Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind

Possessing no word for "lying or falsehood," Houyhnhnms might qualify as ideal readers of Wolfgang Iser's challenging new study, either as a suitably unformed audience or possibly, locked into a static world, as thinkers sorely in need of dynamic concepts. Gulliver discovers that the Houyhnhnms can only approach the ideas of lying, false representation, or the fictional through their expression "saying the thing that is not." One advantage of this category lies in its innocence of the pejorative connotations that at times have been attached to the fictive (as also to the imaginary), and at least in this respect the Houyhnhnms' phrase foreshadows something of Iser's own (rather more knowing) approach to "the fictive." The category also has the advantage of generating an opposition not so much in "the thing that is" as between it and "saying the thing that is," so putting into play an element of relativity likely to serve a reader in approaching such a discourse as Iser's where "the fictive" stands not in commonsense opposition to "the real" or "the true" but is handled as "an operational mode of human consciousness" (xiv) warranting at least as much attention as the cognitive production of referential versions of the world (or "saying the thing that is").

Sadly, if only on the grounds of the Houyhnhnms' lack of both an alphabet and "the least idea of books or literature," my provisional metaphor for the ideal reader rapidly goes lame. Indeed, the essential part in cognition of processes of matching and categorization that are ever only partially successful, perhaps necessarily discrepant, is a matter of fundamental interest and indeed of positive value to both Iser and to Ellen Spolsky. For my own part, left in need of a new metaphor for the ideal reader, any choice I make as I turn to zapping through possibilities will involve selecting another match and in turn generating potentially a set of different or new inferences, each subject to corroboration to a lesser or greater degree, though never to the point of completeness. As each fuzzy categorization (never achieving transcendent correspondence) becomes a ground for new levels of inference, cognition proves a garden of forking paths, a condition for the generation of paradigm shifts and, indeed, of inventiveness itself. In such a typically postmodern environment Brian McHale (tracing the networks of a Borges story, the layout of the labyrinth library of Eco's The Name of the Rose, or the ontological permutations of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow) not surprisingly meets us here, tacitly greeting Iser and Spolsky in (at least partial) recognition. Certainly in discussing Pynchon's thematization of channel hopping in Vineland and comparable uses in the fiction of DeLillo, Rushdie, and Coover, McHale elevates such category switching, though at one remove from cognition, into an emblem of postmodern consciousness: "If the normal flow of TV worlds is a good scale-model or mise-en-abyme of postmodernist ontological plurality, then the heightened, intensified flow produced by zapping is that much better, a model with even higher visibility and sharper 'resolution'" (133).

Iser and Spolsky's approaches to cognition, literature, and reading/interpretation share a fundamentalist aspect (anthropological and psychological in Iser's case; biological, evolutionary, and even systemically neurological in Spolsky's). Each ultimately refers to human needs in relation to the standing imperative of human survival. Those needs and that imperative are not absent from any human situation or practice (for Spolsky, they may be genetically inalienable from human presence), whether such situations take the form, most egregiously, of confronting a previously unencountered animal (Spolsky's recurrent example), framing social institutions, or writing literary interpretation. For Spolsky, such needs find a structure for their satisfaction (though also for their deferred disappointment and consequent reconstitution) in a familiarly Darwinian human capacity for adaptation. Here the issue is not so much of physical mutation (though Spolsky certainly leans towards the materialist side of the mind-brain debate) as of mental adaptation facilitated by the inherent structures of cognition. Indeed, the "apparently systematic biological need and desire for change" (12) that Spolsky highlights in human beings she finds crucially locked into the loops of human cognitive process as modeled in the theory of such as Jerry A. Fodor, Ray Jackendoff, Gerald Edelman, and Daniel C. Dennett. Here, one might say, luck dominates cunning, cognition' s pragmatism in the short term laying the foundations of its long-term strengths. Typifying those theories of brain modularity that Spolsky explores in the opening sections of her study and that propose the discreteness of the routes by which information is received and, to differing degrees, modularly processed is a tendency to build various kinds of "gappiness" into the model of cognition. While such gaps may be experienced as problems in the coherence of nature, they are here posited as projections of gaps both between knowledge modules unable to translate information wholly satisfactorily one to another (say, between visual and linguistic modules) as also within modules, where initial recognition and classification may proceed with evolutionary bravado on a relatively rough-and-ready, need-to-know basis, a slackness also in part permissible in view of the range of modules providing back-up on the same job. ("The job gets done as best it can, and as long as that's good enough for the survival of the species, it's good enough" [34].) However, as in time the inevitable instabilities of categorization become apparent to the categorizer or indeed to others who have simply had more time to become aware of them, zapping resumes, and gaps and discrepancies rematerialize to fulfill their function as the pieces of grit in the oyster of cognition. While making clear that this whole perspective on cognition might well have generated a study focusing on literature, Spolsky goes on to apply her models of cognition principally to the understanding of literary interpretation as practice with particular reference, in Iser's phrase, to "the variety of hermeneutic principles" (ix).

