Does Literary Fiction Challenge Racial Stereotypes?

A book is a mirror: if a fool looks in, do not expect an apostle to look out.
                                                                Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)


Reading literary fiction can be highly pleasurable, but does it also make you a better person? Conventional wisdom and intuition lead us to believe that reading can indeed improve us. However, as the philosopher Emrys Westacott has recently pointed out in his essay for 3Quarksdaily, we may overestimate the capacity of literary fiction to foster moral improvement. A slew of scientific studies have taken on the task of studying the impact of literary fiction on our emotions and thoughts. Some of the recent research has centered on the question of whether literary fiction can increase empathy. In 2013, Bal and Veltkamp published a paper in the journal PLOS One showing that subjects who read excerpts from literary texts scored higher on an empathy scale than those who had read a nonfiction text. This increase in empathy was predominantly found in the participants who felt "transported" (emotionally and cognitively involved) into the literary narrative. Another 2013 study published in the journal Science by Kidd and Castano suggested that reading literary fiction texts increased the ability to understand and relate to the thoughts and emotions of other humans when compared to reading either non-fiction or popular fiction texts.

Scientific assessments of how fiction affects empathy are fraught with difficulties and critics raise many legitimate questions. Do "empathy scales" used in psychology studies truly capture the psychological phenomenon of "empathy"? How long does the effect of reading literary fiction last and does it translate into meaningful shifts in behavior? How does one select appropriate literary fiction texts and control texts, and conduct such studies in a heterogeneous group of participants who probably have very diverse literary tastes? Kidd and Castano, for example, used an excerpt of The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht as a literary fiction text because the book was a finalist for the National Book Award, whereas an excerpt of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was used as a ‘popular fiction' text even though it was long-listed for the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction.
The study "Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction" led by the psychology researcher Dan Johnson from Washington and Lee University took a somewhat different approach. Instead of assessing global changes in empathy, Johnson and colleagues focused on a more specific question. Could the reading of a fictional narrative change the perception of racial stereotypes?


Johnson and his colleagues chose an excerpt from the novel "Saffron Dreams" by the Pakistani-American author Shaila Abdullah. In this novel, the protagonist is a recently widowed pregnant Muslim woman Arissa whose husband Faizan was working in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and killed when the building collapsed. The excerpt from the novel provided to the participants in Johnson's research study describes a scene in which Arissa is traveling alone late at night and is attacked by a group of male teenagers. The teenagers mock and threaten her with a knife because of her Muslim head-scarf (hijab), use racial and ethnic slurs as well as make references to the 9/11 attacks. The narrative excerpt does not specifically mention the word Caucasian, but one of the attackers is identified as blond and another one has a swastika tattoo. They do not believe her when she tries to explain that she was also a victim of the 9/11 attacks and instead refer to her as belonging to a "race of murderers".

The researchers used a second text in their experiment, a synopsis of the literary excerpt from Saffron Dreams. This allowed Johnson colleagues to distinguish between the effects of the literary narrative style with its inner monologue and description of emotions versus the effects of the content. Samples of the literary text and the synopsis used by the researchers can be found at the end of this article (scroll down) for those readers who would like to compare their own reactions to the two texts.
The researchers recruited 68 U.S. participants (mean age 36 years, roughly half were female, 81% Caucasian, reporting seven different religious affiliations but none of them were Muslim) and randomly assigned them to the full literary narrative group (33 participants) or the synopsis group (35 participants).  After the participants read the texts, they were asked to complete a number of questions about the text and its impact on them. They were also presented with 18 male faces that the researchers had designed with a special software in a manner that they appeared ambiguous in terms of Caucasian or Arab characteristics. For example, the faces combined blue eyes with darker skin tones.

The participants were asked to grade the faces as being:
1) Arab
2) mixed, more Arab than Caucasian
3) mixed, more Caucasian than Arab
4) Caucasian

The participants were also asked to estimate the genetic overlap between Caucasians and Arabs on a scale from 0% to 100%.

Participants in the narrative fiction group were more likely to choose one of the ambiguous options (mixed, more Arab than Caucasian or mixed, more Caucasian than Arab) and less likely to choose the categorical options (Arab or Caucasian) than those who read the synopsis. Even more interesting is the finding that the average percentage of genetic overlap between Caucasians and Arabs estimated by the synopsis group was 33%, whereas it was 57% in the narrative fiction group.

Both of these estimates are way off. The genetic overlap between any one human being and another human being on our planet is approximately 99.9%. Even much of the 0.1% variation in the human genome sequences is not due to 'racial' differences. As pointed out in a Nature Genetics article by Lynn Jorde and Stephen Wooding, approximately 90% of total genetic variation between humans would be present in a collection of individuals from any one continent (Asia, Europe or Africa). Only an additional 10% genetic variation would be found if the collection consisted of a mixture of Europeans, Asians and Africans.

