The two archetypal Western ancient fictions, the Iliad and Odyssey, display emotion front and center: Agammenon's greed and jealousy, the love between Achilles and Patrocles (and the former's rage at the latter's death), and Priam's mourning all come to mind. Similarly for the Odyssey, a story about nostalgia in the most literal sense: the pain of Odysseus's estrangement from his family, entangled with the pain of returning as a stranger. Homer even refers to him epithetically as "many-pained" and of "many-sorrows."
That's a small sample size, but the same can be seen in Roman love poetry: Horace does not hide the emotions of his subjects[1].
>As the article says, "In ancient literature, emotions were predictable reactions to external actions or events."
Ancient Greek tragedy has no more "predictable reactions" than a modern work of fiction would have -- it goes into depth about the ambivalence of a character's feelings for example.
Besides the article also says that people in ancient literature didn't openly talk or display their emotions, except through action (tearing their hair, etc). That's patently wrong even for the Iliad, and doubly so for Odyssey.
The article also bizarrely seems to restrict to literature after the fall of Rome and up to the 15th century or so, as if that constitutes the whole of being "ancient"...
Also, have the author read millennia old Greek, Chinese, etc poetry? They'll find all kinds of inner monologues and discussions of feelings.
My heart is no mere mirror
That cannot comprehend.
Brothers I have, but may not
On brothers e’en depend.
Tush! when I go complaining
’Tis only to offend.
No stone this heart of mine is,
That may be turned and rolled;
No mat this heart of mine is,
To fold or to unfold.
Steadfast and strict my life is;
Nought ’gainst it can be told.
Yet here I sit in sorrow,
Scorned by a rabble crew.
My troubles have been many,
My insults not a few.
Calmly I think—then, starting,
I beat my breast anew.
O moon, why now the brighter?*
O sun, why now dost wane?
My heart wears grief as garments
Inured to soil and stain.
Calmly I think—then, starting,
Would fly—but all in vain.
I can't see a translation like that without attempting to provide a simpler, more contemporary one myself:
My heart is not a mirror, it doesn't reflect accurately.
Even though I have brothers, I can't rely on them.
If I tell them my opinion, I will meet with their rage.
My heart is not a stone, it cannot be turned.
My heart is not a mat, it can't be rolled up.
My character is excellent, there's nothing to nitpick.
My grieving heart is anxious, I am hated by the crowd of fools.
I meet with many tragedies, and receive many insults.
Silently, I think about my situation, startled awake I beat my breast.
The sun and the moon, why have you grown small?
The sorrow in my heart, like dirty laundry.
Silently, I think about my situation.
But there's no way to fly away.
This flows nicely, but I feel obligated to pick a few nits:
Unless you sourced the original Greek, that's technically not a translation -- it's an interpretation of a translation. Every time you rewrite something like this (especially between languages) it's a "lossy" process and diverges further from the content, sentiment and emotions of the original.
Secondly, the original clearly made efforts to preserve certain properties of the original, such as its metrical structure. While it's a legitimate topic for debate whether it's worth trying to preserve such things in a translation, that IS something present in the original, present (however poorly) in the translation, and absent from your reinterpretation.
Again, not that yours was bad, just pointing out that there are tradeoffs in translation and that "reads better to the modern ear" is often in tension with other advantages.
Most of our emotions are predictable reactions to external actions or events. Fortunately, modern literature hasn't completely forgotten this.
The article is not very consistent, because it also states that «in medieval or classical texts, “people are constantly planning, remembering, loving, fearing, but they somehow manage to do this without the author drawing attention to these mental states.” This changed dramatically between 1500 and 1700».
The classical Greek tragedies certainly did draw attention to the mental state of their characters. I remember a long monologue of Euripides' Andromache that I would sum up as "This life is too hard. Why did I have a son? I shouldn't have, as my care for him doubles my suffering. But I should not lament, I should act and die for my son."
While the Euripides is an excellent counterpoint, you’re not acknowledging the clear rhetorical turn that started with the western novel (or shakespeare, I guess).
While we don't deny the "clear rhetorical turn that started with the western novel (or shakespeare)", I (and I think the parent) believe that this turn was in fact a return (to what e.g. ancient Greek, Chinese, etc literature did: talk about feelings) and not some wholly new direction.
Greek literature doesn’t have THAT much feelings. There’s nothing remotely in the realm of Hamlet in all of ancient greek lit to my knowledge. Calling it a return is a massive stretch of the Euripides example—I always viewed his works more like sitcoms than having any realistic human characters.
Try Cassandra from the tragedy Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Her psychological torment from having her true predictions go unheeded is every bit as relatable as Hamlet's suffering for very similar reasons. She is an incredibly sympathetic person, not at all a sitcom character.
The Icelandic sagas certainly also portrays emotions. The characters are very much driven by emotions. The point is it is displayed entirely through their actions, not by internal monologue or direct description of their mental states like in 19th century literature.
