Towards a literary science

The above might be a rather grand title; but then, it is a rather grand subject. In our post-Enlightenment age, there is no area to which we will not bring the blunt hammer—or fine scalpel, however you view it—of science. There is perhaps a certain contingent which will not accept this. Certainly, that’s true of religious fundamentalists, but it’s also true of certain literary figures, who consider a scientific understanding of literature hardly an understanding at all, and only hopelessly and meaninglessly reductive. It’s probably true that it is reductive to think of art as serving a specific evolutionary purpose, or to analyse a musical phrase in terms of its frequencies and the resulting brain-wave reactions. But that is not to say that nothing can be gained from such a reduction. Indeed, it may be true that more can be gained from it, even while accepting that literary criticism, in the classical sense, and a scientific analysis of literature, are, as Stephen Jay Gould might put it, non-overlapping magisteria.

Jonathan Gottschall, in a piece for the Boston Globe, wrote about how new modes of literary analysis are becoming ever more popular in the academy and beginning to excavate revelations that traditional criticism would not be able to. But the techniques he describes, as fascinating as they are as far as they go, are nevertheless quite limited, and apparently amount to a statistical analysis of a text or multiple texts. As he says, one can find out, perfectly objectively, that Western literature is no more sexist than non-Western literature. Female characters are six times as likely to be described with reference to their attractiveness than male characters—a ratio that holds in all literature, regardless of its place of origin. This is no doubt a fascinating statistic, though I wonder whether this is actually an anthropological insight, and not really a literary one. Gottschall would no doubt agree that the pervasiveness of this six-to-one ratio is not enough in itself to decide decisively on the matter of which literature is more sexist, if any. What is needed is a far more precise understanding of sexism, and this is something that statistics alone cannot provide. If such analysis is the only route that a possible literary science can take, then it can hardly be called a science at all, since we are still using our pre-conceived, subjective judgements to hew our understanding of the facts.

But then we are walking through a very misty forest here. What is needed is a better understanding of what a literary science will achieve. And surely there is no goal more sought after in the field than the holy grail of literary greatness—what is its nature, and is it possible for anyone to achieve so long as they know the relevant rules? David Cope, the creator of EMI, a computer program that can compose its own music in the style of any given musician, has shown that non-genius computers can make more than passable original creations which garner praise even from experts on Mozart and Beethoven. Indeed, some were fooled into thinking that the Mozart-like pieces really were by Amadeus Wolfgang, albeit far inferior to his masterpieces. A new edition of his software, called Emily Howell, even composes music that’s not influenced by any given composer—though of course they cannot escape the influence of Cope’s algorithms. Cope has not yet created a musical genius, but he has shown us that the traditional treatment of artists as divine, transcendent beings is a mythic balloon that can be burst, as long as we don’t tread too carefully for fear of the charge of iconoclasm.

As scientific as Cope’s approach is and must necessarily be, he presumably bases his program on his own ideas of musical beauty, and this is a limiting factor. If there is one thing that great artistic geniuses can be guaranteed to do, it is to find new ways of achieving beauty that do not appear to be subject to the previously accepted laws. So a true science of art in general cannot escape the root of art—that is, the human brain itself. Man is the measure of all things, as a certain sophist once said; and that is true, though perhaps not so far as it leads to an all-consuming relativism. But did the chicken or the egg—or should I say, art or the brain—come first? It may seem obvious that the brain did, but consider for a moment that our brains evolved in response to their surroundings, and one of those surroundings was art. Obviously, a brain in some form came far prior to art, but when we speak of our brain, we cannot but speak of the brain in its current form. A better understanding of evolution and its relation to art is clearly crucial if we are to take a scientific approach to it.

But we must be careful of taking the all-encompassingly Darwinian approach that is gaining popularity. Brian Boyd, author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction wrote a piece for the American Scholar adopting just such a stance. The need for pattern, he insists, is one of the major reasons we cling to literature as we do, and the need for pattern, clearly, has evolutionary roots. This in itself is hardly a controversial or revolutionary insight, but Boyd seems to base his whole literary stance on this view and little more, and so magicks very little in the way of conclusions that would not have been arrived at had he ignored evolution entirely. The fact that patterns are important in art is taken for granted by virtually all scholars of it; they spend their days searching for and attempting to understand exactly these patterns. Once we have established that art needs patterns, we are no closer to understanding what makes great art great. Can it just be that it requires a more complex set of patterns?

Evolutionary science may lead us to conclude only that what we seek in literature is, at bottom, entertainment. This would be an anticlimax. But it would also show the limitations of thinking in a purely Darwinian way. It may very well be that in evolutionary terms there is not really that much to say about art, other than that it performs a useful function in our inner and social lives. And clearly it’s true to say that the majority of literature is not great, and there never was a time when that wasn’t the case. But those of us who seek to read the classics know that there is something objective about their greatness, and certainly this must be explicable scientifically. Yet it cannot be so simple as to say, for instance, that we evolved a sensitivity for the sublime because it is necessary as a warning against impending danger, and that is all. Even if we all do have a sensitivity for the sublime, clearly it manifests itself differently amongst us, because not that many of us appreciate the sublimity of King Lear, even if a far greater proportion might appreciate the sublimity of a thunderstorm.

Perhaps we have evolved so comprehensively that we are no longer really subject to evolution’s constraints. Although it’s true that we can never escape the rule of nature, and that if we were faced with a terrible natural disaster, the effects of nature on us would be far harder to deny than they are now, yet that doesn’t mean that we haven’t somehow transcended it. Given that we are relatively comfortable, and on the whole are not so pressured by questions of survival that we can think of little else, perhaps the primary way in which we change now is culturally, and biological change is miniscule if it exists at all. The “need” for art might not be a need at all, and merely a highly sophisticated cultural manifestation of some primal need of which we bear only the smallest remnant. That is to say, understanding what caused this primal need can never be sufficient for understanding what makes good art.

A literary science must take all these considerations into account. It cannot look only at statistics or only at evolution. It must look at psychology, it must look at anthropology, it must look at the evolution of language, it must look at syntax and morphology, and, most dauntingly of all, it must look at how all these fields intersect. But no matter how advanced our scientific knowledge of literature becomes, there may remain one problem that turns out to be intractable—we still need a way of identifying greatness to begin with. Even though we may be able to say that Oedipus Rex causes a certain reaction in the brain that Guy Ritchie’s Revolver does not, but on what basis can we say that that reaction suggests that Oedipus Rex is better? Perhaps such a basis is impossible to find. Art, after all, is quite useless. And so, as far as a literary science can take us, there may never be a time when literary criticism becomes entirely pointless.

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