More of a Near Miss--Response to "Collision"

The documentary Collision is an attempt at irony. The title is spelled on the box with a bloody slash for the i coming in the middle of the word. The film opens with hard rock music and Christopher Hitchens dropping the gauntlet: "One of us will have to admit he's wrong. And I think it should be him." There are jerky closeups and dramatic pullaways. The whole thing is made to resemble one of those pre-event commercials on pay-per-view for boxing matches or UFC's.

The big surprise, which I don't think I'm ruining, is that evangelical Christian Douglas Wilson and anti-theist Christopher Hitchens--even in the midst of their heated disagreement--seem to like and respect each other. At several points they stop debating and simply chat with one another. They even trade Wodehouse quotes (and here I thought you had to be English to appreciate that humor). Some of the best scenes have the two men disagreeing without any detectable bitterness, over drinks in a bar, as they ride side by side in car, and each even giving signs of being genuinely curious about what the other is saying. All this bonhomie takes place despite the fact that neither changes his position at all over the course of their book tour.

I guess for some this may come as a surprise, but I've been arguing religion and science and politics with people I like, or even love, since I was in my early teens. One of the things that got me excited about the movie was that my oldest brother, a cancer biologist whose professed Christianity I suspect is a matter of marital expediency (just kidding), once floated the idea of collaborating on a book similar to Wilson and Hitchens's. So I was more disappointed than pleasantly surprised that the film focused more on the two men's mutual respect than on the substance of the debate.

There were some parts of the argument that came through though. The debate wasn't over whether God exists but whether belief in him is beneficial to the world. Either the director or the editors seemed intent on making the outcome an even wash. Wilson took on Hitchens's position that morality is innate, based on an evolutionary need for "human solidarity," by pointing out, validly, that so is immorality and violence. He suggested that Hitchens's own morality was in fact derived from Christianity, even though Hitchens refuses to acknowledge as much. If both morality and its opposite come from human nature, Wilson argues, then you need a third force to compel you in one direction over the other. Hitchens, if he ever answered this point, wasn't shown doing so in the documentary. He does point out, though, that Christianity hasn't been any better historically at restricting human nature to acting on behalf of its better angels.

Wilson's argument is fundamentally postmodern. He explains at one point that he thinks rationalists giving reasons for their believing what they do is no different from him quoting a Bible verse to explain his belief in the Bible. All epistemologies are circular. None are to be privileged. This is nonsense. And it would have been nice to see Hitchens bring him to task for it. For one thing, the argument is purely negative--it attempts to undermine rationalism but offers no positive arguments on behalf of Christianity. To the degree that it effectively casts doubt on nonreligious thinking, it cast the same amount of doubt on religion. For another, the analogy strains itself to the point of absurdity. Reason supporting reason is a whole different animal from the Bible supporting the Bible for the same reason that a statement arrived at by deduction is different from a statement made at random. Two plus two equals four isn't the same as there's an invisible being in the sky and he's pissed.

Of course, two plus two equals four is tautological. It's circular. But science isn't based on rationalism alone; it's rationalism cross-referenced with empiricism. If Wilson's postmodern arguments had any validity (and they don't) they still don't provide him with any basis for being a Christian as opposed to an atheist as opposed to a Muslim as opposed to a drag queen. But science offers a standard of truth.

Wilson's other argument, that you need some third factor beyond good instincts and bad instincts to be moral, is equally lame. Necessity doesn't establish validity. As one witness to the debate in a bar points out, an argument from practicality doesn't serve to prove a position is true. What I wish Hitchens had pointed out, though, is that the third factor need not be divine authority. It can just as easily be empathy. And what about culture? What about human intentionality? Can't we look around, assess the state of the world, realize our dependence on other humans in an increasingly global society, and decide to be moral? I'm a moral being because I was born capable of empathy, and because I subscribe to Enlightenment principles of expanding that empathy and affording everyone on Earth a set of fundamental human rights. And, yes, I think the weight of the evidence suggests that religion, while it serves to foster in-group cooperation, also inspires tribal animosity and war. It needs to be done away with.

One last note: Hitchens tries to illustrate our natural impulse toward moral behavior by describing an assault on a pregnant woman. "Who wouldn't be appalled?" Wilson replies, "Planned Parenthood." I thought Hitchens of all people could be counted on to denounce such an outrage. Instead, he limply says, "Don't be flippant," then stands idly, mutely, by as Wilson explains how serious he is. It's a perfect demonstration of Hitchens's correctness in arguing that Christianity perverts morality that a man as intelligent as Wilson doesn't see that comparing a pregnant woman being thrown down and kicked in the stomach to abortion is akin to comparing violent rape to consensual sex. He ought to be ashamed--but won't ever be. I think Hitchens ought to be ashamed for letting him say it unchallenged (unless the challenge was edited out).

Art as Altruism: Lily Briscoe and the Ghost of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse Part 2 of 2

The question remains, though, of why Virginia Woolf felt it necessary to recall scenes from her childhood in order to lay to rest her inner conflict over her chosen way of life—if that is indeed what To the Lighthouse did for her. She did not, in fact, spend her entire life single but married her husband Leonard in 1912 at the age of thirty and stayed with him until her death in 1941. The Woolfs had been married fifteen years by the time Lighthouse was published (Lee 314). But Virginia’s marriage was quite different from her mother Julia’s. For one, as is made abundantly clear in her diaries, Leonard Woolf was much more supportive and much less demanding than her father Leslie Stephens. More important, though, Julia had seven children of her own and cared for one of Leslie’s from a previous marriage (Lee xx), whereas Virginia remained childless all her life. But, even if she felt her lifestyle represented such a cataclysmic break from her mother’s cultural tradition, it is remarkable that the pain of this partition persisted from the time of Julia’s death when Virginia was thirteen, until the writing of Lighthouse when she was forty-four—the same age as Lily in the last section of the novel. Lily returns to the Ramsays’ summer house ten years after the visit described in the first section, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather mysteriously in the interim, and sets to painting the same image she struggled to capture before. “She had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. It had been knocking about in her mind all these years” (147). But why should Lily experience such difficulty handling a conflict of views with a woman who has been dead for years?

Wilson sees the universal propensity among humans to carry on relationships with supernatural beings—like the minds and personalities of the dead, but also including disembodied characters like deities—as one of a host of mechanisms, partly cultural, partly biological, devoted to ensuring group cohesion. In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, in which he attempts to explain religion in terms of his group selection theory, he writes,

A group of people who abandon self-will and work tirelessly for a greater good will fare very well as a group, much better than if they all pursue their private utilities, as long as the greater good corresponds to the welfare of the group. And religions almost invariably do link the greater good to the welfare of the community of believers, whether an organized modern church or an ethnic group for whom religion is thoroughly intermixed with the rest of their culture. Since religion is such an ancient feature of our species, I have no problem whatsoever imagining the capacity for selflessness and longing to be part of something larger than ourselves as part of our genetic and cultural heritage. (175)

One of the main tasks religious beliefs must handle is the same “free-rider problem” William Flesch discovers at the heart of narrative. What religion offers beyond the social monitoring of group members is the presence of invisible beings whose concerns are tied in to the collective concerns of the group. Jesse Bering contributes to this perspective by positing a specific cognitive mechanism which paved the way for the evolution of beliefs about invisible agents, and his theory provides a crucial backdrop for any discussion of the role the dead play for the living, in life or in literature. Of course, Mrs. Ramsay is not a deity, and though Lily feels as she paints “a sense of some one there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that the world had put on her” (181), which she earlier describes as, “Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus” (179), she does not believe Mrs. Ramsay is still around in any literal sense. Bering suggests this “nothingness” with the power to wring the heart derives from the same capacity humans depend on to know, roughly, what other humans are thinking. Though there is much disagreement about whether apes understand differences in each other’s knowledge and intentions, it is undeniably the case that humans far outshine any other creature in their capacity to reason about the inner, invisible workings of the minds of their conspecifics. We are so predisposed to this type of reasoning that, according to Bering, we apply it to natural phenomena in which no minds are involved. He writes,

just like other people’s surface behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes. (79)

As Lily reflects, “this making up scenes about them, is what we call ‘knowing’ people” (173). And we must make up these scenes because, like the bees hovering about the hive she compares herself to in the first section, we have no direct access to the minds of others. Yet if we are to coordinate our actions adaptively—even competitively when other groups are involved—we have no choice but to rely on working assumptions, our theories of others’ knowledge and intentions, updating them when necessary.

The reading of natural evens as signs of some mysterious mind, as well as the continued importance of minds no longer attached to bodies capable of emitting signs, might have arisen as a mere byproduct of humans’ need to understand one another, but at some point in the course our evolution our theories of disembodied minds was co-opted in the service of helping to solve the free-rider problem. In his book The God Instinct, Bering describes a series of experiments known as “The Princess Alice studies,” which have young children perform various tasks after being primed to believe an invisible agent (named Alice in honor of Bering’s mother) is in the room with them. What he and his colleagues found was that Princess Alice’s influence only emerged as the children’s theory of mind developed, suggesting “the ability to be superstitious actually demands some mental sophistication” (96). But once a theory of mind is operating the suggestion of an invisible presence has a curious effect. First in a study of college students casually told about the ghost of a graduate student before taking a math test, and then in a study of children told Princess Alice was watching them as they performed a difficult task involving Velcro darts, participants primed to consider the mind of a supernatural agent were much less likely to take opportunities to cheat which were built into the experimental designs (193-4).

Because evolution took advantage of our concern for our reputations and our ability to reason about the thoughts and feelings of others to ensure cooperation, Lily’s predicament, her argument with the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay over the proper way for a woman to live, could only be resolved through proof that she was not really free-riding or cheating, but was in fact altruistic in her own way. Considering the fate of a couple Mrs. Ramsay had encouraged to marry, Lily imagines, “She would feel a little triumphant, telling Mrs. Ramsay that the marriage had not been a success.” But, she would go on, “They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely.” Thus Lily manages to “over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas” (174-5). Lily’s ultimate redemption, though, can only come through acknowledgement that the life she has chosen is not actually selfish. The difficulty in this task stems from the fact that “one could not imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole morning on the lawn” (196). Mrs. Ramsay has no appreciation for art or literature, but for Lily it is art—and for Woolf it is literature—that is both the product of all that time alone and her contribution to society as a whole. Lily is redeemed when she finishes her painting, and that is where the novel ends. At the same time, Virginia Woolf, having completed this great work of literature, bequeathed it to society, to us, and in so doing proved her own altruism, thus laying to rest the ghost of Julia Stephens.

Also read:
THEY COMES A DAY: CELEBRATING COOPERATION IN A GATHERING OF OLD MEN AND HORTON HEARS A WHO!

T.J. ECKLEBURG SEES EVERYTHING: THE GREAT GOD-GAP IN GATSBY

MADNESS AND BLISS: CRITICAL VERSUS PRIMITIVE READINGS IN A.S. BYATT’S POSSESSION: A ROMANCE

Art as Altruism: Lily Briscoe and the Ghost of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse Part 1 of 2

Virginia Woolf underwent a transformation in the process of writing To the Lighthouse the nature of which has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry. At the center of the novel is the relationship between the beautiful, self-sacrificing, and yet officious Mrs. Ramsay, and the retiring, introverted artist Lily Briscoe. “I wrote the book very quickly,” Woolf recalls in “Sketch of the Past,” “and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.” Quoting these lines, biographer Hermione Lee suggests the novel is all about Woolf’s parents, “a way of pacifying their ghosts” (476). But how exactly did writing the novel function to end Woolf’s obsession with her mother? And, for that matter, why would she, at forty-four, still be obsessed with a woman who had died when she was only thirteen? Evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering suggests that while humans are uniquely capable of imagining the inner workings of each other’s minds, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this capacity, which psychologists call “theory of mind,” simply fail to comprehend the utter extinction of those other minds. However, the lingering presence of the dead is not merely a byproduct of humans’ need to understand and communicate with other living humans. Bering argues that the watchful gaze of disembodied minds—real or imagined—serves a type of police function, ensuring that otherwise selfish and sneaky individuals cooperate and play by the rules of society. From this perspective, Woolf’s struggle with her mother, and its manifestation as Lily’s struggle with Mrs. Ramsay, represents a sort of trial in which the younger living woman defends herself against a charge of selfishness leveled by her deceased elder. And since Woolf’s obsession with her mother ceased upon completion of the novel, she must have been satisfied that she had successfully exonerated herself.

Woolf made no secret of the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay were fictionalized versions of her own parents, and most critics see Lily as a stand-in for the author—even though she is merely a friend of the Ramsay family. These complex relationships between author and character, and between daughter and parents, lie at the heart of a dynamic which readily lends itself to psychoanalytic explorations. Jane Lilienfeld, for instance, suggests Woolf created Lily as a proxy to help her accept her parents, both long dead by the time she began writing, “as monumental but flawed human beings,” whom she both adored and detested. Having reduced the grand, archetypal Mrs. Ramsay to her proper human dimensions, Lily is free to acknowledge her own “validity as a single woman, as an artist whose power comes not from manipulating others’ lives in order to fulfill herself, but one whose mature vision encapsulates and transcends reality” (372). But for all the elaborate dealings with mythical and mysterious psychic forces, the theories of Freud and Jung explain very little about why writers write and why readers read. And they explain very little about how people relate to the dead, or about what role the dead play in narrative. Freud may have been right about humans’ intense ambivalence toward their parents, but why should this tension persist long after those parents have ceased to exist? And Jung may have been correct in his detection of mythic resonances in his patients’ dreams, but what accounts for such universal narrative patterns? What do they explain?

Looking at narrative from the perspective of modern evolutionary biology offers several important insights into why people devote so much time and energy to, and get so much gratification from immersing themselves in the plights and dealings of fictional characters. Anthropologists believe the primary concern for our species at the time of its origin was the threat of rival tribes vying for control of limited resources. The legacy of this threat is the persistent proclivity for tribal—us versus them—thinking among modern humans. But alongside our penchant for dehumanizing members of out-groups arose a set of mechanisms designed to encourage—and when necessary to enforce—in-group cooperation for the sake of out-competing less cohesive tribes. Evolutionary literary theorist William Flesch sees in narrative a play of these cooperation-enhancing mechanisms. He writes, “our capacity for narrative developed as a way for us to keep track of cooperators” (67), and he goes on to suggest we tend to align ourselves with those we perceive as especially cooperative or altruistic while feeling an intense desire to see those who demonstrate selfishness get their comeuppance. This is because “altruism could not sustain an evolutionarily stable system without the contribution of altruistic punishers to punish the free-riders who would flourish in a population of purely benevolent altruists” (66). Flesch cites the findings of numerous experiments which demonstrate people’s willingness to punish those they see as exploiting unspoken social compacts and implicit rules of fair dealing, even when meting out that punishment involves costs or risks to the punisher (31-34). Child psychologist Karen Wynn has found that even infants too young to speak prefer to play with puppets or blocks with crude plastic eyes that have in some way demonstrated their altruism over the ones they have seen behaving selfishly or aggressively (557-560). Such experiments lead Flesch to posit a social monitoring and volunteered affect theory of narrative interest, whereby humans track the behavior of others, even fictional others, in order to assess their propensity for altruism or selfishness and are anxious to see that the altruistic are vindicated while the selfish are punished. In responding thus to other people’s behavior, whether they are fictional or real, the individual signals his or her own propensity for second- or third-order altruism.

The plot of To the Lighthouse is unlike anything else in literature, and yet a great deal of information is provided regarding the relative cooperativeness of each of the characters. Foremost among them in her compassion for others is Mrs. Ramsay. While it is true from the perspective of her own genetic interests that her heroic devotion to her husband and their eight children can be considered selfish, she nonetheless extends her care beyond the sphere of her family. She even concerns herself with the tribulations of complete strangers, something readers discover early in the novel, as

she ruminated the other problem, of rich and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes… when she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and a note- book and pencil with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half relief to her own curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem. (9)

No sooner does she finish reflecting on this social problem than she catches sight of her husband’s friend Charles Tansley, who is feeling bored and “out of things,” because no one staying at the Ramsays’ summer house likes him. Regardless of the topic Tansley discusses with them, “until he had turned the whole thing around and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them—he was not satisfied” (8). And yet Mrs. Ramsay feels compelled to invite him along on an errand so that he does not have to be alone. Before leaving the premises, though, she has to ask yet another houseguest, Augustus Carmichael, “if he wanted anything” (10). She shows this type of exquisite sensitivity to others’ feelings and states of mind throughout the first section of the novel.

Mrs. Ramsay’s feelings about Lily, another houseguest, are at once dismissive and solicitous. Readers are introduced to Lily only through Mrs. Ramsay’s sudden realization, after prolonged absentmindedness, that she is supposed to be holding still so Lily can paint her. Mrs. Ramsay’s son James, who is sitting with her as he cuts pictures out of a catalogue, makes a strange noise she worries might embarrass him. She turns to see if anyone has heard: “Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that did not matter.” Mrs. Ramsay is doing Lily the favor of posing, but the gesture goes no further than mere politeness. Still, there is a quality the younger woman possesses that she admires. “With her little Chinese eyes,” Mrs. Ramsay thinks, “and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it” (17). Lily’s feelings toward her hostess, on the other hand, though based on a similar recognition that the other enjoys aspects of life utterly foreign to her, are much more intense. At one point early in the novel, Lily wonders, “what could one say to her?” The answer she hazards is “I’m in love with you?” But she decides that is not true and settles on, “‘I’m in love with this all,’ waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children” (19). What Lily loves, and what she tries to capture in her painting, is the essence of the family life Mrs. Ramsay represents, the life Lily herself has rejected in pursuit of her art. It must be noted too that, though Mrs. Ramsay is not related to Lily, Lily has only an elderly father, and so some of the appeal of the large, intact Ramsay family to Lily is the fact that she has been sometime without a mother.

