The Arts and Empathy: Update

I previously wrote about my participation in a fascinating panel discussion regarding the arts and empathy, organized by the Roots of Empathy foundation. Thanks to my fellow panelists, Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director, Toronto International Film Festival) and Martha Durbin (Chair, Board of Trustees for the Royal Ontario Museum), as well as the moderator (Mary Ito, CBC), we had a very stimulating discussion of how exposure to all formats of artistic expression might relate to empathy and understanding. The full video of this discussion can now be viewed on the Roots of Empathy website. I would be happy to elaborate or clarify any of my comments from this discussion, just post your questions below in the Comments section.

What Traits Allow Actors to Embody Their Character?

As you close your eyes, you begin to visualize, carry the weight, and conjure the emotion. For those who are fascinated by the ability to create seemingly real experiences from imagined ones, this particular study may catch your eye. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of how actors are able to become their character so convincingly, a group of researchers examined whether acting ability is related to traits linked to hypnotizability (Panero, Goldstein, Rosenberg, Hughes, & Winner, 2016). This connection was drawn from the fact that in both acting exercises and hypnotic induction, individuals draw on personally-experienced events. Actors draw on their emotions and experiences and then fit those events to the character they wish to play. In a hypnotic state, individuals also draw on real-life experienced that parallel the instructions delivered. For example, if the hypnotic suggestion was for an individual’s arm to feel heavy, this individual would likely draw on a time when they truly experienced their arm feeling weighed down (Panero et al., 2016). 

To examine this putative link between acting abilities and hypnotizability, this study looked at different tendencies associated with hypnotizability: imaginative suggestibility, absorption, and fantasy proneness. Imaginative suggestibility is the ability to recreate an imagine situation so that it feels real. Absorption is a state of focus completely dedicated to experiencing an object (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974). And, lastly, a fantasy prone individual is someone who spends a great deal of time fantasizing and daydreaming (Merckelbach, 2004). The researchers found that actors did indeed score higher than musicians and nonartists on all three tendencies. So it seems that actors do indeed rate themselves higher in traits that have been linked to hypnotizability. This study provides important insight into the abilities actors may possess that allow them to become their character. 

Posted by Michelle Vinitsky

Merckelbach, H. (2004). Telling a good story: Fantasy proneness and the quality of fabricated memories.
Personality and Individual Differences, 37, 1371–1382. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2004.01.007

Panero, M. E., Goldstein, T. R., Rosenberg, R., Hughes, H., & Winner, E. (2016). Do actors possess traits
associated with high hypnotizability? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10(2), 233-239. doi: 10.1037/t10470-000

Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences (“absorption”),
a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83, 268–277. doi: 10.1037/h0036681

The Uses of Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Enabling and the Persuasive

How are we to think about the tension in fiction between how a writer enables the reader to draw his or her own conclusions and how a writer persuades the reader?

Great writers have concentrated on the enabling so, for instance, John Keats said admiringly that William Shakespeare had a "negative capability" (letter to his brothers, of 21-27 December, 1817, p. 261) of writing not to express his own capabilities and preoccupations, but instead to lose his ego and enter the minds of his characters. People have wondered what Shakespeare's views were. Was he a Catholic? Was he a monarchist? This misses the point: Shakespeare was primarily interested in writing so that his audiences could reach their own conclusions. In the same way Anton Chekhov wrote, in a letter of 27 October 1888 to Alexei Suvorin that there are two things one must not confuse:

answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author… It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference” (Yarmolinsky, 1973, p. 117).

At the same time every artist has his or her own vision, and we are affected by it. When we read James Joyce's Dubliners we are invited to see the world differently than in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Yet more problematic: what are we to make of works such as Franz Kafka's The trial, which persuades us, overtly, of ways in which the societies in which we live are both inexorable and inscrutable? Kafka's work is no less art than is Chekhov's. The history of world literature can be read in terms of different cultures offering us images of a political kind: this is how to live or here's what we should change. They have offered knowledge of how cultures work, and hence of certain possibilities of cooperation.

Here's my current solution. The first part is to say, boldly, that art proper (as compared with pseudo-art, see Collingwood, 1938) does enable us to experience our own thoughts and emotions and even change ourselves by small increments. In art proper, the artist says: "Look at this. What do you think and feel about it?" In a lovely exchange in his 1990 film 102 Boulevard Houssmann Alan Bennett has Proust ask his housekeeper, Celeste, whether she ever reads novels. She says she does, occasionally: "To take me out of myself." Proust replies by asking whether a novel might take her into herself. This is the very centre of art, the offering of a gift in which as one loses oneself in a work of art one can be most oneself. In terms of our research results, this squares with our finding that art can enable changes of personalty, not of a kind in which an author has persuaded us, but of our own kind, where the author has enabled us (Djikic et al. 2009).

The second part is to say that enabling is not contradicted by the fact that every artist has an individual vision, and chooses to put to us certain questions. Many artists offer views from a dominant culture. Some are subversive. The artist's choices certainly affect the reader or viewer in a persuasive way. I now think this is all right (from the point of view of art being enabling) because there are many works of art so that, even if some are deviant, even destructive, as one reads one samples across the space of human possibility. This makes for pluralism. Of course pluralism, with its possibility of understanding many kinds of others from their points of view and even (nowadays) from the inside, itself carries a political conviction, that to engage in such sampling is better than any authoritarian stance, and that human individuality is of value. This position squares with our group's results that reading fiction enables us to understand others better, and to empathize with them (Mar et al. 2006).

Each artist achieves a balance between a work that is enabling (which the reader makes his or her own) and a vision that is persuasive (with its implications for how we might live). Science is the paradigm of the persuasive. In science one says, here is the evidence, and this is the conclusion, don't you agree? Art contains evidence, and most writers of fiction work hard on their research to make what they write accurate. But fictional art works not just by finding reliable correspondences with evidence of the outer world, but by suggesting resonances with what is within, in ways that may change as we come to recognize them.

Bennett, A. ((1990). 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Film in the set "Alan Bennett at the BBC."

Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Djikic, M., Oatley, K., Zoeterman, S., & Peterson, J. (2009). On being moved by art:  How reading fiction transforms the self. Creativity Research Journal, 21, 24-29. (Available in OnFiction archives, click here.)

Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin (currrent edition 1976).

Kafka, F. (1925). The trial. Harmondsworth: Penguin (current edition 1955).

Keats, J. (1816-20). Selected poems and letters of Keats (Ed. D  Bush). New York: Houghton Mifflin (current edition 1959).

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

Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.

Yarmolinsky, A. (Ed.). (1973). Letters of Anton Chekhov. New York: Viking.

Quick Hit: Art, Science and the Brain

I'll be participating in a conference that may be of interest to OnFiction readers. What follows is their example blog post, generously provided so that I don't have to write my own:

At the end of the month/beginning of next month I’ll be taking part in a conference that is being put on by ArtsSmarts and Social Innovation Generation at the MaRS Discovery District (SiG@MaRS) – Art, Science and the Brain: New Models of Learning for the 21st Century. It’s a two-day affair (Monday, October 31st – Tuesday, November 1st) that promises to be very interesting: 21 sessions, and 80+ innovators from across North America whose expertise includes education, neuroscience, art and technology. We’ll be putting together interactive sessions with the goal of letting participants collaborate to reimagine the education system. If you would like more information you can take a look at the website.

In the Brain of the Beholder

A very fine summer school organized by Ed Tan was held this July under the auspices of the University of Amsterdam's Centre for Creation, Content and Technology. Its title was "Reading Mediated Minds: Empathy with persons and characters in media and art works" and it was attended by some forty or so graduate students whose research is on print fiction, media, and film.

The first presentation, entitled "Neuroaesthetics," was by the distinguished neuroscientist Semir Zeki. He announced that that we are at the beginning of a revolution, equal in importance to the Copernican one. It's of being able to find scientific answers to questions about subjective mental states. So striking was this statement, that I thought I had better pass on what Zeki said to readers of OnFiction.

One question, said Zeki, is: What are the neural correlates of beauty and ugliness? Kawabata and Zeki (2004) used 192 paintings categorized as abstract, still life, portraits, and landscapes, and had 10 participants rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, from ugly to beautiful. Some days later in an fMRI machine the participants were shown ugly pictures (that had been rated 1 and 2), neutral pictures (rated 5 and 6) and beautiful pictures (rated 9 and 10). As compared with ugly and neutral paintings, beautiful pictures more strongly activated parts of the visual cortex as well as areas of the orbitofrontal cortex that have previously been found to be associated with reward, and emotional engagement, the more beautiful the picture was rated, the more was the activation. By contrast, ugly paintings (as compared with beautiful ones) more intensely activated parts of the motor cortex.

Zeki went on to say that beauty is not art, but that one of the characteristics of great art is ambiguity. We are familiar with visually ambiguous figures, such as the wife/mother-in-law figure, which can seem like the head of young woman looking away from us over her shoulder, and which alternates with a side-view of the face of an older woman with a prominent chin. Zeki proposed that a characteristic of great art is not visual ambiguity (in the manner of ambiguous figures) but cognitive ambiguity. Modern fMRI studies have shown that ambiguity is a property of the brain, as interpretation shifts so does brain activation.

An example of cognitive ambiguity is Jan Vermeer's painting "The girl with the pearl earring." Zeki (2004) has written about the girl in this picture as follows.

She is at once inviting, yet distant, erotically charged but chaste, resentful and yet pleased. These interpretations must all involve memory and experience, of what a face that is expressing these sentiments would look like. The genius of Vermeer is that he does not provide an answer but, by a brilliant subtlety, manages to convey all the expressions, although the viewer is only conscious of one interpretation at any given moment. Because there is no correct solution, the work of art itself becomes a problem that engages the mind. ‘‘Something, and indeed the ultimate thing, must be left over for the mind to do,’’ wrote Schopenhauer (p. 189).

Zeki pointed out that Michelangelo left two-thirds of his works unfinished and that Cezanne, too, left paintings unfinished, saying that he was not interested in finished paintings, because a painting is finished in the brain.

Kawabata, H., & Zeki, S. (2004). Neural correlates of beauty. Journal of Neurophysiology, 91, 1699-1705.

Zeki, S. (2004). The neurology of ambiguity. Consciousness and Cognition, 13, 173-196.

The Imaginary and the Real

 

Norman Rockwell “Marriage License”

Saturday Evening Post Cover © SEPS

Used with kind permission Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, IN.

Address www.saturdayeveningpost.com

 

Two weeks ago, I visited the small town of Stockbridge in Massachusetts and discovered it was where the famous American illustrator and painter Norman Rockwell lived from 1953 onwards.

My room in the charming Red Lion Inn had on its wall a print of one of Rockwell's paintings: "Marriage License." It's a picture of a young six-foot-tall man with short hair, wearing a suit, and with his arm protectively round his fiancée who, even in her white high-heels stands on tiptoe as she carefully holds a fountain pen in her gloved hand to sign her name on the license. Sitting on the other side of the big roll-top desk, looking quizzical, reflective, sceptical perhaps, is the town clerk.

This has been, I think, my favourite Rockwell painting. It invites me to imagine the young man and the young woman totally wrapped up in each other and longing—for the year is 1955—to have sex for the first time. The word "License" in the title is a further hint. At the same time the painting exhibits a fine irony, and I imagine the clerk sitting and waiting, not unkindly and not because he has seen it all before, but in a way that indicates that he knows what might be in store for such young people as they set out in a life together.

I thought I would go and see if there were a real location for this picture. I memorized the shape of the window in the painting, turned right outside the Red Lion and, to my delight, there it was, next-door-but-one: a red brick building bearing the legend "Town Offices 1884." Its side windows were those of the picture.

I went back to my room, looked at the picture again and worked out, from what could be seen through the window, where the scene must have been. The window in the picture is now the front door of the Yankee Candle shop, in which the young woman behind the counter confirmed that I had the location right. She also said she thought that the young people in the picture had indeed married, and had lived in Stockbridge. She said there had been an article in the local paper, The Berkshire Eagle, just a week previously, on people who had been subjects in Rockwell's paintings.

Better and better. I looked up the archive of the Berkshire Eagle, and there was the article, by Amanda Korman about people still living in Stockbridge who had been painted by Rockwell. I e-mailed Amanda Korman to see if she knew anything about the couple in "Marriage License," and she kindly cc'd my enquiry and her reply to Corry Kanzenberg, curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum. She pasted into her e-mail to me the wall label of the oil-on-cavas painting "Marriage License" as follows.

