Of course reading alters our brains, and it is interesting to create experiments that help to explicate exactly how this occurs, but too often the research reflects a simplistic correspondence between a psychological state or activity, such as reading, and its neural correlates, without much thought about further meanings or the philosophical issues involved. Examining the dynamic brain processes involved in fictional experience is important, and if the right questions are asked, it may lead to further understanding of the ways in which fictions of all kinds are related, the ones we read in books, but also the fictional aspects of memory and imagination in general.
My argument here is that without a subtle embodied philosophical framework that includes subjective phenomenal experience as it relates to others and to the world, the blooming imaginative life of human beings, both conscious and unconscious, will be rendered incomprehensible, either as a paradox or as a befuddling reduction to brain locations, which in themselves tell us too little. If, however, imaginative experience is understood, not as some peculiar aesthetic activity practiced by those marginal people we call artists, but rather as an integral aspect of what it means to be a person in the world with others, from prereflective corporeal states to reflective ones, then O’s relation to the fictional characters in the diabolical love story told in Wuthering Heights is nothing more or less than natural.
Remembering in Art: The Horizontal and the Vertical
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A COUPLE of years ago, I walked into a museum, saw a still life on the wall, and, before I had a single articulate thought, the name “Chardin” jumped to mind. The particular canvas was new to me, but its physiognomy, if you will, was not. I was seeing the face of an old friend who had changed a bit but not beyond recognition. How does memory affect looking at a work of art? Like so many simple questions, this one is difficult to answer. Memory is repetition; a thing from the past recurs in the present. Without repetition, we couldn’t recognize anything. “The dialectic of repetition is easy,” writes Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantin Constantius, “for that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”1 Kierkegaard’s Repetition is a bewildering text, but Constantius makes a complex distinction between repetition and recollection, which I will borrow somewhat recklessly for my own purposes. Recollection looks backward; repetition forward.
The “new” Chardin canvas must have unearthed my earlier encounters with the painter’s work, but I had no need to think about them before I made the identification. Most of my remembering was unconscious and therefore cannot be broken down into a sequential process I can analyze. My perception of the canvas and the feeling that accompanied it seemed instantly to generate the proper noun. Of course, I have misrecognized art, too. I have seen what I believe is one painter’s canvas and discovered it belongs to another or, upon returning to a work, I have realized that I had left out an entire figure or object.
Memory is bound up with time, a concept so ferociously difficult to explicate it remains a torture to philosophers. Conscious memories appear to be a feature of our reflective self-consciousness, knowing that we know, that trick of seeing ourselves through the eyes of someone else. We can consciously remember in images and words what was—we have a mental representation of ourselves in a place and at an event sometime in the past—but we can also imagine what might be in the future. I am not interested here in the time of clocks and calendars or in the time of theoretical physics but rather in the felt rhythms of before and after and the strange reality of a present, which cannot be a vanishing point in time, an impossibly small temporal unit, but a continuum in which the represented past is pulled into the present in anticipation of the future. William James’s idea of the stream of consciousness, Henri Bergson’s memory as duration, and Edmund Husserl’s retention and protension are different versions of this retaining, anticipatory phenomenological present. Memory haunts the present as a ghost of the past, a double of what was, happening again in an extended now, but it is always distinct from immediate perceptual reality. When we look at a work of art we are always remembering, even if we are not at all aware of the shaping memories that make our vision possible, but we are also always projecting from that past into an extended present and future.
The spatial conception of time in Western culture is most often a horizontal line or arrow moving from left to right. We imagine a narrative unfolding in this direction. Events are felt as happening in a left-to-right motion, and research has shown that in artworks figures with greater agency or power usually appear to the left in pictorial space—a phenomenon that was first noticed in a neurological patient who suffered from aphasia. Although he confused subject and object in his speech, he could clarify his meanings by drawing. He consistently placed the narrative agent or subject to the left in pictorial space.2 It was hypothesized that this placement might have to do with the brain’s hemispheres and the specializations of right and left, that perhaps we are anatomically designed to see the world’s action in left-to-right terms.
But the fact that in Arabic and Israeli speakers the directional bias is reversed, right to left, and that it appears not to exist in either illiterate speakers or preliterate children has made this theory untenable.3 The spatial agency bias directly echoes the direction of reading and writing, which suggests that the scanning habits of literacy have fundamentally shaped our perception, a striking example of how linguistic culture shapes the way we see and interpret images, not only time as a horizontal left-to-right movement in space, but its effect on how we configure power in space. In Western portraiture it has been noted that faces are more likely to be looking to the left than to the right, and that portraits of men are more likely to be turned to the left than portraits of women, perhaps because the masculine, not the feminine, character is conceived of as “forward looking.” Anne Maass and her colleagues looked at 120 Adam and Eve images and found Adam to the left of Eve in 62 percent of the pictures.4 One could certainly argue that in the Paradise adventure, Eve is more of an agent than Adam, but in these images power trumps story.
