The University of Chicago in the 1930s (educational philosophy so often turns out to be nostalgia for the undergraduate curriculum that the philosopher experienced) used its Humanities and Social Science survey courses to provide just such a broadening and deepening experience. One who had this training was able to bring to bear upon texts from the Western tradition (i.e., most of the texts he or she was likely to encounter) a rich context to illuminate their meaning. This context, in fact, incorporated a wide range of views of class and gender. At the same time, the base of the inverted T exposed the assumptions implicit in this Western tradition to sharp examination from the vantage points of other cultures.
芝加哥大學在1930年代(在大學本科生教育哲學方面經常碰到哲學家經驗過的那種「好古」)利用其「人文暨社會科學通識課程」來提供這種「能日漸博大精深」的體驗。受過這種培訓的人能夠從西方傳統(他們最常碰到的文化環境)找出，，，，，，、。，，，，，、、。，，，，，、：，，、。《》；？！
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Other formulas can produce much the same result. At Columbia, it was a particular selection of great books; at the University of Wisconsin it was Mickeljohn's experimental college built around Henry Adams's Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and his The Education of Henry Adams. The exact formula doesn't matter. What does matter is the opportunity to acquire knowledge that will assure the evocation of rich meanings from any text, with a particular focus on meanings that relate to the culture in which one is likely to spend most of his or her life, but with the external view, also, of that culture that is provided by exposure to alternative Canons.
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To develop these educational issues at length would call for another paper as long as this one, a paper that would be out of place here. My purpose in introducing the issue at all is to show how the theory of meaning I have been explicating can help us examine questions like these. The theory provides a framework within which reason can be applied to the choice of texts to be sampled.
Perhaps it is the parasitism of scholarship upon literature that creates the impression that there is a disembodied text (independent of author or particular readers) which is to be interpreted. That text is the possession of the language community--more strictly of the community that know its scholarly context. Only in them can all of the text's richness of meaning--in this extended sense--be evoked.
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For any text that is preserved over years and centuries, the ownership becomes even more ambiguous. Now there is not only the question of who interprets it but in which historical context, past or present, the interpretation is carried out. We can read the Bible (or Homer, or Chaucer) in the context of the author's culture or our own--or in the context of the ideas of medieval Europe or 16th century China.
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Whether authors would be gladdened by this kind of extension of their meanings is another question. We could guess at the answers. My guess is that Stendhal would be rather appalled,[4] Joyce entranced, and Proust bemused. Tolstoy, who conceived himself as writing down truths, would be indignant: it is his meaning that he would wish to have preserved, nor would he want any reader to actualize a different meaning. But now I am playing the critic's game of inventing meanings for authors and should leave this subject.
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In sum, attention to "the meaning of the text," more or less distinct from "the author's meaning," or "the meaning to the reader," has produced a large part of that luxurious jungle growth we call literary criticism. There is no reason for the Schools to quarrel--they are simply using different reading processes and employing different contexts in which to read their texts. Labeled for what they are, and stripped of claims of exclusiveness or priority, any of these processes and contexts may define interesting, or even valuable, activities. And there might be much merit in aiding undergraduates to develop skill in several or all of them.
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I have already said a good deal about readers, since I have been at pains to insist that critics and authors are readers. Other readers can, of course, read like critics, searching for authors' meanings, exploiting ambiguities, drawing upon the cultural
riches that surround the Great Texts, or perhaps inventing other games of their own. Readers have even made counts of word frequencies in Joyce's Ulysses, in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and in the Federalist Papers that are not without
interest.
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The Casual Reader
Perhaps a word should be said about (or in behalf of) the reader who entrusts himself or herself to the author and only requests that interesting meanings be evoked by what the author has written. Such a reader is sometimes called "casual" or "escapist," but it is possible to suppose that it is precisely this reader whom most authors have had in mind.
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Further, it is possible that many or most readers who belong to the same culture may detect approximately the same meanings in an author belonging to that culture. In an earlier and more innocent age of criticism (and authorship) this may even have been the normal situation: an author recording meanings evoked from his or her mind that were, in turn, evoked in the minds of readers who perused the author's text. What a pleasant, simple world for authors and readers, if perhaps a somewhat impoverished one for those who earn their livings as critics!
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In a slightly more piquant situation, the reader wishes to penetrate another culture: an American reading the English translation of Kawabata's Snow Country, say. (A geisha becomes angry when her lover calls her "a good woman" ("yoi onna"). But is Japanese "anger" American "anger"? And is "yoi onna" a "good woman"?) Here, one would almost call it a cheat if the reader simply allowed the text to evoke meanings steeped in American cultural assumptions.
