Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons: (On Literary Emotions) (Consciousness Literatures & the Arts)

Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons Consciousness Liter ture the Arts & 16 General Editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräf...

Author: Donald Wesling

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Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons

Consciousness Liter ture the Arts

&

16 General Editor:

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board:

Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow


(On Literary Emotions)

Donald Wesling

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2392-5 ISSN: 1573-2193 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Acknowledgments Preface: On Literary Emotions

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Part I. Person, Relation, Theory Chapter 1: Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons Changing the Research Questions to Do a Study of Practice The Persons in Literature Toward a More Conscious Experience of Emotion-States in Writing Scholarly Writing and Emotional Knowledge Chapter 2: A Feeling of and, a Feeling of if: Emotion as Relation Reverse Engineering Lyric Autism Chapter 3: A Theory of Literary Emotion Modesty and Presumption of a Skills Account Elements of a Theory Emotions in the Body of the Person in the World

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Part II. Examples Cognitive, Narrative and Historical Chapter 4: Pity, Fear and Arrangement in W.C. Williams and Shakespeare Connecting Linearity of Plot with Intensity of Pity and Fear W. C. Williams: Spring and All Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Chapter 5: The Wide Net of Storytelling

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Children Know Stories are There Cues to Emotion in La Rochefoucauld, Emily Dickinson, and Joyce Carol Oates Estrangement Emotion in “The Wide Net” Chapter 6: The Story of One Story Historical Study of a Single Story Elements that Persist over Time Changes over Time in the Structure of Feeling Commentary: Seven Texts Working with Tautologies

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Afterword: A Role for Literature

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Bibliography

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Index

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This book is dedicated to my grandsons: Malcolm and Eric Wesling, Nicholas and Oliver Gerber, and Jake and Max Ippolito.

Acknowledgments For helpful comments on early versions of this book I would like to thank Charles Altieri, Marcel Hénaff, David Perkins, Tadeusz Sawek, and Andrew Wright. Two small portions of this book have been published as sections of articles, and I thank the Editors for permission to reprint from these journals: “Emotion Deriving from Sequence in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All,” William Carlos Williams Review 24, 2 (Fall 2004): 41-47; “Scholarly Writing and Emotional Knowledge,” Papers in Language and Literature 43, 4 (Fall 2007): 127. The grotesque joy-and-sorrow cover image for this book is the work of Richard Geiger (1882-1945), and was originally printed as a cover illustration of the 1912 book “Könyv a könyvrl” by Imre Kner, published in Gyoma, Hungary. Reproduced by permission of Hungart Association, Budapest, Hungary: A HUNGART © jelet megfelelen fel kell tntetni. For help in securing permission thanks are due to Erika Kiss (Department of North American Studies) and Klára Koltay (University Library), both of the University of Debrecen; and Juliana Hudák of the Kner Publishing Museum, Gymoa, Hungary. Special thanks go to my daughter, Molly Wesling, who used her computer skills to put the book into a format to fit Rodopi’s standard. * Beyond public domain and fair use quotations, here are the Publishers whom I wish to acknowledge for permission to reprint short passages:

From LIGHTDURESS by Paul Celan, two short poems (“Scooped with the ashladle” and “Apostrophizable”) translated by Pierre Joris, © 2005 by Green Integer Press. Reprinted by permission of the translator, Pierre Joris, and by permission of Green Integer Press. From Emily Dickinson: Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., J599, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, from THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS, world rights permission from Faber & Faber, 3 Queen Square, London WC1 3AU, United Kingdom (USA rights are public domain). From FORMS OF NATIONHOOD by Richard Helgerson. Permission granted by University of Chicago Press. From the play “Phaedra’s Love” by Sarah Kane, in COMPLETE PLAYS OF SARAH KANE, © 2001 by Methuen Publishing Ltd. Permission granted by the Estate of Sarah Kane, with intermediary assitance from Sarah Kane’s literary agent, Casarotto Ramsay Associates, London. From “The Expression of Feeling in Emotion,” by Richard Moran, in PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW 103 (January 1994). Permission granted by Duke University Press. From Vivian Gussin Paley: Reprinted by permission of the publisher from THE BOY WHO WOULD BE A HELICOPTER: THE USES OF STORYTELLING IN THE CLASSROOM by Vivian Gussin Paley, pp. 6-7, 119, 138, 147, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Excerpt from RACINE’S PHAEDRA: A VERSE TRANSLATION by Robert Lowell and copyright renewed © 1988 by Harriet Lowell, Sheridan Lowell, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. From PHEDRE by Jean Racine, translated by Margaret Rawlings, copyright © 1961, renewed © 1989 by Margaret Rawlings. Used by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

From TELLING STORIES by Michael Roemer, © 1995. Used by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. From “Spring and All: (III),” by William Carlos Williams, from COLLECTED POEMS: 1909-1939, VOLUME I, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. British Commonwealth Rights (excluding Canada) from Carcanet Press, Manchester, England. From “The Wide Net” in THE WIDE NET AND OTHER STORIES by Eudora Welty, copyright © 1942 and renewed 1970 by Eudora Welty, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

It is often thought that desire drives us to yearn to possess the objects of our desire. But how unlike poetry that is! We capture nothing in words. The desire that propels poetry propels us away from our “possessions” and forth into the world, replete with realities, from the rocks underneath to our dreams. Lyn Hejinian: from Editor’s Introduction to The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner Poetry, 2004)

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“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.” Statement from Doc, character in Eudora Welty’s story, “The Wide Net”

Preface: On Literary Emotions This book is about emotions as they are a force to be exercised, celebrated, controlled and tracked within the embodied mind of a person. (We are decisively not, here, concerned with expunging emotions.) The person used to be called the philosophical subject, or the self, but I cannot write with those impugned versions of the term. The person has been called exhausted, vanished-in-elocution, passé and overtaken-by-history, returned to class and mass, dead, and so on. Many of those late-20th-century manifesto overstatements designed to destroy an illegitimate category have helped to strip away idealisms and illusions, without eliminating personhood. Personhood emerges as no longer centered or complete or isolated from history or society. Personhood is rather now in part defined by forces impinging from world, just as world is in part invented by human beings as surround for person. At the start of an essay on literature’s imaginary persons, let me leave ordinary experience aside, and then here and there and at the end I can propose the ordinary world as a lure and a task. For most of these pages, I’ll stay in the realm of reading. Nonetheless, there’s a relation between fictive and real, between literary character and ordinary person. And I won’t call it a relation of secondariness, because the attention I’m giving makes the fictive equally valuable, at least to me. In fact the actual topic of this book is the category itself of relation between. The topic is emotions and emotions are relationships. Speaking of imaginary persons: A man in his 83rd year increasingly has difficulty walking, so has his knees replaced with titanium and Teflon sockets in a painful operation; thereafter from his convalescence forward, amazes his grown children by closing all phone conversations with the neverheard-before statement, “Love you”. Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic woman in her early 20s marries a dry-as-dust scholar twice her age to

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help with his researches, but his writing plan proves to be worthless and he shows himself unloving, impotent, jealous, and vindictive. A man takes his four and a half years grandson to the Circus, but the boy makes a scene, cries, insists on leaving after an hour; later in McDonald’s the grandfather corrects the boy’s pronunciation of the word “milk”, and then when he’s reaching across the boy to take him from the car seat at home, the boy says “You smell like elephant poopoo”, and the man, though he understands why this occurs, feels insulted. Phaedra, the grand-daughter of the celestial Sun, wife of the philandering King who is himself the descendant of the Earth, in an ecstatic speech tells her step-son Hippolytus that she lusts for him, grabbing his sword: “See, Prince! Look, this monster, ravenous / for her execution, will not flinch. / I want your sword’s spasmodic final inch”.1 These are examples of emotion-naming experience from a family I know and from literary works by George Eliot and by Racine; so a few of these people are imaginary to all but me. Here, by alternating the types, I have obscured the differences between ordinary and literary emotion. I begin this way to get stories and emotionwords quickly into play, and also because it’s important to suggest how many basic assumptions literary people—writers and critics, and by inference all readers—share with scholars in the field of emotionstudies. My sentence-long stories are intended to lead to four preliminary assertions: that ordinary and literary emotion both involve interpreting signs and gestures (albeit different signs); that reading is a skill we perform with persons as with texts, equally (if differently), and usually effortlessly; that we hold the emotion-names in common and consider some of them, like love and fear, more dominant than others; and, lastly, that we recognize that some emotions have more of visceral reaction than others, but we know that if emotions were only drives there would be no reason to define the social knowledge of all emotions. Literary scholars also, I think, share with the more humanistic psychologists and philosophers the belief that the stories people tell and the words they use to tell them are primary, though partial, evidences for their inner states of feeling (like “You smell like elephant poo-poo”); even the briefest narrative names and organizes a sequence of states, and, so doing, becomes, in D.W. Winnicott’s term for the psychoanalytic talking cure, in a small way reparative.

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For over two thousand years literary works have been a treasury of examples of emotion-in-action, and since Aristotle and Longinus literary criticism has given intelligent commentaries on the forms of feeling in works of verbal art. But literary theorists since the 1920s have usually avoided the topic of emotion. It does not speak well of us that, with honorable exceptions, we refuse to address this topic directly.2 To explain our reluctance would be to explain an absence. Here, rather than produce my hunches about why literary critics have allowed themselves to be trapped in this impasse of thought that prevents collaboration across disciplinary lines, I propose to face the future by starting a dialogue with the disciplines currently at the front of emotion-studies.3 Judging by the number, quality and contentiousness of recent books in several fields, emotion is commanding more attention. If the trend continues, might we in the next decade see a flourishing of concern similar to the high moment of Descartes and Spinoza in the 17th century? Among 20th century thinkers emotion had been banished to the margins of Western thought as the scandal of reason—kept under control in psychology and philosophy by cognitivism, which considers emotions as judgments, and removed from persons (and their bodies, their narratives) in sociology by social constructivism. In the 1990s, the decade of the brain, this set of informal agreements began to shift under pressure from neuro-science. This occurred not just because of the fame and funding of this dramatic science, or because of the admirable discursive accounts of research breakthroughs by clinicians like Antonio R. Damasio and Joseph LeDoux; it was primarily because of definitive proofs that emotion is not a separate add-on to the human being. The more we know about the brain, the more we know that our emotions are a part of normal intellectual functioning—enabling and connecting, not a dangerous opposite force.4 Recent resistance to the dominant school of cognitivism, for example from neuro-science and from Spinozist thinker Gilles Deleuze in his philosophy of affect, has had two salutary effects. Cognitivists themselves, like Martha C. Nussbaum, have developed strong versions of their position; and the elements of a post-cognitivist emotion theory are for the first time welcoming literary ways of seeing. In my own thinking, I affiliate with the work of Charles Altieri, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gilles Deleuze, in seeking a view

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of emotion that derives from Spinozan conatus or will to survive, that distinguishes between emotion and physiological sensation, and that insists on narrative as a way to make sense of a person’s life. In this view, emotions both enable the knowing and are what is known.5 Fredric Jameson and many others are now speculating that narrative—storytelling—is the fundamental shape of the human mind, and this is something my own examples will tend to confirm. I often use storytelling as a stand-in for the term literature in this essay: for me, storytelling includes novels and stories, also poems, plays, films and the plots of scholarly books. We follow stories eagerly, many every day, because we want to recognize, practice, multiply, and control our emotional states, and we need to make surmises about how others feel, too. Storytelling is the most complete re-enactment we know of emotion’s social and reciprocal nature. The multidimensional nature of emotions requires a scholarship fully aware that the human being cannot be reduced to biology, social construction, or discourse alone, but belongs to all of these; that we invest physically in our emotions and that the body is in the mind and the mind in the body; that the commoditization of human feelings is increasingly an issue, as sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has shown in her 1983 study of artificial feeling in airline attendants. Once we’ve made the effort to attend to those requirements, I think we see that the skills of storytelling bring some positive advantage to the still-emergent field of emotion-study. Storytelling brings, for example, the talking library of emotions in action—texts and commentaries in many languages over two millennia; storytelling brings an insistence on the human person and his or her body and utterance as the location of emotion—there or nowhere, although nowhere is interesting; brings acceptance of the need to show the social nature of persons, utterances, and emotions, and not only their sociality, also their historicity; brings, finally, acceptance of the need to make far reaching study into the source texts in philosophical psychology, back as far as Aristotle and the Stoics, in order to learn from previous accounts of emotion and in order not to re-do labor already done. My aim is to offer reminders about a grand old zone of endeavor, and to do this through a close-to-text study of how, as readers, we perform what we know. This leads to the defensible claim that storytelling is the need to understand the significance of lives; the need for context, history, reciprocity, community, and a sense of being fitted into the world.

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The slippage away from cognitivism has opened a role for certain skills of reading and thinking. The argument I want to suggest is not in competition with work in neuro-anatomy, psychology or sociology, because neither literature nor emotion can satisfy the requirement for empirical laws that makes possible a deductive explanation. A storytelling explanation, ruling out taxonomic and siteidentifying methods (what neurons are firing where?), would need a dynamic explanation of reading practice. In storytelling, where there is no difference between fundamental mechanisms and surface responses, we see the unification of what will be divided for thought in the cognitive sciences. This is precisely the time to be asking ourselves what might be the role of literary seeing in explaining emotion states. The topic is ancient but researchers are still far from harmony or a settled method because, as Amélie O. Rorty has said, emotions do not form a natural class. Is the possibility of a unified field more or less likely in this era of the contest of paradigms? There is no way to know, because the sudden involvement of humanists in this specialized discourse only appears to be dialogic: we humanists are reading the psychologists but the psychologists, most of them, have no interest in our kind of reading. However, if the question would be, Is something different on the way?, the answer would be Yes, absolutely, and literary thinking might be a part of whatever is coming. We are in a moment of a certain wavering of the cognitivist paradigm—pushed into oscillation by the rise of the new neuroscience and of alternative views of how we perform what we know about emotion. The post-cognitivist positions would claim that whatever is emotional about emotion has been washed out by cognivitism’s starting premises; would set feeling against belief as a key term; would set Spinoza on emotion in Ethics against cognitivism’s heroic text, Aristotle on emotion in Rhetoric. In such a time of adjustment and contention, literary examples and theory may seem relevant and useful, especially after a long period when cognitivism downplayed the role of emotion in philosophical psychology, and even the study of literature fended off feeling. If I am right, literature—storytelling— might bring some dimensions that neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and sociology cannot usually give to emotion study. Literary thinking has always been good at interpreting emotion states that have already been coded into sequential writing. More

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consciously now, literary thinking might bring increased attention to the emotional lives of imaginary persons, to mixed and hypothetical emotion states, to intensity of emotion states, to historicity and the social nature of emotion states. * My definition of the essentially contested concept, emotion, is conveyed through explanations and examples. I connect the examples to the explanations through statements, through readings by a small set of procedures, and through directive arrays set out like panels to be encountered in a certain sequence. There are more examples in proportion to explanations than in most books of literary scholarship. I hope to be able to connect terms with practices. It accords with the nature of my topic that I should not seek a verbal definition. We need to say what a multiple and contradictory thing emotion might be, what it is near and what it is not, by tracking how we come to know what we feel scene by scene, also by co-ordination of scenes into larger social meanings, in our reading practice. And what of those many, many moments when the discourse of feeling does not exactly correspond with the discourse of knowing? That last is a question I can’t answer in this essay; I find sufficient difficulty trying to explain ordinary cases where literary thinking succeeds. Here I would start the process by bringing in a helpful phrase, a synonym, and a constitutive metaphor. The phrase is “emotional-volitional tone”. It was generated by Mikhail Bakhtin in his fragmentary work of 1919-1921, now translated as Toward a Philosophy of the Act.6 At that time of Civil War in Russia, Michael Holquist notes, Bakhtin was concerned with (among other topics) “the relation between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse” (ix). I like the phrase because it puts cognition and will into one unit, both split and joined by the hyphen, and it turns them into adjective forms that modify tone, which for me opens the whole topic of dialogue: the social moorings of speech, and the possibility of a world existing between, and partaking of both, actions and discourse. Cognitivism as a method might set volitional in front of emotional, because that puts the element of intent, or judgment, first; but as a resistance to what’s dominant I’ll follow Bakhtin in putting feeling first—polemically to

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get both terms back on the level, back to what might be imagined as one term overwriting the other, because that’s the way things probably are in experience. (Warning to those persons rightly quick to question: see just below; of course feelings are briefer, more perception-based, than emotions in any reckoning, but here I am boldly, with full support from ordinary usage, taking feeling as intensifying substitute for emotion.) Both cognitivist and post-cognitivist ideas of emotion involve thinking with feeling—somehow imbricated—but the cognitivist can’t accept the reversibility of the equation, can’t accept that feeling is not, at some level, run by a rational program. By contrast “emotional-volitional tone”, in this use, will take feeling as a force twisting on a force, or, in other figures for its role, as the motive or amplifier for thoughts, the connecting tissue between thoughts. The synonym, already claimed, is feeling for emotion. Traditionally, in the Enlightenment sense, passion is the word for a long-lasting, settled disposition of the agent; the idea of passivity is in the word’s deep structure from the Latin, but experientially the agent must always consider a passion, especially of the ruling sort, a matter of choice. Passions do not flare up; they are limited in number and dominating in force. Emotion is a word for an unwilled, usually brief but in cases like love or hate or grief sometimes life-long surge of self toward an object. Since emotions are what relates us to ourselves and others, and are evoked most often out of reciprocal relations, there are hundreds of named emotions and an infinite number of combinations and intensities. Feeling, a term often and correctly taken as a synonym for emotion, is the term for the most evanescent of these states. But just for this reason, it may be a figure for the others—for their closeness to the body, for the sharpness of their registration in the mind. Feeling is less likely than passion or emotion to be named precisely or timed; but the most likely to be the register of intensity, indeed to comprise the very meaning of intensity. Passion and emotion are usually singular states, but feelings tend to be plural. Feelings cut deeply but briefly into human life, like a musical accompaniment that is either apt, or jarring, when you become aware of it, an accompaniment that is or becomes the story itself. Feelings, not emotions, can be hurt. Feelings come directly from the body, and are indeed the same term as when you refer to sense perception, or to strong registration of a named emotion. Laughing and crying are audible expressions of inner feelings; in them, the clash of outer and

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inner speech is so violent that language is interrupted.7 But it is redundant to speak of inner emotions. You feel well or ill but you grade emotions as strong or weak. Touching, you trace something with your fingers as probes or feelers; on occasion when you wish to be impersonal about a sentiment, you say it touched me when you mean I felt it. You speak with feeling. The metaphor is floods of feeling. To conjure floods is my vaunt against cognitivism. I want to back the despised, multiple, obscure, quick, body-centered term feeling, without losing the range of reference in passion, emotion, tone, sentiment and mood. I need to remind readers of what scientists know in their everyday practice, that small quick changes are changes, and equally that long curves of duration are also measurable as changes though outside the usual range. Also, from the point of view of literature as a field, I wish to emphasize intensity as a value. The scale of intensity is often deliberately omitted in professional studies of emotion in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and neuro-anatomy. To literary people and others, it sometimes seems that intensity is what justifies life in the world, and those are the times when we appreciate floods of feeling. Yes, floods are fast-rushing, destructive events. Floods break out of the bounds of a channel, over-running weak bends and dips and spreading out into widening margins. Floods also create new lakes, new routes, oxbows or shortcuts. Some drown: fields, animals, persons. Floods rise to a high point—then subside. There is tremendous tension in the onset, marked attentively moment by moment, struggled against, and then a return to the more or less normal flow, and much of the anxiety is forgotten in grieving, cleanup, repairs, sunshine. The action of surge and retreat is the same, even when the direction is different, as when the flood comes from an overflowing river on land, or from a tsunami from the deeps off the coast. But the direction does change the metaphor. The metaphor returns us to emotion as feeling, thus countering the upheaval of thought, or the rationality of emotion, implied in the titles of cognitivist studies. The metaphor of emotion as a flood helps us to imagine a volatile emotional life not separate from reason, but not driven by reason—indeed, sought out by reason as an enhancement or correction. The flood of which I speak is as far as possible from the form of pop psychology derived from the work of Wilhelm Reich and called emotional flooding, in which patients are

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regressed by strange and insulting methods to traumatic moments of childhood. I have in mind momentary intensities that may be hard to grasp as steps forward but are nonetheless real experiences, larger spreading tracts of understanding experienced directly or by encounter with works of art. After they have occurred, floods can be dated and mapped. Before they occur they can be anticipated and riprap can be laid, levees raised and bridges strengthened. While they are occurring, nothing else matters and our knowledge and sense of being-in-history are almost equal to our fear. 1

This is from Robert Lowell’s translation of lines from Act II, Scene 5 of Racine’s Phèdre (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 45. Phaedra in Racine actually says: “Lend me your sword”. I use Racine because his play is the crucial example in Chapter 5 below; I use Lowell’s Racine for the skill of the rhyme and the shock value of the 20th century making-explicit what is implied in the original. Here is a shift in structures of feeling between 1677 and 1971—loss of a social tone when Lowell emphasizes sexual violence; a first instance of how literary emotions can be historical. 2 Among the exceptions four have meant a great deal to me: Herbert Read’s studies of English Romantic Poetry in The True Voice of Feeling, William Empson’s books on ambiguity and on complex words, Harold Bloom’s way of making emotion more central than any of his contemporaries in his theory of the anxiety of influence, and Stanley Fish on affective stylistics. 3 There is a phase of commentary on emotion from outside literature that points toward collaboration of disciplines in the future. Arlie Russell Hochschild (The Managed Heart [1983: 220]) is a sociologist: “Emotion… is our experience of the body ready for an imaginary action”; Victor S. Johnston (Why We Feel [1999: 192193]) is a psychologist: “From the ecstasy of orgasms to the inner groans of fear, these prophecies arouse the mind to act on outcomes not yet here. Not knowing where the words come from but heeding their advice, we creatively learn and reason about the world around us”. 4 If we’re rational beings, how is it that we make so many mistakes? In the assignment of questioning whether Reason should be the preferred faculty, two books are worth a look for the way they disturb what most people assume: Jonathan St. B.T. Evans and David E. Over, Rationality and Reasoning (Hove, East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 1996), conclude that researchers should first take account of implicit learning and its “very powerful tacit processing systems that affect our judgments and inferences” (161); Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, in Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds, translated by the author and Keith Botsford (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994), shows a “systematically and universally odd factor at work in our minds” (ix) in the actions of overconfidence, illusory correlations, predictability in hindsight, anchoring, ease of representations, probability blindness,and reconsideration under suitable scripts. These “mental tunnels” are ways of thinking where rationality defeats itself without any excuse that would allow us to blame interference from emotions. The concept of emotional intelligence appeared in the 1990s, when it was needed to ask these questions from the emotion-side of the brain: for a responsible survey of issues, see Emotional Intelligence: Science and

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Myth, edited by Gerald Matthews, Moshe Zeidner and Richard D. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002). 5

Because of the need to distinguish without dividing emotions from mind, Chapter 2, below, is about emotion-as-relation. See note 3 above: after her magnificent phrase on emotion as “our experience of the body ready for an imaginary action”, Hochschild continues (220): “Since the body readies itself

for action in physiological ways, emotion involves biological processes. Thus when we manage an emotion, we are partly managing a bodily preparation for a consciously or unconsciously anticipated deed. This is why emotion work is work, and why estrangement from emotion is estrangement from something of importance and weight”. Another sentence by Hochschild actually summarizes my book’s argument: “When we do not feel emotion, or disclaim an emotion, we lose touch with how we actually link to outer reality” (223). 6 M. M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov, edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). 7 The classic study on this “strange pair of human monopolies” (Marjorie Grene, xiii) is: Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, translated by James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene, with an introduction by Marjorie Grene (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

Part I. Person, Relation, Theory Chapter 1: Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons Joy and Sorrow: I am thinking of Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics, the book that makes my book possible, where he shows our endeavor—to persist, and not only survive, as a human person—as a conscious struggle between what impedes and what fosters life. Sorrow in its widest sense, tristitia or pain, impedes; joy, laetitia or pleasure, fosters. There are many more emotions than these two. Also, emotion is many things, and to study it requires reading in many academic fields. After thousands of years of study and commentary we’re still mostly baffled by this most difficult and contentious of forces in human life, so it is prudent to make two emotions stand for others, and to give warrants for a few reasonably well-hedged claims. Imaginary Persons: the human being defined socially, and performed in writing in literary narratives. Thus: author, character, narrator, actor, dialogic partner, reader, scholar—at least those imaginary lives, their textual sorrows and joys, their virtual voices, their pronouns. From the first sentences of any book, the persons who move across it are effects of discourse. Still, living persons are infinitely more precious than their representations. Some of us have noticed that scholars, who in their books dismiss as idealism the category of the person, will speak eloquently about a person, using the word, when a colleague has died of cancer. In the history of ideas, person, imaginary and emotion are highly contested terms. Until the 20th century, person was a term of dignity, referring to the self-containment of each human being, their right to be in the world and to exercise freedom so long as their actions did not harm others—unified moral agents with pasts and futures; but the root of person is mask, and charges of imposture, selfdivision, illegitimate idealism have increasingly impugned this idea in the Structuralist and post-Structuralist era after 1960—even as the

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term has been elaborated and defended by figures of stature like Max Scheler, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elmer Sprague.1 Imagination, in early usage by Hobbes, Spinoza, Samuel Johnson, was related to the humors of the body, and was a synonym for deception by false images, partial images, base sense perception, dreams; but after revaluation in the 1790s by figures like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the German Romantics, this became a creative force, a power of art-construction—from the momentum of the world through the artist to the art work, back to the world, uniting all that was separate, making new things and ideas. Emotion also began its history as a negative force, a visceral welling up of internal energies that could distort or kill the human being—so emotion for Aristotle and the Stoics was to be pushed back down, or rooted out, or strictly controlled, and studied for that purpose: the vehement emotions were the most feared, so the most studied; but as Norbert Elias has shown, much of the history of the West since the Early Modern has been a civilizing of emotion, a taming for use, a sophistication; while 20th century philosophy and psychology have attempted to show how emotions have each their intention or adaptation, an emergent form of study takes emotion in its strong form of affect as a useful exceeding of categories, and anatomical-clinical studies of emotion have shown its necessary cooperation with cognition to produce the mind which thinks. It is necessary to take sides in these matters, even as we attend to the qualifiers and warnings of opposing views. In this essay I’ll sponsor the positive—that is, counter-dominant to what’s believed in academic circles—valuations of all three terms: person as subjective agent in the world, imagination as creative force working on what’s actual, emotion as the relational structure of the mind that enables and accompanies all thinking. In an against-the-grain use of the related term, I’ll take feeling as the innovating edge of all three of these speculative instruments. 1. Changing the Research Question to Do a Study of Practice Feeling is a chord that moves transversely through the structure of civil society, through all discourse public and intimate, through singing and speaking to the self—from the self. Why is it, then, that persons in the human studies have decided not to engage directly with feeling?


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The answer is in the premise of the question. Feeling moves through and resonates around and conditions all levels in society. So in order to fend off feeling we need to separate it from its opposites however defined, thus to forget that feeling energized and directed the thinking. In order to make feeling the topic of thinking, we need to reconstitute the chord that moves through all discourse. Very ambitious! So much depends on how we define the terms and frame the questions. Facing the issue in its philosophical fullness, just not asking the old questions is a quietly revolutionary step. Within the convolutions of earlier work are new questions waiting to be evoked and pursued. While we’re in an expansive mood, could we explain why humans are literally addicted to narratives about the infinite variety of human motive—why as we grow from infancy to adulthood we never cease pursuing emotion-states in stories? Perhaps this occurs for reasons of adaptation and survival, for both the species and the person. We read stories, watch TV series and films, because we want to recognize, practice, multiply and control our emotional states. Enhancing a person’s relationships with the world and with others must have a collective social value: so what happens for good evolutionary reasons then develops secondary pleasures and pains, and these aesthetic purposes become specialized in turn. Such a claim seems plausible, but cannot be shown. Would that a complete phenomenology of feeling were possible! The corpus of world literature has the greatest approximation of completeness we shall ever see, but we haven’t yet interpreted it that way. However, many partial and limited-use explanations exist, for instance in Seneca’s studies of separate emotions like anger, La Rochefoucauld on pride and self-deception and Stendhal on love, new surveys of the whole range of emotions by Robert Plutchik and by Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, recent separate books on envy, disgust, courage, humiliation, jealousy, violent emotions, ugly feelings; and in sober historical reconstructions of the forming of earlier theories, such as Susan James’s account of the degree of resistance to ancient emotion doctrine in Descartes and others, or Gail Kern Paster’s work on the humoring of the body in the Early Modern period. These studies and hundreds more are pertinent, indispensable. Literary criticism has addressed the issue in brilliant but haphazard ways; but usually the existing studies don’t give what a storytelling

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explanation would need—a dynamic explanation, where we may track changes that make differences, from emotion-state to emotion-state.2 Elsewhere, I’ve studied increasingly indeterminate units as those divide literary works and make them cohere in the reader’s cognition. First I was interested in rhyme-mated pairs of lines; then in free-verse measures and the art-sentence; then in meter and grammar as they scissored each other meaningfully; then in the utterances of embodied persons, replying to each other in a dialogue. In this book, subsuming all those other variable units, the entity that concerns me is the emotion-state—always as it gives over the image of a person with an embodied mind. If we named and narrated these states, would we call them up into fuller consciousness? Should our human sciences research plan be: Always more consciousness? In both cases, yes, but I also believe that for smooth functioning these states must come forth from the wordless darkness of the visceral, the automatic—must be hauled up into consciousness. Some feelings are gut feelings. If we were fully conscious of every feeling at all times, never relying on our reactions or our visceral knowledge, we’d never get anything done or each bit of life’s business would take excruciatingly longer. As constituents of consciousness and of literary works of art, emotionstates nicely waver in the full conceptual space between sheer sequence and ecstatically frozen intensity, between a moment and a lifetime, between body and spirit, so these are hardly like building blocks of equal size that stay in place in a wall. However, in the moving site of the embodied person, or literary character, emotionstates can have names and can be timed and measured as variable forces. I want to show jammings and stretchings, combinations, permutations, obscurities; to show change in the floods of feeling; to show how we rehearse virtual sequences of emotion states in order to practice being more human, rather as a high-jumper imagines the full sequence of an ideal jump more times than she actually runs at the bar. The more defensible middle-range explanations might start by asking how we articulate hypotheses. As I’ve already hinted, neither literature nor emotion can provide a deductive explanation: I’m ruling out taxonomic and site-identifying methods, because of the literary field’s nature as person-centered, social, historical, essentially contested within itself—and even proudly uncertain because concerned with mental processes, moral agency, social moorings. Instead, I’d like to develop and use non-deductive explanations,


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appropriate for the task because these include incomplete systems, in addition to closed systems. I will be looking not at the grand frameworks proposed hopefully in the first words of this chapter, but rather at how we actually perform what we know about personimagination-emotion, when we read. Can we show how emotion-states are read back from writing? Can we get from there to some accounts of how emotion-states are turned into writing? Those are the research questions that might lead to a storytelling explanation, and I’ll pose them with examples in Part II. The present chapter is now devoted to the utterly invisible topic of how we perform what we know—and to whether, achieving that, we have any opportunities for learning new things, for moving from knowing to doing. So we are backing up from what and why, to how. We tell the story of the sequence of emotion-events in order to add this dimension to our reading experience, and in order to be less tentative and more generous in our reading experience. To perform such a narrative of emotion-states, we would require a rich list of names and of discriminations between such states in all their variety, and a willingness to claim and show their presence, their rising and falling, their contradictory overlay, their blend. We would require a display of all notations of emotion in texts, in order to identify these and show their sequence and the social situations that call them forth. How do we perform what we know about emotions? Specifically, what do we do when we read the imaginary persons of stories? It does make a change to do a study of practice. It changes both philosophical psychology and literary style study, to try to coordinate a text’s images and scenes with its emotion-states, by bringing up into conscious awareness states that we’d already stored and neglected—stored to neglect, neglected because stored. What we are studying, with emotion, is behavior so well internalized and familiar that it is automatic. We perform what we know with emotions as quickly and thoughtlessly as we perform, together in the same poetic line, grammar and poetic meter, once those are known as skills. Rather than attempt to devise some new site of origin or mechanism of control, what if we set out to know slowly and consciously what we already know? The idea of performing and judging what we know is a tautology. Like the dangerous letter in E. A. Poe’s story of detection, invisible because left out in plain sight,

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the tautology hides just what we wish to understand. We are attempting to construct what Gregory Bateson described as a slowly self-healing tautology, and alternatively as a hierarchy of orders of recursiveness. The emotion-states in literary works are repeatable and open to continuous re-description: if we can recreate some moments and open out the tautology, the knowledge we would get would be familiar and reassuring, and would lead to more exact judging and more creative performing. A skills reading cannot, however, rest in a familiar, reassuring redundancy. That would yield too much to hard-wiring and biology.3 In a passing note that condensed much of his theory of dialogue, Bakhtin once spoke of “the co-creativity of those who understand.” All speaking-writing-thinking is dialogue between those who speak as if they anticipate a reply, even as they are replying to a previous utterance—just as my sentence is a reply to Bakhtin and a solicitation to my reader. The separate persons are together making a dialogue that calls forth and explains single utterances: co-creation, with an emphasis on new knowledge, like that of the high-jumper—who, on the basis of past jumps, envisions before performing. And envisioning is also performing! Such creation is oriented toward the future and to better success, and that’s an entirely normal performance in the world. Less usual but also creative is the way the reader as a person in the circuit of literary understanding might get stuck in reading, using reading as a timorous escape from agency. Or the reader might put up resistance to the text at hand, through partial reading, mistaken reading whether willed or not, or more honorably through disagreement. These are routes that creative performance might take: they show that a skills account isn’t just the repeating of an automatic response, or of a dominant ideology. In the dialogue of co-creation, there are unplanned inner turnings, which keep persons open to change, development, agency in the world. Indeed, the incompleteness that permits us to enter into dialogues, where we cannot fully anticipate the moves of the other speaker, is one of the defining traits of imaginary persons. 2. The Persons in Literature Already I’ve fallen into a habit that exasperates me in the libraries of recent books on human emotion: the author, telling the reader how we see or feel or know, so that whole books may seem to


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have only sentences beginning with the arrogance of first-person plural pronouns. Can that eager authorial assumption be avoided? Emotion is inescapably a force that is social and reciprocal, but might there be a way to distinguish what’s rightly shared and what is not? I’d say that this is a book about feeling what we know, and about knowing what we feel, except that immediately the pronouns begin to disable my rhetoric. Who am I to make my experience general, to claim to stand or speak for others, to drop for this book my usual retreat into no-pronoun speech which is my way of evading the even greater presumption of the we. I is but one, an imposition, and we is effectively nobody, a hoax. To clarify how we feel what we know, how we know what we feel, is a plan urgent enough to justify my claim to speak for others, to others. To have imagined that this is a dilemma is to make some advance over most existing scholarship in emotion studies. Here I will solve the dilemma of pronouns by using I, we, no-pronoun, and occasionally you in alternation as seems genial or opportune. In a book where I am about to argue that emotions and a body need, most of the time, a person to reside within and be centered by, it seems only right to claim my upright personal pronoun from the first, as an assertion both of originality and of limitation.4 Enough about me and we. What about the author who is not me, and who may not be the final cause of the story, or the only person to praise, but whose name is on the title page as the efficient cause? Let’s make that author, who has suffered death and rebirth in the last generation of commentary, the first of the persons in the family of the text. Here’s a salute to the cruel joy of the storytelling author! In the example of Philip Roth I get all of my circulating terms: imaginary persons, literary success as cruelty and ecstasy, creation, transgression, role of the mind “if it is a mind,” relation of fiction to reality, relation of sorrow to joy. In remarks delivered when he won an award for best novel in 1987, Roth spoke of books rotten and savage and would accept only writing where facts were turned over to the butcher, imagination: “The imagination gets to work. It is not a pleasant sight. The imagination is pitiless, brutal, and cruel. It lacks common decency, discretion, manners, loyalty—yes, it lacks even compassion…. This butcher, imagination, wastes no time with niceties: it clubs the fact over the head, quickly slits its throat, and then with its bare hands it pulls forth the guts. Soon the guts are

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everywhere, the imagination is simply wading through them…. The imagination then turns a dripping mass of eviscerated factuality back to the mind. But the mind (if it is a mind) is no less brutal than the imagination and is not impressed. It finds that the facts have been badly butchered”. And so on—new facts are required, in further cycles of savagery and self-loathing, but “eventually there is a novel”. Some weak readers are “happy only with the facts—stupid as the little facts are all by themselves…. Others, however, with a secret, shameful but well-developed hunger for the brutality, cruelty and pitilessness of imagination and mind, sit back and, under the guise of participating in a culturally uplifting activity, they cannibalize the flesh of fiction. To be sure, there cannot be anywhere, in all the realms of contemplation, anything so disgusting as the taste of a rotten book. But when it tastes good, gamey and good, there’s nothing like it, is there? Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing”.5 With no generosity whatever but plenty of ironic sorrow, Roth refers to failure of writers and of readers as something disgusting, rotten—and success as carnivorous, cannibalistic joy. To achieve success, the creative imagination, in this view of it, eviscerates facts, stupid and little in themselves, in order to get more reality into the book. Philip Roth is an uncompromising storyteller in his novel Sabbath’s Theater (1995), which he wrote some years after his 1987 remarks to the National Book Critics Circle. This will show a practice equal in savagery to his theory of imagination. It will respond to the negative energy roused above, not by surpassing or tamping it down but by using the impulse to sorrow. Since the novel draws joy out of grief, it puts life and death into constant ironic collision, and it never lets an emotion-state exist without its opposite as a shadow. I mean shadow as both fact and figure, because at key points in the story Mickey Sabbath’s dead mother hovers near him, returned from the afterlife to talk to him, to remind him of his failings and of the death that is coming; also Mickey is by profession a puppeteer, a maker of little stories as images of reality. Mickey is 64, haunted by his mother who fell in love with death when his brother was lost in a B-25 in WWII. He has arthritic hands and can no longer work his seductions with the puppets, so he is supported by his second wife who at the end evicts Mickey and takes a young lesbian lover. It is possible Mickey has murdered his first wife, and certainly he fantasizes that he did. He has an adulterous affair with Drenka, a Croatian American neighbor,


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and Roth’s novel describes with full-on explicitness every sexual act and attempted adultery with the wife of his friend in New York City. That skims over large sections of the plot but we cannot convey the outrageousness of local feeling in the book except by long quotations, so I will just say: this novel is an extended treatise on male erotic energy, and seems designed to drive feminists to distraction. (It shows women just as sexually hungry, and instantly ready, as men, and has in Drenka a memorably loving sexual super-heroine, but Drenka is unfaithful with scores of men and the novel has negative stereotypes of lesbians and of one woman in alcoholics anonymous.) We know the events and emotions of the story through the intelligence of Mickey, who has wide human experience and much reading—for instance, one of Mickey’s puppet plays has been King Lear, and the novel quotes from Shakespeare the same multiple Never speech that Roth also uses at the end of his National Book Critics statement. When Mickey is making love with Drenka in their grotto in the woods, early in the novel, his mother is just to the right of Drenka’s head, and then a helicopter comes to hover over the couple and Mickey knows that the helicopter is his mother. There are many other scenes that shadow joy with sorrow to give a new combined emotion, including one early in the novel and another at the very end, where Sabbath in the dark is masturbating on Drenka’s grave, talking to her in the ground, hunted by his mother but actually, twice, seen and challenged by Drenka’s policeman son. The second time he is wearing on his shoulders the American flag that came from his brother’s military coffin, and he is trying to provoke the son to kill him so he will not have to commit suicide with his own hand. Every one of these transgressive, laughable, unexpected scenes, which come about one to a page, is pushed farther than the reader expects, with an effect of dangerous frankness: the very “savagery” and “eviscerated factuality” that Roth described in his talk. The novel ends with Drenka’s policeman son, Matthew, leaving Mickey in the woods near the cemetery. The rhetoric follows the outer speech of Mickey Sabbath with final sentences in free indirect discourse, which are entirely neither in Mickey’s consciousness nor in the author’s, so could come from either, neither, or both: “’But I’m going free! I’ve reveled in the revolting thing one time too many! And I’m going free! I’m a ghoul! I’m a ghoul! After causing all this pain, the ghoul is running free! Matthew!’ But the

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cruiser had driven off, leaving Sabbath ankle-deep in the puddle of the springtime mud, blindly engulfed by the alien, inland woods, by the rainmaking trees and the rainwashed boulders—and with no one to kill except himself. And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here”.6 Reveled/revolting; fucking/die; hated/here. For Roth, our inability to separate sorrow from joy is an agony, a dilemma. His art is to dramatize the dilemma, by means of events experienced by one person, following Sabbath’s fine intelligence as the expression of his sexual body, with that body’s loyalties and faithlessness—and to leave it on two question marks. In this case, to the measure that hatred is life it is also joy, and to the measure that Sabbath has connative power Roth, indistinguishable here from Sabbath in the speech acts, has a writer’s joy. “There’s nothing like it, is there? Nothing.” Here next is a formal bow toward the intelligence of the actor, another of the persons in the family of the text who, like the author, can stand for all the others. In the play or film, actors are who we attend to so in some sense they are their auditors—also they mediate the author, the script, and their own lives and what they know about emotions. A century ago, Constantin Stanislavski encouraged the actor to display what the actor knows by self-scrutiny and research into how people behave, using body, gesture, voice as a systematic, intricately nuanced code—so for Stanislavski the actor’s job was to get in touch with and deliver those emotions in public. In the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot in Paradox of Acting (1773) argued that the actor represents but does not experience emotion-states that are roused and surpassed in any skillful performance: the paradox is that the audience is best served with emotion and meaning when the actor’s detached from emotion and meaning.7 Because the actor needed to know the emotions in the play to detach from them, we must have both Stanislavski and Diderot. That explanation makes a compromise between the partners in my imagined dispute, but I’ve raised this dilemma of the actor in order to find within its logics a productive idea about literature as an art that uses imaginary persons to project virtual emotions; and that takes place in time. I think Diderot is more right, or anyway more creative, than Stanislavski, because Diderot better acknowledges that representation is not re-enactment, and that sequence trumps intensity: this because intensity depends on the


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jump-cuts of sequence. Knowing emotions in advance: that’s what an actor does, and that’s what a plot performs. Only on a second encounter does the auditor/reader know the sequence of emotionstates in advance, but even then, the sequence must be attended to in order to take the meaning. Only on a second encounter does the auditor/reader consciously take on some of the powers of the author/actor, enabling the detachment that comes from seeing the sequence as a whole pattern. Not only the actor does not experience the emotion at the moment of performing: this is the competent reader also. Can it be that grasping the whole sequence is itself an understanding, an emotional completion that may lead to interpretation? That question is similar to the issue W. B. Yeats raised at the end of “Leda and the Swan”: did she take on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop?, and the answer here is, yes, but. Unlike Leda, for whom all time past and future was gathered into an instant, the reader has to attend to arrangement—the alignment of emotion-states, linearity, projection, grouping, memory, feedback, closure, repeatability. Having chosen Diderot, I cannot abandon Stanislavski in the form of his recent interpreter, Peta Tait, who has written an outstanding book on Chekhov’s four major plays and Stanislavsky’s approach to acting emotions: “how emotions in realist drama and its theatre sustain but also resist gender identity.”8 In Performing Emotions, she uses Judith Butler on performance and Susan Bordo on bodies as modes of cultural representation, to elaborate a feminist performance study: “As transient and irresolute agitations, emotions wander, disturbing the equilibrium of cultural spaces” (171); emotions, for Tait as for Stanislavski, are not objects, but rather “embodied spaces in a process of becoming….In acting they are neither authentic nor inauthentic; their degree of truthfulness is a social belief” (170). She says next, in sentences that may take us into a new era of emotion studies where literature has a place: “The expression of emotions suggests an emotional self that comes into existence as it is making emotional spaces. But the materiality of an emotional body has a lightness of density and weight, which allows it to float across social categories and appear, disappear and reappear. Emotions are experienced through the body, as a corporeal consciousness, in physiological and physical movements, in mental imagery and language formations. They are embodied consciousness.

