Chapter 1: Neuroscience and Narrative Theory
1. For classic statements of the structuralist theory of narrative, see Barthes 1975, Todorov 1969, and Lotman 1990. Also see Phelan 2006, 286–91, for a lucid summary of the assumptions and history of models of narrative as a formal system.
2. As I show in this chapter, formalist models and modes of analysis still pervade Herman’s 2013 book Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind, even though he claims to have embraced enactivism and to have abandoned the structuralist assumptions of his earlier narratological work. This may reflect his attempt at “rapprochement,” but my critique of his project is meant to suggest that this compromise is inadequate and incoherent.
3. This opposition is a reprise of the debates between structuralism and its phenomenological and pragmatic opponents. See, for example, Ricoeur’s critique of the langue-parole distinction as static and not historical and interactive enough to account for the sentence-level construction of new meaning in his classic essay “Structure, Word, Event” (1968) as well as Merleau-Ponty’s anti-Saussurean insistence on bodily gesture as the source of our “natural power of expression” and his analysis of conventions as “the depository and the sedimentation of acts of speech” (2012 [1945], 187, 202) rather than transcendental structures.
4. Nadeau’s fascinating book provides a thorough and rigorous (although technically difficult) explanation of the neuroscientific case against universal grammar. See Changeaux 2012, 206–8, for a more concise and accessible explanation of why contemporary neuroscience has rejected the Chomksyan model of “mental organs” as “innate,” “determined genetically,” and “suited to a given species.” For comprehensive reviews of the neuroscientific findings that cast doubt on the claim that language is based on inborn, universal cognitive structures, see Evans and Levinson 2009 and Christiansen and Chater 2008. Nancy Easterlin (2012, 163–79) provides an insightful critique of structural linguistics and its literary applications from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective. Berwick and Chomsky (2016) have recently attempted to reconcile the assumption of an innate “language faculty” with contemporary neurobiology and evolutionary theory. The scientific community generally remains skeptical, however, for reasons outlined in reviews by cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans (2016, 46), who politely notes that their “position seems less reasonable today than it once did,” and by neuroscientist Elliot Murphy (2016, 8), who more pointedly criticizes their reliance “on outdated assumptions” about “how the brain actually operates (via oscillations and their various coupling operations)” and shows in detail that their assertions about the localization of linguistic operations do not fit the experimental evidence. Also see the highly critical review by the language columnist for the Economist (Greene 2016). For a favorable review, see Tattersall 2016.
5. See Ingarden 1973 (1931), 1973 (1937), Iser 1974, 1978, and Jauss 1982. For a brief survey of phenomenological theories of literature and their relation to the epistemological concepts that define this philosophical movement, see my article “Phenomenology” (2012, 378–82) in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (2012).
6. Ricoeur took up the problems of metaphor and narrative as he became convinced that phenomenology needed to take a “hermeneutic turn” in order to engage arguments about sexual desire, politics, and language that had contested the status of consciousness as the controlling center of meaning. Many theorists saw this dislocation of the cogito as a refutation of phenomenology, but Ricoeur regarded it as a productive, even necessary, challenge to reconsider and revise phenomenology’s theories of meaning creation (see Valdés 1991, Armstrong 2012). His analyses of metaphor, narrative, and the conflict of interpretations sought to extend and complicate the phenomenological account of being-in-the-world as paradoxically bound and free, located in a body, historical circumstances, and linguistic structures that simultaneously constrain meaning and enable semantic innovation. These existential paradoxes of embodied, situated meaning creation informed Ricoeur’s (1966) earliest reflections on “the voluntary and the involuntary,” and he returned to them in his late book Oneself as Another (1992). These concerns were, however, always implicit in his explorations of metaphor and narrative.
7. On the confusion between plot and story, see Chatman 1978, 19–20, and Brooks 1984, 12–13.
8. See Genette 1980, which devotes separate chapters to mood (161–211) and voice (212–62). As Jakob Lothe (2000, 41) observes, however, “in much narrative theory perspective has come to indicate both narrator and vision,” although, he argues, these are “two narrative agencies” that “actually supplement rather than duplicate each other.” My point is that the role of seeing-as in both agencies explains why each tends to shade into the other.
9. These are the opposing interpretations offered by Ian Watt (1979) and Albert Guerard (1958), two of the most famous interpreters of the novel. On ambiguity in Conrad, also see my Challenge of Bewilderment (1987).
