Abstract
In Chapter 5 the keynote is movement, which has been a theme in every Chapter but is now essential to analysis of texts that show how the embodied mind is alive in time. The point is that changes of posture and changes of mind are changes in the division of our acts of attention. The array of a dozen works analyzed has a range of eras, types, lengths, structures, languages, including a best-seller hard-boiled novel, a classic French lyric about art-speech, and a mid-length meditation in Romantic blank verse. (Here the book’s only Diagram is a grid showing focus-changes in perception and emotion in the array.) Donald Wesling concludes the whole book with a rationale, unfashionable but unapologetic, for taking every opportunity to name the prosodic and linguistic forms in these twelve items.
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- 1.
As Brian Massumi said in Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2011), p. 37.
- 2.
Here I acknowledge a debt of gratitude for lessons in how to apply gestalt ideas of expectation to the arts, in two books still exciting to read: Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956); Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (1968). Meyer shows how inhibition of response is as crucial as response, and related to response; Smith shows how everything before the ending is preparing for the ending.
- 3.
For this transition, see Neil Shubin, especially Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York: Vintage Books, 2008.)
- 4.
On absence and also perpetual presence of origin, here is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Origin of Language Is Mythic: That Is, There Is Always a Language Before Language, Which Is Perception,” in Nature: Course Notes from the Collége de France (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), p. 219.
- 5.
For this phase, see the books of Father Walter J. Ong.
- 6.
See 31 scientific reports in 442 pages in Attention and Time , Edited by Anna C. Nobre and Jennifer T. Coull (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Shifts of attention take time: of particular interest for aesthetics in the work of these physiological researchers will be pages on speed-accuracy trade-offs (6); salience in oculomotor capture (10); inhibition of return (19); lapses, and phenomena of vigilant and drifting attention (79); fluctuations, and declines of time-on-task (80); gradual decrement in performance over time (83); intentional vs. automatic actions (295); anticipation of the timing of future events (313); entrainment and driving rhythms (322). The most pertinent study for us is “Neural bases of rhythm prediction,” by Ricarda I. Schubotz, pp. 345–355, where she shows how rhythm events activate surrounding systems in the brain: “Predicting rhythm will always activate the entire premortor cortex, because whenever an event is attended to (e.g., a melody, a rhythm, a ball trajectory), this event has, by definition, spatial, temporal, and object properties.” (352–353) See also, for larger philosophical perspectives but also based in clinical neurophysiology, Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (Viking: New York, 2014).
- 7.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983), p. 198. Hochschild’s most powerful single statement in the whole book occurs in Appendix B on “Naming Feeling”: “[W]hen we do not feel emotion, or disclaim an emotion, we lose touch with how we actually link inner to outer reality” (223). That says it all, for a psychology and politics of animalist perception.
- 8.
Modesty of reading practice may attend strong claims, in animalist argument. Have we earned the right to say that literature is the heartland of animalist thinking? Getting ready to watch our own perception in the array, might we even state that the cultural archive of literary texts is “one of the few sources still available of strategies of renaturalization”? That’s Timo Müller explaining how German ecological thinker Gernot Böhme , like (earlier) Walter Benjamin, holds that “We perceive nature not through language but within it.” Müller quotes Böhme: “In this situation, ‘literary anthropology’ is not just one area of literary studies. We must realize that literature (the arts) is an irreplaceable archive of stored experience, perhaps the most important one… in which the historical physiognomies of human beings are conserved. If, today, the importance of human beings seems to be in decline along with the formative force of history… literary studies are called to remind us of the images of the human that are fading out both in their beauty and in their horror.” Timo Müller, “From Literary Anthropology to Cultural Ecology,” in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, Edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 74, 75.
- 9.
Robert Bly, This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 79.
- 10.
Robert Browning, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. 5, Men and Women, Edited by Ian Jack and Robert Ingelsfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 56–61.
- 11.
