OnFiction

What to Read

2013-06-17T09:36:00.001-04:00

Since Raymond Mar and colleagues (Mar et al., 2006) found that reading fiction was associated with better empathy and theory of mind, as measured by Baron-Cohen et al's (2001) Mind in the Eyes test, we have often been asked: ”All right then, what should we read so that we can understand other people better?” We haven’t quite known what to say, although in our Psychologically Significant Fiction, in our Archive, we do start with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, first published two hundred years ago. Now a study by Katrina Fong, Justin Mullin and Raymond Mar (2013) in press in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, has let us know that Pride and Prejudice is exactly the sort of thing to recommend.

Mar et al. (2006) adapted Keith Stanovich's et al.’s (1995) Author Recognition Test. With this test Stanovich et al. were able to measure how much reading people do, and they found that the amount of people’s reading was significantly related to vocabulary and general knowledge, even after controlling for IQ and level of education. Stanovich's idea behind the original test was that readers recognize the names of authors of books they read, and that the number of such names they recognize gives an extremely good proxy for the amount of reading they do. By including names of fiction writers and nonfiction writers Mar et al., adapted the test to identify people who read predominantly fiction and those who read predominately nonfiction. Fong et al. adapted Stanovich et al.’s test one step further by including names of writers of four separate genres: romantic stories, suspense-thriller stories, domestic stories, and science-fiction/fantasy stories.

In their study, Fong and her colleagues controlled for their readers' traits of personality, gender, age, fluency in English, and the amount of nonfiction that they read. After these variables had been controlled for, that is to say after their effects had been subtracted out, the researchers found that the amount of reading of two of the genres, romance and suspense-thriller stories, significantly predicted people's scores on the Mind in the Eyes test. In addition, there was a positive but not-quite significant relationship between the reading of domestic stories and scores on the Mind in the Eyes test, but a negative relationship between the reading of science-fiction/fantasy and this test.

How do we explain this? It is interesting, I think, that these results suggest that a strong element in romance stories is understanding what kind of person a potential romantic partner might be. Suspense-thriller stories, and domestic fiction also have elements of working out what people are up to. Prototypical science-fiction and fantasy stories, on the other hand, have a different kind of focus. They tend to be about such matters as wondering how life might be different in the future, or how it might be possible to travel faster than the speed of light. It makes sense that people who read stories of this kind are becoming more expert in thinking about and practicing matters that are rather different from interpersonal skills of the kind indicated by the Mind in the Eyes test.

Austen, J. (1813). Pride and prejudice. London: Egerton

Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test Revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger's syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241-251.

Fong, K., Mullin, J., & Mar, R. (2013). What you read matters: The role of fiction genres in predicting interpersonal sensitivity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.

Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., & Harrison, M. R. (1995). Knowledge growth and maintenance across the life span: The role of print exposure. Developmental Psychology, 31, 811-826.

Image: Title page of the 1813 first edition of Pride and Prejudice, public domain.

New Research Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

2013-06-10T10:53:00.002-04:00

It is an exciting time to be involved in researching literature and fiction. There has been an explosion of interest in empirical approaches to understanding narrative, marked by growing numbers of published studies, the birth of a new journal, and accompanying media interest. To this list, we can now add the establishment of an important new research institute: the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. The Max Planck Society in Germany was established in 1948, with a mandate to create separate research institutes with a reputation for providing top-notch resources and independence for its scientists. The model has been extremely successful, with at least 17 Nobel laureates having been recognized among their staff. Currently, there are over 80 Max Planck Institutes driving research in a broad range of topics, from the humanities to the hard sciences. This newest institute will focus on scientific approaches to studying music and literature, and will be headed by Prof. Dr. Winfried Menninghaus (language and literature) along with Prof. Dr. Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann (music). Located in Franfurt/Main, this institute has enormous support from the state government who will be providing a total of about 45 million euros in support. With an estimated annual budget of 10 million euros per year, this institute is sure to produce some fascinating new research of interest to our OnFiction readers. The institute is currently seeking PhD students and post-doctoral fellows, for those looking to contribute to this new enterprise.

Pilgrimage

2013-06-03T08:37:00.000-04:00

Although they have something of a medieval quality, pilgrimages seem to be a continuing part of life. I find myself making them from time to time (to Delft where Vermeer lived, click here, and in Paris to places where Proust lived, click here). A modern pilgrimage of a literary kind struck me especially forcefully. It was by Janet Malcolm (2001) to Russia, to visit places where Anton Chekhov had lived.

Why does one make a pilgrimage? First there is the journey, a time perhaps for mediation, Then there is the arrival. Is it that one wants, by being in a place that an artist has been, to take in some of the atmosphere, to see or hear what that person has seen or heard? Or is the fantasy more intimate? A piece of art, perhaps most especially a novel, a short story, or a play, can be thought of as a piece of consciousness, that one can take in, and make one’s own. By journeying to a place where the artist lived, is one somehow wanting to make that consciousness more real?

Malcolm starts her book on her pilgrimage to Russia with the short story of Chekhov’s which happens to be the one that I admire most in all his work, “The lady with the little dog.” It is about Dmitri Gurov and Anna von Diderits who start an affair at the seaside resort of Yalta.

Malcolm’s first paragraph says that: “After they have slept together for the first time [they} drive out at dawn to a village near Yalta called Oreanda, where they sit on a bench near a church and look down on the sea” (p.3). Then Malcolm quotes this famous passage:

Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist ... The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more (Malcolm, p. 3).

Perhaps visiting this place would provide for Malcolm an unusually clear instance of seeing and hearing what an artist saw and heard ... helped by the very timelessness of the idea suggested by these words. She writes that the scene fell short of her expectations, but because her translator and guide, Nina, had gone to some trouble to find the place, she pretended to be thrilled by it.

When Chekhov wrote, more than 100 years ago, he was struggling with questions of what it is to be a human being, and of what it is to find ourselves with this kind of personality rather than that. He wrote, too, about how we deal with the quirks and unseemly desires that have their way us. In one of his themes, Chekhov, the grandson of a serf, who had been beaten frequently by his father during his childhood, thought how it might be possible to squeeze the slave out of himself, and feel red blood coursing through his veins.

Malcolm found Yalta dull and a bit tawdry and indeed, when he first visited the town inn 1888, Chekhov also found it cheap and shoddy. But because he was suffering from tuberculosis, and the climate there was more benign than that of St Petersburg or Moscow, he built a villa on the outskirts of the town in the late 1890s, It was there that he wrote “The lady with the little dog,” as well as Three sisters and The cherry orchard.

When we read “The lady with the little dog,” we can be ourselves, I think, and at the same time metaphorically we can be Gurov, or Anna. Perhaps, in some curious way, if we make an artistic pilgrimage, it is as if we can be both ourselves and the artist to whom we are trying to become mentally closer?

Chekhov, A. (2000). Stories (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). New York: Bantam (originally published 1886-1904).

Malcolm, J. (2001). Reading Chekhov: A critical journey. New York: Random House.

Setting the uncomforTABLE: Food to make a Dinner Party Difficult

2013-05-28T01:06:00.000-04:00

It's hard to say how much you've been enjoying my first few months of this year of diagramming food movement dialogues -- but I knew I was doing something right when the new executive chef of my campus's dining services called on me last week to help design a series of Uncomfortable Dinner Parties. I had mentioned in a panel discussion some weeks ago that it seems critical that scholars and activists interested in food narratives help build capacity for engaging in difficult conversations -- and this idea stuck! It's not only complicating social theorists who enjoy the discomfort of a good challenging conversation, it turns out; the director of dining services realizes that practicing staying with a story through what might be an initially rocky start may be the only way, short of censorship and stability management, to get to a happy ending -- or at least a negotiated ending.

So looking forward to the possibility of having fun with uncomforTABLEs, I am starting to sketch out menus that I realize are all variations on a theme of homage to Mrs. Ramsey's dinner scene in To the Lighthouse (the scene with which, auspiciously, Marjorie DeVault starts her masterful work Feeding the Family). Setting the table, it turns out, provides yet another psychogeographical opportunity to think about how the setting of something like a meal might support or challenge its participants to portray themselves and to explore the characters of others. What if you are seated across from an uninvited guest? How far down the list of uncomfortable scenarios sketched out in my initial menu above do you have to read before you reach for advice on comportment from fictional (or other) dinners you have consumed through reading? Even as a food researcher, I often find myself steering dinner conversation away from a series of well-trod paths relating to angry and oversimplified commonplaces about farmers, seeds, and food choices -- but here is a chance to steer it back, hopefully around the cape of hostility, to the waters of even more fraught topics like toxicity, control over food system governance, and the historical traumas that underpin the modern food regime, like stolen land and forced labor. What kind of dinner tables are not adequately represented in food movement conversation? Whose voices do not usually get portrayed, and what about them either makes people bury their face in their soup or sit up and listen?

My fellow artists and STEM professionals in the Public Art St. Paul City Art Collaboratory, where we will pilot a series of food system suppers later this summer, have been crafting challenging and supportive courses to complement the tenor of different kinds of conversation (as well as roles of characters in different positions in the food system that we will ask participants in the suppers to play as the price of admission): comfort foods follow bitter greens with the promise of intriguing desserts and the temptation of challenging apertifs. All are invited.

