Literature as Affective Technology

I was hanging out in the Twitterverse last week and became drawn into a discussion, as sometimes happens. The discussion was about computers and narrative occasioned by this tweet from Ted Underwood:

The latest issue of Narrative from @ohiostatepress includes a dialogue about AI and narrative between Angus Fletcher, Jon Chun, and @katelelkins. https://t.co/WaW63f6SsE pic.twitter.com/TtLdcRr5K0

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) February 8, 2022

I blitzed my way through the three articles and had a rather negative reaction to the whole conversation, which I registered in a post, Can computers do narrative?

Since the whole business was tipped off by Angus Fletcher’s initial article – which struck me as being enthusiastically confused about computers and nervous systems – I went cruising the web to see what I could find out about him. I read some things, both by and about him, and discovered that he’d recently published, to extravagant praise, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. It’s a general interest book (that is, non-academic) that argues and attempts to demonstrate that literature interacts with the nervous system in a way that helps us to accomplish beneficial imaginative and emotional work. I note, however, that some regard the book as a self-help conjob. Fletcher can come across that way.

But this project makes sense to me. Kenneth Burke anticipated it in “Literature as Equipment for Living” from The Philosophy of Literary Form (1973, but originally collected in 1941 and published in the 30s). Using words and phrases from several definitions of the term “strategy” (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that (p. 298):

[…] surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one's campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”

I’ve been there myself, most obviously in a long essay about one of Coleridge’s Conversation Poems:

Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004. https://www.academia.edu/8345952/Talking_with_Nature_in_This_Lime-Tree_Bower_My_Prison_

I’ve appended the section entitled “Affective Technology,” where I outline my basic approach, drawing on a repeated affective strategy from my childhood, on the incident in Tom Sawyer where Tom sneaks back home to overhear his aunt talking with her friends about his apparent death by drowning, and, of course, on Coleridge’s poem.

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When Coleridge published “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (henceforth LTB) he presented it with a short preface:

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

In a general way, it tells much the same story he'd told Robert Southey three years before. As Kathleen Wheeler has pointed out (1981, p. 146) there are discrepancies between the two versions. For example, the July visit of the 1797 letter has been displaced to June in the 1800 preface and the second-day accident of 1797 has been misplaced to the first day in 1800. But the central point remains the same: Coleridge was separated from his friends by an accident. They were able to go walking about in Nature while Coleridge was not. He wrote the poem while his friends were out and about and he was confined to the garden.

But why did he write the preface at all? Wheeler suggests that “the most fundamental function of the preface is to establish some relation between the poem as art and the world of reality” (146). I agree with that, though I find the implications she draws from that to be a bit over complex. Coleridge was simply telling us: That's how it happened, what it says in the poem. My friends deserted me; I was feeling alone; I started thinking about what they might be seeing, started composing a poem on that topic, and, all of a sudden, I was feeling better.

The poem itself says nothing about poetry; it simply reports the poet's thoughts and feelings of an evening. In contrast, the preface does talk about poetry, or rather, about the poem to which it is affixed. By saying that Coleridge himself, like the person who speaks the poem, was alone one evening while his friends went for a walk, the preface indicates to us that the act of writing the poem played some role in the process that brought about a change in his mood. In brief, Coleridge is telling as that poetry is affective technology, a mind-altering activity.

There is nothing strange in that, at least I do not myself find it strange. I would assume that notion is comfortable and familiar to professional students of literature, but I do not really know, because the practice of critical "reading" tends to focus on meaning, not feeling. We may talk about what characters in novels, plays, and poems feel; but we tend not to talk about what readers or play-goers feel, neither in specific (this or that person) or in general terms.

I do not see any way radically to change that situation. Though I will shortly offer a minor bit of personal revelation, I have no interest in calling for a more confessional criticism. Some people can do that well, but I do not think that such writing is a useful starting point for an objective understanding of the mechanisms that underlie this affective technology, though it may provide raw data for such study. I do think that we should pay more attention to just how people actively use literature to change their moods, much like musicologists Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, Charlie Keil, My Music (Crafts, Cavicchi and Keil 1993), and others (cf. Juslin and Sloboda 2001) have been doing. But I am not going to argue for that kind of work in this essay, as it isn't specific enough for my present intellectual purposes. I am more interested in recent brain-imaging studies that reveal deep brain activity in response to music, Anne Blood's work for example (1999, 2001, 2003), or Semir Zeki's work on romantic love (Bartels and Zeki 2000) and beauty (Kawabata and Zeki 2004).