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Emotions are made meaningful in cultural languages such as this performance of theory [her book] about theatrical emotions” (171). This refers to everything I shall urge on the topics of imaginary persons, textual emotion, and structure of feeling, and it also brings into play something few theorists are able to admit, the historicity of the floods of feeling that motivate our performances in theory. Peta Tait’s position can be mine, if I change theatricality in her final paragraph to storytelling: “emotionality remains inseparable from theatricality”. Storytelling connects the past with the present, sequence with state, the emotion of the linking of moments with the emotion of the moment. Storytelling connects the linearity of plot with pity and fear, two terms I’ll use here as leading instances of the eruptive chaos of intensity. Pity and fear are Aristotle’s terms for tragic emotions—those that produce catharsis in the action of the play and the mind of audience members—but this aspect of Aristotle’s theory has many literary critics disgusted or bewildered, as they avoid explicit admission of the emotional force of tragedy. Here, to prepare for a later chapter on the emotional effects of sequence in writing, I must risk seeming ungrateful to the generation of F.R. Leavis or W.K. Wimsatt. For them pity, fear and catharsis lived in an irrational black box in the heart of mimesis-theory: illogical, messy, cognitive in the worst sense, meaning not in the work itself but in the feelings of the auditor, thus not open to description like a textual object. Writing to resist that view, I treat surprise as a central, indispensable feature of human emotions and of human emotions in literary and other texts. In accordance with this book’s constant emphasis that emotion is a relationship, I should say that for me arrangement and attention are functions of surprise: terms for the textual and psychological relationships that make surprise possible. Pity, fear and catharsis, intensity terms that are not congenial to many readers, are for me the focus of a coming, but also ancient kind of reading: intensities that jut out of the sequence of the plot, emotion states that exist between author, actor, script, character, and the auditors and readers of literary works. Among these agents, whose emotion is literary emotion? Since it’s already a web of relationships, already discourse, every human agent has access and ownership. Leavis and Wimsatt have their High Modern, Eliotic hang-ups about emotion as opening the flood-gates of the irrational, the immature: that’s out of reach; but to settle some of their more superficial worries,


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what I need to do to clear up the conceptual situation is to specify which of those agents I’m looking at for a given analysis. In the experience of the second reading, usually we’re looking at the relationship of all of these agents (actual and virtual) at once. By speaking of a relationship, we’re already assuming separate roles for separate persons in the literary work. The relationship is what creates, then conditions these roles, which can never be dissolved, but which gain in energy by being played here and there and now and then in parallel. So what if it’s the author who does the sequencing and the character who does the recognizing! (Peripety and anagnorisis, reversal and understanding, are also in the reader who performs the written code.) So what if the pity is primarily that of the audience for the character, and the fear is equally that of the audience and the character! (Pity and fear are also woven into the causal relationships of the plot, so author, script and actor also register the negative emotions of tragedy.) Not unusually in the case of the family of persons in and around a story, the identities of imaginary persons are redundant, convertible, shape-shifting; but knowing how to read literary emotions, we already know how to distinguish differences. 3. Toward a More Conscious Experience of Emotion-States in Writing Love, grief, anger, joy, surprise! Often stories name the emotion states they are showing, but usually they perform what they do not name. Often, too, stories name the gestures that are the cues to emotion states—the face, the hand; as in the scene from Dashiell Hammett’s 1934 hardboiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon, where all the actors are together when Sam Spade “shut the door and carried the parcel into the living room. Gutman’s face was red and his cheeks quivered. Cairo and Brigid O’Shaughnessy came to the table as Spade put the parcel there. They were excited. The boy rose, pale and tense, but he remained by the sofa, staring under curling lashes at the others. Spade stepped back from the table, saying: ‘There you are’. Gutman’s fat fingers made short work of cord and paper and excelsior, and he had the black bird in his hands. ‘Ah,’ he said huskily, ‘now, after seventeen years!’ His eyes were moist. Cairo flicked his red lips and worked his hands together. The girl’s lower lip was between her teeth. She and Cairo, like Gutman, and like Spade and the boy, were breathing heavily. The air in the room was chilly and stale, and thick with tobacco smoke.” Then Gutman takes out a pocket-knife and cuts

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into the edge of the bird’s base, exposing, Hammett writes, “the soft grey sheen of lead. Gutman’s breath hissed between his teeth. His face became turgid with hot blood…. He let knife and bird bang down on the table while he wheeled to confront Spade. ‘It’s a fake’, he said hoarsely. Spade’s face had become somber. His nod was slow, but there was no slowness in his hand’s going out to catch Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s wrist….’All right,’ he growled into her face. ‘You’ve had your little joke. Now tell us about it’.”9 That is masterful as action writing. Hammett sets out the elements almost as a filmscript to show how Bogart should grab and berate Mary Astor, how speaking should coordinate with movement, how the camera should be turned. The scene also conveys the essential Hammett tone, which is allied with Spade’s self-protective cynical withdrawal from feeling because he knows the pain of feeling. Oddly that reluctance to react makes Spade intriguing, to the reader and also to the other characters in the story, both male and female. That is an example of emotion study at the most basic level; critics rarely descend to that level. Critics of an earlier era had an aversion to coordinating emotion-states with the images and scenes of stories, or they simply were not interested. Those more recent writers whom I consider my predecessors, my affiliates in post-cognitivist thinking on these matters, tend to work with categories and concepts in their attempt to make the right approach to The Particulars of Rapture, to use Charles Altieri’s title.10 Altieri’s book is a critique of cognitivism, and on the positive side an examination of manner and intensity—“an alternative expressivist model for the values constituted within affective life.” Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, in the process of bringing forward the thought of a neglected maverick psychologist, Sylvan Tomkins, has followed the inner windings of shame and paranoia through recent examples of literature and literary criticism. Gilles Deleuze has shown how “emotion and affect—if affect is intensity—follow different logics and pertain to different orders.”11 Estrangement emotion is my term for something Deleuze and the others, my affiliates, are aware of but do not define, do not pursue. Estrangement emotion is the most distinctive idea storytelling can contribute to our dialogue of disciplines, so a short account of it will prepare us for the more general account in Chapter 3 and the line of examples in Chapter 5. I’m taking “estrangement” from Victor


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Shklovsky’s famous essay in Russian Formalist method, “Art as Device” (1917), where he argues that the purpose of art isn’t to refamiliarize the strange through images, but to de-familiarize what’s become automatic, forcing us to notice. His influential term is ostraneniye, literally “making strange” but also, as he explains it, meaning to distance things and see them from other points of view, and through devices of style to impede perceptions, slow them down, call attention to their properties, including and especially “the artfulness of the object,” the stoniness of the stone. The devices that “increase the difficulty and length of perception” are themselves perceptions, estranging and estranged. Wherever Shklovsky says perception I would also say emotion. In a chapter where I am proposing to change emotion-study to a skills account, and asking how we perform what we know, it is imperative to add this move toward eloignment as a completing term. Along with writers and readers, I need a way to think the smooth performing of automatic skills, along with the much more rare and deliberate turn into artemotions. You need a stone in order to think of it as stony. With emotions, as with perceptions, whatever’s automatic and whatever’s estranged are in rapport.12 Estrangement emotion—the inconspicuous and secondary one, that literally performs the sorrows and joys of imaginary persons—is the emotion that derives from reading. It is a non-normal emotion that comes to seem normal to readers, once we are able to perform its learned conventions by ignoring their materiality; we see through and with its conventions. This kind of emotion sometimes posits feelings without a person to declare or experience them, so it has the ability to detach person from idea, person from utterance. The one who must experience this is the reader, who delights in the suppression of person only because the reader knows that the category of the person cannot be entirely eliminated, even though it may become boring through familiarity.13 It is early in the study of literary emotion, if we still find it mysterious how some marks on a white page, pursued from top down and from left to right, can evoke the physical and moral sense of an ancient palace in Troezen, a woman drowning in black water by a bridge off Cape Cod, a ghost who appears on battlements to speak with his son, or the unveiling of a Maltese falcon in a room in San Francisco. The hints that allow us to imagine these worlds must be

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dense with information, and the information must be chosen and set in order—grouping and prolongation, crescendo and frustration and closure—so that we can perform it as meaningful mental imagery. It is not literary worlds that are mysterious, because they are always a version of the world we know. (My epigraphs are a condensation of this point.) What’s unknown is rather the means of evocation: how we get from a code to a reality-effect. Some of the elements that help create the notation for these virtual worlds are: visual and auditory imagery, especially images of the body and the human face, the human voice; personal pronouns and their way of identifying ownership of experiences and of speech; names of emotions as claims that such states are present and experienced; surprise-startleinterruption; changes in the images and the utterances along a plotted path. There are certainly other elements; the attributes of all such elements when they become swept up into language is infinite in variability: useful singly or in combination, useful in any imaginable circumstance to establish and then move beyond a focus. It is early in the study of literary emotion because of the difficulty of finding linkages, between these notations and the effectof-being-in-the-world that successful verbal art gives to the competent reader. The verbal means are incommensurate with the mental and moral world they construct. I suppose the need, to cross this territory, is the reason why literature is often called a creative or imaginative writing, and why Mikhail Bakhtin thought of writing and reading, and of the relation of dialogic partners, as calling forth “the co-creativity of those who understand”. The co-creativity of readers exceeds and completes the creativity of the author. However this occurs—this the assignment for research!—literature unifies into whole actions, with bodily details and moral choices, the materials of psychology, politics, history, sociology, philosophy. So we’re moving into the ancient topic of the imaginary emotions, what Aristotle in Poetics called “things such as might happen” and what contemporary thinkers call counterfactual. In an Interlude in her neo-Aristotelian, neo-Stoic recent study of emotion, Martha C. Nussbaum considers suffering from the perspective of the implied author, whose “sense of life…is that of someone who looks at reversals and sufferings of reasonably good people with both compassion and fear”.14 In her account of “things such as might happen” she distinguishes between emotions toward characters,


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toward the implied author, and toward “one’s own possibilities” as a spectator. She writes: “When we grasp the patterns of salience offered by the work, we are also grasping our own possibilities” (242, 243): so if we have pity or fear for the predicament of a character like Oedipus, “we have fear that we ourselves may possibly suffer a similar reversal” (245), and in this way we can see how emotions “can have the cognitive content of the real-life emotion” (245) because we’ve responded to the story as the sort of thing that might happen. Nussbaum is in the direct line from Aristotle, but also from Philip Sidney in “Defense of Poetry” and Samuel Johnson in “Preface to Shakespeare,” both of whom defended literary events, including emotions, as belonging to the possible and the probable: literature makes no claim to be either the experience itself or the replacement for it, because literature’s methods are obviously at a remove from the real. Louis Marin has found a specific, strong jouissance that results from the author’s and reader’s mastery of the emotions of imaginary persons—the pleasure of narration “that would stem from the opaque characteristics of narrative representation, in particular when senders are specifically figured in the articulations of the narrative or when the enunciatory situation itself is represented in the narrative”.15 Imagined worlds may assume the center of human attentional fields for a while, as we read a play, but they are not illusions. In fact, the fictional is there as a category to be disrupted. If we are adults we are not deceived. The point is well developed in Richard Moran’s article, “The Expression of Feeling in Emotion”,16 which refutes the idea that works of visual and verbal art show us the structure of another world that we may enter, and be lost within. His final sentence of a long exploratory analysis brings him to the conclusion that “The realm of our emotional responses provides one of the clearer cases in which imagination is not so much a peering into some other world, as a way of relating to this one” (106). Though Moran never uses the term estrangement emotion, his article makes the best case I know for being aware of such a set of cues in our reading. The trouble with past speculation, he says, is that in framing the philosophical problem, “the implied contrast is always with the real thing, because the very thing to be explained is how (awareness of) fictionality is compatible with the appearance of genuine emotional attributes” (82). But if we reversed the line of thought, and stopped being so worried that “it is the sense

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of fictionality that needs to be overcome” (82), we might begin to go after the problem of emotional participation the right way round. Moran: “For it would appear to be the very features of the work that do indeed detract from the realistic presentation of the fictional world that actually do enhance, and don’t inhibit, the intensity and richness of one’s emotional involvement with it. We know that Starry Night would not really be more emotionally engaging if Van Gogh had calmed down and left out all that overwrought brush work. And the highly artificial, figurative, self-conscious language spoken, for example, by Macbeth does not interfere with our ability to be gripped by the play and his situation. So we seem to have gone wrong somewhere. The very expressive qualities that disrupt any sense of a fictional world are in fact central for our psychological participation with artworks” (83). Other terms for those expressive qualities are Marin’s “opaque characteristics…of narrative”—and my own “estrangement emotion.” So the distortion introduced into the system of notation, inseparable from it because it is a notation, is what prevents a slide into ideas of reading as an escape, or reading as straight ideological identification. Distortion is a value. I am most interested in those places where emotion-states encounter literary forms and notations. These are sites of the greatest volatility and intensity, where readers move willingly within floods of feeling. Psychology textbooks in the 20th century have tended to regard intensity as an increment or attachment, tricky to measure, and hardly worth attention with so many other issues of definition and taxonomy to work on. I would say: Without intensity, there is less engagement, less continuous monitoring of feedback; so no dénouement, and possibly no literature. In floods of feeling, a virtual re-experiencing is also an experiencing. If literary emotion is part of knowledge, why repress it? If we wish to repress emotion, we do not do this to promote reason or science, because emotion drives and supports these, and they are worthless without its energies. One task of a coming criticism will be to find estrangement emotion in works of declaration and conventional realism, where it remains hidden in plain sight, in cues so basic they are overlooked. What are those cues and how do we use them to perform what we know? How find the dispersion of focus of the anti-perspectival, within the text that seems perspectival? What may be the asignifying intensities within the text where genre and paraphrasable meaning are


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reassuringly legible, if not always expected? My examples in the following chapters—from American realist storytellers, from tragedians ancient-Shakespearean-modern, from lyric poets from several countries and eras, and from scholars in the human sciences— oblige me to accept this charge and to pose the attendant questions. 4. Scholarly Writing and Emotional Knowledge Scholars are imaginary persons, too. All our writing is spun out of our guts, whatever kind of writer we are, but we arrange many codes of indirection to avoid letting our guts be seen in our academic articles and books. This makes those who write about imaginary persons become, themselves, fictions for the reader. In turn the reader will resist this recognition mightily in order to maintain trust in the knowledge being produced. First guts, then trust, and only then guts in a finer tone—with only partial trust! Eventually, the professional reader of professional writers comes to understand: knowledge is what we’re persuaded is the case in the world, and no scholar’s entirely powerful or charming. That leaves openings for my disagreement with the scholar’s claims and warrants, and my show-me attitude toward the scholar’s manner. There is no way to prove Mikhail Ryklin’s claim, in conversation, that every work of scholarship originates in a trauma that is pushed below the surface in writing—but Ryklin himself has actually shown this in his essay “Bodies of Terror,” where he reads M. M. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais as Bakhtin’s disguised response to the Terror of the Russian 1930s.17 Writing as trauma is the wildest thesis, but trauma is more valuable than vague animus. It may not be trauma in the sense of physical/mental harm or family disruption; more likely here, it would be trauma as an intellectual assignment whose roots can be partly traced to personal experience, like the outsider/insider mind of a Camus or a Derrida raised in Algeria away from the metropole of Paris, or like the working class family life that gave D. H. Lawrence his anger and insight as well as his limitation. Exclusion and suppression prepare for overthrow. Trauma is attractive as a preliminary explanation, because financial and career rewards for scholarly writing are not obviously equivalent to what gets paid out in dogged reading, carrying books out of libraries and back, outlining, drafting, putting family and life on hold for long stretches, taking corrective comments from friends and strangers, suffering rejection at

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publishers, making the index and choosing the cover, writing jacket copy, paying permission fees, correcting the galleys, and paying for extra copies: there has to be an explanation beyond money, for the lonely effort of spirit that drives the scholarly author to ransack libraries and burn up the years. But the original trauma explanation is arbitrary, because it requires us to discern a change in the structure of the scholar-author’s mind and character, and then to find it in every new work.18 Let us more cautiously ask: how do scholarly articles and books deal with scenes of emotion, and how do they perform emotional knowledge, rousing floods of feeling through argument and evidence? Narrative is the answer most readily to hand: scholarly books also come from and appeal to the storytelling urge, and they are easier to write and read if we think of them as the unfolding of stories. What are the filters and baffles through which scholarly stories are told? In Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton, the essential story of their literary criticism is Marx’s stages of history, but energy in the one comes from dialectical reversals and surprise collisions of cultural levels, and in the other from the severe wit of a working-class outsider who speaks in the halls of privilege. In influential scholarship, often part of the story is the author’s force of affect: M.M. Bakhtin’s dialogic inclusiveness, W.K. Wimsatt’s knotty style of compression with its patrician disdain, F.R. Leavis’s lists of grievances against attackers and his repeated watchwords of emphatic assertion, Donald Davie’s formal and theological rigor and his withdrawal from confessional candor, Harold Bloom’s grumpy defense of Aesthetic and Canon against New Historicist critics whom he calls the School of Resentment, Stephen Greenblatt’s personal turn in the statement that he wants to speak with the dead, Jonathan Culler’s and Judith Butler’s sober good sense in summarizing others’ arguments, Elaine Scarry’s decision to end Dreaming by the Book (1999) by pages describing mourning doves and cardinals in her garden. One comes to such summaries of emotional knowledge by remembering the effect of whole books. In the last quarter-century there has been much serious consideration of the convertibility of scholarly and imaginative writing, to the advantage of the scholarly as imaginative. It is normal now to speak of books about books with the same attentiveness we’d give to novels, plays or poems, and the fictive attributes of nonfictional prose are familiar to us, due to the work of such rhetoricians


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as Hayden White. Impersonal, we’ve come to learn, is another word for personality that has been sent around a detour, and that just makes the neutral voice more intriguing as a guise—not something we can dispense with. Now that scholarly writing is no longer a symptom for impersonal, academic writing has often managed a more omnipresent I speaker and opened the pages to straight, even confessional, autobiography. I had to read to the last paragraph of Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood (1992), to find him making exactly this point about several seventeenth-century authors, each of whose discourse of nationhood is also a discourse of self: “In representing England, these writers represent themselves. Their individual authority depends on the authority they attribute to the social and political entity of which they are part. Every man, says Hobbes, belongs in the body of Leviathan. But every man is also the author of Leviathan. All the apparent displacements of rule, all the apparent defenses of it, are so many forms of self-writing. The face that peers out from our various constructions of the nation is inevitably our own. For those who are prepared to recognize it—or rather to recognize him—Hobbes made this point in a particularly telling way. He had his own features engraved on the face of Leviathan. In giving up his right to govern himself, as he says we must all do when we author Leviathan, Hobbes gives up nothing at all. He is the sovereign for whom he apologizes; he, the apocalyptic other with whose ungodly body he merges. In Hobbes’s writing of the nation, perhaps in all national self-writing, self-alienation and self-aggrandizement are one.”19 This was a perfect circle if not a perfect confirmation, because it had me quoting what Helgerson says about Hobbes, who said it best and first. Even this small example of a convergence of contemporaries entails a question, of what may be the rhetoric of scholarship in such an era as the present—the same question that Aristotle asked in his Rhetoric. Aristotle’s answer is ours, too: we need to know everything we can about the emotions of an audience, in order to evoke or suppress the audience’s emotions when we speak. In the late-50s moment of Robert Lowell’s book Life Studies, Lowell defended the poet’s freedom to invent details in family scenes, in order to convey the meaning vividly. That makes perfect sense so long as the inventions are consonant with exactly reproduced details, so the reader cannot, need not know the difference. There, ripeness of

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virtual emotion is all. In scholarship, we do not invent details, but we invent (or, often, borrow from others) their selection and omission, ordering, and the styles of their description. Here framing is all—and phrasing. The framing structures of the scholarly study, which enable argument to show affect, are: preface, epigraph, acknowledgements, part and chapter structures, summaries, statement of concepts, title as standing for the intent of the whole, constitutive metaphors, movement between claims and warrants for claims in the examples, gestures of conclusion. The phrasing-level attributes of the scholarly study, which also enable affect in a more distributed and local way, are: proliferation of terms, perspicuousness of and devotion to examples, diagrams, admissions, ironies, humor, citation of affiliates and disaffiliates, quantity and type of footnotes, disputes, anecdotes or the lack of them, declarations, the conveyed image of the reader, reader-friendly gestures of pace and length, attention to context and history, range, grouping, felicitous phrasing, technical vocabulary, tone of voice, authorial self-reference or the lack of it. Most of these, whether framing or phrasing, are able to be graded on a scale: even with incomplete lists, if we describe, combine, and place on the scale we have here a basic rhetoric for judgment of the scholarly text. Any reviewer for a career file, or a public assessment in a journal, will have some such set of lists, developed from hundreds of encounters and usually kept implicit. Some valuable books may be conducive to more presentation of self than others. In part this can be judged only by asking how disciplinary protocols shape the way emotional knowledge is conveyed.20 More narrowly, we could track the extent to which flaws in argument might coordinate with faulty rhetoric, also reminding ourselves that a writer’s style—whether plodding or outrageous!— may impede a reader but need not fatally harm that writer’s cogency. Scholarship like other kinds of storytelling is everywhere describing emotion-states and also, even at the level of word-choice, syntax, prose-rhythm, displaying emotion-states. Scholarly writing is always persuasive and narrative, and within this writing emotional knowledge is always being overtly claimed, or masked and diverted. The reader of scholarship tracks the story of thought, decodes the notations. There is no cognitive antisepsis. All that matters is that the operations are performed in public and with public terms.


1

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Of all the debatable terms in my chapter title, person is the most controversial. But without it there is no strong study of literary emotions, so I wish to mount a defense. Part of the danger in the term is in ordinary usage—notably, I should say, in the argument that person can be pushed back as far as conception of the embryo, and in the argument, written into modern juridical codes, that a corporation may take the guise of a person so that the individual members may escape some of the costs of legal liability or commercial failure. There is also the argument that the state may, or alternately may not, legally take the life of a person who is a murderer. The most lethal danger is philosophical and lies in the argument current since Nietzsche, that the person like the philosophical subject is a pathetic delusion; and in the extension of this in the kind of ideology-theory that argues the person-subject is an unwitting dupe of the class holding social power. Subjectivism was taken for subjectivity and in a spirit of swingeing removal all forms of self were under critique during the Modernist moment in literature, and among many figures in philosophy between Nietzsche and Deleuze. But it is now obvious that subjectivity can never be expunged, only redirected or briefly disclaimed, and will return, often in a way that will embarrass the thinker who hoped to eliminate it. Equally, personality and the merely personal were taken as personalism or personist, or as weak psychologism, and a valuable concept was tossed out along with its various reductions. The question has been asked, Who comes after the Subject? And I would urge the related question, Who comes after the Person? There is a subject that remains after the claims of the old philosophical subject have been removed, and the same is true of the chastened person that remains to be defined. Here are the attributes of the person who comes after the person: -is non-coincident with self; -is non-coincident with idea; -strives to be self-interpreting; -obliges all descriptions from observers, of an entity spontaneous and independent, to be proven or rejected; -is capable of developing a moral consciousness; -enters into co-creation with a community of other persons: “the co-creativity of those who understand” (M.M. Bakhtin); -acts as if all mental predicates are already personal predicates; -acts as if mind and body are integral, so that body is not lesser or later, and so that agency is both mental and physical together; -acts as though agency were normal and everyday: personhood is agency; -acts as though emotions of imaginary persons are legible and useful to ordinary persons. In the continuous task of creating and understanding persons, the “forms of everyday discourse already available to us” (Elmer Sprague) are paramount, and that includes speech genres, relatively stable personal pronouns, language of the body, narratives of a life—materials which literary thinking can explain in detail. Helpful on this issue are items listed in the Bibliography by Eduardo Cadava (editor, with others), Gilbert Ryle, Elmer Sprague, and Charles Taylor. 2 Anthony Heilbut, our best commentator on Gospel music, wrote to question why a draft of this study had nothing to say about non-literary forms: “At times I thought of my poor gospel singers and preachers, how they can spin on a dime between emotional states more varied than any you mention—how Marion Williams can go

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from poignant to bloodyminded in one syllable through vocal coloration. Also how the participants of a ritual can mock and satirize it, live vividly inside and outside of it. This clarified my sense that gospel singers can be the most sophisticated performers and critics of themselves…. Why not mention that the literary sensibility may reach its zenith in non-literary forms (music, movies, ritual)?” To quote Heilbut’s letter is to mention this, but the reader has to go to his book to have the full, eloquent explanation: The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). 3 This is why, below in Ch. 1 and 3, I will argue that the more we become conscious of the automatic quality of a skills-reading the more we require, as our offset methodin-rapport, the estrangement quality of a literary-style reading. 4 Skepticism about the first person is unavoidable, but should not lead to the dismissing of person as a category. Is not residual presence of persons, however they’re called by dilute and disguised terms, necessary in most thinking and writing? In Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), Richard Moran inquires into how we do, and must, locate the first person. Moran sums up in his last paragraph: “The book as a whole has argued that the concept of a person as a reasoning agent is ineliminable and brings with it a set of basic differences in relating to oneself and relating to others” (193). 5 Philip Roth, “This Butcher, Imagination: Beware of Your Life When a Writer’s at Work”, New York Times Book Review, 14 February 1988: 3. 6 Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995): 451. 7 Denis Diderot, Paradox of Acting, translated by Walter H. Pollock (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957). Those who coach actors in more recent eras have a refinement, beyond Diderot, that specifies the psychology of control. Daniel Spector of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU advises that if actors want to feign a reaction, they should “embrace the acting tool of substitution: Think of something that did elicit that emotion and channel it” (Best Life magazine, October/ November 2005: 76). However, Joaquin Phoenix in a newspaper interview tells of a director who urged him to think of a heated argument with a girlfriend, when they were having trouble with a scene: “An incredible self-awareness about my life came over me and completely took me out of that scene. It made me feel so self-conscious that I walked off the set for four hours. That director managed in one sentence to unravel months of preparation…. I develop a character and I get involved…and I start thinking about the world through their eyes, and I can’t let in any trace of self-awareness”. Robert Hilburn, “The Actor’s Craft: Now you see him, now you don’t,” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2005, Calendar Part I, pages E1 and E4. The implied debate between Spector and Phoenix re-plays the same struggle that we follow in the two voices of Diderot’s dialogue. 8 Peta Tait, Performing Emotions: Gender, bodies, spaces, in Chekhov’s drama and Stanislavski’s theatre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002): 1. 9 Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon in Hammett: Complete Novels (New York: The Library of America, 1999): 570-571. Originally published in 1929 by Alfred A. Knopf, Ltd. 10 Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003): following quotation from page 159.


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Brian Massumi on Deleuze in Deleuze—A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell: 1996): 21. 12 Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”, translated and with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965): all passages here quoted from page 12. This translation uses the term “habituation,” for making-familiar, but another translation uses a term more congenial to my argument: “automatization” (Benjamin Sher, 1991). Shklovsky’s essay is exciting because of its definiteness in clash with standard doctrine, its generation of analytical terms and proliferation of examples, its push to conclusions about aesthetic-moral aims of techniques of verbal art. However, Shklovsky lacks a historical perspective, and with my desire always to pass beyond art-speech to an existing world, however defined, I resist the aestheticism in his wellknown statement, italicized in his original Russian: “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object [would he had stopped there!]; the object is not important” (12). There has been valuable recent commentary on estrangement: Carlo Ginzburg, “Making it Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device”, in his book Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Svetlana Boym, “Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt”, Poetics Today 26 (2005): 581-611; and all the essays in the Estrangement Revisited (II) issue of Poetics Today 27,1 (Spring 2006). 13 Estrangement emotion is an expansive synonym of textual voice, an idea Tadeusz Slawek and I worked to define in a previous book (1995). Many questions come along with the trans-position from voice to emotion. It is better to keep the term and try to work to the other side of what makes it doubtful, in the yoking of writing’s apparent artificiality and emotion’s apparent spontaneity. Can we gain some reassurance by noting that estrangement emotion is what we’ve known as philology or stylistics, but enhanced by emotion-cues such as reference to body-cues in face, hand, eyebrow, and by closer attention to emotion-names, and to sequences of emotion-states as variable units? 14 Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 240. 15 Louis Marin, “The Pleasures of Narration”, in On Representation, translated by Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 68. 16 Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Emotion”, in The Philosophical Review 103, 1 (January 1994). Moran has written a book with the word estrangement in the title, but without any reference to emotion or to Victor Shklovsky: see Bibliography. 17 Mikhail Ryklin, “Bodies of Terror: Theses toward a Logic of Violence”, translated into English by Molly Williams Wesling and Donald Wesling, with an introductory note by Caryl Emerson, New Literary History 24, 1 (Winter 1993): 51-74. 18 Trauma: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories radically changed the field of emotion study—unconscious emotions, neurotic anxiety, the talking cure that confronts repressed experiences have led to a massive and valid regime of interpretation. In Freud, emotion can be instinct, idea, or affect, one or all of these depending on the degree of repression in a given case. Cognitivists that I’m resisting in this book, such as Martha C. Nussbaum and Patricia Greenspan, are themselves resisting the force of Freud’s account of unconscious emotions; in psychology, in

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philosophy cognitivists want an emotion sponsored by an intent—a form of decision. As a student of how we perform what we know, I too have chosen not to grapple directly with the unconscious knowledge that always shadows conscious knowledge. This was Spinoza’s decision and also Bakhtin’s. An account of skills that emphasizes how emotions get into writing already has sufficient difficulty. Others like Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek have ably studied the more capacious question of the “psychic life of power,” the “ticklish subject”: that is, the political psychology of repression. 19 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 294. 20 For the literary field, an eloquent exposition and defense of protocols is Jerome McGann, The Scholar’s Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Chapter 2: A Feeling of and, a Feeling of if : Emotion as Relation With no special language and no partisan psychology, literature brings knowledge of how linkages of opposites, such as a logic of emotion, can occur in experience—in this case the experience of reading stories, poems, plays, non-fictional prose of many types. Literature brings storytelling, which is the need to understand the significance of lives, and of life itself; the need for context, history, reciprocity, community, the sense of being fitted into the world. In the moment of Deconstruction between the 1960s and the 1980s, it was usual to say that metaphor is, and stands for, literature as such, but now it seems more properly inclusive to say that the synonym should be: storytelling.1 When literature is taken as a narrated notation of emotion-states, the conscious decoding shows forth an even higher-level activity than the skills I’ve been discussing so far. Literary knowing is most like ordinary knowing, in the active revelation of relationships between persons, ideas, things. In literary knowing as in ordinary knowing, emotion-states reveal that relations among things are far more interesting and more important than the things themselves. The emotions give impetus, emphasis, relish, rationale, intention and motion to pre-existing ideas about objects whether those objects are literal or psychological; the emotions are wrapped up with thought as the moment of origin of events. When William James wrote: “a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by”, James meant, I think, that it is feelings that motivate our conjunctions and prepositions.2 So the operations of logical and temporal connection (and), dependence (if), exception (but) and method or route (by), may be said to have special intentions of their own. The logic of relations is the most of logic and deletes, or contains for the sake of brevity, the motivation. As I’ve mentioned in the Preface, Mikhail Bakhtin several times used the phrase “emotional-volitional

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A Feeling of and, a Feeling of if: Emotion as Relation

tone,” by which he meant: no feelings without their being twisted in with judgments, no tones of voice but social tones of voice, no thoughts or actions without the meaning-giving of intention, no logic without emotion as accompanying motive. I am bringing forward the radical person-centered philosophy I find in Bakhtin and in literary knowledge, because philosophical psychology can use a reminder that thoughts and feelings require a person to perform them—if only an imaginary, or secondary form of person. Indeed the literary discipline can use the same reminder, because we are still using the analytical language of subject positions that conveys distrust of subjective agency. Because it has to engage with emotions of imaginary persons, an analytical language derived from storytelling is bound to be more generous—even as it requires the usual tests of evidence. I return to the view that emotions enable and reveal the relations among conceptions, images, and the words that express them, with reference now to thinkers from whom I learned this. Critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in a letter about 1800: “For the property of passion is not to create; but to set in increased activity.”3 So emotions work upon elements already stored. I wish to re-emphasize Arlie Russell Hochschild’s excellent statement that: “Emotion… is our experience of the body ready for an imaginary action,”4 because that captures the way feeling signals expectation, perception, preperformance readiness. Her phrasing about “imaginary action” is already working in the realm of the imaginary, even before literary notation comes to process experience a second time. Like Coleridge when Coleridge was trying to fight his way out of 18th century associationism, cognitive scientist Victor Johnston speaks of stored “contextual cues”—of how new events call forth, and regulate, our repertoire of emotional-volitional tones. Under this creative arousal, human beings try out behavioral learning and cognitive reasoning (Johnston); and make “new connections between ideas and images” (Coleridge). Coleridge is the greatest of all commentators on literary emotion, and nearly everything he says is still pertinent; especially, I think, his notion of an armed vision: perception requires a prior idea, in order to be selective and efficient in making sense of the blooming and buzzing, shape-shifting world. For him, poetry represents a fusion of more than usual emotion and more than usual order, and reality is a field of opposites to be reconciled—the wider the disparities, the more


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imaginative the act required to fuse them. Some bad readers, Coleridge said, are sieves or strain-bags, and for them everything of importance slips through, but some readers can be mogul diamonds, whose facets give back the light they receive, but changed. 1. Reverse Engineering Because he’s so interested in what he calls co-adunation—by which he means relations of reciprocity—Coleridge would admire new developments in bio-mimetics where scientists make robots on the model of animals and insects in nature.5 These researchers decide what they want a robot to do, for instance hunt on the ocean floor or fly in air, and then they reverse-engineer a robot to do what the creature does. At MIT, Kismet is a robot with only head, eyes, and dangling wires: you can have interaction with it at a social level because its voice has prosody and emotional tones, it makes and breaks eye-contact, and if you widen your eyes and pull back so does Kismet. Cog is another humanoid robot who can pick up and turn over objects, coordinating arm-reaching with the eyes’ looking; Cog can learn to imitate what a person does with things, but cannot yet manipulate words. Rodney Brooks, head of the artificial intelligence lab at MIT, argues that robots have an emotional model and they interact as though they were animate beings—we have learned how to build these machines, because we’ve now figured out that when our own neurons fire, “the perceptual neurons for understanding an action are the same neurons used for performing an action.” (And my subject is performing what we know!) The emotion-effect, granted, lasts for only a few seconds, but Brooks asks: “If it lasts for ten years, what then?” We are more like machines than we may have hoped, and one literary instance is the palpable fear and resentment in the computer Hal, who pleads for existence when he is slowly shut down in the film 2001: Brooks says, “Maybe he had more emotions than the [film’s] astronauts, in fact.” In a Coleridgean spirit, it falls to me to ask: If, like robots, we did not have emotions, how would we learn what it is like to experience them? If we did not have storytelling, what would we do to create imaginary emotions, to stimulate them, to reverse-engineer them? Is the act of reading a kind of reverse-engineering, in the sense described above by Rodney Brooks? Asking these things, plainly we are not interested in engineering except as a metaphor to describe

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recursive logics, which are made possible by the keen human sense of relations of reciprocity. Perhaps we may reverse-engineer our own explanation by looking at meaningful cases where something is lacking. Here, instead of working on issues at the top of the edifice—such as failure of feeling in the writer or lack of attention or stamina in the reader—I prefer to build a solid base. Still extending the meditation on relationships, I’ll point toward the next chapter’s sketch of a theory by using the rest of this one for examples of literary autism. By this I mean not a clinical condition but a kind of style. In her introductory study of autism in 1994, Francesca Happé shows the “core biological and cognitive deficits [which] cannot at present be cured,” deficits not only of information processing but also of connection to human community through emotion, and she concludes this “is a disorder which fascinates because it seems to be so essentially a disorder of the human condition.”6 Because autism begins to show in children just when they are learning to think and feel, it is especially wrenching and a continuing moral test for those who love and help the autistic child. Only by looking at these deficits can we again be astounded by how much we assume, and thus neglect, about human emotion and the way it defines our condition. Temple Grandin is a high functioning autistic person, who tells the story from within of how it is possible to reverse-engineer every waking minute of the day. Only by assuming her successes can we gain insight into her beautiful and honest explanation of her deficits. Her distinguished book Thinking in Pictures (1995) is an account of her childhood difficulties with learning and her later troubles with relationships and on-the-job situations: she has a doctorate, teaches at a University, lectures on autism around the USA, has made money and fame as a designer of one third of all livestock handling facilities in the country, has written other books on autism and on livestock handling and transport.7 For my purposes, the facts of her welldeserved fame are less valuable than her profound understanding of her own disability, especially on two main topics: her “ability…to excel at visual and spatial skills while performing… poorly at verbal skills,” and her ability to teach herself the necessary verbal and emotional repertoires to work with others. She performs emotional knowledge as an act of conscious will in all everyday encounters, enabled by her precision visual thinking.


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Temple Grandin pictures the appropriate thing to say and do, scanning her brain like a CD-ROM or video library. She means this literally: “My imagination,” she says, “works like the computer graphics programs that created the lifelike dinosaurs in Jurassic Park…. I create new images all the time by taking many little parts of images I have in the video library in my imagination and piecing them together” (21). She brings her propensity to be fearful like a preyspecies animal (88, 172), and her “difficulty stopping endless associations” (25) to bear on her work in animal management: “I can imagine the sensations the animals would feel [in a slaughterhouse]. If I had a calf’s body and hooves, I would be very scared to step on a slippery metal ramp” (24).8 Here are other examples of her practical wisdom: “People with autism have tremendous difficulty with change. In order to deal with a major change such as leaving high school, I needed a way to rehearse it, acting out each phase of my life by walking through an actual door, window, or gate” (34). “People with autism sometimes have body boundary problems,” she says, and when she was able to change a meat plant’s restraint system to permit more humane kosher slaughter, she invented a pusher gate and head yoke because she knew from her own body the sensitivity of animals to hydraulic equipment: operating the levers, she says, “the parts of the apparatus that held the animal felt as if they were a continuation of my own body, similar to the phantom limb effect” (41). Again: “Like most autistics, I don’t experience the feelings attached to personal relationships. My visual world is a literal one, though I have made progress by finding visual symbols to carry me beyond the fixed and rigid world of other people with classic Kanner autism” (60). Again: “I am embarrassed to admit it, but when I was a young child, I liked to sniff people like a dog” (166). And last: “My emotions were primal and simple, but the symbolism of my visual symbol world was extremely complex…. If making associations is not considered thought, then I would have to conclude that I am unable to think. Thinking in visual pictures and making associations is simply a different form of thinking from verbal-based linear thought. There are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds of thinking” (172, 173). So Temple Grandin plays from the human side the reverseengineering of the bio-mechanic researchers. Bravely, ingeniously, she has made of herself a human robot that mimes and feigns the more social emotions which are unavailable to her, while she holds in check

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by the action of imagery the primal fear and confusion that are always threatening to disable her life. Some readers are also critics by profession. Once they can recognize the autistic spectrum from cognitive disorders to sensory processing disorders, and the range of impairment, they begin to find examples of literary autism all over modern and postmodern writing. I refer to speakers in poems and stories who exhibit disintegrative disorders—what Grandin calls “sensory jumbling”—in the kind and pace of images presented in the work. In a few notable stories, characters exhibit autistic traits—like the teenage boy narrator, who (lacking ability to read people) applies mathematical logic to solve a neighborhood dog-murder in Mark Haddon’s brilliant bestseller, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time (2003). I’m more interested in writers who are mouthing nonsense sounds with a high degree of melody or ugliness or redundancy, or scrambling or eliding words or abolishing the sentence as a form of thought, or just playfully running logic programs off the tracks, or planning gigantic or miniature verbal effects. There is a great deal of this deliberate miming of disintegration in James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and in their heirs like the Anglo-American school of Language Poets including Maggie O’Sullivan and Lyn Hejinian. But no 20th century writer, not even the most mainstream figure, is untouched by this tendency to innovate by means of miming some kind of informationjumbling. The method might be more consciously and abundantly used in Modernism and after, but a case might be made that it is after all a permanent resource in writing. I find one of the origins of this tendency in the emotions of love-trance in a woman on a Greek island in 7th century BCE, in Sappho’s “He seems to me equal to gods,” where the speaker says “when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me // no: tongue breaks and thin / fire is running under skin….”9 Other examples that come before Modernism are Blake’s “London,” where a sigh runs down a palace wall and categories and social classes are over-leaped, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire, and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” where huge breathless lists of perceptions evoke the energies of the world as it burns up at differential rates. Of course jokes, anecdotes, fables, tales, biographies, travel tales, nature excursions, stories, novels and other prose narratives are


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the greater part, and the usual instances, of storytelling. But in this essay, I’m putting forth claims for story in plays, poems, and scholarly arguments. Certain of the lyric poems I’ll be looking at, especially those by Paul Celan and Marina Tsvetaeva, are careful recreations of what happens in emotion-states of lessened or no control, or of scattered attention or of archaic pulsions, and that is their narrative. But I see story everywhere. I find story in the two-line or four-line lullabies Federico Garcia Lorca collected from the mouths of mothers in the villages of Spain—indeed Lorca hears complication of tone even in utterances so brief, of such practical intent; and I find story also in the poems of those postmodern theorist-poets, like Barrett Watten and Charles Bernstein, who say they are writing against the tiredness of all narrative: I find it because they need to evoke the fragments of story to cancel story. Indeed, paradoxically, in nonnarrative poetry the countable elements of story, and the numbers of actual story lines started, are greater than in texts that accept narrative as a sturdy, unavoidable frame of thought. In hoax story what’s being avoided is being brought back in, albeit in attenuated or distorted form, absolutely everywhere. There, we have to be even better readers of story, in order to register the many forms of story’s subversion. 2. Lyric Autism Emotion study is the particular field where it is not perverse but entirely appropriate to think of lyric as narrative. Lyric poems are narratives of emotion-states, as told through a profusion of types of units and methods, and primary among these diction, image, syntax, syntax and sentencing, inner and outer speech, utterance in general and most usually first person utterance, tone of voice and changes of tone of voice, parallelism and the breaking of parallelism, equivalence and breaking of equivalence, meter and other forms of measuring including line and stanza. It could be story as event, but often the lyric’s story is of how a mind thinks; or how the idea of the story came to be created; or how sentences follow one after the other. There are many other possibilities, but many lyric stories launch themselves with no reference to the act of telling, leaping into the flood of speech. The title itself, if there is one, the look of the thing on the page, and the energy of the first line’s inauguration of utterance, are enough to put an agent upon a minimal scene and to cue lyric’s stripped-down kind of telling.

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I would like to consider lyric autism as an example of a condition that has its own spectrum of disability, from serious impairment to high functioning. We are all of us on another, wider spectrum from what abilities we have, fragile but real, to those persons with autism or Alzheimer’s, whom we must help, but whose lives we may also try to imagine and represent. As with John Bayley’s description of the decline of his wife Iris Murdoch, it humanizes us to imagine and represent their way of being in the world, and it may help us to help them. There’s here no claim that the disadvantaged person—yes, we want to insist on person—can be accurately known, or that such a person penetrates reality further than the rest of us. Rather, I’d claim we learn more about mind by studying how emotions rise and are baffled in such persons—persons who might easily have been ourselves, after all. The link in language between ideas and images might be explored by re-imagining other kinds of mental processing. It gets to the moment of the creation of the word: knowing when and where the link is uncertain, or broken, takes us behind the over-familiar automatism of the link, to see the elements of the word in their time of fusion. Lyric autism is reverse engineering in language. Paul Celan’s poem “SCOOPED WITH THE ASHLADLE” has its single period at the end, but is not a proper sentence in German or English because it lacks a grammatical subject and because it breaks down at “outside our….” [our what? “our… heaved asunder”?] Nor are the relationships clear or the line of thinking direct, in a discourse that meditates on the relation between mass murder and the suicide attempts of a guilty survivor: SCOOPED WITH THE ASHLADLE from the Beingtrough, soapy, at the second try, toward each other, incomprehensibly fed now, far outside our and already—wherefore?— heaved asunder, then (at the third


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try?) blown behind the horn, before the standing tearconveyor, once, twice, thrice, from an unpaired, budding-cleft flaggy lung.10

Ash is always in Celan a reference to the Nazi gas-ovens where his parents perished; Beingtrough puts the most abstract Heideggerian term into the same word with the place animals eat, so it means a reduction to bare life; try, as in second and third, must mean suicide attempt, and we know that in the attempt that nearly succeeded, shortly before this poem was written, Celan damaged one of his lungs with a knife; standing / tearconveyor is a term for the human body that watches the ash and is the ash, that is scooped and scoops, blown and blows. It is too horrible, too naked, to say gas-oven or self-murder so these are lines that must convey the ideas through collapsing and spacing of meanings. The delicacy of not-saying is built into the saying. The reader is led to make huge inferences to get past the gorgeous discourse of oblique perceptions, the line of feeling that can serve as emotional knowledge but not as sentence-sense. For those who find it difficult to see Celan and autism in the same argument, I would say: all I’m suggesting is that apparent profusion and jumble of sense-perception, extreme emphasis on breaking-off or redundancy in sentence-making, consciously imitate the illegibility of emotions that is present in autism. There need not be an explicit allusion to autism to make the item fit the genre, and not all poems that show productive cognitive and linguistic trouble are examples of lyric autism. The lyrics by Sappho, Blake and Hopkins are at the wide end of the range, where the case for intentional distortion is harder to make. Moving toward the narrower end of this range are Celan and Charles Bernstein, whose departures are more evident from sentence-sense and ordinary—that is, unremarkable—sounds. As intelligibility declines, story is harder to find and becomes far more a matter of guesswork with incomplete or false leads, but the case for the presence of literary autism is easier to argue. The title of Bernstein’s

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short-line poem “Hoods and Scatters” originates in a fire-truck’s “hooks and ladders,” but the pun-like effect emphasizes dispersion, dissemination.11 This is more about the idea of a fire-truck than the fact of it or of fire. Here, the metonym (hook and ladder for fire truck, fire truck for the race of events in the world of factuality) takes over for the thing it stands for in the poem, and the story quickly takes off from any origin in event, following narratives of semantic association and not of sequence of occurring events. The point would seem to be that this is how the mind scatters things; at least this mind. Pseudonarrative is as much a story as straight narrative, though it relies on our impulses to parse straight stories: as here in the logical connections between sentences, the “Must” of command, the “And” of connection, the “Like” of similarity-finding; and in the story lines that start because of the chance of rhyme, as in “pain-again”; or in the little dog who has become a little doggerel because the story wants to refer mockingly to itself as a lesser literary kind; “Or sail to Hook” which is an actual seaport only to discover in the next line that “& Ladder” is the completion of a stock phrase which is itself subject to play in the poem’s title. By following pseudo-story and sound not sense, the poem scatters the reader’s attention, multiplying meanings by continually diverting away from what’s expected. The poem ends: “I’ll / tell you a story in / the morning” because there is no story here. The real story is of course the historical and sociological narrative of why we would come to the point of abjuring storytelling. Wanting to abjure storytelling is a respect-worthy form of literary autism with its origins, I should say, in the ubiquity of story, the familiarity of story, the ease by which story creates relations of reciprocity. Avant-garde work at the furthest margins circles back to return us to the essentials of storytelling as emotion: ubiquity, familiarity, reciprocity; and narratives of the feelings of imaginary persons, textual or estrangement voice, structures of feeling. Working with these essentials of storytelling, I’ll sketch a theory of literary emotion in the next chapter. 1

Part II of this book is all about stories, under the headings of cognition (Ch.4), attributes of narrative (Ch.5), historical changes in one tale (Ch.6). 2 The relevant passage in James: “There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought…. We ought to say a


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feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold”: William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, edited by Gordon Allport (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961): 29. 3 Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983): 56-57. 4 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983): 220. 5 This paragraph, including transcribed quotations, derives from two Terry Gross interviews for the show “Fresh Air” on National Public Radio, in February and March, 2002: the first with an expert on bio-mimetics, and the second with Rodney Brooks on robots. Further details on robots and emotion-cues: see Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002). 6 Francesca Happé, Autism: An Introduction to Psychological Theory (London: University College London [UCL] Press, 1994): 110, 111. See also: Shirley Cohen, Targeting Autism: what we know, don’t know, and can do to help young children with autism and related disorders (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998); and especially, for compassionate commentary on autism in relation to emotion, Laura Schreibman, The Science and Fiction of Autism (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005). 7 Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from my Life with Autism (New York: Doubleday, 1995). 8 Temple Grandin has developed the affinity with animals in a more recent book: Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (Orlandon: Harcourt, Inc., 2005). Certain ecopoets—John Clare, Ted Hughes and in a most spectacular way Maggie O’Sullivan— adopt animal emotions and thought process, so to imagine language from a mammal’s fear-flight point of view; Temple Grandin’s way of reading animals in translation is analogue and explanation for their form of lyric autism. 9 This is poem 31, of which we have four stanzas and one line of another. All extant poems of Sappho are translated, with commentary, by Anne Carson: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage, 2003); the passages here taken are from Carson’s version (63). See also Anne Carson’s study, eros the bittersweet (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998; first published by Princeton University Press, 1986). A beautiful account of emotion and confusion of the senses in Sappho makes it unnecessary for me to do more than mention poem 31as one of the first instances of lyric autism: Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2002): 47-50, 57. 10 Paul Celan, Lightduress, translated from the German by Pierre Joris (Copenhagen & Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005: 26-27. 11 Charles Bernstein, “Hoods and Scatters”, from With Strings (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 102.

