A spearmaster's way of death

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966) 178-179:

Another example of death being softened by welcome, if we can put it that way, is the ritual murder by which the Dinka put to death their aged spearmasters. This is the central rite in Dinka religion. All their other rites and bloodily expressive sacrifices pale in significance besides this one which is not a sacrifice. The spearmasters are a hereditary clan of priests. Their divinity, Flesh, is a symbol of life, light and truth. Spearmasters may be possessed by the divinity; the sacrifices they perform and blessings they give are more efficacious than other men’s. They mediate between their tribe and divinity. The doctrine underlying the ritual of their death is that the spearmaster’s life should not be allowed to escape with his last breath from his dying body. By keeping his life in his body his life is preserved; and the spirit of the spearmaster is thus transmitted to his successor for the good of the community. The community can live on as a rational order because of the unafraid self-sacrifice of its priest.

By reputation among foreign travelers this rite was a brutal suffocation of a helpless old man. An intimate study of Dinka religious ideas reveals the central theme to be the old man’s voluntary choosing of the time, manner and place of his death. The old man himself asks for the death to be prepared for him, he asks for it from his people and on their behalf. He is reverently carried to his grave, and lying in it says his last words to his grieving sons before his natural death is anticipated. By his free, deliberate decision he robs death of the uncertainty of its time and place of coming. His own willing death, ritually framed by the grave itself, is a communal victory for all his people (Lienhardt). By confronting death and grasping it firmly he has said something to his people about the nature of life. [...]

The old spearmaster giving the sign for his own slaying makes a stiffly ritual act. It has none of the exuberance of St. Francis of Assisi rolling naked in the filth and welcoming his Sister Death. But his act touches the same mystery. If anyone held the idea that death and suffering are not an integral part of nature, the delusion is corrected. If there was a temptation to treat ritual as a magic lamp to be rubbed for gaining unlimited riches and power, ritual shows its other side. If the hierarchy of values was crudely material, it is dramatically undermined by paradox and contradiction. In painting such dark themes, pollution symbols are as necessary as the use of black in any depiction whatsoever. Therefore we find corruption enshrined in sacred places and times.

Taboo, abstraction, and living with animals

The late Mary Douglas had been kind enough to blurb my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. After it's publication in 2001 my editor, Bill Frucht, put my directly in touch with Douglas and we began corresponding on a variety of things. Here's a long note I sent her on June 22, 2001.

* * * * * 

Dear Mary,

I've been reading a bit about the Nuer and their cattle (Evans-Pritchard 1940) and the Huaulu and their taboos (Valeri 2000) and find myself wondering what it would take to argue that abstract thinking emerged in our ancestors as a means of organizing their minds under the pressure of living among animals. Why the need to differentiate ourselves from them?

As long as you think of the mind as the Cartesian instrument of rational thought, the question is unintelligible. The differences between us and them are quite obvious. From that point of view, primitive thought is hopelessly confused.

But, of course, that point of view is wrong. The differentiation required is social and emotional, not perceptual and logical.

Cousin Sue 

First, however, let me tell a story. It is about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.

Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they'd raised. I'm told that when Sue and Larry sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said "baaa" in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.

It seems to me that that complex of attitudes and behavior is what taboo is about. In making a sheep's call my cousin was both acknowledging an identity with the animal she'd raised and signaling their difference. Once that had been done it became possible to eat the meat.

Wolves to Dogs

So I now find myself wondering just when in our evolutionary history we first found ourselves faced with the problem of living among animals. It's a problem both of how we interact with animals and of the capacity of our neural machinery at the time. At the moment I'm thinking about the domestication of wolves into dogs, which seems to have happened on the order of 130 kya to 150 kya. By that time we were fairly large-brained. Up until then we knew animals as predators and prey. To domesticate wolves we must, in effect, come to know them as children and as subordinate companions and workers. That is, we must take them into our social system.

As Valeri has noted in his remarks on the Huaulu and their dogs (2000, p. 229), from a dog's point of view, the human master is just Top Dog. That is, dogs assimilate humans to their own social system. My point is that the identification goes in the other direction as well. Thus John Morgan (1999, p. 205) notes that "domestication was greatly facilitated because humans and wolves shared similar cooperative hunting behaviors and extended family social structure. Thus wolves and humans were pre-adapted to fit into each other's ecologies and families. Tame wolves and their descendants would have provided an enormous competitive advantage for the human groups that domesticated them.... From the dog's point of view, humans were pack members who brought food to the pups. Human support enabled dogs to have two litters of pups per year instead of the single little in wolves."

Comparative Rings: To the grocer’s, King Kong, Heart of Darkness

Skull Island ahead.

While I’d originally learned about ring composition in the mid-1970s, I didn’t start thinking about it seriously until I had entered into email discussions with Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, some time in the middle of 2001. She’d been studying ring composition for awhile, mostly in the Old Testament, and was wondering whether or not there could be a neural basis, that is, something more specific than the trivial fact that everything we do has some kind of neural basis. The best I could do was navigation, something I’d looked into in connection with my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil. Why would researching music have me looking into navigation? Because music is about time, and so is dead reckoning – but that’s a digression in this context.

