Affective Strategies, Emotion Schemas, and Empathic Endings: Selkie Girls and A Critical Odyssey

We are drawn to the aesthetic again and again because its impact is registered affectively and somatically, as well as via rational cognition.(Pence 2004, p. 273) The idea of an ‘odyssey’ derives, of course, from Homer’s famous epic narrative, but separates itself from its eponymous hero to become a script which pervades Western literature. By ‘script’ I refer to a metanarrative structure based on an expectation that in a particular context events will unfold in a coherent and predictable order, within expected parameters, and the observer will be involved either as a participant or an observer (see Stephens 2011, p. 14). Because readers recognise a script from only a few components of its constitutive causal chain, writers have considerable scope for varying the components. Thus an odyssey-script does not require a character named ‘Odysseus’, but will involve, in some form, a long journey with many delays, by-ways and wrong movements, but moves towards a particular goal. Yet, as Tennyson’s well-known poem reminds us, an arrival constitutes a site for another departure: It little profits that an idle king,By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel ...Ulysses, 1-6 As our procedures grow old and less productive, and texts seem less responsive to them, we inevitably seek livelier ways of doing things. I have spent the last 30 years or so as a discourse analyst, with a particular focus on how ideology pervades textual representations. During that time, however, I have been somewhat inattentive to the relationship of affect to ideology, perhaps because affect seems to be individually produced, whereas ideology is more a matter of social consensus or even, if we adhere to Althusser’s more extreme view, a social imposition. To put this another way, discourse analysis is less concerned with what readers do with texts than with the role of culture in the production of texts and the potential of texts to position readers. This difference need not result in an either/or choice, needless to say.