Two McCarthys

[ON THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: “So what are we saying here?” writes Cormac McCarthy. “That some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing.” (Above, a reproduction of a fresco in the Chauvet Cave, site of evocative prehistoric paintings.) JEFF PACHOUD/AFP/Getty Images]

A coincidence in the form of two McCarthys in one day.

The first was an Irish doctor, Aidan McCarthy, from Cork, who joined the RAF just before the outbreak of war and went on to spend some years in Japanese captivity. The second was the writer, Cormac McCarthy, from Rhode Island in New England. It turns out that second McCarthy took an interest in the unconscious, the principal subject of the present post. I shall return to his book at reference 2, my copy of which arrived during the recent festivities, in due course.

Aidan

There is no trace of the Irish doctor at Amazon, Abebooks or gmail, so I can only suppose he was a yet another find at RPPL. BH read it at the time, but I was not attracted to it, only coming back to it today in the intervals of the very long-winded (but very successful) batch No.738 of bread.

It turns out that this McCarthy, having survived Dunkirk and then several rough years as prisoner of the Japanese, was in a makeshift bomb shelter at Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb went off. He survived both that and the messy aftermath, eventually being liberated by soldiers of the US Army. All things considered, he appears to have come out of all this in reasonably good shape and went on to have a second career, as it were, ending up as a Group Captain in charge of a service hospital in Germany. A man of faith, the Catholic faith, and I imagine that he would have said that this helped him get through. Which means for me that it did – whatever I might think of that Catholic faith.

And he was without long lasting bitterness towards the Japanese. They were just very different, from another world. I imagine that this helped: hate, however justified, can be very corrosive.

An interesting read from a man who had both luck and a tremendous inner strength, a strength which kept him afloat both during the hard times and afterwards.

Cormac

I had just finished reading the book at reference 2 and was reading the supporting material, to find that this McCarthy took a serious interest in the unconscious and the presence or absence of language there, with the not-very-long and accessible essay at reference 3 being evidence of that interest. Where Kekulé was the eminent German chemist of the 19th century who got the idea for the structure of the benzene ring from a dream, an idea which was fleshed out over the following decades.

I was rather surprised by this essay, only knowing McCarthy as a writer of bleak and violent stories from bleak places. I thought perhaps a gun-toting enthusiast of the far right, along with Clint Eastwood. Checking today, I find that this gloss is not fair on either of them.

To return to the matter in hand, the Kekulé problem can be summarised as follows. Kekulé had been worrying at the structure of benzene for some time when he fell asleep in front of his fire and dreamed of Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. He wakes up and realises that the structure he was looking for was a ring, what we now know as the benzene ring. The problem is, why did the unconscious report the answer in this roundabout way?

The essay is discursive, touching on all kinds of vaguely relevant stuff. So, according to McCarthy, language is a good way of saying where we have got to with a problem – but it does not have much to do with the getting, with the process. And then, the key to human language is having one object – the signifier to use a bit of jargon – refer to, amount to, another – the signified. Once you have that, the rest follows. And for McCarthy, language and cave painting arrived at roughly the same time, say around 100,000 years ago. While the unconscious had been the engine making hominins work for maybe a couple of million years and had managed pretty well for nearly all of this time without language. And has retained, in the way that it works, a strong preference for images over words – this despite clearly understanding language well enough to know about the Kekulé problem.

Another bit of evidence being that the dreams manufactured by the unconscious involve lots of images but no words. Dreams don’t do words, so the benzene ring had to be passed to the conscious mind as an image. Which Kekulé had to translate into words as he woke up.

All of which one may or may not go along with. But McCarthy has done his homework, he has covered the ground, after a fashion. He is taking an informed and considered interest in the matter. I associate to the fact that Simenon took an active interest in medical and psychiatric matters and owned a lot of books thereon, despite making most of his money out of the Maigret stories, in which these matters do pop-up from time to time, but in a usually peripheral way.

As it happens, most of my dreams do not involve movement, do not involve working the muscles, which I believe are mostly turned off during sleep anyway – with two important exceptions being the heart and the lungs. Life does have to go on. So, when I do move in dreams, the motion is more flying, just gliding along, than walking. And there is a lot of imagery, mostly visual rather than aural or tactile. However, last night (Sunday night), as if to prove a point, I did have a dream which seemed to involve both words and speech.

I associate to the fact that thinking in words often involves the muscles in and around the mouth: the motor activity needed to say things is being at least partially activated, which is not going to happen if the muscles have been turned off. But I no not think that this blocks thinking in words.

A few other thoughts.

When lying in bed, either before or after sleep, I certainly do think in words. Contrariwise, bits of dream-like imagery, without words, are a reasonably reliable sign that I am about to fall asleep. Imagery which is perhaps put into some kind of working memory by the unconscious, from where it is fleetingly available to consciousness and its words, after the event, as it were.

Perhaps Kekulé’s unconscious did not solve the problem at all, it just happened to be ruminating about a snake for some other reason we are not told of. While it was the conscious Kekulé that made the connection to benzene, as he woke up.

In sum, while the unconscious might be good at images, and dreams might be stronger on images than words, which might explain the problem at hand, I think that McCarthy was wrong about the near absence of language in the inner workings of today’s brain. We might not know how it does it, but I do think that it is likely to involve language. Language is far too powerful a tool to be put to one side. 

Work in progress: next stop, reference 7, turned up by Bing.

Aside

In this essay at least, McCarthy does not seem very keen on commas. A device which I use a great deal, probably a great deal too much. Nor does he seem very keen on apostrophes in words like ‘don’t’.

Conclusions

McCarthy one was a good read. While McCarthy two offered an unsuspected side to that author. And a useful excursion into a real problem, a real problem in which I am indeed interested.

PS: progress report: further investigation has turned up the work of one Alan Rocke, from which I offer two snippets. First, the dream was very much part of Kekulés years-long search for the structure of benzene. A competitive search too, in the sense that there were other chemists on the same hunt, the same search. And rings were in the air. As it turned out, Kekulé won – but only talked about his dreams years after the event. Second, chemists, in their effort to unravel what was going on at an atomic level, were the first scientists to use visual images in their work. Maybe, under the hood, they really do think in images rather than words, just as McCarthy is suggesting. An introduction to all this is to be found at reference 8 and the full story at reference 9. Too dear and too long for me!

References

Reference 1: A doctor’s war – Aidan McCarthy – 1979.

Reference 2: The road – Cormac McCarthy – 2006.

Reference 3: The Kekulé problem – Cormac McCarthy, Nautilus – 2017.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros. There are plenty of snakes in Freud, but not this one, despite his interest in matters Egyptian.

Reference 5: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/. The text of the essay, complete with advertisements.

Reference 6: https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/cormac-mccarthy-publishes-his-first-science-nonfiction-nautilus. An institute with which McCarthy was associated.

Reference 7: https://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/SP20151130.html.

Reference 8: Chemistry’s visual origins: Vivid imagination was key to unlocking the secrets of molecular structure in the nineteenth century – Andrew Robinson – 2010.

Reference 9: Image and Reality: Kekulé, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination – Alan J. Rocke – 2010. 400 pages of book. The subject of the review at reference 8.