Apart from admiring in the other what each lacks herself, the two women share little in common. The tension between them derives from Lily’s having resigned herself to life without a husband, life in the service of her art and caring for her father, while Mrs. Ramsay simply cannot imagine how any woman could be content without a family. Underlying this conviction is Mrs. Ramsay’s unique view of men and her relationship to them:

Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl—pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!—who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones! (6)

In other words, woe betide Lily Briscoe. Anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, whose work on the evolution of cooperation in humans provides the foundation for Flesch’s theory of narrative, put forth the idea that culture functions to simultaneously maintain group cohesion and to help the group adapt to whatever environment it inhabits. “Human cultures,” they point out, “can change even more quickly than the most rapid examples of genetic evolution by natural selection” (43). What underlies the divergence of views about women’s roles between the two women in Woolf’s novel is that their culture is undergoing major transformations owing to political and economic upheaval in the lead-up to The First World War.

Lily has no long-established tradition of women artists in which to find solace and guidance; rather, the most salient model of womanhood is the family-minded, self-sacrificing Mrs. Ramsay. It is therefore to Mrs. Ramsay that Lily must justify her attempt at establishing a new tradition. She reads the older woman as making the implicit claim that “an unmarried woman has missed the best of life.” In response, Lily imagines how

gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs. Ramsay’s simple certainty… that her dear Lily, her little Brisk, was a fool. (50)

Living alone, being herself, and refusing to give up her time or her being to any husband or children strikes even Lily herself as both selfish and illegitimate, lacking cultural sanction and therefore doubly selfish. Trying to figure out the basis of her attraction to Mrs. Ramsay, beyond her obvious beauty, Lily asks herself, “did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was” (50). Lily’s dilemma is that she can either be herself, or she can be a member of a family, because being a member of a family means she cannot be wholly herself; like Mrs. Ramsay, she would have to make compromises, and her art would cease to have any more significance than the older woman’s note-book with all its writing devoted to social problems. But she must justify devoting her life only to herself. Meanwhile, she’s desperate for some form of human connection beyond the casual greetings and formal exchanges that take place under the Ramsays’ roof.

Lily expresses a desire not just for knowledge from Mrs. Ramsay but for actual unity with her because what she needs is “nothing that could be written in any language known to men.” She wants to be intimate with the “knowledge and wisdom… stored up in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart,” not any factual information that could be channeled through print. The metaphor Lily uses for her struggle is particularly striking for anyone who studies human evolution.

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people. (51)

According to evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, bees are one of only about fifteen species of social insect that have crossed the “Cooperation Divide,” beyond which natural selection at the level of the group supercedes selection at the level of the individual. “Social insect colonies qualify as organisms,” Wilson writes, “not because they are physically bounded but because their members coordinate their activities in organ-like fashion to perpetuate the whole” (144). The main element that separates humans from their ancestors and other primates, he argues, “is that we are evolution’s newest transition from groups of organisms to groups as organisms. Our social groups are the primate equivalent of bodies and beehives” (154). The secret locked away from Lily in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart, the essence of the Ramsay family that she loves so intensely and feels compelled to capture in her painting, is that human individuals are adapted to life in groups of other humans who together represent a type of unitary body. In trying to live by herself and for herself, Lily is going not only against the cultural traditions of the previous generation but even against her own nature.

Part 2.

How to Read Stories--You're probably doing it wrong

There are whole books out there about how to read like a professor or a writer, or how to speed-read and still remember every word. For the most part, you can discard all of them. Studies have shown speed readers are frauds—the faster they read the less they comprehend and remember. The professors suggest applying the wacky theories they use to write their scholarly articles, theories which serve to cast readers out of the story into some abstract realm of symbols, psychological forces, or politics. I find the endeavor offensive.

Writers writing about how to read like a writer are operating on good faith. They just tend to be a bit deluded. Literature is very much like a magic trick, but of course it’s not real magic. They like to encourage people to stand in awe of great works and great passages—something I frankly don’t need any encouragement to do (what is it about the end of “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”?) But to get to those mystical passages you have to read a lot of workaday prose, even in the work of the most lyrical and crafty writers. Awe simply can’t be used as a reading strategy.

Good fiction is like a magic trick because it’s constructed of small parts that our minds can’t help responding to holistically. We read a few lines and all the sudden we have a person in mind; after a few pages we find ourselves caring about what happens to this person. Writers often avoid talking about the trick and the methods and strategies that go into it because they’re afraid once the mystery is gone the trick will cease to convince. But even good magicians will tell you well performed routines frequently astonish even the one performing them. Focusing on the parts does not diminish appreciation for the whole.

The way to read a piece of fiction is to use the information you've already read in order to anticipate what will happen next. Most contemporary stories are divided into several sections, which offer readers the opportunity to pause after each, reflecting how it may fit into the whole of the work. The author had a purpose in including each section: furthering the plot, revealing the character’s personality, developing a theme, or playing with perspective. Practice posing the questions to yourself at the end of each section, what has the author just done, and what does it suggests she’ll likely do in sections to come.

In the early sections, questions will probably be general: What type of story is this? What type of characters are these? But by the time you reach about the two/thirds point they will be much more specific: What’s the author going to do with this character? How is this tension going to be resolved? Efforts to classify and anticipate the elements of the story will, if nothing else, lead to greater engagement with it. Every new character should be memorized—even if doing so requires a mnemonic (practice coming up with one on the fly).

The larger goal, though, is a better understanding of how the type of fiction you read works. Your efforts to place each part into the context of the whole will, over time, as you read more stories, give you a finer appreciation for the strategies writers use to construct their work, one scene or one section at a time. And as you try to anticipate the parts to come from the parts you’ve read you will be training your mind to notice patterns, laying down templates for how to accomplish the types of effects—surprise, emotional resonance, lyricism, profundity—the author has accomplished.

By trying to get ahead of the author, as it were, you won’t be learning to simply reproduce the same effects. By internalizing the strategies, making them automatic, you’ll be freeing up your conscious mind for new flights of creative re-working. You’ll be using the more skilled author’s work to bootstrap your own skill level. But once you’ve accomplished this there’ll be nothing stopping you from taking your own writing to the next level. Anticipation makes reading a challenge in real time—like a video game. And games can be conquered.

Finally, if a story moves you strongly, re-read it immediately. And then put it in a stack for future re-reading.

Also read:

PUTTING DOWN THE PEN: HOW SCHOOL TEACHES US THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO READ LITERATURE

Productivity as Practice:An Expert Performance Approach to Creative Writing Pedagogy Part 3

Start reading at part one.

            But the question of what standards of success the instructor is to apply to students’ work, as well as the ones instructors will encourage the students to apply to each others’ work, has yet to be addressed. The skills students develop through practicing evaluating their own work will both be based on their evaluations of the works of others and be applied to them. The first step toward becoming a creative writer is recognizing how much one likes the writing of another. The work the student is initially exposed to will almost certainly have gone through a complex series of assessments beginning with the author’s of his own work, onto commenters and editors working on behalf of the author, then onto editors working on behalf of publishers, and finally to the publishers themselves. Even upon publication, any given work is unlikely to be read by a majority of readers who appreciate the type of writing it represents until a critical threshold is reached beyond which its likelihood of becoming recommended reading is increased. At some point in the process it may even reach the attention of critics and reviewers, who will themselves evaluate the work either positively or negatively. (This is leaving out the roles of branding and author reputation because they probably aren’t practicable skills.) Since feedback cannot be grounded in any absolute or easily measurable criteria, Ericsson advocates a “socially based definition of creativity” (330). And, since students develop their evaluative skills through internalizing and anticipating the evaluations of others, the choice of which workshop to attend is paramount. The student should seek out those most versed in and most appreciative of the type of writing he aspires to master.

            Simply reading theoretical essays on poetry or storytelling, as Vikil has his students do, is probably far less effective than sampling a theorist’s or critic’s work and then trying to anticipate that evaluator’s response to a work he or she has written about. Some critics’ work lends itself to this type of exercise more readily than others; those who focus on literary as opposed to political elements, and those who put more effort into using sound methods to ensure the validity of their psychological or sociological theories—if they must theorize—will be much more helpful than those who see each new work as an opportunity to reiterate their favorite ideas in a fresh context. It may be advisable, in other words, to concentrate on reviewers rather than critics and theorists. After having learned to anticipate the responses of a few reviewers whose work is influential, the student will be better equipped to evaluate his or her own work in terms of how it will be received in the social context that will be the final arbiter of success or failure.

            Anticipation, as it allows for feedback, could form the basis for several types of practice exercises. Ericsson cites his own and others’ research demonstrating that chess players improve not as a function of how much time they spend playing chess but through studying past games between chess masters. “By trying to select the best move for each position of the game,” Ericsson writes, “and comparing their selected move to the actual move of the game, the players identify discrepancies where they must study the chess position more deeply to uncover the reason for the master’s move” (37). In a similar way, pausing in the process of reading to anticipate a successful author’s next move in a story or novel should offer an opportunity for creative writing students to compare their ideas with the author’s. Of course, areas of divergence between the reader’s ideas for a next move and the one the author actually made need not be interpreted as a mistake on the part of the reader—the reader’s idea may even be better. However, in anticipating what will happen next in a story, the student is generating ideas and therefore getting practice in the area of productivity. And, whether or not the author’s ideas are better, the student will develop greater familiarity with her methods through such active engagement with them. Finally, the students will be getting practice evaluating ideas as they compare their own to those of the author.

            A possible objection to implementing this anticipatory reading method in a creative writing curriculum is that a student learning to anticipate an author’s moves would simply be learning to make moves like the ones that author makes—which amounts to reproduction, not creativity. Indeed, one of the theories Ericsson has explored to explain how expertise develops posits a sort of rote memorization of strategies and their proper application to a limited set of situations. “For a long time it was believed that experts acquired a large repertoire of patterns,” he explains, “and their superior performance could be attributed to simple pattern matching and recall of previously stored actions from memory in an effortless and automatic manner” (331). If expertise relies on memory and pattern recognition, though, then experts would fare no better in novel situations than non-experts. Ericsson has found just the opposite to be the case.

Superior expert performers in domains such as music, chess, and medicine can generate better actions than their less skilled peers even in situations they have never directly experienced. Expert performers have acquired refined mental representations that maintain access to relevant information about the situation and support more extensive, flexible reasoning to determine the appropriate actions demanded by the encountered situation. (331)

What the creative writer would be developing through techniques for practice such as anticipation-based reading likely goes beyond a simple accumulation of fixed strategies—a bigger bag of tricks appropriated from other authors. They would instead be developing a complex working model of storytelling as well as a greater capacity for representing and manipulating the various aspects of their own stories in working memory.

            Skepticism about whether literary writing of any sort can be taught—or learned in any mundane or systematic way—derives from a real and important insight: authors are judged not by how well they reproduce the formulas of poetry and storytelling but by how successful they are in reformulating the conventional techniques of the previous generation of writers. No one taught Cervantes his epic-absurd form of parody. No one taught Shakespeare how to explore the inner workings of his characters’ minds through monologues. No one taught Virginia Woolf how to shun external trappings and delve so exquisitely into the consciousness of her characters. Yet observations of where authors came to reside in relation to prevailing literary cultures don’t always offer clues to the mode of transportation. Woolf, for instance, wrote a great deal about the fashion for representing characters through references to their physical appearances and lists of their possessions in her reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. She didn’t develop her own approach oblivious of what she called “materialism”; fully understanding the method, she found it insufficient for what she hoped to accomplish with her own work. And she’d spent a lot time in her youth reading Shakespeare, with those long eminently revealing monologues (Wood 110). Supposing creative genius is born of mastery of conventions and techniques and not ignorance of or antipathy toward them, the emphasis on the works of established authors in creative writing pedagogy ceases to savor of hidebound conservatism.

            The general pedagogical outline focusing on practice devoted to productivity, as well as the general approach to reading based on anticipation can be refined to accommodate any student’s proclivities or concerns. A student who wants to develop skill in describing characters’ physical appearances in a way that captures something of the essence of their personalities may begin by studying the work of authors from Charles Dickens to Saul Bellow. Though it’s difficult to imagine how such descriptions might be anticipated, the characters’ later development over the course of the plot does offer opportunities to test predictions. Coming away from studies of past works, the student need not be limited to exercises on blank screens or sheets of paper; practice might entail generating multiple ideas for describing some interesting individual he knows in real life, or describing multiple individuals he knows. He may set himself the task of coming up with a good description for everyone interviewed during the course of a television news program. He can practice describing random people who pass on a campus sidewalk, imagining details of their lives and personalities, or characters in shows and movies. By the time the aspiring author is sitting down to write about her own character in a story or novel, she will all but automatically produce a number of possible strategies for making that character come alive through words, increasing the likelihood that she’ll light on one that resonates strongly, first with her own memories and emotions and then with those of her readers. And, if Simonton’s theory has any validity, the works produced according to this strategy need not resemble each other any more than one species resembles another.

            All of the conventional elements of craft—character, plot, theme, dialogue, point of view, and even higher-order dimensions like voice—readily lend themselves to this qualitative approach to practice. A creative writing instructor may coach a student who wants to be better able to devise compelling plots to read stories recognized as excelling in that dimension, encouraging her to pause along the way to write a list of possible complications, twists, and resolutions to compare with the ones she’ll eventually discover in the actual text. If the student fails to anticipate the author’s moves, she can then compare her ideas with the author’s, giving her a deeper sense of why one works better than the others. She may even practice anticipating the plots of television shows and movies, or trying to conceive of how stories in the news might be rendered as fictional plots. To practice describing settings, students could be encouraged to come up with multiple metaphors and similes based on one set and then another of the physical features they observe in real places. How many ways, a student may be prompted, can you have characters exchange the same basic information in a dialogue? Which ones reveal more of the characters’ personalities? Which ones most effectively reprise and develop the themes you’re working with? Any single idea generated in these practice sessions is unlikely to represent a significant breakthrough. But the more ideas one has the more likely she’ll discover one which seems likely to her to garner wider recognition of superior quality. The productivity approach can also be applied to revision and would consist of the writer identifying weak passages or scenes in an early draft and generating several new versions of each one so that a single, best version can be chosen for later drafts.

            What I’ve attempted here is a sketch of one possible approach to teaching. It seems that since many worry about the future of literature, fearing that the growing influence of workshops will lead to insularity and standardization, too few teachers are coming forward with ideas on how to help their students improve, as if whatever methods they admit to using would inevitably lend credence to the image of workshops as assembly lines for the production of mediocre and tragically uninspired poems and short stories. But, if creative writing is in danger of being standardized into obsolescence, the publishing industry is the more likely culprit, as every starry-eyed would-be author knows full well publication is the one irreducible factor underlying professional legitimacy. And research has pretty thoroughly ruled out the notion that familiarity with the techniques of the masters in any domain inevitably precludes original, truly creative thinking. The general outline for practice based on productivity and evaluation can be personalized and refined in countless ways, and students can be counted on to bring an endless variety of experiences and perspectives to workshops, variety that would be difficult, to say the least, to completely eradicate in the span of the two or three years allotted to MFA programs.

            The productivity and evaluation model for creative writing pedagogy also holds a great deal of potential for further development. For instance, a survey of successful poets and fiction writers asking them how they practice—after providing them a précis of Ericsson’s and Simonton’s findings on what constitutes practice—may lead to the development of an enormously useful and surprising repertoire of training techniques. How many authors engage in activities they think of as simple games or distractions but in fact contribute to their ability to write engaging and moving stories or poems? Ultimately, though, the discovery of increasingly effective methods will rely on rigorously designed research comparing approaches to each other. The popular rankings for MFA programs based on the professional success of students who graduate from them are a step in the direction of this type of research, but they have the rather serious flaw of sampling bias owing to higher ranking schools having the advantage of larger applicant pools. At this stage, though, even the subjective ratings of individuals experimenting with several practice techniques would be a useful guide for adjusting and refining teaching methods.

            Applying the expert performance framework developed by Ericsson, Simonton, Csikszentmihaly, and their colleagues to creative writing pedagogy would probably not drastically revolutionize teaching and writing practices. It would rather represent a shift in focus from the evaluation-heavy workshop model onto methods for generating ideas. And of course activities like brainstorming and free writing are as old as the hills. What may be new is the conception of these invention strategies as a form of practice to be engaged in for the purpose of developing skills, and the idea that this practice can and should be engaged in independent of any given writing project. Even if a writing student isn’t working on a story or novel, even if he doesn’t have an idea for one yet, he should still be practicing to be a better storyteller or novelist. It’s probably the case, too, that many or most professional writers already habitually engage in activities fitting the parameters of practice laid out by the expert performance model. Such activities probably already play at least some role in classrooms. Since the basic framework can be tailored to any individual’s interests, passions, weaknesses, and strengths, and since it stresses the importance and quantity of new ideas, it’s not inconceivable that more of this type of practice will lead to greater as opposed to less originality.

