Research Bulletin: Are Some Types of Book Titles Better Liked and Better Remembered?

Humans spend vast amounts of time engaging with fictional stories. There are four main theories that help to explain this love for fiction. First, fiction contains social and psychological experiences of the characters, which helps us gain a better understanding of our own world (Mar & Oatley, 2008). Second, humans are drawn to gossip, which is essentially what fiction is. Fiction gives us a window into the social relationships of the characters. Third, humans are drawn to the moral content of fiction. People enjoy rooting for the good guys, but also enjoy stories about morally ambiguous characters (Janicke & Raney, 2015). Lastly, fiction is associated with hard-wired pleasures, such as an attraction to wealth, power, and beauty (Pinker, 1997).
 
Barnes and Black (2022) wanted to examine whether book titles containing words associated with these four theories would be more appealing and better remembered than titles without such words. The researchers generated five different words associated with each of the four theories. For example, the words “guilty, innocence, virtue, taboo, and evil” were used to create titles related to morality. Five titles that were not related to any of the four categories were selected from the USA Today Bestseller list, to act as the control titles. Undergraduates were then randomly assigned to view these titles, rate how appealing each
was, and then were tested on their memory for each title.
 
Participants rated the titles associated with the four main categories (i.e., mental states, gossip, morality, and pleasure) as more appealing than the control titles. For recall, the “mental states” category was the least well remembered out of all the categories. Next time you go to the bookstore, it would be fun to see whether the bestselling books have titles related to mental states, gossip, pleasure, or morality!
 
References
 
Barnes, J. L., & Black, J. E. (2022). What’s in a name? Book title salience and the
psychology of fiction. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16(2), 290–301.
 
Janicke, S. H., & Raney, A. A. (2015). Exploring the role of identification and moral
disengagement in the enjoyment of an antihero television series. Communications, 40(4),
485-495.
 
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of
social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192.
 
Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. Norton Company.
 
Post by Tia Kleiner
 
* For a copy of the original article, please contact R. Mar (see profile for e-mail).
 
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

The Soul of Kindness

Elizabeth Taylor, born in 1912, was one of the most accomplished English novelists of the Twentieth Century. She can be thought of continuing in the way pioneered by Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf of depicting people’s inner lives but extending this to include several characters’ thoughts in relating and conversing with a set of other people who include relatives, friends, and lovers. She published twelve novels, a children’s book, and many short stories, which she conceived and thought about while bringing up two children. She was outraged by the fact that most male writers have not needed to divide their time in this way. So here, from her A View of the Harbour (1947) is Beth, a novelist on her way up to London on a train to see her publisher. "A man, she thought suddenly, would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, not leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I have now forgotten it" (p. 186). 

 

Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness (1964) can be regarded as a variation on Jane Austen’s Emma, in which the protagonist encourages others to marry. Elizabeth Taylor's novel starts with the wedding of Flora Secretan to Richard, a businessman. In the early part of the book Flora influences her best friend Meg to yearn for a sexual relationship with Patrick, a novelist, without seeming to know that, although he is willing to take Meg out for an occasional meal, it won’t go much further because he is gay. She also influences Richard’s father to marry his mistress, Ba; they do so and both find their lives much more boring than they had previously been. Meg’s brother, Kit, adores Flora and thinks of her as a goddess. He has been to drama school and has had one or two tiny walk-on parts. Although no one else thinks he has the slightest chance, Flora encourages him to believe that he will triumph and become a great actor. In Chapter 2, (p. 14 in the Kindle version) we read this: “she had inconvenient plans for other people’s pleasure, and ideas differing from her own she was not able to tolerate.” Then here, at the end of Chapter 2, are Flora and her new husband, Richard, in bed.

She was glad that there was a way of coaxing him out of his black humour. She turned him to face her, her silky arms around his shoulders. An end to the sulks. Benignly, she made a present of herself.

Flora … the soul of kindness.