Quantified Writing

2013-05-21T12:13:00.003-04:00

I have recently read about ‘Quantified Self’ movement, a group of enthusiasts for self-improvement through self-measurements whose tag-line is ‘self-knowledge through numbers’. The movement has produced a remarkable number of self-tracking apps that measure practically everything (sleep, stress, mood, food, goals, energy, relationships, genes, memes, etc.). If you can think it, there’s a self-tracking app for it. It even has an app that polls your friends and ‘experts’ about what to do (what decision to make) in a difficult situation. I will not delve in philosophical and existential implications of this movement (or at least not right now), but will reflect on its meaning for writers.

Many writers track how much they write. We have all heard of Victor Hugo’s 6,000 words/day, Stephen King’s 2,000 words/day, or Graham Green’s 500 words/day. Even for those who don’t track their daily outputs, they generally know how much they write, and definitely know if they don’t write anything at all.

Let me do a thought experiment on what using a self-tracking app for writing would look like to me. Let’s say I’m excited about a new writing project and decide to track my output. The first couple of days, I’m going strong, looking with pride at numbers of words multiplying into pages. I keep the output steady, all the while calculating how quickly I’ll be done if my productivity streak continues. I’m loving my writing app and think of recommending it to my writer friends. A week later, something or other comes up, and I miss a day. The very next day, I promise myself to double-up the word count for that day, then to keep going. I don’t quite make it, but it’s good enough. In another week, I stumble on some part of my writing project. For three days I don’t write anything. I keep thinking about the problem, sorting it out in my head, but there’s nothing on the page. I look pensively at the writing app, thinking all the while how many days I need to double-up to keep the numbers steady, knowing all the while it’s impossible. I start writing again, slower, but since I want to be up to my regular word number, I start inserting paragraphs and pages that I know are no good (“I’ll edit later, I tell myself, “this is just raw words on a page”). The writing gets worse and worse, and my inspiration flags. Now I’m writing slowly and badly, and since I know that I’m not up to my regular word count, I keep the writing app off (I’ll turn it back on when I’m ‘full speed’). I stop writing for a full week or two. I keep thinking about the numbers of unwritten words, and in a moment of anger or despair delete the writing app from my computer. Then, afterwards, after some length of time, days or years (not exactly quantified), I complete my writing project.

My conclusion about the imaginary self-tracking writing app – fabulous motivator when writing is going well, and despair-inducing when it’s not. The opposite of what I need. But that’s just me. I’m sure thousands of writers out there believe in numbers just enough (not too much and not too little), to have the numbers motivate them at just the right writing time.

OnFiction's Fifth Anniversary

2013-05-13T08:29:00.002-04:00

We are pleased to announce that OnFiction has now been running for five years, and our counter says we have had over a third of a million visits. So thanks very much indeed to all our readers, whether you visit the site occasionally or take our posts by e-mail or other means. We are pleased to provide this site for people who are interested in the psychology of fiction.

The start of the site occurred when a group of people who had known and worked with each other for five six years, and had then met every couple of weeks for two years as a writing group, started to face the fact that one our members was moving from Toronto to Minneapolis. As a writing group we had given ourselves assignments to write 300 words on a topic we chose, and to circulate or read what we had written to each other. So turning ourselves into a blog group enabled us to go on sharing our writings. When I told the group, a couple of weeks ago, that our fifth anniversary was coming up and asked whether we wanted to continue, we all said we would.

An issue that we haven’t discussed in OnFiction is the so-called paradox of fiction. How can it be that we feel emotions for fictional characters? So far as I can see this paradox was formulated by Colin Radford (1975). He asked how it was possible to feel for the fate of Anna Karenina when she does not, and did not, exist. He says to feel emotions in this way is irrational: to be moved by “works of art involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence” (p. 78).

At a recent conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, organized by Helmut Galle on “Fiction in historical and cultural contexts,” at which I made a presentation by Skype, I claimed that it was misleading to see our feelings in fiction as unreal, deceptive, or illogical. To engage in fiction is to enter worlds of the possible—simulations—in which, in an extension of the idea of metaphor, we can be both ourselves and Anna Karenina. The emotions we feel are, indeed, not hers, They are our own emotions, felt empathetically in the circumstances that Anna enters. We have argued that fiction is a simulation of the social world, and when one treats it in this way, it becomes no longer paradoxical that one would experience emotions when reading novels or short stories, or watching plays or films. It would hardly be insightful to argue that simulations of the kind that produce weather forecasts or predictions of climate change are unreal and therefore irrational. The question is whether any particular simulation is a good one, and one might follow the question by a suggestion as to how it might be improved. Fiction is a set of simulations about the hypothetical, but its subject matter is about real understandings of others and ourselves.

One of the metaphors we use is that of a flight simulator. If you were learning to fly a plane you could improve your flying skills in a flight simulator. In this way you can experience a wider variety of situations than you would when flying in a real plane. Gregory Currie, a philosopher who is skeptical about the value of fiction (click here), said in reply to my paper at the Sao Paulo conference that the people who build flight simulators do so by knowing a lot about planes and flying. He said that there is no equivalent set of skills on which writers of fiction draw.

I said there are two replies to this. My first reply is that our results (summarized for instance in Mar, Djikic & Oatley, 2008) show that the more fiction people read the better are their empathy and social understanding. This could not occur if fiction writers knew nothing about social interaction. Curry suggests that writers instruct us readers, but my second reply is that fiction writers don’t instruct us. Writers who are artists offer us situations, and ask us what we feel and what we think. As Chekhov put it in a letter of 27 October 1888 to his mentor and friend Alexei Suvorin, there are two things one must not confuse: “answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author” (Heim & Karlinsky, 1997, p. 116). Chekhov went on to describe the parallel between fiction and what goes on in a law court. The writer’s job, like that of the advocate, is to present the facts of a case in a way that makes sense. But it is the job of reader, just as it is the job of the jury, to draw the conclusions.

Mar, R., Djikic, M., & Oatley, K. (2008). Effects of reading on knowledge, social abilities, and selfhood. In S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova & J. Auracher (Eds.), Directions in empirical literary studies: In honor of Willie van Peer (pp. 127-137). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Radford, C. (1975). How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? Proceedings of the Aristotelican Society, Supplementary Volumes, 49, 67-80.

Heim, M. H., & Karlinsky, S. (1997). Anton Chekhov's life and thought: Selected letters and commentary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Image: Anton Chekhov, 1898, by Osip Braz, source Wikipedia

Research Bulletin: Appreciating Surrealist literature

2013-05-06T10:48:00.002-04:00

In the empirical study of literature, genre is often treated as a broad category. In our own work, for example, we have often examined how exposure to fiction differs from exposure to nonfiction. These two categories each encapsulate a wide diversity of sub-genres that may have little resemblance to one another. That said, even using these broad levels of categorization, systematic differences between the two genres can be observed. But this is not to say that genre-specific studies are without interest; they are simply, and somewhat unfortunately, less frequently performed. Recently, a group of researchers from the UK and Vienna performed a fascinating study of surrealist literature (Swami et al., 2012). They took short excerpts of about 150 words from 10 different sources, such as Salvador Dalí’s The Passions According to Dalí and The Magnetic Fields by Andre Breton and Philiippe Soupault. A total of 400 participants (200 men and 200 women) then read these texts and answered a number of other questions pertaining to demographics and individual differences. The researchers found that although men and women did not differ in their liking for these texts, those with more education and higher incomes expressed greater preference for these excerpts. After controlling for these demographic variables, two individual differences were found to independently predict liking for the surrealist excerpts. One was level of sensation-seeking, with people who were more motivated to encounter different and novel experiences more likely to appreciate the surrealist texts. The other was trait Openness to Experience, a tendency to appreciate aesthetics, engage in fantasy, and enjoy intellectual pursuits. Lastly, a liking for surrealism in general (e.g., its approach to art and film), also independently predicted how much people appreciated this subset of surrealist texts. This study is an important step towards a more nuanced treatment of genre in the empirical study of literature.

Swami, V., Pietsching, J., Stieger, S., Nader, I. W., and Voacek, M. (2012). Beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella! Individual differences and preference for surrealist literature. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6, 35-42.

* For those interested in reading the original article, please e-mail me (address in profile) and I would be happy to send you a copy.

Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women: A Review

2013-05-01T01:15:00.000-04:00

Marie NDiaye’s Trois Femmes Puissantes (2009), translated into English by John Fletcher (2012) as Three Strong Women, tells stories of three women and the men in their lives. The women, Norah, Fanta, and Khady Demba, are Senegalese, and two have found lives of professional success but deep relationship dissatisfaction in France, while the third experiences a prolonged and horrifying attempt to escape from her homeland.

The questions raised are broad but treated nevertheless with admirably rich and emotionally true depth: What is strength? What is the relationship between the capacity for adaptation and the quality of one’s imagination or day dream life? What do children really need from their childhood? Do we need the information we think we need in order to overcome childhood anguish? How does one get to the point where it is possible to ask of oneself the right questions, the ones that might allow access to the thoughts and feelings that might, in a tenuous chain, lead to insight? Questions concerning the treatment of African immigrants to Europe, and European immigrants to Africa, the subjection of women by their male intimates, the mysterious trajectories and evasions of memory, dissociation, self-deception, and faith also are woven throughout these narratives.

