6 Scripts and schemas Scripts and schemasScripts and schemas
Preview
Why do people read literature? Why do people write literature? These questions
have been cogitated by philosophers, literary critics, writers, publishers,
booksellers, and readers for as long as literature has existed. As we have
already seen in examples in previous chapters, often literary texts are about
themselves as texts: as much about writing and reading as they are about the
apparent subject-matter. Different motivations for reading have been suggested,
ranging from an appreciation of realism to a value placed on escapism.
You hear people praising a book because it reflects something to them of
their own lives, has a character they can identify with, or is written out of real
experience and therefore seems to be authentic in a way that is admirable and
engaging. Alternatively you hear people praising a book because of its depth
of imagination, the richness or exotic nature of the characterisation, or the
intricate plotting or surrealism or absurdity of the events.
Both of these opinions, and all points between, rely on a view of the literary
experience that presents a world, a rich setting beyond the words on the
page. The text interacts with the reader’s mental faculties, memories, emotions
and beliefs to produce a sum that is richer than the parts: the text is
actualised, the reader is vivified, by a good book.
In order to understand what is going on here, we need to be able to understand
how exactly texts interact with readerly experience. We need to
address the difficult question of context in relation to literary texts and reading,
and we need to develop a principled idea of context that does not simply
ascribe particular readings to some vague sense of ‘background knowledge’.
As a first step in this direction, one of the earliest applications of an
approach from cognitive science to literature was schema theory. This was
originally developed as a means of providing computer programs in artificial
intelligence research with a contextual ‘knowledge’ that would enable them to
process language. Several different frameworks have been proposed over the
years, with different terminology and with slightly different aims, but I will
gather them together here under the general term ‘schema theory’. Since there
are many examples of schema theoretical applications to the literature of the
last two centuries, and schema poetics does not depend primarily on stylistic
form, I will present an analysis of literature from the Anglo-Saxon period.
Links with literary critical concepts
Context, contextualisation, defamiliarisation, experience,
fictionality, historicism, history, imagination, literariness,
literary worlds, readerliness, realism
Many of the shifts in critical theory and ‘crises’ in literary theorising revolve
around the thorny question of how much textuality, how much readerliness, and
how much history should be brought into literary critical discussions. One of the
advantages of formalist approaches to literature is that analysis is easily visible
and cited evidence is apparent and demonstrable on the surface of a text. Of
course, absolute formalism has to explain how meanings can be generated
without readerly or other contextual input. What is satisfying at the level of pure
description is not very satisfactory as a general account of literary understanding.
By contrast, approaches that have focused on readers reading have been
accused of being psychological studies rather than literary study as such.
Either they emphasise individual idiosyncrasy, or they treat groups of readers
as sources of ‘data’ rather than interpretations. At the other extreme, critical
approaches grounded in historical contexts can be seen as being more interested
in history than the literature itself, treating a literary text as no more
than an archaeological artefact, and engaging in a sort of slapdash poorman’s
history, where claims can be made about the past while evading the
disciplinary rigour and evidence required in genuine historical study.
All of these solutions represent different views of what counts as relevant
and appropriate context. In fact, none of them is either fully contextualised
or entirely decontextualised. Furthermore, they address in different ways
and mainly implicitly the real questions, which are not whether context is
important but how is it important and how is it used. Given the vast amount
of historical context that is potentially available, and the hugeness of the
imagined experience of the author and the contemporary society, and given
the massive encyclopedic knowledge carried around in the heads of readers,
how can we decide which bits of context are used and which are not, in a
principled way? That is the ground of schema poetics.
Conceptual dependency
The main obstacle to artificial intelligence is the fact that language exhibits
conceptual dependency. That is, the selection of words in a sentence, and the
meanings derived from sentences, depend not on a dictionary-like denotation
of these strings of words but on the sets of ideas and other associations
that the words suggest in the minds of speakers and hearers. Often, both
speaker and hearer are familiar with the situation that is being discussed, and
76 Scripts and schemas
therefore every single facet will not need to be enumerated for the situation
to be understood. Similarly, human eyes looking at a set of visual patterns
will link elements together or see shapes and features that are derived from
previously encountered experiences. In the visual field, the context brought
by viewers to disparate objects is called a frame. In the linguistic field, the
conceptual structure drawn from memory to assist in understanding utterances
is a schema that was first called a script.