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But what is the source of leverage to avoid that evasion? Are there human absolutes, unchangeable from one culture to another, to provide the fulcrum that allows the reader to pry out and interpret the subtle differences? There must be some such invariance derivable from the text if the meaning is to be extractable even in part. But now I have moved into the theory of translation, which I cannot undertake to explore further here.
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Many Meanings but One Process
Meaning for the reader is, at bottom, no different from meaning for the critic or the author, although a given text may correspond to quite different meanings for all three. When I say "no different," I refer to the meaning of "meaning." The meaning we inject into a text or derive from it consists of all of those cranial symbol structures that are evoked by its making or reading, including those intensional tests that map part or all of the reading on outside-world denotations.
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Jo 這在那章節
When I visualized the lift at the Grand Hotel in Balbec that Proust described for me, I saw (faintly and vaguely, in my mind's eye) an elaborately decorated open cage that rose from the lobby, its distinguished passengers visibly levitating to their rooms above. When later, on a visit to Balbec (Cabourg), I actually saw that lift, its meaning--the picture evoked from the retinal image--corresponded almost exactly with the mental picture that Proust's words had evoked in me. That
afternoon, sitting on the beach, I drew a sketch, a quite literal sketch, of the hotel itself. Whether it came from my memory of Proust's words or from the scene before my eyes I can hardly say.
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In these pages, I have given a cognitive science interpretation of the enterprise of literary criticism, showing how the critical enterprise can be interpreted in terms of the evocation of texts from meanings and of meanings by texts. Armed
with such an interpretation, we can see what is at stake in an investigation of the sources of imagery in Coleridge's Kubla Khan or the mnemonic devices of the Homeric epics and the songs of Yugoslav bards.
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But what possible utility can such a translation have for humanists? Let me, without attempting either a taxonomy or an exhaustive listing, provide some examples of ways in which it might be profitable to think of criticism in the language of cognitive science, including computer simulation.
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Since my first example is not literary at all, it depends on analogy for its relevance. I have already mentioned that Gordon Novak, now at the University of Texas, wrote an interesting computer program, which he called ISAAC, that reads problems at the end of the chapter of a physics textbook and converts the information conveyed in the problem descriptions into representations stored in the computer's memory. These representations are so "pictorial" that ISAAC can use a simple program to draw pictures of them on the computer terminal screen. Having drawn such a picture, ISAAC can also reinterpret the internal representation with equations describing the physical forces that are at work and can solve these equations.
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Here, then, is a computer program that can translate from language to mental pictures and from mental pictures both to real (visible) pictures and to mathematical equations. Let us pass over such philosophical issues as whether ISAAC understands what it is doing. (I think it does; John Searle thinks it doesn't. But no matter.) What ISAAC clearly does do is to give us a tangible idea of what is involved in converting meanings among natural language, pictorial, and formal symbolic representations. It tells us, for example, what it has to know (to have stored in memory) in order to bring the trick off, and it exemplifies in detail the processes that can be used to do it.
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Since such translations (at least between language and pictures) are central to much literary construction, the insight provided by ISAAC should have some interest and value for us here. The important thing is not that a computer is doing the job, but that we gain from its performance a better understanding of what the job is.
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Let me take one step closer to literary language. Linguistics began its work with the sentence (or even the isolated word) and has gradually been working its way up to paragraphs, passages, and occasionally whole stories. The task of constructing "story grammars"--accounts of the structures of tales and the processes that understand the tales by discovering these structures--has received attention both from linguists (e.g., G?mlich and Raible, 1977) and from cognitive psychologists (e.g., Mandler, 1978), as well as from bridging figures (e.g., de Beaugrande, 1980). Considerable
success has been attained in analysing stories at the level of complexity of, say, Little Red Riding Hood. Story grammars begin to tell us how such components of meaning as plot, motivation, and character are conveyed.
The work that I have mentioned in these paragraphs--both spanning from literature to its psychological foundations and from cognitive science back to literature--provides some prototypes for the kinds of inquiry that can in time create a broad and well-traveled bridge between the two cultures.
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There is no great mystery in the meaning of "meaning."
If we agree that meanings are held in heads and that heads contain complex networks of neurons, then we can locate meanings in the symbol structures that these networks contain. Neurons or symbols, they are simply patterns. And the patterns have meanings because they can refer (point) to each other and especially because some of them can denote (through perceptual tests of the kind I described earlier) things, relations, and events outside the head.
