A Cognitive Approach to John Donne's Songs and Sonnets

M. Winkleman, Kenneth A. Loparo, Michael A. Winkelman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137308337
• eBook ISBN: 9781137348746
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Investigations into how the brain actually works have led to remarkable discoveries and these findings carry profound implications for interpreting literature. This study applies recent breakthroughs from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology in order to deepen our understanding of John Donne's Songs and Sonnets.

Chapter 1

“My Verse, the Strict Map of My Misery”: Of Metaphors and Mindscapes

The resemblance between languages and the development of species is not, of course, random or contingent, for, as Darwin suggests, if we could somehow devise a history of all of human existence over time, we would have precisely the genealogy of languages so sought after in philology.

—Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely

The mind is a plastic snow dome: most beautiful, most interesting, and most itself when, as Elvis put it, it’s all shook up. And metaphor keeps the mind shaking, rattling, and rolling long after Elvis has left the building.

—James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

It is very difficult to describe our thought processes literally. Even many technical Latin and Greek terms from neuroanatomy contain embedded metaphors:

term	etymology
cortex	tree bark
dendrites	tree branches
synapse	fastener
limbus/limbic	rim
thalamus	chambers
amygdala	almonds
pallium	cloak
dentate nucleus	teeth
glia	glue
arachnoid	spiderweb
hippocampus	sea horse
insula	island
reticular formations	nets

Many of these brain parts received their names around Donne’s lifetime, manifestations of the New Learning and taxonomic harbingers of modern medicine. Their operation tends to be understood by means of analogy. Cogitation is commonly represented as an innovative mechanical device—books in the Renaissance, computers now—whereas extreme states of mind are often envisaged in terms of the hydraulic metaphor EMOTIONS ARE FLUIDS (e.g., “boiling with rage”). But what do thinking or speaking actually entail? In trying to answer that question, it might be desirable to explore some of the prehistoric foundations and elemental properties of language. That is, rather than rehashing the trivial pursuits passing for English studies nowadays, an examination of important fundamentals of metaphor and speech may prove more useful. Considered broadly, I contend, ordinary human communication is truly wondrous in its own right; extreme cases like Donne’s “concetti metafisici” are, to coin a phrase, the icing on the cake. It is like flying: NASA’s cutting-edge Space Shuttle is plenty amazing, but we should not lose sight of how impressive it is that a century after the Wright Brothers and after being bound by gravity for millennia, jet travel across continents and oceans has become routine. Accordingly, this chapter presents an overview of current hypotheses about metaphors, including their relation to thinking in general and normal verbal aptitude; then goes on to examine an indispensable image for comprehending the psyche; and finally, in light of these ideas, tries to untangle the long-running debate over the aesthetic value of Metaphysical verse with recourse to cognitive science.

Language: Man Does Not Exist Prior to Language, either as a Species or as an Individual

Since the (figurative) destruction of the Tower of Babel, the question of language origins has engaged a who’s who of intellectuals. Some notables include Giambattista Vico, Adam Smith, Jacob Grimm, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Max Müller. Today, however, more is known about the deep history and essential features of language than ever before.¹ While particular lexis have disappeared, what has been recovered is astounding: light is finally being shed on the mysteries of how we began to talk (cf. Sat4, 35–65). This “explosive growth” on the evolution of language (or “glottogony”) is thoroughly cross-disciplinary: fresh findings are springing from intrepid investigations by paleoanthropologists, linguists, and geneticists.²

Since textuality has become nearly omnipresent in the here and now, it might not be remiss to remind you that confabulation began and developed in a world devoid of any writing whatsoever. For a very long time, conversation was unmediated, and critical nuances would be added by facial expressions, nonverbal cues, and tone—the pronuntiatio et actio of Greco-Roman oratory or “action and accent” of Renaissance drama (Love’s Labor’s Lost, 5.2.99). Direct dialogue is in your face in a way neither books nor even computers can quite replicate yet, not even with emoticons. In his pioneering study Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter J. Ong emphasizes how “in the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings.”³ When critics laud Donne’s colloquial qualities—for example, “I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I / Did, till we lov’d?”—they are responding to the innate power of the spoken word (GoodM, 1–2).

Linguistic competence is found across all cultures. Noam Chomsky realized that the key to this omnipresence is that we are born with an inherited capacity to pick up our mother tongue. This idea of a language instinct has revolutionized linguistics; “universal grammar” (UG) parsimoniously accounts for both aural comprehension and how infants acquire speech. Babies, it turns out, are not mastering language from scratch but instead are adding vocabulary and a few rules, such as acceptable word order, to a preexisting algorithm already latent in the brain. Furthermore, all languages have sentences, syntax, recursion, and parts of speech representing agents, actions, and modifiers. They also have the capability of setting forth hypotheticals, questions, and statements contrary to fact, as in Donne’s Holy Sonnet, “What if this present were the worlds last night?” Flavorful expressions of human gregariousness are also endemic—shmoozing, nudgjening, and kvetching are not restricted to Yiddish. Details about UG still trigger differences of opinion, but its general validity pounds another nail in the coffin bearing Locke’s blank slate, and further invalidates social constructivism. As Christine Kenneally notes in The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language: “The next century will be an exciting time of determining the closeness of the weave of genes, brains, and behavior. The old nature-versus-nurture debate will finally be shucked off and left behind.”⁴

Various forms of physical evidence attested in the fossil record help solve other pieces of the puzzle and fill in missing links. No one will ever again hear about a close escape from a saber-tooth tiger in Ursprache, nor a saga about a woolly mammoth hunt in Proto-Indo-European, but measuring things like cranial capacity, hyoid bone shape, musculoskeletal formation, and changes in the larynx help clue us in to the semantic skills of our ancestors. This is because language requires not only a suite of specialized cognitive proficiencies but also certain biomechanical components, notably the abilities to enunciate various phonemes and hear them distinctly—astonishing adaptations that we normally take for granted.