10. See chapter 3 for a further analysis of the configurative processes of seeing-as that characterize metaphor. Also see the chapter “The Cognitive Powers of Metaphor” in my Conflicting Readings (1990, 67–88) and my critique of blending theory in How Literature Plays with the Brain (2013, 87–88). Easterlin (2012, 163–79) also provides a thorough and illuminating critique of blending along lines similar to mine.
11. See also Ricoeur’s classic essay “Structure, Word, Event” (1968) in which he argues for the importance of attending to the eventfulness of language—the enunciation of words in potentially ever-new combinations as unpredictable sentences deploy preexisting linguistic structures in innovative ways that in turn may transform those structures (as innovative metaphors and narratives can do). Ricoeur’s essays on language and metaphor exposed the problems of reification and reductionism in mid-twentieth-century structuralism, and his theory of narrative can similarly be used to correct these mistakes now as they manifest themselves in the formalist project of twenty-first-century postclassical narratology.
12. Other important second-generation theories that I analyze below include Karin Kukkonen’s (2014a, 2014b, 2016) Bayesian model of narrative as predictive processing and Elaine Auyoung’s (2013, 2018) analysis of representational immersion.
13. Monika Fludernik addresses the compatibility of her model with Ricoeur’s theory of narrative in Towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996, 22–24). Except for a brief dismissive comment on Iser’s theory of the imaginary (42–43; see Iser 1993), however, she otherwise seems unaware of the phenomenological tradition and the resources it offers for analyzing experientiality and narrativity. This is an unfortunate missed opportunity and an odd blindness given the historical connections between Freiburg, where she is based, and the careers of Husserl and Heidegger as well as the geographical proximity of this town in the Black Forest to Konstanz just seventy-five miles south on the Bodensee, where Iser and Jauss developed their theories of readerly reception.
14. Fludernik (1996, 31–35) credits Jonathan Culler (1975) as the source of her argument about the power of narratives to produce naturalization, which Culler in turn bases on the arguments of the Russian formalists about how conventions routinize and dull perception. On the relation between the neuroscience of habituation and Viktor Shklovsky’s (1965 [1917]) well-known aesthetic of defamiliarization, see Armstrong 2013, 48–53, 111–16.
15. For instructive analyses of Joyce’s word play in the Wake, see especially Attridge 1992, Norris 2004, and Derrida 1984.
16. Two of the foundational texts for the theory that cognition is embodied, enactive, and extended are Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991 and Clark 2011. Also see Noë 2009. Reflecting on the tension between these perspectives, Andy Clark (2008, 57) argues that “the true cognitive role of the body . . . is to act as a bridge enabling biological intelligence and the wider world to intermingle in the service of adaptive success.” Clark’s recent work on predictive processing (see 2016) acknowledges the importance of brain-based biological intelligence that his earlier work on the extended mind (see 2011) may seem to have relegated to the sidelines. See chapters 3 and 4 in this book for analyses of the intracortical, brain-based cognitive processes involved in the extended mind’s use of affordances.
Chapter 2: The Temporality of Narrative and the Decentered Brain
1. In a vacuum, electrical energy and light travel at the same velocity, but the speed of electricity carried by a wire will of course be less than this theoretical maximum. In ordinary electronic devices, this speed can be anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of the speed of light (70–90 percent in a copper wire). These rates are many times faster than the rates at which electro-chemical signals are propagated through axons in the brain (at most 150 meters per second in a well-myelinated axon).
2. See Lothe 2000, 54–62, for a lucid explanation of Genette’s temporal categories. On snares, equivocations, and other strategies for setting the reader’s curiosity in motion and postponing its satisfaction, see Roland Barthes’s (1974, 76) classic analysis in S / Z of what he calls the “hermeneutic code” and “the considerable labor the discourse must accomplish if it hopes to arrest the enigma, to keep it open” in defiance of the expectation that the truth will be revealed.
3. On music and time, see Koelsch 2012, Drake and Bertrand 2003, and Samson and Ehrlé 2003. On dance, see Hagendoorn 2004 and Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 2011. Theater, cinema, and even video games can also manipulate, organize, and reconfigure our sense of time because they are fundamentally narrative arts (see Bushnell 2016).
4. See Husserl 1964 [1928] and Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945], 432–57. For lucid explanations of Husserl’s theory of temporal horizons, see Thompson 2007, 312–59, and Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, 77–97. On the implications of these theories for reading, literature, and art, see Armstrong 2013, 91–130.
