Blog for August 2023: Arabic Poetics and Japanese Theatre

Posted on July 25, 2023February 20, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

I began thinking about the possibility of a weblog for the Literary Universals Project as I was reading two excellent books in the past couple of weeks. The first is Lara Harb’s Arabic Poetics, a painstaking, scholarly examination of what the most important Medieval Arabic theorists viewed as producing aesthetic pleasure in response to a literary work. There are at least two ways in which one could relate a study of this sort to universals. The first does not consider the validity of the theories, but simply considers the degree to which closely comparable theories have arisen across (relatively) independent traditions. A difficulty arises here with regard to the requirement for areal distinctness in the study of universals. Specifically, the Arabic theorists were greatly influenced by Aristotle, and thus were not fully independent of—which is to say, not strictly areally distinct from—the European tradition. On the other hand, this influence is limited by the fact that their interpretation of Aristotle was often so different from that found in the west (or, as Vito Evola understandably prefers, as the west’s interpretation of Aristotle was often so different from that found among Arabic commentators). For example, the Medieval Arabic theorists lacked familiarity with tragedy, in some cases assimilating it to panegyric (see Harb 79-80). In any case, the second way that the Arabic theories may be connected with universals does address truth value. Specifically, it considers the degree to which we might reasonably judge these theories to be true, not only of the Arabic tradition, but of a range of traditions.

Harb herself comments briefly on the former. Specifically, she asserts early on that the Arabic theorists’ isolation of (what she calls) “wonder” gives “an aesthetic that is altogether different from the European conceptions of beauty and the sublime” (4). But at the end she modifies this claim, asserting connections with “the eighteenth-century Swiss thinker Johann Jakob Breitinger” (263), as well as the Russian Formalists, and the “French . . . semiotic approach” of Michael Riffaterre (264). She does not address the question of the broader validity of the theories.

Harb begins her book with a discussion of “old” vs. “new” styles in poetry. She relates this in part to “a shift from a tribal to a patron-based society” (25), the spread of literacy, and—what is “perhaps most important” (25)–the accumulation of “an established literary heritage within (and against) which . . . [new] poets composed their own poetry”(26). Admittedly, her construal of this situation has probably been influenced by ideas about the “querelle des anciens et des modernes.” Even so, it is very likely that the development of canons does in fact saddle new poets with “the burden of the past,” as Walter Jackson Bate has discussed. The experience of and response to such a burden, along with the related division between a set of established principles and a set of innovations, constitute likely candidates for at least typological universals (perhaps occurring only in literate cultures with a mercantile economy). On the other hand, the pattern here could be more general as well (e.g., the accumulation of oral poetry may be sufficient to produce a “burden of the past”). Moreover, it is unsurprising—but nonetheless significant—that this ancient-versus-modern opposition would involve such stylistic characterizations as “straightforward and natural” versus “obscure” and “contrived” or “affected” (27). These represent different levels of putative stylization that we find in a range of traditions. One end of the spectrum may be criticized as prosaic or praised as “natural”; the other may be dismissed as mannered or celebrated as “experimental.” (On the degrees of stylization, see my Style in Narrative, 39-41.)

Harb goes on to discuss the theories that developed out of the new poetry. These included a number of important concepts with resonances in theories found in other traditions (though in some cases this is probably due to influence). For example, a number of the Arabic theorists emphasize the crucial role played by takhyīl(roughly, imagination). Though a somewhat vague notion, this does bring to mind the concept of simulation in cognitive science, a concept that is crucial for cognitive accounts of creativity. The connection is strengthened by the close link between takhyīl and emotion (see 89; on the relation between simulation and emotion, see Hogan, Literature and Emotion, 43-44). On the other hand, the connection remains rather general, and at such a general level a link between imagination and literature may be uninformative.

More significant is the specific account of just how wonder, thus (by Harb’s account) aesthetic pleasure, is produced. Wonder is, she tells us, “a cognitive experience” through which “an emotional reaction [is] triggered by the strange and inexplicable” or “unexpected” (8). As it happens, this is very close to one aspect of the account of beauty developed in Beauty and Sublimity. In that book, I argue that, along with several other contributing factors, a recurrent element in aesthetic experience is the recognition of an unanticipated pattern. (A number of researchers have noted something along these lines; see, for example, Vuust and Kringelback on music. See also Fabb on the place of surprise in aesthetic response going beyond the experience of beauty.) The Arabic theorists’ view may seem to diverge from this account insofar as the literary work is “inexplicable,” whereas in my account the isolation of a new (explanatory) pattern is crucial. But Harb changes “inexplicable” on next page, writing “While ignorance might be the impetus for wonder initially, it is the eventual discovery of the meaning and its clarification” that is crucial; again, “that is highly cognitive in nature” (9). If correct (as I of course believe it is), this account should be widely applicable across unrelated traditions.

The second book that provoked this blog is the very different, but also outstanding–A History of Japanese Theatre, edited by Jonah Salz. In the past, I have drawn on Japanese dramatic works in isolating cross-cultural story prototypes, so I will set that topic aside. However, there are other points of connection that suggest possible universals. For example, when reading Terauchi Naoko’s “Ancient and Early Medieval Performing Arts,” I was reminded of the jo-ha-kyū (slow, moderate, quick) division (7; see also Laurence Kominz, “Premodern Playwriting Practices,” 367). That division serves to organize the story at several levels. For one thing, it points toward possible, cross-cultural patterns in the pacing of events. It seems likely that many traditions will tend to cluster rapidly changing, emotionally significant events at the conclusion of a story. This is not surprising, especially if there is a change in the valence of the predominant emotions, most obviously a decline into tragedy or a rise into comedy. The different resolving emotions of the tragic or comic conclusion would be intensified by rapid clustering.

More generally, the jo-ha-kyū division suggests that, in different cultures, people view event structure as fundamentally a matter of a beginning, middle, and end. This is, I suspect, a structure derived from goal pursuit, where the beginning is the establishment of the goal; the end is its achievement or definitive loss; and the middle is the pursuit proper. The causal sequences of, say, physics do not operate in this way, with this tripartite division. If they appear to do so, that is because we have imposed that structure on them.

Salz’s collection points us not only toward possible, cross-cultural patterns in events, but also in characters: Kyogen (the long-standing form of comic theater in Japan) has the following character types: “friendly gods, arrogant but stupid lords, lazy but clever servants, shrewish wives, browbeaten husbands, awkward bridegrooms, greedy priests, [and] fake . . . wizards” (Jonah Salz, “Kyogen: Classical Comedy,” 69). A monotheistic culture typically won’t have friendly gods, and I’m not sure how widespread the category is in polytheistic traditions. Though I have no doubt that all societies have their share of awkward bridegrooms in reality, such characters do not seem to be particularly salient, at least not in the European tradition. Greedy priests are quite visible in South Asian drama, specifically in the form of the vidūṣaka, a clownish Brahmin (member of the priestly caste), and in some modern, progressive, Indian literature. These two instances of traditions with greedy priests (Japan and India) would need to be supplemented if we were to consider this as a possible universal (even of the statistical variety). It does seem likely that characters of this sort appear in a range of traditions. One difficulty, however, lies in the ambiguity of “greedy.” The vidūṣaka is greedy in the sense that he wishes to be supported by a patron, who will treat him to good meals, but not in the sense that he tries to swindle people out of their money. Thus, the vidūṣaka may also be classed as a parasite character, of the sort discussed by Frye (166, 168, 175). On the other hand, this character is also often honest and loyal, thus sympathetic. Other cases of the greedy priest are not so innocuous and likeable. These other cases would include, for example, Brahmins in a modern work who demand that peasants pay substantial fees to have the priests perform socially necessary rituals. Moreover, charlatans who deceive people with their supposed supernatural powers (“fake . . . wizards”) may be greedy priests as well. Thus, the list of types here is not entirely transparent. There is overlap between categories and inconsistency within categories. This makes it somewhat difficult to estimate their recurrence across traditions or, sometimes, even to think of compelling examples.

The remaining types, however, are more straightforward, and clearly present in at least some unrelated traditions. The “arrogant but stupid lords” are a variant of the New Comedy senex iratus, the irascible old man, with some element of the miles gloriosus or braggart soldier as well. Combining these two is not a problem, because both New Comedy types are instances of Frye’s alazon, the character who overestimates himself or herself (39, 172). Alazon characters tend to be paired with eiron characters, who represent themselves as less than they are and, in part as a result of this misleading self-presentation, win out over the alazons. A standard case of the eiron from New Comedy is the wily servant (see Frye 73), thus the “clever servant” of Japanese tradition. Both alazon and eiron character types extend far beyond Greek and Roman New Comedy and Japanese Kyogen.

But this leaves us with the question of why these character types recur. It presumably has something to do with the way human social structures develop. Specifically, complex social relations seem to produce social hierarchies when there is durable, excess wealth (i.e., wealth that is not consumed to satisfy communal needs and that does not rot or otherwise lose its value). In this context, social hierarchies might develop through, for example, accidental events giving some people small advantages, which may then accumulate, eventually producing relatively stable social classes. Such a class hierarchy is not the result of some intellectual or other superiority of the dominant individuals. Moreover, dominated individuals are likely to recognize this and to resent it, even as dominant ideologies are likely to present the hierarchy as (in some sense) meritocratic or as established by God. In this social context, the foolish master and the wily servant are obvious character possibilities, appealing primarily to individuals from dominated groups. Moreover, the subordinated and demeaned groups often included playwrights and other theater people (see Salz 73 on the social status of actors; similar points could be made about other nations).

These points have consequences for recurring themes in literature as well. Thus, Salz points out that Kyogen plays “mocked traditionally revered figures” (77). Of course, that mockery was likely to please some viewers while displeasing others. Indeed, while plays often develop a sort of counter-ideology (mocking those who are commonly treated with reverence), dominant social groups frequently seek to recruit theatre to support standard hierarchies. For example, Julie Iezzi explains in “Kabuki: Superheroes and Femmes Fatales” that, in 1872, the “Ministry of Religious Affairs” “charged the theatre with educating . . . the populace” so as to “honor the Confucian ideal” (128). There are of course many cases of governments seeking to censor or otherwise suppress literary developments of anti-hierarchical themes. This sort of conflict is probably at the root of another cross-cultural literary practice—indirect representation. In “Bunraku Puppet Theatre,” Gotō Shisuo points out that many plays “set in the past” actually “comment covertly on contemporary political developments” (157, trans. Alan Cummings) or, as Andrew Gerstle states, many “history plays” serves “as a vehicle to comment on or criticize contemporary society” (“Chikamatsu Monzaemon: Puppet Playwright,”166-167). It should be obvious why more direct criticisms of dominant hierarchies might be imprudent.

The “shrewish wives” and “browbeaten husbands” of the Kyogen list also recur in some unrelated traditions. This is in part because there are such figures in life. But there are also unkind husbands and intimidated wives. The question then arises as to why we find the former types recurring in comedies, but not (it seems) the latter. The most obvious response is that, in this regard, (male-dominated) literature is simply guided by patriarchal ideology or even misogyny. This is certainly often the case. But it is important to stress that the typology here is for comedy. It seems likely that part of reason for the male/female asymmetry here derives from many people taking male unkindness to have more serious consequences than female unkindness. In other words, we may find a hectoring wife and a hen-pecked husband funny, but be more worried than amused by a bullying husband and intimidated wife.

There are several other points in A History of Japanese Theatre that recall features found in other traditions, ranging from the mere existence of puppet theater, to the organization of Japanese musical theater (“essentially the same structure employed by modern American musical plays” [Kominz 372]), to the association of “felicitous laughter” with “childish antics” (Salz 77; cf. chapter five of Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion). But I cannot go through every relevant point in this sizable (592-page) book. I will conclude by remarking briefly on three features that recur in at least Japanese and American contexts and that I found particularly surprising. The first is the “star system” (Kominz 369, referring to Kabuki). It may at first seem counterintuitive that American film in the 20^th Century and Japanese Kabuki in the 17^th Century should both stress the appeal of particular actors. But, on reflection, it may actually be what one should have expected. There is reason to believe that we in effect respond emotionally to fiction as if it were real, though not (usually) urgent or proximate (see my “Paradoxes of Literary Emotion”). Actors are the part of this emotive “reality” that we see and hear. Although we know that the actors are not the characters, there is still some degree to which we are likely to connect the face we see and the voice we hear with our emotional response to the characters. This is consistent with the two other points that I also found initially surprising. First, popular Kabuki plays generated a market in textual “adaptations” (Kominz 371). In effect a version of “novelizations,” these texts presupposed the existence of a storyworld underwriting the play, a storyworld that could, in turn, be represented in an adaptation. This presupposition is not undermined by the fact that, unlike the case of non-fiction, there is no such underlying reality, and we even know that. Finally, the sale of adaptations was itself related to a range of “commercial publications for fan readership” beginning in the 17^th Century (William Lee, “Premodern Practitioner Principles: Zeami to Chikamatsu,” 451). Personally, I have tended to think of fandom largely in relation to social media. But the psychological sources of fandom are clearly much more general.

The practices outlined in the preceding paragraphs call out for further study, prominently the isolation of related developments in other literary traditions. For the most part, the patterns I have been commenting on do not constitute absolute or near-absolute universals. If valid, they are, for the most part, implicational or typological, dependent on a particular type of socio-economic or other development. But that does not make them any less important or informative. Indeed, while literary universals are understudied in general, implicational and typological universals seem to be particularly ignored—especially those limited by socio-economic conditions. Perhaps this is due to the unfortunate tendency of humanists to see historical change and cross-cultural recurrence as mutually exclusive. However, understanding historical particulars—like understanding cultural particulars—not only uncovers differences, but reveals recurring patterns as well. It is just that we will fail to notice the latter (recurring patterns) when we have made up our minds beforehand that only the former (differences) are possible.

See also “Reason and Aesthetic Pleasure”

Works Cited

Bate, Walter Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.

Fabb, Nigel. A Theory of Thrills, Sublime and Epiphany in Literature. London: Anthem P, 2022.

Harb, Lara. Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Paradoxes of Literary Emotion: Simulation and The Zhào Orphan.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion. Ed., Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan. New York: Routledge, 2022, 134-143.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Style in Narrative: Aspects of an Affective-Cognitive Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Salz, Jonah, ed. A History of Japanese Theatre. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2016.

Vuust, Peter and Morten Kringelbach. “The Pleasure of Music.” In Pleasures of the Brain. Ed. Morten Kringelbach and Kent Berridge. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010, 255–269.

Blog for April 2024: The Double: A Literary Universal?

Posted on April 15, 2024April 23, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

I recently re-watched Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. It is the story of two women—one Polish, one French—who have (different versions of) the same name (Weronika and Veronique), are identical in appearance, have the same medical condition, and share some sense of connectedness. Though they never meet, Weronika catches a glimpse of Veronique when the latter happens to be visiting Poland. Veronique much later discovers Weronika’s image when she is looking at her photos from that trip. They never meet or have any other contact. When the film is over, we understand that, somehow, Weronika’s death from an (undiagnosed) heart condition served as a warning to Veronique, who avoids that fate. In this way, Veronique has a “double” life, not only because she has an alter ego in Weronika, but because she receives a second chance at life through what is in effect a sacrifice—Weronika dies and, as a result, Veronique lives. The idea is clearly suggested at the end of the film through the story told by a puppeteer with whom Veronique has fallen in love. In that story, entitled The Double Life of . . . (the puppeteer has not yet chosen the character’s name), there are two identical girls, born in different countries. One of the girls burns her hand on a hot stove. A few days later, the other almost does the same thing, but withdraws her hand before it is burned.

The life-giving death of Weronika is a version of a key motif from the sacrificial story structure, which recurs cross-culturally. This connection is reinforced by the link between Saint Veronica and the paradigmatic sacrificial story in Christendom, that of Jesus. Indeed, the name “Veronica” is particularly well-chosen here, for Veronica is also associated with a sort of doubling. The legend is that, as Jesus struggled to bear his cross along the via dolorosa to Golgotha, she gave him her veil to wipe his face. When he returned the veil to her, the cloth was imbued with his image. Moreover, “By some accounts, the name Veronica is itself a fanciful derivation from the words vera icon . . . meaning ‘true image’” (Britannica).

The integration of the doubling motif with the sacrificial story structure is, I believe, significant and consequential. Indeed, the first hypothesis I wish to put forward here is that one cross-cultural function of doubling involves just such integration into the universal genres. Consider a famous, early case, found in Euripides’ Helen. According to this work, the Helen who was living with Menelaus and who apparently absconded to Troy along with Paris was not a person at all, but a phantom (εἴδωλον [line 34]), a mirror image (see the entry for εἴδωλον in Eulexis-web [accessed 7 April 2024]), fashioned by Hera. The real Helen was, therefore, never unfaithful to her husband, never violated the ideals that governed wifely virtue at the time. Moving outside of Europe, we find a very similar case in Tulasīdāsa’s “reflection” (“pratibiṃba,” प्रतिबिंब) of Sītā (557)—alternatively, the “shadow” (“chāyā,” छाया) Sītā in Prasad’s Hindi rendition (558). This doubling allows Tulasīdāsa to deal more readily with the difficult issue of Sītā’s chastity when she was held captive by Rāvaṇa in Lanka. Put simply, she couldn’t have betrayed Rāma as she wasn’t even physically there. Interestingly, some other, early cases of the motif treat seduction rather than chastity. Thus, Zeus famously appears in the guise of Amphitryon in order to seduce Alcmena (see Powell 432-436). Indra, a roughly parallel figure in early Indian mythology, undertakes a related deception in order to seduce Ahalyā (see Doniger, selection number 28, and Daniélou 108).

There are many things that these stories tell us. But here I wish to stress that the stories of Sītā, Alcmena, and Ahalyā are all instances of the seduction/sexual-assault genre. The story of the phantom Helen arguably changes the original love triangle to a seduction/sexual-assault genre as well. Thus, we see the doubling motif in two of the prototypical, cross-cultural genres—sacrificial and seduction/sexual-assault. More precisely, in each of these cases, the motif contributes to making the basic story structure into a full-fledged, particular story. In the terminology of How Authors’ Minds Make Stories, in these cases, the motif is one of the techniques available to an author that may be integrated into the set of development principles, itself comprising alteration and specification principles. This is unsurprising, as serving in development principles is a common function of motifs.

Before going on to give instances of doubling from other cross-cultural genres, however, I should say how I have been implicitly defining the doubling motif. Doubles are persons/characters who are identical in some ways, but who also in stand in stark contradiction in other ways. Most often, the identity-features are highly salient (e.g., appearance), while the contradiction-features are highly functional, but not salient—for example, being good versus being evil, or being alive versus being dead (i.e., being a ghost). However, in some cases we find the reverse—salient differences with functional, unrecognized identity-features (this could be the case for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, insofar as we take them to be contrasting images of the same underlying person). In both cases, we would not predict the functional features from the salient features.

I should note that the existence of such a doubling motif is just what one would expect, given general, human cognitive tendencies. For any two items (e.g., persons) that we compare, we can in principle allow for an almost infinite range of differences and similarities. Two of these are particularly important and thus particular targets of attention—the extremes of identity and contradiction. Our deeper concern in these cases is functional; however, we tend to rely on the salience of features in order to judge function. For example, a stranger’s benevolent or malevolent intent is likely to be our true (functional) concern, but we cannot readily ascertain this. Group identity markers, distinguishing in-group members from out-group members (e.g., skin color, language, religious paraphernalia, and so on) tend to be more salient and thereby to serve as proxies for good or ill will, as in the case of hostility attribution bias, which leads us to assume hostile intent more readily for out-group members (see Lukianoff and Haidt, 158).

Of course, this heuristic often misleads us, leaving us vulnerable to hostile intent from in-group members, and at times actually provoking hostile intent from unfairly distrusted out-group members. Given this, it is unsurprising that storytellers across cultures would find saliency-function conflicts cognitively intriguing and emotionally forceful. In addition, as Nigel Fabb points out, we don’t expect any two targets to be distinct and yet indistinguishable. Thus, the indiscernibility of two persons is already likely to provoke keen interest. Such interest will only be intensified by functional contradiction. Moreover, doubling may be applied and developed in such a way as to create increasingly complex cases. For example, for the viewer, the differences between Weronika and Veronique—most obviously, citizenship and language—are reduced in saliency, while the continuities between the two (physical appearance, health, musicality) are highlighted. Note that the former are common markers of group identity, while we generally consider the latter to be markers of individuality. Note also that, for the viewer, both Veronicas are individuals and are linked by that distinctive individuality. However, for anyone who imagines some (generic) Polish and some (generic) French person, these two imagined people would merely be instances of their (salient) national category, with little in the way of individuating characteristics. In this regard, Kieślowski’s treatment of doubling may suggest some of the problems surrounding social identity categorization, particularly in relation to individuation.

As to the other genres, the most common are heroic and romantic. In heroic works, doubling occurs in fairly straightforward ways across battlelines. The most obvious cases treat a good hero and an evil enemy who are so evenly matched that the audience cannot be certain of the outcome when they come into conflict. But some of the most interesting cases put the doubles on the same side. An excellent example of both may be found in Enkidu and Gilgamesh. Beck explains that Enkidu is connected with wild nature (112), while Gilgamesh is associated with the city. As Keppler discusses, the two begin as enemies, and as virtually equal in power. The result of their initial conflict is that the “fury” of Gilgamesh dissipates (Keppler 24), while Enkidu accepts a subordinate position, but one of unique bonding with Gilgamesh. In the end, Enkidu sacrifices his life to save Gilgamesh (though most obviously a sacrificial motif, this type of act is common in heroic stories as well). Enkidu’s death then becomes the key difference between them; it inspires Gilgamesh’s grief, the retrospective remorse that is so common at the end of heroic narratives and that, in this case, motivates Gilgamesh’s (failed) quest for immortality.

Obvious examples of doubling in the romantic genre may be found in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, where it serves primarily to show the irrational, almost hallucinatory quality of romantic love. There are more psychologically subtle suggestions of doubled characters among the women who fascinate the hero of The Tale of Genji.

Among the “minor” genres, we have already seen instances from the seduction plot. Plautus’s Menaechmi provides an exemplary case of doubling in a family reunion story. Keppler recounts an excellent example of the spiritual realization genre—the Jaina legend of Parsvanatha. Parsva is trapped in the cycle of rebirth “by his own fear and desire” (19). In each incarnation, his hateful twin brother, Kamatha, cruelly harms Parsva. Unbeknownst to Parsva or Kamatha, however, these repeated cruelties actually lead Parsva to detachment and ultimately to self-realization (Keppler 194). At that point, Kamatha–witnessing his brother’s imperturbable peace—is freed from his own attachments as well.

(I am leaving aside the revenge and criminal investigation genres in the hope that readers will have some suggestions for relevant works—in those or, for that matter, any of the other genres. You may submit suggestions as well as more elaborate comments via the website, under “Submit,” or by email to Patrick.hogan@uconn.edu.)

* * *

The preceding cases indicate that the doubling motif yields a common technique for the development (specification or alteration) of story structures. As such, it can serve a variety of narrative, emotive, or thematic purposes. For example, the use of doubling in The Double Life of Veronique arguably intensifies the pathos of Weronika’s death, whereas that in Plautus’s play creates mirth, and that in Tulasīdāsa’s poem enables the devotee’s feeling of unqualified bhakti (devotion). But it seems clear that the motif of the double is not confined to an ancillary role, however capacious that role may be. It serves as a central concern in some narratives (whether or not those narratives also express one of the cross-cultural story prototypes). Moreover, this is the way the motif has commonly been treated in earlier critical studies, which in addition tend to focus on interpretation. This interpretive approach—commonly Freudian or Jungian–appears to be the sort of thing a wide range of people think of when I mention literary universals. Indeed, this is what first led me to consider doubling in the film as an appropriate topic for a blog at the Literary Universals Project. There are many motifs, such as doubling, that earlier writers treated as universal, but that I have hardly, if ever, touched upon. That does not seem right. After all, if there are genuinely cross-cultural motifs treated in the Freudian or Jungian traditions, thus outside of cognitive and affective science, they should appear in a cognitive-affective treatment of literary universals (e.g., in this website) as well, albeit with some plausible, cognitive and/or affective hypotheses about their recurrence. But that does not often seem to be the case. Why might such motifs be absent? And why has there been relatively little interest in interpreting those or other universals in a cognitive-affective framework?

As to the former question, I suspect that in some cases, the “archetypes” do not appear with the frequency a Jungian or Freudian analysis might suggest. For example, I am not sure I have ever come across a snake biting its own tail (the “ouroboros”) outside the pages of a book on archetypes. It may still be a significant, cross-cultural presence, but it is hardly one that I find myself pressed to explain.

However, we cannot always dismiss the putative universals of pre-cognitive psychology so readily. As we have seen, doubling does recur cross-culturally—at least enough to merit further study. Moreover, its explication by writers such as Otto Rank seems much less fanciful and much more insightful than some other writings in these pre-cognitive psychological approaches. Specifically, Rank sees the motif of the double as manifesting a fundamental conflict in humans’ relations to themselves. We are all faced with a dilemma. We know that we are destined to die. Our ancestors died; our contemporaries are in the process of dying. There is no exception. Yet, we still think that it couldn’t possibly happen to us. In the double, Rank tells us, we face the unbelievable, yet also undeniable fact of our own nothingness. This seems plausible and universal because this is a dilemma faced by all humans, at least all humans over a certain age. On the other hand, it still seems clear that even Rank overstates the scope of his interpretation. Certainly not every instance of a double treats the conflict surrounding the possibility of “being-toward-death,” as Heidegger would put it. Moreover, Rank’s fully developed examples are all relatively late, European works. In connection with folklore, he does touch on non-European cases, but it is often difficult to say what these mean. It may clarify things if we keep with established literary works, where the doubling motif seems more readily interpretable.

Here, I would like to return briefly to Zeus, Indra, Helen, and Sītā. These four cases are hardly adequate to undergird an interpretation of the motif as a whole. They are nonetheless suggestive. They do not have much, if anything to do with being-toward-death (though that is not true for The Double Life of Veronique). They are, rather, fabrications undertaken to deceive others—either to prevent or to facilitate immoral sexual conduct. In fact, they recall a pattern that Rank’s analyses point to, but never acknowledge—a conflict not between death and life, but between shame and acceptance. (I take shame to be produced by a sense of other people’s disgust at one’s self [see Sapolsky, 502, and Tangney and Tracy, 447–448].) Both the phantom Helen and the shadow Sītā serve to prevent the home society from feeling moral disgust for an important woman in the story. The bed-tricks of Zeus and Indra could be viewed similarly (if we take the focal characters to be the [inadvertently unfaithful] wives). In any case, the doubling in the first two cases (Helen and Sītā) is between an immoral, illusory character and her moral, non-illusory counterpart. In the other two cases, both the illusory and the real husband are moral (or at least not immoral). The moral contrast appears not between the real character and his double, but between, on the one hand, the two illusory characters and, on the other hand, the real characters who make deceitful use of those illusory characters. Thus, shaming seems to be suggested in all these stories. It enters particularly clearly in the case of Indra, who is punished for his misbehavior by having his body covered with female genitalia (see Doniger, selection number 28, and Daniélou 108).

