Literary Morphology:
Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form
Version 4
William L. Benzon
Abstract: Naturalist literary theory conceives of literature as an adaptive behavioral realm grounded in the
capacities of the human brain. In the course of human history literature itself has undergone an evolution that
has produced many kinds of literary work. In this article I propose nine propositions to characterize a
treatment of literary form. These propositions concern neural and mental mechanisms, and literary evolution
in history. Textual meaning is elastic – through not infinitely so – and constrained by form. Form indicates
the computational structure of the act of reading and is the same for all readers. Over the long term, literary
forms become more complex and sophisticated.
Keywords: form, cognition, neuropsychology, evolutionary psychology, evolution, literary theory, cultural
evolution, computation
Published in PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, 2006, article 060608.
http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/l_benzon-literary_morphology_nine_propositions_in
Note: The second, third, and fourth appendices in this version of the article did not appear in the original
published version. See the prefatory note following the table of contents.
CONTENTS
Prefatory Note ................................................................................................................. 1
The Naturalist Study of Literary Form .............................................................................. 2
Practical Criticism and Its Vicissitudes .............................................................................. 3
Embodiment: Literature in the Brain ................................................................................ 6
Computation: Literature in the Mind ............................................................................... 9
Literature in Society: History and Evolution .................................................................... 23
Appendix 1: The Propositions ........................................................................................ 30
Appendix 2: Discovering Binary Oppositions in Neural Activity ...................................... 30
Appendix 3: Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Textual Closure ......................................... 31
Appendix 4: The Computational Envelope of Language, a Dialog.................................. 34
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... 36
References ..................................................................................................................... 36
Notes ............................................................................................................................ 40
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Prefatory Note
The second, third, and fourth appendices were not in the original published
article. I have added them to indicate additional dimensions of the ideas and
later thoughts.
The second appendix is from correspondence I had with the late Walter
Freeman, a neuroscientist at Berkeley, and concerns the possibility about
obtaining neural evidence for the structures of binary oppositions that
appear in literary (and other) texts.
The third and fourth appendices are later thoughts. In the third appendix I
argue that Jakobson’s poetic function is consistent with, can be considered
an aspect of or perhaps an alternative formulation of, the conception of
computational form I set forth in the main text. The fourth appendix is a
brief dialog in which I argue that ordinary arithmetic computation is built
on the computational facility inherent in natural language but with the
semantic aspect “squeezed out.” That’s one in an ongoing series of
reflections in which I argue that (the syntactic apparatus of) natural
language is the basic or simplest form of computation of which the human
mind is capable. That is, perceptual and motoric processes are not
fundamentally computational, though they may be computationally
simulated, which is another matter.
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Literary Morphology:
Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form
William L. Benzon
The Naturalist Study of Literary Form
There are signs that the study of literature has begun recognizing the cognitive and neurosciences and
evolutionary psychology, each a loosely organized arena of intellectual activity that has flourished in the last
three decades. Empirical work continues being published on how people understand literary texts while the
Stanford Humanities Review devoted an entire issue to cognitive criticism, taking at article by Nobel laureate
Herbert Simon (1994) as its point of departure. Poetics Today has had special issues on cognitive poetics;
Philosophy and Literature has been friendly to Darwinian thinking for perhaps a decade; book-length studies and
anthologies are becoming more common, as are conferences.
Much of this work is theoretical and programmatic in nature, suggesting models, modes of
explanation, and ways to proceed but not analyzing specific texts or groups of texts in any detail. Practical
criticism inspired by these newer psychologies is, like most current practical criticism, concerned primarily
with the meaning of texts. My emphasis is different. I am interested in form, in morphology. The purpose of
this essay is to explain and justify that orientation and, in particular, to indicate why the newer psychologies
provide an opportune conceptual environment in which to explore literary form.
There is nothing new about the study of literary form. But the term is ambiguous, between “literary
form” as a kind of literary work, and “form” as differentiated from content. Sorting out the ambiguity is not
easy.
Some ideas about form are basic to all study of literature, such as the existence of comedy, New and
Old, tragedy, romance, lyric, and epic – discussed in such standard works as Northrup Fry’s Anatomy of
Criticism and, more recently, Alistair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes.
Beyond these we have the categories that line the aisles of the popular fiction (as opposed to literary fiction)
sections of bookstores: Fantasy, Romance, Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror, and their subtypes. All of these
are literary forms, kinds of text; but discussions of them typically address matters of content as well as form.
Students of poetry can turn to handbooks detailing poetic forms, e.g. Lewis Turco’s The Book of
Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which in its third edition has well over 300 pages and describes I don’t know
how many poetic forms – I own the 160-page first edition and it has more forms than I care to count. These
forms are characterized in traditional terms, meter, stanzas, rhyme, number of lines and so the handbook is
mostly about form as differentiated from content. This is not a theoretical treatise; it is a practical handbook,
intended for poets and for those who need a way to describe the formal aspects of poems.
While my discussion has some overlap with those discussions, my intention and focus are different.
Unlike the handbooks, my aim is methodological and theoretical, not descriptive. The intellectual program I
outline might well have implications for discussions of literary kinds, but I do not take the sorting out of
kinds as my starting point. My starting point, rather, is with the newer psychologies and how they can help us
analyze the formal aspect of literary works. As that project proceeds it may well help us sort of literary kinds,
but I cannot see that far into the future.
Turning to the task at hand, I have organized this essay around nine propositions, some of which are
hypotheses susceptible to and requiring empirical and/or computational confirmation (i.e. simulation, cf.
Benzon and Hays 1976: 271-273) while others seem to be facilitating assumptions: “if we start from here,
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then we can get somewhere.” As I sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference, I leave that as an exercise
to the reader.
0. Proposition: I will indicate these ideas with this formatting. All of these propositions are listed, in
order, in Appendix 1 at the end of the essay.
I have come to think of this work as critical naturalism. While I am not entirely happy with the term –
“the natural” is a problematic notion – I prefer it to thinking of this work as deriving from some species of
psychology. The problem is that none of these psychologies in themselves has much to say about literature. I
find that one has to do quite a bit of conceptual construction to bridge the gap between what those
psychologies can comfortably deal with and literature itself, especially literary form. Thus while I have made
extensive use of those psychologies, I do not feel that my analytic and descriptive work is of them; it is only
commensurate with them.
When I talk of critical naturalism I am thinking of biology as a disciplinary model. Biology involves
the study of forms and their diversity, where that diversity is the result of a historical process, evolution.
Biology is also, in the words of my colleague Timothy Perper, the study of worlds within worlds; there is the
ecosystem within the environment, and the organism within the ecosystem. Some organisms are many-celled,
and some are single-celled; in both cases we must study anatomy and physiology. When we study the anatomy
and physiology of single cells are studying molecules and molecular processes. The most remarkable of those
molecules are those of DNA and RNA; it is these molecules that make life possible. In the very small, biology
is about how those molecules reproduce themselves and construct other molecules. In the very large, biology
is about how vast populations of those molecules interact with one another through the mediation of
phenotypes and environments.
To a first approximation, literature is like that. We have a large diversity of forms embedded in an
intersecting multitude of histories. Works must be analyzed in the small, e.g. individual tropes and phrases,
and the large, e.g. sonnet cycles and multi-volume novels. Where the biologist examines tissues and
molecules, the naturalistic critic interrogates the mind in its brain. Considered one at a time, works yield
analyses and readings. Considered in the many, we have periods and movements. Both biology and literature
have a mystery at the heart of things, that of origins.
First I offer a general rationale for emphasizing the study of form rather than of meaning. After that
I consider the embodiment of literature in the brain. Then we move to the conceptual heart of this essay, that
literary works be analyzed as computational forms. I conclude with the long-term evolution of literary forms
in human history.
Practical Criticism and Its Vicissitudes
While this essay is about theory and method, its ultimate commitment is to practical criticism. It is not simply
that a theory is of little value unless it provides guidance to the practical critic but that a theory cannot even
be constructed and elaborated without interacting with a substantial body of practice. Literary theory
ultimately rests on the analysis of literary works and their circulation in minds and social groups. Given that, I
want to examine the problem of practical criticism in as neutral a way as I can.
The practical critic, it seems to me, starts with the intuition that there is something very important
going on in literature that is not obvious. Just how the “not obvious” is conceptualized varies from one critical
methodology to another, but, as I am trying to make a neutral statement, I do not want to worry too much
about the differences among all those characterizations. All that concerns me is that the practical critic seeks
to discover something that is not obvious.
Let us say that what the critic is looking for is a pattern, one that bears the impress of the various
“forces” shaping the work, whether they are biological or cultural, individual or socio-political, universal or
locally contingent. On the one hand, literary works are very complex; they have many parts, many traits, and
can be described in many ways. They exhibit many patterns. On the other hand, the human mind is
extraordinarily good at seeking and finding patterns. And we can readily find patterns for things that are not
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there, not really. Is that face on the grilled cheese sandwich really the Virgin Mary, or is it merely the wishful
whim of a true believer in search of miracles? Are those really a Big Bear and a Little Bear in the northern
sky? What is that streak on the photographic plate? It wasn’t exposed to light, so how did that happen? Is it a
freak occurrence or evidence or some recurrent regularity in the world?
Faced with the unlimited variety of patterns one can discern in a literary work, the practical critic
needs a systematic way to eliminate most of them from analytic consideration. Hence critics have invoked
authorial life and intention, historical context, the unconscious mind as construed in various psychologies,
universal mythological patterns, a society’s means of production (broadly construed), and so forth. All of
these rationales, and others, have been invoked to constrain the field of patterns that must be considered. In
arguing for the newer psychologies I am simply casting them in the role of Provider-of-Constraint. I also
happen to believe that they can do better service in that role than existing alternatives. That, however, can
only be decided through practical criticism. I can make various arguments, but the final verdict must
inevitably be in the hands of practical critics who adopt this perspective in their analytical work.
In offering the newer psychologies for use in this way, I am concentrating on the examination of
literary form. In so doing I do not mean to imply that I believe that to be their only use, or even their only
good and proper use. Though I believe these psychologies are useful in the examination of content, I am
concentrating on form for several reasons. In the first place, as I have already indicated, the study of form has
been neglected in both practical and theoretical work grounded in these newer psychologies. In the second
place, these newer psychologies are not well-developed for the study of literature or of literary form. Thus
here is an opportunity for students of literature to contribute to these newer psychologies. To make such
contributions, however, we have to speak in terms that are commensurate with those of the newer
psychologies. And so we must learn something about them and use those terms in our analytical and
descriptive work.
There is a third reason. I believe that literary form places strong constraints on the mind-brain that
experiences the text. This is not at all a new idea; one can find it, for example, in the work of Gregory
Bateson (1972, pp. 128-154), Robert Rogers (1985), David Miall (1988), and Reuven Tsur (1992). If form
imposes constraints on readers, then it seems reasonable to believe that explicit knowledge of form will provide
practical critics with guidance in their search for patterns in the not obvious.
Let us consider a specific example, Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”. The published
version of the poem consists of three stanzas; this division into parts is a simple aspect of the poem’s form. I
have recently argued (Benzon 2004), however, that the poem actually consists of two major movements. This
is an assertion about form, but one that is at odds with the ostensible form of the published text – though not
with the form of a somewhat different unpublished text, which has two stanzas. I made that argument by
attending to the poem’s meaning.
I noticed that the poem focuses on the bower in two places, at the beginning of the poem and at the
beginning of the third stanza. Similarly the sun is evoked at two places, the end of the second stanza and the
end of the poem. Thus the poem appears to consist of two successive movements, each beginning in the
bower and ending with the sun. By attending further to what happens in those movements and to sentence-
final punctuation, I concluded that each movement consists of four parts, and the four parts in the two
movements are in parallel (see Figure 1 below, stanzas are indicated by green blocks). The first stanza of the
poem contains the first two parts of the first movement, while the second stanza contains the second two
parts. The third stanza is devoted entirely to the second movement.
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Figure 1: Constituent Structure in “This Lime-Tree Bower”
That “Lime-Tree Bower” consists of two movements, each consisting of four parts, with the
corresponding parts in parallel – that assertion is about its form. It tells you nothing about what the poem
means, but it indicates some of the constraints acting on a mind that is reading the poem. No matter who
reads the poem, the meaning they construct will involve the elements of those two movements.
