Late in his life, Charles Darwin lost his taste for music and poetry. “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts,” he laments in his autobiography, and for many of us the temptation to place all men and women of science into a category of individuals whose minds resemble machines more than living and emotionally attuned organs of feeling and perceiving is overwhelming. In the 21st century, we even have a convenient psychiatric diagnosis for people of this sort. Don’t we just assume Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory has autism, or at least the milder version of it known as Asperger’s? It’s probably even safe to assume the show’s writers had the diagnostic criteria for the disorder in mind when they first developed his character. Likewise, Dr. Watson in the BBC’s new and obscenely entertaining Sherlock series can’t resist a reference to the quintessential evidence-crunching genius’s own supposed Asperger’s. In Darwin’s case, however, the move away from the arts couldn’t have been due to any congenital deficiency in his finer human sentiments because it occurred only in adulthood. He writes,
I have
said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty
years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the
works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great
pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare,
especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures
gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I
cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read
Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also
almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking
too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me
pleasure.
We could interpret Darwin
here as suggesting that casting his mind too doggedly into his scientific work
somehow ruined his capacity to appreciate Shakespeare. But, like all thinkers
and writers of great nuance and sophistication, his ideas are easy to
mischaracterize through selective quotation (or, if you’re Ben Stein or any of
the other unscrupulous writers behind creationist propaganda like the
pseudo-documentary Expelled, you can
just lie about what he actually wrote). One of the most charming things about Darwin
is that his writing is often more exploratory than merely informative. He
writes in search of answers he has yet to discover. In a wider context, the
quote about his mind becoming a machine, for instance, reads,
This
curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as
books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts
which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as
much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding
general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused
the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend,
I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better
constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had
to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen
to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now
atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these
tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect,
and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of
our nature.
His concern for his lost aestheticism
notwithstanding, Darwin’s humanism, his humanity, radiates in his writing with
a warmth that belies any claim about thinking like a machine, just as the
intelligence that shows through it gainsays his humble deprecations about the
organization of his mind.
In
this excerpt, Darwin, perhaps inadvertently, even manages to put forth a theory
of the function of art. Somehow, poetry and music not only give us pleasure and
make us happy—enjoying them actually constitutes a type of mental exercise that
strengthens our intellect, our emotional awareness, and even our moral
character. Novelist and cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley explores this idea
of human betterment through aesthetic experience in his book Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. This subtitle is notably underwhelming given the long history of
psychoanalytic theorizing about the meaning and role of literature. However,
whereas psychoanalysis has fallen into disrepute among scientists because of its
multiple empirical failures and a general methodological hubris common among its practitioners, the work of Oatley and his team at the University of
Toronto relies on much more modest, and at the same time much more sophisticated,
scientific protocols. One of the tools these researchers use, The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, was in fact first developed to research our new category
of people with machine-like minds. What the researchers find bolsters Darwin’s
impression that art, at least literary art, functions as a kind of exercise for
our faculty of understanding and relating to others.
 |
| Keith Oatley |
Reasoning
that “fiction is a kind of simulation of selves and their vicissitudes in the
social world” (159), Oatley and his colleague Raymond Mar hypothesized that people who spent more time trying
to understand fictional characters would be better at recognizing and reasoning
about other, real-world people’s states of mind. So they devised a test to
assess how much fiction participants in their study read based on how well they
could categorize a long list of names according to which ones belonged to
authors of fiction, which to authors of nonfiction, and which to non-authors.
