On Cognition, Interpretation, and the Survival of Literature: A Response to Hans Adler and Sabine Gross

Hans Adler and Sabine Gross (2002) have offered a thoughtful commentary on the "Literature and the Cognitive Revolution" special issue of Poetics Today (23, no. 1 [spring 2002)]. Of their numerous concerns, I will address three that directly bear on my own article (2002), "Why Is Literature: A Coevolutionary Perspective on Imaginative Worldmaking."

1. The Relationship between the Literary and the Nonliterary Functioning of the Mind

Storytelling, allegory, and metaphor have long been associated with imaginative literature. Yet narrative presentation, analogical thought, and figurative language are constantly encountered in workaday cognition and communication as well. Likewise, role-playing and mind reading occur not only in the theater or through the overheard soliloquies of poetry and the psychological novel. They are omnipresent in ordinary life.

Such shared features of literary and nonliterary mentation could understandably prompt Mark Turner's (1996: v) epigrammatic formulation: "the literary mind is the fundamental mind." After all, we do not need to leave one mind in the cloak room and rent a different mind for the proper appreciation of a performance of The Tempest. Even so, I agree with Adler and Gross (2002: 199) that the aforementioned dictum, if taken literally, might render "Hernadi's model of the (specific) uses of literature (as a specific discourse) both unnecessary and inapplicable by making its subject disappear." The question is whether a literal-minded interpretation is indeed required. I, for one, prefer to consider Turner's talk about the literary nature of the human mind as an attempt to illuminate by way of synecdoche. Like the use of sail for boat or of farmhand for farmworker, such talk projects a salient part (in this case, one important set of cognitive processes) onto the whole (namely, how the human mind works in general).

The following friendly amendment to Turner's notion of the "literary mind" may be acceptable both to him and to Adler, Gross, and other people objecting to its original formulation. Fictional narration, dramatic impersonation, allegorical reference, and poetic diction are literary inflections of our workaday ways of telling stories, enacting roles, and deploying figurative thought and language. Those inflections no doubt mobilize ordinary mental skills, particularly some that are associated with episodic memory, reciprocal mind reading during personal interactions, and analogical thought. But even if evolution could not afford to endow us with separate minds for different kinds of experiences, it did provide us with the cognitive capacity to process certain kinds of stimuli as vehicles of indirect communication and virtual representation. Such processing seems specifically designed to forestall any immediate impact of a literary experience on nonliterary volition and action (see, for instance, Tooby and Cosmides 2001: 8). To be sure, children and other naive spectators may cry out to stage actors to warn them against being eavesdropped upon from behind a curtain. As I put it elsewhere, "literary seduction can only invite, but not enforce, literary consummation" (Hernadi 2001: 57). But when things go smoothly in the mature brain, the kind of literary daydreaming that Jean-Paul Sartre (1965 [1947]: 39) called "directed creation" does not turn readers and spectators into hallucinators or sleepwalkers.

Let me offer a small set of illustrations for the switch of cognitive attitude from the action-bound to the imaginative. An important resource shared by literary and nonliterary communication is the perspectival framework of personal pronouns. Thanks to those pronouns and their functional equivalents like verb endings, all known languages are capable both of distinguishing the subject positions of speaking, spoken-to, and spoken-about persons (I, you, they) and of integrating (we) two or all three of the basic communicative perspectives (see Hernadi 1995: 60–79). Now, the perspectival information supplied by grammatical means in communication can be put to either actual or virtual use in cognition. Without mental processing of a specifically literary kind, you would...