Syntax and pathways PHILIP DAVIS School of English, University of Liverpool
A series of thought-experiments bring together literary criticism and neuroscience to explore the possibility that the shapes of mentality formed by literary language, in particular syntax, lock into, shift and modify established pathways of the brain. The two ordinarily strange bedfellows thus complement each other: literature offers the best model of relatively unprogrammed human thinking, that is to say, human thinking not tied to preconceived conceptual agendas; brain science in turn offers a means by which the inner reality of imaginative language may perhaps be persuasively visualised. Highly challenging though carefully chosen problems from the real world of literary studies provide good hope of determining whether neuroscience is worth the humanist’s candle – and whether that candle can illumine the neuroscientist’s research.
I begin with a snapshot of what it might be like for a writer to be intensely and personally involved in brain science – from a poem called ‘The Pedigree’ by Thomas Hardy.1 I use it to introduce another snapshot, blurred because in motion, of what it is like for a literary scholar to bring an intense and personal involvement in the critical reading of poetry into collaborative engagement with brain science. In A Vision of the Brain (1993), Semir Zeki writes that, The study of the brain is still in its infancy and many exciting ideas about it remain to be generated and to be tested. I hope that no one will be deterred from asking new questions and suggesting new experiments simply because they are not specialists in brain studies. Leaving it to the specialist is about the greatest disservice one can render to brain science in its present state. . . . Perhaps what is needed most in brain studies is the courage to ask questions that may even seem trivial and may therefore inhibit their being asked. . . . You may find that you are making a fool of the specialist, not because he does not have an answer to your question, but because he may not have even realised that there is a question to answer. (ix)
In answer to Zeki’s generous call from the other side of a gap yet to be bridged, I offer what is in part an open letter, in part a manifesto, in part the beginning of a critical path. * Hardy’s ‘The Pedigree’ takes its origins from one dark night in 1916 as the writer stared by moonlight at the Hardy family tree on his desk. Suddenly before his eyes he finds its branches seem to transform themselves into a neurological mirror of what is going on behind his forehead: And then did I divine That every heave and coil and move I made DOI 10.1179/174327908X392843 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4 265 © 2008 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute
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The almost simultaneous double perspective – what he could see, scientifically, as from outside himself while still feeling it personally within – both baffled and disturbed Hardy. He was afraid that all the time he ignorantly enjoyed the illusion of personal spontaneity, he was a product of genetic determinism: Said I then, sunk in tone, ‘I am the merest mimicker and counterfeit! – Though thinking, I am I And what I do I do myself alone.’
It was as though for Hardy there was no breach between science and the humanities – or if there was, it belonged to some much deeper breach in human nature itself between subjectively felt experience and the biological code pre-dating and underpinning it. And still Hardy would make pained poetry out of that apparently unreconcilable rift, even through that terrible word ‘though’: ‘though thinking I am I’. Desperately shaken by his own powerful feelings, Hardy would draw diagrams of his mind, to try to get some sort of objective hold on himself – even at the risk of reluctantly becoming less ‘human’ and more ‘scientific’, if human indeed meant helpless. Sometimes those diagrams were poems – poems which themselves served as brains or brain-scans on the page in front of him, their very structures topologically recreating ‘every heave and coil and move I made/Within my brain’. For all his fear, Hardy wanted to be able to put his finger – almost literally – on what troubled him. Indeed, he would have loved to have believed what T. H. Huxley argued in his Romanes Lectures of 1893, Evolution and Ethics. For there Huxley identified one specific human capacity that would be an escape from determinism, by serving as a kind of loop-back or re-entry system. The mental capacity of human beings to recognise their own mechanisms, said Huxley, could also serve to modify those mechanisms – like the work of a governor in a steam engine. Designed by James Watt, the governor consisted of two arms, hinged on a central pivot and rotated by the action of the steam engine, with a heavy ball at the end of each arm. As the speed increased, centrifugal force moved the balls and the arms outwards, narrowing the aperture of a valve controlling the flow of steam to the engine. As the power was slowly cut off, the speed of the engine reduced and the balls subsided nearer to the central column, thereby slightly opening the valve again in a permanent process of adjustment. The governor was thus a part of the machine which nonetheless could make the machine’s power