Chapter 3: A Theory of Literary Emotion 1. Modesty and Presumption of a Skills Account With the concepts of person and relation in place, now it is time to sketch a theory that will connect the framing ideas of Part I with the examples of Part II. Our purpose is to think beyond the oppositions that have harmed emotion studies and allowed scholars stuck in their disciplines to avoid such work. We are working to reveal the linkages, which are not hierarchical, between ordinary and literary emotions; between emotion and volition; between person, world, and language. The main arguments of this essay are: • It is possible to go beyond the cognitivism that has dominated the disciplines that study emotion. Until recently, philosophers and psychologists thought we could do very well without emotions. Aristotle and the Stoics defined the more dangerous emotions with great skill, in order to root them out or hold them in strict control. Descartes split the reasonable body from the emotional soul. Spinoza in Part III of his Ethics is the heroic originator of late-20th-century neuro-science because Spinoza saw that emotion and cognition regulate each other: they are not the same kinds of agency and do not fire neurons in the same places in the brain, but a lesion in one of these will impair the work of the other. We require a postcognitivist account of emotion that does not immediately see emotion as directed by a belief or intention or adaptation. • A workable research question for post-cognitivist emotionstudies in the literary field might be: How do we perform what we know about emotion, when we write and read?

A Theory of Literary Emotion

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•

•

•

Storytelling is a strong synonym for literature, and a better synonym than others we’ve known in the recent past (like history, metaphor). The narratives of literature are of many types, but let’s now add the possibility that there can be narratives of emotion-states. Literary stories are about the emotions of imaginary persons, and when we become skilled at writing and reading these, we can account for the codes that change ordinary named emotions into written emotions. In the study of how ordinary, first-order emotions are transformed into writing, three practices are especially useful. To phrase these as imperatives: First, read literary and other works for the narrative of emotion-states; Second, read for estrangement emotion, or the emotion that derives only from words arranged on a page; Third, read for the historical structure of feeling, so that you can re-place the text as much as possible in the culture and time of its creation. When you pick up emotion for study, you have also already grasped person and world, and with those you have grasped imaginary person and imaginary world. You pick up everything from any node on the circuit. No world without person, because world is what person invents as a place to disport itself, a place to flourish, or at least to be. The world is much less than the sum total of what’s outside human beings, because the world is circumscribed and imagined only by living beings in their time and space.

What this amounts to for reading practice is already in large part known. With the three imperatives as given in the second-last heading, and with the emphasis below on image, utterance, and scene in literary writing, I’m incorporating emotion-study into stylistics. What I do with my examples will be familiar, except for my emphasis on reading emotions from writing. In this movement from person to world through emotion, and back, there is a presumption of outlook and a modesty of methodology. The presumption comes in our wish to comment upon how emotions in ordinary life get translated into, and performed back from, writing; not just to define the emotions, but to specify the process of their putting-into-writing, a second-order task of terrible


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complexity. This account would challenge a settlement where, for thousands of years, emotions have been considered dangerous, inconvenient, over-personal, hard to control or define, and so on. Ideally, the account would include all thinkable and likely emotions, not just the ecstatic or the negative or the reptilian or the intellectual or the unmixed ones. The approach would be trans-disciplinary, moral, developmental, dialogic, cognitive, narrative, historical. In logic: structure of a flood! In practice: lifetime task for a committee! With such aims, what one might hope for is a partial, uncertain synthesis: imagination of a unified field. The final presumption, and not the least daring, is a drawing back and re-focusing, like a zoom-out camera-shot from above, as I go from the how to the why/where, from practices of reading to gestures within the verbal work of art that solicit what’s without. This is where rhetoric gestures beyond itself because it can do that, too. Commentary on world completes the circuit of inquiry by taking person, place, and thing as the target of ordinary perception. World is ours. World is not only outside the mind because world needs mind to describe, circumscribe; and needs emotion to give energy, value, personality. Emotion-theory has to be a form of philosophical realism, or at least aligned with realism, for this reason. The modesty comes in restricting ourselves to the claim: What You See Is What You Get. The things I wish to read are all on the surface of the writing. I don’t wish to explain how beliefs or intentions control emotions, like cognitivism, or how unconscious motives are the cause, like the anxiety-thesis of Freudian thinkers. My emphasis on performance and skills is a quietism in emotion-theory, namely a search for non-dualism, which seizes on ways to overcome oppositions. It is modest to resist a single definition, and to resist identifying reasons for controlling emotion, but nonetheless to admit that defining, identifying, specifying are part of explanation in this field of study, as in any other. Emotions are experienced and controlled, integrated with thinking, in larger embodied contexts— places of performance, bodies and social relationships. We want to show emotions as they happen in freeze-frame and in flood. We want to show emotions in the embodied person who is active or not in society, in or straining outside a web of relationships, making sense or not making sense of the world.

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The more we can show how we perform what we know about emotions, the more we can bring into consciousness about our actions as persons. We perform more, and more competently, the more we know. What we know is already incalculably vast, but we want to know more and to be better at knowing. In this theory, what we don’t know isn’t unconscious, just kept implicit for the sake of makingautomatic our affective relations to persons, places, things. We keep it implicit in order to get on with our lives, practice our skills and competencies, bring them to bear in the moment; our thoughts, as Wordsworth said in the 1800 Preface, are the representatives of all our past feelings. An explanation of that is in the logical sense weak because it is not a theory of everything, of actualities or essences, but rather a theory of practices in how we learn about the behavior of persons ordinary and imaginary. 2. Elements of a Theory To follow changes that make differences, from emotion-state to emotion-state, let’s encourage a dynamic explanation. The elements of this are: First, classifications that organize perceptions into entities; Second, relational propositions that connect the classifications to descriptions; and Third, descriptions themselves.1 In this essay, the main concepts or classifications are reading as a narrative of imaginary persons, textual emotion as a kind of surplus of information within the reading process, and historical-social framing or what Raymond Williams called the structure of feeling. The relational propositions that connect these concepts to the descriptions, through rules of interaction, are the emotion-states themselves. Reading the cues within stories, my descriptions of emotion-states primarily follow changes in those states through image, utterance, and scene. 2.1 Narrative of Emotion-States Storytelling emotion is a notation, into verbal form, of emotion which is experienced in what we crudely but correctly call real life. Each of these acts may be called a performance. Later and with other agents, the first performance is represented in the story and interpreted by a reader. Because these performances are intimately familiar, the vast territory that is emotion study has to explore will be how we know and perform what we already know. Obviously there’s a difference between the emotion presented in a literary work and the


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emotion of a reader responding to this presentation—Phaedra’s lust in Racine’s play, and the reader’s shock at this lust—but just as plainly, even though the reader knows more than the character about Phaedra’s whole situation, we’re dealing here with a relationship, a convergence of separate minds and different feelings. A story, read for emotion, organizes the flare-ups of these emotion-states in a line, but certainly there’s also an overall trend, something that’s better than sequence or addition.2 Emotion-states need to be specified by name and type and duration, and distinguished from similar but distinct bodily and mental events. Until recently, most critical studies of literary stories have done many things well—describing narratives as sequences of plot events, of conflicts between characters, of leading metaphors, of sentences, of switches of point of view or dialogic partner—but they have not isolated emotion-states as worth studying. Marcel Proust’s essay on reading and Martha C. Nussbaum’s book on emotion as upheaval of thought are, by contrast, examples of a reading practice attentive to the sequence of emotion-events in the stories they study.3 They bring above the threshold what most ordinary and professional readings do perfectly automatically; they emphasize the enabling accompaniment to the other sequences, by naming a work’s dominant and showing changes of state across many divisions, including those in the other sequences. Since I’m the reader in this essay, with no sense I or anyone can be definitive, I trust my responses are good enough to be plausible, persuasive. I’m telling my narrative of emotion-states consciously, in order to add this claim of personhood to the reading experience. Chapter 4 is devoted to examples of how we might perform the narrative of emotion-states. 2.2 Estrangement Emotion This is another name for the literariness that’s woven into the fabric of the writing by storytelling and its practices. Every word of writing that enters into such a weave has its own small bonus. The root of text is the same as for textile. In Racine’s plays, textual emotion in rhyme and meter calls attention to the artifice of writing and writing’s difference from speaking. In other eras and kinds of writing, such as American Language Poetry, textual emotion adds another method and obscures

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the who and where of the speaker—resulting in an emotion of an unknown delivered to an unknown addressee. Whatever the method or era, when the language of the work gets more cloudy, so it is no longer transparent to meaning, textual emotion may attend the words. Estrangement emotion is the aesthetic acceptance of a certain obscurity, arrived as by surrendering something of person to writing as such, to style. As a turning-into-discourse, storytelling, say in Joyce Carol Oates or Eudora Welty, involves combinations, distortions, compressions and sequencings that acquire their own special emotion. Oddly enough, up to a point the greater the distortions of textual emotion, the greater the effect of immediacy and reality. Like imaginary person, estrangement emotion is a paradox and has features that may appear baffling: these two are hidden in plain sight, and they are indistinguishably the product of ordinary emotions and formal codes. A difficulty emerges, that as readers we get so used to interpreting through the instances of the category that we cannot perceive, or theorize, the category. Probably readers should be more aware of these logical sleights of transparency, because we can be deceived by a novel quite awkward in description and dialogue, like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, where a shocking idea and a gripping plot help to sell millions of copies. In my role as guide in this essay, sometimes I am emphasizing the invisibility of effects and sometimes, as here, the materiality. Estrangement emotion emanates from the material text itself, sound-shapes of letters and words, punctuation and white-spacing, syntax, type-fonts, and many other larger and smaller devices. However, this emotion is not entirely restricted to the material text or it could not be emotion. This is a cognitive and aesthetic pleasure, which derives from the author’s notation-system, as that is experienced by readers. It’s what’s left when those single-minded readers, who process the work transitively for theme and content, take off the top and pay no attention to the distortions of the medium. Representations, reductions, conventions, body-related things like sound effects and visual symmetries, uncanny effects of non-logic, non-natural effects like non-punctuation, destabilizing effects of scrambled word order, all have their own specific gravity of feeling. If we read stories and plays and poems while trying to be conscious of this feature, we may feel less close to imaginary embodied persons,


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but we have not lost the category of person, or for that matter the category of world. It’s just one more remove, from the remove we made when recognized it was already discourse we were experiencing. Among literary scholars, the habit of fending off emotion is increased when we bring that term anywhere near the term text. It may help to reassure those who’re still doubtful, if I relate estrangementor-textual emotion to a familiar term, style, because there’s a partial overlap of meanings. While not fully a synonym, estrangement emotion is analogue and also subset of stylistics. This kind of emotion study is not new except in its valuing of emotion and the naming of its instances and cues. This approach emphasizes how change of emotion states in writing are notations for the reader’s developing response. Estrangement emotion like style is in the work and in the reader— connects work and reader, but prevents readers from seeing only themselves and their construction in writing. As Marshall Brown has said, style-study is history-in-detail, and as such keeps us from falling into general categories: “Through their style, cultural expressions become literary by resisting the idealizing universals into which our ideologies otherwise slide. That is the way literature acts critically in expressing its difference from all imposed thoughts…. [S]tyle is the most minute, the least ideal, the most concrete universal with which our writing confronts us…. The return to style is a return to language in its function as the determinate negation constituting history from deep within as a continuously modulating process.”4 I would add to what Marshall Brown says: if style-study helps prevent the slide to ideology, which was the pressing concern when he wrote a decade ago, this material-text kind of emotion-study helps prevent overreliance on inside-the-head psychology, which has in the past been seen as the reason not to study literary or any other emotions. Chapter 5 is devoted to examples of how we perform estrangement emotions in stories. 2.3 Structures of Feeling At a higher level of generality is the structure of feeling, Raymond Williams’s category for the social and historical dominants of human emotion in a definable era. Saying something pertinent about the social-historical structure of feeling is as important to humanistic emotion-study as is site-identification of synapse-firing in neuro-anatomical emotion-study.

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How can we explain the current “surge in the academic study of feeling,” as Rei Terada describes what we’re experiencing?5 Her answer is that “historically, the idea of emotion has been activated to reinforce notions of subjectivity that could use the help” (14), and she has assigned herself the difficult job of retaining a defensible vocabulary of emotion while abandoning “a sense of substantiality and purpose” (15) that comes with the outmoded idea of a person. What’s left of emotion after the literary-philosophical critique that is Deconstruction? That’s her question, but possibly one could also ask what is left of Deconstruction after the necessary confrontation with the unsolved problem of where to place emotion—if not in a person? She would use one recent but receding phase of literary thinking drastically to narrow emotion studies, and I am using other phases to expand them. Rei Terada neglects some ways in which post-Structural thought is stymied by, or fights clear of, the problem of emotion, but she is right to historicize her thinking and to see that we’re entering into a surge that is also a contestation. This is the moment when literary thinking, whether intended as disabling or enabling, can be heard in the dialogues of the trans-disciplinary field that is emotion studies. One notion of subjectivity that needs help now, in my view, is that of the historical or collective self. Terada does not speak of history aside from the history of her field, but in this essay I propose a historical and social framing of feelings that are trans-personal. In Chapter 6 I will show how one story changes through several eras, several modes of production, with the help of a flawed but suggestive term from Raymond Williams. The English examples in Williams usually show social emotion that generated class conflict, social emotion structured as a clash of discourses: the struggle between restoration royalist and residual commonwealth loyalties between 1660-1668, or the struggle between emergent industrial capitalism and the remnants of a failed working-class Chartism in the 1840s, as those are exhibited within and between literary characters, and in the outcomes of plots of novels. The notion of a structure of feeling may be used more broadly, to contrast differences between eras, and that is my purpose in reading landmark texts from the history of Phaedra’s shocking love for her stepson Hippolytus. The successive versions, from Euripides in 5th century BCE to Sarah Kane in the 1990s, return


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us to the conditions of possibility in determinate eras, and that’s what Williams intended with his term. Chapter 6 has a full-scale example of how we may read for historical structures of feeling. 2.4 Emotion-States as Relational Propositions The rules of interaction in this system are determined by changes in intensity, duration, and focus. Responding properly to literary emotion, as to ordinary emotion in experience every day, is most often a matter of judging more or less, now or then, this or that— differences that make a difference. Certainly more than neuroanatomists, and perhaps more than psychologists, writers and their commentators emphasize the dimension of judgment in emotional knowledge: calibrating differences in literature is a crucial cognitive skill, even when we are judging how to present or respond to a visceral event. (Cognitivists would say that emotion is caused by judgment, but I’m arguing that in verbal works of art, it is accompanied and amplified by judgment.) Everything read back from writing is already judged—twice. The changes that are judged are set in motion by three prior intentions that are the concepts in this explanation: reading as narrative of emotion-states of imaginary persons, textual emotion as surplus of information from the matter on the page, structures of feeling as historical conditions of possibility. These three concepts have attached linking propositions which are the emotion-states themselves. The concepts are linked through the emotion-states to images, utterances, and scenes as the descriptive terms. There are three descriptive terms, a number I have taken partly for symmetry and partly for parsimony, because there could be other descriptive terms, or more of them. Since each of the descriptions of image-utterance-scene can link through to each of the concepts, we already have a set of nine operations that are possible and likely, surely enough to make a start—if our concepts are capacious and our descriptions are diverse and accurate. As operator of the system the emotion-state is what is being described and also the enabler of the description. How do emotionstates hold this anomalous position, where what seems a logical impasse is, in experience, a productive tautology? As enablers and markers of change, they map concepts onto descriptions, and, in turn,

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the descriptions refine the concepts. The descriptions turn the states into narratives. Emotion-states are not things or entities—rather arrested processes. They possess temporal and therefore logical volatility. Since we want to say what we feel, we speak of states because we need to fix them long enough to give them names. The names then harden their outlines and their roles. How turn them back into processes? Psychologists and philosophers have their own methods of describing, but usually they are content to study in the past tense, with fixed names and finished states. Literary study may try somewhat harder to be re-enactive, and this bias accounts for my emphasis on performance and verbs of continuation. The literary terms for resolving states back into processes are various, and some of them are: image, utterance, scene, syntax, rhythm, conflict, plot—and the most general word of enactment, “reading.” There is also a productive term whose full meaning literary readers may have lost: habitually, when we want to vary our description and get a synonym for the title of the text, we speak of “the work,” meaning both something made and material, the book, and what it takes to understand the book. The literary work is both the author’s and the reader’s labor, and specifically, labor of judging and performing within a world of valued objects, organizing a world with meaning. Behind this usage is a claim: intellectual work is work in and on the world, emotion work. There is no point in trying to reinvent the names of emotions, and there are reasons to keep the names we have. We may wish to redefine, combine, call socially constructed, but we do accept the necessity and usefulness of names: so that children may be taught to call, and thus begin to control, what they are feeling; so that the rest of us can communicate with children and each other and grow in our humanity; so that writers and readers may have a shorthand reference to emotion-states in works of art. In two sentences, Arlie Russell Hochschild covers all the elements of a theory of emotion-naming: “[F]eeling signals perception and expectation to us, and turning this around, different patterns of perception and expectation correspond to different feeling names. Since culture directs our seeing and expecting, it directs our feeling and our naming of feeling.”6 Once we have named states we can also have blends like Petrarch’s icy fire for love or like German schadenfreude, and we can have rich special states in speakers of one language or members of one group, like


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Spanish duende and African-American blues. Names are also necessary to study the meanings of emotion in different times and cultures—anger has different meanings in Japan and Hungary; and names are needed, as in the work of Zoltán Kövecses, to study metaphors of emotions (anger boiling over, love burning up) in different languages.7 As a linguist, Kövecses uses the common understanding of emotion terms, describing how cliché metaphors originate, so his method is the opposite of what I’m proposing here. Beyond the folk understanding of emotion, itself a topic for scientific treatment, the study of literary emotion tries to determine sequencing and duration of emotion, and degrees of intensity—these are matters for selection and tact, not subject to the certainties of the social sciences. The metaphor that contributes to literary emotion is metaphor within larger structures of works, where it serves to constellate meaning. Hochschild makes a point centrally relevant to literary form, when she says that “compound emotions are serial perceptions,” that derive from “movement of focus”: so in the Petrarchan cold fire rhetoric, or in the aesthetic pleasure of the despairing blues, “We focus on one facet in light of another, with other facets providing background” (224). To the understanding, there is not full fusion of elements in the oxymoron or pun, but a slight shift even within the instant. The focus moves from state to state within the tightly wrapped compound. In storytelling, for which film is only the latest version of habits of cognition of long heritage, movement of focus is a very great deal more crucial than we may have imagined. Focus-shift is the gaining of effects not only from perceptual but of emotional attention; focus-shift is, in fact, emotion in its guise as perception, just as image, utterance and scene, below, are perception in its guise as emotion. Storytelling: movement of focus: ground to figure, then figure to ground: leaping of gaps: gaps set in directional sequence: hierarchies of orders of recursiveness. 2.5 Descriptions: Image, Utterance, Scene Image, utterance, and scene can be illustrated by five lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1910)—lines from the middle of the poem, which fall between two rows of widely-spaced suspension dots:


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.

.

.

.

.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ... I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. .

.

.

.

.

.8

Seeking some kind of human connection in working class districts, this speaker answers his own question by the line-space pause and then the despairing, regressive image of claws. Eliot in his critical writing called this kind of image an objective correlative: it gives body to, or stands for, a feeling. Here, the substitution occurs through the trope of part for whole: “claws” is metonymy for the primitive creature fated to forage in the medium of water where humans cannot hear, cannot live; this creature, by inference, stands for the out-oftouch psychology of the speaker, who is the condensation of loneliness, self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, of grotesque appearance, and so forth. The image of claws contains such a person by ellipsis, without commenting. The blank space between the first three and the last two lines carries the force of logical deduction: shall I say this, no, then I should’ve been that, and therefore I am that. It is not a little hazardous to explain an image’s emotional force, but my intent has been to slow down and put into a set of likely operations what the reader (who knows the 100 or so lines that come before) performs in the instant. T. S. Eliot called Images the needed objective correlatives in a poem, because he feared that emotions would get loose on their own and take over the mind and the poem. Concerned to defeat solipsism because of his reading of F. H. Bradley and possibly because of his own psychological troubles, he wanted a device to anchor emotions in an outer, visible world. Images in poems and plots in plays served the purpose. Eliot’s poetry and criticism, together with the work of other modernists who made a great deal of metaphor, determined what Anglo-American New Criticism would attend to, how it would value past and present writing.


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The line from Eliot to I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis and Cleanth Brooks is direct. For me the most useful of the image-driven critics of the 20th century is Empson. Seven Types of Ambiguity, written in the early 30s, is intelligent not only for its practical readings of occasions in English where several meanings are located in one metaphorical word or phrase, but also for bringing in the emotional energies that are needed to make, and decipher, such effects.9 Despite cluttering the structure of the book with more categories than he needs, despite over-emphasis on devices at the expense of reading whole poems, Empson’s early book has massive ingenuity in the reading of poetic images that show complex thinking motivated by feeling. Movement of focus within one instance, like the famous “Queenlily June with a rose in her hair” (analyzed by Empson on p. 76) with the first word as both noun and adverb, produces an emotional charge when we dart from one meaning to another—“one part after another catches fire,” Empson says (xii, Preface to 2nd ed.). Empson demonstrates that analysis of how we “grasp a complex meaning quickly as a whole” (xii), as we become more exact in following the movements of attentional focus to produce certain effects, does not “lead to a sterility of emotion” (289) but to a richer understanding of the temporal shifts within the copresence of feeling and thinking within the image itself. In his later book The Structure of Complex Words, Empson treats significant single words in texts with the same concerns for how devices are motivated. His long introduction on emotion, there, is the only positive and searching statement on the topic that we have from the New Critics—both Eliot’s remark and W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s essays on intentional and affective fallacies are requests for the avoidance of literary emotion. Empson’s truest heir is Victoria Forrest-Thomson, in a book that pays explicit debts to his example, Poetic Artifice.10 Her argument has achieved cult status among Anglo-American Language School poets, because of her consistency in taking a stand in favor of what she calls “the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as phonetic and prosodic patterns and spatial organization” (xi). This is an explanation and defense of what, partly taught by her, I have called textual emotion, except that her interest is in the writer’s, not the reader’s, approach to language. She makes textual emotion the whole of literary emotion, where for me it is a necessary attendant pleasure, a

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level, a complication. She attacks writers like Ted Hughes who “transform pattern into theme”; and she explicates at length writers like John Ashbery and J. H. Prynne, who use many forms of artifice to estrange and make material poetic language, so to prevent it from being easily cashed into the world—writers who avoid “naturalization,” in her term. There is for her a permissible, rational obscurity that comes from suspending naturalization: the “imagecomplex” pulls in the opposite direction from theme and transparency to meaning, toward non-semantic levels where the real innovation occurs. Forrest-Thomson finds that Empson’s account of poetic artifice is the best model, but she parts company with him “because of his inability to accept that the future of poetry lies in the exploitation of non-meaningful levels of language” (xiv). I admire her ability to pursue image-complexes through whole poems, her willingness to defend obscurity, her unfashionable emphasis on meter and soundeffects and spacing and sequence; I admire the consistency of a theory that argues one extreme view all the way down, with no apologies or exceptions. In Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book (1999), all of literary emotion resolves into following images in sequence. The author evokes the vividness in detail and color of visual images, and then shows how poems and especially novels are in motion like moving pictures. Literary writing is like movie writing, for Scarry; it takes place by story-boarded multiple changes of focus, and her book is the most scrupulous tracking I know of those leaps from image to contiguous image. This practice of turning pictures into spatial and emotional stories does seem to mine something important in reading. After the New Criticism, Deconstructive practice in Paul de Man kept the image as the main device and gave it a special role as the guarantee of literariness as such, because the image (now called metaphor) was exactly where we could not decide between word and word: infinite regress of indecision. This was a reminder about metaphors in writing that had stronger philosophical reasoning behind it, but de Man exaggerated the same lacks as the New Criticism: unwillingness to make any claims about society and history, neglect of the speaking subject in the text; and what’s more pertinent here, inability to show what in the text, like syntax and plot, spaces out and makes sense of the images.


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The image evokes a perceptual or intellectual or emotional context because it is able to eliminate inessentials and condense the rest, and it condenses in order to evoke. In the brutally intelligent human brain, images have another role, too: as mediators between perception and cognition, as enablers and expressions of appropriate memory, they protect us from breakdown. There are a few unfortunate persons with perfect memory—summoning every word, smell, feeling, they are invalids because they cannot forget most of the details. There are many others with Alzheimer’s disease whose longterm memory is dissolving, “the death of a thousand subtractions” in David Shenk’s phrase, and this is the loss of the things that help make them what they are.11 Apparently the coded Image, in Sylvan Tomkins’s single term for something complex and uncountable, is the mental reality that builds a person. The image does so by enabling an immense remembering of experiences, but to pack in the memories they must be compressed and tagged for recall, thus deprived of elements in what amounts to an immense forgetting. In the midst of reading, as in the midst of active life, we are gaining and losing and regaining. During these processes, emotion-states are involved as the operators of the compressing, tagging and selective storing of images. Emotion-states, even the dangerous ones, are thus agents not of irrationality or non-control, but of appropriate intelligence. On Utterance: writing is not speaking, but writing everywhere alludes to and quotes from speaking. In the five lines from T. S. Eliot, above, there is a question, a self-interruption (“…”), and a contrary-tofact statement, and these three allusions to speaking are set in motion by “Shall I say…”, which assumes an addressee for speech acts. Certain modes of literary criticism, and most disciplines that deal with other kinds of evidence than verbal art, forget or de-emphasize the speaking that is in writing. For this reason, reminders of the presence and social role of utterance are always useful, and the literary discipline is suited for the job. Who is speaking? is the quintessential literary question, always necessary and always finally unanswerable because of philosophical problems at the center of discourse. That primary question leads to further questions about the meaning of voice as a physical production of sounds or as an expression of integral personhood, or a metaphor of style; about the speaking subject and its claims to own what’s said, when it might be quoting another’s discourse without attribution or even without conscious intent; about

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dialogue as valued interchange and monologue as coercive official speech. To my mind the most valuable intervention in these issues is the communication theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle, especially when they say: 1) the utterance is the scissors of literary works, not the sentence or any other unit: we ought in the first instance to read for utterances, and to look and listen on the frangible borders of one utterance and the next one, where transitions and interruptions occur; 2) the utterance is social, even when it seems not to be: in rapport with and answerable to an addressee and a wider society; 3) ideological and historical struggles are fought out on the territory of the utterance—that is, within the utterance and its very words, as well as between one utterance and another. The putting-intodiscourse of emotions has to be done with sequences of words, but not or not usually words unanchored to persons. Attempting to identify the speakers and addressees, when we are writer or reader, we get beyond identification to enactment of the feeling. From the precision of the enactment comes the added effect of intensity. Writing is in love with speaking, and afraid of it, because there is no intensity like the approach to voice and person, unless it is the shock of denial of voice and person. A Scene is a unit of middle-length, longer than an image or utterance, and shorter than an act. More than the briefer units, it permits the reader to follow changes in emotion-states. Nonetheless it is restricted to a small set of characters and to the single place that this term signifies in its root meaning. Eliot’s five lines from “Prufrock” make a scene by an internal shift between the speculation in the first thee and the statement in the next two lines, and also more evidently by the unusual lines of suspension dots at top and bottom. A scene is in the first instance visual, like a shot in a film. But, beyond the necessary reference to the human senses, internally a scene is defined by the movement of meanings. Emotion-states are the figures of agency on the ground of the scene. Image, utterance, and scene may be equal in extent to emotionstates, but need not be. Even with the gradual enlargement of unit length in the series image-utterance-scene, which give plenty of variables already, it would be a reduction of the complexity of experience, if each of these descriptors equaled a state. The noncoincidence of unit and state make it impossible to turn this system into a teachable habit of reading, but it does seem to be the case that


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we adjust to the fantastic variety of possible combinations with some ease, in the experience of literary reading. What we could teach that might be new is how we do what we do, at once the easiest and the most difficult thing. Performance can be brought higher above the threshold of conscious intent, to show that the amount of information brought to bear on ordinary reading is immense. Yet registering the information, all the while judging and performing, does not impair our fluency. 3. Emotions in the Body of the Person in the World The larger task of my argument is to connect the circuit from person through emotion to world, and to show that the force of emotional-volitional tone is always, and also, at any time moving in the other direction, as these separable entities define each other. In this study, I began by lifting the concept of emotion, and I found it dovetailed into reason or cognition, and that was the first of my sightings of a complex unity. I found a literary-philosophical corollary in two stages: namely, you can’t have imaginary persons without accepting that there are persons, and you can’t have textual emotions without having ordinary emotions. The conclusive unity, bringing in the final term, is world as flesh and emotional-volitional tone.12 The world in the first instance is the physical, material surround of the person, and while everything that impinges on us in that form is foundational, indispensable, infinite, that’s all I wish to say about it: an acknowledgement, a nod of gratitude and friendship, because of after all discourse—also infinite—is our true territory. The world is historical and literal, and we are leaving it, again, for the world which is imaginary. The world of imaginary persons is equally an emanation of sorrows and joys. Usage, ancient and current, is too strong for us. We might place a ban on this mobile word, but it would be more honorable to find a way to use world less often but with more precision. World is one of the most complex words in English. In the Oxford English Dictionary, in the two-volume, small-print, double-column version, there are six triple-column panels on this term. The definition is huge partly because of fine-grain discrimination of meanings, and partly because of the quantity of examples quoted from Old English to the present time. The word comes from OE, Frisian, OHG, MHG, and ON sources, with one fascinating origin: were (man) plus ald (age), thus

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“life of man.” In drastic condensation of the article, world is: “I. Human existence, a period of this; the pursuits and interests of this present life; in religious use, temporal or mundane affairs; the affairs and conditions of life; secular life or interests, as distinguished from religious; an age or long period of time in earthly or human existence or history; ages; II. The earth or a region of it; the universe or a part of it; the earth, and all created things upon it; the material universe as an ordered system; the sphere within which one’s interests are bound up; one’s sphere of action or thought; a section or part of the earth at large; a division of created things; a group or system of things associated by common characteristics; III. The inhabitants of the earth, or a section of them; the human race; the whole of mankind; human society”.13 Under the term itself, there in all 25 meanings; and under that, the following related words: worldful, worldish, worldless, worldliness, worldling, worldly, worldly-wise, world-man, worldpower, world-riche, worldship, worldward, world-wide. This is the achieved folk-knowledge of ten centuries of usage, and from it I deduce: world is not or not only the physical universe, not human, not secular as opposed to religious, not an age or period, not earth, not inhabitants of earth. World can be any one of these, or combination, or possibly something else, according to the wishes of a historical speaker. So world is, like human or like nature, a category of prejudice, but that doesn’t make it any less worthy of use: indeed world immediately confers a settled and familiar sense of the personat-home, a nonduality of inner and outer that seems absolutely primitive. W.B. Yeats wrote of “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi”; Le Monde is a newspaper; “We are the World” is the anthem of internationalism, and incidentally of Coca Cola; the World Wildlife Fund; Beers of the World; and so on. World is what we need and value, so excursions forth into the world are always into ourselves, our wider possibility. In fact, common usage in English, and by extension in German and French as the languages of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, anticipates the most adept moves in 20th century study of this central term in phenomenology. Ex-cursions are flooded with E-motion, but what’s the mechanism of the relation of emotion and world? How value gets conferred is not only philosophy’s topic. Paul Celan thinks feeling as he performs it through the scissoring of syntax by line:


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APOSTROPHIZABLE was the onewinged soaring blackbird, above the firewall, behind Paris, up there, in the poem.14

There’s the gesture of human-bird connection, through the possible speech to the bird: when possible it’s nearly (but never fully) accomplished, but this poet’s too indirect to abandon himself to hearty speech to a bird; much less would Celan indulge Whitman’s invention of speech for a grieving thrush, as in “Out of the Cradle…”. Still, the named blackbird is proposed as an auditor, an imaginary person in an actual city, with spatial relations of cityscape, behind/above, carefully noted. After all that excursive world-loving, a huge shift in a small space occurs when this tightens to its unexpected close, “up there / in the / poem,” where the emotion of address is suddenly known to be textual emotion. The speculative turnabout happens within a single sentence; fourteen words. Like a glove turned outside-in, excursion is turned into labyrinth, putting pressure of inquiry onto the device of apostrophe. Stop, traveler! Apostrophe is the most prominent of many literary devices that bring speaking into writing, or, to put it another way, that gesture from writing to persons and things in the world.15 Some other devices that do this are: the clash of inner and outer speech, speakers and characters who deliver emotion-states of imaginary persons, images of the bodies of imaginary persons, images as such, plots that have reversal and recognition; and the subject-verbobject order of sentences that shows grammatical agents acting on persons and things. So Celan is an instance of what literature can do and typically does. But in Celan there’s a rigor of exclusion all his own; it’s hard to feel something because feeling’s always deceptive, always mediated by lies and language, and yet it’s better to feel than not to feel. Laconic is best: to send out the lance of emotionalvolitional tone and do it in the most guarded way, hinting but not giving the apostrophe, speaking but not using I, referring to a true species but depriving the textual bird of one wing. Then Celan stops. Celan’s excursion, over so soon, puts excursions into doubt, but return

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to the beginning and he is again bravely setting out. “APOSTROPHIZABLE” is cautious, but it is as close to a rapturous Yes! to the way of the world as can be found in him. However—poet, survivor, Jew—more than most writers he knew the world as monstrous.16 Depressed persons reject the world—they feel dead.17 Severely autistic and Alzheimer’s persons, and those who have catastrophic frontal lobe disorders, can’t read the world, especially when it comes to inferring someone else’s state of mind—they feel lost in life because so little they experience has meaning. Those with manias or delusions produce mismatches between appearances and their feelings—neural pathways are blocked or re-routed. From examples of those who’re still persons but who’ve lost something of personhood, it’s clear that meaningfulness is bound up with emotions, and thus the ability to have non-dual or any perceptions, and to make or follow stories, will be impaired. In normal persons the pathways between the automatic and the conscious brain are more or less open, and the 100 trillion connections, firing billions of neurons, are as active as may be. From the point of view of emotional-volitional tone, and assuming overall health, firing and more firing is best; relations, connections, reciprocities. Since the brain is an adaptive system, and since more and more precise internal maps of the external world are the order of the day every day, the mind can emerge from the brain continually. Emotions are emergent properties connected with body and brain, relating the one to the other and essential to both. In Rita Carter’s words: the emotional right brain has to be subjugated by the less emotional left brain so that the right brain won’t “flood consciousness with its own miserable view of life,” and “visual information has to flow back and forth between the hemispheres, so each side of the brain has the full picture”. Neurologists have recently shown that “the entire body surface is represented on the brain’s surface as thought it had been drawn on.” So the clinical discoveries of the 1990s bring down Descartes’ entire philosophy of body-mind separation, along with the emotion-reason dualism that has tormented philosophy since the 1630s. Spinoza argued for nondual method a generation after Descartes but with no evidences; but after the Decade of the Brain, because of neuronal connections that we can see to be firing or not, we absolutely know that the health of emotion is bound up with the health of reason, and reversibly; and suddenly Spinoza’s


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back in town, with his interpreter Deleuze. Since our language is formed by ferocious dualisms we’ve inherited, what we don’t entirely know is how to edge into the logic of this new situation. The only recent and responsible book about this is a study of non-Western systems that assert the nonduality of subject and object—Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism.18 For centuries reference to The World has been frequent in writings of all types. The concept’s used without explanation or apology, rather like the verb To Be. In scholarly books it doesn’t appear in the index. It’s all over theoretical studies on emotion from the past generation of scholarship and theory. It’s rarely theorized in philosophy except in the narrow tradition of phenomenology, which yields the most capacious commentary. It’s the keynote of one rising genre in literature, eco-writing, but while not constitutive does appear often in all writings since the Early Modern; for instance, there’s the title and dominant social metaphor in Congreve’s Restoration comedy, The Way of the World, and at one point in Wordsworth’s Prelude he speaks of “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,--the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!” The World’s pervasive in thought and literature, where the concept stands as one of our primary examples of nascent nondual thinking. World’s a place not in geography; it’s a site in outwardness for our inwardness but one we’ve found sedimented in language and then anticipated in mind. It’s thus a third term, anterior to those oppositions joy and sorrow, then and now, self and its others however defined. In every human generation, we inherit the world and it becomes our possession—also our responsibility to love, to interpret, improve, rescue, transmit, bequeath, despite its sometime ugliness and horrors. So, emotionally and literally and beyond mass-marketing cliché, We Are the World: no worldliness without the worldlings that name it and give it value. 1

Helpful on incomplete systems and weak explanations is Eugene J. Meehan’s Explanation in Social Science (1968). For Meehan, every system is based upon a set of fundamental variables (or terms), and a set of rules; descriptions must contain networks of interrelated events before explanation is possible. He notes that explanations are themselves tautologies, philosophically speaking. In his systems approach, as here applied, is the possibility of mapping onto the tautology of emotionstates, as hinge or operator of the system, the macro-tautology of historical and the micro-tautology of specific literary form. We can read changes of many sorts all up and down the line.

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2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge said this first, in Chapter 1 of Biographia Literaria: “Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom any where as a separate excitement”. 3 Marcel Proust, On Reading [“Sur la lecture”, 1906], translated and edited by Jean Autret and William Burford (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 4 Marshall Brown, “Le Style est l’homme même: The Action of Literature”, College English 59,7 (November 1997): 801-808; quotations from 806, 807, 808. Brown develops his argument more fully in a chapter of over 50 pages, “Why Style Matters: The Lessons of Taine’s History of English Literature”, in his book, Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 5 Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983): 223. 7 Zoltán Kövecses, Emotion Concepts (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990), and Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 8 T. S. Eliot, from The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962): 6. 9 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: Meridian Books of the Noonday Press, 1955). 10 Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A theory of twentieth-century poetry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978). 11 David Shenk, quoted from his article on memory in the Health and Fitness section of The New York Times (April 2, 2002): D5. 12 World is a definition in progress. I’ve arrived at it by first noticing the term in the major studies of emotion in several fields when a writer touches most valued topics, frequently invoked but rarely explained. A topic list of essential sources, mostly from outside emotion-study, includes: 1. Being-in-the-world. For Martin Heidegger, “the explicit idea of world as such is a prerequisite for the order of world images. And if ‘world’ is constitutive of Da-sein, the conceptual development of the phenomenon of world requires an insight into the fundamental structures of Da-sein” (Being and Time: 48). There is being-in-the-world, but also there is being-together with the world which isn’t only existential but involves a relatio other beings in the world (54): this opens the argument to other terms for being that have a more directly emotional meaning: fear, thrownness and falling, the anxiety of negative feelings, care, attunement, being-at-home. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, a translation of Sein und Zeit by Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). Calling herself “everyday Dasein’s existential interpreter” (235), Sianne Ngai in Ugly Feelings [Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005] struggles against “anxiety’s privileged position in Heidegger’s phenomenology” (235)—Heidegger’s “auratic distance from worldly or feminine sites of asignificance or negativity” (236). 2. World as flesh. In his Working Notes at the end of his unfinished last book, The Visible and the Invisible [translated by Alfonso Lingis:


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Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1968], Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of a mode of analysis wherein “language will make us progressively enter into the Lebenswelt and the ‘wild’ being,” and invoked the “Flesh of the world—flesh of the body—Being…. That means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived) and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches on the world” (249). Merleau-Ponty’s American expositor, David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Viking Books, 1996)], takes this several steps further, to an environmental ethic that argues the consonance between the French phenomenologist and the world-views of indigenous, oral cultures. 3. Changing of the World. Félix Guattari and Jean Baudrillard may not speak often of the world, but that’s because in books from 1989 (FG) and 2000 (JB) they assume all the previous positions outlined here, and also the reader’s knowledge of global ecological crisis, information-glut hookups of the world-wide web, and new trans-national markets in what Guattari calls integrated world capitalism. These social critics are writing in the attempt, by new images of possible thought and action, to divert the rush to eco-cide (FG) and murder of reality (JB) they see around them. They are comparable because both thinkers have a world-mind; they connect a breakdown in affect to a current politics and information-regime, and they have answers that involve a replacement-narrative—a story which will resist capital’s invasion of nature and subjectivity. See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000; French edition 1989); Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, edited by Julia Witwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). “Changing of the World” is Jean-Luc Nancy’s title for the last chapter of his A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003; French edition 1990). In Part VI, World, Nancy devotes three chapters (40 pages) to meditations on the Siege of Sarajevo, on our responsibility for the “creation of sense” to make a democracy: “responsible precisely for what is not given: the demos, the people, the ones with the others” (299), and on the continuing obligations for thought of events in France in 1968. Apropos ’68, Nancy says we could believe that nothing took place, but while there is no identifiable “accomplished destiny” that’s epic or apocalyptic, “there are numerous bodies alongside one another, numerous points between which sense is spaced, shared, and scattered. A brief, almost dry moment of joy, without ecstasy or glory but as hard and alive as a flash of existence” (306-307). 4. Mind and World. Though there’s more mind than world in his account, I much admire the nondualism and quietism of John McDowell’s Mind and World (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994); see my judgment on McDowell in the Afterword. 13 “World” in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), volume II: 3821-3822. Much is deleted in the interest of selected scan; the essay in definition is a provocation to philosophy and must be read as a whole. Though she doesn’t use the word, the reason for inquiring into World was stated by Arlie Russell Hochschild in a book published decades ago: “When we do not feel emotion, or disclaim an emotion, we lose touch with how we actually link inner to outer reality”: The Managed Heart (1983): 223.

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14 Paul Celan, “ANDREDSAM” translated by Pierre Joris, Lightduress (Copenhagen & Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005): 140-141. 15 Jonathan Culler has argued this in an essay from the moment when Deconstruction was on the decline; against the dominant of the early 80s, which was the textualizing of the world, Culler demonstrated that through this device literature might beckon outside itself to things and persons. In a quiet and responsible way, the essay’s a bombshell: “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs—Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 16 For English speakers the commentator who best attends to the particulars of the poems is John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). Stathis Gourgouris turns to Celan at the end of his book that tries to go “beyond the damaged life”, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003): 338342. 17 Wittgenstein said: “The depressed man lives in a depressed world.” In this paragraph I collect several things learned from Rita Carter’s Mapping the Mind (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998): quotations from pages 36, 43, 31. 18 David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in comparative Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988). Loy identifies nondualist elements in a handful of Western philosophers, including pre-eminently Martin Heidegger, but also Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead. See also the essays in Emotions in Asian Thought, edited by Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames, with a discussion by Robert C. Solomon (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995): this shows scholars mostly from Western traditions, including the strict cognitivist Robert C. Solomon, struggling to understand nondualist emotion concepts from India, SE Asia, and China. Can there be a rigorous nondualism in the West?

