Kafka's Cognitive Realism 9780415640671, 9780203082591

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Cognitive Realism, Kafka, and Literary Studies
1. Realism, Cognitive Realism, and Kafka
2. Methodology and Relation to Other Areas of Literary Studies
3. Embodied Cognition
4. Embodied Cognition and Language
5. Embodied Cognition and Literary Language
6. Why Vision?
7. Vision in Kafka Studies
8. Kafkaesque Dualities
9. Chapter Outlines
1 Perception without Pictures
1. Reading and Pictorialism versus Enactivism
2. Pictorialism
3. The Literary History of Pictorialism
4. Realism and Pictures, in Practice
5. The Philosophical and Scientific History of Pictorialism, and Emerging Non-Pictorial Strands
6. Enactivism: A Solution to Pictorialist Problems?
2 Re-Envisioning the Imagination
1. Kafka’s Diaries, Letters, and Fictions
2. Arts and Sciences in Kafka’s Era
3. Kafka, Pictures, and Perception: Overview
4. Problems of Pictorialist Conceptions of Vision, the Imagination, Language, and Consciousness
5. Recognising the Problems of Pictures
6. Kafka’s Enactivist Solutions to the Pictorialist Problems
3 Kafka’s Poetics of Perception in Der Proceß
1. Non-Pictorial Evocation of Perception
2. Linguistic Means of Engaging the Reader
3. Evoking the Fallibility of Non-Pictorial Perception
4. The Impossibility of Linear Narratives
4 Feeling from New Perspectives
1. Emotion in Kafka
2. Emotion in Literary Studies
3. Enactive Emotion
4. (Emotional) Engagement with Others
5. Reflection
6. Emotion, Action, and Perspective
7. Character, Self, Emotion, Action, and Perspective
Conclusion: Cognitive Realism in Kafka and Beyond
Appendices
1. Empirical Study: Readers’ Responses to “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs)
2. Empirical Study: Readers’ Responses to Das Schloß (The Castle)
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

This book uses insights from the cognitive sciences to illuminate Kafka’s poetics, exemplifying a paradigm for literary studies in which cognitive-scientific insights are brought to bear directly on literary texts. The volume shows that the concept of “cognitive realism” can be a critically productive framework for exploring how textual evocations of cognition correspond to or diverge from cognitive realities, and how this may affect real readers. In particular, it argues that Kafka’s evocations of visual perception (including narrative perspective) and emotion can be understood as fundamentally enactive, and that in this sense they are “cognitively realistic”. These cognitively realistic qualities are likely to establish a compellingly direct connection with the reader’s imagination, but because they contradict folk-psychological assumptions about how our minds work, they may also leave the reader unsettled. This is the first time a fully interdisciplinary research paradigm has been used to explore a single author’s fictional works in depth, opening up avenues for future research in cognitive literary science. Emily T. Troscianko is a Junior Research Fellow in Modern Languages (French and German) at St John’s College, Oxford, UK. Recent publications include “The Cognitive Realism of Memory in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary” (Modern Language Review 107 (2012): 772–95) and “Cognitive Realism and Memory in Proust’s Madeleine Episode” (Memory Studies 6 (2013): 437–56).

Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics Edited by Michael Burke

1 Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind Michael Burke 2 Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives Christiana Gregoriou 3 Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory Perspectives on Literary Metaphor Monika Fludernik 4 The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony Authenticity Effects in German Social Autobiographies Chantelle Warner

5 Analyzing Digital Fiction Edited by Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Hans Kristian Rustad 6 Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition Patrick Colm Hogan 7 Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots Dan Shen 8 Kafka’s Cognitive Realism Emily T. Troscianko

Kafka’s Cognitive Realism Emily T. Troscianko

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Emily T. Troscianko to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Troscianko, Emily. Kafka’s Cognitive Realism / by Emily T. Trosciank. pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Stylistics) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. 3. Cognition in literature. I. Title. PT2621.A26Z9393 2014 833′.912—dc23 2013029506 ISBN: 978-0-415-64067-1(hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-08259-1(ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Tom Here he lies where he long’d to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea. (R. L. Stevenson, “Requiem”)

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Contents

1

2

Figures Acknowledgements

ix xi

Introduction: Cognitive Realism, Kafka, and Literary Studies

1

1. Realism, Cognitive Realism, and Kafka 2. Methodology and Relation to Other Areas of Literary Studies 3. Embodied Cognition 4. Embodied Cognition and Language 5. Embodied Cognition and Literary Language 6. Why Vision? 7. Vision in Kafka Studies 8. Kafkaesque Dualities 9. Chapter Outlines

1 8 22 26 27 29 31 33 37

Perception without Pictures

39

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Reading and Pictorialism versus Enactivism Pictorialism The Literary History of Pictorialism Realism and Pictures, in Practice The Philosophical and Scientific History of Pictorialism, and Emerging Non-Pictorial Strands 6. Enactivism: A Solution to Pictorialist Problems?

39 40 54 64

Re-Envisioning the Imagination

94

1. 2. 3. 4.

94 95 96

Kafka’s Diaries, Letters, and Fictions Arts and Sciences in Kafka’s Era Kafka, Pictures, and Perception: Overview Problems of Pictorialist Conceptions of Vision, the Imagination, Language, and Consciousness 5. Recognising the Problems of Pictures 6. Kafka’s Enactivist Solutions to the Pictorialist Problems

70 73

97 107 114

viii 3

4

Contents Kafka’s Poetics of Perception in Der Proceß

120

1. 2. 3. 4.

121 131 144 152

Non-Pictorial Evocation of Perception Linguistic Means of Engaging the Reader Evoking the Fallibility of Non-Pictorial Perception The Impossibility of Linear Narratives

Feeling from New Perspectives

160

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Emotion in Kafka Emotion in Literary Studies Enactive Emotion (Emotional) Engagement with Others Reflection Emotion, Action, and Perspective Character, Self, Emotion, Action, and Perspective

161 163 164 174 179 180 195

Conclusion: Cognitive Realism in Kafka and Beyond

211

Appendices

217

1. Empirical Study: Readers’ Responses to “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) 2. Empirical Study: Readers’ Responses to Das Schloß (The Castle) Bibliography Index

217 220 223 247

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5

The Cartesian Theatre 44 Pushing back the explanandum: picture-viewing homunculi 45 The magic of “giving rise to” conscious experience 46 The explanatory gap, chasm, or fathomless abyss 49 Does enactivism offer an escape route from the Cartesian Theatre? 81 1.6 The fridge light of consciousness is always on 83 2.1 Kafka’s Cartesian Theatre 106 2.2a-b “Of the castle hill there was nothing to be seen” 110–11 2.3 Minimal but “lifelike” imagining 112 3.1 What the text gives us isn’t all we imagine 122 3.2 Multiple threads of consciousness: asking the question creates an answer 153 4.1 Being K. 198 4.2 Meditating through self-division towards self-dissolution 204 Thanks to Jolyon Troscianko for permission to use the copyrighted material in these figures (all except Figures 2.2, 2.3, and 4.1). Thanks to Susan Blackmore for agreeing to the reuse of Figures 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 4.2, which were first published in Consciousness: An Introduction (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003).

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Acknowledgements

A great number of people inspired and supported me at every stage of this project, which began life as my Oxford D.Phil. thesis, and I’m grateful to them all. My deepest thanks go to my doctoral supervisor, Katrin Kohl, for all the discussions, correspondence, and tireless close reading that helped to bring my thesis into being. I’d also like to thank my passionately scientific family—my parents Susan Blackmore and Tom Troscianko, and my brother Jolyon Troscianko—for their continual inspiration, support, and advice in my ongoing attempt to introduce science into literary criticism (and again to Joly for his wonderful illustrations). I thank all those who volunteered to participate in my empirical studies, and those who helped me with the design, data collection, coding, and statistical analysis, including Joshua Billings, Holly Joseph, Mansur Lalljee, Daniel Marszalec, Eloise Page, Edmund Richardson, Thees Spreckelsen, and Jennifer Ward. I thank John J. White for his constructive input as my external doctoral examiner, and Ritchie Robertson for all he has contributed to my scholarship over the years, as my internal examiner and through his continuing encouragement and generosity ever since. I also thank the Balzan interdisciplinary project ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’ for all our conversations. And it goes without saying that I thank Edmund Sprot for his off-the-wall perspectives. I thank David Mossop, who was an invaluable support in clarifying my thoughts and my writing and maintaining my morale during my doctoral years. I thank Graham Barrett, without whom my language would have remained far fuller of imperfections, and the book manuscript much longer unfinished. I thank Michael Burke for all his editorial advice and encouragement, three anonymous reviewers and my editors at Routledge for their role in the book’s development, and my copyeditor, Emmaleigh Burtoff, for helping me tidy up the manuscript. I thank James Anderson for keeping me almost sane during the final proofreading and indexing stages. Finally, I thank everyone who, in many different ways, has helped me through the time after my father’s death and made it possible for me to keep working on this book as though he’d still be here to see it in print. St John’s College, Oxford 15 January 2014

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Introduction Cognitive Realism, Kafka, and Literary Studies

1.

REALISM, COGNITIVE REALISM, AND KAFKA Realistic would be [. . .] something which corresponds to reality, [. . .] a description of how things really are. Something’s realistic if it’s mirroring the reality. Something that mirrors reality; something that reproduces what exists, what actually exists around us. Within art and literature, realism is the actual depiction of the way things are, so a realist story and a realist painting would be almost photographic, if that makes sense.

In an experiment I designed to investigate readers’ responses to Kafka (see Appendix 1 and Troscianko in preparation [a]), participants were also asked to give (speaking into a digital recorder) definitions of terms including “realistic”. The above remarks are taken from four participants’ definitions (Pts 28, 13, 27, and 14). More formal definitions are essentially very similar: in invoking “correspondence” to reality, “mirroring” of reality, and almost photographic “depiction of the way things are”, the participants echo principles expressed in, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “realistic, adj.”: “Characterized by faithfulness of representation, esp. in reference to art, film, and literature; representing things in a way that is accurate and true to life”.1 Here “faithfulness” and “accuracy” of “representation” fulfil the same functions as the key terms in the participants’ definitions, and unfortunately also leave just as many questions unanswered: what does it mean to “represent”, “mirror”, “depict”, or “correspond” to reality “faithfully”, “accurately”, “(almost) photographically”, or in a “true-to-life” fashion? These questions go to the heart of what it means for a fictional text to do or to be anything at all—and this book isn’t long enough to answer them. It isn’t clear that such encompassing questions about “representation” or about “reality” in relation to literature can ever be answered—or even asked—satisfactorily without making textual reception a key criterion. If we do this, then instead of asking what makes a fictional text realistic, we may

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

ask instead: what makes it seem realistic to a reader? This also has the happy consequence of narrowing down impossible ontological questions about the unlimited “reality” being invoked, to the (only slightly) more manageable cognitive question of what factors are involved in creating an effect of reality. In this vein, Roland Barthes has famously discussed the “reality effect” (see Chapter One, p. 61), and other critics have also stressed the importance of “verisimilitude” to readers’ responses to literature: in his important work of early cognitive literary criticism, Jerome Bruner (1986, 52) suggests that literature needs to be “recognizable as ‘true to conceivable experience’”, i.e. to “have verisimilitude”. Further questions then follow on from the question about “seeming” realism: does a realistic text have systematically different effects on readers than an unrealistic text has? And what specific textual features are responsible for creating these effects? The concept of “cognitive realism” is intended to provide a framework for asking and beginning to answer such questions in a directed and delimited manner. Cognition is the mediator between the fictional world and the reader on two levels: as it’s evoked in the fictional characters, the narrator, or both, through whom the fictional world is made available to us, and as it operates in the embodied mind of the reader. Investigating how the connections between these two levels are established is therefore likely to tell us a lot about how an effect of reality is created by a text. A text can be cognitively realistic in any area of cognition, but given that it isn’t really feasible to deal with every aspect of cognition at once, in this book I have chosen one aspect to concentrate on: visual perception. Later in this section I give reasons for making this choice, and in the Conclusion I describe the beginnings of related work on memory. I suggest, then, that a text may be considered cognitively realistic in its evocation of, for example, visual perception if that evocation corresponds to the ways in which visual perception really operates in human minds and bodies, according to the best understanding available in current cognitive science (see p. 14 on my pragmatic but optimistic attitude in this regard). Here “to correspond” means to describe, in this case vision, in a way that can most economically be accounted for with reference to the relevant cognitive facts. (Again, I know the word “facts” will raise some hackles, or at least some eyebrows; as before, please see pp. 14–15 for a few caveats and clarifications.) Cognitive realism can also be a feature of artworks in other media, but I’ll restrict myself in this book to the medium about which I know most— literature. Literary study structured by the concept of cognitive realism is fully compatible with the notion that both individually and culturally specific aspects of text-processing affect experience and interpretation, but in this book I focus primarily on the commonalities which are likely to underlie those variations. The concept of cognitive realism also doesn’t presuppose or entail any blanket value judgements, such as a belief that it’s better to be cognitively realistic than to be cognitively unrealistic (Troscianko 2013a).

Introduction

3

Classification of texts according to categories such as cognitively realistic and cognitively unrealistic should be a means rather than an end: that is, it should be something that allows us to ask and answer interesting questions that couldn’t otherwise be asked or answered. While classificatory precision is helpful, therefore, the point of applying the concept of cognitive realism to literature is not to create a rigid taxonomy of realistic versus unrealistic, but to make use of a framework for identifying certain features and groups of features which recur in texts. This in turn allows us to ask how these features may create certain connections with the cognitive processes of readers and hence affect the reading experience. This then allows us to make informed predictions, which may serve as the basis for empirical testing, as well as to start drawing systematic comparisons between different texts and groups of texts—and indeed between different readers and groups of readers. The term “cognitive realism” may prompt associations with notions of “psychological realism” and the “psychological novel”. Although these terms and concepts are often used to frame debates about characterisation and narrative technique in the history of the novel, they are rarely defined in very clear or thorough terms; often they seem to come down to a somewhat vague notion that this is a genre in which the characters’ thoughts and feelings take priority over action or plot (other synonyms include “novel of character”). In this sense, while psychological realism may, by definition, place emphasis on the mental and emotional life of fictional characters, the resulting evocations of cognition need not have a close relationship to cognitive realities; they may, as Gregory Currie (2011) has argued, rather be eloquent expressions of common misconceptions about cognition—but this would also not necessarily be relevant to analysis from the perspective of psychological realism. Features like temporal fluidity or indeterminacy which characterise narrative constructions such as those of Virginia Woolf (whose name very often comes up in the same breath as the psychological novel) may be cognitively realistic in the sense outlined in this book, but other features may instead express prevalent folk-psychological constructs and hence have quite different effects—and psychological realism offers no way of distinguishing between the two. Indeed, the generally introspective nature of the texts bracketed under the heading of psychological realism is often informed by problematic notions such as the stream of consciousness (mentioned at several points in my discussion), as well as, from the early twentieth century onwards, by Freudian notions of the unconscious. Furthermore, psychological realism in practice often attributes disproportionate importance to the “inner life” of characters’ thoughts and feelings, in isolation from physiological and situational cause and effect, which I will argue are central to all cognitive activities. Cognitive realism therefore offers analytical purchase of a kind distinct from what these other concepts offer, not least because, being better defined, it can also be better operationalised in analysing specific texts. Similarly, although it might be argued

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

that psychological realism rather than nineteenth-century Realism should be used as a reference point, it’s the latter which was the primary context for the complex poetological debates about Realism that I’ll be drawing on in what follows. More specifically, literary Realism can be considered the literary culmination of the history of pictorially configured thought about perception and language with which I want to suggest that Kafka’s writing presents a contrast. Realism, in its broad nineteenth-century incarnation, is therefore the more appropriate choice. My subject is the writing of Franz Kafka (1883–1924). My love of Kafka goes back to reading The Trial (in English translation) at secondary school, and has managed to survive twelve years of academic study. My love of Kafka (or at least of his writing—the personal idolatry is another matter) created an obvious question to be answered: why do I, and lots of other people, find his writing so appealing? Why do his stories about (to name his two best-known plots) waking up as a giant insect and waking up to be arrested for an unknown crime continue to exert such fascination? Surely mere weirdness alone isn’t an adequate answer; if it were, absurdist literature would be much more popular than Kafka. This question of Kafka’s appeal was, for me, the origin of the questions listed at the outset, because it seemed that this Kafkaesque fascination had something to do with the balancing act which Kafka’s texts perform on the tightrope between the “realistic” and the “unreal-seeming”. This is not a new idea: Ritchie Robertson, for example, said something similar in an essay for the edited volume The German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism, discussing how Kafka both makes use of and moves beyond the “semiotics of Realism” (1993, 77). It’s also an intuitively reasonable idea, one that fits with impressions of Kafka beyond literary studies, which is always encouraging. A participant in the above-mentioned empirical study, when defining the term “Kafkaesque”, noted that “You have instantly to think that realistic is the opposite of Kafkaesque. Although Kafka refers to real life, he’s moving beyond what we really see of the material life, in a way, and talking about your feelings behind that, and the internal psychological life of man, and how that is influenced by outside, ‘real’ life; and how that can distort our internal life” (Pt 34). It’s important to bear in mind that, as indicated in these remarks, Kafka is very much still “refer[ring] to real life”. Robertson (64) notes, similarly, that in many respects—for example, in his evocation of character and setting— Kafka’s work “lies beyond but still in sight of Realism”, particularly in the sense that his “descriptions of physical objects hover between metaphor and metonymy”, between the ordering systems of contiguity amongst objects in space and similarity amongst spatially unrelated objects. In the very movement “beyond” Realism, Kafka nonetheless remains deeply indebted and connected to it. Indeed, this study will suggest that instead of configuring Kafka’s relationship with Realism in terms of transcendence, we might instead think of it in terms of simplification: less “going beyond” than “returning to the (cognitive) roots of”—even if this isn’t quite as catchy.

Introduction

5

Numerous other studies of Kafka’s relationship to Realism have been published over the decades. These discussions often draw on considerations relating specifically to descriptive detail and to narrative perspective, and I’ll refer to these in Chapters Three and Four. Many present Kafka’s work in simple opposition to Realism. This kind of contrast often relies on a simplifying and dismissive attitude to Realism; for example, Hans Kügler contrasts Kafka’s writing with that of “[die] sogenannt[e] realistisch[e] Dichtung, die mit der Wirklichkeit gleichsam im vertrauten ‘Du auf Du’ zu stehen glaubt, je direkter und ungebrochener sie im Schreiben darüber verfügt” (so-called realistic literature, which believes itself to be on first-name terms with reality, the more directly and unbrokenly it takes linguistic possession of it; 1970, 110). It’s very easy to make this kind of statement about Realism and argue for Kafka’s deviation from it, but the trouble is that no Realist writer or commentator on Realism would ever make such a claim about its relation to reality. The appeal of these claims is obvious, though: they allow Kafka’s practices to be presented as more sophisticated because he supposedly rejects naïve Realism in favour of a non-Realist mode such as parable: Diese ungebrochene Vitalität der realistischen Dichtung bewirkt für Kafka gerade die platteste Form der künstlerischen Aussage, deren Aussagewert schon dadurch zweifelhaft ist, daß jeder Realismus, indem er die Wirklichkeit sucht, hinter ihr herläuft. [. . .] Entlarvung der Welt, nicht ihre Abbildung, Einsicht in die Wirklichkeitsstruktur, nicht Besitzergreifung der Realität, dies kann für Kafka nur im Gleichnis geleistet werden. (This unbroken vitality of realistic literature produces, for Kafka, the most platitudinous form of artistic statement, whose significance is made doubtful by the mere fact that any Realism, by seeking reality, ends up merely chasing it. [. . .] Exposing the world rather than reproducing it, gaining insight into the structure of reality rather than taking possession of it—this can be achieved, for Kafka, only in parable.) (1970, 110) Other commentators acknowledge, as Robertson does, the lines of continuity between Realism and Kafka’s works. Stephen Dowden remarks on how “The purport of his language would seem to overlap with that of the realist tradition”, citing his “meticulous attention to accuracy of detail and his admiration for prose that is evocative of lived reality”, while suggesting that the difference lies in how “Kafka’s style exploits the conventional illusionism that is so firmly entrenched in the reading habits of the realist novel’s popular audience. He turns this convention against itself by using the language of the real to invent an impossibly irreal world. In this way Kafka parodies the representational conventions of realism” (1986, 102–3). Dowden sees Kafka as lacking confidence “in the power of language to mirror the truth of things’, and as “seiz[ing] the language of realism and turn[ing] it against itself” by demonstrating its opacity (103–4). In apparent contrast, Arnold Heidsieck’s general argument is that “Kafka’s mature style cannot

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be traced to his immediate literary precursors or contemporaries” (1994, 3) and that it is better understood as a response to contemporary “paradigms of perception, consciousness, referential and propositional knowledge, positive law, natural law, and ethics” (13). However, he does also consider Kafka’s relation to Realism, and in this regard demonstrates continuities as well as divergences: he notes how Kafka’s early works “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (Description of a Struggle) and “Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande” (Wedding Preparations in the Country) are “saturated with youthful autobiography and the geography of Prague and share certain stylistic elements with the impressionists and the writers of fin-de-siècle decadence. Yet they also mimic and ironically subvert features of realist representation and naturalist determinism”(3). Specifically, he points out that “Kafka’s fictive descriptions occasionally provide, within realistic everyday settings, supernatural entities and events” (3). Similarly, Norman Holland analyses some of “the realistic elements in “Metamorphosis” that Gregor’s predicament has charged with extra, nonrealistic meaning” (1958, 146), as well as the flipside of this: how the story not only “charges physical realities with spiritual significance” but also “represents abstractions physically” (150). While the commentators above conceive of Kafka and Realism in terms of a coexistence of contrasting features, others suggest that this interaction can also be visible in Kafka’s texts as an identifiable shift from one mode to the other. Ulrich Fülleborn notes how “Das Urteil” (The Judgement) manifests “einen Übergang von der psychologisch-realistischen Darstellung der Wirklichkeit als vermeintlich verfügbarer Umwelt Georg Bendemanns zur Gestaltung einer unheimlich eigenmächtigen, grotesken Welt, als deren Repräsentant Georgs Vater escheint und die geistig-sinnbildliche Bedeutsamkeit erlangt” (a transition from the psychologically realistic depiction of reality as Georg Bendemann’s supposedly accessible environment to the formation of an uncannily arbitrary, grotesque world, represented by Georg’s father and achieving spiritually symbolic significance; 1969, 298). Even before this transition occurs, Fülleborn suggests that the perspectival mode Kafka uses at the start of the story creates a certain “Beunruhigung” (unsettledness; 298). This remark on experiential effects relates to issues that I’ll consider in more detail in the section below (pp. 33–37) on contradictory dualities in responses to Kafka. Kafka’s poetics developed in the context of a widespread engagement, at the turn of the twentieth century, with the term “Realism”. Kafka is most obviously classifiable, of course, as a Modernist rather than a Realist writer; indeed, he has often been described as an “Autor der Klassichen Moderne” (author of classical Modernism; Hiebel 1999, 9; see also Engel 2006), suggesting that Kafka is an exemplar of Modernism and, as a representative of its most enduring, “classical”, features, is slightly removed from its more contingent manifestations. The textual features with which the status of Kafka’s works as Modernist are associated include their fragmentary character (e.g., Braun 2007, esp. 350) and their supposed negativity: James Rolleston asserts that “One of the few certainties of Kafka-criticism is that he was an aesthetic

Introduction

7

modernist, that is, he strove for perfection in art through the demolition of life”, and that Kafka was “theologically insistent on the negative” (1988, 59). An oft-cited characteristic is also Kafka’s focus on the “inner life” (e.g., Zymner 2010, 39) that supposedly contrasts with Realism’s concentration on externals. Like fragmentation and negativity, this is a commonplace of scholarship on Modernism, but it’s one that has rightly been challenged (Herman 2011)—indeed, Rüdiger Zymner himself equivocates about it, suggesting at one point that Modernism is also defined by a heightened interest in external facts (2010, 38). I’ll come back to this question when I talk about descriptive detail in Chapter Three. The relationship between Realism and Modernism is traditionally conceptualised as a linear chronological progression in which Modernism reacts against the precepts of Realism. Esther Leslie (2007) describes the widespread tendency to see Modernism as the end of Realism (citing Lukács’s essay “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” as an important contributor to the linear model), before showing how various different types of “realism” coexist in the “modernist” era. This study will consider the nature and effects of Kafka’s texts by means of a contrast with nineteenth-century literary Realism, one of whose primary stylistic traits is a high level of detail in descriptions of visible aspects of the real world, or a potentially real world (see Chapter One, pp. 60–64). While the contrastive relationship between Realism and Kafka will be highlighted, the point is not to argue for a total disjuncture, but to suggest how, by quite different means, Kafka’s texts and those of literary Realism seek to create an effect of reality. Writing about the famous “Realismusdebatte” (Realism debate) of the 1930s between Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács, John J. White notes that we should view texts contributing to this debate as existing within the context of “a rich and long-standing tradition of competing conceptions of realism” (2005, 145). The complexity of this debate, informed by both nineteenth-century Realism and Russian Formalism, is symptomatic of the entire history of the use of a term which has intuitive appeal and apparent transparency, but which has in the practice of definition of and application to specific texts proven remarkably opaque and multifaceted. Even just in literary (as opposed to philosophical) contexts, the term is plagued by excessive generality and by the multiple ideological investments of its users. Although I don’t by any means claim ideological neutrality, focusing on how Kafka’s texts evoke cognition and may therefore engage the reader’s cognitive processes in particular ways will allow me to develop a cognitive account of Realism that may serve as a newly precise point of reference from which to assess other conceptions of Realism or “realism”. A few practical points, before I go any further. “Literary” and “nonliterary”, and “fictional” and “non-fictional”, are two common spectra of textual classification, overlapping but by no means equivalent. However, given the canonical (i.e., prototypically “literary”) status of Kafka’s “fictional” texts, and the fact that the fiction he wrote was almost exclusively prose

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

fiction, the distinction between the two will be unimportant to me here, and so I’ll use the terms interchangeably, except in Chapter Two, where I investigate Kafka’s “non-fictional” writings and will briefly discuss his blurring of the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. The term “Realism” will be capitalised when referring to Realism as a literary period or movement, primarily in its nineteenth-century incarnation; lower-case “realism” will be used when referring to cognitively orientated aspects of texts that aren’t necessarily encompassed by the literary periodisation. The term “evocation” will be used to denote the textual communication of (information about) aspects of the fictional world, because, unlike common alternatives such as “representation”, “depiction”, “portrayal”, and similar terms, it has no overt pictorialist/representationalist connotations. “Description” will also be used occasionally, but given its emphasis on denotation rather than on the act of calling forth to the mind, and its stronger implication of detailed specification often of static elements of the world (Sternberg 1981, 61), I generally prefer “evocation”. The verbs “evoke” and “induce” are quite often confused when talking about texts and reader responses, but I’ll use them consistently to refer to what texts communicate (“evoke”) and what effects they may cause (“induce”) in readers. Readers’ “responses” are assumed, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to include the broad range of possible cognitive facets, including the emotional, the perceptual and sensorimotor, and what might often be called the “interpretive” (see also p. 31). Finally, I’ll give all quotations from German in the original and in my own English translation, and I’ll usually present accounts of what’s happening in a given section of text by Kafka in passive/impersonal forms, to avoid naïve attributions of direct authorial intention implied by the use of “Kafka writes”, “the author describes”, and similar (though see p. 9 below).

2.

METHODOLOGY AND RELATION TO OTHER AREAS OF LITERARY STUDIES

In order to contextualise my cognitively orientated interrogation of realism, I’ll now briefly consider how the cognitive methodology I shall be employing connects with and differs from several important twentieth-century traditions in literary theory, before proceeding to situate my approach with reference to key areas within cognitive literary studies. I’ll also consider a couple of key methodological issues: the status of science as a hermeneutic tool, and questions of subjectivity and generalisability in critical and ordinary reading.

a)

New Criticism

An important though sometimes neglected requirement of any theoretical approach to literature must be that its postulates or hypotheses end up enriching close reading, i.e. help us read literature more insightfully. New

Introduction

9

Criticism is the best-known promoter of close attention to the structure and formal elements of the text itself, but the attempt to eliminate authorial intention and reader response from literary analysis, most notably in the two (in)famous essays by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (“The Intentional Fallacy” [1946] and “The Affective Fallacy” [1949]), gave New Criticism a direction incompatible with cognitive approaches. A cognitively sensitive programme of literary study must acknowledge that questions of intention and effect can’t simply be evacuated from the set of questions that will always be asked about literature. This doesn’t mean that we need to aim, for example, at recovering an originary authorial intention of which we can only ever have indirect evidence, but given the importance of intention in any communicative act (e.g., Wilson and Sperber 2004), literary criticism’s now deeply ingrained suspicion of intention (most famously embodied in Barthes’s “death of the author”—even if for him the author’s death also means the “birth of the reader” [1977, 148]) seems problematic. We needn’t exchange this suspicion for a more simplistic understanding of intention, however. On the contrary, a better understanding of the neuroscience and psychology of intention compels us to question the folk notions of intention and execution even for the simplest actions and decisions (see, e.g., Wegner and Wheatley 1999; Haggard 2008; Soon et al. 2008; and, with reference to literature, Troscianko 2012a). In line with the literary-critical angle, a cognitive approach must also conclude that it’s impossible to posit, say, an intention (let alone a freely willed intention) to write The Trial. However, an approach based on neuroscientific and behavioural evidence provides purchase on the complex question of what causal and correlational connections might be relevant instead. The concept of extended mind or extended cognition may also help enrich our understanding of authorial intention as inseparable from spoken or written language (Bernini, forthcoming). These seem considerably more productive ways of approaching the question of authorial intention than pretending that it’s simply irrelevant. The present study won’t foreground this question (see Crane 2001 for a good example of a study that does), but it seems to me an important selection criterion for any research programme in the broader sense that it not preclude significant questions like this one. Wimsatt and Beardsley get it wrong in the other direction too, as I see it. In their second essay on fallacies of literary criticism, they condemn the “affective fallacy” as consisting in “a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does). [. . .] It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism” (1949, 31; authors’ italics). This study will proceed from the diametrically opposed assumption that what a literary work “is” can best be understood by investigating what it “does” (because words on the page are not literature until they start to do things cognitively), and that there is therefore no better starting point for literary investigation than the “psychological effects” of great works of fiction—like Kafka’s, say.

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

It’s certainly possible for cognitive approaches to end in “impressionism and relativism”, but this is arguably less likely than in other areas of literary studies, given the wealth of precise scientific data, results, and terminological distinctions at one’s disposal. Indeed, the opposite attack to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s is also often made: that cognitive literary studies imports inappropriately scientific and absolutist methods and arguments into the study of inherently non-generalisable literary effects (see also p. 15). It’s clearly impossible to get it completely right, in everyone’s eyes. I will try to tread a careful but not too hesitant path between impressionism and reductionism, though the observant reader may note that my inclinations lead me closer to the latter.

b)

Reader-Response Studies

Another field of literary criticism that would, to judge from the name, seem to be highly relevant to a study of cognitive realism is reader-response studies, which posits that the meaning of a text can’t be investigated independently of how it engages the reader. Yet in practice, reader-response studies have produced numerous conceptualisations of text-inherent readers (readers constructed by and in the text) that bear no necessary relation to any real flesh-and-blood reader, whether individual or typical. In her introduction to the reader-response school of criticism, Elizabeth Freund (1987, 7) draws attention to the plethora of personifications of the reader that it has spawned, including the mock reader (Gibson), the implied reader (Booth, Iser), the model reader (Eco), the super reader (Riffaterre), the inscribed or encoded reader (Brooke-Rose), the narratee (Prince), the ideal reader (Culler), the literent (N. Holland), and the informed reader or interpretive community (Fish). Although the concept of “audience” or “reader” can in theory include an actual, historical, idiosyncratic personage, the focus of these critics is always precisely on the concept rather than any actuality. The lack of clarity in the relationship between different types of textinherent readers (e.g., fictive versus intended or implied readers), both within and between individual theorists’ accounts, is highlighted in W. Daniel Wilson’s explanatory discussion of “Readers in Texts” (1981). Even Hans Robert Jauss’s (1982) “actual reader” is subordinated in terms of evidential validity to the “implied reader”. Moreover, reader-response critics have tended to elevate the quest for “meaning” in the text over considerations of emotion or imagination evoked as a “response” in even a theoretical reader (see, e.g., Esrock 1994, 25–31, on theorists including Ingarden and Iser). The text’s meaning is often presented as something to be “solved”, reinforcing the notion that “truth” is located in the text and the words on the page, just as for the Formalists and New Critics, and not in fact in the interplay between the text and the (real, live) reader. That isn’t to say that no reader-response critics pay attention to the real reading experience. Stanley Fish relocates meaning in the reader’s “experience” rather than in

Introduction

11

the text, and counters Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “affective fallacy” with his “affective stylistics”, which helpfully reconfigures each sentence in a text as “an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader” (1970, 125, author’s italics). But in Fish’s later work (e.g., 1980), the notion that both reader and text are primarily functions of “interpretive communities” responsible for their reality becomes increasingly dominant, so that reading risks becoming an undifferentiable manifestation of the “context” of interpretation. It’s tempting to conclude, as Freund does, that the multiple “displacements and substitutions” of conceptualised readers in reader-response studies culminate in an abolition of the “irksome dichotomy of reader/text [. . .] by an assimilation of the text into the reader or the reader into the text” (1987, 10). In her opinion, this fundamentally undermines the reader-response project: “In this last phase of ‘reading-as-textuality’, reader-response criticism as a coherent, total and theoretically viable project is extinguished” (10). More broadly, reader-response studies also provides a good example of the problematically divergent basic assumptions held by cognitive science and literary theory. Catherine Emmott highlights the potential difficulties of an interdisciplinary approach combining these two areas, remarking that “Cognitive psychology takes the role of the reader for granted—after all, it is the science of the human mind. By contrast, the major contribution of literary theory’s ‘reader response’ work is to argue this very fact” (1997, viii). In the eyes of other disciplines, calling for a “return to the reader” might easily seem like belatedly stating the obvious. The challenge for the current generation of cognitive literary studies is to demonstrate that, while the obvious may for some time have needed (re)stating in literary studies, cognitive approaches to literature can do more than that: they can yield valuable insights into literary texts and their effects, and even perhaps into the embodied minds that read them. Text-inherent readers can, of course, be useful constructs for conceptualising how texts encourage real readers to respond to them. It’s debatable whether another stage needs to be included in the chain connecting author, narrator/characters, and real readers, but if the extra stage is incorporated, it’s important that it be just that, rather than a replacement of the final one. The real reader, after all, may or may not respond to the invitations made by the text to read in a certain way (i.e., to align himself or herself with a certain text-inherent reader). As already noted, this study won’t explore in detail the many possible dimensions of individual variation in reader responses, but will focus instead primarily on the commonalities of likely responses. What I’ll try to show, however, is that these commonalities have a cognitive as much as a textual origin. Ignoring cognition is therefore as odd as ignoring the text would be. Not ignoring either allows the specific interactions between text and mind to be interrogated in detail, rather than text and mind being conflated and therefore unsusceptible to being analysed as interacting.

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

c)

Structuralism

The question of commonality and difference arises in the context of Structuralist criticism too. Structuralism is interested in individual literary texts primarily as manifestations of macrostructures: the individual subjectivity in relation to which a literary work might be studied is a subject within a system, that is, to be “classified in certain describable categories of a ‘world view’” (Fokkema and Ibsch 1995, 56), in an anthropological sense. Although Structuralist criticism acknowledges that the variable counterpart to the constant text is the reader’s response, the focus is less on how meaning (let alone experience) is created in response to a particular text than on how meaning in general is created, through the combination of a culturally variable signifying system and unchanging cognitive universals—yet rarely with any detailed engagement with the sciences that might have something to contribute as to the nature of these “universals” (though see Gavins and Steen 2003, 5–8, on Structuralism’s affinities with cognitive poetics). Cognitive approaches at their best have the means to counteract the ideologically dangerous tendency often encountered in the humanities to deny all human commonalities, whilst also being able to accommodate and account for individual variation. Structuralism’s dependence on the structures of binary opposition and their mediation is another quality which cognitive approaches may, in practice, often serve to counter, simply by virtue of their object being the complexities of human cognition, which are rarely reducible to neat opposites (see Chapter Four). Sadly, Structuralism has also been the setting for the some of the worst excesses of intellectual pseudo-science, as exposed in the area of cultural studies by Alan Sokal’s famous hoax. Sokal submitted an article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (1996) to Social Text, and revealed in Lingua Franca on the day it was published that it was a spoof, “liberally salted with nonsense”: “Nowhere in all of this is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions” (Sokal 1996; see also Sokal and Bricmont 1998). Julia Kristeva’s Sēmeiōtikē: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art) provides some of the most baffling examples of pseudo-science in the area of literary criticism. I’ve resigned myself simply to never understanding, for example, how the “axiom of choice”, which apparently specifies that there exists a single-valued correspondence, represented by a class, which associates to each non-empty set of the theory (of the system) one of its elements, and is represented by the equation (∃A){Un(A) · x[~Em(x) · ⊃ · (∃y)[y ∈x · ∈A]]} can really be a way of showing, as Kristeva claims it does, how every sequence contains the message of the book, or indeed how that could be useful to anyone (1969, 128; see also Sokal and Bricmont 1998, 37–48).

Introduction

d)

13

Psychoanalytic Readings

Psychoanalytic (especially Freudian) criticism has been one of the most popular ways of incorporating questions of psychology into literary studies (e.g., N. Holland 1990), and psychoanalysis has arguably been subjected to less critical scrutiny in this area than it has been from within the sciences of the mind. Given that Freudian psychoanalysis is primarily a system for telling stories about the mind, rather than an eliminative method of finding things out about the mind, its use in the context of literary studies isn’t surprising, but nor is it cognitively informative, except in yielding a kind of cognitively interesting intertextuality or in manifesting the tenacity of certain folk-psychological modes of thought. Because psychoanalysis can neither generate adequate explanations nor provide more than poor descriptions of psychological phenomena (Macmillan 1997), there would be little to gain from including it in a cognitively orientated study of Kafka’s writings. It could nonetheless be argued that given Freud’s profound influence on early twentieth-century culture, a cognitive study of Kafka should include some consideration of Freud. Kafka probably first encountered Freud’s work at the salon of Bertha Fanta in 1912, and made a throwaway but oft-cited remark in his diary after having completed “Das Urteil”: “Gedanken an Freud natürlich” (Thoughts of Freud, of course; 23 September 1912, T 461). It seems undeniable that Kafka would have been acquainted with texts such as Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) (Marson and Leopold 1964; Campbell 1987), and Peter Beicken has argued that Kafka was relatively sympathetic to psychoanalytic premises, while objecting to their “Heilanspruch” (curative claims; 1974, 201). On the other hand, Judith Ryan suggests that “Freud did not really begin to capture the literary imagination until the second decade of the twentieth century, finally becoming more directly assimilated in the 1920s” (1991, 16). She argues that Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, and William James were the key figures in psychology who attracted most of the attention of writers on both sides of the Atlantic in the two decades before and after the turn of the century, and shows that Kafka was exposed to a broad range of areas in the new psychology relatively early on (from secondary school onwards), notably the psychophysics of Weber and Fechner and the work of Mach and Brentano. Ultimately, because there is already so much work considering the connections between Kafka and Freud (e.g., Sussman 2008), and because I have yet to read a psychoanalytic interpretation which substantially enriched my understanding of Kafka’s work (see also Robertson 1985, 26–27), I prefer to leave that line of inquiry to others.

e)

The Status of Science

The dubious status of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, in combination with its undeniable cultural influence, raises the broader question of how the findings and debates of current cognitive science employed in

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

this study are conceived of: are they seen as historically and conceptually relative, or as providing access to fundamental truths about human cognition? To some extent, I believe that both can apply at once. I’ve set out my position on these questions in Troscianko (2013a), and will summarise here several points made there. Firstly, the cognitive sciences are a disparate and rapidly changing field, with as many divergences as there are collaborative convergences. As in all the sciences, any given finding is necessarily provisional, and whole research paradigms are subject to replacement (Kuhn 1970). Nonetheless, the scientific method is the most refined and effective method we have for generating, testing, and disproving hypotheses, and thereby making progress towards a better understanding of the world and ourselves. Kuhn’s model makes clear that a given paradigm will prevail over its predecessor only if it’s better in important ways—allowing, for example, for strikingly better quantitative precision and the prediction of previously unsuspected phenomena (153–54). Even if the evolution of scientific ideas doesn’t constitute progress towards “the truth”, nonetheless its “successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature” (170). As for truth itself (like “facts”, both words that literary scholars rarely use without scare quotes, actual or implied), it’s clear that there are things that are true and not true about human cognition, just as there are about the structure of DNA and the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. The maximum degree of certainty available to and achieved by humanity about any of these truths is less clear, and highly variable, but it is possible to claim with substantial confidence that our current understanding of, for example, the numerous processes that contribute to visual perception is both more accurate and more complete than that of a century ago. Furthermore, it is, of course, all we have to work with. A decision not to engage with scientific findings simply because they can never be entirely accurate or complete would be a sadly defeatist response, given how much is already known with some confidence about how the mind works, and given how much a cognitive approach to literature can draw on scientific findings about cognition and ultimately perhaps also contribute to them. Happily, visual perception, the cognitive focus of this book, is an area of cognition to which a great deal of research in a number of convergent areas has been dedicated and in which substantial increases in understanding have resulted: “The understanding of vision must stand as one of the great success stories of contemporary science” (Findlay and Gilchrist 2003, 1). That isn’t to say that fundamental questions of epistemology don’t arise when we try to bring literary studies into dialogue with cognitive science. The gulf between the sciences and the humanities is a relatively recent phenomenon: Alva Noë (2009, xv) remarks that the German term “Literaturwissenschaft” (literary criticism, literally the science of literature) denotes the common origins of literary studies (like all the “Geisteswissenschaften” [the humanities]) and the natural and social sciences. However, for the last century or so, the sciences-humanities divide has been real and growing,

Introduction

15

as Postmodernism and scientific/philosophical realism have polarised and increasing specialisation has made it even harder to engage meaningfully with the debates of other subdisciplines, let alone to connect fields as seemingly disparate as literary studies and cognitive science. There are many realms, including cognitive literary studies, in which the sciences-humanities divide can and has begun to be bridged, but the challenges being faced include big questions concerning the aim of intellectual inquiry and the nature of knowledge and evidence. These challenges are strikingly apparent, not least at the level of (relatively) casual conversation with literary scholars: quite often when I mention trying to find answers to questions about literary texts by employing scientific insights and methodologies, the response is a more or less passionate defence of the irreducible multiplicity of ways of being uncertain about texts. Similarly, I often encounter suspicion and defensiveness when I suggest that confidence in scientific progress towards truth might even have any legitimacy as applied to the attempt to develop an HIV vaccine, let alone be applicable to the study of literature. There are plenty of others who respond more constructively, if with equally strong convictions that I’m wrong. It often appears, however, that a perceived state of embattlement with the higher-status and better-funded sciences causes these kinds of anti-science arguments to be expressed more vehemently than they otherwise might be— which is, of course, highly counterproductive. The only useful response to these kinds of objections is, I think, to counter them with a detailed demonstration of what kinds of answers to important questions about literature become accessible if we take the findings and debates of the sciences seriously. This depends on some degree of openness to the very concept of an “answer” being a reasonable aim, but engagement with textual specifics can be a constructive way of sidestepping this issue.

f)

Cognitive Literary Studies

Cognitive approaches need not, in any case, be considered as competing with all other areas of literary studies. Peter Stockwell notes that whereas literary criticism has witnessed many shifts of focus “around the triangle of ‘author-text-reader’, with different traditions placing more or less emphasis on each of these three nodes” (2002, 5), cognitive approaches (for Stockwell, specifically “cognitive poetics”) have the advantage of being able to illuminate all three equally and, if appropriate, in conjunction with one another. Also in a conciliatory vein, Alan Palmer suggests that cognitive approaches should be considered fundamental, not alternative, to other (e.g., historical, feminist, rhetorical) approaches to the study of literature, and that cognitive approaches can be practised with a “pragmatic, undogmatic, and unideological” attitude (2010, 7). This may be easier said than done, however, and is sometimes not even desirable: some other approaches may be considered incompatible with

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

cognitive approaches in particular ways. For example, it would be hard to use a cognitive-scientific framework to support a psychoanalytic reading of a text without some glaring inconsistencies emerging, although even these might be made productive rather than problematic if analysed in the context of, say, a comparative study of cognition itself and its historical conceptualisations. Norman Holland’s article “The Brain of Robert Frost” is an early and very interesting example of a work that does try to combine psychoanalysis and cognitive science. A critic famous for his psychoanalytic readings here presents psychoanalytic theory as consistent with computer-science feedback models of the brain, replacing the “standard” and the “system” in an information-processing feedback loop with “identity” and “self”, and insisting on the existence of “a governing and permeating identity” governing the multiple feedback loops (1984, 383). Holland also espouses principles key to embodied and social cognition (“The ground of our lives is physical and biological, yet our cultural values can either limit our physiology [. . .] or enlarge it” [376]), but preserves the concept of “a higher level of our minds” (379) where all the important decisions are made, in a space apparently unaffected by the body or society. This is partly attributable to the insistence of the computer scientists whose work he draws on that there are distinct “higher” and “lower” feedback loops, but it’s hard to reconcile this stance with more recent models of mind and brain that demonstrate the constant interplay of the different “levels”. Choices may sometimes need to be made between different approaches if inconsistencies are to be avoided. Regardless of the outcome, being forced to make such choices may in itself be an epistemically useful process. Cognitive literary studies is, in any case, far from a monolithic threat to existing critical traditions; indeed, it’s defined more than anything by its disparate, not to say fragmented, character. Even its relationship with science is far from clear cut or unified. My own view is that critically assimilating scientific insights is the prerequisite of any valid cognitive approach. However, it is not uncommon for scholars in cognitive literary studies to be very happy to call what they do “cognitive”, but to be uncomfortable with the “scientific”/“scientifically informed” label. This is just one manifestation of the unstable epistemological and methodological basis of cognitive literary studies. In the effort to provide an overview of the field, Palmer (2010, 5–6) distinguishes between three main types of cognitive approach: cognitive narratology, cognitive poetics, and cognitive approaches to literature. As Palmer characterises them, cognitive narratology applies the findings of cognitive science to various aspects of the narrative comprehension process; cognitive poetics is a form of applied cognitive linguistics; and cognitive approaches to literature have emerged from literary criticism generally, rather than specifically from narrative theory. Cognitive cultural studies (e.g., Zunshine 2010) and ecocriticism (e.g., Glotfelty and Fromm 1996) are other subsections that might be added to the list. It’s also worth mentioning that there is a substantial tradition of “literature and science studies” (represented, for

Introduction

17

example, by the British Society for Literature and Science), whose primary aim is to illuminate the form and content of literary texts with reference to relevant historical incarnations of scientific discourse and practice (e.g., Meyer 2001). Scholars such as Judith Ryan (1991) and Heidsieck (1994), who compare Kafka’s texts with contemporary psychology, pursue this kind of aim. I don’t, primarily because of the complex issues of influence raised by it (Troscianko 2013a), as well as the more mundane question of whether it can be proven that a given author actually read the texts he or she is supposed to have responded to in his or her fiction. Although I show in Chapter Two that Kafka’s engagement with perceptual questions was substantial, my argument about their significance in his fiction doesn’t depend on his intentions or direct intellectual influence. In what follows, I’ll use the terms “cognitive literary studies” and “cognitive approaches (to literature)” in their most general sense, only occasionally adopting Palmer’s distinctions as necessary. Using Palmer’s characterisations, my methods and aims are probably most closely aligned with what he calls “cognitive approaches to literature”, but there are significant differences between my approach and those of the three exemplars listed by Palmer: Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book (1999), Mark Turner’s Reading Minds (1991), and Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction (2006). Specifically, I don’t employ the strongly introspective method favoured by Scarry, I don’t focus primarily on language as Turner does (indeed, I would classify Reading Minds as cognitive poetics in Palmer’s schema), and unlike Zunshine I don’t aim at evolutionary explanations. I also focus here on the work of a single author, unlike most other book-length publications in cognitive literary studies, with the notable exceptions of Mary Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (2001) and Nancy Easterlin’s Wordsworth and the Question of “Romantic Religion” (1996). The variety of subdisciplines within the broad field of cognitive approaches to literature is a strength of the area, meaning that research covers a wide range of angles on the cognitive aspects of literature. However, it’s also a weakness, in that, as noted, the area is highly fragmented and characterised by differences of focus and method that are sometimes more divisive than productive. Another consequence of the field’s newness is arguably a tendency to overcomplicate the critical frameworks used to mediate between cognitive science and literary studies, at the expense of forging direct, intuitively graspable, straightforwardly illuminating connections between the two. Despite its importance in bringing cognitive approaches towards the mainstream, various paradigms within cognitive poetics, such as “text world theory” (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007), might be characterised in these terms. Stockwell, much of whose work builds on text world theory, expresses a common opinion of cognitive approaches when he argues that A trivial way of doing cognitive poetics would be simply to take some of the insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, and

18

Kafka’s Cognitive Realism treat literature as just another piece of data. In effect, we would then set aside impressionistic reading and imprecise intuition and conduct a precise and systematic analysis of what happens when a reader reads a literary text. Given this methodological perspective, we would probably be mainly interested in the continuities and connections between literary readings and readings of non-literary encounters. We would not really have much to say about literary value or status, other than to note that it exists. (2002, 5)

It’s interesting to note the shift between the impassioned attack on “impressionism” in Wimsatt and Beardsley (1949, 31) and the equally passionate defence of it here. At least three unnecessary assumptions are, however, constitutive of this line of argument. Firstly, that “taking insights” directly from cognitive science necessarily entails treating literature as “just another piece of data”, that is, solely as a source of further insights about cognition rather than as an object of study in its own right. (In practice, doing things this way round may be more difficult than using science to illuminate literature; Burke and Troscianko 2013.) Secondly, that “impressionistic reading and imprecise reading” are inherently valuable, more so than “precise and systematic analysis of what happens when a reader reads a literary text” (which is, by implication, “trivial”). And thirdly, that appreciation of the specifics of “literary value” depends on its hard-and-fast demarcation from nonliterary value. The present study hopes to show by example that none of these assumptions is necessary or helpful, and that cognitive literary studies can put literature and the experience of reading literature at the centre of its inquiry precisely by drawing directly on insights from the cognitive sciences, precisely by aiming at precise and systematic analysis, and precisely by assuming literature’s continuity with “nonliterary” modes of expression and experience. This profound divergence in outlook, which may be partly attributed to Stockwell’s concern to distinguish his research paradigm from cognitive linguistics, is certainly also a telling example of the fragmentation of cognitive literary studies—a state of affairs which has arguably not changed much in the decade since Stockwell published Cognitive Poetics. While the other traditions in literary studies discussed above emphasise meaning, cognitive approaches tend to emphasise effects. Peter Dixon, Marisa Bortolussi, and colleagues (1993), for example, distinguish between “text features” and “text effects” as part of a framework that foregrounds interpretation as a contingent cognitive activity of interest in itself rather than subordinate to the conclusions yielded by it. An effect of a literary text is initially an effect on a mind and a body—that of the reader. (A point that will become a key principle of my analysis is that a cognitive effect is always a physical effect as well as a mental one, but I’ll return to that in a moment.) That effect, or those effects, may—and usually do—include interpretive, emotional, perceptual, kinaesthetic, and behavioural components, all interacting reciprocally with the others in the context of an aesthetic experience.

Introduction

19

These primary effects may cause and merge with secondary effects: the text may be employed in subsequent cognitive acts (including memory acts, evaluative and conceptual acts, etc.), or the reading experience may alter one’s medium- to long-term (self-reported) moral attitudes or behaviours (Hakemulder 2000, 39–45)—or indeed one may end up writing a piece of criticism on the text. In seeking an alternative paradigm for studying “reader response” in relation to real readers, cognitive-textual interactions rather than finalised textual “meanings” will be my focus of attention. As Stockwell puts it in the introduction to Cognitive Poetics, “Meaning [. . .] is what literature does” (2002, 4). Areas of literary study such as narratology have long recognised that it can be fruitful to investigate how, as well as what, a text means. In “The Empirical Study of Literature. How Empirical Can It Be?” (whose concerns are still as relevant today as when it was published), Dieter Freundlieb suggests that some of the problems inherent in the empirical study of literature derive from “[the] fact (if it is a fact) that statements about textual meanings in the context of literary interpretations are not empirically true or false” (1989, abstract). Freundlieb here highlights one aspect of the more widely problematic project of scientifically investigating subjective responses—a problem arguably most pressing in empirical work, but present across the field—and his parenthetical equivocation draws our attention to debates about what the limits of empiricism may or may not be. For Freundlieb, these difficulties can be mitigated by shifting the emphasis of investigation from meaning to interpretation: “An empirical study of literature would make interpretation one of its objects of study and explanation” (abstract). The term “interpretation” is used by Freundlieb to denote the cognitive sense-making that any text demands of its reader, rather than any more esoteric form of exegesis. This accords with the focus of the present study, which is concerned with “interpretive” commonalities (how textual elements tap into specific human cognitive—including perceptual and emotional—processes, giving rise to trends and patterns of response that are likely to be common to a majority of readers) rather than with individual “readings” (how a single reader’s personal history and attitudes affect other aspects of his or her response to the text). The empirical work to which I refer at various points does, however, seek to take account of individual differences in the participants, and describes individual responses as well as giving generalised conclusions. A privileging of generality over specificity when it comes to readings of texts arguably accords more closely with traditional literary criticism than would an insistence on individual readings: critical interpretations very rarely take the personal history or character traits of individual readers into account, for example. Of course, literary studies has generally been highly aware of social and historical context, and this is one of the major potential points of contention with cognitive approaches, but in practice, there need be no fundamental conflict. Cognitive approaches are, indeed,

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

uniquely able (even if in practice they aren’t always used) to account for different timescales in the development of cognitive architecture and phenomena, by helping elucidate how different cognitive faculties such as, say, vision and language adapt—at dramatically different speeds—between generations. Importantly, this also means that scientific evidence can be used as a solid basis for arguing, for example, that the neural architecture of vision has changed very little in the evolutionary blink of an eye that separates us from Kafka’s era. A cognitive approach to Kafka can therefore work on the assumption that the twenty-first-century reader will have more commonalities with than differences from the early twentieth-century reader as regards perceptual responses, although it can also be used to nuance this basic position with evidence of, say, cognitive-linguistic shifts on a smaller timescale. Scepticism as to the sensitivity of cognitive approaches may often be voiced with specifically evolutionary approaches in mind: although Patrick Colm Hogan’s (2003) The Mind and Its Stories, for example, presents hypotheses of an admirable scope and falsifiability about universal prototypical narrative structures, his recourse to evolution as the ultimate explanatory force results in an unresolved tension between biological and social factors, which leads away from a focused discussion of literature itself. These kinds of issues, and the ease with which evolutionary approaches, not just to literature, can end up telling superficially satisfying but explanatorily empty “just so” stories (Schlinger 1996), shouldn’t be overgeneralised in challenges to cognitive approaches more broadly. Cognitive literary studies has its problems, as I’ve indicated, but it also has great promise, both in its own right and as part of a network of cognitive-scientific approaches to art. “Empirical aesthetics” is bringing together scientists and humanities scholars through a wide range of experimental work on many kinds of art (e.g., Augustin and Wagemans 2012), and “neuroaesthetics” is also a burgeoning area in which scientists seek to add either “deeper descriptive texture” or “added explanatory force” to our understanding of art (Chatterjee 2010, 60). There are lots of challenges involved in this kind of work, not least that of bridging the potential ontological gulfs between domains like neural activity, behaviour, and experience (Kuzmičová 2012b). But the challenges seem well worth tackling.

g)

The Reader and the Status of Subjectivity

Cognitive approaches that foreground literary effects at some point always have to confront the difficult question of how far my (the critic’s) own responses to a text can and should be used as a source of hypotheses or even working assumptions about how a given text makes “us” feel. On the one hand, for the critic to assume that his or her own responses are typical of a general readership is not only mildly solipsistic but very likely just wrong: someone trained in close reading and familiar with a number of theoretical approaches is by definition not a “normal” reader. Whether the

Introduction

21

difference is a qualitative or quantitative one—whether such training alters responses or primarily increases awareness of them, or conversely reduces their intensity through reflexive distance—is a separate question, and one that requires empirical investigation. Several existing studies have begun to address this issue: Dixon, Bortolussi, and colleagues (1993), for instance, find that experienced readers are more sensitive to and more appreciative of narratorial ambiguity, and Sotirova offers provisional evidence that interpretation of perspectival, or “voicing”, effects depends on linguistic experience (2006, 124–25), concluding that further research might be carried out “to show that dual voicing is perhaps a rather subtle effect of free indirect style to which only some ‘untrained’ readers respond, but which is felt more strongly by ‘experienced’ readers” (125). And although it may simplify matters to assume that the expertise developed by the critic is primarily a distorting factor to be maximally eliminated from, for example, empirical studies of responses to literature, it can certainly also be argued that this is a rather perverse waste of valuable expertise, based on a concept of a “blank-slate” reader which is in any case untenable. Indeed, seen from the other side, the attempt in empirical work to control for contextual knowledge by, for example, removing the name of the author from a literary text may in practice itself end up distorting the “natural reading experience” (to the extent that there is such a thing) by trying to orchestrate an artificial “blankness”. In practice, perhaps the most we can conclude with confidence is that no critical discussion of literature should pretend to be independent of the responses of the critic-as-reader to the text in question, because this can never be the case. The approach espoused in this study is certainly informed by my own specific responses to Kafka’s texts. I hope that I’ll avoid giving the impression of assuming those responses to be typical, universal, or (perish the thought) in some way “ideal”. The reader will notice that in my discussions of individual texts, I make frequent use of qualifying particles and conditional verbal constructions—“likely”, “probably”, “may (well)”, and so forth—as well as other kinds of reminders that a certain effect is only what the text “encourages” or “makes likely”. These linguistic features are intended to maintain an awareness of alternative responses as eminently possible, while using facts about the text and cognition to make well-grounded hypotheses about likely responses. In this sense, my claims, or suggestions, about reader response are meant in the spirit of hypotheses about what effects I think the textual features may have. To avoid being too stylistically cumbersome, I don’t present every hypothesis in the conditional or with qualifications to draw attention to its hypothetical status, but they are all hypotheticals, and should in principle all be empirically testable. Daniel Allington and Joan Swann (2009) have empirically analysed the ambiguities and idealisations inherent in critics’ use of the term “the reader”, and Allington argues that while “phrases like ‘some people’ read as references to actual readers who might respond in a particular way, [. . .] ‘the reader’ evokes an ideal reader, and statements about ideals

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

are normative rather than empirical”.2 To my mind, however, this is a matter of phrasing: the shorthand of “reader” in the singular doesn’t materially alter the nature of the suggestion about potentially testable real readers. As I see it, any statement about a textual effect rather than a textual meaning is from the outset a statement that is amenable—and susceptible—to empirical testing. As soon as an effect on a/the/any/all reader(s) is posited, it becomes possible for a/the/any/all reader(s) not to manifest the posited effect; thus it’s a hypothesis that can be falsified and refined. I will also assume that shared semantic knowledge used in language processing results in responses that are to some extent “predictable and normative” (Fish 1970, 141); Stanley Fish’s concept of “linguistic competence” seems a reasonable way of formalising the constraints that can be assumed to exist on the range and direction of responses, without eliminating individual variation. There’s always a balance to be struck between claiming too much, or arguing too inclusively, and being too circumspect to argue anything much at all. I may well have erred on the former side, but in order to provide some counterbalance to unbridled theorising, I also refer as appropriate to the beginnings of a programme of empirical research designed to help flesh out not only the common features of readers’ responses but also their individual differences. This investigation really is only in the early stages, however, so for now many questions must remain just questions, if better defined ones than they might otherwise have remained. In any case, it’s important to remember that literary interpretation is not an a priori mode of explanation; it can itself benefit from investigation which seeks to explain its processes. Analysis that encompasses both the text and the human mind can aid such explanation. My research is informed by both the theories and the empirical practice of science, and, as appropriate and useful, by parts of the emergent discipline of cognitive literary studies. It combines these with the practice of close reading that has always been central to “traditional” literary criticism, and must remain central to any meaningful analysis of literature. This book will also engage with existing criticism on Kafka and on literary Realism, to show where and how the method espoused here connects with critical conclusions reached by different means. In these ways my project will explore the cognitive underpinnings of the experience of reading Kafka’s fiction, and try to open up ways of understanding a wide variety of other experiences of literature.

3.

EMBODIED COGNITION

Despite the inevitable difficulties of interdisciplinary research (especially humanities-sciences crossover endeavours), this is a deeply exciting time to be engaging with the cognitive sciences in a literary context. The last two decades or so have witnessed a remarkable cognitive-scientific revolution: the body has been brought back into the study of the mind. This revolution

Introduction

23

involves a renewed appreciation for the work of early twentieth-century philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, and psychologists such as James Gibson, but it also can’t be reduced to or equated with the disciplines of Phenomenology or ecological psychology. The new cognitive science provides more precise findings than Phenomenology (see also Chapter One, pp. 73–74), and, in contrast to Gibson’s approach, uses evidence of, for example, the role of action and sensorimotor invariants in vision to better understand not only the sources of information used to drive perception, but also the contributing factors in the subjective experience of perceiving (e.g., O’Regan and Noë 2001a, 1019). Despite appreciating the importance of vision’s role in directing action, Gibson’s work also puts undue emphasis on optic flow (i.e., relative movement of eye and environment) and on environmentally determined eye movements (Findlay and Gilchrist 2003, 6). The newly embodied strand in cognitive science has expanded the scope of the contributions that psychology, neuroscience, artificial-intelligence research, cognitive linguistics, consciousness studies, and philosophy of mind are able to make in furthering our understanding of what it means to experience the world around us, substantiating with detailed evidence the thesis that “Conscious experience is fundamentally grounded in perceptually guided activity in the environment” (Gibbs 2006, 265). This new cognitive science, which places strong emphasis on embodied cognition, represents a significant enough change, or set of changes, that it can be considered a new cognitive-scientific paradigm in a substantive, if not strictly Kuhnian, sense (Froese 2007), and has been termed “second-generation” cognitive science (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 77–81). This label is intended to highlight its difference from the “first-generation” cognitivist and computationalist paradigm, which more or less ignored the body, considering it primarily an extra-cognitive interference, or at most allowing it a role as a source of inputs into the rule-based manipulation of symbols that, in the computationalist view, constitutes cognition. The strength of the claims made about embodied cognition varies significantly, and cogent arguments have been made, for example by Andrew D. Wilson and Sabrina Golonka, that the “replacement hypothesis”—according to which complex internal control structures are replaced as the constituents of cognition by bodies coupled (through perception and movement) to specific environments (Shapiro 2010)—needs to be the guiding criterion in research on embodiment if we are to “follow through on the necessary consequences of allowing cognition to involve more than the brain” (Wilson and Golonka, 2013, 2). Wilson and Golonka are therefore critical of research which shows merely that some cognitive process “can tweak or be tweaked by a state of the body” (8). Others are more willing to embrace a wide range of kinds of embodiment, stronger and weaker—Margaret Wilson (2002), for example, identifies six—and my overview of the field will include research that takes up different positions on the spectrum of claims about embodiment, although the sensorimotor theory of vision on which I draw in the

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following chapters posits a strong embodiment thesis. Before I go any further, it may also be worth making explicit the fact that arguing for embodied and enactive cognition isn’t the same as arguing that the brain has no role in cognition; it clearly does, in vision as much as in everything else that the mind and body do, and the challenge is to integrate findings about the neural mechanisms of vision into a coherent explanatory framework. The present discussion isn’t a neuroscientific one, but I’ll refer to findings from neuroscience where they help to refine my argument. In these paragraphs I’ve introduced the core of the second-generation cognitive sciences as consisting in “embodied” cognition. The three other key elements of the paradigm are enactive, embedded (or situated), and extended cognition (see, e.g., Menary 2010 on “4E” cognition). Different researchers in different research areas tend preferentially to emphasise one or more of these four elements, and to conceive differently of their interrelations. Embodiment (or embodied cognition, or embodied mind) is arguably the most basic concept of the four, since embodiment contains within it the embedded and enactive aspects (a body being inherently situated, and always in action) and is the first step in conceiving of cognition as extending beyond the boundaries of the skull or of the skin. Theories of embodied cognition posit that human cognition is determined by the specifics of human physiology; the thesis of embedded or situated cognition posits that cognition is inseparable from its social, cultural, and physical contexts; while proponents of enactive cognition argue that the effects of context on cognition always occur through active motor interaction; and the theory of extended cognition focuses on the use of environmental props as parts of cognition in a coupled system. Subsequent chapters of this study will focus primarily on the enactive aspect, but in the rest of this section I’ll give a contextualising outline of the broader area to provide evidence of how integral the body is to the mind. Given the focus of the following chapters, the points I make will often be exemplified through visual perception, but almost all apply similarly to other sensory modalities. The work of the philosopher Susan Hurley has been very influential in this field (she died, too young, in 2007). Hurley remarks that it’s common to think of perception and action as peripheral “buffer zones mediating between mind and world”, and more specifically to think of “perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world”, with cognition sandwiched in the space between the two (1998, 1)—this is what she describes as “the classical sandwich model” of the mind (e.g., 20–21, 401). Hurley argues that this conception of the nature of our existence in the world is mistaken: cognition is not simply the sandwich filling, but is inseparable from the sliced white, as it were, of perception and action. Research in areas ranging from psychology and philosophy to neuroscience and artificial intelligence supports this view (see, e.g., M. Johnson 1987 for an early study; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991 for an overview from a Phenomenological perspective; and Hurley 1998 for a more philosophical angle). The instinctive one-way input-output model therefore has to be replaced with

Introduction

25

a model which acknowledges that the functions of the “output” back to the “input” are as complex as those from “input” to “output’, and causally continuous with them. As B. F. Skinner puts it, “The skin is not that important as a boundary” (1963, 953; cited in Palmer 2004, 157). Much scientific research on perception and cognition concentrates on the internal workings of the eyes, brain, neurons, and so on, but a full understanding of these processes as embodied suggests that the boundary of their scientific study shouldn’t be the human body. “To understand the mind’s place in the world,” Hurley suggests, “we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them” (1998, 2). The world must be considered as a determining part of how we think and perceive. Crucially, thinking is at issue here as well as seeing. It may seem quite obvious that visual perception should be fundamentally embodied, since sensory perception seems to have more to do with the specific organs subserving it (eyes, ears, tongue, etc.) than does thought, which can easily seem just to happen in the brain. Sensory perception may also seem more closely linked to action than is thought: we have to swivel our eyes to see, for instance, and reach out to touch things. Beyond a certain point, however, it becomes impossible to maintain a categorical distinction between thinking, perceiving, and acting: our embodied state determines how we perceive, what (and how) we think, and the types of action patterns that we can perform. These perceptions and actions in turn shape our cognitive functions, notably how we can conceptualise and categorise; those concepts and categories feed back into our perceptions and actions, and so on. In Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson offer extensive evidence for the thesis that “[t]he same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason” (1999, 4). The linguist Eve Sweetser also discusses how earlier concrete sense-perception verbs yielded historically later abstract meanings (1990, 28–48), emphasising in particular the importance of vision’s capacity to “reach out” (39) and “seize on” (32) distant objects. Our embodiment obviously determines our interactions with the world, but it determines also how the world appears to us, in the fullest cognitive sense. We don’t passively retrieve representations of the external world and employ these in an unchanging manner in thought; rather, we select environmental features that are relevant to the task at hand and to the functioning sensorimotor modalities. We see, for instance, a stretch of grass quite differently when we are preparing to mow it from when we’re about to play football on it. How we conceive of and categorise “grass” is then altered by every such enactive perceptual experience, and this in turn feeds into how we conceive of grass, mowing grass, playing football on grass, or spending our free time in grassy spaces, increasing our sensorimotor fluency in a way that then has myriad forms of feedback into the rest of cognition.

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

Second-generation cognitive science is contributing to an important change in cognitive literary studies. A forthcoming special issue of Style explicitly employing the “second-generation” epithet (Caracciolo and Kukkonen, forthcoming) seeks to increase the coherence and impetus of this new area, which has already been embraced by scholars such as Guillemette Bolens, David Herman, and Alan Palmer. The introduction to Bolens’s The Style of Gestures (2012) makes a powerful case for the importance of second-generation approaches (without explicitly designating them “second-generation”), citing a wide range of evidence for the fundamental interconnectedness of cognition with its embodied and enactive context. Bolens draws on diverse kinds of evidence for the embodiment of cognition, ranging from how social cognition— the ability to understand other people’s emotions, intentions, aims, beliefs, expectations, and states of mind—is connected with the ability to understand actions, movements, and gestures (2012, 40–41; citing Decety and Stevens 2009) to the finding that motoric aspects of the meaning of action verbs aren’t represented solely through abstract symbolic representations, but are linked with frontal cortical structures that subserve action execution and observation (2012, 37; citing Kemmerer 2006).

4.

