WHERE IS LITERATURE?
(A cognitive quest)
José Luis Guijarro
Universidad de Cádiz
1. Introduction
I hate rice pudding. I love haggis, though.
Apparently, I am a weird guy: almost anybody who has a sweet tooth enjoys rice pudding;
however, if you are not a Scot, you are almost sure to loathe haggis.
I want you to reflect for a moment on the construction of the above message. It is clear from
the use of pronouns that some persons are concerned. It is me who hates, loves, and is (a weird
guy). It is the other people (the normal ones) who enjoy, or loathe.
You would be mildly surprised, would you not, if I had tried to convince you rationally that
rice pudding is awful per se, while haggis has everything in the world to commend it as some sort
of delicatessen.
Let me try this move for a while:
It is a well-established fact that rice is a very popular edible stuff. Whole cultures
have survived and developed because they had plenty of rice, not only to nourish them but
also to allow them to invent excellent dishes that are now appreciated the world over. On
the other hand, milk has been the primary food of all humankind. There is no question, then,
that it has to be widely accepted as a good sort of stuff. Sugar, as well, is normally needed in
our diet and, as such, constitutes an appreciated ingredient... and so on. However, a wellformed dish cannot mix these components in any possible way, for they belong to different
levels of food construction. Rice pudding is therefore a contraption and has no value
whatsoever as a dessert.
I am sure that this type of analysis, one that, as it were, puts the blame on the “object” rice
pudding and not on my personal taste, will sound somewhat ridiculous to almost everyone.
However, we all know that there are bores that insist on proving by “logical” analysis that their
personal tastes are based on strong reasons we can hardly fail to accept.
This, unluckily for me, is what I feel when I face discourse analysis (or even worst, text
analysis) trying to prove that some personal or social tastes can be reasonably validated as
LITERATURE by such a thinking process. I said it is unlucky for me, since I seem to run into all
sort of trouble when I want to make this sensation1 manifest to a literary minded audience. Indeed,
we are so used to think of literature as some sort of discourse (or worst, as some kind of text) that
my only achievement is to convince my audience that I am either a lunatic or an imbecile. Or maybe
both.
And yet, here I am again, trying to give public form to this precise way of thinking of mine.
At this stage you may either stop reading, or, if you are curious and kind enough, go along with me
for a while to find out if I may have some reasons worth considering after all.
Let us first analyze the extended cultural and individual belief that LITERATURE is to be
found in literary texts. It is a well-established fact that no one has ever been able to pinpoint the
The one I tried to create in your mind using the above “reasoned explanation” on the impossibility of anybody
ever liking rice pudding
1
1
object that stands for our mental concept of LITERATURE. If etymologically, at least, a mental
representation presents again (i.e., re-presents) a perceived object in our minds, abstract concepts
such as this one, lack the original status of being present in the outside world. We, therefore, call
them abstract representations. It may be a natural intuitive move to try and find existing objects,
which could give a material ontological status to abstract representations. As the concept
LITERATURE seems to appear always attached to written texts, we turn them by that move into
the objects embodying our mental representation of LITERATURE.
Recently, though, the concept TEXT has been abstracted away in linguistic studies and does
not only refer to the actual written material people usually call text. According to Brown and Yule
(1983), for instance, "text is the verbal record of discourse" not only by means of writing, but using
any other medium. That is to say, a text is just one of the components (the verbal one) of the
communicative act -never the whole act itself.In a communicative act, as we all know, there are oral
elements on top of the verbal constituent, such as the suprasegmental (i.e., intonation) or the
paralinguistic ones (i.e., quality or tone of voice). And also extralinguistic elements from the
environment of the communicative situation, which may be used as context in the inferencing
processes involved.
There are means, of course, to symbolise some, but not all, of these non-verbal elements in
written verbal recordings. Linguistic written codes contain a few marks (interrogation, exclamation,
dots and so on) that can help us infer intonation contours and similar features. However, if one
should want to record other such elements, especially the extralinguistic ones, the only means is to
describe verbally the elements that made the recorder react while participating in the
communicative situation.
Now, there are several problems here. First of all, the coded symbols for, say, intonation, do
not cover the whole array of possibilities of that feature. Intonation has a lot of shades that are not
described by using interrogation or exclamation marks alone. If the recording of the discourse is
indeed in writing, an enormous amount of information gets lost and has to be reinvented (or should
we say inferred?) by the receiver of the message. If, however, the text is a tape recording, these sorts
of features that do not belong to the text, in the sense Brown and Yule proposed, are clearly there to
help (to infer in this case would be appropriate2) the interpretation along the same lines of the
original act of communication.
In the second place, if the recording is a (video) film, there are many possibilities for some
of the extralinguistic features to appear as well. But this time they depend on a previous selection
(i.e., an interpretation) made by one of the participants in the situation -the person recording the
original event, not the one trying to interpret the recording.
Thirdly, if, as I said above, the writer of a text tries to convey more exactly the
suprasegmental, paralinguistic and extralinguistic features, he has to invent a verbal structure of
elements that must be interpreted together with the verbal record itself. Try to figure out the
problem: a text within a text within a text within a text...
If every text has to be interpreted in a real situation and converted into an act of discourse,
the embedding texts that supposedly help the interpretation of a given text have to be interpreted
and turned into discourse as well. This is why, a growing number of people, instead of trying to
embody their abstract representation of LITERATURE in the objects written texts, do so in
(communicative) behaviours: those we indulge in when we interpret a verbal written recording. It
2
The distinction between the two types of inference is clearly exposed in the second chapter of Sperber & Wilson
(1986). In the second case, we infer the hypotheses that the speaker wanted to make mutually manifest; on the other
hand, the first type of inference extracts hypotheses that belong completely to the interpreter's responsibility.
