How did it all begin? If some human activity especially fascinates us, we might become curious enough to ask that question. If that activity happens to be the reading of literature, our first impulse might be to think of the oldest preserved texts, such as the Chinese Book of Songs or the Vedic Hymns, portions of the Hebrew Bible or the Homeric epics. But we know these could not have been the earliest compositions. Thousands of years of preliterate chants, songs, and dramas must have preceded them. When we search for works of verbal art prior to these surviving texts, however, our eyes have nothing to peer into but what Prospero called “the dark backward and abysm of time.” Archaeology can show us Neolithic textiles, Paleolithic figurines and cave paintings, 450-thousand-year-old wooden spears, and stone hand axes crafted some 2.5 million years ago (mya), but not one single prehistoric artifact made of words. True, the absence of evidence, as Carl Sagan liked to say, is not the evidence of absence (Sagan and Druyan, 1992:387). All the same, some small scrap of physical evidence that Pleistocene poets once roamed the earth would be reassuring.
The absence of material evidence is not the only challenge facing us. Even if we were to ask how the earliest historic—i.e., written—poetry came into being, we would still need to confront another vexing question: What do we mean by “poetry?” After all, we have to know what we are looking for. When we think of poetry, most of us think of lyric poems, printed texts in which rhythmical monologists express strong feelings as they struggle through problems to achieve moderately satisfying resolutions. Yet, for Aristotle, the man who gave us the word “poetics,” poetry was not a thing or a set of cultural products but rather an activity, a “making” expressed in the verbal noun poiêsis. Moreover, it meant the making of narratives, dramas, and hymns, composed to be publicly performed—not the written lyric, our standard form of “poetry.” And what of prose narrative fiction? What of the personal essay with its monologic voice searching for revelations and resolutions? What of prose poetry? What of unrhymed, unmetered free verse? What of folk songs, folk ballads, and children’s rhymes? We recognize all these genres as somehow “poetic,” but, as for “poetry,” the object of our search seems to have been constantly changing over history into something else. One thing is certain: if the object of our search is prehistoric poiêsis and the cognitive skills that must have made it possible, we must at the outset lay aside our literate conception of poetry as lines of words printed on white paper rectangles.
We have many questions to ask as we undertake this search, but, before we do so, I must pose a metaquestion: What purpose would be served by answering those questions? That is, how would a theory of proto-poiêsis, a paleopoetics, affect the way we now understand and experience literature? Satisfying our curiosity about anything simply by weaving conjectures into a hypothesis, however artful the weave, is never ultimately satisfying. The only useful purpose of this or any study of origins is to shed new light on the objects under study and thereby encourage further research.
Despite their variety, what we recognize as imaginative compositions have some traits that seem regularly to recur. One of their traits is, for want of a better word, craziness, though perhaps they only seem to display that trait: the fact that verbal poiêsis, unlike the other arts, uses the medium upon which reason and logic are founded means that its moments of irrationality, when they do occur, seem all the more perverse. There is, on the other hand, a long tradition according to which poets, like prophets and shamans, are possessed by spiritual beings that speak through them. Plato, who banned all poets from his ideal republic because they told untruthful stories, explained in the Ion and the Phaedrus that they were also god-possessed madmen. According to the tradition he referred to, poetic utterances are the words of beings outside the human world that speak from within the bodies of humans, making poiêsis—verbal creation—both otherworldly and innerworldly.
Plato’s Socrates, it should be recalled, left exiled Poiêsis the option to defend herself in court or to hire advocates to do so, a challenge that has prompted a series of writers—arguably Aristotle was the first—to reopen her case and appeal her sentence (Republic, book 10). (In English, Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Shelley also penned notable defenses.) If I, too, were to take up this long-standing challenge—and I suppose I am here doing so, after a fashion—I would begin by agreeing with Plato that poets do regularly deviate from rational discourse. But then I would argue that, when they do so, they do not go out of, nor do divine beings go into, their minds. Instead, poets go into their own minds and, doing so, guide us deeply into our own. To help establish that point, I would then proceed to call up a series of character witnesses, persons familiar with the defendant and able to share their insights with the court.
Consider how one extraordinary prose poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, describes the effect words and thoughts could sometimes have on him:
Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars [of our daily lives], is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, or go to the fire, being cold: no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already. I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life…. (“Experience,” Emerson, 2001:207–8)
This experience seems to be above and outside him, a “heaven,” and inside him, a mental space that opens into a vast world he has had no part in creating. He discovers it there where it has always been, a landscape immeasurably ancient, yet forever new, and, like a child he claps his hands with joy. A century later, Robert Duncan (1960) spoke of a similar visionary homeland in his poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”: it is “as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, / that is not mine, but is a made place, / that is mine….”
After Emerson, I would introduce the sixteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, himself a poet of prose as well as verse, and have him describe his own mode of illumination: “It’s wrong to say ‘I think.’ One should say: ‘somebody thinks me.’ Pardon the word play. I is someone else…. If brass wakes up as a trumpet, that’s not its fault. To me that’s obvious. I witness the unfolding of my thought: I look at it, I listen to it. I raise my bow to strike a note: the symphony begins to stir in the depths or comes leaping onto the stage.” Though he may not have then read these latter passages, T. S. Eliot echoed them when he proposed his “impersonal theory of poetry” according to which the “progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” until the poet becomes a medium, a crucible within which thoughts, feelings, and emotions are transmuted.1
In the Western tradition, the idea that each of us possesses, and is sometimes possessed by, some Inner Other derives (ironically) from Socrates’ inner guardian spirit, his daimonion, later modulated by the Judeo-Christian body/soul dualism. This tradition was what Whitman used in order to articulate the curious relationship, sometimes discordant, sometimes erotic, between his inner and outer selves. For him his soul was the wise, deathless, visionary other, an entity that had already lived thousands of lives, while the body was the current, public self, the conscious identity that wore boots and a slouch hat, talked and sang, ate and drank and rode the Broadway omnibus. When poetry stirred within him, it was the soul that spoke, filling the body with a sudden influx of energy. The soul for Yeats was similarly ageless and energetic:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.2
This language of spirit and inspiration is also linked to that tradition of spirit possession, which Plato spoke of as “divine madness,” a tradition that includes the theology of prophecy with all its mysterious visitants, from the Muses of Hesiod, the ruach of Ezekiel, and Caedmon’s dream-messenger to Lorca’s duende, Graves’s White Goddess, and the terrifying angels of Rilke.3
Reading, as well as writing, one can be overwhelmed by experiences that defy rational explanation. Consider Emily Dickinson’s poetic touchstone: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” For Ezra Pound the test was whether or not a set of words created in the reader what he called an “Image,” a verbal pattern capable of presenting “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Such a pattern, he continues, “is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” Pound’s phrase “intellectual and emotional complex” reformulates the ancient claim that poiêsis uses rational discourse as a conduit for nonrational knowledge. This intuited knowledge, though prompted by language, would not itself consist of language. It would instead represent those prelinguistic processes associated with sensory input and motoric output, processes that, when they reach the level of thought, are often accompanied by emotion. T. S. Eliot (1919/1957) in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” argued that intellect and emotion had, since the mid-seventeenth century, drifted so far apart that poetry had now assumed a sort of split personality, a “dissociation of sensibility” in which thought and feeling could no longer coexist. Poets needed to “find the verbal equivalent of states of mind and feeling.” He concluded: “Those who object to the ‘artificiality’ of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to ‘look into our hearts and write.’ But that is not looking deep enough: Racine and Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.”4
If intellect and emotion can manage to merge “in an instant of time,” the relatively slow serial processing of language must coexist with swift, “sudden,” parallel-processed information associated with emotion. Whitman’s defense of poetry, or the particular quotation from “Song of Myself” I would like to insert as his offering, is not a celebration of language or of the Platonic universes of discourse that philosophy can project. Instead, he creates a curious little unplatonic dialogue between himself and language. Language (speech) thinks that, just because it is able to represent anything and everything, it can override visuality (perception and imagination) and directly verbalize the inner self:
My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds, and volumes of worlds.