It is surprising that both groups of study participants heavily underestimated the genetic overlap between Arabs and Caucasians, and that simply reading the fictional text changed their views of the human genome. This latter finding is also a red flag that informs us about the poor state of general knowledge of genetics, which appears to be so fragile that views can be swayed by nonscientific literary texts.

This study is the first to systematically test the impact of reading literary fiction on an individual's assessment of race boundaries and genetic similarity. It suggests that fiction can indeed blur the perception of race boundaries and challenge our stereotypes. The text chosen by the researchers is especially well-suited to defy stereotypical views held by the readers. The protagonist's Muslim husband was killed in the 9/11 attacks and she herself is being harassed by non-Muslim thugs. This may challenge assumptions held by some readers that only non-Muslims were the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The effect of reading the narrative text seemed to have effects on the readers that went far beyond the content matter – the story of a Muslim woman who is showing significant courage while being threatened. The faces shown to the study participants were those of men, and the question of genetic overlap between Caucasians and Arabs was a rather abstract question which had little to do with Arissa's story. Perhaps Arissa's story had a broader effect on the readers. The study did not measure the impact of the narrative on additional stereotypes or assumptions held by the readers such as those regarding other races or sexual orientations, but this is a question that ought to be investigated.
One of the limitations of the study is that it assessed the impact of the story only at a single time-point, immediately after reading the text. Without measuring the effect a few days or weeks later, it is difficult to ascertain whether this was a lasting effect.  Another limitation of this study is that it purposefully chose an anti-stereotypical text, but did not test the opposite hypothesis, that some fictional narratives may potentially foster negative stereotypes.

One of my earliest memories of an English-language novel about Muslim characters is the spy novel "The Mahdi" by the British author A.J Quinnell (pen name for Philip Nicholson) written in 1981. The basic plot is that (spoiler alert) US and British intelligence agencies want to manipulate and control the Muslim world by installing a 'Mahdi', the long-awaited spiritual and political leader of Muslims foretold by Muslim tradition. The ridiculous part of the plan is that the puppet leader is accepted by the Muslim world as the true incarnation of the Mahdi because of a green laser beam emanating from a satellite. The beam incinerates a sacrificial animal in front of a crowd of millions of Muslims at the Hajj pilgrimage and convinces them (and the rest of the Muslim world) that God sent this green laser beam as a sign. This novel portrayed Muslims as gullible idiots who would simply accept the divine nature of a green laser beam. One can only wonder what impact reading an excerpt from that novel would have had on the perception of race boundaries by study participants.

The study by Johnson and colleagues is an important contribution to the research of how reading can change our perceptions of race and possibly stereotypes in general. It shows that reading fiction can blur the perception of race boundaries, but it also raises a number of additional questions about how long this effect lasts, how pervasive it is and whether fiction might also have the opposite effect. Hopefully, these questions will be addressed in future research studies.

Image Credit: Saffron Woman by N.M. Rehman (generated from an attribution-free, public domain photograph)

Reference:

Dan R. Johnson , Brandie L. Huffman & Danny M. Jasper (2014)
Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36:1, 83-90, DOI:10.1080/01973533.2013.856791


Excerpt of the literary fiction sample from "Saffron Dreams" by Shaila Abdullah
 This is just an excerpt from the narrative sample used by the researchers, which was 3,108 words in length (pages 57-64 from the book):

"I got off the northbound No. 2 IRT and found out almost immediately that I was not alone. The late October evening inside the station felt unusually weighty on my senses.
I heard heavy breathing behind me. Angry, smoky, scared. I could tell there were several of them, probably four. Not pros, perhaps in their teens. They walked closer sometimes, and other times the heavy thud of spiked boots on concrete and clanking chains receded into the distance. They walked like boys wanting to be men. They fell short. Why was there no fear in my heart? Probably because there was no more room in my heart for terror. When horror comes face-to-face with you and causes a loved one's death, fear leaves your heart. In its place, merciful God places pain. Throbbing, pulsating, oozing pus, a wound that stays fresh and raw no matter how carefully you treat it. How can you be afraid when you have no one to be fearful for? The safety of your loved ones is what breeds fear in your heart. They are the weak links in your life. Unraveled from them, you are fearless. You can dangle by a thread, hang from the rooftop, bungee jump, skydive, walk a pole, hold your hand over the flame of a candle. Burnt, scalded, crashed, lost, dead, the only loss would be to your own self. Certain things you are not allowed to say or do. Defiant as I am, I say and do them anyway.
And so I traveled with a purse that I held protectively on one side. My hijab covered my head and body as the cool breeze threatened to unveil me. I laughed inwardly as I realized I was more afraid of losing the veil than of being mugged. The funny part of it is, I desperately wanted to lose my hijab when I came to America, but Faizan had stood in my way. For generations, women in his household had worn the veil, although none of them seemed particularly devout. It's just something that was done, no questions asked, no explanations needed. My argument was that we should try to assimilate into the new culture as much as possible, not stand out. Now that he was gone, losing the hijab meant losing a portion of our time together.
It had been just 41 days. My iddat, bereavement period, was over. Technically I was a free woman, not tied to anyone, but what could I do about the skeletons in my closet that wouldn't leave me alone?"