Other cases of the double preserve the moral contrast and the sense of shame, but do so in a way that complicates or challenges standard moral views. A fine example of this may be found in Cao Xueqin and Gao E’s 18^th-Century novel, Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber or Story of the Stone). The main character is Jia Bao-yu. He is a complex character; for example, in sexual preference, he is bisexual; in gender, he might be viewed a transgendered or as what we might today call “gender queer.” You probably won’t be surprised to learn that he does not get along well with his father, who is in fact cruel to the boy. At one point in this multi-volume novel, Jia Bao-yu learns that he has a double, a boy who looks like him in every way. The double’s name is Zhen Bao-yu. Critics invariably point out that the name, “Bao-yu,” means “precious jade” (see Schonebaum 21), while “zhen” means “true” and “jia” means “false” (see Lu 280). This reverses the reader’s experience. It indicates that Jia Bao-yu—the one we know and probably like (since we have continued reading hundreds of pages about him)–is false when compared to the truly “precious” individual, Zhen Bao-yu. Why would Cao and Gao indicate this? I believe it is because our Bao-yu would be socially viewed as false when compared with his counterpart. This contrast is particularly brought out by the fact that Zhen Bao-yu gets along very well with Jia Bao-yu’s father. Indeed, when conversing with Zhen Bao-yu, the father sends for his son (Jia Bao-yu), in order to “exhibit” to his son “this paragon of virtue, as both stimulus and admonition” (Cao and Gao 272). This is likely to remind readers of the ways in which the senior Jia shames his son, even though the reader is likely to take Jia Bao-yu as the superior character.

At first, Jia Bao-yu is enthusiastic about encountering a potentially like-minded youth. But he is soon disappointed, finding his “true” twin insincere and sycophantic, a mere “career worm” (Cao and Gao 274), sententiously invoking “loyalty” and “filial piety” (Cao and Gao 277). As Ferrara explains, this is connected with larger tendencies and conflicts in Chinese society, for Zhen Bao-yu appears to the reader as an arguably rather shallow Confucian, while Jia Bao-yu aligns himself with the more antinomian teachings of Buddhism and Daoism. Indeed, his difference from his alter ego (the career worm) is, in the end, largely explicable by this difference in philosophical orientation. Jia Bao-yu is, in fact, seeking “a more spiritual plane” (Cao and Gao 275) when he finds himself disappointed with Zhen Bao-yu. Moreover, his “falsity” takes on further significance when we read about his dream of encountering Zhen Bao-yu, who had just dreamt about Jia Bao-yu, dreaming . . . . As Ferrara points out, this sequence—like the “Meng” or “Dream” of the book’s title—alludes to Zhuāngzǐ’s famous question (after apparently waking from a dream of being a butterfly) whether he was, in fact, Zhuāngzǐ dreaming he was a butterfly or was rather a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuāngzǐ. This sense of paradox is clearly favored by the authors, pointing again to the social and moral complexity of this presentation of the double, even as it criticizes common social norms and leads us to recall the feelings of shame associated with those norms.

Another instance of this sort, with a further twist, may be found in Rabindranath Tagore’s 1892 short story, “The Living and the Dead.” (Tagore was clearly familiar with European literature and probably had encountered doubles in that literature. Given the colonial context in which he was writing, then, I would not count his use of the double motif as evidence of the universality of the motif. It is, nonetheless, a valuable story to analyze in this context.) The story concerns Kadambini, a young widow who passes out and is assumed by her in-laws to be dead. She wakes up on the cremation ground (before the incineration begins), but finds that she no longer has a place in the world. She spends some time wandering about, not quite dead, but also “exiled from the land of the living” (34). In the end, she commits suicide. Though superficially strange, the story is actually an almost literal criticism of widowhood strictures as practiced in Bengal at the time. Specifically, the widow was forbidden to remarry, to wear clothing that had been dyed, to wear jewelry, to be present on occasions where her presence would be viewed as inauspicious; she was subjected to stringent restrictions on what she could eat, and so on (see, for example, Lamb on continuing practices). In short, when it came to interactions with the living, she was treated as if she were dead. But her spirit remained tethered to the world of the living. By making Kadambini neither truly dead nor truly alive, Tagore fashioned a striking metaphor for the condition of widows in Bengal at the time.

But, of course, all this time she is just Kadambini; so, where is the double, you might ask. This is what makes Tagore’s use of the motif so striking and creative. The double is in the minds of the people around Kadambini, the members of the society that abandons her at the moment of her misfortune, that turns her into “an empty shadow” (36), as if she were a mere chāyā Kadambini, no more real than the chāyā Sītā. Both persons of the double are Kadambini–one as she is, the other as she is seen by society. As she puts it herself, “I am my own ghost” (34), haunted by social shame–over not having children, and over not having been able to keep her husband alive, (a recurring accusation made against widows at the time; see, for example, Tagore 85).

This story suggests that the ultimate grounding of the double motif may be less in the issue of mortality than in the more fundamental division between the first-person point-of-view that we have on ourselves and the third-person point of view that we have on others. Indeed, this distinction is precisely what makes our understanding of death contradictory. We witness deaths only of those toward whom we have a third-person point-of-view. But we understand that all those persons had a (seemingly eternal) first-person point-of-view on themselves, and that we ourselves are the (mortal) objects of a third-person point-of-view for everyone else. This division is also what allows the possibility of self-conscious emotions such as shame, for these emotions make us the object of third-person attributions and assessments. (For a fuller treatment of these points-of-view, see Personal Identity and Literature.)

One further variant may be found in Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure (2001). In this novel, an African-American fiction writer—named Thelonious Ellison (after the jazz pianist, Thelonious Monk, and the black novelist, Ralph Ellison)–finds it difficult to achieve real success, despite widespread acknowledgment of his talent. The main problem appears to be that he does not write Black English Vernacular and treat impoverished communities living in a Hobbesian world of “state of nature” violence. In response to this situation, he writes a parody of pseudo-authentic, “black” fiction. He submits it to his agent with the pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh. To his dismay, the book is a runaway success, which makes him fabulously wealthy. Unsurprisingly, this is all rather seductive, all the more so because he does not use the money self-indulgently, but makes generous gifts to people in need and pays for his mother’s nursing care.

At the end of the novel, as he prepares to announce that Stagg R. Leigh is a pseudonym and that his book, entitled Fuck, is a parody, Ellison at first seems to experience some sort of hallucinatory episode. We soon realize it is a dream, as he walks “through dream sand” (264). But it also appears to be provoked by and representative of an identity crisis: He comes to “a small boy, perhaps me as boy, and he held up a mirror so that I could see my face and it was the face of Stagg Leigh” (264). Leigh quotes a passage from Ralph Ellison: “’Now you’re free of illusion,’ Stagg said. ‘How does it feel to be free of one’s illusions?’” (264-266). The passage occurs at the end of Invisible Man, and there too it is in a dream. Subsequently (in Erasure), Thelonious looks again at the mirror, but the surface is no longer visible to him. He comments, “I could only imagine the image the glass held” (266). Three lines later, Everett’s novel ends with a quotation from Isaac Newton: “hypotheses non fingo.” There are different ways of translating “fingo.” The usual choice seems to be “feign.” I would opt for “imagine”—thus, “I do not imagine hypotheses.” This translation connects the quotation with Thelonious’s effort to “imagine” the “image” in the mirror. He does not know what is there.

I take this ending to suggest the loss of a sense of identity. Thelonious adopts a version of the Zeus/Indra doubling. He fashions a self-image that is false, a disguise. However, he does not do this in order to deceive others for selfish, unethical purposes. Moreover, though he subsequently cooperates in deception (acting the part of Stagg R. Leigh), he never does so for immoral or objectionably egoistic reasons. Rather, he does so to criticize the social preference for his double. If it seems odd to say that Leigh is a double of Thelonious, I should point out that Thelonious’s cooperation means that the few people who meet with Leigh see someone who is physically identical with Thelonious (since they are actually meeting Thelonious). This is also why he sees Stagg R. Leigh in the mirror: Stagg R. Leigh’s face just is the face of Thelonious. Nonetheless, there is a difference between seeing this face as Stagg R. Leigh and seeing it as Thelonious Ellison. Thelonious’s apparent loss of personal identity at the end is not entirely dissimilar to Kadambini’s situation, when she cannot conceive of herself as alive or dead. In both cases, the insistent pressures of socially imposed identity category (such as “widow” or “black man”) disrupt ordinary processes of self-identification.

[Here, too, my analysis is incomplete. I hope that readers will suggest other works of this second, autonomous sort, as well as interpretive analyses of those works.]

In sum, the motif of the double might reasonably be claimed as a universal in two modes. The first is as a technique for the alteration and specification of other story structures, prominently including the cross-cultural story genres. The second is as a minimal structure for the generation of stories that are more distinctive, and that often raise thematic (thus, real-world) concerns bearing on the relation between our status as objects in the world (first of all, for others) and our status as subjects defining the limits of the world (first of all, for ourselves). These concerns prominently include our experience of such self-conscious emotions as shame, as well as our attitude toward and understanding of death.

(I am grateful to Nigel Fabb and Joanna Madloch for comments on an earlier draft of this blog.)

Blog for December 2023: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Posted on December 8, 2023December 11, 2023 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

Cultural Stories and Their Universal Constituents

Some stories appear to be deeply bound to the historical and cultural moment in which they were composed. An account of literary universals does not presuppose that such binding is impossible. On the other hand, it is not clear how such a work could be understood outside the historical moment and cultural milieu in which it was created or why we would care about such an alien piece of work. My own view is that, in such cases, we are simply mistaken; we over-attribute historical and cultural particularity to the work. In this month’s blog, I set out to consider what we might make of such cases in relation to literary universals. To clarify and illustrate the analysis, I will focus on a renowned horror film.

In How Authors’ Minds Make Stories, I argue that a common process in the creation of a literary work is devising new permutations on pre-existing genres. The most prominent among these pre-existing genres are probably the cross-culturally dominant ones. In the case of story genres, these would be heroic, romantic, and so on (see “Story”). While these story genres usually operate as full story sequences, they may also be analyzed into constituents. Indeed, these constituents often have striking similarities across genres and in any case commonly fall into related categories. For example, in all prototypical story genres, the hero or heroine is likely to fail in his or her goal pursuit initially. In romantic narratives, this regularly results in the lover being exiled from his or her beloved or imprisoned away from that beloved. In the heroic genre, it routinely leads to the exile or imprisonment of the legitimate leader. In both cases, then, there is a category of something like enforced isolation of the protagonist. This component recurs in part because it enhances the emotions of the story (e.g., the protagonist’s feeling of helplessness).

Structural parallels of this kind are relevant to “the mind making stories” because these parallels enable a simple form of creative narrative production. Specifically, they facilitate the synthesis of different genres. For example, one can readily integrate romantic and heroic stories at the point where the hero or heroine in the former is separated from his or her beloved and, simultaneously, from the homeland that he or she is struggling to defend in the heroic story.

Of course, the more specific a story component is, the more narrowly genre-bound it is likely to be. While all genre prototypes begin with the protagonist establishing some goal, the goal of countering a foreign invasion is heroic, while that of being united with a beloved is romantic. Even so, synthesis may occur through more specific levels of genre also. Indeed, synthesis in these cases, as perhaps less expected, may be more effective in engaging a reader or producing other desirable consequences. For example, this sort of synthesis may involve an unobtrusive recruitment of metaphor domains from a genre in which they figure prominently to a genre in which they do not usually appear.

Consider two cases. In romantic stories, seasonal imagery appears frequently, most often in the background of the story proper (as when the protagonists fall in love during springtime); as such, it helps to establish the emotional tone of the piece. In heroic stories, the characterization of the invading soldiers commonly relies on one or another of a few models for members of the relevant (enemy) out-group, models such as animals or demons. Such models serve to foster or intensify the reader’s antipathy toward such invaders. These genre-related techniques are different, but not necessarily incompatible. The imagery or model that is commonplace in one genre may be, so to speak, smuggled into the other genre due in part to its unobtrusive location in the background of the story or due to its metaphorical quality.

Of the preceding examples, the modeling of out-groups is the more consequential and is worth a little further elaboration. Models of out-groups commonly function to facilitate violence against other human beings in times of conflict. Admittedly, human beings commit plenty of violence without any apparent need for such facilitation. However, almost all of this is “hot” violence—violence undertaken when one is in the grip of anger–or at least derived from some (real or imagined) personal grievance that, when called to mind, can rekindle the hot anger that one felt initially. Without the blinding arousal of rage—as in the sorts of cases just mentioned–most people will feel some sort of spontaneous empathy with other people. This feeling may not be so strong as to produce genuine altruism. But it seems at least likely to give one qualms about killing or maiming the other person. For this reason, if a society or a dominant stratum within a society wishes to maintain a military force ready to harm some enemy, they may need to devote some effort to inhibiting spontaneous empathy with regard to that enemy.

One way of inhibiting empathy is to establish models for understanding and emotionally responding to the out-groups in question. Common models are derived from a small number of domains and include animals, demons, and the contagiously ill (see 107-110 of my What is Colonialism?). These models draw on and intensify in-group feelings that tend to enable violence, most often fear and disgust. (Unlike fear and disgust, anger appears to be based solely on acts, not on dispositional traits, which are crucial in the present context; thus, the promotion of anger is largely a function of events in particular stories, not of general models.) As Martha Nussbaum has argued, disgust appears to be a particularly potent emotion when one’s aim is to completely disregard the humanity of the target individual or group, as in the case of genocide (347-349). I would add two points to that argument. First, disgust for out-groups is particularly facilitated by models drawn from the health/illness domain (especially contagious illness). Second, in terms of the heroic and sacrificial genres, such disgust is most often directed more toward the disloyal part of the in-group (e.g., those who betray the nation to the invaders) than to members of the out-group (e.g., enemy soldiers) as such.

One suggestion of these claims is that literary works, films, and so on, may be culturally specific in their precise thematic concerns or in the details of their emotional appeals. But this does not mean that they are composed of culturally specific parts. Indeed, it seems rather to be the case that they are to a great extent guided by the usual, cross-cultural and trans-historical models, genres, and associated emotions. We see this particularly when we look at the constituents of such stories and the categories of those constituents.

I recently had occasion to watch the 1978 horror classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The basic plot of the film is that some sort of pod creatures have come to earth to kill and duplicate the bodies of humans, then to live in or through the duplicated bodies. Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) first finds that her husband is a different person. Despite looking the same as always, he has become emotionless. She communicates this to Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), who begins to hear of many similar cases. Bennell and Driscoll investigate the problem, working with a small group of friends. The odds, however, are stacked against them as key governmental agencies from the local police to the federal Justice Department have been taken over by the pod-creature duplicates. Bennell and Driscoll eventually succumb also, though not before Bennell makes an astonishingly ill-timed declaration of his love to Driscoll.

This is the sort of film that many viewers might be inclined to take as highly culturally specific. For one thing, as a story, it does not fit obviously into one universal genre. In addition, its concern with the phenomenon of loved ones apparently being replaced by duplicates suggests the Capgras syndrome in which someone comes to believe that a relative or spouse has been replaced by an imposter. Though presumably a long-existing phenomenon, it was isolated and named as a syndrome only in the 20^th Century. The film changes the etiology of the syndrome. As generally understood today, this delusion is not marked by a change in the target’s emotions. Rather, one no longer feels the same way about that target oneself, and therefore judges him or her to be an imposter (see Buonomano 91). Even in this change, however, the film expresses a culturally specific idea–the standard Romantic view that a loss of emotion is a loss of humanity, the replacement of what is vital in us by something cold and merely mechanical. This is to some extent elaborated elsewhere in the story. Parts of the film seem to implicate the rise of a sort of “feelgood” psychiatry, where our (human) problems are overcome by a pharmaceutically induced numbing of all emotion. Striking a rather different note, comments by the director appear to relate the film instead to the rise of fascism (see Insdorf 133); indeed, the obvious interpretation of the pod people is as fascists or communists who have rejected personal identity for a collective identity. Despite some differences among them, all these interpretive possibilities would seem to indicate that the film is narrowly defined by itsculture and social history.

But that conclusion is too hasty. Even based on the properties already noted, the work is not culturally insular. Stories with some spirit taking over someone else’s body (see, for example, “Sunset” in Pu Songling) or, more broadly, the appearance of a Doppelgänger (see, for example, Ferrara on the renowned Chinese novel, The Story of the Stone) are not unknown in other literary traditions. Moreover, the very possibility of such a story derives from the evidently universal distinction between an inner essence and an outer appearance (see chapter one of Bloom).

More significantly, the film not only draws on, but seems to be composed almost entirely from the constituents of universal genres. First, it has the broad structure of a heroic story. That structure has two parts—foreign invasion and internal usurpation of the (legitimate) in-group social hierarchy. Lacking battlefields, armies, assassinations, and so forth, the film does not look like a heroic story. But it is structured around the two key story events of the genre. This is more obvious in the case of the invasion sequence; indeed, the title tells us that this is the story of an invasion. However, the usurpation is just as clear, given that the police and the Justice Department come under the control of duplicates, who replace their legitimate, human originals.

The differences between the usual invasion or usurpation sequence and the parallel events in this film are, of course, significant. But they are largely a matter of intensification, and that intensification results from the implementation of cross-cultural techniques. This is particularly true of the usurpation. The pod creatures not only take over the government, they in effect take over the bodies and minds of all individual citizens. In other words, they usurp not only social hierarchy, but psychological hierarchy as well. Moreover, this intensification fits well with the emotional goals of heroic plots and the emotional character of horror movies. Some critics have noted that horror films particularly cultivate fear and disgust (see Carroll 38-4). These are, again, the key emotions underwriting the facilitation of violence against out-groups, which is often a central aim of heroic stories.

In terms of the story emotions, the main difference here is that, in standard heroic plots, fear and anger tend to be the central emotional concerns, not disgust. But the threat of the invading out-group is only intensified by their disgust-provoking nature, by the fact that they kill humans from inside, through a mechanism that is as subtle and covert as those by which one contracts a virus. The pod creatures are not literally contagiously ill humans, but it seems clear that their invasion is modeled on contagion or pollution, rather than on the more expected physical combat.

Additionally, as already noted, in the usual versions of the heroic structure, disgust occurs most clearly in relation to in-group betrayal. (This is moral disgust, rather than the physical or pathogen-related disgust that characterizes our response to sickness and decay; however, the two types of disgust appear to be closely connected [see Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley].) Though it does not fit the events logically, the sense of betrayal from the in-group is in effect generalized by putting the invaders into the duplicated bodies of humans. When Driscoll is attacked by the duplicate of her boyfriend and Bennell is attacked by the duplicate of his close friend, Jack (Jeff Goldblum), these feel like betrayals, though we know that the seeming traitors are actually dead; they only appear to be involved as they are externally indistinguishable from the duplicates.

The ending of the film is particularly noteworthy in this regard. It faces us with the Bennell duplicate signaling to the other pod creatures that his friend’s wife remains alive—or at least that is the more obvious interpretation. Bennell had learned earlier that one could save oneself by acting like an emotionless pod creature. Perhaps, then, this really is Bennell and he is just saving himself. I do not mean that this is a likely interpretation. It is, in fact, highly unlikely. But it is just plausible enough to facilitate our sense that the ending involves betrayal (of Jack’s girlfriend by Bennell) and thus is an appropriate target of our (moral) disgust. This final cuing of disgust fits with the general violence-facilitating function of the heroic genre.

Once this modified, heroic structure is set out with some degree of particularization, however, a difficulty arises. Late in the film it becomes possible to have some violent confrontations, parallel with battle scenes in the more common version of heroic conflict. But the very concealment of the “enemy” in the duplicated bodies of in-group members would appear to make violent clashes difficult to justify, at least early on. Put differently, the unaffected characters need to figure out exactly what is happening, to whom it is happening, and why. Otherwise, they risk harming loved ones and befriending enemy invaders. To resolve this dilemma, the film draws on the criminal investigation genre. In effect, the broad structure of the narrative is heroic, but the event-by-event development constitutes a type of criminal investigation. Finally, this is all further integrated with a (rather poorly developed) love story.

In short, Invasion of the Body Snatchers initially appears to be a clear case of a story rooted firmly in the culturally and historically local soil of the United States in the 1970s. It is, of course, true that many of its individuating features are “local” in this way, as is probably the case for any literary work. However, even the most cursory consideration of Invasion’s generic structure and constituents shows that it is not solely local. At an only slightly more abstract level, the film derives from the filmmakers’ synthesis of heroic, criminal investigation, and romantic genres. It does alter the prototypical forms of these genres. But, in doing so, it draws on cross-cultural domains for developing metaphors and imagery to orient our response to out-groups. Moreover, these alterations in the prototypical forms fit well with the—again, cross-cultural—function that the structure-defining, heroic genre commonly serves (here, facilitating violence against out-groups).

Works Cited

Bloom, Paul. How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. New York: Norton, 2010.

Buonomano, Dean. Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives. New York: Norton, 2011.

Carroll, Noël. “Film, Emotion, and Genre.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999, 21-47.

Ferrara, Mark. “Bao-yu and the Second Self: Pairing, Mirroring, and Utopia in Honglou meng.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17.3 (2015): 371-395.

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

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What is Colonialism? New York: Routledge, 2024.

Insdorf, Annette. Philip Kaufman. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2012.

Kaufman, Philip, dir. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Los Angeles, CA: United Artists, 1978.

Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Pu Songling. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Trans. John Minford. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and Clark McCauley. “Disgust.” In Handbook of Emotions. Ed Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Lewis, and Jeannette Haviland-Jones. 4^th ed. New York: Guilford P, 2016, 815-834.

Blog for December 2024: Indigenous Studies and Universals

Posted on December 18, 2024December 18, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Donald R. Wehrs, Auburn University

In recent decades, Indigenous Studies has emerged as a vibrant field of academic scholarship, but one whose theoretical underpinnings and research agenda seem to put in question the concept of literary universals and thus its interpretative value. Making the recovery and delineation of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies its primary focus, Indigenous Studies argues that both diverge categorically from Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment notions of rationality and modern Western conceptualizing of experience. Highlighting the central roles played by Western forms of rationality and conceptualizing in justifying and orchestrating European colonizing violence, Indigenous Studies suggests that politically and morally dubious effects follow predictably from viewing “nature” as separate from and ontologically inferior to “culture,” and that among the most prominent of these effects is universalizing Eurocentric constructions of reason and “civilization.” Discourse in the field further contends that the very ontological-epistemological premises that underlay settler and resource-extractive European colonization continue to inform the theoretical assumptions and analytical practices through which contemporary academic discourse typically “sees” indigenous societies and cultures.

Much Indigenous Studies scholarship aims to recover and explicate modes of conceptualizing that have been partially lost or distorted. It also seeks to document the continuing relevance of retrieved or clarified ontologies and epistemologies for the people shaped historically by them, as well as to demonstrate indigenous thought’s abiding practical, political, and moral value (see Henne 2020; Vizenor 2019; Barker 2017; Lee 2017; Emberley 2014; Schwarz 2001). Critical Indigenous Studies, the field’s theoretical, methodological extension, works to expose, correct, and redress the hegemonic effects of academic discourse perceived as reading into radically different conceptual worlds supposed “universals” that are really modern Western notions and constructions. Aileen Moreton–Robinson describes Critical Indigenous Studies’ goal as that of “mobiliz[izing] Indigenous epistemologies to serve as foundations of knowledge informed by the cultural domains of Indigenous peoples” (2016, 4; also see Watchmán 2024; McCall et al. 2017; Lee 2014). Because the theorizing of “universals” is taken to be a central feature of the Eurocentric bent of dominant academic discourse, critique of such thought is identified with decolonizing scholarly interventions.

Indigenous Studies understands the ontologies and epistemologies it explores to differ among diverse peoples in multifarious ways. Still, the use of “Indigenous” as a collective noun implies that what is so identified shares certain features, above all ways of thinking that preclude separations of nature from culture as well as other Western binary, hierarchical intellectual legacies and assumptions. Indigenous thought is instead characterized as positing interactive reciprocities that shape relations among humans and nonhumans, thus bringing cosmic-divine, ecological-natural, and social-cultural agents or forces into diverse interconnecting networks (for representative discussions, see Henne 2020, 185-89; Rice 2004; Preuss 1988; McPherson 2014, 10-11; Watchmán 2024, 3-21; Werito 2014).

Allied with discourses in Indigenous Studies that associate scientific understandings of nature with Eurocentric marginalization or distortion of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies is an influential current of contemporary anthropological theory. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that in contrast to Western notions of being/truth and rationality “a set of ideas and practices found throughout indigenous America” may be described as “perspectivism”—a “cosmology” that “imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective agencies, human as well as nonhuman, each endowed with the same generic type of soul, that is, the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities”: jaguars are understood to see as beer what humans see as blood, and what humans see as “a muddy salt-lick on a river bank, tapirs see as their big ceremonial house, and so on” (2015, 58). The French anthropologist Philippe Descola, like Viveiros de Castro an Amazonia expert, builds on his Brazilian colleague’s work and his own studies, but also augments it with research from Australia, Siberia, Mesoamerica, Africa, and the Artic. On this comparative basis, Descola distinguishes what he calls “naturalism” (Eurocentric rationalist-scientific hierarchical separations of culture and nature that may be traced back to Genesis and Plato) from three distinct indigenous ontologies: animism, which attributes human-like souls to nonhuman life forms and objects; totemism, which traces group identity and attributes to an ancestral progenitor; and analogy, which views different entities as interrelated by common qualities and distinguished by minute differences or degrees. Descola argues that each of these ontologies figure identity, self-other relations, and world ordering differently, with significant consequences for cosmology, material and social life, and inter-communal relations (2013a, esp. 112-231; also see 2013b).

