Memory, Metaphors, and Meaning

Reading Literary Texts

Nicolae Babuts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351505895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Literature explores the human condition, the mystery of the world, life and death, as well as our relations with others, and our desires and dreams. It differs from science in its aims and methods, but Babuts shows in other respects that literature has much common ground with science. Both aim for an authentic version of truth. To this end, literature employs metaphors, and it does so in a manner similar to that of scientific inquiry.The cognitive view does not imply that there is a one-to-one correlation between the world and text, that meaning belongs to the author, or that literature is equivalent to perception. What it does maintain is that meaning is crucially dependent on mnemonic initiatives and that without memory, the world remains meaningless. Nicolae Babuts claims that at the interface with the printed page, readers process texts in a manner similar to the way they explain the visible world: in segments or units of meaning or dynamic patterns.Babuts argues that humans achieve recognition by integrating stimulus sequences with corresponding patterns that recognize and interpret each segment of a text. Memory produces meaning from these patterns. In harmony with its goals, memory may adopt specific strategies to deal with different stimuli. Dynamic patterns link the unit of processing with the unit of meaning. In sum, Babuts proposes that meaning is achieved through metaphors and narrative, and that both are ways to reach cognitive goals. This original study offers perspectives that will interest cognitive psychologists, as well as those simply interested in the process through which literature stirs the human imagination.

1

Literary Dynamic Patterns

The Mnemonic Origins

I have defined the dynamic pattern in terms of a configuration of stimulus forces, of contours, angles, colors, movement, and interaction. Configured by a sentence or a clause, or rarely by a phrase, a dynamic pattern has a minimum context and a specific identity. It is thus not a schema or a category. A dynamic pattern is the fully integrated counterpart to the mnemonic potentials. It can acquire its definitive form just before it is set on paper to enter the textual blueprint. Subsequently, it is re-created by the reader following the blueprint’s guidelines. To illustrate this, let us take the following example. In one poem speaking about himself as a poet, Victor Hugo assumes the identity of an archangel:

“Avant d’être sur cette terre, / Je sens que jadis j’ai plané;/ J’étais l’archange solitaire” “Before being on this earth, / I feel that long ago I soared; / I was the solitary archangel” (“À celle qui est voilée”). About the same time this pattern appears in an epic poem, La Fin de Satan, in a totally different context: “Jadis.../ —Moi!—J’étais l’archange au front splendide” ‘Long ago.../ —I—I was the archangel with the radiant face’ (“Satan dans la nuit,” i). Each pattern has its own identity, yet at the same time, there is a strong dynamic affinity between them. We do not know which one was created first, but let’s assume that the one expressing the condition of Satan came first. As quoted here each of the two examples represents a dynamic pattern. Let’s imagine the poet in the process of creating the second pattern. Elements of the first, remembered either as a whole pattern or as fragments, intervene to help. At this stage and in this capacity, as contributors, they represent mnemonic potentials. When the creative process ends all these elements have been submitted to a new urgency and become part of the newly created dynamic pattern. So the difference between mnemonic potentials and dynamic patterns is functional.

The question then is at what stage in the creative process we can talk about meaning. Both patterns can be defined as belonging to a master pattern of the fall from grace. Satan’s fall is due to his inordinate pride; Hugo’s is simply the result of being born. “Long ago I was the solitary archangel” echoes (especially the word jadis) “long ago I was the archangel with the radiant face.” The similarity emerges from the kinship between Satan’s banishment and Hugo’s own exile in the Island of Jersey. Yet each pattern has its own identity and its minimum context and acquires meaning at the moment when all the elements are in place and just before the pattern is set down on paper. Exactly how long before writing it down may vary from writer to writer and, in the case of the same writer, from composition to composition. Meaning enters consciousness in a moment of illumination, or epiphany, and is assigned an identity. Once part of a text, the pattern awaits a reader or interpreter to renew its meaning. The text retains its enormous potential, but it can do nothing by itself.

