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Angus Fletcher. <em>Wonderworks. The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature</em>

2021; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/style.55.4.0512

2374-6629

Pavel,

History of Science and Medicine

Angus Fletcher's strikingly original book is a pleasure to read. It offers a wide-ranging reflection on literature's power to heal the human mind's distress and lead it on the path to wise self-assurance. In order to reach this praiseworthy end, Fletcher inspects the three main purposes of literature, to instruct, to delight, and to generate feelings, which had been defined long ago by ancient thinkers—docere, delectare, movere, in Cicero's terms—and are each presented in a new, unexpected and persuasive way.Usually, books about literature focus on a few texts that share the same topic or come from the same culture or period. Fletcher's arguments, by contrast, rely on a large number of literary works, the older ones coming from a variety of traditions, while the recent ones include renowned grand pieces smartly joined with popular novels, movies, TV shows, and comic books.Reading Wonderworks, one feels like walking in a friendly bookstore and browsing through new and used volumes written by English-speaking authors or translated from other languages, in prose or in verse, high-style or low, in order to pick up some, leaf through them and read a few verses or a couple of paragraphs. The difference is that in Wonderworks, Fletcher is next to us to describe the books, make unexpected comments, and explain why one should definitely purchase and read this book or put it back on the shelf right away and forget about it. His advice, which never adopts the superior attitude of knowing so much more than his readers is unassuming, friendly, fun to hear, even as it involves—as it does all the time—an impressive knowledge of both literature and science.Acquainted with the latest results of brain research, Fletcher's arguments take into account the actual ways in which our nervous system operates when we experience passions, desires, hopes, disappointments, traumas, and all versions of positive or negative feelings. Inviting us to read classic or recent books, he points to their cognitive and emotional messages as well as to the resonances they trigger, each time explaining in detail the neurological activity that underlie these cognitive and emotional experiences. As he advances from one set of works to the next, he signals the literary innovations they promote and derives his hypotheses from these works themselves, rather than first postulating an abstract cultural concept and then seeking factual confirmation. His views are inspired by William James' mixture of radical empiricism and decision-based approach to beliefs, by the scientific method that starts with observation, next formulates predictions that rely on causal hypotheses, and then proceeds to experiments or just to further observations needed to confirm or refute these predictions. He also counts on Bertrand Russel's agreement with James' view that conscious intention is the distinctive characteristic of a voluntary act (258). Causality as a general principle, joined in the concrete production of cultural artefacts by intention and will are the factors that make literature possible, as a subsequent article by Fletcher (Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a Narrative, in Narrative, vol. 29, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–28) argues in detail. As opposed to the “glorification of incomprehension” promoted by some disciples of I. A. Richards and their more recent continuators, he agrees with the Aristotelian tradition reinvigorated by Chicago School, according to which literary studies should search the causes that prompt formal, cognitive, and emotional effects. Taking this path allows him not only to understand and explain literature, but also to link it to the scientific knowledge about our brain's detection of causes and its way of eliciting emotions, intentions, and decisions.The book's main hypothesis is that at the levels of teaching (docere) and feeling (movere), literature has a clearly discernable use, a function that could be called “medical” because it instructs its readers about the multitude of emotions and attitudes that are fundamental for a happy, successful self. According to Fletcher, the discovery that literature can do such things was made thousands of years ago, at Ur, in Sumer, in the oldest culture that developed writing, by Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon the Great, a princess who sang a prayer and then wrote it as a piece of poetry, which included her own name. Literature and scripture, we are told, were thus born together, prompting the rise of narratives, stories that, first, connect events and actions answering fundamental questions like “Where does our world come from?” and “Where will we go when we die?” (5) and second, stir emotions.Fletcher calls these discoveries “inventions,” faithful to the Latin origin of this term: inventio “discovery” from invenio “to come upon, to find”. They satisfy the human propensity to wonder, to have “irrational desires,” “uncontrollable passions,” and “griefs that split us into pieces” (7). Literature, Fletcher