OnFiction's Fifth Anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

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.