04 INSIDE THE MIND: PAUL ARMSTRONG
Paul B Armstrong lecturing on neuroscience and narrative, Oslo, 2011.
Paul Armstrong is a Professor of English and former Dean of the College at Brown University, as well as a member of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Prior to this, he was Dean of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Stony Brook and the humanities dean at the University of Oregon. Armstrong has written multiple books including The Phenomenology of Henry James (1983), Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (1990) and Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (2005).
Here we explore the field of Cognitive Literary Studies using two of Armstrong’s fascinating books: How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Armstrong, 2013) and his more recent Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (Armstrong, 2020). The discussion delves into the differences between taxonomic and phenomenological literary theories as well as facets of cognition such as perception and sense of self as they relate to reading and literature. Let us consider how a neuro-phenomenological approach to literary studies can facilitate our understanding of the interrelation between humans and literature.
Dwaynica Greaves (DG): You conduct research in the field of cognitive literary studies—could you share your journey to the field and why have you chosen the cognitive approach for exploring literature?
Paul Armstrong (PA): When I was in graduate school back in the 1970s, the dominant models in literary studies were formalist. They looked at the literary work of art as a self-contained, self-referential linguistic structure separate from the author or the reader. These methods left out things that it seemed to me were essential to how literature matters in our personal lives and in the social world. I was looking for a way to think about literature that was connected to the sources in experience that it arises from (the world of the author) and to our experiences as readers (our personal and social worlds). I found that kind of theory in phenomenology. This is a philosophical movement devoted to describing rigorously and in detail the lived experience of consciousness, associated with philosophical figures like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and also with the American psychologist William James. Phenomenological literary theories view a work of art as an interaction between the acts of authorial consciousness that give rise to the work and the consciousness of the reader who brings these acts to life again.
I wrote several books on phenomenology and literature, focusing on novelists who are particularly interested in consciousness like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and I also wrote about a classic problem in literary theory about which phenomenology has much to say—namely, why there can be multiple, not necessarily compatible interpretations of a novel or a poem that are nevertheless equally valid. Why can there be conflicting readings of a text, and what tests do they pass that an incorrect interpretation doesn’t?
So those were cognitive interests I had before I became a dean and began interacting with neuroscientists and discovered that they were interested in many of the same things I was. When I was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, the departments of neurobiology and psychology both reported to me and routinely approached me with requests for matching funds for grants or with proposals for faculty positions. I always asked to have the science explained to me, and so I got a personalized, first-rate education in cognitive science from some of the best neuroscientists and experimental psychologists in the world.
In these conversations I frequently saw parallels between how phenomenology understands consciousness and how neuroscience understands the brain. For both neuroscience and phenomenology, the mind is not simply a mirror to the world but a constructive predictive processor. I didn’t have time as an administrator to explore what these parallels meant for aesthetic issues—how in reading, for example, we bring a fictional world to life by filling in gaps and building patterns—but as soon as my service as a dean was over, I had plenty of material to write about.
DG: I find your journey inspiring as it shows how questions can lead you towards specific fields you don’t expect to encounter because that’s where the answer lies. Your breadth of knowledge is evident in two of your books that I will be focusing on: Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative and How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. What inspired you to write these books?
PA: I wrote How Literature Plays with the Brain to explore how phenomenological theories about consciousness, reading, and interpretation are related to many fundamental ideas in neuroscience. The bridge between these fields is provided by neuro-phenomenology, especially the path-breaking work of Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela and later explorations by neuro-philosophers Evan Thompson, Shaun Gallagher, and Alva Noë. Recognising that we don’t have a solution to the so-called ‘hard problem’ of how consciousness emerges from neuronal activity, the neuro-phenomenologists respond to this dilemma by exploring the correlations between these domains without trying to explain causation. Correlations between what neurons are doing and what we are experiencing can be very illuminating to researchers working on both sides of the gap between those domains, even if we don’t at least for now have a good explanation of how consciousness emerges from neuronal activity.
