Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories

Notes

253 Introduction 1. Note that a story based on sexual goal pursuit is not necessarily or even usually pornographic. Pornography involves the depiction of sexual relations, which may occur in any genre. 2. This idea extends back at least to William James’s seminal “What Is an Emotion?” 3. The latter simply require that the relevant gene expression not be blocked by abnormal experiences (e.g., brain trauma) or unusual interference from other genetic instructions (e.g., due to mutation). Technically, neuronal pathways formed in this way may or may not be “activity dependent,” which is to say, dependent on activation from experience. However, they are not constrained or specified by particular and variable activity patterns. 4. This possibility of convergent development is one of the things that opposes my approach to that of Franco Moretti. Moretti sees the literatures of separate cultures producing “diversification . . . from their origins” (116). He claims that “sameness appears . . . sometime around the eighteenth century” (116). I agree with Moretti that the sameness that has developed since the eighteenth century is the result of economic forces in an international, highly unequal market. However, my contention throughout this book is that there is an enormous degree of sameness in stories across cultures. Much of this sameness is due to cross-cultural emotional patterns. They are in part innate. But their commonalities are also due in part to convergent social developments (e.g., in childrearing techniques) leading to common critical-period experiences or emotional memories. 5. Kay Young’s Ordinary Pleasures presents an unusual case here. Young combines different theoretical orientations to focus on the pleasures of marriage. In doing this, she does draw attention to an important recurring, functional component of stories—the lovers’ dialogue. This is, in fact, a consequential part of romantic plots cross-culturally. 6. Appraisal theories see emotion as resulting from the evaluation of experiences in relation to goals. Perception theories stress direct perceptual triggers along Notes 254 Notes to pages 19–29 with emotional memories. As should be clear from the preceding outline, my approach is basically perceptual. One task of chapter 1 is to reconcile this account with appraisal theory. 7. The study of universal narrative patterns has grown into a significant research program in recent years. For an accessible overview of some current trends, see Hsu. 8. I usually use the word “ideology” in the pejorative sense. If I use it in the neutral sense, I signal that usage—for example, by referring to “resistant ideology,” which is to say a guiding set of ideas that opposes the dominant ideology of a given society in a given area. 9. I have devoted another book to this topic, The Culture of Conformism. 10. The idea of networks has recently been taken up in a roughly Marxist context by Hardt and Negri. They use the concept in a nontechnical, indeed highly metaphorical way (much as Jameson uses the concept of a Freudian unconscious ). Moreover, they use it to refer to a contemporary development, a “new form” (Multitude xii). In contrast, I use the term in the sense that it is used in network theory. (For an accessible introduction to network theory, see Buchanan; for a briefer summary, see Ferrer i Cancho.) It is a complex of unequally distributed connections, such that any given state of the system is the result of the precise nature of the connections at any given moment. Since the connections are unequally distributed, any given aspect of the resulting state will depend more on some “vertices” (or connection points) than others. This makes it possible to refer loosely to class domination, class hegemony, etc. But by this account, classes are not ontologically fundamental explanatory categories . They are abstractions from shifting network states. Moreover, in keeping with network theory generally, I see this as a transhistorical and cross-cultural principle of social interaction. Indeed, given the technical use of the term, it is difficult to see how it could characterize one period and not others, how it could arise as a “new form.” 1. Before Stories 1. In this chapter, I consider several passages from Anna Karenina in detail, exploring the ways in which emotions organize time and space in this novel. There has of course been an enormous amount of extremely valuable criticism written on Anna Karenina. It has covered such issues as class, the embedment of the novel in the Russian political economy of the time, the relation of the events and discussions in the novel to...