In this interview, Michael Lyons asks Emmylou Grosser (Research Fellow for the Department of Hebrew, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein) about how cognitive studies can inform the way we understand ancient Hebrew poetry—and perhaps ancient narrative as well!
Michael: What do you investigate in your research, and how do you use cognitive studies?
Emmylou: I investigate the nature of the poetic line in ancient Hebrew poetry, which ultimately leads to the study of whole poems. Since the manuscript tradition didn’t develop any standard convention of graphic lineation, and since ancient Hebrew poetry lacks consistent phonological patterning (like meter) and text-internal line-end marking (like rhyme), I ask how we know that the poetic “line” (a basic unit of poetic structure and rhythm) exists. In my recently published monograph (Unparalleled Poetry: A Cognitive Approach to the Free-Rhythm Verse of the Hebrew Bible, Oxford University Press, 2023), I start with a framework oriented towards aural perception—how the poetic line can be heard or perceived as a poem unfolds in time. I draw from Reuven Tsur’s perception-oriented work in poetry, including cognitive constraints in poetic versification systems.
Michael: What are these cognitive constraints?
Emmylou: Tsur demonstrates that cognitive processing shapes the forms that poems take across cultures (i.e., their conventions), as well as how readers or listeners respond to poems. Two cognitive constraints that Tsur explores are the Gestalt principles of perception and the limitations of immediate memory. I argue that the lines of biblical Hebrew poetry are shaped and patterned in ways that are good fits to human processing, that is, in ways that are consistent with how the mind naturally processes perceptual shapes and patterns.
Michael: Why is the identification of the line so important to the study of ancient Israelite poetry?
Emmylou: The poetic line, across cultures, is the basic unit of structure and rhythm of a poem. Biblical scholars are typically interested in structure and how it relates to the meaning of a text, and this is one reason why poetic lines are so important. How we understand the structure of a poem—its organization into lines and larger units—is intertwined with how we interpret it. But this aspect of poetic structure is only part of the picture. Through the organization of words into lines, poetry has the potential to create effects in ways that prose does not. From a cognitive perspective, poetic structure emerges as the listener or reader mentally organizes the language of a poem into lines and larger units. This process of perceiving structure is integrally related to the experience of poetic effects. How we mentally organize art, including verbal art, affects how we experience it—and thus, the message. “Lineation” of biblical texts cannot simply be understood as one step in the process of interpretation or exegesis. Mentally organizing structure of biblical poems is an active part of the reading or listening experience—and, I argue, an aural and temporal demand on the audience. Lines are essential to both the message and the experience of the message: what a poem does, and how it does it.
Michael: How can you study perception of ancient poetic structure when we have no ancient performances or audiences?
Emmylou: Poetry—across cultures—is about meaningfully shaping and patterning language, down to the level of sounds. On the one hand, these shapes and patterns are anchored to which words the poet chooses and what order they are in. This part of my research is especially informed by the study of the language of Biblical Hebrew within a modern linguistic framework: what we can learn about the sounds and structures of the ancient language and how it changed between the Iron Age and Tiberian Hebrew (represented in the medieval manuscripts). On the other hand, there is no such thing as a shape or pattern without perception of the shape or pattern. This is where the cognitive sciences are essential to my work. Gestalt research has shown us that there are universals of human perception: that even though perception is contextual and individual, our minds organize stimuli according to basic principles of perception. These universal principles provide a way to investigate perception of poetic structure, even without ancient audiences. In my research, I draw heavily from studies that connect Gestalt perception to the arts (visual art, Arnheim 1974; music, Meyer 1956; and verbal art, Smith 1968 and Tsur).
Michael: Can you give an example of how our brains organize perceptual stimuli?
Emmylou: The most groundbreaking concept of Gestalt perceptual theory is that perception is based in part-whole organization. We don’t perceive by adding together details, but by organizing part-whole relationships, because, as the famous maxim says, “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.” Gestalt researchers have formulated important principles relating to how our minds perceive structure. One example is the principle of proximity. So, if you see dots and spaces like this—••• ••• ••• —your brain processes this as three groups of three, because “stimuli that are near each other tend to be grouped together.” This is also true of aural sounds, like tap tap tap (pause) tap tap tap (pause) tap tap tap. Another example is the principle of similarity: “stimuli that are similar to each other tend to be grouped together,” like this: ●●○○●●○○●●○○●●○○●●. The principle of symmetry extends the principle of similarity to apply not just to components but also to their position in a whole: (●○▲▲○●). Most of our everyday perception involves much more complexity than these examples, but the principles still apply.
Michael: So how can these principles be applied to the study of ancient Hebrew verse?