Despite sharing with Indigenous Studies a focus on ontology as central to conceptualizing and experiencing life in ways that Eurocentric universalizing occludes, Viveiros de Castro and Descola differ from one another on certain points. Whereas Viveiros de Castro, much influenced by Deleuze, is primarily concerned with viewing ontologies as expressions of culturally specific, communally distinctive perspectives, Descola stresses shared features among the ontologies he elaborates while noting permutations, and their causes and implications, within each type.

Still, Indigenous Studies and this current of anthropological theory concur in suggesting that radically disjunctive ontologies and epistemologies tend to fashion emotional-motivational systems likewise disjunctive and communally-ethnically circumstanced. This view diverges from scholarship in social and cognitive anthropology that regards diverse human cultures to be the products of different ways of interacting with and interpreting a nature whose internal processes are affected by cultural constructions but nonetheless distinct from them (see esp. Boyer 2018, 2001; Bloch 2013, 2012, 1998). The theorizing of literary universals likewise ascribes a degree of universality and autonomy to nature. For Descola such ascriptions are characteristic of “naturalist” (Western, scientific) ontology, for Viveiros de Castro they efface the primacy of difference, and for Critical Indigenous Studies they are associated with Eurocentric colonizing thought and discourse. But for theorizing of literary universals they underlie the postulating of evolutionarily honed, species-wide emotional-motivational systems, to which are attributed recurrences in separate traditions of literary features such as prototypical plot structures of heroism, romance, and sacrifice (Hogan 2024, 2022, 2018, 2011, 2003).

Notable ambiguities or internal tensions attend the contrasting accounts of Indigenous Studies, Viveiros de Castro, and Descola. The more determinate ontological-epistemological formulations are identified with particular peoples and societies, the more homogenous collective worldviews seem to be implied. This not only conflicts with evidence that group identities are never monolithic (see Appiah 2018) but also recalls Herder’s and Fichte’s notion that different ethnic-linguistic collectives have their own distinctive, signature Volkgeist—itself a Eurocentric legacy. Conversely, the more ontological-epistemological formulations overlap or resemble one another in related or unrelated cultures, the more reasonable it appears to understand them as following from shared, evolutionarily derived emotional-motivational systems interacting with specific ecological and socio-historical conditions.

Indeed, animist ontologies as Viveiros de Castro and Descola present them presume that souls have “universal” attributes, “the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities” (Viveiros de Castro 2015, 58), whether these “souls” are those of in-group humans, jaguars, tapirs, or out-group humans. To have a “soul,” for these ontologies, is to view what is encountered in terms of threats and affordances, to distinguish an interiority from exteriority, to be constrained to live from material in the environment, to have social affections, to seek status, and to regard as good what advantages oneself and those affiliated with oneself. Natural and social scientific accounts of human experience of consciousness, subjectivity, emotions, and motivations concur with indigenous accounts of souls on all these points. That others have emotional-volitional systems that are like one’s own but different in perspective entangles one with them in ways that are necessarily socially and ethically fraught.

This is especially the case because interdependence involves flourishing at another’s expense. It does so in relation to game animals for hunter-gatherer societies and out-group humans targeted by inter-communal raiding just as it does so in relation to peoples dispossessed and depopulated by settler colonialism and those whose low wages subsidize affordable computers for others. The degree to which ecological, biological, and social interdependence brings with it flourishing at a cost to others may vary, of course, and may be made more or less. Still, it is naïve to think that wellbeing in this life can ever be made free from indebtedness and prioritizing that is troubling because it cannot be entirely disinterested, equitable, or just. On the most basic level, children survive through the care and physical wear-and-tear expended by the generations they will displace, biological existence demands constant assimilation of energy and resources, and for those endowed with “souls” (or subjective self-awareness) there is no escaping giving some interests or perspectives more attention and value than others. However much hunter-gatherer societies feel kinship with and even apologize to the animals they hunt, they will continue to kill them if their own survival is perceived to depend on it (see Humphrey with Onon 1996, 91-92; Wewa and Gardner 2017, 44-47). Even when reluctance to do harm is raised to the level of a stringent ethics, as in Jainism, there is recognition that to exist is to “be there” instead of or at cost to something else (for amplification, see Wehrs 2024, 151-90). In most cases, individuals and communities do what they perceive as necessary for their own flourishing, albeit with varying degrees of regret, remorse, rationalization, symbolic or notional reparation, and selective contractions of empathy (see Zaki and Ochsner 2012, 2011). The way hunting societies view the game they live from is close to how James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, for example, encourage readers to think of native North Americans.

Because entanglement with others, human and nonhuman, is a “universal” exigency, not an effect of particular modes of conceptualizing, theorizing risks becoming disingenuous if it evades the question of whether an ontology should be valued simply because it is one’s people’s tradition (or another people’s tradition) or because it discloses insights or promotes moral tendencies that are transculturally valid or good. This particularly becomes a pressing matter when indigenous ontologies, identified with reciprocity and cooperation, are contrasted with Eurocentric ones, identified with hierarchy and domination. If any articulated ontology can be subjected to ethical critique on grounds other than internal self-contradiction, then no ontology can be presumed to be self-justifying—or open to evaluation only from within its own terms.

Ontological valorization of reciprocity and cooperation can extend ethical consideration to nonhuman forms of life and even ecological systems, but it can also support violent and appropriative practices, as in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies where thinking of the gods as renewing the life-sustaining cosmological order in exchange for humans providing them blood motivated warfare to harvest captives for human sacrifice (see Fredrick 2024; Rice 2004; Preuss 1988, esp. 73-94). Similarly, valorization of difference—according it metaphysical irreducibility—can take problematic forms. Descola notes that for the Jivaro tribe of Amazonia “[b]y dint of shrinking” an enemy’s head, his “individuality” is “preserved” in ways that are “culturally usable yet at the same time perceived as different” (338). The very difference of perspective or “soul” associated with another’s head, and the worth accorded it, make collecting and shrinking heads an activity viewed as something “good,” socially conscientious members of the community ought to and will “naturally” want to participate in.

Additionally, the theoretical prioritizing of conceptualization prominent within Critical Indigenous Studies and allied discourses might be suspected of betraying unwarranted intellectualist assumptions about how humans, as individuals and members of societies, experience life, assess what is desirable, and make decisions. Such prioritizing notably gives pride of place to activities and spheres over which professors, and before them priests and scribes, claim expert knowledge. What people say they believe, however, and what notions and motives actually govern practical thought and action are often quite different. Literary art and storytelling craft are adept at calling these discrepancies to mind, and they do so in ways that guardians of regulative ontological-epistemological orthodoxies in various societies tend to find disconcerting, if not threatening (see Wehrs 2024, 11-43).

Indeed, consideration of the nature of the literary itself, rather than pointing out internal tensions within alternative academic discourses or appealing to “universality” as it is operative in scientific accounts of nature, offers the best defense of literary universals’ conceptual and interpretative value. Certainly, reading indigenous literary discourses for information about the normative ontological-epistemological notions of the societies from which they emerge is a legitimate and worthwhile scholarly activity, just as is reading non-indigenous literary works for the purpose of documenting prevalent social practices, attitudes, and topical controversies. But this is rather like reading Shakespeare to cull information about the “Elizabethan world picture,” except that E. M. W. Tillyard’s 1959 study of that title is notably not confused about its subject of study. Its interest in the ontological notions evoked for Elizabethans by words such as “dolphin” is in service of understanding the literary use Shakespeare made of them, as when Cleopatra calls Antony “dolphin-like.”

Literature that is of interest as literature, rather than of interest primary as a source of sociological-historiographical data or as one of many examples of a general abstract claim, does not simply express a people’s ontology (or a culture’s monolithic ideology), but rather invites critical reflection on what a given ontology (or its selective and often varied deployment) makes visible and occludes. While discursive techniques and forms may be deployed for various purposes (propaganda, invective, advertising, cheerleading), they become literary in a qualitative sense when made intrinsic to a work’s exploration of endemic and intractable human concerns (conflicts between generations, tensions between genders, dissonance between personal and communal interests, clashes among various motives and plausible notions of what is good). Because human emotional-volitional systems are species-wide evolutionary inheritances, the stories they give rise to assume the shapes of prototypical plots that are intelligible and meaningful across cultures. Even so, heroic, romantic, and sacrificial figurations (often interfused) may take on highly individuated forms which allows them to become nuanced means of eliciting critical reflection on the interplay between what is endemic and what is socio-culturally and psychologically peculiar. When this interplay is developed in strikingly artful and revelatory ways, the literary work survives the contexts of its creation and engages the moral imaginations of those whose conceptualized worlds are radically different from but uncannily receptive to those the work presumes and evokes.

It is best to conclude with brief example. In the Popol Vuh (or Popol Wuj), a narrative the moves from the creation of a pre-human world to the Spanish Conquest of the Quiché (or K’iche) Mayan people of Guatemala, two proto-human boys who are also gods defeat a giant bird, Seven Macaw. Surviving in an early 18^th-century alphabetic Quiché manuscript with accompanying Spanish translation in the hand of a Spanish Catholic priest, the text hasgenerally been taken to be the work of mid-sixteenth-century Quiché nobles. They are thought to have transcribed or redacted the contexts of a much earlier hieroglyphic codex in an effort to preserve what they could of their culture from Spanish destruction. The narrative relates that the gods’ first efforts to create humans failed, causing them to destroy proto-humans by a great flood, after which was left a cosmic-natural order where there is not yet a sun but instead the overbearing Seven Macaw, whose self-enclosed, antisocial propensities made human life ecologically impossible (Tedlock 1996, 73-74).

Fully realized humans were acutely needed, however. Within Mayan ontological-cosmological frameworks,gods are not immortal. Since humans “alone bear the burden of carrying out life-renewing ceremonies so that rebirth can follow death naturally and at its proper time,” the gods (k’abawil) need humans to be their “providers and sustainers” (Christenson 2021, 21; 2007, 80). Indeed, the word for “sustainer,” q’o’l, denotes both “one who provides sustenance, primarily in the form of nourishment, but also in any other way—such as a mother caring for an infant” (21). The Quiché word thus interconnects organic, material wellbeing with affective, sociable moral actions and attitudes. Its use in the narrative implies that a world capable of sustaining human life binds together biological, ecological and social, moral dimensions of being.

“[D]efeat and destruction” (Tedlock 1996, 77) of Seven Macaw is attributed to “two boys,” Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are also “gods.” Tedlock’s translation describes them as viewing as “evil” Seven Macaw’s attempted “self-magnification,” a judgment that accords with widespread oral discursive motifs, especially in trickster tales, that condemn and make comic sport of pomposity and bullying. Companionable cooperation against egoistic bullying likewise is often valorized, across cultures, as deliberative and morally sanctioned “virtuous” violence” (see Wrangham 2019, 222-72; Fiske and Rai 2015, esp. 1-34). Both English- and Spanish-language scholarship has long viewed the text as expressing moral condemnation of Seven Macaw’s pride or self-aggrandizement, most recently Fredrick’s 2024 study. Much in the manner of Critical Indigenous Studies, however, Nathan C. Henne argues that such readings project on the narrative a supposedly “universal” but really Eurocentric binary conceptualization of good/bad.

Henne suggests that the word translated as “evil,” itzel, more properly denotes “broken,” as in something not working right or effectively, and that what is rendered as “self-magnification,” nimarisaj rib, denotes “making oneself big.” On his account, the narrative does not imply a moral critique of antisocial self-aggrandizement, but simply relates that Seven Macaw’s time of acting as the sun has come to an end, for his brightness is insufficient for the world than will succeed the present one (2020, 99-138). Focusing on culturally distinctive ontology, Henne suggests, should disclose the Eurocentric, colonialist effects of projecting a supposed “universal” ethical framework on the narrative. By implication, viewing the Seven Macaw episode in terms of literary universals, as a variant of heroic plot structures in which, typically, a people’s wellbeing is threatened by invasion or tyranny but successfully defended, is unwittingly colonizing by being undiscerning of ontological difference.

It is certainly true that Mesoamerican and more broadly Native American creation accounts commonly posit a succession of worlds. It is also true that “making oneself big” in Maya contexts is not necessarily negative. Indeed, responsibility is associated with bearing a burden, as Allen J. Christenson notes in describing how humans are conceived as “alone bear[ing] the burden of carrying out life-renewing ceremonies so that rebirth can follow death naturally and at its proper time.” But whether a particular instance of making oneself big is viewed as good or not depends, across cultures, on what one makes oneself big for. Within Maya contexts, efficiency in managing burdens of responsibility is linked to enabling and maintaining ontological-ecological conditions on which human and nonhuman life depends. Responsibilities include assuring the reappearance of the sun and other celestial-temporal phenomena (see Rice 53, 58, 60, 99, 149), and sustaining prosperity from which the whole community benefits (Iannone, Houk, and Schwake 2016).

Because the good is so configured, to be “broken” in the sense of not working adequately to ensure ecological-social wellbeing may not in itself be “evil,” but to cling to a position of responsibility under such circumstances makes one an impediment or threat to intermingled natural-human-divine flourishing, and thus one’s actions and attitudes become “evil.” It is not necessary to presume an absolute, extramundane perspective (that of Plato’s forms or a transcendent monotheistic god) to view an effect or intention as “evil,” for what merits praise or warrants condemnation can be relative to this-worldly concerns and goals but nonetheless involve moral-social measures of value. If Seven Macaw’s time as sun has come to an end, his insistence on maintaining his position indefinitely is a form of “self-magnification” that blocks the making of the kind of world needed by k’abawil, humans, and nonhumans in order to thrive. For that reason, making oneself big when one is “broken” is to act “evilly.”

Further, the world being forestalled, on Henne’s own account, is one in which moral-sociable dimensions of humanly experienced life are taken to be ontologically-cosmologically structuring principles. The desired, optimal world is one in which “[a]ll beings and things transact continually with other realms that coincide in place (or that share some other transactional relationship)” (Henne 2020, 188). This characterization is consonant with others, such as Mary H. Preuss’s 1988 study, which stresses that Maya ontology associates the need and thus moral imperative of maintaining an appropriate equilibrium in the universe (“un equilibrio apropriado en el universo”), for all parts of the natural or existent world (“todos los sectores de la naturaleza”) need to work together (“juntos”) (14).

To the extent that Seven Macaw impedes the making of such a world, the Heroic Twins (as they are usually called) have good reasons (at once ontological-practical and moral-social) to remove him from power. Moreover, the violence they direct against Seven Macaw and his family, and the apparent reasons for it, much resembles patterns of violent removal of kings and elites perceived as failing to sustain communal wellbeing that may have been a recurrent feature of pre-European contact Maya political life, and that recent historiographical and archaeological studies have identified as occurring with particular intensity in the 800-830 CE era. The relation of those removals to “effectively bringing an end to Classic [Maya] style of kingship governance” (c. 250-900 CE) is a current area of scholarly inquiry (Iannone, Houk, and Schwake 2016, 21). Notably, sculptural iconographic representation of what appears to be the Heroic Twins’ attack on a large predatory bird deity can be traced back to Late Preclassic times (c. 400 BCE-100 CE), but in such depictions the bird deity’s dominant position and glorious apparel are emphasized, in contrast to the Popol Vuh text’s stress on Seven Macaw’s defeat and humiliation (see Guersey 2021, 268-94).

Recognizing that the Popol Vuh’s Seven Macaw episode draws on and reworks heroic prototypical plot structures that are literary universals is the beginning, not the end, of analysis. The twins defeat a threat to communal flourishing, but one that is not an invader whose aggression is a matter of territorial expansion, but one whose desire to perpetuate his own primacy threatens temporal-cosmological development, and thus the coming into existence of forms of combined ecological-social interaction that enable human (and nonhuman) wellbeing. The emphasis in Indigenous Studies on culturally distinctive ontologies and epistemologies contributes valuably to more nuanced, discerning, and appreciative readings of indigenous literary works, but it does so as a companion rather than alternative to interpretative work informed by consideration of the role literary universals play in giving works their distinctive tenor, texture, network of associations, evocations of emotions, and eliciting of reflection. In the Seven Macaw episode, intoxication with one’s own primacy is depicted as both a moral-social failing and an ontological-cosmological threat, one whose “heroic” overcoming is linked to subordinating making oneself big to ensuring that others can flourish. That separates the self-assertions of the twins from those of Seven Macaw, and provides “universal” ethical standards by which variously conceptualized and constructed worlds (those of gods, Quiché Mayan kingdoms, and Spanish colonizers) may with reason and in justice be assessed.

Works Cited

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Barker, Joanne, Ed. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

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Emberley, Julia V. The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practice. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.

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Guersey, Julia. “Beyond the ‘Myth or Politics’ Debate: Reconsidering Late Preclassic Sculpture, the Principal Bird Deity, and the Popol Vuh.” In The Myths of the Popol Vuh in Cosmology, Art, and Ritual. Ed. Holly Moles, Allen J. Christenson, and Frauke Sachse. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2021. 268-94

Henne, Nathan C. Reading Popol Wuj: A Decolonial Guide. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2020.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

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Iannone, Gyles, Brett A. Houk, and Sonja A. Schwake, Eds. Ritual Violence and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016.

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McCall, Sophie Deanna Reder, David Gaertner, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Eds. Read Listen Tell: Indigenous Stories form Turtle Island. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University, 2017.

McPherson, Robert S. Viewing the Ancestors: Perceptions of the Anaasázi, Mokwic, and Hisatsinom. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Introduction: Locations of Engagement in the First World,” in Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2016. 3-16.

Preuss, Mary H. Los dios del Popol Vuh. Madrid, Spain: Editorial Pliegos, 1988.

Rice, Prudence M. Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

Schwarz, Maureen Trudelle. Navajo Lifeways: Contemporary Issues, Ancient Knowledge. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

Tedlock, Dennis. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Rev. Ed. New York: Touchstone, 1996 [1985].

Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. New York: Vintage, 1959.

Vivieros de Castro, Eduardo. The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Worlds. Chicago, IL: Hau Books, 2015.

Vizenor, Gerald. Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Watchmán, Renáe. Restoring Relations Through Stories: From Dinétah to Denendeh. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024.

Wehrs, Donald R. Ethical Sense and Literary Significance: Deep Sociality and the Cultural Agency of Imaginative Discourse. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Werito, Vincent. “Understanding Hózhó to Achieve Critical Consciousness: A Contemporary Diné Interpretation of the Philosophical Principles of Hózhó.” In Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, ed. Lloyd L. Lee. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. 25-38.

Wewa, Wilson and James A. Gardner. Legends of the Northern Paiute: As Told by Wilson Wewa. Ed. James A. Gardner. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2017.

Wrangham, Richard. The Goodness Paradox: How Evolution Made Us More and Less Violent. London: Profile, 2019.

Zaki, Jamil and Kevin Ochsner, “The Neuroscience of Empathy: Progress, Pitfalls, and Promise,” Nature Neuroscience 15, no. 5 (2012): 675-80.

—–. “You, Me, and My Brain: Self and Other Representation in Social Cognitive Neuroscience.” In Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind. Ed. Alexander Todorov, Susan T. Fiske, and Deborah A. Prentice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 14-39.

Blog for February 2024: Reason and Aesthetic Pleasure

Posted on February 20, 2024February 20, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Back in October, I wrote about Lara Harb’s valuable book (see “Arabic Poetics and Japanese Theatre”). I asked Professor Harb if she wished to respond to anything in the blog. First, she told me about her forthcoming article on wonder, which is certainly relevant to the concerns of the Literary Universals project. (I will have more to say about that article below.) In addition, she had some concerns about the blog, specifically about my comments on the connection between the Arabic Aristotelians and Aristotle. She worried that I was assuming that the Arabic philosophers could not claim the Greek philosophers as part of their tradition. In fact, I completely agree that Plato and Aristotle are part of the Arabic tradition as well as part of the European tradition. The question I am addressing at that point in the blog is not about who inherits the past. It is rather about how a study such as Harb’s might contribute to a research program on literary universals. Specifically, there are multiple, areal links between (what became known as) the European and (what became known as) the Arabic tradition. The issue is whether or not these European-Middle Eastern areal links are so extensive as to make any parallels between the traditions irrelevant to the study of universals. I point to this problem, then explain that the interpretive divergence between the traditions seems great enough that neither the Middle Eastern nor the European theories is rendered redundant within a research program on literary universals.

To give some idea of my estimation of the Arabic tradition, consider the following passage from an article I published in 2004 (“Stories and Morals” 30):

[T]he Arabic theorists . . . engag[ed] in an early and still exemplary form of cross-cultural literary and theoretical synthesis. It was in this context that they formulated their theories of takhyil or “imaginative representation” and of the “poetic syllogism.” The Arabic theorists – al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and so on – came to Aristotle’s Poetics with a specific set of concerns in mind. They read Aristotle in light of those concerns. But this prior orientation did not inhibit the generalizability of their work, as they shaped Aristotle’s ideas into a new theory of literature and ethics. Despite some obvious interpretive errors [e.g., interpreting Aristotle’s tragedy as panegyric], this theory is, on the whole, no less faithful to Aristotle than were the various European writings of the Middle Ages. More importantly, it is, I believe, a more sophisticated, more illuminating, and more accurate theory of literary ethics – or, rather, of one part of literary ethics – than theories promulgated in Europe at the same time and later.

(Similar appreciation can be found in Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature in the section on Arabic theory, which directly follows the section on Plato and Aristotle.)

Harb had related concerns about my comments on the “querelle des anciens et des modernes.” My point there was not that the querelle somehow influenced the Arabic theorists (which, among other things, would have been anachronistic). My point, rather, was that Harb’s analysis was entirely plausible and that a possible argument against her—that she was imposing a Western model (derived from the querelle) onto the Arabic theorists—was without merit. In other words, I was supporting her claims.

Finally, Harb did not care for the translation of “takhyīl” as “imagination.” She is right that I should have noted that she translates it as “make-believe,” though I am not convinced that the change in translation makes much difference. For example, given Kendall Walton’s prominent use of the phrase “make-believe,” I am inclined to see it as no less misleading that the admittedly protean “imagination.”

I have gone through a few of Harb’s qualms about the earlier blog because I suspect that some readers will misunderstand my points similarly. The issue of areal distinction appears to be particularly vexing to non-linguists. As I explain in the introduction to the Literary Universals Project (see here), in order to be part of the data for a study of universals, a feature needs to be found in a greater number of traditions than would occur randomly. The key point is that “traditions” in this context refers to lineages that are genetically and areally distinct—thus traditions that are not descendants of the same proto-tradition nor were they subsequently in sufficient contact with one another to produce the shared property. If we find that the word for, say, “fruit” is closely related in several Romance languages, that does not mean that several unrelated languages use a similar word. It does not suggest a statistical universal. It shows only that these Romance languages derived their word for “fruit” from Latin. As such, it does not count as a datum bearing on language universals. In this case, the parallel across languages is, so to speak, disqualified due to genetic derivation. Similarly, if everybody uses the word “quark” for a quark, that does not mean that anything about the word is universal. It means only that the terminology of physics is largely produced by areal contact (in this case by way of a profession that enables cross-linguistic interaction).

The situation is a bit less straightforward in literary study than in linguistics, thus requiring some qualification (see “Areal Distinctness”). But the basic principle still holds: parallels should generally not be readily explicable by areal contact. My references to the different interpretations of Aristotle constituted an argument that this is one of those less straightforward cases that complicate the assessment of areal influence in the study of literary universals. Even though there was a shared source in the Greek philosophers, the prominent interpretations of those philosophers were different enough to allow the consideration of both traditions, that is, to see them as constituting two traditions and to see both as bearing on the topic of literary universals.

My only significant divergence from Harb, from my point of view, is that she does not draw on recent research on emotion and cognition. I do not mean this as a criticism. Harb has more than enough to do in reading the Arabic literary theorists and their commentators, critics, influences, and so on. However, since well before writing “Stories and Morals,” I have felt that there was a close connection or convergence between the work of the major Islamic Golden Age philosophers and the findings of cognitive science. Systematic study of this connection would, I believe, benefit both groups, enriching our general understanding of the mind as developed in the cognitive and affective sciences while also advancing the specifically literary accounts articulated by the Arabic theorists.

In this context, I would like to consider Harb’s forthcoming essay, which treats aesthetics and wonder. Before going on to that, however, I should pause for a moment to make a few comments on another work. I had initially planned to devote this month’s blog to Dacher Keltner’s Awe. In part, this was because the book promised to treat the same topic as Harb’s essay, but in greater depth and with greater rigor. Having now read the book, I certainly do respect Keltner as an author, a cognitive scientist, and a human being. But I feel his notion of awe is too amorphous to serve as a “fundamental” (xvii) concept in a branch of affective science. He defines “awe” as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world” (7). But that seems clearly too general. Almost everything transcends my current understanding of the world (for example, virtually everything electronic, almost all people, even my own body).

Moreover, I find some of Keltner’s arguments for the explanatory and therapeutic value of awe to be unconvincing. For example, sometimes the data he presents appear to be open to simpler explanations. In one case of this sort, he reports a study in which some test subjects look at a large valley and others look at a tourist area. When the former draw pictures of themselves, those pictures are smaller than when the latter draw pictures of themselves. Keltner interprets this metaphorically as representing a reduction in ego-centrism consequent upon feeling awe. But it seems simpler to interpret it as a response to the literal size of what they have just been looking at. The test subjects are literally much smaller than the valley, but about the same size as other tourists. In addition, he seems to simply set aside apparent counter-examples—such as people’s evident awe before Hitler. On the other hand, Keltner’s book is, in a sense, half affective science and half self-help. Even if his claims for the effects of a walk in the woods are not as well supported or as algorithmically explained as one might like, the chances seem very good that following his advice would yield some benefits, and would be very unlikely to result in any harm.

Now we may turn to Harb’s article. (She has kindly sent me a pre-publication copy. However, as it has not yet been copy-edited, she has asked me not to quote from the piece. I have therefore relied on paraphrase.) Having read her astute and learned analyses, I feel all the more strongly that her explication of the Arabic texts would both benefit and be benefited by integration with cognitive and affective science. This is not because Harb is less scientific (though of course she is not running a lab and undertaking controlled experiments). Rather, it is because her intellectual orientation is in some ways more scientific (e.g., more attentive to precision and logical development) than that of many scientists who write on literature. This is related to her stress on the rationality of the Arabic philosophers themselves. Many writers have discussed, for example, the use of syllogistic logic by these theorists. But Harb is one of the few who has seen the real value of these authors, not in the particulars of syllogisms, but in the larger commitment to reason, of which syllogistic logic is simply one part.

