In an earlier post I discussed an article by Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, in which they wondered about the cognitive benefits of reading Jane Austen. Since then I have been mulling over their last paragraph, which I think is very insightful. Here is most of it:

In the past, efforts to find a scientific justification of literature have encountered a seemingly insuperable contradiction: employing science to validate literature has implied that science is the more fundamental practice, tacitly undermining the reputation of literature instead of strengthening it. Many literary critics have therefore rebelled against scientific justifications, preferring instead to place literature in a separate sphere that stands as its own de facto justification. Yet as science has increasingly been promoted as useful, relevant, and progressive, this segregation has backfired, implying that literary studies is impractical, irrelevant, and antiquated. As a result, literary scholars have found themselves in a bind: they can oppose science, and find themselves marginalized, or they can embrace scientific theories and contribute to this marginalization themselves.

Having identified this problem, they present their approach as one which preserves ‘the usual order [i.e., the way in which evidence and hypotheses are handled] of both scientific and literary research’:

Beginning with a historical investigation of the development of a particular literary form and then transitioning into empirical verifications, it reveals as a tool that emerged over time as a practical means for addressing the physical distinctness of minds. Seen in this way, FID is a distinctly literary response to an environmental concern, providing a scientific justification that does not reduce literature to a mechanical extension of biology, but takes its value to be its own original form.

I really just want to quote this as, more or less, music to my ears. The antipathy of literary critics to scientific justification is perhaps unnecessary, but it’s clearly understandable given the way our cultural environment is structured. The ‘double bind’ they identify is just the thing that this blog, as well as their article, aims to address. And their analysis of Adam Smith and Jane Austen prizes, I think, what their works know about the functioning of minds, and sees them as self-standing sources of insight that are enhanced by, and enhance (more so, I think, in this case), their encounters with science.

Kevin M. Carlsmith, Timothy D. Wilson, and Daniel T. Gilbert, ‘The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95 (2008), 1316-24.

In a recent post I wrote about research into ‘Impact Bias’, the human tendency to imagine that emotional consequences will be greater, and better, than they actually are. One of the examples in the Miloyan and Suddendorf article featured there is revenge: they turn to a study by Carlsmith et al. for its conclusion that ‘people mistakenly think that taking revenge will make them happier than it actually does’.
      Now, there’s revenge and there’s revenge. Carlsmith et al. cite examples of extreme revenge in fiction and in reality. Their essay is well aware of philosophical and literary traditions. In order to create an ethically appropriate experiment, however, they don’t recreate the plot of Hamlet or the Oresteia in the laboratory. Instead, they created a money-based computer game in which players cooperate or betray one another. They then allowed players to punish those who had behaved selfishly with financial penalties within the game, and evaluated expected and actual consequences. As I say, there’s revenge and there’s revenge, and not all the issues involved seem scaleable.
      Nevertheless, the outcome is interesting and suggestive. People expect that retaliatory punishment will make them feel better, but it does not – it seems to enhance, rather than resolve, their brooding on the culprit-victim. My sense is that this is not surprising, and nor would the opposite conclusion be (and it’s worth noting that the paper and the experiment have various nuances). When it comes to revenge, we are contradictory, and we know it. In keeping with the Miloyan and Suddendorf piece, however, it seems that the role of ‘Impact Bias’ is to influence the present – short-term fixes – than to think long-term.

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As usual, I want to make some sort of transition into thinking about literature, which should be easy given how much revenge there is to be found. What struck me, though, was that I did not quickly come upon examples of ‘affective forecasting’. How does Hamlet think a successful revenge will make him feel? How does Orestes think it will make him feel? In these key examples, what struck me was the absence of attempts to imagine a future emotional state. We might presume that they both expect to be a little less tormented than they are now, which doesn’t really happen, unless death counts. But maybe that is enough. What we don’t get is some sort of projection into happiness: ‘if I could just kill Claudius, then I could settle down into contented life with Ophelia, and the occasional condescending visit to my dear old Mum’.
      Of course there are cases in literature where characters look interestingly towards hedonic reward from revenge, and either get it or don’t. I am struck instead by the grim assumption that such questions are not really relevant. Perhaps an expectation of happiness might mask the grim inevitability of the burden; but we don’t even get that.

Eagle-eyed regular readers will notice a new thing to click on in the menu at the top. Home… About This Blog… hang on what’s this?… ‘Shakespearean Thinking Lectures’. This page will, I hope, be the location of some follow-up discussion arising from some lectures I am giving in Cambridge this term. It’s meant for the students attending the lectures and the chances are it’ll only be interesting and useful for them (if for anyone!). I am putting it here because a) it’s less trouble than setting something special up on another system, b) it’s a convenient way of drawing a few more people into this blog, and of course c) because I want ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’ to be a multi-platform shop-window for my Brand.

UPDATE FEB 2017: the ‘Shakespearean Thinking Lectures’ page has been taken down for the time being, while I think about how best to revive the course in May 2017.

Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, ‘A Scientific Justification for Literature: Jane Austen’s Free Indirect Style as Ethical Tool’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 43 (2013), 1-18.

