Brecht and Curious Incident

The above is because I don't really have a working title for this paper.  Or even a thesis quite yet.  This is just to get ideas down for later use.


A topic that really struck a chord with me from the second half of this class is empathy.  Specifically the empathy a reader feels for fictional characters.More often than not, the goal of an author of fiction is to get an audience invested in a work, and believable characters the reader can connect to is one of the best ways to do it. But what happens when a character within a work has problems empathizing with others, or an author intentionally creates a gulf between audience and characters?  Then you get The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, and the works of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. 


Definitions of empathy: 


Keen: Feeling what we believe to be the emotions of others.


Dictionary.com: 1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.  2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.


Wikipedia: the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient being.


Empathy can be distinguished from sympathy as a feeling with, rather than a feeling for.  "I feel what you feel" as opposed to "I feel a supportive emotion about your feelings"


Emotional contagion: "catching" a mood or a feeling


Summarize how narrative empathy might work, quotes from Keen: "Theory of Narrative Empathy," Zunshine "Why We Read Fiction"


Examples from common/popular literature & theater, distinguish between sympathy and empathy again.


Brecht, epic theater, alienation effect:  short bio, clarification of genre, examples of alienation techniques, Mother Courage and her Children


Alienation techniques: opening narrations, geste, learning in dialect performing in Hochdeutsch, stripping away the illusion of scenery, visible lights & wings, timing: set over 10+ years, coherence of story: scenes may be years apart and don't "flow" smoothly, characters distant in and of themselves, subject matter: war, death, "just good business."


The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: Autism, theory of mind, and empathy.  Are we alienated from Christopher when we read because of his trouble relating to other characters?  Is he alienated from other people in the same way Brecht desires his audience to be alienated?  


Facts versus emotion: Christopher and Brecht think about situations/death/tragedy instead of feeling about them.


Geste and Christopher's sheet of paper with the faces: complex expressions are hard to interpret.


Differences of scale: A week in 1 small town in England v. 10+ years in at least 3 countries.  One family and one dog versus 30 years of war and 3 dead children


How much Theory of Mind to work in?  Christopher has trouble mind-reading, does the alienation Brecht desires exclude it as well?  Are we supposed to be able to mind-read his characters?


Mother Courage: Is there something special about this play w/empathy because she has to hold herself distant from the world and the deaths of her children?  Doesn't empathize because she's shut herself off, rather than because her brain is wired that way.


Brainstorm complete.  Hope I can pull some good ideas & sensible structure from this.

Are you paying attention?

          Once again, this class seems to come full circle.  In our discussions of alternate cognitions, we land on ADD/ADHD, and come once again to the topic of attention in the brain.  One particular aspect that has caught my eye this time around is the idea of "deep" attention versus "hyper" attention, as explained in the Hayles article.  The former is the ability to focus on one particular stimulus to the exclusion of all else for long periods of time; absorption in the latest Harry Potter novel, for instance.  The latter is the ability to switch focus rapidly between many different stimuli; for instance, your typical multi-tasking modern college student. (I personally must confess that I have 3 tabs open on my internet browser unrelated to this blog post, as well as Duke Ellington and his All Star Road Band playing in the background.)  
          What particularly fascinates me is how our society has changed over the centuries in what kind of attention it prefers.  Earlier on in human history, when hunting for food and then fighting for territory were of prime importance, we favored hyper attention.  The recent series Percy Jackson and the Olympians explains the ADHD of many modern demigods in this fashion. With brains that are hard-wired for the intense stimulation of combat, Percy and many like him just lose interest in the modern classroom. 
           As we moved on and built aristocracies and monarchies, the focus shifted to deep attention.  To be able to pay attention to only one thing for hours at a time, especially literature, art, or music, was a luxury reserved for the upper classes.  Boredom even more so: what the bored mind can create became one of the prevailing themes of the German Romantic.  As Hayles discusses, deep attention eventually took over: our schools and systems of higher education revolve around this type of attention, requiring it of our students if they are to succeed.
          And the wheel continues to turn: with technology becoming so pervasive in modern society, we return to hyper attention.  Ever-present computers, radios, televisions and digital music players bombard people with a constant barrage of stimulation.  This barrage has become so normal to recent generations that it has reached the point of being a security blanket: how many people every day do you see walking around campus with their earbuds in or their headphones on?  Tired of the stimulation of the natural world, we have been spurred on to create unnatural stimulus and have come to prefer it.
          Is it possible to unite these two kinds of attention?  Hayles brings up the example of video games: a very stimulation, interactive environment, but one that you can immerse yourself in for hours.  To connect back to the combat example above, I have found a similar synergy of attention when fencing or performing for marching band: my world reduces to those stimuli useful to me, shrinking down to the fencing strip or the space from goal line to goal line.  All three of these activities require quick reaction time and close attention, and offer rewards in return: whether it's beating the level, winning the bout, or performing a show without being an inch out of place.  I believe that attention,  like so many other things, will find its best use through balance.