Harb begins by explaining that dictionaries of Classical Arabic define “taʿajjub” or wonder as resulting from experiences that have one or more of the following characteristics: being unexpected, unusual, mysterious, obscure, having an unknown cause, being magnificent. This is a rather broad definition, apparently suffering from the same problems as Keltner’s definition. But in naming this range of possibilities it tells us quite a bit. The first two properties in the list—being unexpected or unusual–come down to much the same thing, to which we will return. Being mysterious, obscure, and having an unknown cause are also virtually equivalent. I take the idea of magnificence simply to mark a strongly positive valence. Dictionaries basically tell us, then, that the elicitor of an experience of wonder is a strongly hedonically valenced target (e.g., an object, or an event) that we did not anticipate and that strikes us as mysterious in the sense that we do not understand how it has come about.

This is still insufficient. But Harb addresses that insufficiency immediately, explaining that wonder, in leading us to recognize our incomprehension, at once provokes us to seek cognitive understanding in the form of an explanation. Developing insights from al-Jurjānī, Harb maintains that aesthetic pleasure derives from wonder, not at the initial moment of mystery, but at the transition from incomprehension to understanding. This too is not quite right. For example, we may come to understand that someone’s unusual appearance is the result of a degenerative disease, but hardly experience aesthetic pleasure at that fact. Even so, it is, I believe, very close.

Harb goes on to enumerate a set of ancillary conditions set out by al-Jurjānī. The first is that our aesthetic pleasure is enhanced by a transition from something abstract to something sensory. Second, it is enhanced by the use of metaphor as this requires the recipient to engage in further effort to gain (pleasurable) understanding. Harb goes on to ask—what about metaphors that have become routine, so that they do not provoke further effort? Here, al-Jurjānī suggests varying the metaphor. He also recommends making use of sharply contrasting ideas. These various points lead Harb to takhyīl—“make believe” (as she translates it), where we in effect take it that the situation named in the metaphor is real (e.g., that a cloud is embarrassed, as in one of the metaphors treated by Harb).

I don’t believe that al-Jurjānī has provided us with a complete account of beauty. However, writing as he did well before the development of cognitive and affective science, he advanced remarkably toward that goal. As already indicated, moving from ignorance to knowledge is far too broad. Moreover, making recipients do cognitive work is not pleasing as such. Indeed, most of the time it is an onerous burden to have to do extra cognitive work to ascertain what could have been communicated to us directly and simply. Even so, I believe that the various points made by al-Jurjānī and Harb are on the right track.

Specifically, in Beauty and Sublimity, I have argued that aesthetic pleasure results from a combination of information-processing (“cognitive”) and motivation-eliciting (“affective”) components. The former are largely a function of nonhabitual categorization. As to the nonhabitual part, there is a great deal of evidence that we gradually stop responding to repeated stimuli (see, for example, LeDoux 138)—at least positive stimuli; as experience tells us, it is much harder, often even impossible, to get used to pain, while pleasures readily come to viewed as routine (on this “hedonic asymmetry,” see Frijda 323). This is why novelty is required for aesthetic pleasure, as in the rareness or unfamiliarity of a metaphorical, rather than literal, statement. Habituation is also why once delightful metaphors become banal. But even frozen metaphors can be thawed out, as Al-Jurjānī recognized. In their brilliant, More Than Cool Reason, George Lakoff and Mark Turner systematize the ways in which boring metaphors can be made delightful again, thereby unknowingly extending a basic insight from al-Jurjānī.

But that is only the “nonhabitual” part of the cognitive criteria. The more crucial part is categorization, for this is the sort of knowledge acquisition that, I argue, contributes positively to aesthetic enjoyment. There are three sorts of categorization, 1) that based on rule-extraction, 2) that based on prototypes or (roughly) average cases, and 3) that based on exemplars or instances (see Murphy and Hoffman 166 and Beauty and Sublimity 130-142). There is strong evidence that aesthetic pleasure in music comes when we tacitly isolate rules governing, for example, themes and variations. There is considerable evidence that natural objects, such as human faces, are more beautiful for us to the degree that they approximate an average instance of the category. Finally, there is at least some reason to believe that we experience aesthetic pleasure through exemplar-based categorization in mimesis. (On the evidence for these various claims, see chapter one of Beauty and Sublimity. Note again that each form of categorization has aesthetic effects only when nonhabitual.)

This covers a good deal of Harb’s and al-Jurjānī ’s insights, connecting them with and extending them through cognitive science. I also mentioned an affective component. Though Harb is not explicitly treating emotion, there are three aspects of her interpretation of al-Jurjānī that bear on emotion. First, his emphasis on sensory concreteness fits well with accounts of emotion that stress perception and embodiment in emotion elicitation (see, for example, chapter two of my What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion.) Second, there is his emphasis on effort. Again, it is not the work itself that is pleasurable but the disburdening of the “cognitive load” (at it is called) once we reach understanding. As Ortony, Clore, and Collins observe, in keeping with al-Jurjānī’s claims, “increases in effort tend to increase the degree to which goals are positively valued” (73)—and the greater the positive evaluation of the goal (here, understanding the source of wonder), the greater the pleasure we feel in successfully achieving that goal. Finally, there is al-Jurjānī’s advice on choosing representations that involve contrast or even opposition. In part, opposition intensifies unexpectedness. In addition, the gradient of change from one emotional state to another, especially one of an contrastive valence, tends to intensify the outcome emotion (e.g., expecting sorrow makes a final joy greater).

It is also important that Harb stresses imagination or “make-believe.” What is difficult in dealing with takhyīl is understanding how we could have emotions regarding persons or situations that we know to be fictional. This is referred to as “the paradox of tragedy.” As I have argued in several publications, our cognitive processes of simulation necessarily have this seemingly paradoxical property, for otherwise their evolutionary function would not be fulfilled. Specifically, that function includes, for example, dissuading us from actions that are likely to prove dangerous. This dissuasion operates by leading us to feel aversion when simulating the ways a particular (imprudent) course of action might unfold. (On simulation, see How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. On the paradox of fiction, see “Paradoxes.”)

All of this does leave out what I consider to be the most important element of aesthetic response—the activation of the attachment system (see Beauty and Sublimity 30-33). Among other connections, there is evidence that, at least for some targets, our feeling of aesthetic pleasure varies with our level of oxytocin (Heinrichs and colleagues 524), a key neurochemical in attachment (see Panksepp and Biven 37, 39). Interestingly, Keltner frequently links oxytocin with awe, possibly suggesting that many cases of what he is calling awe and perhaps what al-Jurjānī (through Harb) calls wonder, are cases of attachment system activation. In any case, I take such activation—thus the involvement of attachment-related feelings–to be a particularly important elicitor of aesthetic response, the feeling that a target is beautiful.

In sum, Laura Harb’s explication of al-Jurjānī shows us once more how much we are missing out on by ignoring non-European traditions of literary theory and aesthetics. Again, I do not believe that al-Jurjānī arrives at a complete account of the experience of the beautiful. But he articulates an extremely insightful theory. Moreover, that theory converges with the insights of cognitive science in many ways. That points us to another unfortunate gap in literary study today, though not as complete a gap—I am referring to the relative absence of cognitive and affective science from literary theory and criticism. Both non-Western theories and cognitive and affective science are clearly relevant to the Literary Universals Project, and their convergence lends support to the cross-cultural scope of both sets of aesthetic

Works Cited

Frijda, Nico. The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Harb, Lara. Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020.

Harb, Lara. “Ta‘ajjub (Wonder): A Rationalist Aesthetic.” PMLA forthcoming.

Heinrichs, Markus, Frances Chen, Gregor Domes, and Robert Kumsta. “Social Stress and Social Approach.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience. Ed. Jorge Armony and Patrik Vuilleumier. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 509–532.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.

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

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Stories and Morals: Emotion, Cognitive Exempla, and the Arabic Aristotelians.” In The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Ed. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004, 31-50.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. New York: Penguin, 2023.

Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

LeDoux, Joseph. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Murphy, Gregory and Aaron Hoffman. “Concepts.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science. Ed. Keith Frankish and William Ramsey, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, 151-170.

Ortony, Andrew, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins.The Cognitive Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. New York: Norton, 2012.

Blog for June 2024: Story Endings and Discourse Endings

Posted on June 20, 2024September 24, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

At the end of May, I had the great pleasure of remotely attending Nigel Fabb’s valedictory address on the topic of endings, given on the occasion of his retirement from Strathclyde University. Nigel’s talk was characteristically erudite, witty, and insightful. Moreover, like so much of Nigel’s work, it introduced topics and approaches that are virtually certain to provoke further reflection, study, and theorization by Nigel himself and by others. Indeed, after listening to Nigel’s talk, I myself began thinking about just what features of endings might be candidates for universality.

Nigel stressed that isolating the “ending” is not simply a perceptual experience. It involves interpretation. In saying this, Nigel was extending the approach to endings that he developed in his book, Language and Literary Structure. A central idea of that book is that many kinds of form are our interpretation of what a text tells us, in context, rather than being observer-independent facts about the text. Endings are, by this account, one such kind.

A somewhat different, but complementary approach, would begin the interpretative isolation of endings by noting a key ambiguity in the term, “ending.” The basic reason why we need interpretation to isolate the ending is that, as narratologists would say, the story ending and the discourse ending are not necessarily the same. Put simply, a story is the sequence of events dramatized in a play or recounted in a narrative. Discourse is the manner in which those events are represented. For example, the discourse might represent story events in non-chronological order. Thus, a romantic comedy might begin at a wedding. As the bride and groom exchange rings and kiss, the unshaven best man turns to the somewhat rumpled maid of honor and whispers discreetly, “Well, that turned out rather better than we might have anticipated.” The film cuts to a clock, which stops its forward progress, then runs backward to eight hours earlier. It is the middle of the night, and the pajama-clad groom is having a ill-tempered exchange with the best man over why anyone would pack a wedding ring in a suitcase, when the item fits easily in one’s pocket—and especially when he knew that the ring was a precious memento of the bride’s grandmother and that she would probably call off the wedding if she thought the prospective groom had been so careless as to entrust that memento to such an untrustworthy guardian. The film cuts to the clock again, now running backward four hours and fifteen minutes, to when the best man is checking his luggage at the airport. We then follow the suitcase as it travels to some exotic destination that happens to have the same name as the regional airport in rural Wisconsin where the wedding was to take place. The rest of the film informs us of how the wedding ring was recovered, and the entire fiasco was concealed from the bride, due in large measure to the quick thinking of the maid of honor. The film ends with a montage of the newlyweds, driving off toward a sign that reads “Niagara Falls, Honeymoon Capital of the World, 836 Miles,” strings of clattering tin cans tied to the bumper, and the best man inviting the maid of honor for a cup of coffee, under a huge sign that says only “CHEESE.” (It’s a Wisconsin thing. Trust me.) In this fanciful scenario, the end of the story is presumably the wedding. But that end of the story occurred at the beginning of the narrative. The discourse ending comprises the departure for Niagara Falls and the possible beginning of a romance between the best man and the maid of honor.

Nigel empirically isolates some recurrent endings from which we might draw theoretical conclusions. Here, I will begin instead with a few theoretical conjectures to orient our look at some actual endings. The first thing we need to do is to characterize story endings more clearly. (A discourse ending is simply the last bit of a work—play, novel, poem, or whatever.) Broadly in keeping with Nigel’s view, I don’t believe that there are any absolute rules as to what constitutes a story ending. But one clear option relies on the common view that a story is preceded and followed by normalcy, which is to say, routines of everyday life. Something happens that disturbs this normalcy—for example, two people fall in love or an enemy invades one’s country. This sets in motion a series of further events until the disturbance is “resolved,” which is to say, things return to normalcy, to generally predictable routine. In a romantic story, the marriage of the lovers is a case of this sort. The subsequent honeymoon is to a degree ambiguous. It is not ordinary in the sense that it does not occur every day. But, within the (partially fictional) culture tacitly assumed in the preceding example, it is predictable. Moreover, it is what people in the culture would assume to follow the wedding (leaving aside some anachronisms, such as the tin cans, added in the hope of producing some comic effect). But, given the preceding problems, the wedding itself was uncertain. Thus, throughout the film, we presume that the usual sequences of events—including the honeymoon–will follow only because the (endangered) wedding has occurred. On the other hand, the hints of a budding romance between the best man and the maid of honor are not at all a matter of resolving the obstacles to the romantic union of the lovers in the main story. So, it is unequivocally a discourse ending.

Once we have distinguished story endings from discourse endings, we might reasonably expect that the two can either coincide or diverge. Coinciding is presumably the default case. Thus, one might anticipate that at least some narratives and dramas, cross-culturally, will conclude the discourse with the ending of the story. For example, we find the 18^th-Century, Japanese playwright, Chikamatsu, ending his romantic tragedy, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, in roughly this way. The lovers, weeping, first consider whether or not they will meet their parents “in the world of the dead” (56). The woman (Ohatsu) then demands that her lover (Tokubei) stab her. He does so, calling out, “Namu Amida” (56), thereby invoking the Pure Land Buddhist belief in the spiritual benefits of invoking the compassionate Buddha, Amitābha. When someone calls his name with sincerity, Pure Land Buddhists believe that Amitābha will aid that person’s enlightenment—thus, his or her freedom from worldly attachment—initially through rebirth in the “Pure Land” (see the entries for “pure land,” “Amitābha,” and “buddhakṣetra” in Buswell, et al.). Having stabbed Ohatsu, Tokubei quickly turns his dagger against himself. After they have both died, the narrator informs us only that “No one is there to tell the tale,” but even so people will “gather to pray for these lovers who beyond a doubt will . . . attain Buddhahood” (56).

This ending is almost entirely a simple representation of the suicide, thus of the final moment of the story. It does, however, contain two elements that suggest how divergent (i.e., non-coinciding) discourse endings might operate generally. In other words, they hint at the functions that might be served by separating the discourse ending from the story ending, or more simply why an author might do such a thing. I take it that the references to the bonds of the lovers with their parents serve to stress the centrality of attachment feelings (as distinct from mere lust) to the lovers’ emotional lives. This in turn makes their immanent attachment loss more salient and their condition all the more pitiable. (Most readers are, presumably, more sympathetic with people suffering attachment loss than with people who are merely sexually frustrated.) It also puts them in the position of children, in some degree heightening our sense of their vulnerability. In these ways, the references to parents intensify the audience members’ empathic response—though only short term. The reference to their eventual Buddhahood gives the viewer or reader hope—indeed, virtual certainty—that this deeply tragic moment will serve as the means to end suffering permanently. Like the reference to parents, this part of the discourse ending serves to modulate our emotion. But in this case, it limits the lovers’ suffering, thereby mitigating our empathic pain, providing us with a more distant, but also more enduring peace. We might in addition take these points to suggest that Chikamatsu is addressing Buddhist themes bearing on desire and suffering.

Thus, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki presents us with two possible functions of discourse endings: emotion modulation (either intensification or mitigation) and thematic assertion. Neither of these is unexpected. I have argued elsewhere (see, for example, Narrative Discourse 17-18 and Affective Narratology 103-104), following many previous writers, that literary narratives have two principal purposes: to produce emotion (in the first place, empathic emotion aimed at characters in the story) and to cultivate attitudes toward and ideas about the real world (thus, “themes” as I am using the term). As these are the two primary goals of literature, it is predictable that the primary goals of discourse endings would be the same.

Of course, narrative works pursue these functions through stories. Thus, we might also expect some discourse endings to bear on stories as such. Upon reflection, we may recognize something of this sort in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. Specifically, the reference to Buddhahood focuses on the fate of the central characters, but it does so for events that occur subsequent to the story represented in this work, events that take place after the story ending. Other works may focus on the fate of “supporting,” or even peripheral characters. Of course, as already noted, some works give us the story ending early on, then conclude with something from the middle or the beginning of that story. Even so, all these story-based discourse endings (as we might call them) ultimately serve emotional or thematic purposes. For instance, in the fictional case presented earlier, the end of the story is actually the first event presented in the film. In cases such as this, the main emotion elicited by the narrative is often mirth, which might be inhibited if the viewer is worried about whether or not things will work out in the end. In Meir Sternberg’s terms, the change in discourse order, so that we know the story outcome from the start, shifts part of our emotional response from suspense to curiosity.

We find particularly illuminating cases of discourse endings in the two versions of Ji Junxiang’s The Zhao Orphan, which appeared in the Yuan and Ming dynasties. The Yuan version appeared during the Mongol rule of China and the play may be read as a call to rebel against this “foreign” domination (see “Paradoxes of Literary Emotion”). The play ends with the orphan’s rage against the would-be usurper, Tu Angu. The orphan contemplates how he will “slit open [Tu Angu’s] belly/Lop off his limbs” (67), and so on. This version is actually different from anything I have mentioned thus far. The discourse ending represents a point in the middle of the story, but the story ending is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, the story is unresolved. I take it that this has both an emotive and a thematic purpose, which become clear in the interpretation of the play as an indirect expression of anti-Yuan, Song loyalism. (The Song dynasty was the Han Chinese dynasty that preceded the Yuan dynasty.) Specifically, in that context, the discourse ending appears aimed at intensifying audience anger at the then-current rulers (i.e., the Yuan dynasty emperors). It implicitly characterize those rulers (thematically) as invaders and usurpers, thus as real-world targets for the sort of rage represented in the character of the Zhao orphan.

The ending of the Ming dynasty version is quite different. As Li points out, this version “tones down or deletes criticism of the . . . ruler and removes any suggestion that the Zhao Orphan . . . could have become a usurper” (19)—or, more properly, a rebel against the current, real-world ruler (who was tacitly characterized as a usurper in the Yuan period version of the play). In the Ming version, the orphan, Cheng Bo, receives the monarch’s permission to arrest Tu Angu secretly, after which the latter’s entire clan is killed and Tu Angu is tortured to death. There is clearly no thematic encouragement of rebellion in this version, unsurprisingly as the foreign, putatively usurping Yuan dynasty has ended. More precisely, the events of the play are presumably taking place in the pre-imperial period (to judge from the dates that Chinese writers have given to the historical sources; see Wai-yee Li’s “Introduction” to the play [17]). Nonetheless, they almost certainly serve to foster terror of the punishments for rebellion against the then-ruling Ming emperor, due to his implicit connection with the ruler in the play.

A possible problem here is that the brutal treatment of Tu Angu and the murder/suicide of the lovers will almost certainly lead some audience members to condemn these characters. Moreover, readers familiar with the Analects will recognize that terrorizing the public, as developed in the play, is far from the tiāndào or “way of heaven” envisioned by Confucius as the proper model for monarchs (see, for example, Analects 2.3 [available here; accessed 11 June 2024]). In part to modulate this very un-Confucian theme, the entire revenge is characterized as following the “way of heaven” (54). This technique of spiritual elevation applies directly to Cheng Bo, though indirectly to the ruler in the play and, thereby, to the Ming ruler also. (I refer to a feature of an ending as a technique if it is repeatedly taken up to specify and implement emotive and/or thematic functions, but is not a literary desideratum in and of itself.) We saw this technique previously in the Chikamatsu play, when the narrator asserts the lovers’ eventual Buddhahood. In both cases, this spiritual elevation serves in part to further secure the audience’s sympathy for the main characters—thus, Cheng Bo in the Ming Zhao Orphan and the lovers in The Love Suicides. In keeping with this function, the discourse ending stresses Cheng Bo’s filial obligations to his murdered parents and to his foster father. It then touches on the fate of the latter, before turning to an account of how various minor characters will be treated–how they will be memorialized if they died to save the Zhao orphan, and so on. This is a version of the discourse ending that recounts the (non-story) fates of the various characters.

Another, somewhat different instance of emotive and thematic spiritualization may be found in the discourse ending of Kalidasa’s 4^th-century, Sanskrit drama, The Recognition of Shakúntala. This is a romantic comedy in which the lovers have been separated due to a curse and have remained separated due to a misunderstanding. Specifically, neither King Dushyánta nor Shakúntala knows about the curse, so neither understands why Dushyánta failed to recognize Shakúntala after their initial separation. The discourse ending includes the reunion of the couple—thus, the story ending. As part of this story-resolving conclusion, both lovers learn about the curse, which exonerates Dushyánta for his earlier rejection of Shakúntala, thereby reconciling the two. But this is not only a reunion of the lovers. It is a family reunion that highlights the affection Dushyánta feels for his young son, an affection that foregrounds the attachment component of the love that motivates the action of the play, much as the references to parents did in the discourse ending of Chikamatsu’s play. This is also connected with a general, spiritual elevation of this family, signaled most clearly by the fact that the concluding events take place in a heavenly hermitage, and by the final words of the play. Specifically, the concluding verses link the king—Dushyánta, and perhaps an actual monarch at the time of the play’s performance)–with heavenly beings. Interestingly, the king himself goes on to pray that he will be devoted to his subjects and will ultimately achieve spiritual enlightenment. This spiritualization has the usual thematic and emotive functions, with the addition of making Dushyánta more sympathetic through humility. (Thanks to Lalita Hogan for help with some points in the Sanskrit original.)

Two other points are worth making about this ending. First, the familial reunion brings the couple’s son, Bhárata, on stage and thereby facilitates the treatment of his eventual fate. Indeed, the play also recurs to Shakúntala’s adoptive father, allowing us to be reassured about his understanding of the situation and his continuing affection for Shakúntala. (It would be easy to worry that he would reject her for apparent promiscuity in becoming pregnant without any recognized marital bond.) Finally, the last act of the play is clearly parallel with the opening act and the invocation of Shiva at the end of the act parallels the invocation of Shiva that opened the play. Thus, the discourse ending closely recalls the discourse beginning of the work. This familiar technique of plot circularity often fosters a feeling of aesthetic pleasure through the reader’s recognition of an unanticipated pattern. (On aesthetic pleasure and unanticipated pattern recognition, see the first chapter of Beauty and Sublimity.) It may also intensify or otherwise modulate our emotional response by recalling for us the initial feelings of the lovers. In the case of this particular work, the circularity may be taken to have thematic implications as well, for the play’s treatment of forgetting suggests theories of the operation of memory traces in relation to spiritual practices (see Affective Narratology, 165-181).

The functions (thematic and emotive) and techniques (e.g., formal circularity) we have considered in the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian cases are, I believe, all familiar from European works as well. It is worth briefly mentioning a case from one further region—Nizami’s 12^th-century Persian poem, The Story of Layla and Majnun. The poem has a total of 54 cantos. The story ending is spread over three of the last four. In canto 50, Layla dies. In cantos 51 and 52, Majnun grieves and dies. Additionally, in these two cantos, Nizami provides further indications that the unconsummated love between Layla and Majnun may be read as an allegory for the Sufi devotee’s love of God, which cannot be realized in a full, mystical union while the former lives in the mundane world. The 53^rd canto sees the lovers buried together, their physical proximity suggesting their ultimate union after resurrection and judgment. This would seem to conclude the story proper. The final canto comprises a vision experienced by the old man who served as a go-between for the lovers. The vision is in part an instance of reporting what happens to the main characters after the story resolution. As in Chikamatsu’s play, however, this epilogue is also a spiritual elevation, for Layla and Majnun are transfigured in the divine Garden—itself a circular return, not to the beginning of the poem, but to the beginning of time itself or creation, though now intensified as “eternal” (thus, with no risk of a Fall). The poet goes on to explain that the moral virtues of the lovers, leading them to “right action” and “compassion,” are the outcome of love (176; I am grateful to Yass Alizadeh for her insights into the linguistic resonances of the original Persian). The intertwining of emotional and thematic purposes could hardly be clearer.

I hope Nigel will forgive me for taking up his fascinating analyses and moving them in a different direction. I say “different,” but that is not at all to say “contradictory.” First, there is certainly overlap between my treatment of endings and Nigel’s. More significantly, I hope Nigel will agree that the parts that do not overlap are complementary. Indeed, I hope he will consider a blog post here on his treatment of endings—which, I must stress, inspired my own, both the parts that overlap with his and the parts that do not.

As to future directions, I have sought to distinguish a range of functions and techniques of discourse endings. They may treat story materials by changing their order of presentation or by extending the tale to the post-story fate of the main characters or the non-story fate of ancillary characters. However, when they do so, the function of this added material is almost always one of emotion modulation or thematic development, for these are the usual desiderata of storytelling. There are different techniques an author may employ to achieve these ends. For example, he or she may associate the protagonists with attachment feelings (e.g., parents or children), thereby enhancing our empathy toward those characters. He or she might also seek to link the protagonists with spirituality, in effect disarming criticism of their (often unorthodox) behavior. Such elevation may be extended beyond the fiction to political figures in the author’s or audience’s world—whether powerful figures (as in the Ming Zhao Orphan) or unjustly disempowered figures (as in the Yuan Zhao Orphan). In some cases, the technique may be formal, as with circularity; then, its emotional effects are often a matter of aesthetic pleasure.

Though I have considered only a handful of works, it seems likely that the same broad principles will be found to recur in a range of cases in the written literatures of East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, as well as Europe and the Europhone Americas. No doubt, the list of techniques could be expanded considerably. But they all probably serve the same broad emotive and thematic functions. What seems more potentially significant, however, is the study of pre-colonial (or indigenous) orature—African, Australian, North and South American, and so on. Indeed, orature is generally much underrepresented in the study of universals, so that it becomes difficult to tell if one has isolated an unrestricted literary pattern, or a pattern that appears only after the development of writing. In any case, Nigel Fabb’s recent work on endings—and, I hope, the preceding reflections on that topic—point toward yet another potentially fruitful area of research in literary universals.

[See also Nigel Fabb’s “Blog for July 2024: Endings are Created by Interpretations.”]

Works Cited

Buswell, Robert, et al. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton UP, 2014.

Chikamatsu. Major Plays of Chikamatsu. Trans., Donald Keene. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

Fabb, Nigel. Language and Literary Structure: The Linguistic Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Fabb, Nigel. “Why Endings Are Better Than Beginnings.” Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK. 29 May 2024.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2011.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2013.

Ji Junxiang. The Zhao Orphan [Ming version]. Trans., Pi-twan Huang and Wai-yee Li. In The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama. Ed., C. T. Hsia, Wai-yee Li, and George Kao. New York: Columbia UP, 2014, 17-54.

Ji Junxiang. The Zhao Orphan [Yuan version]. Tran., Wai-yee Li. In The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama. Ed., C. T. Hsia, Wai-yee Li, and George Kao. New York: Columbia UP, 2014, 55-72.

Kalidasa. The Recognition of Shakúntala. Ed. and trans., Somadeva Vasudeva. New York: New York UP, 2006.