This book has a strange kind of concinnity, unique even among other examples of modernist prose, and one that arises, I think, in part from its combination of symmetrical and asymmetrical structures. In an asymmetry, the first section is 94 pages long; the second 151; and the third 71. The first and third end with a one- paragraph coda viewed from the perspective of the character who was chiefly responsible for the strong woman’s either long brewing or more recent misery, but the second story’s coda (also of one paragraph) is from the perspective of a disinterested neighbor. The first and third are told from the strong female character’s perspective and the second and much longer narrative is told from the perspective of Fanta’s jealous and controlling partner who is undergoing a radical change of heart. Included in each narrative is a past murder, and a past suicide in addition in the second section. And while the characters are all linked, these are not narratives told from the various perspectives of contemporary intimates. Norah is the daughter of the man who took over the vacation hamlet at Dara Salam on the northern border of Senegal after Fanta’s father-in-law died. Fanta is the cousin of Khady, and Khady is the much younger half-sister of Norah with whom Norah did not grow up. Part of the aesthetic strength of this novel directly results, I think, from Ndiaye’s not giving in to strict symmetries, nor to expected relations among characters, nor to expectations concerning narrative completion or pacing.

There are resonances with Proust in the novel’s sophisticated, honest, and meandering descriptions of the nuances of emotion experienced by characters, and a number of madeleinesque moments of involuntary memory; with Nabokov’s Lolita, in Rudy’s homicidal pursuit of the artist who he believes has used him as a model for a public statue without his consent; with Camus' L’Etranger, in its violent confrontations on sandy expanses; and with Dostoevsky, in its wonderment at the amalgamation in one soul of hyper-empathic feelings and murderous ones, and its concern with the love of individuals versus the love of all.

Finally, NDiaye’s writing is incantatory in its reliably precise rendering of emotions and intentions. Here is an example in which the emotionally abusive Rudy Descas is considering what actions he could take to demonstrate to his partner Fanta his newfound insight concerning their relationship:

“Just as he would never again utter certain cruel and absurd words that only anger made him spit out, just as he wouldn't again fall prey to that particular kind of anger -- humiliated, impotent, comforting, he wouldn't again try to charm her, Fanta, with the aid of seductive and false words, because the remarks that he made in the Plateau apartment sought not to achieve any truth whatsoever but solely to bring her to France with him, at the risk (he wasn’t thinking of that then, almost couldn’t care less) of her downfall, of the collapsing of her most reasonable ambitions” (my translation)*

This novel won France’s most prestigious prize for a literary work, the Prix Goncourt, in 2009, and Maria NDiaye is a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2013, the winner of which will be announced on May 22.

NDiaye, Marie. (2009). Trois femmes puissantes. Paris: Gallimard.

NDiaye, Marie. (2012). Three strong women. (John Fletcher, Trans.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

“De même qu’il ne proférerait plus jamais certains mots absurdes et cruels que seule la colère lui faisait cracher, de même qu’il ne serait plus la proie de ce type particulier de colère humiliée, impuissante, réconfortante, il n’essaierait plus de la ravir, elle, Fanta, à l’aide de phrases séductrices et fausses, puisque aussi bien les propos qu’il lui avait tenus dans l’appartement du Plateau n’avaient pas cherché à atteindre quelque vérité que ce fût mais uniquement à l’entraîner en France avec lui, au risque (il n’y songeait pas alors, s’en moquait presque) de sa chute à elle, de l’effondrement de ses plus légitimes ambitions” (2009, p. 220)

Market Fictions, Food Insecurities, and Other Common Food Talk Awkwardnesses

2013-04-23T02:13:00.000-04:00

One of the both ever-interesting and somewhat unfortunate things about studying something as commonplace as the way that people narrate their experience of food politics is that I often get trapped in conversations that lurk uneasily on the brink between being very compelling research opportunities and rather awkward social interactions. Something like this must happen to the rest of you, and I’m curious about the ways you handle that fascinating moment perched on the edge of a discourse abyss: in the study of the social organization of food systems, we tend to think of this as the moment where potentially useful social organizing narratives go to die in the graveyard of slightly misguided if well intentioned truisms about food (often tending toward bogus food claims bordering on the egregious, such as the claims that oilseeds used for industry must inherently be unfit to eat), or foodie overshare (#twittermyamazingsandwich!), or just food randomness, moving away from whatever had become too uncomfortable to talk about toward the mundane. A hearty and extended conversation about oatmeal this weekend* pushed me back over my threshold toward thinking about what happens when people resort to staunchly fictive positions to defend their various optimisms and pessimisms about food stories in ways that prevent the very exploration they seem to invite!

Overstatements and misunderstandings seem rife in food discourse at this moment, when people are upset about qualities of food production that they don’t like, or riled up about food production or food activism they don’t like or don’t understand. Three incidents over the past few weeks—starting in very different ways, but ending with a characteristic fictive pattern—have left me grasping at narrative patterns I will try to tease out here.

The diagram points to these three conversations: the nutritional ones might be the conversations you’re most familiar with, where food industry skeptics make big claims requiring large leaps, in this case resting the blame for increased gluten intolerance with the hegemony of corn. And while I’m probably unusually sympathetic to critiques of particular emphases in plant breeding as a potential exacerbator of problems with wheat gluten, I cannot help my dismay at the smug certainty with which this kind of “operator” game factoid tends to be delivered. I know how much food knowledge comes to us in these rule-of-thumb, somebody-told-somebody-told-me kinds of ways, and I am morbidly fascinated with crowdsourced wisdom with all its resiliencies and idiosyncrasies. But when I hear food industry supporters emphatically dismiss critics by equating concerns about gluten, or sugar, with completely irrational aversions to essential nutrients (as I did hear this week), I feel compelled to poke a bit at the just so storytelling that brings us so much of our food knowledge. And this provokes discomfort.

Working counterclockwise around my sketch above, I’ll move on to the other thing I hear a LOT these days about corn, about how farmers only grow it because of government subsidies. This usually follows relatively reasonable critiques of the ubiquity of processed corn and dubious healthfulness of the foods that contain it (for full disclosure, I should acknowledge that I just snacked on corn chips with salsa filled with frozen corn, although having acknowledged that, I may also need to own up to the ambivalence manifested there, too, as both corn products were organic, sidestepping some of the thorny issues, if acknowledging a range of different potentialities wrapped up in the so often dismissively used label “processed” food, e.g. in the freezing or frying of corn as opposed to its being transmogrified into cola or chicken). Perhaps the nuance with which the plot of processing is relayed might predict the explanatory exploration a food storyteller will tolerate around the question of why farmers grow corn. Assumptions that farmers are being hoodwinked usually leave me frustratingly tongue-tied; farming is complex and does not make people stupid.

Further, this second kind of conversation often is organized around a realization of the need to take back food politics—but as if this needs to be done behind farmers’ backs, and not as if it might be useful to find allegiances and common ground. Perhaps, like my food-processing-complexity litmus test, I might be able to detect correlations between the amount of plot twist someone might tolerate and the likelihood that a person is interested to hear that many farmers think they might be dependent on mainstream crops like corn and soy even if they were not subsidized, as in U.S. agricultural policy, because of the way that these crops have been extensively bred to tolerate a very wide range of growing conditions.

I recognize that getting so complex with the characters in these food stories may require building more familiar plotlines for people to play with—plots that extend, for example, beyond the market optimism that marks the last point in my triad of likely indicators of a food conversation about to derail. It may be difficult to find people who have not succumbed to the attractive logic of “voting with one’s fork,” and I do not purport to try to dismantle the logic of consumer activism story (even if I cannot end that sentence without a reminder of the at least nominal power of voting with, ahem, votes). But with market optimism, I have found, both this week and over the last year that I have been mulling the question of how people tell food stories, cracks in the veneer of market logic ideology that respond well to the participatory sport of interactive narrative building.

In a remarkably unheated debate about whether industry-oriented academics had effective skills for articulating places where industry and public interest might diverge this week, I suddenly realized that the market responsibility paradigm being invoked was entirely organized around the relationship between food processors and consumers, one with obvious vulnerabilities to consumers who might exercise selective pressure on industry processes. The blind spots in this market logic appear in relation to the relative inability of food producers to exercise choice in markets (as there are not so many choices for producers, especially those who have organized their production around the [often quite expensive] operation of large scale food markets, making them price-takers and prone to whatever conditions imposed on them make it possible to retain the possibility of credit access and social safety nets, given the temporal waits and inherent risks of farming). While slightly less catchy than “vote with your fork,” this “cost-price squeeze” is catching on as an idea, as is the “good food gap,” which Lauren Baker (current coordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council) defines eloquently as “the policy space that exists between the farm income crisis and the health crisis,” in which “farmers find it hard to make a living growing food and consumers find it hard to make the good food choices they want to make.”

This dissonance, hard to ignore, does seem to open space for considering, for example, the challenges introduced to narrating food by the expected plot lines associated with markets. In addition to the fiction of market choice that plagues the translation between economic theory and most people’s experience of markets in items with complex values such as food, the market ideologies with which people are familiar can make it difficult for them to acknowledge important differences in the ways markets function. The most striking upending of the food market plot I have encountered, for example, helps counter the assumption North Americans tend to make in attempting to export models of mainstream grocery retail (and wholesale purchasing upstream in the food chain) as the normative way to improve access to fresh produce. This plausible story makes it difficult for us to see that globally more people may access food outside this familiar food chain than through it, and the failure for people like us to be able to understand or even see the intricate markets that connect food producers and consumers in many places makes us much more likely to try to overwrite them with markets that seem more legible or rational to us, without understanding the effects on already existing markets and the many values they translate.