Also read:

WHAT IS A STORY? AND WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO WITH ONE?

HOW TO GET KIDS TO READ LITERATURE WITHOUT MAKING THEM HATE IT

PUTTING DOWN THE PEN: HOW SCHOOL TEACHES US THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO READ LITERATURE

Productivity as Practice: An Expert Performance Approach to Creative Writing Pedagogy Part 2

Begin with part one.

            Of course, productivity alone cannot account for impactful ideas and works; at some point the most promising ideas must be culled from among the multitude. Since foresight seems to play little if any role in the process, Simonton, following D.T. Campbell, describes it as one of “blind variation and selective retention” (310). Simonton thus theorizes that creativity is Darwinian. Innovative and valuable ideas are often borne of non-linear or “divergent” thinking, which means their future use may not be at all apparent when they are originally conceived. So, Csikszentmihalyi follows his advice to produce multiple ideas with the suggestion, “Try to produce unlikely ideas” (369). Ignoring future utility, then, seems to be important for the creative process, at least until the stage is reached when one should “Shift from openness to closure.” Csikszentmihalyi explains

Good scientists, like good artists, must let their minds roam playfully or they will not discover new facts, new patterns, new relationships. At the same time, they must also be able to evaluate critically every novelty they encounter, forget immediately the spurious ones, and then concentrate their minds on developing and realizing the few that are promising. (361)

So, two sets of skills appear to lie at the heart of creative endeavors, and they suggest themselves as focal areas for those hoping to build on their talents. In the domain of creative writing, it would seem the most important things to practice are producing multiple and unlikely ideas, and evaluating those ideas to see which are the most viable.

            The workshop method prevalent in graduate writing programs probably involves at least some degree of practice in both of these skills. Novelist and teacher Ardashir Vakil, in his thoughtful and candid essay, “Teaching Creative Writing,” outlines what happens in his classrooms.

In the first part of the workshop students are given writing exercises. These vary from the most basic—write about a painful experience from your childhood—to more elaborate games in which you get pairs to tell stories to each other and then write the other person’s story with some bits invented. Then we look at texts by established writers and try to analyse what makes them work—what has the writer done?—in terms of character, language, voice and structure to capture our attention and how have they brought forth a visceral emotional response from the reader. (158)

            These exercises amount to efforts to generate ideas by taking inspiration from life, the writer’s or someone else’s, or from the work of successful writers. The analysis of noteworthy texts also shades into the practice of evaluating ideas and methods. Already, though, it seems the focus leans more toward evaluation, the ability to recognize useful ideas, than productivity. And this emphasis becomes even more pronounced as the course progresses.

Along the way, we read essays, interviews and extracts by established writers, reflecting on their practice. Sometimes I use an essay by Freud, Bakhtin or Benjamin on theories of storytelling. Finally, there is a group workshop in which we read and discuss each others’ writing. Each week, someone offers up a story or a few poems or an extract to the group, who go away and read, annotate and comment on it. (158)

Though the writer’s reflections on their practices may describe methods for generating ideas, those methods don’t seem to comprise an integral part of the class. Vakil reports that “with minor variations” this approach is common to creative writing programs all over England and America.

            Before dismissing any of these practices, though, it is important to note that creative writing must rely on skills beyond the production and assessment of random ideas. One could have a wonderful idea for a story but not have the language or storytelling skills necessary to convey it clearly and movingly. Or one may have a great idea for how to string words together into a beautiful sentence but lack any sense of how to fit it into a larger plot or poem. In a critique of the blind-variation and selective-retention model, Ericsson points out that productivity in terms of published works, which is what Simonton used to arrive at his equal odds rule, takes a certain level of expertise for granted. Whether students learn to develop multiple new ideas by writing down each other’s stories or not, it is likely important that they get practice with the basic skills of stringing words together into narratives. As Ericsson explains, “Unless the individual has the technical mastery to develop his or her ideas or products fully, it is unlikely that judges will be able to recognize their value and potential” (330). Though mere productivity may be what separates the professional from the game-changer, to get to the level of expertise required to reliably produce professional-grade work of any quality takes more than a bunch of blindly conceived ideas. As if defending Vakil’s assigned reading of “established writers,” Ericsson argues that “anyone interested in being able to anticipate better what is valued by experts in a domain should study the teachings and recognized masterpieces of master teachers in that domain” (330).

            Part of the disagreement between Simonton and Ericsson stems from their focusing on different levels of the creative process. In the domain of creative writing, even the skills underlying “technical mastery” are open to revision. Writers can—and certainly have—experimented with every aspect of storytelling from word choice and syntax at the fundamental level to perspective and voice at higher-order levels. The same is true for poetry. Assuming the equal odds principle can be extrapolated into each of these levels, teachers of creative writing might view their role as centering on the assessment of their students’ strengths and weaknesses and thenceforth offering encouragement to them to practice in those areas they show poorer skills in. “Develop what you lack” (360) is another of Csikszentmihalyi’s prescriptions. The teacher also has at her disposal the evaluations of each student’s classmates, which she might collate into a more unified assessment. Rather than focusing solely on a student’s text, then, the teacher could ask for the class’s impressions of the writer’s skills as evidenced by the text in relation to others offered by that student in the past. Once a few weaknesses have been agreed upon, the student can then devote practice sessions to generating multiple ideas in that area and subsequently evaluating them with reference to the works of successful authors.

            The general outline for creative writing workshops based on the expert performance framework might entail the following: Get the workshop students to provide assessments, based on each of the texts submitted for the workshop, of their colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses to supplement those provided by the instructor. If a student learns from such assessments that, say, his plots are engaging but his characters are eminently forgettable, he can then devote practice sessions to characterization. These sessions should consist of 1) studying the work of authors particularly strong in this area, 2) brainstorming exercises in which the student generates a large number of ideas in the area, and 3) an exercise at a later time involving a comparative assessment of the ideas produced in the prior stage. This general formula can be applied to developing skills in any aspect of creative writing, from word choice and syntax to plot and perspective. As the workshop progresses and the student receives more feedback from the evaluations, he will get better at anticipating the responses of the instructor and his classmates, thus honing the evaluative skills necessary for the third practice phase.

            The precedence of quantity of ideas over quality may be something of a dirty little secret for those with romantic conceptions of creative writing. Probably owing to these romantic or mystical notions about creativity, workshops focus on assessment and evaluation to the exclusion of productivity. One objection to applying the productivity approach within the expert performance framework likely to be leveled by those with romantic leanings is that they ignore the emotional aspects of creative writing. Where in the process of developing a slew of random words and images and characters does the heart come in? Many writers report that they are routinely struck with ideas and characters—some of whom are inspired by real people—that they simply have to write about. And these ideas that come equipped with preformed emotional resonance are the same ones that end up striking a chord with readers. Applying a formula to the process of conceiving ideas, even assuming it doesn’t necessarily lead to formulaic works, might simply crowd out or somehow dissipate the emotional pull of these moments of true inspiration.

            This account may, however, go further toward supporting the expert performance methods than casting doubt on them. For one, it leaves unanswered the question of how many ideas the writer was developing when the big inspiration struck. How many other real people had the author considered as possible characters before lighting on the one deemed perfect? Like the dreamer who becomes convinced of her dreams’ prophetic powers by dint of forgetting the much greater proportion of dreams that don’t come true, these writers are likely discounting a large number of ideas they generated before settling on the one with the greatest potential. Far from being completely left out of the training methods, emotional resonance can just as easily take ascendant priority as an evaluative criterion. It can even play a central role in the other two phases of practice.

            If the student reads a passage from another author’s work that evokes a strong emotion, she can then analyze the writing to see what made it so powerful. Also, since the emotion the passage evoked will likely prime the reader’s mind to recall experiences that aroused similar feelings—memories which resonate with the passage—it offers an opportunity for brainstorming ideas linked with those feelings, which will in turn have greater potential for evoking them in other readers. And of course the student need not limit herself to memories of actual events; she can elaborate on those events or extemporize to come up with completely new scenes. The fear that a cognitive exercise must preclude any emotional component is based on a false dichotomy between feeling and thought and the assumption that emotions are locked off from thinking and thus not amenable to deliberate training. Any good actor can attest that this assumption is wrong.

Part 3 of this essay.

Productivity as Practice: An Expert Performance Approach to Creative Writing Pedagogy Part 1

            Much of the pedagogy in creative writing workshops derives solely from tradition and rests on the assumption that the mind of the talented writer will adopt its own learned practices in the process of writing. The difficult question of whether mastery, or even expertise, can be inculcated through any process of instruction, and the long-standing tradition of assuming the answer is an only somewhat qualified “no”, comprise just one of several impediments to developing an empirically supported set of teaching methods for aspiring writers. Even the phrase, “empirically supported,” conjures for many the specter of formula, which they fear students will be encouraged to apply to their writing, robbing the products of some mysterious and ineffable quality of freshness and spontaneity. Since the criterion of originality is only one of several that are much easier to recognize than they are to define, the biggest hindrance to moving traditional workshop pedagogy onto firmer empirical ground may be the intractability of the question of what evaluative standards should be applied to student writing. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s central finding in his research on expert achievement is that what separates those who attain a merely sufficient level of proficiency in a performance domain from those who reach higher levels of excellence is the amount of time devoted over the course of training to deliberate practice. But, in a domain with criteria for success that can only be abstractly defined, like creative writing, what would constitute deliberate practice is as difficult to describe in any detail as the standards by which work in that domain are evaluated.

            Paul Kezle, in a review article whose title, “What Creative Writing Pedagogy Might Be,” promises more than the conclusions deliver, writes, “The Iowa Workshop model originally laid out by Paul Engle stands as the pillar of origination for all debate about creative writing pedagogy” (127). This model, which Kezle describes as one of “top-down apprenticeship,” involves a published author who’s achieved some level of acclaim—usually commensurate to the prestige of the school housing the program—whose teaching method consists of little more than moderating evaluative class discussions on each student’s work in turn. The appeal of this method is two-fold. As Shirley Geok-lin Lim explains, it “reliev[es] the teacher of the necessity to offer teacher feedback to students’ writing, through editing, commentary, and other one-to-one, labor intensive, authority-based evaluation” (81), leaving the teacher more time to write his or her own work as the students essentially teach each other and, hopefully, themselves. This aspect of self-teaching is the second main appeal of the workshop method—it bypasses the pesky issue of whether creative writing can be taught, letting the gates of the sacred citadel of creative talent remain closed. Furthermore, as is made inescapably clear in Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era, which tracks the burgeoning of creative writing programs as their numbers go from less than eighty in 1975 to nearly nine hundred today, the method works, at least in terms of its own proliferation.

            But what, beyond enrolling in a workshop, can a writer do to get better at writing? The answer to this question, assuming it can be reliably applied to other writers, holds the key to answering the question of what creative writing teachers can do to help their students improve. Lim, along with many other scholars and teachers with backgrounds in composition, suggests that pedagogy needs to get beyond “lore,” by which she means “the ad hoc strategies composing what today is widely accepted as standard workshop technique” (79). Unfortunately, the direction these theorists take is forbiddingly abstruse, focusing on issues of gender and ethnic identity in the classroom, or the negotiation of power roles (see Russel 109 for a review.) Their prescription for creative writing pedagogy boils down to an injunction to introduce students to poststructuralist ways of thinking and writing. An example sentence from Lim will suffice to show why implementing this approach would be impractical:

As Kalamaras has argued, however, collective identities, socially constructed, historically circumscribed, uniquely experienced, call for a “socially responsible” engagement, not only on the level of theme and content but particularly on that of language awareness, whether of oral or dialectic-orthographic “voice,” lexical choice, particular idiolect features, linguistic registers, and what Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossic characteristics. (86)

Assuming the goal is not to help marginalized individuals find a voice and communicate effectively and expressively in society but rather to help a group of students demonstrating some degree of both talent and passion in the realm of creative writing to reach the highest levels of success possible—or even simply to succeed in finding a way to get paid for doing what they love—arcane linguistic theories are unlikely to be of much use. (Whether they’re of any real use even for the prior goal is debatable.)

            Conceiving of creative writing as the product of a type of performance demanding several discrete skills, at least some of which are improvable through training, brings it into a realm that has been explored with increasing comprehensiveness and with ever more refined methods by psychologists. While University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about the large group of highly successful people in creative fields interviewed for his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention as if they were a breed apart, even going so far as to devote an entire chapter to “The Creative Personality,” and in so doing reinforcing the idea that creative talent is something one is simply born with, he does manage to provide several potentially useful strategies for “Enhancing Personal Creativity” in a chapter by that name. “Just as a physician may look at the physical habits of the most healthy individuals” Csikszentmihalyi writes, “to find in them a prescription that will help everyone else to be more healthy, so we may extract some useful ideas from the lives of a few creative persons about how to enrich the lives of everyone else” (343). The aspirant creative writer must understand, though, that “to move from personal to cultural creativity one needs talent, training, and an enormous dose of good luck” (344). This equation, as it suggests only one variable amenable to deliberate effort, offers a refinement to the question of what an effective creative writing pedagogy might entail. How does one train to be a better a writer? Training as a determining factor underlying exceptional accomplishments is underscored by Ericsson’s finding that “amount of experience in a domain is often a weak predictor of performance” (20). Simply writing poems and stories may not be enough to ensure success in the realm of creative writing, especially considering the intense competition evidenced by those nearly nine hundred MFA programs.

            Because writing stories and poems seldom entails a performance in real time, but instead involves multiple opportunities for inspiration and revision, the distinction Ericsson found between simply engaging in an activity and training for it may not be as stark for creative writing. Writing and training may overlap if the tasks involved in writing meet the requirements for effective training. Having identified deliberate practice as the most important predictor of expert performance, Ericsson breaks the concept down into three elements: “a well-defined task with an appropriate level of difficulty for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors” (21). Deliberate practice requires immediate feedback on performance. In a sense, success can be said to multiply in direct proportion to the accumulation of past failures. But how is a poet to know if the line she’s just written constitutes a success or failure? How does a novelist know if a scene or a chapter bears comparison to the greats of literature?

            One possible way to get around the problem of indefinable evaluative standards is to focus on quantity instead of quality. Ericsson’s colleague, Dean Simonton, studies people in various fields in which innovation is highly valued in an attempt to discover what separates those who exhibit “received expertise,” mastering and carrying on dominant traditions in arts or sciences, from those who show “creative expertise” (228) by transforming or advancing those traditions. Contrary to the conventional view that some individuals possess a finely attuned sense of how to go about producing a successful creative work, Simonton finds that what he calls “the equal odds rule” holds in every creative field he’s studied. What the rule suggests is “that quality correlates positively with quantity, so that creativity becomes a linear statistical function of productivity” (235). Individuals working in creative fields can never be sure which of their works will have an impact, so the creators who have the greatest impact tend to be those who produce the greatest number of works. Simonton has discovered that this rule holds at every stage in the individual’s lifespan, leading him to conclude that success derives more from productivity and playing the odds than from sure-footed and far-seeing genius. “The odds of hitting a bull’s eye,” he writes, “is a probabilistic function of the number of shots” (234). Csikszentmihalyi discovered a similar quantitative principle among the creative people he surveyed; part of creativity, he suggests, is having multiple ideas where only one seems necessary, leading him to the prescription for enhancing personal creativity, “Produce as many ideas as possible” (368).

Part 2 of this essay.

Magic, Fiction, and the Illusion of Free Will part 2

Part 1 of this essay.

Johansson and Hall, in their studies of choice blindness, are building on a tradition harking to the lab of a neurophysiologist working in the 1970’s in San Francisco. Benjamin Libet, in an era before fMRIs, used the brain scanning devices available to him, EEG and EGM (or electromyograph, which measures electrical activity in muscles), to pinpoint when his subjects were physically set in motion by a decision. Macknik and Martinez-Conde explain “Libet found that participants had the conscious sense of willing the movement about 300 milliseconds after the onset of the muscle activity. Moreover, the EEG showed that neurons in the part of their motor cortex where movements are planned became active a full second before any movement could be measured” (180). We all go about our business blithely assured that we decide to do something and then, subsequently, we act on our decision. But in reality our choices tend to be made outside of our conscious awareness, based on mechanisms our minds have no conscious access to, and it’s our justifications for those choices that really come second in the sequence of events. We don’t even know that we’re confabulating, just making stuff up on the fly to explain ourselves, that we’re not being honest. Our confabulations fool us as much as they fool everyone else.

In the decades following Libet’s work, more sophisticated scanners have put the time lapse between when our brains make decisions and when we feel as though our conscious minds have made them as high as seven seconds. That means people who are good at reading facial expressions and body language can often tell what choices we’ll make before we make them. Magicians and mentalists delight in exploiting this quirk of human cognition. Then their marks weave the clever tricksters into their confabulations—attributing to them supernatural powers. Reading this section of Sleights of Mind sent me to my bookshelf for Sack’s The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat because I recalled the story of a patient with Korsakov’s Syndrome who had a gift for rapid confabulation. In a chapter titled “A Matter of Identity,” Sacks narrates his meeting with a man he calls Mr. Thompson, who first treats him as if he’s a customer at the delicatessen where he worked, then shifts to believing the doctor is the butcher next door, then it’s a mechanic, then it’s a doctor—another doctor. In fact, due to neurological damage caused by a fever, Mr. Thompson can’t know who Sacks is; he can’t form moment-to-moment memories or any sense of where he is in time or space. He’s literally disconnected from the world. But his mind has gone into overdrive trying to fill in the missing information. Sacks writes,

Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world (109).

