Andrew Michael Roberts

Listening to Limericks: A Pupillometry Investigation of Perceivers’ Expectancy

What features of a poem make it captivating, and which cognitive mechanisms are sensitive to these features? We addressed these questions experimentally by measuring pupillary responses of 40 participants who listened to a series of Limericks. The Limericks ended with either a semantic, syntactic, rhyme or metric violation. Compared to a control condition without violations, only the rhyme violation condition induced a reliable pupillary response. An anomaly-rating study on the same stimuli showed that all violations were reliably detectable relative to the control condition, but the anomaly induced by rhyme violations was perceived as most severe. Together, our data suggest that rhyme violations in Limericks may induce an emotional response beyond mere anomaly detection.

‘What Constitutes a Reader?’ Don Juan and the Changing Reception of Romantic Form

‘Byron’s poetry is the most striking example I know in literary history of the creative role which poetic form can play’, Auden wrote in ‘The Shield of Perseus’.1 The question of what role, exactly, Byron’s ironically hailed ‘gentle reader’ plays in the reception of poetic form has been approached in a number of ways since the Romantic period. There have been studies of the economics and politics of reception and close analysis of various scenes of reception such as Lucy Newlyn’s examination of Romantic poets’ responses to hearing each other’s work.2 On a different front, profiles of the wider reading public have been constructed through analyses of guides and educational books to see how the ideal reader was envisaged while other scholars have traced the aesthetic horizons of the different groups that make up a readership, for example, women, children and working-class readers. Since Jon P. Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (1987), and Lee Erickson’s The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (2000), particular attention has been paid to the shaping of readerly taste through the direction of the reviewers and editors. In diverse studies of the Romantic period, marginalia, literary table talk and memoirs have been scrutinised for what they can tell us of reactions to poems in the run up to, and immediate aftermath of, publication.

Vision, Power and Homosocial Exchange: The Arrow of Gold

In examining the interaction of gender with colonialist ideologies of race in Conrad’s early work, Chapters 1 and 2 noted a number of examples of the articulation of power relations through visual exchanges between characters. Eyes, looking, appearance and other aspects of the visual remain significant elements in Conrad’s characterization and symbolic patterns of meaning throughout his career.1 However, in Conrad’s late novels the visual again assumes particular importance in relation to gender. The early novels and stories set in the Far East share a number of features with late work such as Victory, Chance and The Arrow of Gold: an ambivalent relationship to popular genres such as adventure and romance, a focus on sexuality and strong representations of women as sexual and visual objects.2 This objectification is, however, more critically presented in the late works, as a role projected onto the women characters by men, and one that they resist, whereas in the earlier work the texts themselves present women in that way, not, certainly, as passive or powerless, but primarily as the focus of male sexual desires and fears. This chapter and the next will examine more systematically the place of the visual in Conrad’s late representations of masculinity.

‘Dim-conceived glories of the brain’: On Ambiguity in Literature and Science

This article explores theoretical issues raised by empirical aesthetics and cognitive literary theory – new fields which attempt to bridge the divide between the humanities and the sciences. It arises from ‘Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition’, a research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The discussion focuses on the concept of ambiguity, which has a rich history in literary studies and has recently attracted attention in neurological and cognitive approaches to literature and art. A shift is proposed from a conception of ambiguity in terms of a relatively passive process of aesthesis to one in which ambiguity plays a role in an active, generative process of poesis. Tracing the influence of ideas of aesthetic autonomy on the historical polarization of science and art, the article draws attention to the role of Romantic aesthetics and the ideologies of modernism in constructing a binary between ambiguous, subjective literary language and rational, objective scientific analysis. It considers how such ideas play out in the literary theory of William Empson and I. A. Richards, the empirical aesthetics of Samir Zeki and Reuven Tsurs cognitive literary theory. Keatss famous idea of ‘negative capability’ is deployed, in combination with Andrew Bowies distinction between analytic and hermeneutic conceptions of truth, to lead into a discussion of ‘cognitive blending’, conceived by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier as an evolutionary adaptation in the human brain allowing the conceptual integration of huge amounts of information. This theory supports a positive valorization of ambiguity as integral to creative thought in both science and art.

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire: Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands

Work and imperialism were two crucial contexts for the definition of masculine identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British society. The two were closely related, since one of the functions of Empire was to provide work for males of the British ruling classes, and to provide markets and materials for the products of the labour of the British working classes. At the same time, imperialism allowed some classes of society not to work, but to live on the proceeds of the labour of others. A striking feature of Conrad’s fiction is that he writes a lot about work, certainly more than Woolf or James and arguably more than Lawrence or Joyce. Work is also a central source of moral value for Conrad. Furthermore, the work he writes about is above all the work of Empire: of the sailors who carried its trade, the adventurers who opened up new territories for conquest or exploitation, and the myriad other professions which followed, from hotel-keepers to accountants. This is particularly so of his early fiction up to and including Lord Jim, which will be the focus of this chapter and the next.

