* ‘Word of Mouth’ (BBC Radio 4), http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075pz7x
* Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York, 2014)

There was another choice episode of ‘Word of Mouth’ this week. The guest was Steven Pinker (Psychology, Harvard), author of several important books on language and thought, and also of The Better Angels of our Nature, for which I have a soft spot because (i) its argument that the human race is improving its behaviour, and (ii) its suggestion that improved empathy as a result of reading literature may have something to do with that, both suit my optimistic book-based outlook rather well.

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Some of the discussion focused on Pinker’s recent book The Sense of Style, which I hadn’t read. Well, I have now. I think it works well to approach a writing-style manual from the perspective of a psychologist. There’s an additional sense of purpose behind the technical advice, a set of reasons why the reader’s mind is best addressed in particular ways. I would have liked more detail on the science and its consequences for writing and reading, but the point is to set up a more general psychological framework in which clear and cogent writing can be explained. I will be recommending the book to lots of my students.

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Pinker seems to me to be very sure-footed when dealing with lots of detailed technical issues. He finds good — and different — reasons for holding the line here, giving a little there. There was, though, one section where I rebelled. Passages from Fredric Jameson and Judith Butler are held up as instances of obscurity and thus stylistic failure, clarity being the key principle. However, the many devotees of these authors relish the challenge of interacting with complex ideas, enjoying the encounter with non-straightforward things. In the kind of writing Jameson and Butler are doing, clarity isn’t the key principle exactly.
      I thought about chasing up Pinker’s counter-example, a paragon of clarity, Brian Greene’s writings about string theory and multiverses. The passages quoted are fine, but I fancied my chances of picking out something relatively opaque. String theory, after all, inasmuch as I understand it, doesn’t lend itself to subject-verb-object simplicity. However, I decided not to, as it seemed a rather uncharitable mission, and not the best way to make the point that I didn’t see much value in an unnecessary swipe at the difficulty of Theory.

The poet Michael Rosen and my colleague Laura Wright present the Radio 4 show ‘Word of Mouth’, which covers a range of topics relating to the English language. In a recent show they turned to the topic of turn-taking, which shrewd readers of this blog will know is quite a favourite of mine. In this show, which you can listen to via this page, they interview the psychologist Stephen Levinson, whose work I’ve featured here.
      It’s an interesting discussion, covering the way that a conversational ‘prediction system’ equips us to anticipate when our turns will come, and enables us to take them with amazing speed. We hear about cadence, grammar, politeness, primates, pair-bonding, ‘investment in the other’, a whole range of things. The topic works very well in this format, with experiments translating into anecdote neatly. There’s a good moment where Michael Rosen just asks ‘why?’.

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Laura Wright mentions that Stephen Levinson was in Cambridge for a ‘Language Sciences Symposium’ at the end of last year. I would have liked to have attended that, but it’s not that surprising that I didn’t hear about it. Literature people and language people don’t talk to one another often enough, in my university and in lots of others. Now of course I wouldn’t be making this sanctimonious point were I not, in a number of small ways, trying to cross this divide. On which, more, some time.
      By way of a parting gift: if you click here you’ll find Frank O’Hara reading a poem (‘The Trout Quintet’) that does some quite interesting things with turn-taking, or so I think anyway.

This post is really the second half of the last, so I thought I’d get it on here straight away rather than milking the moment of suspense. I am trying to identify literary versions of the ‘metastable’ states discussed there. What we’re looking for are moments where characters or narrative achieve ‘a state falling outside the natural equilibrium state of the system but persisting for an extended period of time’.

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When Romeo and Juliet first meet, something goes right. Within the larger context in which their love has to be understood as something that goes wrong, there is a moment of special, lucid harmony. Somehow or other, they write a spontaneous sonnet together:

ROMEO
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
JULIET
You kiss by the book.

They produce a sonnet, rhyming (as Shakespeare’s sonnets do) ABABCDCDEFEFGG, and it ends with a kiss. This could demonstrate the coercive effects of genre, as they are both manoeuvred into commitment by the shaping power of verse form. Perhaps more often it’s read as a sign of something which could seem delightful, the rightness of them being together. I would argue that this ‘rightness’ is a form of metastability. That for a powerfully extendable moment they demonstrate love-above-all, and this moment could be isolated (in a kind of suspension) from the subsequent unfolding of their tragic story.
      Another wonderful thing. Romeo emerges from the kiss ready to repeat the feat. He starts a new sonnet: ‘Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged’. Juliet seems ready to pick it up herself, following with another line. Romeo completes his own rhyme, then carries on, but Juliet takes over mid-line to match ‘took’. She mocks him for being conventional in the way he kisses (‘by the book’).
      The truncated second poem could be understood and performed in a number of ways. Over-eagerness might lead to a premature kiss, most likely by Romeo but perhaps by both. It might also be taken as the breaking of a spell. That suspended moment in which they made a sonnet and exchanged their first kiss can’t quite be repeated, and with a blush or a wink Juliet steps out of the mood. I suggest that one way or another the quality of time changes here, and the play reaches a positive metastability that briefly but tenaciously denies the tragic necessity of their story.