Set in the town clerk's office just footsteps away from Rockwell's first Stockbridge studio on Main Street, Marriage License captures Rockwell's fascination with the somber wood-paneled interiors of his favorite seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Indeed, the building itself is fashioned after one pictured in Jan Vermeer's A Street in Delft. In keeping with the older style, Rockwell replaced an existing metal file cabinet in the left foreground with an old railroad station stove. His model for the town clerk had recently lost his wife, and the authenticity of his feelings adds power to the poignancy in this study of youth and old age.

Corry kindly told me about the three people in the picture, and also sent me a link to the series of photographs from the museum's archives, taken by Rockwell, one by one as he staged the setting for his picture, in the way he normally did. Here is that link: click here.) Among his arrangements for this picture, Rockwell brought in the roll-top desk and replaced the office filing cabinet with a large wood-burning stove. Finally he posed the people who would be models for the final photograph which, in his painting, he copied, almost exactly. To see Rockwell's final photographic study for "Marriage License" (from which he made his painting) you can go to the website of a 2009 exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum, click here.

The relationship with Vermeer is evocative, because Vermeer was one of the first painters to use a camera obscura (forerunner of photography). He too would pose his models as if in a piece of theatre, to transform a moment in time into the eternity of one of his paintings. (On 15 July 2010 I wrote an OnFiction post on my pilgrimage to Delft to see where Vermeer lived and painted, and in it I discuss the idea of painting as theatre; click here.)

For me, the effect of my research on "Marriage License" prompted a transformation of an entirely different kind: it completely changed the way I saw the painting. Rather than an invitation to the imagination, the picture had become a piece of social history. Knowing that there was a real young couple, who did indeed get married, and knowing now (as Corry told me) that the woman in the picture is still alive and her husband died just three years ago, prompted a completely different impression. Now as I look at the picture I see the young couple as if I were to walk past on the street and see them outside the church door after the ceremony. No more irony. It's no longer a commentary on the social absorption of being in love, no longer the imagination of art, with its layers and implications. It's about the real. I find myself wishing the couple well in their lives together or—knowing now a fragment of their subsequent lives—hoping that their marriage was a good one.

In social history, the young couple are themselves. In art they are themselves and at the same time wonderfully different.

My thanks go to Amanda Korman and Corry Kanzenberg, and to the lady in the Yankee Candle shop. In the transformation from Rockwell's final photographic study to the painting, the words "Town Clerk" on the door have been changed to "Marriage Licenses;" the calendar date has been changed to June 11, 1955 (the date of the issue of the Saturday Evening Post for which this would be the cover picture). There are other changes, too: in the painting, foliage seen through the window has been added and a kitten sidles out from behind the clerk's chair.

Other Women's Garden Stories

I have spent considerable part of the last decade reading and listening to stories about other women's gardens. Over this time, it has become increasingly clear to me how important their storied nature is to the significance of the experience of gardens. The transience of garden experience may partly drive the documentation impulse -- like that associated with travel and food. But the narration of gardens seems to play a psychogeographical function beyond the mere capture and communication of ephemeral beauty. In the Toronto context, this is amply clear: the Toronto Community Garden Network, Afri-Can Food Basket, and FoodShare Toronto Garden projects are all adept at mobilizing the stories of gardens for progressive politics. Their stories of people coming together to grow food help marry the sometimes abstract world of collective politics with the readily imaginable benefits of being able to grow food together. Gifting politicians with honey from urban gardens or showing proud before and after photographs of highrise lawns cum food gardens certainly gets some points across about urban political ecologies! (Much as representations of the White House vegetable garden have helped legitimize vegetable gardening.)

The seeming straightforwardness of the stories that can be told with gardens can be troubling, though. Gardens have been canonical sites for teaching proper citizenship and comportment, and gardens are all too often places where "deserving" poor people are taught that they should be able to fix complex systemic poverty themselves, through a bit "honest work." "Healthy" and "natural," gardens are easily used to encode contentious cultural politics in difficult to question ways.

Food gardens are popular development projects, not just for the cultivation of material sustenance, but also for the cultivation of the self. A quick browse of garden fiction lists exhibit the garden as a powerful tool for individuals: self-realization and escape into reflection and transcendent communion with nature are common themes. The significant percentage of gardening that appears to be performed with some narrative intent belies gardening's focus on individuals, however, and draws attention to the social and communicative nature of gardens -- even beyond the obvious domains of community gardening.

And it these social and communicative functions of gardens as stories that I find fascinating. Given the massive cultural shifts that have taken place around food and agriculture over the past century, how much are gardens "read" in the ways their authors intend? How much of the intent of garden narratives is implicit, even to their gardeners? "Garden studies" is an academic area that brings together art history, literature, architecture, landscape architecture, cultural studies, environmental studies, and geography; how much do readings of garden fiction help garden readers interpret?

Grenness, Johannes, 1914, Woman in Red Dress in Garden with Poppies and Summer Day in a Garden, courtesy of Blogger 'SPhera's excellent entry on Johannes Grenness (with several worthwhile gardens to see).

World Connect, 2011, Niagadina Women’s Community Garden, http://www.worldconnect-us.org/projects/project.php?project=582.

River of No Return

Moments of environmental disaster make me turn to the school of landscape photographers who are compelled to document the awful beauty of those environments with which we have fraught relationships: those pieces of nature whose material sustains us on a daily basis, but in the face of which we are struck dumb.

I owe significant intellectual debts in this vein to Frank Gohlke (although it is Laura McPhee's photograph I show here, from the series River of No Return). Gohlke's fascination with the sublime mirrors a trope we are accustomed to reading through in fiction and in literary nonfiction. Despite this familiarity (consider how often Thoreauvian imagery is invoked in North American nature-inspired writing), explicit representations of the sublime still remains remarkable when we come face to face with them.

It has become more fashionable to bring discomfiting images to the public: Edward Burtynsky's images of industrial ruin, waste, and wreckage have wide public followings and have won accolades via the popularizing TED platform. And it may be almost fictive qualities of the unfathomable environments he represents that make them so palateable: uranium and nickel tailings turn the landscape bright fairytale colors.