EMBODIED COGNITION AND LANGUAGE

These examples begin to suggest how the science of embodiment might have relevance specifically to language. Language is processed by both the perceptual and the motor systems (Bolens 2012, 11; citing Jeannerod 2007, 140). Specifically, there is evidence that reading words that denote particular actions activates regions in the premotor cortex that are also active when making the same movements (Hauk, Johnsrude, and Pulvermüller 2004). Barsalou (2008, 628–29) cites a range of research that uses measures including judgement times and eye movements to investigate the parameters of motor responses, or “simulations” (but see Chapter Four, pp. 174–76, on the problems with this concept), while reading about action and metaphorical motion (e.g., “the road runs through the valley”). Similar evidence has been gathered regarding embodied emotions and reading: judgement times were reduced when participants’ covertly manipulated facial expressions (smiling or frowning) matched the valence of textual events (Havas, Glenberg, and Rinck 2007). The discovery in experiments during the 1980s and 1990s of “mirror neurons”, which fire not only when performing but also when observing an action (see also Chapter Four, pp. 175–76), was an important step in providing neurophysiological evidence for “motor resonance”: covert recapitulation of an action being observed or read about (Kemmerer and Gonzalez-Castillo 2010, 55). Although the question of whether motor resonance in linguistic contexts is inherent to semantic access or part of post-semantic processing is not yet resolved (63–64), and although not all lexical items necessarily have

Introduction

27

sensorimotor elements (Mahon and Caramazza 2008), this sort of work poses a significant challenge to the common understanding of concepts as “representationally ‘stable’ neurocognitive constructs” (Kemmerer and GonzalezCastillo 2010, 66) devoid of sensorimotor connections. The science of embodiment has especial relevance to metaphorical language. Lakoff and Johnson’s well-known work on conceptual metaphor (e.g., 2003) presents metaphor as deriving from our embodied experience of the world: given that, to borrow Stockwell’s nice exposition of it, “we are all roughly human-sized containers of air and liquid with our main receptors at the top of our bodies” (2002, 4), large sets of linguistic constants have arisen, such as the multifaceted associations based on the “good is up” and “bad is down” metaphorical mappings (happy is up, sad is down; health and life are up, sickness and death are down; foreseeable events are up and ahead; etc.). This and other work in cognitive linguistics has more recently been complemented by a substantial interest in metaphor processing in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. There is a rich and growing body of work on the patterns of neural activation in response to metaphor, usually finding bilateral hemispheric activation, which implies that visuospatial processing is more involved in the comprehension of metaphor than of literal language (e.g., Gibbs 1994; Brownell 2000; Van Lancker Sidtis 2006). As Lakoff and Johnson have shown, however, “literal” language is permeated with expressions that are metaphorical in an embodied sense: for example, my use of “permeated” derives from the basic conceptual metaphorical equation of language/discourse with a container, as in “his arguments were full of rubbish” and “I couldn’t keep the sadness out of my voice”. Correspondingly, the neuroimaging literature provides evidence that it may be more cognitively relevant to distinguish between “lexicalised” and “novel” metaphors than between “literal” and “metaphorical”/“figurative” language (e.g., Mashal, Faust, and Hendler 2005). Research of this kind both offers evidence of the continuity of literary and everyday language and suggests ways of accounting for their differences: metaphor is a feature of both (see also Turner 1996), but novel metaphor is more common in literature. And tempting as it can be to try to separate literature from the rest of language use as a profoundly special case, it’s important to retain awareness of how grounded it is in the embodied ways we use language every day, even while acknowledging its differences of degree in style, function, and effect.

5.

EMBODIED COGNITION AND LITERARY LANGUAGE

The essentially embodied nature of language yields numerous possible approaches specific to literary effects. Bolens notes that an embodied approach helps us account for literary effects particularly in the realm of “figurality”, given that sensorimotor information contributes to the “full” representation

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

of a given concept—“And this is what matters to literature” (2012, 16). The focus of Bolens’s book is “kinesic style” (e.g., 21), by which she means the centrality of “references to movement, gesture, and action when reading a literary text” and responding to it in an embodied fashion (18). The kinesic style of a text—which includes “narratological, lexical, syntactic, grammatical, rhetorical, figural”, and other aspects (28)—creates a complex network of effects mediated by descriptions of bodily movement in the text and sensorimotor responses in readers. Bolens’s intention is to highlight “kinesic expression as complex sensorimotor dynamics, elaborately semanticized by the author by means of her literary style” (33). In practice, Bolens’s subsequent close readings seem to me largely divorced from the rich scientific theory and findings set out in the introduction—inspired by the general idea but departing rapidly from the specifics—but in principle the scientific and the textual details are, I believe, eminently susceptible to a fully dovetailed treatment at both the micro and the macro levels. In a very obvious sense, literature is all about embodiment: literary (and indeed all fictional and many non-fictional) texts evoke characters who are embodied, situated, and acting in fictional worlds. These characters are more or less closely modelled on real people, actual or potential. In this respect alone, literary texts and readers’ experiences of them are fundamentally embodied, prompting suggestions like Palmer’s that the notion of “physically distributed cognition” could fruitfully be used in the literary analysis of fictional minds (2004, 157–61). Other scholars have used principles of embodiment to challenge idées reçues in literary studies, such as the commonplace that Modernism is defined by an “inward turn”. Plenty of Kafka critics have espoused this point of view: Dowden, for instance, talks about the “extraordinary inwardness of Kafka’s prose” (1986, 103). Herman (2011) uses an enactivist framework to argue that minds in Modernism are instead evoked through an especially rich interplay of “inner” and “outer”, and suggests that rather than conceiving of Modernism as constituting “a movement inward, an exploration of the mind viewed as an interior space” (248), we might usefully think of it as a new “foregrounding of the inextricable interconnection between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ domains— with the scare quotes indicating the extent to which the narratives in question undermine the classical, Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body, the mental and the material” (253). As I hope will become clear in my discussion, this revised conception of what Modernist prose is doing certainly fits the details of Kafka’s prose better than the solidly internalist model it replaces. If we accept the theoretical importance of embodiment to the study of literature, the next big question is how we actually put the science of embodiment to practical use in analysing individual texts. Bolens suggests that the reader of fiction, if she wishes to access the “kinesic intelligibility of the artwork”, needs to “attun[e] herself to the work’s kinesic style” (2012, 179). My own assumption is that a kinesic (or other) style is something which will have experiential

Introduction

29

and interpretive effects whether or not a reader deliberately attunes himself or herself to it, although the effects may be strengthened by doing so. In terms of a critical approach aimed at understanding and explaining rather than at creating experience, however, the concept of attunement is an essential one. The aim of this book is to attune the reader to Kafka’s “cognitive style” (with its inherently kinesic—or, to connect the sensory with the motional, “sensorimotor”—elements) by drawing attention to its cognitive structure, in order that some of its effects become more comprehensible. This will in turn allow us, I hope, to start to answer not only the question of why Kafka’s writing continues to fascinate a twenty-first-century readership, but also—in suitably circumscribed and provisional form—the question of what makes a text realistic and what the effects of such a text might be and why. These inquiries may in turn also form a useful basis for making predictions and drawing connections with texts by other authors. In summary, then, the question of cognitive realism in Kafka’s evocation of perception and emotion, combined with the insights yielded by secondgeneration cognitive science (specifically regarding enactive cognition), together provide us with the two main starting points that I’ll use to explore Kafka’s realism or otherwise, and its effects. In the rest of this introduction, I’ll narrow the focus somewhat, to explain my choice of vision as the primary cognitive subject matter, and to outline how a number of scholarly and popular perspectives on Kafka fit into the framework constituted by the science of embodiment and the cognitive realism of perception.

6.

WHY VISION?

Visual perception is the focus for this study partly because it can be argued that vision is the primary human sense: the one by which we obtain our most precise sensory information about the world around us (e.g., Milner and Goodale 1995, 1; Lukas 2001, 16274; Findlay and Gilchrist 2003, 180). It certainly, for most sighted people, feels this way (Gregory 1998, 1). All the senses in fact calibrate and depend on each other, so it isn’t necessarily very meaningful to identify one as more important than the others, but given that my focus here is on subjective experience, the feeling of primacy matters. Vision is, furthermore, developmentally fundamental in terms of cognition and language acquisition; young children have been shown to use visual features to discriminate between verbal categories (e.g., Sweetser 1990, 39). Vision (and its imaginative corollary) has also—not least because of that feeling of primacy—long had a preeminent status in the theory and practice of literary evocation, and therefore offers a promising testing ground for an approach that seeks to interrogate the cognitive underpinnings of literary effects in conjunction with insights from literary theory broadly construed. Finally, the imaginative corollary of the visual sense, “mental imagery” or vision-like imagining in the absence of the relevant external stimuli, is also

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

the modality that dominates our imaginative experiences. I’ll go into more detail on the close connections between vision and (vision-like) imagination in Chapter One (pp. 86–92), but for now it’s enough to observe that we can usefully conceive of a cognitively prominent continuum established between vision, as evoked in the fictional characters within the text, and (vision-like) imagination, which mediates the reader’s connection with those characters (and the rest of the fictional world). “Imagination” has a highly contested status either as a “faculty” or as a “facility” (e.g., Mooij 1993, 1–3; Thomas 2003a, 79–80). However, the term will be used in this study in a relatively narrow sense, as “imagining seeing” (see Chapter One, p. 90): imagining the fictional world, and in particular imagining seeing it as the fictional characters do. In accordance with my generally anti-representationalist approach, I’ll refer to “imagining” (as a process) rather than to “mental images/imagery” (as representations), except when referring to the established field of mental-imagery research. When I use the term “imagining” to refer to imagining in the visual modality, this is merely a convenient shorthand, and not at all meant to deny the importance of the other sensory modalities of imaginative experience. Indeed, the claim that visual imagining (like vision itself) may be subjectively privileged doesn’t alter the fact that other senses may be more powerful in various ways. Although it’s notoriously difficult to imagine (or to remember) smells, for instance, olfaction has a uniquely direct neuroanatomical connection with the amygdala-hippocampus region of the brain, the “neural substrate of emotional memory” (Herz and Schooler 2002, 22; see also LaBar and Cabeza 2006), which gives it a potency that’s been exploited in literature and is relevant to readers’ responses to literature, very prominently in passages like Proust’s famous “madeleine episode” (Troscianko 2013a; see also Conclusion, p. 214). I simply haven’t space here to do justice to the other kinds of imagining, so they will have to wait for another time, but it’s worth noting that vision conceived of as inseparable from motor processes is a far less reductive way of thinking about imagining than is the emphasis on visual mental imagery in the absence of kinaesthetic elements, with its limiting “mind’s-eye” configuration (Gibbs 2006, 136; see also 124–25). There are general facts about imagining, at the neural and the experiential levels, but individual variation is also clearly significant in people’s tendencies and abilities to have vivid imaginative experiences (Cui et al. 2007). Sweeping statements like the claim at the centre of Scarry’s argument in Dreaming by the Book (drawing on Sartre’s The Psychology of Imagination), that “what the imagination is best at” is “dry, thin two-dimensionality” (1991, 23), are therefore unhelpful to a nuanced exploration of readers’ imaginative responses. Quite apart from the fact that it’s far from clear what “dry” is meant to convey as a descriptor for mental imagery, for some people visual imagining is more or less nonexistent, while it isn’t at all uncommon for others to rate their imaginative experiences as “perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision” (on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire, Marks 1973), or for high proportions of respondents to indicate in Burke’s

Introduction

31

Novel-Reading Questionnaire that they can “readily visualise” the persons and places described in a novel or short story, and that they imagine “clearly” rather than “indistinctly” (Burke 2011, 80–81). There are reasons to think that the empirical study of mental imagery as a whole could do with rethinking, because imagery questionnaires like David Marks’s may not capture what happens, in individual cases or in general, when imaginative experiences are induced by stimuli other than those questionnaires (Troscianko 2013b). For my purposes here, however, I’ll take the pragmatic approach of assuming that there’s likely to be a generalisable pattern in readers’ imaginative responses to certain kinds of textual features, and, as noted above, I’ll supplement that basic stance with references to my own and others’ empirical research with real readers who both resemble and differ from each other. Just as readers are more complex than any single study can do justice to, so literary texts are richer than any single perspective can capture. With any study of literature structured by a single angle or theme, there’s a danger of seeming to reduce the texts under scrutiny to little more than a lot of blank spaces separated by the isolated passages in which the theme in question is salient. There’s of course a great deal going on in Kafka that can’t be taken into account in a study on visual perception (even when understood as bound up with action). However, given that our imaginative experience of literature is our basic cognitive means of engaging with it, and given that visual imagining is so important a part of that engagement, I hope that the following analysis of perception won’t seem too arbitrary in its selectiveness—and that it might in practice also illuminate indirectly some of the gaps in between, by offering new ways of thinking about how our imaginative experiences affect other experiential and interpretive aspects of our responses to Kafka. Or, to put it differently, I hope that thinking about cognition and literature using a second-generation paradigm, and hence in a more inclusive way than is usually the case, might make the gaps in between my visuo-perceptual focal points more tractable too. As a matter of terminology, “cognitive” and “cognition” will be assumed (in line with the preceding discussion of cognition as an integrated set of processes encompassing the physical and the emotional) to have perceptual, sensorimotor, and emotional components, but the latter aspects may also be enumerated separately when the context requires that they be emphasised or differentiated. In general, I hope this inclusiveness will prove useful, at the level of textual analysis and for higher-level reflection on literature as an object of academic study.

7.

VISION IN KAFKA STUDIES

Visual perception is a relatively common theme in literary studies, in the sense that visual perception, or visual culture, or the visual world, has often been interrogated either as a trope within literary works or as an extratextual point of reference. Vision has also been crucial to the definition and/or

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self-definition of literary “movements” or “periods” such as Realism (as I’ll show in Chapter One) and Expressionism (see, e.g., Sokel 1959, 50–51). To my knowledge, however, no critical work on specific literary texts has yet explored in detail how vision and visual imagination might operate in the reading process, in a cognitively literal sense. Given the fantastically large number of critical works on Kafka, it’s surprising how few critics have concentrated specifically on visual perception, with regard either to how the fictional characters see or to how the reader experiences these acts of perception. Carolin Duttlinger (e.g., 2010) has explored the question of attention—which in Kafka often, though not always, means visual attention—with reference to the contemporary scientific understanding of its mechanisms, and suggests that an interplay of attention and distraction characterises texts such as Betrachtung (Meditation) (see also Fuchs 2010). If they deal with perceptual themes at all, Kafka scholars often examine Kafka’s textual constructs specifically of spatiality rather than visuality. Although space is closely connected with perception (i.e., space is the three-dimensional extent in which we perceive objects and events), the German critical tradition in particular tends to focus on Kafka’s idiosyncrasies in this regard in quite abstract terms: scholars often concentrate on themes such as spatial incoherence (Sussman 1979), enclosure (Karl 1977), centrifugal or centripetal dynamics (Fiechter 1980), and motifs of abstract geometry (Steinsaltz 1992). Even spatial evocation itself is often less the object of interest than is the “functionality” or “symbolism” of space (Frey 1965; Ramm 1971; Fiechter 1980; Kim 1983), its thematic framework (Duttlinger 2007), or its historical context (Anderson 1992), leading frequently to the construction of incredibly complex spatial typologies. A great deal of Kafka criticism touching on perceptual issues thus reduces the richness of the fictional world primarily to space. Similarly, such criticism often reduces perception and perspective to elements of an abstract critical terminology which can supposedly be elucidated only by “Erzählforschung” (narratology) (e.g., Busse 2001) or “Kafka-Deutung” (Kafka studies) (e.g., Walter-Schneider 1980), rather than being susceptible to cognitive analysis. Much of this work implicitly prompts a connection of intratextual vision and perspective with perspective in an extra-literary sense—for example, by referring in passing to the reader’s imagination in connection with narratological concerns—but it rarely pursues this kind of connection. Many other studies dealing with perceptual questions in Kafka consider them from one of two main angles, which will be the themes of subsequent chapters. Firstly, the level of descriptive detail, mostly of visible aspects of the fictional world, has often been the subject of discussion, and relevant remarks will be outlined in Chapter Three. Secondly, vision is often discussed in terms of “narrative perspective”, a term which denotes both the “angle” from which things are “seen” in a text and the more broadly cognitive “perspective” from which things are thought or uttered; I’ll discuss Kafka’s characteristic use of narrative perspective in Chapter Four.

Introduction 8.

33

KAFKAESQUE DUALITIES

My basic argument about what the experience of reading Kafka is like and why will be based on two observations: firstly, that the non-representational, enactive way in which vision is evoked by Kafka seems to connect with some fundamental qualities of vision, and secondly, that this is at odds in important ways with our folk-psychological understanding of it. Because of these two points, we might expect to observe an opposing duality of response in readers of Kafka: the sense of being both compelled by the cognitive realism and unsettled by its divergence from familiar ways of thinking (and reading) about perception. In the last part of this introduction, I’ll describe some supporting circumstantial evidence for the dual nature of the experience of reading Kafka, and in the chapters that follow I’ll go on to explore the details of how this kind of effect might be induced and manifested, and also refer to two empirical studies designed help establish to what extent these hypotheses are borne out in the experiences of real readers (see Appendices 1 and 2). Within quite different analytical contexts, numerous Kafka critics have come to strikingly similar conclusions regarding a contradictory duality in responses to Kafka. This dual effect is often linked to Kafka’s use of perspective. Robertson, for instance, discussing “Die Verwandlung” (Metamorphosis), suggests that the text “makes us experience what it is like to have one’s knowledge contradicted by one’s sensations, when the latter are more immediate and more powerful”, and that this effect, mediated by a narrative technique which creates “a disturbing empathy” despite our “superior knowledge”, is part of how the text induces an experience that is both “so compelling and so uncomfortable” (1985, 75). The dual response can be linked to the relationship between characters and events, and to the kind of descriptive detail that baffles as much as it clarifies. Gregory Triffitt (1985) discusses “Ein Landarzt” (A Country Doctor) with reference to the effects on the reader’s experience of “the relationship between the representative figures [fictional characters] and the disconcerting, even baffling phenomena confronting them”, in particular “the relatively stringent limitations Kafka places on his empirical representatives’ ability to actively participate in, to influence and even to understand the situations and events with which they are faced” (113). In combination with this, the disconcerting phenomenon in question is described in such detail that it “assumes a strongly tangible quality and cannot be lightly dismissed, while at the same time it is made as elusive as possible” (115). This combination, Triffitt suggests, is likely to contribute to the mixture of “identification, tension, ambivalence and uncertainty” (119) that characterises the relationship between Kafka’s readers and his characters. He notes also how point of view is constituted partly through action, and this is a key point which will recur in my exploration of perception in Kafka as cognitively realistic.

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In her study on Kafka and photography, which explores Kafka’s “visual imagination” as influenced by the “visual culture” of his era, Duttlinger (2007, e.g., 11) has argued that Kafka exploits the dual capacities of the new medium of photography to contradictory effect: “while photographs bring the world within the viewer’s reach, rendering it accessible and apparently comprehensible, they also contribute to a profound sense of distance and alienation” (14). This can be observed in Kafka’s descriptions of people, objects, and scenes: “The emphasis on apparently random details which suddenly undermine the overall meaning of a scene; the focus on surface, facades, and appearances; and, above all, the rift between photographically detailed descriptions and their promise of underlying meaning are all strategies which Kafka adopts and appropriates from his engagement with photography” (258–59). Duttlinger also situates these considerations within a discussion of the meaning and nature of “realism”, showing how reflections by theorists like Kracauer and Benjamin dismantle the cliché of photographic realism and immediacy, and how photography—and in particular Kafka’s literary engagement with it—can be used to create antirealist effects of distortion (e.g., 15–16, 67–69, 179). The ontological questions raised by Kafka’s fictions are analysed by Richard Murphy, who applies the concept of the fantastical (between the marvellous and the uncanny) to Kafka’s work. He suggests that Kafka’s creation of fantastical effects in combination with a particular version of Realism (1999, 181, 187) results in a hesitation on the reader’s part as to the status of subjectivity, and that, in response to Kafka’s writing, readers engage in a process of “self-dramatization” which consists of “bringing into co-presence these two mutually contradictory worldviews” (200–201). The result of this “process of performative reception” initiated by Kafka’s distinctive representational strategies is, he argues, “that the paradoxical is achieved: the projection of the reader into an unknown and imaginary realm, which is his own life” (201). Gerhard Neumann coins the term “gleitendes Paradox” (sliding paradox) to describe how Kafka’s works confront us with paradoxes, but not in a simple, statically oppositional way: “es erfolgen Schwenkungen, aber diese verklammern sich nie zu krassem Widerspruch” (there are vacillations, but they don’t become interlocked in a stark contradiction; 1968, 709). He argues that through the use of devices like semantic displacements or alienating metaphor, and by consistently countering readers’ expectations (an expectation of the meaning of an image becoming clear, for example), Kafka leads the reader into a space where “alle starre Begrifflichkeit ins Gleiten kommt” (all rigid concepts begin to slip; 722), resulting not only in a comprehensive disorientation (726) but also in a positive movement away from schematised patterns of thought and imagery (736). Whether or not this is enjoyable will, of course, depend on the individual

Introduction

35

reader: one participant in my “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) study expressed frustration with the withholding of clear real-world relevance and meaning: “I find the whole nondescriptness of the story a little bit irritating, inasmuch as I’d quite like to know where a story fits in within the bigger picture, and what it is meant to tell me” (Pt 18). But the same person also spoke of “alternating between yeah this is cool and no, this is not going anywhere”, so it clearly needn’t be all bad. The notion of an opposing duality occurs not only in critical studies of Kafka’s fiction, but also in definitions of the term “Kafkaesque”. Quite striking resemblances to these reflections on Kafka’s works are found in (oral) definitions of the term “Kafkaesque” provided by participants in the “Schakale und Araber” experiment. The term seems to bring with it questions of ontology similar to those addressed by the critics just mentioned, with participants often drawing distinctions between “reality” and “fiction”, the “real” and the “surreal”, the “realistic life” and the “internal life”. They also referred to different layers of “reality”: “his stories are pointing to a deeper reality, or a different reality”, for instance (Pt 17). These comments again provide support for the association I’m making between the effects of Kafka’s prose and its relation to an effect of reality. In particular, several participants speak of an encounter, in the “Kafkaesque”, with aspects of reality that are deeply strange even while being wholly normal, and/or make rapid transitions from the normal to the strange: Kafkaesque is associated with Kafka, obviously, and I’m not an expert in this, but I would associate it with things in a story, or in the course of the events, that you didn’t expect, that come as a surprise, and that don’t really make sense, that don’t really follow from what was there before; so that it is a kind of chaos that something moves from reality to perhaps fiction suddenly, without warning, and nevertheless—and this is also part of Kafkaesque, of the term—and nevertheless nobody really seems to mind. So it is in a sense, Kafkaesque to me means a break—something goes from real to surreal, perhaps—but this seems to be fairly normal, for whatever reason, and nobody really minds. (Pt 16) As another participant more succinctly put it: “somehow you accept it, because it’s Kafka” (Pt 12). This statement in fact echoes early Kafka criticism, in which the notion that we simply “accept it, because it’s Kafka” already finds expression: “Es gibt gar keine Frage mehr, ob es das Alles gibt—das gibt es, [. . .] das ist so” (There is no longer any question at all as to whether all that exists—it does exist, [. . .] it is so; Born 1983, 110). More formal definitions of the “Kafkaesque” are also helpful here. The English term was first used in 1938 by Cecil Day Lewis, describing a novel by Rex Warner as “Kafka-esque in manner” (Jakob 1988, 98; see Jakob

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1971, 1: 226–27 for the original article). A German alternate form for “kafkaesk”, “kafkasche”, seems to have been used from the late 1920s onwards, primarily as a descriptor of Kafka’s works, encompassing features from their gripping quality to their meta-realities (Born 1983, 125, 231, 237, 251, 389, 392).3 The term can most basically be taken to mean “characteristic of Kafka or his works”, but beyond that, dictionary definitions can offer a little more precision. For example, Duden (1999, s.v.) defines “kafkaesk” as “in der Art der Schilderungen Kafkas; auf unergründliche Weise bedrohlich” (in the manner of Kafka’s descriptions; unfathomably threatening). The Oxford English Reference Dictionary (2002, s.v.) gives a fuller definition of the “Kafkaesque”: “(of a situation, atmosphere, etc.) impenetrably oppressive, nightmarish, in a manner characteristic of the fictional world of Franz Kafka”.4 The English definition makes reference to a state of affairs or atmosphere that is equated with an experiential state, or qualified in experiential terms: a “situation” which is “nightmarish”, for instance. The German definition focuses on the experiential quality alone, as mysterious threat rather than nightmarish oppression, and without linking it to any particular sort of situation. Nonetheless, in the essential qualities of the “impenetrable” and the “unfathomable” Duden and the Oxford English Reference Dictionary clearly converge. These dictionary definitions, like the colloquial definitions given by experimental participants and the characterisations of Kafka’s works by critics, yield an overall sense of the “Kafkaesque” as a descriptor of an experience which is highly compelling, yet at the same time somehow unsettling: Duden’s reference to that which feels “unfathomably threatening”, for instance, invokes an element of threat, but also a mystery that invites or even demands unravelling. The Oxford English Reference Dictionary speaks of an “impenetrability” that implies a desire to get beyond the oppressiveness to its cause. This kind of ambivalence is nothing unusual in aesthetic responses. Ernst Jentsch’s (1906) characterisation of the uncanny as “psychische Unsicherheit” (mental uncertainty) invokes ambivalence too, and the striking popularity of “nightmarish” horror films is another example of how nightmares can be fascinating and compelling as well as repulsive. Indeed, a dramatic increase in production of horror films from the 1980s onwards has now reached such proportions that “the horror film has arguably come to saturate popular culture” (Prince 2004, 9); the equivocal experience of enjoying being frightened by films of psychological suspense seems so enduring that it can even be claimed that “the horror film has become coterminus [sic] with our contemporary experience of reality” (10). Although aesthetic experience, especially when being investigated empirically, is often conceived of in terms of simple liking, preference, and pleasure—“The psychology of aesthetic experience is eerily close to the psychology of how much novices say they like something” (Silvia 2009, 48)— art of all kinds has always induced more complex emotional responses, including knowledge-related emotions like confusion, hostile emotions like

Introduction

37

anger, and self-conscious emotions like embarrassment (48). The coders in my empirical study on “Schakale und Araber” compiled a list of no fewer than 14 categories and two dimensions of response in order to cover all major aspects of response—a much richer response than merely liking or disliking. Empirical investigation thus allows us not only to test theoretical propositions, but also to add richness and nuance to them. First things first, however: the aim of this book is to argue the case for why we might expect the duality of the compelling and the unsettling to be a salient characteristic of the experience of reading Kafka, and to suggest one possible set of reasons for why this might be so.

9.

CHAPTER OUTLINES

In Chapter One, I outline the long history of pictorialist accounts of perception and their effects on the history of literary representation, including literary Realism, before tracing the emergence of non-pictorialist strands of thought, which culminate in current enactivist theories of visual perception, imagination, and consciousness. This theory is intended to provide the tools necessary for the textual analysis in the following three chapters. Chapter Two focuses on Kafka’s personal writings, showing how he grapples with problems arising from pictorialist conceptions of vision, imagination, and hence language, and how he finds a solution to these problems involving an enactivist mode of perceiving and writing. The chapter provides a first manifestation in textual practice of the principles set out more abstractly in Chapter One, so the two can fruitfully be read alongside each other. Chapter Three deals with Kafka’s novel Der Proceß (The Trial), demonstrating how the novel’s evocation of perception is enactive rather than pictorial, and how linguistic concepts such as basic-level categorisation help to understand Kafka’s characteristic efficiently minimal mode of evocation. I hypothesise as to the effects of this aspect of Kafka’s poetics on the reader’s experience of the fictional world, and consider its relationship to cognitive and textual narrativisation. The main focus of Chapter Four is narrative perspective. I discuss how Kafka’s typically shifting perspectival forms can be understood as inherently connected with his evocation of not only perception but also emotion as enactive, and give examples from a variety of Kafka’s short fictional works and all three of his novels. I suggest that perspectival instability has profound consequences for readers’ emotional experiences of the fictional worlds, as well as for their conceptions of consciousness and selfhood. Finally, I conclude by proposing some ways in which cognitive realism might be used to inform the study of Realist, Modernist, and many other kinds of literature.

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NOTES 1. OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. Accessed 9 November 2013. www.oed.com/view/Entry/158933?redirectedFrom=realistic. 2. Daniel Allington, personal e-mail communication to author, 11 November 2013. 3. For studies on the Kafkaesque in Kafka see also Nagel 1983, 16; Anz 1989, 14–15; and Hiebel 1999, 13–14. 4. The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., has a simpler definition: “Of or relating to the writings of Franz Kafka; resembling the state of affairs or a state of mind described by Kafka.” OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. Accessed 6 November 2013. www.oed.com/view/Entry/102331?redirected From=kafkaesque.

1

Perception without Pictures

The point of this chapter is to set out the conceptual framework of enactive perception which I’ll use in the following chapters to analyse Kafka’s writing. In Chapter Two I’ll consider Kafka’s personal reflections on cognitive-perceptual issues, and in Chapter Three I’ll explore the cognitive-perceptual structures and the effects of his evocations of the fictional world of Der Proceß (The Trial). Then in Chapter Four I’ll expand on this framework to include enactive emotion in connection with perception, specifically perspective. In order to understand better how Kafka’s fictional texts engage their readers, we need to investigate what it means to imagine the fictional worlds that are evoked through the language of his texts, and to ask how certain textual prompts create more or less direct connections with the reader’s imagination. And to understand the imagination, which is inextricably linked with visual perception, we need some understanding of how vision works. I’ll argue that no exploration of theories of vision and imagination— and therefore of literary effects—can avoid the troublesome opposition of pictorialism (the notion that seeing and imagining are mediated by the mental representation of detail accruing to form a “picture in the head”) and enactivism (the theory that the experiences of vision and imagination are constituted directly by interaction with an actual or potential environment). In the subsequent chapters, I’ll present evidence that Kafka’s evocation of his fictional worlds through visual perception is fundamentally enactive, and argue that this makes them cognitively realistic in the realm of visual perception, with certain potential consequences for the reading experience.

1. READING AND PICTORIALISM VERSUS ENACTIVISM In the most basic sense, reading is the perception, processing, and comprehension of words on the page (or screen). The comprehension of written words proceeds linearly at the level of the clause or sentence, but the visual processing of individual words is a complex process determined by a number of nonlinear factors, including regression and prediction. Normal reading also involves frequently skipping words that can be inferred using

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semantic, syntactic, or phonological knowledge without the words needing to be foveated.1 Decoding and comprehension proceed in interaction with one another, and comprehension is mediated by both “working” and “long-term” memory, which in turn are modulated by semantic and syntactic features, as well as by the interactions of stored information and current context (Kintsch and Mangalath 2011). In my discussion of Kafka and readers’ engagement with literature more generally, I won’t be assuming or adhering to any single theory of the mechanics of reading. Although it could be fruitful to bring an exploration of perceptual issues into dialogue with a reading-based account of literary effects, here I’ll be considering the act of reading in a rather higher-level sense. To read is to establish a cognitive connection with a text, and if the reader is to keep reading, this connection has to be upheld and strengthened: the text has to provoke, and continue to provoke, a cognitive response in the reader that goes beyond the visual processing and comprehension of the printed words. Pictorialist accounts of vision and imagination posit that this response is configured in pictorially representational ways: neural activation of picture-like representations of the object or event is responsible for our experiences when we imagine, just like when we see. Enactivism, by contrast, refutes the notion that pictorial representations of what is seen or imagined are responsible for generating the phenomenology of seeing or imagining: rather, we experience the seen or imagined world in an ongoing process of interaction with it. Brain states (i.e., particular patterns of neural activation) are necessary but not sufficient for these experiences because the body and the world are always involved as well, and the function of neural representation in these experiences is not that of representing the world in the form of a “mental picture”. The following examination of these theories will suggest that enactivism offers potential solutions to several key aspects of the problem of how we consciously experience, aspects which remain intractable in the pictorialist account. I’ll attempt to give an outline of how the pictorial-enactive distinction illuminates mechanisms of vision relevant to understanding the more or less cognitively realistic nature of how Kafka’s characters see the world around them. Then, arguing that imagination can be elucidated in parallel with vision, I’ll try to shed some light on the nature of the continuum between vision and imagination, specifically as manifested in the connection established in literary reading between characters and readers.

2.

PICTORIALISM

The opposition between pictorialism and enactivism will, as I’ve said, be the structuring principle of this and the following chapters. Here it’s worth briefly noting, however, that pictorialism is only one of two major representationalist theories of vision and imagination (or mental imagery), the other being propositionalism. Both these theories are countered by the enactivist

Perception without Pictures

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view. The pictorialist-propositionalist debate has dominated recent discussion of vision and mental imagery, and has led to something of a deadlock, with Stephen Kosslyn (e.g., 1994; and Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis 2006) and Zenon Pylyshyn (e.g., 2003) respectively amongst the most conspicuous representatives of the two camps. For picture theorists, the neural mediators of vision and mental imagery are “analogue” representational arrays, while propositionalists conceive of language-like representations as sufficient to explain all cognitive processes, including the effects attributed to mental imagery (though see Pylyshyn [2003, 131–33] on the merits of enactivist approaches to vision that reduce the explanatory role of representation). Neural representation of the percept, whether analogue or propositional, is at the explanatory heart of both pictorialism and propositionalism, and causes all the problems discussed below with regard to pictorialism. I’ll focus on pictorial rather than propositional representation because of its clearer instantiation of the key problems of representationalism and its closer links with the history, theory, and practice of literary representation. I use the term “pictorial representation” to mean something whose meaning derives from analogue spatial correspondence or resemblance, the point of which is “to preserve a delimited identity with the original”, despite the fact that “the non-identical aspects of that representation” (such as its scaleddown nature) may be “vital for the analog’s utility” (Blachowicz 1998, 160). This corresponds to Kosslyn’s definition: “A depictive representation is a type of picture, which specifies the locations and values of configurations of points in a space” and “convey[s] meaning via [its] resemblance to an object” (1994, 5; see also Pylyshyn [2003, 417] on “us[ing] spatial magnitudes to represent spatial magnitudes” [author’s italics]).2 This type of iconic analogue entails various problems concerning the concept of resemblance and the viewing agent necessitated by it (Pylyshyn 2003, 328–30), and these will be discussed in more detail later (see pp. 43–50).3

a)

The Attractions of Pictorialism

Pictorialism has a long history, and remains popular as a way of explaining our sensory experience of the world because it has a number of significant attractions. The most common sort of conception about how we interact with the world around us, in folk psychology and in much scientific thought, is that we are able to see and imagine because we, or more specifically our brains, build up detailed pictures of the world. This is expressed in numerous common turns of phrase that invoke mental pictures in descriptions of vision and imagination, such as “the place was just how I’d pictured it”, “the landscape was spread out before me like a picture”, or, via the metaphorical equation of vision and knowledge (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2008), “I couldn’t get a clear picture of what he meant”. As for the scientific prevalence of this view, Noë (2009) quotes an “authoritative textbook” on neurobiology as propounding the commonplace view that “‘the brain

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constructs an internal representation of external physical events after first analyzing them into component parts’” (130). This corresponds to the “pure vision” paradigm of visual representation caricatured by Patricia Churchland and colleagues (1994, 24–25). The extent to which lay conceptions feed into scientific accounts of vision, by shaping what research questions are asked, how theoretical frameworks are developed, and even how experimental data are interpreted—the extent to which, in other words, a “view” or an “account” is partially also an “assumption”—isn’t something I’m able to make very strong claims about here. It does seem, though, that various features of subjective experience and of folk psychology are relevant to understanding the appeal of the pictorialist model. This appeal derives not least, I think, from the remarkable fitness for purpose of human vision: we have numerous parallel interconnecting processes contributing to our experience of “seeing”, from pop-out detection mechanisms (allowing us preattentively to identify features that are exceptions to their surroundings, e.g., in colour, size, or orientation) to edge-recognition and contrast-controlling mechanisms. These all work so well together that it’s easy to believe that all the “parts” combine to make a pictorial “whole”. The pictorialist view arguably also remains influential because of the stability and security that seem to be features of our engagement with the world, and that seem to be lost when we relinquish it: if we didn’t create pictorial representations of the world around us, how could we function safely and reliably in it? Without an accurate image of the world, transmitted from our eyes to our brain, and available then to be accessed by all the processes directing cognition and motor action, how could we be in full control of what we see, and how could we act or reflect upon it? Pictorialism gives us, further, a vivid language in which to talk about the private, subjective experiences of seeing and imagining. On the one hand, this language is sanctioned by “a large cultural heritage of graphical representation (maps, drawings, paintings, photographs, diagrams, film and video) which biases us into thinking that our representations of reality have a similar iconic quality” (O’Regan 1992, 475). On the other hand, pictorial terminology is validated by the phenomenology of visuoperceptual experience: “We look out and see the world, and we cannot escape the impression that what we have in our heads is a detailed, stable, extended, and veridical display that corresponds to the scene before us” (Pylyshyn 2003, 2–3). We have the impression that “I” am located in my head looking out at the world, and we have corresponding “difficulty shedding the view that in our heads is a display that our inner first-person self, or our cognitive homunculus, observes” (3). These considerations are what provide the intuitive appeal of picture theories of vision and imagination: we look out and may seem to see a picture of the world, and we try to explain this by saying that it happens because we are seeing an internal picture. Yet, as Pylyshyn notes, “nobody really believes that there are actual pictures in the brain. [. . .] The problem is that while the literal picture-theory or cortical display theory is

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what provides the explanatory force and the intuitive appeal, it is always the picture metaphor that people retreat to in the face of the implausibility of the literal version” (418; see also Findlay and Gilchrist 2003, 2).

b)

The Problems with Pictorialism

“Pictures in the head” are a “natural” way of thinking about imagining, or a “helpful” analogy for it, but most modern pictorialists wouldn’t admit to positing “actual pictures”; Kosslyn now refers to his account of vision and imagery as “depictive” rather than even “quasi-pictorial”, and Kosslyn, William Thompson, and Giorgio Ganis (2006, 136) state explicitly that “The representation [in the “visual buffer” (see below)] is not a picture”, explaining that all that’s needed to have a depiction is a functional space whose geometric properties arise because there are “fixed, hard-wired processes that interpret the representation as if it were a space” (15). This implies that “functional” pictures make one theoretically immune to the problems of positing actual pictures, but even if the pictorial representation is incomplete, or indeed supplemented by propositional representation (136), it has to depict through a form of resemblance (spatial correspondence between the representation and what’s represented) and “in this respect images are like pictures” (44, authors’ italics), and entail the problems I describe below. Comparable forms of equivocation can be identified in many scientific and philosophical accounts of vision and imagination, which use visuospatial metaphors either to help conceptualise the mechanisms and nature of the experiences in question, or to try to explain them (if not, given the forgiving ambiguities of metaphor, something in between). The metaphors range from streams of consciousness to the contents of consciousness, from pictures through theatres to a “global workspace” (Baars, e.g., 1997) and a “conscious mental field” (e.g., Libet 1994). Each of these metaphors constitutes a form of what the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1991) calls the “Cartesian Theatre” (see Figures 1.1 and 2.1, and Chapter Two, pp. 105–7), the nonexistent place in the brain where everything (i.e., all our sensory inputs) comes together and “consciousness happens” as a private show watched by “me”, the theatre’s sole audience. The Cartesian Theatre is posited with varying degrees of explicitness by all pictorialist theories of vision, thereby falling into the trap of “Cartesian materialism”: “the view you arrive at when you discard Descartes’ dualism but fail to discard the imagery of a central (but material) Theater where it ‘all comes together’” (107). It isn’t always clear how literally the metaphors of streams and workspace are meant to be taken, nor what heuristic or other function they’re intended to serve (Baars [1998] defends the value of theatre metaphors of consciousness, but without adequately addressing the problem of dualism). However, the key point to be made is that the mind-matter or mind-body dualism inherent in such forms of thought is no less fundamental for being metaphorical: once we posit that consciousness is a space or container, and that some contents are “in” or “out of” consciousness, just

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

Figure 1.1

The Cartesian Theatre

as when we talk about pictures as the substrate of seeing and imagining, the metaphors are hard to shed in the shift from thinking and talking about experience to accounting for it. Scientific research on the “micro level” of visual mechanisms (see, e.g., Snowden, Thompson, and Troscianko 2006 for an informative and fun introduction to vision science) isn’t necessarily pursued within the framework of any of the three major “macro-level” explanatory systems of pictorialism, propositionalism, and enactivism, and indeed individual findings—for example, on the phenomenon of “mental rotation” in visual mental imagery (Pylyshyn 2003, e.g., 316–21, 405–7)—may be interpreted in dramatically different ways as support for more than one of these frameworks. Pictorialist theories, however, in attempting to account for the basic phenomenology of looking out and seeing the world by positing “veridical displays” or “pictures in the head”, seem inevitably to encounter significant theoretical and empirical obstacles, which may be avoidable on an enactivist account. As I’ll explain in the following sections, the picture theory leads in all its forms to the problem of infinite regress, relies upon the problematic concept of isomorphism, and fails to solve the problem of how or why physical states

Perception without Pictures

45

give rise to consciousness. Despite its “intuitive” appeal, therefore, it arguably fails to provide any real explanatory force after all. i) Infinitely Regressing Homunculi One theoretical problem with pictorialism is the invocation of an infinite regress as a corollary to the homuncular fallacy: if there is a picture-like array inside the head, which presents either an image of external sensory stimuli or an internally generated “mental image”, the information in this image has to be processed by some separate internal faculty—in other words, a homunculus. And if I need a little man inside my head looking at my internal pictures, he must need one inside his, looking at his . . . and so on (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2

Pushing back the explanandum: picture-viewing homunculi

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism

John Hyman (1989) discusses the homuncular fallacy in terms of the relationship between vision and pictures and the philosophical confusions thus entailed. More generally, the homuncular fallacy can be defined as the fallacy of extending mental characteristics to parts of an organism that should rightly be applied only to a whole organism, manifested also in the common locution “in the mind’s eye”. There is no such organ as the mind’s eye, of course, but the term does hint at the close connection between the processes involved in vision and in mental imagery, and in this sense, it is less misleading than, although inevitably entailed by, the metaphor of “pictures in the head”. Any pictorialist theory of vision and the imagination encounters this basic theoretical problem of infinite regress. Kosslyn is the best-known current defender of a pictorialist or quasi-pictorialist theory, the basic assumption of which is that vision (or mental image-formation) is a two-stage process: some sort of “image” finds its way into the mind either via the eyes or from memory, and this image is then scanned, or interpreted, giving rise to our conscious experience of what is seen or imagined. In fact, the process is more of a three-stage one, with the third stage elided in the slippery expression “to give rise to” (see Figure 1.3): “in our usage, a mental image occurs when a representation of the type created during the initial phases of perception is present but the stimulus is not actually being perceived; such representations preserve the perceptible properties of the stimulus and ultimately give rise to the subjective experience of perception” (Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis 2006, 4). It’s unclear how this definition of imagery helps us to understand or account for the experience of seeing or imagining. These three seemingly innocuous words invoke a notion of “emergence”—how complex patterns and systems arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions

Figure 1.3

The magic of “giving rise to” conscious experience

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(J. Holland 1998)—which is all too often, as here, employed as pseudo-filler for the “explanatory gap” between the objective body and brain and the subjective experience (see pp. 48–49). The ambiguous invocation of emergence is, however, central to Kosslyn’s account. Specifically, he posits a “‘visual buffer’” composed of the several retinotopic maps (representing the visual image formed on the retina point for point) in the occipital cortex (the visual processing centre of the brain), where patterns of activation constitute images with “quasi-pictorial” properties (Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis 2006, 38) that depict object shapes. Because there’s more information in the visual buffer than can be processed in detail, an “attention window” selects some regions for further processing (136), and when we see, input from the attention window is compared to stored representations in the object-properties-processing subsystem of which the visual buffer forms part; if the input matches a stored representation, the object is recognised. In a separate subsystem devoted to processing spatial properties, an “object map” indicates locations of objects in a scene or parts of an object, indexing the locations of the rapidly changing representations in the visual buffer produced by eye movements (138). Finally, all this information is interpreted by a “mind’s eye”: “a processor that interprets depictive representations (which in turn— somehow—ultimately give rise to visual perceptual experiences)” (40; see also Thomas 1999, 211–12). There isn’t even any attempt made here to explain how the “giving rise to” might actually work, and in general, it is notable that “picture” theories of imagery tend to amass metaphorical terminology so conspicuous that it’s hard not to be left with the feeling that analogies are being drawn rather than explanations being offered. Theories not structured by pictorialist assumptions about brain functioning seem to require far fewer metaphors. The question of what role metaphor plays in linguistic engagement with perceptual experience is in fact something that Kafka engages with in some depth, and I’ll show in Chapter Two how his personal writings confront questions and problems entailed directly by those of inner homunculi and infinite regressions. Aside from the conflicting evidence for whether the relevant brain areas can be shown to be activated in ways that support the pictorialist theory (Pylyshyn 2003, 392–96), it relies ultimately, as Dennett memorably puts it, on “undischarged homunculi” (1978, 83, 101) to interpret the pictorial representation. Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis confront the accusation that they commit the homuncular fallacy head on, but aside from some problematic inferences from computer simulations (2006, e.g., 40–41), their only defence is the argument that because visual mental imagery draws on largely the same neural system as visual perception, and because “nobody worries that a homunculus is required to explain perception”, the homunculus can’t be a problem for their account of vision and mental imagery: “If we do not need to posit a little man to explain perception, we do not need to posit one to explain imagery” (40). But concerns about homunculi are a common feature of

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accounts of visual perception (e.g., O’Regan and Noë 2001a, target article and commentaries; Findlay and Gilchrist 2003, 8), and they need to be taken equally seriously when investigating vision and the imagination. The basic conceptual structure of accounts that invoke infinitely regressing homunculi isn’t altered by metaphorical equivocation: seeing and imagining are still internal picture viewing—but where and what is the internal viewer? ii) Isomorphic Maps The other main problem with pictorialist theories of perception is isomorphism, or structural equivalence. First-order isomorphism is the structural one-to-one correspondence recruited to explain subjective experience, sometimes in terms of the “neural correlates of consciousness” (Koch 2004). For example, the brain area V1 (primary visual cortex), which is active in seeing and imagining, creates a topographically mapped area of the seen or imagined object (Snowden, Thompson, and Troscianko 2006, 73–77). It may be tempting to think that this explains the quality of the visual or imaginative experience, yet we must remember that the neural representation, the “picture in the head”, although it may be spatially isomorphic, is also hugely distorted. Specifically, the cortical magnification factor is such that the foveal area of the retina is granted a disproportional amount of primary visual cortex, and cortical processing of stimuli is subject to a left-right reversal. In both vision and imagination, the mapping is also, of course, neither three-dimensional nor coloured. (In Chapter Two we’ll see what happens when Kafka plays with the idea of a mountainously three-dimensional image in the head; see pp. 98–101.) Thus there can be no reverse engineering by which we deduce the nature of what is seen or imagined from its cortical map. The map also provides no sort of answer to the question of why or how these aspects of the percept being represented in this place in the brain should result in a subjective experience of what is seen or imagined. The logic of isomorphism takes us only so far, and when it gives out it makes questionable the logic of the whole. Roger Shepard and Susan Chipman’s (1970) notion of “second-order isomorphism” remains equally problematic, in that while the requirement of first-order structural similarity between external objects and internal representations is replaced by a second-order equivalence connecting relations between external objects with the relations between their internal representations, the issue is still how brains represent the world rather than how organisms experience it. iii) The Hardest Problem of Them All The “hard problem” of consciousness is closely related to that of isomorphism. The term “hard problem” was coined by David Chalmers in 1996 to denote the mystery of consciousness: why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences, why and how physical processing “gives rise to” experience. It is one of many related formulations of the venerable mind-body problem (Blackmore 2010, 19–21), which also include the “explanatory gap”,

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Figure 1.4

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The explanatory gap, chasm, or fathomless abyss

defined by Joseph Levine as “a metaphysical gap between physical phenomena and conscious experience” (Levine 2001, 78; see also 7, 76–77), William James’s (1890, 1: 146) “‘chasm’ between the inner and the outer worlds”, and Charles Mercier’s (1888: 9–10) “fathomless abyss” between mind and matter (see Figure 1.4). Kevin O’Regan (in Blackmore 2005b, 160–61) declares that the “hard problem” is rendered a “pseudo-problem” if one takes a sensorimotor view, as will be discussed later. The sensorimotor approach does seem to offer a way of turning the mystery of consciousness— what Dennett (1991, 21; see also 21–25) has described as “just about the last surviving mystery”—into something that we at least know how to think about, into a set of specific questions that may be very difficult to answer but can at least be asked (see also Chalmers 1995; Blackmore 2005a, 1–2). The isomorphism argument is a response to the “hard problem”, proceeding primarily from the representational angle and suggesting that if a brain state resembles a percept closely enough, it must be possible to use it to account for the act and experience of perception. But as I’ve suggested, and as Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis’s defeatist “somehow” also acknowledges (p. 47), there doesn’t seem to be any possible answer to the questions that arise: why should an electrochemical field of a certain shape in the brain

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be a visual experience of that shape? And if the experience is of a red circle does that mean the “cortical counterpart” need be red and circular. . .? As Nigel Thomas (2009) points out, the “hard problem” (and the issue of isomorphism) is also closely connected to that of infinite regress. Pictorialism may come up against the “hard problem” straight away, by positing (through the logic of isomorphism) that neural representations are inherently conscious or that they inherently “give rise to” consciousness (what could give them this quality?). Alternatively, it may confront the problem indirectly, by way of the infinite regress of the homuncular fallacy. This pushes back the problem by invoking multiple stages of information processing, but ultimately leaves us with the same unanswered question of why there is “something it is like” to be me, right now, still staring at this laptop screen (T. Nagel 1974). iv)

Looking without Seeing: Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness Much twentieth-century vision science has been concerned with working out what mechanisms might be involved in resolving the many discrepancies between input and experience. How is it, for instance, that we see a stable visual scene when our eyes make several movements every second, at speeds of more than 500 degrees of visual angle per second? And why don’t we see a black hole at the centre of the visual field, at the point where the optic nerve passes through the retina, given that there are no photoreceptor cells there at all? Mechanisms such as “saccadic suppression” and the “filling-in” of the blind-spot (e.g., Snowden, Thompson, and Troscianko 2006, 31, 334–35) have been invoked to solve the problem of how it is that the numerous poverties in our visual input don’t prevent us from building up a rich and detailed internal representation of the outside world—so that we can “look out and see the world” as rich and detailed. The phenomenon of “change blindness” was a major contributor to a significant shift in vision science, in which the notion that we do build up a rich and detailed internal representation of the world began to be seriously questioned (Blackmore 2010, 94–102; Simons 2000). In one of the first experiments (Blackmore et al. 1995), an image, for example, of a breakfast scene was shown to participants and either held still or moved in an unpredictable direction, forcing an eye movement, or saccade (a swift movement of both eyes simultaneously in the same direction). At the time of the movement or non-movement, the image either stayed the same or changed in a salient way, such as a full glass of milk turning into a nearly empty glass. In the forced-saccade condition, change-detection performance fell to chance levels. Building on earlier work by researchers like Phillips and Singer (1974), who demonstrated the importance of the blank interstimulus interval in preventing change detection, numerous other experiments were performed in which observers failed to notice a strikingly salient change in a scene. Change blindness as such was first observed (Grimes 1996 [developed from a conference presentation in 1992]) in contexts where a change in the display—even so salient a change

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as two people exchanging heads—was made at the moment when the eyes made a saccade. Apparently, therefore, no complete, or perhaps even at all detailed, representation is preserved during the saccade; we expect the scene to remain the same, and the “gist” (see p. 84) of the scene that is preserved is not of such detail as to register a change instantly. Change blindness has since been observed in many other forms: when there are brief flashes or blank screens between pictures (e.g., Blackmore et al. 1995), with image flicker (Rensink et al. 1997), during cuts in films (Levin and Simons 1997), when the change is gradual (Simons et al. 2000), with task and movement variables (Wallis and Bülthoff 2000), and when one conversational partner is replaced by another in a real-life interaction, masked by an occluding object like a door being carried past (Simons and Levin 1998). Viewers fail to notice such salient changes as the gradual disappearance of an object in the centre of the visual field—for example, a large black rock against white water in the foreground of a river scene (Simons et al. 2000)—even though they may be trying to do nothing other than see what is changing. When the experimental paradigm allows, most changes are noticed eventually (e.g., Rensink et al. 1997; Hollingworth and Henderson 2004), but this can take a surprisingly long time. A related phenomenon known as inattentional blindness demonstrates specifically the crucial role played by attention in determining what we see/notice or fail to see/notice: we may be blind to features of a scene to which we are not attending because, for instance, we’re engaged in a task that prioritises other features of it. The most famous demonstration of this is Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris’s (1999) “gorillas in our midst” study. On a video, two teams of three players each, dressed in black or in white, moved around in an open area passing a basketball to each other, and after a little less than a minute a woman in a gorilla costume walked across the action from off-camera to off-camera, taking five seconds to do so, with the players continuing to pass the ball during and after the event. Participants were asked to keep a silent mental count of the number of passes made by one of the two teams, and were asked afterwards to write down their counts and to answer a series of surprise questions on whether they’d noticed anything unusual. Around half the participants failed to notice the woman in the gorilla suit.4 In change blindness, however, even when attention is directed at the salient parts of the picture where the changes occur, detection often fails to happen. Success in change detection does also correlate with optical fixation (Henderson and Hollingworth 1999; O’Regan et al. 2000), but the correlation isn’t total (O’Regan et al. 2000; Zelinsky 2001), that is, how much you look somewhere isn’t the only factor involved. These results challenge the very idea, appealing and long-held as it has been, that vision consists in building up a detailed internal representation of the world (see Kosslyn 1994, e.g., 239–41, on the accumulation and encoding of visual input over time). The prevalence of this idea is testified to by work on “change blindness blindness” (Levin et al. 2000), in which participants systematically overestimate their ability to detect changes.

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Nonetheless, it’s important not to overinterpret the data: some people do detect changes quickly, and most people detect them eventually, so the claim that change blindness proves that there are no internal representations at all isn’t really sustainable. Some researchers have also argued that implicit change detection, or “mindsight”, occurs even if explicit detection doesn’t (see Simons and Ambinder 2005, 47, for a summary). Explicit change detection may underestimate the sensitivity and extent of visual memory; for example, where perspectival changes are involved, a threshold mechanism for explicit change detection may be calibrated to ignore the effects of slightly misjudged eye or head movements (Hollingworth and Henderson 2004). Alternative explanations have also been posited to defend a stronger representationalist thesis: that we have detailed and complete representations, for instance, but comparison mechanisms are faulty, too slow, or unable to access the pathway in which the representation is encoded (e.g., Simons and Rensink 2005; Prinz 2006; Jacob 2008). Another possibility is that detailed representations are overwritten before they can be used in this kind of task. Indeed, Mark Becker, Harold Pashler, and Stuart Anstis (2000) found that a longer interstimulus interval actually increased recognition when a spatial cue was presented after 16 ms. This implies that detailed information may exist in the form of an “iconic trace” from which this information, if attention is directed to it, can be transferred to short-term memory rather than immediately overwritten. Thus, change blindness may not reveal that there are no detailed representations of the scene while viewing it (however minimally or otherwise they are processed); it may reveal instead that we are unable to store much information from a scene after the fact. However, these explanations and findings don’t account for failures to perceive dynamic changes or unattended changes in a single scene, neither of which involves the comparison of two different images. Such objections therefore don’t undermine the general conclusion that change blindness indicates a paucity of internal representation. Other kinds of evidence counter to the conclusions frequently drawn from change-blindness experiments include the fact that people can learn and exploit the probability of object changes, suggesting that conventional change-blindness demonstrations may rely partially on inducing changes unlikely to occur in the real world (e.g., a change in the position of a handrail, in Rensink et al. 1997). Furthermore, objects of central interest in a scene (like people) are more likely to change in real life, and objects of marginal interest (like handrails) are less likely to. This makes it unclear whether it’s the object’s interest or the likelihood of it changing that determines success in change detection. In either case, change blindness may result in part from not knowing where to look and what to attend to rather than from representational sparsity (Droll et al. 2007). A further challenge to the extrapolations made from change-blindness data is that they all depend on rather elaborate interventions to prevent the detection of luminance transients (i.e., salient changes in luminance), which is a key visual mechanism in motion coding and hence change detection (Klein,

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Kingstone, and Pontefract 1992). These are masked by any of the common strategies employed in change-blindness research: by synchrony with saccades, by a blank screen or mud splashes, by a diagonal movement of the image or change in viewpoint, by the extreme slowness of the change, or by brief occlusion of the changing objects (see Arrington, Levin, and Varakin 2006, 1666, for a summary). They can also be masked by contrast (Turatto et al. 2003), and by colour and luminance transients (Arrington, Levin, and Varakin 2006). However, the wide range of transients that can serve this masking effect, the persistence of some change-blindness effects even in no-transient conditions (1670–71), and findings on inattentional blindness, in which there is no masking, are all factors suggesting that this is a rather robust phenomenon which can tell us not just how important luminance changes are to the human motion system, but also quite interesting things about the illusory richness of our visual world (Blackmore et al. 1995). v) Seeing without Looking: Dennett’s Marilyns Change blindness and inattentional blindness demonstrate that we can be “looking” directly at something and fail to see it. The converse is equally true: we can “see” things that we can’t possibly have looked at, in the sense of having foveated them clearly. For instance, we come into a room and see it as a whole, not a series of minuscule and therefore fragmentary foveal “images” built up over time into a total pictorial “representation”. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett argues that consciousness is the result of the massive parallelism of neural activity which constructs “multiple drafts” of sensory inputs, none of which has any special status as “conscious” independently of the moment and the manner in which we probe them (see also Chapter Three, pp. 152–53). Part of his argument involves demonstrating that what we see isn’t represented in any place in the brain (any special place that would make it “conscious”), and to this end he gives a now famous example (for detailed discussion see Pessoa, Thompson, and Noë 1998, target article and commentaries). You walk into a room wallpapered with identical portraits of Marilyn Monroe—what do you see? You would see in a fraction of a second that there were “lots and lots of identical, detailed, focused portraits of Marilyn Monroe.” Since your eyes saccade four or five times a second at most, you could foveate only one or two Marilyns in the time it takes to jump to the conclusion and thereupon to see hundreds of identical Marilyns. We know that parafoveal vision [seeing through all other parts of the retina] could not distinguish Marilyn from various Marilyn-shaped blobs, but nevertheless, what you see is not wallpaper of Marilyn-in-the-middle surrounded by various indistinct Marilyn-shaped blobs. (1991, 354, author’s italics) You don’t see, as the limitations of saccades and foveal fixation would suggest, one clear portrait and lots of bleary blobs, before turning to the

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next, foveating that, identifying it as Marilyn, and so on. You see at a glance, “instantly”, that they are all the same—and you would notice straight away if one had a hat or a silly moustache. You see “all Marilyns”, and yet critically, in Dennett’s argument, you don’t do so by “filling in” the Marilyns neurally; “the detail is in the world, not in your head” (1991, 355). We see the world as it is: continuous, and there all the time, whenever we look. We don’t see the world as the creation of any internal pictorial representation would dictate: gradually and fragmentarily, as we sequentially “look at” things. This fundamental feature of visual experience is highlighted by William James, the founding father of modern psychology: “It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim, when once a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object lie before us, ‘How could we ever have been ignorant of these things and yet have felt the object, or drawn the conclusion, as if it were a continuum, a plenum? There would have been gaps—but we felt no gaps [. . .]’” (1890, 1: 488). We often suddenly “see” something that has long been before our eyes, but we just hadn’t “noticed” it. What we look at, and what we notice, is gappy and fragmentary, yet we don’t see object-shaped gaps where we have failed to notice things; what we see is a continuum, a plenum, a totality. So, if we can both see without possibly having been able to look, and fail to see when we have been looking, then there seems to be a significant flaw in the basic pictorialist notion that we look and in so doing build up a representation, in a process that constitutes seeing. The problems associated with infinite regress, isomorphism, and phenomenology, however, have historically not diminished the clear priority of pictorialist theories of vision and imagination in science and philosophy, as well as in the lay view, for reasons including those set out in the previous section. This priority extends into traditions of linguistic and literary representation dating back to antiquity, and in this context, pictorialism entails further specific problems connected to those just outlined, which are crucial to our understanding of how words can be used to induce imaginative responses.

3.

THE LITERARY HISTORY OF PICTORIALISM

a)

Mimesis and Pictures

Literary Realism is the basis of contemporary and twentieth-century popular fiction, and owes a lot to the Aristotelian notion of mimesis (imitation), which is fundamentally pictorial in nature. The means to aesthetic mimesis are explicitly imaginative: Aristotle insists in the Poetics5 that “the poet should place [tithemi] the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action,

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he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies” (17.1455a21–25). The Greek word enargestata, meaning “the utmost vividness”, is the adjectival superlative of enarges, an adjective used to describe words as clear or distinct, and to describe sensory phenomena as visible or palpable. The positive form is often used (see Liddell and Scott 1940, s.v. enarges) to describe the appearance of the gods in their own forms (e.g., in Homer, Iliad 20.131, and Homer, Odyssey 16.161), or to describe dreams or visions that seem almost real (Homer, Odyssey 4.481; Aeschylus, Persians 179). Jean Hagstrum (1958, 12) glosses the term enarges as one that denotes words which “signify actuality”, achieving a “natural quality”, but in fact its uses blur the boundaries between seeing and imagining, which are metaphorically equated, while the ideal of “vividness” is attained by imagining “spectating”. This notion of “spectating” is itself based on a pictorialist concept of seeing: the phrase “before our eyes” implies a representation, “out there”, of percepts that can be presented to us like a tableau. The Aristotelian concept of mimesis already entails the basically pictorial structure of vivid “presentation”, and this is strengthened by Aristotle’s explicit comparisons of the function of language to that of pictures, repeatedly equating poetry and painting as representational forms, and poet and painter as “imitators”. Despite distinguishing between visual art and language in terms of mimesis and truth status (Halliwell 2002, 44–45), Plato also uses the pictorial structure of “placing” or “presenting” when discussing language (e.g., Ion 535c1), and the idea that verbal vividness makes the audience feel “as if present” became a commonplace in Classical Greek philosophy (Halliwell 2002, 20, note 48). In the section of the Poetics that deals with tragedy, furthermore, Aristotle makes another, more specific, pictorial analogy: “Again, since Tragedy is an imitation [mimesis] of persons who are above the common level, the example of good portrait painters should be followed. They, while reproducing the distinctive form of the original, make a likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful” (15.1454b7–10). Here, Aristotle implicitly invokes the imaginative power that mediates the perceptions of both painters and poets, and allows both to give artistic form to images that reconcile the realistic and the heightened or more perfect. In so doing, Aristotle equates verbal representation and pictorial representation in their aims as well as their methods. The Poetics emphasises the capacity of the artist for pictorially conceived visualisation as necessary to vivid, accurate, and persuasive linguistic evocation, and equates verbal representation with picture painting.

b)

Rhetoric and Pictures

The ideal of “realism” as Aristotle presents it finds its way into portrayals of the imagination in the context of ancient rhetoric. Cicero, writing about rhetoric, explicitly models oratory on painting (and sculpture), and equates

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the functions of pictorial, sculptural, and linguistic art as visible expressions of an imaginative form of imitation (Orator 2.7–3.10). The pursuit of perfection in oratory is conducted by means of “an intellectual ideal by reference to which the artist represents those objects which do not themselves appear to the eye” (Orator 3.9)—an ideal that J. M. Cocking (1991, 40) interprets explicitly as “mimesis”. This oratorical model is representation through language, not of the transient shapes of the sensible world but of the transcendent (Platonic) forms, which can’t be sensorily perceived yet can be grasped “by the mind and the imagination” (Orator 2.8). The model is in this sense reminiscent of Aristotle’s representational ideal: the likeness that is realistic but more beautiful than its subject. Thus emerges a structure in which vision and imagery, mimesis and imagination, “realism” and “idealism”, the pictorial and the verbal, all such conventionally powerful opposites, are connected or conflated at the very origins of literary “poetics”. And there is that final conflation underlying all the others: of vision and imagination with something picture-like. For the rhetorician Quintilian, phantasmata are the products of phantasia (which he translates from Greek into Latin as visio; see Lewis and Short 1879, s.v. visio); they are the means by which things absent are experienced as present. Specifically, “the images of absent things are presented to the mind in such a way that we seem actually to see them with our eyes and have them physically present to us” (The Orator’s Education 6.2.29). Someone highly sensitive to such impressions and who is “exceptionally good at realistically imagining to himself things, words, and actions” has the power of euphantasiotos, or “vivid imagination” (The Orator’s Education 6.2.30). This pictorial faculty in turn enables the production, in rhetorical creation, of enargeia, “what Cicero calls ‘illustratio’ and ‘evidentia’, a quality which makes us seem not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it. Emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself” (The Orator’s Education 6.2.32). The verb repraesento used by Quintilian in the first quotation above can be contrasted with the verb tithemi employed in a similar context in the passage from Aristotle’s Poetics quoted previously. Repraesento means “to make present once again”, “to bring (back) before one”, by extension “to exhibit” or “to display”, as well as (including in relation to painting and sculpture) “to represent” or “to portray”. Tithemi refers rather to the action of directly putting an object into a certain place—in the passage from Aristotle, “planting something in one’s heart / bearing it in mind”, or “moving something into its proper position” (17.1455a21–25). The less statically pictorial connotations of the Greek convey an awareness of actuality in its more enactive, processual aspects than is found in the Latin derived from it. This distinction between tithemenon and repraesentantur could be seen to encapsulate the emergence of stronger pictorial and static elements out of a more subtly modulated (and arguably more cognitively realistic) conception of literary representation. In contexts connecting

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linguistic representation with vision and imagination, the above examples demonstrate the longevity of structures that emphasise the duality of “presentation” as though before a two-dimensional array, a mental screen: “presented to our imagination”, “before our very eyes”, “exhibit”, and so on. The tendency to conceptualise our visual and imaginal experience as “presentational” in structure, and thereby as pictorial, is a deep-rooted one. In his account of the workings of perception and consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey (1992) unpicks the etymologies of the noun and adjective “present” in order to demonstrate how the “sens” element “hovers ambiguously between ‘being’ and ‘feeling’” (from esse and from sentire). However, he doesn’t draw out the equally interesting implications of the first element: if “prae-sens carries the implication of ‘in front of a feeling being’”, then our most basic way of expressing sensory involvement in a situation is by conveying our essential separation from it. To judge from the etymologies, not only is “the subjective present [. . .] comprised of what a person feels happening to him” (99); this “feeling happening” is inherently dualistic. But is this mind-matter dualism what “presence” really feels like? Is the power of words in this way “pictorial”—and is this how the most cognitively realistic writing makes a fictional world present to us?

c)

Ut Pictura Poesis

The theories of linguistic and literary representation exemplified by Aristotle, by the Roman rhetorical tradition, and by the writers of and commentators on nineteenth-century Realism (which I’ll discuss in the following section) seem to work on this dualist assumption. The Aristotelian theory of mimesis yields an imitational ideal which encompasses literature and visual art, and whose core principle as regards the representational capacities of language is that they are potentially pictorial: if the aim of art is pictorial representation, verbal representation is the painting of verbal pictures. This assumption is embodied most explicitly in Horace’s canonical equation of poetry and painting in the Ars poetica (ll. 361–65). Horace’s phrase “ut pictura poesis” means literally “as a painting, poetry”, and the following elucidation reads: “one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the farther away. This courts the shade, that will wish to be seen in the light, and dreads not the critic [sic] insight of the judge. This pleased but once; that, though ten times called for, will always please.” These remarks on some rather superficial shared qualities of poetry and painting shift in later interpretations to a fundamental, normative notion—“let a poem be like a painting” (Hagstrum 1958, 9)—and the phrase has been repeatedly reinterpreted, especially from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment, as a basis for emerging theories of aesthetics and imitation. In a modern dictionary definition of this aesthetic precept, however, John Graham (2003, 465) identifies an important thread of continuity: “Particular emphasis was always placed on the ability of the poet (or orator) to make his listener see

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the object”, often meaning in practice, more specifically, that “the poet, without any real attempt to compete with the painter, should give enough concrete detail for the reader to form an accurate and vivid picture”. Here the notion of “seeing” isn’t even signalled as metaphorical, nor is the equation of “mental image” and picture remotely questioned. The definition accurately reflects the historical intertwining of these terms as used in theories of literary representation and effect. For millennia, then, the pictorial ideal, taken from real pictures and applied to pictorially construed mental images, has defined the connection between reader and text. Hagstrum’s The Sister Arts (1958) provides an account of the long literary history of “pictorialism”, which the author defines as those descriptions and verbal images that are, in their essentials, “capable of transformation into painting or some other visual art” (xxii). Hagstrum demonstrates (sometimes, but not necessarily, with explicit relation to particular paintings or schools of painting) how “the practice of pictorialism has fundamentally affected total poetic structure” (xv) in ways persistent even now. Explicit equations of both the imagination (and by extension visual perception) and language with pictorial representation, and all the structures and conflations that these equations entail, shaped the long tradition of portrayals of the imagination in the context of ancient rhetoric. These in turn have influenced all subsequent discussions of the capacities of language to represent—or, more specifically, to induce imaginative, quasi-visual experiences in the recipient.

d)

Realism and Pictures (or Mirrors)

The pictorial foundation constructed by ancient theoreticians underlies the whole question of the relation between the real and the ideal within the tradition of Realism that culminates in the nineteenth century. Although there was no single coherent “movement” as such, numerous French and German commentators and practitioners in various social and ideological groupings can be found expressing their views on what le réalisme or der Realismus is or should be in periodicals from the 1820s onwards. In the following discussion, I’ll give more weight to the German Realist tradition than to its English or French counterparts, given that this was the tradition with which Kafka was most closely aligned, but many of the aesthetic points hold for those other forms of European Realism. The more socially critical English Realism of Dickens and Thackeray contributed to the German conception of Realism as “bürgerlich” (civic/bourgeois); the German critics admired it for its political liberalism, but also criticised it for being “zu kritisch und zu realistisch” (too critical and too realistic; Bucher et al. 1975, 1: 44). The closest thing to a proper school of “Realism” first emerged in the French visual arts, and the term “Realism” has always been closely associated with both the visual and the pictorial, with fluidities in the term’s usage manifested early on in commentators’ equations or ambiguous conflations of visual art and literature (Jäger 1975).6