For example, I live in Britain and have a ‘going to the pub’ script which I will
need when I finish this chapter later on today. Until it occurred to me to use this
as an example just now, the ‘going to the pub’ script was not at the forefront of
my mind. Later on, I will go not to the pub down the road but to a pub in the
countryside not far from here, where I have never been before. However, I know
that when I get there I will know exactly what to expect and what to do. My pub
script has elements that I expect to see (a bar, a person behind the bar, tables,
beer pumps, bottles, glasses, and so on). Besides these objects, my pub script
includes procedures that I can use in order to get a drink. I know that I have to
go and stand at the bar. I know what form of words to use and what the other
person will say. I know how to reply to the various questions I am asked. I
understand how to pay for the beer there and then, and I know where I am
allowed to sit, the sorts of behaviour that are appropriate, and so on.
Of course I was not born with this knowledge: my pub script has been
learned from experience. Neither is it a static script: I have expanded it and
refined it through experience of a range of different sorts of pubs – pubs that
are also restaurants, pubs that have adopted the continental European practice
of having waiting staff, pubs that have only bottled beers, pubs that
shade into bars, cafés, nightclubs, social clubs, working men’s clubs, Labour
clubs. And I have had to apply my pub script adaptively to a range of situations
– in beer tents, at private parties, at barbecues, buying a beer on an
aeroplane, on a boat on the Danube, in a bar in Tokyo, in a late-night drinking
den in Liverpool, at a Basque festival by catching cider in a glass from an
enormous vat with a pinhole in the side, and so on. All of these are examples
of different tracks through the pub script.
It should be apparent from these examples that a script is a socioculturally
defined mental protocol for negotiating a situation. Miscues in script application
can explain the confusion caused to the French family waiting in an
English pub to be served at their table, or expecting to pay as they leave
rather than there and then, or my confusion when I seemed to have paid for
an empty glass at the Basque festival.
Scripts such as the pub script are situational scripts. We use these to negotiate
commonly experienced events such as being in a restaurant, taking the
bus, or weeding the garden. Additionally, we have scripts that are personal,
such as what to do and say in order to be a complaining passenger, a husband
or wife, or how to talk to someone you have never met before. Lastly, we
have instrumental scripts such as how to light a barbecue, how to switch on
the computer, how to read, and so on.
Scripts and schemas 77
Knowing which script to draw upon in a particular situation depends on
headers that instantiate the script. In terms of written discourse, headers can
be of four types:
• precondition headers – these are references that act as a precondition for
the application of a script (‘Peter fancied a beer’).
• instrumental headers – references to actions that are a means toward the
realisation of the script (‘Peter walked down to the pub’).
• locale headers – references to the setting in which the script usually
applies (‘Peter stood at the bar’).
• internal conceptualisation headers – references to an action or role from
the script (‘Peter ordered a beer’).
Of course, some of these elements can also display prototype effects, such
that ‘Peter fancied a beer. He walked down to the Ferry Inn’ is more likely to
instantiate the pub script than ‘Peter fancied a packet of peanuts. He sat at an
outside table’. It also seems to be the case that at least two headers are
required for a script to be activated: ‘Peter fancied a beer. He got one out of
the fridge and carried on typing’ represents a fleeting script.
A script consists of slots that are assumed to pertain in a situation unless we
are explicitly told otherwise: props; participants; entry conditions; results; and
sequence of events.
In any particular script, these slots are filled with specific items (respectively,
beer glasses, a barman, walking into a pub, getting a drink, ordering and being
served, for example). This can explain why ‘but’ in the following sentence seems
natural: ‘Peter walked into the pub, but the place was deserted’. Compare this
with the oddity of, ‘Peter walked into the pub, but there were people in there,
and beer pumps and glasses’. The application of schema theory can thus
contribute to our understanding of textual coherence.
Scripts develop out of plans, which are generalised conceptual procedures
such as ‘socialising’ or ‘getting a drink’. When a plan becomes routine in
experience, it becomes a script. Plans and scripts arise out of higher level
goals, which are very general aims and objectives carried by individuals, such
as satisfaction goals, achievement goals, preservation goals, and so on. Plans
and goals are the conceptual tools we use to negotiate new situations.