 

Flora’s friend, Meg, works in an office in the middle of London but cannot afford to live in Kensington. So, with a small amount of money inherited from her father and some encouragement from Patrick, she moves into a little house that allows an occasional distant glimpse of the funnel of a ship passing on the river in an area that seems to be somewhere between Greenwich and Woolwich. Near this house lives Liz whose studio is upstairs from a deserted shop that is scheduled for demolition. Liz lives in the most awful mess: dead flowers, cow parsley, some feathers, dinner plates, sea-shells, all over the floor. But she paints pictures:

The rubbish on the floor and about the room had been re-created, reassembled over and over again, into delicate and intricate patterns … there were also some pale girl children, with staring eyes (p. 39).

 

The artistic arrangements are beautiful. It doesn’t seem to be an accident that the painter is called “Liz,” because here is a quote from the end of the Wikipedia article on Elizabeth:

The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.

 

I don’t think The Soul of Kindness is quite perfect, but it seems to me that aspects of it are. It does have a plot, but that’s not really what it’s about. It is a book that one needs to read slowly; it’s unlikely to work if you skip or speed-read. It depicts characters’ thoughts, then thoughts of what they might or might not say, maybe could say or should say … but instead they say something else which is sometimes a cliché, which isn’t quite what they meant to say but, because it’s been heard before, could possibly be alright. People’s beliefs and ideas about each other and about themselves also get passed around. At this book’s centre is the issue that although we human beings are completely dependent on our relationships, we often don’t quite know, and some of us seem unable to know, what effects we might have by saying certain things to others.

 

In this novel, too, are observations: as characters look at gardens and shops and houses. What they see, mingled with their thoughts of what they might say, is a multitude of English peculiarities. The result for the reader (at least this one) was quite a bit of giggling out-loud as I proceeded. In this book as well—rather touchingly depicted—there’s loneliness, particularly for Flora’s mother and for Flora’s friend, Meg.

 

The book’s principal focus is on self-absorption. Although, in Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), there’s affection, there’s not much of it in The Soul of Kindness. Instead there’s reflection … prompted by the question of what we human beings are up to in our lives, and on how we search for meaning within ourselves and with each other.

 

Jane Austen (1816). Emma. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 2003).

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1947). A view of the harbour. New York: New York Review Books (current edition 2015). 

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1964). The soul of kindness. London: Virago (current edition 2010).

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1971). Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. London: Virago (current edition 1982).

 

 

 

Writing Character

Imagine you are given this photograph, and asked to write a fictional character sketch of the man depicted here. This is the task that Marta Maslej, Raymond Mar, and I, gave to participants, in a study published last year. What would there be in your habits and traits that would influence what you write, and how you write it?

In our study we asked 207 participants each to write a fictional character sketch of the man in this photo. We asked them, too, about their habits of writing and reading, and gave them questions about traits of personality, empathy, and engagement in fantasy. Then, to a different group of people, 144 in number, we gave the character sketches that the first group of participants had produced and asked them to rate the sketches as to how likeable, interesting, and complex, each character was.

We found that habits of writing fiction, and of writing and reading poetry, were associated with producing character sketches that were rated as more interesting and complex. In terms of personality traits of Extraversion, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Openness, and Conscientiousness, only Openness was associated with sketches of characters who were interesting and complex. Higher levels of empathetic concern, and of engagement in fantasy, had similar effects. No habits or traits were associated with writing sketches of characters who were more likeable.

We found it surprising that reading more poetry had an effect on people’s abilities to create characters who were interesting and complex, although habits of reading more prose fiction and non-fiction did not. Perhaps reading poetry involves an interest in language and emotion, which are also helpful in verbal depiction of characters. Perhaps the lack of effect from reading more prose is similar to how listening to a lot of music does not necessarily contribute much to becoming a musician.

Some people are drawn to writing fiction. It seems that they are more likely to be among those who seek out challenges of intellectual and aesthetic kinds (the trait of Openness), as well as being higher in empathy for others, and more likely to engage in fantasy. We can imagine that it’s people with these habits and character traits who go on to become authors of novels and short stories that are published.

Maslej, M. M., Oatley, K., & Mar, R. A. (2017). Creating fictional characters: The role of experience, personality, and social processes. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11, 487-499. 