But
Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?
Come now, I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation.
Earlier in that text he had likened speech to the grass that grows on graves where, rooted in the breasts and mouths of the dead, it emerges as myriad tonguelike leaves. Now, elaborating that metaphor, he tells speech that it is like perennial grass whose rooted “live parts” survive the winter. His poems, formed of speech, may manifest themselves as leaves of grass, but their roots constitute an unspoken, unspeakable knowledge that corresponds to (tallies with) the ultimate meaning of things, a rerum natura that he equates with happiness. When this knowledge bursts open its buds in spring, what it utters is not language but some far more primordial sound:
Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams;
I underlying causes, to balance them at last,
My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of things,
Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day).5
If we agree that the primary purpose of language is to share with one another the knowledge we receive from nonverbal sources, i.e., internal sense data (what we feel and what we remember having felt) and external sense data (what we perceive in our environment), then language may be regarded as a sign system that mediates between these two fields of sensory reference. Whitman’s metaphor suggests that this language art serves as a tally sheet to balance inner knowledge against the meaning of external things. Charles Olson also spoke to that point when he asserted that man as a “creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out)” stands in direct relation to
those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share (Olson, 1950/1959).
That last phrase seems at first counterintuitive. Don’t we humans share secrets with one another as subjects and do this through a language that is often self-referential and recursive (“What do you mean by ‘thinks he doesn’t know?’” “What I mean is that she thinks he doesn’t know that her father really intends to …,” etc.)? But Olson is saying that the goal of poetic language is to tell the secrets that objects share with one another, a sharing by human and nonhuman objects that is essentially nonverbal. As Thomas McGrath wrote, “in the beginning was the world” (1982:287), and the word, when it did come, finally allowed humans to share with one another the overheard secrets of that world. This listening, which the Romantics meant when they spoke of “communing with Nature,” science expresses as its faith in the intelligibility of the physical universe.
To a large extent, the dispute between philosophy and poetry that Plato instigated may be methodological. Philosophy, like science, is an open-ended activity, a conversation among opposing principles that manifests itself in “philosophizing.” Poiêsis, on the other hand, manifests itself in compositions that may be sung, intoned, read, or acted out, verbal artifacts that, when performed from memory or silently perused, are objects that transform themselves into instruments by means of which their users extend their own powers of knowing. With that thought in mind, I might close this phase of my defense by introducing the testimony of William Carlos Williams on the vital knowledge—the “news”—that poiêsis has to communicate:
Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.6
As a character witness, this man of science who in his student days dreamed of specializing in neurology, Dr. Williams provides a convenient segue to the body of my argument, which will be voiced by expert witnesses, men and women who claim no intimate knowledge of the defendant. Neither a hard nor soft scientist myself, what I will have to say about paleoanthropology, archaeology, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive linguistics I have gathered as might an investigative reporter, convinced that there is a big, as yet untold, story out there that needs to be pieced together.
If this big story fits into any contemporary genre, it would be “Big History.” As David Christian (1991) first defined it, this approach erases the traditional line dividing “history” from “prehistory,” that is to say, accounts of the past derived from written documents as distinguished from those based on fossil and artifactual evidence. As he and others have argued, the discipline of history should mean the study of all past events. Big History should therefore begin with the Big Bang, currently estimated as having happened 13.7 billion years ago, and enlist input, first, from physicists, astronomers, chemists, and geologists, then from biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, and finally, for events recorded over the past five thousand years, from traditionally trained historians. This division of labor corresponds generally to the hierarchy of sciences proposed by Auguste Comte in the mid-nineteenth century, a system recently reformulated by Gregg Henriques (2003) as the “Tree of Knowledge,” according to which, for example, physics provides the basis upon which the principles of chemistry are built and chemistry provides the basis upon which the principles of biology are built.
Since I will confine my scope to the Quaternary period, ca. 2.5 mya to the present (i.e., the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs), my project might be termed “Not-Quite-So-Big History.” Despite the relative modesty of my time scale, my project will seem to some no less vulnerable to the charge of reckless interdisciplinarity. To anticipate this I will quote Professor Christian:
In tackling questions on these huge scales, the historian is bound to breach conventional discipline boundaries as well as conventional time scales. Can historians legitimately stray like this beyond their patch? Clearly, no single scholar can acquire an expert’s knowledge in all the different disciplines that have a bearing on history at the very large scale. But this does not mean that the historian should abandon such questions. If a question requires some knowledge of biology or geology, then so be it.