Those two movements, with their four parts each, are an aspect of what I will call the poem’s
constituent structure later in this essay. The bower itself, along with the sun, the poet, his friends, and a flying
bird, these are all aspects of the poem’s armature – a time I adapted from Lévi-Strauss (1969, p. 199). While
those two facets do not exhaust formal considerations – for many others, see Tsur 1992 – they are among the
most important formal features, and all literary works exhibit them. Literary works exhibit other formal
aspects, but not all texts exhibit all of these features. The features associated with versification are an obvious
example; patterns of rhyme and meter are not relevant to the study of prose texts.
In thus talking of reading, constituency, and armature I do not mean to invoke conscious and
deliberate activity on the part of readers, much less the often protracted process by which literary critics
produce published analyses and interpretations of texts. Most of what happens in reading is unconscious.
Thus, one of the conceptual motifs of the cognitive sciences is that of the cognitive unconscious (cf. Lakoff and
Johnson 1999, pp. 9-15). Most of our perceptual, conceptual, and affective processes are largely unconscious
and, as such, not susceptible to deliberate notice and manipulation. The processes by which a mind reading
“Lime-Tree Bower” apprehends the two movements, and the parts in each, is not a deliberate conscious
process. It simply happens as a natural consequence of the way the mind apprehends texts. In contrast, the
process by which a critic explicitly identifies these components requires that one look at a text in a certain
way, one that regards a text as a hierarchical structure of units which are considered to reflect the hierarchical
structure of the underlying mental process. I am proposing that the newer psychologies justify this mode of
analysis (cf. Alvarez-Lacalle and Dorow 2006) and will say more about this later on.
Returning to the poem, I further note that my examination of the poem did not stop with its
constituent structure. I went on to offer a fairly elaborate speculation about the psychological mechanisms
underlying the poem’s meaning. Here I touched on John Bowlby’s attachment theory, Winnicott’s conception
of the transitional object, Vygotsky’s account of language acquisition, the notion of an image schema from
cognitive linguistics, and various other ideas and observations from the cognitive and neurosciences. Thus,
while this essay is about the newer psychologies and literary form, I do not think that their value, or
intellectual responsibility, is confined to form. I think we must attend to the whole work and I have strong
preferences about how to think about content, about meaning and feeling. But those preferences are not in
play in this essay except as they follow from the type of formal analysis I propose. I do believe, moreover,
that there is some measure of independence between the formal analysis of a literary work and the problem
of analyzing and explaining that work’s content or meaning. Thus a critic could accept the formal analysis I
have offered for “This Lime-Tree Bower” while proposing a different account of its content.
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In thus proposing to focus on literary form I am, in effect, proposing that we rethink the nature of a
literary work. “Text” has come to be the generic term for such works, even oral performances. We know that
such texts have physical form, but that the meaning is not, in any simple sense, carried within the text, as wine
in a bottle. According to a conventional doctrine, which I accept, the relationship between the signs in a text
and their individual meanings is considered to be arbitrary. It is up to the reader, then, to provide those signs
with meaning. Societies devote considerable effort to ensuring that their members attribute mutually
consistent meanings to linguistic signs, but the process is not a perfect one. And so different people will
experience different meanings from texts, literary texts among them.
While true enough, this view is not adequate to the study of literature. I believe that we must
construe the literary work to be, not merely a text consisting of signs inscribed on some surface, but to be a
largely unconscious computational form consisting of a constituent structure and an armature. In making this
assertion I want to emphasize that I do not accept the computational metaphor in perhaps its commonest
form, that the mind is a specifically digital computer. The general idea of computation is more general and
more abstract than that (cf. von Neumann 1958, Minsky 1967, Wolfram 2002). I have explicitly argued
against the digital metaphor (Benzon 2001) and do not regard it as essential. For my present purposes it is
sufficient to say that I view computation in the broadest possible sense.i What is essential is that the
computational metaphor implies physical embodiement, which in turn implies action in time. All real
computation takes place in physical devices and in real time; as such it is limited by computational resources,
such as the number of computing devices and time available to complete the computation. If I were arguing
in terms of Walter Freemans’s neurodynamics (1995, 1999, 2000) I might use a different term, dynamic form, or
even intentional form. But I believe that computation is the best term for my purposes in this paper.
Finally, I should make a remark about genre as that is the standard rubric under which literary
criticism attempts large-scale systematic treatment of forms. My first remark is simply that the problem is a
very complex one, as one can verify through even a cursory look at Alastair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature: the
Theory of Genres and Modes. Secondly, genre theory does not confine itself to formal traits as I am defining
them. Kinds such as comedy, tragedy, and romance are more matters of content than of form – in the sense I
am using the term. And such a very important and problematic genre as the pastoral demands fairly specific
kinds of content. Thus, while I expect that more scrupulous attention to form may well provide insight into
the general problem of literary kinds, I would not predict any blinding illuminations resulting in sudden
resolution of the problem.
Embodiment: Literature in the Brain
Let us begin with the famous phrase that Coleridge published in Chapter XIV of the Biographia Literaria: “that
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith.” In 2003 Norman Holland
published a neuro-psychoanalytic account of that suspension, arguing that when we read a literary text our
perception of both our bodies and our environment is diminished, “we no longer judge probability or reality-
test” and that “we respond emotionally to the fiction as though it were real.” I believe that these observations
are, in the main, valid.
For me the critical passage in Holland’s essay comes when he observes that “brains serve one
overarching purpose,” namely, “to move a body.” Holland goes on to observe that we are generally static
when “absorbed in a movie or play or book” and that:
Reality-testing, it turns out, is also related to planning movement and action.
To intend to act, to plan a movement, we imagine the outcome. If I plan to move that glass
of water on the table, I have to imagine where it is going to be after I have moved it. I have to
imagine what is not now true — a contrafactual. I understand where the glass now is — the reality of
the glass—by noting where it is not. Having moved the glass, I know where it is by remembering
where it was, again something no longer the fact.
Some minor qualification is necessary. After all, when reading we are generally sufficiently aware of
our surroundings that, for example, we turn on a light when it grows dark, change our posture to prevent
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cramping, and so forth. But these things are not directly related to what is transpiring in the text. In our
mind’s eye we may be perceiving ladies and gentleman at a courtly dance or sailors chasing a whale, but in
reality we are relatively still. Such movements as we make are decoupled from the story we are reading.
This is all obvious enough, even trite. Holland’s point, however, is that, considered as an activity of
the brain, reading texts involves an overall constellation of activities that is quite different from those in play
when we engage directly in the business of living in the world. The same, obviously enough, is true when we
are dreaming. We are detached from the external world, but the sensory areas of the brain are quite active, as
are motor areas, though we move very little. That is because the motor impulses are blocked from reaching
the body, and so it remains at rest (Hobson 1999). That literary experience is, in effect, a waking dream is a
commonplace notion. It remains to be seen to what extent the reading of books and the viewing of plays and
movies is, in any useful technical sense, significantly like dreaming (cf. Panksepp 1998 pp. 134-135, Benzon
2001, pp. 160-164). I bring it up primarily as another example of an overall pattern of brain activity being
associated with a specific mode of experience.
Beyond this, there is a constellation of social conventions governing how we “consume” texts, how
we talk about them with others, how, if at all, we integrate their lessons into our lives. These conventions
have roots in our early childhood, both in play, and in listening to stories told to us by our parents and others.
If one includes pre-linguistic babbling and the mother-infant play organized around that along with similar
activity, one might even argue that the roots on aesthetic play with language are deeper than the use of
language to accomplish the mundane tasks of living. However one might argue that specific point, the larger
point is simply that literary behavior is learned behavior with roots in early interactions between the infant
and others. The brain is trained in the ways of stories and rhymes.
By extension, I suggest that the properties of all literary texts are suited to the capacities of the brain
as it is in the state of special receptivity that Holland describes. One of the characteristics of these texts is that they
must allow for a suitable resolution when one has reached the end of the text. Texts have endings and they
have definite beginnings as well, and middles too; Aristotle observed as much over two-millennia ago. This is
a formal property and does not depend on having specific content or meanings for the film, or text. In this
age of cognitive science this commonplace notion gains a new valence from the idea of computation. All real
computations take place in time. Just how much time a computation will require, and even whether or not it
will ever come to an end at all, is a matter of both practical and theoretical concern in computer science (see,
e.g. Minsky 1967). I will say more about computation later on. For now I want to make one point, that the
neural computation involved in one’s primary experience of a text must come to an end at some point. When
that happens one can then “exit” the literary mode and re-engage the ordinary business of life, with the
appropriate reallocation of neural resources to activing and perceiving in the external world.
Returning to Holland, he does not postulate some literary module in the brain. Rather, he looks to the
overall pattern of activity. That is the approach I take here, with the additional observation that that pattern
of activity is learned and that literary texts are crafted to suit it. With this in mind, I offer the first hypothesis:
1. Literary Mode: Literary experience is mediated by a mode of neural activity in which one’s
primary attention is removed form the external world and invested in experiences prompted by
the text. The properties of literary works are fitted to that mode of activity.
Given that literary experience is subserved by a certain disposition of neural resources, we might
wonder whether or not the neural tissue that supports imaginary experience is the same as the tissue that
supports real experience. My view on this issue was suggested by the elegant cybernetic theory of mind
outlined by William Powers (1973: 222-226). The brain is full of schemas for perceiving, acting, and thinking.
The content of literary works draws on exactly the same schemas as are used in mundane life (cf. Miyashita
1995; Grueter 2006; Benzon 2000). Thus, when I created a semantic model to investigate the meaning of
Shakespeare’s sonnet on “Th’expence of Spirit” (Benzon 1976, 1981) I was implicitly asserting that the high-
level sexual circuitry activated by that poem is the same circuitry activated in real-world sexual activity.
By pushing this idea a bit further we arrive at another hypothesis:
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2. Extralinguistic Grounding: Literary language is linked to extralinguistic sensory and motor
schemas in a way that is essential to literary experience.
Literature is not disembodied language (cf. Lakoff, 1987, Turner, 1996). It is language that evokes images and
sounds and the semblance of physical movement. We may sit still when we read, or listen to a story, but we
understand the movements of characters from one place to another because we ourselves know what it is to
move about. We interpret the gestures and actions we are told about through our own experience of similar
gestures. And so it is with the signs and sounds and smells and tastes, not to mention feeling as well. We can
no longer afford to regard such sensorimotor grounding as somehow secondary in literary experience. It is
essential (cf. Esrock 1994). The sense of this proposition is simply to deny the existence some non-corporeal
and transcendental realm of meanings.
The fact of neural embodiment has some fairly general implications that are worth a moment’s
reflection. In the first place, it implies that the meanings readers find in texts will necessarily be grounded in
their social, historical and personal context. Brains mature in specific contexts and bear the imprint of those
contexts. The formal properties of literary texts do not exempt their readers from the necessity of living in
their worlds. A brain “trained” in 16th century Britain is going to be different from one “trained” in mid-
twentieth century California. On that ground alone one would expect two such readers to experience
different meanings in the same texts. But, I will argue in the next section of this essay, the form of the work
will be the same for both readers.
Paradoxically, neural embodiment also gives literary culture a measure of independence from the
contingencies of immediate historical context. The brain is not a tabula rasa. While it responds to the imprint
of its immediate environment, it does so with internal structures and processes that have been shaped by
millions of years of evolutionary history. Those structures make their own demands on the world and thus
allow for some negotiation between biology and society. The long-term trace of that negotiation, I will argue
in the last section of this essay, is the profusion of forms and texts that constitutes literary history.
Finally, consider the sentiment is expressed in the shopworn final line of “Ars Poetica” by Archibald
MacLeish: “A poem should not mean/But be.” The idea is that literary works afford a certain kind of
experience and that attempts to explicate their meaning are beside the point. In this sense our experience of
literature is as inaccessible to language as our experience of dreams. The fact that literature is expressed in
texts that we may examine at will does not matter. For it is only when we apprehend the text from within a
literary frame of mind that we can experience its meaning and significance. We can we remember and talk
about texts we have read, as we can remember and talk about our dreams. But in neither case does the talk
restore or recover the primary experience. To borrow a line from Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan,” as
soon one has finished reading the text, the experience itself dissipates, “like the images on the surface of a
stream into which a stone has been cast.”
I am thus sympathetic to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s recent Production of Presence (2004), where he
argues that the experience of literature itself is one of presence, while the writing of criticism, the search for
literary meaning, is quite different. It is not an experience of presence. However obvious this may seem, we
need to recognize that, in the past few decades, criticism has forgotten this. For example, three decades ago
Geoffrey Hartman (1975, p. 268) asserted bluntly: “Reading, then, includes reading criticism.” More recently
Tony Jackson (2003, p. 202) has said: “That is, a literary interpretation, if we are allowed to distinguish it as a
distinct kind of interpretation, joins in with the literariness of the text. Literary interpretation is a peculiar and,
I would say, unique conjunction of argument and literature, analytic approach and art form being analyzed.”