Part II. Examples Cognitive, Narrative and Historical Chapter 4: Pity, Fear, and Arrangement in W.C. Williams and Shakespeare In Part I, we have ventured beyond twentieth-century philosophical psychology, to a view of emotion that takes emotion-asfeeling components more seriously. We have come to see emotion as wrapped up with thinking but not dominated by thinking—this because we wanted to explore a post-cognitivist account that does not immediately see emotion as directed by a belief or intention or adaptation. Some of the elements of a forthcoming study turned out to be Spinoza’s non-dualist thought; Bakhtin’s “emotional-volitional” that unites and makes-equal the forces and makes them adjectives for “tone,” which is social; and the discoveries of clinical neuro-science in the 1990s. Let me give a confirmation of all that I have claimed, since it is so rare that a discursive argument in the humanities is borne out by research in physiology. In the early 1990s, scientists found a new firing pattern in the brains of apes and humans. Synapses fire sympathetically when the animal being tested watches another animal performing a task, as if the watcher’s brain is entering into the risks and rewards of the activity (such as reaching for food), at least to the extent of imitating the brain waves of a performance. That is, some of the same motor-activity parts of the brain light up, in both the agent and the observer who is being tested. Therefore (if this is credible, and while heavily and ingeniously tested, it remains a hypothesis) emotions have to do with social relationships, something we already knew but never down to this level of physiology. Because of the identical sites of firing, there is a relation of causal connection between the agent and the observer.1

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Pity, Fear, and Arrangement in W.C. Williams and Shakespeare

In Part I, I reminded the reader that during the last fifteen years, clinical neuro-anatomists have shown that cognition and emotion are most certainly different mental actions. But these scientists have also shown that in normal persons, who do not have a brain lesion or autism or alzheimer’s disease, these faculties arise together and help each other; it bears repeating that neither thinking nor feeling has priority in time or power, and cognition will not by itself cause an emotional response. I played this idea in reverse in my pages on literary autism at the end of Chapter 2. What I said there is also confirmed by new work on mirror neurons, because if a malfunction occurs in this system one likely result is the autistic person’s lack of empathy—inability to read others’ actions, faces, feelings.2 Until now, my examples have been instances to make entertaining and extend the range of the framing ideas. In Part II, my examples in their sequence and handling contribute to the design of three chapters, and much of the argument is carried by the works I describe. The three chapters that follow are all contributions to the theme, announced earlier, of storytelling and emotion, but I’ve chosen to pursue my accounts of stories under increasingly wider covering categories, namely Cognition (Ch. 4), Narrative (5), History (6). I cannot think of Part II as the example-giving or practical half of the book, because of my decision in II as in I to perform what I know as a surrogate for the reader. I want to remind the reader, through argument and quotation and analysis, of the huge pertinence and quick retrieval of the codes we use when we read carefully. With all my limitations on show, I am performing my theory as I work my way to the Afterword. Apparently emotion-theory, like emotions themselves, must be lived through and thought through as a skein of relationships—each of which is a record of changes in emotional-volitional tone. What this amounts to, when we come down to reading practice, is something in large part known because (with my emphasis on image, utterance, and scene) I am incorporating emotion-study into philology, into stylistics. What I do with my design-building examples in Part II will be very familiar, except for the emphasis on reading emotions from writing, and on making emotion-study more historical than it has been. If the proper synonym for literary seeing is storytelling, and if a very great deal of reading is the practice of automatic codes, a reasonable way to begin the study of how ordinary emotions are put into and read back


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from writing will be: to build up stylistics to be able to notate changes of emotion-states across a story, poem, play, personal narrative, or work of scholarship. Here the unit most likely for study, but also hard to control because so variable in length and so subject to changes of meaning in different places and eras, is the emotion-state. In Chapter 4, I examine emotion-states in relation to plot, as plot resides within the characters and many temporal and other relationships of the work, and within the minds of author and reader. So many relationships! So many stored repertoires brought into play, in the recognition of new meanings! And all relying on words printed on pages. Tybalt stabs Mercutio, who jokes, curses, and dies. Phèdre propositions Hippolytus, who runs off horrified. On the last page, Hazel shows up undead and Kelly Kelleher, on the thirty-first approach, dies. Mickey Sabbath masturbates on Drenka’s grave while her policeman-son watches. Prufrock suddenly imagines himself as scuttling undersea claws. Dickinson makes a stupendous metaphysical claim in the second line of a tiny poem. Williams begins a work of 100 pages by numbering his chapters 19, XIII, VI, 2. The surprising event is an eruption into the system of affects, the world-under-construction, of the imaginary person. Surprise is an affect that cuts into other affects, disrupting value and adding new value. It may be the only emotion-state that is determined by the sequence of story. Perhaps, for this reason, surprise is the quintessential emotion of storytelling because it keeps me-the-reader attached to a process that’s about the past, as the past is re-performed in the present. When you follow the line of your own surprises, you make it impossible to untwist the formal from the affective dimensions of your reading experience, or to separate out either of those from the argument of the work. In this chapter, I propose to re-think the affect of surprise through psychologies of attention in works by two Williams, Shakespeare and Carlos Williams. Romeo and Juliet and Spring and All are stories about and of surprise: early works on the condition of earliness, speedy works on speed. Otherwise a popular tragic play and an avant-garde thesis-with-poems are not comparable, and I don’t propose to compare them; these are two among the infinite variety of modes and effects of sequence, and they allow me to explore the topic with some concreteness. It is nonetheless droll, even weirdly

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instructive, that the Williams poem which must have baffled readers in the 1920s due to its Modernist insults and scramblings, now seems to offer itself calmly to inspection—while the play about adolescents, so often acted and assigned, so central an icon of Western culture, grows dense with accumulating obstacles, vibrating inter-animations, violent wrenching sorrows. 1. Connecting Linearity of Plot with Intensity of Pity and Fear In most standard surveys and single-topic books by psychologists, surprise is recognized as an emotion, indeed placed among the major six or eight dominant emotion names; however, surprise is hardly studied, either entirely left out or dealt with as a topic of infant development or assimilated to the mechanism called startle.3 In literary scholarship, there is a valuable body of work on plot, descending from Aristotle but improving upon Aristotle’s sense of the relationships of time within the action of a play: Aristotle’s ideas of reversal and recognition are brilliant early formulations of a theory of surprise, developed from study of plays unfolding in literary time. Aristotle himself was one of the first to say that emotion and plot are not just connected—in the unfolding of successful plays they determine each other, even though plot is primary. But with a few exceptions plot is usually treated as a concern for formalists within the literary field—most often it is treated as an adjunct, nearly transparent or, if seen at all as temporal, something to be summarized.4 Storytelling connects the past with the present, sequence with state, the emotion of the linking of moments with the emotion of the moment. (But what’s a moment, and for whom is the moment? We shall see.) Storytelling connects the linearity of plot with pity and fear, two terms I’m using here as leading instances of the eruptive chaos of intensity. Pity and fear are Aristotle’s terms for emotions that tragedy may purge from the minds of those imaginary persons, characters and audience members. It would be an innovation to show emotion-states in relation to image, scene, and larger sequence, taking named emotions as variable units. This I try in my accounts of Oates and Welty in the next chapter. Some emotions are roused and fade within minutes, like surprise itself in the reader, like the anger of characters in the firstscene street fight in Shakespeare’s play, or like Juliet’s impatience at her Nurse’s delay in giving news. Other emotions, like Romeo’s love


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and grief for both Mercutio and Juliet, persist from their original moment to the death of the character who experiences, and also resonate in the memory of the reader as knowledge of all that loss. What is the relationship between attention and emotion, as these forces actualize each other in the work of art? It has to involve an experience in and of time, progressive and also recursive, repeatable, implicating memory but also the memory-in-advance of foreshadowing; the relentlessness of plot but also the explosiveness of intensity. Attention is one name for the co-instantaneity of thinkingfeeling. I assume the unity of the person, within whom cognition and affect act together, but there’s no co-operation without a prior distinction. Cognition may be central and causal, but cognition needs the amplification of affect within affect’s multitude of scripts that inflect thinking and give it value. Affect grounds the embodied brain in reciprocity with persons and things in the world.5 My account of Spring and All, Williams’s 1923 manifesto-withpoems, is a straight gestalt reading, where I focus on the reader’s expectations. That is why I consider Williams first. My account of Romeo and Juliet is an intensity theory that better integrates pity, fear and arrangement: my methodological synthesis comes second because it builds on gestalt perceptions but makes larger claims. Williams himself uses the terms emotion and sequence several times across his manifesto poem, and he implies their relationship in such phrases as these from the theory sections: “the profitless engagements of the arithmetical” (57); prose is “the fact of an emotion,” but poetry is “the dynamization of emotion into a separate form” (70); we might learn “to give importance to the subdivisions of experience” (81).6 Shakespeare pays attention to attention in the Prologue at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet.7 In this play the actor called Chorus, who speaks the opening sonnet—possibly Shakespeare himself in the earliest productions—gives an oblique version of the story’s plot, “the two hours’ traffic of our stage”, and then says: “The which if you with patient ears attend, / What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend”. So what’s not in the Prologue’s quick revealing overview will be added by author and actors in what follows, but it will unfold and require interpretation, in the time that permits toiling, mending. “[W]ith patient ears attend”: this isn’t a reader but a listening watcher who doesn’t know about act and scene divisions, doesn’t hear the written stage directions that require that Juliet “falls

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upon her bed within the curtains” (IV,3). And, if there’s a reader, that reader’s put into the imaginary role of someone who attends to audible speech acts in the divisions of hours. Patient—attend: Shakespeare’s words for warmth of cognition in author, actors, watching auditor. So acting as theorists of their own works, both poets are acutely attuned to emotional information roused from sequence. As a lead to showing that the poem and play are packed full of reversals and recognitions that perform what all the relevant agents know, and since I’m already using Aristotle’s language to say this, here’s the passage in the Poetics that starts everything: “The finest recognition [a ‘shift from ignorance to awareness’ in the main character] is one that happens at the same time as a peripety [‘a shift of what is being undertaken to the opposite… in accordance with probability or necessity’], as in the case with the one in the Oedipus [Tyrannus of Sophocles]…. [T]he form that is most integrally a part of the plot, the action, is the one aforesaid; for that kind of recognition combined with peripety will excite either pity or fear (and those are the kinds of action of which tragedy is an imitation according to our definition), because both good and bad fortune will also be likely to follow that kind of event…. These then are two elements of plot…; third is the pathos[,] a destructive or painful act, such as deaths on stage, paroxysms of pain, woundings, and all that sort of thing”.8 For any theory of sequence and surprise—terms Aristotle uses elsewhere in his treatise—his famous statement that plot is the heart and soul of tragedy is a central assertion, both for the primacy it gives to plot among the six constructive elements, and for the corollary claims about simple and complex plots, whole actions, magnitude, and causal linkage. But most perspicuous is what he does in the quoted passage, to argue for a textual emotion in plotting, which develops together with and as an expression of intellectual acts of sequencing and recognizing. In the classical fields, Aristotle’s intent when he uses pity, fear and katharsis is still the focus of bitter disputes.9 Gerald F. Else and Stephen Hallwell have written carefully on key terms in Aristotle’s treatise and have come down on opposite sides—Else for emotion in the character in the objective text, Halliwell for emotion in the reader.10 We may prefer to have it be a reader-script relation, like the New Critics, but that severely restricts to two the productive relations of emotion; there are other agents, including author, character, actor,


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and watching auditor. When emotion is set into discourse, all the relationships are at play unless they can be ruled out by logic. Here is another place to bring forward my claim that emotion, in its role as conferring value through networks of relations, works like a wedge cutting through all levels. Of course it makes a difference which agent performs what, but the range can be specified, and a recalibrated focus can be avowed for each critical excursion. In Book 10 of the Republic, Plato had condemned poetry for catering to the anti-rational part of our natures, especially to pity and fear (eleos kai phobos), and Aristotle is showing how these emotions may be roused and purified, by being imitated in the causal sequences of tragic plots. Halliwell spends several pages to show the interlocking nature of compassionate pity and self-directed fear: how these two emotions help each other in the experience of tragedy: “our pity for others’ undeserved suffering depends in part on our sympathetic capacity to imagine, and imaginatively fear, such things for ourselves; and fear for our selves (though this is not the main element in tragic fear) can in turn be created by the sympathetic experience of others’ misfortunes.”11 The basic position in Aristotle, in Rhetoric as well as Poetics, is altruistic, but there are elements of the self-preserving conatus in the two intertwined terms. There is another fifth-century critic, Sicilian teacher of rhetoric Gorgias, who has an expanded palate of emotions that move into and from the beneficial process of storytelling. Gorgias in Oliver Taplin’s literal translation writes of “ultra-fearful shuddering and much-weeping pity and grief-loving longing,” so he makes it more clear than Aristotle that tragic emotions amplify each other as well as the rational argument of the play.12 For Gorgias, in Taplin’s reading, the tragedy is more clearly fixed in the emotional experience of the audience. What’s foundational for Western criticism in these expansions of Aristotle is this: human imagination craves a greater inter-animation of emotions, a wider range of distinguishable agents who may experience emotions, and a sequential shape to make these states legible. There was profound fear of emotions and of art-emotions in Plato, but this was magnificently answered in Aristotle and Gorgias. In subsequent Western theory, the “strong affective dimension” (Halliwell, 200) in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy was often pushed aside in order to favor cognitive claims; Aristotle became, for example, the paragon of rule-driven rationality in one kind of New

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Critical thinking in the United States: W.K.Wimsatt, R.S. Crane, Richard P. McKeon. These critics recoiled from katharsis. Because for them intensity was uncontrollable and time was not visible in the completed work, plot became not a discovery procedure but a round hard shell seen all at once; and emotion became something that could be unwrapped from cognition. Emotion was admitted because Aristotle had admitted and named it, but now emotion had become a messy disturbance of thinking. At the same time as the flourishing of the New Critical Aristotelians, in the 1950s, gestalt psychology came across to the arts, notably with the Heinrich Schenker (Austrian composer/theorist, 1868-1935) system that mapped the whole curve of conflict and resolution in symphonies (from Bach to Brahms) onto a long timeline; and with a splendid book, now largely forgotten, Leonard B. Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956). Meyer brought eventful time back into criticism. He also brought an explicitly declared emotion, though the emotion in Meyer is often narrowly that of unexpectedness, somewhat starved of affective energy. The overall linearity of Meyer is complicated by wider ranges of feeling in Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure (Chicago, 1968), because she shows how poems’ endings implicate every emotion, intention, and formal element that has come before: more than music the verbal arts drag along with them explicit meanings. The premise in both Meyer and Herrnstein Smith is that the human mind craves good continuation, so when works of art frustrate our tendency to respond, they create affect: the temporal arts of music and writing are arts of delay, diversion, grouping, prolongation, and many larger and smaller forms of resolution. The cognition of works of arts in time involves among other things the span of the reader’s attention, and the relation of metric perception to motor habits. This was frankly and explicitly a cognitive psychology of the reader’s response. I take this as a base position, indispensable for getting beyond the limits of Aristotle and the Aristotelians, but itself requiring a re-framing: the better to calibrate a shock that exceeds cognitive surprise. The Fifties Aristotelians mocked Longinus, the 1st century Hellenistic theorist of the Sublime, who is in my view a perfect extension of the emotion-side of Aristotle, not his antithesis.13 The Sublime is a category of ecstatic thinking as well as a kind of style; it expresses what can’t be conveyed directly but can nonetheless be


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shadowed through textual means, in its elevation and uncanny immensity. As an admirer of Sappho, the lyric and epic, Longinus speaks for different emotions than pity, though there is fear in the Sublime.14 He does show interest in a wider range of emotions, pleasurable as well as painful, than the fifth-century BCE Greek critics, and he is more fascinated by ecstatic states of consciousness. At the end of his treatise, Longinus promises another study, now lost, on the emotions: he will, he says, “proceed to our next subject. This was emotion, to which we promised to devote a separate treatise. It occupies… a very important place among the constituents of literature in general, and sublimity in particular….”.15 Longinus sees that emotional peaks in writing need to be described, that they are enhancements to narrative amplitude but not narrative as such, that changes of speakers and of points of view produce jolts of intensity, that imagery and mater make a bare plot more lively and acceptable. Critic as recognizer and as phrase-maker: he also sees that Sappho’s lyric briefness and Homer’s epic extent may both show forms of sublimity, because of the different ways they relate image to story in imaginary floods of feeling. Thus he became the first of us: aspirants to be complete readers of literary emotion. However, Longinus is more an oracle than a teacher: not the theorist of a genre, not a system-builder. His Sublime is usually forgetful of sequence—he craves one-off depth-charge events that explode in the consciousness. No matter; toward a poetics of surprise, Longinus’ careful, text-based exposition of intensity is constitutive in the history of criticism, and connects him to Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. Whitehead in Process and Reality defended the doctrine “that breadth of thought reacting with intensity of sensitive experience stands out as an ultimate claim of experience,” and his expositor Judith A. Jones has taken intensity as “the decisive component of Whitehead’s particular brand of realism…. Existence announces a character of intensiveness that could undergird the formal and quantitative analyses of the natural sciences as well as the decidedly evaluative experiences involved in moral affairs”.16 Deleuze does not engage in speculative metaphysics of that sort, but intensity is a decisive component of his thought, too. As a proponent of making new connections through spread-from-below rhizome and network, of freeing affect from personal feeling, Deleuze

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finds that one purpose of philosophical method is to track variations in intensity. “Intensity is unassimilable”, writes Deleuze’s disciple Brian Massumi: “This dimension of intensity, understood as a superlinear, super-abstract realm of potential; that realm of the virtual as having a different temporal structure, in which past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present, and as having a different, recursive causality”.17 For Deleuze, another name for this nonlinear causality is affect, which is for him far more useful than ordinary emotion, in shaking up the world’s usual state of stupidity. That’s his idiosyncratic technical usage, but can we not keep emotion and give to it some measure, or glamour, of Deleuzian disruptive affect? Whether we call it affect or emotion, it tampers with time: makes for swings of intensity, dissipations of plot. Arrangement equals plot equals Aristotle; pity and fear equal affect equal Deleuze. Plot is the received and preferred organization, while affect is the necessary and neglected, harder to describe. Both sets are needed. How would one convey a meeting of intensity-affect and sequence-plot? The hardest thing would be to enact in a critic’s words the event-quality of a situation when time is distorted and when the image is prolonged: the force of sequence and the trajectory of image. 2. William Carlos Williams: Spring and All I propose to treat Williams from a sequence perspective. A gestalt reading ought to bring forth some practical points about the emotion of cognition itself. This will enable us to see the intensities of Shakespeare’s layered sequence through the grid of gestalt method— also dramatic through lyric, canonical through avant-garde, Early Modern Romance through Modern Anti-Romance, dialogue through monologue. Williams in Spring and All shows the dangers of arithmetical sequence, of following others in one’s writing, and this because he wants to denounce, in his own bold capitals, THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM. The book itself is argument and example on the need to be creative and not repetitive in building sequences. I will argue that by means of his constant violations of expected sequence, Williams helps the reader to become aware of sequence as a


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constructive factor. We might ask: How does consequence derive from sequence? What’s the emotional logic of one-after-another, of breaking-off or of leaping gaps, of trains of images? Where does literary emotion, as Aristotelian pity and fear and Spinozan sorrow and joy, get linked with gestalt emotion as energies of attention? Emotion derives from sequence when a tendency to respond is inhibited. That’s where the explanation begins. Logically it has to be so, that the primary emotion in the temporal arts is surprise, from which most of the other hundreds of art-emotions are built-up. For this reason, and particularly with second and later readings of modernist experiments like Spring and All, the best way to deal with constant small surprise is a quick riffle or scan where all the minibreaks are understood within a large curve of feeling and thinking. I can speak of three violations of sequence: alternation, interruption, and gapping. By alternation, I mean large-scale effects of design in the whole essay-with-poems, namely the frequent shift from the prose of argument to free-verse lyric, and also the delightful scrambling of outof-order chapter numbers and the one title for Chapter XIII printed backwards and upside-down (after these have had their disorientation, Williams stops the numbers for prose sections but he keeps on numbering poems to the end). There is, throughout, unpredictable typography like the mixing of Arabic and roman numerals, the speedy jamming of words without a hyphen like “dovetame” (9). Also there are hundreds of sentences where Williams drops the final period: when no-punctuation and punctuation alternate, in both the prose and the inset poems, we never exactly know whether or where a sentence or segment will end, so the notation of thinking is extremely mobile, full of quick turns. Williams intends that the emotion of bafflement should give way, in the reader, to appreciation for a kind of writing where the author demonstrates his argument. The author avoids the plagiarism of the pre-existing by accepting the accidents that come, thinking with his text. This leads to another, more sly and pervasive form of alternation, where the plausible seductions of storytelling and argument are broken, often, by intrusions of textual self-reference: when, for instance, “SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here” (17), of when we read “said that half a dozen times already” (65), or when Williams can’t let the lyrical vaunt of the word “song” exist, in poem VIII, without following it with “inflated to

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/ fifty pounds pressure” (54) or without dismantling it: “which is the son / leaving off the g / of sunlight and grass” (35). The purest form of textual display is his rare use of nonsense rhyming sounds, as in “tranquilly Titicaca—” (49) to end poem X, or “coom barroom” and “la lu la lu / but lips too few / assume the new—marruu” in poem XX (76-77). These words produce emotions that could only be experienced through reading: in the estrangement emotion, here, the sequence propels us through flickers of mild surprise and irritation. By interruption I mean Williams’s self-silencing—the times in the prose and in the poems when he turns in another direction, seeks an example, breaks off, tires out, cannot or will not complete a thought. There are two types, the dash in the middle or end of a sentence, and the non-punctuated stoppage, and both of these are evident in six short lines at the end of poem III—here doctored by my brackets to locate the effects: Down past the brushwood bristling by the rainsluced wagonroad looms the artist figure of the farmer [dash] – composing [line-end] [line-opening dash] – antagonist [unpunctuated end of poem]

Williams always rescues his breakdowns with new energetic sentencing, but these self-interruptions are the most pervasive design feature of Spring and All. I gave up my rough count of these violations of sequence when I got about a third of the way through, and I had at that point 88 dash constructions and 52 mostly unpunctuated midsentence stoppages. One emotion deriving from sequence is trust, which might lead to respect and affection; a writer might lose trust if the events in the text were repetitive in the order of natural numbers, but might also lose it with too much indecisive faltering, too much of the random. Williams, adhering to his avant-garde axiom, “There is no confusion, only difficulties” (83) keeps veering his sentences toward the random and then pulling them back. In these larger and smaller effects of eventfulness, his method is to test the reader’s trust. By gapping, my third violation of sequence, I refer only to the images in the poems. In the four or five best poems, Williams’s free verse practice is the full imaginative delivery of the theory or sequence in his overall prose argument. With the sequence of images,


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we come more fully into the realm of emotional meanings, still structural but more amenable to emotional logics. Williams knew this when he spoke here about “emotional content” and “emotional research,” and notably when he hit on that excellent, already-quoted phrase for poetry, which “performs the dynamization of emotion into a separate form” (70). His struggle in the later pages of Spring and All to understand his affinities with Marianne Moore is part of the larger question of this work, namely What to Do with Imagism? Even as early as 1923, he knew, and he knew that Moore knew, that Imagism was played out, in the sense of not being structural. Thus he knew that dynamized sequence—in other words, narrative of some sort within the lyric, even if only the story of the reader’s surprises—was one way forward beyond the static symbolic image. Remembering the Imagists, Williams states here that “associating emotions with natural phenomena” is crude (21), but another of his axioms—to write down “that which happens” (51)—is not a contradiction if the writing contains energetic re-ordering with unpredictable deletions between the events. One of the lesser poems in the set is XI, about what’s seen when the speaker’s driving—in order: an elderly man, a woman in blue, a boy of eight “who was / looking at the middle of / the man’s belly / at a watchchain,” and so on, “until / I saw a girl with one leg / over the rail of a balcony” (49-50). It is only relations of glance that connects the sequence: that’s the point about driving. There are two other, more impressive narrative poems about a doctor who caresses his nurse, and about young louts, “dirty satyrs,” where sexual anxiety seems related to some wider social breakdown, but the images and stories are still personal, particular. My last examples here are two poems about flowers, which display opposite ideas of how to connect continuity with discontinuity. The superb poem VII, beginning “The rose is obsolete,” cancels this cliché flower as a candidate for symbolism in the opening, but then brings it back as geometry in the middle, and then beautifully dithers, “half-raised / cold, precise, touching / What / The place between the petal’s / edge and the”: then it plunges to a fantastic claim about how the edges of the perceived rose-petals go out in strict physical lines forever, “The fragility of the flower / unbruised / penetrates space” (32-33). The gaps are between the rose of tradition and the rose of geometry, and between the successive stages through which the image is re-imagined. Williams ends Spring and All on a poem, XXVII,

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about the Black Eyed Susan, a modest orange/purple field flower, with nine opening lines of description, and then ending on ten words in six lines where the speaker addresses the flower as a woman, personifying it through the Susan in its name: “But you / are rich / in savagery-- / Arab / Indian / dark woman” (98). Recursively, he has pulled the last line out of the first line. In this one poem after following the propulsions of sequence for a hundred pages, Williams has decided to bring closure to the whole varied set by one more change-up. He ends his tract by other, equally valid methods—the method of intimate personal address that excludes irony, and the method of metaphor (flower=woman) that needs sequence in order to set off its little detonation, but that acts by collapsing sequence. A more characteristic poem, the best in the book and in my view one of the great poems of the 20th century, is “The pure products of America / go crazy,” number XVIII. Williams here gives an example of his manifesto’s point on imagination as composition of reality, and does it by means of all the effects of dynamized sequence I’ve been examining. “The pure products of America / go crazy” when the worst destroys the best, when there is copulation “without / emotion / save numbed terror,” when a wrecked Elsie brings hillbilly Kentucky into a New Jersey doctor’s house where she works: “expressing with broken / brain the truth about us”, he says. Williams’s imagination can connect social classes through the figure of Elsie, but can only register, not change, what’s degraded: “Somehow / it seems to destroy us // It is only in isolate flecks that / something / is given off // No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car” (70). In this capacious cultural scan, Williams uses all the rhetorical and gestalt effects I’ve mentioned, and goes further to use sequence as a political logic. He relates poverty of sense-making sequence to poverty of emotion and both of these to actual, brutalizing poverty. His and the reader’s emotion deriving from several elements, including sequence, is something like despair. This focus on emotion as feeling-in-the-world is my way of insisting that Spring and All is referential in an oblique way but nonetheless referential. This experimental work requires an author to “witness and adjust,” because it is consonant with everything in Williams to claim that activity like writing/driving/living forces you to deal with sequence when you’ve thrown yourself inescapably into the


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midst of it. I refer here to the adjusting function, but witnessing and self-witnessing are not nothing in the Williams image. So even this late in my account of the poem, I want to worry that Marjorie Perloff has overstated it in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, when she says that Williams’s images here are “perfectly transparent… without depth,” and that “the referentiality of the images is subordinated to their compositional value”.18 She seems to take extrangement emotion for all of emotion in experimental works, but I want to use my evidences to say that in this writer there has to be enough of a sentence to interrupt a sentence, enough of images to surpass imagism, enough of ordinary emotion and perception to turn those into textual status. If we read for emotion deriving from sequence, Spring, for Williams, is creativity, is life—it’s a trope of the avant-garde as a continual beginning, thus a quickening in the sequence of the seasons, a qualitative break within the continuation. When he adds and All in his title, I think that he means all the details of perception of the Earth in its changes, all the human social world, all the practices of the intellect, and the force of imagination that makes the ordinary into art. All is what Spring refers to and is the summation, therefore the aim and end, of sequence. 3. Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Reading Williams with a gestalt frame, I’ve found surprise, admiration, pity, “something like despair”, and certain other states, pressing slightly beyond the expectation-emotions produced by sheer cognitive sequence. Reading Shakespeare, I don’t want to forget anything a gestalt method might notice, but let’s overlay and complicate by trying to catch the momentum of literary time when sequence turns into intensity. Gestalt psychology does well with the kind of arrangement that requires that we bite on to the opening like a bulldog and follow the work through its changes—frustrations and resolutions of what any skillful reader might expect, and also summations in retrospect. Gestalt method works best on effects of deletion, but doesn’t strongly enough register positive changes that bring about an “overing and aftering of the inscape” (G.M. Hopkins)—effects of intensity like constitutive metaphors, switches from soliloquy to dialogue or verse to prose, namings of emotionstates by characters, reverse mirroring of beginnings and endings of plays, or formal ornaments like rhymes between the last line of one

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scene and the first line of the next. Reading Williams I arrived at a summation of a long poem’s meaning only in my final sentences, but now it will be necessary to perform more than a few retellings of the whole story. Perhaps a play yields to this more willingly than a manifesto in poetics that corrects itself with insertions of free verse; a play exhibits conflicts between embodied named voices, so has the advantage of being relatively more dialogic, more public. In a play more of the argument—or thought, in Aristotle’s term for the overall cultural intent—is in the outer speech than in inner speech; nothing’s in the author’s own voice except the stage directions. Plot also and originally meant a little place, a plot of ground, so it has a spatial as well as temporal meaning. Moment can be a spot in time, as in stop a moment, wait a moment, but also gathers affect when it means important or considerable, as in momentous, or in a person of some moment. How catch plot at those moments (they are everywhere but not everywhere equally revealing) when sequence is turning into intensity? Aristotle, even with katharsis and the emphasis on pity and fear, even as supplemented by Longinus, is not helpful enough because he tended to assimilate character and thought to the plot. Taking plot as the soul of the action was brilliantly right, but it had the awkward effect of flattening out the disruptions of emotion-states. We need now to return emotions to drama in their full ability to stall, divert, or expand sequence. Literary criticism has always done well to develop character and thought, two more of Aristotle’s six constituents of tragic drama. Aiming at an even more successful integration of elements, let’s try imagining two or more processes coexisting. Perhaps several tellings, quickly performed, would continually re-frame the analysis and show different rates of change within the work. Perhaps time within the story is compressed or dilated, adding certain possibilities not imaginable from the workings of non-literary time. 3.1. Re-Tellings of Romeo: The Structure of Feeling For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. Exeunt.

(5.3, 309-310)

In Pacific Beach, California, riding by on my bike I heard a girl calling for Romeo, her little dog, and I thought: What’s in a name?— Straight back to 1595. Love, grief, anger, joy, surprise, and a 5-Act


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plot had shrunk into a type-name for a lover and a pet, 400 years later and on the other side of the world. Centuries of culture, including published scholarship, weigh on the play and cannot be removed, but new eventful encounters give us the play itself as evidence of its moment of first public performance. The 1590s built into the play the era’s structure of feeling, but the play is testimony to what an engaged and capacious writer could make of that structure of feeling. That era involves conflict at every conceivable level, and in the created words of drama the telling of that era involves the clash of inner and outer speech.19 The city state of Verona cannot control its powerful citizens, who cannot control their servants and children. Leading families of Verona, Capulets and Montagues, are in a blood feud: servants fight in the streets; there are challenges and swordplay; there’s the duel of Tybalt and Mercutio that turns the plot toward dark fates, when Romeo interposes himself quite literally between the swords. From families who hate come children who love and must die. We know that already from the summary in the Prologue, quoted above here, which tells in the play’s first minute about the deaths of the title characters; so much for surprise, unless there’s another kind of eventfulness that can tolerate multiple retellings of what’s fated. Another retelling of the plot would involve a clash of rhetorics: Romeo’s false, literary love at the start of the play, contrasted with his love-language in the courtship scenes (1.5 and 2.2 especially) once he meets Juliet; and the difference between the Nurse’s crudity, nonsense and loose autobiography and Juliet’s emotional delicacy. There is also the clash of dialogue and soliloquy as alternative speech-acts, a plot of voices utterly transparent to the auditor because utterly known. (On voice as surprise: it is admittedly a little bizarre to have the Chorus before Acts 1 and 2, and the Prince in his pronouncements that come after acts of violence, because these voices seem suddenly to offer a frame of thought near to the author’s.) Another much-rehearsed plot is the expressive intonation that has made it loved and mocked, plundered for names of children and pets, taught in schools—Shakespeare’s frank obsession with naming feelings. It’s this feature which has made Romeo the primary instance of emotion-writing in the Western canon. One example is the dialogue of Juliet and Lady Capulet in 3.5: “Yet let me weep for such a feeling loss” / “So shall you feel the loss”, and others are references to mingled emotions, the most famous of which is “sweet sorrow”.

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Here, for shortness’ sake leaving out examples I’ve collected from Acts 2 and 3, are other lines that show the plot as a graph of sorrow, desire, joy, love, hate, fear, grief, woe: “They must take it in sense that feel it.” [an early sign to the auditor or reader, that feeling is a value in this set of events] -Gregory in 1.1. “measuring his affections by my own”. [sympathy of emotion-states, from person to person] -Benvolio in 1.1. “Black and portentous must this humour prove…. Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow….” [humors theory of emotions] -Montague in 1.1. “What sadness measures Romeo’s hours?” states] -Benvolio in 1.1.

[re-arranging time by emotion-

“But not so long to speak. I long to die / If what thou speakest speak not of remedy”. [the same word, long, is both adjective and verb, and refers equally to time and desire] -Juliet in 4.1. “womanish fear” -Friar Laurence; “Give me, give me! O tell me not of fear!” [love stronger than fear] -Juliet in 4.1. “Thus with a kiss I die”. [loving and dying at the same time; dying as a pun for consummation of the sexual act] -Romeo in 5.3. “Capulet, Montague, / See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, / That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love”. [ironically countervailing emotions] -Prince in 5.3. “woe… / Romeo”. [character’s name connected, by proximity of rhyme, with dominant emotion-word in last lines of the play] -Prince in 5.3.

The continual question is: How speak what one feels? Speech as naming cannot touch feeling, as Juliet knows when she learns she has fallen for her family’s enemy, and as Romeo learns when he gets beyond the lovesick speech about Rosaline in Act 1: learns from being mocked by his male friends and from meeting Juliet. This affect level of the play’s language doesn’t often use the system of the four bodily humors like other Early Modern texts, but it does work by body-signs that are metaphors across the whole play: face-wound-heart-poison, and markedly the kind of pain that is “woe,” a word that rhymes with the main character’s name and that returns often at intervals. Woe is physical and metaphysical at once, an emotion that has energetic life


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for the 1590s structure of feeling, even if it has lost its force for us. Another Early-Modern emotion-naming moment occurs when Benvolio (1.2, 49-50), commiserating with Romeo, refers him to the doctrine of mitigating one passion with another: “Take thou some new infection to thy eye, / And the rank poison of the old will die.”20 By contrast with these back-shadowing examples, one thinks of how the cynical-bawdy-friendly-desperate tones of Mercutio have emerged for us in unusual force because of the sudden visibility, since the 1980s, of the homosexual side of the play.21 I am not alone in thinking that the emotional center has shifted to give Mercutio, dead in Act 3, equal importance to the death of the heterosexual couple at the end. Romeo and Juliet has many instances of textual or derived emotion, which are usually more evident to the reader than the playgoer. The most obvious are the three sonnets (two from the Chorus, and one making up the first dialogue of the title characters when they meet at the banquet). When these are combined with the frequent use of couplets to signal scene-endings and, sometimes, speech-endings, we’re led to ask: given that later tragedies by Shakespeare do not have so many fancy structures or sounds, what is the purpose of rhyming in Romeo? Shakespeare rarely errs in matters of emotional logic, so it would be wise to see this as functional—but how? The 5-Act division of the play seems to have come about as an artifact of published editions, and has influenced the pace of the play for readers ever since 1623 by a whole new order of divisions above the more clearly delineated divisions of the scenes.22 There are several references to reading (e.g., 1.1 and 1.2), and notes and letters are energizers of plotting. The Chorus, a commentator who foretells from outside the events of the whole action, is seen and heard by the audience, although the plentiful stage directions and the reference to “aside” to cue a soliloquy are not. Behind the play is the memory of tragedy as a genre, and within that, the use of the comic (in the role of the Nurse) to contradict and enhance the tragic. However, as has often been remarked, the tragic plot here is not an Aristotelian or Fall of Princes one, and not a conventional 1590s revenge plot either: the loss is of achieved love and possible community. 3.2. Time as Sequence, Causality and Speed Intensity is a variable: depends on pace and strength; most emotions flare and decline in minutes, and even long-term love and

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anger cannot always be the same. So intensity relies on change over time. However, literary duration is psychological not arithmetical. Writers know how to exploit the malleability of time for their storytelling purposes; they accurately cite clock time, then they stretch or compress it. For instance, by subdividing the events of his story, Jack London makes lighting a fire in an Alaskan snow-cave, when there’s one match left, into a minor saga; Annie Dillard drags the minutes-long experience of watching a solar eclipse into the topic of a full essay, by replaying the description several times from diverse angles; the last 42 hours of Juliet’s life in Shakespeare, the last hour in Dr. Faustus’s life in Marlowe, take fleet minutes of elapsed time in the playhouse.23 To study the uses of intensity as a value, we can view it through the manifold of time—literary time, where the surprising moment which disrupts the plot has soon become woven forward into it. Though it is progress toward an impossible limit, in order to isolate what’s intense about emotional intensity, by stages we’ll need to obliterate sequence as such.24 The basic position is clock time, as in the line we’ve seen from Chorus: “the two hours’ traffic of our stage.” A fantasy time-line of that traffic according to the mapping principles of Heinrich Schenker would show risings and fallings according to likely categories—lines that show conflicts of the two Houses, Romeo’s meetings and partings with Juliet, roles of Nurse and Friar as enablers, delays and elisions of event, the role of parents/Prince/Verona populace, duels and deaths, and so on. Such a narrow grid would spread out for several feet, and would tend to suppress the role of the Act-Scene structure and the rhymes; it would be admirable for tracking recurrences, and conflictcrossings of event and image, but less good for emotion-states. Such a representation would show us more evidence that many lines cross in Act 3 with Mercutio’s death and its aftermath. However the Schenkerian design would do little to show how confict breeds conflict down to the next generation, or to show the bravery and intelligence and joyousness and connivance of adolescent love, or the quickening of pace of the last two acts. Once you come to look for them this play has an unusually large number of exact references to time: “We’ll measure them a measure and be gone”; “the date is out of such prolixity”; “too late…I fear, too early”: “But passion lends them power, time means, to meet”; “A fortnight and odd days….Even or odd, of all days in the year, / Come


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Lammas Eve at night she shall be fourteen”; “Can I go forward… / Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out”; “th’ inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb”; “Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say ‘It lightens’”; “What o’clock tomorrow / Shall I send to thee?... By the hour of nine… I will not fail. ‘Tis twenty year till then”. Taking us up to the start of Act 2, those are typical and it matters little which characters speak—all speakers are obsessively aware of passing time. In the dialogue, hours, days, years are ticked off carefully; before and after discriminated, haste and slowness noted, qualitative breaks recognized, predictions made. When Juliet notes that “Some say the lark makes sweet division,” she refers to music but also to daybreak and separation from Romeo: this prepares her next remark on the preciousness of time, “in a minute there are many days.” At the play’s end the second cock has crowed, the curfew bell has rung, “’tis three o’clock,” the time is cursed as “most miserable hour,” and we’re left with “Juliet bleeding, warm, and newly dead, / Who here hath lain this two days buried.” On this brief glance, Shakespeare and his characters are supremely aware of the passage and passionate distortions of time. Before Diderot, Shakespeare knew about the paradox of the actor who plays but does not feel emotions as written. When the actor performs, the actor knows the affects she is capable of—unlike the spectator. In Shakespeare, when dramatic characters feel scripted their foreknowledge is written into plays in fate, the stars; and everything Montague knows when he says “Black and portentous must this humour prove,” and what his son Romeo senses when he says as early as 1.4: “my mind misgives / Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, / shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels…”. Romeo also tells dreams that darkly foreshadow “some joyful news at hand” (5.1) or else some nameless trouble. This is played in reverse, as back-shadowings, in the reports to the Prince by Benvolio (after Tybalt’s death) and the Friar (after the lovers’ deaths in the crypt), when they tell what has happened and why—reports over-long, but it’s characteristic of Shakespeare that he’ll script events first as action for the sake of surprise, then second as explanation. The time scheme is turned inside-out; pre-vision pairs with remembrance. Thus, reading by Act-structures, Nicholas Brooke notices symmetries that uncannily turn sequences into emotion-states: “The spectacle of the formal tragedy is worked out in the highly artificial tomb scenes

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which complement the earlier bedroom scenes…. Act III is very long, but Acts IV and V are both short. Their function is to fulfill the formal structure of the play, and they do this by reversing the sense of Acts I and II: there, a mock-love was exposed, and displaced by a real one; here a mock-death is similarly followed by a real death”.25 I agree about Mercutio’s death. Speculation on time as causality derives from Aristotle, who explained how the composing of plots came from Sicily, and happened when plays abandoned a lampooning mode and writers began to “compose arguments, that is, plots of a general nature”.26 For Aristotle the highest achievement is “the pleasure derived from pity and fear by means of imitation […, and] it is clear that these qualities must be built into the constituent events”; the most tragic actions are the ones where close blood relations are killers, where characters perform fearful acts “knowingly and wittingly” (41), where events are connected by art and not by chance. “The best recognition of all is the one that arises from the events themselves; the emotional shock of surprise is then based on probabilities” (47). So a term of some contempt with him is episode, which I take it is a scene so loosely bound to the story that it could be dropped with no loss, or added in if time had to be burnt up by further examples: “This is the core of the poem; the rest is episodes” (49).27 The mode of connection he calls tying and untying, as with rope-making and weaving of textiles, and the result is an argument. In his brief section 19 on thought, it’s clear that the argument can’t be explicit and needs to rely on the practices of conveying emotions he describes in his Rhetoric, for persuading an audience by appealing to what’s known: “one must use the same practices in tragic actions as in everyday life, when it is a question of making things appear pitiable or fearful, or important and probable” (53). As one of the first to theorize storytelling and emotion, Aristotle has created a workable logic of causal chains where authors bind stories with events that grow out of choices—when characters seem (to themselves, if not to us) to be acting as morally free agents. Taking plot back to its spatial sense, Ted Hughes once spoke in awe of Shakespeare’s ability to re-materialize: the poet-playwright can be in one room and then suddenly he’s vividly there in another, up and off to the side, and the room there is the act, scene, utterance or image. Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet, with a few dark lines that sketch the danger of the war of families, is a deliciously extended courtship ritual


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whose last words promise the “two in one” (2.6.37) of the sacrament of marriage. Act 3, scene 1, set in “A public place” in the stage direction, takes the war to the streets in the play’s longest scene at 193 lines—a scene cut by entrances and exits, Mercutio’s brash prose that can’t be contained by regular lines, quarreling talk about aptness to quarrel, challenge, fight, Mercutio’s death and Romeo’s resolve to revenge it, Tybalt’s death, the rush of citizens and Prince and parents, Benvolio’s summary of what just occurred, and last the Prince’s banishment of Romeo. The scene contains witty talk, violent performative speech acts, bursts of action followed by lulls of anguished reflection. Here’s the causal chain that changes everything in the play: Mercutio challenges the ever-ready Tybalt: “(indicates his sword) Here’s my fiddlestick…”; Romeo, just married, enters and tries to stop the quarrel, speaking words of deflection to his new relative Tybalt; Mercutio and Tybalt fight and “TYBALT UNDER ROMEO’S ARM STABS MERCUTIO AND FLIES WITH HIS FOLLOWERS”; in an excruciating moment, Mercutio says he has “Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch. Marry, ‘tis enough,” and dying calls down “A plague o’ both your houses”—this provokes Romeo into speculations on fate in the midst of grief and anger, and he challenges and kills Tybalt, exclaiming: “O I am fortune’s fool.” So Tybalt kills someone from the Prince’s party, Romeo kills Tybalt the relative of Juliet, the families are both drawn in, and what began as bantering and banquet has taken a turn into a new cycle of revenge that must separate the lovers within minutes of their secret marriage. Between Mercutio’s curse and his “EXIT, SUPPORTED BY BENVOLIO,” and Benvolio’s return to report “O Romeo, Romeo, brave Mercutio’s dead,” Romeo has a short speech to what citizens are left on the scene. He’ll act as macho man and contravene what he’s just learned from Juliet.28 As he’s led to a resolve, it’s here we see him forced by circumstance to exercise a malign free will: This gentleman, the Prince’s near ally, My very friend, hath got this mortal hurt In my behalf—my reputation stained With Tybalt’s slander—Tybalt, that an hour Hath been my kinsman. O sweet Juliet, Thy beauty hath made me effeminate And in my temper softened valor’s steel. (3.1.104-110)

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It tightens the noose of the plot, but one must remember the odd ironic event where the first death has happened UNDER ROMEO’S ARM, a pitiful effect of chance and Romeo’s well-intentioned, even brave, need to stop a fight. Without meaning to, he kills his best friend and loving interlocutor. No person, ordinary or imaginary, is sinful enough to have deserved this way of being fortune’s fool. It’s a strong complication and everything else is tied to it in the following scenes, but our sense that this need not have happened is part of the textual emotion of 3.1. Causality is literally based on chance, both here and even more plainly in Act 5 where a slight change in timing would’ve prevented the double suicide of the title characters. Shakespeare’s plotting has needed this inadvertence, this disastrous bad luck, and his tragedy has brandished bad luck as the way the world is: no explanations.29 Being denied moral certainty rouses in me greater energies, wilder intensities, than the kinds of frustration I might encounter in a cognitive or gestalt approach. In my hunt for value, sufficient cause, a more pure agency, reading this scene through its many shifts I register intensity of affect. And my account has not even explored the issue Jonathan Goldberg and others have brought, concerning Early Modern emotion: the homosocial love between Romeo and his fragile-ribald-affectionate-ironic friend Mercutio, whose loss leads Romeo to veer from the larger compassionate values he’s taken from Juliet. Tragic irony is one of the least bearable of intensities. The character’s meshed in the coils of the plot, increasingly fortune’s fool as the thing tightens toward death or deprivation—sometimes, though, able to speak out of that situation and say what it is like before the lines and pages dwindle and the character slams against the end. Thus Romeo’s cry against the dawn after the lovers’ one night of fulfillment: “More light and light, more dark and dark our woes” (3.5.36). After deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, speaking as a banished man, he’s there caught between sorrow and joy—consciously caught but still talking. A play’s a dissipative structure and requires theories of complexity—fractal ontology, nonlinear causality—to describe how it eliminates its middle, however “middle” is defined. I’ve just looked at the middle Act of the play and found that it’s a pivot, but once we’ve worked through and understood 3.1, seen its emotional linkages and


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causalities as both linear and non-linear, what then?30 The eliminated middle is the present, however defined, and that leads to the codes in the drama that enact time as speed. Among these codes, I’d list as among the larger curves of action: x the broad digressive sweep of the first two Acts, by contrast with the brevity and furious pace of the last two Acts; x the career of manic Mercutio who has to live faster than the two lovers, and whose name recalls the runny metal and the God of Speed with his winged feet: Mercutio is the one main character not in Shakespeare’s source, so he invented what he needed for connection, contrast, pacing; x how these teenagers agitate the emotions of the world toward early loss, directly in contrast with the tragedy of over-living in King Lear; x how straightforward is the route of the lovers’ pity for others and fear for themselves—rarely the reverse, which would be a delaying complication; x how “woe” becomes the shorthand, in this play preeminently, for the combined feeling of pity and fear, as spoken both by and about the lovers; x last, the way, abundantly, lyric modes emerge from dramatic ones, often when time is the theme.31 Everywhere passing utterances become tissues of time references, surprisingly obsessive in all speakers in the briefest selection: x x x x x x x x x

“What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?” (Benvolio, 1.1) “But passion lends them power, time means, to meet…” (Chorus, 2.1) “O, swear not by the moon, th’inconstant moon” (Juliet, 2.2) “But this I pray, / That thou consent to marry us today” (Romeo, a day after meeting Juliet, 2.3) “I stand on sudden haste.” (Romeo, 2.3) “Love’s heralds should be thoughts, / Which ten times faster glides than the sun’s beams… nimble-pinioned doves… wind-swift Cupid wings” (Juliet, 2.5) “Jesu, what haste!” (Nurse, 2.5) “Hie to high fortune!” (Juliet’s hopeful command, with a pun on a verb of speed, 2.5) “Enter Juliet somewhat fast.” (Stage-direction, 2.6)


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“I am sped.” (Mercutio on being stabbed: past tense of verb as image of death, 3.1)

These local images of plunging haste are less evident in the last two Acts, when the larger orders of plot and genre constrain the action. The play’s charged with co-instantaneous action images like “as they kiss consume” and “love-devouring death” and the rhyme “dieremedy”—the culmination of this line, I imagine, is Romeo’s last living speech, “Thus with a kiss I die” (5,3). There are fewer and more widely-spaced examples of slowness as the reverse image of speed, as in the Friar’s denial that anything can ever be timely, “Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow” (2.6.), and the delightful deliberate delay of the Nurse in 2.5, when she provokes Juliet’s anxious speech on how “Love’s heralds should be thoughts” and frustrates the repeated question, “Come, what says Romeo?”32 Super-speaker for a super-addressee in the playhouse, Prince Escalus utters the final lines of civic summary in what the 1597 Quarto calls the Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, As it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Seruants. A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd. (5.3, minus the final couplet)

Speed is where the lyric extremity of sorrow comes in, yielding tragic tone as well as double death—five deaths, actually—community grief, the living-after of the ones who haven’t died. The lovers, especially Juliet whose wisdom is always beautiful, know the need for haste because they are realistic about peripeteia and loss: time is a greater enemy of love than blood feud or the state, because time’s agents are blood feud and the state. The Capulets and Montagues who haven’t died will have golden statues of Romeo and Juliet and a more settled, unified Verona, but now must settle for the lovers as imaginary persons: For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. (5,3: last lines of play)


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Arrangement has brought the audience beyond pity and fear and up to this chiming bracket, backing out of the title by a reference to storytelling. Pity and fear are not usually productive emotions—not so productive as the compassion and courage they might turn into, if we use storytelling to multiply the powers of existence, as Spinoza thinks we ought. “Conceited” is the 1597 term for textual emotion, rather as in 1930 William Empson would’ve called it types of ambiguity and in 1970 Paul de Man the aporia of metaphor. The Prince’s reminder of the story of the story, its conceited art as pleasure derived from what someone in this play calls “sour woe,” is Shakespeare’s cue for applause from the audience. Play beckons to world. * In the next Chapter, I bring the results of my examination of plot into a wider territory, the idea of storytelling as such—the role of reading about imaginary persons in the economy of our lives as readers; and also, in my staged succession of analyses of works, I look at something narrower than plot—the role of image-utterance-scene, my chosen devices that carry and divide emotion-states.

