OnFiction

From Pride to Persuasion

2010-03-11T20:21:00.002-05:00

Jane Austen could certainly not be accused of drawing portraits of mothers in her work with gentle, loving strokes. Austen’s mothers are tolerated, rather than loved, and with a good reason. Take, for example, Mrs. Bennet, of Pride and Prejudice. How could a woman of “mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper,“ be anything but a drag on the cultured, vivacious life of her husband and children? We are told Mrs. Bennet is entirely unconscious of her own emotional life, while being hyperaware of her daughters’ marital status. Disliking Mrs. Bennet’s morally flimsy character and archaic concerns is easy.

Is it perhaps a bit too easy. Austen reduced Mrs. Bennet to a caricature within the first three pages of Pride and Prejudice. And it worked, too, because no matter how much we, as readers, claim to love ‘complex’ characters, it appeals to our carnivorous nature to have an ignorant character for whom we can feel guilt-free contempt and who will be morally ripped apart for our reading pleasure. Austen dutifully, and one feels – with pleasure – offered us up her ignorant mothers.

It was this history of gentle, encouraging fathers and ignorant, dismissible mothers that made me start within the first few pages of Persuasion. Gone is a fine father – now we have a vain, arrogant, and financially irresponsible Sir Elliot, while a dead mother’s place is filled in by a sensible Lady Russell who is looking out for our heroine’s interests. That, of course, means only one thing – Lady Russell is looking out for Elizabeth marital prospects. No longer is the necessity of marriage mocked. We are made aware of uncertain and humiliating position of an unmarried woman, of ceaselessly belittling subjugation to various family members and their individual fortunes. No longer is the mother (or in this case a mother stand-in) offered up to us for easy consumption.

Why the change? One can’t help but wonder whether the change in Austen’s personal circumstances – her family’s plunge into relative poverty, followed by a death of her father, and then an uneasy series of moves that finally landed her, with her mother and sister, onto a cottage estate of one of her brothers - made her feel that the necessity of marriage, and a mother’s role in it, is not a trivial concern.

It is hard for us, born so late, and living in this century, to imagine a time when a woman of social standing couldn’t just “get a job.” It is hard to think that women’s marriages were their livelihoods, just as we now think of careers in medicine or law. It feels ugly to think about, and hard to make light of. And while Austen never abandoned the idea of a happy marriage as an obligatory happy ending of her works, she might have been finally stung by a reality - mothers may have been ignorant procurers of their daughters to respectable marriages, but they have at least tried to protect them against darker alternatives.

It breaks one’s heart to think of Austen, at 40 and without prospects of marriage, still bringing her heroines and heroes to marital bliss. It must have started to taste bitter in her mouth. But at least she gave mothers a break.

Altruism

2010-03-08T10:18:00.005-05:00

A recent paper by Simone Schnall and her colleagues (2010) shows that watching certain kinds of scenes on television increased people's inclination to act altruistically. In two experiments Schnall et al. found that watching a seven-minute film clip from an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show in which a musician paid tribute to his mentor and former music teacher, who had saved him from a life of gang activity and violence, increased altruism. The effect is referred to as elevation. The experimenters found it both in self-reports—people felt uplifted, optimistic about humanity, and wanting to become a better person—as well as in increased actual helping of someone else. The film clip from the Oprah Winfrey Show was autobiographical rather than fictional in the ordinary sense, but occasions in which characters act altruistically are not unusual in fiction. This kind of effect may be thought, perhaps, to counteract effects that many fear of violence on television.

It has been known for a long time, since the famous experiments of Alice Isen (e.g. Isen & Levin, 1972), that feeling happy facilitates the helping of others. In the second experiment of the current study, Schnall et al. included a control group in which participants became happy at watching a television episode that was funny. The results were that participants who watched the elevation clip had more subjective feelings of elevation and also did substantially and significantly more actual helping than those who watched the funny clip. As compared with those who watched the funny clip, those who watched the elevating clip spend approximately twice as long helping the experimenter in a tedious task.

Schnall and her colleagues discuss their result in terms of empathy. A way of thinking about their result is that it arises from identification (known to be important in fiction) which is now thought to be based on empathy. Perhaps empathy prompts recognition of, and aspiration to, what Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius (1986) have called a "possible self." If, on the one hand, media-based news and fiction let us know that life is often harsh and unjust, and is sometimes tragic then, on the other hand, it can show that kindness and altruism are possible for us human beings.

Alice Isen & P. F. Levin (1972). The effect of feeling good on helping: Cookies and kindness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21, 384-388.

Hazel Markus & Paula Nurius (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41, 954-969.

Simone Schnall. Jean Roper & Daniel Fessler (2010). Elevation leads to altruistic behavior. Psychological Science, 21, published online 29 January.

P. D. James and Detective Fiction

2010-03-04T09:20:00.004-05:00

After a long spell of concentrating on writing, it's been a joy to spend four hours reading a book. The book is by P. D. James (2009) Talking about detective fiction. P.D. James, it seems to me, is in the forefront of writers of detective fiction, not just in recent times, but in all time. Intelligent, concerned with human issues rather than merely intellectual puzzles, a writer of beautiful sentences and of engaging thoughts.

James is now 90 years old. Talking about detective fiction has all the qualities one expects of her. Although the book is brief, although it includes a familiar procession of writers in the history of detective fiction—from Wilkie Collins, to Arthur Conan Doyle, to Dorothy Sayers, to Agatha Christie, to Raymond Chandler—what she writes is always thoughtful. The concerns of her book extend to whether detective fiction is quite serious. Her answer is that that both is and is not. In both cases it manages to be worthwhile. James is full of respect for her forbears and contemporaries. She has a lovely chapter on the women who wrote detective fiction in the years between World War I and World War II, arguing that they enable us to see society at that time rather acutely, and to see the changing conditions for women. And James is not shy of making literary comparisons. She has interesting ideas about Jane Austen and E.M. Forster. This, for instance, she cites from Forster, from "The raison d'être of criticism in the arts," a work I did not know:

What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art … And when the process is over, when the picture or symphony or lyric or novel (or whatever it is) is complete, the artist, looking back on it, will wonder how on earth he did it. And indeed he did do it on earth (James, p. 158).

When I wrote my second novel A natural history, I had the idea of writing about a chain of inference in the mind of a scientist of the kind that people like to read in detective stories. It would be just as intricate, I thought, just as dependent on picking up clues. But rather than being focused on one measly murder, it would be focused on how a disease—cholera—killed thousands of people. Wouldn't that be thousands of times better? And wouldn't the reader be able at the same time to understand how scientists think: a bonus? The reader would come to know, too, about what is still the most important discovery in medicine, that germs cause infectious disease.

I was wrong. Not just a bit wrong, but comprehensively wrong. It isn't that my novel didn't work. It worked more-or-less all right, and I am happy with how it turned out. It's just that it did not achieve that resonance with the detective-story-reading public about which I had fantasized. I learned the reason by going to a talk by P. D. James.

The detective story has its appeal, she said in her talk, not because of a death, but because of a murder. Murder is the most horrific of crimes. It damages the fabric of our everyday world. The role of the detective is not to be clever, it's to heal the wound in society. To bring justice, to make the world whole again.

In her current book James says this again: "The detective story proper" she says, "is concerned with the bringing of order out of disorder and the restoration of peace after the destructive eruption of murder" (p. 13). This is the inner movement, the archetypal machinery of the detective story. I hadn't properly understood that. I had thought that the dying of people from disease, and the train of inference to understand how it happened might be equivalent. It isn't. Disease is damaging, but it has no moral dimension. It's human agency that makes murder so destructive to society. That's what makes us want to understand it in such a way that the world can be put right again.

