Kate Chopin's The Awakening

The Awakening, published by Kate Chopin when she was 49 years old, has become a literary classic, and an influential feminist novella. 

Here’s a brief summary. Edna Pontillier is on vacation on Grand Isle with her husband Léonce. In the novella’s eighth paragraph she walks up from a beach with Robert LeBrun, after bathing in the warm Caribbean Sea. On the island she also meets Adèle Ratignolle, mother of three small children, the first person with whom she ever talks about her feelings. Although to start with, Edna cannot swim, she learns to do so and feels liberated. She starts to think of rejecting assigned roles. By the end of the vacation, Edna and Léonce have grown apart, while she and Robert have grown close. To avoid what might happen, Robert moves to Mexico. Back in New Orleans, where she lives, Edna relinquishes her role as housewife, and becomes serious about her painting. Léonce takes a long business trip to New York, his mother looks after the couple’s two young children, and Edna moves into a place she calls the pigeon house. She spends a night with a man who’s a substitute for Robert, whom she thinks is still in Mexico. But he returns and visits her. After some awkward meetings, she kisses him. Although she says that he “must have forgotten that she was Léonce Pontillier’s wife,” she and Robert both declare their love for each other. Then a servant brings a message to say that Adèle Ratignolle is sick, so Edna goes to see her. When Edna returns, she finds a note from Robert. It says: “I love you. Good by—because I love you.” She realizes that he has departed, so she will be solitary. She returns to Grand Isle, removes her clothes, and swims out to sea. 

 

As well as this novella, Kate Chopin is known for her short stories. Her principal literary influence was Guy de Maupassant (whom she first read when she was about 35). “I read his stories,” she said, “I marvelled at them.” He spoke to her directly and intimately. She admired his escape from tradition, his rejection of hypocrisy. Her first short story was published when she was 39.

 

Although there had been myths, fables, and fairy tales, the literary short story dates back perhaps to 1842: Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The short story can be compared with the sonnet: eight lines, four lines, and two lines, with potential turning points between each set, after which we can see what had gone before in a new way. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894) for instance, the protagonist first hears that her husband has died in a railway accident. She breaks down in tears, then goes to her room to be alone. There—turning point—she experiences “something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name”—a feeling of freedom. Then, towards the end of the story, she leaves her room and goes downstairs. There’s a turning of a key in the front door lock—final turning point—her husband returns; she dies of a heart attack.

 

In The Awakening, Kate Chopin uses techniques that are typical of poetry. Although she does this all the way through, an instance is in Chapter 10, when Edna finds she can swim, metaphors include: sea—liberation, learning to swim—accomplishment, actions previously not taken—actions that can now be taken, indoors is containment—outside are possibilities, lying in a hammock—comfort, coziness. There are also reiterated scenes of sleeping and waking. In addition, there are juxtapositions and contrasts. In Chapter 10, Edna’s walk down to the beach with Léonce contrasts with her return with Robert. In a more distant comparison, the novella’s first scene with Edna’s return from bathing connects with its last scene in which she swims out to sea. There are also scenes of emotion as inwardly experienced. For instance, as Edna finds herself able to swim “a feeling of exultation overtook her.” Early versions of such feelings tend to be vague. They then become more distinct; so exultation transforms into a feeling of freedom from the role into which Edna has been cast: wife and mother.

 

Kate Chopin. (1894). “The dream of an hour.” In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories(pp. 259-261). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Kate Chopin (1899). The awakening. In P. Knights (Ed.), Kate Chopin The awakening and other stories (pp. 3-128). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition, 2000).

 

Nicolai Gogol (1842). “The overcoat” (C. Garnett, Trans.). In The overcoat and other stories (pp. 3-51). London: Chatto & Windus (current edition 1923).

 

Clarice Lispector

The novella, The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector, is unlike anything else I have read. This review can be thought of as following on from my previous post about authors hearing the voices of their characters, and characters having independent agency. It’s about the lives of someone called Rodrigo, an author-narrator who starts by thinking of writing a book (the one you would have in your hands as you read The Hour of the Star) and the book’s protagonist, Macabéa, a nineteen-year-old woman, who is thin and not good-looking, who grew up a very poor area in the north-east of Brazil, who had only three years at school, then moved to Rio de Janeiro to be employed as a typist.

Clarise Lispector was born in 1920, in the Ukraine, and her family moved to this same area in the north-east of Brazil, before moving to Rio de Janeiro.

In the story Macabéa meets the arrogant Olímpico, with whom she falls in love. On page 38, the author-narrator says of him: “He had, I just discovered, inside of him, the hard seed of evil.” Later we read that he had killed someone in the north-east of Brazil, and that he was also a thief. A few pages later we read that when walking along with Macabéa, Olímpico says he is strong, so he lifts her into the air. She is euphoric: “what it’s like to fly in an aeroplane” she thinks. Then he dumps her in the mud. Then, another few pages on, Olímpico says to her: “are you just pretending to be an idiot or are you actually an idiot?” Macobéa: “I’m not sure what I am, I think I’m a little … what? … “I mean I’m not quite sure what I am.”