“We make our world through stories,” an optimistic young narrative consultant declared to me this week, as I perched on the edge of people’s comfort zone for narrating food insecurity. “And we can retell those stories, and in so doing, change that world.” “Those stories create institutions, though,” I replied, “that we can’t just forget to change along with the stories”… but his eyes had moved on to the next chapter, and I realized I would need to lay out more carefully the plot line of how that might happen.

*I will note my thorough ambivalence at the oatmeal chat: although it disrupted someone’s very interesting line of thoughts about the manifestation of capitalism in corn (a classic vector for derailment of food politics into food aesthetics), I am intrigued by peanut m&ms being someone’s preferred oatmeal condiment, above raisins, cranberries, blueberries, and coconut, the votes of the four other people at lunch, to whom I am grateful for including me in their conversation, along with the rest of my colleagues above.

Transportation and Levels of Processing

2013-04-15T09:01:00.000-04:00

Melanie Green and her colleagues have shown how narrative increases how strongly readers are transported into what they are reading, and how transportation in turn increases effects of reading, such as persuasiveness. You can read about this, for instance, in Green’s chapter with Karen Dill in the newly published 2013 Handbook of media psychology.

In a recent article, Adrian Janit, Georgina Hammock, and Deborah Richardson (2011) have used Green’s principle of transportation to investigate whether the narrative mode facilitates learning of a topic in psychology. In a first experiment 69 psychology students completed the study. They were randomly assigned to read either a 3501-word story about a dissociative fugue state, or a 792-word excerpt on the same issue from a textbook of abnormal psychology. Twenty propositions were common to both the story and the textbook excerpt, and these were used as items in a quiz that was given after reading and again three weeks later. In addition, participants were also asked to recall as much as possible in their own words about dissociative fugue states. Participants also completed a 12-item test of narrative transportation. The researchers found that those who read the story did significantly better on the quiz and in free-recall than did those who read the textbook excerpt, and the effect was mediated by the extent of participants’ transportation into the text they read.

In a second experiment, which was a replication of the first, 86 participants completed all the measures. As before it had a story-only group and a textbook-excerpt-only group, but in addition another group who read both the story and the textbook excerpt (as well as a fourth group based on manipulation of the appearance of the text that I won’t discuss here). In this study the best scores on the quiz immediately after reading and three weeks later were achieved by the group that read both the story and the textbook excerpt, and this group also achieved the best scores in free recall. Again the effect was mediated by transportation.

I don’t think I have seen a connection made between the idea of transportation and an idea which is strongly established in research on memory. It’s the idea of levels of processing, first published by Craik and Lockhart (1972). It is that as information enters the brain/mind it goes through various levels of processing, first sensory analyses, then deeper perceptual analyses and recognition, then yet deeper conceptual analyses that lead to meaning and implication. Craik and Lockhart’s idea was that the more deeply the information is processed, then the more strongly and the more elaborately it is encoded in memory, and the more memorable it becomes. Janit et al.’s study suggests that transportation might achieve some of its effects by enabling reading material to be processed more deeply, and hence to be better remembered.

Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684.

Green, M. C., & Dill, K., E. (2013). Engaging with stories and characters: Learning, persuasion, and transportation into narrative worlds. In K. E. Dill (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology (pp. 449-461). New York: Oxford University Press.

Janit, A. S., Hammock, G. S., & Richardson, D. S. (2011). The power of fiction: Reading stories in abnormal psychology. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 5.

Before Night Falls

2013-04-08T22:47:00.000-04:00

I think it must be a lucky find - on a residential street, a box of free books is dumped in front of a house. Most of them are unappetizing, but one is in Spanish, and as I am on verge of being able to read it, I thumb through the book. Tiny chapter, short sentences, perfect for a beginner. I take it home.

I stumble even on the title: Antes que Anochezca: Autobiografía. It takes a dictionary and a grammar book (lesson 8 on subjunctive tense) to figure out that the book is called "Before Night Falls: Autobiography." Though a bit annoyed at this delay, I start reading.

'“I was to die in the winter of 1987.*” (p.9) That is how Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban dissident writer, dying from AIDS, begins his memoir. It is a simple and heart-breaking announcement, to let us know that even at the very beginning, he is already at the end.

The first chapter, ‘The Stones’ begins: “I was two. Naked, standing; I was bending to the ground and passing my tongue over the earth. The first taste I remember is the taste of the earth.” (p.17). By chapter four I have to check and re-check my dictionaries because Arenas is writing about things that got Rumi’s poems expelled from U.S. school curricula, and does so without blushing.

As I keep reading, I realize why so few autobiographers do what Arenas had done – write with beauty, candor, and simplicity of one’s life. It is because pending death (not a far-away scary fantasy of death) removes the imaginary audience. The theatre seats are already empty, and the story has to be written for oneself, to free oneself, before the night falls. So Arenas tells us at the very end, in his final letter. “Cuba will be free. I already am.” (p.343)

It is indeed a lucky find.

Arenas, R. (1992). Antes que Anochezca: Autobiografía. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, S.A.

*Please note all quotes are my translations.

"Formative Fiction" in Question

2013-04-03T00:59:00.000-04:00

Joshua Landy’s article “Formative Fictions: Imaginative Literature and the Training of the Capacities” (2012) is an extended excerpt from Landy’s book How to Do Things with Fictions, which came out in late 2012. Landy outlines three main branches of theories of why we read fiction, or to put it another way and leaving intention out of the enterprise, what exactly we get from reading fiction. We read because we want to emulate or strictly avoid emulating a character or templates of form that might end up influencing the structure we weave through our own lives, (“exemplary” fictions), or because fiction-reading increases our emotions (such as empathy, other emotions) or decreases them (allowing us to gain control of our excessive emotions), or because we acquire knowledge about the world, cultural mores, another individual, or ourselves.

Landy’s own theory he calls the “formative,” and he is swift to say that it pertains to a narrow range of works, each presenting a “salient formal device (authorial irony, Romantic irony, shifting point of view, intricate hypotaxis,...)” and that “bolsters in each case a corresponding capability: emotional control, social awareness, logical reasoning, hypothesis-generation, conscious self-deception, Zen-like detachment, even religious faith” (p. 184). And further, “For each capacity there is a specific formal device that corresponds to it and a finite set of texts that serve as uniquely propitious training grounds” (p. 196). His view, he notes, has much in common with Iser, and with other reader-response theories of the reader’s performative role. He differentiates his view from these asserting that, for him, readers don’t haphazardly happen to perform according to the affordances of the text, thereby acquiring some nugget of insight through their own cognitive or emotional sweat. Instead, certain fictional works, and only certain ones, render the reader normatively bound to perform in certain ways (p. 176, note 22) that exercise “capacities” but do not teach something new – Landy is adamantly opposed to the “message-based” (p. 180) views of fiction-reading.

But as one advances in the paper, it becomes clear that the texts (even the very narrow group that Landy targets as essentially “formative”: the New Testament gospel author Mark, Plato, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Proust, Beckett, Brecht), if indeed we were to grant his claim that they are doing “formative” and not “informative” work, are not doing this work in the absence of other factors that it seems must be present for the “formative fictions” to be enabled.

First, Landy uses many synonyms for the concept of getting better at a skill, such as “hone” (p.184, inter alia), “burnish” (p. 197, inter alia), and “fine-tuning” (p. 198), and consistently avoids describing the cognitive change in capacities as learning or knowledge-acquisition. It is, rather, “movement up the ladder of expertise” (p. 189). Indeed, the change in capacity is so unlike learning that the very skill that the honing and burnishing is purported to develop must actually already be in evidence: “In the formative circle [as opposed to the hermeneutic circle] what is both required for and burnished by the reading experience is not understanding but technique” (p. 197, my emphasis). Likewise in his reading of Mark, the prior knowledge of the disciples of Jesus before hearing the parables “both permits access to and is further strengthened by the parables” (p. 188, my emphasis). So, one must already have a little bit of the skill that the particular text is “bound” to “hone” for the honing to work. He claims, “We must already be a little bit good at doing the thing in question: a little bit good at following trains of logic, a little bit good at handling figurative discourse, a little bit good at standing back from our attitudes, a little bit good at juxtaposing claim with counterclaim” (p. 198). Someone or something else has already gotten the reader over the no-knowledge to some-knowledge threshold, whether the reader’s intention to possess better skills (not to “know” more, presumably)– Landy’s “formative fictions” just do the burnishing.

Further, rereading seems to be as essential to the training process as repetitions of mechanics learned to date in any sport. But any coach will tell you that repetitions in the absence of targeted error correction are a waste of time. And error correction is not discussed here. If the only mechanism proposed for improving on the initial reading of a text is reading it again, then the reader’s progress is limited in the way in which the empiricist’s learner is limited: knowledge is acquired through sensory experience, and then more sensory experience, and so on, instead of through proposing conjectures and making one’s best efforts, or encouraging others to make their best efforts, to criticize those conjectures. If knowledge is radically different from trained skill, as Landy claims, then perhaps this should be expressed thus: the reader trains herself precisely to read as she always has.