This outline of the creation of meaning suggests a profitable strategy of bringing together the concept of echoes and that of dynamic patterns to attempt to understand the creative process. For echoes and dynamic patterns are not simply literary devices somewhat limited in scope, but the very underpinnings of the creative initiatives at the foundation of all texts. Roland Barthes had an inkling of this when he almost flippantly remarked:

Every text, being itself the intertext of another text, belongs to the intertextual, which must not be confused with a text’s origins.... The quotations from which a text is constructed are anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks. (“From Work” 77)

Barthes’s contention is both surprising and unexpected, and is more valuable for what it reveals (unwittingly) than for what it denies. For if the quotations from which the text is constructed are already read, that’s because the author read them; once included in that text, their effect is to echo in the reader’s memory, who earlier may have read the same, or similar, texts as the author. And if they are anonymous as origins, their anonymity is suggested by the fact that they have been transformed and submitted to a new urgency. They now obey different needs and inhabit a different space. That is why we need to cross out Barthes’s quotations (they are not quotations) and substitute echoes. What is recovered in a close reading of a text is not so much origins in the sense of sources, but a possible parallel impulse of an author who has interacted with the vision and the verbal resources of another text before moving to create his or her own metaphoric field. So that while Barthes trumps originality with anonymity and extols the value of the intertextual domain at the expense of the individual text, his proposition also betrays its corollary, namely, that the phenomenon he is observing is ubiquitous, affecting every text. And while it is true that the vast majority of these “quotations” are irrecoverable because they intervene in a new text only as fragments, changed, those that are identifiable as echoes show that the phenomenon is not marginal, not an aberration, but that it stands at the very foundation of texts.

For Barthes, then, these “quotations” make a sudden appearance into the text already woven. M. M. Bakhtin, on the other hand, dwells on the process itself, the enterprise of creating a text, and points to those elements that appear to have been left behind, but that nevertheless modulate its meaning:

Indeed, any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it....The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships...and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers.... (Dialogic, 276)

As one can see, the alien words may leave a trace in the new text and thus could be understood to have some affinities with our echoes. In a way that is similar to Barthes’s, Bakhtin describes a process that is fundamental and immanent in the language and its use. What is different from the concept of echoes is that in Barthes’s case the process is somewhat mechanical and in Bakhtin’s the process acquires a language-wide range and a staggering complexity that might inhibit the constitution of meaning. Moreover, in neither case are there allowances made for the dominant role of memory; for it is memory that combines, re-shapes, and re-aligns all the various elements from other texts into a new coherent vision.

In the mnemonic economy a dynamic pattern, as a whole or as a fragment, can produce an echo in a new text, can help create a new dynamic pattern with affinities to the old. And the process is not random, not linked to categories, and not language-wide. It is specific in its transfer of energy and of semantic and dynamic values. Thatcher and John show evidence from neuroscience that leaves no doubt that the identity of a specific sensory information can be preserved: “[D]uring the process of thought or imagination the representational system literally recreates the electrical activity caused by past experience which is retrieved into consciousness” (314). More recently (Oct. 2008), Hagar Gel-bard-Sagiv et al. offer the results of experiments with patients “implanted with depth electrodes” viewing audiovisual clips:

Here, we report the activity of single neurons in the human hippocampus and surrounding areas when subjects first view cinematic episodes consisting of audiovisual sequences and again later when they freely recall these episodes. A subset of these neurons exhibited selective firing, which often persisted throughout and following specific episodes for as long as 12 seconds. Verbal reports of memories of these specific episodes at the time of free recall were preceded by selective reactivation of the same hippocampal and entorhinal cortex neurons. We suggest that this reactivation is an internally generated neuronal correlate for the subjective experience of spontaneous emergence of human recollection. (96)

Note that the researchers use the words “recreates” and “reactivation,” not construct or even reconstruct.

As I shall attempt to show in what follows, a dynamic pattern is language bound in the form of a sentence or clause and it possesses a minimum context. At the moment it is recognized, it becomes a mnemonic event, which is strategically parallel to the outside reality. Three corollaries attend this view. First a dynamic pattern is not a schema or a category. Incontrovertible evidence from the cited experiments in the field of neuroscience leaves no doubt that memory can and does retain the identity of patterns. And this identity is affirmed, strengthened, and modulated by specific language. It is not simply someone entering, but a sentence such as this one: “Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger” (Joyce, Ulysses, 12). Or, not someone falling but “Depuis quatre mille ans il tombait dans l’abîme” “For four thousand years he had been falling into the abyss” (Hugo, La Fin de Satan” 767). Or again, not any thinking but, “Andromaque, je pense à vous!” (Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” Oeuvres 1.85).

