The reader, it seems to me, is entitled to some explanation as to what in the world prompted the writing of a book like this, a book that claims to account for the prehistoric origins of literature. With that in mind, I will say a few words about the personal genesis of this unconventional project.
At some point in my mid-twenties it occurred to me that I would never be a great poet, probably not even a good poet. Yet writing a poem was still so magical an experience that I never wanted to give that up. And perhaps (I said to myself) I didn’t have to give up that experience, that exultant high. Perhaps I simply needed to find a way to enter more intensely into the poetry of others. If I were to do so, however, I knew I had to lay aside much of what I had learned from my teachers, whose New Critical “thou-shalt-nots”—in particular, the “affective fallacy”—had ruled out as irrelevant the very thing I most valued, the reader’s experience of the text.
I was only too happy to lay aside those dogmas, but I was already teaching college classes and finding myself engaged in those old routines of close reading and textual interpretation. How could I communicate my conviction that poems, short stories, and novels permit readers to participate in the writers’ mind-altering process of creation and are therefore themselves a teachable art, if all I did was explicate phrases and clauses? At that time, though, I was confronting the experience of literature both from the perspective of the reader and of the writer, since, at New York University, I was teaching courses in British and American literature and conducting poetry writing workshops. These two artistic activities, I hoped, might in some way be reconciled.
My first book, The Act of Poetry (Random House, 1970), tried to do just that. Here the common ground I staked out for reader and writer was memory: a writer arranges fragments of recollected events into a structure that readers use as though it represented their own remembered past. So, as readers, we don’t read a piece of literature—it reads us—and this reading, like writing, is an act, not some written commentary on that event. Since one’s memory is imprinted with sense experience, I could divide the book into chapters on visual, auditory, and motor/proprioceptive representations and thereby fit in all the basics: visual imagery (simile, metaphor, metonymy, personification, etc.), auditory effects (sound values, rhyme, etc.), and motor effects (rhythm, meter, line, stanza, etc.). My understanding of psychology then, I must confess, was rudimentary. As for my literary-theoretical position, it was anti–New Critical in all respects but one: I did believe that literary texts were single, unified structures, or at least became so in the mind of the reader. My heterodox views I’d absorbed partly from reading Blake, Whitman, and the Beats, partly from reading I. A. Richards, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Poulet. When, later in the 1970s, I encountered Viktor Shklovsky, Louise Rosenblatt, Roman Ingarden, Roman Jakobson, Wolfgang Iser, and Michael Riffaterre, I discovered that what The Act of Poetry had been “doing” was Reader-Response theory.
Even before the Reader-Response movement began to lose steam at the onset of poststructuralism, it seemed to me to have made its separate peace with old-school literary interpretation. Instead of striving to identify the connections between stylistic features and mental events, it seemed now satisfied polling focus groups of readers and tabulating their interpretive choices. Some, like Norman Holland, then fed their results through a psychoanalytical filtering machine to analyze readers’ preconceptions. Others, following the lead of Hans-Robert Jauss, concerned themselves with the variables that had determined the historical reception of given literary texts. Yet others, like Stanley Fish, attributed readers’ interpretations to the influence of authoritative institutions. The questions they asked were often interesting, but they just weren’t the questions I was interested in asking.
Then, in the late 1970s I became aware of a new kind of psychology. Having broken loose from the behaviorist establishment, it had devised experimental strategies that allowed researchers to draw inferences concerning what really goes on inside the “black box,” the brain as the generator of consciousness. Consciousness, it seemed, had been a topic as taboo to behaviorism as a reader’s thoughts and feelings had been to New Criticism. I learned that researchers, some of them, such as Robert Holt and George Sperling, working at NYU, were formulating what they called “Cognitive Psychology.”