Excerpt of the Synopsis used by the researchers as a comparator:
This is the corresponding excerpt from the synopsis used by the researchers. The full-length synopsis was 491 words long:

"The scene starts with Arissa getting off the subway train. She is being followed. Most commuters have already returned home, so it is not the safest time to be traveling alone. Four people are walking behind her. Initially confused by the lack of fear in her heart, she realizes that it is the consequence of losing someone so close to her. It is ironic that she is wearing her hijab, a Muslim veil. She wanted to get rid of it when she came to America, but her husband, Faizon, insisted she keep it. Following his death, keeping the hijab was a way of keeping some of their time together. It has been 41 days since the attack, and Arissa's iddat, bereavement period, is over. She is a free woman, but cannot put aside her grave feelings of loss."

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on the 3Quarksdaily blog.


Johnson, D., Huffman, B., & Jasper, D. (2014). Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36 (1), 83-90 DOI: 10.1080/01973533.2013.856791

Buddhist Musings in Ramadan

Ramadan is the month of fasting and a time for spiritual growth among Muslims. The traditionalist approach to "spiritual growth" is for Muslims to complement their fasting with performing additional prayers at night and regular reading of the Quran throughout the month. My own approach is somewhat different, I tend to complement my fasting with the reading of writings and scriptures from other philosophies or faith traditions, including atheist and humanist teachings. This year, I decided to study the Dhammapada (in the translation of Gil Fronsdal), one of the most widely read and revered writings in the Buddhist faith.

Buddha Statue from the Takht-i-Bahi monastery in Pakistan

I was inspired to learn more about Buddhism because I was reading the remarkable novel "A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki, who is not only a brilliant author but also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest. The first person narrator in the novel is a 16-year old Japanese girl Nao who is bullied by her classmates. Nao's parents moved from Japan to Silicon Valley but were forced to return to Japan when the Dotcom bubble burst. Nao's father loses his job and the family is forced to live in poverty. The family's poverty and the fact that Nao is seen as an alien "transfer student" lead to her being ostracized at school. But her classmates go even further and begin psychologically and physically torturing her, leaving scars and scabs all over her body.

A photo of the Takht-i-Bahi monastery, the most complete ancient Buddhist monastic center in Pakistan and a UNESCO World heritage site

Nao is invited to spend the summer with her 104-year old great-grandmother Jiko who is a Buddhist nun. In the following scene, Jiko takes a bath with Nao and notices the scars:

"I waited. Old Jiko liked to take her time, and she was really good at it because she'd been practicing for so many years, so as a result, I was always waiting for her, and you'd think that waiting would be annoying for a young person like me, but for some reason I didn't mind. It wasn't like I had anything better to do that summer. I sat there on my little wooden stool, naked and hugging my knees and shivering, not from the cold but in anticipation of the scalding heat of the water, so when, instead, I felt her fingertip touch a small scar in the middle of my back, I was startled. My body stiffened. The light was so dim, how could she see my scars with her bad eyes? I figured she couldn't, but then I felt her finger move across my skin in a pattern, hesitant, pausing here and there to connect the dots."You must be very angry," she said. She spoke so quietly, it was like she was talking to herself, and maybe she was. Or maybe she hadn't said anything at all, and I'd just imagined it. Either way, my throat squeezed shut and I couldn't answer, so I shook my head. I was so ashamed, but at the same time, this enormous feeling of sadness brimmed up inside me, and I had to hold my breath to stop from crying.
She didn't say anything else. She washed me gently, and for the first time I just wanted her to hurry up and finish. After we were done, I got dressed quickly and said good night and left her there. I thought I was going to throw up. I didn't want to go back to my room, so I ran halfway down the mountainside and hid in the bamboo forest until it got dark and the fireflies came out. When Muji rang the big bell at the end of her fire watch to signal the end of the day, I snuck back into the temple and crawled into bed.
The next morning I went looking for old Jiko and found her in her room. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the door, bent over her low table. She was reading. I stood in the doorway and didn't even bother to go in. "Yes," I told her. "I'm angry, so what?"

(excerpted from novel "A Tale for the Time Being" by Ruth Ozeki)

Once Nao is able to speak about her anger to Jiko, Nao's healing process can begin. The story makes frequent references to Buddhist teachings, quoting from Buddhist texts as well as allowing the reader to gradually imbibe important spiritual concepts. To better understand these concepts, I decided to read the Dhammapada. 

I first began with the chapter on "Anger" where I was struck by the following verses:

"The one who keeps anger in check as it arises,
            As one would a careening chariot,
I call a charioteer.
            Others are merely rein-holders."

