by Brian Boyd
If information is chaotic, it lacks meaningful pattern and can’t be understood. If, on the other hand, it is completely patterned, we need not continue to pay attention, since the information is redundant: indeed, the psychological process of habituation switches attention off if a stimulus remains, if the pattern of information can be predicted. The most patterned novel possible would repeat one letter, say, q, over and over again—a queue no reader would want to wait in. But an unpredictable combination of patterns repays intense attention and can yield rich inferences, although finding how to ascertain what forms a meaningful pattern and what meaning the pattern implies may not be easy.
Committed to the cognitive niche, humans crave pattern because it can tell us so much. The more our minds can handle multiple patterns at multiple levels, the more successfully we can predict and act. We therefore have what physicist Edward Purcell calls an “avidity for pattern.” As Stephen Jay Gould notes: “The human mind delights in finding pattern.…No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.”5 Extreme informational chaos, the absence of pattern, as in whiteout or dense fog, can even cause distress and loss of sensory function.6
Art offers the opposite of chaos. It concentrates and plays with the world’s profusion of patterns, with its patterns of interrelated or intersecting patterns. Our perception of pattern and of deviation from it produces strong emotional reactions.7 Art engages us by appealing to our appetite for pattern at multiple levels, in producing or perceiving bodily movement, shapes, surfaces, sounds, words, or miniature worlds. Like play, art provokes us to continue the activities it offers long enough and to resume them often enough to modify our neural circuitry over time.
Our compulsion to engage in the behaviors we call art, in cognitive play with high-density pattern, enables us over many repetitions to produce or at least to process patterns in the perceptual and cognitive areas that matter most to us: movement, sound, sight, and sociality. And as in other primate species, the capacity to command attention correlates with status, which correlates in turn with access to resources and therefore with survival and reproduction rates. Those with an exceptional talent in some art can therefore earn status.
For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial: for the artist, to accrue status; for the audience, to motivate engagement. Exposure to a single story told once will not transform a mind substantially, but many repetitions, or many different stories, can improve our capacities for social cognition and scenario construction so valuable to us in the non-story world.
One conclusion I draw from this analysis of the origin of art and story is that attention—engagement in the activity—matters before meaning. Aristotle understood this. So do artists, authors, and audiences. Even children under the age of three grasp the crucial role of catching and holding the attention of listeners. At this age their stories are as much poems as narratives, focusing on striking characters and effects that violate expectations, but in a structure that resembles theme and variation, a simpler kind of pattern, rather than the event continuity that adults expect of stories:
The monkeys
They went up sky
They fall down
Choo choo train in the sky
The train fell down in the sky
I fell down in the sky in the water
I got on my boat and my legs hurt
Daddy fall down in the sky.8
The two-and-a-half-year-old boy who concocts this “story” has no idea yet that stories incorporate not just settings, characters, and events but also aims, goals, and outcomes. He cannot develop a story but seems to intuit the need to surprise, with his unusual characters in unusual places defying the principles of gravity he began to understand before he was three months old. Repetition is the simplest form of elaboration, but since pure repetition holds little interest, repetition of a bold idea with variation offers him the best prospects of holding the attention of listeners with the imaginative resources he has.
A four-year-old boy made up this story:
Once there was a dragon who went poo poo on a house and the house broke
then when the house broke the people died
and when the people died their bones came out and broke and got together again and turned into a skeleton
and then the skeletons came along and scared the people out of the town
and then when all the people got scared out of the town then skeleton babies were born
and then everyone called it skeleton town
and when they called it skeleton town the people came back and then they got scared away again
and then when they all got scared away again the skeletons died no one came to the town
so there was no people ever in that town ever again.9
This story and others by young children are not plotless but unplanned and episodic, a series of opportunistic riffs, each aimed at catching attention: from the dragon as a conventional category-breaching monster to the decorum-breaching “poo poo” on the house and so on.
Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning elbows its way to the fore in academic contexts because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention.
“Examples,” writes Nabokov, “are the stained-glass windows of knowledge (SO 312). Lolita offers a whole Sainte-Chapelle. How can we see its glowing colors better if we look at it in terms of cognitive play with pattern and its means for securing and refreshing attention?