But it’s not Mr. Thompson’s bizarre experience that’s noteworthy; it’s how that experience illuminates our own mundane existence that’s unsettling. And Sacks goes on to explain that it’s not just the setting and the people he encounters that Mr. Thompson had to come up with stories for. He’d also lost the sense of himself.

“Such a frenzy may call forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy—a veritable confabulatory genius—for such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment. We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative—whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs, and lives, a ‘narrative’, and that this narrative is us, our identities” (110).

Mr. Thompson’s confabulatory muscles may be more taxed than most of ours, but we all have them; we all rely on them to make sense of the world and to place ourselves within it. When people with severe epilepsy have the two hemispheres of their brains surgically separated to limit the damage of their seizures, and subsequently have a message delivered to their right hemisphere, they cannot tell you what that message was because language resides in the left hemisphere. But they can and do respond to those messages. When Michael Gazzaniga presented split-brain patients’ right hemispheres with commands to walk or to laugh, they either got up and started walking or began to laugh. When asked why, even though they couldn’t know the true reason, they came up with explanations. “I’m getting a coke,” or “It’s funny how you scientists come up with new tests every week” (Pinker How the Mind Works, pg. 422). G.H. Estabrooks reports that people acting on posthypnotic suggestions, who are likewise unaware they’ve been told by someone else to do something, show the same remarkable capacity for confabulation. He describes an elaborate series of ridiculous behaviors, like putting a lampshade on someone’s head and kneeling before them, that the hypnotized subjects have no problem explaining. “It sounds queer but it’s just a little experiment in psychology,” one man said, oblivious of the irony (Tim Wilson Strangers to Ourselvespg. 95).

Reading Sleights of Mind and recalling these other books on neuroscience, I have this sense that I, along with everyone else, am walking around in a black fog into which my mind projects a three-dimensional film. We never know whether we’re seeing through the fog or whether we’re simply watching the movie projected by our mind. It should pose little difficulty coming up with a story plot, in the conventional sense, that simultaneously surprises and fulfills expectations—we’re doing it constantly. The challenge must be to do it in a way creative enough to stand out amid the welter of competition posed by run-of-the-mill confabulations. Could a story turn on the exposure of the mechanism behind the illusion of free will? Isn’t there a plot somewhere in the discrepancy between our sense that we’re in the driver’s seat, as it were, and the reality that we’re really surfing a wave, propelled along with a tiny bit of discretion regarding what direction we take, every big move potentially spectacular and at the same time potentially catastrophic?

Until I work that out, I’ll turn briefly to another mystery—because I can’t help making a political point and then a humanistic one. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is, pardon the pun, old hat to neuroscientists. And presumably magicians know something about the trick behind our conviction that we have free will. Pen and Teller in particular, because they draw inspiration from The Amaz!ng Randi, a celebrity in the world of skeptics, ought to be well aware of the fact that free will is an illusion. (All three magicians feature prominently in Sleights of Mind.) So how the hell can these guys serve as fellows in the Cato Institute, a front for fossil fuel industry propaganda pretending to be a conservative policy research? (For that matter, how can research have a political leaning?) Self-determination and personal responsibility, the last time I checked, were the foundations of conservative economics. How can Pen and Teller support politics based on what they know is an illusion?

Macknik and Martinez-Conde cite research in an endnote to Sleights of Mind that may amount to an explanation. When Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler prompted participants in what they said was a test of mental arithmetic with a passage from Francis Crick about how free will and identity arise from the mechanistic interworkings of chemicals and biomatter, they were much more likely to cheat than participants prompted with more neutral passages. Macknik and Martinez-Conde write, “One of the more interesting findings in the free will literature is that when people believe, or are led to believe, that free will is an illusion, they may become more antisocial” (272). Though in Pen and Teller’s case a better word than antisocial is probably contemptuous. How could you not think less and less of your fellow man when you make your living every day making fools of him? And if the divine light of every soul is really nothing more than a material spark why should we as a society go out of our way to medicate and educate those whose powers of perception and self-determination don’t even make for a good illusion?

For humanists, the question becomes, how can avoid this tendency toward antisocial attitudes and contempt while still embracing the science that has lifted our species out of darkness? For one thing, we must acknowledge to ourselves that if we see farther, it’s not because we’re inherently better but because of the shoulders on which we’re standing. While it is true that self-determination becomes a silly notion in light of the porousness of what we call the self, it is undeniable that some of us have more options and better influences than others. Sacks is more eloquent than anyone in expressing how the only thing separating neurologist from patient is misfortune. We can think the same way about what separates magicians from audience, or the rich from the poor. When we encounter an individual we’re capable of tricking, we can consider all the mishaps that might have befallen us and left us at the mercy of that individual. It is our capacity for such considerations that lies at the heart of our humanity. It is also what lies at the heart of our passion for the surprising and inevitable stories that only humans tell, even or especially the ones about ourselves we tell to ourselves.

(Pass the blunt.)

Also read:
OLIVER SACKS’S GRAPHOPHILIA AND OTHER COMPENSATIONS FOR A LIFE LIVED “ON THE MOVE”

And:

THE SOUL OF THE SKEPTIC: WHAT PRECISELY IS SAM HARRIS WAKING UP FROM?

And:

THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE PRICE TAG: A REVIEW OF ALEX STONE'S FOOLING HOUDINI

Magic, Fiction, and the Illusion of Free Will part 1 of 2

E.M. Forster famously wrote in his book Aspects of the Novel that what marks a plot resolution as gratifying is that it is both surprising and seemingly inevitable. Many have noted the similarity of this element of storytelling to riddles and magic tricks. “It’s no accident,” William Flesch writes in Comeuppance, “that so many stories revolve around riddles and their solutions” (133). Alfred Hitchcock put it this way: “Tell the audience what you’re going to do and make them wonder how.” In an ever-more competitive fiction market, all the lyrical prose and sympathy-inspiring characterization a brilliant mind can muster will be for naught if the author can’t pose a good riddle or perform some eye-popping magic.

Neuroscientist Stephen L. Macnick and his wife Susana Martinez-Conde turned to magicians as an experiment in thinking outside the box, hoping to glean insights into how the mind works from those following a tradition which takes advantage of its shortcuts and blind spots. The book that came of this collaboration, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions, is itself both surprising and seemingly inevitable (the website for the book). What a perfect blend of methods and traditions in the service of illuminating the mysteries of human perception and cognition. The book begins somewhat mundanely, with descriptions of magic tricks and how they’re done interspersed with sections on basic neuroscience. Readers of Skeptic Magazine or any of the works in the skeptical tradition will likely find the opening chapters hum-drum. But the sections have a cumulative effect.

The hook point for me was the fifth chapter, “The Gorilla in Your Midst,” which takes its title from the famous experiment conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in which participants are asked to watch a video of a group of people passing a basketball around and count the number of passes. A large portion of the participants are so engrossed in the task of counting that they miss a person walking onto the scene in a gorilla costume, who moves to the center of the screen, pounds on his chest, and then walks off camera. A subsequent study by Daniel Memmert tracked people’s eyes while they were watching the video and found that their failure to notice the gorilla wasn’t attributable to the focus of their gaze. Their eyes were directly on it. The failure to notice was a matter of higher-order brain processes: they weren’t looking for a gorilla, so they didn’t see it, even though their eyes were on it. Macnick and Martinez-Conde like to show the video to their students and ask the ones who do manage to notice the gorilla how many times the ball was passed. They never get the right answer. Of course, magicians exploit this limitation in our attention all the time. But we don’t have to go to a magic show to be exploited—we have marketers, PR specialists, the entertainment industry.

At the very least, I hoped Sleights of Mind would be a useful compendium of neuroscience concepts—a refresher course—along with some basic magic tricks that might help make the abstract theories more intuitive. At best, I hoped to glean some insight into how to arrange a sequence of events to achieve that surprising and inevitable effect in the plots of my stories. Some of the tricks might even inspire a plot twist or two. The lesser hope has been gratified spectacularly. It’s too soon to assess whether the greater one will be satisfied. But the book has impressed me on another front I hadn’t anticipated. Having just finished the ninth of twelve chapters, I’m left both disturbed and exhilarated in a way similar to how you feel reading the best of Oliver Sacks or Steven Pinker. There’s some weird shit going on in your brain behind the scenes of the normal stuff you experience in your mind. It’s nothing new for people with a modicum of familiarity with psychology that there’s an illusory aspect to all our perceptions, but in reality it would be more accurate to say there’s a slight perceptual aspect to all our illusions. And one of those illusions is our sense of ourselves.

I found myself wanting to scan the entire seventh chapter, “The Indian Rope Trick,” so I could send a pdf file to everyone I know. It might be the best summation I’ve read of all the ways we overestimate the power of our memories. So many people you talk to express an unwillingness to accept well established findings in psychology and other fields of science because the data don’t mesh with their experiences. Of course, we only have access to our experiences through memory. What those who put experience before science don’t realize is that memories aren’t anything like direct recordings of events; they’re bricolages of impressions laid down prior to the experience, a scant few actual details, and several impressions received well afterward. Your knowledge doesn’t arise from your experiences; your experiences arise from your knowledge. The authors write:

As the memory plays out in your mind, you may have the strong impression that it’s a high-fidelity record, but only a few of its contents are truly accurate. The rest of it is a bunch of props, backdrops, casting extras, and stock footage your mind furnishes on the fly in an unconscious process known as confabulation (119).

The authors go on to explore how confabulation creates the illusion of free will in the ninth chapter, “May the Force be with You.” Petter Johansson and Lars Hall discovered a phenomenon they call “choice blindness” by presenting participants in an experiment with photographs of two women of about equal attractiveness and asking them to choose which one they preferred. In a brilliant mesh of magic with science, the researchers then passed the picture over to the participant and asked him or her to explain their choice—only they used sleight of hand to switch the pictures. Most of them didn’t notice, and they went on to explain why they chose the woman in the picture that they had in fact rejected. The explanations got pretty elaborate too.

Part 2 of this essay.

They Comes a Day: Celebrating Cooperation in A Gathering of Old Men and Horton Hears a Who! Part 3

Read from the beginning.

            The grudging respect all the men on the Marshall plantation feel toward Mathu owing to his readiness to engage in altruistic punishment affords him a status almost equal to the whites. Sheriff Mapes, after letting Lou Dimes, Candy’s white boyfriend, know that he “wasn’t much of a man in his eyesight” because Dimes doesn’t seem capable of standing up to his girlfriend, goes on to say that he admires Mathu. “He’s a better man than most I’ve met, black or white” (74). Later in the novel, a character named Rooster says of Mathu,

He never thought much of me. Used to call me Little Red Rooster all the time. People even said him and Beulah had fooled around some behind my back. I never asked him, I never asked her—I was too scared. But I wasn’t scared now. He knowed I wasn’t scared now. That’s why he was smiling at me. And that made me feel good (181).

We may think less of Mathu’s altruism in light of his fooling around with another man’s wife, but it has become clear over the course of the plot that the men who don’t stand up against their oppressors, out of short-sighted fear, are in a sense responsible for their own mistreatment. (And Beulah’s willingness to fool around with Mathu can’t be overlooked as evidence of his increased reproductive potential.) Mathu goes on to admit to the gathered old men that he “hated y’all ‘cause you never tried.” But he says, “I been changed by y’all. Rooster, Clabber, Dirty Red, Coot—you changed this hardhearted old man” (182). This is the men’s vindication; they get to be recognized as men by the single one among them who hitherto enjoyed that distinction. He can be said to be playing the role of second-order altruist, rewarding and punishing those he interacts with, not just on the basis of how they treat him directly, but how they treat others in the group.

            This indirect or strong reciprocity has likewise been demonstrated in experiments by game theorists, and Flesch finds in it the final piece of what he calls “the puzzle of narrative interest,” by which he means “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). A variation of the ultimatum game called the dictator game eliminates the condition whereby the receiver of the proposed split has the option to veto it and ensure that neither player gets any money. With this set up, proposed splits become more lop-sided, though they still seldom drop below a certain limit. Outcomes become even more interesting when a third player is introduced who witnesses the exchange and is given the opportunity to pay either to reward or punish either of the players. It is furthermore explained to this third person that whatever contribution he or she makes will be amplified by a factor of four by the experimenter. Flesch writes,

Note that the third player gets nothing out of paying to reward or punish except the power or agency to do just that. It is highly irrational for this player to pay to reward or punish, but again considerations of fairness trump rational self-interest. People do pay, and pay a substantial amount, when they think that someone has been treated notably unfairly, or when they think someone has evinced marked generosity, to affect what they have observed (33).

Neuroscientists have even zeroed in on the brain regions that correspond to our suppression of immediate self-interest in the service of altruistic punishment, as well as those responsible for the pleasure we take in anticipating—though not in actually witnessing—free riders meeting with their just deserts (Knoch et al. 829; Quevain et al. 1254). Taken together, the evidence Flesch presents suggests we volunteer affect on behalf of fictional characters who show themselves to be altruists and against those who show themselves to be selfish actors or exploiters, experiencing both frustration and delight in the unfolding of the plot as we hope to see the altruists prevail and the free-riders get their comeuppance. And our capacity for this type of emotional engagement with fiction likely evolved because it serves as a signal to anyone monitoring us as we read or view the story, or as we discuss it later, that we are disposed either toward altruistic punishment or toward third-order free-riding ourselves—and altruism is a costly signal of fitness.

            This dynamic interplay of rational self-interest and altruism is so central to human nature that it lies at the heart of stories as diverse in their themes and social implications as Seuss’s tale of tiny Whos and Gaines’ of elderly black men finally availing themselves of an opportunity to stand up as men. If Horton didn’t go the great lengths he does to save the microscopic persons he hears calling for help, if he’d given up trying to help them once Vlad Vlad-i-koff flew away with them over the mountains, then the young children who experience the story wouldn’t believe the elephant was quite human—and the story would be pretty lame to boot. The most remarkable part of the story, though, is that there’s really no way to determine whether the Whos prove their personhood by surpassing some decibel limit to become audible to the jungle animals or whether they do it by getting every last Who to cooperate. This ambiguity is highlighted by the fact that the final Who to shout is so small: “They’ve proved they ARE persons no matter how small,” Horton declares. “And their whole world was saved by the Smallest of All!” An interesting counterpoint to Jo-Jo’s smallness is how massive Charlie is in Gathering. Charlie turns out to the one who shot Beau. One might think that owing to his large size he, like Horton, is more capable than the others of fending off exploitation at the hands of free-riders. But he admits, “All my natural-born black life I took the ‘busing and never hit back” (189).

            Charlie, of course, isn’t alone in his failure to punish those who abuse him or those he loves. In a moving chapter narrated by a man named Rufe, several of the men tell stories of horrible treatment at the hands of one or another white person, all of whom were allowed to get away with it without so much as a word of rebuke. After a man named Tucker tells a story which ends with his confession that “I didn’t do nothing but stand there and watch them beat my brother to the ground,” Rufe says, “We had all done the same thing sometime or another; we had all seen our brother, sister, mama, daddy insulted once and didn’t do a thing about it” (97). And so in game theory terms all the gathered men, excepting Mathu, are second-order free-riders, deserving of punishment themselves in the eyes of men like Mapes and Mathu. Tucker expresses this culpability when he calls out for his brother’s forgiveness and goes on to chastise himself, saying, “Out of fear of a little pain to my own body, I beat my own brother with a stalk of cane as much as the white folks did” (98). After hearing this and several other stories, Mapes says in frustration, “So this is payday, huh? And it’s all on Fix, huh? Whether he had anything to do with it or not, Fix must pay for everything ever happened to you, huh?” (107). What the men are really doing, though, is refusing to stand idly by as another man gets abused and murdered out of fear of a little bodily damage. As Mathu explains to Mapes after the sheriff asks him if he wants to see these men get hurt, “A man got to do what he think is right, Sheriff.” He continues, “That’s what part him from a boy” (85).

            Just as the ability to cooperate lies at the heart of the Whos’ personhood in Horton, manhood is defined in Gathering as a willingness to stand up, to risk injury or death in an attempt to prevent others from abusing or exploiting the man himself or those he cares about. Men are altruistic punishers. As Rufe says of Mapes, “he knowed Mathu had never backed down from anybody, either. Maybe that’s why he liked him. To him Mathu was a real man. The rest of us wasn’t” (84). The rest of them weren’t, that is, until the day Beau gets shot. The first one to begin the transition is Charlie, who in telling the story to the sheriff of how Beau was mistreating him says, “You don’t talk to a man like that, Sheriff, not when he reach half a hundred”—or fifty years of age. Charlie’s change surprises no one quite as much as it does Beau. “He knowed I wasn’t going to hit him” (190), Charlie says, describing a standoff between the two of them. But Charlie does hit him. And that’s when Beau gets his gun to go after Charlie, who flees to Mathu’s house. “Parrain told me he had a gun there, too, and he said he rather see me laying there dead than to run from another man when I was fifty years old.” When Charlie hesitates, Mathu shoves his gun into the younger man’s hands, and Charlie says, “I didn’t want to take the gun, but I could tell in Parrain’s face if I didn’t, he was go’n stop Beau himself, and then he was go’n stop me, too” (191). Mathu is here refusing to be a second-order free-rider even for a man he serves as a surrogate father to. Charlie takes the gun. And Beau keeps on coming toward the front of the house. “He knowed I had never done nothing like that, never even thought about doing nothing like that. But they comes a day, Sheriff, they comes a day when a man got to stand” (191). After shooting and killing Beau, though, Charlie runs off to let Mathu take the fall for him. But before the novel’s end he returns, saying, “I’m ready to pay. I done dropped a heavy load. Now I know I’m a man” (193). The sheriff agrees, and even addresses Charlie as “Mr. Briggs.”

