M.C. Green and T.C. Brock, ‘The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (2000), 701-721.

In this post I would like to focus on one way in which literature might change the way we think, a phrase resonating from a recent post. In this essay Green and Brock are advancing ‘transportation theory’, which proposes that when readers or listeners are immersed in a story, their attitudes change in accordance with that story. In this article, they describe various experiments designed to show that greater immersion leads to a larger and more lasting effect on beliefs.

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The story in question need not be a fiction. Indeed, one of the experiments they carried out assessed whether or not there was any difference to the immersion / belief change dynamic, depending on whether a story was fictional or not. It seems that there is no difference: the participants had their beliefs affected the same amount whether the story (which was about the gruesome murder of a girl in a shopping mall) was presented as a short story or as a newspaper article
      I first heard about this experiment from Anna Ichino and Greg Currie. They have posted about their interest in this aspect of the field on the ‘Imperfect Cognitions’ blog; you can read the page here. My main response was considerable consternation as to whether the difference in presentation, the same text offered as fiction or non-fiction, was really testing these two categories properly. If a reader thinks what they are reading is a fiction (or not), is that sufficient? Something in my soul, or my mind, thought not, but I found it difficult to come up with clear-cut satisfactory alternative definitions (whether or not the writer intended one or the other; whether or not the facts depicted are verifiable in the real world) which did not have their own problems.

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Anyway, this essay represents an attempt to explore ways in which literature (or immersive stories, anyway) changes the way we think. It is much narrower than Michael Mack’s book, featured in that earlier post. Where Mack looked to literature for an approach to a changing world, Green and Brock are interested in whether, for example, one’s attitude to the punishment is affected by reading stories about victims of crime. Their approach is much narrower, but reassuringly tangible.

Posts will come a bit more slowly over the next month.

It occurred to me after an earlier post that something similar could be said about the very last of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Like 126, it is a bit of an anomaly, and like 126, it might play on memorable and forgettable things.

This is the very last sonnet of the sequence. It still concerns the speaker’s passion for the ‘dark lady’, but it takes a playful tone in introducing a myth about Cupid and one of Diana’s nymphs. Sonnet 153 does something very similar, and the double appearance of the myth offers suggestive possibilities in relation to forgetting. We could see this as a kind of signal from within the realm of conventional love poetry (something like a signal from the lateral prefrontal cortex), overwriting some of the sharp and strange possibilities of destructive desires in these poems. We could also see it in relation to another sort of forgetting, a play of interference, with two instances of the same material, in two adjacent sonnets, overwriting troubling outcomes of the ‘dark lady’ poems. As in the final scenes of plays, the point is not to suggest some direct and measurable effect on the memorability of Shakespeare’s other Sonnets. Rather, the idea of forgetting is something that we can think about, part of the poem’s engagement in its speaker’s predicament: would a failure of memory in this case be wholly a loss, or partly a relief?

Just as I am posting about how literature might make you think differently, an essay by me comes out that deals (in its own way) with this very thing. My essay ‘Thinking in Stanzas: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece‘ has appeared in a book called The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton. You can read about the volume on the Oxford University Press website here. The line-up of authors is really excellent, and I am pleased to be in it with my rather experimental essay.
      I try to bring together (i) the stanza forms of Shakespeare’s poems, and the way they make us think about something over here, set against or in dialogue with something over there; (ii) certain rhetorical tropes (simile, parallel, analogy) that exploit this juxtapositional pattern; (iii) evidence that we organise certain kinds of cognition spatially, as in the ‘mental number line’ that means those in left-to-right writing cultures tend to place low numbers on the left, high numbers on the right. My point is that poems open up thoughts about habits of thinking, what we gain and lose from our tendency to set one thing against another, true and false parallels.
      The reason it seems relevant now, given recent posts, is that I think poetry really does change the way we think, within its bounds and beyond. Different poetic forms cause our thinking to take certain shapes, offer tangible reorderings of experience. Perhaps this could be subjected to empirical testing. Would prolonged exposure to Spenser’s 9-line stanza (already mentioned in this post) make people more deliberative, or less ready to come to a point? The main point I want to make here, in addition to noting that my essay has been published, is that if we want to understand how literature changes the way we think, we could and should think about form.