2
seems to be a good move, since we now opt for the whole process and not just one of its constituent
parts.
But then it becomes immediately apparent that the behaviour we call literary discourse,
which embodies our abstract concept LITERATURE, is absolutely indistinguishable from any other
type of discourse. This is a new sort of problem, since in our traditional thinking, LITERATURE is
something very different from "ordinary" communication. What is to be done, then? There are
basically two solutions here: the first one is to try and convince people at large that, from a
linguistic point of view, there is no difference whatsoever between Literature and other forms of
communication. This indeed seems a well founded belief, since every single trope or figure of
speech which has been traditionally held as a literary device happens uninterruptedly in "ordinary",
and even in "scientific" discourse.
The second solution is to revert to the written text and invest it with social (not linguistic)
values: those that a given cultural group of human beings considers different from everyday
communication. In some cultures3, this difference is seen in terms of sharpness and roundness; that
is to say, sometimes, the words employed have all sorts of sharp cutting edges which can really hurt;
round words can never hurt people for they are not meant to be real in that sense. In our culture we
have a similar distinction between literal and figurative messages; those that our society considers
"ordinary" and those apt to be "Literature" if a number of further social conditions are satisfied4.
Let us try to summarise what we have said so far:
1) Human beings re-present objects from the world in their minds.
2) Human beings present in their minds concepts that have no world correspondent. They
are abstract concepts.
3) Human beings try to find real objects in which to embody (the whole or part of) these
abstract concepts.
4) LITERATURE is one of these abstract concepts.
5) LITERATURE has been embodied in:
a) Texts (written letters on tangible surfaces)
1. Texts, which have now a wider linguistic definition, are only one of the
constituents of an act of communication.
2. A text is, therefore, too small to be considered a whole phenomenon; we
must look for something more complete to embody our concept LITERATURE. We may turn to:
b) Dicourse (communicative behaviour).
1. There is no way to distinguish it linguistically from any other type of
communicative behaviour.
2. We need to find out the social requirements that characterise some
discourses as being LITERATURE.
Don't you feel there is something missing here? I do. But in order to give a coherent
structure to that feeling I am afraid I will have to start from the very beginning.
2.Three types of human thinking:
3
The African Dogons, for instance (Cfr., Calame Griaule, 1965, 1970)
4
Cfr. Pratt (1977)
3
This is a sketchy and adapted account of the nature of that human device for information
processing we call thinking offered by Horton (1989?); I hope it will help us to have some very
important distinctions clearly represented in our minds5.
Living beings are information-processing devices. That is to say, animals in general need to
have some kind of way to interact with their environment in order to survive. Human beings are
animals that belong to the highest step of the evolutionary ladder. Therefore, it may not seem
strange that the first information-processing device developed by humans looks no different from
the one of other superior animals. It uses as inputs the potentially observable objects of the world,
applied some easy inferencing rules of the type, if X, then Y (where X and Y can be one or many
objects) to give outputs that helped survival and propagation. For instance,
If every time [if I come close to a lion, then the lion tries to
eat me up] then I had better not come close to it -or if I do, I had
better have something with which to defend myself.
And so on. The limits of this way of processing are specific -we cannot process reality as
another species would, say as a fly or as an elephant.
The next step in evolutionary history was the possibility for human beings to use as inputs
objects created in their minds, not necessarily observable by their senses. This gave us human
beings an immense power of prediction, for the rules applied to those invented objects was still of
the same inferencing type as the one above. For example,
If every time [if there is a tempest at sea, then our boat may
capsize [if my boat capsizes, then I drown]] then I pray to Neptune
[if everything has a creator, then tempests at sea have a creator
whose name is Neptune] so that he saves me from drowning.
Notice that there are many unwarranted assertions here (e.g. why is the tempest’s creator's
name Neptune?) that we possibly don't share. We can say that the limits of the information
processing we are now looking at are not specific (otherwise you would share them!). They are
social -or cultural, if you prefer. If one shares them, one belongs to the social group; if not, one is a
strange foreigner, or, even worse, a wicked apostate. Either way one might as well be destroyed as a
dangerous heretic -remember Galileo?
The last step in our processing device is the one adopted very recently. The input might be
still constituted by objects invented in our minds, but the inferencing rules must use only observable
(material) facts. This is a very difficult requirement to follow, but since the processing device is
chosen individually, it is the individual who sets its limits in a conscious way.
Before proceeding further, let me point out that the first way of processing is as old (or even
older) as our species, and can therefore never be obviated. That the second one is also very old and
well installed in our mind. It is very difficult not to assert unwarranted cultural acquired notions if
we know that a large body of human beings shares them. Some of them appear to us as if they were
simple facts6, as if their limit was specific and not cultural, that is. The last way of processing,
5
It has, moreover, some important flaws that we are not going to consider here, for our present aim is to get an
intuitive picture of three types of thinking. See Boyer, 1990.
6
Sperber & Wilson (1986) speak of these factual assumptions as stored directly in human minds (as, for instance P),
and oppose them to other ways of storing assumptions (for instance: I believe that P, or P is true, etc).
4
however, is a very difficult one to follow. One has to force oneself in order not to fall into the other
two very natural7 ways of thinking...
3. Where is Literature, for God's sake?
The third kind of thinking is indeed very difficult to achieve. Many requirements are needed
to make it coherent and valid. In the first place, we have to be certain of the nature of the object we
are thinking about8. As you may have gathered, this first requisite is similar to the natural trend I
tried to explain before our urge to embody abstract concepts somehow into things that may be
perceived in the real world. But now, the requisite is no longer an instinctive trend easily fulfilled. It
is rather a carefully constructed causal chain that ties the abstract concept to an (existing structure
of) object(s). For instance, if we apply this requisite seriously, it becomes obvious that behaviours
do not really exist in the world and cannot therefore embody any concept we should want to
investigate. Behaviours are results of desires related to given situations. And as these situations are
structured with real existing objects we can represent mentally, there is no apparent problem here.