Masculinity, ‘Woman’ and Truth: The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance

The gendered circulation of knowledge, which I have described in ‘Heart of Darkness’, reappears in several of Conrad’s later works, notably The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes and Chance, but in each it is disrupted or questioned to a greater degree. The basic paradigm is one in which knowledge, both literal knowledge of particular facts and events and existential knowledge, is sought, shared, competed for and otherwise circulated among groups of men, including the implied author, male narrators (such as Marlow or the language-teacher in Under Western Eyes), male narratees and implied male readers. This circulation involves and is facilitated by the exclusion of women from such knowledge, combined with a tendency to identify them symbolically with it. The women represent the truth, particularly ungraspable metaphysical truth, but they do not possess it. Another way of putting this would be to say that the exclusion of women from the space within which men’s knowledge circulates encourages the identification of the truth ‘beyond’, ultimate or unattainable truth, with the feminine. Jacques Derrida, summing up both the paradox and the logic of Nietzsche’s gendered epistemology, has commented on this incompatibility between representing and possessing truth: How is it possible that woman, who herself is truth, does not believe in truth? And yet, how is it possible to be truth and still believe in it?1

Masculinity and the Body: Typhoon, The Secret Agent

The first sentence of Conrad’s story ‘Typhoon’ informs us that ‘Captain MacWhirr, of the steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that, in the order of material appearances, was the exact counterpart of his mind’ (T, 3). This description not only attributes meaning to the body, but seems to heal the mind–body split by making the body the exact correlate or transparent signifier for the mind. We are then given eight sentences of detailed physical description, as if MacWhirr’s body were the key fact about the story to follow. However, this description immediately creates problems for the opening claim of transparent correspondence. For one thing, what his face accurately reveals about his mind is, specifically, nothing in particular, since it presented no marked characteristics of firmness or stupidity; it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled. (3) Furthermore, the very details of Conrad’s description seem a challenge to the reader’s ingenuity. For example MacWhirr has hair on his face which ‘resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip … no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks’ (3).

Vision and the Economies of Empire and Masculinity: Victory

In the penultimate chapter of Victory: An Island Tale (1915) the reader is offered a tableau of the male gaze, bringing together sexuality, death and the female body and comparable in this respect to the night-time narration scene in The Arrow of Gold. Lena lies dying from a bullet wound which Heyst has just discovered by tearing open the top of her dress. Davidson, who has arrived just too late to avert the tragedy, stands by him: They stood side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole made by Mr. Jones’s bullet under the swelling breast of a dazzling and as it were sacred whiteness. It rose and fell slightly—so slightly that only the eyes of the lover could detect the faint stir of life. Heyst, calm and utterly unlike himself in the face, moving about noiselessly, prepared a wet cloth, and laid it on the insignificant wound, round which there was hardly a trace of blood to mar the charm, the fascination, of that mortal flesh. (405) This is only the culmination of a number of scenes in which Lena is presented as an aestheticized and sexualized object of contemplation: ‘Look! Is that what you mean?’ Heyst raised his head … in the brilliant square of the door he saw the girl—the woman he had longed to see once more—as if enthroned, with her hands on the arms of the chair. She was in black; her face was white, her head dreamily inclined on her breast. (391)

Gender and the Disciplined Body: Nostromo

In Nostromo Conrad deploys stereotypes of gender and race, which is not to say that he merely reproduces such stereotypes, since I shall argue that they form part of the novel’s critique of false consciousness, and its associated deconstruction of certain illusions of masculinity. These stereotypes involve both body and character, and imply their correspondence. It is a novel in which heroic male moustaches are much in evidence. Gould and Nostromo are characters that draw upon two stereotyped versions of normative masculinity, Anglo-Saxon and Latin. Gould is the ideal English gentleman colonial administrator: resolute, dignified, restrained, inscrutable, knowledgeable in the ways of his adopted country yet indelibly English (N, 47–8). This crucial Englishness, which initially seems to hold him apart from what is seen as the mad farce of South American politics, is presented as a bodily characteristic: Born in the country [Sulaco] … spare and tall, with a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn hair, and a thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a new arrival … He looked more English than … anybody out of the hunting-field pictures in the numbers of Punch. (46–7)

Imperialism and Male Bonds: ‘Karain’, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Lord Jim

In Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands male loyalties and friendships, such as those between Lingard and Willems, and between Dain and Almayer, are fractured by tensions surrounding the binaries of race and gender. Sexual passion in the context of the imperial encounter generates a mixture of fear and desire, evoking the death drive and forcing resolutions which re-establish fantasies of racial security, as Willems goes down to self-destruction and Nina is despatched into the imaginary future of a purely exotic world. Aissa, whose racial and sexual otherness threatens to engulf the male imperial self, is transformed from object of desire to object of pity and disgust. Miscegenation or metissage, with its exciting and threatening potentialities, is held at bay, while elements of otherness, even of hybridity, within the male imperial self are evoked only to be suppressed.