It should be pointed out that scripts, plans, goals and their contents are
not fixed structures but are assembled in the course of discourse processing.
Their configuration is dynamic and depends both on the stylistic input and
the particular experiential base of the reader.
Literary schemas
Schemas have also been used to explain bundles of information and features
at every level of linguistic organisation, from the meanings perceived in
individual words to the readings of entire texts. Literary genres, fictional
78 Scripts and schemas
episodes, imagined characters in narrated situations can all be understood as
part of schematised knowledge negotiation. One of the key factors in the
appeal of schema theory is that it sees these knowledge structures as dynamic
and experientially developing. In general, there are three ways in which a
schema can evolve:
• accretion – the addition of new facts to the schema
• tuning – the modification of facts or relations within the schema
• restructuring – the creation of new schemas
For example, for readers who have only a passing familiarity with science
fiction, the SF schema typically has slots such as: spaceships, rayguns, robots
(props); scientists, explorers, aliens (participants); extraterrestrial settings or
time or space travel (entry conditions); apocalypse, or its cunning avoidance
(results); and space battles or laser shoot-outs (sequence of events). As people
read more SF, their schemas accrete extra features, such as the time-dilation
effects of faster-than-light intergalactic travel, or ‘warp’ engines, or positronic
brains, and so on. In the 1960s, there was a perceptible shift in science fiction
from outer space to ‘inner space’, and a concern for psychological, biological
and social science fiction, that represented a tuning of the SF schema for many
readers. New sub-genres within SF later appeared, such as ‘cyberpunk’ or
‘feminist SF’ – for some critics this involved tuning their schemas further, for
others it represented a thorough restructuring of the schema.
Schema theory has been used to revisit the issue of literariness and literary
language. It is argued that most everyday discourse is schema preserving, in
that it confirms existing schemas. Where the confirmation is stereotypical, as
in much advertising discourse, this is schema reinforcing. Sometimes
surprising elements or sequences in the conceptual content of the text can
potentially offer a schema disruption, a challenge to the reader’s existing
knowledge structure. Schema disruptions can be resolved either by schema
adding (the equivalent of accretion above), or by a radical schema refreshment
– a schema change that is the equivalent of tuning, above, or the notion in literature
not so much of defamiliarisation as ‘refamiliarisation’. Clearly, this is
not a definition of literariness as a whole, but a definition of ‘good’ literature,
or literature which is felt to have an impact or effect. The types of schema
management can be summarised as follows:
• knowledge restructuring – the creation of new schemas based on old
templates.
• schema preservation – where incoming facts fit existing schematic knowledge
and have been encountered previously.
• schema reinforcement – where incoming facts are new but strengthen
and confirm schematic knowledge.
• schema accretion – where new facts are added to an existing schema,
enlarging its scope and explanatory range.
Scripts and schemas 79
• schema disruption – where conceptual deviance offers a potential challenge.
• schema refreshment – where a schema is revised and its membership elements
and relations are recast (tuning, defamiliarisation in literature).
This view of schema theory in a literary context points to three different
fields in which schemas operate: world schemas, text schemas, and language
schemas. World schemas cover those schemas considered so far that are to
do with content; text schemas represent our expectations of the way that
world schemas appear to us in terms of their sequencing and structural
organisation; language schemas contain our idea of the appropriate forms of
linguistic patterning and style in which we expect a subject to appear. Taking
the last two together, disruptions in our expectations of textual structure or
stylistic structure constitute discourse deviation, which offers the possibility
for schema refreshment.
However, if we are going to isolate the literary context in this way, why
not short-circuit the argument and simply raise the possibility of a ‘literature’
schema that comprises these deviations? One branch of schema theory suggests
exactly this. A literary schema would not be an ordinary schema but a
higher-level conceptual structure that organises our ways of reading when
we are in the literary context. It is thus a constitutive schema, rather like a
plan or a goal in terms of early schema theory. Any ordinary schema can
appear in a literary context, but once there it is treated in a different way as a
result of literary reading. It is this reading angle that ‘re-registers’ the original
schema and processes it in terms of literary factors.
