To be, or not to be, :
Whether ’tis Nobler in the minde to suffer
The Slings and Arrowes of outragious Fortune,
Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleepe
No more; and by a sleepe, to say we end
The Heart-ake, and the thousand Naturall shockes
That Flesh is heyre too? ‘Tis a consummation
Deuoutly to be wish’d. To dye to sleepe,
To sleepe, perchance to Dreame; ,
For in that sleepe of death, what may come,
When we haue shufflel’d off this mortall coile,
Must giue vs ; the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would beare the Whips and Scornes of time,
The Oppressors wrong, the poore mans Contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d Loue, the Lawes delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurnes
That patient merit of the vnworthy takes,
When he himselfe might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would these Fardles beare
To grunt and sweat vnder a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The vndiscouered Countrey, from whose Borne
No Traueller returnes, Puzels the will,
And makes vs rather beare those illes we haue,
Then flye to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of vs all,
And thus the Natiue hew of Resolution
Is sicklied o’re, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprizes of great pith and moment,
With this regard their turne away,
And loose the name of Action. ,
The faire Ophelia? Nimph, in thy Orizons
Be all my sinnes remembred.

*

To be, or not to be, I ,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, ,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,
The vndiscouered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d.
But for this, ,
Whol’d beare the scornes and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wrong’d,
The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweate vnder this weary life,
When that he may his full Quietus make,
With a bare bodkin, who would this indure,
But for a hope of something after death?
Which , and doth confound the sence,
Which makes vs rather beare those euilles we haue,
Than flie to others that we know not of.
I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of vs all,
in thy orizons, be all my sinnes remembred. (Q1)

Michael Wood, ‘Distraction Theory: How To Read While Thinking of Something Else’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 48.4: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0048.410

I am grateful to Matt Blaiden for pointing out the relevance of this essay to my ‘mind-wandering’ theme, the subject of this post, and this one. Wood’s essay is the fore-runner of a book, The Habits of Distraction, which should come out soon. I have nearly mentioned his earlier book Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2005) a couple of times in earlier posts. It’s more subtle in its investigation of literary knowing than I have been so far.

Wood’s distraction essay argues that ‘only something like the concept of distraction will catch the contours of our experience in all kinds of reading’. He gives three situations where readers need to let themselves be distracted.

1. The puns in Finnegans Wake (baby-babble-Babel, and others) are seen as a ‘small-scale working model of the whole process of making multiple meaning’. We need to let them draw us away from the present occasion.
2. On genre, the idea is that the distracted reader or viewer is able to experience and engage with the effects of genre better than the deliberately attentive one. What looks like irony to the latter works as the fulfilment of genre’s possibilities to the former.
3. On style, the example is Blood Meridian. Distraction here leads to immersion; attentiveness (Wood argues) cannot stomach ‘more or less unreadable passages on every other page’, and thus misses out on the chance to experience the novel fully.

Wood asks: ‘Why isn’t distraction always and only trouble; at best a sidetrack, a diversion, a missing of the main event? A short answer might be that linguistic trouble is scarcely ever only trouble; there are energies, temptations, snatches of instruction there.’ This has something in common with the drift of my argument in relation to mind-wandering and cognition. It suggests that in many more ways literature exploits and validates our tendency to move away from the immediate perceptual situation. Wood worries that literary criticism undervalues this, and even works against it.
      However, I think Wood is also pointing at something that’s a bit different from my earlier emphasis. I have been following through the suggestion in the Trends in Cognitive Sciences article that mind-wandering has probably evolved for a reason – to draw the mind towards more important concerns or new solutions. Although Wood talks about ‘instruction’, I think he is prizing something a bit more subversive (‘energies, temptations’) about what we gain from distraction. I wouldn’t want to invoke evolution and thereby impose any fixed hierarchy of importance on the experience of reading. Perhaps sometimes the point of mind-wandering is to guide us towards something more pressing, but at other times it must allow us to question a set of priorities imposed upon us. It must help us to question what really matters.