Curious Controversy

          At last we come to the namesake of this blog: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.  As with the last time I read it, I couldn't seem to put it down for very long at a stretch, finishing it in less than twenty-four hours.  (It feels good to be a bit ahead in this class for once, I must say.)  There's something about this little book that sucks you in and doesn't let you go, like the black holes the main character discusses in one chapter.  It is also a book that has stirred up quite a bit of controversy and internet discussion since its publication
          Our theme for this week is "alternate cognitions," and it is the "alternate cognition" of the main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time that has sparked such vehement argument.  The lead is a fifteen-year-old boy named Christopher from the small town of Swindon, England.  It is never stated outright within the text itself, but Christopher shows many symptoms of autism or Asperger's syndrome.  He has an intense interest in science and mathematics to the exclusion of almost all else, is unable to process subtle nonverbal cues, and has many peculiar routines and habits that he must stick to, such as avoiding all things yellow and brown.
          However, the author himself has neither disorder, and therein lies the rub for many people.  These readers say he cannot possibly get inside the head of a person with autism or Asperger's and it is demeaning to try.  Readers who are themselves autistic or who have Asperger's are divided on the verisimilitude of Christopher's actions and thought processes as presented in the novel:  some say that they relate very closely with Christopher, others joining the earlier-mentioned camp who think his presentation is overly-simplified and an affront to people with autism-spectrum disorders.
         It is interesting to me that people can be so deeply divided over the presentation of mental disorders such as autism in fiction.  We have "alternate cognitions" about "alternate cognitions," as it were.  I wonder if something similar would happen if someone who has an autism-spectrum disorder were to write a novel with an autistic main character.  Would similar reactions arise from those who don't share the same symptoms, accusing the author of not being "really" autistic?  Will the literary world ever see something like "The Yellow Wallpaper" for autism?   It's difficult to say, as we have so far to go to fully understand the neurotypical brain.

Colorless Green Ideas

"A noun causes a verb causes another noun. (Add adjectives to taste.)"

~Lerer, "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language"

"When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that come after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty"

~Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography

          Statistically speaking, language is a miracle.  Out of the infinite combinations of words and letters and sounds comes some form of sense that is intelligible.  We can try to speak gibberish, but as long as syntactic structure is retained, we will make some kind of sense.  An odd, Carrol-ian, Stein-ian, sense, but we can never divorce words from their structure or meaning.  In poetry, "colorless green ideas" can "sleep furiously," and the brain does not revolt, even though we know that "colorless" and "green" negate each other, and "furiously" is not an adverb one would usually use to modify "sleep."  Even words that are made up can be put into sentences and still make sense: you can read "Jabberwocky" and know that "mimsy" is an adjective and "borogove" is a noun, despite the fact that their semantic meaning is perfectly opaque.  This idea of an internal grammar fascinates me, and only increases my wonder at the human brain and its most marvelous and mutable invention: language.

          This is particularly interesting to me after taking a linguistics class last semester.  Learning how language structure works, and how inherent it is to everything we say or write, and how different languages use these structure patterns differently, opened my eyes to how truly inventive the human race can be.  The fact that we can use things as wildly variable as Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet to get across the same meanings is amazing.  Equally amazing, though, is how fast language can develop.  Lerer mentions in "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language" that a two-year-old learns a new word every two hours.  I remember reading a newspaper article years ago that cited a study positing that children's supposed grammatical errors when learning to talk (ex: double negatives) are actually testing out different possible language patterns in order to find the right one.  

