In their 2009 paper, “Grounding Language in Action,” Arthur Glenberg and Michael Kaschak give a straightforward example of words and bodies: “We demonstrate that merely comprehending a sentence that implies action in one direction (e.g., ‘Close the drawer’ implies action away from the body) interferes with real action in the opposite direction (e.g., movement toward the body).”29 In “Embodied Semantics for Actions: Findings from Functional Brain Imaging,” Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and Antonio Damasio reviewed the literature to assess whether the sensorimotor areas we use to act are also at work when we conceive of the same action in thought and language. The results were mixed, which is not surprising. They found close but not overlapping patterns for action observation and reading phrases about the same action, which led them to surmise that mirror neurons were not necessarily active in understanding language but, following Rizzolatti and Arbib (referred to earlier), may play a role in the development of language. Interestingly, they noted studies in which subjects responded differently to dead metaphors—those repeated ad nauseam so their origins are suppressed—and novel metaphors, in which the literal meaning is still alive.30
While the embodied character of language can be tested with studies such as those that connect an action verb to the premotor or motor cortices of the brain and bodily metaphors to the same areas, the theory as a whole, it seems to me, must be expansive and less literal. Language acquisition is a developmental phenomenon with learned conventions and temporal markers (last week and next year) and with articles (a and the), and the formal and cultural aspects of language must be accounted for in an embodied theory, as well as the fact that language itself shapes our perceptions, experiences, and understanding over time. To give a simple example: the idea of a book’s “greatness,” its inclusion in the canon of Western literature, necessarily affects a person’s reading of the book.
In her paper “The Aesthetic Stance: On the Conditions and Consequences of Becoming a Beholder,” Maria Brincker cites a study by Kendall Eskine et al. in which the researchers found that “perceived size and wall position of an artwork is influenced by prior knowledge about the social status of the artist.” The famous artist’s work is larger than the obscure artist’s work. Brincker stresses, “We must therefore study embodied responses not only to the content or style of the artwork, but to its mode of presentation.”31 Context also shapes perception, but how are we to conceive of these perceptual influences? Helmut Leder’s model of aesthetic experience includes multiple levels: five distinct stages of cognitive processing, including automatic low-level perception, top-down evaluative processes, and parallel emotional ones. As Brincker points out, the model is predicated on the idea that the human mind is a modular information-processing machine, which moves from perceptual inputs (the artwork and its context) through a series of discrete stages toward outputs—aesthetic judgments and feelings. Brincker finds the very idea of inputs and outputs problematic, as do I. “In terms of ‘inputs,’ ” she writes, “the distinction between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic hinges . . . on a pre-classification-box, which is influenced by context, but unrelated to the perceiver’s embodied engagement.”32 Clearly, alienating context from embodied experience does not hold. If O knows that Wuthering Heights has been designated a literary masterpiece, it will affect his reading experience, if only through his openness to the text, organic clicks and all.
It is important to make the phenomenological distinction between prereflective and reflective states of mind and to understand that reflective self-consciousness and the ability to recollect oneself as an other in the past and imagine one’s self in the future, to use symbols as representations of self and other, also play a role in our conscious imaginative capacities and how we perceive time itself. Nevertheless, to draw a firm line between one and the other is artificial. Kant’s free play between imagination and understanding mingles the two; it does not dissect them. The material of fiction is language, after all, a world of written symbols in sequence. The magic, if I am allowed to use that word, is that ingesting those symbols creates new human experiences in the reader.
In his chapter “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” in the Phenomenology of Perception, first published in 1945, Merleau-Ponty argued for an expanded understanding of language beyond narrow dictionary definitions. “If we consider only the conceptual and delimiting meaning of words, it is true that the verbal form—with the exception of endings—appears arbitrary. But it would no longer appear so if we took into account the emotional content of the word, which we have called above its ‘gestural’ sense, which is all-important in poetry, for example. It would then be found that the words, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of ‘singing’ the world, and that their function is to represent things not, as the naïve onomatopoeic theory had it, by reason of an objective resemblance, but because they extract, and literally express, their emotional essence.”33 Gestural for Merleau-Ponty goes beyond closing and opening drawers as real or imagined action. Language, he argues, “presents or rather it is the subject’s taking up of a position in the world of his meanings. The term ‘world’ here is not a manner of speaking: it means that the ‘mental’ or cultural life borrows its structures from natural life and that the thinking subject must have its basis in the subject incarnate.”34 Merleau-Ponty does not argue for a reductive physicalism or eliminative materialism, but rather he insists that linguistic creativity is rooted in bodily motion and blooms from it in myriad forms that “sing the world.”
