Getting Gabriel Wrong: Part 2 of 3

Part 1.

It may be argued, however, that Flesch’s is just another theory; that it calls for a reading of Joyce’s story that contradicts the way Lacanians read it hardly justifies dismissing one theory in favor of the other. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in his Literary Theory: an Introduction, answers the protest that theories get in between readers and stories by arguing that “Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own” (xii). Far from being oblivious to his own theory, though, Flesch marshals copious evidence to support the idea that people respond to characters in fiction the same way they do to people in real life, and that they therefore require no literary theory to appreciate literature. The evidence he cites comes mainly from experiments based on Game Theory scenarios designed to explore the circumstances under which people act either for their own selfish gain or for the mutual gain of groups to which they belong. But some experimenters have shown that even children too young to speak, certainly too young to be conversant in psychological or literary theories, tend to respond to the very type of signals to which Lacanian readers of “The Dead” are most oblivious.

Yale psychologist Karen Wynn published her research on children’s social cognition around the same time as Comeuppance was released, but even though Flesch’s book has no mention of Wynn’s findings they nonetheless demonstrate both how important the processes of social monitoring and volunteered affect are and how early they develop. Wynn’s team presented children as young as three months with a puppet show featuring a cat who wanted to play ball and two rabbits, one who rudely stole away with the ball when it was rolled to it and another who playfully rolled it back to the cat. The children watched the various exchanges with rapt attention, and when presented afterward with a choice of which rabbit to play with themselves almost invariably chose the more cooperative, demonstrating that “preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behavior toward others” (557). This tendency emerges even when the show features no puppets, but only wooden blocks with crude eyes. Game Theorists call this behavior “strong reciprocity,” which Flesch explains “means the strong reciprocator punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator” (22). So, the question regarding Gabriel Conroy becomes what aspects of his behavior signal to strongly reciprocal readers how prone to cooperation he is?

Joyce deliberately broadcasts a costly signal by exposing his protagonist’s private thoughts, risking the misunderstanding of readers unfamiliar with this style of close narration (and apparently that of Lacanians); he therefore strewed helpful signals throughout the story. In the sentence directly following the first mention of Gabriel—“it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife”—a character named Freddy Malins is introduced. While the arrival of Gabriel and his wife is eagerly anticipated by his aunts and his cousin, “they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed” (176). Joyce may as well be Karen Wynn here, presenting one cooperator and one selfish actor to readers, who find out shortly thereafter that “Gabriel’s solicitude was a standing joke” (180) among his wife and his aunts. “It’s such a relief,” Aunt Kate says to Grabriel’s wife after he has gone to check on the state of Freddy, “that Gabriel is here” (182). Her relief can be compared not just to her feelings toward Freddy, but also toward another character, Mr. Browne, who she complains “is everywhere” in an aside to her niece. “He has been laid on here like the gas” (206). Gabriel himself neither participates in nor is in earshot of any of these character assessments. So readers can conclude that, the nature of his inner thoughts notwithstanding, he is thought highly of by his aunts.

There is one character, however, to whom Lacanians can point as having a less than favorable opinion of Gabriel. Molly Ivors, the second woman in the story to make Gabriel blush, provides a key to understanding the central tension of the plot. For Leonard, the story consists of “three attempts by Gabriel Conroy, with three different women, to confirm the fictional unity of his masculine subjectivity” (451). This is an arch and murky way of saying that Gabriel wants the women he encounters to think he is a good man so that he can believe it himself. It is therefore noteworthy to Leonard that Miss Ivors “did not wear a low-cut bodice” (187), which he insists “announces that Miss Ivors does not dress in accordance with what she imagines the male viewer wishes to see” (461). But how Joyce is really trying to characterize her can be seen in the second part of the sentence about what she is wearing: “and the large brooch which was fixed in front of her collar bore on it an Irish device” (187), which Leonard can only fumblingly dismiss as having “a signification for her that is not meant to signify anything to him” (461). But it clearly does signify something to him—that she is a nationalist. As does her dress. Décolletage is, after all, a French style.

What makes Gabriel blush is not Miss Ivors’s refusal to play to his conception of proper female behavior but her revealing to him her knowledge that he has been writing for a newspaper unsympathetic to her political leanings, as well as to the political leanings of the hosts and the guests at the party. Gabriel’s initial impulse in response and his reason for inhibiting it are telling:

He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her (188).

That she is a peer Leonard chalks up as further upsetting feminine expectations, “a fact as awkward and threatening as the absence of a low-cut bodice” (462). The more significant detail here, though, is that even as she threatens to expose him as an outsider Gabriel is concerned not to offend her. And that he is capable of recognizing her as a peer belies the suggestion that all she is to him is a symptom of his insecure manhood. The blush in this scene signals Gabriel’s genuine anxiety lest his anti-nationalistic political orientation and his cosmopolitan tastes offend everyone at the party.

“The Dead” is replete with moments in which Gabriel inhibits his own plans and checks his own desires out of consideration for others. His thinking better of “a grandiose phrase” with Miss Ivors is one case in point, though she does manage to provoke him to reveal his true feelings (perhaps the only instance of him doing so in the whole story): “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (189). Two other instances of him reconsidering his plans are when he performs his postprandial speech with nary a mention of Browning, some lines of whose non-Irish poetry he has been vacillating over quoting, and when he restrains himself from initiating a sexual encounter with his wife Gretta in their hotel room after the party because she is in a “strange mood” and “To take her as she was would be brutal” (217)—this despite the fact that he is in “a fever of rage and desire” (217). Kelley cites this line along with one that says, “He longed to be master of her strange mood,” and yet another that says, “He longed to cry to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her” (217), to support his claim that Gabriel has “infantile tendencies toward domination,” which manifest in his “narcissistic desire and aggression” (204). This could hardly be more wrong. If he were narcissistic, Gretta’s thoughts and feelings would go unregistered in his consciousness. If he were aggressive, he would treat her violently—he would certainly not be worried about being brutal just by coming on to her. The Lacanians are mistaking thoughts and impulses for actions when it is precisely the discrepancy between Gabriel’s desires and his behavior that proves his altruism.

Gabriel’s thoughtfulness is placed into stark relief by several other characters who show neither the inclination nor the capacity to filter their speech to protect other people’s feelings. Boyd explains: “The inhibition of automatic responses is essential to higher intelligence. It is also essential to morality, to overcoming instinctive but unwise responses to, for instance, anger” (264). The main function Gabriel’s blushing plays in the story is to let readers know something about his real feelings because they quickly discover that he is uniquely capable of acting against them. In this, he can be compared to Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne, who in one scene seem to be vying for the prize of who can be the most insulting to the singer Bartell D’Arcy. “Those were the days,” Browne says at one point, “when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin” (199), presumably oblivious to or unconcerned with the fact that there is a singer among his interlocutors. Even Gabriel’s Aunt Kate joins the pile-on, asserting that “there was only one tenor. To please me, I mean” (199). Mr. D’Arcy, readers have been told and amply reminded, happens to be a tenor himself. And both Lily and Miss Ivors, based on their rudeness toward Gabriel, can be added to this list of those who fail to inhibit their automatic responses.

read part 3

Getting Gabriel Wrong: Part 1 of 3

Soon after arriving with his wife at his aunts’ annual celebration of Christmas, Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” has an awkward encounter. Lily, “the caretaker’s daughter” (175), has gone with Gabriel into a pantry near the entrance to help him off with his coat. They exchange a few polite words before Gabriel broaches the topic of whether Lily might be engaged, eliciting from her a bitter remark about the nature of men, which in turn causes him to blush. After nervously adjusting his attire, Gabriel gives her a coin and rushes away to join the party. How readers interpret this initial scene, how they assess Gabriel’s handling of it, has much bearing on how they will experience the entire story. Many psychoanalytic critics, particularly followers of Jacques Lacan, read the encounter as evidence of Gabriel’s need to control others, especially women. According to this approach, the rest of the story consists of Gabriel’s further frustrations at the hands of women until he ultimately succumbs and adopts a more realistic understanding of himself. But the Lacanian reading is cast into severe doubt by an emerging field of narrative studies based on a more scientific view of human psychology. The theories put forth by these evolutionary critics, particularly the Social Monitoring and Volunteered Affect Theory formulated by William Flesch, highlight textual evidence that undermines readings by prominent Lacanians—evidence which has likely led generations of readers to a much more favorable view of Joyce’s protagonist.

