understanding poetry, where words have many shades and levels of mean-
ing beyond mere reference and dictionary definition. It pays attention to the
meaning of sound and tempo, not merely to the content of words.In addition to its other functions, the right brain is also where metaphors
are fashioned and understood. Metaphors are a particularly “effective
decoding device” because they provide contexts for new ideas, find like-
nesses between things from different realms of experience, join the
familiar to the strange, and compress large amounts of information into
a very small compass.
Depending on left-brain activity alone to understand literature is, in
psychologist Howard Gardner’s words, “like reading the script of a play
instead of going to see it”—a metaphor with particular resonance for our
discussion of postmodern criticism. Reading Campbell’s description of
brain-damaged patients whose mental activities are restricted to the left
brain, one can’t help noting their similarities to left-brained critics:They could not appreciate the pattern of connections among key points of a
story, and intruded themselves into events when retelling the plot or answer-
ing questions about it. Instead of treating a fictional narrative as something
with a separate existence of its own, they failed to respect its integrity, tin-
kering with details which did not conform to their notion of truth.... Many
of their comments were feasible and even appropriate when applied very
narrowly, to a single incident. Only when the wider context and the general
setting of the story were taken into account did the comments stand out as
bizarre and out of tune with the clear, overall intention of the author.In contrast to such strict left-mindedness, a poet has to use her entire
brain to write. Taking account of the semantic meaning of words, their
various connotations, their sounds and echoes, and the rhythms they
make, the poet has to engage in a special sort of level-mixing, which
Douglas Hofstadter calls a “tangled hierarchy.” He defines a tangled
hierarchy as a situation where different hierarchical levels, such as a
computer’s hardware and software, fold into each other in hierarchy-vio-
lating ways.
Paul Davies, in a dramatic thought-experiment, illustrates such a
hardware-software tangle by describing a computer with a robotic arm
attached: the software program running on the computer controls the
arm, making it reach into and alter the computer’s hardware, which in
turn affects the way its program operates.
A similar tangle occurs when a poet writes. Poets frequently select
words more for their sound, a low-level phenomenon, than for their158 Paul Lake