However common they are, these ideas seem deeply mistaken to me. The conjunction they imply between
text and critical reading is but a nostalgic way to frame literary interpretation. Our task as literary critics in the
age of the cognitive and neurosciences is to not explicate what individual texts mean, but to understand how
they shape the experience of reading. That requires, among other things, that we undertake an examination of
form with the ultimate goal of understanding how the formal properties of literary works are apprehended by
the brain.
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Computation: Literature in the Mind
While I am favorable to the view that the mind is what the brain does, I am not sure what that gets us in the
absence of a deep understanding of just what it is that the brain does. Ever since reading Karl Pribram on
neural holography (1971) I have been convinced that what the brain does is strange enough that we need
concepts and language about mental entities and events. The laws of mental entities must be consistent with
those of brains, but they are not derivable from them.ii In private conversation David Hays and I talked of
implementation as the relationship between mind and brain: the mind is implemented in the brain (Benzon
1997).
For some purposes it is useful to talk about words, for example, as indivisible objects. For other
purposes, however, we may need to go further and make a distinction between the signifier, where a word is
considered as being constituted by phonemes, syllables, and morphemes, and the signified, semantics –
however one conceives that. Considered as a neural entity, however, even a syllable is a complex thing, having
a vocal motor aspect and an auditory aspect, each of which is itself distributed over a complex neural
meshwork. While it is convenient for us to think about e.g. syllables as unitary things, as implemented in the
brain they are complex neural processes. One could say the same thing about literary characters. The
representation of even an imaginary person will be dispersed over many brain regions, making such a
representation a very complex neural entity indeed. Yet it is often useful to think about characters as unitary
objects. The multiplicity that exists in the brain often seems, to the mind, to be a coherent unity.
This phenomenon is often discussed as the binding problem, which has received considerable
discussion within the neuroscience community (Triesman 1996, Freeman 2000). What I am suggesting,
however, is that the phenomenon of binding be interpreted as evidence of the mind at work. If you will, it is
this capacity for binding that allows a nervous system to implement a mind.
We should also consider Eleanor Rosch’s (1997) sharp observation that experimental psychology has
neglected any consideration of William James’ stream of consciousness, a neglect, so far as I can tell, that
extends to the recent resurgence of work on consciousness in philosophy and psychology. It is not simply
that language processes, for example, are complex, but that when we are talking we are at one and the same
time observing the addressee, taking note of the flies gathering on the strawberry shortcake, the gulls flying
across the sun, and the infant’s cry from across the street. All of these are interleaved in the stream of
consciousness, and yet we manage to keep a conversation going in a coherent manner (Benzon 2001, 71 ff.;
2003a). That is the mind at work and, for all the advances we have made in understanding the brain, the mind
– what the brain does – remains a mystery.
Beyond this we must take account of the fact that, while the human nervous system is pretty much
the same in all human populations, and has been so for the last 100,000 years or more, culture varies
considerably among populations (cf. Spolsky 2002, p. 46). There is, moreover, considerable variation among
cultures in the formal and informal institutionalization of access to altered states of consciousness (Furst
1972, Winkelman 1992) and in the use of external supports for mental activity (e.g. image-making, writing,
calculating devices, etc., see Donald 1991, Hobart and Schiffman 1998). These differences have to do, not
with the brain, but with how the brain is used; these are mental differences.
Literary form is the trace of literary mode as characterized in the previous section. When we examine
literary forms, we are observing traces of the mind in motion. The study of literary form is to a naturalist
criticism as the study of animal form and anatomy is to zoology. Unlike anatomy, however, literary form is
not spatial, it is temporal. Literature unfolds in time. That is why I have chosen to consider form under the
rubric of computation. Computation is irreducibly temporal.
Computation and the Cognitive Sciences
While the temporal nature of literary experience is one reason for taking computation as a model for literary
process, it is not my only reason for so doing. More generally, the idea of computation provided much of the
excitement and energy in the early years of the cognitive sciences. As Ulric Neisser remarked thirty years ago
(1976, pp. 5-6):
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. . . the activities of the computer itself seemed in some ways akin to cognitive processes. Computers
accept information, manipulate symbols, store items in “memory” and retrieve them again, classify
inputs, recognize patterns, and so on. Whether they do these things just like people was less important
than that they do them at all. The coming of the computer provided a much-needed reassurance that
cognitive processes were real; that they could be studied and perhaps understood.
Much of the work in the newer psychologies is conducted in a vocabulary that derives from computing and,
in many cases, involves computer simulations of mental processes. Prior to the computer metaphor we could
populate the mind with sensations, perceptions, concepts, ideas, feelings, drives, desires, signs, and so forth,
but we had no explicit accounts of how these things worked, of how perceptions gave way to concepts, or
how desire led to action. The computer metaphor gave us conceptual tools through which we could construct
explicit models.
Though it is an odd way of putting it, one might say that it is the computer metaphor that laid the
groundwork for the currently fashionable notion of embodied cognition. That formulation is odd on two
counts. In the first place, much of the rhetoric of computation talks of information and information
processing in such a way that almost sounds as though information were not physical. The important point,
of course, is that any given “chunk” of information can take different physical forms – marks on paper,
voltage spikes in a circuit, polarized regions in a magnetic coating, etc. – but always, information is physically
embodied and so available for use by the appropriate physical system. In the second place, at least some
proponents of embodied cognition see their work in opposition to earlier versions of cognition that are
tightly bound to notions of information and computation (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1999, pp. 74 ff.). I take this
confusion as evidence of the provisional state of our investigations.
However much inquiry has followed from application of the idea of computing to the understanding
of human behavior, we are a long way from a consensus psychology built around the idea of computation.
Nor does one seem to be on the horizon. It is very much a work in progress.
That being the case, how can one employ the idea of computation in the study of literary form? First
I wish to make a simple observation about computation as it is currently understood. Computation is not
essentially or even primarily about number and quantity. For most of us, arithmetic may be what comes most
easily to mind when we think of computation. Arithmetic is certainly computation; but when we are doing it,
we are actually manipulating symbols according to well-defined rules. We have symbols that stand for
numerals (zero through nine) symbols that stand for operators (plus, minus, times, divide by, and equals), and
the decimal point. When we manipulate these symbols in certain ways, we perform calculations. No more, no
less.
In the current understanding, computation is symbol manipulation as embodied in the abstract
notion of a Turing machine and similar conceptions (cf. Minsky 1967). But this notion itself is too general to
give us specific guidance. A good computational model of natural language would be obviously be useful.
Despite considerable investigation going back to the 1950s, however, we do not yet have such a model. Nor
is it obvious that such a model would be sufficient, for as our second proposition asserts, “literary language is
linked to extralinguistic sensory and motor schemas.” And that implies that a computational model for
literary texts must deal with extralinguistic matters as well. And so we have worked our way back to the
notion that we do not yet have a consensus psychology grounded in the idea of computation.
In this situation I can see little recourse but to proceed informally. I have already mentioned some
basic concepts in my discussion of Practical Criticism and Its Vicissitudes. In the next section I will develop
those concepts primarily through the notion of a relational network (cf. Norman and Rumelhart 1975). Imagine
a spider’s web. The junctions between threads are called nodes and represent concepts while the threads
themselves are called links and represent relationships between concepts. Such models are widespread in the
cognitive sciences and have been developed in many different domains. iii
Processes in Networks
One of the primary objects of literary computation is simply to compose meaning, on the fly, from the
succession of words in the text. This is not the only computational process – we must also consider the
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sound and rhythm of those words, we must consider style – but that is what I want to concentrate on in this
section. Let us think of lexemes (that is, words) as being represented in a relational network. In Figure 2 dog
would be linked to animal through an ISA link (dog is an animal) and to eat by an AGENT (AGT) link, while in
the same subnetwork liver is linked to eat by a PATIENT (PAT) link (dog eats liver), and so forth through all
the types of concepts and relationships.
Figure 2: Relational Network of Lexemes
The information depicted in this figure could also be represented as a set of propositions, as follows:
ISA (dog, animal)
AGT (dog, eat)
PAT (liver, eat)
ISA (liver, food)
Here we have four propositions, one for each of the relations depicted in the figure. Each proposition
consists of the name of a relation (corresponding to a link in the diagram), over two arguments enclosed in
parentheses (corresponding to the nodes at either end of the link). The order of the arguments corresponds
to the direction of the relationship between them. Dogs are animals, not the reverse. When such networks are
programmed on a computer, propositional forms are used.
The network depicted in Figure 2 is small and quite simple; think of it as a fragment of a larger
network. The networks used in computer simulations of human thinking are quite large, but like that in
Figure 2, they a composed of simple parts connected to one another in simple ways. In the work I did with
David Hays we distinguished between sensorimotor schemas, on the one hand, and cognitive networks on
the other (Benzon 1976, 1978, Hays 1981). Things like dog, pine tree, walk, salt, and so forth, things one can
apprehend with the senses, would be characterized by sensorimotor schemas, and those schemas would, in
turn, provide the foundation for nodes in the cognitive network. Thus the dog, eat, and liver nodes in Figure
2 would be associated with corresponding sensorimotor schemas. We also had mechanisms for defining
abstract concepts over patterns in cognitive networks (Hays 1976, Benzon and Hays 1990a).
For our immediate purposes, however, the important point is that two general classes of operations
can be defined in networks, path tracing and pattern matching (Hays 1977). These processes involve changing
the states of the nodes in a network, e.g. from quiescent to active. In Figure 3 we see some network in which a
particular path is highlighted; those nodes in that path are said to be active while the other nodes are
quiescent. It might, for example, might trace the opening of Shakespeare’s sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit
in a waste of shame/Is lust in action …“
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Figure 3: Path Tracing
In Figure 4 two areas of the network are highlighted, each consisting of five nodes where the pattern
of connection is the same in each network. Though the two subnets have different orientations and overall
proportions in the 2D representation of the network, those are irrelevant; what matters is the pattern of
connectivity, and that is the same in each network. Each consists of four nodes connected by five links in the
same configuration. Hence the patterns match. Of course, pattern matching implies a second order network,
or some other meta-structure, to recognize the match (Hays 1981).
Figure 4: Pattern Matching
Continuing with Shakespeare’s sonnet, one of those fragments might represent the basic lust
sequence at the heart of the sonnet while the other embodies the simile that is introduced in lines seven and
eight: “. . . a swallow'd bait/On purpose laid to make the taker mad.” Both of these actions involve a three
part sequence and so the network fragments representing those sequences have the same form (see Figure 5).
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Figure 5: Lust and Madness
Working in this way we could construct a relational network as the basis for the sonnet’s meaning
(Benzon 1976). The meaning of the poem would then arise in the interaction between the text and such a
network, where the network is implemented in someone’s mind. Such networks, of course, may differ from
one individual to another and even where highly similar, may have different emotional resonance.
Thus far we have two general computational processes, path tracing and pattern matching; I believe
there are at least two others. So far we have assumed that the meanings of individual lexical items combine in
what I will call complementation mode. The perceptual and cognitive schemas that give meaning to the lexemes
take their place “alongside” one another in a conceptual frame of some sort, but they do not interact with one
another in a deep way. When the supporting schemas interact with one another in a rich way we have
conceptual blending as Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have discussed (2002). Path tracing can support
blending on a small scale while pattern matching supports blending on a larger scale. When David Hays and I
(Benzon and Hays 1987) argued that strong metaphor depends on sensorimotor schemas we were, in effect,
offering a neural model of at least some aspects of conceptual blending. In our view, metaphor uses the
propositional power of language to “filter” one sensorimotor schema through another, with the resulting
“precipitate” being an abstraction that is the emergent ground of the metaphor linking the two sensorimotor
schemas.
Note that these processes of semantic meaning – path tracing and pattern matching in both
complementation and blending modes – are not specific to literature. These processes apply to language in
general. Specifically literary processes have to do with literary form and style. It is not clear to me that it is
possible to formulate a completely general principle of literary style and form. When properly interpreted,
Roman Jakobson’s (1960) well-known poetic function may well be just the thing. But I am not aware of such
an interpretation. The sense of Jakobson’s function is to move the physical stuff of language, its sounds and
rhythms, into the foreground or ones consciousness. I suspect that literary texts do this more thoroughly, and
on more scales of organization, than do other texts. But I am not prepared either to assert or argue this point
here and now; it must be considered open to further investigation. In any event, I see little need sharply to
divide the world of texts into literary and non-literary texts. I am content to think of that division as a fuzzy
one that depends on more or less local habits and conventions and, as such, is subject to change and revision.
