Mystery

by Jonah Lehrer

  Salinger’s most Zen story is “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” which takes the form of a phone call between two friends, Arthur and Lee. It’s late at night; the men are somewhere between drunk and hungover. Arthur has just returned from a party where he lost track of his wife, Joanie. He’s angry and rambling. Lee, meanwhile, is lying in bed next to a woman. The conversation unfolds amid this backdrop of uncertainty. Who is the woman? Is she Joanie? How crazy is Arthur?

  What makes the short story a koan is that these questions never get answered. Salinger leads us to suspect that Joanie is the unnamed “girl” in the bed. However, at the end of the story, Arthur calls back with the news that Joanie has just returned. It’s a surprising twist, but the surprise doesn’t bring clarity—it brings the opposite. The more we know about these characters, the less we understand. It’s like thinking about the sound of one hand clapping.

  Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton, was interested in Salinger’s “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” precisely because of its ambiguity.14 Hasson has spent the last several years studying the neural anatomy of narrative. He’s shown people in a brain scanner Hitchcock movies and tracked their eyes as they watch a Sergio Leone western. He’s looked at the mechanics of character development in fiction—we think about pretend people the same way we think about real people—and identified the parts of the cortex that allow us to tell stories about our own life.15 With the Salinger text, Hasson wanted to understand how we deal with a text that can’t be deciphered. “The impressive thing about the story is that it encourages you to interpret it, but it also makes clear that your interpretation might be wrong,” Hasson says. “Salinger has left out the lines that would make any single version the right one.”16

  How does the mind deal with such ambiguity? By searching for resolution. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, observed that ambiguity was inevitably linked to the act of interpretation.17 He used a classic duck-rabbit visual illusion to make his point:

  Some people see a duck. Some people see a rabbit. Some people can switch back and forth between the images in serial fashion. However, as Wittgenstein pointed out, these single interpretations were all incorrect. The right description, he said, was that the picture was a duck-rabbit. Although we can only see one image at a time, we should remember that there are other interpretations. The ambiguity isn’t something to solve on the way to the answer. The ambiguity is the answer.III

  Hasson watched this interpretive process unfold in the brain scanner. To explore the psychology of interpretation, Hasson began his experiment by making a few slight alterations to Salinger’s tale. In the “cheating” condition, he rewrote the opening to make it clear that Joanie is in bed with Arthur. In the “paranoia” condition, he rewrote the first lines to suggest that Arthur is delusional. Hasson then looked to see how these minor edits shaped the way people decoded the rest of the story. The effects of the edits were profound, allowing Hasson and his colleagues to predict which version a subject had seen based solely on their brain activity. “You can really see how interpretation colors everything,” Hasson says. “Once you think you know what’s happening, you read the story very differently.” Interestingly, these neural differences persisted throughout the entire text, even though the only changes occurred in the first four lines. It didn’t matter that the rest of the story was identical: subjects in the different groups ended up processing the narrative in distinct ways. “This really shows us that the brain is an interpretive machine,” Hasson says. “Once it has a frame, it tends to see everything else through that frame.”

  The power of Salinger’s story is that it refuses to settle on any single interpretation. It’s resolutely a duck-rabbit. As a result, readers of the text must shuttle back and forth between these explanations, unsure if Joanie is cheating or Arthur is crazy. Literary scholars refer to this process as a hermeneutic circle. The circle exists when a work is so ambiguous that we can only understand the parts by anticipating their relationship to the whole. Of course, that sense of the whole itself depends on an interpretation of the parts. (Think of the duck-rabbit picture—you notice different details depending on the animal you are trying to see.) So we are stuck in a loop, forced to construct meaning by searching for fleeting patterns and subtle themes, switching between the granular and the gestalt.