At a glance, two disparate assessments of Gabriel seem equally plausible. Is he solicitous or overbearing? Fastidious or overweening? Self-conscious or narcissistic? While chatting with Lily, he smiles “at the three syllables she had given his surname” (177). He subsequently realizes that he “had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll” (177). Lacanian critic James Kelley asserts that these lines describe Gabriel “reveling in his position of superiority” (202). When Gabriel goes on to inquire about Lily’s schooling and, upon learning that she is no longer a student, whether he can expect to be attending her wedding sometime soon, she “glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness: / —The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (177). Joyce leaves unanswered two questions in this scene: why does Lily respond “with great bitterness”? And why does Gabriel lose his composure over it? Kelley suggests that Lily is responding to Gabriel’s “attitude of superiority” (202). Gary Leonard, another Lacanian, sees the encounter similarly, charging Gabriel with the offense of “asking a real woman a question better asked of a little girl in a fairy tale (of course she is that unreal to him)” (458). But Leonard is holding Gabriel to a feminist standard that had not come into existence yet. And Gabriel’s smiling and reminiscing are just as likely reflective of a fatherly as they are of a patriarchal attitude.

One of the appeals of Flesch’s Social Monitoring and Volunteered Affect (SMVA) theory, which views the experience of fiction as a process of tracking characters for signals of altruism and favoring those who emit them, is that it relies on no notional story between the lines of the actual story. When encountering the scene in which Lily responds bitterly to Gabriel’s small talk, readers need not, for instance, be looking at a symbol of class conflict (Marxism) or gender oppression (Feminism) or one consciousness trying to wrest psychic unity from another (Lacanianism). Evidence can be culled from the scene to support the importance of these symbols and dynamics, along with countless others. But their importance rests solely in the mind of the critic serving as advocate for this or that theory. As Flesch’s fellow evolutionary critic Brian Boyd explains in his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, “Such critics assume that if they can ‘apply’ the theory, if they can read a work in its light, they thereby somehow ‘prove’ it, even if the criteria of application and evidence are loose” (387).Unfortunately, those trained in the application of one of these theories can become so preoccupied with the task of sifting between the lines that their experience—to say nothing of their enjoyment—of the lines themselves gets short shrift. And, as Boyd points out, “We learn more when evidence against a reading surfaces, since it forces us to account for a richer stock of information” (387, emphasis in original).

The distorting effect of theory can be seen in the Lacanian critics’ obliviousness toward several aspects of “The Dead” Joyce is trying to draw their attention to. Why, for instance, would Gabriel be embarrassed by Lily’s bitter response when there are no witnesses? She is just a lowly caretaker’s daughter; that he would be at all concerned with what she says or how she says it tells readers something about him. Joyce makes a point of suggesting that Gabriel’s blush is not borne of embarrassment, but rather of his shame at offending Lily, accidental though the offence may have been. He “coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake” (178), and that mistake was supposing Lily would be getting married soon. That Lily’s bitterness at this supposition has anything to do with Gabriel as opposed to the one or more men who have frustrated her in love is unlikely (unless she has a crush on him). Concerning her “three mistresses,” she knows, for instance, that “the only thing they would not stand was back answers” (176), implying that she has ventured some in the past and been chastised for them. Aunt Kate even complains later about Lily’s recent behavior: “I’m sure I don’t know what has come over her lately. She’s not the girl she was at all” (181). This may or may not be enough evidence to support the idea that Lily’s recent transformation resulted from a courtship with one of those men who is all palaver, but it certainly goes a long way toward undermining readings like Kelley’s and Leonard’s.

When Gabriel thrusts a coin into Lily’s hand, his purpose may be “to reestablish his superiority” (202), as Kelley argues, but that assumes both that he has a sense of his own superiority and that he is eager to maintain it. If Gabriel feels so superior, though, why would he respond charitably rather than getting angry? Why, when Aunt Kate references Lily’s recent change, does he make ready “to ask his aunt some questions on this point” (181) instead of making a complaint or insisting on a punishment? A simpler and much more obvious motivation for the thrusting of the coin is to make amends for the accidental offence. But, astonishingly, Leonard concludes solely from Joyce’s use of the word “thrusting” that Lily and Gabriel’s “social intercourse is terminated in a manner that mimics sexual intercourse” (458). Yet another Lacanian, Ivan Trujillo, takes this idea a step further: having equated Gabriel’s blush with an orgasm, he sees the coin as the culmination of an act of prostitution, as paying her back “for his orgasmic feeling of shame” (3).

From the perspective of SMVA theory, laid out in Flesch’s Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, Gabriel’s blushing, which recurs later in the story in his encounter with Molly Ivors, suggests something quite distantly removed from sexual arousal. “Blushing is an honest signal of how one feels,” Flesch writes. “It is honest because we would suppress it if we could” (103). But what feeling might Gabriel be signaling? Flesch offers a clue when he explains,

Being known through hard-to-fake or costly or honest signaling to have the emotional propensity to act against our own rational interests helps those who receive our signals to solve the problem of whether they can trust us. Blushing, weeping, flushing with rage, going livid with shock: all these are reliable signals, not only of how we feel in a certain situation but of the fact that we generally emit reliable signals. It pays to be fathomable. People tend to trust those who blush (106, emphasis in original).

The most obvious information readers of “The Dead” can glean from Gabriel’s blushing at Lily’s response to his questions is that he is genuinely concerned that he may have offended her. Lacanians might counter that his real concern is with the authentication of his own sense of superiority, but again if he really felt so superior why would he care about offending the lowly caretaker’s daughter in an exchange with no witnesses? In fact, Lily’s back is turned, so even she misses the blush. It can be read as a signal from Joyce to readers to let them know a little about what kind of character Gabriel is.

Part 2.

Postmodernism and the Commodification of Authenticity

Inspired by poststructuralism’s dropping of the referent—the conviction that language allows for no access to reality—authors, along with editors and publishers, have instigated a trend away from fiction with authoritative third-person narrators. Authority in general is now something of a bugaboo, a tired and transparent disguise for advocates of exclusionary and oppressive ideologies or discourses. The good intention behind this movement is to give voice to hitherto powerless minorities. But what it means to be powerless and what it means to be a minority are complicated matters. A different breed of truth has taken over. A capturing of, or a representing of, the true experience of this or that minority has become the ascendant pursuit. Authenticity has supplanted authority as the guiding principle of fiction.

One way to achieve authenticity is to be a minority and to tell stories, preferably through first-person narration, that are culled from your actual experiences—or at least figurative representations of those experiences. White guys have a harder time for obvious reasons. To represent their experiences with authenticity usually means portraying their characters as demented. But the biggest problem for attempts at authenticity through first-person narratives is that no human consciously attends to the quantities of detail that make up the most effective, the most vivid scenes in literature. Instead of the voices of real people in real, underrepresented circumstances, readers encounter bizarre, hyper-articulate dialect savants, hybrids of the socially impoverished and the mentally rich, as if liberal documentary filmmakers had been shrunk and surgically implanted into the brains of poor immigrants.

To say that such narrators are like no one you’ll ever meet only addresses the most superficial of the dilemmas inherent in the quest for authenticity. For narrators to tell their stories in obsessive detail they must have some reason to do so; they must be anticipating some effect on their readers. They must have an agenda, which seems to be nothing other than to advertise their own and indirectly the author’s authenticity. Take J. Lo singing “I’m real” as a refrain to one of her songs and a reprisal of the main theme of them all. It raises the question, if you’re so real, why must you so compulsively insist on it? The answer—and J. Lo knows it—is that being real has become a commodity.

Ironically, this emphasis on the experiences of individuals is well in keeping with the so-called western tradition. One of the appeals of postmodernism is that in privileging subjectivity and entirely ruling out objectivity it implies an unbridgeable chasm between one individual and another. In a world of nearly seven billion, this affirmation of uniqueness comes as a welcome assurance. No overlap between individuals means no redundancy, no superfluity. It may also suggest that we can never really know each other, but that’s okay as long as we accept each other as real. But real as opposed to what?

Being real means not being manufactured, artificial, mass produced. It means not being a poseur. Authenticity is our clarion call of resistance to industrialization, commercialism, globalization—even tourism. No wonder so many marketing firms have embraced it. This paradox has placed both writers and readers in an awkward position vis á vis the purpose fiction has traditionally served. We can’t truly understand other people. And our rebel cry against consumerism has long since been packaged and sold back to us. So while reading we’re not learning about others, certainly not learning about ourselves, and at the same time we’re fueling the machine we set out to sabotage.

As poststructuralism’s original case for dropping the referent was pathetic, bringing reality, even the reality of a common humanity, back into the purview of literature suggests itself as a possible escape from this self-defeating solipsism.

