Literatura académica sobre el tema "Thought suppression. Depression, Mental. Feedback (Psychology)"

BackgroundObsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been associated with impairments in stop-signal inhibition, a measure of motor response suppression. The study used a novel paradigm to examine both thought suppression and response inhibition in OCD, where the modulatory effects of stimuli relevant to OCD could also be assessed. Additionally, the study compared inhibitory impairments in OCD patients with and without co-morbid depression, as depression is the major co-morbidity of OCD.MethodVolitional response suppression and unintentional thought suppression to emotive and neutral stimuli were examined using a novel thought stop-signal task. The thought stop-signal task was administered to non-depressed OCD patients, depressed OCD patients and healthy controls (n=20 per group).ResultsMotor inhibition impairments were evident in OCD patients, while motor response performance did not differ between patients and controls. Switching to a new response but not motor inhibition was affected by stimulus relevance in OCD patients. Additionally, unintentional thought suppression as measured by repetition priming was intact. OCD patients with and without depression did not differ on any task performance measures, though there were significant differences in all self-reported measures.ConclusionsResults support motor inhibition deficits in OCD that remain stable regardless of stimulus meaning or co-morbid depression. Only switching to a new response was influenced by stimulus meaning. When response inhibition was successful in OCD patients, so was the unintentional suppression of the accompanying thought.

This article traces the origins of intrusive thoughts in depression, devoting special attention to how misguided attempts to gain mental control can ironically fuel unwanted thoughts. A review of the research highlights the ways in which cognitive biases, stress, and thought suppression can contribute to the development and maintenance of depression. The article concludes with a consideration of the implications for treatment.

Previous research on vulnerability to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been restricted by the absence of prospective studies that measure individual differences prior to traumatization. This study investigated the predictors of analogue post-traumatic intrusive cognitions using a fully prospective design. Non-patient participants completed a range of predictor measures before being exposed to a film about a traumatic fire. Film-induced changes in negative mood were also assessed. Subsequent intrusions were measured both within the experimental session and for a further seven days. The hypothesized predictors were: neuroticism, trait anxiety, extraversion, depression, a general tendency to suppress unpleasant thoughts, beliefs about being “at risk” from fire, mental imagery, self-rated proneness to intrusions and negative mood changes. The results showed that intrusions were predicted by film-induced increases in negative mood, thought suppression tendencies, beliefs about vulnerability to fire and self-rated proneness to intrusive cognitions. The findings are discussed in relation to the literature on thought suppression and cognitive processes in PTSD.

IntroductionThis article addresses the experience of designing and conducting life-writing workshops for a group of clients with severe mental illness; the aim of this pilot study was to begin to determine whether such writing about the self can aid in individual ‘recovery’, as that term is understood by contemporary health professionals. A considerable amount has been written about the potential of creative writing in mental health therapy; the authors of this article provide a brief summary of that literature, then of the concept of ‘recovery’ in a psychology and arts therapy context. There follows a first-hand account by one of the authors of being an arts therapy workshop facilitator in the role of a creative practitioner. This occurred in consultation with, and monitored by, experienced mental health professionals. Life-Writing as ‘Therapeutic’ Life-story or life-writing can be understood in this context as involving more than disclosure or oral expression of a subject’s ‘story’ as in psycho-therapy – life-story is understood as a written, structured narrative. In 2001, Wright and Chung published a review of the literature in which they claimed that writing therapy had been “restimulated by the development of narrative approaches” (278). Pennebaker argues that “catharsis or the venting of emotions” without “cognitive processing” has little therapeutic value and people need to “build a coherent narrative that explains some past experience” in order to benefit from writing” (Pennebaker, Telling Stories 10–11). It is claimed in the Clinical Psychology Review that life-writing has the therapeutic benefits of, for example, “striking physical health and behaviour change” (Esterling et al. 84). The reasons are still unclear, but it is possible that the cognitive and linguistic processing of problematic life-events through narrative writing may help the subject assimilate such problems (Alschuler 113–17). As Pennebaker and Seagal argue in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, the life-writing processallows one to organise and remember events in a coherent fashion while integrating thoughts and feelings ... This gives individuals a sense of predictability and control over their lives. Once an experience has structure and meaning, it would follow that the emotional effects of that experience are more manageable. (1243)It would seem reasonable to suggest that life-writing which constructs a positive recovery narrative can have a positive therapeutic effect, providing a sense of agency, connectedness and creativity, in a similar, integrating