work against itself: the faster it went, the more its effect upon the governor paradoxically served to make it then go slower. Perhaps consciousness could be our brain’s governor. But even if it could not, Hardy still wanted (as well as feared) to know what was happening inside him, to fix and localise it amidst his confusion. The classic humanist objection to neuroscience is, of course, that the localisation of functions is inherently reductive. Thus in his recent quarrel with the novelist A. S. Byatt in the Times Literary Supplement (11 April 2008), Raymond Tallis, gerontologist and philosopher, complained of the presumption of neuro-imaging in claiming to ‘explain’ human emotions such as love. ‘Love’ is tested on the basis of what parts of the brain INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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light up when the subject is shown a picture of the face of a loved one, as compared to the face of one who is not loved. He quotes major neuro-scientists on the neural basis for love thereby being ‘restricted to foci in the medial insula and the anterior cingulated cortex and, subcortically, in the caudate nucleus and the putamen, all bilaterally’. To which Tallis retorts: ‘But love is not like a response to a stimulus. It is not even a single enduring state, like being cold. It encompasses many things, including: not feeling in love at that moment; longing, indifference, delight; wanting to be kind, wanting to impress; worrying. . .’ To Tallis the desire for objectivity and localisation only leads to a non-human travesty of understanding. Wouldn’t Hardy himself now see that he was misled by the gathering claims of nineteenth-century science and what came of them? But, as I shall explain, it is not static, taxonomic names that should interest the literary thinker but rather dramatic and dynamic places – not ‘love’ but the mobile shifting of the relationship in place. I began my own inquiries into the uses of neuro-imaging for literature with another illustration: an image of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the old man holding his head in his hands: O Lear, Lear, Lear! Beat at this gate that let thy folly in And thy dear judgment out. (Folio 1.4, 225–7)
The gate he strikes at here is his own hard forehead, permeable even so to the terrible ins and outs of thought. He is trying, already too late, to get a grip on himself, where – as seemingly it has to be for humans – the physical reality stands in lieu of the mental, when the mental reality is otherwise all too elusive and intangible even to ourselves who speak out of it: ‘O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’ (1.5, 37). It is not the thematic name ‘Madness’ that does anything here, but rather the drama of the repeated ‘not mad’, the paradoxical state of a mind in fear of its very self. Even more specific is the reproach which the horrified Albany casts upon his wife, Lear’s cruel daughter Goneril. ‘What have you done?’ he cries, ‘Tigers not daughters, what have you performed?’ Then at the head of his next sentence, he points to ‘A father, and a gracious aged man’: him, he says, now trying to find a language for that word ‘what’, ‘him have you madded’ (quarto 4.2 40–44, my italics). It is that accelerating coinage ‘madded’ – not the slowly spelt out ‘made mad’ but the adjective energised at once into the verb – that set my research going. It is like what Coriolanus says in relation to an old father-figure whom he must let down: Menenius, he says, ‘Lov’d me above the measure of a father,/Nay godded me indeed’ (Coriolanus 5.3, 10–11). Or, similarly, Antony speaks of the deserters from his army as those who had once ‘spaniell’d me at heels’ and not simply, in slow-motion paraphrase, those who had followed me ‘like spaniels’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.13, 21). Adjective into verb (‘madded’), noun into verb (‘godded’, ‘spaniell’d’) – these are what modern-day linguists call functional shift or word-class conversion. It is also what the Elizabethan critic George Puttenham called ‘enallage or the figure of exchange’ when the poets did not change one word for another but with powerful economy ‘kept the word and changed the shape of him only’ (Puttenham 2007/1589: 3, 15). These functional shifts, I guessed, produced a sudden electrical charge in the brain by not simply going along with an explanatory language but short-circuiting it, getting closer to the very roots of sudden mental-verbal formulation. In that sense the word in functional shift makes life simpler, is more direct and primal in meaning-making. The INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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great Victorian schoolmaster E. A. Abbott explained the economy of Elizabethan English, a language in rich molten transition, thus in the Introduction to his Shakespearian Grammar (1870): In the first place, almost any part of speech can be used as any other part of speech. An adverb can be used as a verb, ‘They askance their eyes’ (‘Rape of Lucrece’); as a noun, ‘the backward and abysm of time’ (The Tempest); or as an adjective, ‘a seldom pleasure’ (Sonnet 52). Any noun, adjective, or neuter verb can be used as an active verb. You can ‘happy’ your friend, ‘malice’ or ‘foot’ your enemy, or ‘fall’ an axe on his head.