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Absurdities and Atrocities in Literary Criticism

All literary theories (except formalism) share one common attraction—they speak to the universal fantasy of being able to know more about someone than that person knows about him- or herself. If you happen to be a feminist critic for instance, then you will examine some author’s work and divine his or her attitude toward women. Because feminist theory insists that all or nearly all texts exemplify patriarchy if they’re not enacting some sort of resistance to it, the author in question will invariably be exposed as either a sexist or a feminist, regardless of whether or not that author intended to make any comment about gender. The author may complain of unfair treatment; indeed, there really is no clearer instance of unchecked confirmation bias. The important point, though, is that the writer of the text supposedly knows little or nothing about how the work functions in the wider culture, what really inspired it at an unconscious level, and what readers will do with it. Substitute bourgeois hegemony for patriarchy in the above formula and you have Marxist criticism. Deconstruction exposes hidden hierarchies. New Historicism teases out dominant and subversive discourses. And none of them flinches at objections from authors that their work has been completely misunderstood.

This has led to a sad, self-righteous state of affairs in English departments. The first wrong turn was taken by Freud when he introduced the world to the unconscious and subsequently failed to come up with a method that could bring its contents to light with any reliability whatsoever. It’s hard to imagine how he could’ve been more wrong about the contents of the human mind. As Voltaire said, “He who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” No sooner did Freud start writing about the unconscious than he began arguing that men want to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. Freud and his followers were fabulists who paid lip service to the principles of scientific epistemology even as they flouted them. But then came the poststructuralists to muddy the waters even more. When Derrida assured everyone that meaning derived from the play of signifiers, which actually meant meaning is impossible, and that referents—to the uninitiated, referents mean the real world—must be dismissed as having any part to play, he was sounding the death knell for any possibility of a viable epistemology. And if truth is completely inaccessible, what’s the point of even trying to use sound methods? Anything goes.

Since critics like to credit themselves with having good political intentions like advocating for women and minorities, they are quite adept at justifying their relaxing of the standards of truth. But just as Voltaire warned, once those standards are relaxed, critics promptly turn around and begin making accusations of sexism and classism and racism. And, since the accusations aren’t based on any reasonable standard of evidence, the accused have no recourse to counterevidence. They have no way of defending themselves. Presumably, their defense would be just another text the critics could read still more evidence into of whatever crime they’re primed to find.

The irony here is that the scientific method was first proposed, at least in part, as a remedy for confirmation bias, as can be seen in this quote from Francis Bacon’s 1620 treatise Novum Organon:

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.

Poststructuralists believe that everything we see is determined by language, which encapsulates all of culture, so our perceptions are hopelessly distorted. What can be done then to arrive at the truth? Well, nothing—all truth is constructed. All that effort scientists put into actually testing their ideas is a waste of time. They’re only going to “discover” what they already know.

But wait: if poststructuralism posits that discovery is impossible, how do its adherents account for airplanes and nuclear power? Just random historical fluctuations, I suppose.

The upshot is that, having declared confirmation bias inescapable, critics embraced it as their chief method. You have to accept their relaxed standard of truth to accept their reasoning about why we should do away with all standards of truth. And you just have to hope like hell they never randomly decide to set their sights on you or your work. We’re lucky as hell the legal system doesn’t work like this. And we can thank those white boys of the enlightenment for that.

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Poststructuralism: Banal When It's Not Busy Being Absurd

            Reading the chapter in one of my textbooks on Poststructualism, I keep wondering why this paradigm has taken such a strong hold of scholars' minds in the humanities. In a lot of ways, the theories that fall under its aegis are really simple--overly simple in fact. The structuralism that has since been posted was the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, who held that words derive their meanings from their relations to other, similar words. Bat means bat because it doesn't mean cat. Simple enough, but Saussure had to gussy up his theory by creating a more general category than "words," which he called signs. And, instead of talking about words and their meanings, he asserts that every sign is made up of a signifier (word) and a signified (concept or meaning).

            What we don't see much of in Saussure's formulation of language is its relation to objects, actions, and experiences. These he labeled referents, and he doesn't think they play much of a role. And this is why structuralism is radical. The common-sense theory of language is that a word's meaning derives from its correspondence to the object it labels. Saussure flipped this understanding on its head, positing a top-down view of language. What neither Saussure nor any of his acolytes seemed to notice is that structuralism can only be an incomplete description of where meaning comes from because, well, it doesn't explain where meaning comes from--unless all the concepts, the signifieds are built into our brains. (Innate!)

            Saussure's top-down theory of language has been, unbeknownst to scholars in the humanities, thoroughly discredited by research in developmental psychology going back to Jean Piaget that shows children's language acquisition begins very concretely and only later in life enables them to deal in abstractions. According to our best evidence, the common-sense, bottom-up theory of language is correct. But along came Jacques Derrida to put the post to structuralism--and make it even more absurd. Derrida realized that if words' meanings come from their relation to similar words then discerning any meaning at all from any given word is an endlessly complicated endeavor. Bat calls to mind not just cat, but also mat, and cad, and cot, ad infinitum. Now, it seems to me that this is a pretty effective refutation of Saussure's theory. But Derrida didn't scrap the faulty premise, but instead drew an amazing conclusion from it: that meaning is impossible.

            Now, to round out the paradigm, you have to import some Marxism. Logically speaking, such an importation is completely unjustified; in fact, it contradicts the indeterminacy of meaning, making poststructuralism fundamentally unsound. But poststructuralists believe all ideas are incoherent, so this doesn't bother them. The Marxist element is the idea that there is always a more powerful group who's foisting their ideology on the less powerful. Derrida spoke of binaries like man and woman--a man is a man because he's not a woman--and black and white--blacks are black because they're not white. We have to ignore the obvious objection that some things can be defined according their own qualities without reference to something else. Derrida's argument is that in creating these binaries to structure our lives we always privilege one side over the other (men and whites of course--even though both Saussure and Derrida were both). So literary critics inspired by Derrida "deconstruct" texts to expose the privileging they take for granted and perpetuate. This gives wonks the gratifying sense of being engaged in social activism.

            Is the fact that these ideas are esoteric what makes them so appealing to humanities scholars, the conviction that they have this understanding that supposedly discredits what the hoi polloi, or even what scientists and historians and writers of actual literature know? Really poststructuralism is nonsense on stilts riding a unicycle. It's banal in that it takes confirmation bias as a starting point, but it's absurd in that it insists this makes knowledge impossible. The linguist founders were armchair obscurantists whose theories have been disproved. But because of all the obscurantism learning the banalities and catching out the absurdities takes a lot of patient reading. So is the effort invested in learning the ideas a factor in making them hard to discount outright? After all, that would mean a lot of wasted effort.

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From Rags to Republican

One of the dishwashers at the restaurant where I work likes to light-heartedly discuss politics with me. “How are things this week on the left?” he might ask. Not even in his twenties yet, he can impressively explain why it’s wrong to conflate communism with Stalinism. He believes the best government would be a communist one, but until we figure out how to establish it, our best option is to go republican. He loves Rush Limbaugh. One day I was talking about disparities in school funding when he began telling about why he doesn’t think that sort of thing is important. “I did horribly in school, but I decided I wanted to learn on my own.”

He went on to tell me about a terrible period he went through growing up, after his parents got divorced and his mother was left nearly destitute. The young dishwater had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. The story struck me because about two weeks earlier I’d been discussing politics with a customer in the dinning room who told a remarkably similar one. He was eating with his wife and their new baby. When I disagreed with him that Obama’s election was a national catastrophe he began an impromptu lecture on conservative ideology. I interrupted him, saying, “I understand top-down economics; I just don’t agree with it.” But when I started to explain the bottom-up theory, he interrupted me with a story about how his mom was on food stamps and they had nothing when he was a kid, and yet here he is, a well-to-do father (he even put a number on his prosperity). “I’m walking proof that it is possible.”

I can go on and on with more examples. It seems like the moment anyone takes up the mantle of economic conservatism for the first time he (usually males) has to put together one of these rags-to-riches stories. I guess I could do it too, with just a little exaggeration. “My first memories are of living in government subsidized apartments, and my parents argued about money almost every day of my life when I was a kid, and then they got divorced and I was devastated—I put on weight until I was morbidly obese and I went to a psychologist for depression because I missed a month of school in fourth grade.” (Actually, that’s not exaggerated at all.)

The point we’re supposed to take away is that hardship is good and that no matter how bad being poor may appear it’s nothing a good work ethic can’t fix. Invariably, the Horatio Alger proceeds to the non sequitur that his making it out of poverty means it’s a bad idea for us as a society to invest in programs to help the poor. Push him by asking what if the poverty he experienced wasn’t as bad as the worst poverty in the country, or where that work ethic that saved him came from, and he’ll most likely shift gears and start explaining that becoming a productive citizen is a matter of incentives.

The logic runs: if you give money to people who aren’t working, you’re taking away the main incentive they had to get off their asses and go to work. Likewise, if you take money away from the people who have earned it by taxing them, you’re giving them a disincentive to continue being productive. This a folksy version of a Skinner Box: you get the pigeons to do whatever tricks you want by rewarding them with food pellets when they get close to performing them correctly—“successive approximations” of the behavior—and punishing them by not giving them food pellets when they go astray. What’s shocking is that this is as sophisticated as the great Reagan Revolution ever got. It’s a psychological theory that was recognized as too simplistic in the 1950’s writ large to explain the economy. What if people can make money in ways other than going to work, say, by selling drugs? The conservatives’ answer—more police, harsher punishments. But what if money isn’t the only reward people respond to? And what if prison doesn’t work like it’s supposed to?