Let us return to our own fictional character O and examine the first words of the Brontë passage he read. “Terror made me cruel” is a pithy, potent clause that begins the longer clauses that follow, just before O shivers. The four words do not signify bodily action, but their meaning is nevertheless corporeal. The compression and rhythm of the introductory clause in a hallucinatory scene of high drama is crucial to its signification, as is the repetition of the r sounds that bind the first and last words. “I found myself terribly afraid, and my fear created a desire, uncharacteristic in me, to act in a hurtful way” is not a substitute, even though from one point of view, we could say the two denote the same meaning. Implicit in Brontë’s clause is the fact that Lockwood is not a sadist. He does not go around routinely rubbing the wrists of girls, even those of phantom girls, against panes of glass and flooding bedsheets with blood. We do know, however, that he has gone to the country to escape himself or, rather, his feelings of love for a woman. The visitation, hallucination, or dream image is not without significance for the narrative as a whole. And yet, the longer version of Brontë’s sentence will not do; the meaning is not the same. Here we have what Susanne Langer called nondiscursive meanings at work.
In her theory of art, Langer rejects a purely positivistic notion of the symbol and contends that “there is an unexplored possibility of genuine semantic beyond the limits of discursive language.”35 The discursive for Langer is a system of representation, which can be found in some kinds of language, in mathematics, and in graphs or diagrams, which can then be translated into alternative formulations or notational systems. The nondiscursive, or the presentational, is image based. Writing about music in Philosophy in a New Key, she quotes Jean d’Udine: “ ‘All living creatures are constantly consummating their own internal rhythm,’ ” and then comments, “This rhythm, the essence of life, is the steady background against which we experience the special articulations produced by feeling.”36 Langer’s description of the motion of inner life applies well to the dance of sequential sentences and the rhythmic quality of a narrative work as a whole, which may walk, race, and skip its way to a resolution, during which the reader participates as active correspondent.
The interpretation of symbolic markings on a page, then, is not merely a matter of decoding orthography for sequential semantic meanings; it is the embodied experience of another person’s narration, which has meaning that appears rhythmically in the urgent staccato of the short sentence, in the pleasures of assonance, the
repetition of a long a or o sound, for example. I do not think that the discursive and nondiscursive can easily be separated or that artistic or poetical language can be contained in a special box. I prefer Cavendish’s continuum, but that does not make Langer’s fundamental insight, which echoes Dewey’s, irrelevant. She was also keenly aware of the shaping effects of symbols. In Feeling and Form, she writes, “In poetic events, the element of brute fact is illusory; the stamp of language makes the whole thing, it creates the ‘fact.’ ”37 The world of fiction for Langer is not propositional and, as Robert Innis points out in his book on her work, “It does not produce a discourse ‘about’ facts that exist independently of their qualitatively defined formulations.”38 Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience.
O’s immersion in Emily Brontë’s masterpiece is not purely about registering the meaning of the words as such but also about feeling the rhythmic qualities of the prose that enhance their significance. O is absorbed by the movement of the prose and by the narrative as a whole, but this takes place without a complete loss of his sense of self. Walton is right that our involvement with novels partakes of the “pretend.” He is wrong that pretending creates a false or quasi-feeling experience. And yet, there is no schizophrenic slippage of bodily location when we read books. O does not believe he is Lockwood or that he has been magically transferred to Wuthering Heights. He willingly gives himself over to the narrator’s voice, but, despite Coleridge’s famous phrase, he does not actually “suspend disbelief.” He knows he is reading a book and, if the story becomes too stimulating, he can close it for the tranquility of his living room. He can leave the “potential space” of the narrative, to borrow D. W. Winnicott’s term for the in-between area or transitional arena of play and “creative living.” Here self and other, the imaginary and the real, are not neatly bifurcated but overlap. In his essay “The Location of Cultural Experience,” Winnicott asks, “If play is neither inside nor outside, where is it?” He answers, “I have located this important area of experience in the potential space between the individual and the environment.”39
Potential space is where novel reading happens and where fictional characters live. Although O may consciously muse on Lockwood’s brutal action or the diabolical motives of Heathcliff, his access to the story and his feelings about it are not predicated on his belief in the reality of either Lockwood or Heathcliff. As Vittorio Gallese points out, “The reification of propositional attitudes inevitably led many cognitive neuroscientists to look for the brain areas/circuits housing desires and beliefs.”40 The search provided contradictory results because, I would say, the theoretical framework is upside down, not to speak of the fact that the search for “desires” or “beliefs” in the brain reveals a startling naïveté about the perils of reductionism. The same reification of propositional attitudes led to the paradox of fiction. If, however, we acknowledge that embodied, dynamic self-other engagement is an ongoing developmental reality, through which “as if” bodily states are continually active, our relation to language itself and the fictional characters created from it in a novel, but also in memory and in myriad encounters with others, can be reframed.
