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The psychology of literary-linguistic form
Nigel Fabb
ANU verbal art workshop, Thursday March 3 2016
Mainstream literary linguistics has argued that literary linguistic forms such as
metre, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism are developments of ordinary
linguistic forms, often further arguing that each specific language enables
specific kinds of literary form for literature in that language. In Fabb (2010) I
called these notions the 'development hypothesis'. However, in three books I
have argued against a full version of the development hypothesis and instead
have explored different aspects of literary linguistic form which are not derived
from linguistic form. Fabb (2002) argues that some kinds of literary form are
attributed to the text as descriptions derived by inference rather than by some
special computation. Fabb and Halle (2008) argue that metrical form is founded
on counting units from one end of the line to the other (with rhythm derived
from counting) and that neither counting nor the line are linguistic forms;
counting may involve cross-modal kinds of cognition shared also with musical
form. Fabb (2015) argues that when the forms of metre, parallelism, rhyme and
alliteration are dependent on a textual section such as the line, that section is
always small enough to fit into working memory. Thus inferencing, cross-modal
computations, and working memory all play a role in shaping literary linguistic
form. These appeals to psychology place these questions about literary form
into a bigger debate about whether the psychology of aesthetic experience is a
version of the psychology of ordinary experience (now the dominant view, which
I assume), or alternatively whether there is a distinct psychology for aesthetic
experience. It includes debates around whether there are distinct 'aesthetic
emotions', and debates around whether there is a "psychologically privileged
category 'fiction'" (Gerrig, who says not).
In the second part of this talk, I continue this shift towards the psychological
aspects of literary form to focus on the particular problem presented by
distinctive momentary experiences which are triggered by some part of a
literary text, and how literary form might contribute to these experiences.
Following Joyce I call these epiphanies or epiphanic experiences. These
epiphanic experiences are brief, can have a strong emotional impact, sometimes
including bodily arousal such as tingles or tears, and can have a distinctive
epistemic feel, often of knowing something important which cannot easily be put
into words, or of accepting a failure to understand. Epiphanic experiences
belong to a diverse family of strong experiences which have been extensively
studied in aesthetics and in psychology (particularly of music) including the
sublime, ecstasy, peak experience, awe, 'chills', and so on. Historical-cultural
circumstances may play a role either in whether and how they are experienced
or reported (Zemka).
In the remainder of the paper I briefly introduce five different proposals about
the role of different aspects of literary form in triggering these epiphanic
experiences. The literary forms involved are often continuous or widespread
throughout a text, but they have their experiential effect at a particular moment
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in the text; this may arise because ordinary forms momentarily combine in a
critical way to produce a distinctive effect.
I first look at the use of parallel phrases which follow quickly one after another, a
device of the 'rhetorical sublime' discussed by Edmund Burke and extensively
used in verbal art. Here, the rapid accumulation of different ways of saying
essentially the same thing appears to produce a distinctive epistemic effect.
This leads on to a question about the relation between exogenous and
endogenous factors (Loschky). I consider the notion of 'brilliance' as it exists in
much Pacific and Australian aesthetics, as a way of producing distinctive kinds of
experience. Exogenous factors include size, speed, loudness, shininess, and so on,
and play a role in triggering epiphanies. I ask whether these exogenous factors
depend for their effect also on the simultaneous operation of endogenous
factors: for example, the Yolngu painting has a brilliant surface over a
symbolically meaningful image (Morphy). I consider this question in the light of
the changing relation between iconography and formal surface (Biddle, Carty).
Third, I look at why endings of texts may produce a distinctive effect, including
the effect described by Smith as 'poetic closure'. I argue that the ends of texts and particularly epiphanic endings - involve significantly increased processing
effort (in relevance-theoretic terms), and that this triggers a search for meaning,
which can be resolved in various ways including by attributing closure (which I
treat as an attributed form, not as a psychological kind), or by the experience of
epiphany.
My fourth proposal asks how the audience or readership remembers fictional
events, given (as Rubin and Umanath note) the uncertain status of such
memories between episodic memory (for personally experienced events) and
semantic memory (for what is generally known). I suggest that intertextuality
can play a role in triggering epiphanic experience, and that it does so by further
problematizing the determination of whether the memory of fictional events is
episodic or semantic. I note that uncertainties of memory can have a distinctive
feel, like epiphanies, drawing an analogy with déjà vu.
My fifth proposal relates to event segmentation (Zacks), and the possibility that
epiphanic effects arise in narratives when the relation between event boundaries
is disordered, for example by a failure of hierarchical containment, where lowerlevel events are not properly contained within higher-level events.
References
Biddle, Jennifer 2007. Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience.
Sydney: University of South Wales Press.
Burke, Edmund 1987 [1757] A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas
of the sublime and beautiful. Edited by James T Boulton. Revised edition.
Oxford: Blackwell
Carty, John 2012. Rethinking Western Desert Abstraction. In Stephen Gilchrist
(ed). 2012. Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary
Aboriginal Australian Art at the Hood Museum of Art. Hood Museum of Art,
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. 105-118
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Fabb, Nigel 2002. Language and literary structure: the linguistic analysis of form
in verse and narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fabb, Nigel and Morris Halle 2008. Meter in poetry: a new theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Fabb, Nigel 2010. Is literary language a development of ordinary language?
Lingua 120: 1219–1232.
Fabb, Nigel 2015. What is Poetry? Language and Memory in the Poems of the
World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological
activities of reading. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Loschky, L.C., Larson, A.M., Magliano, J.P., & Smith, T.J. 2015. What would Jaws
do? The tyranny of film and the relationship between gaze and higher-level
narrative film comprehension. PLoS ONE 10(11): e0142474.
Morphy, Howard. 1989. From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power
Among the Yolngu. Man New Series. 24 (1) pp. 21-40.
Rubin, David C. and Sharda Umanath 2015. Event Memory: A Theory of Memory
for Laboratory, Autobiographical, and Fictional Events. Psychological Review,
122(1), pp.1-23.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 1968. Poetic closure. A study of how poems end.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zacks, Jeffrey M. and Barbara Tversky 2001. Event Structure in Perception and
Conception. Psychological Bulletin, 127(1), pp.3-21
Zemka, Sue 2012. Time and the moment in Victorian literature and society
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press