A talk delivered at the 2018 Cognitive Futures Conference, hosted by the University of Kent, England
I must apologize. … I so deeply love good literature and hate so bitterly bad literature
that my expressions may be stronger than they ought to be.
—Professor Vladimir Nabokov (1941)
Roasted!
EVER SINCE SPURIOUS LINES attributed to Homer were being rejected by the Librarian at
Alexandria, Aristarchus of Samothrace, littérateurs have been getting their knickers in a
twist over the problems posed by Bad Literature. Given the brevity of life, we might start
by asking what profiteth it us to spend our precious time on inferior productions? While
the most inspired works do merit our attention, I contend that studying the inane and
insipid can be worthwhile too. Analyzing them can fine-tune our aesthetic judgements,
and furthermore, reading a certain kind of ludicrous disaster provides its own giddy
rewards.
Furthermore, recent discoveries across the life sciences make now a prime time to
downshift as we cruise along the highways of the Queen’s English in order to engage in
some analytical gawking at select mangled, smoking trainwrecks along the wayside. In
light of such findings, my talk explores “taste” and then unpacks the paradoxical
phenomenon of “hate-reading.” Lastly, for illustration, I’ll examine some verses by
Midlands polymath Erasmus Darwin.
Before turning to new empirical insights, it would be remiss to overlook the
existing tradition of perspicacious critical commentary on subpar writing. Brilliant artes
poeticas stretch back to the classical era, and sagaciously spell out what differentiates the
best and worst. However, to emphasize what’s innovative about a cognitive approach, I’ll
be touching on them only selectively. (Several are cited on the back of your handout.)
I. Smells Like Teen Spirit
Those hors d’oeuvres dispensed with, let’s move to our savoury first main course.
Taste has long been the standard term for artistic preferences. Those not attuned to neurolinguistics,
in fact, ignore the conceptual metaphor that underlies normal thinking about
such evaluations. With apologies for possibly reviewing the familiar, I’d like to quickly
go over the biology of taste. It is, first and foremost, an evolved adaptation. Taste buds in
our tongues, along with our sense of smell and visual perception, guide what we select
for eating. This system of chemo-receptors helps us to ingest vital nutrients and to avoid
putting what is inedible or outright harmful, such as things that appear rotten or diseased,
in our mouths. This somatic equipment, dependent on specialized sensory neurons, keeps
us from knowingly consuming pathogens. In contrast, people around the world like
sweets (natural ones such as honey or ripe fruit, man-made ones such as biscuits or cakes
where available). They enjoy cooked meat or fish, and with local differences, things that
are spicy, flavorful, or umami. There are interesting biocultural variations too: Creole
cuisine differs from Irish fare, while cosmopolitan adults possess more refined palates
than voracious adolescents inundated by adverts for salty, fatty, or sugary processed junk
food. Pregnant women also tend to crave or be nauseated by certain items as they seek to
nourish a healthy fetus. All this implies the non-absolute, fluid nature of taste, but still
there are overarching group preferences.
Taste then functions as an effective metaphor. Especially significant, though, is
that it’s more than just a useful analogy for artistic discernment. In fact, aesthetic
reactions physiologically resemble gustatory ones. This is partly because both are
processed via the insular cortex. In his book Behave, brainiac Robert Sapolsky explains
how our minds equate actual and imaginary disgust and related properties: “Think about
rancid food, and the insula activates. Look at faces showing disgust … and the same
occurs. … This is visceral, not just metaphorically visceral. … The distance between the
symbolic message and the meaning disappears” (560-61). Indeed, our embodied
cognition gives rise to a common psychological experience known as the “Macbeth
effect.” That’s the propensity to wash one’s hands or engage in compulsive cleaning in
order to remove the “stain” of an immoral act: ritual purification is a time-honored self
help mechanism. Aesthetic appraisals, then, depend on deeper prehistoric feelings about
what is quintessentially good or bad.
To explicitly draw out some points from this avenue of enquiry: the personally
subjective likes and dislikes of individuals are widely shared across whole swathes of the
population, just as chocolate or pizza are generally popular while meals made from
roadkill or bugs are usually (though not universally) eschewed. (Tangentially, note that
giant tech firms bent on world domination increasingly deploy sophisticated statistical
algorithms to exploit the digital data about our aggregated inclinations to monetize or
influence our inclinations for everything from click bait to elections.) As several
cognitivists have explored, there are myriad commonalities about our preferences in the
realm of narrative too: audiences are enticed by virtuoso, skillfully wrought storytelling
that delivers emotionally saturated accounts of interesting, humane characters dealing
with conflicts by deploying vivid, fresh language.