E. M. Forster (1951). The raison d'être of criticism in the arts, in Two cheers for democracy (pp. 107-122). Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace.

P. D. James (2009). Talking about detective fiction. New York: Knopf.

Keith Oatley (1998). A natural history. Toronto: Viking Penguin.

George Steiner and Auschwitz

2010-03-01T07:34:00.005-05:00

In a TVO "Flying Solo" clip, the University of Toronto literary theorist Nick Mount was asked to talk on what art can and cannot do (click here). He says that although art might inspire, the Holocaust contradicts the idea that literary art can make us better, and he cites George Steiner's assertion: “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” The quote is from the preface of Steiner's (1967) essays (p. 15). The editors of OnFiction are concerned with the possibility that literature might enable self-improvement, so this assertion seems devastating.

In an e-mail correspondence, Willie van Peer pointed out to me that although the idea circulates that people who worked in Auschwitz were educated and read literature, Steiner's assertion was made without evidence. Van Peer thinks it highly unlikely that camp workers at Auschwitz read Goethe and Rilke.

Following this correspondence, and to think more deeply on this issue, I re-read Christopher Browning's (1992) Ordinary men, on Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, who formed killing squads in Poland, and of whom more is known than of Auschwitz workers. Most of Browning’s research was based on judicial interrogations of 125 of the 486 men in the battalion. At least some of the battalion’s 11 officers achieved high school education. The rank and file were recruited mostly from the working-class in Hamburg. Their average age was 39, and almost none of them had—apart from vocational training—any education beyond age 15. In 1942, two and a half years after recruitment, it became their job to massacre Jews in Polish towns and villages. Browning compares these men with those of Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (now described in a 2007 book), in which men were recruited from an advertisement in a local newspaper and randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a simulated prison. There were 70 male volunteers. Men with psychiatric disorders and histories of crime or drugs were excluded, and 24—all college students—were selected as the most stable and psychologically healthy, to be included. Zimbardo was unable to predict from personality testing which of these would behave in particular ways.

Among both the Order Police and the guards in the prison simulation, some 80% acted as their roles required, and a substantial proportion became brutal and enjoyed their newfound power. (In the prison simulation about a third of the guards constantly invented new forms of cruel harassment.) In the Order Police, some 10% to 20% refused to take part in shootings and, comparably, in the prison experiment two of the eleven guards behaved with consideration to the prisoners.

Epidemiological evidence indicates that some 5.8% of men have the psychiatric disorder of anti-social personality, victims generally of genetic vulnerability and abusive parenting, disposed towards life-long interpersonal violence (see e.g. Oatley, Keltner & Jenkins, 2006). But among ordinary men, it remains unclear why some become brutal when put in positions of power. And, although George Steiner said "we know," we are actually entirely lacking in empirical evidence on whether experience of literature affects people who enter societal roles such as the police that require coercion by force.

There are now well-informed historical accounts of how Germany adopted Nazism (e.g. Evans, 2004). Before 1939, the journalist Sebastian Haffner (1940) had perceived that core Nazis were not so much proponents of a political program, but more men of a certain personality type (which today we would call anti-social personality disorder). In one of the world's first well-orchestrated campaigns to use the new media of radio and film, Nazi propaganda persuaded many to see Hitler not as a criminal but as a good person who would lead their country to greatness. Apart from propensity to violence, nationalism, and anti-Semitism, Nazism was marked by hostility to humanitarian values in education. From 1933 onwards, the Nazis replaced the idea of self-betterment through education and reading by practices designed to induce as many as possible into willing conformity, and to coerce the unwilling remainder by justified fear.

Christopher Browning (1992). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins.

Richard Evans (2004). The coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin.

Sebastian Haffner (1940). Germany Jekyll and Hyde: A contemporary account of Nazi Germany. London: Secker & Warburg (reissued, 2008, Abacus).

Keith Oatley, Dacher Keltner & Jennifer Jenkins (2006). Understanding emotions, second edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

George Steiner (1967). Language and silence: Essays 1958-1966. London: Faber.

Philip Zimbardo (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House.

Wonder and Floating Signifiers

2010-02-25T17:43:00.007-05:00

"We do not find [something] marvelous … [ that] forms part of our everyday experience, but if we were told that [something in an unfamiliar context] behaved in exactly the same way, we would either dismiss the story as incredible or be ‘stupefied with wonder.’"

Wonder (and, more specifically the wonders in the face of which people experience wonder) is the topic of Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park's 1998 treatise Wonders and the Order of Nature. Examining the uses of wonders in the period 1150-1750, Daston and Park demonstrate a fascinating trajectory of a crisis of credibility, as the politics of wonder collide with the politics of reason. Such an exploration of wonder is perhaps particularly salient in an era of conflicts over legitimacy determined by whether something feels right in the gut or resonates with the intellect.

Daston and Park describe wonder in a way that continually reminds me of the way that my environmental science and activism colleagues often promote normative perspectives via the invocation of particularly cool features of the natural world. "Have you ever seen," one of them will begin, "that amazing phenomenon when..." and proceed to outline a wonder of nature that is so complex and so compelling as to command respect and compliance with whatever the management regime may be that they have devised to respect and comply with the wonder of nature in question.

And this wonder is powerful, indeed. For one thing, such wonder appears to be a significant motivator of the careers of many scientists -- not to mention the system and symbolisms of cultures and arts and religions. Wonder, however, plays a fascinatingly slippery role in rhetoric. In significant ways, wonder is a response to that which is unknown, or inadequately knowable. In the passage above -- Daston and Park (p.23) talking about Gervase of Tilbury talking about Augustine -- we can read two tensions: one between the everyday and the unfamiliar, and another between being captivated or attracted by the marvelous and being stupefied with wonder.

I bring in the idea of 'floating signifiers' here -- the category of things for which the 'there, there' is not pinned down by agreed upon meaning -- because I am interested in the bivalent possibility in this tension in wonder. Wonder is so often used to attract, to enchant -- but, for example, from a pedagogical perspective, when is this enchantment an attraction into exploration and when is it an obscuring bewilderment? Wonder may be a tonic response to things we can not know with certainty, but are there indicators of a wonder -- or a wonder-inducement -- more open to exploration (one can see here how reason spelled the doom of wonder, for a time) or more ready to simply let wonder itself stand in for the unknown explanations of the signified.

Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (1998). Wonders and the Order of Nature. New York: Zone Books

Painful Emotions as Pleasurable: A New Theory, by Tom Scheff

2010-02-22T08:01:00.003-05:00

In Keith Oatley’s post of last week on negative emotions (click here) he quotes Norman Holland’s explanation of enjoying horror films: that we get pleasure from the fear we experience in the theatre because we think about it rather than acting on it. This is step in the right direction, but is incomplete because it leaves out the bodily side.

Aristotle originated a theory of catharsis in the theatre. The purpose of tragedy, he wrote, was to “to purge us of pity and terror.” This idea is currently in disrepute because Freud rejected it, even though his first book reported its success. Experimental psychologists also think they have disproved it, because they have shown that acting out anger usually doesn’t get rid of it. Currently it is the fashion to refer to catharsis as a simplistic hydraulic theory, as if there were only one theory rather than many (Scheff, 1979).

However, Aristotle didn’t propose that audiences shout in anger or run away in fear. He was referring to the effect of simply watching a tragedy, somewhat like Wordsworth’s idea that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility.