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The pictorialist assumptions underpinning the Realist tradition are often found in complicated conjunction with metaphors of reflection. Greek thought about vision (see Sheldrake 2005, 32–34, for a summary) emphasised the reflection of the world in the pupil of the eye, leading naturally to the idea of pictures inside the eye or head. The history of literary theorising on the ideal of mimetic imitation, structured around notions of seeing, is marked by the same sort of connection or conflation of pictorial and reflective metaphors. Thus, ut pictura poesis and Widerspiegelung (reflection) become key phrases in debating the ways in which art (like the eye itself) can be the mirror that depicts the world as it’s “seen”, and in such a way as to make us “see” it afresh. The “mirror” metaphor is a common characteristic of the aesthetics of Realism (Kohl 2007, 20, 325–27), and further evidence of the attractiveness of such conflations of picturing and reflecting is found in their nineteenth-century extension to other, more modern technological metaphors of material two-dimensional reproduction: for instance, “[man] daguerreotypirt die Wirklichkeit” ([we] daguerreotype reality; Gutzkow 1975, 111). In the French tradition, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black famously equates the novel with a mirror, as part of an argument for an inclusive aesthetics of both the “blue of the heavens” and the “mud of the filthy puddles on the road”: “His mirror shows the filth, and you blame the mirror!” (2002, 374). However, the mirror metaphor is modified in the German Realist tradition, in which a thoroughly Platonic notion of the “ideal” holds especial sway, countering the French equation of Realism and Naturalism; the German trends of “Real-Idealismus”/“Ideal-Realismus” and “poetischer Realismus” aim to be more than a “sklavische Copie des Wirklichen” (slavish copy of reality; Breitinger 1877, 349; cited in Bucher et al. 1975, 1: 8). One commentator on German literary Realism, writing in 1870 during the heyday of the tradition, says that the whole endeavour of “mirroring reality” would be hopeless if “der Spiegel welcher die Natur abbilden soll ein todter Körper wäre, gleichsam eine Glas- oder Metallfläche” (the mirror which is to depict nature were a dead body, a sort of glass or metal surface; Homberger 1975, 117). Reflecting happens rather “in dem lebendigen Geiste des Dichters” (in the living mind/spirit of the writer;), but rather than this being a matter of mechanical reflection, what happens is that objects are “painted” or “drawn”, which results in the “ideal picture” of the “real world”.7 Heinrich Emil Homberger’s article (entitled “Der realistische Roman”, or “The realistic novel”) combines pictorial language with the invocation of vision: “Wer die Natur wiedergeben will, muß sie wiedergeben wie sie dem Auge sich darstellt” (Anyone wishing to reproduce nature must reproduce it as it represents itself to the eye; 118). The perceptual analogy is treated exhaustively and in detail, in terms of perspective, focus, and so on, until finally the pictorial and the linguistic are totally identified: “Die Worte sind eben nicht die Dinge selbst, sondern deren ideale Bilder” (Words are, after all, not things themselves, but the ideal images of things; 119). Literary representation here,

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as before, operates by means of a creative, constructive process in which the ideal of artistic cognition is pictorially construed. Homberger doesn’t neglect the relations between the real and the ideal, nor the transient effects of the artist’s visual perspective and his emotions, yet the ultimate aim, the verbal representation of reality, remains clear: the Realist should seek “die Wahrheit im Kleide der Wirklichkeit” (truth wearing the mantel of reality), “von der realen Welt deren ideales Bild” (the ideal image of the real world), or “die Treue der Natur” (faithfulness to nature; 1975, 117–18). He does question the possibility of mirroring nature (what nature, and with what sort of mirror? [117]), but this interrogation of the metaphor is swiftly abandoned in favour of prescriptive certainties. The definitions of “Wahrheit” (truth), “Wirklichkeit” (reality), “d[ie] real[e] Welt” (the real world), and “die Natur” (nature) aren’t questioned, nor is the notion that the best way of conveying this reality is through words that aim at pictorial vividness and accuracy. This inheritance of pictorially imbued notions of imagination and linguistic representation manifests itself in the majority of Realist texts in the assumption upon which they are apparently based (and for which they may seem to provide evidence): that we need verbal “pictures” of the fictional scenes to be painted so that we can vividly, accurately, and meaningfully imagine them. Creating pictures in the head of the reader, so the theory (and the practice) seems to go, will correspond most closely to what it’s like actually to see these situations, by means of pictures being created in the head of the observer, and so it will enhance the “realistic” impression conveyed.

e)

Realism and Reality

It’s important not to oversimplify the nature of the Realist connection with reality. The history of Realism is one of confrontations with aesthetic and ontological concerns at every turn, concerns which underlie all of its perceptual and pictorial tenets. As noted, the German tradition in particular is imbued with notions of idealism that present an apparent opposition to Realism’s concern with reality. This element is due in part to Hegel’s influence on aesthetic debate: his aesthetic ideal, combining four principles— nature, form, the ideal, and the characteristic—yielded by previous debate, led German Realism ever further away from French-influenced Naturalism and its emphasis on the influence of heredity and environment on human development (Jäger 1975, 13–21). Contemporary German debate testified also to the complex interactions of Realism with the claims of Classicism and Romanticism, history and myth, religion and humanism, and any number of other ideological frameworks (ibid.). To a large extent, therefore, German (“Poetic”) Realism found itself performing the function of “Vermittlung” (mediation) between opposing poles (Martini 1977, 361), and one major difficulty involved in seeking a unified definition or characterisation of Realism is the often elided distinction and interplay between the historical

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and the aesthetic meanings of the term—between contextuality and methodology (Ritzer 2003, 220).8 Common to both, however, although articulated in different ways, is an essential “Spannungspolarität” (polarity of tension; Martini 1977, 353) which encompasses the poles of fiction and reality, appearance and actuality, moral truth and factual reality, illusion and aestheticism, detail and beauty, reproduction of the world and self-expression, and many other formidable oppositions (349). No conception or manifestation of Realism can avoid the dialectical oppositions inherent to it. In his well-known discussion of description in Flaubert, Barthes addresses this dialectic by means of the tensions in Realist writing between referentiality and meaning, between the real and the plausible or the “vraisemblable” (1982, 15). The description of minutiae serves the demands of referential exactitude, but the countering demands of rhetoric require that everything included in the narrative be meaningful: “This mixing, this interweaving of constraints, has two advantages: on the one hand the aesthetic function, by conferring a meaning on the set piece, is a safeguard against a downward spiral into endless detail. [. . .] On the other hand, by stating the referent to be real, and by pretending to follow it slavishly, realistic description avoids being seduced into fantasizing (a precaution which was believed necessary for the ‘objectivity’ of the account)” (14). In this sense, it becomes impossible to uphold a distinction of the kind suggested, albeit with caveats, by David Lodge (drawing on Roman Jakobson’s [1960] argument): that Realism operates largely through metonymy and Modernism through metaphor (1977, e.g., 111–18; see also, e.g., 109–11 for qualifications). According to Barthes, the Realist detail becomes “a kind of background or setting meant to receive the jewels of a few precious metaphors” (1982, 13), as carefully constructed as a painting, and ultimately concerned with “l’effet de réel” (16), rather than, one might say, “l’effet du réel”—the reality effect, rather than the effect of reality itself. Realism is as artificial as any other aesthetic mode, yet however much its “reality” is a textual construction, it lays claim to what could be experienced as real. The construction of a possible reality may consist in varying proportions of appeals to readers’ culturally specific responses—for example, through the referentiality of place names and famous people—and appeals to cognitive features that may be temporally more enduring and culturally/geographically less varied. Despite the pretensions of Realism to objectivity, the recourse to subjectivity is in fact what most satisfactorily unites its disparate theories: the subjectivity of the world as perceived.

f)

Realism and Vision

In literary Realism and more broadly, evocation of visual perception is a crucial means of conveying the psychological, experiential reality of the subject matter, of the world being evoked. Not only is vision subjectively prominent here, but a long philosophical tradition has also associated it

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with objectivity and impartiality (Brooks 2005, 16). This combination gives vision a particular status within the Realist framework, which, as I’ll suggest, relies on an interesting fusion of subjectivity and objectivity. In a summary of the history of “Beschreibung” (description), Hans Christoph Buch (1972, 16) characterises literary fiction as a process not “merely” of imitating nature (whatever that means), but of creating new possible “perceptual contents” analogous to those present in reality. He cites Agnes Hochstetter-Preyer arguing that “[Fiktionen] sind also gedacht wie Gegenstände möglicher oder nach Analogie möglicher Wahrnehmung, ‘als ob’ sie solche Gegenstände wären, mit der einen Besonderheit, daß ihnen die Realität ausdrücklich abgesprochen wird” ([fictions] are conceived as objects of possible or analogously possible perception, “as if” they were such objects, with the one peculiarity that reality is explicitly denied them). Fictions, in other words, engage the reader’s perceptual faculties as if they were the actual objects of perception, while more or less unequivocally “denying” reality. In the sense that it “explicitly denies reality”, while seeking to evoke that which could be perceived, Realism adopts a central tenet of Aristotelian poetics: the value that Aristotle places on probability rather than actuality or historical truth (Poetics 24.1460a25–27). However strong or otherwise the ontological claims to full-blown reality, the portrayal of at least perceptual possibility is essential to description that seeks to be “realistic”. In her Reallexikon article on “Realismus”, Monika Ritzer stresses the importance of perception in Realist description: “Durch Darstellungsweisen, die den Vorgang der Wahrnehmung (sinnliche Anschauung, Sinnverständnis) nachvollziehen, entsteht eine Vergegenwärtigung gegenständlicher Wirklichkeit” (Through means of representation that reconstruct the process of perception (sensory observation, grasping of meaning), there emerges a making-present of objective reality; 2003, 218). Here perception is not merely possible, but actual, and so the “reality” thus made “present” acquires the impression of immediacy and objective existence through the very foregrounding of its subjective, perceptual mediation. It’s primarily this perceptual mediation that engages and stimulates the reader’s imagination. I’ll suggest, however, that things are rather more complex than this, since literary Realism often in fact creates a persuasive sense of reality not by simulating visual experience, but by employing a crucially different strategy: instead of exploiting the cognitive-perceptual mechanisms themselves, it taps into common assumptions about vision and imagination. This means that the Realist aim of vividly inducing imagining by conveying visual perception is often not directly achieved; instead, a correspondence is established above all with folk-psychological conceptualisations of vision and imagination. This kind of observation has precedent in the critical literature. Although Peter Brooks, in his Realist Vision, doesn’t distinguish between the visual and the pictorial, he does note that the Realist faith in “verbal pictures” may be considered misplaced: “Visual inspection and inventory of the world mean, I noted, a large deployment of description,

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in what sometimes seems to us a misplaced faith that verbal pictures of the world are both necessary and sufficient to creating a sense of place, context, milieu that in turn explain and motivate characters, their actions and reflections” (2005, 17). An understanding of the problems of pictorialism allows us to appreciate the fact that such verbal pictures may be neither sufficient nor necessary in cognitive terms, even in their basic function of evoking the visible elements of the fictional world, and may be based on a misplaced equation of the visual with the pictorial. Brooks observes that “[t]he descriptive imperative points to the primacy of the visual in realism” (17), and in practice, as we have seen, this imperative entails the primacy of the pictorial. The difference that this distinction opens up between Realism and cognitive realism will be discussed in greater detail later on. I’ve already mentioned that literary Realism, whilst generally presupposing an essentially stable physical world and seeking to “represent” it through pictorially conceived language, is a nexus of complex aesthetic and ontological considerations, but social and ideological concerns are also important factors. Commentators such as Erich Auerbach, in his seminal Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature), have appealed primarily to the subject matter itself in defining Realism, rather than to the link it creates between text and reader, and thus Auerbach gives a historicist account of Realism as the category of “realistische Werke ernsten Stils und Charakters” (realistic works of serious style and character; 1977, 517). This seems to emphasise a stylistic consideration (the “serious”), but he is concerned above all with the social breadth of subjects to which Realist texts (notably those of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola) are able to give “serious” treatment. Auerbach would therefore not have recognised a definition of Realism which took no account of society in a political sense (see also Eagleton 2003). A Realist text can’t, however, advance any ethical or other agenda without first inducing in the reader an experience of its fictional world with enough force to make that reader accept it as at least possible, and acceptance of a fiction as possible can’t occur without the capacity to imagine it. Dennett (1990, 298), for example, has argued that there’s no such thing as conceiving of something, or conceptually entertaining a possibility, without imagining, and there are good arguments for the existence of a single cognitive “code” mediating both imagining and believing (e.g., Nichols 2004, 2006). Realism may in one sense be seen as the most basic form of literary evocation, because the Realist “possibility” is synonymous with the “reality” of the perceptible external world around us. Realism as historically incarnated need not, of course, subscribe (in theory or practice) to the mimetic ideal of mirror- or picture-like “imitation”, yet, more than any other literary mode, it seeks to make us imagine what we are used to seeing.9 However, as I’ve suggested in theory above and will try to illustrate in practice below, this often results in Realist texts painting verbal pictures, subordinating “what we are used to seeing” to “what we are used

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to thinking (and reading) about seeing”. The examples I give are, predictably, cherry-picked insofar as they are relatively well-known texts that illustrate my points especially concisely, but many other authors and texts could have been presented in their place.

4.

REALISM AND PICTURES, IN PRACTICE

a)

Fontane

Let’s now consider three examples of the Realist, pictorially underpinned descriptive mode in practice, one each from the German, French, and English traditions. Fontane is perhaps the best-known proponent of nineteenth-century German Realism, as well as one of the most prolific. As seems to be the case with the classification of any great author, Fontane’s status as a Realist is contested; some commentators read the detail of his descriptions, for example, as imbued with symbolic meaning. Discussion of Fontane’s referential strategies is fraught with multiplying (and not always mutually exclusive) terminologies (Demetz 1964; Thanner, 1967; Ohl 1968; Hillebrand 1971; Hertling 1985), and his own views on Realism are far from straightforward (see, e.g., his early [1853] essay, and Zimmermann 1988, 33–40). However, Fontane’s fiction provides an excellent example of the aspect of the Realist tradition I’m focusing on here: how the pictorial structures of descriptive detail in Realism may affect the reader’s cognitive engagement with the fictional world. Fontane’s works are characterised by a very high level of descriptive detail. Most of the novels begin with an extended description of location that precedes (or occasionally encompasses) the introduction of characters and the initiation of action, and these opening descriptions are configured very much as pictorial tableaux. In Irrungen, Wirrungen (Delusions, Confusions), for instance, the “geometric” precision of the descriptions is striking: indicators of distance, angle, orientation, and direction proliferate, and are interspersed with vivid, discrete, precisely profiled and located objects and edifices, such as “ein rot und grün gestrichenes Holztürmchen mit einem halb weggebrochenen Zifferblatt” (a wooden turret, painted red and green, with a clock-face half broken off), “die hart an der linken Ecke gelegene, von früh bis spät aufstehende Haustür” (the front door, at the far left corner, always ajar from dawn till dusk), etc. ([1888] 1971, 319). The construction of the scene typically operates by conveying exactly what can be seen from a clearly defined standpoint: for instance, “[ein] kleines, dreifenstriges, in einem Vorgärtchen um etwa hundert Schritte zurückgelegenes Wohnhaus, [welches] trotz aller Kleinheit und Zurückgezogenheit, von der vorübergehenden Straße her sehr wohl erkannt werden konnte” ([a] small house with three windows, situated some hundred paces back in a little front garden, could still, despite the fact that it was so small and secluded, be readily

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spotted from the street that led past it; 319). This isn’t an isolated phenomenon in Fontane’s work, for in the first paragraph of Effi Briest, his best-known novel, we find the same proliferation of orientational detail— “[i]n Front des [. . .] Herrenhauses” (in front of the [. . .] country seat), “nach der Park- und Gartenseite hin” (on the side facing the park and gardens), “in seiner Mitte” (at its centre), “an seinem Rande” (around the edge), “[e]inige zwanzig Schritte weiter” (some twenty paces further), “in Richtung und Lage genau dem Seitenflügel entsprechend” (corresponding exactly to the wing in direction and position)‚ “hinter” (behind), “an dessen offener Seite” (at whose open end), “dicht daneben” (close by), “horizontal gelegenes” (horizontal), “etwas schief stehend” (slightly crooked), “zwischen” (between)—as well as of object description: “ein rechtwinklig angebauter Seitenflügel” (a wing built on at right angles), “[ein] weiß und grün quadrierte[r] Fliesengang” (a white and green flagstone path), “ein großes, in seiner Mitte mit einer Sonnenuhr und an seinem Rande mit Canna indica und Rhabarberstauden besetztes Rondell” (a large circular flowerbed with a sundial in the middle and canna lilies and rhubarb around the edge), etc. ([1896] 1971, 7). Fontane’s narrative openings are thus constructed in a pictorial way, as though seeing or imagining operated by means of pictures in the head. This has been noted in the critical literature, and Hubert Ohl (1968, 202–3), for example, stresses the pictorial character of Fontane’s (fictional) depictions of landscapes in connection to their perspectivally subjective, deictic mode of construction, while Hans Jürgen Zimmermann (1988, 92) draws attention to the picture-like artificiality of Fontane’s landscape descriptions and to the positive connotations of the “Bild” (picture/image) for him (91, note 14). This pictorial quality is evidenced also in Fontane’s non-fictional writing (he began his professional career as a journalist and travel writer): his five-volume Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Walks through the March of Brandenburg), for instance, contains numerous evocations of views and landscapes introduced explicitly as pictures or images ([1862– 1889] 1977, e.g., 271, 590, 593, 596, 600). The scene is sometimes evoked from an internal standpoint, and sometimes from a “bird’s-eye perspective” that renders it flat, like a cartographic depiction. Irrungen, Wirrungen begins: “An dem Schnittpunkt von Kurfürstendamm und Kurfürstenstraße, schräg gegenüber dem ‘Zoologischen’, befand sich in der Mitte der siebziger Jahre noch eine große, feldeinwärts sich erstreckende Gärtnerei [. . .]” (At the intersection of the Kurfüstendamm and the Kurfürstenstrasse, diagonally across from the Zoological Garden, there was still, in the middle of the seventies, a large market garden, which stretched out in the direction of the fields; [1888] 1971, 319). This map-like quality means that we have a continual sense not so much of an environment with which we might interact, but of a two-dimensional array whose creation assumes a pictorial form of perception. It has therefore been argued that the opening scenes of Fontane’s novels don’t serve to “draw the reader

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in” to a world that can then be imagined in an immersive manner. Bruno Hillebrand, for example, notes the relationship between “Fontanes Raumperspektive [. . .] eines außenstehenden Beobachters” (Fontane’s spatial perspective [. . .] of an externally located observer; 1971, 233) and the reader’s difficulty “sich in den Raum einzuleben” (to feel at home in the space; 241); the fictional world remains somewhat distant. These scenes present a static tableau, or a theatrical backdrop, and Fontane in fact uses an explicitly theatrical metaphor in the opening lines of Irrungen, Wirrungen: “[. . .] ließ vermuten, daß hinter dieser Kulisse nich etwas anderes verborgen sein müsse” ([. . .] led one to suspect that behind this stage drop something else might indeed be hidden’ to ‘[. . .] suggested that behind this curtain something else must be hidden; [1888] 1971, 319). The fictional world is thus evoked in detail, but with the conspicuous quality of a two-dimensional array, which results less in an effet de réel than in an impression of reality that has been aesthetically (pictorially) reconfigured.

b)

Balzac

An overview of the openings of Balzac’s novels yields comparable though not identical conclusions regarding how the fictional world is constructed pictorially. Eugénie Grandet, for instance, presents an introductory generalisation about “houses in certain provincial towns” and some orientating remarks concerning the qualities of the particular Saumur street in question that still exist, and subsequently configures the opening description of the urban setting as being perceived by a walker who goes along the street, then pauses in front of a house and goes in: “It is difficult to go past these houses without marvelling at the enormous beams [. . .]. Further on there are doors studded with enormous nails [. . .]. Next door to the rickety house with roughcast walls [. . .]. The low rooms [. . .] are deep and dark [. . .]. This wall is used to display the shopkeeper’s wares [. . .]” ([1833] 1990, 3–4). Additional (perceptual and non-perceptual) information that wouldn’t be accessible, however, to the mere passerby, or “stranger” (3) (who is tacitly aligned with the unfamiliar reader), creates an impression closer to that of being accompanied along the street by a knowledgeable guide (the narrator) who directs one’s attention and fills in the gaps of one’s knowledge and even one’s perception: for example, indicating how the street is in different seasons, explaining how the shutters are “taken down in the morning and are put back and secured with iron bolts every evening” (4), providing a view of a roof and its shingles. This corresponds to a pattern identified by Andreas Kablitz (2003), who notes that the structure of perception is represented at the openings of Balzac’s novels in combination with a demonstration of systematic knowledge, and that the perceptions of an internal figure alternate with those of a non-situated narrator (or “figural narration” becomes part of “authorial knowledge”, and vice versa), both evoking specifics and invoking generalities.

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The shift from impersonal or anonymous constructions to the “vous” of direct address (“[. . .] who comes and sells you what you want”; [1833] 1990, 4–5) strengthens the impression that (contrary to the effect in Fontane) the reader is being guided through the fictional world by someone with superior knowledge. The visual details are a combination of those being registered by the walker-as-reader and those provided by a more privileged narrator, and many of the visual details require the narratorial interpretation to be meaningful (“On yet another a citizen has engraved the insignia of the nobility conferred by his position as a magistrate, the pride of his long-forgotten period of office”; 4) or even to be perceived at all (“Further along you can barely see the delicate carvings on worn, blackened window-sills”; 4). The effect is thus one of both immediacy, in the stranger’s not yet familiarised perceptions, and reassuring overview, in the perceptual and informational completeness contributed by the narrator. The assumption is not made, as in Fontane, that perception, or cognition more broadly, fills in all the gaps; but many of the cognitive-perceptual gaps are filled by the narrator, so that the reader is not confronted with the cognitively realistic strangeness of unfilled gaps. Le Colonel Chabert also gives the reader a detailed description of the initial setting, here a lawyer’s office, including geometric details such as the diagonal angle of the stove pipe, a comprehensive list of the food, drink, and crockery located on the chimneypiece, and a description of the storeroom’s “seemingly infinite number of tickets [which] hung from each crammed compartment, some with the red, taped ends that give legal dossiers a special appearance” ([1832] 1997, 5). Nonetheless, there are again notable differences from the Fontane excerpts discussed previously. Firstly, although the visual sense is dominant, as in Fontane and Realism more generally (see Goulet 2006 on the importance of visual epistemology—and its complications—to Realism in general and Balzac in particular), there are also striking appeals to other senses, notably smell (“The odor of these food items blended so well with the stench of the overheated stove and the peculiar perfume of offices and old paper”; 5) and touch (the furnishings are in this translation described as “crude” [6], but in the French are “crasseux”: filthy, grimy, greasy). Secondly, the novel doesn’t begin in this descriptive mode: the first thousand or so words of the text recount a conversation between employees in the lawyer’s office, along with evocations of action (the messenger eating a piece of bread and firing pellets of it out of the window), generalising characterisations (“The average gutter-jumper, like Simonnin, is a boy of thirteen or fourteen [. . .]. He has the habits of a Parisian street urchin and the inclinations of a con man”; 1), and narratorial comment (“Everything was going on at once: the appeal, the gossip, and the conspiracy”; 3). The description of the rooms themselves comes at the moment when the clerks have just called out, “‘Come in!’” (4), and just before the client is described shutting the door as he enters. This delay in detailed description, and the fact of its coinciding with the entrance of a

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stranger into the surroundings, has the effect of aligning the description with the perceptions of the man entering as opposed to those of the clerks already present. This effect isn’t negated, although it is complicated, by the inclusion of information which goes beyond the scope of the client’s knowledge, such as the cup of chocolate belonging to the head clerk, the whereabouts of the second clerk, or the expansion into generalisations about Parisian offices. The timing of the description expresses a distinction between the type and amount of detail perceived in familiar as opposed to unfamiliar spaces—a distinction which will become relevant again in Chapter Three (pp. 128, 130–31, and 144–51). The text before the scene-setting description aligns the reader with the familiar perspective, while the description itself exchanges this for a perspective closer to that of unfamiliarity. Initially, then, all that’s evoked is what is relevant to the fictional characters in their dealings with one another and their environment, along with a few extra details such as the orientation provided by the narrator: “a building in the Rue Vivienne, the address of Monsieur Derville, attorney-at-law” ([1832] 1997, 1). Once the reader has thus been granted a sense of familiarity with the group of clerks, any possible sense of disorientation resulting from the minimal scene-setting is dispelled by the subsequent descriptive passage. This passage generally assumes ignorance of the surroundings, but situates the ignorance narratively in a way that avoids the sense that the description is being generated by the narrator solely for the reader’s benefit. In both of the openings by Balzac discussed here, therefore, perception is not evoked as always and wholly pictorial; rather, the reassurance of pictorially construed perception and interpretation is achieved through the use of distinct but complementary perspectives and the configuration of scene-setting descriptions as variously attributable to them.

c)

Dickens

Our third Realist novelist is Dickens, and in his texts we see further variation on the techniques examined so far. Dickens occasionally establishes the opening location with a level of geographical specificity similar to Fontane (for example, in Barnaby Rudge). More often, however, he uses generalisations in a similar manner to Balzac, but even more liberally, both in setting the scene spatially, as at the beginning of Bleak House (“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, [. . .] fog down the river [. . .]. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights [. . .]”; [1852–1853] 2003, 13), and in evoking other more universal facts as applying both generally and in the present case (“On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head [. . .]”; 14). In these examples, specific facts (a given stretch of river being fog-covered, or a given collection of men being in the courtroom) are presented through plurals, or modals of expectation or probability, in a way that invests them with greater significance, even while making them imaginatively less distinct

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as singular entities. Distinction is also reduced by the truncated quality of the sentences without any verbs (“Fog everywhere.”) or without finite verbs (“Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets [. . .]”; 14); if we should wish to draw a pictorial analogy, a rough sketch would seem more apt here than a complete picture. Perception is hindered by the fog and darkness in a technique that can be compared to the start of The Battle of Life: A Love Story, where time and place are declared immaterial, and the gory aftermath of battle is evoked ex negativo through the exclamation, “Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the sights the moon beheld upon that field [. . .]” ([1846] 2008, 247). Nonetheless, both novels fit into a general pattern, encountered in many of Dickens’s narrative openings, of providing broad contextualising spatial detail, often through somehow compromised perception, before “zooming in” to the specifics of character, action, and dialogue. Ian Ousby (1975, 382–83), for instance, comments on Dickens’s swift move from the general to the particular in the opening of Bleak House, while Elana Gomel (2011, 300) identifies a proto-cinematic style in this chapter. The way in which “[t]he eye/I of the extradiegetic narrator persistently identifies with the highest vantage point on the scene” (301) contributes to the opening effect of omniscience through perspectival totality. The subsequent narrowing down to detail doesn’t contradict this effect, but presents the detail as located firmly within the general and the panoramic, and as equally accessible through the narrative descriptions. These initial “wide-angle” descriptions, like those in Martin Chuzzlewit ([1843–1844] 1999, 18–21) and Little Dorrit ([1855–1857] 2003, 15), are also rich in metaphor, simile, and personification. Such scene-setting can powerfully evoke a particular atmosphere: the “staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of acid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away” at the start of Little Dorrit (15) make the heat and light of Marseilles in August instantly imaginable. The descriptions often serve the purpose of social commentary as well as being spurs to the imagination—in Ousby’s words, they “presuppos[e] a correspondence between the external appearance of things and their inner condition” (1975, 382). This is true of Bleak House’s fog (“Never can there come fog too thick [. . .] to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth”; [1852–1853] 2003, 14) and the line in Little Dorrit between “the foul water within the harbour” and “the beautiful sea without”: “The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass” (15). In all these cases, however, the point of the descriptive sections is also to induce an experience of perceptual imagining through visual specifics, first giving the reader a perceptual overview (with or without social/moral connotations), and then directing us towards more central visible minutiae (the contents of the prison cell in Little Dorrit, the movement and posture of the characters first introduced in Martin Chuzzlewit [[1843–1844] 1999, e.g., 20–22]).

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The apparent authorial assumption is that both are necessary, or at least desirable, if we are to engage with the story imaginatively. In Dickens, and to a lesser degree in Balzac, the narrative voice manifests a clear awareness of the reader, through irony, helpful filling-in, or other interpretive stances; in this way, “descriptive details [. . .] become memorably emblematic” (Brooks 2005, 41). All three authors also employ proper nouns—names of towns, cities, streets, and so on—to act as referential shortcuts for prompting detailed imagining, to establish the equivalence of the real world and the fictional, and (for those to whom the references are meaningful) to create a sense of complicity between narrator and reader. Both perceptually and interpretively, then, the single most pervasive feature of the three authors and their texts considered here seems to be a concern to make the reader maximally informed. The resulting sense of being well looked after is a very different effect from that created by Kafka’s fictions, and I’ll expand in Chapter Three on the argument that the pictorial or non-pictorial evocation of the fictional world is a major determinant of whether a reassured feeling or a more equivocal reaction is the effect induced in the reader.

5.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC HISTORY OF PICTORIALISM, AND EMERGING NON-PICTORIAL STRANDS

I’ve tried to show that nineteenth-century Realism, on the basis of Classical aesthetics, is informed by pictorialist principles as regards the ways in which language can and should stimulate the imagination. Up to the present day, the philosophical and scientific tradition of thought about vision and imagination has been informed by the same pictorial structures, but it also shows the emergence of significant non-pictorialist strands of theory. This emergence of a non-pictorialist account of the workings of vision and imagination can be traced back as far as Plato and Aristotle; it then becomes more salient in Kant, and most notably, at around Kafka’s time, in the writings of Wittgenstein. Tracing this progression will allow us to contextualise the literary conceptions of perception we’ve just considered, as well as clarify where the non-pictorialist account I’ll be setting out in the rest of this chapter and drawing on in the following chapters comes from. All this matters to the study of literature because literary texts are populated by fictional characters, and their perceptual experiences of the fictional world are key to how the reader’s imaginative experience of that world develops.

a)

Plato and Aristotle

In his writings on vision and imagination, Plato seems primarily interested not in developing a systematic theory of perception, but rather in emphasising the unreliability of perception and memory as sources of true knowledge.

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He suggests that inner images help to control the “lower” appetites of the soul (Timaeus 71a-d), but doesn’t distinguish fundamentally between internal “mental” images (denoted variously as the “eidolon”, “phantasma”, or “eikon”) and external ones, such as reflections, paintings, sculptures, and shadows—all located on the lowest level of the Divided Line’s hierarchy of being (Republic 509d-e; see also 597d-99a). Pictorial characteristics connect many of these forms of image (see Thomas 2013, § 2.1): memory is compared to a wax tablet (Theaetetus 191c,d), for example, and an inner artist (metaphorically) paints pictures in the soul of what we see (Philebus 39b,c). Aristotle defines imagination (“phantasia”) as “the process by which we say that an image is presented us” (On the Soul iii, 428a), and describes it as being subject to willed control (unlike belief, where truth and falsehood are inescapable determinants) and lacking in emotional effect. While we might be moved by thinking about something frightening, “in imagination we are like spectators looking at something dreadful or encouraging in a picture” (427b), so imagining is here fundamentally like viewing a picture. He clearly distinguishes imagination (“phantasia”) from perception and discursive thought, yet states that “imagination always implies perception, and is itself implied by judgment” (427b). The content of the imagination is what can be perceived, but lacks the authenticity, the self-evident truth, of perception; instead, what we experience when we imagine is best described as phainetai (“it appears / one causes to appear”). This resembles what happens not when we ordinarily, successfully see, but when we see something imperfectly: we say “it appears to be a man”, for instance, when we’re not sure. In this sense, the connection between visual perception and imagination is clearest in “non-paradigmatic sensory experience” (Schofield 1995, e.g., 258–60), where we compare what we can see with how we’re used to seeing things, and are thereby able to see this collection of sensory stimuli as a man but without automatic certainty. From Aristotle onwards, this kind of “seeing as” has been a central strand in theories of vision and imagination.

b)

Kant

Jumping forward to the eighteenth century, the significance of actual pictorial representation is increasingly dispensed with in philosophical thought about the process of categorical perception. Kant’s notion of Einbildungskraft (“imagination”, literally “imaginative power/ability”), the faculty that lets us see an object of a certain kind as an object of that kind, emphasises the cognitive power or ability (Kraft) to create pictorial representations, rather than the actual representation-forming itself. As Mary Warnock puts it when discussing Kant in Imagination (1976): “if we identify something as a rhododendron bush, we do so only in the light of being able to envisage other bushes of the same kind. [. . .] So, in our immediate recognition of what is before us, there is built a possibility, which could at any time be actualized, of the framing of images of other bushes, or of other aspects of this

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bush” (138). To recognise something is to be able to imagine other things like it (Kant, 1926, A120–22); our experience of the world as a meaningful totality is based on the many possible perceptions that extend beyond the actual. P. F. Strawson ([1970] 2008, 61–62) also discusses how Kant’s “Einbildungskraft” is an active “power or potentiality” (in Kant’s phrase, “ein tätiges Vermögen”, 1926, A120), by means of which non-actual perceptions (i.e., past and merely possible perceptions) are used to make sense of the actual object being perceived. The potential for representation, not the representation-forming itself, is what lets us see an object of a certain kind as that kind of object.

c)

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein suggests a model of perception comparable to the Kantian process, in which the “actual” percept is made sense of via the “non-actual” percepts latent within it. To be seeing something like “this” or like “that” is an experience that requires the mastery of a specific technique, or set of techniques, of recognition: “Das Substrat dieses Erlebnisses ist das Beherrschen einer Technik” (The substratum of this experience is the mastery of a technique; [1953] 2009, 437/§222). Only if someone can do, has learnt, or is master of a given technique, does it make sense to say that he or she has had the corresponding experience; the mastery of a technique is the defining criterion of any visual (or other sensory) experience (437–38/§224). According to Wittgenstein, experience is about mastery of actual changes in perception, as they elicit the readiness for other possible perceptions: to see a tree is to expect, and be ready, to see it (as I move) from a slightly different angle, from slightly closer or further away, in a different context of light and shadow. In seeing an object as a certain kind of object, the observer’s behavioural disposition includes a readiness for other perceptions of the same object: “Ich kann im Dreieck jetzt das als Spitze, das als Grundlinie sehen—jetzt das als Spitze und das als Grundlinie” (In the triangle I can see now this as apex, that as base—now this as apex, that as base; 437–38/§222, author’s italics). Seeing the world is thus about interacting with it in terms of actuality and potentiality, not about internally representing the external world. As Pylyshyn puts it: “The problem is that the experience of ‘seeing’ is not informationally equivalent to any display because it must include potential as well as actual inputs” (2003, 353, author’s italics). This line of thinking has been extended influentially by Gilbert Ryle ([1949] 1990), who coined the term “the ghost in the machine” to denote the unexplained interaction between thought and action entailed by Cartesian dualism, and who describes the details of visual perception in terms of anticipation, movement, and the confirmation of what is anticipated. The initially counterintuitive logic of saying that experience is contingent upon mastery of a technique of recognition is something that Wittgenstein acknowledges: “Wie seltsam aber, daß dies [das Beherrschen einer Technik]

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die logische Bedingung dessen sein soll, daß Einer das und das erlebt!” (But how odd for this [the mastery of a technique] to be the logical condition of someone’s having such-and-such an experience!; [1953] 2009, 437–38/§223, author’s italics). This remains problematic perhaps because here the fact of experiencing is still something, some entity, separate from the mastery that is its prerequisite. The question is therefore still raised of what it actually means to “have such and such an experience”—and this might simply lead back to the notion that experiencing is representing to oneself the results of enacting the relevant mastery, leaving us with as wide an explanatory gap as that engendered by any pictorialist account. A possible solution, as posited by enactivist theories of vision and consciousness, is to go further still: to confront an even simpler strangeness and start thinking of experience not just as contingent upon, but also as consisting in, such mastery. Then we might be able to do away with pictures (and with the problems of who or what looks at them, what they are made of, and precisely how looking at them can mean seeing) altogether.

6.

ENACTIVISM: A SOLUTION TO PICTORIALIST PROBLEMS?

a)

Precursors

The modern precursors of the enactivist account of perception were already emerging in Kafka’s era. The physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1867 characterisation of perception as a process of involuntary and unconscious inference concerning the properties of the objects to be perceived makes a marked departure from pictorialist theories, in that it emphasises knowledge and action as opposed to retinal stimulation: “in Helmholtz’s classic theory of perception [. . .] what is perceived are expected contingencies, not what is on the retina or some iconic derivative of it” (O’Regan 1992, 472, note 3; see also Helmholtz 1867). In 1905, Henri Poincaré described how locating things requires no “mental map”: “To localize an object simply means to represent to oneself the movements that would be necessary to reach it. It is not a question of representing the movements themselves in space, but solely of representing to oneself the muscular sensations which accompany these movements and which do not presuppose the existence of space” (1958, 47; cited in O’Regan and Noë 2001a, 942). However, despite his having replaced the contents of the retinal image with experienced movement as what is represented, Poincaré’s repeated emphasis on “representation” continues to entail a form of dualism, with all its attendant problems as outlined above. A step further away from insistence on representation of the world as the origin of sensory experience occurs with the Phenomenological movement in philosophy, founded by Husserl, and extended by thinkers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Perhaps more than any other philosopher,

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Merleau-Ponty accords the body (or the “body-subject”), and more specifically the body’s capacity for action, significance in the understanding of self and world. This forms an important part of his attempt to counter the mind-body (and self-world) dualism of his philosophical predecessors (see Reynolds 2005 for a helpful discussion). In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty seeks to replace the internal, iconic model of perception as the imprinting of the external world on the subject with a model in which the lived body is central, and action, exploration, and openness to the world are crucial. For Merleau-Ponty, the Cartesian cogito is supplanted by a concept of the world defined through “intersensory unity”: consciousness is, in the first place, a matter not of “I think that” but of “I can” ([1945] 2002, 159), and the “can” is exemplified precisely through the linkage of “[s]ight and movement” (159). Perception is tightly linked to action, indeed inseparable from it: “every perceptual habit is still a motor habit and here equally the process of grasping a [sensory] meaning is performed by the body” (176–77). Merleau-Ponty argues that the body must be conceived of as subject rather than object because its absence is inconceivable to us. The concept of habit as a response to circumstance, which elides the usual action motivators of thought and intention, is described in The Structure of Behavior in terms that evoke a constant interplay and evolution of situation and action. For the football player, “The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the ‘goal’, for example, just as immediately as the vertical and horizontal planes of his own body. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action” ([1942] 1965, 168–69). In his late, unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty replaces traditional mind-body (subject-object) dualism with a chiasm or reversibility in which there is both divergence and overlap—for example, the awareness of what it feels like to be touched encroaches or supervenes on the experience of touching ([1964] 1968, 130–55)—rather than any absolute distinction between the two poles. To judge from his own critique in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty was himself not satisfied that he had avoided falling back into dualism in Phenomenology of Perception, but his investigations of perception were devoted to an attempt to bridge the explanatory gap. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, a generally anti-representationalist trend in accordance with these philosophical strands has been discernable in cognitive science. The individual contributions, which include James J. Gibson’s influential work on “affordances” or action potentialities (e.g., 1986, 127–46), were arguably first unified when Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch published The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, in which they proposed “the term enactive to emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind

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on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” (1991, 9, authors’ italics). The debate on how representation should be defined, and to what extent it should be posited or rejected as a causal and constitutive part of perception and cognition, is complex and ongoing. The broadest definition of a representation, as something which encodes information about the world (e.g., Pylyshyn 2003, 290), can’t be challenged by any account of neural functioning. Obviously, the brain stores information (or at least it undergoes changes such that information can be reconstructed); but the distributed nature of neural networks, and the multiple parallel pathways in the brain, may make “representation” a misleading term. Once we allow that a representation may be merely “functional”, “distributed”, “dynamic”, or all three (on the last of these, see, e.g., Van Gelder 1999) rather than “local”, “continuous”, and “analogue”, then there are representations everywhere in the brain, subserving all cognitive functions. Nonetheless, whilst pictorialist theories posit that neural representation (whether “functional” or otherwise) of what is seen or imagined is necessary to the experience of seeing or imagining, non-pictorialist theories tend to challenge this claim and the dualist problems it entails.

b)

The Sensorimotor Account

i) The Strengths Reactions against the pictorialist model of vision have taken different forms. An “active vision” paradigm, for instance, has been advocated in replacement of a “passive” or “pure” vision approach (Findlay and Gilchrist 2003, 4–6) (although “active vision” may only go as far as taking eye movements into account), while “interactive vision” has also been put forward (Churchland et al. 1994). Common sense arguments for questioning passive/pure/pictorialist models of vision include a simple evolutionary point: “Vision, like other sensory functions, has its evolutionary rationale rooted in improved motor control”, and the visual system’s architecture has evolved to “facilitate the organism’s thriving at the four Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction” (25). Inevitably, in a complex and changing real-world environment, motor decisions to further these aims, including eye, head, and other body movements, often need to be made—and may be best made—without access to a fully fleshed-out picture in the head, which may mean that pictures in the head never in fact evolved as an essential part of vision. Here I’ll focus on the “sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness” (O’Regan and Noë 2001a), which is the most fully workedout enactive account of perception, and takes a relatively clear stance on the issue of representation (though Hutto [2005] accuses the authors of falling back into cognitivism despite their anti-representationalist agenda). Although the terms “enactive” and “sensorimotor” aren’t interchangeable, the approaches which they denote can be seen as theoretically equivalent in

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how they understand perception and the relation between the perceiver and the environment (Taraborelli and Mossio 2008). The sensorimotor account posits sensory experience not as pictorial representation but as action, doing away with the notion of representation of the outside world both as the explanatory medium and as the experiential phenomenon to be explained. As I’ll outline in the next section, the account has the potential to illuminate the nature of the imagination as well as that of vision and consciousness. In essence, the theory posits that vision is action: seeing is looking, in a particular sense—a way of acting, of perceptually exploring one’s environment. It was first set out in full in O’Regan and Noë’s 2001 paper, and has since been expanded in books by both authors: Action in Perception (Noë 2005) and Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness (O’Regan 2011). Collaborators include David Philipona (on sensorimotor colour perception) and Erik Myin (on broader philosophical connections), and the central concept of sensorimotor contingencies has recently been applied to robotics (Maye and Engel 2011), and explored and expanded from a dynamical-systems perspective (Buhrmann, Di Paolo, and Barandiaran 2013; see also Viviani 2002, cited in Gibbs 2006, 77–78; Beer 2011), while the more general philosophical contexts of enactivism continue to be explored by the likes of Andy Clark, Daniel Hutto, and Lawrence Shapiro. Seeing, according to the sensorimotor theory, doesn’t happen through the mediation of internal representations of the outside world. The brain is, of course, crucially involved, as it is in everything with do, but what it isn’t doing is constructing representations of the world that somehow constitute, or “give rise to”, the experience of seeing. The world is its own, external (re)presentation, and we see when we exercise thought- or action-related mastery of the laws of sensorimotor contingency—when we know, in other words, what would change in our visual input if we were to act in a certain way. The theory distinguishes between the sensorimotor contingencies related to the visual modality and visual apparatus (e.g., the laws of retinal projection), and those related to the visual attributes of external objects (e.g., size, shape, texture, and colour). All are at a level of extreme specificity: we can separate out the changes that a flat, convex, or concave surface should undergo, or the distortions that should occur, when we move our eyes to any position on its surface, or when we move or rotate it. Thus, it isn’t as if we can’t “see” a bottle if we have never seen one before; our brains extract the laws of sensorimotor contingency through myriad encounters with sets, subsets, and combinations of these laws over time. A sense of one’s location in the world consists in movement and mastery of the laws that govern this movement, which is neither dictated by nor contributes to build up any internal representation of the external world. Correspondingly, Andreas Engel (2010, 229) has proposed that the concept and term “representation”, even with preceding qualifiers such as “action-oriented” or “deictic”, might well be replaced by the concept of a “directive” (extending

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throughout the entire cognitive system, or extended mind), a term which carries less of a “cognitivist burden” (230). These directives are the “functional roles of neural states”, whose “neural vehicles” are distributed across numerous brain regions. Directives probably operate via dynamic interactions between sets of neurons in a variety of sensory modalities as well as neurons in other brain areas such as premotor and prefrontal cortex, the limbic system, and the basal ganglia (230). An intermediate view, such as Clark’s “minimal representationalism”, posits “action-oriented representations” which both “describe” and “prescribe” (1997, 49), whereas in O’Regan and Noë’s view, the laws of sensorimotor contingency actually constitute the way the brain codes visual attributes. Noë and O’Regan (2002, 588–90) offer various kinds of neuroscientific evidence to support their claim, in areas including the relationship between attention and action and neural plasticity. For example, the attentional neural system is part of neural premotor processing, such that attentional shifts are associated with eye-movement preparation in the superior colliculus (Kustov and Robinson 1996). Furthermore, cortical representations of visual and somatosensory information can change as a function of stimulation, use, or lesion—for example, in proficient Braille readers, tactile processing pathways usually linked in the secondary somatosensory area can be “rerouted” to ventral occipital cortical regions usually subserving visual shape recognition (Sadato et al. 1998). Vision can thus be conceived of as a “law-governed mode of encounter with the environment”, as “the activity of exploring the environment in ways mediated by knowledge of the relevant sensorimotor contingencies” (O’Regan and Noë 2001a, 943, authors’ italics). A lifetime’s worth of sets of sensorimotor contingencies, recorded from innumerable encounters with different visual and spatial attributes and visual stimuli, are latent, neurally encoded (though see p. 85), and potentially available for recall: the perceiver thus has “mastery” of all these sensorimotor sets. But when a given object is currently being seen, the relevant sets are actualised, and the person has “active mastery” of them. The fact of those particular sets, from all those potentially applicable, being actually applicable and currently exercised, is what constitutes visually perceiving the object. Current exercise of the applicable sets constitutes active mastery of the sensorimotor potentialities associated with that object: if you were to move your eyes like this, the object would change like this (see Möller 1999 for a comparable theory of “perception through anticipation”). The impression of seeing is constituted by knowledge of a “certain web of contingencies”—as you move, or the object moves, and it looks the way that you were prepared for it to look, you see it (O’Regan and Noë 2001a, 945). The experience of seeing the world, according to O’Regan and Noë, consists in knowing how it would look if you were to look, and thus it involves a particular combination of immediacy and potentiality. This has consequences for how we think about the conscious/unconscious divide, because all “conscious” seeing is highly determined by what we can’t see but know that we could see (which would

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often be called what we “unconsciously” see). I’ll come back to this in Chapter Three (e.g., pp. 152–54). There’s a good deal of evidence that people perceive objects and spaces in terms of their affordances for embodied action; for example, people make the same judgements about whether a slanted surface can support an upright stance using vision and touch, but come to the visual judgement more quickly (Fitzpatrick et al. 1994; see Gibbs 2006, 65, for a summary of related research). As for the neural underpinnings of action-based perception, in general terms, the effects of action on neural architecture and activation are significant. Action affects functional neural architecture in brain areas including the motor cortex, for example, whilst action contexts (e.g., unrestrained eye movements versus controlled fixation) affect visual neuron activation (Engel 2010, 227–28). Specifically with regard to vision, several brain areas—including the posterior parietal cortex, the premotor and supplementary motor areas, and the primary motor area—contribute to the incorporation of visual and motor information as “a highly integrated visuomotor network” which receives projections from the primary visual cortex via the dorsal pathway (see below) (Tucker and Ellis 2001, 770). Furthermore, evidence on the neural mechanisms of efferent (central) and afferent (peripheral) motor signals shows that “predictions about the sensory outcome of movement are critical for the basic interpretation of sensory inputs” (Engel 2010, 227), with the nervous system using a combination of both preplanning and feedback control for motor control (Desmurget and Grafton 2000). It’s been argued that efference copies, or copies of motor instructions, constitute evidence against the sensorimotor theory. Supposedly, since copybased predictions about resulting sensory feedback mean that less attention need be paid to this feedback, the phenomenology of experience should be affected only minimally by it: “an agent’s visual experience of a sensory change that arises as a result of the self-generated movement should be attenuated [because it is less surprising]” (Jacob 2008, 458, author’s italics). This line of argument, however, misinterprets the sensorimotor account of subjective experience as dependent on the neurophysiological “highlighting” of certain aspects of that experience, when both the more predictable effects of self-generated movement and the less predictable effects of externally generated movement are in fact equally important parts of the law-governed nature of perceptual experience; the extent to which individual features are “attention-grabbing” is encoded in the way we experience. The phenomenology is determined, not refuted, by this imbalance, just as it is by every other quality of brain-body interaction. Some have also suggested that the distinction between the “dorsal” and “ventral” streams in vision (Milner and Goodale 1995), normally categorised respectively as those providing information for “action” and “perception”, contradicts the sensorimotor account (Wallis and Wright 2009, 274–78), given that damage to the ventral stream can result in a visual form

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of agnosia, where visual experience is severely impaired but visuomotor abilities are not, and that damage to the dorsal stream can result in optic ataxia, where visuomotor performance is impaired but not visual experience. Clark (2006, 8) draws on evidence that “the contents of conscious visual experience are optimized for selection, choice and reason rather than the fine guidance of action”, arguing that this optimisation introduces a “buffer zone keeping detailed knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies at arms [sic] length from the day-to-day business of conscious perceptual experience”. O’Regan and Noë, however, do acknowledge levels of cognitive organisation above that of basic sensorimotor routines when they specify that exercise of the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies must be used for thought or action planning/guidance (2001a, 944; see also Torrance 2002 and Mandik 2005). Evidence has further emerged that the strong version of the dual-stream account, according to which dorsal-stream activity is irrelevant to conscious perception, needs to be qualified (e.g., Gallese et al. 1999; Jeannerod 1999; see also Gibbs 2006, 58–61), prompting some researchers to suggest that we need to go further and invoke by way of explanation either multiple visual systems (see, e.g., Brenner and Smeets 2007, 274), or a “Mere Motley” (Clark 2010, 65; see also Clark 2001) or “labyrinthine” (Sloman 2007) theory of vision. The key difference between some interpretations of the strong dual-stream account and the essentials of the sensorimotor account is that what makes information “conscious” or “aware”, according to the latter, “cannot consist just in the activity or lack of activity in a certain brain region (e.g., the ventral stream). [. . .] Rather, visual awareness is a fact at the level of the integrated behavior of the whole organism” (O’Regan and Noë 2001a, 969). Further work is needed to refine our understanding of the interplay of action-orientated and perception-orientated processes, but a complete disjunction of the two is currently not supported even by evidence of neural dissociation. Implicit change-detection tasks show a clear distinction in detection rates between display movement and observer movement: only the former requires effortful processing and sometimes results in viewpoint-dependent recognition, while updating of observer position in the latter case depends on vestibular and/or proprioceptive as well as visual information (Simons and Wang 1998). Although display and observer movements can produce equivalent changes to the retinal image, variable involvement of motor processing results in salient differences in visual processing. A range of work on perception-action coupling at the level of “micro-affordances” has also investigated the ways in which a visual stimulus functionally potentiates a motor interaction (grasping) with the stimulus as part of a categorisation task (Tucker and Ellis 2001; see also Richez, Coello, and Olivier 2012 on both reaching and grasping potentiation). Uta Sailer, Randall Flanagan, and Roland Johansson (2005) have shown dramatic changes in the relation of gaze behaviour and hand movements, or the vision-action “buffer”, in the different stages of learning a complex visuomotor task, with eye movements initially lagging behind

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action but by the end preceding it by around 0.5 s. These kinds of findings add to the evidence for a “continuum from visual to motor processing”, and support the conclusion that “There is no point along this continuum where one can accurately say that visual processing ends and motor processing begins” (Tucker and Ellis 2001, 792). The sensorimotor account also offers new perspectives on familiar phenomena in the literature on vision and eye movements, such as saccadic suppression. This mechanism is interpreted not as compensating for eye movements, but as contributing to “the normal sampling of correlated visual and motor activity which constitutes visual perception” (O’Regan and Noë 2001b, 92). Rather than trying to explain “how it could be that we do not notice the tremendous perturbations that are caused on the retinal image every time the eye makes a saccade—which is between three to five times a second, all the waking day”, it makes a lot more sense to conclude instead that “Vision occurs through movement, not despite movement” (92, authors’ italics; see also Findlay and Gilchrist’s active-vision account of trans-saccadic integration [2003, 176–77]). Similar conclusions can be drawn regarding the filling-in of the blind-spot and the “binding problem”: how different attributes of a stimulus, such as shape and colour, can be “bound together” to give rise to a unified percept (O’Regan and Noë 2001b, 92–93; see also Gibbs 2006, 67). More broadly, some of the specific practical and theoretical developments yielded by an enactive approach are outlined by Clark (2009), including the uses to which robotics researchers are putting enactivist insights in creating algorithmic loops that extend beyond the robot into the world. Raymond Gibbs (2006, 69–73) also summarises AL (“artificial life”) robotics research in which the robot’s own activity is used as a guide to understanding the environment, using multiple parallel activity patterns rather than a global decision based on central internal representations of the world. This kind of research into enactive systems shows “how knowledge is embedded in a distributed fashion (body, sensors, actuators, nervous/control systems, etc.), or even partly in the environment” (73). This account seeks to close all the explanatory gaps in explaining the nature of visual experience or any form of sensory consciousness. There is no added extra, no magical addition of “conscious experience”, no “giving rise to” consciousness by neural representations of the world; there is no special place where all our sensory inputs come together and a “self” observes them all, as on the stage of the Cartesian Theatre. Because the sensorimotor theory posits no internal pictorial representations that need internal viewers to read them off or view them, it avoids both Cartesian materialism and the homuncular fallacy, which pictorialist theories inevitably entail (see Figure 1.5). And this theory also doesn’t commit the error of isomorphism: mistaking the quality of an experience for the quality of the mechanisms which generate it. As regards the rich and detailed view that we feel we have of the world, which is where all the picture metaphors come from in the first place—well,

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Figure 1.5

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Does enactivism offer an escape route from the Cartesian Theatre?

if we stop to think for a moment, we may realise that perceptual experience isn’t actually like this: that “[s]ome things are in the center of your focus and attention, others are only dimly present, as background detail, and much detail is altogether absent from your current experience” (Noë 2002, 2). We don’t necessarily feel such gradations as essential to our experience, but the crucial point is that even when perceptual experience does seem picture-like—vivid, detailed, comprehensive—this doesn’t mean that any sort of mental pictures are responsible for it seeming that way. Our detailed visual experience of a room as densely packed with the details of objects and their spatial arrangement, size, colour, and so on (or as papered

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with many identical Marilyns), doesn’t depend upon a detailed mental picture of a room: “crucially, the fact that you now experience the world as detailed does not entail that, right now, you represent all that detail in consciousness” (2, author’s italics). Indeed, I hope it’s clear by now that there is nothing it could mean to represent detail “in consciousness”, as regards vision or any other sensory modality or facet of experience. Our visual apparatus may provide us with visual information, but however long we stand looking at the scene, we do not, O’Regan and Noë argue, build up this input into a representation. The visual input is continually thrown away because the detail can stay out there in the world; we never have, nor ever need to have, all of Dennett’s Marilyns in our head at once, since “no matter how vivid your impression is that you see all that detail, the detail is in the world, not in your head” (Dennett 1991, 355). We leave the detail out there in the world, while we store information for exploring that world. (Interestingly, a very similar claim has been made in the context of social cognition: “Insofar as all human culture is predicated on the collective ability of large social groups, it is more appropriate to view an individual brain not as the repository of social knowledge, but rather as a source for generating it within a supportive social context” [Adolphs 2006, 33; cited in Bolens 2012, 45]). In practice, the distinction between storing details of the external environment and storing the information and instructions needed to explore it may not be clear cut: findings regarding the retention across eye movements of spatial information used to guide subsequent eye movements (Karn and Hayhoe 2000) have been cited (by Blackmore 2010, 101) as potential support for the sensorimotor theory, but of course spatial details are details of the environment as well as instructions for perceptual exploration. Nonetheless, there is still an important difference between the primary purpose of information retained in the service of accumulating a more or less complete representation of the world, and the primary purpose of information serving continuous exploratory goals—a difference which will be manifest in the extent of what’s stored, as well as in its duration. An influential notion in conceptualising the durational aspects of the representations potentially involved in vision is Ronald Rensink’s suggestion that detail becomes available “just in time” (2000, 32). Rensink’s understanding of vision as based on “virtual representation” still entails that representations of objects are built up, but they are built up one at a time, as needed, and dissolve when attention moves elsewhere. The idea is that we have the impression of a rich visual world because we can always make a new representation “just in time” by using information from the world itself. This way of thinking about the richness of our visual world makes the temporal element of potentiality central (see also Findlay and Gilchrist 2003, 2, on potential availability and eye movements). Experience of the world as present and detailed consists in knowing that we could be seeing any part of it in detail if we should choose to—if we should act so as to render it visible. We process only a small number of details, but we “see” the whole scene in the

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sense of being “aware” of it all: knowledge of immediate availability is the experience of conscious seeing. (Visual) “awareness” is a continuum, not an all-or-nothing quality (O’Regan and Noë 2001a, 944); there’s no question of things being either “in” or “out” of something mysterious (a state? a container?) called “consciousness”. Like the fridge light that seems to be always on because it’s on whenever we open the door to look, we think we are consciously seeing everything because, as soon as we check on anything, we direct our attention towards it, and so of course we see it (see Figure 1.6). The fridge-light analogy is a twentieth-century adaptation, suggested by Thomas (1999), of William James’s desire to “turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks” (1890, 1: 244; see also O’Regan in conversation with Susan Blackmore, in Blackmore 2005b, 162). In both scenarios, the inquiring action turns darkness into light, and by analogy creates consciousness where it didn’t previously exist. Yet if we don’t check, then we don’t feel that we aren’t seeing; it’s the act of looking at something that reassures us that

Figure 1.6

The fridge light of consciousness is always on

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it was always already visible. As O’Regan provocatively puts it: “Perception is an illusion created by the desire to look [. . .] !” (1992, 475, note 8, author’s italics). An illusion is not something that does not exist, but something that is not what it seems, and visual perception seems like seeing everything; in fact, our insatiable desire to look, our ever imminent looking, is itself enough to make it seem as if at every moment we were perceiving it all. Our experience of the world therefore consists not in looking and then seeing, but in our perpetually imagining looking and imagining what we would see.

ii)

The Weaknesses

As I’ve already begun to suggest, however, O’Regan and Noë overstate their case as regards the absence of representations of the world. Arguably this was a necessary and beneficial strategy in the face of the overwhelming prevalence of pictorialist assumptions about vision, but it has left the theory open to criticism on certain eminently reasonable grounds. According to the sensorimotor theory, a crucial property of any of these representations is that they aren’t what we see when we see the world around us; they are not responsible for the phenomenology of perception. This could, however, be refined rather than weakened by an acknowledgement of sparse representational support mechanisms in perception. Most importantly, some information about the perceived scene simply must be retained (through trans-saccadic memory) between saccades, otherwise we would have to start from scratch with each blink or eye movement. This information may be very minimal, and has been characterised variously as a “sketchy higher-level representation” (Blackmore et al. 1995), “extremely reduced visual representations” (Hayhoe 2000, 50), a “gist” (e.g., Simons and Levin 1997, 266–67; see also Rensink 2000, 36), and a “virtual representation” (Rensink 2000): Rensink proposes a sparse “‘just in time’ system that simply provides the right object representation at the right time”, and relies on the continuous nature of natural illumination to allow objects to serve as their own short-term memories (32). Virtual representations may, he suggests, be constructed from “gist”, spatial layout, and a longer-term schema of the scene; they aren’t “structures built up from eye movements and attentional shifts, but rather, are structures that guide such activities” (36, author’s italics). They needn’t be minimal in all ways, but are always minimal in some way: “This [triadic] architecture uses representations that are stable and representations that contain large amounts of visual detail. But at no point does it use representations that are both stable and contain large amounts of detail” (39, author’s italics; see also Becker et al. 2000 on relatively detailed but short-term representations). Ben Tatler suggests that our representations of the world may last no longer than about the duration of a fixation (2001; Tatler and Land 2011), and Rensink (2000) argues that retinotopic, detailed, and map-like representations or “sketches” with little spatial or temporal coherence are overwritten or fade away within a few

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hundred milliseconds, constantly regenerating as long as light continues to enter the eyes, and largely created anew after each eye movement, though perhaps with some carryover when the structures are re-formed at the new retinal location. Experiments on “deictic vision” (the use of the visual system to control action) by Dana Ballard and colleagues (e.g., 1992; see also refinements in Ballard et al. 1995) have investigated patterns of eye movements involved in executing a particular task (in Ballard et al. 1992 and Ballard et al. 1995, by moving coloured blocks on a screen to copy a model configuration), and have found that in the majority of cases, rather than reducing the need for eye movements by storing a detailed representation of the relevant elements, representational (both memory and computational) demands are instead minimised, and a number of eye movements larger than strictly necessary are employed to assess separately, for example, colour and then location. Again, to the extent that representations are computed, they are computed “just in time” for the task at hand (see also Triesch et al. 2003). Enactivism can also be challenged—and Charles Wallis and Wayne Wright (2009) have cogently done so—on the grounds that its proponents differ wildly in their claims about the explanatory power of enactivism (can it solve the “hard problem” or just the “easy problems” of consciousness?) and the constitutive role of action (in particular, does action have to be actual or can it be merely potential?). If we acknowledge, as it seems we must, that to use the world as an external memory we need to have at least a minimal representation of it, or that object recognition often takes place perfectly well without any movement except eye movements, we end up having to posit saccades and information stores as key to perception, which is very far from a radical claim (Wallis and Wright 2009, 261–62). As I mentioned before, Hutto (2005) argues for a Radical Enactivism that rejects the idea of content, whether informational or representational, being necessary to perception, removing the knowledge basis from sensorimotor expectations, and claiming that experience is determined by the exercise of certain learned or inherited abilities rather than the active mastery of sensorimotor knowledge. The field is thus highly disparate in its claims. Finally, the requisite neuroscientific evidence is still lacking: Wallis and Wright argue that where the neural system subserving the learning and mastery of sensorimotor contingencies might be remains unclear (2009, 281–93), but they don’t consider the obvious possibility that vision recruits the same motor pathways involved in action, but stopping short of actualising it. This would converge with arguments like Tucker and Ellis’s (2001, 770) that the perception of objects relies on the partial activation of the motor patterns required to interact with them. Just how “partial” or otherwise remains to be investigated. But in any case, despite the still nascent and fluid nature of the field and the discrepancies in the strength of researchers’ claims, and whether we think it’s too radical or not radical enough, or think it completely solves the “hard problem” or not, I hope I’ve suggested here some ways in which

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enactivism can avoid the problems of pictorialism and begin to answer some questions about why seeing feels as it does.

c)

Sensorimotor Imagining

In the sensorimotor account, the experience of imagining is a subset of all visual experience, without the “illusion of immediacy”10 given by the immediate availability of information about the outside world usually provided in the retinal image. We aren’t looking at internal pictorial representations when we imagine, any more than when we see. Imaginative experience indeed gives less of an illusion of being pictorial than vision does, because the solid, detailed real-world percepts aren’t there in all the stability they have when we see. Visual perception and imagination are on a continuum, and are known to involve the same parts of the brain; Xu Cui and colleagues (2007), for example, find a correlation between activity in the visual cortex and reported vividness of mental imagery when visualising oneself or another person either bench-pressing or stair-climbing, while Pylyshyn (2003, e.g., 333–43) discusses how this connection does not—counter to many interpretations—entail that either vision or imagination operates using picture-like images. Although the visual system is involved in both, neither depends on picture-like representations; the visual system isn’t being used to “see” some state of the brain (400, also, e.g., 335, 389–90). By the late nineteenth century, William James was eloquently describing how seeing and imagining must be conceived of as equivalent: “The same cerebral process which, when aroused from without by a sense-organ, gives the perception of an object, will give an idea of the same object when aroused by other cerebral processes from within” (1890, 1: 20, author’s italics). The difference is that in vision the external world is continually narrowing down the possibilities, while in the imagination far more can remain potential. Like the previous accounts that explicitly connected vision and imagination, this way of understanding visual perception brings with it a particular way of thinking about the imagination. Thus it also contributes to a fuller understanding of what happens when we read: how that cognitive connection between text and reader arises and operates. After all, when we read, all we are actually looking at and seeing are the black marks on the paper; it’s through the imagination that we, as readers, experience the fictional world—by imagining seeing. As a neutral definition, we can say that “the term ‘mental image’ [or the verb ‘to imagine’] is only the name for the experience of ‘seeing’ without the presence of the object being seen” (Pylyshyn 2003, 419). The experience of imagery, or, better, of imagining, may be understood not as a matter of having pictures in the head, but as an activity of exploration, like visual perception. Just as we experience the world “as if” we were seeing it all in vivid detail, so we experience what’s imagined as if we were seeing the corresponding object. Thomas has suggested that because of the ubiquitous involvement of the imagination in vision, “A better understanding of

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the imagination is likely to deepen our insight into the nature of consciousness (and, probably, vice-versa)” (2003, 79). The imagination is, as Kant pointed out, centrally involved in all conscious experience, and this is especially true, of course, in the experience of reading fiction. Seeing is an active process: the activity directed at an object of visual perception can be identified as the cognitive act of perceiving. By extension, during the imaginative experience the schema (the stored instructions for a behaviour or action) that directs the activity of exploration is active in much the same way as during visual perception. The activity is even more obvious when we imagine: we have to work hard to keep actively imagining something, because it isn’t simply there in the world for us to look at. Considered in this way, in both seeing and imagining there are ways of acting but no internal objects. This is the line taken in the perceptual-activity, or enactive, theory of perception and mental imagery, which Thomas, its main proponent, explicitly aligns with the enactive approach set out in O’Regan and Noë’s original (2001a) sensorimotor theory of visual consciousness (e.g., Thomas 2003b; also Gibbs 2006, 133). This abolition of the pictorial mental image as either percept or neural state is radical, and essential to the non-pictorialist approach to cognitive and linguistic functioning. In short: categorical perception (or “perceiving as”) is the active exploration and interrogation of the environment, and imagining is the partial enactment of this exploration in the absence of the appropriate object. As Thomas states, there is no actual stimulus that would have been responsible for the present perceptual experience: “Imagery is experienced when a schema that is not directly relevant to the exploration of the current environment is allowed at least partial control of the exploratory apparatus. We imagine, say, a cat, by going through (some of) the motions of examining something and finding that it is a cat, even though there is no cat (and perhaps nothing relevant at all) there to be examined. Imagining a cat is seeing nothing-in-particular as a cat” (1999, 218, author’s italics; see also Dilman and Ishiguro 1967, e.g., 54). The opening expression here is imperfect: we don’t experience imagery; we experience what we imagine. Yet the notion of seeing “nothing-in-particular as a cat” seems helpful in configuring the relations between imagining and seeing—and therefore between a reader’s imaginative experience and fictional narrated perceptions—in terms of “seeing as”. However, if we give this notion a little more thought, we might want to question how useful it is to say that “nothing-in-particular”, or “perhaps nothing relevant at all”, is being imagined when we imagine a cat. When we imagine a cat we perform the same kinds of interrogative behaviours as when we see one, but in this case the answers are supplied from memory rather than by the immediate environment. While in the experience of actually seeing a cat we constantly receive multiple kinds of visual feedback relating to colour, luminance, etc., and somatosensory feedback relating to tactile resistance, warmth, smoothness, and so on, when imagining one we supply weaker versions of these kinds of feedback from memory. The interactive nature of imagining becomes especially clear if we imagine, say, stroking a

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particular cat, where we may positively feel our arms move to touch the fur; but in any case, having active mastery of all these sensorimotor contingencies is the basis of both seeing and imagining. It might be natural to think that another key part of this would be to compensate for the lack of actual sensory feedback (i.e., the fact that there isn’t actually any silky-smooth fur there to be stroked and to provide specific kinds of resistance), but one principle in non-pictorialist theories of perception is that there is no a priori need to represent the absence of information. As Dennett points out, providing a representation and merely ignoring the absence of a representation aren’t the same thing (1991, 359), and so, when imagining a nonexistent cat, we don’t need to ignore the lack of full sensory feedback actively; we simply work with what we have. The relative poverty of memory-derived inputs is adequate in itself to account for the characteristic phenomenology of imaginative experience as rather “less” than full visual experience. The question of terminology becomes an interesting one when imagining is conceived as so much about interactive engagement and not at all about mental images: does this mean we should abandon the term “image” altogether? In her study of the imagination, Warnock comes to the conclusion that although in talking of imagining we can’t help talking of images, the image can’t be treated as an independent object capable of being examined on its own: “We may need the noun [the mental image]; but to understand it we have to understand the verb [to imagine]. It thus becomes clear that the question how we are to describe an image as it presents itself to us, inevitably turns into the other question what we are doing when we imagine something. [. . .] In order to understand the image, we need to understand the diverse but related functions of imagination” (1976, 172–73). Warnock later (208) somewhat weakens this conclusion by resorting to the terminology of hierarchical layers: the higher levels “in” consciousness and the lower levels “out of” or “below” consciousness. In this vein, she describes the imagination as working away down “below the level of consciousness”, tidying up “the chaos of sense experience”. In the section quoted above, however, she expresses the simple but possibly counterintuitive insight that action always imposes itself as the necessary explanatory addition to pictorial representation. As we’ve seen, philosophical and scientific developments have presented it as a highly fruitful addition—so fruitful that perhaps it becomes an alternative, and we can even claim that we don’t in fact “need the noun” after all. This kind of account is supported by evidence from a variety of different research areas. Gibbs (2006, 124–42) discusses the thesis that imagining is inseparable from motor processes with reference to a range of findings. For example, imagining doing something—whether imagining what it would look like or what it would feel like—causes people to execute an attenuated version of the action, as in an early study by Jacobson (1932) where imagining bending the right arm leads to a contraction in the relevant biceps-brachial muscles. Furthermore, enactive imagining in prospective contexts seems to have a functional role: when we imagine

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possible future actions, motor imagery seems not to require the existence of a completed premotor plan, but to be involved in the planning process itself (S. Johnson 2000). Pylyshyn (2003, 386) discusses how the spatial configuration of images is derived directly from the spatiality of the real world, which in turn is derived from proprioceptive, kinaesthetic, auditory, and other sense modalities. He doesn’t want to go so far as to conclude that “dynamic visual imagery is carried out by means of the motor system (or that visual operations exploit motor control mechanisms)” (382, author’s italics), but it isn’t entirely clear why not. The notion that imagining involves covert re-enactment of the exploratory perceptual behaviour appropriate for exploring the imagined object if it were present is supported by extensive eye-tracking evidence: that scanpaths are remarkably similar when imagining (during recall) to when viewing an actual image (e.g., Johansson, Holsanova, and Holmqvist 2006, who used a complex painting of four men doing gardening in their shirt sleeves and asked participants to recall and describe the constituents of the image, as well as to recall and describe the constituents of a verbal account of a garden), that saccades are directed towards the interesting parts of the imagined scene (Spivey and Geng 2001), and that when participants are instructed not to move the eyes or head when imagining a moving object, the imagined motion tends to slow or stop (Ruggieri 1999). Given that eye movements are apparently not inhibited, the exploratory behaviour isn’t even entirely covert. While these kinds of findings can certainly be accommodated by a pictorialist account of vision (see Thomas’s 2003 critique of the loose formulations and ad hoc additions and amendments of Kosslyn’s research programme), they are positively predicted by the perceptual-activity theory. Ruggieri and Alfieri (1992) have also demonstrated that the length of the optical axis (i.e., the thickness) of the crystalline lens in the eye changes according to whether a near object (a word on a page) or a far object (a ship on the horizon) is being imagined, just as it does when we focus on something near or far in the external world. Work on unilateral neglect provides support from a different angle. The term refers to the loss of half of the visual world due to damage to the right parietal cortex: patients seem not to realise that the left-hand side of the world even exists, though they can see things on that side if their attention is drawn to them (for a brief overview, see Blackmore 2010, 193–94). The neglect affects imaginative as well as visual experiences (in this context it is sometimes called representational or imaginal neglect): not only do patients shave just the right side of their beard, or eat from just the right side of their plate, they also manifest neglect when imagining. Edoardo Bisiach and Claudio Luzzatti (1978) asked patients to imagine the cathedral square in Milan, first facing the Duomo di Milano, and to describe what they saw. They described all the buildings that would be on the right if they were standing there, and omitted all those on the left; but when asked to imagine facing the other way, they listed all the buildings they had previously left out. Bartolomeo (2002) has argued that Kosslyn’s account of the neuroanatomical underpinnings of

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imaginative experience (according to which activity in occipital visual areas is essential, because the visual system “sees” the image display) is incompatible with the findings on representational neglect. Conversely, Paolo Bartolomeo and Sylvie Chokron (2002), in a commentary on Pylyshyn (2002) whose enactivist conclusion meets with a rather warm reception from Pylyshyn in his replies section, summarise evidence for various kinds of influence of sensorimotor procedures (e.g., turning the head, irrigating the ear with very cold water) on imaginal neglect, including by facilitating the leftwards orientating of attention. This means that imaginal neglect can’t be attributed to a damaged or missing left side of a mental picture (and indeed the lesions that lead to neglect aren’t in the retinotopically mapped areas singled out by Kosslyn), or to the failure to pay attention to an internal picture. Rather, procedures that help patients orientate their gaze more to the left seem to help them re-enact exploration of that side of space and thus imagine it (because the re-enactment is the imagining). As Thomas (2003b) summarises, “Whatever it is that causes neglect patients to fail to explore to the left when they are actually looking at something may be expected also to cause them to fail to go through the motions of exploring to the left when they are going through the motions of looking at it (i.e., imagining it)”. Although the eye movements involved in imagining are a manifestation of “endogenous” attention (i.e., as part of top-down, schema-driven perceptual exploration) rather than “exogenous” (i.e., as a bottom-up response mechanism to external stimuli), they are still an “external” as opposed to an “internal” attentional process, in that they involve muscles and bodily movements, not neural mechanisms alone. Defining “imagining” as “seeing as” connects the “as if” element of visual perception (we experience the world as if we were seeing it all in vivid detail) and the “as if” element of imagining (we experience what is imagined as if we were seeing the corresponding object). Perceptual-activity theory posits a continuum of experiences between normal seeing and “pure” imagining, with lots of in-between points on the continuum in which either “see as” or “imagine” could equally well be used: for example, “imagining nothing-in-particular as a cat” / “seeing a cloud as a cat”, or “I saw the tree as an alien space ship” / “I imagined the tree was an alien space ship”. The particular place of a given experience on this continuum is determined by which perceptual tests are carried out and which of their results are accepted and/or responded to. The processes of the imagination, then, may usefully be defined along with those of visual interpretation as “imaginative” processes that allow us to perceive things as certain types of thing, whether out there in the world or not. And even when there’s nothing real being looked at, the process seems not to be a matter of making internal pictures; rather, it can be understood as a particular way of exercising the capacity for “seeing as”. What we imagine is what we never quite get as far as wholly seeing— because, after all, it isn’t there to see. When we imagine, instead of looking at an internal array as if we were looking at the external world, we are activating the sensorimotor knowledge

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of what it is like to be looking at something (knowledge accrued in past experiences of such looking). This might mean that we are prepared to look in some particular way, for instance, or to activate the colour system in a relevant way. The potentiality isn’t infinite—if it were, there would be no difference between imagining a castle and imagining a frog. Yet as Sartre (1972, 9–10) recognised, when you imagine, everything is determined by intentionality: you are imagining a castle if you know what you are imagining to be a castle (see also Pylyshyn 2003, 329, 414); if you know it to be a pathetic collection of village houses, it is such a collection. However, it isn’t always necessary even to go this far and cognitively specify. We may start needing to specify once we “probe” our experience by asking ourselves about its details, and at this point, specificity may be created. On the other hand, it may not, if the details remain unspecifiable: “I often feel I have a vivid image of someone’s face, but when asked whether the person wears glasses, I find that my image is silent on that question: it neither has nor lacks glasses, [. . .] nor does it contain the information that something is missing” (Pylyshyn 2003, 34). In Chapters Three (pp. 152–59) and Four (p. 191) I’ll discuss the significance of “asking the question” in relation to “conscious” perceptual experience in greater depth. At this point, I’ll simply conclude that there is more potentiality in imagining than in seeing, because there is no real world being seen, and the potential is narrowed down less than occurs when we actually look—as, in seeing, we have to do. The indeterminacy of the experience of imagining is the natural extension of the potentiality at the heart of visual perception. It’s important to note that this is emphatically not a quality that pictures have: imaginative indeterminacy is not like a smear or blurry patch; it consists in being inexplicitly noncommittal (Block 1981, 12–13).11 Easy as it is to fall into pictorialising forms of expression, language in fact has the capacity to express such qualities as instability and indeterminacy that are visual and imaginative rather than pictorial: “sentences (and other language-like compositional encoding systems) have this sort of content indeterminacy, whereas pictures do not” (Pylyshyn 2003, 34, author’s italics). I’ll come back to the question of how much language and perception can and need to specify in Chapter Three (esp. pp. 138–42), where I introduce the concept of basic-level categorisation as a form of cognitive efficiency that spans the linguistic and the perceptual realms. This form of “seeing” without there being anything (external) to look at, of enacting the sensorimotor mastery without a present sensory stimulus, has a processual and experiential simplicity as an extension of seeing. In imaginative experience conceived of in this way, “seeing” and “imagining” are wholly reconciled, just as external visual perception always partially reconciles them. What is lacking is the “illusion generated by the desire to look”, because even if we do look (at a particular aspect of what is imagined), there’s no retinal image to give us the customary illusion of immediacy. The literary text—most especially, I would suggest, a text which is cognitively realistic in its evocation of visual perception—can induce

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precisely this form of experience: a cognitively realistic text can achieve potent experiential effects by exploiting the perceptual continuum between imagining and seeing. If we conceive of imagining as an experiential form poised in potentiality, the writer who doesn’t always try to embody ideas (or scenes, or described actions) wholly allows this potentiality to remain unchannelled into specificity. A writer who does this may induce a particular sort of powerful experience in the recipient by tapping into fundamental perceptual-imaginative processes. This way of understanding the nature of perception, and the enactive perceptual continuum of vision and imagination, allows us to make informed hypotheses about what sorts of literary texts will most directly engage the reader’s imagination in an enactive way. We can hypothesise that traditional Realist texts based on pictorialist assumptions will engage the reader’s perceptual processes less directly than will a cognitively realistic text that isn’t structured by the principles of pictorialism—although Realist texts will therefore have other effects, such as inducing the reassuring feeling of folk-psychological expectations fulfilled. Kafka’s fictional texts, I’ll argue, engage us very directly by evoking vision and stimulating the imagination in non-pictorial, cognitively realistic ways, but they are also unsettling for the same reason. As we’ll see in the following chapter, Kafka himself wrestles with the problems that pictorialism poses to making sense of what language and perception do, and he finds solutions to these problems that are enactivist in nature. Analysing Kafka’s personal writings thus gives us an important complementary perspective on how his fictions negotiate the divide between the pictorial and the enactive.

