cognitive poetics for writers

[cognitive-poetics]

prototypicality as tool of analysis

wtf is this? 

I’ve talked previously about prototypicality, which is more or less the idea that there is a “standard” version of a piece of text (fractally at the level of sentence, paragraph, section, etc) from which that text can deviate. For example, a prototypical sentence tends to be organized in the order subject-verb-object, where the subject is the topic and agent, and sentences can deviate from that to different degrees. Deviation normally requires a reason--e.g., you use the passive voice, which deviates from the subject-as-agent rule, when you want the receiver of the action to be highlighted as topical.

A prototype is a messy, leaky category. Prototypes even at the sentence level might be multi-modal, with more than one dominant prototype, and it only gets harder to get a grip on as you move to broader, more abstracted prototypes, issues of genre or macro form and such. The prototypes in these cases tend to be far more varied, shifting and fuzzy, as you get prototypes that represent sub-genres, or sub-sub-genres and so on. And of course, at a certain level of granularity, you run into the inevitable problem that different people have read/watched/seen/listened to different things, so there is no possibility of a single canonical “prototypical stance” from which to interpret something.

And yet, you absolutely cannot get away from understanding a work without some reference to the way it deviates from a generic prototype of its kind. The act of reading relies on these prototypes as orienting footholds for their interpretation of the text, even in the basic, mostly unconscious and automatic sense of interpretation.

This kind of analysis is essentially what you do when you paraphrase a poem. Paraphrasing mostly strips the text of its various literary devices. This of course serves to facilitate a literal understanding, but it also serves as a point of comparison with the text as it exists.

Let’s take a simple example. Here is William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

This poem follows the imagist dictum of plain, direct language, so it requires very little change. We can start by rendering it in prose:

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.

A few minor changes to maximize syntactic and semantic clarity:

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow which is wet with rainwater and which is beside the white chickens.

So a formal understanding of this poem begins, whether implicitly or explicitly, as we are doing here, with an analysis of how the poem differs from its paraphrase. And from this, we may productively note the following about the poem:

it lacks capital letters and punctuation

the rhythmic and concrete structure

the three bottom stanzas are a noun phrase, a reduced relative clause and a prepositional phrase respectively, and together they make up a noun phrase that is the object of the preposition “upon”

the splitting of two compound words, “wheelbarrow” and “rainwater”

the metaphorical use of “glazed”

And then, by assuming these choices to be purposeful, we can properly analyze their effects.

[cognitive-poetics]

cognitive poetics masterpost

i’m moving my cognitive poetics posting to this sideblog for people who aren’t interesting in my various other ramblings, so here’s the masterpost so far (existing posts so far will, at least for now, remain where they are.)

the purpose of this project is to produce systematic, actionable and potentially original writing advice based on insights from cognitive science.

introduction

figure and ground

figure, how and when

spreading activation

ground creates figure

image schemata

deixis

metatextual deixis

metatextual deixis: guiding questions

metatextual deixis: too like the lightning

metaphor

crafting metaphor

crafting metaphors: guiding questions

a note on “show don’t tell”

“avoid the passive voice“

prototypicality and deviance

prototypicality as tool of analysis

[cognitive-poetics]

Rosie Mucho (née Rosalind Rasmussen, and soon to be so again) had a longish list of errands, some pleasant, one not, one not even exactly an errand at all though Rosie had decided to think of it as one, had put it on the mental list along with the daycare center, the stop at Bluto's Automotive, and the library. In the car with her were her three-year-old daughter Sam, her two Australian sheepdogs, her natal chart in a brown manila envelope, a historical novel by Fellowes Kraft to be returned, and her husband's lunch, wrapped in plastic wrap; and then too all the other oddments, baggage and tackle that invariably accumulate in a car of this one's kind and age. Beside her on the seat was the rear-view mirror, which only that morning had come off, when Rosie tried to adjust it, from where it was attached to the front window. It reflected nothing useful there, only cast up into Rosie's face and her daughter's the brilliant August morning and the leafy way.

from Aegypt by John Crowley

First off, Crowley is a great namer, and he’s obviously having fun with it--that one-two punch of Rosie Mucho (two iambs trochees, btw) and the alliterative/consonant Rosalind Rasmussen (two dactyls), and Fellowes Craft. (The protagonist’s name is Pierce Moffet, and the town this takes place in is Blackbury Jambs, which borders on excessively twee but I’ll allow it).

