Of Hoovers and Histories

I returned from Canada this week to see Simon Armitage and other well-known UK poets in the news, defending the arts against Sir James Dyson’s claim that Britain’s economic prosperity is suffering because we don’t put enough emphasis on utility in our education system. Instead of producing engineers, Sir Dyson complained, we’re sending students off to University to read “French lesbian poetry.” 

Anyone familiar with Iain McGilchrist’s ‘The Master and His Emissary’ can’t help seeing the subsequent debate through the lens of left hemisphere versus right hemisphere, quantifiable utility versus a more holistic appreciation of ‘value’. It brought to mind Albert Einstein's comment that ‘the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.’

But I sometimes wonder if my own tendency to see the world in these bicameral terms is just as reductive as some of Dyson’s arguments. Reading a fascinating article by Keith Sagar about Ted Hughes and the bicameral mind this week, I began to question how dogmatic we should be about applying hemispheric lateralisation to literature. Sagar gives an excellent account of McGilchrist's argument and outlines its relevance to much creative writing:

"There is a perpetual dialogue or conflict throughout Western literature between opposites, each of which embodies several characteristics we can now associate with the hemispheres. Prometheus is an embodiment of left-hemisphere hubris, unable (for all his fabled foresight) to see beyond short-term usefulness, that the gift of fire would inevitably lead to atom bombs. Creon versus Antigone, and Oedipus versus Tiresias, in Sophocles, Pentheus versus Dionysos, in Euripides, are all dialogues between left and right hemispheres, with the sympathies of the writer invariably with the right. That dialogue has continued ever since, between the Round Table and the Green Knight, for example. It is central in Shakespeare, between Adonis and Venus, Malvolio and Sir Toby, Angelo and the Duke, Greeks and Trojans, Romans and Egyptians, and within all the tragic heroes, culminating with Prospero versus Sycorax. Blake calls the two hemispheres Heaven and Hell, Urizen and Los, single and fourfold vision. It is Coleridge‟s dialogue with his banished „natural man‟, who insists on being heard as the Ancient Mariner. It is the basis of Yeats‟ journey to and retreat from Byzantium. It is a constant theme in Lawrence, who wrote....It is the battle between Piggy and Simon within the mind of Ralph in Golding‟s Lord of the Flies, between the New Men and the Neanderthals in The Inheritors.

What all these writers...were talking about, without, of course, realizing it, was the battle between the hemispheres. Now their prescience is substantiated with the evidence that the split of which they wrote is not only a metaphor."

Though Sagar's prose is compelling, I wondered if characterising all these literary themes in terms of hemispehric lateralisation doesn't privilege a focus on the brain over all other kinds of focus. If they didn't 'realise' it, then can we really say that 'what all these writers...were talking about....was the battle between the hemispheres'?. If that wasn't the writers' primary intention, how far can we go in presuming hemispehric conflict was a theme? 

I think a point that Sagar makes towards the end of his article is more crucial:

"Indeed for thousands of years poets have accurately described the split in the human psyche. Most of the greatest writers in the Western canon have written about it; in some cases about little else. Of course they knew nothing of the two hemispheres, but they knew from experience, their own and the inherited racial experience of myth and literature, that man is an almost fatally split creature ― hence the primacy of tragedy. Had they known what we now know of the hemispheres it would have made no difference to the way they wrote, since abstractions and generalizations are death to imagination. They would still have expressed their ideas (possibly even conceived them in the first place) as characters and metaphors."

Abstractions and generalisations are death to imagination. Quite. We can only write about what we want to write about. The rest is for the critics. It seems apt to finish with a poem that explores the notion of things as symbols, things as over-signified: Don Paterson's 'Two Trees' which you can read in full on his website here. The poem describes an orange and lemon tree which were grafted together so they looked as if they produced a double crop of fruit and found a place in local legend ('and not one kid in the village didn't know / the magic tree on Miguel's patio'), until:

The man who bought the house had had no dream

so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, and then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.