NOTES 1. To “foveate” is to fixate with the fovea, the 0.3 mm–diameter area at the centre of the retina, which is the only retinal area that allows for sharp, high-resolution vision; acuity over the rest of the retina is quite poor. For a concise history of eye-movement research in reading, see Paulson and Goodman 1999; Burke (2011, 12–39) also provides a helpful outline of approaches in discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics, and a summary of reading-related findings in eye-movement research and neuroscience, including sections on memory and mirror neurons. 2. Kosslyn’s more recent discussions build on rather than replace his 1994 account, which is frequently cited as a source of supporting evidence or argumentation in Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis 2006. 3. For further discussion of the ambiguities of the term “representation” see Noë’s exchange with Sperber at www.interdisciplines.org/medias/confs/archives/ archive_1.pdf, pp. 40–41, and for representation specifically from the point of view of enactivism (enactivist representation doesn’t have content or encode information), see Menary 2006, esp. 3–7. Schier (1986) discusses the philosophy of pictorial representation more broadly. 4. See the original study for various additional conditions in the unexpected event, counting task, and video style, and corresponding variations in detection rates.

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5. I cite the Internet Classics Archive translation of the Poetics, translated by Butcher (1987), in preference to other published versions such as Halliwell’s (1987) translation on the grounds of its more literal translations of terms relating to perception and representation, which allow us more accurately to assess the extent to which pictorial locutions are employed. (Standard line references are taken from the Heinemann edition, e.g. 1927.) For this judgement and the material on enargestata and tithemi/repraesento in sections 3a and 3b of this chapter, I am indebted to Edmund Richardson. 6. See also Wellek 2003 on “Realism in Literature”, and Bucher et al. 1975, vol. 2, for a collection of primary documentation from periodicals, etc. 7. Another notable example of idealist Realism is Fontane’s oft-cited (1853) essay on “Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848” (Our lyric and epic poetry since 1848), in which the subject matter of true Realism is “das Wahre” (the true), which lies beyond “die bloße Sinnenwelt” (the mere world of the senses; 1975, 100). See also Bucher et al. 1975, 94–95. 8. This distinction is manifested in the very fact that Ritzer’s Reallexikon article on the term “Realismus” as “ästhetischer Begriff” (aesthetic concept) is followed by a separate one on Realism as “literaturhistorischer Epochenbegriff” (period concept in literary history). 9. For a history of Classical and German theory on representation (mimesis, ut pictura poesis), see Willems 1989, esp. chs 6–7. See also Ritzer 1997, 218, on the “Anschaulichkeit” (vividness) essential to Realism. 10. Conversation with O’Regan, July 2007. 11. Here Block is summarising Dennett’s (1969, 92–93) argument, and objects that here Dennett is committing the “photographic fallacy” (Block 1981, 14): forgetting that pictures like stick figures can in fact be inexplicitly noncommittal (see Chapter Two, pp. 112–14). Of course they can, but pictorialist arguments tend to foreground the high resolution and detail of the neural representations of visual stimuli (e.g., Kosslyn 1994, 92, 412), and if depiction operates at least partially by resemblance (Kossyln, Thompson, and Ganis 2006, 44), the dualist problems remain unsolved (see pp. 43–50).

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Re-Envisioning the Imagination

KAFKA’S DIARIES, LETTERS, AND FICTIONS Wenn ich wahllos einen Satz hinschreibe z.B. Er schaute aus dem Fenster so ist er schon vollkommen. (When I write a sentence down at random, e.g., He looked out of the window, then it is already perfect.) (19 February 1911, T 30)

Kafka’s diaries (and, to a lesser extent, his letters) have always exerted a special fascination on readers and scholars. They are full of rich reflections on life and writing, and indeed the impossibility of writing; as Julian Preece (2002, 115) notes, “Not being able to write becomes at [. . .] times the main subject in his diary and the subject of writing preoccupies him in letters too”. The diaries and letters have often been used as keys to unlock the seemingly less self-reflexive mysteries of the fictional works. That is not my aim here. Kafka interspersed “diary entries” and “fiction” in the same volumes; the writing of a personal chronicle, the reflection on writing, the preparation for literary work, the drafting of the fictions, and the literary product can’t be satisfactorily separated (Beißner 1963, 7; Guntermann 1991, 61, 148; Fromm 1998, 26; Preece 2002, 116, 123; Glinski 2004, 170–73). This means that a categorical distinction between the “realistic” and the “subjective”, which has been attributed to Kafka as part of the supposedly preeminent status of imagination over the external world in his thinking and writing (Guntermann 1991, 62, 86–88), isn’t really tenable. Most of Kafka’s writing denies a definite boundary between these “opposites”. For these reasons, there is even less justification with Kafka than with many other authors for treating the diaries and letters as straightforwardly revealing the true meaning of the fictions, because they express what he “really meant”. Instead, the two are best treated as intersecting but not equivalent creations of scenarios mediated by the author’s imagination. (The phrase “Vorstellung, daß [. . .]” [Imagined that [. . .]] is, as it happens, strikingly frequent in the diaries [Guntermann 1991, 86–87].) Arguably, the difference, when there is one, is a matter of making things explicit— especially (it is Kafka, after all) doubts. Mark Harman (2011, 51) remarks that, in his diaries, Kafka “gives free rein not only to his tendency to think

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in images but also to his need to interrogate such thinking”; Kafka’s diaries have been described as a fundamentally “reflexive Gattung” (reflexive genre; Guntermann 1991, 11, 22–25, 63). In what I’ll pragmatically call the fictional works, explicit reflections—for example, on how precarious the moment of waking is, or character motivation—are often deleted in favour of a more laconic style (Troscianko 2010). In his diaries and correspondence, by contrast, more is often allowed to remain expressed. These are the places where Kafka deals most explicitly with precisely the issues considered in Chapter One: language and perception, and how the two interact. This chapter will therefore try to show how Kafka’s reflections on his own experience in and of the world, and the problems of perception and linguistic evocation which arise as he writes about this experience, can help us better understand how his fictional works negotiate these same problems, not by offering a more reliable truth, but simply by making some things more explicit as interesting or problematic.

2.

ARTS AND SCIENCES IN KAFKA’S ERA

Kafka’s works, like all literature, are both timeless and of their time: they are informed by the era in which they were created, but are not solely responses to that era. In Kafka’s case in particular, there is a striking interplay between the temporal and the timeless; this is reflected in the descriptions of him as an author of “classical Modernism” mentioned in the Introduction (p. 6). One way in which Kafka’s writing has been seen as being of his era is in how it draws on contemporary scientific thought (J. Ryan 1991, 2002), which was more broadly understood and assimilated in the early twentieth century than today (Emter 1995). Though I won’t discuss the changes in the early twentieth-century world view in detail here, the Modernist literary scene in the German-speaking world was clearly one rich in art-science interactions: major authors such as Musil, Broch, and Benn were educated in physics and contributed to a general “Gedankenspiel mit den physikalischen Ideen” (cognitive play with the ideas of physics; 100). As for Kafka himself, Klaus Wagenbach (1958, 174–75) documents how he frequented the Prague “salon” hosted by Frau Bertha Fanta, where lively discussions about science (specifically physics), philosophy, mathematics, and religion and theosophy took place, at which Kant, Hegel, and Brentano (amongst others) were discussed, and at which Einstein (then teaching in Prague) was a frequent guest. During Kafka’s lifetime, developments in the physical sciences, most notably the theories of Einstein himself, and the science of perception (see Chapter One, p. 73) together posed a dramatic challenge to prior notions of the structure of the world (and the universe), and how we interact with it perceptually and experientially. This period exemplifies Thomas Kuhn’s concept of a “paradigm shift”, which leads people not just to conceive of

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things differently, but even to see them anew (Kuhn 1970, e.g., 101–2, 120, 128–29). Such destabilisations of received wisdom about the world undoubtedly contributed to the instability manifest in the writings of Kafka and his contemporaries; in many of these works, nothing can quite be taken for granted any longer. Mach’s empiricism exerted a particular influence on the authors of the period, not least Kafka (J. Ryan 1991, 2002), as he sought to ground physics in sensation, positing a concept of experience in which time and space are simply types of “Empfindung” (sensation), and sensations are just one type of “Element” (element). “Self” therefore becomes indistinguishable from “world”, and dissolves into a centreless flux of sensation (Mach 1987, esp. 3, 10, 17–19), leading to his famous conclusion that “Das Ich ist unrettbar” (The self is unsalvageable; 20). Theories of this kind further challenged any assumption that the connections between the experiencing subject and the subjectively experienced world could be conceived of in terms of pictorially precise, stable, and comprehensive representation.

3.

KAFKA, PICTURES, AND PERCEPTION: OVERVIEW

Kafka wrestles in his personal writings with pictorialist issues which fall into three main parts: those engaging with pictorial notions of vision and imagination, those engaging with the difficulties of evoking cognitive and perceptual processes in words (difficulties which tend to be exacerbated by the first set of notions), and those reflecting on the nature of conscious experience more generally. He finds solutions to these issues arising from pictorialist assumptions by adopting an enactivist approach to evoking perception. For the sake of clarity, the difference between pictorialism and enactivism will be presented here as a problem and its solution, but I want to make clear that this is no strictly teleological development. Some of Kafka’s reflections on the “problem” come from later in his life than the indications of a “solution”. Nonetheless, illuminating contrasts can be drawn between the “entrapment” in pictorialism and the “discovery” of enactivism, while illuminating similarities can be seen in how the enactivist mode of writing is evidenced in the diaries and in Kafka’s fictional practice. As noted in Chapter One (p. 42), one of the main contributing factors to the default primacy of pictorialist assumptions in everyday thought about perception is probably the stability that seems to be lost if we relinquish them—a stability that seems to be an existent feature of our perceptual interaction with the world, without which successful negotiation of everyday tasks would be impossible. For Kafka, however, there is no starting point at which stability is or can be assumed: the writer of texts like “Die Bäume” (The Trees; DL 33) is a master and victim of multilayered uncertainties, and he refuses to seek or accept superficial consolations that distract from the awareness of instability. This may be one reason why his exploration of

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questions relating to perception and language moves so quickly and decisively away from pictorialism and its reassurances. His linguistic creativity means, furthermore, that the vivid language of pictures in the head is questioned and experimented with just like so many other habits of speech. I’ll try to show here that Kafka’s personal writings can be meaningfully illuminated with regard to the same features of perception and imagination crucial to understanding how his fictional texts operate. As Duttlinger (2007, 10) has it, “Kafka [. . .] transfers more general modes of visual perception and experience from his personal to his fictional writings and vice versa, thus interlinking the two on psychological, aesthetic, and epistemological levels”. I hope to show how a scientifically informed focus on the specifically perceptual aspects of Kafka’s reflections on his experience can enrich our understanding of these connections.

4.

PROBLEMS OF PICTORIALIST CONCEPTIONS OF VISION, THE IMAGINATION, LANGUAGE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Many of the problems that Kafka encounters as he reflects on the connections between visuality, the imagination, and language seem to be based on a pictorial notion of both how vision and imagination function and how language evokes things. Although these different strands can’t be neatly separated, since all Kafka’s testimony on these issues is verbally mediated and the use of language is always inclusively cognitive, I’ll try to distinguish between them at least roughly.

a)

Vision and Imagination

Kafka repeatedly connects seeing and imagining in ways that are implicitly or explicitly pictorial. Some of these ways are quite inconspicuous: the common locution “vor den Augen” (before one’s eyes) recurs in Kafka’s descriptions of visual as well as imaginative experience; he equates the two as perceptual confrontations with a two-dimensional array, whether in seeing or imagining. He writes in these terms to his intimate correspondent Milena about the visual immediacy of his imaginative experience of her surroundings: “Und so weit ist alles und doch habe ich die Klinke Deiner Tür so nahe vor den Augen wie mein Tintenfaß” (And everything is so far away and yet I have the handle of your door just as close before my eyes as my inkstand; n.d., BM 128). The superlative creative experience of writing “Das Urteil” (The Judgement) in one long nocturnal sitting is similarly evoked as an observation of something unfolding in front of him: Kafka describes how “die Geschichte [sich] vor mir entwickelte” (the story developed in front of me; 23 September 1912, T 460, see also T 199, T 358). In the first of these examples (just as for Quintilian; see Chapter One, p. 56), the power of the imagination lies in its capacity to close down distance, making the

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imagined as closely present a reality as the perceived, and the “presence” that the imagination makes possible is construed precisely as presentation, before the observer (see Chapter One, pp. 55–57). This follows the tradition of portrayals of the imagination in ancient rhetorical theory, which explicitly connects “mental images” and the imagination with linguistic representation and persuasion of a mimetically conveyed “reality”. Both here and in Kafka, emphasis is placed on the duality of “presentation” and “reception”, as opposition to a two-dimensional array: the most realistic scenes are those “presented to our imagination”, put “before our very eyes”. These structures are embedded quite deep in the German language: even the German term for “(mental) image”, Vorstellung, is tied to the same presentational structure (vor = in front of, before; stellen = to place, to put). These sorts of linguistic features, however, arguably demonstrate the general linguistic dominance of pictorial locutions, rather than any more definite attitude on Kafka’s part. In other cases too, the limitations of German terminology obscure the extent to which Kafka’s indications of pictoriality are to be taken “literally”: in the pictorial implications of, for example, darstellen (to portray, to depict) (see also Buch 1972, 10, on the pictorial etymologies of beschreiben [to describe] and schildern [to portray or to depict]). This kind of ambiguity is frequently and tantalisingly foregrounded in the use of the general term Bild; in many cases the English terms “image” and “picture” would both be possible translations, and the choice between them could be revealing. In German, however, the distinction is much less pronounced. Although we have to be cautious in drawing conclusions specific to Kafka, these locutions are only the foundations for the many more explicit equations of both the imagination (and by extension visual perception) and language with pictorial representation that can be found in Kafka’s personal writings. Sometimes these are unproblematic: one day Kafka writes to his best friend Max Brod, “Liebster Max, eine kurze Darstellung dessen, wie sich die Sache in einem heute allerdings aus verschiedenen Gründen etwas erschütterten Kopfe malt” (Dearest Max, a brief portrayal of how the matter is painting itself in my head, which today, for various reasons, is admittedly rather unsettled; 5 November 1923, B 463). Here the picture is clear, and clearly enough a picture: Kafka introduces a verbal account (pictorial in nature, if only in the etymological sense of “Darstellung”) of a conceptual construal of an event as it’s explicitly painted in the head. The painting has happened in the head, but it’s unclear whether it has occurred as if on a surface, or simply indeterminately within the headspace—and the reflexive “to paint itself” only increases the ambiguity by removing any sense of agency on Kafka’s part. Other pictures cause more problems. In another diary entry, the location of the picture is left unspecified, but the picture itself is clearly described as a self-sufficient two-dimensional representation: “[v]or dem Einschlafen hatte ich gestern die zeichnerische Vorstellung einer für sich bergähnlich in

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der Luft abgesonderten Menschengruppe, die mir in ihrer zeichnerischen Technik vollständig neu und, einmal erfunden, leicht ausführbar schien” (before falling asleep last night I had a drawing-like image of a group of people outlined in the air like a mountain, which seemed to me to be completely new in its drawing technique, and, once invented, easy to execute; 16–17 December 1911, T 296). In this passage the “drawing-like image” is compared to the outline of a mountain; the group of figures hovers in the “air” of the imaginative space. Here already, though, there is an equivocation in the very two-dimensionality that the repeated term “zeichnerisch” (drawing-like) at first seems firmly to establish: a mountain is a three-dimensional form, and air is what suffuses the three-dimensional world, but they have no place in a substrate equivalent to the flat blankness of a mental “canvas”. The three-dimensional imagining “head” appears, rather, an air-filled extension of the external world. The somewhat problematic nature of “diese schöne Zeichnung [. . .] im Kopfe” (this pretty drawing [. . .] in my head; T 296), in terms of both its representational capacity and the experience it constitutes, is enhanced by the conclusion of the passage: “Da fand sich allerdings bald, daß ich mir nichts anderes vorgestellt hatte als eine kleine Gruppe aus grauweißem Porcellan [sic]” (Then, however, it transpired that I had imagined nothing other than a small group made of greyish-white porcelain; T 297). Now the three-dimensional solidity of sculpture explicitly intrudes on pictoriality, hence Kafka can’t actually execute the drawing; he can only try to write about it. The apparent technical novelty of the imagined drawing is exposed as a confusion of media: it was only “seen as” (imagined to be) a drawing, whereas it was actually a sculpted ornament. The capacity of “invention” (erfinden), which yielded the original image, is reduced to mere “imagination” (sich vorstellen)—that is, the presentation to oneself of “picture-like images” which aren’t, in the end, even convincingly picture-like. One of the fundamental qualities of imaginative experience, its incontestable intentionality (see Chapter One, p. 91), is here contested, as Kafka mistakes his imagining of the sculpture for that of a drawing. He “sees as” a picture something which is not one, and then he realises he has done so: some other cognitive faculty corrects the imaginative capacity, or some change in the imagining allows this other faculty to recognise the error. So here, imagining is like looking at pictures—pictures which are open to (mis)interpretation in a way that imaginative experience, always already interpreted, is not. But even when this picture is reinterpreted as a sculpture, it remains, in a basic sense, pictorial: a “visible”, interpretable form is “presented to” something like “consciousness” by some other faculty of “invention merging into imagination”. Thus, the fundamentally pictorial nature of the imagination is questioned even as it’s experienced, and it can be called into question like this only by virtue of its products being open to interpretation like a picture. Once the intrinsic intentionality of the imagination is lost, its self-sufficiency disintegrates too.

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As soon as internal pictures are posited, they have to be interpreted—they can’t remain in the paradoxical state of always-already-interpreted potentiality that the (non-pictorial) imagination allows. The picture must be interpreted, and any interpretation is only one of infinite possible interpretations; the picture therefore has no representational self-sufficiency. Reinterpretation, then, is not quite inevitable but probable, and it’s what happens here. The reinterpreting is of an interesting kind, too: Kafka describes the most logical next interpretive step, in terms of a general reflection on seeing and imagining. If we posit pictures in the head, then why not objects in the head? If the pictures are doing the job of “representing” the world to us (either directly, through vision, or as cognitively re-created in imagining), how are they representing its depth? As O’Regan puts it: “A first problem with the notion of internal screen comes from the fact that depth information must somehow be coded in the internal screen—so internal ‘scale model’ is a better concept than internal ‘screen’” (1992, 468). Kafka’s “realisation” of three-dimensionality therefore resonates with a critical limitation of pictorial theories: if vision works by means of pictures in the head, what allows us to see (or imagine) more than a strictly picture-like world? And if we cede this point and conclude that there must be three-dimensional models in the head to allow us to see a three-dimensional world, then where are they, and why can we not detect them? Even if we could, would they also be the right colour, to scale, and so on? Once we make perception a matter of correspondence (see Chapter One, e.g., p. 48), the requirements can never be fully met. If we try to meet them, we end up with odd claims like Scarry’s when she states, “Flowers can be taken as the representative of the imagination because of the ease of imagining them. That ease is in turn attributable to their size and the size of our heads, their shape and the shape of our eyes [. . .]” (1999, 64, author’s italics). This is a poeticised version of the assumption that imagining is mediated by something that goes on inside the head and involves correspondence in size between what’s imagined and its mental representation, or, more weirdly, correspondence in shape between what’s imagined and the optical organ responsible for visual perception of it. (Halfway along the spectrum from pictures to three-dimensional models we find David Marr’s (1982) “2½D sketch”, a stage in visual processing posited to fulfil the function of making explicit the rough depth and orientation of objects in a still retinocentric fashion.) Kafka’s “drawing” in the head doesn’t look like a mountain; it looks like a porcelain model. No representational problems are solved by its being a model rather than a picture: these problems emerge as soon as we posit any sort of dimensional thing in the head being looked at. Only because Kafka’s drawing is a drawing, a picture, can it “look like” anything in this corrigible way, and in this quality the drawing is directly opposed to imaginative experience, in which it seems to make much more sense to say that there is no actual thing (no image; certainly no “Vorstellung”, no presentation)

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that we are “seeing as” something. When we are imagining, we are just imagining seeing (as). The drawing that subsequently comes to look like a sculpture enacts only the first step in an infinite possible chain of interpretive “looking at”, a sequence that holds no promise of mental “entity” and “interpretation” ever coinciding. Kafka’s imaginative experience is here problematically self-divided rather than cohesively intuitive, and this can be attributed to the wider context of pictorial conceptions of vision and imagination. We have seen how inevitably these conceptions lead to dual structures, both temporal and spatial, in trying to model the processes involved. To this extent, Kafka’s experiences stand in the long-established tradition of historical thought on vision and the imagination: he experiences, conceives of, and describes his sensory inputs as being “evaluated” by a (higher) cognitive faculty to which they are “presented”.

b)

Language

When the imagination is conceived of and evoked in such completely pictorial terms, not only the imagination itself but also the language used to describe it is cast into doubt. Whether language can really do all—or even anything—that’s asked of it is an ever-recurring and torturous question for Kafka. What’s asked of it is, most often and fundamentally, that it should represent the “products”, or “contents”, of the writer’s consciousness, or imagination. And in the context of such demands, it’s the pictorial form of the imagination, as Kafka describes it, that renders both the cognitive experience and the linguistic attempt to evoke it so difficult. The pictorial form is what’s responsible for the infinite regress, the infinite lack of self-sufficiency, which plagues Kafka’s concept of self, and contributes to his lack of confidence in the possibility of describing the self or anything else. The failure of imaginative self-sufficiency, or self-coincidence, inexorably entails the same failure in the language that seeks to convey it. This is powerfully conveyed in a diary entry of 1911: Dieses Gefühl des Falschen, das ich beim Schreiben habe, ließe sich unter dem Bilde darstellen, daß einer vor zwei Bodenlöchern auf eine Erscheinung wartet, die nur aus dem zur rechten Seite herauskommen darf. Während aber gerade dieses unter einem matt sichtbaren Verschluß bleibt, steigt aus dem linken eine Erscheinung nach der andern, sucht den Blick auf sich zu ziehn und erreicht dies schließlich mühelos durch ihren wachsenden Umfang, der endlich sogar die richtige Öffnung, so sehr man abwehrt, verdeckt. [. . .] Wie wenig kräftig ist das obere Bild. Zwischen tatsächliches Gefühl und vergleichende Beschreibung ist wie ein Brett eine zusammenhangslose Voraussetzung eingelegt. (This feeling of falsity which I have when I write could be portrayed by the image of someone waiting in front of two holes in the floor for an apparition

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Here the attempt to convey a “feeling of falsity” in words is introduced with the slightly tentative subjunctive “ließe sich. . .” (could be. . .), but a seemingly self-sufficient textual image then develops: of ignoring something until it imposes itself beyond hope of ignoring it. The adverb “dully” in the phrase “dully visible closure” qualifies visibility in a way that corresponds to the sealing-off of what is expected; the duality of left and right (the thing can only come out of the right) has a simplicity and certainty which, as is appropriate in conveying falsity, prove misleading. Falsity does seem to be quite well evoked here—yet all this is then instantly undercut by the description of the situation as, again, merely a “Bild” (picture/image), and one which fails to evoke the “actual feeling” (of falsity). This verbal “picture/ image” remains only a “comparison”, a corresponding image too weak to correspond to an experience that’s unobservable and hence unrepresentable in pictorial terms. The abstruse simile of a plank of wood as a “disconnected prerequisite” doesn’t reveal or derive from a comprehensible metaphorical structure based on sensorimotor constants (Lakoff and Johnson 2003), but instead only heightens the sense of arbitrariness in language when pictorially configured. Kafka’s attempt to evoke subjectivity in words results merely in a pictorially corresponding image that fails very much to correspond. Kafka was constantly concerned with this specific aspect of referentiality and its failure. A diary entry from 1922 describes the inability of language to convey internal truth, this time imaginative rather than emotional: Die Wildheit des inneren Ganges mag verschiedene Gründe haben, der sichtbarste ist die Selbstbeobachtung, die keine Vorstellung zur Ruhe kommen läßt, jede emporjagt um dann selbst wieder als Vorstellung von neuer Selbstbeobachtung weiter gejagt zu werden. [. . .] “Jagd” ist ja nur ein Bild, ich kann auch sagen “Ansturm gegen die letzte irdische Grenze” undzwar Ansturm von unten, von den Menschen her und kann, da auch dies nur ein Bild ist, es ersetzen durch das Bild des Ansturmes von oben, zu mir herab. (The wildness of the inner movement may have various reasons, the most visible of these is self-observation, which lets no image come to rest, hunts each one upwards, in order then to be hunted on by new self-observation. [. . .] “Hunt” is indeed only an image, I can also say “storming the last earthly border”, and storming from below, from where the people are, and I can, because this too is

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only an image, replace it with the image of storming from above, down towards me.) (16 January 1922, T 877–78) Here reflexivity imposes itself on the transparently representational quality of “images”, and imagining is a process of infinite self-reflection. The “mind’s eye” observes each mental image as it emerges, and converts it into nothing but an image of self-observation; and because the imagination is thus infinitely self-reflexive, the verbal image that evokes it is infinitely replaceable. This relationship between words and experiences as mediated through mirror images is as far as can be from the Realist trope of reflection as undistorted reproduction of the world (Chapter One, pp. 59–60). Furthermore, a general lack of internal equilibrium or steady movement is attributed to the faculty of self-observation whose action prevents the “products” of the imagination from coming to rest. Introspective observation is here itself a propulsive force that entails an infinite process of transformation: from an image (of something) into an image of its own observation. This transformative process is enacted as infinite substitution, through the verbs emporjagen (to hunt upwards) and weiterjagen (to hunt onwards). No image can gain, or retain, the equilibrium of representation, because it’s always immediately transformed into an image of being observed: transparency, as it were, is instantly supplanted by reflexivity. This failure to cognitively represent anything but cognition itself then leads to the failure of language to represent it—if nothing can be internally “observed” except the reflexive act of observation, there’s nothing to be described in words, because they require as referents objects that are not infinitely self-reflexive. Kafka’s diary writing has been characterised as a mirrorlike means of observing the true self: his aim, according to Guntermann, is “die Situation des Ich [. . .] sich möglichst unverfälscht zu erkennen [zu] geben” (to reveal the situation of the self [. . .] with as little distortion as possible; 1991, 107). Guntermann also defines the diaries as “ein Spiegelbild im eigentlichen Sinne des Wortes, der Spiegel des Innen” (a mirror image in the true sense of the word, the mirror of the inner; 16). Although Kafka’s sustained interest in the nature of the self is unquestionable, the notion of a mimetic, undistorted mirroring is precisely what the diaries expose as delusion. Kafka’s own thoughts about mirroring in relation to cognition are distinctly sceptical: he describes introspective psychology as an infinitely referential description of the illusion of a reflection, and as the non-event of reading mirror writing, in which one can read the writing, with effort but always getting the right answer, and yet actually nothing’s happened after all (NSII 32, 100). His critique of psychology (or despair at its impossibility) through multiplied metaphors of reflection is similar to the accumulation of metaphors in pictorial accounts of vision and imagination (see Chapter One, p. 47). Kafka’s comments on mirroring are as far from expressing confidence in the possibility of reflecting external “nature” as they are from any notion that the internal world can straightforwardly be

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observed—further than ever, it seems, even from knowing what either the observation or the internal world might consist in. The “explanatory gap” is here multiplied into infinite mirror images of itself. This diary entry makes it clear that the verbal “image” is only an arbitrary way of imposing a visible structure on a process whose “movement” is in fact altogether imaginary. The whole sequence is introduced as the most “visible” grounds for the inner unrest, but this declaration initiates the description of a string of acts of observation that are all nothing but metaphors of visibility. And precisely in demonstrating their own metaphorical nature, their own lack of self-sufficiency, these observations devalue the verbal metaphors that gave them relative substance in the first place. A month or so earlier, Kafka had stated in his diary: “Die Metaphern sind eines in dem Vielen, was mich am Schreiben verzweifeln läßt. Die Unselbständigkeit des Schreibens [. . .]” (Metaphors are one of the many things that make me despair of writing. The insufficiency of writing [. . .]; 6 December 1921, T 875). Trying to write about the “inner movement”, he shows just how this sort of despair emerges, since in the attempt to evoke the self-reflexive progression of the imagination, one verbal “image” leads to another equally valid from the perspective of the writer, just as the mental images are nothing but images of themselves as observed from the perspective of the thinker. The visuospatial forms of the “hunt” might just as well be those of “storming the borders”—from below, or from above. . . . They’re all just verbal “pictures”, imposed upon and failing to represent the internal pictures which also fail to represent. Yet this need not occur: the imagination need not (fail to) be described thus. Kafka’s description, indeed, intimates this: that in the very logic of the infinite self-reflexivity there is an equivocation. The repeatedly invoked “self-observation” is not in fact observation of the self by the self: it’s the observation by the self that posits something distinct from the self, within the self, that can be observed—the “images”. This is part of the fallacy of consciousness as a container of “contents”: the self, if it exists at all, simply can’t sustainably be divisible into an “I” watching and “conscious contents” being watched. The very oddity of the phrase “the most visible [reason] is self-observation” draws attention to this logical slippage; observation itself could never be visible, only the observer, the observed, or both. So a duality has had to be made out of a unity in order for there to be something for cognition, and language, to refer to—in Phenomenological terms, to be directed towards, to intend. “Self-observation” is what has served this purpose, allowing the directional nature of visual perception to be transferred to the internal realm, and although the qualifying prefix acknowledges the lack of any true perceptual duality, it doesn’t wholly negate the one that’s been posited. The duality of “observation”—the observed as distinct from the observer— is inherent to external visual perception, and in this passage it is preserved because it’s necessary to the language in which perceptual metaphors are

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created and used to describe perceptions, even though these turn out to be non-perceptions. It might seem strange that the indivisible intentionality of imaginative processes should be so difficult to grasp cognitively, as an experiential truth, yet perhaps such self-understanding, especially given the inherited weight of pictorial conceptualisations, does present as great a cognitive obstacle as it does a verbal one. In the spheres of language and cognition, the dual subject-object form comes naturally; in this case, in both spheres, it becomes self-defeating. In this diary entry, then, we find one form of infinite regress inevitably entailed by another: the linguistic by the cognitive. (This isn’t the place to tackle the complex question of precisely how thought and language are connected, historically, conceptually, or neurally, but it’s relatively clear that they aren’t the same thing and that each can influence the other.) The linguistic form is naturally the one whose capacities, and incapacities, most forcefully confront the writer at every turn. In Kafka’s diaries, the infinitely referential, metaphorical, approximating, even self-negating nature of language is repeatedly—and powerfully—conveyed as problematic (e.g., T 875, 926). But the disconnection between different parts of the “self” is perhaps the more fundamental problem from which this linguistic one arises, and it recurs in many guises (e.g., T 49–50, 329–30, 429, 562, 889, 910; NSII 61; B 399 [end July 1922]), with the desire for the possibility of self-observation oscillating with the agonised recognition of its inescapability (or rather, of the inescapability of positing it, or something like it). Whichever way Kafka’s evaluation of it shifts, the problem remains a problem, and can be summarised as the fallacy of pictorialism. As we saw in Chapter One, the pictorial fallacy is the notion that there is a picture-like array inside the head which represents either external sensory stimuli or internally generated information, and is viewed by some internal faculty of observation, a homunculus of some sort. As soon as you say that there are pictures in your head and a little man, or a “self”, in there looking at them, you have a self that is divided: surely those pictures are part of my “self” too, so what’s this second self looking at them, and does he have his own little man, an observing “self”, inside his head too, looking at his pictures—or, more logically, looking at his porcelain models?

c)

Consciousness

When the pictorial fallacy is extended into a “porcelain-model fallacy”, we move into the realm of other three-dimensional metaphors used by scientists and philosophers to exemplify the problems of dualism. Possibly the most famous of these is Dennett’s (1991) Cartesian Theatre, which illustrates what we might call the theatrical fallacy. This is the notion that conscious experience is the result of a performance on an internal stage, on which all the actors and props—the porcelain ornaments “representing” things—are gathered, and that this performance, when watched

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by the homuncular “I”, is what makes “consciousness happen”, while nothing offstage is “accessible to consciousness”. Of course, no one subscribes to the fleshed-out theatrical model, but it’s remarkable, once one starts looking, how many theories of consciousness invoke some form of Cartesian Theatre by maintaining a boundary between conscious and nonconscious that can be upheld “all the way in” (1991, e.g., 111, 117, author’s italics). The spectator in a Cartesian Theatre, and the impossibility of him being conscious of his own theatrical “contents of consciousness”, are precisely what Kafka conveys in the following description of an unobservable “Schauspiel” (performance) (see Figure 2.1): “Ein segmentartiges Stück ist ihm aus dem Hinterkopf herausgeschnitten. Mit der Sonne schaut die ganze Welt hinein. Ihn macht es nervös, es lenkt ihn von der Arbeit ab, auch ärgert er sich, daß gerade er von dem Schauspiel ausgeschlossen sein soll” (A segment-like piece has been cut out of the back of his head. The whole world looks in with the sun. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and he is also irritated that he of all people should be shut out of the performance; 10 January 1920, T 847)

Figure 2.1

Kafka’s Cartesian Theatre

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Even when a physical “peephole” is cut in the head (the back of the head, directly in line with the eyes) to let the rest of the world look in, the actual observation of the Cartesian drama only unsettles, because it remains as invisible as ever to the single spectator for whom seeing it can have any meaning—the spectator whose experience of seeing (with his forwards-facing, world-facing eyes) is what constitutes this drama. There is no “performance” because “he of all people [is] shut out”. “He” is the man who looks out at the world, who tries to concentrate on his work, but can’t, because the work, the world, no longer seem a sufficient “performance”, nor he a sufficient observer: where is the little “he” inside his head, able to look “for him”, as it were, with eyes at the back of his head, at the performance being internally enacted? The “he”, as perceiving subject, remains stubbornly unitary; no subsidiary “he” emerges to observe a performance other than the one of world and work (from which the observer, the actor, himself is being distracted by thoughts of inner observers and actors). Hence there is no observation by the world either (although the idea brings nervousness, because if there were a performance it would be being watched); all the events, the sights and sounds of the inner spectacle, exist only for that inner eye or inner ear, that inner “he”, and yet they don’t—the self perhaps is unitary, or nonexistent. In any case, such metaphors of duality, deriving both from the structures of language which demand them and from the long histories of conceptualisation (and linguistic evocation) that have entrenched them, create entities (internal stages on which things can be seen by internal selves) where there are none, and insoluble problems where there need be none.

5.

RECOGNISING THE PROBLEMS OF PICTURES

Kafka had quite a bit of trouble with pictures and his publishers, and the unavoidable effects of the pictorial capacity and obligation to specify densely seem key here. In correspondence dealing with the cover of “Der Heizer” (The Stoker), for instance, he describes the illustration chosen by the publisher as both “contradicting” the prose and outdoing it: “erstens widerlegte es mich, der ich doch das allermodernste New York dargestellt hatte, zweitens war es gegenüber der Geschichte im Vorteil, da es vor ihr wirkte und als Bild konzentrierter als Prosa” (firstly it contradicted me, given that I had, after all, portrayed an ultramodern New York, and secondly it had an advantage over the story, because it took effect before the story and in a picture’s more concentrated way than prose; 25 May 1913, BI 196). The more “concentrated” effect of the picture, giving a mass of intricate visual detail, is problematic because it isn’t, as we’ve seen, what visual perception is like: vision gives us an illusion of immediate totality, but not by filling in all the gaps. This matters to us as critics because the ways in which a correspondence is established between a text and either the reader’s

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perceptual faculties or the reader’s folk-psychological assumptions about perception may contribute to determining how that text makes the reader imagine. And it matters to Kafka because if a picture not only preempts but also outdoes and contradicts readers’ imaginative responses, what the text is meant to do on its own terms is clearly jeopardised. There’s a big difference between forging an imaginative connection through words and through pictures, and the cover may end up spoiling it all. (Kafka lost the argument, though: an 1840 engraving by William Henry Bartlett originally entitled “The Ferry at Brooklyn, New York” and labelled in the book simply “Der Hafen von New York”, was included as the frontispiece to the first edition, although not in later editions; Gray et al. 2005, 120.) The more concentrated power of the picture comes up again a couple of years later, in Kafka’s negotiations with his publisher over the cover for “Die Verwandlung” (Metamorphosis). This time Kafka explicitly—indeed, passionately—specifies that “Das Insekt selbst kann nicht gezeichnet werden. Es kann aber nicht einmal von der Ferne aus gezeigt werden” (The insect itself cannot be drawn. It cannot be shown even from a distance; 25 October 1915, BI 145). The ability of language to allow the “insect” to remain precisely that, an entity indeterminate in further details, like how long its legs are or what colour its abdomen is, fosters the capacity of the reader’s imagination to let it likewise remain indeterminate. A picture, on the other hand, would force everything into specificity. If a picture really is required, Kafka says, it should ideally be nothing more than “die Eltern und die Schwester im beleuchteten Zimmer, während die Tür zum ganz finsteren Nebenzimmer offensteht” (the parents and the sister in a lit room, while the door to the completely dark next room stands open; BI 145). This alternative picture (which is very similar to the one used for the first edition, by Kurt Wolff Verlag; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metamorphosis. jpg) depicts nothing explicitly surreal, and is as much of a reconciliation as it’s possible to bring about between the pictorial form and the indeterminacy of the imagination; indeed, it turns a picture into an open-ended invitation to imagine. Such open-ended invitations to imagine are a feature of many of Kafka’s fictional works, most strikingly perhaps the opening of Das Schloß (The Castle) (although the opening was originally a more convoluted affair, beginning with a conversation in the village inn between an unnamed “guest” and the landlord and maid; S/A 115–17): Es war spät abend als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehn, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloß an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führt und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor. (It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay in deep snow. Of the castle hill there was nothing to be seen, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest

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glimmer of light hinted at the great castle. For a long time K. stood on the wooden bridge that leads from the country road to the village and looked up into the apparent emptiness.) (S 7) These lines are remarkable for their simplicity, and for the power with which they make the castle cognitively present for the reader despite our being told only that it can’t be seen. The word order which means that we learn of the existence of the “Schloßberg” (castle hill) before we are told it can’t be seen probably plays an important role in creating this cognitive presence. Another contributing factor is the description of K. looking up into the “apparent emptiness”. The perspective adopted by the opening lines is ambiguous: on the one hand, we are given information which K. presumably doesn’t possess (that there’s a castle hill there which he can’t see) but on the other hand, we are aligned with his cognitive perspective by the situated specifics of his location and the direction of his gaze. This ambiguity makes it hard to know how to interpret phrases like “the apparent emptiness”: does this indicate knowledge on K.’s part that the emptiness is indeed only apparent, and that there really is a great castle there, or is the knowledge simply that of an external, omniscient focaliser? In either case, the “apparent” nature of the emptiness allows the castle to be present even in its absence; indeed, its “presence despite absence” is a more powerful presence than simple visual presence would be, in that the castle matters enough to be worth invoking even though it’s invisible. The striking use of the present tense “leads” also grants a continuing reality to all that is described, rather than letting the setting be relegated along with the events wholly to the past. I’ve begun to explore the imaginative force of this opening paragraph empirically, using an experimental method that involves participants drawing what’s evoked for them imaginatively by reading the passage and then describing any differences between what they imagined and what they drew (see Appendix 2 and Troscianko in preparation [b]). On the basis of the initial data, a significant proportion draw the castle, even though all we’re told about it is that it can’t be seen. What seems to be happening is that people elaborate imaginatively to some extent beyond the text given (many committed to the castle having crenellations and an arched door, some even gave it detailed brickwork or ivy), but not to the extent of drawing a fully filled-in “mental picture” (see Figure 2.2a). The experiences that the drawings are intended to represent seem rich yet simple: one participant spoke of the depth and weight of the darkness, but also noted that “The image in my mind was quite simple” (Pt 2). Another (Pt 9) mentioned the “lifelike” nature of what she imagined, as well as its vividness (“more like a shot from a film, in colour, in 3D”) and its emotional quality (“you could feel the oppressing clouds”), while her drawing had very minimal outlines—although she did give K. a rather solid rucksack (see Figure 2.3). Richness and simplicity, sufficiency

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Figure 2.2a

“Of the castle hill there was nothing to be seen”

and gappiness, are complementary in the imaginative experiences as pictorially represented in response to this passage of Kafka’s. Some participants identified the paradox inherent in their imaginative experiences, as the text makes the castle invisible, but their imaginations make it visible: “I imagined a castle but I know ur not meant 2 see castle [sic]”

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Figure 2.2b “Of the castle hill there was nothing to be seen”

(Pt 27); “I imagined a castle and a hill in the background, even though the text clearly mentioned K. couldn’t see anything because of the darkness and fog” (Pt 32). Others identified a disjuncture not between text and experience, but between experience and drawing, describing the difficulty of drawing fog/mist or darkness, and by implication of drawing invisibility, while one remarked on how “The picture has the outlines of houses and castles obscured by fog, but in my mind the character just sees white because of the snow and fog” (Pt 37) (see Figure 2.2b). In this statement, both slippages are encapsulated: firstly the fact that (fictional) visual invisibility can be the prompt to imaginative visibility (she does imagine the castle in partially drawable form), but secondly the fact that the picture can’t properly convey how the fog obscures the outlines of something present but invisible. To some extent, then, the pictorial form compels a concretising of the imaginative experience, so that things which are cognitively present need to be drawn, made visible, given specific form, in a way

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Figure 2.3

Minimal but “lifelike” imagining

they needn’t have when they’re imagined. But this particular kind of picture—drawn with just a pencil and without preplanning, and with the option to leave plenty of white space, to use rough shading to denote darkness or fog, to leave objects as just outlines—perhaps approximates more closely than a richer example of pictorial art the imagination’s ease with indeterminacy and unfilled gaps. From William James to the latest change-blindness research, gaps have been considered key to understanding perception (see Chapter One, e.g., pp. 50–54). This passage is almost nothing but gaps, and yet these aren’t the limitlessly ambiguous gaps of Postmodernism, but ones exploiting the comprehensible gaps that define perceptual experience. In many such passages in Kafka’s

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fiction, the words don’t threaten to channel their imaginative power into any particular, or over-particularised, response, and a similarly minimal approach to representation is manifested in Kafka’s own drawings, as if he were attempting to combat in pictures as well as in words the danger of making too much explicit. His six black, filled-in stick men with minimal contextual accoutrements, his sketches of a horse and rider or a torture machine or a slightly anthropomorphic house, the more abstract sketches conveying the movement or stasis of human figures or in natural scenes, all reject pictorial realism, for example by doing without single-point perspective and its creation—partly through conventional distortions from mathematical space—of an illusion of objectively existent reality (Pirenne 1970, e.g., 121–35, 161, 175). As Claude Gandelman (1986, 153–86) argues in his chapter on “Kafka comme dessinateur expressionniste”, Kafka’s artistic practice seeks to minimise the representational capacities of the pictorial in favour of an Expressionist emphasis on movement and expressive gesture, and a tendency towards abstraction. This shouldn’t surprise us, given Kafka’s substantial engagement with the visual arts of his era; he was a friend and admirer of the Symbolist and Expressionist artist Alfred Kubin (see, e.g., BI 196–7 [25 May 1913]), and Ladendorf (1961, e.g., 294–95, 299–300) documents how he not only studied art history (in 1901–2) but was also in close contact with the art historian Oskar Pollak, read art periodicals, described visual art in his diaries, particularly liked van Gogh, and was at one point even going to have some of his drawings published by Max Brod. This isn’t to say that there aren’t differences between the various styles of Kafka’s drawings. The series of six stick men that Wolfgang Rothe characterises as “existentielle Chiffren der Einsamkeit” (existential ciphers of solitude; 1979, 565; see, e.g., the images in Wagenbach 1983, 144), showing a black figure in various positions and with various props (walking stick, table and chair, fencing foil, etc.), evoke both location and movement through the most minimal contextual indicators: the objects create connections to an implied surrounding world. These connections mean that although these figures hover in undefined relation to one another on the paper, they are more easily comprehensible than those sketches in which it seems that more is given; in the latter, the outlines are hazy, and although movement is clear, the figures lack much distinction from the world within which they move, with all conveyed through an equally hasty linearity. Therefore, while they give more spatial context, the more “complete” images are more disorientating. In neither case is pictorially realistic representation forthcoming: Rothe’s categorisation of the impressionistic sketches as “begrenzt realistisch[e] Darstellung” (limitedly realistic portrayals; 1979, 565) misses the point. In these drawings, just as in his writing, Kafka’s aim seems not at all to be realism in a conventional sense, since stability, detail, and precision are secondary to the evocation of situations through minimally specified interactions of figures and environments. Rothe has also suggested that the drawings represent characters and scenes in Kafka’s fictions: for example,

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he interprets the drawing set in a hilly landscape with poplar trees as one of the scenes in “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (Description of a Struggle). The stick men also invite interpretation along these lines, especially with reference to Josef K. in Der Proceß (The Trial), given that the figure sitting with his head on the table could easily be seen as K. sunk in a stupor at his desk in the bank (P 149), or the figure with a defiant stance before the railings as K. on the podium at his first interrogation (e.g., P 60). But if the drawings do have this referential relationship to the fictions, they perform that function without specifying, as a photograph or an illustration of a more traditional pictorial realism couldn’t avoid doing.

6.

KAFKA’S ENACTIVIST SOLUTIONS TO THE PICTORIALIST PROBLEMS

One way out of this phenomenological impasse may be, as outlined in Chapter One, to posit experience (whether visual or imaginative) not as pictorial representation but as action, and thereby to do away with the notion of representation both as the experiential phenomenon to be explained and as the explanatory medium itself. Then the fallacy of consciousness (including visual percepts and “mental images”) as theatre or as model- or picture-viewing in the head can be let go, which has advantages in logical as well as phenomenological terms: neither seeing nor indeed imagining really feels pictorial at all once we start to pay attention to our experience (see Chapter One, esp. pp. 80–81 and 91). This is perhaps one reason why Kafka’s descriptions of imagination as such almost always end up rendering themselves problematic. According to the enactivist view, as we have seen, there is no re-presentation of the world inside the brain. We don’t need to make internal pictures of the outside world; we simply need ways of probing this outside world where it is, and one of these is visual perception. Several passages in Kafka’s travel diaries seem to intimate an awareness of this: his descriptions of his experience of two sculptures at the Louvre in 1911, the Venus de Milo and the Borghese Gladiator, seem strikingly free from the problems of transparency, reflexivity, and infinite regress that so often dominate his descriptions of perception and linguistic evocation. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Kafka’s reflections on sculpture stand in a tradition of thought about interactional perception, (verbal) representation, and emotional effect as prompted by sculptural forms: Cicero equates oratory with sculpture (see Chapter One, pp. 55–56), for instance, and Lessing’s 1766 essay “Laokoon” explicitly uses sculpture to counter the equation of language and pictures. Kafka describes the Venus de Milo thus: Venus von Milo, deren Anblick bei dem langsamsten Umgehn schnell und überraschend wechselt. Leider eine erzwungene (über Taille und

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Hülle) aber einige wahre Bemerkungen gemacht, zu deren Erinnerung ich eine plastische Reproduktion nötig hätte, besonders darüber wie das gebogene linke Knie den Anblick von allen Seiten mitbestimmt, manchmal aber nur sehr schwach. Die erzwungene Bemerkung: Man erwartet, daß über der aufhörenden Hülle der Leib sich gleich verjüngt, er wird aber zunächst sogar noch breiter. Das fallende vom Knie gehaltene Kleid. (Venus de Milo, the view of which changes quickly and surprisingly however slowly one walks around it. I made sadly one forced remark (about waist and drapery) but a few true remarks, to remember which I would need a three-dimensional reproduction, especially about how the bent left knee codetermines the view from all sides, but sometimes just very weakly. The forced remark: one expects the body above where the drapery ends to taper immediately, but to begin with it just grows wider still. The falling dress held by the knee.) (August/September 1911, T 1007) This passage evokes the experience of looking and seeing as one of exploring, not of being presented with a perceptual content that’s given uniformly and in detail, in the manner of a picture, as entailed when Kosslyn speaks, for example, of how “The visual buffer has a fixed resolution [. . .]. Visual neurons average input over a certain area. This averaging process is equivalent to introducing a ‘grain’ in the buffer, and all representations should be affected by this grain” (1994, 99), or of how “In order to encode the appearance of an object in detail, the attention window must be positioned to surround its representation in the visual buffer” (92). Vision here is ever-changing enaction: an interaction of the movements of the observer and the ways in which the object invites and “codetermines” Kafka’s expectations, attention, and gaze. The “view” of the statue is part of the act of walking around it which determines its alterations: the “percept” is bound up with the movement, even as the speed of the perceptual changes is contrasted with the slowness of the physical motion. The German word Anblick (view) allows for an ambiguity of reference, vacillating between, or merging, the “percept” and the “perception”, what’s seen and the act of looking. This dual quality, inherent in the experience of viewing as it is to this word, is further exploited in the second sentence, where the “view” of the whole is doubly determined. Initially, it’s constituted by the interaction between the single part of the sculpture, the bent knee, and the implied continuing movement and observation “from all sides”, which are determined by the knee. But at the same time, it’s necessarily constituted by all the changes in the total “view” which this ongoing movement continually modifies—the “view” and the “viewing” repeatedly redefine each other. The contours of the sculptural form itself are thus conveyed through the variations in the cognitive-perceptual and physical movements to which they give rise, and with which they interact: the varying speeds, the varying strengths, are connected to the varying breadths and lengths by the cognitive

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processes through which they’re experienced in time, as parts of a process in which expectation, attention, and perception are inseparable from their “(intentional) objects”. In the final sentence, the sculptural form itself is imbued more explicitly with motion: falling (of the dress) and holding (of the dress by the knee) evoke an internal tension and interplay that echo the perceptual enactment in which they take part. The object becomes still more fully a partner in a dynamic sensorimotor interaction. Kafka presumably considers his one “forced” remark about the waist and drapery lacking in the self-evident “truth” of his other remarks because it concerns an unfulfilled expectation: he expects a narrowing of the body which does not occur. That things can take us by surprise, however, is one of the unavoidable consequences of an enactive as opposed to a pictorial way of seeing; we don’t see everything at once, and therefore everything may not be as expected from our first glance. This is unsettling, but is ultimately as much a “true remark” as are the others. The adjective “forced” is, as it happens, also perfectly appropriate to describe the enactive codetermination of “percept” and “perceiver”: given that the percept has this form and the perceiver makes these movements, this perceptual experience is what must transpire. The extent to which the perceptual object itself defines the manner of perception is perhaps even more clearly conveyed in the passage immediately following this one, where Kafka describes the Borghese Gladiator: Der Borghesische Fechter, dessen Vorderanblick nicht der Hauptanblick ist, denn er bringt den Beschauer zum Zurückweichen und ist zerstreuter. Von hinten aber gesehen, dort wo der Fuß zuerst auf dem Boden ansetzt, wird der überraschte Blick das fest gezogene Bein entlang gelockt und fliegt geschützt über den unaufhaltsamen Rücken zu dem nach vorn gehobenen Arm und Schwert. (The Borghese Gladiator, the front view of which is not the main view, for it makes the viewer recoil and is more dispersed. But seen from behind, from where the foot first sets down on the ground, the surprised gaze is enticed along the tautly stretched leg and flies safely over the irresistible back to the arm and sword that are held up forwards.) (August/September 1911, T 1007–8) Here, as might be expected from the difference in sculptural subject matter (Venus versus gladiator), the directional impulses of perception generated by the object’s form are all the more powerful. The strength of the physical forms (“tightly stretched”, “irresistible”) powerfully directs the gaze in ways that are conveyed as merging the motional and the almost emotional: “enticed along” connotes seduction, “flies safely” denotes protection. And the convergence of these two elements is anticipated in the visual-cognitive compound of “the surprised gaze”, the subject of these constituent acts of emotionally motional perception. Such effects are based on the common conceptual-metaphorical association of emotion with movement (Lakoff and

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Johnson [2003, 49–50] give examples of expressions deriving from the metaphors “love is a physical force” and “emotional effect is physical contact”), but move these metaphors a little way along the spectrum from the lexicalised to the more innovative and striking. The visual-cognitive “surprise” implies a powerful preceding expectation; this has been created by the especially visceral nature of the observer’s physical reaction to, or interaction with, the sculpture as seen from the front (“recoil”). The expectation is then thwarted, or again redirected, by what happens when the observer moves, in response to the initial view, to the back of the sculpture. Vision, motion, and conceptually informed emotion are fully interconnected. In the case of both sculptures, the act of perception draws attention to itself as dynamic and emotionally charged because of the strikingly fluid forms of the objects. These objects, as works of art, arouse and frustrate cognitive-perceptual expectations more strongly than would familiar everyday objects; they allow for the sort of “true remarks” that, despite Kafka’s perfunctory caveat about the need for a “three-dimensional reproduction”, aren’t self-problematising or self-reflexive, in the manner of so many of the other perceptual and cognitive experiences he describes. These descriptions of sculptures may not be explanations of phenomena, as attempted elsewhere in the diaries, but they are at least simple evocations rather than self-multiplying analogies. The emotional effect of these works of art is far from the rhetorical ideal discussed in Chapter One, according to which, despite the emphasis on persuasively “moving” the listener, the power of vivid visualisation is in fact congealed into the stasis of the pictorial form, the presented or “exhibited” array (see, e.g., Quintilian, The Orator’s Education 6.2.32, Chapter One, p. 56). The aesthetically aroused emotion is here not only contingent upon, but also fully bound up with, a visual experience defined by its dynamism. It’s notable that these observations are described impersonally, which means that the subtleties of the two personal experiences claim a general validity, and perhaps help to evade the cognitive-perceptual regresses threatened in the notion of making “observations” on one’s own observations. Linguistic regress is similarly avoided: the “observations” can be verbally conveyed, and not by seeking to illustrate the visible minutiae—colour, light and shade, etc.—as a pictorial notion of perception or a pictorial use of language would dictate. Rather, language captures forms and movements in their fluid perceptual interrelation: “[. . .] the surprised gaze is enticed along the tautly stretched leg [. . .]”. In these descriptions by Kafka, observation and its evocation here go hand in hand, echoing what Noë (2002, 1) suggests, in an extension of the sensorimotor view of visual consciousness, as a way out of the “paradox of perceptual transparency”. He asks how there can be a phenomenology of experience, a science of consciousness, given the fact that “although it is possible to make a picture of a room, it is not possible to depict our experience of the room”. How can we explore visual states if “There can be no pictures

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of the visual field itself”? How, if at all, can we conceive of (or represent) our (visual) experience in a way that ends neither in the dead end of transparency nor in the infinities of self-regress? For Noë, the answer lies in the use of “art as a tool for phenomenological exploration”: Consider the way a Richard Serra sculpture presents a surprising environmental occasion for phenomenological self-reflection. The pieces overpower and overwhelm, induce giddy disorientation, and generally make us aware of what it is like to be a perceiver, an enactor of perceptual content. When we explore a Serra sculpture we actively explore an environment and the sculpture provides a context in which we are enabled to catch ourselves in the act of exploring the world. [. . .] Artists like [Chuck] Close and Serra make experience their subject matter, not by attempting to depict experience itself, but by providing perceivers an opportunity of self-aware enactment. Artists expose enactment for what it is, and so they enable us to understand our active role in perceptually experiencing the world. (2002, 4)1 The art that Kafka looks at exposes the experience of observation for what it is: enactment. Thus, even while inducing “phenomenological selfreflection”, it allows him temporarily to escape from the infinite regresses of perception and of representation, both cognitive and verbal. Kafka is aware of what it feels like to be perceiving, and he is able to evoke this awareness in words, because (perceptual, cognitive, verbal) “contents” are no longer entities but actions. Language, it seems, can “transparently” convey its subject when the subject—perception itself—is rid of the torturous implications of either transparency or reflexivity. Self-awareness comes from looking outwards into the world, not from looking inwards into an internal world, and the looking is an interaction with the external world, as it affords inexhaustible opportunities for movement, thought, emotion, and action. Structures of the outside world aren’t, as can so easily be assumed in folk psychology and everyday language, things to be pictorially depicted or reflexively mirrored in perception, nor need this sort of representational structure be reproduced in language. A similar emancipation from verbal self-referentiality, even in its enactment, is encapsulated in the uncomprehending glory of the sentence quoted at the start of this chapter: “Wenn ich wahllos einen Satz hinschreibe z.B. Er schaute aus dem Fenster so ist er schon vollkommen” (When I write a sentence down at random, e.g., He looked out of the window, then it is already perfect; 19 February 1911, T 3). Reflecting on, and writing about, the perfection itself doesn’t ruin it, perhaps because the writing seems to capture its own arbitrary enactment: the sentence within the sentence seems to emerge “at random” in its inevitable and always-already-complete perfection. Perhaps another reason that this sentence “works” is that the action of writing down not only closes down all distance between action and its evocation, but is also echoed, as action,

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in the act of looking out of the window, which evokes the act of perception in its simplest, most world-directed form. The latent implications of the window as transparency, reflexivity, and so on are elided in the simple perceptual act of looking. In this sentence—or these two sentences—we find the seeds of what I’ll argue comes to define Kafka’s fictional writing: the verbal evocation of perception as non-pictorial enaction. This definition corresponds to the highly physical character which Kafka attributes to his own writing at its best (as on the inspired night of writing “Das Urteil” [The Judgement]): “in einem solchen Zusammenhang, mit solcher vollständigen Öffnung des Leibes und der Seele” (in such a context, with such a complete opening of body and soul; T 46). Ideally self-unified writing of this kind by Kafka has been described as “ein psycho-physischer Akt” (a psychophysical act; Zymner 2010, 3). Despite Kafka’s emphasis on the importance of “die Darstellung meines traumhaften innern Lebens” (the portrayal of my dreamlike inner life; 6 August 1914, T 546), and his oft-expressed wish to limit the life of the body and interaction with the outside world to the bare minimum (e.g., T 341; BI 40), consummate writing experiences embrace the body in all its dirt and pain (he describes it also in terms of a birth; T 491). As Robertson argues, we should take all of Kafka’s diary entries with a degree of scepticism, since they are “often exercises in self-stylization, and indeed self-pity” (2010, 72). But the gaps and contradictions between the ways in which he chooses to style himself and his writing are also telling. For all the allure of the disembodied inner world, bodily interaction with the outside world simply works far better. We’ve seen, then, how Kafka’s more or less explicit reflections on vision, the imagination, and the function of language in his diaries and letters render any pictorially representational account of their operations problematic. Simultaneously, however, they intimate the source of a solution to these problems, and in the next chapter we’ll see that in his fictional texts the solution is more fully enacted. In Kafka’s descriptions of his experiences in the Louvre, he discovers for himself the non-pictorial qualities that language shares with vision and imagination. These same qualities allow his fictions to tap into something fundamental and—despite the long tradition of pictorialism—timeless about vision and imagining. This, I’ll argue, is the essence of Kafka’s cognitively realistic poetics.

NOTE 1. See, e.g., http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/06/06/arts/KIMM.slide1 .jpg for a photograph of one of Serra’s sculptures, “Torqued Spirals”.

3

Kafka’s Poetics of Perception in Der Proceß

Someone must have falsely accused you because, without your having done anything wrong, one morning you are arrested. Your landlady Frau Grubach’s cook, who brings you your breakfast at about eight o’clock every morning, doesn’t come this time. That’s never happened before. You wait a little while longer, from your pillow you see the old woman who lives opposite and who is watching you with a quite uncharacteristic curiosity, but then, at once disconcerted and hungry, you ring the bell. Instantly there’s a knock at the door, and a man you’ve never seen in the house comes in. . . . Der Proceß (The Trial) is one of Kafka’s best-known narratives, and figures in the definitions of the term “Kafkaesque” offered by several participants in the empirical study on readers’ responses to Kafka which I’ve already mentioned (see, e.g., Introduction, p. 1). Participant 33, for example, defined the term “Kafkaesque” as follows: “‘Kafkaesque’ means to me situations like the Proceß where you—where someone is subject to a power which seems to be immense, unlimited, absolute to him, and he feels frightened because of this immense power, and he doesn’t really know what to do; he’s completely reduced to his fear; that’s this kind of situation, where you’re confronted with power, and your only reaction is fear—that’s a situation which I could call ‘Kafkaesque’”. This response emphasises the strength of the cognitive constituent of what Der Proceß does: the main thing that this participant remembers of the novel is the protagonist’s fear, rather than any particular element of plot or characterisation. Another participant (Pt 30) said that the term “Kafkaesque” “always reminds me of books like the Proceß, or things we did at school, and also always of very intense but nevertheless very disturbing pictures you maybe don’t want to see; but it also tells you a lot about yourself when you’re confronted with it”. Here too, the cognitive aspect is emphasised, and the duality of response that I’ve suggested may be an important feature of readers’ responses to Kafka in general is also expressed: the intense is here opposed to the disturbing, in a clear parallel with what I’ve described in terms of the opposition of the compelling and the unsettling. The notion that reading Kafka can tell you a lot about yourself also ties into the concept of cognitive realism—that Kafka’s texts may make us rethink our own psychology. The power and popularity

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of Der Proceß, together with its novel-length scope, make it a promising focus for investigating in detail how Kafka creates his fictional worlds and how they are likely to connect with the reader’s cognition. This chapter explores Kafka’s novel in order to illuminate its remarkable ability to engage readers across nearly a century since its publication in 1925. To this end I’ll consider four major related facets of the text’s descriptive technique, all of which contribute to its cognitive realism of visual perception: the evocation of perceptual processes as non-pictorial by way of enactivist principles, the use of specifically linguistic tools to modulate the reading experience, the destabilising of common pictorialist concepts of what seeing is, and the reduced manifestation of common cognitive and literary principles of “narrativisation”. I’ll suggest how these characteristics of the novel differentiate it from what we might think of as the typically pictorial paradigm of literary Realism (as outlined and exemplified in Chapter One), in terms of effects both on the reading experience and on our broader notions of perceptual interaction with the world around us. All my suggestions about the effects of aspects of the text on “readers” or “the reader” should be read in terms of my clarifications in the Introduction (pp. 21–22); all are meant as potentially testable hypotheses, although for the sake of style I often present them without qualifying conditionals.

1.