The crucial thing, according to theories of aesthetic distance, is that the audience identifies with the players, and feel their emotions, but at the same time realize that they are safe in the theatre (Goddard, 1951; Evans, 1960). At this distance, being both in and out of their own feelings, emotions that might be painful if one were completely lost in them become pleasurable. In a tragedy, one can have a “good” rather than a bad cry, and experience good fear rather than the painful kind.

My students experience roller coasters as pleasurable, but only if they are sure that the ride is safe. They allow themselves to feel fear because they are able, at the same time, to watch themselves doing it, rather than becoming completely caught up in it. Levine (1997) refers to this process as pendulating, moving very rapidly in and out of emotions that would otherwise be painful. We move so fast that we usually don’t realize it. These states can occur not only in the theatre but whenever we feel safe enough to replay intense emotional experiences, such as describing them to another person we trust, or, occasionally, reliving them alone.

Emotions are at their core only bodily states of arousal, of readiness for fight or flight, etc. In humans, at least, we have many ways of managing these states, not only fight or flight. Feeling safe enough to experience them with some detachment makes them pleasurable, rather than painful. The ability to stop our reactions is reassuring, giving us a feeling of safety in the face of intense fear, grief, anger or shame (Scheff, 2007).

The most controversial issue in catharsis theory is the attempt to answer the question of what to do with the energy and adrenaline that is aroused if you don’t fight or flee. When I was a young man, I knew that running six miles when angry would burn off some of the adrenaline so that I might be able to sleep at night.

Later I stumbled on to a better way. Sometimes, instead of blowing my top, I said to the person who had angered me, “I am angry at you because….” Usually I had to repeat my reasons several times before they understood that although courteous, I was also angry. During my explanation, I often experienced the room as warmer. However, after several episodes, I realized that it was me that was hot. Body heat, I think rapidly (less than a minute) metabolizes the adrenaline touched off by anger.

What about fear? I have had some extraordinary experiences of responding to fear with what might look to an unknowing observer as an epileptic fit of shaking and sweating. The experiences were enjoyable both during and after their occurrence. It may be too soon to write off the ancient idea of catharsis.

Bertrand Evans (1969) Shakespeare’s comedies. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Harold Goddard (1951). The meaning of Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peter A. Levine (1997). Waking the tiger. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

Thomas Scheff (1979). Catharsis in healing, ritual, and drama. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thomas Scheff (2007). Catharsis and other heresies. Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, 1, 98-113.

Literary Science

2010-02-19T16:05:00.005-05:00

[Readers: My apologies for the lateness of this post. RM]

Although we take it somewhat for granted that our readers are interested in the science of fiction, this enterprise should probably not escape question. Why should we study literature and film with a method of observation borrowed from physics and chemistry? Can a science of fiction be anything but reductive? Do we cheapen our experience of art by placing it under a microscope? Or, more accurately, by placing tiny parts of it under a microscope and attempting to generalize to the whole. These are not trivial questions, and a number of valid, and even opposing, perspectives on this issue can be easily defended.

For myself, I believe in the scientific study of fiction because I believe in science. Basic science, specifically, or science for science's sake, with no necessary reference to some predicted application. In other words, I believe that we should be making careful observations of our world in order to better understand it, and that scientists have long ignored many aspects of our world that seem important: such as fiction.

Another reason why I believe in the science of fiction is that I believe in fiction. I believe it is a powerful force in the lives of many, if not all, of us. Moreover, I detect a troubling trend in our culture whereby science is becoming over-valued relative to art. Both are ways of shedding light on truth and neither should be privileged over the other. One way to restore a balance, I believe, is the scientific study of art. If fiction, as art, can be demonstrated to have important consequences that are measurable and reliable, our culture will begin to pay more attention to art and its role in our lives. This, at least, is my hope.

Jonathan Gottschall wrote a very interesting article on the necessity of a science of literary fiction for the Boston Globe, which appeared on the front page of the 'Ideas' section. It is a concise and compelling argument, but only one side of this debate. I would be interested to hear our readers' thoughts on this issue, including the many possible counterpoints to the points raised by myself and Dr. Gottschall.

Negative Emotions

2010-02-15T06:32:00.007-05:00

Why—it's a question that seems not to go away—do people pay money to watch films in which they know they will experience emotions that they avoid in ordinary life? Two recent papers reflect on the question.

Paul Silvia says aesthetics are usually about taking pleasure in things, for instance because they are beautiful. He offers what he calls a tour of unusual emotions that can't be grouped with pleasure. He describes three families of such emotions: knowledge emotions (interest, confusion, and surprise), hostile emotions (anger disgust and contempt), and self conscious emotions (pride, shame and embarrassment) which occur in fiction. About the self conscious emotions Sylvia says:

Understanding personal and collective feelings of pride, shame, guilt, regret, and embarrassment is central to a mature science of aesthetics, but our field knows so little about these emotions. Of the emotion families, self-consciousness emotions afford the most to researchers looking for untrod terrain (p. 50).

Silvia says the the field of aesthetics should have more to say about why people have these emotions in their encounters with the arts but, in this article, he does not offer an explanation of the paradox of people seeking the seemingly unpleasurable.

Norman Holland (2010) starts a brief piece in Psychology Today by discussing a horror film he saw recently. The film seemed designed to make him feel fear. He does come up with an explanation.

I think that fictionality (= non-acting in response to an emotional stimulus) leads to pleasure. Actuality (= having to decide about acting in response to an emotional stimulus) leads, not to pleasure, but to planning motor activity … I think that … knowing that we won't have to do anything [in fiction] … is in and of itself pleasurable.

It seems possible that being in an emotional state has enjoyable aspects to it. What is unpleasurable, according to Holland, are the possible consequences for our own life, and here emotions signal that we have to do something about them.

Film, in particular, is designed to lead us through sequences of emotional states. Murray Smith (1995) argues that the basis of these emotions is identification with characters. It is the characters who absorb our interest. It is with them that we become emotionally involved. Perhaps the root reason for our engagement with emotion is that because we are inherently social creatures we are fascinated by what can go on in the social world, for ourselves and others, be it positive or negative.

Norman Holland (2010). Why are there horror movies? Psychology Today, January 4.

Paul Silvia (2009). Looking past pleasure: anger, confusion, disgust, pride, surprise, and other unusual aesthetic emotions. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3, 48-51.

Murray Smith (1995). Engaging characters: Fiction, emotion, and the cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Daimon's Precious Gifts

2010-02-11T19:35:00.011-05:00

“When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me."

So begins “The Last of the Wine”, the novel that had made lay Ancient Greece enthusiasts gasp with pleasure and perpetually prickly scholars scratch their heads. As we turn the pages, Alexias, a baby boy born in wake of the plague of Athens, survives his inauspicious childhood, becomes a youth, and then a man during the Peloponnesian War. On the book’s pages we meet Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Phaedo, Kritias, Alkibiades, we hear of Euripedes, Aristophanes, Perikles, Agis. No longer are they hard-to-pronounce names we have read in small-print volumes pulled from dusty bookshelves. They are fully grown people, living their philosophy, politics, and art, right before our eyes.

Following the publication of the book, the author, Mary Renault, had been welcomed warmly (and erroneously) into the collective bosom of scholars who had thought only a fellow classicist could have written a book that gets all the details of this ancient world just right. Gay men were similarly convinced that hiding under the pseudonym of Mary Renault had to be a man. After all, only a man could write in such an intimate manner about love between men, so common in Ancient Greece. To their disappointment, Renault was neither a classicist nor a man.