Then Olímpico goes off with Glória, a blond chubby girl who works in the same office as Macabéa. Feeling guilty, Glória recommends that Macabéa should visit a fortune teller, Madame Carlota, who sees in Macabéa’s cards that her life has been and continues to be horrible. Then she relents and tells her client that her life will be wonderful, that she will be courted and marry someone called Hans. Macabéa is enchanted. As she leaves the fortune teller’s place, and steps off the pavement, she is run over and killed by a large and expensive Mercedes.

As Colm Tóibín wrote in a very engaging review: 

In October 1977, shortly before her death, she [Lispector] published the novella The Hour of the Star in which all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded in a densely self-conscious narrative dealing with the difficulty and odd pleasures of storytelling and then proceeding, when it could, to tell the story of Macabéa, a woman who, Lispector told an interviewer, "was so poor that all she ate were hot dogs". But she made clear that this was "not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery." [Then], Lispector told a TV interviewer: "I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me, and on the way home in the taxi I thought it'd be really funny if a taxi hit me and ran me over and I died after hearing all those good things.”

But this novella isn’t about the plot. It’s about how Lispector the writer, created Rodrigo, the author-narrator, who created Macabéa as a character, and how this character in turn seems to take part in the process of creating not just author-narrator Rodrigo but also, perhaps, in a certain kind of way, Lispector. 

If we knew that that someone had decided to enter the police, or to be shop assistant or office worker, we might think that she or he had taken a decision, to become a person of a certain kind and that, in turn, the role she or he has taken on would shape something in that person. But an original idea of this novella, is that a somewhat similar process can occur with a writer and the story and characters that the writer decides to create. As we read on page 13 the author-narrator says: 

I have a fidgety character on my hands who escapes me at every turn expecting me to retrieve her … I see that north-eastern girl looking in the mirror and—a ruffle of the drum—in the mirror appears my weary and unshaven face. We’re that interchangeable.

Then on page 61 the author-narrator says to his readers:

As for me I’m tired. Maybe of the company of Macabéa, Glória, Olímpico… I have to interrupt this story for about three days … For the last three days, alone, without characters, I depersonalize myself … as if taking off my clothes … and now I emerge and miss Macabéa. Let’s continue.

But this novella is not just about this fascinating conversation among the writer, the author-narrator, the characters, and ourselves as readers. It’s a meditation on the nature of human life. It’s about how much we understand about others or understand about ourselves.

Clarice Lispector (2011). The hour of the star (second edition, with introduction by Colm Tóibín) (B. Moser, Trans.). New York: New Directions.

Colm Tóibín (2014) Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star is as bewildering as it is brilliant. The Guardian, 18 January.

Toni Morrison's Jazz

The 1992 novel, Jazz, by Toni Morrison, is original and engaging. In Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, Virginia Woolf accomplished a novel of inwardness. In Jazz, Toni Morrison accomplished a further step: a novel of relationship. She did this by basing her book on a form of music—jazz—in which a theme is introduced and then, as in some pieces of classical music for instance by Bach, variations are offered. In this novel, the variations suggest ways in which different people experience a certain event (which one may think of as a theme) and, with this, their relationships change. 

Jazz is a kind of love story, a mode that’s virtually a human universal. But this one is different, because it is not just a love story but a story of other kinds of relating as well. Following this novel, books in which relationship has come to the centre seem to be more frequent. So, for instance, in 2007, Katy Roiphe published Uncommon Arrangements, a biography not of a person but of relationships in marriage. Then came the novels of Elena Ferrante. The first, My Brilliant Friend, published in English in 2012, is not really about the friend as such, but about the narrator’s relationship with the friend when they were young. Then, in subsequent novels, Ferrante has written about how the relationship developed into adulthood.

Morrison states the theme of her novel at the book’s beginning. The fifty-year-old Joe is in love with an eighteen-year-old, Dorcas. At a party, he shoots her. As Morrison writes in the fourth and fifth line of the novel, he did this “just to keep the feeling going.”  No-one sees the shooting, and Joe is not arrested. He is married to Violet, but they’re not much in touch with each other. At Dorcas’s funeral, Violet stabs the dead girl with a knife, and wonders how she might take on some of the characteristics of Dorcas, so that Joe will love her.

Morrison’s suggestion in her novel is that being black in America gives one not just the legacy of slavery, but continuing oppression, so that achievement becomes difficult, and for many people almost impossible. But the human spirit is not suppressed. In the kind of society that has resulted, the focus has come to be on relationship. Jazz is a form of music that arose in this society, a form based on the relationships among the players, that depicts sadness (as in the blues), suffering, sometimes violence but, at the same time, progress.

By starting with a theme, and progressing through a sequence of chord structures, the musical form of jazz is based on improvisation in which the players of different instruments, and sometimes a singer, improvise in relation to each other. This is the kind of structure that Morrison uses in her novel. 

