Month: February 2017

Arbitrary Innovations and Literary Universals

Posted on February 13, 2017

Nigel Fabb, University of Strathclyde

The possibility of literary universals comes from the possibility that the forms and other aspects of literary texts are shaped by external factors such as psychology and the sociocultural functions of literature. Psychological factors include limitations on memory and processing, along with psycholinguistic factors (which might allow linguistic universals to have an influence on literary universals).

However, any text can have forms imposed on it which are not determined by psychological or general sociocultural factors (Fabb). Consider for example the new assigned forms of Oulipo literature (Mathews and Brotchie), including for example the writing of lipogrammatic texts in which a letter of the alphabet is excluded throughout, such as George Perec’s La Disparition which never uses the letter “e.” As an example of a more common type of imposed form consider the Hiberno-Latin poem “Altus prosator” in which every stanza begins on a new letter of the Latin alphabet. The alphabet is not itself related to a literary universal, but is an independent system. Would we expect the imposition of these arbitrary forms to have any relation to literary universals? The question is difficult. A relevant consideration is whether the forms are widespread. For example, are poems which follow the forward sequence of the alphabet significantly more common than poems which follow the equally arbitrary backwards sequence of the alphabet (e.g., starting with Z), and if they are, does this reflect the operation of a literary universal (or some other factor)? The same kind of question might be asked about any imposed form. For example, pattern poems (Higgins) involve the imposition of an external form – the shape of an image – which can influence the composition of the written poem (such as the length of lines); but are some patterns more common than others, and if so, is this because psychological or functional factors are playing a role, and might these be part of literary universals?

A key consideration is whether the form is used more than once, or by more than one author, and whether it constitutes a “tradition.” Consider for example the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s invented meter called “sprung rhythm,” which adapts an older folk tradition of “loose iambic” meter but extends the number of unstressed syllables allowed between a fixed number of stressed syllables. This meter has occasionally been imitated; for example, Dylan Thomas’s poem “In Country Sleep” is in sprung rhythm (and includes other explicit echoes of Hopkins). Why was Hopkins’s meter not used more widely? There might be literary-historical reasons; perhaps the posthumous publication of his poems came at a time when his innovations already seemed out of fashion. In other words, sprung rhythm may conform to literary universals but failed to be adopted for other reasons. It it also may be that sprung rhythm is not well suited to literary (here metrical) universals. Promoting this argument, Fabb and Halle argue that Hopkins draws on two previously separated ways of adding syllables to the line: the additional syllables of folk verse and the uncounted syllables (synaloepha etc.) of iambic pentameter. This ambiguity of origin for extra syllables makes it difficult to establish the underlying metrical form of sprung rhythm poems, which in turn might militate against its survival as a metrical tradition. Hopkins’s sprung rhythm shows that it is not straightforward to use take-up into a tradition as a way of judging whether a literary innovation conforms to literary universals.

It is worth comparing innovations in literature with invented languages. Like literary innovations, languages are invented by specific people at specific times; in a few cases, those languages are learned by children as native speakers; they include Esperanto and some sign languages. Invented languages need not conform to any linguistic universals, but it is a general assumption (with supporting evidence) that when these languages are learned, they are changed such that they come to conform to universals. These are like the changes that a pidgin undergoes on its route to becoming a creole. Here we see the loose analogy with literary invention, when a particular invention becomes a tradition, such that not only the original author uses it, but it is used by other authors (and is read by readers). But, as we have seen, this criterion is difficult to use consistently; innovations can be unadopted for a variety of reasons, and artificial systems might furthermore be used for a long time. As an underlying problem, there is no equivalent of the “native speaker” when it comes to literature; in principle one could learn an (adapted) invented language as one’s only language, but there is no equivalent to this for literature.

We are left with the problem that we cannot be sure whether a characteristic of a literary text, particularly when it is fairly unique, should be expected to conform to literary universals. We know that innovations can in principle be arbitrary relative to literary universals, but there are no watertight tests for establishing whether any particular characteristic should be counted as arbitrary.

Works Cited

Fabb, Nigel. “Is Literary Language a Development of Ordinary Language?” Lingua 120 (2010): 1219–1232.

Fabb, Nigel and Morris Halle. Meter in Poetry: A New Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Higgins, Dick. Pattern Poetry. Guide to an Unknown Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Mathews, Harry, and Alastair Brotchie. Oulipo Compendium. Revised and Updated. London: Atlas Press, 2005.

Literary Meaning: An Evolutionary Perspective

Posted on February 9, 2017

Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri, Saint Louis

Four Meta-Universals of Literary Meaning

In a persuasive formulation, Meyer Abrams reduces all literary activity to four components: the author, the reader, the world to which a literary work refers, and the work itself (Abrams “Types”). Since the poststructuralist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, much literary theory has consisted in eliminating or de-emphasizing one or another of these components—announcing the death of the author, declaring the impossibility of reference to a world outside the text, dissolving individual texts into circulating streams of cultural energies, or reducing the reader to an uncritical participant within a “community” that passively echoes this or that dominant episteme. Humanist and Darwinist critics have frequently criticized these efforts to develop a theory of literature by discarding some of its parts (Abrams, “Transformation”; Carroll, Evolution; Crews, Postmodern Pooh; Crews, Skeptical Engagements; Storey; Carroll et al., Graphing 1-8; Cain; Boyd, Carroll and Gottschall; Patai). There is no need to go over all that ground again. Instead, in this current essay, I use Abrams’s categories as a starting point for developing evolutionary ideas on universals of literary meaning.

Abrams’s four categories are literary meta-universals: conditions without which no other literary universals could exist. Authors speak to readers; literary works refer to a world shared by authors and readers; and a literary work is the medium through which authors communicate with readers. Those four propositions imply four further aspects of the universal literary situation: (1) intentional meaning (what authors intend to communicate); (2) interpretation (the activity of readers seeking to understand what authors mean); (3) meaning itself (what authors say and how readers respond to what authors say); and (4) the organization of meaning in language (linguistic and literary structure).

Abrams’s meta-universals are couched in the ordinary language of humanist common sense. Correlating these concepts with concepts from evolutionary biology situates them within an established scientific paradigm and confirms their robust validity. Authors and readers are human organisms. The world to which literary works refer is the environment in which those organisms live. Literary works are communicative signals, a form of social interaction that is displayed also by many species that do not have the capacity for articulate language. Abrams’s humanist concepts are not, then, superficial descriptors. They cut nature at its joints.

Abrams’s four categories identify appropriate units of analysis for literary research, but they do not offer causal explanation. The theory of adaptation by means of natural selection is a causal explanation that encompasses a vast network of subsidiary causal explanations. Ethology, the zoological discipline that deals most broadly with behavior, distinguishes four main categories of explanation: phylogeny, ontogeny, mechanism, and adaptive function (Tinbergen). Phylogeny concerns the evolutionary origins of any given behavior. Ontogeny concerns development within a single lifespan. Mechanism refers to the anatomical, physiological, and neurochemical structures that are the proximate causes of behavior. Adaptive function concerns the way any given mechanism has contributed to survival or reproduction, hence to the propagation of genes.

Evolutionary literary study assimilates information and explanatory hypotheses from a wide range of disciplines: primatology and comparative psychology (Chapais, “Social Universals”), cognitive and affective neuroscience (Panksepp and Biven; Decety and Cacioppo), developmental psychology (Konner), evolutionary social psychology (Carroll, “Social Theory”; Graham, Haidt and Nosek), evolutionary anthropology (Low), evolutionary psychology (Buss), and biocultural theory (Henrich; Carroll et al., “Biocultural Theory”). Evolutionary hypotheses about universals of literary meaning should integrate ideas from all these disciplines with ideas from empirically grounded disciplines more closely associated with literary study, for instance, from narrative psychology, affective narratology, the psychology of fiction, and evolutionary literary study (McAdams, “Actor”; Johnson-Laird and Oatley; Oatley, Psychology of Fiction; Tamir et al.; Oatley, Passionate Muse; Hogan, “Story“; Hogan, Authors’ Minds; Hogan, Affective Narratology; Carroll, “Minds”; Boyd; Gottschall Storytelling; Boyd, Carroll and Gottschall; Saunders; Clasen; Jacobs and Willems).

Four Levels of Organization for the Analysis of Literary Meaning

Meaning consists in mental experiences in the minds of authors and readers: perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. From an evolutionary perspective, meaning in literary texts can be analyzed at four distinct levels of organization: (1) universal, pan-human forms of experience; (2) specific cultural configurations that are prompted and constrained by pan-human forms of experience; (3) individual identities of authors, readers, and characters; and (4) structures and qualities that distinguish individual literary works from one another. Each of these levels is itself a universal feature of literary works. All works reflect pan-human forms of behavior and experience; all works are lodged within one or more particular cultural traditions; all works are produced by individual minds and interpreted by other individual minds; and all works display unique, distinctive characteristics. Each level of analysis can yield valuable information. A comprehensive evolutionary critique of meaning in any given literary text would integrate all four levels of analysis.