            Beau turns out to be only one of several people who get their comeuppance as the plot unfolds. Fix gets his when his own son Gil refuses to join a lynch mob to go after Mathu, thus repudiating his conviction that blacks are inferior and undeserving of due process. Talking to a deputy named Russ who’s trying to convince him to return to his college town and prepare for a football game the next day, Gil asks, “What about my papa? ... I’ve already killed him. Bury him tomorrow?” (151). Luke Will, Fix’s friend who actually does get a group of guys together with guns to seek revenge against Mathu, ends up killing and getting killed in turn by Charlie. Reverend Jameson gets humiliated by Beulah who calls him a “bootlicker” (105) and forces him to back down by taunting him. Even Candy, the white woman who orchestrated the gathering, gets excluded from the men’s meeting inside the house. And when she refuses to leave, “Lou picked her up, under his arm, and came with her down the steps. Candy was cussing him, hitting at him, cussing Mapes, kicking, but Lou didn’t pay her any mind. He took her out to the road, throwed her into her own car, and slammed the door” (177).So Lou Dimes gets to redeem himself and establish his own manhood by altruistically punishing Candy.

            One of the most interesting punishments, though, is the one suffered by Sheriff Mapes. During the trial that ensues in the wake of the gunfight outside Mathu’s house, the DA demands that Mapes explain why he was unable to secure the peace. After being told to make his answer audible to the court, Mapes says, “The whole fight, I was sitting on my ass in the middle of the walk. Luke Will shot me, and I was sitting on my ass in the middle of the walk. Now, is that loud enough?” Lou goes on to describe how Mapes

got up from the witness chair and returned to the other seat. That’s when everyone in the courtroom started laughing, including Judge Reynolds. The people passing by out on the street must have thought we were showing a Charlie Chaplin movie in there. That happened the morning of the third day, and until that evening when the trial finally ended, people were still laughing. Mapes, with his left arm in a sling, stayed red all day, and would probably stay red for years to come (213).

Luke Will is only peripherally responsible for this humiliation; Mapes’s real tormenter is none other than Ernest Gaines himself. After relying on this character to serve as a type of foil and sounding board for the others, the author takes the opportunity to show us how he really feels about the sheriff’s attitude toward the Marshall men.

            Gaines’s altruistic punishment of his own character is only one of the ways he invites readers to participate in the celebration of group solidarity in his novel. Whether they realize it or not, each time they flip the page from one chapter to the next and find that the narration has been handed off from one character to another, they’re receiving the suggestion from Gaines that each of these characters wants to be heard not only by Sheriff Mapes, not just by the whites who become privy to the event through the trial and through the reporting of Lou Dimes, and not even just by the youngest generation, represented by Snookum, who, inspired by the older men, tells the sheriff “Wish I was just a little older so I coulda shot him” (109). The characters in Gathering are telling the story about how they stood up and finally punished the whites who were oppressing them to everyone who reads the book. As Flesch explains of narratives, “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). Gaines signals his approval for what his characters are doing by writing about it. We signal ours by reading about it and taking pleasure in the positive outcome for everyone but Charlie, who despite not surviving his dual with Luke Will, nevertheless gets the satisfaction of being addressed as, and treated as a man by both Mapes, who calls him Mr. Briggs, and his surrogate father. The handing off of the narration among the characters—but never among the ones like Mathu or Candy who might steal the show, as it were—could have highlighted differences between the various accounts, and in so doing conveyed a message of conflict. But Gaines seldom has the chapters overlap, obviating any concern for inconsistency, and the effect is a sense of the characters taking turns, trusting one another to tell their story right.

            Boyd does a good job of summing up the wonderful appeal of Horton Hears a Who! in terms which are also uncannily suited to accounting for the charm of A Gathering of Old Men. He writes,

Dr. Seuss’s comedy and his seriousness are the twin chambers of his story’s huge heart. The fantastic extravagance of Horton’s altruism makes him all the more attractive and makes us all the more readily sympathize with him, ally ourselves with his goals, and rejoice in the positive outcome for him and those he champions (376).

The main difference between the two works is that Gaines focuses more on punishment than Seuss because parents in the 1950s probably would have preferred not to expose their children to the violence that comeuppance tends to entail. But even violence can serve the goal of ensuring cooperation among self-interested individuals. And in the end it’s not the larger-than-life, self-sacrificing heroes that leave us so enchanted upon our departures from Seuss’s Jungle of Nool and Gaine’s Marshall plantation—and so eager to return. It’s rather the satisfaction we get from witnessing and vicariously participating in the larger spirit of community these heroes inspire. For there are circumstances under which humans have evolved to behave selfishly, just as there are those which nudge us toward selflessness. There is grandeur in the view that one of the aspects of our environments that inspire us to be more mindful of others is the presence in our culture of stories like Gaines’s and Seuss’s.

Also read:

FROM DARWIN TO DR. SEUSS: DOUBLING DOWN ON THE DUMBEST APPROACH TO COMBATTING RACISM

WHAT IS A STORY? AND WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO WITH ONE?

HOW VIOLENT FICTION WORKS: ROHAN WILSON’S “THE ROVING PARTY” AND JAMES WOOD’S SANGUINARY SUBLIME FROM CONRAD TO MCCARTHY

They Comes a Day: Celebrating Cooperation in A Gathering of Old Men and Horton Hears a Who! Part 2: Punishment

            Punishment, game theorists have found, is crucial to maintaining cooperative cohesion within a group, as it diminishes the benefits purely selfish actors can expect to gain from free-riding. It can also serve as a mechanism to lessen the threat of exploitation at the hands of outsiders who might try to join the group in order to take advantage of any established norm of altruism among its members. Flesch writes, “Darwin himself had proposed a way for altruism to evolve through the mechanism of group selection. Groups with altruists do better as a group than groups without. But it was shown in the 1960s that, in fact, such groups would be too easily infiltrated or invaded by nonaltruists” (5). Obviously, identity as a group member becomes a serious matter whenever each member relies on the others, so much so that evolutionary biologists all but ruled out even the possibility of group selection for nearly forty years. This difficulty is reflected in both Horton and Gathering by the characters whose interests aren’t in line with those of the group. Jo-Jo must be encouraged to give up his shirking and call out with the rest of the Whos for acknowledgment of their personhood. Reverend Jameson likewise signals his own selfish motives as he tries to coax Mathu into surrendering himself, saying, “I ain’t got no home if they burn this place down” (54).

            Even Candy, the white woman who sends Snookum to call the men together—thus playing a role in Gaines’s novel similar to the one Horton plays in Seuss’s story—turns out to be less motivated by the good of the group than by more personal concerns. Explaining her motives to Mrs. Merle, Candy declares, “I won’t let them touch my people” (17). Of course, Candy is risking less than the men. “Clinton can handle Mapes in court” (16), she says, meaning that with a lawyer she can count on the fair trial Mathu and the other black men can’t. When Mapes shows up, she confesses along with the others, and when he starts beating them one after another, she steps to the front of the line and says, “I’m next” (71)—again, secure in her assumption that she isn’t at risk like the others. Even though she’s never in as much danger, at this point in the novel it still seems she’s behaving altruistically, mixing herself up in trouble she had nothing to do with. However, when the men begin to consider the possibility that they’ve waited long enough, that Fix may not be coming after all, and that it may be time for everyone to put down his gun and let Mathu go with Mapes, Candy refuses to let the men even deliberate the option amongst themselves, revealing that her motives are much more selfish than they originally seemed. “I want you to help me with my own child one day” (176), she says to Mathu. “You’ll die if they put you in that jail. And this place’ll die, too. There’s no reason for this place to be if you’re not here” (177). Since her purpose is merely to save Mathu, it can even be said that she’s free-riding on the cooperation of the other black men; in that sense, she’s almost as exploitative as any other white who treats the blacks like servants. And, like Jameson, she has to be dealt with in order for the collective goals of the group to be achieved.

            Experiments that were being conducted around the same time as Gaines was writing Gathering showed that people are willing, even eager to punish others whose behavior strikes them as unfair or exploitative, even when administering that punishment involves incurring some cost to themselves. Like The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the ultimatum game involves two people, one of whom is often a confederate of the researchers, who have to decide on a strategy for interacting with one another. In this case, one of the participants is given a sum of money and told to offer the other participant a cut of it. The only catch is that the second player must accept the cut or neither player gets to keep the money. “It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer,” Flesch writes. “The responder will always come out better by accepting than vetoing” (31). But what the researchers discovered was that a line exists beneath which responders will almost always refuse the cut. “This means they are paying to punish,” Flesch explains. “They are giving up a sure gain in order to punish the selfishness of the proposer” (31). Game theorists call this behavior altruistic punishment because “the punisher’s willingness to pay this cost may be an important part in enforcing norms of fairness” (31). In other words, the punisher is incurring a cost to him or herself in order to ensure that selfish actors don’t have a chance to get a foothold in the larger, cooperative group.

            Before considering the role punishment plays in Gathering and Horton, it is important to understand another mechanism that many evolutionary biologists theorize must have been operating for cooperation to have become established in human societies, a process referred to as the handicap principle, or costly signaling. A lone altruist in any group is unlikely to fare well in terms of survival and reproduction. So the question arises as to how the minimum threshold of cooperators in a population was first surmounted. Boyd traces the process along a path from mutualism, or coincidental mutual benefits, to inclusive fitness, whereby organisms help others who are likely to share their genes—usually family members—to reciprocal altruism, a quid pro quo arrangement in which one organism will aid another in anticipation of some future repayment (54-57). But some individuals in some population of organisms in our human ancestry must have benefited from altruism that went beyond familial duty and tit-for-tat bartering. In their classic book The Handicap Principal, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi suggest that altruism serves a function in cooperative species similar to the one served by a peacock’s feathers. Conspecifics have much to gain from accurate assessments of each other’s fitness when choosing mates or allies. Many species have thus evolved methods for signaling their fitness, and as the Zahavis explain, “in order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly” (xiv). A peacock signals his fitness with cumbersome plumage because his ability to survive in spite of the handicap serves as a guarantee of his strength and resourcefulness. Flesch and others find in this idea the key to solving the mystery of how altruism first became established; human altruism is, if anything, even more elaborate than the peacock’s display.

            One of the reasons Horton is the one to champion the Whos—aside from his keen hearing—is that he would be the only one in the population of jungle creatures capable of holding all the others at bay for any length of time. It takes “dozens” of the monkeys in the Wickersham family to pose a threat to the elephant, who is several times larger than any of them. Of course, the teaming up of the Wickershams with the big kangaroo and the small kangaroo in her pouch is also a show of cooperation. And their motive can even be called altruistic: “For almost two days you’ve run wild and insisted / On chatting with persons who’ve never existed. / Such carryings-on in our peaceable jungle! / We’ve had quite enough of your bellowing bungle.” Apparently, the kangaroo is concerned that Horton’s behavior is disruptive to the rest of the animals in the jungle, so she’s playing the role of altruistic punisher. This concern, along with our knowledge that no one but Horton can be sure of the Whos’ existence, probably goes a long way toward explaining why we’re content with Horton’s vindication in the end and don’t feel any need to see the monkeys or the kangaroos punished. But before being vindicated Horton endures a great deal of suffering on behalf of the Whos. The picture of the exhausted elephant picking through the field of clovers is only the beginning. Later, as the Wickershams are trying to tie him up so they can steal the clover again, “They beat him! They mauled him! They started to haul / Him into his cage!” Even in the midst of the ill-treatment, though, Horton continues exhorting the mayor of Who-ville to keep trying to gather more voices so the other animals can hear them. As Horton suffers more and more, our estimation of his altruism, and thus his fitness, grows commensurately.

            Just as Horton is unique among the jungle animals in his ability to stand up to the others, Mathu is unique among the black men on the Marshall plantation in his willingness to stand up to the whites. Upon first hearing about the gathering and its purpose, one of the men, Chimley, recalls that Mathu had once fought Fix, Beau’s father, the man all the characters fear will be leading a lynch mob after his son’s killer. When Fix once told Mathu to throw away his empty Coke bottle, “Mathu told him he wasn’t nobody’s servant” (30). In not allowing Fix to free-ride on the cooperative habits of his fellow plantation workers, Mathu was sending him the message that he could count on resistance from at least one of the black men. To send that message, Mathu had to be willing to fight, and he had to be willing to suffer the consequences of Fix’s wrath even if he won the fight. Sure enough, when Mathu won, “the white folks wanted to lynch Mathu” (30), and it was only because the sheriff took charge and forbade further reprisals that he escaped hanging. “But that wasn’t the last fight Mathu had on that river with them white people,” Chimley says. The other black men know that Mathu’s fighting back could potentially be to their benefit even more than his. And so when they hear about his latest act of altruistic punishment they’re inspired at last to join his efforts. “If he did it, you know we ought to be there” (30), Chimley’s fishing buddy Mat says to him. “Mathu was the only one we knowed had ever stood up” (31), and now they have a chance to stand up with him.

Part 3

They Comes a Day: Celebrating Cooperation in A Gathering of Old Men and Horton Hears a Who! Part 1

            Ernest Gaines opens his novel A Gathering of Old Men with a young boy named Snookum being sent on an errand to tell a group of men to come together in defense of an individual named Mathu, a black man who readers are led to believe has shot and killed a white man on a post-civil rights era Louisiana plantation still carrying on the legacy of Jim Crow. But the goal of protecting Mathu from revenge at the hands of the white man’s family gets subsumed by a greater cause, that of ensuring all the gathered men be treated as men and not like slaves. Though it may seem a flippant comparison, there are many parallels between Gaines’s novel and the children’s classic Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss, which likewise features a gathering of threatened people who can only save themselves by collectively calling for recognition of their personhood. Evolutionary critics, who see in narratives a play of evolved psychological mechanisms, would view this resemblance as more than coincidence.

            Brian Boyd examines Horton in his book On the Origin of Stories, juxtaposing it with Homer’s epic The Odyssey to demonstrate that both the children’s story and the ageless classic for adults engage emotional adaptations shared by all humans. Boyd’s theoretical framework incorporates a wide array of findings from both evolutionary and cognitive science. Though much of his thinking overlaps with the ideas William Flesch puts forth in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, Flesch’s theory of narrative is at once more focused and multidimensional. Flesch theorizes that our thoughts and feelings are engaged while reading a story because we’ve evolved to monitor others—even fictional others—for signals of altruism and to emotionally favor those who emit them, while at the same time wanting to see those who behave selfishly get punished. He arrives at this social monitoring and volunteered affect model using research into the evolution of cooperation in humans, research which Boyd likewise refers to in explaining universal narrative themes. Though Flesch’s ideas are more compelling because he focuses more on the experience of reading stories than on their thematic content, both authors would agree that the appeal of stories like Horton and Gathering lies in our strong human desire to see people who are willing to cooperate, even at great cost to themselves, prevail over those who behave only on their own behalves.

            Though her research was published too late to be included in either Flesch’s or Boyd’s book, Karen Wynn, a Yale psychologist who studies the development of social behavior in children, has conducted experiments that highlight how integral the task of separating selfish actors from cooperators is even for children too young to speak. In one setup, infants watch a puppet show that features a small white tiger who wants to play ball and two rabbits, each of whom respond quite differently to the tiger’s overtures. One rabbit, distinguished by a green jacket, rudely steals off with the ball after the tiger has rolled it over. But when the other rabbit, this one in an orange jacket, receives the ball from the tiger, the two end up playfully rolling it back and forth to each other. The young children attend to these exchanges with rapt interest, and when presented with a choice afterward of which rabbit to play with they almost invariably choose the one with the orange jacket, the cooperative one. This preference extends even to wooden blocks with nothing but crude eyes to suggest they’re living beings. When Wynn’s colleagues stage a demonstration in which one block hinders another’s attempt to climb a hill, and then subsequently a third block helps the climber, children afterward overwhelmingly choose the helper to play with. Wynn concludes that “preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behavior toward others” (557). Evolutionary game theorists, who use mathematical models to simulate encounters between individuals relying on varying strategies for dealing with others in an attempt to determine how likely each strategy is to evolve, call the behavior Wynn and her colleagues observed strong reciprocity, which Flesch explains occurs when “the strong reciprocator punishes or rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator” (22).