Note: This continues the discussion I began in Beauty and the Beast: King Kong as ring composition, plus myth logic, New Savanna, October 2, 2017: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/10/beauty-and-beast-king-kong-as-ring.html

To the grocer’s and back

All animals have to navigate their way around the world, way-finding it’s often called. The neural structures for it thus must be ancient. And they are, the hippocampus among them.

So, imagine you take a walk to the corner grocer’s to get a quart of milk and you return home by the same route:

1. Walk out the front door and turn left on Oak St.

2. Walk three blocks west and turn right on Princeton Dr.

3. Go two blocks north. Big Al’s Little Grocer is on your left.

X. Enter and purchase A quart of Aunt Emma’s Dairy Fresh Milk.

3’. Exit Big Al’s and walk two blocks south on Princeton.

2’. Turn left onto Oak and go three blocks east.

1’. Turn right and enter your home at No. 223.

What I like about this is that the path is a ring-form, certainly not geographically (you don’t travel in a circle), but in the sense meant in ring composition. You start at one location (home), take a trip where you accomplish some goal (purchase milk) and then return to your starting location (home). You traverse the same path on the return trip as you did setting out, but in the opposition direction. The two paths are thus symmetric with respect to landmarks passed over time.

But you didn’t set out to execute a ring-form trip. You set out to get a quart of milk. The ring-form was a side effect of the interaction between your conscious intention and the lay of the land.

And that’s what I want for ring composition, a way to ‘generate’ it naturally without conscious deliberation. Journey’s are common enough in literature – Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Moby Dick, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn come to mind. But do we have any ring-form texts where we have journeys of the requisite kind (same path to and fro)? Yes we do, King Kong and Heart of Darkness.

Journey to Skull Island

The movie doesn’t specify the route in detail, but the general idea is clear enough:

1. New York

2. Ocean Voyage

3. Skull Island: Native Territory

X. Skull Island: Kong’s Territory

3’. Skull Island: Native Territory

2’. Ocean Voyage

1’. New York

I’ve crossed out the ocean voyage on the return leg because that isn’t depicted in the film. We cut directly from Kong unconscious on the beach of Skull Island to New York City the day Kong goes on exhibit.

But of course it’s not the mere trip that’s important. That’s just a vehicle, if you will, for the story. What happens during each leg of the trip? Here’s a sketch:

1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.

2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.

3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.

4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.

5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.

X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.

5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.

4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.

3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.

2’. Ocean Voyage.

1’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow; Kong killed.

Note that I’ve elaborated the central sequence, treating Driscoll’s rescue of Darrow as the ‘answer’ to his wounding of Kong. I’ll justify that in a later post where I look at the underlying myth logic.

That last step strikes me as being a bit busy; too many events for only one segment. Here’s what I’m going to do: What happens is what’s important, as opposed simply to where it happens. Hence I’m going to drop the ocean voyage from the return left and redistribute the events of that last segment. That gives us this:

1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.

2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.

3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.

4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.

5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.

X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.

5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.

4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.

3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.

2’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow.

1’. New York: Kong ascends Empire State Building with Darrow; Kong killed.

In this version Kong’s escape and capture of Darrow in New York (2’) ‘answers’ Driscoll and Darrow falling in love (2). Intuitively, that makes sense in terms of myth-logic – yes, I know, I’ve got some explaining to do...later.

Do I like it? Yes.

But do I believe it? Not yet. I’m just making it up. I need to think it through.

Two Problems for the Human Sciences, and Two Metaphors

For as long as I can remember such things – back to my undergraduate years in the 1960s – humanists have been defending themselves and their work against all comers: politicians, scientists of all kinds, and disgruntled letter writers. And always the defense comes down to this: we provide a holistic and integrated view of what it is to be human in a world that is, well, just what IS the world like anyhow?

It’s a mugs game and I refuse to play it. I was trained in the human sciences: hermeneutics AND cognitive science, history AND social science, and I’ve played jazz and rhythm and blues in seedy nightclubs, ritzy weddings, and outdoors before thousands. It’s all good. It’s all come into play as I’ve investigated the human mind through music and literature.

In this essay I look at literature. First I consider literary form as displayed in ring form texts. Then I review the historical problem posed by Shakespeare and the rise of the European novel. My general point is that we need all our conceptual resources to deal with these problems. But let’s begin with an analogy: how do we understand, say, a cathedral?

The Cathedral Problem

Cathedrals are made of stone blocks, mortar, pieces of stained glass, lead strips, metal fittings, wooden beams and boards, and so forth. You can go through a cathedral and count and label every block and locate them on a (3D) map. You can do the same for the doors and cabinets, the plumbing, heating fixtures, and wiring, and so forth. You will now, in some sense, have described the cathedral. But you won't have captured its design. That’s difficult and those how focus on it often use vague language, not because they like vagueness, but because, at the moment, that’s all that’s available.

And so it goes with literature and newer psychologies: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. My humanist colleagues keep hearing that they should get on board with the cognitive revolution and the decade of the brain. But it all sounds like trying to explain a cathedral by counting the building blocks, measuring the pitch of the roof, and analyzing the refractive properties of pieces of colored glass.