I try to show in this book how correlations between lived experience and neurobiological processes offer insights into reading, literature, and art. What are the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experiences like the classical beauty of symmetrical forms, for example, or conversely, what explains the power of dissonant avant-garde experiments and how are they different from ugliness or noise? How do both harmonious and dissonant forms play with fundamental cognitive processes? Art provides us with patterns we need to find our way in the world, but experiences of surprise and disruption that are also characteristic of aesthetic experience keep us flexible and combat the tendency of patterns to become habitual and rigidify. Those are some of the issues I explore in How Literature Plays with the Brain—and ‘play’ is the key concept, both aesthetically and cognitively, because I show that literature plays with our cognitive capacities and keeps them alert and lively.
Throughout my career, I've also been interested in novels and narratives. Stories and the Brain takes the cognitive theories about play and the building and breaking of patterns from How Literature Plays with the Brain and asks how they apply to how stories invoke and reconfigure our customary patterns for making sense of experience. Stories are a major way in which we learn about how the world is patterned, but stories take up those patterns and experiment with them, reconfiguring them in surprising ways and subjecting them to the twists and turns that make up a good plot. We expect to be surprised by a good story, and that’s one of the ways stories help keep us cognitively flexible, testing our patterns for making sense, exposing their blind spots and giving us new ways of configuring the world. Stories and the Brain explores a more specialized topic than How Literature Plays with the Brain, but similar issues are central to both books because play with pattern is a pervasive feature of literature, as it is a central feature of our cognitive lives.
Cover of How Literature Plays with the Brain, 2013. Photo by Julie Burris © Julie Burris
Cover of Stories and the Brain, 2020. Photo by Jennifer Corr Paulson © Jennifer Corr Paulson.
DG: You mention your interest in aesthetic issues such as harmony and dissonance. Could you tell us more about that and how it feeds into both books?
PA: I regularly teach a course on the history of criticism from Plato to postmodernism, and one of its themes is the perennial opposition between theories of art that emphasize symmetry, balance, and rule-governed order and theories that find value in breaking the rules and disrupting established patterns. A similar opposition also divides phenomenological theories of art, where Roman Ingarden describes a literary work as ‘a polyphonic harmony of value qualities’, but in contrast Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss argue that art differs from entertainment and kitsch by disrupting conventions rather than reinforcing them. Not surprisingly, neuroscientists who have studied visual art repeat this opposition, with Jean-Pierre Changeux stressing classical symmetry and balance, but V. S. Ramachandran calling attention to how art, like caricature, distorts reality. Everywhere you turn, harmony and dissonance reappear as fundamental features of art and aesthetic experience.
This is not entirely surprising once you realize that the opposition between harmony and dissonance in aesthetics is correlated to a basic paradox of mental functioning. On the one hand, the brain needs constancy. It needs patterns or models that will predict in a relatively reliable way how sensory inputs are going to combine from one moment to the next. And so the brain builds up habits as repeated experiences reinforce our models for configuring the world. As Donald Hebb memorably put it, neurons that fire together, wire together. Constancy reinforces itself, but the danger here is that you may get stuck. Our cognitive habits can rigidify and become traps that limit what we can recognize and respond to. The brain needs not only constancy but also flexibility, openness to change, and the ability to adapt to new, unforeseen situations. Literature is well designed to help us with these challenges and to negotiate our contradictory needs for constancy and flexibility. Literature plays with harmony and dissonance, reinforcing patterns that it invokes in its beautiful symmetries and helping us to extend and refine them, but it also can break the hold on us of our cognitive habits by disruptions that unsettle our customary patterns and open us to new ways of seeing relationships.
DG: This is a great introduction to the content of your books, hence my next set of questions will focus on Stories and the Brain so we can discuss some of these theoretical paradoxes. In your first chapter entitled ‘Neuroscience and Narrative Theory’ you speak about the different approaches to narratology. What are the differences between the taxonomic/structural and phenomenological/cognitive approaches and which approach do you favour?