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It may be that some or all in the audience can’t see much stability, given that from the play’s Prologue onwards (at least; long before, really) we have known that this is a doomed love. In this case, the sonnet’s attempt to fix itself as a generic state that’s hard to leave is thwarted. It may, nevertheless, be thought of by analogy with the psychological categories at stake here: metastability may not be so easily reached in an Elizabethan tragedy as it is, Kringlebach et al. argue, in our brains. But this could tell us something about both.
      My second example from Romeo and Juliet is no more straightforward. I am interested in the way Mercutio’s ‘Queen Mab’ speech settles into its own mode (drawing out the idea of the mischievous dream-fairy at length, to the extent that Romeo interrupts his friend). On the one hand, this isn’t exactly a stable state: it’s mocking, it evokes a slightly nightmarish world, it’s not evoking some genre into which literature typically gravitates. If the audience is slow to leave it, it’s perhaps only because Mercutio distends it so effortfully.

MERCUTIO
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she–
ROMEO
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing.

So, yes, it is rather long. I love the bit in Shakespeare in Love where Ben Affleck, playing the part of top actor Ned Alleyn, praises the speech but wonders where the rest of his part has gone. It is an anomaly, and a diversion. Perhaps an audience sees something like a way out: if we continue in this fantastical mode we won’t need to watch the lovers die. However, it comes too early in the play for that retardant effect to be all that welcome.
      (For something like that, what about the ‘Willow’ scene in Othello? Precariously but tenderly Desdemona and Emilia set up something like a stable moment, with the danger of male intrusion just about distanced. I also wonder about the scene in Romeo and Juliet where Romeo berates the apothecary: it goes on a bit too long and a bit too vehemently, but maybe it sets up an alternative pattern for Romeo, peevishly attacking tradespeople but not reverting to the pathway to disaster.)
      The ‘Queen Mab’ speech is not, as I say, stable, but it is an extended turn to a different tone that’s at odds with the overall systematic shape of Romeo and Juliet. There’s something in this idea of metastability, I think, and it’s something that might be operating instructively, insightfully, in literature. There must be other, better examples out there.

Morten L. Kringelbach, Anthony R. McIntosh, Petra Ritter, Viktor K. Jirsa, and Gustavo Deco, ‘The Rediscovery of Slowness: Exploring the Timing of Cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 615-28.

I am not going to make another quip about my promise to pursue the topic of impulsivity when actually I am writing about something very different.
      Kringlebach et al. pursue the thought that, since the brain does not appear to be optimally quick in the way it performs some tasks, it’s a reasonable evolutionary assumption that it might be optimally slow instead. Healthy brains, they argue, might need to take their time. OK, so perhaps I am writing about impulsivity, but from another oblique angle.
      They draw on findings in ‘advanced whole-brain computational modeling’ to back up anecdotal and literary suggestions that slowness is special. In my post on Milton’s poem ‘Il Penseroso’ (here) you can find one of the examples I would put forward. The neuroscientific contribution comes from an interest in timing rather than ‘static spatial correlation’. (For those new to this, I set up the basic fMRI / MEG distinction here.)
      The concept of ‘metastability’ is crucial to the whole argument, and I have been finding it a very interesting concept to think with, identify, and corroborate in literature. Metastability means: ‘a state falling outside the natural equilibrium state of the system but persisting for an extended period of time’. Apparently ‘the healthy human brain is maximally metastable, which leads to a natural slowness of task-related cognition’. I think this means that our thinking has a tendency to settle into fixed states which don’t feed back efficiently into the needs of the whole cognitive system.
      One facet of this is a ‘critical slowing down’ at the point of transition or bifurcation between brain states, in both rats and humans. I think what’s meant here is that we are good at achieving this ‘metastability’ in one mode of thought, and good at retaining it (i.e., bad at relinquishing it) when a transition is offered or called for.
      One aspiration is to reclaim slowness and move from there into a fuller understanding of mental health. I suppose that an implicit presumption that cognition should be centralised and tuned for maximum speed might affect the way we understand many mental illnesses. Another is to offer more understanding of ‘how slowness can help us deal with what may feel like an ever-accelerating pace of life’. And indeed… ‘by learning to optimally balance fast and slow processes in the maximally metastable brain, we may be able to extend the “now” into the “long now”’. So it ends up with something that sounds like Mindfulness (they call it ‘a Zen-like perspective’).
      Back to metastability. In the next post I am going to discuss a couple of passages in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that, I think, create a literary version of ‘metastability’ (or something like it). The idea will be that there are indeed moments where a certain tone or genre establishes itself and proves hard to shift. Conceivably such moments – a compelling speech, a touch of comedy, a philosophical digression, a vivid description – give us an experience of the sort of slowed transition described by Kringlebach et al. It’s not just digression, then, it’s a mirror of the way our minds may work, capable of settling into marginal states.

Daniel T. Gilbert, Gary King, Stephen Pettigrew, Timothy D. Wilson, Comment on ‘Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science’, Science, 351, Issue 6277, 4th March 2016, DOI: 10.1126/science.aad7243.

Another quick post, prompted by seeing a link to a New York Times article, which led to this piece in Science. It’s the latest turn in what has been called the ‘Replication Crisis’ in Psychology. Over the last few years there have been concerted attempts to repeat some prominent experiments. In principle it should be possible to replicate these and achieve comparable results, but in a striking number of cases the experimenters have found themselves unable to do so. Hence the crisis and the media attention: such failures threatened the integrity of the science and perhaps the scientists involved. But this piece seems important: it suggests that in various ways the rigour of the attempted replications may have been less secure than that of the initial experiments, and that some debatable choices about statistics were made. There will be more twists and turns in this story. On the one hand, replication is very difficult, it’s not often rewarding work, and it needs to be defended; on the other hand, it’s got to be done right, and on the whole I’m relieved that the discipline may not be as undermined as it looked for a while.