The events with which the novel starts occur at the beginning of 1926. As the narrator says, after World War I: “Armistice was seven years old when Violet disrupted the funeral” (p. 9). Both Violet and Joe had been married for many years and had come from the rural South, to live in Harlem which, in the novel, is called “The City.” They had been getting along with each other, in a way, but not so well. They had no children together and this too, becomes a theme. Both realize that they did not really choose each other. Thinking back to when they met Violet says: “from the very beginning I was a substitute. And so was he” (p. 97). It’s many years later that Joe does make a choice: he come to love Dorcas. On page 135 he says, as if he were speaking to her: “I chose you. Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out … I didn’t fall in love. I rose in it.”

Part of the performance of jazz music involves solos by players of particular instruments. In the book this is mirrored by stories told by Violet and Joe about their early lives in the South. Later in the book other characters enter as well. They include Malvonne Edwards, from whom Joe rents a room for a few hours a week, in the building in which he lives, so that he and Dorcas can meet there to have sex. Then there is Alice Manfred, who took Dorcas on when her mother (Alice’s sister) was killed in the anti-black race riots of St Louis in 1917, in which many people died.

There’s some wonderfully lyrical writing in this novel. Here’s an example.

A colored man floats down out of the sky blowing a saxophone, and below him, in the space between two buildings, a girl talks earnestly to a man in a straw hat. He touches her lip to remove a bit of something there. Suddenly she is quiet. He tilts her chin up. They stand there. Her grip on her purse slackens and her neck makes a nice curve … Do what you please in the City. It is there to back and frame you no matter what you do… Hospitality is gold in this City. You have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit (pp. 8-9). 

After Dorcas’s death, Violet comes to know and relate to both Alice Manfred and Malvonne Edwards. Then, later as well, Dorcas’s best friend Felice enters the story, as does a young man called Acton, whom all the young women want to be with. Dorcas manages to catch him, and starts to have sex with him. Joe realizes this. And that is the reason—well, one of the reasons—he shoots Dorcas. What happens, then, in the relationship between Violet and Joe? To find out, you need to read the novel.  

At the end of her book, Morrison adds the loveliest coda, in which the novel’s narrator speaks to the author. By means of what she says, in a Proustian way, she speaks to us, the readers, engaging us also in relationship with the novel’s characters and events, as well as with the narrator … and the author.

Elena Ferrante (2012). My brilliant friend (A. Goldstein, Trans.). New York: Europa Editions.

Toni Morrison (1992). Jazz. New York: Knopf. Page numbers are from the 2004 paperback edition, with a new Foreword by the author, published by Vintage International.

Katy Roiphe (2007). Uncommon arrangements: Seven portraits of married life in London literary circles, 1910-1939. New York: Virago.

Virginia Woolf (1925). Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.

The Lowbrow Status of Science Fiction

In trying to find out what makes a piece of fiction ‘literary’, Chris Gavaler and Dan Johnson of Washington and Lee University dove into papers from literary criticism and psychology that each proposed different definitions of ‘literariness’. Among the various definitions they came across, they found one that suggested that a text’s literariness might depend on how much it encouraged the reader to infer what characters are thinking or feeling (Kidd & Castano, 2013), an ability known as theory-of-mind. Gavaler and Johnson seized on this idea, hypothesizing that a literary text might contain the fewer explanations of a character’s state of mind, forcing the reader to make more inferences. These researchers were also interested in how this idea might interact with genre fiction, specifically the genre of science fiction. So they devised an experiment with four conditions. Participants would read a brief passage of science fiction or a realistic story, with or without explanations of the character’s state of mind. The authors would then measure readers’ ratings of literary merit, comprehension of the text, and inferencing effort. 

The researchers found that those who read a text with explanations of a character’s state of mind understood the text better and rated the text as having greater literary merit, compared to those who read texts without these explanations. This was regardless of whether the text was science fiction or not. Those who read a science fiction passage rated it as having less literary merit than did those who read a realistic passage. They also did not understand the text as well and made less of an effort to infer the character’s state of mind. This was the case whether or not the passage included explanations of the character’s state of mind. 

A subsequent experiment built on this research to examine the reader’s construction of a world’s physical and social rules, as well as their efforts to understand the plot. The results were similar to those of the first experiment. Interestingly, readers of science fiction exerted more effort in understanding the world of the narrative, yet did not understand the world as well as those who had read a text that was more realistic. Those who read science fiction also put in as much effort to understand the plot as did those who read a realistic passage, yet did not understand the plot as well. 

Long story short, it appears that the science fiction genre prompts a style of reading that is less attentive to characters, more attentive to the world of the narrative, and yet results in poorer overall comprehension. These experiments also show that the perception of literary merit seems to be tied to the inclusion of explanations of a character’s thoughts and feelings, and not the absence of such explanations, as the authors initially thought. 

References

Gavaler, C., & Johnson, D. R. (2017). The genre effect. A science fiction (vs. realism) 
manipulation decreases inference effort, reading comprehension, and perceptions of 
literary merit. Scientific Study of Literature, 7(1), 79-108. doi:10.1075/ssol.7.1.04gav

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science,
342, 377–380. doi: 10.1126/science.1239918

Post by Krithika Sukumar

* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).

In the Mind of Another

One of the lovely aspects of fiction is to be able to enter other minds, and this occurs in an especially touching way when the character in whose mind one finds oneself lives in a society different from one's own.