Nizami. The Story of Layla and Majnun. Ed. and trans., Rudolf Gelpke. English version in collaboration with E. Mattin and G. Hill. Final chapter trans., Zia Inayat Khan and Omid Safi. New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1997.

Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1993.

Blog for October 2023: Love Stories and Historical Universals

Posted on October 9, 2023October 10, 2023 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Nicolas Baumard (Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique, Paris) and his collaborators designed and followed out a series of rigorous empirical studies treating “The cultural evolution of love in literary history.” The questions addressed in this study are, first, has romantic love varied in its social importance and, second, if so, what explains this fluctuation. A year and a half ago, they published their findings in an illuminating article, which I have just had the great pleasure of reading.

From the preceding summary, this research may appear irrelevant to a website on literary universals, as it does not initially seem to treat either literature or universals. However, the research focuses on the presence and importance of romantic love in literary fiction. This serves as a gauge for estimating the importance of romantic love in the societies where the literary works were written. Moreover, in treating literary romantic love, Baumard et al. in effect consider romantic tragi-comedy, though they do not generally phrase their findings in narratological terms.

As to universals, it might seem that a treatment of a history of changes would be the opposite of a study of universals. But, first, one presumption of the research is that romantic narratives are to be found in a range of genetically distinct traditions. Specifically, the focus of the study is on the fact that the prominence of the romantic genre varies, not only in Europe, but in China, Japan, India, and the Middle East. To vary, it must of course be present, part of the storytelling repertoire in all those traditions. In addition, their explanation for this variation is that romantic love increases in literary prominence as a given society makes advances in economic development. In The Mind and Its Stories (28-29), I drew on the linguistic study of universals to isolate different types of universal. These include historical universals. Historical universals are implicational or typological universals whose outcomes vary in systematic, predictable ways, depending on some features of their historical conditions (such as the prominence of mercantile capitalism). The research program of Baumard and colleagues is an exemplary instance of isolating and explaining an historical universal. That is particularly important as, among humanists, historical universals are hardly even acknowledged as a possible category.

Baumard et al.’s research shows us what could be gained by systematic, interdisciplinary work on literary universals, undertaken collectively. Conversely, it indicates some of what is lost when that cooperative work is absent (as it is, due primarily to the strange prejudices against seeking cross-cultural patterns, prejudices that pervade literary study today). In some cases, I believe Baumard and colleagues would have benefited from this interaction. For example, in characterizing romantic works, Baumard et al. contrast romantic love with sexual desire. In a sense, this is obvious. But it is also somewhat misleading. Sexual desire is one of the emotion systems that is recruited in the development of romantic love (see What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion, 33-37) and is, as such, part of romantic stories. The other component emotion systems are attachment (rightly emphasized by Baumard and colleagues) and what might be called “reward dependency” (a key factor in, for example, the suicidal despair of some separated lovers, a motif stressed by Baumard and colleagues). It is also significant that there is a separate, less frequent genre—the seduction story—which focuses on sexual desire without attachment. More generally, it seems that Baumard et al.’s research program might have benefited from the affective narratological analysis of how emotion systems generate cross-cultural story patterns.

Narratological work would have benefited equally from such interaction. For example, Baumard and his colleagues point to idealization of the beloved and the “long-term commitment” of the lovers. I analyzed these features solely in terms of intensifying the emotional effect of romantic works. When the lovers live “happily ever after,” their happy ending is particularly happy. This is true not only for the lovers, but for any reader who has a parallel interpersonal stance—which is to say, an empathic attitude–toward them. (This parallel stance is usually the result of categorizing the lovers as part of a one’s in-group.) Baumard and colleagues add to this the observation that evolutionary purposes are served by long-term parenting commitments. More remarkably, they find that “a higher importance of love in literary narratives is always associated with more positive attitudes towards children in the society” (514), a connection that would probably never even have occurred to most narratologists.

Areal distinctness is another topic which has not so far benefited from the collaboration of research scientists and humanists studying literary universals. In linguistics, there are two standard criteria for identifying a shared property as evidence of a universal. Specifically, the traditions across which the property recurs must be distinct in origin (genetic distinctness) and not have influenced one another due to interaction (areal distinctness). However, the issue is complicated by the fact that it is so easy for one literary tradition to influence another. I have therefore argued that one should of course seek genuinely areally distinct traditions, but that only works from culturally hegemonic and culturally subordinated traditions should be excluded due to areal contamination. This applies most clearly to modern colonial relations (e.g., postcolonial African novels). There are also some differences in how readily specific literary techniques may be transmitted (see “Areal Distinctness”). Baumard and colleagues take a different, but complementary approach. They adopt a method for empirically estimating the effects of influence across traditions. This provides them with data to argue that, for example, “while Eurasian societies were in contact with each other, cultural diffusion played a minor role in explaining the concomitant rise of love” (507).

The two approaches also complement one another on the issue of just what they count as data. Baumard et al. exclude all work that is not fictional narrative. This seems to be overly restrictive. Following Hayden White and others, we might expect to find considerable value in incorporating work on historical and other types of narrative. In addition, lyric poetry often concerns key moments in stories, such as the separation of lovers (see The Mind and Its Stories), making it potentially relevant as well. At the same time, Baumard et al. usefully broaden the scope of research by noting that patterns may appear in retellings of a story. In connection with this, they find that “The study of literary transmission chains shows that the same story line becomes more romantic when economic development increases” (507).

It seems clear that, in the study of literary universals, we in the humanities have a great deal to gain from the empirical orientation of researchers such as Baumard and colleagues. I believe that they have something to gain from our literary expertise and philosophical reflections and hypotheses as well. I will conclude this short discussion by noting one further way in which greater interaction might serve both groups. It concerns the possible political analysis of cross-cultural genres, including romantic stories, and how such analysis might contribute to understanding both the enduring and variable appearance of specific story genres, such as stories of romantic love.

Literary critics these days are insistently political. Often, I believe, this is a problem, especially when literary critics extend their righteous indignation to politically and ethically neutral topics or even get things backwards. (Cases of the second sort occur when they denounce the study of universals as racist and celebrate difference, despite the fact that racist claims are never based on claims that, say, blacks and whites share the same capacities, needs, etc., but always presuppose precisely difference.) Even so, the concern with politics does sometimes lead humanists to potentially worthwhile observations. Specifically, they may be more sensitive, in any given case, to the possible relevance of socio-economic class, exploitation, dominant ideology, and related topics (drawn largely from Marxist analysis).

Again, Baumard and colleagues link the predominance of romantic love stories with economic growth, and they make a compelling case for seeing the former as developing out of the latter. But that connection does not yet explain the change in narrative frequency. We still need some way of getting from economic growth to the predominance of romantic stories. One possibility is that economic growth leads to a change in readership, which in turn leads to the increase in love stories. But why might that be? Baumard et al. consider two possible readership-based accounts. The first is that a market for love stories is created by an increase in female readers. They do not find evidence for this explanation, though they do not believe the connection to be impossible either. The second readership-based possibility is that the market is transformed by male readers who are “less sophisticated” (517), and therefor opt to read love stories. Baumard and colleagues (rightly) argue that love stories are not in fact less sophisticated than other story genres. Beyond these two possibilities, the most obvious ways of explaining a change in audience would include, for example, the increased availability of stories in the vernacular, a broadening of education in learned languages, or the greater affordability of books. I do not know if any of these factors fit the periods that saw an increase in love stories. But, even if they do fit, they do not in themselves explain the change in proportions of different story genres. We still require some feature of the new readers that turns them toward tales of romance.

Here, we might briefly consider a different sort of possible explanation. (I am not actually supporting this explanation, but articulating a way of thinking that may suggest fruitful lines of inquiry.) The research summarized in The Mind and Its Stories and Affective Narratology indicates that there are three predominant types of story-structure that recur with particular frequency across traditions. These are romantic, heroic, and sacrificial. (I will leave aside the sacrificial genre here, as well as the less commonly occurring genres.) These genres are, of course, defined by story elements (in prototypical configurations, rather than having necessary and sufficient conditions). But they tend to imply certain values as well, some of which could reasonably be seen as part of an ideology supporting one or another socio-economic class or class fraction. I do not mean that they are class-based in a strict, Marxist sense. The ideological implications of all the story genres are more context-sensitive and malleable than that might imply. But the ideological resonances are of the same general sort. One way of considering changes in the frequency and centrality of any story genre, then, might appeal to some combination of two factors—first, changes in the enduring dominance of one or another class (or at least changes in class domination of the production and dissemination of stories) and, second, changes in circumstances that impact the ways in which a dominant class or class fraction exercises that domination.

More exactly, the heroic genre tends to support a strict ruling hierarchy within a society and a sharp division between the in-group society and an enemy out-group (most intensively represented in war). Ethically, it stresses such virtues as physical bravery and loyalty to leaders and comrades. It should be clear this configuration of values greatly benefits the dominant social classes. Perhaps this ideology initially benefits a feudal aristocracy, but the feelings of group pride, depersonalization (seeing oneself primarily as part of a group), etc., are not confined to feudalism; they are readily transferred to a variety of economic and political systems. Despite this bias toward a dominant class, this genre–with its formation of in- and out-groups, its celebration of in-group achievements, and so on–is well-suited to human psychology, including the psychology of those who are not in the elite class.

The romantic genre, in contrast, commonly favors individual choice against social authority, sometimes generally and sometimes by carving out an area of privacy that is exempted from the usual social rules. In keeping with our cognitive tendency to displace category-based generalizations with individuating judgments, it largely repudiates identity categories, favoring individual, affiliative bonds instead. A traditional Marxist interpretation would link these points with a bourgeois ideology, serving the interests of a mercantile or, later, industrial capitalist class. However, I am inclined to see the genre differently. I believe the heroic plot serves “ruling class” interests, whether feudal or capitalist, but romantic narratives do not typically embody any particular class ideology. Rather than requiring some sort of commitment to a market system for marriage, sympathizing with a person’s individual preference in attachment relations seems likely to arise spontaneously. When faced with individual attachment bonds, it is, rather, indifference or antipathy that has to be created, if the work is to have some sort of ideological bias.

More exactly, both heroic narratives and romantic narratives appeal to a wide range of people, for they fit our psychology (as Baumard and colleagues put it [515]). However, they do not do so equally. Our engagement with a literary work seems likely to vary with the intensity of our emotional response to the goals involved. Moreover, it seems likely that the majority of people would have a strong, spontaneous emotional commitment to union with an attachment figure. In contrast, I would imagine that, among those without relevant experiences, emotional engagement with battle would not be as strong. Finally, one’s degree of engagement with a work seems likely to vary with one’s sense that the implied norms of the work serve or contradict one’s self-interest; this would almost certainly be more likely to occur with heroic than with romantic stories. Given these factors, one would expect romantic storytelling to increase with almost any expansion of readership. In that way, it is a sort of default, a result that may need less further interpretation than we initially expected.

Again, I am not necessarily committed to the as an explanation of Baumard et al.’s findings. Though I certainly do believe that there is some truth to this argument, I sketch it here to suggest some possible paths toward such an explanation, and as a further illustration of how a more broadly integrated research program in literary universals may benefit all those involved, in this case by first of all challenging standard ways of thinking about the topic. In any event, the great value of Baumard et al.’s research findings and explanation of those findings is clear. My hope is that humanists will recognize this value, and that Baumard and colleagues will continue with their illuminating program of research.

WORKS CITED

Baumard, Nicolas, Elise Huillery, Alexandre Hyafil, and Lou Safra. “The cultural evolution of love in literary history.” Nature Human Behaviour 6 (April 2022): 506-522.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

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

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Blog for September 2024: On the Visibility of Universals

Posted on September 24, 2024September 24, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

A few months ago, I served as one referee for Stephen Levinson’s excellent new book, The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. In this book and in earlier works, Levinson has been very critical of other linguists’—especially Noam Chomsky’s—claims about universals of language structure. In consequence, he is sometimes viewed as an anti-universalist, not entirely without reason (see, for example, chapter two of Irish). However, Levinson acknowledges the existence of cross-language patterns in language structure, at least of a statistical or implicational variety. (On statistical, implicational, and absolute universals, see “What Are Literary Universals?”) Admittedly, Levinson does not find such patterns particularly engaging or illuminating, but that seems to me largely a matter of personal taste, not anything entailed by his arguments. What is more important, he finds other universals of language to be quite significant, as well as consequential for our understanding of the origins of language and other important topics. Specifically, Levinson explores the idea that robust universals may be found in language usage or pragmatics. In examining these universals, he develops the relevant implications of such pragmatic principles as Gricean cooperation, along with more general affective and cognitive processes, such as empathy and Theory of Mind. (In his “cooperative principle,” Paul Grice famously articulated general rules that govern our production and interpretation of speech, but that go beyond strict logic. For example, suppose you say, “I haven’t seen Jones in a while,” and then I say, “The flu has been particularly virulent this year.” You will take me to be suggesting that Jones had the flu, not making some irrelevant comment.) Specifically, Levinson recruits research on cooperation, etc., to formulate explanations of a range of absolute universals, such as conversational turn-taking. Moreover, his explanations do not address these universals at a merely general level. Rather, he enters into details, treating features of the processes in question, such as the precise timing of turn-taking.

Not long after I had read Levinson’s manuscript, I received an email from my friend, Bradley Irish. Brad was working on a book manuscript treating universalism and its status in the humanities and social sciences. Among other things, he told me that a number of linguists he had read or spoken with reported that most linguists no longer supported the idea of language universals. They attributed the sea-change in the discipline to an article by Evans and Levinson that appeared in the prestigious journal, Brain and Behavioral Sciences, in 2009. Brad wanted to get my opinion. I explained that I was not in a position to judge what most linguists currently believe, though when I spoke with colleagues in linguistics at the University of Connecticut, they vigorously disagreed with this characterization of their profession today.

In any event, I decided that I should read the article. In the usual format of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, there was a target article (by Evans and Levinson, in this case), followed by a number of rejoinders from prominent researchers in the field, followed by a response to the rejoinders. The article and rejoinders clearly raise issues relevant to the Literary Universals Project, specifically issues surrounding the identification of universals.

The first thing to say about the article is that, whatever one thinks of the specific arguments, it really should not be characterized as “anti-universalist,” though it is easy to see how readers might come away with that impression. In fact, Evans and Levinson, along with most of the commentators on their article, accept that view that there are recurring structures and processes across languages. As I have already suggested, Evans and Levinson accept universals primarily in the broad sense in which Joseph Greenberg used the term and which is also the sense in which it is used on this website. (On the other hand, Evans and Levinson clearly do not care for Greenberg’s terminology and would evidently prefer restricting the term, “universal,” to absolute universals.) For example, in the abstract for their article, they write that “there are significant recurrent patterns in organization” across languages (429). Thus, they are not disputing universality as such. Rather, they are disputing a particular set of claims about language universals—specifically, the claims that an innate Universal Grammar underlies all natural, human languages, yielding an extensive uniformity of principles across languages, principles that are almost entirely modular in the sense that they refer to language features without appeal to contextual or pragmatic functions, such as communication. In contrast, Evans and Levinson maintain that the “recurrent patterns” are tendential, rather than absolute, and that they are “better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition” (429). In other words, the object of their critical argument is not so much universalism as a certain sort of innatism, one that leads to extensive claims about absolute universals and restricts the possible explanations for those universals to innate, specifically linguistic structures and processes.

I am not at all certain that Evans and Levinson’s account is fully accurate with regard to Chomsky’s views on these topics, at the time or subsequently. (Chomsky is the main target of their criticisms.) However, I largely agree with their positive claims, as well as their methodological concerns. As to the latter, in On Interpretation (1996), I maintained that Chomsky’s innatism is not as parsimonious as possible and that at least some of the grammatical facts he seeks to explain by complex rules are themselves well-explained by locating language in its social, interactive context. Moreover, I maintained that the patterns Chomsky isolates are often not strict rules, but looser tendencies and preferences. In addition, I followed Hilary Putnam and others in arguing that language acquisition does not require a specialized, innate apparatus, but can draw on “generalized learning strategies” (see Putnam “The ‘Innateness Hypothesis’” and “What is Innate”). Specifically, my contention was that, in a variety of cases, both structure and acquisition could be understood by reference to communicative intent along with ordinary principles of rational inference.

I should stress that none of this is intended to be in any way dismissive of Chomsky’s work. In fact, I consider that work to be exemplary of scientific theorizing at its very best. Indeed, I find Chomsky’s analyses deeply insightful and clarifying, even when I end up disagreeing with them. The crucial point here is just that my claims are closely related to those of Evans and Levinson, but remain compatible with a robust universalism. Part of this relatedness includes the greater attention to statistical, domain-general, and communicative universals than would be found in Chomsky-type—or generativist–formalisms. This derives from the fact that the cross-language patterns claimed by different theories are themselves (somewhat) different. Most obviously, the nature of innately-specified universals is different from the nature of universals that are not innately specified. As I have repeatedly tried to stress in discussing universals with skeptics, “universal” does not mean or imply “innate as such”; for example, universals may arise from convergent development derived from responses to recurring social or physical problems. This is a point that should be obvious, but apparently is not—hence the need to repeat it.

On the other hand, the generativists make many extremely valuable observations and draw surprising, insightful inferences, which non-generativists need to take account of. This is clear in the generativist responses to Evans and Levinson’s article. These responses repeatedly criticize Evans and Levinson for taking superficial differences at face value, thereby failing to recognize sometimes non-obvious patterns that subsume the apparent differences. Whatever one thinks of any specific cases treated by generativists, the general point should be underscored, not only for linguistic universals, but for literary universals also. Indeed, the apparent self-evidence of cultural difference, as we might call it, is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to the development of a scientific treatment of universals. An initial, spontaneous sense of alienation in the face of unfamiliar artifacts or practices commonly underwrites the dismissal of the universalist project right from the start, thereby barring even the most basic attempts at identifying possible, cross-cultural patterns.

It may be difficult for readers to imagine a relevant case where the prima facie foreignness of a practice conceals an underlying commonality, and I doubt that the examples from linguistics would prove very illuminating for students of literature. I will therefore try to clarify this issue with a brief example (selected and summarized from work in progress). I have maintained that one cross-culturally recurring story genre is defined by the protagonist’s goal of seeking some sort of personal retribution, usually outside the standard, social procedures for the punishment of crime (see Affective Narratology, 120-135). Such revenge narratives form a “minor” or less frequent genre, but they appear significantly in a range of traditions. I obviously cannot overview a variety of cases from different literary traditions here. However, a valuable way of approaching the issue of cross-cultural genres is by treating selected, prominent cases, what I refer to as paradigms. In the Western tradition, a work such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is highly paradigmatic; indeed, it has received almost unparalleled attention and has been the object of almost unequalled praise. Though not nearly as revered as Hamlet, Ji Junxiang’s Great Revenge of the Zhao Orphan has a notable position in Chinese literary history, making it an appropriate work for comparison. For example, Shih-pe Wang notes that “Wang Guowei (1877-1927), the founding figure of the study of Chinese drama, proposed that the play should be considered one of the great tragedies of world literature” (127). In addition, it is one of the “most frequently performed Chinese plays on the world’s stages” and has appeared in numerous versions (127; see also Li 17-19). For our purposes, the important point here is that these two paradigmatic works are both instances of the revenge genre. Put crudely, even if there were few other revenge stories in either tradition, it would still be reasonable to see both traditions as significantly including this genre. (There is nothing comparable in language as such, and thus in the study of linguistic universals.) Other paradigmatic works treating revenge would include, in Japan, Chikamatsu’s Drum of the Waves of Horikawa and Zeami’s Atsumori; and, in Greece, Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, among others.

Revenge narratives are built out of a protagonist’s suffering some harm, in recompense for which he or she seeks to subject his or her (presumptively guilty) antagonist to equal or greater harm. The harm at issue often involves loss of status; it almost invariably involves attachment loss, either the death of a loved one or betrayal by a trusted companion (friend, spouse, or family member). Status harm, attachment loss, and personal betrayal are likely to elicit empathic anger on the part of the reader, often leading him or her to hope that the hero succeeds in snuffing out the unworthy life of the treacherous enemy. But, thematically, revenge narratives are frequently, perhaps usually, ambivalent. For one thing, the covert nature of the hero’s revenge leads to “collateral damage,” most obviously the accidental deaths of innocents. When the hero does manage to do in the right person, this may result in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. As Martha Nussbaum stresses about revenge in real life, in no case does it reverse the original harm (e.g., resurrecting the dead beloved); even at its best, it succeeds only in adding new injury (not even simple insult, but palpable suffering) to prior injury. These problems are brought out particularly by the contrast between revenge and the closely related criminal investigation genre, for it is precisely the absence of an (unbiased) criminal investigation that makes the faults of revenge so salient. The point is particularly clear in Aeschylus.

Readers familiar with Ji’s play (as well as Hamlet) will already have recognized that these plays share some of the prototypical characteristics just outlined. Fundamentally, both the orphan and Hamlet lose their father to a politically usurping enemy and both set out to slay that enemy. However, there are apparently some striking differences on other features I see as prototypical. Specifically, in keeping with the assumption that Chinese culture looks more favorably on revenge than does Western culture, one might interpret the Chinese play as having little ambivalence. Once he learns of the misdeeds of his enemy, the orphan is single-minded in his rage against that enemy. There is none of the waffling and delay that we find in Hamlet. Moreover, the revenge of the orphan does not lead to the deaths of any innocents, while Hamlet’s plot puts Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern—and, indirectly, Cordelia—into their graves prematurely. Indeed, we even find Hamlet setting up a sort of sting operation designed to provide him with concrete evidence of his uncle’s guilt—a sequence that immediately recalls the sorts of tactics associated with criminal investigations. Finally, Hamlet himself ends up dead, unlike the orphan. Given all this, it would be easy to read the two plays as very different, and as testifying to a stark, cultural difference between their societies.

But these superficial differences readily mislead us into missing some striking similarities in the two works. One problem is the cultural clichés that surround the plays. Despite a famous passage in the The Classic of Rites that urges revenge (1.70), there is ample evidence that opposition to revenge is equally culturally supported in Chinese tradition (see Cheng). There is also empirical evidence that Chinese people have ambivalent feelings about revenge (see the study reported in Huang). Moreover, while Hamlet is tasked with killing his uncle, the orphan must kill the man who is, in effect, his adoptive father. Ambivalence may not be explicit in the character who takes revenge (i.e., the orphan). However, the emotional complexity is clear in the larger thematic and affective development of the play. Conversely, Hamlet is arguably rather less ambivalent than we are inclined to assume. For example, he does not appear to have any affection for his uncle. Moreover, the well-known quandary of critics has been, “Why does Hamlet delay?” (see, for example, https://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamlet/hamletfivereasons.html), which at least appears to suggest that the critics are in favor of the revenge and would like to see the prince get on with it.

The preceding points may, then, lead us to ask what it is that enables both plays to convey complex attitudes toward revenge. As to The Zhao Orphan, I have argued that the play is a sort of allegory appealing to Southern Sòng Dynasty loyalists to rise up against the alien, Yuán Dynasty rulers, taking revenge for the usurpation of the earlier, indigenous dynasty. If this interpretation is valid, then we can make sense of details of the play, such as the whole idea of making the orphan in effect into the adopted child of his enemy (see Hogan “Paradoxes”).

How, then, is this related to Hamlet? The relation is not readily ascertained by fixing on the superficial properties of the plays. It requires a recognition that both Hamlet and the Zhao orphan cannot in fact choose the impartial option of criminal investigation. The objectivity and fairness of criminal investigation are upheld by the integrity of the social institutions that engage in such investigation. The problem in these plays is that—literally in Hamlet, allegorically in The Zhao Orphan–the criminals themselves constitute the government. This results in a situation where the only possible outcome of criminal investigation is itself a doubling of the crime, as Hamlet or the orphan would inevitably be made a victim once again. (In addition, both plays do this by combining the revenge structure with the usurpation sequence of the heroic prototype, which is another striking commonality.)

As I hope this illustrates, the plays are not well characterized by Evans and Levinson’s celebratory affirmation of vast linguistic (here, by extension, literary) diversity. These plays are, instead, much better characterized by Mark Baker’s comment that, “each new language [literary work] I have studied presents both fascinating new examples of diversity and important new evidence that human languages [or literary genres] are all variations on the same theme[s].” (448).

I might summarize (and slightly extend) the preceding reflections as follows: There is a striking contrast today between two different approaches to linguistics, with implications for the study of literary universals. One group (which includes generativists) is concerned principally with the algorithmic generation of descriptions and explanations of language structure, formulated in terms of well-defined, fully explicit systems, often derived from mathematical models. The other is, roughly, humanistic in orientation and tends to stress the experiential plausibility of descriptions and explanations, drawing on less abstract models from biology, and focused on language function. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I tend to favor the explanations of the humanistic group—the emphasis on communication, the appeal to a range of contributory causal factors, and so on. However, I often see the rigorous descriptions undertaken by the mathematical group as more insightful and illuminating—as with, for example, their work to formulate the structure of languages in terms of principles and parameters. One aspect of this difference is that the humanists, it may be argued, considerably underestimate the extent of universals, taking superficial differences at face value; at the same time, the mathematical group tends to rely too heavily on innatism in explaining the universals. Students of literary universals have things to learn from both groups. However, the biases of most literary researchers today are clearly parallel with those of the humanistic group. For this reason, despite the fact that I tend to agree with the explanations offered by the humanistic group, I must say that students of literature have more to learn from the mathematical group. This includes learning to identify underlying commonalities across traditions—thus literary universals–especially those that are concealed by superficial differences.

Works Cited

Baker, Mark. “Language Universals: Abstract But Not Mythological.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 448-449.

Cheng, Anne. “Filial Piety with a Vengeance: The Tension Between Rites and Law in the Han.” Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History, edited by Alan Chan and Sor-hoon Tan, RoutledgeCurzon 2004, pp. 29-43.

Classic of Rites, The. (禮記 [Lǐjì]). Trans. James Legge. Available at https://ctext.org/liji (accessed 12 April 2020).

Evans, Nicholas and Stephen Levinson. “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 429-448.

Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2011.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. On Interpretation: Meaning and Inference in Law, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Paradoxes of Literary Emotion: Simulation and The Zhào Orphan.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion. Ed. Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan. New York: Routledge, 2022, 134-43.

Huang, Jialing. “Loving Shuang Ju: Chinese Audiences’ Entertainment Experience of Retribution Narratives.”Psychology of Popular Media 13.3 (2023): 447-456.