1

The connection between performer and observer is causal, but it works as affective appraisal and not as deliberate choice. Since I’m resisting the dominant idea that emotions are judgments, I use the term affective appraisal rather than other terms from philosophical psychology such as intention or belief. Though emotion is wrapped up with reason in the appraisal of a situation, the emotion is not caused by an act of will. On mirror neurons: The claim of priority for this discovery, which came about by chance when researchers at the University of Parma were looking for something else, belongs to Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues. See Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, “Mirrors in the Mind,” Scientific American 295/5 (November 2006), pages 30-37 (article summary: “Mirror neurons, a special class of cells in the brain, may mediate our ability to mimic, learn and understand the actions and intentions of others”). Another account of the same phenomenon is Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat, in Edge [Edge Foundation, Inc], on-line communication from 1.10.06: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran06_index.html. In a recent book and articles related to it, Daniel Goleman, who popularized the term emotional knowledge in the 1990s, has promoted mirror neurons to support a new thesis about social knowledge.

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2


See, in the same issue of Scientific American cited in Note 1, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman, “Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism” (pages 38-45). 3 Honorable exceptions: the writings of Stanley Schachter, and of George and Jean Mandler. 4 These I’ve found admirable: Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology (Houndmills, England: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003). 5 Here I am remembering Spinoza; also Sylvan S. Tomkins and his four volumes titled Affect—Imagery—Consciousness (Springer Publishing Company, 1962-1992); and especially Tomkins’s introductory sentences to Volume III (1991; page 6): “The affect system is… the primary motivational system because without its amplification, nothing else matters—and with its amplification system, anything else can matter. It thus combines urgency with generality. It lends its power to memory, to perception, to thought, and to action no less than to the drives”. 6 William Carlos Williams, Spring & All (Buffalo, NY: Frontier Press). Page numbers from this edition. 7 Quotations from this edition: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, edited by T.J.B. Spencer (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1967). 8 This is the heart of section 11 of Aristotle’s Poetics, translated, with an Introduction, by Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), quoted [with excisions] from pp. 35-37. 9 The word katharsis he uses only once, but pity and fear return six times together, in the linkage Aristotle takes from Plato but then defends; but occasionally these terms appear apart and once in adjectival forms (“pitiable or fearful,” section 19). Stephen Halliwell gives a condensed summary of a century of philological-critical warring over the interpretation of katharsis in his Appendix 5: see note 7. 10 Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957; Else has summarized the main original arguments of his interpretation in his Introduction to his translation of the Poetics: see note 5; Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, with a New Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 1998). 11 Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 177. Halliwell’s position on pity-fear-sympathy is similar to that expressed in more than one book by Martha C. Nussbaum. 12 Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); for Gorgias, see pp. 167-168. The whole of Taplin’s Chapter 10, “Emotion and meaning in the theatre,” is wise on emotion-states in sequences: unlike a contrived emotional experience like a football match, the experience of tragedy has a decreased randomness: “Our emotional involvement has perspective and context at the same time, and not just in retrospect. Thus the events of the tragedy are in an ordered sequence, a sequence which gives shape and comprehensibility to what we feel. And , most important of all, the affairs of the characters which move us are given a moral setting which is argued and explored in the play…. The quality of the tragedy depends both on its power to arouse our emotions and on the setting of those emotions in a sequence of moral and intellectual complications which is set out and


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examined. Tragedy evokes our feelings for others, like much else; but it is distinguished by the order and significance it imparts to suffering” (169-170). 13 One exception to this statement is Allen Tate’s essay, “Longinus and the ‘New Criticism’”, in The Man of Letters in the Modern World (New York: Meridian Books, 1955). Tate finds that Longinus “came nearer to a comprehensive theory of literary form than any other ancient critic” (192). Paraphrasing Longinus, he anticipates my larger point about sequence as it turns into intensity in the creative process: “Style reveals that which is not style in the process of forming it. Style does not create the subject, it discovers it” (183). 14 Sappho’s poem beginning “He seems to me equal to gods” comes to us because it is quoted by Longinus, who takes her claim to be unable to speak as a supreme example of elevated speech—the Sublime is the aesthetics of our being overwhelmed, where we convey the indescribable through language. Longinus identifies the skill with which the writer “brings everything together—mind and body, hearing and tongue, eyes and skin…”, and specifically remarks on the union of contradictions in Sappho’s images of hot/cold, in her senses/out of her mind, alive/dead. He directly declares unity of emotional effect to be Sappho’s and his own concern. The poem’s story, on this showing, is the recreation of incapacity, due to what Longinus calls not one passion by a “complex of emotions”. Longinus refers to Sappho’s bodily senses as something she has lost: “She seems… to be looking for them as though they were external to her”; that thousand-year-old phrase could come from a current medical textbook on the feeling-brain disablement. Sappho’s literary autism works by utter ecstasy, and by ecstasy uttered. The poem is violent but also coherent; a tale of how a stasis of love-trance comes about; a concourse but also a unified narrative of emotionstates in conflict. Quotations from ‘Longinus,’ On Sublimity, translated by D. A. Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965): 14-15. 15 Longinus, On Sublimity (1965 translation; see previous note): 53. 16 Whitehead is quoted by Judith A. Jones: Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology (Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998): x; the sentences from Jones herself also come from her Introduction: x-xi. 17 Brian Massumi, Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002): see the whole of Chapter 1, “The Autonomy of Affect.” In these sentences on Deleuze I also rely on what I’ve learned in John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000). 18 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981): 131, 138. 19 Bakhtin’s terms for speech acts, inner/outer speech and expressive intonation, are explained in scattered places in Bakhtin’s writings; also in studies like my book, Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003). 20 On the emergence of this kind of therapy, where one passion counteracts the harmful effects of another, see Albert Hirshman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Victoria Kahn has re-thought Hirshman’s contribution in the wake of more recent Marxist critiques of ideology: “The Passions and the Interests in Early Modern Europe: The case of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, edited by Gail Kern

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Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 21 I refer especially to Jonathan Goldberg’s influential essay on “Romeo and Juliet’s Open R’s,” in Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). This is picked up and further pursued in Philippa Berry’s feminist reading, in her chapter on the play in Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring death in the tragedies (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 22 On the Act as an artifact and the scene as a primary division, see Chapter I in James E. Hirsh, The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). 23 Here is Joe Kavalier, comic book artist, storyteller, and imaginary person in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (New York: Picador, 2000): 253—with a practitioner’s account of innovation in plot: “He told her about his experiments with a film vocabulary, his sense of the emotional moment of a panel, and of the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time that lay between the panels of a comic book page.” 24 Intensity in my use of the term usually applies not to whole works, but to events in works, specifiable moments that break and then re-unite the sequence. As such it is a literary mode. On modes: see Spinoza and Altieri. 25 Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968): 82, 104, 82. The symmetries are ingenious, and one may wonder if they are more in Brooke’s mind than in Shakespeare’s or an observer’s or reader’s. Also: since observers of the play in the 1590s and today do not know when acts begin or end, could act-length or disposition of symmetrical scenes have more than a general emotional impact? No way to know this except to note that one critic has remarked on it. 26 Else translation (Cornell UP): 24. 27 Suspicious of plot as the soul of the action, Galen Strawson has a witty lecture where he divides the human race into core-plot personalities versus episode-loving personalities: “A fallacy of our age: Not every life is a narrative”, Times Literary Supplement, October 15, 2004: 13-15. “There are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative.” Narrative types, for him, are Heidegger and Conrad; Episodic types are Coleridge, Proust, and Bob Dylan. 28 A classic instance of what Sylvan S. Tomkins calls magnification of anger: amplification added to motivation, “connecting one affect-laden scene with another affect-laden scene…. I define magnification as the advantaged ratio of the simplicity or ordering information to the power of ordered information times its affect density…. [There is] the sequential as well as simultaneous coupling of anger and shame, anger and distress, anger and disgust, anger and terror, anger and dissmell.” Affect-ImageryConsciousness, Volume III, The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1991): 75, 80, 214. Except for the reference to smell, Tomkins describes what Shakespeare enacts in 3.1. 29 Harold Bloom, in the Yale Annotated Shakespeare edition of Romeo and Juliet, Fully annotated with an Introduction by Burton Raffel and an Essay by Harold Bloom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), calls this play a training ground in which Shakespeare “teaches himself remorselessness…” (214). Michael


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Roemer has insights on liberty and causality: “[W]hen we leave the safe arena of story, [we too] must forget what we know, become blind, and once again assume the illusion of our liberty, so that we can go forward into the future—which, in story, is also the past.” “Most narratives are presented as skeins of connections that reflect and depend on the cause-and-effect relationships which appear to govern human life. But though they may unfold in an enchainement of social, economic, and psychological links that are clear and plausible, the primary cause—the origin of the plot—remains beyond our understanding…. At its edge, all story shades into darkness.” Michael Roemer, Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995): 37, 42-43. 30 On the relation of causality to intensity, see the crucial passages from Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: “Intensity is the unassimilable…. This dimension of intensity, understood as a superlinear, super-abstract realm of potential; that realm of the virtual as having a different temporal structure, in which past and future brush shoulders with no mediating present, and as having a different, recursive causality…” (26, 31). 31 On lyric modes emerging from the sheath of something else, drama or discursiveness: wasn’t this what Williams was describing in his avant-garde call for “the dynamization of emotion into a separate form”? 32 Speeds and slownesses. In drama, the slowness of a messenger can be the random but efficient cause of tragedy, where the most crucial people are always too late. Gilles Deleuze arrives at a phenomenology of surprise in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (City Lights, 1988). First Deleuze summarizes: one substance for all attributes; one Nature for all bodies; one Nature for all individuals; a “common plane of immanence” on which all bodies and all minds are situated. Then he speaks of living in a modal world, where modes are capacities for being affected, and for affecting other persons. E-motion is thus a kinetic proposition, involving motion and rest, acceleration and deceleration: “a composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence.” Differential velocities are everything. Summarizing, Deleuze says Spinoza thinks that “no one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of”, (125) but here, I suggest, literary emotion has something to add: one can rehearse ahead of time in thought (philosophy), or in the practice of literary reading (the prefeeling of coming events in the lives of imaginary persons, or of the reading person). This is another version of Diderot’s paradox of the actor. Milan Kundera in his novel, Slowness, addresses these issues through experiences of imaginary persons.

Chapter 5: The Wide Net of Storytelling All stories, ephemeral and weighty alike, bring with them the actual work of performing. The struggle for understanding is inseparably emotional and cognitive, and the storytelling species finds this search for emotional-volitional tone a pleasurable labor, for both the person telling and the person to whom the story is told. In this essay, I’m reciting an ancient story about what it’s like to be the person to whom the story is told, and what we need to know to be that. Story is itself the most basic word, by comparison with narrative or plot or even myth or tale. The story I tell in this book is so ordinary that we usually don’t think about it, but there are interior turns, novelties and oddities, within the familiarity. What it feels like to make a home in the world: always the same spreading-root action of story, though infinitely varied by person, by author; and changing developmentally for each person through all stages of the life cycle. This book on joys and sorrows is no less a story for being told in the theoretical language of Martin Heidegger who speaks of bringing Dasein “face to face with its world as world.” To begin and end this chapter’s story about stories I’ll use a metaphor not original with me, that of the wide net for the action of storytelling from, against and on the world. The wide net is a collector, in its first meaning in Eudora Welty’s story, but following her I understand it also as a collection, in this case a grouping of images that stand for range, selection, abundance, reticulation, strain, capture, escape, search, excursion. 1. Children Know Stories are There Eudora Welty wrote this in One Writer’s Beginnings: “Listening children know stories are there”; and she remembered about her mother: “Reciting, her voice took on resonance and firmness, it rang with the old fervor, with ferocity even. She was teaching me one more, almost her last, lesson: emotions do not grow old. I know that I would feel as she did, and I do.”1 In her autobiography and her “Wide

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Net” story about imaginary persons, Welty anticipates the point I’m elaborating: stories and their decoding already contain some version of the world as we value it, and we wouldn’t obsessively read, or listen or watch, if there were not an opening to the world as known, as imagined. Listening children know this too, on the showing of a wonderful book by Vivian Gussin Paley, who sits next to pre-school and kindergarten students as they make and easily think beyond each others’ stories: “As Lilly dictates her story, half a dozen other themes splash noisily around us from all directions: ‘Y’wanna play tiger? Sabre tooth?’ ‘Superman! I shotted you.’ ‘Wah, wah, mommy, mommy!’ ‘Ghostbusters! Green Slimer! ‘Meow, meow, nice kitty.’ ‘Are you the dad, Simon? Here’s our cave for good bears.’

Not one child asks, ‘What’s everyone doing? Who are these crawling, crouching, climbing people?’ There is no confusion, only the desire to fit into someone’s story or convince a classmate to enter yours.”2 Paley comments: “’Pretend’ often confuses the adult, but it is the child’s real and serious world, the stage upon which any identity is possible and secret thoughts can be safely revealed” (7); “They do not pretend to be storytellers; they are storytellers” (17); “Children, at all ages, expect fantasy to generate… an ongoing dialogue to which they bring a broad range of intellectual and emotional knowledge at a very early age” (10); “Children’s own rites and images seem mainly concerned with the uses of friendship and fantasy to avoid fear and loneliness and to establish a comfortable relationship with people and events” (10). Paley quotes hundreds of these stories in her own plot line that covers a school year, including her adult additions to the storytelling process—especially her interactions with Jason, an out-ofstep child in the group who will join in with only a single rigid story about a boy as a helicopter. She refuses from the start to label Jason, and treats his story as a problem he needs to solve, sometimes with her own help in the form of questions and reminders. It’s a slow process that’s a testimony to her own respect for the children’s abilities as a community of storytellers: the children accept the helicopter premise


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and work with it, finding advantages and anomalies that push Jason to respond, to change. A turning point comes late in the school year: “Crashing suits most boys, but Jason is not yet willing to allow another child to have control over his crashes. Nonetheless, the experience [of another boy asking ‘Who wants to crash?’] makes Jason bold. He jumps up as I turn to Arlene’s story. ‘Who wants to be in this story?.... Who wants to be a helicopter’, Jason asks. ‘I don’t have a helicopter’, Arlene tells him. Jason looks at her quizzically. ‘What do you have?’ Coming from Jason, the question is startling. This may be his first full acknowledgement that people create different characters, just as he has fashioned his helicopter role”. Jason returns to his seat and “rotates his helicopter blades slowly, whispering to himself…. It is his rehearsal for the future”, says Jason’s teacher: “when he will feel comfortable in approaching another child with ‘Do you want to play with me? Who do you want to be?” (119). Paley’s conclusion: “Pretend is one of the subjects Jason is studying” (138); when Jason pretends to fly his classmate Samantha home, he has finally “figured out his own way to use his most precious possession and private fantasy to enable him to play with others…. [S]chool is starting to feel like home….Jason’s helicopter will be the agent of rescue, from school to home. The ultimate fear and loss, Jason tells us, is separation” (147). From home to school, from school to home, then, with storytelling as the mediating power, deriving from reciprocity but also performing and training it: forth into the world. One thing that Vivian Gussin Paley’s book takes into account, as Eudora Welty’s brief comments do not, is that the primal Scene of Storytelling always includes resistance to the tale, in the productive forms of non-understanding or impatience. In this Scene Oliver from Tucson, four years old, is in bed on his back with the cover to his chin, and grandfather is sitting on the end of the bed reading “The Witch” from The Yellow Story Book, a century-old collection edited by Andrew Lang. Oliver’s brother Nicholas and cousin Jake are sitting on the floor playing with their Game Boys, also listening. The story involves a peasant, his motherless boy-and-girl twins, a wicked stepmother who sends the children to a grandmother in the forest who’s actually a witch, magical talking animals who help the children to escape from servitude and fear, and the father driving out the stepmother when he learns what’s happened. The story is five pages long

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and includes two detailed engravings of the huge witch and the tiny children. Grandfather reads with different voices for characters, emphasizing words and picking up the pace at moments of threat to the children in the story, showing the pictures when they come in the narrative. Oliver is unmoving and his eyes are wide open, and next night when grandfather is looking through the book for another story, Oliver says, “Grandpa, don’t read another story about a witch, it gives me nightmares.” Oliver’s frightened by the witch, but also he’s remembering what a strain it was to hear the longest story he’s ever heard. Over ten unbroken minutes, he had to process winding or abrupt English sentences, speech-acts, plot-turns, inserted couplets spoken by mice and birds, exaggerated emphasis, changes of pace, switches between words and pictures. Oliver is resisting estrangement emotion, indeed complaining eloquently about it, but also learning the conventions that govern storytelling. Children know stories are there because they’ve heard stories told in the voice of reciting that adds strangeness and value—a changed voice. Oliver’s life will include thousands of stories, some as brief as a joke or cartoon, some as forgettable as an episode of The West Wing on TV, and some as immense as a book by Gibbon, Proust, Tolstoy. One story will be equivalent to the length of Oliver’s life and will need to be told by others, if it is told; an obituary is a pitiful story, so much less than a biography. Now Grandfather is reading a Hardy Boys mystery to Nicholas. The book was written as one of a series fifty years ago. Nicholas, who’s six, follows the plot carefully, ready to hear two or three chapters each night. But Grandfather surrenders the task of reading to Nicholas’s mother because he quickly comes to despise the voice of the narrator, which is trying very hard to find an exciting vernacular speech. The language has dated slang, jumpy exclamations several to a page, and the padding of unnecessary dialogue and action-deferring descriptions. Grandfather’s repulsion is physical, and he can barely hold the book in his hand and say the words, because he’s sorry Nicholas has to put up with rotten writing in order to follow the thin line of the plot. Without having at hand admirable children’s stories by authors like Roald Dahl or Ted Hughes or J.R. Rowling, much to be preferred would be the frank bathroom humor of another book Nicholas knows, an illustrated comic called Captain Underpants.


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The Hardy Boys book did not fail for Nicholas. He was not the one who could not follow to the end. Has the book failed, or has Grandfather? From the same text, Grandfather wanted a literary experience and Nicholas wanted a boy detective who cleverly finds clues and foils malicious adults. This is an example of the perversity of failure that makes it hard to discuss. Rather like emotion itself, which Spinoza calls a confused idea, in failure value and disvalue can change places, figure can become ground, effect become cause, passive be active, bad be allowable. Nicholas was taking what he could get from reading, and in later years may take other things, so what was appropriate and adequate for him now may not be later on. Still, something has gone wrong and needs to be explained. It’s not sufficient to say that the Hardy Boys book wasn’t trying to be literature and so should not have been read with the standards of literature: because the standards of professional writing—of literate appropriateness and emotional adequacy—are all that matter here. Stories of all genres, including Captain Underpants, can be effective for the means they bring to the catharsis they intend. The difference in this modest example is that a case could be made for failure of feeling in the Hardy Boys novel.3 I would forgive the author of the Hardy Boys novel for using the slang of fifty years ago. But let’s not call adequate a storytelling whose idea of boys’ lives is theoretical, condescending, and dishonest—whose rhetoric is the outer sign of some lack of fellowfeeling for precisely the targeted reader. The boys’ novel example has proven to have more productive instability than we imagined. Even if some readers, like Nicholas, are able to take away affirmation of their abilities to follow fairly complex story lines and also to practice their problem-solving skills, inferior storytelling diminishes the power of acting in both mind and body. Infelicity of plotting, character, conflict, point of view, narrator’s voice, dialogue, diction, description, figurative language, and rhythm must in the perspective of ethics, and in the long run, blunt one’s perceptions of language and through language, which is a kind of mediated action, of action generally. Though this may not be clear to you at first encounter with a flawed story, especially if the novel is read to you by a trusted family member, the inadequacies of bad writing wear out life and time rather than infusing them with joy. Boys and girls should read and hear just about everything, regardless of appropriateness or adequacy. But, as

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one may see in Vivian Gussin Paley’s care in showing Jason’s developing sense of his identity-in-community, this doesn’t entail the assumption that all stories are equal in developing the power of a person’s ability to flourish. 2. Cues to Emotion in La Rochefoucauld, Emily Dickinson, and Joyce Carol Oates Literature emerged as a separable field of endeavor, with its own descriptive term, in European romanticism. The very same isolation from other discourses that helped literature to step forth, hobbled it with troubles as a philosophical category. Now after two hundred years we are nearing the end of that mode of production, and will these troubles end when literature is folded into something else? Not in any future we can foresee. Michel Foucault: the isolation of literary language increasingly “differentiated [it] from the discourse of ideas… [and] the values that were able to keep it in general circulation”; after romanticism this left literature with nothing “to do but curve back in a perpetual return upon itself, as if its discourse could have no other content than the expression of its own form.”4 Foucault’s “perpetual” and “no other” are far too decisive, but his “as if” suggests a valuable complication. Literary language is always returning upon itself, but from what, and what happens after the return? To introduce the discourse of emotions will amplify our ideas of the processing of literary content for writers and readers. I want to argue that estrangement emotion isn’t another empty formalism of literary self-regard, because by means of these channeled floods of feeling we connect what we read with what we know. “Listening children know stories are there.” If for the adult a story is too much there, too predictable, a writer may produce obstacles to easy interpreting. To combat the expected, the writer may resist the reader in the forms of distance, cruelty, obscurity, scrambling of logic and sequence, over-the-top gothic, snootiness or smarminess of narrative voice, morally impugned narrators and characters, excessive coincidence, and so on. These are all stances that result from a writer’s conscious decision to make the reader work harder for emotional meanings. All such stances are valid, though for me the morally impugned narrator is the hardest to take: I remember putting aside Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier on first attempt, in something like disgust, and then after about


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ten years looking at it again and discovering the brilliant sly consistency of the handling of that disreputable narrator. This is precisely the situation Roland Barthes addressed by his manifesto for écriture, where he advanced the claims of the scriptible over the relaxing charms of the lisible. To me it seems that as readers of reading, we might consider the many relations of the writer to the readerly, and to adjust the one to the other by finding a kind of quotient in each text. Relations, I have said, are what emotions are about—relations and then, as a result of circuits being connected, causations. Believability and naturalness are created by material means that have psychological effects, in a huge code that remains only partly described. Despite the code’s imperfect description we use it every day to decipher and enjoy narratives, so it’s nothing obscure: simply immense and automatic. We write, and read, by linguistic and related cues, the most important of which, as I said, have to do with sequence (plot), person (character), utterance (dialogue), and image (perceptual content). These are elements of code that hide themselves as code, and that is part of their function in producing a certain realityeffect. When the effect becomes familiar, when the cues become sufficiently obvious, we tend to call it believable, natural, or literary. Thus the hiding and the uncovering, the believable-natural and their cancellation, writing and reading, literature and our attempts to exceed it, are in a relation of contradictory rapport. In a limited time frame these categories may seem to be in alternation, but they are at all times logically locked together. Precisely because the categories oppose each other they require, and therefore define, each other. In the first chapter, I said I wish to find textual emotion in works of declaration and conventional realism, where it remains hidden in cues so basic they are overlooked. This is the assignment for what follows here, beginning with a trial of method on miniatures, like Duc de la Rochefoucauld’s Maxim 43: We think we lead when we are being led, and while making for one goal with our minds, are insensibly drawn to another by our hearts.5

A moralist who uses the Maxim as the chosen genre relies on the reader’s knowing other Maxims in the series, so each entry is a niche in the system—here, a 17th century skeptical philosophy of the effects of self-interest, which lead us to self-deception. La Rochefoucauld wants the reader to recoil slightly when the reader’s human motives

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are stripped bare: first awareness, then shame, then the cynical recognition that all are alike in dissembling their motives, last the wistful thought that this is necessary and nothing can be remedied. The elements that evoke this ordinary sequence of emotion-states are the Maxim itself as a genre and its brevity; the way a complex periodic sentence contains, indeed puts into conflict, the several oppositions—mind/heart, conscious/unconscious, make toward/drawn, lead/being led or drawn, one goal/another; the structure of the sentence, which (moving through three successive lobes) is designed to save for the end a shock of revelation about our actual motives. The shock may be small, but is wounding, and genre, sentencing, sequence, metaphor, are all elements of estrangement emotion that produce it. Since this is the trial example and builds the base, let’s be explicit about the claim. The writer, as Roland Barthes has said, is the one who thinks sentences; there is a sentence-emotion, in this case made up from effects of delay, deletion, opposition, chaining of sounds, surprise of the final word, assumptions in the metaphors about human choices, assumptions in the pronouns about the origins of voices. The Maxim is a genre of the sentence, and in these hands is the rhetoric of the small deep wound. Estrangement emotion is the supreme place of the naturalizing of the arbitrary. Language has its alphabets and embedded rules. The art-sentence has its infinite variety of possible effects. The Maxim has its own history, its use for many different purposes. All these have no connection with La Rochefoucauld’s philosophy of self-deceptions of amour-propre, for which they have been recruited, but writing and reading turn these systems into the guise of a philosophy, inseparable from it. There’s a contagion of affect from the meaning to the sentence form: meaning’s always logically and chronologically first. Then there is a feedback of affect from the sentence form to the meaning. But in the experience of storytelling, even in so brief a story as one sentence, whatever is arbitrary is forgotten—and for smooth comprehension, needs to be forgotten. In Emily Dickinson, the formal elements that she thinks from within, while using, are the hymn stanza with its four-square meter and rhyme, the English sentence, punctuation, simile, metaphor: There is a pain—so utter— It swallows substance up—


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Then covers the Abyss with Trance— So Memory can step Around—across—upon it— As one within a Swoon— Goes safely—where an open eye— Would drop Him—Bone by Bone.6

The genre of the poem is the definition, where the first part-line proposes the noun of physical and mental emotion to be defined. This is pain as sorrow, perhaps. Then Dickinson shows the pain’s intensity comparatively, by her image of the abyss, which she prolongs by personifying Memory and giving it ability to step. In her last three lines she gives her simile, in the skirted dangers of sleep-walking. The metaphor and simile of avoided danger are ways of defining the ultimate intensity of pain, and of finding unexpected benefit in the balm of Memory. The images are essays in definition, giving present tense verbs and visual content, developing a growing story because of their cohesion, adding new elements by the line and part-line. The story is played positively in the lines on Memory traversing the Abyss, and negatively in the lines on the Swoon-walker who might fall if awake and well. Have I ever felt this pain?, the reader asks. The non-usual phrasings in Dickinson’s lines are instances of estrangement emotion, making a poem about pain painful and a poem about memory memorable. These are the very features of distortion Richard Moran spoke about in the article I quoted in a previous chapter. These are cues which enhance the reader’s involvement even though they might seem to betray the purposes of storytelling: •

• •

Dickinson’s particular and inimitable habit of punctuating phrases and clauses by short dashes, so the poem lurches from one lobe of the line, from one line, to the next with no other punctuation: eleven dashes in eight lines! Her ability to use these divisions to suggest spatial distinctions and temporal progress, as in “Around— across—upon it—“; Her over-riding of the hymn stanza’s ending at the close of the fourth line, by putting an enjambment and a nonpunctuation where a period is expected;


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• • • •

•

Her enactive use of the line end just here, where one line ends “step” and we have to move down to “Around”: both those words enact their positions in the line; Her extreme metonymy where “an open eye” stands for a person who is awake, a “bone” for a body; Her use of “so” in two senses, first in l.1 as an intensifier, and second in l.4 as the drawing of a consequence; Her stupendous metaphysical claim, using technical philosopher’s language about pain: “so utter--/It swallows substance up—“: unexpected in a poem so tiny, and especially as it comes in the second line with no preparation whatsoever, and in the form of a violent image of ingestion, wherein our pain eats us; Her method of threading a definition, an argument, a story, through eight full lines in only one sentence, perfectly cohesive but built out of many segments of different lengths, along a chain of images and of logical reversals: a trial of sense far beyond the demands of ordinary English sentence comprehension.

There is more of meaning, not less, because of these features that make the reader work. Those contemporaries who thought Dickinson was unreadable, those editors until the 1950s who cleaned out the dashes and capitals and isolated the stanzas into standard quatrains and re-punctuated her, have lost something. As we’ve known for fifty years, when the early editors dropped the cues for estrangement emotion they were cutting into meaning. This is a poem of strenuous nobility that calls forth our powers. Dickinson shows an acute understanding of how physical pain has a psychological, even a theological dimension. Hers is an intellectual recognition, driven inward to become itself an affect. She explores the pain and in obscure ways mimes it, but she also intends to mitigate it. This is a pain so harrowing that it generates, in the force of memory, its own counter-value. Part of the effect comes from the contrast we get between the strong logical drive of the definition genre, the constellation of the images, the sense of completion of rhymes at expected intervals, finally the satisfaction of a finished sentence—as played off against the cognitive uncertainties from cues I’ve listed.


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The joy of completing a difficult task of thinking is everywhere shadowed by the sorrow of the meanings we take away. In her short novel Black Water (1992), Joyce Carol Oates tells the whole story more than once. In describing the novel, I shall do something similar by tracking the curve of the plot through each of four categories that take me outward from the person—from bodily or sensory emotion through the several sources of literary emotion.7 How much of the story’s meaning can be caught in these categories of Name and Face, Image and Scene, and Sequence/Surprise? Oates has written a story of 154 pages in 32 short chapters—the first chapter is the shortest, only a paragraph. The novel is a masked and updated account of a historical incident: it is about the events of the July day in 1969 when Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker, died by drowning off Chappaquiddick Island, a short ferry ride off the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Mary Jo Kopechne was in a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy; they had left a party together, and their car plunged off the Dike Bridge into a pond where it overturned. Kopechne died trapped in the car after she exhausted the air; but Kennedy swam ashore and did not report the accident until the next morning; later on, he claimed he’d been dazed by the crash. Kennedy’s critics suggested he had been driving drunk, had panicked after the accident, or had even tried to arrange a cover-up of his involvement. Joyce Carol Oates has listened to all of Kennedy’s critics, and has written an extremely edgy and violent hymn of grief for Mary Jo Kopechne. The form of the story is punctuated by ironic surprises—again and again we’re brought up to the verge of this young woman Kelly Kelleher’s death by drowning, and then by narrative rescues we go back to her life and the events of her last day. The novel continually refers to love, grief, anger, joy, and surprise: to take only one tiny moment, Kelly Kelleher has a revealing line of inner, unexpressed speech to her mother and father, “Yes I love you please will you let me alone”: love and anger within one thought. In her novel, Oates has taken a historical event from over twenty years earlier and brought it up to 1991, the final year of the first George Bush presidency: with explicit references to the business boom of the 1960s when Kelly’s dad flourished, to the time when the Senator was one of three candidates for president in 1988, to “the TV war in the Persian Gulf” in ’91, to the Senator’s comments on the Supreme Court and the Gulf War and capital punishment, to the

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Senator’s vote to give funds to the Contras, to the AIDS epidemic in its first decade, to Bobby Kennedy, to the Vietnam War. It is a rich historical placement, but all by quick small touches. Oates changes Kelly Kelleher from her historical model, making Kelly of the same Irish Catholic group as the Senator and giving her other affinities: her undergraduate honors thesis written on the Senator’s political opinions, her job on the staff of a political magazine favorable to Democrats, her sense of despair when the first George Bush was elected. Oates changes the actual July 18th date of the Chappaquiddick accident to the Fourth of July, in order to emphasize the national scope of the action, and Oates directly comments on the Senator’s presidential ambitions and his special role as “one of the immune… one of the powerful adults of the world” (61) who guides and controls history. There is a chapter of several pages on the Senator’s noble opinions about capital punishment, and the need not to convict and kill the innocent: this seems unnecessary until you remember that his lust, his reckless driving under the influence of alcohol, his halfhearted attempts to save Kelly from the sunken car, have given capital punishment to an innocent woman. Near the end of the novel there is a chapter from his own point of view, where we get his lying excuses: he says “that girl” was drunk and pulled the wheel of the car (147). Oates treats his blame of Kelly ironically, but doesn’t herself excuse Kelly for being influenced by the cultural forces that structure an American young woman’s feelings: Kelly reads the new issue of Glamour that tells her to “go for it,” which she interprets as a permission to kiss an American senator and ride off with him to a motel on the mainland; she credits astrology and thinks of herself as a typical Scorpio; she uses Opium perfume, and she starves herself “to punish herself” (51) in the cellulite craze of the 80s. Oates imagines Kelly’s inner speech as an American woman, Kelly’s pathetically wrong assumption that the black water was “her fault. You just don’t want to offend [men]. Even the nice ones” (98). This defines the structure of feeling at the end of the American twentieth century; women will still get into adulterous affairs and will even get killed, and men will still swim away from no-fault accidents. This is the reason Oates takes such care to show the emotional life of an American woman alive and in the agony of her dying, and is the reason why, in the novel’s Dedication, “For the Kellys,” she makes the name a plural.


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2.1. Name and Face Some of the most obvious and abundant items in our emotional experience are the least remarked, so I would mention two ways to keep these items in conscious possession. First, if writers use emotionwords in relation to their characters, writers are pointing toward an interpretation; these terms are themselves primary evidence. If you read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time with pen in hand, circling emotion words, you will need to stop for a rest every four pages, because these terms come so frequently in changing contexts. In Oates, love is the primary emotion-name, and often comes in combination with grief, anger, joy, surprise; and in the novel’s last sentence-long paragraph, “faces haggard with grief” comes three lines away from “squealing in expectation of joy,” an ironic collision. Second, writers refer to the human or animal face as the readout of emotional and cognitive states, and they refer to the rest of the body and its gestures for clues to inner experience—this is an elaborate code, heavily used, capable of immense subtlety. Though actors and politicians and others were informal students of the codes for centuries, Charles Darwin started the scholarly study of facial expression in a book of 1872. In our own moment Paul Ekman has followed Darwin with greater detail in the study of musculature that conveys shades of feeling. In reading most writers, it is necessary to register this physical end of the emotion-range—Oates shows this obsessively, with many references to the face of Kelly Kelleher and the Senator, sometimes in close up on her acne and the large pores on his big nose, several times showing the beery kiss they have on the beach with his “enormous tongue [that] penetrated her dry, alarmed mouth,” his “big gregarious hand,” her hot face, his tongue tasting her shoulder, his eyes “a blue like washed glass,” Kelly pulling on her new swimsuit with underwire bra, the Senator’s weight at 215 pounds, his weight on top of her in the sinking car. Oates specializes in these physical sensations and the feelings and thoughts that attach to them: a novelist of sensation and enactment, as far as may be from statement or essay, so a single page of Oates has the same perceptual content as many more pages of Kafka or Musil or Pamuk.