5. The phrase “We live forward, but we understand backward” originates with the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1938, 127) and is quoted by William James in Pragmatism (1978 [1908], 107). Also see Armstrong 2013, 91–130.
6. On the prism spectacle experiment, see Stratton 1897 and Snyder and Pronko 1952. This is, of course, a double reversal because the images on the retina are upside-down to begin with, and the spectacles reverse the brain’s habit of reading them as rightside up, a habit that then gets reestablished once the wearer becomes accustomed to this new distortion.
7. The phi phenomenon (so named after the angle phi that separates the dots in the experiment) was first studied by Max Wertheimer (1912) and refers to the apparent motion that we perceive between two static points that flash at particular intervals. Nelson Goodman then asked what would happen if the dots were different colors, and Paul Kolers and Michael von Grünau (1976) did the experiment on what became known as the “color phi” phenomenon (see Goodman 1978, 82–83, on his proposal and their experiment). Daniel Dennett (1991, 114–28) uses this phenomenon to support his multiple drafts model of consciousness, which describes consciousness not as a theater viewed by an observer but as an assemblage of “parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs” that undergo “continuous ‘editorial revision’ ” (111). This ongoing process of interpretation and revision is characterized by the temporal recursivity that I analyze in this section.
8. See Leys 2011, 452–63, for an insightful critique of the ways in which Massumi here and elsewhere misrepresents scientific experiments and then on the basis of those misrepresentations goes on to make extravagant, unwarranted metaphysical claims.
9. As the editors explain, Dickens’s source for this anecdote is a story in Tales of the Genii (1764) by James Ridley that “relates how the Sultan’s vizier builds a palace that is designed to cave in and crush a pair of evil enchanters who have seized the Sultan’s throne” (476).
10. Given his lifelong interest in freedom, limitation, and temporality, it is no accident that Ricoeur felt compelled to undertake a major study of narrative and time. Ricoeur began his career with an ambitious study of Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1966), and he returned to these existential questions in his late book Oneself as Another (1992). On the relation between narrative, freedom, and fate, see especially Morson 1994.
11. Shaun Gallagher (2005, 238–43) questions, however, whether motor control and free will are identical problems. “There is a distinction between fast, automatic reflex actions and slower, voluntary action,” he argues. “Free will cannot be squeezed into time-frames of 150–350 msecs” because it requires “conscious deliberation” over “an extended duration equivalent to a specious present” (238–39). Not all phenomenological thinkers equate freedom with conscious deliberation, however. For example, see Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945], 458–83), who argues that often “deliberation follows the decision” (460) that I find I have already made prereflectively when I look back and ask why I acted as I did, and my reflections then disclose an implicit choice in the original prereflective action that I only come to recognize after the fact. At precisely what temporal moment freedom begins is a question that defies definitive answer. But no matter what the answer might be, the fact that neurobiological time is asynchronous and not homogeneous is what makes possible not only the prospective and retrospective deliberations of voluntary action but also the steering of motor acts that we experience as agency.
12. For example, see the exchange that unfolded in Critical Inquiry after Frank attempted to answer the criticisms of spatial form Kermode makes in The Sense of an Ending (1967): Frank 1977, Kermode 1978, and Frank 1978. See Mitchell 1980 for an analysis of the aesthetic issues involved in this dispute. As Mitchell notes, however, the criticisms of spatial form were often political rather aesthetic: “The most polemical attacks [against Frank’s theory] have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with anti-historical and even fascist ideologies” (541), especially the views of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, a connection Kermode also makes in his 1978 essay. Frank replies that “it is really no longer permissible to identify the revolt against linear time in modern literature as a whole . . . with the repulsive social-political ideas of a few (or one [i.e., Ezra Pound]) of the Anglo-American writers of the post-World War I generation” (96), and he quotes in his defense the theorist of the avant-garde Renato Poggioli: “We must deny the hypothesis that the relation between avant-garde art (or art generally) and politics can be established a priori. Such a connection can only be determined a posterori, from the viewpoint of the avant-garde’s own political opinions and convictions” (quoted in Frank 1977, 101). The disruption and foregrounding of the temporal processes of meaning making brought about by spatial form can serve a variety of epistemological, aesthetic, and social purposes. To lay bare how time is working in the construction of meaning leaves open how this knowledge will be used, and its political consequences are not predetermined. See chapter 4 for a further analysis of what neuroscience can (and cannot) tell us about the social powers of literature.