infers, has a crucial existential purpose: it was invented “for overcoming the doubt and pain of just being us” (9).Examining literature's links to wonder from the oldest times to nowadays, Fletcher proposes an inventory of literary innovations, each time showing how recent neuroscience can detect the actual labor of literature in various places of our brain. The starting point of his inquiry is Aristotle's reflections on what literature does: generate emotions, and how it does it: by assembling a plot, characters, a story-world, a narrator, and a style of telling/writing. Oedipus' story—Fletcher continues—takes us on the life path of a young prince who “was fated to sleep with his mother.” Learning about this prediction, the mother takes drastic action, but the shepherd she entrusts to get rid of her son brings him to another country, where he is raised by a different mother. Later, when Oedipus discovers from an oracle what fate has decided for him, he flees the home he believes to be his and, reaching his true native city, he meets “a lovely widowed queen …”Fletcher thus selects only a few elements of Sophocles' Oedipus King to emphasize a basic invention in literature, the stretch, as he calls it, which consists in exaggerating passions, dilemmas, actions, feelings, and the rhetorical means of presenting them, in order to invite us, readers or spectators, to “lose ourselves” in the book, the play or the film. And, in addition to feeling good about this experience, we also feel “less bad” about ourselves since the story purges our unhealthy fears in a process that Aristotle called catharsis “purification, purgation.” It concurs, Fletcher suggests, with the recent psychiatric discovery that therapy is helped by “self-efficacy,” that is, by the silent or explicit conviction that we are strong enough to handle our posttraumatic fears. According to Fletcher, Aristotle understood the importance of self-efficacy when he discussed the role of belated recognition (anagnorisis) in tragedy. When toward the end of Sophocles' play, Oedipus realizes that his wife is his actual mother, he finally can look “from above” at his own tragedy, in what Fletcher calls a Hurt Delay. (The capital letters emphasize the importance of each invention.) To benefit from Oedipus's story, we must learn to adopt the God's-Eye view on our human condition, accept Oedipus's pain—as the Chorus does in the play—and empathize with the hero's assent to his misfortune.To instruct, to move, and to cure, literature offers us a multitude of procedures that Fletcher persuasively portrays, linking them with their neuroscience counterparts and with their benefits for our mental health. In the oldest times, singers could amaze and terrify their listeners by reciting supernatural utterances in a God Voice, as in the Biblical “Let there be light.” In Homer's Iliad, by contrast, the same majestic voice signals the presence of danger and rallies the listener's courage by chanting a human pean: “The wrath, sing, goddess, of Achilles, son of Peleus,” which celebrates the military rivalries and heroic struggles of the Greek allies in the war against Troy. Peans enhance valor, neuroscience tells us, given that group song increases the amount of oxytocin in our blood, as do prayers that announce a divine presence (37). The energy of the Iliad, Fletcher explains, helps readers Take Heart, as do so many books and movies on similar themes, including novels by Charles Dickens and Toni Morrison, and movies like Ridley Scott's Gladiator. After Homer Rallying our Courage, poems by ancient Greek Sappho, ancient Chinese Zhou, and ninth-century Abbasid princess Ulayya bint al-Mahdi teach us how to Rekindle the Romance. Thus, we find the Secret Discloser of our most unique feelings and are able, as when we read Jane Austen's later novels, to “discover wonder intimate” (56).This being done, we need to get rid of Anger, as the book of Job, according to Fletcher's reading, entices us to do. Job's arrogance when he faces God's tests deserves to be punished, some might think, but his subsequent repentance calls for empathy. Neuroscience shows that our brain longs for justice, individual and collective, but also that this longing can lead to violence, isolation, and hate. Job's long complaints and his final apology, Fletcher argues, encourages empathy and increases the chances of mental and social peace. Sometimes, however, an exclamation, a mere cry, are enough to generate empathy, as do Oedipus's howl in Oedipus King and, at the end of Antigone, Creon's wail when he realizes that his over-zealous embrace of civic rigor as king of Thebes and his rejection of family benevolence led to the death of his son and his wife: “Oh, the crime is mine and mine alone!” (65).A praise of satire (Aesop's fables, some of Socrates' lines in Plato's dialogues) and self-satire (Socrates again) enjoin us to take the Serenity Elevator and “float above hurt” (71, 80), while the exploration of the future, tragic in Oedipus's case, can be the topic of narratives that offer suspense and Excite our Curiosity, as is the case with the sub-Saharan oral poem The Epic of Sundata (thirteenth century), the Celtic stories of King Arthur and his knights, and, more recently, the popular docudramas about space travel. Then, back to nobler feelings, one