PA: There is a long tradition in narrative theory that favors taxonomic thinking. Structuralists think that language is fundamentally a system of rules and conventions that make speech possible, and so to understand stories we need to formulate something like the grammar that underlies them. Phenomenological theorists argue that rules and structures derive from acts of speaking, and they worry that linguistic taxonomies miss the interactive processes through which speakers and hearers communicate. Those interactions are particularly important for understanding how new meanings can emerge that aren’t predicted by the rules. That is obviously crucial for literary works that bring new ways of understanding into being.
In narrative theory, similarly, for phenomenology the key issue to focus on is the interaction between story-tellers and listeners. Those interactions are the playground where cognitive structures from experience are taken up and reconfigured into narrative patterns, and it’s the exchange of patterns in these interactions that allows stories to challenge and reorganize our sense of the world. You can’t do justice to those dynamic processes with a static taxonomy. Classification has its uses. But it’s not the end-all and be-all. Language needs rules and conventions, but their purpose is to make communication possible, and their use can change them—for example, when a new metaphor breaks the rules in order to suggest a new way of seeing things, or when a surprising story defies our expectations and reorients us. Stories and the Brain similarly argues for an interactive, intersubjective model of understanding narrative that emphasizes the participatory sense-making of the reading process through which stories come alive. Taxonomies are useful insofar as they give us tools for analysing the structures at play in an interaction, but it’s a mistake to make structures more important than the communicative events they enable.
The parallels to cognitive science are once again instructive. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when structuralism and formalist models were dominant in narrative theory, modular theories of brain functioning were prevalent, likening the brain to a computer. The brain does have different modules, of course, but increasingly in the neuroscience of the last two decades, theories of the ‘brain web’ and the ‘connectome’ have emphasized how the purpose and function of any module depends on how it interacts with other parts of the cortex and the body. Similarly, a narrative theorist’s goal should not be to privilege taxonomies but to ask, how can these taxonomic categories help us to explain interactions? Narrative theory has moved from structuralism to interactive theories of communication just as neuroscience is moving from modularity to an emphasis on connectivity.
DG: Continuing the topic of narrative theorists, when thinking about individuals’ experiences with exploring narrative and the cognitive work that occurs when reading, an interesting point you mentioned in the same chapter is that ‘Literary theorists have long recognized that interpretation is inherently circular …’ Could you explain how interpretation is circular?
PA: A central chapter in How Literature Plays with the Brain is entitled ‘The Neuroscience of the Hermeneutic Circle’, and it points out that both literary theory and cognitive science regard understanding as a circular process. A paradox of interpretation that all readers experience is that you can only understand a part of any text by projecting a sense of the whole it belongs to, even as you can only get to that whole by working through the parts. In any interpretation, indeed in any cognitive act, there's a perpetual back-and-forth between part and whole. This is especially evident, for example, in the Gestalt shifts that happen with classic ambiguous figures such as the ‘rabbit-duck’ or the ‘urn and two faces’. These ambiguous figures fascinate literary theorists and cognitive scientists alike because they are small-scale models of how parts and wholes are interdependent and mutually defining.
Is it a rabbit or a duck?
DG: You touched on temporality which leads to the last question I will ask directed at Stories and the Brain. You speak about the relations between the empathic brain, narrative and time in the chapter ‘The Temporality of Narrative and the Decentered Brain.’ Could you tell us more about the relationship between narrative and time, and its effects on the reader?
PA: Stories are an amazing tool for helping us to organise time. Aristotle says stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, which may seem obvious and straightforward, but that’s not at all like what William James calls the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ of experience. Our lived, everyday experience of the world doesn’t have a clearly defined beginning-middle-end structure. How, then, do we develop a sense of the temporal order of things? Well, part of the answer is that this is provided by the stories that circulate in our cultures. One of the things stories do is to organize our sense of time, translating the one-thing-after-another of experience into more orderly patterns and relationships.