Embodied simulation (ES), Vittorio Gallese’s theory of how mirror systems in the brain create an implicit, not explicit, intersubjective reality between human beings, may be called upon to rethink our relation to fictional characters. ES stands as a neurobiological explanation for what Merleau-Ponty called intercorporeality. It does not rely on metarepresentations or second-order representations. “A direct form of understanding others from within, as it were—intentional attunement—is achieved by the activation of neural systems underpinning what we and others do and feel. Parallel to the detached third-person sensory description of the observed social stimuli, internal nonpropositional ‘representations’ in bodily format of the body states associated with actions, emotions, and sensations are evoked in the observer, as if he or she were performing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion or sensation.”41 This as if or virtual state between me and you occurs without a propositional attitude, despite the fact that I may be simultaneously reflecting on what you just meant by your last comment.
A 2008 paper, “A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation, Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways,” by M. Jabbi, J. Bastiaansen, and C. Keysers, which is cited by Gallese and Ammaniti, tested a hypothesis about emotion, in this case, disgust, under three conditions.42 The participants watched actors taste the content of a cup and look disgusted, tasted bitter liquids themselves to induce disgust, and read and imagined scenarios that involved disgust. In all three conditions, they found shared substrates, the anterior insula and adjacent frontal operculum, but distinct functional circuitry. This makes perfect sense. The three experiences are not identical, after all.
I was happy to see that the team included a sample script in their paper, which I will not quote but rather describe. The text employs the second person, “you,” and involves the reader’s physical contact with the decomposing head of a rat in a bed he or she is supposed to sleep in for the night in a scuzzy motel in the Czech Republic. As I read it, I felt a grimace forming on my face, the muscles in my shoulders tense, and an involuntary shudder come over me. The organic clicks were immediate.
Embodied simulation is a form of preconceptual imaginative connection to the other during perception. Does reading a novel double “as if” functions—the automatic ones of ES and the conscious awareness of fiction as fiction? Yes. The conscious knowledge that one is reading a novel does not affect the unconscious imaginative participation in the events of the book or our emotional responses to them, but it contextualizes the experience as safe. Heathcliff will not leap out of the pages into the living room. We are aware of what I call “the aesthetic frame” around reader and book or, if we recall Helmholtz, around spectator and actor in the play. The aesthetic frame does not falsify emotion; rather, it opens the reader to varieties of human experience that without it would be unprotected and unsafe. The aesthetic frame may be precisely what allows feelings of grief and fear to be weirdly pleasurable and grand, rather than purely miserable. Aristotle speaks of catharsis just once in the Poetics. In a well-wrought tragedy, the philosopher tells us, it is not necessary to see the spectacle: “The plot in fact should be so framed that, without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents.”43 Is a paradox at work in this Aristotelian “tragic pleasure”? I think not. Works of art can, at their best, make us feel more alive, can bring us an intensity of feeling that we might shun in our everyday lives as dangerous. Within the protective frame of a fiction we can discover emotional truths that we may not find elsewhere, that we may not even have known existed.
Emotion is essential both to reading fiction and to writing it. Without feelings to guide her, the novelist could never decide what was right or wrong in a particular story, why one character dies and another lives, for example. Making judgments about the course of a fictional story is also guided by “somatic markers,” to borrow a term from Antonio Damasio.44 Even if those feelings are generated by a fiction and experienced inside the aesthetic frame, once they have been located in a corporeal, not floating, mental reality, it is clear that by their very nature they cannot be fictive or quasi or anything but real.
There have been a number of “your brain on fiction” studies with fMRI. Most of them are embarrassingly primitive. One study at Emory University found that subjects had altered resting-state brain activity after reading a thriller by Robert Harris called Pompeii the night before the fMRI for nineteen consecutive nights. In a popular article on the research, the scientist Gregory Berns is quoted as saying, “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”45 The philosophical problems created
by this simple statement are hair-raising. Surely Berns is not suggesting that reading fiction was heretofore considered a nonbiological activity. The need to simplify scientific results for the press is no doubt partially to blame. For the general reader, “brain changes” is understood to mean that something “real,” “material,” and “literal” is occurring, as opposed to something “unreal,” “immaterial,” and “figurative.”
The paper itself acknowledges the difficulties involved in parsing exactly what changes are directly attributable to novel reading. The participants were not reading while in the fMRI. Perhaps they were actively daydreaming. There was no control group of non-Pompeii readers. Nevertheless, the authors’ somewhat hesitant conclusion was that the nineteen participants showed “detectable and significant common alteration of their RSN [resting-state networks] associated with reading sections of a novel the previous evening” and that short-term effects originated in the left angular gyrus and long-term effects were dispersed bilaterally in the somatosensory cortex. The paper cites Aziz-Zadeh and Damasio’s research, and it ends with an endorsement of embodied semantics or the biology of the figurative: “It remains an open question for further study as to how lasting these effects are, but our results suggest a potential mechanism by which reading stories not only strengthen [sic] language processing regions but also affect [sic] the individual through embodied semantics in sensorimotor regions.”46
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