For Western readers, a novel by the Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami has this effect. The novel is translated as Strange Weather in Tokyo. It's about a woman, Tsukiko, who at the start of the story is age 37, who works in an office. Although she has had boyfriends, they seem not to have lasted long, and she doesn't seem to have close women friends. One evening she is in a bar, near the station, and happens to see, there, a man who is perhaps in his seventies, who recognizes her. He was her teacher of Japanese in secondary school. They keep running into each other, in this bar, and they chat. She calls him Sensei, "Teacher." They don't seem to have much in common. He remembers that, at school, she wasn't very good at Japanese. She remembers, too, that she wasn't very interested in it.

Sensei is a widower. After the meet several times in the bar, he invites her, after a good deal of sake drinking, to his home, which is nearby. Although reluctant, she goes along. The house is cluttered. It's full of things that other people would have thrown away. He gives her something to drink, and some crackers to eat.

Then Sensei starts to read a newspaper. It's not that day's newspaper, but one that has been discarded, which he has picked up from somewhere. He seems to have forgotten that Tsukiko is there. She speaks to him, and he replies: "Would you like to read the newspaper?" he asks.

Sensei goes into the next room and brings back some things: several old clay tea-pots that he has saved from railway take-out meals he had bought many years previously, and a collection of electric batteries that have long since lost their charge. He talks about them a bit. The chapter ends with him reciting three lines of a poem, and with him closing his eyes, nodding off, perhaps asleep. In the pale light of the moon, Tsukiko gazes at the batteries.

An effect the book had on me is that which one is supposed to attain though mindfulness. I would read a chapter—the chapters are short—then look up, and notice what I saw. On one occasion it was a pepper pot, which had been left on a wooden table. I looked at the small glass pot, which was octagonal, and had a silver-coloured metal top, pierced with thirteen small holes in a star pattern. I noticed the relation of the pot to the table, and to the window sill, and to the top of a straight-back chair, the seat of which was under the table. I saw the relation of these objects to each other.

Is this, I thought, a Japanese way? A way of being able to see and experience such spatial layouts and arrangements. A nineteenth-century Western way is quite different. The essayist and art critic John Ruskin, for instance, might have recommended that I look at the salt-cellar, and reflect that someone who had a training in art had drawn it, that someone else had made a model of it, someone else had arranged for it to be moulded in glass, and for the metal lid, with its holes in it, to be manufactured. Each of these people would have got up in the morning, eaten something for breakfast, gone to work, chatted with their work mates, as they made these things for us to use.

Kawakami's book continues with Tsukiko and Sensei getting along with one another, then falling out because he likes the Giants baseball team, whereas she does not. This is followed by a period when they notice each other but refuse to talk. Then they start to talk again. They go on expeditions of several kinds. They chat, sometimes quite a bit, sometimes not much at all. As readers we are within Tsukiko's mind. It is a mind that is uncertain, thoughtful but confused, wondering, lonely. And, as one may imagine, the novel is a love story.

Kawakami, H. (2012). Strange Weather in Tokyo (A. M. Powell, Trans.). London: Portobello Books.

Literariness and Empathy

Virginia Woolf said that Katherine Mansfield was the only person of whose writing she had ever felt jealous. Some of Mansfield's stories are, indeed, strikingly original. A new study by Anežka Kuzmičová and colleagues is an investigation of the reading one of these stories: "The fly," published in 1922, a year before Mansfield died.

The story is about "the boss," an elderly man who is reminded of the death of his only son, six years previously, in World War I. His son had been everything to him. In the period after his son's death, the boss had wept many times. Following the reminder, he made a demand to his office assistant that he should not be disturbed. He did this because he wanted to weep again, but no tears came. Mansfield writes: "He wasn't feeling as he wanted to feel." He noticed a fly in his inkwell, fished it out with a pen, put in on his blotting pad, and watched it go through elaborate motions to clean itself. When it had done so, the boss filled his pen, and from it let fall a drop of ink onto the fly.  Then, writes Mansfield, "... as if painfully, it dragged itself forward." More slowly this time, it started to clean itself again, and finally finished the task. Then the boss dripped more ink on the fly, then did so once more. The fly was dead. The boss flung the blotting paper with the sodden fly on it into the waste-paper basket, and could no longer remember what he had been thinking about before.

"The fly" is a story with lots of imagery and foregrounding, characteristics of literary writing. Influenced by the finding of David Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013), that reading a literary short story as compared with a popular one, improved readers' empathy and theory-of-mind, Kuzmičová and colleagues asked people to read either a direct translation of "The fly," into Norwegian, or a translation that had been rewritten by a writer of popular fiction to remove foregrounded phrases. The method used by the researchers was to ask participants to read either the literary translation or the more popularly written version, and to mark passages that they found striking and evocative. They were then asked to choose three of these passages and write of their experiences in reading them. People's writings of their experiences were then coded for expressions of empathy.

The researchers expected, with this method, to replicate the result of Kidd and Castano. Instead they found that empathetic expressions were more numerous among readers of the more popularly written story than among readers of the more literary version. No allowance was made for differences of reading difficulty between the two versions, and there is no mention of the coding being done by people who were blind to which condition the participants' experiences were from. Nevertheless the result is thought provoking, and goes against a current trend. What might it mean?