This lack might not be adumbrated so forcefully around Landy’s reading of Plato in which the reader’s capacities are honed when she is required to “mend the faulty arguments” (p. 202) which Plato has woven through his dialogues, or in Mallarmé, “where the training consists in the parallel processing of multiple referential dimensions” (p. 202), simply because these kinds of hypotheses about what the reader is required to do in reading these authors have been converging around the works at least since reader-response theory re-oriented our perspectives on fiction-reading. Convergence of hypothesized reading processes over time is not proof that any undergirding theory represents reality, of course, but does argue for its continued testing. However, when we are told, in by far the most lengthy example offered as support for his thesis, that the parables of Jesus, in both the contexts of first-century disciples and twenty-first century readers, “[f]ar from being designed to communicate information more effectively... serve, instead to make us better at handling and producing figurative language” (p. 189) and that the proper reception and production of figurative language is “what turns a novice into a true Son of God” (p. 190), one wonders if any skill honed, burnished, or fine-tuned could be worth the price of possibly getting it wrong in the context of no error correction mechanisms.

Of course, one could argue that rereading is an error-correction mechanism, but that is perhaps only likely to be true for readers whose job it is to spend hours rereading texts and perhaps increasing their chances of winnowing out their own interpretive errors, for committed Popperians, or for psychologists who are aware of how captivating and resistant to change one’s own hypothesis can be. Thus, it seems that the narrow range of texts that offer “formative fictions” is to be read by a correspondingly narrow range of readers.

Landy, J. (2012). Formative fictions: Imaginative literature and the training of the capacities. Poetics Today, 33, 169-216.

Landy, J. (2012). How to do things with fiction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Research Bulletin: Suspense, Engagement, and Belief Change

2013-03-26T10:38:00.000-04:00

Narrative fiction has the power to deeply engage us and transport us into fictional worlds (Gerrig, 1993). Moreover, these experiences “abroad” in the realm of the narrative can have a profound impact, even shaping our attitudes and beliefs about the real world (Green & Brock, 2000). But what aspects of a narrative are responsible for this feeling of being transported? One possible candidate is suspense, or the anticipation we feel towards future events in a narrative. Dr. Anneke de Graaf (Amsterdam) and Dr. Lettica Hustinx (Radboud) designed an experiment to examine the role of suspense in fostering transportation, and how this may influence the potential for a narrative to sway our beliefs about the world. In a clever manipulation, they created two versions of a story, one that contained suspense and another that did not, based on the basic plot of a man named Tony who contracts malaria in Mali. In the suspense version, readers are presented with: (1) a setting, of Tony sitting on his rooftop in Mali contemplating his life, (2) an initiating event in the form of Tony contracting malaria, (3) an attempt at resolution whereby Western medical treatment at the hospital fails to cure him, and (4), a final resolution whereby a traditional African healer is able to cure Tony of malaria. This story is based on a novel, De Dans van de Geesten (Dance of the Spirits), by Ton van der Lee (2005). In order to create a non-suspense version, the researchers manipulated the order of events so that the story begins with Tony contracting malaria (2) followed by a successful healing attempt by an African healer (4), which precedes a series of flashbacks that describe his contemplative episode (1) and failed healing attempt at the Western hospital (3). The researchers then presented either the suspense version or the non-suspense version to 60 people in a public library in the south of the Netherlands. What they found was that those who read the suspense version were more transported into the world of the story, in that they reported being more attentive to the piece and also experienced more emotions in response to reading it. Those who read the suspense version of the story also reported beliefs that were more in line with the theme of the story relative to those who read the non-suspenseful version. The great strength of this study is that an important element of narratives was manipulated so that a direct effect could be tested with respect to how story structure impacts how we respond to a story. Suspense, in the form of events placed between an initiating events and its resolution, appears to help engage readers and this engagement is related to the power of a narrative to alter a person’s beliefs.

Gerrig, R. J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Green, M. C. & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 701–721.

de Graaf, A. & Hustinx, L. (2011). The effect of story structure on emotion,
transportation, and persuasion. Information Design Journal, 19, 142–154.

Research Bulletin: Writing can improve relationships

2013-03-18T09:24:00.000-04:00

In a recent study, Eli Finkel and his colleagues (2013) have found that writing to re-appraise conflicts with spouses, improves the quality of marital relationships. Participants in the study were 120 married couples who lived in the Chicago area, who answered an advertisement. At the beginning of the study they completed an internet survey and also came for a laboratory visit for a study that was different from the current one. At that time, and at four-month intervals for two years, they completed an internet questionnaire that contained six single-item scales: of relationship satisfaction, love, intimacy, trust, passion, and commitment. For instance the relationship satisfaction question was "I feel satisfied with our relationship." It was scored 1 "strongly agree" to 7 "strongly disagree." The combined scores on these six scales gave an index of subjective marital quality. At month four, and then every four months (with all data being collected entirely by internet), both members of all the couples were asked to write a “'fact-based summary of the most significant disagreement' they had experienced with their spouse over the preceding four months, 'focusing on behavior, not on thoughts or feelings.'”

At 12 months, half the couples were randomly assigned to a condition in which, after they had written the fact-based summary of their disagreement, they were to write for seven minutes to reappraise this summary by thinking about it as if it were seen by a third party, from a neutral point of view. Every time they started this seven-minute reappraisal they were given three prompts. In the first prompt they were asked to think of this neutral third party as someone who wanted the best for all involved, and who tried to think what good might come from the disagreement. In the second prompt, they were told that some people find it helpful to take this third-person point of view during disagreements with the partner, and to think what obstacles they faced in taking this point of view during a disagreement. In the third prompt, they were told that although there are obstacles to taking this third-person point of view, they should nonetheless try to take it during disagreements, to think how they could succeed in doing this, and to think how taking it might make the best of disagreements.

Over the first part of the study (0 to 12 months) there was a steady downward trend in the average of the six-item measure of marital quality for all the couples. This is a normal finding, since marital quality tends generally to decline from the time of marriage until children leave home. At 16, 20, and 24 months, the downward trend of marital quality stopped for the couples who had the writing assignment to reappraise a conflict by thinking about it from the point of view of a third party, and the encouragement to use this point of view during disagreements. This cessation of the graph's downward slope was significantly different from the graph of the control couples who had not been asked to do the reappraisal assignment and had not been given prompts. Their graph continued downwards, with no change of direction, until the end of the study at 24 months.

This fascinating study recalls the benefits to the functioning of the body’s immune system of writing about a significant emotional episode by Pennebaker (e.g. Pennebaker & Chung, 2011) Perhaps marriage is part of a social immune system, so that writing thoughtfully about it can improve its function.

Finkel, E. J., Slotter, E. B., Luchies, L. B., Walton, G. M., & Gross, J. J. (2013). A brief intervention to promote conflict reapprasial preserves marital quality over time. Psychological Science, in press.

Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. (2011). Expressive writing: Connections to mental and physical health. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), Oxford handbook of health psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Image: The best time of day blog, accessed 17 March 2013

Moral certainty, relational ambiguity, and the food between

2013-03-12T01:47:00.000-04:00

My first food dialogue map isn't very pretty, despite starting with the premise, "I read a book." I also realize it's not as legible as I might like, so let me tell you a little bit about what you're seeing before I explore my chagrin at realizing, after a lifetime spent trying to get people to read books, that I suddenly want them to stop.

The base diagram here is the core of our attempt to lay out a diversity of different approaches to key themes of the local and regional food economy discourse here in Minnesota (follow the image link for the filled-in clickable version). Rather than delve into the specifics, however (I'll undoubtedly fill you in on the details as this year-long series continues), I'd like to trace out two tensions that have emerged strongly as I've worked through this idea of a "food economy" -- tensions I've overlain on the top of this diagram in yellow and blue in my attempt to start exploring the axes they delineate: embedding vs. extracting value, and declaring moral certainty vs. building what I'm calling relational ambiguity.

Now especially with such detailed interest in food economy and culture, I obviously don't want people to stop reading books entirely -- for one thing, this would be a hard moment to even try in the blossoming world of food and agriculture writing. But when I encountered someone yesterday saying "I've read this book that you must read," after proffering several dubious statistics about the state of food affairs, my heart sank in what I immediately recognized to be a response to an increasingly characteristic pattern in my public encounters with people interested in food. I was unable to make headway against the convincing book in the entire remainder of our conversation (about my agreement with the general diagnosis, but my interest in enlisting allies, say, in farmers -- who also don't want to see corporate takeovers of food policy making seed lairds rich -- rather than pissing them off with suspect allegations about their judgment and practices!). It was not that my argument's substance was different, but it was asking someone to step away from a clear and polarized position to a more ambiguous and relational one, and I recognize that this comes with costs (even while I may not yet have adequately practiced my arguments for why they're worthwhile costs to take on).

As I thought about what might change my colleague's mind, I could not help reflecting on the central theme of many of the books and films that I have recently read about food economy -- most notably the film Bitter Seeds, which played here last week, and the book The Hungry World (in addition to the articles that went into the development of Bet the Farm). All of these stories trace the development of logics of extraction in food systems -- Bitter Seeds perhaps most accessibly, as it traces the transformation, in a generation, of a peasant economy into a brutal tangle, from which value is extracted (via the construction of needs for credit by the replacement of seed saving with commercialized seeds and associated input costs) at the same time that people desperately try to figure out how to even survive in such a system. This is such a perfect example of the problems my colleague is fighting -- but it is also an example of the complicated ways people become entangled in food discourses: farmers may be trapped on a cost-price treadmill, but (given the efforts already made, and the resounding beating they have taken by industry counter-attacks, most notably the over $50 million put into defeating the wildly popular California proposition to label GMO foods) publicizing written facts about agri-food problems seems much less likely to change them than organizing alternatives and transition strategies.