13. This process of temporal framing should not be confused with the frames of first-generation cognitive narratology. The temporal parsing of phenomena into ever-shifting windows of integration is not the same as the fixed, static “mental models” or “cognitive schemata” of structuralist narratology. Unlike cognitive frames that encode rules for interpreting typical situations, the perceptual framing that Varela describes refers to configurative processes of seeing-as that organize cognition in a reciprocal, recursive manner through shifting, mutually formative part-whole relationships. Temporal windows of integration are aspects of the activity of cognitive configuration—of how binding occurs at different temporal levels—and not reified, rule-governed cognitive structures.
14. The best-known instance of such selective memory loss is the case of a patient referred to in the neuroscience literature as H. M. (later identified as Henry Molaison), whose hippocampus was surgically removed in an attempt to relieve his epileptic seizures. After the surgery, as Eric Kandel (2006, 127–33) explains, “H. M. remained the same intelligent, kind, and amusing man he had always been, but he was unable to convert any new memories into permanent memory. . . . [H]e had perfectly good short-term memory, lasting for minutes,” and he retained “implicit (or procedural) memory” for various habitual, embodied abilities. For example, he could learn new skills, like “tracing the outline of a star,” and he “retained what he had learned through practice—even though he had no recollection of the task.” What he had lost was the ability to form new explicit memories of people, events, or experiences, a process of consolidation that passes through the hippocampus. For a riveting account of this case, see Dittrich 2016.
15. An interesting attempt to overcome this limitation is Uri Hasson’s method of intersubject correlation analysis (ISC) that compares the time course of fMRI images of specific brain regions of different subjects in response to the same stimulus. See Hasson et al. 2004 for an explanation of the method and Hasson et al. 2008 for an ISC analysis of how viewers respond to different films. See Armstrong 2013, 5, for an evaluation of these findings. For a detailed survey of the various technologies for studying the brain and their limitations, see “The Tools: Imaging the Living Brain” in Baars and Gage 2010, 95–125. Also see chapter 4 in this book on other recent efforts to develop methods and technologies for analyzing the neurobiological processes underlying collaborative interactions.
Chapter 3: Action, Embodied Cognition, and the As-If of Narrative Figuration
1. See the analysis in chapter 1 of the dispute between first- and second-generation cognitive literary theorists. Giving primacy to embodied action over the schemes, frames, and preference rules of traditional cognitive narratology, proponents of enactive narratology eschew the taxonomies of structuralist theory and instead explore the various ways in which stories draw on and set in motion embodied processes of cognition. Important examples include Bolens 2012, Caracciolo 2014, and Kukkonen 2017. Also see the analysis below of work by Kuzmičová 2012, Cave 2016, and Auyoung 2018.
2. As Jakob Lothe (2000, 77) observes, the relation between action and character in Aristotle’s Poetics is more complex and contradictory than this oft-quoted pronouncement suggests: “Is it right to make characters subordinate to those fictional events which precisely they have initiated and constituted? . . . The problem is already apparent in Aristotle, for although he ranks the action above the characters, several of the key terms in his Poetics (such as ‘reversal and recognition’ . . .) are closely related to the concept of character.” E. M. Forster (1927, 126) also famously disputes the claim that action trumps character: “We know better. We believe that happiness and misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access.” Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (2006 [1966], 236) note that Forster’s claim “is very much the assertion of a modern, mimetically oriented novelist.” How fictional character is produced and perceived is a complicated question that I take up in the next chapter’s analysis of narrative and the problem of other minds.
3. On the neuroscience of habituation, see Eric Kandel’s (2006, 198–220) discussion of his well-known experiments on the sea slug (also see Noë 2009, 99–128). On the implications of these experiments for aesthetic experience, see Armstrong 2013, 111–16.
4. Whether intentions are intrinsic to actions is one of the main objections to mirror neuron theory raised by Hickok (2009, 2014) and other skeptics like Patricia Churchland (2011), who offers the example of the ambiguity of raising one’s hand. I have more to say about this controversy in my analysis of grounded versus ungrounded cognition. See also my evaluation of the mirror neuron evidence in How Literature Plays with the Brain (2013, 139–42).
5. This is not, however, the linear and mechanical process that the notion of preference rules implies (in set of conditions C, prefer to see A as B). See Jahn 1997, 2005, and my critique of structuralist cognitive narratology in chapter 1. As Heidegger explains, the fore-structure of understanding is a recursive, to-and-fro process, manifested in how we perpetually shift back and forth between our expectations and our explications of possibilities they project; see the chapter titled “Understanding and Interpretation” [Verstehen und Auslegung] in Being and Time (1962 [1927], 188–95).