In contrast, many elements of the really bad are then clear: clichéd, unoriginal,
dull stories with illogical plots featuring unrealistic personages and outcomes get thumbs
down. Analogous criteria exist for good and bad poetry. New Humanist scholar Denis
Dutton, in his fine book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, spells
out defining attributes of the most god-awful poetry, which he calls “supercomic”:
To be supercomic, a poet must write stunningly bad verse and do so with great earnestness. It is a
category that depends for its very existence on an author’s having intentions of a certain sort,
specifically not ironic. As it is, there are no conventions at all peculiar to supercomic verse:
seriousness of purpose and sublime ineptitude are its only requirements. (171-72)
This strikes me as being right on the mark. But it leads to an intriguing issue: what about
literature that some find truly engaging, others lame or puerile?
Part of the answer lies in the reality that among all humans, defined by shared
DNA and universal traits, there is widespread variation in intelligence, just as there is a
Gaussian bell curve range of average height or weight. Experienced, smart bookworms
have a higher threshold; less discriminating or brainy audiences, on the other hand,
readily consume literary junk food. As that actor-critic Hamlet stated about a tragedy
he’d once witnessed:
The play, I remember, pleased not the million. ‘Twas caviar to the general. But it was—as I
received it, and others whose judgements in such matters cried in the top of mine—an excellent
play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. (2.2.417-22)
He echoes here Aristotle’s observation in the Poetics that only the better sort appreciate
the finest productions and “the form that appeals to everybody is extremely vulgar” (74).
Such a perspective should not spark much controversy. However, in the barbaric,
mutinous American Colonies at any rate, where anti-intellectualism and anti-scientism
are resurgent and there’s a tidal wave of populist bias against merit and excellence,
judging by such an exclusive, unegalitarian Gold Standard seems almost beyond the pale.
In many ways it’s inimical to the prevalent cultural ethos.
This is not to suggest that literary works can be precisely quantified, nor that ideas
about high art don’t reflect “cultural capital.” For example, Pope’s scintillating satire The
Rape of the Lock would not be very funny to readers ignorant of the generic conventions
of epic poetry. Rather, my point is that we should accept the range of brain power across
the species; all happy readers are not alike. Moreover, like actual taste, we might then
acknowledge the existence of more than one gradient, without sliding all the way to
subjective relativism. Having unfolded the splanchnic roots of taste and its biocultural
variability, and touched on some initial implications, let’s proceed to our next matter.
II. This Sucks!
At present, fakery and lowest-common-denominator-ism stand triumphant in
popular artforms. A thin silver lining is the rise among urbane sophisticates of hatereading.
This is taking a perverse delight from disparaging the transcendently mediocre.
It affords the opportunity of experiencing schadenfreude and indulging in snarkiness. As
the behavioral scientists frequently remind us, we humans are extremely status-conscious,
and lambasting or roasting what’s crummy signals our refined acumen while allowing us
to express our inner ‘mean girls.’ Furthermore, as the neuroscientists confirm, we’re
prone to self-serving delusions, so what one asserts to be hate-reading can provide figleaf
cover for succumbing to guilty pleasures, as one curls up on the couch with a glass of
wine and escapes into Outlander or the latest Ruth Ware mystery.
The point of origin for this approach might be the First Satire of Juvenal, where
he attacks his talentless contemporaries and infamously vents that in wretchedly decadent
times like these, “it’s difficult not to write satire.” Like satire, hate-reading lets us smugly
look down upon overrated hack authors and the unenlightened, uncouth consumers of
their jejune tomes. Similarly, as Thomas Hobbes observed in The Elements of Law,
Natural and Politic, “the passion of Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising
from some sudden conception of some eminency in our selves, by comparison with the
infirmities of others.” In a world as debased as ours, mocking inferior works therefore
serves multiple functions.
