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.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the way that a ‘Gentleman’ in the second quarto of Hamlet was renamed a ‘Doctor’, and taken to task for his care of Ophelia, at the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ conference. In the post I mentioned another Shakespearean doctor who reports on a disordered mind, in Macbeth. I thought I might revisit that character, because, as in Hamlet, it’s striking how sketchy he is. This is not Shakespeare’s indictment of psychiatry, because it is not psychiatry at all; but it does suggest how difficult it is to deal with someone else’s thoughts. There is another thing the ‘two doctors’ share: they both have to answer to people far more powerful than they are. Diagnosis never happens in a social vacuum.

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Act 5 Scene 1 features a Doctor and a Gentlewoman observing Lady Macbeth while she sleepwalks. The Gentlewoman describes past instances of what the Doctor deems ‘a great perturbation in nature’, but she will not repeat what she heard being said. Then the Queen comes in, rubbing her hands as if washing them, and talking about a ‘spot’. The Doctor says that he will write down what she says ‘to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly’. It is clear that they realise that she is revealing terrible secrets; the Doctor says ‘you have known what you should not’. Nevertheless he remembers his therapeutic function and advises the Gentlewoman to ‘remove from her the means of all annoyance / And keep eyes upon her’. His parting words are ‘I think, but dare not speak’.
      Soon after this, in Act 5 Scene 3, which is shortly before Lady Macbeth dies offstage in what may well be a suicide, Macbeth hears the Doctor’s report:

MACBETH
How does your patient, doctor?
DOCTOR
Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick coming ,
That keep her from her rest.
MACBETH
Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
DOCTOR
Therein the patient
Must minister to .
MACBETH
Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.

There is not much more care at Macbeth’s castle than there is at Elsinore, and soon after this the Doctor expresses, in an aside, his wish to leave. Of course the Doctor cannot cleanse someone’s conscience, or someone’s state of grace. To that extent everyone ministers to themselves. And of course he cannot reveal too much to his murderous monarch. Nevertheless, it is still telling that this Doctor, in his only reappearance, is so casual about the ‘care plan’ for Lady Macbeth.
      This is very partial evidence indeed, but it seems as if Shakespeare, who is credited with a lot of insight in his portrayals of disordered minds, did not display much faith in our ability to solve their problems.

The title will reveal itself to be ironic as this post proceeds. However, I suppose, it is true that I am about to give away a major plot twist in one of Shakespeare’s plays, The Winter’s Tale. Does knowing in advance spoil, or even change things? That is part of the point. This post is a follow-up to earlier attempts to think about evidence that literature ‘changes the way we think’ – or indeed produces any effects at all. See here, and here.

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Once, when I was writing about The Winter’s Tale, I wanted to argue that the audience of that play is not truly surprised when the statue of Hermione comes to life (or, at least, reveals itself not to be a statue). It seemed to me that for a variety of reasons we inwardly know it’s coming and/or we see it arising naturally from the action. I had the good fortune of being edited by Stanley Wells, who argued that in his experience of watching the play, many in Stratford RSC audiences – first timers especially – were palpably shocked. I was ready to defer to him, knowing that he had certainly seen the play more times than me, and that I didn’t actually remember paying any attention to other people in the theatre at the critical moment. I think probably I wasn’t referring to the moment itself anyway, but to a more considered form of surprise, a residue left after the full experience of the literary work puts it into some sort of context.

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I could imagine a couple of experiments that would produce data to help address the question ‘is the audience surprised when Hermione’s statue comes to life?’.

(i) ASK DIRECTLY IN RETROSPECT
As the audience is leaving the theatre you could ask each person to evaluate their level of surprise during the statue scene.

(ii) TEST UNCONSCIOUS RESPONSES IN REAL TIME
During the performance audience members could be rigged up with sensors measuring surprise responses (facial movements? tensed muscles?).

The outcome of this would be some data. The difference between the two options is, I think, that in case (i) the audience would have the opportunity to manipulate their memories or stories of what happened in the moment, over- or under-playing surprise according to the reactions of others around them, the rest of the denouement, and the social situation in which the question was posed. In case (ii) the surprise would be more immediate, and could not be feigned.

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It is not clear to me, though, that this gives (ii) an advantage in authenticity. Perhaps the kind of literary surprise that matters is a combination of response plus socialization plus reflection. In general literature is a form in which feelings can be considered, where immediacy and a pause for thought meet one another. This is not quite , but it is not a million miles away.
      In saying this I am indirectly rejoining my discussion with Stanley Wells, in that the moment of sudden reaction may not necessarily be where the value of surprise lies in The Winter’s Tale. More purposefully, I am trying to get at why experiment (i), which seems in some ways to miss the right time to test surprise, may actually be closer to what really matters. And this is even without noting that an audience member covered with electrodes is not so clearly experiencing The Winter’s Tale as it should be experienced, whereas the audience member in (i) has had the chance to respond in the moment and over time.

It is difficult to experiment on literary responses and/or effects. Surprise!

UPDATE: it occurs to me that the either/or set up here between two kinds of experiment might be a red herring. The interesting thing might be to do both, and compare the differences.

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?