6. Fictionality may take various historical shapes, but it is wrong to claim that it was invented by any particular genre or cultural form, as Catherine Gallagher (2006, 337) notoriously does in asserting that the eighteenth-century novel “discovered fiction.” Some of the characteristics of eighteenth-century life that, in her view, gave rise to “the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction”—the “affective speculation,” for example, of women envisioning potential marriage partners or the economic imaginings of entrepreneurs “calculating risks” in the marketplace (346–47)—go back to fundamental characteristics of our species as exploratory, hypothesis-generating animals that have a long evolutionary history (see Clark 2016). In contrast to Gallagher, Iser finds in the pastoral poetry of much earlier periods a “paradigm of literary fictionality” (1993, 22–86) in its characteristic doubling of worlds that exemplifies the generative capacity of the as if (his primary examples are Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser). Provisionality is an inherent characteristic of action and perception, and it lends itself to the playful transformations of what Iser calls “the fictive and the imaginary,” which in turn can give rise to various historical forms of fictionality, but none of these versions of the as if deserves to be privileged over any other.
7. On the role of Broca’s area in organizing events and comprehending sequences in action-perception circuits, also see Saygin et al. 2004, Fadiga et al. 2009, Berthoz and Petit 2008, 53, and Jeannerod 2006, 163–64.
8. See Terence Cave’s similar analysis of inference in cognition and reading based on the relevance theory of Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber (2012) in his important book Thinking with Literature (2016). See my analysis below of Cave’s theory of literary affordances. Also see Clark (2016) for the Bayesian model of cognition as probabilistic prediction on which Kukkonen 2016 draws. On the role of hypotheses and presuppositions in literary interpretation, also see my Conflicting Readings (1990).
9. See the analysis in chapter 2 of the futurity of emotions in what Jenefer Robinson calls “affective appraisals.”
10. The mirror neuron literature is vast. For a summary of the foundational experiments and the controversy surrounding them, see Armstrong 2013, 137–42. Recent accounts of the state of research are provided by Ferrari and Rizzolati 2014 and Rizzolati and Fogassi 2014. Thorough explanations of the Parma group’s findings are provided by Rizzolati and Sinigaglia 2008 and Iacoboni 2008. For skeptical analyses see Hickok (2008, 2014), Churchland (2011), and Caramazza et al. (2014).
11. Roel Willems and Daniel Casasanto likewise note that “it remains an open question whether people can understand words referring to actions they have never performed as completely as they understand words for actions they have performed themselves”; “the way people act in the world influences their semantic representations,” but “people can also understand language about actions they have never performed.” As they observe, “This creates a potential tension between embodiment and abstraction” (2011, 3).
12. Localization dies hard, however. For example, see Semir Zeki’s attempt (2011, 2012) to identify the region of the brain that is responsible for beauty in music and the visual arts. See Armstrong 2013, 1–25, and chapter 4 for a critique of this approach.
13. As Clare Pettitt (2016, 143) notes, this “awkward pagoda” is “the most famous of all of James’s late metaphors.” She interestingly characterizes Jamesian metaphor as “a sophisticated model of embodied knowledge” that “suggests that the roots of our abstract world lie deep in physical practice” (142). The classic criticism of this figure comes from F. R. Leavis (1948). Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s chapter titled “The Imagination of Metaphor” (1976, 37–63) offers a still unsurpassed analysis of the cognitive play of Jamesian figuration. Also see my more detailed interpretation of this passage in The Challenge of Bewilderment (1987, 59–60).
14. For an explanation of Joyce’s use of siglas, see Finn Fordham’s (2012) informative introduction to Finnegans Wake. The 1929 recording of Joyce reading the opening lines of the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter is available in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/JamesJoyceReadsannaLiviaPlurabelleFromFinnegansWake1929) and on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8kFqiv8Vww).