But problems do arise when we face desires. What is a desire? Or better put: what are the causes for
that urge we phenomenologically call desire? If causes exist and somehow interact in the world
clearly and distinctly, we must be able to pick them up if we want to satisfy the observational
condition of tertiary thinking. In the case of desires, this may involve a further step back and maybe
a lot more, until we feel pretty sure that we are not dealing with sky-hooks9 but with real physical
objects that pre-exist our conceptualisations.
In the second place, once we know the object we are thinking about, we have to be able to
describe it10 accurately. A good way to achieve this, in some cases, seems to be the following: (1)
We describe the initial conditions that exist before the object has been created. (2) We describe the
conditions that define the actual object as it exists in the world. (3) We describe the operations that
might achieve this change11.
In the third place, one has to be able to explain how and why things turn out to be the way
we have described them. One way of doing it is by specifying the steps that actualise the set of
operations in a given situation12; that is to say, one has to find out how that specific object came to
be in the real world. Another way of doing this is to specify the material objects that given cultures
consider embodiments of these very same computations13, whenever this is indeed the case. Which
means that one might find reasons explaining why things are and function, as they seem to do for
members of a social group.
Let me assume that you go along with me in the following two radical hypotheses:
7
One should perhaps say, very natural and very cultural, in order to be exact.
8
Chomsky called this requirement observational adequacy.
9
Cfr., Dennett, 1995, describes them as concepts hanging from thin air with no known casual origin but our
imagination power. They are unfit for tertiary thinking by definition.
10
We have to reach the level of descriptive adequacy in Chomsky's terms.
11
David Marr (1982) explicitly defined this requirement as the computational level of analysis.
12
What Marr defines as the algorithmic level.
13
And which Marr defines as the implementational level of analysis.
5
(1) Our concept LITERATURE may not be only an object called "text", for it can never
constitute a complete description of any communicative act.
(2) Our concept LITERATURE cannot be embodied by a behaviour, called "discourse",
since a behaviour is only the result of a given cause-effect chain process.
You may wonder now: Where the Devil does LITERATURE hide, then? Is there an actual
possibility of applying to the analysis of this concept a tertiary way of thinking (i.e., using the third
type of thinking process) that would make sense? In other words, can we give a scientific account of
what LITERATURE really is and does in the real world?
I think there is a way to do it. But we will have to change our traditional outlook in more
than one way, and as I said at the beginning, not very many literary-minded people would want to
do this. You might. And it is for your sake only that I will go on with my idea.
3. À la recherche de la LITTÉRATURE perdue:
Let me try the cognitive frame. For cognitivists, mental representations are the only units
worth studying scientifically. As our aim here is to figure out if LITERATURE can be dealt with in
precisely that way, we will have to characterize it in representational terms.
LITERATURE belongs to that macrofield of thinking that we loosely name humanities.
Now, cognitivists would argue that the kinds of representation humanists are normally concerned
with are:
(1) What human behaviors represent. For example, talking, playing, cooking,
hunting, etc.
(2) What the result of these behaviors represent. For example, a book, a dish, a
building, etc.
(3) What the way in which some of those results are viewed represent. For example,
a poem, a birthday cake, a special uniform, etc.
Notice that all these representations have in principle the dual status private and/or public.
You may have a certain representation of the behaviour that you consider writing, as opposed, say,
to the behaviour that you consider painting, or scribbling. The representations of a book, as
opposed, say, to an article or to a picture. The representation of a poem as opposed, say, to a
landscape or a narrative. And you may believe that this representation of yours is as a whole
publicly held by some other people.
Humanists, however, tend to forget the private character of these representations and
assume without further ado that their own private representations are public without any relevant14
difference between them. They then proceed as if that object (i.e., the public representation) was
something real out there, and begin building (structures of) hypothesis over it, some with great
amounts of ingenuity and sophistication. In the end, humanists end up with theories over concepts
that are not even clearly (not to say causally and materially) defined. It is as if you started with an
internal representation of some experience of yours and then pretend that you had a scientific point
of view of it because you could build up a marvelous (structure of) hypothesis over its constituent
parts, its functioning, and whatnot. This, by the way, is what the so-called scientific structural
approach to human behaviour (anthropological, linguistical, etc.) has splendidly done in our century
creating a vast amount of theories that can hardly be falsified because they do not rest on any solid
ground. The only way to oppose one of those very clever theories is to create another with more
14
Which in some levels is absolutely true. The problem is when inadvertedly one assumes that certain (structure of)
hypothesis are manifest for everybody and uses this as a basic element in the construction of a theory.
6
cleverness and sophistication. But none represents an explanation of any real problem existing
outside our own minds15. We have to come down to earth and abandon skyhooks if we really want
to think scientifically about these matters. That is to say, we have to be very careful in the choosing
of our objects of study and find out exactly what their nature can be. Moreover, we have to be aware
that certain representations are so private in nature that, even when they become public, never loose
their private character. For instance, when we think that X resembles Y it is because we privately
process for our benefit some aspects of X that we think match in a certain way with aspects of Y.
But it would be astonishing, would it not, if somebody tried to study resemblance in general. This is
the kind of weird feeling that invades me when I come across some academic papers on
"humanistic" topics: they are loosing their time and... ours, too!
Another very difficult topic to study scientifically, as I said before, is "behaviour". Nobody
would want, I suppose, to indulge in the construction of a learned framework on the behaviour of
my dog eating all sorts of rubbish in the street and refusing the food for dogs I kindly produce for its
dinner. What a zoologist might probably want to know, however, is what could the causes for that
type of behaviour well be -not the actual behaviour by itself.
