Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy

Dreams We Learn

Duncan A. Lucas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319948621
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319948638
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy employs Silvan Tomkins' Affect-Script theory of human psychology to explore the largely unacknowledged emotions of disgust and shame in tragedy. The book begins with an overview of Tomkins' relationship to both traditional psychoanalysis and theories of human motivation and emotion, before considering tragedy via case studies of Oedipus, Hamlet, and Death of a Salesman.  Aligning Affect-Script theory with literary genre studies, this text explores what motivates fictional characters within the closed conditions of their imagined worlds and how we as an audience relate to and understand fictional characters as motivated humans.

 

Part ITheory

© The Author(s) 2018

Duncan A. LucasAffect Theory, Genre, and the Example of TragedyPalgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94863-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Duncan A. Lucas¹

(1)

Mohawk College, Hamilton, ON, Canada

… And all the men and women merely players.

Shakespeare, As You Like It.

End Abstract

This book employs American psychologist-philosopher Silvan Tomkins’ affect and script theories to draw out consistent, significant, but largely unacknowledged emotional content in tragedy. While the primary focus of application in this exploration is tragedy as a genre, this volume also serves as an introduction to and first instalment in a larger study of emotional consistencies in additional types of foundational narrative structures, or what Northrop Frye calls the “pregeneric” (1957, 162) myths in his seminal Anatomy of Criticism, specifically tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony-satire, which taken together comprise his “central unified myth” (192). My explorations here concern relations of similarity between specific narratives within the tradition of tragedy, typically though not necessarily in dramatic form, across three Western cultural moments, and these observations lean toward the possibility of emotional universals within the tragic tradition and perhaps within all four pregeneric myths.

Part I of this book is the theory section, starting with this general introduction, followed by a detailed introduction to Tomkins’ theoretical models in the context of and as a potential literary hermeneutic in Chap. 2, and then an exploration of tragedy as a genre in Chap. 3. Part II is an application and detailed testing of my theoretical hypotheses in three case studies: Sophocles’ Oedipus,¹ Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. These dramas as narratives are chosen specifically both for their iconic status and for their seemingly different cultural moments in Ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and mid-twentieth-century America. Admittedly, however, they are all “Western.”

But I want first to begin this discourse with my favourite passage from Tomkins : “The world we perceive is a dream we learn to have from a script we have not written” (1992, 4: 239). And now an unabashed confession: I am a Silvan Tomkins fan. He is for me brilliant. For about 12 months, I had been studying and appreciating Tomkins’ ideas around affect, cognition, and human beingness when that sentence astonished me. I’ve cited his Affect Imagery Consciousness (AIC) volume four, which is where I first noticed the sentence, but I later rediscovered it early in Chap. 1 of volume one from 1962. It is a one-sentence compression of his entire theoretical construct, which up to that point I had not quite seen in toto. I was contemporaneously struck by the thought that while we read literature, we are dreaming in the sense that we are constructing imagery and animating fictive people using our memories while in quiet dialogue with an author’s script. Dreams are analogous imaginative reconstitutions. One curiosity about dreams, however, is how they so often insinuate a narrative structure during their illusory consciousness only to elude meaningful interpretive patterns, except possibly with reference to their predominant emotions. What I feel upon waking seems to me most essential and explicatory. A fundamental difference between dreams and literature (in the broadest sense) is that from an early age, people learn the “rules” of storytelling, if only implicitly. There are organizable and organized patterns to literature as a constructive practice. Life, literature, dream all involve multiple levels of caring, of feeling, of thinking. Literature is a dream with which we can learn to define, to illuminate, to reflect on our lives. Literature, I think, may be the single greatest database for the study of patterns in human emotional life.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has attempted the type of examination of emotion and genre as I do within this exploration, and only a limited number of critics have taken advantage of Tomkins’ theories to illuminate literary and/or cultural objects and productions. I have not yet found a wholesale application of Tomkins’ idiosyncratic vocabulary and theoretical constructions in “Affect-Script Psychology,” or ASP, which might also represent “affect-script philosophy,” to literary and/or cultural products. (I include a detailed glossary of Tomkins’ terminology to facilitate an appreciation and understanding of his specific word usages.) The methodology that I derive from Tomkins’ work leads to an examination of these literary objects as case studies in applied theory. In terms of the tradition of literary studies, this work most closely aligns as a combination of psychological and/or psychoanalytical explorations of literature with genre studies. Though not specifically concerned with the historical context of my chosen examples, I show that despite radical cultural differences, a common emotional thread can be traced through the generic history of tragedy by observing a high ratio of correspondence between specific examples of what Silvan Tomkins calls affect-scripts, or ways of living and dealing with emotion, and tragedy as a genre. Readers should be aware that while I use the terms “affect” and “emotion” synonymously in this introduction, those two terms will be totally differentiated in the next chapter, and that is key to my argument.