Prior to writing “The Last of the Wine,” Renault had written six contemporary novels that were … ok. I had read them all, trying to find the seeds of the genius that would produce “The Last of the Wine” and was perplexed. They were ok and that was all. It appears that between the last page of her last contemporary novel and the beginning page of her first historical novel, she got possessed of the novel-writing genius. And the genius did not only help with “The Last of the Wine”, it kept whispering into her ear secrets that had made possible writing of eight more historical novels, including two trilogies, one following the life of Theseus, the other of Alexander the Great. And none of her historical novels had missed the mark. In each, not only does she bring political events and mores of Ancient Greeks to life, she thinks with their minds, betrays their prejudices, exalts their loves, and worships their gods.

Some have facetiously remarked Renault "channeled" Ancient Greece. Well, no matter which ancient daimon had sang into her ear, we should be grateful she brought the long dead world of Ancient Greece to searing, brilliant, life.

Gateway of Imagination

2010-02-08T08:35:00.007-05:00

"Byron … describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine—Mine is the hardest task." So wrote John Keats in a letter to his brother George in September 1819. Keats, I think, is one of the most affecting and unusual poets in English, in part because he was able to depict the movements of the imagination, conscious and unconscious.

The best book I know on imagination is by Paul Harris (2000). It is focused on childhood. In it Harris points out that in pretend play children create whole imaginary worlds. They can for instance, create the world of a tea party in which pretend tea is poured from a toy teapot into toy cups. If an adult knocks over a cup and says, “I’m terribly sorry,” and makes a show of wiping up the pretend spillage, and then says “Can you fill it up again, please,” the child knows to bring the teapot to pour pretend tea into just that cup that was pretend-spilled, and not into any of the other cups, all of which—in the real world—are also empty. It used to be said that children find it difficult to distinguish fantasy and reality, but this is not so. Children at the pretend tea party know that nothing will get actually wet when pretend tea is spilled. They can create a whole self-consistent pretend world, which they know is different from the ordinary world, and they easily maintain the boundaries between the two.

One might think that this kind of imaginative play is mildly interesting but essentially frivolous. Not so. Imagination of the kind that starts in childhood is the gateway not just to literature, as Keats discerned, but to adult thinking. In her experiment-based book on how imagination is necessary for creating mental models (including models of how the world might be but is not), Ruth Byrne (2005) has said that rational thought has turned out to be: “more imaginative than cognitive scientists ... supposed,” and that “imaginative thought is more rational than scientists imagined” (xi).

One of the experimental studies about which Harris has very interesting thoughts is that of Aleksandr Luria (1976) who, in 1931 and 1932 travelled to Uzbekistan to examine the effects of literacy programs that had been instituted in the USSR at that time. In a post entitled "The actor problem" (for which please click here) I described one of Luria's studies. As compared with people who had not taken a literacy program, in this study Luria found that those who had taken one were enabled to move beyond their immediate experience, so that in addition to experienced-based thinking they could start to think in abstract ways. Harris explains that the educational programs were very elementary. It was not that people who took them became widely knowledgeable. The programs inducted them into the possibilities of imagining "what if?" They could do this because they had been able to play as children, and in that play to create imaginary worlds. When we take on reading-based education, we become able to use our child-derived imagination to guide our thoughts by something beyond the immediate, for instance by ideas or by words.

Raymond Mar and I (2008) have argued that abstraction is central to fiction: the literary notions of action, character, emotion are all abstractions. Imagination is not frivolous. It enables one to think. Fiction is one of its gateways.

Ruth Byrne (2005). The rational imagination: How people create alternatives to reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Paul Harris (2000). The work of the imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.

Aleksandr Luria (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Raymond Mar & Keith Oatley (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 173-192.

(Mis)trust

2010-02-04T21:57:00.009-05:00

“A book must be an ice-ax to break the frozen sea inside us.” said Kafka. It sounds painful – and it is painful. Yet we submit to pain, most happily, when it comes to art. We even anticipate it, this pain of blinders torn by design, of delicately woven untruths rudely ripped apart. We submit to the pain of coming out of the darkness into the unkindly bright sun, from ignorance or self-deception into truth. But let us not assume that any pain is welcome. Art-lovers are not masochists, after all, welcoming pain for its own sake.

This trust, given by the art-lover to the artist as easily as a child gives it to his mother, can be abused. And it is precisely this feeling of abuse and betrayal that I felt while watching A Serious Man. It is clear what its creators, Joel and Ethan Coen, had intended – a dark comedy that disturbs and enlightens, in style of Solondz’s ‘Happiness’. It has been touted as their best work ever. Yet despite wondrous performances by some of the supporting actors, the film didn’t manage to disturb and enlighten in right proportions. It disturbed too much and enlightened too little.

The disturbing parts of the film seemed gratuitous – graphically violent scenes punctuate the flow of the film without being meaningful counterpoints to the rest of the plot. It was as if the Coen brothers tickled us playfully underneath our chins, just before they slapped us viciously on the cheek. This is wrong kind of disturbing for a film that means to awake something truthful inside its viewers.

Most of us come to films both innocent and savvy. We bring our openness and trust, and know, too, that growing requires pains. Artists know they can do with our trust as they wish. They can hurt us, and hurt us needlessly. But just because they can, it doesn’t mean it should be done.

Fiction and Human Rights

2010-02-01T08:09:00.004-05:00

In a scathing article, Jerome Stolnitz (1991) argued that art has only short term effects. Greek drama is regarded as powerful but, says Stolnitz: “There is no evidence that Aristophanes shortened the Peloponnesian War by so much as a day” (p. 200). Stolnitz asserts that effects of art simply do not appear in history.

Except that—as Frank Hakemulder has pointed out to me—they do. They appear in the history of human rights. As historian Lynn Hunt (2007) has shown, the establishment of human rights has been strongly affected by literary art.

We now think of human rights as universal, but Hunt shows that 300 years ago even the idea of human rights was not present in European society. It had to be invented. By the end of the eighteenth century a change was accomplished. Hunt offers three landmarks, which she cites (pp. 215-229). In the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 we read: "all men are created equal … with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." In The French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, the first article is "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." Now, in our present age we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948, in the shadow of the Nazi era. Its first article is: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."

The full establishment of these principles in society world-wide is still some way off, but important steps have been taken. Slavery is no longer tolerable. Torture is no longer accepted as a legal procedure. Women and people of ethnic minorities, who previously lacked legal rights, are now established in many countries as having full rights of citizenship.

Hunt's finding is that invention of the idea of the equality of rights, declarations of rights, and the changes in society that have followed them, depended on two factors. One was empathy, which really is a human universal. "It depends," says Hunt, "on a biologically based ability to understand the subjectivity of other people and to be able to imagine that their inner experiences are like one's own" (p. 39). The other was the mobilization of this empathy towards those who were outside people's immediate social groupings. Although Hunt does not attribute this mobilization entirely to literary art, she concludes that the novel contributed to it substantially. "Reading novels," she says, "created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative" (p. 39). Many novels contributed. One that Hunt discusses is Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) written by a man and inviting empathetic identification with a woman of a humble social class. Hunt quotes from Pamela:

… he kissed me two or three times, as if he would have eaten me.—At last I burst from him, and was getting out of the Summer-house; but he held me back, and shut the Door.

I would have given my Life for a Farthing. And he said, I'll do you no Harm, Pamela; don't be afraid of me. I said I won't stay! You won't, Hussy! Said he. Do you know who you speak to? I lost all Fear, and all Respect, and said Yes, I do Sir, too well!—Well may I forget that I am your Servant, when you forget what belongs to a Master.