It was not the words themselves that were the problem for comprehension, said Abbott, for the most difficult ones could be looked up easily in a glossary. What was challenging about reading Shakespeare were the differences of idiom and syntax. The sense of ellipsis – the omission or contraction of words – simply did not trouble Elizabethan authors, argued Abbott, provided the deficiency could be deduced from the context: ‘Hence it was common to place words in the order in which they came uppermost in the mind without much regard to syntax.’ Mind before grammar is the priority, creation before communication. But actually this happens not so much without regard for syntax, as Abbot suggests, but through the responsive adaptation of grammar, in the second place, to those spaces that the excited mind, in the first, leaves for it. Thus, by a rapid reassembling, the grammar fits itself around the sense that was immediately sought for. The dynamic comes out of this rapid tension in space which dissolves all too easily if Albany had simply said to his wife: ‘You have made mad a father and a gracious aged man.’ He goes to ‘a father’ first, primally, and then to what, incredibly, you have done to him or made of him thereafter: ‘madded’. I have to say I am tired of the language of mere paraphrase; its sheer secondariness bores the brain. There is too much of it in current literary criticism – the names, the themes, the pigeonholes of interpretation created by pre-established (usually political) programmes. And, worse, there is too much of it in the over-generalised discourse of our society – the language of reductive common sense, the pre-formed opinions and uncreative slogans, the unthinking buzz-word and the all-too-predictable agenda. It is not deep primary stuff when all too often we know the established pathways in advance, the way the thinking must be going again. But in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817) Hazlitt said that Shakespeare was not like other writers who merely give us ‘versions or paraphrases’ of nature; for Shakespeare gives us instead what he calls nature’s ‘original text’. Functional shift, I believe, is one small part of that original text. By that, I mean it is an instinctively-won rhetorical instrument that keys into and works upon the underlying laws and structures of mental creation. So I took functional shift, this tiny powerful and fast tool of Shakespeare, to the brain scientists for experimentation, because it was localisable in this sense at least: you could point to it in a sentence, you could target it in an experiment. Such localisation has no necessary relation to reductivism, only to specificity. It offers a place where the mind may get some hold on itself and its own processes. I assumed and still believe that mind is brain, but with consciousness. With the help of Neil Roberts in Liverpool and Guillaume Thierry at Bangor, experiments began with EEG (electroencephalography) and are continuing with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). So far, as we have shown in NeuroImage, INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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functional shift can be seen to have the function of stretching the human mind towards new connections, making the language itself more alive to us, at a level of neural excitement never fully exorcised by subsequent conceptualisation (Davis, Thierry, Roberts and Gonzalez-Diaz 2008). What is this word, says the brain instinctively of madded or godded: noun or verb, verb or adjective? A powerful P600 surge (a parietal modulation peaking approximately 600 milliseconds after the onset of the word that upsets syntactic integrity) is registered on the EEG graph, but crucially with no N400 effect (the negative wave modulation that occurs 400 milliseconds after the onset of the critical word if and only if it disrupts the meaning of the sentence). This means that while the brain can still recognise fundamental sense amidst the electric surprise of ‘madded’ or ‘godded’ or ‘spaniell’d’, there is triggered a syntactic re-evaluation process. It is as though Shakespeare, playing with the reciprocal relation between semantics and syntax in the generation of meaning, were a pianist able with one hand to keep the background melody going, the underlying sense, whilst simultaneously the other pushes towards ever more complex variations and syncopations. Functional shift, we suspect, is likely to raise attention in a brain primed thereby to look for further difficulty and to work at a higher revitalised level of emergent consciousness. Further experiments will try to show the effect of the increased attention on the words that follow the word of functional shift. But this is what is vitally at stake: to try to see how consciousness is called into being when simple automaticity is baulked. Where so many experiments in brain-imaging concern negative mistakes made by damaged brains, literary experiments have this advantage: that they deal with the (so to speak) positive errors encouraged by, say, functional shift, which are created for the sake of mental health, in the broadest sense. For these excited hesitations have the electricity to open up newly possible networks of understanding out of the old repertoire of adjective-noun-verb travelling all too easily left to right. If some neuroscientists are right, there is one small area of the brain that normally processes nouns and a different sector that processes verbs. Suppose that nouns and verbs are indeed separately localised, what happens when the brain is confronted with a functional shift that it cannot immediately pigeon-hole as noun or verb? The revitalising word is then powerfully and demandingly free, looking to create some third area out of the baffled interaction of the two. The shift in language creates