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.

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.

Orientation and Hospitality: On Celebrations of Place and Time (7th Anniversary Post)

What prompts the scripts that propel us into action? What is disorienting enough to stop us in our tracks?

Today marks OnFiction's seventh year, and the occasion of an anniversary (and a significant one -- will we itch to do something else now?) and also of my return home after a half year away gives me an opportunity to think about functions of the celebration of time and place.

Spending several months in a small foreign city where people mostly speak your language -- just more quietly -- is an excellent exercise in attuning to cues around you. And returning to one's home country -- cacophonous and loud with an overwhelming array of familiar cues makes one grasp for prioritizing tools to decide: what requires action?

I returned from my time in Aotearoa New Zealand via San Francisco, which, it turns out, shares a remarkable array of vegetation. Many plants were introduced to both places from South Africa, and in the beach neighborhood where I was staying with family, my favorite pohutukawa trees were everywhere, as pictured above (and here, in Gisborne, for contrast, and for the context of my tree posture). They were even blooming, throwing me even more completely into seasonal disorientation.

The pohutukawa is widely considered the Christmas tree of New Zealand, largely because its large red blossoms are most fully out around Christmas, the height of summer in the Southern hemisphere. As if it was not difficult enough to make a graceful transition from the starting up of the autumn term in Otago to the wrapping up of the spring term back in the U.S., Christmas trees that had really only just stopped flowering in the late summer of our very southerly latitude (where the trees are really not quite out by Christmas) were popping out in the sunny California April. 

Vegetation is always a force to be reckoned with, setting up association-filled backgrounds that are easy to underappreciate -- and the commanding nature of American spoken language is also a predictable attentional force to be reckoned with. Perhaps more surprising than these were the stars. Looking out over the Pacific when the sun went down over San Francisco, the beach seemed familiar -- but I found myself suddenly gripped with the realization that I would not be able to see southern hemisphere constellations! What was surprising about this reaction is the fact that I can barely recognize any of these constellations, making my attachment to them either purely nominal -- or based on an attachment to place details even more subtle than vegetation-noticing.

Over the next few weeks, I will be further exploring the idea of orientation, and how orientation can be provided through bodies of knowledge codified under the rules of hospitality (or, perhaps more abstractly, specific forms of discourse). Celebrations of time and place provide a profoundly useful starting place, because they feature qualities of orientation -- reminders of the past ways people have interacted with a place and each other, and often re-enactments of how this has taken place and changed form over time, along with celebrations of hopes for future plans in place and in the context of the continuity of community time. Reverse engineering the hospitality of celebrations may also suggest some of the common features of disorientation. Expecting a marginal view of those few constellations I can pick out from the far south, I am thrown off by the realization that my view has shifted (even if it has shifted back to a much more familiar view, this is the disoriented reaction that precedes the slower working out of how stars relate as they appear in the Pacific gloaming). Accustomed to quiet conversation, I am jolted by a thousand conversations that seem to be spoken as if I should be hearing them. A week later, I am re-oriented, having picked back up on the habits appropriate to familiar cues -- but I am also intrigued by that liminal space where habits can be seen unhabitually, and wonder how much that, too, is what we celebrate in the spectacle of things like anniversary?

Research Bulletin: How we Experience Literary Characters

In an unusual move, Felix Budelmann, Laurie Maguire and Ben Teasdale (2013) of Oxford University published a piece of research on audience responses to theatrical tragedy not in an academic journal but in the Times Literary Supplement. They asked audience members to view three opening scenes from Sophocles’s Antigone and two from Shakespeare’s King Lear. After each scene audience members answered a questionnaire about selected characters based on three psychologically well-established concepts. For the first of these the researchers took ratings of the audience’s emotional and cognitive perspective-taking (identification). For the second they asked about moral approval of each character. For the third they asked why characters did what they did (attribution). An interesting manipulation was to have the directors direct the plays in two completely different ways. One version of the scenes from Antigone was directed in a way that was sympathetic to Antigone, and one version was directed to be sympathetic to Creon. In the scenes from King Lear one version was directed to be pro-Lear and the other to be pro-Cordelia. The researchers report that for both plays the two versions were strikingly divergent. Although this research account was not peer-reviewed, it is of considerable interest for the psychology of fiction.

One striking finding of this study was that although audience members identified with all the characters, with less than 25% separating the top from the bottom scores (for all characters), moral approval varied considerably. For instance Antigone was approved of more that twice as much as Creon, and Cordelia was approved of more than two-and-a-half times as much as Lear. As for attribution, for Antigone dispositional and situational attributions were of about the same, but in the first scene of King Lear, the actions of Lear were seen to be caused far more by his disposition than by the external situation.

