Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 2, August 2002

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Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain. Reading With Cognitive Theory. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,  2001. 288 pp. Pbk: ISBN: 0-691-06992-1, $21.95 / £15.95. Hbk: ISBN: 0-691-05087-2, $55.00 / £37.95.

 Reviewed by

Michael Mangan 

    Let us start with a single sentence from near the end of Mary Thomas Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain:  “Applying the perspectives of cognitive theory can help us see another side of  [The Tempest], namely, how it reveals (like Measure for Measure, but with more attention to extrabodily physicality) the failures of discourse to control the material world” (p. 179). It is a sentence which stands out precisely because it addresses so directly the first question that this book as a whole raises: that is to say, what’s the point? The book sets out to apply the insights of current cognitive science to a reading of six Shakespeare plays – all but one of them comedies. But why? Apart from the generally beneficial experimental value of testing one field of knowledge against another, is there anything to be gained by the exercise? Is there any good reason why Shakespeare students should prepare themselves for a reading of the plays by immersing themselves in works of cognitive science, or why directors and actors might turn to (say) George Lakoff for guidance on underlying interpretive principles? Crane argues that there is, and that by standing on the comparatively firm ground of current cognitive science we will be able to take more precise and accurate bearings on the otherwise chaotically polysemic plays. In the sentence quoted above, she directs us to one of the results of this proposed approach. If we apply insights derived from cognitive theory, we are told, we will be able to see more clearly how The Tempest “reveals … the failures of discourse to control the material world.” And at this point “we” take a deep breath, and wonder quite why we need that sort of help in order to interpret Prospero’s breaking of his staff, his drowning of his book and his serio-ironic appeal to the audience – dramatic moments which have, for the last four hundred years or so, been recognized as acknowledgements of the failures of Prospero’s own discourse (and possibly, by extension, Shakespeare’s).

    But that kind of conservative knee-jerk reaction is insufficient. It is not to the detriment of a new theory if it reaches established conclusions by alternative routes. Crane herself raises this point in her introductory chapter, conceding that a reader may well wonder how the cognitive approach to Shakespeare differs from previous philological or New Critical approaches. She replies that “Although the readings that I produce here may at various points seem very similar to those generated by these other word-based approaches, they are based in a different theory of meaning and emphasize different patterns and structures” (p.27).  So yes, it may well be that a close reading of the text, informed by the principles of cognitive theory, will indeed offer new perspectives on, or sharper definitions of, an old interpretation: “old wine (Shakespeare) in new bottles (cognitive science)”, as Mark Turner unappealingly describes the book’s project on the jacket blurb. So the question is – does it?

   Let us stick with the Tempest chapter for a bit. In fact, this actually has very little cognitive science in it at all. It is essentially an essay about image clusters and stage history, and it focuses rather unconvincingly on “ a set of words that are linked primarily by sound and only secondarily by associations of sense: pinch, pitch, pity, pen and pine (and its cognate, pain)” (p.181). Crane has some fair insights about these words and their connotations, but there is something rather shaky about the premise from which she starts. How meaningful is a cluster based primarily on sound rather than sense? And if sound is appropriate as the essential criterion, shouldn’t it be applied a little more rigorously? “Pitch” does not sound very much like “pen”, except that they are both one-syllable words beginning with p. And as far as the secondary associations of sense are concerned, yes, “pain” and “pine” are cognate, but not in the sense that “pine” is used in The Tempest, namely to refer to a type of tree. And where does “pitch” fit in (it’s used to mean “tar” on two occasions and “throw” on one)? The words are not chosen on grounds of frequency: none of them is used particularly often in the play. “Pine” occurs three times;  “pen” once; “pitch” three times. The key word in the cluster, according to Crane, is “pinch”, which strictly speaking occurs only twice, although by including mutations and compounds it could be stretched to eight appearances. Compare that with two randomly chosen (I promise you) comparitors, “fish” (13) and “mind” (10). And when Crane then goes on to insist that all these words “are also linked by their association with inarticulate human or animal cries of pain” (p.180) it looks very much as if she’s making it all up.

    The chapter then attempts to link the findings of its image-analysis with stage history. This is potentially a welcome move, especially since one of the things about Crane’s approach which does distinguish it from old-style New-Critical cluster-hunting is that it regularly pays attention to the fact that the plays existed as part of a cultural practice which took place in the theatre, and that the theatrical conditions of their production had some bearing on their form. However, the argument that the word “pinch” is Shakespeare’s comment upon staging conditions at the Blackfriars theatre seems terribly strained. There may be a grain of truth in the idea – working at Blackfriars probably did seem more “pinched” than the Globe. But it’s not at all clear why Shakespeare, who had been writing for the Blackfriars for four years (not to mention other venues, such as Whitehall and improvised theatre spaces on summer tours), should only just have noticed the comparative lack of stage space and needed to make a song and dance about it in 1612.

