Reflections on self-reflexiveness in literature.

SELF-REFLEXIVENESS, the human ability to pay attention to what we pay attention to by moving to a higher order of abstracting, our power to develop a detached almost third-person perspective about a Cast-person perspective, I consider one of the most fascinating formulations of general semantics. The capacity to step back and observe an intense emotional upheaval, in some cases even studying it in slow motion and thoroughly mapping its subtle changes, distinguishes the human being from the animal.

Dr. Joseph DeVito, in his introduction to General Semantics: Guide and Workbook, suggested that self-reflexiveness was perhaps "the most difficult of the principles, and the least written about in general semantics." Using Korzybski's map/territory analogy, DeVito continues, "an ideal map would have to include a map of itself, if the map were a part of the territory. And then that map would have to include a map of the map."

Dr. Sanford I. Berman, in his How to Think, Communicate, and Behave Intelligently: An Introduction to General Semantics, notes that,

   You can have a map, and then you can have a map of a map. And you
   Can have a map of that map, and a map of that map, and you can go on
   indefinitely having maps of maps. This is also true of language. You
   can have words about the nonverbal world of reality. Then you can
   have a word or a statement about that statements you can have a
   statement about that statement, indefinitely. This is another
   similarity between language and a map--the self-reflexiveness.

We can find examples of self-reflexive human behavior in the works of several writers of what has become labeled the Realistic and Naturalistic periods of American literature. Incidentally, regarding these periods, Meyer Abrams characterizes naturalistic literary philosophy as an expression of the impersonality of the scientific method--a cold detached view of humanity.

Stephen Crane

We can see a form of self-reflexiveness in the precarious situation described in Crane's Open Boat, in which shipwrecked individuals huddle together, afraid for their lives, in a small dinghy surrounded by roaring whitecaps. Even in the midst of this emotional turmoil, the narrator reflects, "viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque." (Crane, p.904)

As the narrator reflects upon the calamitous situation of their shipwreck, he moves into a detached absurd self-effacing irony. "Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing. If men could only train for them and have them occur when the men had reached pink condition, there would be less drowning at sea." (Crane, p.907) (This narrator's comments remind me of an incident in which I made a statement to a police officer in Pasadena following a fender bender on Colorado Boulevard. "I didn't even see the guy coming," I told the policeman in an incredulous tone of voice. The officer replied flatly, "That's why we call these accidents.")

In another incident in the Open Boat, the crew members become frustrated at the ineffectiveness of their attempt to enlist help from the people on shore. The former light-heartedness has gone. "To their sharpened minds it was easy to conjure pictures of all kinds of incompetency and blindness and indeed, cowardice. There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign." (Crane, p.909) Although we realize that Crane's own hindsight has led to this evaluation, as had the "viewed from a balcony" observation, in the context of the story, the narrator in real time appears to evaluate his evaluations.

Walt Whitman

Similarly, the kaleidoscopically shifting point of view of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" allows us to see the process of the mapper mapping his mapping. Several episodes reveal a systematic shift of focus from the map to the mapper.

   The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails,
   she cuts the sparkle and scud,
                                                      (Whitman, p. 128)

   I ascend to the foretruck,
   I take my place late at night in the crow's-nest,
                                                       (Whitman, p.148)

   I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west,
   the bride was a red girl,
                                                        (Whitman p.128)

   I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
   I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.
                                                      (Whitman, p. 148)

   The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
   heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
                                                       (Whitman, p.128)

   I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
   Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
                                                       (Whitman, p.149)

In the shift from spectator (or third-person observer) to the first-person participant, Whitman makes a decided shift from the map to the mapmaker. Throughout "Song of Myself," Whitman forces us to experience similar experiences from vastly different perspectives. The ability to metaphorically put ourselves in another's shoes demonstrates a rather advanced application of self-reflexiveness. Whitman, as the poet of the entire spectrum of human experience, moves effortlessly from opposite to opposite:

   I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
   My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
                                                        (Whitman p.158)

   Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
   I take my place among you as much as among any,
                                                      (Whitman, p. 158)

   I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the
   least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than
   myself.
                                                       (Whitman, p.164)

Whitman allows us to doubt and to doubt our doubting, self-reflexively mapping our mapping.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, delving into micro-life as vigorously as Whitman had immersed himself in macro-life, was perhaps the most introspective--and by extension, one of the most self-reflexive poets in American literature, providing insights into the processes of pain, shock, death, suffering, despair, and cynicism.

