Abbott and Costello meet ... John Hawkes: The Goose on the Grave, affect, and Tomkins's script theory.(Bud Abbott and Lou Costello)(Silvan Tomkins)

"The sublime has always located itself between discrete orders of meaning. It is not a category in itself as a term that describes what cannot be categorized, and the writers it claims cannot be held to any one literary genre."

Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995)

"Cognition without affect is weak; affect without cognition is blind."

Silvan Tomkins, "The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the Study of Personality" (1981)

In each of the classic "vaudevillian horror" films produced by Universal in the 1940s and 50s starring the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, (1) there is a moment where the clown Costello finally confronts the monster who has been privately terrorizing him throughout the film but whose existence the strawman Abbott continually doubts. At that moment of confrontation, all that the terrified Costello can do is produce a minute-long monologue of comedic sputters, gasps, and unintelligible utterances in an attempt to spit out his partner's name in his signature cry for help: "AaaaaaaaaaBBoooooott." (2) Of course, by the time the dubious Abbott arrives, the monster has already fled. Though a parody of the individual's encounter with the gothic, Costello's utterance of terror captures faithfully the artist's confrontation with and subsequent expression of the sublime: that crisis of the unspoken or the unspeakable which becomes, in Wordsworth's famous phrase, "the burthen of the mystery" that the writer undergoes in an attempt to reconstruct for his unenlightened reader the original terror of that experience, which he will no doubt fail to do given the individualistic properties of terror. For this reason, true terror lies less in the cognitive representation transferred to the reader via the medium of language (written or visual)--which is instead fear, a premeditated terror, or horror, a terror diffused over time--and more in the emotive impetus behind that expression from the start. Or, as John Hawkes himself put it in his 1964 interview with John Enck, the purest expression of fiction is the attempt "to create a world, not represent it"; thus the "creation ought to be more significant than the representation" (qtd. in Ferrari 3).

This idea of privileging biological affect--the innate physiological response to internal and external stimuli--over psychological representation in interpreting scenes of daily life around us forms the basis of Silvan Tomkins's highly influential affect and script theories. (3) Inverting Freudian psychoanalysis and its privileging of cognition over emotion, Tomkins argued that "affective responses are the primary motives of human beings" (EA 217) which only become cognitive once the mind has processed a correlative for that feeling into an appropriate action (a smile, a shiver, or an increased heart rate). With all experience being filtered through an affect and only understood by the individual as either a positive or a negative feeling, (4) any conscious reflection on the effect of the stimulus on the individual or its resultant action--such as Costello's shocked expression and terrorized stuttering--unavoidably distances the response from its stimulus. In this sense, biological responses dictate psychological ones and not vice versa, with the added corollary suggesting that the study of purely psychological responses in an individual to a given stimulus necessarily denudes that stimulus of its original impact on the individual. In terms of triggering affect in literature, which is at best the cognitive stage of the individual's affect one step further removed (as it passes from the mind of the author to that of the reader), the best we could ever hope for is its artificial reproduction via an authentic stimulus. (5)

Tomkins believed, however, that language used "for the expression, clarification and deepening of feelings" in literature could at least help counter "the reduction in visibility of affects, effected by language which embeds, distorts or is irrelevant to the affects and which thereby impoverishes the affective life of man" (AIC, 1:219). Since Tomkins's personality theory is one based on the "scene and the relationships between scenes, as ordered by a set of rules [...] defined as scripts" (EA 313), examining the plots and scenes of literary texts and analyzing the plurideterminate scripts that govern their characters' personalities can reveal authentic patterns of human development, since an author plots and peoples his stories with characters that unavoidably reproduce and respond to human affects. As Tomkins writes,