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.