All that is required is a willingness to exploit the division of intellectual labor that exists in all our universities. Far from being unusual, this is normal procedure in any science; indeed it is normal procedure within and among the many sub-disciplines that make up history. Besides, such borrowing is more feasible today than it would have been even a decade ago; there exist now numerous fine works of popularization by specialists in many different academic disciplines, works that offer scholarly, up-to-date, and lucid summaries of the different fields. So there is no fundamental objection to the crossing of discipline boundaries; the difficulties are purely practical. (1991:226–27)
As for of my particular venture into Big History, its ultimate purpose is not simply to time-travel to earlier stages in the evolution of the human mind but rather to explore the depths you and I have within our minds here and now, those deep foundations within which certain strings of words have the power to resonate with astonishing results. Accordingly, my first premise is this: the human brain is an embodiment of its own evolutionary narrative. My second premise is that, broadly defined, poetry is the brain’s use of language to recover knowledge that is at once deeply past and deeply present.
The broad chronological model I will follow is that provided by Merlin Donald. In his Origins of the Modern Mind (1991) and A Mind So Rare (2001), he set forth a series of four stages that represent the evolution of hominid cognition from prehuman Australopithecine to contemporary human. I will review them in more detail in chapter 3, but at this point a brief outline is in order: (1) The Episodic Stage. The social circumstances of prehuman primates favored those individuals possessing a capacity to experience social encounters as complex, meaningful, ongoing episodes. This need, he suggests, put selective pressures on short-term working memory and rewarded those able to bind together longer and longer intervals, i.e., episodes, of experience. (2) The Mimetic Stage. With the advent of stone technology (ca. 2.5 mya), early humans demonstrated a degree of imitative aptitude that decisively separated them from their primate cousins. As the mimetic stage advanced, more and more cultural information was transmitted across generations, including firemaking and improved hunting techniques. (3) The Mythic Stage. While their immediate ancestors certainly had communicative skills, it was one small branch, Homo sapiens sapiens, that seems to have been the first to develop a full language (lexicon and syntax). The ability to communicate using a flexible, combinatorial system of spoken sounds continued a trend toward shared, culturally preserved knowledge. Finally, (4) The Theoretic Stage. This marked the full externalization of language in the form of written documents, the preservation of information without mnemonic structure, the dissemination of multiple copies, and the critical comparison of texts. It also marked a transition from biological to biocultural evolution. Most evolutionary changes are cumulative, so, as Donald stresses, modern, literate humans are fully endowed with (1) episodic consciousness, the ability to monitor and assimilate up to an hour or more of data input; (2) mimetic capacity, the ability to observe and replicate the behavior of others; and (3) linguistic skill, the ability to use speech to share information, negotiate disputes, narrate past events, and plan future actions.
Rhetoric, Poetics, and Hermeneutics
This, then, accounts for the “paleo-” part of my title. Now, in order to clarify the “-poetics” part, I should start by offering a definition of poetics. Most broadly defined, poetics is the study of the principles and techniques of making things (from the Greek verb poiein, “to make”). Though it has sometimes been applied to the other arts, it usually refers to the verbal arts. In following this tradition, I will examine the principles that govern the making of a wide range of verbal artifacts, including folk tales, ballads, proverbs, rituals, epics, dramas, and novels, as well as those verse forms generally classified as “poetry.” But in addition to the principles of making, I will also consider the poetics of remaking, i.e., the performance of such artifacts, either publicly before an audience or privately through the reading of written words.
But before I can explore its evolutionary implications, I need to distinguish poetics from two related verbal disciplines: rhetoric and hermeneutics. The problem is that these three share some of one another’s properties, so, before I differentiate them, I must first understand how they are connected. To arrive at that understanding, I will borrow that hierarchical scheme familiar to the natural sciences. Accordingly, I will propose linguistics as the immediate basis of rhetoric, rhetoric as the basis of poetics, and poetics as the basis of hermeneutics: just as the various sciences deal with different emergent orders of material complexity, the latter three verbal disciplines deal with different emergent orders of symbolic complexity (M. Turner, 1991).
Language was the representational system our highly social ancestors devised to plan and execute cooperative action, to arbitrate disputes, and, from the point of view of the individual, to better manipulate the behavior of others to one’s own advantage. These social purposes also entailed, of course, the sharing of object information, for knowledge about others (gossip) and knowledge about the environment (food sources and predators) would have increased one’s value in the eyes of the community. Communicating social and object information in ways that convinced others of one’s knowledge and trustworthiness became the valuable skill we understand as rhetoric.
Rhetoric, we should keep in mind, serves purposes that predate language and, in fact, predate the emergence of our human genus, purposes that include territorial dominance, sexual selection, alliance building, and all those other social negotiations practiced by our primate ancestors. This rhetoric would have been one of postural, gestural, and vocal signals.
When we view rhetoric as a means of achieving certain human goals, we classify it as a kind of tool. But this analogy needs a further distinction. Rhetoric is not one tool, nor is it a toolbox where a multitude of crafted implements are kept. It is rather a landscape strewn all over with findable tools. Since persuasive speech is most urgently required to cope with unforeseen circumstances, no one can know in advance what tool might be called for. The proper words must be found then and there and put together swiftly and effectively. If we think of language as a landscape, invention becomes the process of finding usable phrases, an activity that in a hunter-gatherer society would be analogous to finding particular stones, sticks, vines, or leaves that could be employed as ad hoc instruments to help crush, grind, poke, bind, wrap, or otherwise modify other things. In classical rhetoric this skill came to be termed “invention” (Latin, inventio; Greek heurêsis), the discovery of the verbal means to persuade an audience concerning a particular issue. The rhetorical devices we find do indeed serve us as found tools, and, once used, they are discarded—but not lost, because, if we have learned the art of rhetoric, we know the customary places, the topoi, or loci, in our mental landscape of language where we can go to retrieve them.
The devices that the rhetor, like some resourceful hunter-gatherer, nimbly retrieves are effective not only because they reverberate in language but also because they tap into our brain’s prelinguistic strata. For example, narrative, including anecdote and exemplum, appeals to episodic memory, the principal means we have to organize our autobiographical past. Metaphor, metonymy, personification, and apostrophe are stylistic resources that evoke the powers of mental imaging and dream. Forceful delivery (actio) uses gesture and other paralinguistic features to excite incipient motor reactions in audience members, which in turn intensify their emotions.
