Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (55 page)
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Authors: Douglas Hofstadter,Emmanuel Sander
The creation of a general category through the pluralization of a proper noun, such as a famous person’s name, is based on the idea that there is an essence to each very well-known person or thing, be it the Moon, the Mona Lisa, Mecca, or Mozart. This essence can be pinpointed and then distilled from the entity itself; such an act of distillation gives rise to a new abstract category, much as we saw happening in the passage from
hard-desk
to
soft-desk.
It’s not difficult to see that the same mechanisms of essence-identification and essence-distillation underlie a different family of expressions, based on the names of famous cultural landmarks, such as the following few: “the Rolls-Royce of dishwashers”, “the Concorde of trains”, “the Rolex of cameras”, “the Leica of sound reproduction”, “the Mona Lisa of the British Museum”, and “the Taj Mahal of chicken coops”, not to mention “the Stradivarius of fly-fishing fishing reels”.
One might think great fame is needed for a person or thing to be “canonized” as an abstract public category and thus to be realizable in multiple instances. However, this impression is deceptive: anyone and everyone can be so canonized, albeit at a more local level. One needs merely to be “locally famous” — intimately known to one’s
family and friends — and that is something that we all are, fortunately, and hence we can all be canonized and pluralized by our kith and kin, and indeed we often are, for we are among their “personal celebrities”, so to speak, and they are among ours.
Now and then in conversation, people toss off phrases like “Ellen is the Jeff of her family”, “I’m the Sam of my circle of friends”, “Bill is her David”, “She’s their George and Priscilla”, and so on. The first of these might be used to express the idea that one’s friend Ellen has a habit of cracking riotously funny deadpan jokes, especially in the setting of her family, and that this trait of hers is reminiscent of another friend Jeff, who belongs to an unrelated family. In making this kind of analogy, one hopes to cast a fresh perspective on Ellen and perhaps also on Jeff, since taking a fresh point of view via a spontaneous analogy often brings novel insights. As this anecdote suggests, we are all influenced by categories centered on familiar people — our “personal celebrities”.
To be sure, Jeff possesses many attributes besides his sense of humor, but the conversation is focused on Ellen and her style of humor, and in that context, only a narrow facet of Jeff is likely to be elicited in the listener. The fact that Ellen is the teen-aged daughter in her family, while Jeff is the middle-aged husband in his, is irrelevant in this context, and is easily ignored. In other words, a context-dependent “essence of Jeff” will be implicitly distilled by the listener with no trouble. This kind of streamlined usage is a highly effective mode of communication, provided the participants in the conversation have the needed background knowledge.
The phrase “the Jeff of her family” amounts to a pluralization of Jeff, suggesting that there could be various Jeffs in various families (or in other groups of people). In other words, it converts
Jeff the unique individual
into
Jeff the founding member
of a category. Of course, since the phrase was just a throwaway remark, this category may not last long in anyone’s mind, but it might conceivably plant the seed for a long-lasting and extensible category, so that in later conversations someone might refer to “the Jeff of our family”, “the Jeff of that club”, “the Jeff of my salsa class”, and so forth. But since Jeff has many facets, there could also be other conversations in which another of his facets — say, his perennial pessimism or his frequent griping about his work — would be the “essence of Jeff” that would be implicitly pinpointed and effortlessly understood.
We have no trouble using Jeff as the nucleus of a category. We effortlessly understand remarks like “Sally’s no Jeff!”, just as we effortlessly understand a remark like “Clint ain’t no Mozart!” Or even more explicitly pluralizing him, one could say, “Too bad there aren’t a lot more Jeffs in this world!” We pluralize old Jeff just as glibly as we pluralize Mozart, Mother Teresa, Madonna, Steve Jobs, or Joan of Arc.
This type of linguistic playfulness is only one way in which we pluralize our canonized friends. There are other ways we do so, however, which reveal that we see our friends as multi-member categories not just when we consciously decide to do so but also subconsciously, without any prior intention to pluralize. The next section will deal with these kinds of events.