In the car with her were her three-year-old daughter Sam, her two Australian sheepdogs, her natal chart in a brown manila envelope, a historical novel by Fellowes Kraft to be returned, and her husband's lunch, wrapped in plastic wrap

Once again characterization by list. These are in the context of the unnamed errands, which the book and the lunch suggest are related to (and the daycare has already been mentioned, so we can include the child among those), so that gives meaning to the enumerated objects. As I’ve said before, a challenge with lists is variety, and we get a spectrum of things. Ordering is also a source of meaning in lists, and here we seem to get a rough ordering by importance, which specifically does two interesting things: puts the husband’s lunch last, which ties in with the “soon to be again” at the beginning in suggesting conflict in the marriage, and puts the most intriguing item in the inconspicuous middle--the natal chart, the only item there whose corresponding errand is not stated or easily presumed, recalling the intriguingly vague single unpleasant errand that’s not really an errand and very gently ratcheting up the curiosity re: its nature.

A separate point: the mirror “cast[ing] up... the brilliant August morning.” The mirror itself fits with the general structure of enumerating objects in the car connected to Rosie’s errands. In this way, Crowley conveys what the weather is like within the structure of ideas that he has created for this paragraph. It’s an example of how good writing comes of compression and integration--when you want to include an incidental detail, find a way to fit it into the ordering principle of the passage.

possible lessons: naming, lists, compressing and integrating detail

[cognitive-poetics]

One Sunday afternoon Mother wandered through our kitchen, where Father was making a sandwich and listening to the ball game. The Pirates were playing the New York Giants at Forbes Field. In those days, the Giants had a utility infielder named Wayne Terwilliger. Just as Mother passed through, the radio announcer cried — with undue drama — "Terwilliger bunts one!" "Terwilliger bunts one?" Mother cried back, stopped short. She turned. "Is that English?" "The player's name is Terwilliger," Father said. "He bunted." "That's marvelous," Mother said. "'Terwilliger bunts one.' No wonder you listen to baseball. 'Terwilliger bunts one.'" For the next seven or eight years, Mother made this surprising string of syllables her own. Testing a microphone, she repeated, "Terwilliger bunts one"; testing a pen or a typewriter, she wrote it. If, as happened surprisingly often in the course of various improvised gags, she pretended to whisper something else in my ear, she actually whispered, "Terwilliger bunts one." Whenever someone used a French phrase or a Latin one she answered solemnly, "Terwilliger bunts one." If Mother had had, like Andrew Carnegie, the opportunity to cook up a motto for a coat of arms, hers would have read simply and tellingly, "Terwilliger bunts one." (Carnegie's was "Death to Privilege.")

from Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

This is kind of a famous passage already so I’ll be brief. Here, Dillard focuses on this one particular phrase to tell us about her mother.  The point of the passage is characterization, this particular brand of playfulness of her mother’s, but the primary object of focus is the phrase, which comes to signify the thing that pivots around it. This is the essence of symbolism, and also a great way to break up the monotony of building a passage around e.g. an abstract concept or chronological order.

[cognitive-poetics]

The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e., dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.

David Foster Wallace, opening paragraph for “The Nature of Fun”

Since I’m on a DFW kick, let’s look at this little gem. There is something quintessentially DFW about this passage, which helps to pin down some of what is distinctive about his style, mainly the way in which he blends registers, particularly here:

hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth

A list is an interesting device if you know how to use it, and boy does he. The pitfall of a list is that it gets boring because it’s syntactically repetitive, so you have to generate some novelty to command reader attention. Part of how he does this is of course the grotesquery of the image he is generating here, but another is the wild variation in register, ranging from technical medical terms (”hydrocephalic”, “cerebrospinal fluid”) to the crass (”flipper-armed” and, arguably, “retarded”).