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2.2. Image and Scene One starts with the need for some size and kind of unit to be the literary match for emotion-states, and one settles on these because they are obviously sub-sets of a whole, they take up small enough chunks of text to be units, they can be variable but not infinitely variable in length, they have clear starting and ending points, and they can be repeated along the line of the narrative. An image in a story might be a once-off, momentary device, as when Oates refers to the Senator’s car door buckling under water just like an aluminum can of Miller Lite, or might become, through emphasis, a constitutive metaphor—like the black water of the title and that image’s 31 abrupt returns that end scenes with reminders of mortality. The possibility of a larger meaning reminds me of Antonio R. Damasio’s speculation that images “are probably the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated,” whether visual or somatosensory, whether from memory recall or from situations from outside.8 In the short novel with short chapters, scenes can be extremely brief, strung in sequence without transition, several scenes in one paragraph, one chapter equaling one scene like the half-page Chapter 1. So with Oates everything happens in a race, unlike those immense thoughtful rhythms of narrative that you get in twenty-page scenes in Henry James. Since much of the story is condensed into the paragraph that ends the novel, that passage can be my example of image and scene. The black water was in Kelly’s mouth, nostrils, lungs, “and her heart was beating in quick erratic lurches laboring to supply oxygen to her fainting brain where she saw so vividly jagged needles rising like stalagmites”, Oates writes. The reader has the privilege here to experience an imagination at the moment before death in the mind of the person dying, and Kelly is hallucinating. The Senator might save her, “there he was!—suddenly above her and swimming down”, she “lifted her arms to him”, then she swam up to see the night sky and the moon, then the switch to inner speech: “If I can see [the moon], I am still alive”, then the image of Mommy and Daddy but they’re old, “their faces haggard with grief”, but she’s running, “squealing in expectation in joy in her little white anklet socks raising her arms to be lifted high kicking in the air”: an image of birth, of joy, exactly at the moment of her death, “as the black water filled her lungs and she died”. Thus the mind in the story fights for survival through hopeful


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images, imaginations, memories or inventions of ecstatic flourishing that will contest the destruction of brain cells. At the moment of most angry pathos, the writer kills off the mind and the huge breathless sentence and the story. The writer’s agent of death is the black water but the black water, we know by now, is the Senator, and the powerful predatory male in his weakness and faithlessness is America, and this is what America does to its women. The ironies here are in the images, and the pace and dénouement of the scene. If we pursue the ironies to their ending, there’s another anger in the novel, the writer’s anger against the way America fails, betrays, and literally kills its females, and then blames them. Kelly has uncanny foresight of the desolation of her parents, a generous thought about the grief of others in the future. Joyce Carol Oates grieves for her Kelly and the imaginary person’s need to set the lifting up of joy against the sinking of death, but she’s also ruthless: she needs Kelly’s death to enforce a larger political irony.9 2.3. Sequence/Surprise Surprise is one of the emotion-names barely mentioned by psychologists and philosophers. Storytelling, though, justifies the massive claim of surprise upon our attention—as I’ve shown in Chapter 4. Indeed, story might be a synonym for surprise—or for the re-focusing of attention. The psychology of surprise involves expectation: something unusual and unpatterned happens and we are frustrated, we need to adjust, we go into hunting mode to find new patterns after the interruption. I believe this is a primary mode of literature’s operation, which was known by all writers from the origin of writing, as an art involving time. In 150 pages Oates returns at least 31 times to the scene just before the rented car of the Senator and Kelly goes over the edge into the deep water, and during the moment of sinking and his escape and her being trapped and running out of air. Oates switches back and forth between micro-analyses of that moment and memories of the day’s events at the Fourth of July party on the island and other quick stories of Kelly’s childhood, her relations with her parents and her exboyfriend. The black water keeps coming back to punctuate, cut off, show to be oddly fated the earlier events of Kelly’s day. Then at page 103 starts a new series of preliminary deaths, where one paragraph ends “she died,” and the next revives her with the words “No: she was

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watching…”. Something similar then happens three more times until the last page, where there is a large white space after “she died” and as readers we realize Kelly has been well and truly executed by the author and Kelly’s life and story are over. We might call that sequence a gimmick, but if it is a gimmick it does surprise us, and endear us to Kelly more, by breaking a pattern of expectation: no more rescues. Black Water is a clear instance of the conflict of logics between what the Russian Formalist critics, and Jonathan Culler after them, call story and discourse. The distinction is between the story as a series of events and the story as reported in narrative—between the real-time unfolding of the imagined biographies of the characters, and the way these presumed facts are re-sequenced for effect. The desired effect is a crescendo of surprise. In a welcome sentence in The Pursuit of Signs, Culler says “We still do not appreciate as fully as we ought the importance of narrative schemes and models in all aspects of our lives”: this bears on any study of literary emotion, because it is brave enough to connect reading texts with reading persons.10 Culler points out that “if one thinks of discourse [only] as the presentation of story, one would find it difficult to account for the sorts of effects” I’ve just discussed in the Oates novel, which (says Culler) “depend on the determination of story by discourse.” However, “if one were to adopt the view that what we call ‘events’ are nothing other than products of discourse, a series of predicates attached to agents in the text, then one would be even less able to account for the force of narrative.” Culler concludes that “neither perspective… is likely to offer a satisfactory narratology, nor can the two fit together in a harmonious synthesis”, so “one must be willing to shift from one perspective to the other, from story to discourse and back again”. In Black Water, aside from the larger toggling operation I’ve already described, which dramatically breaks sequence again and again, there are smaller effects of what might be called anticipative recollection, which employ the conflict of logics Culler is noticing. Kelly is said to be memorizing her adventure with the Senator, for later telling (16); two pages are studded with the abrupt phrase, “just before the car flew off the road” (18-19); the first mention of the Senator’s kiss is followed by the phrase, “but that was later”; Kelly notices insects on the island, and the author remarks on “their tiny deaths flying at them out of the future”, most certainly a foreshadowing of Kelly’s fate on this Independence Day; “You will tell your story” is the author’s summary


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of Kelly’s assumption of her own autonomy, but ironically it is left to another to tell Kelly’s story; Kelly has quick visions of her parents as they appear before her birth and after her death. Throughout, too, Oates uses the past progressive tense, as in “she was pulling herself up”, which through incessant returns becomes associated with a perspective from the other side of death: the reader may never explicitly realize this as the tense of death, but it has an emotional effect. Repetition is the reverse face of surprise.11 3. Estrangement Emotion in “The Wide Net” Eudora Welty won with her story the first prize in the O. Henry Memorial Contest Award, in 1942, and then made its title the title of her second collection in 1943. Since she made this title the title of the book, plainly this story has a larger poetics of her kind of narrative. I believe that for the author, her wide-net metaphor stands for storytelling. The story begins: “William Wallace’s wife Hazel was going to have a baby. But this was October, and it was six months away, and she acted exactly as though it would be tomorrow.”12 Hazel is distracted by the coming of this first child, William Wallace goes out drinking with two of the boys down the road and stays out all night, Hazel writes a note to say she’s going to the river to drown herself. William Wallace collects the men and boys from Dover, gets the wide net to drag the Pearl River from upstream back down to Dover, and sets off in a procession to find Hazel’s body. They drag, fish, talk, have encounters on the way with gators and the King of the Snakes and a violent thunderstorm, William Wallace cuts his foot, and they return the next day to march through the town well satisfied, but with no drowned corpse. William picks a senseless fight with his best friend Virgil, then goes home to find Hazel, who reveals her ruse; he spanks her affectionately, and they enter the house at twilight, with her rights re-established. The story ends with this sentence: “And after a few minutes she took him by the hand and led him into the house, smiling as if she were smiling down on him” (72). Those are the incidents, but the chaining of images, sentences, and scenes is not there, and neither is the wise and versatile dialect speech or the narrator’s organizing themes or her interest in emotion-states. I propose a reading from the point of view of the emotion-states and estrangement emotions, which rise up and change across the

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whole. The emotions are place-specific to the Old Natchez Trace in the American South. These emotions are also for most of the story focused on the male characters and their outing to drag the river. The tone is oddly jaunty for a story about a group of men and boys, who are out to find a presumably dead woman/wife/about-to-be-mother. In fact, all the cues that point toward a coherent textual emotion in this tale deserve the name of comedy, for Hazel’s death is doubtful from the start, and her reappearance at the end affirms marriage and a new life and life itself. The role of the wife is never long forgotten, even though she shows up briefly at beginning and end, because gendered emotion, marriage-emotion, is part of the meaning. Here I emphasize image, utterance, and scene as divisions in the storytelling. I also refer to sentence, paragraph, and section in a story that has three numbered sections. There are other kinds of units, perhaps worth seeking: for example, little narratives of recurring metaphors that help stitch the story together and help it develop; there may be what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ideologemes, larger social meaning-units; there may also be units of emotion, showing the rise and fall of emotion-states, or showing the mixing and overlay of emotion-states. The appearing and disappearing voice of the narrator in a realistic story is also one component of textual emotion, over the course of the whole tale, as we’ve already seen in the strong stage directions of the opening and closing sentences. This narrator plainly loves her characters, their ruses and processions, their rural speech that is even in the smallest instances, such as the exclamations of children, full of human understanding and perfectly adequate to the speakers’ situation. William Wallace Jamieson: he’s a Scot by background, emotionally unforthcoming but a warrior by the heritage of his name—worthy of the prettiest woman in the county, and he does love her. The epic is in his name. Virgil’s a companion, but he’s also a commentator on events with a humorous angle of vision, as in “Why, that ain’t like Hazel,” his reply to the announcement that she is off to drown herself: laconicism is lack of affect, and suppression of feeling is a kind of feeling. The writer Virgil is Dante’s guide through a more divine comedy, so there is reference to another grander search. Hazel is “going to have a baby”: from the first sentence the dominant of the story is the emotion of childbirth, and anxiety in the


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marriage is the root of all emotions between these rural Southern people who do not say just what they feel. The coming of the baby is a new force: Hazel needs William Wallace more, but she also rebuffs his touch. She “would look as straight at nothing as she could”: she is happy and afraid, there and not-there. He reacts and goes for a night of drinking with his friends, and she replies with a fake suicide note. This is an emotional war between them, complicated by youth and naïve awkwardness. After reading her note, William Wallace “ran out front, his face red like the red of the picked cotton field he ran over”. (Emotion-cue: face as register of emotion.) Already there is mixing of motive that creates conflict, and when there is conflict there is storytelling tension, in the form of frustration to be released, prolonged, developed, resolved. A good deal of dialogue follows, between the sober William Wallace and a quietly funny Virgil: they speak of how William Wallace met Hazel, of Hazel’s motives for bolting, of Hazel’s intelligence. “’She’s a lot smarter than her cousins in Beula,’ said Virgil. ‘And especially Edna Earle, that never did get to be what you’d call a heavy thinker. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day how the little tale of the ‘C’ got through the ‘L’ in a Coca-Cola sign’”. William Wallace catches a rabbit”, and Virgil makes explicit in his comment—“Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife?”—that the cotton-tail is a guise of Hazel: the author thought this scene worthy of a page and a half because it deepens the image of the marriage relationship and also of male friendship. Now also starts, after a one-line break, the scene of collecting the net-dragging group, a delightful delay for the description of townsfolk as the two men speak of them. (We here remember that processions are one main theme of Welty’s book about her beginnings.) Doc, owner of the net, enters the procession. His summary of world events, including a war, indicates that he is the only person in the story concerned with outer historical time. Doc is the smartest man around, but “it sure takes time” says William Wallace, because there is the pleasure of explanation, of language, and that must itself have a kind of feeling fiction can perform. “’My advice remains, Let well enough alone’, said Doc. ‘Whatever this mysterious event will turn out to be, it has kept one woman from talking a while. However, Lady Hazel is the prettiest girl in Mississippi, you’ve never seen a prettier one and you never will. A golden-haired girl’”. Doc’s

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gently misogynist line is what passes for humor between men and boys. Welty brings the idea of a procession out into the open in a paragraph of beauty and oddity, about the men and boys walking on the Old Natchez Trace, carrying the net. Grady and Brucie are little boys whose father was drowned in the Pearl River: “Once they went through a forest of cucumber trees and came up on a high ridge. Grady and Brucie who were running ahead all the way stopped in their tracks; a whistle had blown and far down and far away a long freight train was passing. It seemed like a little festival procession, moving with the slowness of ignorance or a dream, from distance to distance, the tiny pink and gray cars like secret boxes. Grady was counting the cars to himself, as if he could certainly see each one clearly, and Brucie watched his lips, hushed and cautious, the way he would watch a bird drinking. Tears suddenly came to Grady’s eyes, but it could only be because a tiny man walked along the top of the train, walking and moving on top of the moving train” (47-48). The train is a procession of sound and sight, watched by a procession. Children like Grady are emotional beings, watching the world and each other. The metaphors of the bird drinking and the tiny man on the train are obscure, and the author leaves them that way. How get from the sight to the emotion? Welty crosses the gap and presents the fact of the emotion without the causal link. The first section ends with the group walking, birds flying up, and Doc, the raisonneur-figure, connects the men and boys to the natural scene and also connects the scene with Hazel and the coming birth of a child: “’We’re walking in the changing-time’, said Doc. ‘Any day now the change will come. It’s going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog that’s ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Come one of these nights and we can wander down here and tree a nice possum. Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Sweet-gum red, hickory yellow, dogwood red, sycamore yellow’. …. They went on and suddenly the woods opened upon light and they had reached the river. Everyone stopped, but Doc talked on ahead as thought nothing had happened. ‘Only today’, he said, ‘today, in October sun, it’s all gold—sky and tree and water. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold’” (48). Immediately William Wallace thinks of Hazel at home “looking straight before her,


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like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch”. The emotion-cues here are luminance (perceived brightness) and color as appealing to separate parts of the brain, and touch. The trees, Hazel, and the river are all golden, caught up and beautiful in change. Early in the second section, Welty uses the voices of black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell, to reinforce the title metaphor, “She [the net] won’t let nothing through.” The river, its vines and eels, is evoked as a force, with all the characters getting lines of dialogue. William Wallace says little, but when they catch a small alligator, he speaks out of his obsession, “He ain’t nothing but a little-old baby”. The baby theme is emphasized here, but grotesquely. Now comes the appearance of a figure on the bank, and Virgil goes some distance to speak with him. This stranger has no role in the story, so why does Welty spend a page on him? My guess is that the person they glimpse is actually Hazel, and Virgil is in on her plan: Virgil says that the little man claimed he was harmless as a baby (that theme again!), but Virgil cannot answer how the man looked. William Wallace’s irrational fight with Virgil at the end may be played out because, at some level, the husband knows of his friend’s collusion and makes him pay for it. William Wallace dives with the net, Grady and Brucie have a hallucination of their drowned father in the water, they catch and eat fish, William Wallace gets drowsy and leaps up with the memory of Hazel, and Virgil says to him: “You’re feeling as good as you felt last night”. Doc then speaks, in passing and as a response to these events, what must be Welty’s philosophy of the story: “The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy”. William Wallace’s reply to that is to leap up, hook a big catfish to his belt buckle, and do “a dance so crazy that he would die next”. He has “tears of laughter”: a combination of emotions in one moment, one phrase, shown also in the emotion-cue of his red face with a two-day beard. Then the story’s reply to that is to bring on the tremendous brief scene of the King of Snakes: “But all of a sudden there was an even louder cheer, from everybody at once, and all pointed fingers moved from William Wallace to the river. In the center of three light-gold rings across the water [luminance and color, again] was lifted first an old hoary head (‘It has whiskers!’ a voice cried) and then in an undulation loop after loop and hump after hump of a long dark body, until there were a dozen rings of ripples, one behind the other, stretching all across the river, like a necklace.

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‘The King of the Snakes!’ cried all the Malones at once, in high tenor voices and leaning together. ‘The King of the Snakes’, intoned old Doc in his profound base. ‘He looked you in the eye’. William Wallace stared back at the King of the Snakes with all his might”.

Brucie darts after the snake, Grady restrains him, and “Then thunder like a stone loosened and rolled down the bank’, and as if the seaserpent with whiskers were not enough, Welty heaps on more, a paragraph of violent light and dark about the coming storm. Outer and inner are coming to violent conflict in these images, and the storm when it comes will mark a resolution. Mixed with the description of sublime outer nature are the wisecracks of the men and boys. There is next a symbolizing of the outer by the inner, when the wind plasters the leaves on the bodies of the huddled procession, and little Sam says: “Now us got scales…us is the fishes”. So Welty gives a crucial, connection-making line to the black lad. The storm is the releasing and representing of force, a frank emotion made literal. In One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty has spoken of the extreme importance to her of the relationship of outer and inner weather.13 As the storm ends, William Wallace cuts his foot to pay in another way for not being nurturing of his wife, and section 2 ends. The cut is as nothing, compared to the gifts of community comradeship across ages and races, looking into the meaningful eyes of the King of Snakes, hearing Doc on the equality of sorrow and joy, experiencing the storm as the end of the search. The opening of the third and final section is description, that mode whose textual emotion is rarely considered because usually our reading is dominated by event and character.14 All the more reason to pursue such a paragraph: “In Dover it had rained, and the town looked somehow like new. The wavy heat of late afternoon came down from the watertank and fell over everything like shiny mosquito-netting. At the wide place where the road was paved and patched with tar, it seemed newly embedded with Coca-Cola tops. The old circus posters on the story were nearly gone, only bits, the snowflakes of white horses, clinging to its side. Morning-glory vines started almost visibly to grow over the roofs and cling round the ties of the railroad track, where bluejays lighted on the rails, and umbrella chinaberry trees hung heavily over the whole town, dripping intermittently upon the tin roofs”. These are


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the possible perceptions of the river-dragging party: things they could experience but never utter, so registered at the level of primary impulses. The point of view, if there is one, is that of the group mind of a ragged bunch of male townsfolk, so this unobtrusively breaks up a single point of view, and that is why it seems uncanny. To whom did the town look new? No agent is mentioned. The wavy heat came down as a person might, or a thing, so is atmosphere made animate. The image of Coca-Cola tops newly embedded in the soft tar is another, perhaps the most brilliant, of the story’s preoccupations with luminance. There is a non-logical leap of connection in those snowflakes of white horses in the tattered posters. The morning glory vines can almost be seen to grow, they are so vital: but almost visibly to whom? The vines and jays on the rails emphasize the sleepy, nonpractical nature of the town, invaded by wild nature. The chinaberry trees that hung heavily over the whole town, dripping intermittently are seen and heard as if from above, but how could that be, short of a hovering helicopter? The anti-perspectival is here, and so too the asignifying intensities one might praise in fractured avant-garde works, but where in anti-realist writing these effects would be the center of the reader’s attention, here they are transitional: the scene on which the agents will soon be brought. The town is empty, except for “a little corn-shuck doll” on the bench of the store; another metonymy for the baby at the implied center of the story. The men and boys are welcomed back by the town, exultant, and even William Wallace has on his face “a frown of pleasure.” (Emotion-cue: more contradictory mixtures of feelings.) The party breaks up to go separate ways, William Wallace fights with Virgil but they part as friends, and then William Wallace is given a sign on the story’s third-last page, “a rainbow at night,” very rare, to show the search is over. He smiles twice on this page: again, the emotion-cue of the feeling face. If this is to be an ending, much must come together: the married couple, the chase theme and the touch theme, past and future, outer nature and the human family. All these elements are there one after the other, or one with another. When he spanks Hazel it is affectionate, a symbolic punishment. (Emotion-cue: action that seems contradictory to loving feeling actually deepens it.) At the very end William Wallace stands next to Hazel and has a frown on his face but it is a frown of family joy, and she smiles on him twice. In the final


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sentence, she touches him by hand, and light and dark are united in this scene of dusk. Why is she “smiling as if she were smiling down on him”?: because vertical height, even moral or virtual, is a metaphor for social power, and she has had her little victory. The story resolves itself onto her feeling, not his, even though the story has been about William Wallace until this point. Since all the signs I’ve read have been linguistic, letters on a page or otherwise material, estrangement emotion pervades even this classic work of realistic fiction. What has emerged is the veiled, gnarled, circuitous, plural, overlaid nature of emotion of people in communities like Dover, in male groups like the processions, and in the conflict of the family. Even a happy family has conflict! This is a genial story, where the author and reader take pleasure in the conflict, in the community, in the processional nature of men at work and play, in the reunion of the family that fosters the child, and in the chase that is courtship. William Wallace Jamieson must go through a number of tests before he is allowed back into the family. He knows he is fated to go through it, including the diving into the depths of water, the cut in his flesh, the fight with Virgil, and the recognitions of the natural scene—river, snake, storm. If he had not strayed he would not have had the emotion of return, and the glories of the hunt, including friendship, snake, storm. In this telling, my version of the reader’s mind had to be slowed down and partly dismantled. I’ve emphasized moments of intensity and of multiple or impossible perspective. The emotion-units we’ve discovered are: • • • •

•

Emotion-centers: face, touch, outer nature. Key metaphors: baby, net. Overlay or contradictory doubling of emotion as something valuable: pain-joy, frown-smile. The scene as structural unit, more powerful and analyzable than the page or the section: the rabbit-scene, the snake-scene, the eating-catfish scene, the storm-scene, the final scene of talk and spanking between married partners and parents. Description of outer landscape as description of inner emotion, most spectacularly in the storm, but more delicately in the lightning bugs in the last paragraph, when both leading


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characters looked “into the dark fields where the lightningbugs flickered away”. Here the main elements of estrangement emotion that lead to uncanny cognition are the unexplained appearance of the little man who follows the procession on the river bank, and the multiple perspectives that are found in the images that are presented from the natural world. But on every page Eudora Welty’s realism passes over into something strange in perception or in speech or in narrator’s voice, creating the surprises of storytelling. The surprises are small but there are many of them distributed through the story and its modes of telling. The net of the story had to be wide, to contain the world and what its denizens feel about the world. It also had to be wide to contain the effects of discourse that make something virtual seem like something actual. * In Chapter 6 below, I develop a diagram into a survey, as I consider many separate plots over time. The plots and their emphases are radically different, in a few of these cases, but these are all versions of the same story about Phaedra and her passion. This permits me to historicize stories in relation to emotions, and to test what remains the same in a few named emotions—also to specify what seems to change across eras and cultures. 1

Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983): 14, 52. 2 Vivian Gussin Paley, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990): 6-7. 3 Spinoza is useful here because parts three and four of the Ethics give explanatory force to our hopes for appropriateness and adequacy. His definition of adequacy comes from ourselves, from what we are: our actions make adequate causes, and when we are obviously driven or influenced, the cause is only partial. Emotions are themselves actions if they increase or diminish the body’s power of acting—emotions are also, in sophisticated corollary, the idea of the body’s power of acting. This permits me to pursue the definition of failure of writing as unintentional passivity: an action only partly caused, and a decrease and hindrance of the body’s power of acting. Failure means physical and mental blockage, mistake, misreading of emotional states, lack of resources—and hundreds of other versions of inadequacy all of which entail, ultimately, actual loss of each thing’s endeavor to persist in its own being. 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; this translation: New York: Vintage, 1973): 300.

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5


Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes (No. 43), Présentation et notes: Jean Lafond (Imprimerie Nationale Éditions, 1998): 66. The French is: “L’homme croit souvent se conduire lorsqu’il est conduit, et pendant que par son esprit il tend à un but, son Coeur l’entraîne insensiblement à un autre.” I have been led to think of La Rochefoucauld by the long, energetic account of the Maxims, along with writings by three other French Moralists, in Chapter 2 of Jon Elster’s Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6 Emily Dickinson, #599 (c. 1862) in Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Back Bay Books [Little, Brown and Company], 1961): 294. 7 Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water (New York: Dutton, 1992). 8 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994): 107-108. 9 Sometimes it seems that Joyce Carol Oates is telling this same story in all her stories: Female American Innocence and what happens to it. She is however prolific in the numbers and methods of her stories. Her abundant life work, delivering such a broad range of tales that cut increasingly deeply into a steep canyon, contradicts one’s initial sense that she is writing quickly out of a kind of transcription of dreams. The speed is due to conviction, knowledge of what is her center, artistic control over dangerous materials. There is here the political and feminist intelligence of an immense variation, wherein she sees opportunities for telling her Story everywhere, everywhere varied. What gives the show of being instinctual in her talent is what makes it initially attractive, but this is only one of the baffles or outworks of a talent that is artful, bloodyminded, unafraid to kill. 10 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981): 186-187. 11 There are probably hundreds of types of estrangement emotion in Oates’s novel, including image, scene, and the reordering of sequence of plot I’ve described. Before we leave Oates, here are examples of smaller effects: the rapid shift from storytelling mode in normal type to inner speech in italics, or intonation suggested by italicized words within a phrase; the road sign printed inside a box made of lines on page 30; and the long white blank after the closural gesture, “she died,” on the final page. Such effects shift not only our attention, but also our emotional allegiance as readers. Oates is extremely busy with these cues, so the reader is sprinting, always almost overwhelmed. 12 Eudora Welty, The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943; San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, n.d.): 34. 13 A prize-winning long poem that works this reversible, emotion-as-weather metaphor is Sylvia Legris’s Nerve Squall (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005). 14 On description as narrative mode, see Philippe Hamon, Introduction à l’analyse du Descriptif (Paris: Hachette, 1981); and Philippe Hamon, editor, La Description littéraire de l’Antiquité à Roland Barthes: une anthologie (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1991).

Chapter 6: The Story of One Story Father’s far away—on a mission in the land of death. Mother’s much younger—one of his conquest-brides. She reveals her illicit passion for Stepson to Nurse, then to Stepson, but he’s a hunter and a woman-hater—aghast at Step-Mama’s increasingly bold declarations of lust for his body. Father comes back suddenly, is lied to about who forced whom to commit adultery, so he curses Son, who must die horribly from the attack of a sea-monster. Step-Mama kills herself, and Father’s left with the consciousness that he’s caused the death of the Son who would inherit the kingdom. 1. Historical Study of a Single Story Let’s single out this one from the world’s small set of stories.1 This story of seductions by the stepmother has had a magnificent life in Western culture. I want to isolate its enduring character-relations and plot-turns, then to show a few radical deviations and many changes of emphasis over time. The story of Phaedra offers my seven tellers, from Euripides in 428 BCE to Sarah Kane in 1996 AD, a chance to force one family to break down. The core story is of how a woman can be sick and eloquent in illicit love, how a king-fatherhusband can be disrespected but also act murderously out of his own rage, how a son can be drawn into a perverse scenario partly through his own proud adolescent purity, and how others in the community can be sucked into the family’s disaster. The core story undergoes mutations without being harmed at all, so its staying power must draw upon an enduring emotional resource—we can only speculate on what social needs this satisfies. My idea: mother-love gone dreadfully wrong, woman-desire declaring itself, must shock and scare us; we need to see these enacted in full, crazy strength before we see these extirpated, with the innocent as well as the guilty members of the duo both dead. Hippolytus runs away from Phaedra! There is no incest! They are not even blood relatives! But the soliciting and suspicion of

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what looks like incest, as a taboo of social structure, is enough to destroy people of value. In the dynastic tragedies of Euripides, Seneca, and Racine, it is also enough to change the course of state, but in twentieth-century American examples from O’Neill and Jeffers the story destroys only the family. (Among my examples, Marina Tsvetaeva has a lyric and Sarah Kane a satiric swerve from tragedy while keeping the story’s main elements.) We’re drawn to stories like this by intensities in the psychology of imaginary persons, but along with that we may recognize an estrangement emotion. This prolongs and complicates our response, making us want to return for further acquaintance with the actions, utterances and framing conventions that the storyteller used to draw us in. In the Phaedra stories estrangement emotion comes from force of tragic destiny, from a genre that requires irresolvable clashes of value; also from hundreds of cues in the words on the page, including presence or absence of a chorus, length of poetic lines and of speeches in dialogues, stage directions, punctuation, and so on. Estrangement is produced with, within, and against the ordinary emotions of Phaedra’s wish to live her lust in the world. This had to be said early in a chapter where I pursue lust as a dominant in the stories of seven eras, because while emotion-as-psychology may be the hook that catches us, emotion-as-estrangement is always part of our pleasure, part of literary thinking. In words of Roland Barthes on Racine, the right way to think of the core story is: “a tragedy of secrecy, but also a love story.” Historical study of emotions is rarely of interest to neurophysiologists and psychologists. Some philosophers who study logics of behavior are content to work with emotion terms as if the terms are essences, with no past histories. Other kinds of study, like the one I am making, must try to face up to changes in meanings of emotions across times and cultures. If anger and joy and surprise and 132 other terms for emotion-states,2 along with the relationships they refer to are built into plays and poems, the works of verbal art are evidences for historically specific meanings. Here, I’m calling those contextual cues, and the epochs they refer to, structures of feeling. The phrase isn’t my own, and it’s open to reasonable reproach, but briefly to justify it will give it renewed currency and will offer a metaphor I can use in discussing my example-texts. Structure of Feeling has the advantage


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of combining plot and meander, strict and random. It has the disadvantage of assuming what needs to be explained and argued for. From what Raymond Williams says to justify the term he invents, it is clear that he was more interested in the structure than in the feeling: for him structure meant the describable map of social forces in a historical era, and feeling meant the culture that was largely determined by a mode of production. He did not say a great deal about the feeling side of his phrase, but he never retracted it, and never apologized for keeping feeling as a register of historical powerrelations and as a force in itself, which could act on (not only within) the historical forces of a given era. He was a socialist and a history man and the emphasis was on the first term, even though superstructure could influence base and the current wasn’t all in one direction. Williams’s term has its difficulties, as we’ll see, but let’s honor his decision to keep and rework it though his books from The Long Revolution (1961) to Marxism and Literature (1977). The term’s advantages as an oxymoron holding contrary impulses together will outweigh its evident weakness, which comes in the form of puzzling paradox, insufficient or variable definition, and in practice, a lesser emphasis on the feeling side. Feeling’s there as a synonym for culture, but the substitution, as defended and retained, makes a statement. The implication that the full double term carries—of history as the force that shapes life into definable periods and of culture as what gets molded—is something Williams resisted throughout his work and something he resists in this term, in the two-way operation of the “of” as his copula. To comment on the telling and reading of versions of one story across a stretch of time, we require a more expansive account of history and a more precise registration of the forms of emotion. In my own use of Williams’s term, I want to follow Williams in his chapter on the concept in Marxism and Literature and put structure into the plural; and I want to raise feeling into equal scholarly prominence with historical being. Williams would not approve of the temporal gaps that I treat mostly by known terms of intellectual history, or of the way I am forced to take feelings as, usually, the estrangement emotions of plays and poems. Under the cover of Williams’s term, this is an experiment in how we might historicize the study of emotions in

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the singular story of Phaedra over many centuries, languages, and culture-hearths. My chapter on the emotions of stories over time relies on a diagram. To do justice to the separate works, such study would require more than a chapter—would resemble George Steiner’s book on the Antigone stories.3 However, I admit the limitations of what I intend, which is a sweeping historical trial. There are certain controls that take my explanations beyond the thinness of labels, the randomness of hunches: 1.) There is one basic story, re-written in differing circumstances; 2.) All the re-writings except one, in Tsvetaeva, are dramatic and dialogic in form, and are tragic in intent or at least, with Kane, in possibility; 3.) Three of the Phaedra stories, in O’Neill, Tsvetaeva, and Jeffers participate in one structure of feeling in Williams’s strict generation-based measure of less than a decade of time abruptly begun by a collapse of values at the end of World War I—and two of those texts have a single language and national origin. Roughly a third of the books on my shelves, ranging from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to a book by a sociologist about emotions at work in Japan and America, take human emotions as evolutionary givens, fairly stable in their terminology and durable in their roles—across centuries, across cultures. In the other books on my shelves, authors study and compare differences in the way emotion-terms are used in antiquity, the early modern, and the present day. This larger set includes several on the vehement passions from ancient Greece and Rome to the present day, a book by a conservative scholar who argues society would be better off if we downplayed social envy, several studies on love as passion in the Romantic era, two books on rage and resentment and one on types of mourning in former East-Bloc countries, and four intellectual histories that take up the Early Modern and Enlightenment fascination, taxonomic and political, with playing emotions off against one another as countervailing forces. Typical is the collection from 2004 entitled Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotions, whose editors and authors emphasize the differences (cognitive scenarios, emotion scripts) between pre-Cartesian versions of emotions like sadness, compassion, cheerfulness, and what we might say of these today after the long-ago lapse of the psychophysiology of the humors: after Enlightenment faculty


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psychology, Romantic emphasis on feelings-as-relationships—after Darwin and Freud. For historically-based studies, the emotions retain certain core attributes and therefore their names, but emotions do different work in different eras. It would be problematic to claim that the emotions themselves change, but Gail Kern Paster on humors in Shakespeare and Barbara Koziak on anger in Aristotle do widen the range of possibility, and uncertainty, for what the emotions themselves might be. “A particular and native style” is what Williams hopes to define in The Long Revolution, where he gives his first sustained definition of his concept. Structure of feeling, he says there, “is as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, this… is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument are of major importance.”4 It isn’t possessed in the same way by all of a nation’s citizens, “[b]ut I think it is a very deep and very wide possession, in all actual communities, precisely because it is on it that communication depends. And what is particularly interesting is that it does not seem to be, in any formal sense, learned. One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or the general cultural pattern, but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come ‘from’ anywhere” (65). In this book Williams’s example is the “dominant social character” (80) of the English 1840s, a culture of confused emergence (humans clustering in cities, industry with its insult to workers and environment, Corn Laws, Chartism, the two worlds of rich and poor) that culminates in 1848 when the Continent has a social revolution and England does not. Here, the working class rose to greater class consciousness and then had its rise abruptly stopped in the mid-Victorian age of equipoise, and in Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and others of this moment, new semantic figures “specified exposure and isolation as a general condition, and poverty, debt, or illegitimacy as its connecting instances”.5 In the particular structure of feeling before 1848, storytelling was in advance of Early Victorian ideology.

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The brief chapter on the concept in Marxism and Literature says more than twenty pages in the earlier book, because here Williams isolates and emphasizes his notion of generational struggle of eras, and develops his sense of cultural products as material records of change-as-lived, “often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming”.6 Structures of feeling “can be defined as social experiences in solution”: “Methodologically, a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements and their connections in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence…. The hypothesis has a special relevance to art and literature, where the true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind, which cannot without loss be reduced to belief-systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships, though it may include all these as lived and experienced…”. (133) Actual, specific, lived, experienced: Williams often uses such terms as he unfolds his idea, leaving himself open to criticisms from friendly interlocutors on the left like Perry Anderson, who think this the product of a naïve realism. Such talk, as combined with feeling and affect, is vulnerable, as Williams has admitted, but at least we hear in it Williams attempting to connect a theory of periods to the lives of human actors.7 Raymond Williams intends his term to be a softer-than-theusual Marxist specification, for period study of cultural documents. The term has been received in this spirit by many critics in his tradition, as in this sentence from Terry Eagleton: “Like comedy, [tragedy] can refer at once to works of art, real-life events and worldviews or structures of feeling.”8 As with other current, inherited terms, if we fairly summarize their intent and declare how we are using them, we can describe examples—then we’re open to public correction. Here I broaden the term to compare emotion-states from more than a few eras and places. I don’t intend that each play or poem stand for everything else from its place and time, like an icon or short version, but I cannot get bearings on my texts without surrounding them with certain references. Hence the diagram of Author, Mode of Production, Religious Dimension, Main Character, Formal Properties, and Changes Over Time of Core Story. Let the map serve as preview, summary, adjunct, and tracking device.

Set in remote past from Greek city-state: limited democracy of adult males who are not slaves or foreigners. Set in remote Greek past as seen from the Monarchy of Imperial Rome

Euripides 428 BC Greece

Set in remote past, from early Modern France; perspective of Jansenism and noblesse de robe. Critique of Power of Theseus?

Exile from the new Soviet state; the isolation of exile for the lyric voice

Racine 1677 France

Tsvetaeva c. 1922 Russia

Seneca 54 BC Rome

Mode of Production

Author

The is a strict actscene structure; in verse formal couplets; no chorus

No chorus, and no other speaker; one of the poems is short-line and the other is long-line

Phaedra is central figure.

One voice only: Phaedra's ecstasy of lust.

Oaths and references to Gods; but Gods are not present on stage; the curse of Theseus on Hippolytus is performed through a messenger's report.

Divinity is sedimented in the oaths of the speaker, and exists only there

Reduction to one side of a dialogue; Phaedra speaks in both poems, and has no dialogic partner; dense in images and sounds that emphasize ecstasy, desperation

Emphasis is now on rhetorical figures, and on psychological deepening to show lust as perversion The woman is the central figure in a presentation of extreme violence and extreme control; very unusual: Hippolytus is given Aricie, a love-interest

Structured by acts; chorus is present; in verse

Title has changed to make Phaedra central figure.

Memories of Green divinities, but Gods are not in the play; not close to action

Goddesses, on stage, speak at beginning and end of play; they control the action

Changes over Time in Core Story Fear of women and their passions

Formal Properties Prologue, Scenes, and Epilogue: with Chorus to comment; in verse

Main Character Play named for Hippolytus.

Religious Dimension

The Story of One Story 149

Back-dated to New England frontier farm community: 1850s, as seen from 1919.

Back-dated to 1910 from 1920s; California coast, with isolated agricultural family, little surrounding culture, but magnificent landscapes and creatures Present day with minor memories of ancient stories; monarchy in late capitalist media culture; a satire on the British royal family

O'Neill 1919 USA

Jeffers 1926-7 USA

Kane 1976 UK

Mode of Production

Author

Act-scene structure with heavy stage directions; dialect speech; residual chorus at the end in the speeches of the sheriff

The central character is the Theseus figure, Ephraim Cabot, the father.

The Theseus figure, here called Cawdor, is central.

The Hippolytus figure is central, because all look to him and because he has most capacious consciousness.

References to God limited to oaths, but speakers in the play do possess a sense of sin.

The Gods are in us, in animals, in places

God is entirely eliminated from reference; from language, even from oaths, or if God (as Christ Almighty) appears, it's as an object of satire

A story poem in 16 segments, long lines; unique in array, emphasis on scene is equal to emphasis on agents. Prosaic, laconic; organized by short scenes in short quick lines of dialogue; crowd at end is chorus substitute, but mocked for limitations

Formal Properties

Main Character

Religious Dimension

Hatred of eloquence, of emotions and ideals: embodied in meaningless sex, in travesty of Royal words and deeds, in brevity of style

Changes over Time in Core Story Reduction of the action to an isolated family. Unusual features: emphasis on the father; child born of union of mother and stepson; pervasive dialect speech Isolation in time, place: assimilation to viewpoints of landscape and animals

150 The Story of One Story


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It’s important not to claim too much! My chapter can’t substitute for an adequate intellectual history or an adequate textual interpretation, though it does emerge from some practice in those disciplines. In fact, adequacy in these matters would require a massive study that might swamp storytelling, because there is the relevant pressure of hundreds of books on my seven texts and their eras—a clamor of expert witnesses in the several sectors. This is my aim: to use and defend Williams’s term by showing a synthesis concerning emotion-states in the Phaedra story in seven versions; and to tell my own history of one story by reference to emotion-states in historical (as distinct from cognitive or psychological) time. Along the way, there will be more occasions to treat examples of estrangement emotion in image and scene. Also such a quick history of one set of overlapping circles of affect in plots, in characters, will validate a claim made about stories by many readers before me: if as author you have to perform dangerous impulses in order to condemn them, you unleash those impulses and they could be hard to control. Though it doesn’t happen in my seven stories, there might be an imperfect catharsis—confusion, bad art. These are minor dangers admittedly, but (speaking of art and of morality) what is it about these Phaedras that keeps their stories out of trouble? 2. Elements that Persist Over Time We can see what a story is, by isolating in a historical array of versions what time cannot touch, like a Yosemitic half-dome remaining after rivers of ice have scraped over and around.9 The story is not only plot, though the magnitude and sequence of the actions are essential to storytelling: as instance, when children re-tell they string events and they omit almost everything else. The story is not only character or dialogue or description or narrator’s stance or language. As much as these, the core story is a set of emotional relationships involving speech acts, modes of regard, variations of pace. In my reading of the Phaedra array, five granite knobs remain unchanged. A critic in re-telling enters into the floods of feeling of the story, even if, as here, the narrative finds little resonance in the critic’s own lived experience. It is the intensities of the story that group and prolong one’s response. A critic in re-telling must feel close to Proust and Barthes, those readers of Racine who loved to see Phaedra’s passion

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on the stage. Retelling, we are also close to Lowell and Hughes, those translators who picked Racine’s Phaedra because they could use energies in her extremity—poetic opportunities for English verse, rubbed raw by her honesty but also disguised in a ventriloquial female voice. 2.1. Plots of Desire: Phaedra’s transgression If it were Theseus breaking the laws of marriage and the conventions of the state and the sedimented rules of nature through incest, it would not be so great a shock. He has broken such laws before and he is a man so there is automatic willingness to forgive because the culture is phallogocentric, and anyway he’s not around for the opening half of the story. It is the younger bride and her virginal stepson who are thrown together because of Theseus’s absence. She’s aware of the sanctions she is breaking as she goes forward. She’s sick with guilt but that doesn’t prevent her from acting, and when she begins to act she sees a destiny in it. Love-driven Phaedra wades into the flood of feeling, partly because she has inherited genes of lust from her mother but mostly because she makes a choice; she finds eloquence in and through her loss of control. 2.2. The Moment of Dangerous Declaration Slowly, through dramatic exchange of speeches, Hippolytus understands what her flattery means—her hints about dynastic union and joint rule—her sex-talk referring to his body and images of the hard and straight. She brings him to the point of recognition, then not coyly drawing back to wait for his move, or denying her meaning, she offers herself to him. The language in all versions is as nakedly direct as it can be. She could not be more wrong about his personality because he is the last person in her world who would have sex with her or any woman: he’s the disciple of Artemis and the frequenter of bosky places, hunter of animals, a-social and a-sexual, in love with his own purity as it results from fleeing human contact. He’s just the opposite of his father, her husband Theseus, who has fucked any available woman he encountered in the ancient world. Maybe she loves in Hippolytus his very psychological inaccessibility, his virginity, not only as a challenge to bring him back to his essential humanity through his sexual self, but as a blank screen on which she


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can write, evoke, and whip into ecstasy her own desire. He’s a human sex-tool with which she can experiment. Her declaration has her bringing herself toward climax by speech alone. His rude rejection, when he finally understands and is appalled, leaves her hanging frustrated on the edge. No wonder she must quickly depart from the scene. No wonder she slinks away to cultivate her fury. The violence of her lust will lead to the violence of self-pity, of denunciation of the one who rejected her, finally to his violent death. Perhaps the core of the core story is here: imagining a woman who over-rides taboos and consequences, fully aware of her transgression, who cultivates her ecstasy. She lets it rip, and then feeling herself in the middle of a dangerous speech, uses the energy of her sin to prolong her state of passion. 2.3. The Chastity of Hippolytus He is the hunter of wild animals, in the company of male companions, so his deity is Artemis, the Lady of the Forest. He scorns the love of woman—that is why Love-Goddess Aphrodite, in Euripides’s inaugural play, makes of the action a test of his ability to rejoin the ranks of men like his father. But though he says little about it, he seems to scorn his father and his reputation with women: in abreaction, he will avoid what Theseus seeks, and define himself that way. Woman is for him contamination, a dilution of his pure power of avoidance. His evasion is the reversed face of his father’s contempt for women and thus connected to his father’s life. This is just what intrigues Phaedra and makes him into her emotional experiment. His will be the Nature of trees and beasts and not the Nature of generation and family, but of course whatever you avoid this obsessively, will begin to have control over you and will pull you toward what you fear, hate, and evade. 2.4. The Role of Goddesses—and God In Euripides, the play is set up as a frame-story, with the smaller family-dynastic struggle a test or guise of the celestial antagonism of Artemis and Aphrodite, each of whom wants to sponsor the life-value of Hippolytus. That is why the inaugural play has the son’s name as its title. In Seneca and Racine, the frame drops away and the focus shifts to Phaedra. There is a religious range of

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reference in Seneca, through statement and metaphor, but the Greek deities are distant in time and space for the Roman writer. In Racine, the struggle in Phaedra is played out as a nearly equal contest between impulses to sin and to social-religious rectitude, with a Christian overlay on the inherited Euripidean story. Racine, in another era, wants to think of the story as plot for a Christian tragedy: a contest against one’s worst self, a struggle his Phaedra and his audience might win if they stiffen themselves with beliefs gained from the Jansenist community: though Phaedra in ancient Troezen must fail, the audience in modern Paris may not. The more recent versions in O’Neill, Tsvetaeva, and Jeffers have only minor references to systems of belief. In Kane, in the sixth of eight scenes, Hippolytus while in prison contests the meaning of God with a Priest, and the scene ends with Hippolytus receiving oral sex from his confessor and saying to him, “Go. Confess. Before you burn” (97). So now, if God has withdrawn into the heavens or into social relations or into the landscape and its trees and hawks, or has been denounced or forgotten—that there is only a residue of God is another descriptor of the era’s structure of feeling. Even a reduced or forgotten God can be present, as a defining factor.10 2.5. Persisting Elements of Genre and Form From the first story to the most recent, the action is insistently tragic, in the bare sense of a plot that must destroy persons and ideas of value. The action is also tragic in trajectory, pulled up toward religious ideas without remaining within them, always falling back into ethics or politics—forcing suffering, managing on occasion to speak suffering but not fully to explain it with a theodicy. In most of these (excepting Racine and the two actions that are written out as poems in Jeffers and Tsvetaeva), the plot requires a Chorus to add a community point of view, and to expand the impact of the catastrophe more widely into society. The Chorus in Euripides and Seneca comes on stage at moments of decision for the protagonists, to intone warnings and judgments—many speaking as one; in later plays by O’Neill and Kane, the Chorus has shrunk to one or two citizens whose comment comes mostly in the final scene. Whether set up as plays or poems, all these actions deliver their meanings by characters’ speech acts to each other, though in Tsvetaeva it is strictly a one-sided


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dialogue and in Jeffers a great deal is performed by action-writing and commentary in the voice of a narrator—who comes from the same California coastal community as the doomed family of Cawdor. Without exception, these stories show forth Phaedra’s desire in the images of contagion—illness, flames; and all of the stories except modern plays by O’Neill and Kane use the condensation of the poetic line to do their telling (Kane’s speeches are so brief that they appear on the page like short lines of verse). Apparently there can be heightening of tragic feeling in the use of the strictest of literary measures. 3. Changes over Time in the Structure of Feeling Those are the elements that persist, and that give force to the recognition we started with: behind the Phaedras, there’s a single story. Now, working from one version to the next on the assumption that each new guise is some kind of emanation of its culture and era, any reader will find changes. The variant versions in their difference from one another are the best, or at least the nearest, evidence we have, to suggest the existence of structures of feeling—a strong but slender, literary record of moments of social history. The record in this form is intricately coded, heavily and distantly mediated, yet legible. Each of the seven points in the chain will expand, by the addition of wider and wider circles of documentation. Each Phaedra story is itself a structure of feeling and the possibility of development into the social structure, which is its condition of possibility. The story and its society are both structures of feeling, profoundly related, so we trust, but the link or homology is hard to trace. We have help from secondary sources like books on Greek tragedy by H.D.F. Kitto and Albert Cook, studies of Racine by Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, and a New York Times article on the short desperate life of Sarah Kane. But let’s admit that no conceivable explanation will get us adequately from the structure of the play to the social structure of its moment of origin. I can make a plausible start in discussing the changes over time in three topics (characters, power relations, tragedy and the medium). Then I want to analyze and compare passages from all seven authors. This chapter concludes with remarks on what can happen to a shocking story over time—how a story retains the ability to represent, also to exceed, the conditions of its emergence.

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Are lust and disgust at lust the same in all eras and cultures? No, and to say how and why will begin to describe the differences in historical structures of feeling. An act of lust robbed Helen from her husband and started what was, for the Ancients, a world war, but the original act is elided, overshadowed by the dynastic conflict that follows upon it. If lust is one of seven deadly sins, during the Christian era in the West, condemnations of this emotion will make it more central in consciousness than in another chronotope, especially when thought-sin is as much a breakdown as the sin enacted. But even within the Christian era, huge differences open out between the examples of Lancelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Tess Darbyfield and Alec D’Urberville, Willy Loman and the lady buyer he meets on the road, and the linked couples in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. What changes radically, along with definitions of marriage, are the objects, genders, and social valuations of forbidden desire. What changes is the relationship between lust and love—how the one is incompletely socialized into the other. Without intending to do this, literature records historical changes in the emotion that dominates each story. Also, through nuanced plots that give over a Helen or Romeo and make their names images of value, literature influences an emotion’s later meanings. Romeo—young love; Othello—jealousy: but so much is lost when it is phrased that way, including the dialogues and conflicts they move within, their speech acts, their development in time, their blank verse, their deaths. Phaedra—lust of a woman for an inappropriate man: but there are several Phaedras, several structures of feeling. 3.1. Three Categories of Change in the Seven Texts in the Array Changes Over Time in the Central Characters Kane’s Phaedra gives oral sex to Hippolytus and then denounces him as a rapist; her role is over by her own suicide twothirds of the way through the play; so Kane’s title, Phaedra’s Love, is ironic and the play is not primarily about the title character. If we treat Kane for the moment as an exception for this reason, then the general trend of treatment of characters in this story is increasingly to move from the Hippolytus figure to the struggle-within-sin of Phaedra—her mind, her guilt. This is strongly true in the movement from the


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Euripides to the Seneca, Racine, and Tsvetaeva versions, and less the case in the Americans, O’Neill and Jeffers, where the father and son figures seem as prominent as the seductive stepmother. In O’Neill and Jeffers, the conflict is more distributed, because the stepmother is less of a tormented powerful intellect. The confidante Nurse is a crucial secondary figure in the ancient and early modern versions—actually threatened with torture by Theseus in Seneca—but has disappeared in the twentieth-century ones. Other figures become agents of new plotting in the more recent versions: Aricie, a character invented by the author, becomes Hippolytus’ intended bride in Racine; the Hippolytus character in O’Neill has two conventional brothers against whom he can define his actions and a baby son born of his forbidden union; the Hippolytus figure in Jeffers has a thirteen year old sister who cares for an injured hawk; in Kane, Hippolytus’ stepsister Strophe is one of his sexual partners, who is raped and then killed by Theseus in the play’s last scene. Changes in Power Relations Here the structure of feeling most closely approaches the era’s mode of production—ancient aristocratic rule in city states in Euripides and Seneca, early modern emergent (but monarchial) nation state in Racine, twentieth-century father-dominated families in the era of high capitalism where persons in works of verbal art are only loosely members of communities (of rural New England or California [O’Neill, Jeffers], or of Russians in 1920s exile [Tsvetaeva]). In these last, the sin is hidden, driven inward, and not always the cause of a protagonist’s actual death; horrible exposure is enough—a kind of social death. Every royal figure is dead on or off the stage in Kane’s play, because she thinks her characters are abominations and they deserve no less: “Theseus cuts his own throat and bleeds to death. The three bodies lie completely still. Eventually, Hippolytus opens his eyes and looks at the sky. Hippolytus: Vultures.(He manages a smile.) If there could have been more moments like this. Hippolytus dies. A vulture descends and begins to eat his body”.11

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Hippolytus likes anything that cuts through the veil of meaninglessness that is his life, even if it is ghastly violation and violence; in this he seems like the author, who wants her play to end with the vultures as one image of press and populace feeding on the royals. Nobody escapes death or satire, certainly not Hippolytus despite his plucky perverse smile. In all versions except Kane’s, the action is set back in time by centuries or decades to a more primal, heroic era when power over others was more direct, patriarchal, complete, supported by social sanction—yet despite this, the plot of the stepmother’s seduction transgresses the father’s power and it takes deaths to reassert a modified, chastened tradition at story’s end. In Euripides, Seneca, Racine, and to some extent in Jeffers, it takes even more, a reassertion of the natural order of the earth itself as image of a traditional power structure—the working out of the father’s curse through ecological cataclysm (the late-in-the-action sea monster in the first three of these versions, the early-in-action wildfire in Jeffers). The overall movement is from royal to ordinary family—thence to a royal family disrespected like an ordinary one in Kane; from high oracular speech of divinities and royals in Euripides, to dialect New England in O’Neill and landscape-ecstatic in Jeffers—thence to simplified language of primal sex-pulsion in Kane, where the claim of “love” in the title and in Phaedra’s mouth is always unbelievable. The overall movement is also from full formal chorus in the two ancient plays to single choral characters with few lines to speak, in most of the later versions: so the pressure of the community, actively judging, is attenuated over time. In Kane, the pressure of community is that of the crowd who watch and cheer as Theseus rapes Strophe, and of Woman 2 who cuts off Hippolytus’s genitals and throws them on the barbecue, and of Policeman 2 who spits on Hippolytus’s body. In Kane, unlike other versions, the royals, the crowd as a diminished chorus, and also the watching-listening audience are all subject to free-roaming satire, and there is no reassertion at the end of a modified traditional social order. It is useful to have Kane in the array, because her story specializes in the hints of negativity and transgression in all other versions: breakdown without recuperation.


