It’s been a commonplace for two or three decades that narrative is a mode of thought. It is my impression — though I could be wrong — that this literature takes narrative at face value. Narrative situates things and events in relation to one another in time and space and that’s what narrative thinking is about.
I think narrative is used in a more subtle way. That more subtle mode of thought is the object of this post. Just how this more subtle thinking works, the fundamental mechanisms, that is not at all obvious. That something interesting is going on, though, that is relatively easy to spot.
I want to begin by presenting a more or less contemporary example, the Walter Lantz cartoon The Greatest Man in Siam. After that I’ll offer a suggestion or two about what might be going on. Then it’s on to a second example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I conclude by suggesting that we’re dealing with a computational form that realizes the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson.
Why the Greatest?
In The Greatest Man in Siam a king holds a contest to choose a mate for his daughter. Four men appear for the contest. The first three are dismissed and the last one wins. It’s in these four contests that this mode of thought, which I’ll call implicit analysis, takes place.
The first man presents himself as the smartest man in Siam, the second as the richest, the third as the fastest, and the fourth as the hottest – “hot” in the sense of hot jazz and what that implies. We’re given no particular reason why the last man wins. The king doesn’t say something like, “I declare thee the winner because X.” The first three are each dismissed for reasons related to their proclaimed strengths; the fourth is not. He makes his pitch, does his dance, and gets the girl, all without explanation.
Why’d the fourth man win? Because he was a trumpeter? Well, what’s so special about trumpeters? We can go at it the other way: What did the other three have in common that disqualified them? How were they like one another, but different from the trumpet player? If they’d all been clarinet players, then we might conclude that the folks who made the cartoon like trumpeters, but not clarinetists. But they weren’t clarinetists, nor drummers, nor masons, nor bakers, nor merchants. Each was something different, but all were losers.
The analytic problem we have to solve, then, goes like this: The first three are alike with some characteristic with respect to which they differ from the last; what’s that characteristic? That’s the problem I set out to solve, and I devoted two posts to it (The Greatest Social Contract in Siam and Siamese Eyes, Electricity, and a Contest). My method was straight out of Composition 101: comparison and contrast. I examined this that and the other aspect of each contest and contestant, compared and contrasted, and reached a conclusion, more or less.
While my conclusion was not as focused as I’d like, it comes down to this: the first three defied the king’s authority and they weren’t sexy; the fourth was sexy and he didn’t defy the king. That is, it has nothing to do with a preference for trumpeters over fast rich smart guys. It’s about authority and sexiness.
Now, that wasn’t obvious. It’s not there on the “surface” of the narrative, which is ostensibly about being smart, rich, fast, or a musician (who, incidentally, appeared to be a schlub – but the moves, he had the moves). So how does the cartoon convey that difference to the viewer, a viewer who isn’t going to undertake the analytical work I did?
We can say that the unconscious figures it out. But that’s not much help. How does the unconscious do that? Implicit in a lot of talk about the unconscious is some notion of some homunculi who reason things out, more or less like literary critics and psychoanalysts might, but who don’t tell their human what they’re up to. When they’re done, however, they somehow signal their result. No, we need to do better than that.
But just how we might do so, that is not at all obvious to me. I can imagine in a general way that the literature on conceptual blending might have something to say. I would also point to a speculation on the neural underpinnings of metaphor that David Hays and I published some years ago. But really, this is just hand waving.
As much as I’d like to know how the mind does this, I don’t see a good candidate mechanism. But I can offer another, and somewhat different, example of the phenomenon. That might at least give us some more clues about what’s going on.
The Exchanges in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late Medieval romance in verse form. Briefly, the Green Knight shows up a Camelot on New Year’s Day and challenges the court to a beheading game: I’ll let one of you take a swing at my neck with an ax if you agree to meet me in the Green Chapel a year from now and take a swing at your neck. Gawain accepts, takes his swing, the Green Knight then picks up his severed head and rides off. Gawain follows a year later, as he’d agreed.