Grounded in the art of rhetoric, poetics explores the next level of language-mediated complexity, that of closed, unitized, verbal systems, those entities that incorporate rhetorical devices while introducing their own special properties, e.g., meter, melody, dance, and mise-en-scène. To extend my instrumental analogy: poetics is the study of complex rhetorical artifacts, made tools that are not found through a process of improvisation and are not treated as disposable objects but are instead prized, saved, and reused.7 In the first sentence of his Poetics, Aristotle implies that such works are made, like tools, in order to modify other things when he promises to consider each kind of poem in terms of its particular dunamis, i.e., its inherent property as an object to pass from a state of potency (dunamis) to a state of action (energeia). Poetics, as he went on to demonstrate in the body of his treatise, is a study of the ways in which verbal artists make structures of spoken words that, when activated by performers, can produce certain effects on an audience. When, therefore, he discussed Oedipus Rex or the Iliad, he did so in order to ask how such powerful works are made and what they do, not what they mean.
The fault line that would eventually separate poetics from hermeneutics appears as early as the fourth century B.C.E. Plato, in exiling poetry from his ideal state, does so on hermeneutic grounds: what poets mean does not correspond with verifiable facts.
Hermeneutics as a scholarly discipline, however, was slow to emerge. Aristotle, who seemed ready to write about virtually everything, never wrote a treatise on what we would recognize as hermeneutics. Though Plato critiqued Homer and his place in Greek pedagogy in the Republic, he never ventured into textual interpretation. Greeks and Romans quoted lines and sentences from literary works but were little given to commenting on those works. Granted, there were the periodic attempts to allegorize Homer, and several Late Latin commentaries on Vergil’s poems were published, but classical readers seemed confident that they understood their writers without tutorial manuals.8 It was not until culturally alien texts appeared, believed to be authored by an extraterrestrial god, that hermeneutics came into its own as a scholarly enterprise. Since then, the task of crafting a coherent theology out of a collection of disparate religious texts has taxed the hermeneutical ingenuity of two millennia of Christian scholars. Along the way, biblical exegesis, a specialized form of hermeneutics, has also provided humanist scholars with a repertoire of interpretive methods that they proceeded to apply, first to the Greek and Latin canon, then to vernacular European works, and eventually to selected works of world literature.
It was writing, scriptura in the generic sense of the word, that indirectly generated secular hermeneutics as a discipline. By the seventeenth century, writing and the book industry had made texts so numerous and so culturally diverse that, without expert interpretation, much of their meaning was inaccessible. Now, even within a common culture, a book written forty years ago may seem to young adults to be alien in its references, moral values, and affective tone. The artifacts that constitute the vast corpus of “literature” may still be tools, but most of them are not immediately usable. Now, when one of these tools arrives and is taken out of its box, it cannot be made to work until its pieces are put together and its operating procedures learned. And it has been the hermeneut’s job, often in the format of a classroom lecture, to draft the how-to-assemble charts and write the user’s manual.
As poetics emerged from rhetoric as the making, or poiêsis, of rhetorical artifacts, hermeneutics emerged from poetics to cope with the bewildering multiplication of artifacts that writing and eventually print culture produced. As a variety of technical writing, hermeneutics has now for well over a century been the principal discipline taught in every graduate and undergraduate department of literature. Such departments have simply assumed as their special mission the establishing of meaning and have pursued this one goal through a mixture of historical studies, textual analysis, and critical evaluation. Even those who have argued for the ambiguity or indeterminacy of meaning have addressed meaning as their central issue. How things made of words actually do what they do has seemed to most literary scholars an insufficiently important question to ask. Consequently, when it is not a synonym for versification, “poetics” has come to mean “literary theory,” which has come to mean “critical theory,” which, when professionally practiced, amounts to the interpretation of texts.
This activity is an appropriation of the text, as Paul Ricoeur (1991) called it. But one person’s appropriation may be another person’s misappropriation. Susan Sontag (1966/2001:7) wrote: “[I]nterpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’ It is to turn the world into this world. (‘This world’! As if there were any other.)”
Part of the disagreement may lie folded in the meanings of that word “interpretation.” As I proposed (Collins 1991a:x–xxi; Collins 1991b:101–29), the verb “interpret” has two quite different meanings: (1) to perform a composition, as in the phrases “to interpret a dramatic role” or “interpret a piece of music,” and (2) to convert an obscure message into a more understandable form, as one does by translating from one language into another. This is closely related to the duality of the gerund “reading,” as (a) the act of reading and (b) the analysis of a text, as in “a reading.”9 That the very real differences between these two usages is usually ignored testifies to the depth of this problem. Interpretation #1 is an artistic enactment by which a scripted object passes from potency to act and, as such, lies in the purview of a poetics, whereas interpretation #2 is an analytical paraphrase that substitutes one coded message for another. When Stanley Fish (1982:355) announced that “interpretation, like it or not, is the only game in town,” he was acknowledging a practice long established in scholarly and academic institutions, from the early Marxist, Freudian, and Jungian schools to New Criticism and from structuralism, through to poststructuralism, New Historicism, post-Colonial, and gender studies. While I would not deny that it serves a valuable pedagogical purpose, I do not accept that hermeneutical interpretation should be—even if it still is—the only game in town.
My own attention, as I recount in my preface, has continued to be focused on the verbal work of art, not as an object of hermeneutical analysis, but rather as an instrument of cognitive action. The purpose of poetics, as I see it, is to study how that instrument is made and how the mind employs it, whether the verbal artifact is mediated by performers or by a written text. This experience, after all, is causally and, therefore, logically prior to literary interpretation, which can never be more insightful than the action of reading that precedes it. We should expect no less of literary interpretation than of travel writing, a genre that presupposes a real trip to, and real perceptions of, some real place. Being prior to hermeneutics, poetics cannot use hermeneutics as its disciplinary foundation, much less use hermeneutical practice to justify its own existence. It must build instead upon disciplines that are situated prior to itself, first rhetoric, then, continuing backward, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, semiotics, and evolutionary biology.
Directly prior to linguistics in this order of disciplines, cognitive science emerged from psychology in the mid-1960s. Recruiting this new cognitive model, researchers first established the fact of mental images and their relation to visual perception, then proposed and tested hypotheses in neuroscience that have led to other far-ranging discoveries, all the while expanding their toolbox with the addition of computer modeling and brain imaging technologies. Thanks to its paradigm-changing revelations, cognitive science has suggested to a number of scientific disciplines, e.g., linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, and biology, certain new directions of research.