I sobb'd and cry'd most sadly. What a foolish Hussy you are! said he: Have I done you any Harm?—Yes, Sir, said I, the greatest Harm in the World: You have taught me to forget myself, and what belongs to me (Richardson, p. 23).

Pamela and other novels of the middle of the eighteenth century were hugely successful and enthusiastically discussed by a rapidly growing reading public. Hunt cites Diderot as writing of Richardson's narrative: "In the space of a few hours I went through a great number of situations which the longest life can hardly offer across its entire duration" (pp. 55-56). Readers learned to enter into the emotions of ordinary people, says Hunt; and then she says: "Human rights grew out of the seedbed sowed by these feelings. Human rights could only flourish when people learned to think of others as their equals, as like them in some fundamental fashion" (p. 58).

Lynn Hunt (2007). Inventing human rights. New York: Norton.

Samuel Richardson (1740). Pamela. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 2001).

Jerome Stolnitz (1991). On the historical triviality of art. British Journal of Aesthetics, 31, 195-202.

Pursuit

2010-01-29T01:23:00.004-05:00

It crept up, fine as a thread, this one forbidden thought. I tried to dress it up, or bully it, or recant it. But it gathered strength, insolent and pernicious. It heeded me little, if at all. It reveled in its cruel pursuit.

I grew tired, then slow. I stopped, and turned - a trick that I learned somewhere along the way. It crashed surprised, into me. It split and shattered all over me. I wear its fragments, yet still, sometimes I miss the unbroken thing.

Effort after Meaning

2010-01-25T09:41:00.007-05:00

In an interesting essay in this week's New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn writes about the difference between memoir and fiction in terms of truth and untruth. Members of the OnFiction group have (if I may speak for all of us) been a bit dissatisfied with the idea that non-fiction is true and fiction is untrue. We prefer to see fiction in terms of its subject matter: exploration of how selves make their sometimes problematic ways through the social world.

Mendelsohn starts his article with Freud's refusal in 1929 of an advance of $5000 for an autobiography, and he cites Freud's reaction to the invitation. "What makes all autobiographies worthless," Freud wrote, "is, after all, their mendacity." Mendelsohn discusses Augustine's Confessions as the first of the literary autobiographies in the West, and then confesses that he had signed up for a non-fiction book on contemporary gay culture in America, but had found that the more deeply he got into it, the harder it became "to isolate what 'gay identity' might be." Because he did not want to suggest that he somehow stood outside the tensions and instabilities of his subject matter, he thought he would write about himself: a memoir. It was published as The elusive embrace.

In his New Yorker article, Mendelsohn ranges across many issues, including journalists who just make stuff up, and of stories of holocaust survivors presented as autobiographies but written by people who weren't even there. His thoughts in the article conclude with him and his brother, Matt, sitting on a plane when some people behind them, members of a choir, started to sing a song. Matt said: "Remember we sang that in choir?" What Daniel remembered was that he had been in the choir but that Matt had not been in it. Daniel was in the process of writing a book based on people's memories from more than twice as long ago as those of his and his brother's boyhoods.

A psychological study that Mendelsohn mentions is that of Frederic Bartlett (1932). The study is well known in psychology but not nearly well enough known generally. In it Bartlett completely contradicted the idea that we can generally be accurate in what we recall. We can remember certain details, and we store these in memory along with an attitude and a sense of the whole. If we need to recall, we can sometimes retrieve some of the details plus our attitude, along with our knowledge of how the world works, and we construct an account of what must have happened. Bartlett explained that in remembering we are hardly ever entirely accurate, and usually it's not at all important that we be so.

Uncertainty about what really happened is an issue that rightly exercises historians and journalists. But the deeper issue, raised by Bartlett though not mentioned by Mendelsohn, is that when remembering or, indeed, when trying to make sense of anything for the first time, we are constantly engaged in an "effort after meaning" (Bartlett, p. 20). In his refusal to write an autobiography, Freud wasn't worrying about truth and untruth, but about truth and lying. He was suspicious of being cast into a situation in which he would find himself making willful distortions. The pressure to present oneself more-or-less favorably to a readership that could be unsympathetic may be too much. Of course it may. In his Confessions, Augustine made a cunning manoeuvre by taking up a purpose other than mere self-presentation. He depicted his life as necessarily sinful because we are all necessarily human. For the rest of us, it might be possible to confess to a loved one, to a psychotherapist, even to a priest, who will understand us as if from the inside. But confessing to the public about matters that were troubling even to ourselves?

Fiction, then, in which one searches for truths other than those of mere actuality, as if from the inside, may be the real expression of the human effort after meaning.

Image: Saint Augustine, detail from a stained glass window by Louis Tiffany

Augustine (circa 401). The confessions (G. Wills, Trans.). New York: Penguin (current edition 2006).

Frederic Bartlett (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Daniel Mendelsohn (1999). The elusive embrace: Desire and the riddle of identity. New York: Knopf.

Daniel Mendelsohn (2010). But enough about me. New Yorker, January 25, pp. 68-74.

It's Good

2010-01-21T22:44:00.005-05:00

“It’s good, good, good. When it’s published people will say that it’s good, good, good.” This was F. Scott Fitzgerald speaking of his own book, the book he intended to be the great American novel of his time. He had written more than 400,000 words, only to throw out three-quarters of the manuscript, and then kept re-writing, convinced that once done, it would take the world by storm. He didn’t mind it took time – the whole nine years – to complete. Tender is the Night was finally published in 1934. The highly anticipated reviews were, at most, indifferent. Fitzgerald’s puzzlement over this comparative failure led him to dissect the book for its flaws. He believed that if only he could shift few scenes about, if only he could present the plot, the characters, a bit more clearly, then… then the world would finally get it. He did manage, in subsequent printings to move a few scenes about, but to no wondrous effect.

It is understandable why Fitzgerald may have thought the book promising. Dick Divers, a handsome, socially suave, gifted psychiatrist is driven to alcoholism and ruin by a marriage to a beautiful, schizophrenic, Nicole. The plot, thinly, if at all veiled, recapitulation of his own destructive marriage, is dense and glamorous. Fitzgerald’s startling aptness for a perfect metaphor does not flag either. The problem, the only problem, is that it is hard, somehow, to really care about Dick Divers. But why should this be so?

It could be the over-writing, or under-writing, or perhaps both. First, we are overwhelmed at just how handsome, suave, and nurturing Dick Divers is. So much injustice, and done to such a fine man! Some novelists can’t resist the fantasy of their own person, and by writing themselves into the leading men and women, end up crushing the lead character under the weight of their own immodesty. Or perhaps it is the lack of the shade and depth that comes from believing what is in one’s mind is already on the page. Novelists, like all others, have enough compassion and interest in their own lives that it is hard for them to understand why a character that resembles them so nearly should not automatically lay claim to interest and compassion of others. What results is a flat, unmoving and unmoved character, struggling to arouse enough interest to carry the reader on her voyage through the book. If only we could be more tender to Fitzgerald’s keen disappointments.