The researchers were shocked and surprised to find very little difference in their measures of how people felt and thought about the characters between the two versions of the performances. They say that, “The texts seemed director proof.” In Antigone the character Antigone was identified with and approved about the same in the version sympathetic to Antigone as in the one played as sympathetic to Creon. In King Lear, Cordelia was identified with and approved about the same across both versions, and more than with Lear.

This seems to mean that even though performances of a play-as-a-whole can be very different, we audience members tend to focus on characters and draw our own conclusions about them. I am reminded of Chekhov’s letter to Alexei Suvorin of 27 October 1888, in which he says the that the role of the artist is to formulate questions correctly, not to answer them. He follows this by a legal metaphor:

It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference (Heim & Karlinsky, p. 117).

Felix Budelmann, Laurie Maguire and Ben Teasdale (2013). The play’s the thing. Times Literary Supplement, 19 July. The online version includes quantitative data and is entitled “Audience Reactions to Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy.”
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3Ada99b8a5-1102-4d47-aabb-118ca658722d/datastreams/ATTACHMENT01

(If this link does not work directly, paste this address into your browser.)

Heim, M. H., & Karlinsky, S. (1997). Anton Chekhov's life and thought: Selected letters and commentary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Image: Histogram from Figure 1 of the On-line version of Budelmann et al.’s study

#Occupy OnFiction

In the past few weeks, I have been closely watching, and also participating in, the Occupy movement. After a rather dry decade in terms of both street activism and also any evidence of concern on the part of the general populace about the dramatic gains being made both within countries and also globally in the distance between rich and poor, I have been struck by the remarkable cogency of the message being delivered by protestors (despite all defensive attempts to deny the movement coherence): they would like more social equality.

Enough opportunities have been opened by this movement to explain why that I can skip ahead to a brief discussion of #Occupy narrative. (Although I will say that I have perhaps never as much appreciated the validating nature of being on the side of a dominant culture narrative--along with its accompanying epistemological danger: if everyone agrees with me, I must be right! In addition, if you haven't been following any of the various Occupations, I'll exhort you to read up on them, particularly in the indie press; they're making good points salient to most people.)

As I have also been exhorting my classes (especially my course on globalization, more or less abstracted here in the links in this post) for years, the targets being taken on by various Occupy protests are large and obvious enough that the narrative thread is fairly available: the economic activities of the free market, despite all the attractive imagery of trickle-down economics and the tide rising all boats that was supposed to follow from that has not worked; instead it has dammed ever-larger proportions of world wealth in ever-smaller pockets of circulation. Even if some laggards have fallen behind on this message and insist that they really ARE part of the 1%, despite all indications to the contrary (particularly amusing in this and related schoolings), most people who are paying attention are understanding the basic message that power needs to be wrested away from the small cluster of financial giants controlling the world economy -- enough that a wide range of personal testimonials, succinct expressions of anger, and kind of random signs are all building a movement that, if you hadn't been paying attention to the financial sector taking over, would seem almost implausibly coherent.

No less than George Lakoff has weighed in on this coherence* (having impressively waited, first, though, a decent interval to allow the movement to express itself without people perceiving messaging "help" from corners like his): "From what I have seen of most members of OWS, your individual concerns all flow from one moral focus."

OWS is a moral and patriotic movement. It sees Democracy as flowing from citizens caring about one another as well as themselves, and acting with both personal and social responsibility. Democratic governance is about The Public, and the liberty that The Public provides for a thriving Private Sphere. From such a democracy flows fairness, which is incompatible with a hugely disproportionate distribution of wealth. And from the sense of care implicit in such a democracy flows a commitment to the preservation of nature.

To allow you, dear readers, some time to catch up on all these interesting analyses, I will keep my comments brief. However, having been mulling Rebecca Wells Jopling's recent post on the language of deception in auto-biography, I have been curious about the cognitive processes that have gone into the development of the #Occupy narratives. Has the opportunity to read and hear about so many others' narratives about their own experience of being down and out, despite their best efforts, due to systemic barriers helped to transform a muddy set of complex financial arrangements into a personal experience people can identify with? Has something about the narrativization of the current financial crisis transformed it from an analysis people didn't want to hear about from social scientists like me into something people cannot wait to share the latest tidbit about on their facebook pages? For those of us interested in maintaining the momentum of this engagement with important progressive politics, it will be important to understand what enables different people to tell their stories of current experience and future vision in ways that engage with difficult politics (even the 99% in Canada and the U.S., for example, are still mostly in the world 1%, and the political implications of that probably come with enough cognitive dissonance reduction to sink the most agentic and fun-seeming promotional campaign possible). But while people are paying attention and trying to figure out what to do, this seems like an excellent moment to read some signs, listen to your local protestors, and figure out how implausibly aspirational change narratives that are usually relegated to the realm of fictional utopias become real for people.