Michael Mack, How Literature Changes the Way We Think (Continuum, 2012)

Not for the first time, I have been reading a book that is so near to, and yet so far from, my interests in this blog. (Another was Aboutness.) In How Literature Changes the Way We Think Michael Mack argues that literature offers special ways for us to solve problems. He has pursued this passionate defence of literature in .

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In How Literature Changes the Way We Think Mack argues that the arts have ‘innovative force’, they ‘disrupt homogeneity, , or the reproduction of what we are used to’. He writes about how literature’s ‘mental space has the capacity to change our ways of perception and cognition in a uniquely powerful manner precisely by dint of its separation from what we are used to see as presentations or representations of our world’. It ‘transforms our cognition by undermining the way that fictions keep us enthralled’. Indeed, ‘the cognitive upheavals, which literature initiates and impels, could match the changes in age and longevity that are due to advances in biomedicine’. For Mack, literature’s knowledge is aimed at the future, and for humanity facing its future it is, or should be, ‘key to problem solving due to its life renewing and life preserving impetus’.
      This is very much an argument for the present day, and for a particular version of the present, where the world and its societies are aging, and the future poses severe challenges to human resilience, attitudes, and ethics. The argument mostly arises in discussions of writings about art, culture, history, and change by Spinoza, Nietzsche, Arendt, Žižek, Heidegger, and others. When fictional works appear – The Road, 1984, Never Let Me Go – they tend to illustrate the problems rather the solutions, I think. So there aren’t a set of tangible instances of literature presenting readers with new ethical strategies, either in the past or present. And so there are not specific proposals as to how we might take particular texts now and find problem-solving inspiration in them.

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It may be rather prosaic of me to approach a work of cultural criticism in this way. But it’s consistent with my reason for blogging about it. Mack uses the word ‘cognitive’ often, but although he cites Antonio Damasio on a number of occasions (mostly in relation to the mind / body relationship, and Damasio’s approval of Spinoza) his definition of ‘the way we think’ takes hardly any explicit or extended account of cognitive science, its conclusions or methods. Within the humanities it is normal and perhaps reasonable enough to treat thinking as the domain of philosophy. There are indeed some kinds of thinking – consciousness, for example, or deliberation – where scientific experiments really have not got very far. Nonetheless, my inclination now is that assertions about ‘changing the way we think’ lend themselves to, and may require, empirical testing.
      Any experiment into whether literature increases adaptive resilience in a changing world would have to work on a reductive scale, in comparison with Mack’s book. It could only define literary experience quite narrowly (a measured period of time spent in close consideration of a text; a threshold for how much time a given person spends reading outside the lab), and it could only represent adaptive resilience narrowly too: questionnaires, scenarios – it’s not exactly Cormac McCarthy. Nonetheless, for me at least, this would be a worthwhile check on Mack’s argument. This seems to me like a typical interdisciplinary tension, and one that’s partly addressed in Mack’s . It doesn’t seem over-ambitious to think that it could be resolved.

Last week I went to a workshop at the annual Royal College of Psychiatrists conference, organised by Neil Hunt, a consultant in Cambridge. They used Shakespeare’s Ophelia, in Hamlet, as a case study. Part of the focus of the event was on evaluating her mental state, and ascertaining signs of suicide risk, on the basis of the evidence in the text. Part of it, which I found particularly intriguing, was addressed to a coroner, defending the actions taken by the psychiatrist who treated Ophelia.

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There is, of course, no psychiatrist in the play. However, one was ingeniously excavated from the text. Here is one familiar version of one key scene, taken from the 1623 First Folio edition:

QUEEN
I will not speake with her.
HORATIO
She is importunate, indeed distract,
Her moode will needs be pittied.
QUEEN
What would she haue?
HORATIO
She speakes much of her Father; saies she heares
There’s trickes i’th’world, and , and beats her heart,
Spurnes enuiously at , speakes things in doubt,
That carry but halfe sense: Her speech is nothing,
Yet the vnshaped vse of it doth moue
The hearers to ; they ayme at it,
And botch the words vp fit to their owne thoughts,
Which as her winkes, and nods, and gestures yeeld them,
Indeed would make one thinke there would be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much vnhappily.
QUEEN
’Twere good she were spoken with,
For she may strew dangerous coniectures
In ill breeding minds. Let her come in.