a shift in the brain: plausibly, the two morphing into an analogous shape behind the eyes and in front of them. A shift in the poem may create a shift in a brain which is absorbed in the poem’s structures, and in the to-and-fro between page and mentality for a writer, that shift in the brain may trigger further modifications in the text. That poems are our brains makes literature much more than a matter of style. That is why we want to know through fMRI where the action of the brain is located (MEG (magnetoencephalography) tests initially seem to suggest frontal cortex on left anterior), and the shapes it creates in the network of connectivity. For this is the crucial possibility concerning localisation: if the brain, caught between the basic neural substrates of noun and of verb, is pressed into doing something new or different, then paradoxically it will be forced to react to the pressures of localisation by creating a niche made free of them. Pressures can create the necessity for freedom or may be transformed into creativity itself. This would be the mental version of Watt’s governor. That is why it is so apt if the word of functional shift hardly INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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changes in itself, whilst changing everything else around it: it is a matter of plasticity. In such ways then, the improvising brain will be undetermined by those localised laws it nonetheless still works from. That paradox, if true, if demonstrable, could offer a central key to our mental progress. The ultimate ambition of our ongoing project, entitled ‘The Shakespeared Brain’, is to show that Shakespeare’s use of language gets so far into our brains that it shifts and new-creates pathways. This is not unlike the establishment of new biological networks using novel combinations of existing elements: genes and proteins in biology; units of phonology, semantics, syntax and morphology in language. But the bottom line is no more and no less than this: anyone interested in these dynamic linguistic effects would want to know what is going on in the brain as a result of them – out of sheer blind interest – and would believe that some day it would be possible to know more. * Yet even supposing that our results are as revealing as I hope (and in these still early days of neuro-science I am constantly warned that they may not be), why do we need these experiments, if literature can already do such things anyway? Here is one reason. These experiments, however rudimentary, excite much general interest. I do not think that this is just because brain science is fashionable – a falsely reassuring hoax, like phrenology in the Victorian age, as Raymond Tallis seems to suspect. Deeper than that, I think it is because it answers to people’s need to have some physical trace, if not proof, of their mental working. That in itself is not only to do with the exciting desire to see as from outside what hiddenly we do within – enticing though that is. It is also to do with many people not quite believing that they do indeed have an inner reality, that their mind is available to them for the difficult work of modification of their own structures of being. This is not just a concern of my own subject, the study of literature – though it would be a very powerful thing if both inside and outside universities people believed more in the sheer importance of the exploratory act of reading as we go along the lines, rather than a predetermined pigeon-holing. But it is an even wider issue than that: for if people can get even a glimpse of what they do, invisibly behind their foreheads, it could give them more confidence to do it more and do it better; it could convince them that there is a demonstrable reality at work beneath subjective intuitions. In encouragement of mental complexity, brain-imaging could help make people appreciative of the capacity to be more creatively daring in their ways of thinking, without resorting to the well-trodden mental pathways. I know that when we have recorded students reading aloud and then showed them the results of their verbal stresses and durations on a graph, they are struck by the implicit thinking which has been going on within what they do performatively and instinctively. Suppose, one future day, an equivalent screen could be set up in this way for thinking: this is what you do when you are thinking routinely; but this is what is happening when you are struggling to think. Why is it, I ask myself, that I have better conversations with brain scientists than with colleagues from literature or philosophy? It is because talking with the neuro-scientists is like discovering a new language for, and a new belief in, the human mind. And this new language is not just a more fashionable mode of description: potentially, it may be a way of itself releasing a new realisation of our abilities and powers. INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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* This creates another major reason for continuing with these experiments. It is to do with the slogan ‘Not names, but places’. To try to show more specifically what I mean, let me take advantage of the very preliminary and speculative nature of our research by bringing to the reader of ISR the sort of rough hypothesis and example I take to my brain scientists, to ask them if it can somehow make for an experiment. Recently I put before them a single passage from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). It comes some time after David has first introduced his old schoolfriend and school-hero, James Steerforth, into his surrogate family, the Peggotty household. What he didn’t know, but now finds out, is that Steerforth has seduced the youngest member of that trusting family, the beautiful naïve young girl, Little