Stories can earn attention through subject matter. Although house buying has become a stressful preoccupation in modern life, we have no genre of real-estate novels. But we do have stories about romantic love. An evolutionist can note the significance of reproduction and survival in the transmission of genes and the evolution of species to explain why, over countless generations, our emotions have been designed to respond so intensely to love and death and why romance stories so often focus on finding love while thrillers, mysteries, and adventure tales focus on avoiding death.
Precisely because who will partner whom matters so much to us, love stories have always flooded the story pool. Any new romance runs the risk of neglect through habituation, the fading of interest in repeated stimuli. But the passionate sexual love of a mature man for a girl is not an overfamiliar love story. As a novel about an unusual love and an unusual murder, Lolita appeals to immemorial interests but from unexpected angles. It surprised and shocked the public when it was first published, and it still does. At over 50 million copies sold, it is surely the most demanding novel ever to sell so well.
Let’s dive from the overall design into the details of Humbert’s story to see if they bear out the idea of art as cognitive play with pattern, and to see how Nabokov eliminates habituation and animates attention. Humbert begins:
1
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
2
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Au
strian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.
No other novel that I can recall starts with more patterned prose than Lolita. And its initial patterns themselves form parts of other patterns, like Humbert’s self-projection as an artist, a poet, an adoring lover, or his aestheticizing Lolita. But pattern and tantalizing hints of pattern saturate the text: Humbert’s mother is “the granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps.” That in itself may be coincidence, or perhaps meaningful pattern; what are the odds of these two subjects containing the adjacent letters a, l, e, o? Is that accident or design, and if design, why?
Nabokov has been called the greatest prose stylist in English, and not, I think, for the likes of Humbert’s patterned prose but for his mastery of the psychology of attention, his capacity to shift our imaginations so quickly. Lolita’s name supplies the first word of Humbert’s text and the last. His attention is obsessively on her, and he cannot introduce her name without caressing each syllable with lips and tongue. But even as he lingers on her in the second paragraph, the sudden images of Lo with different names and in different circumstances flash her into our mind’s eye: “Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.…Lola in slacks.…Dolores on the dotted line.” Nabokov knows how to catch our attention and fire our imagination by unexpected details and shifts.
Notice the saccadic jump in attention, without sensory detail but with the surprise revelation of “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Or the shift again from summary to “I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture postcards.” Everyone sits up here, because Humbert suddenly breaks frame, as it were, and because of the sudden concreteness: the mere idea of passing around these polished postcards activates motor, tactile, and visual areas of the brain—as neuroscientists have only recently established.10
The average shot length in Hollywood movies has been shrinking as viewers have learned to assimilate film faster and to cope with the information rush of the modern world. Nabokov has influenced writers from acclaimed oldsters (Italo Calvino, W. G. Sebald, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk) to feisty youngsters (Aleksandar Hemon, Zadie Smith, Marisha Pessl) by introducing into fiction something akin to modern film’s reduction in shot length, its rapidity of changes of subject or perspective. I suspect that storytelling in general has speeded up our capacity to shift attention from one perspective to another. Homer generally moves from subject to subject slowly compared with modern storytelling, let alone Nabokov, but even Homer can swiftly shift level and focus when he suddenly backgrounds a warrior dying on the battlefield.
The intense sound patterning in Humbert’s opening words may be unusual in fiction, but a high density of meaningful multiple patterns occurs everywhere in stories, even without Nabokovian alliterative play. Character is one kind of pattern particularly significant for social animals: identifying individuals and discerning consistent differences of personality (even animals as simple as guppies distinguish the personalities of others of their kind and interact with them accordingly). Character clues come thick and fast in fiction. That combination of Humbert’s obsessive focus on Lolita and his capacity to shift attention so rapidly in the opening paragraphs of the novel arouses our interest in his lively, highly self-conscious mind—even if we soon find ourselves uneasy about what that mind intends.
Events can be unique and unprecedented in trivial details, but we understand them because they are similar enough in pattern to other situations we experience directly or indirectly: we recognize romantic love, for instance, as clearly in Humbert’s first lines as we hear the pattern of his words.