How often do we let our anger chariot determine our paths? I can remember countless times when I have been passively holding the reins but rarely take control of this chariot.
I will just leave you with one more excerpt from the Dhammapada, but I advise you to read it (and, of course, Ozeki's novel!) in its entirety:

From the chapter "The Sage":

"As a solid mass of rock,
            Is not moved by the wind,
So a sage is not moved
            By praise or blame."

***************
Image credit: 1) Buddha statue now housed in Berlin, image by Gryffindor via Wikimedia, 2) Takht-i-Bahi monastery ruins in Northern Pakistan, image by Ziegler175 via Wikimedia.

Composites

"Shorter sentences and simple words!" was the battle cry of all my English teachers. Their comments and corrections of our English-language essays and homework assignments were very predictable. Apparently, they had all sworn allegiance to the same secret Fraternal Order of Syntax Police. I am sure that students of the English language all over the world have heard similar advice from their teachers, but English teachers at German schools excel in their diligent use of linguistic guillotines to chop up sentences and words. The problem is that they have to teach English to students who think, write and breathe in German, the lego of languages.

Lego blocks invite the observer to grab them and build marvelously creative and complex structures. The German language similarly invites its users to construct composite words and composite sentences. A virtually unlimited number of composite nouns can be created in German, begetting new words which consist of two, three or more components with meanings that extend far beyond the sum of their parts. The famous composite German word "Schadenfreude" is now used worldwide to describe the shameful emotion of joy when observing harm befall others. It combines "Schaden" (harm or damage) and "Freude" (joy), and its allure lies in the honest labeling of a guilty pleasure and the inherent tension of combining two seemingly discordant words.

The lego-like qualities of German can also be easily applied to how sentences are structured. Commas are a German writer's best friends. A German sentence can contain numerous clauses and sub-clauses, weaving a quilt of truths, tangents and tangential truths, all combined into the serpentine splendor of a single sentence. Readers may not enjoy navigating their way through such verschachtelt sentences, but writers take great pleasure in envisioning a reader who unwraps a sentence as if opening a matryoshka doll only to find that the last word of a mammoth sentence negates its fore-shadowed meaning.


Even though our teachers indulged such playfulness when we wrote in German, they were all the more harsh when it came to our English assignments. They knew that we had a hankering for creating long sentences, so they returned them to us covered in red ink markings, indicative of their syntactic fervor. This obsession with short sentences and words took the joy out of writing in English. German was the language of beauty and poetry, whereas English became the language best suited for efficient communication. By the time I reached my teenage years, I began to lose interest in writing anything in English beyond our mandatory school assignments. I still enjoyed reading books in English, such as the books of Enid Blyton, but I could not fathom how a language of simple sentences and simple words could be used to create works of literary beauty. This false notion fell apart when I first read "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe.

The decision to read "Things Fall Apart" was not completely arbitrary. My earliest memories of this world are those of the years I spent as a child in Igboland. My family moved from Pakistan to Germany when I was one year old, but we soon moved on to Nigeria. Germany was financing the rehabilitation of the electrical power grid that had been destroyed during the Biafra War. My father was one of the electrical engineers sent from Germany to help with the restoration and expansion of the electrical power supply in the South-Eastern part of Nigeria – the region which was home to the Igbo people and which had attempted and failed to secede as the Republic of Biafra.

We first stayed in Enugu, the former capital of the transient Republic of Biafra and then lived in the city of Aba. My memories of the time in Igboland are just sequences of images and scenes, and it is difficult to make sense of all of them: Kind and friendly people, palm trees and mysterious forests, riding a tricycle in elliptical loops, visits to electrical sub-stations. We returned to Germany when I was four years old. I would never live in the Igboland again, but recalling the fragmented memories of those early childhood years has always evoked a sense of comfort and joy in me. When I came across "Things Fall Apart" as a fourteen-year old and learned that it took place in an Igbo village, I knew that I simply had to read it.

I was not prepared for the impact the book would have on me. Great books shake us up, change us in a profound and unpredictable manner, leaving footprints that are etched into the rinds of our soul. "Things Fall Apart" was the first great English language book that I read. I was mesmerized by its language. This book was living proof that one could write a profound and beautiful book in English, using short, simple sentences.

 As the Ibo say: "When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk."
And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion— to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.
 Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
A child cannot pay for its mother's milk.

It wasn't just the beautiful language, aphorisms, Igbo proverbs and haunting images that made this book so unique. "Things Fall Apart" contained no heroes. The books that I had read before "Things Fall Apart" usually made it obvious who the hero was. But "Things Fall Apart" was different. Okonkwo was no hero, not even a tragic hero. But he also was no villain. As with so many of the characters in the book, I could see myself in them and yet I was also disgusted by some of the abhorrent acts they committed. I wanted to like Okonkwo, but I could not like a man who participated in the killing of his adopted son or nearly killed his wife in a fit of anger.

Guns fired the last salute and the cannon rent the sky. And then from the center of the delirious fury came a cry of agony and shouts of horror. It was as if a spell had been cast. All was silent. In the center of the crowd a boy lay in a pool of blood. It was the dead man's sixteen-year-old son, who with his brothers and half-brothers had been dancing the traditional farewell to their father. Okonkwo's gun had exploded and a piece of iron had pierced the boy's heart.

