Last night I again started reading Antonio Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. I don't know why I stopped reading the last time: I'm learning a lot and enjoying myself immensely, just as I did with his Descartes Error and The Feeling of What Happens. The new book extends his earlier work on the intricate and intimate relationship between mind and the entire body, not just the brain. In a much too simple paraphrase, here he argues that emotions are body states tied to homeostatic processes and that feelings are the representations of these states generated by sufficiently complex brains. He presents a great deal of evidence for the evolutionary priority of emotion as well as for its priority in brain-body interaction in both healthy and neurologically damaged people, and he argues convincingly that feelings, the maps of bodily emotion, are guides to behavior in the world.
His argument dovetails neatly with that presented in Denis Dutton's review of Joseph Carroll's, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (a book I've not yet read) and in Mark Turner's The Literary Mind: that literature, and especially storytelling, are in their origin ways of organizing one's relationship with others through vicarious experience: "It helps us to regulate our complex psychological organization, and it helps us cultivate our socially adaptive capacity for entering mentally into the experience of other people." [Carroll, quoted by Dutton] This is far from the "art as drug" view sometimes expressed by, for instance, Steven Pinker (who quotes a lot of poetry himself), and it is not a narrow, utilitarian view. It grounds the making of literary art deep in our very nature.
I started thinking about this last night when I saw the title of one the sections in chapter 3 — "Mixing Memory and Desire: An Aside." Not a coincidence. He quotes approvingly from "Tintern Abbey": "sensation sweet felt in the blood and felt along the heart … passing even into [your] purer mind in tranquil restoration." Chapter One ends "It must be that Emily Dickinson was right" about the brain being wider than the sky. But the real impetus for this post was yet another article I found via Arts & Letters Daily, on Helen Vendler, and some comments there from Marjorie Perloff on how she agrees with Vendler:
Ms. Perloff objects to the tendency to treat poetic form as an expendable distraction from analyzing ideas or historical context. "I'm always shocked," she says, "when I see that people who are supposed to be in literature can't analyze a simple poem." She describes talking to a young scholar who had written on Keats and asking about the poet's use of terza rima. He could not answer because he didn't really know anything about verse form.
"There are specific things to be learned about literature," says Ms. Perloff. "Just like economics or history or any other field, you have to learn the vocabulary.
and how she disagrees:
"She has much more of a moral view of literature than I do," says Ms. Perloff. "The literature she likes, say, Robert Lowell, she likes because it dramatizes suffering and teaches you certain moral lessons. I don't think art makes one a better person, that literature teaches you the meaning of life. But the sheer pleasure of the text -- the sheer joy in all the different values of literature, fictive or poetic -- these are the greatest things. The more you can learn about it, the better."
Evidently the avant garde-friendly Perloff would disagree with Carroll, and probably with Damasio, preferring to think of literature as a self-referential game (Josh, is that organicism or inorganicism?), a kind of add-on for the knowledgeable. But then I thought I remembered that Perloff herself had recently committed a strange gaffe concerning literary terminology, and that I had written about it — yup. She'd called some acephalous anapestic tetrameter "chug-chug pentameter." Well, I thought, everyone makes mistakes, and here, at least, she seems to be making one sensible argument. So I looked further. It turns out Perloff was called on the IP thing and defended herself this way [You need access to Project Muse to use the link. The quote appears in the journal symploke 9.1-2 (2001) p. 191]:
The anapest is merely a variation on the iamb, and although many of the lines do have four primary stresses and primarily anapestic feet, the meter, in keeping with that of the nursery rhyme or folk ballad, is not consistent. … Many nursery rhymes have exactly this mix of spondees, iambs, and anapests in rhyming stanzas, which is why I called its rhythm "chug-chug."
But she didn't. She called it "chug-chug iambic pentameter." And the anapest is not "merely a variation on the iamb."
You won't be surprised that I believe literature, including poetry, must address the basic issues of how we live with one another and our world, and I think I can be pardoned a little schadenfreude when one of the principle exponents of the opposing view — that it is a game for "the sheer pleasure of the text" — can't manage what she herself acknowledges as basic: "you have to learn the vocabulary."
8:26:22 PM 
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