It is the creative exploration that happens at the edge of conceivable possibility that intrigues me in the experience of being compelled by these images. After a week of watching the world turn away from terrible suffering brought by natural disasters in Japan to contemplate the possible (but yet fictive) suffering brought by the following industrial disasters, I cannot help but being struck by the fact that the New York Times review of Gohlke's last major retrospective at MOMA begins by likening the amount of energy released by the 1980 Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption to "the detonation of one Hiroshima-size atomic bomb every second for nine hours." Our compulsion toward domains for which our explanatory stories remain only fuzzily drawn is striking and seems matched (and illustrated, as in the news this week) by how little we have to say in the face of the terrible sublime. The review continues,

"showing the effects of a destructive force of unimaginable proportions calls to mind the 18th-century idea of the sublime: the frightening and exhilarating confrontation with an unfathomably vast and powerful universe in which human life seems but a minor and fragile accident."

Art and War

In December 1865, John Ruskin gave a commencement a speech to the cadets graduating from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. It was based on a startling thesis – that war is a necessary precondition to art.

All pure and noble arts are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on Earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people if it remains at peace. There is no art among an agricultural people if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine art, but cannot produce. Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle.

In evidence, Ruskin traces the preoccupation with war and military images in art from Egypt to Greece, to European knights, and onward. My first thought in response to his speech was that from a scientific perspective, the evidence is, at best, correlational. I almost started making a list of confounding variables, then stopped myself to ask a question – not whether art indeed fuels war, but why would Ruskin choose to believe so.

War evokes death, and perhaps it is death that is the culprit without which there could be no art. Art arose around the same time that our predecessors chose not to throw their dead children and spouses away in the forest, but bury them with trinkets that would help them in the next world. So, perhaps it is the belief in the world that is invisible, transcending the senses, the world to be respected, propitiated, the world ever absorbing the dead, that made art possible. But there is, and always has been, death even without the war, so we are left searching further for Ruskin’s high esteem of the power of war to engender art.

A clue could lie in Ruskin’s low esteem of ‘practical’ Romans whose battle wasn’t as ‘poetical’ as that of Greeks or European knights. Here, the distinct evocation of the idea of honor and courage, battle for higher aim, even for its own sake, parallels the idea of art as the creation of objects whose function is not practical, but for its own sake, too. But here I diverge from Ruskin. Just as art is not for its own sake, but a connection to a world that is not material, but experiential or relational, so a war is never for its own sake, but either rapacious or relational. After all, Homer celebrates the reluctant and sometimes misguided battle of Achilles, dying to revenge his beloved Patroclus, but has no kind words for ever-acquiring Agamnemon. And so it is with the war in general. Below the layers of self-deceptions and justifications, it is motivated either by an instinct to acquire and dominate, or protect (or revenge the loss of) one’s relationships, one’s means of connecting to another.

And then perhaps there is the courage that inevitably follows when one is willing to face one’s enemy willingly and openly to protect something that they value more than their own life. It is the courage that in today’s world of various automatized means of destruction has been becoming extinct. How much courage does it take to destroy a life half-way across the world, by sitting in one’s cubicle and pressing a few buttons on the keyboard?

There could be many things without which there could be no art – death, suffering, courage to protect relationships of value at the cost of one’s life, even the existence of warriors unafraid to die for something they value more than their life. But war, with its rapacious greed, indiscriminate destruction, I think war is not one of them.

Ruskin, J. (1865/2008). Woolwich: John Ruskin observes that war gives birth to art. Lapham’s Quarterly, 1(1), 28-30.

In Defense of Re-infatuation

I was fascinated by Maja Djikic's recent post In Defense of Torment, and the idea she probes of the work involved in creative reinvention. Pop culture representations of creativity embrace a strikingly opposed (and perhaps equally off-base) pair of ideas about what it means to be creative: on one hand, the tormented artist is chained to her desk, suffering through a frenzy of productivity like what all good workers are supposed to produce, but inspired and irresistible; on the other hand, creative arts are the domain of relaxation and renewal through a sort of surrender to the pleasure of the sensual. The bad attitude of art students (I discovered when I was one) has a lot to do with the resulting two tone look so often sent their way: wary concern about people driven too close to the edge and fawning envy over the supposed life of Riley lived by those who could afford to while away their days in the leisurely pursuit of the muse.

What seems so obviously off about these widely reproduced ideas about creativity is their assumption of an abdication of agency -- the idea of the artist as either possessed or leisurely does not capture any of the process of work that goes into the production of creative endeavors. In a recent commentary on this summer's art reality TV show, Work of Art, Karen Haselmann pointed out that the spectacularization of making art (in which we see artists scrambling to assemble materials to hasty deadlines) leaves out what is, in fact, the most important part of most creative endeavors: the effortful and often agonizing staring into the unknown, in which we wrest patterns of meaning out of the stuff around us.

As Maja so eloquently pointed out, being able to approach this task does not merely mean being chained to our desks. (Although producing a lot does seem to help.) In addition, as she points out:

It means probing, and sometimes destroying, the inner landscape that has grown insensitive to the elusive caress of art.

It seems worth underlining this sentiment because our habituation to the stimuli and motives around us is so powerful, and the arrangement of our inner landscapes is not something we necessarily consider reorganizing. Especially in the mechanized but oh-so-customizable matrix of our social media devices (who has not learned the palpitations of a lover's text message or an interesting email's arrival in a dull moment?), our receptivities are rapidly reorganized without necessary attention -- and the things that provoke us to meaningful (if sometimes tormented) effort are often all too easy to fail to adequately prioritize. I have an inordinate fondness for a billboard near my house that is much like the one illustrating this essay: the purple rectangle is simultaneously painfully mundane and also dramatically pointing out the novelty of the giant images that insert themselves into our consciousness. Some deserve our infatuation more than others, and we should engage in the repeated effort to sensitize ourselves in ways that satisfy our desires for creative exploration.

Travelogue: In Delft with Vermeer

Last weekend I went on a Quixotic quest to Delft, to try and think myself into the mind of Johannes Vermeer who spent his whole life there. I love Vermeer, especially his painting that is usually called "The art of painting."