manner. Humans typically see their lives as stories. Paul Eakin stresses the link between narrative and identity in both this internal life-story and in outwardly constructed autobiography:narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self – the self of autobiographical discourse - does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative. (Making Selves 100)So both a self-in-time and a socially viable identity may depend on such narrative. The term ‘dysnarrativia’ has been coined to describe the documented inability to construct self-narrative by those suffering amnesia, autism, severe child abuse or brain damage. The lack of ability to achieve narrative construction seems to be correlated with identity disorders (Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography 124). (For an overview of the current literature on creative and life-writing as therapy see Murphy & Neilsen). What is of particular relevance to university creative writing practitioners/teachers is that there is evidence, for example from Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman and creative writing academic Vicki Linder, that life-narratives are more therapeutically effective if guided to be written according to fundamental ‘effective writing’ aesthetic conventions – such as having a regard to coherent structure in the narrative, the avoidance of cliché, practising the ‘demonstrate don’t state’ dictum, and writing in one’s own voice, for example. Defining ‘Recovery’There remains debate as to the meaning of recovery in the context of mental health service delivery, but there is agreement that recovery entails significantly more than symptom remission or functional improvement (Liberman & Kopelowicz). In a National Consensus Statement, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) unit of the US Department of Health and Human Services in 2005 described recovery (in general terms) as being achieved by the enabling of a person with a mental illness to live meaningfully in a chosen community, while also attempting to realize individual potential. ‘Recovery’ as a central concept behind rehabilitation can be understood both as objective recovery – that is, in terms of noting a reduction in objective indicators of illness and disability (such as rates of hospital usage or unemployment) and a greater degree of social functioning – and also as subjective recovery. Subjective recovery can be ascertained by listening closely to what clients themselves have said about their own experiences. It has been pointed out (King, Lloyd & Meehan 2) that there is not always a correspondence between objective indicators of recovery and the subjective, lived experience of recovery. The experience of mental illness is not just one of symptoms and disability but equally importantly one of major challenge to sense of self. Equally, recovery from mental illness is experienced not just in terms of symptoms and disability but also as a recovery of sense of self … Recovery of sense of self and recovery with respect to symptoms and disability may not correspond. (King, Lloyd & Meehan; see also Davidson & Strauss)Symptoms of disability can persist, but a person can have a much stronger sense of self or empowerment – that is still recovery. Illness dislocates the sense of self as part of a community and of a self with skills and abilities. Restoring this sense of empowerment is an aim of arts therapy. To put it another way, recovery is a complex process by which a client with a mental illness develops a sense of identity and agency as a citizen, as distinct from identification with illness and disability and passivity as a ‘patient’. The creative arts have gone well beyond being seen as a diversion for the mentally ill. In a comprehensive UK study of creative arts projects for clients with mental illness, Helen Spandler et al. discovered strong evidence that participation in creative activity promoted a sense of purpose and meaning, and assisted in “rediscovering or rebuilding an identity within and beyond that of someone with mental health difficulties” (795). Recovery is aided by people being motivated to achieve self-confidence through mastery and competence; by learning and achieving goals. Clearly this is where arts therapy could be expected or hoped to be effective. The aim of the pilot study was not to measure ‘creativity’, but whether involvement in what is commonly understood as a creative process (life-writing) can have flow-on benefits in terms of the illness of the workshop participant. The psychologists involved, though more familiar with visual arts therapy (reasonably well-established in Australia – in 2006, the ANZAT began publishing the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Therapy), thought creative writing could also be valuable. Preparation for and Delivery of the Workshops I was acutely aware that I had no formal training in delivering a program to clients with mental health illness. I was counselled during several meetings with experienced psychologists and a social worker that the participants in the three workshops over two weeks would largely be people who had degrees of difficulty in living independently, and could well have perceptual problems, could misjudge signals from outside and inside the group, and be on medication that could affect their degree of engagement. Some clients could have impaired concentration and cognition, and a deficit in volition. Participants needed to be free to leave and rejoin the workshops during the afternoon sessions. Attendance might well fall as the workshops progressed. Full ethical clearance was attained though the University of Queensland medical faculty (after detailed description of the content and conduct of the proposed workshops) and consent forms prepared for participants. My original workshop ‘kit’ to be distributed to participants underwent some significant changes as I was counselled and prepared for