A couple of weeks ago I went a conference on ‘Visualising Posture in Dante’s Comedy’, organised by Heather Webb from the Italian Department in Cambridge, and Vladimir Mirodan from Central St Martins College in London. The first session included Mirodan’s students performing scenes from Purgatorio: they created the postures and movements of the prideful, envious, and gluttonous. This worked beautifully, even in the sterile environment of a seminar room: one interesting quality was the way they moved through the sinners’ journey into their characteristic purgatorial shapes. In the poem the reader initially has to infer the reasons why (for example) it’s fitting that the prideful find themselves bent over under the weight of huge rocks; in performance, the movement was realised in front of us.
      This, and the insightful ways in which the Dante scholars unfolded the significance of movement in his work, would have been a satisfying conference on its own. But the event also brought in – to a building one minute from my office – two scholars who have completely changed the way I think about movement in literature.
      One was Vittorio Gallese, the cognitive scientist who played a key role in the discovery of mirror neurons and the exploration of their significance. The other was Guillemette Bolens, author of The Style of Gestures, a brilliant book I think, which explores how the human capacity for enriches our experience of literature. ‘Kinesic intelligence’ means mentally simulating, engaging with, understanding, interpreting, the movements of others. This happens when the movements are physically present and when they are represented in written form.

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Lower down in this past I shall give a brief introduction to the work of Gallese . Before doing that, though, I will note perhaps the most cheering outcome of the day for me. I had thought that the mirror neurons field, and the kinesic intelligence field, were rather at odds. The emphasis on ‘intelligence’ discerns the latter from what is happening at a sub-personal level, in the mirror neuron system. You could simplify it into things done by the mind versus things done by the brain (but I’m not sure anyone involved would like the two things to be opposed quite like that). As it turned out, Gallese was quick to say that his experiments into ‘experimental aesthetics’ did not aspire to explain the humanities, but rather to complement and correlate. So it’s possible to learn from and work with both, while still keeping track of crucial differences in their reference points and goals.

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Gallese’s team discovered mirror neurons in monkeys, and then repeated the findings in humans. The same neurons that are activated in movement are also activated when monkeys and humans watch movement. There is still debate about what this phenomenon is and what it means, but the field has expanded in two ways. First, this mirror system and the ‘embodied simulation’ it allows (i.e. we are constantly re-embodying what we see at a neural level) has been seen as the basis of planning, assessing attentions, empathy and even aesthetic experience. I traced this path in an essay called ‘The Shakespearean Grasp’. Second, it has been shown that sensory experiences and even emotions are mirrored in a related way: we seem to simulate pain, disgust, and so on, in our neurons.
      For anyone who does not know about this, and who is interested in the thought that readers of literature may in some way simulate the experiences they read about, a question follows quickly: is there any continuity between watching an action and reading about it? The experimenters offer is a rather resounding ‘yes’. A few references:

* Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, Stephen M. Wilson, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and Marco Iacoboni, ‘Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions’, Current Biology, 16 (2006), 1–6, sets out to ‘compare activity related to linguistic stimuli with activity related to action observation’ (p. 4). Its ‘results suggest a key role of mirror neuron areas in the re-enactment of sensory-motor representations during conceptual processing of actions invoked by linguistic stimuli’ (p. 1).

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* O. Hauk, I. Johnsrude, F. Pulvermüller, ‘Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex’, Neuron, 22 (2004), 301-7, finds that the words ‘kick’ and ‘lick’, etc., activate the appropriate action centres in the brain.

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* An intriguing nuancing of the idea: R.A. Zwaan, L.J. Taylor, M. de Boer, ‘Motor resonance as a function of narrative time: further tests of the linguistic focus hypothesis’, Brain and Language, 112 (2010), 143-9. Here they found motor-neuron resonance when the action words were placed in the present, and in the past, but not when they expressed future intentions.

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* See also, for an instance of sensory simulation, A. Barrós-Loscertales, J. González, , N. Ventura-Campos, J.C. Bustamante, V. Costumero, M.A. Parcet, and C. Ávila, ‘Reading “salt” activates gustatory brain regions: fMRI evidence for semantic grounding in a novel sensory modality’, Cerebral Cortex, 22 (2012), 2554-2563. They say ‘we conclude that the meaning of taste words is grounded in distributed cortical circuits reaching into areas that process taste sensations’ (p. 2554). I am a bit unsure about how to take ‘meaning’ here, but the immediacy of the link between reading a word and the activation of sensory neurons is striking.

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Gallese has done a lot to orient his work in philosophy and latterly (along with collaborators) in literary theory. I think these works represent a congenial introduction to his work for those coming from the perspective of fiction. Incidentally, they post-date the reading I did for ‘The Shakespearean Grasp’; or possibly I restricted myself to a particular pathway through his experiments. Anyway, I didn’t mention them there, but I don’t think I’d have said anything differently.

