“Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us”:

The Cognitive Poetics of Attention in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

Francis X. Altomare

Florida Atlantic University

Attention, our topic in this volume, is one that seems to me to provide a particularly

valuable segue between literature, criticism, and the increasingly influential fields comprising the

cognitive sciences. In our current climate of ideas it is difficult to deny that cognitive

approaches in literary studies, whether called cognitive poetics, psychonarratology or, more

broadly, cognitive literary studies, are gaining momentum. Despite claims by detractors that

importing cognitive ideas into humanistic discourse leads to “neurobabble,” I am more

optimistic, seeing in these innovative approaches a means of integrating various literary-

theoretical schemas with cognitive-scientific ones rooted in a robust realism. However, various

theoretical and methodological problems confront any attempt to bridge the discursive gaps

between literary studies and the cognitive sciences, and consequently these approaches have

been strikingly uneven. Given the nascent status of cognitive poetics (the term I prefer for such

approaches, on purely aesthetic grounds), this is not surprising: Like Popperian science,

cognitive poetics must necessarily proceed via trial-and-error, refining its suppositions in light of

both evidence and theory. What is surprising is that the phenomenon of attention has been

largely neglected in cognitive poetic discourse thus far, an unfortunate lacuna in what is an

otherwise far-reaching approach.1 In addition, there has been a general dearth of cognitive poetic

criticism that seriously engages what has come to be known as complex systems theory, a

research paradigm within the cognitive sciences that has proposed several convincing models of

1 Cognitive poetics, a term coined by Reuven Tsur, has been expanded into many areas, and attention has not been

entirely neglected. However, cognitive poeticists have tended to focus on metaphor, theory of mind, conceptual

blending, and other broader topics. For an accessible early introduction to the field, see Stockwell, Peter, Cognitive

Poetics: An Introduction, London, Routledge, 2002.

2

attention. Complex systems theory describes cognition as a multimodal process emerging from

stochastic yet coordinated neural, somatic, and ecological interactions, and explains various

cognitive processes in these terms, including attention.2

My purpose in this paper is thus two-fold. First, I want to attempt a cognitive poetic

reading of a literary work that treats attention as a thematic focus: Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

(1987). Second, I want to develop a critical approach that derives its premises from salient

(though under-discussed outside the groves of cognitive science) theories about the cognitive

mechanisms of attention, while simultaneously examining how literature can deepen our

understanding of these mechanisms. My hope is that such an approach will contribute to the

broader project of cognitive poetics as a bidirectional exchange of ideas, rather than merely the

theoretical subservience of literary to scientific modes. More specifically, I also hope to expand

the role of cognitive poetics in Vonnegut studies, an area where cognitive approaches have been

surprisingly absent.3

Before beginning with a short demonstration, I would like to add a few prefatory notes.

First, although I believe that attention forms a thematic crux throughout Vonnegut’s entire

oeuvre, I will be focusing primarily on Bluebeard in part because it has received (in my opinion,

unfairly) far less critical attention than Vonnegut’s other novels,4 and in part because it

exemplifies the sophisticated ways in which the author adopts and adapts scientific theories into

his literary work. Second, I would like to reiterate here at the outset that attention constitutes a

prominent theme in the novel, making it doubly appropriate for our purposes here in this volume.

2 For an accessible overview of such models, see Kelso, J. A. Scott, Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of

Brain and Behavior, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1995.

3 One notable exception is Broer, Lawrence R., Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut,

Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1989.

4 Excepting, of course, his novels Slapstick and Jailbird, both of which have been generally neglected by critics.

3

Furthermore, Bluebeard sufficiently encapsulates the sort of consilient approach toward attention

that I am advocating, one that elegantly blends art with science without transmogrifying either

domain beyond recognition or committing too many category mistakes—an unfortunate

tendency in certain poststructuralist co-options of scientific concepts.5 Indeed, consilience

6

undergirds any cognitive poetic reading because, as a project bridging the Two Cultures divide, it

suggests that literature can participate in a convergence of evidence to delineate more accurate

theories about the world and our place in it. As both a tool and a philosophical position,

consilience (as manifest in cognitive poetics especially) contributes to the semantic richness of

Vonnegut’s novels, and to Bluebeard in particular.