the workshops. The major adjustment to my usual choice of material and approach was made in view of the advice that recounting traumatic events can have a negative effect on some patients – at least in the short term. For the sake of both the individuals and the group as a whole this was to be avoided. I changed my initial emphasis on encouraging participants to recount their traumatic experiences in a cathartic way (as suggested by the narrative psychology literature), to encouraging them to recount positive narratives from their lives – narratives of ‘recovery’ – as I explain in more detail below. I was also counselled that clients with mental health problems might dwell on retelling their story – their case history – rather than reflecting upon it or using their creative and imaginative ability to shape a life-story that was not a catalogue of their medical history. Some participants did demonstrate a desire to retell their medical history or narrative – including a recurring theme of the difficulty in gaining continuity with one trusted medical professional. I gently guided these participants back to fashioning a different and more creative narrative, with elements of scene creation, description and so on, by my first listening intently to and acknowledging their medical narrative for a few minutes and then suggesting we try to move beyond that. This simple strategy was largely successful; several participants commented explicitly that they were tired of having to retell their medical history to each new health professional they encountered in the hospital system, for example. My principal uncertainty was whether I should conduct the workshops at the same level of complexity that I had in the past with groups of university students or community groups. While in both of those cohorts there will often be some participants with mental health issues, for the most part this possibility does not affect the level or kind of content of material discussed in workshops. However, within this pilot group all had been diagnosed with moderate to severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, but also bipolar disorder and acute depression and anxiety disorders. The fact that my credentials were only as a published writer and teacher of creative writing, not as a health professional, was also a strong concern to me. But the clients readily accepted me as someone who knew the difficulty of writing well and getting published. I stressed to them that my primary aim was to teach effective creative writing as an end in itself. That it might be beneficial in health terms was secondary. It was a health professional who introduced me and briefly outlined the research aims of the workshop – including some attempt to measure qualitatively any possible benefits. It was my impression that the participants did not have a diminished sense of my usefulness because I was not a health professional. Their focus was on having the opportunity to practice creative writing and/or participate in a creative group activity. As mentioned above, I had prepared a workshop ‘kit’ for the participants of 15 pages. It contained the usual guidelines for effective writing – extracts from professional writers’ published work (including an extract from my own published work – a matter of equity, since they were allowing me to read their work), and a number of writing exercises (using description, concrete and abstract words, narrative point of view, writing in scenes, show don’t tell). The kit contained extracts from memoirs by Hugh Lunn and Bill Bryson, as well as a descriptive passage from Charles Dickens. An extract from Inga Clendinnen’s 2006 account in Agamemnon’s Kiss: selected essays of her positive interaction with fellow cancer patients (a narrative with the underlying theme of recovery) was also valuable for the participants. I stressed to the group that this material was very similar to that used with beginning writers among university students. I described the importance of life-writing as follows: Life-writing is simply telling a story from your life and perhaps musing or commenting on it at the same time. When you write a short account of something chosen from your life, you are making a pattern, using your memory, using your powers of description – you are being creative. You are being a story-teller. And story-telling is one very important thing that makes us humans different from all other animals – and it is a way in which we find a lot of meaning in our lives.My central advice in the kit was: “Just try to be as honest as you can – and to remember as well as you can … being honest and direct is both the best and the easiest way to write memoir”. The only major difference between my approach with these clients and that with a university class was in the selection of possible topics offered. In keeping with the advice of the psychologists who were experts in the theory of ‘recovery’, the topics were predominantly positive, though one or two topics gave the opportunity to recount and/or explore a negative experience if the participant wanted to do so: A time when I was able to help another personA time when I realised what really mattered in lifeA time when I overcame a major difficultyA time when I felt part of a group or teamA time when I knew what I wanted to do with my lifeA time when someone recognised a talent or quality of mineA time I did something that I was proud of A time when I learned something important to meA memorable time when I lived in a certain house or suburbA story that begins: “Looking back, I now understand that …”The group expressed satisfaction with these topics, though they had the usual writing students’ difficulty in choosing the one that best suited them. In the first two workshops we worked our way through the kit; in the third workshop, two weeks later, each participant read their own work to the group and received feedback from their peers and