Now let us connect use the idea of a network to develop the ideas of constituency and armature. Let
us start with constituency. Consider Figure 6:
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Figure 6: Path with Three Constituents
The diagram depicts the same path displayed in Figure 3, with is the path traced through some cognitive
network as it is rendered into language. In Figure 6 the path has been broken into three segments. Each of
those segments is a constituent of the entire path. Each of those segments could, in principle, be divided into
constituents and, by the same token, the entire path could be a constituent in some longer path.
There is psychological evidence that the constituent structure of sentences reflects the way the mind
(unconsciously) parses them for processing (Neisser 1966: 259 ff., Taylor 1976: 105 ff.). I am simply, and
perhaps rashly, extending this notion to the entire text (as does Cureton 1992, pp. 179 ff.). The meaning of a
text may or may not, ultimately, be a single gestalt. But the process of arriving at that meaning has a structure
in which partial meanings are “computed” and, in turn, combined into more comprehensive meanings, until
the entire text has been comprehended (Alvarez-Lacalle and Dorow 2006).
To develop the notion of an armature, consider Figure 7:
Figure 7: Animals Eat Food
At the top of the network we have three nodes that could be rendered into language as a simple
generalization, animals eat food. Beneath the animal node we have a tree structure indicating that birds and
beasts are animals, and that robins and eagles are birds while dogs and horses are beasts; obviously this is only
a portion of the tree for animals. Anyone of these subordinate nodes could be substituted for animal in the
assertion, “animals eat food,” and the assertion would remain valid. Thus we could consider animal to be a
variable while beast and bird would be specific values for that variable, and so on for robin and eagle in relation
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to bird and dog and horse in relation to beast. This fundamental distinction, between variable and value, is
important to the notion of an armature.
Notice that the notion of food is as general as that of an animal. While robins and German
shepherds do eat food, what is food for one is not necessarily food for the other. German shepherds
generally don't eat worms nor do robins eat chopped liver. These are matters of empirical fact, not logical
form. “Dogs eat liver” is a valid assertion while “dogs eat tofu” is not. Liver and tofu are both kinds of food
but dogs eat the former, but not the latter. Once a variable has been chosen for one of the variables in a
generalization – such as “animals eat food” – that choice places constraints on the values that can be chosen for
the other variables. By armature I mean the generalization, such as “animals eat food,” along with the
constraints on animal types and food types (that is on values for the variables) required to produce valid
assertions.
This is not quite how Lévi-Strauss proceeded when he introduced the term in The Raw and the Cooked
(p. 199) for he was concerned with myths, not simple empirical generalizations. Where I talk of a general
assertion – e.g. animals eat food – he talks of a “a pattern of functions,” where his functions correspond to
my variables. And where I talk of values he talks of the code. In both cases the armature consists of “a
combination of properties that remain invariant” in various cases where code elements (values) have been
assigned to functions (variables). In the case of simple generalizations, the proper combinations yield true
statements; in the case of myths, the proper combinations yield satisfying myths. In the language of
structuralist linguistics (e.g. Jakobson 1956, 1960), constituency is related to the axis of combination while
armature is related to constraints on the axis of selection.
Given these various ideas about computation I offer these two closely related propositions:
3. Form: The form of a given work can be said to be a computational structure.
In this essay I will be concentrating on constituency and armature, but I do not believe that these
computational notions exhaust the idea of literary form, as I have already indicated.
4. Sharability: That computational form is the same for all competent readers.
In effect the sharability proposition states that the computational structure of a work is an objective property
of that work and, as such, is accessible to all qualified readers, that is, readers who have assimilated the
conventions governing a particular type of text. The meaning of texts is open-ended, but their form is not.iv
Most of my discussion will center on form itself, taking sharability for granted.
Constituent Structure
Let us begin our examination of constituency with a well-known formal pattern, the Shakespearean sonnet. In
this 14-line form three quatrains are followed by a couplet, thus:
Figure 8: Structure of a Shakespearean Sonnet
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The rhyme scheme is: abab cdcd efef gg. Note that this scheme reinforces the boundaries between the
quatrains.
Each branch of this tree indicates the “processing” of a portion of the poem. One processes section
of 1.11 and obtains a partial result. Once one has processed 1.12, one can now obtain a partial result for 1.1.
Sections 1.2 and 1.3 are processed in turn and, when complete, one can obtain a result for 1. One then
processes the final couplet and combines that partial result with the result for the quatrains and thus arrive at
the poem’s meaning. In the case of Shakespeare’s sonnet on “Th’expence of Spirit” the quatrains move back
and forth through a sequence of desire, consummation, and shame and the concluding couplet brings stability
and closure by admitting that all people share the emotional turmoil of that inevitable sequence (Benzon
1976, 1978, 1981, 1993a: 131-133; see Hobbs 1990: 115-130 for the analysis of a Milton sonnet).
All competent readers will parse the text in the same way; that is to say they will arrive at the same
structure of partial meanings being organized into more inclusive meanings culminating in the meaning of the
entire text. As I have already indicated, this process is unconscious. It is not something one does deliberately
and according to explicit criteria. Where competent readers will differ is in the meanings evoked at the lowest
level of this constituent structure. The important point, however, is that the varying meanings different
readers bring to the words and phrases in a text are processed in a computational structure that is the same
for all competent readers. The significance of this assertion will become more apparent with the discussion of
hypotheses five and six below. For now, I want to return to constituent structure.
The constituent structure of fixed poetic forms, such as the sonnet or madrigal, is obvious enough; it
is, in fact, defined in the form itself—which, of course, affords the poet the opportunity to work against the
structure, a complication which is beyond the scope of a brief statement such as this (cf. Fish 1980, Tsur
1992, pp. 126 ff.). But constituent structure exists, of course, in poems not based on formulas that strictly
govern meter, rhyme, and stanza structure, such as Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” or “Kubla
Khan.” The constituent structure of “Kubla Khan” is quite elaborate, consisting of a systematic interplay of
binary and ternary branchings (for details of this analysis see Benzon 1985, 2003b). The ternary branchings
provide the key to the poem’s structure. The diagram below depicts those ternary branchings. I have
“trimmed” the binary branchings to simplify the structure a bit; all of the terminal nodes in the following tree
in fact have binary branchings except 1.221, 1.222, 1.223, 2.221, 2.222, and 2.223:
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Figure 9: Constituents in “Kubla Khan”
The poem has an elaborate rhyme scheme which parallels the constituent structure quite closely, deviating
from it in only two sections, 1.22 and 2.22. Notice that the deviation is at the same structural position in the
two sections of the poem. In the first part of the poem that middle of the middle is where the fountain
bursts into Kubla’s realm and gives birth to the river Alph. In the second part of the poem that middle of the
middle consists of a single line (47), “That sunny dome! those caves of ice!” The poem’s structure thus
suggests that those two elements perform a similar function in their respective contexts (cf. Roman
Jakobson’s remarks on the poetic function of language, 1960). We should note that line 47 is a repetition of
the line 36 (“A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”), which ends the first section of the poem and which,
according to my semantic analysis, embodies the various threads of meaning at play in that section.
With respect to this particular poem, the identification of form with computation asserts that the
meaning of the first section of the poem enters into the meaning of the second section at line 47. Sharability
asserts that this is true for all competent readers regardless of the specific and individual associations each
may have for the various words and phrases in the poem. However the sense of that pairing (the sunny dome
and caves of ice) may vary from one reader to another, that the paring occurs twice in the poem, and just
where it occurs, that is the same for all readers. Given the infamous history of this particular poem and its
critical commentary (see Tsur 1987), these are not trivial assertions.
The more general argument, of course, is that similar assertions are true for all works of literature.
My examples have been drawn from lyric poetry, but I think the principle applies to other distinct types as
well. I do not, however, regard the business of “scaling” up from relatively short lyrics to full-scale dramas
and narratives as a simple or obvious matter. Let me offer a few informal remarks.
One example of a large-scale formal structure is the ternary form that Northrup Frye (1965) and C.
L. Barber (1959) have identified in Shakespearean comedy. As both of them knew, the form is an old one.
The skeletal story is a simple one: 1) boy meets girl, 2) they are separated, 3) they are reunited. Patrick Colm
Hogan (2003) has found this story in many oral and literate cultures around the world. As Shakespeare has
realized the form, the whole world of the play shifts into a different mode in the separation phase. In this
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middle phase social structure is temporarily dissolved and it is through that dissolution that the couple can
become reunited society be reconstituted around them.
Note that at this point we have gone beyond simply identifying constituent structure. We are now
analyzing the relationship between different constituents. It is one thing to say that a story has three
components; it is another thing to assert that, for some class of texts each having three components, the
components have certain characteristics. In general, once one has identified the constituents, one then goes
on to characterize the role each component plays in the complete work.
I have analyzed a different kind of triple form in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1977). The story
begins and ends in Camelot but the middle episode (the third of the text’s four divisions) takes place at
Hautdesert, in the wilderness far from Camelot. Hautdesert is an anti-court. King Arthur presides at Camelot,
but a woman – Arthur’s half-sister, Morgan Le Fay – presides at Hautdesert. Whereas knights pursue ladies
at Camelot – Gawain was among the most gallant – ladies pursue knights at Hautdesert; Gawain is pursued
by his host’s wife. The story is rich and ironic, and resists easy summary. My point is simply that it has a triple
form, one that shares a critical characteristic with other stories of triple form, that the middle sequence takes
place in an anti-world.
More elaborate structures, of course, are possible. One such structural type is so-called ring form
(Peterson 1976, Paxson 2001), where a narrative will unfold through a series of steps to a mid-point and then
trace its way back through the same series of steps, but in reverse, thus:
1 2 3 … X … 3’ 2’ 1’
Mary Douglas (1993, 1999) has been investigating ring structure in books of the Old Testament, while I have
found it in Osamu Tezuka’s graphic novel, Metropolis (Benzon, in press). The fact that rings are symmetrical
about a mid-point suggests that they may ultimately depend on the cognitive structures we use for use for
spatial navigation. If you travel from location A to N and then back you will pass the same landmarks on each
half of the journey, but in reverse order. This, of course, is no more than a raw suggestion.
Haruki Murakami’s recent novel, Kafka on the Shore, employs a different kind of formal device. The
story follows two protagonists, a teenaged boy and a middle age man and is organized into 49 relatively short
chapters plus a short introductory section focused on the boy. The first chapter is set in the present and is
about the boy. The second chapter is in the past and is about the man. The chapters then alternate to the end
of the book: boy, man, boy, man, and so on. As the story advances the two plots become intertwined into the
same story. While there may well be a higher level structure at work, that is, in this context, a secondary
matter. What is important is simply the use of alternating chapters as a formal device.
And so it could go for who knows how many more formal devices governing constituency. The
objective here is not to make an exhaustive list, but only an indicative one.
Armature
As the computational metaphor and algebraic example suggests, the notion of constituency has mathematical
roots. Mathematical expressions have variables (x and y, etc.) and variables can take values (such as numbers).
The elements of the armature are analogous to variables. As such, any number of elements in a literary work
could be in its armature – practically anything named in word or phrase. I do not, however, believe that is the
case; but I do not know how to formulate an a priori definition of armature elements. So we must proceed
inductively, by considering examples.
Characters may be the most important class of armature entities. For that reason I want to begin my
discussion of the armature by discussing characters. Let us start with a paragraph from Norman Holland's
The Dynamics of Literary Response. Holland is preparing to argue that we are justified in treating literary
characters, mere fictions, as though they we real people:
Let us turn and look in another direction, namely, Smith College where in 1944 two psychologists
performed a quite fascinating experiment. To a group of undergraduates, they showed an animated
cartoon detailing the adventures of a large black triangle, a small black triangle, and a circle, the three
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of them moving in various ways in and out of a rectangle. After the short came the main feature: the
psychologists asked for comments, and the Smith girls "with great uniformity" described the big
triangle as "aggressive," "pugnacious," "mean," "temperamental," "irritable," "power-loving,"
"possessive," "quick to take offense," and "taking advantage of his size" (it was, after all, the larger
triangle). Eight per cent of the girls even went so far as to conclude that this triangle had a lower I. Q.
than the other.