  This sounds frustrating, but it’s an effective hook. Because the mind is so eager to find the best interpretation, the mystery of the ambiguity holds our attention. “If you’re reading this story the way it was written, then you’re trying to figure out the conversation for yourself,” Hasson says. “The fact that it stays confusing is part of the reason you keep reading.” When no answers are forthcoming, we read the words closer. Maybe Joanie is sleeping with Lee? Then we read the words again. Maybe she’s not? “That ambiguity makes it more taxing for the brain, but it also makes it more interesting,” Hasson says. “You can’t make any one interpretation stick, no matter how badly you want it or how many times you go back to it. There is no end to it.”

  Schrödinger’s Cat

  The critic William Empson observed, in his 1930 classic, Seven Types of Ambiguity, that the power of poetry depends on its ambiguity, which he defined as the ability to incite “alternative views… without sheer misreading.”18 According to Empson, the obscurities of verse are what pull us in. The force of the words depends on their simultaneous truths.

  Empson gives the example of Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXXIII.19 The poem begins with flattery:

  I never saw that you did painting need,

  And therefore to your fair no painting set;

  So far, so obvious: the subject of the sonnet is too lovely for words. This is what a sonnet is supposed to sound like. It’s a poem of praise, a rhyme to our beloved. But simple compliments bore Shakespeare. As Jay-Z notes, the sonnet is a clear precursor for the braggadocio rap, which also limns a strict structure to force the writer “to find every nook and cranny in the subject and… invent new language for saying old things.”20 So the verse becomes a metaphor for itself: “If you can say how dope you are in a completely original, clever, powerful way,” Jay-Z writes, then “the rhyme itself becomes proof of the boast’s truth.”

  In Sonnet LXXXIII, Shakespeare shows off his skills by exploding the clichés of the standard sonnet. What begins as a love song turns into an Elizabethan braggadocio rap: Shakespeare is using the confining form to show off his creative genius. He does this by infusing the short poem with an astonishing amount of ambiguity, starting with the next lines.

  I found, or thought I found, you did exceed

  The barren tender of a poet’s debt;

  Shakespeare here is taking advantage of language’s innate subtleties, deploying words with a multiplicity of possible meanings. There is, to start, the problem of “tender,” which can either be an adjective (“caring”) or a noun (“offered payment for what is due”). And then there’s the issue of the “debt.” Shakespeare has crafted the line so that we can’t tell if the debt is owed by the poet or to the poet. If it’s owed by the poet, the line means that the beauty of the subject exceeds what the poet could express in verse. How romantic. However, if it’s a debt owed to the poet, as a payment for his writing, it implies a sense of loss: the poet used to be a friend, but now he’s just a hired hand. Either way, Empson says, the use of “barren,” along with the parenthetical “or thought I found,” hints at feelings of bitterness. Something has gone wrong with the relationship.

  As the sonnet winds to an end, the gap between these interpretations turns into a chasm.

  For I impair not beauty being mute,

  When others would give life and bring a tomb.

  It’s a couplet ripe with questions. For one, it’s not clear whose tomb this is. “This might be Shakespeare’s tomb,” Empson writes, in which case the line suggests that the poet brings a lifetime of devotion. But it could also be the subject’s tomb. In this reading, what seems like flattery is actually a
veiled threat: the poet is choosing to be mute so that he doesn’t destroy the superficial appeal of his subject. Because if the poet did try to write about his subject, he would be forced to reveal their ugly secrets, those dark truths that are hidden by those “fair eyes.”

  The ambiguity of the sonnet captures Shakespeare’s uncanny talent. What could easily be a shallow poem of praise instead becomes a demonstration of poetry’s potential: even a short verse with a strict rhyme scheme can become a duck-rabbit, giving rise to two contradictory interpretations. In the romantic version, the subject is too pretty for adjectives, which is why the poet is writing about his inability to write a proper sonnet. However, in the aggrieved version, the poem captures the complexity of a broken friendship. This uncertainty of meaning cannot be escaped—even if you find one interpretation more persuasive, Shakespeare makes sure that your reading will be shadowed by its opposite. As James Baldwin noted in The Cross of Redemption: “That is why he [Shakespeare] is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle.”