NON-PICTORIAL EVOCATION OF PERCEPTION

The beginning of Der Proceß is remarkable for the power with which it allows (and forces) the reader to experience the opening situation: a man waking up to his own unexplained arrest. Cognitive realism in the evocation of visual perception defines the novel’s opening and determines our apparently effortless imaginative response to it. When it comes to setting the scene, there are no more than the barest fragments of description, yet nothing seems lacking: Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet. Die Köchin der Frau Grubach, seiner Zimmervermieterin, die ihm jeden Tag gegen acht Uhr früh das Frühstück brachte, kam diesmal nicht. Das war noch niemals geschehn. K. wartete noch ein Weilchen, sah von seinem Kopfkissen aus die alte Frau die ihm gegenüber wohnte und die ihn mit einer an ihr ganz ungewöhnlichen Neugierde beobachtete, dann aber, gleichzeitig befremdet und hungrig, läutete er. Sofort klopfte es und ein Mann, den er in dieser Wohnung noch niemals gesehen hatte trat ein. [. . .] “Wer sind Sie?” fragte K. und saß gleich halb aufrecht im Bett. (Someone must have falsely accused Josef K., because without his having done anything wrong, one morning he was arrested. His landlady Frau Grubach’s cook, who brought him his breakfast at about eight o’clock every morning,

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The first information the reader is given about K.’s location and, indirectly, about the room he must be in is that “K. [. . .] sah von seinem Kopfkissen aus die alte Frau die ihm gegenüber wohnte” (K. [. . .] saw from his pillow the old woman who lived opposite him; P 7). This is followed by the description of what happens once K. has rung for his breakfast: “[s]ofort klopfte es” (instantly there was a knock). A head on a pillow, an unspecified “opposite”, a knock at an unspecified door: everywhere there are gaps, but—to paraphrase what William James (1890, 1: 488, see also Chapter One, p. 54) identified as one of the fundamental features of visual experience—“we feel no gaps” (see Figure 3.1). We “see” a man lying in bed looking out of his bedroom window at a window in the house across the street and hearing a knock at his bedroom door; because of the channelling effects of the narrative perspective, discussed in Chapter Four, to some extent we may also look out ourselves, hear the knock from “over there” ourselves. The fact of its being a bedroom, the fact of there being a window, and the fact of its being a door that is knocked at, are all merely implied, not stated. Only then is the scene given a setting: “dies[e] Wohnung” (this apartment). Yet even this comes in the context of a (perceptual) negation: “ein Mann, den er in dieser Wohnung noch niemals gesehen hatte trat ein” (a man whom he had never seen in the apartment before came in; P 7). The subject of the sentence is the man entering, qualified by his strangeness, to which the flat is secondary. The setting is thus multiply indeterminate in its basic constituents, and certainly no spatial orientation of any kind is established between them,

Figure 3.1

What the text gives us isn’t all we imagine

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but this seems not to matter. Just enough seems to be given to negotiate the threshold between the superfluous and the sufficient. The text needn’t even tell us that K. is in bed, or in his bedroom, for the reader to know, from the mention of the pillow, that this is the case; the bed itself is first referred to when K. sits up (“[K.] saß gleich halb aufrecht im Bett” [[K.] immediately half sat up in bed; P 7]) in response to the strange man’s entrance. Similarly, the word “Wohnung” (apartment) occurs only long after it’s become clear that this is the kind of place we’re in. Anežka Kuzmičová (2012a, 276–78) has characterised “visual description” as a static, state-orientated description of appearances which, in exchange for the high degree of fidelity of imaginative response that it provokes, always involves a pause in narrative temporality. In an empirical study of reading-group/book-club responses to a story by Steinbeck, Daniel Allington finds that in general “too much ‘describing’ is grounds for negative evaluation” (2011, 323) and that some people have a tendency to skip long descriptions (324). Descriptions of the kind that make us say to ourselves “‘come on let’s get on with the story’” (323) are precisely what we don’t get here: setting is established through action and enactive perception rather than through prototypical “visual description”. The immediate environment exists only insofar as K. interacts with it—but what little we know about it is perfectly adequate, perhaps because, as Kuzmičová (2012b, 35–36; citing Marcel 2003, 66–68) suggests, simple mentioning of a movement or action creates a greater effect of cognitive verisimilitude and hence of “presence” in the fictional world than do extended descriptions of them, thanks to our rather poor proprioceptive awareness of our movements, and our focus primarily on the object we’re interacting with. By the same minimalist means, the dialogue is also connected with the immediate environment through action. The reader gleans an impression of K.’s physical stance and of the perspective from which he engages in the dialogue after half sitting up. Without any such indicators of action, and their perspectival and hence perceptual implications, we would have no imaginative grasp on the scene, and pictorial details might then be required instead. In other words, we might then feel that we wanted, or needed, to know where the bed was relative to the door, how far the strange man had come into the room, and so on. As it is, there seems to be enough—just enough—to initiate the action and keep us engrossed in our reading of what follows. In general, this opening scene, to the extent that it’s “constructed” in any cumulative way at all, is constructed through the actions of the character who perceives it. This method dispenses with the kind of detailed descriptions of furniture, lighting, outlook, and wider spatial and temporal context characteristic of a conventionally Realist pictorial mode of evocation (for specific examples, see Chapter One, pp. 64–70). Minimalist sufficiency here balances indeterminacy and simplicity, insufficiency and self-evidence. Early Kafka critics made much of the striking simplicity of Kafka’s writing, in which nothing yet seemed lacking. Commentators speak of “seine

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blühenden Einfachheiten der Sprache” (his blossoming simplicities of language; Born 1983, 173) and invoke the resonant concept of the sublime: “seine Einfachheit tönt, so erhaben ist sie” (his simplicity is so sublime that it resonates; 121). Since then, other Kafka critics, in all sorts of analytical contexts, have commented on the paucity of detail in his works. Some use this factor to differentiate Kafka’s texts from those of nineteenth-century Realism: Russell Berman (1982, 16), for instance, describes Kafka’s writing as lacking “the surfeit of concrete details which characterized the nineteenth-century realist novel: the contours of physiognomy, the texture of clothing, the colors of nature, etc.”. These details were crucial to readers’ responses, as “the basic commodity of exchange between the text and its recipient”, which “described the world to a reader willing to envision it”, whereas Kafka, by contrast, “presents the reader with the paradox of extremely precise outlines in the absence of the precise qualities for which the realist canon had prepared him” (16). Kafka’s works convey anything but vagueness, yet the “status of the detail” (16) is crucial in distinguishing his work from that of his Realist predecessors. “The seductive intelligibility and simplicity of Kafka’s language”, “[t]he economy of his unpretentious style”, have been ascribed an even stronger anti-Realist function: that of “parody” (Dowden 1986, 102–4). For Dowden, this linguistic simplicity is key to making the reader expect something Realist, in the sense that the writing first “seems to be at one with that which it represents” (103), but then relentlessly undermines this impression. Like Kügler (see Introduction, p. 5), Dowden somewhat overstates the simplistic confidence of the “ideal writer of realist prose [. . .] in the power of language to mirror the truth of things” (103)—if this is an ideal (and it isn’t clear that it always or straightforwardly is), it isn’t one which any actual Realist writer would come very close to. Dowden also mentions “Kafka’s meticulous attention to accuracy of detail” (102), but while it’s certainly true that some of Kafka’s (visual) descriptions are in some ways extremely detailed, “meticulous” implies a more systematic approach than seems on the whole to be the case; Kafka’s “admiration for prose that is evocative of lived reality” (102) seems more to the point. As I’ll suggest later in this chapter (pp. 143–44), when substantial detail is given, it’s often quite disorientating in its effect, and presents a sharp contrast to the frequent absence of anything that might be called visual “detail”. Kafka’s fictions evoke a response in the reader through precise modulation of descriptive (in)determinacy to specific perceptual-imaginative effect. As we’ve begun to see, Kafka gives us a lot in terms of the richness of the reading experience without doing so in the constituents of the text. The words create a bare framework, yet the experience is likely to be very far from bare. In the rest of “Verhaftung” (Arrest), the opening chapter of Der Proceß, the evocation of the fictional world is characterised by paucity of descriptive detail. The rooms of K.’s apartment are described either in very generalised terms (see the unpunctuated excess of “Möbeln Decken

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Porzellan und Photographien” (furniture blankets porcelain and photographs; P 9) or with fragmentary gradualness. We know nothing at all, to begin with, about what K.’s bedroom might be like or what it might contain, and by the end of the chapter we still have little idea of its general proportions, but have learnt that it contains a cupboard, a clothes chest, a washstand, and so on. It’s notable, further, that almost none of the elements that fill or shape the apartment are themselves characterised by any visual description. The lack of adjectival modifiers is striking—if, and only if, one starts looking for them. The white of a blouse of Fräulein Bürstner’s hung by the window to dry, for instance, is almost the only (non)colour in the whole chapter (see also Frey 1965, 175). The adjectives used rarely go beyond the basic level (see pp. 138–42): tall, short, hard, soft, heavy, light, hot, cold, black, white, red, green, blue, yellow (Lakoff 1987, 271). This remains true for the whole novel, yet is noticeable only on close analysis. In both the amount of the world evoked and the degree of its fleshing out beyond blankness, we observe in this chapter the emergence of a technique that might be defined as fragmentarily cumulative. In one sense, this might seem to contradict what I said in Chapter One about the noncumulative nature of the processes of human visual perception and the implications this has for the kind of descriptions that tap effectively into these processes in their imaginative form. But the point isn’t the accumulation, in the sense of cumulative progress towards an end product, a complete “image” (textual and thence imaginative) of the fictional world; we accumulate knowledge of the world and how to interact with it, but not internal pictures of it. The fragments of information about the fictional world that we get in Kafka don’t feel like fragments: as each emerges it seems sufficient until the next fragment emerges, each tending to specify, “just in time”, something that we need to know about because a character sees or otherwise interacts with it. This makes us readier to accept what’s given, as it’s given, rather than to experience a lack of descriptive detail. Kafka’s mode of description creates the potential for experiencing what is described almost as if it were the real world that was being experienced. My suggestion, then, is that Josef K. is evoked as seeing the fictional world in the way that we do the real, and that this means we can “see” the fictional world almost as he does, by “seeing as”: as if it were real, and as if he saw all of it. In the case of the extent of the fictional world as well as the detail of its description, this sufficiency in fragmentation or indeterminacy can be attributed to the fact that, in the perceptions of the character, the world or its details are typically simply there, as given, as soon as required. K. needs a clean shirt (P 19), so he goes to his wardrobe, which was there before and which he (and hence we) will have “seen”, inasmuch as he saw no gap where it wasn’t—but which he didn’t see, in the sense of attending to it, until he needed the shirt, at which point the colour or size or shape of the wardrobe isn’t what he’s attending to, because he just needs the shirt. K. is unlikely to register the specifics of the appearance of his own wardrobe as he

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hastily gets out a shirt to dress himself for his arrestors; and so, as we read of his fetching the shirt, we are unlikely to register the absence of specifics because our attention, too, is otherwise directed. The experiential convergence of character and reader through evoked visual perception and induced imagining makes us likely to feel that we really “see” what he does. The visual-imaginative continuum of “seeing as” and “seeing as if” is enacted through the mediation of the textual gaps. In this way, we are drawn into and through the world in which the novel’s events take place. The fictional world expands as the events unfold: soon after K.’s awakening, the apartment gains in extent. We learn that there’s a “Nebenzimmer” (adjoining room; P 8) next to the bedroom, as K. watches the man open the door to it in order to communicate with someone in it: “[der Mann] wandte sich zur Tür, die er ein wenig öffnete, um jemandem, der offenbar knapp hinter der Tür stand, zu sagen: [. . .]” ([the man] turned to the door, which he opened a little, in order to say to someone obviously standing slightly behind the door: [. . .]; P 8). The descriptor “Nebenzimmer”, in combination with the action-bound expansion, signals that what’s given here is wholly relative to what has already been (minimally) established: it defines the new room through nothing other than spatial contiguity with the old. If the enactivist theory of vision suggests that the world emerges always as required, “just in time”, when you look, when you act, such an expansion through contiguity can be seen to make this principle fictionally productive. We are introduced to the world of this chapter (and so of the whole text) in the same way as we experience external reality: the world expands as perceptual and motor interactions demand. The question of precisely how the mediation of the character’s experience might intersect with and affect the reader’s experience will be addressed in the next chapter, but for now, I’ll just note that a perceptual continuum between vision and imagination is established and upheld by the text giving us everything as, and only as, K. interacts with it, and therefore as we need to know about it. The “Zimmer” (room) and the “Nebenzimmer” (adjoining room) or “Wohnzimmer” (living room) (P 9), Fräulein Bürstner’s “Zimmer” (P 19), and finally the “Treppe” (stairs), “Ecke” (corner), and “Wagen” (car) (P 28–29), emerge one from the last, with no prior overview and barely any description. The moment-by-moment mode of perception is preserved in the second chapter, “Gespräch mit Frau Grubach / Dann Fräulein Bürstner” (Conversation with Frau Grubach / Then Fräulein Bürstner), which continues the functional expansion that occurs in the first chapter. Another adjacent room, the “Vorzimmer” (anteroom; P 38), is added to our cognitive plan of the apartment, and the interface between outside and inside thereby gains a little in definition: there’s now a “Haustor” (house door) from the street, leading to a half-lit “Flur” (hallway) and thence to the “Treppe” (stairs) we’d already seen (P 31). In this way, the nature of the perceptible world as essentially continuous is also made narratively tangible. Prior to the introduction of these

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details, we’re content implicitly to assume that there must be more to the apartment than we know of (and more to the building than the apartment), on the basis of what Roman Ingarden describes as “[die] Unmöglichkeit des Raumabbruchs” ([the] impossibility of spatial discontinuity; 1965, 236). In Ingarden’s terms, the entire apartment (and all that lies beyond) has been effectively “mitdargestellt” (co-represented; 236), sufficiently so as to render us willing to wait for actual, if minimal, “representation”, and to expect it and fluidly accept it when it does occur. Each room is taken as a “Raumausschnitt” (segment of space; 236), even as its status as a mere “segment” doesn’t entail any feeling of incompleteness. A pattern is thus established that will be repeated in all of the following chapters: limited expansion of the fictional world through contiguity is combined with hints of other places neither visible nor, often, imaginable. For instance, the “Partie auf [einem] Segelboot” (party on [a] sailing boat; P 50) to which the Deputy Manager extends an invitation to K., or his niece’s “Pension” (boarding school; P 122), or the nebulous “[das] Land” ([the] countryside; P 125, 127), an escape offered to K. by his uncle. These seem so impossibly distant from what we know of K., mentally trapped in the city, that we can imagine them barely better than he can. In general in Der Proceß, the textual creation of the fictional world occurs not least through the characters’ actions: however minimally evoked, the narrative setting of, for example, the apartment of the opening chapter has all the self-evidence of a presently inhabited environment. To a large extent, it needn’t even be explicitly described as perceived, because it’s likely to be sufficiently constituted in the reader’s imagination through the character’s interactions with the environment. If we accept the notion of “vision as action”, many of the narrative descriptions of actions—such as that first evocation of K. half sitting up in bed—can themselves be considered part of the narration of sense perceptions, and thence of the perceived fictional world itself. The description of action can thus be seen to contribute to the evocation of both perception and the fictional world, so that the durative nature of descriptions of the fictional world, the idea that “chronology is always disrupted by spatial indications” (Bal 2009, 143), is undercut. We don’t have to wait while the story stops and a new scene is set in which the action can then continue to unfold; the scene is constructed through the character’s temporal exploration of it. This also challenges the notion of what Boris Uspensky, citing Foucault, describes as the basic linguistic “translation” of space—that is, the fictional world—into time: “a verbal description of any spatial relationship (or of any reality) is necessarily translated into a temporal sequence” (1973, 77). If the fictional world is being evoked in substantial pictorial detail, it’s hard to avoid the significant temporal interruption of a linear sequence of descriptive details. Kafka, by contrast, minimises the rigid linearity of the textual temporality precisely through what Uspenksy describes as the other basic feature of language, in opposition to pictures: its prerogative of spatial indeterminacy (1973, 76; see also Pylyshyn 2003,

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34; cited in Chapter One, p. 91). In Der Proceß, the indeterminacy of the fictional reality is given by, and manifest in, the essential connection between the fictional world and the action that takes place within it (on indeterminacy in Das Schloß [The Castle], see also Troscianko 2010, 157). The “translation” of space into time, description into imaginable action, is so efficient as to seem almost untranslated. The experience of this fictional world is not one of stopping, waiting for a cumulative description, and then carrying on reading about the action. Instead, the narration of action, and by extension of perception, is the narration of the world itself, and the linear reading of the text (see Chapter One, pp. 39–40) doesn’t dictate a linearly cumulative experience of its details. The textual content and the reader’s experience of it are determined by enaction, and in accordance with the principles of enactive, embodied, and situated cognition more generally, understanding the narration of action as narration of sense perceptions also entails that the protagonist’s cognition more broadly is being narrated: cognition is temporally contingent, interactive with environment, and action-orientated. The description of K. half sitting up in bed contributes to this fluid evocation of the fictional world, and the protagonist’s perceptual and broader cognitive engagement with it, through narrated action. The reader is given an indication of K.’s physical stance and, to some extent, his cognitive-perceptual perspective as he perceives and speaks to the man who has entered, yet the extent of this really is minimal: there are no clues as to distance or orientation of bed to door, man to man. Nonetheless, his sitting up implies that his attention has been seized, and suggests a possible nervousness and/or self-defensiveness—although, of course, he only half sits up. The description of action gives us what we require to establish enough of a sense of K.’s visual and cognitive perspective, of the interactional movements constituting his presence in that location, to carry us imaginatively through the succeeding dialogue. By such means, the reader is prompted to experience the fictional world on a continuum with the protagonist. This might seem an odd claim, since here, as at the beginning of most narratives, the reader lacks knowledge of the spatial and temporal context familiar to the protagonist. (In other openings of Kafka’s fictions, such as Das Schloß [The Castle], the protagonist too is removed from the habitual, so that the cognitive-perceptual continuum between character and reader is more clearly upheld.) The reader’s inferior knowledge as compared with the protagonist’s, and the cognitively realistic evocation of perception as enactive—as essentially action-directed and task-specific rather than providing a pictorial overview—might lead us to expect the reader to be bewildered, and the character not. However, a setting like Josef K.’s flat, and a temporal context as familiar as waking after a night’s sleep, is standardised enough in its features that most readers are probably able simply to assume its nondescript, template-like familiarity, or to impose on it, to some extent, the outline and features of a flat or flats they do know well, and/or the cognitive script (Schank and Abelson 1977;

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see pp. 133–35 below) of morning routines to which they are intimately accustomed. But as discussed later (p. 133), the amount of explicit imagining and tracking of spatial features by readers is likely to be so minimal, and events so rapidly become strange, that we, along with the protagonist, are disconnected from our habitual scripts and compelled to improvise. Just like Josef K., then, we don’t find ourselves asking about the details of the fictional world until they emerge as part of the action: the fictional world being potentially there in its totality is enough to allow us to experience it as really there (on perception and potentiality, see Chapter One, e.g., pp. 82–84). By studying in detail how the text’s primary perceptual consciousness—that is, K.’s—is conveyed to the reader’s imagination, itself another inherently perceptual form of consciousness, we can meaningfully posit connections between text and reader, making use of what we know about perception to show how the evocation of the fictional world makes us “perceive”. Emmott (1997, 117–19) also compares the assumptions we use to keep track of the fictional world and the real world, discussing how, in both cases, we rely to some extent on contextual assumptions and monitoring. She concludes, however, that the reader of fiction is actually more like a blind person than a sighted one, relying on a mental representation of the fictional world that requires continual updating. What I’m trying to argue here, in contrast, is that the concept of mental representation in the sense of a comprehensive map of the fictional world may be misleading, and that the reader’s experience of the fictional world is parallel not to real-life blindness but to visual experience, defined as it is by potentiality. As regards the matter of (in)determinacy, this approach prevents us from being reduced to the conclusion that reading is like being blind, or that “In fiction, indeterminacy strikes at random” (Pavel 1986, 107). We’re unlikely to regret the absence of a verbally painted picture of K.’s bedroom, for instance, because we make no detailed, lasting internal pictures of rooms anyway. The perceptual continuum between vision and imagination, as narratively mediated, is responsible for the effects created by the amount and type of descriptive detail given in the novel. It can provide an answer to the question of why so much being left out is powerful rather than just frustrating. “One morning” and a “pillow” are enough to start us off; this basic context is then elaborated with minimally adequate additions to give our (equivalently minimal) imaginative processes the ease of spontaneity—or the illusion of it. The text narratively directs our imaginings, but these seem virtually self-sufficient because they are so subtly propelled. Far from feeling we are laboriously filling in the gaps left by the textual descriptions, we are allowed to imagine without being made to feel that we need to imagine everything. As we saw in Chapter One, however, the non-pictorialist conception of vision entails not only that we can look and not see (I give examples of “change blindness” and “inattentional blindness” in Der Proceß at pp. 148 and 155–59), but also that we can see without looking. At several times,

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Der Proceß evokes the remarkable event of instantaneous perception—of the world just being there when we open our eyes, when we enter a new environment. This is strikingly conveyed at the very beginning of the novel, when K. wakes up, as well as later on in the first chapter. K., having leapt out of bed and pulled on his trousers in indignation at the intruder’s words, hesitantly enters the next room: “Im Nebenzimmer, in das K. langsamer eintrat als er wollte, sah es auf den ersten Blick fast genau so aus, wie am Abend vorher” (In the adjoining room, which K. entered more slowly than he wanted to, everything looked, at first glance, almost exactly the same as on the night before; P 8–9). This description of K. registering the similarity of the room to the night before precedes a description of the room in its similarities to and differences from “usual”. The phrase “auf den ersten Blick” (at first glance) realigns the reader with K.’s visual perspective, and introduces the description of the room in a way that corresponds closely to how perception works in a non-pictorial sense. In this example, K. walks into a room overfilled “mit Möbeln Decken Porzellan und Photographien” (with furniture blankets porcelain and photographs; P 9) and sees it all, just like that, at a glance. As in Dennett’s “Marilyn” example, discussed in Chapter One (see pp. 53–54), K. seeing all of this does not require that he focus on each of the things in turn, in order to build up, over time, an internal representation of the room from multiple fragmentary foveal images. The world is just instantly there, all at once, in the continuous, and continually present, way that it always just is (see also Troscianko 2010, 155–56). Sensory excess is what we cope with at every moment of our waking lives; there is so much world out there that we can’t look at it all. And because how we see has a lot in common with how we imagine—we experience the world “as if” we were seeing it all in detail, divided up into cognitively meaningful categories (see pp. 71–72)—the evocation here of non-pictorially instantaneous perceptual processes is especially suited to eliciting an equivalently swift and smooth imaginative experience in the reader, of imagining the room almost as if we were seeing it. The familiarity of the next-door room, signalled by the way that the subsequent description is configured as a comparison with how the room normally is, contributes to the ease of K.’s perceptual awareness. There is substantial evidence that expectation “can guide the acquisition of visual information” and obviate the need for in-depth processing, that it “facilitates the interpretation of visual input”: the interpretation of patterns of retinal stimulation, which are unavoidably ambiguous, can be guided by contextual probabilities (Summerfield and Egner 2009, 403). This perceptual prediction is task-dependent and bound up with motor control, involving premotor and connected parietal brain areas, and mediated in particular by “forward models” of future stimulus change and the efference copies which partially support them (see Chapter One, p. 78), whether predictions are being made about sensory consequences of action or noncontingent sensory stimuli (Bubic et al. 2008, 155–56). Benjamin Vincent (2012) found that prediction in visual search is mediated

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by internal predictive models which make the assumption that the world is complex and changeable. Beyond vision, there’s evidence to suggest that the absence of a schema to structure events makes both comprehension and recall difficult (e.g., Bransford and Johnson 1972). All these factors contribute to the ease and speed of K.’s perceptions of spaces familiar to him, and conversely, as we’ll see later on, they mean that when he begins to enter new locations, how and what he sees, and feels he sees, will necessarily also begin to change—specifically, to become more problematic. I’m trying here to show how Der Proceß encourages us to experience its fictional world in a way that closely approaches the phenomenology of our experience of the actual world, and to argue that we may experience this fictional world in this way not least because its indeterminacy or incompleteness, as well as its paradoxical completeness, correspond closely to those of the actual world. Cognitive realism of visual perception means that we are no more liable to notice the “randomness” of what’s given or not given, seen or not seen, here than in the world around us. Just as when we’re seeing, when we read and imagine we don’t ask questions until an answer is required—and at that very moment, the (fragment of an) answer is always given (see pp. 152–59). I’ve suggested that Kafka’s principles of textual inclusion and omission can be exposed most clearly by looking at how the perception of the fictional world is evoked, because he comprehensively undercuts the conventional linearity of narrative in a manner that can be elucidated with reference to the cognitive realism of visual perception. In the following section, I’ll focus on the precise means by which this novel, as a linguistic text, evokes its fictional world, and I’ll investigate the linguistic tools by which Kafka engages the reader in a reading experience that’s simultaneously compelling and unsettling.

2.

LINGUISTIC MEANS OF ENGAGING THE READER

I outlined in Chapter One reasons for concluding that in visual perception we don’t build up representations of the world by gradually “filling in the gaps”, and have now suggested that in reading Der Proceß we don’t fill in the textual gaps to create nicely coherent mental models of the scenes described. We’re given information of such a nature that this “filling-in” of the gaps can remain at the stage of instinctively assuming that we’re able to do so, being (more or less) confident that, if we chose to, we could “see” K.’s bedroom in all its fully furnished, clearly delineated, accurately dimensional glory. This imaginative confidence is the exact parallel of that perceptual confidence which constitutes the feeling that we really are, at any given moment, seeing all of the world around us. The notion of gap-filling—whether or not it happens, and how— features in literary theory too: Ingarden (e.g., 1965, 266–70) suggests that gap-filling is a ubiquitous component of all literary reading. For Ingarden,

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since the imagined objects in literary texts can be evoked only incompletely, from limited perspectives, there inevitably arise “Unbestimmtheitsstellen” (spots of indeterminacy), or “Lücken” (gaps) which, even if not “consciously” noticed, compel an active response in the reader of completion or concretisation. He stresses that the gaps are not filled mechanically, but are, as Peter Zima puts it, using Kafka’s Proceß as his example, the “Ausgangspunkt für eine produktive Tätigkeit” (starting point for a productive activity; 1991, 255). Wolfgang Iser’s (1972) notion of “Leerstellen” (empty places, gaps) develops Ingarden’s thoughts further, but neither pays much attention to the fact that lots of gaps may just not need filling. Yet, given that our engagement with real objects does not involve such concretisation, and that imagination is so closely connected to vision, active input by the reader leading to total cognitive specification of perceptual features (“filling in” all Dennett’s Marilyns one by one) may be seen as the exception rather than the norm. Some Kafka criticism has drawn attention to the fact that Kafka’s texts contain gaps that are essentially unfillable: James Phelan (2011) draws on rhetorical theory to analyse “Das Urteil” (The Judgement) in terms of the distinction between mere “determinate ambiguity” and the stronger textual “stubbornness” (32) of the “unfillable gap” (29, see also 24). Although Phelan’s focus is on more interpretively salient gaps than the present discussion, his insight that Kafka’s narratives may prevent habitual gap-filling activities at the levels of character, motivation, and event is closely related to the notion that they may simply not require such gap-filling in the context of perception. The potentiality of the fictional world and its events being given in their entirety is enough to allow us to experience them as really given—and our cognitive resources of scripts for likely scenarios are a crucial part of the way in which the minimal information of the text can create the effect of imaginative sufficiency. In general, readers do as little as they can get away with in terms of gap-filling: in his book on experiencing fictional worlds, Richard Gerrig (1993, 36–39) presents evidence to suggest that minimalism, or “minimal inferencing”, is the natural defining feature of readers’ imaginative experiences of the “narrative worlds” of texts. In connection with this, it has been argued that a “principle of minimal departure” (M.-L. Ryan 1991, e.g., 51), or the “reality principle” (Walton 1990), governs readers’ engagements with fictional worlds, insofar as they assume equivalences with the real world unless given to believe otherwise: we assume Josef K. is like other men in all respects except his unexplained arrest and his various described character traits. This presupposes that an ontologically complete world is simply being evoked gappily, and that these gaps aren’t features of the ontology of the fictional world itself; rather than there being “no answer” to the question of what Josef K. looks like, the answer is simply not given textually, and it may well not be crucial imaginatively. The default assumption of ontological identity with the real world entails a confidence in leaving things unspecified that corresponds to our facility in coping with (and most of the time not

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even noticing) real-life perceptual under-determinacy. Of course, as Richard Walsh (2007, 17) points out, there are also indeterminacies for which the real world offers no guidance, such as the question “exactly how many times did K. consider the idea of preparing a short account of his life?”, and this raises in turn the broader questions of what inferences are relevant in a pragmatic sense and how much the gap-filling process is generally pursued. We might now have adequate evidence to conclude that in all sorts of perceptual respects we don’t spontaneously, automatically make inferences of any substantial detail unless specifically required by the text to do so, nor do we experience the consequent absence of detailed cognitive “representations” as a deficiency. This seems especially true of spatial location, which is relevant to our discussion of the evocation of the fictional world. The theory of “situation models” (Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983), or “mental models” (Johnson-Laird 1983), posits that in order to comprehend a text we need a mental representation of what it’s about in order to be able to store the textual information, integrate new information, and use the information for inferencing. There is evidence for prioritised processing of words denoting objects or places spatially associated to the protagonist relative to those which are spatially dissociated (e.g., Glenberg, Meyer, and Lindem 1987). However, more recent research into spatial mental models and reading (using reading times as a measure of increased processing load) has suggested that, in contrast to this handling of the situational dimensions of time, causation, motivation, and protagonist, readers don’t normally keep track of the relative positions of objects “unless specifically instructed to do so”, or construct detailed spatial representations “unless this is easy for them [i.e., lots of it’s done for us] or relevant to their goals [i.e., made necessary by the descriptive mode or the type of action described]” (Zwaan et al. 1998, 215). This “theoretically important dissociation between the spatial dimension and the other situational dimensions” (215), combined with the evidence I’ve summarised suggesting that vision and imagination are non-pictorial, provides grounds for asking whether the mental model is the best way of thinking about the cognitive tracking of visuospatial facets of the fictional world. In general, as Kafka sets up narrative situations in Der Proceß , he gives us just enough detail to activate an appropriate cognitive-imaginative script and to keep it active during our reading of what follows. The “script” was introduced by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson (1977) and denotes “a memory structure that specifies a stereotypical sequence of actions that people carry out in familiar situations” (Gerrig 1993, 32). Scripts are created neurally by the cumulative bias of neural connections through repeated activation: these connections become more likely to be reactivated in situations that bear a structural resemblance to previously generalised ones (Clancey 1993). The “restaurant meal” script, for example, a situational script, includes a basic set sequence of sitting down at a table, ordering from the menu, etc.; it’s probably unnecessary for all the details to be given

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in a text for us to infer automatically or assume this sequence as a context for explicitly described actions, dialogue, and so on. Terminology varies: such structures have been discussed in terms of “scripts”, “(event) schemas”, and “frames”, the last introduced into artificial intelligence research by Marvin Minsky (1975; see also Aitchison 1994, 70–72, 115–17). Frames imply a more spatial concept, whereas scripts refer to process models, but there is considerable overlap in the terms’ usage. I’ll refer to “scripts”, as this conveys a more temporally extended process than does “frame”. Shlomith RimmonKenan also discusses the activation of frames during reading, as constituting a process of forming or grounding hypotheses “in a déjà-vu model of coherence” (2002, 124), and although the notion of a “model of coherence” might suggest a rigid form of cognitive schematisation, she emphasises the dynamic nature of the process of “formation, development, modification, and replacement of hypotheses” in interaction with “the construction of frames, their transformation, and dismantling” (124). The usefulness of script theory to literary studies has been challenged by Allington (2005), who argues that the concept of the script or the schema has become so popular in cognitive poetics precisely because it’s so vague that it doesn’t even commit to being an actual mental structure as opposed to an extended metaphor for cognition (see also Aitchison 1994, 70, 115). He notes that Stockwell (2003, 269–70) advocates the use of schema theory on the grounds that it allows one “to discuss the organization of information in science fiction without becoming entangled in superfluous detail”—“superfluous detail” no doubt meaning the details of how the theory may or may not be borne out by empirical cognitive research. Similarly, but even more strikingly, Elena Semino acknowledges that people who use the theory “are talking metaphorically about something to do with information in our brains” (2001, 353), and that “it is virtually impossible to find evidence that contradicts schema theory, which paradoxically highlights the greatest weakness of the model” (1997, 149), although she nonetheless concludes that it still “provides a powerful descriptive and explanatory heuristic for interpretative activities” (149). This seems to be cherry-picking of science’s sound-bites with little concern for their scientific foundations—indeed, despite explicit acknowledgement of the fragility of these foundations. As Allington puts it: “the terminology of scripts gives [cognitive stylisticians] a convenient way of conceptually organising their speculations about the contextual knowledge necessary for reading a particular work of literature, even if that is not the same way that knowledge is generally organised by real readers’ brains”.1 On the other hand, schema theory hasn’t sunk without trace in cognitive science: Lawrence Barsalou’s situated-simulation model, for example, has a place for schemas as constituents of goal-related conceptual knowledge; he speaks of the “[c]lassic theories of scripts and frames”, but also of how they provide only “preliminary accounts of what this knowledge might look like” (2003, 551). That is, the theory has promise, but hasn’t yet been fleshed out nearly as much as

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it needs to be. My use of script/schema theory as a loose framework in some of my remarks in the following discussion takes these caveats into account: our concepts of events probably are structured in a way that to some extent resembles the script model, indeterminate as it is on many counts, but I fully acknowledge that here the science has so far contributed only a rather small amount of detail to flesh out a concept which is often employed primarily metaphorically. Script activation is likely to be less a matter of the reader importing sense-making frameworks fully formed than a case of the text propelling (and sometimes complicating) ongoing acts of expansion beyond what’s textually given. And with Kafka, these acts are especially prominent because of the number of apparent invitations to such expansion. Lakoff describes Marvin Minsky’s concept of a frame as equipped with “default values [. . .] for a slot that are used if no specific contextual information is supplied” (1987, 116). Although this may be an overly computational way of expressing it, manifesting the computational cognitivism that second-generation cognitive science has reacted against, the idea of there being gaps and our being led to do something with them seems highly apposite to the sort of reading that Kafka’s texts induce. What we do with them, however, is unlikely to be “filling” them with detail, whether default or individual. The scripts of waking up in the morning and, later in the novel, of being at work or going to see a lawyer are efficiently cued by means of the actions that unfold within the respective settings but also themselves contribute to evoking those settings. Both setting and action tend to have an initial self-evidence that’s increasingly troubled as events progress. To the extent that K.’s actions (half sitting up in bed, walking into the adjoining room, dressing, etc.) both contribute to and are affected by the “plot” in a broader sense—the sequence of events, fleshed out by dialogue—their self-evidence is from the outset, and ever more strongly, inflected by the weirdness of what’s actually happening to K. This means that where “filling in” with “default values” may be unnecessary in the case of perceptual detail, in the case of social and behavioural scripts it becomes impossible. I’ve now mentioned several respects in which plot might interact with setting as well as with perception and action. Thor Grünbaum sets out a basic way of conceiving of the relationship between action on the smaller scale and plot on the larger scale: a narrated story must contain some minimal narration of “happenings”, that is, it must contain “some narrative sequence that depicts or unfolds some dynamicity or change” (2007, 297). In this sense, what we might call “events” and what we might call “(physical) actions” are functionally equivalent in “tak[ing] a present state of affairs and chang[ing] it to a new one” (297). The structure of multiple action successions that transform one state to another is the plot. I’ll work from this basic assumption, which allows physical embodied action and the plot or story to be conceived of as constantly feeding into one another, in the context of enactive perceptions which evoke the fictional world as perceived.

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As I’ve begun to suggest, a key means by which Der Proceß modulates readers’ cognitive engagement is a significant contrast between the ordinary (in terms of setting) and the extraordinary (in terms of events). The events are so strange that we’re forced to abandon, or radically rework, any ordinary script almost immediately, and yet the environment in which they unfold, evoked through such simple forms as Bett, Tür, Wohnung (bed, door, apartment), and so on, is so intuitively ordinary that it makes an imaginatively effortless setting for the strangeness. These everyday entities might be compared to the prototype stimuli that act as triggers for, and then interact with, numerous elements of remembered scenarios that we have cognitively available (see Aitchison 1994, 51–72). The minimalist power of Kafka’s evocations of the fictional world stands in apparent contrast to the often striking oddity of the events, which challenges our conventional cognitive “scripts”, but the two elements are completely complementary. By considering the fictional world and the narrated events as the two constituents of situation, we can explore how a text such as Der Proceß induces an experience of this world through precise orchestration of how much and what is textually given. One of the sources of the text’s power is the confluence of oddity in the “scripted” events and absolute ordinariness in the locations in which they unfold, and both effects arise from the same source: minimalism. The oddity and the ordinariness consist in there being less than we might expect: less is specified, less is clarified, than we are used to; we know neither why K. has been arrested nor how his bedroom is furnished. Yet, as regards both the events and the location, it seems to me, this “less” is enough. The novel’s locations and events are established in interconnected fashion through the minimalism of enactive perception and goal-orientated action. The setting provides no distraction from events, but that isn’t to say that the fictional world is a neutral, rigid framework for the action, because the enactive perceptions are what constitute the fictional world, and the goal-orientated actions (going to find a shirt, looking for the room where his interrogation is meant to be) are also frequently evoked in world-constituting terms. The world is thus inseparable from the events in the sense that it’s constituted by them as part of a wholly compelling narrative situation, in the awareness of the character who perceives as he acts, and through the narration that conveys these perceptual actions to the reader. Narrative perspective also contributes to this minimalism, of course, since we don’t know consistently or substantially more than K. does about what’s going on, and we aren’t invited to imagine consistently or substantially more than what he enactively sees; the setting and events are therefore all the more inseparable from the perceptual consciousness through which our experience of them is mediated. (I’ll talk more about this in Chapter Four.) This interaction of the fictional world and its events as a contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary connects in specific ways with the reader’s cognitive processes. Even the generally automatic tendency

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of the reader to carry out just those inferences necessary to ensure local coherence—privileged, automatic, “inside” inferences “constructed as part of the moment-by-moment experience of the narrative world” (Gerrig 1993, 44, see also 31, 37–39)—is undermined in two opposite directions. On the one hand, this tendency is countered by the fact that the “local coherence” of events is so quickly and comprehensively shattered that we make little attempt to salvage it. In the sixth chapter, for example, K. visits a lawyer and has an eventful time inside his strange and dimly lit apartment: having a conversation at the lawyer’s candlelit bedside, hunting down a webbed-fingered woman in the lawyer’s deserted office. Any ready-made scripts of visits to lawyers that we might employ to make cognitive sense of the lawyer’s visually indistinct and spatially baffling apartment would soon be rendered strikingly unhelpful, and therefore essentially redundant; it’s easier, in the end, to take things as they come, accepting coherences where they arise. On the other hand, our tendency to make inferences to achieve coherence is countered, or muted, because the world in which the events unfold is evoked in such a way that any specific inference is not required: “local coherence” is just there, self-evidently, without our needing to ask. Since fully inferring coherences is made to seem at once impossible and pointless, we’re permitted to remain poised on the edge of inference, content to assume unspecified coherence imaginatively, just as we do when we see. The text promotes this stance on the edge of explicitly imagining and inferring by only fleetingly channelling our imaginings into visual or interpretive specificity. Often, just enough is specified to activate a cognitive script in a way that keeps us feeling we could always specify more, and the potentiality thus preserved allows for great flexibility. Going to see a lawyer is normally so little like the situation in which K. finds himself, yet we accept it all as it happens, and without great effort of assimilation, because everything follows on logically, as well as unexpectedly, from the previous step. K.’s uncle visits and takes him to the lawyer, even though it’s “Acht Uhr, eine ungewöhnliche Zeit für Parteienbesuche” (Eight o’clock, an unusual time for client visits; P 129) and in spite of the fact that K. hasn’t realised that this is the sort of trial in which a lawyer can be used; it turns out that the lawyer is ill, which makes sense of why he’s found in bed; his nurse has webbed fingers, which arises quite naturally from her jealous question about whether K.’s lover has any “körperlichen Fehler” (physical defect; P 145); and so on. Where we attempt to respond with inferences despite the oddity of events (and here also of some aspects of the environment), these inferences are likely to be far from importations of fully formed meaning, but rather constructions as required. Here we might invoke Lawrence Barsalou’s notion of “ad hoc categories”: conceptual categories that aren’t conventional or fixed, but constructed as immediately required, and structured according to immediate goals as a function of one’s cognitive models. They “provide an interface between roles in knowledge (e.g., schemata) and the environment”, and as such they “are not

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well established in memory and do not become apparent without context”, but their “internal structures are generally as stable and robust as those in familiar taxonomic categories” (Barsalou 2011, 86). These ad hoc categories are no more primitive concepts (i.e., concepts that can’t be broken down into other simpler concepts) than basic-level categories are (see pp. 139–42); complexity emerges within spontaneity, whereas at the basic level, as we’ll see shortly, it exists within simplicity. Kafka blurs the boundaries between conventional categories and “ad hoc” ones by creating situations in which the conventional seem to apply (waking up in bed, sacking one’s lawyer, and so on), then forcing us to revise these categories, to create new scripts out of them that retain some validity as the parameters shift—just as K. finds himself continually forced to do. When K. visits the lawyer with his uncle, they’re kept waiting outside, and are confronted by an enigmatic pair of eyes peering out at them through the door. When they’re let in and the eyes are embodied as a young girl, K. struggles to make sense of things in the candlelight: “K. staunte das Mädchen noch an” (K. continued to look with amazement at the girl; P 130). But soon afterwards, leaning on an armchair somewhere near the lawyer’s bedside, “K. selbst sah allem ruhig zu” (K. himself looked on calmly at everything; P 132). He has seemingly already ceased to expect events to fit a conventional script, and has even stopped trying to make a specific ad hoc script adequate to account for every eventuality, because this so swiftly proves impossible—instead he has to let emerge what will. K. keeps making slight cognitive shifts to keep up with events, and the reader is able to do so too: there is never so much given, so much strangeness specified, that we succumb to a sense of complete surrealism. Kafka’s texts create a strong cognitive connection with the reader through a carefully modulated verbal simplicity which is a major part of the minimalism of his narrative technique. The experience of reading Der Proceß is full and engaging, even though the words of the text are so sparse, as here: “In einem Winkel des Zimmers, wohin das Kerzenlicht noch nicht drang, erhob sich im Bett ein Gesicht mit langem Bart” (In one of the room’s nooks, into which the candlelight did not yet penetrate, a face with a long beard sat up in bed; P 130–31). The words in themselves give us very little, but we are drawn into the scene, “seeing” this unlit face and implicitly attaching it to a body despite its disembodied description. So what’s going on? Why does this minimalism work so powerfully? As one part of the answer to this question, I’ve discussed the direct convergence established between the reader’s imagination and the processes of enactive perception evoked in the text. I’ve sharpened this focus on the evocation of the fictional world through consideration of the cognitive-linguistic “scripts” that determine our comprehension of the narrated events. A third concept which may help us in determining why this text is so powerfully engaging is that of categorisation—cognitive and linguistic. I suggested in Chapter One that it might be useful to think of seeing as a process of “seeing as”. Whenever we see something as a particular kind

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of thing—say, a tree—we are categorising. The theory of prototypes and basic-level categorisation, pioneered by Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues in the 1970s and developed since by researchers including Lakoff and Johnson, provides a way of understanding how we divide up the world into meaningful categories; it can therefore help us understand why we tend to see things as the particular kinds of things that we do. Rosch (e.g., 1977) found that the categories into which we divide all the world’s stimuli are not only organised hierarchically from the most general to the most specific, but also incorporate cognitively basic levels that claim a privileged place within this general-to-specific hierarchy: the most cognitively basic level is in the middle of the hierarchy. That is, when people are prompted to list category attributes, even if they’re presented with more specific words, they in general show virtually no increase in knowledge beyond what’s prompted by the basic level. A basic-level categorisation might be that of a “bed”, for instance, rather than either a “four-poster bed” or a “piece of furniture”, so in this case no additional associations would be stimulated by the subordinate term (“four-poster bed”) than by the basic-level term (Lakoff 1987, 47). Each level of these categories also usually has best examples, called prototypes, in graded sequences: a bed, for example, is a more prototypical example of furniture than is a bookcase (Rosch 1975). Such basic-level distinctions “are ‘the generally most useful distinctions to make in the world,’ since they are characterized by overall shape and motor interaction and are at the most general level at which one can form a mental image” (Lakoff 1987, 49). Basic-level terms are the simplest way of conveying what something looks like and how we interact physically with it in an imaginable form. These criteria have obvious relevance to our concerns here: the questions of vision, action, and imagination are precisely those which are central to readers’ experiences of fictional worlds. In the example of the disembodied face in the lawyer’s apartment, “room”, “bed”, “face”, and “beard” provide maximal information with minimal specification, thereby allowing us most fluidly to imagine what’s given. This theory provides a way of connecting the verbal simplicity of Kafka’s writing to its cognitive power. We can trace the source of this power back to the individual words on the page, in as simple a sense as Kafka’s use of the word “bed”, as opposed to, say, “divan” or “furniture”. Various scholars have noted the remarkable prevalence and thematic significance of beds in Kafka’s fiction, especially Der Proceß (e.g., Jeziorkowski 1992; Rieger 2012). The interpretive richness of beds in Kafka’s fiction can be set against the simplicity with which Kafka generally evokes them, as neutral settings for more striking events, using the basic rather than the superordinate or subordinate level of specification. Another relevant criterion for determining basic-level categorisation is that it’s the level at which terms are used in neutral contexts. “There’s a dog on the porch can be used in a neutral context, whereas special contexts are needed for There’s a mammal on the porch or There’s a wire-haired terrier

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on the porch” (Lakoff 1987, 46, author’s italics). Either of the latter two sentences could form part of a narrative situation only if the qualities of the mammal or the terrier were relevant in some quite particular way to its situation there on the porch. In the case of the dog, however, nothing specific is implied as to the context and nothing specific need be inferred. The situation, there on the porch, is given as self-evident in its neutrality, exactly as Josef K.’s bedroom at the start of the novel remains just a bedroom, an emergent environment, where a “large polished four-poster bed with a floral bedspread”, say, would have certain very different effects. Firstly, it would interrupt what Kuzmičová (2012b) calls “dynamic veracity” in the description of action (congruence between the time it takes to perform and to read about), which can be disrupted not only by summarising action narration (“Josef K. got up and got ready to go out”)—as opposed to the narrative rendition of simple actions (“Josef K. got up and pulled on his dressing gown”)—but also by extended visual description creating a narrative pause, as discussed above (pp. 127–28). Secondly, it would prompt other more detailed inferences about the location, drawing the setting to the forefront of our cognitive engagement with what’s happening to K. In the case of the lawyer’s room, in contrast, the very presence of a bed, however neutrally evoked, contributes to the creation of a non-neutral context, because beds and visits to lawyers aren’t expected to go together, but this non-neutral context isn’t so conspicuous that we’re forced to engage much with the specifics of the bedside and its incongruence. The scripts for “interview with lawyer” and “visit to sickbed” are combined in a setting which, thanks to the bed’s basic-level evocation, is only mildly unsettling. The striking neutrality of many of Kafka’s descriptions can thus be connected with how they work cognitively, for he employs a high proportion of terms that are basic-level, prototypical, or both, especially when introducing the reader to new spaces. Josef K., for example, quickly pulls on his “Hose” (trousers) when the stranger first appears in his room; a little later he chooses “sein bestes schwarzes Kleid, ein Jackettkleid” (his best black jacket; P 19) and a nondescript shirt; he eats an apple instead of his full breakfast; a “Nachttisch” (night stand; P 16) or “Nachttischchen” (small night stand; P 19-20) appears in the first chapter, but far more common are the unspecified “Tisch” (table) and “Stuhl” (chair), both also prototypes; he leaves the house in an “Automobil” (P 28–29), works in a “Bank”, and so on. (See pp. 143–44, however, for Kafka’s intermittent use of striking detail.) Kafka seems to be tapping into precisely the level of specificity at which most knowledge is organised and at which our experience is preconceptually structured, through descriptions that achieve maximal “efficiency” and preconceptual cogency (Lakoff 1987, 267) by working so often on this basic level. “The idea that certain concepts are not merely understood intellectually [. . .] [but] are used automatically, unconsciously, and without noticeable effort as part of normal functioning” (12–13, author’s italics) suggests that Kafka, by engaging his readers with so much of the fictional

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world at the preconceptual, sensorimotor level, may be forging especially direct paths to psychological impact. Because K. himself interacts with the fictional world at this level, the reader’s imagination is connected directly to his cognitive-perceptual processes in a cogent cognitive continuum. Not only objects but also natural images depicting environmental scenes can be classified into basic-level categories: we assign semantic categories to neural data originating from looking at a natural image, and these can be understood in terms of “prototype images”, or “natural image categories”, of visual scenes, such as a face, a car, a hand, a chair, a mountain, a country road, a street, and an indoor scene; a close-up or far-away pedestrian in an urban scene, a car in an urban scene, a lamp in an indoor scene, and so on (Torralba and Oliva 2003, 391–92). Categorisation is therefore relevant in terms of both cognition more generally, and visual perception (and hence the processes of perceptual imagining) specifically. Furthermore, as mentioned above, basic-level categories aren’t primitive concepts, but are at an intermediate level, at which complexity underlies apparent cognitive-perceptual simplicity. So this might be an important part of what allows Kafka’s descriptions to give so much (experientially) while seeming to give so little (verbally)—to give so little while seeming to give so much. If we look at the words on the page dispassionately, they seem to add up to rather little; if we read them as narrative, they create a powerful cognitive-perceptual experience. By working effectively with basic-level and prototypical categories, Kafka’s descriptions don’t overwhelm us with too much: they provide sufficiency instead of excess. His minimalism isn’t simply about giving less, but about giving just enough by means of what seems like so little—a maximally efficient minimalism. The concept of basic-level categorisation can be related to Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s “relevance theory” of communication, in which amount of detail is also crucial. “Relevance” is maximised when the most new information is communicated in a given context with the least amount of effort: when telling someone how much we earn, we naturally round to the nearest thousand, or ten thousand, whereas when filling in our tax return, every penny matters; both presumptions of optimal relevance would be quite inappropriate in the other context. The relationship between cognitive effects and processing effort is universal, in perception as well as in language use: “As a result of constant selection pressures toward increasing efficiency, [. . .] our perceptual mechanisms tend automatically to pick out potentially relevant stimuli, our memory retrieval mechanisms tend automatically to activate potentially relevant assumptions, and our inferential mechanisms tend spontaneously to process them in the most productive way” (Wilson and Sperber 2004, 610; see also Sperber and Wilson 1995). Relevance is automatically sought and perceived in both perception and language in order to maximise cognitive efficiency. Kafka makes things easy for us a lot of the time as regards relevance. (Yes, even Kafka can be easy on his reader.) His writing strikes an effective

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balance: rather than operating, for instance, according to pictorialist principles that would dictate a consistent preference for greater detail, for the subordinate level (the rocking chair, sports car, golden retriever), it often remains instead on the basic level (chair, car, dog). Because of the cognitively privileged nature of the basic level, Kafka’s textual “stimuli” yield as much, interpretively and imaginatively, as would more highly specified descriptions, while retaining the simplicity that seems to reflect our enactive-perceptual interaction with the world and hence also effectively triggers our imaginative evocation of it. We can clearly and easily imagine a chair; we have general motor actions for seeing chairs and sitting in them (i.e., their sensorimotor affordances, or invitations to action, are relatively homogeneous). But it takes more effort to imagine either a “kitchen chair” or “furniture” (perhaps especially the latter), and we have no motor actions for interacting with furniture in general that aren’t motor actions for interacting with some basic-level object such as a chair. Imagining may usefully be thought of as the partial enactment of appropriate processes of exploration and interrogation, and we respond much more readily if prompted—as we so often are by Kafka—to imagine a bed than either a bunk bed or a piece of furniture. This imaginative response also then corresponds closely to the perceptual interactions of the fictional character with the fictional world (though see Chapter Four for perspectival complications), thereby doubly furthering its evocation. Categories thus provide a way to analyse how the perceptual processes of character and reader can be brought into fruitful alignment through specific verbal elements of the narration of situation and action. Kafka exploits the power of these processes of categorisation, and the cognitive levels through which they operate, in order to convey visual experience and induce imaginative experience in a highly efficient way. In the sixth chapter, K. finally leaves the lawyer’s apartment: “Als er aus dem Haustor trat, fiel ein leichter Regen, er wollte in die Mitte der Straße gehn, [. . .] da stürzte aus einem Automobil, das vor dem Haus wartete, und das K. in seiner Zerstreutheit gar nicht bemerkt hatte, der Onkel” (As he went out of the house door, a light rain fell; he wanted to walk in the middle of the road, [. . .] then his uncle leapt out of an automobile which waited in front of the house and which K. in his absentmindedness had not noticed at all; P 146). The length of this sentence, with clauses connected by commas, is a notable characteristic of Kafka’s writing. Fritz Martini declares that “[e]s ist eine der wesentlichen und originären künstlerischen Leistungen Kafkas, wie er es erreicht, das Erzählen und in ihm den Leser in der dichten Verkettung, im Kontinuum dieser funktionalen Sprache festzuhalten” (the way in which Kafka manages to hold the narrative, and through it the reader, in the tight intertwining, the continuum, of this functional language is one of his essential and original artistic achievements; 1970, 292); by means of this continuum, Kafka “zwingt den Leser in den Fluß des Geschehens mit einer unvermittelten Direktheit hinein” (forces the reader with sudden directness into the flow of events; 292). Martini also remarks on the tension in Kafka’s writing

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between the attempt to create self-sufficient “Bildsituationen” (image situations) and the “funktionale Verkettung des Ganzen” (functional interlinking of the whole; 293), and notes how through the syntax of “lang abrollende Sätze” (long unspooling sentences; 293) the latter tendency generally prevails and we’re left not with self-sufficient images but with signs that always point beyond themselves. I hope that my exploration of the enactive/ pictorial distinction, as well as the implications of cognitive categorisation, helps to show in more detail how this tension is resolved and what its resolution entails. The sentence length interacts with the relative simplicity of the lexicon; many of the clauses could stand alone as full sentences, but their connection induces a feeling of fluid movement that contributes often, as in the sentence describing K. and his uncle, to the enactive flow of the reading process and its sense of ease. Yet we may also be slightly unsettled, for two reasons: firstly, because so much less is narratively given than we’re used to (what sort of a street is it, what type of car, what time of day?), and secondly because the character’s processes of perception are increasingly exposed as fallible. I’ll talk more about this second kind of unsettledness in what follows. Kafka doesn’t eschew detail indiscriminately: he intersperses generally minimalist evocations with striking detail. In the “Türhüter” (doorkeeper) legend, for instance, despite the prevailing evocative sparsity, fragments of specificity (the “große Spitznase” [big pointy nose], the “lange[r] dünne[r] schwarze[r] tartarische[r] Bart” [long thin black Tartar beard], and the “Pelzmantel” [fur coat ]; P 293) create visually defined entities to focus our imaginings. Elsewhere in the novel, equivalent moments of striking detail act as the focal points of more broadly and more minimally evoked settings. These detailed descriptions often contribute markedly to the atmosphere of the entire scene, especially when the increased clarity corresponds to a change in the light by which the object or detail of setting is illuminated. The pillows in Fräulein Bürstner’s moonlit bedroom, for example, heighten the atmosphere of brooding, silent darkness: “Auffallend hoch schienen die Pölster [sic] im Bett, sie lagen zum Teil im Mondlicht” (The pillows in the bed seemed conspicuously high, they lay partially in the moonlight; P 36). As K. is led to his execution, he and the two men cross a bridge: “Das im Mondlicht glänzende und zitternde Wasser teilte sich um eine kleine Insel, auf der wie zusammengedrängt Laubmassen von Bäumen und Sträuchern sich aufhäuften” (The water, shining and trembling in the moonlight, parted around a small island, on which, as if herded together, leafy thickets of trees and bushes were heaped; P 309). This glimpse of natural beauty is poignantly incongruous with the bleakness of the final chapter, but also prefigures its last scene, which departs from the city and the protection that now, retrospectively, the city seems to have afforded from reality. Many of these flashes of details, however, are notably accompanied by indications of the fallibility of perception, or its divergences from interpretive cognition. In the first example above, the evocation of moonlight on the

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pillows is preceded by a qualification: “Soviel man sehen konnte war wirklich alles an seinem Platz, auch die Bluse hieng nicht mehr an der Fensterklinke” (As far as could be seen, everything was truly in its place; the blouse, too, no longer hung from the window handle; P 36). Descriptive detail here is bound up with uncertainty about seeing and the perception of an absence notable only thanks to a memory of presence. Similarly, in the second example above, what stands out (the river glistening in the moonlight) is closely connected with what’s invisible: “[u]nter ihnen [den Laubmassen] jetzt unsichtbar führten Kieswege mit bequemen Bänken, auf denen K. in manchem Sommer sich gestreckt und gedehnt hatte” (now invisible beneath them [the masses of foliage] ran gravel paths with comfortable benches upon which K. had stretched and lolled during many a summer; P 309). What can’t be seen is again significant in the remembrance of it being there. Even instances of seemingly straightforward visual clarity and completeness in Der Proceß are inseparable from memories, absences, uncertainties, which contradict the possibility of straightforwardly pictorial perception.

3.

EVOKING THE FALLIBILITY OF NON-PICTORIAL PERCEPTION

In Der Proceß, Kafka evokes vision and its enaction with uncanny accuracy, so that we’re able to enact with uncanny ease the perceptual imagining of what is evoked, but having drawn us in, he also shows the fallibilities of these same processes. As discussed in Chapter One (p. 42), human vision has adapted to achieve maximal “fitness for purpose” with minimal cognitive resources. If we really did build up pictorial representations of everything around us, we would make few or no mistakes in sight or recognition, yet the costs in terms of brain power would be enormous: our brains would have to weigh approximately ten tonnes in order to achieve high resolution across the visual field (Snowden, Thompson, and Troscianko 2006, 75), and storing all this information in a representational format would be even more impractical. Instead, we perceive in an enactive, “just-in-time” fashion, and this works very well most of the time. However, there is much more potential for errors and omissions than pictorially configured perception would entail. Mistakes can easily occur in the context of instantaneous perception. When in the first chapter K. enters the neighbouring room soon after waking, he “sees as if” he saw all the detail, so we do as well, but his initial visual impression then needs modifying slightly: there might be a little more space than usual in the cluttered room, yet “man erkannte das nicht gleich” (one did not notice that immediately; P 9). This may be connected with how K. enters the room more slowly than he intends to: he is altogether nervous, cognitively disturbed, because events are slightly strange, and his nervousness perhaps in turn further compromises his perceptions. In

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addition, of course, the pronoun here is “one”, not “he”; a shift from a specific perceptual experience to a more generalised one (on pronominal shifts, see also Chapter Four, pp. 190 and 200–202). Mostly things still work as normal—but already, in terms of both the events unfolding and their perceptual and cognitive assimilation, not quite. “Seeing as” here begins to work less than perfectly. Kafka evokes perceptual processes in such a way as to show, to unsettling effect, the fallible nature of enactive perception. In the third chapter, as K. goes for his first court hearing, the “entlegen[e] Vorstadtstraße” (remote suburban street; P 50) at which he arrives is presented initially in terms of its failure to correspond to K.’s expectations. He expected striking, if indeterminate, specificity: “Er hatte gedacht das Haus schon von der Ferne an irgendeinem Zeichen, das er sich selbst nicht genau vorgestellt hatte, oder an einer besondern Bewegung vor dem Eingang schon von weitem zu erkennen” (He had thought to identify the house even from a distance, by some sort of sign which he had not clearly imagined to himself, or by special activity in front of the entrance; P 53). Instead he is confronted with featureless uniformity: the subsequent description of K. pausing and looking down the Juliusstraße is characteristic of a number of the novel’s evocations of the fictional world in their privileging of similarity and generality (see also, e.g., the “zwei Reihen langer Holzbänke” [two rows of long wooden benches; P 93], the “in der Regel kleine einfenstrige Zimmer, in denen auch gekocht wurde” [generally small, one-windowed rooms, in which people were also cooking; P 56], etc.): “Aber die Juliusstraße, in der es [das Haus] sein sollte und an deren Beginn K. einen Augenblick lang stehen blieb, enthielt auf beiden Seiten fast ganz einförmige Häuser, hohe graue von armen Leuten bewohnte Miethäuser” (But the Juliusstraβe, in which it [the house] was supposed to be and at the beginning of which K. stood still a moment, contained on both sides almost entirely uniformly shaped houses, tall grey rented houses inhabited by poor people; P 53). The buildings’ prototypicality keeps a Realist form of social commentary minimal (the inhabitants are simply “poor”, rather than, say, oppressed or exploited, associations more strongly present in an earlier draft in which the “poor people” were “factory workers” [P/A 185]) while achieving maximal syntactic efficiency (again, this is less true of a previous version which used a relative clause instead of the nested structure of the revised version, [P/A 185]). A focus on the more generic visual aspects of the scene means that the reader is left to infer the particulars of social deprivation and industrialisation that contextualise the poverty. This sort of narration of perception might seem to be part of an anti-perceptual, schematising method, but in fact it corresponds to perceptual processes precisely in its schematisation: we cope with the excess of visual stimuli in the external world by registering patterns, repetitions—by making totalities out of fragmentary perceptions. Thomas (2002) describes the “schema” as a neurally implemented data structure that governs perceptual exploration of the world, in terms of both what perceptual tests are applied and how

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future exploration is made more efficient by modifications and updates to the schema on the basis of the results of the tests. In this sense, the schema provides the cognitive link between seeing and imagining as exploratory processes of “seeing as”; as opposed to the “image schemas” of Lakoff and Johnson (2003), however, the schema isn’t itself part of “conscious” experience. The fact that these totalising categorisations of the world—“identical houses rented by poor people”—are only ever partial is conveyed through the addition of the word “almost”. We categorise, make sense of the world, just as well as we can, at any given moment. As noted previously (p. 141), vision science has extended the notion of basic-level categories from semantic to visuo-perceptual classification. Research on “spectral signatures”, a way of summarising the different orientations and spatial-frequency distributions of a given environment, has shown that spatial frequencies alone (i.e., the rate of alternation of the luminance in a visual stimulus) contribute significantly to our being able to recognise, say, a street as a street, regardless of what other sorts of information are available. Variations and relations between horizontal and vertical contours in the spectral signature are most significant with regard to man-made scenes (Torralba and Oliva 2003, 394). Correspondingly, in the description of the Juliusstraße, the street is defined by its length and the height of the houses that line it, and in general the world of Der Proceß is characterised by extremes of linearity: K. is “durch die Stockwerke gezogen” (pulled through the storeys; P 57) as he seeks the court room, which is itself divided sharply in two (P 58); his first sight of the court’s “Kanzleien” (offices), which he visits in the fourth chapter, is of “ein langer Gang, von dem aus roh gezimmerte Türen zu den einzelnen Abteilungen des Dachbodens führten” (a long passage, from which roughly hewn doors led off to the individual divisions of the attic; P 92); he escapes from the painter Titorelli’s room via “ein[en] lange[n] Gang” (a long passage; P 222); and so on. These similarities serve to blur the distinctions between interiors and exteriors, but thereby situate us only more strongly in a totally, almost indiscriminately, man-made world, one that remains nearly untouched by the natural until the final chapter. Rolf Goebel (2002, 49) describes the fusion in Kafka’s city of interiors and exteriors, houses and streets, into “one continuous labyrinthine space”, while Gesine Frey (1965, 207) speaks of an “unendlich[e] Aufeinanderfolge immer gleicher Raumstrukturen” (an endless sequence of identical spatial structures). This kind of environment is modulated to the point of oppressiveness in the novel as a whole. Vision research, furthermore, has made it clear that environmental context plays a crucial role in the identification of objects usually to be found in such environments, enabling observers to identify them without having to explore them visually. We see, in other words, because we know what we would see in this sort of place. This feeds into an anti-hierarchical approach to understanding how scene recognition and localisation occur (Torralba and Oliva 2003, 404–7): the extent to which these things happen

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by nonconscious processing of very low-level features (in interaction with higher-level cognitive assumptions) is another nail in the coffin of cumulative pictorialism (see Chapter One, pp. 51 and 82). As K. briefly pauses to observe the street, much of what he sees is subtly and concisely conveyed: the houses and their windows, their shirtsleeved inhabitants and the piles of bed linen, and everything else are taken in as a street, as a categorised whole, by all the cognitive mechanisms that allow us to infer such things with the rapidity of spontaneous “perception”. Here already, though, and more obviously than in the cluttered room adjoining K.’s bedroom, the process isn’t quite complete: uniformity is registered but not cognitively resolved into meaning. The connection of perception with the “seeing-as” schemas that drive it, and hence also with the reader’s interpretive assimilation of this perception, is left obliquely incomplete, for as K. begins slowly to walk down the street, the street is no more to him than the sum of many recurring specificities. K.’s experiences, both visual and imaginative, of the fictional world, are unsettling primarily because of the ways in which thought and perception interact, rather than any more salient strangeness. The first time K. visits the court’s offices, he rapidly becomes overwhelmed, and the latter part of the fourth chapter narrates his feverish escape. The passage powerfully evokes the constricting and confusing psychological effects of the court environment, even while remaining as completely neutral in (non)description as are any of the evocations of the ordinary external world: just numerous normal corridors, rooms, wooden doors (e.g., P 96–97). The emotional power comes from the interaction of vision, movement, and environment, not from anything inherently, saliently odd in what is being described: “gerade das wollte er ja vermeiden, weiter geführt zu werden, je weiter er kam, desto ärger mußte es werden” (being led on further was exactly what he wanted to avoid; the further he went, the worse it would get; P 100). “Weiter” (further) is experientially equated with “ärger” (worse); while entirely ordinary, the place is entirely strange to the reader because it consists of nothing but K.’s perceptions of it. This passage is remarkable for conveying great intensity of physiological experience precisely as an experience hedged with conditionality (“als stürze” [as if falling], “als schaukle” [as if rocking], “als würden” [as if] “als wäre” [as if], etc.; P 105–6). There’s nothing disorientating here except K.’s visuospatial disorientation, and yet even this has no validity as immediately given, merging as it does again and again with imagination and hypothesis conveyed by the multiple similes of the narration. (Kafka’s characteristic use of the “als [+ subjunctive]” [as if] construction will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Four, p. 202, with further examples on pp. 149, 171, and 192.) Kafka therefore doesn’t need to evoke extreme, supernatural weirdness in order to create unsettling effects. He does so simply by preventing us from being completely certain what it really means to see or imagine: we can’t be certain that seeing means believing—a time-honoured metaphorical equivalence (Kohl 2007)— and imagining not. The way in which Kafka makes us uncertain of the distinctions between seeing and imagining, and what each of these entails in terms

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of cognitive certainty, becomes a central part of how the fictional world of Der Proceß is textually evoked. In the first chapter of Der Proceß, the interaction of vision and imagination is to a large degree unproblematic in the sense that K. is doing the seeing (or the not seeing) and the reader the imagining. But here already, the clear cognitive-perceptual boundaries begin to blur: K. “sees” his bedroom as he wakes up, without specifically registering any of it (P 7); he sees and characterises the totality of the room next door in an instant, but without registering specifics, and then modifies his initial impression (P 9); he moves between rooms and within rooms, occasionally focusing on minutiae (P 19–24); and he fails to notice salient “objects” like a group of well-known colleagues (P 27), or events such as the departure of the two officials who have intruded (P 28–29). The chapter thus occupies numerous points on the continuum of visual awareness, which ranges from “conscious seeing” to simply not seeing, even when the object is “unmissable”. This makes it hard to maintain an interpretation such as Franz Kuna’s that in this chapter “Kafka is at pains to demonstrate the total division between the seen and an assumed unseen reality” (1976, 100)—the worlds of everyday life and of the court. On the contrary, the continuum is made irreducibly fluid, but Kuna reduces this fluidity to a stable duality, and thereby also unnecessarily inflates the experiential into the metaphysical, suggesting that here “two different planes of reality are superimposed on each other” (98) whose incompatibility “results from an inability on K.’s part to incorporate them both into his consciousness at any one time” (99). The “worlds” are in fact frighteningly compatible, and K.’s failures to align or combine them are more satisfyingly interpreted as ordinary failures of real-world perception. We needn’t suggest anything as esoteric as that “Josef K. has then a kind of double consciousness, which is to say he has to process reality into two separate worlds” (99) to account for his failure to notice his colleagues. Rather, as we’ll see, we can reconcile this with the ordinary precisely by taking it to extremes—by recalling that we all inhabit multiple “worlds” (visual spaces, cognitive models), more or less separate, giving more or less the illusion of unity, all the time. Although perception might in general be thought of as involving an awareness of possible states of affairs (e.g., Smeets and Brenner 2008, esp. 207–8), it often also involves perception of “impossible” states of affairs. Perceptual “impossibilities” aren’t just experientially possible; they can be fun. Think of our enjoyment, say, of Escher’s games with staircases, visual illusions that show the supposed three-dimensional coherence of a unitary visual space to be illusory (207–8; Seckel 2004, 88, 90–92). “Visual space” isn’t a single space, but rather the sum of our interactions with the world as we employ different sources of information for answering questions about different aspects of the world or performing particular tasks: “what you see is what you need” (Triesch et al. 2003). The dorsal and ventral distinction discussed in Chapter One (pp. 78–79) adds a further kind of support

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to the conclusion that there is no single coherent, well-formed sensory or perceptual space—and, unlike many Realist writers, Kafka doesn’t seem to be working on the assumption that there is. This is also true of cognition more broadly: Lakoff (1987, 121–22) notes how commonplace it is for us to hold multiple and inconsistent “idealized cognitive models” or modes of understanding simultaneously, and how comfortable we are with doing so. Research on linguistically engendered “spatial mental models” similarly suggests that people’s representations of environments are often schematic, multiple, varying in abstractness, perspective, and detail, and systematically distorted (Tversky et al. 1994, 667). Findings of this kind complement the considerations outlined in Chapter One that make the term “representation”, with its connotations of comprehensiveness and analogue accuracy, seem inappropriate for denoting what happens in vision and conceptualisation. Kafka plays out such mutually accommodating inconsistencies in the ways in which he hints at worlds of meaning that are inconsistent yet very nearly consistent in the descriptive manifestations through which they’re created. He does so not least by destabilising precisely our “idealized cognitive model” of seeing itself (Lakoff 1987, 128–29), or, to put it another way, by challenging the prototypical usage of the verb “to see” (Aitchison 1994, 57). The illusion of the unified coherence of visual space is broken: we are forced to “see as” in multiple ways at once. This directs us to the central means by which Kafka evokes the visualimaginative continuum as a continuum and makes its fluidity ever more unsettling. The interactions between seeing and imagining are most disturbingly fluid and ambiguous in the fifth chapter, “Der Prügler” (The Beater), where the juxtaposed environments and realities of the lumber room and the bank, one within the other, together elicit a salient change in K.’s interactions with them. K. progresses from a precarious confidence in the possibility of demarcating the two experiential realms to a need, by the end, to relinquish this confidence almost entirely. He’s initially confident in his certainties: “Ich könnte einfach die Tür hier zuschlagen, nichts weiter sehn und hören wollen und nachhausegehn” (I could simply slam the door, not want to see or hear anything more, and go home; P 112); “K. hatte schnell die Tür zugeworfen [. . .]. Das Schreien hatte vollständig aufgehört” (K. had quickly slammed the door [. . .]. The screaming had completely stopped; P 114). Then his certainties begin to falter: “Jedenfalls hatte K. nichts anderes tun können, als die Tür zuschlagen, trotzdem dadurch auch jetzt noch für K. durchaus nicht jede Gefahr beseitigt blieb” (In any case, K. could not have done anything but slam the door, although this even now certainly did not eliminate every danger for K.; P 116). Soon confidence has ceded completely to desperation: “Auch noch am nächsten Tag kamen K. die Wächter nicht aus dem Sinn [. . .]. Sofort warf K. die Tür zu und schlug noch mit den Fäusten gegen sie, als sei sie dann fester verschlossen. Fast weinend lief er zu den Dienern” (On the next day, too, K. still could not get the guards out of his mind [. . .]. K. immediately

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slammed the door and then banged on it with his fists, as if this would lock it more securely. Almost crying, he ran to the servants; P 117). The strength of K.’s emotion here—the only time in the novel that we see him like this, close to tears—is justified by the extent to which the verbs sehen (to see), hören (to hear), and erkennen (to recognise/notice) have been shifted and stretched in meaning. K. initially fails to recognise the men being beaten as the guards from his arrest; he sees them writhing and hears their screams, but he closes the door and it all ceases to exist—or seems to, until he returns the next day. This passage is the most explicitly dreamlike in the novel: the closing of the door is like the moment of awakening, and as in a dream, perceptions are at once difficult to pin down and irrefutable as “reality”. The episode provides a significant contribution to the process by which, as the novel progresses, Kafka calls increasingly into question just what seeing or imagining anything as anything means, and hence how we can satisfactorily separate the two. By destabilising the relationship between seeing and imagining, Kafka unsettles our convictions about reality and our potential cognitive and perceptual relations with it. What does it mean to “recognise” someone in a room that seems to come into being only when one enters it? And yet each new location that we encounter also has an essential perceptual immediacy: K.’s bedroom, the court room and the lawyer’s and Titorelli’s rooms, the street entrances into these buildings, the staircases within them. Each adds to K.’s world, and our experience of it, a visually powerful conviction that creates innumerable cognitive uncertainties even while being quite effortlessly imaginable. In the junk-room episode, Kafka further blurs the boundaries between seeing and imagining by evoking an environment that is incontrovertibly seen by K. but which by its nature seems to claim the status of the imaginative or even the dreamlike. The chapter “Der Prügler” (The Beater) presents a uniquely unsettling juxtaposition of the real and the surreal, the perceptually incontrovertible and indeterminate, the controllable and the incontrollable, the seen and the imagined or dreamt. Dowden (1986, 131) remarks on the difficulty of accepting the common view that the court as a whole is nothing but Josef K.’s dream of it, the novel a demonstration of “consciousness as a generative force”, and indeed, it doesn’t seem possible to maintain that there’s only one cognitive space at issue here: all the interesting effects are created by the interactions and infiltrations between clearly real and less clearly real parts of the fictional world. Despite K.’s initial confidence that he need only shut the door of the lumber room to annul its reality, the room does infiltrate the world around it, perceptually and emotionally, as the screams of the beaten men reverberate in the corridor of the bank, audible throughout the whole building (P 113). This deeply unsettles K., as does the scene being played out in the room itself; the scene unsettles the reader, too, because of both its violence and how the ambiguities which it raises regarding the status of experience and the world experienced are combined with a disturbing visual simplicity. The force of the description of one

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of the men being beaten on the floor makes a strong connection between the man and the floor, the place where he’s writhing: “[er] stieß [. . .] in Franz, nicht stark aber doch stark genug, daß der Besinnungslose niederfiel und im Krampf mit den Händen den Boden absuchte” ([he] bumped [. . .] into Franz, not hard but hard enough to make the senseless man fall down and convulsively search the floor with his hands; P 109). This degree of visual clarity prevents what is seen from being dismissed as something “merely” dreamt or imagined; it keeps the boundaries between seeing and imagining wholly fluid, by momentarily but powerfully intimating—as in a dream— that this has to be seeing. The lumber room is just a room with an ordinary door, in which horrible things can be seen happening and from which screams emanate down to an ordinary corridor, but it’s also a room to some extent affected by action, and this is crucial in determining its reality. As I suggested in Chapter One, seeing is a form of action that allows us not to disambiguate a “picture” of the external world, but rather to get from the world information about the mode of interaction that connects us with the stimulus. So if action has no effect, I must be dreaming, or hallucinating. In the text, interaction exists, but is equivocal; K. hovers on the edges of dream and hallucination. The description contains elements both of extreme clarity and of essential ambiguity in the realm of visual perception itself: “[er] stak in einer Art dunklern Lederkleidung [. . .]” ([he] wore a type of dark leather clothing; P 113). Here the indeterminacy is located not in the act of perception but in the perceived object itself, for despite the subsequent ongoing description of the clothing, its nature (like that of the man first seen by K. from his bed, as he was arrested) defies clarity. Whereas in an earlier manuscript version, the indeterminacy had been in the cognitive-perceptual assessment (“[er] war scheinbar ganz in schwarzes Leder gekleidet”; [[he] was apparently dressed entirely in black leather; P/A 213]), in the revised version determinacy is simply not to be had. The fictional world is made imaginable for the reader through the perceptions of the characters, and when they see on the boundaries of dreaming or hallucinating, we are consummately made aware of how precarious are the processes of creating and sustaining perceptual worlds. In spite of this, the existence of a preconceptual, perceptible domain to which we apply perceptual categorisations isn’t in itself challenged in Der Proceß. The existence of an external world is not what’s at issue here or in Kafka’s writings more generally; his conceptual and imaginative structures remain constrained by actual external reality and the ways in which we function as part of it. This corresponds to what Lakoff describes as the basic philosophical “realism” preserved by “experientialism” (the view that thought is fundamentally shaped by the body): existential realism is committed to the existence of the real world “since our conceptual structures [e.g., our cognitive categories] are strongly (though by no means totally) constrained by reality and by the way we function as an inherent part of

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reality” (1987, 372). By upholding a fundamental ontological realism, Kafka is able to advance a cognitive realism: a realism that challenges our assumptions of what cognition and perception are, rather than accommodating these assumptions as literary Realism often does. While this aspect of Realist poetics may have a reassuring effect, however, the works of Dickens, Balzac, Fontane, and the other great Realists don’t of course induce reading experiences that are “reassuring” (comfortable or comforting) in their entirety: their satirical force, evocation of human suffering, exploration of doomed love, and much else besides may lead to powerful and equivocal responses in the reader. But the world in which these events play out is self-evidently stable, and human perceptual interaction with this world is not typically questioned in its reliability (Flaubert and Henry James being notable exceptions); in this sense their Realism is different from Kafka’s cognitive realism in the evocation of visual perception.

