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.

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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.

J.W. Schooler. J. Smallwood, K. Christoff, T.C. Handy, E.D. Reichle, M.A. Sayette, ‘Meta-Awareness, Perceptual Decoupling and the Wandering Mind’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (2011), 319-26.

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I found this a very interesting article, perhaps because I am easily distracted. Mind-wandering is defined as ‘engaging in cognitions unrelated to the current demands of the external environment’. Schooler et al. identify two key processes: ‘perceptual decoupling’ (the capacity to disengage attention from sensory information) and ‘meta-awareness’ (the capacity to take deliberate note of ongoing conscious activity). The findings are varied: mind-wandering interferes with the sensory task at hand (of course); awareness of engaging in mind-wandering is only intermittent (and the feeling of having been aware may be constructed in retrospect – we feel we must have known so we imagine that we did).
      Perhaps the most interesting thing for me is the suggestions about the functionality of mind-wandering. Yes, it interferes with concentration on the immediate environment. But the capacity to disengage, and the capacity to think about the contents of consciousness, may be uniquely human. Their product, mind-wandering, may be a by-product of evolved capacities, or it may have evolved functions in itself: for example (Schooler et al. suggest) it may help in the process of planning the future, in multitasking, in ‘’, and in creativity. There is, perhaps, a happy medium between the over-focused (narrow, limited) and the over-distractable (diffuse, never finishing things), but as far as we can tell it’s the latter which makes us different from the brute beasts.

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What might a poem know about mind-wandering? This is one of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s sonnets, which imagines love as a battle in which his mistress’s displeasure sends his passion fleeing:

      The long love that in my thought doth harbour,
      And in my heart doth keep his residence,
      Into my face presseth with bold pretence,
      And therein campeth, spreading his banner.
      She that me to love and suffer
      And wills that my trust and
      Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence
      With his hardiness taketh displeasure.
      Where with all unto the heart’s forest he fleeth
      Leaving with pain and cry,
      And there him hideth and not appeareth.
      What may I do when my master feareth?
      But in the field with him to live and die?
      For good is the life, ending faithfully.

It is not a straightforward matter saying what this is about. Of course it is about the lover’s plight, and finds a painful but humorous conclusion, that the courageous thing to do, in a hopeless fight, is to die bravely. Since this is a close imitation of a poem by the Italian poet Petrarch (as many of Wyatt’s love poems are), it is also about a relationship with earlier poetry. The yield of this aboutness is not so clear, but Wyatt is exploring the way in which a lover’s voices is composed out of other voices, and the way that the voice of English poetry may find itself within and around the achievements of other languages.

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However, it often feels, when reading poetry, that we’re doing well when we get beyond the first level of aboutness and see something else (‘subtext’ is often the word used) emerging. Wyatt’s image of the ‘heart’s forest’ is very arresting. It is not there in the Petrarch. It represents the inward recesses of the human as a tangled, place. The poem, I think, finds itself somewhere unexpectedly sharp-edged as a metaphor turns out to be very suggestive about what the mind and its emotions are like.
      Towards the end of the poem I think there is another shift of attention. This depends quite a bit on other poems by Wyatt, and on the ways in which critics have got used to thinking about Wyatt. He often manages to find resonance between the servitude of love and the servitude of the subject in Henry VIII’s court. The shift of gender towards the end gives us a male master (the heart, despite being fearful of the lover, still rules the speaker’s life), a battlefield metaphor that suddenly seems a bit more literal, and a loaded political word: ‘faithful[ly]’. The poem seems again to find itself doing something different from its primary ostensible business.

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Is this poem mind-wandering? On the one hand, it seems to lose focus on the presumed perceptual business, and it begins exploring topics where we might see creativity, planning, awareness of the dangers around (all positive reasons for mind-wandering in general). On the other hand, we might credit this as the poem’s main outcome, the benefit of its process, perhaps even its – not the result of a failure to keep on task. Furthermore, the mind that’s wandering is not simply the author’s mind, since as a reader I was aware of helping with the wandering; and although a poem might look like a representation of a thought-process, it is not a mind however much it likes to wander.
      Perhaps a better question would be: what does this poem think (or know) about mind-wandering? Between writer, text, and reader, I think, there is a pretty deep exchange about the benefit, hazard, inevitability, pattern, purpose (etc.) of the human tendency to deviate from the point. It seems likely that literature will celebrate the benefits of thinking outside the moment; it could not exist without that capacity and it may train that capacity.

Not long ago I declared a moratorium on posts about mental time-travel (a third post on the topic seemed like enough). Then I decided to go to hear and give a lecture at Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education, and a new post came to mind.
      There will be a video of the lecture here soon; at the time of writing, it’s just the abstract. They blog about their shared project here. You can find them doing a TED talk about wordless communication here.
      Their talk at the ICE centred on the imagination (or what they called the ‘imagination system’ as opposed to the ‘knowledge system’) and its role in memory and prediction. I was struck by their very broad idea of the imagination. Sometimes, as I understand it, scientists and philosophers talk about mental ‘imagery’ to denote inward pictures of pasts or futures or elsewheres or could-bes, to avoid friction with popular ideas of fancy and fiction; Clayton and Wilkins used the more loaded term to draw in a huge range of thinking outside the immediate context. I liked having my narrower but (I realise) problematically under-formed idea of imagination tested by the feeling that something particular and specific could be merged into a much larger category.