Achebe was not judging or mocking his characters, but sharing them with us. He was telling us about how real humans think and behave. As I read the book, I felt that I was being initiated into life. Life would be messy. Most of us would end up being neither true heroes nor true villains but composites of heroism and villainy.  If I did not want end up like Okwonkwo, the ultimate non-negotiator, I needed to accept the fact that my life would be a series of negotiations: negotiations between individuals, negotiations between conflicting identities and negotiations between values and cultures. The book described a specific clash of cultures in colonial Africa, but it was easy to apply the same clash to so many other cultures. I tried to envision Okwonkwo as an Indian farmer whose world began to fall apart when Arab armies invaded the Sindh. I imagined Okwonkwo as a Native American, a Roman or a Japanese warrior, each negotiating his way through cultural upheavals. The history of humankind is always that of things falling apart and, importantly, that of rebuilding after the falling apart.    

As soon as the day broke, a large crowd of men from Ezeudu's quarter stormed Okonkwo's compound, dressed in garbs of war. They set fire to his houses, demolished his red walls, killed his animals and destroyed his barn. It was the justice of the earth goddess, and they were merely her messengers. They had no hatred in their hearts against Okonkwo. His greatest friend, Obierika, was among them. They were merely cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman.

I read "Things Fall Apart" to find my past, but it defined my future. It helped me recognize the beauty of the English language and prepared me for life in a way that no book had ever done before.

Notes: All quotes are from "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe

Image Credits: Stack of "Things Fall Apart" (by Scartol via Wikimedia Commons), Photo of a porcelain insulator with a bullet hole probably from the Biafra war, Photo taken from the Presidential Hotel in Enugu 1973. 

Teju Cole on W.G. Sebald

Teju Cole writes in the New Yorker about the German author W.G. Sebald:

Throughout his career, W. G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. To this he added a willful blurring of literary boundaries and, in fact, almost all his writing, and not just the poetry and prose, comprised history, memoir, biography, autobiography, art criticism, scholarly arcana, and invention. This expert mixing of forms owed a great deal to his reading of the seventeenth-century melancholics Robert Burton and Thomas Browne, and Sebald’s looping sentences were an intentional homage to nineteenth-century German-language writers like Adalbert Stifter and Gottfried Keller. But so strongly has the style come to be associated with Sebald’s own work that even books that preceded his, such as those by Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, can seem, from our perspective as readers of English translations, simply “Sebaldian.”Sebald’s reputation rests on four novels—“Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” “The Rings of Saturn,” and “Austerlitz”—all of them reflections on the history of violence in general, and on the legacy of the Holocaust in particular. Our sense of this achievement has been enriched by his other works: the ones published in his lifetime (the lectures “On the Natural History of Destruction” and the long poem “After Nature”), and those that were released posthumously (including the essay collection “Campo Santo,” and the volumes of short poems “Unrecounted” and “For Years Now”). Sebald’s shade, like Roberto Bolaño’s, gives the illusion of being extraordinarily productive, and the publication now of “Across the Land and the Water,” billed as his “Selected Poems 1964-2001,” does not feel surprising. Ten years on, we are not quite prepared for him to put down his pen.

Read more here

Teju Cole on literary empathy, humanity and drones

Teju Cole writes in The New Yorker about literary empathy, humanity and drones:

I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere. And so I take helpless refuge in literature again, rewriting the opening lines of seven well-known books:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.

Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.

I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.

 Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.

Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

You can read more here.

Beautiful Description of Munich in "Gladius Dei" by Thomas Mann

Here is a beautiful description of Munich in the short story 'Gladius Dei' by Thomas Mann, translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Thomas Mann wrote it in 1902, but whenever I read this story, it reminds me of present-day Munich and the Odeonsplatz:

GLADIUS DEI

MUNICH WAS LUMINOUS. A radiant, blue-silk sky stretched out over the festive squares and white-columned temples, the neoclassical monuments and Baroque churches, the spurting fountains, the palaces and gardens of the residence, and the latter’s broad and shining perspectives, carefully calculated and surrounded by green, basked in the sunny haze of a first and lovely June day. 

The chattering of birds and furtive rejoicing throughout the streets ... and the unhurried and amusing bustle of the beautiful and leisurely city rolled, surged, and hummed across plazas and rows of houses. Tourists of all nations climbed up the steps to museums or rode around in the small, slow droshkies, peering right and left and up the building walls in promiscuous curiosity. 

Numerous windows were open, and from many of them music poured out into the streets, people practicing on pianos, violins, or cellos, sincere and well-meaning dilettantish efforts. But at the Odeon, as could be heard, people were earnestly studying at several grand pianos. 