The neuroscience of time is fascinating. The temporality of the brain is not homogeneous, and that’s a good thing. Different parts of the brain respond at different rates, and the synchronizations, desynchronizations, and resynchronizations through which neuronal assemblies form are always coming and going. The brain is never fully stable, and its temporal imbalances keep us flexible and attuned to what’s coming next. As Antonio Damasio notes, ‘We're always late for consciousness by about a half a second.’ Benjamin Libet conducted famous mind-time experiments that reveal how consciousness is always catching up with subliminal cognitive processes that already respond before we are aware of this. You slam on the brakes to avoid the child running across the street chasing a ball, for example, before you realize that you've done it.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard similarly says, ‘we live forward, but we understand backwards.’ Contemporary neuroscientists interested in predictive processing like Karl Friston, Mark Solms, and Andy Clark have shown that the brain is a hypothesis-testing organ that is constantly anticipating what will happen next. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger similarly argue that in our experience of the world we're always ahead of ourselves and oriented toward the future.
Stories are wonderful instruments for playing with our expectations. We read stories by making predictions about the progression of the narrative: What will happen next to the damsel in distress or the hero on a quest? But again, one danger for the brain is that it can get locked into certain patterns, and this can interfere with its agility in making adjustments when its predictions fail. Stories ward off this danger by the way they invoke our expectations and then surprise them. Stories raise our expectations about how patterns will unfold, but they rarely if ever satisfy them fully—that would be boring! There can be something soothing, of course, in a story that follows familiar patterns, as the parent of any child knows who wants everything repeated in a bedtime story just so. Instead, stories typically play with the expectations they raise and, in the process, revise, complicate or overturn the patterns that guide our predictions. Once again there’s value to constancy and also to flexibility. So, it's important to have a lot of different kinds of stories in circulation that compete and challenge each other, and this competition—the diversity of stories that make up our worlds—enriches our sense of complexity and keeps us alert for new and unexpected relations.
DG: That’s incredibly interesting and it’s making me wonder whether my bookshelf has a variety of narratives. My next set of questions will focus on How Literature Plays with the Brain. In the chapter ‘The Brain and Aesthetic Experience’, you mention that ‘Critics who draw on neuroscience or cognitive psychology for hunches to guide their literary interpretations must still engage in the to-and-fro of interpretive hypothesis testing’. Firstly, when would a literary critic need to engage with neurobiological models/cognitive science to critique a text? And secondly, why is interpretive hypothesis testing important to the critique process?
PA: What I’m trying to do in both books is to describe cognitive processes that happen to all readers, regardless of the particular ways in which they interpret. When a literary critic tries to interpret a poem, play or novel, they can't just look at my books and say, okay here's the answer. Instead, they must ask, how am I going to use these processes to interpret a specific text?
Understanding the underlying processes doesn't necessarily make you a better interpreter. Similarly, knowing the physiology of kicking a soccer ball is not going to make you a better player. If you've got to kick a penalty shot and you start thinking about what’s going on in your motor cortex and the time-lag between perception and consciousness, all of this reflection is going to interfere with the kick, and you’ll probably miss! By the same token, knowing the underlying epistemology of reading doesn't necessarily make you a better interpreter, and too much theorizing can make you self-conscious about these processes and interfere with the act. On the positive side, however, this knowledge can give you clues to understanding what's going on when you encounter a text that bewilders or confuses you. Again, in a similar way an athlete struggling with a performance problem can sometimes be helped by a theoretical explanation of the problem she’s having. The point, however, is that everybody who interprets, whether it's a poem or a novel or a play, no matter how expert they are, must make guesses about the relationship between the part and the whole, and there are no automatic, fail-safe methods for producing good guesses.
Engaging with models from cognitive science can be very useful to interpreters like me who are interested in novels that foreground epistemological questions and play interpretive games with us to expose cognitive processes we’re ordinarily unaware of in everyday life. Studying the works of novelists like Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford who were interested in different aspects of consciousness, I have found it helpful to borrow concepts and terms from cognitive science. This does not turn these novelists into neuroscientists. Instead, I think it enables us to better appreciate their extraordinary intuitions about how we know the world as well as their artistry in inventing narrative strategies that help us think about how we think. We need all the instruments we can find, including ideas from neuroscience, to do justice to the cognitive and aesthetic complexity of the works of these and other modern novelists like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner who are fascinated by consciousness. The perspectives of science and literature can inform each other, but using scientific categories to analyse literary states of affairs isn’t mechanical or deterministic. Employing science productively to understand literature requires tact and grace and an appreciation for the differences as well as the similarities between them.
