Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2016)

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Emily Troscianko
(Emily T. Troscianko works somewhere between the cognitive and medical humanities, writes a blog on eating disorders for Psychology Today, and coordinates postdoctoral training and support in the Humanities Division at Oxford.)

It’s hard doing cognitive things with literature without coming across as either defensive (yes, you really can use science without betraying the essence of the literary) or aggressive (why the hell aren’t you guys getting in on the act too? don’t you know how exciting it is?). Terence Cave’s new book is a modest masterclass in how to avoid both.
      I should declare, before I go any further, my obvious biases: I was part of Terence’s three-year Balzan Prize-funded project ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’ from 2010-2013, and I chaired the book launch event at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) last month (you can watch the podcast here). I’ve been looking forward to this book for years. Still, excitement and disappointment are often bedfellows, so as with many biases, this one cuts both ways. And had I been disappointed, I would simply have stayed quiet. [While we’re in full disclosure mode, I was also part of Terence’s project — Raphael.]
      But the book is excellent, and important. It is important, for everything that it expresses, and also because Terence, having built a career on other ways of studying literature, has in the last six years or so become convinced of the value of an explicitly cognitive approach. All those of us who move away from the traditional centres of disciplinary inquiry take different routes towards the borderlands. The prompts and consequences of Terence’s conviction are quite different from mine – I have a much more existential leaning towards empirical testability, for example. But anyone who wants to understand literature better can learn from Terence’s path.
      His interest is, far more squarely than mine, in the literary texts themselves – not the reading experience, not how minds work (though these bathe in the light he casts on the texts). Whether conceiving of literature as an instrument, a vehicle, an object, a product, a symptom, an archive, or a playground of thought (pp. 12, 14, 105), whether navigating nimbly through Yeats’s ‘The Balloon of the Mind’ or Winnie-the-Pooh, whether wading into the waters of cognitive representation or the sensorimotor constraints of ‘a soft grey cat-fog drifting in on foggy feet’ (pp. 101-102), words on pages stand at the centre.
      This decisiveness of focus doesn’t, as I say, shut out the workings of the readerly mind from illumination, and it certainly doesn’t proceed down the familiar dead end of trying to separate off literary language categorically from other language use (quite the contrary – as on pp. 71-72, 104), but it does mean that the science is shaped to the demands of the texts. This actually results in some nicely nonchalant examples of science-humanities give-and-take, most saliently in the discussion of cognitive affordances: Terence confidently adapts the psychologist James J. Gibson’s definition of affordance to encompass the object as well as what it affords (p. 48) – so Edward Lear’s old man’s beard is an affordance for birds’ nest-building, say (p. 6). Terence defends the philosophical ‘weakness’ of the concept as offering a bridge between the big picture of human evolution and the small brush strokes of textual construction.

At moments like this, I felt particularly strongly that one of Terence’s main aims for the book – to promote the role of literary studies in the cognitive conversation – was being brilliantly furthered, and again, quite without any of the clarion-calling to arms which many of us feel necessary: just by doing some cognitive inflecting of literary study, and some literary inflecting of the study of the mind, and seeing where both end up.
      This can, as Terence admits, result in an unsystematic form of borrowing that ‘risks becoming a kind of pirate raid in which one grabs some interesting-sounding ideas and carries them off for consumption on home territory’ (p. 17). Interestingly, the psychologist who spoke at the launch event, Ilona Roth, had no problem with the pirate model. Although she stressed the importance of testability, the other two principles she spoke of in relation to what the book does were selectivity and adaptation: both are OK, indeed good. And Ilona’s prime example of adaptation was what Terence does with affordances. The other scientific commentator, Deirdre Wilson, a linguist who co-developed the theory of communication known as Relevance Theory, took friendly issue with Terence’s relegation of relevance theory to the unenlightened pre-embodiment era (p. 28). Deirdre insisted on the breadth of ‘inference’, as the central process by which we create meaning from what we read or hear; it is, she said, any procedure to yield a warranted conclusion, and anyone who equates it narrowly with logic, reasoning, or similar has misunderstood the theory. But I think what they both agree on is that misunderstandings shade easily into differences of emphasis and application, and that all are differences from which we learn.
      The launch event’s third commentator, the writer of fiction and non-fiction Marina Warner, remarked first off that this volume, while compact, is not small in what it makes you think. Or in how it makes you think – with a whole new toolkit for grasping literature with both hands: for coming to realise what kinesic affordances are, and then experiencing them in your own reading, guided by Terence’s readings. If language, as Marina put it, can be like a prosthesis, enabling new or forgotten kinds of cognitively literal movement, Terence’s book lets us try on a whole range of delicately calibrated limbs: calling our attention to our automatic responses, slowing them down, making them remarkable again.
      So we’re invited to read the opening line of Conrad’s Lord Jim, in which Jim is described as reminiscent of a charging bull. ‘Well, think of a charging bull. When you register visually the animal’s posture and the direction of its charge, how soon do you make it hot-foot for the nearest bull-proof exit? Pretty soon. […] Reflective cognitive response emerges visibly in this sentence (and the novel) from an instinctive, unreflective mode of apprehension’ (p. 23). And, in a slightly different kinesic mode, there’s the moment-by-moment unpacking of an aristocrat’s elegant vaulting of a chair in de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves: ‘Nemours’s options for coming through to the dancing area without delay are extremely limited. The milling crowd is solidified, reified, as a compact mass: the seat affords the slender opportunity of a clear path. […] We know that she knows that Nemours is an alpha male. […] We understand that she’s turned on, as we would say, by Nemours’s trick with the chair’ (pp. 117-118).
      Terence says early on that because there are many good readers who aren’t academics, ‘academic critics have to argue that their explanatory frameworks, theories, and formal protocols, their poetics and their rhetorics, add value to the individual experience of reading’ (p. 21). When I first read this, I disagreed on both the necessity and the possibility: studying literature, or literary reading, is about better understanding literature or reading, not enjoying it more. But by the time I got to the end of this persuasive work of criticism, at least half of my disagreement was gone.

