grammar and neuroplasticity

Philip Davis has a fascinating piece in The Reader (UK) entitled "The Shakespeared Brain" which addresses an issue I for one, and I imagine many of us who have read and studied experimental poetry for any extended period of time, have suspected to be the case -- that non-normative grammar might change the way the brain works.

Beginning with "a specific intuition – about Shakespeare: that the very shapes of Shakespeares lines and sentences somehow had a dramatic effect at deep levels in my mind," Davis conducted an experiment with Neil Roberts, a neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool, regarding the cognitive effect of a characteristic Shakespearean rhetorical device known as "anthimeria," or the syntactial forcing of one part of speech to perform the labor of another, i.e.

to try to see what happens inside us when the brain comes upon sentences like 'The dancers foot it with grace', or 'We waited for disclose of news', or 'Strong wines thick my thoughts', or 'I could out-tongue your griefs' or 'Fall down and knee/The way into his mercy'. For research suggests that there is one specific part of the brain that processes nouns and another part that processes verbs: but what happens when for a micro-second there is a serious hesitation between whether, in context, this is noun or verb. The main cognitive research done so far on the confusion of verbs and nouns has been to do with mistakes made by those who are brain-damaged and thus on the possible neural correlates of grammatical errors and semantic violations. Hardly anybody appears to have investigated the neural processing of a 'positive error' such as functional shift in normal healthy organisms.

The results are fascinating, and vary depending on whether or not the resulting shift creates sentences that still make some sense or not given the violation of normative grammar. But Davis goes on from this evidence to muse further (and in ways that will not surprise anyone who has worked with victims of traumatic brain injuries whose neural functioning has moved and thus been regained):

Shakespeare's syntax, its shifts and movements, can lock into the existing pathways of the brain and actually move and change them – away from old and aging mental habits and easy long-established sequences. It could be that Shakespeare's use of language gets so far into our brains that he shifts and new-creates pathways - not unlike the establishment of new biological networks using novel combinations of existing elements (genes/proteins in biology: units of phonology, semantics, syntax , and morphology in language). Then indeed we might be able to see something of the ways literature can cause affect or create change, without resorting to being assertively gushy.

Upon reading this I was immediately led to recall the audio file of a Bernadette Mayer class on experimental writing techniques, held June 1978 at Naropa, during which Mayer reads passages from Clark Coolidge's Polaroid (page 69), Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation (LIII), and Shakespeare's Sonnet 105 and invites students to explore the connections. It's a 39 minute audio file, and the passage in question takes place beginning at 7:00 minutes into the file. I won't reproduce those texts here but will include a subsequent experiment conducts, namely to offer three lines, one each from the three authors in question, and invite readers to consider which is by which. (Answer key in the comments.)

Test #1:
to one of one still such and even so
itself in come as same
and now and hours not at all

Test #2
once more to add feeling to feeling
off near to points in itself
one thing expressing leaves out difference

I reproduce Mayer's exercise in fun but also in the spirit of the very serious implications of Philip Davis' insight, namely to consider form his Shakespeare example what neuroplasticity potential lies in the writing of Stein and Coolidge among others.

must we burn the avant garde?

a belated follow-up to mark's ten-day-old post (a blogworld eternity) that nevertheless seems an appropriate occasion for heuriskein's tentative return to form after a nearly 5-month hiatus. mark mused:

Is the time of any idea of an avant garde over with? Do we need more insistence on the value of aesthetic extremes? Is it important to remind people that it’s not really possible to reject the avant garde before you understand what it was in the first place? Can avant garde possibilities be found in a Stan Apps-style defining of avant garde practices, or in an impulse to unsettle accepted pieties in numerous contexts that’s both broader but perhaps dangerously general? Both? Is the idea of an avant garde old news, or one that we’ve already gone too far in forgetting? How would we know, right now, avant garde work if we saw it?

and i'll only be able to address myself to those directions where a line of inquiry is clearly fleshed out, beginning with what i commented then:

i'll hopefully respond more directly to what you and others have said, mark, in a subsequent post. but for now my initial impulse is to insist that the spirit of the avant-garde is still quite vital but that it might be more useful to think less in linear/temporal orientations (after, ahead, progress) than in spatial ones (centers and peripheries).

and i think this is the significant development of the past few years in contemporary poetry, namely the proliferation of peripheries relative to the centers of poetic production in this country -- and peripheries with less explicit or definable affinities for the historical avant garde.

that is, there are always central locations (literally or figuratively) of cultural production, and usually those centers exercise a certain amount of control or authority over that production -- defining not only its terms but just as if not more importantly its values. and then there are peripheries of cultural production that operate to some extent without abiding by those central or dominant terms and values.

if by avant garde we mean such peripheries, then by no means has the time place or work of the avant garde come to pass: for as long as there are those dominant centers of cultural production that would presume to dictate terms and values for other modes or production -- or worse yet, operate as if their terms and values are the only ones in existence -- then it will be incumbant upon avant garde peripheries to challenge those terms and values by boldy asserting their own.

it is only in this sense that the "historical avant garde" is not a contradiction in terms that needs to be finessed or nuanced away through the use of a term like "post avant." if anything, "post avant" means to acknowledge and attend to this apparent contradiction.

the problem with the historical avant garde, its obvious militarism aside, is the very notion of progress definitional to it. art, science, knowledge -- these do not move in a linear forward trajectory; innovations, paradigm shifts (kuhn), epistemic breaks (foucault) are registered and then consolidated, refined, even codified (so much so even to achieve power displacements in/of/at previous productive centers). extremity, transgression, innovation cannot be maintained perpetually, nor are these the sole values to which peripheries must always adhere.

take the case of gertrude stein. her primary innovative stylistic achievements are by now at least 60 years old. those innovations have been revisited & refined by poets and writers probably every decade since then. her peers in the visual arts (like picasso) have been long canonized and commercialized. (i had a print of his don quixote on my freshman dorm room door.) and yet still it is quite common today, as i pointed out in a post to the buffalo poetics list, to run across such journalistic drivel as this by one philip hensher of the daily telegraph:

"I happily admit I haven't read The Making of Americans (1934) and have no intention of doing so, since it's half am illion words long, and almost all of those sound like this: I mean, I mean and that is not what I mean. I mean that not any one is saying what they are meaning. I mean that I am feeling something, I mean that I mean something and I mean that not any one is thinking, is feeling, is saying, is certain of that thing, I mean that not any one can be. And so on and so forth. [...]