Many clever and detailed studies of animal communication provide backstory. Research on simian gestures and vocalizings plus bird and whale songs has allowed probable deductions to be made about the genesis of human speech. The sophisticated system we now use is descended from such warning cries, sounds for locating and identifying group members, and variegated social calls.

The underlying microscopic bases for the multiplex pieces of human language have become another critically significant area of discovery. MRIs now permit mentation to be imaged as it happens, showing specific brain areas and neural pathways engaged in listening, talking, and imagining. In Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution, Philip Lieberman elucidates that “the brain mechanisms that are implicated in regulating speech are also involved in comprehending and producing sentences that have complex syntax, and yield that ability to think in abstract terms.”⁵ The cracking of the genetic code is proving equally groundbreaking, permitting scientists to refine their knowledge about where human nature comes from (including its built-in flexibility and adaptability). There is a ways to go, but it is becoming apparent that language usage and metaphorical thinking are both pleiotropic, arising from the expression of numerous genes and the complex interactions of various cortical regions plus environmental factors.

At present, inquiry into this related matrix of questions draws from both positive experimental neuroscience and more inferential imaginative work in “humane learning and languages” (Selected Letters, 36). An understanding of metaphor has not yet been put upon such firm foundations as other physiological items such as epidemiology or vision, but headway is being made into this vital aspect of human thinking.

Metaphors

It is now accepted that speech is usually infused with what Donne termed “many Metaphoricall and Similitudinarie” tropes.⁶ Without resorting to such comparisons, personifications, hyperboles, and metonymies, discourse would evaporate.⁷ Steven Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, provides prehistoric background: “Human intelligence, with its capacity to think an unlimited number of abstract thoughts, evolved out of primate circuitry for coping with the physical and social world, augmented by a capacity to extend these circuits to new domains by metaphorical abstraction.”⁸ The golden rule is that metaphors aid in comprehension through reification: abstract concepts are represented in terms of concrete entities.⁹ A = B, and we adeptly chart the correspondences. Helpful analogies make it easier to hypostatize things otherwise murky. For instance, a statement like “Anderson gave a strong paper; her main point was incisive and her illustrations were on-target” is unlikely to cause confusion. Though she may have read her lecture from a laptop computer (it was not a tangible document delivered to anyone), we automatically decode the meaning. It lacked any physical force, her sharp thesis did not tear any flesh (incisor: a tooth adapted for cutting, from French inciser via Latin incisus, past participle of in + caedere, ‘to cut’), and her spoken examples in this pretend case were not even visible Powerpoint icons and did not hit anything, but it still makes perfect sense. People routinely deploy a stupendous proficiency for solving metaphors. In fact, vigilant philological awareness is required to discern the imagery normally inhabiting our utterances. As the pioneering work of linguist George Lakoff has established, the bulk of our common target conceptual schema comes from the everyday world. For example, from our propensity to disagree and fight we get ARGUMENT IS WAR: “Marisa shot down my modest proposal” and suchlike phrases (cf. the bellum grammaticale of the Renaissance).

Generally, poetic metaphors follow the same pattern, but with atypical or conspicuous variations on ordinary or expected usage. In his book Metaphor, Zoltán Kövecses finds that “original, creative literary metaphors . . . are typically less clear but richer in meaning” than commonplace ones.¹⁰ Donne’s distinctive animal comparisons demonstrate this:

He [Love] is the tyran Pike, our hearts the Frye. (Broken, 16)

When thou wilt swimme in that live bath,

Each fish, which every channell hath,

Will amorously to thee swimme,

Gladder to catch thee, then thou him. (Bait, 9–12)

But of our dallyance no more signes there are,

Then fishes leave in streames, or Birds in aire. (Sappho, 41–42; cf. HWKiss, 55–58)

But O, selfe traytor, I do bring

The spider love, which transubstantiates all,

And can convert Manna to gall. (Twick, 5–7)

Thus I reclaim’d my buzard love, to flye

At what, and when, and how, and where I chuse;

Now negligent of sport I lye,

And now as other Fawkners use,

I spring a mistresse, sweare, write, sigh and weepe:

And the game kill’d, or lost, goe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction: “Love Sometimes Would Contemplate, Sometimes Do”
• 1.   “My Verse, the Strict Map of My Misery”: Of Metaphors and Mindscapes
• 2.   The Composing of “A Jeat Ring Sent”; or Donne as Thinker and Imaginator
• 3.   “A Lecture, Love, in Loves Philosophy”: Donne’s Illuminating Anatomizations
• 4.   “John Donne, Anne Donne, Vn-done”? A Biocultural Reassessment of Their Scandalous Marriage
• 5.   “Firme Substantial Love”: Donne’s Penetrating Observations
• 6.   “The Very Ecstasy of Love”: Prescriptions for Bliss in Irvine Welsh and John Donne
• 7.   Sighs and Tears: Biological Costly Signals and Donne’s “Whining Poëtry”
• 8.   “Verse That Drawes Natures Workes, from Natures Law”; or, Prolegomenon to a Darwinian Defense of Literature
• Conclusion: Why Cognitive Science Matters Now
• Appendix: A Brief Review of Scholarship
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index