For Iser, literature's special role in relation to the needs of human beings, "whose lives are sustained by their imagination," lies in its capacity to stage and so give presence to "what otherwise would remain unavailable" and thus to function as "a mirror of human plasticity" (xi). ("If we are our own otherness, then, staging is a mode of exhibition in which such a disposition comes to a full fruition" [303].) In this respect Iser may well echo arguments that have previously been made in respect of fantasy (W. R. Irwin's, for example) but broadens the proposed field of relevance from fantasy to fictionalization at large. The plasticity that Iser posits, a never-ending process of self-fashioning particularly manifest in reading and part of "the inveterate urge of human beings to become present to themselves," is as shifting, deferring, and shape changing as the inferential inventiveness that Spolsky highlights: it is an urge toward an adaptive plasticity that "will never issue into a definitive shape, because self-grasping arises out of overstepping limitations" (xi). Iser's discourse consequently finds its momentum and its subject in a rhetoric dealing not just in "overstepping" but in "outstripping," "boundary-crossing," "doubling," "mirroring," "staging," "game-playing," and "as-ifness." These are the fruitful characteristics of a process in which the fictive opens spaces in existing versions of the world for the imaginary to come into being (without wholly losing sight of such versions) and to generate permutational play ("the infrastructure of representation" [xviii]) as levels of cognition, like plates of graphite, slide over one another in perpetual reregistration. The bottom line of Iser's arguments is that literature is a medium that shows all determinacy to be illusory, though this is a perception that leads less to despair than to a celebration of the necessity and the dangerous edge of creativity. There is certainly a nausea involved in the perspective (and to follow Iser charting the differentials of psychological process at work in reading is no journey for faint hearts). Yet in this essay in psychological relations rather than positions, Iser finds a perspective on evolutionary success, human freedom, the potential for social change, and a whole experiential texture of desire, discovery, and creativity in which literary fictionality--and its defining interplay of the fictive and the imaginary--plays a crucial part. Given the special understanding of key terms that Iser deploys, it might have been helpful if the reader were positioned somewhat earlier than in chapters 2 and 4 to locate those usages in relation to the illuminating histories of ideas and critical analyses relating to "the fictive" and "the imaginary" as themes in philosophical thought. The revaluation of fiction that Iser pursues from Bacon and Bentham to such as Vaihinger and Goodman and his examination of the modulations in understanding of the imagination from Coleridge through Sartre to Castoriadis provide an intellectual framework that might well have helpfully preceded the distinctive readings of pastoral romance as paradigm of literary fictionality (Sidney, Montemayor, Sannazaro) embarked upon in the first chapter. What nevertheless emerges in a book to be read, chewed, and thoroughly digested (though by no means all at once) is a defense on a fundamental ground of human need of the fictive, the imaginary, and literature itself, to which readers will be returning for many years.

Spolsky's methodology takes her to a number of historically realized chains of critical debate, which are examined less for their inherent interest (though this they possess) or as a basis for her acting as some metacritical arbiter than to demonstrate the inherent dynamics of change at work in a field and then to show in a blend of cognitive-theoretical and new-historicist explanation why change, while inevitable qua change, took the particular form that it did. Genre is most evidently category; Spolsky thus finds grist for her mill in, for example, the reworking in a nuclear age of ideas about revenge and about tragedy as genre and in a splitting through various analysts' hands of the genre of autobiography into perceived European and American branches and the subsequent bifurcation of that genre of American autobiography into Western and Eastern subdivisions. Extrapolating with some delicacy of analysis the implicit graduated scales of rules of the genres proposed by her guinea-pig critics, Spolsky demonstrates how rules at one point enjoying utterly axiomatic status (for example, that autobiography is always written by the subject of the autobiography) may be liable to wholesale transformation. She traces the impetus to the particular nature of such transformations in the fields of force generated by phases of postwar (particularly 1960s and 1970s) American cultural and political history swinging the momentum of category zapping in one direction or another, a stance I continue to find more satisfying (corroborative) than accounts of self-contained generic evolution (such as Eric Rabkin's). Spolsky's is clearly also a perspective on literary interpretation's processes of categorization, with which Brian McHale must sympathize. Indeed, in Constructing Postmodernism he casts a historic self as guinea pig in that he argues the limitations of his own Postmodernist Fiction (published five years before) in leaning towards a monolithic definition of the postmodern instead of embracing an experience of reading within divergent categorizations (or constructions) of the phenomenon. McHale hardly achieves the (perhaps impossible) purity of his own aspirations in this respect; ultimately, one concludes, his money is riding on his own proposition of modernism' s defining concern with the epistemologically problematic versus postmodernism's defining interest in ontological pluralization. However, the idea of maintaining, as he puts it, a kind of negative capability in relation to synchronically generated critical categories (as long as this is something other than eclecticism) constitutes an interesting addendum (and potential corrigendum) to Spolsky's diachronic narratives in the spirit of Kuhnian paradigm shifts and their related cycles of redefined "normal science," of the successive modification of such categories as genre.