Her charm emerges periodically in her books. The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933) is a perfect, lucid delight; Tender Buttons (1914) sounds, not unattractively, like the work of Edith Sitwell after a pint or two of vodka; and Wars I Have Seen (1944) is disconcertingly indistinguishable in style and in every respect from the Anita Loos novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925).[...]

But was Stein really all that interested in anything? You would be hard-put to extract any cogent statement on any subject from almost any of her books."

it's not just that there is a set of values being articulated here -- that writers should always accommodate the demands of all possible readers, that writers should never challenge the expectations or abilities of readers, that a writer's entire corpus must be read(able) in order to be valuable, and so on and so on -- but that these values are an unchallenged and unchallengeable, uncontested and uncontestable given. there is no space wherein any deviation or dissent from these values might inhabit. to the periphery with you!, sneers these values; little wonder is it then that the periphery dweller does so gladly and proudly. (not to mention the fact that mr hensher's attempt at a stein parody is quite possibly the worst and lamest attempt at such ever.

another case in point: there's an early (1973?) article (contact me if interested to read in full) by one marjorie g. perloff that explains in great detail and with full supporting evidence how charles olson's 1950 manifesto "projective verse" derives nearly all its crucial argumentative claims and moves from the imagist and vorticist doctrines expounded by pound and williams some 30-35 years previous. olson is by this account retrograde, rear guard; and yet such an account fails to recognize that in those intervening years the force of those pound-williams injunctions had almost completely dissipated and that certain poets in 1950 needed those dictates to be reiterated afresh and anew.

personally i think this is a period in post avant writing that is most distinguished by consolidation, assessment and refinement rather than breakthroughs, transgressions and innovations. there is no perpetual innovation: at some point one must stop, look around and do some stock-taking, see what the trailblazers have done, what they have left behind, what work can be put to rest and what work still needs to be pursued.

as i write this i must also acknowledge a dimension in which there are "advances" being made, and this involves what might be called the growing post avant diaspora. that is what i referred to in my comments to mark, namely the increasing numbers of poets coming out of mainstream poetic institutions who are dissatisfied with the available mechanisms of poetic production and distribution and are turning towards those modes formerly adopted (largely but hardly exclusively) by the historical avant garde -- but without any deep or lasting affinities with the historical avant garde's varied aesthetics or politics. less vulgar minds would have once described this as a compromising or sullying of the purity of the avant garde. by contrast i see this as a quite healthy development. it also makes our work harder as there are now more books and magazines and poets then ever. welcome, fellow travellers!

dekoven on stein

what did i find tipped into the GWU gelman library copy of marianne dekoven's a different language: gertrude stein's experimental writing (univ of wisconsin press 1983) -- a very heavily checked-out copy i might add, with a third due date slip pasted into the back flyleaf and 56 circulation and/or discharge date stamps on them (fairly regularly from october 1983 until may 4 2001, making me the first one to check out this book in six years and thus ending the noticeable drop off in interest in gertrude stein here at GWU) -- tipped in between pages 8 and 9, in the midst of which dekoven is making an argument about how the big deconstructive and reader-response critics of the day (jonathan culler, harold bloom, wolfgang iser) very much relied upon thematically paraphrasable texts and thus are in no position to come to terms with stein's work, resting near the top very cozy in the binding between these two pages, perfectly perpendicular to the text of the printed page is a thin strip of paper cut out from a magazine bearing, in a thick sans serif font about 13 point size, the words

          What should I pack?








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from a quick look tho i can say without hesitation that in the 23 intervening years' worth of literary criticism since dekoven's a different language was published, i have not seen much that improves on this.

But what strikes the reader most forcefully about all of this writing [she cites passages from barthelme, joyce, woolf, burroughs, beckett and stein] is that it cannot be read in the normal way.... we cannot interpret any of them to form coherent, single, whole, closed, ordered, finite, sensible meanings, even several such meanings, without radically altering the nature and effect of the writing as it is read.

That obstruction of normal reading is, for the purposes of this study, the most important feature of experimental writing, including Stein's.... this book's... overall sense of experimental writing as an alternative language, which requires a different kind of reading and which opposes itself to the dominant patriarchal culture in definable ways, should apply to all experimental writing. (5)

it's very much what i'm trying to do in my work on clark coolidge's poetry, for example, where dekoven writes:

My aim... is not to interpret specific works, partly because interpretation defeats experimental writing (since if has no Meaning, no unitary coherence), and partly because the division within any experimental style into specific works is generally arbitrary, and often meaningless. What requires analysis, therefore, is the style rather than the work. (xv)

Having difficulty working up a response to the latest piece of wisdom from Bill Kristol -- he's so profoundly wrong it's hard to know where to start.

In the meantime, a nice write-up of the MLA Poetry Extravaganza Part I (Wednesday Night at the Four Seasons) at Chris Murray's Tex Files (see her December 29 entry). And a nice round of photos by Kap.

My big score at the MLA Book Exhibit was a copy of Ulla Dydo's Gertrude Stein The Language That Rises for five bucks. Bought two, gave one to Alan Golding.