Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

 
For writers like George Eliot, the ability of art to elicit an empathetic response from the reader is one of its paramount readers. I've read a few posts this week on the subject of why we feel forms of emotional attachment to fictional characters i.e. to regard them no differently to written accounts of real figures or even to people we know. Firstly, Butterflies and Wheels:

"It is very odd, and even somewhat mysterious, what powerful emotions we can feel about fictional characters. The oddity becomes more obvious if you try to imagine animals doing it. The idea is absurd - yet we're so used to doing it ourselves that we forget how odd it is. What's that about, do you suppose? Other minds, probably. Right? Must be. The social animal thing. Our brains would have been too expensive to have evolved if they didn't have a huge payoff; the payoff is social collaboration; for that we need a working theory of mind. So we have this hypertrophied faculty of thinking and feeling about the interior worlds of other people - so hypertrophied that it works even (or especially) on people who don't actually exist."


Secondly, George Szirtes;

"The answer to this is bound to be long and tentative, but my guess is that the imagination does not distinguish carefully between the real and the imagined... So we have few reliable data to the objective reality of others. We understand that others exist and that we live in a world where not to acknowledge their existence would quickly lead to ruin... Consciousness tells us we are subjective beings, that the evidence of our senses is not enough. It is precisely because we have imaginations that we can cope with the world: we can construct the scenarios in which the world makes sense in the ways we are capable of apprehending sense... The fact that we know we are shaping apprehensions of reality into sense means we are properly sceptical about our imagination too. And that is how literary, theatrical, cinematic, and other artistic conventions work. They frame the imagination, allowing it scope but limiting it. That is the vital function of art."


It generally seems to me that the tendency to anthropomorphise is the critical question here and our tendency to attribute intentions, emotions and other mental states to inanimate objects (whether that happens to mean incarnating physical elements into the form of a deity or simply swearing at obstreperous household appliances). However, before I go too far in accepting the evolutionary psychology explanation offered in the former quotation above, it's worth noting that it can be argued that the role of character (and consequently of empathy) changes over time. In classical literature, the absence of a notion of free will tends to constrain the role of consciousness while in medieval literature the idea of self-annihilation before god as being a worthy goal tends to have a similar effect. Early prose narratives, like those of Daniel Defoe, often tend to by highly episodic with character somewhat inconsistent between episodes. For the type of narrative, being discussed, we have to turn to the sentimental novel with its combination of first person narration and explicit soliciting of empathy. As such, an emotional reaction to the death of Lear or Cleopatra is rather different to that of Clarissa:

"Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and loves, above all Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Julie. These books received frenzied popular and critical acclaim, but not because they said anything about constitutions and rights, even allegorically. What they did do, according to Hunt, was to encourage readers to identify with weak female characters who struggled to preserve their autonomy and integrity against various forms of domestic oppression.

For her, the 18th-century discovery that rights were self-evident depended on two factors. First, people had to learn to see one another as separate, autonomous individuals possessed of free will. And second, they had to be able to empathise with one another, to see themselves in one another’s shoes. Only when they came to feel, viscerally, that all others deserved the same rights as they did could the notion of universal, equal, natural rights take hold. Hunt notes further that "autonomy and empathy are cultural practices." They have histories, and both changed remarkably during the 18th century. Which is where the novels come in.

Happily, Hunt does not depend solely on novels to make her point, and rapidly sketches in a much broader cultural background. She draws on Norbert Elias, and his story of the "ever-rising threshold of shame about bodily functions", to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of "sympathy". She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that "an almost complete turnabout in attitudes took place over a couple of decades." Up to the mid-18th century, most educated Europeans accepted the legitimacy of the most grisly forms of torture: stretching on the rack, pincers, forcing gallons of water down the throat, and a form of execution that involved crushing a person’s bones, dislocating their limbs, and then stretching them over a cartwheel and leaving them to die. When Voltaire condemned the judicial murder of the Protestant Jean Calas in the 1760s, he did not initially consider the victim's "breaking on the wheel" worthy of comment. But some years later he denounced the punishment as inhuman, and by the 1780s torture in general had come to be almost universally denounced as barbaric and impermissible."


Beyond this also lies the question of whether this anthropomorphisation applies not just to characters but also to the text itself, as with the Barthesian notion of the death of the author or Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy (and its related idea ). It seems to me that the intentional fallacy and the pathetic fallacy have more than a little in common. Here, the text is assumed to possess a character of its own right which transparently reflects that of the author, leading readers to assume that a character's viewpoint must necessarily echo that of the author or that the depiction of certain events is equivalent to authorial endorsement of them (as with films like Crash or novels like American Psycho). In practice this is less reliable that our habit of seeing patterns and shapes in clouds. However, it's worth noting that these sorts of tendencies do vary by culture to some extent;

" In one study, by Dr. Nisbett and Incheol Choi, of Seoul National University in Korea, the Korean and American subjects were asked to read an essay either in favor of or opposed to the French conducting atomic tests in the Pacific. The subjects were told that the essay writer had been given "no choice" about what to write.

But subjects from both cultures still showed a tendency to "err," judging that the essay writers believed in the position endorsed in the essays. When the Korean subjects were first required to undergo a similar experience themselves, writing an essay according to instructions, they quickly adjusted their estimates of how strongly the original essay writers believed what they wrote. But Americans clung to the notion that the essay writers were expressing sincere beliefs."


This shouldn't be too surprising; Eastern cultures have long tended to be sceptical over the determination of the ethical character of actions rather than the justification of claims as well as being less concerned with any idea of the self or with individualism in the Western sense. But it would be interesting to know whether Japanese or Chinese literature is less reliant on identification with the narrator as a representation of the author or on emotional identification with the interior life of a character. The example of how Japan modified European naturalism into a genre that while identifying author and protagonist did so by dwelling at length on negative aspects of his personality, would seem to suggest there is something to this.

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posted by Richard 7:43 pm