The main appeal, I think, to Skinner Box Economics is that it says, in effect, don’t worry about having more than other people because you’ve earned what you have. You deserve it. What a relief to hear that we have more because we’re just better people. We needn’t work ourselves up over the wretched plight of the have-nots; if they really wanted to, they could have everything we have. To keep this line of reasoning afloat you need to buoy it up with a bit of elitism: so maybe offering everyone the same incentives won’t make everyone rich, but the smartest and most industrious people will be alright. If you’re doing alright, then you must be smart and industrious. And if you’re filthy rich, say, Wall Street banker rich, then, well, you must be one amazing S.O.B. How much money you have becomes an index of how virtuous you are as a person. And some people are so amazing in fact that the worst thing society can do is hold them back in any way, because their prosperity is so awesome it benefits everyone—it trickles down. There you have it, a rationale for letting rich people do whatever they want, and leaving poor people to their own devices to pull up their own damn bootstraps. This is the thinking that has led to even our democratic president believing that he needs to pander to Wall Street to save the economy. This is conservatism. And it’s so silly no adult should entertain it for more than a moment.

A philosophy that further empowers the powerful, that justifies the holding of power over the masses of the less powerful, ought to be appealing to anyone who actually has power. But it’s remarkable how well these ideas trickle down to the rest of us. One way to account for the assimilation of Skinner Box Economics among the middle class is that it is the middle class; people in it still have to justify being more privileged than those in the lower classes. But the real draw probably has little to do with any recognition of one’s actual circumstances; it relies rather on a large-scale obliviousness of them. Psychologists have been documenting for years the power of two biases we all fall prey to that have bearing on our economic thinking: the first is the self-serving bias, according to which we take credit any time we succeed at something but point to forces beyond our control whenever we fail. One of the best examples of the self-serving bias is research showing that the percentage of people who believe themselves to be better-than-average drivers is in the nineties—even among those who’ve recently been at fault in a traffic accident. (Sounds like Wall Street.) The second bias, which is the flipside of the first, is the fundamental attribution error, according to which we privilege attributions of persistent character traits to other people in explaining their behavior at the expense of external, situational factors—when someone cuts us off while we’re driving we immediately conclude that person is a jerk, even though we attribute the same type of behavior in ourselves to our being late for a meeting.

Any line of thinking that leads one away from the comforting belief in his or her own infinite capacity for self-determination will inevitably fail to take hold in the minds of those who rely on intuition as a standard of truth. That’s why the conservative ideology is such an incoherent mess: on the one hand, you’re trying to create a scientific model for how the economy works (or doesn’t), but on the other you’re trying not only to leave intact people’s faith in free will but also to bolster it, to elevate it to the status of linchpin to the entire worldview. But free will and determinism don’t mix, and unless you resort to religious concepts of non-material souls there’s no place to locate free will in the natural world. The very notion of free will is self-serving to anyone at all successful in his or her life—and that’s why self-determination, in the face of extreme adversity, is fetishized by the right. That’s why every conservative has a rags-to-riches story to offer as proof of the true nature of economic forces.

The real wonder of the widespread appeal of conservatism is the enormous capacity it suggests we all have for taking our advantages for granted. Most people bristle when you even use the words advantage or privilege—as if you’re undermining their worth or authenticity as a person. But the advantages middle class people enjoy are glaring and undeniable. Sure, many of us were raised by single mothers who went through periods of hardship. I’d say most of us, though, had grandparents around who were willing to lend a helping hand here and there. And even if these grandparents didn’t provide loans or handouts they did provide the cultural capital that makes us recognizable to other middle class people as part of the tribe. What makes conservative rags-to-riches stories impossible prima facie is that the people telling them know the plot elements so well, meaning someone taught them the virtue of self-reliance, and they tell them in standard American English, with mouths full of shiny, straight teeth, in accents that belie the story’s gist. It may not seem, in hindsight, that they were comfortably ensconced in the middle class, but at the very least they were surrounded by middle class people, and benefiting from their attention.

You might be tempted to conclude that the role of contingency is left out of conservative ideology, but that’s not really the case. Contingency in the form of bad luck is incorporated into conservative thinking in the form of the very narratives of triumph over adversity that are offered as proof of the fatherly wisdom of the free market. In this way, the ideology is inextricably bound to the storyteller’s authenticity as a person. I suffered and toiled, the storyteller reasons, and therefore my accomplishments are genuine, my character strong. The corollary to this personal investment in what is no longer merely an economic theory is that any dawning awareness of people in worse circumstances than those endured and overcome by the authentic man or woman will be resisted as a threat to that authenticity. If they were to accept that they had it better or easier than some, then their victories would be invalidated. They are thus highly motivated to discount, or simply not to notice contingencies like generational or cultural advantages.

I’ve yet to hear a rags-to-riches story that begins with a malnourished and overstressed mother giving birth prematurely to a cognitively impaired and immuno-compromised baby, and continues with a malnourished and neglected childhood in underperforming schools where not a teacher nor a classmate can be found who places any real value on education, and ends with the hard-working, intelligent person you see in front of you, who makes a pretty decent income and is raising a proud, healthy family. Severely impoverished people live a different world, and however bad we middle-class toilers think we’ve had it we should never be so callous and oblivious to claim we’ve seen and mastered that world. But Skinner Box Economics doesn’t just fail because some of us are born less able to perform successive approximations of the various tricks of productivity; it fails because it’s based on an inadequate theory of human motivation. Rewards and punishments work to determine our behavior to be sure, but the only people who sit around calculating outcomes and navigating incentives and disincentives with a constant eye toward the bottom line are the rich executives who benefit most from a general acceptance of supply-side economics.

The main cultural disadvantage for people growing up in poor families in poor neighborhoods is that the individuals who are likely to serve as role models there will seldom be the beacons of middle-class virtue we stupidly expect our incentive structure to produce. When I was growing up, I looked up to my older brothers, and wanted to do whatever they were doing. And I looked up to an older neighbor kid, whose influence led me to race bikes at local parks. Later my role models were Jean Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I got into martial arts and physical fitness. Soon thereafter, I began to idolize novelists and scientists. Skinnerian behaviorism has been supplanted in the social sciences by theories emphasizing the importance of observational learning, as well as the undeniable role of basic drives like the one for status-seeking. Primatologist Frans de Waal, for instance, has proposed a theory for cultural transmission—in both apes and humans—called BIOL, for bonding and identification based observational learning. What this theory suggests is that our personalities are largely determined by a proclivity for seeking out high-status individuals whom we admire, assimilating their values and beliefs, and emulating their behavior. Absent a paragon of the Calvinist work ethic, no amount of incentives is going to turn a child into the type of person who tells conservative rags-to-riches stories.

The thing to take away from these stories is usually that there is a figure or two who perform admirably in them—the single mom, the determined dad, the charismatic teacher. And the message isn’t about economics at all but about culture and family. Conservatives tout the sanctity of family and the importance of good parenting but when they come face-to-face with the products of poor parenting they see only the products of bad decisions. Middle class parents go to agonizing lengths to ensure their children grow up in good neighborhoods and attend good schools but suggest to them that how well someone behaves is a function of how much they have—how much love and attention, how much healthy food and access to doctors, how much they can count on their struggles being worthwhile—and those same middle class parents will warn you about the dangers of making excuses.

The real proof of how well conservative policies work is not to be found in anecdotes, no matter how numerous; it’s in measures of social mobility. The story these measures tell about the effects of moving farther to the right as a country contrast rather starkly with all the rags-to-Republican tales of personal heroism. But then numbers aren’t really stories; there’s no authenticity and self-congratulation to be gleaned from statistics; and if it’s really true that we owe our prosperity to chance, well, that’s just depressing—and discouraging. We can take some encouragement for our stories of hardship though. We just have to take note of how often the evidence they provide for poverty—food stamps, rent-controlled housing—are in fact government programs to aid the impoverished. They must be working.