A second corollary is that a dynamic pattern, being part of a larger context, is submitted to the exigencies of the referential power of language. It is crucial to see that the referent has two components. One is the material, that is physiological, Andromache, as she lived more than three thousand years ago, another is the coded pattern, the symbolic face of Andromache as it is formed by previous readings about her. The fact that memory in reading about Andromache refers to her symbolic identity that it knows and not to her biological identity that it does not know and cannot know does not mean that the mythical Andromache, Homer’s portrait of her or the portrait re-created by other poets, does not correspond to the biological Andromache. Under the present historical circumstances, the distance in time and the fact that we only know people from the reports that others make about them, or from the report of our own senses (also coded), we have to assume a fair degree of strategic correspondence. That is the only correspondence we can have.

Evidence that we believe in some correspondence surfaces in the cognitive understanding of reference. As I have said, the referent has two components: the material identity of the world, things in themselves that we cannot know, and the symbolic or coded identity that is formulated and coded by our sensory data, regardless of whether the information comes from the outside world or from readings and conversations. (I will have a chance to explain the concept of the splitting of the referent in a separate work.) In this state of affairs, reference involves two procedures: recognition and projection. First, memory summons the appropriate mnemonic potentials to recognize and complete the identity of the incoming sensory data. It refers to what it knows to interpret the new. When the incoming coded sequences meet mnemonic potentials and are recognized, when the Andromache pattern and its identity enter our consciousness, memory undertakes a second strategic move, a projection of the Andromache pattern into the space of the outside world: We see Andromache anchored in space and time, Andromache in the visible world, and not in the pattern’s actual location in an area of the brain. This is in harmony with what Wolfgang Kohler pointed out in 1959, namely that visual objects “appear outside the visual self” (see Gestalt, 126). That is why we believe in reference, why Andromache in the mind becomes a real Andromache.

That is also why Yves Bonnefoy can say of Baudelaire’s Andromache that she is “une passante lointaine, une femme réelle” “a distant passerby, a real woman,” who exists “hors de la conscience” “outside consciousness” (L’Improbable 160-61). “The inner mind of the self,” writes Ian Haight, “projects itself onto ‘external’ perception” (13). And this mnemonic projection, determined by evolutionary factors, has a dual purpose: to grant interpretive sanction to our perception and to establish a correspondence with the outside world. Without that ability the individual could not survive in any environment.

A third corollary to the cognitive view is that the dynamic pattern betrays the creator’s intent, that is, a strategy to create a world parallel to the actual. And although the newly created world is a transfiguration of the real, not a copy of it, it nevertheless is intended to present insights into the dynamics of the real and reflect relations that define the actual world. Thus Joyce’s sentence is part of an overall strategy (to deny intent and strategy is to revert to the antiquated view that produced “the intentional fallacy”) and does not introduce a simple structure or schema of entering; it rather presents a scene in which the old woman’s entering initiates the breakthrough of mystery into the world of the novel. Neuroscience again provides evidence that listeners ask who the speaker is and implicitly what his or her intent is. Van Berkum and his colleagues analyze event-related brain responses and conclude:

What the brain’s electrophysiology allows us to see is that voice-based inferences about the identity of the speaker and information encoded in the meaning of spoken words jointly constrain the same early sense-making process, without a principled delay in the use of speaker-related information. (589)

This research involved speaker and listeners, but there is little doubt that the findings would also apply to writer and readers.

The minimum context of a dynamic pattern marks its unique identity and, even if we are not aware, or only vaguely aware, of it, enables the involuntary memory to access it and retrieve it. The relations of the forces of a dynamic pattern comprise all aspects of meaning including sensory dynamics, metaphoric interaction, and conceptual depth. The concept of dynamic patterns as units of meaning posits a radically new foundation for reading, writing, and speaking.