Young men, whistling the Nothung motif and crowding the back of the modern theater every evening, wandered in and out of the university or the National Library, with literary journals in the side pockets of their jackets. A royal coach stopped outside the Academy of Fine Arts, which spread its white wings between Turk Street and the Victory Gate. And at the top of the Academy’s ramp, the models stood, sat, and lounged in colorful groups— picturesque oldsters, youngsters, and women in the costumes of the Alban Hills. 

Casualness and unhurried ambling through all the long avenues in northern Munich ... People were not exactly driven or devoured by the greedy craving to earn their livelihood; instead their aim was to lead a pleasant life. Young artists, with small round hats on the backs of their heads, with loose ties and no canes, carefree fellows, who paid their rent with color sketches, were strolling about to let this light-blue morning affect their moods, and they looked at the young girls, that short pretty type with brunet hair in a band, somewhat oversize feet, and heedless morals.... Every fifth house had studio windows blinking in the sun. At times an artistic structure stood out in the series of bourgeois buildings, the work of an imaginative young architect, a wide house with flat arches and bizarre ornamentation, full of wit and style. And suddenly, somewhere, the door in an all-too-boring facade was framed by a bold improvisation, by flowing lines and sunny colors, bacchantes, nixes, and rosy nudes............

This excerpt is taken from "Death in Venice and Other Tales" by Thomas Mann, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, Penguin Group 1999.

Here is the original in German from Project Gutenberg:

GLADIUS DEI

München leuchtete. Über den festlichen Plätzen und weißen Säulentempeln, den antikisierenden Monumenten und Barockkirchen, den springenden Brunnen, Palästen und Gartenanlagen der Residenz spannte sich strahlend ein Himmel von blauer Seide, und ihre breiten und lichten, umgrünten und wohlberechneten Perspektiven lagen in dem Sonnendunst eines ersten, schönen Junitages.  

Vogelgeschwätz und heimlicher Jubel über allen Gassen. …Und auf Plätzen und Zeilen rollt, wallt und summt das unüberstürzte und amüsante Treiben der schönen und gemächlichen Stadt. Reisende aller Nationen kutschieren in den kleinen, langsamen Droschken umher, indem sie rechts und links in wahlloser Neugier an den Wänden der Häuser hinaufschauen, und steigen die Freitreppen der Museen hinan… 

 Viele Fenster stehen geöffnet, und aus vielen klingt Musik auf die Straßen hinaus, Übungen auf dem Klavier, der Geige oder dem Violoncell, redliche und wohlgemeinte dilettantische Bemühungen. Im 'Odeon' aber wird, wie man vernimmt, an mehreren Flügeln ernstlich studiert.  

Junge Leute, die das Nothung-Motiv pfeifen und abends die Hintergründe des modernen Schauspielhauses füllen, wandern, literarische Zeitschriften in den Seitentaschen ihrer Jacketts, in der Universität und der Staatsbibliothek aus und ein. Vor der Akademie der bildenden Künste, die ihre weißen Arme zwischen der Türkenstraße und dem Siegestor ausbreitet, hält eine Hofkarosse. Und auf der Höhe der Rampe stehen, sitzen und lagern in farbigen Gruppen die Modelle, pittoreske Greise, Kinder und Frauen in der Tracht der Albaner Berge.  

Lässigkeit und hastloses Schlendern in all den langen Straßenzügen des Nordens… Man ist von Erwerbsgier nicht gerade gehetzt und verzehrt dortselbst, sondern lebt angenehmen Zwecken. Junge Künstler, runde Hütchen auf den Hinterköpfen, mit lockeren Krawatten und ohne Stock, unbesorgte Gesellen, die ihren Mietzins mit Farbenskizzen bezahlen, gehen spazieren, um diesen hellblauen Vormittag auf ihre Stimmung wirken zu lassen, und sehen den kleinen Mädchen nach, diesem hübschen, untersetzten Typus mit den brünetten Haarbandeaux, den etwas zu großen Füßen und den unbedenklichen Sitten. …Jedes fünfte Haus läßt Atelierfensterscheiben in der Sonne blinken. Manchmal tritt ein Kunstbau aus der Reihe der bürgerlichen hervor, das Werk eines phantasievollen jungen Architekten, breit und flachbogig, mit bizarrer Ornamentik, voll Witz und Stil. Und plötzlich ist irgendwo die Tür an einer allzu langweiligen Fassade von einer kecken Improvisation umrahmt, von fließenden Linien und sonnigen Farben, Bacchanten, Nixen, rosigen Nacktheiten….

The complete original text in German can be found at Project Gutenberg.

Image Credit: Color photo lithograph of the Odeonsplatz in Munich around 1900, via Wikimedia

"What I really want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader”

Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita (Part 1):

“I don’t wish to touch hearts, I don’t even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader.”

Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita (Part 2):

The Writer's Secret Is Not Inspiration

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's 2006 Nobel lecture:

"The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too. In my novel, My Name is Red, when I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorising each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life.

If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me."

The complete Nobel lecture can be found here.