A methodical man, John Shade usually copied out his daily quota of completed lines at midnight but even if he recopied them later, as I suspect he sometimes did, he marked his card or cards not with the date of his final adjustments, but with that of his Corrected Draft or first Fair Copy. I mean, he preserved the date of actual creation rather than that of second or third thoughts. There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings. (Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962), p. 13)

This is the third paragraph of the ‘Foreword’ to Pale Fire. Nabokov’s novel takes the form of a 999-line poem by one John Shade, and a long commentary written by the poet’s neighbour Charles Kinbote (this foreword is in his voice – it’s part of the fiction). Superficially it looks like a conventional poetry edition, with the text first and the notes afterwards. However, several complex stories emerge from that commentary, about the poet and his family, and especially about Kinbote.
      I have scruples about spoilers, and although Pale Fire is , I will only say that it is difficult to tell what is real and what is not, where delusions begin and end. It is obvious from the paragraph quoted above that this is no normal edition. For some reason it includes the results of subjective distraction, and thus it is making us think about mind-wandering (what kind of narrator does it; what it says about them), a topic I began to discuss in my previous post.
      Kinbote’s attention frequently shifts to his particular concerns, although for him this means he is attending to the important business at hand, rather than straying off the point. The novel is more the story he gradually unfolds than about anything else, however unreliable he may be.

The poem starts with some memorable lines and the vivid image of a beautiful bird killed by flying into a window:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (1-4)

The commentary on these opening lines eventually turns away from the business of explaining what it means, to the wider context in which the poem is supposedly working:

The poem was begun at the dead center of the year, a few minutes after midnight July 1, while I played chess with a young Iranian enrolled in our summer school; and I do not doubt that our poet would have understood his annotator’s temptation to synchronize a certain fateful fact, the departure from Zembla of the would-be regicide Gradus, with that date. Actually, Gradus left Onhava on the Copenhagen plane on July 5. (p. 74)

The annotator makes what seems like a gratuitous personal connection, by associating the poem with a mundane memory of playing chess. Then he coyly sets up a complicated suggestion about a link between the initiation of the poem and the start of a journey by a yet unmentioned character (which actually happened on a different day).
      Pale Fire offers, then, a narrator whose mind wanders, more and less purposefully, across time and space. The reader has to navigate alongside. This, however complex, seems to me a relatively routine (though often profound) aspect of a novel’s exploration of mind-wandering. Here I’d like to highlight something else about how this particular novel works.

*

How do we read the poem? Do we keep moving back and forth between text and notes, or do we read all the poem and then the notes? Once we realise that there is a story emerging in the commentary, the centre of gravity must shift decisively in that direction. This leaves a question over how we pay attention to lines like these:

“What is that funny creaking – do you hear?”
“It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear.”
“If you’re not sleeping, let’s turn on the light.
I hate that wind! Let’s play some chess.” “All right.”
“I’m sure it’s not the shutter. There – again.”
“It is a tendril fingering the pane.”
“What glided down the roof and made that thud?”
“It is old winter tumbling in the mud.”
“And now what shall I do? My knight is pinned.” (lines 653-61)

The fretful voices and the game of chess remind me of The Waste Land. But really, there is in these lines about nocturnal anxiety. So as I read them, I feel my attention being drawn away to the notes, where the questions I have are being answered. In fact there is no note on these lines.
      The Trends in Cognitive Sciences article that spurred the previous post suggested that wandering minds have probably evolved for a reason. Sometimes we are drawn away from the present by a necessary or productive thought. A novel like Pale Fire experiments with the definition of foreground and background, presenting us, perhaps, with an immediate perceptual environment (the text of the poem) that feels like it ought to be on our minds, but isn’t. The definition of what is actually the matter at hand has to change as the novel goes on. It would be very hard for a scientific experiment to capture this dynamic quality in our sense of what is foreground and what is background. Pale Fire exposes the strange human capacity to think outside the moment and discover that outside is where the moment really is.