Modes of Life

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Literary fiction has a main concern with character. Literary characters are made up of sets of features that enable us to make mental models of them, to understand them in ways that—if we knew them in daily life—would enable us to interact with them. Character, in fiction, has aspects of the psychological traits of personality, but enhanced by influences of specific events. A less-noticed aspect might be called "modes of life." People with particular traits adapt to, or are unable to adapt to, different modes, such as being married or divorced, being a parent, being employed as a civil servant or a shop assistant, being unemployed, living here or living there. A writer who is particularly good on such modes is Penelope Lively, whose most famous book is Moon Tiger. Born in Cairo in 1933, she continues to write and, on 4 May this year, a thoughtful and engaging profile of her was published in the New York Times, Sunday Book Review Section, by Charles McGrath.

One of Lively's interests is in how events that may seem small at the time can have large effects, and—as it were—jolt people from one mode into another. In her most recent novel, How it all began, she pushes this idea towards a certain edge. A random event occurs when one of the novel's characters, Charlotte, is mugged on a London street. We don't know about the mugger, but the event prompts changes in several other lives. Charlotte is taken to hospital and a phone-call is made to her daughter, Rose. She works for an academic, Henry, who likes being famous, and likes to mix with famous people. She deals with his correspondence and accompanies him to important events. The mugging means that Rose has to look after her mother, Charlotte, and therefore cannot accompany Henry, next day, to Manchester, to give a distinguished lecture. Another person has to be called in to accompany him: his niece, Marion. Without the presence of Rose, Henry messes up his lecture, makes an utter fool of himself. He has an idea of how to reinstate himself, but following the debacle, his life starts to unravel. Rose accepts her mother coming to stay in her house, and move about on crutches. This has a substantial effect on Rose and her husband. As to Henry's niece, Marion: because she has to escort Henry to Manchester, she isn't able to meet her lover, Jeremy. Thinking Jeremy to be in his flat, she leaves a message to tell him she can't see him. But he's not in the flat. He is at home where he lives with his wife Stella. Without thinking, he leaves his mobile phone in the pocket of a jacket he has hung on a door, while he nips out on an errand. Stella finds the phone and the message. She realizes her husband is having an affair. She throws a wobbly, and starts proceedings for a divorce.

In an earlier novel, Consequences, Lively traces the influence of events, and the ways in which they precipitate people into different modes of life, over three generations of women. Lorna is born in privilege. As she sits on a bench in St James's Park, she sees Matt an artist, who is making drawings of ducks on the pond there. The two start going out, then get married, and go with almost no money to Somerset, to live in a tiny cottage. On the walls of its upstairs room, Matt paints murals: love scenes of Lorna and him. Matt is killed in Crete, in World War II. When she is grown up, their daughter, Molly, comes across a discarded newspaper, and happens to see an advertisement for a job, for which she applies, and is accepted: the job changes her life. Molly's daughter, Ruth, who considers her own birth to have been an accident, finds out about some of these events. She retraces the footsteps of Matt to Crete, and of him and Lorna to the Somerset cottage, where she sees the murals. This last part of the book, I found, was very moving.

We each enter into a different mode with each kind of person with whom we interact: parent, child, employer, someone we are fond of, someone we don't like. As Erving Goffman (1961) says, with each person it's as if we pass through an invisible membrane that separates one role from another. These roles can expand into modes. An engaging aspect of Lively's work is that she concentrates on these modes in ways that enable us to reflect upon them in our own lives.

Goffman, E. (1961). “Fun in games” in Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction (pp. 15-81). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

Lively, P. (1987). Moon tiger. London: Deutsch.

Lively, P. (2007). Consequences. Toronto: Key Porter.

Lively, P. (2011). How it all began. New York: Viking.

McGrath, C. (2017, 4 May 2017). "A writer writes:" Penelope Lively's fiction defies the test of time, New York Times Book Review Section.