A literary schema for fiction, for example, is based on alternativity when
compared with the organising principles of our other world schemas (more
on worlds in Chapters 7 and 10). Measuring the divergence from our everyday
expectations of text schemas and language schemas in literature is a
matter of narratological and stylistic analysis. The degree of deviation from
our sense of reality in world schematic structure can be measured on a scale
of informativity, on the basis of three orders of informativity:
• first-order informativity – normal, unremarkable things are schema preserving
or reinforcing.
• second-order informativity – unusual or less likely things encountered in
literary worlds develop schematic knowledge by accretion.
• third-order informativity – impossible or highly unlikely things represent
a challenge to schema knowledge as schema disruption. This can result in
schema refreshment or radical knowledge restructuring if the challenge
necessitates a wholesale paradigm shift, a change in worldview.
Second- and third-order occurrences are assimilated into existing knowledge
by downgrading, which is a motivation search through schema knowledge
for a resolution: an attempt at schema preservation in the first instance.
Downgrading can be either backwards into the memory of the previous text,
80 Scripts and schemas
or forwards in anticipating what will happen. For example, at the beginning
of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), Joseph K. is arrested without having done
anything wrong. This anomaly (second-order, I would suggest) cannot be
downgraded backwards as it occurs in the first sentence of the novel. The
reader’s only option is to read on for an explanation in an attempt to have the
anomaly downgraded forwards. Of course, no downgrading ever appears,
and the anomaly has eventually to be downgraded outwards by recognising
that the alternative world of a literary schema (Kafka-esque metaphysical
absurdism) is in operation.
More radically, Greg Egan’s short story ‘The Infinite Assassin’ begins:
One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts shuffling
reality, it’s always me they send into the whirlpool to put things right.
(Egan 1996: 1)
There are various disruptions of language schema here: what is ‘S’, ‘the
whirlpool’, and ‘shuffling reality’? In the world schema, who is ‘me’ and why
is he being sent ‘to put things right’? These second-order anomalies are
quickly joined by third-order elements, as the story outlines people, cars,
buildings and even people’s clothes, hair and faces all shifting and changing,
appearing and disappearing in front of the narrator’s eyes. Only by the end
of the story can I downgrade all this by discovering that ‘S’ is a drug in which
hallucinations generate breaks between alternate parallel universes, and the
narrator is an employee of ‘The Company’ with an infinite number of
parallel personalities. In every parallel universe, he has to kill the drugdreamer
in order to regularise every local universe again. Clearly, new physical
properties of the world schema are required here, but this is not allowed
to present a radical shift in worldview as soon as the reader realises that the
story is constituted by a science fiction track within the literature schema.
Discussion
Before proceeding, you might like to discuss the application of schema
theory in the context of literary reading. Here are some possible questions to
think about and discuss:
• There is a problem of regression underlying schema theory: that is,
where do schemas ultimately come from? Schank and Abelson (1977)
posit plans and goals as increasingly abstract motivations, but it should
be pointed out that their model was intended for computer programming
not human psychology. In applying it to human minds, we are
faced with questions such as: Where do babies get their schemas? Could
there be a schema for schema construction that generates all other
knowledge? What are the psychological mechanisms by which unfamiliar
experiences are assigned to different schemas?
Scripts and schemas 81
• There is a more practical methodological problem when schema theory
is applied to literary reading. It is not easy (indeed sometimes it seems
quite arbitrary) to reach a principled decision as to which level of schema
is being used in a particular situation. Do I have a pub schema, or is it
really just a track through my more general restaurant/bar schema? Or is
this in turn simply a specific part of my transaction schema? Alternatively,
might I not have separate schemas for country pubs, town pubs,
Irish pubs, gastro-pubs, or theme pubs? When I read or see Macbeth, do
I have a Shakespearean play schema, or a court politics schema in operation?
Or in fact, do I accrete a Macbeth schema, and can every literary
text be said to generate its own specific schema?
• What do you think of the distinction between schema reinforcement and
schema refreshment? Does it offer a convincing means of understanding
‘literariness’ as opposed to closely related modes such as advertising,
travel writing, religious sermons or parables?
• Schema poetics is essentially an approach to the conceptual organisation
of literature and readers’ minds. Other than the consequences of
different language schemas in operation, it should then be possible to
sketch schematic readings of translated works without any problems
(unless there are large cultural issues at the level of world schema, of
course). However, the headers and slots within schemas and the tracks
through schemas can also be discussed in terms of their stylistic and
narratological features. How far do you think schema theory can be
assimilated with stylistics? You might consider two parallel translations
of a text in order to help you come to a conclusion.