Em’ly – and now he has eloped with her. The disclosure marks the end of a chapter, chapter 31 in the novel, but what is extraordinary is that the following passage is the very beginning of the next chapter. That is to say, it is not, of course, really a beginning in the conventional formality of experience, nor is it simply material for story: it is more innerly the psychological after-shock, in the experience of catching up with reality, and learning to live with the hangover of trauma. Hence the need for a mental shape different from typeexpectations. Here then is the still youthful David left trying to take in what the betrayal and the disappearance of his friend has left him with: What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and so I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of my devotion to him. Deeply as I felt my own unconscious part in his pollution of an honest home, I believed that if I had been brought face to face with him, I could not have uttered one reproach. I should have loved him so well still – though he fascinated me no longer – I should have held in so much tenderness the memory of my affection for him, that I think I should have been as weak as a spirit-wounded child, in all but the entertainment of a thought that we could ever be re-united. That thought I never had. I felt, as he had felt, that all was at an end between us. What his remembrances of me were, I have never known – they were light enough, perhaps, and easily dismissed – but mine of him were as the remembrances of a cherished friend, who was dead. (Chapter 32)
In the face of a severely disorienting experience which does not fit with the assumptions of the past, this is in David’s world an important new transitional place, a site lodged in internal space and time, wherein the protagonist does not know quite what to think and yet knows it is psychically important to find out. It is what Dickens always sought (‘more . . . ‘more’ . . . ‘more’): an unexpectedly dense, messy sort of emotionally saturated solution, full of life’s stuff in search of clarifying emergence. I say to the neuro-scientists: Can we wire up, or scan, the brains of readers in the following part of the passage in particular, and ask them to hit an excitement-button when they felt some sudden change in the ostensibly uniform process of the sentences: I should have loved him so well still – though he fascinated me no longer – I should have held in so much tenderness the memory of my affection for him, that I think I should have been as weak as a spirit-wounded child, in all but the entertainment of a thought that we could ever be re-united. That thought I never had. INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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There is much to say here – the shift from ‘loved’ to ‘fascinated’, as from ‘still’ to ‘no longer’; the very feeling which the word ‘though’ bears, even though it is not the name for an emotion; the syntactic pathway opened up by ‘so well’ followed by ‘so much’ until we get to ‘that’. And I would love a software programme that enabled students to track and light up those key phrases on a large screen as if watching a brain making its way. But I am just going to point to one thing: namely, the sudden local modification created by weak as a child ‘in all but the entertainment of a thought that. . .’ That is where you might begin to think about hitting the change-button. Mere ‘entertainment’ of being re-united would be a regressive denial of what Freud was to call the reality principle; but finally David Copperfield cannot hold off the more serious realisation which emerges through the syntax – that Steerforth is now as though dead to him and this is now like an experience of mourning. But crucially because the realisation ‘in all but’ comes too late in the sentence to change the shape of what preceded it, there has to be another sentence, a sentence of the reality principle itself. ‘That thought I never had’ is where I would expect subjects to press the button. At such a moment this is thought in its happening, an inner event with deep structures. For literary thinking is important not for literature’s sake but because it is the most unprogrammed form of human thought. It is also the best model brain science has to work from, if it is to capture the spontaneous living complexity of the human brain, and not merely limit itself to subjects spotting the colour red. In experiment, we could change and simplify the syntax, breaking down or differently amalgamating the sentences so that they start and finish as formally single, separately shaped thoughts, one at a time: ‘But I never thought we could ever be re-united.’ We could even try out on our trial-subjects the simple alternative as a control: ‘I never had that thought’. It would still be the shortest, most cut-off sentence in the whole paragraph. But ‘That thought I never had’ is more positively a definite farewell to the now unthinkable thought. Even in its minuteness, this is that most vital of evolutionary developments: a feedback mechanism that builds upon itself (‘that’), creating a retrospective second voice emergent out of an earlier one; a suddenly evolved lift of level turning a thought or (better) the impossibility and rejection of a thought into something that made for the finality of what we might call character. ‘That thought I never had’ is therefore like an act of revision in process: its realisation effects a change in the sheer internal age of the person, from child to adult, as from brain-message to settled conscious mind. This is, in every sense, adult thinking and the reader knows it by its syntactic shape working its way within the sheer pressurised place of its dilemma. I want to see this new pathway; I wish to test its possible relation to the syntax which helps form it