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Changes in the Relationship of Tragedy to the Medium Here I want to remember the point F.R. Leavis made against historians of ideas and political critics—and would make against me if he read to this point in the chapter. Leavis thought critics were avoiding the language of the text. In “Tragedy and the Medium,” written fifty years ago but still cogent, he argued that it isn’t enough to strip off the content layer and then stop, because everything’s imbricated: there are no layers in the writing, or the reading, of the tragic play. Leavis didn’t use the term estrangement emotion, but that’s what he was defending. Thus, in Shakespeare’s tragic drama the sequence of events is scaled and structured; the text is made by choices as to images, scenes, speech acts, meters and pacings; and the language is as much part of the tragic experience as questions of power, social class, relation to divinity, and so on. Though Raymond Williams did not involve himself in close-reading practices, I believe he agreed with Leavis on this matter, so for Williams the term structure of feeling worked equally well for texts and eras, because texts and eras define each other. If this is the case, then estrangement emotion can itself be historicized, and will be minor but indispensable evidence of structures of feeling. I will list elements here in a historical scan, and will then explain their emotional force below, in my comment on passages. •

Syllable, Word, Phrase. Plays by all dramatists except those in the 20th century, O’Neill and Kane, are in strict metrical lines, so for the majority—as for the poets, Tsvetaeva and Jeffers—those lines are weighed out, down to the fine grain of the syllable. Exclamations, dialogues, occur across lines and part lines, so in these dramatists there are whole blocks of lines shaped into extensive speeches—for example, the famous tirades in Racine, in twenty-line verse-paragraphs. O’Neill, writing prose, makes up for the want of that kind of organization by the selection of words in a stylized local dialect speech—an ugly energy in nearly every utterance, occasionally crude or a little weird. Kane makes up for meter by reducing speeches to phrases or simple sentences, so pages of dialogue read like the trading of one-liners; this forbids


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emotional expansiveness—Kane’s speakers do not have metaphors, dialects, or philosophies to flaunt. Image and Metaphor. Through recurrence, images become metaphors that emphasize elements in the plot, giving emotional force—illness in Seneca, fire for desire in Racine, hawks as freedom in Jeffers, mares in heat for Phaedra’s passion in Tsvetaeva. Speech Acts. In the plays in the set, speeches are almost always dialogues between two or more speakers, to expose the conflict in a sequence of colloquies, though here and there a soliloquy may appear. The full range of speech acts comes into play—asserting, begging, bragging, wheedling, stating, questioning, and scores of others, including speech that performs deeds. In Tsvetaeva, the speaker is Phaedra herself, making admissions to Hippolytus as auditor as a way to stir his interest, but Hippolytus never replies; in Jeffers, the other poem but now novelized in 16 parts and 100 pages, there’s also a reduced dialogism, when much is conveyed in the narrator’s voice. The non-dramatic poets, Tsvetaeva and Jeffers, produce a form of specialized language, ecstatic for her and expansive for him, that’s akin to the choice of a dialect speech in O’Neill’s prose; but in O’Neill’s play the oddity of lexical choice is everywhere intrusive, over a long stretch of writing. Larger Divisions of Scene and Act. Tsvetaeva has produced two poems, numbered and rhymed, of middle length: one in short lines and one in long lines, bound into quatrains. For her the action is in the straight declaration of Phaedra’s ecstatic passion. Jeffers has a story narrative in 5- or 6-stress long lines, unrhymed and broken into verse paragraphs, set out in sections. For him, the action is not only the story of family breakdown but the relation of human character to environment in the wild California coastal mountains: diminishment of human action by the purity and cruelty of the natural scene, so within each section there’s considerable switching of perspective to bring in earth as implicit judgment upon humanity’s doings. Euripides writes a strict progression of scenes with


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a Prologue and Epilogue, but in Seneca, Racine and O’Neill the writers have moved to a five-act structure, with a special complication, rise, discovery, and unknotting of the action. Kane reverts to the Euripidean scene structure, so the action is over in 8 scenes and less than 40 pages, with no deviations or subplots. Such outer frames influence the parceling and pacing of the story’s information, regulating the effect of surprise. Never, in any of these, is the reader allowed to luxuriate in a single textual emotion or act of stylistic brio, but the stories with more expansive forms permit greater thoughtfulness in the reader—the surprises keep coming, but not at the furious pace one finds in the stripped speech of the two women in this set, Tsvetaeva and Kane. With these and some other devices, writers convey the effect of named characters speaking, acting. The stories within which the characters move, their emotion states, their scenes are conjured with black marks on blank pages. If Aristotle is right when he says that the plot is the soul of the action, and he is, then the characters are not the story, but this kind of story is impossible without them, and the same is true of the indispensable material text: tragedy as medium. The structure of the language is the structure of feeling, which is a notation of culture and era, but the gaps in this chain of mediations are to be leaped—by inferences. The chain of mediations is itself a story—how we struggle against limitations. 4. Commentary: Seven Texts Here are seven scenes or part-scenes (actually nine, if we count separate passages from Racine). To make a benchmark for comparisons, I’ve chosen passages from Seneca, Racine, Tsvetaeva and Kane from the place in the tale where Phaedra makes her declaration of lust to Hippolytus. I’ve taken the rest of the passages to show other events, other styles that may stand for historical structures of feeling. Here are the protocols for commentary: to choose texts for comparability; to emphasize my particular version of style-study, with focus on scene, utterance, image as the dominant codes for describing emotion-states in stories; to work with translations of some literary

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merit, but also to refer to originals when possible; to give full identification of passages for placement in the work; to give close accounting of incidents and rhetoric in passages taken, but to offer quotation only within the limits of fair use.12 4.1. Euripides, Hippolytus (428 BCE) Aphrodite (Cypris) declares at the Prologue of this play exactly what will happen: the Goddess of Love will bring down Hippolytus for his disrespect—his scorn of women and sexual love. What’s in doubt is not the action but the manner of its unfolding, and what those involved say from within the conflicts of the plot. Artemis, the counter-Goddess who has Hippolytus’ faith, has her counterstatement in the Epilogue, well after Phaedra has sent a false letter of accusation, which leads to the king’s curse and her stepson’s death. I’ve selected for comment the last lines of the whole play, which contain the judgments of Artemis, the farewell forgiveness of dying Hippolytus for his father, and a statement of “common grief” from the Chorus. To speak of the medium of tragedy when we are reading a translation is always in the strict sense impossible, but some elements of textual emotion come through: hence the dissemination of plays and the survival of the genre. In the dialogue of the son and the father who has killed him with a curse, there’s an unexpectedly soft tone that comes through the grid of Theseus’s oath-like formulations (“Would that it was I who was dying”), through the reproach of Hippolytus’s “Bitter…bitter” and the straight speaking of “you would have killed me—/You were so angry.” H.D.F. Kitto is right to question whether the ending of the play, after Phaedra’s departure, might be anticlimatic and to wonder why Hippolytus is so chilly, but he seems to have missed the new tones of this ending scene. Here, father-king and son-prince are reconciled by their own relenting and by the agency of the Goddess, Artemis, who gives each of them explanations that will dissolve anger. The tone is affectionate, elegiac. They touch each other physically and forgive each other with direct emotion words, oaths, exclamations, farewells. Hippolytus performs his own death by words: “I’m gone. Cover my face up quickly.” Theseus speaks a eulogy not without a flash of anger against Aphrodite, cause of this conflict, and then the Chorus re-frames the whole with the city’s


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perspective (“common grief” beyond that of the family affected) and actually ends the action by two lines on story-telling, emotion, and social class. At the very end estrangement emotion comes out into the public sphere of speech, and Hippolytus is returned to story. By giving only a mention to Artemis, I’ve obscured a figure most central to the structure of feeling in the play. As Kitto says, Phaedra herself is only a temptress in this play, and Hippolytus is onesided, a woman-hater living in the woods; these two, and Theseus, are victims of the elemental powers of nature embodied in the two goddesses. It isn’t a tragedy of character, really, until the very lines in our passage at the play’s end, where Artemis helps father and son to love each other again—where briefly they escape, at the last, the conflict plot that Aphrodite set working in the Prologue. The statues of the two goddesses stand on the stage throughout the action, as reminders of mythos and images of the division that cannot be healed. These are implacable Goddess-women—unlike Phaedra in the play who is shown, like other women in Greek tragedy, in extremis—so there is no way to make a case for anything like an enlightened social consciousness. Nor is there a historical mind in the play: the stress of the wars of Athens, the adjustments of civic life in a city state with limited democratic structures, are not here, not even in the wider gestures of the Chorus. The structure of feeling, in a play that was part of the Dionysiac festivals, is in the given myth of the ambivalence of the gods, linking the tragedy not with contemporary events but with religion.13 The play is back-dated from the often chaotic Greek democracy and intellectual pluralism of Athens in the fifth century BCE, to an earlier Monarchial era. The imagined moment of action is the tightly centered, knowable community of the city state in an era when farming is phasing into arts of the city, when the gods are near and just beginning to fade. 4.2. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Phaedra (c. 54 AD) Seneca’s Act II begins with some hundreds of lines of exposition in a dialogue between the quizzing Chorus and the Nurse, and then Hippolytus enters for a harsh encounter with the Nurse where he violently confirms his misogyny—“I curse the lot of you” (70); “[I] hate / all women, without one exception” (70). Just here Phaedra

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enters, faints, is lifted up by Hippolytus, thinks inwardly “It is too late for chastity” (71), and tells her stepson to get rid of any auditors. Hinting her anxieties, she denies the word mother and prefers to be called sister, maid, or widow. The dramatic center of the play occurs next when she conquers her reluctance to speak. In contrast to the Greek storytellers, Seneca (second half of 1st century A.D.) seems more concerned with writing than speaking, with reading than performance.14 The earlier version of the story by Euripides is more episodic without the five-act structure that comes in with Seneca’s plays, more dialogic because Euripides has fewer arialike long speeches; and Euripides is less concerned with the display of rhetoric in images, epigrams, monologues, asides. Between Euripides and Seneca there is half a millennium of history and of play-making, and Seneca is acutely aware of bringing the Greek heritage over to Rome because Ovid had already done that for this tale. Seneca is so influenced by the monologue of Phaedra in Ovid’s Heroides that he is willing to shift Euripides’ title character from Hippolytus to his stepmother—Seneca gives to his Phaedra a speaking voice charged with the Ovidian imagery of inner wounding, flames of love. Here Phaedra loses her struggle against love for Hippolytus’s physical body: she speaks her rage of desire, which she first hints in the flame images and then slowly begins to reveal in her description of Theseus’s face, hair, skin when he was younger—so like Hippolytus (“Your beauty shines like his….”). Even though the figures are conventional, her imagery of flames, and Hippolytus’ cosmic references to thunderbolts and clouds, are examples of rhetoric that expresses emotions of some force. In another method that Euripides rarely uses, both these speakers extend their utterance by appeals to absent impossible auditors (Phaedra to her sister and Hippolytus to the “Great ruler of the gods”), so the one in front of them must suffer through, and interpret, the apostrophe. Her increasingly open lovemadness and his shocked, then self-blaming, then angry and insulting reply are developed through other means, too, including epigram (“Crime moves…swiftly”), alternation of long and short sentences, energetic alternation of allusions (Phoebe-Phoebus) with recurrent images (flames, madness) with straight speech (“Speak openly”; “Pity my love”). Also there’s physical gesture to accompany the text, unknown to audience or reader except through what’s said in the


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text—Phaedra faints just before this scene starts, she kneels twice in front of her stepson in the lines quoted, and soon in the same Act there’s a resonantly symbolic tussle over Hippolytus’ sword. A lovetormented queen and her angry-guilty stepson, in the midst of emotional crisis, expand on details of how a body looks, what things were like on Crete, why the weather is not affected by the enormity of proposed incest. The rhetoric, then, is repetitive, hyperbolical, but also by contrast to what we’ve seen in Euripides this unusual excess of style, of personal assertion, shows how insecure the speakers are. This is, as all the commentators have remarked, a highly introspective drama: people thinking at length and aloud, and what they say is neither pretty nor consoling. Seneca as dramatist is driven by belatedness, by his training in rhetoric, and by tragic form to explore states of violent emotion he would wish to suppress in his other writings as a Stoic philosopher. Emotion here is notably rich in the growth of figures that stand for the claims of self, and those figures do correlate with historical structures of feeling in Neronian Rome. As commentators often note, in Seneca the plots are Greek but the atmosphere—of all speechexchanges as power-plays, of corruption at high social levels, of secrecy, of stasis and circularity—is Roman. Perhaps the collapse of Minoan civilization in Crete, Phaedra’s homeland, is implicitly a warning to Rome; perhaps the horrors in the Palace in Troezen are guises for similar ghastly possibilities in Roman royal houses. Charles Segal has said that “even more than the Tacitean histories, Senecan tragedy responds to this corruption by studying the soul’s forced exploration of its innermost dark places” (12). In this passage, there are other elements that date the play by indirect means: the kind of tragedy without an exit, wherein society’s demand for sublimation wins out over the struggle of a character, in this case Phaedra, for love or at least for self-control; needless deaths of persons because society must triumph; meaningless appeals to the gods, who prove to be distant and fickle. Thus is textual emotion evoked and constrained by the structure of feeling. These elements mark Seneca’s distance from his Greek model, so if “the Ghost of Euripides haunts every line” (Segal, 202), so too does that other, just visible ghost that is the oppressive society of Nero’s Rome.

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So we have a Greek story told by a Roman of senatorial rank, and in Latin. This is Monarch-City-Fading of the Gods at one remove, without the heavy emphasis on kingship and with no frame-story of the Goddesses influencing the action. How convenient to present a corrupt court that’s not in the Roman world of absolute power but somewhere else and centuries ago! The Chorus of concerned citizens has more to say than in Euripides, but has little to say that is unconventional or doubtful of the imperial right to rule even when power is lust-tormented and arbitrary. 4.3. Jean Racine, Phèdre (1677) The story of Euripides and Seneca is now in French and in the super-control of rhymed alexandrines. The Court of the monarch is the center of the action and the only physical setting; but even, or especially, in a polity of terrible constraint, lust will break out as a destroyer, and will be known as such by Phaedra herself: the queen, the mother, the cause of chaos in herself and others. The lack of a Christian sublimation, a Christian monarch, a Christian god with His salvation, is felt everywhere in Phaedra’s inner sense of sin, but stated nowhere. Thus by supreme indirection does a member of the noblesse de robe, from the tiny sect of Jansenism associated with Port Royal but now writing from the Parisian center of theater and government, offer a mirror for aristocrats and monarchs through the conscious sin of a Greek queen. This will be the longest commentary, because this is perhaps the most creative and morally searching of the Phaedra stories and because there’s a Raymond Williams connection. Also the ordinary emotions are named in the play, and the estrangement emotions are on show in every single counted syllable and sound of the twelve-syllable line, every rhyme, every reference in the play’s words to the characters’ physical actions; and in addition to a brilliant tradition of acting—including Sarah Bernhardt, there’s a profound tradition of commentary—including Proust, Barrault, Barthes, Goldmann.15 Lucien Goldmann’s account in The Hidden God and elsewhere gets down to evidences for an exact historical placement of Racine, preeminently in this play, as a poet-playwright who invents tragedy as radical opposition between God and the world. Goldmann’s briefer account in the book translated as Racine has introductory praise from


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Raymond Williams, who further develops his definitions of the structure of feeling with help from Goldmann’s method. Williams’s admiration for the thought of his contemporary, a French sociologist on the Left, leads us back to the play, through Goldmann. For my purposes, Goldmann yields a reading of Phèdre as the fullest confrontation of Jansenist God with the World, the completing term of my own theory on literary emotions; also a reading of this play as a supreme creative effort in Racine’s developing career, for he produced partial tragic actions in many of his earlier plays and no tragic plots thereafter. In Phèdre, the most capacious tragic action is also the furthest penetration into social and religious history in the exactlydefined era: Goldmann makes this play representative of class relationships between an uncompromising, isolated religious group and the monarchy in 1677 (events in mid-1670s France have exact bearing on how the play sets absolute values into absolute conflict). Of course, my comment relying on and in part exceeding WilliamsGoldmann, can’t settle all likely questions concerning relation of a single story to the Phaedra myth, or how we can adjust analysis to differences of genre and audience, or how an emotion may be preserved and studied in translation. Teachers of French schoolchildren have a standard way of showing changes across the play, by means of Phaedra’s three aveux, or avowals, of her guilty love for Hippolytus: the confessions to her nurse Oenone in Act I, Scene 3; to Hippolytus himself in Act II, Scene 5; and at the very end to Theseus in Act V, Scene 7, where she removes suspicion from Hippolytus and commits suicide. French schoolteachers are correct to link these passages; as I comment on the aveux from Acts II and V, I would introduce the idea that development would not be a good term for a play where the heroine refers to her ancestor the sun-god in her first and last speeches and where, as Lucien Goldmann notices, she knows from the play’s opening that this is her last day: “O Thou, Great Sun!”, she gestures, “I come to look on Thee for the last time” (I, 3). If she has judged her own guilt in Act I, the action of the play will be to reveal to others a sin that she has already recognized: a static action which ends when all the interlocutors know, through death, the price of confessing and delaying confession.

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Racine uses a small set of terms like fureur, passion, amour, haine, monstre, tu, je, moi, each of which changes slightly and deepens in context. Many of these recurring terms are present in the scene from II, 5, in a passage that is the product of a restricted lexicon of feeling, and of a stagecraft with few actors delivering formal blocks of speech like arias; it is also the product of a highly over-determined scheme of rhyme and meter. The scene has its own internal movement of focus because every seven or eight lines of Phaedra’s tirade, there is a bold change of topic and perspective, thus of emotional tone. Phaedra makes her declaration obliquely; Hippolytus wonders aloud whether she forgets that his father is her husband; she pulls back and he turns to leave (Hippolyte: “Et je vais . . .,” where the suspension dots mean a mid-utterance break in the dialogue)—when she unleashes this: Ah! Cruel, tu m’as trop entendue. Je t’en ai assex dit pour te tirer d’erreur. Hé bien! Connais donc Phèdre et toute sa fureur. J’aime. (You monster! You understood me too well! Why do you hang there, speechless, petrified, Polite? My mind whirls. What have I to hide? Phaedra in all her madness stands before you. I love you! Fool, I love you, I adore you!)16

Given the terrible constraints against adultery and incest, and against women declaring love, it is reckless of Phaedra to speak the conflicts of her condition. But speak she does, revealing secrets in the next 40 lines, abandoning defenses—the audience is progressively unsettled to know what outrage is next. The more she knows of her own iniquity, the more she is reluctant, and willing, to act—to declare a love, to touch another character, to lie to save herself, to plot the extinction of Hippolytus and Aricia who love more purely, and finally to commit suicide. She is transfigured: not hysterical, but ecstatic with knowledge. Her long speech ends: Venge-toi, punis-moi d’un odieux amour. Digne fils du héros qui t’a donné le jour, Délivre l’univers d’un monster qui t’irrite.


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La veuve de Thésée ose aimer Hippolyte! Crois-moi, ce monster affreux ne doit point t’échapper. Voilà mon coeur. C’est là que ta main doit frapper. Impatient déjà d’expier son offense, Au-devant de ton bras je le sens qui s’avance. Frappe. Ou sit u le crois indigne de tes coups, Si ta haine m’envie un supplice si doux, Ou si d’un sang trop vil ta main serait trempée, Au défaut de ton bras prête-moi ton épée. Donne. (Oh take your vengeance, do, and punish me For such a hideous and illicit love! Your father was a hero, be like him, And rid the world of one more monster now. Does Theseus’ widow dare to love his son? Believe me you should not let her escape. Here is my heart. Here, where your hand should strike, It waits impatient to expiate Its guilt. It leaps to meet your arm. Oh strike! Or if your hatred envy me a blow Of such sweet torture, if blood too vile You think would therefore drench your hand, then give, Give me, if not your arm, at least your sword! Give.)17

Phaedra’s folly and passion, called by her in this speech fureur (l. 672), pushes the limits of what is possible in extreme human emotion, in tragic moral discovery, in Racine, and in the structure of feeling in France in 1677. Her passions count for more in this play than in Racine’s classical models. As example, Phèdre’s inner life as speaking subject is shown by French scholars who say that she speaks the firstperson pronoun 305 times in the play, and she speaks the verb of existence (être) 49 times. Racine’s tone is determined by audacity of image, utterance and scene within, and also against, the extreme strictness of societal taboo and formal stagecraft. The reader of the 21st century will be taught by the play to register, at some level of conscious response, the conventions of Racine’s time that give intensity. What may seem to us minor shifts of emphasis, from formal vous to intimate tu, from statemental language to Ah!, from Hippolyte facing Phaedra to his turning away to leave, from Phaedra being near to Hippolyte to her

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touching his arm, is a massive earthquake within such circumstances of control. For Phaedra to take her stepson’s sexual sword and brandish it, requesting murder at his hands, is a culminating enormity—and the play must still burn through three more acts. Her third and last avowal, when she has poisoned herself, is her confession to Theseus in the play’s last scene (V,7): Les moments me sont chers, écoutez-moi, Thésée, C’est moi qui sur ce fils chaste et respectueux Osai jeter un oeil profane, incesteux. Le ciel mit dans mon sein une flame funeste; La detestable Oenone a conduit tout le reste….[10 lines deleted] J’ai pris, j’a fait couler dans mes brûlantes veines Un poison que Médée apporta dans Athènes. Déjà jusqu’à mon coeur le venin parvenu Dans ce coeur expirant jette un froid inconnu; Déjà je ne vois plus qu’à travers un nuage Et le ciel et l’époux que ma présence outrage; Et la mort, à mes yeux dérobant la clarté, Rend au jour, qu’ils souillaient, toute sa pureté. (Theseus, Moments to me are precious. Listen now. Phaedra it was who dared to look with love Profane—incestuous—upon that chaste And dutiful Hippolytus, your son. Heaven in my heart kindled the fatal clame Detestable Oenone did the rest…. I have taken And through all my burning veins now runs A poison brought to Athens by Medea. Already has the venom reached my heart; This dying heart is filled with—icy cold! Already only through a mist I see The Heavens and the husband unto whom My presence is an outrage. Death removes The light from eyes which have defiled it, so— Restores to daylight all its purity.)18

Imagining how the actor would play this, Jean-Louis Barrault plausibly shows Phaedra’s emotions in her actions—she interrupts Theseus’ previous speech with a raised finger, she demands the attention of the husband-king who’s already forgetting her, she speaks


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with less and less energy to the point of disappearing (Barrault: “elle se résorbe…elle tend vers zéro”), bends, falls, expires (195). Roland Barthes doesn’t attempt this kind of specific reading of the emotions of the physical body, because he understands Racine as a cruel tragedian of destinies and takes Phaedra as a figure so disembodied that she will only use her voice to break her silence three times, in her three avowals—the last of which, here, she uses to speak her death (32). It isn’t Phaedra’s guilt that’s the problem, it’s her silence. For Barthes, in this kind of action, “to speak is to do, the logos takes over the functions of praxis and substitutes for it…. praxis is drained, language filled” (58); this tragedy “immobilizes contradictions, refuses mediation, keeps the conflict open” (60). Whereas Gilles Revaz says Theseus gets the last word because the king must reassert the virtues of family and monarchy, both Barthes and Goldmann read Theseus’ final speech as a ridiculous coda from one who’s by now a comic puppet.19 This is the less expected position. For the two earlier critics, once Phaedra has spoken her death on the last page, the play turns abruptly away from tragedy with a brief speech from Theseus, who can say nothing adequate to her example. Barthes and Goldmann are, like Revaz, sociologists, but they emphasize not Racine’s affirmation of state power—rather the way this tragic hero denies the world as she speaks her desire, her death.20 Goldmann makes a great deal of the insuperable gulf between Phaedra and the other characters, including Theseus, who lack value and reality. On the side of estrangement emotion, he is very perceptive to see that a coherent dramaturgy keeps the tragic figure isolated from the others: Racine exaggerates strict inherited unities of time, place, and person; he omits the chorus he knew so well from Euripides and Seneca; and he refuses the effects of reversal and recognition. Speech by speech these methods combine well with magnificent, monologic tirades like the one I’ve just quoted. In his short version of his thesis, in Racine (1972), Goldmann lists three constituent elements of every tragedy: “an essentially insoluble conflict resulting from the clash between a world which knows only relativity, compromise, the more or less, and a universe dominated by the need for absolute values, for totality, and governed by the law of all or nothing.”21 The third of these, the universe, is “fatality, transcendancy, God”, and tragedy in this view is “a spectacle under the permanent observation of a deity”

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who is always present but remains hidden, like the Sun, Phaedra’s ancestor, who she refers to in her first and last lines in the play, and who has another hidden name, as Venus. In drastic summary: for Goldmann, Phaedra between world and universe is by homology Racine’s class position between the King his patron and the Jansenist God of his youth. Goldmann shows how the writer had spent ten years in Jansenist society by the age of nineteen, how through the alternations of repression and indulgence of the Jansenist sect (1640s1670s) Racine came to affiliate with extreme Jansenist religious separation, how the writer even after his role as Historiographer Royal wrote a history of Jansenism and on his death chose to be buried at Port Royal des Champs. Phèdre through its action is the conflict plot of the radical opposition between God and the world. Goldmann, arguing thus, takes my own story further by showing that the tragic hero’s lust is beside the point. Phaedra’s sexual desire, which takes so much more central a role in 20th century versions of the myth, is here the vehicle for a hope to live in the world. By the time of her second avowal, when Hippolytus flees from her in the scene I’ve discussed from Act II, lust is a doomed desire and has its role only in the in the fear of Hippolytus and the jealous rage of Theseus. One admires Goldmann’s ability to situate the play in the struggles of religion and class in the 1670s; in Racine’s own career as a culminating, uncompromising play of refusal of the world; and in the history of tragedy and its Baroque restriction of language, especially the staging of insoluble conflict. It’s not only Racine because Pascal, also trained at Port Royal, shows the same structure of consciousness in the Pensées. Goldmann strives to be historical with his homology-argument and with his density of detail, unusual for a sociologist, on conventions of language and stagecraft, and he has some quite wonderful bits of noticing, for example on how the hero’s first and last speeches, on her relation to the Sun, show a fixed obsession that prevents the play’s movement forward in time, or in self-understanding; he’s also very good, in passing, on how Racine’s screen of classical figures can be transparent to the religious struggle of his own sect, his own era. Raymond Williams may have liked these elements too, in The Hidden God and Racine, but his introduction to the English version of the latter book shows him most concerned in


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the lesson English criticism could pick up from Continental theory on the topic of social structure. Referring to the limitations of English practical criticism and the older versions base-superstructure thinking, and to his own invention of “Structure of Feeling” as a speculative tool, he praises Goldmann’s ability to think totality: “The point of thinking in terms of totality is the realization that we are part of it” (xiv). In Goldmann, structure is what underlies the separate disciplines of sociology, literary criticism, and cultural history—one begins from structure, “which by definition is not individually but collectively created” (xvi), so the task of criticism is to respond to these “underlying and formative structures” of actual and of possible consciousness. Much that we already know can thus be brought to bear. Goldmann himself had said, in the Preface to The Hidden God, “that facts concerning man always form themselves into significant global structures, which are at one and the same time practical, theoretical, and emotive, and that these structures can be studied a scientific manner….” (ix). Williams thought this exemplary, including that attached but equally weighty element, “and emotive”: for Goldmann had already thought through “the structures of the genesis of consciousness” (Williams), and given a full-scale historical example in the careers of two great representative geniuses of the seventeenth century. Williams knew an affiliate when he saw one. But others have worried, and rightly, that the method of homology, while social, stops itself before seeking to be capaciously dialectical.22 Relying on Goldmann here, despite his contentious place in scholarship, it has been possible to extend comment on Racine into the range of our terms for emotion study—to raise again and in this context the notions of person and imaginary person, emotion as relation, world in its wide range of meanings, image-utterance-scene as analytical tools, the narrative of emotion states, estrangement emotion, and not least, the structure of feeling. Among the commentators, Goldmann is still the most helpful for his discussion on the social grounding of tragedy as a mode of inquiry. Among the commentators, Roland Barthes is most helpful for his discussion, pertinent to emotion studies, of how the tragic element clashes with the psychological element in Racine’s late plays. Barthes responds to a 1958 production of Phèdre at the Théâtre National

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Populaire, where the play fell to pieces because Phaedra was acted in naturalistic delivery and Theseus in tragic delivery. Phaedra is guilty, jealous, angry, daring. We know very well those emotion-states and the way they’d be played, for after all, Phaedra is brave enough to discover what she needs to understand in the midst of saying, and she determines to say everything before she must disappear. She is first and most severe of the judges who regard her with horror. However, to the degree that we take the play as a love story or a guilt story, Barthes argues, we lose the tragic. In 1958, Maria Casarès “acted Phaedra’s passion as a disease, not as a destiny; there was obviously no longer any communication with the gods in her role” (146). The actor had a difficult assignment because the character of Phaedra “is divided, not psychologically but aesthetically.” How define another kind of delivery—an estrangement delivery that recognizes, “If we want to keep Racine, we must keep him at a distance” (149)? Barthes says the method is to produce a massive diction, not parceling out the meanings: “tragic discourse proceeds in great motionless blocks” (147). We, as readers, exceed Phaedra and we know that part of the experience of her mind is estrangement emotion. I think this is what Proust means when he resists reading sample passages and prefers, in his remarks on the play, to characterize a whole emotional-volitional tone. Proust and Barthes mock the actors who would attempt to cue clear familiar emotions with their delivery—these historians want artificial elocution of alexandrine couplets, not psychological realism. For them, it is estrangement emotion, notated in works and performed from the notation, which defines and preserves a historical era’s structure of feeling. The meter and the severely reduced stagecraft must call attention to themselves, and to the extent that they do they draw the mind away from what is said. To a certain kind of observer this is delicious. Apparently the partial obliteration of meaning and of psychological realism yields both aesthetic adequacy and the effect of historical accuracy.23 4.4. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Phaedra” (suite of two poems, 1923) Perhaps remembering the example of Sappho’s love-trance poems and their fragmentary appearance on the page, Tsvetaeva writes of erotic obsession. More obviously and directly she is trying to give the ecstatic essence of Racine’s play.24 All the other Phaedras


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occur in full-length tragic or satiric productions, but this is a lyric reduction. Intensity is everything for Tsvetaeva. In nearly all versions, including this one, the emotional keynote is the audience’s sense that Phaedra will say anything—that nothing forbidden will go unsaid. Phaedra’s emotional nakedness is more sustained and raw than any other figure in world drama. Tsvetaeva in exile, experimenting in life with lovers of both sexes and conducting imaginary loves in lyrics that are like letters, needs a heroine of sexual daring. Sometimes in passing this will be Eurydice and Joan of Arc, but with Phaedra she enters the voice of the heroine for two embodied lyrics. The first of these is titled “Complaint” and is spoken by the author as the tragic queen, direct to the indifferent Hippolytus, her stepson who will be floored to hear her declaration of animal lust. (As we’ve seen, this accords with the legend as it is passed from Euripides and Seneca to Racine. But biographically for the author, this is also, like her related long poem “Wires,” a disguised declaration to the friendly but unavailable Boris Pasternak, who in the same year was also out of Russia but not nearby.) Phaedra speaks to make Hippolytus appalled and to appall herself: Hippolytus! Hippolytus! It hurts. It singes… My cheeks are feverish… What cruel horror is hidden In the name of Hippolytus!

In stanza one, the Russian actually finds the hurt [bolit] within the sound of the proper name, something the translation cannot convey: Ippolit! Ippolit! Bolit! Here, as many times below in the poem, sentences fail on suspension dots, and fire is the figure for bodily conflagration, lust not disguised but declared and redoubled in the saying (“An inflamed mare comes galloping / Like a red wound,” lines 19-20). The last stanza is reduced to a line, “Hippolytus, soothe me…”; and that line is reduced to two words (Ippolit, utali…), each of three syllables, rhyming. She asks at the end, as throughout, for soothing from Hippolytus, but soothing means release of impossible sexual tension in the animal act. In the body of the poem, the speaker can hardly get through a full sentence or line without breaking off to

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change direction or to return to the accusatory and supplicatory naming of her auditor, a name that is flooding her consciousness. As in Sappho’s most famous poem, this is the story of an unchanging state, static except it gets worse as it is prolonged. But this Phaedra’s act of prolonging is itself perversely enjoyed—through proliferation of wounding images (horsefly sting, mare in heat, Harpy, lava), through many re-focusings by cut up lines and sentences, and through jagged punctuation. The original Russian of the last full stanza has that marker of mixed emotion, the “?!” of doubt and insistence, but also six more exclamations and three dash structures, all subdividing four short lines, giving the fullest example of verbalemotional breakdown at the end point. Also like Sappho’s lyric autism: the speaker’s body is not her own, when sentences lack first person pronouns (“Singed by Hippolytus!”), and when body parts operate as their own sentence subjects (“Arms want to enter the earth”). We feel that reading this Phaedra-Tsvetaeva’s utterance, we are near the sources of verbal creativity, where utterances are started and cut in a controlled enactment of disarray, and where images of pain are born out of pain. This is one side of a dialogue, spoken from exile in near-total abandonment of all social circumstances except erotic longing. Tsvetaeva uses the Greek figure to evoke and disguise a modern Russian interiority; she presents a commoner speaking as if she were a queen. 4.5. Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms (1919) In O’Neill’s version, Abbie is brought home as a new stepmother by Ephraim Cabot, the father, and youngest son Eben gives in to her seduction. They have a child together and Cabot thinks the child is his; but Eben sees that the baby stands between him and inheriting the family farm—this issue of real estate and inheritance is a determining one for O’Neill, as for none of the other Phaedras. Abbie, mistaking Eben’s violence of rejection, smothers the baby to regain Eben’s love. The dead child, with the need for the sheriff to come to arrest the mother, is only in O’Neill. He divides his action into three parts, each subdivided into several scenes. In the opening of Part Three, Scene Three, the second-last Scene in the play, harsh truths are being forced into the light.


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The chasm between Euripides-Seneca and O’Neill-Jeffers is almost beyond imagining, but I see two advantages we can get from the scale of this historical divide: first, a lure to explain why some eras have clusters of interest in the Phaedra story, with the correlative question of why large tracts of time pass with no versions—but this I won’t pursue; second, an incentive to mark off the differences between versions of the same story two millennia apart—differences relevant to my current task of defining the 1920s structure of feeling in the United States. With O’Neill-Jeffers we are in the agricultural back country: the American physical setting is important in O’Neill as symbolic nature (those over-shadowing elms) and as inheritable property; and Pacific coastal topography is built into Jeffers’s plot as a sustaining-threatening agency that blights human and animal life with a fire, enhances with the nearby Pacific, provides animals to be cared for and killed, and gives an endless store of images for human emotion. Now we reach stories in English, but what English! In O’Neill the speech heard by the play’s audience is a provincial dialect in its orthography, but these are sounds never heard in any American place except O’Neill’s stage. As outer image of a character’s limitation, this bizarre dialect speech is nonetheless coherent, and pervasive across all speakers; by contrast the italicized stage-settings, as in our passage, are in the standard English of the author and audience. O’Neill is unlike all other writers in the array in this respect: the language of his characters is dense with stereotyped or awkward phrasing (as in Eben’s “old skunk”, “stinkin’ mean”, “by God”, “some day I’ll be a-comin’ back”, all in four lines), and he masks their poverty of speech with dialect sounds and brutality of incident in the plot. Jeffers has his own special speech, an alternation of lyrical landscape writing with utterances long or abrupt, from characters or narrator, that are sometimes fiercely direct, sometimes brilliant with images from the natural world. Also while aware of pre-existing plays, Greek and French, Jeffers like Tsvetaeva writes a storytelling poem. Though all other versions of the Phaedra story use the poetic line as the basic building unit, the unit in O’Neill and Kane is the whole spoken utterance. O’Neill and Kane achieve occasional moments of condensation or marvels of speeded pace, similar to poetic effects, but they are content to work in prose, presumably because of a desire for greater realism, naturalness, and so on. Perhaps they assume that for

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strong affect poetry is played out, lacks resources; unquestionably, they are exchanging one dominant for another dominant, to achieve new kinds of estrangement emotion. So in O’Neill the always-slightly-awkward dialect is a vehicle of estrangement emotion, emphasizing the provincial isolation of the characters, their deep but usually unsubtle feelings of desire for persons and property—and occasionally a vehicle of tamped-down affect in speaker, author, audience, as in the horrible brevity of Abbie’s “Ay-eh,” a New-Englandism entirely inadequate to the fact of baby-murder. The characters find things out and express their intent through a language not efficient or lovely, and like Eben in the lastquoted sentence with its dash-structures, they come up against their own inability to speak even as they keep speaking. They interrupt themselves, speak in partial sentences, incessantly question and exclaim, move into silence or tears. By these speech practices the textual emotion, even when named (as with Abbie: “I hated myself fur doin’ it”), is always in a small way out of focus, flailing at meaning. Previous writers in the array were able to show emotion through a character’s speech and implied gesture. Since stage directions were unknown, or not written, actors figured out what emotions to project through interpreting the text. (If there are stagebusiness directions in the texts we read, usually they are supplied by translators as a guide to readers.) These ancient practices have changed in O’Neill, who tells director, actor, and reader what characters are doing and feeling, so that occasionally it seems the italicized statements about textual emotions will take over: is he writing a novel to accompany his play? Has he put into his own stage directions what he failed to weave into the meaning of speeches? Does he feel that the release from meter has allowed for discursive descriptiveness in this matter of characters’ motives? O’Neill’s signature style is to manipulate his characters as emotion master, telling everyone involved what can’t be conveyed in the inarticulate speech of self-involved farmers. In the passage, we learn from O’Neill’s italics how the woman speaks hysterically while the man responds dully. Her extremity of affect collides with his lack of it, and her gradual recognition and acceptance of what she’s done (“I hated myself”) calls up from him grief mingled with rage. All the emotionterms are stated just before the speeches they are intended to explain;


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so in combination with what characters declare in dialect, cliché, broken syntax, that’s another way O’Neill can show the strong but inaccurate emotions of his imaginary persons. For this playwright, strong emotions in conflict are nearly everything, and he achieves dramatic force both despite and because of the limitations of language. His need to tell as well as show strong emotions helps define the structure of feeling of this play. I think he backdates from 1919 to the 1850s, puts the play’s speech through the provincial grid of dialect, and adds heavy italicized comment on action and tone all for the same reason: to isolate and justify in gesture what is vehement, to see what will happen when characters are put into extreme states. What he wanted from the Phaedra narrative was a laboratory for exploration of desire as such, in the most violent terms he could imagine. In this he did succeed. He was able to use all these imaginative methods to overcome his own formidable failings of speaking-feeling, which are written into the play as incoherent speech and lumbering irony. The story is now in dialect American speech and set in 1850s rural New England, with the king diminished to a family’s father, the state diminished to farm-community policemen, Phaedra renamed Abby as a sexy second wife interested in gaining property. The play’s written in the middle of WWI, as if neither that war nor the Civil War ever took place. The dynastic and mythical elements have thus almost disappeared, but other elements have expanded or been added: the house is now literally a farmhouse under elm trees, and the PhaedraHippolytus figures have an actual child whose provenance is revealed to create the story’s climax in the husband-father’s jealousy. The vast backdrop of the ancient story is only implied in the shape of the action. Isolated American individuals within a divided family, driven by crude passions for sex or money, provide a sufficient but sparse sociality. 4.6. Robinson Jeffers, Cawdor (1926-28) Fera to Cawdor in section XIV, after Cawdor has killed his son because of her lie: this is a dialogic moment in a story that alternates speech with dreams and landscape description, so an equally representative moment could have come from the tracking shot from an eagle’s eye view of Cawdor’s California coastal canyon that ends

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the same section. But Phaedra-Fera, whose name brings the animal up out of the woman, confesses her guilt in a language of landscapeinterfusion very close to what I’m presuming is the author’s habitual speech. I presume this from an authorial aside that comes hundreds of lines later in XIV near the end of the eagle’s-flight aria that ends the section: (But as for me, I have heard the summer dust crying to be born As much as ever flesh cried to be quiet.) (286)

The dialogue between Fera and Cawdor is both gorgeous and raw. Fera speaks first to explain how her stepson Hood, refused her attempt to seduce him: “he died / for that”. Cawdor absorbs her confession impassively. In earlier versions of the story, the encounter of guilty Phaedra and enraged Theseus is avoided by a letter, or by intervention by the Nurse, but Jeffers plainly wants a husband-wife fight. Here Fera has three eloquent and mocking speeches, interrupted by brief comments from Cawdor and the narrator, and by the end she has convinced Cawdor that his murder of Hood, his son, was a terrible error scripted by her: “One boy was honest and so you killed him”. She will, she says, confess because she desires her own “honey-sweet death”: that contradictory phrase is one evidence of her reckless state of emotion as she describes how she tried to tempt her husband’s son with her begging, her body: “I gave him my flesh to eat…”. Here as in many of the other Phaedras, there is the imagery of faces as the outer sign of feelings: “His face distorted itself….writhed like the shining smoke…”. In one of the best lines of the whole narrative poem, in her third speech she connects her longing to the landscape, entirely typical of Jeffers’ own way of relating agent to scene: “I wish the little rivers under the laughing kingfishers in every canyon were / Fire, and my heart not afraid to go down”. One use of the long line, and of a loose elaborating syntax, is to connect the elements in the world of Cawdor—families in isolated communities; the nearness of ecstasy and death in an unforgiving natural world shared by kingfishers, hawks and humans, and of humans both whites and Mexicans; the anomaly of feeling consciousness, desire, love, honor, mockery, faithfulness, jealousy or triumph, in a world of matter of fact that ends for each human being in death. In Jeffers’s narrative, Phaedra-Fera


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doesn’t die, but she is obsessed with death, expends her considerable eloquence and beauty to have it delivered to her, or to others near her. The constitutive elements of this structure of feeling are Greek tragedy generally and all the previous Phaedras, the memory of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, admiration for how character and environment collide in an elemental way on the California coast, the wish to novelize a poem and have the merits of both forms and especially lyric’s direct statement and singing line, and the wish to demonstrate certain truths and strengths even after the moral abyss of World War I. There’s also, I should guess, an exploratory design: to show the malign power of a destructive father, who acts before knowing the truth to destroy his son, because he is jealous and willing to think the worst. That story was always within the Phaedra myth but treated with haste. Given the mid-twenties origin of this work, and the back-dating of the action to 1910, this particular Phaedra is an allegory of a generation that killed off and survived its sons in World War I. Accordingly, this story is named for the father and not for the erring wife or the hunter-wanderer son, and in this version the father shoots his own son. Whatever’s father-centered and nature-setting-centered is emphasized here, and the inherited emphases from the tradition are played down, including reference to any divine sanction for the events. Phaedra is Fera: assimilated to a feral animal, nothing like a queen except in her proud beauty. The story aspires to the cruelty and unconcern of animals, especially free hawks, but human narratives must be drawn into complex social entanglements involving besmirching lusts, so there’s some sympathy for Hood the asexual son who must flee from Fera’s sexual taunts. 4.7. Sarah Kane, Phaedra’s Love (1996) Kane’s scenes are the shortest by far, but her longest, our study-text in Scene Four, contains the encounter between mother and stepson. Nonetheless, even this would play in only a few minutes because the speeches are blunt single sentences. What’s removed is everything to do with affect, so that even if one character says “I love you” this is so stripped of motivation it can only be ironic, especially when the confession quickly turns into barren sex and mortal betrayal.