Also, I would like to briefly discuss the quote in my title. The line comes from a scene

near the end of Breakfast of Champions (1973). Vonnegut, in the midst of a metaleptic cameo as

a character in his own novel, remarks that, “As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that

there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines,

doomed to collide and collide and collide.”7 This comically bleak Hobbesian vision of human

existence resurfaces often in Vonnegut’s work, but he does not let it rest at a mere reductive

physicalist view of cognition. In his response to Vonnegut’s fictional avatar, the artist Rabo

Karabekian, a minor character in Breakfast of Champions later recycled as the protagonist of

Bluebeard, asserts in a moment of epiphany that “Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe

sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”8 Although Vonnegut

5 For analyses of such misappropriations, see: Sokal, Alan, and Bricmont, Jean, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern

Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York, Picador, 1998; see also Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of What?

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1999.

6 “Consilience” in this context was popularized by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in Wilson, Edward O., Consilience:

The Unity of Knowledge, New York, Vintage, 1999.

7 Vonnegut, Kurt, Breakfast of Champions, New York, Delacorte, 1973, 225.

4

describes his characters throughout Breakfast of Champions (and again later in Bluebeard) as

automatons and “machines made of meat,”9 he admits here the centrality of attention (i.e.,

awareness) in defining the human as a conscious machine; he also insinuates a profound

reverence for this complex process, a reverence necessary for any coherent ethics. Awareness,

synonymous in this instance with both consciousness and attention in many respects, is thus for

Vonnegut both the ultimate result of mechanical-organic metabolisms and simultaneously a

higher-order phenomenon not necessarily reducible in toto to such processes. In his attempt to

wrestle with his personal fear of an inhumane scientific metaphysics, Vonnegut therefore

manages to ridicule physico-mechanical models of mind even as he endorses them. This raises a

fundamental question: Given his ambiguous relationship with the natural sciences, how exactly

does Vonnegut understand attention qua emergent cognitive process? Of course, Vonnegut must

always be taken, like his literary forefather Twain, as simultaneously an iconoclastic cynic and a

shaman of reason; we can never be quite sure whether he is satirizing or embracing the science

with which he was so intimately familiar.10

But a jest, we might recall from Freud, always

betrays something serious. Vonnegut’s repeated use of this “meat” metaphor, joke or not, at

least suggests a physicalist understanding that the mind, as an extension and emergent property

of the body, operates upon complex organic (and therefore physical) processes. Lest Vonnegut’s

portrayal of humans as “machines made of meat” unsettle us (as it seems to do with many of us

humanists), let us remember a maxim from philosopher Daniel Dennett about the nature of

8 ibid., 226.

9 ibid., 72.

10

For a thorough exploration of Vonnegut’s personal relationship with science, see Shields, Charles J., And So It

Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2011, 104-148 and passim.

5

cognition, a comment that might also apply to an impromptu Hungarian folk dance: “It ain’t the

meat, it’s the motion.”11

So, let’s put some of that meat in motion—and I promise this does not involve any

species of dancing. Instead, I’d like us to do something that too many literary critics it seems are

nervous about doing: we’re going to perform (gasp!) an experiment. What I want to share with

you is not a Gedankenexperimente like those common in philosophy, but rather a quite literally

hands-on demonstration. Dennett once suggested an approach called “experimental philosophy”

and I would here like to venture towards an experimental literary theory, in the spirit of

cognitive poetics.

First, raise both hands in front of you with palms facing each other and each index finger

fully extended. Next, slowly wag your index fingers at opposite intervals. This is antiparallel

movement (or anti-phase), such that when one finger is extended parallel with the axis formed by

your arm, the other is perpendicular to this same axis (see Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Antiparallel Bimanual Coordination

Now, accelerate this movement until you cannot go any faster. At a certain rate—what is

usually called the critical rate—you should have noticed something peculiar: the movements that

were originally antiparallel somehow inexplicably lock phases (see Fig. 2). (If this did not

11

Adapted from a 1951 song by Lois Mann and Henry Glover, Dennett’s remark was made in response to the

biological naturalist position of John Searle. See Hofstadter, Douglas R., I Am A Strange Loop, New York, Basic

Books, 2007, 201.

6

happen in your case, please consult your local cognitive scientist, as you are the only human

being on the planet capable of resisting this phase shift.)

