I was excited by the headline. Typically, I approach reading as entering into a relationship with a writer and, when it comes to reading the works of cherished writers, I often work with the fantasy that I’m getting to them better, more intimately. I even once had the experience of hallucinating an encounter with a dead author while visiting with his widow in their apartment in Paris. But as I read through Dr. Mar’s report of the study I was left with some questions and even some objections.
First, the background to the study. According to Dr. Mar:
“A fascinating study currently In Press in the Journal of Research in Personality (Kufner et al., in press), provides evidence that in some ways, we can infer what an author is like based solely on their writing. Although previous studies on inferring personality from written text have been conducted, this was the first study to look at creative writing as opposed to personal essays.”
Fair enough, readers of my first post will know that I’m quite interested in the ways that scientific research might inform the study of literature and enhance my understanding and enjoyment of the world of books and the arts.
Dr. Mar goes on to describe the experiment:
“One group of people were given 7 minutes to write a piece of creative fiction that incorporated these 5 words: plane crash, parlor-maid, fireworks, Middle Ages, and supermarket. These authors also rated their own personality and completed a measure of verbal ability (i.e., a vocabulary test). A separate group of individuals then read these stories, and attempted to judge the personality of the author.”
I’ve got some questions that already come up here but I’ll just hang on to them until you get to read Dr. Mar’s account of the findings:
“There was remarkable consensus among these raters for these judgments, but even more surprising there was also some measurable accuracy. Specifically, these raters could accurately predict the personality of the authors for two main personality traits: Openness and Agreeableness. Openness refers to how creative, open-minded, and intelligent a person is, and raters appeared to make these judgments based on the creative expression found in the writing. Agreeableness is a trait that describes the degree to which a person is focused on harmonious personal relationships, and raters accurately judged Agreeableness by noting the social orientation of words found in the text. Lastly, raters were also successful in predicting the verbal ability of the author, by noting how sophisticated the writing was in the story. Rater were not successful, however, in judging how outgoing, conscientious, or susceptible to negative emotion the writers were. These results were replicated in a second sample of participants, increasing our confidence in these findings.”Now, I haven't read the entire article and, I want to stress, I'm not a psychologist, experimental or otherwise, and so some of my questions, though worth asking, may have very simple and satisfying answers. I'm uncertain about the validity of some of the assumptions that seem to underlie the study and the interpretation of the findings. Let me lay out what I think those assumptions are:
1. That a piece of creative fiction, written in seven minutes by (as far as I can tell from this report) regular Joe's (that is, not by people who self-define or are otherwise determined to be creative writers) can stand for all creative writing.
2. That the "creative writers" personality self-assessment can adequately represent their personalities for the purposes of measuring the accuracy of readers' own assessments of the personality of the author of the text they read.
3. That the narrator of a piece of creative writing, say a piece of fiction, is identical to its author.
Perhaps I'm mistaken in identifying these as underlying assumptions or perhaps, if they were indeed underlying assumptions, the psychologists at work accounted for them in some way in the full version of the paper. For the sake of argument, though, I'm going to proceed as if these were operating assumptions and that they weren't accounted for.
Let me begin with assumption # 2, because I'm sure some psychologist here can clarify this for me. And let me say I'm a long-time addict to a variety of different personality assessment tests. In my experience they can often provide useful and surprising insights about how I see myself. But I'm not sure how much they really tell me or anyone else about my personality. At the very least, it would seem that if something called "the author's personality" is to be known and fixed as a kind of baseline fact for this study to proceed then we'd want an assessment of that personality that doesn't depend entirely on the author's self-assessment.
But assumptions 1 and 3 are the ones that really trouble me, as a student of literature. I wondered, as I read the findings, about how such a study would fare with, say, the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita:
"Lolita, light of my life, fire ofI'm not saying that this approach would be completely useless. But I'm pretty comfortable asserting that the author Vladimir Nabokov does not have the same personality as the unreliable, pedophiliac narrator of the novel, Humbert Humbert. In fact, we teachers of literature often have to work hard to get our students to grasp the subtle point that while what we may know of an author's life can certainly help us to understand a text, the author and the narrator are not the same person. I think most creative writers worth their salt would accept that as well. But I don't see how this psychological study accounted for that.
my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip
of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee.
Ta."She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning,
standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly
at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always
Lolita."Did she have a precursor? She did,
indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all
had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom
by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age
was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."Ladies and gentlement of the jury,
exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged
seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."
Or take the following short text, which I reproduce in its entirety, by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, entitled "Borges and I":
“The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.”
Borges here takes up the question at issue very directly and, without belaboring the point, I think he creates a verbal artifact of sufficient complexity as to demolish any putative claim to be able to accurately capture the personality of its narrator, let alone its author.
With both Nabokov and Borges we have texts whose level of craft and complexity, I think it's safe to say, are likely to outstrip whatever I (or any other non creative writer) might generate in seven minutes. And, obviously, Nabokov and Borges are not alone in this. They're just the first two examples that came to mind. What about Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock, in which a character named Philip Roth, who resembles in many ways what we know of the life of the author Philip Roth, tries to track down and confront an individual who has assumed his identity and begun to make public statements in the name of the novelist Philip Roth. What could we say with reasonable certainty about the personality of Philip Roth, or Nabokov, or Borges, on the basis of quickly reading their texts? I cherish as much as the next reader the fantasy that I'm getting to know authors by reading their works. But I prefer to keep that fantasy hazy and loose and short of the certainty that Dr. Mar seems to feel this study suggests we can actually have.
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