They then had participants take the Mind-in-the-Eyes Test, which consists of
matching close-up pictures of peoples’ eyes with terms describing their
emotional state at the time they were taken. The researchers also had
participants take the Interpersonal Perception Test, which has them answer
questions about the relationships of people in short video clips featuring
social interactions. An example question might be “Which of the two children,
or both, or neither, are offspring of the two adults in the clip?” (Imagine Sherlock Holmes taking this test.) As hypothesized, Oatley writes, “We found
that the more fiction people read, the better they were at the Mind-in-the-Eyes
Test. A similar relationship held, though less strongly, for reading fiction
and the Interpersonal Perception Test” (159).
 |
| Raymond Mar |
One
major shortcoming of this study is that it fails to establish causality; people
who are naturally better at reading emotions and making sound inferences about
social interactions may gravitate to fiction for some reason. So Mar set up an experiment
in which he had participants read either a nonfiction article from an issue of
the New Yorker or a work of short
fiction chosen to be the same length and require the same level of reading
skills. When the two groups then took a test of social reasoning, the ones who
had read the short story outperformed the control group. Both groups also took
a test of analytic reasoning as a further control; on this variable there was
no difference in performance between the groups. The outcome of this experiment, Oatley stresses, shouldn’t be interpreted as
evidence that reading one story will increase your social skills in any
meaningful and lasting way. But reading habits established over long periods likely
explain the more significant differences between individuals found in the
earlier study. As Oatley explains,
Readers
of fiction tend to become more expert at making models of others and
themselves, and at navigating the social world, and readers of non-fiction are
likely to become more expert at genetics, or cookery, or environmental studies,
or whatever they spend their time reading. Raymond Mar’s experimental study on
reading pieces from the New Yorker is
probably best explained by priming. Reading a fictional piece puts people into
a frame of mind of thinking about the social world, and this is probably why
they did better at the test of social reasoning. (160)
Connecting these findings to real-world outcomes,
Oatley and his team also found that “reading fiction was not associated with
loneliness,” as the stereotype suggests, “but was associated with what
psychologists call high social support, being in a circle of people whom
participants saw a lot, and who were available to them practically and
emotionally” (160).
These
studies by the University of Toronto team have received wide publicity, but
the people who should be the most interested in them have little or no idea how
to go about making sense of them. Most people simply either read fiction or
they don’t. If you happen to be of the tribe who studies fiction, then you were
probably educated in a way that engendered mixed feelings—profound confusion
really—about science and how it works. In his review of The Storytelling Animal, a book in which Jonathan Gottschall
incorporates the Toronto team’s findings into the theory that narrative serves
the adaptive function of making human social groups more cooperative and
cohesive, Adam
Gopnik sneers,
Surely if there were any truth in the
notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then
college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of
fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of
back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric
self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly
and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a
thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.
Oatley himself is well aware of the strange
case of university English departments. He cites a report by Willie
van Peer on a small study he did comparing students in the natural sciences to
students in the humanities. Oatley explains,
There
was considerable scatter, but on average the science students had higher
emotional intelligence than the humanities students, the opposite of what was
expected; van Peer indicts teaching in the humanities for often turning people
away from human understanding towards technical analyses of details. (160)
Oatley suggests in a footnote that an earlier
study corroborates van Peer’s indictment. It found that high school students
who show more emotional involvement with short stories—the type of
connection that would engender greater empathy—did proportionally worse on
standard academic assessments of English proficiency. The clear implication of
these findings is that the way literature is taught in universities and high
schools is long overdue for an in-depth critical analysis.
