8 ms·

Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? (2017)

78 points by dnetesn 8y ago

jonyt 8y ago
Meh. First, the articles cited all have the same familiar problems of statistical psychology studies - small sample size drawn from psychology students. Also, unrelatedly, I find ancient stories in many cases better than modern ones because of modern literary fiction's obsession with recording the minutiae of every character's thoughts. As the article notes, in one short story David Foster Wallace takes 12 pages to record a boy walking to a pool and jumping in. I can see the case for representing characters' inner states, it's an important part of the story, but modern literary fiction takes it way too far.
- yason 8y ago
  I can see the case for representing characters' inner states, it's an important part of the story, but modern literary fiction takes it way too far. Considering how things are written now maybe the inner states are the story? Maybe collectively we've shifted to being more interested in exploring human thoughts and emotions and not so much the direct action anymore? And maybe in a hundred years or so we'll shift our curiosity in some other part of the interaction that is life. Exploration always swings between taking it way too far and taking it way too near.
  - buboard 8y ago
    or maybe because we 've shifted to cities. observing people is easier to write about when it is all you see is people and you live far from nature.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Most contemporary fiction is not like David Foster Wallace. Literary fiction is special subset of fiction that moves its own way, have its own audience, habits and so on.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
masonic 8y ago
It's an odd coincidence that someone would submit an article that's a year old that was already submitted just eight hours earlier today. Another odd coincidence is that the submitter did the same earlier today with another nautil.us article ("The Robot Economy Will Run on Blockchain").
- dang 8y ago
  Presumably it's because the article was just republished.
woodruffw 8y ago
Is this really the case? The two archetypal Western ancient fictions, the Iliad and Odyssey, display emotion front and center: Agammenon's greed and jealousy, the love between Achilles and Patrocles (and the former's rage at the latter's death), and Priam's mourning all come to mind. Similarly for the Odyssey, a story about nostalgia in the most literal sense: the pain of Odysseus's estrangement from his family, entangled with the pain of returning as a stranger. Homer even refers to him epithetically as "many-pained" and of "many-sorrows." That's a small sample size, but the same can be seen in Roman love poetry: Horace does not hide the emotions of his subjects[1]. [1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Odes_(Horace)/Book_I/5 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Odes_(Horace)/Boo...
- paganel 8y ago
  A Persian poet like Hafez [1], who lived in the 14th century, also deals pretty extensively with feelings, much more so than a lot of novelists and poets from today's age. Granted, I've only read him in translation but even so I remember that his poetry left a definite mark on younger me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez
  - smnrchrds 8y ago
    Hafez's poems are not fiction. They don't have a plot, they are just pure expressions of emotions. I am curious to know if Ferdowsi ever talks about feelings in Shahnameh [0]. I cannot remember any such instances, but I have only ever read small parts of it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
- olavk 8y ago
  The Icelandic sagas certainly also portrays emotions. The characters are very much driven by emotions. The point is it is displayed entirely through their actions, not by internal monologue or direct description of their mental states like in 19th century literature. Ancient lyrical poetry like Sappho on the other hand is direct expression of feelings. Ecclesiastes (in the Bible) is a monologue about the narrators feelings and mental state. So it seems to more like a question of genre and narrative style rather than some kind of mental development of humanity. The sagas are not fiction, they are supposed to be about actual historical figures and events. You don't know what a historical figure actually thought and felt, only what they said and did. There are some examples in the sagas where characters directly express their feeling through poetry.
joe_the_user 8y ago
It seems like this sort of inquiry would connect with Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It is a fascinating thesis, one what has been somewhat beyond science to test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
- Latteland 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing that link. Jaynes' idea is interesting but I really think we're no different than people in the past. I don't see how this change to bicameral minds could have happened.
  - rgrieselhuber 8y ago
    I see it not as a hardware change but a software change. That doesn’t prove Jaynes’ theory, of course. There is another book called Metaprogramming and the Human Biocomputer. Jaynes’ theory is interesting to me because it reminds me of disassociative disorders.