* In ‘Embodied Simulation Theory: Imagination and Narrative’, Neuropsychoanalysis, 13 (2011), 196-200, he responds to Siri Hustvedt’s piece ‘Three Emotional Stories: Reflections on Memory, the Imagination, Narrative, and the Self’ in the same journal (pp. 187-96).

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* With Hannah Wojciehowski, Gallese has written ‘How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology’, California Italian Studies, 2 (2011), i.e. here. This gets further into proposing ways in which the terms of literary criticism might be reframed. So instead of an ‘objective correlative’, there may be a ‘subjective correlative’. The big idea is that we should think of aesthetic experience as ‘liberated embodied simulation’, a form in which to simulate intense emotions and actions through the re-use of mental states.

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* see also Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, ‘The Mirror Neuron Mechanism and Literary Studies: An Interview with Vittorio Gallese’, California Italian Studies, 2 (2010), i.e. here.

One interesting thing that became clearer in reading these pieces was that the discovery of mirror neurons emerged from a search for ‘canonical neurons’. These have been rather eclipsed, but there is evidence for them and they are fascinating. These are neurons that activate when performing an action (such as using a hammer) but also when looking at the object involved in the action. The brain – the argument goes – routinely responds to objects in the world by tracking their possible uses and interactions.

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Finally, a couple of times I have heard and read Gallese quoting literary examples with approval (there’s a passage from Dante in the ‘Toward an Embodied Narratology’ mentioned above). He sees them as instances where ‘art anticipates science’. I suppose I might be forgiven a counter-suggestion, playing with chronology and keeping to the partisan theme of this blog, that the experiments are instances of ‘science repeating what art already knows’ – but really it’s a dynamic exchange between the two that I like (and he does too, I think).

There is an interesting podcast in the ‘Philosophy Bites’ series here. Peter Lamarque makes a concise and articulate case that literature does not contain, and is not a source of, knowledge about the world. Whereas scientists and philosophers have theories which they test according to rigorous criteria (a process that leads to knowledge in the sense Lamarque prefers), novelists and poets do not. What they have is something more like a vision, with a claim to verisimilitude in many respects, but not a commitment to truthfulness overall.
      For Lamarque, Plato is still in view, and his concerns are still pertinent: imagination and seductive writing can cause us to believe things that aren’t well-grounded. Literature makes us believe things ‘for the wrong reasons’, swept along by the power and seductiveness of language rather than reason, argument, and analysis. From among Lamarque’s examples… Proust offers an interesting vision of memory but he is not testing a theory about it such that any results can aspire to be true; indeed, it does not fundamentally matter if it’s true or not. Kafka’s vision of human nature is (it could be argued) false, or at least the case for its truth isn’t complete. Nevertheless, it’s a ‘vision of a certain outlook’, valuable as a result.

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Lamarque values literature for the way is helps us in ‘coming to see new possibilities… engagement… pleasures’. And it’s worth noting that not many people who work on literature, or read it, actually base their valuation on the idea that it knows things in the sense that Lamarque prefers. I come closer to it in this blog than I have anywhere else in my writing. Nevertheless, it’s clear that I need to argue for knowledge as something literature might provide. A few germs of a response are in this post, and this one. The former suggests that the definition of knowledge might need to expand to be useful in this context; and that literary knowledge may be a thing that happens in the interaction between readers and works. The latter proposes that the truth of fiction may be less direct and explicit than Lamarque would want, but nevertheless significant. I don’t think either of these ideas would seem persuasive to the philosophical position taken in the podcast, but that may have to be something I live with.
      I realise (with pleasure and alarm) that the blog’s first birthday is approaching. I plan to post on progress so far, and will think further about these key terms there.

I have posted a few times about literature and forgetting before: here, here, and most recently here. In all those posts, I looked at literary endings (or thereabouts), as places where forgetting and remembering might both be required. I have been thinking about whether I could find similar dynamics in the midst of works, where forgetting is germane to proceeding rather than concluding. As it turns out, the example which seems most apt is a passage I have pondered many times, not least because it has been a set text for those of my students who choose a Latin literature option: the end of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6. This is Dryden’s translation:

Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish’d ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro’ transparent horn arise;
Thro’ polish’d ivory pass deluding lies.
Of various things discoursing as he pass’d,
Anchises hither bends his steps at last.
Then, thro’ the gate of iv’ry, he dismiss’d
His valiant offspring and divining guest.
Straight to the ships Aeneas his way,
Embark’d his men, and skimm’d along the sea,
Still coasting, till he gain’d Cajeta’s bay.
At length on oozy ground his galleys moor;
Their heads are turn’d to sea, their sterns to shore.