me. The feedback was encouraged to be positive and constructive, and the group spontaneously adopted a positive reinforcement approach, applauding each piece of writing. Workshop DynamicsThe venue for the workshops was a suburban house in the Logan area of Brisbane used as a drop-in centre for those with mental illness, and the majority of the participants would be familiar with it. It had a large, breezy deck on which a round-table configuration of seating was arranged. This veranda-type setting was sheltered enough to enable all to be heard easily and formal enough to emphasise a learning event was taking place; but it was also open enough to encourage a relaxed atmosphere. The week before the first workshop I visited the house to have lunch with a number of the participants. This gave me a sense of some of the participants’ personalities and degree of engagement, the way they related to each other, and in turn enabled them to begin to have some familiarity with me and ask questions. As a novice at working with this kind of client, I found this experience extremely valuable, especially as it suggested that a relatively high degree of communication and cognition would be possible, and it reduced the anxiety I had about pitching the workshops at an appropriate level. In the course of the first workshop, the most initially sceptical workshop participant ended up being the most engaged contributor. A highly intelligent woman, she felt it would be too upsetting to write about negative events, but ultimately wrote a very effective piece about the empowerment she gained from caring for a stray cat and locating the owner. Her narrative also expressed her realisation that the pet was partly a replacement for spending time with her son, who lived interstate. Another strong participant previously had written a book-length narrative of her years of misdiagnoses and trauma in the hospital system before coming under the care of her present health professionals. The participant who had the least literacy skills was accepted by the group as an equal and after a while contributed enthusiastically. Though he refused to sign the consent form at the outset, he asked to do so at the close of the first afternoon. The workshop was comprised of clients from two health provider organisations; at first the two groups tended to speak with those they already knew (as in any such situation in the broader community), but by the third workshop a sense of larger group identity was being manifested in their comments, as they spoke of what ‘the group’ would like in the future – such as their work being published in some form. It was clear that, as in a university setting, part of the beneficial effect of the workshops came from group and face to face interaction. It would be more difficult to have this dimension of benefit achieved via a web-based version of the workshops, though a chat room scenario would presumably go some way towards establishing a group feeling. Web-based delivery would certainly suit participants who lacked mobility or who lived in the regions. Clearly the Internet is a vital social networking tool, and an Internet-based version of the workshops could well be attempted in the future. My own previous experience of community digital storytelling workshops (Neilsen, Digital Storytelling as Life-writing) suggests that a high degree of technical proficiency can not be expected across such a cohort; but with adequate technical support, a program (the usual short, self-written script, recorded voice-over and still images scanned from the participants’ photo albums, etc) could make digital storytelling a further dimension of therapeutic life-writing for clients with mental illness. One of the most useful teaching techniques in a class room setting is the judicious use of humour – to create a sense of sharing a perspective, and simply to make material more entertaining. I tested the waters at the outset by referring to the mental health worker sitting in the background, and declaring (with some comic exaggeration) my concern that if I didn’t run the workshop well he would report adversely on me. There was general laughter and this expression of my vulnerability seemed to defuse anxiety on the part of some participants. As the workshop progressed I found I could use both humorous extracts of life-writing and ad hoc comic comments (never at the expense of a participant) as freely as in a university class. Participants made some droll comments in the overall context of encouraging one another in their contributions, both oral and written. Only one participant exhibited some temporary distress during one of the workshops. I was allowing another participant the freedom to digress from the main topic and the participant beside me displayed agitation and sharply demanded we get back to the point. I apologised and acknowledged I had not stayed as focused as I should and returned to the topic. I suspect I had a fortunate first experience of such arts therapy workshops – and that this was largely due to the voluntary nature of the study and that most of the participants brought a prior positive experience of the workshop scenario, and prior interest in creative writing, to the workshops. Outcomes A significantly positive outcome was that only one of the nine participants missed a session (through ill-health) and none left during workshops. The workshops tended to proceed longer than the three hours allotted on each occasion. Post-workshop interviews were conducted by a psychologist with the participants. Detailed data is not available yet – but there was a clear indication by almost all participants that they felt the workshops were beneficial and that they would like to participate in further workshops. All but one agreed to have their life-writing included in a newsletter produced by one of the sponsors of the workshops. The positive reception of the workshops by the participants