    In the chapter on The Tempest, then, cognitive theory forms, at best, a vague and generalized backdrop to what is otherwise a rather unsatisfactory mixture of image-analysis and stage history. While this chapter is perhaps the most extreme case of this, there is oddly little cognitive science within the book as a whole. The introductory chapter sketches the broad field of cognitive theory. “Virtually all branches of cognitive science”, according to Crane, “are centred on investigation of the ways in which the mind … is produced by the brain and other bodily systems” (p.4) Thankfully, though, Crane’s real interest is in Shakespeare’s mind rather than his brain: in cognition as the use and handling of knowledge rather than the hard-wired  neuropsychology of language, or the investigations into the neural substrates of language processing in a centuries-dead playwright. By the end of the introductory chapter she has defined her aim as being “simply to look for traces of a mind at work in a text” (p.35) – something which sounds very much like old-fashioned authorial intentionalism.

    When we get onto chapters on individual plays, the specific findings of particular cognitive scientists are rarely mentioned. When they are, they are presented strangely unconvincingly: if, for example, the cognitive researcher Albert Bregman really does believe – as Crane suggests on p.182 – that human perception of sound takes its energy directly from the source rather than from reflection from other objects, he is clearly in need of an elementary course in acoustics. (Particularly, perhaps, in theatre acoustics.) Elsewhere there are some rather generalized accounts of what might be the “cognitive theory approach” to a particular question, accounts which provide few references to specific experiments or studies, and which tend to gloss over any of the arguments which may exist between different cognitive theorists. Frequently, the cognitive approach is characterized in opposition to various forms of French critical theory: in particular Lacan and Foucault, although Marxism generally gets a few sideswipes. It seems that the deeper project of the book has less to do with Shakespeare than with an underlying antipathy to psychoanalysis, to left-oriented critical theory and to post-Foucauldian deconstructive thought which, according to Crane, represents the subject “simply” as a function of impersonal power relations.

   Thus, the Twelfth Night chapter, for example, touches on the difference between Lacanian desire (defined by a sense of lack) and desire in cognitive theory (characterised rather vaguely as being “bound up with the emergence of both consciousness and thought” (p.96)). However, this then seems to have little to do with the main thrust of the chapter, most of which consists of a perfectly decent and rather old-fashioned exploration of the wordplay around the words “suits” and “suitor”. One is left wondering quite what connections Crane herself really sees between the theory and the text – beyond the cue which Lakoff’s work on metaphor gives for analysis of image-clusters in the old style.

   The book’s first chapter, on The Comedy of Errors, is the one that tries hardest actually to integrate contemporary cognitive theory and textual reading. It points us towards the ideas of Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, and George Lakoff concerning “the basic role of spatial orientation in the development of consciousness, selfhood and language” (p.37), and then uses that as a backdrop against which to explore characters’ “almost obsessive references to their placement in society, in “house”, “home” and, as a defining opposite of home, “the mart” (p.42). But while this results in something more focused than the Twelfth Night argument, it still adds up to little more than saying that ideas of space are important in subject formation (a sound enough idea but hardly earth-shattering) and then writing an essay about images of self, home, society and belonging in The Comedy of Errors.

   It may be that this is a symptom of a deeper methodological problem that affects this attempt to apply one field of knowledge to another: perhaps it can only work on this very general level. Crane does, after all, attempt to introduce some specificity early on in the chapter, when she defines cognitive theories of spatiality in terms (once more) of their opposition to Lacanian concepts: “A cognitive version of the spatial formation of subjectivity involves not just an image of the embodied self … but a tangible experience of it based on somatosensory signals from both inside and outside the body” (p.39). This, in itself is fair enough. Admittedly, it might be thought that Lacan is being rather caricatured here, in the implied allegation that any true Lacanian would actually deny the existence of somatosensory signals. Even so, Crane is quite properly indicating a genuine epistemological conflict between two different models of subjectivity, in which the psychoanalytical model places a greater stress on the symbolic, and consequently offers a more fragmented “self” than the cognitive model. But then we have to ask – so what? The debate between Lacan and the cognitive scientists might be important, but is it important in terms of a reading of The Comedy of Errors? And if so, in what way? If the spatial subjectivity of Antipholus (either of ‘em) turns out to be Lakoffian rather than Lacanian, how would we know and why would we care? These are questions for which Crane has no answers.