Since our research group published the finding that the more fiction people read, the better they did in a test of empathy and theory-of-mind (Mar et al., 2006), empathy has become a topic of interest in understanding effects of fiction. Kidd and Castano (2013) hypothesized that the effect is principally due not just to fiction as compared with non-fiction, but that it occurs especially with literary works. So a kind of generalization has occurred: that the main effect of literary reading is to increase people's empathy.

Increased empathy may indeed occur with literary writing. Indeed this effect has been found by Emy Koopman (2016) for a literary text that included foregrounding as compared with a version from which foregrounding had been removed.

When I read Mansfield's stories, I find myself going back to read passages again, in order to think about them. This happened when I re-read "The fly." It could be that, in the study by Kuzmičová and colleagues, the popular version of "The fly" was more straightforward, more engaging for its readers, than the literary version.

Prompting empathy is not the only effect of literary writing, and foregrounding is not the only feature that makes for literariness. "The fly" seems to me to be less about empathy than about the passage of time, about regression to childhood, about the unconscious, about the human propensity, in war and in grief, to be cruel.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342, 377-380.

Koopman, E. M. E. (2016). Effects of "literariness" on emotions and on empathy and reflection after reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10, 82-98.

Kuzmičová, A., Mangen, A., Støle, H., & Begnum, A. C. (2017). Literature and readers’ empathy: A qualitative text manipulation study. Language and Literature, 26, 137-152.

Mansfield, K. (1922). "The fly." In D. M. Davin (Ed.), Katherine Mansfield: Selected stories (pp. 353-358). Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 1981).

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.

Writing and Inspiration

Do writers who feel themselves to be inspired enable their readers to feel the same way? This is the question that Todd Thrash and his colleagues asked in a recent paper (Thrash et al., 2016). The authors quote Maurice Bowra (1951) who wrote “inspired words create life in us because they are themselves alive” (p. 36).

Thrash and his colleagues gave 195 students half an hour to write a poem on “the human condition,” and then to rate how inspired they felt when writing their poem. All the poems were scored on a series of measures by independent raters. The most important independent rating was of Insightfulness: “The degree to which the poem transcends the obvious or superficial and discerns the hidden nature of things.” All the poems were also read by 220 student readers, who rated how inspired they felt on reading each poem.

The main results of the study were that poems by writers who felt more inspired when writing elicited more inspiration from their average readers, and that the effect was moderated by the independent ratings of the poems’ Insightfulness.

What is inspiration? For the researchers the answer is indicated by the scale of nine items, which they gave their student writers. The items included, “I felt inspired while expressing my ideas,” and ‘I was inspired to revise this poem.” It may be, therefore, that what the researchers call “inspiration” is of writers having the sense that they have had a good idea to write about, with the additional sense that its wording catches something that is worthwhile, and is of a kind that can be offered to readers. It may be interesting to wonder what other ways there may be of thinking about this kind of mental state when one is writing.

Bowra, M. (1951). Inspiration and poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thrash, M. T., Maruskin, L., Moldovan, E. G., Olevnick, V., & Belzac, W. C. (2016). Writer-reader contagion of inspiration and related states: Conditional process analyses within a cross-classified writer x reader framework. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, advance online publication.

 

Ibsen and the Provisional

In Henrik Ibsen and the birth of modernism, Toril Moi proposes that Ibsen was the most important playwright since Shakespeare, and that his work was critical to the coming of modernism in the West. Last month, I was pleased to give a talk at the Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo. I wanted to explore with the people there a theme of Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding unscientific postscript and the seeming opposite, Ibsen's plays about science.

On the theme of science, Ibsen had written Ghosts, about the discovery of syphilis in a family. Following the shock provoked by that play, in 1882 he wrote An enemy of the people, about the discovery by Dr Stockmann that, in the town baths which were central to the economy of the town where he lived, the water was contaminated.

Dr Stockmann thinks at first that his discovery will benefit the town. But the town's mayor, his brother, thinks otherwise, and the local people come to think of Dr Stockmann as their enemy.

A huge concern of Ibsen's time was the spate of five cholera epidemics that swept through Europe in the nineteenth century, killing hundreds of thousands of people. In the 1850s, cholera was discovered to be spread by contaminated water, but it took years for the discovery to be accepted. It was, however, this discovery that enabled the inference that infectious diseases are spread by germs. Cholera and its implications caused great public consternation, and were discussed in newspapers much as AIDS was discussed in the 1980s, and cancer is discussed today.

A source for An enemy of the people came from a friendship with the poet, Alfred Meissner, which Ibsen had formed in the 1870s when he was living in Munich. H.G. Kohler recounts how Meissner told Ibsen that his father, Dr Eduard Meissner, had worked in Teplitz, in Bohemia. In the middle of the summer of 1832, he had diagnosed a case of cholera. The mayor of the town tried to get him to change his diagnosis, but he refused. A mob besieged his house, smashed his windows, and demanded that he leave the town. In a two-faced way, the town's mayor professed friendship with Dr Meissner, but endorsed the crowd's demands, so Dr Meissner and his family were forced to leave the town.

