Theory of mind in literature

I had been reading Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction, and I had some reservations about it.  I will have to explain what I perceive that the book is about, and what I imagine that the writer is thinking that I will understand from her perceived idea of who I am and what my background may be.

Why We Read Fiction was published in 2006.  There has been an increasing push in literary studies to draw outside disciplines into the discussion, and Zunshine follows suit by attempting to apply psychology’s Theory of Mind to literary analysis.  The idea behind Theory of Mind is that we have the capacity to imagine that other people are animated by other minds, and that we are able to understand people’s actions based on that imagination.  We are not privy, after all, to the exact thoughts or emotional state of anyone but ourselves, and it requires the ability to intuitively make abstract the subtle information that we receive from them (facial movements, body language, tone of voice, etc.).  Zunshine believes that this has an impact on how we read fiction, that we appreciate fiction because we enjoy the game of imagining hypothetical social situations involving imagined people.  It lets us stretch out brain muscles and get ready for the real thing.

I get troubled by a number of things:

1) Zunshine is writing from the perspective of a student of literature, so she makes no allowances for quality.  Her examples are Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Nabokov (Lolita, primarily for shock value), and Henry James (just name it).  Aside from a section at the end of the book about detective novels, she’s entering this conversation by using people who are experts at their craft and are generally encouraging people to respond a certain way, rather than letting people just wander into it.  I do not like the agency of the writers being removed in this fashion.  This is another postmodernist attempt to give the reader the power to do whatever they want with the text.  The closest I see Zunshine getting to quality and writer agency is by suggesting that getting James ‘right’ lets the reader understand a deeper nuance, and thus a richer Theory of Mind experience.

2) She suggests that it doesn’t matter if people are correct or not in their assumptions about the people in a work of fiction for them to enjoy it.  They could be completely wrong in their imaginings of what the characters are thinking, and they would still get something out of the reading, or enjoy the reading simply for the chance to play the imagination game.  I have to disagree.  By misinterpreting those fictional mental states in a work of fiction, the reader is often left confused and angry because the perceived mental states do not make contextual sense.  Again, we need some agency put in the hands of the writer, who, if they have done their job well, will guide the reader through the mental states accurately.  If a reader is not reaching a properly conceived idea of those mental states, either the writer is not doing his/her job correctly, or the reader is unaware of how those mental states could possibly be – either through mental deficiency or through a lack of…

3) …experience.  Zunshine makes no allowances for experience, which is necessary for a proper (or, at least, less likely to be incorrect) Theory of Mind.  The ability to imagine another mind is all fine and good, but that imagining must be based on experience and understanding of both ourselves and others for it to be at all accurate.  If it is habitually inaccurate, how could it evolve into a necessary component of modern human minds?  This, of course, goes back to my previous two points, suggesting that the writer must have the skills necessary to guide a properly ordered mind towards a believable outcome.

4) My final concern is less about content and more about delivery.  Zunshine relies on postmodernist language to deliver her message, which is confused, conflated, and contrived.  First, there is the invented terminology.  I don’t care if Zunshine coined this or the cognitive psychologists did, but I hate reading the word ‘metarepresentationality.’  Seriously, do we need a new word to suggest that I can imagine that someone else has a brain?  Second, and perhaps more importantly to me, I get tired very quickly of Zunshine’s reiteration of ideas by breaking it down into ‘plain old’ English.  I constantly feel like she is saying “HERE are the educated words I use to describe it to people who are LITERATE, and here are the words that I will use to explain it in simple terms, for simple people, like yourself.”  Make no mistake that I can understand her inflated vocabulary.  I read a critical work as though it was meant for me to read, as a peer, and I get offended by the suggestion that she has to dumb down her argument for me.  More likely, if she spoke plainly and directly, she wouldn’t have to explain herself a second time.  She even asks the reader, “why do we need this newfangled concept?”  Newfangled?  Is she intentionally using language that suggests I am an uneducated hick?  Or am I supposed to be on her side of the joke, laughing at the people who just don’t understand her genius?  I get offended because I find myself disagreeing with her, and her approach to any argument against her is to turn to this ‘local dialect’ speak.  Clearly, if you do not agree with her, it must be because you just don’t understand her argument, so she has to dumb it down for you.

She asks early in her work why we assume, in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that Peter Walsh’s shaking is attributed to his mental state and not a physical ailment.  Her naswer is that we automatically assume it’s a mental state because that’s what we do with fiction.  The truth is this:

1) The passage came and went, and was never again mentioned.  The brevity suggests that it is a mental state and not a physical ailment because it is never mentioned again for the rest of the novel.

2) We have known people who have shaken due to emotional distress, or have shaken ourselves.  Knowledge and experience.  Parkinson’s disease is and was a rare thing.  Why would we assume the less likely reason behind something?

3) Woolf is a writer with serious control over her craft, and is writing a novel based on states of mind.  That is, the entire novel deals with what people think or feel while performing actions.  She guides us to that conclusion intentionally through her writing, because she understands what our experiences will imply to us, and she is very good at it.  We were supposed to conclude that based on what was written.

4) I am not an idiot, nor should we assume that anyone reading Mrs. Dalloway is an idiot, nor is Virginia Woolf.

…of course, here is a complaint of mine, for a nice rant to finish off this blog entry.  Poorly written works, including anime and Batman Beyond, have an underdeveloped Theory of Mind.  Simply having a Theory of Mind (or metarepresentationality ability) does not mean that it is developed healthily.  The people who like these works either do not care about the accuracy of mental states in the work or in other REAL people (such as anyone who liked The Dark Knight – the characters could never possibly exist mentally, let alone biographically) or are confused as to the general mental states of others (such as anyone who likes anime).  Good writing does not have to be High Art and Literature, but it does have to maintain a healthy Theory of Mind rather than rely on ‘making a point” and ignoring character development.  This rant will, from now on (thank you for that at least, Zunshine) suppliment previous rants I have had about misunderstanding characterization or motivation, because it’s damned important to the conversation and damned accurate.