Its particular effect upon literary studies has, however, proved somewhat problematical. This became especially apparent when, in spring of 2002, Poetics Today published an entire issue devoted to “cognitive poetics,” Literature and the Cognitive Revolution. Edited by Alan Richardson and Francis F. Steen, this issue presented contributions by Mark Turner, Paul Hernadi, Ellen Spolsky, Reuven Tsur, Lisa Zunshine, the two editors, and Tony Jackson, who concluded the issue with a commentary on the preceding articles.
Jackson’s critique I found revealing for several reasons. For one thing, he asserted that the only justification for cognitive poetics was the degree to which it could improve the current practice of literary interpretation. The proof of any cognitive pudding was in the eating, which in his mind was the interpretation of an actual literary text, and, on that account, the results served up in Poetics Today he found generally unpalatable. What was so revolutionary about this “cognitive turn” in literary theory, if the writers who tried to demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive science to the explication of novels and poems could have reached the same interpretive outcomes had they used standard historicist methods? I confess I had to agree with Jackson on this last point. Reading “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution,” I had kept imagining salespersons on some late-night TV infomercial touting some new and powerful device—a state-of-the-art computer that calculates the monthly grocery budget for a family of four or a surgical laser that juliennes string beans.10
I did, though, disagree with Jackson’s premise and with that of most of the contributors as well, the notion that cognitive poetics should provide current hermeneutics with a revitalizing transfusion of new insights. This new and powerful model of the mind, it seemed to me, should first produce new and powerful insights into the mind’s engagement with its own made instruments. If cognitive poetics does eventually transform the way we practice literary interpretation, it will only do so after it has wholly transformed the way we experience the works of art themselves.
But old institutional habits die slowly, if at all. In the Anglo-American tradition, the hermeneutical imperative came to be linked with a need to cleanse the interpretation of all elements deemed nonessential. As the New Critics diagnosed the problem, the objective thing-in-itself, the “verbal icon,” could not be identified with the reader’s experience of it, since that experience inevitably involved such messy features as idiosyncratic mental imagery and emotions. Of course, each reader’s personal contributions to the experience will be different and may be adscititious, but, if these are unavoidable factors in every actual reading of a text, what sense does it make to demand that they cease to exist? A poetics that ignores the significance of nonverbal cognition, preferring instead to borrow a strict information-processing model from cognitive psychology, simply reframes the New Critics’ “affective fallacy” by appealing to “higher” cortical processes and computational algorithms.11
The reader’s brain does indeed process information in the form of verbal representations, but, equally important, it responds to them with its own internally generated nonverbal representations, which manifest themselves as images, motor simulations, empathy, and a rich spectrum of affects—moods, feelings, and emotions. Words and verbal constructions do indeed direct these responses, but these responses do not resonate from the parts of the brain that process language. If anyone could actually read a piece of literature solely on the verbal level, the experience would be like only watching a pianist’s fingers as they intricately move across a keyboard and never hearing the music. In short, when nonverbal processes become mere epiphenomena, the “embodied mind” loses its embodiment and cognitive poetics loses its right to call itself a poetics.
Cognitive poetics is not, however, the only project to re-envision humane letters in scientific terms. Since the publication of Joseph Carroll’s Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), the movement known as “Literary Darwinism” has won for itself considerable visibility. Like cognitive poetics, it grew in reaction to the anti-science excesses of poststructuralist theory and the postmodernist notion that human behavior could be adequately explained by an analysis of cultural, as opposed to natural, factors. As cognitive poetics drew many of its early insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, Literary Darwinism initially built upon two other sets of scientific ideas—sociobiology, as proposed by E. O. Wilson (1975), and evolutionary psychology, as defined by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (1992).
As Carroll sees it, literature makes sense only in the light of evolution. Literary Darwinism, therefore, provides the only rational foundation literary studies can ever have, a programmatic position that has attracted a number of other literary scholars, such as Brian Boyd, Denis Dutton, and John Gottschall. In 2005 Carroll described this program as follows:
In this hypothesis, the primary adaptive function of art is to provide the mind with subjectively weighted models of reality in such a way as to help organize the complex human motivational system. Art does not simply provide examples of appropriate behavior or adaptive information. It provides an emotionally saturated simulation of experience. Producing and consuming these simulations enable people both to experience the emotions depicted and to stand back from them and gain a cognitively detached sense of the larger patterns of human life. (This balancing between emotional involvement and cognitive detachment is what is meant by “aesthetic distance.”) By vicariously participating in the simulated life provided by these models, people improve their ability to understand and regulate their own behavior and to assess the behavior of other people. (2005:940)
This, paragraph sums up his movement and proposes a hypothesis that, if verified—to the extent that it is verifiable—would indeed provide the humanities with a firm foundation. The problem comes when Literary Darwinists try to move from the summary level to the particulars.
Insofar as Literary Darwinism derives its explanatory power from evolutionary psychology, it posits a set of innate behavioral adaptations, e.g., survival instinct, sexual desire, competitiveness, kinship values, etc. Perhaps because any attempt to base these general traits in dedicated, domain-specific brain modules would be to balance a literary hypothesis atop a psychological hypothesis, Carroll has come to dissociate himself from what he now calls “‘orthodox’ or ‘narrow-school’ EP [evolutionary psychology]” and speaks instead in broader terms of a system of “elemental motives” (1999:409).12 He thus detaches Literary Darwinism from the “massive modularity” thesis that has made evolutionary psychology so vulnerable in the eyes of its critics. Focusing its attention on the plot, Literary Darwinism connects overt narrative themes to “elemental motives,” identified as ancestral adaptations that evolved over a period of 1.5 million years. In short, since Pleistocene adaptations still govern the choices of fictional characters, Darwinism provides the only foolproof key to literary meaning.
Thematics is a quite valid field of inquiry. It is important, from time to time, to stop and ask ourselves: Why does this playwright or that novelist portray characters perplexed by this or that dilemma or driven by this or that passion? The presence of given themes in a literary text may indeed reflect adaptations that were once necessary for the survival of our hominid ancestors, but this is not a sufficient explanation for their survival in fictive scenarios or indeed for the survival of fictive scenarios themselves. As Jonathan Kramnick (2011) proposed in his recent critique of Literary Darwinism, in reading pieces of fiction there are more complex processes at work involving pretense, imagination, memory, emotion, and other “features of mind [evolutionarily] selected (if at all) for other purposes.” It is not sufficient simply to restate a set of Pleistocene adaptations in a manner that is “relentlessly thematic” (2011:340, 344; author’s emphases).