"Delft is very touristy," said one of my Dutch friends. Well, it is. But I was being a tourist, and few places in Europe are more charming than Delft, with brickwork streets and alleys, canals with waterlilies, beautiful buildings and bridges, freedom from the infernal combustion engine. To be a really good tourist town in Europe, a place must have been rich several hundred years ago, must not have been bombed in World War II, and must have avoided the high-rises. Delft has these characteristics. It became rich in the age of Dutch colonialism when Vermeer lived.

Only 35 of Vermeer's paintings exist (Schneider, 2000). All but two have women in them. In ten of them, a woman is depicted as concentrating on some activity such as pouring milk, writing or reading a letter, playing a musical instrument. In 11 of them, a woman looks directly at the artist, that is to say at the viewer.

Vermeer was interested in science. He seems to have been one of the first painters to use a camera obscura, and he seems also to have been fascinated by the geometry of the perspectives he created. In the domain of painting he seems to me to have been interested in those matters about which Elaine Scarry (1999) wrote in the domain of prose fiction: how the artist invites the reader—or in this case the viewer—not just to glimpse objects, but to construct scenes. So, as well as perspectival textures such as tiled floors, in 15 of Vermeer's paintings there is illumination of an interior from a window, always on the left of the painting, that infuses a bright glow from that side. Vermeer carefully depicts the transparency of the window glass and the grey of cast shadows. He chooses frequently to offer reflections in mirrors, windows, wine glasses, even earrings. It's as if he is saying to us: "Here are the cues; from them you can construct this scene in your mind."

Although Vermeer is often described as a marvel of naturalism, every one of his interior paintings is a piece of theatre in which the subjects' clothing has been carefully chosen, and emblematic props have been deliberately arranged. The subjects are not so much portraits, as depictions of characters of a kind one might come across in fiction or allegory. Scholars agree that the central figure of "The art of painting" is Clio, the muse of history. She wears a laurel wreath. In one hand she carries a trombone, which signifies fame. In the other hand she holds a book: written history. Behind her is a map of the Netherlands. This painting isn't about painting. It's about a hope for a historical event. Though it used to be dated earlier, it now seems that it was painted around 1672, when the Netherlands was threatened with yet another invasion by one of its European neighbours, and  was hoping to make an alliance with another of them. Not only were Africa, India, China and the Americas invaded by European colonizers but European countries invaded each other. In this picture, it seems, Vermeer hoped that history would be written of how the Dutch had held out and won a famous victory.

I was in Delft on the day of the World Cup Finals. In the evening before the match, streets, squares, and cafes were full of hopeful young men and women in orange T-shirts. Now that the age of European colonialism has thankfully receded, the desire to conquer distant lands and the competition among European countries has come down to football. Can one imagine Vermeer today painting Clio with an orange T-shirt, and holding not a trombone but one of those raucous trumpets that were blown so incessantly by spectators at the matches in South Africa?

In "The art of painting," which should perhaps be renamed "The hope of history," Vermeer depicts Clio with her eyelids lowered, perhaps in modesty. Am I too fanciful to think her lowered eyelids might signify shame? The history of European nations gives us plenty to be ashamed of. Even so, Vermeer has given us some of the world's most wonderful paintings. I visited the place where he is thought to have been buried, in the Oude Kerk. In this striking and austere church there is a very small, very plain, plaque on the floor that says simply "Johannes Vermeer 1632 - 1675." Beside it, were two bunches of flowers and, very movingly, beside the smaller bunch—placed there, so I imagined, by a painter who was grateful for the inspiration that Vermeer has given us—two paint brushes had been laid.

Elaine Scarry (1999). Dreaming by the book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Norbert Schneider (2000). Vermeer: The complete paintings. Köln: Taschen.

Image: Detail from Vermeer's "The art of painting."

Travelogue: Transformative Art

New York is seen as an intense centre of the arts and, having spent four days there last week, OnFiction's correspondent-at-large is able to report that this is still the case, outdoors as well as in.

Outdoors, with some friends and starting at the corner of 20th Street and 10th Avenue, I visited the High Line, which was once an elevated railway and which recently has been artistically transformed into a walk-way park. The time of year wasn't ideal for the flowers, but everything else was perfect, from the ironwork stairs up from street level, to the reiterated motif of something like concrete sleepers laid lengthways along the path, to the pieces of railway track (still there), to the sight (off to one side) of the new IAC building by Frank Gehry, looking luminous even on an already-bright day, and views towards the Hudson River with its sadly-now-deserted piers.

Indoors the arts were seen at their exuberant best in a smallish side-room at St Marks Church over on the Lower East Side, where a theatre company called the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator does its thing, uniting, as it says in its handouts, "elements of the performing arts, visual art, music composition, psychoanalysis, and literature." The play we saw was Three Pianos. The only thing wrong with it was the title, because although three pianos are characters in the play, being pushed energetically around the stage—sometimes while being played—this title does nothing to hint at the what the play is really about. The play is a transformation of Franz Schubert's twenty-four-part song-cycle, Winterreise.

I realize that one could not call a play: Schubert and German Romanticism … Ehem. But that would be a closer title than the one it now has. The play was written, and is performed, by Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy, and Dave Malloy. All act brilliantly, each in several parts, to represent Schubertian goings-on at the beginnings of both the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. All play the piano(s), exquisitely. All sing, beautifully. And, although for the most part they speak in English, all of them occasionally also make a bit of a hash of German. For a couple of the songs, for which they didn't like the music Schubert provided, the writers have composed some of their own. The play includes a professor giving a lecture on the history of commercial pressures on Western classical music in which Church authorities, seemingly stuck with monastic chanting, were delighted at the invention of the idea that two notes could be sung by different people at the same time. It includes, too, a biography of Schubert, and an enactment of one of his parties in which plastic glasses and opened bottles of wine are passed out among the audience.