* Roel M. Willems and Arthur M. Jacobs, ‘Caring About Dostoyevsky: The Untapped Potential of Studying Literature’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 243-5.
* Roger E. Beaty, Mathias Benedek, Paul J. Silvia, and Daniel L. Schacter, ‘Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 87-95.

These two essays are both concerned, directly or indirectly, with literary matters, and they both worry about ‘ecological validity’. This is, more or less, the requirement that the conditions of an experiment should resemble those of the real-world situation behind explained. My sense is that cognitive scientists are often prepared to surrender a lot of ecological validity in order to achieve experimental clarity. It’s hard to see ecological validity in the belly of an MRI machine, but it may be a price worth paying, a lot of the time.
      Beaty et al. are interested in the relationship between creativity and cognitive control. They conclude that a hybrid approach must be necessary, since different aspects of creativity (‘idea generation’, ‘idea evaluation’) seem to require different levels of control. One of their outstanding questions turns to the issue at hand: ‘How can neuroscientists study creativity while maintaining ecological validity?’. It is indeed difficult to see how some key parts of the usual narratives of creativity (e.g. the idea that strikes like lightning) can be recreated in measurable conditions. On the other hand, the complexity of human thought shouldn’t be allowed to discourage attempts to understand it.

*

Willems and Jacobs think that reading fiction offers a ‘unique window onto… mental simulation, emotion, empathy, and immersion’. They acknowledge the difficulty of constructing experiments on reading, some of which are obvious enough. We read at home, at work, on buses, in bed, for pleasure, for relaxation, to improve ourselves, and so on; but not in laboratory conditions. More interestingly, they note the scruples of researchers in relation to texts: they ‘typically do not alter literary texts, in order not to make crucial changes to the carefully crafted original’, which ‘is in contrast to most cognitive neuroscience experiments in which the variable of interest is manipulated in the materials’.
      I find this very interesting, and I don’t think I’ve seen scientists considering it before. I mentioned one ingenious but problematic version of such alteration in this post. Experimenters created a variable by saying for some participants that a text was a fiction, and for others that it was a piece of journalism. More subtle means of producing variant texts (e.g. a Shakespearean tragedy without any comic moments, Macbeth without the porter) could be tested, to suggest what factors influence audience responses or enjoyment. Obviously they’re right to be wary of upsetting balances and tensions in complex artistic constructions (imagine a memory game played by removing one object at a time from Holbein’s Ambassadors). But perhaps it could be done thoughtfully.
      In the end Willems and Jacobs are quite optimistic, saying that ‘it is an understatement to conclude that the research so far has not done justice to the richness of literature’, but advocating more effort to understand ‘the story-liking nature of the human mind’, and ‘a much more intimate collaboration between cognitive scientists and scholars in the humanities’. Well I am all for that, even though I’m a bit twitchy about the emphasis, understandable though it is, on story: there is more to the literary than that.