Image Credit: Orhan Pamuk by David Shankbone 2009, Via Wikimedia - Creative Commons license

"I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar."

An excerpt from Bertrand Russell's 1950 Nobel lecture:

"Interwoven with many other political motives are two closely related passions to which human beings are regrettably prone: I mean fear and hate. It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds. If you are English and someone says to you, «The French are your brothers», your first instinctive feeling will be, «Nonsense. They shrug their shoulders, and talk French. And I am even told that they eat frogs.» If he explains to you that we may have to fight the Russians, that, if so, it will be desirable to defend the line of the Rhine, and that, if the line of the Rhine is to be defended, the help of the French is essential, you will begin to see what he means when he says that the French are your brothers. But if some fellow-traveller were to go on to say that the Russians also are your brothers, he would be unable to persuade you, unless he could show that we are in danger from the Martians. We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love."

The complete 1950 Nobel lecture of Bertrand Russell can be found here.

Image: Photo of Bertrand Russell/Wikimedia

"To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life"

An excerpt from the 1982 Nobel lecture given by Gabriel García Márquez:

"Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

 In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune."

The complete 1982 Nobel lecture of Gabriel García Márquez can be found here.

Image: Photo of Gabriel García Márquez via Jose Lara/Wikimedia

Goethe's Blog: Coffee Shop

I am in a coffee shop.

Sipping Lipton tea, because I do not have enough money for a cappuccino.

And because I can get free hot water refills without having to buy more teabags.

As long as I keep on sipping my tea, they cannot kick me out and I get to use their free Wi-fi.

I think I have hit rock bottom.

I have $ 370,000 in student loans – not a big surprise after getting a B.A. in philosophy, attending four years of medical school, two years of law school and even a Master of Divinity.

But no real job. Probably because I have never applied for a full-time job.

I get by, teaching at community colleges as an adjunct professor and tutoring some lazy high school students who are not very bright but happen to have rich parents. This is enough to pay my rent, but I do not have health insurance and I cannot defer my loan payments any longer.

I know that I am smarter than all the other professors and students, and I do not care that they do not recognize my brilliance. The fact that they think I am a loser is the best proof for my superiority. The unrecognized genius. 

The sad thing is that I am so smart that I know I am ignorant. They are so ignorant that they think they are smart. I like these two sentences. Maybe one day I will turn them into an aphorism.

The lady at the counter is glaring at me. I do not care. 

I keep on sipping my homeopathic Lipton tea. I think it is my sixth hot water refill, all from one teabag. If homeopathy works, than the tea buzz should get stronger with every refill. No buzz yet, but I probably just need to dilute it further. 

I think I know why I am so lazy. I am not afraid. Once I realized that I was smarter than every other person, I lost both - my ambition and my conscience.

As I am going through my email on my laptop, I see one email that does excite me. it bears the symbol of the elite hackers. Hacking into databases, uncovering secrets that nobody else has access to, this sounds like something I want to devote myself to. True knowledge, occult knowledge. I might make some money, too.

 All I need to do is to click on this link and I will join the ranks of the greatest hackers that have ever lived on this planet.  

I think I am going to be a hacker.

Image via Wikimedia: Painting by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein - Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1787 

Phflogging

The word "blog" is a portmanteau derived from "web" and "log", because the earliest "blogs" were simply online diaries or online logs. I thought that it might be fun to create fictional blogs for famous literary or philosophical figures that are living in the present and sharing their personal thoughts with the world in the form of blog posts. I therefore proudly coined the portmanteau "flog", derived from "fictional" and "blog", but the “f” could represent a number of other f-words, such as "frustration", “funny” or “fake”. The words "flog" and “flogging” would also evoke images of literary characters being flogged by the challenges of contemporary life, i.e. imagine Goethe struggling with the fact that he has just written down a brilliant poem, but for some unfathomable reason, Windows Vista has crashed, his USB flash drive has become unreadable and the poem is lost forever. 

I googled the term "flog", just to make sure that it was truly unique and novel, but Wikipedia revealed that the word has already been taken. In digispeak, “flog” is used in a whole host of contexts, including “fictional blog”, “food blog”, “fake blog”. I then decided to coin a new portmanteau (I only recently learned what this word means, so I have the urge to keep on using it) – “phlog”, derived from “philosophical blog”. It turns out that “phlog” is already in use, apparently for a blog written with a Gopher protocol. I don’t really understand what that means, but I know that I cannot use it.

I have finally come up with a truly original portmanteau: “Phflog” – philosophical fictional blog. It is pronounced /fflɒɡ/ and the only way to distinguish it from just plain old “flog” is that “phflog” has a prolonged “f” sound in the beginning. I will soon start with some phflog-posts, probably some for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and for Friedrich Nietzsche, both of them living in the present day USA. The phflogs will contain fragments of their writings or quotes from their books, intermingled with some present day events. This is a bit of an experiment and I would like to see where it goes.

