in cinema and literature (compare, for instance, the top ten of literary bestsellers and cinematic blockbusters). Such medial characteristics influence viewers’ affective practices and the affective potentials of films as audiovisual texts. They bring forth certain typical forms of film design and use in the context of a media system. This allows for unconventional films such as Derek Jarman’s Blue, which shows only a monochrome image and tells its story exclusively through a voiceover, but they are rare exceptions. Typically, the potentials of the medium lead to specific affective structures on several strata of films as audiovisual texts or artworks. Being aware of these structures makes it easier to avoid “medium blindness,” to understand the affective specificity of film, and to compare it to other media and arts.

How Diferent Structures of Artworks Evoke Diferent Kinds of Afects Whenever artworks or media texts represent, express, and evoke emotions, this involves the interplay of impulses from several structural strata. Such strata have been distinguished by various approaches, from Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art to Persson’s Understanding Cinema or the VIMAP model by Pelowski et al. In previous work I have tried to integrate insights of such approaches into a model that connects the structures of artworks with their potentials to evoke certain kinds of audience responses (Eder Casablanca, Collateral). According to this model, artworks are most generally composed of four interconnected strata that correspond to certain sensual, cognitive and affective processes: (1) Already before any objects are recognized, the sensory perception of material stimuli or signs—the look and feel of printed pages; the images and sounds of a film—may trigger perceptual affects: we respond subliminally to sad hues, harmonious forms, nervous rhythms, pleasant textures etc. The images and sounds of the film can express and trigger sensations and moods independently of what is shown. The influence of music on emotions forms a separate field of research (Sena Moore). (2) From this basis, and building on imaginations, simulations, or inferences, audiences gradually reconstruct the represented worlds (storyworlds) of artworks by developing mental models of spaces, characters and situations. This evokes a whole range of diegetic emotions and moods, for instance, being curious to explore strange worlds; enjoying the atmosphere of environments; being overwhelmed by sublime landscapes; being fascinated by characters and their beauty; sympathizing and empathizing with them; taking sides in their conflicts; feeling curiosity, suspense and surprise about the course of events;

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responding to changing situations with fear, hope, or joy. Audiences may also react to reliable or unreliable narrators, trust them or disagree with their affective stances. (3) Already during reception, audiences are regularly interpreting artworks in search for higher-level meanings (cf. Bordwell, Bremond et al., Plantinga, Schmitt et al.). This includes processes of abstraction, sense-making, thematic comprehension, and interpreting elements of the represented world as metaphors or secondary signs that stand for something else, something more general. By way of that, audiences respond to overarching themes, messages and arguments with thematic emotions, for instance, with anger about a political statement, fascination about subtle allusions, or disturbance in the face of a gloomy view of the human condition. (4) Finally, audiences also respond to various perceived or imagined elements of the communicative situation of artworks with reflective emotions: they may admire the realism or the sophisticated design of an artwork and respond with aesthetic pleasure (“artefact emotions”; Tan 82), anticipate its worrying social impact, appreciate the good intentions of its creators or are disgusted by their racism, or react to their own emotions with “metaemotions” (Bartsch) like embarrassment about their own fear in a horror movie. Of course, this distinction between four strata of affective structures and responses is just a very rough approximation. Between them, there are transitional zones, and they are interconnected in complex ways: a shocking action may be downplayed by gentle forms or stressed by its relation to a recurring theme. On the one hand, the strata build upon each other: audiences have to perceive material signs in order to understand represented worlds, and they have to understand represented worlds in order to infer general messages. On the other hand, the upper layers also exert an influence on the lower ones: for instance, if viewers doubt the creators’ truthfulness (4), they may reject their messages (3), disbelieve represented events (2), or even lose the interest to invest perceptual attention at all (1). The bi-directional interplay between all four layers means that theories of art may not ignore any of them.

What Is Specifc About Film’s Afective Potentials Distinguishing between layers of affective structures makes it easier to compare different media and arts. It makes visible, for instance, that on the diegetic and thematic layers (worlds and meanings), some affective potentials of Winter’s Bone as a film and as a novel are roughly similar: both transport their audiences into an inhospitable landscape and gloomy atmosphere. Both aim to make their audiences sympathize and empathize with their protagonist, Ree, side with her and fear for her in her struggles against a hostile environment and overpowering antagonists. Both aim to evoke curiosity about the disappearance of her father, suspense about her search for him, shock at the drastic climax, and relief at the surprising ending. And both convey poignant messages about the hardships and hopes of poor women in rural regions of the USA, and about courage and strength in the face of apparently hopeless situations. At the same time, however, the worlds and messages of film and book do not only diverge in many details (e.g., character traits, thematic motifs), they are also conveyed and experienced in media-specific ways. This can be better understood by considering the other two structural and affective layers, where film and literature diverge even more significantly. This is because of their mediality, as described earlier: the first structural layer of films is characterized by their “perceptual interface” (Hogan Style), i.e., their multimodal combination of sign systems, and their audiovisual techniques. And the fourth layer is preconfigured by a range of film-specific practices, norms, and organizations. 358

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On the first layer, that of material signs, watching the film is more closely connected to perception, while reading the book is more centered on imagination. At the beginning of Winter’s Bone, for example, viewers will respond to the somber timbre of the lullaby and the dull colors and slow rhythms of the moving images. The novel, in contrast, presents words of a certain visuality and trochaic rhythmicality: “Rée Dólly stóod at bréak of dáy on her cóld frónt stéps and smélled cóming flúrries” (Woodrell 1). When we read the book, we see those printed letters and imagine the sounds of words, but they are just springboards into imagination: the words activate visual, acoustic, haptic, olfactory, and other imaginative processes, mostly based on the reader’s own memories. In contrast, when we watch the film, we actually hear sounds, music, and voices, and we see rhythmic patterns of moving images, of changing forms, colors, and textures. All this affects the viewers’ senses more directly and lets them experience the represented world in a different, more sensual way that depends less on their own personal memories. That does not mean, of course, that watching a film does not involve imagination and memory. It does, but in a different way than reading a book, and in a closer coupling with direct sensation and perception. The fourth level, the structure of communicative situations and their reflections, is also quite different in the media of film and literature. In contrast to solitary readers, the affective responses of viewers follow the conditions of collective reception in a fixed timeframe, leading to media-specific meta-emotions, as mentioned earlier. Moreover, readers and viewers tend to relate differently to the authors of a work: readers may enjoy the feeling of a personal communication with an individual author, which differs significantly from cinéastes’ admiration of cine-auteurs or their attraction to movie stars. Artefact emotions are also medium-specific and presuppose certain kinds of aesthetic knowledge. In the film Winter’s Bone, for instance, we might the admire the restrained energy of Jennifer Lawrence’s acting, while in the book we appreciate Daniel Woodrell’s evocative style of writing. All this means that emotionally responding to films depends on media-specific norms, expectations, and knowledge. The differences on the lowest and highest structural layers of films and literary works— perceptions of material signs and reflections on communicative situations—have consequences: they affect audiences’ diegetic and thematic emotions on the two middle layers of represented worlds and expressed meanings. They preconfigure the specific stylistic features of films, for instance, forms of representation, narration and emplotment, and their affective consequences. They influence how audiences participate in represented worlds, engage with characters and narrators, take perspectives, experience the rhythms of scenes and plots, are moved by metaphors, appreciate intertextual allusions, or respond to moral messages of authors. This also indicates that the widely used bipartition between “fiction (witness) emotions” and “artefact emotions” is too simple: not only are there many further kinds of affects, but moreover those different affective impulses may interact and influence each other. The affective specificity of films has been described in depth by an abundance of theories in film and media studies. Like in literary studies, those theories are based on various general theories of affect and emotion that focus on different kinds of affective structures (Eder et al.): affect studies concentrate on “core affects,” evolutionary psychology on innate affect programs, phenomenology on subjectively felt experiences, cognitive psychology on users’ appraisals, analytical philosophy on conscious moral evaluations, psychoanalysis on subconscious amoral desires, etc. Like literary theories, film theories disagree about the extent to which affective processes are shaped by nature, culture, social collectives, individual personality, or current situations, and about which sociocultural factors—e.g., childhood experiences, cultural norms, or social identities—are the most important factors in forming viewers’ affective dispositions. 359

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The four strata-model of artworks is open to include insights from all those different approaches. However, it shows that some approaches cannot stand alone—for instance, unspecific “core affects” may be important on the basic layer, but on other layers more cognitively loaded emotions will come into play. Moreover, the framework shows that most theories of film and emotion concentrate on the second layer, on emotions stemming from experiencing represented worlds. Many connect this with references to the first layer, audiovisual sensations and perceptions (e.g., Grodal, Plantinga, G. Smith). But only few theories consider the emotional force of higher-level meanings (Plantinga, Hogan Style), and only some rare works examine the affective role of medium-specific practices (Barker), contexts, or “ecologies” (Ivakhiv). This is not the place to try and close that gap. Instead, the following brings together the most prominent commonalities in the ways how different film theories describe the stylistic affectivity of film, with a focus on its represented worlds and their narrative and audiovisual presentation. In his approach to an “affective-cognitive stylistics,” Hogan (Style) discusses several differences between film style and literary style. Some concern medium-specific practices (as outlined earlier): films’ collaborative authorship and their widespread reliance on external norms of production and reception (the “continuity system”). In the following, I will build on Hogan’s discussion of three further characteristics—film’s “perceptual interface,” narration, and emplotment—and will combine it with own previous work and findings from various film theories. The general thesis is that how films’ worlds are presented, how they are narrated, and how their elements are arranged have affective consequences typical for film as a medium. On the level of represented worlds, the affectivity of film is characterized by the sensual concreteness of those worlds; by the potential to either hide narrators or use a polyphony of narrators; and by typical forms of emplotment that influence viewers’ responses in terms of attention, causality, and time. These stylistic features are located on the second layer of film’s affective structures (as described earlier), but at the same time indicate interesting relations to the other layers.

Storyworlds: Sensual Concreteness and Perceptual Afects Because of their multimodal combination of audiovisual sign systems films present worlds and spaces in visual and auditory concreteness and specificity rather than through imagination alone. Thereby they provide their audience with a higher quantity and density of potential affective stimuli, whereas literary texts focus more specifically on a narrower selection of cues. For example, films like The Mill and the Cross (2011) show several co-occurring actions simultaneously in one shot on different image planes, letting the viewers decide where to focus their attention. One could say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a few words may also be enough to establish the affective essence of a situation. Moreover, film favors information about perceivable, concrete aspects of the world over its abstract or imperceptible properties: a character’s thoughts and personality traits, the laws and conventions that rule a society—such things are more often conveyed through moving images of bodily actions than through, say, the voice of a narrator. The novel Winter’s Bone directly tells us how old Ree is, what she perceives and feels. It evokes sensual anticipations such as the smell of “coming flurries” in free indirect discourse, and uses counterfactual comparisons like “her cheeks reddening as if smacked.” In contrast, the film uses camerawork and editing to draw us into Ree’s world, focus our attention on her appearance, environment, and actions, and make us infer her thoughts and feelings. Films’ audiovisuality makes it more difficult to reproduce characters’ abstract, propositional thoughts. They have to be conveyed by voice-over 360

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narration, “mindscreen” (Kawin), or metaphorical images and sounds, and such conspicuous techniques are usually avoided. More often the thoughts, desires and feelings of characters are suggested by their appearance and behavior, by narrative context, dialogue, music, editing, sound or image design, and have to be inferred on this basis. That has consequences for our affective relations to characters and our immersion in represented worlds. Various film theories assume that sensual, perceptual kinds of affective responses to represented things, bodies and events are more pronounced in film than in literature. Authors in film phenomenology describe how the sensual perception of images and sounds, shapes, colors, textures and movements lends intensive moods and atmospheres to the worlds depicted (Sinnerbrink) and synesthetically activates other senses such as touch (Sobchack). Cognitive film theories also examine bodily affects and the specific ways how films activate viewers’ bodies and brains (Antunes; Grodal; G. Smith). One example are “sensorimotor projections” (Hogan “Sensorimotor”), when viewers subliminally anticipate characters’ movements or are surprised by jump cuts. Because of their concreteness, films easily evoke sensual pleasures and shocks—the sudden bang of a gun, stroboscopic light in a club scene, the deep thud of an asteroid hitting earth. In Winter’s Bone, the scenes when Ree is beaten up or when she cuts off the hands of her father’s corpse combine sensual shocks with bodily simulation, which makes watching them hardly bearable. More generally, film fosters embodied simulation, intercorporal contagion, affective mimicry, somatic forms of empathy, of feelingwith characters (cf. Grodal, M. Smith, Eder Figur), sometimes explained by the workings of mirror neurons (Gallese and Guerra). Whatever the theoretical background, one may assume that the bodies of spectators are affected by perceiving and sometimes imitating the bodies of characters as well as those of other spectators. The so-called body genres (Williams)—bloody slashes in horror movies, genitals in pornography, tears and convulsive faces in melodrama— just aim at particularly intense forms of such bodily, sensual affects. Of course, these are not the only uses of multimodal sensuality in films. Hogan describes “painterly” films that take up stylistic features of other visual arts to create more subtle kinds of beauty and pleasure (Style). For instance, the Vermeer lighting at the beginning of Winter’s Bone makes Ree’s beauty shine and transforms her poor environment. Approaches in Deleuzian “affect studies” as well as in cognitive film theory try to capture how the temporal unfolding of audiovisual forms—in the case of “expression movements” (Schmitt et al.) or “audiovisual metaphors” (Fahlenbrach)—not only evokes perceptual affects but simultaneously conveys higher-level meanings based on bodily experiences. The sensual design of spatial relations (boundaries, size, distance, direction etc.) and interrelated movements—of objects in front of the camera, of the camera itself, of sounds and editing— may posit the viewers bodily as well as mentally toward certain meanings and feelings. The sensual concreteness and moving temporality of film thus runs from audiovisual perception to immersion in represented worlds and to the experience of higher-level meanings, influencing affective responses on all those layers.

Narration: Immersion, Polyphonic Perspectives, and Afective Complexity The multimodality of films also enables typical forms of narration with characteristic affective potentials. For one thing, it makes it possible to separate verbal, visual, and auditory narrators and to combine or intermesh their multiple perspectives on simultaneous visual and auditory tracks. Some films set narrative perspectives against each other in order to create affective tensions or evoke emotional evaluations: in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), the verbal narrator invites disapproval, as he seems completely unaffected by brutal events on the visual 361

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track. In a deeply moving sequence of Thomas Heise’s documentary Heimat Is a Space in Time (2019), the filmmaker reads a series of letters, written in 1942 by his relatives, Jewish citizens of Vienna awaiting their deportation to a concentration camp. Meanwhile on the visual track, the camera scrolls down endless deportation lists until finally the names of his relatives appear. While many films evoke multilayered emotional processes through multiple narrators, by far the most films are governed by a contrary convention: to make personal narrators disappear and aim for a seemingly unmediated presence of the represented world. This narrative strategy, used also in Winter’s Bone, fosters viewers’immersion in the film’s world, but at the same time excludes emotions directed at a narrator’s stance. Even films that hide their narrator, however, may evoke complex or mixed emotions through a polyphony of perspectives. One possibility is perceptual focalization: films can make the audience take the characters’ visual and acoustic perspectives through subjective images or sound. In Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), for example, the sound suddenly becomes muffled after the protagonist has received a blow to the ear in a boxing match. Such techniques may serve to strengthen film-specific forms of empathy, sympathy, or other affective relations to characters, as described by several theories (M. Smith, Eder Figur). Contrasting with that, early psychoanalytical theories (Baudry) have posited that the viewers’ “identification with the camera” was more important than character engagement. While this may be doubted, camera work and editing can make the viewers share the embodied perception of narrators or characters: mimetic POV shots or travelling shots feel different when they are done with a nervous hand-held camera, a Steadicam, or a dolly (Hogan Style). Such techniques may contribute to making the viewers share a character’s “existential feelings,” her fundamental way to experience the world (Eder Existential). Moreover, in contrast to literature, films can make the viewers feel that characters turning toward the camera are directly addressing them or interacting with them. Such cases of “parasocial interaction” (Horton and Wohl) may evoke self-directed emotions such as fear at the attack of monsters (Alien, 1979) or feelings of complicity with ruthless villains (House of Cards, 2013). In 3D movies, it has become a convention to “hurl things” toward the startled audience. The affective specificity of filmic narration, then, includes techniques as different as strengthening immersion by hiding narrators, creating complex affects through a polyphony of perspectives, fostering character engagement through perceptual perspective-taking, and evoking self-directed emotions through parasocial interaction.

Emplotment: Te Temporality of Filmic Afects The specific affectivity of films also results from the way they structure their plots and arrange their material. Hogan describes several stylistic characteristics of the temporal, structural, and attentional organization of films (Style). Among other things, he mentions film-specific techniques for presenting temporal relations of simultaneity (superimposition, split screen) or duration (freeze frame, slow motion). However, other aspects of filmic temporality may be even more consequential. Some concern rather broad pragmatic tendencies: feature films usually have a shorter duration than novels, and their sequence and speed is more rigidly fixed—viewers have less control of the tempo than readers. This means that many films have to simplify and condense complex content (e.g., the multifactorial causality of human relations or political events) more than novels, and that they may more inconspicuously rush over improbabilities in a plot. Both can lead to greater affective speed and density, but also to a greater frequency of simpler or less adequate emotions. The fixed speed of films also makes the expressive and affective qualities of duration and rhythm more important: the precise timing of gags and fights, the ticking bomb under the table, the endless moment when lovers’ eyes meet. 362

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A further film-specific aspect of emplotment concerns certain conventions of storytelling that are reinforced by film’s costly production and its catering to larger audiences. Narratives are supposed to evoke sympathy for protagonists, curiosity about their backstories, suspense on the development of their conflicts, and surprise at unexpected turns and solutions. The basic strategies to create “narrative emotions” of curiosity, suspense, and surprise by way of ordering and withholding narrative information (Sternberg) apply to film and literature alike. However, films adhere more closely to conventional narrative schemata, such as a rhythmic division into three (or four) acts, because those schemata are strongly anchored norms in the film industry. Winter’s Bone is not a mainstream film, but compared to the book its plot nevertheless conforms significantly more to such storytelling conventions. During the last third of the novel, Ree becomes a passive, reflecting character. The film, however, tries to keep her as an active protagonist until the end by cutting reflective passages and inserting new scenes that are not in the book: for instance, Ree chases the main antagonist at a cattle market and helps her uncle pressure her father’s murderers. By way of that, the film intensifies conflict and suspense, while the book focuses more on psychological drama.

Conclusion Film and literature express and evoke emotions differently. The specific affectivity of film is based on its mediality—particularly, on its multimodal sign systems, audiovisual techniques, and established practices. These medium-specific properties preconfigure the affective structures of films on four interconnected levels: the sensual forms of images and sounds, the structures of represented worlds and stories, the construal of higher-level meanings, and the relations to communicative contexts. As yet, film theories have mostly focused on represented worlds and their interrelations with filmic forms and meanings. In these respects, three stylistic features seem especially important sources of film-specific affects: the sensual concreteness of represented worlds and events; the possibility to hide narrators (in order to foster immersion in filmic worlds) or multiply perspectives (in order to evoke complex emotions); and the temporal emplotment (timing of affects and narrative emotions). Of course, these are only some crucial characteristics of film-specific affectivity. Beyond that there are many more, for instance, visual and musical beauty, the appeal of stars, genres such as the musical, or collective laughter in the film theatre. All those affective specifics distinguish film from literature; and compared to other media and arts, such as opera or painting, further characteristics of film’s affective specificity would again emerge.

Works Cited Antunes, Luis Rocha. The Multisensory Film Experience: A Cognitive Model of Experiential Film Aesthetics. Intellect, 2016. Barker, Martin. “Crossing Out the Audience.” Audiences. Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, edited by Ian Christie, Amsterdam UP, 2012, pp. 187–205. Bartsch, Anne. “Meta-Emotion. How Films and Music Videos Communicate Emotions about Emotion.” Projections, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 45–59. Bateman, John A. “Multimodality and Materiality: The Interplay of Textuality and Texturality in the Aesthetics of Film.” Poetics Today, vol. 40, no. 2, 2019, pp. 235–268. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2, 1974, pp. 39–47. Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Harvard UP, 1989.

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Jens Eder Bremond, Claude, Joshua Landy, and Thomas G. Pavel, editors. Thematics. New Approaches. State U of New York P, 1995. Carroll, Noël. “Film, Emotion, and Genre.” Passionate Views. Film, Cognition, and Emotion, edited by Carl R. Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, Johns Hopkins UP, 1999, pp. 21–47. Eder, Jens. “Casablanca and the Richness of Emotion.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008, pp. 231–250. ———. “Collateral Emotions. Political Web Videos and Divergent Audience Responses.” Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film, edited by Catalin Brylla and Mette Kramer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 183–203. ———. Die Figur im Film. Grundlagen der Figurenanalyse. Schüren, 2008 (English translation: Film Characters: Theory, Analysis, Interpretation. Open Book Publishers, to be published in 2022). ———. “Films and Existential Feelings.” Projections, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016, pp. 75–103. ———, Julian Hanich, and Jane Stadler. “Introduction: Media and emotions.” NECSUS Spring 2019 #Emotions, 27 May 2019, necsus-ejms.org/media-and-emotion-an-introduction. Fahlenbrach, Kathrin. “Audiovisual Metaphors as Embodied Narratives in Moving Images.” Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches, edited by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Routledge, 2015, pp. 33–50. Gallese, Vittorio, and Michele Guerra. “Embodying Movies. Embodied Simulation and Film Studies.” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, vol. 3, 2012, pp. 183–210. Grodal, Torben. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford UP, 2009. Hanich, Julian. The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience. Edinburgh UP, 2017. Hausken, Liv. “Coda: Textual Theory and Blind Spots in Media Studies.” Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Nebraska UP, 2004, pp. 387–400. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Sensorimotor Projection, Violations of Continuity, and Emotion in the Experience of Film.” Projections, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 41–58. ———. Style in Narrative. Oxford UP, 2021. Horton, Donald, and Richard R. Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction. Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry, vol. 19, no. 3, 1956, pp. 215–229. Hven, Steffen. “The Affective Niches of Media.” NECSUS Spring 2019 #Emotions, 27 May 2019, necsus-ejms.org/the-affective-niches-of-media. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art. Northwestern UP, 1973. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Kawin, Bruce F. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton UP, 1978. Meyrowitz, Joshua. “Medium Theory: An Alternative to the Dominant Paradigm of Media Effects.” The SAGE Handbook of Media Processes and Effects, edited by Robin L. Nabi and Mary Beth Oliver, Sage, 2009, pp. 517–530. Pelowski, Matthew, Patrick S. Markey, Michael Forster, Gernot Gerger, and Helmut Leder. “Move Me, Astonish Me . . . Delight My Eyes and Brain: The Vienna Integrated Model of Top-down and Bottomup Processes in Art Perception (VIMAP) and Corresponding Affective, Evaluative, and Neurophysiological Correlates.” Physics of Life Reviews, vol. 21, 2017, pp. 80–125. Persson, Per. Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery. Cambridge UP, 2003. Plantinga, Carl. Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement. Oxford UP, 2018. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Media and Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, Routledge, 2005, pp. 288–292. Schmidt, Axel. “Medien und Medienkommunikation.” Mediensoziologie. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium, edited by Dagmar Hoffmann and Rainer Winter, Nomos, 2018, pp. 39–56. Schmitt, Christina, Sarah Greifenstein, and Hermann Kappelhoff. “Expressive Movement and Metaphoric Meaning Making in Audio-visual Media.” Body—Language—Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Vol. 2, edited by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva H. Ladewig, David McNeill, and Jana Bressem, De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 2092–2112. Sena Moore, Kimberly. “Understanding the Influence of Music on Emotions. A Historical Review.” Music Therapy Perspectives, vol. 35, no. 2, 2016, pp. 131–143. Sinnerbrink, Robert. “Stimmung. Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood.” Screen, vol. 53, no. 2, 2012, pp. 148–163. Smith, Greg M. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge UP, 2003. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford UP, 1995. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton UP, 1992.

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31 GRAPHIC FICTION BIPOC Teen Comics Frederick Luis Aldama

Abstract: This chapter examines a range of comic book narratives that center on the formation of teen of color protagonists. The chapter demonstrates how the visual-verbal shaping devices of comics across a range of genres—horror, realist, and superhero—create absorbing and expansive teen storyworlds that can and do tell us much about the struggles and triumphs of core identity formation for those violently pushed to the racial, sexual, and gender margins. In its analysis of the way creators construct the ethnoracial pause, the chapter explores how the visual-verbal distillations and reconstructions of real-world experiences can and do dishabituate and make new readers’perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and worldviews about the world teens of color inhabit.

We engage with narratives of all shapes, sizes, and formats—including the visual-verbal variety known as comics. Many like myself gravitate to these visual-verbal storyworlds to explore and nourish our imaginations, and with this all variety of intricately woven together perspectives, thoughts, and feelings. And, of course, comics use both the visual and verbal registers to generate these magnificent and idiosyncratic bundles of experience both in our storyworld immersion (character, theme, plot) and in our aesthetic-design gestaltic grasp. Put simply, and as relating directly to this volume’s focus, the visual (mostly) and verbal shaping devices invite us to experience a complex range of networked emotions. Just as a particular characterization or character-tocharacter encounter might trigger, say, rage in us, so too might the choice of color and line work trigger or amplify such an emotion. Conversely (and simultaneously), just as we might experience affection with a character, so too might we really like a comic because of its aesthetic design. Like other media and their respective narrative forms, we see, too, that the elements that make up the storyworld (characters and themes, for instance) can and do accrue in ways that point us toward a dominant set of emotions, negative or positive. And, by convention, the visual elements that go into the design of a given comic book—that geometrize the narrative— do the same. Sometimes the storyworld and aesthetic-design emotion sets come to exist in conflict, but mostly they work together. They give us our emotion North, as it were, and in so doing also shape into the epic, tragic, comic, and sacrificial prototype narratives so elegantly conceptualized and nuanced in Patrick Colm Hogan’s works. So, while any given DC or Marvel superhero comic will trigger all variety of up-and-down emotions, they’re ultimately dominated by emotions that typify epic prototypes: hope, inspiration, happiness, satisfaction, and the thrill of victory. Conversely, any given Indy or Alternative comic tend to settle into a DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-37

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dominance of emotions such as anxiety, fear, shame, and emptiness that typify the tragic or sacrificial prototype narrative. To wit: Spiegelman’s Maus, Satrapi’s Persepolis, David B’s Epileptic, Ellen Forney’s Marbles, Sarah Leavit’s Tangles, David Small’s Stitches, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, and J. P. Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda. I’m catholic in my taste for comics and of prototype narratives. I’m just as drawn to the holocaust-set comics of Spiegelman as I am the caped crusaders of George Pérez. In each I not only find myself sutured to complex webs of emotions as laid out briefly earlier, but also steadfast reminders via the visual elements of the materiality of our minds-in-bodies situated in time and place. And, in some comics these visuals make constantly visible subjectivities that have been ignored or erased by a mainstream that privileges straight, male, and light of skin. While I will consume just about any kind of comic, it’s comics that revolve around issues of race, gender, and sexuality that I choose to purposefully spend time with. And of late, I find myself drawn to comics that focus on Black/Brown Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) teen coming-of-age stories. It’s these storyworlds with their respective aesthetic designs that at once speak to past and present xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynistic violence and trauma and that celebrate the tremendous potentialities of the imagination and action of BIPOC youth. No matter the genre, single or team authored, mainstream or Indy published, YA or adult marketed age, we can and do experience all sorts of transformative emotions in BIPOC teen focused comic books. As such, in this chapter I’ll examine a range of these narratives to begin to demonstrate how the visual-verbal shaping devices of comics across a range of genres, publishers, and intended age groups that do create absorbing and expansive teen storyworlds that can and do tell us much about the struggles and triumphs of core identity formation for those violently pushed to the racial, sexual, and gender margins. In each I examine how the creative distillations and reconstructions of realworld experiences of BIPOC teens can and do dishabituate and make new our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and worldviews about the world we all inhabit. The central connector for the comics that I examine is their shared focus on the formation of BIPOC youth. That is, they work within (as well as expand and complicate) the deep and wide planetary tradition of the bildungsroman. Off the cuff I think, Mori Ogai’s Seinen, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. However, because these comics use the visual as the dominant shaping device of the narrative, these teen-of-color focused comics use the visual design precisely to ask us to take pause, absorb, and experience those emotions caught up in and that result from issues relating to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. BIPOC teen-of-color comics provide what I call an ethnoracial pause where the visual (mostly) and verbal design of the story asks readers to pause to feel and think about how time and place inform tensions and resolutions in the formation of intersectional (race, class, gender, sexuality) identities. Creators of teen-of-color comic book stories use the visuals to anchor this formation within complex and diverse spaces in the architecturing of interiors and exteriors, geometrized urban spaces, suburban, and rural landscapes. They use the verbal elements to anchor the BIPOC identity formation in and through language (slang, swearing, and Spanish-English, for instance). That is, creators of teen-of-color comics strategically deploy the ethnoracial pause to worldbuild time-spaces (recall that in comics the time-space unit of meaning is the panel) that vitally inform and richly texture those complex human perceptions, thoughts, and emotions of the otherwise maligned, marginalized, or erased. The significance of the ethnoracial pause lines up nicely, too, with other of my work. For instance, in my co-directed qualitative study, “Toward an AI Future of Comics Study and Creation: A Cognitive-Affective Approach,” we determined that while the average reader of comics (a baseline of comics literacy) might not be able to “extract the core emotional 367

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messages” (188) from a given comic book story, they all had an emotional reaction to the splash-page—that single image that fills the entirety of a page. Creators use the visuals of the splash page to create a pause in the narrative; they are used to compress, and within this compression, stretch—our emotion response. BIPOC add to their use of the splash page (and panel) the dimension of race, gender, sexuality. They use the visuals to build the ethnoracial pause—and with this they engage and trigger emotions in the reader. On the matter or formulation and clarification, let me add here that BIPOC-bildung comics are a willful distillation and creative recreation of teens of color perspectives, thoughts, feelings, and actions. Unlike, say, The Low, Low Woods (2020) or Superman Smashes the Klan (2020) that create narrative blueprints cemented into place for all eternity, the flesh-and-blood reader-viewer of these comics bring their own set of emotions that form (or are informing) their core selves (memories, worldviews, and so on). That is, while reader-viewers experience real thoughts and feelings when engaging with a young protagonist like Roberta or Superman in Superman Smashes the Klan, they do so in loosely guided ways—and in ways that may change in time (young or old, for instance) and place (classroom or bedroom, for instance). As already mentioned, our emotion engagement with these comics at the aesthetic level also changes in time and place. In my youth when my comics literacy was in its infancy, I would not have had the awe experience I do today at Dani’s masterful aesthetic design in shaping the story of The Low, Low Woods. Put otherwise, BIPOC creators of BIPOC teen coming of age comics use their networked brain to reconstruct a specific slice of reality in ways that yield a new product (artifact, action, thought) that activates the reader-viewer’s networked sense, emotion, and cognitive super-system in time and place. And, because BIPOC teen formation comics focus the formation of the core selves (affect, learning, long-term memory and consolidation of new memories, time perception, olfaction, posture and movement, decision making and motivation, reward and pleasure, and actions and motor behavior), they can and do shed light on the struggles and triumphs experienced by realworld teens-of-color.

Allegorical Worldbuilding BIPOC comics creatives choose to worldbuild within and across all genres: sci-fi, fantasy, superhero, romance, horror—you name it. With The Low, Low Woods Carmen María Machado (writer) and Dani (artist) choose to worldbuild their BIPOC-bildung comic within the speculative genre of horror. Set in a former mining town called Shudder-to-Think, the storyworld is filled to the brim with marauding skinless, hybrid human/animal creatures, woman-child witches, and evil energy that violently turns women’s wombs into interdimensional sinkholes. Machado and Dani use the horror genre to allegorize the plight of women and queer teens of color in society. The protagonists and dominant filters of the story: lesbian teens of color and best friends, El (Latina) and Vee (Black). The horror of their lives doesn’t stem from, say, being bullied as queer teens of color at school. It revolves around central mysteries like why they suffer from bouts of confusion and forgetfulness and shock-horror encounters with frightening (evil) creatures and forces that target the women of the town. Dani’s visuals drive home how BIPOC teens experience negative emotions more as perpetual states than of short duration, the, say, normal way one experiences emotions of fear. In one instance, Vee’s sensual encounter with Jessica turns, with the flip of a page, into a splash-page scene of horror (Figure 31.1). Dani’s geometrizing of Vee’s posture and facial expression along with the page design that tips everything downward diagonally from left-to-right triggers in the feeling of shock and confusion. Not only does it act as a signpost in the narrative that we are to read this as an allegory of patriarchal society’s misogynistic violence, but it powerfully reminds us that that 368

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Figure 31.1 Splash page of Vee’s shock at the sight of Jessica in The Low, Low Woods (2020) Source: Carmen Maria Machado and Dani. The Low, Low Woods (2020).

as a queer teen of color, Vee can never take for granted the exploration of the pleasures and curiosities of her body with another’s that’s so important to the healthy development of her as a young woman. Indeed, as the narrative unfolds, Vee discovers a legacy of this violence against women, including Jessica’s living-dead mother (Figure 31.2). A central element of El and Vee’s journey—and their formation—is to figure out why they suffer from their collective forgetting. They do figure this out, learning deep histories of the town and how the men used special spring water that would erase memories to abduct, rape, maim, and kill the town’s girls and women. Along with this knowledge, El and Vee also discover the antidote: suncap mushrooms. 369

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Figure 31.2 Splash page of Jessica’s mother in The Low, Low Woods (2020) Source: Carmen Maria Machado and Dani. The Low, Low Woods (2020).

This allows them to remember, or rather to rememory per Toni Morrison, their lived collective trauma; all those horrific acts against them during their collective blackouts. This rememory process provides the knowledge of what happened, allowing them to move out of the perpetual states of negative emotion that their environment had created. It allows them to identify then vanquish the violent and violating men of the town. Machado and Dani’s choice to use the storytelling conventions and visual design of horror give shape to an allegory that powerfully critiques the misogynistic and homophobic violence that informs the shaping of a patriarchal society. They allegorize the blood-curdling fear experienced by lesbian teens of color in such a society, one built on reprehensible acts of violence against girls, women, and queer people of color. They also leave us with hope in the collective struggle to unearth histories erased and violation and violence overcome. 370

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BIPOC Teen Formation and Builtspaces Stepping into the comics storyworlds built by BIPOC creators we experience the complex ways in which teens of color form their identities in their daily survival of builtspaces. Just as the world El and Vee inhabit create a constant sense of precarity of lesbian teens of color, so too do we see how male teens of color can’t take for granted lives lived in urban spaces. The BIPOC creative team Tony Medina (writer), Stacey Robinson (artist) and John Jennings (artist) geometrize the urban builtspace as one that’s surveils, attacks, maims, and murders young Black and Brown teens like eponymous tragic hero of their comic, I Am Alfonso Jones (2017). They frame the narrative with Alfonso’s murder; shot dead by a police officer mistaking a clothes hanger for a gun. As the story unfolds, they use the visual and verbal shaping devices to stretch the narrative into deep time and space, linking Alfonso’s murder with long histories of Black and Brown peoples whose lives are brutally cut short by the police violence that upholds a white supremacist US social system. In the narrative, ghosts appear of contemporaries such as Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin as well as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Malcolm X. Robinson and Jennings’ visuals convey this feeling of oppression, geometrizing the builtspaces in ways that convey the sense of suffocation and hostility to BIPOC teens like Alfonso. Robinson and Jennings are also careful to build in that ethnoracial pause, that concept I mention in the beginning of this chapter and that points to the very special situation in time and space where and when the subject reaches one or several mental spaces briefly inhabitable with peace of mind after suffering the constant quotidian pressure and violence against BIPOC teens. As a pause, and being ethnoracial, it is a rare place of gentle emotions or affections where the young subject feels safe and untroubled for a while. In the present case the ethnoracial pause happens in the moments when, in flashback, we are with Alfonso as he confidently and with great joy, freely navigates an otherwise racially confining and dangerous urban space. Robinson and Jennings’ ethnoracial pause includes these moments when Alfonso’s deft and swift bicycle maneuvering create a blur (erase) out of the oppressively looming, labyrinthine series of decayed dark structures and the suffocating streets chock full of cars (Figure 31.3). These ethnoracial pauses convey Alfonso’s joie de vivre; his making his own these affective builtspaces. BIPOC creators also use builtspaces to ask readers to reflect on how a racist and sexist social mirror reflects people of color as monstrous. I think here of Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) where she chooses to open the first pages of the story with a darkly shaded, roughly penciled Chicago skyline and exterior of a gothic-styled builtspace (Figure 31.4). Ferris uses the convention of the rectangular space to convey the interior thoughts of her Latina near-teen protagonist, Karen Reyes, as she transforms into a howling beast. Within these first pages, we are witness to Karen’s transformation within her bedroom, in the basement apartment of a gothic-styled row house, in a late 1960s Chicago (Figures 31.5 and 31.6). The basement apartment—and even more so her bedroom—become a fortress against an ever-present M.O.B.: Mean. Ordinary. Boring. It’s within the space of the bedroom that Reyes can embrace her monstrousness, protected from an adult world of xenophobes that threaten to annihilate those like Karen: “Kill the monster,” shouts one such adult. For Ferris, the builtspace functions as place of refuge in a society that deems intersectional subjects (pubescence, race, and gender) as monstrous. It also functions as the space whereby the reader experiences the protagonist’s coming of age and total embracing of her sense of self as monstrous—as Other—in ways that lead to self-agency. To this end, Ferris uses the building’s spaces as markers of Karen’s bildungs—her education as an empowered monster. For 371

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Figure 31.3 Alfonso rides confidently through the city in I Am Alfonso Jones (2017) Source: Tony Medina, Stacey Robinson, and John Jennings, I Am Alfonso Jones (2017).

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Figure 31.4 The Chicago skyline in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) Source: Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017).

Figure 31.5 The building where Karen Reyes lives in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) Source: Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017).

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Figure 31.6 Karen Reyes transforming into a monster in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) Source: Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017).

instance, it’s the first-floor apartment that becomes associated with Reyes’s first experience of death—gender (woman) and ethnoracially marked (Jewish) death: Today our upstairs neighbor Mrs. Anka Silverberg died under mysterious circumstances. She was shot in the heart in her livingroom but she was found lying in her bed with the covers arranged neatly—just like she’d tucked in for the night. Ferris chooses to portray Karen’s relationship to Anka through visuals of the building’s builtspaces. Anka’s only ever seen confined to the building. The building is a cage to Anka. 374

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Ferris’s use of perspective shows Karen in a subordinate position, as a nascent teen would be to an adult. Yet, as we learn from Karen’s journaled thoughts, she also feels a certain affinity with and affection for Anka. It was like she’d forgotten all about me. . . . I now can’t get it out of my head that there was someone with Anka. . . . A shadow . . . or maybe it was . . . like she was waiting for something or someone . . . and there was a kind of strange sort of . . dead thing about her. For Ferris, the basement apartment becomes a protective builtspace; for Karen to come into her monstrousness. It stands in contrast with the actual basement of the building—a space adjacent to Karen and her mother’s apartment—that’s cold, empty, lifeless and dungeon like. When it’s too cold out, this is where Karen’s mother goes “to burn an index card with a picture of the offending cuss” in order to “take the cuss off.” The cuss, like a hex, results from any number of things: picking up a black button off the sidewalk, brushing hair after dark, cutting toenails on Sunday, being photographed holding a cat. It’s a subterranean space of pipes that expel waste from the building, of chained and locked doors, barred windows—a space of mysticism. It’s also a space that’s forbidden to Karen (child), unless to accompany and help the mother (adult). And, as one might expect, it becomes one of several of the domestic, private spaces she interfaces with (the basement again) on her own terms, marking the growing of her free will and freedom to choose where to exist, move, perceive, think and feel within larger, public builtspaces. But, of course, a space of mysticism is in this case very different from an ethnoracial pause in terms of place, duration and affective contents, fundamentally because it points to a public builtspace not to the private emotional refuge sought and built by the ethnoracial pause. Karen’s formation of the self is shaped by her experience of domestic, private, restricted, quite confined spaces. This practical knowledge derived from her limited Weltanschauung resources includes a growing of a deep affinity and affection for her older brother, Diego (aka Deeze). Home early from middle school, she witnesses Deeze in flagrante. It’s not seeing him having sex with a woman that’s interesting for Ferris. It’s that this moment deepens Karen’s relationship with her brother. After he asks her not to tell the mom, she responds: “That goes without saying. . . . It’s forgotten. . . . My lips are sealed.” She’s more deeply tied to him through their shared secret. Arguably, more importantly as the reader flips to the next page, we see how this connection to the brother continues her education of the senses: the arts in particular. Diego is a great artist. He paints the exterior of his body, even, with tattoo art grounded in Latinx history and culture: portraits of Emiliano Zapata and Diego Rivera, calavera, and religious iconography, for instance. He teaches Karen how to use a quill pen and ink to draw block letters. He’s also the one who she confides in when bullied at school for being a bastard. To explain and comfort Karen about the absent father, Deeze geometrizes how two adults (the circles) can overlap and create a third, new entity: Karen, and with her, where “the whole world is born.” Indeed, it’s Deeze and builtspaces of art that come to comfort and educate Karen about life beyond her self and in the world. Ferris visually captures this with a page that features the Art Institute and Deeze and Karen. Once inside the Art Institute, Karen reflects: “He showed me how not just to see with my eyes, but hear, smell, taste and touch with them, too.” Standing in front of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” Karen exclaims: “I can smell starch church clothes, green grass, picnic sandwiches made of salami and mustard. I can hear kids laughing and the little dog yapping and its owner saying ‘Hush, Paco.’” She learns the formal aspects of geometric shaping and how it conveys meaning—the balancing on 375

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a tip-point triangle shaped compositions to create dynamism, for instance. It also becomes a tool for her particular way of understanding the world. Jacob Jordaens’s “Temptation of Magdelene” allows her to see and understand better Anka’s emotions as someone bored and “shut-in.” It’s in a dreamscape sequence that includes paintings—“suddenly I was in the museum skipping from one painting to another every time I jumped into a new one it tilted and I was almost pitched off ”—Frédéric Bazille, George Inness, Monet, Harold Sohlberg, and Gustave Doré that allow her to find her way back to a primal relationship to her mother. It’s in the private space of Deeze’s bedroom, too, that Karen is exposed to and learns from art books—as well as from other forms of art such as music and Mad Magazine. Ferris uses color shading very sparingly throughout My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. This is one of the occasions, emphasizing the importance of the connection to her brother (as protector, too, from the mother) in understanding her own emotions (she learns of the gulags, Anka’s persecution as a Jew in Nazi Germany and forced prostitution, among other things) and desires (same-sex) as part of the education of her self. After this triptych like series, Karen tells Deeze: “I um like . . . I like . . . uh . . . Girls.” For BIPOC comics creators like Ferris as well as Robinson and Jennings, builtspaces are more than a taken-for-granted element of a given narrative or opportunity for self-reflexive play a la Chris Ware. They offer an opportunity to clear new spaces for the sharing of untold histories of ethnoracial, gendered, and sexual trauma, oppression, and exploitation. They become powerful reminders of how BIPOC teens exist within builtspaces that contain and mark as monstrous or that violently obliterate them from existence.

BIPOC Teens . . . Up, Up, and Away BIPOC teen coming of age comic book stories hit with hard truths—and clear space for the celebration of their imagination and creativity. In the comics examined earlier, the inclusion of the powerful imagination and creativity of BIPOC teens has been more of a whisper within formation narratives—the graphic bildung—dominated by the horrors of racism, misogyny, and queerphobic violence. In superhero comics such as Gene Luen Yang (writer) and the artist team known as Gurihiru’s Superman Smashes the Klan (2020), as well as Alex Sanchez (writer) and Jul Maroh’s (artist) You Brought Me the Ocean (2020), such societal horrors are present, but ultimately as whispers to the foregrounding of superpowered moments (wish fulfillment fantasies) where straight and queer BIPOC teens knock down queerphobic and racist bullies and soar up, up, and away. Yang and Gurihiru choose to set their superheroic comic (and use the color palette of 1940s comics), Superman Smashes the Klan in 1946, not only to draw the reader-viewer’s attention to the serialized radio story of Superman outing the real KKK for its deplorable xenophobic acts, but also to scratch deep into the surface of a post–WWII zeitgeist characterized by the mythmaking of a happy-go-lucky, Leave-It-To-Beaver everybody-get-along middle-class whiteness. By choosing to focalize the story through a young Asian American, Roberta “Lan-Shin” Lee who experiences and pushes back at pressures of assimilation and overt racism, this creative of color team wake their readers to long histories of anti-Asian policy and practice. And, by creating a pro-assimilationist father, Dr. Lee, and a brother, Tommy, who has internalized racism (he refers to Asians as “wontons,” for instance), the creative team show the complex ways that xenophobia works (past and present) in the United States. All that Roberta and her family experience disturbingly resonate with the continued anti-Asian violence ripping through the US social fabric today. As per the storytelling conventions of most superhero comics, Yang and Gurihiru make sure we know who the villains are. Here it’s overt racists like Chuck’s Uncle Matt, a cardcarrying member of the KKK (Asians are “demons by nature”) and it’s those like Chuck who 376

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Figure 31.7 Chuck with Uncle Matt in Superman Smashes the Klan (2020) Source: Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, Superman Smashes the Klan (2020).

are complicit in their silence. During a scene when the uncle reveals his deep racism, Gurihiru chooses to use a rigid, vertical rectangular panel layout and to use hard triangular geometric shapes for the faces to intensify our sense of the rigidity of a racist worldview (Figure 31.7). And, again per the conventions, the villains are bad, but can also end up being a little complicated, at least enough for us to find something (a vulnerability) to sympathize with. While Uncle Matt remains hardened in his racist ways, young Chuck wakes to his own racist actions and reforms. Superman Smashes the Klan does more than reproduce superhero comic book narrative formula. Yes, Yang and Gurihiru want us to readily identify the do-gooders—Ramona and Superman, in this case—but they want also to complicate how communities of color internalize racism, as when the dad Dr. Lee rejects the help of the Black community and betrays his own anti-Black colorism. Gurihiru gives this moment an entire (splash) page and uses lines and perspective that geometrize this in ways that convey a sense of falling and slippage downward off the page (Figure 31.8). Dr. Lee’s betrays a different kind of prejudice than the white supremacist Uncle Matt; it’s one that springs from his sense of precarious existence as an immigrant. Here and elsewhere Yang and Gurihiru want readers to experience the consequences of buying into the model minority myth that divides communities of color between the desirable and undesirable. In Superman Smashes the Klan the disenfranchised win the day, including an empowered young Roberta who helps Superman bring down the KKK. Along the way, a lot more happens including Yang and Gurihiru’s use of the ethnoracial pause for us to delve deeply into Superman’s own journey of discovery and acceptance of his alienness (Figure 31.9). Flashbacks show us a young Clark struggling with destructive self-doubt that first buries his alienness then bifurcates his sense of self: Clark Kent vs. Alien. 377

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Figure 31.8 Ramona with her father Dr. Lee who rejects the help of the Black community in Superman Smashes the Klan (2020) Source: Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, Superman Smashes the Klan (2020).