A dynamic pattern can originate in several ways. In the memory of an observer, a dynamic pattern coming from the outside world may begin in the preliminary integration of the retinal mosaic. It would then meet the appropriate mnemonic potentials, be recognized, identified, and integrated. A similar process may produce dynamic patterns during reading. Sentences or clauses would be deciphered and the pattern they configure would be recognized, identified, and integrated, both within the textual narrative and in a mnemonic space. For the observer or reader meaning occurs at the moment when the pattern enters consciousness, the moment of recognition, the moment of thought. Once the pattern is given an identity and assigned a lot in the geography of memory, it will continue to be interpreted in light of past and incoming patterns. And because each reader invokes different mnemonic potentials to recognize a pattern, different readers may interpret the same pattern differently. But no matter how they interpret what they read, they all do it dynamic pattern by dynamic pattern, in quanta of energy.

For a writer, in addition to dynamic patterns from the outside world, memory may also create dynamic patterns from fragments of other dynamic patterns that were processed during reading (or conversation). This phenomenon has been called echo (distinguished from allusion). Thus, many literary dynamic patterns owe their existence to the process of retrieval during which writers or speakers recall fragments or whole patterns they have heard or read in the past and use them to create new patterns and a new text. The retrieved patterns or fragments may lead a writer to produce new thoughts and images or, on the other hand, new perceptions and thoughts may act as cues to retrieve the old patterns. While the identity of a dynamic pattern is vital in the process of its retrieval, once it is recalled and is used in the creation of a new text, either as a whole or in fragments, it is transformed. It now has to meet the requirements of a new environment and obey the laws of a different metaphoric field: it is no longer the same pattern. That is why it is proper to say that echoes are evidence of affinities between two writers and do not represent borrowings.

Because often memory retrieves fragments of past readings, some critics have been led to believe that only short phrases or schemas are involved. And indeed after a reading, with time, there occurs a fragmentation of the textual fabric, a break-up of cataclysmic proportions. That is, readers remember the theme of a poem, the tonality of its metaphoric field, the narrative if it has one, and some of its memorable sentences, but generally do not (unless they have a photographic memory or learn to recite it) recall the text verbatim. This is a fortiori true of a novel, where plot and characters would stand out, but not the exact wording. Thus many sentences and the patterns they configure, perhaps the majority, do not survive intact. But as I will attempt to show, even if they are remembered as fragments they can still draw a great deal of energy from their original encoding and identity.

We are dealing here with a mnemonic process that is at the foundation of texts. Yet, for all the attention that texts have received from critical theory, very few critics and theoreticians have been willing to recognize the central role of memory in the phenomenon of echoes and in the creation of literary patterns.However, there are some encouraging signs. In an eminently lucid article, speaking about allusion and echoes, Gregory Machacek puts it bluntly:

Despite such scorn from poststructuralist critics, for at least the past twenty years scholars of classical and modern literature have been struggling to develop a conceptual model and a critical vocabulary that will allow them more effectively to discuss the nature and workings of these brief phraseological adaptations (usually referred to as allusions or echoes....) (523)¹

Machacek focuses on the species of allusion that he refers to “as phraseological adaptation,” seeing it as “a literary device involving subtle artistry and playful erudition” (535).

My own concern is, of course, with the mnemonic process of retrieval which foregrounds dynamic patterns or fragments of dynamic patterns from previous readings and uses them to create new patterns and new texts. As I have indicated above, because of their capacity to combine with other elements during reading or during the creative process, I call such verbal fragments mnemonic potentials. When they do combine with other perceptual and verbal material to form dynamic patterns and are included into a new text they may retain some qualities of their past and act as echoes, betraying their mnemonic origin. I use the word “echo” not in the sense of a “repetition” of sound (after all even echoes in nature are distorted or fragmentary reenactments of sound not pure repetitions), but as an indication of the existence of a previous state that is now taken u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Literary Dynamic Patterns
• 2 The Beginning of Interpretation
• 3 Reading Poetry
• 4 The Allure of Myth
• 5 Beginnings and Endings
• 6 Metaphoric Fields: Blaga, Melville, and Leopardi
• 7 The Tonality of Metaphoric Fields
• Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• References
• Index