  - spc476 8y ago
    I'm currently reading the book [1] and while I haven't finished it yet, the thrust (if I'm understanding it correctly) seems to be that it was the increasing complexity of civilization (as populations rose in an area) that lead the brain to reform connections to be less bicameral in nature. There are evolutionary changes in humans that are known to us. For instance, people of European descent can still digest milk into adulthood; the father you get from Europe, the greater that lactose intolerance grows. So it could also be for bicameralism. I too, am skeptical about how this came across the world, but he does mention in passing that some of the Pre-Columbian cultures of North America could have still been bicameral as late as the early 1500s. It's really an interesting read. [1] I found a copy in a used book store and the price was right.
  - tw1010 8y ago
    I don't think you can evaluate if that's true by reading books by people in the past. There are a lot of different states of mind which are consistent with the same output. I mean, just think about how many people with wildly different states of mind (schizophrenic, autism) today who can write books which are indistinguishable from books by "normal" people.
throwaway487548 8y ago
Ramayana and Mahabharata do.
jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
So through the eyes love attains the heart For the eyes are the scouts of the heart And the eyes go reconnoitering For what it would please the heart to possess And when they are in full accord And firm, all three, in one resolve At that time, perfect love is born From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart. For as all true lovers know, love is perfect kindness Which is born, there is no doubt from the heart and eyes.* -Guiraut de Borneilh >Tristan, you have drunk your death >>If by my death you mean this agony of love, that is my life. If by my death you mean the punishment [Iseult and I] are to suffer if discovered, I accept that. But if by my death you mean eternal punishment in the fires of hell, I accept that too. What about the troubadours? It seems like their works had a common theme of "My love for this person is an expression of who I am and what is happening inside of me as an individual" Everything I know about the troubadours I learned watching Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on my TV, so I may be missing some important information.
- Bayart 8y ago
  It's not long form fiction though, it's essentially song-writing. The success of that genre, and it's exotic dimension, had a lot to do with its sentimental overtones (and erotic undertones), which was at the time quite disruptive. Socially it correlates with the rise of a new intelligentsia looking for more than the epic fiction that were the literary bread and butter until then. It colored the chivalric literature that came afterwards but even then the epic form remained the framework of reference.
  - jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
    Ah. Thanks for clarifying.
naasking 8y ago
You could also argue improved technology allowed for more detailed narratives. Hand copying scrolls and books means only the essential details of a narrative would be recorded. Hyper linking means you could now conceptually write a story from every character's perspective and switch between them with a click.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Why assume that feelings aren't essential details of a a narrative in some stories?
  - naasking 8y ago
    If they were, they'd be mentioned briefly as facts rather than a whole narrative spent on justifying those feelings, like the Greek myths mentioned in this thread that are about grief, jealousy, lust, etc.
aries1980 8y ago
> The emergence of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries introduced omniscient narrators who could penetrate their characters’ psyches, at times probing motives that were opaque to the characters themselves. And by the 20th century, many authors labored not just to describe, but to simulate the psychological experience of characters. What about Scipio's Dream by Cicero? http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cicero_dream_of_scipio_02_trans.htm http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cicero_dream_of_scipio_02_... One of the earliest psychoanalytical novel I know.
scandox 8y ago
Mimesis by Erich Auerbach is very good at tracing and considering these developments purely by looking at the works and language.
ineedasername 8y ago
I think they're reading the wrong things or overestimating the "inpredictable" nature of emotions in modern lit. Oedipus is filled with emotions, and certainly not all of any more or less "predictable" than something modern. Actually it might be less predictable-- modern sensibilities woild not have us respond the same way, leaving a baby to die, lillimg a stranger on the road etc.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Didn't these old stories get acted out as they were told? Perhaps the emotion was expected to appear on the stage, on the performers, not in the lines?
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  The article is more about introspection of feeling than expressing emotion.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