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Figure 31.9 Clark Kent/Superman’s discovery of his own alienness in Superman Smashes the Klan (2020) Source: Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru, Superman Smashes the Klan (2020).

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He learns to embrace the totality of who he is, only after Roberta shares her own struggles with feeling a sense of belonging and after she tells him: You’re . . . limiting yourself! I could feel it! I have a theory. . . . You want to fit in better. . . . You want everybody to believe you’re just a better version of a normal human. . . . But the truth is . . . you can do things that are entirely different from what humans can do. . . . You holding back actually endangers people. Yang and Gurihiru express the triumph of his embrace of the totality of his alien self by geometrizing him with a power stance, a chonmage, and, thus for the first time in the comic, an identifiable Asian warrior look. That they have him out himself as alien (“I’m from another place”) in the middle of a baseball stadium asks readers also to put immigrants steadfastly at the center of American history, society—and its mythos. With You Brought Me the Ocean Alex Sanchez (writer) and Jul Maroh (artist) put queer intersectionality front and center in the superhero narrative. Their protagonist is a Black teen, Jake Hyde (son of Black Manta), who struggles to come to terms with a nascent queer sexuality, and water bending superpowers. He lives with his single mom in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where Spanish and Latinxs are everywhere, including his best friend, Maria, and builtspaces that celebrate indigenous histories and cultures. And, as Jake’s journey unfolds and he learns to confront and vanquish queer and transphobic bullies (the villains), so too do Maroh’s color pallets shift from muted yellows and browns of the desert to vital turquoise blues and greens of the ocean. He learns to accept and publicly embrace the integration of the totality of his identity: as Black, queer, and superhuman. To get to this place of intersectional embrace, Jake first struggles with self-doubt and depression. Sanchez and Maroh use verbal and visual shaping devices to build into the story an ethnoracial pause that marks a turning point in Jakes formation of self (Figure 31.10). Jake falls back on his bed and stares up at the ceiling trying to come to terms with his sense of being monstrous: physical marks on the body and a social mirror that reflects back his samesex desires as deviant. In a cascade of images, we move from his thinking that all of these feelings will dissipate if he could live elsewhere (looking up at a map on the ceiling) to the tight bundled body at the page’s bottom that conveys his deep anxiety and fear at not being able to be fully himself. Sanchez’s narrative coupled with Maroh’s visuals of Jakes body posture and expression tumble us through emotions of shame—he covers his body as he looks at the mirror’s reflection—to anger as he sheds his jacket to helplessness and loss of hope as he slumps over, falls from his chair, and holds his jacket tight. The black swirls intensify our sense of the radical meaning of this ethnoracial pause as a hinge moment in his life—one that could lead to deeper confusion and darkness or one that can lead to empowerment and emancipation. In a second defining pause in the narrative, Sanchez and Maroh add Jake’s exploration and embrace of his queer sexuality. It’s an ethnoracial pause, with sexuality added to the intersectional mix. Apprehended as a triptych, we move from a Jake hesitantly unbuttoning his shirt to the full sensual embrace of his love interest, Kenny. As the panels unfold, we move from touching of feet to neck and face and full embrace, moving from hesitation to confidence as Jake and Kenny mutually explore then express one another’s deep sensual and sexual longing, desire, and love of one another. With verbal and visual skill and dexterity, Sanchez and Maroh invite us into this intimate moment of the intersectional ethnoracial pause. They invite us to share in Jake and Kenney’s dreaming and the safe ways they discover a new segment of reality while they are acquiring an education in the intensity of mental and physical love. For queer BIPOC teens like Jake, the space of the daydream acts as an important space of creativity within an ethnoracial pause where it’s possible to imagine and ultimately create 380

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Figure 31.10 Jake/Aqualad filled with self-doubt in You Brought Me the Ocean (2020) Source: Alex Sanchez and Jul Maroh, You Brought Me the Ocean (2020).

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an empowered and emancipated integrated self able to act, engage, explore in a world that constantly seeks to crush and control non-normative thoughts, feelings, and actions. Taken as a whole, You Brought Me the Ocean powerfully reminds readers that for queer BIPOC teens, the daydreaming brain is the actively forward-looking brain, the special and specific way the wish-fulfillment brain creates new worlds and new worldviews, and this is the work of the fiction-making brain—all of which seek refuge and quietude from everyday queerphobic and racist assaults within an ethnoracial pause of their own creation. As I hope I’ve at least begun to suggest, queer BIPOC-building comics forcefully remind us of the power of emotions and the imagination. They remind us, too, that while all teens experience physical, cognitive, and emotive stressors during this time of expansive core self-formation, those that face LGBTQ+ teens and teens of color are more powerful and thus more likely to crush the full development of curiosity and creativity. As these comics powerfully recreate, BIPOC teens and LGBTQ+ teens are under attack. Misinformation backed by violent actions continue to perpetuate myths of rigid race, sexual, and gender binaries and oppositions. The BIPOC comics examined here also point us to other ways of thinking about teen intersectional identities. And as such, they do more than daydream wish-fulfilment fantasies of victory over oppressors. They empower and enrich. Through visual and verbal means, they wake readers to ways that all teens can freely and powerfully grow fluid, messy, exuberant, complex patterns of thought, behaviors, and experiences. Teen of color coming of age comics are not escapist fantasy. Indeed, when done well, they take us more deeply into how intersectional identities and experience survive and thrive in society today. They invite readers and viewers into storyworlds where they may see themselves represented. They invite those who may not see themselves to step into the shoes— capes—of these teens to perceive, feel, and think anew about this magical, wondrous time in the formation of BIPOC and genderqueer teens. They invite us to celebrate these identities and experiences. These stories that have for so long been swept into corners and within these corners boxed in by systemic structures that fail to register the actual lived reality. They celebrate diversity as the space of creativity and storytelling innovation. Finally, they remind adult readers that teens of color in all their rich experiences have something to teach us adults, too.

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis, and Laura Wagner. “Toward an AI Future of Comics Study and Creation: A Cognitive-Affective Approach.” Cyber Media: Science, Sound, and Vision, edited by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, Jonathan Leal, and Selmin Kara, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 187–204. Ferris, Emil. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Fantagraphics, 2017. Machado, Carmen Maria, and Dani. The Low, Low Woods. DC Black Label, 2020. Medina, Tony, Stacey Robinson, and John Jennings. I Am Alfonso Jones. Tu Books, 2017. Sanchez, Alex, and Jul Maroh. You Brought Me the Ocean. DC Comics, 2020. Yang, Gene Luen, and Gurihiru. Superman Smashes the Klan. DC Comics, 2020.

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32 LYRIC John Brenkman

Abstract: Unlike the obvious fact of poetry’s close connection to emotion, the nature of the connection is a problem that criticism and theory approach from various, often incompatible angles. Where is the feeling in poetry located? The poet, the reader, or the poem? Affect and discourse are inseparable in Aristotle’s rhetoric, Kant’s aesthetics, and Heidegger’s poetics. For Hegel, lyric subjectivity is concrete insofar as it is fictive; for T. S. Eliot, experience and emotion are realized poetically insofar as they separate from the poet’s actual experiences and emotions. Gilles Deleuze and Susanne K. Langer develop aesthetic theories founded on the premise that aisthesis belongs to the artwork or poem not to the creator or recipient. By contrast, G. Gabrielle Starr and Stanley Fish lodge affect in the reception of artwork or poem, Starr via neuroscience and Fish through affective stylistics. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that a collective feeling—atmosphere—undergirds the poet’s expression of individual feeling. These various theoretical approaches are illustrated, and tested, with reference to poems by Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabeth Bishop, and W.S. Merwin.

Lyric and emotion—what could be more obviously connected? That’s just the problem, for while the fact of connection is obvious, its nature is not. My task here, as I see it, is to point out some of the ways that criticism and theory attempt to comprehend poetry’s particular power to convey, evoke, disclose, express, or name affects—recognizing that each of those verbs can imply a radically distinct perspective on the question. As a result, I will maintain a certain methodological agnosticism toward the plurality of perspectives. Nevertheless, my own perspective on some basic questions inflects my account, so let me summarize salient features of my view at the outset. In their strong form, three of the theses I develop in Mood and Trope extend the implications, nearly to the breaking-point perhaps, of pivotal ideas in Aristotle, Kant, and Heidegger. Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric establishes such an intimate relation between rhetoric and the emotions that not only are the modes of persuasion intrinsically linked to the orator’s capacity to arouse or dampen particular emotions but also, beyond this explicit argument, the emotions Aristotle enumerates are inseparable from the social and discursive fabric in which those modes of persuasion themselves are embedded. The socio-discursive conditions of rhetoric at the same time condition the emotions. Rhetoric and emotion are co-emergent and interdependent. Two essential claims in Kant’s Critique of Judgment are that the experience this is beautiful entails the claim that others find it beautiful and, on the other hand, that there is no standard DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-38

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or principle that determines the beautiful or could compel someone else to have the same experience and make the same claim. The urge to persuade is part and parcel of the feeling this is beautiful—that is, the affect contains within itself the tacit appeal to others—even as that appeal is ungrounded in any preexisting rule or objective standard. It is thus that from Kant we glimpse the nature and practice of modern criticism. From Heidegger’s Being and Time I derive the thesis that affect in poetry lies not in what is said about emotion, feeling, passion, and so on, but in the saying and the way of saying. Refusing to grant a primary or foundational role to the affective, the cognitive, or the linguistic aspect of human existence, Heidegger argues for the “equiprimordiality” of mood, understanding, and speech (Rede). They affect one another but none precedes or masters the others. We are always in a mood; it is at once within and without, since it is the vibration of being-in-theworld, the attunement of “being-in”; as concern, worry, attention, it reaches toward understanding, and always latent in understanding is the potential for being articulated. Heidegger uses a cluster of nearly interchangeable terms in referring to emotion as a fundamental aspect of human existence, principally state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) and attunement (Gestimmtsein) in addition to mood (Stimmung). The link of the poetic and the affective is asserted as follows: Being-in and its state-of-mind are made known in discourse and indicated in language by intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk, ‘the way of speaking.’ In ‘poetical’ discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities of one’s state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence. (205; H 162) The poem is autotelic not in a formalistic sense but in being the fullest exploration and exploitation, in and for itself, of the capacity of language to disclose states of mind. Affect is indissociable from language and discursive practices in all three of these problematics: emotion and the rhetorical techniques of persuasion in Aristotle; feeling and the claim to agreement in Kant’s aesthetics; and state-of-mind, attunement, or mood and the specifically poetic act of communication in Heidegger. All of which brings to the fore another feature of poetry, namely, that poems are at once poetic, rhetorical, and aesthetic. Yet the distinct fields of inquiry of poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetics cannot be unified or synthesized. Poetry exceeds all the disciplines that set out to understand it. And the question of understanding brings out yet another mode of inquiry: interpretation. Hermeneutics, then, comprises a fourth set of procedures interacting with poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetics without completely meshing with them. The fact that poetry mobilizes and compels four ultimately incommensurate modes of inquiry affirms its specificity, irreducibility, and inexhaustibility within the totality of human undertakings. By the same token, it provides a caveat to critics and theorists. The more refined or systematized the approach the more sharply it will bring into focus particular dimensions of the poetry and the more unaware it will be of what it does not bring into focus. The undeniable but elusive connection of poetry and emotion will vary within the intrinsic plurality of criticism itself. ... The first problem in thinking about the connection of poetry and affect concerns where precisely is feeling located. In the reader, the poet, the poem? And what would it mean to locate affect in the poem rather than the poet or reader? When engrossed in the performance of a Shakespearean tragedy, our feelings are aroused to ever greater intensity by, say, Lear’s soliloquy on the heath. And yet neither we nor the actor is feeling what Lear feels. The raging exiled and abandoned king’s unique and revealing emotions are at once tangible and virtual. What has recently been 384

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called affect theory faces just this paradox of the tangible and the virtual, the felt and the imagined, when it comes to literary works. Even though the dramatic soliloquy is not an adequate model for lyric, the emotion expressed or embodied by a poem is likewise at once tangible and virtual. Poetry is the most precise possible way of conveying an emotion, and yet that emotion is not the reader’s, nor even the poet’s. It belongs to the poem alone. This paradox has often been expressed negatively, as when T. S. Eliot rebuts the notion that poets are motivated by a need to communicate their experience: The “experience” in question may be the result of a fusion of feelings so numerous, and ultimately so obscure in their origins, that even if there be communication of them, the poet may hardly be aware of what he is communicating, and what is there to be communicated was not in existence before the poem was completed. (131) Hegel advances a positive rather than negative formulation by saying that “the poet . . . to be the center which holds the whole lyric work of art together” must grasp some fragment from the stream of actual experiences, impressions, feelings, thoughts, and so on, and “identify himself with this particularization of himself as with himself, so that in it he feels and envisions himself ” (1133). One could chalk up the difference as stemming from Hegel’s benchmark of romanticism and Eliot’s of modernism. More significant, though, is the way their formulations resonate with one another despite not quite jelling. For Hegel, the lyric I attains its concreteness only via the poet’s complete identification, in the composition of the poem, with a transitory “situation” or “specific mood.” For Eliot, the poem evokes experiences and clusters of feeling that do not exist as such before the poem’s composition is achieved. Lyric subjectivity in Hegel is concrete insofar as it is fictive, and for Eliot experience and emotion are realized poetically insofar as they separate from the poet’s actual experiences and emotions. The question is taken up afresh by Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and in What Is Philosophy?, co-authored with Félix Guattari. Deleuze asserts that art is a form of thinking, just as much as philosophy or science; what distinguishes it from those forms of thought is that it thinks via percepts-and-affects, which are to be distinguished from perceptions and feelings in everyday life. He is looking to understand the artwork as “a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects. . . . Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived [experience].” They “are independent of a state of those who experience them” (Philosophy, 164). What is this enigmatic difference between the artwork’s percepts-and-affects and lived experiences, perceptions, and feelings? A benchmark for Deleuze is Cézanne’s practice of using a large palette and never mixing colors but juxtaposing or “modulating” them on the canvas: sensation . . . is in the body; even the body of an apple. . . . Sensation is what is painted. What is painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation. (Bacon, 32) This idea combines with a certain sense of the artwork’s autonomy: The artist creates blocs of percepts and affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must stand up on its own. The artist’s greatest difficulty is to make it stand up on its own (tenir debout tout seul). (Philosophy, 164) 385

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The bloc of percepts-and-affects is a being insofar as it constitutes the artwork itself, and an artwork endures because as a bloc of percepts-and-affects it stands up on its own. From the hermeneutical perspective, which Deleuze largely eschews, an artwork endures insofar as it persists through varying receptions and interpretations across decades and centuries. The artwork is a temporal object in the strong sense that it exists in time. It persists by varying. Its significance is not fixed but is constituted anew throughout the history of its reception, and yet the bloc of percepts-and-affects confronts every reception, every interpretation, as at once invitation and obstacle to understanding. The artwork’s resistance to understanding assures its endurance. What is conventionally called the artwork’s permanence is, rather, its impermeability. While preparing this chapter, I finally cracked open a book that has accusingly stared out at me from the bookshelf for three decades or more, its title alone commanding my attention and mocking my neglect. Feeling and Form is Susanne K. Langer’s major contribution to aesthetic theory. Published in 1953 and sufficiently overlooked that its author has yet to make it into the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the work takes on, I discovered, just this problematic of the difference between lived experiences, feelings, and thoughts and those embodied in artworks. “Here we are supposed, then, to encounter as an actual content of the world a feeling that is not being felt. No subject is expressing it; it is just objectively there” (20). Langer works with three linked concepts: vital import, symbolic form (borrowed from Ernst Cassirer), and significant form (borrowed from the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell). Taking music as her model, she poses the need to bridge vitalism and hermeneutics. “Music has import, and this import is the pattern of sentience—the pattern of life itself, as it is felt and directly known. Let us therefore call the significance of music its ‘vital import’ instead of ‘meaning’” (31–32). Vital import is music’s mode of significant form: its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import. (32) The stake of Langer’s starting-point in music is to wrest the term “symbol” from a linguistic model and establish a fundamentally aesthetic relation between the symbol and the symbolized: “The function of music is not the stimulation of feeling, but expression of it; and furthermore, not the symptomatic expression of feelings that beset the composer but a symbolic expression of the forms of sentience as he understands them” (28, my italics). Modifying Langer’s modification of Bell’s concept, I construe artistic form as significant form in the sense that an artwork’s form provokes an act of understanding, jolts us into a new or distinct perspective on the world, opens a question about existence, even, as Rilke testifies in “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” confronts us at rare moments with You must change your life. The relevant contrast is with form, pattern, or shape in general. Design, for example, requires a wealth of imaginative and artistic creativity to give a distinctive shape and feel to the objects produced and yet differs from significant form, for while the decorative or usable object adduces aesthetic pleasure, it does not effect the existential jolt that inaugurates questioning and interpretation. Form in the sense of music’s patterns of articulated sound is the hinge between vitalism and hermeneutics, that is, between life and significance, sentience and understanding, sense and sense. Like Deleuze, Langer recognizes that the affects materialized in the artwork do not belong to the subjective experience of creator or recipient, and again like Deleuze, she takes a vitalistic 386

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approach to the materials and processes at work in the artwork. Both philosophers bring the double problematic of materiality and vitality to bear on aesthetic theory. Like painting for Deleuze, Langer’s benchmark of music challenges literary theory to understand the aesthetic in relation to artistic forms that language is not a part of in order to understand the aesthetic dimension of poetry. Northrop Frye, it is worth noting, defines the inner dynamic of the lyric as a genre in Anatomy of Criticism in its tendency to reach toward the boundary where it would become music or the one where it would congeal into image. It is as though the most condensed and fullest exploration of linguistic possibility at the same time probes language’s dissolution. When Langer turns to literature, the phenomenology of reading sets the terms. With reference to Blake’s “Tyger, tyger, burning bright,” she asserts that “the very first words of the poem effect the break with the reader’s actual environment” (214). She produces a cascade of terms to designate poetry as appearance in relation to reality. The poem is the “semblance of experienced events,” “illusion of life,” or “virtual order of experiences” (214); the “semblance of life” (217), “semblance of reasoning” (219), “symbol of feeling” (230), or “virtual experience of belief ” (243). The problem with these richly suggestive formulations is that they implicitly render the first term—semblance, appearance, symbol, image, illusion—secondary to the second: feeling, reasoning, experience, reality, life. And they do not account for the dynamic relation between the two sides of the of. What gets obscured in the idea of the “illusion of life” is the fact that the illusion itself becomes part of life! In Niklas Luhmann’s terms, the artwork differentiates itself from reality and, in thus differentiating itself, becomes a part of reality. “The function of art concerns the meaning of this split” (142)—a meaning that, in my view, is specific to every work and every artist. The limitless ways in which the split occurs and its meaning unfolds open the very space in which criticism operates. The “break with the reader’s environment” needs to be seen at once as separating the lyric from reality and, during the vibrant interval of reading, drawing the lyric into the reader’s reality. ... The difficulty of addressing this problematic emerges in those theoretical projects which foreground the reader’s experience. Rhetoric and aesthetics intend to do just that. The question of affect rotates from the artwork’s percepts-and-affects to the recipients’ perceptual and affective experience. Let’s consider two radically distinct attempts to account for how the recipient is affected by the literary or artistic work: Stanley Fish’s classic essay “Literature in the Reader,” which proposes a theory and method of “affective stylistics” designed to comprehend a text’s rhetoric as an action performed on the reader, albeit “an ideal or idealized reader” (145); and G. Gabrielle Starr’s Feeling Beauty, in which she seeks to shed light on aesthetic experience via neuroscience by examining the brain activity of empirical subjects engaged in looking at artworks under laboratory conditions. Starr doubled her training in literary studies with extensive formal study of neuroscience and then collaborated with neuroscientists to design and conduct a series of experiments to determine the sites and nature of the brain activity involved in responding to visual artworks. She supports the view that the mind is capable of producing imagery in the sense of “imagined sensory experience” that can be said to “mime perceptual experience” (77), be it visual, auditory, olfactory, haptic, gustatory, or of motion. Research in neuroscience purports to show that areas of the brain engaged in sensations and perceptions of actual objects are also active in “imagined” sensations and perceptions. Starr points to the brain’s “default mode network . . . a set of interconnected brain areas that are generally active in periods of waking rest but whose activity generally decreases with external stimulation” (23). The experiments she conducted indicated that these areas remained active even as the subjects’ attention was drawn to actual 387

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visual images. “With intensely powerful aesthetic experience, parts of the default mode network are, surprisingly, engaged” (23). Neither Langer nor Luhmann would be surprised, since for them the artwork or poem is immediately grasped in its difference from reality. Kant would not be surprised because the objects and phenomena that throw one into a disinterested aesthetic attitude set themselves apart from objects of desire or use (or danger or threat). Starr offers a further angle, concluding that the scientific research “indicates that the default mode network is important to aesthetic experience in its ability to mediate the interconnectivity of the internal and external worlds, an interconnectivity lit up by pleasures and rewards” (63). This accords with the, I assume, widely shared experience that the concentrated attentiveness to an artwork or reading of a poem is accompanied by all manner of free associations, personal memories, fleeting feelings, thought fragments, fantasies, and images or phrases from other works; there is a vibrant, scarcely perceptible oscillation between “inside and outside.” What to make of this oscillation? The question animates, or roils, Kant’s thinking, as he struggles against his own subject-object, outer reality-inner reality distinctions in saying that in aesthetic judgment the beautiful is wrongly attributed to the object whereas it belongs solely to the subject—and yet could not arise without the object. Here is another way of marking the space in which the art of criticism operates, where one’s inner responses to the work must sort themselves out into an account of the work and an appeal for others’ agreement. This role of criticism gets eclipsed in Starr’s theorizations. Ironically so, since it is her commentaries on Ovid, Keats, and Elizabeth Bishop, far more than the neuroscience experiments, that drive her theoretical claims about the aesthetic. In effect the poetry criticism determines the postulated connections between the aesthetic and the neural. Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” turns around the acquaintance with an “old man” who works at the wharf cleaning fish, repairing nets, and unloading the catch of incoming boats:1 The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. Around this pivotal encounter Bishop weaves vivid descriptions of the fishhouse and environs; of frequent visits that sometimes include singing “Baptist hymns” to a seal “interested in music;/ like me a believer in total immersion”; and of the sea that laps at the wharf and stirs imaginings and thoughts beyond sensory immediacy. In the poem’s final lines, as Starr says, “the sense-strewn landscape of the poem melds onto a world of words, words that gesture toward what we could not ever properly sense” (96): If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Starr homes in on the “layers of sensory imagery, from sight (dark) to taste (salt), touch (cold), and motion and sound (with poetry itself ), matter” (97), and shows that all those senses and the 388

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words themselves occur across the entire poem. Stressing the closing lines’ “drawn . . . forever, flowing and drawn, . . . flowing and flown,” Starr concludes that this imagery of motion . . . unites the sensory modes together, from audition to vision, taste, and touch. Motion can thus emerge not just as denoted or described but as felt, making the lawful rhythm of the poem in mind, or hand, or tongue. (97) As in Langer’s conception of form and feeling, the poem’s rhythmed movements, from the metrical and sonorous to the syntactical and semantic, are felt. Starr goes further (my italics): “The pleasures of interconnection are organized around imagined movement and are distributed in a variety of images that call on the broad variety of modes through which imagery may come to life” (97). But can it be presupposed that in the flow of reading the sense of “it would first taste bitter,” “small iridescent flies,” and “your wrist would ache” gives rise to an imitative sensing of a bitter taste, fly iridescence, and an aching wrist? The term imagery in the neuroscientific idiom is not just overdetermined but overburdened; there is poetic imagery (a term used with more ease than precision); there are poetry’s “sensory images” (words that designate tastes, sights, smells, touch, and movement); there is the supposed “imagined sensory experience” of mental imagery (using the metaphor of “image” to designate even proprioception or silent audition); and there is the brain scan’s imagery that furnishes the evidence of the locale and intensity of cerebral activity (an “image” only because the fMRI, in registering quantities and intensities of blood flow, mechanically represents them in color-coded visuals). The mixing of these loosely defined kinds of “imagery” lends an unearned aura of knowable connection, analogy, mirroring, between brain and experience, the neural and the aesthetic. Starr herself obliquely acknowledges the problem, I believe, in pointing out that at the end of Bishop’s poem the sensory imagery “melds onto a world of words, words that gesture toward what we could not ever properly sense” (96). Starr’s intent is to align the poem with the neuroscientific concept of “sensory competition” (114), the perpetually fluctuating prominence of one sense over others. What stands out, though, is her notion of “semantic-sensory metaphor” (78) and of “the valenced relations between what we experience—sensations and images, yes, but also ideas and events” (117). The sensory and the semantic are in fact locked together in the poem’s language. In contrast to Starr, Fish looks to poetry’s rhetorical rather than aesthetic dimension in his innovative contribution to reception criticism. He takes the term “affective” in affective stylistics in an expansive sense. In the context of debates going back to I. A. Richards, he insists that the affective in literary response cannot be restricted to the “emotive”: in the category of response I include . . . all the precise mental operations involved in reading, including the formulation of complete thoughts, the performing (and regretting) of acts of judgment, the following and making of logical sequences; and . . . my insistence on the cumulative pressures of the reading experience puts restrictions on the possible responses to a word or a phrase. (140) Style and rhetoric according to Fish are crafted into a strategy designed to adduce a specific response, the response of the putatively ideal reader. He calls this reader a “construct,” “neither an abstraction, nor any actual living reader, but a hybrid—a real reader (me) who does everything in his power to make himself informed” (145) in the sense of acquiring 389

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a wide range of linguistic, cultural, historical, and literary competences. While the aim is to recognize the reader’s “actively mediating presence” (123), the resulting method does something quite different. The postulated ideal reader is passive rather than active. As is clear in Fish’s sample analyses, the ideal reader is the optimally manipulated reader. The syntactical and figurative aspects of the text—its style—are viewed as strategies to affect the reader in a particular way, to effect a particular response. There is indeed an active mediator nevertheless. Namely, the theorist-critic who creates the ideal reader. In the rhetoric of Fish’s critical writing, the actual critic—“the real reader (me)”—is selfeffacing, or self-disguising, through the claims made about the text’s stylistic strategies as they affect and effect the ideal reader. The actual plurality of possible readings is casually flicked aside; as opposed to a criticism that tacitly acknowledges, via the “enlarged mentality” (Kant), others’ perspectives and plausible responses and interpretations in arguing for one’s own. Fish’s account ends up more objectivating than the view of the New Critics, his principal antagonists, for whom the text is an object, verbal icon, or well-wrought urn. All critical methods can be said to stylize the critic’s response to the work, and Fish’s are so elegant and consistent that they bring immense insight to an essential aspect of poetry and, by the same token, are utterly blind to many other essential aspects. Let’s dare to locate the blindness and the insight on a terrain where Fish enjoys unrivaled critical acuity. He offers this line from Paradise Lost (I, 335): “Nor did they not perceive the evil plight,” and proceeds with a word-by-word, super slo-mo analysis to show how affective stylistics is supposed to work. Nor did they, he claims, creates the expectation of a verb, which is thwarted by the intrusive (because unexpected) “not.” In effect what the reader does, or is forced to do, at this point, is ask a question—did they or didn’t they?—and in search of an answer he either rereads—in which case he simply repeats the sequence of mental operations—or goes forward—in which he case he finds the anticipated verb, but in either case the syntactical uncertainty remains unresolved. (125–26) Fish’s ideal reader is whipsawed word-by-word, syntactical unit-by-unit, in the hope, apparently unfulfilled in this case, of making sense of the utterance. But is that how anyone reads? The double negative is not all that ambiguous in context. The preceding fiftysome lines have the staggered Satan stand at the shore of the burning lake where his vast army of angelic rebels lie “intrans’t,” “Abject and lost,” and “Under amazement of thir hideous change.” He addresses them to arouse them, calling “so loud that, that all the hollow Deep/Of Hell resounded.” Following the last line of his ensuing speech (I, 315–30) comes the passage describing the fallen angels’ reaction: Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n. They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung Upon the wing; as when men wont to watch On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread, Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake. Nor did they not perceive the evil plight In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel; Yet to thir General’s Voice they soon obey’d Innumerable. (I, 330–38) 390

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The truncated line in question—“Nor did they not perceive the evil plight . . .”—is prepared by the several descriptions of the defeated angels’ barely conscious state of abjection. Like negligent sentries asleep on duty and suddenly coming-to “ere well awake,” they take stock of their situation. Milton’s double negatives are an emphatic way of saying and they did not fail to see their plight and feel their pain. Despite their half-awake state they see and feel the waking reality. And “Yet,” despite this realization and suffering, “to thir General’s Voice they soon obeyed/Innumerable.” The passage’s affective dimension in the sense of the pathos and psychological complexity of the rebels’ predicament is lost in simply concluding that the double negative’s “syntactical uncertainty remains unresolved.” Nothing of course is simply simple in Fish’s reading of Milton. The sample sentence is a fragment pulled from his earlier Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost.” The supposed undecidability of the double negative is there given a precise significance. Milton leads the reader to understand how the alternatives he hovers between are equally true. [The fallen angels] do perceive the fire, the pain, the gloom, but they are blind to the moral meaning of their situation, that is to their evil plight. The supposed syntactico-semantic uncertainty (they did/they did not) is here neatly divided into physical recognition and moral misrecognition. They know they have fallen but not that they are fallen. The poem’s rhetoric is in the service of a harsh authorial glare: “Milton will not allow Satan even a small success. His forces are only half awake (‘ere well awake’)” (99). Fish sees his method as overcoming the schism within Milton studies at the time between the Blakean and the doctrinal interpreters. Paradise Lost is about how its readers came to be the way they are; its method . . . is to provoke in its readers wayward, fallen responses which are then corrected by one of several authoritative voices (the narrator, God, Raphael, Michael, the Son). In this way, I argued, the reader is brought to a better understanding of his sinful nature and is encouraged to participate in his own reformation. (x) The ideal-reader construct purports to understand the rhetorical effectiveness of poetic style, but isn’t the rhetorical domain of persuasion precisely that where responses are possible not necessary, contingent not mandated? ... The two prongs of rhetoric—mode of address and figures of speech—are essential to poetry. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? launches an incipient metaphor, simile, or conceit and a mode of address promising a compliment, flattery, a declaration of admiration or adoration, seduction: Thou art more lovely and more temperate. But when the couplet arrives, figure and address shift: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” To paraphrase: Sorry, my love, you’re going to age and decline, lose your youth and beauty, die, and, unlike the summer, never return—except in my song, which will endure and immortalize its author’s name while yours and you are forgotten. As with God’s creation and the tailor’s trousers in Beckett, Look at your beauty, and look at MY POEM! My heretical paraphrases are not inaccurate, but they are also decidedly wrong. Restated as things someone who writes poetry might actually say to a lover, they are arrogant and spiteful. In the poem, by contrast, the seductive playfulness and ironic bite interlace in a complex rhetorical unity 391

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that discloses the clashing temporalities of cyclical seasons, transitory beauty and love, human mortality, and poetry’s power to endure. While there are crueller moments throughout Shakespeare’s scattered rimes, the hint of cruelty here—or tinge of resentment in the older lover’s very attraction to the beloved’s youthful beauty—is double-edged, evoking the impermanence not only of the beloved’s beauty and youth but also of the love that motivates the poet’s utterance itself. The cruelty is nested in the unspoken melancholy, the hubris in the implied expectation of loss. The couplet’s trope, according to which the poem celebrates beauty, youth, and love by triumphantly outliving them, trammels up the poet and his beloved alike in the seine of time and mortality. All the darker shadings are the inner lining of the overtly expressed admiration and passion, which is what gives Shakespeare’s sonnets the psychosexual complexity they introduced into the Petrarchan tradition, where cruelty, for example, is attributed to the beloved and only figuratively for her withholding the pleasure that her beauty and charms inspire the poet to beseech her to grant. That the act of saying and way of saying are the site of affect in poetry can be tested by looking at how another poet takes up the same constellation of themes—the seasons’ cycles, love’s transitoriness, human mortality, and poetry’s aspiration to endure—and conveys an altogether different mood and feeling. In W. S. Merwin’s The Pupil (2001) several poems evoke a return visit to the stone house he restored and lived in for many years perched above the Dordogne river valley in southwestern France. “The Veil of May” casts a summer’s day not as a conceit for beauty and youth but as a veil of leaves; the forest of ash, walnut, hawthorne, and oak breaks out in summertime foliage, and “in a moment the river has/disappeared down in the valley”:2 it will not be seen again now a while from this place on the ridge but over it the summer will flow and not seem to be moving The latent paradoxes—the river’s flow is hidden under the flow of unmoving summer— anticipate the imbrications of natural and human time in “The Night Plums,”3 where return is an act of recovery—“I saw them again/the sloes on the terrace”—but at the same time an encounter with the unrecoverable: “When almost all whom I had known there/in other days had gone.” Whether he stands in the predawn from a sleepless night or an early rising is left unsaid; human time, unlike that of the flowering shrubs, is implacably linear not cyclical: “After a season of hard cold and the turning/of the night and of the year and of years.” The poem’s power lies in being neither affirmation of renewal nor lamentation. The passage of time is sustained in memory and also sustains memory and the very possibility of return. Grasped through this human time the season is felt not as cycle but as the paradoxical simultaneity of birth (the “white blossoms” that “open,/in their own hour naked and luminous”) and a time older than time in the blossoms’ “ancient fragrance.” It is only in the sharpened attitude toward his own mortality, and as his own longevity measures what has passed, that the blossoms’ transitory and ephemeral scent puts him in contact with the vast expanse of nonhuman time. The bloc of percepts-and-affects in these few lines exceeds any single emotional label, no less complex than the emotional knot of resentment, melancholy, hubris, and expectation in Shakespeare’s sonnet. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, moved by recollections of his earliest acquaintance with Sonnet 18, devotes an essay to Shakespeare’s sonnets in Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung. Read four centuries after they were written, the sonnets convey a sense of a world that is radically distinct from our own. Gumbrecht calls this sense the atmosphere embodied in the poems. 392

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As a matter of principle, texts and artifacts soak up the atmosphere of their times. In both aesthetic and historical terms, however, everything depends on the degree to which texts absorb them and the intensity with which acts of reading and reciting make these moods present again. (40) As a critic, Gumbrecht moves adeptly between the vitalist and the hermeneutic dimensions of literary experience. For he teases out the atmosphere of the sonnets by identifying the “levels of significance” by which “separate phenomenal spheres,” variously emphasized “like different instruments in an orchestra,” body forth the “climates and moods” specific to Shakespeare’s world. There are four such layers in his interpretation. The universe and stars: “But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,/ And, constant stars, in them I read . . .”; “For nothing this wide universe I call,/ Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.” Seasons, weather: “So are you to my thoughts as food to life,/ Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground”; “That time of year thou mayst in me behold/ When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold.” Space, distance, proximity: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,/ So do minutes hasten to their end”; “For nimble thought can jump both sea and land/ As soon as think the place where he would be.” Physical presence of others: “That use is not forbidden usury/ Which happies those that pay the willing loan”; “How can my Muse want subject to invent/ While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse./ Thine own sweet argument . . .?” The examples are Gumbrecht’s, taken from Sonnets 14, 109, 75, 73, 60, 44, 6, 38, respectively. Each of his interpretive categories marks one of the “palpable register[s] of world, atmosphere and mood” (44) operating and woven together in the sonnets. He leaves tacit the orchestration discernable in Sonnet 18: “the darling buds of May,” “the eye of heaven shines,” “thy eternal summer,” “Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade.” Atmosphere places mood on a collective rather than individual plane. It suggests a period feeling or collective state-of-mind. Atmosphere is palpable on more intimate levels in everyday life, too, as when visiting a family or couple one feels the mood of their household, its vibe, its background tones. For Gumbrecht the set of predispositions and expressive possibilities that condition poetic utterance is an atmosphere in the sense of the historical precondition of specific feelings. It is the feeling from which feelings emerge. I put it that way because there are several such attempts among the philosophers and theorists I have discussed to understand specific emotions as arising from an underlying tonality or affective base, like the social structure of feeling in Aristotle or the base mood of Angst in Heidegger. Poetic affects arise from the “illusion of life” or “pattern of sentience,” for Langer. Temperament or sensibility have been given a similar role. “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads,” writes Emerson in the essay “Experience.” It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. . . . The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. (243–44) In Heidegger’s conception, by contrast, mood (Stimmung) is not subjective distortion but rather the attunement of being-in-the-world. Inconsistencies abound. Affect eludes fixed terminologies. It’s why we have poetry.

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Notes 1 The poem is available in full at the Poetry Foundation website, www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/52192/at-the-fishhouses (accessed 8 August 2021). 2 The poem is available in full at the Merwin Conservancy website, https://merwinconservancy. org/2018/05/the-veil-of-may-by-ws-merwin/ (accessed 8 August 2021). 3 Available in full at The Poetry Foundation website, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ browse?contentId=41100 (accessed 8 August 2021).

Works Cited Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. Translated by H. C. Lawson-Tancred, Penguin Books, 2004 [1991]. Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems, Prose, and Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, The Library of America, 2008. Brenkman, John. Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect. U of Chicago P, 2020. Deleuze, Gilles. Frances Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith, U of Minnesota P, 2003. ———, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchel, Columbia UP, 1994. Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009 [1957]. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First and Second Series. Vintage Books/The Library of America, 1990. Fish, Stanley. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.” New Literary History, vol. 2, 1970, pp. 123–162. ———. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost.” 2nd ed., Harvard UP, 1997. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton UP, 2000 [1957]. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature. Translated by Erik Butler, Stanford UP, 2012. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford UP, 1974. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, 1962. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge UP, 2000. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Luhmann, Niklas. Art as Social System. Translated by Eva M. Knodt, Stanford UP, 2000. Merwin, W. S. The Pupil. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans, Cambridge UP, 1996. Starr, G. Gabrielle. Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. MIT Press, 2013.

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33 PROSE FICTION Bartosz Stopel

Abstract: The chapter explores prominent work on reader emotions as relevant to prose fiction, paying particular attention to the role of simulation with regard to three key components of fiction: social worlds, narrators and characters, and the projection of story outcomes. Simulation is understood as modeling and predicting otherwise inaccessible data and in the case of fiction this mostly means human interaction and other minds. The first section is devoted to the distinction into fiction and artifact emotions as narratives simulate and imitate real-life human actions (fiction) and at the same time are carefully designed to produce given effects (artifact). The other two sections cover the affective dimension of discourse, the way of presenting a story. The first one discusses prose fiction as a complex act of communication where readers simulate and respond to various entities involved (implied authors, non-personified narrators), along with corresponding emotional attitudes associated with their narrative functions. The last section covers plotting, the organization and unfolding of story events in the process of reading, in conjunction with the three basic plot emotions: suspense, curiosity, and surprise. Simulation is crucial here, too, as readers constantly project and respond to possible story outcomes or causes.

Prose fiction is perhaps the most widely read and accessible literary form. Surely, many would think of it first upon hearing the word “literature” and, consequently, nowadays it may be seen as a literary prototype. One distinct feature of prose fiction that makes it relatively easy to enjoy is that it offers insights into complex social worlds and character minds, which both provide us with a wide array of emotional responses. But we don’t only respond to the contents of stories. We tend to experience powerful feelings in reaction to the other distinguishing feature of prose fiction, the highly complex manipulation of discourse, the way that a story is delivered to us by the narrator. Outlining how readers respond emotionally to fictional worlds and to ways of presenting them is the topic of this chapter.

Fiction and Design When we talk about fictional qualities of stories, we typically mean that they are not real, that they are created. It is certainly true that fiction is a creation. It is designed and structured in specific ways, but at the same time fictional worlds are largely representations of real worlds of human interactions. Both qualities affect our emotional reactions to prose fiction. DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-39

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The feelings we have about the contents of fictional worlds are called fiction emotions (Tan) and arise in reaction to characters, events and settings. Assuming that stories are fundamentally accounts of characters pursuing goals, it comes as no surprise that studies of fiction emotions tend to prioritize responses to characters embedded in social worlds. In a number of studies, Keith Oatley and others defend the idea that the very function of fiction is simulation of social worlds (see Oatley, “Why Fiction” and “Fiction: Simulation” and Mar and Oatley). Generally speaking, simulation offers a model and some degree of information about a complex system whose behavior it predicts when direct access is unavailable. Thus, by giving us opportunity to attach to characters and to witness their actions, prose fiction offers to simulate real human behavior and social worlds in ways that may not be accessible in real life. However, we don’t merely witness fictional stories. We actively simulate and co-create the specifics of fictional worlds. We respond to them emotionally when we ourselves simulate how characters feel at a given moment or assess their overall situation compared to their goals. We feel for and with characters because of the instinctive human capacity for empathy: imagining the feelings of others. These feelings are often called empathetic emotions (Tan) and their most fundamental role is to establish positive responses to major characters: sympathy, admiration, or compassion. They arise in response to how we see ourselves in comparison to characters and their concerns. If we perceive a character as more capable and powerful than us, we will respond with admiration. Conversely, we feel compassion when we see them as weaker or in a difficult position. Sympathy marks positive feelings of rooting for a character without feeling inferior or superior. The list of character-centered emotions is clearly longer and involves antipathetic response of disdain, disgust, hatred or schadenfreude and a wide spectrum of positive responses (Plantinga 69). Since simulation of fiction gives us insight into social worlds and human interactions, it is often claimed it fosters our empathy and sympathetic reactions to others. A number of scholars point to a meaningful link between exposure to fiction and enhanced empathy and pro-social behavior (Oatley and Djikic; Oatley, Such Stuff; Oatley, Passionate; Kidd and Castano; Keen, Empathy; Robinson). The so-called sentimental education (Robinson) stresses how emotional experiences of literature encourage us to reflect on the actions and choices of characters, clarifying understanding of our own emotions, leading to insights involving a story’s ethical implications, modifying or forming new beliefs. Although the idea that literature cultivates sensibility and fosters empathy by offering structured emotional experiences goes back to ancient times, it is far from uncontroversial. In fact, it is easy to point out one would never observe increased empathy in many readers. Common readers may take up a novel for reasons very different than wanting to relish complex social worlds and human interactions. Stories can also induce harmful, anti-social or self-indulgent experiences. It would also be hard to prove that literary scholars are more empathic than a number of other professions that do not necessarily involve avid fiction reading. Empirical studies of such matters are not unproblematic and although they suggest prose fiction enhances empathy, the discussion is far from concluded (see Chapter 7 of Hogan, Literature). Apart from characters, story structures themselves are a crucial source of fictional emotions, especially that most genres follow the narrative pattern of rising emotional tension in response to characters facing obstacles in pursuit of their goals up to a resolution and emotional relief. These goals are typically tied to basic human needs and emotions and their particular configurations lead to emergence of specific genres, each of which aims to elicit a given body of emotions (Hogan, Affective). For instance, Aristotle famously listed pity and fear as emotions central to tragedy. An obvious case is mirth and comedy (Hogan, Literature, 106–117). 396

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Heroic stories expound pride and anger and romantic ones celebrate feelings of sexual desire and attachment. Revenge and crime stories explore anger and disgust (though it is not unusual for them to focus on jealousy, humiliation, guilt, or grief; see Hogan, Affective, for an overview of the preceding) while disgust combined with fear gives rise to horror (Carroll, Philosophy). Clearly, both categories and corresponding emotions can mix almost freely, but typically any narrative will have a core body of coherent emotions it aims to evoke. The emotional role of the setting is chiefly to induce mood (Hogan, Literature, 133–139), which is a low-intensity, long-lasting emotional state that prepares readers for the emergence of more specific short-term emotions. For example, Dickens’ Bleak House opens with an almost two-page-long description of November fog, mud, and gloom in nineteenth-century London. This clearly establishes a dark, negatively charged and disturbing mood and sets readers to expect more specific, localized and more intense darker emotions as the story develops. However realistic fictional stories may be, they are never mere imitation of reality, for that would entail chaotic structure, randomness and a lack of focus or theme. Instead, fictional stories maintain an illusion of reality, but at the same time they are carefully designed, structured and selected, so as to have proper form and coherence that assure producing intended emotional and cognitive effects. Apart from being fictions, they are artifacts that elicit artifact emotions. Probably the first one to notice this in the Western tradition was Aristotle with his influential theory of mimesis stating that actions in a narrative mirror real life, though at the same time they should have “an air of design” (see also Hogan, On Interpretation, 163–194). Artifact emotions are triggered by the sense that a story is designed: delight in its style, amazement at the complexity or originality of the narrative structure, surprise at formal experiments (e.g., metafiction), admiration of its overall excellence, or, conversely, disappointment with its predictability or annoyance with unrealistic plot twists. What counts as fiction may slip into artefact and correspondingly trigger different emotions, either positive or negative. For example, we may experience a character as an artificial construct when they feel like a device to propel the plot, rather than a fictional representation of a human. Depending on the overall context of the work, this may be a failed approach to fiction eliciting disappointment or a bold, successful formal experiment that produces amazement and ironic distance to the story. Settings may become more artefactual when we notice they serve a symbolic or a structural feature, such as contrast, or add to the theme of a story (which is the case of Dickens’ Bleak House). Some scholars maintain that our responses to fictional and artifactual qualities differ in significance. Carroll influentially claims that even though fictional emotions may be important to understand some aspects of a story, as when we are supposed to hate a certain character or otherwise find it unintelligible (“Art, Narrative,” 192), their function is to draw our attention to the formal, artistic features. In other words, they serve a secondary role of leading to recognize and appreciate a literary narrative as an artefact. This recognition, according to Carroll, does not really involve emotional experience, but a more intellectual sizing-up (“Art Appreciation”). Similar views have been expressed by a prominent philosopher of literature, Peter Lamarque, who claims one feels emotions when in a reading mode highlighting fictional content of a story, but when turning attention to a story as a work of art, to what it really is, one only identifies certain properties: “what its aims are, what themes it explores, and how successful it is at an artistic or aesthetic level.” One recognizes emotions expressed by the text, in an intellectual manner, but one either does not feel them or feeling them is irrelevant to understanding and evaluating the work. Numerous arguments have been voiced against this view (Levinson; Feagin; Stopel, “Aesthetic”; Stopel, From Mind to Text). However, Lamarque’s important distinction into two reading 397

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modes alludes to another crucial quality of fiction: being an act of communication with various types of readers and authors simultaneously involved, which I will explore in the next section. Philosophical work that underestimates emotional response to fictions is vehemently opposed by Jenefer Robinson. Robinson agrees with Carroll that ordinary emotional reactions direct our attention to and help us grasp significant elements of stories. But her claims go further than this. She insists understanding stories, specifically realist novels, requires understanding fictional characters as if they were actual people and this is impossible without responding to them emotionally (Robinson, “Response”). If we didn’t feel sad at Jay Gatsby’s tragic fate, didn’t sympathize with Huck Finn’s and Jim’s bonding, didn’t feel indignation at Roger Chillingworth’s cruelty, we would misunderstand the stories they are part of. Interestingly, Robinson is wary of extending her observations beyond realist fiction, but since fictional characters are almost never disconnected from human behavior, this proviso feels too strict. Robinson also devotes substantial space to explore the relation between fictional and artefactual aspects of novels. Whereas fictional content elicits ordinary, garden-variety emotions that we feel in everyday life, formal qualities modulate, guide and manage them, allowing readers to cope with emotional excess or difficult feelings, arousing pleasurable reactions. Of course, readers often respond inappropriately to fictions and this may be either because the author failed to execute their intentions or because the reader failed to recognize them. In the former case, and contra Robinson, improper response does not always entail misunderstanding. For example, one may understand the (generally successful) intention to elicit compassion for Uncle Tom, but find the characterization too sentimental and respond negatively. In the latter case, the reader may not be open or trained to recognize the proper reaction, but this may also be due to mismatched personal experience. Our responses are partly functions of emotional memories tied to specific evets of our lives and, consequently, responses of an individual to the same story may differ over time, depending on the precise content of these memories. Some cases would fall in between. For example, an author of a relatively old text may have carried out their intentions successfully for the target audience, but because of time and culture difference, the response may be inaccessible to modern readers, however trained.

