Literary Distributed Cognition & Memory
Miranda Anderson, University of Edinburgh
Jean Cocteau, The Blood of a Poet
What does the memory have to do with how we experience literary texts and
performances?
Experiences reignite memories, while it is our sedimented memories, the layers of
cognitive pathways formed over our developmental and evolutionary histories, that in
the first place ignite experiences, giving them salience. So to offer a basic example, when
we encounter a cup of coffee, we know how to handle it. Present and past are
interwoven and are reciprocally constitutive. Our lives’ entwined cognitive, emotional,
physical and sociocultural experiences lay down pathways of prediction and
potentiality. Those interwoven strands of present and past anticipate the future, as our
perpetually expanding, diminishing and ever shifting horizons, shape our
phenomenological experiences. Merleau-Ponty described it in terms of ‘each gesture or
each perception’ being ‘situated in relation to a thousand virtual cooordinates’, whether
we are moving through a familiar space, where immediately one is aware that ‘looking
out the window involves having the fireplace to my left’, or chatting with a close friend
where ‘each of his words, and each of mine contain, beyond what they signify for
someone else, a multitude of references’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 131). These mental
panoramas encompass the spatial, the social and the inner mental life. Our mental
movement through these panoramas shifts seamlessly between the actual and the
counterfactual; the past, present and future; the real and the fictional; the present and
the possible. The capacity to anticipate the future and the goings-on of another’s mind
stretches beyond the potentially actual into a capacity to imagine fictional places, times
and people. Our flexibility, such that we are able to use things in the world to think with,
extends to the domain of language and literature (Anderson 2015).
Language, and particularly the consciously crafted language of literature, triggers a rich
array of responses that are grounded in our sedimented emotional, physical and
cultural histories. This involves both sharing among individuals as well as divergences
in our particular responses. Theatre and film also make use of the expressive
affordances of the sensory material world in real or virtual form respectively, from
physical gestures to natural and sociocultural objects and environments. These
advantages over the simply verbal accounts of printed stories are countered by the
significant development in literary texts of the means to communicate the workings of
other minds, rather than just depict it from an external perspective, such as via
subjective reports or physiological expressions. At the same time, all three share
techniques and devices that compensate for their artificiality and make use of these to
reawaken or heighten experience. D.H. Lawrence’s description (below) brings into our
own minds either consciously or non-consciously instances when we’ve strained to
make something out in the dim distance:
He could just make sure of the small black figure moving in the hollow of the
failing day. He seemed to see her in the midst of such obscurity, that he was like a
clairvoyant, seeing rather with the mind’s eye than with ordinary sight. (Lawrence
1994, 555)
As one reads the eyes and mind also attentively strain along the words towards the
figure as if one has a kind of second sight, by means of the author’s imagination figured
forth in words. Literary works are cognitive mediators, which by immersing us in them
(to a greater or lesser extent), make us aware of our immersion in life, while also (to a
greater or lesser extent) revealing the aesthetic structures whereby we are immersed in
fiction, so inviting reflection on the more mundane structures that shape our daily lives.
These works are able to operate in this powerful way partly because of the way in
which they become part of our cognitive system, as they build upon the structures of
our personal memories. We flesh out fictions via inferences grounded in memories, and
in the process recalibrate our memories.
Recent research on episodic memory, which involves the creation and storing of
personal memories, suggests that mental scene construction, whether past, future or
fictionally oriented, is a reconstructive process (Hassabis and Maguire 2007). Those
with damage to the hippocampus, a brain area associated with the episodic memory,
when asked to think about their route to work or their upcoming holiday, or to imagine
that they live in an underwater world, will in all three instances not be able to verbally
sketch out any kind of detailed picture or storyline. Impaired capacity to recollect goes
hand in hand with the impairment of the imagination, which is necessary for
engagement with literature. Lost is the wonderful capacity of imagining through words
a perceptual experience and then the later recollection of such an imaginary perceptual
experience, either within or beyond the thought-world of the literary work. These
literary experiences ‘flash upon that inward eye’ at times more vividly than the
mundanities of daily life (Wordsworth): they fuse into and supplement our thousand
virtual coordinates, in relation to which we orient ourselves in a literary work and in
the world. Such is the extended cognitive reach that literature can give to most of us and
that the episodic memory facilitates.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Miranda. 2015. The Renaissance Extended Mind. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Demis Hassabis and Eleanor A. Maguire. 2007. ‘Deconstructing episodic memory with
construction.’ Trends in Cognitive Science 11.7: 299-306.
Lawrence, D.H. 1994. ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.’ Collected Stories. New York:
Everyman’s Library.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge.
Wordsworth, William. ‘Daffodils.’ Poems of Wordsworth. Edinburgh, Nelson Classics.