Emma Firestone and Raphael Lyne, ‘Purity and Disgust in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays’, in Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives, ed. Robbie Duschinsky, Simone Schnall, and Daniel H. Weiss (Routledge, 2016), pp. 238-55.

Right at the end of last year, just in time to hit the 50th anniversary of Mary Douglas’s anthropological classic Purity and Danger, this came out. It’s a collaboration between me and my former PhD student (and friend to the blog) Emma Firestone.
      We look at what are traditionally thought of as Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’ (mostly Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well), and ask why we find both (i) a distinctive concentration of disgust-inducing language, especially in the form of metaphor, and (ii) tendencies towards anxiety, pessimism, and dissatisfaction, in audiences and critics.
      Inspired by findings in ’embodiment’ psychology, which suggest links between physical disgust and harsh moral judgment, and between purity, cleanness, and leniency, we propose that patterns of gross language in these plays have something to do with the way that readers’ and critics’ assessments of right and wrong appear to be thrown off balance. We don’t commit to straightforward causation but we think there’s a meaningful correlation.
      Emma is more of a veteran in this field than I am. She has written a great essay picking up on the famous experiment in which holding a hot drink made people more positively disposed towards strangers. See ‘Warmth and Affection in Henry IV: Why No One Likes Prince Hal’ in Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Johnson, Sutton, and Tribble (2014).

Derek Attridge, The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015)

Because I write a blog called what this one’s called, people sometimes assume I am well on top of the latest reading around the subject. Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up with pretty obvious things, though: this is an example. Attridge’s book follows up his own The Singularity of Literature (2004) and aims to continue its ambitious project to define literature, to understand the way in which it works, to explore how readers should perform their roles best, and to establish its potential as a contributor to our ethical lives.
      It has a whole chapter on ‘what literature knows’ (not particularly about your brain, but still). One key point is how ready many scrupulous thinkers are to attribute agency to works of art — they are said to know things, remember things, show things, and so on. We’ve all been there. Attridge addresses a range of philosophical and critical work on the matter. Michael Wood (briefly mentioned on the blog here) is prominent, as is Peter de Bolla, who happens to have an office very near mine. I didn’t remember that in Art Matters (2001) de Bolla asks what Barnett Newman’s painting ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’ knows; I wouldn’t have been so alert to the idea back when I read it. I do remember quite a few things, though: it’s thanks to that book that I am listening to Glenn Gould play Bach’s Goldberg Variations even as I write this.
      Attridge argues that the knowledge in question is a property of the event of reading and its effects on the reader, rather than something inherent to literature itself. Here is a selection of key moments:

A full engagement with a work of art involves such processes of thought and feeling [i.e. a varied range of responses and questions prompted by it]; and if the work seems to know things that we don’t, it’s because it brings us to the limits of our own understanding, raising questions and making connections that have not hitherto been part of our mental — or physical — universe. (p. 254)
…
Works of art don’t ‘know’ or think, then, though they can involve the viewer, reader, or auditor in a performance of knowing or thinking. If they appear to have these human capacities, it’s because in responding to their alterity, singularity, and inventiveness [these are key words in Attridge’s definition of literature and its qualities and functions] we find our cognitive faculties engaged and tested; our familiar maps prove inadequate, and we move into new and strange territory. When Wood says, as I noted earlier, ‘What literature knows, what a novel or poem or play knows, is strictly, unfiguratively, what I now know before I read the text’, I’m tempted to correct him: what makes us want to say that literature knows is the experience of challenge or discovery that makes us different after reading the text.
…
We act out our knowing, our wanting to know, our wanting to know what it’s like to know or not to know; or rather these things are acted out in the experience that is the event of the artwork. If we are different after this experience, it’s not because we have added to our store of knowledge, it’s because, in gaining access to the work’s alterity, singularity, and inventiveness, we’ve discovered new ways of knowing (and perhaps new ways of not-knowing). Ascribing to works of art the capacity to think or to know (or to smile) is one way of registering metaphorically that process of discovery — or rather of continual discovering, since we don’t have any treasure to show when we stop listening or looking or reading. And that, of course, is why we go on doing it. (p. 258)

In some ways, this works pretty well for me. I recognize this way of describing the value of literature as dynamic, situational, repeatable, and rewarding in that it modifies the reader’s thinking. And yet it seems at odds with one of the ways I’ve been thinking about literature in this blog, as a store of knowledge about the mind that has been built up over time as the result of the efforts of writers who, without necessarily knowing it, were passing on the fruits of their observations and hypotheses. By ‘store’ I don’t mean something so tangible that it simply does not need the ‘event’ of attentive reading that Attridge describes. On the other hand, I am suggesting something that has a bit of tenacity, something to which literary people can point and say to the sceptical ‘look, see what we have here’.