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The theory of literary criticism has to do with the ways in which meanings are used to generate text in natural languages and the ways in which the perusal of texts evokes meanings. Viewed in this way, criticism can be viewed (imperialistically) simply as a branch of cognitive science. I have tried to sketch out some of the rich modes in which criticism can be pursued and has been pursued historically. A closer tie of criticism with cognitive science will surely lead to the invention of new modes, which may turn out to be as fascinating and valuable as those already pursued.
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I have talked of meanings and criticism descriptively rather than normatively. An outsider, viewing the internecine battles that seem to go on constantly within the commmunity of critics and theorists of criticism, wonders why they cannot be
settled easily and pacifically. Each School appears to describe some particular mode of evocation, hence of meaning, and then to claim it as the correct one. If the claims of uniqueness and exclusive correctness were abandoned, as they surely must be, peaceful coexistence could be wholly restored. Of course that might not be as much fun as the current noisy combat.
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I have spoken mainly about literature, a genre in which the transmission of true declaratory information is at most one of an author's intents and often not the most important. There is, of course, also criticism applied to expository prose, where
we direct our main attention to veridicality, clarity, absence of ambiguity, and simplicity (perhaps in that order). This does not mean that we must exclude literary qualities from expository prose, although they may have to compete with the
qualities proper to the genre. Certainly some of the Great Texts in science have important literary as well as expository virtues.
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In writing this essay, I have intended to write expository prose. In particular, my main intent was to set forth a clear theory of meaning and to apply it to the enterprise of literary criticism. I tried to avoid technicality in doing this, and if I have sacrificed clarity, I will refer the reader to some of my more technical writings on these topics, which may throw light on what is dark here. I recommend in particular Chapters 3 and 4 of The Sciences of the Artificial (1981) and my recent essay on The Information Processing Explanation of Gestalt Phenomena (1986).
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My own position here, while the position of an outsider, can be interpreted as proposing yet another school of criticism. Using the dichotomy proposed by Professor Stephen Greenblatt between resonance (that is, knowledge) and wonder, my
theory would seem to fall solidly on the side of resonance. I have been exploring the contexts from which meanings arise; I have not been expressing the wonder that meanings can evoke.
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But scientific analysis is never very distant from wonder. The great Dutch mechanician, Simon Stevinus, took for the motto on his crest: "Wonder en is gheen wonder"--wonderful, yet not unfathomable. A snowflake is still wonderful,
perhaps more wonderful, after we have discovered the fractal origins of its design. Meanings are still wonderful after we have traced out the cognitive processes that underlie them. Science adds to the wonders of appearance the wonders of explanation. It follows the path from wonder to resonance, and then back to a deeper wonder.
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At the outset, I gave my principal reason for addressing this topic: it seemed a good site for a bridge between the two cultures. If the span I have erected seems flimsy or unaesthetic, I hope that others, when dismantling it, will replace it with a better one.
Professional competence in a domain of the humanities, like competence in a domain of science, requires the accumulation of a great deal of specialized knowledge. We cannot expect to master the content of more than a very few domains in any great depth. What we can hope to do is to work toward a common understanding of the mental processes that all of us use to extract meanings. However distinct and dissimilar the domains, our minds, fashioned from the same raw stuff and employing the same basic symbolic processes, must have a great deal in common that we can share.
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If scientists and humanists have only this small common ground, it is very important ground. They can share the common experiences of being human. They can share a concern for the
polity and the society in which they carry on their lives
(drawing the boundaries as wide as the whole world). And they can share the processes that their minds use to deal with the inner and outer domains, personal, professional, and civic, in which they are immersed--the processes that evoke and
manipulate meanings, from texts and from the world.
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Acknowledgements
This paper had its origins in one of the Hitchcock Lectures that I gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990, but has since undergone extensive revision. A number of my colleagues, including David Carrier, John R. Hayes, Alan
Kennedy, Erwin Steinberg, and Gary Waller have provided me with extensive and insightful comments on earlier drafts. I thank them warmly for their help while pronouncing the usual absolution and taking full reponsibility on my own
shoulders for the final product. I am grateful also for the insights I obtained from those who pioneered in the directions toward which this essay points. At the risk of omitting others, I should like to mention in particular Robert de Beaugrande,
Walter Kintsch, and Roger Schank.
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