The conceptual distance between any of the various conventional vocabularies of literary analysis and that of brain imaging is, alas, more of a canyon than a gap and I do not propose to close it. But I can toss a few cables across the canyon in hope that others will find them useful in constructing a bridge. Thus I will use John Bowlby's work on attachment to conceptualize the relationship between mother and infant. Bowlby was trained as a psychoanalyst, but came to reconstruct the dynamics of that relationship in terms of behavioral biology and informatics. I will then propose simple neural relationships in which to think about Winnicott's work on transitional objects and elaborate on the model by drawing on L. S. Vygotsky's account of language learning. That will lead us directly to Norman Holland's recent work on the neuro-psychoanalytic foundations of literary experience.

Loss and Restoration

When I was young my parents would punish me by sending me to my room. Not only was I thus unable to continue doing whatever it was that I had been doing, but I was also separated from the world in general and, of course, separated from my parents in particular. While confined to my room I would feel aggrieved and brood for a bit and sooner or later imagine a scenario in which I had died somehow. I would continue the story by imagining my parents grieving for me, and saying how they had wronged me, but it's too late now because I'm dead. By then I would start feeling better.

This, of course, is a form of play, though it is not the sort of thing that typically comes to mind when we think of childhood play. But play it is, for it required me to imagine myself in a role quite different from my actual situation. It also required that I imagine a situation in which my parents were as bereft as I felt, thereby making me superior to them.

I have no idea how common this particular mood-altering play scenario is, but something like it seems to have informed Chapters 13 through 15 of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. While the incidents in those chapters may have been based on Twain's childhood experience, those chapters are themselves works of fiction. We can read them in an hour or so, but they depict fictional events that transpired over a course of days.

As Chapter 13 opens, Tom is feeling aggrieved. His aunt had recently punished him for a prank he had played on the family cat and Becky Thatcher was ignoring his romantic overtures.

Tom's mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame him for the consequences -- why shouldn't they? What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime.

Tom encounters his friend Joe Harper, who is of a similar mind, and they join up with Huck Finn and run away to Jackson's Island, where they intend to live a fine life as pirates.

Late in their second day they hear canon shot over the water. Tom concludes that the townsfolk suspected the boys had drowned and so were trying to bring their bodies to the surface. That night—we are now in Chapter 15—Tom slips back to town and sneaks into his house. There he listens to his Aunt Polly and to Joe's mother commiserating over their loss, affirming that, though a bit devilish, their boys were good at heart. These words had a powerful effect on Tom:

Tom was snuffling, now, himself — and more in pity of himself than anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with joy — and the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to his nature, too, but he resisted and lay still.

Tom then returned to the island in time for breakfast and "recounted (and adorned) his adventures. They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale was done."

Though I do not recall the details of any of the childhood fantasies I employed to restore my sense of well-being, I rather suspect that Twain's three chapters are more richly realized than anything I managed to conjure up. The most interesting aspect of Twain's story is that the boys ran away to become pirates. That is, within the means available to them, they did their best to become free and autonomous actors rather than being bound to adults in the role of a child. It was from within that bit of adventuresome pretense that Tom overheard the heart-warming conversation. Though sorely tempted, he did not immediately break from his pretended autonomy. Rather he returned to the island and thus afforded Twain the pleasure of extending this theme through four more chapters worth of variations.

Let us now return to LTB. As I mentioned in the introduction, we know from Coleridge's own hand that the first text of the poem was occasioned by an incident which prevented him from going on a nature walk with his friends, Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb. So it is possible that the writing of the poem was occasioned by a bout of melancholy and that, by the time a text had been drafted, the melancholy was gone. I take Coleridge's account of the poem's origins, however, as nothing more than a clue to its supporting affective dynamic. Yet it is a clue that was important enough to Coleridge that, when he published the poem, he provided it with a preface indicating roughly, though not exactly, what he had said in the letter to Southey.

We should, nonetheless, remind ourselves to honor the distinction between that real occasion and the poem itself regardless of how well the events in the moment mimic the real events of the evening. The events of the evening took place over some hours, but one can read the poem itself in a few minutes. And you do not need to know anything about Coleridge's life or the topography of the Lake District to understand and appreciate the poem.

With these various experiences in mind, the real and fictional, I want to turn to the work of John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980; Parkes and Hinde 1982), who has revised traditional psychoanalytic understanding of the psychology of attachment, loss and separation. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Bowlby came to doubt the classical psychoanalytic belief that the child's attachment to her mother was rooted in the mother's provision of nutrition. He came to believe, instead, that it was the mother's caring presence itself that was significant to the infant and undertook an extensive cross-disciplinary conceptual program to argue his case. One of Bowlby's signal moves was to ground his study of human attachment in the ethological literature about attachment among animals, including imprinting in birds. To this I would add more recent neurobiological work that has identified many of the neural circuits mediating infant-parent bonding (e.g. Panksepp 1998, Konner 2004). This behavior has a long phylogenetic history and is mediated by specific neural circuits.