* I was somewhat less impressed with Jonathan Haidt's analysis, which, although cleverly illustrated, was frustrating in its seemingly willful slippage in discussing the central #Occupy tenet of fairness, since such a large part of the message everyone else seems to be taking away has to do with the unfairness of the similar amounts of work done by (/"contributed by") the "99%" and the "1%", despite their huge outcome disparities, in contrast to his assessment that "When everyone’s contribution is the same, then the proportional outcome is equality. But in a free market system, where some work harder or are more talented or lucky, it will always be the case that some people make a greater contribution than others, and therefore end up taking home a larger share of the pie."

Forum Theatre, by Frank Hakemulder

Imagining oneself into being someone else is often considered an effective way of learning. Through imagination, it is assumed, one can explore the possibilities and risks of unfamiliar circumstances. Furthermore, putting oneself in the shoes of another person is considered to be fundamental for empathy and moral reasoning. Such thought processes may be enhanced in several ways, in particular, it may be suggested, through responses to narrative and role-play. It may even be that these are very much alike.

A practical application of this idea can be found in Forum Theatre, a kind of interactive drama developed by Augusto Boal. Originally, the purpose of Forum Theatre was to make audiences aware of relations between oppressors and the oppressed (click here) as well as the possibilities of avoiding their unsavoury consequences. The scenario of a play in this kind of theatre typically brings the victims to an unhappy ending caused by the oppressors. The play is performed twice in one session: once in the usual way, and then, during the second performance, spectators are invited by a facilitator, called the Joker, to participate. When someone feels that he or she could turn the sequence of events in a positive direction, they are encouraged by the Joker to come to the stage and play the role of one of the characters. It is through the active involvement of improvising in an imaginary situation that the participants may be able to change their attitudes and beliefs. Their practicing of alternative courses of action that would resolve the problem of oppression may add to the effect of Forum Theatre. In addition to the active mental effort of placing oneself in the position of someone else, participants have the bodily experience of actually being in situations unfamiliar to them. This is assumed to boost the effects of Forum Theatre considerably.

To evaluate the effectiveness of Forum Theatre I conducted a field experiment in Sri Lanka (an abstract of this field experiment, Hakemulder, 2009, was presented at a recent conference, PALA-2009, click here for abstracts). In the study, I examined which aspects of audiences’ reactions to such interactive improvisational theatre may be responsible for its influence on both participants and onlookers. Studies concerning the impact of narratives on real-world beliefs, as well as the results of role-play experiments suggest that participants’ and spectators’ feeling of being transported (Green & Brock, 2002) into the as if situation of the play may cause belief changes. This hypothesis was put to the test in the context of Enter-Growth’s Palama, a project of the International Labor Organisation (Click here to see a brief YouTube documentary on Palama). The project aimed at changing the predominantly negative beliefs about business in rural Sri Lanka. I found that some of the intended effects did occur. The degree to which the audiences felt transported explained, in part, effects on beliefs about the possibilities and benefits of starting a business.

Melanie Green & Timothy Brock (2002). In the mind's eye: Transportation-imagery model of narrative persuasion. In M. C. Green, J. J. Strange & T. C. Brock (Eds.) Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations (pp. 315-341). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Frank Hakemulder (2009). Imagination in the leading role: The effects of feeling transported into a fictional world on real-world beliefs. Paper presented at the Poetics and Linguistics Association Conference (PALA-2009), Middelburg, the Netherlands.

The Psychology of Actors

Readers and audience members pick up cues from a piece of fiction and from these they mentally create fictional worlds and their inhabitants, in a kind of inner performance. We usually consider the writer as responsible for offering the cues that the reader or audience member will pick up and use, but in theatre, film, and television, there is not one, but two phases. There is a first phase: a written script. But audiences never see it. What they see is an external performance on stage, in a film, or on television. This is the second and mediating phase, and it is from this that audience members take their cues. In the research of the editors of OnFiction, we have worked from the idea that fiction is simulation of the social world, so that for both writers and readers the psychological processes of creating the fictional worlds are based on empathy, theory of mind, and other kinds of social understanding. In a recent paper, Thalia Goldstein (2009) has proposed that actors—those people who offer the mediating performances—might also be people who have taken a particular interest in empathy, theory of mind, and the goings-on of the social world.