Ancient lyrical poetry like Sappho on the other hand is direct expression of feelings. Ecclesiastes (in the Bible) is a monologue about the narrators feelings and mental state.
So it seems to more like a question of genre and narrative style rather than some kind of mental development of humanity. The sagas are not fiction, they are supposed to be about actual historical figures and events. You don't know what a historical figure actually thought and felt, only what they said and did. There are some examples in the sagas where characters directly express their feeling through poetry.
I interpeted “feelings” as “explicit emotional introspection”. There’s a little of this in the Oddysey, but the first book I can think of that clearly does this is Don Quixote.
It’s absolutely absurd to interpret the article as saying writers didn’t acknowledge emotion.
Note I said “a little”, not “little”. You can quibble about the amount but I was trying to explicitly say that the Oddysey IS an example of this in ancient lit.
Still nothing compared to Macbeth or Hamlet, though.
A Persian poet like Hafez [1], who lived in the 14th century, also deals pretty extensively with feelings, much more so than a lot of novelists and poets from today's age. Granted, I've only read him in translation but even so I remember that his poetry left a definite mark on younger me.
Hafez's poems are not fiction. They don't have a plot, they are just pure expressions of emotions.
I am curious to know if Ferdowsi ever talks about feelings in Shahnameh [0]. I cannot remember any such instances, but I have only ever read small parts of it.
While it's autobiography rather than fiction, the Confessions of St. Augustine explore the author's state of mind as deeply as any modern work I can think of. It was written around the end of the 4th Century AD. [0]
But this article started with an example from the middle ages rather than the ancient world, so lets look there as well. Medieval literature does explore human feelings quite deeply. The stories of Chaucer (Canterbury Tales), Dante (Inferno, etc.), and Boccaccio (Decameron) exhibit characters with a rich internal life. Arguing to the contrary mostly proves you have not read them.
It seems like this sort of inquiry would connect with Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It is a fascinating thesis, one what has been somewhat beyond science to test.
Jaynes' work is wonderful anthropological scifi, and I recommend it to anyone for that purpose. And I'm not being snarky there; I think it's really enjoyable as something to stimulate the imagination.
As actual science, the book should set every cherrypicking alarm bell ringing. For example, he talks a lot about right vs. left positioning of religious imagery, which is a key part of his theory. The problem with that is that if you come up with any theory based on right/left, you can expect about 50% of the evidence to support you, even if you're wrong.
And the whole book is like that. Lots of enthralling examples, with speculation about how they connect to his theory, but very little systematic analysis of evidence.
Initially I thought the article would be about that: how our brain shaped our thinking, and then our literature, culture. I think it's a lot more interesting to ask how our brains shaped our thinking, and then everything we created from literature to culture, to society..
From history books and movies we have this idea that humans were much like us.. but I begin to think in fact, it's almost as if humanity was an entirely different species, almost alien to the way we see ourselves today. I think in many ways they must have been much more reactive and automatic in their behaviour, and if you could travel back in time you would feel like you are amongst complete lunatics and it would be very frightening.
That's the impression I got from the theory, but I really don't buy it. I have yet to read a piece of ancient literature that didn't feel like it was written by a modern human. Gilgamesh, brought up earlier, is a great example.
> they must have been much more reactive and automatic in their behaviour, and if you could travel back in time you would feel like you are amongst complete lunatics and it would be very frightening
This is exactly how I feel when I visit certain extremely religious relatives. They have a 'spiritual' explanation for almost every last tiny detail of their ongoing daily experience. Sometimes I think a few of the more fringe groups of this sort are actively enabling unmedicated schizophrenics.
Thanks for sharing that link. Jaynes' idea is interesting but I really think we're no different than people in the past. I don't see how this change to bicameral minds could have happened.
I'm currently reading the book [1] and while I haven't finished it yet, the thrust (if I'm understanding it correctly) seems to be that it was the increasing complexity of civilization (as populations rose in an area) that lead the brain to reform connections to be less bicameral in nature.
There are evolutionary changes in humans that are known to us. For instance, people of European descent can still digest milk into adulthood; the father you get from Europe, the greater that lactose intolerance grows. So it could also be for bicameralism.
I too, am skeptical about how this came across the world, but he does mention in passing that some of the Pre-Columbian cultures of North America could have still been bicameral as late as the early 1500s. It's really an interesting read.
[1] I found a copy in a used book store and the price was right.
I see it not as a hardware change but a software change. That doesn’t prove Jaynes’ theory, of course. There is another book called Metaprogramming and the Human Biocomputer.
Jaynes’ theory is interesting to me because it reminds me of disassociative disorders.
I don't think you can evaluate if that's true by reading books by people in the past. There are a lot of different states of mind which are consistent with the same output. I mean, just think about how many people with wildly different states of mind (schizophrenic, autism) today who can write books which are indistinguishable from books by "normal" people.