            Children reading Horton—or having it read to them—probably become engaged initially because they appreciate Horton’s efforts to protect the speck of dust on which he hears a voice calling for help. But that’s only the beginning of the elephant’s struggle to keep the microscopic creatures called the Whos safe. At one point, after chasing the eagle Vlad Vlad-i-koff, who has stolen a clover Horton has placed the Who’s speck of dust on, all through the night over absurdly rugged terrain, the elephant has to pick through a field with millions of nearly identical clovers before recovering the one with the Whos on it. The accompanying illustration of the slumped and bedraggled elephant shows beyond doubt the lengths to which Horton is willing to go on behalf of his friends. And, as Boyd points out, “we all love an altruist. As game theory simulations of cooperation show, any participant in a social exchange benefits when the other partner is an altruist. And Horton’s altruism is as colossal as his physique” (375). But Flesch would emphasize that we don’t favor Horton merely because he would be a good exchange partner for each of us to deal with directly; rather, we can signal our own altruism by volunteering affect on behalf of someone who has clearly demonstrated his own. He writes that

Among the kinds of behavior that we monitor through tracking or through report, and that we have a tendency to punish or reward, is the way others monitor behavior through tracking or through report, and the way they manifest a tendency to punish and reward (50).

So, even as we’re assessing someone to determine how selfish or altruistic he or she is, others are assessing us to see how we respond to what we discover. Favoring an altruist (or showing disfavor for a selfish actor) is itself a signal of altruism. In game theory terms, witnesses can become second-order altruists, or third-order, or however many order. But how could this propensity toward monitoring and cooperation have evolved in a Darwinian world of intense competition for survival and reproduction?

            The main conceptual tool used by game theorists to see how various strategies for dealing with others fare when pitted against each other is a scenario called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Imagine two criminals are arrested and taken to separate rooms to be interrogated without being given a chance to consult with one another. If both criminals keep their mouths shut and confess to nothing, then they will both serve a prison sentence of one year. So their cooperation results in a negative outcome. However, if both criminals confess, the outcome is a longer, five-year sentence. What makes the scenario useful in understanding how cooperation could have evolved is the condition that if just one criminal confesses—if he or she takes advantage of the fellow prisoner’s cooperation—the confessor goes free without spending any more time in custody. Meanwhile, the criminal who doesn’t confess, but whose partner does, gets a sentence of twenty years. The idea is that small benefits accrue over time to cooperators, but there’s always temptation for individuals to act for their own short-term benefit to their partners’ detriment (Flesch 23; Boyd 56 uses slightly different numbers but to the same effect).

            The Prisoner’s Dilemma has several variations, and it can be scaled up to conceptualize cooperation among groups with more than two members. The single Who not shouting in Horton is an example of how even a lone free-rider, a “shirker,” can undermine group cohesion. And, mild as it is, this character gets some comeuppance when Seuss refers to him as a “twerp.” More severe punishment turns out to be unnecessary because the mayor of Who-ville prevails upon him how important his cooperation is. In Gathering, the men likewise face a prisoner’s dilemma when, having all brought their own shotguns and shown their own willingness to confess to the killing of the white man named Beau, Sheriff Mapes begins separating each of them in turn from the group gathered around Mathu’s porch and beating them when they refuse to name Mathu as the true culprit. Speaking to Mathu, Mapes says, “I know you did it… You’re the only one here man enough. But I have to hear it from one of them. One of them must say he was called here after it happened” (85). If just one man buckles under the sheriff’s abuse, analogous to the one year sentence for cooperators in The Prisoner’s Dilemma, then all their efforts will be for naught and the men will miss out on their opportunity to stand up to their white oppressors. The gathered men face another similar dilemma when the racist Luke Will shows up with his own group to lynch Mathu; as long as the older men cooperate, they maintain an advantage over the whites who can’t imagine them standing up at all, much less standing up together.

Part 2

Sagan's Foreboding

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time--when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

Carl Sagan, Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1996

Defiance and Duplicity: Decoding Poe’s Attacks on Readers Part 4 0f 4

Part 1

            Absent from any of the critical attempts to uncover what the cat might symbolize is what ought to have been the most obvious starting point—the cat’s name. In a footnote to the Norton Critical Edition of Poe’s work, G.R. Thompson explains that Pluto is the “name in some myths of the ruler of Hell (or Hades, which is another name for its ruler)” (349). Though Thompson is elsewhere in the same edition savvy in sifting out Poe’s satirical side, he fails here to look further into the name Pluto, probably for the same reason so many other critics fail to look further into it—because it meshes well the preconception of Poe as the writer of Gothic Horror stories. That is precisely the reason why the name is such a perfect trap for those readers unable to view his work with anything but a single, film-covered eye. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “Pluto is the Latin form (used in English) of the Greek name Plutō n, meaning ‘wealth-giver’, because wealth is seen as coming from the earth” (6 April 2009). The word persists with this meaning today, usually in the form of a suffix. As the Oxford English Dictionary Online attests, “pluto-, comb. form,” is used in “forming nouns and adjectives relating to wealth and the wealthy” (6 April 2009), as in the term plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. (The equation of money and the underworld has a long history, dating from much earlier than “Death and Taxes.” The name Dis, another Roman name for Hades, comes from the word dives, “rich.” Dante places Plutus, actually a separate Roman god but whose name in Italian is still Pluto, in the fourth circle of The Inferno, overseeing the Avaricious and the Prodigal, along with the Lady Fortune [59].)

            Poe seems to have made the safe assumption that his use of the name Pluto would be seen with the cyclopean eye of his readers as a casual reference to the resting place of the dead, and some of the bragging of his narrators’ just may be an expression of his own pride in so well concealing, while at the same time expressing, his true feelings toward his wealth-giver, the reading public. When the narrator of “Tell-Tale” says, “in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, [I] placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim” (320), only the befuddled psychoanalyst can keep at bay the suspicion aroused by what is commonly read as an instantaneous transition from pride into a state of overwhelming guilt. The beating of the heart that prompts the confession is really a continuation of the terror excited by the old man’s one-eyed glare; no matter what Poe does with his writing, only the fear-inducing aspects are ever appreciated. Since the old man is an earlier version of Pluto, the tale itself represents the author’s confession of his true ambivalence toward his readers. And why did he make such a confession? “Anything was more tolerable than this derision!” he says. “I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer!” (320) But the confession went unheard, drowned out by the terrified beating of readers’ hearts. It is even possible that “Black Cat,” “Imp,” and “Amontillado” represent continued, escalated flirtations with being found out. The victim of “Imp” is nothing but a reader with money. And the murderer of Fortunato—note the name—though confessing in the tale, ends by bragging about escaping detection for “half of a century” (421); three years after he began playing this game, Poe was probably less and less worried that anyone would catch him at it. But it is in “Black Cat” that the allegory—or coded message—is the most developed.

            Before looking more closely at this story, an important distinction must be made between irony and duplicity. When the author clues readers into knowledge the protagonist is not privy to, as Gargano gives Poe credit for doing in “Black Cat,” that is irony. In this sense, Poe and the narrator of the story need to be distinguished from each other. But that doesn’t mean Poe can’t be seen in the story at a different level. As Regan explains:

The intention of the writer who employs irony is that the reader shall, perhaps after momentary difficulties, decipher his code; the intention of the writer who employs duplicity is that his code baffle as many readers as possible. (294)

One level is what Griffith calls the “Gothic overplot,” another level is the ironic one identified by Gargano, and yet another level, a duplicitous or coded one—the “satiric underside”—seems to be signaled by recurring elements between this and other tales, like a focus on eyes, and perversity, as well as by the dual meanings of the cat’s name.

            This multi-dimensionality is keeping with Poe’s ideas of the Arabesque, a term which appeared in the title of an earlier collection of his tales. As Thompson explains, “Islamic tradition discourages the artistic reproduction of any natural forms that may be said to possess a soul,” and to avoid such forms artists in this tradition rely on “almost purely geometrical forms” such as the elaborate designs seen in Arabesque architecture and textiles. One of the primary characteristics of these designs is that each patterned is inlaid and interweaved with several others so that the overall image is intricate and multidimensional. Thompson also points out that Poe, following the influence of German theorist Friedrich von Schlegel, applied the same principle to his conception of Romantic Irony, “which is neither just parodic or serious but both simultaneously, as in Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the plays of Shakespeare” (79). It appears, however, that Poe added yet another layer to this design. And this is how he solved the dilemma historian Jill Lepore describes thus: “he needed to turn his pen to profit, but he also wanted to signal…that he was lowering himself” (68).

            The first paragraph of “Black Cat” features a few odd statements that have been the source of much commentary. The narrator calls the story the “most wild, yet most homely narrative” (348) in the first sentence. In this seeming contradiction lies an invitation to a dual reading. In the middle of the paragraph, he characterizes the story as consisting of “a series of mere household events” (349) before explaining how horrible and devastating their consequences have been, another seeming contradiction. But the final sentence of the paragraph is the most telling:

Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place—some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects. (349)

This statement could of course be read as another application of the Gothic trope of having the unreliably hysterical narrator reference the possibility of his own madness in order to make his ravings more credible. “I neither expect nor solicit belief,” (348) he says in the first sentence—because he would have to be crazy to, the implication runs. But, with Gargano’s evidence in mind of Poe’s deliberate use of the double voice, one the author’s and one the narrator’s, along with Griffith’s discovery of a “satiric underside” concealed by the “Gothic overplot” elsewhere in Poe’s work, and especially in light of the dual meanings of the cat’s name, another reading suggests itself: Poe is taunting his readers to catch him disparaging them.

            It is noteworthy that the narrator himself is responsible for the half-blindness of the cat, since this was not the case with the old man in “Tell-Tale.” Before getting to the disoculation, though, the narrator describes a childhood surrounded by pets, even to the exclusion of human companions. “There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute,” he writes, “which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man” (349). The man Poe, ever frustrated by those on whom he depended for anything, must have taken great pleasure in the complete dependence and obedience of animals. But then cats are much less obedient than dogs. In terms of his career, this early period represents his naïve and romantic youth, before maturity complicated his ideas and feelings toward his art. All that was to change when, with his own pen, he made himself into something more complex than a writer of romantic poetry. His writing was to take on a satiric edge, not that his readers ever really caught on to the difference. Really at this point in the story, though, there is more Gothic plot than coded satire, and the equation of the narrator’s love of animals with Poe’s early romantic writing is no less tenuous than countless other allegorical readings. But when the narrator, in the grip of perversity, goes beyond the initial injury and kills Pluto, things get more interesting.

            The Imp of the Perverse compelled the narrator of that tale not to murder his victim but to confess it, but in “Black Cat” perversity is responsible for the eponymous cat’s demise. “Imp,” published two years later, may have been referring to the symbolic violence done to the reader of the earlier tale. Since the perpetrator had gone undetected for so long, the Imp, a self-destructive force, had proven itself not to have been in play. Poe suffered no consequences for loosing “Black Cat” on his audiences. But he did suffer from his strained relationships with those who served as an intermediary between him and his readers, editors like White and Graham. In another apparent contradiction, the narrator of “Black Cat” claims, “It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only—that urged me continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute” (350). Whom is he hurting when he hurts the cat? The answer comes in the next paragraph: “On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire… The whole house was blazing” (351). Having given in to his frustration with his wealth-giver, the narrator subsequently, immediately, loses his home. For those who missed this not-so-subtle point, he adds a few lines later, “My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up” (351).

            Just as White failed to detect the parody in “Berenice,” Poe could always count on at least a preponderance of his readers at large to miss any satire he concealed in his work. And so, despite the violence done to it, the black cat returns—Poe continues to make money by writing scary stories. But because he was in more dire economic straits at this time in his life, owing largely to his falling out with Graham, the cat returns sporting an ominous sign: “the GALLOWS!”(353) delineated by a tuft of white fur. The narrator brings this second cat home, where it “became immediately a great favorite with my wife” (352). But he says, “I soon found a dislike to it arising with me…its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed” (352). Oddly, it is not until the paragraph following this admission of his dislike, that he mentions what would seem to be its most remarkable feature: “like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes” (352). Of course, Poe continued to hate the admiration of his half-blind readers, even though it was helping him support his wife.

            The narrator admits that he “longed to destroy” (352) Pluto, but was dissuaded from doing so “by absolute dread of the beast” (353), which he attributes to the image in the cat’s fur. Forced to coexist with this object of dread, he wrestles with the irony of how he “a man, fashioned in the image of High God,” was being made “wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity” by “a brute beast—whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed” (353), a line which clearly equates perversity with contempt. The uneasy cohabitation persists until his wife, “the most patient of sufferers,” accompanies him, “upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit” (353). The cat rushes in to trip him, causing him to forget his dread and take up an ax, which when his wife tries to stop him from using, ends up in her brain. His rage for the cat gets turned on his wife. Since the cat is the “wealth-giver,” the image springs direfully to mind of Virginia shivering in her unheated room with nothing but a coat and a cat to keep her warm.

            At this point, the story becomes, like the others in the nexus, a case of self-destructive boasting. After walling up his wife, he says “I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself—‘Here at least, then, my labor has not been in vain’” (354). When police arrive to investigate her disappearance, he shows them to the cellar and the basement—“Secure… in the inscrutability of my place of concealment” (355). Once they have had a look around and are making to leave, the narrator calls them back. “The glee at my heart” he says, “was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness” (355). He starts boasting about how his is “an excellently well constructed house,” and “through the mere phrenzy of bravado” (355), he raps with his cane on the wall concealing his wife’s body. Just as in “Tell-Tale” and “Imp,” the narrator is responsible for the discovery of his own crime. Pluto, inadvertently walled up with his wife, aroused by the tapping, sounds a cry “half of horror and half of triumph,” so that the wall is torn down and it is revealed, perched atop his dead wife’s head, looking out with its “solitary eye of fire” (355).

            What is most impressive about Poe’s coded attacks on his readers is that the stories concealing them are so good that even critics with a sophisticated awareness of his multileveled satires have found no reason to see them as anything but superbly crafted Gothic tales. This excellence, which he achieved despite his contempt for those who appreciated the genre, is itself yet another form of defiance. Poe must have determined that if he had to write overwrought, hysterical tales of murder and madness to be read, he would just have to show everyone how it was done. He would take it to the next level—and do so in the same stories into which he was weaving his codes. Harold Bloom, straining to find something positive to say about Poe, writes that he “authentically frightens children, and the fright can be a kind of trauma,” and his own reading of the author as a child “induced nasty and repetitious nightmares that linger even now” (3). Bloom is just the kind of authority Poe would have detested, and he would have been delighted to hear to that he managed to give the critic, who hasn’t even caught on to the topmost layer of his layers-deep satire, nightmares into adulthood. Still, his laugh would have to be tempered by the tragedy that he never did get his chance to write what he wanted to write without the specter of poverty looming over him.

Also read:
PUTTING DOWN THE PEN: HOW SCHOOL TEACHES US THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO READ LITERATURE

THE CREEPY KING EFFECT: WHY WE CAN'T HELP CONFUSING WRITERS WITH THEIR CHARACTERS

REBECCA MEAD’S MIDDLEMARCH PILGRIMAGE AND THE 3 WRONG WAYS TO READ A NOVEL

Defiance and Duplicity: Decoding Poe’s Attacks on Readers Part 3 of 4

Part 1

WHAT DOES POE'S BLACK CAT SYMBOLIZE?

            To contextualize the writing of “Black Cat” biographically, two events are of interest. In January of 1842, Poe’s wife, Virginia, damaged a blood vessel while singing, and this was but the beginning of her decline in health brought about by tuberculosis. Her condition was quite likely exacerbated by their poverty; one of Poe’s letters from the time describes how all Virginia had to guard her from the winter cold was his greatcoat used as a blanket, atop of which perched a tortoiseshell cat to keep her chest warm. Despite his money troubles, though, Poe resigned his editorship of Graham’s Magazine after a power struggle with George Graham. Subsequently, he was forced to cast about desperately for editors and publishers for his work (Thompson xxxiii-iv). Tellingly, though, before the falling out, Poe seems to have discovered a fondness for cryptograms. He even tried to get hired by the government to write them. About a year before leaving Graham’s, he published an essay on “secret writing,” which he described as writing “in such a manner as to elude general comprehension” (Lepore 69).

            “The Black Cat” is, on the surface, an especially haunting tale, and it has spurred a great deal of commentary. Oates, ever ambivalent about Poe, features it in the anthology American Gothic Tales. Though she demurs from giving it pride of place, tucking it between “Tartarus of Maids” and “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as the fifth story in the table of contents, she nevertheless writes that the story

demonstrates Poe at his most brilliant, presenting a madman’s voice with such mounting plausibility that the reader almost—almost—identifies with his unmotivated and seemingly unresisted acts of insane violence against the affectionate black cat, Pluto, and eventually his own wife. (4)

            The story introduces “the spirit of PERVERSNESS,” which Poe revisited in a later tale, to account for these “unmotivated and seemingly unresisted acts.” But there is no other reference to any philosophical school or literary tradition. And there are no physical descriptions of the characters. The only character who is really represented in any detail is the narrator, leaving readers to wonder who he is, if they should take him at his word when he recounts his tale, and what they should make of this invoking of perversity as a clue to his motive.

            A long tradition continues of critical attempts to determine what the eponymous cat symbolizes in the hope that doing so will shed some light on what the narrator’s motive—though he claimed he had none—was in killing first the cat and then his wife. Ed Piacentino provides page-long footnotes to his interpretation of the story which summarize, thesis by thesis, this critical history. His own perspective, heavily influenced by all the others, is that

The narrator’s motive for murdering his wife seems to be subconscious and, therefore, the crime "is not consciously premeditated. Nor is the narrator able to understand rationally or to persuade convincingly why he has done this terrible deed, though he repeatedly offers explanations—actually untenable rationalizations—for his former actions." (153)

Citing Piacentino as an example of misguided psychologizing, Joseph Stark works to place the story in its historical context and suggests that such “analyses…may indicate in their very strivings to provide answers that no sufficiently clear cause for the narrator’s murder of his wife and the cat may be found in the text” (255). Of course, the story states this much explicitly, but what Stark argues would have been disturbing about this taking the narrator at his word is that it “posed significant challenges to increasingly influential scientific thought as well as to shifting evangelical theology” (255). These critics’ points may be valid, but they apply only insofar as the story is taken at face value.