Open Mind

The story of Haruki Murakami's novel Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki and his years of pilgrimage is that of a quest. In late adolescence, Tsukuru had been one of a group of five young people who were very close. They were not just friends, they thought and acted almost as one. Then, in his second year at university, his four friends cut him off, and told him not to get in touch with any of them again ... ever. It seemed as if he had done something, but he did not know what it was. For months he was extremely depressed. He wanted to commit suicide. The novel is a pilgrimage in which Tsukuru journeys through his life, and tries to find out what the meaning of all this had been.

In his twenties Tsukuru meets Haida, a young man of about the same age as himself, and they become close. Haida is a graduate student who says that his idea in life is "to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way ... kind of like constructing a vacuum" (p. 48).

I think what Haida is talking about here is a kind of reflection, a kind of contemplation, a kind of mindfulness, in which in the "vacuum" one lets thoughts just come into one's mind. I think this is the mode in which Murakami may write his books. It is the mode in which I write mine. It's the mode one enters when one takes up a literary novel or short story, and lets it in. One puts aside one's mundane concerns and goals, and opens one's mind to whatever may occur.

Whereas in the East, a kind of meditation has grown up in which one concentrates on one particular thing, perhaps one's breathing, and allows other thoughts that enter the mind just to drift out of it without paying attention to them, this kind of mode is an opposite. It is a welcoming of all the thoughts that come into the mind, an allowing of them to move around in there, to make associations with other thoughts, with memories, with ideas. It's on these kinds of associations, when they are meaningful to us, that we may concentrate, whether we are writing or reading.

We have featured Murakami's short stories before in OnFiction (click here). In some of these he starts by depicting what seems to be an ordinary world. Then, one finds that growing out of it, or growing alongside it, is an extra-ordinary world, something like a dream world. This idea is developed further in Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki. Just as, in A midsummer-night's dream, Shakespeare was able to present us with a dream world, in order to see our day-to-day world more clearly, so too is Murakami. The dream-world is something like the unconscious. It's composed of inward meanings. Moving between the two—the ordinary world and a dream world—is part of this novel. By means of such movements Tsukuro, and we, are able to think about ourselves, and each other, and our relationships with others, in new and clarifying ways. In life, or as one makes one's own pilgrimage through this book, in the vacuum that one may create in the mind, thoughts and memories can connect with each other and, by means of associations between and among them, we can change from the sometimes colourless, to the more colourful. That is to say that among our thoughts, memories, and reflections, we can choose what is important for us, and understand it more deeply.

Murakami, H. (2014). Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki and his years of pilgrimage (P. Garbriel, Trans.). Toronto: Anchor Canada.

Shakespeare, W. (1600). A midsummer night's dream. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995).

Writing as Exploration

At the Morgan Library in New York, one of the exhibitions is of some of Jane Austen’s letters and some drafts of her fiction. Her letters are, for the most part, continuous. As in conversation, the words seem just to have flowed. By contrast, Austen’s drafts of fiction are full of crossings-out. Some people might think of this as trial-and-error, but a far better way of thinking about it is as exploration. When one reads a novel or short story, or watches a film, one wants to engage in something that had been explored, thought about, written, re-written, explored again, explored widely.

With her colleagues, Sabina Bourgeois-Bougrine of Paris Descartes University conducted 90-minute interviews with 22 recognized French screenplay writers. The interviewers asked about:

information input (where and how the scriptwriter gets information and inspiration), mental processes (reasoning, planning, thinking, daydreaming, problem solving, decision making), relationships with others, job context, and constraints (p. 385).

The authors of the paper propose a metaphor: writing is traversing a maze of creativity. It is as if writers make a journey in which they navigate several segments, going up blind alleys, doubling back, finding the best pathways. The authors propose three phases. First there is a long and enjoyable phase of what they call “impregnation,” which often involves making maps of the coming journey. This is followed by a phase that the authors call “structuring,” which for screenwriting involves writing an outline and/or treatment that a director, a producer, or a sponsor, must accept before a project can be financed to go forward. In the third phase there is intense writing and re-writing of the script.