Whichever direction your time arrow points, if you try to lift time out of space, you will find yourself confounded. Without the metaphor we lose the concept of personal temporality altogether. Interestingly, it is impossible to have a conscious autobiographical memory without a spatial configuration. The remembered self must be somewhere: I remember the picnic by the lake. It must have been 1965. I was ten. In order to remember the events of the picnic, I have to ground it. In harmony with the great traditions of artificial mnemonic systems, those palaces and rooms that root words to a place so they can be remembered, conscious personal memory does not exist without space. Space anchors time in memory.
In the working notes for his unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed an idea of vertical time, a radical break with earlier philosophies, one he related to what he called “wild being,” être sauvage. What is vertical time? It is surely preliterate time, a time that stays with us even after we are thinking about ourselves thinking and recording those thoughts on paper. Vertical time is not bound purely to self-conscious reflection or to any Cartesian idea of the mental but to a time of embodied animal being, to prepersonal, preconceptual, prereflective time, a time human beings share with mice. “Then past and present,” Merleau-Ponty wrote, “are Ineinander, each enveloping-enveloped—and that itself is the flesh.”5 Time in this understanding is not something we are “in.” It is not a line forward or an ongoing tick of the clock, and it cannot be separated from our perception of the world. The hard lines usually drawn between a body and what is outside it soften in this idea of enveloped and enveloping “flesh.”
It is not easy to explicate precisely what Merleau-Ponty meant by this verticality and flesh, nor how he would have developed the idea had he lived, but it is interesting to tip time’s direction and keep verticality in mind in relation to the
problem of memory and perception in relation to artworks. The philosopher understood that all species are linked. He called these connections interanimality. Learning and memory are part of the lives of even simple invertebrate creatures. The sea slug, Aplysia, with only ten thousand neurons, has been the object of many studies, most famously in the memory research of Eric Kandel.6 The slug will never call up mental images of last week’s crawl toward a stone, but sensitization and habituation, primitive forms of learning and remembering, are part of its life.
Human beings are far more complex than sea slugs, but we are their relatives as remembering beings nevertheless. My ability to recognize a Chardin canvas that is new to me through earlier perceptions is not a passive act but a creative one, which relies on memory, most of which is unconscious. Despite increasing knowledge about the brain’s visual system, heated debates (both scientific and philosophical) go on about how the human mind perceives and remembers what is out there in the world. There is growing evidence that unconscious inference influences how we see. “Unconscious inference” was a term used by the biophysicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who argued that vision is determined by prior experience.7 We perceive the world through perceptual repetitions, repetitions that become expectations over time. We fill in what is missing in our perception with inferences from the past. Without such inferences, I could not have recognized that canvas as one by Chardin. There are scientists who argue that the role of our embodied brains in perception is essentially an economic, conservative one and that perceptual inferences help to minimize surprises from the environment.8 Whether this can stand as a global theory of perception remains open.
What is certain is the past lives on in the bodily present, often without our awareness, and its regular perceptual rhythms and repetitions help shape our organized vision. Research on change blindness demonstrates that many of us fail to notice even dramatic alterations in a visual scene, whether the image is fixed or moving. For example, one actor replaces another in a film, and we haven’t a clue that a shift has been made.9 Similarly, studies on inattentional blindness have shown that if people have a task to perform, counting the number of times a ball changes hands during a game, for example, many of them will miss an unexpected intrusion, such as a woman strolling calmly through the proceedings with an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit.10 Even more remarkable is the phenomenon of blindsight, discovered in patients who have lesions in their primary visual cortex and insist they can see nothing. Despite the fact that they have no visual experience, they are able to discriminate objects, colors, and spatial configurations far above chance levels. In other words, blindsight patients can see but they have no conscious awareness of seeing.11 These forms of blindness are not irrelevant to looking at art. To what degree do we conventionalize the images in front of us because we see the patterns we expect to see? How much do we miss? How much of vision is stereotyped? Do we always quash surprise to the degree that it is possible without even knowing we are doing it? And how much visual information do we take in without being at all conscious of it?
Much has been written about the prospective or predictive brain in neuroscience, which may help explain not just gaps in our perception but our notoriously unreliable autobiographical memories. We all know that each person who was present at that family picnic recalls the get-together differently. It is even possible that Uncle Fred, who did not attend the picnic, has vivid memories of that sunny afternoon by the lake and its sensational event: the near drowning of Cousin Thomas and his rescue by the heroic Aunt Angelina. Uncle Fred’s certainty that he remembers Thomas in extremis and Angelina’s daring dive underscores the contagious nature of stories (he heard all about it), as well as the vivid mental imagery that may accompany them. Imaginary and real events merge in a highly promiscuous manner in the human mind. Nevertheless, Uncle Fred’s false memory might make him more alert to struggling swimmers in the future, or at least that is how the evolutionary story about why we have such faulty memories might be told. What matters is not that we see every detail in the visual field but rather that we see what is most salient. Perfect recollections of our pasts may be less important than using its lessons as flexible repetitions in the future.