The
idea that literature has the power to make us better people is not new; indeed,
it was the very idea on which the humanities were originally founded. We have
to wonder what people like Gopnik believe the point of celebrating literature
is if not to foster greater understanding and empathy. If you either enjoy it
or you don’t, and it has no beneficial effects on individuals or on society in
general, why bother encouraging anyone to read? Why bother writing essays about
it in the New Yorker? Tellingly, many
scholars in the humanities began doubting the power of art to inspire greater
humanity around the same time they began questioning the value and promise of scientific
progress. Oatley writes,
Part
of the devastation of World War II was the failure of German citizens, one of
the world’s most highly educated populations, to prevent their nation’s slide
into Nazism. George Steiner has famously asserted: “We know that a man can read
Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to
his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” (164)
 |
| Willie van Peer |
Postwar literary theory and criticism has,
perversely, tended toward the view that literature and language in general serve
as a vessel for passing on all the evils inherent in our western, patriarchal,
racist, imperialist culture. The purpose of literary analysis then becomes to
shift out these elements and resist them. Unfortunately, such accusatory
theories leave unanswered the question of why, if literature inculcates
oppressive ideologies, we should bother reading it at all. As van Peer muses in
the report Oatley cites, “The Inhumanity of
the Humanities,”
Consider
the ills flowing from postmodern approaches, the “posthuman”: this usually
involves the hegemony of “race/class/gender” in which literary texts are
treated with suspicion. Here is a major source of that loss of emotional
connection between student and literature. How can one expect a certain
humanity to grow in students if they are continuously instructed to distrust
authors and texts? (8)
Oatley
and van Peer point out, moreover, that the evidence for concentration camp
workers having any degree of literary or aesthetic sophistication is
nonexistent. According to the best available evidence, most of the greatest
atrocities were committed by soldiers who never graduated high school. The
suggestion that some type of cozy relationship existed between Nazism and an
enthusiasm for Goethe runs afoul of recorded history. As Oatley points out,
Apart
from propensity to violence, nationalism, and anti-Semitism, Nazism was marked
by hostility to humanitarian values in education. From 1933 onwards, the Nazis
replaced the idea of self-betterment through education and reading by practices
designed to induce as many as possible into willing conformity, and to coerce
the unwilling remainder by justified fear. (165)
 |
| Lynn Hunt |
Oatley also cites the work of historian Lynn Hunt,
whose book Inventing Human Rights
traces the original social movement for the recognition of universal human
rights to the mid-1700s, when what we recognize today as novels were
first being written. Other scholars like Steven Pinker have pointed out too
that, while it’s hard not to dwell on tragedies like the Holocaust, even
atrocities of that magnitude are resoundingly overmatched by the much larger post-Enlightenment trend toward peace, freedom, and the wider recognition of
human rights. It’s sad that one of the lasting legacies of all the great catastrophes
of the 20th Century is a tradition in humanities scholarship that
has the people who are supposed to be the custodians of our literary heritage
hell-bent on teaching us all the ways that literature makes us evil.
Because
Oatley is a central figure in what we can only hope is a movement to end the
current reign of self-righteous insanity in literary studies, it pains me not
to be able to recommend Such Stuff as
Dreams to anyone but dedicated specialists. Oatley writes in the
preface that he has “imagined the book as having some of the qualities of
fiction. That is to say I have designed it to have a narrative flow” (x), and it
may simply be that this suggestion set my expectations too high. But the book
is poorly edited, the prose is bland and often roles over itself into graceless
tangles, and a couple of the chapters seem like little more than haphazardly
collated reports of studies and theories, none exactly off-topic, none
completely without interest, but all lacking any central progression or theme. The book often reads more like an annotated bibliography than a story. Oatley’s
scholarly range is impressive, however, bearing not just on cognitive science
and literature through the centuries but extending as well to the work of
important literary theorists. The book is never unreadable, never opaque, but
it’s not exactly a work of art in its own right.
Insofar
as Such Stuff as Dreams is organized
around a central idea, it is that fiction ought be thought of not as “a direct
impression of life,” as Henry James suggests in his famous essay “The Art of Fiction,” and as many contemporary critics—notably James Wood—seem to think of
it. Rather, Oatley agrees with Robert Louis Stevenson’s response to James’s
essay, “A Humble Remonstrance,” in which he writes that
Life
is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art in
comparison is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate.
Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear,
among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a
discreet musician. (qtd on pg 8)
Oatley theorizes that stories are simulations,
much like dreams, that go beyond mere reflections of life to highlight through defamiliarization particular aspects of life, to cast them in a new light so as to deepen our understanding and experience of them. He writes,
Every
true artistic expression, I think, is not just about the surface of things. It
always has some aspect of the abstract. The issue is whether, by a change of perspective
or by a making the familiar strange, by means of an artistically depicted
world, we can see our everyday world in a deeper way. (15)
Critics of high-brow literature like Wood appreciate
defamiliarization at the level of description; Oatley is suggesting here though
that the story as a whole functions as a “metaphor-in-the-large” (17), a way of
not just making us experience as strange some object or isolated feeling, but
of reconceptualizing entire relationships, careers, encounters, biographies—what
we recognize in fiction as plots. This is an important insight, and it topples
verisimilitude from its ascendant position atop the hierarchy of literary
values while rendering complaints about clichéd plots potentially moot. Didn’t
Shakespeare recycle plots after all?
The
theory of fiction as a type of simulation to improve social skills and possibly
to facilitate group cooperation is emerging as the frontrunner in attempts to
explain narrative interest in the context of human evolution. It is to date,
however, impossible to rule out the possibility that our interest in stories is
not directly adaptive but instead emerges as a byproduct of other traits that
confer more immediate biological advantages. The finding that readers track
actions in stories with the same brain regions that activate when they witness similar actions in reality, or when they engage in them themselves, is important
support for the simulation theory. But the function of mirror neurons isn’t
well enough understood yet for us to determine from this study how much
engagement with fictional stories depends on the reader's identifying with the
protagonist. Oatley’s theory is more consonant with direct and straightforward identification.
He writes,
A very
basic emotional process engages the reader with plans and fortunes of a
protagonist. This is what often drives the plot and, perhaps, keeps us turning
the pages, or keeps us in our seat at the movies or at the theater. It can be
enjoyable. In art we experience the emotion, but with it the possibility of
something else, too. The way we see the world can change, and we ourselves can
change. Art is not simply taking a ride on preoccupations and prejudices, using
a schema that runs as usual. Art enables us to experience some emotions in
contexts that we would not ordinarily encounter, and to think of ourselves in
ways that usually we do not. (118)
Much of this change, Oatley suggests, comes from
realizing that we too are capable of behaving in ways that we might not like. “I am capable of this too:
selfishness, lack of sympathy” (193), is what he believes we think in response to witnessing good
characters behave badly.
Oatley’s
theory has a lot to recommend it, but William Flesch’s theory of narrative
interest, which suggests we don’t identify with fictional characters directly
but rather track them and anxiously hope for them to get whatever we feel they
deserve, seems much more plausible in the context of our response to
protagonists behaving in surprisingly selfish or antisocial ways. When I see Ed Norton as Tyler Durden beating Angel
Face half to death in Fight Club, for instance, I
don’t think, hey, that’s me smashing that poor guy’s face with
my fists. Instead, I think, what the hell are you doing? I had you pegged as a good guy. I know you’re trying not to be as much of a pushover as you used to
be but this is getting scary. I’m anxious that Angel Face doesn’t get too
damaged—partly because I imagine that would be devastating to Tyler. And I’m
anxious lest this incident be a harbinger of worse behavior to come.
The
issue of identification is just one of several interesting questions that can
lend itself to further research. Oatley and Mar’s studies are not enormous in terms of sample size, and
their subjects were mostly young college students. What types of fiction work
the best to foster empathy? What types of reading strategies might we encourage
students to apply to reading literature—apart from trying to remove obstacles
to emotional connections with characters? But, aside from the Big-Bad-Western
Empire myth that currently has humanities scholars grooming successive
generations of deluded ideologues to be little more than culture vultures
presiding over the creation and celebration of Loser Lit, the other main
challenge to transporting literary theory onto firmer empirical grounds is the
assumption that the arts in general and literature in particular demand a
wholly different type of thinking to create and appreciate than the type that
goes into the intricate mechanics and intensely disciplined practices of
science.
 |
| Simon Baron-Cohen |
As Oatley and the Toronto
team have shown, people who enjoy fiction tend to have the opposite of autism.