has encouraged planning to be undertaken for a wide-ranging longitudinal study by means of a significant number of workshops in both life-writing and visual arts in more than one city, conducted by a team of health professionals and creative practitioners – this time with sophisticated measurement instruments to gauge the effectiveness of art therapy in aiding ‘recovery’. Small as the workshop group was, the pilot study seems to validate previous research in the UK and US as we have summarised above. The indications are that significant elements of recovery (in particular, feelings of enhanced agency and creativity), can be achieved by life-writing workshops that are guided by creative practitioners; and that it is the process of narrative construction within life-writing that engages with or enhances a sense of self and identity. NoteWe are indebted, in making the summary of the concept of ‘recovery’ in health science terms, to work in progress by the following research team: Robert King, Tom O'Brien and Claire Edwards (School of Medicine, University of Queensland), Margot Schofield and Patricia Fenner (School of Public Health, Latrobe University). We are also grateful for the generous assistance of both this group and Seiji Humphries from the Richmond Queensland Fellowship, in providing preparation for the workshops. ReferencesAlschuler, Mari. “Lifestories – Biography and Autobiography as Healing Tools for Adults with Mental Illness.” Journal of Poetry Therapy 11.2 (1997): 113–17.Davidson, Larry and John Strauss. “Sense of Self in Recovery from Severe Mental Illness.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 65 (1992): 31–45.Eakin, Paul. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies of the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.———. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.Esterling, B.A., L. L’Abate., E.J. Murray, and J.W. Pennebaker. “Empirical Foundations for Writing in Prevention and Psychotherapy: Mental and Physical Health Outcomes.” Clinical Psychology Review 19.1 (1999): 79–96.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.King, Robert, Chris Lloyd, and Tom Meehan. Handbook of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.Liberman, Robert, and Alex Kopelowicz. “Recovery from Schizophrenia: A Criterion-Based Definition.” In Ralph, R., and P. Corrigan (eds). Recovery in Mental Illness: Broadening Our Understanding of Wellness. Washington, DC: APA, 2005.Linder, Vicki. “The Tale of two Bethanies: Trauma in the Creative Writing Classroom.” New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 1.1 (2004): 6–14Murphy, Ffion, and Philip Neilsen. “Recuperating Writers – and Writing: The Potential of Writing Therapy.” TEXT 12.1 (Apr. 2008). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april08/murphy_neilsen.htm›.Neilsen, Philip. “Digital Storytelling as Life-Writing: Self-Construction, Therapeutic Effect, Textual Analysis Leading to an Enabling ‘Aesthetic’ for the Community Voice.” ‹http://www.speculation2005.qut.edu.au/papers/Neilsen.pdf›.Pennebaker, James W., and Janel D. Seagal. “Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55.10 (1999): 1243–54.Pennebaker, James W. “Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Literature and Medicine 19.1 (2000): 3–18.Spandler, H., J. Secker, L. Kent, S. Hacking, and J. Shenton. “Catching Life: The Contribution of Arts Initiatives to ‘Recovery’ Approaches in Mental Health.” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 14.8 (2007): 791–799.Wright, Jeannie, and Man Cheung Chung. “Mastery or Mystery? Therapeutic Writing: A Review of the Literature.” British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 29.3 (2001): 277–91.

IntroductionCan a person’s tastes in art, music, literature, cinema, sport, humour or other fields be changed through online activity? This article explores that question by comparing recent research findings in the areas of neuroplasticity and flow. Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity, is the idea that the human brain can change its structure and function through thought and activity, even into old age (Doidge). The second concept—flow—comes from the field of psychology, and refers to a deeply satisfying state of focused attention that people sometimes experience while engaging in an enjoyable activity such as browsing the Web (Csikszentmihalyi, Flow). Research into the experiences of web users, conducted from these two different perspectives, reveal interesting connections to the acquisition of taste and opportunities for further investigation. Neuroplasticity The term neuroplasticity comes from the words neuron and plastic. Neurons are the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic, in this context, means flexibility or malleability. Neuroplasticity has replaced the formerly-held belief that the brain is a physiologically static organ, hard-wired like a machine (Kolb, Gibb and Robinson). For much of the last century, scientists believed that adult brains, unlike those of children, could not produce new neurons or build new pathways or connections between neurons. According to this view, any brain function that was lost through damage was irretrievable. Today, research into neuroplasticity has proven that this is not the case. In the late 1960s and 1970s pioneering scientists such as Paul Bach-y-Rita demonstrated that brains change their structure with different activities they perform (Kercel). When certain parts fail, other parts can sometimes take over. Subsequent research by many scientists has validated this once-controversial idea, leading to practical benefits such as the restoration of limb function in stroke victims, and improved cognition and perception in people with learning disabilities (Nowak et al.). Merzenich, for example, has demonstrated how a brain’s processing areas, called brain maps, change in response to what people do over the course of their