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The Perceptual Layer: In the mind’s ear

4 May 2025 by 6 Comments

Nowadays, we usually take in written language by reading it silently. This was not always the case. For thousands of years after the invention of writing, texts were normally decoded by reading aloud: a considerable help in puzzling out the meaning of a continuous scribble without punctuation, even without spaces between the words. Indeed, the earliest form of punctuation was a system of marks for use by the professional orators who recited texts aloud at public readings. The marks, distant ancestors of the comma, period, and semicolon, indicated where the reader should take a short pause for breath, a longer pause to indicate the end of a sentence, or a pause of intermediate length for clarity or emphasis. The earliest unambiguous mention of silent reading comes from the fifth century, when St. Augustine remarks in amazement on the prodigious skill of his contemporary, St. Ambrose:

When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.

It was several hundred years later still that silent reading became normal in the Western world. To this day, when we read, we normally perform a live mental translation of the text into spoken language. Most people, when reading stories for pleasure, and especially when reading dialogue, put the text through this process of purely mental subvocalization; sometimes it even spills over into physical subvocalization, and the lips actually move. This happens above all with poetry, in which the sound and rhythm of the words are nearly always of cardinal importance. The most effective poetry can tempt us to read aloud, even if we have nobody to read to but ourselves, in the good old-fashioned way that every kind of text was read before St. Ambrose’s remarkable innovation. At the other extreme, some kinds of technical writing, such as mathematical equations or chemical formulae, cannot be translated adequately into spoken language, and we receive those in unrelieved silence.

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The Formal Layer: Delivering the text

3 May 2025 by 2 Comments

To tell a story, you need a way of delivering it from your brain to the brains of your audience; that is what ‘telling’ means. Throughout history, there have been only three main methods of delivering a story: the spoken word, the written word, and various kinds of dramatic performance. Each of these three can be delivered with the help of various physical materials, or, in modern times, electronic media. That, it would seem, is all there is to say about the Formal layer; but if we pause to think, we may discover some additional points, and work towards some general principles on the process of ‘swapping out’ within a layer.

Let us look at each of these methods in a little more detail.

1. Oral storytelling

The oldest medium by far, of course, is the spoken word. In human history, words were the first signs ever employed solely to point at something external to themselves; and they were the first signs whose meanings were arbitrary. The same group of sounds, in the same order, can mean entirely different things in different languages. Mist, for instance, means ‘fog’ in English, but ‘manure’ in German: as the makers of Irish Mist liqueur found out when they tried to sell their product in Germany.

This example shows why I refer to this bottom layer of a story as the Formal, rather than physical, layer. Meaning is carried by form rather than substance. It doesn’t matter whose voice is speaking, whether it is high or low, loud or soft, musical or hoarse; as long as the speaker repeats the correct sounds in the proper order, to someone else who understands the same language, the words carry their meaning. Likewise, in writing, it is the forms of the letters, not the material they are made of, that carries the meaning. To borrow an example from a well-known psychological test:

RED –––– BLUE

The second word is red, but it is the first word that means ‘red’. The meaning the words point to is not intrinsic to the words themselves; and that meaning is determined by the form – the sound or shape of each letter and the way they are combined.

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Digression: More about the OSI Model

2 May 2025 by Leave a Comment

In the earliest days of electronic computers, each computer stood completely alone. Each new machine represented a unique design, with its own architecture, operating codes, and methods of storing data. The early computer engineers were staggeringly ingenious in coming up with different ways of representing binary information. On different machines, ones and zeroes were represented by switching vacuum tubes, or magnetized patches on rotating metal drums, or bright and dark spots on oscilloscope screens – even by patterns of sound waves travelling through tubes filled with mercury. But two storage methods quickly became standard, allowing data to be shared between machines: IBM punch cards and magnetic tapes. If you have ever seen a computer in an old movie from the 1960s, you probably saw the whirring tape machines and clattering card punches in among the huge banks of machinery with their innumerable blinking lights.

The trouble with punch cards and magnetic tapes is that they have to be physically carried from one computer to another, and that is a slow process. By the end of the fifties, the U.S. military was using dedicated telephone lines to link computers together electronically. The SAGE network, as it was called, allowed several large computers to quickly share incoming data from the radar stations that continuously scanned the skies in case of a Russian nuclear attack. This worked because all the computers in the SAGE network were identical, so there was no trouble about translation. Other early networks had the same limitation. They either connected similar mainframe computers together, or connected one computer to many identical terminals. There was no general way of connecting different computers on the same network.

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The OSI Model and the Story Model

2 May 2025 by 6 Comments

Seven is a significant number, for reasons that have nothing to do with luck. It has been said that the human brain is not equipped to deal directly with numbers larger than five; but that appears to be more a fault of the human visual cortex, which needs to mentally divide larger collections of objects into smaller groups in order to count them. Other regions of the brain cope very well with larger groups, and groups of seven are an especial favourite. In particular, the people who study group dynamics have found that the ideal size of a working group is seven people. Fewer people in a group give you, of course, fewer hands to do the work, but also can limit the group’s ability to incorporate all the various skills needed for a job. With more than seven members, the group begins to become unwieldy, as people have insufficient opportunities to deal with one another face to face and get to know each other’s needs and capacities.