Goldstein is just starting her research on the psychological development and training of actors. In this paper she describes, for instance, a study in press by her and her PhD supervisor, Ellen Winner, in which they interviewed 11 professional actors who had acted on Broadway and 10 patent lawyers about such matters as their involvement of pretend play in childhood, and their attunement to others' emotions. Actors were distinguished from lawyers in recalling higher involvement in fictional worlds and pretend play in their childhood.

In the same way that fiction writers must create fictional worlds, and have an intense interest in them, so must actors. Therefore, says Goldstein:

Reading, understanding, and then creating a part onstage, in a film, or on a TV show requires a deep analysis of the inner life of that character. To portray a character, actors must first have a genuine understanding of that individual's mental and emotional life. In other words, actors must develop a good "theory of mind" so that they can grasp the inner workings of the characters they must portray. Thus it is likely that training in acting leads to advanced levels of theory of mind (p. 7).

This is an exciting and innovative program of research, and we look forward to more results on actors' theory of mind, empathy, and regulation of emotions.

Thalia Goldstein (2009). Psychological perspectives on acting. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 3, 6-9.

Thalia Goldstein & Ellen Winner (in press). Living in alternative and inner worlds: Early signs of acting talent. Creativity Research Journal.

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.

Travelogue Review: Under a Cloud

One can grumble about a lot of things in London—about the cloudy skies or about how expensive the Underground is—but something one cannot grumble about is the theatre. There are, of course, jokes: Decline the verb "to be interested in drama:" "I'm interested in drama, you are involved with the theatre, he's in show-business." Nonetheless, theatre is something the Brits do superbly well.

On London's South Bank there stands not only the Royal Festival Hall, opened in 1951, the first new large public building in London after the destructions of the War, but also the National Theatre, and the new Globe. Do not fret that the National Theatre building is a grey concrete thing of slabs and boxes. We don't have to compare it with Sydney Opera House or the Bilbao Guggenheim. It's what goes on inside that counts.

And it does count. It is hard to go to anything at the National Theatre that isn't good. Recently we saw Burnt by the Sun, a brilliant play, superbly acted, adapted by Peter Flannery from the screenplay by Nikita Mikhalov and Rustam Ibragimbekov of the excellent 1995 Russian film of the same name. It's about Sergei Kotov, a celebrated general in the Red Army, who has become a popular figure. (He is played in the National Theatre production by Ciarán Hinds.) The play takes place on a day in the summer of 1936, in the General's dacha (country house) by a lake a few miles outside Moscow. The General comes from a peasant family. He fought in the Russian Civil War after the Revolution, and he has a bluff and reassuring faith in the new society. He lives now with his wife Maroussia (played by Michelle Dockery) and his ten-year-old daughter Nadia (Skye Bennett/Holly Gibbs). Some of Maroussia's relatives are there too at the dacha. Do they live there, or are they just hanging around the spacious house? In any event, they dispose themselves in a beautifully Chekhovian way. One gathers that Maroussia's family were the previous owners of the dacha, and they talk about Pre-Revolutionary times.

The setting for the story is the beginning of Stalin's purges of senior officers from the Red Army. The action proper starts with the return, after many years, of Mitia (played by Rory Kinnear) who had grown up close to Maroussia's family. Kotof and Maroussia both recognize him immediately when they see him. There is a sudden tension. Why has he come?

It is very unusual to make a play out of a film. This adaptation for the stage involves a deeper exploration of the characters Kotov and Mitia, and one wonders how far it is theatre that has allowed this effect. At the same time there has been a change in atmosphere. The film is very Russian, but this very moving play—and perhaps this is part of how they can keep packing 900 people, night after night, into this theatre—seems, in its preoccupations, rather British. It is about the trustfulness of family life, despite its tensions, compared with a distrust of politics and the outside world. It is about the desire for society to be better for everyone while yearning nostalgically for privilege and the past (nostalgia being that sentiment in which things are not what they used to be, and never have been). These are ambivalences I feel myself, for a Britain from which I have emigrated and from which, when I return, I notice that hold myself emotionally at a certain distance.