Fig. 2: Parallel Bimanual Coordination

This shift in phase results not, as one might initially think, from a biomechanical limitation;

rather, the anti-parallel motion transitions into parallel motion due to a cognitive restraint, one

rooted in the fundamental ways in which our mind~brain processes information.12

This

phenomenon was first explained in the mid-1980s by the Haken-Kelso-Bunz, or HKB, model:

seemingly un-harmonized firings of neural patterns reach a point of criticality and unexpectedly

synchronize, giving rise to emergent cognitive processes.13

The results are always coordinated

thus: our brains rely upon synchronizing antipodes in order to create an orderly neural

choreography out of seemingly chaotic events. This is explained in part by the synergism

explored in physicist Hermann Haken’s pioneering work,14

which describes systems wherein top-

down and bottom-up modalities interact to produce often surprising events—something also seen

repeatedly in Vonnegut’s fictions. But there is something else at work here, a strange

12

I use “mind~brain” here to specifically evoke the complementary philosophy of Kelso and Engstrøm.

13

For the original formulation of this model, see: Haken, H., Kelso, J.A.S., and Bunz, H., A theoretical model of

phase transitions in human hand movements, Biological Cybernetics, 51, 1985, 347-356. For an assessment of more

recent developments, see: Fuchs, Armin, and Viktor K. Jirsa, The HKB model revisited: How varying the degree of

symmetry controls dynamics, Human Movement Science, Vol. 19, 2000, 425-449.

14

Haken, Hermann, Synergetics: Introduction and Advanced Topics, New York, Springer, 2004.

7

convergence of evidence between how literature represents the interactions between mind and

nature, and isomorphic models developed by contemporary complex systems theorists.

I sometimes describe myself as a “recovering cognitive scientist,” having spent many

years working and studying in cognitive science laboratories before coming over to the “dark

side” of literary theory and philosophy. When I worked under cognitive scientist Scott Kelso (the

“K” in the aforementioned HKB model) at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Complex

Systems, this “finger wagging” experiment was the standard introduction to coordination

dynamics, a paradigm within complex systems theory which has been successfully adapted at

levels from the molecular to the neural to the social. It is within the framework of coordination

dynamics that I would like to discuss attention in Vonnegut’s novel.

Although rarely discussed outside the technical literature, coordination dynamics is at the

vanguard of contemporary cognitive science, another term which I would briefly like to define as

it is often bandied about in erroneous contexts. When I here say cognitive science I am not

talking about neuroscience or experimental psychology per se, which may or may not adopt the

tenets of cognitive science. I am more specifically referring to the interdisciplinary offspring of

cybernetics, cognitive science being the study of the mind based upon computational models.15

It is a philosophy which envisions the mind~brain as a modular information-processing organ

that is necessarily embodied, self-organizing, and evolved through natural selection.

Coordination dynamics builds on these suppositions and emphasizes the metastable nature of

cognitive processes, including attention.

Now, you might ask, what does all of this finger wagging have to do with literature, let

alone Vonnegut’s fiction? I am positing that it’s actually quite crucial to both. In fact, the

15

The connection between cognitive science and its forerunner cybernetics is often left unmentioned, but offers

further fodder for discussion given Vonnegut’s familiarity with cybernetics.

8

mechanism underlying bimanual coordination is the “most basic phenomenon in coordination

dynamics . . . [and] the bimanual coordination paradigm was used as an experimental window to

address issues in learning, sensorimotor coordination, attention, and many other areas.”16

With

such broad applicability, why should coordination dynamics not also dialogue with literature?

After all, the connection between this fundamental manual phenomenon and other cognitive

processes—especially attention—is quite robust. An increasing amount of empirical research

concurs, emphasizing “that central cost and pattern stability covary, suggesting that bimanual

coordination and the attentional activity of the CNS involved in maintaining such a coordination

bear on the same underlying dynamics.”17

From an ostensibly trivial instance of meat in motion,

an entire theory of cognition has emerged, one with radical consequences for our understanding

of both attention and literature.

Coordination dynamics offers a promising new paradigm for how a reader and a text

interact to generate meaning through the cognitive modalities of attention, although there has

been little work to-date expanding this model into reader-response research. But I am here

focused on a more theoretical question, namely how authors who attempt to represent cognitive

processes through fiction—consciousness and attention in particular—have arrived at

conclusions that are extremely similar to those arising from coordination dynamics and complex

systems theory, what I previously called a convergence of evidence. Are texts capable of

capturing the parallel, dynamic nature of attention given their intrinsically linear form? Can

certain texts elucidate attention in ways that complement what we are learning from the cognitive

16

Fuchs, Armin and Jirsa, Viktor, K., Coordination: Neural, Behavioral and Social Dynamics, New York, Springer,

2008, 334.