Fitzgerald, F.S. (1953). Three Novels. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

Research Bulletin: Words that Make you Smile

2010-01-18T12:03:00.005-05:00

There has been a growing body of evidence that language and other cognitive functions are embodied, that basic sensory and motor processes undergird more complex and abstract cognitive processes. Neuroscientific research has demonstrated that the parts of our brain devoted to action tend to become engaged when we read about actions, for example (see our previous post here). Recently this work has been extended to the realm of emotions, using a very clever paradigm. Francesco Foroni and Gun R. Semin (2009), two researchers from The Netherlands, examined whether reading verbs such as “to smile” or “to frown” would result in subtle smiles or frowns on the part of the reader. Movement of the facial muscles was measured using small electrodes (i.e., facial electromyography) as participants read action verbs pertaining to facial expressions or emotional adjectives (e.g., funny, annoying). For both sets of words, the muscles in the face appropriate for producing the corresponding facial expression were activated, but the effect was stronger for the action verbs. This is much in line with a previous finding that demonstrated similar responses in facial muscles when people looked at pictures of actual smiles and frowns (Dimberg et al., 2000).

Foroni and Semin extended these results in a second experiment, designed to examine whether these tiny facial movements impact our judgments. If reading “to smile” produces a tiny smile on our face, do these motor movements play a role in how funny we perceive something to be? What if these motor movements were inhibited, would we still see an effect on judgments? The researchers again presented adjectives and action verbs, but this time they were presented subliminally (flashed so briefly that the participants were not aware of what was shown). After each flashed word, participants then read a cartoon and had to rate how funny they thought it was. Importantly, half of the people were asked to hold a pencil in their mouth while making these judgments, effectively preventing them from producing the tiny smiles and frowns seen in the first experiment. What the researchers found was that subliminally-presented action verbs, but not adjectives, affected how funny the participants rated the cartoons. But this only occurred when they were permitted to make the subtle facial movements (i.e., those who did not have to hold a pencil in their mouths). So, not only does reading some words result in tiny facial movements corresponding to the appropriate emotion, these tiny movements also affect our subsequent emotional judgements. This clever experiment seems much in line with the idea that while reading fiction we undergo an embodied simulation of experience that involves real emotions (e.g., Oatley, 1999).

Dimberg, U., Thumberg, M., & Elmehed, K. (2000). Unconscious facial reactions to emotional facial expressions. Psychological Science, 11, 86–89.

Foroni, F., & Semin, G. R. (2009). Language that puts you in touch with your bodily feelings. Psychological Science, 20, 974–980.

Oatley, K. (1999). Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation. Review of General Psychology, 3, 101–117.

Image Credit

Revisiting Inoculation

2010-01-13T23:44:00.009-05:00

In a post last summer, I broached the idea of narrative inoculation, and considered ways in which inoculation might take place:

In narrative contexts, inoculation refers to the function that opposing ideas may have in strengthening the ideas they critique.

For example, the desensitization of familiarity might complement the cognitive dissonance reduction of a concept too difficult, dissonant, or fear-inducing to fit into everyday governing narratives. ... Commodification ... exemplifies yet other paths by which symbolic mechanisms help to vaccinate us against the viral critiques and crises that might suggest problems with our current practices or explanatory frames.

With the circulation of H1N1 and our attempts to inoculate against the rapidly changing virus, the metaphor of inoculation has gained recent resonance. I saw the concept mobilized for the first time during the last month on an agriculture website, not exactly the place I'd expected it: the basic argument (not phrased in the vocabulary of inoculation, but using the concept) was that organizations like the Humane Society have been successful in their campaigns critiquing mainstream meat production practices in part because consumers have become unfamiliar with the stories that describe modern agriculture. In a fascinating rhetorical prescription, the essay author suggested that instead of promoting abstract agricultural products as symbolically desirable ("Beef, it's what's for dinner," Pork, the other white meat," and "Got milk?"), modern farmers needed to grab the narrative bull by the storied horns, and give consumers a taste of the same process-oriented story that has served critics so well.

This prescription is striking, and suggests some interesting categories of effect for the implementation of inoculation. At one extreme, inoculating someone with a story line could be likened to desensitization. What starts as exposure therapy, making the ascent of elevators an acceptable trajectory and experience, may end up inuring soldiers, for example, to situations that are understandably emotion-provoking. In the livestock case in question, this line of reasoning might suggest, give people enough of the stories of confined animal raising that form the backbone of the agricultural horror genre, and they will stop having such overblown (it is implied) reactions to cute piggies in concrete stalls. And I suspect that this is, in fact, the goal in mind. For many farmers and those close to them, a clearer sense of the story of the everyday life of farming puts the photogenic plight of livestock in a context where the difficult structural circumstances and human drama make the decisions that lead to particular livestock practices seem inescapable -- and perhaps familiar, inoculated against.

However, as much as this may well happen to some degree, looking at what appears to happen to many people as they are exposed to vaccination-level doses of stories coded as upsetting by many mainstream audiences, it appears that any analysis of narrative inoculation also has to consider the narrative structures that make things sayable -- or not. In the same way that "cancer" is said only in a whisper by some, talking about where food comes from -- particularly if its origins might elicit an emotional response -- is taboo for some, or at least not "table talk." This suggests the presence of guiding scripts, such as the film scripts to which I've linked above -- the narratives that make it ok to talk about raw meat and its origins, for example, or that give us exploratory guidelines for heading into such territory. This raises further interesting questions about what happens when someone is exposed to a story fragment such as "confined animals gain weight faster" vs. "confined animals pine for outdoors" -- each three word phrase evokes such vastly additional stories, and yet, would one inoculate against the other? If I had thought, "on the one hand, they do gain weight faster," does that moderate the resonance of the story I envision along with, "pining for outdoors"?

Lights, Cameras, Fiction

2010-01-11T19:01:00.003-05:00

It is becoming increasingly difficult to discuss the psychology of fiction in light of the blurring boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. This is particularly true of television, where reality TV has come to dominate programming. Although these shows were permitted to continue during the recent writer's strike in America, this decision seems suspect in light of recent admissions that the content of these shows is often more planned or "written" than not. The controversy surrounding James Frey's book, A Million Little Pieces, also exemplifies the public's thirst for a reality that embodies all the thrill of fiction.

A short animated collaboration between cartoonist Chris Ware and This American Life's Ira Glass (below) provides an additional facet for consideration. Admittedly, it does not deal directly with fiction, nonfiction, and how the two may be distinguished. What it does do is provide remarkable insight into how turning cameras on reality transforms us in some very fundamental ways. Given the direction that entertainment media is headed, these changes are certainly deserving of note and perhaps no small amount of concern.

Research Bulletin: A Sad Decline

2010-01-07T13:11:00.005-05:00

In a recent post entitled "The Writer's Fingerprint" (click here), Raymond Mar discussed computer search over a corpus of an author's works to detect idiosyncratic uses of language. Using these methods, linguistic fingerprints have been found, left by particular authors at the scene of their writings.

Comparable methods have also been used to detect linguistic changes that occur to particular writers over their lifetime. Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst have used three measures of Agatha Christie's detective novels, written between the age of 28 (The mysterious affair at Styles) and the age of 82 (The postern of fate). The measures they used were the size of vocabulary, the number of repetitions of fixed phrases, and the use of indefinite words (such as "thing," "anything," "something").

Agatha Christie was born in 1890, and died in 1976. She was enormously prolific. According to Lancashire and Hirst, she wrote 85 novels and plays, and by 1990 two billion copies of her works had been sold. Each of her works was planned meticulously before she started to write it, and she received little or no input from editors. This last fact is important from the point of view of how far the writings that were analyzed were attributable solely to the author.

Lancashire and Hirst followed the method used by Peter Garrard and his colleagues (2005) in their analysis of the effects of early Alzheimer's Disease on Iris Murdoch. Garrard et al. found that changes of word-use by Murdoch indicated that when she was writing her last book she was already in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and that it was her word-use rather than her syntax that was affected.

