Brian Boyd explains it all for you, only better

I am increasingly pleased to find the work I have been trying to do for nearly two years being done, in separate parts, by others, and set forth more intelligibly and pleasingly because they don't try to spit it out all in a single blog post.

Brian Boyd's "The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature" in The American Scholar (http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp08/literature-boyd.html) not only spells out why he thinks we need a science of literature, he explains who his opponents are, which I have been reluctant to do because it just leads to quarrels that get in the way of the main point.

To avoid that quarrel, I would say before quoting this that yes, yes, yes, literature also provides valuable documentation of our historical condition as regards race, class, and gender. Those just aren't the only games in town, as RCG theorists have maintained against all evidence to the contrary. Sex and power and ownership are fairly strong motivations for juggling the variables of race, class, and gender to benefit those who do the juggling, so we ought to keep track of what balls the jugglers have in the air or elsewhere. But.

So here are some provocative extracts from Dr. Boyd:

"Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

"Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

"I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence."

"Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern. ...the unique cognitive play of human art redirects it in new ways and to new functions.

"Play exists even in the brightest invertebrates, like octopi, and in all mammals in which it has been investigated. ...The exuberance of play enlarges the boundaries of ordinary behavior, in unusual and extreme movements, in ways that enable animals to cope better with the unexpected.

"Humans uniquely inhabit 'the cognitive niche.' We have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. We have uniquely long childhoods, and even beyond childhood we continue to play more than other species. ...

"Humans have not only a unique predilection for open-ended pattern but also a unique propensity to share attention (long before we learn language) and for that reason a unique capacity for learning from others. Our inclination for sharing attention and for social learning ensures that we readily master the rudiments of local artistic traditions.

"... Pattern usually signals regularities in the world rather than mere chance: the pattern that my head and my feet turn up not far from one another is not coincidence but part of the regularity that is me.

"Until very recently computers have fared dismally at pattern recognition, but living organisms have long been expert at it. Pattern turns the data of the senses into information that can guide behavior. ...

"Because the world swarms with patterns, animal minds evolved as pattern extractors, able to detect the information meaningful to their kind of organism in their kind of environment and therefore to predict and act accordingly. ...

"If information is chaotic, it lacks meaningful pattern and can’t be understood. If on the other hand it is completely patterned, we need not continue to pay attention, since the information is redundant: indeed the psychological process of habituation switches attention off if a stimulus remains, if the pattern of information can be predicted. The most patterned novel possible would repeat one letter, say q, over and over again—a queue no reader would want to wait in. But an unpredictable combination of patterns repays intense attention and can yield rich inferences, although it may not be easy finding how to ascertain what forms a meaningful pattern and what meaning the pattern implies.

"Committed to the cognitive niche, humans crave pattern because it can tell us so much. The more our minds can handle multiple patterns at multiple levels, the more successfully we can predict and act."

Boyd, a Nabokov scholar, goes on at length to use examples from Lolita to illustrate some of his points. And he concludes that literary studies are, in fact, useful in terms of extending our knowledge of the human species in interactions beyond race, class, and gender (about which topics one could, of course, find quite a bit to say as regards the basic plot of Lolita). The notion here is that the evolutionary uses of pattern recognition are part of the structure that precedes, though it does not preclude, the social games beloved of the RCG theorists:

"The pleasure art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect, the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations: perhaps as a consequence of the modern bombardment of the high-density patterns of art through television, dvds, music and iPods, computer games, YouTube and the like.

"And with their high intensity of pattern and their fixed form, works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind.

"Literary studies have no need to feel embarrassed at the art of literature or the pleasure we derive from it. Literature and other arts have helped extend our command of information patterns, and that singular command makes us who we are."

So there. This plays so much into what I have been trying to tell y'all, though none too plainly, that I have to write at least one more post explaining why it plays into what I have been trying to tell you (plural, which is what "y'all" is in proper Southern).

all y'all listen up now, I'm only going to say this once

I'm lying; as I often quote from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, I shall say it again. And probably real soon, too.

The good professor Boyd mentions in passing that sufficiently repeated stimuli cease to stimulate. So as not to be overwhelmed with having to re-invent the world every time we wake out of sleep, we develop as many habit patterns as possible, and our society does its best to make sure that those habit patterns are to the benefit of those in power.

So one of my repeated hypotheses has been that yes, traditional religions often inculcate habit patterns that help the powers keep the lid on, but there have also been traditional religious practices designed to help blow the lid off, only less destructively than uncontrolled revolution would. One of many questions up for grabs is whether those practices are just disguised ways of acquiring street smarts (of recognizing patterns that the powers do not want you to recognize) or whether there really are other orders beyond the visible, too.

But we can get a long way along by bracketing the question of the actual existence of invisible entities, and just looking at the techniques that increase awareness of the whole surrounding environment and such like.

Religious-studies scholars get ticked off at re-readings of Zen and Tantra and what have you because to look at the techniques ignores the social structures that those techniques often support. But some of the most incisive and socially insightful psychological techniques are embedded in religions that have actively supported an oppressive state, and been in turn supported by it.

So I keep wanting to flip a couple of theorists around and suggest that yes, some of these supposed mystics were really social revolutionaries avant le lettre, making the best deal possible for the people under circumstances in which real liberty was no more than a future hope. But they may also have been providing a form of individual inner liberation from the self-made prisons of our sexual obsessions, fruitless longing for unattainable luxury, and all the other crap that in general keeps us unhappy no matter how good things get.

And artmakers have been doing the same thing, too. So art and religion really are parallel in ways that Andre Malraux saw and our pissed-off theorists of the present day do not. Not that Malraux was right about the details. He wasn't. But like some other folks I like to cite as wrong but inspired, he saw that we could now pick out some patterns that might well be really there.

But given the sheer quantity of nonsense currently abroad about retraining yourself, is there really any way to pick out what it is that literature sometimes does to change us and not just to entertain us? or music, for that matter?

The trouble is that we seem inclined to all-or-nothing models of the self. But anybody who has tried to learn a language knows that sometimes you can pick up a dozen odd words plus the uses of the suffix to indicate possession, and after that you hit the wall. Reformatting your habit patterns and/or learning to think about things in a new way is always like that.

So it's silly to say, as George Steiner once did, that it changes our view of art and literature to know that a man can listen to recordings of Bach at night and go to his work at Auschwitz in the morning. It means that some people are just more habituated and harder to reach than others. One of the most discouraging experiences for any author is to find out why his fans like to read his stuff; it's seldom for the reasons he would have liked.

Boyd implicitly raises the issue of finding out why it's harder for potentially revolutionary aesthetic insights to break through to some people than to others. Mostly, we've learned to look at things in just one way, and nothing is ever going to break us out of that rut, short of simply shocking experiences, whether the shocks be unpleasant or pleasurable.

So it makes sense for someone to fantasize that a sequence of pleasant and unpleasant experiences might help wake somebody up. If one thing doesn't do the trick, two things in rapid succession might.

Or maybe not, but that's another part of the story.