Nikita Mikhalof and Rustam Ibragimbekov (1995). Burnt by the sun. (Film). Russia.

Peter Flannery (2009). Burnt by the sun. London, National Theatre, Lyttelton, until 21 May.

Travelogue: Front Row Seat

I miss my Toronto friends, though I do like being in London, and something one should certainly do here is to take a visit to the buses. Although the 168 is not regarded as one of London's great buses—it gets four stars rather than five—it is definitely worth considering. It goes from Hampstead Heath (though really it's South End Green), to very useful places like Euston (just a couple of minutes walk from the British Library), through Russell Square from where one can see the tower of the University Senate House, then across Waterloo Bridge to the South Bank, where the National Theatre is. Waterloo Bridge is not Westminster Bridge with its view about which Wordsworth wrote, "Earth has not anything to show more fair." For that you need to be on the Number 12. But the view from Waterloo Bridge is still good. The 168 is a double decker. It is best to go upstairs and, if possible, get a seat in the front row, from where one can see not only the buildings, and the river as one crosses it, but the Audis and Jaguars below which scuttle like cockroaches through gaps in the traffic.

On the 168, the timbre of the voice announcements as we approach each stop is very fine. The announcements are recorded by an actress who I would say is fresh from a run at the Old Vic. For the bus, she uses her BBC accent, informative rather than intimate. One can imagine that although this woman would have preferred something in the West End, she was pleased to get this part. She is of the expressive school of acting, so that two stops after leaving South End Green, she announces "Pond Street" with a sense of satisfaction. Although I think she is doing her best with the script, one could question the decision to announce the stop in this way since (like the stop from where we started) this one is named inappropriately. By the time we reach it, we have turned left from Pond Street and are 200 yards down Rosslyn Hill. I would suggest the stop be renamed "Hampstead Green," home to a host of golden daffodils. Further down the hill we come to "Belsize Park"; this delivered with confidence. Soon afterwards, "Chalk Farm Station" is said with a rising tone, expressing surprise. If I were the director, I would query this interpretation, because in my experience there are few things in London less surprising than reaching Chalk Farm Station. "Camden Town Station" is said as if in passing, which is perfectly correct, and "Pratt Street" is said in the most matter-of-fact manner. As the bus leaves each stop the announcer tells us the number, "one six eight," and then after a tiny pause we hear "to." This preposition is pronounced in a neutral tone so that it can be inserted by the recording engineer into any phrase. Then: "Old Kent Road, Tesco," said with descending pitch not, I think, to disparage Tesco, but to give the sense of final destination, where the driver can have a cup of tea.

One might think that hearing every couple of minutes, "one six eight ... to ... Old Kent Road, Tesco," would be pretty annoying. In fact the experience, with the moving stage set and the sound of this woman's voice in one's ears, is quite stirring. For the sake of the appreciation she must receive from a wide sector of the population, it is perhaps good that she got this part rather than something in the West End, which would probably only have been a re-run, and where the seats are much more expensive.

Realism and Interiority

From the Renaissance onwards, there has been a movement in the West towards realism in many of the arts. Its intent is to depict life without embellishment or commentary. In the Twentieth Century realism was carried forward by photography, and in fiction the cinema has been a strong influence, with its idea that what you see on the screen is what you would have seen with your own eyes had you been there. Realism has been distinguished from Romanticism, and from the Abstract, but really, I wonder, might it not be better to contrast it with interiority? Realism as what one might see out there in the world can be compared with the thoughts, desires, and always-partial understandings of the interior mind: what goes on in the world compared with what we project onto it. We can think, perhaps, of art as balanced on this border between the exterior and the interior.

In the literary fiction of the West, new impetus was given to interiority with modernism, in Marcel Proust's close identification of the reader with the narrator, in Virginia Woolf's depictions of inner life and its streams of consciousness, in Hermann Hesse's themes derived from Jungian psychoanalysis. In Japan, a different kind of movement towards the interior took place in the theatre. It occurred by making the exterior deliberately non-realistic in the drama forms of Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki. In Noh the principal actor wears a mask. In Bunraku characters are played by puppets that are two-thirds life-size, each activated by three pupetteers who wear black cloaks—a strangely effective way to depict the imperfectly known forces that act upon us—while a man on one side of the stage reads the script, and on the other side of the stage musicians accompany the piece. In Kabuki, characters are played by actors who move infrequently and scarcely change their facial expressions. The effect of these drama forms, so far as I can see, is to invite a kind of reflection from the events on the stage into the interior of the minds of the audience.