Cognitive poetic analysis
Here is the opening of the 156-line poem which is usually called ‘The Dream
of the Rood’ (‘rood’ meaning ‘cross’), written down in the ninth or tenth
century. In the translation, I have tried to preserve the sound of the vocabulary
as closely as possible, though Anglo-Saxon grammar allows great flexibility
which makes it difficult to keep the word-order exact:
82 Scripts and schemas
Hwæt, ic swefna cyst secgan wylle,
hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte,
syðþan reordberend reste wunedon.
Þuhte me þæt ic gesawe syllicre treow
on lyft lædan leohte bewunden,
beama beorhtost. Eall þæt beacen
wæs
begoten mid golde; gimmas stodon
fægere æt foldan sceatum, swycle þær
fife wæron
Listen, and I will say the best of visions
which came to me in the mid-night
while chatterers lay in bed.
I thought that I saw a wondrous tree
held high aloft, wound round with light,
the brightest of beams. All that beacon
was
arrayed in gold; gems stood
fair at the earth’s corners, and there
were five too
Unless you are very familiar with Anglo-Saxon (or ‘Old English’), you are
likely to find this poem bewildering, firstly because any language schema you
possess is unlikely to offer you more than a bare understanding of the
language of the poem. Even with my gloss to help you see the roots of words
such as ‘will’, ‘night’, ‘tree’ and ‘ghosts’, your language schema probably
does not include other words such as ‘sceatum’ or ‘syllicre’, grammatical
word-endings, and some odd symbols (þ and ð, both versions of the sound
‘th’, and æ; and the vowel lengthening marks over a and e, for example).
Any text schematic knowledge you possess (again, unless you have studied
this literature) is likely also to be insufficient. If you can read the text correctly
out loud, you might notice the heavy alliteration across each line and perhaps
also notice that each line falls into two halves, but would you recognise this
pattern as the characteristic feature of Anglo-Saxon literature? You might
even be tempted to read all sorts of stylistically significant meanings into the
strange word-ordering, unless you know about Anglo-Saxon inflectional
grammar and simply ascribe the grammatical flexibility to the demands of
half-line alliteration. Would you recognise this patterning as a consequence of
a ‘literary’ tradition that was primarily oral and memorised, and only committed
to writing late in the period? Would you recognise some of the phrases from
the poem from what might be a popular earlier shorter poem, or realise that
these echoed some runic phrases carved onto a stone cross at Ruthwell in the
Scottish borders around the year 700? Would you think that the poet had cleverly
reworked some popular material into a full and complex narrative and
surrealistic world, embedded in layers of dream-vision and mystical revelation?
Perhaps only if you were an Anglo-Saxon listener.
This leads us to the first issue in schema poetics: whose schema is to be
used? We cannot talk of ‘the schema of the poem’, since schemas belong to
people not texts. I will offer a schematic reading that, inevitably, is my own
modern one, but I will return in the Explorations at the end to the question of
recreating a contemporary schematic reading of the poem.
An exploration of the world schema dimension might get us some way
initially. The poem is structured into the sort of narrative embedding that is
familiar to modern readers (not very dissimilar to that of Wuthering Heights, for
example). The speaker is compelled to describe a dream in which they see a
vision of a fantastically bright and decorated tree. It becomes clear in the
description that this is the cross on which Christ died, with the speaker giving an
account of his own sense of fear, sinfulness and guilt. Then the cross speaks
Scripts and schemas 83
uppe on þam eaxlgespanne. Beheoldon
þær engeldryhta feala
fægere þurh forðgesceaft; ne wæs
ðær huru fracodes gealga,
ac hine þær beheoldon halige gastas,
men ofer moldan, and eall þeos mære
gesceaft.
upon the axle-span. Beheld by legions
of the lord’s angels,
fair through all creation; this truly was
not a criminal’s gallows,
but it was beheld by holy ghosts,
men over the land, and by all this
glorious creation.
directly through the narrating speaker, describing how it was torn from its roots
from the forest’s edge and forced by enemies to hoist up criminals. This central
part of the poem, over 94 lines, is spoken in the first person by the cross. It
describes how it was used as an instrument of God when Christ climbed up onto
it, and it shares the wounds and pain of the humiliation. Then:
These most famous lines express the most forceful alliteration in the poem.