Narration Prose fiction is not only a designed simulation of social worlds but also an act of communication. In narratology, the discipline devoted to the study of stories and storytelling, one typically talks about what is communicated (the fictional content) and how it is communicated (the discourse). Discourse can be further subdivided into narration, the style of telling the story by a narrator, and plotting, the actual organization and unfolding of events that may produce various discrepancies in the chronology of the story and manipulate our judgment of characters. I will focus on narration in this section and then proceed to plot in the final part. Thinking of prose fiction as an act of reporting a story obviously prioritizes transmission of information rather than elicitation of emotion. It is more cognitive than affective and almost all of the rich and vast research in this area focuses on the former. However, cognition is not a cold, disembodied, intellectual process. It is constantly affected by emotion and anytime we draw inferences, evaluate character actions, simulate story outcomes or interpret possible meanings while reading, we are guided by emotion. Apart from simulating the content of the story, we also simulate the act of communication where a number of virtual participants are attributed basic qualities of the human mind, including emotion. For example, when we read a story narrated by a non-personified narrator, we still simulate the narrator as having human intellectual and emotional capacities. 398

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Intuitively, it is clear that literary communication involves real authors, real readers, narrators and characters. In reality, it is much more complex. Take the famous opening sentence of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. These words are uttered by the personified narrator and the protagonist of the story, Holden Caulfield, but who is he speaking to? Although it’s tempting to say he speaks to each real reader, none of them could have been the actual addressees of Holden, a fictional character conceived of in the USA in the 1940s. It is clear later on that he does not report it to any other character, either. The same applies to the actual author. Surely, Salinger wrote his novel for real readers, but it is impossible that he was able to address it to an astonishing number of diverse individuals in different times and places. A basic model of narrative communication that captures these nuances involves at least three discursive levels: Real author [Implied author[Narrator Narratee] Implied Reader] Real Reader The above suggests that in between the two flesh-and-blood humans involved in narrative communication, the real author and the real reader, further participants that are constructed or simulated can be distinguished. Specifically, while reading, we simulate two further entities that correspond with real readers and authors, but which are controlled by the textual material. Readers routinely identify or take up a role that is implied by the text, which suggests how to properly respond to it. At the same time, largely based on stylistic or ideological features of a text, they project an implied author-like persona that is not necessarily entirely equivalent to the real author. Finally, the story is told by a narrator, who tends to be separate from the implied author, but the narrator’s audience consists of another simulated entity, the narratee. For example, the real author, Salinger must have had in mind a body of knowledge and skills shared by real readers which would allow them to properly grasp the meaning, themes, patterns and structures of the story, as opposed to responding to it in a highly personal manner that any real reader could be prone to. This proper grasp of the story is the work of real readers adopting the attitude of the implied readers who can properly identify possible meanings of works owing to specific type of attention to the text and inference-making. In a parallel fashion, real readers when identifying the implied reader, simulate an implied author, a persona constructed mostly on the basis of the story itself, rather than relying on biographical evidence. Correspondingly, Holden tells his story to another entity existing on his own level of discourse, the non-personified narratee. To elaborate on the differences between implied and real readers, consider some symbolic patterns in Catcher in the Rye. In recounting his story, Holden frequently alludes to his red hunting hat, doubtlessly symbolic of his struggles with a sense of alienation from society. Yet, the narrator never explicitly speaks of this meaning and may not fully realize it. Correspondingly, the narratee Holden has in mind is not necessarily supposed to recognize the symbolic meaning. But as soon as any real reader takes up the attitude of an implied reader who knows that this is one of the ways in which authors routinely introduce symbols, its significance becomes clearer. Finally, real readers may simulate and respond to the hat in their own personal ways or miss its meaning altogether if they do not adopt the implied reader attitude. 399

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Various reader emotions are tied to each component of the model. The most obvious case are the idiosyncratic and individualized emotions of the real reader who draws from personal experiences and memories. The implied reader is more of a textual property or a “receptive attitude” (see Hogan, Narrative Discourse) taken up by real readers who try to identify broader aesthetic intentions of the author. As mentioned in the previous section, there is some debate whether emotional processing is important for this attitude or that perhaps comprehension of the text’s properties is enough. Hogan notes that the implied reader mode involves emotional response insofar as it is provided by the actual reader’s experiences (Narrative, 55). For example, one could perhaps sympathize with some of Holden’s struggles if one endured a period of adolescent angst, memories of which are activated upon reading about it. However, Hogan argues that this emotional role is optional and concludes that the implied reader may be construed minimally as someone who understands what the text expresses without necessarily feeling it. As a result, he introduces a subtype of an implied reader who “feels the appropriate emotions in response to the work” (Narrative, 57), calling it sahṛdaya, following Sanskrit poetic theory. Most of the fictional emotions covered in the previous section fall under the implied reader category, for they are the intended emotional experiences evoked by appropriate attention and a receptive attitude toward the story. How we respond emotionally to narrators largely depends on the extent to which they are personified. If the narrator is a character in a story, like Holden, many of our emotional responses will be empathic in nature mirroring those that we have toward any other character. However, these are not strictly in response to the narrator’s defining function, the control over the access to the story. They also leave open the issue of responding to a non-personified narrator who exists outside of the storyworld. Two of the most important traits of a narrator with bearing on emotional response are reliability and forthcomingness (the amount of information provided to readers at a given moment). Consequently, the key emotional responses will be trust/distrust and acquiescence/ restiveness (Hogan, Literature, 159–164), though one could think of frustration, joy, curiosity or the state of flow: compare Tobin’s discussion of frustration, seduction and delight in response to narrators (234–270). Catcher in the Rye’s opening words already hint at these responses and create a certain tension felt throughout the whole novel. On the one hand, Holden may be said to be reliable and build trust by being open, natural, casual and straightforward. On the other hand, he may be seen as unforthcoming and unreliable by deliberately refusing to share the basic information about himself. Which of the two may be a more appropriate response depends on the evaluation of the upcoming events in the implied reader mode, but overall Holden is highly judgmental and opinionated as a narrator, leading to possible and localized feelings of frustration and distrust. In one of the more ambiguous passages of the novel, he visits the teacher who he feels closest to and values for being open, natural and unconventional, staying for a sleepover. At night, he is woken by the teacher touching his forehead. Holden understandably becomes agitated and quickly leaves, yet it’s not entirely clear how to understand what happened. At first, he’s (as usual) rash at interpreting the act as sexual harassment fueled by his own obsession with homosexuality, but later disavows his quick judgment. Overall, Holden’s narration is ambiguous and potentially unreliable as he often produces emotionally charged, subjective commentaries brimming with anger and disgust that may not always parallel the responses of readers to the events he reports. One may wonder to what extent the very events of the whole novel are faithfully represented. The status of a non-personified narrator is elegantly addressed by the simulation theory: typically we still simulate the narrator as possessing at least some basic human cognitive and 400

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emotional architecture. We assume they are going to give us information the way humans do, but that they could also have various emotional attitudes to the story. Thus apart from reliability and forthcomingness one can think of a plethora of narrator’s emotional attitudes that need not be exclusive to personified narrators and which will produce various responses. Even a non-personified narrator may be naïve, boastful, superior, ironic, or playful, but the specific extent to which these attitudes intersect with reliability and forthcomingness or affect empathic responses to characters remains an area to be studied. Note that all emotional reactions tied to the defining functions of narrators are not empathic. In her research on surprise in narratives, Vera Tobin adds further emotional reactions one may have involving narrative unreliability. For example, upon discovering that a narrator is unreliable, one may feel ashamed of one’s earlier naïve reading (202–234). Some forms of unreliability may intersect with the fiction/artifact distinction (234–270) as when the story’s status as an artifact is highlighted and then add further reactions of heightened surprise or delight in structural paradoxes (see Hogan’s discussion of flaunted and occluded narratorial artificiality [Hogan, How Authors’, 161–183]). The model of narrative communication can be further refined by adding another, optional discursive level below the narrator, that of a focalizer. Focalizer is the character whose perspective and experiences are at the center of the narrator’s attention. If a story contains a focalizer, then focalization is either internal, where the narrator reports their feelings and thoughts (as in the case of Holden: he is both the narrator and the focalizer), or external, where the readers are only given external facts about the focalizer’s behavior (as is typical in films). Just like narration, focalization is primarily significant in terms of access to information (epistemic), but one can also talk about affective focalization (Hogan, Narrative, 47–53): narrators may restrict access to characters based on interest and preference, thus they will be emotionally motivated. Since personified narrators are typically focalizers, this is most interesting for non-personified narrators. Such a narrator, spontaneously simulated by readers, will have a mind with human cognitive and emotional capacities. Emotion will then be used by such a narrator to select, reveal or conceal information about characters. One can consider a story with a number of internal focalizers where an omniscient non-personified narrator does not have epistemic limits on focalization, but does not share information about characters evenly (Hogan, Narrative, 50). This indicates a sense of preference based on interest, thus affectively motivated restriction on information. Such preference may not only manipulate readers’ emotions, but also attempt to shape their ethical or political attitudes. Thinking of prose fiction as an act of communication has some consequences for emotional learning mentioned in the previous section. Robinson discusses how real readers, after simulating implied authors, should reconstruct implied readers so as to identify intended and appropriate emotions (Deeper, 178–194). Only then can they actually train their empathy and learn emotionally from a story, for example by recognizing one should feel compassion for Uncle Tom or admiration for Atticus Finch. Compare Noël Carroll’s work on “criterial prefocusing,” a strategy through which fiction enables us to clarify, calibrate, but also to change our personal emotional reactions against the backdrop of cultural norms (“Literature”). Since real readers always bring their own personalities and experiences to their readings, this suggests a potential for diversity when constructing implied authors and readers who may only share rather general and rough similarities across a range of real readers attending to the same story. On the other hand, taking the implied reader stance requires some openness and accumulating significant amount of experiences. This means the intended emotional learning may not take place when one is not ready for it and, alternatively, it may take various forms when attending to the same story at different stages of our lives. 401

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Plot Apart from control and restriction of story information associated with the workings of a narrator, the other crucial function of discourse is presenting and ordering the events that make up the story, or plotting. Unfolding events affords another set of distinct emotional reactions that stem from the dynamic and temporal nature of plots, as opposed to a static, chronological abstraction of the events presented, or the story. Typically, the three most crucial plot emotions are identified as suspense, curiosity and surprise (Sternberg). In their original formulation by Sternberg and others (Bordwell, Brewer and Lichtenstein), the first two arise as a result of crucial narrative information missing at any given moment of reading: we either do not know exactly what will happen or why something happened. Suspense is elicited by uncertainty about what the plot brings next and curiosity is tied to wondering what led to a certain event. Surprise means breaching whatever expectations involving the two that readers have. Simulation is relevant here as readers routinely imagine the past and future of a story they read and respond to these simulations emotionally. On the one hand, plot emotions arise because of the temporal restrictions on the narrative information we get at given moment, as the whole point of telling a story is to stretch it in time and delay the revelation of crucial content. On the other hand, we feel them because while reading we always simulate, consciously or not, a number of possible story outcomes or possible causes of the events presented to us (compare Carroll, Philosophy for erotetic narration). Consequently, one could say the main function of plotting is to present events in a way that piques our interest and draws us into the story so that we imagine possible scenarios of the narrative future and past, and then to breach these expectations, constantly evoking the three basic plot emotions. Take the opening sentence of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which foregrounds both suspense and curiosity: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” Curiosity would clearly be tied to the circumstances leading to Bunny’s death, the character’s identity and the narrator’s (and possibly their acquaintances’) potential involvement in it, while suspense would be triggered by wondering what the gravity of the situation entails and how the characters will deal with it. Compare the famous opening sentence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” In these few words, and with a complex use of flashback and flashforward, it is evident how skillfully Marquez orchestrates all three plot emotions. The narrator presents two events involving various degrees of suspense directed at the possible unfolding of the story. First, whether the colonel is going to be killed in the future, and second, what is going to happen now with and meant by the discovery of ice. The passage also attempts to elicit curiosity as to what led the colonel to face the firing squad and why it made him think of that distant afternoon. Although whatever answers to these questions readers may have explored after just one sentence, it is perhaps too early to have these expectations subverted, but the striking anachrony and the juxtaposition of two events: execution by a firing squad and a family afternoon when ice is discovered may already be fairly surprising. Both examples also hint at another important operation of plotting: control over our fictional emotions, or those pertaining to the storyworld. Simply put, our feelings about characters and actions depend on the amount and ordering of information about the fictional world that is unveiled to us at any given time and what expectations we may have about them, before they become solidified after we finish the story. In this sense, the function of plotting mirrors that of the narrator. 402

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Because our basic experience of stories is marked by constant projections into narrative future and past, many scholars see plot emotions as essential or even defining of storytelling or narrativity itself. Suzanne Keen calls them “core narrative affects” (Keen, Narrative, 152–155). For Sternberg, what makes a narrative is precisely such an organization of events that constantly attempts to elicit suspense, curiosity, and surprise. Whereas manipulation of the three emotions may indeed be central to fictional narratives, it may be too strict of a criterion for all of narrativity. For example, a lot of ordinary everyday conversational storytelling may not focus on them at all. If I report how my holiday went to a friend, I may be principally motivated by conveying information and experiences or building attachment in a narrative framework, rather than manipulating the core narrative affects. Although the three plot emotions have merited the most scholarly attention, it is difficult to deny the importance of other feelings that arise as a result of plotting, such as anticipation, startle (Plantinga), relief, disappointment or care (Hogan, Literature). Their role has not been studied in as much detail so far. Despite what many see as the fundamental role of the three plot emotions for experiencing narratives, studying them is fraught with a number of problems. Surprise appears to be radically different than the other two. It is also clear one may feel suspense about unrevealed past events and curiosity about the future (Hogan, Literature, 155–156). Moreover, suspense seems to arise when a story suggests an outcome we would not prefer is probable (Hogan, Literature, 157), whereas curiosity has little to do with preferred outcomes, but with a general interest as to what or why something happens. In other words, the difference between the two emotions is not a matter of temporal direction, but of perception of potential outcomes. Regarding the role of outcomes, Hogan proposes to acknowledge the importance of an even more fundamental attitude than suspense: care, which he defines as simulation of both preferred and aversive outcomes without a clear sense of which one is more probable and which precedes suspense as a basic motivation for reading. The idea of suspense as a global plot emotion (Plantinga; Brewer and Lichtenstein) is sometimes rejected and the term is used only for localized incidents in a narrative where emergence of aversive outcomes is strongly suggested (Carroll, Philosophy). For example, In The Scarlet Letter, when Hester learns of the threat of losing her daughter, this is a localized suspenseful moment in which there is a relatively strong risk of an aversive outcome. In contrast, Poe’s short story The Pit and the Pendulum may be one of the rare cases where suspense in the preceding sense is a global emotion stretching over the whole story. The aversive outcome, the imminent death of the narrator, is suggested in the story’s opening lines and the rest consists of shorter sequences, separated by the narrator fainting, where various scenarios of looming death in the dungeon are strongly implied. In most narratives, however, such highly suspenseful sequences are not necessarily global. In Catcher in the Rye, suspense seems to be scattered across the story during several important events, such as when Holden wakes up at his teacher’s house or when he’s assaulted after his unsuccessful tryst with a sex worker. Overall, however, most of the narrative does not seem to suggest highly aversive outcomes are imminent. In fact, the story begins right after such an outcome: Holden flunking most of his classes. At this point, his goals and obstacles are not clearly defined and, consequently, curiosity or care seem better candidates for the global attitudes that propel us to read the novel. The significance of plot emotions led some scholars to claim they are in fact varieties of one global overarching affect that serves as a basic motivation for engaging in a narrative. Tan calls it interest and ascribes it to our desire for a preferred outcome of a story, and a related concept, called narrative tension, can be found in Baroni (see also Kafalenos). Whereas it is justified to study interest in relation to suspense, curiosity and surprise, some question whether it can be genuinely called an emotion or argue that it is a vague concept (Plantinga and Tan). Even if 403

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interest may be a problematic candidate for a global emotion, this does not preclude the study of mechanisms responsible for piquing readerly interest. For example, depending on other factors, interest may be triggered and sustained by both novelty and predictability. Interest may also be instrumental, as when it is elicited by our empathic engagement with a character and their goals or intrinsic when some story outcomes or sequences are interesting in themselves (e.g., in a series of comical scenes) (Hogan, Literature, 156–159). Regardless of some of the conceptual issues involving plot emotions, their importance has managed to spawn a sizable amount of growing research focused on more specific issues. One such case is the phenomenon known as the paradox of suspense. If one of the core plot emotions involves uncertainty of what happens, how is it possible to feel it upon rereading? Some scholars hold that when we reread, we still simulate and analyze possible short-term outcomes independently of our long-term knowledge (Hogan, Literature, 159). A related claim is that imagining aversive outcomes itself is enough to build suspense (Carroll, “The Paradox”). Some think we empathize with characters who themselves feel uncertain, though other answers have been suggested, too (Lehne and Koelsch). Resolution of tension or patterns of suspense build-up and emotional release certainly play a role in experiencing stories aesthetically (Lehne and Koelsch). Surprise is often listed as playing an even more fundamental aesthetic role in the experience of fiction and art in general. A certain amount of unpredictability of a story that leads to tracing and identifying unusual narrative patterns is intrinsically rewarding and accompanied by feelings of heightened surprise. On the other hand, surprise deemed most desirable from a narrative point of view cannot be entirely unpredictable or random, leading some scholars to identify the narrative centrality of a wellmade surprise (Tobin), that is, a type of surprise where upon a revelation of crucial, unpredictable content one is prone to say “why didn’t I see that coming? It makes perfect sense,” retrospectively, even though the story was successful in mystifying it. A story outcome that is post-dictable, rather than predictable.

Conclusion The concept of simulation is instrumental in explaining the wide array of emotional reactions to both contents of prose fiction and to its discourse. It is most evident in response to storyworlds, insofar as stories themselves are simulations of social worlds and human behavior and rich sources of emotional experiences. More inconspicuously, but equally importantly, simulation enters elements of narrative discourse, plot and narration, as when readers project event outcomes and causes, reacting to them emotionally, or when they imagine narrators as having the emotional and cognitive qualities of human minds, even if they are not personified. Since discourse appears to be a less obvious candidate for eliciting emotions, most existing studies have focused on emotional response to fictional content. Extensive investigation of the affective qualities of discourse remains a topic for future research.

Works Cited Baroni, Raphaël. La Tension Narrative: Suspense, Curiosité et Surprise. Editions Du Seuil, 2007. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Routledge, 1985. Brewer, William F., and Edward H. Lichtenstein. “Stories Are to Entertain: A Structural-Affect Theory of Stories.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 6, nos. 5–6, 1982, pp. 473–486, doi:10.1016/0378-2166(82)90021-2. Carroll, Noël. “Art Appreciation.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 50, no. 4, 2016, pp. 1–14. ———. “Art, Narrative and Emotion.” Emotion and the Arts, edited by Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, Oxford UP, 1997.

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Prose Fiction ———. “Literature, the Emotions, and Learning.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–18, doi:10.1353/phl.2020.0000. ———. “The Paradox of Suspense.” Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, edited by Peter Vorderer et al., Routledge, 1996. ———. Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1989. Feagin, Susan. “Giving Emotions Their Due.” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 50, no. 1, 2010, pp. 89–99. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. U of Nebraska P, 2011. ———. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge UP, 2013. ———. Literature and Emotion. Routledge, an Imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. ———. Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art. Ohio State UP, 2013. ———. On Interpretation Meaning and Inference in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. U of Georgia P, 1996. Kafalenos, E. “Emotions Induced by Narratives.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 2, 2008, pp. 377–384, doi:10.1215/03335372-2007-030. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2007. ———. Narrative Form. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Kidd, David Comer, and Emanuele Castano. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science, vol. 342, no. 6156, 2013, pp. 377–380. Lamarque, Peter. “Narrative and Emotion: On Not Getting Too Carried Away,” online article https:// instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com/2019/12/10/peter-lamarque-narrative-and-emotion-on-notgetting-too-carried-away/ 2019. Lehne, Moritz, and Stefan Koelsch. “Tension—Resolution Patterns as a Key Element of Aesthetic Experience: Psychological Principles and Underlying Brain Mechanisms.” Art, Aesthetics, and the Brain, 2015, pp. 285–302, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199670000.003.0014. ———. “Toward a General Psychological Model of Tension and Suspense.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 6, 2015, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00079. Levinson, Jerrold. “Toward an Adequate Conception of Aesthetic Experience.” Aesthetic Pursuits: Essays in Philosophy of Art. Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 28–47. Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 3, no. 3, 2008, pp. 173–192, doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Penguin, 2014. Oatley, Keith. “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, no. 8, 2016, pp. 618–628, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.06.002. ———. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories. Oxford UP, 2012. ———. Such Stuff as Dreams. Wiley, 2011, doi:10.1002/9781119970910. ———. “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 3, no. 2, 1999, pp. 101–117, doi:10.1037/1089-2680.3.2.101. ———, and Maja Djikic. “Psychology of Narrative Art.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 161–168, doi:10.1037/gpr0000113. Plantinga, Carl R. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. U of California P, 2009. ———, and Ed Tan. “Is an Overarching Theory of Affect in Film Viewing Possible?” Journal of Moving Images Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007. Robinson, Jenefer. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Clarendon Press, 2005. ———. “Response to Critics.” Debates in Aesthetics, vol. 14, no. 1, 2019, pp. 95–121. Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Penguin, 2010. Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Stopel, Bartosz. “Aesthetic Appreciation and the Dependence Between Deep and Surface Interpretation.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 14, no. 1, 2020, pp. 94–119, doi:10.1515/jlt-2020-0006. Stopel, Bartosz. From Mind to Text: Continuities and Breaks Between Cognitive, Aesthetic and Textualist Approaches to Literature. Routledge, 2017. Tan, Ed S. Emotion and Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Erlbaum, 1996. Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. Vintage, 2011. Tobin, Vera. Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot. Harvard UP, 2018.

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PART 6

Literary Examples

34 GEOFFREY CHAUCER Reading with Feeling Stephanie Downes

Abstract: This chapter considers the long reputation of medieval English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400), as a writer with privileged insight into human emotions. It explores how attending to Chaucerian reception alongside critical analysis of Chaucer’s writing can help to illuminate the complex, interrelated histories of affect and emotion in the study of premodern literature. The first half of the chapter focuses on the development of new perspectives on affect and emotion in Chaucer studies; in particular, it addresses the influence of theories of affect, of the mind and cognition, and the history of emotions over the past decade. The second part of the chapter offers an interpretation of the relationship between affects, emotions, and material texts in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.”

Medieval English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400), has long been received as a writer with privileged insight into human emotions. In his own time Chaucer was pressed into service of the God of Love by his contemporaries and fellow poets, including Thomas Usk, John Gower, and Eustache Deschamps. Writing was the essential act of Chaucer’s service; Venus herself claims Chaucer as “mi disciple and mi poete” in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (lines 1387–90). This was in part a reputation of Chaucer’s own making. In the famous tragedy, Troilus and Criseyde, the poet-narrator writes of serving Love’s servants (i.e., mortal lovers): “I, that God of Loves servantz serve” (Book 1, line 15).1 Chaucer’s earliest reputation thus firmly associated his work with the theme of love, and with two of the most powerfully affective literary genres: romance and tragedy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Chaucerian readers and critics moved away from this appreciation of Chaucer as a poet of love. Instead, they described a writer of comedy, a careful observer of human “Inclinations,” and a craftsman of character and temperament. Chaucer’s writing provoked laughter, disgust, and admiration in equal measure. As John Dryden wrote famously in 1700 of the cast of pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Here Is God’s Plenty”: he [Chaucer] has taken into the Compass of his Canterbury Tales the various Manners and Humours (as we now call them) of the whole English Nation, in his Age. Not a single Character has escap’d him. All his Pilgrims are severally distinguished

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-41

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from each other; and not only in their Inclinations, but in their very Phisiognomies and Persons. (Vol. II) By the nineteenth century, a combination of “realism and the power to inspire sentiment were seen as Chaucer’s great qualities” (Saunders 2001, 7). For nineteenth-century critics, the capacity of Chaucer’s writing both to represent and to elicit strong feeling also included the feeling of pleasure that comes from the aesthetic appreciation of literature. In 1812, George Crabbe wrote of the Tales, “they excite our feelings [. . .] with powerful appeals to the heart and affections” (274). William Hazlitt, in his 1818 Lectures on the English Poets, suggests that “readers of Chaucer’s poetry feel more nearly what the persons he describes must have felt, than perhaps those of any other poet” (45). And Samuel Taylor Coleridge declares: I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. [. . .] How exquisitely tender he is, and how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is remarkable in Shakespeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by act of imagination and metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. (Coburn 466; quoted in Trigg 54) Stephanie Trigg reads Coleridge’s comments as evidence of Chaucer’s long affective history. Here, Coleridge’s affection for Chaucer is offered as a case study for the place of literary and reception studies in the history of emotions (Trigg 2018, 55). I would add to this that Chaucer’s ongoing reception as a writer with profound understanding of human emotion and a transhistorical capacity to affect his readers has been central to the development of his reputation over time as one of the most influential and canonical poets in Western literary history. Twentieth-century Chaucer criticism continued to emphasize the emotional and aesthetic qualities of Chaucer’s corpus, while often shying away from the previous century’s interest in their effect on the modern reader (Downes and McNamara). In the twenty-first century, however, a new attention to Chaucerian emotion, affect and aesthetics has emerged, largely influenced by three main (and often interwoven) approaches to the study of literature and emotions: cognitive and scientific theories of emotion, affect theory, and the history of emotions. Chapters and articles on aspects of Chaucerian emotion and affect now abound. Among these, the spectrum of emotions associated with love and/or tragedy are still common critical themes ( joy, bliss, sorrow etc.), but these are now joined by various studies of pleasure, anger, mirth, shame, guilt, pity and vulnerability, among other emotions and affects/effects in Chaucer’s writing. One feature that unites and differentiates twenty-first-century perspectives on Chaucer and emotion is their interest in emotion itself: Peter Brown’s recently revised A New Companion to Chaucer Studies, for example, originally published in 2006 and updated in 2019, retains its chapter on “Love,” but now additionally boasts a chapter on Chaucerian “Emotion” in general (McNamer). In Part 1 of this chapter I focus on the development of new perspectives on Chaucer and emotion in twenty-first criticism, paying particular attention to the last ten years. I argue that over the past decade Chaucerian scholarship has engaged with various configurations of literature and emotion in both Chaucer’s writing and its long reception. These efforts concentrate on medieval and modern conceptualisations of emotion, often simultaneously. And they confirm what many students and scholars of literature already know: that while the study of emotions (social, cultural, historical, psychological and scientific) can influence the study of 410

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literature, the study of literary texts themselves illuminates the study of emotions. Twenty-firstcentury Chaucer critics also insist on the centrality of Chaucer in understanding the relationship between (medieval) literature and emotions in the West. Within this discourse Chaucer’s writing is consistently emphasized as “an exceptionally rich trove of thinking about feeling” (McNamer 2019, 123). In Part 2 I focus on Chaucer’s own awareness of the emotional textures of literature’s physical forms—from the written page, to the bound book. In doing so I explore a line of inquiry in the study of emotions that is still taking hold in Chaucer studies and in literary studies more generally: that is, the role of literature in articulating the relationship between material culture and emotions, past and/or present. I concentrate on two main examples of the affective potential of literature from Chaucer’s writing: the famous opening stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde, and the “Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales. In both examples, Chaucer represents physical books containing literary narratives as affective, emotional objects that arouse a range of feelings in their makers and readers. Chaucer’s writing, with its deeply inscribed concern for both textual creation and reception, shows that the relationship between emotion and literature—or the embodied acts of feeling and reading—is material, embodied, and highly complex.

Chaucerian Afect, Cognition and the History of Emotions In their introduction to Medieval Affect, Feeling and Emotion, Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker argue that modern theories of affect, emotion, and the history of emotions alone aren’t enough to understand the complexly intertwined physical, spiritual, material, and intellectual experiences of love and grief presented in a poem like Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess. They argue instead that literary scholars aim to prioritize “an intersectional premodern affect/ emotion studies,” focusing on “how premodern writings theorize affect and emotion in ways that priortize their inherent intersectionality” (Burger and Crocker 2–3). In medieval literary criticism, “affect” is usually conceived as a primary effect, while emotion is secondary—an attempt to describe or mediate an unconscious affect consciously. When a distinction between the two is made, “affect” (sometimes linked to the Latin affectus and the Middle English affecte) is closely associated with bodily, involuntary inclinations and expressions of feeling; “emotion” tends to encompass broader cultural, social, intellectual and/or political circumstances and effects. In this chapter, I use the terms “affect” and “emotion” primarily in ways that reflect the uses of (individual) medievalist critics, who often either resist distinguishing between the two (or, at least, are suspicious of doing so), or who prefer to emphasize the ways in which they are intimately entwined. The critical entanglement of affect with emotion in Chaucerian scholarship is therefore a useful place for us to start. While certain twenty-first-century critics might specifically apply theories of the mind or of affect to their reading of Chaucer’s works, or might interpret them primarily under the rubric of the “history of emotions,” they rarely adhere to one approach to the exclusion of all others. It is quite usual for a Chaucerian affect theorist to write about emotion; or for a historian of the emotions to write about the affective dimensions of Chaucer’s writing. Some Chaucerian critics use affect and emotion interchangeably or even simultaneously, highlighting out the ways that medieval texts themselves trouble conceptual distinctions between “affect(s)” and “emotion(s)” and theoretical ones. Barry Windeatt, for example, discusses Chaucer’s deliberate placement of tears and weeping as “emotionally affecting,” underscoring Chaucer’s own emphasis on both the physiology and culture of weeping in general. Chaucer, Windeatt shows, “augments the tears he finds” in his sources, moving, repeating, and 411

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even inserting them into his writing (Windeatt 75). Corinne Saunders has pointed out Chaucer’s texts don’t easily succumb to the dualisms—“[m]ind and body, head and heart, thinking and feeling”—embedded in many forms of Western discourse. “Of all medieval English poets,” she writes, “Chaucer is perhaps most deeply engaged with the power of affect on both minds and bodies” (Saunders 2016, 11). Writing of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Steele Nowlin shows how “the interjection ‘allas!’ signals the moments at which affect and invention collapse into emotion and narrative” (Steele 25). The poem itself, he argues, is “awash in feeling” (Steele 17). Medievalist literary critic Sarah McNamer, author of the influential 2009 monograph, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, argues for “feeling” (from the Middle English “felynge”) as a term that goes some way toward capturing the fusion of affect and emotion in medieval discourse (McNamer 2007). As Saunders’ integration of “feeling” with “thinking” highlights, the modern term “feeling” alone does little to capture the cognitive function of emotion in medieval literary texts. McNamer, however, has shown that “the meanings of felynge attested in the MED [Middle English Dictionary] and in Chaucer include manifestly sensory designations, on the one hand, and cognitive processes on the other” (McNamer 2019, 125). In short, it’s complicated, and much of the most persuasive work on Chaucer over the past decade invests in these very complications, which also speak to variety of pre- and post-modern conceptions of emotions, affects, and feelings in literary and narrative contexts. Drawing on the work of cultural theorist and literary critic Sianne Ngai, Glenn Burger reads the presence of “ugly feelings” in The Legend of Good Women—a work that Chaucer claims to have written at the behest of the God of Love to atone for his mistreatment of women elsewhere in his oeuvre—as “radically destabiliz[ing] the structures of feeling” embedded in the tradition of courtly love. While courtly love insists on love as a way of ennobling (erotic) desire, Burger shows that “Chaucer’s women experience love [. . .] as a befuddling, paralyzing, even destructive morass of ugly feelings” (Burger 67). Ngai’s “affective model,” Burger writes, “is suggestive in offering a way to think more productively and agentially about the conflicted emotional responses that the Legend generates” (Burger 69), gesturing to the affective experiences of modern and medieval readers alike. Also drawing on Ngai, Wan-Chuan Kao explores “the affective and aesthetic demands [of ] Sir Thopas on its audience,” a narrative tale (from The Canterbury Tales) in which Chaucer transforms “cute shame into somber authority” (Kao, 147–8). Kao characterizes narrative cuteness as eliciting “both tender caretaking and sadistic aggression in the subject; the cute object is simultaneously held gently and squeezed tightly” (Kao, 148). Textual cuteness offers an interpretative conundrum: how should the reader approach and treat the “cute” (Chaucerian) text? Guillemette Bolens describes Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a collection of stories that not only arouses mixed emotions in its readers, but that deliberately and repeatedly challenges readers’ emotional literacy. Bolens pays close attention to what she calls “style kinésique”— which includes the most subtle movements of characters’ bodies—in “The Squire’s Tale” and the “Prologue to the Man of Law’s Tale,” to show how Chaucer refuses to reduce emotions to instantly legible corporeal signs (Bolens 97). Facial expressions in Chaucer, as I have argued elsewhere, instruct as they challenge both characters and readers, offering them a chance to grapple with the complex narrativity of emotions (Downes). Corporeal emotions in Chaucer’s Tales are rarely stable, static signs of joy or sorrow, but moving (and often literally moving) portraits that invite their audience’s intellectual scrutiny. As Clare Davidson puts it: “The attribution of behaviors outside of the words of a text to the text’s characters, especially when these behaviors and their meanings are partially unclear, is part of the process of reading fiction” (Davidson 150). 412

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In another essay on the presence (and sometimes the absence) of tears and weeping in Troilus and Criseyde, Jamie C. Fumo draws on both sociology and psychology. She argues that Chaucer uses Criseyde’s tears to “destabilize venerable literary expectations surrounding female tearfulness, particularly in relation to widowhood and infidelity.” Fumo demonstrates that Criseyde’s tears simultaneously write her out of and back into the anti-feminist tradition. By the end of the poem’s eight books, Criseyde is much more than an ambiguously weeping woman capable of manipulating both tears and people, but the poem’s “most complex emotional agent” (Fumo 37). Criseyde’s public and private tears are unstable gestural signs left open to “interpretive contestation” (Fumo 64). Chaucer manipulates Criseyde’s tears to reinscribe her role in Chaucer’s narrative, and revise—without fully resolving—her reputation in the mind of reader. Chaucer was familiar with contemporary medical and scientific discourses on emotion. Medieval theories of the body were particularly concerned with bodily fluids—blood, sweat, urine, phlegm, semen and tears—while emotions themselves were often characterized according to their liquidity. Medieval theories of medicine, which drew on the humoral theories developed by Hippocrates (c. 460–370 CE) and Galen (129–c. 216 CE), associated individual temperament with a balance or imbalance of humors—wet, dry, hot, and cold. Humoral theories helped popularize what Barbara Rosenwein calls the “hydraulic” mode, in which “emotions are like great liquids within each person, heaving and frothing, eager to be let out”—a perspective that continues to dominate many popular Western perceptions of how human feelings work (Rosenwein 834). Chaucer was himself aware of the figurative potential of liquidity in conveying individual feeing. As Lucie Kaempfer shows, Chaucer gives affect substance in his writing through an assortment of liquid metaphors, from writing with tears and drinking woe to bathing in bliss. The effect is a blurring of science, physiology, and metaphor, an externalisation of the internal processes through which a medieval individual was thought to be subject to their passions (Kaempfer 21). I’ll return to the metaphor of tears as ink in the second part of this chapter. For now I want to dwell for a moment on McNamer has called the “literariness” of literature; that is, the capacity of literary texts to function as “affective scripts, capable of producing complex emotional effects in those who engage with them” (McNamer 2015, 1436; see also Affective Meditations). Chaucerians interested in emotion have found that his works exemplify this kind of literariness. Trigg compares Chaucer and Malory’s singular uses of the simile “weeping like a child who has been beaten,” to underscore the necessity of reading emotions in literary texts contextually: Figurative expressions such as similes, proverbs, and metaphors may not offer us the direct or unambiguous identification of emotions, but they can be read as powerful attempts to tell and show us what emotions look and feel like, in very particular narrative and social contexts. (Trigg 2019, 26) Such figurations abound in Chaucer’s writing—as the essays briefly summarized here attest. Of course, studies of emotions in premodern literature over the past decade have regularly featured non-Chaucerian texts, sometimes alongside Chaucerian texts (as in the preceding example) and sometimes in isolation. In this chapter, I focus on Chaucer as an exemplary writer, not of his time, as such, but of English literary history. In focusing on the recent reception of Chaucer, I acknowledge the relationship of his influence on the discipline to the central place his writing has occupied in rethinking the relationship of literature to emotion and affect 413

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during the Middle Ages. The scholarly, popular and political emotions that drive Chaucer’s enduring reputation (especially as the so-called father of English poetry) are worth consideration in and of themselves. Attending to emotion—through affect theory, cognitive studies, or the history of emotions or some combination of these—in Chaucer’s works brings us back to the question of what is unique about literary witnesses to the study of emotions. But it also opens up new ways of thinking about Chaucer’s writing and its legacy in a variety of other theoretical approaches—including but not limited to feminist studies, queer studies, disability studies and critical race theory—by emphasizing how structures of feeling shape discrimination and intolerance as well as inclusion and acceptance. Over the last ten years, Chaucerians have consistently emphasized the ways in which Chaucer’s works harness “literariness” to destabilize, disrupt and disorient traditional, expected or normative views of how (medieval and/or modern) emotions work, and for whom. The present chapter is no exception to the sense of exemplarity that dominates much critical work on Chaucer, including that which has been written about Chaucer and emotion over the past ten years. In what follows, an awareness of the constructed nature of Chaucer’s modern exemplarity—that is, his Western, canonical status—underpins how his management of the relationship of emotions to texts is understood. In seeking to connect work on Chaucer and emotion with work on objects and emotion, I intend to show how Chaucer inscribes emotions and feelings in both the body and mind, in the material world of the narrative, and in the “real” world(s) in which his writing is received.

Text as Emotional Object in Chaucer The relationship between literary text, material culture, and emotions is complicated for a number of reasons, but especially so because books themselves exist in both physical and semiotic states. Literature usefully allows us to “get at” emotional objects—to consider the ways in which objects themselves make, carry, and evoke spectrums of feeling. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed describes the relationship between objects and emotional narratives as involving “impressions,” or, in other words, “the very affect of one surface upon another.” Ahmed argues: “Emotions are both about objects, which they [. . .] shape, and are also shaped by objects” (Ahmed 6–7). Ahmed is not, here, specifically (or only) interested in material culture, nor does her work focus on literary narrative per se. But in drawing our attention, via this metaphor, both to the metaphorical materiality of emotion and to the ways in which emotions materialize in the world, Ahmed usefully guides literary scholars interested in the various intersections of objects and emotions in literature. Medieval literary scholar Kellie Robertson shows that Chaucer wrote carefully about the ways in which the material world and the human were mutually constitutive, using “material metaphors” to “help him grapple with [. . .] questions of how the matere of the physical world and the matere of the poet were related” (Robertson 112). Robertson’s focus on Chaucer’s representation of objects does not (and does not intend) to take into account their affective properties. And yet not only are objects powerful conveyers of emotion in Chaucer’s writing, but emotions themselves in Chaucerian texts often materialize and take shape through the sorts of “material metaphors” and tropes Robertson describes. In what follows I examine two examples from Chaucer’s writing that explore the relationship of literary texts, physical books, and emotions. The first is from the opening lines of Troilus and Criseyde. In this metatextual moment, the poet’s metaphorical tears are transformed into ink; Chaucer gestures both to the emotions inscribed in his narrative, and to the book in 414

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which the text of the poem is inscribed. The second is from the “Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” in which the “Wife,” Alisoun, vandalizes her husband’s book of “wikked wives,” before he violently attacks her with it. In the first example emotion and affect materialize as the actual book in the reader’s hand; in the other, a book serves as a narrative catalyst for both physical and emotional suffering and violence. The ultimate destruction of the book—which describes, suffers, and performs violent acts—by fire brings about narrative resolution, but the book has already transfigured the wife’s body irrevocably.

Te Page In the thirteenth-century medieval writer Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (which Chaucer translated) weeping makes the narrator write, while writing makes him weep: Carmina qui quondam studio florente peregi, flebilis heu meastos cogor inire modos. Ecce mihi lacerate dictant scribenda Camenae et ueris elegi fletibus ora rigant. (lines 1–4)

Allas! I wepynge, am constreyned to bygynnen vers of sorwful matere, that whilom in florysschyng studie made delitable ditees. For lo, rendynge muses of poetes enditen to me thynges to ben writen, and drery vers of wretchidnesse weten my face with verray tears. (Boece, lines 1–6) Allas! Weeping, I must begin verses of sorrowful subject matter, who once in flourishing study made delightful ditties. Behold, rending muses of poetry teach me things to write, and dreary verses of wretchedness wet my face with true tears. (my translation) Tears and ink are mutually productive and inseparable. Chaucer revisits and revises Boethius’s metaphor in the famous and often studied opening stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde, in which the poet’s subject matter and its verse form materialize in tears: Thesiphone, thow help me for t’endite Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write (Book I, lines 5–7) Thisiphone, help me to compose These woeful verses, which/who weep as I write. (my translation)

There is no mention of ink in either Chaucer’s or Boethius’s examples, and yet by liquidising the poetic form—verses that are wet, or that weep—both ink and tears are implied. The imagery in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius is clear: as the verses weep, they wet the poet’s face; these weeping verses are the poet-narrator’s tears and the poet-narrator himself is crying, at least in a metaphorical sense. In Troilus there is a heightened ambiguity about who or what is weeping: do the verses weep as the poet writes? Or does the poet weep as he writes 415

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the verses? The syntactical ambiguity of the line makes space for either interpretation, or for both. Chaucer retains the Boethian emphasis on the mutually co-constitutive acts of weeping and writing, while inviting the reader to participate in a hermeneutic game, understanding that both readings can be true simultaneously. In the second verse the narrator goes on to enumerate his narratorial role as the “sorwful instrument” (Book I, line 10)—the pen—of lover’s complaints. The poet calls on Tisiphone, a Fury, to help him work; just as a woeful man has a sad face, so should a “sorwful tale” have a “sory chere” (Book I, line 14)—a sad expression. The textual object that emerges in these lines is not a book, but rather a single manuscript page. The text of the tragedy is written over the poet’s face; his sad expression conveys its emotional textures. Of course, a medieval text might well be written, literally, on skin—parchment or vellum being made from the cleaned and scraped skins of sheep or cows. Chaucer here invites the reader to bear witness to the physical page as awash in tears of ink, while to a listening audience he offers the face of the poet or the speaker as a key to its emotional register. Either way, as the emotions of the narrative surface they also materialize on skin and/or parchment, conveying to the reader or listener the emotional stakes of what they are about to read or hear. This materialization of emotion on the “face” of the text matters because it anchors affects and emotions in the material world. It gestures not only to the ways in which emotions are experienced, but also to the ways in which they are interpreted and understood, as signs of states that are difficult to articulate in words, and to understand intellectually. As Andrew Lynch puts it, the Trolius simultaneously presents its readers with “a complex quasi-historical situation, [and] suggests multiple terms and frameworks for understanding the emotions involved in it.” The fact that Chaucer, in the opening lines of Troilus, conflates the production of literature with the production of emotion reflects our long-held belief in the affective capacity of literature. But it also emphasizes that literary texts are objects that insist on an embodied reader, capable of reading and responding to literature’s emotions.