The advice may be well meant, but it isn’t terribly useful. It takes our attention away from the problem – how the whole shebang works – and asks us to settle for a pile of things we already know. Almost.

Ring Forms in Literature

I first learned of ring form in an article published in PMLA – the oldest literary journal published in the United States – back in 1976: “Measure and Symmetry in Literature” by R. G. Peterson. The idea is a simple one, that some texts, or parts of texts, are symmetrically arranged about a center point: 

A, B … X … B’, A’

He produced many examples, from Iliad through Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the “Author’s Prologue” to Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems. But my interests, like those of most literary critics, were elsewhere and so I merely noted the article and went on about my business.

I was reminded of this work some years ago when I entered into correspondence with the late Mary Douglas, a British anthropologist who rose to academic stardom – such as it was back in ancient times – after the 1966 publication of Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. She spent the last decade of her career immersed in the arcana of classical and Biblical studies, publishing monographs on the Book of Leviticus and the Book of Numbers and, in 2007, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, based on a series of lectures she had delivered at Yale. Among other things, she argues that such forms aren’t special to the ancient world, that they continue in modern times – she offers Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as an example.

She opens her 10th chapter by referring to Roman Jakobson, one of the pioneering linguistics of the 20th Century, who believed, on the basis of extensive study, that such patterns reflect “a faculty inherent in the relation among language, grammar, and brain.” But why are such patterns so very difficult to recognize if they are so natural to us?

Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology

Another working paper (title above). Links, abstract, etc., below.

 

Academia: https://www.academia.edu/8529105/Ring_Composition_Some_Notes_on_a_Particular_Literary_Morphology

SSRN page: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2502556

Abstract: Ring-composition is an ancient way of ordering narratives, but it exists in a variety of modern texts as well. Mary Douglas has identified seven criteria for recognizing narrative rings: 1) exposition or prologue, 2) split into two halves, 3) parallel sections, 4) indicators to mark individual sections, 5) central loading. 6) rings within rings, and 7) closure at two levels. I analyze a variety of texts according to those criteria (“Kubla Khan,” Metropolis, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now), introduce the notion of center point construction as a weakened, and therefor more general, form of ring composition, and discuss ring-composition in relation to a computational model of mental behavior.

Introduction: Rings and Narratives

I first learned about ring form composition in a 1976 article by R. G. Peterson, “Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature” (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375), which I probably read when it was originally published. By ring Peterson meant texts having this kind of form, often known as chiasmus:

A, B, … X … B’, A’

OR

A, B, … X, X’, … B’, A’

Peterson was reporting on a literature that was two decades old by that time, though it was mostly about classical and biblical texts. Beyond verifying the chiasmus in Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”, however, I did nothing with the article. I simply filed the topic away in my mind.

I wasn’t until early in this millennium, after the publication of Beethoven’s Anvil, that I put ring composition on my own agenda. The late Mary Douglas had been kind enough to blurb the book and my editor put me in touch with her after it was published. In the course of our correspondence she asked me if I had any ideas about how the brain might do such a thing. She was interested in ring forms because she thought they were somehow fundamental to the human mind. Here’s an entry from my notes at the time:

The most interesting aspect of ring-composition is the inverse order requirement. Why do I think that? Because it places the most "stress" on the brain's equipment. Consider the alphabet. School children spend hours learning to recite the alphabet. But the fact that you've learned it doesn't mean that you can recite it in reverse order. That requires further practice. The brain's standard procedure for memorizing lists (whatever it is) is unidirectional. In contrast, once the alphabet has been written down, it is a trivial matter to read it in either direction. The eyes scan right to left as easily as left to right, bottom to top as easily as top to bottom.

So, just how is it that ring forms arise? It’s one thing to have a chiasmus that spans a short time period, such as that at the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 – “this the world well knows yet none knows well…” – but how do we do such a thing for a much longer span?

My initial thought, though, was that the navigation system might produce ring forms. Consider what happens when you leave home for some purpose at some other place and then return by the same route. For example, Mary goes to the grocer to buy a bottle of milk:

1) Mary leaves home.

2) She walks past the oak tree.

3) She walks past the post box.

4) She arrives at the grocery store.

5) She opens the door and enters.

6) She nods to the cashier.

7) She gets a bottle of milk from the cooler.

6’) She pays the cashier for the milk.

5’) She exits through the door.

4’) She walks away from the grocery store.

3’) She walks past the post box.

2’) She walks past the oak tree.

1’) Mary arrives home.

That’s a canonical ring form, with the departure from and arrival back home being the first and last elements in the ring and the purchase of the bottle of milk being the mid-point. The events in the tale are arrayed symmetrically about the mid-point.

Center Point Construction and the Computational Mind

Edit (12.12.13): Jim Hoagland pointed out that my discussion of the basic symbol sets of arithmetic and natural language was wrong. I've corrected the problem (I think).

I was looking at Mary Douglas’s checklist for ring forms and realized that each item on it had a plausible interpretation in the domain of computation. So that’s where I’m going in this post. But that’s not where I start. First I want to talk a little about computation, then another look at Tezuka’s Metropolis, and then the Douglas checklist.