needs to ease one's mind by reading (yes!) Dante's Inferno, where souls are forever punished for their sins while readers, initially infected with paranoia, are warned to beware and free themselves from fear. In a long list of writers and thinkers who would later play the same game, one meets the famous Chaucer, Luther, Milton, Balzac, Karl Marx, Jules Verne, Kafka, Borges, as well as my much-loved Phillip K. Dick.Fairy tales next, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella among others, help us Jettison our Pessimism, as do Chaplin comic movies (beginning with The Gold Rush) and super-hero comic books about Superman, Supergirl, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, the Incredible Hulk, and many others, whose basic rule, quoted by Fletcher, requires that “In every instance, good shall triumph over evil” (120). In a witty section at the end of this chapter, the author imagines a brief story of the world's intellectual adventures and narrates it as the fairy-tale life of Andrew Lang, nineteenth-century connoisseur of popular traditions. Born in Scotland in 1844, the boy was raised “by a goodly, wise matron, Mother Enlightenment who taught him that all of Nature was created by Reason.” Unfortunately, soon a terrible stepmother jumped from the pages of a sad book, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859) to tell everybody that life comes from innumerable arbitrary mutations and natural selections. Instead of Reason, Luck. How to undo this tragic intervention? By going back to fairy tales, Andrew Lang answered and published The Blue Fairy Book (1889), followed by other collections of fairy tales, many of which, Fletcher reminds us, were read by J. R. R. Tolkien, Walt Disney and, I would guess, C. S. Lewis. Yet, since in fairytales luck rather than reason brings happiness, Fletcher reminds his readers that good fortune “can descend like a flash from the blue …” (124).Once Cinderella's miracles emphasize how useful all literary genres can be, we can turn to grief in Shakespeare's Hamlet, a play written three years after the author lost his 11-years old son Hamnet. As Fletcher suggests, Shakespeare needed three years to come to terms with grief and heal by writing a tragedy about it, a revenge tragedy to some extent inspired by Thomas Kyd's Hieronimo Is Mad Again (around 1592), but simpler and slower. The king of Denmark having just died, his ghost appears to let his son, Hamlet, know that the murderer was the victim's brother, who soon married the widow, Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. The various actions of the play, Fletcher argues, offer a model of grief therapy, which, in Shakespeare's time as well as nowadays, involves two stages. First, one must acknowledge one's sorrow, thus letting the deep parts of our brain process it to reassure and boost our self-worth. Second, one needs to recollect the happy moments of the past, thus letting the brain release some dopamine for neural pleasure. When in Macbeth, Fletcher notes, Macduff learns that his wife and babies had been slaughtered, before deciding to take revenge he wants to “feel [this loss] as a man,” to remember the things “That were most precious to me” (129).By slowing down the plot and including Hamlet's meditations on life and death, Fletcher argues, the play shows how hard it is “to pause in grief” and “even harder to move on,” how wrong it is to stop grieving too soon, as Hamlet's mother did, and how for Hamlet the memory of his dead father will “wipe away all trivial fond records” (132). Hamlet's melancholy, anger, sudden changes of mood, are all symptoms of what Fletcher calls a “complicated grief,” an emotion that overwhelms our intricate nervous system, its traditional remedy being funeral rites. In Hamlet's case, however, the ghost of his dead father asks for revenge and the son, unable to act, “stumbles upon another way to keep his father's memory alive: staging a play” (135). The play, The Murder of Gonzago, staged in the third act, is just art, however, and cannot cure Hamlet's grief. Only later does he meet someone “he can trust to remember” (136) in the person of Laertes, the brother of Ophelia, the young woman, now dead, whom Hamlet loved and neglected. Realizing that he is not alone in his sorrow, for the first time Hamlet feels a greater peace (136) and teaches us, spectators, that grief and mourning have an end. Because of this Sorrow Resolver, Hamlet was and still is Shakespeare's most successful play.Soon, John Donne's paradoxical poetry will Banish Despair, Cao Xueqin's Dream of Red Chamber would teach us how to Achieve Self-Acceptance, and, together with Henry Fielding, Jane Austen will Ward Off Heartbreak. Cervantes's Don Quixote had a role in the latter invention, since it helped stop the older fascination with chivalric romances, preparing the way for modern reason to replace it (170). Alas, Fletcher complains, the madness of romance came back in 1740, when Samuel Richardson dared publish Pamela, an epistolary romance, followed by Clarissa, a much longer one. Without going into the details of these works, Fletcher commends Henry Fielding for resisting romance's attempt to take over narrative literature. The rival novel Fielding wrote, Tom Jones, is sentimental to some extent, not unlike Richardson's romances, but