In other words, as scientists we are interested in material causes of phenomena; and since
the objects hanging from skyhooks have no known causes (material or otherwise), they are not
objects for scientific thinking. The only point of some of the most long sky-hanging objects in our
culture (or any other) is that they offer us a (possible) goal we might want to analyze in causal
terms. They may prove useful in offering new insights and, especially, an explicatory ladder going
from the very simple material causes to the notion that has remained unexplained until now.
Let it be acquired that LITERATURE is an act of human communication causing a
behaviour we call discourse. And then, let us try to understand something when we characterize this
type of discourse as being artistic.
3.A. What are we "observing" when we talk about ART?
This is indeed a tough question; so let me repeat what I said before, in order to set the
problem straight. The are some who believe that when one talks about ART one is thinking about
the objects that make up the inventory of some worldwide accepted human creativity results:
pictures, sculptures, books, photographs, films, musical partitures and whatnot. For them, therefore,
art is in the objects themselves. Others prefer to think about human creativity in general and
concentrate on what artists tried to do when they painted, wrote, or danced. For these people art is in
the action of the artists. Others, still, believe that art is in the "eyes of the beholder", in the reception
of the messages artists produced. For them, art is in the action of the interpreter(s). We may also
believe that art is both, action from the part of the artist and the receptor, and the object that
embodies the artistic message and try to study the "object" art as a mixture of activity and result of
that activity. Let me try a different approach.
Suppose we characterize ART as an attitude. An attitude is previous to action and,
obviously, to the results of that action. From this point of view, it may be a good start. But what is
an attitude? you will ask. Psychologists have difficulties in defining what a human attitude really
amounts too; let me then simplify the problem by accepting the very clear notion of attitude Sperber
and Wilson (1986) define. For them an attitude is a way of processing information. No more and no
less. In human communication, the participants are aware that there are different ways of processing
15
Sperber (1996) humorously shows that, from a structuralist point of view, one could argue that Hamlet and Red
Riding Hood have exactly opposite deep structures!
7
the same propositional forms in order to get the message straight. If I say a simple sentence like I
will come tomorrow, my attitude which has to be discovered (by elements in the situation, by my
tone of voice or whatever) may be interpreted as a threat or as a promise. If I assert that Tony has
always been a very clever guy you may well notice that I say it with an ironic or even sarcastic
intention. There are, of course, ways to make these attitudes explicit in human communication by
embedding propositions in so-called performative propositions or, better, high order propositions.
What interests us is that we do not process the information in the propositions expressed in the
same way if we assume there are different attitudes in the utterances.
For all I know, ART (and one of its manifestations, LITERATURE) is the processing of
information in a special way which will have to be described. Even a WC basin can become art if
we adopt a certain attitude with respect to the information we can extract from it in special
circumstances, as modern artists well know.
3.A.2. How do we "describe" ART?
Following a well-known cognitive pragmatic theory16, I will characterize human
communication as a process whereby new information is put in contact with old information stored
in our minds in order to produce the desired effects. These desired effects, then, depend on the
relevance the new information shows for us in a given moment.
My question is: how does a newborn baby find relevant information when it does not have
any other information in its mind? One can argue, I think quite rightly17, that there is innate
information stored in the minds of newborn babies who could then act in the way Sperber and
Wilson suggest. But it might be slightly otherwise if we believe that the first information which
comes from the outside gets imprinted in the mind creating what Fodor (1983) calls a module -i.e.,
a device to process information in a certain fixed way (language might be such a module). Sperber
(1994) has a different story for modules that neatly fits my idea. For him, modules are not only
imprinted or otherwise fixed at the beginning of human life; he thinks human minds do not stop
creating modules during the whole of their existence.
We could perhaps say in an impressionistic manner that the creation of those modules is in
fact the building up of what we know as human personality. The fixing of some way of processing
the information that comes from the outside, be it of the sounds of a human language, or of any
other type of information, does indeed characterize us in many important aspects.
My claim is that, in some special cases, humans are not only natively programmed to
develop processing modules, but can adopt an attitude which facilitates the building up of such
devices. We have all heard of the long practices that some "religious" movements establish in order
to get an illumination of some kind or other. In our culture, for instance, lack of sleep and food
together with long prayers, which through repetition and repetition loose their communicative
effects, achieve states of mind where the information stored in the brains, or at least some of it, is
not recovered in order to process the new information that keeps coming in. If you go on long
enough, so some people claim, you might then all of a sudden "see the light" -the information
coming from the outer world in a new and brilliant (?) way. In the Japanese Zen culture, the
blocking of the normal pace of information processing using stored information to interact with the
new is achieved by the koans -sentences without any sense the Master constantly repeats for his
8
16
Relevance theory, as it is exposed in Sperber & Wilson (1986, 1996)
17
Cfr., Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby (1992) -not to mention Chomsky in almost all of his work.
pupils benefit. There are other means in other cultures, as we all know. The important thing is that
they all try to stop using old information in order to process relevantly new incoming information.
The mystics assert that this way of seeing reality is the only real way. As the Zen dictum says:
When you start your way of Zen, the mountain is a
mountain. When you go along the way, the mountain ceases to be a
mountain. But when you arrive at the satori (illumination), the
mountain IS the mountain18
Now, I do think that the deep sense of the attitude that I want to describe as art is precisely a
manner to process information that has a lot to do with the mystic attitude. In former papers19 I
pointed out that the notion of art as being subjective could be explained in these terms: the subject
experiences reality directly, without using any model (or object) prefabricated to handle or
understand reality -which is what scientific thinking tries to achieve by being objective.