17

Monno, Audrey, Temprado, Jean-Jacques, Zanone, Pier-Giorgio, and Laurent, Michel, The interplay of attention

and bimanual coordination dynamics, Acta Psychologia, Vol. 10, 2002, 187.

9

sciences? In what ways can a cognitive poetics of attention shed light on this phenomenon

without reducing it to mere “meat in motion”? I hope to show that Vonnegut is an author who

has patently captured the complexity of attention through his literary art—and perhaps even

developed his own version of its coordination dynamics through non-scientific means.

According to coordination dynamics, attention is not a unitary process, but rather a series

of parallel processes which the brain synthesizes into a seemingly cohesive whole, much in the

way that consciousness emerges: rhythms settling into a metastable state, even as oscillators

continue to do their own specific tasks.18

Emergence is again a crucial term here. In their 2006

philosophical work The Complementary Nature, cognitive scientists Kelso and Engstrøm expand

coordination into a full-blown philosophy,19

arguing that these oscillations between binaries

underlie the very way we think, expanding the original model into what they call the “philosophy

of complementary pairs.” Two phenomena relevant to attention underlie this philosophy. One is

the notion of self-organization, most commonly expressed through autopoiesis whereby a system

creates itself with itself, moving from lower to higher orders of complexity through recursive

feedback loops. The other is metastability, an increasingly important term from coordination

dynamics that points to the importance of the “in-between” states in neural and behavioral events

rather than the traditional cognitive scientific tendency to concentrate on the all-or-nothing

absolutes of binaries—a tendency that has haunted metaphysics since the pre-Socratics. When

expanded into a full-blown theory of complementarity, coordination dynamics therefore extends

18

For more comprehensive discussions of attention from a cognitive science perspective, see: Cohen, Ronald A.,

Cognitive science of attention: Current concepts and approaches, in The Neuropsychology of Attention, 2nd ed., New

York, Springer, 2014, 55-68; and see also Posner, M. I., Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention, New York, Guilford

Press, 2004.

19

Kelso, J. A. Scott, and Engstrøm, David A., The Complementary Nature, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press,

2006.

10

early models of attention such as William James’s, which described it as the transition between

“focus” and “margin.”20

It is this idea of metastability in particular that underlies Vonnegut’s depiction of

attention in Bluebeard, one contrary to early conceptions of attention such as those of Wilhelm

Wundt and William James. For Wundt, attention was the fixation point of apperception, while

for William James attention was “the taking possession of the mind, in a clear and vivid form, of

one out of what seem several simultaneously present objects or trains of thought.”21

In contrast

to these early formulations, Vonnegut presents attention as a cadre of parallel modal complexes,

multiple strands in an eternal golden braid. More like a cognitive scientist than a traditional

psychologist, Vonnegut portrays attention as the synergistic interaction of feedback loops

between environment and perceiver, both formally through his stylistic innovations and

thematically through his characters. As such, attention for Vonnegut is never a unified

focalization as Wundt or James would have it; it is inextricably bound to perception, memory,

and learning processes, and it never attends to a single stimulus or focus. When the narratival

eye diverts its attention in Bluebeard, for example, Vonnegut’s treatment of attention replicates

the synergistic, coordinated processes described by cognitive science.

As defined by current models in complex systems, and as we saw in our earlier

demonstration, attention describes a conscious type of “phase-locking” whereby perceptual and

cognitive processes that are often unsynchronized become harmonically synergized during

periods of focus. In Bluebeard Vonnegut gives us a textual example of this process by weaving

narratives that oscillate between past and present in a seemingly chaotic manner only to give rise

20

For a reconfiguration of this idea in terms of “fringes” and “transitive states,” see also Arvidson, P. Sven,

Attention in context, in Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Shaun Gallagher and Daniel

Schmicking (eds.), New York, Springer, 2010, 99-122.

21

James, William, Principles of Psychology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1890, 403-404.