Aeneas is the hero, the founder of Rome. Anchises is his father, or rather the shade of his father, for at this point Aeneas is leaving the underworld, where he has been a ‘divining guest’, a visitor receiving prophecies of his descendants’ glorious future. Aeneas moves on purposefully – ‘Straight’ – and commences his settlement (or invasion) of Italy.
      The exit via the cave of sleep has two gates. One is the departure point for ‘true visions’, the other ‘deluding’ ones. This seems like a conventional sort of allegory, a way of imagining the origin of dreams. However, when a human has to walk through the gates, they take on additional, strange, tangible significance. Virgil is clear: Aeneas leaves by the path of delusions. The implication – a somewhat indirect one – is that he will forget what he has heard in the underworld. He does not mention the prophecies again. He fulfils his destiny unencumbered by knowledge, though perhaps he is fuelled by the residual conviction.
      The tangle of thoughts about prophecy and forgetting helps us see the strange burden of being Aeneas. He is always the founder of Rome, always destined for greatness, and yet he finds his way there through humans pains and failings. The work needs its readers, too, to rediscover what it already knows, that Aeneas will found a great city, but then to set that knowledge aside and engage with the narrative’s fears and doubts. This is hard to do, paradoxical – but the point about literature and ‘motivated forgetting’ is that it’s not simple, and it’s counter-productive in some ways.
      The neural signs of motivated forgetting discussed in my first post on the subject arise when we have to do something about unpleasant, painful, and/or embarrassing experiences. It seems telling, then, that Virgil includes the figure of Marcellus in the line of Roman heroes that Anchises shows Aeneas. Marcellus is the nephew of Augustus, Virgil’s patron and Rome’s leader. He died young, much lamented. The appearance of this figure, unexpected, discordant, tactless, painful, in the glorious parade, might be just the sort of thing that motivated forgetting might helpfully downplay. Better to keep things on track. In conjunction with the two gates from the realm of Sleep, this puts further stress on the way that progress through glory and pain may involve forgetting and remembering in a precarious balance. Even if Marcellus is the kind of thing we might productively forget, and Aeneas seems to, most readers don’t.
      Finally, I think there is a parallel with the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve leave the Garden after a long prophecy about the traumatic future of mankind, and its ultimate hope of salvation. Milton is not as tantalizing as Virgil on the subject of memory, but it must be at stake to some extent.

Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

They are all on their own, unsure where to go, not clued-up about how to proceed. Nevertheless, they must carry with them the promise of salvation, and that must retain its relationship to the generations of conflict and suffering. They are not facing what mostly lies in the past for the reader, which adds further twists. However, this is another ending, and this was meant to be about middles.
      Perhaps what the Aeneid knows about motivated forgetting is not just that it sometimes needs to be done. It is one way, as the scientists suggest, of holding life together in a consistent shape. However, it is a flawed system: some things aren’t easy to forget, others really should not be forgotten.

In addition to the ‘motivated forgetting’ that has been bothering me since this post, I have been thinking a bit about the other reasons why we forget. These are listed in that post as well, but are probably worth repeating. It’s widely accepted that we forget things because memory traces decay over time, because new memories interfere with old ones, and because memories can be linked to physical circumstances. Literary interest in forgetting turns to these sometimes, as writers explore the strange counter-intuitive need to forget things in the course of reading or watching.

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Samuel Beckett seems a rewarding and taxing case in this respect as in many others. I often think of Beckett, nearly as often as I think of Shakespeare, in these cognitive contexts. I am . I don’t think it’s because they are the only writers I can ever remember. I think it’s because they both use the dramatic form to undertake particularly searching examinations of the ways we think.

In his play Happy Days, for example, I think that we see…

INTERFERENCE in the repetitions of actions and phrases, overlapping one another, sapping meanings, finding new meanings, not allowing things to settle.
DECAY OVER TIME actually thematized within the play, and discussed, but also felt by the audience as the things that are distinctive about the play seem to enervate as it develops.
THE REMOVAL OF PHYSICAL CONTEXT as Winnie is buried much more deeply in the second act, changing the configuration of body and stage that has become, perhaps, a focus for the memorability of things in the first act.

All these things are true of other Beckett plays too – Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape come to mind. As in the Shakespearean cases before, the point is not straightforwardly that Beckett’s play causes its readers to forget things as it goes on. However, in these strange play-worlds it seems fitting that an element of self-negating forgettability complements their combination of despair and resilience. They may inhibit their own lasting impressions, offering a richly different theatrical experience.