The queen is troubled by Ophelia, and would rather avoid her. However, she senses that her madness may result from, and could reveal, dark secrets. Horatio, Hamlet’s friend, gives a perplexed but thoughtful description of her incoherent and persistent ramblings. It is likely that this version is revised from the different scene we see in the second quarto (1604):

QUEEN
I will not speake with her.
GENTLEMAN
Shee is importunat,
Indeede distract, her moode will needes be pittied.
QUEEN
What would she haue?
GENTLEMAN
She speakes much of her father, sayes she heares
There’s tricks i’th world, and hems, and beates her hart,
Spurnes enuiously at strawes, speakes things in doubt
That carry but halfe sence, her speech is nothing,
Yet the vnshaped vse of it doth moue
The hearers to collection, they yawne at it,
And botch the words vp fit to theyr owne thoughts,
Which as her wincks, and nods, and gestures yeeld them,
Indeede would make one thinke there might be thought
Though nothing sure, yet much vnhappily.
HORATIO
Twere good she were spoken with, for shee may strew
Dangerous coniectures in ill breeding mindes,
Let her come in.

Here a generic Gentleman reports on his observations of Ophelia, and it is Horatio, not Gertrude, who worries that she might cause suspicious minds to fester. In my Oxford text the editor G.R. Hibbard sees the Folio version as a piece of streamlining. A superfluous role is removed from the play. This seems fair enough, but the differences are consequential. Having Horatio rather than Gertrude fearing loose talk is quite a significant change; and missing out on the Gentleman’s contribution removes the idea that someone – perhaps with expertise – has been given the task of observing Ophelia.
      At the conference workshop, a deft change was made: ‘Gentleman’ became ‘Doctor’. This gave the psychiatrists’ workshop a focus for their hypothetical consideration of a professional’s actions and their consequences in a legal framework. This is not entirely unwarranted. In Macbeth there is a palace doctor who witnesses Lady Macbeth’s night-time delusions, and reports upon them to her husband. The Hamlet scene represents a comparable situation, where it seems reasonable to think that the person entrusted with reporting on a sick individual might be qualified to do it.
      But this is Elsinore, and this is Tragedy. The psychiatrists found ways of representing both points of view when presenting to the coroner. Ophelia was assessed, but nothing immediate was done: her behaviour wasn’t demonstrably consistent with suicide, and she was in a well-supported environment. On the other hand, the assessment was brief and perhaps inadequate, the patient evidently had disordered and morbid thoughts, and the care plan was too hands-off. Left in an unstable mental state in an impersonal and dysfunctional court, where nobody had shown her sufficient attention or sympathy thus far, it seemed all too predictable that Ophelia had killed herself, or at least put herself in danger.

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A coroner (or ‘crowner’) is mentioned in Hamlet a little later. The gravediggers sardonically note that the official view is that Ophelia should have Christian burial – she has not committed suicide. They reason, all too plausibly, that her rank and connections must have helped. In the play, as for the psychiatrists, psychological judgments become entwined with legal judgments and social contexts. This might be one reason why considering Shakespeare’s plays seems productive to them. (There must be other reasons of course: the finite evidence, the need or chance to read between the lines, the sense of these narratives being realised and embodied in performance, the quality of psychological insight, the familiarity of the material, its status, its novelty, and so on…)
      But the thing I came away thinking about most was care. There is a chilling lack of care for Ophelia. This is not just a judgment on characters, but also on the play itself. So little time is spent on her decline and her crisis. Everything seems to be consumed by Hamlet himself. This is how things are in Tragedy, perhaps, where nurses help you make fatal assignations and doctors cannot do anything to help. It is also the particular situation in which Ophelia finds herself, without anyone to support her.
      The doctor-who-isn’t-a-doctor is either very astute or very lax. His main conclusion is that people draw conclusions from Ophelia that suit their own way of thinking. They ‘botch up the words fit to their own thoughts’. This is indeed what happens in Hamlet – to the hero himself when Polonius assumes he is mad for love, but Claudius thinks he is plotting to usurp him. Perhaps it’s a reflection on how difficult it is to interpret other minds on their own terms, even if you are supposed to be an expert. Then again, if we indulge the idea that this Gentleman should have something therapeutic to offer, this may just be a very unproductive medical opinion.