Merleau-Ponty spoke of the perceiving body as a vehicle for “I can.” In 1952, the neuropsychologist Roger Sperry also linked the mental to the motor. “An analysis of our current thinking will show that it tends to suffer generally from a failure to view mental activities in their proper relation, or even in any relation, to motor behavior.” He further argues, “Perception is basically an implicit preparation to respond. Its function is to prepare the organism for adaptive action.”12 Perception involves all our senses, but we are so used to thinking of vision as the sense of senses, the supreme form in which the world is made available to us, that the idea that seeing is intimately bound up with bodily motion, that it evolved to help us run or jump or attack, may seem a bit odd. But, as Melvyn Goodale puts it, “Visual systems first evolved not to enable animals to see, but to provide distal sensory control of their movements. Vision as ‘sight’ is a relative newcomer to the evolutionary landscape.”13 Goodale and his collaborator, David Milner, have hypothesized that there are two distinct visual pathways in the brain—the dorsal and ventral streams. The dorsal stream, which evolved first, informs motor behaviors—vision for bodily action. The ventral stream, which evolved later, informs cognition. This is vision for perception, one that establishes a catalogue of visual representations of the world, which allows us to identify and classify objects and events. What does this have to do with art? Images inspire active responses. The experience of art viewing is not just a visual one; it is muscular and emotional as well.
Perception involves unconscious kinesthetic memories, separable from our vivid or vague mental images of a picnic remembered differently by each member of the family, images that are referred to as declarative, explicit, or conscious memories. Implicit memories include motor-sensory, procedural memories, what Merleau-Ponty, among others, called “habit” learning. Walking, talking, swimming, reading, and writing are skills we once struggled to master but that through repetition have become unreflective. As the spatial agency bias demonstrates, however, such unconscious habits may become essential to our conceptions of time, space, narrative, and social power. The Russian neurologist A. R. Luria coined a beautiful phrase for these learned but automatic motions. He called them “kinetic melodies.”14 A person can lose the ability to retain long-term autobiographical memory without losing the ability to learn new visuomotor skills, as was made clear in the famous case of H.M., whom Brenda Milner studied for years. H.M. suffered from terrible epileptic seizures, submitted to an operation, which stopped the seizures, but he sustained damage to the medial temporal lobe of his brain. His perception, intelligence, and short-term memory (the ability to retain information for seconds) were intact, but he forgot what had happened to him soon after it occurred. He had lost long-term memory. He did, however, learn and retain the ability to perform a complex mirror drawing skill. What he forgot was his experience of learning it.15
We see in order to move, but we also vicariously mirror movements we see in others. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin notes that some human actions “seem to be due to imitation or some sort of sympathy.” He mentions throat clearing among audience members when a singer goes hoarse and the fact that “at leaping matches, as the performer makes his spring, many of the spectators, generally men and boys, move their feet.”16 Darwin was fascinated by imitation and the “social instincts” in both animals and human beings and regarded sympathy as crucial to collective life, a trait he believed was increased through natural selection. Both the artist and the art viewer relate to the work of art with forms of sympathetic connection.
Neuroscience research has demonstrated this human reflectivity in vicarious movement, sensation, and emotion. When we look at another person, see an image of another person, or even read about an
other person doing or feeling something, we participate in that doing or feeling automatically and subliminally. Neural systems in the premotor and somatosensory cortex are activated in us that allow for an implicit understanding of what is happening to the other person. There continue to be debates about neuronal mirror systems. Much remains to be known, but empirical infant research, along with research on our fellow mammals, confirms that we are social beings oriented toward others from the beginning of our lives and that our development is predicated on that essential bond. My philosophical leanings have caused me to embrace an embodied, motor-sensory-affective relational mammalian reality, of which we human beings are a part.
This virtual connection to the other is embedded in how we see art and to what we understand as the imagination itself. The art historian David Freedberg and the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese have written about embodied simulation and empathetic experiences in art viewing and argued that this preconceptual, somatic experience plays a vital role in our responses to works of art.17 A now well-known fMRI—brain scan—study on professional dancers found that this neural participation was stronger when viewers watched movements they had themselves mastered, a finding that suggests learning, which becomes unconscious motor or habit memories, in this case of specific, highly complex gestures, sharpens the self-other link in mirroring others.18
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind Page 55
