Editor’s Note: Functional Fixedness

“A metaphor goes out and comes back; it is a fetching motion of the imagination.”

—Tony Hoagland

The term “functional fixedness,” as borrowed from Gestalt psychology, means the inability to repurpose an object for any means other than its original function. When you search the house for a ladder in order to change the light bulb, because the perfectly serviceable chair in front of you is “for sitting on,” you are practicing a form of functional fixedness. When I scold my son by saying “the couch is not a jungle gym,” I am teaching him good manners, yes, but I am also reinforcing functional fixedness.

But I see another function for the term. I see its analogues everywhere. When an adjunct instructor is used to fill classes that no one else wants to teach, and paid virtually nothing for it, despite out-performing her tenured colleagues in publication and teaching evaluations, the faculty may be said to suffer from a kind of functional fixedness: “An adjunct is an adjunct is an adjunct.” When obnoxious diners mistreat the staff because of the entitlement conferred by the context, they fail to see the server as a human being capable of any purpose beyond serving food, and in so doing they can be said to fall victim to functional fixedness.

In literature, metaphor is the axe with which the author shatters the reader’s habit of functional fixedness. An image is repurposed and suddenly our synapses fire in new ways. When two incongruous things are juxtaposed (“the wine-dark sea”), our mind makes an associative leap that it never has before, and the heretofore unknown relationship between seemingly unlike things (“wine” and “sea”) is revealed. As it turns out, wine can be used not only to quench thirst or induce pleasure or accompany ceremonial ritual, but it can also be used to reveal the color of the ocean at night.

This capacity of metaphor—to cause a mind to stray from its busiest highways, to take an alternate route and meander through unexpected detours—lies at the heart of any successful literary enterprise. It’s widely understood that surprise is a quality that writers strive for—in plot, or incident, or epiphany—but the particular kind of surprise that only an incisive metaphor can produce is the lever that our best writers pull, sentence by sentence, page by page.

Contained within this issue are stories, poems, and essays that awakened us from the lull of familiar ways of thinking and forced us to reckon with new possibilities; work that took us down unlit alleyways and gravelled country roads, through marshes and woods where Google maps has never been—and shown us the joy of the unexpected. May you be as challenged and delighted as we were by this collection of elevating (and truth-telling and question-posing and mirror-reflecting and window-gazing and lightning-bolt-striking and lightbulb-flashing) literary experiences.