The Pan-Human Level of Organization

An ongoing effort in evolutionary social science aims at identifying the species-typical characteristics of human nature. Donald Brown’s classic portrait of “The Universal People” in Human Universals (1991) suggests the rich complexity of concepts required to describe a fictional “tribe” that exhibits features of behavior, qualities of experience, and forms of thought that appear in every known culture. Later research has pursued many different aspects of that universal picture, for instance, language, cognition, emotions, mating psychology, parenting, kinship, social dynamics, morality, religion, and the arts. (See Brown, “HUMAN UNIVERSALS.”)

Every species has a distinct, species-typical organization of birth, growth, ways of reproduction, and (if the species is social) social life. In every species, the overarching structure of life consists in a reproductive cycle. The field of biology that analyzes species-typical reproductive cycles is known as “life history theory” (Flatt and Heyland). Research on human life history theory has produced detailed accounts of how human reproductive and social behavior has evolved in adaptive interactions with ecological factors to produce the specifically human organization of the life cycle: altricial birth, extended infant dependency, extended childhood, pair-bonded dual parenting combined with cooperative male coalitions, cooperative child care, bilateral multi-generational kin networks, post-reproductive longevity, and death (Muehlenbein and Flinn; Kaplan, Gurven and Winking; Chapais, “Monogamy”). Life history theory reveals the underlying structure and the adaptive logic behind the rich complexity of behavior exhibited by “The Universal People” (Carroll, “Imaginary Lives”).

The Cultural Level of Organization

In the past three decades or so, evolutionary cultural theory has gradually gained a firmer purchase on the peculiarly “biocultural” character of the human species (Carroll et al., “Biocultural Theory”). The theory of “gene-culture coevolution” describes the causal interaction of biological characteristics and cultural inventions over the course of human evolutionary history. Major landmarks in gene-culture coevolution include upright walking (freeing the hands), the use of tools, the control of fire (enabling cooked food, a reduced gut, and an expanded brain), the development of cooperative foraging centered on a campsite, the organization of families, the expansion of groups into clans and tribes, the evolution of language, the advent of agriculture and pastoralism, the invention of writing, and the massing of populations in cities. Each of these events has involved reciprocal alterations in the human genome and in the transmission of heritable cultural practices (Lumsden and Wilson; Richerson and Boyd; Henrich; Cochran and Harpending).

Because humans have evolved to be highly cultural, every culture develops distinct beliefs and practices, but all beliefs and practices, no matter how diverse, are informed by universal human motives, passions, and imaginative proclivities. Hence the fact that love poems, family dramas, heroic quests, or stories of revenge are easily intelligible across diverse cultures. Hence also the existence of a recognizable body of “world literature”—a common world heritage produced by translations of works from diverse cultures.

Organization at the Level of Individual Persons

Differences in individual identity include the three categories most often invoked in the cultural theory pervasive in the academic literary establishment: gender, race, and class. Major differences less often registered include distinctions of age and family role, degrees of social connectedness, differences of vocation, differences of religious and political belief, differences in temperament such as exuberance or moodiness, aggressive anger or affectional warmth, and differences in intellectual or imaginative characteristics such as learning, humor, imaginative vigor, aesthetic sensitivity, eloquence, creativity, or talent in some particular art or science (McAdams, Personality Development).

All individual differences are platformed on common, shared features of human experience. Races and classes interbreed. Genders are interdependent. Family members form parts of interdependent social organizations. Specialized vocations are functional units in complex economic systems. Personality differences are grounded in neurophysiological characteristics essential to all normal human functioning. All normally developing people have minds and recognize mental life—beliefs, values, feelings, thoughts—in other individuals.

Meaning can only take place in individual minds, but individual minds are always in interactive relationship with other individual minds. The production of meaning in literature is itself an inherently social activity—an activity of transmission, reception, and response.

Organization at the Level of Individual Literary Works

Human nature—the species-typical organization of human life—offers a wide range of subjects for literary depiction. Authors can choose, for instance, to write about any of the phases of life, from childhood and adolescence to maturity and old age; about any motives or concerns—survival, ambition, self-realization, gender or relations between the sexes, family life, kin relations, or social interactions; or about intellectual, artistic, or spiritual aspirations. Every culture has complex traditions that organize all these features of life, and they also have forms of imaginative culture that contain mythic figures, folk tales, and religious and artistic traditions that present such themes in multifaceted ways. Each culture contains an array of poetic, narrative, dramatic, and rhetorical techniques that can be used to construct literary works. Every individual human being has a unique identity that involves some particular configuration of personality traits, mental aptitudes, networks of family and social relationships, personal experiences, and ideas, beliefs, tastes, and attitudes. When some individual author sits down to compose a literary work, he or she has a virtually unlimited range of variables from which to select, and an unlimited range of possible ways in which to organize those variables.

A Formal Definition of Literature

To give more substance to the concept of literary meaning, we have to have a usable working definition of literature. To produce a definition, we need not suppose that literature is a Platonic absolute and that the purpose of definition is to identify the secret essence of literature. We need only locate literature in a class of human behaviors and distinguish it from other members of that class. (That procedure is the definition of a “formal definition.”) The definition proposed here is that literature is an aesthetically modeled verbal construct that evokes or depicts the subjective quality of human experience. In evoking subjective quality, literature is like the other arts but different from science and from much humanist scholarship. In using words as its specific medium, literature differs from the plastic arts and overlaps with science, philosophy, and history. Like the other arts, and unlike these other disciplines, literature typically concerns itself with the aesthetic aspects of its medium: the formal organization of sensory properties.

This definition implies no necessary boundary between high and low art. The definition is broad enough to take in doggerel verse, stand-up comedy, impromptu dramatic enactments, lyric poems, theatrical works, and narrative fictions of every sort. The definition allows for overlaps with other media—film or opera, for instance, or graphic narratives with verbal captions. It does not stipulate fiction as a necessary or exclusive feature of literature, and it draws no sharp boundary between literary works and the more highly colored forms of rhetoric, philosophical disquisition, biography, or historical narrative. The two limiting features in the definition are the aesthetic modeling of the verbal medium and the evocation or depiction of subjective experience. Presuming that readers provisionally accept the definition here offered, we can say that these limiting features—aesthetic modeling and qualitative subjectivity—are themselves universals of literary meaning. They are integral to the kinds of meaning conveyed in literature, and to the way literature conveys those meanings.

Imaginative Virtual Worlds

Literary authors often give direct expression to their own subjective sensations. Most lyric poets are overtly expressive, and many novelists and short story writers comment explicitly on their feelings about the fictional events they depict. Characters in drama and fiction often express emotions and describe their inner states, and authors of fiction routinely describe and analyze the inmost qualities of sensation and thought in their characters.

All these forms of subjectivity are encompassed within a broader, universal category of subjective sensation in literature: the imaginative virtual world. Every literary work creates an imaginative space shared by the author and reader. The subjective sensation within that shared imaginative space is modulated by universal features of human experience, by beliefs and forms of feeling peculiar to the cultures in which it is created and in which it is read, by the personalities of the author who creates it and the reader who reads it, and by the semantic, affective, and aesthetic properties of the words that are the medium of its existence.

Every individual literary work is imbued with the whole array of attitudes, beliefs, and tastes that make up an author’s world view. Attitudes, beliefs, and tastes within a single mind can of course conflict with one another. When they do, those internal conflicts—tensions, ambiguities, confusions, the feeling of disunion—are themselves distinctive features of the author’s world view. Each individual work is a manifestation of that world view, a fragment of the whole. Each fragment is indelibly stamped by the mind of the person who creates it. In entering imaginatively into a literary work, a reader is entering also into the author’s world view.

The very act of using artistic verbal constructs to create a shared space of imaginative experience is a universal aspect of literary meaning. In entering a shared imaginative space created by intentional verbal constructs, readers implicitly enter into the common human fellowship of imaginative virtual experience. So far as we know, that kind of experience is uniquely human. Independently of any specific quality in any given literary work, that uniquely human fellowship has inherent qualities all its own. It is verbal, imaginative, creative. It points to the world outside itself but organizes itself internally through concepts, images, rhetorical constructions, and tonal patterns. It contains denotative statements but deploys forms of meaning that are fully realized only through the interactions among its conceptual, emotional, and sensory elements. It is a simulacrum but also runs parallel with the real inner world of memories, dreams, and reveries that make up much of our active mental life (Raichle; Kaufman and Gregoire; Buckner, Andrews-Hanna and Schacter; Carroll, “Minds”; Andrews‐Hanna, Smallwood and Spreng).