4.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LINEAR NARRATIVES

In a world that emerges just in time, as required, when we look, there can be no complete, linear narratives in the manner of traditional Realism. Through evocations of enactive perception, Kafka powerfully exploits the extent to which the minimal, the potential, and the indeterminate can be sufficient, often giving us so little, yet in such a way that we are unlikely to experience a lack. The narrative through which the fictional world of Der Proceß emerges is thus a narrative that corresponds less to those we retrospectively create about our experience than to the nature of sensory experience itself. Our whole visual world is full of gaps all the time, but most of the time we see no gaps: that there are gaps is something we are able much of the time to deny and to conceal by creating narratives out of experience, making retrospective sense of things by imposing linearity and totality on what are in fact gappy, multiple, simultaneous stimuli. If I ask myself the question “Am I conscious now?”, the answer is always yes; the fact that the answer is always yes, however, needn’t mean that I am in fact always “conscious”. Dennett (1991) and Blackmore (2005a, 2012) both suggest that what we think of as consciousness is created by “probing” one’s experience, and one way of doing this is, according to Blackmore, “asking the question”. In Dennett’s account (1991, ch. 5), neural activity, with its multiple parallel, asynchronous streams of processing, can be conceptualised as constituting multiple drafts, any of which can at any time be made “conscious”, or given the appearance of becoming a “final draft”, by “probing”. A probe is anything that makes one strand of neural processing more prominent than others: an attention-grabbing stimulus, a task demand, or, in Blackmore’s terms, the act of “asking the question”, and any of these can turn a draft into a narrative, retrospectively. In Blackmore’s comparable but distinct model, the “drafts” are instead “threads”—the sound of the tap dripping over there, the

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sight of the keyboard here, the slight clamminess in my palms, the recurring thought about what there might be for lunch—which can be made “conscious” just by attending or probing as Dennett describes (see Figure 3.2). The main difference between the two accounts is that for Dennett what’s noticed, what becomes a narrative rather than remaining a draft, is determined primarily by whether whatever it is has consequences (a speech act, the pressing of a lever, etc.), while for Blackmore, things are noticed and seem to become “conscious” if a given thread or threads connect up with some aspects of a “self-model”, which she envisions as consisting of two parts: a body model and a more intellectual construction of a sense of self as experiencer. The body model is here understood to mediate one’s physical engagement with the environment through neural processing of numerous informational inputs at the temporoparietal junction (where the temporal and parietal lobes meet). But just because we construct this kind of selfmodel, that doesn’t mean that we should consider the self thus constructed to be continuous or indeed necessary to there being experiences (even if not “had” by anyone in particular). Experiences happen, they may come to seem conscious if they end up being connected with the operations of self-creation, and otherwise they probably won’t. Key to both accounts is that there’s no “fact of the matter” about what is or isn’t conscious until our experience is probed, and that consciousness is nothing more than an attribution after the fact—a very powerful attribution, but nonetheless just that. If I ask myself the question “What am I conscious of now?”, an answer is always forthcoming: “a now, a stream of experiences, and a self who observes it all appear together, and a moment

Figure 3.2

Multiple threads of consciousness: asking the question creates an answer

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later they are gone. Next time you ask, a new self and a new world are concocted, backwards from memory” (Blackmore 2005a, 131). In the literary realm, this kind of linear cognitive narrativisation has its counterpart in the nineteenth-century Realist practice of making complete and coherent narratives of experience, consisting of a series, or “stream”, of connected moments of conscious experience. In the early twentieth century, psychology’s “stream of consciousness” (James 1890, e.g., 1: 360) became a model for well-known literary attempts to convey the supposedly stream-like nature of experience in words, but although “stream-of-consciousness” writing is commonly associated with Modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf, and Beat authors like Kerouac, we’ve seen that Realism can be understood as based on the same assumptions about the nature of consciousness as a continuous and singular flow of richly detailed sensory experiences. And yet, if sensory experience consists of enactive processes that don’t work towards any single stable point of representation, and if there is no sustainable distinction between things “in” and “out” of consciousness, then the answer must always be constructed just as the question is asked. If we think about it this way, there is no single “stream of consciousness” which can be probed to ascertain what it now contains, or what it contained in the moments leading up to now. The apparent singularity of the stream is instead an artefact of the act of probing. The world of conscious experience therefore emerges as we probe, as we pay attention, as we ask the question “Am I conscious now?” Although the answer to this question is always yes, Blackmore (2012) describes how slightly different effects can result when we direct the question at the past instead of the present, when we look back and ask “Was I conscious a moment ago?”, or “What was I conscious of a moment ago?” These backwards-directed questions, rather than making us latch on to some feeling, thought, or perception and automatically calling it “what I’m conscious of now”, have the potential to initiate a more complex set of answers. You’ve probably had the experience of becoming aware of a clock chiming when it’s already being doing so for a while. On the one hand, you might feel as though you’d become conscious of the clock chiming only once you’d asked yourself about it or otherwise had your attention drawn to it, but on the other hand you might well feel as though you’d already been conscious of it for some time before you’d asked—to the extent that you could say how many times it’d already chimed (James 1890, 1: 646). The impossibility of saying for certain whether or not you were conscious of a particular stimulus at any given moment is one way in which the self-evidence of there being a single stream of consciousness with clearly defined contents can be experientially challenged. When K. asks “Did I fail to notice those candles on the altar?” or “Had I seen the office director before?” (see pp. 158–59 and 156), there are similarly no definitive answers, though there are many ways of constructing semblances of them. By evoking a world in which it becomes ever clearer that there can be no “fact of the matter”, no definitive answers to such questions (“Did

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I see?”, “Did I fail to see?”), Kafka confronts both his protagonist and his readers with the inadequacy of our customary attempts to narrativise, to make a “proper” narrative out of, experience. At the same time, however, Kafka also hints at the superfluity of such attempts. The necessity of conventional narrativisation of experience is challenged by a narrative that does much less of it than we’re used to. These reflections on Der Proceß have tried to show how Kafka’s evocations of parts of the fictional world tap into the fundamental processes by which we experience the external world, as well as how they destabilise these processes. In some respects this destabilisation echoes Kafka’s personal reflections as discussed in Chapter Two, but here it doesn’t end, as it does there, in sterility, or frustration, or dead ends of self-reflexive complication. Even as vision and imagination are complicated, the narrative context of perceptual enaction, in which situations are temporally constituted through space and action, keeps everything in motion: enacting the prerogatives of potentiality and indeterminacy, as entailed by and manifested in the connection of world and action, it prevents a subsidence into the stasis of self-reflexivity, or into infinite regress. The processes of seeing and imagining which mediate the reader’s cognitive access to the fictional world may lose their self-evidence, but there remains at least the potential for an ongoing enactive interaction between the textual content and the reader’s experience. The textual evocations of the fictional world temporally define the entire reading experience of any text, and through our exploration of perception we can see how, in temporal terms, the narrative of Der Proceß both converges with and unsettles the processes by which we try to make sense of the world that we perceptually experience. Kafka makes sufficient concessions to the conventions of experiential and literary narratives, in combination with his minimal mode of descriptive evocation, to draw us through the fictional world with what feels like smooth linearity: seasonal time, clock time, moment-to-moment time. Chapters begin innocuously, in terms of both location and temporality; as Robertson (1985, 95) has described, the earlier chapters are characterised by passages of reassuringly orientating narrated summary, but as the coherence of perception breaks down, so does temporal linearity. The text is increasingly full of gaps and ambiguities: the indeterminate temporal gaps between chapters, for example (Frey 1965, 208–10), most notably between the penultimate and the final chapter, making K. and his room feel oddly alien despite their familiarity. The novel’s composition in separate notebooks, and the uncertain order of all but the first and last chapters (which were composed first [Pasley 1992]) further suggest that conventional narrativisation, for Kafka, is far from a self-evident creative principle. There are also many moments in the text when perceptions which K. took for granted as they occurred are retrospectively probed and revealed as lacking: “Da erinnerte sich K. daß er das Weggehn des Aufsehers und der Wächter gar nicht bemerkt hatte, der Aufseher hatte ihm die drei Beamten verdeckt und nun wieder die Beamten den Aufseher” (Then K. remembered

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that he had not noticed the overseer and the guards leaving; the overseer had blocked his view of the three officials, as they now blocked the view of the overseer; P 28–29). K.’s repeated realisation of his past failures to notice things and resolution to do better in future, and his conviction, until the very day of his execution, that the best thing he can do is “bis zum Ende den ruhig einteilenden Verstand [zu] behalten” (retain his calmly allocating reason to the end; P 308), contribute to the sense that both perception and interpretation are crucially enlisted in K.’s attempts to make sense and take control of a frightening world. The narrative conveys both the attempts to narrativise experience of the fictional world and the momentary failures to do so—yet many of these “failures” show that “success” is neither possible nor necessary for everyday perception to keep working well enough. Experience of the world just happens, and so does that of the fictional world of Der Proceß, by the character as well as by the reader. We’re made aware of the gaps only retrospectively: nonlinearity suffices, until a sudden attempt is made to linearise. Such an attempt may be made by a character asking whether he saw or imagined, or whether he recognised, and if not, why not, or by the reader asking how much we were really textually given. In the case of his “change blindness”, for instance, K. retells the perceptual story to himself to make sense of his past failures of attention, and resolves to do better in future, just as we may try, for the sake of reassuring clarity, to work out some “fact of the matter” about the allocation of attention that was never explicitly given, but both attempts are just more or less successful (plausible, reassuring) fabrications. Another example can be found in K.’s first visit to the lawyer, when his attention wanders and he begins to ask himself “ob er den Kanzleidirektor nicht schon einmal gesehn hatte, vielleicht sogar in der Versammlung bei seiner ersten Untersuchung. Wenn er sich auch vielleicht täuschte, so hätte sich doch der Kanzleidirektor den Versammlungsteilnehmern in der ersten Reihe, den alten Herren mit den schüttern Bärten vorzüglich eingefügt” (whether he hadn’t seen the office director once before, maybe even in the assembly during his first hearing. He might be mistaken, but the office director would have fitted in perfectly with the old men with the thin beards; P 139). Having initially noticed no similarity, he now (re)constructs a connection between this man and the barely distinguishable “old men with thin beards”, yet there remains the possibility that he is mistaken, that he has never seen him before, or not then, a possibility that seems heightened by the conditional pluperfect construction of the final speculation. Perhaps a vague sense of familiarity has led to recognition; perhaps it has led to false recognition. There is now no answer to the question of whether or not K. saw this man before, only a fuzzy space where perception and memory remain entangled and it becomes pretty clear that retrospective attribution is the primary means of distinguishing between what was and wasn’t “conscious”. There’s a

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notable preponderance of descriptions in the pluperfect (e.g., “Auch die andern hatten sich genähert” [The others had also drawn closer; P 26]) where this tense is used, not just because of the requirement of sequence of tenses, but to convey actions and events that have already happened—yet weren’t perceived as they happened, or weren’t narrated (as having been perceived) when they did. Yet, rarely does the reader feel any jolt back into the recaptured “present”. Only more salient temporal disjunctures, in which, for instance, the “Wirkung” (effect) of an event is mentioned before its narration (P 173), might make us more abruptly aware that the narrative can’t be unfolding precisely as K. experiences it, and momentarily disrupt the fluid perceptual convergence of character and reader. The temporal linearity of perception is destabilised in ways that compel us powerfully yet subtly, because the resulting evocations correspond more closely to our actual sensory experience than to what we conventionally seek to make of it retrospectively. Sufficiency in minimalism, gaps that are not gaps, ease with inconsistencies until something prompts retrospection, an unsettled question—these features supplant neat, cumulative, total, linear narratives, experiential or verbal. Other facets of cognition lag behind perception when K. is being carried out of the offices by the Auskunftgeber (information-giver) and his assistant: “Endlich merkte er, daß sie zu ihm sprachen, aber er verstand sie nicht” (He finally noticed that they were talking to him, but he did not understand them; P 106). At the end of his first hearing, similarly, K. notices something that should have been conspicuous from the start: “Unter den Bärten aber—und das war die eigentliche Entdeckung, die K. machte—schimmerten am Rockkragen Abzeichen in verschiedener Größe und Farbe. Alle hatten diese Abzeichen, soweit man sehen konnte” (Amongst the beards, though—and this was the real discovery K. made—insignias of various sizes and colours shimmered on the collars of their gowns. All of them had these insignias, as far as one could see; P 71). This is a narrative instantiation of the characteristic gappiness of perception identified by William James (see Chapter One, p. 54): how could K. have seen no badge-shaped gaps where the badges should, must have, been? But he simply didn’t feel as though he saw either them or the gaps; they—both the badges and the badge-shaped gaps—just weren’t. In this case, the only reason the badges are “noticed” is that K. probes his perceptual experience with the question of whether he has assessed his audience correctly, and this makes the experience of the badges become “conscious”, but it nonetheless remains impossible to say one way or the other whether K. had “seen” the badges before. As it is, the noticing is salient enough that he has to reassess his whole narrative of the hearing, because it causes what never before seemed like a gap suddenly to be exposed as one. In some cases, K. notices gaps, becomes retrospectively aware of his own “Scheuklappenblick” (blinkered vision; Allemann 1963, 239), and then quickly accounts for the gaps in order to restore a sense of cognitive control.

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He recognises his three colleagues, for example, only when they are identified as such, and marvels at how he could have failed to do so: “Wie hatte K. das übersehen können? Wie hatte er doch hingenommen sein müssen, von dem Aufseher und den Wächtern, um diese drei nicht zu erkennen” (How could K. have overlooked this? How preoccupied he must have been with the overseer and the guards not to recognise these three; P 27). Here he asks how the past cognitive-perceptual failure could have taken place, and then instantly answers the question: he was distracted by the others. In this sense the retrospective fabrication is successful, in that a reason for the gap is constructed which fits with both the narrative of the day’s events and K.’s self-understanding as possessed of a “calmly allocating reason”. This way in which Kafka evokes K.’s perceptual engagement with the fictional world foregrounds the cognitive compulsion to narrativise, and it does so not least by contrast and association with the literary manifestation of this cognitive habit in nineteenth-century Realism. Within the constraints of temporality that the linguistic and literary form imposes, the novel induces cognitively realistic experiences of the world which it evokes, precisely by making unstable the Realist narratives that our minds and our novels so often append to reality. But at the same time, it remains sufficiently conventional, recognisable, and reassuringly linear to ensure that there’s no substantial barrier to comprehension or experience: the openings of chapters, especially towards the beginning of the novel, provide us with temporal context and continuities in the manner of literary Realism. Thus at the start of the second chapter, for instance, K.’s evening habits are described (“In diesem Frühjahr pflegte K. die Abende in der Weise zu verbringen [. . .]” [During this spring, K. tended to spend his evenings in this way [. . .]; P 30]), while at the start of the third chapter the reader is filled in on the fact that K. has received a phone call regarding his first hearing: “K. war telephonisch verständigt worden, daß am nächsten Sonntag eine kleine Untersuchung in seiner Angelegenheit stattfinden würde” (K. had been informed by telephone that a small hearing into his case would take place on the following Sunday; P 49). We are led innocuously, by clear temporal indicators, into a world that we are then able to experience imaginatively almost as the character does visually—not pre-narrativised, but with moment-to-moment sufficiency. This unquestioned immediacy can be upheld until either we or K. suspect in some instance that perhaps there hasn’t been a coherent narrative, and, thinking that there should be, bring the nonlinear, fragmentarily cumulative, incomplete strangeness of it all fully into view. A paradigmatic prompt to this kind of questioning occurs in the cathedral when K. suddenly notices a triangle of candles, and doesn’t know whether they were there all along or have just been lit: “In der Ferne funkelte auf dem Hauptaltar ein großes Dreieck von Kerzenlichtern, K. hätte nicht mit Bestimmtheit sagen können, ob er sie schon früher gesehen hatte. Vielleicht waren sie erst jetzt angezündet” (In the distance, a large triangle of candle lights sparkled on the main altar, K. could not have said with certainty whether he had seen them earlier

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already. Maybe they had only now been lit; P 280). Yet if he did fail to see them before, he felt no gap, nor did we; we’re left with the retrospective knowledge that there may have been a gap—and that we’ll never be sure. The vagueness of the temporal indicator “schon früher” (earlier already) minimises the specificity of the moment when K. might previously have been expected to see the candles, sustaining the doubt that he and the reader experience regarding the whole question of seeing and not seeing. The unusual use of the passive adds to this effect: while the standard pluperfect passive construction would be “waren angezündet worden” (had been lit), the passive auxiliary “worden” (been) is missing here, even though “angezündet” is clearly meant as a finite verb form rather than a past participle used adjectivally. This makes the phrase grammatically illogical and stylistically aberrant, only increasing the sense of confusion regarding time and agency. Thus, as we experience this fictional world, the text also invites us to recognise that the truth of our conscious experience of the world is stranger than the fictions we habitually make of it. Kafka’s cognitively realistic evocation of visual perception is able to give us the same illusion of seeing as we get from looking at the world around us, and yet it’s at once exhilaratingly stripped of those illusions of seeing everything, of experiencing from start to finish. This, I think, is as deeply compelling as it is unsettling. All the ways in which vision is conveyed as enactive, as fallible, as merging with imagination, and as not fully susceptible to linear narrativisation not only affect the reader’s imaginative and interpretive responses, but also have a substantial emotional effect, as essential to the experience of reading Kafka (or any author) as are the cognitive-perceptual elements of this experience. Any discussion of the power of literature to draw in the reader is incomplete without an examination of the emotional aspect of the reader’s response, and such an examination is the focus of Chapter Four, which aims to show how the emotional experience of reading Kafka depends on the vacillations of narrative perspective characteristic of Kafka’s narrative poetics, and how both are closely connected to his enactive mode of description. As we’ll see, furthermore, Kafka’s modulations of narrative perspective have far-reaching consequences for our concepts of unified self, and this too has the potential to bring about strong emotional responses on the reader’s part.

NOTE 1. Daniel Allington, personal e-mail communication to author, 20 December 2012.

4

Feeling from New Perspectives

Personally, I would like to read, I would like to know, how the narrator feels about this: is he scared, is he surprised, does he just accept it as it is? If anything, this is a feeling of the shortcoming of the story, to me: that I never really quite see into the head of the narrator. (Pt 18)

Any fictional reality we might encounter will be accessible to us only through some kind of perspectival mediation, even if that mediation is the apparent non-mediation of the classical omniscient narrator of nineteenth-century Realism. The perspectives through which we access fictional worlds are cognitive perspectives in a broad sense, in that they encompass perception as well as knowledge and linguistic expression. Neither the perceptual (and here, as previously, I’ll be focusing on the visual) perspective nor the other cognitive aspects of perspective are always easy to identify, and indeed, difficulty identifying them may be an important part of a reader’s response (approving or otherwise) to fictions like Kafka’s—but they are nonetheless present. Kafka’s mutable and ambiguous perspectival technique has many manifestations and all kinds of possible effects, and just as I suggested in the previous chapter that his evocation of visual perception as enactive induces an experience in the reader that combines the compelling and the unsettling by being cognitively realistic yet counter to folk-psychological expectations, here I’ll extend this hypothesis to take in his evocation of perspective and the related construction of emotion as enactive. I’ll also reflect on how the broader concept of selfhood is implicated in Kafka’s distinctive ways of evoking perspective and emotion enactively, and how this too challenges readers’ expectations. Firstly, I’ll explore how Kafka’s perspectival style can be illuminated by the principles of enactive cognition which I’ve used to explore visual perception in the previous chapters: not only is perception itself evoked enactively, but the embodied and situated perspectives from which perception (and the rest of cognition: thoughts, emotions, etc.) happens can also be understood, in their instability and ambiguity, as enactive. Secondly, I’ll connect perspective with emotion, in the context of reading fiction, in three different ways. All emotion is inherently perspectival in that emotional appraisal reflects what something means to me now, from my

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current perspective (in the broadest meaning of the term); narrative perspective is thus an important means by which emotion is evoked in fiction, as characters’ appraisals are conveyed in ways that depend to a large extent on how the perspectival structure is configured. A specific subcategory of emotion, empathy, is similarly fundamental to readers’ emotional engagement with fiction, key to which is the adoption of the perspective of the object of empathy; since perspective is even more central to empathy than to emotion in general, it becomes doubly important when we’re considering emotion in the context of fiction. Perspectival modulations of the kind found in Kafka’s fictions, finally, are likely to have specific emotional effects on the reader, particularly in prompting a frequent vacillation between empathic engagement with the fictional characters and their situations and conversely, moments of reflection on the characters, their situations, and their emotional responses as well as on the reader’s own emotions.

1.

EMOTION IN KAFKA

The “Kafkaesque” is commonly understood, as I discussed in the Introduction (pp. 35–36), as involving emotions like surprise and a sense of threat and oppressiveness. One participant in my empirical study on the short story “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) defined the term explicitly as constituted by a “feeling”: “I think Kafkaesque to me is very much a feeling, rather than to describe a work of art; it’s more the Kafkaesque feeling of the person experiencing being lost and not really knowing what’s going on” (Pt 8). Correspondingly, Kafka’s fictional texts clearly induce emotion: other participants responded to events in the story as “very scary” (Pt 22) or “very eerie, frightening” (Pt 3), or “really somehow unnerving and really disturbing” (Pt 30). The participant who spoke of the Kafkaesque feeling of being lost also described expansively, when responding to the story, “a visual, disturbing image of these jackals coming back to the camel; it’s almost like a nightmarish scene, they won’t stay away; it’s like when you see films of rats or whatever, they keep coming back, even if they might run off for a little while, they keep coming back” (Pt 8). But Kafka’s texts don’t always elicit emotional responses in such straightforward ways, and several readers of “Schakale und Araber” reported feeling emotionally ambivalent. One described “very mixed emotions” (Pt 3), another “a feeling that the author somewhat plays with my emotions; every new paragraph I’m not so sure on which side I should be, who is, if you like, good and who is bad” (Pt 1). A third spoke of “a continuous up and down: [. . .] I’m really always alternating between, this is going somewhere, and, this is really bizarre, I’m not entirely sure if I like this” (Pt 18), while a fourth mentioned at one point “a very funny description in a very dark story” (Pt 22), just as another noted how “within all that fear and tension, you have to chuckle a little bit, actually” (Pt 31). In certain cases, moreover, rather than alternation between

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two opposing reactions, the emotional ambivalence of the respondents is encapsulated in a single response: one participant, in reaction to the concluding “orgy of violence” (the jackals tearing apart the carcass of a camel), described feeling “perversely attracted” (Pt 33). These dualities aren’t purely emotional, and I’ve discussed them in broader cognitive terms in the previous chapter, but then, as I’ll argue in what follows, there is no such thing as a “purely emotional” response—emotion is part of cognition and almost all cognition is inflected with emotion in some way. Although the focus of this chapter is “emotional response”, therefore, it should rapidly become clear that this kind of response ties in closely with what I’ve suggested might result from Kafka’s cognitively realistic evocation of visual perception. Some of the critical literature on Kafka that I mentioned in the Introduction (see pp. 33–35) identifies a dual response as inherent to readers’ responses, and in Chapter Three (pp. 136–37), I briefly speculated that some of the effect of Kafka’s prose in Der Proceß (The Trial ) might come from the neutrality of the context in which the often strange and/ or upsetting events unfold; in a forthcoming publication (Troscianko, forthcoming), I talk about a flattening effect in another text by Kafka, “Ein Hungerkünstler” (A Hunger Artist). The potentially emotive drama and/or weirdness of events in Kafka’s fictions like the hunger artist’s death by self-starvation, Josef K.’s execution and Georg’s self-execution, Gregor’s transformation, and K.’s perpetual inability to reach the castle are all notable for the matter-of-fact way in which they are narrated; the greatest strangeness comes from the contrast between the events’ oddity and the style of their evocation. This is something picked up on by a participant in my experiment, responding to a part of the story where one of the jackals talks about their need for peace from the Arabs: “This is quite repulsive, and doesn’t really have much to do with peace, I find; it’s just said in a peaceful way, but if you just think about it, it doesn’t sound peaceful at all” (Pt 16). Karl Richter suggests that “Emotionalisierung durch Versachlichung” (emotionalisation through neutralisation; 1983, 445) can be seen as a central technique in Kafka’s prose, arguing that the reader’s “Sensibilisierung” (sensitisation) is effected precisely through the narrator’s or protagonist’s “Sachlichkeit” (objectivity, neutrality): “das scheinbar Unbeteiligte” (apparent impartiality) of narration acts as an effective strategy for eliciting the “Beteiligung” (partiality, involvement) of the reader, whose reaction counterbalances the juxtaposition of affective event and emotionless depiction (437). In this identification of “Aussparung” (omission) as an agent of “Aktivierung” (activation) (437), Richter accounts for the particular emotional impact of Kafka’s texts, although I think that the neat oppositions of “objectivity” and “sensitisation”, “omission” and “activation”, end up somewhat limiting his argument. There are opposing forces in Kafka’s texts and readers’ responses to them, no doubt, yet I think that these oppositions coexist more than

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mutually exclude each other; there’s neither total “objectivity” nor complete “omission” of emotion in the text, and there’s no full impartiality on the reader’s part, but rather, more likely, a balance or alternation between being compelled and being unsettled.

2.

EMOTION IN LITERARY STUDIES

Several areas of cognitive literary studies have foregrounded emotion as an aspect of the experiences induced by fiction. Seminal early work by I. A. Richards (1929) has more recently been developed by scholars such as Gerald Cupchik and colleagues (e.g., Cupchik 1994; Cupchik et al. 1998), Keith Oatley (e.g., 1994, 2002), David Miall (e.g., 1988, 2011), Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (2000), Patrick Colm Hogan (2003), Suzanne Keen (2007), and Michael Burke (2011). Cosmides and Tooby point out what I remarked on earlier: that emotion is an intrinsic part of “cognition” more generally, and shouldn’t be separated from the other components because it seems somehow less serious or more woolly—or indeed more pernicious and distorting—than, say, inferential reasoning: “one cannot sensibly talk about emotion affecting cognition because ‘cognition’ refers to [. . .] all of the brain’s operations, including emotions and reasoning (whether deliberative or nonconscious), and not to any particular subset of operations” (2000, 98). In a recent exhaustive survey of the past and present status of emotion in science, philosophy, and literary studies, Keen (2011, 31–32; citing Radway 1997) notes that one common feature of approaches to literature which take account of the emotions is to demarcate the supposed emotional effects of popular fiction (skin-crawling, erotically exciting, tearjerking, etc.) from the intellectual demands of high literature. But I hope it will become clear in this chapter that, as far as I’m concerned, although there will always be variations in degree, there is no categorical distinction to be drawn between “low” literature that induces bodily responses and “high” literature that doesn’t (see also Keen 2007, x). Kafka provides a good example of writing that is both undeniably “highbrow” and also very visceral in its effects. Responding to “Schakale und Araber”, participants engaged with the story’s linguistic features and its potential symbolism in perfectly natural conjunction with their mentions of feeling sick (Pt 34) and frightened (see above), or their observations that what’s described is repulsive or “gives me the creeps” (Pt 3). More generally, as I’ll outline in what follows, all responses to literature are in part emotional, and all such emotional responses to literature are embodied and enactive. The infamous “affective fallacy” of Wimsatt and Beardsley, discussed briefly in my Introduction (p. 9), was a concept formulated in condemnation of the psychological focus of many reader-response critics of poetry, which the authors accuse of “impressionism and relativism” (1949, 31). The outpourings of emotion in some of the critics cited by the authors may well

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have needed reining in, but Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument takes a distinction between “cognition” and “emotion” for granted, and is based on a fundamentally suspicious attitude to the latter (e.g., 38, 47). The authors do acknowledge the physiological aspect of emotion, but state that “The purely affective report is either too physiological or it is too vague” (45). While it’s true that these are both dangers in criticism that takes account of the emotions (or other aspects of cognition), I don’t agree that such “reports” are therefore useless to literary study. Nor do these dangers entail that, as Wimsatt and Beardsley maintain, we have to limit ourselves to talking only about the objects of emotion, rather than the physiological or self-reported manifestations of the emotions themselves (47). Indeed, it’s unclear why discussing either verbal or physiological indicators of emotions should jeopardise or preclude (instead of obviously furthering) consideration of the more or less stable interrelations of emotions and their objects, which the authors (48) even admit is desirable. The problem of finding the right language for emotion is also highlighted by Jane Tompkins (1977, 173), who defends a “language of feeling” that is “somewhat loose, colloquial” as both appropriate and necessary to attempt to do justice to her reactions to a novel, “to convey some sense of their original strength and lack of premeditation”. But the problem isn’t just one of language: it’s a lack of a suitable analytical framework within which to analyse emotion’s manifestations in texts and readers. I hope that the appraisal theory of emotion, which I’ll set out and employ in what follows, might serve as a useful part of such a framework. What I say here about readers’ emotional responses to particular sections of text will necessarily be speculative, but I’ll try to ground my hypotheses in precise observations about the texts themselves. These observations will in turn be grounded, where appropriate, in psychological theory (itself based on empirical evidence), as well as, where relevant, in narratological distinctions.

3.

ENACTIVE EMOTION

a)

Folk Psychology

The dualist structures which I’ve discussed in previous chapters are inseparable from Plato’s tripartite model of the soul as consisting of reason, will or spirit, and the lower instincts, appetites, or emotions (Republic 439a-442d), and the long subsequent philosophical tradition of placing emotion and reason in opposition to one another. The folk-psychological view of emotions has a similarly dualist structure. According to Zoltan Kövecses (2008), the prototypical lay understanding of emotion (across the English, Hungarian, Japanese, and Chinese languages and cultures) comprises five stages, ordered in a temporal and causal sequence: the cause, the emotion (as force), an attempt at control (over an emotional act), loss of control,

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and the expression of the emotion. This model can be simplified down to “cause—emotion force—involuntary expression”, and is created and mediated by the use of conceptual metaphors like that of the pressurised container (“she blew her top, she was so furious”), which in turn are subsets of the widespread metaphor of the mind itself (or some part of it) as a container (see Chapter One, p. 43). In the metaphor of anger as an uncontainable substance, trying to keep that substance inside the container, for example, is the attempt to control the anger, while the substance leaving the container is its involuntary expression. In the folk-psychological view, in other words, action is part of the expression of the emotion, subsequent and secondary to the emotion itself, and results from a loss of control induced by the emotion.

b)

Appraisal

Just as Wittgenstein remarked on how queer it appears to call mastery a prerequisite of experience (see Chapter One, pp. 72–73), it seems paradoxical to state that cognitive appraisal is required for emotion rather than, say, precluded by (strong) emotion. In the lay model just outlined, if appraisal has a place at all, it’s in the “attempt at control” stage (i.e., the stage when the emotion is resisted), but in the account I’m about to outline, appraisal initiates the whole emotional process. This contention is supported by various findings in recent cognitive science, including research by Damasio (1999, 2003, 2006) and Minsky (1987, 2006; see also Cacioppo et al. 2000 for an overview of the psychophysiology of emotion, and Lewis 2005 on the neurobiology of emotion and appraisal, including the interactions of the two.) The following discussion is particularly indebted to the work of Nico Frijda, especially his 2007 book The Laws of Emotion, a wide-ranging review of recent research on emotion and a persuasive argument for the processual, appraisal-driven nature of emotional experience. According to the appraisal theory, for me to feel an emotion I have to have judged an object or situation with regard to what it means to me: its meaning for current and future personal concerns and actions (Frijda 2007, 93, 123). The frequently invoked Platonic split between emotion and reason thus becomes meaningless, as emotional experiences always involve cognitive appraisal or judgement: “Emotion arousal is shot through by cognition” (102), or, in the terminology used above, emotions are part of cognition and are shot through with what we may call “reason” or “rational thought”. Terms like emotion and arousal are familiar to us as designators of entities separate and even opposed to those of appraisal, judgement, and reason, but the appraisal theory holds that emotion never occurs other than preceded by its more “rational” counterpart. Emotional appraisal is an affective and enactive cognitive act, based on the same kinds of information used in what we may regard as “rational thought”: “Information becomes emotional appraisal when it consists of affect- [pleasure/ pain] and action-relevant embodied cognition” (Frijda 2007, 110). Appraisal,

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and the emotion to which it gives rise, is an inherently situated (i.e., perspectivally delimited) process, a response to “constellations of objects or situations in a spatiotemporal context” (101). So we can think of emotion, which arises out of an appraisal from a particular point of view, as essentially perspectival. In this way, emotional appraisal forms part of embodied, situated, and enactive cognition: “One is bodily and actively present in the same space as one’s emotions’ causes and effects. There are no appraisal representations. There is appraised information coming in from different sources” (107). Appraisals can be as basic as the activation of processes involved in signalling pleasure or pain by means of a physiological sensitivity like a pain sensor, but they can also involve more complex “dispositions” such as an animal’s fright at the sound of its own species’ alarm call (99), and they aren’t limited to the evaluation of a stimulus as pleasant or unpleasant, but can consist of the whole range of more complex human emotional responses. Frijda’s basic definition of the term “appraisal” is that it “refers to processes in or by the individual that intervene between events as such, and emotional experiences and other emotional responses” (97). The causal relationships between appraisals and emotional responses may be reciprocal and recursive, with emotional events themselves contributing to how the appraisal pattern develops in the form of an “emotion-appraisal amalgam” (Lewis 2005, e.g., 176). In principle, appraisals are nonconscious (Frijda 1993, 378): we don’t experience them any more than we do “mental images”. Just as we experience situations, events, people, and objects as imagined, so also do we experience them, after the appraisal, as appraised: an awe-inspiring view, say, rather than “a view” and “awe”. But to appraise isn’t simply to make an appraisal and no more; it’s a temporally extended activity that occurs in actual interaction with events—or in thought, during the imagining or recall of such events. The initial appraisal induces an emotional experience with many components, including experience of the situation/event/person/ object as appraised, positive or negative affect (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant feeling), bodily arousal, attentional orientation, a state of action readiness, and often a particular action readiness or tendency (i.e., a state of readiness to achieve a particular aim, though not for performing a specific action). The antecedent appraisal and its attendant consequences may then be followed by an additional elaborative appraisal, which, unlike its antecedent appraisal, is manifest in experience. The elaborative appraisal can, however, easily be confused with its antecedent, despite the fact that it may be quite different, even causally the reverse: this is what happens when you believe that you fell in love because your loved one is beautiful, rather than understanding that you think your loved one beautiful because you fell in love (360). The interplay of antecedent and elaborative appraisals is evoked in a cognitively realistic manner in Kafka’s story “Die Verwandlung” (Metamorphosis) when Gregor listens to his mother worrying out loud to his sister that it would be a cruelty, not a kindness, to empty his room of furniture:

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Beim Anhören dieser Worte der Mutter erkannte Gregor, daß der Mangel jeder unmittelbaren menschlichen Ansprache, verbunden mit dem einförmigen Leben inmitten der Familie, im Laufe dieser zwei Monate seinen Verstand hatte verwirren müssen, denn anders konnte er es sich nicht erklären, daß er ernsthaft darnach hatte verlangen können, daß sein Zimmer ausgeleert würde. (On hearing these words from his mother Gregor realised that the lack of all direct human speech, along with the monotony of life within the family, must have confused his mind over the past two months, for he could not account otherwise for the fact that he could quite earnestly have longed for his room to be emptied.) (DL 162) After the fact, Gregor’s elaborative, experienced appraisal is that he’d longed for the room to be emptied because he’d been confused by the lack of verbal contact with other people and the monotony of family life. But the reader is also prompted here, precisely by the mention of confusion, to interpret things differently from Gregor: the obvious alternative is to understand what he glosses as confusion to be instead the natural cognitive changes resulting from his transformation into an insect and the simultaneous changes in his behavioural preferences. The antecedent appraisal would then be “this is a good thing, because I want to be able to crawl over the walls and ceiling more easily”, making Gregor happily anticipatory. Then, by the time of the realisation quoted here, he has reappraised events as “I thought this was a good thing because I was confused by being so isolated and bored (so I am upset)”, implicitly with a new antecedent appraisal of “this is a bad thing, because I’m scared of becoming more fully an animal”. By highlighting the discrepancies between possible emotional appraisals, the text dramatises the ambivalences and fears involved in Gregor’s gradual transition to a more fully insect state, as well as his attempts to deny them. While the cognitive realism here may be compelling, the potentially unsettling aspect of this kind of evocation consists in the way that Gregor’s introspective capacities are so clearly yet subtly flagged as flawed: his access to the causes of his own mental states is presented as confused even as he supposedly identifies prior confusion in himself. The possibility of introspective insight (see pp. 192–93), and in particular the transparency of emotion to itself, are called into question by the (somewhat messy) inseparability of thought and emotion in the form of appraisal.

c)

Action Readiness

i) In All Emotion Emotional appraisals and actions are “intimately intertwined” (Frijda 2007, 109). From an evolutionary perspective, emotion is vital for allowing flexible action: it lets us respond to situations as they arise, favouring some courses of action over others without constituting a rigid schema. For example, the

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desire to be close to someone or something due to affection or attraction doesn’t rigidly dictate specific courses of acting but makes some (choosing to sit down near that person, say) more likely. Emotional response consists in the activation of a certain “action readiness”: the primary behavioural function of emotions is to simplify the interface between the sensory and motor systems (Rolls 1999, 68), in order to allow fluid transitions from the perception of stimuli to the appropriate yet flexible reaction to them. Enaction consequently has a central place in the analysis of emotion as a cognitive act, no less than it does in the understanding of vision and imagination. In a simple sense, emotion in Kafka’s fictions is often described as part of the characterisation of an action or vice versa. Action is essentially situated and perspectival, always initiated from a particular position in space and time, and the textual evocation of action therefore complements the narrative perspective in allowing the reader to adopt the perspective of the character and hence comprehend, or even share empathically, that character’s emotions. In “Der Bau” (The Burrow), for instance, the habitual actions of the creature living in its underground burrow and obsessively shoring up its defences against the outside world are described as follows: “Mit der Stirn also bin ich tausend- und tausendmal tage- und nächtelang gegen die Erde angerannt, war glücklich, wenn ich sie mir blutig schlug, denn dies war ein Beweis der beginnenden Festigkeit der Wand” (So I ran against the earth with my forehead thousands and thousands of times, all day and all night long, was happy when I hit it so hard I drew blood, for this was proof that the wall was beginning to harden; NSII 581). The protagonist’s happiness at the blood that eventually comes is both consequence and inherent part of this situated action; it’s quite the opposite of an internal emotional state which may or may not lead to action depending on whether some kind of willpower function exerts adequate control over it. Temporally, causally, experientially, the emotion is contingent on and inseparable from the action (“when I [. . .]”) and the subsequent articulated appraisal (“for this was [. . .]”) of the situation, which here seems to correspond to the antecedent appraisal; for us as readers, the emotional descriptor and the action reciprocally make sense of each other. Heinz Politzer (1962, 323) claims of this story that “The dimension of space has ceased to exist in the subterranean corridors [of ‘Der Bau’]. Infinite time prevails there”; but on the contrary, the “union of the animal with its cave”, which Politzer describes as “unworldly” (323), is completely world-bound, requiring the all-encompassing reality of the space that allows for the animal’s actions, without which there would be no such union. These actions are necessary to the protagonist’s emotional experience, and therefore to the emotional experience which may be imagined and empathically experienced by the reader. Emotion in Kafka’s fictions is, as I’ve said, frequently evoked in a cognitively realistic manner as enactive, and clarified or fleshed out by action, but when emotions aren’t explicitly named, actions aren’t always unambiguous indicators of them. There is no fail-safe one-to-one correspondence

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between a given emotion and a particular action sequence; sometimes emotions remain opaque even as their action constituents are described, and this may be partially a function of the narrative perspective. At a key point in the climactic dialogue of “Das Urteil” (The Judgement), when Georg’s father asks him whether his friend in St Petersburg really exists, not long before he condemns his son to death by drowning, the phrase “Georg stand verlegen auf” (Georg stood up self-consciously/confusedly; DL 52) gives a clear indication of his response to the question. Situational perspective here makes sense of emotion, and emotion is expressed by active engagement with this situation from a particular perspective: the predominant narrative perspective being Georg’s, the emotional “meaning” is unproblematically embedded in the action description. In contrast, just after Georg stands up and responds to his father in a conciliatory manner, his father adopts a more ambiguous stance: “Georg stand knapp neben seinem Vater, der den Kopf mit dem struppigen weißen Haar auf die Brust hatte sinken lassen” (Georg stood right next to his father, who had let his head with its tousled white hair sink on to his breast; DL 53). The appraisals we may imagine from Georg’s perspective are as lacking in transparency as those hinted at by the father’s action, which could be anything from exhaustion to a dangerously brewing fury. A defining feature of readers’ responses to many of Kafka’s texts is the uncertainty entailed by this kind of opacity of character reaction, which itself is mediated by the non-omniscient perspectival structure (which will be further discussed later on). Such uncertainty is testified to with striking frequency by the history of critical commentary on “Das Urteil”: the strange way in which events proceed (in this case, above all, Georg submitting to his father’s sentence) “gives rise to an almost endless series of questions—questions that have shaped the interpretive interaction with this text throughout the history of its reception” (Gray et al. 2005, 278). Some critics have expressed interpretive certainty: Oliver Jahraus, for instance, interprets the ongoing changes in the father-son dynamic as part of “der Modellfall eines Machtapparates am Beispiel der Familie” (the epitome of a power structure exemplified through the family; 2008, 417). But this kind of abstraction from the physical facts can provide only limited interpretive purchase given the fundamentally emotional physicality of the interactions between Georg and his father, and the ambiguities that are equally central to them. Seeking to do justice to these ambiguities, Phelan (2011), constructing an interpretive model that draws on rhetorical theory (see Chapter Three, p. 132), characterises the effects of “Das Urteil” on the reader as an interplay between “determinate ambiguity” and the more fundamentally “unfillable gap”. The reduction of emotion to action is a key element of the determinate ambiguity, which in this case isn’t necessarily impossible to resolve but demands sensitive engagement with the enactive details if its emotional meaning is to be experienced as even partially comprehensible.

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Emotional appraisal is inherently both embodied and enactive, not just in the sense of causing bodily reactions or constituting “gut reactions”, but because it inherently involves action-planning and action itself. Furthermore, potentiality is as crucial to emotional response as it is to perceptual processes, since emotions are “states of action readiness that flexibly motivate flexible actions” (Frijda 2007, 115; see also Rolls 1999, 67–68), and action readiness itself is a form of perpetual potentiality. Different emotions have different relations to potentiality, and these are a large part of what makes them feel as they do: “In joy the world appears open, can be conquered without constraint; it enables action. In frustration, ongoing action is blocked, or being set for particular sensations does not find them” (Frijda 2007, 107). Rather than emotions resulting, when insufficiently controlled, in action of one kind or another, according to the appraisal theory they aren’t only causes and effects of action, but are also essentially constituted by the potential for action. Given that emotions are mediated by environmental affordances (i.e., the perceived fitness of aspects of the environment for particular actions) and action-monitoring procedures, an appraisal of personal loss, for instance, isn’t about forming a mental representation of a certain absence; it involves becoming aware that already initiated action planning is now in vain (109). An example of this is found in “Erstes Leid” (First Suffering), where the trapeze artist’s sadness at the mere thought of performing with only one trapeze instead of two is a completely enactive experience in the mode of potentiality: “[er] sagte [. . .] schluchzend: ‘Nur diese eine Stange in den Händen—wie kann ich denn leben!’” ([he] said [. . .], sobbing, “Only this single pole in my hands—how can I live!”; DL 320). The unbearable sadness is experienced imaginatively as the actual holding in his hands of only a single pole, and simultaneously as the more limited potential which this single pole provides for future action. Imagining the feel of the single pole, as well as a whole future life lived in the absence of the greater potential promised by two, is why the experience is so upsetting. Action readiness as potentiality is an inherent part of emotional response, and often leads to particular actualised action. In “Die Verwandlung”, for example, Gregor feels anxious in his high-ceilinged, empty room once his mother and sister have taken some of the furniture out, and this kind of anxiety makes some actions more likely than others: he might freeze in indecision (awaiting further stimuli to action), or begin to look around the room for more concrete sources of his unease, or, as in fact happens, he runs and hides: “[er] eilte [. . .] unter das Kanapee, wo er sich [. . .] gleich sehr behaglich fühlte” ([he] rushed [. . .] under the sofa, where he [. . .] immediately felt very comfortable; DL 145). The action readiness here is a desire to find somewhere to hide, not specifically to run under the sofa in the corner; in this new position, as a consequence of action, the emotion then shifts from anxiety to comfort. Enaction (whether actual or potential) is cause, effect, and constituent of emotion to the extent that none of them can usefully be considered in isolation from the others. The

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enactive element may be no more than action readiness, or a tingle down the spine, or a momentarily racing heart, but this is true of all emotionally charged situations. The description of Gregor’s response to his sister’s violin playing is an oft-quoted passage of “Die Verwandlung” and involves the feeling of being “gripped”, a standard component of responses to art and especially narrative art. In Gregor’s case, the appraisal of the music as gripping ultimately manifests itself in substantial action: “War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff? Ihm war, als zeige sich ihm der Weg zu der ersehnten unbekannten Nahrung. Er war entschlossen, bis zur Schwester vorzudringen” (Was he an animal, since music gripped him so? It was as if he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been longing for. He was determined to make his way forward to his sister; DL 185). Gregor’s love of the music is felt as a physically compelling movement, and drawing on the appraisal theory of emotion, we can separate this simple observation out into three distinct components: the music is experienced as appraised (i.e., as gripping), it activates in Gregor a longing readiness for movement towards the goal of an unknown sustenance, and this readiness is then manifested in a specific decision to act, to move physically towards his sister, which is soon carried out. In many instances of more “aesthetic emotion”, this final stage never occurs, but the component of enactive potentiality remains central to understanding them. ii) In Aesthetic Emotion When a reader experiences an emotion during the reading of a text, whether empathically or in personal response, the emotion isn’t directly induced by sensory stimuli; it’s connected with sensory input only insofar as seeing the words on the page activates an imaginative response to what is textually evoked, which in turn prompts an emotional response. This “aesthetic emotion” has two characteristics, either of which can, on its own, apply to other sorts of emotions: firstly, the relationship with sensory experience is indirect in this way, and secondly, the action readiness of the response rarely develops fully into action. Both criteria, however, are distinctions in degree, not in kind: plenty of real-life emotions are induced by report rather than the events in question, and the response needn’t always actually be carried out in real-life situations—while it can indeed be partially carried out when we read. Appraisals are, as I’ve said, perspectival in the sense of being spatiotemporally situated, and the context causing the emotion may, in aesthetic and other responses, be at one remove from the context in which the emotion is experienced. Aesthetic responses can also, however, close down the cognitive distance between the fictional and the emotional situations. Herman refers to the capacity of literature to transport or immerse the reader (themselves both metaphors of spatial displacement) as a “deictic shift” (drawing on Segal 1995) “from the here and now of face-to-face interaction, or the space-time coordinates of an encounter with a printed text or a cinematic

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narrative, to the here and now that constitute the deictic center of the world being told about” (Herman 2002, 14). Empirical research suggests that a cognitive displacement really does happen: story-consistent beliefs and positive attitudes towards sympathetic characters increase, while negative responses are reduced, when readers are highly transported (Green and Brock 2000). The main point here is that as readers make emotional appraisals mediated by empathy with fictional characters, the appraisal process is predicated on perspectival situatedness just as is its real-life counterpart. If you’re empathising with Georg as you read “Das Urteil” (The Judgement), you may well feel an involuntary shudder or tingle down your spine when you read about how his father, having thrown off the covers and stood up on his bed, accuses Georg of betraying his friend and parents because of lust for his fiancée: “Und er stand vollkommen frei und warf die Beine. Er strahlte vor Einsicht” (And he stood perfectly free/unsupported and kicked his legs. He was radiant with insight; DL 57). If so, your tingling shudder is a central component of your emotion, rather than just an epiphenomenal accompaniment; it’s part of the situated, perspectival action readiness appropriate to fear (e.g., heightened attention, the desire to move away). Even though we don’t yet have any indication of Georg’s response as we read these lines, we may readily imagine the appraisal, from his perspective, that “my father is frightening”. This appraisal registers the interaction of variables of present embodiment (Frijda 2007, 107–8): from where I stand, in this light, at this distance, given our shared history, I feel that my father there, moving thus, standing thus, is frightening; this person and this part of the world have this meaning for me, now. If Georg’s emotional response involves his palms feeling sweaty and his longing to run away, the reader’s empathic response may also involve less fully developed forms of the same physiological response and action tendencies. Action is thus crucial to understanding aesthetic emotions. Being moved by art, for example, may involve the intense action readiness of interest, possibly in combination with other more specific ones: the deference of giving oneself over to something greater than oneself, or the contemplative reflection or enthusiasm for self-improvement variously induced by beauty (Frijda 2007, 38–39). Participants in my “Schakale und Araber” experiment spoke of being “really taken in by this language now” (Pt 14) and of how “I think this poetic language does have quite a positive influence on me” (Pt 3); both convey the specifically active force of specifically aesthetic (linguistic) qualities of the text, with the implied responses on their part of being enthralled and feeling/acting positively. To state categorically, as Noël Carroll does, that “artworks, in the standard case, command attention, not action” (1997, 201) is to rely on a questionable distinction: one of the main functions of attention is to select stimuli relevant to a specific form of action, while action contexts in turn strongly determine the allocation of (visual) attention (Humphreys and Riddoch 2005), and attention itself usually involves basic actions like turning the eyes and/or head and body. The

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enactive nature of a reader’s engagement with a fictional text has long been recognised under the heading of “participation”, but now developments in research on emotion in psychology and philosophy make it more viable than previously to investigate emotion in the aesthetic context (N. Carroll 1997, 190), and to add more psychological depth to the concept of enaction in aesthetic emotion. Emotional responses to art, more so than in other areas of experience, are enactive in the mode of potentiality. Aesthetic emotions are defined by “virtual action tendencies” (Frijda 2007, 39), and in this sense, are to reallife emotions as imagining is to seeing: the same neural and behavioural processes are activated, but only indirectly by sensory input, and they needn’t be developed into full action (actually looking, actually running and hiding, and so on). Just as the imagining of a castle, say, has eye movements and other exploratory behaviours in common with seeing a castle, so also may emotionally responding to a castle involve (along with the relevant affect and the experience of the castle as appraised) activation of the action tendencies, say, of flight or exploration. When we’re caught up in a novel, our peripheral responses to its plot twists and haunting images may be minimal, but this doesn’t justify, as some commentators (e.g., Currie 1990; Walton 1990, 249–54) have suggested, a categorical distinction between aesthetically induced emotions and those induced by other stimuli. Indeed, the so-called “paradox of fiction” (see Levinson 1997, 22–27, for a helpful review of the debates surrounding it)—why (and whether) we feel “real emotions” for characters and situations we know to be fictional—is based on a simple, obviously mistaken premise: that we can respond emotionally only to things we believe to be real. When we engage emotionally with fiction, nothing happens qualitatively differently from many emotional experiences that make up “real life”. Every day you experience emotions stimulated by situations and events that aren’t part of your here-and-now sensory experience: a friend tells you how upset and jealous he feels to see a woman kissing another man and you empathise with him. When your friend tells you this, what you feel is the same sort of thing, mediated by the same kinds of mechanisms, as when you read a narrative about a man being made upset and envious thus. And just as you’re aware to some extent that your friend might partially or completely be making up this story, when you read fiction you’re aware that aspects of it may derive from real-life experiences. Your responses to real life and to fiction are on a continuum: the amount and type of information you have and the extent to which you believe in the reality of the other’s emotion vary, but in both cases you may feel what you imagine to be the other’s emotions, and this, as well as any other emotional reaction, is a real emotional response (Frijda 2007, 38). Whether an emotion is “true” or “false” is a less helpful question than whether various components are or aren’t involved. There is no ontological gulf here: direct presence simply isn’t necessary to emotion of any kind. Blakey Vermeule (2010, 47–48) notes that social reasoning “continues when people

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are out of range”, gives the example that we find it hard to stop interacting with people close to us after they die, and concludes by asking, “Do literary narratives take advantage of our inability to admit that someone we know is truly dead?” Emotional engagement at a distance is all too easy. More generally, perhaps the best-known argument in evolutionary studies of literature is the notion that creating and consuming fictional narratives is an evolutionarily adaptive behaviour because of the opportunity they provide to practise the theory-of-mind skills we use with real people (Zunshine 2006). Although it’d be hard to maintain that fiction provides faultless how-to manuals for theory-of-mind practice (or anything else), it does seem highly plausible that one of narrative’s evolutionary benefits would be the opportunity to engage with a wide range of people and situations without the inconvenience or danger of confronting them in real life. A variety of arguments have also been put forward with regard to the role of literature as a structure for managing information and making sense of the world (see, e.g., Boyd 2009; J. Carroll 2004; Sugiyama 2001; Wilson 1999). For all these reasons, positing a categorical distinction between real-life and aesthetic emotions is neither necessary nor useful.

4.

(EMOTIONAL) ENGAGEMENT WITH OTHERS

How do we actually engage emotionally with other people? Does it involve simulation of the other person’s emotion(s), a kind of mind-reading, or something else entirely? There are three main theories of social cognition which try to explain how it is that we can understand other people: “theory theory”, “simulation theory”, and “interaction theory”, the last of these much newer than the others (see Chesters, forthcoming, for a cogent summary in connection to literature, which I draw on here). “Theory theory” posits a “theory of mind” that operates through the attribution of mental states (including thoughts, desires, and intentions) to someone else, and the inference of these mental states from externally observable behaviours, with the attributions and inferences based on folk-psychological generalisations and predictions. As such, “theory theory” is essentially dualist: mental states and events (even one’s own) are non-perceptible, internal, and only indirectly inferable. This kind of mind-reading through inference also occurs in “simulation theory”, but its foundation isn’t a folk-psychological theory of mind; instead, it happens by means of a simulation of the other person’s actions, followed by a simulated experience of the mental state which gave rise to those actions, and a subsequent attribution of this mental state to the other person. Simulation might happen at the explicit, personal or the implicit, subpersonal level, and might be deliberate or automatic, but however conceived of, it raises a fundamental question about empathic understanding: how can I ever attribute a mental state different from my own to another person (Gallagher 2012, 363)? “Interaction theory” involves no indirect inferential route through theory

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of mind or simulation, but assumes that consciousness, given its situated, embodied, and enactive nature, is always directly and at least partially accessible through externals of context and interaction: “Accessing your thoughts, beliefs and desires thus becomes, for Interaction Theory, less a matter of reading your mind than attending to the world we already share” (Chesters, forthcoming). Although deliberate attempts at mind-reading or simulation do sometimes occur, especially when events deviate from expectations, this explanation raises fewer problems as an account of the default mode of social cognition than do “theory theory” and “simulation theory”. According to “interaction theory”, when we perceive another’s action we don’t undergo a simulation (i.e., a replication) of that action; rather, we prepare ourselves to respond to it (Gallagher 2011, 107). This means, when it comes to literature, that there are different ways in which we can and do enactively respond to people (in this case fictional characters). In Shaun Gallagher’s words, we engage with them “in the mode of an anticipatory kinaesthetics”: “one might say that the work of art falls short of actuality, or, perhaps more positively, the work of art transcends actuality in that it presents me with enactive possibilities that remain only possibilities that cannot be actualized” (2011, 108). In the sphere of social cognition as a whole, therefore, as in the realms of perception and emotion, potentiality is central to the experience of enactive engagement with the fictional world. Gallagher suggests that there is no “priming” for action or interaction, but only an experience of “the purely possible or maybe even the impossible” (109), which distinguishes aesthetic from real-life experiences; if we don’t feel the need to make such a categorical distinction, however, we may just as well say that possibility is simply experienced as such: as the potential for actual action, and not in any specially purified form. Empirical work on eye movements when viewing visual art, involving participants being asked to tell a story about a painting of men working in a field (Holsanova 2006; see also Johansson, Holsanova, and Holmqvist 2006) offers support for the idea that social cognition in an aesthetic context operates enactively and through potentiality: participants’ eye movements, recorded as they told the narratives, preceded the mentioning of items in those narratives, and the narratives often also picked up on action possibilities which the image left potential. One neural mechanism that may contribute to embodied empathic reading experiences features so-called “mirror neurons”. This type of neuron was first found in the lateral ventral premotor area of macaque monkeys, and discharges when a monkey performs a particular grasping movement, for example, or observes the same movement being made by another monkey or the experimenter, or even simply looks at an object grasped in the past (di Pellegrino et al. 1992). A broad network of neural activity compatible with the presence of mirror neurons has since been identified in humans and interpreted as the result of an efference copy signal (Gallese 2001, 41; see also Chapter One, p. 78) that originally served to help the organism achieve better control of action performance. Such activation suggests that

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perception and action converge even at the neural level, and for this reason mirror neurons have also been termed “visuomotor neurons” (e.g., Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004, 169–70). Maxim Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese (2002, 133) speculate that the activity of these neurons could create “a feeling of empathy or familiarity in the observer”, because the observed action causing the mirror-neuron discharge must by definition be an action in the observer’s behavioural or imaginative repertoire; this is an application and extension of “simulation theory”. The same problem, however, regarding actual access to other people’s minds is entailed here, and a troublesome equation of personal-level with subpersonal processes (i.e., experienced simulation with neural activation) is hard to avoid. A less problematic way of thinking about the involvement of mirror neurons in interpersonal engagement is as “an integral part of an enactive perceptual system that contributes to our intersubjective interactions” (Gallagher 2011, 99), but without involving simulation. Gallagher (102–8) presents cogent reasons why, despite the general consensus, it doesn’t make sense to think of mirror-neuron activity as simulation, in particular outlining findings that go against the “matching” requirement of “simulation theory”: for around two-thirds of mirror neurons, neural response patterns are significantly different when executing a movement and observing someone else executing it. This means that we should think of them in terms of complementary rather than similar or matching actions—as contributing to a subject’s enactive response to the possibilities afforded by someone else’s actions (107). Although we may therefore not want to make as strong a claim as Jean Decety and Jennifer Stevens’s (2009, 15), that “The fundamental ability of the motor system to resonate when perceiving actions, emotions, and sensation provides the primary means by which we understand others and can therefore be considered as a basic form of intersubjectivity”, the mirror-neuron system may well contribute to how intersubjective interactions are modulated. Although neuroscientific findings about mirror neurons are easy to over-interpret, especially for commentators from other disciplines, and have attracted criticism of various kinds (e.g., Dinstein et al. 2008; Hickok 2009), they do offer another perspective not only on how enactive perception operates, but also on how the interconnections between perception and emotion are configured. There’s now experimental evidence that mirror-neuron function extends (in different brain areas, particularly the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex) to the experience and observation of emotional states such as pain (Singer et al. 2004; Avenanti et al. 2005; Botvinick et al. 2005) and disgust (Wicker et al. 2003), as well as to reading about actions (Speer et al. 2009). There are, in addition, some data to indicate that people who are more empathic according to self-report questionnaires have stronger activation in the mirror systems for actions, specifically auditorily perceived hand and

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mouth actions (Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, and Keysers 2006), and emotions, specifically gustatory emotions (Jabbi, Swart, and Keysers 2007).

a)

Empathy

Feeling that we experience what someone else experiences, or “empathising”, is often seen as the most important emotional response in the literary context. Empathy, broadly defined, occurs when “we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” (Keen 2007, 5), whereas identification, by contrast, takes place when we feel that we temporarily are the character in question, so I’ll treat identification as a limit case of empathy more generally. The component parts of both phenomena are far from simple, and may include recognition of similarity, imitation, admiration, introjection, and projection (Oatley and Gholamain 1997, 276). As for what elicits them, Keen argues that the requirements for empathic response may be relatively minimal, and needn’t include the explicit naming of the emotional state to be empathised with: “Character identification and empathy felt for fictional characters requires certain traits (such as a name, a recognizable situation, and at least implicit feelings), but dispenses with other requirements associated with realistic representation. [. . .] readers’ empathy may be swiftly activated by a simple sign of an active agent. [. . .] empathy for fictional characters may require only minimal elements of identity, situation, and feeling, not necessarily complex or realistic characterization” (2007, 68–69, author’s italics). In one scene from Der Proceß, Josef K. meets a woman when he goes back to the hall where he had his first interrogation, and talks to her for a while before she’s summoned away by a law student. Here the emotion is clear without being made explicit, and empathy is rapidly prompted by means of the minimal characterisation of the protagonist, as well as through the specific enactive perspective from which he engages in the situation: Sie streichelte noch K.’s Hand, sprang auf und lief zum Fenster. Unwillkürlich haschte noch K. nach ihrer Hand ins Leere. [. . .] Der Student sah kurz über die Schulter der Frau hinweg nach K. hin, ließ sich aber nicht stören, ja drückte sich sogar enger an die Frau und umfaßte sie. (She kept on stroking K.’s hand, jumped up and ran to the window. Involuntarily, K. groped for her hand in the emptiness. [. . .] The student looked briefly over the woman’s shoulder towards K., but didn’t let himself be put off, indeed he pressed himself against the woman more tightly and embraced her.) (P 83–84) K.’s perception of the student’s eagerness—the brevity of his backwards glance, the closeness of his embrace—is inseparable from the preceding sensation of being stroked and then not. Action and perception make the emotion of jealousy on K.’s part and of nonchalant satisfaction on the student’s

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part manifest despite their implicitness, and encourage readers to empathise in an enactive fashion, specifically with K.’s act of groping futilely after her, anticipating his movements and preparing to respond to them in the mode of potentiality. Keen (2007, 79–80) suggests that situational empathy, a specific subtype of empathy, occurs at moments of irresolution in circumstances or relationships, and relies on personal experience of an equivalent situation more than does empathy for characters, requiring for this reason “much less effort in role taking and imaginative extension” (79). In reading this scene, therefore, if you’ve never seen the woman or man you’re attracted to being seduced by someone else, you may be less able and inclined to empathise. Empathic emotions, however, whatever the form they take, are by no means the only kind of aesthetic emotion, and the reader’s emotional experience may involve, in addition to the empathically experienced emotion as the character, an emotional response to that emotion as the reader. Such a response may involve sympathy, for example—or indeed anger, sadness, or envy. Amy Coplan (2004, 149) stresses the mutable quality of readers’ emotional responses to fiction: “The reader is neither fixed nor immobile; he is neither forced to mirror exactly the characters’ experiences nor forced to observe the characters’ experiences from the outside. Through the process of empathic connection, the reader simulates a character’s experience, but because he simultaneously has his own thoughts, emotions, and desires, his overall experience involves more than just that simulation”. Conceiving of our cognitive engagement with others in terms of anticipatory kinaesthetics rather than simulation reduces the starkness of the distinction between empathic and non-empathic emotions presented here—feeling empathy with Josef K., say, is being prepared to respond to his world as he does rather than replicating his internal state— but the basic point remains valid that any response to a fictional text is typically a mixture of more and less empathic emotions which occur in combination (Tan 2000, 120) and co-vary over time. (The reader is of course not obliged to respond emotionally at all, but a reading experience that involves no emotional response, as may occur, for instance, during skim-reading, is both atypical and lacking in meaningful engagement.) In the example case from Der Proceß, we may empathise with Josef K.’s futile jealousy and its enacted manifestation, but we may also pass judgement on it and the anger and impatience which accompany it: “ihm [wurde] das leise Zwiegespräch am Fenster zu lang, er klopfte mit den Knöcheln auf das Podium und dann auch mit der Faust” (he [grew] tired of the quiet dialogue at the window, he rapped his knuckles and then his fist on the podium; P 84). We may do so in ways that feel judgemental in a more or less emotional manner—in anger or impatience on our own account, or in a more dispassionate assessment of him—but any response arising from an appraisal of K. and his actions will be to some extent inflected with emotion and its qualities of enactive potentiality.