11

to an emergent sense of hyper-acute attentiveness. Throughout the novel the narrator, a self-

deprecating, one-eyed, Armenian minimalist expressionist painter (got that?) named Rabo

Karabekian, flashes between the macro-narrative (or so-called “present”) and the content of his

autobiography, the narrative of which constitutes the bulk of the novel. This metanarrative

within the novel vacillates between a seemingly erratic matrix of life-events: the narrator traces

his boyhood as the son of an Armenian cobbler disenchanted by the American dream; we follow

him through his apprenticeship to Dan Gregory, a Norman-Rockwell-type illustrator who

happens to also be a Fascist adherent of Mussolini; we see his affairs with love and war; and we

see his struggle to create the very novel we are reading. We also bear witness to Rabo

Karabekian’s transformation from a staunch realist (in both the metaphysical and the aesthetic

senses) to a central figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, a movement that perhaps

more than any other in the visual arts challenged and reconfigured our understanding of

attention, both the attention given by an artist to his work and the attention demanded of those

reading the painting itself. Stylistically, Vonnegut performs a similar trick by giving us a

narrative that is more like a splatter of Sateen Duraluxe paint on canvas (Karebekian’s own ill-

fated claim to artistic fame in the novel) than anything resembling a Bildungsroman. Yet, in

typical Vonnegut fashion, we get none of these narratives except in pieces, in fragments

reminiscent of William S. Burroughs “cut-up technique,” a compositional strategy that was itself,

by Burroughs’s admission, an attempt to replicate “word viruses,” or what are more commonly

referred to as memes.22

Nevertheless, from this matrix of events, Vonnegut’s novel emerges, and

it does so through the continuous oscillations between Rabo Karabekian’s memory-bound

22

For an excellent discussion of the cognitive implications of Burrough’s technique, see Robinson, Edward S., Shift

Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2011, 54-57. For a

recent treatment of memes in a cognitive context, see Aunger, Robert, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How

We Think, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2002.

12

timestreams, between his exogenous and endogenous modes of attention, and between nonlinear

narratives.

From a formalist perspective, one immediately notes that Bluebeard, like Vonnegut’s

other novels, is anything but linear. Instead, it consists of a series of brief paragraphical spurts

divided by lines of asterisks denoting a shift—what we might call an attentional shift—where

reader, author, and character/narrator strafe into a parallel strand of the narrative. Thus from the

outset Vonnegut manipulates our attention even as he is commenting on how it functions. One

might even argue that the narrator is a feature of the text designed to manipulate the readers’

attention, even as Vonnegut’s own particular telegraphic style reifies the mechanisms of

attention itself. That is, rather than a continuous stream of consciousness or discourse indirect

libre, we get a sporadic, lilting cognitive dance, a complex anti-parallel finger-wagging in the

text that exemplifies and aestheticizes the exact sort of metastability described by coordination

dynamics.

Now, you might say, isn’t a narrative that jumps between past and present merely

demonstrating something about memory, not attention? Like Proust, Vonnegut indeed makes

memory one of his central preoccupations as a novelist, but the role of memory in Vonnegut’s

schema of attention is by no means spurious. In fact, cognitive models of attention have

consistently situated memory at the center of attention.23

Yet, in addition to memory, one of the

most prominent textual features of Bluebeard is the narrative leaps between the specious present

and the remembered past. Of course, the specious present—a term from James that has gained

significant currency in contemporary cognitive science—is itself already past, given the

inevitable delay in our neural processing. Vonnegut and his narrator Karabekian seem acutely

23

Knudsen, Eric I., Fundamental Components of Attention, Annual Review of Neuroscience, Vol. 30, 2007, 57-78.

13

aware of this fact, remarking throughout the novel that by the time an event occurs it is always

already remembered. These repeated oscillations provide the narrator with a Spinozan

perspective sub specie aeternatis, an almost godlike vision of the novel’s events characteristic of

Vonnegut’s style. But unlike the cosmic perspectives of Winston Niles Rumfoord in The Sirens

of Titan or the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five “seeing all time as you might see a

stretch of the Rocky Mountains,”24

in Bluebeard the effect is not so much an Einsteinian vision

of spacetime so much as a comment on the simultaneous nature of attention as a process that

constantly engages the past even as it produces the specious present.

In a rhetorical move reminiscent of time-travel narratives, Vonnegut marks these

transitions throughout the novel with taglines. Consider the beginning of Chapter 20, when after

a digression into his feud with the widow Circe Berman in the previous chapter, Karabekian

says, “Back to the past”25

and proceeds to discuss his boyhood apprenticeship as an illustrator,

only to remark, “Okay, Back to the present”26

and continue with that narrative, then three

paragraphs later, “Back to the past again.”27

As we proceed through the novel, these tags

become more frequent, even though at this point the reader is familiar enough with Vonnegut’s

abrupt attentional shifts that they are somewhat superficial stylistic devices, intended to draw the

readers’ attention to both the way the narrator is shifting his attention within the novel, and to the

way that attention as such is constantly in flux, always metastable. Later in the novel these

formal markers become even more obtrusive, as when Vonnegut repeatedly interjects: “Bulletin

from the present” to update the reader about the conditions surrounding Karabekian as we read

24

Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 109.