Authors have a primary determinative force in using words to create an imaginative virtual world. They choose and arrange the words, and they imbue their artifice with their own mental character. Even so, readers are not merely passive recipients of authorial intentions. Every reader has his or her own world view. Each is animated by basic human motives and emotions—for instance, by hunger, thirst, love, and fear. Each reader’s culture endows him or her with beliefs, values, attitudes, and forms of imagination that have descended through generations and are shared by multitudes. Despite these shared aspects of mental life, each reader has a personal identity shaped by a unique combination of genetic endowments and environmental influences.

Readers willingly enter into the imaginative virtual worlds created by authors, but each reader also makes something of his or her own out of what the author gives. However explicit, definite, and unequivocal an author might be, intended meanings necessarily interact with the whole structure of values, beliefs, tastes, and attitudes that make up the reader’s own world view. As Auden says in his elegy for Yeats, “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” Readers do not only assimilate. They respond and judge.

We have empirical evidence that readers respond in broadly similar ways to literary texts. They identify similar meanings in an author’s work, and even their emotional responses display broad similarities (Carroll et al., Graphing). Those similarities are grounded in common, shared aspects of human nature. Humans are broadly similar—anatomically, physiologically, neurologically—but no one person (not even an identical twin) is precisely the same as any other person. The uniqueness of individual identity is itself a human universal. In parallel, the uniqueness of individual response is a universal of literary meaning. It seems safe to say that no reader ever experiences the same work in precisely the same way as any other reader. And indeed, it seems likely that no reader ever reads the same work, or the same line, in quite the same way twice.

Universals of literary meaning include both these contrasting tendencies: broad similarity of recognition and response, and the unique subjective particularity of transient moments of literary experience.

A Framework for Analyzing Meaning in Literature: Theme, Tone, and Form

The broad similarity of humans—the kind of similarity described in Brown’s “Universal People”—makes it possible to construct a set of categories for the impersonal, objective analysis of literary meaning. A common framework of comparison is necessary both for describing the similarities of literary experience and for distinguishing experiences among cultures and individual persons. Some set of common terms is indispensable to any research program that aspires to joining a collective effort in producing cumulative, empirical knowledge (Gottschall, New Humanities; Carroll et al. Graphing).

Themes

If a work of literature is an aesthetically modeled verbal construct that evokes or depicts subjective qualities of human experience, a neutral analytic framework for analyzing literary experience would need to take in the constituents of subjective experience and the specifically aesthetic, literary characteristics that evoke or depict that experience. Subjective experience does not take place in a vacuum. In literature, it is invariably set in relation to events and circumstances. Events and circumstances might seem infinitely diverse, but the analysis of human actions can be reasonably delimited by analyzing the species-typical patterns of human life. Specifically human forms of mating, parenting, family organization, social interaction, and imaginative culture can be precisely described (Brown, Human Universals; Muehlenbein and Flinn; Chapais, “Social Universals”; Henrich). Every phase and kind of relationship identified in human life history theory displays its own characteristic motives and concerns. Those motives and concerns can be used as taxonomy of basic themes for literary analysis (Carroll, “Imaginary Lives”; Carroll, “Minds”).

Adopting one common meaning of the term “themes,” I here designate subject areas as “themes.” (Other theorists use the term “themes” with a different signification.) Major themes include childhood and the struggles of growing up, life in a social group, intergroup conflict, mating, parenting, relations among siblings and other relatives, and the life of the mind (religion, ideology, and the arts).

Emotional Tone

Every subject bears within itself a range of affective potentialities, from joy and fulfillment to rage and despair. Characters depicted in literature experience emotions; authors have emotional responses to depicted events; and readers respond both to depicted events and to authors. This whole range of subjective sensation is traditionally characterized as “tone.”

The subjective quality of experience is best captured in the study of emotions. From an evolutionary perspective, two particular kinds of emotional study seem most useful for the purposes of generating a neutral analytic framework closely allied with evolved motives, phases of life, and species-typical kinds of social relationships: the cross-cultural study of emotional facial expressions, and affective neuroscience. On the basis of cross-cultural research on facial expressions, Paul Ekman identifies seven basic emotions: anger, fear, contempt, disgust, joy, sadness, and surprise. On the basis of neurological research, Jaak Panksepp identifies seven emotional systems that partially overlap with Ekman’s seven basic emotions: seeking, fear, rage, lust, maternal care, grief, and play. Basic emotions and emotion systems like those identified by Ekman and Panksepp are complicated and extended in self-conscious and social emotions such as embarrassment, pride, shame, guilt, remorse, and jealousy (Hogan, Affective Narratology; Oatley, Passionate Muse; Carroll et al., Graphing).

Form

Form in fictional narrative begins with the choice of words and the combinations of words in sentences and larger structures such as stanzas, paragraphs, and scenes. Purely physical properties include sound patterns and rhetorical rhythms, but the purely physical elements of language are always intertwined with semantic content and emotional tone. Images and figures of speech are indirect forms of sensory perception and thus also part of the aesthetic quality of literature. The aesthetic medium that begins in sensory experience in literature extends in imagination up through levels of formal organization that can be “perceived” only indirectly, through decoding time schemes and analyzing perspectival interactions among characters, narrators, implied authors, and implied readers (Carroll, “Minds”).

Since its inception, literary theory has aimed at identifying universal structural features in literary texts. Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and end offers a classic example of a purely structural hypothesis. Efforts at creating a universal and universally accepted system of genres have so far met with limited success (Fowler), but there is wide general agreement on the characteristics of a few basic genres such as tragedy, comedy, satire, and heroic quest (Frye; Hogan, “Story”; Carroll, “Literary Meaning”). The forms of narration can be delineated with reference to relations among an implied author, a narrator, characters, and an implied reader (Booth; Carroll, “Minds”). Classifications based on the form of representation—verse, drama, and narrative—are well understood. Most literary critics, regardless of theoretical affiliations, recognize the central role of imagery, metaphor, and symbolism in literary structure (Hogan, “Imagery“).

Attributes of “The Universal People” described by Donald Brown include forms of oral, proto-literary expression: narrative, metaphor, metonomy, onomatopoeia, and poetic meter. The existence of these proto-literary forms in all known cultures points toward underlying pan-human forms of neurological development. Empirical research on the psychology of reading now has techniques and tools, including neuroimaging, that are likely to produce rapid advances, in the near future, on understanding the neurological mechanisms that regulate these processes (Jacobs). Pan-human neurological mechanisms are “natural kinds.” Classifications based on natural kinds offer good prospects for empirical development and for integration with thematic and tonal analysis focused on basic motives and emotions.

Established terms in prosody and narratology can be tested against techniques that allow empirical investigation into the psychology of reading (Jacobs). The ideal, ultimately, would be to ground all purely formal categories in cognitive science and to integrate them with an understanding of themes and emotional tone.

Living in the Imagination

Literature or its oral antecedents are human universals. People in all known cultures tell stories, act out scenes, play imaginatively with language, and use it for evocative, expressive, and aesthetic purposes. The idea of imaginative virtual worlds suggests why humans might have evolved this peculiar, uniquely human form of behavior. The imagination seems to be part of the universal repertory of human adaptive capacities (Abraham; Carroll, “Adaptive Function”; Kaufman and Gregoire; Mithen). Compared to humans, animals of other species are more tightly locked into the sensory present, reacting to stimuli from the environment and deploying a relatively narrow range of species-typical behaviors. All normally developing human beings connect the present with the past and with anticipations of the future, entertain cosmological ideas, evaluate behavior through reference to abstract moral codes, construct autobiographical narratives, and interpret events by comparing them, consciously or not, with stories, myths, and images drawn from their culture. In this sense, all human beings live in the imagination. They occupy a virtual imaginative world. Words are crucially important in constructing those worlds. When the words are organized in aesthetically modeled ways to evoke or depict subjective human experience, we call that literature.

Future Research

The evolutionary social sciences have been gradually moving toward the formation of a true paradigm: a model of the human mind that is comprehensive in scope, grounded in empirically validated causal explanations, and capable of cumulative empirical and theoretical development. Biocultural theory has become widely accepted in principle (Carroll et al., “Survey”), but in much evolutionary thinking, theories of “culture” still focus chiefly on technology, social customs, and markers of tribal identity. From the perspective adopted in this essay, understanding that humans live in the imagination is the last major component needed to construct an adequate basic model of the adapted mind. Several streams of research are now converging on that last major component: neuroimaging research on the brain’s default mode network (also known as “the imagination network”; Kaufman and Gregoire), narrative psychology (McAdams, Personality Development), the psychology of fiction (Oatley, Psychology of Fiction), cognitive and affective literary theory (Boyd; Hogan, Affective Narratology), and evolutionary literary theory (Boyd, Carroll and Gottschall).