I recognize that this may seem naive, especially in the face of the political economy just mentioned -- however, I think that there is utility in engaging the other tension mentioned, between extraction of value (for example, via financializing each aspect of the food economy, so that every step involved in bringing food from field to fork involves someone else's profit) versus building of value (so that the parts of food systems we value are supported via collaborative institutionalization, not just left to implicitly fill in the borders around parts people don't like). A central feature of the axis between embedding and extracting value appears to have to do with the scales of time and space considered, as well as the cultures of time and space. Perhaps paradoxically, the longer-term and larger-scale approach we book-readers have been trained to privilege as "more systemic" may also bias us toward types of abstract accounting that discount important values -- values that may not be fungible, or extractable, and yet may still be significantly impacted by the pressures of organizing systems around values that CAN be extracted. I close with uncertainty over whether there is an association between these two tensions or not. I'm not convinced that unwavering moral certainty supports the continuance of extractive regimes. But I do think that the practices involved in engaging others and accepting the ambiguity necessary in negotiating plural values (not with moral relativism, but negotiating accountability to the values of those involved) may be the same governance practices needed to keep values embedded in a system, suggesting yet more reasons we might want to understand the stories of others, and how they relate to ours.

Monday Quick Hits

2013-03-04T10:35:00.000-05:00

Due to some unfortunate (but not unduly serious) circumstances, there will be no regularly-scheduled blog post for today. Our normal posting will resume next Monday. In the meantime, we hope you will enjoy the following:

One of our earliest posts, from Keith Oatley, on Dante.
The Toronto Public Library's latest "Who's Reading What?" column, featuring an OnFiction editor.
The Underground New York Public Library.

Our apologies again for this disruption in service.

Escaping Chronology in Non-Fiction Writing

2013-02-25T23:09:00.000-05:00

Some years ago I was teaching a high-school English course to Grade 12 students and the program required that they complete an independent research project. Traditionally, the assignment was to analyze a work or works of fiction of the student’s choice. I asked the students what they thought of the idea of reading a literary autobiography (written by fiction writers, playwrights, screenwriters) and analyzing it as if it were a work of fiction. The idea was met with enthusiasm and the students eagerly sought out autobiographies of their favorite writers, read them and started writing. I was very clear about the assignment, which went something like this: “Choose two or three themes in the person’s life and discuss the way those themes are explored. The themes can be those identified and discussed by the author of the autobiography or that you have identified but the author did not highlight.”

The task proved nearly impossible for a number of these students, though they were some of the brightest teenagers I had taught. I sat after school with student after student reading and rereading stylistically and grammatically excellent draft after draft, trying to say the magic words that would allow them to release themselves from the grip of the chronological. Perhaps it was the non-fictional status of the events represented in the narrative, or the strong chronological tendency of almost all autobiographies whether literary or not, or perhaps a human cognitive developmental limitation at this age that was impeding them; the more I guided them toward thematic and linguistic concerns, the stronger they embraced the chronological.

In an intriguing pair of essays on structure in the writing of non-fiction published in The New Yorker (2011; 2013), Pulitzer-prize winning writer John McPhee explains that battling chronology is the fate of any writer of non-fiction, and especially those who profile individuals. He reveals his words of encouragement to his Princeton students: “A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction” (2013, p. 48). But first one must take on the challenge of the chronology. Even fictional accounts do not present each event in the order that it happens. He argues not only that countering chronology can and should be undertaken, but gives very clear instructions on different ways in which he accomplished just that over the decades in his writing and particularly in non-fiction pieces published in Time and The New Yorker.

In the earlier essay, “The Writing Life: Progression: How and What?” McPhee discusses the idea explored over 160 years ago by Edgar Allan Poe in recounting his beliefs concerning how he came to write “The Raven.” Poe structured the poem not by a concatenation of images, logical argument, or plot, but following an abstract formula. He started with a tone: melancholy. He wanted a refrain of only one word. He wanted a particular vowel-to-consonant combination in that refrain. “Nevermore” was apparently the first word that came to mind to fit his very abstract bill.

McPhee claims that in two of his biographical pieces he tried something similar. He calls these “abstract expressions in search of subject matter” (2011, p. 39): his “double profile” project simultaneously profiled two American tennis champions the week of their U.S. Open finals match. As McPhee puts it, such a structure allows 1 plus 1 to equal more than 2. It also breaks the dominant chronology of one life through the juxtaposition of two lives within the stricture of the narrative of the match itself. Another project employed his “ABC/D” structure, in which he profiled an ardent environmentalist, “D” from the perspectives of a dam builder, a mining geologist, and a resort developer, even shooting the rapids on the Colorado River with his subjects to see how they interacted. The multiplicity of perspectives may not definitively prevent chronological presentation of events, but the abstract plan prevents a chronological presentation from being an easy undertaking at the very least.

The abstract plan allows the writer to explore the very images and suggestiveness that drew him to the project in the first place, while freeing him from the need to include details whose interest lies only in their cognitive bridging for the reader. Indeed it is the writer’s belief in the necessity of that cognitive bridging that must go, according to McPhee. The writer can successfully avoid chronology in profiling an individual just by presenting “any number of discrete portraits, each distinct from the others and thematic in character, leaving the chronology of the subject’s life to look after itself” (2013, p. 50). McPhee’s commitment to trusting the reader to make those connections is expressed forcefully in an interview in The Paris Review in 2010: “You look for good juxtapositions. If you’ve got good juxtapositions, you don’t have to worry about what I regard as idiotic things, like a composed transition. If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you. You don’t need to build all these bridges and ropes between the two parts” (2010). One of the ways he enhanced his chances of creating such juxtapositions earlier in his career was by grouping his notes on each event into a separate file folder. Each folder was represented by an index card which was then arranged and re-arranged on a large sheet of plywood. Such a system would make it more work to order the events chronologically than to group them in other more aesthetically interesting amalgams.

Another way in which the chronology syndrome may be evaded is to pick a story in which the notion of chronology is meaningless. In the colorfully entitled article “Tight-Assed River,” McPhee chronicled the towboats, the boats they tow, and their pilots as they make endless loops up and down the Illinois River. They leave from no notable city and arrive at no notable city, performing an “endless yo-yo” (2013, p. 55) that is quite unlike a journey from point A to point B. But how often does such a strange writing project come along?

Perhaps McPhee’s greatest antidote for dealing with chronology when exploring a life in a written profile, though one which he himself does not identify as such, is strongly recommending that the writer choose a topic which deeply interests him or her. It sounds almost too simple. And yet, if the writer is deeply interested in the material, a chronological rendering of the material should perhaps more often than not impose itself as a kind of inauthentic embodiment of what was integrally compelling about the topic. (How often do we hear ourselves telling a friend “Oh, the order of events in that film was simply breathtaking!”) And where, according to McPhee, does that deep interest come from? McPhee notes, “I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than ninety per cent” (2013, pgs. 39-40).

In retrospect, perhaps I should not have asked my earnest and hard-working students to choose a literary autobiography of a current favorite writer. Perhaps I should have asked them to seek out such a work of an author whom they adored as children or early adolescents. Could it be that the complexity and authenticity of the emotional network surrounding the topic would have shielded them from the vortex of chronology in their own writing?

Hessler, P. (2010). Interview with John McPhee. The Paris Review, Issue 192.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5997/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-3-john-mcphee .

McPhee, J. (2011). “The Writing Life – Progression: How and what?” The New Yorker, 14 November 2011: 36- 42.

McPhee, J. (2013). “The Writing Life – Structure: Beyond the picnic-table crisis.” The New Yorker, 14 January 2013: 46-55.

Image: John McPhee Wikipedia

Silence

2013-02-18T10:47:00.002-05:00

First I waited for the sounds
that cleave the silence.
Then I waited for the silence
that cleaves me.
But the chatter spread, and grew, and multiplied.
It deceived me.
Now I wait, once again, for the silence
to cleave me.

Research Bulletin: Fact, Fiction, or Fake?

2013-02-11T10:54:00.002-05:00

Much of what we read can be broadly categorized as fact or fiction. Newspaper articles are seen as true accounts of real-world events, whereas novels and short stories draw us into compelling narrative worlds that result from creative craft. There are, however, texts that seem to readily fall between these two categories, such as historical fiction and perhaps self-serving autobiographies. One other form of text that escapes easy categorization are those that are first presented as factual but later found to be the product of fiction. James Frey’s novel, A Million Little Pieces, is one good example of such a narrative. Now that it is known that this work was intended to deceive readers into thinking that a fictional account was factual, how does this affect the way we read and process it? Dr. Markus Appel and his graduate student Barbara Maleckar investigated this very question, by presenting readers with an identical text introduced as either fact (i.e., nonfiction), fiction, or fake (fictional stories initially presented as factual but found to be untrue), along with a control story on an entirely different topic. What they found was that readers were less engaged or transported into the fake story relative to the fiction and nonfiction stories. Moreover, although reading the story tended to alter reader attitudes to be more in line with the themes of the story, when the story was introduced as fake and readers had a higher tendency to enjoy critical thinking (i.e., were high in what is known as “need for cognition”) there was less persuasion observed. Overall, the results of this study illustrate how fictional texts are not viewed the same as fake texts, or fictional texts that were first passed off as nonfiction. Which means that the additional contextual information that we have about a text can affect the way that we process it and how it influences us; knowing that an author had tried to deceive readers can make a story less engaging and also less influential. Honesty, therefore, would seem to remain the best policy, even for writers of fiction.