Writing scripts and writing for print fiction are in many ways similar, but whereas those who write novels and short stories often work mostly alone and at a certain stage with an editor, scriptwriting is a journey with several others. The authors of this paper say: “The process of rewriting several versions of the script seems to be universal among screenplay writers, engaging often the producer of the film, actors, and so forth (p. 396). The moral standpoints, the views, the ideas, and the preferences, of these people need to be taken into account. Successful scriptwriting depends, in part, on being able to maintain good working relationships with all of them.

In addition, they [the scriptwriters] reported that as one “gets into the skin of the main character,” “understands the character,” and “makes him talk,” they often experience enjoyable moments in which intuition, unconscious, and automatic process take over the generation and selection of creative ideas (p. 397).

The authors offer many other fascinating quotes from the scriptwriters. Here’s one about the first phase:

when I find a good idea, or a scene that I like, I turn around it. Generally, I do a lot of things that are indirectly related to the work, I read a lot, I copy many texts that interest me, I see a lot of movies, I listen to a lot of music (p. 390).

Here is a quote from a scriptwriter about the second phase:

You can have all the talent and all the literary imagination—which are two essential components of the profession—if you don’t have the skills for this tedious task of structuring, you cannot go far. This is something that has more to do with math, a kind of mental structure or consistency: such cause produces such effect (p. 392).

And, here’s a quote from a scriptwriter about the final phase:

There is a constant fluctuation. There are only manic-depressive people in this profession! (laughs). It’s like climbing stairs toward an untouchable star, because in fact at each step we need to climb another one, and as the goal is to reach an untouchable star, we are always in this situation (p. 395).

One reason why Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ metaphor of the maze is such a good one is that, although they don’t say this, for a really good story nearly the whole maze needs to have been explored. When this has happened, the watcher of the movie (or the reader of the book) will get the sense that the route taken in the story is a good one in comparison with all the less-good turnings that could have been taken.

Bourgeois-Bougrine, S., Glaveneau, V., Botella, M., Guillou, K., De Biasi, P. M., & Lubart, T. (2014). The creativity maze: Exploring creativity in screenplay writing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8, 384-399.

Image: Cawthorne Maze, South Yorkshire.

"On or about December 1910": When and Whence Literary Modernism, Really?

It has been a pleasure this week reading and rereading two articles, written 90 years apart, by authors who are both trying to figure out, or at least to present what they presume they have figured out, concerning when literary Modernism happened and what it was exactly. Both articles approach the question by using a sieve method, asking what it is that Modernism was not trying to do or could not do, and then trying to patch together and coherently present what’s left.

In 1924, Virginia Woolf’s cryptically seductive, and arbitrary but bold selection of a year and month, even, when “human character changed” (5) referred to a moment in cultural history when novelists were discovering and producing novels demonstrating that “there is something permanently interesting in character in itself” (5). Understanding how to present that interest and ensuing observations was “an absorbing pursuit” and articulating it “an obsession” (6) for the group of writers (only later to be called “High Modernists”) most of whom had begun writing “on or about December 1910” (21), Woolf notes.

Woolf has not very nice words to say about novelists immediately preceding her generation. They give the public too much of what they want to hear; they respect too much the contemporary cultural “common ground” that values objects, social utility, tradition, and geneaology, over individuals and their emotional and psychological experiences. What she thought necessary was a closet clean-up through the slow but determined development of a “code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship” (21), an interaction that she compares to talking about the weather as an accepted way of seeking to make a stranger aware of one as a thinking and feeling other (as opposed, I should think, to simply an annoying occupant of a much-coveted seat on the subway, or the person in front of one in line to order a hamburger). Woolf does not fault her predecessors because their writing is not timeless, but precisely because it is timely. These writers knew what contemporary cultural code language invited readers to a more intimate relationship with writers and which frightened them away. But they did not take it upon themselves to change that code. But Woolf also admonished readers in words somewhat to this effect: don’t let yourself be frightened away – what’s coming up next among novelists will astound you. Woolf was trying to identify not only what the new tenor of the novel and poetry was, but what had led up to it.