What is Computation, Anyhow?

If, when you think about computers and computation, you mostly think about numbers and arithmetic, then you’re likely to be puzzled, if not horrified, at the idea that literature is somehow computational. Literature, after all, is not about numbers – though the pages and chapters of books may be numbered.

But then, computation isn’t necessarily about numbers either. It depends on how you think of it.

“625” and “six-hundred and twenty-five” are strings of characters and each represents the same number. The first string is of the sort used in arithmetic calculation while the second is not, though not for any inherent problem. It’s a simple matter of convenience; the string of numerals is more compact, and hence more convenient, than the string of words. Note, however, that when “625” is read aloud it might sound the same as “six-hundred and twenty-five”, though it might also be abbreviated to “six-twenty-five”.

When you learn arithmetic you learn the tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. These tables consist of basic propositions about numbers and how they behave under those four operations. You also learn a handful of simple rules to be used in applying those operations to multi-digit numbers. What you are learning – and practicing, hour upon hour – is symbol manipulation, but symbol manipulation of a very restricted kind.

Ordinary language use, after all, is also symbol manipulation. And, while there are restrictions, and lots of them, the proper manipulation of the symbols of ordinary language is open ended in a way the arithmetic calculation is not. Perhaps the most fundamental difference has to do with the set of symbols used to spell the names of the entities.

For both arithmetic and natural language is finite and quite small. For arithmetic the set consists of ten numerals (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9), four operators (+ - * /), and an equals sign (=). The symbol set for any natural language is complicated by the fact that, for written languages, there may not be a one-to-one relationship between the symbol set for the written and spoken versions. There we would have to have separate discussions for alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems. And in either case, the spoken language has prosodic features that are not well represented in the written language.

Consider written English. We have the 24 letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation marks. That’s finite and small. However, letter combinations are used to form words, but the way they are combined to do so is completely arbitrary with respect to what the words mean and how they are used. That gives rise to what linguists call duality of patterning; the fact that language is patterned with respect to sound (phonetics and phonology) and with respect to meaning (semantics and syntax).

That isn’t the case with arithmetic. There is a systematic relationship between how a number is spelled and the value of the number designated by its name. Thus the spellings tell us that, of “478”, “829”, and “321”, 829 is the largest and 321 is the smallest. But the spellings of “dog”, “dot”, and “elephant” do not tell us which, if any, are living creatures. In particular, of the two that have similar spellings, one is living, the other is not. The third (“elephant”) is also a living creature though its spelling shares no letters with “dog”.

Ring Form Opportunity: King Kong – and some notes on how to do it

David Bordwell just sent me the following note:

Long ago I remember the French critic Thierry Kuntzel giving a talk (which he never published, I think) on KING KONG arguing that it had such a construction, which he compared to an opened book, and the discovery of Kong as the 'gutter' (we'd say) between two pages, before and after. I've never checked to confirm this, but maybe it would fit too.

Are there any takers? I have seen the original, as well as the more recent remake, but this is not something you can do from memory. You need to watch the film and take notes. Judging from my experience, it should take at least half-a-day to do this.

And you start with a leg-up. In the first place, you have a reason to think the film might be a ring form, so you're looking for something specific–remember Mary Douglas's check list? Further, you've got a candidate for the central episode; that makes things much simpler.

Now you're trying to verify whether or not that episode is the center of a ring. Without that start you might have to test several episodes for centrality. And – obviously – when you're looking for ring form, the first thing to look for IS that central episode. In the cases of both Tezuka's Metropolis and Heart of Darkness, I started with a suspicion about what the central episode was.

Myth: From Lévi-Strauss and Douglas to Conrad and Coppola: A Working Paper

I've uploaded another working paper to my SSRN page. It is edited from two blog posts, From Heart of Darkness to Apocalypse Now and Lévi-Strauss and Contemporary Myth: Heart of Apocalypse. I have removed some redundant material and shifted emphasis here and there.

Here's the link to the full working paper. The abstract and introduction are below.

* * * * *

Abstract: Heart of Darkness (HoD) and Apocalypse Now (AN) both exhibit center point construction. Each narrative is constructed about a central incident that is, in effect, a précis of the whole. In HoD that incident is the death of the helmsman, into which Conrad inserted a long paragraph giving Kurtz’s history. In AN that incident is the (needless) massacre of the crew of a sampan. The two narratives, however, are thematically different. HoD is about European imperialism while AN is about the American state. These differences are reflected in differences in the ways the two narratives utilize center point construction.

* * * * *

I have had two anthropologists standing over me as I’ve worked on these two texts, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. I was influenced by both of them, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, early in my career. It is Lévi-Strauss who inspired my overall approach to (literary) texts and it is Douglas who gave me the structural clue I’ve followed in these two texts. Let me think about Douglas in this introduction. I’ll turn to Lévi-Strauss later on.

Given my interest in form, it was easy for her to enlist me in her inquiry into ring forms, which I have since broadened into an inquiry into what I have been calling center point construction. But we differed on one issue. She believed that the writers of ring form texts knew what they were doing whereas I was and am skeptical. Certainly, they worked with skill and deliberation. But it is by no means obvious to me that they deliberately set out to craft such forms. I find it plausible that such tales are the emergent result of other factors.