This conflict is replayed in An enemy of the people, with Dr Stockmann's diagnosis of contaminated water in the town's public baths. He becomes increasingly assertive, and is rejected by everyone in the town except his wife and children. The climax comes at the end when Dr Stockmann proclaims: "the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone." 

Science is based on evidence and is provisional. At the same time one can meet scientists who believe they are absolutely right, who confront every attempt to ask questions, or to offer suggestions, with vehemence.

Søren Kierkegaard proposes the idea of indirect communication in a passage of some eight pages in Part Two of Concluding unscientific postscript. His idea is that indirect communication is a mode in which a person communicates with someone else not to persuade, not to try to get the other person to think as the person wants, not to coerce, but to enable the other to think and feel what she or she wants to think and feel. Kierkegaard links it to inwardness, which is fundamental to modernism in literature.

One implication of the idea of indirect communication is that as audience members and readers of artistic fiction we are not instructed, not persuaded what to think and feel. Instead, we are invited to think and feel for ourselves in the circumstances of a play, short story, novel, or film. And rather than being unscientific, as Kierkegaard may seem to imply from the title of his book, the idea is also at the centre of science because although a scientist offers evidence, and suggests inferences from it, science is provisional. The scientist does not stand alone. Changes of interpretation can be suggested by other people when new evidence is discovered, when new inferences are offered.

Ibsen, H. (1882). Ghosts, and A public enemy. (usual translataion An enemy of the people) In P. Watts (Trans.), Ibsen, Ghosts and other plays (pp. 101-219). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kierkegaard, S. (1846). Concluding unscientific postscript (D. F. Swenson & W. Lowrie, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Currrenl work published 1968).

Kohler, H. G. (1990). Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Eduard Meissner's expulsion from Teplitz. British Medical Journal, 300, 1123-1126.

Moi, T. (2006). Henrik Ibsen and the birth of modernism: Art, theater, philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Literary reading and mentalizing

Since the publication from our research group that the reading of fiction as compared with non-fiction is associated with better empathy and understanding of others (Mar et al., 2006) people have done experimental tests on this issue. Among these, Kidd and Castano (2013) made a hit with their finding that reading literary fiction, as compared with reading popular fiction, prompted better empathy and theory-of-mind.

In a recent report from the University of L’Aquila, in Italy, Maria Pino and Monica Mazzi have taken some important further steps. Whereas previous experimental tests have used short stories and essays, Pino and Mazzi had 214 people read a whole book. The books were all about the same length, and participants were assigned to read one of two books of literary fiction, one of two of nonfiction, or one of two of science fiction. Also, whereas previous experimental studies on the issue have tended to use just one outcome measure, Pino and Mazzi used several. One set of measures was of what the authors call “Mentalizing.” They included a self-report test of empathy, a test of theory-of-mind in which participants were asked to say why people in the book they read did certain things, two tests in which participants were asked to infer from photographs what people were feeling, and an emotion attribution test in which participants were asked to infer from very short stories what people were feeling. A second set of measures was of what the authors call “Sharing.” These included scales that asked how participants were affected in emotional situations, how they behaved in certain social circumstances, and how emotional they felt in reaction to pictures and situations.

The results were that as compared with particpants who read a book of nonfiction or science fiction, those who read a book of literary fiction showed improved Mentalizing, but they showed no change in Sharing. Pino and Mazzi conclude that their results suggest that reading literary fiction may be helpful to people who have difficulties in understanding the minds of others.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342, 377-380.

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.

Pino, M. C., & Mazza, M. (2016). The use of "literary fiction" to promote mentalizing ability. PLoS One, 11(8). doi: org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160254

Image: Cover of George Saunders’s Tenth of December, one of the books of literary fiction read by participants in this study.

 

Literary Reading

What distinguishes novels and short stories that are literary from those that are not? The issue has come into focus in the psychology of fiction with David Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s (2013) finding that reading stories that were literary was more likely to prompt an improvement of empathy and theory-of-mind than reading stories that achieved high popularity on Amazon.

In his book on literariness, David Miall (2006) proposed that one factor is that literary writers use styles such as foregrounding, which attract attention and prompt reflection. In S/Z Roland Barthes (1975) distinguished writerly reading from readerly reading. In writerly reading a person takes on a role like that of a writer, in creating the story that he or she experiences. In contrast, he says, readerly reading is a “kind of idleness” (p. 4). Another possibility is that literary works enable people to think and reflect on characters. This view was put by Frank Hakemulder (2000) in The moral laboratory. He said that: "The complexity of literary characters helps readers to have more sophisticated ideas about others’ emotions and motives than stereotyped characters in popular fiction” (p. 15).

Although it has often been thought that literature has a function to instruct, with Shelley’s (1819) idea that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” being an example, this may not be right. It is possible that the central quality of the literary is that it enables readers to feel and think for themselves (Djikic & Oatley, 2014).