*

The author Willems and Jacobs invoke as an instance of the kind of story humans like, and the phenomenon that should be understood, is Dostoyevsky. There’s no particular reason why, I don’t think, he’s just a well-known novelist who seems a long way from the everyday concerns of their scientific colleagues. But my mind was turned to Dostoyevsky recently when I re-read (for the nth time) a passage in Martin Amis’s 1995 novel The Information.
      I think this is a brilliant novel in general, but the passage where the unsuccessful hero visits his more successful friend on a plane is one of its high points. With misanthropic snobbery the narrative voice, and the character’s viewpoint, survey the passengers’ reading matter. Dostoyevsky features in a surprising way, listed disparagingly among the ‘incautiously canonized’. I’ve been meaning to share this passage with someone for a while, and suddenly it makes sense to do it here.

The stewardess escorted him down the length of Economy, and then another stewardess escorted him through Business World; he ducked under a curtain, and then another stewardess led him into First. As he made this journey, this journey within a journey, getting nearer to America, Richard looked to see what everyone was reading, and found that his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn’t that the businessmen and businesswomen were immersing themselves in incorrigibly minor or incautiously canonized figures like Thornton Wilder or Dostoyevsky, or with lightweight literary middlemen like A.L. Rowse or Lord David Cecil, or yet with teacup-storm philosophers, exploded revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State cosmologists or pallid poets over whom the finger of sentimentality continued to waver. They were reading trex: outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers: escape from the pressures facing the contemporary entrepreneur. And then he pitched up in the intellectual slum of First Class, among all its drugged tycoons, and the few books lying unregarded on softly swelling stomachs were jacketed with hunting scenes or ripe young couples in mid swirl or swoon. They all lay there flattened out in the digestive torpor of mid-afternoon, and nobody was reading anything — except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature scepticism, at a perfume catalogue. Jesus, what happened on the Concorde? Scouring the troposphere at the limit of life, and given a glimpse of the other side — a glimpse of what the rest of the universe almost exclusively consisted of (unpunctuated vacuum) — the Mach II morons would be sitting there, and staring into space. The space within. Not the space without. In the very nib of the aeroplane sat Gwyn Barry, who was reading his schedule. (pp. 288-9)

* Nai Ding and Hongjian He, ‘Rhythm of Silence’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 82-4.
* S.J. Kayser et al., ‘Irregular Speech Rate Dissociates Auditory Cortical Entrainment, Evoked Responses, and Frontal Alpha’, Journal of Neuroscience, 35 (2015), 14691-701.

Did I mention that I find turn-taking interesting, when it’s talked about by scientists and linguists, and when it’s practised by characters in plays? I definitely did here, and you’ll find further links in that post. So, yes, I am drawn to turn-taking. It is a Siren. Maybe it’s because I worry about it, quite frequently stopping myself and saying to students ‘were you about to say something?’. Maybe everyone worries about it.
      Anyway, Nai Ding and Hongjian He have added silence to the rhythmic mix in a short essay in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. They are particularly inspired by the experiments published in Kayser et al., in which altering silence intervals unsettled listeners’ ability to understand speech. Rhythm and ‘predictive processes’ seem to need some gaps to work properly. They’re really talking about gaps between and within words, rather than between statements (which would be more akin to the turn-taking I’ve written about before).
      There is more to know about these functional silences. Their durations are not random: it seems they are defined by the ‘biomechanical properties of the human articulators’ and the ‘neurodynamical properties of the human brain’. It’s not easy to disentangle the needs of the sound-maker and the sound-receiver. They have evolved together, after all. They also vary according to the ‘hierarchical prosodic structure of speech’. So we are used to smaller gaps after, say, syllables in the middle of routine words, than we are after significant syllables in key nouns in key rhetorical positions.
      There are, of course, many dramatic instances where the silence between speeches are manipulated. The dramatic pause is a characteristic of some writers (Pinter, Beckett) who find other ways of disrupting comfort and/or confidence in human speech-interactions.
      And there must be somewhere to go with these smaller silences: some writers (like James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, maybe) coin words, mingle syllables, thus varying from where we might think a word is supposed to end. What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers. Disrupted comprehension, which worried the scientists, is only the beginning of the pleasure and pain of Finnegans Wake, which simply isn’t going to yield to an alert reader on anything like first run through. But it might draw out some characteristics of our need for silence in word-rhythm.