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The Cost of Denying the Abyss: Signals of Selfishness and Altruism in Death in Venice 4th and Final Part

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It is Tadzio’s role as a paragon of prosociality that makes his less than perfect teeth so striking to Aschenbach. When he first notices that the boys’ teeth are “not as attractive as they might have been,” he sees it as a sign that he is “sickly” and that he will “probably not live to grow old” (51). For some reason this thought provides him with a “feeling of satisfaction or relief,” perhaps because it allays some of the envy he feels for the boy, which is naturally already much allayed simply by dint of his being a child. Later, when Tadzio is playing on the beach with his friend Jashu, he is described as looking at the other boy and “smiling with eyes and lips” (60). And, when it happens by chance that Aschenbach and Tadzio actually come face-to-face and the young boy smiles at the old man, he can barely stand it. “You mustn’t smile like that!” he imagines saying. “One mustn’t, do you hear, mustn’t smile like that at anyone!” (67). The symbolism of teeth in Death in Venice is close to that of language: Aschenbach comes to know that “Eros dwells in language” (62) as he sits writing an essay that has been inspired by the boy’s beauty. Language itself is an inherently social adaptation. But the old writer uses it only in isolation. Likewise, teeth serve both the self-directed function of mastication and the other-directed one of conveying emotion.

Aschenbach at the beginning only sees virtue in the artist who “clenches his teeth in proud shame” (30) as he sacrifices himself, like St. Sebastian, to his art. But it was, in fact, the appearance of an exotic traveler’s teeth, bared aggressively, that brought about the “extraordinary expansion of his inner self” (25) that culminates in his trip to Venice. What he can’t stand about Tadzio’s smile is that it shows the happiness that comes with human interaction. Near the end of the novella, after he’s had his epiphanic vision of the bacchanal overtaking the mountains with “a human and animal swarm” (81), and after the narrator says that he “no longer feared the observant eyes of other people” (82), he is prepared to accept this message of the dual-purpose of teeth—and language—from the barber who is trying to convince him to dye his hair: “If certain people who profess moral disapproval of cosmetics were to be logical enough to extend such rigorous principles to their teeth, the result would be rather disgusting” (83).

But Tadzio serves as a major character in a novella that hews to an aesthetic of verisimilitude, so there must be more to him than what he symbolizes. What Mann suggests in the story is that Aschenbach is genuinely attracted to the boy for his classical beauty. From this initial admiration, his obsession could simply have developed as a result of his hitherto un-volunteered emotions finding a convenient object. From this perspective, the absence of Tadzio’s father is significant because it means there is less threat of violent reprisal for his stalking of the boy. Aschenbach is a social cripple. While he is simply incapable of meaningfully conversing and interacting with adults, he is morally and artistically bound not to get too close to the young boy. At one of the few points where he considers taking the plunge, he balks because he fears it would lead “to a wholesome disenchantment,” and “the fact now seemed to be that the aging lover no longer wished to be disenchanted, that the intoxication was too precious to him” (63). His solitary existence has been suffocating him so long that he’s glad for even this unfulfilling and forbidden interaction at a distance.

And the two do indeed interact. It seems the influence between them isn’t just in the direction of sociable boy to aloof man either; it goes the other way as well. When the street band plays outside the hotel, Aschenbach is horrified by the guitarist’s violation of “artistic distance” (76) as he works the crowd, a social artist without the slightest concern for dignity. While the rest of the crowd laughs, Aschenbach remains serious, and to his surprise he sees Tadzio, sitting on a balcony across from him, is “returning his glance,” and

had remained no less serious than himself, just as if he were regulating his attitude and expression by those of the older man, and as if the general mood had no power over him while Aschenbach kept aloof from it (76).

A few days later, on what will be his last day on the beach, Aschenbach witnesses a fight between Tadzio and his subservient friend Jashu. The weaker but higher-status boy throws sand in the face of the stronger, submissive one. Jashu wrestles Tadzio to the ground and presses his face into the sand until he is nearly suffocated. After the tussle, Tadzio sulks away, waving off all gestures of remorse and refusing all pleas for forgiveness. The last thing Aschenbach sees before his death is the boy he loved for his social nature standing alone on a small island with his back to his friends. As he loses consciousness, he imagines the young boy summoning him, not to himself but out toward the sea, the abyss, beyond.

Aschenbach ultimately fails to save Tadzio by informing his mother of the epidemic because he lacks the strength to redeem himself. The idea of returning to the sterility of his disciplined solitude appeals to him no more than resigning himself to death from cholera. Even though he considers telling Tadzio’s mother to leave Venice with her family, “a decent action which would cleanse his conscience,” and which would also signal his altruism, he never goes through with it because it would “give him back to himself again” (80). He thus becomes a second-order free-rider by failing to punish the Venetian authorities who are covering up the crisis to protect their income from tourists. But he will get what’s coming to him. He will pay the price for his fame and for the mistake embodied in the art that purchased it for him; he pays for trying to deny his affinity with the abyss—and in doing so he signals his creator’s acknowledgement of it.

Of the considerations which recommend Flesch’s theory about our emotional engagement with literature, perhaps the most compelling is that if it is valid it would lead to the inevitable conclusion that we in fact don’t need a theory, either Flesch’s or anyone else’s, to enjoy narratives. (A theory that argues for its own superfluity—how’s that for costly signaling?) And it is difficult to imagine someone reading Death in Venice for the first time and not vacillating between pity and disgust at each new development of Aschenbach’s predicament, not wondering what Thomas Mann meant in having his character go on at such overblown length about the nature of art, not shuffling among multiple hypotheses about Mann’s feelings toward Aschenbach, and not dreading the possibility that Tadzio might be harmed in some way, his innocence compromised, dreading it almost as much for the sake of Aschenbach as for the boy himself because it would be so catastrophic for both of them. It is difficult to imagine anyone laying the book down and then having a casual conversation about it that didn’t focus on these concerns.

But, if the theory does have validity, it would not suggest that all works ought to be equally accessible to all readers, and part of the appeal of Death in Venice is that it is multifaceted enough to prompt innumerable conversations, casual and otherwise, assuming those reading it have the wherewithal to appreciate its niceties. After all, our ability to appreciate the most sophisticated texts is a form of honest signaling onto itself. In addition to sophistication, Mann’s novella also provides us an opportunity to signal our own strong reciprocity by caring what type of character Achenbach turns out to be—and what type of author Thomas Mann was. In the end, though, the characters in any given story need not lend themselves to easy analysis in terms of strong reciprocity; many of the most fascinating characters, from Milton’s Satan, to Bronte’s Heathcliff, even to the pirate Jack Sparrow, demonstrate dynamic mixes of selfish and altruistic behavior. But what will they do when it really matters?

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An Evolutionary Approach to Death in Venice Part 3

Read from the beginning

Flesch follows theorists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi in positing what they call “the handicap principle” as an explanation for how strong reciprocity could evolve and persist in animal populations. As is evident from people’s behavior in The Ultimatum Game, they are willing to pay a price, in other words to handicap themselves, for the sake of fairness. What makes the handicap effective as a signal is that the individual who imposes it on him- or herself must be able to survive with the added burden. The peacock signals his fitness with his elaborate feathers because only a fit individual could drag around such a cumbersome display. (Conspicuous consumption is the human financial analog.) Humans, on the other hand, signal their fitness, and thus enhance their reputations, by taking on the costs of rewarding fellow altruists, and even more so by punishing defectors. Flesch calls this “costly signaling.” And it explains the emphasis Mann places on the costs incurred by Aschenbach in the service of his art. But does Aschenbach’s writing somehow signal his strong reciprocity?

Death in Venice is at base a narrative exploration of the nature of art and how it affects the life of the artist. It must be borne in mind that even as we are assessing Aschenbach’s work for signs of strong reciprocity we are simultaneously assessing the work of Thomas Mann for the same quality. This observation suggests the possibility that, altruistic as Aschenbach may have believed he was in the beginning of the story, Mann may be signaling to us, his readers, his own altruism by punishing his character for his wrongheaded approach to art. In Flesch’s words, “The story tells a story of punishment; the story punishes as story; the storyteller represents him- or herself as an altruistic punisher by telling it” (83). We in turn signal our own strong reciprocity by volunteering affect for the characters, in the case of Aschenbach a feeling of suspicion and indignation at the beginning—assuming we disagree with his theories of art—and perhaps even a pleasurable anticipation of comeuppance for him. By the end of the story, though, what we feel for him is more likely to be pity. Aschenbach won much of his acclaim as the author of a work called A Study in Abjection, which reflects his decision to “repudiate knowledge” (32). The story is described as

an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology and represented by the figure of that spiritless, witless semiscoundrel who cheats his way into a destiny of sorts when, motivated by his own ineptitude and depravity and ethical whimsicality, he drives his wife into the arms of a callow youth—convinced that his intellectual depths entitle him to behave
with contemptible baseness (32).

It seems the story was about a second-order free-rider who failed or refused to punish two defectors. And the story itself was the punishment of the second-order free-rider by a third-order observer. So, Aschenbach is indeed a moralist, a strong reciprocator, by he is a moralist of a certain type:

The forthright words of condemnation which here weighed vileness in the balance and found it wanting—they proclaimed their writer’s renunciation of all moral skepticism, of every kind of sympathy with the abyss; they declared his repudiation of the laxity of that compassionate principle which holds that to understand all is to forgive all (32).