In her poem, "After Great Pain; A Formal Feeling Comes," Emily Dickinson metaphorically describes the feeling attending shock or severe trauma.

   After great pain, a formal feeling comes-
   The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs-
   The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
   And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

   (Dickinson, p. 181)

As the poet self-reflexively pays attention to her reaction to trauma or shock, she becomes aware of a numb acceptance of her previously sharp and intense pain. She becomes cognizant of bodily processes going into nervous conservation--leading to a progressive feeling of deadness or detachment (metaphorically described as wooden, quartz, or stone):

   The Feet, mechanical, go round-
   Of Groand, or Air, or Ought-
   A Wooden way
   Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone-

(Dickin.qon,p.181)

Emily Dickinson self-reflexively describes what we might visualize as the systematic shutting down of neural transmitters following an overload:

   This is the Hour of Lead--
   Remembered,
   if outlived,
   As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
   First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

   (Dickinson p.181)

The hour of lead connotes again the overwhelming feeling of deadness following a severe emotional trauma. We can see stages of adjustment that resemble Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief, in which depression and acceptance appear toward the end of the process.

Serf-reflexiveness provides insight into the unresponsive refractory period experienced by individuals going through pain, a cushion that insulates previous pain from present pain, as in Diekenson's Pain has an Element of Blank:

   Pain--has an Element of Blank--
   It cannot recollect
   When it begun--or if there were
   A time when it was not--

   It has no future--but itself--
   Its Infinite realms contain
   Its Past--enlightened to perceive
   New Periods--of Pain--

   (Dickinson,p.189)

In the physiological processes attending emotional upheaval, certain auditory processes become amplified and exaggerated. For example, when I awake from a nightmare, I often hear the unmistakable lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub of my own heartbeat, although most of the time this remains below the level of consciousness. In Emily Dickinson's poem, I Felt a Funeral in My Brain, she describes an amplified audio sensation resembling the drums of a funeral dirge, perhaps similar to the drum cadence that many in this nation became attuned to during John Kennedy's state funeral:

   And when they all were seated,
   A service like a drum
   Kept beating, beating, till I thought
   My mind was going numb.

   (Dickinson, p. 176)

The beats of the drum (as well as the sounds of marching boots) that the poet describes seem to come from an internal source, perhaps triggered by consciousness of a heightened pulse or heartbeat. Other internal sounds generally below the threshold of consciousness include what we describe as "a ringing in our ears." Dickinson describes such a process in the third and fourth stanzas of the same poem:

   And then I heard them lift a box
   And creak across my soul
   With those same boots of lead, again
   Then space began to toll

   As all the heavens were a bell
   And being but an ear,
   And I and silence some strange race,
   Wrecked, solitary, here.

   (Dickinson, p. 176)

The 1964 Richard Widmark movie, The Long Ships, portrayed a fabled huge golden bell (called the "Mother of Sound") fashioned by monks off the coast of northern Africa. When this bell would peal, the entire heavens would reverberate in deafening sound. Did the tolling Dickinson could hear in inner space resemble this overwhelming noise?

T. S. Eliot

Self-reflexiveness in literature may describe intense internal turmoil in which the narrator engages in obsessive self-monitoring such as that depicted in T. S. Eliot's antihero J. Alfred Prufrock:

   In a minute there is time
   For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse

   (Eliot, p.1421)

The reader agonizes with the narrator as nanoseconds are parsed with meticulous indecision:

   Time to turn back and descend the stair,
   With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
   They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
   My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin;
   My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
   [They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!']

   (Eliot, p.1421)

Prufrock's self-reflexive heightened self-absorption becomes rapidly alternated with an anxious or fearful attempt to see himself through other people's eyes. This new perception brings about a further modification of behavior.

