I’m in the midst of A. S. Byatt’s Possession in my Intro. to Literary Studies class, working up to assignment one, which asks students to work with symbolism in Byatt’s romance. The idea of symbolism is quite complex (the etymology alone is intricate and fascinating). Students are accustomed to talking about imagery, themes, character, even the writer’s biographical and cultural context. Symbolism, however, is something new for most of these freshmen and sophomores.

Over the years, I’ve tried various ways of explaining symbolism to students. The most satisfactory ways I’ve found to depend on close reading that enacts the drama of symbolic suggestion as a kind of unfolding awareness of connections, of patterns, of possibilities of meaning. That kind of going-through works well. Yet I’ve always felt the lack of some more communicable conceptual language, one that would convey the complexity of symbolism and its effects without reducing symbolism to something like The Da Vinci Code or merely the kind of thing students are used to in high school English classes.

Courtesy of a brilliant linguistics colleague, I’ve become aware of the idea of cognitive resonance and its connections to meaning-making. I’m trying to follow this idea up, piecemeal, in my spare time between other tasks. I’m becoming intrigued. The idea involves networks of assocations that resonate between people because of shared models, or even shared modelling. I know about constructivism and ideas of scaffolding learning, but the metaphor of model-making makes deeper sense to me, as it involves a certain kind of abstraction that nevertheless can both resonate with the original concept or thing and create a kind of cognitive resonance with others in the same meaning-making environment.

What this means for Possession is that I want students to be able to make interesting models that represent (abstract, demonstrate, enact) networks of suggestion and resonance within the romance, particularly as those networks emerge from ways in which physical realities come to suggest immaterial or abstract realities. And I want them to build models that resonate with those networks of suggestion and resonance. I particularly want them to attend to (and respond to, and model in response to) the ways in which Byatt signals her own modelling, her own concerns with networks of suggestion and resonance. A tricky business, but aided immeasurably by the rich and often obvious ways in which Byatt trains the attentive reader to experience and represent those cognitive resonances. In many respects, the romance is the story of ultra-alert readers who come to a richer experience of cognitive resonance (symbolic responsiveness) in their own reading.

I’ve located a book called The Art of Software Modelling that discusses cognitive resonance in some very interesting ways. One sentence in particular caught my eye:

So for any system of sufficient size,  the rule of thumb is that for anything too complex to entirely encompass within one’s mind, it is necessary to sacrifice some accuracy in favor of understanding.

There’s a world of complexity and even paradox within that sentence. I suppose one thing I’m trying to teach my students is how to find that sweet spot where the model demonstrates understanding, while knowing that they cannot and should not strive for a simple 1:1 replication. Building the model prepares for resonance, and results from it; yet resonance always involves suggestion and resemblance, and is not merely a reproduction.