For Agatha Christie, Lancashire and Hirst analyzed the first 50,000 words of each of 15 of her detective novels. They found that, in comparison with the detective novels she wrote between the ages of 28 and 32, those written between the ages of 81 and 82 showed a 15 to 30% loss in vocabulary and a 14% increase in the use of repeated phrases. Her last detective novel had 1.23% of indefinite words, as compared with 0.27% in her first. Lancashire and Hirst conclude that, like Iris Murdoch, Agatha Christie had started to suffer from dementia by the time of her last writings, perhaps Alzheimer's Disease.

Though we all decline in our abilities of recall with aging, Alzheimer's seems to have severe effects on cues for retrieval from memory. It is a sad decline, perhaps especially sad for writers.

Peter Garrard, Lisa Maloney, Jack Hodges, & Karalyn Patterson (2005). The effects of very early Alzheimer’s disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author. Brain, 128, 250–260.

Lancashire, I., & Hirst, G. (2009). Vocabulary changes in Agatha Christie's mysteries as an indication of dementia: A case study. Paper presented at the 19th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, Cognitive Aging: Research and Practice, 8–10 March, Toronto.

From Play to Fiction

2010-01-04T09:03:00.009-05:00

Last year saw the publication of Brian Boyd's important book On the origin of stories, reviewed in our Books on the Psychology of Fiction (for which please click here). In it Boyd argues that fiction is a human universal evolved from play, already present in other mammals, and emphasized in humans.

I think that the first psychologist to suggest that fiction originates in play was Sigmund Freud. In 1908 he published an article in a Berlin literary magazine, entitled Der dichter und das phantasieren (Creative writing and day-dreaming). It starts like this:

We laymen have always been intensely curious to know ... from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable (p. 131).

The secret? It’s that the writer draws on the play of childhood, and on day-dreaming which is one of its adult continuations. In play, says Freud, children act out their wishes: of being grown up. Day-dreaming and night dreaming, Freud asserts, are also expressions of intense wishes. Writers—especially popular writers—offer such dreams which are typically of either (as Freud puts it in a slightly stuffy way) an ambitious or erotic kind. He uses these terms to indicate the motivations of what we now call action stories (liked mainly by men) and romances (liked mainly by women). He points out that in an action story a hero may lie “unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds” at the end of one chapter and find himself, at the beginning of the next chapter, being “carefully nursed and on the way to recovery.” One reads such stories with a sense of security. They are of what we wish for ourselves, to succeed in a grand way despite all adversity, and to be tenderly cared for. In raw form such phantasies in adulthood would seem too infantile for us to admit to others or even to our selves. Creative writers transmute such ideas into something acceptable.

A year earlier Freud had published his first work on fiction: Delusions and dreams in Jensen's Gradiva. In it he analyzes Norbert Hanhold, a fictional archaeologist who is the protagonist of Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 novel, Gradiva. In the story Hanhold obtains a copy of a Roman bas relief of a walking woman in a flowing garment, and starts to experience compelling phantasies and dreams about her … (Freud himself acquired a copy of this same bas relief in 1907, and it is still on the wall of his room in the London house where he died, now a museum.)

Freud points out that play in childhood is a source of intense pleasure. We don't give up such pleasures, Freud asserts, we exchange their sources for something else. So as play declines towards the end of childhood, it's exchanged for other things, equally pleasurable, that derive from it, such as fiction.

Brian Boyd (2009). On the origin of stories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sigmund Freud (1907). Delusions and dreams in Jensen's Gradiva. In A. Dickson (Ed.), Pelican Freud Library, 14: Art and literature (pp. 29-118). London: Penguin (current edition 1985).

Sigmund Freud (1908). Creative writers and day-dreaming. In A. Dickson (Ed.), Pelican Freud Library, 14: Art and literature (pp. 130-141). London: Penguin (current edition 1985).

Travelogue: San Francisco

2009-12-31T00:03:00.002-05:00

On a clear day, with a blue-blue sky touched by wisps of high cirrus, few American cities could be as spectacular as San Francisco. Not only are there steep hills and vistas but, in many of the residential streets, there stand—plentiful and elegant—the distinctive wooden houses sometimes known as Queen Annes, in tasteful yellows, restrained greys, and demure beiges.

Nor are the staples of art, education, and gustation, neglected here. On the new University of California San Francisco Campus at Mission Bay, there are outdoor art-works which include two 49-feet-tall steel plates by local sculptor, Richard Serra. One of the plates slants sideways slightly to the north, and the other slightly to the south. They stand outside an eatery called Peasant Pies that is furnished with beautiful tables made from wood salvaged from demolished buildings. I was pleased to find in it a Soup and Pie Combo for $5.70: Vegan Vegetable Soup plus a Basque Beef and Potato Pie. Delicious.

Transport, too, is very fine in San Francisco. As well as the excellent buses and trains, there are, of course, the famous cable cars. In each one, a giant pincer device passes down through its floor into channels in the roadway wherein run the cables at a constant 9.5 miles an hour. The car operator, known as the gripman—typically a six-foot-something twenty-five-year-old—hauls heftily on a long lever to clasp the pincer onto a cable so that the car can be pulled by it up the steep hills. I understand that the first gripwoman, after working on her upper-body strength, started employment in 1998. The pleasure of a ride on a cable car is exceeded only by a visit to the cable barn, where one can see the marvellous machinery and winding gear for the cables. Almost as good as the cable cars is the F-Market streetcar line that runs from Fisherman's Wharf, to the Embarcadero, and up the hill of Market Street to Castro. Although many of the F-Market cars are only sixty years old, some are much older. They have been brought here from across America—from New York, from Baltimore, from the Boston Elevated Railway, and elsewhere—and some have come from as far away as Italy, Australia, and Japan.

My mother-in-law, whom my family and I are visiting, lives in a house not far from where the F-Market streetcars turn round. Her road is parallel to, and further up the hill from, Castro Street. From her windows one can look eastwards across the roofs, to the fjord-like San Francisco Bay, and beyond to the Berkeley Hills and Oakland. On many days, a vivid sunrise splashes a mile into the sky across the whole eastern horizon. And, as daylight grows and I gaze out across the city, I wonder whether, in a moment, a flying saucer might glide noiselessly past.

My mother-in-law lives on the edge of San Francisco's gay district where one sees, in the shops and on the streets, many more lesbian and gay couples than straight couples. She attends a church which is also the Catholic Church of the gay community, which has a fine choir and holds services which have about them a certain ceremony. Religious belief is beyond my capacity, but on some Christmas Eves, I have gone with my mother-in-law and the rest of the family to this church. One year, I remember a warm and humorous priest giving a sermon that took the form of a shaggy-dog story. It was about the three kings, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, from the East, following a star on their journey to Bethlehem for the first Christmas. It had all the detours and innuendo necessary to a good shaggy dog story. Its culmination was achieved—one could imagine it happening right here in San Francisco—when the three kings reached the end of their journey, but were mistaken for three queens.

The editors of OnFiction wish all our readers a happy 2010.

One Shining Word

2009-12-28T17:04:00.002-05:00

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

That a poet as talented as Emily Dickinson would have said this is not a mystery, for poets must gaze at words with as much love as astronomers tracing galaxies in the midnight-blue skies. But how many of us, even those who make our living by words, still think of a written word as inscrutable and alluring, worthy of the sustained contemplation that foreshadows love? Not very many, and for a good reason. It is the same reason that makes it easy to lose sight of the preciousness of water, when we can command its presence by turning on a faucet, and when we can use it so unglamorously in flushing a toilet. A written word is so ubiquitous that teenagers text each other around the same dinner table, and e-mail is a preferred form of communication to a colleague sitting in the next cubicle. It is difficult, indeed, to think of words as precious, but is hard, too, not to grope to imagine a time when the words still shone.