I soon found myself reading more papers on this new psychology than on literary studies—I remember once admitting to George Sperling that I’d become more familiar with his writings than with those of any of my English Department colleagues. At that time I was also drawn to the psychological writings of Endel Tulving, James J. Gibson, and Allan Paivio. Reading their papers, I found experiments that were clear and conclusions that seemed to promise answers to some of the oldest, most fundamental, and most perplexing questions in my field: What does fictive discourse do? How does verbally cued imagination work? What are the structures of memory and how do these relate to the structures of narrative? How are mood, feeling, and emotion generated in the reading of literature? The beauty of it all was that the scientists whose work seemed to be offering solutions to these literary conundrums were not literary theorists and, so, had blessedly no allegiance to this or that aesthetic school or “interpretive community.”
In the early 1980s I participated in two NYU faculty colloquia. One, called the “Colloquium on Consciousness and the Brain,” met twice monthly at the NYU Medical Center. It was chaired by Rodolfo Llinás and drew psychologists from the Washington Square campus, among whom I remember the young Tony Movshon. When after a year or so this colloquium adjourned for the last time, I convened one of my own and, joining with Paul Vitz of the Psychology Department, scheduled a series of talks and discussions on the relation of psychology to the arts. Named the “Psychoaesthetics Colloquium,” it survived almost three years before it succumbed to the sort of malaise that too often besets such cross-disciplinary endeavors. Though interested and curious, participants from the humanities (e.g., literature, music, and the visual arts) and those from the various psychological subfields (e.g., cognitive, physiological, and educational psychology) were generally unready to assume another disciplinary perspective and learn to use its language. They were willing to showcase their findings but seemed reluctant to consider incorporating cross-disciplinary insights into their own ongoing research.
Though the ending of this discussion group was a disappointment, I continued to collect ideas from cognitive psychology, particularly ideas pertaining to visual imagery and applicable to the reading of literature. These began to interact in my mind, as cross-disciplinary ideas tend to do when left to their own devices, and by the late 1980s I found I had brought to term a rather monstrous manuscript that I feared no editor would publish and, if published, no one else would read. I thereupon resolved to divide it surgically and produce from it two viable offspring. One, Reading the Written Image, traced the history of verbal images, analyzed the cultural biases against them, and proposed ways by which to read them. The last sentence of the book was a calculated nod toward my “next” book: “Any further study of the written image must squarely face the issue of mental imaging and must do so, it seems to me, within the disciplinary context of cognitive psychology.” This companion opus, Poetics of the Mind’s Eye, was wholly devoted to the application of cognitive models to the reading of literature, especially to the mental representation of verbal images as simulations of perception and memory. By pure coincidence, both were published simultaneously in 1991, one by Penn State University Press, the other by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The next year, when Reuven Tsur published Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics, the field I had been working in finally got a name. (Tsur, I must add, had published a 66-page paper in 1983, entitled “What is cognitive poetics?” but this question of his hadn’t begun to provoke answers until the 1990s.)
In these two books I introduced a concept that will be central to this book, the concept that a verbal composition is an instrument, a verbal artifact. By “artifact,” I don’t mean what the New Critics meant by the “verbal icon,” a quasi-spatial representation like a painting. A verbal artifact has an instrumental function: it is a skillfully made tool that we save and reuse to achieve some purpose. When it is not in use, it reverts to the status of an object and may be examined as an assembly of parts, but its meanings reveal themselves only in action, not in rest. For me the term “cognitive poetics” implies the study of the use of tools made of words.
Following the publication of my twin volumes in 1991, my interests drew me for a while from cognitive poetics to cognitive rhetoric. By “cognitive rhetoric” I mean the study of the persuasive resources inherent in the structure of language. As cognitive linguists and stylisticians identify them, these resources are the structural components out of which verbal artifacts are built, the process that is the special purview of cognitive poetics. (The working relationship of rhetoric and poetics will emerge as a major theme in the chapters that follow.) In my first venture into cognitive rhetoric, Authority Figures (1996), I examined two such rhetorical resources, the pronoun paradigm and metaphor, in the context of political authority within canonical texts from the Iliad to the Christian Book of Revelation. Continuing this line of research, Homeland Mythology (Penn State University Press, 2007) focused on the use of biblical narratives in the construction of American exceptionalism. In it I argued that metaphor, conceptual metaphor as George Lakoff defined it, has always been the basis of political authority and its founding myths, that this myth-making trope sleeps in language, waiting like a seed to germinate, or, an apter analogy, like a virus to replicate.