The cross goes on to describe how men came to carry the body away and
lament the death; Christ was placed into the tomb and the cross was buried
in a pit. Christ’s resurrection is not described directly at first, but in terms of
the cross being dug up and adorned with gold and silver. The cross ends by
rejoicing in the fact that it was chosen for the task and it enjoins the dreamer
to repeat the vision to others. The narrative then pops up a level back to the
dreamer who emphasises the salvation available to those who rely on the
symbol of the cross. The poem ends with a worshipful prayer:
First, there is the third-order anomaly of a speaking tree to be reconciled with
world schematic knowledge. Downgrading backwards, the anomaly is part
of a dream account. Downgrading outwards, the literary rhetorical figure of
84 Scripts and schemas
Feala ic on þam beorge gebiden
hæbbe
wraðra wyrda: geseah ic weruda God
þearle þenian; þystro hæfdon
bewrigen mid wolcnum Wealdendes
hræw;
scirne sciman sceadu forðeode,
wann under wolcnum. Weop eal
gesceaft,
cwiðdon cyninges fyll: Crist wæs on
rode.
Again and again on that hill I lived
through
cruel events: I saw the God of warriors
terribly racked; darkness had
wreathed with clouds the Lord’s
corpse;
sheer radiance overcome by shadow,
dark under clouds. All creation
wept,
lamenting a king’s fall: Christ was on
the cross.
Se Sunu wæs sigorfæst on þam
siðfate,
mihtig and spedig, þa he mid
manigeo com,
gasta weorode, on Godes
rice,
Anwealda ælmihtig, englum to
blisse
and eallum ðam halgum þam þe
on heofonum ær
wunedon on wuldre, þa heora
Wealdend cwom,
ælmihtig God, þær his eðel
wæs.
The Son was victorious from that
journey,
mighty and successful, when he
came with many,
a company of souls, to the kingdom
of God,
the almighty Ruler, to the bliss of
the angels
and all the saints that in heaven
till then
had lived in glory, when their
Ruler came,
almighty God, there where his
home was.
‘personification’ is familiar enough for it to be easily recognised, but this
action immediately cues up a literary schema for the analysis of the poem (as
well as the cues provided by the layout and language). It seems to me that the
blend of conventional dream schema and conventional literary schema
allows a twofold angle to be maintained throughout the poem. This pattern
of complementary dimensions is the major strategy perceived in my interpretation,
as I will illustrate below.
The most obvious schematic knowledge required is the schema of Christ’s
death (properly a narrative script, familiar from ‘scripture’), and the schema of
the central tenets of Christian faith. It is not until the ninth line, however, that
an explicit header (‘engeldryhta feala’) might invoke these schemas. This is an
internal conceptualisation header, but the religious cues which quickly follow
it (‘forðgesceaft’ and ‘halige gastas’) might make the reader re-evaluate the
dream-vision opening as a precondition header for a spiritual revelation.
However, what follows is not a simple re-telling of the passion of Christ, a
schema reinforcement by simple repetition. The story is recounted with a
radical shift in point of view from that of the synoptic gospels. Placing the
cross as both instrument and witness offers a potential schema disruption
that at least holds the possibility of a defamiliarised if not variant interpretation
of the crucial event in Christianity. (If sustained, this might even be seen
as the grounds of a heresy). How this disruption and higher-order informativity
is resolved is the rhetorical brilliance of the poem.
It seems to me that giving the tree a first-person voice in the text evidently
encourages a schematic reading that equates the tree with the idea of a
human individual. The individual tree, unremarkable in the forest, is chosen
to be an instrument of God’s plan: like Christ on the eve of the crucifixion, it
describes how it did not want to be placed in this role, but accepts its fate stoically.
As Jesus is God made man within the Christian schema, so the tree is
vivified and made flesh, given a voice, consciousness, wilfulness and freewill.
It is both chosen and given a choice.