Kramnick’s reference to pretense is especially apt in light of Carroll’s curious claim that “fictionality is not a distinguishing characteristic of literature” (1995:107). If one accepted that claim, all questions of fictive play and defamiliarizing representations would have to be ruled out in advance (Miall, 2005:146). But declaring, in effect, “It’s just that simple!” and ruling out troublesome questions only provokes other cage-rattling questions, such as: Are hermeneutic systems, like literary texts, also driven by “elemental motives?” If so, what “elemental motive” is responsible for Literary Darwinism? Was there a point in time that a passion to dominate Paleolithic palaver became selected as an inheritable trait?
Just that simple? No, not just that simple.
This book represents an alternative way to bring poetics into alignment with human evolution. Rather than focus on narrative themes, I examine in detail various cognitive skills essential to verbal art and trace their gradual emergence over the long prehistory of our species. These are skills adapted to the presymbolic mind. That is, they evolved before humans communicated with one another using arbitrary signs—conventional symbols—and relied on visual images for both inner thought and the outward exchange of thoughts. Note: Throughout this book I have consistently used “symbol” and “symbolic” as semiotic terms referring to arbitrary signs, such as words (spoken and written), as distinct from indices (signs that refer to physically associated objects) and icons (signs that resemble what they refer to). I do not use “symbol” in the sense of an image that stands for a complex structure of hidden meanings, a usage common to religion, psychoanalysis, and literary studies.
Chapter 2, “From Dualities to Dyads,” begins my exploration of cognitive skills preadaptive to language with a consideration of Dual-Process Theory. This field, which emerged in the mid-1990s, posits the coexistence in the brain of two distinct cognitive systems, one intuitive, the other deliberative, a bipartite arrangement reminiscent of the right-hemisphere/left-hemisphere duality. Since the intuitive system comprises cognitive features shared with nonhuman animals and the deliberative system is uniquely human, the evolutionary implications of Dual-Process Theory make it highly relevant to paleopoetics.
I note that this is a restrictively cognitive theory, by which I mean it focuses on information processing to the exclusion of that overarching duality, perception and action. In an effort to incorporate these larger functions, I propose that parallel and serial processes, which dual-process theorists list among their paired opposites, are not only essential to information processing but are also key modes of perception and action. In perception, for example, they collaborate to produce figure–ground discrimination; in action they collaborate to effect multitasking. The parallel and serial modes are therefore not contraries but rather correlatives, necessary complements that come together to constitute an integrated duality, or, as I call it, a “dyad.” The distinctive pattern they present is one in which broad and diffuse awareness coexists with narrow and finely defined attention. Replicated in diverse functions, from bimanual coordination to episodic memory, this dyadic pattern provides a heuristic key to yet other functions, such as gestural communication, protolanguage, full language, and, ultimately, verbal artifacts. In proposing this hypothesis as a friendly amendment to the Dual-Process Theory, I suggest that the dyadic pattern was an adaptation selected to smooth the transition from the prehuman to the fully human brain, a transition not yet completed.
In chapter 3, “Play and Instrumentality,” I examine these two elements as presymbolic functions preadaptive to language. As such, they are associated with Donald’s episodic and mimetic stages, respectively. Observed especially among young mammals, play has been variously explained as a way to exercise hunting and fight-or-flight routines, to bond with peers, to establish status in a social hierarchy, or simply to discharge excess energy. Play undoubtedly does serve these particular purposes, but, taking my cue from Gregory Bateson’s essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1972), I regard play more broadly as a central and formative factor in cognitive evolution. As Bateson observed, play requires participants to enclose certain actions inside a frame, a “play frame” within which an animal’s actions (e.g., chasing, kicking, and biting) that normally signify X, now signify Y. In other words, play participants interpret indexical signs as merely icons (semblances) of indices, and so, in this case, aggressive behavior only seems aggressive. By combining icon and index, social play becomes an instance of dyadic patterning, one that also produces another effect: it detaches a natural sign from its normal significance and converts that sign into an intentional token usable in itself as a communicable thought.
Of course, signs that can float about detached from jointly perceived contexts may become means of deception. For that reason social play requires a high degree of trust. The sign systems that evolved within genus Homo, beginning perhaps some 2.5 mya, succeeded only because in-group cohesion was strong enough to minimize deception and maximize trust. Whenever a conventional system of signs, a lexicon of arbitrary symbols, emerged and, by about 100,000 years ago, was organized by a compositional syntax, it owed its existence to the play instinct, that old mammalian trick of “We do this, but we mean that.” In linguistic terms, this amounts to, for example, “We say ‘dog,’ but we mean ‘that short furry animal that wags its tail and barks.’” The “this-means-that” semiotic play principle from which every symbolic sign system flows is also the principle that first breathed life into the verbal artifact as an imitative performance. Storytellers, dramatic actors, and ritual performers initiated their work by stepping inside a play frame, a kind of sacred space in which ordinary words and actions came to assume extraordinary meanings. As Coleridge put it, the first principle of “poetic faith” is a “suspension of disbelief,” a quasi-religious affirmation (“for the moment”) of the truth of this performance.13
The second function I deal with in this chapter is instrumentality, by which I mean the use of an object as a tool to enhance human action. The magical potential of an entity to transform itself from an external thing to an extension of the user is the essence of the object–tool dyad. But here another distinction is evolutionarily crucial, the nondyadic distinction between found and made tools. When tasks only required clubs, reaching sticks, or nut-cracking stones, the materials for such tools might be readily found when needed, but when the tasks required cutting, grinding, shaving, binding, or sewing, proper tools would have to be crafted and then preserved for future use. The reusable instrument, so central to the notion of material culture, was the prototype from which other less palpable instruments were to be fashioned and preserved. These latter instruments we may call cultural behaviors, repeatable sequences of action that left no archaeological traces and can only be inferred from physical evidence, e.g., stone tools and fossilized bones. Among those behaviors I include tool making, tool use, dances, and songs. The latter, as sequences of symbolic sounds, I designate as verbal artifacts.