And people who do science are, well, Sheldon. Interestingly, though, the
writers of The Big Bang Theory, for
whatever reason, included some contraindications for a diagnosis of autism or
Asperger’s in Sheldon’s character. Like the other scientists in the show, he’s
obsessed with comic books, which require at least some understanding of facial
expression and body language to follow. As Simon Baron-Cohen, the autism
researcher who designed the Mind-in-the-Eyes test, explains, “Autism is an
empathy disorder: those with autism have major difficulties in 'mindreading' or
putting themselves into someone else’s shoes, imagining the world through
someone else’s feelings” (137). Baron-Cohen has coined the term “mindblindness”
to describe the central feature of the disorder, and many have posited that the
underlying cause is abnormal development of the brain regions devoted to
perspective taking and understanding others, what cognitive psychologists refer
to as our Theory of Mind.
To follow comic book plotlines, Sheldon would have
to make ample use of his own Theory of Mind. He’s also given to absorption in various
science fiction shows on TV. If he were only interested in futuristic
gadgets, as an autistic would be, he could just as easily get more
scientifically plausible versions of them in any number of nonfiction venues. By
Baron-Cohen’s definition, Sherlock Holmes can’t possibly have Asperger’s either
because his ability to get into other people’s heads is vastly superior to
pretty much everyone else’s. As he explains in “The Musgrave Ritual,” “You know my methods in such cases, Watson: I put myself in
the man’s place, and having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how
I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances.”
What
about Darwin, though, that demigod of science who openly professed to being
nauseated by Shakespeare? Isn’t he a prime candidate for entry into the
surprisingly unpopulated ranks of heartless, data-crunching scientists whose
thinking lends itself so conveniently to cooptation by oppressors and committers
of wartime atrocities? It turns out that though Darwin held many of the same
racist views as nearly all educated men of his time, his ability to empathize
across racial and class divides was extraordinary. Darwin was not himself a
Social Darwinist, a theory devised by Herbert Spencer to justify inequality (which
has currency still today among political conservatives). And Darwin was also a
passionate abolitionist, as is clear in the following excerpts from The Voyage
of the Beagle:
On the
19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never
again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it
recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near
Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that
some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child
even to remonstrate.
Darwin is responding to cruelty in a way no one around
him at the time would have. And note how deeply it pains him, how profound and keenly felt
his sympathy is.
I was
present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men,
women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived
together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I
authentically heard of;—nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details,
had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of
the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil.
It is
often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our
poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of
nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on
slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in
one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful
disease.
And finally we come to the matter of Darwin’s
Theory of Mind, which was quite clearly in no way deficient.
Those
who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never
seem to put themselves into the position of the latter;—what a cheerless
prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever
hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which
nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts
to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men who profess
to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that His
Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think
that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of
liberty, have been and are so guilty; but it is a consolation to reflect, that
we at least have made a greater sacrifice than ever made by any nation, to
expiate our sin. (530-31)
I
suspect that Darwin’s distaste for Shakespeare was borne of oversensitivity. He
doesn't say music failed to move him; he didn’t like it because it made him
think “too energetically.” And as aesthetically pleasing as Shakespeare is,
existentially speaking, his plays tend to be pretty harsh, even the comedies.
When Prospero says, "We are such stuff / as dreams are made on" in Act 4 of The Tempest, he's actually talking not about characters in stories, but about how ephemeral and insignificant real human lives are. But why, beyond some likely nudge from his inherited temperament, was Darwin so
sensitive? Why was he so empathetic even to those so vastly different from him?
After admitting he’d lost his taste for Shakespeare, paintings, and music, he
goes to say,
On the
other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high
order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often
bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like
all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law
ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the
first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if
a pretty woman all the better.
[Check out the Toronto group's blog at onfiction.ca]
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