          The one story that has hit me the hardest, though, is Lerer's description of the students at the school for the deaf in Nicaragua.  These students were able to create a language from nothing: they didn't even have the sounds that most people with spoken language are able to experiment with.  Instead, they were able to codify a set of gestures that had meaning to them, and create their own sign language.  Successive generations were able to take the language to a higher level of complexity, to add verb agreement and distinct parts of speech.  A groundwork having been provided, they were able to create their own grammar structure.  There is some controversy about whether this sign language arose entirely independently, but it is still a beautiful example of the triumph of the human desire to communicate.

          From here on out, I will try to ask "did that make sense" less often, and "what does that mean to you" more often.  I'll try out some of my own linguistic experiments, and see where they lead me.  I might create the next "quiz" or "chortle," or stumble on some equally cogent phrase for something never before seen. From new words to new worlds isn't that terribly large of a jump, especially for Homo mendax, man the storyteller.

Curiouser and Curiouser...

"Life, friends, is boring."

~John Berryman, Dream Song 14

          On reading this poem for a second time, images of boredom and what we associate it with appeared to me, as if projected on a mental screen.  Sherlock Holmes, from the new BBC series, languishes on a sofa, repeatedly declaring he is bored while shooting a smiley face into the wall of his flat; Prince Leonce, from Büchner's play Leonce und Lena stretches out on a bench, declaring that everything humans do is out of boredom; and of course, students in a lecture lean on their hands and stare into space as their eyes glaze over.  Life may be boring, but boredom, friends, is interesting.

          Boredom is a fascinating emotion as it seems to be almost completely internally generated.  It is possible to be bored by something, but even that seems to stem from lack of your own engagement.  In contrast to other emotions such as anger or joy, boredom is signified by a near complete lack of response, of a shutting down of mental faculties.  In Domasio's "Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain" it is posited that emotions and feelings grew out of a need to communicate socially, to convey information to others.  What, then, is the purpose of an emotion or emotional state of immobility and disinterest?  Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society, notes that "Man is the only animal capable of being bored."  Are we so attuned to activity that its lack results in withdrawal symptoms?  Or is it a sign that we are becoming--or have we become-- detached from a world that has ceased to amuse us?  Existentialists might say that boredom is merely a little glimpse into the nothing that our life really is, that we fill it with action and noise to avoid the abyss, trying to find an answer.  
          Boredom is also a great motivator in that it is the most pressing phobia of the world of entertainment.  The greatest condemnation a work, whether print or film, can receive, is the stamp of "boring."  Audience boredom, or the fear of it, is what arguably drives writers, editors, producers, networks, and publishers to constantly search for the new and different, or even just the old in a new sparkly package.  How many times have vampires, or cowboys, fantasy worlds gone in and out of vogue over the years, changing and developing each time.  Could we actually credit boredom with the progress of human society?  Staving of ennui with the printing press, moon landing, and one thousand other events?  Are we that afraid of stagnation?
         My own answer to that is no, except for one thing: perhaps boredom could lead to curiosity.  The idle mind wanders to may strange and interesting places, and once it catches on something, the real fun, so to speak, begins!  Making new worlds and new ideas starts with two little words, and can go anywhere from there.  Take some time this weekend and ask yourself "What if?"  Take a ball of thread or a handful of white pebbles with you though, it's a wide world out there, and you'll never know where you'll end up.  Or not, because sometimes getting lost is half the fun!

Tea and Empathy (or lack thereof)

"The Storyteller ... tacitly trains ... members of the social group to recognize and give priority to culturally valued emotional states." ~Keen, "Theory of Narrative Empathy

          Our topic this week is that of narrative empathy and the theory of the mind. Narrative empathy is the idea that literary works and storytelling in general can generate an empathic emotional response for their intended audience, get them to "feel the pain" of the characters. Many successful works are praised for the extent to which they accomplish this. Others (cough Hemingway cough) can be denigrated because they are seen a not doing enough to spark empathy. But what happens when an author intentionally attempts to avoid arousing empathy in his work? The answer lies in the epic theater and Verfremdungseffekt of Bertolt Brecht.