and to know how much or how little they map onto one another. And if I want to see what these sentences would be like in the brain’s processing of it, so too, I think, would Dickens – and so, I know, would George Eliot. For George Eliot famously writes of Doctor Lydgate in Middlemarch (1872), as he peers through his microscope into the deep physical structures of life: He wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thorough-fares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness. (Chapter 16) INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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What the literary microscope equivalently offers is a sense of meaning and experience that only at the crude macro-level of ordinary human paraphrase would we dismiss reductively as ‘David’s excuses for Steerforth’. That last is merely a name, not a place, not a shape working in space and time within a new area of tension. That is to say, in David Copperfield or in Middlemarch, the scale of the Victorian realist ambition goes way beyond reportage: its aim is to make life create itself again through the medium of the realist model. That is why I have also been collaborating recently with a research student, Melissa Raines, on George Eliot’s manuscripts, as well as pursuing the brain-science project. For what George Eliot is often working on in those drafts and refinements are ways of reaching the nervous system via her prose – whatever the combination between her own nervous system, the reader’s, and that of her imagined characters. She starts from Herbert Spencer’s proposition in The Principles of Psychology that just as a sudden noise causes a nervous shock to the sentient organism, and just as a strong unexpected impression made through the eyes causes a subjectively similar shock, so it is that further up the evolutionary scale the sudden occurrence of a thought is still, remarkably, like the effect of a physical blow (1855: 150–1). What fascinates George Eliot is what she calls that nervous ‘quivering thing’ which looks out from inside the apparently solid, everyday appearance of ordinary folk, for all their protective skins (Felix Holt, 1860, chapter 1). The ‘vibrations’ of these vulnerable human organisms are often, she says, like an unheard ‘whisper’ amidst the general outward roar of hurrying existence (Felix Holt, introduction). It is that whisper that George Eliot struggles to hear; it is those vibrations she endeavours to register in that nervous system which she makes of her prose by process of revision. Lydgate too, in his own research-work, first set about ‘framing’ his object, then ‘correcting it to more and more exactness of relation’ (chapter 16). Even so, Raymond Tallis reports pessimistically that the most sophisticated neural imaging cannot distinguish between physical pain and the pain of social rejection. But I think that is wonderful: it tells us something of the human evolution of pain and the felt reality of our otherwise discountable sensitivities. Similarly I love the idea that ‘leg’ fires the same part of the brain when we read it as a word as when we use it as a limb, albeit at a lesser degree of intensity. These are correspondences we can work with, realities we can recreate at different levels or in different models across the physico-mental spectrum that demands inter-disciplinary study for an essentially inter-disciplinary creature in whom emotion is the intermediary nervous messenger. Reading and writing are major sources and major exploiters of such correspondence. That is why we should appreciate those already existent intuitive strategies that enable us to get our brains working less predictably: they are not merely ‘arty’, though the art and craft of writing well knows them. But we should also imagine using brain science not only retrospectively but prospectively to locate or develop new strategies. Let me try to develop this last suggestion by a simple but rather discreditable example. Thus: I know I sometimes find my own thinking pre-empted or foreclosed by dealing too habitually in the language of alternatives. When, for instance, in Lear the old man thinks of the danger of going mad, how far is that bit of his mind that can still do the thinking transcendent of the looming insanity, and how far is it already implicated in it and screaming out of it? It is like the fearfully paradoxical awareness of Alzheimer’s. INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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Now, I know that the two possibilities I have sketched only mark the parameters of what is at stake here; but too often I cannot get in between them to work and mine the space. The old verbal slogan – not either/or but both/and – doesn’t really help me: it is not syntactically sharp enough to avoid clumsy fudging. I need some mental equivalent of forensics, of micro-surgery as it were, where I am only frustratedly fumbling with thick fingers. I feel as if the two thoughts might set off distinct charges going in different ways, but I can sense no explorative network created by them into which I can reach down below the mental surface. The poet David Constantine is helpful here when he describes what it is like, on sitting down, to have at the back of his mind (as we say) some pre-existent adumbration of the poem he wants to write and then to have to try to match and realise it: Trying to write a poem, the space you are staring into will in the end, if you are lucky, begin to fill with words. The space becomes a shape. But you need to be quite peculiarly lucky. The words taking shape may be the wrong words. They may be in the way of, not on the way towards the poem. They may actually make it less likely that you will ever get where you feel you want to get. Then you would prefer the space to the shape, blankness to fullness, if the words coming in are wrong and in the way. (Constantine 1999/2000: 11)