Those simple geometrical figures are no more representations of real people than are the subjects of a Mozart
sonata. Yet the Smith students were quite comfortable discussing them as though they were human beings,
just as Barlow easily treated musical subjects as human subjects. Holland’s point is that we project human
fullness on to such things.
And so we do. But I want to suggest a somewhat converse notion, that on some level we experience
the diverse richness and articulation of well-wrought characters as though they were simple geometric figures
dancing about in space. That is to say, when we watch a Shakespeare play or read a Flaubert novel, there is a
level of our understanding that apprehends the interacting characters as though they were no more elaborated
than the triangles and circle of the film watched by the Smith students. I would speculate that those
mechanisms are subcortical and thus intimately linked to our subcortical emotional circuitry.
Consider the “vibe” you get upon first meeting someone, that lasting first impression in which you
inscribe later impressions. If I had to guess, I would guess that such appraisals are made in the portions of the
limbic system (informally, i.e. the “lizard” brain) that are devoted to emotion and social cognition while our
more differentiated apprehension of others is embodied in phylogenetically more recent cortical tissue. And
so it would be with literary characters as well; each character has a relatively undifferentiated subcortical
component that is linked to a highly articulated cortical component. The “paths” the subcortical components
“trace” in “socio-emotive space” are analogous to the development of musical subjects in a composition.
I am thus asserting that we treat characters, not simply as complex ordered collections of various
attributes (cf. Rimon-Kenan 1983, 29-42), but that we also treat them as integrated wholes. If this is true at
all, it will be true because human beings are very astute at assessing one another and in appraising social
situations, a matter that has been given considerable attention in recent thinking about human evolution (see
e.g. Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Boehm 1999; Allman 1999, 173-174, and
Mithen 2005). I further suggest that the various manipulations considered under the heading of point of view
and focalization depend on the capacity to treat characters as single units of computation. Darwinian critic
Joseph Carroll (2004, 2005) has given special consideration to this in his most recent theorizing. Let me
suggest this proposition:
5. Character as Computational Unit: Individual characters can be treated as unified
computational units in some, but not necessarily all, literary forms.
Now we are ready to consider a specific example, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. This
comedy presents us with two very different couples, Claudio and Hero, and Beatrice and Benedick. Each
couple is involved in a romance and the overall structure of the play derives from the interaction of these two
plots. I suspect that competent readers “filter” (cf. my remarks about blending above) one couple’s story
through the other couple’s story and arrive at a psychological problematic which is common to both couples.
This is a formal possibility inherent in multiple plots and does not depend on the exact nature of the plots
nor of the characters in them (cf. Empson 1974, 34).
At this point it seems to me that we are working at the level of abstraction Propp assumed when he
discussed the functions of a tale’s dramatis personae. As Propp observed, “the number of functions is
extremely small, while the number of personages is extremely large” (Propp 1968, p. 20). The configuration
of functions realized in a particular story is a formal matter, while the details of the characters occupying
those functions belongs to the story’s content. The Shakespearean double plot involves a certain
configuration of functions; these functions are formal elements in the computational structure of the story-
form.
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One issue that has come up in commentary on Much Ado concerns Claudio’s character: Is he a true
romantic, deeply in love with Hero, or is he an opportunist on the lookout for an eligible heiress? Critics
favoring these positions (or variants of them) argue in the standard way, quoting passages to substantiate their
views on the matter. Both views thus have textual authorization. I would like to suggest that this particular
argument is of little consequence.
I make this suggestion, not because I am indifferent to the conflict between these two readings of
Claudio’s character – though one might well argue that, just as real people are not thoroughly consistent,
neither are literary characters – or even because I wish to allow different readers their own readings, though I
do wish to allow that. I have something different in mind. It seems to me that what is central to this play, as
with the subjects of a sonata, is formal contrast. In the play we contrast the two relationships and the
individuals in those relationships: Claudio and Hero, Beatrice and Benedick. It is the contrast between
Claudio and Benedick that is important, not the exact formulation of either one’s character. Whatever
Claudio’s motivation, he interacts with Hero in a way that is quite different from the way Benedick interacts
with Beatrice. The relationship between Claudio and Hero is asymmetrical; he talks and pursues while she
says little and consents to his suit. The relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is symmetrical; they both
talk, a lot, and there is no conventional male pursuit of his beloved. The contrast between these two sets of
lovers is, I submit, more robust than their individual natures considered in isolation. That contrast is central
to the play and it is, in the sense that I am arguing, a formal matter. That contrast is between characters in the
play’s armature.
My next proposition is a generalization of that observation:
6. Armature Invariance: The relationships between the entities in the armature of a literary work are
the same for all readers.
Whether or not that proposition is true, what it means is clear enough in the case of characters. To take
another example, however readers may disagree about Hamlet’s nature, the relationships between Hamlet and
Ophelia, Hamlet and Gertrude, Hamlet and Claudius, and so forth, will exhibit greater consistency. But what
does this mean for other kinds of entities, and just what other kinds of entities might be in the armature?
Let us consider a recent movie: the recent remake of King Kong. The armature of such a story certainly
includes the main characters, such as Kong, the actress Ann Darrow, the movie director, the boat captain,
and few others. But it may also include places, e.g. New York and Skull Island. There is a moment
somewhere in the middle of the film when Kong and Ann are resting in his nest on Skull Island, high up on
the mountain. It is early evening and we see them interacting against the sunset in the background. This
moment had been preceded by a great deal of strenuous action and violence. There is a similar moment near
the end of the film. In this moment Kong is atop the Empire State building and is wounded from having
been shot several times by machine guns mounted in airplanes. He had carried Ann here as we was running
from his captors. Again, a great deal of violence has preceded this moment. But, for this moment, the planes
have stopped shooting at Kong and he is resting, with Ann sitting in his hand. It is evening, and the sun lights
the sky behind them, just as it had back in his mountain nest.
Whatever any given movie-goer feels in these moments, whatever they think they mean, the parallel
is there for everyone to see. I am suggesting that even such incidents, akin to Propp’s functions, are
components of the armature as well. Whatever feelings these scenes may evoke in viewers, the relationship
between the two scenes is fixed for all viewers. That relationship is fixed by the movie itself, the relative ordering
between them, the exact time between them, the preceding and succeeding sounds and images, those are all
fixed.
Beyond this, it is not obvious to me how one would provide a general and a priori characterization of
the entities that constitute the armature of a text. I have talked about the major characters in a narrator, and
about specific episodes. Are minor characters part of the armature? What of the many characters in, e.g. War
and Peace: are all of them in the armature? The answer is not immediately obvious, nor is it particularly
pressing.
Lyric poetry presents more pressing issues. Here there is only one speaking character, the poet or
poetic voice, though there may be one or more characters addressed or spoken about. In any event, the
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burden of the work is variously on what is seen, thought, felt, or desired. Consider, once again, Shakespeare’s
sonnet 129. How many characters do we have here? Certainly there is the rather abstractly conceived person
consumed and troubled by lust. Is “the world” that “well knows” this story to be considered a separate
character? Regardless of the answer, I also believe that the stations of lust (recall Figure 5) are in this poem’s
armature. The order in which they are evoked is necessarily the same for all readers.
As another example, recall “Kubla Khan.” Kubla and the wailing woman are in the armature, as are
the ancestors, all in the first movement. In the second movement we have the poet, the damsel with a
dulcimer, and the auditors who cry “Beware!” Beyond that, I have already noted that lines 36 and 47 are
almost exactly the same, and have asserted that the poem’s structure fixes the relationship between those lines
for all readers. But we could also consider simply the caves of ice, on the one hand, and the sunny pleasure-
dome on the other. They are significant entities in that poem and I would expect that the relationship
between them is the same for all readers, through each reader might well have his or her own sense of them.
The poem has other significant entities as well, including the fountain, the river Alph, the music loud and
long, and so forth.
As a still different example, consider William Carlos Williams’s “To a Solitary Disciple,” the poem
Lakoff and Turner used as their central example in More Than Cool Reason. We have the poetic voice, an
addressee mentioned only once – “mon cher” in the first line – and a series of admonitions from the first to
the second – observe, notice, grasp, see, etc. -- and two central objects, the moon and the church steeple.
The moon and the steeple are surely armature entities, but the poet and his disciple? What of the colors –
pink, turquoise, orange, etc. – so important in the poem? The answers to these questions are not clear. Other
than the steeple and the moon, it is not clear that these entities play the signal role in this poem that
characters play in a narrative.
Perhaps the notion of an armature is not so useful for such poems, either because it captures too
little or even because it might be forced to capture too much. I can see no way to puzzle through the issue
except to consider specific examples in some detail. That is beyond the scope of this essay. If the notion of an
armature is useful for a large set of literary works, that is all I ask of it. A generalization need not be all
encompassing if it is to be useful.
An Empirical Note
It is fine and dandy to assert, as I have done, that relationships between the entities in the armature of a
literary work are the same for all readers. I have even provided some argumentation in one specific case, Much
Ado About Nothing. But how could we get empirical evidence on the matter?
While I certainly do not have a general approach to offer, nor do I know of any empirical work that
speaks to the problem, I have a suggestion about how we could begin gathering evidence. Let us consider the
case of literary characters and continue with Much Ado as an example.
I think the five-factor personality model could be used to gather relevant evidence. This model
conceives of personality as have five factors: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional
Stability, and Openness to Experience (cf. Carroll 2004). Mathematically, each of five factors corresponds to a
dimension in an abstract personality space – perhaps this is the perceptual space of our neural equipment for
social cognition. A subject completes a test instrument and, on the basis of his or her responses, is assigned a
value on each of the five factors. Thus the nature of one’s personality is characterized by a point in a five-
dimensional space. While the commonest use of the model is for individuals to appraise themselves using an
appropriate test instrument, it is also possible to use test instruments to appraise the personalities of others
(Funder 1999). I have been assured by experts (David Funder and Joseph Glickstein, personal
communication) that it would be possible to evaluate the personalities of fictional characters.
To test my hypothesis about characters in Much Ado we would have subjects read the play or watch a
performance of it. Once they are done, let them rate each of the four central characters using a five-factors
test instrument. Thus, for each test subject we will end up with four points in the five-dimensional space
defined by the five factors; each point indicates the personality of one of the central characters in the play:
Beatrice, Benedick, Claudio, or Hero. Four points determine a quadrilateral. So let us now compare the
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quadrilaterals generated by each subject’s response as measured by a five-factors inventory. My hypothesis is
that, while the quadrilaterals may vary among the subjects in position and orientation within the space, they
will be congruent with one another. That is, the corresponding sides will have the same lengths and the
corresponding angles will be the same as well.
Figure 10: Characters in Abstract Personality Space
Figure 10 illustrates the general principle; though that space is only 2-dimensional, the principle holds
for spaces of higher dimensionality. On the left we see two sets of points indicating the personality judgments
of two hypothetical subjects; the judgment of one subject is represented by round points, the other by square
points. Since the corresponding points for these two subjects are in different locations, it is clear that these
two subjects differ in how they assess the personality of each of the characters. Now look at the right, where
one set of judgments (square points) has been rotated counter clockwise so that we can more readily compare
the two sets. We see that the quadrilaterals are congruent, indicating that both subjects regard the relationships
between the characters as the same.
Obviously this particular mode of empirical investigation will not work where we have armature
entities that are not people. It would not be appropriate if we wanted to gauge the relationships among
fountain, dome, and caves in “Kubla Khan.” We might, however, try asking subjects to think of those things
as though they were people and then to ascribe personality characteristics to them – recall the Smith experiment
that Holland reports.
More directly, we could use a different text instrument. Psychometricians have many other them;
perhaps the venerable semantic differential (Osgood, May and Miron 1975) would produce useful results.
Whatever the test instrument, I do not, in principle, see any problem with conducting such measurements.1
Forms and Formalism
However important constituency and armature are, they are not the only formal aspects of literary works, as I
have remarked before. Returning to Shakespeare, for example, he uses distinctly different kinds of language –
blank verse, rhymed verse, prose, etc. – for different dramatic purposes. That too is a matter of literary form,
as are the various strategies of the narrative voice in novels. Other phenomena are relevant, many discussed
under the rubric of narratology (Genette 1980, 1988), but these examples are enough to suggest that there is
more to literary form than constituent structure and poetic sound patterning. A naturalist criticism will need
to reconceptualize traditional discussions of these forms using computationally informed strategies. Reuven
Tsur’s Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics, conceived under the aegis of Gestalt psychology, catalogues and
illustrates many formal devices, and brings them within the scope of the contemporary cognitive sciences.