What of novels? A famous Japanese novel, The Makioka sisters, concentrates on relationships and how to conduct them. Here a sense of inwardness is achieved from a metaphorical connection between the outer forms of nature and inner feelings. Sachiko (the second-oldest of four sisters, who is married, with a child, and who has living in her house her two younger sisters, Yukiko and Taeko) makes her annual pilgrimage to Kyoto to see the cherry blossoms at the Heian Shrine. She sees with relief that this year the cherries are in full bloom, but she sees them also as passing with the end of spring, and has "the thought that even if she herself stood here next year, Yukiko might be married and far away" (p. 89). The outward sense of the blossoms, soon to fall from the trees, prompts an inward sadness that perhaps next year Yukiko may be not be with her, but by this point in the novel we readers know she is deeply anxious that the time for the thirty-year-old Yukiko to make a successful marriage may be past.

Junichiro Tanizaki (1943-1948). The Makioka sisters (E. Seidensticker, Trans.). New York: Vintage (currrent edition 1957).

Act V

The National Public Radio show This American Life has a fascinating episode (#218: "Act V") that follows a group of inmates in a high-security prison as they prepare to perform the last act of Hamlet. It is a wonderful exploration of the potential for fiction to transform an individual, to illuminate one's own personality and experiences and lead to individual growth. One also cannot help but ponder the potential for human transformation in general, and the competing goals of incarceration: to both rehabilitate and to punish. You can listen to the show for free here (a copy can also be downloaded for 95 cents). The organization responsible for this program can be found here. This American Life can be subscribed to as a podcast, through iTunes.

Psychology of Theatre Conference

An upcoming conference on Theatre and Cognitive Science may be of interest to those curious about the psychology of fiction. The details are below, for those who might want to attend or present:

Call for Papers
SYMPOSIUM ON THEATRE AND COGNITIVE STUDIES

University of Pittsburgh
February 27th and 28th, 2009

Plenary Speaker:
Mark Johnson, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon
"Cognition and the Arts"

The University of Pittsburgh's Symposium on Theatre and Cognitive Studies will feature new work at the intersection of theatre/performance studies and the studies of the mind and brain. We encourage paper proposals from theatre and performance scholars working in the fields of acting, spectatorship, directing, design, playwriting, and theatricality. We also encourage proposals from cognitive literary critics with an interest in drama, including script analysis and dramaturgy.

Topics presented may include (but are not limited to) conceptual integration ("blending"), Theory of Mind, empathy studies, affordances, emotions, memory, and cognition as these relate to the history, theory, and practice of the theatre. Final papers should be twenty minutes long.

Mark Johnson is the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, 1987) and The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago, 2007). With George Lakoff, Johnson has co-authored the highly influential Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999). In keeping with recent emphases on "cognitive embodiment," Johnson researches the ways in which meaning and cognition are intimately tied to embodied epistemology and to what he calls "the pervasive aesthetic characteristics of all experience."

Symposium Organizers: Bruce McConachie, University of Pittsburgh; Rhonda Blair, Southern Methodist University; F. Elizabeth Hart, University of Connecticut; Pil Hansen, University of Toronto; John Lutterbie, SUNY Stony Brook; and Amy Cook, Indiana University.

Send 200-300 word proposals to Pil Hansen and John Lutterbie by emails only: Hansen.pil@gmail.com and John.Lutterbie@gmail.com.

Deadline for all proposals: October 1, 2008

Books on the Psychology of Fiction at the Cinema and the Theatre

Since we introduced our list of books and micro-reviews on the psychology of fiction, we have added several more. In addition Bill Benzon has contributed a review of a book on the cognitive structure of comic-book fiction by Scott McCloud (1993), and Peter Sattler a review of a book on mental imagery in fiction by Elaine Scarry (1999).

It occurred to me that although our interests include the cinema and the theatre, our original list was without books on films, and there was only one on theatre, namely Aristotle's (330 BCE) Poetics. We have now remedied this defect to some extent by adding four books on the psychology of cinema: the influential book on the psychology of fiction films by Peter Bordwell (1985), and books by Murray Smith (1995), Ed Tan (1996), and Michael Ondaatje (2002). We have also added two on the psychology of theatrical acting by Konstantin Stanislavski (1936) and Elly Konijn (2000).

Although a number of people have kindly said that our list of books is helpful, I am aware that there are many gaps. Also, I am not a very fast reader. So, please suggest books and offer micro-reviews that we can add to the list, which can be accessed by clicking here.