
Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? (2017) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/why-doesnt-ancient-fiction-talk-about-feelings
======
hopler
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18261599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18261599)

61 days ago. 54 comments, including the same misunderstanding of the thesis
due to responding to the misleading title.

~~~
akavel
Can you try to summarize how you see the thesis, then? It may actually be
helpful to others if you do; if you believe that the article states a
different thesis than the title, then it may be too subtle a difference for
some readers to find; specifically, I personally am one such case — I'd be
very interested in learning if there's something I missed!

~~~
goto11
I'm not the one you are replying to, but my 50 cent: It seems many replies
think the article is claiming that ancient literature does contain emotions.

This is not what the article is saying. It is saying that _medieval authors
represented characters’ mental states mainly through their direct speech and
gestures, which were used to convey intense emotions in a stereotypical
way—lots of hand-wringing and tearing of hair, but few subtle gestures such as
raised eyebrows or faint smiles flickering over lips._

So examples from poetry, classical drama, Ecclesiastes etc. does not disprove
this. Those are all examples of direct speech. And the gestures of Achilles
are not exactly subtle. (And in any case Greek antiquity is not medieval.)

The article is concerned about how mental states are described in fiction. The
sagas does not say "Eric felt conflicting emotions about this but kept
silent". They describe what he said and did, and you have to figure out the
mental state yourself unless he outright says (or sings) what he is feeling.
In contrast modern literature may have an all-knowing narrator which tells you
the emotions and thoughts of the characters, or you may have internal
monologue or stream-of-consciousnesses which give you a direct view into the
mind of the characters.

A question then is why pre-modern literature use direct speech to convey
emotion while modern use mentalizing? A possible explanation is that pre-
modern literature was read or acted out in public, while modern literature is
read silently in private.

The article further propose that reading literary fiction may in itself
improve your mentalizing skills, i.e. your ability to imagine what other
people are thinking and feeling.

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jonathanyc
The hypothesis that this is somehow related to a shift to modernity was
utterly undermined for me as soon as I learned about poems like the Li Sao[1],
written 2000 years before the author claims that literature developed to allow
people to decipher complex societies. The character clearly feels—it’s not the
case that what we interpret as their feelings are actually just actions taken
by gods:

    
    
       Nine fields of orchids at one time I grew,
       For melilot a hundred acres too,
       And fifty acres for the azalea bright,
       The rumex fragrant and the lichen white.
       I longed to see them yielding blossoms rare,
       And thought in season due the spoil to share.
       I did not grieve to see them die away,
       But grieved because midst weeds they did decay.
    

No doubt a cursory search of ancient literature from other cultures will find
similar examples. In the end this enduring myth seems to be flawed in the same
way as the hypothesis that somehow a cabal of medieval rulers invented a
couple centuries of time out of nowhere.[2]

[1]
[http://www.lingshidao.cn/hanshi/quyuan.htm](http://www.lingshidao.cn/hanshi/quyuan.htm)
[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis)

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kwhitefoot
Perhaps it's saga writers who don't talk about feelings. Take a look at the
Oedipus plays, Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus. I can't say
anything about the ancient Greek but public performance of the modern dress
English version of Antigone (based on Jean Anouilh's French version) that we
put on in high school was as emotionally charged as you can get. If Sophocles
were around now he'd be serious box office material.

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squozzer
I thought of Antigone's execution dirge as the post's counterexample.

Or another example - Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Maybe fiction, maybe not,
but certainly an example of internal exposition.

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akavel
Also: the book of Ecclesiastes [1][2], or the Song of Songs [3] — poetry at
its finest... how is it not about thoughts and feelings?

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes)

[2]:
[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes_(Bible)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes_\(Bible\))

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Songs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Songs)

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cafard
Depends on where you draw the line for ancient. In the Iliad, Achilles spends
a fair bit of time discussing his feelings--mostly, to be sure, of suffering
disrespect or of mourning his friend. The main actors of the Aeneid don't have
especially stuff upper lips, do they?

~~~
the_af
The oft-discussed here "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes -- intriguing and possibly wrong, but still a
fascinating read -- argues otherwise. This is what Jaynes has to say about
Achilles [1]:

"The word _psyche_ , which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most
instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out
his _psyche_ onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The _thumos_
, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or
agitation. When a man stops moving, the _thumos_ leaves his limbs. But it is
also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to
alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon,
Apollo hears his prayer and "casts strength in his _thumos_ " (Iliad, 16:529).
The _thumos_ can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one
place that Achilles will fight "when the _thumos_ in his chest tells him to
and a god rouses him""

(Note that, simplifying a bit, Jaynes argued that the men in the Illiad were
consciousless robots which "heard the voices" of the Gods telling them to do
things, instead of having an inner monologue)

and

"The Iliad is about action and it is full of action — constant action. It
really is about Achilles' acts and their consequences, not about his mind. And
as for the gods, the Iliadic authors and the Iliadic characters all agree in
the acceptance of this divinely managed world. To say the gods are an artistic
apparatus is the same kind of thing as to say that Joan of Arc told the
Inquisition about her voices merely to make it all vivid to those who were
about to condemn her. It is not that the vague general ideas of psychological
causation appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by
inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way
around."

[1] [http://www.julianjaynes.org/origin-of-
consciousness_english_...](http://www.julianjaynes.org/origin-of-
consciousness_english_book-one-chapter-three.php)