1The binary oppositions that the structuralists were fond of might be considered aspects of the armature as
well. I have added a short note about obtaining neural evidence about such oppositions in Appendix 2. [Note
added 6 August 2016.]
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The world’s literatures exhibit hundreds if not thousands of formal devices. This is no place to
attempt a catalogue of them, nor even a catalogue of essays and monographs about literary forms. My
purpose has been to offer a some examples from two major formal categories – computation and armature –
to exemplify what I am talking about form as the trace of the mind in motion.
At the same time and given the preceding arguments, however, it is not difficult to see how the New
Critics were so easily attracted to the notion of the autonomous text that bears its meaning within itself. The
arguments I have made in this section suggest that the text does place very strong constraints on the reader’s
experience and it does so for all readers. Readers, real readers, are not abstract theoretical constructs. They
have bodies and brains, and those brains and bodies place limits on what readers can construe from a text.
Thus, while the text itself is but symbols on a page, those symbols are the result of a long cultural history
adapting them to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of real brains. At the same time, no reader can divest
him or herself of the particularities of his or her history, whether personal or cultural. Each will experience
the text in a different way – and a given individual may experience one and the same text in different ways at
different times – and will find different meanings in it through the process of articulating that experience in
casual conversation, friendly correspondence, or formal written criticism. These differences are ineluctable.
No critical method can hope to eliminate them or to transcend them.
For all their insistence on the importance of form, the New Critics were, as critics, concerned
primarily to explore the meaning of texts. They did not study form, rather they assumed it, and studied
meaning on the basis of that assumption. I propose to invert that relationship. Let us study form, and use
meaning as a source of evidence about form, as I did in attending to the bower and the sun in Coleridge’s
“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” Noticing that both bower and sun occur twice in the poem, and where
they occur – that is easy, whereas figuring out what they mean, as symbols, is not so easy. I do not deny that
the bower and the sun function as symbols in the poem, nor do I deny the importance of that function. But
consideration of those issues is a separate matter from identifying the formal structure of the poem. I am
arguing both that we devote time and energy to pursuing this more modest goal in a more comprehensive
and rigorous fashion than earlier generations of critics have done and that the computational metaphor
affords some guidance in this work.
Literature in Society: History and Evolution
In the small, biology is the study of molecules, tissues, morphology, and physiology. In the large it is the study
populations, phenotypic variation and, above all, evolution. Literature comes in an astonishing variety of
forms, from the very small, such as the 17 syllable haiku, to the very large, such as narratives sprawled out
over multiple volumes. That suggests that literature might be amenable to evolutionary study, but whether or
not such inquiry can take hold, that is a different matter.
The notion that culture, and therefore literature, evolves is not a new one. Nineteenth century
thinkers talked easily about the evolution of languages, cultures, and plants and animals. But evolutionary
study has only taken hold in biology. The evolutionary study of culture has languished.
There are signs, however, that that is changing. When Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in
1976 he speculated that culture too might evolve and he coined the term “meme” to indicate the cultural
analog to the biological gene. The term entered the general lexicon and has attracted an enormous amount of
popular and journalistic commentary, but very little serious scholarship. The general interest in Darwinism,
however, has proven so robust that there is a growing, if scattered, academic literature on cultural evolution.v
Thus an intellectual context is emerging in which we can consider literature as a facet of cultural evolution (cf.
Spolsky 2002).
Elasticity and Change
With that in mind, let us consider a passage from Ellen Spolsky’s “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary
Theory As a Species of Post-Structuralism” (2002, p. 52):
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the gap between the signifier and the signified is no tragedy; it builds in the flexibility to allow the
system to meet the challenge of new contexts and to use old words in new combinations and with
new meanings. It is true that deviations from conventional or expected uses are risky. Attempts to
communicate might fail or might not succeed unless buttressed with other communications—facial or
hand gestures, pictures, paraphrases, and wordy explanations. And even then they might fail. But the
prospect of never being able to adapt the representational system to new contexts is worse from the
point of view of species survival. Thus one could hypothesize that the human representational system
evolved in response to a tension between two needs, the need for good enough (reliable enough)
representation and the need for a flexible representational system.
Spolsky thus sees “the gap between the signifier and the signified,” not as a deficiency to be tolerated and
somehow accommodated. On the contrary, it is a virtue. I believe Spolsky is correct, and that her point
requires another proposition:
7. Elasticity: The meaning of literary works is elastic and can readily accommodate differences in
expressive detail and differences among individuals.
Note specifically that I have decided to phrase this property in positive terms, as elasticity, rather than in
negative terms, whether Spolsky’s “gap” or in terms of being indeterminate, or incomplete. While this is, in
some measure, a matter of mere semantics, it is also a matter of connotation and emphasis. And that, I
believe, is important.
As Spolsky argues, in her article and in the quoted passage, it is this elasticity that allows for change
and therefore history as something more than one thing after another. The persistence of works from an
earlier to a later, and culturally different, time gives us a purchase on the past that allows us to see human
history as an evolving shape in a temporality that is measured in decades, centuries, millennia and tens and
hundreds of millennia. While we can never read Coleridge, Shakespeare, Sappho, or Shikibu as their
contemporaries did – not even with the aid of the most generous and ingenious New Historicist collections
of resonant contemporary oddities – we can measure our distance from them and attempt to understand the
processes that both connect and separate us.
Increasing Sophistication of Literary Forms
That literary forms change over time is not in itself problematic. But those forms do more than simply
change. Over the long run forms become sophisticated as more powerful computational strategies emerge.
Thus my eighth proposition:
8. Increasing Formal Sophistication: The long-term course of literary history has been toward
forms of increasing sophistication.
For about two decades David Hays and I pursued an intellectual program in what is, in effect, comparative
cultural anatomy. It seemed to us that some cultures seem to use more sophisticated cognitive and expressive
systems than others. Jointly and together we undertook studies characterizing the structures and mechanisms
behind that sophistication in the realms of cognition (Benzon and Hays 1990a), expressive culture (Hays
1992), narrative (Benzon 1978, 1993a), music (Benzon 1993b, 2001, 222-249), and technology (Hays 1995).
We made a general argument that focuses on speech, writing, calculation, and computing as the driving forces
in cultural sophistication (cf. Hobart and Schiffman 1998). As cultures developed more sophisticated external
supports (Donald 1991, 275 ff.) for mental activity (writing, algorithms, computers), they developed more
sophisticated ways of organizing all mental activities. We have used the term “rank” to label these levels of
sophistication and speculate that four such ranks have so far arisen in human history (cf. Barnes 2000).
The critical point is that the set of constructions and processes at rank N logically presupposes those
of rank N-1. Our conception of cultural rank is similar to Piaget’s notion of stages, where later stages develop
from earlier ones through a process of reflective abstraction (Piaget 1970, 1971, 1976). That is what justifies
saying that one cultural form is of a higher cognitive rank than another.
Note that sophistication and complexity are not the same thing. Calculation by Roman numerals is
not so sophisticated as calculation by Hindu-Arabic numerals, but it is often more complex. The Hindu-
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Arabic system is distinguished by the use of the decimal point and by a symbol, zero, indicating the absence
of magnitude. Grasping the meaning and utility of zero was not easy for Europeans (Crosby 1997, 113 ff.). It
is sophistication that Hays and I have focused on in developing ranks theory.
Beyond this, I note that nothing in this scheme precludes the development of even further ranks of
the cultural forms. There is no “top level” to this scheme; or, if you will, the existence of a top level at any
time will inevitably tempt someone to go up there and construct yet another level. Nor is the scheme
teleological; Hays and I have not postulated any end-point toward which cultural forms are evolving. This
differentiates our work from older conceptions of cultural evolution where an endpoint was often postulated
(cf. Shweder 1991, pp. 117-119).
My work on the evolution of literary forms has been specifically on the narrative and its relation to
the self (Benzon 1978, 1993a). While I cannot summarize the whole argument here, I can give some small
sense of it. A cognitive and particularly a computational perspective is particularly important here, for it
provides a way of giving substance to the notion of sophistication. For example, consider the well-known
classic distinction between story and plot (cf. Schklovsky 1965). Story refers to the intrinsic temporal order of a
series of events in some narrative while plot refers to the order in which those events are introduced into a
particular narrative. Where plot order and story order are the same, there is no need to make the distinction.
But many narratives introduce events in some order other than that intrinsic to those events. Thus the in
medias res convention of epic allows one to begin a narrative with events well along in the temporal and causal
chain and then introduce flashbacks to tell earlier episodes in the story.
Such a narrative scheme requires greater sophistication than simply telling events in order. But this
phenomenon has had little or no force in literary theorizing beyond noting that plotting can and often does
present story events out of temporal sequence. However, in the computationally informed world of cognitive
science it is obvious that narratives in which plotting differs from story require sophisticated cognitive
machinery (Benzon 1978, 201-210; 1993a, 136-137). One can use a certain range of constructions to create
narratives in which plot and story are undifferentiated. To differentiate them, one must add constructions to
the repertoire that explicitly operate on temporal order. What I am suggesting is that such additional constructions
were invented in the course of human history and allowed people to tell more sophisticated tales. A
computationally informed criticism must take account of such inventions and explore their literary
consequences.
The capacity for differentiating story and plot is not the only difference between rank 2 narrative and
rank 1 narrative, though it is perhaps the most obvious one. The actors in rank 2 narrative are more richly
realized than those in rank 1 narrative. By comparison to the actors in Iliad or Odyssey the actors in primitive
myths and folktales hardly have any character at all. They act, and different characters act in different ways.
But one has little sense that their actions flow from something within them, from a will, a style, a personal
character. Trickster, Cinderella, Amaterasu, and their kin have attributes, but little character. They do what the
plot demands of them, no more, no less.
When we get to the novel, however, we see not only actors with character, but actors with inner lives
who change and grow in the course of the narrative (cf. Scholes and Kellog 1966, 160 ff.). That does not
happen in Homer, the Old Testament, or Virgil. That is new, and requires a new rank of cognitive control over
narrative materials. In parallel with personal growth and an inner life, the novel also manipulates the
relationship between the narrator and the characters in the story, thus creating routine ironic effects that are
relatively rare in rank 2 narrative. As Leslie Fiedler (1966, 32-33) has remarked, with the novel we have “a
new kind of self, a new level of mind; for what has been happening since the eighteenth century seems more
like the development of a new organ than a mere finding of a new way to describe old experience.” Thus the
emergence of the novel represents a third rank in the evolution of narrative forms. I also believe that,
beginning with modernism in the last century, we are seeing the emergence of fourth rank narrative forms,
but hesitate to characterize it.
Lisa Zunshine’s recent book, Why We Read Fiction (2006), focuses on a problem that is relevant to this
discussion and that may well have diagnostic utility. She is interested in the way narratives focus our attention
on the minds of the characters, their thoughts, hopes, desires, intentions, and so forth. In particular, she is
interested in how characters make assumptions and inferences about one another’s minds and in the
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computational problem involved in following inferential chains of the form, “John thinks that Jenny desires
that Michael . . . “ and so forth. This capability has come to be known as “mind-reading” in the psychological
literature (cf. Baron-Cohen 1995). Zunshine reports empirical work indicating that people have trouble
following such chains beyond four links (pp. 28-29). One might ask, then, whether or not the novel differs
from other forms of narrative in the degree to which it exploits and extends this inferential capability. This
particular characteristic seems sufficiently “clear and distinct” – to borrow a phrase from Descartes – that it
could be used diagnostically in following the development of narrative forms, as I have proposed using the
differentiation of story and plot.
But this is only narrative. There are other forms of literature. If Hays are I are correct in our general
approach to the anatomy of cultural forms, then appropriate analysis should reveal ranks in poetic and
dramatic forms as well. Pending confirming evidence I offer this more specific proposition:
9. Ranks: Over the long-term literary history has so far evolved forms at four successive cognitive
ranks. These are correlated with a richer and more flexible construction of the self.
Note that, whatever its empirical validity, this work is entirely descriptive. I do not attempt to explain
why these forms have evolved in this way; I simply assert that they have. Before concluding this section by
offering some speculation about why this evolution has occurred, however, I want to review some large scale
studies first.