25

id., Bluebeard, 158.

26

ibid., 159.

27

ibid., 160.

14

the text of his autobiography that he is writing. These jumps are also crucial given that attention,

a fundamental aspect of consciousness more broadly, is a time-bound process.

These switches between two perspectives are also doubly ironic given that the narrator

Karabekian has one eye! This fact is not coincidental, given the role of the eye as the organ of

attention.28

Furthermore, as the cognitive science of vision tells us, vision resembles attention

insofar as it is anything but a homogenous continuum; it is a series of saccades, jerking eye

movements which the mind~brain synthesizes into an illusory coherence post hoc. The same is

true of Vonnegut’s narrative: Rabo Karabekian’s narrative is anything but monocular, being

rather multi-nodal, nonlinear, or better yet, polyphonic. In this sense Karabekian is the Cyclops

and the Sirens rolled into one. Indeed, the Joycean allusion here is irresistible, given that

elsewhere I have explicated a similar process at work in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.29

Like Leopold Bloom, Rabo Karabekian reconstructs the strangeness of the everyday from

fragmented details, his attention tugged hither and thither, and yet in the end a cohesive portrait

is painted, one that resembles the clandestine portrait which Karabekian hides in the potato barn,

a fact which constantly teases us throughout the novel. Furthermore, like Joyce’s monumental

project, which one might call hyper-realist (we might recall Joyce’s much-abused remark that he

wanted Ulysses to be so accurate that if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt from the book

alone), Karabekian admits that his own narrative must be read as a realist representation. There

is some irony here of course—nothing in Vonnegut is ever cut-and-dry—and the text echoes the

cosmic joke of so many absurd lives aspiring to meaningfulness in a reality actively constructed

by our cognitive capacities. Even more ironic is that, although the narrator is himself a member

28

See Jenkin, Michael, and Harris, Laurence, Vision and Attention, New York, Springer, 2001.

29

See Altomare, Francis X., A Calculus of Fire: Strange Loops and Autopoietic Consciousness in Selected

Twentieth-Century Fiction from James Joyce to Philip K. Dick—A Cognitive Poetic Approach, Pittsburgh, UMI,

2013.

15

of the “Three Musketeers” (a group of Abstract Expressionists that includes a fictionalized

Jackson Pollock), Karabekian is masquerading as a realist. “Don’t you love it?” he asks halfway

through the novel, “This is real life we are now experiencing.”30

We might read this in several

ways, but it certainly draws our attention to both the many layers of artifice at work in the novel

as well as our own meta-level of awareness taking place. At that moment, our attention is

engaged in a feedback loop with the text in the elegant dance of reading, and we are indeed

experiencing life, even if life at that moment consists of us engaging with the imaginary lives of

imaginary persons. Just because it’s only happening in our heads, however, does not make it any

less real, as the late Professor Albus Dumbledore reminds us at the conclusion of J. K. Rowling’s

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. But Karabekian—and Vonnegut as well, since the two

cannot be satisfactorily disentangled—is fully aware that attention is indeed a perpetual process

of construction and reconstruction. Thus, when he is caught outside the Museum of Modern Art

by his mentor, the Fascist illustrator Dan Gregory, Karabekian remarks, “Reconstructing what he

said to us long ago . . .”31

and draws our attention to the artifice of his own act of recollection.

Then, after discussing the eventual demise of his mentor (who because of his Fascist uniform

was mistaken for a soldier while painting for Mussolini in Africa), the narrator continues:

“Bulletin from the present,” yanking us back into the narrative of the old veteran, Karabekian.32

At this point in the novel, Karabekian’s attention is oscillating wildly between past and present,

between an almost schizophrenic array of topics and themes, and between macro- and

micronarratives. Even as he struggles to complete each narrative, he cannot sustain his attention

30

Vonnegut, Kurt, Bluebeard, 163.

31

ibid., 167.

32

ibid., 168.