As well as addressing literary interpretation's processes of category reformulation, Spolsky explores the possibility of relating larger-scale methodological difference and change to discrete modular activity in the brain. Differences between successive sorts of literary criticism "can be seen to line up with the different kinds of processing that cognitive scientists have begun to describe. . . . In short, different styles of criticism can be seen as evidence of the existence of distinguishable, if interdependent, modules of knowledge, originating in distinguishable if interdependent modules of the mind" (10). In the later feminist writing of Sandra Gilbert, for example, Spolsky distinguishes a kind of analogical and expansively transformational discourse related to visual/iconic knowing, liberating in its use of a potentially endless "collocation of related, analogical images, details, excerpts, ideas" (98). At the same time, Spolsky also raises questions about the politics of feminism, institutions, and the literary canon in relation to Gilbert' s apparent short-circuiting of such open-ended transformational readings at stages of interpretation emphasizing female oppression and resignation; Spolsky's further perception, in Gilbert's selection of analogical argument, of kinds of politic negotiation with, and self-insertion into, the discourse of a sanctioned and male-dominated poststructuralism will doubtless also provoke response. The practices of literary history, here exemplified by a group of medievalists arguing about boundaries and methodology, are also analyzed within a cognitive framework, this time stressing "viewer-centred" and "object-centred" possibilities. In short, what through all these concrete instances of debate may before have seemed arguments within the society of interpretation, within society at large, or even between societies are here reperceived as arguments within a shared "society of mind" where it is essentially different knowledge modules rather than different minds and interests that are taking up the cudgels.

What is perhaps most surprising about Spolsky's argument is the extent of its eventual movement into a lyrical utopian mode. The recognition of human erring as part of the ground plan of cognition releases a generously, even extravagantly, pluralistic conclusion. To understand all, it might seem--or to understand how all is [mis]understood--is to forgive all: "one should be able to understand an issue from different perspectives without having to dismiss one or the other as wrong" (173). All literary interpretation is necessarily the product of the brain; the lesson of modularity is the tolerance of difference of interpretation and even of defectiveness of interpretation; one man's insufficient category is the next man's or probably woman's basis for zapping. Were it just a plea for better manners in debate, this would certainly have its appeal, but it begins to look something akin to McHale's version of negative capability. But why, one might wonder, stop at (or even begin with) literary interpretation? Religion and politics offer themselves as just as viable topics for consideration and fields where the repercussions of tolerance would presumably generate "a better life" (192) in even more striking ways than if literary critics and theorists were nicer to each other. (I am sure Spolsky is just as alert as the author of Constructing Postmodernism to such a "postmodernist experience" as Tel-Aviv in January and February 1991, when McHale was "writing about Pynchon during the day, spending the night listening for air-raid sirens . . ." [xii].) However, Menenius's hopeful account of the modular body (Coriolanus 1.1) has never stopped the great toe arguing with the belly (or confuted its justification in doing so), and neither, I suspect, will a model of the modular mind. Spolsky here takes up a transcendent position that is hardly tenable; the biological materialism that she presents herself erecting as colegislator with, and counterweight to, cultural materialism here risks overbalancing through overloading. At least in this neurocratizing tendency, new historicist readers of the twenty-second century may here trace something akin to New-Order optimism or post-Cold War euphoria. (As Christopher Fry observed and McHale's studies of Gravity's Rainbow surely endorse: "There may always be another reality / To make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.") Meanwhile, though "the precariousness and exposure of being human" (Iser 303) may remain, readers of Spolsky's book will certainly gain a fruitful self-consciousness, if not a skepticism, concerning their own activity over a wide range of areas of interpretation.

Other Works Cited

Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, 1991.

Edelman, Gerald. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Fodor, Jerry A. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge: MIT P, 1983.

Irwin, W. R. The Game of the Impossible. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.

Jackendoff, Ray. Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge: MIT P, 1987.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

Miles,Peter. "The Fantastic in Literature." Literary Taste, Culture and Mass-Communication. Cambridge: Chadwyck, 1979. Vol. 7 of Content and Taste: Religion and Myth. Ed. Peter Davison, Rolf Meyersohn, Edward Shils. 333-38.

Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Northern Illinois University
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group