            Originally published in August of 1843, “The Black Cat” forms a nexus with three other tales, “The Tell-Tale Heart” published seven months earlier, “The Imp of the Perverse” from July 1845, and “The Cask of Amontillado” from November 1846. Since the plot of “Black Cat” bears strong similarities to both “Tell-Tale” and “Amontillado,” centering on the murder and immuring of victims and narrated by men at the mercy of confessional compulsions, it may be helpful in uncovering any deliberately concealed satire to pursue a strategy similar to Griffith’s intertextual approach to “Ligeia.” The first notable detail arising from this comparison is the emphasis on the eyes of the victims in both “Tell-Tale” and “Black Cat,” as well as the narrator’s denial of ill-feeling toward them. “I loved the old man,” he says of the victim in “Tell-Tale,” but he was nonetheless driven to murder by one of the old man’s eyes. “He had the eye of a vulture,” the narrator says, “a pale blue eye, with a film over it” (317). The victim in “Amontillado” is also described at one point as looking into the narrator’s eyes “with two filmy orbs” (417), but in this case the eyes are not integral to the plot, whereas in “Tell-Tale” the narrator ends up postponing the violence until the eighth night because in attempting to kill the old man in his sleep he keeps finding him with the offending eye closed.

            In “Black Cat,” eyes come into play in the first incident the narrator describes. Returning home drunk, he suspects the hitherto affectionate cat is avoiding him. So, he chases it down, and then he says, “I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” (350) Since only one of the old man’s eyes in “Tell-Tale” is ever mentioned, it seems the violence in these stories has something to do with the victims being one-eyed. Poe does something interesting, too, in the line following the narrator’s description of the abuse of his pet: the narrator says, “I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity” (350). It is as if Poe were drawing readers’ attention to the violent implement’s similarity to a pen. The now one-eyed cat goes on to foment the narrator’s rage, much the way the old man’s eye in “Tell-Tale” does, only in the case of “Black Cat” that rage gets turned onto the narrator’s wife.

            The victim in “Amontillado” keeps both his eyes unto death, but the narrator’s motive for killing him is never in question because he states it in the opening lines. “The thousand injuries of Fortunato,” he says, “I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge” (415). The nature of the insult remains a mystery throughout the tale, but Fortunato is presented as a proud, pretentious buffoon. “You are rich,” the narrator says to him to coax him into the trap, “respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as I once was” (417). This exploitation of Fortunato’s pride, along with the vague reference to the narrator’s fallen status, persists until the end. The victim in “Amontillado” closely resembles many of the high-status targets of Poe’s satires. But what is important about him in the context of “Black Cat” and the two other tales linked to it is that Poe gives him a name. Neither the old man in “Tell-Tale” nor the wife in “Black Cat” nor the victim in “The Imp of the Perverse” has a name. In fact, the only details given about this last character are that he had a “habit of reading in bed” (405) and that he had an estate large enough to tempt the narrator to murder so that he might inherit it. But there is another victim in these stories whom Poe did deign to give a name, and that is the black cat himself, Pluto.

            There remains, however, another major intertextual element to examine before considering the possible significance of the cat’s name, and that is “the spirit of PERVERSENESS” (350), as it is referred to in “Black Cat,” and The Imp of the Perverse, which gives the later story its title. “Imp” begins with a lengthy philosophical discussion on what the narrator calls the “overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake” (403). The narrator in “Black Cat” defines it as the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only” (350). Early in “Imp,” the narrator is at pains to distinguish between perverseness and “the Combativeness of Phrenology,” by asserting that while “Combativeness has for its essence the necessity of self-defense,” when perversity is in play “the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment prevails” (403). However, later in the story, the same narrator concedes that perversity is “occasionally known to operate in furtherance of good” (405). A plethora of examples from Poe’s own biography suggests themselves as illustrations of an impulse akin to combativeness but with an element of self-destructiveness. There is much of pride in Poe’s perversity, but more of defiance. “Imp” is not about a conflict with a superior, though, but rather a well planned and executed murder the culprit would have escaped all suspicion for had he not been overtaken by the mysterious impulse to confess. It’s important to note that perversity does not push the narrator to murder; it compels him to tell everyone he did it. And he states explicitly that the confession is prompted by perversity, not any attack of conscience. Is he really confessing, or is he taking credit, demanding recognition, boasting about his perfect crime?

            A rich drunkard named Fortunato, an old man with one staring eye, a man who likes to read in bed, and an affectionate cat named Pluto, all end up—along with one woman as collateral damage—murdered by unnamed narrators and, except for the reader, walled up with bricks or floorboards, but perversity is invoked to account for only one of these violent acts, that against the one-eyed cat. The “longing of the soul to vex itself,” however, clearly overtakes the narrator again at the end of “Black Cat” when “through the mere phrenzy of bravado” (355) he raps his cane against the wall concealing his wife’s body, boasting to the police investigating her disappearance about how solidly built it is. As in “Imp,” the narrator is betrayed, not by a guilty conscience, but by an inability to restrain from bragging about his deeds, either how well they were planned and executed or how well they were concealed. The pride of the murderer is prominent in “Tell-Tale” as well. Poe not only adheres to the convention in supernatural storytelling of addressing the readers’ supposition of the narrator’s madness but takes it to the next level; not only are the murderers not crazy, they are exceptionally competent and intelligent. “Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust [my head] in” to the old man’s room (317), the narrator of “Tell-Tale” boasts. Later, on the night of the murder, he says

Never before that night, had I felt the extent of my own powers—of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. (318)

The murder complete, he goes on to boast some more about “the wise precautions” he takes in hiding the body. “I… replaced the boards so cleverly,” he says, “so cunningly, that no human eye—not even his—could have detected any thing wrong” (319-20). In fact, except for “Black Cat,” all the stories in this nexus are really extended boasts. But what was it about that old man’s eye that provoked the narrator to kill him? Could it be the same thing that drove the narrator in the later tale to kill his cat?

Part 4

Defiance and Duplicity: Decoding Poe’s Attacks on Readers Part 2 of 4

Part 1.

            This chafing under authority manifested itself in Poe’s reviews of the more successful of contemporary writers as well. He once wrote, “The most ‘popular,’ the most ‘successful’ writers among us (for a brief period at least) are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere address, perseverance, effrontery—in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks” (quoted in Lepore 68). This formulation is the crux of Poe’s dilemma, as he was forced to balance his need to sell his work with his urge to demonstrate his genius. One of the ways he tried to do so was to criticize the dominant literary tradition of the day. In this endeavor too, he went to excess. His attacks on what were known as the New England Brahmins, Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, were legendary, especially those against William Wadsworth Longfellow, which he referred to as his “Little Longfellow War.” His reviews showed such a pronounced tendency toward vitriol that was nicknamed “tomahawk man” by his fellow reviewers (Thompson xxviii). At the same time, he routinely quarreled with the editors of the magazines who employed him and published these reviews because he insisted on “total authority” and “complete editorial control” (Thompson xxxii). His ultimate goal, which was never realized, was to publish his own magazine.

            Regan provides a fascinating look into how Poe treated an author he actually admired, and it provides a useful lesson into the type of games he liked to play with his readers. In his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, Poe claims that in the story “Howe’s Masquerade,” “we observe something which resembles a plagiarism—but which may be a very flattering coincidence of thought” (649). He then compares an excerpt from the story to one from his own “William Wilson,” and the supposed similarities are so tenuous as to leave readers suspecting that Poe is merely flattering himself. But that he is up to something more devious is evidenced by Poe’s contradicting statement that “Mr. Hawthorne is original at all points” (648, note the italics). If there remains any doubt of what Regan calls Poe’s duplicity, he points out that “Hawthorne wrote his tale at least a year before Poe wrote his” (284). The plagiary, it turns out—really more a case of inspiration than a copying of lines verbatim—was committed by Poe. In the May, 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine which featured the review, one of Poe’s stories, “The Mask of the Red Death. A Fantasy,” also appeared. Regan induces that Poe was leading attentive readers along a trail of clues. He writes:

And so the idea of a fatal red pestilence and the setting, a masquerade in a princely house in which a ruler and his aristocratic followers have elected a self-defensive claustration—these two most salient elements of Poe’s “Mask of the Red Death”—can both be found in a work of Hawthorne’s which we can say with certainty Poe had read very shortly before writing his 'Fantasy'.(286)

So it appears that Poe’s idea of acknowledging a literary debt entailed publicly accusing his inspiration of plagiarism—but leaving clues in the accusation that would lead careful investigators to the truth. The creator of the detective genre certainly enjoyed leaving this kind of trail.

            Poe did at times go after those in positions of power in straightforward and self-contained satirical stories. Indeed, Stephen Mooney, a critic who specializes in Poe’s comedy, points out defiance plays as a much of role in what Poe found funny in his stories as it did elsewhere in his life. Mooney writes that Poe’s humor “is directed toward the exposure of a society in which heroes and rulers are shown to be deluded or irresponsible and their subjects a dehumanized, sycophantic mass” (433). Mr. Blackwood and Signora Psyche Zenobia are a case in point, but there are also the admirer’s of “The Man That Was Used Up,” the revelers and the court in “Hop Frog,” and the asylum staff and its inmates in “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” All of these stories operate on the humor inherent in overturning an unjust or absurd hierarchy. Poe subtly poked fun at real political leaders of his day too, for instance, by giving the devil the features of Martin Van Buren in “The Devil in the Belfry” (Whipple 88).

            Most interesting, though, are the humorous attacks Poe concealed by weaving them as threads into otherwise serious tales. Clark Griffith, for example, finds in “Ligeia,” “an allegory of terror almost perfectly co-ordinated with the subtlest of allegorized jests” (17). One of the authorities Poe defies in the story is obviously death itself. Death and time are challenged in similar ways in many of his tales—including, farcically, in “A Predicament.” But Griffith suggests that the Lady Ligeia “symbolizes…the very incarnation of German idealism, German Transcendentalism provided with an allegorical form” (21). The other lady of the story, Rowena Trevanion, symbolizes English Romanticism “‘unspiritualized’ by German cant” (24). Here too Poe is making fun of the dominant literary traditions of his day. But, as Regan points out, Griffith discovered the nature of this “Gothic overplot with [a] satiric underside” (17) only when he used keys found in other stories published around the same time, “Siope” (or “Silence” as it was later renamed) and “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” with its overt references to Romanticism and Transcendentalism. But what Regan believes is most impressive about the subtle satire in “Ligeia” is that the “‘underside’ is of a remarkably deceptive kind, since failing to take account of it in no way damages the self-consistent ‘Gothic overplot’” (294). Poe does such an excellent job manipulating the genre beloved by the reading masses that the symbolic violence his tales perpetrate is seldom noticed. Such is the case with “The Black Cat,” in which that violence is directed at those reading masses themselves.

            Critic James W. Gargano sees in this story evidence that Poe, instead of betraying his own neuroses in his writing, very deliberately clues in readers to the unreliability of his narrators, insisting that a “close analysis of ‘The Black Cat’ must certainly exonerate Poe of the charge of merely sensational writing” (829). Gargano goes on to defend Poe against criticism like Bloom’s and Oates’s that his style was overwrought, which is “based, ultimately, on the untenable and often unanalyzed assumption that Poe and his narrator’s are identical literary twins and that he must be held responsible for all their wild or perfervid utterances” (824). Though Gargano is right that Poe is up to something deliberate with his bouts of breathless hysteria, he overlooks the many instances in which Poe encourages readers to look for him in his stories. For instance, William Wilson’s birthday is given as January 19th, Poe’s own birthday. The captain of the ship in “Ms. Found in a Bottle” is precisely the same height as the author and has the same eye color. And the protagonist of “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” has a name similar enough to Edgar Allan Poe’s to have caused some confusion regarding the fictional status of the tale when it was first published (Wilbur 808).

Part 3

Defiance and Duplicity: Decoding Poe’s Attacks on Readers Part 1 of 4

            Modern writers and critics are never quite sure what to make of Edgar Allan Poe. Aldous Huxley famously described Poe’s verse lines as the equivalent of “the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger,” and the popular critic Harold Bloom extends the indictment to Poe’s prose, writing “Poe's awful diction… seems to demand the decent masking of a competent French translation” (2). What accounts for the stories continuing impact, Bloom suggests, are “the psychological dynamics and mythic reverberations of his stories” (3). Joyce Carol Oates, who of all contemporary writers might be expected to show Poe some sympathy, seems to agree with Bloom, charging that Poe’s stories are “hampered by… writerly turgidity” but nonetheless work on readers’ minds through his expert use of “surreal dream-images” (91). What these critics fail to realize is that when Poe went to excess in his prose he was doing it quite deliberately. He liked to use his stories to play games with his readers, simultaneously courting them, so that he could make a living, and signaling to them—at least the brightest and most attentive of them—that his mind was too good for the genre he was writing in, his tastes too sophisticated.

            The obliviousness of critics like Bloom notwithstanding, most Poe scholars are well aware that his writing was often intended as a satire on popular works of his day that showed the same poor tastes and the same tendency toward excess which readers today mistake as his own failures of eloquence. Indeed, some scholars have detected satiric elements to what are usually taken as Poe’s most serious works in the Gothic Horror genre. Clark Griffith, for instance, sees in the story “Ligeia” evidence of a “satiric underside” to the “Gothic overplot” (17) which arrests the attention of most readers. And, as critic Robert Regan explains, “Poe…was capable of synchronizing a multi-faceted tale of terror with a literary satire,” and he was furthermore “surely… capable of making his satiric point apparent if he had chosen to” (294). To understand what it is Poe is satirizing—and to discover why his satire is often concealed—it is important to read each of his stories not just in the context of his other stories but, because he had a proclivity toward what Regan refers to as duplicity, of his life beyond his work as well. Even a cursory study of his biography reveals a pattern of self-destructive defiance reflective of an incapacity to tolerate being at the slightest disadvantage. Poe, poverty-stricken for most of his adult life, even went so far as to defy the very readers he depended on for his paltry livelihood, but he did so in a manner so clever most of them caught no hint of the sneer. In point of fact, he more than once managed to escape detection for expressions of outright contempt for his readers by encoding them within some of the very tales—“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado”—they found, and continue to find, most pleasing—and most horrifying.

            That Poe often wrote what were intended to be straightforward satires or comedies is clear in any comprehensive edition of his work. The story “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” for instance, not only quotes Cervantes, but probably owes its central conceit, a dunderheaded and ambitious writer seeking out the ridiculous, but lucrative, advice of a magazine editor, to the prologue of Part I of Don Quixote, in which the author struggles with the opening of his story until a friend comes along and advises him on how to embellish it (Levine 15). And Thomas Mabbott, a major Poe critic, has found letters in which the author describes a framing scheme for his early stories similar to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a group, The Folio Club—“a mere Junto of Dunderheadism,” he calls them in an introduction (595)—takes turns telling stories and then votes to award a prize to the best. Poe writes: “As soon as each tale is read—the other 16 members criticise it in turn—and their criticisms are intended as a burlesque upon criticism generally” (173). The tales themselves, Poe writes, “are of a bizarre and generally whimsical character” (173). Robert Regan takes this evidence of Poe’s comedic intentions a step further, pointing out that when readers responded to “parodies or imitations of the mannered styles of fiction of his day” by giving them “praise for virtues [they] never pretended to,” the author “seems to have decided to make the best of being misunderstood: if his audience would not laugh at his clownishness, he would laugh at theirs” (281).

            Poe was not opposed to writing stories and poems he knew would be appealing to a popular audience—he couldn’t afford to be. But, as in every other sphere of his life, Poe chafed under this dependence, and was eager to signal his contempt whenever he could. This is most explicitly demonstrated in his treatment of stories published in—or associated with—Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” The story features the fictional Signora Psyche Zenobia—known to her enemies as Suky Snobbs—seeking the advice of Mr. Blackwood, who at one point gives her some examples of real works in the style he’s prescribing. He first praises “The Dead Alive,” saying “You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin.” Then, of “Confessions of an Opium-eater,” he says

fine, very fine!—glorious imagination—deep philosophy—acute speculation—plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote that paper—but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper. (176)

            Of course, Poe himself would go on to write a story titled “The Premature Burial,” so his attitude toward this type of writing was more complicated than Juniper’s authorship would suggest. Indeed, the story Signora Psyche Zenobia writes in the manner advocated by Mr. Blackwood, “A Predicament,” or “The Scythe of Time” as it was originally titled, is not fundamentally different from the style in which Poe wrote his more serious tales. It seems, rather, to have resulted from a cranking up of the exaggeration dial until the burlesque that is elsewhere imperceptible to popular readers comes across as patently ridiculous. And this wasn’t the first time Poe lampooned the overblown prose and farfetched plots of what were called “sensation tales,” like those published in Blackwood’s; three years earlier, with “Berenice,” another tale of premature burial, he tried to mimic these same excesses, but no one, including Thomas White, the editor who published it, caught the joke.