This mode of literary engagement was blessed with its own patron saint: essayist
and belletrist William Hazlitt. In 1823 he poison-penned “On the Pleasure of Hating.” It’s
gleefully misanthropic and self-loathing. Hazlitt proposes that especially in a civilized,
modern age, bookish detesting fulfills an innate, atavistic purpose:
They carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and the
revenge of a barbarous age and people. … We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of
them in turn. As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilisation, the flimsy veil of humanity.
“Off, you lendings!” … The heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at
being restored once more to freedom and lawless, unrestrained impulses. (359)
Hazlitt also contributes his own Homeric catalogue of things he scorns. Listed among his
rebuke are both trendy and fashionable best-sellers, and even classics of British
Literature, which mostly reflect his own snobbery:
The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss
that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of
ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them. … To cry up Shakespeare as the god of
our idolatry, seems like a vulgar national prejudice: to take down a volume of Chaucer, or
Spenser, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Ford, or Marlowe, has very much the look of pedantry and
egotism. … [However,] each successive generation of fools is busily employed in reading the
trash of the day. (366)
As an early modernist, this hits uncomfortably close to home for me. But given how
much everything stinks, maybe the only sensible response is to despise it all?
Arguably though, the specific subject for an appropriate hate-reading should be
selected with care. Picking on a Twilight or a Rupi Kaur is like shooting fish in a barrel.
It’s too easy (reminding us of the Vicomte de Valmont’s initial refusal to seduce the naïf
convent girl Cécile de Volanges in Dangerous Liaisons). I’d avow that it’s that slightly
pretentious, striving, tacky, thoroughly middlebrow or bourgeois literary fiction that
seems best, and which makes a proper hate-read so “devilish pleasing.” We raconteuring
humans have inherited tricky, devious minds, and nowadays this virtual or vicarious
feuding utilizes some of their darker, more primeval aspects.
III. Profaning Nature
Having theorized and cognitivized our topic, let’s proceed to a test case. It’s from
that acme of bathos, the long, posthumously published poem The Temple of Nature
(1803) by Erasmus Darwin. This Darwin was a doctor, amateur naturalist and versifier,
and grandfather to both you-know-who and Francis Galton. In The Temple of Nature, he
recounts assorted biological observations. In the passage on your handout, various
aquatic creatures are anatomized:
So still the Tadpole cleaves the watery vale,
With balanc’d fins and undulating tail;
New lungs and limbs proclaim his second birth,
Breathe the dry air, and bound upon the earth. . . .
Allied to fish, the Lizard cleaves the flood,
With one-cell’d heart, and dark frigescent blood;
Half-reasoning Beavers long-unbreathing dart
Through Eirie’s waves with perforated heart;
With gills and lungs respiring Lampreys steer,
Kiss the rude rocks, and suck till they adhere; . . .
With gills pulmonic breathes th’ enormous Whale,
And spouts aquatic columns to the gale. (I.343-62)
From a formal perspective, these are competent, end-stopped heroic couplets, with, it
must be acknowledged, an impressively detailed lexicon. In contrast, however, to truly
high-quality verse, whose wit, insight, and verbal dexterity spark the pleasurable release
of dopamine and other endorphins in the brain, there is something cringe-inducing here.
(I try to map out the grounds for a Rezeptionästhetik based on cognitive neuroscience in
my little book on John Donne, in case anyone’s interested.) Most well trained readers
would find this sample uninspired or maladroit due to the incongruity between the
material physiology of the cardiopulmonary organs of these denizens of great Neptune’s
realms and the high-style, poetical diction invoked to describe them. The amphibian in
the first lines doesn’t just metamorphose from tadpole to frog, he undergoes a Christ-like
Resurrection. The baroque depictions, such as the “dark frigescent blood” of the lizard,
seem untouched by deliberate irony, by authorial awareness that his elevated idiom
echoes epic battle scenes. The “perforated heart,” the cleaving and darting, and the
watery vale seem lifted from the combats and underworld journeys of Beowulf or The
Iliad. Last not least: Darwin’s lampreys (which don’t attach themselves to rocks nor
possess lungs btw). That line concerning their adhesive mouths just seems “off.” It
faintly, probably inadvertently, sounds like a phrase in the bawdy poem “The Imperfect
Enjoyment” by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, whose paramour’s ardour is conveyed
through breathless images of her kissing: “She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her
face” (6). Certainly, authors can deploy amorous motifs in unromantic places or
otherwise juxtapose opposites to good effect, but here Darwin has blindly achieved some
unpremeditated comedy—he’s penned one long ‘purple passage.’