  For Empson, ambiguity is not just an intellectual game—it’s also the source of the poetic emotion. A recent study by scientists at the Max Planck Institutes supports his theory.21 By reading people dozens of different poems inside an fMRI machine—selections included Shakespeare sonnets, “Psalm” by Paul Celan, and lines from Rilke—the scientists could detect the particular aspects of poetry that led to chills, goose bumps, and spikes in blood flow to reward areas in the brain. According to the scientists, one of the most important aspects of poetic form was the “closure effect,” that ability of poetry to “exploit our brain’s inclination towards rhythmicity, periodicity, and the resulting prediction of upcoming events.” The best poems encourage our need to make sense of things, but then subvert it with ambiguity. The words trick us into seeking the closure they refuse to yield.IV In this respect, poetry echoes the subversive structures of music, which also generates feelings from the uncertainty contained within its form.22

  This helps explain another puzzling finding from the study, which is that the magnitude of goose bumps increases with repeated exposure to the poem. While familiarity usually leads to adaptation—we become less sensitive to the stimulus—good poetry escapes this trap, making us more sensitive instead. One possibility is that such sensitization reflects the intrinsic mysteriousness of the verse, which only expands with rereading. We might think Paul Celan’s “Psalm” is decipherable; the words are simple, dancing on the edge of clarity. But then we are shown the poem again—“A Nothing / we were, are now, and ever / shall be, blooming”—and realize that these words are a duck-rabbit, just like Shakespeare’s sonnet. There is no single answer.

  The rewards of ambiguity aren’t limited to literature. We live in the golden age of television, which is another way of saying we can watch countless shows full of difficult characters, complex plots, and mystery hooks. The golden age is often said to have begun with the arrival of The Sopranos, created by David Chase. Tony was a complicated antihero, but Chase wasn’t willing to limit the mystery to his cast of mobsters. He wanted the entire show to be ambiguous, endlessly rewatchable because it had no settled interpretation.

  The infamous series finale reflects this strategy. Tony is waiting at a diner for his family. He passes the time looking at the jukebox. He settles on “Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Journey. As the pop song begins, his wife walks through the door, followed by Tony’s son. The camera lingers on a few suspicious strangers. There’s a man in a hat drinking coffee, and a shifty-eyed customer in a Members Only jacket sitting at the counter. Then a series of quick shots: Meadow Soprano in the parking lot, the man in the jacket entering the bathroom, onion rings at the table. The door of the diner opens again and Tony looks up. Smash cut to black.

  The abrupt ending inspired countless theories, at least once people realized their cable didn’t go out. Some were convinced that Tony was murdered by the man in the jacket. (According to this theory, the man retrieves a gun from the bathroom; the last shot is from Tony’s point of view, and the sudden blackness is the mark of his death. As Tony’s mother says, “It’s all a big nothing.”) Others insisted that Tony was still alive, but forced to live a life of chronic fear. (In this version, there is no assassin in the diner, but Tony suspects everyone; the suspense we feel is his eternal punishment.) In search of answers, viewers analyzed every frame, searching for allusions to earlier episodes; they mined the lyrics of the Journey song; they kept asking Chase if Tony was really dead.

  Chase refused to answer. Or rather, he kept reminding people that there was no answer. “Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point,” Chase insisted in a public letter. “To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.”23 Although we want to know what happened to Tony—we’ve spent more than eighty hours watching him and his cronies—Chase insists that we’re stuck with the mystery.

  The critic Alan Sepinwall has compared the ending of The Sopranos to the famous thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger.24 In Schrödinger’s example, a cat is trapped inside a cardboard box with a vial of poison. It is either dead or alive, but you can’t know until you look inside: the act of observation creates the reality. While Schrödinger devised the thought experiment as a critique of quantum indeterminacy, it also captures the ambiguous state of Tony Soprano. The only difference is that his mystery box can never be opened.

