Abstract
Chapter 2 threads an intellectual story about hearing as a sense through a line of examples, both scholarly (example: Michel Serres) and literary (Gerard Manley Hopkins). Perception-into-writing is the focus. The point is that in language, we replace and re-enact an enormous range of movements within the material surround that perception has needed in order to perform. That is how we bring the instinctual, which is invisible, up into the visible, which is the legible. In this book the sentence, and the stringing of sentences called scene, are the carriers of animalist perception. Art sentences, in a novel by Louise Erdrich or in a poem by Ted Hughes, make us more conscious of our positions in time, space, hierarchy, society, the planet.
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Notes
- 1.
Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, and Michael K. Tanenhaus, Editors, Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 2.
English is a subject-prominent language , but in languages like Hungarian that have case markers the subject may appear anywhere. Gabor Györi writes: “It is only an obligatory convention that the noun preceding the verb is the subject while the one following it is the object. A language having case markers does not rely so heavily on word order for sentence meaning. … In Hungarian, all word orders (i.e., SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, and OVS) are possible and correct, naturally with differences in style, emphasis, etc., but not in their basic meaning. …”. Gabor Györi, “Animal Communication and Human Language: Searching for Their Evolutionary Relationship,” in The Biology of Language, Edited by Stanisław Puppel (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1995), p. 114.
- 3.
Yes, for Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Paul Grice. But anyone else? Actually, linguists scorning the sentence and never alluding to the dialogism of all utterances, and philosophers writing in sentences but almost never on sentences, give examples in the disciplines of a claim I’m soon to make: focused on the yield of our perceptions we usually operate in ignorance of our method of perceiving.
- 4.
To answer the question in the previous note, and to show a sentence about sentences that carries animalist perception as it comments upon it, here is Michel Serres in The Five Senses, Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 109–110: “Within a single sentence, inside a single space during the course of a single action, we find rhythm and music, silence and singing, the chaotic crackle of noise, everything that precedes language, and the transformations of one into the other, as though we were dealing with a box both sonorous and deaf, tempestuous, attentive and tacit, capable of changing one acoustic system into another, just as I described it happening within the body, both the transmitter of its own noises and the receiver of its pains and fits, its pleasures and joys; an empty box during times of good health, manufacturing language out of warm vibrations.” Note that Serres has written a whole book on the five senses to pull down language from its pre-eminence as a human skill. For him senses are veridical and hard and language is arrogant and soft.
- 5.
For confirmation that rhetoricians have always been animalists, see Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017). See also another study, recent and relevant, which links formal rhetoric to the attributes of animalist thinking: Don Dialostosky, Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoricality (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2016).
- 6.
Thus Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, who told The Paris Review: “I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat.” Quoted in Roger Cohen, reviewing Ferrante’s novel The Story of the Lost Child, in The New York Review of Books, May 26, 2016, p. 53.
- 7.
Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife, New and Revised Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 111. This is the first sentence of a longish paragraph near the end of Chapter 7. The sentence connects to context in the sentences before and after, entangled in a pattern of plot, but it is here wrenched out of that specific site for scrutiny. Later on it must be repositioned in the larger design.
- 8.
Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), p. 41.
- 9.
Thank you, Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!” But your graveyard words are saturated in irony as much as admiration. Might another era have you say, also with irony, without dropping angel or god, “In action how like a bobcat, In apprehension how like a raven”?
- 10.
David Bohm, On Creativity, Edited by Lee Nichol (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 16.
- 11.
When I turn in chapter “Attributes of Animalist Thinking” to describe four attributes of animalist perception and interpretation, the first attribute will be Creativity and the last, where I have a good deal more to say about Sylvan Tomkins, is Amplification of Affect. Oddly enough, the single book with the most searching and detailed description of Tomkins’s thought, career, and influence is one that condemns him for contradictions and slippages: See Chapter I in Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
- 12.
In The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, November 13, 2014, “Olafur Eliasson on How to Do Good Art,” article by Ned Beauman.
- 13.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
- 14.
I rely on Gay Watson, A Philosophy of Emptiness (London: Reaktion Books, 2014); Bhante Gunaratana, Meditation on Perception, Foreword by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Books, 2014); and the Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing, that takes up the first ten pages of the book of commentary by Thich Nhat Hanh, Breathe! You Are Alive (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1996).
- 15.
Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Senses (I), Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, Introductions by the translators, and by Steven Connor (London and New York: Continuum, 2008) (Original French edition, Les Cinq Sens, Grasset et Fasquelle, 1985).
- 16.
Annie Dillard, quoted by Geoff Dyer in his introduction to Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), p. xvi.
- 17.
Steven Connor, Introduction, The Five Senses, p. 3. Connor also says: Serres “uses his sensuousness to inflect his style,” and by his style “demonstrates the implication of the senses in the constitution of human knowledge.”
- 18.
No one knows who said or wrote this first, but Leibniz and Locke comment upon the phrase: see Connor, Introduction, p. 6, where several transformations by Serres are quoted, including “There is nothing in the mind that has not first of all been set free by the senses… There is nothing in conversation that has not first been in this bouquet.”
- 19.
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Original Publication 1990.
- 20.
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
- 21.
Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 2.
- 22.
Barbara Maria Stafford, “Crystal and Smoke: Putting Image Back in Mind,” Introduction (pp. 1–63), in Barbara Maria Stafford, Editor, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field: Bridging the Humanities-Neuroscience Divide (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- 23.
Edward Dorn, Slinger, Book IIII, “Prolegomenon” (Berkeley, CA: Wingbow Press, 1975), p. 145. The first two lines are quoted from a poem by Jeremy Prynne (1936–).
- 24.
Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poems by Paul Dutton, Selected with an introduction by Gary Barwin and an afterword by Paul Dutton (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), pp. 38–41. I quote here the last third of the poem, up to the end.
- 25.
Maggie O’Sullivan, The New British Poetry, Edited by Gillian Allnutt (London: Paladin, 1988), p. 319.
- 26.
Useful commentary on Maggie O’Sullivan’s defiantly unofficial Bestiary: Charles Bernstein, Pitch of Poetry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 177–181; Eric Falci, The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945–2010 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 195–198.
- 27.
This is the longest continuous passage from Orghast I have been able to find: Ted Hughes: Selected Translations, Poems, Edited by Daniel Weissbort (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006), pp. 74–75. For the circumstances of the performance as led by Peter Brook, see A. C. H. Smith, Orghast at Persepolis, An account of the experiment in theatre directed by Peter Brook and written by Ted Hughes (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972).
- 28.
Eric Jarvis of Duke University is paraphrased by Erin Wayman, “Finding the Brain’s Common Language,” Science News, July 27, 2013, p. 32. All passages that follow are by Wayman and from this page. On language comprehension that is spread all across the cortex: Meghan Rosen, “Words’ Meanings Mapped in Brain,” Science News, May 28, 2016, p. 15. On the by-now-better-known mirror neurons, see anything on the topic by V. S. Ramachandran.
- 29.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Henry Purcell,” in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edited by Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 157. Notes on the poem: pp. 402–404. I have omitted the author’s own abundant diacritical marks on the text that show the points where sprung rhythm acts on and in the lines.
- 30.
Aisthētikos = sensitive; aisthanesthai = to perceive.
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Wesling, D. (2019). Perception, Cognition, Writing. In: Animal Perception and Literary Language. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04969-0_2
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