You also probably noticed that the whole paragraph is a single sentence, which is also a balancing act. He pulls it off mainly with syntactic variety, starting with a subordinate relative clause (”where...”), a parenthetical with two participial phrases (”dragging”, “appearing”), then the list, which starts with a comma but then uses “and” to connect the various elements, then a prepositional phrase (“as it mewls”), plus a couple more participial phrases, until it reaches that colon. A long sentence generates tension because you need to keep the basic structure and meaning sort of suspended in your head until the period in order to parse it as a whole, which is resolved tersely with “the writer’s complete attention,” granting greater emphasis to the already prime real estate of the end of the sentence. Also, the sentence contains no other standalone noun phrases (appositives), which grants that final phrase additional novelty.

On a smaller note, another element of DFW’s style is that he is unusually unshy about repeating nouns. Notice how many times he repeats “writer” in the first half of the sentence, where most people would have used at least a couple of pronouns.

potential lessons: list as rhetorical device, leveraging disgust, syntactic variety, effective long sentences

[the-phooey]

I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (via the-phooey)

[cognitive-poetics]

The smell is, more than anything, like this swimming pool: a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals. The pool has a strong clear blue smell, though you know the smell is never as strong when you are actually in the blue water, as you are now, all swum out, resting back along the shallow end, the hip-high water lapping at where it’s all changed...

Shake off the blue clean. You’re half-bleached, loose and soft, tenderized, pads of fingers wrinkled. The mist of the pool’s too-clean smell is in your eyes; it breaks light into gentle color. Knock your head with the heel of your hand. One side has a flabby echo. Cock your head to the side and hop—sudden heat in your ear, delicious, and brain-warmed water turns cold on the nautilus of your ear’s outside. You can hear harder tinnier music, closer shouts, much movement in much water...

Almost everyone in line for the board watches the ladder. Older boys watch older girls’ bottoms as they go up. The bottoms are in soft thin cloth, tight nylon stretch. The good bottoms move up the ladder like pendulums in liquid, a gentle uncrackable code. The girls’ legs make you think of deer. Look bored...

This woman above you should not wear a suit as tight as the suit she is wearing. She is as old as your mother, and as big. She is too big and too white. Her suit is full of her. The backs of her thighs are squeezed by the suit and look like cheese. Her legs have abrupt little squiggles of cold blue shattered vein under the white skin, as if something were broken, hurt, in her legs. Her legs look like they hurt to be squeezed, full of curled Arabic lines of cold broken blue. Her legs make you feel like your own legs hurt.

from David Foster Wallace, “Forever Overhead,” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Immediately, of course, there’s the narrative potential of the second person, very rarely used. The central effect here is that Wallace is able to give precise, poetical voice to the adolescent boy’s thoughts in ways he would not credibly be able to do in his own (” The good bottoms move up the ladder like pendulums in liquid, a gentle uncrackable code ”)--i.e., we cannot believe the words are his, but we can believe that the impressions that underlie them are.

To this end, the voice of the narrator itself is clinical and removed, a sense bolstered by extensive use of the verbs "to be” and “to have” (commonly excoriated by writing advice), descriptive and passive language rather than strong verbs--which of course also emphasize the contemplative element here.

Part of the strength here is a sense of evocatively rendering sensory detail to the reader, such as the “clear blue smell” of the pool. Relatedly, there are precise elements of the experience of being in a public or semi-public pool, that will be true to the reader’s memories of similar experiences (“Cock your head to the side and hop—sudden heat in your ear, delicious, and brain-warmed water turns cold on the nautilus of your ear’s outside”). In writing, this is an end in itself.