78 points by dnetesn 8y ago

Meh. First, the articles cited all have the same familiar problems of statistical psychology studies - small sample size drawn from psychology students. Also, unrelatedly, I find ancient stories in many cases better than modern ones because of modern literary fiction's obsession with recording the minutiae of every character's thoughts. As the article notes, in one short story David Foster Wallace takes 12 pages to record a boy walking to a pool and jumping in. I can see the case for representing characters' inner states, it's an important part of the story, but modern literary fiction takes it way too far.

yason 8y ago
I can see the case for representing characters' inner states, it's an important part of the story, but modern literary fiction takes it way too far. Considering how things are written now maybe the inner states are the story? Maybe collectively we've shifted to being more interested in exploring human thoughts and emotions and not so much the direct action anymore? And maybe in a hundred years or so we'll shift our curiosity in some other part of the interaction that is life. Exploration always swings between taking it way too far and taking it way too near.
- buboard 8y ago
  or maybe because we 've shifted to cities. observing people is easier to write about when it is all you see is people and you live far from nature.
- watwut 8y ago
  Most contemporary fiction is not like David Foster Wallace. Literary fiction is special subset of fiction that moves its own way, have its own audience, habits and so on.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

masonic 8y ago

It's an odd coincidence that someone would submit an article that's a year old that was already submitted just eight hours earlier today. Another odd coincidence is that the submitter did the same earlier today with another nautil.us article ("The Robot Economy Will Run on Blockchain").

dang 8y ago
Presumably it's because the article was just republished.

woodruffw 8y ago

Is this really the case? The two archetypal Western ancient fictions, the Iliad and Odyssey, display emotion front and center: Agammenon's greed and jealousy, the love between Achilles and Patrocles (and the former's rage at the latter's death), and Priam's mourning all come to mind. Similarly for the Odyssey, a story about nostalgia in the most literal sense: the pain of Odysseus's estrangement from his family, entangled with the pain of returning as a stranger. Homer even refers to him epithetically as "many-pained" and of "many-sorrows." That's a small sample size, but the same can be seen in Roman love poetry: Horace does not hide the emotions of his subjects[1]. [1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Odes_(Horace)/Book_I/5 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Odes_(Horace)/Boo...

paganel 8y ago
A Persian poet like Hafez [1], who lived in the 14th century, also deals pretty extensively with feelings, much more so than a lot of novelists and poets from today's age. Granted, I've only read him in translation but even so I remember that his poetry left a definite mark on younger me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez
- smnrchrds 8y ago
  Hafez's poems are not fiction. They don't have a plot, they are just pure expressions of emotions. I am curious to know if Ferdowsi ever talks about feelings in Shahnameh [0]. I cannot remember any such instances, but I have only ever read small parts of it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh
olavk 8y ago
The Icelandic sagas certainly also portrays emotions. The characters are very much driven by emotions. The point is it is displayed entirely through their actions, not by internal monologue or direct description of their mental states like in 19th century literature. Ancient lyrical poetry like Sappho on the other hand is direct expression of feelings. Ecclesiastes (in the Bible) is a monologue about the narrators feelings and mental state. So it seems to more like a question of genre and narrative style rather than some kind of mental development of humanity. The sagas are not fiction, they are supposed to be about actual historical figures and events. You don't know what a historical figure actually thought and felt, only what they said and did. There are some examples in the sagas where characters directly express their feeling through poetry.