Emy Koopman (2016) compared three different versions of a chapter from Anna Enquist’s literary novel, Counterpoint, about loss of a child. The original version contained a high level of semantic, phonetic, and grammatical foregrounding. In a second version, foregrounding that depended on imagery was removed: a version without imagery. In a third version all foregrounding was removed: a version without foregrounding. People assigned to read the original version scored higher on self-reported empathy than those who read the version without foregrounding. Koopman also found that people who read the original text experienced more ambivalent emotions such as “a sad beauty” or a “grey joy,” than those who read the version without foregrounding. Might this have indicated that as well as having their own feelings of empathy for others, readers of the original story were feeling for themselves in a writerly way? Readers of the original version were not however found to be more reflective than those who read other versions. What might be done, one may wonder, to see how literary stories may invite us not just to feel empathetically and ambivalently, but also to think reflectively, for ourselves?

Barthes, R. (1975). S / Z (R. Miller, Trans.). London: Cape.
Djikic, M., & Oatley, K. (2014). The art in fiction: From indirect communication to changes of the self. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8, 498-505.
Hakemulder, F. (2000). The moral laboratory: Experiments examining the effects of reading literature on social perception and moral self-concept. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342, 377-380.
Koopman, E. M. E. (2016). Effects of "literariness" on emotions and on empathy and reflection after reading. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 10, 82-98.
Miall, D. S. (2006). Literary reading: Empirical and theoretical studies. New York: Peter Lang.
Shelley, P. B. (1819). A defence of poetry. In C. Norman (Ed.), Poets on poetry (pp. 180-211). New York: Free Press.

Stories of the Earth: Prince reminds us how much care it takes to live with each other

The week of Earth Day was intense in Minneapolis this year. Earth Day eve, already a time of pensive introspection given the reminder of climate change this year has been (the pile of street snow that usually would not be melted at the end of my driveway for another month has been gone for over two months already!) and ongoing struggles with dire racial inequalities, also brought the news of Prince's death. As my hometown's most notable hero, Prince has inspired not only the overnight purplization of the city (everyone I encountered on Earth Day was wearing purple, and murals like the one pictured went up immediately), but also an Earth Day sung in and out with all night mourning dance parties. 

I will remain brief and encourage readers to go back to watching amazing Prince music videos and sharing their stories with friends, but will also share a quick reflection of my own. Listening to and watching the outpouring of remembrance and appreciation amongst all my friends (most of whom grew up here, in the inspiring and liberating purple shadow -- and who are giving bookish tributes, #princerevelry, and more), a significant part of what I am hearing echoed is the caring work that makes it possible to live with each other. Van Jones emotional remembrance perhaps has made this most visible for people, opening up the view to Prince's humanitarianism, if they hadn't been paying attention to visible work such as Planet Earth or his more subtle involvement building and funding Green for All and #YesWeCode. Watching those music videos (such as this one with Beyonce) in this light reveals ways of listening and responding that seem important to learn from (this moment, this move!) -- they make Prince so sexy and so loved partly because they show graceful and creative ways of acting on paying attention and caring. 

Caring enough to continue living here seems like one important way to practice our celebration of Earth and its communities, and trying to pay attention, then figuring out what to DO about what we've noticed, like Prince, seems a good tribute.

Are shrubs the hipster scented candle? Shrubs and Fermentation, part 2 of 2

As I should perhaps have explained in my prior essay struggling through the social justice implications of sugars and flavorings, shrubs are intense extractions of aromatic compounds from plant matter, contributing a much wider and more idiosyncratic flavoring of beverages. They are often extracted by the combination of fruits, herbs, and spices with sugar and cider vinegar, the active bacterial cultures of which continue to ferment the sugars and fruits, creating novel but recognizable flavors—often from produce that might otherwise have spoiled, such as softening fruits.

Given contemporary interest in mixology, shrubs represent a rediscovery of longstanding folk foodways, such as making switchel (highlighted in the haying scene featured in my childhood copy of the Little House on the Prairie cookbook, for example). They are often also used to perform claims about the tastes of place, taking advantage of locally characteristic flavors and preserving them in relatively storable — and marketable — ways.

Shrubs are also an excellent example of what are often characterized as hipster approaches to consumption and production, emphasizing artisanal craft and unique and intense experience, particularly in the mundane materiality of everyday life. As part of a recent project exploring the uses of edible signal species of climate change, I have been learning about shrubs, and experiencing their intensity has led me to pose this question about whether they represent something like a hipster version of scented candles, a question I think is interesting beyond the superficial similarity of enjoyable aroma.

As a person who has always avoided artificial scents because of unpleasant effects such as headache and respiratory tract pain, I have often been dubious about the appeal of cinnamon-scented stores, smelly candles and fruity personal care items, and air fresheners in general. (And research on the effects of phthalates and other substances used in these scented products reinforces my concern and suggests that people with heightened chemical sensitivities to such substances may well be providing coal-mine canary services to the broader populace.) However, the half hour I spent sniffing at my first shrub once it had brewed (when I had rescued impulse-buy strawberries and some leftover parsley) gave me a sudden appreciation for the sensory pleasure that scented candles must provide for others less punished by them!

