Abstract
This book uses Silvan Tomkins’ affect-script theory to consider correlations between literary protagonists and genre, suggests why the study of the emotional experiences of fictional personalities can inform descriptions of the foundational literary categories of tragedy and comedy, romance, and irony-satire, and ultimately explores unacknowledged emotional content in tragedy with three case studies. The introduction looks at Tomkins’ relationship to traditional psychoanalysis and current theories of human motivation and emotion, and sets a context for discussing affect and literature. “Scripts” are “sets of ordering rules for the interpretation, evaluation, prediction, production, or control of [the] scenes” comprising daily life. They are a complex assemblage of sublimated biopsychosocial influences within, without, as, the human organism. Tomkins says that the “human being” is to be found as much in language, art, and science, as in economic, political, and social institutions, as in the cerebrum, nervous system, and genes. He invigorates extant discourses of human beingness and opens under-explored lines on inquiry in affect theory and literary studies.
… And all the men and women merely players.
Shakespeare, As You Like It.
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Notes
- 1.
I am adopting the simple title Oedipus rather than Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King, or Oedipus Tyrannus due to critical confusion concerning the most appropriate form. See Bernard Knox’s (1989) “Sophocles’ Oedipus” for an exposition of connotations of tyrannus (sometimes tyrannos ) and Charles Segal’s (2001) Oedipus Tyrannus (6).
- 2.
A very brief sampling of writers making effective use of Tomkins’ theories: In Joe Adamson’s (1997) Melville, Shame and the Evil Eye and, with Hilary Clark (1999), in Scenes of Shame, Tomkins is cited as an important shame and affect theorist, not least because Tomkins proposes a model different from the many Freud-Lacan derivatives in psychoanalysis. See also Alan C. Elms. 2000. “Painwise in Space: The Psychology of Isolation in Cordwainer Smith and James P. Tiptree, Jr.,” Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction. Ed. Gary Westfahl. 131–40. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Doris McIlwain, in a 2007 special section of the journal Theory and Psychology (17.4), assembled Tomkins-centred articles from herself—“Pleasure in Mind: Silvan Tomkins and Affect in Aesthetics, Personality Theory and Culture” and “Rezoning Pleasure: Drives and Affects in Personality Theory”—from Susan Best with “Rethinking Visual Pleasure: Aesthetics and Affect” and Adam Frank’s “Phantoms Limn” Silvan Tomkins and Affective Prosthetics.” William Todd Schultz. “Finding Fate’s Father: Some life history influences on Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’.” Biography 21.4 (Fall 1998). 463–481. And: Wilson , Elizabeth A. 2010. “Shaming AI,” Affect and Artificial Intelligence. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2010.
- 3.
Following from those “two vectors,” they outline eight “affectual orientations”: (1) phenomenologies of embodiment, (2) cybernetics, (3) non-Cartesian philosophy (Spinozism), (4) psychological and psychoanalytical, (5) political engagement as contra-normative, (6) contra-linguistic turn and ethico-aesthetic, (7) discourses of emotion, and (8) practices of science and science studies. While they specifically name Tomkins to the fourth category, taking his “human being theory” as a whole, he can be seen to make meaningful, dialogical contributions to each orientation as investigation.
- 4.
I’m thinking here, for example, of Ruth Leys’ “The Turn to Affect: A Critique” in Critical Inquiry (Spring 2011).
- 5.
Patrick Hogan explores related ideas in “Characters and Their Plots” inasmuch as he recognizes the “inter-relation of plots and characters [which] is complicated by the fact that neither is wholly individual and unique,” because both “fall into patterns” and that “patterns in plots are related to the patterns in characters” (2010, 134). He then explores relations of generalizations in plot and characters as both become particularized.
- 6.
Jung’s personality-type indicator scales evaluate people in terms of the thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting introvert or extrovert. Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers later expanded and doubled the number of scales by adding perceiving and judging. As a model of exposition within psychoanalysis, these personality -type indicators resemble how I apply Tomkins’ affect-script theory as a typology, all of which is outlined in Chap. 2.
- 7.