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REFLECTION

In addition to feeling this mixture of more and less empathic emotions, readers of fictional texts are also likely to be prompted by certain textual features to reflect on their own emotional responses—to appraise their own emotional appraisals. A fiction is primarily a narrative of human action (Oatley and Gholamain 1997, 273), and reading is a participatory activity mediated by the imagination: we enactively imagine doing, seeing, and so on, from the perspective of the character(s), and we enactively appraise in empathy with them. But we reflect on experiencing too, when something (or even nothing in particular) in the text prompts us to take up an external perspective on this imagined experience, and we therefore carry out two alternating and interacting forms of appraisal as we read. This happens in real-world experiences too, and may be assumed to occur all the time in fictional characters’ experiences: Josef K. may reflect on his jealousy as soon as he bangs his fist on the podium, and ask himself, even if only briefly, whether this is the best response to the situation. We’re unlikely to assume, however, that this adoption of a reflexive stance occurs in fictional experiences unless we’re given textual indications of its happening, since the folk-psychological understanding of emotional experience is of something that overwhelms us and forestalls precisely our capacity for reflection. The situation when reading, however, is likely to be more disjunctive than in unmediated experiences, given that the words of a fictional text can almost never be attributed to the temporal present of the focaliser, and that fictional worlds don’t require ongoing full-bodily engagement and response as the real world does. Fiction thus has the structural potential to prompt more reflexive instances than may occur in real life, resulting in an experience which is compelling, as we enactively engage, but may also be unsettling as moments of reflection accumulate, through perspectival shifts away from the primary focaliser. Kafka’s texts manifest an especially distinctive form of this duality, in the realm of emotion as well as in that of visual perception, and in both cases it’s explicable with reference to enactive cognition. A basic constituent of conscious experience seems to be a degree of pre-reflexive self-consciousness, which includes a minimal sense of self (known in the Phenomenological tradition as “ipseity”) that enables people to use the first-person pronoun and report on their experience (Gallagher and Zahavi 2010; Legrand 2007). Minimal self-reference also encompasses body awareness, a tacit kind of awareness that “I can” (or “I can’t”), sustained by the kinaesthetic activation that produces “an implicit and pervasive reference to one’s own body” when one performs an action like reaching out and touching something. Gallagher and Zahavi (2010, § 4) note that this results from the potential for action as well as action itself: “the body attains self-awareness in action (or in our dispositions to action, or in our action possibilities) when it relates to something, uses something, or

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moves through the world”. That I’m not aware of every detail of what my body is doing is a function of how my body awareness is fully integrated with the intentional action being performed (see also Chapter One, p. 78, on efferent signals and awareness, and Chapter Three, p. 123). Reflexive self-consciousness occurs when I reflect on this pre-reflexively self-conscious state: when I happily think about how I caught the tennis ball just now, for instance, rather than just being pre-reflexively aware of catching the ball as I do it. One of the factors making “Die Verwandlung” unsettling is that actions which are usually experienced pre-reflexively—like scratching an itch, for example, or getting out of bed (DL 116–17, 121–24)—are experienced reflexively because of Gregor’s unfamiliarity with his new body. Brain-imaging data support the pre-reflexive/reflexive distinction, and suggest that neural activation varies between pre-reflexive and reflexive self-reference, the former involving activity in the somatosensory cortex and the insula (both of which receive homeostatic afferent signals in several sensory modalities), the latter involving stronger activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (Esslen et al. 2008). Although Michaela Esslen’s and her colleagues’ study cited here provides some interesting insights into the embodied nature of pre-reflexive self-awareness and its distinction from reflexive self-awareness, however, it does assume that pre-reflexive and reflexive self-awareness can be unproblematically mapped on to the linguistic processing of the first-person pronoun and adjectival self-descriptors respectively, which seems overly simplistic. In the more complex condition of reading extended fictional texts, this kind of second-order conscious experience may be induced by any number of textual structures: particularly, I suggest, those complicating the maintenance of a consistent narrative perspective on a singular experiencing subject.

6.

EMOTION, ACTION, AND PERSPECTIVE

a)

Perspective and Enactivism

The filter through which the reader engages with all aspects of fictional characters’ cognition is narrative perspective, and in this section I’ll be focusing on how the interrelations between emotion and action are textually configured through its mediation. I’ll suggest that the modulations of perspective characteristic of Kafka’s style can be seen as an extension, in narrative practice, of the principles yielded by enactivist ways of understanding perception and emotion, and that these modulations have particular emotional effects on readers crucial to the experience induced by Kafka’s texts. Traditional Realism (and popular fiction, which is strongly informed by Realist principles) usually exploits a stable and singular perspective in order to convey a “perceptual reality” directly and cogently to the reader. Kafka’s works achieve this goal too, I think, but in a cognitively realistic manner, rather

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than in one that corresponds to our expectations about cognition (specifically about the stability of perceptual perspectives). The perceptual reality of the fictional world is evoked in Kafka’s fictions firstly by conveying perception and emotion as enactive, and secondly through a perspectival technique based on multiplicity and instability. The ocular perspective often privileged, explicitly or tacitly, in narratological work on point of view or narrative perspective, as well as their successor focalisation (Niederhoff 2011), has no fundamental primacy in enactivism. Quite apart from all the distortions to which the retinal image is subject, seeing doesn’t happen solely in the eyes, or even in the connection between the eyes and brain, but in the body containing both, in the continual interaction of the eyes and brain and nervous system and muscles, the vestibular system, the proprioceptive system, and so on. Seeing is interacting with the world from a given position within a given context: vision is situated and “deictic” (in the sense of being demonstrative and controlling action; see Chapter One, p. 85), not panoramic or cartographic. Kafka’s texts often lack the stability entailed by ocular-centric/neurocentric assumptions, which also tend to posit a single originary location of perceptual consciousness—in the brain, and based on retinal projections; there is no single, pictorially stable viewpoint whence the characters see and we imagine seeing. Kafka’s use of free indirect style1 in particular, and the striking frequency of perspectival shifts in his fictional texts in general, bear structural similarities to the consequences of the enactive nature of perception and cognition for perspectival stability and singularity. As we saw in Chapter One (pp. 80–81), enactivism denies the notion of a “theatre of consciousness”, a point at which everything comes together in the brain and “reaches consciousness”; it similarly dispenses with any internal homunculus (the audience in the theatre) registering everything. As a result, the folk-psychological idea that perspective can be stable and singular, and the pictorialist tenet that everything comes together in a place in the occipital cortex where representing equals seeing, become problematic: the perceiving “self” is not located, as folk psychology might have it, just behind the eyes or in the centre of the brain, nor is it towards the back of the brain where the visual cortex is, as might be inferred from pictorialist theories of vision, or in any other precisely definable place. It’s long been known that visual information is processed in multiple cortical areas and via multiple parallel pathways (Kandel and Wurtz 2000), but it’s now possible to go further and say that visual processing is dispersed amongst many sensory, physiological, and cognitive stimuli and responses, in complex feedback and feed-forward loops, and attentiveness to the nature of first-person experience may confirm this dispersion in experiential terms (Blackmore 2012). Vision remains perspectival in the sense of being situated and deictic, but it’s never statically so, and beyond a certain point it becomes impossible to pinpoint a centre at which everything converges or from which it all emanates. Kafka’s use of narrative perspective, which incorporates numerous shifts between more or less well-defined perspectives, can

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be read as enacting in narrative practice the multiplicity and instability of perspective that enactivism entails. Kafka’s fictional texts narratively emphasise the perspectival consequences of enactivism, and this may have certain effects on how engagement and reflection alternate in the reading experience. The emotional response that Kafka’s texts induce may be especially compelling due to the cognitively realistic evocation of perception and emotion as inherently enactive; but the perspectival vacillations may also slightly unsettle us, making us pause and reflect, more or less briefly and more or less explicitly, on the nature of this enactive engagement, before being plunged back into it. Perspectival instability may in itself have a powerful emotional effect, always the case when one’s expectations are challenged—both the folk-psychological expectations about the nature of visual perspective and the readerly expectations about how narrative perspective tends to operate. Combined with our expectations about visual perception more generally (as discussed in the previous chapters), and our expectations about how emotion will be evoked as a counter to rationality and as a potentially overwhelming force to be resisted, as well as our assumptions about unified subjectivity, our expectations relating specifically to perspective create a multifaceted challenge for us as readers. The effect may be a pleasurably expansive experience: openness to or acceptance of what has come and may come (see Frijda 2007, e.g., 69–70, 85, on “acceptance wriggles” ranging from devoting attention to sniffing). Pleasure can arise too from difficulty encountered and overcome (83), and Kafka’s works present a substantial difficulty likely to be successfully assimilated; as Ed Tan says of artworks in general, they offer a “challenge mixed with promise” (2000, 120). And this challenge can be conceived of in specifically enactive, appraisal-based terms: works of art may initiate an “emotional action tendency to spend attention and effort [in the search for understanding], which has control precedence [. . .] in the sense that it persists in the face of distracting stimuli” and is experienced in the form of an emotionally inflected “interest” (120, author’s italics). This meaningfully interested response to a challenge can also entail vulnerability, however, as the repeated mentions by experimental participants of the story being disturbing testify: “disturbed” and “disturbing” alone came up twelve times, in six participants’ responses to the text or definitions of the term “Kafkaesque” (Pts 3, 16, 8, 22, 34, 30). On the other hand, we may take pleasure in reading Kafka partly because it makes us feel more than usually vulnerable. Overall, these multiple kinds of challenge to folk-psychological and hence readerly expectations may induce an enactively compelled yet unsettled ambivalence in how the reader responds.

b)

Perspective in Literary Studies

Idioms of perspective and point of view—“What’s your perspective on that?”, “From my point of view”, “It was hard to keep a sense of perspective”— conflate vision and thought (see also Chapter One, p. 41) and imply that comprehension depends on the adoption of a particular visual perspective,

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and by extension that a vision-like process is at issue. We’ve seen in Chapter One (pp. 30 and 86) that imagining is on a perceptual continuum with seeing, and I’ve argued here that enactive seeing always happens from a particular perspective, if without the precision and singularity of an ocular- or neurocentric account of vision. Dennett (1990, 298) suggests, indeed, that there’s no such thing as conceiving without imagining—that is, engaging perceptually, and thus necessarily from a perspective. “Narrative perspective”, then, is crucial to how we imagine and more generally interact with the fictional world; it’s the primary means by which the reader’s view of the fictional world is modulated. As Grünbaum (2013, 134) puts it, “the main function of focalization lies in the way it can determine the parameters for the reader’s sensory imagination of the narrated world”. This in turn is fundamental to how we emotionally engage with the fictional world, since emotional experience is inseparable from other aspects of cognition, and is as fully embodied and situated—and therefore perspectival—a process as seeing and imagining. When Kendall Walton (1990, 340) says “I do not see any reason to assume that all visualization must be from a point of view”, he apparently misses the point that this “visual” element of imagining which he highlights necessitates precisely viewing, from a given point in space and time (see also Grünbaum 2013, 123). Such essential situatedness is why we associate traditional pictorial realism in the visual arts with clarity and singularity of perspective: when we look at a painting rendered in linear perspective, we feel as though we’re “really seeing” the long corridor, say, stretching away from us to its “vanishing point” in the distance, and thus that it “really exists”, more so than if we look at, say, a floor plan of the same building. Similarly, in literature, when we read that “K. looked down the long straight corridor”, or, indeed, “I looked down the long straight corridor”, we have more of an impression of “really seeing” than when we read that “there was a long straight corridor”. The perspectival situatedness of literary texts can best be discussed within the narratological framework of “focalisation”, which is the perspectival delimitation of what is given about the fictional world, while “focalisers” are the agents doing the focalising (in Kafka’s texts, usually fictional characters), and “narration” refers to the words of the text which convey what’s focalised. In order to define and demarcate the ways in which the fictional world is presented to the reader, as fictionally experienced and linguistically communicated, we need a terminology that allows us to discuss how focalisers interact—both those personified within the fictional world (“intradiegetic”) and those manifested only through the verbal elements of the narration (“extradiegetic”)—and how these interactions are expressed in the narration. “Perspective” is a useful qualifier for the act of focalisation, embracing “both the physical and the psychological points of perception” (Bal 2009, 146). Using this terminology, free indirect style, perhaps Kafka’s most famous perspectival technique, will be characterised in the following terms: third-person narration of an intradiegetic focalisation that alternates or merges more or less often with focalisation by other focalisers, either intra- or extradiegetic.

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Perspective in Cognitive Literary Studies

There’s a widespread assumption, discussed by Willie van Peer and Henk Pander Maat (2001, 230) that the more “inside” information a textual perspective provides about a character, the more likely it is to induce sympathy and identification. But how does narrative perspective actually affect real readers? A number of studies using a variety of methodologies have begun to answer this question (see also Appendix 2). Gerrig (1993, 59–63) summarises a variety of studies, mostly using non-fictional texts, investigating the effect of perspective on causal attributions and recall, while Bortolussi and Dixon (2003, ch. 6) outline some relevant work on perspective and spatial mental models before setting out their vision for a psychonarratological approach to focalisation. They include a taxonomy of textual features and reader constructions relating to focalisation, and report on a study which found an effect of specific perceptual access on readers’ assessment of fictional characters (including a measure of inclination to sympathise) (194–98). Keith Millis (1995), meanwhile, showed an increase in reading time when participants read a sentence including a shift in perspective, which suggests that readers do in fact incorporate perspective into their mental models of the fictional world. Dixon and colleagues (1993) have also demonstrated (for frequent readers) that emergent effects in textual appreciation—things that make readers appreciate (enjoy, think highly of, recommend) a text more the second time around—are dependent on textual indicators of narratorial ambiguity such as questions or qualifiers like “perhaps”, “maybe”, and “might”. David Bryant, Barbara Tversky, and Nancy Franklin (1992) investigated readers’ adoption of internal versus external perspectives on narrative scenes by having participants read narratives describing a scene and probing them for the locations of objects mentioned in the narrative. When an internal perspective is given, response times to “front” questions are faster than to “back” ones, and this provides a method of determining what perspective a reader has adopted when the textual perspective is unspecified. Finally, van Peer and Pander Maat (1996) found a weak effect of increased sympathy for characters whose thoughts and feelings are internally focalised, while a follow-up study (van Peer and Pander Maat 2001) found an effect of focalisation on explanation of characters’ behaviour, with “internal” focalisation (providing access to characters’ thoughts and feelings) causing readers to prefer, for example, explanations involving “legitimate” over “egoistic” motives. There’s still much to be investigated in this area, but the assumption that narrative perspective is actively processed by readers and has a range of significant effects appears to be borne out in empirical practice.

d)

Perspective in Kafka Studies

“Perspective” is something of a minefield in Kafka studies. The proliferation of visuospatial metaphors that characterises critics’ attempts to define the reader’s relation to K. in Das Schloß (The Castle) and Josef K. in Der

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Proceß, for instance, bears witness to the perspectival complexity of these novels: the perspective is “confined” or “constricted” or “(uncomfortably) close to” the character, a “(narrow and uncertain) viewpoint” or “monopolised/mono-perspectival narration” is “obtrusively visible”, defined by “congruence” with or conversely by “distance” or “separation” from the protagonist, or is somewhere on the “borderline”; it’s “over Josef K.’s head” or has “a standpoint superior to” him, or it positively “departs from” or “deserts” him (Sheppard 1977, esp. 397–98; Robertson 1985, 124–25; and Robertson 1993, 67–69; both citing others as well as creating their own formulations). This plethora of metaphorical terminology also reflects the sheer importance of literary “perspective”, especially when considering readers’ responses and works like Kafka’s. As Walton has put it, “Subtleties of emphasis and differences in the ways appreciators respond to depictions of various sorts will be clarified and explained by what is or is not fictional [i.e., true within the fiction] about from where, and how in other respects, we see” (1990, 340). This is true of both pictorial and verbal representations, and indeed, Walton’s own distinction between the two rests on a dubious claim that a lack of “richness and vivacity” characterises the “perceptual games of make-believe” we play with literature (295–96). Here I’ll situate the reader’s potential emotional responses to the focaliser(s) on a spectrum from “distanced” at one end, via “empathic” (as defined at p. 177) and “closely empathic”, to “identificatory” at the other. By using only a limited number of spatial metaphors, and trying to avoid doing so in an overly polarised or impressionistic way, I hope to make them productive. Friedrich Beißner, the most famous commentator on the subject of narrative perspective in Kafka’s fictions, coined the term “Einsinnigkeit” (usually translated as “monopolised perspective”) to characterise their basic perspectival structure: we see (and know) nothing except what the protagonist sees (and knows). Beißner not only claims that narrator and protagonist are unified in Kafka, a claim which has since been countered, but he also goes further and suggests that the narrator becomes identical with the fictional events: Der Abstand zwischen dem Geschehen und dem Erzählen ist aufgehoben. [. . .] Kafka läßt dem Erzähler keinen Raum neben oder über den Gestalten, keinen Abstand von dem Vorgang. [. . .] Es gibt nur den sich selbst (paradox praeterital) erzählenden Vorgang: [. . .] daher die oft bezeugte Wirkung des Beklemmenden. (The distance between event and narration is annulled. [. . .] Kafka allows the narrator no space beside or above the figures and no distance from events. [. . .] There is only the sequence of events that is narrating itself (paradoxically in the past tense): [. . .] hence the oft-attested effect of oppressiveness.) (1952, 34–36) Again, metaphors of lack of space (“beside” and “above”) are employed, combined here with a spatial metaphor of time (the first “distance”) and

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a temporal and logical paradox (events narrating themselves and already in the past), to try to account for the striking effects of Kafka’s sometimes “claustrophobic” style. I’ll suggest in what follows, however, that the effect is often less claustrophobia than dispersal, and that the precise temporal or spatial distance between the narrator/narration and what’s narrated matters less than the fact that it’s constantly shifting. Kafka’s perspectival style, as I’ll demonstrate with textual examples below, is characterised by numerous shifts away from the primary focaliser and intrusions of an additional focaliser. But in the majority of cases, these shifts are brief and subtle, and some ambiguity remains as to whether there has really been any intrusion or inconsistency. The subtlety of these fluctuations is so delicately preserved that Kafka reception was long defined by one of two opposing but equally categorical characterisations of his use of perspective. Kafka critics of the late 1920s (in Born 1983) took the novels to be instances of third-person omniscience: Manfred Sturmann referred to Kafka as a “große[r] Epiker” (great epic writer; 172), while Oskar Baum deemed him a godlike author who withholds information from the reader as well as from the character (163–64); Max Brod and others also spoke of how “anonym” (anonymous) and “fremd” (foreign, alien) K. and Josef K. are to the reader (e.g., 170, 237). Then Beißner’s (1952) postulate of “Einsinnigkeit” (monopolised perspective) reversed the consensus, and the novels were for some time considered to be examples of consistently upheld singular perspective, whether narrated in the first or the third person: “so bleibt ihm [dem Erzähler] kein andrer Platz als in der Seele seiner Hauptgestalt: er erzählt sich selbst, er verwandelt sich in Josef K. und in den Landvermesser K.” (There is no place for him [the narrator] other than in the soul of his central figure: he narrates himself, he transforms himself into Josef K. and into the land surveyor K.; 29). The critical pendulum swung from self-evident omniscience to self-evident singularity, and only subsequently has it generally been agreed, and cogently demonstrated, that what’s really going on is something in between (though see Kim 1983 on “Einheit der Perspektive” [unity of perspective], in accordance with Beißner). Ingeborg Henel (1973, 418), for one, has noted how in Der Proceß, “Wenn Kafka eindeutig aus der Perspektive des Helden erzählt, so bedeutet das nicht, daß er den Standpunkt des Helden vertritt” (If Kafka narrates from the perspective of the hero, that doesn’t mean he represents the hero’s standpoint). Commentators such as Keith Leopold (1963), Winfried Kudszus (1973), Richard Sheppard (1977), and Roy Pascal (1982) have helped flesh out the details of Kafka’s in-between technique, and this aspect of his narrative construction has continued to generate discussion of how the intrusions of “[e]in neutraler Erzähler” (a neutral narrator) into “dem vom Protagonisten Empfundenen” (what is experienced by the protagonist) allow or compel the reader to acquire distance from the protagonist, and contribute to the effect of a discrepancy between the protagonist’s perceptions and reality (Müller 2008, 523–24). Considering the effects of this in-between technique on the reader, Robertson (1985, 95) has suggested that Der Proceß may

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create an effect composed of a “precarious combination of sympathetic with ironic identification”. He advocates the notion of (potential) “congruence” (a term originating with Henel [1973]) as preferable to the relative simplicity of uninflected “identification”, and maintains that the dual effect is caused not least by Kafka’s use of narrative perspective: “the reader does not identify with the hero but rather is offered a perspective congruent with that of the hero”, and “the narrative technique of Der Prozeß gives the reader a perspective congruent to K.’s but superior to it” (94, 124–25). A. E. Dyson (1987, 71) arguably goes too far when he attributes “a curious—almost Brechtian—alienation effect” to the narrative “neutrality of tone” in Der Proceß and the moments at which “the narrator’s reflections depart from K.”, but straightforward identification is highly unlikely too.

e)

Free Indirect Style (in Kafka)

The narrative mode of free indirect style is a characteristic element of Modernism. Pascal (1982) has outlined the progressive shift from the impersonal narrator of epic and romance to the personal narrator of the novel: the complication of this “personal” form by means of free indirect style occurs already in Austen’s works, and influentially in Flaubert’s, becoming more common from the early twentieth century onwards, in Joyce, Woolf, and of course Kafka.2 He endorses Hartmut Binder’s earlier conclusion that Kafka’s texts (like Flaubert’s) are structured by the duality of “the impersonal narrator who describes events from outside and the characters themselves whose experience of these events is given, through various devices, in their own terms” (11–12). This is already a significant departure from Beißner’s claim that there’s no separation in Kafka between narrator and character, and in practice, Kafka builds on the basic dual form to create even more complex effects. In Kafka’s version as well as its more conventional incarnations in Modernism and since, “free indirect style” denotes a freedom to dispense with the usual textual indicators of thought or perception—“he thought”, “he saw”, and so on—in order that we should experience the fictional world as the character does, yet with the distancing effect of third-person and pasttense verb forms. To use a visual metaphor, we see both “through the character’s eyes” and “over his shoulder”, and Walton makes a similar analogy between free indirect style and the “point-of-view shots” in film: when what the character sees is shown along with the seeing character, this has a comparable structure and effect to free indirect style (1990, 378–79). An example of this technique is found in the evocation of how K., having stopped on his first attempt to get to the castle, meets the schoolteacher and then decides to walk a bit further: Wenn er sich in seinem heutigen Zustand zwang, seinen Spaziergang wenigstens bis zum Eingang des Schlosses auszudehnen, war übergenug getan.

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism So ging er wieder vorwärts, aber es war ein langer Weg. Die Straße nämlich, diese Hauptstraße des Dorfes, führte nicht zum Schloßberg, sie führte nur nahe heran, dann aber wie absichtlich bog sie ab [. . .] plötzlich stand er still und konnte nicht mehr weiter. Nun, er war ja nicht verlassen, rechts und links standen Bauernhütten, er machte einen Schneeball und warf ihn gegen ein Fenster. (If he forced himself, in his current condition, to extend his walk at least as far as the entrance to the castle, that would be more than enough. Thus he went on again, but it was a long road. In fact the street, this main village street, did not lead directly to the castle hill, it only led close to it, but then curved away as though deliberately [. . .] suddenly he stood still and could not go on. Well, he wasn’t quite abandoned after all, to right and left there were peasants’ cottages, he made a snowball and threw it at a window.) (S 21)

Here the description of K. walking is framed by moments of free indirect discourse before and afterwards, prompting us to interpret the whole description of the road curving away from the castle as K.’s own sensory perceptions rather than to treat them as the privileged knowledge of an omniscient narrator, even though there is no grammatical imperative for us to do so. The middle section, indeed, functions as an instance of what narratologists such as Seymour Chatman (1978, 204–5) and Palmer (2004, e.g., 48–49) refer to as “free indirect perception”, and Bernhard Fehr (1938) first identified as “substitutionary perception”. This is a specific form, like free indirect discourse itself or “substitutionary speech”, of the general category of “substitutionary narration and description” or “free indirect style” (98). Fehr notes that while what he calls a “perception indicator” (P.I.) may sometimes precede the sentence(s) of substitutionary perception (e.g., “I looked at the count. He was sitting at the table smoking a cigar”; 99, author’s emphasis), it may also be merely hinted at or completely absent (see also Pascal 1982, 24–25). An action may serve as an alternative marker of free indirect perception: in Fehr’s example, “Getting there connotes seeing things and people there” (1938, 100, author’s emphasis). This can mean that if only a verb phrase of movement like “walking back” is given, and no verb of perception, “the P.I. is in fact only absent on paper. Its place is in the imaginative reader’s mind who, being told that the actor went back to the hotel, will silently add: ‘and there he looked round’” (100). The reader’s enactive imaginative response, in other words, automatically involves the association of action with perception; actions like K.’s beginning to walk again can, as I’ve discussed in Chapter Three (pp. 127–28), provide linguistic cues to read evocations of the fictional world as evocations also of the focalising character’s perceptions (and hence the rest of their cognition). By means of free indirect perception, “the whole consciousnesses of characters can be expanded to include descriptions of aspects of the storyworld that are seen from their perceptual, cognitive, and evaluative point of view” (Palmer 2004, 49).

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When we imagine the standing and thinking, the walking, the throwing of the snowball, therefore, do we “see” K. as well as what he sees? If we do, we’re more likely to see the back of his head than his face (see Figure 2.2b), and we’re unlikely to see much by way of the specifics of appearance, given that he’s never really described at all; although some of the participants in my experiment on responses to the start of the novel (Appendix 2) gave him some kind of hat, and two drew a rucksack (see Figure 2.3) and suitcase respectively, minimal definition in the body and other features seems (especially right at the start) to be the rule. If we don’t see K., we’re presumably identifying with K. at least in terms of the visual perspective adopted, although as we’ll see later in this chapter the identification needn’t be straightforward. The subtle oddity of what’s being perceived here—the road that seems to curve deliberately away from the castle—increases the equivocal nature of our connection with K., making us question the status of what he experiences. All these factors encourage a response of compelled engagement despite or indeed because of the fact that it leaves so much implicit. The standard form of free indirect style encourages the reader to enter a cognitive continuum with the focalising character’s cognition (including thought, emotion, perception, and action), because there’s no definable separate narrator or focaliser to distance us from it. Some commentators argue for a dual-voice definition in which the character’s and the narrator’s perspectives are both perceived by readers as present, others argue for a single-voice interpretation in which either the character’s consciousness is all we have or the character’s subjectivity is subsumed by the narrator’s (see Sotirova 2006, 109, for a summary); the empirical data on what real readers actually do are limited (109–11), and Sotirova’s study yields no statistically significant difference between readers’ tendencies to interpret free indirect style as dual or single (120–21). In Kafka’s version of it, however, interpretations are complicated by the periodic intrusions of, or shifts to, a separate if not easily definable focaliser. The effects of these intrusions or shifts can be thought of as to some extent cumulative in that they may well create marked differences in readers’ responses in accordance with their number, frequency, and variety. In this sense isolating discrete (and short) sections of text and using them to illustrate how experiences are induced in the ongoing interaction of text and reader over paragraphs and pages can’t help but betray the processual nature of the emotional and interpretive experiences in question. However, the effects can undoubtedly also occur singly, as they must in short texts where there may be only one perspectival shift, and what I’ll be attempting to do later in this chapter is to hypothesise possible effects on response of specific textual shifts in perspective, rather than to give exhaustive accounts of experiences of reading entire texts. Employing short excerpts to exemplify key moments of change, I hope to convey at least a partial impression of how Kafka’s texts make readers feel. Grünbaum (2013, 116) has argued that normal readers don’t pay attention to micro-level linguistic structures, suggesting that the cognitive

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costs of task switching make us unlikely to engage in a “Restless search for the best interpretation”, but while it’s certainly true that not every reader will always notice every shift of perspective, depending on how quickly and carefully they read, their consequences are nonetheless likely to be registered in knock-on effects on both interpretive and experiential aspects of reading, especially as they accumulate during ongoing reading. As Grünbaum points out, the evidence against a particular interpretation of narrative perspective can accumulate to the point where the reader is forced to re-evaluate it, and I’m interested here in the moments of subtle questioning that might, in Kafka, precede a realisation of perspectival multiplicity.

f)

Perspectival Instabilities in Kafka

While shifts in perspective can be brought about in all kinds of ways, those which I’ll discuss here involve cognitive-perceptual negations, adverbials, and subjunctive “as if” phrases. Stanley Corngold, in The Fate of the Self (1986, 171–72), gives a systematic list of different kinds of “breaks in perspective” in Kafka: shifts in personal pronouns, tense shifts, the pluperfect, verbs of “reflexive self-consciousness”, “verbs used to report, as opposed to stage, a scene”, “adverbs stipulating ‘objective’ time spans and localizable places”, and “reported perceptions of things outside the ken of the protagonist”. In their totality, he suggests, these breaks indicate the presence of a “superior narrator [. . .] holding out to us the promise of intended meaning”, yet they don’t “fall into a satisfying or indeed intelligible pattern”, and by way of explanation he asks us to entertain the notion of a deliberate and yet arbitrary narrative act (172–73, 174–75). Corngold is thus able to avoid labelling some perspectival shifts “deliberate” and some “accidental”, as Leopold (1963) does when discussing Der Proceß, and indeed calling shifts accidental just because they’re minor and inconspicuous. Although speculations as to authorial intention may be relatively justifiable when it comes to added, deleted, or abandoned sections, they are otherwise fairly hard to substantiate. The danger is that the critic invents an authorial strategy (e.g., Kafka was trying to maintain Josef K.’s perspective in the experiencing present) and then imposes it in circular fashion on textual features that supposedly provide evidence for rather than against it, which means that the breaks in perspective must be mistakes on Kafka’s part. Instead, I’ll give some examples of how shifts in perspective in Kafka’s works combine with other cognitively realistic textual features relating to emotional appraisal and action readiness, and try to show how all of these together may have effects on readers’ emotional responses to characters and situations. I’ll suggest in particular that perspectival shifts may cause pre-reflexive emotional engagement with the fictional world and characters to alternate with reflexive engagement with characters’ emotions and the reader’s own responses, which may contribute to the overall experience of being both compelled and unsettled that I argue is induced by Kafka’s cognitive realism.

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Kafka’s early unpublished story “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (Description of a Struggle) features numerous instances of perspectival contradictions, often ambiguous, less often incontrovertible. Things are repeatedly described as unseen or unnoticed from the primary focaliser’s perspective: “Dabei begann er weiter zu gehn und ich folgte ihm, ohne es zu merken, denn mich beschäftigte sein Ausspruch” (Then he began to walk on and I followed him, without noticing it, for I was absorbed by his statement; NSI 61); “Ich sah nicht, daß er erstaunt war, als er sich mitleidig zu mir bückte und mich mit weicher Hand streichelte” (I didn’t see that he was astonished as he bent down compassionately over me and stroked me with a gentle hand; NSI 67–68). In the context of first-person narration, such negations can be interpreted as evidence of a disjuncture between past (experiencing) and present (narrating) selves, and hence as an example of double intradiegetic focalisation, that is, of a text narrated by a first-person narrator looking back at his past self. In this text, however, there’s no consistent double framework, and in these cases the things that might possibly have been worked out by the narrating self after the fact seem rather too minor (especially the first one, the following without noticing) for him to have had any obvious reason to. The negations therefore have a slightly unsettling effect, by hinting at the existence of an omniscient extradiegetic focaliser who sees and notices what hasn’t been seen or noticed by the character, even as the character seems otherwise to be acting as both narrator and focaliser. In both of these instances of perspectival contradiction, the focaliser is presented as divided between competing sensory inputs and actions (walking and listening, seeing and feeling), as decentred, dispersed amongst competing cognitive tasks. What’s most striking, though, is not that the focaliser doesn’t notice something because he’s busy with something else, but that the “fact of the matter” about what was or wasn’t seen or noticed is and remains ambiguous. Just as I discussed in Chapter Three (pp. 152–59), when we “ask the question”, the answer is constructed retrospectively (I didn’t see, I didn’t notice), but given that these things are mentioned in the text and there’s no obvious other source of information, they seem by implication to have been seen/ noticed. The alternative conclusion prompted by this impasse is that there’s simply no answer: he neither saw nor didn’t see, or he both saw and didn’t see, so this isn’t a meaningful distinction independent of the “probe” applied later (the act of narrating the story). This is reminiscent of the example of the chiming clock (Chapter Three, p. 154), in which, although it feels like you’ve only just become aware of the chimes, you can nonetheless, if you try, say how many there have already been, yet had you not asked yourself that question, you would never have been “conscious” of them. In neither case is there any definitive answer to be had about whether a given experience was “conscious” or not. These inconspicuous lines in “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” raise the possibility that something described as unnoticed nevertheless was, and thereby cast into doubt the status of that noticing, even while not ruling

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out the more reassuring option that it’s simply the narrating self working things out after the fact. The story’s other perspectival shifts, however, are harder to account for, including some of the disorientating adverbial and “as though. . .” constructions: Kaum waren wir ins Freie getreten, als ich offenbar in große Munterkeit gerieth. Ich hob die Beine übermuthig [sic] und ließ die Gelenke lustig knacken, ich rief über die Gasse einen Namen hin, als sei mir ein Freund um die Ecke entwischt, ich warf den Hut im Sprung hoch und fing ihn prahlerisch auf. (We had hardly stepped out into the open than I apparently/obviously became very cheerful. I raised my legs in high spirits and made my joints crack comically, I called a name out across the alley, as though a friend had disappeared around the corner, I threw my hat up as I jumped and caught it ostentatiously.) (NSI 57) The use of the adverb “offenbar” (apparently, obviously; see also pp. 208–9) in the context of a narrator-focaliser is startling: how can an emotional state be only “apparent” (or indeed need stating as “obvious”) to the experiencing subject himself? The act of calling, too, which is compared only conditionally to the calling of a vanished friend, similarly begs the question of where precisely the uncertainty, the implicit qualification, of the comparison lies: is he who calls imagining seeing and hearing himself from the outside, or is his very sentiment and intent invisible to himself, even though the next moment, when he describes his hat catching as ostentatious, both are quite evident to him? Both of these techniques—the cognitive-perceptual negations and the “as though. . .” constructions—render the textual perspective multiply uncertain in cognitive terms, as the world is evoked from perspectives that relativise themselves. This mutual relativising of perspectives happens in ways that can be aligned with the consequences of conceiving of cognition (including vision and emotion) as enactive. The sensorimotor theory of visual consciousness entails a certain way of thinking about first-person access to one’s own visual experiences. Since seeing is something we do, through the ongoing interaction of brain, body, and environment, not an inner (mind or brain) state, or even a state at all, there’s no such thing as introspection, in the sense of looking inwards at something occurring there: “first-person reflection on the character of experience would not consist in introspection at all, but rather in attentiveness to the complexity of the activity of perceptual exploration” (O’Regan and Noë 2001a, 965, authors’ italics; see also Ryle 1990). This principle extends to other aspects of enactive cognition, and emotion, too, is an experience of the object as appraised, of a state of action readiness, of positive or negative affect, and of bodily arousal; like vision, it’s inherently a way of responding to the environment. As such, “becoming very cheerful” isn’t a matter of having an internal state that—as in the pressurised container of folk psychology (see p. 165)—determines through irresistible accumulation

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subsequent possible actions like throwing one’s hat in the air. There is thus no single unified object of introspective attention in emotional (or other) experience, and this means in turn that the possibility of introspection itself becomes questionable, which is just what the equivocation in this textual example (“I apparently/obviously became very cheerful”) evokes. Experience is no longer the internalised preserve of the introspective self, but something of which actions, visible from the outside, become crucial components—in cheerfulness, the energetic high-spirited walking, for instance, and less prototypically the comical cracking of the joints. The calling of the name “as though a friend had disappeared around the corner” is a natural extension of this, constituted as much by externalised movement and sound as by the original dispositional intention; indeed, the notion that a freely willed intention precedes action is challenged by current cognitive (neuro)science (see Introduction, p. 9). In these ways, the equivocal evocation of the focaliser’s access to his own emotion and action can be understood as cognitively realistic in how it questions the folk-psychological beliefs in introspective access to internal states and freely willed intentions to act. Again, these equivocations could be accounted for partially by the discrepancy between focalising and narrating selves, yet the same caveats as in the previous case apply: lack of a consistent framing device and relative triviality of the past states/actions. The reader may therefore vacillate between empathic response and the reflexive distance induced by cognitively realistic but unexpected equivocations in the first-person form. Kafka’s technique here, as so often is, is precariously poised between (simpler) extremes. We saw in Chapter Three how he usually gives just enough, in terms of descriptive specificity, for us to think we can imagine the fictional world—or never quite to get to the point of needing to check whether we really can. A similar balancing act is performed with perspective: Kafka prevents the reader from feeling either completely comfortable or completely uncomfortable. We think we know where we are, “where we stand”, before something gently forces us to acknowledge that, actually, we’re not sure after all. This is a crucial part of the compelling yet unsettling experience that I suggest is a feature of reading Kafka’s texts. The opening chapter of his first novel, Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared, retitled Amerika by Max Brod), nicely illustrates how the complexities of perspective interact with emotion and action and prompt a periodic shifting into second-order reflection on the reader’s part. The narrative begins in what appears to be omniscient external focalisation, as Karl arrives by steamer in New York Harbour. Direct thought is one clear indicator of this omniscience, because it denotes access to someone else’s private thoughts, and the second paragraph of the text reads: “‘So hoch’, sagte er sich und wurde, wie er so gar nicht an das Weggehn dachte, von der immer mehr anschwellenden Menge der Gepäckträger, die an ihm vorüberzogen, allmählich bis an das Bordgeländer geschoben” (“So high”, he said to himself, and not thinking at all about leaving, he was gradually pushed up against the railing by the swelling throng

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of porters who were passing by; V 7). A verb of cognition in the negative is another major indicator of omniscience in third-person narration. The reader therefore doesn’t stand as Karl on the ship’s deck, but rather, is encouraged to observe him standing and thinking, knowing what he isn’t thinking about. The second part of the sentence, however, is a dynamic evocation of Karl’s situation, from his own perspective: context-dependence is inherent in the participial adjective “swelling” and the verb “passing by”, and we feel Karl’s bewilderment, as situationally manifested; it’s an experience to which his own perspective is intrinsic. These three words force us to share the visual perspective which orientates them, otherwise they make no imaginative sense. Again there’s an equivocation, a vacillation so rapid that it might feel like a duality: after being encouraged to adopt a more distanced, external perspective on Karl, the reader is then drawn into feeling empathy with him via the imaginative experience of a dynamic situation evoked only through Karl’s own perspectival experience of it. The instabilities of these imaginative perspectives also entail, at some level, a second emotional response: the uncertainty and self-reflexive questioning which result from the instabilities that prompt dissociation as well as empathy. A more conventional use of extradiegetic focalisation, such as we might find in a nineteenth-century Realist text, would represent the scene more like this: “The ship was crowded with porters, and Karl was gradually swept up by them. He felt scared and bewildered, but at the same time a little exhilarated.” Kafka instead creates for us the ship (which hasn’t yet been explicitly mentioned) in the form of the people and the railing towards which Karl is pushed and by which an emotional response is induced in him. The emotional appraisal remains implicit: in the course of the narration, the facts— the perceiving and the feeling and the situation in which they take place—are enacted as part of the evocation of the action of being pushed up against the railing, and thus needn’t all be stated. In place of a verbal picture to prompt the creation of a “picture in the head”, with some action descriptors to convey what happens within that pictorial setting, and some emotion tags to help infer the correct affective consequences, you’re forced to enact the empathic (anticipatory, responsive) appraisal of this situation as a whole: imagining the action means imagining the situation, and imagining the situation means imagining the perception and empathically experiencing the emotion. If this passage is successful, the reader won’t be able to help enactively experiencing all of this through the ongoing cognitive engagement that the words compel even as they’re read. Our consideration of the shifts in focalisation in some of Kafka’s shorter prose has therefore yielded examples of how these shifts may cause difficulty for the reader in determining, at any given point, precisely who is (or indeed how many people are) “seeing” or “speaking” (e.g., Walton 1990, 376; Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 73). Situation and action are repeatedly evoked in ways that prevent us from identifying any singular perspective, whether verbal, visual, thought-based, or emotional. In the final section I’ll draw out the argument which has been emerging from the cases I’ve looked

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at so far: that this ambiguity serves not to confuse and frustrate the reader superficially, but to force the reader to question, more or less explicitly, the certainties which this ambiguity seems wilfully to disregard. These certainties concern selfhood, and are perhaps even more deeply ingrained than those regarding perception that I’ve addressed in the preceding chapters.

7.

CHARACTER, SELF, EMOTION, ACTION, AND PERSPECTIVE

I’ll now try to put the pieces of this book’s jigsaw puzzle together by arguing that, in the context of the enactive evocation of vision and emotion, Kafka’s modulations of narrative perspective and evocations of the fictional characters in ways explicable with reference to enactive cognition result in a comprehensive destabilisation of common concepts of self. We use the word “self” to mean many different things: the bodily site of subjective sensory experiences; the “I” that makes decisions and takes responsibility; the sense I have of being here in my head, looking out at the world; the “I” who has lived a life up to this moment, the “present”, and will continue to live it in the future. We rarely consider the heterogeneous nature of the concept, however, and amalgamate its constituent parts as convenient, for instance in fusing the ongoing temporal existence of a discrete body as “self” with the moral “self” who exercises free will. The tenacity of the concept of an ideally unified and persistent self is evidenced, for example, by the enduring appeal of Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis. But the point made in Chapter One (p. 42) regarding pictorialism in vision can also be made here: the prevalence of this concept of self is the effect, not cause, of our ability (perceptually, physiologically, physically) to act efficiently in the world. All of the mechanisms allowing us to do so, rather than the conceptualisation to which they give rise, are “fit for purpose”. While many literary texts, most notably those in the Realist tradition, take these multiple meanings of “self” and work on the assumption of their unity, Kafka, by contrast, separates them out and reminds us that we’d known they were multiple all along. Key to this process is the means by which the “me looking out at the world” dichotomy is dissolved: showing subjective experience for what it is—intrinsically as much “world” as “self”. Kafka’s works create an experience of this sort of perceptual and existential coherence, but it’s precarious, a matter not of interaction between two poles, or of their stable unification, but of interaction that subsumes those poles without unifying them.

a)

Characterisation and Self in Kafka

In folk psychology, character is something that a self has, whether defined by “kindness”, “selfishness”, or “good humour”. The notion of a fictional character is balanced between character in this sense and self: a fictional character

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is a self, but is generally evoked as having a specific character too. In Realist literature, as in folk psychology (at least when it comes to assessing others’ behaviours; less so with one’s own), the character that fictional characters have is typically overestimated as a cause of behaviour (Currie 2011), whereas a complex interaction of personality and situation—the latter in many cases more significant a factor—is in fact responsible for determining behaviour (see e.g., Kihlstrom 2013 on the “interactionist” perspective). Narrative perspective affects the reader’s tendency to attribute behaviour differentially to character and situation, in that sympathy for a character is driven to some extent by internal focalisation of that character; in internally focalised texts, readers are more likely to appeal to situational factors to explain the internally focalised character’s “egoistic” actions and more likely to invoke dispositional factors to explain the “egoistic” actions of other characters (van Peer and Pander Maat 2001; see also p. 184). Kafka’s texts don’t prompt a conventional strategy of action interpretation, either by straightforward internal focalisation or (as I’ll discuss below) by a Realist roundedness of character; instead, focalisation is unstable and characterisation operates by the enactivist principles I’ll outline in what follows. Both these factors contribute to how his fictions may destabilise readers’ concepts of self, not least by troubling their instinctive ways of making sense of behaviour. Numerous Kafka scholars (e.g., Politzer 1975; Sweeney 1990; Grimm 1994; Krauss 1996) have considered the notion of selfhood an important feature of his works. Walter Sokel, for instance, in “Kafka’s Poetics of the Inner Self”, defines “the paradox that underlies Kafka’s [. . .] poetics” as the attempt to “[lift] the inner world into language, and thus into articulated consciousness”, even while aiming at the “dissolution of the self” (2002, 78). He presents the two poles of language and self as ultimately irreconcilable, the closest thing to resolution being that “The inner self conquers the word by ‘filling it out’” (67), but following on from my observations in Chapter Two (e.g., p. 103), I argue that, instead, while these tensions are apparent in Kafka’s fictions, language is the means by which the hermetic nature of the “inner self” or “inner world” and all its concomitant polarities are collapsed. Kevin Sweeney’s “Competing Theories of Identity in Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’” describes “Die Verwandlung” as a “philosophical exploration of the nature of self, personhood and identity”, beginning with a “psychologically incomplete” transformation; dualist conceptions of self cede to behaviourist and materialist views, which are replaced in turn by a “social-constructionist theory of the self and personal identity” (1990, 23). The story’s progression from one theory to the next may not be as clear as Sweeney suggests, yet the argument that Kafka troubles our sense of self in specific ways relating to mind-body-world interaction is persuasive in helping to account for the destabilising effects of this and other works. Given that character is such a substantial constituent of the notion of self, the extent to which fictional characters are “rounded” in their characterisation naturally affects how self as a concept is evoked or undermined.

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Critical debate has engaged extensively with questions of characterisation and its absence in Kafka’s narratives, including with its effect on the reader, and discussion of Der Proceß in particular has yielded various proposals as to the cognitive-emotional connection established between Josef K. and the reader, which may be applicable to his other works. Some critics have suggested that Josef K. remains an anonymous cipher, others that he constitutes an “everyman” figure, and others still that his anonymity, his averageness, or simply the (not quite correctly) assumed “Einsinnigkeit” (monopolised perspective) of the narration leads us to “fill in” all the “missing” detail ourselves. Beda Allemann (1963, 238), for example, claims that the reader’s basic restriction to what Josef K. experiences necessarily entails “eine Identifizierung mit dieser Hauptfigur [. . .], die sonst nur schwer erklärbar wäre” (an identification with this protagonist [. . .] which would otherwise be difficult to explain), and furthermore considers this process of identification possible only because the reader “fills in” the gaps in the character quite without realising it: “[d]er unbefangene Leser wird gar nicht bemerken, wie sehr er diese Figur ständig mit seinen eigenen Empfindungen und Regungen ‘auffüllt’” (the naïve reader won’t notice at all how much he is constantly “filling” this character with his own sensations and emotions; 238). Allemann remarks only a paragraph earlier on how “Die Spannung, die den Roman zusammenhält, [. . .] ein erzählerisches Ausharren vor der inhaltlichen Unbestimmtheit des Gegenstandes möglich machen [muß]” (The tension that holds the novel together [. . .] must make possible a narrative endurance of the indeterminacy of content; 238), and connects this with the limitations imposed by Kafka’s perspectival form, but the concept of “identification” (or what more properly should here be called projection) directly contradicts the point about structural “tension” and indeterminacy. The tension created by this novel, as in most of Kafka’s other fictions, can’t be resolved simply by the projection on to the main character of the reader’s own feelings; rather, it’s preserved through the perpetually upheld illusion that unproblematic projection is possible. Kafka’s style, one could say, creates a constant temptation to project, as well as to empathise to the point of identification, which the texts never allow to be entirely achieved—and perhaps never even let us reach the point of feeling we need to achieve. Neither anonymity nor averageness does justice to the “character” of most of Kafka’s protagonists, and in most cases our responses aren’t as simple as either alienation or identification. At the outset of Das Schloß, for instance, K. is little more than a cipher, an everyman with a non-name, and almost everything about him is left unspecified: his full name, his appearance (we are told only that he is “recht zerlumpt” [ever so shabby; S 11]), all but the sparest anecdotes of his past life and “Heimat” (home; e.g., S 17–18, 49–50). In this respect, Kafka’s mode of evocation of fictional characters differs from the more substantial characterisation provided by many Realist authors such as George Eliot or Charles Dickens, but this doesn’t mean that empathy or even identification is prevented; many readers imagine themselves in the position

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Figure 4.1

Being K.

of K. at the novel’s mysterious opening. In my empirical study, whether or not participants included K. in their drawings provided a clue to the perspective which they had instinctively adopted: many didn’t draw him at all, but configured the picture from “their own” point of view as K (see Figure 4.1). The original version of the early sections of Das Schloß, before a shift from first-person to third-person narration had been effected, may have caused more consistent reader responses in this regard (my empirical study is intended to help establish this); the initial use of “ich” (I), however, has left traces in the revised version, adding to the equivocal nature of the novel’s perspectival effects (see Cohn 1968 on the revisions, given in S/A 120–85). We therefore repeatedly find ourselves tempted to fill in K. by projecting our own traits on to him, yet as the novel progresses, the fragments of information we’re given about K. contribute to prevent our feeling that we need to do so. Scholarly readings have made much of the etymological and symbolic potential of the Landvermesser (properly “land surveyor”, but the German vermessen

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can also mean “foolhardy” or “presumptuous”, or “to mismeasure”; e.g., Dowden 1995, 30), and have, as a result, seen K. as an incongruously modern hero in a village tale which is also “Gothic romance, classical myth, religious allegory, and social satire” (Boa 2002, 62). Whether or not we perceive these kinds of additional layers of meaning in K.’s “character”, however, that character, such as it is, emerges primarily through situation—the gradually accruing sum of numerous situated instances of perception, appraisal, action, and reaction.

b)

Self, Character, and Perspective

Preserving a concept of unitary self is difficult if there’s no stable or singular perspective from which that self looks out at the world. “My” experience of reading Kafka and, therefore, imagining the protagonist seeing things, doesn’t incontrovertibly consist of only “Gregor’s” or “Georg’s” thoughts or perceptions. “I” think that I, as a singular subject, imagine them—but do I really? Is it possible to “imagine as” more than one subjectivity at once? Is there even any such thing as the constant and singular subject? What does this mean for our concept of the self, of “I”? Again and again when reading Kafka’s fictions, we can neither fully “empathise” with the main character nor assume a dispassionate external perspective on him. The narratives are structured primarily by the actions, thoughts, perceptions, and emotions of the main focaliser, yet numerous subtly unsettling shifts, hinting at the existence of other focalisers, render us unsure of precisely what constitutes the cognitive or visual basis of our imagining. We’re often not quite certain what we feel either, and this prevalent uncertainty can be powerfully unsettling. Furthermore, Kafka’s fictions never really give us privileged access to the workings of his protagonists’ minds, as Realist texts often do, so that we’re confronted not only with shifts of focalisation but also with focalisers whose capacities for introspection (in the first person and free indirect style) or capacities for insight into others’ minds (when the focaliser is extradiegetic) are limited. This may result in an impression of aloofness even in a first-person narrative like “Schakale und Araber” (“my feelings towards the participants have completely changed several times while I read everything so far—apart from maybe the narrator, who seems so distant and aloof”; Pt 3), or in a sense of fascination at the scarcity of insight: “I find it intriguing, fascinating, to be guided through the story without ever fully understanding what the narrator feels” (Pt 18). Even if we do to some extent empathise with the character—with Karl, say—our emotional response can’t occur with all the self-evidence of situated embodiment as Karl: we can’t respond with complete empathy, since there’s no initial, singular experience with which an empathic connection can be established. This kind of effect is induced by many of the textual examples I’ve already discussed in this chapter, but I’ll now treat in a little more detail one story that demonstrates it particularly clearly.

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One of Kafka’s early stories, part of the Betrachtung (Meditation or Contemplation) collection and entitled “Kinder auf der Landstraße” (Children on the Country Road), involves numerous salient perspectival shifts, and hence causes numerous shifts in the reader’s emotional response, as well as more or less explicit reflections on what it means to be a narrative “I”. The basic perspective is that of a narrator-focaliser, but just as in all of Kafka’s first-person stories, the narrative “I” isn’t straightforwardly sustained. A page into the story, the “ich” (I) gives way to an unspecified “wir” (we), and you as reader are forced to shift the focus of your empathic feelings: “Wir durchstießen den Abend mit dem Kopf” (We penetrated the evening with our heads; DL 10). If you do engage empathically, you are no longer “I” but “we”, obliged to imagine through the perspectives of multiple subjects, and even as the distinctions between subjects dissolve, so do other differences: “Es gab keine Tages- und keine Nachtzeit” (There was no day- and no nighttime; DL 10–11). In imagining the ongoing movement here, it’s easy to get caught up in the imagining, yet any sense of self is dispersed, so that the empathic imagination has no singular point of reference: “Bald rieben sich unsere Westenknöpfe aneinander wie Zähne, bald liefen wir in gleichbleibender Entfernung” (Now our waistcoat buttons were rubbing against each other like teeth, now we were running at a steady distance from each other; DL 11). This dispersal is enhanced by the strong simile “like teeth”, which transfers the rubbing of teeth in one’s own mouth to the rubbing of bodies against one another; the strange out-of-body effect counters any solid sense of togetherness. And then, when you’ve barely had time to get used to this new multiplicity of subjects, the “wir” (we) gives way in turn to a generalised “man” (one), the shift occurring this time in mid-sentence: “Alles war gleichmäßig erwärmt, wir spürten nicht Wärme, nicht Kälte im Gras, nur müde wurde man” (Everything was equally warmed, we felt no warmth, no cold in the grass, one only grew tired; DL 11). The German man is frequently used as an alternative to wir, sounding much less stilted and unnatural in this context than one does in English, but the shift from one to the other is nonetheless noticeable: action is still multiple, communal, yet even this multiplicity is now slightly oblique; man, unlike wir, doesn’t unequivocally convey inclusion. You, as the reader, can no longer be certain of who is perceiving, and you cease to be able to judge with any certainty what’s perceived. Who precisely is it who feels neither warmth nor cold? Is the answer to this question the same as to the question of who feels tired? Are you meant to keep imagining the subjective responses of the original “ich” (I), multiplied some number of times? How can this “ich” be sure that all the others feel likewise? How can you be sure? If the reader can’t identify a singular subject, there’s no way to gain certainty about either the objective reality of the fictional world or the status of the subjective experience of it. In this story, singularity and stability seem within reach but are withheld, as the “man” is sustained for long enough to make the implied “wir” feel distant: “Den Mond sah man schon in einiger

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Höhe, ein Postwagen fuhr in seinem Licht vorbei” (One could already see the moon quite high, a mail coach drove by in its light; DL 12). Both the perceiving subject and the perspective of perception have become quite ambiguous, and what’s perceived by the character and what can be imagined by the reader are marked by the same ambiguity. The reader may feel empathically implicated in the experiences evoked in the text—for instance, in the sentence where the shift from “wir” to “man” occurs, feeling the grass and the absence of warmth or cold that resolves itself into tiredness—but each pronominal shift also prompts reflection on that empathic experience. This self-reflexive movement occurs especially in the shift from “wir” to “man”, since it’s accompanied by an explicit indicator of the state (if only gradually attained) of tiredness, which is defined by disconnection from rather than openness to one’s environment. The reader is doubly dissociated from appraising “in situ” enactively; empathic experience cedes momentarily to slightly unsettled reflection. We, as readers, alongside imagining and feeling as “ich”/“wir”/“man”, will almost inevitably register, at some level, the shifts between these subjects, and pause each time to question the nature of our own experience and appraisal. As the imagining and questioning are kept in continual alternation, moreover, we respond emotionally to the very continual vacillation of the perspectives—or just to the constant prospect of it. We come almost to expect the complicating, distancing effect created by the pronoun “man” not to last, and sure enough, our connection with the situation and action is soon made more closely empathic once again by a return to the “wir”, although momentarily so: “Da lag einem nicht mehr soviel daran, allein zu sein. [. . .] Wir liefen enger beisammen, manche reichten einander die Hände, den Kopf konnte man nicht genug hoch haben, weil es abwärts ging” (Then one was no longer so keen to be alone. [. . .] We ran closer together, some held out their hands to each other, one couldn’t keep one’s head high enough, because the way was downhill; DL 12). We feel the compelling proximity of those running, the exhilaration and confusion, the gravitational pull of the downwards slope—and at the same time, we process the shift of pronoun from “man” (here in the dative “einem”) to “wir” and back again, seeking in both cases to reconcile this shift with the one in visuospatial perspective. We probably try to make some sort of appraisal of what’s seen and felt; we engage in a vacillating emotional experience of questioning reflexive awareness followed by a plunge back into empathy. What we feel are all of our appraisals in turn, as we empathically imagine, but also, in alternation with these, a reflexive experience more than and separate from the sum of its constituent imaginative parts. If we’re induced by the text to engage in more than one empathic connection, and have no control over when or how the change from one to another occurs, each connection loses its self-evidence, and we cease to know what this “empathy” is. How can one subject (the reader) imaginatively and responsively share in the experience of another subject? Who would the fictional subject be? What would the experience be? Questions of this kind

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accumulate as we read the story, until finally, the perspective narrows again to that of the “ich”: Es war schon Zeit. Ich küßte den, der bei mir stand, reichte den drei Nächsten nur so die Hände, begann den Weg zurückzulaufen, keiner rief mich. [. . .] Ich strebte zu der Stadt im Süden hin, von der es in unserem Dorfe hieß: [. . .]. (It was already time. I kissed the one who stood next to me, just held out my hands to the three nearest, began to go back the same way, no one called out to me. [. . .] I was making for the city in the south of which it was said in our village: [. . .].) (DL 13) The story ends with a disembodied song, the words of which we imagine the “ich” chanting as he walks: we walk imaginatively as him, but have the influence of too many other wider perspectives not to be walking with him as well—or just seeing him walking, and hearing him singing, from somewhere up on high. Not from anywhere stable, however, anywhere permitting omniscience, for what’s happened to the “wir” and the “man”? Who is this “ich” anyway? The likely emotional effects of this short text are thus twofold: the compelling empathic emotion which is the basis of narrative fiction, and the movements of slightly unsettled reflection and the secondary emotion inherent in them, the latter induced by the fact that this empathic emotion, and all the perceptual and more broadly cognitive connections intrinsic to it, can’t be unproblematically singular. The pattern of multiple shifts of focalisation is repeated in most of the stories in the Betrachtung collection, and in varying ways denies certainty to the reader, not only of the accuracy or validity of the perception, but also simply of who is doing the perceiving. We have no stable criteria of judgement, and these are further denied to us by the use of the “als [+ subjunctive]” (as if) construction. In the following example, the construction hovers on the edge of simile: “[f]ragte mich einer vom Fenster aus, so sah ich ihn an, als schaue ich ins Gebirge oder in die bloße Luft, und auch ihm war an einer Antwort nicht viel gelegen” (if anyone asked me a question from the window, I would look at him as though I were looking into the mountains, or into thin air, and he too did not particularly care whether he got an answer or not; DL 10). An implicit shift is effected from the focalisation of the first-person narrator to the external impression that his action makes from the perspective of the person outside the window, and the shift is strengthened here by the subsequent clause, which seems to offer information that couldn’t have been accessible to the “I”. As so often happens, however, both of these “shifts” are merely possible rather than undeniable: the first could be the first-person focaliser’s imagination of what he must, or intends to, look like from the outside, while the second could be his inference of the other’s attitude from his appearance and action. The reader is therefore emotionally unsettled both by the possibility of a shift having occurred and by the impossibility of ever quite deciding whether it really has.

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This story demonstrates the techniques of perspectival equivocation that constitute one of the defining features of the unsettling power of Kafka’s works in their general emotional effect on the reader and, more specifically, in their challenge to what we might normally think of as a perceiving and acting self. The relation that we have to Kafka’s protagonists doesn’t correspond fully to either “real life” or “normal fiction”; again, it’s somewhere in between. In real life we have no access to anyone except through their spoken words and external behaviour, while in more familiar fiction, we see through one character’s eyes and none of the others’, or else we share all the privileges of an omniscient extradiegetic focaliser. We’re not used to seeing “more or less” through someone else’s eyes, and although we may often feel “more or less” empathic towards someone, the knowledge and the gaps in knowledge which determine these instances of emotional equivocation don’t correspond to those which we’re accustomed to negotiating. Walton states, in Mimesis as Make-Believe, that generally in seeing the world around us we have a wider range of information on which to base our judgements than we do when we read (1990, 359). This is undoubtedly true, but the most skilful writing allows us to read and keep reading without entirely realising our lack of information, because it keeps us poised confidently on the edge of needing to see or imagine. It’s upon this basis that Kafka’s fictions engage the reader, I argue, but he then complicates matters: in some ways the amounts and sorts of information that we have about the fictional world correspond closely and efficiently to those which we find ourselves seeking out in the real world, but the correspondence isn’t allowed to remain perfect. Having made us imagine with great ease by giving us the amount and sort of information about the fictional world that we’d expect in the real world, Kafka prevents our knowing how to use it.

c)

Self, Character, and Action

Emotional experience is inherently embodied: to feel is to interact through cognitive (including sensory) experience, or the imaginative enactment of such experience, as an embodied subject. If we’re made uncertain as to whether a narrated experience can really be attributed to an embodied subject and what such embodiment actually means (when the subjectivity seems multiple or otherwise unusual), our emotional reaction is correspondingly altered, and perhaps muted. The perspectival structure of the text, however, equally prevents our retaining a detached distance (visual, emotional, or otherwise cognitive) from the protagonist’s experience, and we are caught, vacillating, between the two. This equivocation in Kafka’s fictions differs from traditional Realist texts, many of which (Thomas Mann’s, for instance, or Thackeray’s, more overtly) use irony to highlight the boundaries between characters, narrator, author, and reader; the ambivalence the equivocation causes is central to the experience of reading Kafka, and arises directly from his evocation of perception and emotion as enactive engagement. I’ve argued in this and the preceding chapter that the reader may feel compelled but also unsettled because the principles of enactive vision and enactive emotion

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by which Kafka’s fictions operate entail that the narrative descriptions of actions become themselves part of the evocation of sensory perceptions and of emotion, as well as of the perceived world itself, meaning that “external” and “internal” worlds lose their sharp distinction. Frijda (2007, 223–24) argues that our usual emotional sense of coherence with the world, which is absent if we’re depressed and feel disconnected from the world and reality, is constituted by the actual coherence of the world impinging on the body, and by the body modifying the world through action readiness and action. There’s certainly something to this, but if we take the theory of enactive cognition to its logical conclusion, we find that the concepts of self and world as separate entities become far more fluid. The concept of self is the basis of human feelings of autonomy and uniqueness, but centuries of mindfulness practice (especially meditation in the Zen tradition) suggest that during focused attention to the nature of “one’s own” experience, this concept, and those it supports, dissolve to the point that the possessive, and the possessor, do too. The use of Zen in a cognitive-science context has recent precedent in Blackmore’s Zen and the Art of Consciousness (2011), which argues that mindfulness meditation in the Zen model can help us get closer to solving the mystery of consciousness by forcing us to pay attention to what experience is really like and develop theories from there rather than basing scientific accounts on flawed assumptions about the phenomenology to be explained. How self dissolves when you look right at it (see Figure 4.2) is crucial here, as it always has been in Zen Buddhism: James Austin shows, in Selfless Insight: Zen and the

Figure 4.2

Meditating through self-division towards self-dissolution

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Meditative Transformations of Consciousness, that the “insight-wisdom” of “no-self” is at the heart of Zen, citing the words of millennia of Zen, Taoist, and Ch’an masters which emphasise how the long “Path of Zen leads towards selflessness incrementally”, and “To study your own self is to forget yourself. To forget yourself is to have the objective world prevail in you” (2009, 49, 95). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991), one of the seminal texts of second-generation cognitive science, explicitly draws on Buddhist meditative practice and theory, and argues that in the last century or so, cognitive science has also begun to provide a “tangible demonstration [. . .] that the self or cognizing subject is fundamentally fragmented, divided, or nonunified” (xvii; see also their chapter “The I of the Storm”, 59–84). Fundamental to this non-unification is the enactive nature of consciousness: its moment-to-moment, task-driven, environmentally situated essence, and its lack of centre where everything comes together “in consciousness” for the “self” whose consciousness it is. Descriptions of action are therefore a major part of the evocation not only of perception and hence of the fictional world (see Chapter Three), but also of the fictional character who experiences that world. In Das Schloß, K. is evoked as divided by continually competitive and contradictory impressions, such as when he finds there’s a telephone in the inn where he stays on his first night in the village: “Man war vorzüglich eingerichtet. Im einzelnen überraschte es K., im Ganzen hatte er es freilich erwartet. Es zeigte sich daß das Telephon fast über seinem Kopf angebracht war, in seiner Verschlafenheit hatte er es übersehn” (They were excellently equipped. In particular it surprised K., in general he had certainly expected it. It transpired that the telephone was installed almost over his head, in his sleepiness he had overlooked it; S 10). In this first chapter, K. is presented as a non-unified site of competing cognitive threads, none of which is wholly available or comprehensible to the reader. What does it mean to expect a telephone in general but not in particular? The folk-psychological understanding of vision as pictorial leads us to expect that he should have noticed a telephone above his head, but then again, what exactly does the “almost” mean? Was it really just his sleepiness that made him miss it? The novel thus begins by evoking internal disconnections in K.’s interactions with the world that make our own connection with him more complex than simply comprehending empathy. We’re all subject, as K. is, to competing attentional demands, yet we don’t naturally identify with a character presented so, because our expectations about perception as well as the self so sharply contradict what’s presented here. Even for K. himself, the accumulation of situations amounts to no more than an interminable sequence of events inducing weariness and oversensitivity: “so verletzlich war er jetzt” (he was so vulnerable now; S 172). K. has no social situation and no clear role, and there are no summaries at the beginnings of chapters as in Der Proceß: instead, events unfold inexorably.