lives. Different brain maps exist for different activities and functions, including sensory perception, motor skills and higher mental activities. Brain maps are governed by competition for mental resources and the principle of “use it or lose it.” If a person stops exercising particular mental skills, such as speaking Spanish or playing piano, then the brain map space for those skills is handed over to skills that they practise instead. Brain maps are also governed by a principle that is summarised by the expression, “neurons that fire together wire together” (Doidge 63). Neurons in brain maps develop stronger connections to each other when they are activated at the same moment in time. Consequently people are able to form new maps by developing new neural connections. Acquiring Tastes Doidge has illustrated the role that neuroplasticity plays in acquiring new tastes by explaining how habitual viewing of online pornography can shape sexual tastes (102). In the mid- to late-1990s, Doidge (a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst) treated several men who had lost interest in their sexual partners as a consequence of their addiction to online pornography. Doidge explains their change of sexual taste in terms of neuroplasticity, noting that “pornography, delivered by high-speed Internet connections, satisfies every one of the prerequisites for neuroplastic change” (102). The sexual excitement of viewing pornography releases a chemical neurotransmitter named dopamine that activates the brain’s pleasure centres. Since “neurons that fire together wire together”, the repeated viewing of pornography effectively wires the pornographic images into the pleasure centres of the brain with the focused attention required for neuroplastic change. In other words, habitual viewers of pornography develop new brain maps based on the photos and videos they see. And since the brain operates on a “use it or lose it” principle, they long to keep those new maps activated. Consequently, pornography has an addictive power. Like all addicts, the men who Doidge treated developed a tolerance to the photos and videos they observed and sought out progressively higher levels of stimulation for satisfaction. Doidge explains the result: The content of what they found exciting changed as the Web sites introduced themes and scripts that altered their brains without their awareness. Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them—the reason, I believe, they began to find their girlfriends less of a turn-on. (109) If the habitual viewing of online pornography can change sexual tastes, what other tastes can be changed through online activity? Art? Music? Literature? Cinema? Sport? Humour? One avenue for investigating this question is to consider existing research into the flow experiences of web users. The term flow refers to a deeply satisfying state of focused attention that was first identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Beyond Boredom) in his studies of optimal experiences. According to Csikszentmihalyi, people in flow “are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (Flow 4). Flow experiences are characterised by some common elements, which include a balance between the challenges of an activity and the skills required to meet those challenges; clear goals and feedback; concentration on the task at hand; a sense of control; a merging of action and awareness; a loss of self-consciousness; a distorted sense of time; and the autotelic experience. The term autotelic refers to an activity that is done, not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. Whenever people reflect on their flow experiences, they mention some, and often all, of these characteristics. Support for Csikszentmihalyi’s characterisation of flow can be found in studies of many diverse activities, such as playing computer games (Chen) and participating in sport (Jackson), to mention just two examples. The activities that people engage in to experience flow vary enormously, but they describe how it feels in almost identical terms. Pace has developed a grounded theory of the flow experiences of web users engaged in content-seeking activities including directed searching and exploratory browsing. The term grounded in this instance refers to the fact that the theory was developed using the Grounded Theory research method, and its explanations are grounded in the study’s data rather than deduced from research literature (Charmaz). A review of that theory reveals many similarities between the flow experiences of web users engaged in content-seeking activities and the experiences of habitual viewers of online pornography described by Doidge. The following sections will consider several of those similarities. Focused Attention Focused attention is essential for long-term neuroplastic change. Goleman notes that “when practice occurs while we are focusing elsewhere, the brain does not rewire the relevant circuitry for that particular routine” (164). In a series of brain mapping experiments with monkeys, Merzenich discovered that “lasting changes occurred only when his monkeys paid close attention” (Doidge 68). When the animals performed tasks without paying close attention, their brain maps changed, but the changes did not last. Focused attention also plays a central role in the flow experiences of web users. The higher-than-average challenges associated with flow activities require a complete focusing of attention on the task at hand, or as Csikszentmihalyi puts it, “a centering of attention on a limited stimulus field” (Beyond Boredom 40). An important by-product of this fact is that flow leaves no room in one’s consciousness for irrelevant thoughts, worries or distractions (Csikszentmihalyi, Flow 58). People who experience flow frequently report that, while it lasts, they are able to forget about the unpleasant aspects of life. Consider the following comment from a 42-year-old