The paragraph about the “good bottoms” renders this beginning of puberty--the sense of being on the cusp of something he doesn’t understand. The “older boys” watch the girls, but of course he is doing that too (”The bottoms are in soft thin cloth, tight nylon stretch” = “he’s looking”), so he is changing into something he doesn’t think of himself as. “The girls’ legs make you think of deer”: an interesting and unexpected detail, but when I think about it, I see it. It suggests to me a naive and sincere eroticism that hasn’t fallen into the well-worn grooves of the socially acceptable.

(It’s not clear here, but he’s in line for a diving board, which is of course symbolic of a moment of great change; his feelings about the diving board = his feelings about puberty.)

That last paragraph stands in stark juxtaposition with the sexy butts, and it is unpleasant and disgusting (“look like cheese”), but there is an unwitting identification in literal empathy (“Her legs make you feel like your own legs hurt.”). That and the connection he makes to his mother, in the context of puberty, suggest the dawning of awareness that he too will one day be old and that he is part of this great cycle.

possible lessons: using the second person, writing as precise rendering of experiences, description means the character’s attention, the effect of “passive” language, how incident and detail work to generate thematic content

[cognitive-poetics]

The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate, a poet known in American literary circles as ‘the poet’s poet’ or sometimes simply ‘the Poet,’ lay outside on the deck, bare-chested, moderately overweight, in a partially reclined deck chair, in the sun, reading, half supine, moderately but not severely overweight, winner of two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Lamont Prize, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Prix de Rome, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Medal, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a president emeritus of PEN, a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six, lying in an unwet XL Speedo-brand swimsuit in an incrementally reclinable canvas deck chair on the tile deck beside the home’s pool, a poet who was among the first ten Americans to receive a ‘Genius Grant’ from the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, one of only three American recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature now living, 5'8’’, 181 lbs., brown/brown, hairline unevenly recessed because of the inconsistent acceptance/rejection of various Hair Augmentation Systems– brand transplants, he sat, or lay—or perhaps most accurately just ‘reclined’—in a black Speedo swimsuit by the home’s kidney-shaped pool…

David Foster Wallace, “Death is Not the End,” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

This here’s a bit of an exercise in style, a story that is pretty much only characterization, most of which (and everything here) is one long sentence consisting of mostly subordinate clauses and phrases. It is unstructured and repetitive, which suggests stream of consciousness but also makes it monotonous, which is by design.

So what Wallace is doing here is giving us a peek into this man’s mind. What does it say about him? Well the fact that he both can and does recite a long list of awards and honors tells us he is vain.

What is repeated is important, and the fact of repetition, and that he is a poet, suggests that he is revising his thoughts as a piece of writing (“he sat, or lay—or perhaps most accurately just ‘reclined’”). And in this revision he reveals himself, i.e., from “moderately overweight” to “moderately but not severely overweight”, and dropping the XL from the Speedo the second time around. Another note: he gets that first repetition, “moderately but not severely,” in early to clue the reader into what’s going on, stylistically.

Some of it works through juxtaposition, as in “ a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation, now fifty-six”, which suggests his insecurity about his age (in addition to the bare repetition of his age), plus of course the detail about hair treatment.

Wallace does this thing, on display here, where he almost completely takes the voice of a character, but not quite, so a few details seem to break through the consistency of the character’s voice, like the bit about the “Hair Augmentation Systems.” It creates this very fine-tuned irony, subtly announcing the distancing of the narrative voice and the character.

But even the bad things he does bring up suggest he has the impulse to be honest with himself, which suggests he sees himself as a truth-teller, but can’t resist qualifying and diminishing negative details.

The monotony of his thoughts also serve as a subtle dig on the character, who is very attached to his image as a poet, but whose thoughts are narcissistic and banal.

Some potential lessons: a character cares about what they pay attention to and subjects they keep coming back to; characters (people) are self-deceptive, even in their thoughts; how to do repetition and syntax in stream of consciousness; use of repetition, period; using lists for effect

[cognitive-poetics]

After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean, so to speak, were the heads of many curious caddies, a few of the more ingenious chauffeurs, the golf professional’s deaf sister—and there were usually several stray, diffident waves who might have rolled inside had they so desired. This was the gallery.

