Verse Versus Story Open Versus Convergent Pattern

Literature has two main, often intertwined, strands: narrative and verse. What unites and what distinguishes them? What can we learn from disentangling them?

Shakespeare offers an especially fruitful test case. In much of his work he weaves together narrative and verse more memorably than any other writer; his sonnets form the most successful collection of Western literary lyrics. The Scottish poet Don Paterson, in his ebullient Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2010), recently declared that the sonnets too “have to be read as a narrative of the progress of love.” I argue, on the contrary, that we need to read the sonnets as lyrics, as verse without narrative, and to appreciate the deep differences between, say, the love lyricism in the dramatic narrative of Twelfth Night and the love lyrics in the sonnets.

In On the Origin of Stories (2009), focusing evolutionary and cognitive lenses on art in general, I propose that we can find the common features of all the arts if we understand art as cognitive play with pattern; I then focus more tightly on narrative and on the art of fiction in particular. In Why Lyrics Last (2012) I focus on verse, especially lyric in its strictest sense, as verse without narrative. Here I would like to build on the difference between these two books to contrast the almost automatic convergence of patterns in fiction with the compounding of patterns upon patterns—patterns athwart or concealed behind other patterns—in verse, especially in lyric.

The world swarms with information, which animals and even plants can interpret in order to respond appropriately to threats and opportunities in their environments. But analyzing this information is costly in time and effort. Slowly evolved modes of pattern recognition—such as those found in vertebrate visual systems, recognizing outlines, shapes, movement and direction—reduce the cost of interpreting information and allow animals to respond to it quickly. Brains therefore operate, observes the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, “not by logic but rather by pattern recognition”; “pattern recognition” is the “primary mode” of thought (Second Nature, 2006).

We human beings depend for our survival on our superior handling of information, and hence on our capacity to recognize—and to find new ways of recognizing—patterns. We therefore have a natural appetite for pattern. If we glimpse out of the corners of our eyes a long slithery-sinuous thing in the grass, we will recoil with alarm; that’s enough of a pattern to identify a snake and to trigger instantly an evolved emotional warning signal. Yet, because identifying objects, actions, processes, and events as patterns allows us such good clear information and such rapid responses, we are attracted to pattern. We may see a snake and identify it as such; but, if we know we’re not at risk, we can respond to the other patterns it forms—the curves of its body and the designs on its skin—and see them as beautiful.

Cognition evolved to guide action; it integrates the most salient information patterns around us, allowing us to understand where we have come from and where we are, so that we can decide where to move next. Narrative therefore shapes much of our thought and much of our literature. Indeed narrative seems highly likely to be the default orientation of the human mind. By that I mean that if the human mind can process information in narrative terms, if it can interpret what it experiences as events, it will—and it will do so through a more or less automatic convergence of pattern-recognition processes.

The neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux propose convergence zones in the brain, where, say, the distinct what and where pathways in our visual processing converge to allow us to understand both the nature of objects and their location. These convergent-information pathways feed in turn into higher-level convergence zones, where information from still other kinds of pathways, like visual and aural and emotional, meet. The pressure to understand events, especially events involving one’s own species, has produced superconvergence zones in the brain.

In everyday event comprehension and in narratives such as...