Te Book New and old, written and read, collected, stored, tattered and torn, books and their contents are highly emotional, affective objects in Chaucer’s oeuvre. Reading a book might cause a character to sleep or dream of love or sorrow; to feel joy and comfort, or anger or misery; or serve to instruct or distract. Chaucer insists on the world within the book, a fictional world that is always understood in relation to the “real” world in which it is read and with which it shares its emotional textures. In Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, an insomniac narrator reaches for a book—a “romaunce”—to “rede and drive the night away” (lines 46–9). The volume he takes up becomes the catalyst for his dream about the Man in Black, who is mourning the tragic death of White. In the opening lines of the Parliament of Fowles, the narrator reads an old, tattered copy of the Dream of Scipio before falling into his own dream (lines 30 ff ). In the Legend of Good Women, Love berates the narrator for failing to write about virtuous women. It transpires that the narrator already owns numerous books about such women: “sixty bokes olde and new” (line 273) are stored in a chest in his bedroom (line 498). In a scene in Troilus, Criseyde reads with her ladies during the long siege of Troy (Book II, lines 79–111); her uncle, Pandarus, asks her what she’s reading, and is disappointed to learn the book is a history of Thebes, not a romance. He has interrupted the women’s reading just as 416

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King Laius has been killed by his son, Oedipus, and Amphiaraus (“Amphiorax”), the bishop, is to be condemned to Hell. Criseyde calls the physical book into the scene, gesturing to the red-lettered rubric—“here we styntyn [stop] at this lettres rede” (line 103). But Pandarus begs Criseyde lay aside the book and its contents along with her widow’s garb, and dance with him in honour of the Spring (traditionally the time of lovers): Do wey youre book, rys up, and let us daunce, And lat us don to May som observaunce. (Book II, lines 110–2) Put away with your book, rise up, and let us dance, And let us pay homage to May. (my translation)

For Criseyde, this particular book is both a symbol and a sign of her widowhood; for Pandarus, it is a sign of her reluctance to love. Pandarus insists the book can be set aside or exchanged in order to rewrite the fictional and emotional “reality” in which he and Criseyde exist. In the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the physical book is a symbol of individual power, as both the Wife, Alisoun, and her husband, Jankyn, encounter each other violently over its physical form and contents. The Wife introduces the book briefly—without mention of its contents—as belonging to her husband. It is “his book,” and serves as an example of his refusal to acknowledge his wife’s desires: He nolde suffre nothyng of my list. By God, he smoot me ones on the lyst, For that I rente out of his book a leef, That of the strook myn ere wax al deef. (lines 633–6) He would suffer nothing I desired. By God, he struck me once on the side of my head, Because I tore a leaf out of his book, That of the blow my ear became completely deaf. (my translation)

The reader does not know—yet—what drove Alisoun to damage the book in the first instance, although the husband’s violent rage is clear. The Wife’s delayed explanation of her own motivations allows the book to take its place in the narrative as an intensely emotional object, charged with affects the reader cannot not yet fully grasp. The Wife later tells the story of her husband’s domestic abuse again, this time drawing out precisely these affects. The husband, we learn, takes pleasure in emotionally abusing his wife by reciting anti-feminist stories and proverbs. He owns a book of “wikked wyves” (line 685) from which he frequently reads for his amusement (“his desport”), laughing uproariously (“[a]t which boke he lough alwey ful faste,” lines 670–2). One night, he reads aloud to her from this book by the hearth, enumerating various classical women who thwarted and/or abused men (including the same “Amphiorax” that Criseyde read about in Troilus, lines 740–1). As the list grows, so, the reader assumes, does the wife’s anger, hurt and frustration, until she attempts to dismantle the book’s capacity for harm with her own acts of physical violence: first she tears 417

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three pages from the book (not one, as she suggests earlier), and then punches her husband on the cheek, causing him to fall backwards into the fireplace. We already know at least part of what happens next, but the wife adds new narrative detail: Jankyn starts up like a furious lion (“he up stirte as dooth a wood leoun,” line 794), and hits his wife over the head with his fist, causing her deafness. As Alisoun collapses, as if dead, Jankyn makes to flee from the scene of the murder (line 798), until she addresses him, “Oh, have you killed me, false thief ?” (“O, hastow slain me, false theef ?,” line 800). In the scene that follows, Alisoun revises the fictions she has been read from Jankyn’s book, from stories of men wronged by women, to stories of women wronged by men. And yet she does so in a way that subtly recalls those same stories of women’s manipulation and deceit: the Wife bids her attacker come closer so that she may kiss him, and takes her revenge instead by striking him for the second time across the cheek. In the negotiation that ensues, Alisoun’s husband cedes her sovereignty in their marriage. To consolidate this new relationship, the wife makes her husband burn the book of wicked wives: He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond, To han the governance of hous and lond, And of his tonge, and of his hond [hand] also; And made hym brenne [burn] his book anon right tho [immediately]. (lines 813–6) He gave me the bridle [to hold] in my hand, To have the governance of house and land, And of his tongue, and of his hand also, And made him burn his book immediately right then. (my translation)

For both the Wife and her husband the book of wicked wives is an evolving emotional object, and its “impressions”—to borrow Ahmed’s term—are various. The book is at once a source of pleasure and delight, and a source of physical as well as emotional pain and suffering. The ways in which the book as a physical object can be manipulated and destroyed bring about new modes of feeling. In the end, the book’s shifting emotional valences are precisely what mark it as a symbol of domestic power; the way in which the physical object of the book is wielded, and by whom, signifies who is in control. With the disintegration of the book of wicked women into ashes, the Wife’s Prologue can end, and her story proper—which centers on a women’s sovereignty—can begin. And yet, in the wife’s deafness, the book has left an indelible mark on her body.

Conclusion Chaucer’s readers have long been attuned to the affective capacity of reading his works, and to the emotional textures of reading within his works. As Saunders observes, in Chaucer, “the workings of mind, body, and affect are key to psychological representation, and also define the reader’s relation to the text” (Saunders 2016, 15). But the emotional “impressions” made by Chaucer’s texts are not limited to impressions on his readers—medieval and modern alike— but are embedded within his fictions themselves. Books become hermeneutic signs for the intertwined acts of reading, thinking, and feeling themselves. In Chaucer’s writing, bodies and books connect and collide, endlessly making impressions on each other that shape affect inside and outside the text alike. 418

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Even as literature lays itself open to reading and interpretation, it exercises a form agency over readers, not only in its capacity, as Lynch has observed elsewhere in this collection, “to elicit complex emotional and affective responses in its audience, to ‘move’ people,” but to confound, confuse, deter. You can close a book—even discard or destroy it—but its impressions won’t immediately disappear; the book has already left its mark on the body and/or in the mind. Chaucer was clearly invested in the idea of literature’s capacity to explore, describe and elicit emotions of various kinds, including mixed emotions. His long reputation as an intensely emotional and emotive writer has influenced the twenty-first-century investment in his work as a significant archive in writing the (literary) history of emotions in the West. In this chapter I have tried to show the ways in which attending to both Chaucer’s works and Chaucerian reception illuminates the complex, interrelated histories of affect, emotion, and literature. For more than six hundred years Chaucer’s reception has insisted on his originary force in the history of English literature. Following suit, twenty-first-century Chaucerian scholarship has tended to emphasize emotion or affect, feeling or some combination of these as manifestations of a form of poetic, aesthetic complexity specific to Chaucer. And yet there is often nuance in these readings of Chaucerian affect and emotions, which return to the ways in which Chaucer “disrupts” and “destabilizes” both medieval and modern readers’ expectations of what emotions are, what they do, what they mean, and for whom. The physical book, I have argued, is one of the key figurations with which Chaucer articulates the entanglement of reading and feeling. Just as books and emotions can be “read,” so too can they be transformed in different circumstances. Chaucer, like Ovid, famously sends his writing out into the world— “Go, litel bok” (Troilus, Book V, l. 1786)—on the understanding that books have emotional agency precisely because they are physical objects that connect with minds and bodies, and become enmeshed in people’s lives.

Note 1 For all quotations from Chaucer, see The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford University Press, 1987).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. Boethius. Consolatio Philosophiae. Edited by James J. O’Donnell. Thomas Library, Bryn Mawr College, 1990. Bolens, Guillemette. “La Narration des Émotions et la Réactivité du Déstinataire dans ‘Les Contes de Canterbury’ de G. Chaucer.” Médiévales, vol. 61, 2011, pp. 97–117. Brown, Peter, editor. A New Companion to Chaucer. Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. Burger, Glenn. “‘Pite Renneth Soone in Gentil Herte’: Ugly Feelings and Gendered Conduct in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, pp. 66–84. ———, and Holly A. Crocker. “Introduction.” Medieval Affect, Feeling and Emotion, edited by Burger and Crocker, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 1–24. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson, Oxford UP, 1987. Coleridge, William Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 14: Table Talk. Edited by Kathleen Coburn and B. Winer, Princeton UP, 1990. Davidson, Clare. “Reading in Bed with Troilus and Criseyde.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 55, no. 2, 2020, pp. 147–170. Downes, Stephanie. “Have ye nat seyn sometyme a pale face?” Contemporary Chaucer through the Centuries: Essays for Stephanie Trigg, edited by Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine, Manchester UP, 2018, pp. 74–90. ———, and Rebecca McNamara. “The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature.” Literature Compass, vol. 13, no. 6, 2016, pp. 444–456.

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Stephanie Downes Dryden, John. [Preface to the Fables.] The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Vol. II. Edited by George Gilfillan, Edinburgh, 1855. Fumo, Jamie C. “Criseida Lacrymosa? Rereading the Weeping Criseyde.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 54, no. 1, 2019, pp. 35–66. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Edited by Russell A. Peck, Medieval Institute Publications, 2003–2005. Hazlitt, William. Lectures on the English Poets. London, 1818. Kaempfer, Lucie. “Drinking Sorrow and Bathing in Bliss: Liquid Emotions in Chaucer.” Open Library of Humanities, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–24. Kao, Wan-Chuan. “Cute Chaucer.” Exemplaria, vol. 30, no. 2, 2018, pp. 147–171. The Life and Poetical Works of the Rev. George Crabbe. Edited by John Murray, London, 1847. Lynch, Andrew. “Emotion and Middle English Literature,” edited by Sif Rikhardsdottir and Raluca Radulescu, forthcoming. McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. U of Pennsylvania P, 2009. ———. “Emotion.” A New Companion to Chaucer. Wiley-Blackwell, 2019, pp. 123–36. ———. “Feeling.” Middle English, edited by Paul Strohm, Oxford UP, pp. 241–257. ———. “The Literariness of Literature and the History of Emotions.” PMLA, vol. 130, no. 5, 2015, pp. 1433–1442. Nowlin, Steele. “The Legend of Good Women and the Affect of Invention.” Exemplaria, vol. 25, no. 1, 2013, pp. 16–35. Robertson, Kellie. “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto.” Exemplaria, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 99–118. Rosenwein, Barbara. “Worrying About Emotions in History.” The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 3, 2002, pp. 821–845. Saunders, Corinne. “Affect Reading: Chaucer, Women, and Romance.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 51, no. 1, 2016, pp. 11–30. ———. Chaucer. Blackwell, 2001. Trigg, Stephanie. “Delicious, Tender Chaucer: Coleridge, Emotion and Affect.” SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, vol. 30, 2014, pp. 51–66. ———. “Weeping Like a Child Who Has Been Beaten.” Medieval Affect, Feeling and Emotion, edited by Burger and Crocker, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 25–46. Windeatt, Barry. “Chaucer’s Tears.” Critical Survey, vol. 30, no. 2, 2018, pp. 74–93.

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35 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Anxieties About Trust in Te Tempest Lalita Pandit Hogan

Abstract: After a brief overview of early modern literary emotion and its place in the current “emotional turn” in the humanities, this chapter, using insights drawn from trust theory, explores how anxieties about trust are foregrounded in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Trust is widely studied today by social scientists who draw on Shakespeare’s work, as well as other literary texts, to elucidate points. Trust is not a discrete emotion, though it is an affective phenomenon, and in The Tempest, anxiety about trust gives rise to, among other emotions, disgust and anger. The two main protagonists, Prospero and Caliban, are anchored in these two basic emotions. Their working relationship requires a measure of trust, even though they find each other untrustworthy. This ambivalent-trust trope, as I identify it here, is not uncommon in Shakespeare’s plays; it is relational, communicative, boundarydefining, and in The Tempest this trope shapes emotional situations that guide the play’s language, scene structure, and overall dramaturgy.

Though scholars agree that Shakespeare’s entire canon is relevant for the twenty-first-century “emotional turn” in the humanities, studies of early modern literary emotion are still circumscribed by disciplinary parameters of New Historicism. Long before the current emotional turn, ‘passions’ and ‘affects’ received the attention of disciplines as diverse as medicine and religion. Thus, historicizing literary emotion has meant, in part, contextualizing it in relation to early modern non-literary materials from medicine (e.g., Galen, Hippocrates) to understand how the medieval theory of humors shapes what Paster calls humoral subjectivities and ecologies of passion.1 Alternatively, it may involve locating emotions in the context of religion and religious controversies, such as accounting for “Biblical emotions” (e.g., despair at Christ’s suffering on the Cross, and hope of salvation) as they are modulated in The Book of Common Prayer and The Homilies.2 Scholars reluctant to accept the humoral theory as a master theory, also draw on spirituality (e.g., Aquinas, Augustine, even Burton) to speak of disembodied emotion elicited by reflection on the nature of soul and God.3 Equally important are inquiries into rhetoric to understand emotions as they play into persuasive discourses (e.g., Aristotle, Cicero), and moral philosophy (e.g., Plato and others) that explore spiritual feeling and moral sentiment.4 Antecedents of early modern emotion in classical and medieval literatures form another area of investigation. For example, Cora Fox studies Ovidian metamorphoses and early modern affect surrounding sexuality and gender,5 and Ovidian emotion is one major example of inter-textual emotion in Shakespeare.6 The text and intertext model, in general, shows how emotion is not DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-42

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only biological, as the humoral approach might suggest, but also cultural. In other words, centuries of English and Continental priests, preachers, theologians, men of medicine, rhetoricians, moral philosophers, historians of science, visual artists, story tellers, and others generated a range of emotion scripts, which Shakespeare inherited and transformed. This allowed him to create a heterogenous, dynamic, pluralistic repertoire of poetic, narrative, and dramaturgical emotions.7 In light of the inherited and transformed knowledge, scholarship on Shakespeare and emotion sometimes raises questions about shared emotional experience from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries. Can we assume these literary emotions transmit across time spontaneously? Do we need a case by case method grounded in context sensitive assumptions of continuity (and discontinuity)?8 I assume (1) that Shakespearean emotions have a proven record of transmission; (2) the antecedents that existed for him are not frozen in time and (3) gaps in transmission are a common feature of understanding literary emotions of any kind. The Tempest, for instance, is firmly anchored in early modern belief in magic, cosmological and other hierarchies based on the superiority of mind over matter; yet, it has also adapted well to paradigmatic shifts in theory, including the current emotional turn. Predicated on a magically wrought meteorological turbulence, the play explicitly links characters to the elements, air and fire (Ariel), earth (Caliban) and water (the oceans around the island) that can be manipulated through Prospero’s art, and Ariel’s hydraulic engineering.9 Prospero’s magic is seen by critics as an emblem for Shakespeare’s art,10 and the island as his stage, where illusions of “cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces” as well as “of vines with clust’ring bunches growing” (4.1.151; 110) can be created.11 In other words, the island is neither the cities of his tragedies, nor the green world of his earlier comedies.12 “This green land” (4.1.130) that Iris refers to, and “shortgrassed green,” as Ceres describes it, are illusory stage sets. Surely, the wedding masque has Ceres recall “Earth’s increase, and foison plenty” (110);13 yet, as material practice, agriculture is absent. Caliban is a hunter-gatherer, while his master remains insulated from the earth.14 Grounded in a historicist method, Elizabeth Harvey draws attention to Ariel’s “particular relation to emotion,” because the spirit moves Prospero to sympathy. From the perspectives of cognitive neuroscience, Patrick Colm Hogan explores how compassion is blocked and facilitated in The Tempest and Cesaire’s Une Tempete (276–86). Unlike compassion, some forms of trust are based on rational appraisal of investments and benefits, while other forms link to affect. Accepting of Prospero’s mental superiority (to Caliban), Harvey reminds us of how Prospero’s decision making is in accord with Galen’s advocacy of “cultivating reason” to “curb irrational passions” (45). Yet, Prospero’s disgust at Caliban, whom he repeatedly calls ‘filth’ and ‘earth’ remains unmodulated, and its affective parallel is Caliban’s reactive anger. Both, in my view, stem from their close working relationship where each regards the other as untrustworthy. Drawing on Trust Theory, the following discussion focuses on anxiety about trust that elicits a range of emotions: disgust, fear, anger, as well as some bonding emotions. Why is earth and its cultivation (or not) important in this? Trust theorists would say cultivation leads to development of social capital required for “various relationships allowing individuals to trust each other,” with the trust arrow going “from individuals to institutions” (see Hardin Trust: Key Concepts, 78). That is, trust as social capital is generated among individuals in communities, while institutions formalize the processes.

Epistemology and Felicities of Trust Expectation of trust is necessary for social life, though distrust, such as exists between Prospero and Caliban, is also part of its dynamics. Wherever there is trust there is also a possibility for betrayal, carrying a risk for those who place trust in others, in institutions, in 422

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contested religious doctrines, in secular laws, charters and contracts. Most theorists associate trust with positive affect, and believe that among business partners it allows for efficient economic transactions, while “absence of trust forces people to take costly precautions that inhibit trade” (see Fehr and Zehender 392). Interpersonal and/or social trust is a four step process. The one who trusts makes possible some action from the trustee which would not be otherwise possible; since there is a time lag between “extension of trust” and “consequence of trust,” the trustworthiness or untrustworthiness of the trustee can have positive or negative results. If positive, the trustor will flourish, if negative he will be harmed. In addition, the action of placing trust involves a “voluntary commitment of resources at the trustee’s disposal,” and thus, makes the trustor vulnerable to harm, but also open to felicity that comes with the recognition that while the trustee could have done harm, she chose not to do so (Fehr and Zehender 392). Exploration of biological foundations of trust entails an “evolutionary approach to understanding trust and trustworthiness”; this research supports the idea that “cooperation and reciprocity” have evolved because they maximize gain and minimize loss for everyone (Ostrum and Walker 392; 9). When both partners maintain trust, the gain is greater for both than if they both violate; but, as the research shows, if one partner betrays, he/she maximizes his/her gain. The social cost of betrayal, however, is loss of reputation for trustworthiness; this inclines people and institutions toward trust. Empirical studies through gift-exchange games and trust experiments under controlled settings, according to Fehr and Zehender, have proven reasonably reliable for measuring trust, while literary works are also widely used by social scientists and historians.15 The evolutionary bend on which most of today’s trust theories are based does, in fact, conflict with the early modern idea of providence. However, to the belief in providential design, no matter how much it pervades early modern texts, the exception of Lucretius, whom Stephen Greenblatt describes as some “sort of atheist” (183), is also noteworthy. Lucretian thought, claimed to have been influential in some circles, reads like an early articulation of evolutionary theory; that is, as his main theses are reproduced in Greenblatt’s Swerve (185–202). The cheery advocacy of trust by today’s theorists, despite its dangers and risks, is based on broad consensus. As stated earlier, trust generates mostly positive affect; binds rather than separates people, communities and nations; makes them more accountable than less accountable; increases efficiency in business practices, as well as in good functioning of governments. On the other hand, the path to trust is difficult, and once it is lost in a society it is very hard to regain, as Pete Buttigieg, one of the 2020 presidential candidates, in his recent book on trust, shows (167; 33–35; 141–147). Embedded in these larger forms of trust, is trust as habitus. Trust “as habitus is a protective mechanism relying on everyday routines, stable reputations, and tacit memories.” These can be “social habits of conduct and routinized practices; mental habits or takenfor-granted assumptions; and, ceremonial habits, or rituals.”16 Trust theorists take the term, habitus, from Pierre Bourdieu who defines it as “systems of disposition,” that “are effectively realized only in relation to a determinate structure of positions socially marked by the social properties of their occupants” (71). While Bourdieu uses the term to examine genres of cultural production and symbolic capital, trust theorists use it to locate trust in material and non-material exchanges and the social capital they generate. In The Tempest, we will see how the encompassing epistemology of trust provides material for Prospero’s complaint, which informs the play’s action; trust as habitus (in its disruption) causes pain to Prospero’s test subjects, giving rise to vital emotion situations. Restored habitus, through ceremonials and pageantry, constitutes the denouement where trust is, hypothetically, renewed. 423

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The storm raised at Prospero’s command creates what Hegel, in his discussion of tragedy, categorizes as the first type of “collision,” which is with natural forces (115). This collision challenges the Neapolitans’ expectation of smooth navigation of the seas. Since this is not a tragedy, they don’t drown. They are dispersed on an island, that, they don’t know if they can trust. In addition, their perceptions of the topography are impacted by anxieties about trust, and their plans of profiteering by betrayal and perfidy. A case in point is Sebastian and Antonio’s regicide and usurpation plot, that, due to Ariel’s timely interventions, doesn’t come to pass. Adrian, in contrast, is trying to think of the island as safe space. Sharing this perception, he begins thus; “though this island seems to be desert—,” is interrupted by Antonio and Sebastian. Adrian pauses and persists, “Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible.” After further interruptions, Adrian continues: “It needs must be subtle, tender, and delicate/temperance” (2.1.33–45). ‘Temperance’ in Adrian’s line refers to climate; temperance is also a neo-Stoic virtue that modulates passions, inculcating faith, on which trust can be based, though this reference is ironized here by Antonio’s bawdy pun on the allegorical figure, Temperance (43). Despite the punning interference, Adrian completes his waylaid sentence: “The air breathes upon us here most sweetly” (45). Unsurprisingly, this perception is contradicted by what the other two say: “As if it had lungs, and rotten ones/ Or, it were perfumed by a fen” (46–47). This detail reinforces embodiment, attributing properties of disgust to the atmosphere. In his notes on the play, Coleridge observes that “Shakespeare never puts habitual scorn in the mouths of other than bad men” (128). While the scorn distances a conventional pastoral, thematically heavier matters weigh on Sebastian’s mind, namely, a shared distrust among European polities about Islamic powers in the Mediterranean, since the Neapolitans are returning from Claribel’s undesired marriage and exile to Tunis.17 In the middle of the play, violations of trust in the home society are targeted for correction in this new, alien space, when, in the guise of a harpy, Ariel addresses “the three men of sin” (3.3.54), telling them they have been brought “to this lower world/ And what is in ‘t—the never-surfeited sea/ Hath cause to belch up you, and on this island,/ Where man doth not inhabit—” (3.3.55–58). The island is inhabited by the civilized and the savage, as Fanny Kemble in the nineteenth century measures the scale: First, and the lowest in the scale comes the gross and uncouth, but powerful savage, who represents the more ponderous and the unwieldy (earth and water), which the wise Magician . . . compels to his service; and the brutal and animal propensities of the nature of man, which he, the type of its noblest development, holds in lordly subjugation. (132) Many twentieth-century readings have questioned the fairness and accuracy of these scales, and claimed Caliban as the new world savage, an Afro-Caribbean slave or an Afro-American slave, aborigine, and so forth.18 This colorful reception history notwithstanding, in generic human terms the trouble between Caliban and Prospero is rooted in Prospero’s difficulties with interpersonal trust.

Prospero: Te Prehistory of Betrayal Prospero arrives with psychological baggage about trust, characterizing his brother as “perfidious” (1.2.68), and confesses: “my trust,/ Like a good parent did beget of him/ A falsehood in its contrary as great/ As my trust was, which had indeed no limit,/ A confidence sans bound” 424

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(94–97). In other words, boundless trust begot prodigious betrayal when Antonio joined his magician brother’s “inveterate enemy” (121–22), the King of Naples, to remove the Duke of Milan, along with his infant daughter, “some leagues to the sea,” hoisting them onto “a rotten carcass of a butt, not rigged/Nor tackle, sail, not mast,” a boat that “the very rats instinctively” had quitted (145–48). As the sea belched up “the three men of sin” to be tried for betrayal, it “roared” at Prospero and Miranda. They sighed to the winds, “whose pity, sighing back again,/ Did [them] but loving wrong” (149–51), by blowing them farther out to the sea. What “preserved” Prospero was his “cherubin” daughter’s trust, shown by her “smile,” and “providence divine” (152–58). In practical terms the provisions supplied by Gonzalo preserved them. The physical danger of high waters on a broken, untrustworthy bark is paired with the affective risk of entrusting his brother with the “manage of the state” and “the government” (70, 75). Parallel to the this-worldly risk and danger runs Prospero’s confidence in “providence divine” and Miranda’s smile being “infused with fortitude from heaven” (154), the supra-mundane that favors him. Outside of this framing, however, Prospero’s story simulates four steps of violated trust. At the first step, he voluntarily delegates administrative duties to Antonio; that leaves Antonio free to harm him. Antonio takes the second step and betrays; Prospero belatedly realizes he erred in making a trustworthiness decision. The fourth step of the process sees Antonio maximizing his gain and his brother’s loss. Consequently, Antonio becomes the Duke of Milan, and Prospero is exiled. In his exile, Prospero is waiting to re-encounter those who have betrayed him. Taking note of the unsettled nature of Prospero’s habitation on the island, that, in my view inhibits formation of the social capital of trust, Charlotte Scott dwells on the absence of agriculture and landscaping. She draws on medieval and early modern husbandry manuals that consider planting, pruning and laying out gardens essential to creating harmony between man, society and nature. To this effect, she points out: The complex semantic relationship between faith and cultivation meant that metaphors of husbandry were at their most mobile in the context of Christianity. Deriving their authority from Genesis images of husbandry became extremely powerful ways of representing civility as human development of the earth. (193) This kind of hands on civility is absent on the island, and without it trust as a commodity cannot be built and distributed. The only advantage of this is risk-control (for betrayal). Absence of cultivation also refutes the taken for granted assumption that “For Prospero, the land is to be cultivated, the native to be civilized” (Vaughan 170). As he is alienated from the island’s earth, Prospero’s magic allows him to work around, not with the earth, while trust requires us to work with other humans, and with the physical world.

Disruption of Trust as Habitus, Trust as Sentiment, and Trust as Encapsulated Interest Prospero, to some a magus figure,19 is able to create, out of the mess of his past, a schema of restored trust before he marries off his daughter to his “inveterate” enemy’s son. The emotional journey to that point requires a shipwreck in which “Not a hair perished” (1.2.217), but Prospero’s enemies feared for their lives. Ariel reports that “All but mariners/ Plunged into the foaming brine and quit the vessel” (1.2.210–11) and Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, cried, “Hell is empty,/ And all the devils are here” (214–15). Spatial disorientation and anxieties 425

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about food and shelter confront them once they land. Father (Alonso) and son (Ferdinand) are separated from each other and made to believe the other is drowned. Alonso laments: “O thou my heir/ . . . what strange fish/ Hath made his meal on thee” (2.1.106–8). When food is brought to them by “several strange shapes,” it vanishes before they can eat (3.3.20–41). In all these instances trust as “taken for granted” assumption is suspended in a controlled setting. Why? To use physical pain and cognitive confusion for moral chastisement.20 From the perspective of trust theory, the play resembles a cognitive-affective experiment on how denial of routine expectations of food, shelter and familiar ambiance can cause pain that penetrates the “sensible soul,” site of emotions and their transformation.21 Prospero’s trust in Ariel, who works out the details of the wreck, rescue and reformation, clues us to another feature of trust theory, trust as encapsulated interest. As opposed to (1) trust as habitus and (2) trust based on sentiment, such as love, attachment and loyalty, (3) encapsulated trust is more limited, and is based on an inclusion of our interests. What incentives do we have for trust and trustworthiness (see Hardin 1–7). While trust based on sentiment is an open system, trust based on encapsulated interest is a closed system. Prospero’s relation to Ariel is anchored in both, as evidenced in Ariel’s “Do you love me, Master” in consonance with Prospero’s reiterated endearments. In contrast, their opening encounter foregrounds trust as encapsulated interest when Ariel demands his freedom. “Is there more toil” (1.2.242) he asks, and reminds Prospero, “thou did promise/ To bate me a full year” (248–49) in return for the “pains” of service that he is given (242). While this makes him an indentured laborer in the colonies (as opposed to a slave), from the perspective of trust theory Ariel’s cooperation to perform “to point the tempest I bade thee” (1.1.193), or “do me business in the veins of the earth” (255), has an anticipated goal: “[Ariel’s] liberty” (245). His insistence makes this part of their trust a closed system, and Prospero resorts to guilttripping: “I must/ Once in a month recount what thou hast been,/ which thou forget’st” (261– 63). We find out that Sycorax, in her “unmitigable rage,” at the spirit’s not being able to carry out her commands trapped him in a rift “inside a cloven pine” for a “dozen years” (276–79) and Prospero freed him. Unlike Caliban, Ariel offers no counter narrative, only reiterates his “worthy service,” and how he “told [him] no lies, made no mistakings, served/ Without or grudge or grumbling” (246–48). To coerce Ariel, Prospero digs into somatic memories of pain: “Thy groans/ Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts/ Of ever-angry bears” (287–89), and threatens: “I will rend an oak/ And peg thee in his knotty entrails” (295–96). Oak will hurt more than pine. However, consistent with their positively toned trust, despite the threats, Prospero promises: “after two days/ I will discharge thee” (298–99) and keeps the promise. The encapsulated interest (of both) motivates trust, leads to cooperation, efficiency, and expediency. The dramaturg of the unities of time and action, Ariel, transforms into many shapes and guises, pervading the atmosphere, while the place, the grungy earth waits.

Difculties of Trust: Caliban and Prospero Caliban’s territorial claim is not anchored to any aspect of social habitus, but his confidence: “This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother,/ Which though tak’st from me” (1.2.331–32), and his bitter complaint: “here you sty me/ In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me/ The rest o’ th’ island” (342–44). Caliban’s claim is a less glorified version of Prospero’s belief in being the elect, and he speaks of his dispossession to Trinculo and Stephano: “As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant,/ A sorcerer, that by his cunning hath/ Cheated me of the island” (3.2.39–41). In the opening scene, however, Caliban remembers a trust-based bonding with Prospero. “When thou cam’st first,” he says, “Thou strok’st me made much of me,” remembers 426

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being given “water with berries” to drink (332–34). On the basis of these routines, he says, “And then I loved thee/And showed thee all th’ qualities o’ the island” (336–37). Recapping the moment of first trouble in paradise, Prospero says: “I have used thee,/ Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged thee/ In mine own cell till thou didst seek to violate/ The honor of my child” (1.2.345–48). This accusation, met with Caliban’s infamous rejoinder that he could have “peopled the isle with Calibans” (349), is no more than a shameless assertion that procreative urge causes sexual desire, a widely disseminated notion in today’s evolutionary biology. From that point on, Prospero’s disgust is born of the necessity to trust the untrustworthy because as he admits to Miranda, “He does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices/ That profit us” (311–13). From an evolutionary perspective disgust is beneficial; it has evolved to protect humans (and animals) from ingesting rotten food. It is biologically eliminative and establishes boundaries (Rozin 637–53). Cognitively, moral disgust is associated with removing oneself from untrustworthy people (Evans 21). Odd as it may sound, Prospero’s righteous disgust and Caliban’s equally righteous anger establish clean boundaries to facilitate services demanded and rendered.22 Prospero’s fear of miscegenation is a learnt emotion. His treatment of Ferdinand and his crazed warnings to the couple against pre-marital sex show that he equates social trust with virtue, reputation, institutional consent (in this case, for marriage). However, his denigration of Caliban as “A freckled whelp” (1.2.283), his vulgar reference to the child Caliban being “littered” on the island by his hag-mother (282), is part of the same habitus that establishes positive norms of reciprocity.23 The word, “litter,” reinforces Caliban as a conflation of animal and human (and earth). The monster epithet used by others for Caliban suggests unnatural birth, as Auden clarifies: “Sycorax gave birth to Caliban, the father being either the Devil, or the god Setebos” (299). The word, “litter,” in conjunction with Prospero’s reference to Sycorax’s “earthy and abhorred commands” to Ariel (1.2.273), in my construal, carries a so far unexplored intertextual echo from the story of “The Swan Knight” in the old French Crusade Cycle, in which the mother, Beatrix, is slandered by her mother-in-law as having given birth to “puppies,” though the word, litter, is not used, while the six sons and a daughter are abandoned in the forest, raised by a deer and a hermit. Unlike Beatrix, Sycorax has birthed only one son; interspecies sex and nurture is not suggested here. Yet, like Beatrix’s offspring, Sycorax’s son finds himself abandoned (raised by a hermit like magician) and also like Beatrix’s progeny, is entitled to inherit. Caliban is figuratively seen as an animal, while Beatrix’s children magically transform to swans which saves them from death, and eventually, all but one of them, regain human form and inheritance rights (see McCracken 40–63, for a retelling of this medieval tale). Though a hostile act of betrayal, nurture in the forest by an animal (the deer) and the hermit, suggesting providential comfort and trust may not exactly fit Caliban’s story, it serves to demystify Sycorax in a new way.24 Ariel’s prehistory also mirrors trials of Beatrix’s offspring, and like them it ends on a positive note. The dyadic trust between Prospero and Ariel requires Caliban’s exclusion. The dark side of trust is not only that sometimes we need to trust the untrustworthy, as Caliban and Prospero do; trust is also contingent on someone having to be excluded. Those who do the excluding are often in positions of power, and for their profit, can make sure the included (e.g., Ariel) and the excluded (e.g., Caliban) remain disconnected.25 It follows, then, that if Prospero’s profit is a lifetime purchase of unpaid service, Caliban’s profit is cursing. “You taught me language, my profit on’t is,” he says, “I know how to curse, the red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!” (1.2.362–64). A core relational theme for anger, according to the prominent emotion theorist, Richard Lazarus, is “a demeaning offense to me and mine” (164). Caliban’s anger 427

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is self-protective. All the same, in response to Prospero’s “I’ll rack thee with old cramps,/ Fill thy bones with aches, make thee roar,/ That beasts shall tremble at thy din” (368–70), Caliban admits: “I must obey. His art is of such power/it would control my dam’s god, Setebos,/ And make a vassal of him” (370–73). Contrarily, Ariel’s conciliation is happy toned: “That’s my noble master/ What shall I do? Say, what? What shall I do” (299–300). As with characters, so it is with the elements they represent. In contrast to water, fire, and air, earth is associated with bad smells, howling beasts, disgusting persons, such as “the filthy-mantled pool behind [his] cell” where, at his command, Ariel left the motley insurrectionists—Trinculo, Stephano, and Caliban—“dancing up to th’ chins, that the foul lake/ O’erstunk their feet” (4.1.183– 85). The slimy waters of the earth are used to shame Caliban and his “confederates” (140), and Ariel chases them through “Toothed briars, and sharp furzes, pricking gorse, and thorns” that “enter” their “frail shins” (180–81), causing pain. As an antidote to his fear and distrust of Prospero, Caliban, sensing Stephano’s fear when the invisible Ariel mimics the tune of their song, says: Be not afeard; this isle is full of noises. And sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand tangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices That, if I had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and shower Riches to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again. (3.2.128–36)

Caliban will revise his view of Stephano and Trinculo, yet his hope (of getting rid of the tyrant) establishes trust as encapsulated interest. One bad (or good) thing about Prospero’s ambivalent trust is that it predicts Caliban cannot betray. Distrust reduces risk, and there is an inevitability to Caliban’s failed insurrection. It cannot be. Caliban, however—still called “bastard,” “this thing of darkness”—is pardoned for a greater offense, and acknowledged by Prospero as his (5.1.275–80). Caliban’s hope, however, brings him comfort, as bonding emotions contribute to thick trust, and Caliban has his lyrical epiphany, an oppositional parallel to which is his first encounter with Trinculo when a pitiless storm joins them limb to limb. Trinculo, distressed at the absence of “bush or shrub” anywhere, tries to comprehend what this huddled thing is—“a man, or fish?” (2.2.24), decides that it smells like some “strange fish” (26), but since there is “no shelter hereabouts,” decides to “shroud till the dregs of the storm be past,” concluding: “Misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows” (35–38). This uncanny commingling instantiates trust based on shared vulnerability. Stephano’s first inference is that it is “some monster of the isle with four legs and two voices,” and he offers drink to relieve its “ague.” As an antithesis to the spirits’ making a feast vanish before the prisoners can eat, Stephano’s sack is a ritual offering that initiates trust (2.2.76–80). Caliban’s initial fear leads him to assume it is a spirit come to punish him, and he cries out: “Don’t torment me, prithee! I will bring my wood home faster” (67–8). His groaning is cured with more booze until Stephano recognizes Trinculo’s familiar voice, is able to extricate his legs, crying out: “Thou art very Trinculo indeed! How cam’st thou to be in siege of this mooncalf. Can he vent Trinculos?” (2.2.108–9). It is impossible not to hear an oblique echo of Caliban peopling the island with Calibans in Stephano’s “Can he vent Trinculos?” For his part, Trinculo thought Caliban is dead: “I 428

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took him to be killed with a thunderstroke” (110). Being thought of as a dead fish drinking up the storm, excreting Trinculos, ties Caliban to the earth in a different fashion from his lyrical tribute to the island’s music. Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano’s being thrown into the stinking lake behind Prospero’s cell (for their penance) and their immersion in the storm are, indeed, inverted baptisms and communions: ceremonials that establish trust. Even though this scene foregrounds a great deal of stigmatization of Europe’s racial others as non-human, as commodifiable objects in European markets, its dramaturgical and figurative appeal lies in the tight knot of spontaneous trust among, not only Europeans and their Others, but also between the earth, the weather and humans, with Caliban at the center. His wonder at Stephano and Trinculo parallels Miranda’s wonder at Ferdinand (1.2.410) and later, at the “goodly creatures,” eliciting joy: “How beauteous mankind is!” (5.1.181–82). Prospero’s gentle “’Tis new to thee” (83) applies equally to Caliban.26 This affective logic informs Caliban’s offer to show his wondrous “new masters” food sources of this earth: I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow, And I with long nails will dig thee pignuts. Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset. I will bring thee To clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scalmels from the rock. (2.2.157–63)

Conclusion On this island, where Caliban’s flesh is mortified daily so that sometimes he is “All wound with adders” (5.1.13), the welcome he gives to shipwrecked strangers counterpoints to Prospero’s power-welcome to his kinsmen, whom he knit up in “their distractions” (3.3.90–91), causing an affliction so great that even Gonzalo cries out: “All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement/ inhabit here. Some heavenly power guide us/ Out of this fearful country” (5.1.104–6). The end makes clear that it was never Prospero’s intention to establish new networks of trust; his goal all along was to reconfigure structures of power, negotiate his own rehabilitation, with his former sphere of power restored. It is no wonder, then, that Caliban, who, in the beginning of the play refers to himself as his own king, in the middle celebrates himself as: “Ban, ‘ban Ca-caliban/Has a new master” (2.2.173–74); at the end says, “I’ll be wise hereafter” (5.1.296). He will still be a trusting (not naïve as before) earth-monster, not master, and (possibly) a free native who can fend for himself and others, who is commensurate with the earth, its storms, pelting rain, fires rising from swamps, its rocks, its muddy trenches, mazes for pathways in which he gets lost while carrying fish and wood: its misshapen ugliness like his own.

Notes 1 Similarly drawing on Galen and others, Elizabeth Harvey identifies “seams of somatic and cerebral experience” (36) that organize King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest. Paster’s seminal study of humoral subjectivities, and ecologies of passion in Hamlet, Othello, and other plays, remains a significant milestone. 2 In a fascinating discussion, David Bagchi talks about the role played by The Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies in taming and faming the deeply moving power of Biblical emotions. 3 In their “Introduction” to Renaissance of Emotion, Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan explore how “interpretation and valuation of emotion” must go beyond “humoral medical knowledge” because

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“contemporary writers drew variously on teachings from Protestant, Catholic, Anglican, Judaic, Augustinian, Neoplatonic, and Neo-Stoic traditions to help frame their understanding of emotional experience and its consequent role in earthly and spiritual life” (13). See also, Mary Lund in Meek and Sullivan (88–102). Neil Rhodes draws on a wide variety of texts, including those by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, for an inquiry into how rhetorical tropes constitute emotion and how performance impacts circulation of emotion from stage to audience (19–29). See Danijela Kambaskovic’s contextualizing of lyric emotion in Shakespeare’s sonnets by reference to Plato’s philosophy of love. She also refers to Calvin and Hebrew texts to speak of “smell as being the most spiritual of senses” (21). Fox links texts to intertexts for understanding cultures of emotion. She explores Ovid’s influence on embodied emotion in Shakespeare and his contemporaries (3–8). Lynn Enterline traces influences of classical literature taught in schoolrooms to claim that “Shakespeare’s representation of the passions indicates that early school training encouraged in pupils a highly mediated relation to emotion,” as they made a “detour through the passions” of “classical figures offered for imitation” (15). Using a Lacanian framework, Lalita Pandit reads the sad and happy flower offering speeches of Ophelia and Perdita as examples of Shakespeare’s metamorphic emotion language as it is shaped by an “underlying working-through” of myth through Ovid’s retelling of the Proserpina story (258–62). As editor of the recent, Shakespeare and Emotion volume, Katherine A. Craik devotes the entire Part II to representation and thematization of discrete emotions, fear, grief, sympathy, shame, anger, pride, as well as moods and other affective states such as happiness, love, nostalgia, wonder and confusion in Shakespeare plays and poems, covering almost the entire canon (151–343). Patrick Colm Hogan studies Shakespearean emotion within comparative frameworks across time and place to explore how literary emotion ties to ethics. Bradley J. Irish, in his study of emotion in the Tudor court explores social and political violence associated with a public discourse of disgust. Lalita Pandit Hogan uses appraisal theory to decode the prophecies in Macbeth as appraisals that elicit a range of negative emotions, though the anticipation itself had been a “happy prologue.” Christy Anderson draws attention to revival of interest in mechanical technologies of hydraulics in Shakespeare’s time, making nature a work of art, while acknowledging that “wind and water are mobile and fluid forces of nature and appear in many guises” (42, 41). The artificial reproduction of wind, air, and water in the play may be more contained, but earth, not as prepossessing, in my view, remains outside of artifice. Wilson Knight says the play captures, “spiritual progress from 1599 to 1600, to the year 1611, or whenever, exactly, The Tempest was written. According to this reading, Prospero is not God, rather the controlling judgement of Shakespeare, since Ariel and Caliban are also representations of dual minor personalities of his soul” (139–140). William Shakespeare. The Tempest, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Norton, 2019). All textual citations are to this edition. In his Introduction to the New Cambridge edition, David Lindley refers to Robert Miola’s observation that the island is like the green world of early comedies (73). Charlotte Scot says: “A testimony to the role of human intervention in the landscape, Ceres’ images define cultivation as mediation between order and abundance” (198). Drawing attention to Cesaire’s rewriting, Virginia Vaughn says, “To Cesaire, Prospero is anti-Nature. Just as the magician uses his power to control his servants, Ariel and Caliban, he uses—brave utensils—to insulate himself from the earth” (170). In his study of poverty, debt and trust in early modern society, the historian Laurence Fontaine takes up Timon of Athens and Merchant of Venice because he thinks plays “refract society” (218) and are, thus, valuable sources of information. See Barbara A. Misztal, “Trust as Habitus” (102; 105; 102–156). Commenting on the larger anxieties the play refracts, Barbara Fuchs says, “Textual signs of English anxiety about Islamic power in the Mediterranean abound in the play, though critics generally relegate these signs to literary register” (277). In an eloquent overview of the reception history of the play and Caliban, Simon Palfrey says: “Caliban evades generic taxonomies as much as, at the play’s end, he eludes a romantic closure. He remains as definitively unfinished and cumulative as history and its verdicts” (167). Departing from conventional views of Prospero as “the quintessential Renaissance philosopher-magus,” or “Prospero as witch” (169), Barbara Mowat argues that Prospero is a “product of several magic traditions,” and it is possible “to conflate the magus, the enchanter, and the wizard into one figure” (185).

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William Shakespeare 20 See Javier Moscoso on early modern ideas on physical pain and its affective efficacy for moral education (45–48). 21 See Elizabeth Harvey on “Galen’s grafting of the Platonic and Aristotelian tripartite model of the soul, vegetative, sensible and rational” to his medical model (43). 22 In her discussion of Bosola’s cooperation with and disgust at the two evil brothers of the Duchess, in The Duchess of Malfi, Lalita Pandit Hogan says: “Bosola uses this affect to remove himself psychologically, though he cannot remove himself socially” (168). See also Steven Mullaney on emotions being a “boundary phenomenon” (19). 23 George Lamming’s indictment of Prospero is instigated by the latter’s interruption of Ferdinand and Miranda’s courtship: “It is at this point that Prospero intervenes to supply us again with the stuff he is made of: an imperialist by circumstance, a sadist by disease; and, above all, an old man in whom envy and revenge are equally matched” (164). 24 Marina Warner makes other connections, when she says, “Behind Sycorax lie two of the most notorious witches of antiquity: Circe and Medea” (100). I find the Beatrix echo more affective. 25 See, for example, in Une Tempete, how the coming together of Caliban and Ariel evidences Cesaire’s desire for the two to build trust (149–156). 26 About the primacy of wonder as an emotion of discovery in Shakespeare, Tom Bishop thinks, “Wonder inhabits Shakespeare’s work from start to finish and from top to bottom” (318).

Works Cited Anderson, Christy. “Wild Waters: Hydraulics and the Forces of Nature.” The Tempest and Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, U of Pennsylvania P, 2000, pp. 41–47. Auden, W. “The Tempest” (1947). Lectures on Shakespeare. Edited by Arthur Kirsch, Princeton UP, 2000, pp. 296–307. Bagchi, David. “‘The Scripture Moveth us in Sundry Places: Framing Biblical Emotion in the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies.” The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, edited by Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, Manchester UP, 2015, pp. 45–64. Bishop, Tom. “Wonder: Pericles, The Tempest, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle.’” Shakespeare and Emotion, edited by Katherine Craik, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 317–329. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Edited by Randal Johnson, Columbia UP, 1993, pp. 29–73. Buttigeg, Pete. Trust: America’s Best Chance. Norton, 2020. Coleridge, Samuel. “Notes on the Tempest” (1836). The Tempest, edited by Peter Hulme and William H Sherman, Norton, 2019, pp. 125–129. Craik, Katherine, editor. Shakespeare and Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2020, pp. 41–47. Enterline, Lynn. “Rhetoric and the Passions in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom.” Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline Emotion. U of Pennsylvania P, 2012, pp. 9–32. Evans, Dylan. Emotion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2001. Fehr, Ernest, and Christian Zehender. “Trust.” Oxford Companion to Emotion and Affective Sciences, edited by David Sander and Klaus R Scherer, Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 209, 392–393. Fontaine, Laurence. “Political Economies and Cultures of Exchange.” Poverty, Credit and Trust in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 218–245. Fox, Cora. Ovid and the Poetics of Emotion in Elizabethan England. Palgrave, 2009, pp. 3–8. Fuchs, Barbara. “Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest” (1997), The Tempest, Norton, 2004, pp. 265–285. Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Way Things Are.” The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Norton, 2011, pp. 185–202. Hardin, Russell. Trust: Key Concepts. Polity Press, 2006, pp. 1–41. ———. Trust and Trustworthiness. Russel Sage Foundation, 2000, pp. 1–7. Harvey, Elizabeth. “Medicine: King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest.” Shakespeare and Emotion, edited by Katherine Craik, Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 34–48. Hogan, Lalita Pandit. “‘Prophesying with Accents Terrible’: Emotion and Appraisal in Macbeth.” Towards a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, U of Texas P, 2010, pp. 251–280.

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Lalita Pandit Hogan ———. “Trust and Disgust: The Precariousness of Positive Emotions in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.” Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, edited by Cora Fox, Bradley Irish, and Cassie M. Miura, Manchester UP, 2021, pp. 168–183. Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Compassion and Pity: The Tempest and Une Tempete.” What Literature Teaches us About Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 257–286. Hulme, Peter, and William Sherman, editors. “Cesaire’s Une Tempete at The Gate.” The Tempest and Its Travels, U Pennsylvania P, pp. 149–156. Irish, Bradley. Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, Emotion and Early Modern Feeling. Southwestern UP, 2018. Kambaskovic, Danijela. “Of Comfort and Despaire: Plato’s Philosophy of Love and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies, edited by R. S. White, Mark Houlahan, and Katrina O’Loughlin, Palgrave, 2015, pp. 17–28. Knight, Wilson. “Myth and Miracle.” (1929), The Tempest, edited by Peter Hulme and William Sherman, Norton, 2004, pp. 137–141. Lamming, George. “A Monster, a Child, a Slave.” The Pleasures of Exile (1990), The Tempest. Norton, 2019, pp. 154–174. Lazarus, Richard. “Universal Antecedents of the Emotions.” The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, edited by Paul Ekman and Richard J Davidson, Oxford UP, 1994. Lund, Mary. “Robert Burton, Perfect Happiness and the visio dei.” Renaissance of Emotion, edited by Erin Sullivan and Richard Meek, Manchester UP, 2015, pp. 88–102. McCracken, Peggy. “Nursing Animals and Cross-Species Intimacy.” From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe. U of Notre Dame P, 2013, pp. 39–64. Meek, Richard, and Erin Sullivan, editors. The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Manchester UP, 2015. Mistztal, Barbara. “Trust as Habitus.” Trust in Modern Societies. Polity P, 1998, pp. 102–156. Moscoso, Javier. “Pain and Suffering.” Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, edited by Susan Broomhall, Routledge, 2017, pp. 45–48. Mowat, Barbara. “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus” (1981), reprint in The Tempest. Norton, 2004, pp. 168–187. Mullaney, Steven. “Introduction: Structures of Feeling and Reformation of Emotion.” Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare. U of Chicago P, 2015, pp. 7–50. Ostrum, Elinor, and James Walker. Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons from Experimental Research. Russel Sage Foundation, 2002. Palfrey, Simon. “Magnetic Island and the Islander in The Tempest.” A New World of Words. Oxford UP, 1997. Pandit, Lalita. “Shakespeare, Ovid, and Saxo Grammaticus.” Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, edited by Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit, U of Georgia P, 1990, pp. 248–267. Paster, Gail. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. U of Chicago P, 2004, pp. 1–76. Rhodes, Neil. “Rhetoric: Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare and Emotion. Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 19–29. Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark McCauley. “Disgust.” Handbook of Emotions, edited by Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Guilford Press, 2000, pp. 637–653. Scot, Charlotte. “Prospero’s Husbandry and the Cultivation of Anxiety.” Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture. Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 187–216. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, Norton, 2019, pp. 3–73. Warner, Marina. “‘The Foul Witch’ and Her ‘Freckled Whelp’: Circean Mutations in the New New World.” “The Tempest” and Its Travels. U of Pennsylvania P, 2000, pp. 97–113. White, R. Mark Houlahan et al., editors. Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies. Palgrave, 2015. Wilhelm, Hegel. “Dramatic Action and Character.” Hegel on Tragedy, edited by Anne and Henry Paolucci, Harper, 1975, pp. 95–163.