The balcony was inside. It consisted of the circle of wicker chairs that lined the wall of the combination clubroom and ballroom. At these Saturday-night dances it was largely feminine; a great babel of middle-aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lorgnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was critical, it occasionally showed grudging admiration, but never approval, for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that when the younger set dance in the summer-time it is with the very worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the corners, and the more popular, more dangerous, girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers.

But, after all, this critical circle is not close enough to the stage to see the actors’ faces and catch the subtler byplay. It can only frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge. It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence. No; boxes, orchestra-circle, principals, and chorus be represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway to the plaintive African rhythm of Dyer’s dance orchestra.

opening from “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The most salient element here is the extended metaphor–dance hall as theater. The three paragraphs neatly separate the three levels of the metaphor: the servicepeople outside looking in, the chaperones, and finally the youths. There is a clear sense of spatial movement from the outside in, like a movie that starts from a very wide establishing shot and zooms into the subject.

Clear spatial movement helps to engage and retain attention and provides a simplified schema in which to understand the passage. Furthermore, it echoes the reader “going into the story” as they begin to read it. The theatrical metaphor is also apt, ending on the implicit offer of treating the reader to the “drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence.”

This strategy also creates a distancing effect (of passing “over” the characters), which is intensified by the phrasing. The people outside are an “ocean”; the chaperones are treated with irony (the speaker borrows their POV for the second half of the paragraph, to gentle parodic effect); and the center is a “medley of faces,” all of which sets up the more general tone of medium-distance irony, close enough to get intimate, but not enough not to make fun of it.

[cognitive-poetics]

A little more on this: the tone and the particular details establish a position and personality for the narrator. The servicepeople are mostly glossed over compared with the chaperones, which makes it clear the narrator more closely identifies with the latter; plus, the gently ironic tone also helps to mark the voice as upper class. But his teasing of same puts a distance there, too--plus the teasing itself marks the narrator as unjudgmental, poking fun at their fuddy-duddy perspective (“for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that”).

But neither is the narrator one of the kids, or at least not anymore. So it establishes a perspective that’s on the young side of adult, maybe around 30-40, someone who can do more than “frown and lean” at the goings-on of the young people.

[cognitive-poetics]

After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean, so to speak, were the heads of many curious caddies, a few of the more ingenious chauffeurs, the golf professional's deaf sister—and there were usually several stray, diffident waves who might have rolled inside had they so desired. This was the gallery.

The balcony was inside. It consisted of the circle of wicker chairs that lined the wall of the combination clubroom and ballroom. At these Saturday-night dances it was largely feminine; a great babel of middle-aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lorgnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was critical, it occasionally showed grudging admiration, but never approval, for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that when the younger set dance in the summer-time it is with the very worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the corners, and the more popular, more dangerous, girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers.

But, after all, this critical circle is not close enough to the stage to see the actors' faces and catch the subtler byplay. It can only frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge. It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence. No; boxes, orchestra-circle, principals, and chorus be represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway to the plaintive African rhythm of Dyer's dance orchestra.

opening from “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The most salient element here is the extended metaphor--dance hall as theater. The three paragraphs neatly separate the three levels of the metaphor: the servicepeople outside looking in, the chaperones, and finally the youths. There is a clear sense of spatial movement from the outside in, like a movie that starts from a very wide establishing shot and zooms into the subject.

Clear spatial movement helps to engage and retain attention and provides a simplified schema in which to understand the passage. Furthermore, it echoes the reader “going into the story” as they begin to read it. The theatrical metaphor is also apt, ending on the implicit offer of treating the reader to the “drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence.”

This strategy also creates a distancing effect (of passing “over” the characters), which is intensified by the phrasing. The people outside are an “ocean”; the chaperones are treated with irony (the speaker borrows their POV for the second half of the paragraph, to gentle parodic effect); and the center is a “medley of faces,” all of which sets up the more general tone of medium-distance irony, close enough to get intimate, but not enough not to make fun of it.