15. Caroline Levine (2015, 9) gets this definition slightly but importantly wrong in her influential argument about the politics of form: “With affordances, then, we can begin to grasp the constraints on form that are imposed by materiality itself.” This reified, objectivist conception of materiality is precisely what Gibson opposes. As I explain in more detail in what follows, the constraints characterizing an affordance are a matter of the reciprocal relations between the user’s dispositions and the potentialities opened up by the interaction of these with the environment (Gibson’s is an ecological theory of perception). They are not determined in advance or “imposed by materiality itself.” Levine’s impersonal, materialist conception of form ignores how (as a Gibsonian analysis would emphasize) the affordances of a social or literary form depend on the uses to which we put them. As Lambros Malafouris (2013, 18) explains, “In the human engagement with the material world there are no fixed attributes of agent entities and patient entities and no clean ontological separations between them; rather, there is a constitutive intertwining between intentionality and affordance.” Affordances are as much immaterial as they are material because they are potentialities that are undefined until they are engaged by a particular organism, an agent whose perception of the possible actions available in an environment depends as much on its cognitive equipment as on what is “there” in the world. Affordances are thus futural and horizonal, depending for their potentialities on reciprocal interactions with users that are unpredictable, and this openness to variation and innovation cannot be accounted for by an impersonal notion of form as materiality. Their immateriality also allows affordances to have an aesthetic dimension, a playful as-if quality that a purely materialist theory is bound to overlook (as is the case with the peculiar neglect of the aesthetic in Levine’s theory of form). Malafouris’s favorite example is the unpredictable play of the potter’s wheel, where “the being of the potter is co-dependent and interweaved with the becoming of the clay” (20).
16. James Phelan provides an especially insightful analysis of this complex issue in his fascinating chapter “Somebody Telling Somebody Else: Audiences and Probable Impossibilities” (2017, 30–59). As he explains, “Probable deviations are not one-off or anomalous phenomena but rather instructive examples that indicate how tellers frequently rely on the unfolding of readerly dynamics in their construction of textual dynamics” (43). His account of how readerly and textual dynamics interact in instances of “plausible violations of probability” (59) is consistent with the analysis I offer here of how the various modalities of action that intertwine in a narrative play with the reader’s probability predictions.
17. Here is the entire passage Kukkonen cites. The protagonist Ferdinand “has just had a brush with death,” Kukkonen explains, “and escapes with a potentially treacherous landlady as his guide to the next town and safety”: “Common fear was a comfortable sensation to what he felt in this excursion. The first steps he had taken for his preservation, were the effects of mere instinct, while his faculties were extinguished or suppressed by despair; but, now as his reflection began to recur, he was haunted by the most intolerable apprehensions. Every whisper of the wind through the thickets, was swelled into the hoarse menaces of murder, the shaking of the boughs was construed into the brandishing of poignards, and every shadow of a tree, became the apparition of a ruffian eager for blood. In short, at each of these occurrences, he felt what was infinitely more tormenting than the stab of a real dagger; and at every fresh filip of his fear, he acted as remembrancer to his conductress, in a new volley of imprecations, importing that her life was absolutely connected with his opinion of his own safety” (quoted in 2014b, 368).
Chapter 4: Neuroscience and the Social Powers of Narrative
1. This doubling is characteristic of all stories, not only those that portray psychological interiority. Regardless of their subject matter, stories double my world with another world as the patterns of intentionality that characterize my habits of understanding interact with the different configurative patterns of the narrative. In some realistic fictions that represent the psychological lives of characters, this doubling may connect the reader to another’s inner thoughts and feelings, although this of course is not something all stories try to do.
2. Frith cites Pronin, Berger, and Molouki 2007 to support his claim that we more easily identify causes of behavior in others than ourselves. This study of the so-called introspection illusion documented a perhaps unsurprising asymmetry in conformity assessments—that is, a tendency to judge others as more conformist than we are.
3. Cohn calls free indirect discourse “narrated monologue,” an oxymoronic term whose contradiction (a first-person monologue voiced in third-person narration) reflects this ambiguity. She distinguishes this form in turn from “quoted monologue” (defined as “a character’s mental discourse”) and “psycho-narration” (“the narrator’s discourse about a character’s consciousness”) (see 1978, 14). The narratological literature on free indirect discourse is immense. Central to its many debates is Gérard Genette’s problematic distinction (1980, 161–262) between voice and focalization (or “mood,” in his vocabulary)—“who says” versus “who sees”—two seemingly different states of affairs from a narratological standpoint that are blended indistinguishably in free indirect discourse. See Walsh 2010 for an insightful summary and analysis of this controversy.