Let Me Tell You about the Journey I Took

Consider a simple story. Louise Crimson travels from her home in Townsville to visit her Grandma in Centerville and then she returns by the same route, thus:

A. Louise Crimson travels to Townsville to visit Grandma.

B. Louise arrives in Little Glenn.

C. Arrives in Corner Cove.

D. Arrives at Grandma’s in Centerville. Grandma bakes her a peace cobbler

C’. Louise travels back to Corner Cove.

B’. And then on to Little Glenn. After a little rest she departs…

A’. …and arrives home in Townsville in time to share the last bit of peach cobbler with her best friend Ruth.

He route is symmetrical and any story she told about that journey would most naturally take the form of a canonical ring. Yet, in telling her story, Louise did not set out to produce a ring-form. Rather, it came about as a consequence of the route she travelled, on the one hand, and of the normal mode of story telling–list the incidents in chronological order–on the other.

Center Point Construction: Description and Objectivity

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

—Bruno Latour

...we are not to attempt to hack off parts like a clumsy butcher...

– Plato

This post follows upon my earlier post, Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola, and presupposed knowledge of it. I want to discuss the method I employed in making that argument and, in particular, I want to argue that it is possible for the profession to obtain objective knowledge of such matters.

I am aware, of course, that objectivity has taken a beating in the past few decades. Nonetheless I persist. I do not think that objectivity is a matter of unmediated access to the world. That doesn’t exist. Nor do I think that a pure heart and a clean mind are adequate to the job.

Rather objectivity is a matter of proper method, of construction or, to use a word from Latour, of composition. Our picture of the objective world is one we compose. And I offer ring form as one of those conceptual objects that we can compose in an objective manner.

The simplest form of objectivity is simple intersubjective agreement. It was when critics discovered that they could not attain intersubjective agreement on matters of interpretation, of meaning, that we began to question our activity, to theorize the discipline. My suggestion is that we bracket meaning and concentrate on describing form. There is where we can attain intersubjective agreement.

That is what I did in arguing about center point construction in “Kubla Khan”, Tezuka’s Metropolis, Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now. I note that in talking of description I am not asserting that description, unlike interpretation, is in some mysterious way, unmediated. Description requires its terminology, such as ring form or center point construction, such as center loading, and so forth. But that terminology is about form, not meaning. These statements are descriptive, not because they are unmediated, but, in effect, because that is all that they do: describe. One would, of course, like to know how it is that the mind constructs such things, and why the mind takes pleasure in them. Description will not provide answers to those questions. But I see little hope of constructing answers if we do not start with good descriptions.

Objectivity

Before getting down to it, though, I want to show that I really mean it when I say that I am not presupposing that description is equivalent to having unmediated access to our object texts. Let’s sharpen our knives on Stanley fish.

Center Point Construction: Coleridge, Tezuka, Conrad, and Coppola

This one's going to take awhile; it's got 5800 words, plus several tables. You might want to have some snacks ready and make sure the cell phone's been silenced.

Yesterday I declared the psychological “revolution” in literary studies to be stillborn. Neither the cognitive poetics born of the so-called cognitive revolution nor the Darwinian literary criticism born of evolutionary psychology has yet delivered a new criticism. Nor, for reasons I explained in the post, do I expect them to deliver a robust and insightful new criticism any time soon. As currently constituted, those psychologies can tell us something about the bricks and mortar of our texts, but they can say nothing about the designs.

This post is about design, one particular design that I call center point construction. I describe it – and that’s all I do, describe it – as I’ve found it in four texts, four texts of very different kinds: 1) “Kubla Khan”, a lyric poem, 2) Metropolis, a Japanese manga narrative, 3) Heart of Darkness, a novella, and 4) Apocalypse Now, a motion picture. That the last two should share the same formal armature, to borrow a term from Lévi-Strauss, is perhaps not surprising. But the form I’ve found in both of them has not, so far as I know, before been described in either of them. That the same form can be found in two other texts that differ as much from one another as either in turn differs from Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now, that seems worthy of our attention.

A psychological model that could account for the same form in those very different realizations would thereby be one of considerable interest. For it would have to deal with radically differences in temporal scale and presentation medium. I am willing to leave the creation of such a model to the psychologists: evolutionary, cognitive, and neuroscientific. While they’re working on that I plan to be describing more texts, some having center point construction, but others based on different organizing principles.

After some preliminary throat clearing I go through the texts in order: “Kubla Khan”, Metropolis, Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now. I’ve collected references to more detailed work on these texts at the end of the post.

Beyond “Kubla Khan”

As I’ve written in several posts, it was my early work on “Kubla Khan” that sent me down the path I’ve been traveling for the last four decades. However, I’ve always had a problem “selling” that work to others. “Kubla Khan” seems to be a one-off poem; there’s no other poem quite like it. Thus, however interesting its structure, it’s difficult to generalize from that work.

So, the poem’s got an interesting structure, what of it? It’s only one poem fer chrissakes!