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36 JANE AUSTEN AND THE EMOTION OF LOVE Keith Oatley

Abstract: Jane Austen was one of fiction’s most important innovators. All six of her published novels treat the emotion of love. In Pride and Prejudice, she transformed the Western idea in which a person might see someone across a crowded room, meet that person’s eyes, and fall in love. At the beginning of this novel, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy do see each other, but are disdainful—both rather proud, both rather prejudiced. Not only does Austen suggest that one can only really love a person when one comes to know them, but as Elizabeth and Darcy start to know each other and, because of this, can begin to love each other, she arranges that we, as readers, come to know and love these two characters as well. Thereby she creates a parallel in which we readers can come to feel with these protagonists, empathetically. After Pride and Prejudice, the novel Emma is briefly discussed, as part of Austen’s exploration of the psychology of love relationships.

Jane Austen and Her Relations Jane Austen was born in December 1775 to a mother whose maiden name was Leigh, in the village of Steventon, of which her father, the Reverend George Austen, was the Rector. Jane was seventh of eight children, with six brothers and an older sister, Cassandra. Biographies of Austen include those by Tomalin (1997), Le Faye (1998), Shields (2001), and Looser (2017). As they recount, the family lived in this village until 1801, when Jane’s father retired, and the family moved to the town of Bath. After the Revd George Austen died in 1805, Cassandra and Jane went, with their mother, to live in various places before moving in 1809, to Chawton, in Hampshire. The house into which they moved was owned by their brother, Edward, who, in 1783, had been adopted by rich relatives who were childless, and needed a son to inherit their estate. You can visit the house in Chawton. You can see the piano that Jane played each morning. In the living room, you can see the small round table on which Jane wrote. It’s scarcely big enough to bear a piece of paper. You can see the bedroom that Jane and Cassandra shared. Except when they were travelling from place to place, which they did a fair bit, they shared a bedroom almost all their lives. It was while Jane lived in Chawton that the first four of her novels were published. By 1817 she had become ill, probably from Addison’s Disease, in which insufficient adrenal hormones DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-43

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are produced. Cassandra took her to Winchester for medical treatment. Jane died there in July of that year. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral. That December her last two novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together, with a biographical note by her brother Henry.

Te Novel and Love As Margaret Doody (1997) relates, we can think of the novel as having started some two thousand years ago. The novel is not an epic. It is not about Kings and Queens. It is not usually about war. It is generally about ordinary people and how they do and don’t get along with each other. Though fiction, from Latin, means “something made,” novels are not made up; they are about issues that we all know, including certain aspects of emotions. Science tends to concentrate on one kind of truth—correspondence—for instance between hypothesis and observation or outcome. Literary fiction is also based on correspondence truths. So we know, for instance, that if, in a piece of fiction, Amy is angry with Beth, a correspondence truth is that an outcome may involve Amy saying or doing something hurtful. But fiction generally also embodies two other kinds of truth (Oatley, “Why Fiction”). So, along with correspondences, come truths of coherence within complexes. Among coherent factors may be whether two people, such as Amy and Beth, are mother and daughter, sisters, work colleagues, new acquaintances, lovers. . . . Each of these will make differences to episodes of emotion, and fiction can explore them. Literary fiction also includes truths of a personal kind, about how what one reads can resonate with us. In this way, as Vessel, Starr, and Rubin (2013) put it, on the basis of their brain imaging results, this kind of truth can “reach within.” In her six novels, Jane Austen shows how these all three of these kinds of truth are involved, with a center of emotion. From the ancient time when novels started, only one is now to be found in bookshops. It’s The Golden Ass (Apuleius, 160–180/1950); not so much a love story as a sex story. Its personal issues deal with spirituality. An early novel that prompts psychological reflection was The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (c. 1000/2001), a lady-in-waiting in the Japanese royal court. The complex-coherence issue that this love story treats is about how a man may look everywhere he can to try to find and make love with a woman who reminds him of his mother. For Europeans the first novel is often taken to be Don Quixote, by Cervantes (1605/2005), tilting at windmills, objects of imagination, meant humorously to contradict the idea of correspondence of mind with reality but also to ask us, in a way that is personal: what we are up to in our lives. For the English (see Watt, 1957) there’s Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719/2003). This also directs us to consider personal truths: how to be or not to be alone. Then came Henry Fielding’s (1749/1985) Tom Jones, about a young profligate. Maybe it’s a love story but it’s more of a sex-story in which, after a series of adventures—complexity, all over the place—that include episodes of sex outside marriage, Tom marries Sophia Western. It is known that Jane Austen read it because, in a letter to Cassandra, she wrote about how she and a young law student called Tom LeFroy discussed this novel. The discussion took place during a visit of LeFroy in the Christmas holidays of 1795, when both Jane and he were 20. The meetings occurred at Manydown House, the home of Jane’s and Cassandra’s close friends and neighbors: Alethea, Catherine, and Elizabeth Bigg. It was there that Jane and Tom danced and talked together. Tomalin (1997) explains that when, in this letter, Jane told Cassandra about her discussions of Fielding’s novel with Tom LeFroy, she was giving more than a hint that she and LeFroy had been talking about their sexual attraction to each other. When LeFroy 434

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was quite old, he confessed to a nephew that he’d been in love with Jane. Here’s what Tomalin writes: “There must have been something more than dancing and sitting out together: kisses at least, a stirring of the blood, a quickening of the breath” (118). By biographers, these events are generally referred to as a “flirtation.” Neither LeFroy nor Jane had money so they could not marry (correspondence and coherence truths). And Tom LeFroy seems not to have behaved like Tom Jones. In 1802 Jane received a proposal of marriage in this very same place, Manydown House, from Harris Bigg-Wither, brother of the women friends of Cassandra and Jane. Jane accepted him, thinking, perhaps, that she would be mistress of an elegant house, able to be comfortable, able to provide for her parents and sister, able to help her brothers in their careers. But as she lay awake that night, she must also have thought about Tom LeFroy with whom, seven years earlier, she had danced and flirted. Perhaps she thought, too, about the idea that she had explored—of intimacy—in her novel, First Impressions, written some years before, and sent to a publisher by her father in 1797. It was rejected. A later, reworked version would become Pride and Prejudice, to be published in 1813. The day after Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal, Jane dressed carefully, went to meet him and said that she was honored, but she had made a mistake. She explained that she esteemed him, but that this was not enough; she would not be acting in the right way to him if she were to accept. She withdrew her consent. Although all her novels end in marriage or engagement, Jane herself did not marry. She probably never had sex. Her flirtation with Tom LeFroy may have contributed a part to how she thought about love. A larger part—her main experience of intimacy—came from her relationship with Cassandra. It was her own imagination, and her sisterly relationship on which she drew to depict intimacy in her novels: her idea of the state of love, in which couples could be fulfilled in marriage. In Europe the first famous novel of the beginning of the Romantic Era, in which emotion and its implications were the subject, was The Sorrows of Young Werther (by Goethe, 1774/1989), a love story. The first English novels that are still read by many today, written a few decades after the start of the Romantic Era, are Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811/1980) and Pride and Prejudice (1813/1970). In the rest of this chapter, I deal mainly with Pride and Prejudice, which may be the world’s very best love story. Among other influences, it seems to have been the prototype for the whole genre now called “romance” (Vivanco & Kramer, 2010).

Six Steps to the Fall In his reading of stories from all round the world—created before the age of European colonization—Hogan (The Mind) found that most common was the love story in which, often, two young people long to be united but a powerful older man tries to prevent them. The best-known love story in English follows this pattern: Romeo and Juliet. As Jill Levinson, in her Introduction to the (2000 edition of the play) the story was well known in Elizabethan England. It arose as myth from many sources, but the plot that Shakespeare used is thought to have derived from an Italian version written around 1530. Love stories differ in different cultures (Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992), but one version seems to have taken a grip on people in Europe and North America. It’s the idea that a person can fall—yes, fall—in love. Here’s the idea. First two people must be young, and open to this experience. Second, one person (sometimes each of them) sees the other. Third, there’s attraction. Fourth, there’s an interval during which fantasies build, and are projected onto the other. Fifth, 435

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there’s a meeting in which each confirms that they are feeling about the other in the same way. Sixth, that’s it! They’re in love. In Shakespeare’s version, Romeo sees Juliet at a feast that is followed by dancing. She is dancing with a man. Romeo watches her from the other side of the room; thinks he has never seen such beauty. He starts up a fantasy. Then, after the dance has ended, he crosses the room. He’s already worshipping her. He touches her with his hand, and speaks the first four lines of a sonnet (a verse form created to express love): If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Romeo is telling Juliet that he sees her as a shrine that a pilgrim visits. Then, continuing the sonnet form, she replies: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this, For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. (Act 1, scene 4)

So Juliet, aged 13, looks at Romeo. She is, as we might now say, quickly “into it.” She reaches out her hand to touch his. She’s amused by the thought of herself as a saint and plays on the idea of palm as a hand and palmer as a pilgrim who returns from the Holy Land bearing a piece of palm tree. After the last line of the sonnet, Romeo kisses Juliet. Averill (1985) found that this kind of experience continues. He asked people to read a story which, in the 1950s, was published in a newspaper because it so perfectly followed the sequence of falling in love. The story was of a woman of age 19 and man of age 23, strangers who, one Monday, boarded a train in San Francisco. They sat on opposite sides of the aisle. They looked at each other. They stayed on separate sides of the aisle until Wednesday. “I’d already made up my mind to say yes if he asked me to marry him,” said the woman. “We did most of the talking with our eyes,” said the man. By Thursday when they disembarked in Omaha, Nebraska, they had decided to marry. In Nebraska the woman was unable to marry at the age of 19 without parental consent, so they had to cross the river to the adjoining state of Iowa, where they married on Friday. Some 40% of respondents whom Averill asked said that they’d had an experience of this kind. A further 40% of respondents said their experiences of love did not conform to this, but they knew about it and based their unfavorable attitude to it on a single departure from the pattern.

A New Direction Here is what Jane Austen realized. In the falling-in-love sequence the two people know almost nothing about each other. So, in Pride and Prejudice, she set the love story off in a different direction, with the idea that you can only really love someone if you know who they are and, more importantly, if you accept who they are. What an enormous improvement Austen’s idea is, on the six-step version based on projection, which continues to be popular, for instance in Hollywood. 436

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An empirical study by Lisa Neff and Benjamin Karney (2005) gives another twist. They studied newly married people, who tended to be very caught up with each other. Neff and Karney called this “global adoration.” Only later did the members of these couples start to realize that the other had certain personality traits. Many of the wives, but not usually the husbands, started to understand their partners’ traits accurately. These women were then able to be supportive to their husbands and make it more likely that their marriages would last. Pride and Prejudice has another theme, perhaps related to what Neff and Carney found. It is that if, before you marry, you do know a bit about the other person, and know there’s an aspect you can’t stand, you may be able to do something to change it. This theme had also occurred in love stories before the time when Jane Austen wrote. For instance, it occurred in Samuel Richardson’s novel of 1740, Pamela.

Te Writing of Novels as Exploration Some early novels meander so that it seems as if we read the writers’ thoughts that they have jotted down. Austen was one of the first to have become more concise, to make the story cohere (coherence truth), and to be engaging for the reader (personal truth). We know Pride and Prejudice went through several drafts. If one looks at letters sent by Jane to Cassandra, we see that, in them, she writes continuously, with an easy flow and no crossings out. A page from one of these letters can be seen as page 105 of Le Faye’s (1998) biography. Here, Austen wrote as she would talk in conversation. In contrast, drafts of Austen’s fiction are full of crossingsout. You can see some of these on the front and back inside-covers of Tomalin’s (1997) book. In her fiction, Austen is not just writing down what she would if she were in a conversation, she is thinking, thinking . . . externalizing her mind onto paper, then putting herself into the role of reader: reading what she has thought and written, then moving forward, writing something new, thinking in the course of exploration. A novel is not something one just has in one’s head and jots down. It goes through many iterations. Oatley and Djikic studied interviews published in Paris Review, and found that of 52 famous writers of fiction (including 14 Nobel Prize winners) 38 wrote five or more drafts of their novels or short stories. The first scene of Tolstoy’s War and Peace has 15 surviving drafts (Feuer)—copied by his wife, Sofia, so he could develop them further each day—the surviving versions are those that didn’t end in the wastepaper basket. In the course of her iterations Austen developed the idea of writing as thinking (Oatley and Djikic). For her, writing was an exploration. At the age of 16 she wrote on the first page of a notebook, “a gift from my father.” At that time paper was expensive, and as Tomalin says, the fact that George Austen bought some for his daughter shows his encouragement of her writing. From the middle of the nineteenth century, paper became cheaper so that newspapers and novels could be read by many more people, and writers could more easily write more drafts. So, as compared with other novels of her time, Austen’s novels were carefully, thoughtfully, coherently, constructed. But as Ong (1954) said, however well a work of literature is constructed: “It is unbearable for a man or woman to be faced with anything less than a person” (320). So again, alongside truths of correspondence and coherence: the personal.

Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen wins first prize for Best First Sentence of a novel. Here’s how Pride and Prejudice starts: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” It’s witty, ironic, intriguing, with its suggestion of profound issues 437

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such as the position of women and their relation to men, and to money. We are invited to read on. As Harding (1940) would put it: Pride and Prejudice includes a “regulated hatred,” both of certain kinds of individuals who bully others, and those who are “condescending,” a term, which at that time, usually referred to how members of upper classes treated members of lower classes. More generally, Harding implied, Austen expresses a hatred of the invidious position of women in her time (correspondence, coherence, personal). It was almost impossible for them to have their own careers. Financially, and in other ways, they were dependent on men. In Pride and Prejudice, this issue starts with Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, who have five daughters. Mr. Bennet wanted a son to inherit his estate; the law at that time prevented estates being left to women. Mrs. Bennet’s preoccupation was to have her five daughters marry wealthy men. A rich man, called Bingley, moves into the neighborhood. Mrs. Bennet is delighted as she thinks he can marry one of her daughters. At a ball, Bingley’s close friend Mr. Darcy—well born and rich—enters the room. Out of politeness, Darcy dances with both of Bingley’s sisters. When he is asked to dance with someone else, such as Elizabeth, he is heard to say about her, in direct speech, loud enough for her to hear, “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me” (9). As a result, Elizabeth had “no very cordial feelings towards him” (9). Instead, a bit later on, Elizabeth starts to take a liking to George Wickham, who had been Darcy’s friend, but had fallen out with him. He denounces Darcy, which increases her dislike of him. As time passes, however, Darcy starts to notice Elizabeth, finds out about her, starts to feel attracted to her. He does, however, think her family to be much beneath his (condescension). Then, in the middle of the book, he says to her that he has struggled with his feelings but is unable to repress them, so he makes her a proposal of marriage. She rejects him. She is angry that he does not treat her family with respect and has been instrumental in undermining a relationship of Bingley with her older sister, whom she loves. Elizabeth realizes—the idea at the heart of this novel—that the only worthwhile relationship of people who marry is one of equality, without which there can be no intimacy—a quality that is far more important than the sordid financial dependency of women on men. As Hardy (1984) explains, in Jane Austen’s Heroines, intimacy in love relationships was the central issue for them. In 1977 Lodge suggested that poetry and some plays depend on metaphor. In contrast, novels and films more usually depend on metonymy which, as Jakobson (1956) said, is accomplished by juxtapositions and by the figure of part-for-whole (synecdoche). An example of the first kind, in Pride and Prejudice, is Mrs. Bennet’s idea that a rich man coming to live in the neighborhood means that he will choose one of her daughters juxtaposed with what Mr Bennet says, which is that all his daughters are “silly and ignorant like other girls” (2). This juxtaposition gives us a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s relationship with each other, devoid of intimacy. This kind of association offers a resonance (personal) in which we, as readers, come to share an association with one that has taken place in the mind of the author. A part-for-whole example occurs when Mr. Darcy, at the ball, refuses to dance with anyone except Bingley’s sisters. Instead, as we see on page 8, he spent the evening “walking about the room.” This refusal is the part; the whole is what the people in the neighborhood thought: “the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world.”

Invitations to Readers The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice has another critical feature. Although it was not distinctive to Austen, she was among the first to use it effectively in novels. It’s called “free indirect style.” It’s not an utterance of one of the characters which, since the introduction of punctuation (which came after the invention of printed books), is called direct speech, usually 438

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set in inverted commas. Free indirect style, without punctuation, might seem to be an something that a character thinks. It’s also something that a narrator might say. But, better than that, it’s a thought that a reader might have. In reading this novel, one is not being told this or that. One finds oneself joining in, thinking and feeling for oneself. Here’s another example of free indirect style from page 6: “To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.” It includes “step,” as one may take in a dance. It prompts us, as we think of Elizabeth’s Bennet’s family, into the imagined world that Austen invites us to construct, of the perhaps-not-too-serious activity of attending a dance in its juxtaposition with the all-too-serious activity of securing a husband. As the novel proceeds, Elizabeth starts to find out more about Darcy, whom after Wickham’s denunciation, she begins to understand better. After her anger and rejection of his proposal, Darcy starts being able to understand himself, including his narcissistic feelings of superiority over others. Then, along with this, he starts to be able to understand Elizabeth, and the position she is in. This is important to the story, but far more important is that, as Elizabeth and Darcy start to understand and grow fond of each other, Austen arranges that we readers also start to understand and grow fond, first of Elizabeth, then of Darcy. So the feelings, the emotions, are not those of the characters. They are ours, as readers (personal). As this begins to happen, we also start to become fond of Jane Austen and of her book (which in a letter to Cassandra, when she heard from the publisher that it would be published, she called “my darling child”). Some time later, John Ruskin, as well as Marcel Proust in his translation of Ruskin (Proust and Ruskin, 2011), suggested the idea of books as friends. As Booth (1988) has said, fiction is personal, and we can be closely affected by writers, whose company we keep. He went on to say that stories are “friendship offerings” (174). And as I wrote (Oatley, “Imagination”): Austen builds a satisfying allegory: a resonance between the intimacy that Elizabeth comes to feel for Darcy as she begins to understand him and the intimacy that we readers can come to feel for Austen. Affection for her is attested by the many branches of the Jane Austen Society in Britain and round the world. It’s an affection we can feel as we come to understand her in her metonymies, playfulness, and irony. (239) Jane Austen started to write early, and to read out pieces to her sister and brothers. Here’s part of something she wrote when she was 14 or 15, called Jack and Alice. It has since been published with other juvenilia (Austen, 1787–1794/2014). “On enquiring for his House I was directed thro’ this Wood to the one you there see. With a heart elated by the expected happiness of beholding him I entered it and had proceeded thus far in my progress thro’ it, when I found myself suddenly seized by the leg and on examining the cause of it, found that I was caught in one of the steel traps so common in gentlemen’s grounds.” “Ah,” cried Lady Williams, “how fortunate we are to meet with you; since we might otherwise perhaps have shared the like misfortune—” (22–24). Modern readers can imagine members of her family laughing in delight. Southam (2001) has remarked that in this family there was “a flow of native wit, with all the fun and nonsense of a large and clever family . . . rich in shrewd remarks, bright with playfulness and humor” (4). 439

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Wong (2018) has written about playfulness: about how in Austen’s Mansfield Park, the protagonist, Fanny Price, as a child, is unable to play. Wong discusses this in terms of development, therapy, and neuroscience, with the sense that play is a mode of creativity, important when we are children, important in our interactions as adults. In her childhood recitations Jane Austen was playful. Wong says that fiction writers like her invite readers to be “transformed by the serious play of imagining fictional minds” (137). What Austen did was turn her playfulness into irony, which found an ideal place in her novels. It, too, is an invitation to intimacy with us, as readers.

Originality Jackson (2006) wrote that it’s been difficult to say exactly what is original in the contents or style of Jane Austen. For instance, in 1811, Mary Brunton published Self Control, about moral issues of women in love and marriage. We know, from a letter to Cassandra that it was read by Austen. It seems to have influenced her in the preparation of the final manuscript of Pride and Prejudice. But perhaps Austen’s originality is not so difficult to see as Jackson suggests. The originality of Pride and Prejudice includes intimacy with the reader, and playfulness transmuted into irony. The novel is a journey of discovery, of social exploration, in which rather than witnessing characters, we personally take part with them, and as them. By the time she was 24, Austen had written three full novels. Pride and Prejudice was the first that she worked on that would later be published, started as First Impressions in 1796 when she was 20 and finished a year later. That version, along with her draft of Sense and Sensibility were initially written in epistolary style—a series of letters between characters—popular in the eighteenth century. It enabled the depiction of different points of view, and a certain inwardness. The later version, published in 1813, still works wonderfully well for modern readers. It includes third person narration, free-indirect style, and parts of some 40 letters (a remnant, perhaps, from earlier versions).

Republication and Emma Our means of understanding Jane Austen includes memories of her by members of her family, notebooks, and drafts of uncompleted novels (Austen, 1787–1794/2014; 1993). The growth of her popularity is thought to have been influenced by a biography by her nephew, James Austen-Leigh published in 1869. In the twentieth century, Austen became established as one of England’s favorite writers with republication, in 1920, of her six novels by Oxford UP, with editorial input by eminent scholars, pleased to put the 1914–1918 war behind them. As Sutherland (2006) explains, although the manuscripts were rather clear, these scholars worked on them word by word, in every way they could, including updating the spelling, though not always the punctuation. Emma, is thought by many to be Austen’s most perfectly structured novel. As to emotion, it has less to say than Pride and Prejudice. It is, however, not without its reflections on this issue. At a turning point of the novel, Emma and seven companions go for a picnic to Box Hill, in Surrey. As they sit on the hill, Emma flirts happily with Frank Churchill, but the other six are listless. Frank then says to them that Emma has asked him to say: she desires to know what you are all thinking of . . . she only demands from each of you either one thing very clever . . . or two things moderately clever—or three things very dull indeed, and she engages to laugh heartily at them all. (335) 440

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An answer comes from Miss Bates, a middle-aged unmarried woman who is unable to stop talking all the time about trivial matters of no interest to others. “Oh very well then,” said Miss Bates, “then I need not be uneasy. Three things very dull indeed. That will just do for me . . .” Emma could not resist. “Ah, ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number—only three at once.” (335) By a blush Miss Bates shows she is upset. Then later, as they wait for their carriage, Mr Knightley tells Emma that she should not have spoken as she did. He says that if Miss Bates were rich or fortunate, then he would not have worried. But he says, “She is poor; she is sunk from the comforts she was born to, and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion” (339). As she gets into the carriage Emma reproaches herself, “Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. . . . How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates?” (340). On the way home, in the carriage, Emma feels tears running down her cheeks. Are these tears about Miss Bates? Or are they poignant because, as we readers may suspect, it will be Mr Knightley whom Emma will come to love and marry?

Approaches to the Mind For many years psychology and literary theory seemed far apart. Psychologists tended to consider fiction as description that had neither reliability nor validity. Literary theorists often considered psychologists to be immersed in an inappropriate reductionism. More recently, it has been recognized that psychology and literary theory are close. This has been enabled by the current mode of mainstream psychology as cognitive, where this term means having to do with the mind, conscious and unconscious, in its perceptions, remembrances, actions, and interactions with others. Some literary theorists have recognized this proximity and drawn on cognitive psychology. Among useful publications in this regard are those of Hogan (Cognitive Science), Jaén and Simon, and Zunshine (Oxford). One set of empirical findings and theory in cognitive psychology, which has been influential, is known as theory-of-mind (Astington et al.) about how we understand minds of others whose knowledge is different than our own. Zunshine (Why) has proposed that novels are not just a bit about theory-of-mind, but all about it. Hogan (“Persuasion”) has discussed Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion, in this way. He discusses how, in this novel, Austen makes distinctions between characters’ theory-of-mind about individuals whom they know, and their theory-of-mind about members of sections of society, for instance about how women think of men. He goes on to discuss how, in Persuasion, Austen offers recognitions of some of the mistakes characters make, and the rest of us can make in our everyday lives: our biases, our errors in thinking that an emotion is due to this, when really it is due to that. He concludes that, in this novel Austen introduces us into “complex, lifelike situations, rather than the simplified situations of experimental research” (197). So we return to the idea that in novels, one may approach truths that include coherence and the personal, rather than just those of correspondence. Among psychologists who have worked on the connection between psychology and literature are Bruner, Gerrig, and Oatley (Such Stuff ). This work includes empirical studies, in which it has been found that reading more fiction, as compared with nonfiction, enables people to 441

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become more emotionally empathetic with others and to understand them better (Mar; Oatley, “Fiction”). In terms of human emotions, most current understandings of them now, in psychology, are cognitive (Oatley and Johnson-Laird), which brings us back to Pride and Prejudice, in which Austen suggests that love that really is love depends on cognitive knowledge of the other person.

Infuence Jane Austen has been influential on writers who followed her. She was an influence on George Eliot who, as we know from her journals, read Sense and Sensibility more than once. Here’s what Rebecca Mead wrote in 2013: without Austen, no Eliot . . . Could there be a more Austenesque scenario than the beginning of Middlemarch, which presents two young, well-born, unmarried women recently arrived in a country neighborhood, one of them filled with sense and the other brimming with sensibility? Some may demur, but one may say that the two most important writers of the nineteenthcentury English novel were Jane Austen and George Eliot. Without them English literature would not be what it is and—more than that—our psychological understandings of human emotions would not be what they are (see e.g., Keltner, Oatley, and Jenkins). George Eliot thought of her writing as: a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of—what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we can strive. (Haight, 466) This is a sentiment with which Jane Austen may have agreed.

Works Cited Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Translated by R. Graves, Penguin, 1950. Astington, Janet, Paul Harris, and David Olson, editors. Developing Theories of Mind. Cambridge UP, 1988. Austen, Jane. Catherine and Other Writings. Oxford UP, 1993. ———. Emma. Oxford UP, 2003. ———. Love and Friendship and Other Youthful Writings. Edited by C. Alexander, Penguin, 2014. ———. Mansfield Park. Oxford UP, 2003. ———. Northanger Abbey. Oxford UP, 1980. ———. Persuasion. Oxford UP, 2008. ———. Pride and Prejudice. Oxford UP, 1970. ———. Sense and Sensibility. Oxford UP, 1980. Austen-Leigh, James. A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections. Oxford UP, 2002. Averill, James. “The Social Construction of Emotion: With Special Reference to Love.” The Social Construction of the Person, edited by K. J. Gergen and K. E. Davis, Springer Verlag, 1985, pp. 89–109. Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. U of California P, 1988. Bruner, Jerome. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard UP, 1986. Brunton, Mary. Self-Control. Manners & Miller, 1811. Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. Translated by E. Grossman, Ecco, 2005.

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Jane Austen and the Emotion of Love Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Penguin, 2003. Doody, Margaret. The True Story of the Novel. HarperCollins, 1997. Feuer, K. B. Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace. Cornell UP, 1996. Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones. Penguin, 1985. Gerrig, Richard. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Yale UP, 1993. Goethe, Johann. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Translated by M. Hulse, Penguin, 1989. Haight, Gordon. Selections from George Eliot’s Letters. Yale UP, 1985. Harding, D. W. “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen.” Scrutiny, vol. 8, 1940, pp. 346–362. Hardy, John. Jane Austen’s Heroines: Intimacy in Human Relationships. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. Routledge, 2003. ———. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge UP, 2003. ———. “Persuasion: Lessons in Sociocultural Understanding.” Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind, edited by B. Lau, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 180–199. Jaén, Isabel, and Julien Simon, editors. Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions. U of Texas P, 2012. Jackson, Heather. “Raising the Unread: Mary Brunton and Jane Austen.” Times Literary Supplement, 7 Apr. 2006, pp. 14–15. Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance.” Fundamentals of Language, edited by R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Mouton, 1956, pp. 53–83. Jankowiak, William, and Edward Fischer. “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love.” Ethnology, vol. 31, 1992, pp. 149–155. Keltner, Dacher, Keith Oatley, and Jennifer Jenkins. Understanding Emotions. 4th ed., Wiley, 2019. Le Faye, Deidre. Jane Austen. British Library, 1998. Lodge, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Fiction. Cornell UP, 1977. Looser, Devoney. The Making of Jane Austen. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017. Mar, Raymond. “Evaluating Whether Stories Can Promote Social Cognition: Introducing the Social Processes and Content Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) Framework.” Discourse Processes, vol. 55, 2018, pp. 454–479. Mead, Rebecca. “Without Austen No Eliot.” The New Yorker, 28 Jan. 2013. Murasaki, Shikibu. The Tale of Genji. Translated by R. Tyler, Viking Penguin, 2001. Neff, Lisa, and Benjamin Karney. “To Know You Is to Love You: The Implications of Global Adoration and Specific Accuracy for Marital Relationships.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 88, 2005, pp. 480–497. Oatley, Keith. “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 618–628. ———. “Imagination, Inference, Intimacy: The Psychology of Pride and Prejudice.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 235–244. ———. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. ———. “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 3, 1999, pp. 101–117. ———, and Maja Djikic. “Writing as Thinking.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 12, 2008, pp. 9–27. Ong, Walter. “The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 4, 1954, pp. 309–320. Proust, Marcel, and John Ruskin. On Reading, with Sesame and Lilies 1: Of Kings’ Treasuries. Hesperus, 2011. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. Oxford UP, 2001. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by J. Levinson, Oxford UP, 2000. Shields, Carol. Jane Austen. Viking, 2001. Southam, Brian. Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development Through the Surviving Papers. Athone Press, 2001. Sutherland, Kathryn. “On Looking Into Chapman’s Emma.” Times Literary Supplement, 13 Jan. 2006, pp. 12–13. Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life. Viking Penguin, 1997. Vessel, Edward, Gabrielle Starr, and Nava Rubin. “Art Reaches Within: Aesthetic Experience, the Self and the Default Mode Network.” Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 7, 2013, p. 258.

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Keith Oatley Vivanco, Laura, and Kyra Kramer. “There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, vol. 1, Online 4 Aug. 2010. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Chatto & Windus, 1957. Wong, Beth. “My Fanny: The Price of Play.” In Jane Austen and the Sciences of the Mind, edited by B. Lau, Routledge, 2018, pp. 136–155. Zunshine, Lisa, editor. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford UP, 2015. ———. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State UP, 2006.

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37 VIRGINIA WOOLF’S DEVELOPMENT OF A SOCIOLOGY OF EMOTION IN THE COMPOSITION OF THE YEARS (1937) Emily Ridge

Abstract: This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Years as indicative of a shift in her authorial engagement with emotion from early to late modernism. In her study of the “empathy-driven” narratives that came to the fore during the modernist period, Meghan Marie Hammond posits Woolf’s early work as central. However, Woolf’s late work exhibits greater circumspection. The Years was, for example, originally conceived as a “novel-essay” in which each fictional chapter would be accompanied by an explanatory piece of nonfictional analysis, drawing on extensive research. In the existing draft versions of these essays, Woolf explicates characters’emotional responses and impressions in the light of prevailing norms and codes of behavior, gender expectations, education, class, and history. As such, rather than recreating an immersive empathic experience, she becomes, in The Years, a sociologist of emotion. With a focus on the interplay between those early essay drafts and the finished novel, the chapter will argue that Woolf demonstrates an analytic interest in the social function and implications of emotion in ways that anticipate aspects of later work on emotion in sociology, from emotion regulation and display rules to gender stereotyping and intergroup emotions.

When Virginia Woolf’s The Years was first published in 1937, it was generally understood to be a backward-looking novel, a novel not just about social history but one representing, on a stylistic level, a return to the kind of realist aesthetic that shaped Woolf’s work before her high modernist experiments of the 1920s. The novel traces the lives and experiences of the members of one extended family—the Pargiters—across several generations and is chronologically structured by way of a series of seemingly arbitrary temporal points from 1880 to the “Present Day,” sometime in the mid-1930s. In light of its focus on family and society, the major intertextual reference point, in early reviews, was the Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, one of the very authors Woolf distanced herself from in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924). Placed within the category of Woolf’s “late” writing, The Years has thus been taken to exemplify retrospectivity and retreat. For more recent critics, this categorization risks limiting discussion of a novel that sets out to capture an “old fabric insensibly changing without death or violence into the future” DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-44

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(Woolf, “Letter” 116). Alice Wood, for example, insists that The Years enacts a continuation of rather than a break with the experimentalism that characterized Woolf’s middle period; for her, the novel is “representative of a movement forward rather than a retreat within Woolf’s oeuvre” (28). She goes so far as to suggest that we consider Woolf’s initial drafts of The Years in terms of an incipient postmodernism (44, 145). Like Wood, I regard The Years as a forward-looking novel. But, in this chapter, I want to redirect attention to a very different late twentieth-century intellectual movement that emerged in parallel with postmodernist innovations. I am referring here to the 1970s turn toward emotion within the field of sociology. While Woolf’s contemporaries interpreted her focus on social questions as evidence of a retreat, I will propose that it is, on the contrary, her sociological treatment of emotion that renders The Years ahead of its time. Woolf’s “sociological” imperative in The Years has already been widely noted (Snaith, Introduction lii; Wood 20, 29), based on her own account of the endeavor to forge a kind of factual aesthetic. Indeed, she pointedly set out to conjoin aesthetics with historiography, introspection with social analysis, or, more bluntly, fiction with “fact.” The latter is Woolf’s own term. Factuality was integral to the novel’s conception from the earliest stages of its composition. In a diary entry from November 2, 1932, Woolf comments: “after abstaining from the novel of fact all these years—since 1919—& N[ight] & D[ay]. indeed, I find myself infinitely delighting in facts for a change, & in possession of quantities beyond counting” (qtd. in Snaith, Introduction l).1 She originally envisaged The Years as a “novel-essay” in which each fictional chapter on the life of the Pargiter family at its center would be accompanied by a discursive and explanatory essay, interweaving, in a very visceral way, those facts with her fiction. When Woolf enthuses that she is in possession of “quantities” of facts “beyond counting,” this was no exaggeration. A kind of “mass observation project” (Snaith, Introduction li), her work on this novel-essay involved the accumulation of enough research findings and newspaper excerpts to fill three bound notebooks. Although the essays were later excluded from the finished novel, which is far more oblique in its expression, the fact-based research she undertook for those interwoven essay segments underpins the larger fictional work she came to write.2 As Alex Zwerdling has demonstrated, Woolf had long been interested in the “complex relationship between interior life and the life of society” (3), but The Years was her most “ambitious effort” (45) both to offer an informed commentary on and to imagine such a relationship. What has been less well-observed, however, is the extent to which Woolf’s research-based interpretation of the relationship between interior life and the life of society hinged on the question of emotion. According to Mitchell A. Leaska, in his introduction to the posthumously published drafts of the novel-essay, the driving and recurring question of the project as a whole was how to bridge the “deep chasms which normally separate historic fact from immediate feeling” (xv) or, in other words, the work of the historian from the work of the novelist, more specifically the introspective modernist novelist. As Wood notes, Woolf saw a clear distinction between “objective ‘fact,’” as the “accurate record of actual people, places, events, dates or statistical information” and “subjective ‘truth,’ that is, the faithful representation of human experiences and emotions” (52).3 The implication is that historical fact is traditionally removed from the question of feeling. If Woolf set out to collapse that distance in The Years, it was not only by bringing the objective fact of the historian and the subjective truth of the novelist into dialogue, it was also by taking a factual approach to subjectivity. To put it another way, the objective facts that Woolf collected through her research very often concerned the idea of feeling itself. The essay sections of those early novel-essay drafts show that Woolf sought to understand how emotion is socially construed. In proffering a sociological reading of emotions, she considerably pre-dates the discipline of sociology itself which gave “comparatively little attention to the dynamics of emotions” until much later in the century, a delay that is “remarkable in light of the 446

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fact that emotions pervade virtually every aspect of human experience and all social relations” (Turner and Stets 1; see also Bericat 497). Woolf might not have access, at this 1930s juncture, to an appropriate terminology, but she does theorize, in an embryonic form, certain concepts that would become key to sociological discussions of emotion from the 1970s onwards. In this chapter, I will spotlight three areas of special interest: (1) Emotion Regulation; (2) Gender and Emotion; and (3) Intergroup Emotions. If Woolf has been characterized as an early postmodernist for her innovative fusion of fact and fiction in The Years, this innovation was made possible precisely because she was also an early sociologist of feeling.

Emotion Regulation In this section, I will mainly concentrate on The Pargiters; that is the title that was posthumously given to the novel-essay drafts, drafts which Woolf went on to re-work as part of the opening 1880 chapter of The Years. The six essays Woolf wrote to accompany the 1880 fictional episodes offer a unique opportunity to observe Woolf critiquing and contextualizing her own work, serving “as her own interpreter” (Radin 15). Woolf seems determined to present fictional specimens that exhibit the ways in which social interactions shape emotional development and expression. This marks a decisive shift away from her earlier work, which sought to give a more “empathic” representation of the inner workings of the mind (Hammond 148). While these earlier attempts to authentically capture the twists and turns of conscious thought, subjectivity and memory have been studied from psychoanalytic and even neuroscientific perspectives (for example, Abel; Park 108–114), the more outward-facing portrayal of emotion in The Years makes this later novel of particular interest from the perspective of sociology: “In general, whereas disciplines such as psychology focus on individual processes that bring about emotions, sociology places the person in a context and examines how social structures and culture influence the arousal and flow of emotions in individuals” (Turner and Stets 2). In her first analytical essay, Woolf is very careful to precisely stipulate her social parameters: As I am only able to give you short extracts from a novel that will run into many volumes, I must explain that the family of Pargiter is one of those typical English families whose members are to be found in the Army, the Navy, and the Church; the Bar; the Stock Exchange; the Civil Services; the House of Commons; who never rise very high or sink very low, although some Pargiters have married the daughters of Earls, and others have kept small tobacconists shops in the suburbs of London. (Pargiters 9) Woolf points here to the regulation of this typical family’s social position, but her unstated intention is to explore the complex processes through which the inner lives and feelings of its members are correspondingly regulated within this specific context, in order to prove that “emotions are a constituent part of all social phenomena” (Bericat 496). One key strand of sociological research has concerned the degree to which emotions are used as “socialization tools” (Mesquita et al. 405) to bring individuals into step with particular cultural norms, ideals, and models. This practice can start at a young age when emotional responses are instilled by parents or other figures of authority to manage deviant behavior: Socializing emotions, in part, are assumed to work through the associated action tendencies that are used to override other, less desirable, emotions and behaviors. 447

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As children repeatedly experience these emotions in situations in which they do not comply with the social norms, they eventually become internalized responses. (Mesquita et al. 405) One basic example of this might be the use of punishment in relation to behaviors that threaten social norms, generating a fear that then becomes a kneejerk response in such situations. Children thus come to learn, through their own emotions, the kinds of behaviors a particular culture attaches importance to and what kinds of behaviors are devalued. Woolf illustrates such socialization tools in action throughout her 1880 chapter but especially highlights their implementation on the youngest family member, a child by the name of Rose Pargiter. At a time when women had very limited access to the public sphere without a chaperone, Rose is shown to flout the household rules by surreptitiously paying a nighttime visit to a local store on her own. On her return, Rose encounters a man who exposes himself to her and, in her essay-based analysis of the fictional scene, Woolf describes the impact of this grotesque encounter in the context of a culture that repressed any kind of sexual knowledge or experience in young women. Rose cannot even confide in her older sister, Eleanor: But though the fact of Rose’s adventure is easily verified, to give a faithful account of its effect upon her mind is by no means easy. Her first instinct, when Eleanor came in, was to turn away and hide herself. She felt that what had happened was not merely “naughty” but somehow wrong. But in what sense did she feel it to be wrong? The grey face that hung on a string in front of her eyes somehow suggested to her a range of emotion in herself of which she was instinctively afraid; as if, without being told a word about it, she knew that she was able to feel what it was wrong to feel. [. . .] So that she did not mind banging the front door when she came in—she did not mind being found out in her disobedience—what she could not say to her sister, even, was that she had seen a sight that puzzled her, and shocked her, and suggested that there were things brooding round her, unspoken of, which roused curiosity and physical fear. (Pargiters 50) Woolf describes, in this passage, the internalization of social codes through the evaluation of emotion. We are told that Rose intuits a “range” of potential emotional responses and tentatively sifts these responses according to what she assumes to be appropriate and what she suspects to be “wrong.” In other words, her burgeoning sexuality is in the process of being actively shaped as part of a culture that allows women very little sexual expression to the point that certain feelings—in this case, confusion, guilt and fear—seem to naturally arise (without explicit verbalization) and these feelings then serve to crystalize culturally specific norms. Through the representative figure of Rose, Woolf demonstrates, in a nascent stage, the operation of what sociologists refer to as “emotion regulation,” consisting of behavioral, cognitive, attentional, physiological or emotional strategies to eliminate, maintain, or change emotional experience and/or expression [. . .] with a primary goal being the avoidance of painful affect that might come from negative self- or social judgment and/or relational loss. (Brody et al. 379–80) 448

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In other words, Rose is beginning to assess and manage her feelings in line with a developing awareness of social expectations and taboos. These are expectations and taboos that equally serve to regulate the family’s social position, imposing a kind of feminine modesty that both insures against the prospect of a downward spiral into social shame while also keeping upwardfacing pretensions and indiscretions in check. In her adult characters, Woolf portrays this operation at a more advanced level. We observe family members regulating each other—this is known, in the field, as “co-regulation” (Mesquita et al. 406)—when they correct behaviors that elicit emotions that are deemed inappropriate. Eleanor, for instance, warns her younger sisters, Delia and Milly, not to be caught looking out of the window at a young man on the pavement. Woolf notes in her “Second Essay,” that “he was, because of his sex, exciting a certain interest in her sisters; and [Eleanor] was assuming, as one assumes a fact well known to every one, that the girls must hide their interest in the young man” (Pargiters 36; emphasis in original). At other moments, the process is shown to occur internally when a character implicitly registers that their own emotions are out of sync with the social model. For example, Delia and Milly witness a woman with a perambulator and this sight produces an affect markedly unlike that produced by the young man: The sight of the baby had stirred in each quite a different emotion. Milly had felt a curious, though quite unanalysed, desire to look at the baby, to hold it, to feel its body, to press her lips to the nape of its neck; whereas Delia had felt, also without being fully conscious of it, a vague uneasiness, as if some emotion were expected of her which, for some reason, she did not feel; and then, instead of following the perambulator, as her sisters did, with her eyes, she turned and came back abruptly into the room, to exclaim a moment later, “O my God,” as the thought struck her that she would never be allowed to go to Germany and study music. (Pargiters 36) The two sisters experience contradictory responses to the idea of maternity, one that accords with social expectations and another that does not. Both are unconscious of the extent to which these emotions are socially directed though Delia—like Rose earlier—is subject to an uneasiness about her own experience of discordance that prompts a physiological reaction. She makes a connection between her own apparent emotional deficiency and a lack of educational opportunity for women without quite understanding it. Woolf herself explicitly spells out this connection earlier in the essay when we learn that Delia’s active regulation of her emotion has partly resulted in an educational lack. In addressing the question of why the daughters of the household have not received an education equivalent to the sons, Woolf turns to the financial situation of Delia’s father, Captain Pargiter. The expansion of Delia’s education would depend on the consent of her father and a certain reduction of spending on the schooling of her brothers: Delia was not one of those forcible characters who get their own way at the expense of other people’s feelings. She would have been more interesting she [had] been able to say, “If you cut down Harry’s allowance, if you gave up sending Bobby to Eton, but send him to a cheaper school, which is just as good, there would be enough for me to go to College—or to Germany—where I shall be taught music properly.” But neither Harry nor Bobby would have liked her; and Delia was one of those people who liked being liked. (Pargiters 28–9) 449

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From a sociological perspective, this extract offers a classic illustration of the social functionality of emotion whereby emotions are managed and re-deployed to achieve certain socially sanctioned goals in a pragmatic way. This process “depends on the way in which the person assesses his or her concerns or goals in relation to others’ concerns or goals, and regulates his or her emotions accordingly” (Fischer and Manstead 426). Thus Delia subdues her educational ambitions with respect to her brothers’ in order to maintain domestic harmony and interpersonal connection. She chooses what sociologists refer to as the “affiliation function” of emotion over the “distancing function” with the aim of strengthening social ties as opposed to gaining at the possible expense of others or, perhaps more pointedly, being perceived to put her own needs first (Fischer and Manstead 425). It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that Delia is fulfilling a social goal through the self-sacrificial management of her emotions. Yet, as Woolf repeatedly stresses, Delia exists in a patriarchal culture that makes affiliation more expedient for a woman than distancing. A different choice might make her more “interesting,” but it would also make her life more difficult. Delia is socially astute enough to recognize that being liked will benefit her more, within this paradigm, than being educated. In the finished novel, Delia manifests a continual awareness of the performance of emotion in everyday life: “None of us feel anything at all, she thought; we’re all pretending” (The Years 78). Nodding ahead to the “dramaturgical approach” that was later spearheaded by sociologist Erving Goffman (233), who explored the kinds of cultural and social scripts that are established and followed in any kind of interaction, Woolf presents an image of social life that is underwritten by a practice of emotion regulation, whether unconsciously embedded or strategically performed.