  The Mystery of Meaning

  It was another slow Sunday afternoon in the WKNR-FM studio in Detroit. Russ Gibb, a garrulous music promoter with a moptop and thick circular glasses, was spinning prog and garage rock, taking calls from listeners in between sets. (When he wasn’t a part-time DJ, Gibb was running the Grande Ballroom, a repurposed dance hall that helped launch such local acts as Alice Cooper, MC5, and the Stooges.) He’d just finished playing some songs off Abbey Road, the new Beatles album, when Tom from Ypsilanti called in to the studio.

  Tom had alarming news: Paul McCartney was dead. Gibb gave off a skeptical laugh. He’d just listened to a beautiful new Lennon/McCartney song. How could Paul be gone? “Listen,” Gibb said, “that story is always floating around about somebody, but it’s just not true.” But the caller wouldn’t quit. “There are clues to McCartney’s death in the records,” Tom insisted. “What you’ve got to do is play ‘Revolution Number Nine’ backwards.”

  Gibb was intrigued. This silly conspiracy could be falsified on air, which would make for excellent radio. The DJ grabbed his copy of the White Album and slipped disc two onto the turntable.

  “Now what part am I supposed to play?” Gibb asked.

  “Right at the beginning. Play the part where the voice keeps saying, ‘number nine… number nine.’ ”

  Gibb found the groove on the record and began carefully rotating the vinyl backward. A ghostly voice emerged from the static, only it wasn’t talking about numbers anymore. This is what Gibb heard: “Turn me on, dead man… turn me on, dead man.”

  Tom from Ypsilanti came back on the air, his voice mingled with feedback: “So did you hear it, Uncle Russ?”

  “Yeah, man, I sure did.”25

  Gibb knew that Paul McCartney wasn’t dead. But he also knew how to entertain his audience. The same kids who came to the Grande Ballroom to watch Alice Cooper in clown makeup would eat up this dead-Beatle nonsense.

  He was right. Toward the end of Gibb’s radio show, a teenager came running into the studio clutching a copy of Magical Mystery Tour. According to the writer Andru Reeve, who chronicles the “Paul Is Dead” conspiracy in Turn Me On, Dead Man, the freckle-faced kid promised that he could show Gibb “a clue that really proves McCartney is dead.” All Gibb had to do was slow down the last few seconds of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Without hesitating, Gibb grabbed the record and turned it on.

  Amid the di
storted screeches and swirling strings, one could make out the hazy voice of John Lennon. At first, it sounded as if he were saying “cranberry sauce” or maybe “I’m very bored.” But if you played the record again, and you listened closely, you could hear the secret message: “I buried Paul.”26

  It didn’t take long before Gibb’s radio act became national news. On October 14, 1969—just two days after Gibb played “Revolution Number Nine” backward on the air—a sophomore at the University of Michigan named Fred LaBour decided to turn his review of Abbey Road for the Michigan Daily into a detailed accounting of all the clues pointing to McCartney’s death. (If it was satire, nobody got the joke.) LaBour cited the backward code of “Revolution,” and Lennon’s morbid confession on “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but he also added in visual evidence. In the Magical Mystery Tour booklet, the other Beatles were wearing red roses on their lapels; Paul’s is black. Or look at the cover of Abbey Road, which told the story of Paul’s funeral procession. The other Beatles were wearing shoes. Only Paul was walking barefoot, as if he were about to be buried. (On the album cover, Paul was holding a cigarette in his right hand. As LaBour notes, “The original [Paul] was left-handed.”) The parked Volkswagen Beetle had a license plate that includes “28IF,” which alluded to the fact that McCartney would be twenty-eight years old if he hadn’t died.V And then there was the music itself. “ ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is British Navy slang for the cemetery in England where naval heroes are buried,” LaBour wrote. “ ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ is Lennon wrestling with Paul, trying to pull him out of the earth.”