4. See the analysis of the mirror neuron controversy in chapter 3 and also in Armstrong 2013, 136–42. See Iacoboni 2008 and Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008 on the evidence in favor of the theory and Hickok 2014 on the reasons for skepticism. For recent reports of the state of the research by proponents of the theory, see Ferrari and Rizzolatti 2014 and Rizzolatti and Fogassi 2014.
5. The work of popular fiction referred to here is the Harry Potter series, which has been shown to enhance performance on some measures of theory of mind and empathy (see Vezzali et al. 2015). On the effects of romance novels versus domestic fiction and science fiction/fantasy, see Fong, Mullin, and Mar 2013. This study correlated performance on an interpersonal sensitivity task with respondents’ familiarity with various literary genres as indicated by their answers to an author recognition test, but the article reporting their results unfortunately does not specify which authors were included in each category. The distinction between romance and science fiction/fantasy seems relatively straightforward but the boundary between romance and domestic fiction much less so.
6. See James Phelan’s thoughtful struggle with the ethical dilemmas posed by this novel (2005, 98–131). “Nabokov is doing something extraordinary, however distasteful,” he argues: “Occupying the perspective of a pedophile, asking us to take that perspective seriously, and, indeed, . . . asking us, at least to some extent, to sympathize with him” (130). Phelan attempts to give Nabokov every benefit of the doubt (more than I find myself able to do), but he finally concludes that “because the attention Nabokov and the authorial audience give to Humbert’s perspective comes at the expense of Dolores’s, Nabokov’s very construction of the novel mirrors Humbert’s dominance at the level of action” (130–31). Phelan is torn about how to evaluate the novel because he believes that priority should be granted to “the authorial audience,” which he regards as a perspective inscribed in the text, yet he confesses that “as flesh-and-blood reader, I find that perspective to have significant strengths and problems” (130). The “authorial audience” is not an independent, objective state of affairs, however, but a doubled, intersubjective structure that is produced over the history of reception by the different engagements of “flesh and blood readers” with Nabokov’s text, and the disturbing dissonances between me and not me generated across this history are part of this work’s heteronomous existence (see chapter 2). No author can understand in advance how she will be understood in the future. As Gadamer (1993 [1960], 296–97) points out, “Not just occasionally, but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. . . . It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all” (see Armstrong 2011). There is no reason to privilege either pole in the author-audience relationship—no reason to defer to the “authorial audience”—because their interaction is how a text lives and is passed on. The ethical dilemmas posed by the acts of identification Humbert’s narration invites are integral to this interaction, and the risk Nabokov runs is that readers (like me) may not be willing to play along with him (as Phelan generously tries to do) because the cruelty and disregard with which Dolores is treated interfere irreparably with the text’s call for our participation. As Phelan rightly concludes, “The author who created this book is someone to be admired but also someone to be wary of” (131). Different readers will come to different conclusions about whether admiration or wariness is more in order, but in either case these dilemmas are vivid proof that simulation is an inadequate model for the mismatches that may occur between the reader’s appraisals and those dramatized in a text.
7. See the chart on page 101 of this fascinating study for a detailed breakdown of Alderson-Day, Bernini, and Fernyhough’s results. For example, when asked “Do you ever hear characters’ voices when you are reading?” the responses were “Never 166 (11%), Very occasionally 157 (10%), Some of the time 446 (28%), Most of the time 468 (30%), All of the time 329 (21%).” The question “How vivid are characters’ voices when you read?” elicited these responses: “No voices present 125 (8.0%), Vaguely present 307 (19.6%), Voices with some vivid qualities 555 (35.4%), Voices with lots of vivid qualities 363 (23.2%), As vivid as hearing an actual person 216 (13.8%).”
8. On the Pamela controversy, see Keymer 2001, and on Fielding’s critique of Richardson, see Battestin 1961.
9. See Martin Hoffman’s authoritative Empathy and Moral Development (2000) for a nuanced analysis of the contingencies and complications that characterize the path from fellow feeling to compassion and moral altruism.
10. Hoffman (2000, 297) cautions, however, against exaggerating the dangers of in-group bias: “There is nothing inherently wrong with bias in favor of family and friends. . . . In-group empathic bias is normal and acceptable as long as it allows people to help strangers as well.” He cites research demonstrating that “at least in America, bystanders are prone to help strangers”—although, he notes, “to a lesser degree than family and friends.”