Gender and Emotion It will already have become apparent that many of Woolf’s insights on emotion pertain to the question of gender. This is no surprise. The book originated in a 1931 speech to the National Society for Women’s Services on women’s access to professional life, and, in her novel, Woolf deliberately set out to deal with the “effects of gendered education ideology on sexual identity” (Snaith, Introduction lxi). The practice of emotion regulation within a defined social context is equally governed by gender norms. In this section, I will focus more specifically on questions of gender expectation and stereotype in relation to emotional expression, as conceived by Woolf. The stereotype that women exceed men in terms of emotional expressiveness and experience is now well-established across cultures and there is evidence that “gender stereotypes can generate expectancies about same- and opposite-sex partners that influence and elicit particular behaviors and emotional expressions, becoming self-fulfilling prophecies” (Brody et al. 371; see also Shields 229–30). Woolf is concerned with the causes and effects of such gendered expectations and one stereotype she targets, in particular, is that of sympathy. Her 1930 essay “On Being Ill” goes so far as to conceive of sympathy as an “illusion” (The Moment 13). She makes the further point that sympathy has largely become the province of women who “having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions” (13). In her 1931 speech, she reiterates this association between women and sympathy. In this speech, she undertakes to kill off the infamous “Angel in the House.” For Woolf, this domestic Angel was “so constituted that she never had a wish or a mind of her own but preferred to sympathise with the wishes and minds of others” (Pargiters xxx). Although Woolf uses the term “sympathize” here, she appears to be pointing to an empathetic rather than a sympathetic process. For Fritz Breithaupt, excessive empathy can entail a kind of self-erasure, in keeping with Woolf’s Angel description; this is an effect of “simulating, adapting, or otherwise engaging with the perceived perspective, state, or identity of another and thereby losing, ignoring, or forgetting one’s 450

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own perspective, interests, or state” (85). Not incidentally, the self-effacing demands made upon women’s sympathy—indeed the belief that women must, by nature, be sympathetic—is a qualm that recurs in the early drafts for her novel-essay too, principally through the character of Kitty Malone. We are introduced to Kitty at her parents’ house in Oxford in 1880, as she is on the cusp of womanhood. Kitty does not question gendered expectations surrounding emotional expression. Yet Woolf, in her analysis, exposes the extent to which the very definitions of “man” and “woman” were rooted, at that time, in differentiated categories of emotion: A woman behaved in one way and a man in another. Ever since she could remember, she had been trained as a woman. And the Concise Oxford Dictionary, though published in 1929—more than fifty years later*—still preserves in its definition of womanliness, in a compact form, [the ideal] which governed Kitty’s life in 1880: “Womanly . . . having or showing the qualities befitting a woman . . . modesty, compassion, tact, &c.” Nor did Kitty question the same authorities’ verdict that manliness consists in “having a man’s virtues, courage, frankness, &c.” (Pargiters 151–2; emphasis in original) Such definitions establish very specific and gender-based “display rules” for emotion, to use another term widely used in contemporary sociological research; these are “cultural norms regulating how, when, and where emotions can be expressed by males and females in any particular culture” (Brody et al. 372). Woolf gives us an indication of the self-fulfilling nature of Kitty’s rigorous training by emphasizing her competence in the domains of sympathy and “compassion,” the degree to which she is “aware of a variety and complexity of human relationships” (Pargiters 116) of which her male peers are largely ignorant. Yet Woolf is equally interested in those moments when display rules are violated. Recent studies have shown that “[w]omen and men are judged for both under- and overexpressing emotions that are perceived as stereotypic for their sex” (Brody et al. 372). The Pargiters and The Years provide examples of both kinds of transgression as well as transgressions involving the wrong sorts of display. Kitty finds herself suspecting a particular male undergraduate student by the name of Tony Ashton because of his capacity for sympathy, a trait deemed uncharacteristic for a man. Woolf explains this suspicion in the fifth of the essays: Such sympathy with her, from an undergraduate, was so unusual that Kitty was at first inclined to confide in this strange young man who did not seem to belong to any of the usual classes. And then she was repulsed. What was queer about him? (Pargiters 115) It is earlier hinted that Ashton is homosexual; it goes without saying that Kitty’s is also a training in heteronormativity. Women, on the other hand, are socially judged for underexpressing this emotion. If The Years begins in 1880 with the figure of Kitty who is being groomed to become a sympathetic Angel in the House, it is bookended, in the final “Present Day” 1930s chapter by the socially awkward figure of an educated young woman, Peggy, a medical doctor who refuses to get caught up in a process of sympathetic self-effacement. During the party that closes the book, Peggy encounters a young man and is subjected to a longwinded and selfabsorbed monologue. The ear that she lends is the very opposite of sympathetic: I, I, I—he went on. [. . .] He had to expose, had to exhibit. But why let him? she thought, as he went on talking. For what do I care about his “I, I, I”? Or his poetry? 451

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Let me shake him off then, she said to herself, feeling like a person whose blood has been sucked, leaving all the nerve-centres pale. She paused. He noted her lack of sympathy. He thought her stupid, she supposed. (The Years 325–6) Unlike her predecessors, Peggy has no intention of getting caught up in the wishes and minds of others precisely because she is conscious of having a mind of her own. Yet, as Evelyn Chan points out, her suppression of emotion and refusal of sympathetic engagement also comes at a cost: The equality that feminists have fought such bitter battles for has been achieved in Peggy, but even the pleasure that she derives from her teacher’s praise is overshadowed by the immense alienation she feels in her role as a professional woman, a position which she has worked hard for but which seems ill-fitting and unsatisfactory. (134) Through Peggy’s alienation, we can better understand why Delia, at an earlier point, might have chosen to regulate her desires for education in order to ensure affiliation rather than distance. Subject to “standards of emotional ‘appropriateness’ [that] are differentially applied to men and women,” Peggy, Kitty, Delia, and, to a lesser degree, Tony Ashton confront the double bind proposed by S. A. Shields in 1987: they are caught between the expectation and “positive sanctioning of female expressiveness” and the “denigration of authentic feelings (i.e., viewing emotion as a liability)” (247).

Intergroup Emotions Woolf’s 1930s writing reveals one further sociological preoccupation that might be aligned with the current concept of “intergroup emotions.” This term denotes the social emotions that “arise when people identify with a social group and respond emotionally to events or objects that impinge on the group” (Smith and Mackie 412).4 Deriving from social identity and selfcategorization theories—which posit the importance of group membership to individual identity—intergroup emotions focus on the experiences of an individual within a group that has taken on “emotional significance” (Smith and Mackie 413). In The Years, such an experience is exemplified in public school life as well as the collegial system at Oxford University. In a draft chapter from the novel-essay, the character of Edward Pargiter, who in 1880 is an Oxford undergraduate, recalls how the “spirit” of his former school had “permeated” him (Pargiters 60). He further remembers his Headmaster’s assertion that “even the most thoughtless, could not leave [the school] without feeling that our character as members of a society or fellowship is something different from our individual character when we are living apart or in solitude” (60). In her own analysis of this passage, Woolf suggests an extension of this feeling of fellowship from school to university: to understand what effect such teaching had had upon Edward Pargiter and thousands upon thousands of other young men, so that as they sat in their rooms at Oxford and Cambridge, they felt themselves, as Edward felt himself, dedicated to carry on the tradition, with whatever expansions and modifications the university might suggest, to give the full effect of all this, and of infinitely more than all this, upon the whole 452

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mind and nature of an intelligent and vigorous young man, would be entirely impossible for anyone who had not spent ten years first at Rexby and then at Benedict’s. (Pargiters 77–8) Edward does not think his dedication to this tradition; he feels it. Woolf attributes the development of this group-oriented emotion to a certain kind of instruction, involving elements of emotion regulation and convergence. And here she plays a neat rhetorical trick; since she herself has been deprived of such instruction as a woman, she cannot fully describe its effects. A full understanding is “impossible” without being part of the group itself. Indeed, intergroup emotion implies “ingroups” and “outgroups” as well as the question of how far ingroup-directed emotions can shape outgroup-directed prejudice (Smith and Mackie 419–20). Existing evidence “underline[s] the importance of understanding group-level emotions as part of the entire picture of prejudice, as well as their important role in strategies [. . .] for prejudice reduction” (Smith and Mackie 419–20). Where Edward’s elite education is concerned, Woolf draws attention to different forms of exclusion: “A highly educated foreigner, visiting Oxford in 1880, failed completely to understand what the life of an Oxford undergraduate meant. A working man would be equally at a loss” (Pargiters 78). Her priority, however, is to emphasize the exclusion of women, an outgroup of which she herself forms a part. In her novel-essay, she implies that outgroup-directed prejudice against women is a facet of the very development of ingroup-directed emotion in the formation of what she calls a “fellowship of men together” (Pargiters 54). When, for example, Rose is barred from the school room at a young age by her brother Bobby, this exclusion is presented as an outcome of Bobby’s initiation into this “great fellowship” that he began to feel, yielded a great many rights and privileges and required even of himself, at the age of twelve, certain loyalties and assertions; for example, it was essential to make it plain that the school room was his room; especially when his school friends came back to tea. It was essential that Rose should be kept out of it. (Pargiters 54) We see similar forms of outgroup marginalization at work in the cases of Delia and Kitty. As the daughter of an Oxford Don, Kitty feels a persistent sense of alienation from the surrounding undergraduate scene and this is likened, in The Years, to being left out of an inside joke: What were they laughing at, she wondered as she stood by the window. It sounded as if they were enjoying themselves. They never laugh like that when they come to tea at the Lodge, she thought, as the laughter died away. (The Years 53) A year after the publication of The Years, Woolf would go on to publish her feminist and pacifist polemic Three Guineas (1938), a follow-up and companion piece that overtly incorporated much of the research and factual material that she had removed from the preceding novel. In Three Guineas, she would famously advocate for the formation of an “Outsider’s Society” (Room 204), comprising the daughters of educated men. Crucially, this is posited as a society that aims to eliminate strong emotion in favor of what Lili Hsieh has referred to as a “politics of affect which is based, paradoxically, on indifference” (29), an indifference that offers an antidote to those emotion-fueled kinds of fellowship that lead, for Woolf, to “patriotic demonstrations” (Room 207) and acts of war. In favoring a tone of indifference, she 453

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probably also had in mind her imagined research project on women and fiction at the British Museum, as recounted in A Room of One’s Own, during which she comes across a range of misogynistic accounts of women “written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth” (Room 27). But this Society of Outsiders also aims to counter outgroup prejudice through a form of “cooperation” (Room 204, 241), to use a word that Woolf repeats several times, rather than antagonism. For Hsieh, such an approach “opens an undefined space for the [male] addressee to join the work of the outsider’s society” (46). It is as if Woolf has come to a realization, through her social study of emotions during the six-year process of working on The Years, that feeling can also be re-regulated in ways that can work strategically for those who have been excluded, through the right combination of distancing and affiliation techniques.

Conclusion If Woolf’s research for and work on The Years culminated in Three Guineas, it is worth remembering that the whole project began with a speech on professions for women, and I will conclude by suggesting that Woolf’s sociological and multifaceted study of feeling also offers a self-reflexive commentary on the profession of the woman writer. Like her characters, Woolf can also be found to navigate gender-based stereotypes and expectations of emotional expression on the level of writing style. In A Room of One’s Own, she acknowledges that earlier women writers were accomplished “in the analysis of emotion” (Room 57), but she presents this accomplishment, in part, as reductive and narrow. Her own writing career was marked, as Zwerdling has observed, by a “fundamental conflict between the imperatives of psychological fiction and the needs of the satirist” (45). We might understand this as a reiteration of that conflict between affiliation and distance in terms of authorial method. Her analytic approach to The Years complicates an earlier interest in the unmediated aesthetic representation of what she called in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” the “infinite variety” and “astonishing disorder” of feelings (Collected 336). But perhaps it was this very capacity to immerse herself in the immediacy and apparent disorder of emotion that enabled the kinds of sociological insight that informed her later work.

Notes 1 Night and Day (1919), Woolf’s second novel, was written in a more conventionally realist style in comparison to later novels like Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927) in which she developed her high modernist aesthetic. Her work on The Years immediately followed The Waves (1931), generally perceived to be Woolf’s most experimental modernist work, and this is one reason why many critics saw the latter novel as staging a kind of u-turn on a stylistic level. 2 Grace Radin provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the transformation from novel-essay to novel, explicating the extent of the revisions undertaken during a long and arduous process of composition. 3 Snaith uses the terms “public” and “private” to explain the same division in that “fact-based writing centred around public issues and events, whereas fiction found its point of origin in her private consciousness” (Virginia 90). 4 The term “emotional communities” has been used to discuss a similar phenomenon (Rosenwein 2).

Words Cited Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalyis. U of Chicago P, 1989. Bericat, Eduardo. “The Sociology of Emotions: Four Decades of Progress.” Current Sociology, vol. 64, no. 3, 2016, pp. 491–513.

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Virginia Woolf ’s The Years (1937) Breithaupt, Fritz. “A Three-Person Model of Empathy.” Emotion Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 2012, pp. 84–91. Brody, Leslie R. “Gender and Emotion.” The Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett et al., Guilford Press, 2016, pp. 369–392. Chan, Evelyn Tsz Yan. Virginia Woolf and the Professions. Cambridge UP, 2014. Fischer, Agneta H., and Anthony S. R. Manstead. “Social Functions of Emotion and Emotion Regulation.” The Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett et al., Guilford Press, 2016, pp. 424–439. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin, 1990. Hammond, Meghan Marie. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Hsieh, Lili. “The Other Side of the Picture: The Politics of Affect in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Three Guineas.’” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 36, no. 1, 2006, pp. 20–52. Leaska, Mitchell A. “Introduction.” The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, by Virginia Woolf, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, pp. vii–xxii. Mesquita, Batja, et al. “The Cultural Psychology of Emotions.” The Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett et al., Guilford Press, 2016, pp. 393–411. Park, Sowon S. “The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf.” Contradictory Woolf, edited by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki, Clemson UP, 2012, pp. 108–114. Radin, Grace. Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. U of Tennessee P, 1981. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Cornell UP, 2006. Shields, Stephanie A. “Women, Men, and the Dilemma of Emotion.” Sex and Gender, edited by Phillip Shaver and Clyde Hendrick, Sage Publications, 1987, pp. 229–250. Smith, Eliot R., and Diane M. Mackie. “Intergroup Emotions.” The Handbook of Emotions, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett et al., Guilford Press, 2016, pp. 412–423. Snaith, Anna. “Introduction.” The Years, by Virginia Woolf, edited by Anna Snaith, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. xxxix–xcix. ———. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Turner, Jonathan H., and Jan E. Stets. The Sociology of Emotions. Cambridge UP, 2005. Wood, Alice. Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism: The Genesis of The Years, Three Guineas and Between the Acts. Bloomsbury, 2013. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays—Volume 1, edited by Leonard Woolf, Chatto and Windus, 1966. ———. “Letter to Stephen Spender—7 April 1937.” The Letters of Virginia Woolf—Volume VI: 1936– 1941, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, pp. 115–116. ———. The Moment and Other Essays. Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. ———. The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, Harvest/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ———. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, edited by Hermione Lee, Vintage, 2001. ———. The Years, edited by Anna Snaith, Cambridge UP, 2012. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. U of California P, 1986.

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38 HELON HABILA Structural Helplessness and the Quest for Hope in Oil on Water Donald R. Wehrs

Abstract: Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water indicts the ecological devastation and human suffering visited on Nigeria’s delta region. Through his journey upriver, the novel’s protagonist-narrator, Rufus, is initiated into a condition of structural helplessness, of being trapped and immobilized, by three contending but mutually enabling forces (international petroleum corporations, national elites, and bands of armed militants), each pursuing wealth via direct and/or indirect violence. Rufus’s increasing emotional solidarity with bullied and brutalized local communities becomes a means of initiating readers, including those who benefit daily from faraway corporate predations, into moral awareness of the price that many pay so that a few may enjoy a lot. But the journey’s unexpected movement from reasons for despair to sources of hope reshapes the emotions elicited, in Rufus and thus in the reader. This in turn raises probing questions about what sort of hope in a just and sustainable future literary education of the emotions might rationally sustain.

Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water has rightfully been seen as a scathing indictment of the institutional practices, social norms, and moral myopia visiting ecological devastation and human suffering on Nigeria’s delta region (see Courtois, Feldner, Egya, Medovoi). The novel’s young, novice journalist protagonist describes his traveling by boat into the delta interior accompanied by a mentoring, once-lionized senior newsman, Zaq, in hopes of achieving a career-launching “big scoop” by making contact with the kidnapped wife of a British petroleum engineer and her abductors. Habila’s novel is part of a growing archive of Nigerian literary works exploring how petrodollar corruption not only reflects corporate and First World indifference to its cost to local populations and environments, but also undermines the efficacy and legitimacy of the postcolonial state, an undermining that in turn incites nonstate resistance by numerous, competing bands of armed “militants” (see Bartosch, Mari, Edebor). These “militants,” while claiming to defend the environment and local peoples, extract wealth from violence or its threat. They shake down oil companies for “protection,” exact tribute and compliance from local populations similarly “protected,” and use targeted kidnappings—such as of the British engineer’s wife—to gain big-payoff ransoms (Feldner 523, Egya 98, Medovoi 22). Through his journey upriver, the novel’s protagonist, Rufus, is initiated into a condition of structural helplessness, of being trapped and immobilized, sometimes literally, by three contending but also mutually enabling forces, each pursuing wealth via direct and/or indirect DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-45

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violence. Habila’s depiction of Rufus’s increasing emotional solidarity with bullied and brutalized local communities becomes a means of initiating readers, including those who benefit daily from faraway corporate predations, into moral awareness of the price many pay so that a few may enjoy a lot. There is certainly an anticolonial eco-critical edge to this (see Lassiter, Caminero-Santangelo and Myers, Huggan, and Tiffin). But to the extent that the “slow violence” (see Nixon) of ecological destruction and political disempowerment depicted in the delta is understood as a forerunner of what awaits the planet and all who depend on lifesustaining resources and reciprocities, the emotions bound up with structural helplessness threaten to engulf not just delta communities, or Nigerians, or the formerly colonized, but everyone. Indeed, Habila notes that at readings of the novel “people would always ask [him] to suggest a way forward,” such as whether they should “boycott Shell and Chevron,” questions that he found “it hard to answer” (Habila, “Future,” 153–54). In sharp contrast to its evocation of emotions arising from anxieties that for the novel’s characters and for the rest of us there may be no “way forward,” the depicted journey unexpectedly moves from delineating reasons for despair to offering sources of hope. What Rufus discovers bears witness to the presence and persistence of individual goodness and integrity, to the anti-hegemonic resiliency of communally mediated attachments, and to the reparative, regenerative possibilities of religiously mediated appreciation of ecological-human, materialsocial interdependencies. Through following imaginatively, via simulation, where Rufus goes, physically and emotionally, the reader encounters, as it were alongside him, these separate and entwined sources of hope, each of which projects ways forward that in combination with the others become stronger and more plausible, thus transforming the emotional tenor of what both Rufus and readers experience. The encountered sources of hope function, individually but more importantly collectively, as an invitation to voyage that embraces but also extends beyond topical political education. Habila has described his “challenge” in writing the novel as one of taking “subject matter” that was “already political, in fact too political,” and “mak[ing] it less political” (“Future” 159), which he tried to do through adopting the form of detective fiction, presenting the journalists as detectives, and the crime as kidnapping. He could then use Rufus’s “judgment,” as conveyed by first-person narration, which “we’ve learned” in the course of the narrative “to trust,” as a means of bringing readers “to realize the crime in question here isn’t only about a woman kidnapped, it is about a whole people being held hostage by oil companies and rent collecting politicians” (160). Just as oil is extracted for the benefit of world markets, not local communities, so those communities are systematically divested of natural resources, such as healthy fish, necessary to sustain a measure of economic self-sufficiency. As a consequence, their capacity to retain some degree of self-rule, and thus continuing cultural cohesion and distinctiveness, is relentlessly eroded. Habila describes a journey through a labyrinthine aquatic landscape where dead birds’ “outstretched wings black and slick with oil” and “dead fish bobb[ing] white-bellied between tree roots” (Habila, Oil, 10) disclose the metastasizing of a double neocolonial dependency: first, the dependency structuring power relations between multinational corporations and the national government; second, the dependency the national government would impose on local, ethnically and culturally diverse communities. Localized ecological destruction forces small communities into patron-client networks of dependency that national elites control. This parallels and replicates the way that small-scale self-governing societies have been incorporated into and subjugated by large-scale hierarchical states since the first appearance of the latter in third millennium BCE Mesopotamia (see Scott 116–82), but with the crucial difference that in neocolonial contexts the state-governing elite is itself in a position of dependent clientage. 457

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Habila’s novel addresses this political subject matter (not originally selected by him, but by a British film company that asked him to write a screenplay) in ways that draw on his own background as a newspaper reporter and required him to engage in journalistic research. Born into a family that was part of the Christian minority community of predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria, he had no prior personal connection with the delta region (Habila, “Future,” 153–54). But the peculiar story that unfolds, as well as the texture and tenor of the narrative’s prose, nudges readers to recognize that the novel’s concerns include but exceed those of protest, exposé, resistance, and national or ethnic frames of reference. These had previously been evoked, most poignantly in the multimedia work of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed in 1995 by the military government of General Sani Abacha for his activism on behalf of his Ogoni people and their environmentally devastated Niger Delta land (see Saro-Wiwa, Genocide, Forest). Habila, after acknowledging that it is “a privilege for a writer to fight for his country, for his tradition,” goes on to ask, “But is there a stage where this obsessive focus on writing for the nation becomes a weight around the neck, an albatross, stifling the growth of the writers?” (Habila, “Future,” 157). Citing Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera’s desire not to be called an “African writer,” Habila observes how Marechera, in seeing himself “as writing in the tradition of the American Beat writers,” as “inspired by the European modernists,” and as fashioning “complex Bakhtinian carnivalesque tales,” did not want his work to be “defined by others,” to be pigeonholed as just another example of “writing back to the empire,” itself presumed not only as obligatory for postcolonial authors, but often taken to be, especially in Western-based publishing and academic circles, their exclusive claim to attention (see Selasi, “Stop”). Oil on Water seeks to modulate readers’ emotions by complicating their relation to an “already political,” even “too political” subject matter. This is done in part through placing the narrator-protagonist’s journey in dialogue with at least three seemingly disjunctive cultural contexts, none of which has been substantially discussed in criticism on the work. First, the narrative frame of a journey upriver that constitutes a sobering, maturating initiation into horror culminating in encountering power-corrupted leaders (the head of local government forces and of the most powerful militant group, respectively) must recall Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)—especially for readers with the sort of post-national literary background that Habila attributes to Marechera and his target audience. Still, it might appear perverse for Habila to construct a narrative that invites readers to notice structural, thematic, and tonal connections with Heart of Darkness, for Chinua Achebe, in a critique first published in 1977, singled out Conrad’s work as a prime instance of high European literary culture’s collusion with colonialist deprecations of African peoples and dismissal of their sociocultural life (see Achebe 1–20). To this context, Habila adds a second one by presenting his protagonist’s journey as an initiation through ordeal, through physical and emotional pain, into mentor-guided insight and moral maturity. By configuring Rufus’s ethical maturation in terms of a journey into the wild or unknown, in which courageous adventuring into disorienting and unsettling spaces enables initiation into privileged knowledge via ordeal, Habila counterbalances narrative structuring aligned with a canonized English text problematically entangled with Eurocentric thought by simultaneously evoking cultural paradigms prominent in West Africa, but also found, with variations, among diverse communities subjected to Anglophone colonization—in Australia, the Americas, and elsewhere (see Ottenberg, Turner, Turner and Turner, Camara 102–54, Wehrs, Islam, 23–49, Pre-Colonial, 75–100, Bucko, Gill 121–77). Moreover, to the extent the reader participates imaginatively in what Rufus experiences, the novel itself takes on attributes of a mentor-guided initiation, and thus Habila, by inviting the reader to participate in Rufus’s 458

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emotional journey, raises searching, meta-poetic questions about what sort of hope literary education of the emotions might rationally sustain. To these contexts, a third, transcultural one is engaged through the novel’s quest motif. While this motif resonates with diverse traditions, including African ones featuring hunters as pathfinders (Okpewho 52, Babalola), it is developed in ways surprisingly evocative of formal and thematic features of medieval romance. Journeys initiated by pursuit of abducted women often start out as vehicles for knights to prove themselves publicly, to use their adventures to gain a reputation and status, much in the way that the chance of getting a “big scoop” gives young journalists opportunities for recognition and validation. But in romance, quests may mutate into a testing, educating, purifying, or redeeming of the knight’s inner character or soul (see Sir Gawain, Chrétien). Habila’s novel describes such a process. Additionally, the young protagonist’s relation to his mentoring, senior journalist companion recalls Dante’s relation to Virgil in the Commedia even as the educative role of female characters in deepening the narrator’s moral awareness resembles that played by Beatrice (see Webb, Holmes, Cestaro). In bringing together this heterogeneous mix of contexts, in building on and expanding the cultural pluralisms internal to Nigeria and beyond it, Habila creates a remarkably innovative literary work, one that, while remaining a realistic political fiction participating in the “petrodollar” and “delta region protest” subgenres, delineates a simultaneously downward journey into horror and upward journey into moral-spiritual rebirth or renewal, the resonances and implications of which are post-national and transcultural. The downward movement, consistent with Dantesque intimations of traveling into places where hope must be abandoned, elicits emotions tethered to helplessness and entrapment. But the upward movement provides glimpses of ways forward, and thus unites resistance with solace and encouragement. The novel contests dispiriting postcolonial disillusionment by allowing “[l]iterature” to be “a torch with which we navigate the darkness of the world,” granting “hope even as it illustrates the often dark and airless human condition,” for even in its formal structure, creating “out of a mass of images and words a world with relationships and characters,” fiction tells us “there is order, the world is not mere chaos,” and thereby it shows “a way forward, a possibility, a consolation,” by “creat[ing] meaning out of confusion” (Habila, “Future,” 160). Through its evocations of Heart of Darkness, Oil on Water makes consideration of convergences and divergences between the two narratives central to what readers are invited to experience, along with Rufus, as both an interpretative journey and an unsettling initiation. In Oil on Water, notably, there are two analogues to Conrad’s Kurtz—first, the tyrannical, militanthunting, mentally unstable leader of army delta patrols, called “the Major,” who, after dousing with gasoline prisoners suspected of collaboration with bands of terrorists or rebels, can barely restrain his impulse to “exterminate all the brutes” (Conrad 95) by setting them alight (Habila, Oil, 61–64); second, the affectively flattened and ruthless leader of the strongest group of kidnappers, extortionists, and/or environmentalist freedom-fighters, called “the Professor,” who blithely executes first Jamabo, a friend of the British woman’s chauffeur, Salomon, for engaging in freelance kidnapping in his “territory” (225), and then Salomon (230), for trying to flee with and thus rescue the woman, an act motivated in part by fear but also by compassion and guilt. The narrative begins in the middle of the journey’s story, though readers learn this only well into the novel. Rufus and Zaq, together with a local old man acting as their guide and his young son, are in a small boat searching for the kidnapped British woman. They find shelter for the night with the old man’s riverside village community, whose leader is the old man’s brother, Chief Ibiram. After being hospitably received and fed, the next day they travel on until they are captured by soldiers and taken to the Major, with whom Rufus, after some nervous waiting, is 459

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granted an interview. The major’s emphatic, hectoring, manic discourse betrays the mentally and morally deteriorating effects of having become accustomed to acting without restraint or accountability. In all this, he resembles the Kurtz eventually encountered by Marlow. Both characters behave in a manner consistent with clinical studies of how “[d]isinhibited aggression can help people maintain and acquire material resources and acquire dominance over rivals” (McIntyre, Hippel, and Barlow 41), in particular because preexisting associations of power with “a lack of self-control” prime people to view its display “as a signal of power” (46, also see Ent, Baumeister, and Vonasch). This narrative arc, already interlaced with extended flashbacks filling out Rufus’s backstory, is then suspended as Rufus goes back to an earlier starting point by describing how he and Zaq, days before the novel’s initial scene, started their river journey in the company of other journalists. They were part of what was supposed to be a routine press junket, which usually followed a safe, ritualized script. In exchange for showing that hostages were alive and giving journalists a story, the militants would get to publicize their grievances and make ransom demands. This time, however, an army raid on the intended meeting site initiates a chain of events that culminates in Rufus’s encounter with the Major. After having related what occurred prior to the novel’s opening scene, Rufus then describes what happens after his interview with the Major. He is taken hostage by the militants and then, in the novel’s final chapter, gains a meeting with the Professor, whose discourse, though superficially distinct from the Major’s, similarly reveals the psychological-moral effects of being long habituated to acting without restraint or accountability. Thus his portrait, like the Major’s, recalls Kurtz as Conrad’s Marlow represents him. Through this narrative doubling, in which journeying across a blighted riverine landscape twice culminates in capture by a Kurtz-like figure, the novel generates a sense of entrapment, of being able to move only between harrowing variants of the same thing, which not only describes Rufus’s experience but also that of delta communities, caught as they are between the conflicting demands and terrifyingly analogous visitations of the Major and the Professor. Indeed, the kind of vulnerabilities and foreclosures into which the journey upriver initiates one, the secret knowledge of a heart of darkness it imparts, applies beyond the delta to other postcolonial populations, in Nigeria and elsewhere. Further, the seeming blockage of ameliorative alternatives, of any desirable, credible future, extends across city/country, ethnic/ cultural divides and unites the two generations to which Habila and Rufus belong. For those generations (Habila was born in 1967 and Rufus seems to be in his mid-twenties in 2009), neither traditional nor modern forms of personal and civic virtue (not hard work or prudent decision making, not educational achievement or professional merit) are likely to ensure a comfortable level of physical well-being, social stability, and economic security. This situation speaks to experiences of postcolonial disillusionment now more than two generations deep (see Habila, “Future,” 156, Soyinka, Hountondji). If the eliciting of positive emotions is tied to affective registering of bodily and social well-being, or to reasonable anticipation of future well-being for oneself and those to whom one is attached (see Damasio, Barrett, Hogan, Literature, Affective, Mind), then it would seem that the world through which Rufus and the reader travel augurs for those who must remain there little more than miasmic congealing of disabling, dispiriting despair. Indeed, even among rats, “vicarious” witnessing of others’ recurrent “social defeat” triggers combined “physical and emotional stress” (Sial et al.), and humans are acutely susceptible to both vicarious and experientially conditioned learned helplessness (Chambers and Hammonds, Kofta and Sedek, Day, Kane, and Roberts). Confronted with both uncontrollability and unpredictability, humans appear subject to toxically entwined anxiety and depression (Havranek). 460

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Rather chillingly, Habila makes clear that motifs from Heart of Darkness apply so well to contemporary Niger Delta realities that the old man guiding Zaq and Rufus begs them to take his young son with them back to the city of Port Harcourt (39–41), and his brother, Chief Ibarim, is last seen leading his people in an exodus by boat toward Port Harcourt in hope of refuge and opportunity. But Port Harcourt is also a site of entrapment and foreclosure. Zaq notes that “a kind of despair, a lack of the energy needed for holding on, for persevering,” characterizes not only his newsroom’s furnishings but also “the faces and shoulders of his fellow reporters as they came in off the crowded buses and the merciless streets early in the morning,” and that the same “look” is “on faces coming off the buses in Lagos and Abuja and Kano and Ibadan, a drugged, let-me-just-get-through-the-day look” (33). The novel makes clear the impetus to further flight, through emigration—a course Habila himself has pursued, among many other writers and professionals of his and Rufus’s generations, and that Habila likens to being a tree “whose roots are firmly planted in Africa, but whose branches live in the sunlight of another continent” (“Future” 158, see Mari, Selasi, “Bye-Bye,” Mbembe and Balakrishnan). In his critique of Heart of Darkness, Achebe argues that Conrad speaks to “deep anxieties” in the West “about the precariousness of its civilization” by presenting Africa as “trapped in primordial barbarity” (17), with the result that Africa becomes “merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz” (12), and thus a “backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor.” Certainly, Habila’s text contests Conrad’s by insisting on the humanity and agency of those dwelling along the river. Still, the initiation of his narrator-protagonist, like Conrad’s, involves repeated experiences of being what Marlow calls “horror struck” (Conrad 59), for emotional upheavals triggered by simple acts of witnessing, in both works, generate morally fraught reflection. Marlow sees Africans at a way station being worked to death: “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom” (58). While there is a measure of Eurocentric “poor devils!” condescension here, there is also dramatization of cognitively reordering emotional responses rooted in somatic fellow feeling but sharpened and given direction by a sense of justice and right. Likewise, when Rufus sees abandoned villages and ecological ruin, his narration invites readers to share and affirm the emotions he experiences, which should lead them, Habila wagers (“Future” 160), in time, to trust his judgment: “The next village was almost a replica of the last: the same empty squat dwellings, the same ripe and flagrant stench, the barrenness, the oil slick and the same indefinable sadness in the air” (Oil 10). In both works initiation into “horror” culminates in encountering people whose minds have disintegrated as a result of their having long been able to act without restraint or accountability. Certainly Western-directed exploitive extraction of natural resources for world markets—in Conrad’s work, ivory, in Habila’s, oil—makes possible the impunity that Kurtz, the Major, and the Professor enjoy. But Habila depicts the militarist bullying of the Major and the selffinancing violence of the Professor in ways that, for readers with the requisite cultural memory, evoke nineteenth-century patterns of incessant raiding and warfare. In southern Nigeria generals or warlords engaged in competitive self-enrichment were called, “omo-ogun,” “war-boys” (see Johnson, Ajayi and Smith, Matory, Falola and Oguntomsin, Usman and Falola 141–206). Habila elsewhere notes that Boko Haram’s contemporary Islamic militancy and kidnappings occur in the same place (northern Nigeria) that in the nineteenth century was traversed by enslaving and subjugating jihadist armies (see Habila, Chibok, Bashir Salau, Smaldone). He presents Kurtz-like mental and moral disintegrations as effects of more than Western anxieties and pretensions, suggesting instead that the Major and the Professor exemplify attitudes and 461

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practices that have indigenous antecedents as well as international impetus, though the former involve complex historical sociocultural legacies invisible to Eurocentric, colonialist, racist eyes. Because the parallels between Oil on Water and Heart of Darkness are so stark, their differences are striking. Habila joins Achebe in suggesting that Conrad’s portrait of African peoples is “grossly inadequate” (Achebe 16), but does so by following Conrad in identifying the heart of darkness not with an “African barbarity” that contaminates Kurtz, but with what Marlow describes as “something wanting in him—some small matter which when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence” (Conrad 104). The same absence lurks behind the speechifying of the Major and Professor, but Rufus encounters the “small matter,” the “something” that in Kurtz is “wanting,” fully present in the communal life he encounters in the delta—in the hospitality he receives, in Chief Ibarim’s concern for his people, in the old man’s devotion to his son, in the professionalism of the doctor and nurse he meets, in Zaq’s mentorship, in the religious community that offers refuge and healing, and ultimately in himself, when he voluntarily makes himself hostage to the militants in place of the old man’s son (207–08). What he finds is an obdurate unexpected, unselfish decency, a depth of sociable feeling, and an ethical core the absence of which constitutes for Kurtz, and for Marlow, the “horror.” Thus, what Rufus discovers initiates and transforms him, leads him in what may be perceived retrospectively as an ascent. That movement upward, transforming the emotional tenor of the novel, involves deepening connection to his sister, Boma, who is scarred physically and psychically by a fire caused by the ignition of barrels full of oil that their father, in an effort to stave off destitution, had tapped from pipelines and planned to sell. Rufus’s movement upward also involves increasing appreciation and affection for the nurse, Gloria, who selflessly and courageously serves the people of the delta. Through Boma and Gloria, the female agency valorized in medieval romance is brought into a space of initiation that, in West Africa and elsewhere, is typically configured as exclusively single-gendered (men initiating young males, women initiating young females). A subtle criticism of the gender politics associated with traditional initiatory rituals may be implied, which would also be a criticism of the gendered segregation that characterizes Heart of Darkness, where Marlow, like Kurtz, would protect European women from knowledge that it would be “too dark altogether” (Conrad 126) for late Victorian gentlemen to allow them to glimpse. Connected to Rufus’s receptivity to female discourse and influence, and central to his discovery in himself of what Kurtz lacks, is his encounter with the religious community located on an island periodically assaulted by both the Major’s and the Professor’s forces. That community somehow resists co-option by either side. It resiliently and improbably endures, which suggests that it also is emblematic of the “small matter,” the “something,” in which hope of alternatives to entrapment and foreclosure, to decivilization and ecological devastation, might, however guardedly, be vested. Watching the white-robed worshippers at nightfall on the edge of the water, “facing the huge dying sun, their arms outstretched, supplicatory, . . . swaying rhythmically, imitating the movement of the waves,” the confused Rufus has the significance of what he sees explained by the nurse Gloria. Acting like Beatrice to his Dante, she observes, “They believe in the healing powers of the sea” (126). She takes him to a communal meal where the priest, Naman, explains to him the origins of their shrine: “a long time ago after a terrible war,” the “blood of the dead” turned the rivers red,” so that “priests from different shrines got together” to build a shrine by the river, for “[t]he land needed to be cleansed of blood and pollution” (128). Statue figures “represent[ing] the ancestors watching over us” were constructed, and every evening the worshippers went to the river, “to bathe in it, to cry to it, and to promise never to abominate it ever 462

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again,” after which the rivers became once more life-bearing, and ever since the community has kept their island free from “oil prospecting and other activities that contaminate the water and lead to greed and violence” (128–29). Habila’s imagined religious community melds aspects of African piety that stress the interpenetration and interdependence of natural-ecological, socio-moral, and divine-cosmic realms (see Parrinder, Stoller, Peel). It affirms direct causal relation between human ethical behavior and the sustaining of conditions under which material and social human life is possible. The novel thus suggest that what piety imparts mythically is a knowledge whose forgetting induces and naturalizes the horrific absence of any ethical core (see Morton 41–43). While associations of red with blood and pollution have transcultural resonance, in Nigerian contexts red recalls the Yoruba war deity, Ogun, whereas white, the color of the religious community’s robes, is affiliated with Obatala, the Yoruba deity identified with serenity, moderation, and reconciliation (Belasco 98–99). To be sure, readers may participate in Rufus’s emotional journey, and co-experience its surprising shift in trajectory, without coming to the novel possessed of all or any of the sorts of cultural, historical, and literary memories that Habila’s prose and narrative structure is apt to trigger. Still, to the extent that such contexts and connections are available to be activated, the emotional tenor of the reading experience will be sharpened and deepened, for just as memory shapes “myriad unconscious ways of responding to the world,” so “remembered material . . . compared and contrasted” with that presently encountered, in life or texts, predisposes and guides “attentional processes” (Squire and Dede 3, 4, 7). That is why, in general, the more one brings to the reading of a literary work the more one will get out of it, emotionally no less than cognitively. On the most basic level, being aware of how much the fictive 2009 upriver journey of Rufus recalls the fictive 1899 journey of Marlow deepens the pathos of Habila’s text by reinforcing the sense of structural helplessness it elicits while heightening the novel’s critique of neocolonialist predation by bringing to mind how illusory the difference of nominal national independence has proven. At the same time, recognition of Oil on Water’s dialogical engagement with Heart of Darkness directs one’s attention to divergences between the works, thus alerting us to the significance of differences in where Rufus, as opposed to Marlow, ends up emotionally. At the same time, placing Habila’s novel within much broader contexts opens lines of reflection that affect how imaginative participation in Rufus’s emotions is experienced. For example, Kurtz, the Major, and the Professor, and the power-structures behind them, all exemplify forms of “bullying” and “freeloading” that both evolutionary studies and social science suggest are endemic threats to cooperative sociality, which societies either find ways to restrain and manage, or fall victim to (see Wrangham, Boehm). Seen in this light, neocolonial ecological devastation scales up and rationalizes embedded antisocial tendencies, the global consequences of which put us all, as it were, in Rufus’s boat. Moreover, many readers may discern uncomfortably the extent of their own “freeloading” courtesy of “bullying” they might, abstractly, deplore. Conversely, the fictive religious community Habila creates not only blends together currents of West African piety, but also reflects notions central to societies around the world not influenced by transcendent, otherworldly religion or philosophy—namely, that interpenetrative reciprocities link together human, spiritual, and natural agents and modes of being, and that successful, sustainable flourishing requires proper mindfulness and skill in engaging diverse networks of interdependency within which humans and their communities are embedded (see Taylor 147–53, Emberley). Thinking of human flourishing in terms of well-being born of fitting well into, or aligning with, enveloping networks and interactive valences is well-captured by the Greek term eudaimonia, translated as “happiness,” a state toward which 463

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emotional life is arguably oriented (Nussbaum). In light of interlocking climatic, ecological, and pathogenic calamities imperiling twenty-first-century humanity, such notions may now appear not as archaic or escapist residues, but as compelling, pertinent, and prescient bearers of reparative possibility. Indeed, contact with the religious community, and with the other ethically centered people he meets, prepares Rufus for offering himself as a hostage to the militants in place of the young boy, which allows him to become the messenger of the Professor’s ransom demands. Habila portrays suffering engendering altruism, a seemingly counterintuitive notion, but one for which there is empirical support (Staub and Vollhardt, Majdandzic et al.). The novel concludes with Rufus watching from a hill the worshippers “in the water, swaying and humming,” thinking of the British woman’s prospective liberation once he delivers the Professor’s message, and of his sister’s prospective well-being as one of the worshippers, which makes him feel “the same optimism” he had felt in looking at Chief Ibiram and his people: “They were a fragile flotilla, ordinary men and women and babies, a puny armada about to launch itself once more into uncertain waters” (239). Being initiated into the presence of a basic, abiding decency that Conrad depicts as being horrifically absent, a stubborn goodness, kindliness, and sense of obligation that remains resilient, unbowed, and luminous despite all the darkness surrounding it, Rufus gains a knowledge that gives him an ethical orientation and mission. In this he is much like Dante at the end of Paradiso, who likewise “turned and began [his] descent” (239).

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. Doubleday, 1989. Ajayi, J. F. Ade and Robert Smith. Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 1971. Babalola, S. A. The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala. Clarendon, 1966. Bashar Salau, Muhammed. Plantation Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate: A Historical and Comparative Study. U of Rochester P, 2018. Bartosch, Roman. “The Energy of Stories: Postcolonialism, the Petroleum Unconscious, and the Crude Side of Cultural Ecology.” Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, nos. 2–3, 2019, pp. 116–135. Belasco, Bernard I. The Entrepreneur as Culture Hero: Preadaptations in Nigerian Economic Development. Praeger, 1980. Boehm, Christopher. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. Basic, 2012. Bucko, Raymond A. The Lakota Sweat Lodge Ritual: History and Contemporary Practices. U of Nebraska P, 1998. Camara, Laye. L’Enfant noir. Plon, 1953. Caminero-Santangelo, Byron, and Garth Myers, editors. Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa. Ohio State UP, 2011. Cestaro, Gary P. Date and the Grammar of the Nursing Body. Notre Dame UP, 2003. Chambers, Sheridan, and Frank Hammonds. “Vicariously Learned Helplessness: The Role of Perceived Dominance and the Prestige of a Model.” The Journal of General Psychology, vol. 141, no. 3, 2014, pp. 280–295. Chrétien de Troyes. Erec et Enide. Edited and translated by Carleton W. Carroll, Garland, 1987. Conrad, Joseph. Youth, Heart of Darkness, the End of the Tether. Edited by Owen Knowles, Cambridge UP, 2010. Courtois, Cédric. “‘In This Country, the Very Air We Breathe in Politics’: Helon Habila and the Flowing Together of Politics and Poetics.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2018, pp. 55–68. Damasio, Antonio. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Pantheon, 2018. Day, Chris, Robert T. Kane, and Clare Roberts. “The Prevention of Depression in Rural Australian Women.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, vol. 13, 2003, pp. 1–14. Edebor, Solomon Adedokun. “Rape of a Nation: An Eco-Critical Reading of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water.” Journal of Arts & Humanities, vol. 6, 2017, pp. 41–49.

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Donald R. Wehrs Parrinder, Edward Geoffrey. West African Religion: A Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Akan, Ewe, Yoruba, Ibo, and Kindred Peoples. Barnes & Noble, 1970. Peel, J. D. Y. Christianity, Islam, and Orisa-Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction. U of California P, 2016. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. A Forest of Flowers: Short Stories. Saros, 1986. ———. Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy. Saros, 1992. Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale UP, 2017. Selasi, Taiye. “Bye-Bye Babar.” The LIP Magazine, 3 Mar. 2005, thelip.robertsharp.co.uk. ———. “Stop Pigeonholing African Writers.” Critical Creative Writing: Essential Readings on the Writer’s Craft, edited by Janelle Adsit, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 46–53. Sial, Omar K., Brandon L. Warren, Lyonna F. Alcantara, Eric M. Parise, and Carlos A. Balãnos-Guzmán. “Vicarious Social Defeat Stress: Bridging the Gap Between Physical and Emotional Stress.” Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 258, 2016, pp. 94–103. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Transition. Translated by Simon Armitage, Norton, 2007. Smaldone, Joseph P. Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate: Historical and Sociological Perspectives. Cambridge UP, 1977. Soyinka, Wole. “The Writer in an African State.” Transition, vol. 6, no. 31, 1967, pp. 10–13. Squire, Larry R., and Adam J. O. Dede. “Conscious and Unconscious Memory Systems.” Learning and Memory, edited by Eric R. Kandel, Yadin Dudai, and Mark R. Mayford, Cold Harbor Spring Laboratory Press, 2016. Staub, Ervin, and Johanna Vollhardt. “Altruism Born of Suffering: The Roots of Caring and Helping After Victimization and Other Trauma.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 78, no. 3, 2008, pp. 267–280. Stoller, Paul. The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey. U of Chicago P, 2009. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2007. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Cornell UP, 1977. ———, and Edith L. B. Turner, editors. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience. U of Arizona P, 1985. Usman, Aribidesi, and Toyin Falola. The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present. Cambridge UP, 2019. Webb, Heather. Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman. Oxford UP, 2016. Wehrs, Donald R. Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative. Lexington, 2008. ———. Pre-Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives: From Ethiopia Unbound to Things Fall Apart, 1911–1958. Ashgate, 2008. Wrangham, Richard. The Goodness Paradox: How Evolution Made us More and Less Violent. Profile, 2019.

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39 VIET THANH NGUYEN Navigating Anger and Empathy in Te Sympathizer Sue J. Kim Abstract: Anger and empathy might be thought of as opposed states; if empathy is to “feel with,” then anger could be said to “feel against.” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer, seeks to negotiate a balance between, on one hand, anger at historical, systemic crimes such as colonialism, neo-imperialism, war, rape, racism, exploitation, and oppression, and, on the other hand, empathy even for one’s enemies. Nguyen’s explicit project is to combine empathy and anger to explore the wider ethical possibilities of relating to the Other. This chapter explores how The Sympathizer seeks to intervene in debates on our affective relations to “the Other,” demanding a radical ethics of recognizing the other while also understanding historical culpability. The very structure of the novel, with its multiplied figures and meanings, reflects this ethical project.