A couple of days before Gawain’s due to have his head chopped off he arrives at a mysterious castle deep in the forest. The host, Sir Bercilak, graciously takes him in, telling him that the Green Chapel’s in the neighborhood and he’ll given him directions when the time comes. But for now, the Bercilak proposes, they’ll go about their business for the next three days and make an exchange at the end of the day. The host will give Gawain his ‘winnings’ (not the word used in the text, but it’ll do) and Gawain will give the host his.
Early each morning Bercilak takes his retinue and goes hunting, returning at the end of the day to make the exchange with Gawain. Meanwhile, Gawain, who had a reputation as a lady’s man, visits Bercilak’s wife in her chambers, where she pursues him – an important reversal of the standard roles, but not something we can pursue here. He then turns his winnings over to Bercilak at the end of the day. On the first two days, they exchange fresh meat (Bercilak) for kisses (which Gawain received from milady). On the third day they have nothing to exchange. Bercilak hunted fox that day, and fox meat was regarded as inedible; so he had nothing to give Gawain. As for Gawain, he received a green girdle from milady, who told him it would save his life. That being so, he decided to withhold it from the exchange. He breaks his bargain.
Years ago, when I first became interested in this text, I wondered about that third day. More was going on than met the superficial eye. So, I pulled out good old comparison and contrast, primed it with an article by Edmund Leach on taboo and made a fairly subtle argument that, in an odd way, Bercilak was holding back as well; he too was a transgressor. The upshot, I argued, is that these two transgressions mark the division of the moral universe into three realms, the animal or natural, the human or cultural, and the divine.
My argument, of course, was explicit. I defined terms, compared things and acts, and drew conclusions. The problem, as in The Greatest Man in Siam, is how these comparisons can be drawn unconsciously, though some mechanism that doesn’t presuppose sly homunculi at work.
Computational Form
As I said above, I don’t know what that mechanism is. All I can do at this point is to spot evidence of its activity in various texts. The basic tell-tale is the ritualistic repetition of a set of actions with limited variations from one repetition to the next. In the two cases I’ve examining here, the sequences are defined, within their respective texts, as quasi-rituals. The contest for the king’s daughter is declared as such; and the exchange of ‘winnings’ is declared as such.
In the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, each of the three days follows the same pattern: 1) Bercilak begins his hunt at dawn, 2) then we switch focus to Gawain and milady, 3) we return to the forest for the conclusion of the hunt, and, finally 4) the exchange at day’s end. In The Greatest Man in Siam, the sequence isn’t quite so exact. All four contestants, however, do intone their virtues to the same piece of music. That music has its own form, of course, and that form is preserved for each contestant.
I suggest that this alignment of the segments gives us a clue to the underlying mechanism, whatever it is. That mechanism expects that textual entities playing the same role will be encountered in parallel positions in the sequence. This rather sounds like Roman Jakobson’s poetic function, which he defined as the projection of “equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”* The axis of combination is, of course, the linguistic string itself. Entities that occupy the same functional ‘slot’ in that string are to be treated as equivalent or contrastive in meaning.
I would suggest that we are talking about computational form as I discussed it in my essay on literary morphology. So, parallelism is one aspect of this mechanism for implicit, unconscious, analysis and comparison.
The other aspect goes like this: We have a small number N of parallel sequences. In Siam N = 4, in Gawain N = 3. These sequences are presented to us one at a time in succession. The sequences differ between themselves in some obvious way. Hence it follows that the first N-1 sequences differ among themselves in some obvious way. Additionally, those N-1 items are alike in some way that’s not obvious. Whatever this characteristic is, they differ from the Nth item with respect to it.
Figuring out just how this computational form works, that’s a job for the computational cognitive and neurosciences. Finding and analyzing examples of this form, that’s a job for literary critics and cultural analysts. The analytic and descriptive work can be done independently of and in parallel with the explanatory model building. Yet without the analytic and descriptive work by humanists, the scientists working of the mechanisms will be flying blind. By the same token, we need mechanistic models if we are to understand how these texts work, both in the mind and in society-wide culture.
As the TV commercial says, it’s time to make the donuts.
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*Jakobson, R. (1960). Linguistics and Poetics. Style in Language. T. Sebeok, ed. Cambridge, MIT Press: 350-377.
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