Mop Up
To mop up this sprawling muddle of a manifesto: our friend, the aforementioned
Alexander Pope, composed one of the great statements about literary aesthetics, An Essay
on Criticism. There he claimed that “Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well” (724).
Given how hard that is to do, it’s certain we’ll continue to be inundated with Bad
Literature. I believe that reading the bad and ugly can be useful. In the spirit of John
Milton, I’d promote a kind of critical Manichaeanism in which it’s necessary to ponder
what’s crummy in order to appreciate and comprehend what’s impressive.
Other open-ended questions might also be raised: what about Bad Shakespeare, or
how to properly assess so-called ‘genre literature’? How valid are our initial empirical
criteria for aesthetic judgments? And perhaps even more imperative: given the coarsening
of culture and society, are we approaching some dystopian Fahrenheit 451 or 1984
scenario where quality literature shan’t officially be studied at all?
Pardon me for ending on such a heavy note—my theme today should be fun! So I
hope my remarks have provided some enlightening, humorous, tasty food for thought,
and will help you as you explore the beguiling worlds of turbid, turgid bad lit.
Thank you!
*A longer version of this presentation, entitled “Whence Bad Literature?” contains a
complete apparatus criticus, including citations.
Handout:
Michael A. Winkelman Cognitive Futures Conference
michael.alan.winkelman@gmail.com University of Kent
1-4 July 2018
‘Bitterly Hating Bad Literature’: A Cognitive Offensive
I must apologize. … I so deeply love good literature and hate so bitterly bad literature
that my expressions may be stronger than they ought to be.
—Professor Vladimir Nabokov (1941)
So still the Tadpole cleaves the watery vale,
With balanc’d fins and undulating tail;
New lungs and limbs proclaim his second birth,
Breathe the dry air, and bound upon the earth. . . .
Allied to fish, the Lizard cleaves the flood,
With one-cell’d heart, and dark frigescent blood;
Half-reasoning Beavers long-unbreathing dart
Through Eirie’s waves with perforated heart;
With gills and lungs respiring Lampreys steer,
Kiss the rude rocks, and suck till they adhere; . . .
With gills pulmonic breathes th’ enormous Whale,
And spouts aquatic columns to the gale.
—Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (1803), I.343-62
Additional Reading
Dorsch, T.S., trans. Classical Literary Criticism: Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry; Horace,
On the Art of Poetry; Longinus, On the Sublime. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965.
Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. NY:
Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Eliot, George [Marian Evans]. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” 1856. Selected Essays,
Poems, and Other Writings. Eds. A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. London & NY:
Penguin Books, 1990. 140-63.
Hazlitt, William. “On the Pleasure of Hating.” 1823. Essays by William Hazlitt. Ed. Percy
Van Dyke Shelly. NY: Scribner’s, 1924. 356-71.
Milton, John. “Areopagitica.” 1644. The Portable Milton. Ed. Douglas Bush. NY: The
Viking Press, 1949. 151-205.
Pope, Alexander. Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope. Ed. Aubrey Williams. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
Sapolsky, Robert. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. NY: Penguin,
2017.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” 1964. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. NY:
Delta/Dell, 1966. 275-92.
Twain, Mark [Samuel Clemens]. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” 1895. The
Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain. Ed. Charles Neider.
Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1966. 631-42.
Winkelman, Michael. A Cognitive Approach to John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets.
Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Wyndham Lewis, D.B., and Charles Lee, eds. The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad
Verse. NY: Capricorn Books, 1962.
Video meliora proboque, / Deteriora sequor.
(I see what is the better course, and I approve it; but still I follow the worse.)
—Ovid, Metamorphoses (VII.20-21)
Difficile est saturam non scribere.
([In such debauched times,] it is hard not to write satire.)
—Juvenal, Satire I.30
Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’
—Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
—Oscar Wilde
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.
—Oscar Wilde on The Old Curiosity Shop by Dickens
90% of anything is crap.
—Sturgeon’s Law
HAMLET: The play, I remember, pleased not the million. ‘Twas caviar to the general. But it
was—as I received it, and others whose judgements in such matters cried in the top of mine—an
excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. (2.2.417-
22)