This is like Wordsworth’s soul when, as he puts it, it is ‘remembering how she felt, but what she felt/Remembering not’ (The Prelude, 1805, Book 2, 335–6): the feel of ‘how’ seeking to bring back the sense of ‘what’. With Constantine, the writer is thus situated as it were between the pre-verbal structurings at the back of the mind and what he seeks to make of them on the page before him. He is trying to make the two click together, resonate, seeking a two-way correspondence and reciprocal modification between them. And it is when this does not work that the writer feels the words replacing the dim thoughts or getting in their way. Or, again, he or she feels the syntax not so much creating the room, the niche, the triggering contour for the words to come into being, but rather pre-empting or cajoling or distorting them. It may indeed be impossible, but in some imaginary brain-imaging of the future, it would be truly wonderful to see the two mental levels – the unwritten and the written – moving together and apart, mapping onto and composing each other. But when we are baulked, or when we too easily fall back on generally habitual but specifically unsuitable pathways, then it is as though some tool is missing – and especially so for those in-between areas which are the places with no name. It is like John Henry Newman in his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) finding only in hindsight that gradually, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, he had been all the time en route to a religious conversion from the Church of England to Catholicism. At the time itself he was unable to see that his perplexity was getting anywhere or was part of any journey – even though outsiders judged the conversion long-since inevitable. But paradoxically for him, the interim was not part of a form moving towards a future destination, was not even an interim, until seen to be so afterwards. No wonder the man cannot remember an elusive and uncertain past which was not then what the future was going to make of it: For who can know himself and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him? and who can recollect, at the distance of twenty-five years, all that he once knew about his thoughts and deeds, and INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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that, during a portion of his life, when even at the time his observation, whether of himself or of the external world, was less than before or after, by very reason of the perplexity and dismay which weighed upon him? (Part 5)
Newman would say, rightly enough, that no brain machine of itself could help us in such a situation, at the time or afterwards. But his use of ‘and that . . . when even . . . less than . . . by very’ in the above passage is itself a piece of mental machinery that keeps the mind absorbed in the predicament without being able to define it. Otherwise all we have is another autobiography which exists simply at the macro level of summary, the mere results of life lumped into the banal retrospective linearity of ‘Then I did x, then I became y’. The world of predictable opinion and secondhand paraphrase comes into existence when people become cut off in their macro workings from those micro workings that should inform them. That is the rigidity of the brain that a poem, say, in the appropriate emotional subject-area might serve to disrupt. Of course in the current-day preference for bullet-points, modern forms of attention hardly extend to Newman’s micro syntax . But again I would love to see how and why ‘and that’ emphatically works in the brain – because I know introspectively, subjectively, that something neo-muscular is happening. ‘And that, during a portion of his life, when even at the time his observation, whether of himself or of the external world, was less than before or after, by very reason of the perplexity and dismay which weighed upon him?’ There is, said William James, ‘a feeling of and, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by’ just as surely as there is a feeling of cold (James 1890, chapter 9). Newman’s is the feeling of ‘that’, a cross between demonstrative pronoun and conjunction, and again, as with functional shift, what I think we have here is a small verbal instrument, suitable for experiment, which has a quasi-synaptic effect upon mental and syntactic pathways. James’s conjunctions are hardly words you would look up in a dictionary: they exist not so much for their semantic sense as for their syntactically enabling effect. And this is very much the case with a creative use of ‘that’. Crucially, this deictic or pointing effect seeks to establish localisation but at a meta level of syntax such that the sentence almost gets a hold of itself, thereby creating a self-conscious system that refers backwards (anaphora) and forwards (cataphora) across its length to extend the range of mental time. Such words are holding words, storing local memory within the syntax. But more than that, they are also evolutionary tools, tools for mental evolution, that in their signalling by excitement or inhibition instinctively reproduce within one system on the page what goes in another in the brain. The eighteenth-century linguist Horne Tooke thought for instance – wrongly but instructively – that the etymology of ‘but’ lay in the contraction of ‘be out’ as though the word were a mental messenger. Wanted: partners and funds to forward such experimentation into what words such as ‘but’ do. But one final thought. It will be noted that all the examples I have given are deviations from some norm of expectation or convention. Often accompanied by shock, they are not so much in sheer defiance of such norms as disconcertedly surprised to find those norms