16

on the present and inevitably returns to his memoir, stating “But back to 1936 again! Listen.”33

The text becomes a sort of dynamic model of attention in miniature, constantly in flux even as it

attempts to reify Karabekian’s experience.

This telegraphic technique will be immediately familiar to readers of Slaughterhouse-

Five in particular, where Vonnegut makes the technique part of the novel’s time-travel conceit,

and in both cases it might be misread as a representation of pathological attention, or inattention.

For example, the narrator’s inability to maintain concentration might perhaps be read as a

symptom of a broader pathology, something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),

something which fascinated Vonnegut. But I am not suggesting that Vonnegut is merely

representing this or any other disorder, insofar as these movements in the text approximate

normal attention and time perception. Representing attention as an ever-shifting gestalt,

Vonnegut leaps between temporalities not because of any pathology per se, but because our

attention actually operates that way. As he admits in his semi-memoir Timequake, “Timequake! I

am back in 1947 again . . . and a rerun begins. We all have to do again exactly what we did the

first time through, for good or ill.”34

This describes a sort of frame-breaking meditation on

memory but, rather than being pathological, it is also an accurate description of how attention

normally functions: We are constantly oscillating between poles in a coordination dynamic

between remembered past and specious present, between detailed minutiae and grand scheme.

Vonnegut’s often erratic prose style gives the illusion of being unfocused, but in fact

results in an extremely refined vision of reality; this is an inversion of our own mental processes

even as it is a reflection of them, because we experience an illusion of coherence constructed

from fragmented stimuli from all directions. It is the seemingly passive shifting of attention in

33

ibid., 180.

34

Vonnegut, Kurt, Timequake, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1997, 218.

17

the text that best replicates what cognitive scientists are finding, albeit via two radically different

methods. In this sense, Bluebeard is a particularly consilient text, one that contributes to a

convergence of evidence about mechanisms of attention in ways completely inaccessible by

normal scientific means.

This leads me to a final point about Vonnegut’s treatment of attention in the novel: that

expectation is a crucial aspect of this process. Vonnegut constantly toys with our expectations,

manipulating our attention for effect. For example, the mystery of what Rabo Karabekian keeps

in his potato barn haunts the entire novel until the final pages of the book. The widow Circe

Berman constantly pesters Karabekian about it, and the narrator teases us with hints: “She asked

me point blank if it had anything to do with what was in the barn. ‘Maybe it does and maybe it

doesn’t,’ I said. But I will tell you a secret,” he confides to the reader, “it does, it does.”35

The

building suspense is actualized when Karabekian reveals the barn to Circe Berman:

We were standing on the rim of a beautiful green valley in

springtime. By actual count, there were five thousand, two

hundred and nineteen people on the rim with us or down below.

The largest person was the size of a cigarette, and the smallest a

flyspeck. There were farmhouses here and there, and the ruins of a

medieval watchtower on the rim where we stood. The picture was

so realistic that it might have been a photograph. ‘Where are we?’

said Circe Berman. ‘Where I was,’ I said, “when the sun came up

the day the Second World War ended in Europe.36

35

Vonnegut, Kurt, Bluebeard, 169.

36

ibid., 280-281.

18

The scene represents a marvelous literary moment. Moreover, the anticipation for this one event

has been accumulating throughout the novel, and in many ways the revelation of the painting in

Karabekian’s potato barn is the novel’s central epiphany: the realization that Karabekian carries

within himself such fantastically and savagely accurate memories of his life, that he could only

exorcise himself through an aesthetic act, directing all of his attention toward that artifact in an

attempt to purge his attention, to purify his consciousness and his memory, of the horrors of war.

The painting also exists in a metonymic relationship with the novel as a whole: art and literature

as man’s futile attempt to capture, however insufficiently or however beautifully, his

phenomenological experience of attention.

Like all master novelists, Vonnegut is always playing with our expectations. In typical

Vonnegutian fashion, he alludes to the fates and deeds of every character before they actually

perform said events in the text. In this way, he is always priming us, and I use that term in the

psychological sense. Indeed, when the foretold events actually occur, always precisely as

expected, our attention is somehow heightened rather than deflated; instead of the boredom one

associates with reading a familiar plot, there is instead a surge of excitement at the realization

that it has come to pass. Contemporary complex systems research, especially work on

expectation and emotional arousal in music cognition,37

suggests that we are neurally more

excited by events that occur which we expect, as if the priming has heightened our arousal when

the stimulus finally is apprehended. Similarly, Vonnegut achieves this in his fiction by priming

the reader, by distorting the traditional modes of linear narrative only to exploit our own

cognitive capacities.