Likewise, Melanie Conroy (2014) recently conducted a study in which she sought to discover in which decade(s) of the French novel there is empirical evidence of what critic Erich Kahler had called the “inward turn of narrative”, which was precisely what Woolf had been trying to account for. Conroy’s field is French literature, so she sought evidence of linguistic innovations in 384 French novels contained in the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database of French literature. This database contains digital versions of texts from the twelfth to the twentieth century and was developed and is maintained by the University of Chicago. She wanted to test whether linguistic innovations could account for the eventual movement toward a modernist aesthetic in the French novel. Conroy conducted a database search for instances of reporting clauses (specifically, se-dit-il, se-dit-elle, pensa-t-il, pensa-t-elle, pensa, se disait and pensait) and then created the metric of “Common reporting clauses per 10,000 words” for each decade of the period from 1800-1929. She found several peaks in the data, in the 1830’s, 1860’s, 1890’s, and 1920’s, and she found two “large increases” in this set of phrases, in the 1830s and between 1910 and 1929 (165). She says that the “inward turn” of the 1830’s was larger than that of the later period. The earlier increase comes at the beginning of French Realism, and the second within the period of high Modernism. She then analyzed individual novels within each decade span and focused on particular authors who most frequently used these reporting clauses.

I admire Conroy’s efforts to try to identify through linguistic markers the most intensely focused historical moment of literary Modernism in French novels, as well as the ingenuity of using the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database to pursue that objective. However, as Conroy’s study stands, it cannot comment on the questions it asks, because of both theoretical difficulties within the conception of the project, and empirical and statistical methodological problems.   

There is a deep wavering on Conroy’s part, it seems to me at least, concerning whether she believes that the linguistic markers she searches are evidence of the “inward turn” or that they are just pre-“inward turn” awareness of authorial concern with characters’ mental states. Are reporting clauses and mental state verbs more valuable for their absence in the early twentieth century, when examples of free indirect thought might be more in evidence, than for their presence in the nineteenth?  She calls the two peaks in reporting phrases and mental states “rival ‘inward turns’” (166). The article is entitled “Before the ‘Inward Turn,’” but she says her research question is “do reporting clauses and mental verbs occur more frequently in some authors, texts, or decades than elsewhere? If the frequency of these markers is significantly higher in them, these authors, books, or decades quite possibly engage in more thought representation and thereby strengthen the ‘inward turn’” (134). 

But is the strengthening by constituting the turn, or only by making possible the arrival of the more developed free indirect thought which itself constitutes the turn? How can free indirect thought be argued to be more developed than just using lots of reporting phrases and references to characters’ mental states? And if they are so very different, does one have anything to do with the other at the level of the reader’s sense of intimacy with the author, which was so important to Woolf in the article discussed? These questions are important, because if the marked phrases themselves are evidence of the turn, the tables will mean one thing, but if they are precisely evidence against the literary period having arrived yet, we might as well turn the line graphs upside down and read the lows as highs and the highs as lows. 

My concern with the data analysis is that it is essentially just counting, even when ratios, as opposed to straight counts, are being compared. Though the author mentions that comparisons are “statistically significant” (137, footnote 50 on 147) on two or three occasions, I find no evidence of statistical tests having been done. Did the numbers beat out chance? If they did, what was the value of the effect size? It seems to me that time-series analysis would have been most appropriate, but I imagine that there would be problems with meeting the assumptions of that line of testing. For example, in a number of “counts,” the period 1900-1929 is treated alongside other slices of time that are only a decade long. Auto-correlation might have posed a problem as well. Perhaps the statistical tests were done, but not reported. In either case, these findings cannot be used to build further results upon until they are substantiated.  

What exactly is that “code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship” (21) the understanding of which Woolf takes to be key for understanding the clinamen that occurred “on or about December 1910” (4)? Can textual analysis of databases of literary works help us to learn more about that code? It seems to me that a study like Conroy’s that included many more instances of different kinds of mental states of characters might be helpful in this pursuit. Inevitably one would need to count also instances of free indirect thought, not a possibility using digital techniques alone, it would seem to me. But the questions are well worth asking and well worth tackling large databases and sophisticated statistical techniques to get to the bottom of.

Conroy, Melanie. (2014). Before the “Inward Turn”: Tracing Represented Thought in the French Novel. Poetics Today (35): 117-171. 