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… And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown …
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1)

This seems familiar: it is with the imagination that literature reaches things that have never been seen before, or never could be seen. ‘Unknown’, though, could be less adventurous. It might just mean ‘never actually witnessed’.
      A few years before A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed Edmund Spenser included a figure representing the imagination in The Faerie Queene. Phantastes can see ‘things to come’, and his chamber has ‘Infinite shapes of things dispersed ; / Some such as in the world were neuer , / can deuized be of mortall wit’.
      Again, this seems familiar: imagination is how we conjure up the impossible. But Spenser doesn’t actually tell us about these unseen things. Instead, there is detail about other shapes in Phantastes’ chamber, ‘daily seene, and knowen by their names…’, such as ‘hags, centaurs… lions, owles, fooles’. Owls? Well, I have seen a number of owls. And centaurs? I’ve never seen one of those, but a centaur is composed out of two .

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Perhaps Shakespeare and Spenser are hinting at the Clayton / Wilkins version of imagination, which stretches rather than breaks with the known. We look in vain for the truly impossible in Phantastes’ chamber. As I thought about the continuity between predicting possible futures and imagining impossible ones, I thought of chess (I often think of chess). Is a chessplayer’s ability to remember variations seen before, and to calculate variations that would follow from decisions made over the board, a kind of imagination?
      I want to say no: in chess the parameters are finite, all the necessary information is present. There are far, far too many possibilities to calculate – they are as good as infinite really – but projections of outcomes are bounded by possibles and probables. They can never truly be ‘unknown’.
      Incidentally, if you have any interest in chess there’s a nice relic on Youtube: a of classic BBC series The Master Game. I like the one that features Byrne and Korchnoi. Both players tell us their thinking in retrospect, but it feels authentic enough. It isn’t the most creative of games – no dazzling sacrifices – but even here it begins to feel OK to think of some of the processes as imaginative. Korchnoi believes, on the basis of memory and prediction, that he will be alright, but he cannot know this. Byrne, deep down, knows he won’t. Even so, to call these acts of imagination sits a bit uneasily.

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There are some developed taxonomies of imagination. Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft have simulation (i.e. the ability for mental activity to happen ‘off-line’, separately from the world) as the mechanism by which imagination is defined. They distinguish between creative imagination and recreative imagination. The former is what I am gesturing after here, and they set it aside pretty quickly after noting that Hume called it . They focus on the latter, which denotes the ability to see the world from a different perspective.
      These categories may be helpful in organising particulars about the subject, but they don’t get closer to pinning down the art-centric idea of imagination that I was worrying about in the Clayton / Wilkins talk. I am not even sure whether I prefer the artistic imagination to be a special case. I do think, though, that the resonant load the term carries from its artistic contexts across history shouldn’t be discarded too readily.

I think this is the last post I’ll write about mental time travel (after this one and this one). I’m coming back to the subject because I think my examples thus far have dealt with reminiscent imagining, but not enough with future planning. Scientific research into mental time travel is particularly focused on the evolutionary advantage that lies in the ability to put memory and foresight together. Some of the most ingenious experiments attempt to catch other animals in the act.

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Human plans in reality and in fiction seem a great deal more complicated than those observed in, say, . When humans work together, plans can overlap and cohere, but they can also diverge and interfere. William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying involves the reader in a family’s gruelling journey to bury a matriarch. Changing narrators give their own perspectives with varying degrees of lucidity.
      The plan to bury Addie Bundren in Jefferson overlaps with her husband Anse’s wish to get some new teeth. When the family arrives, however, they soon find themselves being introduced to a new mother figure:

‘It’s Cash and Jewel and Vardaman and Dewey Dell,’ pa says, kind of hangdog and proud too, with his teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. ‘Meet Mrs Bundren,’ he says. (Penguin Modern Classics edition, p. 208)

Was this Anse’s plan all along? Either to find himself a new wife as quickly as possible, or to make an assignation with someone he had lined up? His sons and daughter don’t know (or don’t say); perhaps the same is actually true of him. A distinction could be made between the publically acknowledged plan, the privately preferred plan, and the unconsciously operating plan. As I Lay Dying doesn’t give us characters who make this distinction apparent.

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Meanwhile, on the Bundrens’ wagon, other future-oriented scenarios are emerging. The passing of time on the journey is set against other time-critical considerations. Dewey Dell is pregnant but has a plan for a termination. The decomposing body in its coffin is attracting disapproval and carrion birds. Cash’s broken leg is failing to heal, and the narrative voice (Darl, in this case) expresses himself resonantly as they make an effort to relieve the pain:

‘If it’ll just help you,’ pa says. ‘I asks your forgiveness. I never foreseen it no more than you.’
‘It feels fine,’ Cash says.
If you just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time. (p. 166)

Darl eventually ravels out into an act of arson and is sent to an asylum. The family’s eventual solution is to seal Cash’s leg in cement, so it will not be jarred by the wagon’s bumpy journey. This is obviously a bad idea, and later an appalled doctor promises much pain and not much mobility. In this novel there are some truly terrible plans, some mundane ones, some mysterious ones, and they all have their distinctive timescales. We sense one grinding by as another stalls.

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As I Lay Dying is hardly unique among novels for featuring a group of characters journeying, or pursuing complex, partially shared goals in some other way. It is distinctive for opening up so many fictional consciousnesses and yet making their mental time travels so idiosyncratic and opaque. I think this complexity must be a quality of the mental time travel that is wound into the turbulent lives of humans. In our woven social existences it must be typical that plans are always being modified, abandoned, rediscovered, revealed and concealed (from ourselves as well as from others) because of their interactions with the plans of others. I don’t think there’s a more illuminating way of exploring the experience and consequences of that than in literature.