During roughly the third quarter of the twentieth century some anthropologists and archaeologists
did a great deal of empirical work on cultural complexity, mostly among preliterate societies. This work
typically involves large-scale cross-cultural studies. Much of it was directed toward forms of social
organization, establishing a sequence going from the hunting-gathering band, to the tribe, the village, the
chiefdom, petty-kingdom, and church-state (Hays 1993, chapter 5; Hays 1997; cf. Service 1975). Note that
these levels of social organization are all within preliterate cultures, suggesting that that rank notion is a rather
crude one, capturing only the broadest features of cultural evolution. Very little of this work, so far as I know,
was specifically directed at literary forms, but some indicative work has been done.
If we move, for a moment, from literature to music, we encounter a large study conducted by Alan
Lomax in the 1960s (1968). Lomax and his colleagues prepared a sample of over 3000 songs, representing
233 cultures from 5 continents plus the Pacific islands, and had judges code the songs on features of style—
nature of the performing group, relationship between vocal part and instrumental parts, melodic style,
rhythmic style, wordiness, tone quality, tempo, and so on. They correlated style traits with measures of social
complexity and found that the simpler the society, the simpler its song lyrics. The simplest societies used a
great deal of repetition and nonsense syllables. Similarly, the precision of enunciation varies with social
complexity; the more complex the society, the more precise the enunciation. The prevalence of solo singers
was also associated with complexity. In the simplest societies, everyone sang; no one was given or took a solo
role. It is only in more complex societies, with permanent leaders and social stratification, that we see
ensembles divided into a soloist and accompanists.
Returning to literature, John Roberts, Brian Sutton-Smith, and Adam Kendon (1963) were interested
in the relationship between child-rearing practices, community size, types of games, and folk tales. In
particular, they were interested in what they have called the strategic mode. Strategy plays minor role in games
of physical skill, but a dominant role in games such as chess and poker, which also has strong elements of
chance. In folk tales, we can examine how the outcome is achieved, whether through physical skill, chance
(guessing, casting lots, magic), or strategy (e.g. evaluating a situation, deception, out-witting an opponent).
They discovered that games of strategy are likely to co-occur with folktales having a strong strategic element
and that both are more likely in politically complex societies (chiefdoms and above).
Large-scale cross-cultural studies are rare among literary scholars, but not completely absent. Patrick
Hogan has published on narrative universals (2003); Michelle Scalise Sugiyama (2001) has examined the
practical information contained in narratives from a wide range of cultures; and Jonathan Gottschall (2005)
has been working on the characteristics of heroines in folk tales. None of these scholars, however, has been
interested in the kinds of issues studied by Lomax and by Roberts, Sutton-Smith, and Kendon.
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Now let us consider a different style of large-scale research. Franco Moretti (2003) has recently
published some very interesting work on the origins and course of the novel in Britain, Denmark, India,
Japan, Italy, Span, and Nigeria. In this work he is interested in sheer numbers, creating graphs depicting the
number of titles published per year over a century or more, starting in the eighteenth century. In most cases –
Britain, Denmark, India, Japan, Italy, Spain – he finds that the rise is not a steady one but is marked with
declines so long and deep that we must talk of the cyclic rise and fall of the novel.
To my mind, however, Moretti’s most interesting finding concerns the emergence of British
novelistic genres between 1750 and 1900. Most generally, he shows that the types of genre shift over time.
For example, Gothic novels were strong from 1800-1825, sporting novels seem to run from 1820 to 1860,
while imperial romances run from 1850 though 1890, and so on for over 40 genres. What is most interesting,
however, is that the genres seem grouped into six periods of creativity and they disappear in clusters as well.
Consequently there is an almost complete turn-over in genres every 25 years or so, that is, roughly a
generation (p. 80 ff.). Moretti cannot explain that nor can I. But it does seem to be a fact about literary
history and perhaps even a fact of a new kind.
How could one explain such a pattern? I find that to be a deep and puzzling question. But it is not
just the evolution of the British novel that puzzles me, it is the phenomenon of cultural, and literary,
evolution itself. The work of Lomax and of Roberts, Sutton-Smith, and Kendon suggests causal relations
between cultural forms and social organization – a game that has been played by legions of Marxist scholars
and critics – but the existence of such relations does not itself tell us why, in the long run, more complex and
sophisticated forms evolve.
The problem is important, but also obscure. Rather than attempt to summarize various approaches,
or to offer speculations of my own, I want simply to mention the work of Colin Martindale, who offers both
a causal model and empirical support for his model. Colin Martindale (1975, 1990) has been thinking about
this for a long time and he has both a theory and empirical data supporting that theory. His work is
sufficiently rich and complex that it resists summary formulation.
A need for novelty is the driving factor in Martindale’s scheme – as it has been in many schemes.
People seek the new. Novelty value is what recommends literary works to readers and, in turn, leads them to
recommend works to their friends. The trouble, of course, is that once one has sufficient experience of the
new, it looses its capacity to excite. It has become old. Psychologists call this habituation, and it is a much-
studied aspect of neural operation. Martindale argues that art overcomes habituation through changes in the
nature of the unconscious content of art and in the formal elaboration of content. Martindale has analyzed
long runs of French and British and American poetry, classical music, Gothic architecture, European
painting, Japanese prints, and New England grave stones. In all cases he has found cyclic variations in form
and content of the sort predicted by his theory.
Martindale’s theory is fundamentally about audience reception. It is the audience that decides which
works it likes and it is those preferences that, in the long run, allow selected works to enter the canon. Thus
when Martindale is tracking artistic change he is also indirectly tracking changes in the collective psyche.
Impressive though Martindale’s work is, it presents at least one difficulty. The majority of the
traditions Martindale has examined originated in or after the sixteenth century. This has been an era of
relatively rapid change throughout much of the world, with the rate of change and its geographic extent
increasing throughout the period. But there have been long stretches relative stasis in many cultural traditions.
In particular, cultural traditions from the earliest years of full humanity persisted well into the nineteenth
century, with a many small groups still remaining. If we are ever seeking novelty, what accounts for this
relative stasis?
Beyond observing that, without stability of norms and practices, we cannot have any culture at all, I
do not have an approach to this problem. Any account of expressive culture must allow for both stability and
change and account for the predominance or one or the other. However interesting and important that
problem is, it is far beyond the scope of this essay, and so I must leave it behind. It is one thing to describe
literary forms over historical time and cultural space. Explaining those differences, accounting for change and
variation in literary morphology, that is a different problem.
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In the Realm of the Aesthetic
I would like to conclude by considering a passage from one of Edward Said’s last essays, “Globalizing
Literary Study,” published in 2001 in PMLA. He says:
I myself have no doubt, for instance, that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists, yet how it exists in
relation to history, politics, social structures, and the like, is really difficult to specify. Questions and
doubts about all these other relations have eroded the formerly perdurable national and aesthetic
frameworks, limits, and boundaries almost completely. The notion neither of author, nor of work, nor
of nation is as dependable as it once was, and for that matter the role of imagination, which used to be
a central one, along with that of identity has undergone a Copernican transformation in the common
understanding of it.
That is a mountain of questioning and doubt. From it I would like to show how we can begin salvaging at
least some sense of the aesthetic as a force, and one under human control, if not as a completely autonomous
realm.
Consider the following diagram, which depicts, in a highly abstracted fashion, the relationship
between biology, culture, and the features – components of form and content – of literary works:
Figure 11: Biology and Culture in the Literary Work
On the left I have indicated the various biological and cultural factors acting on the artist while the various
features of literary works are on the right. One can think of this either as depicting the factors involved in
producing a particular work or as depicting the factors involved in producing a body of work. At this level of
abstraction there is little difference between the two.
The important part of the diagram is the middle block, the artist’s brain. What is important is that the
biological and cultural factors do not map on to the features in a simple manner. Each trait is subject to
multiple influencing factors, both biological and cultural. To be sure, in King Kong, for example, there is the
Empire State building. It is pretty easy to relate that particular trait to the real thing in the world. But I don’t
think anyone is going to argue that that real building has exerted any causal force on the movie. Literary and
other works will have many such features. But not everything about a work can be accounted for in such a
fashion. In particular, form cannot be so explained.
How then can we account for the traits of an individual literary work, or a body of works? The
writer’s brain, that is what is directly responsible for those works. Everything that acts upon and through the
writer is somehow present in the writer’s brain. But that brain consists of trillions of neurons, each of which
is linked to thousands and tens of thousands of other neurons. Such a system is complex beyond our
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comprehension and understanding. Given that complexity it is not unreasonable to think of the artist
exercising autonomous powers of imagination. These powers are not ethereal, disembodied, and outside
history, but the cannot be accounted for in any simple way. The brain is irreducibly complex. That it is the
brain that is complex does not somehow mean that it is “outside” or “other than” the person. It is, the
person.
That person is at the interactive nexus of cultural and biological forces. The cultural forces are the
cumulative result of historical processes extending back into the past a million or ten million years ago, where
they vanish into biological forces extending billions of years back to the beginning of life on earth. Though
each person’s brain is subject to cultural influence, it nonetheless bears the forms and processes of events that
that are much older. That biology is ever available to resist, to sidestep, moribund and oppressive cultural
forces. It is thus precisely because human aesthetics is grounded in human biology that it has a means of
resisting and eventually working around oppressive institutions.
Thus, there is no danger that a biologically-informed criticism will succumb to simple-minded genetic
determinism, as many humanists seem to fear (cf. Ehrenreich and McIntosh 1997). On the contrary, such a
criticism may be our best prospect for redeeming Said’s faith in art and the imagination. I believe, and have
argued in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, that only a biological approach to the
arts will allow us to understand how the shared pleasures of aesthetic activity are the foundation of our
humanity. Those pleasures are grounded in the intrinsic dynamic patterns of the human nervous system, in its
capacity for pattern and design. Literary works are the product of those capacities as well and literary form is
their direct trace.
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Appendix 1: The Propositions
Here are the nine propositions, without commentary or explication, listed in the order in which they were
introduced in the main text.
1. Literary Mode: Literary experience is mediated by a mode of neural activity in which one’s primary
attention is removed form the external world and invested in the text. The properties of literary works are
fitted to that mode of activity.
2. Extralinguistic Grounding: Literary language is linked to extralinguistic sensory and motor schemas in
a way that is essential to literary experience.
3. Form: The form of a given work can be said to be a computational structure.
4. Sharability: That computational form is the same for all competent readers.
5. Character as Computational Unit: Individual characters can be treated as unified computational units
in some, but not necessarily all, literary forms.
6. Armature Invariance: The relationships between the entities in the armature of a literary work are the same
for all readers.
7. Elasticity: The meaning of literary works is elastic and can readily accommodate differences in
expressive detail and differences among individuals.
8. Increasing Formal Sophistication: The long-term course of literary history has been toward forms of
increasing sophistication.
9. Ranks: Over the long-term literary history has so far evolved forms at four successive cognitive ranks.
These are correlated with a richer and more flexible construction of the self.
Appendix 2: Discovering Binary Oppositions in Neural Activity
This is an email exchange I had with the late Walter Freeman sometime in the first decade of this century. I
seem to have lost the original emails and I didn’t record the dates when I copied them into my notes. The
exchange concerns the possibility of identifying binary oppositions (see the structuralists, such as Claude
Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson) in neural data taken while a person is reading a text.
Walter,
I've had another crazy idea. I've been thinking about
Haken's remark that the trick to dealing with dynamical
systems is to find phenomena of low dimensionality in them.
What I think is that that is what poetic form does for
language. The meaning of any reasonable hunk of language
is a trajectory in a space of very high dimensionality.
Poetic form "carves out" a few dimensions of that space and
makes them "sharable" so that "I" and "Thou" can meet in
aesthetic contemplation.
- 30 -
So, what does this mean? One standard analytic technique
is to discover binary oppositions in the text and see how
they are treated. In KK Coleridge has a pile of them,
human vs. natural, male vs. female, auditory vs. visual,
expressive vs. volitional, etc. So, I'm thinking of making
a table with one column for each line of the poem and then
other columns for each of these "induced" dimensions. I
then score the content of each line on each dimension, say
+, - and 0. That set of scores, taken in order from first
to last line, is the poem's trajectory through a low
dimensional projection or compression of the brain's state
space.
The trick, of course, is to pull those dimensions out of
the EEG data. Having a sound recording of the reading
might be useful. What happens if you use the amplitude
envelope of the sound recording to "filter" the EEG data?
Later,
Bill B
Not crazy, Bill, but technologically challenging!
Will keep on file and get back to you.