Charles Altieri, in The Particulars of Rapture, calls Tomkins “the greatest theorist focused” (2003, 47) on affect. Altieri is frustrated with contemporary literary criticism due to scholars’ obsession with historical and socio-political critiques in the service of a “moral wisdom or ethically enlightened attitude” (1) which leads to “over-readings” of meaning. Instead, he seeks to establish a context for reading toward aesthetic philosophies through “various affective dimensions of experience” (2) as they manifest in art and literature. While Altieri implicitly understands Tomkins’ ideas about affect as an aesthetic experience, he makes neither extensive nor exemplary use of Tomkins’ theories by citing only Sedgwick and Frank’s edited volume of Tomkins’ writings on shame, which, while incredibly important, is but one aspect of Tomkins’ large, extensive, and comprehensive theoretical system.

Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (1995) tried to introduce Tomkins to a generation of critics with Shame and Its Sisters, and they have had some success. Stephen Barber and David Clark refer to that book, in their introduction to Regarding Sedgwick, as “carefully reducing the body of his writings to a representative core as a way of preserving and indeed reanimating its significance” (2002, 49; emphasis added). This is terribly inaccurate. Shame, although very important to Tomkins’ total theoretical schema, is only one of nine “affects,” which are in turn only the beginning concepts of a comprehensive imagining and modelling of human psychology. Still, I applaud Sedgwick and Frank’s (1995) efforts to institute a new model of analysis, notably in their introduction “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold.” As Altieri is frustrated with many modern critics’ attitudes, so Sedgwick and Frank feel that Tomkins offers an alternative to Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” because, “from a systems theory point of view” (Sedgwick 2002, 248), Tomkins opens new interpretive possibilities beyond the entrenched “paranoia” of modern critical theory. Yet even a critic of Sedgwick’s stature has been unable to motivate fundamental acceptance of Tomkins in critical theory and literary interpretation. In his article “When Whippoorwills Call,” for example, James Kincaid writes that with Shame and Its Sisters, “we are shown how to listen to the past so as to hear intimately, drawing up from inside ourselves a way to think and see feelingly. The systems theorist, Silvan Tomkins , has not yet worked his way inside our practice. But he will, since he is now Eve-saturated” (2002, 239). This has proved largely untrue thus far, although contrary evidence might seem to suggest otherwise.²

Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth released the much-cited essay collection The Affect Theory Reader in 2010 and even dedicated it to Eve Sedgwick. Yet Tomkins is cited in only 3 of the 14 compiled essays and then exclusively mediated through the Sedgwick -Frank, shame-focused lens. None of the affect theorists in the Gregg and Seigworth volume treat Tomkins’ work as primary texts. Nonetheless, anyone who begins reading Gregg and Seigworth’s The Affect Theory Reader quickly learns that, in those editors’ perceptions, there are “two dominant vectors of affect study in the humanities” (2010, 5).³ One vector is defined by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Theory
• Part II. Application
• Back Matter