Film and television writers know this as if by instinct. The most memorable shows tend to have regular casts, not necessarily of seven, but at any rate of six to eight, close to the sweet spot of group dynamics, so that viewers can feel familiar with each character, yet also find them to have an interesting variety. This is why, when Sherwood Schwartz created Gilligan’s Island, he put exactly seven people aboard the S. S. Minnow. It is also why there are Seven Samurai in one film, and a Magnificent Seven in another. And it explains why, of the two most famous works of fantasy to debut in 1937 (both still beloved today), the Seven Dwarfs in Snow White are much more memorable characters than the rather faceless and interchangeable thirteen Dwarves in The Hobbit. Thorin, Balin, and Bombur are about the only ones who stand out in the reader’s memory; the others have little to do beyond making up the unlucky number for Mr. Baggins to make lucky again.

Of course we have seven Deadly Sins, seven Cardinal Virtues, seven Wonders of the World, seven (named) continents, and other useful sets of the same size. Mnemonics like ‘Roy G. Biv’, for the seven supposed colours of the rainbow, and ‘Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me’ for the seven principal spectral types of stars, often work best with seven members in the list. (XKCD once made a joke: ‘I have this problem where all sets of seven things are indistinguishable to me.’ He therefore listed the Seven Dwarfs as Sneezy, Phylum, Europe, Sloth, Guacamole, Data Link, and Colossus of Rhodes.)

For this reason, if you want to break a large task down into components so that they are easy to remember in the correct order, it is advantageous to have no more than seven parts. That is what the authors of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model did, and what I propose to do with the mental process by which writers create stories and readers or viewers receive them. The OSI model takes the task of sending data across a computer network and divides it into seven sub-tasks or ‘layers’, each with its own clearly defined function. I list them in reverse numerical order, with the most abstract layer at the top and the nuts and bolts at the bottom:

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Translation, Adaptation, and the Layered Model

1 May 2025 by 5 Comments

The late Ursula K. Le Guin complained that when she taught creative writing classes, there were always students who had a fine command of prose mechanics, but no notion of what a story is or how to tell one. She never could find a way to explain to such students what it was that she was actually trying to teach, let alone why. Editors of fiction, whether for magazines or book publishers, report the same thing: they get reams of manuscripts that are technically well written, but do not actually tell stories – presumably because the author doesn’t know how, or else doesn’t know what is and is not a story, and submits whatever he writes whether it is a story or not. There seems to be a failure of perception at work here, a sort of conceptual colour-blindness. I cannot pretend to cure it – even Le Guin couldn‘t do that – but I can perhaps shed some light on the condition itself; but to do that I shall have to take a rather odd detour.

One of the less perused books in my library is a thing called Legends of the World, edited by Richard Cavendish: a collection of legends, strictly so called – neither myths nor ‘realistic’ stories – from cultures around the earth. Most of these stories recognizably are stories: they are about characters who want things, and the deeds they perform in striving to get them. The same structure is visibly present (especially visible when the legends are reduced to their shortest form, as in this volume) all over the world: Europe, India, China, Africa, North America, the Inca culture. But when we get to the Amazon basin, something goes off the rails, in a very interesting way.

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A Critical Problem

30 April 2025 by 22 Comments

‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’

‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’

—C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Do not be alarmed by the title of this essai. The problem I propose to discuss is a problem only for critics; though for them, I contend, it is critical. For the past century at least, literary criticism has been going up a blind alley; or, put less charitably, contemplating its own navel until it falls right in.

The influential critics, the ones who establish critical schools and write textbooks and contribute to learned journals, are too often pure academics with no experience of writing literature, and the literature they actually read is only a tiny subset of the available universe of fiction and poetry, consisting largely of technical exercises written to exemplify the very theories by which the critics propose to ‘explain’ them. (If you want to sell a story to a literary journal, you had better write in the editors’ preferred code, so they can decode your story and feel clever doing it.) In my time I have seen various theories come and go. They all have this in common, that they are very good indeed at analysing texts written explicitly with the theories in mind, but when they are applied to older or more popular works, they reveal anything and nothing: chiefly, they reveal the critic’s own biases, and conveniently allow him to find in the text the very worst things that he expected to find.

The ‘New Criticism’ was already old when I was young, and the Freudian and Marxist schools are older still. Since then we have seen the rise, and in most cases also the fall, of the Structuralist, Postmodernist, Feminist, and Critical Theory schools, among many others. Every one of these schools has the same weakness and is open to the same objections: they all attend exclusively to the text of a story, and puzzle it out as if it were a linguistic riddle or a cryptic crossword, and not at all to the experience that the story conveys to a reader. It is true that this experience is subjective, and the text is objective; but the text exists only to induce that subjective experience in the reader, and as far as possible, to recreate in the reader something of the writer’s own subjective thoughts and feelings, and communicate some facet of the writer’s understanding of the world. It is ‘objective’ to measure a sunset with a spectroscope, but that does not get you any closer to understanding how ordinary people experience sunsets.

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