The last presymbolic function I discuss is visuality, a topic to which I devote the whole of chapter 4. I chose to entitle this chapter “The World as We See It” in order to suggest that so much of what we understand as our terrestrial environment is determined by the ways our visual anatomy construes it. From the surface of our eyes to the various deep pathways of the brain, visual data, as they pass along, are given structures that have come to characterize what Jakob von Uexküll (1921) would term our human umwelt. In this chapter I investigate the neural circuitry by which the brain processes visual arrays and show how this sense modality helps coordinate locomotion, prehension, and other essential actions. The discovery (1980–1995) of the two visual pathways, or streams, revealed how serial and parallel processes collaborate to produce an integrated visual field, including figure–ground distinctions. It further illustrated the capacity of the brain to simultaneously perceive (1) a sharply defined, narrowly focused figure and (2) a broadly scanned, relatively diffuse ground of other objects.
When I chose for my subtitle the phrase “the evolution of the preliterate imagination,” I meant these words quite literally, especially that word “imagination.” I did not mean the phrase as a high-sounding synonym for know-how or cleverness. I meant it as the simulation of sensory perception, especially visual perception. Unless we have a clear understanding of visual perception, both as a means of selecting and recognizing objects and as a means of interacting with them, our understanding of simulated vision, i.e., imagination, will be rudimentary. Since one of the principal achievements of language is the encoding of our visible umwelt as verbal images, I have reviewed here some of the findings of current neuroscience that seem to me to be most pertinent to the study of literature.
Symbolic Play and the Verbal Artifact
With chapter 4, I complete my preliminary presentation of the dyadic features of the presymbolic mind that I have inserted into Merlin Donald’s chronology, claiming them as preadaptive to language and its artifacts. Having introduced the issues of instrumentality, play, and visuality I can now venture an anticipatory definition of the verbal artifact as an instrument that the brain uses to play visual mental images. If we apply the terms of this definition to the other so-called sister arts, we can see that, while all have play in common, important specific differences exist. In dance we may say that the body is the instrument, but we may not do so if we define an instrument as an external tool, a prosthesis. In nonverbal music, external instrumentation is customarily used, but the channel is auditory, not visual-imaginal. Finally, in painting and sculpture we use a visual object as an external instrument, but what results from that are visual perceptions, not mental images.
Verbal artifacture—poetry, broadly defined—has language as its instrumental medium. It is this communicative code of arbitrary symbols, its origins, and its preliterate uses that I investigate in the final three chapters of this book. Modern glottogony, the theory of language origins, was hastily conceived in the mid-nineteenth century in a liaison of linguistics and evolutionary biology, prematurely born, and, soon after, nearly smothered in its cradle by the Société de Linguistique de Paris and the Sanskrit philologist Friedrich Max Müller. The French society in 1866 announced it would no longer consider publishing articles that dealt with the origin of language. (And, it must be said, most of the work then published in this nascent field ranged from the implausible to the preposterous). Max Müller (1868) ridiculed any and all theories that derived language from nonlinguistic behaviors, e.g., the imitation of sounds to represent their sources (the “bow-wow” theory), emotive interjection (the “pooh-pooh” theory), and sounds used to coordinate collective action (the “yo-heave-ho” theory). All Darwinian speculation was wrong from the start because, as he averred, “language forms an unpassable barrier between man and beast” (Müller, 1889).
It took a century for an evolution-based glottogony to come of age and another half century for it to make substantial advances. Noam Chomsky (1968) introduced the idea that human language could best be explained as the result of a genetic mutation that occurred at some point early in the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species. Ironically, though, Chomsky and those who followed his lead, e.g., Derek Bickerton (1992) and Steven Pinker (1994), still managed to keep Max Müller’s unpassable barrier firmly in place by excluding any possibility of intermediate stages between nonlinguistic communication and fully grammatical language.
It was therefore left to other scholars to argue the case for some form of prelinguistic communication variously based on gesture and noncompositional vocalization. It is principally their ideas that I review in chapter 5, “Human Communication: From Pre-Language to Protolanguage.” With this chapter I also return to the topic of mimesis and the evolutionary traits associated with Donald’s mimetic stage. I begin this discussion with the much-debated question of whether social information or object information came first. Social information is communication that, anchored in a present circumstance, is intended to influence the behavior of others; object information uses names to identify objects and may refer to nonpresent circumstances—the past, the future, and the elsewhere. If social information came first, the link between primate communication and language remains intact, for all primates have gestural and vocal means of expressing their needs and fears and use this wordless rhetoric to influence the behavior of conspecifics. Conversely, if object information came first, the unpassable barrier remains in place, for the capacity to employ a vocabulary of referential names would have to have appeared suddenly and fully formed. The majority opinion now seems to favor social information as the preadaptive matrix from which object information gradually emerged. This means that gestures, online indexical signs such as pointing and iconic signs such as handshapes, would have preceded the use of arbitrary symbols for displaced referents.
A symbolic system, gestural perhaps at first but eventually vocal, would have permitted humans to refer to, and think about, absent things and events. Did a symbolic communicative code, a vocal lexicon without a syntax, precede the emergence of language? Was this “protolanguage” a system of gestures, of vocalizations, or a combination of both? Could humans have used it to communicate without some, albeit rudimentary, syntax? These questions have provoked a lively debate over the past two decades. The current estimates as to when full language came into being vary greatly, but, since all humans possess it, we generally assume it appeared prior to 60,000 B.P. (before the present) when our species began to diverge in its migration out of Africa.
After presenting a time line that incorporates a number of theoretical positions, I analyze gesture as a semiotic medium and note that, oddly enough, writers in this field have seldom taken advantage of the simple distinctions of index, icon, and symbol with two notable exceptions, Terrence Deacon (1997) and Jordan Zlatev (2008). The conclusions they arrive at are, however, strikingly opposed. Deacon uses the Peircean distinctions in order to reinforce Max Müller’s barrier by claiming that in no way can symbolic signs be generated from icons and indices. Zlatev, on the other hand, sees the latter two sign functions as preadaptive to a symbolic code, such as language. I go on to support Zlatev’s position by suggesting several ways by which selective pressures could indeed have driven the human communicative code from index and icon to symbol and then extended its medium from gesture to voice. With a second time line I illustrate how this transition could have occurred and propose that a gradually changing protolanguage could have been in use during a transitional period of over 500,000 years.
With the emergence of full, or true, language, we arrive at the onset of Donald’s mythic stage. Chapter 6, titled “Language: Its Prelinguistic Inheritance,” highlights those cognitive aspects of pre-language that were later selected for the more persuasive functions of rhetoric and for the shaping of verbal artifacts. One prelinguistic aspect is the centrality of a dominant individual, represented in the pronoun paradigm. As I proposed in Authority Figures (1996), this rhetorical structure represents the speaker (I) as the central visual/vocal source of information in respect to an audience (You) and excludes from this speech circle all third persons (They). In turn-taking conversation the roles of first and second persons shift, but in poetic performance, whatever its form, an unchanging speaker-to-hearer relationship tends to be maintained.