Lee Child, Never Go Back, A Jack Reacher Novel (New York: Bantam Books, 2013; 2016 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Tie-in Edition--to accompany the film of the same title, with Tom Cruise as Reacher): passage quoted with breaks for summary from pp. 200–201 of the 2016 edition. This is billed on the cover as #1 New York Times Bestseller; it is the author’s 26th novel. Note that the entire passage has more speech-reference than I can display here: especially Reacher’s strategic threats to provoke the redneck drug-dealers, and his imagining of bursts of inner speech that express their delusions about body-stances in a fight.
- 12.
Here is Nick Richardson summarizing the book he’s reviewing, which is an analysis of The Bestseller Code by two literary computer people, Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers (London: Allen Lane, 2016): “Fifty Shades [of Gray]… has a plot structure that the computer has ascertained is the plot structure most likely to shift serious units. There are emotional ups and downs, five of each, and the story moves from one to the other with metronomic regularity…. The plots of Stephen King, Jackie Collins, Dan Brown, Sylvia Day, Danielle Steel, Lee Child, and James Patterson have a similar shape, and the curve of The Da Vinci Code is identical in its measuring out of highs and lows until the very end of the novel.” Nick Richardson, “Short Cuts,” The London Review of Books, 17 November 2016, p. 18.
- 13.
Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, complete in Clough: Selected Poems, Edited by J. P. Phelan (London and New York: Longman Annotated Texts, 1995), pp. 78–79. Clough’s dates are 1819–1861.
- 14.
The meter, incidentally, that Clough has angliziced into accentual-syllabic measure from the ancient Roman culture which you hold in contempt in your expressed opinions.
- 15.
The French original is quoted from Oeuvres Complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Texte Établi et Annoté par Henri Mondor et G. Jean-Aubry, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945), pp. 53–54. The poem has been translated by C. F. Macintyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 56 (translation unavailable here). There are several problems with the translation, and notably the use of a semicolon at mid-point at the end of line 8, where the French has a colon: Macintyre wants a diptych and a major cut here, but the French takes a breath and surges ahead with further description of the scene, specifying the agency at the end (finger-touch) and then allegorizing it with an appositional clause that makes the final line.
- 16.
The moral-historical issues are well shown in a sentence in Lawrence Buell’s chapter on the novel: “The mirror opposition of whalemen (especially Ahab) bestialized by the hunt versus the whale (especially Moby Dick) maddened by being hunted is culturally avant-garde insofar as it implies a comparative pathology of early capitalist enterprise and of intelligent mammals under pressure of systematic harassment”: Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 214.
- 17.
As Buell notes, lack of communication, on both sides, is the source of ironies in “A Presentation of Whales,” Barry Lopez’s great essay of the 1980s on the beaching—then official burning—of whales on the Oregon coast. The history and natural history of The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea (New York: Ecco, 2010) has also called forth a noble book by Philip Hoare, whose final chapter has the author in a neoprene wetsuit off the Azores, swimming with sperm whales, “eye to eye, fin to fin, fluke to fluke”: “I knew now that the whales had the measure of me; that they knew what I was, even if I could not comprehend them; that I was an object in a four-dimensional map, appraised in six senses. Every nuance of their movement took account of mine.” (418)
- 18.
From Chapter 128, The Pequod Meets the Rachel: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale. In The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 6, Edited, with Historical Note, by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), pp. 531–533.
- 19.
Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 57. Enough of the poem can be quoted to show method, but for purposes of the array the full text should be consulted.
- 20.
Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber & Faber, 2002): the passage for comment is between p. 42 and p. 44.
- 21.
The passage selected is 52 continuous lines from “why is this intervening form” in the author’s voice, to “bring it alongside” in the Naval Cadet’s voice. This has proven too long to quote, so can only be described. To test my commentary on perception and expectation, the reader is referred to the poem in the Faber & Faber edition.
- 22.