Appel, M. & Maleckar, B. (2012). The influence of paratext on narrative persuasion: Fact, fiction, or fake? Human Communication Research, 38, 459–484.

(A copy of this article is available here.)

Get Into Reading

2013-02-04T22:54:00.001-05:00

A number of programs have run with the objective of using reading and discussion of fiction in groups for therapeutic purposes. We have discussed two of these: “Changing lives through literature,” in which young offenders are put on probation and join literature seminars rather than being sent to jail (cilck here) and “Literature for life,” in which unpartnered pregnant teenagers join reading groups (click here). Another such scheme has now been reported, called “Get Into Reading,” for medical patients diagnosed with depression.

Christopher Dowrick and four colleagues (2012) report that two reading groups were run every week for a year, for patients in Liverpool, England. One was based on a general practice and the other on a medical drop-in centre. Sessions were 90 minutes long and all material was read aloud at the group. Sessions started with the facilitator reading four or five pages of a novel or short story and then prompting open-ended discussion of themes of what had been read, and of what may have been happening to the participants’ feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Then, further sections of the reading material were read, either by the facilitator or one of the group members, again followed by discussion, and so on. The last 20 to 30 minutes of each group were devoted to reading and discussion of a poem. Eighteen patients began the study. The main outcome measure was from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), in which a score of 10 or more indicated clinical depression. Six patients who at first had high PHQ scores (mean 16.0, indicating moderate depression) completed the whole year’s study, and scored a mean of 11.2 at follow-up. The reduction in mean depression score was marginally significant on a t-test.

In addition, group discussions were sampled, and analyzed. Patients also provided reflective diaries. The researchers report that qualitative evidence indicated that shared reading of literary texts, skilled facilitation, and attention to social group process were all important to the groups’ experiences. Although there were dropouts and although the outcome measures were limited to before and after scores, these scores were encouraging.

As we, in our research group, have found, conducting studies of reading as therapy in a way that corresponds to a laboratory study is very difficult. To do anything like a successful randomized controlled trial would be even more difficult; probably a hundred participants would be needed, along with a control activity of an interest comparable to that of the reading group. Nonetheless, therapeutically directed reading groups certainly give the qualitative impression that some participants find them really worthwhile. And that may be a very important observation.

Dowrick, C., Billington, J., Robinson, J., Hamer, A., & Williams, C. (2012). Get into Reading as an intervention for common mental health problems: Exploring catalysts for change. Medical Humanities, 38, 75-80.

Talking Food, Consuming Silence: Mapping Food Movement Dialogues, Engagements with Justice and Power, and Problems Translating between Them

2013-01-29T01:36:00.000-05:00

As many readers have noticed, my interest in the psychology of narrative has been engaged in some long-term public work on the way that people talk about food, and about the ways that this talk about food organizes ways that social interactions around food and feeding are conducted -- for example, in a series of seminars on the implications of the way that people talk about "feeding the world", or in a series of interactive food system games I've constructed and conducted as a platform for challenging dialogue at venues such as the Frozen River Film Festival or the Minnesota State Fair. There have been a couple of features of this work that I have particularly enjoyed, and that I'd like to mull over in the context of the OnFiction community.

First, and perhaps most successfully, as part of the method I have used to help construct these opportunities for narrating food experience in new ways, I have deputized "discursive referees" -- people who are given a public mandate to stop the conversation at hand if, for example, it falls into well-trod ruts that it might be more interesting to step around, or, even better, to examine as themselves objects of inquiry. Discourse referees have been one of my favorite parts of treating narratives as exploratory games -- many referees have been wonderful: sparing, generous, and yet stepping in gently just at the moment a conversation starts to derail and providing enough reference to help rewind to the point of derailment and to help construct possible ways around the stumbling point. This approach has been lucky, I realize, but I'd like to continue to try it out and to consider some of the ways that some of what works so well about it is the way it marries some of the best parts of our experience of written and spoken language.

A second aspect of "talking food" that I have found so compelling is the way this careful attention to narrative experience (such as with the development of discussion contexts welcoming to refereeing) has led me to mapping discursive and epistemological terrains. I am, after all, a geographer, and studying various representations of food system conflicts has brought me repeatedly to thinking about what it might be like to map the geography of knowledge terrains.

I am, of course, particularly interested in spaces of ambivalence, where people might wander around lost and buffeted by winds of contradictory motive -- but I am also fascinated by different positions kept incommensurate by growing mountains of misunderstanding or widening chasms of disdain, fear, or defensiveness. As a geographer, I have been hung up on how to subvert geo-coding data to represent epistemological space. And I have already started importing geographic concepts that help organize the narrative space: territorial metaphors such as “realist geopolitics” (contained / sovereign / given) versus “critical geopolitics” (intertwined / constructed) give me ways to consider and treat the boundary conflicts between different knowledge cultures!

Despite having spent the greater part of an artists' residency this summer thinking about how to model food system discourses in a game narrated in State Fair Vernacular, however (as well as the transformative transition from a landscape artist into a geographer during a long stint of sculpting cartographic symbolizations), it wasn't until I was repeatedly zoomed across Stephen Colbert's Tolkienesque map of New York (above) during his immensely nerdy Hobbit week that I considered less technologically geo-referenced cartographic techniques for thinking about the shapes of politically contentious food narratives. I could draw them out.

And so, over the next year, I will provide monthly installments in a series of "narrative maps" sketching out patterns in the ways people represent their experience the food system.

In addition to depicting these representations, I hope to use my maps to reflect, exhibit, and interpret people’s engagement with the patterns I play with -- to see how well they capture the way people imagine themselves to be connected with the eco-social processes and cultural knowledge that constitute the food system, and various people’s hopes for sustainable and transformative food systems. My ambition for this modest series of maps is that it will provide the armature on which I might build a gradual public process for assembling tools existing oral history projects and community food assessments (and other publicly generated food system knowledge tools) and transforming them into a navigable public learning domain -- both online, and in the series of games and tours I will continue to develop.

Stay tuned for the February installment: 1. Introduction: Mapping Discourses through Food.

Effects of Fiction on Empathy

2013-01-21T11:01:00.000-05:00

Although Raymond Mar and others in our group (Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, dela Paz, & Peterson, 2006) were, I think, the first to find an association between the amount of fiction people read and their levels of empathy, in that 2006 study there was some ambiguity about the causal direction of the effect. We hypothesized that fiction—which we proposed was a simulation of the social world—enabled people to become more empathetic with others, but at that time we were not able to rule out the possibility that the association might have been due to people who were more empathetic having a preference for fiction rather than non-fiction. In a replication of the earlier study (Mar, Oatley & Peterson, 2009), however, we found that the association could not be explained by empathetic people preferring to read fiction, or indeed by other individual differences among readers. Even so, to show unequivocally the causal direction of the effect experimental studies were needed.

Two such studies have now been performed by people who are not connected with our group. One study was by Dan Johnson (which we reported in OnFiction on 22 November 2011, click here). Now a second study has been performed by Matthis Bal and Martijn Veltkamp (2013).

Bal and Veltkamp put together the idea of fiction as social simulation with Green’s (2004) idea of transportation as an indication of people’s engagement in stories. In their first experiment, Bal and Veltkamp had 66 participants read either a Sherlock Holmes story, “The adventure of the six Napoleons” by Arthur Conan Doyle, or a selection of the same length from a newspaper about riots in Libya and a disaster in Japan. Transportation into the text was measured by three items prompted by Busselle and Bilandzic’s (2008) account of engagement in stories: “The story affected me emotionally,” “During the reading of the text, when a main character succeeded I felt happy, and when they suffered in some way, I felt sad,” and “I felt sorry for some of the characters in the text.” Empathy was measured just before reading the text (Time 1), directly after reading (Time 2), and one week later (Time 3), by the Empathetic Concern scale of Davis (1983). In a second experiment, 97 participants followed same procedure except that they read either a fictional text, a chapter from José Saramago’s Blindness, or a non-fictional text which was of extracts from a newspaper.

The results of the first experiment were that people who were high in transportation into the Sherlock Holmes story increased their empathy from Time 1 to Time 3, but there was no significant change in empathy in those who read the newspaper extracts. In the second experiment, people who were high in transportation into the story by Saramago increased their empathy somewhat from Time 1 to Time 3 but the increase was not significant, while people who were high in transportation into the newspaper extracts significantly decreased their empathy from Time 1 to Time 3. In both experiments, people who read the fictional stories but were not transported into them showed decreased empathy from Time 1 to Time 3. The authors suggest that this was because without transportation into a story readers became frustrated and disengaged.

One of the virtues of Bal and Veltkamp’s paper is the use of real literary examples for people to read. We are still some way from being able to say what attributes of stories invite the most transportation, or prompt the strongest changes in empathy, but such questions now seem as if they may soon be answerable.

Bal, P. M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013). How does fiction reading influence empathy? An experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation. PLoS One.