The humanised aspects of the cross are what generate most of the vivid
images in the poem, and this further serves to create a strong identification
between the dying man and the instrument of his death. At the crucifixion, it is
the cross, rather than the body of Jesus, that experiences the wounds
(‘þurhdrifan hi me mid deorcan næglum; on me syndon þa dolg gesiene, /
opene inwidhlemmas – they drove through me with dark nails; in me still the
wounds are seen, / open evil gashes’). The personification allows an identity to
be created between seeing something and being an active part of it. There is a
combination of both instrumentality and witnessing throughout the poem.
It is interesting to compare the points at which the schema of Christ’s
passion and the poem’s narrative diverge. A prominent consequence of the
shift in viewpoint to the cross is in the agency and wilfulness of actions. The
cross, an instrument, is passive throughout: enemies cut it down, hauled it on
their shoulders, set it on a hill, and many enemies secured it there. However,
these enemies are not active when it comes to Jesus: he ‘efstan elne micle, þæt
Scripts and schemas 85
he me wolde on gestigan – he hasten[ed] with great courage, that he wanted
to climb up on me’. The enemies’ actions are mediated through the cross: it
was raised up, and it raised up the Lord of heaven. The usual roles of active
and passive from the gospel schema are refreshed here, primarily as a consequence
of the shift in viewpoint.
Overall in the cross’ speech, then, there are reversals judged against
schema expectations along the dimensions of active and passive, participating
and observing, instrument and witness, inanimacy and a manifestation of
human faculties, wilfulness and acceptance. These blends of binaries are paralleled
in the various slots of the schema: a prop (the cross) becomes a participant
alongside Jesus, and his enemies, friends and angels, and yet the cross
remains an accepting recipient of all the other participants’ actions. Its only
action is its account, its witness to its experience, yet it is narratologically the
central participant in the poem. An identity is created in the core of the poem
that equates witnessing and evangelising with Christian duty and its redemptive
consequence.
The final third of the poem is often regarded as a sort of ‘tacked on’ Christian
litany of faith. The cross pops out from its biblical experience to address
the dreamer directly twice, beginning both lines 78 and 95 with, ‘hæleð min
se leofa’ (my beloved man), in order to emphasise that its act of witness is
now enjoined on the dreamer too. A conventional statement of judgement
day and redemption follows. The vivid humanised imagery is replaced by
abstract terms, long rambling sentences, and a close repetition of the Christian
creed of heavenly salvation. However, this conventionality is important
in a discussion of the poem’s schema poetics. Given the highly unconventional
schema disruption which has preceded this point, schema preservation
by this sort of catechism rehearsal appears more like a reassuring schema
reinforcement. There is, though, a final rhetorical shift that the poem allows
which makes it more than just a restatement of Christian ideology.
The narratological pop back to the level of the dreamer effects a shift back
to a real personal and human viewpoint, and we are given individual hints of
this person. He is probably an old man, alone:
And he prays for his death in order to join them in heaven, where the Lord’s
people are seated at a feast. He prays that the Lord will be a friend to him,
and ends with the passage quoted previously (p.84), closing the triumphant
return of Christ and the angel armies from the harrowing of hell with a
simple and domestic homecoming: ‘þær his eðel wæs’.
At the end, then, we get a shift of the act of witness to the dreamer, now
86 Scripts and schemas
Nah ic ricra feala
freonda on feoldan, ac hie forð
heonon
gewiton of worulde dreamum
I do not have many powerful
friends on earth, but onwards from
here they
have departed this world of dreams.
awoken and telling the poem to the listening audience. His vicarious dream
participation in the story of the cross has compelled him to become a witness
like the cross, and that act is the poem itself. The personal details emphasise his
human reality in our world, and the homely details further reinforce a schema
of familiarity and domestic warmth. However, all this reality is in fact a ‘world
of dreams’. It is heaven, redemption and salvation that are real and true.
Though this is a schema reinforcement, it is one which asserts the truth of
mysticism and spirituality. It manages it not by the usual downgrading of
unreal elements into a familiar resolving schema, but by an upgrading of the
familiar world into an anomalous and mystical dream state, over which the
abstractions of the vision of salvation are the incomprehensible reality.
The potential schema disruption in the first part of the poem is resolved
not by a schema refreshment but by a powerful act of schema reinforcement.