The sciences characteristically seek explanations that reduce complex phenomena to basic causal principles, preferably principles that can be quantified. Literary critics characteristically seek to evoke complex imaginative structures in literary works. From the perspective adopted in this essay, a comprehensive research program in literary meaning would extend across a methodological spectrum that is occupied, at one pole, by empirical, quantitative research, and at the other pole, by imaginatively responsive interpretive work. Empirical research on the psychology and neurology of literary experience would be constrained by the need to approximate to the complex imaginative structures evoked in interpretive criticism. Interpretive criticism would be constrained by established scientific knowledge, an ethos of respect for empirical validity, and the logic of causal explanatory reduction. Research at both poles would be lodged within a comprehensive, unified conception of the human mind. That conception would synthesize convergent findings from the whole range of disciplines that take Homo sapiens as their subject matter.

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Poetic Line Length

Posted on February 9, 2017

Nigel Fabb, Strathclyde University

Absolute universal: Some types of regular poetic form – meter, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism – regulate linguistic form relative to a sequence of words which must be short enough to fit into working memory. For example, a meter is regulated over a line which can fit as a whole into working memory.

It has been claimed by various authors that a line of metrical poetry is limited in its upper length by working memory capacity. This claim requires a distinction between two aspects of metricality. Consider Paradise Lost, which is in iambic pentameter for all of its length. The meter is a set of constraints on a sequence of words which add up to about ten syllables (with a rhythm holding over that sequence); any constraint on line length must relate to this aspect of metricality, where the meter holds of a textual sequence of a certain length (often within a range of variations, but never limitless, and never very long). The other aspect of the meter is that the whole poem is in iambic pentameter, and in this aspect of metricality there is no upper limit on length. It is thus necessary to distinguish the aspect of metricality which holds within a section (e.g., the metrical line) and the aspect of metricality which holds over a whole text, which can be isometric or heterometric, where distinct sections are in different meters (in some cases, radically heterometric as in Greek lyric poetry). There is usually no relation between these two aspects of a meter: iambic pentameter always controls the line in the same way but can combine with other meters in all kinds of ways to form patterns across a longer text.

Once we focus on the aspect of metricality which holds within a section (usually called a line), we can specify that the sections are always fairly short. In many metrical traditions, the meter holds over a section which we might call a line. (In some traditions, there is a longer and a shorter section, each of which might be called the line, depending on what aspect of form we focus on – as in Beowulf for example or the Arabic beyt); even if the meter holds of the larger section it is still always fairly short. Various authors have argued that the metrical section can be no longer than the sequence of words which can fit into working memory capacity (Tsur, Hogan, Willett etc). They tend to assume Miller’s characterization of working memory capacity as “seven plus or minus two” units (e.g., words, or sometimes syllables). This however would not offer enough capacity for lines in many metrical traditions; it is also incorrect as a characterization of working memory capacity. Working memory capacity is now considered by psychologists to contain about four ‘chunks’ of information (Cowan), and Baddeley suggests that in the episodic buffer of working memory a sequence of about fifteen lexical/grammatical words can fit into working memory. Some such word-based measure is a larger estimate of capacity which is likely to be enough to fit any metrically-governed sequence of words in any poetic tradition. (I illustrate this claim from a range of traditions in Fabb What is Poetry.) This raises the possibility that the metrical line may be subject to an upper limit on length: it must fit into working memory capacity.

Note that this limit on length is based on information (e.g., number of words) and not on duration. There is no specifically durational limit on the upper length of the line; Turner and Pöppel claim a three second upper limit, but this is disproved by Fabb’s (“There is No Psychological Limit”) survey of recorded poetry. Baddeley has a multi-component theory of working memory, and suggests that one part of working memory, the phonological loop is indeed limited by duration (two seconds of material); but it is not this part of working memory which is involved in this generalization (instead it is the episodic buffer which is limited by information, not time).

Adapting an existing tradition, my suggestion is that a kind of regular poetic form – meter – is constrained to operate over sequences which are no longer than can be held in working memory. In Fabb What is Poetry I suggest that three other kinds of regular poetic form are similarly constrained: rhyme, alliteration and parallelism. This requires a similar separation between two aspects of a form: (i) the constraints it places relative to a sequence of words, where the sequence is limited in length, and (ii) the overall pattern it forms over a text, where there is no upper limit. Consider for example rhyme. The constraint relative to a sequence can be stated for an English sonnet as ‘the final word in a line must rhyme’ (note that again this refers to the line as the relevant section, a section of limited length). Rhyme can then be distributed in various kinds of pattern, which can hold over couplets, quatrains, octave/sestet or the whole poem, where there are no upper limits on the size of unit over which the pattern is defined. Similar claims can be made for alliteration, where the rule requires e.g., one word in every half-line to alliterate, or one word in every line. The same alliteration pattern can then be sustained throughout a whole poem (e.g., in the Somali gabay genre). Parallelism is a looser structural notion, and can be found intermittently in prose (unlineated text) as well as poetry; when it is found in poetry, however, each part of a parallel pair is relatively short in length (Fabb “Poetic Parallelism”). In conclusion, it appears that the four most widespread kinds of regular form found in poetry all hold of relatively short textual sequences, short enough to fit into working memory capacity.

Though Fabb What is Poetry shows that these claims appear to hold true for many different poetic traditions, the claims suffer from a lack of relevant psychological evidence. First, we know rather little about the capacity of working memory as regards how many words will fit into it, and how different languages with different kinds of word place different demands on working memory (Cohen-Mimran et al). Second, the measures offered, e.g., Baddeley’s fifteen words, depend on the words being syntactically connected in a coherent way (enabling chunking), but this is not always true of poetry where nonsyntactic concatenation is more common (Fabb “Why is Verse” suggests that poetic lines actually have no syntax). Third, as far as I know there are no experimental results telling us how many words within a poem can fit as a sequence into working memory.

The generalization is that certain regular poetic forms must hold over a sequence of words which can fit into working memory. This rules out two possibilities. First, it means that regular poetic forms such as meter, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism cannot hold of prose. This is because the difference between prose and poetry is that only the latter has sections (e.g., lines) which are not isomorphic with syntactic or linguistic prosodic constituents; it is these sections over which the poetic forms hold, and which are limited in upper length. Second, it means that in poetry, regular poetic forms cannot depend on long sequences; to give a specific example, there should be no poetry in which the only constraint on rhyming words is that they must fall at the end of quatrains (because they would be too long).

Note that the generalization does not apply to poetic lines as such. Whitman’s lines can be longer than likely to fit into working memory. But these lines also have no regular poetic form; the poetic forms emerge temporarily in Whitman’s poetry, just as they can do in prose. The generalization applies only to poetic lines which have certain kinds of regular form. However, other kinds of poetic form may not be constrained in the same way; for example, in the Hiberno-Latin poem Altus Prosator (attr. St Columba) the first word in each of the six-line stanzas is alphabetically constrained: A in the first stanza, B in the second, etc. Though the pattern is unconstrained (as it always is), there is nevertheless a rule, “put an alphabetically constrained word at the beginning of each stanza,” which because of the size of unit referred to would be impossible for rhyme, alliteration, metre, or parallelism. It is worth noting that this type of form depends on writing (which may allow for the larger units relative to which it is defined).

If the generalization is correct, then it might suggest that working memory has a role in the processing of regular poetic forms such as meter, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism; long-term memory is also important, for the overall patterns (including the very complex patterns formed by rhyme schemes or by responsion in Greek odes). Does it have any consequence for the aesthetics of poetry: e.g., arising from the need to hold a metrical line as a whole unit in working memory. Hogan suggests that the relation to working memory has a function of fostering aesthetic experience by enabling what Abhinavagupta calls “savoring” and that such savoring is in part a matter of fuller or richer encoding of verbal properties, relative to our (usually non-aesthetic) encoding of ordinary language

Future Research

(i) It would be useful to know a lot more about working memory capacity and how it relates to linguistic form. For example, psychologists claims about working memory capacity tend to refer to lexical/syntactic words, but it is clear that prosodic words (and prosodic constituency) are relevant in metre and other aspects of poetry.

(ii) I know of no relevant experimental work to test working memory capacity and poetry. In comparison, there is a big body of work on long term memory and poetry (particularly oral poetry). The relation between the two kinds of memory would also be interesting to explore, as regards poetic form and the line.

(Thanks to an anonymous reviewer who forced a complete rewrite and resubmission.)

Works Cited

Baddeley, Alan. “Working Memory: Theories, Models, and Controversies.” Annu. Rev. Psychol. 63 (2012): 1–29.

Cohen-Mimran, Ravit, Jasmeen Adwan-Mansour and Shimon Sapir. “The Effect of Morphological Complexity on Verbal Working Memory: Results from Arabic Speaking Children.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 42 (2013): 239–253.