DG: Thinking about the knowledge and understanding we gain from neurobiological models—in the chapter ‘The Neuroscience of the Hermeneutic Circle’ you refer to Wolfgang Iser’s argument that ‘all literary works are unfinished as they invite the reader’s participation by leaving blanks and indeterminacies for us to fill in’. Could you give some examples of the blanks we may have to fill in when reading?
Paul B Armstrong, 2015. Photo by Beverly Haviland © Beverly Haviland.
PA: The most realistic novel leaves out a lot that's basic to experience. There are words on the page but there's no smell nor touch. We read silently and there's no sound. All of these dimensions of reality are missing on the page, and yet when you read James’s Portrait of a Lady or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, you feel ‘this is reality,’ it's a life-like experience. So how do we get a sense of life and all of its richness and plenitude from a text where all of this sensory material is missing? Part of the answer is that we fill in these gaps—not all of them, to be sure, and each of us in our own way—and thereby give the fictional world a sense of presence that it wouldn’t have without what we bring to it.
You usually don't notice this gap-filling because you’re immersed in the illusion you create, building consistent patterns that construct the work’s world and letting yourself be carried away. Again, thinking too much about these processes as they’re happening would interfere with the illusion. But sometimes you see a movie version of a novel that you love and you say ‘no, wait a minute, that's not how that character looks.’ Your surprise shows that you had filled in a blank that the movie filled in differently.
What novelists and storytellers have figured out is how to structure the absences and indeterminacies in their texts—what they leave out—in order to get us to draw on familiar, basic epistemological processes from everyday life to fill in what’s missing. In ordinary, everyday cognition we always have a sense that the world stretches beyond the horizons of our particular, limited perspective. We’re always anticipating and making adjustments as our experiences either confirm or, more interestingly, falsify or revise what we’d predicted from our limited point of view. We do something similar when we fill out what’s implied but not said explicitly in a text as we read. It’s just like life to unfold in partial perspectives that we tacitly supplement and complete, and so it’s quite natural to create a life-like simulation of experience by filling out a fictional world.
DG: Thinking about the self and subjectivity, I’ll move on to the final chapter ‘The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego.’ You mention that reading is an ‘excellent experience through which to study the paradox of the alter ego.’ What is the paradox of the alter ego and is there any empirical research that can give insight into this paradox?
PA: For phenomenological theorists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, our experience of other minds is inherently paradoxical. They point out that lived experience is both intersubjective and solipsistic. When I begin to reflect, I find myself already enmeshed in a social world, and my perception of things assumes that others see sides of objects hidden from my perspective. But that expectation is only a prediction and a guess, because I am destined never to experience the presence of the world to another consciousness.
Except when you read! Then, miraculously, if not completely, this paradox is momentarily overcome. When you read a story or a poem, you think the thoughts of someone else as if they were your own, which of course they are not. This is an experience of doubling, the ‘real me’ I bring to the work doubled with the ‘alien me’ that I produce by thinking the thoughts embedded in the text and held ready for me to activate them. This doubling both reinforces my sense of self—the ‘real me’ that’s experiencing this strange, unfamiliar, but perhaps intriguing ‘other me’ whose world I am co-habiting—but it also allows us the rare privilege of getting outside of ourselves and experiencing someone else’s experience with an immediacy unavailable to us in real life.
DG: It is intriguing to learn that reading is a collaborative experience even when reading alone. In How Literature Plays with the Brain you say that ‘reading is a fundamentally collaborative process’ and a ‘prime example of shared intentionality.’ Could you explain this?
PA: The neuro-anthropologist Michael Tomasello argues that one of the differences between humans and apes is that we collaborate in ways that other primates don’t, not even our closest relatives (Tomasello, 2020), and this ability to make meaning together—which is what happens when we read—is responsible for our ability to construct the cultures we inhabit and pass on to our descendants. This argument is controversial because the boundary between us and other species is fuzzy and permeable, not absolute. But the question Tomasello asks is: How is it that we're able to share attention? You and I right now, we're sharing attention in this conversation, with you in one Zoom box and me in another. Sharing attention also happens when we think the thoughts of someone else in reading.