Things began to open up a few years ago. The late Mary Douglas got me interested in ring form, where texts are organized like so: A, B, C…X…C’, B’, A’. The last episode mirrors the first, the next to last mirrors and second, and so forth around a central episode. While the two movements of “Kubla Khan” are symmetrical about a mid-point, they don’t appear to have other features of ring form and the poem as a whole doesn’t have a ring form.

Then I discovered that Osamu Tezuka’s manga, Metropolis, has a ring form. And, though it is a narrative not a lyric poem, it shares an important feature with “Kubla Khan.” It has an emblematic ending. Just at the first movement of “Kubla Khan” ends with a line that is an emblem for the whole poem – “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” – so Metropolis ends with an image that can stand as an emblem for the entire narrative – the central character, Michi, in effect becomes transformed into a statue.

What if I analytically decomposed the form of “Kubla Khan” into different elements such that each element is a formal device that can perform certain functions? Maybe those different devices can be found in other texts.

The Ring Form Challenge

The challenge is simple: for any given text – poem, drama, novel, film, what have you – is it a ring or not? That is, does it have the form:

A, B, … X … B’, A’

OR

A, B, … X, X’, … B’, A’

The question seems fairly straightforward, and, yes, the QUESTION is. But answering it may not be. I speak from experience.

Note that the question is about form, not meaning, and that answering the question requires that you describe the text, not that you figure out what it means. You will, however, have to pay attention to meaning to determine, say, whether or not two elements function in parallel. But comparing the meanings of elements within a text is quite different from translating meanings into some theoretical discourse.

I think we need to know, for any text we wish to study, whether or not it has a ring form. And if not a ring, then what? Why should we know this? Because form is important, it guides our apprehension of the text.

What I REALLY think is that if enough people set out in search of ring forms, by the time, say, that a 100 new ring form texts have been identified, a new mode of literary study will be emerging, one that can be commensurate with the new psychologies, but which is not subordinate to any other discipline or body of knowledge.

Mary Douglas on Rings

The study of ring forms is not new. I first learned about ring forms in a 1976 article in PMLA: R. G. Peterson, Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature (PMLA 91, 3: 367-375). He was reporting on a literature that was two decades old by that time, though it was mostly about classical and biblical texts. Beyond verifying the chiasmus in Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue”, however, I did nothing with the article. I simply filed the topic away in my mind.

I didn’t begin to think about rings until Mary Douglas brought them to my attention earlier in the decade. She had been kind enough to blurb my book – Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture – and my editor put me in touch with her after the book came out. She’d been working on the topic for some time and had published books on two Old Testment texts: Leviticus As Literature (Oxford 1999), In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Oxford 2001). She believed that rings are fundamental to human thought.

Animals, Humans, Taboo

Valerio Valeri. The Forest of Taboos. The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

The late Mary Douglas gave this book a stellar review in either Nature or Science, I forget which. So I bought it and I’ve read most, though not all, of it. Yes, it’s stellar.

I just pulled if off the shelf on the hunch that it would speak to my current interest in Walt Disney’s Dumbo. Why would I think that? Because Dumbo is a story about animals, animals and humans, that’s why. And taboo is very much about animals and humans, but also plants and humans. And, if it is the best treatment we’ve got of taboo—which is pretty much what Douglas said of it—then it just has to be relevant.

It is, and also to object-oriented ontology and animals studies.

But this isn’t going to be a review or summary or anything like it. I just want to quote a few passages from Chapter 4, “Zoology and Meatology”.

p. 179-180:

Precisely because animals are our next of kin, because they offer a ready mirror for human attributes, for virtues and vices, taken together they raise a problem of self-definition for us: to establish where the difference between animal and human lies is to define what it is to be human...We ourselves come from a tradition where animals and humans have been radically opposed on ontological grounds—that is, on the grounds of the soul/body distinction. One way or another, we are all heirs to Descartes on this. He has left us with some outmoded furniture, which we have put in a dark corner but still occasionally use to support our plates when we enjoy our steak or roast.

That is, when we eat animal flesh we do so secure in the belief that animals really are radically different from us and that, therefore, we are not being cannibalistic in eating them. Valeri continues (p. 180):

Descartes believes that granting a soul to animals is an error second only to denying God. Animals are for him pure machines, and as such devoid of any signification beyond their utility. This cleavage is logically related to another one, that of soul and body in humans. Together, they run counter to any possible problematic of taboo, for eating is reduced to the confrontation of two machines, the human-body machine and the animal-body machine, under the detached gaze of a disembodied, self-determining subject—the cogito. Such a subject cannot be undermined by eating; the horrors and the dangers, but also the pleasures, of the transmutation of nonself into self are unknown to it. Food concerns the body, not the soul; res cogitans is radically separated from res extensa, so that the kinship between soulless animal and the soulful human can be severed at the root.

See, animals and machines, the equation of the two. That’s all over the place in cartoons, in Dumbo. But also the identification of animals and humans. But surely identity is transitive, no? So, if ‘animals=machines’ and ‘humans=animals’ then it follows that ‘humans=machines’.

Whoops!

Reset!