Saul Bellow 

In Saul Bellow's antihero, Tommy Wilhelm who agonizes with a hopelessly divided set of thoughts, we can see a similar "hostage to one's own thought" imagery. At the end of Chapter I of Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm realizes that his thoughts (like an iatrogenic disease) are destroying him, and prays, "--let me out of my thoughts." (Bellow, p.2085) Like Prufrock, Tommy Wilhelm vacillates continually, and then (one level of abstraction removed) berates himself for his vacillation. Tommy, afraid to assert himself, would rather harbor a painful cognitive dissonance:

   When he listened he made a fight mouth and rolled his eyes
   thoughtfully. He would soon fire and begin to utter short, loud,
   impatient breaths, and he would say, "Oh yes ... yes ... yes ... I
   couldn't agree more." When he was forced to differ he would declare,
   "Well I'm not sure. I don't really see it that way. I'm of two minds
   about it." He would never willingly hurt any man's feelings.

   (Bellow, p.2086)

Like other typical Schlimazel antiheroes, Tommy wavers in his decisions, and then seems magnetically drawn to the most self-defeating response. One such episode occurred when Tommy, after giving the bogus Dr. Tamkin his last $1,500 to speculate on lard futures, realizes his vulnerability and begins to ruminate:

   Calculations like this made Wilhelm feel ill. But how did he get by?
   He must be in his fifties. How did he support himself Five years in
   Egypt; Hollywood before that; Michigan; Ohio; Chicago. A man of fifty
   has supported himself for at least thirty years. You could be sure
   that Tamkin bed never worked in a factory or in an office. How did he
   make it? His taste in clothes was horrible, but he didn't buy cheap
   things. He wore corduroy or velvet shirts from Clyde's, painted
   neckties, striped socks. There was a slightly acid or pasty smell
   about his person; for a doctor, he didn't bathe much."

   (Bellow, p.2117)

Predictably, Tommy Wilhelm, having thoroughly calculated and contemplated the possible consequences, makes the wrong decision and adds to his repertoire of failure. Having become acclimated to his "loser" or "victim" status, Tommy self-reflexively attempts to find some kind of transcendental purpose for his habit of making self-defeating decisions:

   But at the same time, since there were depths in Wilhelm not
   unsuspected by himself, he received a suggestion from some remote
   element in his thoughts that the business of life, the real
   business--to carry his peculiar burden, to feel shame and impotence,
   to taste those quelled tears--the only important business, the
   highest business was being done. Maybe the making of mistakes
   expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being
   here. Maybe he was supposed to make them and suffer from them on this
   earth.

   (Bellow, p.2102)

The need to find ultimate meaning in a debilitating handicap, the death of a spouse or offspring, or from intense pain, represents a self-reflexive moving to a different order of abstraction. Once, in an emergency room in Longview Texas, as I sat doubled over with pain from a gall bladder attack, I received comfort from projecting myself into a future in which I could attach significant meaning to my present trauma in some instructional purpose, perhaps in an article such as this.

Viktor Frankl 

Viktor Frankl, in the midst of the most degrading kind of human slavery in a Nazi concentration camp, self-reflexively moved to a higher order of abstraction, forming in his mind's eye a picture of his future freedom--when he could reclaim his dignity. He described in vivid detail the picture which he created to help him fast-forward to some distant time in the future:

   I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and
   pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on
   comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the
   psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that
   moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint
   of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the
   sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already
   of the past.

   (Frankl, p.117)

Frankl concludes this account by affirming that the prisoner who had lost faith in the future, in his future, was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold and became subject to mental and physical decay. Developing a future orientation--something unique to the time-binding class of life--demonstrates the self-reflexive principle in its purest form.

We teachers may certainly use literary passages as pump-priming techniques to sharpen our students' own self-reflexiveness capabilities, to enhance their appreciation of literature, and perhaps to give them tools to deal with real-time difficulties in their own lives.

REFERENCES

Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day in Anthology of American Literature: Volume II, Realism to the Present, 6th ed. Ed. George McMichael. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Berman, Sanford I., Ph.D. How to Think, Communicate, and Behave Intelligently: An Introduction to General Semantics (audio tape). San Diego, CA: Educational Cassettes, 1974.

Crane, Stephen. "The Open Boat" in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed Ed. Nina Baym. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003.

DeVito, Joseph, Ph.D. Introduction to General Semantics: Guide and Workbook (audio tape). Deland, FL: Everett Edwards, 1971.

Dickinson, Emily. "Poems" in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003.

Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003.

Frankl, Viktor. Man's Search for Meaning. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1967.

Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself' in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003.

DAVID F. MAAS *

* Dr. David Maas is a Professor of English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and is the author of many ETC' articles. He currently serves as VP/Education, ISGS.