Anger and empathy might be thought of as opposed states. If empathy is to “feel with,” then anger could be said to “feel against.” Part physiological, part cognitive (with cognition understood as multileveled, with physiology and cognition mutually interrelated), anger is generally understood as a reaction against another person, thing, or situation, rising from the obstruction of a goal, frustration of expectations, and/or violation of a set of norms. Empathy is the identification with the thoughts, feelings, and/or perspective of another person. Is it possible, then to experience them simultaneously? Can one be angry with the Other, while also feeling empathy for them? What would that look like, and perhaps more importantly, what would that mean? Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer, seeks to negotiate a balance between, on one hand, simmering anger at historical, systemic crimes such as colonialism, neo-imperialism, war, rape, racism, exploitation, and oppression, and, on the other hand, empathy for every character, no matter how loathsome. The novel considers many targets of anger: the United States, Americans, Vietnamese (North and South), even Vietnamese Americans and Asian Americans. The novel explores this anger while also seeking a way to feel radical empathy for the other, even our enemies. For Nguyen, such challenging empathy is ethically and politically necessary, even as we must grapple with the multiple legacies of colonialism, neo-imperialism, war, and racism. In his 2016 nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen paraphrases Levinas, “the face of the Other can elicit both justice and violence” (Chapter 9). Nguyen’s explicit project is to combine empathy and anger to explore the wider possibilities of relating to the Other. This project is not only literary and ethical but also DOI: 10.4324/9780367809843-46

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political. It is a major contribution to how we understand—and how we should understand— these two states of emotion. In this chapter, I review understandings of anger and empathy in studies of emotion, a multidisciplinary, sometimes contentious endeavor, in relation to Nguyen’s own discussion of his goals. Then I examine how The Sympathizer seeks to intervene in debates on our affective relations to “the Other,” demanding a radical ethics of recognizing the other while also understanding historical culpability. The very structure of the novel, with its multiplied figures and meanings, reflects this ethical project.

Anger and Empathy As essays in this volume make clear, the study of emotions is a multidisciplinary endeavor with many roots and branches. Many of these debates cohere around several key questions: What is the relationship between physiology and cognition (i.e., does the latter include the former, or should they be distinct)? What is the relationship of the individual feeler to context, culture, and collectives? Or rather, how important is knowledge of history and context to unpacking emotion? Like inquiry into all emotions, studies of anger have generated both agreement and debate in cognitive studies and cultural studies.1 In cognitive psychology, the appraisal theory is widespread. In this general model (it has many variants), an emotion is produced when a subject makes some sort of evaluation of some phenomenon in relation to desired goals or outcomes. Anger in particular is produced in a subject when another obstructs achievement of one’s goals and/or another violates group norms. The International Handbook of Anger lists commonly agreed-upon triggers of anger: “frustration; threats to autonomy, authority, or reputation; disrespect and insult; norm or rule violation; and a sense of injustice. Some authors subsume these various provocations under a rubric of goal blockage” (Potegal, Stemmler, and Spielberger 3–4). Even so, in order for anger to actually result, several factors are usually present. First, there is some violation of group norms that renders the other’s action illegitimate; in other words, there is a moral element. Second is agency attribution, or the notion that the obstructing Other is consciously choosing to do so. As Clore and Centerbar put it, “anger implies agency” (141). Third, the feeling subject believes that the state of things can be changed, that the situation is not inevitable and the goal can still be reached. Frijda writes, “Anger implies hope” (429). Of course, almost no part of this model has gone unchallenged. For instance, “cognition” can mean anything from higher-order levels of thinking to mutually influencing processes between physiology and cognition at various levels. What is the relationship of the physical expression of anger to creating the emotion? Is it anger if one’s blood pressure does not rise? Researchers have argued that physiological, cognitive, and neurochemical processes that form an emotion can be multidirectional interactive and heterogeneous, informing and influencing one another. Multiple emotions—such as fear and anger—can be experienced simultaneously. Moreover, what explains feelings of anger if the object is inanimate with no agency and there is no hope of change, e.g., if I have an important meeting early on a very cold winter morning and my car refuses to start, and I get angry at my car, is that really anger? It sure feels like anger. Is frustration different in kind from anger, or simply a different point on a sliding scale of anger-like affect? Finally, cognitive studies scholars debate the extent to which culture and collectivities play a role in shaping anger. If anger is triggered by group norms, then the norms must have been created by the group at some point. If anger implies hope, how do you get people angry enough to make change? 468

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In ways that resonate with these questions, feminist and ethnic studies scholars—such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Alison Jaggar, Kathleen Woodward, and Sara Ahmed—have theorized political anger for decades. Understanding systems of oppression can create anger, so discourses of political analysis can help explain and/or create outrage; collective discourses can inform and shape anger. But anger at injustice—explicit or unarticulated-but-felt—can also create collectivities, as demonstrated in consciousness-raising sessions in second-wave feminism and/or cultural nationalism. Anger can be useful in motivating action as well as destructive for individuals and for groups. Anger can also be used to pathologize and dismiss certain groups, particularly the “angry” woman of color, irrational, pathological, dangerous. While political accounts of anger are not incompatible with cognitive accounts of anger, they do insist that we take more seriously and explicitly the historical conditions in which a feeler feels and the analysis of the world that informs a subject’s appraisal. Nguyen has made clear that anger—of various kinds, in various ways—informs The Sympathizer. The novel expresses clear anger at the French colonizers and American neo-imperialists in Vietnam, but it is also motivated by what he perceives as the lack of anger in Asian American literature. In a 2015 interview, Nguyen states: I was also responding to a lot of Asian American literature, which I read a great deal of because that’s part of what my research is about. One of the things that characterizes both Vietnamese and Asian American literature is that it’s often times not very angry. There’s not a lot of rage, at least not in the past few decades. And if there is anger or rage, it has to be directed at the ignorant: the Asian country of origin or Asian families or Asian patriarchs. While all that is important, I sensed a reluctance to be angry at American culture or at the United States for what it has done. That’s why, in the book, I adopt a much angrier tone towards American culture and the US. (Tran) Americans and the United States, however, are not the only targets of anger. Nguyen continues: I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook, so the book is also very critical of South Vietnamese culture and politics and Vietnamese communism. Instead of choosing its targets selectively—only being critical of one group—it decides to hold everyone accountable. (Tran) Two points are key here. First is the idea that everyone has can do/has done something that is worthy of eliciting anger; everyone should be held accountable because everyone has the capacity to act as an agent. Second, anger is not simply an input-output process, but one in which context, power and interest play a part. Nguyen notes elsewhere that in Vietnamese American literature, particularly the early refugee narratives such as Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, the tendency is to be grateful or conciliatory to Americans. Even if the refugee subject knows that the United States is partially culpable for creating the conditions in which the refugee comes into being (i.e., has to flee), it may be dangerous to the survival of self and family to express that emotion. In addition, Nguyen’s implicit charge is that Asian Americans are reluctant to express anger and are perhaps too quick to accept the model minority label, eager for benefits under white supremacy, while distancing themselves from “angry” black and brown people. Asian Americans should not, Nguyen argues, shy away from anger, because there are things that should make us angry. 469

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Empathy studies is an even more dynamic field of study. Empathy is generally understood as “feeling with” the emotions of another. From its early origins as a description of an aesthetic experience, the term implies some sort of affective and/or cognitive identification with another’s feelings. Empathy ranges from mirroring another’s feelings, or emotional empathy, to higher-order perspective-taking, or what is sometimes referred to as cognitive empathy. Empathy can perhaps be best understood in contrast to sympathy. If empathy is to “feel with,” or comprehend and/or actually experience the feelings of another, then sympathy is to “feel for” or to pity, or to feel sorry or concern for another’s emotional state. With sympathy, in other words, the sense of distance and disidentification with the other is heightened. Thus, sympathy has been criticized for expressing, exacerbating, and replicating condescension, objectification, and paternalism. Due the popularity of thinkers ranging from philosopher Martha Nussbaum to evolutionary cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the idea that empathy promotes social good—the “empathyaltruism hypothesis”—has become widespread. In particular, the benefit of reading literature to promote empathy has been widely disseminated in higher education; reading and viewing a wide variety of media from different walks of life, presumably, promotes one’s ability to identify with others’ feelings and thoughts. In contrast, many others have pointed out the ethical and political dangers of empathy. If I feel empathy for another person’s suffering, this might be a first step to helping that other person, but (1) perhaps I do not actually know/feel what the other is experiencing (mistaken empathy), and/or (2) if I do not understand (or refuse to acknowledge) the histories and structures that have produced the suffering, then I risk simply allowing the suffering to continue. Moreover, I may feel self-satisfied that I feel empathy for another, when I have neither truly empathized and/or understood what produced the suffering. Finally, it is an open question whether simply feeling empathy in itself, even if genuine, accurate, or undertaken in good faith, actually promotes social good. Beyond that, empathy through reading literature poses all sorts of potential challenges. In Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, Meghan Marie Hammond and I collected an excellent group of essays that explore in more depth the complexities of feeling empathy through literature, including cultural context, literary form, etc. In her influential book Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen identifies a number of narrative strategies authors of contemporary fiction use to promote strategic empathy, including internal perspective, interior monologue, free indirect discourse, and narration about a character’s mental states or feelings. Authors use such tools to achieve what Keen identifies as three main forms of empathic appeals: (1) “bounded strategic empathy,” which occurs among group members; (2) “ambassadorial strategic empathy,” which reaches out to specific out-group members to create feeling for a particular group, often with a particular goal (e.g., appeals for aid); and (3) “broadcast strategic empathy,” which seeks to cultivate empathy within every reader “by emphasizing our common vulnerabilities and hopes” (142). The Sympathizer is interested in none of these; rather, Nguyen is interested in pushing us to think more radically about empathy, or a more complex “ethics of recognition,” both to acknowledge the histories and conditions that create boundaries as well as to potentially move beyond these borders. What Nguyen finds particularly galling is when sympathy or even empathy for another’s suffering results in the objectification of the sufferer. In a sense, this kind of empathy—again, even if truly felt—runs the risk of foreclosing the possibility that the Other is capable of other emotions, of being the perpetrator as well as the victim, of being the subject as well as the object, in their full historical context. Nguyen explains in a 2018 interview: I mean of course there’s anger at being depicted as a stereotype, you know, to be raped, massacred on screen, never to have anything to say and so on. But there’s 470

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another kind of anger directed at what you’re talking about, which is the condescension and the pity that are involved in thinking about Southeast Asians simply as victims. Now you might think that’s a good thing, right? You know that if you think of another population as victims, and we’ll do stuff to help them—but it’s to permanently infantilize them. It’s to take away their voice so that when we actually speak, we won’t be heard because we’re not supposed to have subjectivity. This is a dual-edged sword because if we claim our subjectivity and speak up so that we’re not just victims—we can’t simply then just be victims. That’s why I said it’s important to claim our humanity and our inhumanity, to acknowledge that we’re victims of Agent Orange and that we turn around and we also destroy our forest as well. And that’s perfectly understandable. (“Viet Thanh Nguyen” 11) Fundamentally, for Nguyen, “An ethics of recognition involves a change in how we see the other, and in how we see ourselves as well, especially in relation to the other” (Nothing Ever Dies, Chapter 9). This ethics acknowledges the full humanity of both oneself and other, with capacity for both good and ill. Nguyen speaks not only to white Americans or Asian Americans or Americans or Vietnamese but everyone, calling on everyone to both understand and be self-critical: Understanding that the violent ones, our enemies, are motivated not only by hatred but also by compassion and empathy—in other words, by love—gives us a mirror to recognize that our own compulsory emotions are just as partial, prejudiced, and powerful. Understanding this, we can see that we, too, inhabit the low ground, ready to exert violence despite any heady ambitions for transcendence. (Nothing Ever Dies, Chapter 9) Against an ethics of difference that refuses to acknowledge the full, contradictory, multiple complexity of the other, Nguyen argues that “Without cosmopolitanism’s call for an unbounded empathy that extends to all, including others, we are left with a dangerously small circle of the near and the dear” (Nothing Ever Dies, Chapter 9). But Nguyen is not calling simply for universal empathy. A radical ethics of recognition includes anger at injustice against anyone, anywhere; the recognition of the multiple, complex roles and responsibilities of various people in creating these injustices; and the understanding that anyone can be both humane and inhuman, victim and victimizer, the subject and object of feeling. It is a mixture of concrete history and ethical abstraction, the simultaneous recognition of what has been and what could be. Sarah Chihaya calls this a “fierce, uncomfortable, ‘multiplicitous,’ and slippery” empathy, that requires the “acknowledge[ment of ] the multiplicity of both perpetrator and victim” and “vulnerability to a certain slippage between these imagined positions” (369). This complex, radical empathy is what The Sympathizer stages. Although we can see anger and empathy at work in the novel in various ways, at various levels, the dynamics of emotion in the novel attempt to push us further politically and ethically.

Sympathy and Confession The unnamed narrator of The Sympathizer lays out his dualities from the novel’s first lines: I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a 471

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horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. (1) He is a North Vietnamese spy working undercover as aide-de-camp for a South Vietnamese General, who heads the secret police. The mixed-race child of a French Catholic priest and a Vietnamese woman, he has been educated in the United States and is fluent in English. The narrator has the ability to identify and understand many others’ points of view, while still carrying on his work—including murder—for both the nationalist General and his communist supervisors. The narrator is indeed vexed by a surfeit of what we might call cognitive empathy, rather than affective identification. He is not an empath, absorbing the emotions of others against his will; rather, he is a cerebral perspective-taker. Although the text conveys anger at situations, the narrator himself is not an angry or emotional; as we learn at the end of the novel, he has in fact repressed his most traumatic memory. When he does feel anger, he equivocates and/or intellectualizes, possibly because his multiple perspective-taking short-circuits his appraisal and makes him open to many goals. The very title of the novel sets out its complex relational project. Sympathy connotes feelings of pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortune; as a result, it widens the distance between subject and object. But sympathy can also imply connection or common feeling between people, such as sympathy between two or “my sympathies lie with your argument.” A sympathizer is one who agrees with or supports a sentiment or opinion, often an unpopular or unsavory opinion (e.g. Nazi sympathizer). As the General says, “Sympathizers. Spies in our ranks. Sleeper agents” (56). In the context of the Vietnam War, both nonfictional and fictional accounts have largely rendered Vietnamese people as dehumanized objects of pity who should be grateful for refuge. Yet, as Nguyen as discussed, an ethical project of recognition of the Other should create a space both for empathy as well as anger. For instance, despite the anger at Americans for neo-imperialism in Vietnam and racism in the United States (at the level of narrator as well as novel), the narrator struggles to Other the enemy: Should I not refer to those people, my enemies, as “them”? I confess that after having spent almost my whole life in their company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others. My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After all, if she had not blurred the lines between maid and priest, or allowed them to be blurred, I would not exist. (35) The narrator’s very existence depends on the temporary dissolution of boundaries between self and other, or between the maid and priest. The boundaries, however, continue, because the narrator’s mother and father inhabit separate spheres by race, nationality, gender, class, and religion. In such ways, the novel constantly explores how the blurring between self and other, between ally and alien, does not take place in a vacuum but rather is overdetermined. Likewise, the text plays on the notion of confession. The novel itself is meant to be a confession, written for the Commandant in the communist prison camp, but as with almost everything in the novel, the term holds multiple meanings. A confession is an admission of guilt, but it can 472

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also be statement of religious belief. In the Augustinian tradition, it’s also an account of one’s journey to conversion. Thus, the narrator’s confession—the novel itself—serves as Nguyen’s outlining of a radical ethics of recognition and challenging empathy. Yet confession is supposed to relieve the person confessing of the burden of a secret sin, either leading to absolution and contrition (in religious contexts) or punishment and contrition (in correctional contexts). The narrator’s confession neither relieves him of burden or punishment, and, as with many coerced admissions, it is only meant to provide what the interrogators want to hear. The narrator’s confession is not an absolution, or request for forgiveness, or road to salvation, or statement of doctrine. Rather, the narrator confesses to understanding history and the humans in it rather than adhering to a single ideology. In the eyes of his interrogators, this is his greatest crime, but it is structurally and ethically—and carefully—what Nguyen encourages us to strive for. The novel unpacks this project in roughly three sections. The first section of the novel, awash in doubles and multiples of the narrator, explores the narrator’s escape from Saigon, including the traumatic day that Saigon fell in 1975, and his experiences with the community of South Vietnamese living in Los Angeles, particularly the cadre of nationalists working with the General. During this time, the narrator continues to report to his communist supervisor, his childhood friend Man. In the second section, the narrator is assigned to serve as a cultural advisor to an American movie about the Vietnam War, a thinly veiled reference to Apocalypse Now. The novel grapples here primarily with questions of representation and voice. In the final section, against Man’s orders, the narrator accompanies a group of South Vietnamese nationalists in an ill-fated invasion of their homeland; they are killed or captured, with the final chapters taking place in a prisoner of war camp, the site of the narrator’s confession to a mysterious Commandant. Nguyen has commented that he intentionally wanted the narrator confessing to another Vietnamese person, for a number of reasons. In addition to disrupting the centrality of Americanness or whiteness by having the two main interlocutors both be Vietnamese, the dubious ethics of the confession (torture, lies, repression, truth) show the ethical complexity of both interlocutors. In the first part of the novel, we meet the narrator’s doubles, with whom he identifies and disidentifies. The narrator has two childhood blood brothers, a friendship forged in fighting against bullies and cemented with a blood oath (224–5), who represent radically different paths. His childhood friend Bon is a conservative South Vietnamese nationalist whose wife and child are killed during the escape from Saigon; Bon is thereafter wholly committed to counter-revolution. Man, on the other hand, is the one who converted the narrator to communism and serves as his spy handler. Sonny is yet another double, the narrator’s friend from college who is now a progressive journalist, critical of both the Vietnamese nationalists and American racism. Each of these doppelgangers provides a window and worldview for the narrator (and novel) to identify with, proliferating through the novel until the final pages shift from “I” to the first-person plural “we.” The multiplicities and complexities offered these doubles counteract an overly simplified, bifurcated view of the world and of people. A former professor gets the narrator a job as a clerk in the Department of Oriental Studies at Occidental College, where the Department Chair, a “great Orientalist” (61), tasks the narrator with making a list of Oriental vs. Occidental qualities. The Chair exhorts the narrator, as an Amerasian, to serve as a bridge between cultures: “You embody the symbiosis of Orient and Occident, the possibility that out of two can come one” (63). The Chair continues, Here you can learn how not to be torn apart by your opposing sides, but rather to balance them and benefit from both. Reconcile your divided allegiances and you will 473

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be the ideal translator between two sides, a goodwill ambassador to bring opposing nations to peace! (63) In contrast, the narrator struggles through his choices, which include fingering (falsely) a South Vietnamese “crapulent major” as a communist spy, leading to his assassination by Bon on the General’s orders. The narrator ponders: Nothing was more clear-cut than civilization versus barbarism, but what was the killing of the crapulent major? A simple act of barbarism or a complex one that advanced revolutionary civilization? It had to be the latter, a contradictory act that suited our age. We Marxists believe that capitalism generates contradictions and will fall apart from them, but only if men take action. But it was not just capitalism that was contradictory. As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, but I was right to kill him. Wasn’t I? (98) In the middle section of the novel, the narrator is assigned to be an advisor for The Hamlet, a thinly veiled fictionalized version of Apocalypse Now. The narrator expresses anger at the representation of Asians, describing “all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to steal the place of real Asian men,” such “cartoons” as “Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Number One Son, Hop Sing—Hop Sing!—and the bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap not so much played as mocked by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (123). The only alternative to these caricatures is silent victimhood. In reading the initial script, the narrator is flummoxed by having read a screenplay whose greatest special effect was neither the blowing up of various things nor the evisceration of various bodies, but the achievement of narrating a movie about our country where not a single one of our countrymen had an intelligible word to say. (123–124) Yet the murkier ethical struggle between Auteur and narrator over representation is where Nguyen’s project can be seen. When the narrator first meets the Auteur, he questions his own anger: I confess to being angry with the Auteur, but was I wrong in being angry? This was especially the case when he acknowledged he did not even know that Montagnard was simply a French catchall term for the dozens of Highland minorities. What if, I said to him, I wrote a screenplay about the American West and simply called all the natives Indians? You’d want to know whether the cavalry was fighting the Navajo or Apache or Comanche, right? Likewise, I would want to know, when you say these people are Montagnards, whether we speak of the Bru or the Nung or the Tay. Let me tell you a secret, the Auteur said. You ready. Here it is. No one gives a shit. (128–129) 474

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The joke is that calling all Native people “Indians,” regardless of tribe, is exactly what American Western films do, and, in the words of the Auteur, “No one gives a shit.” Implied here is that while the Auteur, individually, is a boorish example of cynical egomania, he is not the only culprit. It would be useful to be angry at the Auteur, but there is a wider field of history and context that also calls for anger (at the situation) and for greater empathy (for representations of others). As Nguyen has said repeatedly, creating spaces for more voices, more stories, and more possibilities for empathy (while not ignoring history) is the very project of his novel. The final section of the novel, after Bon and the narrator are captured in a Vietnamese prison camp headed by the mysterious Commandant, whom we learn is actually Man, horribly disfigured by napalm. The narrator writes and rewrites a 295-page confession (the novel up to this point). Eventually, he claims “I have nothing left to confess!” while also knowing that “We can never stop confessing because we are imperfect. Even the commandant and I must criticize ourselves to each other, as the Party has intended.” Under torture, he asks “If you already know what I forgot to confess, then tell me!” (323). The novel’s twenty-first chapter breaks out of the confession mode, switching to third person (the only chapter to do so) and questionand-answer format. Here is where we see both the clearest crystallization of Nguyen’s ethicalaesthetic project, as well as possibly its limits. In this chapter, the narrator finally confesses that he had been present at the violent gang rape of a communist agent by South Vietnamese police, who have been trained by his American friend Claude. The communist agent appears early in the novel, when the narrator recounts the look of hate she gives him when he, a community spy working for the General, helps capture her. But until now, we have heard nothing about this rape, despite an extended discussion of the ethics of a rape scene during the filming of The Hamlet. The narrator recounts how, unwilling to blow his cover, he watched and did nothing. This is the last thing that the narrator, has hidden and repressed and is forced to confess. Although he does not participate directly in the rape, our antihero spy is nonetheless guilty of causing unimaginable suffering to another. Perhaps because this is the limit of what he can understand, a long stream-of-consciousness passage follows his forced confession; this passage encapsulates the novel’s complex, difficult project of relating to another. In one long paragraph of more than five hundred words, the, the narrator says that the rapists were “good students, just like me” (339). The narrator then lists a series of conditional clauses, all starting with the conjunction “if,” listing the historical developments that had to come together to create this person. Grammar makes the novel’s ultimate point: all the conditional clauses, all the historical events, have created this situation, including and particularly the two enemies who are allies and had been friends, the interrogator and prisoner, facing each other at this moment. The passage starts in the present, with the narrator asking his interrogators to “please just turn off the lights, if you would please just turn off the telephone, if you would just stop calling me.” The narrator continues into the past, “if you would remember that the two of us were once and perhaps still are the best of friends,” and wonders briefly about “if history’s ship had taken a different tack,” if he had “become an accountant,” “fallen in love with the right woman,” and “been a more virtuous lover.” But the passage continues to plumb the complex past all at once: if my mother had been less of a mother, if my father had gone to save souls in Algeria instead of here, if the commandant did not need to make me over, if my own people did not suspect me, if they saw me as one of them, if we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists 475

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or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn’t come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn’t taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said, Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand years, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if Adam and Eve still frolicked in the Garden of Eden, if the dragon lord and the fairy queen had not given birth to us, if the two of them had not parted ways . . . if history had never happened, neither as farce nor as tragedy, if the serpent of language had not bitten me, if I had never been born, if my mother was never cleft, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep? (339–340) This overwhelming list has created the narrator and Vietnam. After admitting his complicity in the community agent’s rape, the narrator’s levels of complicity and guilt, plus the torture and lack of sleep, break through into this stream-of-historical-consciousness. As important as Nguyen’s project is, it is worth considering possible limits to the narrator’s limitless empathy. Like Yossarian’s discovery of Snowden’s secret in Catch-22, the narrator’s epiphanic moment cited earlier comes just as the narrative runs up against the boundary of intelligibility. In Yossarian’s case, it is the fact of death. For The Sympathizer’s narrator, that limit is a rape. Yet why does this constitute the border? And is it truly necessary to use this trope, yet again, to depict the limits of intelligibility and the horror of war? As Sylvia Chong asks, If the rape of the communist agent has its analogue in The Hamlet’s rape of Mai, can one savage the representation of Mai’s rape as exploitative while commending the rape of the communist agent as artistic, perhaps necessary? Just as Nguyen cringes in “intense feelings of disgust, horror, shame, and rage” when he sees himself as gook on-screen (Nothing 65), I likewise cringe as I feel thrust into the position of these raped women. (376) Chong asks, “Is it possible to write (or film) the war without traveling through this abject trope?” (376). The narrator’s boundless empathy echoes throughout The Sympathizer, for better or for worse, until the repressed traumatic memory of the rape. He is distanced from the communist agent’s suffering, as well as the policemen who rape her. It is therefore worth asking: Why is this the limit? Is it to challenge the reader’s identification with the narrator-protagonist, to ask if we can understand him beyond this ethical limit? Is this the limit of Nguyen’s vision, where his empathy and the empathic reach of his novel breaks down? Or does this point to where radical empathy does have limits?

Note 1 I discuss studies of anger in more length in the first two chapters of On Anger.

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Works Cited Chihaya, Sarah. “Slips and Slides.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 2, 2018, pp. 364–370. Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. “Vietnam, the Movie: Part Deux.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 2, 2018, pp. 371–377. Clore, Gerald L., and David B. Centerbar. “Analyzing Anger: How to Make People Mad.” Emotion, vol. 4, no. 2, June 2004, pp. 139–144. Frijda, Nico H. The Emotions. Cambridge UP, 1986. Hammond, Meghan Marie, and Sue J. Kim, editors. Rethinking Empathy Through Literature. Kindle ed., Routledge, 2014. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2010. Kim, Sue J. On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative. U of Texas P, 2013. ———. “Race and Empathy in G. B. Tran’s Vietnamerica.” Edinburg Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories, edited by Robyn Warhol and Zara Dinnen, Edinburgh UP, 2018, pp. 99–116. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Kindle ed., Harvard UP, 2016. ———. The Sympathizer. Grove, 2015. Potegal, Michael, Gerhard Stemmler, and Charles Spielberger, editors. International Handbook of Anger: Constituent and Concomitant Biological, Psychological, and Social Processes. Springer, 2010. Tran, Paul. “Viet Thanh Nguyen: Anger in the Asian American Novel.” Asian American Writers Workshop, 19 June 2015, https://aaww.org/viet-thanh-nguyen-anger-asian-american-novel/. “Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation with Andrew Lam.” Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies, vol. 9, 2018, pp. 8–19.

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INDEX

Note: numbers in bold indicate a table. Numbers in italics indicate a figure on the corresponding page. 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended cognition) cognition model 270 Abacha, Sani 458 Abhinavagupta 274, 278, 280 Achebe, Chinua 458, 461, 462 Adiche, Chimamanda Ngozi 230 Adolphs, Ralph 2 Aeschylus: Oresteia 135; tragedies of 156 Æsop’s Fables 106 aesthetic emotions 90, 123–132; eight, inside the Sanskrit tradition 156; evoking 171; rasas as 54; setting and landscape evoking 195 aesthetic encomia 181 aesthetic form: trauma theory and 249 aesthetic goals: human mind and 261 aesthetic knowledge: artefact emotions and 359 aesthetic moods 92 aesthetic pleasure 358 aesthetic techniques 250 aesthetics: Chaucerian 410; empirical 124–125; high modernist 454n1; historiography and (Woolf) 446; Kantian 384; literary 248; neuroaesthetics 124; Romantic 130; science of (Nietzsche) 157; trauma 255 aesthetics of identification (Brecht) 157 Aesthetics of Reception (Rezeptionsästhetik) 317–319 affect: audiovisual media (film) and 354–363; Chaucerian 411–419; core narrative 403; defamiliarization and 54; definition of 28; embodiment and 51; emotion and 409; gender and 215–218; literary pleasure as 104; percepts and 385, 386, 387, 392; poetic 393; politics of 453; queer theory and 244; reader response

and 54; theorization of 33n1; theory of negative 243; tragic 112 affective cohesion 156 affective crisis 161 affective (eco)narratology 195–197 affective exchange 50 affective experience 306 Affective Fallacy 115 affective focalization 401 affective historicism 180–190; cognitive empathy and 186–189 affective history 181 affective irony 164 Affective Narratology see Hogan, Patrick Colm affective neuroscience 15–24, 86–87 affective niche 356 affective relations to the Other 467, 468, 470 affective responses to narrative 314, 321, 326 affective science 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 99; disgust and 323; recurring patterns in 336 affective states 57, 113; negative 126 affective stylistics 387, 389 affective turn 1, 238, 344 affectivity: Aristotelian 164 affects 30 affect studies 3, 171–172; Deleuzian 361; gender studies and 216–217 affect theory 2, 3, 8, 9, 26–33; colonialist/ postcolonialist literature and 172–174, 176–177; gender and 215; Ley’s critique of 31–32; queer theory and (Sedgwick) 236–244 Ahmed, Sara: affect, definition of 29; Cultural Politics of Emotion 30, 172, 174, 216, 217, 414; on “impressions” 418; political anger, theorization of 469; positive affects offered by 34n9

478

Index AIDS crisis 244 aisthesis 383 Aizura, Aren 34n7 alcoholism 183–186 Aldama, Frederick Luis: Analyzing World Fiction 169 Alexander, Jeffrey 244n13, 248 alienation effect 157, 164 Analects (Lún Yǔ) (Kǒngzǐ/Confucius) 135 Anderson, Ben 28 Anderson, Christy 430n9 Andreas Capellanus 320 Andrews, Kristin 8 anger 7, 397; agency and 468; as basic human emotion 17, 18, 86, 89, 90; bhava of 274; cognitive model of 39; disordered 222; as “emotion name” 98; empathy and 467–476; gender and 218; lack of 469; metonymy of 40, 41, 42; as non-aesthetic emotion 123; political 469; racial marginalization and 231–233, 235; righteous 427; satire linked to 92, 93; violation of trust and 295 Angst 393, 400 anti-Asian policies 376 antibiologism 238, 244 anti-Blackness 377 anticolonialism 175, 457 anti-essentialism 237–238 anti-feminist tradition 413 antihero 64, 70, 311–312, 475 anti-intentionalism 31 antinormativity 236–237, 243, 245n18 antipathetic narrative 139 anti-racism 33 anti-revenge literature 135 antisocial behavior 184 antiuniversality 4 anxiety: climate 200; “deep” 461; horror linked to feelings of 92, 93; marginalization and 225; melodrama and 286; paranoia and 288; tragic narrative and 367; traumatic 251; over trust in The Tempest 421–429; “ugly feeling” of 30 Anzaldúa [Gloria] 31 Apolline and Dionysiac, duality of 157 Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica 5–7 apostrophe (trope of direct rhetorical address) 343–351 appraisal 50–58; abstract 55; affective 117; inferential 58 appraisal theory of emotions 18, 52–58, 88, 430n8; in cognitive psychology 468 Apuleius: Golden Ass, The 434 Aristotle: affectivity of 164; Art of Rhetoric 383; body (gendered), understanding of 216–218; on “choice” 101–102; on “design” 337n2; on emotion in story structure 328; Galen, influence on 429n21; on metaphor as mark

of genius 264; on mimesis 272, 273, 280, 397; Oedipus Rex 93, 112; Parts of Animals 158–159; on peripeteia 272; Physics 158–159; Plato, debate with 111–114, 119, 152; on plot as soul of drama 159; Poetics 71n1, 111–114, 151, 156, 264, 272, 273, 280; rhetorical techniques of persuasion 384, 421; on social structure of feeling 393; on structure of stories 138; on tragedy 156–160, 396; virtues 205; on worthy actions 101 Armstrong, Paul 16 Arnold, Magda 18 Arnold, Matthew: “Dover Beach” 43–44, 119 Arthurian romance 104 Ashley, Colin Patrick 32 artefact/artifact emotions 103, 104, 150, 151, 358, 359, 395, 397, 401 artwork 123–128, 131–133, 385; aisthesis and 383; Deleuze on 385–386; film as media texts or 355, 357–358, 360; four different structures evoking different kinds of affect 357–358, 360; Langer on 386–387, 388; Luhmann on 387, 388 attachment 70; aesthetic response and 127; emotional 61, 71, 322, 349; ideal (friendship) 218; identification and 63–64, 66; in/securities of 123, 126, 132, 336; in King Lear 160, 162; optimism of 29; person 336; place 194, 336; queer theory and 237–243; in Twelfth Night 219 attachment bonds 141 attachment loss 336 attachment object 335 attachment security 334 Atwood, Margaret 175 audacity 351 Auden, Wystan Hugh 286, 427 Auerbach, Erich 273 Augustine 119n1, 421 Austen, Cassandra 433, 434 Austen, Edward 433 Austen, George 433, 437 Austen, Henry 434 Austen, Jane 10; death of 434; ease of identifying passages by 286; Emma 440–441; emotion of love and 433–442; free indirect style used by 438–439; “gloomy” novels of 91; illness of 433; Mansfield Park 176; Northanger Abbey 434; Persuasion 103, 434; pleasure of reading 19; Pride and Prejudice 433–442; Sense and Sensibility 435, 442; on writing as thinking 437 Austen-Leigh, James 440 Auyoung, Elaine 21 Averill, James 436 Aziz-Zadeh, L. 67 Bacigalupi, Paolo: Water Knife, The 192–193, 197–200 Bacon, Francis (Sir) 347

479

Index Bagchi, David 429n2 Bagnis, Arianna 312 Baier, Annette 295 Baldwin, James 229; Notes of a Native Son 232 Barad, Karen 32 Barber, C. L. 158 Barcelona, Antonio 38, 40 Barlowe, Jerome: Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe 323–324 Baroni, Raphaël 403 Barrett, Lisa Feldman 4, 18, 20; constructed emotion theory 23; constructivist school associated with 88 Barsalou, Lawrence W. 20 basic emotions 18, 90 basic emotion theory (BET) 4, 34n11 Bate, Jonathan 193 Bateson, P. 337n3 Baxter, Charles 22, 23 B, David (David B): Epileptic 367 beautiful, the 383–384 Bechdel, Alison: Are You My Mother? 247–254; Fun Home 250–251, 257n17 Beckett, Samuel 287–288, 391 Bennet, Elizabeth and Bennet family (characters) see Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice “Bennett and Browne” see Woolf, Virginia Bell, Acton see Brontë, Anne Bell, Clive 125–126, 386 Bennett, Jane 32, 35n17 Bentham [Jeremy] 203 Berlant, Lauren 29, 31, 34n9; Queen of America 216; on Sedgwick 242, 244 Berliner, Todd 298 betrayal 6, 79; attachment 7; in Cymbeline 163; in Godfather, The 206; in King Lear 160; positive affect associated with 422; social cost of 423; in Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 424–425, 427, 428; trust and 422; of trust 295, 296; usurpation-restoration plotline 336 Bezdek, Matthew A. 309–311, 313 Bharata Muni 71n1, 274 bhava (everyday emotions) 156, 274 Bildungsroman 106, 240, 367 Bigg sisters 434 Bigg-Wither, Harris 435 bildung-comics 368, 371, 376 Billies, Michelle 32 Bishop, Elizabeth 388, 389 Bishop, Tom 431n26 bisociation 262 black affective resistance 32 black bile 222 Black enslavement 188–190 Black/Brown Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) 366–382; “angry” 469; teen formation and builtspace 371–376

Black feminisms 31 Black Lives Matter 175 black magic 130 Black men 227–229, 232 blackness 32, 226, 228, 331 Black liberation theology 321 Black women 80, 231, 321; “Angry” 228 Bladow, Kyle: Affective Ecocriticism 193, 195 Blake [William] 387, 391 blending theory 261, 262, 270 Bloomsbury group 126, 170, 256n10, 386 Blyton, Enid 106 Boethius 415–416 Boko Haram 461 Bolens, Guillemette 412 Bond, Lucy 248 Booker, Christopher 334 Boose, Linda 164n3 Booth, Wayne 295–296, 439 Boquet, Damien 99, 108n3 Borges, Jorge Luis 113, 114 Borghi, Anna 41 Bortolussi, Marisa 281 Bourdieu, Pierre 423 Bovilsky, Lara 189 Bowen, Elizabeth: Hotel, The 239–241, 244n10 Bowlby, John 64 Bradbury, Ray: ease of identifying passages by 266 Braidotti, Rosi 32 “brain coupling” 310 Brecht, Bertolt: alienation effect of 157, 164; Mother Courage 157; Platonic suspicion of emotions expressed by 119n1 Breithaupt, Fritz 199, 450 Brinkema, Eugenie 31 Brody, Leslie R. 448 Brontë, Anne: as “Acton Bell” 226 Brontë, Charlotte 106, 176; Jane Eyre 367 Brontë, Emily 45 Brontë Sisters 226 Broomhall, Susan 223n1 Broom, Timothy 66 Brown, Laura S. 247 Brown, Peter 410 Brown teens (as readers) 371 Bruner, Jerome 272, 441 Brunton, Mary: Self Control 440 Buddha 476 Buddhist thought 52 Buell, Lawrence: Environmental Imagination 193–194 Bui, Thi: Best We Could Do 367 bullies 276, 280, 473 Burke, Edmund 127 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress 106 Burger, Glenn 411–412

480

Index Burke, Edmund 127 Butler, Judith 216; Gender Trouble 238, 242, 243 Butler, Martin 163 Buttigieg, Pete 423 Cacioppo, John 140 Capone, Al 206 Carnegie, Dale 301 Carroll, Joseph 4 Carroll, Noël 135, 145–146, 398; on “criterial prefocusing” 401; on “paradox of fiction” 195; Philosophy for Erotic Narration 402, 403; on “socialization theory” of mirth 185; on “superiority of mirth” 184 Caruth, Cathy 247–248 Casetti, Francesco 70 Cassirer, Ernst 386 Castano, Emanuele 19, 147–148, 396 catharsis 112; emotional 71n1, 156 causal chain 268 causal connections 147–148, 176 causal construal 330 causal inferences 75 causality 76, 362 causal meanings 263 causal sequences 136, 138; in stories 329–332, 334–337 Cavell, Stanley 161, 165n3 Ceres 422n, 420n13 Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote 434 Cesaire: Une Tempête 422, 420n14, 431n25 Cézanne [Paul] 385 Chan, Evelyn Tsz Yan 452 Chaplan, Rebecca 256n10 Chase, David 207 Chaucer, Geoffrey 10, 409–419; Legend of Good Women 412; modern gender readings of 101; Canterbury Tales 295; Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale 41; Troilus and Criseyde 413 cheating context 310 Chekhov, Anton: “Lady with a Dog” 69; short stories 280; Stories 275 Cheng, Anne 135 Chen, Mel Y. 32 Chesterton, G.K. 299 Chestopalova, Natalja 256n10 Chicana identity 233; see also Latina Chihaya, Sarah 471 Chong, Sylvia 476 Churchyard, Thomas 325 Christie, Agatha 299; Murder of Roger Ackroyd 296 Cicero 421 Clare, Eli 34n7 Clark, Andy 302n3 Clarke, Elizabeth 321 Clark Kent/Superman 377, 379

Classic of Rites [礼记, Lǐjì] 135 Clay, Zanna 147 Clewell, Tammy 256n10 Clore, Gerald L. 468 cognitive-affective processes 348, 357, 360 cognitive disorientation 123, 127, 132 cognitive embodiment 288 cognitive empathy 183–189, 190, 472 cognitive estrangement 192 cognitive film theory 361 cognitive fluidity 262 cognitive footprint 263 cognitive impairment 269 cognitive linguistics 9, 38–48 cognitive literary theory 88 cognitive load 212 cognitive narratology 193, 195 cognitive neuroscience 422, 468 cognitive patterns and creativity 261–270 cognitive processes: causal sequences guiding 329, 331; readers’ narrative experiences and 306–308, 314 cognitive psychology 88, 298, 335, 359, 468 cognitive science 1–2, 50–71, 270; methods of 308; research 305, 306 cognitive states 116–117 cognitive studies 414 cognitive theory of emotions 52, 61, 410, 412; see also emotions cognitive theory of trust 155; see also trust Coleman, Lerita 184 Coleman, Rebecca 34n6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 181, 183, 189, 287; on Chaucer 410; on Shakespeare’s The Tempest 424 Collingwood, R. G. 113–115, 119, 280 Colombetti, Giovanna 53, 56, 57, 58 comedy: Black enslavement perceived as 188; cognitive empathy and 183–186; cringe 92; Cymbeline and 155–164; emotions linked to 90, 92; fertility rites tied to 158; grossout 328; happiness and 9; men represented by 157; mirth and 158, 185, 328, 396; Zhào Orphan as 135; rasa of 274; Renaissance 219; resolution achieved in 139; romantic 92, 93, 329; screwball 328, 329; story conventions of 334, 336; tragicomedy 46, 54, 155, 163; Very Woman, A as 189 comic resolution 142, 336 comic rhythm 158, 164 comics (graphic novels) 247; BIPOC teen 366–382; superhero 376, 377 comics literacy 367, 368 comic, the 374 communicative situation of artworks 358 confession: false 296; love 355; sympathy and 471–476 confessional groups 100

481

Index confessional tale 128 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness 176, 458–462 constructed emotion theory 18, 23 constructivist approaches: to emotion 4, 87–88, 187, 189–190; to sexuality 237 CONTAINMENT Schema 263 convents 100 COVID-19 234 Cook, Anne E. 307 Coplan, Amy 64 Coppola, Francis Ford: Godfather, The (film) 205–206 Cowen, Alan S. 91 Crabbe, George 410 Craik, Katherine 430n7 Craik, Kenneth 279 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 226 cringe comedy 92 “crippled child” game 252–255, 257n16 criterial prefocusing 116 critical race theory 26, 32, 223, 414 crying 159, 160; by Hamlet 65; by Lear 161; see also weeping Culler, Jonathan 344, 349 Cummins, Jeanine: American Dirt 234 Currie, Gregory 148–149, 199 Curry, James 188 Cvetkovich, Ann 29, 34n9; Mixed Feelings 216 Damasio, Antonio R. 15, 53, 460; affect theories of 31; on mental phenomenon emerging from organisms’ context 193, 195 Dante 273–274, 464; Virgil and 459 Danticat, Edwidge 16; Breath, Eyes, Memory 23–24 D’Arcens, Louise 99 Darcy, Fitzwilliam (character) see Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice Darwin, Charles: Descent of Man 86; emotion research by 88; Expression of the Emotions 17, 31, 86 Darwinian struggle 208 Dau, Duc 321 Davies, David 146 defamiliarization, theory of 54 Default Mode Network (DMN) 67 Defoe, Daniel: Political History of the Devil 106; Robinson Crusoe 434 De Jaegher, Hanne 56 Deleuze, Gilles 1; affect as processual ongoingness 31; affect studies influenced by 361; art as form of thinking 385–386; Francis Bacon 385; Langer and 386–387; post-structuralist thought of 3; Spinoza/ Deleuze trajectory in affect theory 27–30, 32–33; vitalistic approach of 386–387; What is Philosophy? 385

Delgado, Richard 178n11 D’Erasmo, Stacey 22 Deschamps, Eustache 409 Detection Club (Christie, Sayers, etc.) 299 detective fiction 92, 176, 299, 457 Diallo, Amadou 371 Dickens, Charles 68, 106; Bleak House 397; Great Expectations 367; joys of reading 151; Old Curiosity Shop 103 Diedrich, Lisa 251, 254, 256n10, 257n16 Dionysius 157, 162 Di Paolo, Ezequiel 56 Djikic, Maja 437 disability: emotion and 180–190; medical models of 182; noble suffering and 182–183; the passions and 182–183 disability narratives 183 disability studies 26, 223, 414 disembodied emotion 16, 421 disempowerment: political 457 disgust: in anti-Wolsey satire 323–326; as basic human emotion 17, 86, 90; bhava of 274; comedy and 328; as expressed by Hamlet 65; Haidt’s experiments with 212; horror genre tied to 397; as linked to Satire 92, 93; memories of 330; moral 323; as negative aesthetic emotion 124; paradox of 193–194; poetics of 323–326; as provoked by Chaucer’s writing 409; reversal expressed via 156; Tempest, The 422, 424, 427–428 disposition 2, 3 6, 7; affective 117, 357, 359; emotional 98; psychological 29 Dissanayake, Ellen 50, 51, 55, 57 distrust: post-structuralism 239; propaganda linked to 92; risk reduced by 428; satire linked to 92; trust or 295, 400, 422 dhvani (suggestion) 280–281 Dixon, Peter 281 Doan, Laura 244n12 Doody, Margaret 272, 434 Douglass, Frederick 225 Dryden, John 409 dual-process brain 211 Du Bois, W.E.B. 227 dystopian fiction 192, 197, 200 Eagleton, Terry 157 Easterlin, Nancy 55, 194 Eaton, Anne 151, 153n8 Ebert, Roger 297, 301 ecocriticism 193–195 ecocritics 194, 195, 200 ecological…: calamities 464; collapse 198, 200; devastation 199, 456–457, 461–462; misery 197; nostalgia 194; validity 75 econarratologist see James, Erin econarratology 195–197

482

Index ecophobia 194, 198 Eggers, Dave: What is the What 174–175 Ekman, Paul 4, 52, 86–88, 90, 91 elegy 92, 130 eliciting conditions for emotion 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 46, 137–139 Eliot, George: Austen’s influence on 442; Flaubert and 276; Middlemarch 275, 281; Mill on the Floss 106; Nussbaum on 68 Eliot, T.S.: “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 264; literary modernism and 106, 385; on poetic process 263; on poetry as communication 385; religious poems of 93 Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man 367 Ellman, Maud 244n10 embarrassment 90; apostrophes in lyric poetry understood as an 344, 349; cringe comedy and 92; as meta-emotion 358 embeddedness 5–6 embedded relationality 27 embedment, literature and 292 embodied emotion 42, 48, 50–58; in artworks 386; model of 58; in poetry 385, 392; prominence in various literary genres 77; real life responses 301; sentimental novel and 218 embodied experience: cultural contexts and 234; literary representations of 222; queer theory and 238 embodied feeling 158; in Chaucer 411 embodied genders 216, 219 embodied metaphors 22, 48 embodied relationality 27 embodied self 186, 188; as being formed by literature 217; Galenic notions of 215 embodied sensation: feelings as 29 embodied simulation (ES): fictional characters and 61–71; as fostered by watching films 361, 362; literary texts and liberated embodied simulation 192–198, 200; Mirror Neuron Activation and 62 embodiment 40–41; of American Blackness 228; cognitive science and 50–58; conditions of 345; cultural studies’ turn toward 223; of desire 344; difference and 239; emotions’ 15; identity (racial) and 232, 233–234; impassioned 344, 351; queer 34n7; theory of 9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 393 Emission Schema 263–269 emotional engagement 117–118; literary style and 283–292 emotional experiences of readers 305–314; dynamics among 317–326; prose fiction and 395–404 emotional investment 300–301 emotional maps 91–92 emotional process: cognition as last stage of 117

emotional risk: unreliable feelings and 294–295, 298–302 emotional tears: in Cymbeline 163–164; in King Lear 159–163 emotional turn 422 emotional universality 4 emotion categories: eight 85, 89–90 emotion regulation 447–450 emotions: aesthetic 90, 123–132; aestheticdesign 366; affect and 3, 26–31; affective historicism and 180–190; apostrophes (direct address) and 343–349, 351; artefact/ artifact 103, 104, 150, 151, 358, 359, 395, 397, 401; BIPOC teen comics (graphic fiction) and 366–368, 370–371, 376, 380, 382; in characters, authors, readers 93–94; Chaucer and 409–419; cognitive linguistics and 38–48; cognitive science and 50–58; in colonial and postcolonial literature 169–177; complex 363; constructivist approach to 4; corporeal 412; dark 397; definition of 2–4; early modern literature and 421; ecology and 192–200; eliciting conditions for 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 46, 137–139; empirical approaches to the study of 74–83; epic prototype 366; erotic 265; evolutionary approaches to 158; evolutionary research on 86–88; fiction 103, 104, 150, 151, 396; fictional 397, 400; fictional characters and 272–281; figurative language of 261–270; film as medium and 354–363; gender and 214–223, 450–452; gendered 348; history of 27, 98–107, 238, 343, 410, 419; identity and 233–234; intergroup 452–453; literary 134–142; literary frames and 46; literary meaning and 85–96; literature and 5–8; love (in Austen) 433–442; lyric poetry and 383–393; mapping 88–89; meta- 358, 359; moral 203–212; as multicomponential phenomenon 2; narrative 363; neuroscientific understanding of 16–24; as psychophysiological events 86; periodspecific 343; philosophy and 110–119; plot 402–404; post-modern concepts of 412; premodern literature and 409; race/ethnicity as linked to 225–235; reader 400; reception of 319–322; rhetoric and 383; sexuality and 236–244; short-term 397; as socialization tools 447–448; sociological reading of 446; sociology of (Woolf) 445–454; social study of (Woolf) 454; story structures and 328–337; study of 468; in Tempest, The 421–428; tragic 159–160; transhistorical 343; trauma and 249–250, 255; universals 4; see also anger; appraisal theory of emotions; basic emotions; basic emotion theory; bhava; empathy; disgust; fear; happiness; joy; love, pity; pride; rasa, rasas emotion research, two main schools of 88