Alexi Parshchikov, “Minus-Korabl’,” in Figuri Intyitsii [Figures of Intuition] (Moskovckii rabochii, 1989), pp. 91–92. This is the first edition. The English translation, here and below, is by Molly Williams Wesling.
- 23.
Mikhail Epstein, “Afterword: Metamorphosis,” in Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry, Edited by Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby.
- 24.
See Andrew Wachtel, “The Youngest Anarchists: Kutik, Sedakova, Kibirov, Parshchikov,” in a collection of essays on Rereading Russian Poetry, Edited by Stephanie Sandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and especially Alexandra Smith, Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 2006). Parshchikov wrote, like Pushkin, a poema of forty pages on the Battlefield of Poltava; like Pushkin, a “Conversation Between an Editor and a Poet”; and a poem to his poetic instruments like Pushkin to his inkpot. It is also relevant that Parshchikov actually looked like Pushkin. He died in Cologne in 2009.
- 25.
Parshchikov published a statement on perception and poetics in the 80s, where he said that the world “is not finished… it requires participation, co-creation. The metaphor, commencing with the object or thing, no longer leaves it as it found it.” “New Poetry,” in Poetics Journal 8, Edited by Barrett Watten and Lyn Hejinian (Berkeley, CA, 1989), p. 21.
- 26.
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Edited by Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 114–118.
- 27.
“King Leontes is Insane,” by Ben Brantley, The New York Times, December 8, 2016, p. C7.
- 28.
Tim Wood in his notes to this poem shows he is aware of the predecessor who mocked the traditionalists of plagiarism even more humorously, by scrambling the numbers and types of the parts: William Carlos Williams in Spring & All (1923), where the first part is Chapter 19, and the next one is Chapter XIII.
- 29.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, or “many-languagedness,” is behind the notion of clash of discourses, and I have defined the clash idea at length, with examples, in my book Mikhail Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry (Lewisburg, PA and London: Bucknell University Press, 2003).
- 30.
Tim Wood, Notched Sunsets (Berkeley, CA: Atelos 36, 2016), p. 15.
- 31.
This Note (p. 730) and the poem itself of “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (pp. 50–52) are quoted from William Wordsworth, 21st Century Oxford Authors, Edited by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- 32.
A recent instance from a crossover scholar in visual arts and neurophysiology is in Barbara Maria Stafford’s introductory essay in the volume she edited, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities-Neuroscience Divide (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 1–2, referring to Wordsworth in the passage but not in this quotation: “Both sides of the wide disciplinary aisle… seem to need one another, and both contend that it is the mysteries of science as well as those of art that make the soul ache to understand the shaping powers of the human mind—the uncanny ability to co-create or ‘half-create’ with the rest of creation.”
- 33.
My book on grammetrics defines these terms: The Scissors of Meter: Grammetrics and Reading (Ann Arbor and London: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
- 34.
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), p. 70. Enough is quoted to start the comparison with Wordsworth; but to appreciate sense-sound-versification the full final stanza, and full poem, should be read.
- 35.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 274; Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism, pp. 121–122; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 42.
- 36.
This and related points may be learned from the exposition of Louise Westling, who explains Merleau-Ponty’s use of the same technical term, flesh, for human beings and for the textures of the material surround. What I say here owes much to her essay, “Merleau-Ponty’s Ecophenomenology,” in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, Edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), especially pp. 130–134, 137.
- 37.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, Compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard. Translated from the French by Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), pp. 211–212. Sentences before and after this passage are also illuminating.
- 38.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Edited by Claude Lefort, Translated by John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
- 39.
Isabelle Huppert, quoted in Rachel Donadio, “Light in the Dark,” The New York Times Style Magazine, December 4, 2016, pp. 144–149.
- 40.
Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” Philosophical Review 103, No. 1 (1994), pp. 75–106. The two passages contained here come from pp. 83 and 106.
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Wesling, D. (2019). Perception and Expectation in Literature. In: Animal Perception and Literary Language. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04969-0_5
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