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The eleventh chapter, entitled “In der Schule” (At School), ends, “Damit schlug er die Tür zu” (With that he slammed the door; S 211), while the next, “Die Gehilfen” (The Assistants), picks up precisely where “At School” leaves off, and begins: “Kaum waren alle fort, sagte K. zu den Gehilfen: ‘Geht hinaus!’” (Hardly had they all left than K. said to the assistants: “Get out!”; S 212). No clear sense of unity is established in K.’s perceptions and actions: different situations induce different behaviours, and elements of each situation compete to gain priority for attention and thereby cognitive resources. Perhaps this is why Kafka’s characters sometimes give the impression of being “peculiarly bodiless”, as Sokel (1959, 51) puts it; we aren’t used to basic bodily unity being unaccompanied by unity of character and cognition. In Das Schloß, K. is “characterised” not as a unified self, with a given set of tendencies and traits, who has sensory and emotional experiences, but rather as a collection of micro-threads of cognition and/or behaviour gaining priority and losing it again: “Durch die Mühe, welche ihm das bloße Gehn verursachte, geschah es, daß er seine Gedanken nicht beherrschen konnte. [. . .] Immer wieder tauchte die Heimat auf und Erinnerungen an sie erfüllten ihn. Auch dort stand auf dem Hauptplatz eine Kirche” (Because of the effort involved merely in walking, he could not control his thoughts. [. . .] His homeland appeared to him again and again, and memories of it filled him. There too, there was a church in the main square; S 49). We’ve already seen how thought affects action in K., such that he keeps walking, for example, only because of his stubborn expectations; here action interferes with thought, and memory is induced through perception to intrude into thought. The fictional world of Das Schloß is evoked through the processes of K.’s cognition as they respond to the situations in which he finds himself—through an ever-emerging accumulation of reactions, K. is “characterised”. After a while, indeed, the reader may well feel no particular lack; K. seems to work as a character over the course of the novel, despite having few actual characteristics. As Phillip Rhein (1964, 26) puts it, “In spite of the slightness of these verbal sketches by Kafka [. . .], the reader is never allowed to feel that he is dealing with unreal people.” But the accumulation of reactions is incomplete, and they fail to reveal, in combination, a fully formed, subtly nuanced character. As with detail in the description of the fictional world in Der Proceß, characterisation in Das Schloß hovers on the edge of sufficiency and cohesion, which means that our experience of the fictional world, more or less through K.’s eyes, is unimpeded by excess detail or the consciously sensed lack of it, and therefore has all the apparent effortlessness which is achieved by the descriptive balancing act treated in Chapter Three. But equally it means that the apparent spontaneity and naturalness of our experience is tempered with a sense of unease and by continual shifts into the questioning reflection of an experience that can’t be self-evident. Kafka’s short stories can be more disorientating than his novels in part because this method of “characterisation” lacks the narrative efficiency of

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a conventional Realist character sketch, which summarises traits independent of particular action contexts. In Kafka’s fictions, character emerges as constituted and expressed through action, perception, and emotion rather than being condensed into generalisations, but in a short story there’s simply insufficient time for this to happen. In “Ein Landarzt” (A Country Doctor), for instance, a similar technique is employed as in the two novels, as the doctor’s competing sensory inputs evoke the world around him, but this doesn’t happen often enough to provide the reader with much of a sense of his character: Zur Mauer, an die Seite der Wunde legen sie mich. Dann gehen alle aus der Stube; die Tür wird zugemacht; der Gesang verstummt; Wolken treten vor den Mond; warm liegt das Bettzeug um mich; schattenhaft schwanken die Pferdeköpfe in den Fensterlöchern. “Weißt du,” höre ich, mir ins Ohr gesagt, “mein Vertrauen zu dir ist sehr gering.” (They lay me by the wall, on the side of the wound. Then they all leave the room; the door is closed; the song ends; clouds move across the moon; the bedclothes lie warm around me; the horses’ heads sway shadowy in the window openings. “Do you know,” I hear, said into my ear, “my confidence in you is very slight.”) (DL 259) Touch, hearing, vision, silence, and shadowy, shifting darkness. All of these compete and coalesce into the evocation of a world and a situation, and over time, they would constitute a recognisable “character”, but part of the unsettling effect of the short stories is precisely the fact that this doesn’t happen before they come to an end—although, as ever, we are left feeling that it could, that it might be about to happen at any moment. In Das Schloß, however, this process of potentiality being evoked and almost fulfilled is re-enacted time after time, giving us a precarious sense of a character as he lives a life. Let’s have another look at the section about K.’s wanderings through the snow: Wenn er sich in seinem heutigen Zustand zwang, seinen Spaziergang wenigstens bis zum Eingang des Schlosses auszudehnen, war übergenug getan. So ging er wieder vorwärts, aber es war ein langer Weg. Die Straße nämlich, diese Hauptstraße des Dorfes, führte nicht zum Schloßberg, sie führte nur nahe heran, dann aber wie absichtlich bog sie ab [. . .]. Immer erwartete K., daß nun endlich die Straße zum Schloß einlenken müsse, und nur weil er es erwartete ging er weiter; offenbar infolge seiner Müdigkeit zögerte er die Straße zu verlassen, auch staunte er über die Länge des Dorfes, das kein Ende nahm, immerwieder die kleinen Häuschen und vereiste Fensterscheiben und Schnee und Menschenleere—endlich riß er sich los von dieser festhaltenden Straße, ein schmales Gäßchen nahm ihn auf, noch tieferer Schnee, das Herausziehen der einsinkenen Füße war

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Kafka’s Cognitive Realism eine schwere Arbeit, Schweiß brach ihm aus, plötzlich stand er still und konnte nicht mehr weiter. Nun, er war ja nicht verlassen, rechts und links standen Bauernhütten, er machte einen Schneeball und warf ihn gegen ein Fenster. (If he forced himself, in his current condition, to extend his walk at least as far as the entrance to the castle, that would be more than enough. Thus he went on again, but it was a long road. In fact the street, this main village street, did not lead directly to the castle hill, it only led close to it, but then curved away as though deliberately [. . .]. K. kept expecting that now the road must finally turn in towards the castle, and only because he expected it did he carry on; apparently/obviously because of his tiredness he hesitated to leave the road, and he was astonished by the length of the village, which never came to an end, over and over the little houses and iced-up window panes and snow and absence of people—finally he tore himself away from this road which held on tight, a narrow alleyway welcomed him, even deeper snow, the lifting-out of his sinking feet was difficult work, he broke into a sweat, suddenly he stood still and couldn’t go on. Well, he was not quite abandoned after all, right and left there were peasants’ cottages, he made a snowball and threw it at a window.) (S 21)

There’s nothing in his surroundings to give K. any confidence that the road will ever begin to curve towards the castle; his stubbornness is conveyed to the reader through the action (carrying on walking) dictated by his apparently unfounded expectations that the castle is accessible, but also just by his tiredness itself and his resulting inability to do otherwise. Character is enacted here as a way of responding to an environment: the endless road stimulates tiredness but also dogged persistence, and the tiredness and persistence in turn further determine perception, enhancing the uniformity of the houses, the windows, the snow, and the emptiness, all of which contributes to making K. feel not only fatigued but also trapped. This feeling of entrapment, as we imagine, constitutes what we feel if we feel as K., and if we do so, we’ll then tend to imagine as he sees. The reader’s empathy with K. thus emerges arguably not despite but thanks to the lack of conventional characterisation separate from action, and may do so with quite surprising power because of the codependency of the reader’s perceptual imaginings and the situated emotional appraisal that both determines and is determined by those imaginings. This codependency creates an emotional connection that embraces the character as well as his situation, in which, as for the reader, the character’s emotion affects his perceptual engagement with the environment and vice versa. Our relationship with K. (or with Josef K., or Georg, or Gregor, etc.) is modulated both by the level of descriptive detail given about him—his “characterisation”—as the main focaliser and, as I’ve already discussed, by the interactions of other ambiguously related focalisers. We may therefore feel uneasy for two reasons: the implications of enactive vision and

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enactive emotion and the imperfect correspondence of what Kafka gives us to either “real life” or “normal fiction”. The focaliser in the passage about K. walking through the interminable village is K. himself, but the “freedom” of the free indirect style is manifested in the inconspicuous particle “offenbar” (apparently): as before (p. 192), “apparently” to whom? The tiredness as causal state is qualified by this suppositional particle, shifted from subjective fact to unlocated inference: the reader may feel as K. the sense of expectation, inseparable from K.’s seeing of the road and the progress along it, and from our perceptual imagining of it. But then “offenbar” acts to shift us away from K.’s perspective, so that we imagine him from the outside, doggedly continuing, and watch him being astonished, no longer certain whether this astonishment is fact or supposition. Nor can we be sure precisely what sort of emotional responses are determining his subsequent visual perceptions, and we have no way of finding out. In the real world, if you were expectant but also frustrated and tired, you would see the village in a way determined partly by the action tendencies of expectant and frustrated tiredness: walking more slowly, looking more rigidly ahead, ignoring irrelevant stimuli, measuring your progress by counting paces or houses passed. The apparent endlessness of the village would be connected multiply and inextricably to your emotional (and physical) state, and it would elicit further action tendencies culminating, perhaps, in your finally losing all patience and leaving the road, which has come to feel as though it’s “holding on” to you. You wouldn’t be sure whether the village seemed endless just because you were so tired and frustrated or whether it really was unusually long, but you would be able to find out (you could, for instance, deliberately start to count the houses). As the reader of Das Schloß, however, such a possibility is unavailable, since inference based on empathy is impossible; our criteria of judgement have no coherence because our empathic understanding is equivocal. If we knew that K. was refusing to leave the road because he was tired, our knowledge of the action tendencies induced by that state would let us read the description of the village with a reasonable degree of certainty as to the respective degrees of subjectivity and objectivity involved: we would assume that K. was tired and therefore seeing the village as longer than it in fact is. Instead, the intrusion of this unidentified focaliser for just a moment, just a word (“offenbar”), robs this inferential process of stability. We are dealing with K.’s subjectivity, but seemingly not only with it; we’re seeing more or less through his eyes, but have to ask ourselves quite how much or how little—and there’s no answer to be found. Kafka’s fictions create situations that are quite cognitively normal in perceptual and emotional terms (if not with regard to plot), yet they feel so strange because we’re unaccustomed when we read to the enactive compulsion of the experiential “flow” from which we’re repeatedly, momentarily removed, and to how frequently and forcefully this removal happens. Again and again, the “more” and the “less” of our perspectival connection with the characters are shifted at times and in ways not only beyond our control,

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but also entailing essential indeterminacy. Kafka evokes a fictional reality in a cognitively realistic manner by tapping into the fundamental processes by which we see, imagine, and feel, processes which seem unfamiliar because of our folk-psychological beliefs about how perception and emotion work. He evokes this reality in a way that elicits all the more equivocal responses by reminding us, also, of the multiple potential meanings of the word “self”, and to do this he has to go even further beyond Realism to get back to its roots than he does with perception, since the relevant beliefs, perpetuated not least by our ordinary use of language, are stronger still and feel even more indispensable. Kafka’s protagonists, however, have to begin to question them, and so do we. When we do, we realise that of course we’d known it was otherwise: that there’s no homunculus in “my” head looking out, nor is “K.” or “Gregor” in “his” head looking out. So when the texts make it abundantly clear that there are no such singularities, and prevent their characters from continuing to believe there are, we may realise, at some point, that we’d known it all along.

NOTES 1. See Pascal 1977, 31–32, on the implications of the term “free indirect speech” and its usefulness despite shortcomings, as well as on the German equivalent “erlebte Rede” (22–23, 29–30). The latter is a key term in Kafka criticism, but emphasises the “expressive, subjective side” of the linguistic phenomenon at the expense of its “narratorial function” (29), while failing to make it clear “who is supposed to be doing the ‘experiencing’” (30). 2. See also Pascal 1977 and Stanzel 1979 for more detailed investigations of free indirect discourse, and McHale 2013 for an overview of methods of speech representation.

Conclusion Cognitive Realism in Kafka and Beyond

In this book I’ve tried to show one way in which the cognitive sciences can enrich literary studies, and I’ve set out some of the insights into Kafka’s writings that become accessible when we embrace the implications of a number of insights from second-generation cognitive science. These are, firstly, that in visual perception, external reality isn’t represented pictorially, but enacted; secondly, that emotion isn’t separate from reason or action, but tightly bound up with both; and thirdly, that cognitive perspectives are always situated and action-driven, but never purely neuro- or ocular-centric. All these points are true of human cognition in many of Kafka’s fictions as well as in the real world, and understanding these texts as—amongst the many other things they are and do—characterised by enactive qualities in their evocation of perception and emotion allows us to understand them as cognitively realistic. This in turn yields hypotheses about the experience of reading Kafka, an experience that I’ve suggested may be internally contradictory: a feeling of being compelled but also unsettled. The cognitive realism of Kafka’s evocation of cognition as enactive can be considered responsible for creating the effect of describing “the world as you could really take it in with your senses” or “what one is used to according to experience” (the definition of “realistic” given by Participant 7 in my “Schakale und Araber” [Jackals and Arabs] experiment). Even when the plot is anything but realistic, we “accept it because it’s Kafka” (see Introduction, p. 35), partly because the evocation of perception of the fictional world is cognitively realistic, if counterintuitively so, in its enactive qualities: the “Gewimmel von Schakalen” (throng of jackals) and the “mattes Gold erglänzende, verlöschende Augen” (eyes gleaming, going out, in matte gold; DL 270) are described by one participant as being “really present, and [. . .] really somehow unnerving and really disturbing” (Pt 30), that is, both compelling and unsettling. Another participant identified the “realistic” and the “fascinating” as mutually exclusive opposites: “[realistic] would be something where nothing supernatural happens, no magical elements, no unexpected elements, no overstated elements [. . .] realistic almost has associations of boring, and therefore not particularly fascinating or interesting [. . .]” (Pt 8). I’ve suggested, however, that a text which is realistic in a

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cognitive sense can be fascinating precisely through that cognitive realism, in part because our folk-psychological notions about cognition are often mistaken (Chabris and Simons 2011), so that we’re confronted at every turn by the “unexpected elements” deemed here to be the opposite of the realistic but which in fact characterise it in the cognitive realm. Conceiving of “realistic” and “fascinating” as opposed to one another is closely related to the tendency to conceive of “realistic” and “Kafkaesque” similarly in opposition. In one participant’s comments, the realistic/ Kafkaesque dichotomy is mediated by an opposition between the external, “outside”, “material” life (corresponding to the term “realistic”) and the “internal psychological life” (corresponding to the term “Kafkaesque”): “You have instantly to think that realistic is the opposite of Kafkaesque. Although Kafka refers to real life, he’s moving beyond what we really see of the material life, in a way, and talking about your feelings behind that, and the internal psychological life of man, and how that is influenced by outside, “real” life, and how that can distort our internal life” (Pt 34). In this schema, the external is what’s real, what affects, and specifically “distorts”, the internal—a metaphor which commonly designates the “space” where cognition happens. These oppositions are deeply rooted, and there are cognitive reasons why (see Chapter One, p. 42), but in this book I’ve given an overview of why and how, rather than “feelings” (or other aspects of one’s psychological state) being “behind” or “beyond” external reality, external reality—the world and one’s actions within it—is a constitutive part of those feelings. Kafka’s cognitive realism in the evocation of enactive cognition allows us to experience this by establishing a central equivalence between the enactive way that vision and imagination (including perspective) and emotion are evoked in the fictional world of the text, and how these processes operate enactively in the real world and mind of the reader. Doing so makes the realistic and the Kafkaesque, like the external and the internal, or the realistic and the fascinating, integrated parts of the same experience, and thus, although Modernist literature has traditionally been characterised in terms of an “inward turn”, in Kafka’s case at least it would better be understood as placing a renewed emphasis on the constant interaction of “inner” and “outer” (Herman 2011). To keep this concluding section brief, I’ll now simply say a little about how the concept of cognitive realism may be used to structure research on the work of authors other than Kafka. The scientifically informed research method I’ve outlined offers a means of investigating texts of many varied genres and periods in terms of their own specific forms of cognitive realism, and exploring these other manifestations may allow literary studies to pose new questions about literature and the mind, and to begin to answer those questions in ways that are both precise and generalisable. The case study offered here may, moreover, be expanded not only to encompass a broader corpus of texts, but also to draw on other areas of cognitive

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science: potentially fruitful areas of inquiry include the branches of psychology and philosophy of mind dealing with other sensory modalities, memory, or the various cognitive interactions that result in a feeling of agency, for example. All of these are important facets of the experiences of fictional characters and their readers, and some of them have been popular objects of inquiry in literary studies: memory, for instance, in both its individual and collective forms, has been central to the recent revival of interest in archive studies (e.g., Hutchinson and Weller 2011), and the matter of agency dovetails with the fraught but perennially inviting question of authorial intention. Cognitive realism may also be useful in beginning to answer questions about particular literary features: an investigation of the effects of “stream of consciousness” as a literary device, for instance, could fruitfully start by asking whether consciousness is textually evoked as structurally serial or parallel (Hogan 2013). Trends in critical response to a particular author, or indeed in the sciences of the mind contemporary to that author, could furthermore be connected to the exploration of fiction in terms of cognitive realism. This study inevitably raises questions concerning the status of the texts that I’ve contrasted with Kafka’s. I’ve defined Kafka’s cognitive realism in opposition to the “period” or “movement” of literary Realism by means of the enactive versus pictorial distinction, which has necessarily resulted in a somewhat limited account of what Realism does in terms of cognition. Realist texts are cognitively realistic in specific ways that I’ve been unable to explore here, and the effects of the ways in which they’re unrealistic are more complex than I’ve had space to consider. A given text may be engaging precisely because it’s cognitively unrealistic in its evocation of one or more aspects of cognition, not least since cognitive realism and folk psychology are often in opposition, so that unrealistic textual features are likely to forge closer links with folk-psychological structures. Further investigation of the flipside of cognitive realism, not merely as a supposedly negative pole to an apparently positive textual characteristic, but as a quality in its own right with its own variations and its own range of effects in relation to both cognition and folk psychology, may also contribute to our understanding of how textual and cognitive phenomena interact. Many of our folk-psychological assumptions about cognition differ from the cognitive realities, and this suggests that many features of Realist texts, which by definition seem cognitively realistic, which seem to “describ[e] the world as you could really take it in with your senses”, in fact aren’t and don’t. The same is true of visual art: lapses of perspective, for example, which are relatively common in realist paintings and drawings, “are based on preconceived ideas of how things should be, instead of on direct observation of how they are” (Pirenne 1970, 171). I’ve begun to explore this question of being and seeming realistic in discussions of cognitive realism and memory in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (Troscianko 2012a) and Proust’s In Search

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of Lost Time (Troscianko 2013a). My analysis of Madame Bovary focuses on cognitive dissonance and its connections to emotion and memory in the trajectory of Emma’s life. The article concludes by considering the contested status of Madame Bovary as a Realist text from a cognitive angle, and in particular the paradox that we require Realism to converge with our expectations about cognition, which may themselves be subject to (systematic and interesting) errors. Emma Bovary’s character may have elicited the highly ambivalent responses it has because its cognitive realism seems unrealistic. My exploration of Proust’s “madeleine episode” ends with the observation that when the cognitive realities and folk-psychological expectations converge, he evokes facets of cognition accordingly, and when they diverge, he goes with the folk psychology rather than with the cognitive reality. This means that we never find cognitive realism countering our expectations, with all the ambivalence that it can cause, so that even though Proust in fact smuggles through a highly counterintuitive fact about memory, readers are able to, and usually do, ignore it in favour of a reading that corresponds to expectations, and so seems realistic. Examining whether and how Modernism differs from Realism in terms of cognitive realism may help further refine our understanding of the apparent opposition between the two “periods” with reference to their respective cognitive structures and possible effects on readers, allowing us to tackle such questions as whether there are some types of cognitive realism that are especially prevalent in, or even defining characteristics of, Realist and Modernist texts respectively. Can the differences in the types of cognitive realism identified in Realism and Modernism, moreover, be related specifically to contemporary changes in the scientific understanding of the mind or indeed of the natural world that differentiate the two “periods”? Do these changes correlate with or have they influenced authors’ methods of literary evocation and readers’ (and critics’) reception of them? Or does the entire distinction between Realism and Modernism turn out to be a red herring from a cognitive perspective? Embodiment, enactivism, and situatedness are general features of human cognition, but human bodies are also individual bodies in specific environments with particular histories of thought and action, meaning that first-person approaches to cognition may be as useful in cognitive literary studies as they’ve proven to be in some areas of cognitive science broadly conceived, for instance in Blackmore’s (2011) study (see Chapter Four, p. 204), which proposes first-person experience as a source of corrective insights about consciousness (see also Austin 1998). There are noteworthy arguments against the principle of first-person Phenomenology (Dennett 2001), but the case for it is also persuasive, especially with a phenomenon as intractable as consciousness. The utility of first-person cognitive approaches to literary studies will depend, by definition, on the text and reader, but in some cases an acknowledgment by the critic-reader of the personal nature of his or her embodiment may not only be analytically fruitful but also have an

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ethical dimension. In this vein, I suggest (Troscianko, forthcoming) that Kafka’s short story “Ein Hungerkünstler” (A Hunger Artist) can be illuminated from a critical perspective that draws on second-generation scientific findings about eating disorders and starvation, as well as on first-person testimony speaking to the subjective side of starvation. The ethical point arises when we consider how deeply rooted mind-body dualism is in literary studies, as in folk psychology, and how wide-ranging its effects can be on how we read texts and how we communicate our readings to others. Starvation is an excellent case in point: starving oneself to death or close to it is a fundamentally embodied experience of denying embodiment, and the trouble is that the same metaphorical equations which the anorexic uses to defend his or her hunger addiction (hunger = self-control, power, purity, beauty, specialness) have come to inhabit literary-critical discourse, in which the body has also consistently been ignored, devalued, or both (see Anderson 1988 for a brief discussion of the problem, and Steinhauer 1962, esp. 40–43, for a striking exemplification of it). My own history of anorexia (Troscianko 2009, 2012b) has made me more sensitive to the dangers inherent in talking about self-starvation as “a noble ideal” (Steinhauer 1962, 41) than I otherwise would be, and this sensitivity can be valuable when it comes to identifying some of the blind-spots of my discipline and the real-world problems that it has the potential to compound, resist, or ameliorate. It’s important to remember that those who read books and articles on literature are real people too, potentially susceptible to ill-judged statements about how admirable it is to starve oneself to death. This kind of ethical concern arises most obviously with “pathological” literature, but the inclusion of a first-person perspective could be beneficial in all sorts of areas where cognition is under discussion, not as a disembodied mental phenomenon, but as something that happens in the brain and the rest of the body, with all the concomitant messiness of situated specificities that both cognitive science and literary studies have at times been happier to ignore. In general terms, I see exciting scope for applying and developing the terms and concepts “cognitively realistic” and “cognitively unrealistic” in a wide-ranging exploration of how fictional texts engage their readers through different forms of cognitive realism, treating literature, folk psychology, and cognitive realities as a rich constellation of cause and effect and interrelation. None of the observations in this volume about Kafka’s poetics could have been made with the methods of traditional literary criticism alone, or without the practice of close reading that’s central to literary criticism; at the most fundamental level, literary criticism and cognitive scientific findings and debates have here interacted with and enriched each other. I hope that the benefits of this interaction for literary studies are clear, but I believe that the enrichment may flow in the direction of the cognitive sciences too: thinking about the reading experience in relation to perceptual variables is relevant to some areas of the psychology of reading, for example, while the specific question of how the imagination, or mental imagery, is

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affected by different prompts (e.g., a fictional text versus a mental-imagery questionnaire) remains underexplored (Troscianko 2013b). Cognitive realism should prove a useful framework for this and similar research, although other models are and will be essential too. The exchange between literary studies and cognitive science has yet to become a true dialogue, and as literary scholars we need to start more proactively to consider how cognitive scientists could benefit from an interdisciplinary exchange centred on how minds and texts interact. The challenges involved in such scienceshumanities exchanges are numerous, but research that aims to initiate a more fully reciprocal dialogue has already shown promise (e.g., Sanford and Emmott 2012; Burke and Troscianko 2013). Combining expertise in the details of how literary texts are constructed with expertise in relevant aspects of how minds work should in principle yield rewards for both disciplines, not only contributing to how we understand cognition within and in interaction with fiction, but also, as Lodge suggests in Consciousness and the Novel (2002), helping to illuminate the nature of cognition and consciousness in their own right. It’s this latter quality that will allow cognitive literary studies to become a cognitive science, a cognitive literary science (Burke and Troscianko, forthcoming), and that’s what I hope the future of this field will be. For now, though, I shall be happy if anyone else comes away from this encounter with the cognitive sciences feeling, as I do, that they understand Kafka better for it.

Appendix 1

EMPIRICAL STUDY: READERS’ RESPONSES TO “SCHAKALE UND ARABER” (JACKALS AND ARABS) I designed this empirical study to test three hypotheses: 1) that the experience of reading a text by Kafka comprises two opposing constituents of response: being compelled yet simultaneously unsettled; 2) that the changes which Kafka made to the manuscripts of his fictional texts (of which there are many) contribute to the strength of these effects (i.e., that the manuscript changes increase the strength and frequency of the two opposing constituents of response; and 3) that Kafka’s manuscript changes specifically concerning how perception is evoked have a greater effect than other sorts of changes on those opposing constituents of response. I divided the participants (34 in total, with a variety of ages, educational backgrounds, and occupations, but all bilingual in German and English) into three groups, and presented each with one of three (unidentified) versions of Kafka’s short story “Schakale und Araber” in the original German (based on Kafka’s notebooks, see NSI 317–22, rather than the subsequently published version, DL 270–75). I chose this text because it’s reasonably short but has lots of manuscript variants, including plenty that relate to the evocation of perception (NSI/A 276–79). I split the text into 34 segments and presented the entire text to each participant separately (sitting alone in the testing room), segment by segment on a computer screen. I instructed the participants to describe aloud (in English) every aspect of their reading experience: any thoughts, feelings, interpretations, evaluations, personal memories, ideas, or images that were conjured up by what they had read. The responses were recorded on a digital recorder, and I then transcribed them and gave the transcriptions to three independent coders, employed to carry out the main stage of the analysis in order to minimise experimenter bias. They used sampled responses to derive a list of categories covering all the aspects of the reactions to the text, before coding all the responses according to how strongly each of these types of reaction was manifested in respect of a given segment of text. The final coding scheme comprised the categories listed below, measured on a six-point scale

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from 0–5, plus two dimensions ranging from −5 to +5, allowing for a neutral or ambivalent response between the two positive poles: Anticipation/excitement Association Description Discomfort/fear Frustration/annoyance Identification/empathy Moral judgement/shock Recognition of inconsistency Recognition of pattern Relief/pleasure Speculation/extrapolation Surprise Sympathy/pity Uncertainty/confusion Positive-negative Cognitive-emotional Using the categories of response devised by the judges’ coding work, I then formulated category-specific hypotheses from the three general hypotheses stated above, and analysed the coding data to see whether the initial prediction regarding the “compelling yet unsettling” reading experience was borne out in the participants’ responses, and whether there were statistically significant differences in the nature of these experiences between the three groups. The statistical analysis revealed a problem regarding the extent of coding variability between the three coders, such that the hypotheses couldn’t be confidently verified or disproved and the conclusions to be drawn from the experiment are (unless I attempt a re-coding of the data) more or less limited to methodological ones, and some qualitative observations as outlined in the next paragraph. The derived categories and dimensions might provide a useful starting point for future studies, but their labelling raises questions about breadth (e.g., uncertainty and confusion overlap but clearly aren’t equivalent) that may be causally related to the lack of inter-coder reliability: people are very reliable at coding things when the categories make sense, and not when they don’t. I also asked the participants some questions concerning their recognition of the story and understanding of the term “Kafkaesque”. The definitions they provided were used partly to gain insight into the everyday meaning of the “Kafkaesque” but mainly to determine whether, despite participants not recognising the story’s authorship (most of them didn’t), their responses demonstrated an affinity with what they themselves defined as “Kafkaesque”. This proved to be the case: there were remarkable convergences in many cases between the definition given and the response to the text. Finally, the participants completed two questionnaires: the Vividness

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of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). These deal respectively with two key areas of reader response to fiction, “visual imagination” and “empathy”, and a comparison of the VVIQ results and the responses to Kafka’s text have formed the basis for a discussion of imagery questionnaires and their relationship to textually induced imagery (Troscianko 2013b). (See references to this experiment on pp. 1, 4, 35, 37, 120, 161, 163, 172, 182, 199, and 211.)

Appendix 2

EMPIRICAL STUDY: READERS’ RESPONSES TO DAS SCHLOß (THE CASTLE) This study had a very simple method: participants were simply asked to read the opening paragraph of Das Schloß (given to participants in an English translation), and then to draw what they imagined as they read. At the time of writing, the data collection wasn’t yet completed, but approximately 72 participants were to be tested, again with varying ages, educational backgrounds, and employment situations. The passage read as follows: It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay in deep snow. Of the castle hill there was nothing to be seen, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest glimmer of light hinted at the great castle. For a long time K. stood on the wooden bridge that leads from the country road to the village and looked up into the apparent emptiness. My goal here was to gain an open-ended assessment of the imaginative experience of reading the beginning of Das Schloß, as well as to test a specific hypothesis regarding Kafka’s use of narrative perspective in it: that the change in perspective from the first to the third person made by Kafka in the course of writing Das Schloß (S/A 120–85; see Chapter Four, p. 198) results in a different imaginative relation between the reader and the protagonist K. This would be assessed by the presence or absence of K. in the drawings; the more specific hypothesis was that the first-person form would result in fewer participants drawing K. because they felt they were “seeing the scene through his eyes”, whereas the third-person form would result in more participants drawing K. because their relation to him was more equivocal. The other main variable in the drawings was the presence or absence of the castle, and the level of detail in its depiction if present: this is connected to the issue of perspective in that the first-person form would hypothetically have the effect of unifying the divergent information encapsulated in the phrase “the apparent emptiness” as deriving from a single cognitive perspective, encouraging the reader to attribute both the inability to see anything and the knowledge that there’s nonetheless

Appendix 2

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something there to be seen to K. himself. This in turn would make it more likely for participants to draw the castle (in some detail), because information about its existence would be more easily assessable as the protagonist’s own knowledge, and more clearly a feature of his thoughts as he stands there looking, rather than originating from an unknown (extradiegetic) source. An alternative possibility, however, is that readers would attribute more significance or reliability to information provided by an extradiegetic focaliser who appears to conform to the “omniscient narrator” model of Realism, and therefore would believe more fully in the existence of the castle when it seems guaranteed by an authority separate from K. I also asked participants whether they felt there were any differences between what they drew and what they imagined, and if so, to describe them. This question was intended to elicit details regarding the difficulties of rendering an imaginative experience in pictorial form, which should be substantial, given my argument that vision and imagination are non-pictorial. (See references to this experiment on pp. 109–12, 189, and 197–98.)

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Index

2½D sketch 100 4E cognition 24 Abelson, Robert P. 128, 133 action readiness 166, 167–8, 170–4, 182, 190, 192, 204, 209 action tendency see action readiness active vision see vision, active Adolphs, Ralph 82 adverbs 102, 190, 192 Aeschylus 55 aesthetics, empirical see empirical aesthetics affective fallacy see fallacy, affective affordance 74, 78, 79, 142, 170 agnosia, visual 78–9 Aitchison, Jean 134, 136, 149 Alfieri, Giovanni 89 Allemann, Beda 157, 197 Allington, Daniel 21, 38n, 123, 134, 159n Ambinder, Michael S. 52 Anderson, Mark 32, 215 Anstis, Stuart M. 52 Anz, Thomas 38n Aristotle 54–7, 62, 70–1, 93n Arrington, James G. 53 artificial intelligence 23, 24, 134 artificial life 80; see also artificial intelligence “asking the question” 91, 131, 152–9, 191; see also consciousness and probing attention: and action 172; and art 172; and enactive emotion 166, 172, 182; endogenous and exogenous 90; and inattentional blindness 51, 53; and introspection 81, 192–3, 204 (see also reflection); and Kafka studies 32; and probing

83, 152–3, 154, 156 (see also consciousness and probing); and reading 66, 189–90; and sensorimotor vision (see sensorimotor vision and attention); and social cognition 175; and unilateral neglect 89–90; and virtual representation 82, 84 attention window 47, 115 Auerbach, Erich 63 Augustin, M. Dorothee 20 Austen, Jane 187 Austin, James H. 204–5, 214 Avenanti, Alessio 176 Aziz-Zadeh, Lisa 176 Baars, Bernard J. 43 Bal, Mieke 127, 183 Ballard, Dana H. 85 Balzac, Honoré de 63, 66–8, 70, 152 Barandiaran, Xabier 76 Barsalou, Lawrence W. 26, 134, 137–8 Barthes, Roland 2, 9, 61 Bartlett, William Henry 108 Bartolomeo, Paolo 89–90 Baum, Oskar 186 Beardsley, Monroe C. 9–10, 11, 18, 163–4 Becker, Mark W. 52, 84 Beer, Randall D. 76 behaviourism 196 Beicken, Peter 13 Beißner, Friedrich 94, 185–6, 187 Benjamin, Walter 34 Benn, Gottfried 95 Berman, Russell A. 124 Bernini, Marco 9 Binder, Hartmut 187 binding problem 80

248

Index

blind-spot, filling-in of 50, 80 Bisiach, Edoardo 89 Blachowicz, James 41 Blackmore, Susan J. 48–9, 50–1, 53, 82, 83, 84, 89, 152–4, 181, 204, 214 Block, Ned 91, 93n Boa, Elizabeth 199 Bolens, Guillemette 26, 27–8, 82 Borghese Gladiator 114, 116–17 Born, Jürgen 35–6, 124, 186 Bortolussi, Marisa 18, 21, 184 Botvinick, Matthew 176 Boyd, Brian 174 brain, role of: in consciousness 48, 53, 79; in imagining 40–1, 86, 89–90; in olfaction 30; in reading 26; in reflexive consciousness 180; in representation 75, 76–7; in scripts 134; in self-model 153; in social cognition 82, 175–6; in vision 24, 40–2, 47, 48–50, 53, 76–8, 79, 85, 114, 115, 130, 144, 181, 192 Bransford, John D. 131 Braun, Michael 6 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 187 Breitinger, Heinrich 59 Brenner, Eli 79, 148 Brentano, Franz 13, 95 Bricmont, Jean 12 Broch, Hermann 95 Brock, Timothy C. 172 Brod, Max 98, 113, 186, 193 Brooke-Rose, Christine 10 Brooks, Peter 62–3, 70 Brownell, Hiram 27 Bruner, Jerome S. 2 Bryant, David J. 184 Bubic, Andreja 130 Buch, Hans Christoph 62, 98 Bucher, Max 58, 59, 93n Buddhism see Zen buffer: between mind and world 24; vision-action 79–80; visual 43, 47, 115 Buhrmann, Thomas 76 Bülthoff, Heinrich 51 Burke, Michael 18, 30–1, 92n, 163, 216 Busse, Constanze 32 Butcher, Samuel Henry 93n Cabeza, Roberto 30 Cacioppo, John T. 165 Campbell, Karen J. 13

Caracciolo, Marco 26 Carroll, Joseph 174 Carroll, Noël 172–3 Cartesian cogito 74 Cartesian dualism see dualism, mind-body Cartesian materialism 43, 80 Cartesian Theatre 43–4, 80–1, 105–7, 114, 181, 205 categories: ad hoc 137–8; basic-level 37, 91, 125, 128, 138–42, 146; cognitive-perceptual 25, 29, 37, 71–2, 79, 87, 130, 143, 146–7, 151 (see also “seeing as”); natural image 141, 146–7; of readers’ responses 37, 217–18 Chabris, Christopher F. 51, 212 Chalmers, David J. 48–9 change blindness 50–3, 129, 148, 155–6, 157, 158–9 characterisation, fictional 3, 4, 28, 30, 33, 63, 67, 69, 95, 128, 132, 177, 184, 195–9, 205–8, 214 Chatman, Seymour 188 Chatterjee, Anjan 20 Chesters, Timothy 174–5 Chipman, Susan 48 Chokron, Sylvie 90 Churchland, Patricia S. 42, 75 Cicero 55–6, 114 Clancey, William J. 133 Clark, Andy 76, 77, 79, 80 Close, Chuck 118 close reading 8–9, 20, 22, 28, 215 Cocking, J. M. 56 Coello, Yann 79 cogito, Cartesian see Cartesian cogito cognition, definition of 31, 163 cognition, social see social cognition cognitive cultural studies 16 cognitive linguistics 16, 17–18, 23, 25, 27, 92n; see also language processing cognitive literary science 216 cognitive literary studies 2, 8, 10, 11, 15–20, 22, 26, 163, 184, 214, 216 cognitive poetics 12, 15, 16, 17–18, 19, 134 cognitive psychology see psychology, cognitive cognitively unrealistic 2–3, 4, 213–14, 215 cognitive realism: definition and uses of 2–3; general qualities and effects

Index of (in Kafka) 91–2, 119, 120, 131, 152, 159, 160, 167, 190, 193, 203–4, 209–10, 211–12; beyond Kafka 212–16; and psychological realism 3; and value judgements 2; see also duality of response; Kafkaesque cognitive science, second-generation 23–4, 26, 29, 31, 135, 205, 211, 215 cognitivism 23, 75, 77, 135; see also neurocentrism; ocular-centrism Cohn, Dorrit 198 compelled response see duality of response computationalism see cognitivism consciousness: contents of 43, 79, 101, 104, 106, 118, 154 (see also Cartesian Theatre; metaphors of mind/consciousness as container/ space); and probing 53, 91, 152–54, 155, 157, 191 (see also attention and probing); stream of 3, 43, 153–54, 213 consciousness studies 23 Coplan, Amy 178 Corngold, Stanley 190 Cosmides, Leda 163 Craighero, Laila 176 Crane, Mary Thomas 9, 17 Cui, Xu 30, 86 Culler, Jonathon 10 Cupchik, Gerald C. 163 Currie, Gregory 3, 173, 196 Damasio, Antonio R. 165 Decety, Jean 26, 176 deictic representation see representation, deictic deictic shift 171–2 deictic vision 85, 181 Demetz, Peter 64 Dennett, Daniel C. 43, 47, 49, 53–4, 63, 82, 88, 93n, 105–6, 130, 132, 152–3, 183, 214 Descartes, René see dualism, mind-body Desmurget, Michel 78 Dickens, Charles 58, 68–70, 152, 197 Dilman, Ilham 87 Dinstein, Ilan 176 Di Paolo, Ezequiel Alejandro 76 directive, cognitive 76–7 Dixon, Peter 18, 21, 184 dorsal stream see two-streams hypothesis Dowden, Stephen D. 5, 28, 124, 150, 199

249

drawing see pictures Droll, Jason A. 52 dualism, mind-body 28, 43, 57, 72, 73–5, 93n, 105, 164, 174, 196, 215 duality of response: cognitive realism, general qualities and effects of (in Kafka) 33–7; and emotion/ reflection 161–3, 179, 182, 190, 193–4, 202, 203; and empirical research 120, 161–2, 211–12, 217–18; and evocation of character 206; and evocation of introspection 167; and evocation of perception 33, 91–2, 131, 143, 155, 159, 160, 203–4; beyond Kafka 214; and narrative perspective 6, 33, 160, 182, 190, 193–4, 202, 203; see also Kafkaesque Duttlinger, Carolin 32, 34, 97 dynamic veracity 140 Dyson, A. E. 187 Eagleton, Terry 63 Easterlin, Nancy 17 Eco, Umberto 10 ecocriticism 16 ecological psychology see psychology, ecological effect of reality see reality effect efference copies 78, 130, 175 effet de réel see reality effect Egner, Tobias 130 Einsinnigkeit (monopolised perspective) 185–6, 197 Einstein, Albert 95 Eliot, George 197 Ellis, Rob 78, 79–80, 85 embedded cognition see situated cognition embodied cognition 2, 11, 16, 18, 22–9, 128, 160, 163, 165–6, 175, 183, 203, 214 emergence 46–7 Emmott, Catherine 11, 129, 216 emotion: absence of in Kafka’s style 162–3, 187; aesthetic 171–4, 182; and appraisal 160–1, 164, 165–73, 178–9, 182, 190, 192, 194, 199, 201, 208; and author 60; and empirical research 109, 120, 160, 161–2, 163, 172, 199, 211, 218–19; as enactive 37, 39, 116–17, 118, 160, 164–78,

250

Index

180–1, 182, 194, 204, 209, 211, 212; and evolution 167; and imagination 56, 71; and Josef K. (Der Proceß) 147, 149–50; and memory 30, 214; as part of cognition 31, 160, 163–4, 165, 168; as perspectival 160–1, 166, 171–2, 183; and readers’ responses 8, 10, 18–19, 26, 31, 36–7, 120, 147, 159, 161–4, 171–4, 180, 182–3, 185, 189–95, 197–203, 205–10 (see also emotion and empirical research); and rhetoric 56, 117; and social cognition 26, 174–6; and visual art 36–7, 114, 116–17; see also fallacy, affective; duality of response; empathy; folk psychology; identification; narrative perspective and emotion; reflection empathy 33, 161, 168, 171–3, 174–9, 185, 193–4, 197, 199–203, 205, 208–9, 218–19 empirical aesthetics 20, 36 empirical study of literature 3, 19, 20, 21–2, 36; and hypothesis 3, 20–2, 29, 33, 37, 92, 121, 160, 164, 189, 211, 217–18, 220; and my research 22, 31, 33; and narrative perspective (see narrative perspective and empirical research); and “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) 1, 4, 35, 37, 120, 161, 163, 172, 182, 199, 211, 217–19; and Das Schloß (The Castle) 109–12, 189, 197–8, 220–21 Emter, Elisabeth 95 enactive cognition 24, 25–6, 28, 29, 74–5, 128, 160, 175, 179, 181, 192, 195, 204–5, 211, 212, 214; see also emotion as enactive; narrative perspective as enactive enactive representation (rhetoric) 56 enactive perception (vision and imagination) 25, 33, 37, 39–41, 44, 73, 75, 80–1, 85–6, 87–8, 92, 176; see also sensorimotor imagining; sensorimotor vision; fallibility of 143–52; and Kafka 33, 37, 39–40, 92, 96, 114–19, 121–31, 135–6, 138, 142, 144, 152, 159, 160, 179, 188, 192,

194, 203, 205, 208, 211–13; and narrative perspective (see narrative perspective as enactive); and perspective 181–2, 183 enactive versus sensorimotor 75–6 enargeia 56 enarges/enargestata 55, 93n Engel, Andreas K. 76, 78 Engel, Manfred 6 erlebte Rede 210n; see also free indirect style Escher, M. C. 148 Esrock, Ellen 10 Esslen, Michaela 180 evolution see emotion and evolution of; vision and evolution evolutionary literary studies 17, 20, 174 expectation, role of: in reading 39; in reading Kafka 34, 35, 124, 127, 136–37, 140, 160, 181, 182, 193, 201, 203, 205, 209, 211–12; in relation to folk psychology 92, 174, 214; in social cognition 175; in vision 50–1, 72, 73, 77, 78, 85, 92n, 115–17, 130–1, 146–7, 205, 209; see also familiarity, role of in cognition experimentation see empirical study of literature expertise, of readers 20–1 explanatory gap 47, 48–9, 73, 74, 80, 104 Expressionism 32, 113 extended cognition 9, 24, 77 eye movements: and attention 172; and imagining 89–90, 173, 175; and reading 26, 39–40, 92n; and social cognition 175; and vision 23, 25, 47, 50–4, 75, 76–8, 79–80, 82, 84–5, 130 fallacy: affective 9, 11, 163–4; homuncular 42, 45–48, 50, 80, 105–6, 181, 195, 210; intentional 9; photographic 93n; theatrical 105 fallibility of perception see enactive vision, fallibility of familiarity, role of in cognition 33, 66–8, 117, 128, 130–1, 133, 155, 156, 176, 180, 210; see also expectation, role of Fanta, Bertha 13, 95 fantastical, the 34 Faust, Miriam 27

Index Fechner, Gustav 13 feedback 16, 24–5, 78, 80, 87–8, 181 Fehr, Bernhard 188 Fiechter, Hans Paul 32 Findlay, John M. 14, 23, 29, 43, 48, 75, 80, 82 first-person approaches 181, 214–15 Fish, Stanley 10–11, 22 Fitzpatrick, Paula 78 Flanagan, J. Randall 79 Flaubert, Gustave 61, 63, 152, 187, 213–14 focalisation 181, 183–4, 194, 196; see also narrative perspective Fokkema, Douwe Wessel 12 folk psychology 3, 13, 160, 182, 212, 213, 215; and dualism 215; and emotion 160, 164–5, 179, 182, 192–3, 210; and intention 9, 193; and introspection 193; and literary expectations 182; and memory 214; and perception 33, 41–2, 62, 92, 108, 118, 160, 181–2, 205, 210; and self/ character 181, 195–6, 199, 205–6, 210, 213; and social cognition 174; see also expectation, role of in relation to folk psychology Fontane, Theodor 64–6, 67, 68, 93n, 152 Formalism 7, 10 Foucault, Michel 127 frame see script, cognitive Franklin, Nancy 184 free indirect style 21, 181, 183, 187–9, 199, 209, 210n free will 9, 193, 195; see also intention Freud, Sigmund see psychoanalysis; unconscious Freund, Elizabeth 10–11 Freundlieb, Dieter 19 Frey, Gesine 32, 125, 146, 155 Frijda, Nico H. 165–7, 170, 172–3, 182, 204 Froese, Tom 23 Fromm, Harold 16 Fromm, Waldemar 94 Fuchs, Anne 32 Fülleborn, Ulrich 6 Gallagher, Shaun 174–6, 179 Gallese, Vittorio 79, 175–6 Gandelman, Claude 113 Ganis, Giorgio 41, 43, 46–7, 49, 92n, 93n

251

gap, explanatory see explanatory gap gaps 31, 54, 66–7, 107, 110, 112, 122, 125–6, 129, 135, 152, 155–9, 197, 203; and literary theory 131–33, 169 Gavins, Joanna 12, 17 Gazzola, Valeria 176 Geng, J. J. 89 Gerrig, Richard J. 132, 133, 137, 184 Gholamain, Mitra 177, 179 Gibbs, Raymond W. 23, 27, 30, 76, 78, 79, 80, 87, 88 Gibson, James J. 23, 74 Gibson, Walker 10 Gilchrist, Iain 14, 23, 29, 43, 48, 75, 80, 82 gist 51, 84 “give rise to” 45, 46–7, 48, 50, 76, 80 Glenberg, Arthur M. 26, 133 Glinski, Sophie von 94 Glotfelty, Cheryll 16 Goebel, Rolf J. 146 Golonka, Sabrina 23 Gomel, Elana 69 Gonzalez-Castillo, Javier 26–7 Goodale, Melyvn A. 29, 78 Goodman, Kenneth S. 92n Goulet, Andrea 67 Grafton, Scott 78 Graham, John 57 Gray, Richard T. 108, 169 Green, Melanie C. 172 Gregory, Richard 29 Grimes, John 50 Grimm, Catherine 196 Grünbaum, Thor 135, 183, 189–90 Guntermann, Georg 94–5, 103 Gutzkow, Karl 59 Haggard, Patrick 9 Hagstrum, Jean H. 55, 57–8 Hakemulder, Jèmeljan 19 Halliwell, Stephen 55, 93n hard problem 48–50, 85; see also dualism, mind-body Harman, Mark 94 Hauk, Olaf 26 Havas, David A. 26 Hayhoe, Mary 82, 84 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 60, 95 Heidegger, Martin 73 Heidsieck, Arnold 5, 17 Helmholtz, Hermann von 73 Henderson, John M. 51–2

252

Index

Hendler, Talma 27 Henel, Ingeborg 186–7 Herman, David 7, 26, 28, 171–2, 212 Hertling, Gunter H. 64 Herz, Rachel S. 30 Hickok, Gregory 176 Hiebel, Hans 6, 38n Hillebrand, Bruno 64, 66 Hochstetter-Preyer, Agnes 62 Hogan, Patrick Colm 20, 163, 213 Holland, John H. 47 Holland, Norman N. 6, 10, 13, 16 Hollingworth, Andrew 51–2 Holmqvist, Kenneth 89, 175 Holsanova, Jana 89, 175 Homberger, Heinrich Emil 59–60 Homer 55 homunculus see fallacy, homuncular Horace 57 Humphrey, Nicholas 57 Humphreys, Glyn W. 172 Hurley, Susan L. 24–5 Husserl, Edmund 23, 73 Hutchinson, Ben 213 Hutto, Daniel D. 75–6, 85 Hyman, John 46 Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide 41 Ibsch, Elrud 12 idealized cognitive model 149 idealism see Realism, nineteenthcentury, and idealism identification, emotional 33, 177, 184, 185, 187, 189, 197–8, 205, 218; see also projection, emotional illusion: and perception 84, 86, 91, 107, 113, 129, 148–9, 159; and emotion 197 imagery, mental see imagination image schema 146 imaginal neglect see unilateral neglect imagination: and conceiving/believing 63; definition of 29–31; see also e.g. brain; emotion; enactive perception (vision and imagination); eye movements; individual variation; intentionality; pictorialism; schema; sensorimotor imagining; vividness immersion 66, 171; see also presence, immersive Impressionism 6 impressionist: as term of criticism 9–10, 163, 185; as term of praise 18

inattentional blindness 51, 53, 142, 148, 155–6, 157–9 indeterminacy see gaps indeterminacy, spots of 132 individual variation 2, 10, 11–12, 13, 19, 22, 30–1, 35, 214 infinite regress 44–6, 47–8, 50, 54, 101, 103–5, 114, 117, 118, 155; see also fallacy, homuncular influence, intellectual 13, 17, 34, 58, 60, 214 Ingarden, Roman 10, 127, 131–2 instantaneous perception 53–4, 129–30, 144 intention: authorial 8–9, 17, 190, 213; and Phenomenology 74; science of 9, 193; and social cognition 26, 174; see also free will intentional fallacy see fallacy, intentional intentionality: and imagination 91, 99, 104–5; and vision 116 interaction theory 174–5; see also social cognition interactive vision see vision, interactive interdisciplinarity 11, 12, 14–15, 20, 22, 215–16 Interpersonal Reactivity Index 219 interpretive community 10–11 introspection 3, 17, 103, 167, 192–3, 199; see also “asking the question”; consciousness and probing; reflection ipseity 179 Iser, Wolfgang 10, 132 Ishiguro, Hidé 87 isomorphism 44, 48–50, 54, 80, 100 Jabbi, Mbemba 176 Jacob, Pierre 52, 78 Jacobson, Edmund 88 Jäger, Georg 58, 60 Jahraus, Oliver 169 Jakob, Dieter 35–6 Jakobson, Roman 61 James, Henry 152 James, William 13, 49, 54, 83, 86, 112, 122, 154, 157 Jauss, Hans Robert 10 Jeannerod, Marc 26, 79 Jentsch, Ernst 36 Jeziorkowski, Klaus 139 Johansson, Roger 89, 175 Johansson, Roland S. 79 Johnson, Scott H. 89

Index Johnson, Marcia K. 131 Johnson, Mark 23, 24, 25, 27, 102, 117, 139, 146 Johnson-Laird, Philip N. 133 Johnsrude, Ingrid 26 Joyce, James 154, 187 “just in time” 82, 84–5, 125–6, 144, 152; see also potentiality Kablitz, Andreas 66 Kafka, Franz, works: “Die Bäume” (The Trees) 96; “Der Bau” (The Burrow) 168; “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (Description of a Struggle) 6, 114, 191–3; Betrachtung (Meditation) 32, 200–2; Briefe (Letters) 98, 105, 107, 108, 113, 119; Briefe an Milena (Letters to Milena) 97; “Erstes Leid” (First Suffering) 170; “Der Heizer” (The Stoker) 107; “Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande” (Wedding Preparations in the Country) 6; “Ein Hungerkünstler” (A Hunger Artist) 162, 215; “Kinder auf der Landstraße” (Children on the Country Road) 200–2; “Ein Landarzt” (A Country Doctor) 33, 207; Der Proceß (The Trial) 4, 9, 37, 114, 120–59, 162, 177–9, 184–7, 190, 197, 205, 206, 208; Das Schloß (The Castle) 108–12, 128, 184–6, 187–9, 197–9, 205–9, 220–1; Tagebücher (Diaries) 13, 94, 97, 98–9, 101–3, 104, 105, 106, 113, 114–17, 118, 119; “Das Urteil” (The Judgement) 6, 13, 97, 119, 132, 162, 169, 172, 199, 208; Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared) 193–4, 199; “Die Verwandlung” (Metamorphosis) 6, 33, 108, 166–7, 170–1, 180, 196 Kafkaesque 4, 35–6, 38n, 120, 161, 182, 212, 218 Kandel, Eric 181 Kant, Immanuel 70, 71–2, 87, 95 Karl, Frederick R. 32 Karn, Keith S. 82 Keen, Suzanne 163, 177–8 Kemmerer, David 26–7 Kerouac, Jack 154

253

Keysers, Christian 176 Kihlstrom, John F. 196 Kim, Jeong-Suk 32, 186 kinesic style 28–9 Kingstone, Alan 53 Kintsch, Walter 40, 133 Klein, Raymond 52 Koch, Christof 48 Kohl, Katrin M. 59, 147 Kosslyn, Stephen Michael 41, 43, 46–7, 49, 51, 89–90, 92n, 93n, 115 Kövecses, Zoltan 164 Kracauer, Siegfried 34 Krauss, Karoline 196 Kristeva, Julia 12 Kubin, Alfred 113 Kudszus, Winfried 186 Kügler, Hans 5, 124 Kuhn, Thomas S. 14, 23, 95–6 Kukkonen, Karin 26 Kuna, Franz 148 Kustov, Alexander A. 77 Kuzmičová, Anežka 20, 123, 140 LaBar, Kevin S. 30 Ladendorf, Heinz 113 Lakoff, George 23, 25, 27, 102, 116, 125, 135, 139–40, 146, 149, 151 Land, Michael F. 84 language processing 2, 22, 26–7, 39–40, 133, 141, 180 Legrand, Dorothée 179 Leopold, Keith 13, 186, 190 Leslie, Esther 7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 114 Levin, Daniel T. 51, 53, 84 Levine, Joseph 49 Levinson, Jerrold 173 Lewis, Cecil Day 35 Lewis, Charlton T. 56 Lewis, Marc D. 165, 166 Libet, Benjamin 43 Liddell, Henry George 55 Lindem, Karen 133 linearity: and cognition 152, 154–5, 156–9; and description 127–8; of fictional world 145–6; and literary periodisation 7; and narrative time 155, 158, 205–6; and Realism 152, 154; and text processing 39–40, 128; undercut in Kafka 127–8, 131, 152–9 linear perspective 183 linguistic competence 22

254

Index

literary theory 8–13, 15–20, 29, 131–3, 169 literature and science studies 16–17 literent 10 Lodge, David 61, 216 Lukács, Georg 7 Lukas, J. 29 luminance 87 transients 52–3 Luzzatti, Claudio 89 Mach, Ernst 13, 96 Macmillan, Malcolm 13 Mandik, Pete 79 Mangalath, Praful 40 Mann, Thomas 7, 203 manuscript changes 108, 145, 151, 198, 217, 220 Marcel, Anthony 123 Marks, David 30–1 Marr, David 100 Marson, Eric 13 Martini, Fritz 60–1, 142 Mashal, Nira 27 materialism 196; see also Cartesian materialism Maye, Alexander 76 McHale, Brian 210n meditation see mindfulness memory: and cognitive categories 137–8; and cognitive realism 2, 213–14; and consciousness 153–4; and emotion 30, 166; and imagining 46, 70–1, 87–8, 89; and language processing 19, 40, 92n, 131, 141, 184; and scripts 133; and vision 52, 77, 84–5, 141, 144, 156, 206 Menary, Richard 24, 92n mental imagery see imagination mental map 73 mental model 131, 133, 149, 184 mental rotation 44 Mercier, Charles 49 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 23, 73–4 metaphors: conceptual 27, 41, 102, 116–17, 147, 165, 212, 215; and dualism 212, 215; and Kafka studies 4, 34, 184–5; and language processing 26–7; and literary theory 171; and metonymy 4, 61; of mind/ consciousness as container/space 28, 43, 82, 83, 88, 104, 148,

154, 165, 192, 196, 212 (see also contents of consciousness); and narrative perspective 184–5, 187; of pictoriality/reflexivity 43–4, 46, 47–8, 58–60, 71, 80, 103–7; and Realism 61, 66, 69; and scripts 134–5 metonymy see metaphors and metonymy Meyer, Marion 133 Meyer, Steven 17 Miall, David S. 163 Millis, Keith K. 184 Milner, A. David 29, 78 mimesis 54–6, 57, 59, 63, 93n, 98, 103 mindfulness 204–5 mind’s eye 30, 46, 47, 103 mindsight 52 minimal departure, principle of 132 minimalism: and description 37, 68, 123, 127–9, 132, 136, 138–9, 141, 143, 145, 152, 155, 157, 177; and Kafka’s drawings 113; and readers’ responses 109, 112, 129, 132, 173, 189; and representation 77, 84–5, 129; and self-consciousness 179; and vision 144 Minsky, Marvin 134, 135, 165 mirroring 1, 5, 59–60, 63, 103–4, 118, 124, 178; see also reflection mirror neurons 26, 92n, 175–6 Modernism 6–7, 28, 37, 61, 95, 154, 187, 212, 214 Möller, Ralf 77 Monroe, Marilyn 53–4, 82, 130, 132 Mooij, Jan Jakob A. 30 Mossio, Matteo 76 motor resonance 26 Müller, Michael 186 multiple drafts 53, 152–3 Murphy, Richard 34 Musil, Robert 95 Myin, Erik 76 Nagel, Bert 38n Nagel, Thomas 50 narrative perspective: and action 122–3, 125–6, 128, 130, 136, 142, 168, 169; and emotion 160–1, 168, 169, 171–2, 177, 179, 180, 182–3, 184, 187, 189, 190, 193–4, 196–7, 199–203, 209; and empirical research 21, 184,

Index 189, 198, 220–1; as enactive 37, 39, 159, 160, 177, 179, 180–3, 192–3, 195, 212; and Kafka studies 5, 6, 32, 33, 184–7, 190, 197, 198; and literary expectations 182; and Realism 59–60, 65–6, 68, 69, 180, 203; and self/character 195–96, 199–203, 209–10; shifts/ ambiguities in 37, 109, 142, 159, 160–1, 169, 179–82, 184, 186, 189–95, 199–203, 206, 209–10 narrativisation 37, 121, 154–6, 158–9 narratology 19, 28, 32, 164, 181, 183, 188 cognitive 16; see also psychonarratology Naturalism 6, 59, 60 Neumann, Gerhard 34 neural correlates of consciousness 48 neural plasticity 77 neuroaesthetics 20 neurocentrism 25, 181, 183, 211; see also cognitivism; ocular-centrism neuroscience 9, 23, 24, 26–7, 41–2, 77, 78, 85, 89–90, 92n, 112, 175–6, 180, 193 New Criticism 8–10 Nichols, Shaun 63 Niederhoff, Burkhard 181 Noë, Alva 14, 23, 41–2, 48, 53, 73, 75–7, 79–84, 87, 92n, 117–18, 192 nonconscious 106, 147, 163, 166; see also unconscious Oatley, Keith 163, 177, 179 object map 47 objectivity see Realism and objectivity ocular-centrism 23, 25, 181, 183, 211 Ohl, Hubert 64, 65 olfaction 30, 67 Oliva, Aude 141, 146 Olivier, Gérard 79 omniscience 69, 109, 160, 169, 186, 191, 193–4, 202–3, 221 optic ataxia 79 O’Regan, J. Kevin 23, 42, 48, 49, 51, 73, 75–7, 79–80, 82–4, 87, 93n, 100, 192 Ousby, Ian 69 Palmer, Alan 15, 16–17, 25, 26, 28, 188 Pander Maat, Henk 184, 196 parable 5 paradigm shift see Kuhn, Thomas

255

paradox 34, 100, 110, 117, 124, 131, 165, 185–6, 196, 214; of fiction 173 Pascal, Roy 186, 187, 188, 210n Pashler, Harold 52 Pasley, Malcolm 155 Paulson, Eric J. 92n Pavel, Thomas G. 129 Pellegrino, G. di 175 perception see imagination; vision perceptual-activity theory of perception and mental imagery 87, 89–90; see also sensorimotor imagining perspective: and action 168, 172, 211; and change blindness 52; and mental models 149; and visual art 113, 183, 213 Pessoa, Luiz 53 Phelan, James 132, 169 Phenomenology 23, 24, 73–4, 104, 117–18, 179, 214 Philipona, David 76 Phillips, W. A. 50 philosophy of mind 23, 24, 213; see also Phenomenology photography 42, 114; and Kafka studies 34; see also fallacy, photographic physics, Kafka and contemporary 95–6 pictorialism 39–41; attractions of 41–3; and Kafka’s diaries and letters 37, 96–119; Kafka’s solutions to problems of 92, 96, 114–19; literary history of 4, 37, 54–64, 117; in literary practice 8, 64–70, 92, 121, 123, 127, 194; philosophical and scientific history of 37, 70–3, 92n, 93n; philosophical and scientific reactions against 73–5, 84; problems with 43–54, 63, 73, 75, 80–2, 86, 89, 92, 93n, 96, 97–119, 181; see also metaphors of pictoriality/ reflexivity; mirroring pictures: illustrating Kafka’s publications 107–8; Kafka’s own 113–14; in readers’ responses to Kafka (see empirical study of literature and Das Schloß) Pirenne, M. H. 113, 213 Plato 55, 56, 59, 70–1, 164, 165 plot 3, 4, 120, 135–6, 173, 209, 211 pluperfect see tense, pluperfect Poincaré, Henri 73

256

Index

Politzer, Heinz 168, 196 Pollak, Oskar 113 Pontefract, Amanda 53 Postmodernism 15, 112 potentiality: and affordances 74; and characterisation 207; and emotion 170–1, 173, 175, 178, 197; and perception 39, 72, 77, 82–4, 85, 86, 90–2, 100, 125, 129, 131–2, 137, 141, 152, 155, 175, 203; and perspectival shifts 201–2; and Realism 7; and relevance theory 141; and self-consciousness 179; and social cognition 175 Prague 6, 95 prediction see expectation, role of Preece, Julian 94 presence, immersive 123 presentation, pictorial structure of 55, 56–7, 76, 98, 99, 100–1, 114 Prince, Gerald 10 Prince, Stephen 36 principle of minimal departure see minimal departure, principle of Prinz, Jesse 52 projection, emotional 34, 177, 197–8 pronouns: and self 179, 180; shifts in 145, 190, 200–2 propositionalism 40–1, 43, 44 prototype, cognitive 20, 136, 139, 140–1, 149, 164 (see also categories); images 141 Proust, Marcel 30, 213–14 psychoanalysis 13, 16, 195 psychology: cognitive, 11, 17, 27; ecological 23; and embodied cognition 23–4; and intention 9; Kafka and contemporary 13, 17, 32, 103 psychonarratology 184 psycholinguistics see language processing psychological novel 3 psychophysics 13, 119 psychophysiology 165 Pulvermüller, Friedemann 26 Pylyshyn, Zenon W. 41, 42, 44, 47, 72, 75, 86, 89, 90, 91, 127 Quintilian 56, 97, 117 Radical Enactivism 85 Radway, Janice 163 Ramm, Klaus 32

reader 21–22, 121; see also readerresponse studies reader-response studies 10–11, 163; and text-inherent readers 10 readers’ responses see duality of response; emotion and readers’ responses; empirical study of literature reading times 133, 184 realism: cognitive (see cognitive realism); psychological 3–4, 6; scientific/ philosophical 15, 151–2; and visual art 113–14, 213 Realism, nineteenth-century 4, 22, 93n; and cognitive realism 7–8, 37, 213–14; English 58, 68–70; French 58–9, 66–8; German 58–61, 64–6, 93n; and idealism 56, 58, 59–60, 93n; Kafka as “beyond” 4, 210; Kafka as connected to 4, 5–6, 34, 158, 212, 180–1; Kafka as opposed to 4, 5–6, 7, 34, 121, 123–4, 145, 149, 152, 158, 180–1, 194, 195, 197, 199, 203, 206–7, 212–13; and linearity/narrativisation 152, 154, 158; and mimesis 54, 57, 59, 63, 93n; and mirroring (see mirroring); and Modernism 6–7, 61, 214; and narrative perspective 160, 180, 194, 199, 203, 221; and Naturalism 59, 60; and objectivity 61–2; and pictorialism 37, 57, 58, 60, 70, 92, 121, 123; Poetic 59, 60; and psychological realism 4; and reality 60–2; and self/character 195–6, 197, 207; as socio-political 63; and vision 31–2, 61–3 Realismusdebatte (Realism debate) 7 realistic, definitions of 1, 211–12; see also empirical study of literature reality effect 2, 7, 35, 61, 66 reality principle 132 recall see memory reductionism 10 reflection: on own experience 21, 42, 94–5, 97, 103–5, 114, 117–19, 155, 161, 179–80, 182, 190, 192, 193–4, 200–2, 206; see also mirroring; introspection relevance theory 9, 141 Rensink, Ronald 51, 52, 82, 84 replacement hypothesis 23

Index representation: absence of 84, 88; action-oriented 76–77; analogue 41, 75, 149; deictic 76; functional 43, 75; virtual 82, 84; see also change blindness; directive; gist; isomorphism; pictorialism retina 47, 48, 50, 53, 73, 76, 79, 80, 84–5, 86, 90, 91, 92n, 100, 130, 181 Reynolds, Jack 74 Rhein, Phillip H. 206 rhetoric 15, 28, 55–8, 61, 98, 117, 132, 169 Richards, I. A. 163 Richardson, Edmund 93n Richez, Aurélien 79 Richter, Karl 162 Riddoch, M. Jane 172 Rieger, Jeanette C. 139 Riffaterre, Michael 10 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 134, 194 Rinck, Mike 26 Ritzer, Monika 61, 62, 93n Robertson, Ritchie 4, 5, 13, 33, 119, 155, 185, 186–7 Robinson, David Lee 77 robotics see artificial intelligence; artificial life Rolleston, James 6 Rolls, Edmund T. 168, 170 Romanticism 60 Rosch, Eleanor 24, 74, 139, 205 Rothe, Wolfgang 113–14 Ruggieri, Vezio 89 Ryan, Judith 13, 17, 95–6 Ryan, Marie-Laure 132 Ryle, Gilbert 72, 192 saccade see eye movements saccadic suppression 50, 80 Sadato, Norihiro 77 Sailer, Uta 79 sandwich model of mind 24 Sanford, Anthony J. 216 Sartre, Jean-Paul 30, 91 Scarry, Elaine 17, 30, 100 Schank, Roger C. 128, 133 schema: cognitive 131, 134–5, 137, 149; and emotion 167; and imagining 87, 90; and vision 84, 145–6, 147; see also image schema; script, cognitive Schier, Flint 92n Schlinger, Henry 20

257

Schofield, Malcolm 71 Schooler, Jonathon W. 30 science, status of 13–15, 16, 215–16 Scott, Robert 55 script, cognitive 128–9, 132, 133–8, 140 sculpture 55–6, 71, 99, 101, 114–19 Seckel, Al 148 “seeing as” 71, 87, 90, 99, 101, 125–6, 138, 144–7, 149 seeing without looking see instantaneous perception Segal, Erwin M. 171 self 195: and character 195–6, 199–203, 205–10; and consciousness 153–4; as enactive 205–8; and feedback loops 16; as homunculus 42, 80, 104–7, 181, 210; and Kafka studies 196; and narrative perspective 159, 160, 191–3, 199–203, 208–10; and Phenomenology 74, 179–80; and philosophy contemporary to Kafka 96; and reflexivity 101–5, 179–80, 191–93, 201; and Zen 204–5; see also characterisation; folk psychology and self/character; fallacy, homuncular; reflection on own experience self-consciousness 179–80; see also reflection on own experience self-model 153 Semino, Elena 134 sensorimotor imagining 86–92 sensorimotor information in language 27–8, 29 sensorimotor invariants 23, 102 sensorimotor responses in reading 8, 31 (see also motor resonance) sensorimotor vision 75–86; and attention 77, 78, 115–16, 125–6, 128, 205–6; and the hard problem 49; precursors of 23, 73–5; and strong embodiment 23–4 (see also enactive perception; enactive versus sensorimotor) Serra, Richard 118, 119n Shapiro, Lawrence A. 23, 76 Sheldrake, Roger 59 Shepard, Roger N. 48 Sheppard, Richard 185, 186 Short, Charles 56 Silvia, Paul J. 36 Simons, Daniel J. 50–2, 79, 84, 212

258

Index

simulation: computer 47; and reading 26; and social cognition 174–5, 176, 178; see also situated-simulation model Singer, W. 50 Singer, Tania 176 situated cognition 24, 28, 109, 128, 160, 166, 168, 171–2, 175, 181, 183, 199, 205, 208, 211, 214, 215 situated-simulation model 134 situation model see mental model Skinner, B. F. 25 Sloman, Aaron 79 Smeets, Jeroen B. J. 79, 148 smell, sense of see olfaction Snowden, Robert 44, 48, 50, 144 social cognition 16, 26, 82, 174–6 Sokal, Alan 12 Sokel, Walter H. 32, 196, 206 Soon, Chun Siong 9 Sotirova, Violeta 21, 189 space: and evocation of fictional world 4, 66, 68–9, 122, 123, 126–8, 137, 146, 150, 155; and frames 134; and imagining 89, 90, 99; interior 28, 98–9, 212 (see also space, metaphors of); and Kafka studies 4, 32, 146, 168, 185–6; and literary theory 171–2; and mental models 129, 133, 149, 184; metaphors of 43, 171, 184–6, 212 (see also space, interior); and perspective in visual art 113; and representation 41, 43, 48, 84; and sensation 96; and time 127–8, 183; and vision 47, 52, 73, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 148–9 spatial frequency 146 spectral signature 146 Speer, Nicole K. 176 Sperber, Dan 9, 92n, 141 Spivey, M. J. 89 Stamenov, Maxim I. 176 Stanzel, F. K. 210n Steen, Gerard 12 Steinbeck, John 123 Steinhauer, Harry 215 Steinsaltz, David 32 Stendhal 59, 63 Stevens, Jennifer A. 26, 176 Stockwell, Peter 15, 17–18, 19, 27, 134 Strawson, P. F. 72

stream of consciousness see consciousness, stream of Structuralism 12 Sturmann, Manfred 186 subjectivity: and critical practice 20–2; and readers’ responses 12, 19; and Realism 61–2; see also self; empathy subjunctive 102, 147, 202 substitutionary narration 188 Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise 174 Summerfield, Christopher 130 supernatural 6, 147, 211 Sussman, Henry 13, 32 Swann, Joan 21 Swart, Marte 176 Sweeney, Kevin W. 196 Sweetser, Eve 25, 29 symbols: in literature 6, 32, 64, 163, 198–9; in cognition 23, 26 Symbolism 113 sympathy 172, 178, 184, 187, 196, 218 Tan, Ed S. 178, 182 Taraborelli, Dario 76 Tatler, Benjamin W. 84 tense 109, 185, 187, 190; pluperfect 156–7, 159, 190 text processing see language processing; linearity and text processing text world theory 17 Thackeray, William Makepeace 58, 203 Thanner, Josef 64 theory of mind 174–5 theory theory see theory of mind Thomas, Nigel J. T. 30, 47, 50, 71, 83, 86–7, 89, 90, 145 Thompson, Evan 24, 53, 74, 205 Thompson, Peter 44, 48, 50, 144 Thompson, William L. 41, 43, 46–7, 49, 92n, 93n time: and action 168; and characterisation 207; and consciousness 148, 154; and dynamic veracity 140; and emotion 164, 166–7, 168, 171, 178; and evocation of fictional world 3, 123, 127–8, 155, 157–9, 205–7; and Kafka studies 155, 168, 185–6, 190; and literary theory 171–2; and mental models 133; metaphors of 185; and perception 51, 53–4, 76–7, 82, 84–5, 101, 115–16, 130, 183;

Index

259

and perspective 179, 183, 190; and scripts 134; and self 195; and sensation 96; and space 127–28 Tompkins, Jane P. 164 Tooby, John 163 Torralba, Antonio 141, 146 Torrance, Steve 79 translation: of Aristotle’s Poetics 93n; of German pictorial terminology 98; from Greek to Latin 56; of Kafka’s works 8; of space into time 127–8 trans-saccadic integration see transsaccadic memory trans-saccadic memory 50–1, 80, 84 Triesch, Jochen 85, 148 Triffitt, Gregory B. 33 Troscianko, Emily T. 1, 2, 9, 14, 17, 18, 30, 31, 95, 109, 128, 130, 162, 213–14, 215, 216, 219 Troscianko, Tom 44, 48, 50, 144 truth(s) 5, 10, 14–15, 55, 60, 61, 62, 71, 95, 102, 105, 116, 124, 159 Tucker, Mike 78, 79–80, 85 Turatto, Massimo 53 Turner, Mark 17, 27 Tversky, Barbara 149, 184 two-streams hypothesis 78–9, 148–9

86, 88; of metaphorical movement 26; and narrative perspective 190; of negation 194; omission of 69, 159, 188; of representation 56; of vision 25, 149, 150 verisimilitude 2; cognitive 123 Vermeule, Blakey 173 Vincent, Benjamin T. 130 virtual action tendency see action tendency, virtual vision 14, 29–32; active 75; deictic (see deictic vision); as enactive (see enactive vision); and evolution 20, 75; interactive 75; and Kafka studies 31–2; passive/ pure 75; and Realism 31–2, 61–4; sensorimotor account of (see sensorimotor vision) visual buffer see buffer, visual visual perception see vision Viviani, Paolo 76 vividness: and imagining 30, 54–5, 56, 58, 60, 62, 86, 91, 109, 117; and linguistic/literary evocation 42, 55, 60, 64, 93n, 97; and vision 81–2, 90 Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire 30, 218–19

uncanny, the 34, 36 unconscious 3, 73, 77–8, 140; see also nonconscious unilateral neglect 89–90 universals: cognitive 12, 21, 141; narrative 20 unrealistic see cognitively unrealistic unsettled response see duality of response Uspensky, Boris Andreevich 127 ut pictura poesis 57–8, 59, 93n

Wagemans, Johan 20 Wagenbach, Klaus 95, 113 Wallis, Charles 78, 85 Wallis, Guy 51 Walsh, Richard 133 Walter-Schneider, Margret 32 Walton, Kendall L. 132, 173, 183, 185, 187, 194, 203 Warner, Rex 35 Warnock, Mary 71, 88 Weber, Max 13 Wegner, Daniel M. 9 Wellek, René 93n Weller, Shane 213 Werth, Paul 17 Wheatley, Thalia 9 White, John J. 7 Wicker, Bruno 176 Willems, Gottfried 93n Wilson, Andrew D. 23 Wilson, Deirdre 9, 141 Wilson, Edward O. 174 Wilson, Margaret 23

Van Dijk, Teun Adrianus 133 Van Gelder, Tim 75 van Gogh, Vincent Willem 113 Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana 27 van Peer, Willie 184, 196 Varakin, D. Alexander 53 Varela, Francisco J. 24, 74, 205 ventral stream see two-streams hypothesis Venus de Milo 114–16 verbs: of action 26; and free indirect style 187, 188; of imagining

260

Index

Wilson, W. Daniel 10 Wimsatt, William K. Jr 9–10, 11, 18, 163–4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 70, 72–3, 165 Wolff, Kurt (Verlag) 108 Woolf, Virginia 3, 154, 187 Wright, Wayne 78, 85 Wurtz, Robert H. 181

Zahavi, Dan 179 Zelinsky, Gregory J. 51 Zen 204–5 Zima, Peter V. 132 Zimmermann, Hans Jürgen 64, 65 Zola, Émile 63 Zunshine, Lisa 16, 17, 174 Zwaan, Rolf A. 133 Zymner, Rüdiger 7, 119