Attitudes can be inferred by using all sorts of indices; but they can also be decoded from the
high order propositions that sometimes explicitly embed linguistic messages. The attitude I have
described as the true embodiment of the notion of ART can also be inferred or decoded as the case
might be. We have all sorts of indices that allow us to process some type of information in the
"subjective" manner, some of which are so strongly manifest that they approach the decoding
process. For instance, if we see a broom hanging from a wall in a museum, we have a very manifest
indication that it is to be treated as art, and not as a tool abandoned by the cleaning staff.
At this point of my description, there may be many who oppose strongly to the idea of ART
as a mystical attitude and experience -and they are probably right, for this attitude cannot be the
whole story. Indeed, for most of us ART, is an experience that needs a lot of cultural background in
order to be appreciated in a convenient way. So, where does the idea of not using stored
representations go? I will certainly have to develop this idea further if I want a more general account
of what the artistic attitude really is.
3.A.3. Where to look for scientific "explanations":
Perhaps, ART (and LITERATURE) could be defined as a complex of two basic human
attitudes. The description of these attitudes has to account for the following facts: in the first place,
one of them permits us to try to perceive reality in a direct way, with as little interfering schemes of
stored hypothesis as possible. As this attitude is what gives ART its subjective character, I will call
it subjectivizing attitude.
The second attitude would be the one that allows us to display information wholes in order to judge
them in some individually and/or socially established manner. This is what makes ART a
communicative phenomenon. We will call it displaying attitude 20for obvious reasons. What we
My own adaptation from Benoit, 1960: 64 who says literaly: Avant qu’un homme étidie le Zen, pour luis
les montagnes sont des montagnes (...); lorsque grâce aux renseignements d’un bon maître, il a réalisé une certaine
vision intérieure de la verité de Zen, pour lui les montagnes ne sont plus des montagnes (...); mais aprés cela,
lorsqu’il parvient réellement à l’asile du repos, de nouveau les montagnes sont des montagnes (...).
18
19
Guijarro (1984, 1993)
20
Cfr., Pratt, 1977
9
now need is an explanation of why human beings have the possibility of processing information in
such a peculiar21 way and, also, when and how they use it.
I have no biological explanation for the subjectivizing attitude. I can, however, loosely
advance a working social hypothesis by pointing to the fact that, apart from the new born babies, the
processing of information with as little as possible interaction with stored information seems to
occur automatically in certain moments of human life. Another such moment could be when the
individual finds a mate. Everything is "logically" against this mating, but there you are, it's love at
first sight. One can do nothing about it! I hope that the shallowness and banality of this explanation
does not obscure the real possibility of pointing to a socio-biological function of this way of
processing. In other moments of great emotion (fear, anguish, delight, whatever) this way of
processing incoming information seems to function as well and "form" the personality of the
individual who went through it. Who has not heard that Soandso changed since he came back from
the War? Among other explanations, the subjective contact with the information provided by the
world in such special circumstances may be worth investigating further. If it proves to be right, we
will then have a real explanation of the effects art sometimes produces.
The displaying attitude is easier to trace biologically (and socially). As Pratt claims, it
enhances the social network, enabling people to share feelings of solidarity -an important cohesive
factor for our social species. It has therefore a clear selective value. Of course, the representations
people want to share and value form part of the three systems I tried to describe above -speciesspecific, social and individual. It seems that species-specific possibilities are arousal raising and
arousal-moderating devices, such as those pointed out by Berlyne (1971: 254):
The arousal-raising capacity (...) depends mainly on information
content, complexity, number of subunits and details, and richness of ornamentation.
(...) Similarly, arousal moderation depends in large measure on redundancy, of
which there is a great deal whenever (...) importance is attached to symmetrical or
otherwise restrictive structure.
The social possibilities depend on acquired patterns in cultural evolution. Some societies,
like our modern Western one, may value innovation; some, repetition of explicit cultural structures,
as apparently the ancient Egyptians did; others, still, as the people in the Renaissance, strive to
recover the cultural patterns of ancient cultures. There are also cultural topics that are fashionable in
one culture and forgotten in others, etc.
It is of course very difficult to point to individual interests in general. The afore mentioned
Berlyne tries a classification of, what to me is of dubious value, but which may interest statisticallyminded researchers (Cfr. Berlyne ,1971: 255-265).
.
3.B. How can one get to the place where LITERATURE is hiding?
I do hope I have been able to convey the existence of a real possibility of reaching the three
levels of adequacy in theorizing scientifically over propositional representations such as ART and
LITERATURE. Let me attempt to characterize the manner in which we might treat this topic in a
21
I say peculiar because I am not aware that any other living organism uses its mental powers to direct
information processing in that way.
10
scientifically cognitive way
3.B.1. The computational level of analysis:
According to Simon (1981:153), "solving a problem simply means to make the solution
transparent". If we now want to solve the computational problem that art and literature set for us,
we must first represent a notion of computation extended enough to comprehend operations
happening inside the heads of people and those that maybe found in the social system itself - what
we normally call, culture. This idea is from Hutchins (1996), for whom,
"Computation [may] be taken, in a broad sense, to refer to
the propagation of representational state across representational
media" (p.118).
In studying art and literature, then, we will be interested in the patterns of certain elements
that can be interpreted as representations in a given medium; in the way such representations go
from one medium to the other. Now, what can these patterns be?
The answer, for the moment, can only be a very intuitive one. It could go like this:
On the one hand, human beings are part of a physical and social environment. Physical
environment is perceived and represented by the processes we outlined at the beginning of this
paper. That is to say, human beings learn to deal with the physical world by creating mental
representations of its relevant aspects. Social environment, however, is not as obvious to perception
as physical elements are. Human beings are of course sensitive to some social interactions from
almost as soon as they are aware of the physical shapes and laws that govern the physical world. For
instance, they immediately learn that their mother is the helping social partner vital to their needs22.