A fascination with the origins of human phenomena has itself an ancient origin. Every oral culture has had its origin myths and its tales of a majestic and unrecoverable age of heroes, which, when writing was introduced, became among its most revered documents. In later times this fascination has often been expressed in studies of mythic narratives as interpretable records of prehistoric behaviors, beliefs, and modes of consciousness. Perhaps because these tales were normally transmitted in heightened language and verse form, it has often been assumed that ancient humans were naturally “poetic.” Because many of these early documents were preserved by priestly institutions and modified to honor local deities, it has also been assumed that these men and women were profoundly religious. In modern times this use of myths as guides to our deep past has led to a number of engrossing studies. One thinks of Johan Bachofen on matriarchy, James Frazer on sacred kingship, Carl Jung on mythic archetypes, Robert Graves on Celtic matriarchal poetics, and Julian Jaynes on the physiology of the Bronze Age brain.
My own current project, this “paleopoetics,” takes a different tack. As an inquiry into human origins, specifically the cognitive/evolutionary origins of what we now know as “imaginative literature,” it relies on information derived from much more recent sources, mainly from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. By living up to the name the U.S. Congress designated for it—the “Decade of the Brain”—the 1990s opened wide the gates of possibility for mine and for many another line of inquiry. Preceded by a quarter century of important discoveries, the split-brain findings among the most notable, the 1990s took full advantage of fresh technical breakthroughs, such as brain scanning devices, that accelerated advances in visual and auditory neuroscience, established the existence of mirror neurons that convert perception into simulated movement, proved that higher cognitive processes are performed by cells widely distributed throughout the brain, and disproved the old theory that brain cells, once they die, cannot be replaced. The brain, which we now know can regenerate its cells, continually reconnects them into new networks as new information is learned. Alongside these discoveries were those made in genetics (the Human Genome Project) and in computer technology (computer modeling and computational neuroscience). Through the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, as the Internet provided researchers the means to share their ideas with colleagues, Francis Bacon’s dream of the “New Atlantis” had finally become reality.
Though we may not yet agree on what selective pressures led our genus to evolve the particular cognitive skills it now possesses or ever know precisely when those skills emerged, we’ve come much closer to knowing what these adaptations must have been and the sequence of their appearance. Converging evidence from primatology, archaeology, paleoanthropology, genetics, neuroscience, linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer modeling has encouraged scholars to make claims that preceding generations would have dismissed as “just-so stories.” This is especially the case for theories of the origins of language, a field that has flourished over the past twenty years and is, of course, the point of departure for this and any other theory of the origins of verbal artifacts.
Writers of prose fiction and poetry for their part have also been fascinated by these questions of origins and often saw their ancient counterparts as practitioners of an art that was simpler, stronger, and more genuine than that of later writers. The various literary genres of one’s own age were like streams that one must trace upward to their fountainhead high in the mountains. The higher one climbed in this vision quest, the purer the water. In the early twentieth century, Ezra Pound was one writer who felt especially drawn to those ancient sources. In 1920, when he published a number of his literary essays under the title Instigations, he concluded with a posthumous essay by the sinologist, Ernest Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” For Pound, the notion that a language of visual images could have preceded, or at least coexisted with, a spoken code seemed to confirm his deepest intuitions. That, and the prospect of traveling back in time to recover the originary power of poetry, he must have found most exciting in the essay. For there, among many other memorable insights, Fenollosa had written: “[P]oetry does consciously what the primitive races did unconsciously” and, therefore, the “chief purpose” of modern literary scholars and poets “lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.” The time has come when feeling back along those ancient lines has finally become a practical possibility.