There are a lot of people who don't think verbally, who nevertheless manage (because they have to, because that's basically the only channel we have) to share their ideas using language (in an indistinguishable way from people who do think with words). Some people think with sounds, some are primarily visual thinkers, some are informed by their emotions. I don't think it's infeasible that there are other ways of thinking (or other states of consciousness), which nevertheless have the capacity to produce the same type of output, in terms of writing, as what we with our consciousness produce today.
It's not so far fetched to say that mammal brains are all pretty similar and have a similar "consciousness" that "lower" mammals may be mediated/obscured by inability to use complex language or some other constraints
Thank you for bringing this up. I love this book. The thesis is breathtaking. But as you say, nearly impossible to test rigorously :(
I wonder if its plausibility will become more apparent as lifespans increase, allowing the typical adult human to be able to converse with more than just the generation below and above and hence be able to get at least a local estimation of the rate of change of consciousness in real life; vs. having to rely solely on literature as evidence for the mutability of human consciousness.
We are pretty far off from humans living the thousands of years needed to directly witness the evolution of consciousness species wide. You'd see much more variation by surveying geneticallh remote people alive today.
Meh. First, the articles cited all have the same familiar problems of statistical psychology studies - small sample size drawn from psychology students.
Also, unrelatedly, I find ancient stories in many cases better than modern ones because of modern literary fiction's obsession with recording the minutiae of every character's thoughts. As the article notes, in one short story David Foster Wallace takes 12 pages to record a boy walking to a pool and jumping in. I can see the case for representing characters' inner states, it's an important part of the story, but modern literary fiction takes it way too far.
I can see the case for representing characters' inner states, it's an important part of the story, but modern literary fiction takes it way too far.
Considering how things are written now maybe the inner states are the story? Maybe collectively we've shifted to being more interested in exploring human thoughts and emotions and not so much the direct action anymore? And maybe in a hundred years or so we'll shift our curiosity in some other part of the interaction that is life.
Exploration always swings between taking it way too far and taking it way too near.
Most contemporary fiction is not like David Foster Wallace. Literary fiction is special subset of fiction that moves its own way, have its own audience, habits and so on.
You could also argue improved technology allowed for more detailed narratives. Hand copying scrolls and books means only the essential details of a narrative would be recorded.
Hyper linking means you could now conceptually write a story from every character's perspective and switch between them with a click.
If they were, they'd be mentioned briefly as facts rather than a whole narrative spent on justifying those feelings, like the Greek myths mentioned in this thread that are about grief, jealousy, lust, etc.
So through the eyes love attains the heart
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in one resolve
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
For as all true lovers know, love is perfect kindness
Which is born, there is no doubt from the heart and eyes.*
-Guiraut de Borneilh
>Tristan, you have drunk your death
>>If by my death you mean this agony of love, that is my life. If by my death you mean the punishment [Iseult and I] are to suffer if discovered, I accept that. But if by my death you mean eternal punishment in the fires of hell, I accept that too.
What about the troubadours? It seems like their works had a common theme of "My love for this person is an expression of who I am and what is happening inside of me as an individual"
Everything I know about the troubadours I learned watching Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers on my TV, so I may be missing some important information.
It's not long form fiction though, it's essentially song-writing. The success of that genre, and it's exotic dimension, had a lot to do with its sentimental overtones (and erotic undertones), which was at the time quite disruptive. Socially it correlates with the rise of a new intelligentsia looking for more than the epic fiction that were the literary bread and butter until then. It colored the chivalric literature that came afterwards but even then the epic form remained the framework of reference.
> The emergence of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries introduced omniscient narrators who could penetrate their characters’ psyches, at times probing motives that were opaque to the characters themselves. And by the 20th century, many authors labored not just to describe, but to simulate the psychological experience of characters.
Didn't these old stories get acted out as they were told? Perhaps the emotion was expected to appear on the stage, on the performers, not in the lines?
I think they're reading the wrong things or overestimating the "inpredictable" nature of emotions in modern lit. Oedipus is filled with emotions, and certainly not all of any more or less "predictable" than something modern. Actually it might be less predictable-- modern sensibilities woild not have us respond the same way, leaving a baby to die, lillimg a stranger on the road etc.
The two archetypal Western ancient fictions, the Iliad and Odyssey, display emotion front and center: Agammenon's greed and jealousy, the love between Achilles and Patrocles (and the former's rage at the latter's death), and Priam's mourning all come to mind. Similarly for the Odyssey, a story about nostalgia in the most literal sense: the pain of Odysseus's estrangement from his family, entangled with the pain of returning as a stranger. Homer even refers to him epithetically as "many-pained" and of "many-sorrows."
That's a small sample size, but the same can be seen in Roman love poetry: Horace does not hide the emotions of his subjects[1].
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Odes_(Horace)/Boo...