Irish, Bradley. The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

Levinson, Stephen. The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming.

Li, Wai-yee. “Introduction.’ In The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama. Ed. C. T. Hiah, Wai-yee Li, and George Kao. New York: Columbia UP, 2014.

Nussbaum, Martha. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016.

Putnam, Hilary. “The Innateness Hypothesis’ and Explanatory Models in Linguistics.” In Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975

Putnam, Hilary. “What is Innate and Why: Comments on the Debate.” In Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Ed. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980, 397-409.

Wang, Shih-pe. The Orphan of Zhao: The Meaning of Loyalty and Filiality. In How to Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology. New York: Columbia UP, 2022, 127-150.

Blog for November 2024: Religious Literature

Posted on November 19, 2024November 19, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Since we revived the Literary Universals Project in 2016, I’ve been expecting, and hoping, to receive an article on literature and religion. This is not only because the topic is intrinsically interesting, but also because the data are complicated in a way that I believe illustrates some of the challenges that face the study of literary universals. I am very far from an expert in the field. However, cognizant of the relative informality allowed by a blog post, I finally decided that I should just go ahead and treat some of the material that I am familiar with, in the hope that this will inspire other writers, with greater depth and breadth of knowledge, to extend or correct my comments. To give a rough idea of what should be included here, I count something as literary if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients in part for the experience of emotions, whether those be suspense, wonder at beauty, empathic love, or something else. I count something as religious if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients because they believe that it communicates truths—including moral truths–that transcend mundane, human life.

To Start: A Small Point About Starting Points

Writers who argue that there are literary universals are often accused of Eurocentrism. That is probably often the case, though not necessarily in the morally objectionable sense of “Eurocentrism.” For example, writers raised and educated in Western societies often start out making use of the emotion concepts of their native language. I don’t see this as a problem, as long as emotion concepts from other languages are also included in the research program eventually and as long as researchers are sensitive to contravening evidence regarding their own-language concepts. My assumption would be that, if an emotion concept names an emotion that people in one culture experience, then it is probably an emotion that some people in other cultures do—or at least could–also experience. Conversely, if the concept is problematic when a researcher seeks to apply it to other societies, that probably suggests a problem with its application to his or her own society as well. For example, a common view of romantic love in the U.S. appears to be that it is “true love” only if it is eternal. In some other societies, researchers might have difficulty finding cases of true love, conceived in this way, as common conceptions of romantic love view it as ephemeral and those conceptions are likely to affect the ways in which people report their emotions. But it would actually be difficult to find “true love” in the U.S. also. Attachment or companionate love can be enduring, and seems to occur everywhere in an enduring form (e.g., parents do not stop loving their children after a certain interval). But “romantic love lasts between twelve and eighteen months” (Fisher 100) “True love” is as non-existent in the U.S. as elsewhere. We learn this when we begin to research “true love,” rather than assuming, for culturalist reasons, that we have it and other people don’t. In this way, having multiple, (temporarily) culture-“centric” starting points should only enrich our study of universals, rather than limiting it.

In any event, whatever my unself-conscious presuppositions may be, and however European they may be, this issue does not usually arise with my self-conscious adoption of models. Specifically, my explicit model for a given form of cross-cultural literary study is more likely to be Indian than European. This is in part a result of personal interest, and in part a matter of having learned about Indian literature through explicit study, rather than implicit assimilation. What is most important, however, is that in many respects, Indian literature and Indian religion—or, perhaps, philosophy of literature and philosophy of religion—seem often more finely differentiated and more comprehensive than the parallel cultural forms in other traditions.

By “finely differentiated,” I mean having clear, systematic definitions for key concepts. By “comprehensive,” I mean having a logically complete set of key concepts. For example, in religious philosophy, Indic traditions of ontology may be organized by reference to a few basic principles, which are subjected to systematic variation, yielding a set of logical alternatives. If we begin with the distinction between spirit and matter (puruṣa and prakṛti in Sanskrit), and that between monism and dualism, the logical possibilities are as follows: Dualism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist; in the Indian tradition, this is the Sāṃkhya school (see Grimes 282-283). Monism: only puruṣa exists; this is Advaita Vedānta (see Grimes 15). Monism: only praṛkti exists; this is Cārvāka (see Grimes 102). Monism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist, but they are not distinct from one another (e.g., to use current philosophical terminology, they are two aspects of the same [single] reality); this is “Absolute Monism” (see Pandit 45; see also Dmitrieva). The only remaining possibility is that neither exists. I am not sure that I know what such a claim means. But it is very reminiscent of the Buddhist idea that everything is śūnyatā or the void (see Grimes 305). In effect, this covers all the schools of early Indic metaphysics, and indeed all possible schools defined by these premises. That breadth is what makes Indian metaphysics perhaps uniquely “comprehensive,” as I just put it. The explicit, well-specified definitions of each school are what make it “finely differentiated.”

Comprehensiveness and fine differentiation as found in Indian traditions here have two consequences that are worth drawing out. First, all societies that have some practice of the relevant kind (here, they all have an ontology, or several—disputed–ontologies). As such, they must take up at least one of the possibilities set out in the early Indian scheme. Second, the existence of all the logical possibilities in India entails that there is not some general principle of cultural uniformity that prevents different people in a given society from believing distinct metaphysics or any one person from changing his or her mind. (On common assumptions about cultural uniformity, and some reasons why they are misguided–see Moody-Adams).

Actually, there is one significant aspect of ontology that is not explicitly separated out in Indian metaphysics, at least not early on. That is just where one should locate the mind. In Sāṃkhya, the mind is prakṛti. In the West, it has more usually fallen under the category of puruṣa. This is the sort of difference that can be very productive intellectually for both groups when they interact with one another and are thereby faced with contradictions between their assumptions and those common in the other society. Of course, our topic here is religious literature, not ontology, but the same basic principles apply.

From the Vedas to the Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇas

The most ancient, sacred texts of Hinduism are the Vedas. The first part of the Vedas, called “Saṃhitā,” meaning “collection” (Feuerstein 254), includes a range of hymns or poems. Within the Indian tradition, these are exemplary cases of religious literature. As such they have a number of characteristics that suggest possible candidates for universals of religious literature. Here are some:

A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural).
These scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals.
Such works frequently include allusions to myths, legends, and/or historical events.
These canonical literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which some verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals.
The collection of such works includes praise of deities and petition for benefits from them (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall; see 5.83, pp. 172-174 of O’Flaherty).

Of these, petitionary prayer and hymns of praise are the functionally-defined categories of religious verse or, more broadly, religious literature that are most obviously candidates for universality. They are both pervasive in Christianity. Thus, we find both in such standardized prayers as the “Our Father.” Poems of praise are to be found throughout the psalms, which are Jewish in origin, but have become part of Christian religious literature as well. These functions are clearly not confined to the verses that are themselves part of the religion’s textual canon (parallel to the Vedic hymns). They appear also in works written by later authors in a literary context that is not specifically religious. For example, John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is a (highly innovative) petitionary verse. As to presence in ritual, even a cursory look at the Catholic mass shows the presence of both types of literary speech (i.e., celebratory and petitionary). There has certainly been interpretive and scholarly commentary on the parts of the bible that we are likely to count as literature, though such attention is hardly confined to the poetic parts of that book.

Beyond Hinduism and Christianity, Gerstenberger discusses the presence of both forms of poetry in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hebrew verse. Moreover, he connects these functions with religious ritual (see 86-87). In addition, he isolates further characteristics of some religious literature, such as “confession of guilt” (83). This is of course an important feature of Christian tradition, and appears as part of the sacrificial story structure (see “Story”), which I will leave aside, having discussed story genres at length elsewhere (see chapter six of The Mind and Its Stories and chapter three of Affective Narratology). Gerstenberger goes on to refer to ritually-embedded petitionary prayer in the Americas as well, citing Navajo practice (85).

In Orthodox Islam, the Qur’ān is seen not only as the divinely revealed truth, but as the ne plus ultra of aesthetic excellence–thus, in effect, the greatest poetry (though believers would not phrase it this way). For example, Allen notes that “miraculous qualities” were “attributed to its style” (52). Despite this, for historical reasons, one of its surahs (the twenty-sixth) treats poets as deceptive and dangerous enemies of Islam. This makes the nature and use of poetry in Islam particularly complex. At the same time, however, I believe the aestheric status of the Qur’ān gives us license to count virtually any part of it as literature, as marked by the aesthetic qualities of verbal art. This, in turn, suggests a small but significant revision of the first candidate universal, which should now read as follows:

A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural). Sacred texts may also incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse.

This makes sense in part because there is no clear reason why, as a general rule, religions would canonize a particular body of verse. The revised version indicates that a spiritually elevated text would be associated with various sorts of excellence, including aesthetic excellence, and that there are different ways of accomplishing this—through a focally aestheticized part or through a more diffusely aestheticized whole. This also suggests a revision of our second possible universal, which might now read as follows:

Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.

Here, too, the most obvious reason for the connection is that ritual—like canonical texts—is pre-eminent for its spiritual and moral excellence. As the most excellent of all excellences (from the religious point of view), one might reasonably view it as subsuming other excellences, including those that are aesthetic.

Continuing for the moment with Islam, it is unsurprising that praise of Allāh is pervasive in the Qur’ān. Petitionary appeals seem to be infrequent, perhaps due to the philosophical problems with petitionary prayer in monotheisms (see, for example, Davison). Even so, requests aimed at God are not absent. The Qur’ān begins “Praise be to Allāh, the Lord of the worlds” (Ali 1.1). It continues, “Thee do we beseech for help/Guide us on the right path” (Ali 1.4-5). Given that the Qur’ān, even more than the Vedic hymns, constitutes the centerpiece of its religion, it is unsurprising that it has been subjected to widespread analysis. This prominently includes the presentation of background, completing stories that are presented in only fragmentary, elliptical, allusive fashion, as with the Vedic hymns. It is also unsurprising that the Qur’ān figures in Islamic ritual—most obviously in the profession of faith and in the daily prayers required of Muslims (though, again, it is not so much the specific text as the broader aestheticization that seems crucial here).

Of the major written traditions, I have not yet mentioned those in China. China is an unusual case as the dominant belief systems in the society have downplayed ideas of divinity, relying principally on the relatively abstract and impersonal ideas, such as Tiān or Heaven. In some ways, Heaven has the same functions as the concept of God in the monotheistic religions. For example, the Tiāndào or Way of Heaven is the morally right path. That morally right path underwrites the sorts of social hierarchy that are often underwritten by “divine command” elsewhere, as when the Tiāndào is invoked to support filial piety (xiào), just as divine command is invoked to support “Honor[ing] thy father and thy mother” in the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments.

More precisely, the dominant religious orientations in China have been, first, Rú Jiā (“Confucianism”), associated with the sage, Kǒngzǐ (“Confucius”), followed by Dàoism, associated with the sage, Lǎozǐ. These are later joined by Buddhism. The foundational text of Dàoism is the Dàodéjīng, a highly poetic work, which certainly satisfies our aesthetic hypothesis (#1). It has also generated a sizable set of explications, along the lines suggested by other traditions. (For example, influential commentaries by Heshang Gong [2^nd Century C.E.] and Cheng Xuanying [7^th Century C.E.] are readily available in English.)

As to petitionary prayer, the different religious schools are not so mutually exclusive as the Middle Eastern monotheisms. In consequence, “According to individual needs and circumstances, lay persons may . . . address prayers and petitions indifferently to Dàoist, Buddhist, or popular deities” (Pregadio). On the other hand, neither petitionary prayer nor praise of a deity appears to be a common use of Dàoist or Confucian literature. Indeed, it does not appear to be a common use of religious literature in much of Buddhism either. This relative paucity of both genres seems likely to be a function of the degree to which the religions teach that important goals can—indeed, must–be achieved by the efforts of individual aspirants alone, as opposed to those that assert the centrality of something along the lines of divine grace. The Chinese religious philosophies tend to stress individual effort. Something like divine grace does become more prominent with Mahāyāna Buddhism, where the need for the beneficence of a bodhisattva is evident. This is particularly salient in Pure Land Buddhism, which is important for us as it guides a number of Chinese and Japanese literary works that are religious in their themes, though they are not themselves scriptural. A striking example is Zeami’s Atsumori in which the main character calls on the Amida Buddha to bring him and his enemy into the Pure Land where they may overcome their antipathy and reach enlightenment together. Even so, Mahāyāna Buddhism does generally maintain a commitment to personal effort as a key factor in achieving enlightenment. Perhaps in consequence, it seems fairly common for Buddhist literary works to suggest the benefits of Buddhist equanimity—rather than, say, appealing to a bodhisattva for spiritual aid. For example, a Buddhist poet, such as Wáng Wéi (8^th-Century China), may seek to convey the emotional results of a Buddhist sensibility through the depiction of the peacefulness of the speaker’s relation to nature. Other prominent examples of this sort may be found in the poetry of Bashō (17^th-Century Japan).

Of the East Asian religions, perhaps the most interesting, for our purposes, is Rú Jiā, due to the unusual way in which it conforms to these cross-cultural patterns. First, it does develop a central canon of religious poetry. Indeed, the Classic of Poetry (Shījīng) is so important to Rú Jiā that Confucian scholars were expected to memorize the 305 poems it contains. What is surprising here is that so many of the poems evidently deal with secular matters, such as love affairs. These are recruited to religious purposes through the extensive commentaries that turn evidently irreligious or at least non-religious poems into coded treatments of religious topics, principally morals. Thus, the Classic of Poetry includes the features we have been considering. However, it shapes this collection of poetry into a religious canon, not only—perhaps not even primarily–through the straightforward, intuitive meanings of the poems, but through self-consciously counter-intuitive reinterpretations of these poems.

As to the genres of the poetry, praise appears often enough. However, it is not praise of Heaven, but praise of morally exemplary individuals. This is what one would expect from a tradition that depersonalizes the usual, anthropomorphic divine beings. Tiān is, after all, a somewhat odd target for eulogizing. On the other hand, the narratives of exemplary individuals constitute another cross-cultural pattern in religious literature. We might then formulate a sixth candidate universal as follows:

Stories of morally exemplary figures, often life stories, are frequently part of the set of sacred writings or at least have a sort of semi-canonical status for the religion. (In referring to “semi-canonical” works, I have in mind the model of śruti and smṛti in Hinduism; the former comprises eternal, revealed works, while the latter includes the most highly regarded, but still corrigible texts that originated at a particular time and place as the product of a human author.)

When possible, the morally exemplary subjects of such biographies are both divine and human or, if only human, are uniquely associated with the divine world. Thus, another Hindu scripture—more popular and more widely revered than the Vedas—is the Rāmāyaṇa, the exemplary life of the incarnation of the god, Viṣṇu, as Rāma. The point is no less obvious in the case of Christianity, where each gospel is a life of the morally exemplary divine incarnation, Jesus. The attention to the culminating prophet, Muḥammad, in Islam is similar. While not divine, Muḥammad is as close as a human comes to that status. For believers, his life represents the Sunnah or correct path; it stands as “the authoritative example of the way a Muslim should live” (Waines 288). This path (of Muḥammad’s life) appears somewhat elliptically in the canonical Ḥadîth and more fully in ibn Isḥâq’s (8^th-Century C.E.) Life of God’s Messenger, a work of nearly scriptural status. The life of the Buddha is exemplary also, without there being any particularly canonized or near canonized version, as far as I am aware—though there are works esteemed as part of the relevant literary canons, such as Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit drama, The Life of the Buddha. We also find exemplar-defining works recounting the lives of the Christian saints and lives of the Jain Elders (e.g., by Hemacandra).

It seems to be the case that the exemplary biographies must frequently resolve moral inconsistencies, conflicts between the way people act—or even the way gods are imagined to act—and the moral idealization demanded by the genre. As Barrett points out, we imagine gods in much the same way we imagine people, though we may deny this when asked (see chapter eight of Barrett). Barrett does not extend this to our moral imagination, but the stories themselves would seem to suggest that such an extension is warranted. Consider the Fall of humankind. Referring to Paradise Lost, the esteemed literary critic, William Empson, observed that God “kills Adam and Eve and all their descendants for eating an apple,” which is the sort of behavior we would expect from “a merciless tyrant” (Leonard xxv, summarizing Empson), not the morally ideal agent. Of course, Milton’s poem is non-canonical (i.e., not part of scripture). But parallel points apply to many acts in canonical scriptures as well. Religious authorities must in some way deal with this problem. Sometimes, the canonical version just eliminates the offensive act (though we can know this only if an original including the act has been preserved). In narratological terms, this would involve rectifying the ethics of the work at the level of the story. When present in the story, the problematic act may be backgrounded, perhaps recounted diffusely, so that it requires effortful, self-conscious inference. In this way, a sort of ethical resolution is produced through discourse, the way the story is told. The Confucian approach accomplishes its purposes a bit differently, altering the standard interpretation rather than the story or the discourse (for examples, see Cai; actually all traditions adopt a number of strategies, but in varying proportions). Hindu traditions offer yet another another form of this ethical rectification by in effect placing an interpretation of the act in the story (through a character) or by way of discourse (through a narrator). For example, this occurs with some of Rāma’s more morally objectionable acts, such as abandoning his wife. In the context of the Rāmāyaṇa itself, it is clear that the mistreatment of Sītā has its source in patriarchal structure. In consequence, the ethical contradictions that concern this mistreatment are not simply character flaws in Rāma, but are a reflection of the patriarchal structure and associated sexism and misogyny of the society. In this way, the ethical contradictions in any religious literature may derive from the politics of the society, rather than the psychology of the hero or heroine.

Leaving aside Gerstenberger’s reference to Navajo religion, the preceding comments have been confined to major world religions. Nonetheless, the cases we have considered do suggest the plausibility of a claim that the following tendencies are at least statistical universals of religious literature.

A religion will frequently include a body of literary works (often, poems) as central, canonical—thus scriptural–texts (oral or written). Sacred texts also tend to incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse. (These scriptural works of verbal art should be distinguished from religious works of verbal art that have no scriptural status.)
Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.
Religious literary works frequently allude to myths, legends, or historical events, in effect presupposing the reader’s or listener’s familiarity with those works.
Canonical, literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals. In other words, the scriptural works of verbal art come to be embedded in traditions of commentary. Moreover, the commentaries may be incompatible with one another and with the most obvious, literal interpretation of the texts.
Scriptural, literary works—and, to a great extent, non-canonized religious literary works also—often praise deities and petition them for benefits (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall). While the praise is usually explicit, the petitionary purpose may be expressed indirectly, unless it is aimed at specifically spiritual or moral benefit (thus, some version of grace).
Canonical religious story literature commonly recounts a religion’s myths.
One particularly important genre of scriptural or near-scriptural story literature recounts the life of some moral exemplar.
The fashioning of morally exemplary lives often involves reconciling human fallibility with the idealization that is required by the genre. In addition, it is likely to require the reconciliation of an unethical, ideological bias with moral or religious principles that contradict it (see, for example, the arguments used in the Bhagavad Gita in support of war). Such reconciliation may be achieved by changing (bowdlerizing) the relevant texts, changing the interpretation of those texts, or rationalizing the moral failings of the exemplar.

I imagine that some of these points (e.g., the importance of praise and petition) carry over to a range of orally transmitted religions, while others (e.g., the expanding corpus of commentaries) might be confined to highly literate societies. But I will have to leave those issues for another time (and probably another author).

Bhakti

It is important to turn now to a form of religious feeling that has been highly productive and is one source of much literature that has been both popular for spiritual reasons and esteemed for its aesthetic accomplishments. In an Indian context, this is referred to as literature of “bhakti,” which is usually translated as “devotion.” Bhakti is not the emotion of the poet who petitions Indra, an anthropomorphic deity who rules over the anthropomorphic Hindu pantheon and who might be prevailed upon to produce rain. Rather, it is a feeling of intense longing, a feeling that one’s well-being is wholly dependent on achieving and sustaining a close connection with the object of devotion—whether Viṣṇu as the warrior Rāma, or Viṣṇu as baby Kṛṣṇa, or the Goddess as a protective slayer of demons. In short, it is love. The bhakta or devotee may love the deity as one loves a romantic partner—as is most common in literature–or as one loves a parent, or one’s child, or a dear friend. We find examples of each sort in Indian literature.

This is not unique to South Asia, though the emphasis on romantic love is even more pronounced in other traditions. Most obviously, we find it in the mystical poets of Christianity and Islam. The former include such figures as Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Lamenting the relative neglect of these writers today, Housden pleads that “we [Christians] too have our great love songs to God, our cries of longing, our sorrows of separation, our bliss of union” (xvii; see Housden for a selection of Christian mystical poetry also). In the mystical branch of Islam, Ṣūfī writers sometimes employed allegory to convey their unorthodox views. The allegory was regularly one of romantic love. For example, Nizami’s great narrative poem, Layla and Majnun, represents Majnun’s passionate longing for spiritual union with Allāh indirectly as Majnun’s passionate longing for romantic union with Layla.

But there is a difficulty here. The clear cases of religious bhakti literature are found almost entirely in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Perhaps the earliest examples of such poetry are to be found in Judaism (“The Song of Songs”) and Hinduism (e.g., in the Kṛṣṇabhakti sections of the Bhagavad Gītā). Ṣūfism was influenced by Hinduism, and Christian mysticism was influenced by Ṣūfism. Due to such influence (“areal contamination,” as it is sometimes called), we cannot feel confident that these three cases point to a universal feature of religious literature (in the technical sense of universal). On the other hand, we almost certainly need to loosen this linguistic criterion in the case of literature (see the section on areal contact in “What are Literary Universals?”). In any event, given the degree of contact between these three religions and other religious traditions, we are left to wonder why a form of sacred poetry so enthusiastically embraced from India to Spain seems not to have inspired similar devotion on the part of Confucians, Buddhists, and others.

One possible explanation begins with the nature of the emotion at issue. No matter which analogy best fits the poet’s feelings—spousal, parental, or filial love or close friendship—a central component of those feelings is attachment care. Though prototypically associated with the bonding of parents and small children, attachment is a key component of romantic love and deep, enduring friendship as well. One peculiarity of attachment as an emotion system is that it takes individual persons as its targets. Most emotions are elicited by any member of a class of objects. While it is possible to be afraid of one particular wolf and not others, we are usually wary of all wolves. In contrast, a toddler is likely to be attached to his or her own mother, not everyone who shares the property of being a mother, and similarly the mother is attached to her own child.

Understanding this fact about attachment might lead us to hypothesize that attachment relations to a deity would be marked by two features. First, the attachment object should be singular. Second, that target should be distinguished by individuating characteristics. After all, the toddler identifies his or her mother, and rejects substitutes; he or she must be able to distinguish one from the other—by scent, voice, and so on. These two features of attachment would seem to suggest that the members of monotheistic religions might be more open to a bhakti orientation, at least insofar as that religion imagines the deity to be distinctively personified. In the technical terminology of the study of universals, this would constitute an hypothesis of a typological and statistical universal (see “What are Literary Universals?”), an hypothesis that literatures of a certain type—here, religious literatures associated with a monotheistic religion–are (statistically) more likely to develop works expressing a bhakti-like passionate emotion for God, modeled particularly on romantic love.

At least, as a simple, first approximation, this seems to fit the data reasonably well. Various forms of Christianity clearly share these characteristics. In consequence, it is unsurprising to find an emphasis on devotional love in some of its literature and at least lip service to love in its general teaching. Islam too fits here in being monotheistic. In orthodox Islam, Allāh is rather minimally personified, but He is given a voice and some traits through the Qur’ān. On the other hand, Ṣūfī mysticism—often considered heretical in orthodox Islam—is perhaps the form of bhakti-based religious poetry and prose that involves the most elaborate creation of individual characters to allegorize the mystic’s relation to God. We see this in, for example, Niẓāmī’s development of the spiritual allegory of Laila and Majnun, or in some elements of ‘Aṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds (also mystical allegories), and in the dense metaphors of Rūmī’s poetry. We find a similar situation in Judaism—a monotheism with a rather minimally personified deity. Jewish tradition does include the early “Song of Songs,” a love poem commonly interpreted as an allegory for the relation between the Jewish people and God (see Jerusalem 991). In keeping with this, Harold Bloom sees the poem as influencing St. John of the Cross (see 221-222). Still, given the way in which Ṣūfī mystical poetry developed, we might expect to find more bhakti-like literary work in unorthodox writings of Judaism—perhaps, for example, those influenced by Kabbalah.

Given that the other clear cases are all monotheisms, one might wonder how India became such an important source of bhakti-based literature. But, in fact, Hinduism has a monotheistic structure, albeit of an unusual type. It refers to an array of “gods.” However, the anthropomorphic court of Indra is not of the same ontological type as the “Trinity” of Brahma, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. Moreover, for many Hindu theologians—indeed, virtually all those who follow the Vedāntic principles of the Upaniṣads—the supreme deity (e.g., Mahāviṣṇu) encompasses even the Trinity. Finally, in the case of Vaiṣṇavites (devotees of Viṣṇu), this supreme deity has been incarnated and thus given a wealth of personifying characteristics, as both a child and an adult. On the other hand, the ultimate unity of the divine in philosophical Hinduism is not so much a monotheism of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort as monism, an assertion that every soul is ultimately one in that divine being (who is, in this respect, commonly referred to as brahman). This division in personification is given a name in Hinduism—that between devotion to a deity “with properties” (saguna) or as absolute, thus “without properties” (nirguna; see Feuerstein 201-202 and 247-248).

This may at first appear to pose a problem. However, it fits the mystical analogy with romantic love perfectly. The longing of the bhakta for God in both Hindu and non-Hindu religious literature is not a longing to set up a home and have children, or to enjoy any worldly benefit. It is, rather, a longing to be one with the beloved, to be united in such a way as to overcome the sometimes unbearable isolation of being a conscious self. Mysticism could be conceived of as a sort of therapy for the existential loneliness of consciousness (a point I have discussed elsewhere; see chapter six of Personal Identity and Literature, and “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness”). As such, it is certainly not confined to monotheisms. However, the development of a carefully personified single, potentially all-encompassing deity may facilitate the literary development of mysticism.

Future Directions

The implications of all this for future research on universals of religious literature are fairly straightforward. Here are a few possible directives, based on the preceding analyses.