Why this one? Well it’s the way that the steadily filling helmet cuts off the singer without cutting off the song. The word after the mouth stops: silence. One thing that’s special about this video is that Thom Yorke found it very difficult to hold his breath, and (I saw a superb Making Of film once) the successful take came after despairing failure. His smile of triumph and the surge of relief that comes when he gets it right, exciting even if you don’t know the background, were well earned.

And this one? Well, I thought I was the only person who played ‘No Surprises’ on the ukulele. And it has a very clever video that does something quite different with the immersion, with the outcome both lighter and darker.

* Derek Ryan, Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
* Paul Auster, Timbuktu (Faber, 1999)

Cambridge University Library isn’t much of a place for browsing. Its classification system means that books are shelved for size, then for subject, and then by order of acquisition (something like that, anyway). This means that the book you want is rarely next to other books you want. However, some classmarks can produce gold. I can’t actually remember the book I was looking for when I had a little fiesta in 730.4. Lots of cool titles. And Animal Theory was the one I left with.
      I picked it up because it has things to offer to an interest of mine: the literary representation of other kinds of consciousness. I’ve touched on it in this blog, in a series of posts about ‘Knowing Worlds’; here’s one, which discusses Virginia Woolf’s biography of a dog, Flush. Curiously enough this book, and the Flush post, speak to another blog-theme, which was, for a while, the language of smell: that sequence started here.
      Paul Auster’s novel Timbuktu is discussed by Ryan as an attempt to represent a dog’s world. Mr Bones, the dog in question, has canine senses, and his loving, eccentric owner becomes obsessed with the idea of creating a ‘Symphony of Smells’ for him. Auster doesn’t really get into the dog’s head here (he does this at other times, such as during the dog’s moving final moments) but the episode is nicely evocative of the interesting cognitive gap.

Thus began the lunatic winter of 1988. Mr Bones has never seen Willy so excited, so calm, so filled with steadfast energy. For three and a half months he worked on the project to the exclusion of everything else, scarcely bothering to smoke or drink anymore, sleeping only when absolutely compelled to, all but forgetting to write, read, or pick his nose. He drew up plans, made lists, experimented with smells, traced diagrams, built structures out of wood, canvas, cardboard, and plastic. There were so many calculations to be made, so many tests to be run, so many daunting questions to be answered. What was the ideal sequence of smells? How long should a symphony of smells last, and how many smells should it contain? What was the proper shape of the symphony hall? Should it be constructed as labyrinth, or was a progression of boxes within boxes better suited to a dog’s sensibility? Should the dog do the work alone, or should the dog’s owner be there to guide him from one stage of the performance to the next? Should each symphony revolve around a single subject – food, for example, or female scents – or should various elements be mixed together? (p. 41)
[… and then soon after …]
For the fact was that Mr Bones was a dog, and dogs enjoyed smelling whatever they were given to smell. It was in their nature; it was what they were born to do; it was, as Willy had correctly observed, their calling in life. For once, Mr Bones was glad that he had not been endowed with human speech. If he had, he would have been forced to tell Willy the truth, and that would have caused him much pain. For a dog, he would have said, for a dog, dear master, the fact is that the whole world is a symphony of smells. Every hour, every minute, every second of his waking life is at once a physical and a spiritual experience. There is no difference between the inner and the outer, nothing to separate the high from the low. It’s as if, as if… (p. 43-4)

There’s an interesting mixture of metaphor here: the world of smelled is framed as a soundscape (‘symphony’), and in spatial terms (‘labyrinth’, etc.). And it’s also interesting that the dog’s attempt to explain what the olfactory world is like fades away into parallel and ellipsis (‘as if…’). So we are back in the territory of those earlier posts, with fiction a form in which to see how language might reach after the elusive experience of smell. Perhaps it’s all the more effective because Auster doesn’t dwell ponderously on the moment. The manic enthusiasm of the owner, and the earnest devotion of the dog, propel us through the episode.

Neema Parvini, who teaches at the University of Surrey, edits a podcast about Shakespeare and contemporary theory, and in the most recent episode, he talks to me. You can link to it by clicking on the word ‘here’ here. I enjoyed the conversation, because Neema and I are both interested in the historicist scholarship that has been at the forefront of Shakespeare studies for the last thirty years, and we are both interested in how a cognitive approach may challenge and/or enrich the historicist paradigm. He has written books about both: Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (2012), and Shakespeare and Cognition Thinking Fast and Slow through Character (2015). As a result he may well be the more cogent speaker… I keep having flashbacks of myself telling my old war stories, delivering pious sermons, and so on, but I enjoyed it a lot.