According to Tomasello, this ability to collaborate and share attention is also basic to how we learn language. Storytelling is also a way of sharing attention. Collaborative activity is basic to social life. It's how we build worlds in common that take us beyond what we might have done on our own. Art matters not just for the values it conveys but, more fundamentally, for the possibilities it offers us to share attention and to engage in interactive, participatory sense-making with other members of our species, past, present, and future.
DG: You have also written various articles on neuroscience and literature, and so the next set of questions will be pulled from some thoughts I found interesting. In ‘Henry James and Neuroscience: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Differences’ (Armstrong, 2018a), you argue that the conscious experience of engaging with literature cannot be captured by brain imaging devices such as fMRI. How then do we capture the subjective experience of reading differently from what scanning technologies can reveal?
PA: The issue here is the problem of qualia, or ‘what it is like’ to be conscious. An fMRI image looks like a full-colour picture of what is happening in the brain as we have an experience, but these images are doubly indirect. First, although any and every cognitive experience is based on neural activity, those neurons are not ‘what it is like’ to have the experience. Second, even the fMRI image is only an indirect representation of that activity, a measurement of differential blood flow to various parts of the brain, statistical differences that are translated into the visual images that give the illusion of representing the brain in action.
Literary renderings of what it is like to be conscious are also indirect, but in a different way. For example, Henry James is famous for formalizing ‘point of view’ as a principle of novelistic composition. He tells his stories through a particular character’s perspective on the world, with its characteristic insights and blindnesses. The point of view of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady or Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors gives you a sense of what it's like to be them. We are inside their experience, in one sense, and so this is a more immediate rendering of ‘what it is like’ than the scanning images can offer. But in another sense, even as we share their experience, we are called upon by James to evaluate their take on the world, and this double process of inhabiting another’s point of view while also analysing and criticizing it is different from what it’s like to have a primordial, first-person experience. James does this, further, in a characteristic manner that we can identify as his novelistic style. So we experience Isabel’s and Strether’s worlds ‘as if’ we were them, which we aren’t, but this ‘as if’ is James’s way of using a literary style to render the elusive experience of what it is like to be conscious and to ask us to reflect about what that entails.
Both literature and neuroscience approach conscious experience indirectly, then, but their strategies of indirection are different. These differences are illuminating, I think, because they call attention to what each of these approaches can and can’t do. An fMRI image reveals some things that a Henry James novel doesn’t, but if what is missing from an fMRI image is the ‘qualia’ of the experience it represents, a novel that renders the world through the point of view of a character is a cognitive instrument that provides access to that.
Cover of The Phenomenology of Henry James, 1983.
Cover of Play and the Politics of Reading, 2005. Photo by Scott Levine © Scott Levine.
DG: This leads to another thought from this article I found interesting: ‘When literary works from whatever genre or period attempt to recreate what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, they can only do so by using styles, conventions, and techniques that are not identical to the subjective experience they seek to represent’. Why is this the case? Why do non-identical subjective experiences move us?
PA: Aristotle famously says that the fate of the tragic hero produces pity and fear and then purges those emotions through catharsis. And that is, he argues, because we identify with the tragic hero. But identification is complicated and contradictory, and tragedies are not necessarily cathartic.
The psychologist Theodore Lipps used the term ‘Einfühlung’ (‘feeling in’) to describe the process of identification, a process he said was the basis for empathy. One example often cited in the empathy literature is the experience of seeing an acrobat on a high-wire and feeling fear because we identify with her and feel what she is feeling—only that’s obviously not the case. The cool, calm, and collected acrobat is not feeling the same emotions as the frightened spectator. Feeling with another in empathy is like thinking the thoughts or feeling the feelings of someone else as we read, which is a process of doubling—both like and not-like the original experience we are sharing, but at a distance, through the aesthetic mediation of the work’s stylistic rendering of experience.