I next reintroduce two themes discussed earlier, play and visuality, and place them in the context of cognitive linguistics and its emergent subfield, cognitive rhetoric. The relation of symbol to its referent, unlike that of index and icon to their referents, is arbitrary. Having no sensory connection with its meaning, a word may justifiably be termed nonsensical. It is only the play instinct with its double-framing that can maintain a rule-governed connection of the symbolic signifier to its signified. The fact that infants during those crucial months of early language acquisition are also acquiring the principle of pretend-play suggests that the dyadic pattern constitutive of social play may be preadaptive to the dyadic pattern that links arbitrary sounds with intended referents. In exploring this linkage, I also review George Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphor and argue that metaphor and metonymy are also rhetorical expressions of mammalian play behavior.
Having commented on the play aspects of lexical elements, I then turn to the visual aspects of syntax and, citing the work of Talmy Givón, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy, consider how language functions as a means of simulating visual perception of objects and visually guided action. Referring back to chapter 4, as well as to my book Poetics of the Mind’s Eye (1991a), I align the traditional parts of speech with specific optical processes, e.g., fixations and saccades. I then return to the dual-pathway theory of vision and map it onto some of the models proposed by cognitive linguists. I conclude this chapter by proposing that the five classical canons of rhetoric, particularly invention and style, represent vision-based cognitive functions that also operate in spontaneous speech.
In my final chapter, “The Poetics of the Verbal Artifact,” I suggest how the earliest kinds of poetry may have emerged as formularies used in various rituals pertaining to life events (birth, coming of age, marriage, death, etc.) and food production cycles (hunting, fishing, sowing, harvesting, etc.). These spoken portions would include origin myths, prayers, and incantations that might later become detached from these ritual actions.
The rhetorical features, inherent in language, would now be used in these carefully made instruments of words to focus a hearer’s attention by holding and extending the duration of his or her short-term working memory. Verbal artifacts would also need to incorporate elements that facilitate long-term memory storage between performances. The major stylistic features associated with oral composition, e.g., repetition, formulas, parataxis, and extraordinary events, all exist to serve the needs of these two kinds of memory. In addition, older prelinguistic features, retained as paralanguage, were adapted to reinforce the rhetorical powers of verbal artifacts. As gesture and prosody (intonation, amplitude, duration, etc.), they supplied persuasive affect and nuance to speech, as well as formal structures for the expressions of imitative play in narrative, drama, ritual, and song.
In my epilogue, I consider the impact of writing on an oral poetic tradition that might have lasted over 100,000 years. While I can only touch on a few issues, I point out how writing, as an external memory system, made most mnemonic structures unnecessary and prose possible, how the absence of a visible oral performer allowed readers to freely generate mental imagery in response to verbal cues, and how the availability of easily rereadable texts invited writers to create more complex representations of human thoughts and feelings.
I end by reasserting the generally accepted principle that evolution is a cumulative process by which older adaptations are kept in reserve or reused for new purposes. This applies to the successful cognitive traits our nonhuman primate ancestors possessed, as well as those our genus and our own subspecies later developed. As each new stage commenced, and as new means of directing attention appeared, the older means slipped into the background, but, when they did, they continued to perform functions essential to the survival of the species. This means that prelinguistic expressivity was incorporated into spoken language, the oral vitality of which was later incorporated into written texts.
Before you and I enter my paleopoetic time machine, having just outlined this projected mission into prehistory, I want to reaffirm some of the thoughts I began with in this introductory chapter.
By “poetics” I do not refer restrictively to what we literates now call “poetry,” i.e., compositions in verse: by using the phrase “verbal artifact” I mean to indicate a much more inclusive cultural technê. In my concept of “paleopoetics” I include the skills that prelinguistic humans practiced, skills that, when language evolved, were expressed in verbal structures. It is this repertoire of techniques that, having formed the preliterate imagination, flourished well over fifty thousand years before writing and the literate imagination first emerged a mere five thousand years ago. I have tried to set forth the idea of a paleopoetics by first placing it within the domain of a cognitive poetics that incorporates the full implications of the phrase “embodied mind” and that therefore regards cognition as including perception and action, language comprehension and mental imagery, information processing and emotion. At this point in history, the defense of poetry with which I began this chapter can be mounted only by a defense of poetics. With this in mind, I will now close this chapter with some brief summary remarks.
As a symbolic system, language constitutes our principal means of sharing information. What intention is to means, so rhetoric is to language. Cognitive rhetoric, the study of the art of speech as hearers (and readers) process it, examines how skilled speakers deploy clusters of words as found tools. Cognitive rhetoric therefore has as its disciplinary basis the science of cognitive linguistics. With that perspective, we may view the work of researchers, such as Ronald Langacker, Leonard Talmy, and the functionalist, Talmy Givón, as supplying the general principles for the more specific inquiries of cognitive rhetoricians, such as George Lakoff and Mark Turner.
Cognitive poetics, as I envisage it, is the study of verbal artifacts as made tools. When we engage these tools and they shift their status from that of objects to that of instruments, they reveal their rhetorical affordances. Since this engagement activates the words, transforming them into the simulations of perceptions, memories, thoughts, and emotions, the verbal artifact is a cognitive tool that can only be understood in reference to the cognitive actions it facilitates.
Can there be a cognitive hermeneutics? Not if by “cognitive” we mean those processes associated with perception, imagination, memory, and other essentially nonverbal representations. Moreover, if a verbal artifact is, by definition, a cognitive tool, it cannot be understood apart from those cognitive processes that activate it and in turn are activated by it. It follows that it ceases to be a tool when it assumes the status of an object, which is precisely how hermeneutics must engage it. The only justification for hermeneutics, after all, is the breakdown of a communicative tool. Let me be clear: hermeneutic theory and the practice of literary interpretation have legitimate functions to perform, but these functions can be termed “cognitive” only in the narrowest definition of that word. As for cognitive poetics, it cannot incorporate hermeneutic aims and perspectives without delegitimizing its own discipline. To assume that it, or any other poetics, must justify its existence by supplementing the work of interpretation is to transpose those two activities, and, as Thoreau once wisely remarked, “The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.”