How an author’s mind made stories: Emotion and ethics in Tagore’s short fiction

Patrick Colm Hogan

doi:10.1515/fns-2017-0010

Authors may be understood as producing stories from their narrative idiolects. Narrative idiolects are sets of principles that enable the simulation of possible sequences of causally connected events. Such idiolects include prototypes that define classes of stories. These prototypes or proto-stories are complexes of cognitive and affective structures that guide the interpretation of real-world events as well as the production of fictions. Like everyone, Rabindranath Tagore had a range of proto-stories. But one was particularly important for him. This was a proto-story based on attachment, the sort of bonding that first of all characterizes the relations of parents and young children. This proto-story centers on the formation and violation of attachment relations, with the ethical and political issues that surround such violation. Specifically, Tagore’s ethical and political imagination was largely guided by the norm of securely developing attachment. It was elaborated into stories by reference to deviations from that norm. Those deviations are caused by attachment threat or loss. In connection with these points, Tagore’s attachment proto-story suggests two key ethical virtues – attachment sensitivity and attachment openness. These, in turn, may be disturbed by the social production of shame, often in relation to gender ideology. This essay examines Tagore’s attachment proto-story and its ethical and political consequences.

How an author’s mind made stories: Emotion and ethics in Tagore’s short fiction

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