Andreas Kappes and M.J. Crockett, ‘The Benefits and Costs of a Rose-Coloured Hindsight’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 644-6.

I wrote about the benefits of nostalgia once (here). Now Kappes and Crockett are proposing reasons why our self-serving biases extend into the past as well as the future. We’re habitually optimistic, but we also have a kind of ‘unethical amnesia’: ‘memories of unethical behavior are less vivid than memories of good deeds’. This amnesia takes a while to set in, and once an unwanted memory has been suppressed once, it gets less likely that it will be remembered. This appears to be a matter of retrieval rather than encoding: the memories that reflect badly on us go in alright, but we don’t recover them again.
      There are benefits and costs. It might protect us from psychopathology, and it might help our ‘social impression management’: we need to convince other people we’re good to be around, so it makes sense that we convince ourselves first. It may seem benign enough, this ability to keep thinking well of ourselves, but the authors are concerned that it also extends to other members of social groups. They link it to historical episodes in which ‘white-washed narratives replace the despicable episodes many would rather forget’.

*

Aeschylus portrays something like this in Agamemnon. The King returns from the ten-year Trojan war in triumph. He and his army have come to terms with the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia as they travelled to Troy. (Agamemnon was told that this was the only way of getting the Gods to bring some wind for the becalmed fleet.) She is not forgotten, but the whole episode is cocooned in necessity: it had to be done, there was no other option. At home in Argos, however, Clytemnestra has not moved on at all: for her the death of Iphigenia is crying out for vengeance as freshly as ever. However, she has a new lover and has enjoyed power over the city in her husband’s absence, so her motives are complex. Rose-tinted and blood-stained are all one here.

Matthias Mittner, Guy E. Hawkins, Wouter Boekel, and Birte U. Forstmann, ‘A Neural Model of Mind Wandering’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 570-8.

Having written a longer post (here) about mind-wandering recently, I will handle this briefly, though it’s just as interesting. It is a bit more focused on brain imaging than the Seli et al. article I cited there, which means it includes a lot of stuff I (and the literary tradition) can’t really engage with in a nuanced way.
      One of the brain regions in question is the Default Mode Network which is (as the name suggests) really a combination of regions, and it keeps cropping up. I mentioned that last time too. Mittner et al., however, are interested in more parts of the brain and in the complex connectivity between them. They say that ‘it is essential for future studies to simultaneously collect data reflecting the involvement of the various neural components, which will require the development of better neuroimaging protocols’. Theirs is ‘an integrative framework’, which ‘attempts to explain how dynamic changes in brain systems give rise to the subjective experience of mind wandering’.
      Most tangible for my purposes, especially in the light of that earlier post which focused on the intentional quality of some mind-wandering, is their attempt to define (or at least pursue) ‘a neural and conceptual distinction between an off-focus state and an active mind-wandering state’. They take this ‘off-focus state’ to an extreme by bringing in the phenomenon of ‘mind-blanking’, wherein (I suppose) the switching off from the perceptual world doesn’t get anywhere.

*

This idea took me back to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Aubade’. After feeling that in some ways I was not at all grateful to be re-entering its bleak world, I have decided that in the end I am very grateful, because I think it’s great. ‘I work all day, and get half-drunk at night’, he says; ‘Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare’. And then it cheers up. Oh, no, it, doesn’t! He lies in the dark, seeing ‘what’s really always there […] Unresting death’. Dread ‘flashes’, and then in the second stanza, ‘The mind blanks at the glare’. The poem’s rejection of consolation (Christian, classical) is gloomily thrilling. It has several little hints of Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech, sardonically making its point that fine words are no use. As ‘light strengthens’, the day starts, and ‘work has to be done’, but mortality is still there.
      This is a perfect opposite to the Chaucerian dream-vision opening I described in my previous post. There, the process of going to sleep allows the mind to flourish into far-reaching imaginative explanations. In Larkin’s poem, the process of waking up leaves the mind ‘blank’ in the face of blunt truths. It’s inspiration, of a sort.