tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post2363586387708072810..comments2024-03-19T02:14:31.704-04:00Comments on <center>OnFiction</center>: Research Bulletin: Minds of Their OwnKeith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-56131147647323228862008-08-19T19:42:00.000-04:002008-08-19T19:42:00.000-04:00Thank you, Bill. I too have wondered about the rel...Thank you, Bill. I too have wondered about the relation of autonomous characters to Freudian ideas. The term I have used, "split," comes from psychoanalysis. But I am not sure what else to say in this direction. Although I used to be somewhat skeptical about the importance of theory of mind, I think I have come round. Certainly the term is now firmly established in developmental research. As you pointed out yourself, the idea derives from Piagetian perspective taking, and hence from being able to take the perspective of another. That seems an interesting idea to me.Keith Oatleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-62307215098107873232008-08-18T19:01:00.000-04:002008-08-18T19:01:00.000-04:00Thanks for your remarks, Keith. Though I don't wri...Thanks for your remarks, Keith. Though I don't write fiction, I've heard anecdotes of characters "resisting" their authors for decades. I've also got decades of experience trying to wrestle my ideas into shape and, of course, sometimes it's so bad that I just have to give up. But it's only in the last 2, 3, 4, whatever, years that it's occurred to me that they might be aspects of the same phenomenon, hence my comment to your piece.<BR/><BR/>But your remark prompted me to think of the Freudian unconscious, which is likely to impinge on a novelist rather differently than on a mathematician or a sociologist, or even a literary critic. A character that embodies an aspect of one's unconscious (whatever we mean by "embody" and "unconscious") might well resist authorial control. Beyond this, of course, we commonly talk about ourselves as though the mind were full of agents, some of which obey us, and some of which do not (George Lakoff has an article about this*).<BR/><BR/>As for theory of mind, some years ago Kelvin Konner registered a protest against the term, suggesting that "This is fascinating stuff and something we need to understand. But a term such as ‘theory of mind’ simply stands in the way. It makes for catchy article titles but conveys no meaning" (Melvin Konner, Bad Words, <I>Nature</I>, 411, p. 743; 14 June 2001). I tend to agree with him. I have some faint hint of an idea of what might be going on in a situation where you ask a four-year-old what a doll knows about what's behind door number three; given generous helpings of such experimental observations, I can simply ignore the "theory of mind" term. But when we're dealing with adults reading or writing fiction and invoke TOM to explain something about imaginary characters, well, at that point it seems to that the term has taken on a life of its own and simply serves to paper over our ignorance. <BR/><BR/>I mean, if I'm going to use marginal concepts magnified by conceptual tap-dancing and hand-waving, I'd rather go with good old psychoanalysis than this new-fangled theory of mind gizmo.<BR/><BR/>* Lakoff, G. (1996). Sorry, I'm Not Myself Today: The Metaphor System for Conceptualizing the Self. <I>Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar</I>. G. Fauconnier and E. Sweetser. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 91-123.Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-73992985515135294462008-08-18T17:34:00.000-04:002008-08-18T17:34:00.000-04:00Thank you, Bill. I was not thinking about it like ...Thank you, Bill. I was not thinking about it like that, but now that you put it in this way, I am sure that you are right: that part of the issue is of the writer working with constraints that are difficult to reconcile, not unlike a mathematician. Constraint-juggling was the major metaphor that Flower and Hayes came up with from all their research on the writing process. I think that must be the centre of it. It's just that after reading Marjorie Taylor's paper, and with my own sense as a fiction writer who has experienced this phenomenon, Rohan's comment prompted the rather sudden intuition of something else, too: a split between an individualist self (the one that plans, tries to get a book finished, or tries to solve a problem in psychology) and another self, perhaps just as important, of the compellingly social kind. So that might mean a more problematic sort of constraint juggling. Or I am too influenced by the rather dramatic nature of Marjorie Taylor's idea of the autonomous agent, with its link to ideas of theory of mind?Keith Oatleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-3522063939890884762008-08-18T13:04:00.000-04:002008-08-18T13:04:00.000-04:00I wonder . . . Is this so very different from the ...I wonder . . . Is this so very different from the situation of a thinker who's working on this or that subject, and the ideas just won't fall into place like they should? They resist the thinker's will and desire and pull her thoughts in unanticipated and, perhaps, undesired directions. <BR/><BR/>It seems to me that any creative process that's a genuine exploration, whether of imaginary characters in a fictional world, mathematical objects in some abstract domain, concepts in some psychological model, and so forth, is going to have an integrity that "resists" the easy impulses of the creator. Where the domain is that of fiction, this resistance may be experienced as that of a character having his or her own will. When it's an intellectual domain, it's just, well, things aren't working out.Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-22511773932875777652008-08-14T09:22:00.000-04:002008-08-14T09:22:00.000-04:00Thank you, Rohan, for this comment. These instance...Thank you, Rohan, for this comment. These instances from Trollope and Grafton are very interesting. The Grafton one, in particular, connects both to the quotation from E.M. Forster in this post, and to our earlier post about writer's block. Part of the purpose of fiction, as it seems to me, is to explore what it is to be human. Now, in the process of writing, is discovered a disunity within ourselves that had been only partially recognized: between an apparently controlling and individualistic consciousness (as represented by the writer wanting to get on with a plan) and a strong influence of the goals and idiosyncrasies of other people (as represented by fictional characters) in their predicaments.Keith Oatleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-54899340587911019062008-08-13T21:54:00.000-04:002008-08-13T21:54:00.000-04:00I recall that in Anthony Trollope's Autobiography ...I recall that in Anthony Trollope's <I>Autobiography</I> he describes walking in the woods and thinking about his characters and the situation he'd devised for them until he knew, or discovered, exactly what they would do. On a somewhat different level, perhaps, I recently watched an interview with mystery novelist Sue Grafton who described a writing rut she had fallen into and said she came out of it when she realized her main character, Kinsey Millhone, "was sulking" because Grafton had been censoring her.Rohan Maitzenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12111722115617352412noreply@blogger.com