Unusually, this is negotiated by a radical point-of-view shift, accompanied
by other aspects of schematic and discourse deviance as set out above, and an
act of conceptual upgrading in order to participate in the Christian schema
that is the necessary consequence of the poem. The abstractions are not
simply made concrete (such as through personification), but are presented
with a sensitivity to individual consciousness: the poem directs the listener to
listen and see and feel and call to mind familiar homely comforts. The overall
effect is to map transcendental concepts into the schema of the individual’s
personal sense and life: a reinforcement of the Christian schema in the strongest
and most personally relevant terms.
Explorations
1 Schema poetics is a good way of accounting for the fact that different readers
produce different interpretations of the same text. You could use schema
theory to track the readings made in two published critical studies of a
literary text. You could also examine the rhetorical means by which each
critic claims that their reading is the more convincing, appropriate or just.
2 You might explore whether the notion of genre is represented by
schemas. Taking a genre that you know very well, compare your own
schematic understanding of its typical slots with someone who is not so
familiar with the genre. You can use this to account for differences in
your interpretations and evaluations of texts within the genre.
3 In a play, the staging presents a world that can be very rich in schema
headers. The audience has to take account not only of the schema cues
offered by the set, but must also keep a projected track of the knowledge
schemas carried by each character, and finally try to assimilate all of this
into the literary schema which they imagine best represents either the
author or director or both. You might try to draw this out of a particular
performance (it will be easier if you have a video of the play). On a more
theoretical level, you might consider what is the schema theory status of
Scripts and schemas 87
a theatre audience. Individuals might respond differently to the same
play, but is there any sense of a group or collective consciousness: an
audience schema?
4 Schematised differences in literary presumptions, allusions, genres and
other socio-political audience expectations can be used to account for
historical variations in readings. Do you think it is possible to reconstruct
the schema of the contemporary readership or audience of the
original text?
5 Take a story in which something very unexpected happens. Spy thrillers,
crime fiction and science fiction are good places to find this. Can you
account for the sense of surprise and the effect of the ‘twist’ in schema
poetic terms? How does the narrative set the reader up for the surprise?
6 A criticism that has been levelled at schema theory is that in a dyadic (twoperson)
exchange, it only accounts for the behaviour and expectations of
one of the participants. In a pub schema, for example, it cannot predict
which one of many different possible appropriate things the barman
might say. Since, in the literary context, authorial intention is inaccessible,
this might not be such a problem for schema poetics, where the focus is on
the reader. However, schema theory in general has addressed this question
by emphasising the dynamic nature of reading as a negotiation through a
mental space (see next chapter). Applying this to literary reading, it might
be necessary to follow the process of schema accretion in stages through a
text-reading, rather than focusing on one moment. You could try this by
tracking the schema instantiation offered by the beginning of a novel, and
then follow its development at key points in the narrative.
Further reading and references
The original psychological model of schema theory was proposed by Bartlett
(1932) and developed for artificial intelligence by Schank and Abelson
(1977) and Schank (1982a, 1982b, 1984, 1986). Alternative terms for
‘scripts’, which I have gathered as schemas, include the terms ‘frame’
(Minsky 1975, 1986; Tannen 1984; and Fillmore 1985) and ‘scenario’
(Sanford and Garrod 1981). For a critique, see Edwards (1997).
What I have called schema poetics, the use of schema theory in literary
discussion, is accessible through the work of Rumelhart (1975, 1980, 1984;
Rumelhart and Norman 1978; see also Thorndyke 1977, and Thorndyke and
Yekovich 1980). Schema reinforcement and refreshment, and arguments
about literariness, come from Cook (1994; see also 1989, 1992). I have assimilated
Rumelhart’s and Cook’s terms, as suggested by Semino (1997: 159).
Semino (1997) also demonstrates a schema poetic analysis of modern
poetry. Culpeper (2001) applies schema theory to drama and characterisation.
Tsur (1992: 207–43) applies schemas to poetry. Cockcroft (2002) connects
schema theory and classical rhetoric. Other examples of schema poetics
include Freundlieb (1982), Mandler (1984), Gladsky (1992), and Müske
88 Scripts and schemas
(1990). The orders of informativity and the idea of literature as a constitutive
schema are from de Beaugrande (1980 and 1987 respectively). Abelson
(1987), Lehnert and Vine (1987), Meutsch and Viehoff (1989), Miall (1988,
1989) and Spiro (1980, 1982; Spiro, Bruce and Brewer 1980) have all
discussed schema poetics.
Scripts and schemas 89