Cowan, Nelson. “The Magical Number 4 in Short-term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24 (2000): 87–185.

Fabb, Nigel “Why is Verse Poetry?” PN Review 189. 36 (2009): 52–57.

Fabb, Nigel “There is no Psychological Limit on the Duration of Metrical Lines in Performance: Against Turner and Pöppel.” International Journal of Literary Linguistics 2 (2013): 1-29

Fabb, Nigel. What is Poetry? Language and Memory in the Poems of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Fabb, Nigel. “Poetic Parallelism and Working Memory.” Oral Tradition 31/2 (2017). Special issue on Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance, ed. Frog & Lotte Tarkka.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Literary Universals.” Poetics Today 18 (1997): 223–249.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Miller, George A. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review 101 (1956): 343-352.

Tsur, Reuven. Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance. An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics. Berne: Peter Lang,1998.

Turner, Frederick and Ernst Pöppel. “Metered Poetry, the Brain, and Time.” In Beauty and the Brain. Biological Aspects of Aesthetics. Eds. Ingo Rentschler, Barbara Herzberger and David Epstein. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1988, 71–90.

Willett, Steven J. “Working Memory and its Vonstraints on Colometry.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica. New Series 71 (2002): 7-19.

Comments on Zheng Ying, “Chinese and Western Drama”

Posted on February 6, 2017

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

I was both pleased and stimulated to read Zheng Ying’s insightful reflections on tragi-comedy and tragedy. Since Professor Zheng is concerned centrally with my work on this topic, it seemed appropriate that I make a few comments. Broadly speaking, I believe Professor Zheng’s essay shows us something important about tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy. However, I am not convinced that it shows us a difference between Chinese and Western drama.

First, I should say that I did not initially conceive of my comments on tragedy and tragi-comedy as involving terribly substantive claims. I had analyzed story sequences in terms of goal pursuit, with goals defined by imagined happiness. Achievement of the goal is the basic condition of comedy. This left the obvious issue of what constitutes tragedy, since heroes do not typically pursue objects they do not believe will make them happy. My claim was simply that tragedy is not a problem because the tragic hero pursues a happiness goal in the usual way; what marks off tragedy from comedy is that the hero cannot achieve the goal. For example, Romeo and Juliet desire union. Their deaths prevent this. I went on to argue that prototypical comedies intensify their outcome emotion (of joy) by developing the middle of the story into an apparent loss of the happiness goal. For example, it is all well and good if John and Jane fall in love, then get married with their parents’ and friends’ enthusiastic encouragement. But it is more engaging and ultimately enjoyable if John and Jane are married after they have been separated by parental disapproval, with one of them apparently dying and the other being engaged to a wicked rival. In comedy, that intensification in the middle is, so to speak, temporarily tragic. The lovers are not dead; the conflict with the parents can be overcome. In tragedy, that middle is permanent.

Reading Professor Zheng’s essay, I realized that these claims are not simply preliminary to the genre analyses that follow. They do have some independent consequences. The first consequence that I should note is terminological. I use the term “tragi-comedy” to refer to outcomes of story sequences—failure to achieve goals (tragedy or the “tragi-” part of “tragicomedy”) versus success in achieving them (comedy). Another use of “tragi-comedy” refers to overall mood—sad (tragedy or the “tragi-” part of “tragi-comedy”) or joyful (comedy). In keeping with the latter usage, some writers refer to a work as a tragi-comedy if sorrowful elements disturb our response to the joyful elements, rendering the predominant mood unclear. Rather than referring to this as “tragi-comedy,” I would refer to (degrees of) ambivalence.

I believe to some extent Professor Zheng’s comments concern ambivalence rather than tragi-comedy (in my usage). However, that brings me to the second consequence, which is not merely terminological. Professor Zheng’s essay suggests to me that ambivalence is in part a matter of the extent to which happiness outcomes are or are not achieved, In other words, ambivalence results from different degrees of “shortening,” as Professor Zheng would put it. I have stressed the broad extent of ambivalence in other work (see How). But I did not fully realize its importance in tragedy or tragi-comedy before reading Professor Zheng’s analysis.

Specifically, Professor Zheng presents a suggestive argument that both Chinese and Western narratives involve shortening comedy into tragedy. However, in my terms, he indicates that Chinese tragedies are more ambivalent (thus have more joy) in their outcomes. This is possible. However, if true, it could only be shown by broad survey. What Professor Zheng’s examples suggest to me is, rather, that both traditions are more ambivalent than I had previously thought. In The Mind and Its Stories, I did stress the troubled character of heroic usurpation narratives. The “epilogue of suffering” that often ends such stories suggests that there is frequently a tragic mood even in works that count as tragi-comedies by my outcome-oriented definition. I also pointed out that many heroic stories involve the original leader being killed and replaced by his heir. Given these points, The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Chao seems to conform relatively well to the general structure of heroic tragi-comedy—or, more properly, it seems to approximate the prototype (since we are not dealing with necessary and sufficient conditions here, but with roughly average tendencies).

Hamlet is more clearly tragic than Chi Chun-hsiang’s play. The usurper is killed, but so is the hero (the usurped leader’s heir). King Lear turns out to be a difficult case. It partially approximates the tragi-comic prototype as the usurped leader (Lear) is succeeded by his favored son-in-law (Albany; recall the opening lines of the play, “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall” [I.i.1-2]). But his favorite child (Cordelia) has been killed—partially due to conflict with that son-in-law. Even while being more complex in its outcome, King Lear seems clearly to be varying the prototypical, tragi-comic case. But its complexity—narrative, thematic, and above all emotional—is important and consequential.

The key point for present purposes is that all these heroic works—Chinese and Western–betray degrees of ambivalence, whether we judge them ultimately tragic or comic in outcome. The same point applies to romantic works. (On heroic and romantic works, see “Story.”) Consider, for example, Romeo and Juliet and Ma Chih-yuan’s Autumn in Han Palace. Both involve the permanent, tragic separation of the lovers. But both also involve social reconciliation at the end—reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets in the former case and reconciliation between Emperor Yuan and Emperor Huhanya in the latter. Indeed, once we are attuned to ambivalence, we are likely to notice that it occurs even in comedies, most obviously with the “scapegoat” figure—for example, Malvolio at the end of Twelfth Night or the suicidal rival, Cheng Heng, at the end of Western Chamber Romance.

In sum, it is not clear that there is a systematic difference between Chinese and Western drama in the nature of shortening tragi-comedy into tragedy. Rather, Professor Zheng seems to me to have drawn our attention, very valuably, to variation in the degree of such shortening in both traditions. This in turn sensitizes us to the extent of ambivalence in both tragedy and comedy. Finally, it suggests that there is not a sharp comedy-tragedy division, but a continuum, with ambiguous cases—rather as we might have expected from the idea of tragi-comedy to begin with.

Future Research

The preceding points suggest that the ambivalence of both comedy and tragedy should be studied more systematically across a range of traditions. Part of this research may involve understanding what patterns there are in such ambivalence, for example what forms of “shortening” we find in more tragic stories or how common scapegoating is in comedies. Another part of this research may involve explaining why different traditions apparently develop comic and tragic outcomes in different proportions, both within and across works. Finally, further study of the way tragi-comedy operates in the different universal-prototypical genres (such as the heroic and romantic stories) might advance our understanding of why some genres appear more prone to ambivalence than others.

Works Cited

Chi Chun-hsiang. “The Orphan of Chao.” In Six Yuan Plays. Ed. and trans. Liu Jung-en. New York: Penguin, 1972, 41-81.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Ma Chih-yuan. Autumn in Han Palace. In Six Yuan Plays. Ed. and trans. Liu Jung-en. New York: Penguin, 1972, 189-224.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. In The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: Norton, 1997, 2307-2554.

Tung Chieh-yuan. Master Tung’s Western Chamber Romance. Ed. and trans. Li-li Ch’en. New York: Columbia UP, 1976.

Chinese and Western Drama: Tragi-Comedy and Tragedy

Posted on February 4, 2017

Zheng Ying, Zhejiang University

The structural difference between traditional Chinese and western drama has long been studied by generations of comparative literary scholars. However, with the universal structure of human narratives — tragi-comedy, as promoted by Patrick Colm Hogan in The Mind and Its Stories–the issue of similarities and dissimilarities could find some answers. Professor Hogan defines “tragi-comedy” as a structure with a sorrow-eliciting middle part and a happiness-eliciting ending simultaneously, and hence the traditional genre of tragedy is merely a variation of it, a shortened form in which the plot comes to end in the middle part (see Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories), the model of which can be outlined by the following graph.