The principle Aschenbach adheres to in the place of understanding and forgiveness is Frederick the Great’s “durchhalten!” (29), which signals his determination to rise above his own disadvantages, to trumpet “the heroism of weakness” (31). This Anti-Enlightenment attitude is all but indistinguishable from conservative ideology at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. And it may even be that with the novella Mann is signaling not just his strong reciprocity and his aesthetic philosophy, but also his political beliefs.

The closing section of the novella can be seen as a refutation of the theory of art expounded in the second chapter. Aschenbach, it seems, has overcompensated for the undignified, unmanly nature of his work by applying to it a militaristically strenuous ethos. Over time, this intense rigor has dried his well of creativity, and his existence has become unbearably sterile. The turn he takes over the course of the plot is toward greater fertility. Unfortunately, he lacks the wisdom to balance his unruly social emotions with his eagerness to maintain his dignity.

There he sat, the master, the artist who had achieved dignity, the author of A Study in Abjection, he who in such paradigmatically pure form had repudiated intellectual vagrancy and the murky depths, who had proclaimed his renunciation of all sympathy with the abyss, who had weighed vileness in the balance and found it wanting; he who had risen so high, who had set his face against his own sophistication, grown out of all his irony, and taken on the commitments of one whom the public trusted; he, whose fame was official, whose name had been ennobled, and on whose style young boys were taught to model their own (85).

Some critics cite these lines as evidence that the narrator is taking a step away from the character and establishing an ironic distance (Furst 167). According to this reading, Mann has witnessed his protagonist’s dejection in the face of overwhelming temptation, and is taking an opportunity to signal to his readers that he doesn’t condone this acquiescence but is merely narrating it. But the statement that Aschenbach had successfully “grown out of all his irony” in the midst of such an ironic sentence belies that reading. And that he goes on to deliver, in his imagination at least, a discourse on what he’s discovered through the course of his journey to be the true nature of art further suggests the inextricability of the narration from Aschenbach’s thoughts.

In the lines about the former dignified master, Mann is maintaining the free indirect style of narration he’s used throughout the story. The early respect and admiration evinced by the narrator is a reflection of Aschenbach’s high opinion of himself, and when this opinion turns sour it isn’t a signal that the narrator is abandoning him, but that he simply has come to think ill of himself. (A comparison of the narrative style of Death in Venice with that of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary may be of future interest.) In an earlier scene, Mann even locates the source of Aschenbach’s self-doubts. The love-stricken man is standing in the hallway of the hotel, leaning his head against the door to listen for Tadzio’s voice, and running “the risk of being surprised and discovered in this insane situation” (71). This risk calls to mind his ancestors, to whom he habitually rehearses the list of his achievements so that he can assure himself of “the respect they could not have withheld.” But naturally he’s worried about what they might say about his present circumstances.

But for that matter, what would they have said about his entire life, a life that had deviated from theirs to the point of degeneracy, this life of his in the compulsive service of art, this life about
which he himself, adopting the civic values of his forefathers, had once let fall such mocking observations (71).

Aschenbach’s militaristic approach to his writing has been a reaction to his abiding uncertainty about the value, the manly dignity, of any life devoted to art. He wants to prove to himself that he is living up to the standards and ideals of his heroic ancestors. And yet, here he is, shamefully infatuated with a young boy he lacks the social grace even to greet casually. We may feel pity for him at this point, but to do so, ironically, we must apply that same principle, “to understand all is to forgive all” (32), he himself has so strenuously repudiated. This is his comeuppance.

In his discourse to Phaedrus near the end of the novella, Aschenbach has to admit to the young boy, and to himself, that “though we may be heroes in our fashion and disciplined warriors, yet we are like women, for it is passion that exalts us,” and that “we writers can be neither wise nor dignified” (85). And, despite his earlier renunciation, he now recognizes that he “has been born with an incorrigible and natural tendency toward the abyss” (86). The great author’s downfall can be read as the inevitable result of his long repression of this tendency. But it can also be read as a demonstration of the real dangers all artists must face, the costs that will ensue should they fail to strike a proper balance between disciplined solitude and passionate abandon. As the story begins, Aschenbach’s work is described as tending “toward the exemplary and definitive, the fastidiously conventional, the conservative and formal and even formulaic” (33). This description is remarkable for its distance from the work in which it is found, and thus it fails to imply the approval the author—here at the beginning of the story is where the narrator’s ironic distance is most in evidence. And since the distance between Aschenbach and Thomas Mann is established early on, the two men’s views of art can actually be seen as converging at the end of the novella, though Mann probably intended to imply that Aschenbach is overcompensating in the opposite direction in his move toward acknowledging his kinship with the abyss.

But is Aschenbach’s attraction to Tadzio merely a punishment exacted by an unsympathetic contriver of the plot that is his fate? When he first glimpses the young boy, it is in the presence of several of his sisters, a governess, and later his mother. This absence of an adult male figure may be noteworthy in light of the narrator’s earlier emphasis on the fact that Aschenbach, though once married and father to a girl, “never had a son” (33). As noted earlier, his feelings for the boy are at one point described as “a paternal fondness” (51). In many ways, Tadzio is nothing like the old man: he has long, blond, curly hair, compared with Aschenbach’s short, dark hair; he gives off an “air of richness and indulgence” (44), while Achenbach is all austerity and restraint; he is a “lie-abed” (46) while the old man gets up early to work; most importantly, Tadzio is always surrounded with companions, while Aschenbach had “grown up by himself, without companions,” and because of his physical weakness “medical advice and care made school attendance impossible” (29). Tellingly, after first seeing Tadzio and watching him on the beach that first time, he goes back to his hotel room, where

he spent some time in front of the looking glass studying his gray hair, his weary sharp-featured face. At that moment he thought of his fame, reflected that many people recognized him on the streets and would gaze at him respectfully, saluting the unerring and graceful power of his language—he recalled the external successes he could think of that his talent had brought him, even calling to mind his elevation to nobility (51).

What Aschenbach has just become aware of through comparing himself to the boy is that Tadzio is prosocial—he even volunteers some punitive affect, a mild altruistic punishment on behalf of his Polish countrymen, to a Russian family sharing the beach when he signals them by “glaring forth a black message of hatred” (49)—while he, despite his fame, is utterly friendless and his days are devoted solely to his own selfish endeavors. In many ways, Tadzio is his conduit from his northern, solitary, disciplined, and even antiseptic existence to the southern world that is crowded, indulgent, and, it turns out, infected. When he acknowledges his love for the boy is when his famously closed fist opens in “a gesture that gladly bade welcome” (57).

Read part 4

Literary Darwinism and Death in Venice Part 2

Part 1.

At one point, Tadzio smiles at Aschenbach, and the famous author is “so deeply shaken that he was forced to flee” (67). The poor man nearly collapses hyperventilating.

Whether the character is wrestling with a temptation to molest the boy or not, however, it may seem as though Mann has gone far afield of the domain accessible to evolutionary biology, especially in light of the Achenbach’s ultimate fate in the story. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson map this domain in their introduction to the essay collection The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. The authors whose work they’ve included in the book focus on three main questions: “First, what is literature about?” (xxv), in other words, what can an evolutionary approach tell us about the contents of literary work? Gottschall and Wilson preview the answer, suggesting that “survival and reproduction are ‘on the minds’ of all species that have minds and should dominate the stories of the one speaks and writes.” Joseph Carroll’s contribution to the collection, “Human Nature and Literary Meaning,” exemplifies this approach. Carroll goes so far as to schematize seven of what he terms “behavioral systems” into a diagram of human interests we can expect to find in successful stories (89).

The elements of Death in Venice critics like Carroll would probably emphasize are Aschenbach’s concern for his status, his awareness of his parents’ legacy, and his own “paternal fondness” (51) for Tadzio. However, Tadzio is not in fact Aschenbach’s son, meaning the older man has no genetic interest in the boy. And, though “Mating” is on Carroll’s diagram, pederasty really doesn’t have any place on it. A case could be made that Tadzio somehow hijacks Aschenbach’s parenting system, and that his mating system, though misdirected, is still functioning. But the explanatory power of the model is further diminished by each of these exceptions—as well as the one represented by the “Survival” system. And the second question addressed by the authors of Literary Animal, “what is literary for?” (xxv), the question of function, poses its own problems for readings of Mann’s novella. In her essay, “Reverse-Engineering Narrative,” Michelle Scalise Sugiyama argues that our proclivity to tell and attend to stories evolved as “a low-cost, readily available means of amplifying social experiences” (189). This didactic function may also overlap with one akin to play or exercise, leading to “a feedback loop between storytelling and theory of mind: storytelling may help build or strengthen theory of mind, which in turn enriches storytelling, with further enriches theory of mind, and so on” (189). As intriguing as this idea is, it can only account for stories about people in general, and say much about why any specific story is more compelling than any other. The third question posed in The Literary Animal is what would an application of a scientific epistemology to literature look like? But to my knowledge no research that even approaches the rigor of science has been conducted on Death in Venice.