joe_the_user 8y ago

It seems like this sort of inquiry would connect with Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It is a fascinating thesis, one what has been somewhat beyond science to test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Latteland 8y ago
Thanks for sharing that link. Jaynes' idea is interesting but I really think we're no different than people in the past. I don't see how this change to bicameral minds could have happened.
- rgrieselhuber 8y ago
  I see it not as a hardware change but a software change. That doesn’t prove Jaynes’ theory, of course. There is another book called Metaprogramming and the Human Biocomputer. Jaynes’ theory is interesting to me because it reminds me of disassociative disorders.
- spc476 8y ago
  I'm currently reading the book [1] and while I haven't finished it yet, the thrust (if I'm understanding it correctly) seems to be that it was the increasing complexity of civilization (as populations rose in an area) that lead the brain to reform connections to be less bicameral in nature. There are evolutionary changes in humans that are known to us. For instance, people of European descent can still digest milk into adulthood; the father you get from Europe, the greater that lactose intolerance grows. So it could also be for bicameralism. I too, am skeptical about how this came across the world, but he does mention in passing that some of the Pre-Columbian cultures of North America could have still been bicameral as late as the early 1500s. It's really an interesting read. [1] I found a copy in a used book store and the price was right.
- tw1010 8y ago
  I don't think you can evaluate if that's true by reading books by people in the past. There are a lot of different states of mind which are consistent with the same output. I mean, just think about how many people with wildly different states of mind (schizophrenic, autism) today who can write books which are indistinguishable from books by "normal" people.

throwaway487548 8y ago

Ramayana and Mahabharata do.

jacobwilliamroy 8y ago

So through the eyes love attains the heart For the eyes are the scouts of the heart And the eyes go reconnoitering For what it would please the heart to possess And when they are in full accord And firm, all three, in one resolve At that time, perfect love is born From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart. For as all true lovers know, love is perfect kindness Which is born, there is no doubt from the heart and eyes.* -Guiraut de Borneilh >Tristan, you have drunk your death >>If by my death you mean this agony of love, that is my life. If by my death you mean the punishment [Iseult and I] are to suffer if discovered, I accept that. But if by my death you mean eternal punishment in the fires of hell, I accept that too. What about the troubadours? It seems like their works had a common theme of "My love for this person is an expression of who I am and what is happening inside of me as an individual" Everything I know about the troubadours I learned watching Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on my TV, so I may be missing some important information.

Bayart 8y ago
It's not long form fiction though, it's essentially song-writing. The success of that genre, and it's exotic dimension, had a lot to do with its sentimental overtones (and erotic undertones), which was at the time quite disruptive. Socially it correlates with the rise of a new intelligentsia looking for more than the epic fiction that were the literary bread and butter until then. It colored the chivalric literature that came afterwards but even then the epic form remained the framework of reference.
- jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
  Ah. Thanks for clarifying.

naasking 8y ago

You could also argue improved technology allowed for more detailed narratives. Hand copying scrolls and books means only the essential details of a narrative would be recorded. Hyper linking means you could now conceptually write a story from every character's perspective and switch between them with a click.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
Why assume that feelings aren't essential details of a a narrative in some stories?
- naasking 8y ago
  If they were, they'd be mentioned briefly as facts rather than a whole narrative spent on justifying those feelings, like the Greek myths mentioned in this thread that are about grief, jealousy, lust, etc.

aries1980 8y ago

> The emergence of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries introduced omniscient narrators who could penetrate their characters’ psyches, at times probing motives that were opaque to the characters themselves. And by the 20th century, many authors labored not just to describe, but to simulate the psychological experience of characters. What about Scipio's Dream by Cicero? http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cicero_dream_of_scipio_02_trans.htm http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cicero_dream_of_scipio_02_... One of the earliest psychoanalytical novel I know.

scandox 8y ago

Mimesis by Erich Auerbach is very good at tracing and considering these developments purely by looking at the works and language.

ineedasername 8y ago

I think they're reading the wrong things or overestimating the "inpredictable" nature of emotions in modern lit. Oedipus is filled with emotions, and certainly not all of any more or less "predictable" than something modern. Actually it might be less predictable-- modern sensibilities woild not have us respond the same way, leaving a baby to die, lillimg a stranger on the road etc.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Didn't these old stories get acted out as they were told? Perhaps the emotion was expected to appear on the stage, on the performers, not in the lines?

fjsolwmv 8y ago
The article is more about introspection of feeling than expressing emotion.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]