Evaluate hypotheses 1-8 by reference to as wide a range of orally (as opposed to chirographically) maintained and local (as opposed to world) religions as possible. This may include further specifications of the hypotheses (e.g., as to whether the same sorts of goods are requested in petitionary prayer across cultures and whether there is any pattern when they diverge).
Consider historical factors as well. I have treated the world religions almost as if they were timeless. That may work well enough for petition and praise (of which human beings never seem to tire). But the bhakti-based literature was not always a prominent part of religious literature; its proliferation occurred during certain periods. Why was that?
Systematically examine the division between an emphasis on grace and an emphasis on individual effort, addressing its implications for the features and purposes of religious literature.
Systematically consider if there is any necessary connection between bhakti-based literature and the sort of religious counterculture that is so evident in certain forms of Ṣūfism. More generally, we need further exploration of the political dimensions of bhakti and mysticism.
Systematically explore the relation between religion and attachment, which seems to be virtually unconsidered. This might include such specific sub-topics as the place of bhakti-like literature in the Jewish tradition, particularly Kabbalah, which the preceding analysis suggests would be likely to include such literature.

Addendum. Rather on a whim, I decided I would take maybe an hour to see what I could find that bears on the final point about Kabbalah. Within about five minutes, I came upon a virtual treasure trove of mystical poetry of eros, due to Cole’s valuable collection. Like Christian, Muslim, and Hindu writers, many poets of this tradition do indeed draw on the model of romantic love to express and convey the poet’s devotion to God.

Works Cited

Abhinavagupta. Tantrasāra. Translation and commentaries by B. N. Pandit. Varanasi, India: Indian Mind, 2020.

Ali, Maulana Muḥammad. The Holy Qur’ān: Arabic Text, English Translation and Commentary. 2^nd ed. Columbus, OH Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Isha’at Islam Lahore, Inc., 1995.

Allen, Roger. An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Barrett, Justin. Cognitive Science, Religion, and Philosophy: From Human Minds to Divine Minds. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton P, 2011.

Bloom, Harold. The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2011.

Cai, Zong-qi. “Poetry and Ideology: The Canonization of the Book of Poetry (Shijing) During the Han.” How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang. Ed. Zong-qi Cai.New York: Columbia UP, 2018, 65-77. Kindle Edition.

Cole, Peter, ed. and trans. The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse of the Jewish Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012.

Davison, Scott A. “Petitionary Prayer.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Available online at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/petitionary-prayer/ .

Dmitrieva, Victoria. “Foreword.” In Abhinavagupta, 7-18.

Feuerstein, Georg. The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2000.

Fisher, Helen. “The Drive to Love: The Neural Mechanism for Mate Selection.” In The New Psychology of Love.” Ed. Robert Sternberg and Karin Weis. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006, 87-115.

Gerstenberger, Erhard. “Petition and Praise: Basic Forms of Prayer in the Babylonian and Hebrew Tradition.” [“Altorientalische Gebetsliteratur: Form, außersprachlicher Kontext und interkulturelle Adaptionsprozesse.”] Die Welt des Orients 49.1 (2019), 81-94.

Grimes, John. A Concies Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sanskrit Terms Defined in English. Revised ed. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1996.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2011.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.5-6 (2004): 116-142.

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

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Personal Identity and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Housden, Roger, ed. For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2009.

Jerusalem Bible, The. Ed. Alexander Jones. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.

Leonard, J. “Introduction.” In Paradise Lost. Ed. J. Leonard. New York: Penguin, 2003, vi-xxxix.

Moody-Adams, Michele. Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

O’Flaherty, Wendy, ed. and trans. The Rig Veda. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Pandit, B. N. History of Kashmir Saivism. Srinagar, Kashmir, India: Utpal Publications, 1989.

Pregadio, Fabrizio. “Religious Daoism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Available online at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/daoism-religion/ .

Waines, David. An Introduction to Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Blog for July 2024: Endings are Created by Interpretations

Posted on July 6, 2024September 24, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

LTERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature.

Nigel Fabb, University of Strathclyde

This blog is a response to Patrick Hogan’s response to my valedictory lecture marking my retirement, ‘Why endings are better than beginnings’. This title was appropriate to the occasion, but not quite accurate, as the lecture was about the special affordances of endings, rather than a competition between beginnings and endings. Patrick develops an account of a particular kind of ending which might be universal (“Story Endings and Discourse Endings”). In this blog, I explain and illustrate the two things I said in the lecture about endings. The first is that an ending is established as an outcome of an interpretation of the text; it is not an observer-independent fact about the text. The second is that the ending of a text can exploit the audience’s prior knowledge of the text, because the ending (usually) comes at the end, and that this can give endings an emotional boost based on expectation and surprise, accompanied by the empathy we have developed for characters. These are simple and ontologically parsimonious proposals which require nothing other than ordinary psychology, and so should be universally available for writers and readers, though how endings are interpreted, and how they use prior knowledge, may differ cross-culturally.

I begin by explaining what I mean by saying that an ending is derived by interpretation. This proposal is in keeping with the account of literary form which I outlined in Language and Literary Structure, where I suggested that many kinds of literary form are not facts about a text but arise as interpretations of the text. In effect, these kinds of literary form – which include almost all kinds of literary form – are meanings of the text, pragmatically communicated. The literary form is attributed to the text on the basis of evidence offered by the (author of the) text in context. This is the same as the way that all communicated meanings are attributed to the communicator, on the basis of evidence provided by the communicator in context. This follows from the ‘relevance theory’ of communication established by Sperber and Wilson, and it should be universal. The idea that an ending is an interpretation of the text can be clarified by comparing endings with ‘lasts’ which are objective facts about a text. The last word in Jane Eyre is ‘Jesus’, and this is a fact about the text. But where the ending of the novel is depends on the reader, with the ending likely to be located at the beginning of the final chapter with the statement “Reader, I married him.” This makes sense as an ending both because it resolves the romantic plot of the narrative, but also because it restores the broken family of the beginning. In contrast, the activities of St John Rivers (which occupy the end of the book) do not feel like the ending to the novel. However, since endings are interpretations there is nothing stopping a reader from treating the description of his activities in fact as the ending of the novel, depending on whether the reader finds this part of the text to conclude one of the themes of the novel (I return to this below). It is worth noting that one of the reasons why an ending is best treated as an interpretation, that is, a kind of meaning, is that to a large extent it is the meaning of the preceding text which tells us where the ending is. If locating an ending depends on meaning, that strongly suggests that being an ending is also a type of meaning.

A ‘last’ is a fact about the text, but nevertheless the identification of the last can depend on how it is defined. What, for example, is the last sentence in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela)? These questions can be answered by making the question more precise. Finnegans Wake ends in the middle of a sentence (which is then continued by returning to the beginning of the novel), so is this the last sentence, or is the last sentence the preceding completed sentence? This is a matter of definition, not inference. Hopscotch begins with an instruction from the author as to how to read the text, offering (at least) two options, which have different last sentences. In one reading, the reader reads chapters in sequence and stops at chapter 56, so the last sentence of chapter 56 is, in this reading, the last sentence of the book. In another reading, the reader reads chapters according to an out-of-order sequence, and in this reading the last sentence of chapter 131 or the last sentence of chapter 58 is the last sentence of the book. These are both ways of defining the last sentence, and a third is that the last sentence is the last sentence in the highest-numbered chapter 155 (which is under neither instruction the last to be read). Again, finding the last is a matter of definition and instruction, not a matter of inference. Thus, it is possible to do interesting things with lasts but because they are fairly determinate, the possibilities are nowhere as rich as the possibilities of manipulating the ending.

The distinction between an ending and a last can be seen in the common phenomenon of making the ending not the last thing in the text. Fairytales and folktales often have a ‘coda’ (Labov’s term) which comes after the narrative finishes, and reflects back on the narrative or connects it to our audience world. Consider for example the story of the Demon of Ganish, in the Burushaski language and told by Jemadaar Imaam Yaar Bèg to D.L.R. Lorimer in 1924, and published in his grammar. In the story, a demon eats people and then a hero pegs her down into a boulder, thus putting her activities to an end; this is the ending of the story. But then there are two more sentences, explaining that the boulder and the peg still exist and can be located still; these are the last part of the text, but not its ending. Fairy stories which end “And they lived happily ever after” do the same thing: this sentence is not part of the ending of the story, but comes after it. Texts sometimes provide a kind of post-ending coda by directly addressing their audience, after the narrative has finished: the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray liked ending his texts with ‘Goodbye’, and Puck at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream asks the audience to applaud. Here the address to the audience might or might not be interpreted also as an ending. What counts as an ending is always a matter of interpretation, depending on the evidence provided by the text in its context, which can include a knowledge of the genre.

If endings depend on how the text is interpreted, then there are a great many possibilities for endings. There can be one ending, or more than one ending, or no ending, depending on how the text is interpreted. Perhaps Jane Eyre has two endings, depending on how we interpret St John Rivers’s place in the overall narrative. Relevant evidence comes from a reading of the novel where many of the characters are named after the elements of earth, air, water or fire; this character has the distinction of being both fire – St John pronounced as ‘singe-in’ – and water, which perhaps gives him a special symbolic role, allowing his ending to be part of the book’s ending, if the book is interpreted as being about the four elements. A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be interpreted as having four endings, one for each of the groups of characters, in sequence: the lovers, the mechanicals, the royals, the fairies. Sometimes it is hard to find an ending in a text. A friend described her experience of borrowing a novel from the library, getting to the last page and finding no ending, and assuming that there were some pages missing (and so, fruitlessly, borrowed another copy to check). Some texts imply that the narrative sequence will come to an end after the last: in the penultimate chapter of To the Lighthouseonly Mr. Ramsay reaches the island and his children rise to follow him as the chapter ends, but by implication their ending/arrival will occur after the last words of the chapter. (This is also a novel which can be interpreted as having two distinct endings.) In some texts, involving live performance in particular, the empty space after the text has finished can be interpreted as the ending, such as a concert performance which ends with a silence, before the audience is allowed to clap, or The Sopranos which cuts to a long-held silent black screen at the end.

How do we locate the ending in a text? The text provides us with evidence, and we also come to the text with prior knowledge. So, we know that the ending is likely to be near the last but may not be the last, and if we know the genre we can predict sometimes where the ending will fall. In many kinds of text, the ending has a relation to the beginning, and so by knowing how the text began we can infer the presence of an ending. For example, in Propp’s schema for fairy tales, a narrative begins by the hero’s family being disrupted (for example by the father leaving home) and it ends when a family is constructed around the hero (for example by marriage). This is one of the important pieces of evidence which we use to infer that ‘Reader, I married him.’ is the ending of Jane Eyre. Some endings at the last quote the title of the text (because the title is also a beginning) to imply the ending of the text, as in ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ or The Crying of Lot 49. Or the text cycles back to the beginning as Finnegans Wake does. It is worth noting that some texts explicitly discuss the fact that they have an ending (as The Truman Show does), and may tease the reader as to when the ending will come, and what it will be. Or the text may tell the reader at the beginning how it will end, as Slaughterhouse Five does, though with a prediction compromised by the disordered temporal structure of the text. Endings are normally near the last part of the text, but it is also possible to find endings elsewhere in a text, including near the first part of the text: a novel or film which starts at the end of events and then recounts how we got there might be said to have an ending at the beginning (as in Sunset Boulevard), though perhaps this stretches the notion of ending too far, given that being near the last is one of the relevant kinds of evidence for the presence of an ending.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Poetic Closure offered one of the most extensively worked-out accounts of endings in poems, focusing in particular on the reader’s experience of ‘closure’ at the ending. Smith notes that the form of the poem offers a clue as to the ending, by changing its form: she said that closure arises from “the terminal modification of a formal principle”. She focuses mainly on terminal modifications in the direction of greater regularity, but also acknowledges that the modification can also go in the direction of greater irregularity. Beyond poetry, we can also say that a text can use a change to tell us that it is ending: something different happens. For example, a play or film may end with people dancing, when they have not previously danced (as in the films White Noise or Leon the Pig Farmer). It is worth noting that the recognition of a terminal modification also depends on inference. A change is something we infer about a text. Texts are too complex for ‘change’ to be just a fact about them: they constantly change, so what we are looking for is a significant change, an attribution which depends on interpretation. Increased or decreased regularity must be established relative to some interpretative framework, and what is ‘different’ in a text depends on what we think the text has been before. So, Smith’s terminal modification is not an irrefutable fact about a text but an interpretation of it.

What I have said here about endings should in principle be universal: that is, endings are always attributed to a text by inference rather than holding of the text as facts. The universal fact is that form is capable of holding of a text just by being inferred. But because inference depends on knowledge, including cultural knowledge and knowledge of literary genres, whether an ending is inferred, and what evidence cues the ending, is likely to vary between cultures. The novel, a form which emerged in a particular cultural context, also developed a type of ending of its own, something Kermode discusses in The Sense of an Ending and Lodge in the last chapter of The Art of Fiction. Readers of novels take this into account as context both when interpreting where the ending is and in expecting that there will be an ending. Perhaps for some genres of texts, in some cultures, there is no convention that there will be an ending near the ‘last’ part of the text. Thus the presence of endings, and what kinds of endings there are, may all differ between literatures.

I turn now to a different aspect of endings, which exploits our universal human psychology and thus should also be universal. Endings are (usually) near the last part of a text, which means that if we have read the text all the way up to this point, by the time the ending arrives we have built up knowledge of characters and events. This knowledge can generate expectations as to what will happen at the end, and our knowledge of characters can produce empathy towards them which makes us care about what happens to them at the end. Expectations can be met, which can be emotionally powerful. Expectations can also be denied, which can also be emotionally powerful, particularly when we are surprised by an ending. Expectations can also be met but before or after or slightly differently from what we expect: a combination of satisfaction and denial, again potentially emotionally satisfying. (Huron’s Sweet Anticipation is a very nice account of expectation and emotion in music, which carries over to literature.)The combination of the manipulation of expectations with our empathy towards characters can also be emotionally powerful.

In a text dependent on time, such as a piece of music or a film, a change in tempo at the end (a ‘terminal modification of a formal principle’) can produce a powerful effect. I find this for example in Todd Haynes’s film Carol in which the final action is very slightly decelerated as Rooney Mara moves towards Cate Blanchett, and where the actors themselves become very still at the end (the slowing down of the action is made very salient by having extras walk across the image, clearly slowed down). A speeding up at the end can be found the end of Istvan Szabo’s Mephisto where the first world war is represented very rapidly, or the television series Six Feet Under when we see the future deaths of all the characters. These speedings up also feel like prolepsis, where we remain in the present and anticipate the future, another type of terminal modification which cues the ending. The denial of expectations can involve various kinds of ‘twist’. Two of my favorite twists come in the endings of Borges ‘The Aleph’ and Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (I won’t say what they are, to avoid spoilers). Another kind of denial comes with the bathetic ending, the ending that ends not with a bang but a whimper: for some, King Lear ends like this. A common technique in approaching an ending is to interrupt the flow of the sequence, just before the ending comes. The Burushaski story of the Demon of Ganish, mentioned earlier, is interrupted just before the final gesture of pegging the demon into a boulder, when the narrator stops to explain where the boulder came from. This type of interruption resembles the technique which Labov and Waletzky identified as the ‘evaluation’ in oral narratives, an interruption just before the point of the story arrives; though this is not an ending, the technique of interrupting in order to cue something important is the same. Note again that a lot of this is dependent on how we interpret the text, because what constitutes an interruption is a matter of interpretation, not just a fact about the text. I think, for example, that we can treat the ending of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony as having an interruption of this kind. The symphony shifts from D minor to D major towards the end, and the whole orchestra plays a sustained major chord while the timpani beat out a repeated pattern on A and D, then just before the end the whole orchestra cuts out and all we hear is the timpani playing three beats on A-D-A, now accompanied by the bass drum, and then the chord returns and the whole piece ends. That break in the texturally thick sound, leaving just the texturally thin but loud sound of the percussion, feels to me like an interruption, and has an extraordinarily powerful effect at the ending.

A connection between these is that they involve a change at the ending, either in form or in content. In narratives, the change may involve a change of place, sometimes crossing a saliently liminal zone, as when going in or out of a doorway, or down or up a staircase. Consider for example the end of The Searchers, with its movements in and out of the doorway of the house. I once saw Ingmar Bergman’s production of A Doll’s House, and though I knew it ended with Nora going ot of the door, I was astonished when Nora first walked down from the stage into the audience and then out through the auditorium door, crossing two liminalities. In the ending of The Truman Show, the hero Jim Carrey goes up a staircase and through a door into the world, and the heroine Natascha McElhone goes down a different staircase and out into the world. In changing locations, endings share a characteristic with beginnings, which can also involve a change of place, and for the same basic reason: we experience the world as divided into events, and event boundaries at the beginning and end can be marked by changes in location. In interpreting a text as having a beginning and an ending, we may draw on our perception of the organization of events in the world (Radvansky and Zacks ). One of the ways of changing place is to move from a narrow domain into a broader domain, as Adam and Eve do at the end of Paradise Lost, or Chief at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or Calvin and Hobbes in the last frame of their cartoon strip, or more abstractly at the end of ‘Ozymandias’ as “the lone and level sands stretch far away”. In addition to signalling an event boundary, this type of ending also allows new anticipations and expectations to be formed at the end of the text, offering an ‘openness’ which some readers respond positively to. Another type of change can be a shift to utter chaos, as at the end of ‘Dover Beach’ or the disintegration of language at the end of the songs ‘The big country’ (Talking Heads) or ‘White man in Hammersmith Palais’ (The Clash).

All the techniques which can be used to manipulate our expectations of the ending are available in all languages and literatures. They depend on commonalities such as our experience of time, our building up of expectations, our empathy, and the fact that most of what we find in texts depends on universal principles of interpretation (i.e., a universal pragmatic theory such as relevance theory).

Works Cited

Fabb, Nigel. Language and Literary Structure: The Linguistic Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Huron, David. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. 2nd edition. Oxford, 2000.

Labov, W. & J. Waletzky. “Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience.” In Helm, J. ed., Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Proceedings of the 1966 annual spring meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 12–44, 1967.

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Vintage, 2011.

Lorimer, D. L. R. The Burushaski Language. Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning, 1935.

Radvansky, Gabriel A. and Jeffrey M. Zacks (Eds.) Event Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure. A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

In Memoriam: David Bordwell (1947-2024)

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

Mario Slugan, Queen Mary University of London

David Bordwell passed away on 29 February 2024. I was aware that he had health difficulties as he missed a couple of recent Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image annual conferences – a society whose ethos he deeply inspired and for a few years presided over. But I clearly did not understand the gravity of the situation for I was dumbfounded when I heard the distressing news in a short email from Noël Carroll. Taken together, Bordwell and Carroll are undeniably two scholars who have contributed the most to film studies no longer being contests of who can produce more references to Althusser, Lacan or Freud, or who can offer a reinterpretation of this or that canonical work in a psychoanalytic, gender, or some other ideology critique key. We can only thank the minor gods of lucid writing in the humanities that the two found themselves at the same time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where in 1996 they co-edited Post-Theory – a volume which cleared the way for the research programme of film cognitivism. Next to the introductory essay on the then dominance of what is still known simply as Theory with a capital T (as the posthumously just published book by Frederic Jameson, another recently passed pre-eminent scholar, evinces), Bordwell’s contribution to the volume was a piece titled “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision” which introduced the notion of “contingent universals.”

Summarizing both Bordwell’s original account and Ted Nannicelli’s explanation of the concept in his contribution to the Literary Universals Project (available here), contingent universals are the underlying reasons for why a specific artistic technique is widely distributed and comprehensible. In other words, contingent universals are human practices that are at least widely distributed across cultures. Bordwell’s focal technique is shot/reverse shot and, underlying this, the practice of conversation which involves a face-to-face exchange and taking turns. It is this practice of conversation that is arguably widely spread across cultures, which then explains why the editing structure which alternates two characters in relatively close shots to represent a conversation is so widely used and understood. While this might seem sensible, even self-evident, for the readers of the Literary Universals Project, during the heyday of Theory it was controversial, for at that time it was not uncommon to take even the recognition of verisimilar photographic images as culturally constructed. In such a context, positing contingent universals, thus moving away from purely nurture accounts of film comprehension, was a highly innovative move.

Of course, Bordwell’s towering influence on film studies had started much earlier and extends far beyond theory to include other two traditional branches of the discipline: history and criticism. Already in the late 1970s, together with his spouse Kristin Thompson, Bordwell published Film Art, the most widely used disciplinary textbook which taught thousands of students how to analyze film style, currently in its thirteenth edition and translated to more than a dozen languages. In mid-80s he authored Narration in the Fiction Film – a manifesto of cognitivist film theory – which introduced the then radical idea that for the model for how the viewer understands film we should look to the discipline of contemporary psychology, rather than early 20^th century psychoanalysis. Appearing in 1988, The Classical Hollywood Cinema another joint project with Thompson, with Janet Staiger contributing this time as well, has remained the fundamental work for understanding the means of production, their evolution, and the textual features of the Hollywood studio system. Film History, originally from 1994 and again co-authored with Thompson, now in its fifth edition, is to this very day one of the best introductions to film history and canonical national cinemas from the end of 19^th century to the beginning of the 21^st.

I will not list many other books that he published (although I believe Making Meaning – a scathing critique of the schematic and run-of-the-mill practice of academic film interpretation – is as timely now as it was in 1989 and as applicable to literary scholarship as it is to film). Instead, I would like to devote the remaining words to what becomes clear to anybody who read many of the in-memoriam posts that appeared in the days after his demise and written by many of those who were lucky enough to be his students (and are now themselves notable academics)–how generous Bordwell was as both a colleague and teacher. Despite the disciplinary authority he exuded, in his interactions in the classroom or the conference room he was always attentive and positive towards other people’s ideas even when they clashed with his own. At the 2016 Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image conference at Cornell University, I had the good fortune of experiencing this generosity firsthand when after my presentation he approached me and said that he liked my points and found them convincing. Imagine that! You are a postgraduate student who is wrapping up their PhD and sending your job applications all over the place, and David Bordwell tells you that you have good ideas. (That will keep you inspired through a couple of dozen rejection letters.) While the experience was unique for me, this type of encouragement must have been habitual to him. This is yet another reason to appreciate the wide reach of Bordwell’s scholarship, one which, I dare say, is for film studies what shot/reverse shot is for film style.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WORKSHOP PROGRAM AND ABSTRACTS

Posted on April 4, 2019May 14, 2019 by Patrick C. Hogan

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WORKSHOP

24 May 2019

This workshop is made possible by a generous grant from the University of Connecticut Office of the Vice President for Research, as well as funding from the Department of English and the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut, and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation. The organizers (Patrick Colm Hogan, Severi Luoto, and Arnab Dutta Roy) would also like to thank Robert Hasenfratz, Melanie Hepburn, Juliet Kapsis, Gustavo Nanclares, Lauren Schaller, and Chris Vials for their help.

PROGRAM

(All events will take place in room 112 of Oak Hall, University of Connecticut, Storrs, except dinner, which will take place in room 236 of Oak Hall.)

8:30-9:00 Refreshments, collect registration materials, check computer.

9:00-9:05 Welcome.

Arnab Dutta Roy, University of Connecticut

9:05-9:30 “On the Very Idea of a Research Program Treating Literary Universals”

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

9:40-10:35 “A Universalist Account of Prominence Distinctions among Unstressed Syllables”

Geoffrey Russom, Brown University

Chair, Robert Hasenfratz, University of Connecticut

10:45-12:00

“Literary Spatial Patterning”

Liz Finnigan, Southern Regional College, N. Ireland ,

“Literary Canons as Universals:

Or, Essential Criteria for a New Philosophy of Literature”

Christopher Kuipers, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

“Literary Universals, the Spanish Atlantic, and the Question of Modernity:

From Cabeza de Vaca to Castro”

Soren Triff, Bristol Community College and University of Connecticut.

Chair, Yohei Igarashi, University of Connecticut

12:00-1:00 Lunch

12:30 Video: “Etiological Animal Tales as a Typological Universal”

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, University of Oregon

1:00-1:55 “Universals of Literary Meaning”

Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri-St. Louis

Chair, Severi Luoto, University of Auckland

2:05-3:20

“Metaphors of Sexuality across the Atlantic: La Celestina and the Popol Vuh”

Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, Yale University

“Psycholinguistic Sex Differences in Literary Fiction:

A Computerised Text Analysis of 300 Novels”

Severi Luoto, University of Auckland

“Politics of ‘Primal Androgyny’:

Some Specific Cultural Implications of this Statistical Universal”

Arnab Dutta Roy, University of Connecticut

Chair, Rosa Helena Chinchilla, University of Connecticut

3:30-4:45

“Narrative Empathy Is Everywhere:

The Ability to Empathize with Literature is a Literary Universal”

Kelly Mahaffy, University of Connecticut

“Traveling Through Theatre: Cultural Universals: Some Journeys”

Sonjoy Dutta-Roy, University of Allahabad

“‘Imaginal’ Shapes: Waking, Dreaming, Sleeping in Cross-Cultural Storytelling”

Neela Bhattacharya Saxena, Nassau Community College

Chair, Evelyn Tribble, University of Connecticut

4:55-5:45

“Counterintuitive Imagery as a Literary Universal”

Tom Dolack, Wheaton College

“Ministering to Power:

Fiction in Court Settings, from Halicarnassus to Heian Japan”

Sara R. Johnson, University of Connecticut

Chair, Shailen Mishra, University of Delaware

5:45-6:15

General Discussion:

Questions for any panelists,

ideas for fostering research on cross-cultural literary patterns,

and anything else anyone would like to bring up.

Chair, Lalita Pandit Hogan, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

6:30-8:00

Buffet dinner in Oak 236 for workshop registrants.

ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

“On the Very Idea of a Research Program Treating Literary Universals”

Patrick Colm Hogan, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, University of Connecticut

Modeled on the research program in linguistic universals, the Literary Universals Project seeks to establish a platform for the study of cross-cultural patterns in literature and orature. This opening workshop presentation sets out a basic definition of literary universals, responding to some common misconceptions about universals. It goes on to sketch what it involved in describing and explaining literary universals. It considers some common problems encountered in interdisciplinary research programs, and distinguishes the methodological orientation of the Literary Universals Project from that of non-cognitive approaches, such as Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots. In conclusion, it sets out what intellectual goals might be pursued through the study of literary universals.

Patrick Colm Hoganis a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the English Department, the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Program in Cognitive Science. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and the forthcoming Personal Identity and Literature (Routledge, 2019). He is a co-editor and co-founder of The Literary Universals Project.