A bit later, p. 180:

If we are to understand why eating, and especially the eating of animals, is inseparable from the idea of taboo in Huaulu, we must forget Descartes or his residual effects on our ideas and practices. We must accept the Huaulu premise that no radical ontological difference between the human eater and the nonhuman eaten exists. [Graham Harman and Tim Morton, did you see THAT?] At the same time, we must not remain Cartesian in the very reversal of the Cartesian ontology. That the Huaulu do not postulate an inseparable ontological barrier between animal and human does not mean that they are not preoccupied with differentiating them. On the contrary, the lack of any guaranteed, a priori difference means that the difference has to be created constantly through various cultural practices which demonstrate it. The main practice of it is precisely that of taboo.

And it’s not as though we Moderns have somehow miraculously broken free of such problems. Not at all. We’ve got them all over the place. Hence the proliferation of Funny Animal cartoons and comics in mid-20th-century America. That, of course, takes some explaining, which is more than I’m up to in this little post.

I note only that on the next page (181) Valeri points out that the Huaulu have no word that corresponds to our word “animal”. He goes on to imply that they don’t have any word corresponding to “plant” either, though he does not say this outright. This is common enough in preliterate societies. In fact, it seems to be the norm (Brent Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification, 1992). This does not, however, mean that they lack the concepts, either or animal or plant. Valeri makes it quite clear that the Huaulu have such concepts.

So, how does a culture deal with concepts from which it lacks names? For that, I suspect, is what’s going on in funny animal cartoons and comics.

More later.

HD5: The Heart of Heart of Darkness

Or, Center Point construction in a tale within a tale within a tale

For Mary Douglas

It’s a long way through this post. First, I look at the structural center of Heart of Darkness, which is that long paragraph I’ve called the nexus. I then argue that Heart and Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis deploy different techniques for achieving what I’m calling center point construction, which is close kin to the ring forms that held Mary Douglas’s attention at the end of her career. Finally, I attach an appendix that contains the complete text of the nexus.

Consider the following diagram. It represents, albeit crudely, the narrative structure of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

While the tale is told mostly by Marlow, Marlow does not speak directly to us, the readers. Rather, his tale is told to a group of four men aboard a boat in the Thames. One of those tells it to us. That tale is the frame tale. It begins Conrad’s novella, running for roughly 1300 words before giving way to Marlow, and it concludes the novella, with the last 70 words or so. It also shows up here and there during Marlow’s tale, though never for long. The diagram doesn’t show those . . . what shall we call them, intrusions, reminders, touchstones relief points?

This much is well-recognized in the literature on the book, which I’ve been examining in the two case books I’ve just acquired, the Norton Critical Edition (2006) edited by Paul Armstrong, and Ross C. Murfin’s Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011). But there’s a third ‘level’, which I’m calling the nexus. It is not, in what I’ve read so far, singled out as a tale within the tale within the tale, as my diagram has it.

But it is certainly mentioned. For example, in Albert Guerard’s, “The Journey Within” (from his 1958 book, Conrad the Novelist), which is reprinted in the Norton, pp. 326-336. He says, “We think we are about to meet Kurtz at last,” referring to a passage in paragraph 101 (see endnote on paragraph numbering) where Marlow tells us that he did get to meet Kurtz. And then Guerard observes: “But instead Marlow leaps ahead to his meeting with the “Intended”; comments on Kurtz’s megalomania and assumption of his place among the devils of the land; reports on his seventeen-page pamphlet ...” In those three clauses Guerard has characterized the paragraph that I’m calling the nexus.

The Nexus

The segment I’m calling the nexus is part of Marlow’s tale, but I believe that it deserves to be treated as a separate narrative entity. For one thing, and this is what originally brought it to my attention, it contains material that is told out of temporal order. At the point where Marlow launches into the nexus – which, by the way, is one of the places where the frame tale reaches in to Marlow’s tale, reminding us that Marlow is not talking to us, but that he’s talking to someone else, and it is this anonymous someone else who writes to us – they have not yet gotten to the Inner Station, where Marlow is located. And yet it is during the nexus that Marlow tells us, not simply of all the ivory they found and recovered at the station, but that they loaded it aboard the ship: “We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck.” That ivory is not mentioned later at the time when they actually do load it into the boat. In paragraph 140 it’s the middle of the night and Marlow has followed Kurtz ashore and then in paragraph 141 we’ve left at noon and nothing is said about carting 1000s of pounds of ivory onto the ship.

What’s going on in the story at the point where the nexus emerges is that the boat is a few hours away from the Inner Station and is under attack. The helmsman has just been killed and Marlow, who was captaining the boat, was standing in the man’s blood. He, Marlow, tossed a blood-drenched shoe overboard and had told himself that, alas, he would never hear Marlow speak:

I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn't say to myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The man presented himself as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action.

Then the other shoe

went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought, 'By Jove! it's all over. We are too late; he has vanished—the gift has vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that chap speak after all,'—and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these savages in the bush.

At which point the teller of the frame tale takes over for a bit, describing Marlow lighting and taking a draw on his pipe, and, after some preparatory chatter from Marlow (paragraph 101) and a long silence – what was going on in Marlow’s mind during that silence? – then, and only then, do we get the nexus.