The Winterreise—winter journey—is a series of poems by Wilhelm Müller that Schubert set to piano and voice. At the beginning of the first song comes this: " I remember a perfect day in May / How bright the flowers, how cool the breeze / The maiden had a friendly smile." As one of the actors explains, the poems are about a wanderer who seems to have lost, or at least mislaid, his loved one. So he goes on a journey, in winter-time. The plot is that nothing happens. As the play-recital started, it reminded me of a formal dinner of about 20 people in honour of a distinguished classical singer who was visiting our university. I remember asking her what she thought of the relation of music to emotion. "Music is all about emotion," she said. "The greater the singer or instrumentalist, the more profound the emotion expressed." That was interesting enough, but then—even better—with the volume of her finely-trained voice turned up slightly too loud for the room we were in, she started to discourse on the difference between German and French romanticism. "In a song, they both start off in the same way," she said. "The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and over there on the other side of the valley, is my beloved. But then," she said, "they diverge. In the German version the singer asks 'Why, oh why, can my loved one and I never be united?' The French version is quite different; in it the singer says: 'And I'm going over to the other side of the valley, right now, so we can have a really nice fuck.'"

Three Pianos evidently grows out of a profound love for Schubert, expressing the emotions of his Lieder in beautiful piano and voice performances, whilst at the same time making hilarious fun of German romanticism. Onto something like a blackboard, in mixtures of German and English, are projected the titles of the songs: Die Wetterfahne (The weathervane), Erstarrung (Benumbed), Die Post (The post), Die Krähe (The crow), Täuschung (Illusion), and so on, as well as some of their words. In the way that often happens in poetry, the poems in Winterreise are metaphors: metaphors of how the outer world of winter reflects an inner world of desolation. One encounters such passages as this: "The wind is turning the weather vane on the roof of my sweetheart's house." Well, yes …

I like some of Schubert's Lieder, quite a bit, but Winterreise was one of my least favourite of his works, perhaps (as depicted in this play), because Müller's text goes on, rather, and then goes on some more, without anything happening. Half way through the play, one of the actors explains: Schubert's music brought meaning to pieces of poetry that previously had been incomprehensible. Well, yes ...

Ontological-hysteric: I should say so. When I returned home to Toronto, completely incubated, I listened to some of the songs of Winterreise again, and really enjoyed them.

Photo, New York Times, March 18: Rick Burkhardt, in his role as Schubert, holds aloft his heart.

Literary Science

[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.

Reading by Neural Recycling

Stanislas Dehaene is a French neuroscientist, who has a background in mathematics, experimental psychology, and brain research. He is known for his work on the neural basis of numerical thinking, but in his most recent work he has turned his mind to reading. His book on the subject—Reading in the brain—is a very good read.

Dehaene's basic idea is that the neural processes that are used in reading, an activity which is only about 5000 years old, must have been pre-adapted or, as Dehaene says, "recycled" from processes that had already been in used for something firmly established and important in vision. Dehaene argues that the part of the visual system that is suited for analyzing patterns of the kind of which letters such as Ts, Ls, and Ys are made is that which has been used for many millions of years for recognizing edges and corners, the branches of trees, and so on, in the natural world. In this brain area, he argues, neurons have receptive fields that are tuned, or are tunable, to such patterns.

It is remarkable, says Dehaene that that we can recognize objects from mere line-drawings. Such drawings are least 30,000 years old, for instance in cave paintings such as the ox-like animal from Lascaux at the head of this post. Dehaene has studied ancient Middle Eastern and Western writing systems from cuneiform and hieroglyphic onwards, as well as Oriental writing systems like Chinese. Writing systems started with pictograms, which in turn derived from line-drawings.

The development of writing systems was a process of stylization and standardization, also a process of assimilation to what the receptive fields of visual neurons could easily respond to. In the earliest discovered Semitic writing (Proto-Sinaitic, from about 1700 BCE), the pictogram for an ox became a circle with two curved lines coming out of its top (for horns). It is a stylized version of something not very different from the Lascaux ox-head. In Phoenician, a writing system that descended from Proto-Sinaitic, a further stylization occurred: the curved lines became straight, and the character was rotated through 90 degrees, so that it looks like an A lying on its side. Written Greek derived from Phoenician, and in it a further 90 degree rotation occurred to produce A, alpha, and the same shape carried into the letter A in Latin which, of course, is still with us in English. Alpha derives from aleph, which in early Semitic languages means "ox." Dehaene goes on to show that most characters, in most writing systems, are made from one to three strokes. So, in the lower case Latin alphabet, c is one stroke, f is two strokes, k is three strokes (as is capital A). It isn't that the brain had to adapt to reading, but that writing systems had to adapt to a pre-existing functionality of the brain.

For readers of all languages, Dehaene claims, a specific area of the brain, the left occipito-temporal region, is the basis for the recognition of written characters. He calls it the letter box. This region has been identified in neuro-imaging studies by Dehaene and his colleagues, and it is used by Chinese people when they read Chinese, as well as by Westerners as they read European scripts. From this region, connections are made principally to two systems, one of which is concerned with the meanings of words and the other with their sounds. As a child learns to read, a network with an input from the letterbox region is formed. When the letterbox region is damaged, for instance by a stroke, a skilled reader can suffer the syndrome of being suddenly unable to read, though still able to write. The well-known Canadian writer of detective fiction, Howard Engel suffered such a stroke and I wrote a post about him (to see it you may click here).

At the end of his book, Dehaene goes on to describe how other features of the brain may have been the bases for other cultural inventions. He says that: "Mathematics, art, and religion may also be construed as constrained devices, adjusted to our primate brains by millennia of cultural evolution." He goes on to propose that a "conscious neuronal workspace" has arisen, and this "vast system of cortical connections, allows for the flexible arrangement of mental objects for novel purposes" (p. 301). According to this proposal, this network is not only the basis of conscious thought, but of the explorations of art.

Stanislas Dehaene (2009). Reading in the brain: The science and evolution of a human invention. New York: Viking.

Film as an Art Form, by Thomas Scheff

The film Groundhog day, written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis, and directed by Harold Ramis, is about Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray), a meteorologist for the weather program of a television station. Every year he has go with his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell), to a small town in Pennsylvania called Punxsutawney to report on Groundhog Day, February 2. On this day, in this place, each year, a groundhog much beloved of the local population emerges from his home. If (according to Wikipedia), the groundhog "sees his shadow and returns to his hole, the whole of the United States will have six more weeks of winter. If [the groundhog] does not see his shadow, spring will arrive early."