Woolf, Virginia. (1924). The Hogarth Essays: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth Press.   
   

Scripting Embodied Experience: Table Manners as Written in Linens (and playing cards)

Annie Smart's set design for To the Lighthouse, Berkeley Rep

Given my thoughts last week about how understanding experience as embodied can matter to the way we model interactions, I am returning this week to my ongoing project of mapping out food interactions. I attempt this through some food infrastructure that is at once inordinately mundate and evocatively mysterious: the supports for meals that usually take the supporting role in the food dramas we enact throughout the day, such as table linens and utensils. (These jive well with my usual underdog-cheering affection for place and setting in preference to character and plot in the analysis and construction of stories.)

I am here considering a series of lines directly quoted from Chapter 17, the dinner scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  Each of these "playing cards" blocks out some movement, some table manner, some deliberate scripting of meal relationships--and I can imagine each being part of a deck of role-playing cards, for example, that might begin a compelling dinner party:

Quick Hits: Daily habits of famous writers

Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings has a fascinating post on the daily habits of famous writers. By pulling relevant quotes from interviews published in The Paris Review, Popova manages to capture just how much diversity there is in approaching writing by these authors. Fascinated by this diversity in daily routine, she wondered whether there might be a relation between the sleeping habits of writers and their productivity. To explore this, she enlisted the help of an Italian information designer to create an infographic that visualizes the two variables. The full post is worth reading, so I won't ruin it for you. Both efforts reflect a desire that I think is common in writers. Since many struggle to write, we endeavour to understand just how the others manage to "do it." 

The interviews upon which she drew for this data include, as might be expected, many gems of advice. Take, for example, E. B. White's proclamation that "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper." 

In ending this post, I will leave you with an excerpt from an interview with Maya Angelou, who left us so recently but will never be forgotten. 

"I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop — I’m a serious cook — and pretend to be normal. I play sane — Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them — fifty acceptable pages — it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important."

"Gliding in the arms of your own writing": Rosa Montero's La loca de la casa

The dedication of Rosa Montero’s La loca de la casa (2003) enticingly sets the theme and tone of this beautiful hymn to human imagination. The words are presented, appropriately, within a half rectangle – the half that includes one long side on the top and one short side on the left. The other half is missing. The dedication reads: “For Martina, who is and isn’t. And who, not being, has taught me a lot” (all translations are mine). At certain points in the narrative, the reader is forced to question indeed whether Montero’s sister Martina, who figures so saliently in important passages of this autobiography/novel, actually exists. Over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that Montero’s first point is that, from the perspective of the reader, it doesn’t matter whether her sister exists. What matters are the emotions, thoughts, simulations, and insights experienced along the way. But her more radical second point is that the interlacing of her own life and that of her sister exist more crisply in her imagination than in her memory and even than in her day to day interactions with Martina. 

In the skirmishes between memory and imagination, Montero accepts that, often enough, imagination wins: “In fact, when a certain amount of time passes, say twenty years, since the thing I remember, sometimes it’s hard to distinguish whether I lived it, dreamed it, imagined it, or perhaps wrote it (which highlights… the power of the imagination: imagined life is also life)” (224). It is clear in the peregrinations of her thoughts, memories, and citations of other writers that she feels a deep respect for the realness of what we imagine, and the imaginative quality of what we experience as real, and most especially for the mutual influences of the two. 

She explores rich questions concerning the imagination and its role in our lives, madness, falling in love, feeling the need to escape death through creating art, and the struggle between memory and fantasy. She believes that imagining can help one’s mental health, relates her personal story of suffering panic attacks in her twenties as a journalist, and reports the diminution and disappearance of those experiences after she began writing fiction.  She says that “One always writes against death” (13) and shares stories she has read that illustrate this notion: how the Persian noble woman Scheherazade and the painter Wang-Fô, of ancient Chinese legend, are saved by their practicing of their respective arts: storytelling and painting. She shares the two questions she most detests being asked at conferences and readings: Is there a women’s literature? and Which does she prefer, journalism or fiction-writing? Her answers are no, and fiction. “I can easily imagine myself not being a journalist, but I can’t conceive of myself without novels” (181). 