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I’ve taken my passage from the place in this scene where the verbal exchange phases into a sexual one, because Kane, like only O’Neill in the array, delivers the deed that shadowed this story since Euripides. Her characters—more like named figments—move between emotions of boredom and lust, and when mother and son commit incest it is in the spirit of Hippolytus’s “If we fuck we’ll never talk again” and Phaedra’s “I wanted to see your face when you came” (80, 82). Hippolytus has sex with every named figure of consequence in the play except his father, but including himself and the priest and his mother—also his stepsister, Strophe. From Euripides, where the Chorus spoke odes in the form of Strophe and Antistrophe, we’ve come to this—a royal character named for a stanza, Kane’s most naked form of textual emotion.25 This play’s not in degrees of emotional subtlety, but rather in degrees of emotional brutality. The most notable cues to estrangement emotion are those nine Silences in the stage directions. What occurs in those dead spaces? One comes to know the answer: nothing. The dialogue’s pace is slowed, spaced, but not for intellection, rather for lack of connection, lack of resources. It is all about affectlessness, but not the kind of disconnect between feeling and behaving we’ve seen in O’Neill, where there was hot lust and mutual love between Eben and Abbie, with a new family unit beginning—until the murder of the baby. Kane’s no-affect is philosophical, and related to a postmodern contempt for emotion. In this structure of feeling, the names are archaic and Greek, and the Royals under attack are the Elizabeth II set we know from the tabloids of the 1990s, but the actions are strict logical lessons in what has happened to meaning in a time of exhaustion. Sarah Kane, playwright of the unshockable self, needs a rhetoric that will carry these meanings of no-affect, so her writing’s not distinguished by glamour or skill or complexity; her ordinary language is not as strange as the specialized speech of O’Neill or Jeffers because they and their characters still credit enough of love to be shocked when immemorial rules are violated. The brevity of the play and of each single speech is part of the rhetoric of logic lesson, and so too the punctuation by silences. This is the same mother-stepson dialogue we have seen before in the passages from Seneca, Racine, and Tsvetaeva, though in Tsvetaeva only the stepmother speaks. Phaedra is always aggressor


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and supplicant, making her declaration, but here what’s new (aside from the act of oral sex performed on-stage) is Hippolytus’s attitude and the feeling-tone of the family relationship. In his diffidence, his Beckettian waiting-ethos that makes him the recipient of others’ feelings but the possessor of none of his own except ennui and cruelty, he is plainly no Euripidean woman-hating woodsman. He is a cynical blank script that others wish to fill with their assumptions, and he knows it; he’s the bland commentator on Phaedra’s statements: “Not very logical…. That’s not the word exactly.” Phaedra speaks of her love for him, analyzes his special state (“You’re in pain”), propositions him for sex, but for him sex is equivalent to watching TV and eating sweets: at the end of this passage he’s engaged in all three at the same time. For him sex will shorten by a moment of forgetfulness the life he abhors but cannot end by himself. This is typical of his mind: “Getting dark thank Christ day’s nearly over.” He needs to wear out time by any meretricious means, so for him oral sex with his stepmother is worth a good minute. For her the meaning is greater, has something to do with “love,” that unexplained term from the play’s title, but the passage ends with her expressing emotion by crying and Hippolytus explaining “Mystery over.” The mystery of sex with a stepson violating the taboo against adultery and incest is really just another brief act: Hippolytus’s “thank Christ” as a vacant epithet, and his “Mystery over” as a denial of sin, are acknowledgements that his world is now fully open, without constraints but also without meaning. Because Phaedra’s Love is ironic, absurd, hollowed-out, and in the act grubby and degrading, the play is really about Hippolytus and the exhaustion of value. The effect is of severe critique of all forms of sociallyconstrained traditional mystery, as imaged in the phoniness of Phaedra’s Love as leading instance. Despite the fact of corpses littering the stage at the end, this Phaedra is really a satire. This one is not, like the others in the array, a tragedy. Kane’s corpses are not ideals, which after Ibsen and Brecht have been long chased off the Western stage, but rather the last of the forbidden deeds, the most deeply rooted—incest even more deeply mystified than adultery, as Kane knows because that’s why she took Phaedra’s story to re-do for her meditation. End of era; end of millennium; end of her life: she intends nothing less than the rooting out of incest as sin. The

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characters in this play have no shame, and if they have any illusions of family, aristocracy, nation, the people, these are stripped by play’s end. But the audience may still have hang-ups and shame, a sense of mystery, a belief in love and fidelity, and the purpose of the satire is to make the audience ashamed of shame itself. So this isn’t satire in the service of conservative or any other values, as in Pope or Swift or Byron; this is satire whose purpose is the disembarrassment of value as such, thus of emotion. The new structure of feeling that the play points toward is a structure of no feeling. What would the British monarchy be like if that family had total economic and sexual power over others, in an era of late-capitalist media culture? They would be like these nearly inarticulate nasty people with automatic desires and no love, and with contempt for the rest of the nation. Sarah Kane finds in the core story, from Euripides, every possibility of dark action and stark language, and she uses these potentially tragic elements for satiric purposes. Of all the works studied here, the one most absolute with the emotional-volitional tone of bloodymindedness—of being past feeling because the speaker or character has seen everything, burnt through to the other side of life while still remaining alive—is the most recent. Kane’s play ends with testicles on a barbecue, incest-rape, and other grand guignol events. The only defense of the play is that the author is piling on insults to her characters and to the audience, as the most severe warning: Don’t Be Like This. Consistency of tone and action is all, so the warning, if there is one, has to be rigidly excluded from the utterance. To be most effective at In Yer Face drama is to choke any whisper of a hint that there might be a concession to preaching, or admission of joy. 5. Working with Tautologies “Structures of feeling,” Raymond Williams’s term, is a paradox and so is my term “estrangement emotion.” The story of Phaedra is owned by seven authors, but also through these terms and in this retelling by Williams—and by me. Paradoxes are vulnerable; so are tautologies. How turn these into speculative instruments so to make the most of the limits of our thinking, in this case the admittedly long chain of mediations between works and eras? Having arrived at a paradox near the end of the


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previous section—the feeling of no feeling, a thought tangled in a thought—I’m reminded of the weakness and possible strength of this story of one story. As to possible strength: one of my continuing tales, or themes, has been the narrative of the dominant emotion of lust, which has carried with it surprise, anger, horror, grief, and other violent emotions. Within that tale, there was a development in the Hippolytus figure who recoiled from Phaedra’s proposal in the ancient writers and in Racine, but who gave in to a stepmother’s sexual approaches in O’Neill and Kane. The Hippolytus figure in Jeffers’s long poem made a valuable 20th century exception, because there Hood was a total reversion to the woodsman who flees women in Euripides: plainly Jeffers was attracted to this side of the myth, and his text nicely disrupts any plan to see the modern or American era the time of compliant males. This line ended most emphatically in Kane, where lust and incest have become routine, thus no longer transgressive or even thinkable. (Remember, though, that at the end of the Euripides play non-violent emotions prevail when father and son are reconciled by a Goddess; and that at the end of the Jeffers long poem the characters that remain are aged and exhausted, beyond any vehemence, certainly past anything like lust.) Another of my tales has been the narrative of tragedy as a genre, its relation to ideas of divinity and to violent death, its exploration of transgression in Phaedra and error in Theseus, its diversion into nearby channels of lyric and satiric emotion. Apparently tragedy—like emotion, like story—is a concept sufficiently loose and baggy to contain many elements, contradictory elements, and it requires multiple framing devices and a historical approach. (Remember, though, that it is a constellated concept or we would not attempt to define it or tell its history or argue about its decline: tragedy like emotion and story is finally one thing persisting across eras, selves and examples, in this case identifiable as a sequence of events that threatens to destroy persons and ideas of value.) Now as to possible weakness: in the account of the array, I’ve brought expositions of estrangement emotion into frequent contact with claims about the several historical structures of feeling. The story of my story has been the justification of Williams’s term, through encounter with dated documents and also through encounter with

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conventions of style and dramaturgy. I admitted that the works being studied were not sufficient representatives of their eras. However, since I knew, or gained from experts, something about both specific passages and specific eras, I did work back and forth between the form of the text and things everyone knows about the historical moments. I tried to recruit, and integrate, ideas from the one with ideas from the other. The story of one story over time has to be highly redundant, if you accept it as a single story. Like Marxists and New Historicists before me, indeed like anyone who wants to do historical work, I am open to the charge of tautology. In logic, a tautology is a needless repetition of the same idea in different words, and in literary arguments it is often a matter of finding the evidences you need in the materials you’ve chosen to use. In my array, the poems and plays are singular, weak evidences of the eras in which they are written, and what I’ve gathered about the eras can stand as partial evidences about why these writings do what they do. My textual evidence comes from the stories themselves, which I have presented through commentaries on selected scenes of some length; I also find a form of evidence in comments by scholars and interpretations by translators. My historical explanations come from dates and cultural descriptions of eras that anyone might have in a store of general knowledge. But there will never be sufficient evidence to describe even one literary work exhaustively in its historical context, and here are seven. Let’s look at the structure of the tautology I’ve created. How is emotion a tautology? How is Phaedra? Is it because emotion-scenes become evidences of changing ideas of emotion, in this case the one emotion of Phaedra’s lust? Historical continuity of the emotion-term and structural sameness in the plays might lead others to consider that the input is equal to the output, so no knowledge is being produced. Since I do not want a loose universal, like Williams I would split and exploit the tautology. Further questions would emerge. For instance, could the sameness contain slippages, inequalities, growth or regress over time, re-descriptions? Would it be valuable to notice the increasing emergence of the Phaedra character in the story of this story? To notice that in the plays of O’Neill and Kane the theme of desire is pulled up to the play’s title? To notice that Marina Tsvetaeva has in her poems made a condensation, from Euripides and Racine, of


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the ecstatic mood in Phaedra’s monologues? To notice that the 20th century plays in the array are the only ones that make a major issue of the lack of affect? Yes to all the above; by making connections and correlations, both local and cultural, we pack the tautology with details. Estrangement emotion is not only on the written pages of another era and culture, but also in the mind of the reader today. Structures of feeling are to be viewed now under the attribute of estrangement emotion, now under the attribute of historical hypotheses; sometimes a single character’s speech, a single scholar’s discussion, can cover both attributes in the same space. Emotions are explained by adaptations or judgments or beliefs or intentions that are imposed to give them measurable meaning, only in so far as those reckonings are understood to be ideas of these affections, not the affections of the body.26 The story of a story is not a summary or a diagram but a shape cut in time containing eventful, directive images of persons in conflict. Phaedra and tragedy are in their instances but they are also permanent categories of the Western mind. 1

While drafting this chapter, I read Marianne McDonald’s book, The Living Art of Greek Tragedy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), who takes more than a third of her study to pursue the legacy of Euripides: she covers all the accounts of Hippolytus/Phaedra that I cover, and several others, with commentary that describes actual theatrical performances. I am grateful to Marianne McDonald for informing me about Sarah Kane’s version and its disguised intent as a satire directed against the British royal family; Summer Neilson Moshy gave to me and my class on Kane’s Phaedra play many new ideas about the intent of In Yer Face drama. With J. W. Walton, Marianne McDonald has co-edited Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002), with a valuable essay by Richard Cave, “’After Hippolytus’: Irish Versions of Phaedra’s Story”. When my draft was completed as a historical-critical essay, I found another study of the Phaedra myth based on the Racine play and raising issues of the paradox of the human being, with reference to Levinas and Heidegger: Simon Critchley’s article “I Want to Die, I hate my Life—Phaedra’s Malaise”, is a philosophical inquiry into authenticity, with a coda on the Wooster Group’s recent dramatization of Phèdre and on Kane’s cruel play (in the Rethinking Tragedy issue of New Literary History 35,1 (Winter 2004): 17-40. Another limited survey, this time of versions of Racine’s play in English in the last generation (including Robert Lowell’s), is Patrick Crutwell, “Six Phaedras in Search of One Phèdre”, Delos: A Journal on & of Translation, vol. 2 (Austin, TX: National Translation Center, 1968): 198-211. 2 There are 135 emotion-names according to the chart of the American Psychological Association.

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George Steiner, Antigones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Other books that pursue changes over time of core stories are: Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho 1546-1937 (University of Chicago Press, 1989); Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, editors, Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 2002); and Marianne McDonald’s Living Art of Greek Tragedy (see note 1). I should also mention, for its resonance, in its sphere, with what I am doing, Hung Q. Tu’s book of political poems in Language-School-related free verse, Structures of Feeling (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2003); and the announcement of a 2005 Program in the symposium series of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA), entitled “Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression”. The brochure for the Clark Library symposium has these sentences: “Like Michel Foucault and others, Williams regards ‘feelings’ as phenomena shaped by culture and therefore as crucial elements of the historical record. But how do we go about studying such ephemeral qualities when the people who embodied them lived 400 years ago?” So scholarship too must evoke emotions of imaginary persons. 4 The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965): 64, 65. 5 Williams returns to the 1840s to phrase it this way, in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 134. 6 Marxism and Literature, 133. 7 Perry Anderson and colleagues from New Left Review press hard, but tactfully, in their interviews with Williams; their colloquy on “structure of feeling” occurs in Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: NLB and Verso Books, 1981), 156-168. Anderson asks how Williams would delimit a generation as a period, how the concept structure of feeling “can be articulated to a plurality of classes,” and whether the structure of feeling is more or less accessible in the temporal present of the analyst. Williams clarifies that his concept really emerges from and returns to the analysis of works of verbal art as crystallizations of historical era; and that the concept is best employed, in his opinion, to show how the official meanings of one epoch lose force when another epoch and structure of feeling struggle into existence. Williams’s best warning to me in my own use of his concept comes when he writes: “Yet it can be objected that the notion illegitimately infers from this range of evidence the existence of a structure which is much wider and is unexpressed” (158). 8

Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003): 9. 9

Nanapush, Native American shaman narrator of Louise Erdrich’s novel Four Souls (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) has another metaphor: “The coughball of an owl is a packed lump of everything the bird can’t digest—bones, fur, teeth, claws, and nails. An owl tears apart its catch, gulps it down whole, and nourishes itself on blood and flesh. The residue, the indissolvable, fuses. In the small, light, solid pellet, the frail skull of a finch, femur of a mouse, cleft necklace of vertebrae, seed-fine teeth, gray gopher and rabbit fur. A perfect compression of being. What is the essence, the soul? my Jesuit teachers used to ask their students. What is the irreducible? I answer, what the owl pukes. That is also the story—what is left after the events in all their juices and chaos are reduced to the essence. The story—all that time does not digest” (71).


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Because of the diminishment from multiple gods to one and because even the one seems to disappear, these references to divinity could be marshaled not as signs of persistence but of profound change of belief, across my array of structures of feeling. What I have just said could be repeated below in my list of changes over time. My reason for keeping this topic here: tragic stories require a transcendental origin or point of recourse, as explanation of and limit upon the action, even though (as Kierkegaard and others say) the action itself in this genre must remain for the most part within the ethical sphere. 11 Sarah Kane, “Phaedra’s Love”, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001): 102103. 12 Publishing considerations preclude taking space with scene-length passages that are usually 2-3 pages long. For purposes of following and checking, the reader has full citations for texts used. I’ll identify the sources below in this Note, along with the exact passages being described. The sources and passages are: 1.) Euripides, Hippolytus, translated by David Grene, in Greek Tragedies, Volume 1, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1968): 289-91—from the speech of Theseus, “Would that it was I who was dying instead of you!” to the end of the play: Epilogue, lines 1410-1466; 2.) Seneca, Phaedra, translated with an introduction by Frederick Ahl (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986): 73-75, Act II, lines 635-688, starting with speech of Hippolytus, “Tell me, what is the evil troubling you?”; 3.) Jean Racine, Phèdre. For the original French I have used the edition with Notes by Anne Autiquet (Paris: Hachette, 2002), which conforms to the standard Gallimard edition of 1951-1952, reedited 1999; for the English version: Jean Racine, Phèdre, translated by Margaret Rawlings (New York: Penguin Books, 1961, 1989): for II, 4, pages 85, 87, and for V, 7, pages 165, 167, 169 on the English side of the French-English facing-text edition; 4.) Marina Tsvetaeva, “Phaedra,” from the facing text edition, After Russia=Posle Rosii, translated by Michael M. Naydan with Slava Yastremski; edited and annotated by Michael M. Naydan (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1992); 5.) Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms, in The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1955): 259261—Part Three, Scene Three, partial, from the italicized scene setting, “Just before dawn in the morning,” to Eben’s speech, “Ye lie! I never said—I never dreamed ye’d—I’d cut off my head afore I’d hurt his finger.” 6.) Robinson Jeffers, Cawdor from Selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): pages 278-279—36 lines onward from Fera’s speech “Hood refused me”. 7.) Sarah Kane, Phaedra’s Love in Sarah Kane: Complete Plays, introduced by David Grieg (London: Methuen Publishing, Ltd., 2001): pages 78-81—from Hippolytus, “Why don’t you go and talk to Strophe?” to Hippolytus, “There. Mystery over. / [Silence].” 13 My comment relies on things learned from H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study ([1939, 1950] Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, N.D.); Albert Cook, Enactment: Greek Tragedy (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1971); JeanPierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, translated by Janet Lloyd ([1972] Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, MIT Press, 1990). Marianne McDonald writes, in personal communication: “the gods in Euripides [are

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immoral]….Two young innocents downed by a goddess’s jealousy…. In Aeschylus [and Sophocles] there’s a gesture towards divine ethics [but] by the time of Euripides with his complete disillusionment with the Peloponnesian War and its self-serving violations of any notion of justice, the gods are even more unjust than men and have more power. Witness [Hippolytus]…the goddesses cannot forgive, but the humans do”. 14 My comment on Seneca relies on things learned from the introductory materials in Seneca: Phaedra , translated and introduced by Frederick Ahl (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986); from Charles Segal, Language and Desire in Seneca’s Phaedra (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); and from the Introduction by editor and translator John G. Fitch to Seneca VIII: The Tragedies, The Loeb Classical Library 62 (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2002). 15 Proust comments on the play and its turn-of-the-century acting tradition in his essay “On Reading,” and also here and there in his novel. Jean-Louis Barrault: Phèdre de Jean Racine, mise en scène et commentaries de Jean-Louis Barrault (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1946). Roland Barthes: On Racine, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Octagon Books [FSG], 1977), with separate chapters on traditions in Racinian acting (“Racine Spoken”) and commentary (“History or Literature?). Lucien Goldmann: The Hidden God: A study of tragic vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the tragedies of Racine, translated by Philip Thody (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and New York: Humanities Press, 1964; also Racine, translated by Alastair Hamilton, with an introduction bv Raymond Williams (Cambridge, UK: Rivers Press, 1972). 16 From II, 5. To show in a small instance how the couplet form might be brought into English, here is the Robert Lowell translation: Robert Lowell, Racine’s Phaedra (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1971): 43. 17 From II,5. Rhymed original and blank verse translation from Phèdre by Jean Racine, translated by Margaret Rawlings (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); 86, 87. In the Rawlings version, much of the sense is carried across into English, but the loss of the rhymed couplets means the loss of an emotional-volitional tone of nobility, elegance, buildup of pressure due to terrible constraint. For comparison: Lowell’s tooexplicitly-sexual rhymed version of the end of this speech appears above in the Preface. 18 Rawlings translation (Penguin, 1961, 1989): 167, 169. 19 Gilles Revaz, La représentation de la monarchie absolue dans le théâtre racinien: Analyses Socio-discursives (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1998): 176. Goldmann, however, thinks the king’s last speech is still necessary: “in order to remind the universe that God—who sees the essence of things—the real corpse is not off-stage, with the body of Phaedra. It is there, standing before them, in the presence of the king who is going to reign and govern the State” (The Hidden God: 391). 20 Goldmann, Racine (1972): “Authentic humanity was incarnated for him by the persecuted and the rebels…. Racine…united in his work the two principal characteristics of all progressive literature—implacable realism and the defense of oppressed innocence” (102). By realism, not here a literary term, Goldmann


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apparently means the ability to refuse the compromises of the world, when we define world as social and political. 21 Lucien Goldmann, Racine (1972): 6-7. 22 This is Fredric Jameson’s respectful reservation in essays of the 1970s and in The Political Unconscious; and Roland Barthes permits himself one sentence of complaint on the topic in the survey-of-scholarship chapter at the end of On Racine: “Even Goldmann, careful as he is to multiply the stages between the work and the thing signified, yields to the analogical postulate: Pascal and Racine belonging to a politically disappointed group, their vision of the world will reproduce that disappointment, as if the writer had no other power than to copy himself literally” (169). Gilles Revaz, consciously in opposition to Goldmann, argues that Racine was one of those who “tried to conciliate in their discourse Jansenism with power” (242). 23 More recent evidence of this comes from the Wooster Group’s production of “To You, the Birdie (Phèdre)” in Brooklyn in 2002—a condensed adaptation by Paul Schmidt that, according to the review in The New York Times, required “the simulated administration of enemas onstage”, the use of badminton as a mocking of the games the queen has to play (politics, love) with Venus calling the faults, constant presence of courtiers to restrict any idea of privacy or interior life, videotape on “a screen that covers the lower parts of the performers’ bodies, dividing characters into flesh and image”. Plainly the Wooster Group has been reading Barthes on the kinds of distance needed to suggest “everything from the self-alienating effects of passion to the ways Baroque-era France looked at classical Greece”. “Racine’s Pale Queen, Forever Struggling,” by Ben Brantley, The New York Times Living Arts Section B1 (Tuesday, February 19, 2002). 24 Osip Mandelstam has a 1915 poem about Racine that begins with the line, “Ia ne uvizhu znamenitoi Fedry” [I won’t see the famous Phaedra…]. The Phaedra myth was read with attention in the Mandelstam-Tsvetaeva circle in the years before the Revolution, on the evidences of Gregory Freidin in his book A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Freidin titles an entire chapter “Le Nouvel Hippolite and Phaedra-Russia: 1915-1916.” 25 Marianne McDonald in private communication: “Strophe and Antistrophe…turning, and turning back…and what better name than ‘the twister’ for a daughter who consistently betrays her mother by sleeping with her mother’s consort (suggested earlier in the play) and her brother”. 26 As supreme recognizer and splitter of tautologies, Spinoza says this.

Afterword: A Role for Literature When we unlink my title’s terms, literary and emotions go back to their original contexts and each enters a wide sphere of meaning. Emotion’s role in the economy of the person is relational and regulative. We get help in defining emotion, when we try to understand how changes occur, in direction and intensity and from state to state, in a person’s life. Literature’s role in the economy of emotion-studies is to give examples of how these states get put into writing, read back from written stories of lives. It helps to define literature to see what it might contribute to other disciplines in this emergent field. When we recombine the terms for the purpose of this book’s argument, we drag with them those wider contexts. Then, not without contradictions and loose ends, we fold together the contexts to make a new module. The reason cognitivism ultimately fails is that perception and immediate judgment are always surrounded by something more, an emotional relation to reality. This emotional relation arises for good evolutionary reasons—it conduces to survival, and to flourishing— but it also occurs because of the physiology of the brain, which is the inscribed map of the body and its emotions. Until recently, we’ve missed out on existence as an affective relation to the way the world is: an affective relation to other persons, to objects, and to the way things feel in general. However, affect is now on the agenda. Twentieth century philosophers—Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Binswanger—have shown how affect is Being, how affect is produced around things. Affective grounding is the fundamental, permanent relation to reality. I went forth in this book with the claim that feeling is a chord that moves transversely through the structure of civil society, through all discourse public and intimate, through singing and speaking to the self—from the self. That was an attempt to try out, from the start, what might happen under the premise of non-dualism. Insofar as the claim was historical it was assertive, since this book’s assignments

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have been more cognitive than historical even though one chapter, on Phaedras, has a historical spine. Insofar as the claim was cognitive while eschewing cognitivism, I’ve spoken as a scholarly magpie gathering details from clinicians, like Antonio R. Damasio, and from their interpreters in the academy. The argument about emotion-asrelation begins at the reach and measure of the human senses, but of course once you’ve got that reach you can take your science to the outer margins of the universe. Our tacit knowing maps the world onto the body, and the body, with its emotional centers, has been already mapped “on the brain’s surface as through it had been drawn on” (Rita Carter).1 What’s distinguishable in thought is united in proprioception, and in brain-physiology. “The most undeniable thing there is, our own awareness, would be forever beyond our conceptual grasp. But if our minds are a part of nature, that is to be expected, even welcomed” (Stephen Pinker).2 “We mistakenly equate emotionality with the primitive and rationality with the advanced, but in fact the more intelligent the animal, the deeper its passions” (Natalie Angier).3 So why and when did human beings need the dualthinking that distinguishes brain from scene, thinking from feeling; and what might be the means of reuniting these entities and these forces within the person, in a second non-duality?4 It would help if students of emotion, including those who work in neuro-anatomy and neuro-philosophy, admitted that emotion’s historical and social.5 It would help if students of emotion allowed that literature, without its own special language, models something about complex emotion states more successfully than other fields—their inability to be coded by cognitivist theory or by digital networks or information technologies. By the ordinary means of conventions of enactment, literature assesses complex phenomena without a code of practice. Robert Frost once said that poetry’s the only art that contains within its language the way you get to judge it. We might judge with it, too. As parting gesture of collaborative critique, I’d urge a role for literature in supplementing the discourse of a neuro-psychologist, a sociologist, and a philosopher. Clinician Joseph LeDoux has devoted much of his life to the study of fear, a primary emotion that arises, in its main manifestations, in the amygdala. This research plan has influenced his book, The Emotional Brain (1998), for while he ends with a hope for reunifying of cognition and emotion, most of the study puts the case


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for emotions as not just oppositional but disruptive.6 “While conscious control over emotions is weak, emotions can flood consciousness” (19); and this is part of survival, part of unity with and in the world, and not a failure or dis-proportion unless we think of it that way. LeDoux states, correctly, that the wiring of the brain’s stronger from emotions to cognitive systems, rather than from cognitive systems to emotions; he assumes two systems and an inevitable opposition, without explaining why. For him it’s a matter of control versus non-control. He doesn’t speak, as Aristotle does, of how we can feign control by using one system to help or hinder the other. He’s not interested in how the arts might re-instate a balance and proportion. “The proper level of analysis of a psychological function,” LeDoux states, “is at the level at which that function is represented in the brain” (16); that may be true for neuro-anatomy, but for literature the proper level of analysis is whatever yields interesting claims in the re-evocation of reading performance. “Emotions are things that happen to us rather than things we will to occur” (119), LeDoux claims, but literary authors and readers are constantly willing the re-occuring of emotion-states in imaginary persons. He doesn’t account for pre-enactment, either, or for faking an emotion, or for experiencing an emotion in art that we’ve never experienced first in life.7 For Niklas Luhmann in Social Systems (1984), world is an “ultimate concept” that stands as a frame for thinking about the really interesting entities that subdivide below itself: “We employ the concept of a world as a concept for the unity of the difference between system and environment and use it as an ultimate concept, one free of further differences.”8 So world is ungraspable and is not an imagined space in which one can go forth; environment is a term in theory for the outside of a social system; person is “sustained by the corpus mysticum of the subject” and by the “empirical plausibility” of daily life, which are merely superficial frames (Instead of a Preface, xliv). Attempting to blast sociology out of a theory crisis, Luhmann imagines a new level of working in the mental space above persons and groups and below the phenomenally given world. He seeks a way to think about fractical division of un-named social systems, and about the way those systems describe themselves from the inside. For him environment does not mean the phenomenally given world, or what others like Anglo-American nature writers would call the

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natural world; it’s the surround of a social system. For him, emotions are always in the plural and always threats to the systems they intrude into: “Given the conceptual foundation of an autopoeisis based on consciousness, it is easy to gain access to a sphere of problems that until now have proved quite difficult for sociology (and therefore have hardly been treated), namely, the world of emotions. Emotions arise and grip body and consciousness when the autopoeisis of consciousness is in danger” (274). Easy! But Luhmann doesn’t pursue the plan he’s proposed here, except to say emotions are unstable because they die away, they “seem to assume an immunizing role for the psychic system,” and their variegation into distinct forms is something that comes “secondarily” because it’s socially conditioned (274-5). Psychic systems are messier than social systems, so they can’t fit as easily into this theory, a point tactfully raised against Luhmann in a conversation he had with (literary scholar) Katherine Hayles.9 Niklas Luhmann is forever right to say to theorists: do not dualize, problematize! But immediately after saying that, without ever advancing the literary thinking I’ve tried in this essay, he comes up with this question: “how [can one] build the difference between system and environment into the self-description of a social system that acquires information potential via reduction to connections between actions[?]. In brief, how can one, by reducing complexity, increase the complexity that can be apprehended?” (171) One answer to this, not given by Luhmann, is to try the powers of narrative, storytelling—of history, literature. For John McDowell in his lectures on Mind and World (1994), we might increase the complexity that can be apprehended, by methods unusually sympathetic to literary thinking.10 His methods are direct realism and a quietism in philosophy—an attempt to dissolve dualisms, so to reduce the problems in his field. The basic position, if I understand him, is that the world is out there, necessarily and verifiably, and any philosophy that’s solely devoted to world or to mind is at fault. His key concept is spontaneity, a term he finds in Hegel and defines with Hegel as a capacity for responsiveness; spontaneity is interior, conceptual, but allows the impingement of the world on our sensibility: “we can effect this deletion of the outer boundary without falling into idealism, without slighting the independence of reality” (Lecture II, 34). McDowell’s advantage over literary scholars is a technical language, a full sense of the positions


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taken on mind and world in his sub-field, a debater’s fluency of style for the handling of tricky distinctions. He’s single-minded: eschews all ideas of mind except his own; makes no reference, for example, to neuro-anatomical studies of the brain. In responding to him, our advantage could be that mind for us includes emotions. This must influence the definition of world as well. His neglect of emotion limits his idea of agency and of the relations he theorizes, including his idea of perception as the hinge or enabler of mind-world connections.11 McDowell, who hates “intuitions without concepts” (87), mentions the idea of a Brain-in-a-Vat with some show of horror (17n), but there is in his book some trend in that direction, because he is a cognitivist for whom world is a value to be gestured at, not loved or evoked, and for whom reason dominates agency and spontaneity. As is the way with a discourse of such severity, the book lacks examples, descriptions, lists, re-tellings, metaphors—those devices where affect might come in, had it not been fended off. The one emotion McDowell admits, this his quietism, is the anxiety he has to bring peace to this topic and to his profession, by dissolving dualisms. * Going forth beyond the confines of this book, how might I secure some common ground between workers on emotion—a nonduality of disciplines? Psychologists and philosophers, whether cognitivists like Martha C. Nussbaum or gut-feeling theorists like William James and his adherents, have tended to write about states as if the emotions have just been experienced in their full original force. Such an analysis can trace origins and follow the manifestations in and on the body, and the results in action. This practice makes sense, though it assumes very early that the emotion can be identified and named, and that it usually arrives unmixed with other kinds of feelings. Literary students of emotion can only marvel at this way of proceeding, and learn from it, but our practice is different, and will psychologists and philosophers learn from us? They take emotions as single events, unhistorical and non-social, and as purely physiological or judgmental as may be, because that reductionism cleans up the scene of study. Literary emotion is differently packaged and unpackaged, because works of verbal art are already full sequences of states: stories, no matter what the genre may be. So literary emotions

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are already social and historical, and since they’re locked into a notation, they’re always repeatable. You can, in literature, get the emotion again in the same form; and it never changes, unless you change the questions you ask and the way you ask them, as you read. In literature, more emotions are named more often than readers realize, and the only way to register this is literally to circle the emotion-words as we read; but other states are mixtures or obscure, without names, and require interpretation case by case, sequence by sequence. Beyond acting as a store of examples, literature could now have a more direct role, based on what this practice is and does. As a constant reminder of the necessity of paying attention to emotion before, in, and after writing, literary works can give force to tendencies in other fields. The action and status of literature will support whatever’s post-cognitive, whatever’s person-and-bodyrelated, whatever’s attentive to stories in time, whatever opposes bloody-mindedness with generosity, whatever beckons from language to world. Think again of Denis Diderot and the paradox of the stage actor, who plays but doesn’t experience the feelings in the script, night after night. The actor knows what joy or sorrow look like, sound like, and the actor recreates an image of a state that’s believable enough in the moment. Knowing in advance the actor can practice to perform. Because he or she has seen the script, the actor can remember and can also anticipate; both actions build up associational grooves. That script stands for all of writing. Spontaneity is an imitation of a first-time event; expectation is never innocent or unprepared. The posture of literary scholarship, as of performance in all its varieties, is a willed facing-forth into the future. Emotions are relations, lines of linkage between ourselves and reality. The joys and sorrows of imaginary persons are scripts for actors, ourselves, who are practicing to give, sympathize, and control their lives in the world.


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Tacit knowing, as a fundamental power of mind, is Michael Polanyi’s term: “The Logic of Tacit Inference (1964)”, Knowing and Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); he writes: “The theory of tacit knowing establishes a continuous transition from the natural sciences to the study of the humanities” (156). Rita Carter’s phrase comes from Mapping the Mind (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998): 31. 2 Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997): 565. Pinker also writes: “A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others…. Our bafflement at the mysteries of the ages may have been the price we paid for a combinatorial mind that opened up a world of words and sentences, of theories and equations, of poems and melodies, of jokes and stories, the very things that make a mind worth having” (565). 3 Natalie Angier, Woman: an Intimate Biography (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999): 198. Angier further writes: “The greater the intelligence, the greater the demand on emotions, the portmanteaus of information, to expand their capacity and multiply their zippers and compartments. We impugn emotions, but we are lucky to be so thick with them. They give us something to think about and decode. We are brilliant because of them, not in spite of them. Hormones are part of the suitcase, and they are part of the contents” (198). 4 In several books since the early 1990s, Bruno Latour has argued: in order to constitute a secular physical science in the late 17th century, thinkers and experimentalists prised apart thought and things, and this helped the immense leap of science and technology in the centuries that followed. But the agreement has now outlived its use and we must get back in thought to the point before we were modern in this particular way—we do this by abolishing the culture-nature division and by acting as if the world’s full of quasi-objects: things charged, in my Bakhtinian phrasing, with emotional-volitional tone. That’s Latour’s story of how we might come to a nondualism in our era. 5 For emotions as social and incidentally for an account of why it took so long to realize that they are, I recommend a philosopher’s lively and lucid study: Paul Dumouchel, Emotions: essai sur le corps et le social (Institut Synthélabo: 1999). 6 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988). Ian Hacking reviews this with a different set of reservations in “By What Link are the Organs Excited?”: Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1998: 11-12. 7 Stephen Pinker, with the wider reach of a philosophical linguist, can say: “Knowledge… throws up the paradox that knowers are acquainted with things that have never impinged upon them…”: How the Mind Works: 565. 8 Niklas Luhmann, Social Structures, translated by John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995; first German edition 1984): 208. 9 “Theory of a Different Order: A Conversation with Katherine Hayles and Niklas Luhmann”, in Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation by William Rasch (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000): 172-173. Hayles said: “To me, it’s essential to talk about the observer in terms that would take account of these positional and locative factors as well as the theoretical question of how it is that we can know the world.”

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John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994). 11 In a respectful but critical book devoted to McDowell, Sandra M. Dingli finds that his denial of non-conceptual content doesn’t comport with his acceptance of direct realism (her Ch. 3 and 6), and she discusses the possibility of “incorporating Heideggerian elements into McDowell’s picture” (187). Heidegger emphasizes “in” when he proposes a being-in-the-world: his acceptance of “the practical manner in which human beings relate to the world in their everyday purposeful activity, which includes both skilful and intellectual coping” (Dingli, 178-9), “points toward a direction where the traditional distinction… between subjectivity and objectivity is no longer valid or necessary and can therefore be considered as meaningless” (Dingli, 185). For these reasons McDowell should be read along with Heidegger and along with his commentator and corrector: Sandra M. Dingli, On Thinking and the World: John McDowell’s Mind and World (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005).

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Index actor, theories of the, 32-33, 46 n. 14, 90, 105, 198 alternation, poetic device of, 95-96 Altieri, Charles, 15, 36 Alzheimer’s disease, 75, 80 Angier, Natalie, 194, 199 apostrophe, as literary device, 79-80, 84 n. 15 Aristotle, 15, 16, 17, 34, 38, 43, 88, 90, 91, 92, 100, 103, 106, 161, 195 Ashbery, John, 74 attention, defined, 89 author, as one of the persons in the text, 29-32, 41, 89 autism, literary, 52-55; lyric, 55-58; new theories of, 112, n. 2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18-19; 24, 28, 41, 42, 48 n. 18, 49-50, 76, 134 Barthes, Roland, 123, 144, 151-152, 155, 171, 173-174 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 166, 170-171 Bateson, Gregory, 28 Bayley, John, 56 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron, 25 Bergson, Henri, 194 Bernstein, Charles, 55, 57-58 Binswanger, Ludwig, 194 Blake, William, 54, 57 brain research, recent, 15, 67, 80, 85, 194-195 Brooke, Nicholas, 105 Brooks, Rodney, 51 Brown, Dan, 66 Brown, Marshall, 67 Carter, Rita, 80, 194 catharsis, 90-91, 151 Celan, Paul, 55, 56-57, 78-80 cognition, in relation to affect, 89, 194-195 cognitivism, school in psychology and philosophy, 15, 17, 61, 85, 193 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 24, 50-51 Cook, Albert, 155 Culler, Jonathan, 132

218

Index

Damasio, Eugenio, 15, 130, 194 Darwin, Charles, 129, 147 definition, the, as a literary form, 125, 126 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 36, 93-94 de Man, Paul, 74, 111 Descartes, 15, 61, 81, 146 description, as a mode of literary emotion, 138-139 Dickinson, Emily, 124-127 Diderot, 32-33, 198 Dingli, Sandra M., 200 Eagleton, Terry, 42, 148 Ekman, Paul, 129 Elias, Norbert, 24 Eliot, George, 13-14 Eliot, T. S., 71-72, 75, 76 Else, Gerald F., 90-91 emotion: estrangement emotion, reading for, 36-41, 47, 65-67, 73-74, 111, 124, 133141, 142, 144, 159; imaginary, 38-40, 103; names of, as evidence of inner states, 14, 35-36, 49, 69-71, 87, 88-89, 103, 144, 178-179, 187; states, narrative of, 62, 64-65, 105, 133-141, 148. See also: feeling, discourse of; relation, category of; structure of feeling emotion-study, role of literature in, 15-21, 49-51, 61-69, 193-198 emotional knowledge, 41-44 emotional-volitional tone, 18-19, 49-50, 86, 117, 184 Empson, William, 73, 111 Euripides, 153, 162-163 explanations, 64, 81 n. 1 feeling, discourse of, 18, 19-21, 24-25, 26, 70, 145, 193; commoditization of, 16; floods of, 20-21, 63, 122 Ford, Ford Maddox, 122-123 Forrest-Thomson, Victoria, 73-74 Foucault, Michel, 122 Freud, Sigmund, 147 Frost, Robert, 194 gapping, poetic device of, 96-97 gestalt psychology, in accounts of poems, 92, 94-99 Goldmann, Lucien, 155, 166-167, 171-173 Gorgias, on emotions in tragic drama, 91 Grandin, Temple, 52-54 Guattari, Félix, 82 n. 12 Haddon, Mark, 54 Halliwell, Stephen, 90-91 Hammett, Dashiel, 35 Hardy Boys, responses to novel about, 120-122

Index

219

Hayles, Katherine, 196, 199 Heidegger, Martin, 57, 82 n. 12, 117, 193, 200 Hejinian, Lyn, 54 Helgerson, Richard, 43 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 16, 50, 70, 71, 83 n. 13 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 54, 57 Hughes, Ted, 74, 106, 120, 152 ideologeme, as social meaning unit, 134 image, 71-75, 94, 130-131 imagination, concept of, 24, 29-30, 99 intensity, as a value, 19, 32-33, 34, 36, 40, 76, 89, 93-94, 99, 103-104, 108-109, 114 n. 24, 115 n. 30, 144 interruption, poetic device of, 96 James, Henry, 130 James, Susan, 25 James, William, 49, 197 Jameson, Fredric, 42, 191 Jansenism, in Racine’s plays, 166, 172 Jeffers, Robinson, 179-181 Johnston, Victor, 50 Jones, Judith A., 93 joy, 23, 30, 32, 144; of the author, 29-32 Kafka, Franz, 129 Kane, Sarah, 155, 156, 157-158, 159-60, 177-178, 181-184, 185 Kitto, H. D. F., 155, 162, 163 Koziak, Barbara, 147 Kövecses, Zoltán, 71 Language Poets, the, 54, 65-66 Latour, Bruno, 199 Lawrence, D. H., 41 Leavis, F. R., 34, 42, 73, 159 LeDoux, Joseph, 15, 194-195 literature, attributes of, 49 Longinus, 15, 92-93, 100 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 55 Lowell, Robert, translator of Racine, 21, 43, 152 Luhmann, Niklas, 195-196 lust, 144, 156, 172 Marin, Louis, 39-40 maxim, as literary form, 123-124 McDonald, Marianne, 187, 188, 189-90, 191 McDowell, John, 196-197, 200 Meehan, Eugene J., 81 n. 1

220

Index

Mercutio, role of, 23, 107-108, 109 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 82-3 n. 12, 194 Meyer, Leonard B., 92 mirror neurons, 85-86, 111 Moran, Richard, 39-40, 46 n. 4, 125 Murdoch, Iris, 56 name and face, as emotional markers, 129 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 83 n. 12 non-duality, as desirable, 81, 82 n.12, 84 n.18, 85, 193, 194 Nussbaum, Martha C., 15, 38-39, 47 n. 18, 65, 197 Oates, Joyce Carol, 66, 127-128, 142 n. 9, 142 n. 11 O’Neill, Eugene, 176-179 O’Sullivan, Maggie, 54 Paley, Vivian Gussin, 118-120 Pamuk, Orhan, 129 Paster, Gail Kern, 25, 146-147 performing what we know, about emotion, 26-28 Perloff, Marjorie, 99 person, the, 13, 14, 16, 23, 28-35, 37, 45 n. 1, 50, 66-67 person, imaginary, 13-14, 23, 28, 77, 110; scholars as imaginary persons, 41-44, 144 Phaedra, as literary character, 14, 65, 68-69, 143-144, 152, 162-163, 168-171, 175176, 182-183 Pinker, Stephen, 194, 199 pity and fear, conjoined terms in Aristotle’s Poetics, 34, 35, 88, 94, 111, 112 n. 9 Plato, 91 plot, linearity of, 88-94, 145; causal chains in, 105-106 Plutchik, Robert, 25 Proust, Marcel, 65, 129, 151-152, 166, 174 Prynne, J. H., 74 Racine, Jean, 14, 65, 153, 166-174 reading, skills of, 28, 37, 41, 70, 90 Reich, Wilhelm, 20-21 relation, category of, 13, 22 n. 5, 25, 34-35, 49-55, 69-70, 86, 198 Revaz, Gilles, 171 reverse engineering, 51-52, 56 Rochefoucault, Duc de la, 25, 123-124 Rorty, Amélie O., 17 Roth, Philip, 29-32 Ryklin, Mikhail, 41 Sappho, 54, 57, 93, 113 n. 14, 176 Scarry, Elaine, 74 scene, 76, 130-131 Schenker, Heinrich, analyst of music, 92, 104

Index

221

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 15, 36 Segal, Charles, 165 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, playwright and philosopher, 25, 153, 163-166 sequence, reading for, 27, 34, 87-88, 90, 94-99, 131-133; time as, 103-111 Shakespeare, William, 87-90, 99-111, 114 nn. 25, 29 Shklovsky, Viktor, 33-37 sorrow, 23, 30, 110 Spinoza, 15, 16, 17, 23, 48 n. 18, 61, 80-81, 111, 141 n. 3, 191 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 92 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 32-34 startle, mechanism of, 88 Steiner, George, 146 Stoics, view of emotion in, 16, 38-39 storytelling, 13-14, 50, 62, 71, 88, 117, 131, 147, 196; abjuring it, 58; children and, 117-122; emotion and, 16, 34; mode of explanation, 17, 27; synonym for literature, as term, 16, 49; within poems, 55, 57-58 structure of feeling, reading for the historical, 67-9, 144-151, 163, 173, 184 stylistics, 26, 44, 62, 67, 86-87, 159-161 surprise, 34, 87-88, 105, 131-133, 144; relation to speed and slowness, 115 n. 32 Tait, Peta, 33-34 Terada, Rei, 68 Tomkins, Sylvan, 36, 75, 114 n. 28 tragedy, 91, 108, 161, 165, 173, 185 trauma, deriving writing from, 41-42, 47 n. 18 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 55, 154-155, 174-176 utterance, 75-76; in Shakespeare, variety of, 101-102 Welty, Eudora, 66, 117-118, 133-141 Whitehead, Alfred North, 93 Williams, Raymond, 64, 67, 68-69, 144-148, 159, 166-167, 172-173, 184, 185-186, 188. See also: structure of feeling Williams, W. C., 87, 88, 94-99 Wimsatt, W. K., 34, 42, 73, 92 Winnicott, D. W., 14 woe, Elizabethan term, 102-103, 109, 111 Wordsworth, William, 64, 81 world, idea of, 16, 38, 62, 63, 70, 77-81, 82 n. 13, 98-99, 111, 117, 119, 141, 196, 198 Yellow Story Book, response to tale in, 119-120

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