Contemporary Poetry

I’d like to draw your attention to poetry.  After some sudden life realizations, I’ve decided to turn my energies to active creation rather than active criticism of things that do not deserve the attention.  One problem I’ve noticed that I have with my own poetry is that it isn’t marketable to contemporary audiences.  Now, I prefer art and poetry to reach out to the world and engage it, rather than reach in to my [inner turmoil/masturbatory fantasies/truths only pertaining to me].  Because of my natural aversion to self-expressive diary-diarrhetic word jumbles, my own work tends to get impersonal and sound pretentious.

There isn’t a magic wand I can wave that makes me more approachable, but I have been working on it.  Strangely enough, my whole argument against contemporary poetry is that it is less and less approachable because it is far too personal.  I do not understand what is going on in one person’s mind, and they don’t seem to want to share it. They’re skipping steps on the journey and not telling me what’s left out – they’re leaving out connections in their argument, and that makes it look like they’re jumping to conclusions.  And I think that’s my biggest problem.  Here is an illustration of my point, written by myself.

Love is failure

when wings of

broken butterflies, spinning

in oil at milestone 124, highway 79

fade to onion pulp and neon

relish in warm rancid bowls

in West Virginia.

Now, I personally think that is hilarious.  I have taken a private, personal memory, shared by only one other person, and convoluted a poem with it’s meaning, memory, and no roadsigns to tell my audience what the hell I am talking about.  The next thing that the contemporary poet will do is remove themselves from accountability, never to reveal the big ’secret’ that the poem sprang from, saying it is because ‘everyone will interpret it how they will,’ but truthfully, it takes away the mystery that the poem relies on.  Or, they will go into overabundant detail, explaining what every word means to them, in order for the poem to take on a meaning beyond the few confusing nonsense phrases the poet vomits onto paper.  It’s about deception, either way.  I want poems to get richer and deeper when I know where they come from, but stand alone without that information because they stand for common experiences rather than the specific event a poet happened to go through personally.

For reading this entire post, I’ll give you a bonus treat.  This link. Enjoy.

new directions

I’ve had to reconsider how I’m approaching the world and the craft of writing.  I realize that I have to approach things from a more professional angle.  It’s difficult, though, to maintain composure in the face of hideously insulting artwork.

…There has been some kind of misunderstanding of how artists are viewed by the world.  And the artists are doing everything they can to promote the misconceptions.  I get the impression that the world of art and literature is made up of stage magicians, all hiding  their secrets from an audience that may lose interest if those secrets are revealed.  So the artists perpetuate a mystery of divine inspiration and raw talent.

Am I a traitor to my profession if I give away these secrets to a general public?  Will the other magicians hold it against me later in life?

I have expressed that I dislike pure self-expression in art.  Writing should not be journal entries, no matter how therapeutic it is for the writer.  In fact, I would rather see writers kill themselves, literally, in an attempt to express something to the world about the world.

The Motion Picture of Dorian Gray

I believe now that the war is lost.  The film Dorian Gray that is due in theaters September 9th is perhaps the most offensive thing I’ve ever been accosted with.  Note the title of the film, and watch this trailer:

Did anyone notice something missing?  In the title and in the trailer?  That’s right.  WHERE IS THE PICTURE?  Oscar Wilde’s novel was about the relationship between art, artist, critic, subject, and how the population is affected by artistic movements, particularly the decadent/aesthetic movement of his time.  What happens when you remove or downplay the art aspect of that story?  I can’t tell if the portrait of Dorian Gray is in the movie, but it’s certainly ignored in the trailer in favor of Gray’s personal decadence.

Removing the role of the picture, if not the picture itself, and replacing it with mirror images makes the story focus on the personal, post-modern, self-interpretive, self-subjective, self-interested, selfish trend in art and general media that we’ve seen building for years.  I doubt this is intended as a criticism or social commentary.  Most likely it is a Hollywood response to ‘people don’t want to hear about that art stuff.  Let’s focus on the decadence and the individual.’  In the end, this movie can say, is that there is no real art, or that it doesn’t matter.  Critic and artist are one in the same (with the merging of Basil and Lord Henry into one character, it seems), and their opinion shouldn’t matter to you because they are manipulating you into belief rather than allowing you, the individual, to make decisions on your own.

I have never heard before, in my life, that Dorian Gray’s problems were all because of ‘what Lord Henry did.’  His curse extended from a pledge that he made himself, based on the unpracticed philosophy of Lord Henry and a painting created by Basil Hallward, followed by the choices that Gray made after being linked to the painting as he was.  We’ll see how that all plays out with this new movie, and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

What I expect, though, is another confused ‘message’ being sent out by Hollywood.  They produce a sensationalist movie that gives warning about individuals (the audience) indulging in decadent behavior, all the while giving the audience a means of experiencing that behavior vicariously through the characters in the movie.  And that’s it.  From what I saw in the trailer, if there is a portrait of Gray, it was created by Lord Henry almost in secret, and he’s using it against Gray, or some stupid thing like that.  The entire point of the story is pissed on and thrown right out the window, while at the same time, the movie stands as an unintentional metaphor for the state of Fine Art in the world – all gone, replaced by selfish individualism at the cost of understanding anything outside one’s limited personal experiences.