Phil Connors hates the assignment, and thinks it ludicrous, but one year after reporting on the groundhog's emergence, there is a blizzard that forces him and the TV crew to stay another night in Punxsutawney. Next day Phil wakes up and finds himself living February 2 all over again: the same events, the same people, the same everything. It happens again the next day, and the next ... It looks as if Phil will keep reliving this day for ever. Although everyone he meets is experiencing the day for the first time, Phil knows he has been through it before. What would it be like if every day were the same? And what would it be like to be able to change some of the things one has done in one's life?

Each new viewing I stumble on new layers of meaning unnoticed earlier. My first impression was merely romantic comedy: boy gets girl. Next time I noticed that there was another layer on top of that one: a sly lesson in the meaning of romance. Most of the scenes were about wrong moves, but toward the end, Phil begins to wake up. A longer review, in which I discuss more layers, is in the Archives of Film Reviews (click here). This is an excellent film that gets four stars on a five-star rating.

Romantic Theory of Art

I can still remember the excitement I felt when some 30 years ago I heard a colleague, Stephen Medcalf, explaining R. G. Collingwood's theory of art, and saying that he thought the theory was pretty much right. I thought: Why haven't I heard of this before? I went out and bought Collingwood's (1938) book, and became even more interested. Collingwood’s theory is that emotions are fundamental to our being, but that they are often difficult to understand, and that art is the expression of them in a language (of words, music, painting, etc.) in order to explore them and understand them better. Although art involves technique it is separate because, in an activity that is purely technical (e.g. making a chair), one has something like a blueprint, and an idea of the end result before one starts. Art is different. As an expression and an exploration, one does not know the end result until one achieves it. Collingwood's theory is a formulation of the Romantic idea of art, as employed by Johann von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, et al.

In the talk I am scheduled to give to the Poetics and Linguistics Association 2009 conference (mentioned in Wednesday's post) I will present Collingwood's theory and some of the research that colleagues and I have done on emotions, which have allowed some questions that arise from the theory to be tested.

Here is one question: Are emotions difficult to understand? Elaine Duncan and I found an answer by asking people to keep emotion diaries, structured like questionnaires, in which they noted down details of emotions they experienced in daily life (Oatley and Duncan, 1994). We found that quite often people didn't understand aspects of their emotions. When recorded in this way, 31% of emotion incidents included mixed emotions, with common mixtures being sadness plus anger, anger plus fear, happiness plus fear. Part of the difficulty in understanding, here, was that the emotions contradicted each other. In addition, even when emotions were not mixed, on 6% of occasions, people knew that they were having an emotion or mood but did not know what caused it. When people were in clinical states such as depression and anxiety, the proportion of emotions for which they did not know the cause rose to 25%. Moreover, as Bernard Rimé (2009) found, for emotions that were remembered at the end of the day and recorded in diaries at that time, approximately 90% of them had been confided to someone else, typically a friend or family member. This confiding was partly to help understand the emotions better, and partly to align them with what we and others think about ourselves and others.

So there is evidence that, although emotions are perhaps the most personal aspects of our psychology, and although they are are sometimes straightforward, plenty of them have aspects that are difficult to understand, that need clarification and exploration.

Another question is: How good are we at recognizing the emotions of others? Laurette Larocque and I (e.g. Oatley & Larocque, 1995) made an estimate of this when we asked people to keep diaries of occasions on which they had made an arrangement with someone else, which had then gone wrong. The most common type of such error was of planning to meet someone, and the other person did not show up, but many other kinds also occurred. We called these occasions joint errors. Person 1 is the person whom we originally asked to keep an error diary. We asked each Person 1 to keep a diary of the next joint error that occurred to him or her, and note down what went wrong, what the original plan was, what emotions were experienced, and what Person 1 thought were the emotions of the other person involved in the error (Person 2). In one study we also asked, after the error, for our Person 1 to give a diary to Person 2.

This is what we found. The most common emotion for people to feel when there had been an error, was anger at the other person for having messed up. (Both Person 1 and Person 2 tended to think it was the other who had not performed their part properly.) Of 33 episodes of anger recorded by Person 1 or Person 2, 24 were recognized correctly by the other (73%). Averaging over five other emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, shame, guilt) that one person experienced, however, the other correctly recognized that emotion on only 21 out of 72 occasions (29%). Of these emotions, shame was the least recognized. It was reported to have occurred 10 times but was recognized only once by the other person.

So although we are good at understanding and recognizing our own and other people's emotions, we are not that good. If, as Collingwood suggests, literary fiction is about explorations of emotions in the vicissitudes of our plans and interactions with each other, it can give scope for us readers to become better at understanding emotions in ourselves and others.

R.G. Collingwood (1938). The principles of art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keith Oatley & Elaine Duncan (1994). The experience of emotions in everyday life. Cognition and Emotion, 8, 369-381.

Keith Oatley & Laurette Larocque (1995). Everyday concepts of emotions following every-other-day errors in joint plans. In J. Russell, J.-M. Fernandez-Dols, A. S. R. Manstead & J. Wellenkamp (Eds.), Everyday conceptions of Emotions: An introduction to the psychology, anthropology, and linguistics of emotion. (pp. 145-165). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Bernard Rimé (2009). Emotion elicits social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review. Emotion Review, 1, 60-85.

Cartoon: Joint error by Peg Parsons (drawn especially to illustrate our research)

The Actor Problem

In a comment on 18 May to a post in OnFiction, Blog Nerd gave a link to a very interesting 2004 article entitled "The actor problem" (click here to read it). This article is by Jennifer Ewing Pierce, who may bear a relationship to Blog Nerd. In the article, to be republished in a collection next year, Pierce poses a challenge. She says:

Is creating and enacting emotion essentially cognitive or essentially perceptuomotor? What is the goal of enacted emotion? ... is the desire for creating and watching performance constitutive of our cognitive ability or is it a happy accident? ... A satisfying model of what the actor does and why we desire him to do it lies at the crux of a comprehensive philosophy of the emotions.

Pierce takes up her own challenge by confronting Kendall Walton's (1990) book Mimesis as make believe. For Walton, fiction yields only pseudo-emotions. If we go to the cinema to watch a thriller and feel frightened, this is not real fear, says Walton. If it were, we would get up and run out, because real fear has an outcome: a strong urge to escape. Instead we stay in our seats. In general, says Walton, the emotions we feel in fiction are make believe, as in children's games.