But Montero is not a believer in the “muse”, as one might surmise from her great respect for the imagination. She introduces the question of craft, quite intriguingly, by performing it. Montero cryptically introduces a narrative of her encounter at the age of twenty-three with a famous and very handsome European actor, M., who is in Madrid making a movie. She is set up on a date with M. through a friend in the movie business. Strangely though, after telling us about her amorous encounter with M, she tells us that she will tell us the story again later. In fact, she narrates the same encounter two more times. The three versions of Montero’s encounter with M. are different in quality, with one more purely suspenseful, another more purely emotional and erotic, and the culminating one a finer version with the best parts of the previous two excised from their original narratives and combined, and added to, such that it is quite powerful, much finer than either of the previous versions. And yet they are all told as if they really had happened to her. Her point here seems to be that the iteration of the encounter towards its final version is also work of the imagination in a simmering pot of tasty bits of images, memories, suppressions, juxtapositions, and symbols, and not the work of a muse. 

Trained as a psychologist, Montero nevertheless is not up to date on some questions in this area. She says that one can test her hypothesis that a “woman’s literature” does not exist, she says, by “reading another person passages from novels, and I am sure that the hearer will not guess the sex of the authors at a rate any better than mere statistical chance” (171). But studies suggest that readers can guess the sex of the writer of literary works, and better than at chance levels. A few pages later, when she writes “I would say that the great majority of the world’s psychiatrists and psychologists are individuals who have had mental problems” (184), one wonders how she is defining her categories. But it is interesting to hear of her informal survey based on a question originally posed by the writer Nuria Amat to writers: if you had to choose between never writing again and never reading again, which would you choose? Montero asked this “worrisome question” (199) to a number of writer friends and acquaintances over the years after having heard of it. She reports that over 90% (including herself) would rather give up writing than reading. A fascinating result. And perhaps one that one of our readers involved in research on response to literature might like to take up and empirically test.

I would recommend this exquisite narrative to anyone interested in questions of creativity and writing, although it’s not clear whether there is an English translation available. My cursory searches have yielded nothing yet. If there is one, I certainly hope that the title is not The crazed woman inside me, which seems to be a suggested English translation for the book on Amazon.com. “La loca de la casa” means something closer to “The loony one in the family” or “the family loon.” Here there is a double referent to the author herself and to the imagination. I think this translation better gets at the idea of the commonness of madness or “craziness,” because Montero’s point is that since each of us has an imagination, each of us has una loca en casa, and perhaps la locura is not something contained inside one person (as the earlier translation suggests), but is an interpersonal and social process as well.

Finally, I’ll leave you with what is probably my favorite passage of this work. It is a lovely meditation on what it feels like to be writing well, and perhaps experiencing what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1990) has called “flow.”

“In fact, there are days in which you feel so inspired, so overflowing with words and images that you write with a complete feeling of weightlessness, you write as someone soaring over the horizon, surprising even yourself with what you’ve written: But did I know that? How was I capable of writing this paragraph? Sometimes it happens that you are writing way beyond your capacities, you are writing better than you know how to write. And you don’t want to budge from this spot, you don’t want to breathe or blink, much less think, so that you don’t interrupt this miracle. Writing, in these strange raptures of lightness, is like dancing a very complicated waltz with someone, and doing it perfectly. Rounds and rounds in the arms of your partner, weaving in and out with intricate steps, such beautiful steps, with winged feet; and the music of the words echoes in your ears, and the world all about is a sparkling of crystal chandeliers and silver candelabras, of shining silks, and lustrous shoes, the world is a whirling pool of splendours and your dance borders on the most complete beauty, one turn and another and you continue without missing a beat, it’s marvelous, however much you fear losing the rhythm, stepping on your partner, being once more clumsy and human; but you manage to continue for one more round, and another and perhaps another, gliding in the arms of your own writing” (49).

Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. NewYork: Harper.

Montero, Rosa. La loca de la casa. (2003). Mexico: Alfaguara.