{"id":110398,"date":"2017-05-01T08:59:15","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T12:59:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110398"},"modified":"2017-05-01T10:51:24","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T14:51:24","slug":"fiction-without-emotion-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/01\/fiction-without-emotion-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction Without Emotion, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_110399\" style=\"width: 817px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/lesliecaron.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-110399\" class=\"wp-image-110399 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/lesliecaron.jpg\" width=\"807\" height=\"632\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/lesliecaron.jpg 807w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/lesliecaron-300x235.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/lesliecaron-768x601.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-110399\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Leslie Caron reads\u2014coolly.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>As those who\u2019ve taken my expensive, profoundly eye-opening advanced writers\u2019 seminar\u00a0know, fiction is all about <em>feelings<\/em>. (I write this on the chalkboard at the start of every lesson\u2014it\u2019s my trademark.) If your short story lacks a rich, gooey emotional center, if it doesn\u2019t ooze verisimilitude and nuance, why, it\u2019s no more effective than the copy on the side of the orange-juice carton, says I. Your professors would like\u00a0you to believe that this is self-evident, that it\u2019s always been so. But fiction has a secret: it\u2019s only a Johnny-come-lately to the world of emotional depth. A few hundred years ago, literature was a far less psychological enterprise, and people still liked it well enough. No one is quite sure why the medium reoriented itself. Julie Sedivy explains the evolution: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/47\/consciousness\/why-doesnt-ancient-fiction-talk-about-feelings\" target=\"_blank\">As noted by literary scholar Monika Fludernik, medieval authors represented characters\u2019 mental states mainly through their direct speech and gestures, which were used to convey intense emotions in a stereotypical way\u2014lots of hand-wringing and tearing of hair, but few subtle gestures<\/a> \u2026 This changed dramatically between 1500 and 1700, when it became common for characters to pause in the middle of the action, launching into monologues as they struggled with conflicting desires, contemplated the motives of others, or lost themselves in fantasy\u2014as is familiar to anyone who\u2019s studied the psychologically rich soliloquies of Shakespeare\u2019s plays. Hart suggests that these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, rereading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>We all text dead people sometimes. It\u2019s easier than texting living people, and it\u2019s the only way our smartphones can help us grieve\u2014a kind of virtual grave-site visitation. It\u2019s probably more effective than anyone cares to admit, except when, as Amelia Tait writes, the dead seem to come back to life: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/science-tech\/technology\/2017\/04\/i-begged-him-come-home-breaking-taboo-around-texting-dead\" target=\"_blank\">Using technology to talk to the dead is a behavior we rarely\u2014if ever\u2014hear anything about<\/a>. If the words \u2018texting the dead\u2019 make it into the media, they are usually followed by a far more sensationalist \u2018and then they text back!!!!\u2019 Yet although messaging the deceased is popularly seen as the stuff of horror movies and trashy headlines, in reality it is simply a new, modern way to grieve \u2026 Quite frequently, however, this reply does come. After a few months\u2014but sometimes in\u00a0as little as thirty days\u2014phone companies will reallocate a deceased person\u2019s phone number. If someone is texting this number to \u2018talk\u2019 to their dead loved one, this can be difficult for everyone involved \u2026 Behind the sensationalist tabloid headlines of \u2018texting back\u2019 is a more mundane\u2014and cruel\u2014reality of\u00a0pranksters pretending to be the dead relatives come back to life.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In the seventies, Jeremy Bernstein wrote a profile of Einstein for <em>The New Yorker<\/em>. Little did he know that the prepublication process would involve the first-ever instance of fact-checking by fireplace: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/blog\/2017\/04\/27\/jeremy-bernstein\/annals-of-fact-checking\/\">It went smoothly until we got to Einstein\u2019s aphorism \u2018Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht\u2019<\/a> (which I would translate as \u2018God is sophisticated but not malicious,\u2019 though it\u2019s often rendered \u2018subtle\u2019 rather than \u2018sophisticated\u2019) \u2026 The fact-checker wouldn\u2019t let me quote the aphorism unless I could produce a source he could verify. I didn\u2019t even know when Einstein had said it or why. In desperation I called the Princeton maths department. The secretary who answered the phone told me that the aphorism was inscribed, in German, over the fireplace outside her office in Fine Hall \u2026 The mathematician Oswald Veblen, who heard Einstein make the remark, in 1930, got his permission to make it part of the fireplace in Fine Hall. The mathematics department has moved (to a newer building also called Fine Hall) but the aphorism has remained where it was, as well as in my\u00a0<em>New Yorker <\/em>profile.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Virginia Woolf got her kicks in all kinds of ways, one of which was, apparently, by flirting with her sister\u2019s husband, Clive Bell. Paul Levy explains, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2017\/05\/11\/vanessa-bell-virginia-woolf-painter-and-novelist\/\" target=\"_blank\">Virginia began her teasing flirtation with her brother-in-law on a family trip to Cornwall<\/a> \u2026 The unconsummated \u2018affair\u2019 continued well after the three years that the Bells\u2019 marriage flourished, and even after Virginia\u2019s own marriage in 1912. Clive had taken up with an old flame, and by 1910 Vanessa was interested in Roger Fry. Among Clive\u2019s unpublished letters to Lytton [Strachey] is his comment on November 22, 1913, about Vanessa giving Roger a hard time: \u2018That woman\u2019s a vixen with her lovers you know \u2026 I wish Virginia would recover I want to try to have an affair with her\u2019; and, on November 28, 1917: \u2018Virginia, unfucked or almost, alas!, grows more charming with the years\u2019 \u2026 In 1925 Virginia said to her friend Gwen Raverat, \u2018It was my affair with Clive and Nessa &#8230; For some reason that turned more of a knife in me than anything else has ever done.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Andrea K. Scott on the late Vito Acconci, who died last week: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/culture-desk\/postscript-vito-acconci-1940-2017?intcid=mod-latest\" target=\"_blank\">He was an American original, who began his career as a poet\u2014a jittery Beckett<\/a> \u2026 Acconci defies labels\u2014later in his career he transformed his interest in public space into an unorthodox architectural practice, which never attained the transformative power of his art. But, of his great early work, one could say that he made a medium out of menace. It\u2019s impossible to imagine, for example,\u00a0Jordan Wolfson\u2019s violent provocation\u00a0at this year\u2019s Whitney Biennial without the precedent of Acconci\u2019s piece <em>Claim Excerpts<\/em>, from 1971, for which he videotaped himself wielding a metal pipe at the foot of the stairs of a gallery basement and televised his threats on a closed-circuit TV. On Twitter, the late artist\u2019s tag line was, \u2018Vito Acconci is now following you,\u2019 a reference to <em>Following Piece<\/em>, from 1969, for which he tailed a random stranger every day for one autumn month in New York City, until the\u00a0stranger\u00a0entered a private domain.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: pondering the emotionlessness of ancient fiction; fact-checking by fireplace; texting the dead; and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[9471,28580,17488,7791,28579,28576,71,28578,2019,28577,3612,13249,14161,3047,969,28565],"class_list":["post-110398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-albert-einstein","tag-clive-bell","tag-emotion","tag-fact-checking","tag-facts","tag-feelings","tag-fiction","tag-fireplaces","tag-grief","tag-medieval-literature","tag-psychology","tag-text-messages","tag-texting","tag-vanessa-bell","tag-virginia-woolf","tag-vito-acconci"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Before Fiction Dealt with Feelings<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: pondering the emotionlessness of ancient fiction; 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