Think about it: Conrad didn’t toss both shoes overboard at once. He tossed one, then threw out a significant thought, and then tossed the other. That’s a very careful, very particular bit of writing. Why make such a big deal out of Marlow’s bloody shoes? Because it’s in our shoes that we trod the earth, because Oedipus means swollen-footed? I don’t know, but Conrad did make a deal out of it. At this critical point in the story where a man, an African, died.

But I digress. The nexus. So, Marlow tosses his shoes overboard, then relieves himself of the nexus, 1500 words in a story of 38,000 words, for 4% of the total. And then he returns his telling to the story’s present and drags the lifeless body over the edge:

The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass, and I saw the body roll over twice before I lost sight of it for ever. All the pilgrims and the manager were then congregated on the awning-deck about the pilot-house, chattering at each other like a flock of excited magpies, and there was a scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude. What they wanted to keep that body hanging about for I can't guess. Embalm it, maybe.

Other than Kurtz, this is the only other person who dies in the story. That Conrad should tuck the novella’s longest paragraph into the moments between shoes overboard and corpse overboard is no accident, nor is it an accident that this paragraph contains out-of-sequence information.

Those three things – out of sequence information, the helmsman’s death, and the length of the paragraph – all suggest to me that this paragraph is special, that it deserves to be treated as a separate ‘level’ of narration. Technically, no, it’s not a tale within a tale. Effectively, it is, giving us the structure I’ve diagrammed above.

What’s it About?

So what’s in this paragraph that I call it the nexus? [Note that I’ve copied the whole paragraph into an appendix to this post.] It begins by asserting that this world, the world of the tale, is men only:

Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it--completely. They--the women, I mean--are out of it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it.

Yes, women are out of it but specifically, the Intended. This is the first time she’s mentioned as such, the first time we know that Kurtz intended to get married. But we don’t actually see her until the very end of the story.

From there Marlow works his way quickly to the ivory by way of Kurtz’s bald head, “like a ball—an ivory ball.” Then there’s talk of the moral comforts and pressure of home, which are gone in the jungle, Kurtz’s pan-European background, his education, his beautifully-written report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, the unspeakable practices Kurtz allowed himself, and, of course, the report’s postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” And by the by Marlow arrives at something of an abbreviated eulogy for his helmsman:

I missed my late helmsman awfully,--I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see, he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back--a help--an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me--I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory--like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.

That ends it, the nexus.

And it call it that because, whatever this story’s about, it’s all there, compressed into those 1500 words. It’s a part that is also the image of the whole. And within that part we have the Litany — 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—' which, in its way, is a highly compressed image of the whole. We thus have THE WHOLE STORY compressed into THE NEXUS compressed into THE LITANY.

Note, finally, that the nexus begins by mentioning the Intended, and then pushing her aside, and ends with Marlow’s eulogy for his helmsman. If there’s any heart in this story, that’s it, Marlow’s feeling for his lost helmsman – is it an accident that Conrad made this man a helmsman, the one who steered the boat? I’m reminded of that other great 19th Century river yarn, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A very different yarn, to be sure, but one built on the bond between a white man, in the person of Huck Finn, abused son of an alcoholic, and a black man, Jim, runaway slave. The bond between Huck and Jim was real, but far from simple. In particular, it did not prevent Huck from allowing Tom Sawyer to stage an elaborate play with Jim in the center, a play that had more to do with Tom’s theatricality than Jim’s desire for freedom. Similarly, I do not think we have to believe that Marlow (and Conrad) regarded the helmsman’s humanity as being equal to his own in order to credit his feeling for the man, a man who is nameless, like everyone else in this tale except Kurtz.

Center Point Construction

And THAT is my best guess as to why Conrad stuck the nexus, with its out-of-sequence material, at this point in the narrative. For reasons having to do with a psychology we don’t understand, the nexus had to be toward the center of the book. Whatever effect Conrad was after, it required that the nexus be in more or less this place. Too early and we wouldn’t know enough, or not know enough, to appreciate it; too late and, well, it would be too late. It had to go toward the middle. Given that the ivory is at the material center of this greedy activity, the nexus had to assure us that, yes, the ivory was safely in hand, even though we hadn’t gotten to that point in the story.

For it isn’t in the center. Heart of Darkness was broken into three installments for serial publication. The nexus is in the second half of the middle installment. The whole text is something over 38,000 words long. The nexus starts at about 23,000 words in and there are roughly 13,500 words after it. So it’s well beyond the center, but not quite in the last third.

Queen Mary 2 Putting Out to Sea

She was docked on the West Side of Manhattan above mid-town and so she had to sail down the Hudson. I was shooting from Hoboken (across the river from Midtown) and photographed her as she went down the river. What REALLY struck me as I was working on the photos is HOW MUCH CRAP THERE IS IN THE ATMOSPHERE. The colors in the Queen Mary 2 were so much brighter than those in the buildings on Manhattan only a couple of hundred yards to a half mile further away.

I took these photographs today 21 May 2010. You can find more from this set, as well as other photos of the Queen Mary 2 and the QE2 that I took in October of 2008, at my Flickr site.