In any case, even a social relation has to be mentally represented in some manner in order to be of
any help for the individual. Let us suppose that these representations (the physical as well as some
social ones) are stored directly as factual representations23.
On the other hand, as we also mentioned before, human beings developed the faculty of
embedding representations into other representations, thus creating a huge amount of mental
elements which became the proper objects of secondary thought. What can the evolutionary benefits
of this extended mode of processing information be? At first glance, dealing with real aspects of the
world in an appropriate way is clearly an asset for survival; but dealing with imaginary
representations which do not exist out there in the actually perceived world seems to be a hindrance
rather than a help to survival. With all those dangerous creatures trying to destroy us, or with all that
(material and spiritual) food waiting for us it seems a lot of waste to start imagining unexisting
objects which keep us busy instead of running away from foes or grasping edible fruits of all sorts.
Perhaps a good answer to the problem of the selective value of secondary thought lies in the
following idea:
It deals (almost from the child's first talk...) with the stuff of
human action and human intentionality. It mediates between the
22
In fact, some researchers believe that "Any higher mental function (...) was social at some point before becoming
an internal, truly mental function. It was first a social relation between two people" (Vygotsky, quoted in Hutchins
(id:283))
23
Cfr., Sperber & Wilson, 1986:
11
canonical world of culture and the more idiosyncratic world of
beliefs, desires and hopes. It renders the exceptional
comprehensible and keeps the uncanny at bay -save as the uncanny
is needed as a trope. It reiterates the norms of the society without
being didactic. And... it provides a basis for rhetoric without
confrontation. It can even teach, conserve memory, or alter the past
(Bruner, 1990: 52).
Imagination in general serves this social assimilation process by adapting individuals to
their material and social world in a smooth way, eliminating possible destroying processes of
maladaptation. And precisely because the individual is intimately aware most of the time that the
products of his imagination are not factual information, (s)he uses a different way of processing
them -displaying them in order to be able to watch and eventually judge if they are in any way
useful or not. Naturally, all this is hardly a conscious procedure; what the individual does seem to
feel is a certain "peace of mind" that may help to accept difficult physical and social constraints.
It is likely that in cases where a whole human group feels these constraints the imagination
of one of its member may serve as a "peace maker" too, if it can be properly communicated. And if
the other members of the group come to value this narrative and accept it as displayed information
for their benefit, it may even become an idiosyncratic product which slowly turns into a "tradition"
for that group. It is in that sense, I believe, that the last part of Bruner's quotation above is to be
understood.
The patterns interpreted as representations in a given mind could probably be distinguished
in the following terms:
A) On the one hand, we have the unproblematic representations. Namely, those that
belong to what we could loosely call the content of the representations, keeping in mind that
there seem to be two types of these representations: the facts and actions of an external
world (real or imagined), and the mental events in the mind of the protagonist(s)24. These
two types can appear together, for instance, in the narrative, where the important element in
a narrated imaginary world is the way the protagonist(s) interpret the world. Sometimes,
however, the weight of one of these types of representations outbalances the other type as,
for instance, in lyrical poetry.
B) On the other hand, the problematic representations: those that belong to the
evaluation world of the participants. I call them problematic because, as I said before, in
cognitive theory there is a tendency to consider that representations belong only to the first
group, while the second group consists really of procedures which indicate the way one
should operate with representations. I am not sure if procedures would be considered
representations in all instances25, but I conceive them as somehow ingrained in human
minds -just as representations are. These evaluative representations would frame the content
representations in such a way that the whole message might be considered as displayed and,
thus, prepared to be socially valued.
As we said above, a computational analysis has to account for the way such representations
go from one medium to the other. How private representations made up from perceptions of the
world and of private representations that interpret these representations become public
12
24
Cfr. Bruner, id.: 51
25
See Deirdre Wilson's mimeographed class notes on Semantic Theory, for instance
representations and are therefore capable of turning into private representations yet again in the
minds of the people that perceive and interpret them. If we agree that this computational process is
what we call human communication, it seems clear that a pragmatic approach such as the one
Relevance Theory describes might well be a device for analyzing its operations in an explicit and
coherent way. However, there seems to be more to it than just human communication. For one
thing, public representations constrain, not only the content, but also the form of the likely material
concerned in these operations. Let me quote Bruner again:
...The language of skillful narrative differs from that of
skillful exposition in its employment of "subjunctivizing
transformations". These are lexical and grammatical usages that
highlight subjective states, attenuating circumstances, alternative
possibilities (id., 53)
We should investigate if this idea is correct and if more constraints like these are to be found
and may be explicitly described as cultural (or perhaps even as biological) processes. This field of
research is one of the ways I see to expand our knowledge of what literature really is. Especially, if
those "subjectivizing transformations" and other similar devices are evaluating representations
which trigger the displaying mode of processing information. But there is still another field closely
related to this, namely, the one that traces the passage of representations from a given medium, say,
the private mental one, to another, say, the public cultural one, and viceversa. A very interesting
starting point for this analysis is Dan Sperber's sketch of a theory which he calls the epidemiology
of representations (Sperber, 1984, 1990 y 1994) or the contagion of ideas (Sperber, 1996) which can
be summed up here with his own words:
An epidemiology of representations is a study of the casual chains in which
[the] mental and public representations are involved: the construction or retrieval of
mental representations may cause individuals to modify their physical environment,
for instance to produce a public representation. These modifications of the
environment may cause other individuals to construct mental representations of
their own; these new representations may be stored and later retrieved, and, in turn,
cause the individuals who hold them to modify the environment, and so on26.
3.B.2. The representational level of analysis:
At this level, one should find out what sorts of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and actions are
considered by different societies to embody the computational processes I tried to outline above.