Pierce counters Walton's argument with one from Wilshire (1978) whom she quotes as saying:

It is badly misleading, though perfectly ‘natural,’ to say that acting is pretending. To say this connotes that the pretender falsifies himself, though he knows perfectly well who he really is. But the actor-artist is searching for himself through enactment---experimentally finding the other “in” himself, and so finding and developing himself in his freedom. If he is in a production with a pre-established script, the playwright has left a character type to be enacted.

Thus the aspect of outcome in emotions, which for Walton is missing in fiction, is present for the actor although in a a different kind of way. I believe Wilshire and Pierce are right, and that Walton has it exactly the wrong way round. Developmentally, as Paul Harris (2000) has shown, imagination and abstract thinking are built on the pretend play of childhood. What Walton offers is an anti-developmental theory so that adult art, instead growing out of play, is regression to a supposed childhood state.

One of the most revealing psychological studies of the development of abstraction was performed by Luria (1976). In 1931 and 1932, he traveled to Uzbekistan to study effects of the USSR’s newly introduced literacy programs. Luria compared people who had taken these programs with people who had not. Among his cognitive tests he asked: “In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are the bears there?” The form is that of a syllogism. He tested 15 people who had remained illiterate. Of these only four were able to answer this question. Those who could not answer it replied, for instance, that they could not say because they had never been to Novaya Zemlya. By contrast all 15 of those who had attended a literacy program could answer the question. They were able to escape the literal and immediate, to think in abstractions. Harris argues that Luria's result occurred because those who took the educational programs were inducted into the possibilities of imagining "what if?" Walton seems to have set himself into the opposite state, defining emotion as having a certain kind of behavioral outcome and maintaining a literal stance: "I can't have been frightened by the thriller because I didn't run out of the cinema."

In fiction we visit in imagination places we have never seen, we become people whom we are not, we enter many more situations than a lifetime could contain. In doing so we—like Wilshire's actor—undertake mental enactments. Thereby, we discover aspects of ourselves, a perfectly good outcome for the emotions we experience.

(Walton's and Harris's books are reviewed in our Books on the Psychology of Fiction, which you can reach by clicking here.)

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

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

Jennifer Ewing Pierce (2004) “The actor problem: Live and filmed performance and 
classical cognitivism.” Consciousness and the Arts and Literature, 5, December.

Kendall Walton (1990). Mimesis as make-believe: On the foundations of the representational arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Bruce Wilshire (1978). Enactment, transformation and identity of the self. Dialectics and Humanism 3, 52-68.

Moods and Stories

In a post of 9 May in The Valve, entitled "Emotion recollected in tranquillity" (click here to read it) Bill Benzon a frequent and welcome contributor to OnFiction put forward a fascinating and original hypothesis about the role of art in our lives. His proposal has two steps. The first is to disagree with Steven Pinker who thinks that liking art has no evolutionary significance. Benzon thinks art, including music, is adaptive, and that it has an important function of reducing anxieties that are hard to express to others. He argues that:

music reduced anxiety in the group and thereby made it more fit to encounter real challenges and dangers. More recently, and inspired by Pinker’s own The Stuff of Thought, I argued that story-telling allows us to share perceptions, feelings, and values that we cannot talk about.

Benzon's proposal is a productive one. It is a more specific, and evolutionarily based, version of a general idea of the Romantics (as hinted at in the title of Benzon's post in The Valve) that art functions to explore and thus help to assimilate and understand emotions. I have turned the Romantics' idea of art as the expression and exploration of emotions into a small set of psychological hypotheses (Oatley, 2003), which Maja Djikic, Jordan Peterson and I (2006) have started to test. We compared the ways in which writers of fiction and physicists talk about themselves and their work in interviews. We found that fiction writers were far more preoccupied with emotions, especially negative emotions, than were physicists. So literary art tends to come from people who are concerned with their emotions—especially negative ones—and they tend to share these emotions with others, perhaps to help allay them.

The second step in Benzon's proposal derives from the finding that memories are often mood dependent: people tend to recall autobiographical memories of when they were happy when they are happy once again, and they best recall memories of loss and failure when they are sad. Benzon's new idea is that, in the ordinary course of events, people are thus partly cut off from large parts of their autobiographical selves. He then argues that in stories people experience depictions of many desires and many emotions. These depictions thus enable people to recall a wider range of experience than usual and, because they tend to discuss stories with others, or experience them in social settings, these experiences also have social implications. Benzon says:

My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Stories – as well as poems and plays – allow us to experience a wide range of desires and feelings in an arena where our personal lives are secure and protected, where our experience is socially approved. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood.

I would like to offer an extra observation, to add to Benzon's argument. The research group of which I am part has done a good deal of work to show that stories actively induce moods and emotions. For instance, Seema Nundy and I (see Oatley, 2002) asked people to read Russell Banks's short story "Sarah Cole," which induces different emotions in different readers, most commonly anger and sadness. In different moods, it is not only that different memories become available. We found that different modes of thinking became available. After participants had read "Sarah Cole,' we asked them to respond to three interpretive questions about it. In their answers, people made angry by the story reasoned in a way that cognitive scientists call forward chaining, first offering a premise and then thinking forward from it towards implications. People made sad by the story predominantly used backward chaining, thinking backwards from a conclusion to what led up to it. What have these modes of thinking got to do with moods? When angry one thinks forward from a slight or injustice towards possibilities of what to do about it, including possibilities of vengeance. When sad, one backtracks mentally from the loss or mistake to what might have caused it.

William Benzon (2002). Beethoven's anvil: Music in mind and culture. New York: Basic Books.

Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley & Jordan Peterson (2006). The bitter-sweet labor of emoting: The linguistic comparison of writers and physicists. Creativity Research Journal, 18, 191-197.

Keith Oatley (2002). Emotions and the story worlds of fiction. In Melaine Green, Jeffrey Strange & Tim Brock (Eds.) Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations (pp. 39-69). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Keith Oatley (2003). Creative expression and communication of emotion in the visual and narrative arts. In Richard. Davidson, Klaus Scherer & Hill Goldsmith (Eds.) Handbook of Affective Sciences (pp. 481-502). New York: Oxford University Press.

Steven Pinker (2007). The stuff of thought: Language as a window into human nature. New York: Viking.