reduced to the background against which the new variations are felt and measured. I think this has plausible relation with the grand argument Nicholas Humphrey puts forward in Seeing Red (2006). There Humphrey addresses the issue of conscious experience, thinking in particular of those subjective inner feelings of personal INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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quality that seem to defy reductive explanation. They seem mysterious but in a sense, says Humphrey, there is no mystery about them: whether their sense of specialness is right or delusive, they are there only to assert and protect such individuality, and that alone is their evolutionary value. They say, in the face of what it common – and especially perhaps death and dying as the great example: Still it makes a difference that it is me or has to do with those who are mine. Or as Humphrey describes this poignant resolve of ours: ‘The more mysterious and unworldly the qualities of consciousness, the more seriously significant the Self. And the more significant the Self, the greater the boost to human self-confidence and self-importance – and the greater the value that individuals place on their own and others’ lives’ (p.132). I want to add that the individual modification of common language – and especially the capacity to use syntax to shift existing mental pathways and begin to configure new ones – is a major episode in that story of the evolutionary value of individual qualia. It is therefore, finally, as a visionary figure in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) puts it: Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot-tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness; now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway. (Chapter 40)
There are sudden hot spots in the brain, pre-conceptual moments of neural excitement and resonance and recognition when it feels that something innerly important must somehow find a way for itself. Thinking is physical like that. We are that brain and we are right to want to see it, and we are right to want to make it exist outside ourselves in words and in works. NOTES 1.
I have been helped in particular by Broks 2003; Changeux 1997; Damasio 2000; Humphrey 2006; Johnson 1987; LeDoux 1999; Lakoff and Johnson 2003; Lehrer 2007; Scarry 1999 and 1988; Turner 1996; Turner and Fauconnier 2002; Wales 1987; Wolf 2008. For a fuller technical bibliography see Davis, Thierry, Roberts and Gonzalez-Diaz 2008. See also Davis 2007.
REFERENCES Abbott, Edwin. 1870. A Shakespearian grammar: An attempt to illustrate some of the differences between Elizabethan and modern English: For the use of schools. London: Macmillan. Broks, Paul. 2003. Into the Silent Land. London: Atlantic Books. Changeux, Jean-Pierre. 1997. . Tr. L. Garey. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Constantine, David. 1999/2000. ‘Finding the Words’. In Other Words 13/14: 11. Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens. London. Vintage. Davis, Philip. 2007. Shakespeare Thinking. London: Continuum. Davis, Philip, G. Thierry, N.Roberts and V. Gonzalez-Diaz. 2008. ‘Event-related potential characterisation of the Shakespearean functional shift in narrative sentence structure’. NeuroImage 40.2: 923–31. Hazlitt, William. 1817. Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. London: R. Hunter. Humphrey, Nicholas. 2006. Seeing Red. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LeDoux, Joseph. 1999. The Emotional Brain. London: Phoenix. INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 4
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Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lehrer, Jonathan. 2007. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Newman, John Henry. 1864. Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a reply to a pamphlet. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green. Puttenham, George. 2007/1589. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1988. Literature and the Body: Populations and Persons. Baltimore: John Hopkins. Scarry, Elaine. 1999. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Spencer, Herbert. 1855. The Principles of Psychology. London: Longman and Company. Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Mark and Gilles Fauconnier. 2002. The Way We Think; Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Wales, Kathleen. 1987. ‘An Aspect of Shakespeare’s Dynamic Language’. In V.Salmon and E. Burness (eds), A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama. Amsterdam; John Benjamins. Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the Squid. Cambridge: Icon Books. Zeki, Semir. 1993. A Vision of the Brain. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.
Professor Philip Davis is in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK. His publications include Memory and Writing: from Wordsworth to Lawrence; two books on Shakespeare – Sudden Shakespeare and Shakespeare Thinking; a book on Samuel Johnson, In Mind of Johnson; and Volume 8 in the new Oxford English Literary History Series, The Victorians 1830–1880. He has edited a selection of Ruskin’s writings and an anthology of religious verse. His interest in all that goes into the act of reading is reflected in a monograph called The Experience of Reading and an edited collection of essays entitled Real Voices: On Reading. He is involved in two practical, interdisciplinary projects: one on the effects of reading groups, with the Health and Community Care Research Unit; the other on the relation of Shakespearian syntax to neural pathways in collaboration with the University’s Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre (www.liv.ac.uk/english/staff/ philipdavis.htm;
[email protected]).
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