Structure of Tragedy and Tragi-Comedy (Hogan)

A: Beginning B: Sorrowful Middle C: Happy Ending

____________________________________________

Tragedy

__________________________________________________________________________

Tragi-Comedy

In this paper, with comparison under the model of “tragi-comedy” and tragedy respectively, and with evidence drawn from Chinese and western literary theories and classical works, I would try to argue that both Chinese and western drama have “tragi-comedy” and the shortened tragedy as one of their important narrative universals, but only that Chinese and western tragedy are shortened differently. For the convenience of narration, I would use “A-B-C” structure to refer to “tragi-comedy” and a shortened “A-B” structure to refer to tragedy.

Tragi-Comedy in Chinese and Western Drama

After examination, it can be found that both Chinese and western drama have the structure of “tragi-comedy” as one of their narrative prototypes, which is not only suggested in their literary theories but also manifested in many of their representative classical works.

Comparison from Literary Theories

Though it is widely believed by western literary theorists that tragedy and comedy are two distinguished dramatic genres, the genre of “tragicomedy” has been separated from genres of tragedy and comedy since very early times, and become one of the independent literary genres. Though traditional critics such as Hegel did not give high reputation to this mixed literary genre, many modern critics advocate tragicomedy to be a quite important genre since the mix of tragedy and comedy is exactly “the basic pattern of human life”, informing “human being’s perception of their environment and their most central religious beliefs” (Foster 9).

In Chinese dramatic theory, however, though there is no similar independent concept as “tragi-comedy,” this A-B-C structure was indeed widely approved and considered legal and valuable. In On Lyrics(曲品), Lu Tiancheng of the Ming Dynasty, spoke highly of the plays which mixed the tragic emotions and happy ones, and remarked on The Story of Lute（琵琶记, a tragi-comedy, as the best example of “work of great excellence”, for it “alternates so properly, setting sadness and pleasure in turn”[1] (Lu 224). In Principles of Lyrics (曲律), Wang Jide compared the plot of a drama to “a snake in the mountain, whose head is in good link with its tail”[2] (Wang132). The description, “whose head is in good link with its tail,” is in fact another way of saying that the seed of happiness-pursuing sown at the beginning of a play must have its harvest in its denouement, though the middle could be somewhat different.

Comparison from Literary Works

Along the history of western drama, a lot of great examples of tragi-comedy, or “tragicomedy” as it is traditionally defined, could be found. In works of ancient Greek, Euripides’ Alcestis is a good example. The goal there is somewhat the romantic reunion of lovers from the heroine’s position. In the “middle” part, the goal is tragically unobtained, for even though the heroine Alcestis has prepared to donate her own life to save her husband’s and only asks her husband never to marry again in return, her husband eats his words soon after her death. But in the end, her life is saved by her husband’s friend, who sends her to her husband’s hand and unites her with him again. In the Renaissance period, many Shakespearean plays fit this model in the same way. His famous work, The Winter’s Tale, even encompasses two stories of romantic tragi-comedies. One is around the royal family: In the middle, queen Hermione’s faintness (which is due to her husband king Leontes’ accusation) becomes the rumor of death and is believed by the king deeply. Hermione comes back to life from the unconsciousness statue and gets united with her family in the final part. The other is around the heirs of the two countries: Their engagement is strongly rejected by the prince’s parent Polixenes. They must escape to Sicilia, and their marriage gets his approval only later in the play. Besides, as Hogan has put forward, some classical series of tragedies such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, or the two parts of Faust of modern works, can also be integrated into tragic-comedy of a larger cycle.

In traditional Chinese drama, we find Zheng Guangzu’s The Soul of Qiannu Leaves Her Body（倩女离魂)as mentioned by Hogan. In Act II of this play, Qiannu’s soul departs from her body and joins her fiancé who is forced to spend three years away from hometown. This is the sorrowful middle, as Qiannu’s body seems destined to die at home. In Act IV, however, she gets married with her fiancé after her soul joins into her body again. This is the happiness-eliciting ending. Many other classical plays are of the same general type–The Story of Lute（琵琶记),The Tale of Rabbit (白兔记), The Romance of the West Chamber（西厢记), Night Rain in the Xiaoxiang Court (潇湘夜雨), The Peony Pavilion（牡丹亭）etc.

Tragedy in Chinese and Western Drama

In both western and Chinese drama, we can, similarly, find the shortened version of “tragi-comedy”—tragedy. However, we would also find that they are shortened to a different extent and in slightly different ways, the relation of which may be seen more clearly in the graph below. As it is shown, suppose Point C in tragi-comedy includes several happiness-eliciting elements. Though both Chinese and western tragedy give Point C as a cut off, Chinese tragedy tends to cut off only part of C, while western tragedy cuts off C more thoroughly. In other words, more elements of Point C get preserved in a Chinese tragedy, very often in a partial “joyous reunion” following the sorrowful middle part). (The term “joyous reunion” is conventially used in Chinese dramatic studies to refer to the phenomenon that Chinese dramas often end with some kind of pleasure: those who begin with sadness end with happiness, those who begin with separation end with reunion, and those with poverty and with richness, and so forth [see Wang Guowei, A History of The Dramas of the Song and Yuan Dynasties (宋元戏曲史]). It is modified as “partial” here because, compared with the “joyous reunion” in other dramas, in tragedy, it is neither a complete restoration of the statement appearing in Point A nor a goal finally realized, but a partial restitution of the original order, a half-achieved statement of the goal, or a satisfying compensation to the sorrowful middle when the goal is impossible to gain as expected. In contrast, the story will cease strictly in Point B in a western tragedy.

Structure of Tragedy (Revised)

A: Beginning B: Sorrowful Middle C: Happy Ending

____________________________________________

Western Tragedy

_____________________________________________________________

Chinese Tragedy Partial Joyous Reunion

Comparison from Literary Theories

For Chinese tragedy, we can not only understand this “joyous reunion” from the ancient literary theories mentioned above, but also from several modern scholar’s observations. The goal in the beginning must have some echo in the end, and if it is not obtained, it must have some compensation. For instance, Qian Zhongshu has once asserted that in Chinese drama, “the curtain does not fall on the main tragic event, but on the aftermath of that event. The tragic moment with passion at its highest and pain at its deepest seems to ebb out in a long falling close” (Qian 53-65), in which the involvement of both Point B and C is highlighted. Wang Guowei (Wang 12) and Cai Yuanpei (Cai 66-67) have maintained that for Chinese drama, “those who begin with separation end with reunion.” Wang Jisi’s research, in which western drama is described as “happiness—sorrow—deeper sorrow”, and Chinese drama as “happiness—sorrow—happiness—deeper sorrow—lighter happiness” (Wang 75-79) also outlines this relation.

Similarly, we can find the requirement for the precise A-B structure of western tragedy from western dramatic theories, from ancient Aristotle’s to the previous dramatic critics. Aristotle described the magnitude of tragedy (30-31, 36-37), writing that

as great as a magnitude as it takes for a change to happen into good from bad fortune, or from good to bad fortune, when it comes about by a likely or necessary sequence, there is a sufficient limit of magnitude…it is therefore necessary for the story that is in beautiful shape to be single–not double as some people claim–changing not into good fortune from bad but the opposite way, from good fortune to bad.

This is to say that, as long as there is a complete change “from good to bad fortune”, the change from Point A to Point B, the “sufficient limit of magnitude” is so well finished that no more excessive joyous sequence, thus Point C, is needed. In Hegel’s opinion, in tragedy, each of the two parties of the conflict stands for their own reason. Now that either of them could defeat the other and get the final success, the ruin of both is the necessary ending of the whole play. In “The Psychology of Tragic Pleasure”, Roy Morrell pointed out that tragedy should firmly exclude Point C, which is the period of “the gratification of a wish” in his word, “In short, tragic pleasure does not arise through the gratification of a wish, but in a wish’s frustration…Tragedy does not ‘please’ in this sense; it does not please our palate, nor awaken pleasurable anticipation. On the contrary, we resist Tragedy, and try to avert it” (22-37). And in V.G. Belinsky’s idea, the hero “could not be ‘hero’ without this sacrifice or death” (Belinsky, 370).

Comparison from Literary Works

Many canonical works from each tradition provide evidence for this distinction as well. Tragic plays since the Yuan Dynasty, such as The Gross Injustice to Maid Dou（窦娥冤）by Guan Hanqing and The Orphan of Zhao (赵氏孤儿)by Ji Junxiang, have been recognized as models of Chinese tragedy, and they are composed in this structure. In The Gross Injustice to Maid Dou, for example, a young woman named Dou Duan-yun is going after the goal of social justice, for she is unjustly charged with murder by villain Zhang Lu’er who poisons his own father but accuses her of the murder. In Act III, when Dou Duan-yun is sentenced to death by the governor and appeals to heaven to have pity, the sorrow-eliciting Point B comes to its climax for the justice she pursues has not yet been obtained before her death. But in the end Dou Duan-yun’s spirit asks her father, a government official, to retry the case and he manages to give the criminals the punishments they deserve. Thus a compensation of justice qualifies Dou’s tragedy.