God wielded the buzzer

Christian Lorentzen writes in the London Review of Books:

David Foster Wallace
Wikimedia Pabouk

David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister AmyMoby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental. Jim was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois; Sally taught English at a community college, and at home with her children was what her son in his fiction would term a ‘militant grammarian’, constantly monitoring their usage and syntax, turning it into a game. David was a creature of university campuses: Champaign-Urbana as a child; Amherst for college; Tucson for his MFA at the University of Arizona; back to Amherst to teach fiction writing; Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a stint as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, then teaching fiction at Emerson College in Boston; Syracuse, where he went to be close to the poet Mary Karr; Bloomington-Normal for his first secure position at Illinois State; and finally Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where he killed himself in 2008 at the age of 46. He emerged as a writer from a university-based avant-garde tradition, but was adopted at an early stage by the New York mainstream; he was sought after by editors of glossy magazines and touted in the media as a ‘voice of his generation’ from his early thirties onwards, photographed with his long hair and bandana and two big dogs. This combination of academic prestige and big city popularity is fairly rare, and it’s one reason Wallace’s canonisation in the US has proceeded so rapidly. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (the line is Christina Stead’s but Wallace used it twice in his fiction and once in an essay, in reverse; Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square.

Read more here..... 

Do Not Write Love Poems

Let us have a look at some of the best advice on writing that has ever been given to an aspiring poet. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was one of the greatest poets of the German language. He wrote a series of ten letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, an aspiring poet, that were later published as "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter", or in the English translation as "Letters to a Young Poet".

In these letters, Rilke initiates Kappus into the mysteries of writing poetry as well as into the art of living a meaningful life. The advice given by Rilke is just as valuable today, as it was more than a century ago. Perhaps, in a networked world in which solitude has become a rare luxury and treat, I feel that Rilke's advice has become even more valuable.

I will present some excerpts of the letters in the original German as well as a translation into English.

The letter dated February 17, 1903 contains the following passage:

Schreiben Sie nicht Liebesgedichte; weichen Sie zuerst denjenigen Formen aus, die zu geläufig und gewöhnlich sind: sie sind die schwersten, denn es gehört eine große, ausgereifte Kraft dazu, Eigenes zu geben, wo sich gute und zum Teil glänzende Überlieferungen in Menge einstellen.  

Darum retten Sie sich vor den allgemeinen Motiven zu denen, die Ihnen Ihr eigener Alltag bietet; schildern Sie Ihre Traurigkeiten und Wünsche, die vorübergehenden Gedanken und den Glauben an irgendeine Schönheit - schildern Sie das alles mit inniger, stiller, demütiger Aufrichtigkeit und gebrauchen Sie, um sich auszudrücken, die Dinge Ihrer Umgebung, die Bilder Ihrer Träume und die Gegenstände ihrer Erinnerung.

My translation of this passage is:

Do not write love poems; try to initially avoid those forms that are too commonplace and ordinary: they are the most challenging, because it takes great strength and maturity to create something of your own, when you have to compete with so many good and even great predecessors. 

 So save yourself from these general themes and instead write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, your fleeting thoughts and your belief in some form of beauty - describe all this with heartfelt, quite and humble sincerity. When you express yourself, use the everyday items around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects from your memories.

Why is Rilke's advice so important? And why does it apply to all writers, not just to poets?

Many of us who try to write run into the highly prevalent and painful condition known as "Writer's block". Here is what Professor Wikipedia says about "Writer's block":

Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some "blocked" writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.

There is no straightforward cure for this agonizing ailment, which can paralyze the mind and soul alike. In an aspiring writer, it awakens the desire to eat junk food, watch mind-numbing sitcoms and snap at all fellow primates that try to communicate with you.  Most of my Writer's block flare-ups occur when I try to right about lofty and grand themes, such as Love, Death or Justice. Whenever I sit down in front of my keyboard to start writing about such a profound theme, I think about all the wonderful poems, essays and novels that have been written about these topics in the past. My fingers are paralyzed, because I feel there is nothing I can add to what Goethe, Rilke, Eichendorff and Star Wars have already eloquently put in words.

But Rilke tells us that this is the wrong approach. We should focus on the tedious details of our lives. Let us face it, most of our lives are quite boring and ordinary, but these mundane and tedious details are what really define us and distinguish us from other writers. When I have to decide whether my sixth "How-to-be-a- Writer" self-help book should be either "Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses" or "Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing" or when I experience Schadenfreude that I made it onto the commuter train on time, but the person who pushed me aside earlier is left standing angrily at the platform. These mundane moments are much easier to describe, because they are truly my own experiences and when I write about them I am not burdened by the history of great writing. I do not know what self-help writing guides Shakespeare used, but I am pretty sure he did not read "Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses" and I am also pretty sure he did not experience the Schadenfreude of getting on the train.

Once I start writing about these seemingly mundane topics, my writing is more sincere. I also realize that extraordinary ideas are derived from ordinary details. 

The complete German text of the letter can be found on www.rilke.de.

An English translation of the complete letter is available here.