For instance, there are societies where these processes are not managed in written media and
constitute what some very aptly call oraliture27. In those oral cultures, the representations of these
processes, which may include the social instances in which they are enacted, the accepted ways of
"artistic" creation, and even the sort of value they favor most, seem to be significantly different from
those of a literary society like ours. Consider, for instance, the oral marks that indicate in Wolof
culture that a "special" discourse (i.e., a tale) is starting and so, inevitably, the people concerned are
requested to adopt the displaying way of producing and perceiving its information.
26
Sperber, 1984: p.77
27
Cfr., Díaz-Plaja, 1984: 29
13
Je conte
Nous t'écoutons
Il était une fois
Cela est arrivé
Quand c'est arrivé étais-tu présent?
Parle je t'écoute28
In oral cultures, the displaying attitude goes further than in literate societies. There is first
the rhythm to mark the passage from one communicative situation to another and to help in opening
up the ways of processing information in this way. But rhythm itself has some kind of content value
which can also be displayed and valued. From this point of view, Senghor (1964) has this to say:
Qu'est-ce le rythme? C'est l'architecture de l'être, le dynamisme interne qui
lui donne forme, le système d'ondes qu'il émet à l'adresse des Autres, l'expression
pure de la Force Vitale. Le rythme c'est le choc vibratoire, la force qui, à travers le
sens, nous saisit à la racine de l'être. Il s'exprime par les moyens les plus matériels,
les plus sensuels: lignes, surfaces, couleurs, volumes en architecture, scuplture et
peinture; accents en poésie et musique; mouvements dans la danse. Mais ce faisant,
il ordonne tout ce concret vers la lumière de l'esprit. (ps:211-212).
Senghor is definitely not an illiterate person; therefore, this passage is full of literary images
we are, more or less, used to read in our type of society. But it is not clear to me whether it is
possible to understand fully the real meaning of the passage unless one has had the privilege to hear
and see the very same Senghor speaking parts of his own literary production. It is only then that one
understands some particularly obscure expressions of this text like the last one: "[le rythme]
ordonne tout ce concret vers la lumière de l'esprit". I can assure you, rhythm does just that when
Senghor is performing!
Rhythm, however, is not the only difference. The symbolic nature of oral languages is also
very concrete and, therefore, able to be displayed as well. Let us read Senghor once again:
L'oeuvre d'art nègre exprime, par nature, une ideé ou sentiment-image: un
symbole. (...) L'image naît de la force de suggestion du signe employé: du signifiant.
Car l'image ici n'est pas une image-équation, mais ine image-analogie, où le mot
suggère beaucoup plus qu'il ne dit. Le tour de force est d'autant plus aisé que les
langues africaines sont des langues concrètes, dont tous les mots, par leur racines
sont chargés d'un sens concret émotif. Au-delà du sigifiant, il faut toujours voire le
signifié.29
I do think that these sort of metaphoric texts can only give us an intuitive notion of the
representations that are culturally disseminated in some oral cultures; we cannot pretend to achieve
more in this paper.
On the other hand, it does not seem to be the place here to give an exhaustive account of the
28
29
14
Kesteloot, Liliane & M'Body (1983)
Quoted by Adiaffi (l983), p.20
current representations that exist in our cultural environment. This is a topic for an extended paper
in its own right. However, it may be worthwhile to try a sketchy outline of what constraints we are
subjected to by our own representational world in this domain. We will realize that some attitudes,
activities and what have you, which seem perhaps to be quite "natural" for us, are really cultural
representations that differ from those we considered above in substantial ways.
I will summarize here what Pratt (1977) understood as "preparatory conditions" in the
typical speech act theory trend she favored. From our present cognitive point of view, they can be
re-interpreted as representations we all have when we face the literary phenomenon.
She starts by quoting Ohman (1971), who said that
our readiness to discover and dwell on the implicit meaning
in works of literature -and to judge them important- is a
consequence of our knowing them to be literary works (p.116),
and then proceeds to describe the representations that build up this knowledge:
First of all, we have the representation that the text was composed in writing and that it is
definitive. This representation is composed by a structure of the following sub-representations: the
writer had time to plan and prepare his utterance and to correct it; therefore, we assume that the text
is free from gross randomness -it is a satisfactory version. This representation is also formed by
another subset of representations: we believe that the text will be worth it. And because of it, we
accept that it may be longer and more difficult to decipher. We also have the representation that the
work passed through a process of selection (publishers, editors, critics, reviewers, etc.).
Like the masters of ceremonies, these literary judgers ratify the speaker on
our behalf and request our attention on his behalf, with the obvious difference that
the role of master of ceremonies is mainly symbolic, while that of editors,
publishers and critics is very real indeed (p.119).
This last representation gives us some confidence as to the social value ascribed to a given
piece of written discourse. That is to say, we not only hope for the fulfillment of our expectancies,
but we also implicitly accept the classification of the work we read given by those selection devices
our culture provides. This is what I think Traugott (1976) had in mind when she stated that the
notion of genres and subgenres was a set of appropriate conditions. The extend of our knowledge on
these matters depends of course on our learning the social coordinates that govern a cultural
background. I can imagine that the general representations (novels, theatre, poems, etc.) are quite
well disseminated in our own cultural tradition. Whereas some more refined classifications depend
on a more specific learning which not every member of our society is able to achieve.
Summing up, one can say that we have the social representation of a speech situation in
which the speaker has an unique access to the floor. But we know that this access is not free. He
must make it worth while for us. And here lies the reason for displaying the text in one way or
another so that we can value it and accept our momentary relinquishing of the floor.
