Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature

Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999. 292 pp.

When I was a graduate student in the 1960s, I asked a neurophysiologist friend how my brain allowed me to understand what it meant for my love to be like a red red rose. "Hmph," he snorted, in scorn of my presumption: "I work on a single neuron in the squid." Even though he is also a prize-winning poet himself, he was not interested in speculating about how the phenomenology of understanding poetry might be instantiated in the brain. Accepting this rebuff, I contented myself with the formal theories of meaning that predominated at the time. Describing a theory as "formal," at least in generative linguistic circles, was and still is a shorthand way of saying that it makes no claims about how the components and processes hypothesized by the model might map onto either the processes of the human mind, as psychologists would describe them, or its physiology or neurology. Theories that do make such claims have recently come to be called theories of embodiment, and it is as a contribution to these theories and to their struggles against formalism that I value Elaine Scarry's book.

The formalist disengagement of levels of description is a methodological reduction that produces a distinction between form and function, usually with an assumption that the two will eventually be reconnected. The advantage of this approach is assumed to be that, even while the second goal is elusive, work can continue on the first. There is an unspoken trust that the explanation of the relationship will somehow emerge from the sheer density of the descriptive work in stage one, but there are always those who will try to hasten its coming. Reaching, immodestly, thus, for answers to the Big Questions about how human heads make meaning, some literary scholars in the 1960s invested in a heretical version of New Critical formalism called stylistics. In these studies, ¹ the descriptive categories of linguistics were mobilized to describe formal differences among writers, and—here comes the heretical part—to claim that meaningful forms could be identified, counted, and compared in order to establish objective distinctions among literary authors and schools. There was even some tentative work in computer-assisted stylistics, the greatest success being the study in which Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace (1964) identified the author of the previously unattributed Federalist papers by identifying and counting formal features of the reliably attributed essays.

This work had not gotten very far, however, when Stanley Fish (1980a [1973], 1980b) attacked the project with even greater scorn than my neurophysiologist friend had shown. Don't fool yourselves, he told these hyper-formalists, into thinking that you are discovering the connections between form and meaning. Your project is incoherent because it assumes two contradictory positions at once. It begins with an assumption that any intended meaning can be expressed in more than one form, since only if this is true could an author's style be truly a matter of choice. Yet, it must also assume that a given meaning can only be expressed by one form, since only if this is true can it be claimed, as the stylisticians did, that, in describing the author's formal choices, they have identified the intended meaning automatically and objectively.

Fish's critique of the stylisticians' assumptions was itself open to criticism, ² but it was an important landmark in the ongoing struggle against reductionism in literary theory. It also served to bring into clearer focus the larger issue of determinism and choice in language and thought, already broached by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1967) and, in the 1970s, featuring centrally in the language theory of the Yale deconstructionists. ³ In Fish's own work on seventeenth-century poetry (1967, 1972), he did not make the mistake of claiming that he had discovered an objective method of arriving at the meaning of...