          Brecht was a German playwright of the early twentieth century and penned such works as The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage and her Children. Brecht tried to keep his plays very much grounded in the intellectual, to try and keep the audience aware that they are watching a play and to make them think about what they see on stage. He was notably displeased when the song "Mack the Knife" from The Threepenny Opera became popular because of the catchy tune, with no regard to the bloody, murderous subject matter. To these ends Brecht created the genre of epic theater.

Epic theater was inteded to contrast sharply with typical "dramatic theater," and was designed to distance both the actors and the audience from the action. This distance and lack of empathy desired by Brecht has been termed the Verfremdungseffekt, or "alienation effect." Prolouges before each scene describe what is going to happen in it, draining the plays of much of their dramatic tension. A recent Michigan State production of Mother Courage used silent animated shorts and boxing ring announcers to this end. Scenes and plotlines in epic theater are often fragmentary, with only loose connections between them. In Mother Courage, set during the Thirty Year's war, years can pass from scene to scene, and the whole play covers nearly the entire war.

          This distance from the subject matter is also applied to the characters and the actors in epic theater. Actors were encouraged to learn their lines in their native dialect, but perform in standard stage German, preventing familiarity with their parts. Characters are very flat, do not change, and are often defined by a single trait. Many non-central characters do not even have names. In Mother Courage, besides the titular woman and her children, only the prostitute Yvette is given a name, the rest of the characters being referred to by profession or rank in the army. Even the central charaters of the "children" (they are at least 18 for the majority of the play) are only allowed the depth a single trait will give them: Eilif is brave, Swiss Cheese is honest, and Katrin is kind. Their mother is given no personal development whatsoever, and arrives at the end of the war the same as she was at the beginning: tough, cold, and almost unfeeling, qualities you needed to survive as a camp follower in that time.

           If all of this distance results in the desired lack of empathy, the audience will leave thinking how horrible it is that war has wreaked this destruction on the world, and that war in and of itself is wrong, unlinked to any personal connection. How successful this is though, I am not sure. Humans are empathic creatures by nature, and will find ways to relate to almost anything.



Skeleton Outline for Midterm Paper

Of Cookies and Hobbyhorses:

Memory and Association in Literature

After a month of exploring the literary history of the mind, we’ve dived headfirst into some interesting literature, and some equally fascinating topics in cognitive science. Attention, distraction, memory, association, the physicality of thought and the location of the soul; all have been covered in blogs and three-hour class discussions that leave me wanting more. As fuel to the fire we’ve read some of history’s great authors: Descartes, Sterne, Swift, and Proust, to name but a few. These authors became our “case studies” for the scientific concepts mentioned above. The one topic that I have become personally attached to is that of memory and association, the connections the brain can make without the conscious knowledge of the mind associated with it. When memory and association are brought up in the context of literature, one’s mind naturally jumps to Marcel Proust and his work In Search of Lost Time, where the author sets his story against the canvas of his memory, rebuilding a world for himself as he lies bedridden in his apartment. Proust’s famous trains of associations have been analyzed for almost one hundred years (the book was first published in French in 1913), but I propose that this authorial device began one hundred and fifty years earlier with Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne uses his narration style, his characters, and structural and typographical devices to paint an interesting and challenging portrait of association in the brain.

The most obvious reference to association in the mind in Sterne’s work is the style of narration itself.

Though most neurotypical brains function in very much the same way, no two individual minds follow the same paths of association.

In addition to the narration style, Laurence Sterne also applies the concept of association to his characters.

It is what Sterne does with these associations and devices that really interesting, though.
Proust used his reminiscences to build a world and contemplate the nature of the mind, while Sterne bypasses navel-gazing in favor of humor and satire. Through his chapters and volumes, as well as his typographical idiosyncrasies, he lampoons the nature of the novel at its most basic level. By writing Tristram Shandy as if it is being told aloud, or transcribed directly from thought to page, Sterne keeps his reader guessing, thrown about on a spinning carnival teacup-ride of disorienting associations. And what do we have to cling to throughout this madness but the hope that the main plot will finally progress, that Sterne has a final destination in mind. And in the end, even this meager hope is torn away, as the whole novel is revealed to be a cock-and-bull story told by Uncle Toby to the rest of the family. The connections between Tristram Shandy and the structure of the mind highlight the ridiculous, complicated nature of human consciousness, and showcase how far we are from truly understanding another person’s way of thinking.