3.B.3. The implementational level of analysis:
This level is difficult to circumscribe for the following reason: in LITERATURE, the
material implements, i.e., the written texts, or even the books themselves, are not considered literary
components of the artistic phenomenon. It would be very weird if someone would insist in
including the description of the material aspects of a text (font, length, colour, etc.) or of the object
15
we call book, (covers, pages, weight, etc.) in a literary research. And yet, there is much to say about
the role that printing and editing have in the representation of LITERATURE in our culture. I do
not know if my own private representations of LITERATURE can be generalized. For me at least,
this representation includes, as one of its constituent parts, images of well furnished libraries,
handsome volumes, and cheap pocket editions awaiting to be admired and used by eager readers
and other book lovers. I have deliberately made a distinction between the "admiration" books
produce and the "use" we make of them. I said above, though, that in reading LITERATURE we
process the information so that we may admire or otherwise value the messages we interpret. In this
I see a close relationship with the admiration books as physical objects often produce. Very seldom,
a book, in the material sense of the term, is an artistic object by itself. The admiration we feel in
front of a library full of books might come from our representation of the thousands of possibilities
the books have in them to make us appreciate and value what others have either created or
appreciated and valued before us30..I n cognitive science there is, however, a well entrenched belief
in concentrating research almost exclusively in the analysis of computational structure; little
attention is paid to the description of media where this structure is implemented31. This might be a
bad habit. Hutchins, for one, thinks that,
What is the implementational level for the (...) system as a whole is the
computational level for the people who operate the tools of the system. The material
means in which the computation is actually performed are implementational details
for the system, but they set the task constraints on the performance (...). (Id., 51).
4. Conclusions
I started this paper pointing to personal tastes and to the difficulty we have in objectivizing
them in order to make them topics of rational explanation. There are all sorts of variables operating
whenever we feel repulsion or attraction towards something, which depend on multiple factors
ranging from the genetic, to the social. If we could manage to describe the whole array of
interrelated drives that function in every particular instance of every individual human being we
would, however, be capable of describing these tastes. But it would be absurd to be content with
explanations that concentrated solely on the special nature of the objects that somehow fulfill our
tastes.
In the same vein, LITERATURE, which is a compound of interrelated mental operations
working at different levels, as we have seen, cannot possibly be described, not to say explained, by
objectivizing it in texts and trying to find out its textual characteristics alone. It may not even be
properly understood by concentrating on the analysis of the human communicative behaviour that
we call discourse. Behaviors are effects of previous causes, and as such cannot become explanations
for phenomena. Rather, they need to be explained in a causal way, whenever they appear. Some
30
Pratt makes a very interesting remark in this respect. She acknowledges the fact that books bear with them at least
the message that another person, on top of the author, considered the book worth it. This makes it different from orators
in street corners and writers of side-walk poetry. They have to win their audience by themselves, while in
institutionalized literature as it is implemented in books, this is made by a host of other people who as I said above,
considered it important enough to have it published, reviewed and sold in bookshops. As she says: "an utterance which
does not pass trough this process (whether because it was not submitted or because it was rejected) is not a work of
literature" (p.120-1)
31
16
We have heard thousands of times that what is important is the program, not the types of machines that can run it.
would argue that the result of this communicative behaviour is really the meaning of the text, and as
such, LITERATURE, is in fact the kind of meaning that exists in the text and which we extract
from it by doing certain operations on it. This is, I think, the most widely accepted notion in literary
analysis, because it is also the most extended notion we have about messages in general. But as
Hutchins says:
Meanings can only even be imagined to be in the message when the environment
about which communication is performed is very stable and there are very strong
constraints on the expectations. In many endeavors, creating and maintaining the illusion
that meanings reside in the messages requires that a great deal of effort be put into the
controlling the environment in which communication takes place. Meanings seem to be in
the messages only when the structurestructures with which the messages must be brought
into coordination are already reliably in place and taken for granted. The illusion that
meaning is in the message is a hard-won social and cultural accomplishment (my italics)32.
From my point of view, then, we have to invest a lot of effort in banning the identification
of LITERATURE with (textual) meaning that so clearly pervades literary theory. We will then
perhaps start to understand the primary causes that might be held responsible for the existence of
this phenomenon in almost every human society. And, of course, we will be able to allot their
proper place in that explanation to texts, meanings and human attitudes, and show their
interrelations and effects in a real scientific manner. At which point you may start to wonder why is
it that I am so strongly dedicated to finding scientific explanations to phenomena that, as we all
know, defy rational explanations and are better comprehended by human feelings let loose. As the
well known jazz musician put it:
Man, will you just please, kindly dig it (...), and hold up on all those wonderful
seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what it is all the time, you’ll never get time to
know!33.
Like every other human being, I can also dig LITERATURE as something that makes me
feel. But, how do I know that my feelings are similar to any other feelings people may have while
enjoying LITERATURE? I experience my own feelings, of course. But I have no way to establish if
your feelings that you name with similar terms as I do mine are in fact the same sort of experience. I
infer your feelings by what you say and, especially, by what you do. If you keep reading a book that
I found worth reading, I gather that you may have a feeling of enjoyment. If you say you like a book,
but you never find time to read it, I will infer that you don’t have that joyous feeling, no matter what
you say. The point of this paper, and of my looking for scientific explanation for LITERATURE, is
to find a common ground where you and I and anybody else can come to an agreement about what
we are really talking about when we indulge in topics such as this. And that is another very
interesting way to dig aspects of our world that puzzle our brains and, until now, defy our real
understanding.
32
Hutchins, 1996, 238-9.
33
Quoted in Pirsig, 1976: 212
17
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[This paper appeared in Patterns in Discourse and Text. Ensayos de análisis del discurso en
lengua inglesa, edited by Angela Downing, A.Jesús Moya & José I. Albentosa, 1998: 151-176,
Cuenca, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha]
19