Emmylou: I approach the issue of the poetic line in Hebrew verse as a perceptual problem: how can the line be heard or perceived? Ancient Hebrew verse doesn’t usually follow any external templates for line or stanza patterning (like an English sonnet does), but it still creates complex shapes and patterns from potentially any aspect of language, including sounds, word order, phrasing, syntax, and semantics. The internal patterning or organization of each line emerges in relation to another line or lines within a line-grouping. That is, a line must be organized as a line in relation to a larger whole. It is the relational organization that is so important to the perception of the line. Our brains are used to this kind of perceptual complexity and organization. They are wired for it, and we do it all the time. Biblical poetry is a “normal fit.” I spend much of my book giving examples of this. For example, I argue that biblical poetry, by the principles of proximity and similarity, uses similar sounds to bind words together within lines (which is actually similar to alliterative English verse). Another example is symmetry: many, though not all, of the phenomena related to “parallelism” can be better understood and accounted for through the perceptual principle of symmetry.
Michael: Why can’t we just use “parallelism” to identify the poetic line in ancient Hebrew verse?
Emmylou: Though “parallelism” has been mainstream in biblical scholarship for 250 years, there is no consensus among scholars on what counts as parallelism, or how parallelism relates to the poetic line. I think the reason for this is that parallelism is an inadequate model for understanding the structures and potential effects of biblical poetry. Saying that two things are parallel, or correspond, or that something repeats, is very different from understanding how a segment of text emerges as a whole. Noticing that two things are “parallel” doesn’t account for the patterning that they take, or how the pattern aurally and temporally unfolds. For example, an A B C A B C pattern might unfold as a symmetrical whole, in which case the second “C” would provide a click of closure. Or, an A B C A B C pattern might unfold as a pattern of continuation, in which case another A is expected (unless some other strategy is used to modify the expectation so that nothing more is expected). Perception is largely influenced by similarity, by perceiving likenesses, or just degrees of likeness. But how we organize patterns into meaningful shapes is far more complex than noticing correspondences. “Parallelism” is not a nuanced enough concept to help us understand these kinds of complex shapes, and how they create structures and expectations and perceptual forces in poetry. I think Gestalt theory provides a better framework for how verbal shapes and patterns can emerge from so many possible variables and aspects of language. Also, the same perceptual principles and cognitive strategies that apply to line-structure, I argue, account for how listeners can organize poetic lines and groupings into larger shapes and ultimately the integrated whole of the poem.
Michael: How might a cognitive approach to the study of verse help us with the study of narrative?
Emmylou: Before I started asking questions about biblical poetry, I was never a poetry kind of person; when I was taught about poetry in school, it seemed elite and inaccessible. For students learning Biblical Hebrew, we teach them to read narrative first, and maybe, if they advance enough, we introduce them to poetry. But one thing I have learned from studying biblical poetry is that if you want to understand a culture’s narrative art, you might want to understand their poetry first!
Poetry is basic to human cultural experience; it seems to be language universal. Its principles are not elite or inaccessible, even though the experience of poetry can be profound. As Arnheim says about visual art, “Every man’s eyesight anticipates in a modest way the justly admired capacity of the artist to produce patterns that validly interpret experience by means of organized form” (1974: 46). What is going on in biblical poetry—the cognitive strategies it requires of the reader—are normal to human processing. If we understand these conventions of biblical poetry and the cognitive strategies they require, I think, we will find analogies in the conventions and cognitive reading strategies demanded by biblical narrative—though without the structural unit of the line. I demonstrate this in my book with Genesis 1. It is not uncommon to use the word “parallelism” to describe patterning in narrative, but, as in poetry, I think we can do better than that with a Gestalt framework.
Bibliography
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Grosser, Emmylou J. Unparalleled Poetry: A Cognitive Approach to the Free-Rhythm Verse of the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
________. “What Symmetry Can Do That Parallelism Can’t: Line Perception and Poetic Effects in the Song of Deborah.” Vetus Testamentum 71.2 (2021): 175-204.
Meyer, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Tsur, Reuven. Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils. Cognition and Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
________. Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance. An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics. Rev. ed. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2012.
________. Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. 2d ed. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2008.
Wagemans, Johan (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Wagemans, Johan, James H. Elder, Michael Kubovy, Stephen E. Palmer, Mary A. Peterson, Manish Singh, Rüdiger von der Heydt. “A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: I. Perceptual Grouping and Figure-Ground Organization.” Psychological Bulletin 138.6 (2012): 1172-217.
Wertheimer, Max. “Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms.” Pages 71-88 in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology. Edited by Willis D. Ellis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938.
