When the speaker of Marvellâs poem addresses these (almost) closing words to his âcoy mistress,â exactly what has he communicated? A powerful sense of urgency, certainly, in keeping with the general thrust of the poem as sexual invitation. But just what are readers supposed to see? If we look more closely, this âimageâ appears a perfect instance of what Christopher Ricks calls Marvellâs tendency to transcend the visualizable.1 The rolled-up ball of strength and sweetness in the first couplet is evidently connected to the âtearing throughâ of the second. But how? Is the ball the thing tearing or the thing torn? âTear through ⌠the iron gatesâ is unclear too. âWith rough strifeâ could imply the resistance of a closed grill, the pleasures forcibly dragged between its bars. But the gates might equally be open, with a ball-couple tearing along a path through them. Or, perhaps, we might picture the lovers propelling a ball at speed. This faint suggestion is prolonged in the subsequent and final lines of the poem, where we find âone ballâ suddenly scaled up to become âour sunâ driven along by the poet and his mistress:And yet all these things the loverâs words make visible only obscurely, and possibly not at all.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run. (84)
What does seem certain is that the image engages the body as well as the eye: the action verbs âroll ⌠upâ and âtearâ prompt a powerful sense of force first gathered then unleashed. Sound and rhythm contribute: in the fricative violence of line 3, and as the pace slows in the spondaic ârough strifeâ only to rattle through the subsequent line. But acknowledging the centrality of embodiment to the image does not make it any more straightforward. That the poetâs mistress might struggle to make global sense of it, for all its embodied immediacy, may not much matter to him. After all immediacy, and not good sense, is precisely what the poet urges: âletâs do this violent, constraint-defying thing,â he seems to say, âand not worry about the details.â The position of the engaged reader or critic, to whom the details do matter, is a little different, however. He or she likewise has no choice but to be struck by the physical shock of Marvellâs lines. But this does not mean that the full potential import of the image is experienced with immediacy. What begins as a pre-conscious response is likely to be expanded into a series of more deliberate rehearsals, as we model in more reflective and conscious ways a wide variety of candidate movements to which the verse appears to gesture, such as forcefully pressing through an iron grill or rolling a ball at speed. Thematically speaking, âTo His Coy Mistressâ pits spontaneity against deliberation, and hopes the first will win. But, cognitively speaking, the poem calls on a mixture of both from careful readers. It calls on what, drawing on work in the cognitive sciences and cognitive humanities, we propose to call their âkinesic intelligence.â
Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, the cognitive revolution has transformed disciplines as diverse as linguistics, artificial intelligence, psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. âCognitiveâ should not be understood here as restricted to so-called higher-order ratiocinative modes of thinking. As philosopher Ray Jackendoff puts it, âcognitionâ means âan organismâs understanding or grasp of the world and its ability to formulate and execute actions in the world.â2 In other words, the cognitive sciences understand mental processing to be geared towards action, and include within the âcognitiveâ the non-rational, bodily or emotional. Thus the psychologist Raymond Gibbs warns that âwe must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action.â3 Indeed, as the philosopher Shaun Gallagher puts it, âthe broad argument about the importance of embodiment for understanding cognition has already been made in numerous ways, and there is a growing consensus across a variety of disciplines that this basic fact is inescapable.â4
We cite Gibbs, Gallagher and Jackendoff to give our readers a sense of the importance of the embodied paradigm in general rather than to align ourselves with any version of it in particular. Conceptions of embodied cognition take diverse forms, and have contributed to diverse cognitive literary research. Particularly influential in the so-called âfirst waveâ of literary cognitivism was work by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Mark Turner, which argued that language derived metaphorically from our corporeal and spatially oriented life.5 More recently, theories of extended mind or distributed cognition (often grouped together as â4E cognitionâ) have come to the fore.6 Theorists of Extended Mind (EM) understand the cognitive system to include not only the brain but also the body and the world. In common with other second-wave cognitive literary approaches, and our own, Extended Mind presents cognition as a combination of both universal and historical features, emphasizing neural plasticity and the âextensionâ of human cognition into language and culture. For instance, literary scholars have employed EM to explain how early modern playing companies dealt with the mnemonic burden of performing up to six plays per week, or brought it into dialogue with Renaissance conceptions of cognition and subjectivity as similarly âextendedâ or âdistributed.â7
Our own approach is grounded in the combination of immediacy and complexity, which we identified in our response to Marvellâs âball.â The cognitive sciences focus on mental processing that is too swift to be fully registered in our awareness. Hence Daniel Kahnemannâs bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow draws attention to how much of our cognition is extremely rapid. But literary authors and readers, we suggest, engage in a special task, which is to think both fast and slow. They do this by deploying their âkinesic intelligence.â
The term âkinesic intelligenceâ was first introduced to the critical lexicon by Ellen Spolsky in 1996, borrowed from psychology and neurology.8 As well as shining a spotlight on our cognitive responses to movement in literature and visual art, Spolsky argued that, especially where art and literature are concerned, embodied knowledge âis not especially privileged in being less ambiguous than other kinds of knowledge.â9 Complexity arose, Spolsky suggested, in the form of conflicts or clashes between bodily knowledge and other forms. Thus Spolsky raised important questions about the degree to which kinesic intelligence was direct or intuitive, and how it related to other modes of knowledge.
Then, armed with insights from more recent scientific work, Guillemette Bolens suggested some new answers to Spolskyâs questions.10 A growing body of research into âmotor resonanceââor kinesisâindicates that when we observe the action of another, we access our embodied kinaesthetic memory in order to retrieve a simulation of that action, and so our brains respond in a way similar to when we ourselves execute the movement observed (the phenomenon of so-called âmirror neuronsâ). Furthermore, motor resonance functions not only when we witness movement but also when we imagine seeing movement, or remember seeing movement, or when we look at visual images of movement, or even when we read a verbal description. Bolens mobilized these insights to argue that âkinesic intelligence in literature is the faculty that enables us to produce and use perceptual simulations in order to understand narrated movements or gestures.â Kinesic then, is not a synonym for kinetic: kinesis refers not to moveme...