Aesthetic distance, produced by the ‘as if’ of an artistic style, allows us to identify with other worlds, but the ‘not-like’ means that our reaction will not be the same as the character’s or the author’s—or even exactly like another reader’s whose doubling of ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ differs from mine because we bring different experiences to the same text. Feelings of identification can take a variety of different forms. Perhaps we will feel catharsis and have our pity and fear purged, or perhaps for another viewer these feelings will produce distress. Or for another viewer seeing violence enacted might make them feel aggressive—but that too is not an automatic, inevitable reaction, as the literature on the effects of violent video games shows (Przybylski & Weinstein, 2019). The effects of an ‘as if’ staging of an experience by a literary work will vary according to how it is stylized by the author and also according to how the different dispositions of readers respond. Again, the aesthetic experience is an intersubjective interaction, and it will vary according to how both parties to the collaboration affect each other.
DG: Your answer links with ideas mentioned in your article ‘Neuroscience and the Social Powers of Narrative’ (Armstrong, 2018b). How do we allow ourselves to be shaped by stories? In what ways can this reshaping be for better or for worse?
PA: Steven Pinker famously argues that literature is a powerful instrument for moral betterment because it allows us to identify with other people we would not otherwise come across and this, he claims, enlarges our capacity for empathy. His example is the 18th century epistolary novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson in which a chambermaid writes letters that let us feel what it was like for her to fend off the advances of her employer until the example of her virtuous resistance converts him and he proposes marriage.
Well, what Pinker seems unaware of is that many readers at the time thought the novel was an invitation to vicarious erotic thrills as they experienced the deceptive amorous games that the deceitful chambermaid played in order to seduce her boss. Henry Fielding wrote two novels based on this different interpretation—Shamela which, as the name suggests, portrays Pamela as a fraud, and Joseph Andrews, which renders the point of view of a male hero whose virtue is preyed upon by a female seductress. Fielding led the so-called ‘anti-Pamelists’ who read a very different moral into Richardson’s story than Pinker does.
The point of this history is that the ‘as’ of identification is not straightforward and can lead to different kinds of doubling, different ways of being-with the world we re-enact as we read. Richardson’s novel Pamela could prompt morally uplifting sympathy or vicarious erotic excitement, for example, or suspicion, antagonism, and mockery. Contrary to Pinker’s simplistic ideas about identification and reading, doubling may increase our capacity for empathy, or not. Pro-social behaviour is not an automatic, pre-destined result.
Reading literature can have many outcomes, some morally beneficial, others purely aesthetic, and others perhaps deleterious if we get carried away by a story that reinforces prejudices we might do better to criticize and revise. The stories I like are those that play with our preconceptions and prompt us to reflect about them, stories that combat the tendency of our habits to rigidify. I also try to teach my students to be open-minded, playful readers who enjoy the cognitive challenges texts pose and who are open to the different experiences of what it is like to be conscious that great literature offers.
References
Armstrong, P. B. (2013). How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art. JHU Press.
Armstrong, P. B. (2015). ‘What Is It Like to Be Conscious? Impressionism and the Problem of Qualia’. In A History of the Modernist Novel (pp. 66–85). Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, P. B. (2018a). ‘Henry James and Neuroscience: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Differences’. The Henry James Review, 39(2), 133–151.
Armstrong, P. B. (2018b). ‘Neuroscience and the Social Powers of Narrative’. The Journal of English Language and Literature, 64(1), 3-24.
Armstrong, P. B. (2020). Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative. JHU Press.
Montag, C., Gallinat, J., & Heinz, A. (2008). ‘Theodor Lipps and the Concept of Empathy: 1851–1914’. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(10), 1261–1261.
Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Viking.
Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2019). ‘Violent video game engagement is not associated with adolescents’ aggressive behaviour: evidence from a registered report’. Royal Society Open Science, 6(2), 171474.
Tomasello, M. (2020). ‘The adaptive origins of uniquely human sociality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London’. Series B, Biological Sciences, 375(1803), 20190493.
All images shown courtesy of Paul B Armstrong.