It is those circuits, I am suggesting, that are active in the various real and fictional cases of loss or separation we have been considering. In the case of the real events—my childhood maneuver, Coleridge's experience one evening in 1797—the circuits are those in my brain and in Coleridge's. In the case of the fictional events—Tom Sawyer's fictional activity, and the events in LTB—the circuits are those in the brains of those who read those fictions. In these latter cases the readers may be reading those texts to sooth some sense of real loss in their lives, but not necessarily so. They may just be reading for pleasure—or to satisfy a course requirement.

These situations are sufficiently different that I think they require different accounts, but I have no intention of attempting that here. My interest is in one case, that of the brain of someone reading LTB. But I would first like to make some more general remarks.

Let us remind ourselves that attachment is a relationship and, as such, involves two parties, the infant or Child and the Caretaker—terms I will use when talking about these roles. Discussions of attachment tend to focus on the infant, on her need for attachment, her strategies of maintaining it, her response to loss, and so forth. But the infant's activities would be fruitless if the Caretaker were not highly motivated, not only to respond to the infant's actions, but to anticipate the infant's needs and actively to arrange the world for the infant's benefit. While the relationship is very intense for both Caretaker and Child, they play very different roles in that relationship.

This leads to a suggestion about the mechanism of the particular psychological strategy I have been examining: at the point where the child is imagining his parents in grief over the child's death, that child has, in his imagination, assumed the Caretaker role in the attachment relation. The child can thus reinterpret his own sense of loss as empathy with or response to his parent's grief over the child's imaginary death. Further, as the child imaginatively enacts the Caretaker role he can project the Child role onto his parents. Thus the child can master his own sense of separation and loss by employing his identification with his parents to engineer an imaginative transformation of that loss. That, more or less, is what I suspect I was doing as a child.

And I propose that that is what Mark Twain was depicting in Tom Sawyer. That is why I called attention to the fact that Tom and Joe ran off to be pirates and thus had, at least in their own minds, ceased to be children. They had become autonomous adults of a particularly adventuresome kind, living at the fringes of civilization. It is from that point of view that Tom observed the conversation between Aunt Polly and Mrs. Harper and it is from that point of view that he felt an impulse to reveal himself to his Aunt and thus relieve her grief and anxiety. Twain tells us, however, that that impulse also came with a sense of “the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing.” That has the smell of the child about it. But I regard that as further evidence of my point, that in a person mature enough to take at least some care for others it is easy, under the appropriate circumstances, to flip from one role to the other in the attachment interaction.

Just what is going on in the brain of someone reading Tom Sawyer is, of course, a different question. I have already argued (Benzon 2001) that we use the same neural circuits to understand fictional events that we use to understand and enact real events, but I don't want to repeat those arguments here. The reader of Twain's book thus has an opportunity to enact a certain strategy for mastering loss in a context that is completely safe, as the events are not real and so the reader’s own welfare is not in jeopardy.

And so, I will be arguing, does the reader of LTB. We must be careful, however, in identifying just what it is that has been lost. Both the preface and the opening lines of the poem quite clearly state that his friends have left him alone. Once he has registered that fact, however, the first loss the poet complains about is that of “beauties and feelings.” His friends may have left him, but it isn't their presence that he misses, it is those beauties and feelings, by which he presumably means the things his friends will see on their walk. He misses the opportunity to go out in Nature; that is why the bower is a prison. Something then happens during the first two stanzas that transforms the poet's mood so that, when he once again turns his attention on the bower at the beginning of the third stanza, he does so in delight. The setting that had seemed barren is now experienced as overflowing with life.

It would seem that, if I want to analyze this dynamic in terms of the attachment relationship, then I have to put the poet in the Child role and (Mother) Nature in the Caretaker role. It is Nature that is lost in the beginning, and it is Nature that is found later on. The process that leads from the first state to the second involves the poet's imagining what his friends might be seeing on their walk; they thus mediate his re-attachment to Nature. This relationship then becomes inverted in the course of the third stanza so that at the very end, Nature mediates the poet's relationship with one of his friends, Charles Lamb:

My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path across the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross’d the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood’st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

He blesses the rook, not for what it is, but for what it is to his gentle-hearted friend. This natural creature, and the sun that is its setting, is a link to his friend, just has his friend had been his link to nature earlier in the poem.

Thus we must augment Bowlby's account of attachment with a theory of mediation in the attachment relationship. Fortunately D. W. Winnicott has provided us with such a theory.

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The rest of the essay is long, with a number of diagrams. Reverse-engineering literary texts is a complex job.