William Flesch makes a significant advance for evolutionary theories of literature by not focusing on either content or function; instead his interest lies in what he calls “narrative interest,” which he defines as “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). In concentrating on why we experience anxiety and other emotions—what he calls “volunteered affect”—Flesch is moving into the realm of phenomenology (but he fortunately steers clear of the absurd obscurantism of past theorists in that realm). Merely by attempting to explain this experience of what he, along with several of the authors in The Literary Animal, recognizes as a “cultural universal,” he is effectively countering Eagleton’s argument about the necessity of theory. Indeed, Donald Brown reports in his book Human Universals, everywhere we know there are people, we have good evidence that they routinely immerse themselves in stories, even if many of them take much more rudimentary forms than the most sophisticated world literature. There are several other research programs that have demonstrated the immediacy of our experience with narratives. One study that was conducted after Flesch’s book was published found that “Different neural systems track changes in the situation of a story” (Speer et al. 989). The interesting thing about these different neural systems is that they aren’t all associated with language. “Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities” (989). What this study and others like it suggest is that, contra Poststructuralism, we take meaning from language by referencing it against our experiences—experience and meaning may be inseparable, but experience takes precedence.

But why should our brains be so engaged with the activities of fictional characters? Why, for that matter, should so much of our minds be devoted to following what even real people do? Flesch takes another important step toward a viable theory of narrative engagement when he eschews what is known as “The Selfish Gene” approach to ethology, named for the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins. According to this view, all behavior is the end result of a chain of causation ending with the genotype of the individual performing the behavior. The corollary to this assumption is that all behavior must somehow serve the genes that are its ultimate cause. So, for instance, any behavior which appears to benefit another individual can usually be shown to favor the genes of the one performing it. The two main examples or this genetic selfishness resulting in apparent altruism are inclusive fitness, whereby individuals favor relatives because they are likely to carry many of the same genes, including the ones causing the behavior, and reciprocal altruism, whereby individuals engage in tit-for-tat or quid pro quo exchanges with non-related others. Recent theorists, however, most notably Elliot Sober, David Sloan Wilson (the co-editor of The Literary Animal), and Robert Axelrod, have developed models in which cooperation rather than selfishness, genetic or otherwise, is the norm. And these models have held up against, partly because they were informed by, tests of real human behavior.

The problem with cooperation within a group is that as soon as it is established individuals can benefit themselves (and their genes) by treating the cooperators selfishly—i.e. by cheating. From the selfish gene perspective, selection at the level of the group is all but impossible because “group boundaries,” in Flesch’s words, “are too porous” (5). Any population in which acting for the benefit of the group is the norm will almost certainly be infiltrated by individuals acting for their own benefit. To conceptualize and test the various models of cooperation, many biologists use a scenario borrowed from the economic field of “Game Theory” known as “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” The prisoner is arrested with one of his accomplices, from whom he is immediately separated so that they have no chance to communicate. Each prisoner then has the option either to confess or to keep quiet. If neither prisoner confesses—i.e. if they cooperate—they will each serve a meager one-year sentence. But if the first prisoner keeps quiet while the second confesses, then the first gets twenty years and the second goes free. This scenario simulates the conditions under which small benefits accrue to cooperators, but there is much more to be gained by cheating. If they both confess, they each get five years. Cooperation can still take hold over multiple iterations if the prisoners simply remember how their accomplices responded to the dilemma in the past. Reciprocal altruism is what develops in the scenarios when reputations for cooperating or cheating come into play. But something still more interesting happens when you put humans, who can be counted on to have not only reputations but also myriad social ties, through scenarios like the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Flesch finds an important clue to the mystery of human engagement with fictional narrative in the outcomes of experiments based on a variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma called “The Ultimatum Game.” In this simple set-up, one participant is given a sum of money which he must then propose to split with another participant with the only proviso being that the receiver must accept the cut being offered. If the receiver thinks the cut is unfair, say if the proposer offers a measly ten percent, he or she can veto the offer and neither participant gets any money. The key here, as Flesch points out, is that

It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer. The responder will always come out better by accepting than by vetoing. And yet people generally veto offers of less than 25 percent of the original sum. This means they are paying to punish (31).

People experience this costly indignation even when they aren’t themselves the potential beneficiaries of the proposed cut. In another variation of the game called the “3-Player Dictator Game,” the first player, the dictator, receives the sum of cash and then offers the second player a cut, this time without any threat of veto. The catch is that the third player can reward or punish the other two, but to do so he or she has pay. For every dollar the third player contributes, he or she can add four dollars to the receiver or deduct four dollars from the dictator. “It is highly irrational,” Flesch observes, “for this player to pay to reward or punish, but again considerations of fairness trump rational self-interest. People do pay” (33). And it seems they actually enjoy paying. Flesch goes on to cite research showing that pleasure centers in the brain become active when people are witnessing these types of interaction and anticipating this type of punishment, which because of its cost to the punisher is called “altruistic punishment.” It has a real-world corollary in the Italian Mafia’s strictly enforced code of silence known as “omerta,” under which anyone who informs against his colleagues can expect to be killed.

Groups in which the type of behavior demonstrated by third players in dictator games, known as “strong reciprocity,” which Flesch defines as occurring when a group member “punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with reciprocator” (21-22), can sustain a norm of cooperation. On a basic level, a taxonomy can be created of different types of individual within a cooperative population: there are the cooperators, the defectors, who act solely for their own (or their genes’) interest, and punishers. Adding strong reciprocity to the equation, though, gives us what are called “second-order” players. If, for instance, an individual defects, or free-rides on the cooperation of the other group members, anyone who witnesses this behavior and fails to punish it becomes a second-order free-rider. By extrapolation, someone who fails to punish a second-order free-rider becomes a third-order one, and so on ad infinitum. So we now have a model in which individuals track each other’s behavior to see whether they are altruistic or selfish, and in which individuals are emotionally inclined to favor the altruistic and desire punishment, from first or second or however many order punishers, for the selfish, but there is one more piece of the puzzle of human cooperation, one which is integral to an evolutionary account of our interest in a character like Gustav von Aschenbach.

Death in Venice is the story of a man who has devoted himself so completely to his writing that any part of him concerned with all the other aspects of his life, and in particular his social life, has atrophied to the point of paralysis. His writing has been his grand, altruistic gesture to society, a gesture made at a great personal cost.

Hidden away among Aschenbach’s writings was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame (30).

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A Literary Darwinist Take on Death in Venice Part 1

There is comfort to be had in the orderliness of solitude, but that orderliness will be the first casualty in any encounter with other people. Such is the experience of Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s 1911 novel Death in Venice. Aschenbach has not, however, strived for solitude and order for the sake of comfort—at least not by his own account—but rather for the sake of his art, to which he has devoted himself single-mindedly, even monomaniacally, his whole life. Now, at age fifty, newly elevated to a titled status, Aschenbach has become acutely aware of all he has sacrificed on the altar of his accomplishment. The desire for fame, as philosopher David Hume explained, is paradoxically an altruistic one. At least in the short-term, no one has anything to gain from the dedication and toil that are the hallmark of ambition. And status will tend to be awarded to those whose services or accomplishments benefit society at large and not any select part of it the ambitious has special designs for or interest in. As selfish as we may seem at first glance, we humans tend to be drawn to the ambitious for the other-directedness their ambition signals.

Evolutionary Literary Critic William Flesch incorporates Hume’s argument into the theoretical framework he lays out in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, in which he posits that one of our biggest joys in reading fictional narratives derives from our capacity to track characters while anticipating rewards for the altruistic and comeuppance for the selfish. With this biological perspective in mind, Aschenbach’s fate in the course of the novel can be viewed as hinging on whether he will be able, once he’s stepped away from the lonely duty of his writing, to establish intimate relationships with real humans, as he betrays a desperate longing to do. When he ultimately fails in this endeavor, largely because he fails to commit himself to it fully, Mann has the opportunity to signal to his readers how grave the danger is that every artist, including Thomas Mann, must face as he stands at the edge of the abyss.