            In his correspondence with White, Poe gives a sense of what he believed he was working with—and against—in the publishing world of the 1830’s and 40’s. White agreed to publish “Berenice,” in which the protagonist, in the throes of his obsession with a woman’s teeth, removes them from her corpse, only to discover she wasn’t really dead, even though he suspected it was in bad taste. Poe apparently agreed. “The subject is by far too horrible,” he writes, “and I confess that I hesitated in sending it you especially as a specimen of my capabilities” (597). He goes on to claim that he was prompted to write the story by a wager against his ability to compose one on such a horrible subject. Napier Wilt, a critic who considers the question of Poe’s attitude toward his tales, finds this claim “somewhat dubious” (102). But it seems such a bet would have been the very type of challenge to Poe’s genius he could not back down from. And Poe goes on: “The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution” (597). That admission of the superiority of others’ work is more dubious by far than that the story was conceived from a bet.

            Poe then explicates to White precisely how the pieces he refers to, which are responsible for the success of the magazines that publish them, handle their topics. The way he describes them provides a lens through which to view works of his beyond just the one he is defending. The public, he writes, likes works consisting in “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (597). He goes on to list several examples of stories that adhere to this formula, and Wilt attests that he could have made the list much longer: “Even a casual study of the early nineteenth-century English and American magazines yields hundreds of such tales” (103). So it seems that even as Poe was contemptuous of the writers of these articles—as well as the audiences who ensured their proliferation—he determined to write his own semi-serious stories in a similar vein, only to turn around some time later and poke fun at the style much less subtly in “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” He sums up his motivation later in the letter to White. “To be appreciated,” he writes, “one must be read” (597).

            It cannot be concluded, though, that Poe was a sellout who slavishly pandered to the blinkered sensibilities of the reading public—because he never acted slavish to anyone. He grew up the foster son of John Allan, a well-to-do Southern merchant. In the course of his upbringing he somehow, in G.R. Thompson’s words, came to “expect the life of the son of a Virginia gentleman—or, if not quite an aristocrat, the next best to that—the son of a prosperous merchant” (xxi). But by the time Poe was attending the University of Virginia, Allan was growing weary of underwriting the profligate Poe’s excesses, such as his habit of losing enormous sums at gambling tables, and cut him off. His foster mother tried to arrange a reconciliation but Poe was too proud to grovel. He did prevail upon Allan, though, years later to help finance his education at West Point. Unfortunately, he blew this too when he wrote to a creditor explaining that his foster father had not yet sent him the money he needed to pay off the debt, further suggesting that the reason for the delay was that “Mr. A. is not very often sober” (Thompson xxiii). The letter was then enclosed along with a demand for payment sent directly to said Mr. A. Rather than face the humiliation of being dismissed from West Point for being unable to pay his expenses, Poe decided to get himself kicked out by disobeying orders. There is even a story—possibly apocryphal—of the cadet showing up in formation naked (Thompson xxxiii).

Part 2

What to Leave Out: Minimalism and the Hemingway Mystique

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” features a man who is lamenting his lost opportunities to write a bunch of stories he’s been saving up in his mind as he lays wounded and dying from an injury he suffered while on safari in Africa. It turns out Hemingway himself once suffered an injury while on safari in Africa; but of course he survived to write about the ordeal. Several of his other stories likewise feature fictionalized versions of himself. In fact, there are very few works in the Hemingway oeuvre that aren’t at least obliquely about Hemingway.

The success of the famous “iceberg theory” of writing, which has the author refrain from explicit statements about important elements of the characters’ minds, histories, and motivations, probably relied in large part on readers’ suspicion that the stories they were reading were true. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained,

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

The prose style of this theorizing on prose style is markedly unlike Hemingway’s usual “short, declarative statements.” And it is remarkably revealing. It almost seems as though Hemingway is boasting about being able to get away with leaving out as many of the details as he does in his stories because he’s so familiar with the subjects of which he writes. And what exciting and fascinating subjects they are—wars, romances, travels, brushes with death, encounters with man-eating beasts. Yet readers coming to the stories with romantic visions of Hemingway’s adventures are quickly disappointed by the angst, insecurity, and fear of the actual Hemingway experience.

Stories like “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” unsettle us because there is a truth in them that not many people are given to exploring (even in America, land of “happily ever after,” marriages entail struggles for dominance). But much of the impact of Hemingway’s work comes from the mystique surrounding the man himself. Hemingway was a brand even before his influence had reached its zenith. So readers can’t really come to his work without letting their views about the author fill in the blanks he so expertly left empty. That’s probably why feelings about it tend to be so polarized.

If you take Hemingway’s celebrity out of the equation, though, you’re still left with a formidable proposition: fiction works not by detailing the protagonist’s innermost thoughts and finding clever metaphors for his or her feelings; rather the goal is to describe the scene in enough detail, to render the circumstances so thoroughly that the reader doesn’t need to be told how the character feels because the reader can imagine for him or herself what it would be like to inhabit a real-life version of the story. This proposition may have begun as far back as Proust, and having been taken in a completely new direction by Hemingway, reached something of an apotheosis in the minimalism of such authors as Raymond Carver. Of course, Carver’s more domestic dramas rely on a common stock of experience in place of the celebrity of the author, but the effect is of even greater revelation—or perhaps recognition is a better word.

Really, though, if you take this theory of storytelling to its logical endpoint you have films and movies, and you’ve lost the element that makes fiction writing unique—the space for interiority. It’s no coincidence that the best candidate for the Hemingway mantle today—at least in his most recent works—has had his two latest books adapted into films within a couple years of their publication. Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been able to rely on any public notion of his interchangeability with his characters; nor does he write about experiences he can count on his readers to recognize. Instead, he builds his stories up from the ground of popular genres we’re most familiar with from our lifetime love affair with cinema.

No Country for Old Men reads so much like Hemingway at points that you wonder if McCarthy took frequent breaks from the writing to dip into the icon’s complete short stories. At the same time, the novel reads so much like a script you wonder if the movie rights were sold before or after he began writing it.

If Hemingway could only write about things he’d actually experienced, and Carver can only write about experiences similar to those his readers have actually had, and McCarthy is dependent on our familiarity with popular genres, it seems the theory of omission or minimalism either runs up against a wall or gets stuck in an infinite regress. The possibility of discovery, the author going somewhere new and taking his readers along for the ride, recedes farther and farther into the distance. These limitations are real, of course, no matter what style you’re writing in; all writers must follow the injunction to write what they know—at least up to a point. I think the lesson to take from Hemingway and his followers is that the emotion inferred is often more poignant than the emotion described, but inference is only one of many tools in the writer’s toolbox.

Also read:

LIFE'S WHITE MACHINE: JAMES WOOD AND WHAT DOESN'T HAPPEN IN FICTION

Eric Harris: Antisocial Aggressor or Narcissistic Avenger?

Coincident with my writing a paper defending Gabriel Conroy in James Joyce’s story “The Dead” from charges of narcissism leveled by Lacanian critics, my then girlfriend was preparing a presentation on the Columbine shooter Eric Harris which had her trying to determine whether he would have better fit the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic or for Antisocial Personality Disorder. Everything about Harris screamed narcissist, but there was a deal-breaker for the diagnosis: people who hold themselves in astronomical esteem seem unlikely candidates for suicide, and Harris turned his gun on himself in culmination of his murder spree.

Clinical diagnoses are mere descriptive categorizations which don’t in any way explain behavior; at best, they may pave the way for explanations by delineating the phenomenon to be explained. Yet the nature of Harris’s thinking about himself has important implications for our understanding of other types of violence. Was he incapable of empathizing with others, unable to see and unwilling to treat them as feeling, sovereign beings, in keeping with an antisocial diagnosis? Or did he instead believe himself to be so superior to his peers that they simply didn’t merit sympathy or recognition, suggesting narcissism? His infamous journals suggest pretty unequivocally that the latter was the case. But again we must ask if a real narcissist would kill himself?

This seeming paradox was brought to my attention again this week as I was reading 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior (about which I will very likely be writing more here). Myth #33 is that “Low Self-Esteem Is a Major Cause of Psychological Problems” (162). The authors make use of the common misconception that the two boys responsible for the shootings were meek and shy and got constantly picked on until their anger boiled over into violence. (It turns out the boiling-over metaphor is wrong too, as explained under Myth #30: “It’s Better to Express Anger to Others than to Hold It in.”) The boys were indeed teased and taunted, but the experience didn’t seem to lower their view of themselves. “Instead,” the authors write, “Harris and Klebold’s high self-esteem may have led them to perceive the taunts of their classmates as threats to their inflated sense of self-worth, motivating them to seek revenge” (165).

Narcissists, they explain, “believe themselves deserving of special privileges” or entitlements. “When confronted with a challenge to their perceived worth, or what clinical psychologists term a ‘narcissistic injury,’ they’re liable to lash out at others” (165). We usually think of school shootings as random acts of violence, but maybe the Columbine massacre wasn’t exactly random. It may rather have been a natural response to perceived offenses—just one that went atrociously beyond the realm of what anyone would consider fair. If what Harris did on that day in April of 1999 was not an act of aggression but one of revenge, it may be useful to consider it in terms of costly punishment, a special instance of costly signaling.

The strength of a costly signal is commensurate with that cost, so Harris’s willingness both to kill and to die might have been his way of insisting that the offense he was punishing was deathly serious. What the authors of 50 Great Myths argue is that the perceived crime consisted of his classmates not properly recognizing and deferring to his superiority. Instead of contradicting the idea that Harris held himself in great esteem then, his readiness to die for the sake of his message demonstrates just how superior he thought he was—in his mind the punishment was justified by the offense, and how seriously he took the slights of his classmates can be seen as an index of how superior to them he thought he was. The greater the difference in relative worth between Harris and his schoolmates, the greater the injustice.

Perceived relative status plays a role in all punishments. Among two people of equal status, such factors as any uncertainty regarding guilt, mitigating circumstances surrounding the offense, and concern for making the punishment equal to the crime will enter into any consideration of just deserts. But the degree to which these factors are ignored can be used as an index for the size of the power differential between the two individuals—or at least to the perceived power differential. Someone who feels infinitely superior will be willing to dish out infinite punishment. Absent a truly horrendous crime, revenge is a narcissistic undertaking.

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SYMPATHIZING WITH PSYCHOS: WHY WE WANT TO SEE ALEX ESCAPE HIS FATE AS A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

And:

THE MENTAL ILLNESS ZODIAC: WHY THE DSM 5 WON'T BE ANYTHING BUT MORE PSEUDOSCIENCE

Getting Gabriel Wrong: Part 3 of 3

Part 1.

Part 2.

From a SMVA perspective, then, readers seek out signals of Gabriel’s propensity for altruism and cooperation, and, once they receive them, are compelled to volunteer affect on his behalf. In other words, they are anxious for the plot to unfold in a way that favors and vindicates him. According to Flesch, this dynamic is the basis of “narrative interest,” which he defines as “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). Having detected Gabriel’s “difficult-to-fake” signal of his genuine concern for the caretaker’s daughter, readers can be counted on to sympathize with him. Immediately after he insists that Lily accept a coin and leaves her presence, he begins brooding over whether to include the lines from Browning in his speech. Here readers become privy to the tension underlying his self-consciousness: “he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers” (179). His thoughts continue:

their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry (179).

Gabriel’s mother, through whom he is related to the hosts of the party, turns out to have “married T.J. Conroy of the Port and Docks” (179). In other words, “the brains carrier of the Morkan family” (186), as Aunt Kate calls Gabriel’s mother, married into money. Leonard contends that “the Browning quote is there to invite from [Gabriel’s] audience authorization for his viewing of himself as someone with refined tastes and a superior education” (460). But that Gabriel is more educated is not a boast he wants to convince everyone of; it is rather a fact he goes out of his way not to lord over them, as is the higher grade of culture his mother married into. Leonard also charges Gabriel with having “contempt for them as peers” (460), but if that were the case he would not bother himself about appearing “ridiculous” before them. The Lacanian is treating the reality Gabriel is trying to mitigate as a fantasy he is trying to propagate.

The predicament Gabriel faces that readers hope to see him through is that he really differs from the people at the party in important ways. His sense of not belonging is real, and yet he cares about them. To this day, anyone who has left a small town to go to college is faced with a similar dilemma whenever he or she returns home and realizes how vast the gulf is separating the educated from the uneducated. And, far from using his books as props for some delusion of grandeur, Gabriel genuinely loves them, so much so that when one arrives for him to review it is “almost more welcome than the paltry cheque” (188). It turns out that the Browning quote Leonard fails to credit him for not including in his speech came from one of these books he has reviewed. Gabriel originally applies the phrase “thought-tormented” to the “music” (192) of the Browning poem in his review. The phrase turns up again in his speech, but this time, in an act of creativity inspired by his confrontation with Miss Ivors, he has turned it into a charge against “a thought-tormented age… educated or hypereducated as it is,” which he also claims to fear is lacking in “humanity,” “hospitality,” and “kindly humour” (203)—this from the man who was mortified earlier lest the assembled audience “think that he was airing his superior education” (179). Rather than risk that verdict, Gabriel makes a complete concession to the sensibility of Miss Ivors, believing it to be more closely aligned with that of his audience than his own.

He is in this scene inhibiting his impulse to hold forth on the poetry he genuinely loves and the principles in which he genuinely believes because he recognizes that they will not only go unappreciated but will even be offensive to many in his audience. This is intelligence keeping passion in check, something Gabriel alone in the story is capable of. But this is also intelligence in the service of dishonesty; Gabriel is being disingenuous. His thoughts really are tormenting him throughout the story with greater self-consciousness. Lacanian critics may see this as a form of narcissism, but it is remarkable how reliably self-sacrificing Gabriel is. Indeed, the epiphany he experiences is that he is too self-sacrificing, a “pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians” (220). Hearing his wife Gretta tell the story of Michael Furey, the boy who braved the weather for her in a condition of ill-health and who died as a result, he recognizes a quality he himself lacks. What he finds so threatening and at the same time so admirable about Furey is his unchecked impulsivity, his passion untempered by intelligence. “Better pass boldly into that other world,” he thinks, “in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age” (223). Much like the eponymous Eveline in an earlier Dubliners story, Gabriel is at risk of being paralyzed by his duties to his family and to his culture.

That Gabriel is in a sense too altruistic does not imply that his epiphany is a repudiation of altruism; what Gabriel calls into question are the dishonesty his good nature leads him to and the provincialism that necessitates it. It is ironic that his realization is prompted by a former inhabitant of Galway, an Irish territory Miss Ivors had tried to persuade him to acquaint himself with earlier. But it must be noted that for Furey to be true to himself there meant he had to die. And yet there is a nostalgic note in the enigmatic line, written by an expatriate from Ireland now living on the continent: “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward” (223). Gretta is of course also from Galway, and when Gabriel tells her of Miss Ivors suggestion she responds, “I’d love to see Galway again” (191). When Kelley argues that Gabriel’s vision of snow falling all over Ireland symbolizes how “Mutuality replaces mastery” (206) in his consciousness, he is only half-wrong. Gabriel has felt horribly alone all night. He has even felt alone throughout his marriage; when Gretta falls asleep after telling him the story of Michael Furey, “He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife” (222). But he has learned Gretta is just like him in that she keeps her true thoughts and feelings to herself: “He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes” (223). Mutuality is not replacing mastery; it is replacing isolation.

The central premise of Joyce’s story, that Gabriel needs to escape the close-minded nationalism of his Irish culture, or at least find a way to be true to himself within it, simply fails if Gabriel is not a character worth saving. Though Flesch insists one of his goals in Comeuppance “is to assert the reconcilability of a Darwinian perspective, one that accepts evolutionary origins and constraints on human mental processing, with the best of European philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory” (207), it is difficult not to see the various Lacanian readings of “The Dead” as bestowing their views on the story rather than discovering them in it. In a bit of irony Lacan himself might have appreciated, it is the Lacanians who are the true narcissists, looking as they do into the story and seeing only their own principles reflected back at them. There is also an element of self-righteousness in their negative characterization of Gabriel, since naturally these critics are claiming to know better than to be so controlling and to put on such superior airs. But in imposing their self-consciously esoteric views they are doing a disservice to readers—and themselves—by making the story far less enjoyable.

Works Cited

Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Belknap,

2009. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Anniversary Ed. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

Flesch, William. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological

Components of Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York:

Penguin, 1996. 175-224. Print.

Kelley, James. “Mirrored Selves and Princely Failings: A Lacanian Approach to James Joyce’s

‘The Dead.’” In-Between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism 12.1-2 (2003):

201-09. Print.

Leonard, Gary. “Joyce and Lacan: ‘The Woman’ as a Symptom of ‘Masculinity’ in ‘The Dead.’”

James Joyce Quarterly 28.2 (1991): 451-72. Print.

Trujillo, Ivan E. “Perversion as the Jouissance of The Woman in ‘The Dead’: Joyce, Lacan and

Fucking the Other.” Other Voices 1.3 (1999): 1-11. Web. 30 Mar. 2010.

Wynn, Karen, J. Kiley Hamlin, and Paul Bloom. “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants.” Nature

450.22 (2007): 557-560. Web. 30 Mar. 2010.

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