483

Index emotion theorists 5 emotion theory: constructed 18, 20; evolutionary 90–91 empathic concern 55 empathy 6; categorial 229; character 193; cognitive 183–186, 188–189, 470; colonialism, postcolonialism, and 169; emotional 470; emotion-based 277, 279; failed 175; false 175; film-specific forms of 362; gender and 79; identification and 63, 64; identity and 230–232, 233; literary fiction and 70, 171–174, 332, 396; mistaken 470; narrative 62, 173–175, 228, 235; readers’ experience of 292, 312; radical 476; real-world 232; role of 195; simulation and 136; somatic forms of 361; strategic 174–175, 177, 470; sympathy and 55, 58, 144–153; in Sympathizer, The (Nguyen) 467–476 empathy-altruism hypothesis 470 Empathy and the Novel see Keen, Suzanne empathy-driven narrative 445, 450 empathy studies 470 emplotment 359, 360, 362–363 enactive cognition and enactivism 50–51, 53, 56–58 enslavement 171, 180–190, 461 Enterline, Lynn 430n5 Equiano, Olaudah 225 epic: gendering of 218; novel as distinct from 434 epic prototype 366 epiphany 90, 92, 476; lyrical 428 epistemic…: agents 66; economies 31; emotions 125; mental spaces 48 Epistemology of the Closet see Sedgwick, Eve epithalamion 345 Esrock, Ellen 22–23 essentialism 169; anti-essentialism 237–238 Estok, Simon 194 Euripides 156; Hecuba 159; Hippolytus 295 Evans, Robert 321 evolutionary emotion theory 90–91 Fall, the (Edenic) 102–103 Fanon, Frantz 172 Fawaz, Ramzi 245n17 fear 396; ambient 286; anger and 468; bhava of 274; cognitive models of 39; as ecophobic emotion 198; as “emotion-names” as opposed to emotions 98; as emotion of tragedy 9; emotion-system arousal and 331; existential 288; fascination and 126–128, 131; fiction and 116; in Gone Girl 300; heroic adventure linked to 92; horror genre and 92–93, 358, 397; metonymy linked to 40; organismal assessment of 52; pity and 111–112, 114, 155–156, 396; pleasure and (Tolstoy) 278; as prototypical or ‘basic’ emotion 3, 17, 86, 90; as prototypical emotion concept 41; satire and 93; sexual

165, 345; simulation and 136; as socially discouraged emotion 21; story universals and 335, 336, 351; tragic narrative and 367; in Tempest, The 422, 425, 427, 428; tragic 112; Trust Theory and 422 fear conditioning 17, 117 fear of miscegenation 427 fear of nature 194 feeling (felyng), meaning of 412 Fehr, Ernest 423 Felman, Shoshana 247 Felski, Rita 164n1, 176, 245n16 feminism: Black 31; identity categories and 236; intersectionality and 226; postcolonial criticism and 176; revolutionary 174; see also Ahmed, Sara; anti-feminist tradition; hooks, bell; Jaggar, Alison; Lorde, Audre; Ngai, Sianne; Woodward, Kathleen; Woolf, Virginia feminist scholars 469 feminist studies 414 feminist theology 321 feminist theory 215–216, 223 feminist therapy: text as example of 256n10 Feminist/ Queer/Cultural trajectory 26, 27, 29–30, 32–33; literary emotion studies influenced by 214 Ferrand, Jacques 223n7 Ferris, Emil: My Favorite Thing is Monsters 371–376 Fetta, Stephanie 233 fiction: character and emotion in 272–280; detective 92, 176, 299, 457; dystopian 192, 197, 200; empathy and 441–442; gangster 205, 206, 210; Gothic 131; graphic 248–250, 366–382; literature as 100; mindreading and 148; narrative 295; paradox of 115–116, 119n2, 124, 134–142, 195; prose 287, 395–404; realist 297, 398; rhetoric of 294; science fiction 192, 197, 199; speculative 197; surprise in 300–301; truths conveyed by 434; young adult 77; women as portrayed in 78, 80; women as readers of 79, 81; women as writers of 82 fictional characters: emotional engagement with 61–71, 118, 147, 302; emotion words used to describe 90; motives of 85; understanding 118 fiction emotions 103, 104, 144, 150–151, 359 fictionality 177, 355 fictional narratives: characters in 91; long prose 93; prose 171 fiction emotion/artefact emotion relationship 104 fictivity 262 Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones 434 filmic affect 362–363 Fischel, Joseph J. 244n13 Fish, Stanley 102–103; Iser, review of 320; “Literature in the Reader” 387; Milton, reading

484

Index of 391; on reader as construct 389–390; Surprised by Sin 391 Flatley, Jonathan 34n9; Like Andy Warhol 244n11 Flaubert, Gustave 20; Madame Bovary 276 Fletcher, John: A Very Woman 180–190 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 189 Flynn, Gillian: Gone Girl 300–301 Fludernik, Monika 295 Fodor, Jerry 59n3 Fontaine, Laurence 430n15 Formalism: art theory 125; literary 126, 131; Russian 318 formalist hermeneutics 344, 348, 351 Forney, Ellen: Marbles 367 Foucault, Michel 1; History of Sexuality Vol. 1 238, 244n1 Fowler, Roger 288 Fox, Cora 421, 430n5 Foxe, John 325 Frankenstein see Shelley, Mary Frankissstein see Winterson, Jeannette Freeman, D.: Catching the Nearest Way 38 Freeman, M.: Metaphor Making Meaning 45; Poem as Icon 38 Freeman, R. Austin 299 Freud, Sigmund 101; Bechdel, influence on 254; “case study” system initiated by 249; on drive system, Tomkins’ disagreement with 34n10; dynamic unconscious, concept of 211; on human sexual life 238; hunger and sexuality as drives 237; on libidinal blockages 239; and Klein, differences in viewpoints of human drive 242; melancholy as understood by 218; superiority thesis of 158 Frijda, Nico 52 Frye, Northrup 158, 187, 387 Fuchs, Barbara 430n17 Fumo, Jamie C. 413 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 67–68, 77, 310, 312, 389 Galen 101, 422, 429n1; embodied self 215–216; humoralism and humoral theory of 351, 413, 421; see also Harvey, Elizabeth Gallese, Vittorio 196 Galsworthy, John: Forsyte Saga 445 Gamble, Joseph 244n15 Game of Thrones (television series) 63 gangster ethics 203–212 gangster fiction 205, 206, 210 gangster films 210–211 Garcia-Rojas, Claudia 31–32 Gardner, John: Art of Fiction 273 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 181 Garrard, Greg 193 Gehring, Wes 328

gender: in BIPOC comics/graphic fiction 367, 368, 371, 376, 382; emotion in literature and 74–83; narrative, emotions, and 234; queer theory and 236, 238; sex and 240; sexuality and 236, 239; in Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 214–223 gender binary 219, 382 gendered concepts: in King Lear 164 gender expectations: in Pargiters/The Years (Woolf) 445, 450–452 gender norms 161 gender performativity 242 gender politics 462 genderqueer 382 gender readings: of Chaucer 101 gender roles: in Godfather, The 205, 209; in Twelfth Night 222 gender stereotypes: in Woolf 454 Gender Trouble see Butler, Judith Gerrig, Richard J. 193, 196, 273, 441 Gibbs, R.: Poetics of Mind 38, 42 Gill, Roma 182 goal alignment 311–314 goal of happiness 46; see also happiness goals of story 137–140; genres and 328, 331–332, 334–337 Godfather, The (film) 205–206, 209 Goethe, Johann: Sorrows of Young Werther 101, 435 Goffman, Erving 58; “dramaturgical approach” 450; “impression management” 298; Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 277 Goleman, Daniel 15 González, Christopher: Permissible Narratives 226–227 goodness 103; Black women and 227; fragility of 112, 159, 163; individual 457; stubborn 464 Gothic genre 123, 126, 130–132; ecogothic 194 Gouldthorp, Bethany 148 Gower, John 409 Graesser, Arthur C. 53–54 Granik, Debra 354 Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhào (Jì) 134–142; Míng dynasty version 134–135, 142; Yuán dynasty version 134–135, 140–142 Greenblatt, Stephen 423 Greene, Joshua 203, 210–212 Green, Melanie 308 greensickness 222, 223n7 Greene, Thomas: Light in Troy 219 “green world” 158, 163, 422, 430n12 Grice, H. P. 299 Grubbs, Lindsey 19 Guasco, Michael 188, 189, 190n14 Guattari, Félix 385 Gumbrecht, Ulrich 383, 392–393 Gurihuru: Superman Smashes the Klan 368, 376–380

485

Index Guthrie, J.: Emily Dickinson’s Vision 45 Gwyn, Peter 322 Habila, Helon: Oil on Water 456–464 habitus 423, 425–427 Haidt, Jonathan 203, 210–212 Halliwell, Stephen 273 Hamilton, Denise 199 Hamilton, Jennifer 165 Hammond, Meghan Marie 445, 470 happiness 46; affect and 30; as affective object 216; as basic emotion 52; bhava of 274; cognitive models of 39; comedy and 9, 92; enduring 46; emotion concepts of 40; empathy in relationship to 145; eudaimonia as 463; goal of 46; literary choice of 155, 336; rags to riches arc focusing on 129; short story framing of 46; story structure leading to 164; two emotional prototypes for 54 Haraway, Donna 32–33 Harding, D. 438 Hardin, Russell 159 Hardy, John 438 Hardy, Thomas 91 Harris, Adrienne 356 Hartman, Geoffrey 247 Hartman, Saidiya V. 188–189 Hayles, N. Katherine 16 Hazlitt, William 410 Hegel, G.W.F.: on lyric subjectivity 385; on tragedy 156–157, 159, 424, 474 Heidegger, Martin 384, 393; Being and Time 384 Heise, Thomas: Heimat is a Space in Time (film) 362 Heise, Ursula: Sense of Place 194 Hemingway, Ernest: “A Very Short Story” 46 Hemmings, Clare 29 Hempel, Carl 331–332 Henrician period 322 Henry VIII (King of England) 322–323 Henry V (play) see Shakespeare, William Henry VIII (play) see Shakespeare, William Henrich, Joseph Patrick 204–205 Herman, David 62, 196, 231 hermeneutic game: Chaucer 416, 418 hermeneutics 384; formalist 344; vitalism and 386, 393 hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur) 176 hermeneutic tradition: Chinese 141 Hershezon, Daniel 188 heroes 5, 68, 80, 110; danger posed to 195; envied by gods 157; see also antihero; superhero; villain heroic adventure 92, 93 heroic narrative 329 heroic plots 57, 335–336 heroic story prototype 142, 328, 334, 335, 337, 355; pride and anger expounded by 397

heroic struggle 355 heroic tragicomedy 54 heroine 145; cross-dressing 221; screen (film) 300; therapeutic narratives offered by 247, 249–250, 256n10; tragic 138 higher-level meanings 358 Highsmith, Patricia 300 Hinojosa, Maria 234 hippies 206 hippocampus 17 Hippocrates 413, 421 Hippolytus see Euripides Hitchcock, Alfred: Marnie (film) 309; Stage Fright (film) 296 Hobgood, Alison 182 Hogan, Lalita Pandit 170 Hogan, Patrick Colm 23; Affective Narratology 55, 397; on art and emotion, historical slippage regarding 181; on Austen’s Persuasion 441; on care 403; “categorial empathy” 229; on categorial identity 233; on commonality of the love story 435; on empathy, cognition and emotional response in literature 169; on epic prototypes 366; on “ethical-political response” to anger 232; on flaunted and occluded narratorial artificiality 401; on gap-filling 131; on group specificity of empathic responses 187; on implied reader mode 400; Literature and Emotion 195, 276; The Mind and Its Stories 38, 46, 85, 231; on narrators endowed with emotional standing 299; on narratives surrounding attachment 126; on Shakespearean emotions tied to ethics 430n8; on “superiority theory” of mirth 184; theory of emotion prototypes 57; What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion 261, 276 Holbrook, Peter 100 Holinshead, Raphael 325 holism, textual 288 Holub, Robert 318–319 homo and hetero binary 244 homodiegetic narrator 295 homoeroticism 239, 265 homonormativity 243 homophobia 240, 367, 370 homosexuality 238, 400, 451; see also queer theory homosociality 216 hooks, bell 469 Hohwy, Jakob 302n3 horror (genre) 92 Hsieh, Lili 453–454 Hsieh, Liu see Liu, Hsieh Hume, David 211 humoralism and humor theory see Galen hunter-gatherer 136; Caliban as 422 hunters as pathfinders 459 hyperphantasia 68

486

Index Idema, Wilt 134, 142 identification: aesthetics of 157; affective 472; attachment and 63–66; cognitive 470; empathy as form of 467; irrationality and 111; with literary or fictional characters 61, 66, 171, 200, 476; literary experience and 55; mimesis and 280; overidentification 254; Plato on 111; scent 269; with social group 90; theories of 61; trait 67 identity see Chicana identity; embodiment; emotions; empathy; sexual identity image schemas 262, 268 immersion 308, 361–363, 366, 388; perception and 355 incest 124 incest avoidance 337n3 individual creativity 261–270; schema instantiation and 263–264 inexhaustibility 107, 159, 384 Ingarden, Roman 357 ingroups and outgroups 92, 453 integration see Resonance-Integration-Validation (RI-Val) interdisciplinarity 3–4, 283 intergroup emotion 447, 452–454 Ioppolo, Grace 164n3 Irish, Bradley J. 217, 430n8 Iser, Wolfgang 131, 318 Izard, Carroll 85, 88, 90 Iyengar, Sujata 189 Jacobs, Harriet 225 Jackson, Heather 440 Jaén, Isabel 441 Jaggar, Alison 469 Jagose, Annamarie 244n1, 244n9 Jakobson, Roman 284, 292, 438 James, Erin 193; Storyworld Accord 195 James, Henry 85, 118, 239; “Art of Fiction” 272; ease of identifying passages by 266; Golden Bowl 150; Portrait of a Lady 145 Jamestown, Virginia 170 James, William 15, 52–53 Jankyn see Chaucer: Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale Jannidis, Fotis 63 Jaquette Ray, Sarah 200 Jarman, Derek: Blue 357 Jauss, Hans Robert 318–322, 325 Jì Jūnxiáng 134–142 Jìn kingdom (sixth century BCE) 141 John, Eileen 150 Johnson, Jenell 19 Johnson-Laird, P.N. 52, 54, 59n3 Johnson, Mark 22; image schemas 262 Johnson, Rian 296 Johnson, Samuel: Preface to Shakespeare 108n2; on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline 163

Jones, Trina 228 Joseph, Miriam (Sister) 343 joy 86, 90, 98, 283, 358, 400; as corporeal emotion in Chaucer 412; embodied condition of 41; at reunion of lovers 332 joyful 336, 345 Joyce, James 93; Ulysses 33 Kaempfer, Lucie 413 Kambaskovic, Danijela 430n4 Kansteiner, Wulf 248 Kant, Immanuel 123–125, 203, 384, 388, 390 Kao, Wan-Chuan 412 Kaplan, E. Ann 248 Karnein, Alfred 320 Karney, Benjamin 437 Keen, Suzanne 55, 68–69; Empathy and the Novel 68–69, 229, 312, 470; three main forms of empathetic appeal 470 Keltner, Dacher 4, 87–89, 91 Kemble, Fanny 424 Kidd, David Comer 19, 147–148, 396 Kim, Sue J.: On Anger 231 Kintsch, Walter 307 Kitcher, P. 337n3 Knausgaard, Karl Ove 107 knighthood tale 319 Knight, Wilson 430n10 Knox, Ronald 299 Kǒngzǐ/Confucius 135, 141 Koopman, Eva Maria (Emy) 77, 277 Korsmeyer, Carolyn 126 Kosslyn, Stephen 20, 51 Kubrick, Stanley: Barry Lyndon (film) 362 Kuiken, Don 54, 56, 57 Kukkonen, Karin 298 Lacan, Jacques 238, 254, 256n10 Lacey, Simon 23 Ladino, Jennifer: Affective Ecocriticism 193–195 Lakoff, George 22, 38; embodied emotion metaphor and poetry 42–43; More than Cool Reason 42; Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things 31 Lamarque, Peter 397 Lamming, George 431n23 Landsman, Claude 248 Langer, Susanne 158, 164; Feeling and Form 386–389, 393 Latina characters 199, 368, 371 Latina literature see Fetta, Stephanie Latinx: history and culture 375; stereotypes of 228: United States 230, 232, 234, 375, 380 Laub, Dori 247 laughter 158; comic 189; contagious collective 357, 363; crying and 159; narrative production of 294

487

Index Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover 93 Landy, Joshua 151–152 Lazarus, Richard S. 52, 427 Leaska, Mitchell A. 446 Leavit, Sarah: Tangles 367 LeDoux, Joseph 17, 18 Leech, Geoffrey N. 287, 288 Le Faye, Deirdre 433, 437 LeFroy, Tom 434–435 lesbianism 239–240; teens of color as 368, 370, 371; see also homosexuality; queer theory lesbian panic 239 Levinas [Emanuel] 467 Levin, Ira: Kiss Before Dying (film) 300 Levin, Janet 195 Levinson, Jill 435 Leys, Ruth 31, 34n11 Liebers, Nicole 70 literary Darwinists 88 Littlefield, Melissa 19 Liu, Hsieh 110 Lodge, David 438 London, Jack 86, 93–94 Looser, Devoney 433 Lorde, Audre 469 love: accepting 253; Austen and 433–442; Chaucer as poet of 409–411; cognitive models for 39; courtly 320, 412; emotion category of 38; female versus male 215, 219; filial 160; in King Lear 160–162, 165n3; literary genres engaging 92; lust and 89; marriage and 102; maternal 252, 254; metonymy and 40; parasocial relationships involving feelings of 61, 63; pseudoscientific theories of 130; romantic 46, 57, 139, 336; in Romeo and Juliet 345; sentimental woman and 79; as syndrome 223n2; as tragic motif 159; trust and 426 love confession 355 Love, Heather 245n16 love marriage 333 love poetry 262–265, 270 lovers 269, 321; separation of 332; Troilus and Criseyde 417 lovesickness 222, 223n7 Love’s Labour’s Lost see Shakespeare, William “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” see Eliot, T.S. love story: Austen’s disruption/reworking of 433–442; common pattern of 333, 435; romance genre and 81; romantic plot of 335; sringara 280; story resolution of 139 love triangle 336 Luckhurst, Roger 248 Luhmann, Niklas 387–388 Lún Yǔ see Analects lust 90; pornography and 92 Lynch, Andrew 416, 419 Lyrical Ballads see Wordsworth

lyrical epiphany 428 lyric poetry 383–393; as affective art 171; “I” 51; by Naidu 173–174; by Petrarch 219–220; see also apostrophe; epithalamion lyric subjectivity 3 lyric, the 261–262, 267 Machado, Carmen Maria (with Dani): Low, Low Woods 368–370 Magnet, Shoshana 256n10 Malatino, Hilary 34n7 Malory [Thomas] 413 Mandate of Heaven 140–142 Mandel, Emily St. John: Station Eleven 305–314 Mansfield, Katherine 170, 289, 290 Marañón, Gregorio 18 Marechera, Dambudzo 457 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 402 Marr, David: Vision 51 Martin, A. 184 Martin, Mary Patricia 295 Martin, Trayvon 371 Marxism 176, 318, 474 Marx, Karl 476 Maslin, Janet 301 Massinger, Philip: A Very Woman 180–190 Massumi, Brian 29 material stimuli or signs 357 Matravers, Derek 135, 136 Matsumoto, David 2 McCown, Gary 351n2 McEwan, Ian 124 McGuigan, F. 67 McKoon, Gail 306 McNamer, Sarah 412–413 McQuarrie, Christopher 297 Mead, Rebecca 442 Medea 5–7 Medina, Tony 371 Meek, Richard 429n3 melancholy 30, 89, 182, 218, 253; masculine 221–222; in Shakespeare 392 Menninghaus, Winfried 128, 131 mental space theory 47–48 Merwin, W. S.: Pupil, The 392 Mesquita, Batja 448 metaphor: conceptual 8, 38, 39–46; conventional emotion 48; embodied 22; embodied emotion 42; Godfather (film) as 206; implied 220; incipient 391; liquid 413; as mark of genius 264; material 414; poetry and 287, 438; sensory associations of 21; somatic-sensory 389; spiritual 269 metaphor/allegory 7 metaphorical enslavement 180–183, 186, 189 metaphor of…: dance 50; “image” 389; symbiosis 15; tears 415; tears as ink 413; the village 290

488

Index metonymy 39, 40, 345; novels and films dependence on 438 Miall, David 53–57 Miller, Alice 254 Miller, Henry 93 Mill [John Stuart] 203 Milton, John 45; Fish’s reading of 391; Paradise Lost 102–103, 390–391 “Miltonic style” 286 mimesis: Aristotle on 272, 273, 280, 397 mind-style 288, 289, 290 Míng dynasty see Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhào (Jì) Mirror Neuron Mechanism (MNM) 62 mirror neurons 146–147, 361 mirror neuron system 196 mirth 118; Aristotle on 157; in Chaucer’s writing 410; in Hollywood films of the 1990s 328; social bonds and evolution of play required for 159; “socialization theory” of 185, 188; “superiority theory” of 184, 188; see also comedy; happiness Mitchell, Jason P. 66 monism 287–288 Monson, Don A. 320 Montaigne, Michel de 217–218 moral allegiance 195 moral awareness 457, 459 moral deviance 55 moral disgust 323–324, 427; see also disgust moral dumbfounding 212 moral conundrum 70 moral emotions 123–124, 203–212 moral function of literature 130 moral intuitions 203, 210–212 morality 210 morality drama 323 morality plays 211 moral judgements 297 moral meaning 391 moral outrage 79 moral philosophy 421 moral rationalizer 212 moral reasoning: social-intuitionist model of 211 moral self-division 347 moral superiority 93 moral transgression 58, 124 moral violation 141 moral virtue 159 Morrison, Toni: Beloved 33, 233 Moscoso, Javier 431n20 Moulton, Ian 223n7 Mowat, Barbara 430n19 Moylan, Tom 197, 199 Mulcahy, Melissa 148 Mullaney, Steven 431n22

multidimensional framework for conceptualizing aesthetic emotions 129–132 multifunctionality of texts 288 multimodal imagery 22 multimodality of film 354–363 multisensory imagery 23–24 multispecies activisms 32–33 multivocality 295 Muñoz, Jose M. 34n7 Munro, Alice: “The Office” 281 Murasaki Shikubu (Lady): Tale of Genji 110, 273, 434 Murphie, Andrew 34n2 My Dinner with André (film) 210 mysteries and detective fiction 92 Naidu, Sarojini 173–174, 178n9 narration see unreliable narration narrative and plot 294–302 narrative engagement 308–309 narrative events: readers’ experiences of 309–311 Nature (goddess): King Lear 349–350 Natyashastra 156 Neff, Lisa 437 Nell, Victor 78 Neruda, Pablo: Oda a su aroma 269–270 “neurohype” 19 New Criticism 115 Ngai, Sianne 34n9; Ugly Feelings 30, 412 Ngugi wa Thiongo: A Grain of Wheat 175 Nguyễn, Việt Thanh 225, 230–231; Sympathizer, The 467–477 Nietzsche, Friedrich 155–157 Nigeria 226, 230; cultural pluralism of 459; omo-ogun 461; postcolonial 460; war deity Ogun 463 Nigerian authors see Adiche, Chimamanda; Habila, Helon nonfiction 139–140; accounts of Vietnam War 472; empathy and 441; explanatory 279; graphic (comic) 247 “nonfiction novel” 250, 255 nonfiction writers 177 Norwood, Kimberly Jade 228 Nowlin, Steele 412 Nünning, Ansgar 295 Nussbaum, Martha 68, 69; on empathy as social good 470; on “fragility of goodness” 112, 159, 163; on James’ Golden Bowl 150 Oatley, Keith 52, 54, 331; on art and literature’s tendency to focus on most difficult emotions 127; on emotion in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 276, 279; on fiction as simulation of social worlds 396; on fiction’s impact on readers’ personalities 69; on Hamlet 66; on numbers of drafts produced by writers of fiction 437;

489

Index “relived emotion” 56; on psychology and literature 441; Understanding Emotions 87 O’Brien, Edward J. 307 O’Brien, Tim: In the Lake of the Woods 300 O’Connor, Flannery 20 Oedipal struggle 251 Oedipus 417 Oedipus Rex see Aristotle Offill, Jenny 208 Ogai, Mori: Seinen 367 Ogun (Yoruba war deity) 463 omo-ogun (war boys) 461 Ondaatje, Michael: Anil’s Ghost 178n11 Ong, Walter 437 ostranenie 54, 277, 279 Other, the 467–468 others see self and others Otto, Eric 197 Ovid 320, 388, 419, 421; see also Fox, Cora Paine, Tom: Common Sense 170 Palfrey, Simon 430n18 Panero, Marie 148 Panksepp, Jaak 4, 15, 18, 87–88; on laughter, crying, and the brain 159; “primary process” emotion systems identified by 90; SEEKING system 137, 139, 155 Papez, James 17 Paradise 268–269, 427; see also Fall, the; Milton, John paranoia 30, 244, 288 paranoia context 310 paranoid approach to critical analysis 31, 242–244 parasocial interaction 63, 70, 362 parasocial relationships (PSRs) 61, 63, 70 Parris, David Paul 321 participatory perspective on narrative experiences 308–309 Paster, Gail Kern 216, 217; on “humoral subjectivities” 421, 429n1 Pasternak, Boris: Dr. Zhivago 292 pastoral, the 92 Path-Goal Schema 263, 264, 268 Payne, Joseph (Dr.) 276 percepts, sensory 20 percepts-and-affects 385, 386, 387, 392 perceptual affects 360–361 Perez, George 367 Persson, Per 357 Petrarch: Rime Sparse 214–215, 219–221 Petrarchan tradition 392 Phelan, James 295, 301 Phillips, Natalie 19, 24 Pinker, Steven 470 Pismenny, Arinna 223n2 pity: fear and 111–112, 114, 155–156, 396

Plato: Aristotle, debate with 111–114, 119, 152; arts, “dual process brain,” interest in 211; condemnation of 153n9; on emotion 101, 113, 119; Galen, influence on 431n21; Ion 110; on mimesis 111; moral philosophy of 421; philosophy of love 430n4; Republic 110–111, 152; on tragedy 156 plot: heroic 335–336; marriage 239; romantic 334; seven basic 334; thriller 199; see also emplotment; narrative and plot plot development 129 plot emotions, three 403–404 plot lines 159; bourgeois 183; usurpationrestoration 142, 335–336, 424 plot shapes 77 plot twists 295, 297, 300–301, 346; unrealistic 397 poetry see lyric poetry polemic: Three Guineas (Woolf) 453–454 Popova, Yanna 57 pornographer 198 pornography 92–93, 124, 361 postcolonial literature 169–177; Oil on Water (Habila) as example of 456, 458–460 Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) 248, 249 Pratt, Mary Louise 198 pride (emotion of) 40, 397; heroic adventure, as linked to 92, 336, 397; as social emotion 90; two kinds of 336 Pride and Prejudice see Austen, Jane Prieto Pablos, Juan Antonio 296 Prinz, Jesse J. 53, 178n11 propaganda 92 prose fiction 395–404 prosopopoeia 344 Proust, Marcel 239, 275, 279; Ruskin, translation of 439 Psychological Construction theory 4 Puttenham, George 345 Puzo, Mario: Godfather, The 205 qualia 196, 229 queer Black feminisms 31 queer intersectionality 380 queerphobia 376 queer studies 29, 414 queer teens of color 368–370, 376, 380, 382 queer theory 26, 214–216, 223; affect theory and 236–244; embodied experience and 238 Quintilian 343, 430n4 Rabinowitz, Peter J. 178n10 Radin, Grace 454n2 rags to riches story arc 129, 334 rasa, rasas (literary emotion or sentiments) 110, 274, 278; bhava as distinct from 156, 274; dhvani (suggestion) and 280–281; of sringara (love story) 280–281

490

Index rasa theory 54, 71 Ratcliffe, Roger 306 Rawnsley, Clara 165n9 Ray, Sarah Jaquette 200 readers 305–314 reception: affect and 383; artwork and 386; audience 319; Biblical 321; Chaucerian 409, 411, 419; collective 359; poetic creation and 130; readerly 104, 192; social 317–326; utterance and 99 reception criticism 369 reception history 326; of King Lear 160, 163; of Tempest 424, 430n18 reception of fiction 136 reception of film 360 reception of narratives 234 reception practice 356 reception studies 410 reception theory 317–319, 322; applied to literary works about Cardinal Wolsey 322–236; see also Jauss, Hans Robert; Iser, Wolfgang Reddy, William M. 99 regicide 348, 424 represented worlds (storyworlds) 357 Reservoir Dogs (film) 210–211 resonance: affective 193; emotional 290; empathetic 175; historical 351; personal 438; transcultural 459, 463 Resonance-Integration-Validation (RI-Val) 306–307, 309 revenge and revenge stories 335, 397; Cymbeline 163–164; Empire Writes Back (Rushdie) 176; King Lear 163; Oresteia 153; Orphan of Zhao 134–142; Tempest, The 431n23; Very Woman, A 182, 185 Rhodes, Neil 430n4 Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea 176 Richards, Ivor A. 285, 389 Richardson, Brian 178n10, 295 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela 437 Ricoeur, Paul 176 Rilke [Rainer Maria] 386 Robertson, Kellie 414 Robin Hood 206–207 Robinson, Benedict 344 Robinson, Jenefer 117–119; on aesthetic emotions 124–127, 132; on sentimental education 396; on real readers and implied readers 401; on understanding fictional characters as if real people 398; Understanding Argument and Attention Argument advanced by 118 Robinson, Stacey 371, 376 Rohy, Valerie 244n9 romance: Arthurian 104; love and 89, lust and 89; medieval 459, 462; quest for 93, 459 romance genre 70, 92; Austen as prototype for 435; Chaucer and 409; embodied emotions

prominent in 77; emotionality and 78; emotions associated with 92; as female domain 81–83, 218; male writers of 82; strong and soft 81; women writers and 74, 81–82 Romanticism 106, 113, 130, 385 romantic love see love Romero-Jodár, Andrés 249–250 Rosch, Eleanor 41, 56; Embodied Mind 52–53 Rosenwein, Barbara 99; “emotional communities” 130, 454n4; “emotions dossiers” 101; “emotional mosaicism” 106; “hydraulic” mode of emotions 413 Rottschaefer, William 337n3 Roy, Arundhati 367 Roy, William: Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe 323–324 Rubin, Gayle: “Thinking Sex” 237–238 Rubin, Nava 434 Rushdie, Salman 173, 176 Rush, Ormond 321 Russian Formalism 318 Rust, Stephen 194 Rú Xué (Confucianism) 140, 141 Ryan, Marie-Laure 356 Said, Edward: Culture and Imperialism 178n13; Orientalism 172 Salamon, Gayle 244n3 Salinger, J.D.: Catcher in the Rye 399; “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” 310 Sanchez, Alex 376, 380 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 458 Sathian, Krish 23 satire 90, 92–93; anti-Wolsey 322–324 Satrapi [Marjane]: Persepolis 367 Saunders, Corinne 412, 418 Sauter, Wilmar 321, 322 savage, the 228, 424 Savannah, Georgia 229 Savarese, Ralph James 19 Sayers, Dorothy 299 Scarry, Elaine 20–21, 23, 198; on “vivacity” 196 Schachter, Stanley 18 Schadenfreude 171 Schaefer, Donovan 27 Schalkwyk, David 223n3 Scot, Charlotte 425, 430n13 Sheer, Monique 215 schema: cognitivist concept of 54; CONTAINMENT 263; EMISSION 263, 265, 266, 269; FORCE 42; Graesser’s application of 54; image 42, 262, 268, 270; manipulation of 58; narrative 363; PATH-GOAL 263, 264, 268; sensorimotor (brain) 63; spatial 264, 267 schemata: narrative 363 schema instantiation 263–264 schema theory 53

491

Index schematic folk theory of emotions 41 schematic integration 262, 263, 265, 266, 267 schematic knowledge 55 schematization of experience 48 Schiesari, Juliana 218 Schindler, Ines 125–126, 131 Schmälzle, Ralf 310 Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew 197, 199–200 Schwartz-Leeper, Gavin 325 Scorsese, Martin: Raging Bull (film) 362 Scott, Charlotte 425 Scott, Joan 244n7 Scruton, Roger 101 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: affect and queer theory 236–244; antiepistemological work of 243; Between Men 216; Epistemology of the Closet 238–239, 242–243; “Melanie Klein” 242; “nonce taxonomy” of 240; on sexuality and sex drive 237–238; Shame and its Sisters 30–31, 34n9, 244n4; Touching Feeling 237 SEEKING system (Panksepp) 137, 139, 155 Seigworth, Gregory J. 28 self 242; cultural 181; emancipated integrated 382; embodied 217; modern 215 self-agency 371 self and others 64, 66–68, 181 self-awareness 90 self-doubt 377, 381 Semino, Elena 47, 289 sexual identity 239, 367 sexuality 236–244; bisexuality 250; gender and 421; queer 380; see also homosexuality; lesbianism Shafer, Daniel M. 311–312 Shakespearean emotions tied to ethics 430n8 Shakespearean tragedy 156, 384 Shakespeare, William 9, 343; affect produced by 150; apostrophes (direct addresses) in the work of 343–351; Coriolanus 329; Cymbeline 163, 165n9; grammar school training of 69; Hamlet 63, 64, 284; Julius Caesar 351; King Henry V 322; King Henry VIII 325–326; King Lear 329, 349, 384; Love’s Labour’s Lost 265–267; Macbeth 130; modern gender readings of 101; plays of 38, 164, 328; poetry of 410; popularity of 106; Richard III, 180; Romeo and Juliet 435–436; portrayal of 180; 392–393, 430n4; Tempest, The 421–429; Twelfth Night 214–223; Winter’s Tale 349 shame 75, 88; experienced by King Lear 161, 165n4; explored by Chaucer 410, 412; Fetta’s examination of 233; among gangsters 203; gay (queer) 236; in Petrarch 219–221; as social emotion 90, 449; tragedy, as associated with 92 Shame and its Sisters see Sedgewick, Eve shame avoidance 336 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein 116, 127–132

Sherwood, Yvonne 321 Shields, Carol 433 Shields, Stephanie A. 452 Shījīng (Classic of Poetry) 159 Shiota, Michelle N. 4 Shklovsky, Victor: on ostranenie 54, 277, 279 Shomura, Chad 32 Short, Mick 287, 288 Sidney, Philip 100, 103, 104 Silvia, Paul J. 125 simulation 6, 20–23, 86–87; embodied 61–71, 361; emotional engagement and 330; liberated embodied 192–193, 195–197, 200; mental 262, 268, 272–273, 280; prose fiction and 396, 398–400, 402; stories engaging processes of 329, 331–332, 334; Zhao Orphan and 134–142 simulation theory 124, 153n3, 400 Singer, Bryan: Usual Suspects (film) 296–297 Singer, Jerome 18 Skelton, John 322–324; Magnyfycence 322 Sklar, Howard 199 slavery 180–190; see also Black enslavement Sloman, Steven 329 Slovic, Scott 194 Small, David: Stitches 367 Smith, Edward E. 51 Smith, Murray 195 Smith, Patricia Juliana 239 Smith, Zadie: White Teeth 267 Snaith, Anna 454n3 Snaza, Nathan: Animate Literacies 33 social mirror 371, 380 Soles, Carter 194 soliloquy 344, 349, 351, 384–385 sonnets: Petrarch 219, 221; Shakespeare 392–393, 430n4 Sophocles 68; Theban trilogy 114; tragedies of 156 Sopranos, The (television show) 205, 207 South Africa 226 South Asia 335 Southam, Brian 439 Southeast Asia 471 Southern Europe 207 Southern Sòng Dynasty 140 South (American) 226 South Vietnam, South Vietnamese 467, 469, 472–475 Southwest (American) 192, 198 Spaulding, Shannon 146–147 Spelman, Elizabeth 218 Spenser, Edmund: Faerie Queen 1, 7, 8 Spiegelman, Art 256n9; Maus 247, 367 Spielberg, Steven: Munich (film) 313 Spiller, Elizabeth 188 Spinoza, Benedict 263; Ethics 27 Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory in affect theory 26–29, 32–33

492

Index sringara (love story) 280–281; see also rasa, rasas spirituality 421 Starr, Gabrielle 24, 387–389, 434; Feeling Beauty 21, 387; on multisensory imagery 23 Stassen, J.P.: Deogratias 367 Steinbock, Eliza 34n7 Steiner, George 156–157 Sternberg, Meir 57, 172, 294, 402–403 Stewart, Kathleen 31 Stoker, Bram: Dracula 131–132 Stockton, Kathryn Bond 240 Stockwell, Peter: Cognitive Poetics 38 stories 328–337; causal sequence of 138; cognitive processing of 193; crime 204, 205; emotions evoked by 18–19, 78; fictional 136, 140; implicit or explicit 329–332; literary 275, 280; narrative deception in 296, 299, 301; “organizing of time” by 16; power of 68; revenge 135, 142; right to tell certain 234; sad 77; surprise 301 story arcs, six basic 129 story genres 328; universals of 334–336 story prototypes 335, 337 storyworld 64, 402; comics 367, 368, 371, 382; narrative environments and 192–198; narrator outside 400; racialized experiences and 225, 231; sensual concreteness and perceptual affects in 360–361; taboo topics inside 124; teen 367; visual-verbal 366–367 story world absorption 308 storyworld reconstruction 224, 357 Stout, Rex 299 Strachey, James 252, 256n10 style: content and 287; dualist view of 287; emotional 130; expression carried by 288; filmic 355; free indirect 438–439; language and 283–292; metrical 284; mind-style 288, 289, 290; narrative 229; plain 286; realist 454n1; rhetoric and 389 style as…: choice 283–285; effect 288–290; experience 291–292; object 285–288 “style kinésique” 412 sublime, the 123–124, 126–131; Romantic 92 suicide 250, 251; threat of 182 suicide contagion 101 superhero narrative 366, 368, 376, 377, 380 “superiority theory” of mirth 184 Superman Smashes the Klan (1946 edition; 2020 edition) 368, 376–377, 377–379 surprise 50, 57; as core element of narrativity 171, 294; as global plot emotion 402, 403; as narrative emotion 363; simulation and 395; see also plot twist suspense 50, 57; as aesthetic emotion 125; affective response of 310; as core element of narrativity 171, 294; as global plot emotion

402, 403; as narrative emotion 363; paradox of 404; participatory responses amplified by 311; simulation and 395 Sutherland, Kathryn 440 taboos and taboo actions 70, 124, 131, 449 Tagore, Rabindrath 173 Tale of Genji see Murasaki Shikubu (Lady) Talmy, Leonard: Force Dynamics 39 Taneja, Preti 165n3 Tartt, Donna: Secret History 402 tears: biological 159; Chaucer’s placement of 411, 413; contranatural 162; emotional 155–164; expressive 162; metaphorical 414, 415, 416; natural 161, 164; quasi- 62; supra-natural 161; undesired 357; see also weeping Terrone, Enrico 337n2 testimonio 169 therapeutic narrative 247–251, 253–255 Thomas, Bigger see Wright, Richard: Native Son Thomas, Piri: Down These Mean Streets 233 Thompson, Evan: Embodied Mind 52, 53, 56 Thompson, Flora: Lark Rise to Candleford 289–290 Tobin, Vera 400–401 Tolkien, J.R.R. 106 Tolstoy, Leo 21; Anna Karenina 275, 276–279; Jenefer Robinson on 118; “Kholstomer” 277; Leech and Short on 287; Oatley and Jenkins and 279; What is Art? 113–114; War and Peace, drafts of 437; Woolf on 278 Tomalin, Claire 433–435, 437 Tomasello, Michael 279, 298, 301 Tomkins, Silvan 30–31, 237 tragedy: absolute 156; Aristotle on 156–160, 396; basic emotions and 90, 112; Chaucer and 409–410, 416; comedy vs 328, 334; comitragedy 336; emotions of 9, 92; Greek 156; Hamlet as 135; Hegel’s views of 156–157, 159, 424, 474; King Lear as 93, 155–164; moral disapproval experienced via 124; Oedipus Rex as 93, 112; paradox of 134, 135–137, 139, 142; pathos of 93; pity and fear as emotions central to 396; Plato’s objection to 156; plot development/emotional arc of 129; rasa of 274; Shakespearean 156, 384; story conventions of 334, 336; sorrow in 155; Troilus and Criseyde as 409; Very Woman, A as not 189 see also Booker, Steven; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Steiner, George tragic fear 112 tragicomedy 155, 159, 163, 336; heroic 54; romantic 46 tragic emotion 159–160, 164 tragic genre 155–156 tragic hero 371 tragic middle 336

493

Index tragic narrative 366, 367 tragic normalcy 139 transphobia 380 transportation (immersive) 308–309 transportation scale 308 Traub, Valerie 241, 244n3 trauma 247–255; BIPOC stories and 367; coherent stories emerging from 332; collective 370; race and ethnicity tied to 225; sexual 376 trauma studies 247, 248, 250 trauma theory 249 Trigg, Stephanie 410, 413 trust: consequence of 160; in Cymbeline 163–164; dark side of 427; difficulties of 426–429; disruption of 425–426; epistemology of 423; in King Lear 155–613; social 301; as social emotion 90; in Tempest 421–429; violated 159, 295, 297, 301; see also betrayal; distrust trust theory 159, 421 trustworthiness 160, 164; untrustworthiness 427 Trust Theory 422 Tuan, Yi-Fu 194 Turchi, Peter 22 Turner, Mark 38, 42 Tversky, Amos 312 twist in plot see plot twists Umwelt 63 universal genres 328–329, 332, 334–335 unreliable feelings 294–302 unreliable narration 58, 295, 296, 301, 358, 400–401 Urrea, Luis Alberto 234 Usk, Thomas 409 usurpation-restoration plotline 142, 335–336, 424 Vaage, Margrethe Bruun 71n2 Valdez Quade, Kirstin 22 validation see Resonance-Integration-Validation (RI-Val) Van Dine, S.S. 297 Vermeule, Blakey 55, 61, 69 Vessel, Edward A. 21, 434 vessel, female body as 217 Vietnam 467–476 Vietnam war veterans 247 villain 141, 163; attractive 350; conventional 376–377; hero versus 311–312; ruthless 362 villainess 240, 300 Vingerhoets, Ad 165n6 Vonnegut, Kurt 77 Walton, Kendall 145; “Fearing Fictions” 115–116; on relationship of literature to emotions 119 Walton, Robert see Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein Wang, Ban 248 Warhol, Robyn R. 234

Warner, Marina 431n24 Wazana Tompkins, Kyla 32, 34n15 weeping 160; Chaucer’s use of 411, 413, 415, 416; culture of 411; by Guinevere 105; in King Lear 161, 162 WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) 203–206, 210–211 Wharton, Edith 118, 301 Wheatley, Edward 182 “white affect studies” 31 white America 227, 229–230, 232; white supremacy in 371, 377, 469, 471 whiteness 376; Americanness and 473 White, R. 165n7 white settler colonialism 170 whitewashing of social oppression 176 white Western philosophical genealogies 32 white women 80 Whitlock, Gillian 169 Wiegman, Robyn 243, 244n1, 245n18 Wilde, Oscar 103, 123; indecency trial of 131–132; Picture of Dorian Gray 130 Wilder, Thornton: Our Town 295 Wildgruber, D. 67 Williams, Raymond 174; “structures of feelings” 29, 34n8, 173 Windeatt, Barry 411–412 Winnicott, Donald W. 251–252, 254–255, 257n11 Winter’s Bone (film) 354–363 Winterson, Jeanette: Frankissstein 130–131 Winter’s Tale 349 Wofford, Susanne 223n3 Wojciehowski, Hannah 196 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin 79 Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal) 317, 322–326 wonder: Romantic Sublime and 92; Shakespeare’s use of 429, 430n7, 431n26 wonderful, the (rasa) 274 wonders 127 Wong, Beth 440 Wood, Alice 446 Woodrell, Daniel: Winter’s Bone 354, 358, 359; film version 354–363 Woods, Marjorie 69 Woodward, Kathleen 469 Woolf, Leonard 170 Woolf, Virginia 256n10; associative meditations of 93; Bell and 126; literary modernism of 106; “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 273, 445, 454; Mrs. Dalloway 126; Orlando 239; Pargiters, The 445–453; Room of One’s Own 454; “Russian Point of View” 278; Three Guineas 453; To the Lighthouse 252; Years, The 445–454 Wordsworth, William 100, 103; aesthetic credo 130; Lyrical Ballads 113

494

Index Wright, Richard 228 Wright, Thomas 223n2, 345 Yang, Gene Luen: Superman Smashes the Klan 368, 376–380 Yeats, William Butler 107 Yeshurun, Yaara 310 Young, Damon 232–233 Young, Kay 234 Yuán dynasty 134, 140, 141, 142

Zahavi, Dan 62 Zane, Peder 275, 276 Zeman, Adam 68 Zhào Orphan story (Zhàoshì gū’ér dà bào chóu) see Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhào (Jì) Zunshine, Lisa 23; on fiction and theory of mind 279, 291, 331, 441; Secret Life of Literature 292; Why We Read Fiction 19, 69, 282, 291, 441 Zwerdling, Alex 446, 454

495