Recognizing the joy and beauty of this sensory enjoyment — whether it's a more protected and less acute one, or a more sensation seeking version — makes me also recognize some of the social dynamics caught up in the celebration of the invitation to inhabit a particular place through the senses, or the deriding of poor taste around someone else's scent preferences. As with the precious approach to many food and "lifestyle" choice, things like scent can be used not only for enjoyment, but to perform that enjoyment in ways that signal class positioning as well as empathy for other (as with sugar boycotts). Implications for the ways we craft narratives of of the senses may include more attention to the way we invite others to share or explore our experiences of sensory delight, without dismissiveness or judgment and with attention to the embedding of privilege in foodie preciousness. (A wonderful film treatment of taste this evokes is The Taste of Others!)

IGEL Conference on Literature and Empathy

I recently participated in a fantastic workshop sponsored by the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (its acronym comes from its original German name, which also means "hedgehog," hence the logo). Organized by Drs. Berenike Hermann and Gerhard Lauer (University of Göttingen), it featured an impressive line-up of researchers all doing excellent empirical work on this topic. Although a great deal of fascinating findings were presented, the general consensus was that there is much work left to do. Thankfully, there are a great many researchers up to this challenge including an exciting cohort of young scientist! The organizers of this conference have been generous enough to post all of the abstracts from the speakers and I would greatly encourage readers of this site to take a look. All talks were also recorded and hopefully these will also be available over the next couple of weeks. A full list of speakers appears below. Right now you can also see some photos and comments from participants on Twitter (#IGEL2015). It is exciting indeed to see so much work being done on this topic! 

Also, if you are a researcher, please consider becoming a member of IGEL. They are a lovely group of people.  

Markus Appel

Marisa Bortolussi & Peter Dixon

Emanuele Castano

Frank Hakemulder

Roel Willems

Elsi Kaiser

Emy Koopman

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Anne Mangen

Raymond Mar

Tobias Richter

Massimo Salgaro

Mette Steenberg

Willie van Peer

Mikkel Wallentin

Fenja Ziegler

Reflexive Dialogics

In recent posts, I have been thinking through some questions of internal dialogue. Noticing the process of narrating new places as I explore them has heightened my awareness of a relatively constant layer of internal dialogue, and I have become interested in the functions of this dialogic layer of thought.

One of my projects in my temporary home has been to make itako boards for planing in the surf here, as the shape of the waves is different from the water where I have swum before, and I have been exploring how to move in unfamiliar water. This has provided two domains for continuing my observation of internal dialogue.

First, surfing language is so amusingly already incorporated into everyday vernacular that there is a hiccoughing cadence to the process of realizing what words like “wipeout,” “bail,” and “rip” mean in embodied, rather than metaphorical, experience. I often find myself using the surfing terms I have picked up from pop culture in the imperative, directed at myself: “duck dive!”

I then often have an agonizing (and very motivated) moment with a wave looming up over me as I summon all of the embodied associations I have with this word to launch myself into (under) the wave (usually a second too late, after such a thought process, and often with the accompanying doubt, “or should that have been a turtle roll?). As the physical experience becomes more familiar and automatic, the verbal exploratory layer gets less noticeable. It is when I am flailing in the fizz that I thrash the potential accumulated glossary for insight; when I am shooting along in a wave, it seems less likely to be narrated. (It will be interesting to see if this is a parabolic association: perhaps once there is more bandwidth to spare, exploratory language will be more noticeable? Are there proportions of expertise to novelty that maximize or minimize internal narration?)

Second, the laborious process of making boards that were seaworthy provided a chance to observe the kind of dialogue that appears when doing repetitive things like sanding or painting. Almost every time I dug into the process of sanding to reach the state of even attention over the surface that contributes to a proper finish, I would find that quality of attention accompanied by the playing out of elaborate dialogues of fictional characters in my head. It reminded me of summers painting houses with my father—a very distinctive kind of imaginative dialogue, where I often came to notice that I was spinning out a story right in the middle of a complex plot.  

Together with my recent attention to the constant labeling efforts of internal narration, this familiar process made me think about how the dialogue that plays through our heads as we make sense of the things we are doing (or as we reach a certain daydreaming quality of attention) seems useful to understand. It tells about the complex networks of meaning and bias we bring to new situations, and reveals some of the ways that we bring our already existing interpretive schemes even when we think we are experiencing something novel and fresh.

It also may suggest interesting things about the way we model dialogue.

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours passingly portrays Virginia Woolf’s relationship with this almost subterranean creative process. In the film version, Woolf is seen in a series of scenes in a very specific state of distracted attention, in which she discovers, in quite fully formed shape, large sections of dialogue and plot. Looking back over our archives to see how dialogic thought has been treated, I found it productive along this line of thought to revisit Thomas Scheff’s 2009 essay on “Virginia Woolf’s Multi-personal Dialogues”:

If women are usually better than men at spontaneous, non-instrumental, rapid role-taking, with looseness of association, this difference might explain women’s greater intuition then men. It may be that rapid, loose and/or non-conventional associations are a feature of parallel, rather than serial processing in mental activity. Parallel mental processing means that one is thinking in several different trains of thought at once. These parallel trains of thought are all, or all but one, going on outside awareness. When these several trains are all attempts to solve the same problem, they can give rise to extremely rapid and imaginative solutions to difficult problems.