A year ago I wrote a post mostly about the work of Keith Oatley (here). I discussed his idea that literature makes us better at understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with other minds. As I said then, this research seems like good news for literature people like me, because it attributes tangible benefits to the kind of reading I recommend to my students, and that I want to do anyway.
      I was also a bit hesitant. I was wary about the direct and instrumental way literature was said to work. I made a wry observation (so, so wry) along the lines that if literature really did equip us to relate well to other human beings, then you’d expect meetings in the Faculty of English to be a bit less fraught. And, I must be honest, I knew that this Fletcher and Benveniste essay was in the offing, and I was leaving it some intellectual room. In the offing, I thought, but now in fact it’s been out for more than a year. Still, it’s better to catch up and discuss it late, than never.
      The essay focuses on the (FID) of Jane Austen. This has been cited by Oatley as the sort of technique that enhances the empathetic skills of literary readers. Fletcher and Benveniste advocate a different approach to the question, which starts by analysing what literary texts and their cultural contexts reveal in themselves, rather than starting with a theory from the scientific perspective: ‘we will begin with a literary analysis of form and open it up to scientific verification’ (p. 2).
      The main argument is that Austen’s FID does more to restrain our mind-reading than to enhance it. What we get from a sophisticated experience of FID is a richer awareness that other minds are different from ours, hard to read, physically separate, largely unavailable. The argument draws in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which, a half-century before Austen, formulated the proposition that literature encourages us to restrain ourselves in our interactions with other minds, rather than giving access to them.

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In Richardson’s epistolary novels, and then in the FID of Austen, we see two scrupulous, indirect routes to ethical considerations in literature. Another neat turn in the argument registers that from Sense and Sensibility to Emma, early to late Austen, something changes. In the former, Fletcher and Benveniste argue, FID is used to exert ‘moral control’ (p. 9) over the reader, whereas in Emma it inculcates tolerance – it is ‘a way to model the self-restraint of propriety’ (p. 10).
      There is a further aspect of the argument: experimental testing of the hypothesis. For the detail here, we will have to wait for another publication, though some results (which ‘supported the view that FID encouraged restraint’) can be obtained from the authors (see p. 13). This promises to be a large and fascinating survey of how different literary styles encourage, or do not, this sort of self-checking.
      Keith Oatley and his collaborators want to tell literary people that their chosen medium is straightforwardly good for us; but now I find myself responding positively to literary people talking back to scientists and saying ‘we’re not so sure that it is, not so straightforwardly anyway’. It’s a bit ironic. However, while the ability to read minds is a hugely significant evolved phenomenon, the ability to question and analyse that ability is a subtle but crucial contributor to sophisticated social life. It’s the kind of thing that I can believe literary experience really helps build, in children and adults and even colleagues.

Beyon Miloyan and Thomas Suddendorf, ‘Feelings of the Future’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 196-200.

I like it when cognitive scientists study distinctive qualities of our minds, then identify problems with the ways they work, and then suggest reasons why these problems may in fact be the result of evolution, affording advantages in one way or another. Miloyan and Suddendorf are interested in ‘affective forecasting’, our ability to predict how we will feel under future conditions. Experiments suggest that we are liable to overestimate the intensity and duration of emotional consequences. This is ‘impact bias’. The paper suggests ways in which this inbuilt overestimation may offer adaptive advantages: it may help motivate goal-oriented actions (now is what matters; later can take care of itself), and it may help motivate cooperative activity.
      I found this a very thought-provoking essay. One of its key examples was a large experiment on newlyweds. As Miloyan and Suddendorf put it, ‘newlywed spouses typically predict increases in relationship satisfaction over time and yet experience satisfaction declines’. Strikingly, ‘those who predict greater increases in satisfaction experience steeper declines’. In the authors worry that this latter point means that those most at risk of failing marriages may be less likely to seek help early on. It’s rather a sad read, actually.

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I wondered whether some of the key terms in the Miloyan and Suddendorf survey were all that stable. ‘Impact bias’ seems simple enough but when an emotion is specified – ‘satisfaction’, ‘happiness’ – it becomes a complex thing, dependent on a variety of factors. I wondered whether it was actually part of their point, or not, that the future predicted and the outcome experienced seem to be very different things. The affective forecast imagines a scenario but it’s really oriented towards present action – I’m sure that at least is part of their point. When the imagined time comes around, it’s a different present.
      No wonder, perhaps, that Shakespeare’s comedies end with newlywed optimism. Even if we have to allow for the social and cultural differences between then and now as they pertain to expectations of marriage, there is some overlap of interests. The emphatic belief that marriage promises happiness causes a set of committing, irrational, hasty, but mostly cheering actions. We never get to find out how badly the characters will be served by their choices. The Miloyan and Suddendorf article doesn’t only suggest that Shakespeare’s comedies are sensibly curtailed at the most optimistic point. It also suggests that ‘impact bias’ makes the world go round – that social change, relationships and families, progress in its most basic form, forwardness itself, rely on hard-wired, loveable, necessary, possibly doomed optimism. Shakespeare’s marriage comedies are built around that knowledge.
      As You Like It; exactly so, in the now. All’s Well That Ends Well; the play knows that the positioning of an ‘end’, where you stop recording, makes a big difference:

BERTRAM
If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.
HELENA
If it appear not plain and prove untrue,
Deadly divorce step between me and you!

Lavner et al. went back after four years to see what the newlywed optimism had turned into. Better to leave Helena and Bertram at the ‘if’ stage, and let the optimistic forecast affect the present, which is what it is supposed to do.