As comparison, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear’s distribution of the land can be viewed as Point A in which his goal is to give his daughters their deserved share of his land. But after his distribution plan proves to be totally wrong, the disastrous failure becomes inescapable even though he has once regretted and tried to rectify it. In the end of the play, he and his three daughters all die, and this is exactly the sorrow-eliciting Point B. In another play of Shakespeare, Othello, the story ends with Point B likewise. The goal herein is the loving union of Othello and Desdemona, but this happiness goal is not finally achieved. Though he has managed to marry her, he smothers her to death under the deceit of Iago, and commits suicide after the truth is revealed.

It is true that in some western dramas, when the goal could not be attained, the decent man and the evil one will meet their doom at the same time. To some extent, the death of the evil group is another way of the triumph of the good, and hence analogous to the “joyous reunion.” Nonetheless, it is far less “happy” than the latter, since a usual Chinese literary practice would not only give the sinner his deserved punishment but also give the hero or his group some restitution after their sorrowful experience. So, if the most ideal form of happy ending in tragi-comedy is to give a happy life to the good and bitter penalization for the evil, the ending in Chinese tragedy preserves more of it.

Let us take Hogan’s heroic tragi-comedy as example, and divide the full version of it into three stages, (A) the possession of power, (B) the lost of power during which the hero makes great effort to regain that power, and (C) the ultimate regaining of the power. In relation to this, we may consider two tragedies of this same theme, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ji Junxiang’s The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao （赵氏孤儿大报仇）. They are extraordinarily alike in the first two stages, but differ in the ending stage.

1) Similar Beginning, the Order Destroyed

In the beginning of The Orphan of Zhao, in the name of the king, Tu’an Gu slaughters over three hundred people who constitute the family of his political rival, Zhao. When Zhao’s wife, the princess, Lady Zhuang is briefly spared, and prisoned in their house, she gives birth to her son. That heir, the orphan of Zhao, is not only threatened to death, but also deprived of his aristocratic life and political power.

The order is similarly seriously destroyed in Hamlet. The old king is murdered by his own brother, the usurper Claudius, and Hamlet’s mother is married by the latter. As Hamlet has said that he “hath killed my king and whored my mother” and “Thrown out his angle for my proper life” (V.ii.65, 67). Hamlet himself is at the risk of being deprived of his proper position, and the royal family is destroyed.

2) Similar Middle Part, the Order Lost in Pursuit

In The Orphan of Zhao, the newborn orphan is entrusted to the doctor Cheng Ying and carried out of his home in the medicine chest, after which he is endowed with the great task of revenge. As Cheng Ying explains in Act II, “all of the Zhao family rest their hope on this little boy, wishing him to take revenge.”[3] In Hamlet, after Prince Hamlet gets to know the truth of his father’s death from his father’s ghost. Thus he too is endowed with the task of revenge, as his father has asked him “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder”(I,v.25) and he himself announces that “The time is out of joint：O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right !”(I,v.189-190) .

And in both plays, situations in this part are sorrowful as many people lose their lives. In the former, they are the kind general Han Jue, Cheng Ying’s own son, minister Gongsun, and so on; in the latter, they are Hamlet’s fiancée Ophelia and her brother, as well as his own mother.

3) Varied endings

According to Hogan, the final stage of tragi-comedy will very often include at least two elements , one is the punishment of the destroyer of the order, that “He/she then battles the usurper” in Hogan’s words, and the other is the order’s going back to normal, the hero “is restored to his/her proper place as leader of his/her society” (110). While both plays have the first element, the second element is completely cut off in Hamlet but embodied in a compensatory form in the Ji’s play.

As for the first element, both plays have it. In The Orphan of Zhao, it is manifested as the grown-up orphan arrests the killer Tu’an, who has been his adoptive father for twenty years, and gives him a torturous death, to “stick him to the wooden donkey (a instruments of torture), cut off the flesh from his bones, and when all of his flesh is taken off, chop off his head and give him disembowelment, in case he dies too quickly.”[4] In Hamlet, it is embodied as Hamlet kills the usurper Claudius by the poisoned foil.

As for the second element, it gets half-embodied in The Orphan of Zhao, and in a form of compensation. While the orphan wins his deserved position back and his major saver, Cheng Ying gets a considerable reward, many other decent people who have passed away during the previous stage, such as Han Jue and Gongsun, who have no chance to come back to life, but only get some compensation from the emperor’s citation which declares, “To let Han Jue’s descendant be the general still, and to give Cheng Ying farms ten hectares. To build memorial for old Gongsun, to give all decent people praise”[5]（VI). In contrast, not only does Hamlet die soon after the death of Claudius due to his wound (a standard way in which a heroic tragi-comedy is shortened into a tragedy), his rightful dominion is seized by the outside invader, prince Fortinbras of Norway.
Conclusion

With the examination of Chinese drama and its western counterpart under the framework of Hogan’s universal narrative structure of tragi-comedy, it might be concluded that (1) both of the two literary conventions have the prototype of “tragi-comedy” similarly; (2) though both of them have the shortened form of “tragi-comedy,” tragedy as well, they have it shortened differently, with an additional “joyous reunion” in the typical Chinese dramatic ending.

Furthermore, with this finding, a possible cognitive answer might be suggested to the classical question “whether China has tragedy” in comparative literary study of 20^th century. If we define the “tragedy” here as “tragedy of the western version”: the answer may be “no”, for a Chinese tragic play may differ from a western tragedy in how it gets the ending of tragi-comedy cut off; but if we define the “tragedy” as a shortened form of tragi-comedy, the answer could be “yes,” for Chinese tragic play resembles its western counterpart in its “tragi-comedy minus” shape.

[See also Patrick Colm Hogan, “Comments on Zheng“]

Works Cited

Aristotle. Poetics. Newburyport: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Company, 2006.

Foster, Verna A. The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. Ashgate Publishing, 2004.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Morrell, Roy. “The Psychology of Tragic Pleasure.” Essays in Criticism VI (1956).

Qian Zhongshu. “Tragedy in Old Chinese Drama”. A Collection of Qian Zhonshu’s English Essays. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press, 2005.

别林斯基（著）,诗歌的分类和分科,载满涛,辛未艾(译)《别林斯基文学论文选》.上海:上海译文出版社,2000.

蔡元培,在北京通俗教育研究会演说词,载《蔡元培文选（注释本）》,百花文艺出版社, 2006.

陈季同（著）,李华川, 凌敏（译）,《中国人的戏剧》. 桂林:广西师范大学出版社,2006.

纪君祥,《赵氏孤儿》. 上海:上海古籍出版社, 2010.

吕天成,《曲品》,载《中国古典戏曲论著集成（第六册）》.北京:中国戏剧出版社,1959.

莎士比亚,《哈姆雷特》（中英对照）. 北京:中国广播电视出版社, 台北: 远东图书公司, 2002.

王国维,宋元戏曲史,载《王国维文学论著三种》.北京: 商务印书馆, 2001.

王季思,悲喜相乘.《戏曲艺术》, 1990 (1).

王骥德,曲律,载《中国古典戏曲论著集成（第四册）》, 北京: 中国戏剧出版社,1982.

朱光潜,《悲剧心理学(中英文)》.北京:中华书局, 2012.

Endnotes

[1] “串插甚合局段，苦乐相错。”

[2] “务如常山之蛇，首尾相应。”

[3] “赵氏一家全靠着这小舍人，要他报仇哩。”

[4] “与我将这贼钉上木驴，细细的剐上三千刀，皮肉都尽，方才断首开膛，休着他死的早了。”

[5] “韩厥后仍为上将，给程婴十顷田庄。老公孙立碑造墓，弥明辈概与扬。”

Ethical Universals and Postcolonialism

Posted on February 3, 2017

Arnab Dutta Roy, University of Connecticut

Ethical universals broadly refer to systems of ethical principles, patterns, codes, or moral deliberations that are presumed to have a cross-cultural relevance. The study of ethical universals is of two general types: descriptive and normative. This entry considers the latter, as it applied to the study of literature.

Normative or prescriptive ethics mainly concerns the intrinsic value of human conduct, seeking to establish what is morally valuable or politically admirable. While, there are many aspects to the study of normative ethics in disciplines of philosophy and various social sciences, in literary studies, such study is primarily applied to determine the quality of a literary creation, based on its ethical, aesthetic, or political worth.

Evaluations of ethical universals are commonly based on the presumption that humans share certain descriptive properties of emotions, cognition, experience, and reasoning (see Donald Brown for relevant descriptive human universals). While this presumption informs normative conceptions of universalism as broad ethical principles invoked by people cross-culturally (in a variety of situations and circumstances, socially or politically), this entry concerns universalism as it is invoked specifically as a response to oppression. More exactly, this essay concerns the invocation of normative ethical universals in cross-cultural activisms against colonialism as expressed in literary works.