It is easy to imagine an elderly bureaucrat in the court of Mycenae or Crete, to imagine him spending his days carving endless lists of inventory - cows, goats, pigs, oil-jugs, grain, slaves – recording it all meticulously for the benefit of his masters. And imagine him one long evening, when, tricked by the muses, he succumbs into carving a word for which he had no use – ‘dusk’ perhaps, or ‘love’. Imagine his wonder, his awe that a word can resonate, that it can borne things in him. And fear too, of what a word that has no use may do. Imagine him in the morning, sobered from his drunkenness by more useful words, more cows, more pigs and goats. It is easy to imagine our ancient gentleman never again letting himself be seduced into carving a word that has no use, for he was no fool, and knew the power of one shining word.

But there is no need to imagine. We can watch ourselves carving cows and pigs and goats on our computer screens, squeezing all our words, even ‘dusk’ or ‘love’ for the last cent. And unlike our ancient gentleman, we are no longer afraid, either, that a word could resonate enough to disturb our placid surface. It is not words that have lost their power. It is we, who no longer shine.

The Future of Reading

2009-12-24T11:48:00.003-05:00

Last week I took part in a television discussion on the future of reading, on a program called The Agenda (on TVO, arranged by Wodek Szemberg and hosted by Steve Paikin; you can watch the program, broadcast on 16 December, by clicking here). The other people in the discussion were Bob Young (who runs the Institute for the Future of the Book, click here), Bill Buxton (Chief Researcher at Microsoft), Mark Federman (a researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), and Cynthia Good (former Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at Penguin Canada, now Director of the Creative Book Publishing Program at Humber College, in Toronto).

The discussion was on whether the computer and the internet were changing the way we read, and whether they have already put in place the elements of a revolution that will be as significant for reading as the introduction of printed books by Johannes Gutenberg 555 years ago.

Perhaps the most obvious change in the last couple of years has been that the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle, and the Apple i-Phone, have appeared, which connect to the internet, and which enable one to choose, download, and read books, all by means of one portable device. The new technological niche opened up here is that of replacing the hardback and the paperback (the printed codex) with electronic print on a small computer interface. The opportunity that this brings is to hold thousands of books in a piece of hardware the size of one book (or less). It will make for less weight in your luggage when you travel, save shelf-space in your house, require fewer trees to be chopped down, and save you trips to the bookshop. The worry is that it will cause these bookshops to close, and that it will mark the end of traditional publishing. In all this, however, the book and the act of reading stay much the same. The new electronic reading devices are designed to emulate the print-on-paper book. They already do a pretty good job, and no doubt they will get better.

The next phase of the revolution is only just beginning. It will be to make both writing and reading more interactive: writing-and-reading. For instance every blog, including OnFiction, is a publisher, and offers the opportunity not only for more people to write and promulgate what they write, but for people to engage with the writers in discussion, a mode that we at OnFiction, of course, encourage in comments sections at the end of each post. This mode of interactivity has much further to go. Spontaneity in writing is likely to become more highly valued. There are already on-line games in which players jointly produce fictional worlds and fictional interactions. Authors can make use of feedback from readers, readers can engage with each other … the new modes of interactivity for fiction and non-fiction will be fascinating to witness.

Will the book as we know it become extinct? In the TVO discussion, Cynthia Good and I found ourselves on the side of dinosaurs in relation to the other three panel members, the techno-chappies, who pronounced the paper book already obsolete.

The coming into existence of the paper-and-print book has many accomplishments, two of which, it seems to me, were scarcely foreseeable in 1455. They are entirely remarkable. One was to enable the emergence and wide appreciation of novels and short-stories: forms in which authors spend months and years on a work, thinking, drafting and re-drafting, so that they can reach all the way down into the subjects they treat. The other has been the possibilities for readers to enter into relationships—quite intimate relationships—with books, with authors, with fictional characters. in his essay Sur la lecture (On reading) Marcel Proust put it like this.

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it's because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: "What did they think of us?"—"Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?"—"Did they like us?"—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading (p. 40, my translation).

Marcel Proust (1905). Sur la lecture. Mozambook http://www.bullesdozer.com/mediatheque/ebook/Proust/Sur%20la%20lecture.pdf (current edition 2001).

Forbidden Love

2009-12-21T17:43:00.003-05:00

It must be a quality of snobs to have to be pushed in the direction in which multitudes are already running. In this particular case, 17 million readers of the book, and in the first day of film release, at least 3 million viewers. The enormity of Twilight’s success made me conflicted – a bit like going to the dentist to have a tooth pulled out. Not only do you anticipate pain, but also a sense of emptiness and loss afterward. I mean, what is one to expect from a film described as a ‘teenage vampire romance flick’?

And sure, it was a teenage flick, and about vampires and romance, but not quite in that order. The film had two recommendations – the way it was filmed (beautifully), and its eternally animating theme (forbidden love). In this case, the never-to-be-consummated romance is between the awkward and fortunately-named Bella and her ethereal-looking, handsome, and terribly conflicted lover Edward. Bella’s very scent arouses his passions, both as a man and as a vampire. Here we have it – one’s own nature turned against itself. Will they be forever suspended just beyond the reach of each other’s kiss, or shall one of them sacrifice their very essence for love…

Well, probably neither. Meyers isn’t Shakespeare or Keats, and judging by the number of new Twilight books and movies coming out, it might take a very long while for this particular saga to reach its conclusion. And while I might not be tempted to see another installation of the story, now at least I don’t shrink a little inside every time faces of the Twilight protagonists light up the magazine covers. Rather I imagine millions searching, if a bit too earnestly, for a thread to lead them out of the labyrinth to their own love.

Research Bulletin: The Writer’s Fingerprint

2009-12-17T08:00:00.001-05:00

A recent BBC article described a study by Sebastian Bernhardsson (2009) and colleagues, in which they examined how the number of unique words (appearing only once) in a text relates to how long the overall text is. While it should go without saying that a longer text is likely to have more unique words than a shorter text, the relationship between the number of such words and the length of the text turns out to differ by author. Bernhardsson and colleagues (2009) examined various works of different length by Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and D. H. Lawrence. What they found was that each author produced a unique curve that could be seen as a sort of finger-print for that author. Moreover, this curve appeared consistent across works, and works of different lengths, leading the researchers to conclude that whenever writers create a work they are pulling from a hypothetical “meta-book,” that encompasses their style.

While it would be nice to see this work replicated, using a greater corpus of authors, the idea that a writer’s style can be quantified using relatively simple word-count techniques is not a new one. Jamie Pennebaker, for example, has demonstrated that language use is an individual difference that can be used to predict a wide variety of things, including health outcomes and personality (e.g., Pennebaker & Graybeal, 2001). That our style of writing reflects something innate to our self and being, in a very real way, probably comes as no surprise to those of us who write. It is comforting, however, that this is not mere intuition but a phenomenon profound enough in magnitude to be detected using relatively crude research methods. It would be interesting to examine how a person’s writing style changes, and how these changes might reflect changes in the individual as a result of personal growth or encounters with unfortunate happenstance.

Bernhardsson, S., Correa da Rocha, L. E., & Minnhagen, P. (2009). The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language. New Journal of Physics, 11, 123015. (Online journal)

Pennebaker, J. W., & Graybeal, A. (2001). Patterns of natural language use: Disclosure, Personality, and Social Integration. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 90-93.