~~~
goto11
> It really is about Achilles' acts and their consequences, not about his
> mind.

I don't understand that. All his actions are driven by his emotions. The first
line is "Sing, Goddess, of Achilles' rage" (In the original Greek "rage" is
literally the first word). So obviously the mind and emotions of Achilles is
the absolute center of the story, driving all the action.

~~~
the_af
Well, I don't speak Greek and understand the historical meaning of Greek terms
even less, but I think Jaynes' thesis is that every term we now associate with
the mind and with inner emotions was meant in the Illiad to be more like a
physical or even an external command of "the Gods" (see his discussion of
_psyche_ and _thumos_ ).

That is, while it's now obvious to us these were emotions, the authors of the
Illiad didn't perceive them as such -- or so I understand Jaynes argued -- and
instead they thought they were either physical things (much like a stomach
ache) or a command of "the Gods".

If you speak Greek, what's the exact term for "rage" as written in the Illiad?

\----

edit: ok, found it. Jaynes claims this:

"Even the poem itself is not wrought by men in our sense. Its first three
words are _Menin aedie Thea_ , 'Of wrath sing, O Goddess!' And the entire epic
which follows is the song of the goddess which the entranced bard 'heard' and
chanted to his iron-age listeners among the ruins of Agamemnon's world."

I find it a bit disappointing because even if the singer didn't ascribe
feelings to men, he must at least understand the meaning of "wrath" itself.
And it seems to me it must be hard to understand this emotion unless you can
feel it.

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pessimizer
Because "feelings" are just after-the-fact, extremely culturally bound,
rationalized labels that people are taught to put on the reactive arousal of
their sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

The more dense and plastic civilization becomes, the more important the labels
become - because assignment and the discussion of the assignment of these
labels becomes the most important signal of ingroup/outgroup, which then means
the difference between eating and not eating. For the middle-class
professional/management class (the people who make a living based on
perceptions of their authority), this leads to a culture of stories that can
spend 100x more words saying how somebody feels, why someone feels, and what's
wrong or right with that, rather than any physical acts conceivably verifiable
by observation.

"Social intelligence" is what a member of the academic middle-class might
label this. A different member of the academic middle-class belonging to a
entirely different culture (place or time), however, would probably label any
particular example the first academic pointed out as "social stupidity," due
to their respecting an entirely different set of arbitrary signs mythologizing
the same acts.

Before the rise of the medicalization of thought (as psychology), by average
people in conversation, and by elites in their theories of scientific social
control, what was important was the description of acts and the prediction of
acts - but Freud did a number on the West.

Angry and sad were once descriptions about how people looked, and tentative
predictions of what they were liable to do (based on past experience of that
look.)

/rant

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jkingsbery
Catullus's poems are all about feelings. If we include non-fiction,
Augustine's Confessions has a lot of feelings too.

I think that if people were better educated in what actually went on in
Medieval and Ancient times, there would be more articles that are better
written about it.

~~~
goto11
The article does not say ancient literature does not contain feelings.

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goto11
Just a heads up: Apparently the finding that reading literary fiction improves
empathy is one of the many studies that have failed to replicate:
[https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/10/19/three-labs-just-
failed-...](https://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/10/19/three-labs-just-failed-to-
replicate-the-finding-that-a-quick-read-of-literary-fiction-boosts-your-
empathy/)

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scottlocklin
Ancient fiction does talk about feelings; the author evidently hasn't read any
to any great degree. I mean, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad to The
Tale of the Heike to the Bible; plenty of emotion in all of them, and plenty
of description of internal mental state.

It's true the sagas don't so much; mostly because it was a spoken word art
form. Duh.

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goto11
The article does not say that ancient fiction does not contain emotion.
Actually it doesn't say anything about ancient fiction as all, it contrast
_medieval_ fiction to early modern and modern.

The Sagas were an oral tradition - so were the Iliad and Gilgamesh and most of
the Bible centuries before they were written down. Does your "Duh" imply some
obvious point I am missing?

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sbhn
To be or not to be, that is the question,

~~~
mrec
Shakespeare ain't exactly ancient.