male’s recollection of experiencing flow while using the Web: “It’s a total concentration experience. You’re so interested in doing what it is you’re doing that nothing’s interrupting you.” In everyday life, one’s concentration is rarely so intense that all preoccupations disappear from consciousness, but that is precisely what happens in a flow experience. All of the troubling thoughts that normally occupy the mind are temporarily suspended while the pressing demands of the flow activity consume one’s attention. Let’s now consider a second similarity between the flow experiences of web users and the taste-changing experiences of habitual viewers of online pornography. Enjoyment The pleasure experienced by the pornography addicts treated by Doidge played an important role in the alteration of their brain maps and sexual tastes. Since “neurons that fire together wire together”, the repeated viewing of pornographic photos and videos wired those images into the pleasure centres of their brains with the focused attention required for neuroplastic change. Web users in flow also experience enjoyment, but possibly a different kind of enjoyment to the pleasure described by Doidge. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi make the following distinction between pleasure and enjoyment: Pleasure is the good feeling that comes from satisfying homeostatic needs such as hunger, sex, and bodily comfort. Enjoyment, on the other hand, refers to the good feelings people experience when they break through the limits of homeostasis—when they do something that stretches them beyond what they were—in an athletic event, an artistic performance, a good deed, a stimulating conversation. (12) The enjoyment experienced by people in flow is sometimes described as “the autotelic experience.” According to Csikszentmihalyi, an autotelic experience is “a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward” (Flow 67). Because autotelic experiences are so satisfying, they create a strong desire to repeat the activity that produced the experience. Consider the following comment from a web user about the reasons he enjoys online content-seeking activities that have led to flow: It’s like going to somewhere new. You’re always learning something. You’re always finding something. And you don’t know what it is you’re going to find. There’s so much out there that you’ll go there one day and then you’ll come back, and you’ll actually end up on a different path and finding something different. So it’s investigation of the unknown really. This comment, like many web users’ recollections of their flow experiences, points to a relationship between enjoyment and discovery. This connection is also evident in flow experiences that occur during other kinds of activities. For example, Csikszentmihalyi suggests that “the reason we enjoy a particular activity is not because such pleasure has been previously programmed in our nervous system, but because of something discovered as a result of interaction” (The Evolving Self 189). He illustrates this point with the example of a person who is at first indifferent to or bored by a particular activity, such as listening to classical music. When opportunities for action in the context of the activity become clearer, or when the individual’s skills improve, the activity may start to be interesting and finally gratifying. For example, if a person begins to understand the design underlying a symphony he or she might begin to enjoy the act of listening. This example hints at how discovery, enjoyment and other rewards of flow may engender change in a person’s taste. Let’s now consider a third similarity between the two areas of research. Compulsive Behaviour One consequence of flow experiences being so enjoyable is that they create a strong desire to repeat whatever helped to make them happen. If a person experiences flow while browsing online for new music, for example, he or she will probably want to repeat that activity to enjoy the experience again. Consider the following comment from a 28-year-old female web user who recalled experiencing flow intermittently over a period of three days: “I did go to bed—really late. And then as soon as I got up in the morning I was zoom—straight back on there […] I guess it’s a bit like a gambling addiction.” This study informant’s use of the term addiction highlights another similarity between the flow experiences of web users and habitual viewing of online pornography. Flow experiences can, in a very small percentage of cases, encourage compulsive behaviour and possibly addiction. A study by Khang, Kim and Kim found that “experiences of the flow state significantly influenced media addiction” across three media forms: the Internet, mobile phones and video games (2423). Examples of problems associated with excessive Internet use include sleep deprivation, poor eating and exercise habits, conflict with family members, and neglect of academic, interpersonal, financial and, occupational responsibilities (Douglas et al). Some heavy Internet users report feelings of moodiness and anxiety while they are offline, along with an intense desire to log in. Doidge states that “the addictiveness of Internet pornography is not a metaphor” (106), but many researchers are reluctant to apply the term addiction to heavy Internet use. Internet addiction first came to the attention of the research community in the mid-1990s when Young conceptualised it as an impulse-control disorder and proposed a set of diagnostic criteria based on the diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. However, after more than fifteen years of research on this subject, there is still no agreement on a definition or diagnostic criteria for Internet addiction. Some researchers argue that Internet addiction is not a true addiction and may be no more than a symptom of other existing disorders such as anxiety or depression (Weinstein and