Mann’s novel was published at an interesting time, not just geopolitically, but in the realm of literary theory as well. Most notably, the years leading up to 1911 saw the ascendancy of Freudian psychoanalysis. Mann has even suggested that Death in Venice was at least partly inspired by Freud’s ideas (Symington, 128). And it has gone on to be re-evaluated countless times in light of not only psychoanalytic developments but of those of several other newly christened and burgeoning literary theories. Readers of this nearly hundred-year-old story may rightly ask whether it has any meaning to anyone not steeped in such paradigms, especially since the value—and validity—of literary theory in general, and psychoanalysis in particular are being questioned in many arenas. Terry Eagleton notes in the preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition of his popular Literary Theory: An Introductionthat there has been “in recent times the growth of a kind of anti-theory” (vii). In the original preface to the same work, he writes:

Some students and critics…protest that literary theory “gets in between the reader and the work.” The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a “literary work” was in the first place, or how we were to read it (xii).

Authors like Flesch, however, along with others who subscribe to the recently developed set of theories collectively labeled Literary Darwinism, would probably insist that Eagleton vastly underestimates just how unreflective and implicit our appreciation of narrative really is.

If there are cases, though, in which Eagleton’s argument holds up, they would probably be those works which are heavily influenced by the theories that would be referenced to interpret them, and Death in Venice certainly falls into that category. But these special cases shouldn’t overshadow the fact that when Eagleton makes the seemingly obvious point that we must have some theory of literature if we’re to make any sense of our reading, he is in fact making a rather grand assumption, one in keeping with a broader poststructuralist paradigm. According to this view, objectivity is impossible because our only real contact with the world and its inhabitants is through language. This observation, which in a banal way is indisputable—if it’s not rendered linguistically we can’t speak or write about it—takes the emphasis away from any firsthand experience with either the world or the text and affords to language the utmost power in determining our beliefs, and even our perceptions. The flipside of this linguistic or discursive determinism is that any social phenomenon we examine, from a work of fiction to the institutionalized marginalization of women and minorities, is somehow encapsulated in and promulgated through the medium of language. Poststructuralism has led many to the conclusion that the most effective remedy for such inequality and injustice consists of changing the way we talk and write about people and their relations. This political program, disparaged (accurately) by conservatives with the label “political correctness,” has been singularly ineffective.

One possible explanation for this failure is that the poststructuralists’ understanding of human nature and human knowledge is grossly off the mark. Indeed, to Eagleton’s claim that we need a theory of literature or of language to get meaning out of a novel, most linguists, cognitive neuroscientists, and any other scientist involved in the study of human behavior would simply respond nonsense. Almost all of the “structures” discursive determinists insist are encapsulated in and propagated through language are to be found elsewhere in human (and sometimes non-human) cognition and in wider cultural networks. It is perhaps a partial concession to the argument that discursive determinism can only lead to infinite regresses, and that any theory of literature must be grounded in a wider understanding of human nature, that the longest chapter of Eagleton’s book is devoted to psychoanalysis. And what could Death in Venice be if not a tale about a repressed homosexual who has achieved eminence through the disciplined sublimation of his desires into literature, but who eventually buckles under the strain and succumbs to perversion and sickness? More importantly, if Freud’s model of the unconscious has been shown to be inaccurate, and repression a mere chimera, must Mann’s novel be relegated to a category of works whose interest is solely historical? (One of the most damning refutations of Eagleton’s argument for the necessity of theory is that such a category is so difficult to fill.)

If Flesch is correct in arguing that our interest in fiction is inseparable from our propensity for tracking other people, assessing their proclivity toward altruism, and anticipating the apportionment of just deserts, Gustav von Aschenbach, who has devoted his life to solitary public service, but who through the course of the novel abandons this service and sets out on an adventure consisting of multiple potential encounters with flesh-and-blood humans, may still attract the attention of post-Freudian (or simply non-Freudian) readers. Another way to frame to the repression-sublimation-perversion dynamic central to Death in Venice is as an enactment of the benefits of an intense devotion to art being overwhelmed by its costs and risks. An excerpt that can serve as a key to unlocking the symbolism of the entire novel comes when Aschenbach is at last settled in his hotel in Venice:

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions. The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden (43).

Can Aschenbach, a devotee of solitude, be considered prosocial or altruistic? He can when the fruit of his solitude is the poetic creation prized by the society as a whole. However, the plot of the story focuses more on the perverse and the forbidden, on the great man’s fall from grace. Any yet these costs are suffered, not by society, but by the artist alone, so in the end he can be seen as even more of an altruist—he is in fact a martyr. (And many a poststructuralist critic would take this opportunity to highlight the word art in the middle of martyr.)

In the lead-up to this martyrdom, however, Aschenbach toes the very selfish waters of pedophilia. What little suspense the plot has to offer comes from uncertainty over how far the august author will allow his obsession with the young boy Tadzio to take him. Are we monitoring Aschenbach to see if he gives into temptation? Interestingly, his attraction for the young boy is never explicitly described as sexual. There are suggestive lines, to be sure, especially those coming in the wake of Aschenbach’s discovery of the epidemic being covered up by the Venetian authorities. His response is to become elated.

For to passion, as to crime, the assured everyday order and stability of things is not opportune, and any weakening of the civil structure, any chaos and disaster afflicting the world, must be welcome to it, as offering a vague hope of turning such circumstances to its advantage (68).

This line can not only be read as proof that Aschenbach indeed has a selfish desire to satisfy, a passion awaiting the opportunity to press—or take—its advantage; it can also be seen as a piece of puzzle that was his motivation for coming to Venice in the first place. Did he gravitate to this place because of the disruption of the daily order, the chaos, it promised? Soon after the narrator refers to this “vague hope” he reveals that Aschenbach has begun doing more than merely watching Tadzio—he’s been following him around. All the while, though, the unease about whether the devotee of solitude will ever get close enough to do any sort of harm to the object of his obsession is undercut by the great pains he goes to just to keep the boy in view juxtaposed with the fact that it never seems to occur to him to simply approach and begin a conversation.

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Edgar Allan Poe Doesn't Like You

Well, it's October, and I'm reminded of a 20-page paper I wrote all the way back in the spring semester about Poe. (Seriously, that's a long time to be thinking about a paper.) It's not very often that you have the chance to make any actual discoveries when you're researching papers in English (or any other topics for that matter). But I came up with something new--as far as I can tell.

Before you read any further, you have to have read "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "The Imp of the Perverse," and "The Cask of Amontillado" to really understand what I'm about to write. If you haven't read them get cracking here.

Now, a lot of the murders that take place in Poe stories seem to have little or no motive. The conventional way to account for this is to conclude the murderers are simply insane, or that their motives are unconscious. But, knowing as we do that psychoanalysis is worthless pseudoscience, and that Poe predated Freud, we might want better answers. The stories above are listed in the order in which they were written, and I suggest there's a progression. In "Tell-Tale," the murder victim is an old man who is killed because of his one staring eye. In "Black Cat," the victims are a one-eyed cat (whose loss of the other eye makes a dual victim) and the murderer's/narrator's wife. The only thing mentioned about the victim in "Imp" is that he was fond of reading by candlelight. And Fortunato in "Amontillado" is a rich drunk guy who gets killed because he treats Montressor contemptuously.

The key to unlocking the true victim of Poe's aggression comes from an examination of these victims' names--or rather, the two of them that Poe's deigns to give names. One of course is Fortunato, which is pretty suggestive in itself. The other belongs to the hapless cat, Pluto. Now, most readers with any knowledge of mythology at all see the name Pluto and think, ah, the god of the underworld. Poe's a creepy guy so in this horror story it only fits that a cat would have a name vaguely associated with Hell. But Pluto--or Dis--has been tied to wealth throughout history. In Dante's Inferno, for instance, Fortuna and Plutus (actually a separate deity but often conflated) are in the fourth circle guarding the avaricious and prodigal. Even the name Pluto translates to "wealth-giver."

The old man in "Tell-Tale" looks at the narrator with only one eye because he's half blind. Poe intended much of his work as satire, but his readers constantly mistook his work for what it was designed to parody. The old man only saw the horror story, and was blind to the joke. The cat, Pluto, is likewise a stand-in for Poe's half blind readership, on whom he depends for his wealth. That's why in trying to kill the cat all the narrator manages to do is kill his wife. (Poe's wife had TB, and he agonized over the shabby, unheated rooms his poverty relegated them to.) Notice in all these stories, the narrator can't help bragging about how brilliantly he planned and executed the murders--only to be found out later by some supernatural means. The dead reader in "Imp" is pretty self-explanatory, and is possibly a reference to the symbolic murder in "Black Cat." And then there's Montressor, who tells his story several years after committing the crime, because he's sure now he won't be caught--no one at that point in Poe's life had broken his coded message, and he had little confidence anyone would.

So when it seems like Poe is going over the top, as silly critics like Harold Bloom take him to task for doing, keep in mind he's doing it deliberately. He's expecting to be taken only half seriously. And if you never picked up on this he'd just as soon bury an ax in your stupid skull and leave you walled up in some cellar, never to be found.

You can read the longer essay: DEFIANCE AND DUPLICITY: DECODING POE’S ATTACKS ON READERS PART 1 OF 4