37

For a representative study on expectation and music perception, see van den Bosch, Iris, Salimpoor, Valorie N.,

and Zatorre, Robert J., Familiarity mediates the relationship between emotional arousal and pleasure during music

listening, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Vol. 7, 2013, n.p.

19

We must keep in mind, of course, that Vonnegut did not write his novel with these

mechanisms (at least as they are currently understood scientifically) in mind, but rather from a

phenomenological understanding of attention. The much-maligned Cartesian method of

introspection, central both to phenomenology and to Wundt’s earliest conception of psychology,

is the novelist’s bread and butter—fiction magnifies the fantastic nexus generated through

introspection, and a novel is introspection raised to a higher exponent. Fittingly, the findings of

phenomenologists38

are being corroborated by cognitive science, but fiction provides different

phenomenological tools for reaching the branches of the tree of knowledge which the

implements of science cannot attain alone. By combining literary methods with cognitive theory,

cognitive poeticists are thereby fertilizing the soil of cognitive research with fresh insights,

germinating new hypotheses, and nurturing a genuine hope for an authentic Third Culture.

The conclusion of Bluebeard returns us to a variation of Karabekian’s quote from

Breakfast of Champions with which I opened this discussion, and it offers an appropriate segue

to something resembling a conclusion. After musing on the mural in his potato barn, Rabo

Karabekian states, “My soul didn’t know what kind of picture to paint, but my meat sure did,” to

which Circe replies, “isn’t it time for your soul which has been ashamed of your meat for so long

to thank your meat for finally doing something wonderful? . . . You actually have to do it.”39

When Karabekian asks how, Berman replies in a manner eerily suggestive of the manual

experiment undergirding coordination dynamics: “Hold your hand in front of your eyes, she said,

and look at those strange and clever animals with love and gratitude, and tell them out loud:

38

Arvidson, P. Sven, Attention in context, In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Shaun Gallagher

and Daniel Schmicking (eds.), New York, Springer, 2010, 99-122.

39

Vonnegut, Kurt, Bluebeard, 210.

20

‘Thank you, Meat.’ So I did. I held my hands in front of my eyes, and I said out loud with all my

heart: ‘Thank you, Meat.’ Oh happy Meat, Oh happy soul, oh happy Rabo Karabekian!”40

We are returned to the physicalist notion of attention as emergent process, but with a restored

sense of wonder. Rather than mere mechanism, attention becomes a central aspect of

consciousness in Vonnegut’s narrative, an observation corroborated by cognitive research:

“Rather than the prevailing view that attention is something that happens in the field of

consciousness, consciousness becomes part of the sphere of attention—attending becomes the

unifying center for discussions of consciousness.”41

Vonnegut seems to have intuited a similar

relationship between the modes of attention and those aspects of consciousness which define

human subjective experience.

In summation, Vonnegut’s text embodies the sort of complex structural nonlinearity that

typifies attention (and, more broadly, consciousness) even while the ostensible simplicity of his

prose suggests that complexity, either textual or cognitive, emerges from simpler lower-order

modes, a sort of Escher tessellation that produces a wondrous effect. This does not by any

means reduce the novel to a mere example by which to test the theories of cognitive science,

although it does this also. Neither does a cognitive poetics relegate literature to a servile position

as handmaiden to a more rational Muse. Instead, it shows that art always prefigures science, that

the artists—and especially literary artists—reach the shores of innovation first in their beautiful

(if motley and kluge-like) ships that defy the laws of physics, doing so in anticipation of the

scientists, who will eventually arrive in their precisely calibrated (if cumbersome and torpedo-

like) nuclear submarines. I am being slightly facetious here, yet my point is an honest one. No

matter how elegant or sophisticated, no scientific theory can hope to capture the nuances of

40

ibid.

41

Arvidson, P. Sven, Attention in context, 115.

21

human attention as well as a novelist like Vonnegut, if only because he takes the meat and the

motion and reminds us that they are, when all is said and done, wonderfully complex human

processes, too complex for even the most intricate quantitative methods. Indeed, by constantly

refocusing our attention as readers, and by crafting a literary artwork of attention, Vonnegut

ultimately calls us back into ourselves, making us more fully and humanly alert to the fact that

our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us.

22

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