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Toward a Biopoetics of Second-Order Symbolism in the Storytelling Arts

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Toward a Biopoetics of Second-Order Symbolism in the Storytelling Arts UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Narrative (K)nots / Symbolic Seduction: Toward a Biopoetics of Second-Order Symbolism in the Storytelling Arts A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Nicholas Fate Pici Committee in charge: Professor Kay Young, Chair Professor Sowon Park Professor Edward Branigan December 2017 The dissertation of Nick Pici is approved. _______________________________________________ Edward Branigan _______________________________________________ Sowon Park _______________________________________________ Kay Young, Committee Chair December 2017 Narrative (K)nots / Symbolic Seduction: Toward a Biopoetics of Second-Order Symbolism in the Storytelling Arts Copyright © 2017 by Nick Pici iii DEDICATION To Joe and Anne Jennifer and Kayla Cooper and Roxy Stanley, Edgar, and Ernest iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Deepest gratitude to Dr. Kay Young and Dr. Edward Branigan for their unyielding patience with my meandering intellectual explorations, writerly false starts, and frequent hesitations. Their willingness to allow me to build this project up slowly, brick by painstaking brick, and to write what I truly wanted to write is appreciated beyond words. The same can be said of UCSB’s Department of English and Graduate Division. Great thanks also to Sowon Park, who nimbly agreed to join my committee in the late stages and who furnished eloquent and invaluable feedback about my project’s content and trajectory. Further thanks to Dr. Miyoung Chun, who provided professional mentorship, morale boosts, and employment during across the entire arc of my graduate career and dissertation-writing process. Love and special thanks to my parents for being the most unswerving and persistent supporters of my ambitions to earn the PhD. And to my partner Kayla, whose love, tolerance, and belief in my abilities have remained resolute during the final stages of writing. Lastly, for offering the purest forms of unconditional love, positive energy, and perpetual furballs I have yet known, Cooper Pici earns special canine distinction for his loaned spirit and free therapy. v VITA OF NICK PICI September 2017 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts, English, University of Dayton, June 1997 (summa cum laude) Master of Arts, English, University of Dayton, June 1999 Doctor of Philosophy, English, University of California Santa Barbara, June 2017 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2003–2010: Teaching Assistant, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara 2004–2005: Teaching Instructor, Writing Program, UC Santa Barbara 2006–2012: Teaching Assistant, Department of Film Studies, UC Santa Barbara 2012–2014: Writing Tutor, Santa Barbara Community College 2013–present: Managing Editor, ARTMargins, UC Santa Barbara 2006–present: Writing and Editorial Consultant, The Kavli Foundation FIELDS OF STUDY American Literature Film Studies Hermeneutics Cognitive Humanities Biocultural Poetics vi ABSTRACT Narrative (K)nots / Symbolic Seduction: Toward a Biopoetics of Second-Order Symbolism in the Storytelling Arts by Nicholas Fate Pici This dissertation intends to reimagine and reinvigorate theoretical criticism on symbolism in the narrative arts from an evolutionary-cognitive perspective. It gestures toward establishing a more robust, scientifically informed, consilient view of how symbolic devices operate in aesthetic-narrative texts and inside the minds of artists and audiences: i.e. toward formulating a biopoetics of symbol. It presents, specifically, a biocultural treatment of the nature, function, and value of indirect referential complexes precipitated by the techniques and modes of second-order symbolism within aesthetic-narrative art. Aesthetic text–makers configure the cues and patterns of their texts to tap specific and sometimes multiple stages of the mind-brain’s PECMA flow, serially or in parallel. This peculiar cognitive orientation—wherein mental routines must cope with simultaneous multimodal “brain tappings”—has enabled a special mode of meaning-making to take shape: second-order symbolism within a replete aesthetic environment. Certain cultural energies, traditions, and technologies have enabled Western artists and their interpretive communities to refine second-order meaning-making, giving rise to a generic mode of symbolic realism— a mode that might be useful for demarcating between so-called literary/artistic texts and non- literary/non-artistic texts. Selections from American short fiction and film are offered as paradigmatic instances of symbolic realism: Hemingway, Poe, and Kubrick are spotlighted. Non-American texts establish a cross-cultural, cross-temporal, species-typical profile of vii second-order symbologics. Traditional boundaries between poetry, fiction, and visual art are crossed to reckon second-order symbolism as a multimedia, multimodal platform of artistic technique. Foundational questions explored include: § Why and to what ends do some artists deploy devices of second-order symbolism? § How does a biopoetics of symbol embed with theories of reading and hermeneutics? § What are the cognitive advantages and disadvantages of engaging in an open-ended, or elusive and obliquely decodable, signification process? § How do the cognitive mechanisms of the evolved mind-brain enable, constrain, or otherwise contribute to second-order symbolic processes of meaning-making? § How are these symbol-producing/symbol-reading ev-cog mechanisms implicated in the larger replete aesthetics of meaning-exchange ecologies that emerge in the artistic transaction between textmaker, text, and text-interpreter? This dissertation sets out on an interdisciplinary, biocultural sortie for thinking through these questions. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: Hedging the Fox: An Epistemic Speciation .................................................. 1 1. Preparing the Symbolic Meal: Key Terms and Guideposts .................................. 39 2. Against Against Interpretation: A Hermeneutic Synthesis ................................. 106 3. Theoretical and Methodological Orientation: A Modest Ev-Cog Proposal / Consilience / No Mo Pomo: ................................................................................ 209 4. A Symbol Survey: The Ghosts of Theories Present ........................................... 291 5. A Symbol Survey: The Ghosts of Theories Past ................................................. 408 6. Toward a Biopoetics of Symbol: The Replete Peekaboo Aesthetics of Symbolic Realism and Other Ev-Cog Updates ................................................................... 606 7. A Symbologics of Literature: The Psychologies and Cycles of the Short Story 607 8. A Symbologics of Cinema: Symbolic (Sur)realism in Kubrick and Lynch ....... 608 Conclusion: Emergent Questions, Research Opportunities, Spreading the Joyful Seduction of the Symbolic Peekaboo .................................................................. 609 Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 610 ix PREFACE Hedging the Fox: An Epistemic Speciation The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν µέγα — Archilochus1 Archilochus’s now-memetic aphorism about the pluralistic fox and the monistic hedgehog has been interpreted variously over the years. Most significantly, Isaiah Berlin resurrected the phrase, culled from the Greek lyricist’s written fragments, to apply it as an epistemic framing device for his critique of Tolstoy and our habits of mind more generally. Berlin observes the history of the phrase’s polyvalence at the outset of his 1953 eponymously titled long-essay The Hedgehog and the Fox: Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system […] in terms of which they understand, think, and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance—and, on the other side, those who pursue 1 In the first footnote of his eponymously titled essay, Isaiah Berlin attributes Archilochus’s quote to fragment 1 many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.2 3 ]lmhj Since the publication of Berlin’s essay, the fox/hedgehog trope has circulated widely, experiencing a modestly meteoric rise across the cultural firmanent of English letters and even on occasion entering the currents of mainstream media. Berlin would later say, “I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously.”4 In a 1955 letter, he even confesses, “I am very sorry to have called my own book The Hedgehog and the Fox. I wish I hadn’t now.”5 The hedgehog/fox schema was nonetheless taken seriously enough by many of his readers. And judging by the dominant tone of Berlin’s essay—one of sober well-measured reason—it is reasonable to think the author was being retrospectively reserved or glib in the face of the analogy’s new-found celebrity. As Berlin
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