Literary scholars such as Mukti Mangharam, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Patrick Hogan, Lalita Pandit, Ashis Nandy, and Judith Butler centrally relate the study of universalism to literature. Some scholars such as Mangharam and Ngũgĩ consider literature to endorse a particularistic universalism that places individual differences and social practices in a broader human universalism. Mangharam, for instance, defines universals as a sum of lived particulars. She observes that in the universal scheme “every person is a particular, unique addition to a universal horizon of humanity” (Mangharam 82). More precisely, she emphasizes that this idea of liberal humanism is expressed in the social writings of many Africanist poets such as William Kgositsile, Amiri Baraka, and Aime Cesaire, in responding to the oppression of black communities around the world. Ngũgĩ declares himself as “unrepentant universalist,” advancing the view that “true humanism, with its universal outreach, can flower amongst the people of the earth” (xvii). This view centrally guides his vision for African literatures, in the context of decolonization.

Others develop universalism as an opposition to colonialism. Hogan and Pandit, for instance, find universalism as a pro-social cultural response to practices of absolutisms around the world, examined in postcolonial texts from India, the West Indies, China, Trinidad, and elsewhere (for a more detailed view on empathic universalism, see Pandit’s entry on empathic and hegemonic universalism). Similarly, Nandy distinguishes between the conceptions of homogenized universalism and distinctive civilizational universalism. He defines the former as a product of uprootedness and de-culturation brought forth by colonialism (Nandy x). He finds the latter “embedded in the tolerance encoded in various traditional ways of life in a highly diverse plural society” (Nandy xi). His justification of the latter as a preferred model of social interaction emerges from his readings of Tagore’s novels, Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) and Char Adhyaya (Four Chapters). Butler invokes a distinction between conceptions of wretched binationalism and diasporic binationalism in the poetry of the Palestinian poet, Mahmud Darwish. She finds that the former expresses colonial occupation, a social formation defined through strict boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized. She articulates the latter in the poetic conception of universal co-existence based on “a set of principles that would defend…the rights of all minorities and refugees… the opposition to coercive containment and expulsion, the necessity of dismantling colonial and military control over borders, natural resources, and human freedom” (41). As such, the conception of diasporic binationalism becomes central to Butler’s political reflections on the history of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, as evoked in Darwish’s poetry.

Political thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Amartya Sen also find literary analysis valuable in considering universal ethical issues of cultural identity, politics, and human rights. Both Appiah and Nussbaum approach universalism through political conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Appiah, for instance, finds cosmopolitan ethics developing from two interconnected moral views. First, human beings have obligations to others, “obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship” (Appiah, Cosmopolitanism xv). Second, humans have obligations to take seriously the values of not just of human lives in general, “but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the specific practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (Appiah, Cosmopolitanism xv). His views on cosmopolitanism are drawn in part from his readings of Arabic poetry by poets such as Haji Abdu El- Yezdi, who wrote in the poetic tradition of Qasida that advances a humanism by infusing “an Eastern version of humanitarianism blended with the skeptical or, as we now say, the scientific habit of mind” (Appiah, Cosmopolitanism 260).

Nussbaum defines cosmopolitanism as emerging from two distinct but interconnected spheres of human communities, the community of birth and the community of human argument and aspiration (Nussbaum 7). In the community of birth, she situates an individual within specific socio-political and historical contexts. In the community of human argument and aspiration, she articulates the individual’s place within a larger community of humanity. Nussbaum’s model of “cosmopolitan education” and, more generally, her cautions against narrow patriotisms, bear centrally on Tagore’s critique of the Hindu patriotic ideology of “Bande Mataram,” developed in his novel Ghare Baire. Such normative reflections allow both Appiah and Nussbaum to articulate cosmopolitanism as a model of global politics, that is simultaneously sensitive to particulars of culture and human universalities based on cross-cultural similarities of aspirations, moral beliefs, and so on.

Sen is another noted social scientist who heavily relies on universalism to reflect on issues of global politics and economics. A prime example is his articulation of globalization as a system of ethical universalism that should ensure that “our global civilization is a world heritage—and not just a collection of disparate local cultures” (Sen 85). While this view is developed primarily as a response to the rise ethnocentric nationalisms in India, particularly sectarian politics of the Hindutva movement, it is also the basis of his conceptions of rationality and freedom informing his economic theory of social choice. Sen’s attention to literatures is widely reflected in his social writings. A clear case is his critique of globalization in relation to postcolonial Indian history, developed through a range of literary writings on India from ancient to modern times (including postcolonial readings of Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, travel writings by foreigners on India, modern works by writers such as Tagore, Bankim Chandra, and others).

There are several notable influences on these recent studies on universalism. Tagore’s universal ethics, as reflected in his literary and political writings, is foremost in guiding many theoretical approaches to universalism, including works by Nussbaum, Sen, and Nandy. His influence is also clear in Hogan and Pandit, as their positions on the topic are often informed by critical readings of empathy and universal ethics in Tagore’s novels such as Gora and Ghare Baire. Scholars of universalism are also indebted to writings of western philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Rawls. Nussbaum, Appiah, and Sen, in this regard, consistently evoke Kantian theories of cosmopolitan laws, world citizenship, and the categorical imperative (among other things) to formulate their views of the topic in politics and social justice. Similarly, contemporary theories on cosmopolitanisms are often developed in dialogue with certain Rawlsian conceptions of justice and social cooperation (either in agreement or disagreement). For instance, Nussbaum’s responses to systems of patriotisms are informed by implicit references to Rawl’s “veil of ignorance” in social contract (Nussbaum 134). Appiah, on the other hand, finds Rawl’s conceptions of justice overly reliant on systems of nation-state, thus posing a potential challenge to cosmopolitan conceptions at a more international scale (see Appiah’s “Cosmopolitan Patriots”).

Another major influence is Edward Said, particularly his later works on cultures and colonialism. In his preface to Orientalism in 2003, Said distinguishes two different forms of knowledge systems. One relates to ethnocentric knowledges informing “an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and outright war” (xv). The other concerns knowledges reflective of the diverse voices of people, formulated through “understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sake.” (xv). Through such clarifications, Said establishes a clear separation between epistemologies that reveal culturally inclusive humanisms, and colonial practices of orientalism. This Saidian view centrally informs Butler’s positions on universalism, particularly her views on wretched and diasporic binationalism. It is also invoked by Hogan in his discussions on social universalism.

Historically, universalism has often been cited in anti-universal ways. To this end, cross-cultural claims of ethics are often the basis for discrimination against marginalized groups and populations around the world. However, recent studies have clarified that such coercive practices never really express universalism, rather, they demonstrate how in many ways cross-cultural practices of ethnocentrism are projected to have universal significance, ethical and otherwise. This is clearly revealed in the scholarships noted in this entry, scholarship that in different ways distinguishes between non-coercive universalisms or cosmopolitanisms and ideologies of colonialism.

Future Research

Research on ethical universals in literary studies is far from conclusive. A potential task in the field of prescriptive ethics is the organization and development of the emerging scholarship on universalism. There is a need for a research program that highlights universalism as a prominent feature of many ethically sensitive postcolonial literatures aiming to address issues of marginalization in the broader context of colonial histories. In this sense, there is a possibility for future research projects to develop a more detailed understanding of how universalisms are differently expressed in particular literary productions across the world, and how such studies can be valuable to enquiries concerning ethics and politics that go well beyond the scope of specific literary texts.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” In For Love of Country? Ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996, 21-29.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: WW Norton & Company, 2010.

Brown, Donald E. Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

Butler, Judith. “‘What Shall We Do Without Exile?’: Said and Darwish Address the Future.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32 (2012): 30-56.

Dasgupta, Uma. Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson, eds. Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Dutta Roy, Arnab. “Ethical Universals in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies: A Posthumanist Critique of Universal Human Rights.” Humanities 5, no. 3 (2016): 64.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2000.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2003.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Mangharam, Mukti Lakhi. “‘The Universal is the Entire Collection of Particulars’: Grounding Identity in a Shared Horizon of Humanity.” College Literature 40 (2013): 81-98.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom. London: James Currey, 1993.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Patriotism and Cosmpolitanism.” In For Love of Country? Ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996, 3-17.

Pandit, Lalita. “Caste, Race, and Nation: History and Dialectic in Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora.” In Literary India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, and Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995, 207-33.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Sabyasachi, Bhattacharya. The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore. New Delhi: National Book Trust (1997).

Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

Sen, Amartya. Rationality and Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Four Chapters. Trans. Rimli Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Srishti Publishers, 2002.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Gora. Trans. Sujit Mukherjee. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2003.

Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World. Trans. Surendranath Tagore. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005.