In fiction we often find the compounding of event patterns: Humbert’s love for his childhood sweetheart, “Annabel Leigh,” the “certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea,” for instance, prefigures (and, as he wants to suggest, explains, intensifies the romanticism of, and helps excuse) his love for the girl-child Lolita. In Nabokov and many other authors, the relationship of life and art forms another kind of pattern: here, the relationship between the girl whom Humbert calls Annabel Leigh and Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” whose “kingdom by the sea” he also echoes. Such a pattern of characters’ lives echoing art runs through the novel as a genre from Don Quixote to Northanger Abbey and Madame Bovary and into modernism, postmodernism, and beyond.
Expectations are possible because the world and its objects and events fall into patterns. But we learn more from the surprising than from the expected since surprise signals something new and therefore potentially worth notice. Stories fall into patterns of patterns, which storytellers can play with to arouse, satisfy, defeat, or surprise expectations—and no wonder that expectation and surprise drive so much of our interest in story. When Humbert discloses that he is a murderer, certain patterns of events instantly spring to our minds, and, as we realize when we read on, our storyteller wishes to toy with storytelling expectations. The usual whodunit pattern of a murder mystery gives way to a whocoppedit pattern (see VNAY 243), as Humbert parades one possible victim after another before us and then finds out the name of the person he wishes to kill but refuses to tell us, although he unhelpfully notes he has sprinkled clues to the victim’s identity throughout the story so far.
The most powerful patterns of all in fiction tend to be those associated with plot: with goals, obstacles, and outcomes, with expectations and surprises. Humbert’s goal of obtaining Lolita powerfully shapes expectations and ironies throughout part 1 of the novel; his goal of venting his murderous hatred on the rival who took Lolita from him shapes much of part 2. These intensely human, albeit in Humbert’s case perverse, goal patterns shape the narrative impetus of the novel. But Nabokov builds in other patterns, like those of Lolita’s relationship to the stranger pursuing Humbert and Lolita out west: on a first reading we wonder with Humbert whether these signs signal a rival, a detective on his trail, or a paranoid projection of his fears or guilt. Quilty, the stranger, weaves a different set of elusive patterns into the hotel and motel ledgers along the way for the express purpose of tantalizing and taunting Humbert and us. And Humbert in telling his story then weaves into his manuscript the patterns pointing to Quilty’s presence in order to tantalize and taunt us so that we cannot immediately identify the patterns he can now see, comprehend, and control.
In On the Origin of Stories, I note two examples of “early” story: one early in human history, Homer’s Odyssey; the other early in individual development, Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!. I do not stress pattern in these two stories, but the openings of both books swarm with form. The Odyssey opens with the metrical pattern of dactylic hexameter, the structural pattern of the invocation to the muse and the proem, the focus on one hero amid larger events, and the verbal pattern of poly-adjectives surrounding Odysseus, even twice within the first line. In the opening four lines of Horton Hears a Who! we find verbal pattern play at least as intense—alliteration, anaphora, anapestic tetrameter, antithesis, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, internal rhyme—usually in multiple doses and compounded by visual and narrative patterns.
Writers of fiction, from Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare to Dickens, Joyce, Nabokov, Beckett, and Dr. Seuss, produce patterns at many levels. Others produce fewer kinds of pattern but focus intensely on those that matter most to us in human terms, character and event, plus their own particular predilections: in Austen’s case, for instance, generalizations about human conduct and character, in Tolstoy’s, the patterns of an acutely observed physical and physiological world.
As “The monkeys / They went up sky” and dragons poo-pooing and Homer and Dr. Seuss show in their different ways, pattern saturates story from the start. But Lolita, a sophisticated late instance of story, not only proliferates patterns but also problematizes them. It protrudes pattern but sometimes provokes by suggesting significant implications it nevertheless withholds. The hotel name, The Enchanted Hunters, obtrudes in a first reading of Lolita, especially as the goal of Humbert’s quest to possess Lolita, and because of the ecphrastic fresco at the hotel, whose enchanted hunters Humbert reimagines in terms of orgiastic incandescence, and because Humbert, although the hunter, feels enchanted when Lolita turns on him and suggests that they make love. A year and a half later Lolita is about to star in a school play called The Enchanted Hunters when she suggests to Humbert that they leave Beardsley and travel west together. In Elphinstone, a gem of a western state, as we later discover, she has an assignation with Quilty, the play’s author, who also happened to be staying at The Enchanted Hunters the night Humbert tried to possess Lolita in her sleep and did possess her when she awoke.