Lejoyeux). Regardless of this controversy, the potential for compulsive behaviour is another clear similarity between the flow experiences of web users and the neuroplastic change caused by habitual viewing of online pornography. One more similarity will be considered. Sidetracks In Pace’s study of the flow experiences of web users, informants reported engaging in two general types of content-seeking behaviour: (1) a directed searching mode in which one is motivated to find a particular piece of content such as the answer to a question or a specific music video; and (2) an exploratory browsing mode that is characterised by diffuse motives such as passing time or seeking stimulation. Directed searching and exploratory browsing are not dichotomous forms of navigation behaviour. On the contrary, they are closely interrelated. Web users move back and forth between the two modes, often many times within the same session. Just as web users can change from one navigation mode to another, they can also get sidetracked from one topic to another. For instance, it is reportedly quite common for a web user engaged in a content-seeking activity to decide to pursue a different goal because his or her curiosity is aroused by interesting content or links that are not directly relevant to the task at hand. Consider the following comment from a 21-year-old female web user whose desire to find contact details for a local Tai Chi group disappeared when a link to the Sportsgirl web site attracted her attention: I think I typed in “sports” […] I was actually looking for a place to do Tai Chi and that sort of thing. So I was looking for a sport. And it ended up coming up with the Sportsgirl web site. And I ended up looking at clothes all afternoon. So that was kind of cool. Sidetracks are a common feature of the flow experiences of web users. They are also a prominent feature of the description that Doidge provided of the pornography addicts’ neuroplastic change (109). The content of what the men found exciting changed as the web sites they viewed introduced “themes and scripts” or sidetracks that altered their brain maps. “Without being fully aware of what they were looking for, they scanned hundreds of images and scenarios until they hit upon an image or sexual script that touched some buried theme that really excited them”, Doidge notes (110). Conclusion Can a person’s tastes in art, music, literature, cinema, sport, humour or some other field be changed through online activity, just as sexual tastes can? This article alone cannot conclusively answer that question, but significant similarities between the flow experiences of web users and the neuroplastic change experienced by habitual viewers of online pornography suggest that flow theory could be a fruitful line of investigation. Can the flow experiences of web users lead to changes in taste, just as the neuroplastic change caused by habitual viewing of online pornography can lead to changes in sexual taste? What is the relationship between flow and neuroplastic change? Is the Internet the most appropriate environment for exploring these questions about taste, or do offline flow activities provide insights that have been neglected? These are some of the unanswered questions arising from this discussion that require further investigation. Advances in the field of neuroplasticity have been described as some of “the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century” (Doidge xv). These advances provide an opportunity to revisit related theories and to enhance our understanding of phenomena such as flow and taste. References Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2006. Chen, Jenova. “Flow in Games (and Everything Else).” Communications of the ACM 50.4 (2007): 31–34. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1975. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990. Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2010. Douglas, Alecia C., Juline E. Mills, Mamadou Niang, Svetlana Stepchenkova, Sookeun Byun, Celestino Ruffini, Seul Ki Lee, Jihad Loutfi, Jung-Kook Lee, Mikhail Atallah, and Marina Blanton. “Internet Addiction: Meta-Synthesis of Qualitative Research for the Decade 1996-2006.” Computers in Human Behavior 24 (2008): 3027–3044. Goleman, Daniel. Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Jackson, Susan. “Toward a Conceptual Understanding of the Flow Experience in Elite Athletes.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 67.1 (1996): 76–90. Khang, Hyoungkoo, Jung Kyu Kim, and Yeojin Kim. “Self-Traits and Motivations as Antecedents of Digital Media Flow and Addiction: The Internet, Mobile Phones, and Video Games.” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (2013): 2416–2424. Kercel, Stephen W. “Editorial: The Wide-Ranging Impact of the Work of Paul Bach-y-Rita.” Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 4.4 (2005): 403–406. Kolb, Bryan, Robbin Gibb, and Terry E. Robinson. “Brain Plasticity and Behavior.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 12.1 (2003): 1–5. Merzenich, Michael. Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life. San Francisco: Parnassus Publishing, 2013. Nowak, Dennis A., Kathrin Bösl, Jitka Podubeckà, and James R. Carey. “Noninvasive Brain Stimulation and Motor Recovery After Stroke.” Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience 28 (2010): 531–544. Pace, Steven. “A Grounded Theory of the Flow Experiences of Web Users.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 60.3 (2004): 327–363. Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist 55.1 (2000): 5–14. Weinstein, Aviv, and Michel Lejoyeux. “Internet Addiction or Excessive Internet Use.” The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 36 (2010): 277–283. Young, Kimberly S. Caught in the Net: How to Recognize the Signs of Internet Addiction—And a Winning Strategy for Recovery. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.