also full of mock-epic humor, like Don Quixote. It was Tom Jones that later let Jane Austen realize that literature could both romanticize the splendor of love and laugh at human frailty. Her own novels, Emma in particular, Fletcher shows, teach us how to accept that other people “have their own distinct needs and desires” both sincere and imperfect, needs and desires about which we should “care—with care” (180). Austen's stylistic use of free indirect speech appropriately suggests that the thoughts of other people are not always and entirely unreachable by us.Readers who would like to Energize Their Life can look for help in Mary Shelley's science-fiction novel Frankenstein and learn to Solve Every Mystery from Edgar Allan Poe's novella “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Then, in one of the most powerful chapters of the book, one can Become one's Better Self under the guidance of Frederick Douglass's second and third autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), which instruct readers to “love the rich strangeness of where we come from, while opening ourselves to all the possibilities beyond” (224), that is, in the context of the struggle for abolition of slavery, to remember one's origin and participate in collective political activities. As Fletcher advises us: make “every day your independence day” (226).Wonderworks offers further lessons: to Bounce Back from Failure, in George Eliot's Middlemarch, to resist brain washing, in Mark Anthony's funeral speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and to find Peace of Mind in Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll feeds our creativity, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez renews our future—as does, perhaps, Kafka's Metamorphosis—while other notable works help us make wiser decisions, believe in ourselves, unfreeze our hearts, live our dreams, and, last but not least, lessen our loneliness. Fletcher concludes by reminding writers who want to invent that the best inventor is Nature: like her, as old Quintilian knew, writers should embrace happy accidents, copy many models, and focus on what works rather than on what is “right” (388).Angus Fletcher's book, both erudite and fun to read, surprising and full of common sense, sensitive to the latest discoveries of neurology and in tune with ancient studies of literature, is a great success. By demonstrating that in addition to artistic pleasure, literary narratives train us to handle our emotions and reach a happy, responsible self, Wonderworks convincingly shows that literature has an essential, durable role in human education, be it in school or later, in our personal life.Admirably emphasizing individual sentiments and their intricate rapports with the health of the self, Fletcher's research takes advantage of the neurology of affective life, which captures so well the brain activities related to various individual feelings, moods, and states of mind. One possible way to reach further results in this promising field would consist in examining those aspects of literary narratives which, going beyond individual feelings, examine our interactions with other beings, human or divine, most usually with those who are close to us, parents, descendants, love-mates, rulers, gods, known or unknown, possible or actual. Love, loyalty, rebellion, adversity, betrayal, crime, revenge can be considered as networks of links between several participants, all having their own intentions and projects, all making decisions and all experiencing their own particular feelings, to which we, readers, resonate in various ways. The existential purpose of literature, so well defined by Fletcher, would thus be extended to “overcoming the doubt and pain of always being together with our fellow human beings.” Two kinds of works would provide relevant examples: those in which the action depends on chains of past events and those whose characters prepare subsequent one. In both cases, Fletcher's rejection of the “glorification of incomprehension” and his interest in narrative causality are vital.Concerning past events, it often happens that stories and plays do not go all the way back to the original circumstances that directly or indirectly have caused the actions they narrate or represent. In Oedipus King, which stages a late episode in the main character and his mother's life, the protagonist discovers that, in accordance with old oracles, he has murdered his own father and married his mother. At the end of the tragedy, his lamentations inspire our pity, as Fletcher notes, but also our repulsion (our fear, Aristotle would say) of a world in which the gods can assign someone this horrible fate without any clear reason. Was there an older transgression in Oedipus's family that could help making sense of his fate? Sophocles doesn't mention it, but other authors reveal that Laius, Oedipus's father, had in his youth raped and caused the death of Chrysippus, the teenage son of Pelops, king of Pisa, who hosted Laius to protect him from dynastic conflicts in Thebes. As punishment, the gods forbad Laius to marry and when he did it anyway, an oracle warned him and his wife Jocasta that if they do not refrain from having children their son will kill his father and, as other oracles added, will marry his mother. They