PLENARY TALKS

“Universals of Literary Meaning”

Joseph Carroll, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English, University of Missouri-St. Louis

Literature consists in aesthetically modeled verbal constructs that depict or evoke subjective experience. “Meaning” in literature consists in the communication of imaginative effects. I identify four levels for the organization of meaning in literary texts: the pan-human level, the culturally specific level, the level of individual persons (authors and readers), and the level of individual literary works. The term “Pan-human” is synonymous with the term “universal.” When applied to literary texts, those terms signify universal subjects, themes, emotions, and forms of organization. The forms of organization range from large-scale structural features of narrative, drama, and verse to micro-structures of style. By definition, universal features of literary texts appear in all texts, including texts distinguished by differences of culture, by differences of individual authorial identity, and by particularities of subject, theme, tone, and form in any given literary work, each of which is unique in some respect. Literary meaning varies by culture, authorial identity, and individual text, but those categories are themselves literary universals. That is, all texts are embedded in some particular culture, are imbued with characteristics that derive from the minds of the authors who create them, and display unique individual ways of combining subjects, themes, emotions, and formal structures. Universal elements of human experience combine differently in different texts to produce the specific forms of meaning in those texts. I’ll illustrate these propositions with examples from world literature.

JosephCarroll is Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the English department at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Since the early 1990s, he has been working to integrate evolutionary research and literary study. He has developed an evolutionary theory of literature, produced interpretive essays on literary works ranging from plays of Shakespeare to modern novels, written essays in intellectual history, and conducted empirical research on protagonists and antagonists in Victorian fiction.

“A Universalist Account of Prominence Distinctions among Unstressed Syllables”

Geoffrey Russom, Emeritus Professor of English, Brown University; Nicholas Brown

Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres (Emeritus).

In a recent paper (Swedish Academy, 2018), Paul Kiparsky has identified differences in metrical prominence among unstressed constituents. Inflectional endings, for example, are less prominent than independent unstressed words and can be added more freely to a verse as extrametrical syllables. In this respect as in others, Germanic alliterative meters provide evidence not easily obtained from the meters most thoroughly studied by Western scholars. This paper identifies gradations of prominence within Old English verse patterns, as analyzed in Russom (2017), and isolates prominence differences among unstressed syllables due to differences in frequency, syllable count, and syntactic constituency. For practical reasons, metrists have attended primarily to metrical rules that apply without exception. This was understandable in 19th century, when linguists interested in poetic form used index cards and had to put just one feature of interest at the top for indexing. Today, however, relational databases like Excel provide a much more efficient research tool. When the metrical features of each verse are notated in an electronic entry, a researcher can instantly obtain a list of all and only those verses in the same poem that have any of the notated features –– or any desired combination of the notated features. There is no longer any excuse for overemphasizing the ‘always / never’ contrast and neglecting the ‘often / seldom’ contrast, which may sometimes provide better insight into universal principles of verse construction. The presentation will conclude with a demonstration of Excel scansions that provide the evidence for claims made in the paper.

Geoffrey Russomis Emeritus Professor of English at Brown University and Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres (Emeritus). Hiss research interests include Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, and Old Irish literary cultures; linguistic theory; and theory of poetic meter. He is best known for arguments showing that rules of poetic meter are abstracted from rules of ordinary language and, once abstracted, operate like new linguistic rules, interacting with other rules of the linguistic system to yield a varied yet well-defined array of acceptable verse patterns. Russom is author of three books published by Cambridge University Press: Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory (1987), Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre (1998), and The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry: From the Earliest Alliterative Poems to Iambic Pentameter (2017). His 2017 book traces poetic use of English and some cognate languages from about 300 BCE to the present, presenting a theory of evolutionary metrics within Chomsky’s universalist framework. The theory relating linguistic systems to metrical systems is further developed in “Optimality Theory, Language Typology, and Universalist Metrics,” Studia Metrica et Poetica 5.1 (2018), 7–27. In addition to work on poetic form, Russom has published articles on the linguistic history of English, the multicultural backgrounds of Beowulf, and the artistic excellence of preliterate verse traditions.

PANEL PRESENTATIONS

“Counterintuitive Imagery as a Literary Universal”

Tom Dolack, Wheaton College

A productive strain of research in the cognitive study of religion has focused on the prevalence of “counterintuitive imagery,” or images that violate our expectations of ontological categories (animals that talk, people without bodies). I propose that such a religious universal is better viewed as a literary universal, and can be regarded as a fundamental element of narrative, not just religion. Making this connection would allow us to apply a wealth of research on the origins of religion to the origins of narrative and literature, enabling at least the formulation of hypotheses about the beginnings of the narrative arts.

But first some quantitative work is necessary. Is counterintuitive imagery as universal in literary texts as in religious? Is there a difference in rates between written and oral traditions? Has it decreased over time? As an attempt to begin answering these questions, a team of undergraduates and I began to quantify rates of counterintuitive imagery in the Hebrew Bible and the Harry Potter novels. Ultimately, far more texts will need to be analyzed in as many genres as possible, but these texts served as a proof of concept.

What we found was that the Potter novels in fact had higher levels of counterintuitive imagery than the Bible, even more than the older books that were initially composed orally. Based on informal counts of other works, this does not appear to be an exception, either. Counterintuitive imagery clearly permeates literary texts, not just oral or religious works. In other words, it can be viewed as a universal. Assuming the findings hold up after additional research, this would indicate a need to rethink the purpose of counterintuitive imagery, and the possibility of uniting research on the origins of religion and literature.

“Traveling Through Theatre: Cultural Universals: Some Journeys”

Sonjoy Dutta-Roy, University of Allahabad

In this presentation, I will explore the deep moorings of fertility myths and rituals in a range of literary and performative works including Eliot’s The Wasteland, Chandrashekhar Kambar’s Jokumaraswamy, and Arun Mukherjee’s Mareech: The Legend. Among the various sources that feed the cultural universal of fertility rites in Eliot’s poem is the Brihadaranyika Upanishad. I will pick up the encrypted narrative in the Upanishad story and explore the psychological dimensions of sexuality in the gender relationships that trouble Eliot’s poem. I will connect this to the fertility rites in rural Karnataka and Bengal that give birth to Kambar’s and Mukherjee’s plays. All these works encase certain propagandistic political elements that I will try to highlight. It is at this level that universalisms are often constructed and mobilized for creating power hierarchies in their particular social contexts. But even in such projects, the stories by themselves have bristling indicators that might constantly run against the manipulation of ideas. This often happens as subtext and a much more emancipatory universalism might challenge the canon-creating or political motivated agendas that might be there. I will show this through a reading and sharing of performative experiences from these sources. Through this study, I place the importance of some cultural universals (in this case fertility rites) and their corresponding universalizations in different story-telling and performative traditions for Humanities and its pedagogy.

“Literary Spatial Patterning”

Liz Finnigan, Southern Regional College, N. Ireland

In this paper I propose a statistical universal (Hogan 2016) about visual spatial pattering within verbal narrative. The universal states that unique patterns of representation can be found in the literary descriptions for three categories of space: Setting, Place and Person. These patterns are found in particular spatial frames, which I term topological frames, and are a set of schemas for describing setting, places or people. I call these frames topological because they describe the location of objects within a space and their inter-related arrangements. In literary texts, we should expect individual writers to produce spatial representations that are based on stylistic choices which create difference and this also includes the possibility of randomness. Yet, in topological frames the same patterns of spatial relations occur consistently demonstrating a statistical probability in their favour.

“Ministering to Power: Fiction in Court Settings, from Halicarnassus to Heian Japan”

Sara R. Johnson, University of Connecticut

It was once a common perception that the novel was a creation of Renaissance and early modern Europe (Cervantes in Spain, Rabelais in France, Richardson or Defoe in England), but today there is growing understanding that novels have emerged more widely in both geographical space and time, from the Greek and Latin novels of the second century CE in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, to the eleventh-century Tale of Genji in Japan, to the classic form of the novel that began to emerge in fourteenth-century China. In each of these cultural settings, long-form prose was also used to narrate “true” stories of the nation’s past. It is not surprising, then, that one commonly finds alongside “novel” and “history” many narrative texts that mingle perceived “truth” and “fiction” in surprising ways.

In “Embodiment and Universals,” Vittorio Gallese remarks: “It is fair to say that virtually all human beings share the same impulse to narrate – and listen to – stories.” As students of narratology understand, the genres of history and novel both tell “stories” in their own way, and historical and fictional narrative shares many common features. Yet the emergence of both long-form prose fiction and prose narrative history, while widespread, has not been entirely universal. Rather, each has tended to appear in specific cultural and historical contexts, often being associated with one or more “founders” (e.g. Herodotus for Greek history, Cervantes for the Spanish novel, Lady Murasaki for the Genji Monogatari). Likewise, narratives that mingle fiction and fact do not appear universally but along particular fault lines in time and space.

My talk will reflect upon the emergence of narrative texts of an ambivalent nature (those which are difficult to classify neatly as either “history” or “fiction,” “true” or “false”) at two specific points: in eleventh century Japan, shortly after the appearance of the Tale of Genji, and in fourth century BCE Asia Minor, along the boundary between Greek and Persian imperial spheres.

“Literary Canons as Universals; Or, Essential Criteria for a New Philosophy of Literature”

Christopher Kuipers, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

This presentation will explore two things: first, how literary canons are formed universally, as essential expressions of valuation across all literate cultures; and, second, what this universality of canonization implies for reviving the philosophy of literature.

Despite the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s, “the canon” (as a demarcated set of selections) is still alive and well, as university courses, dissertations, and monographs throughout today’s literary profession blithely attest. But is canonicity truly universal, particularly given the global influence of this avowedly Western concept? There are at least five reasons why canons do seem to be universals in the strict sense. Selection, or valuation of certain things, is unavoidable in culture. Secondly, the other interlinked literary ideas we associate with “canons” (rules, corpuses, lists) likewise form a coherent conceptual-metaphorical complex across cultures, despite varying terminologies. Third, there were a wide variety of such terms in Greco-Roman culture, where “canon” eventually emerged as the, ahem, canonical term. Fourth, in ideological situations where canonicity is specifically declined, all the conceptual usages of “canon” remain fully in play. Fifth, perhaps most interestingly, the selective concept of “canon” exerts profound influence even where there is no positive corresponding keyword, as in the case of the Hebrew Bible (there are only terms to designate works “excluded,” etc. from the canonized Tanakh).

This disruptively anti-ideological, rigorously terministic analysis of canonicity directs us to reconsider the philosophy of literature, which has emerged from scholarly dormancy in the last decade. A philosophy of literature worth the name will entail the following canonical criteria: 1) Literature must be considered as a human instinct, like language and consciousness itself. Anthropologically, literature is likely a human exaptation of music, and certainly a coded expression of ancient patterns of human wisdom. 2) There must be formulated a philosophically satisfactory definition of literature, one free from the pervasive mythology of modern print culture, a definition embracing drama, orality, and visual forms we intuitively recognize as literature, such as film and comics. 3) There must be delineated the values, plural, of literature. The values to be articulated must range well beyond the contingency paradigm of critique, and encompass the full range of literary pleasure and utility, recognition and discovery, that continually engage creators and audiences in any language. 4) There must be acknowledged, so it can be counteracted, the modernizing conceptual impulse to de-mythologize and de-pluralize literature, as epitomized by the singularizing “the” of “the canon” and “the Bible” (< ta biblia “books”). 5) Criticism must be recognized to have a fourth, moral dimension as ethos, in addition to its other three dynamic spheres: grammatica (genitive interpretation alongside generative textuality); mythos (truth-telling alongside fictivity); and logos (gray theory alongside green networks). Increasingly neglected among the canons of criticism since the Enlightenment, ethos is critically keyed to educative value: interest and practice, andragogy and axiology.

“Psycholinguistic Sex Differences in Literary Fiction: A Computerised Text Analysis of 300 Novels”

Severi Luoto, University of Auckland

Sex is a fundamental biological variable that influences almost all traits in humans. The study of psychological sex differences has been an intensely researched area for decades, if not centuries. Although psychological sex differences have been reported in a variety of domains, linguists still debate about the magnitude of such differences in language use. Using machine learning to find contrasting features of male and female writing, Argamon and colleagues (2009) found significant sexual dimorphism in French texts from the 12th–20th centuries. Female authors used more personal pronouns and negative polarity items than males, while male-authored texts had a higher frequency of determiners and numerical quantifiers. Studying Dutch novels published in the 21st century, Koolen (2018) found large to very large sex differences in the frequencies of pronouns, articles, numbers, and positive emotions, among other categories. I present findings from a corpus linguistic study on 150 male-authored and 150 female-authored British, Irish, and American novels. Sex differences were examined in contemporary prizewinning novels as well as canonical works published between 1800–2017. The novels were analysed with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. Very large (Cohen’s d > 1) sex differences were found for personal pronoun use, positive emotion words, social words—all more frequent in female-authored novels—as well as article use and words reflecting analytical thinking, both more frequent in male-authored novels. Other psycholinguistic categories showed sex differences ranging from negligible to large (0 < d < 1). The findings are consistent with existing psychological and linguistic research on sex differences, preliminarily suggesting that literary texts may contain universal sexual dimorphism that arises from fundamental sex differences in psychological traits. These findings on 300 novels provide further challenges to the gender similarities hypothesis while supporting the sex differences hypothesis arising from and supported by evolutionary science.

“Narrative Empathy Is Everywhere: The Ability to Empathize with Literature is a Literary Universal”

Kelly Mahaffy, University of Connecticut

Empathy has been one of the most frequently studied concepts of the last decade, yet literary scholars are still unsettled over whether empathy can be considered truly universal or not. If empathy is considered a literary universals, it would mean proving that more often than chance readers can empathize with stories, a feat that has proven difficult. In this presentation, I will consider Suzanne Keen’s “Narrative Empathy: A Universal Response to Literature?” in which she argues against considering empathy as a literary universal and extend the position of Patrick Colm Hogan’s “Comments on Keen: Universal Principles versus Uniformity” to argue that, not only is narrative empathy a literary universal, but that we can universally predict which characters, scenes, and moments of a work of literature will provoke the most empathic responses from readers.

Empathy is no longer a strange pseudo-science constructed solely of self-reported feelings and emotional responses. Now, empathy is often viewed through changes in neuronal activation via neuroimaging, a technique that not only allows for a confirmation of empathizing but also allows comparative analysis of empathic responses across many social strata. Relying on this work on empathy from cognitive science, focusing on the work of Anezka Kuzmičová, I will prove that it is more likely than chance for readers to empathize with speaking characters featuring ingroup characteristics in emotionally salient situations within literature. This distinction is important, for predicting the times that a reader will empathize while reading a literary text can help to suggest what characters or scenes will be most memorable, why literature is important, and some of the ways evolution makes humans predisposed to enjoying art.

“Metaphors of Sexuality across the Atlantic: La Celestina and the Popol Vuh”

Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, Yale University

Students of the Popol Vuh and other sixteenth-century indigenous texts from Guatemala and Mexico have long noted the presence of motifs and passages that parallel European texts. The parallels are commonly explained as the result of Spanish religious teachings and other forms of influence on native authors, and the possibilities of parallel but independent origins are rarely considered. In this talk, I explore sexual metaphors involving toothache, which are present in two major literary works produced within decades of each other across the Atlantic: the late fifteenth-century Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, and the mid-sixteenth century Popol Vuh. While there are good probabilities that the authors of the Popol Vuh incorporated elements of Christianity in their work, I argue that their treatment of toothache as a sexual metaphor did not derive from Spanish teachings. In support of this argument, I explore the meanings associated with toothache in European literature and oral literature from indigenous communities in Guatemala and Mexico.

“Politics of ‘Primal Androgyny’: Some Specific Cultural Implications of this Statistical Universal”

Arnab Dutta Roy, University of Connecticut

Motifs of “primal androgyny” appear across many mythic and folk traditions around the world dating back thousands of years. Such motifs broadly reveal two interconnected myths (that are evoked either individually or collectively). One, the first humans incorporated both male and female sexual attributes (spiritual, physical, or both). Two, the divinity that created humans was a primal androgyny (mainly on account of its ability to self-procreate). Variations of these myths can be found in a range of pre-colonial traditions from Africa or African diasporic regions (Dogon, Kemetic, Santeria, Haitian), Americas (Navaho, Zuni, Crow, Aztec), Australian tribes, Europe (Greek and Roman), Middle East (Babylonian, Abrahamic), Asia (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist), and others. A comprehensive study on the topic has not been done so far. As such, this project, in the first part, offers a systematic research program that relates primal androgyny as a prime candidate for statistical universals specific to oral and written mythic traditions.

Building on this comparative frame, the second half of the presentation will examine questions of sexuality and tradition through a reading of androgyny in certain South Asian scriptural and folk traditions (for instance, the mythical Hindu figure of ‘Ardhanarishvara’ or the myths of androgyny in the Tibetan folklore: Uncle Tompa). These readings will explore questions such as how the universal tropes of androgyny have appeared in these traditions, how have they been culturally codified, and what are the broader moral underpinnings of the stories which encase such myths. Thus, my basic aim will be to evaluate the extent to which such readings can complicate and become subversive of existing dogmatic prescriptions of religious patriarchy and unreflective heteronormativity.

“‘Imaginal’ Shapes: Waking, Dreaming, Sleeping in Cross-Cultural Storytelling”

Neela Bhattacharya Saxena, Nassau Community College

Human experience of wakefulness, dream and sleep have something remarkably common across all cultural borders although how we make sense of them depends upon a culture’s theories of self-perception. Haruki Murakami’s narrator in his story “Sleep” communicates her experience of one fateful night: “I remember with perfect clarity that first night I lost the ability to sleep. I was having a repulsive dream—a dark, slimy dream….I woke at the climactic moment–came fully awake with a start, as if something had dragged me back at the last moment from a fatal turning point.” She is transformed as a result of that night and at the end of the story, we are not quite sure about her reality, sanity or our own.

Irving’s celebrated story “Rip Van Winkle”, whose roots go back to a Greek tale of Epimenides who slept for 57 years, presents a perplexed character who finds freedom through his prolonged sleep. In a Pancharatrastory from India a Brahmin’s dream is apparently told as a cautionary tale against castles in the air. In Robert Sawyer’s trilogy WWW: Wake, Watch, Wonder, we encounter the spontaneous “waking” of Webmind, an emergent AI in a computer. All these stories bring us face to face with the nature of consciousness and human creative imagination’s ability to give “airy nothing, a local habitation and a name.”

Utilizing the articulations of Andalusian Sufi master Ibn al Arabi whose word KhayalHenry Corbin translates as “imaginal” and Indic understanding of the word Kalpana, this paper will observe some of these tales to assert what Thomas Cheetham states in an essay on Corbin and Hillman: “To live a life in tune with imaginal realities requires abandoning the desire for what postmodernists call master narratives.”

“Etiological Animal Tales as a Typological Universal”

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, University of Oregon

Hunting demands extensive knowledge of animal behavior, characteristics, and habitat, raising the question of how foragers acquire this knowledge. One potential source is etiological animal tales (EAT), which are pervasive in forager oral tradition and explain the origin of a species’ distinctive physical and/or behavioral traits. If these stories serve as a repository for traditional zoological knowledge, we would expect them to contain information about traits that are useful for identifying, predicting availability of, locating, killing, processing, and/or avoiding dangerous encounters with the animal. These predictions were tested in an earlier study that used story collections from 64 diverse hunter-gatherer societies (Scalise Sugiyama 2017). For each collection, one EAT was chosen at random for content analysis; all 64 stories evinced the predicted information, showing a strong cross-cultural trend. Here I present the results of a follow-up study that examines whether this pattern holds across all EAT within a given culture. For this analysis, ten cultures were selected from the original sample (two from each of five world geographic regions). All EAT from each culture were analyzed for the presence of information about the animal’s availability, behavior, diet, habitat, interspecies relationships, physical traits, sign, techniques used to hunt/process the animal, and hazards associated with the animal. Results suggest that EAT are an important vector of zoological knowledge transmission across forager groups.

“Literary Universals, the Spanish Atlantic, and the Question of Modernity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Castro”

Soren Triff, Bristol Community College and University of Connecticut

Literary universals, like story prototypes, can be useful to make “visible” ideologies and discourses that otherwise would remain difficult or impossible to observe in Spanish Atlantic texts. The purpose of my presentation is not to demonstrate the validity of literary universals, that has been already demonstrated, nor their presence in the texts selected, they were chosen because of their presence, but to investigate underlying ideologies and discourses and see what they can tell us about modernity in the Spanish Atlantic.

In order to put literary universals to the test, I have chosen one narrative structure that Patrick Hogan calls heroic tragicomedy (The Mind and Its Stories [2003] and Affective Narratology [2011]) and apply it to two non-fiction prose pieces. One document is a foundational text of U.S. literature, that happens to be written in Spanish—La relación or Naufragios [Shipwreck], by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the other is a foundational text of castroism, Palabras a los intelectuales [Words to the Intellectuals], by Fidel Castro.

In the first part of the presentation, I establish the theoretical foundation, mentioning the relationship between systems of emotion and narratives, and the latter with ideology. Ideology is presented as a connector between universal narratives and particular historically grounded discourses. The theoretical frame for literary discourses is based on Michel Foucault’s “race war” which he sees as the “genealogy” of revolutionary discourse, particularly as he presented it in ‘Society Must Be Defended’ (2003). I rely on Ulf Hannerz’s Cultural Complexity (1992) for a final look at the modernity of the texts.

In the second part of the presentation, I briefly mention in each case the theme, initial social conflict of the narrative, analyze the body of the narrative including the usurpation sequence and the threat-defense sequence, and the end of the story in which a happiness goal is reached and a new idealized normality is achieved. The heroic tragicomedy contributes to identifying not only explicit and implicit ideologies, but also discursive regularities in very dissimilar non-fiction prose texts like a sixteenth century exploration account by a Spanish author and a twentieth century speech by a Caribbean political leader. The presentation concludes with a reflection on the contribution of the heroic tragicomedy to interrogating texts deeper ideologically, and evaluating to what extent they support or hinder modern worldviews in the Spanish Atlantic.

Reuven Tsur (1932-2021)

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Patrick C. Hogan

I was deeply saddened to learn that the brilliant and warm-hearted Reuven Tsur passed away earlier today. His contributions to the linguistics of poetry–including the study of literary universals–were invaluable. The Literary Universals Project was honored to publish his and Chen Gafni’s “Phonetic Symbolism: Double-Edgedness and Aspect-Switching” just two years ago. This is a great intellectual and human loss.

Talking Stories: Encyclopedia of Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Posted on September 11, 2021September 11, 2021 by Patrick C. Hogan

Earlier this year (2021), Michelle Scalise Sugiyama (Anthropology, University of Oregon) launched Talking Stories: Encyclopedia of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, an open educational resource that situates the prehistory of literature and science in the oral traditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Based on the premise that oral narrative is one of humanity’s earliest information technologies, the Encyclopedia aggregates stories from diverse hunter-gatherer cultures and explicates the ecological knowledge they encode, with links to articles, books, films, and other pedagogical resources. The site is designed for use by educators seeking to integrate traditional Indigenous literature, philosophy, and science into their courses, and by students and researchers interested in the origins of natural history, symbolic behavior, and cultural transmission.

“The Double” (Addendum): Doubling, Shame, and Body Dysmorphia

Posted on April 23, 2024April 23, 2024 by Patrick C. Hogan

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

As a member of a movie discussion group, I often see films that I would ordinarily be entirely unaware of. The week after posting my blog on “The Double,” I saw Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki). The film concerns a young woman, Sofie, who does not have any real social life, but rather devotes herself to work. The reason for this appears to be given in her offhand remark early in the film that she is not beautiful. Beauty is a recurring theme in the film. For example, the titular character, Howl, at one point claims that he doesn’t want to live if he can’t be beautiful. Sophie is transformed into a severely overweight, old woman. She gazes at her mirror image in dismay at this transformation. The change is caused by a curse from Howl’s former love interest—the Witch of the Waste–who has lost her beauty, growing morbidly obese (her name in English clearly involves a pun on “waist”).

The film includes various sorts of doubling. At one point, Howl takes on the appearance of a particular king as a disguise. This is reminiscent of the Zeus and Indra cases, except that Howl does it to protect a woman rather than to seduce her. This is, obviously, a doubling in which two different persons appear in identical bodies. There is also a prince who appears as an unspeaking scarecrow, which may suggest the dead version of the self stressed by Rank—though, appropriately for the film’s younger audience, the death motif is very much underplayed, and the prince is restored at the end anyway. Though it stretches the use of the term somewhat, the change in the Witch of the Waste could be viewed as a sort of doubling also, one in which the bodily self alters so much that we might be tempted to say that the person is no longer recognizable.

The doublings all involve the relation between one’s first-person sense of oneself and one’s third-person sense of others. In addition, they bring into play one’s idea of other people’s third-person sense of oneself. This is clearest in reference to beauty. To say one is or is not beautiful is usually to say, in part, that one’s bodily appearance to others is or is not beautiful for them. Again, it is the sense of other people’s disgust at oneself that triggers shame. Shame can be moral, intellectual, related to personality, and so on. It can also bear on one’s physical presence and appearance. In this last case, it commonly manifests itself as body dysmorphia (see chapter three of Giles)—a distortion of one’s bodily self-image, a distortion that highlights or even imagines (what one takes to be) aversive features and downplays or even occludes (what one takes to be) attractive features. This is just what happens with Sofie, as she is “cursed” with being an overweight, old woman. The curse is in effect a metaphor for her own dysmorphia, and both last until she and her borderline dysmorphic beloved, Howl, are united at the end of the movie.

One difficulty with treating body dysmorphia and age is that it could lead to ageism. Fortunately, the film avoids this problem. As my fellow film-group members stressed in discussion, the old Sofie is quite a strong, self-confident agent. Indeed, she is far more active than the young Sofie, Perhaps this is precisely because she is no longer focused on her appearance. As Rorty and Wong explain, “Someone with a low sense of somatic self-confidence”—as appears to be the case with young Sofie—“can feel alienated or unimpowered, act in a tentative and anxious way, limit her desires, avoid confrontational situations, expect failure, and so on” (21). This is exactly what we see with the young Sofie at the start of the film.

In short, this film reinforces some points of my earlier post. What is more important, it leads us to see some aspects of literary doubling—and of shame—that are consistent with those earlier points, but I had not even begun to articulate.

Works Cited

Flanagan, Owen and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, eds. Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.

Giles, David. Psychology of the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Miyazaki, Hayao, dir. Howl’s Moving Castle. Tokyo: Studio Ghibli, 2005.

Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg and David Wong. “Aspects of Identity and Agency.” In Flanagan and Rorty, 19–36.