11. See Konvalinka and Roepstorff 2012 for a useful analysis of the technical difficulties of performing EEG and fMRI studies of multiple-brain interactions and a review of the innovative procedures neuroscientists have employed to attempt to overcome them. Advances in portable EEG technology have facilitated such so-called hyperscanning studies, as has the recent development of NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy), which measures changes in blood flow through detectors on the scalp. The hyperscanning movement’s ultimate goal, still a long way off (if attainable at all), is something approximating what Nobel laureate David Hubel once described when he was asked about the brain-scanning technology he would like to have available in an ideal world (2011), which he said was a cap fitted onto the skull of a mobile subject that could measure single-cell neuronal activity at all levels of the brain. Hubel had in mind only a single brain. For hyperscanning studies of collaboration, a group of subjects would need to be fitted out with such caps and the measurements taken from them would then have to be calibrated.
12. Whether this kind of reciprocity challenges Tomasello’s claims for the uniqueness of the human ability to collaborate is an interesting question. For explorations of animal-animal and animal-human cooperative activity, see Prum 2013 and Weil 2012. See Tomasello 2014 for an analysis of the differences between human collaboration and the sorts of cooperative behavior observable in apes. Given how much we share with other species because of our evolutionary histories, it would be strange if there were no continuities across the animal-human divide, but Tomasello also makes a compelling case that differences in the capacity for collaboration (“we intentionality”) have made possible kinds of cultural learning and sharing among humans that are less in evidence, if at all, among other species.
13. See, for example, Clark’s 2016 research on “predictive processing” and the top-down hypothesis-generating capacities of the brain, which recognizes the importance of brain-based cognitive processes inside the head.
14. See chapter 1 on the error of referring to our processes of configurative seeing-as by using the terminology of “schemas, scripts, and preference rules” that Bracher employs.
15. An example of how this boundary can shift is Hurricane Maria that struck Puerto Rico on 16 September 2017, which at first was a misfortune that caused great suffering to the island’s residents but could not be blamed on any particular individual’s or government agency’s malfeasance. This misfortune then resulted in injustice when the federal government’s relief efforts lagged behind the response to similar natural disasters in Florida and Texas. The first days without electrical power on Puerto Rico were unfortunate but not necessarily unfair; the fact that residents months later were still without electricity, however, could rightly be considered an injustice.
16. For a lucid explanation of these concepts see Phelan 2018. The lively discussion that this target essay provoked provides an excellent overview of the current state of the debate about these much-discussed distinctions (see especially the responses by Alber, Lothe, and Prince).
17. As one recent study (Parkes 2011, ix) observes, “Literary impressionism is usually described as a set of stylistic and formal strategies designed to heighten our sense of individual perceptual experience,” and the term “impression,” although variously defined, “signifies the mark of sensory experience on human consciousness.” On the variety of novelists who have been characterized as impressionist, see Kronegger (1973) and Matz (2001). For more on the epistemological implications of the narrative experiments of James, Conrad, and Ford that I analyze here, see my Challenge of Bewilderment (1987).
18. This is the key point that David Herman misunderstands when he claims that modernist writers all share a commitment to an “ecologically valid,” anti-Cartesian model of embodied, enactive cognition (see 2011, 243–72). In his eagerness to defend Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence, and other modern novelists against the charge that they are guilty of the cognitive fallacy of splitting mind and body by turning the novel inward, Herman homogenizes their epistemologies—they do not all agree, after all, on what it is like to be conscious—even as he overlooks the historical specificity of any representation of consciousness. The different versions of conscious life displayed in the cognitive archive should not be evaluated according to their epistemological validity but rather should be appreciated for their distinctive deployment of the as of the as if in disclosing particular aspects of cognitive life (and in the process concealing, disguising, and possibly distorting others). Even if the modernists were all Cartesianist, that would not be a bad thing but instead a sign of their cultural and historical particularity (it would perhaps be more accurate to say that different modern writers vary in their distance from and proximity to this outlook, with Pater, Proust, and Beckett closest and Lawrence and Joyce farthest away). The representational styles in the archive are not teleological stages in a movement toward the “truth” of twenty-first-century cognitive science but evidence of our biocultural diversity, which is characterized by shifting and variable combinations of cognitive universals and historical, cultural differences.
19. Alva Noë makes a similar argument (2015) that works of art are “strange tools” that lay bare the patterns of organization through which we experience the world in order to make possible their reorganization.
Epilogue
1. Among others, see Bernini 2018, Bolens 2012, Caracciolo 2014, Gosetti-Ferencei 2018, Kuzmičová 2012, Park 2012, 2018, and Troscianko 2014.