fail to obey. For those who know this version of the myth, Oedipus's lamentations in Sophocles's tragedy would sound even more upsetting, given that the protagonist is punished for someone else's—Laius and Jocasta's—faults. Moreover, since Oedipus neither desired nor courted Jocasta, widow queen of Thebes, but received her as a prize for having saved the city from the monstrous Sphinx, he had nothing to reproach himself. Going beyond the original transgressors, the wrath of the gods punished their innocent heirs. The emotional lesson might in this case include reverence for hospitality (Pelops's) and repulsion for sexual violence (Laius's against Chrysippus) but, also, in the face of divine injustice, a blaze of despair. Literary works, one should not forget, are often meant to generate negative feelings, gloom, hopelessness, revulsion, that may resist Aristotelian catharsis.Equally significant are the multiple links between various individuals when they plan future actions. The first revenge tragedy in English literature, Thomas Kyd's Hieronimo Is Mad Again, stages a rather complicated, yet always intelligible plot, involving the murder of young Horatio by his love-rival Balthazar, allied with Lorenzo, a false friend, followed by a spectacular revenge planned by Hieronimo, the victim's father. Compared to Thomas Kyd's play, Shakespeare's Hamlet, written a decade later, has a simpler structure which, as Fletcher's comments rightly emphasize, is oriented toward the main character's emotions and hesitations. Nevertheless, beyond Hamlet's long monologues, melancholy lines and clownish answers, one can notice a carefully organized sequence of feelings, decisions, actions, and reactions.Revenge, first. At the beginning of the play, prince Hamlet learns from the ghost of his father that he was murdered by Claudius, who is now the king of the country. While in The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo tries to go to court against the murderers of his son but fails, in Hamlet the suspected criminal being a monarch, courts have no authority against him. As the dead king's son, Hamlet is responsible for punishing his uncle. But how can the prince make sure that the ghost's testimony is reliable? By watching his uncle's attitudes during a play, slightly edited, which evokes the crime (“The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King” 2.2, 593–4). Once convinced that the ghost told him the truth, Hamlet attempts to kill his uncle twice: while Claudius prays—but why should one send a murderer to heaven?—and when, suspecting that Claudius is hidden in the room of Gertrude, Hamlet stabs … Polonius, adviser of the king.Self-protection, next. The guilty king having sensed Hamlet's hostility, the prince must be on guard. Sent to England to be murdered, Hamlet arranges instead the execution of the two courtiers who betrayed him. At the end of the tragedy, the prince understands that he has been deceitfully wounded with a poisoned sword and has only a few moments to stab Claudius with the same sword. It is the failure of self-protection that makes the final revenge both possible and urgent.Hamlet's links with Gertrude, his mother, are equally relevant. How was it possible, he wonders, for Gertrude not to lament and mourn long enough the departure of the man who linked the two of them most intimately—his father, her husband—and instead marry someone else, right away, against good manners and funeral customs? Perhaps all women are equally mercurial, including his beloved Ophelia, daughter of Polonius. Hence Hamlet's ever-changing attitude toward Ophelia and, at the same time, his attempt to open Gertrude's eyes (3.4). A close look at the turns of the plot suggests that the play's denouement—Claudius and Hamlet being both killed by the poisoned blade of the same sword—has something to do with Gertrude's “trespass,” as Hamlet calls her hasty marriage with Claudius (3. 4, v. 142). It is, indeed, because of this marriage that Hamlet doubts women's loyalty and treats Ophelia the way he does, causing her despair, madness, and drowning. Her death and Polonius's—by Hamlet's hand in Gertrude's room—motivate Ophelia's brother, Laertes, to conspire with Claudius against Hamlet. Consequently, Laertes challenges the prince to a fencing fight during which, by chance, the secretly poisoned sword changes hands and both fighters are wounded. Facing death, Laertes confesses his betrayal and Hamlet rushes to stab Claudius. The chain of feelings and actions aptly fits Fletcher's idea of causality in literature: Gertrude fails to mourn her first husband; therefore, Hamlet suspects all women, thus causing Ophelia's death, soon avenged by Laertes, who tells Hamlet the truth so that the prince, before dying, kills Claudius.Gift-rapped in an unusually flamboyant play that includes surprising successions of settings, the triple role of the main protagonist as avenger, deep thinker and clown, and a multi-layered style, Hamlet's coherent plot and plausible depiction of a variety of feelings is a major factor of its success. A study of literature that would examine such multiple human interactions and, just like Wonderworks, would research the ways in which our nervous system ponders and sustains them would be a superb continuation of this important, deeply satisfactory work.