Tomkins wrote a brief psychobiography of Freud . Discussing the rarity of “radical intellectual creativity” (1962, 1: 362), Tomkins described Freud’s success in affect terms: he came from a Jewish cultural heritage of “affective investment in learning” (362) and scholarship; he had a strong inclination to excitement; that excitement becomes attached to joy through “creative intellectual activity by the self” (363), leading to pride and self-conception as an intellectual leader and creator; he was committed to his purpose; he had a powerful streak of negativism and contempt for other intellectuals but ever subordinated to his positive motivators. These factors were coupled with the negative affect motivators fear (of failure) and particularly shame (of potential failure), all combining as a push for excellence; and yet, that package is “at best half of the matter” (365). Freud also required an antidote to the inevitable negative affect of his revolutionary work, or courage against all personal and social opposition, be it internal or external. In AIC 2, Tomkins accounts for Freud’s theory in terms of his personality. In a life punctuated by perceived betrayals by the good mother, sibling rivalry within his family creates a complex of anxiety, terror, humiliation, and disenchantment that was exacerbated by an ineffectual and weak father, anti-Semitism, and guilt over his own failures or limitations. The Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, and penis envy express Freud’s own paranoid posture: “In Freud’s world there is humiliation and terror, and the threat of castration is an extraordinarily appropriate symbol not simply of anxiety as Freud represented it but of the conjoint threats of terror and humiliation” (1963, 2: 526).
- 8.
Crews later renounced psychoanalytic criticism, primarily because psychoanalysis failed as a “science.”
- 9.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment investigates “enlightenment” as a “will to explain” and thus to master the environment based on Bacon’s maxim, “Power and knowledge are synonymous” (1972, 4). Those with knowledge justify domination through cultural systems of power . Myth is a historical will to enlightenment.
- 10.
At first glance, written literature may seem to disallow reference to observable facial expression. In the descriptive mode, however, literature may indicate facial affect, and some examples will be observed in the case studies. Visual literature—film, television, comic books and the graphic novel, photography—employs facial expression, but those cultural objects are outside this study’s purview. While looking for clues to interpret facial expressions of emotion, Tomkins spent hours watching television without sound.
- 11.
This argument continues today: is cognition primary over affect-emotion or vice versa? See, for example, the so-called Lazarus versus Zajonc debate in Scherer and Ekman’s (1984) edited volume Approaches to Emotion, notably Chaps. 10, 11, and 12, and Ruth Leys’ (2011) “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.”
- 12.
As cultural relativism combined with behaviourism to interpret the influence of socialization on emotional expression, the possibility of cross-cultural, universals of human facial expression was rejected (Ekman 1973, 5). Ekman’s own work, however, with much help and support from his “mentor” (2003, xxi) Tomkins, demonstrates that such universals do in fact exist. See part three of Tomkins’ Exploring Affect, “The face of affect”; see also Ekman’s Unmasking the Face (1975), The Face of Man (1980), and Emotion in the Human Face (1982). Carroll Izard, also under Tomkins’ tutelage, similarly explored universal, facial expressions in Human Emotions (1977).
- 13.
Curiously, this coincides with the emergence of computer technology, although, as Bernard Weiner points out, the computer was not the machine model used up to this point but rather a more mechanical conception. Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics discourse profoundly influenced Tomkins as his career flourished in the mid-1950s.
- 14.
Damasio’s (1999) The Feeling of What Happens and (2003) Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain continue to anatomize components of rationality and emotion as functions of the body-mind synergy.
- 15.
Oatley currently co-administrates an online blog called On Fiction, which is dedicated to “developing the psychology of fiction,” and by using “theoretical and empirical perspectives, [they] endeavour to understand how fiction is created, and how readers and audience members engage it” (n.d., “About”).
- 16.
Nussbaum expands her “neediness and lack of self-sufficiency” argument in her follow-up book Hiding from Humanity as she contrasts anger and fear against shame and disgust in their relative “thought-content” (2004, 13), particularly as a basis for the construction of a legal system within a liberal society. In a sort of didactic mode, literary expression is entirely about social relations with readers and/or live audiences (i.e. drama) as vicarious empathizers, and in Keith Oatley’s opinion, fiction is thus “a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life ” (Paul 2012).
- 17.
Tomkins and Demos (1995) compiled Exploring Affect as a helpful and quite fulsome introduction to his work.
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Lucas, D.A. (2018). Introduction. In: Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94863-8_1
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