Busselle, R., & Bilandzic, H. (2008). Fictionality and perceived realism in experiencing stories: A model of narrative comprehension and engagement. Communication Theory, 18, 255-280.

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 113-126.

Green, M. C. (2004). Transportation into narrative worlds: The role of prior knowledge and perceived realism. Discourse Processes, 38, 247-266.

Johnson, D. R. (2012). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Personality and Individual Differences, 52, 150-155.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 694-712.

Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., & Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications: The European Journal of Communication, 34, 407-428.

Image: Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget (1904), from Wikipedia

At the MLA

2013-01-14T08:31:00.001-05:00

Until the beginning of this year I knew of the MLA principally through David Lodge's novel Small World (1984), in which Philip Swallow of Brummidge University (recognizable as the University of Birmingham), Morris Zapp of Euphoric State University (recognizable as Berkeley), and others, attend an MLA meeting.

MLA is an acronym for the Modern Language Association of America. But, as with the United Kingdom which is neither united nor a kingdom, the words don't mean what they say. As David Lodge points out in his novel, when the words say "Modern Language," the Association is not really concerned with language but with literature, mostly literature in English. As well as that, although "Modern" could refer to something written recently, it could equally refer to Beowulf, written a thousand years ago. Also, MLA doesn't usually mean the Association, but the Association's annual meeting, which is held in a big city and attended by several thousand people at the beginning of each year. It runs over four days, with more than 30 sessions in parallel on a bewildering array of topics. It's where young people who have just received their PhDs in literature interview for jobs, where assistant professors look for jobs as associate professors at better universities than the ones that they are currently at, and where scholars who are established can be lauded.

I was very pleased to be invited to the 2013 MLA by Patrick Hogan, to present some the work we do on the psychology of fiction. There at the conference, too, were some people whom I am very glad to know, who run the MLA Division on Cognitive Approaches to Literature. Since these approaches have begun, I have been hoping that they would become rather prominent. This hope has been encouraged by David Lodge himself having written both a novel, Thinks (2001), and a theoretical piece (2002), about cognitive approaches to literature. But this movement has, I am sad to say, not yet completely filled the vacuum left by the demise of post-modernism.

The MLA meeting that is depicted in Small World is held in New York, and its big event is a session on "The Function of Criticism." In it Philip Swallow says that this function is to assist in the function of literature itself, which is to enable us to live more fully, more finely. Michel Tardieu says that the function of criticism is not to offer interpretations, but to understand the structural laws that allow literature to be produced at all. Siegfried von Turpitz says that Tardieu's project is doomed to failure because works of literature come into existence only in the mind of the reader. Fulvia Morgana says that the function of criticism is to wage war against the very concept of literature, because it's an instrument of bourgeois hegemony. And Morris Zapp says that this function is to reach no conclusion whatever because to read literature is to subject oneself to displacements of curiosity and desire endlessly from one sentence to another.

In the 30 years since Small World was written, structuralism has become post-structuralism, but some streams of criticism depicted in the novel are still recognizable. Noticeable additions have been made, especially of minority and post-colonial literatures. The main big event that I could find in the 2013 MLA meeting, held in Boston, was of a panel in which three distinguished literary scholars spoke on "Why teach literature?"

The first of these scholars was Patricia Yaeger whose title was "The embodied classroom." I was interested that, apart from Mark Doty, a poet, the people whose work she drew on were psychologists and philosophers. One was Christopher Bollas (see e.g. Bollas, 2011) a Winnicottian psychoanalyst who has proposed that literature can be "a holding environment," and a "transformational object." Yaeger went on discuss the work of the cognitive theoreticians Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who have developed the idea of the extended mind. Teaching literature, she said, offers conditions for extending the mind, and for distributing cognition.

The second scholar was Jean-Michel Rabaté who called his talk "Why teach what you already know?" He concentrated on a 1955 dispute between F.R. Leavis and Clement Greenberg. He disagreed with Leavis's proposal that literature can enable us to become better people, and agreed with Greenberg that it only explains what we already know. I wanted to ask why achieving such explanations did not, in itself, enable us to become better people, but I didn't get the chance.

The third scholar was Helen Vendler who entitled her talk "Why teach? Why literature?" She was the person I really wanted to hear, because I am an ardent admirer of her 1997 book on Shakespeare's Sonnets. She said that literature is often taught in courses on the great books, and that these courses are about the history of ideas. But really, she said, the generative force of literature is not ideas but emotions. So, once again, here seemed to be a plea for a rapprochement of psychology and literature.

I live in hope.

Bollas, C. (2011). The Christopher Bollas reader. New York: Routledge.
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 7-19.
Leavis, F. R., & Greenberg, C. (1955). A critical exchange. Commentary (August). http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/a-critical-exchange/
Lodge, D. (1984). Small world. London: Secker & Warburg.
Lodge, D. (2001). Thinks. London: Secker & Warburg.
Lodge, D. (2002). Consciousness and the novel. In D. Lodge (Ed.), Consciousness and the novel (pp. 1-91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vendler, H. (1997). The art of Shakespeare's sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Quick Hit: Bibliomat

2013-01-09T12:34:00.005-05:00

The Monkey's Paw, a unique antiquarian bookshop in Toronto (see sample stock here), now boasts a random book-dispenser known as the Bibliomat. Built by Craig Small, this vending machine delivers interesting titles, chosen randomly, for only $2. We rarely find ourselves in possession of a book that we haven't chosen, unless it is a gift. So in some ways this device is a marvellous way to treat yourself to a gift, given by a friend with exceptional taste.

Below is a video of the Bibliomat in action.

The BIBLIO-MAT from Craig Small on Vimeo.

The Uses of Memory

2013-01-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

When I go to London I like to wander the streets in a Virginia-Woolf-like way. I am fascinated by how people live in this city—how people look, what they say to each other, the places they live—different from and yet comparable with how people are in the city of Toronto where I now live. Cities seem to me the very acme of human life, where people can live alone or together, in a room, or an apartment, or a house, where they can meet or not meet others as they choose, where creativity and innovation occur, where each person generally allows others to do what they are doing without interference, and without too much of the us-and-themness of in-groups and out-groups. If your only experience of humanity were of hunter-gatherer societies, and you were told that it was in these that human emotions and sociality had developed for several million years, could you ever think that cities could work? But they do. They work wonderfully.

In London, however, as well as my fascination with the present-day, I also find memories coming to mind: there goes a number 38 bus, which reminds me that I used to go to school on the 38A. Here a Victorian terrace is interrupted by a piece of newer building; probably this is where a bomb fell, and I am reminded of living through London air-raids as a child. And that street over there is where I used to go when I was training in psychotherapy.

Psychologists seem to think that the function of memory is to enable them to do experiments on it. The memories I mentioned in the previous paragraph would be classed as episodic, or autobiographical. But, of course, human memory isn’t really for reminiscence. Like computer memory it’s for the now and the future, so that we can use what we know and what we have experienced to think and act in the world.

Nonetheless reminiscences do occur. Do they have a function which is not mere nostalgia? On a recent visit to London at the end of 2012, at the Tate Gallery, now called Tate Britain, I saw a wonderful exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelites, informative, transporting, and moving. While I was waiting for my entry time, I looked at some of the permanent collection, and discovered in a corner a small picture by one of my favorite between-the-wars painters, Alfred Wallis. He had been a fisherman, and then lived by selling second-hand goods for boats. He was self-taught and had almost no money. His paintings are on pieces of cardboard taken from cardboard boxes, with paints obtained not from an art shop but from a ships’ chandler. To me Wallis is wonderful. In his pictures of boats, and houses, and quays, the sizes and setting, and the relationships of the objects, in the picture are psychological rather than topographical.

The picture reminded me of how I was introduced to Wallis’s paintings. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge and one day, on the Backs, I was sitting on a bench talking with a friend when a man came and sat on the bench next to us, and started a conversation. He told us about his collection of paintings, and invited us to come to his house, which was nearby, to see them. After an hour or so of being shown wonderful pictures by Alfred Wallis, Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood, David Jones, and sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, we went into another room to meet Helen, the wife of the man who had invited us, and to be offered tea, brown bread, and honey. It was the first of several visits. The place was Kettle’s Yard, and the man was Jim Ede. He had been an art student at the Slade, and he started to buy works by his contemporaries. He arranged them in this house and started to show them and talk about them, without any commercial component, to students like myself. Nowadays Kettle’s Yard is a famous art gallery, and if you go to Cambridge, you might want to put it high on your list for a visit.

And memory? The memory of mine about Alfred Wallis and Jim Ede is not mere reminiscence; it’s about how I first started to listen to talk about art, and from that, haltingly, to start to think and talk about art myself. This activity that I remember became part of me.

Art isn’t just art. Typically it’s accompanied by an orbit of thoughtful engagement and of discussion. The discussion draws, I think, on that phase of early development in which there is a child with an adult, and some object of shared attention: a cup perhaps, or a fire-engine. Our engagement with such objects in the world starts as relational. It grows in what Donald Winnicott (1971) called the “space-in-between” the self and the other, which in childhood is often a space of playfulness. It’s the space of relating, and of conversation. It’s a space of coming to know the other. From this space all culture grows, and it never—Winnicott says—loses the connection with the other person.

And what we aim to do here at OnFiction, dear readers: is to offer you, in an electronically mediated relationship, talk about the art of fiction.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.