Walter
Appendix 3: Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Textual Closure
Roman Jakobson’s poetic function2 is one of the best-known and most obscure ideas in modern poetics. I
believe that it extends beyond the kinds of examples Jakobson himself gave, to include, for example, ring-
form narratives. It may as well be considered a computational principle applying to texts considered as strings
of word forms.
Literary Form
Two years ago Sandra MacPherson wrote3 that she's looking for “for a genuinely formalist critical practice, a
little formalism that would turn one away from history without shame or apology” (p. 385). What does she
mean by form? She means “nothing more—and nothing less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a
tree) takes” (p. 390).
The basic shape that literary matter takes is simple, a string. When spoken the string is an
acoustic wave. When written the string is a collection of written symbols that generally take rectangular form
on the page but that are read as though they were one long string – which they are. The rectangular
arrangement is but a convenient way of fitting the string onto sheets of paper.
2 Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT
Press,1960), 350-77.
3 Sandra Macpherson, A Little Formalism, ELH, Volume 82, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 385-405.
- 31 -
Music takes the form of a string. That’s one example for us, and poetry is often likened to music.
Beads on a wire is another example – a metaphor sometimes used to characterize DNA. I suggest that
Roman Jakobson’s poetic function is an abstract statement of a formal principle for things strung together in
linear order, such as words.
Jakobson’s formulation of this principle is one of the most enigmatic statements in the critical
literature (p. 358):
The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.
Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.
What does that mean? The sequence, of course, is our string. A bit later he says (p. 358):
Measure of sequences is a device that, outside of the poetic function, finds no application in
language. Only in poetry with its regular reiteration of equivalent units is the time of the speech
flow experienced, as it is — to cite another semiotic pattern — with musical time.
Almost all of his examples are from poetry. Take rhyme. Line endings occur at regular measured intervals.
When similar syllables occur at specific fixed intervals, that is projection from the axis of selection (one
syllable or another, one word or another) to the axis of combination. That is rhyme. Rhyme is a simple and
obvious example of the poetic function. Jakobson goes on to give other, more sophisticated, examples.
But I want to move out of the domain entirely. Let me suggest that ring-composition also
exemplifies the poetic function. You may recall that ring-composition involves linear arrangements of this
form:
A, B, C...X...C’, B, A’.
The letters indicate ‘slots’ in the sequence while the identity of the letters indicates the pattern of symmetrical
matching that is characteristic of ring composition. Matching pairs are equivalent in some semantic sense and
the form requires that they be deployed in a certain sequence.
That, I realize is a highly abstract paragraph. As I intend this as only a short note, I have no intention
of filling that out.4 My object is simply to point out that ring-composition can be seen as exemplifying
Jakobson’s poetic function, thereby extending its applicable range beyond the kinds of examples Jakobson
himself gave and that others typically give. The poetic function isn’t specifically about poetry. It operates in
non-poetic narrative forms as well.
I have no reason to believe that the poetic function will account for all aspects of literary form. Just
how many aspects it accounts for, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. That will require more work.
The poetic function as a computational principle
Not only can Jakobson’s poetic function be extended beyond the examples he gave, which came from poetry, to
other formal features, such as ring composition. I now want to suggest that it is a computational principle as
well. What do I mean by computation?5 That’s always a question in these discussions, isn’t it?
When Alan Turing formalized the idea of computation he did so with the notion of a so-called
Turing Machine: “The machine operates on an infinite memory tape divided into discrete cells. The machine
positions its head over a cell and ‘reads’ (scans) the symbol there.”6 There’s more to it than that, but that’s all
we need here. It’s that tape that interests me, the one with discrete cells, each containing a symbol. Turing
defined computation as an operation on the contents of those cells. Just what kind of symbols we’re dealing
4 For that, see, e.g., Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, Yale University Press, 2007. I have
numerous posts on ring form at New Savanna, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ring-form
and a number of working papers at Academic.edu: https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon.
5 I have argued at some length that literary form is computational: Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a
Naturalist Theory of Form. PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608.
https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form
6 Turing machine, Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 19, 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
- 32 -
with is irrelevant as long as the basic rules governing their use are well-specified. The symbols might be
numerals and mathematical operators, but they might also be the words and punctuation marks of a written
language.
Linguists frequently refer to strings; an utterance is a string of phonemes, or morphemes, or words,
depending on what you’re interested in. Of course it doesn’t have to be an utterance; the string can consist of
a written text. What’s important is that it’s a string.
Well, Jakobson’s poetic function places restrictions on the arrangement of words on the string,
restrictions independent of those made by ordinary syntax. Let us recall his definition:
The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.
Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.
The sequence, of course, is our string. As for the rest of it, that’s a bit obscure. But it’s easy to see how things
like meter and rhyme impose restrictions on the composition of strings. And we have just seen, if only briefly,
that ring composition may be seen as restrictions of the composition of a string. In a working paper on ring
composition, I have already pointed out how the seven rules Mary Douglas gave for characterizing ring
composition7 can be given a computational interpretation (pp. 39-42).
Textual closure and literary form
I propose these as central to a computational account of literary form:
1. The process whereby word forms, whether spoken, written, or gestured (signed), are linked to
meaning/semantics is irreducibly computational.
2. A complete text is well-formed if and only if its meaning is resolved once the last word form has
been taken up.
3. It is in this context that Roman Jakobson’s poetic function may be considered a principle of literary
form.
1 and 2 are about language in general.
It is not clear to me whether 1 is a matter of definition or a statement empirical fact subject to
investigation. If it is to be construed as fact, what would the investigation be like? What counts as evidence? If
it is a matter of definition, what is the more general definition of computation of which this would be a
particular instance? Would Alan Turing’s defintion, via the Turing Machine, be sufficient?
On 2, I rather imagine there is relevant literature, though I don’t know. Obviously there is a huge
literature about computational completion, and 2 would fall within the scope of that literature. Whether or
not a computation will complete is one thing. This is much more specific. It says that we are
1. computing the value of a string by
2. moving through the string from left to right (though I suppose we can allow some back-tracking and
some looking ahead) and that
3. the value of the string will have been completed shortly after the rightmost character has been read.
“Shortly after” means, say, less than 1/1000 to 1/100 of the time it takes to read the string from beginning to
end–something like that; it needs to be adjusted to allow for both haiku and driple decker Victorian novels.
On 3, I note that Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney takes the form of a sermon, but it exhibits
ring-composition and thus falls within the scope of Jakobson’s poetic function.8 I note as well that Alan Liu’s
essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, exhibits ring-composition, but is expository and
argumentative prose.9 It is possible, but by no means obvious, that all literary texts are governed by the poetic
7Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology, Working Paper, September 28, 2014, 70 pp.
https://www.academia.edu/8529105/Ring_Composition_Some_Notes_on_a_Particular_Literary_Morphology
8 Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney: Technics of Power and Grace, Working Paper, July 2015, 37 pp.,
https://www.academia.edu/14487024/Obama_s_Eulogy_for_Clementa_Pinckney_Technics_of_Power_and
_Grace
9 Remarks on Alan Liu and the Digital Humanities, a Working Paper, April 2014, 24 pp.,
https://www.academia.edu/7776079/Remarks_on_Alan_Liu_and_the_Digital_Humanities_A_Working_Paper
- 33 -
function (whatever “govern” means), but that non-literary texts exhibit it as well. It is also possible that some
literary texts exhibit it and some do not. Finally, we might ask whether or not, and if so, in what way, the use
of the poetic function in a text contributes to its closure, as defined in 2.
Appendix 4: The Computational Envelope of Language, a Dialog
Time to saddle-up and once more ride my current hobby horse, or one of them at least. In this case, the idea
that natural language is the simplest aspect of human activity that is fundamentally and irreducibly
computational in nature.
Let’s back into it.
*****
Is arithmetic calculation computational in kind?
Well yes, of course. If anything is computation, that sure is.
Well then, in my current view, arithmetic calculation is language from which meaning has been completely removed,
squeezed out as it were, leaving us with syntax, morphology, and so forth.
Elaborate..
First, let’s remind ourselves that arithmetic calculation, as performed by writing symbols on some surface, is a very
specialized form of language. Sure, we think of it as something different from language...
All those years of drill and practice in primary school?
Yes. We have it drilled into our heads that arithmetic is one thing, over here, while language is something different, over
there. But it’s obvious, isn’t it, that arithmetic is built from language?
OK, I’ll accept that.
So, arithmetic calculation has two kinds of symbols, numerals and operators. Both are finite in number. Numerals can
be concatenated into strings of any length and in any order and combination.
OK. In the standard Arabic notation there are ten numerals, zero (0) through (9).
That’s correct.
And we’ve got five operators, +, -, * [times], ÷, and =. And, come to think of it, we probably should
have left and right parenthesis as well.
OK. What’s the relationship between these two kinds of symbols?
Hmmmm....The operators allow as to specify various relationships between strings of numerals.
Starting with, yes, starting with a basic set of equivalences of the form, NumStr Op NumStr = NumStr,
where Op is one from +, -, *, and ÷ and NumStr is a string of one or, in the case of these primitive
equivalences, two numerals.10
Thus giving us those tables we memorized in grade school. Right!
What do you mean by semantics being removed?
Well, what are the potentially meaning-bearing elements in this collection?
That would be the numerals, no?
Yes. What do they mean?
Why, they don’t meaning anything...
Well... But they aren’t completely empty, are they?
No.
Elaborate. What’s not empty about, say, 5?
5 could designate...
By “designate” you mean “mean”?
10 Isn’t that a bit sophisticated for the Glaucon figure in this dialog? Yes, but this is a 21st century Glaucon. He’s
got a few tricks up his sleeve.
- 34 -
Yes. 5 could designate any collection with five members. 5 apples, 5 oranges, 5 mountains, 5 stars...
What about an apple, an orange, a mountain, a star, and a dragon?
Yes, as long as there’s five of them.
Ah, I see. The numerals, or strings of numerals, are connected to the world though the operation of
counting. When we use them to count, they, in effect, become numbers. But, yes, that’s a very general kind of
relationship. Not much semantics or meaning there.11
Right. And that’s what I mean by empty of semantics. All we’ve got left is syntax, more or less.
Sounds a bit like Searle in his Chinese Room.
Yes, it does, doesn’t it?
The idea is that the mental machinery we use to do arithmetic calculation, that’s natural computation, computation
performed by a brain, from which semantics has been removed. That machinery is there in ordinary language, or even
extraordinary language. Language couldn’t function without it. That’s where language gets its combinatorial facility.
And THAT sounds like Chomsky, no?
Yes.
*****
And so it goes, on and on.
When the intellectual history of the second half of the twentieth century gets written, the discovery
of the irreducibly computational nature of natural language will surely be listed as one of the highlights. Just
who will get the honor, that’s not clear, though Chomsky is an obvious candidate. He certainly played a major
role. But he didn’t figure out how an actual physical system could do it (the question was of little or no
interest to him), and surely that’s part of the problem. If so, however, then we still haven’t gotten it figured
out, have we?
11 Sounds a bit like the Frege/Russell set theory definition of number: a natural number n is the collection of
all sets with n elements. See Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-
theoretic_definition_of_natural_numbers.
- 35 -
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Norman Holland, Franco Moretti, Timothy Perper and Ellen Spolsky for comments on segments
of and earlier versions of this essay. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for forcing me to make some
hard choices and thereby tighten my exposition and arguments.
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Notes
iFor my general views on computation and the mind, see Benzon 1978; 2001, 51-59; Benzon and Hays 1976,
1987, 1988.
iiThe general issue is that of reductionism. I have been influenced by Monod (1971), among others; the
discussion of complexity in Benzon and Hays (1990b) is also relevant.
iii As far as I know the use of relational networks to represent language and conceptual structure was
developed independently by Michael Halliday and Sydney Lamb in the early 1960s (Lamb, personal
communication). Others were influenced by one or both of them or, I suspect, arrived at the notion through
some other route. The idea is a rather obvious one; for example, it is embedded in the nineteenth-century
practice of diagramming sentences, which has been taught in schools through the last century.
iv Readers always have the option of skipping around in their reading. Sporadic readings of an hour at a time
might "cut" the book at different places, and, of course, one can start a book without finishing it. It is not
clear how this affects the main argument and, for now, I am willing to postulate an idealized reading where
the reader either reads a book in one sitting or stops only between chapters.
v Laland and Brown (2002) review the major contemporary approaches to cultural evolution; David Hays
(1997) has reviewed and synthesized a slightly older literature on cultural complexity; Taylor (1996) and
Wright (2000) are useful and imaginative popular expositions.
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