Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? (2017)
nautil.us
nautil.us
61 days ago. 54 comments, including the same misunderstanding of the thesis due to responding to the misleading title.
This is not what the article is saying. It is saying that medieval authors represented characters’ mental states mainly through their direct speech and gestures, which were used to convey intense emotions in a stereotypical way—lots of hand-wringing and tearing of hair, but few subtle gestures such as raised eyebrows or faint smiles flickering over lips.
So examples from poetry, classical drama, Ecclesiastes etc. does not disprove this. Those are all examples of direct speech. And the gestures of Achilles are not exactly subtle. (And in any case Greek antiquity is not medieval.)
The article is concerned about how mental states are described in fiction. The sagas does not say "Eric felt conflicting emotions about this but kept silent". They describe what he said and did, and you have to figure out the mental state yourself unless he outright says (or sings) what he is feeling. In contrast modern literature may have an all-knowing narrator which tells you the emotions and thoughts of the characters, or you may have internal monologue or stream-of-consciousnesses which give you a direct view into the mind of the characters.
A question then is why pre-modern literature use direct speech to convey emotion while modern use mentalizing? A possible explanation is that pre-modern literature was read or acted out in public, while modern literature is read silently in private.
The article further propose that reading literary fiction may in itself improve your mentalizing skills, i.e. your ability to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling.
Nine fields of orchids at one time I grew,
For melilot a hundred acres too,
And fifty acres for the azalea bright,
The rumex fragrant and the lichen white.
I longed to see them yielding blossoms rare,
And thought in season due the spoil to share.
I did not grieve to see them die away,
But grieved because midst weeds they did decay.
[1] http://www.lingshidao.cn/hanshi/quyuan.htm [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
Or another example - Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Maybe fiction, maybe not, but certainly an example of internal exposition.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes
However the article continues "Moreover, emotions were usually predictable reactions to external actions or events, revealing little about a character that was complex or surprising." which is absolutely bullshit. The Icelandic Sagas which the article uses as an example have lots of examples of complex and surprising emotions - it is just narrated in a "show - don't tell" genre.
"The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and "casts strength in his thumos" (Iliad, 16:529). The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one place that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him""
(Note that, simplifying a bit, Jaynes argued that the men in the Illiad were consciousless robots which "heard the voices" of the Gods telling them to do things, instead of having an inner monologue)
and
"The Iliad is about action and it is full of action — constant action. It really is about Achilles' acts and their consequences, not about his mind. And as for the gods, the Iliadic authors and the Iliadic characters all agree in the acceptance of this divinely managed world. To say the gods are an artistic apparatus is the same kind of thing as to say that Joan of Arc told the Inquisition about her voices merely to make it all vivid to those who were about to condemn her. It is not that the vague general ideas of psychological causation appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way around."
[1] http://www.julianjaynes.org/origin-of-consciousness_english_...
I don't understand that. All his actions are driven by his emotions. The first line is "Sing, Goddess, of Achilles' rage" (In the original Greek "rage" is literally the first word). So obviously the mind and emotions of Achilles is the absolute center of the story, driving all the action.
That is, while it's now obvious to us these were emotions, the authors of the Illiad didn't perceive them as such -- or so I understand Jaynes argued -- and instead they thought they were either physical things (much like a stomach ache) or a command of "the Gods".
If you speak Greek, what's the exact term for "rage" as written in the Illiad?
----
edit: ok, found it. Jaynes claims this:
"Even the poem itself is not wrought by men in our sense. Its first three words are Menin aedie Thea, 'Of wrath sing, O Goddess!' And the entire epic which follows is the song of the goddess which the entranced bard 'heard' and chanted to his iron-age listeners among the ruins of Agamemnon's world."
I find it a bit disappointing because even if the singer didn't ascribe feelings to men, he must at least understand the meaning of "wrath" itself. And it seems to me it must be hard to understand this emotion unless you can feel it.
Again, I must add the disclaimer that I don't know whether Jaynes was correct. I suspect he wasn't. But he built such a fascinating house of cards with his theory...
The more dense and plastic civilization becomes, the more important the labels become - because assignment and the discussion of the assignment of these labels becomes the most important signal of ingroup/outgroup, which then means the difference between eating and not eating. For the middle-class professional/management class (the people who make a living based on perceptions of their authority), this leads to a culture of stories that can spend 100x more words saying how somebody feels, why someone feels, and what's wrong or right with that, rather than any physical acts conceivably verifiable by observation.
"Social intelligence" is what a member of the academic middle-class might label this. A different member of the academic middle-class belonging to a entirely different culture (place or time), however, would probably label any particular example the first academic pointed out as "social stupidity," due to their respecting an entirely different set of arbitrary signs mythologizing the same acts.
Before the rise of the medicalization of thought (as psychology), by average people in conversation, and by elites in their theories of scientific social control, what was important was the description of acts and the prediction of acts - but Freud did a number on the West.
Angry and sad were once descriptions about how people looked, and tentative predictions of what they were liable to do (based on past experience of that look.)
/rant
I think that if people were better educated in what actually went on in Medieval and Ancient times, there would be more articles that are better written about it.
It's true the sagas don't so much; mostly because it was a spoken word art form. Duh.
The Sagas were an oral tradition - so were the Iliad and Gilgamesh and most of the Bible centuries before they were written down. Does your "Duh" imply some obvious point I am missing?