We have all had the experience of confusing one person with another — and here we are speaking not of their names, which may be very dissimilar, but of their identities. More specifically, we mean the experience of slipping, to one’s surprise, from a person to a “similar” person. Errors of this sort reveal unintentional recategorizations: occasions in which person A is momentarily confused with person B, who is very familiar, and the lexical label for person B — that is, B’s first name — comes to mind rather than A’s first name. This kind of error takes place frequently because categories for people such as our friends can be centered on a single individual and yet blur outwards so as to let in, on occasion, other less central members. Here are some concrete examples:
Paul just had a violent argument with his wife Catherine. In the heat of the fight, he accidentally called her “Jessica”, the first name of his previous wife, with whom he had often had arguments before they divorced. For Paul, during this argument, Catherine became momentarily Jessica, or perhaps “another Jessica”.
Richard’s daughter is named Marilyn, but dozens of times he has called her “Liz”, or come very close to doing so. “Liz” is in fact his younger sister’s first name. Marilyn, who is 15, reminds him of how Liz was at that age. Moreover, Marilyn is the second-born, just as Liz was, and her way of acting around her older brother is very much like the way Liz acted around Richard when they were teen-agers. Each summer, Richard takes his family to his old hometown, where his sister still lives, and during those times the tendency is reinforced, and Marilyn becomes even more frequently “a Liz”.
Every so often, Phil calls his wife Iris by the name “Betty”, which is the name of his long-time assistant at work. This unintended, unconscious confusing of the names of “his two women” makes Phil feel very ill at ease, because whenever he does it, he feels as if the role played by Iris in his life is scarcely any more important than the role of an assistant, which is very troubling to him. This frequent error, repeatedly turning Iris into “a Betty”, makes Phil wonder whether boredom isn’t creeping into his marriage.
This phenomenon of conflating two people’s identities (
i.e.
, seeing one person as an “instance” of another person — that is, as a member of the mental category centered on another individual) can also occur outside of language. When one meets someone new, it sometimes happens that one is reminded, more or less consciously, of someone else, and this déjà-vu sensation can be so strong that we feel we had already met the new person before, and we can anticipate their reactions to what we say, guess accurately their attitudes toward many things, intuit their interests and their sense of humor. (This is what happened when John and Rebecca met Thor, at the end of
Chapter 3
.) We treat the new person the way we would treat our old friend, and a much greater degree of intimacy is rapidly achieved thanks to this coincidence than would be imaginable with a “genuine stranger”.
We are not referring to social stereotypes that are triggered in our mind when we see someone wearing certain articles of clothing, or hear certain words or phrases uttered, or have similar superficial reactions. We’re talking about situations where one has the strong feeling of really
knowing
the new person (although one may later discover that this impression was unwarranted), and this intuition is the direct result of a categorization. Once the new acquaintance has been categorized as
a Nancy
, or as any other of our “personal celebrities”, then our expectations regarding the new person’s inner nature come from this categorization, just as our expectations that a certain animal will bark come from our categorization of it as
a dog
, or that an object will break if it falls come from our categorization of it as
a teacup
, or that an object is edible because of our categorization of it as
an apple.
We might thus expect of
a Nancy
we’ve just met that she will be gentle, compassionate, and maternal; that when she laughs she will turn her head in a certain way; that she will often lean forward when she walks; that she has a certain style of humor, and so on. On the other hand, we certainly don’t expect her name will be “Nancy” — that would just be amusing icing on the cake.
Sometimes unusual circumstances can result in a deep confusion of the identities of two people one knows well, profoundly shaking some of one’s cherished categories.
Dan’s wife Ruth had fallen under the spell of another man, and the fear of losing his beloved wife was eating away at Dan day and night. To his surprise, the name “Jeanine” started coming to his mind when he thought about Ruth, which mystified him, since nothing like that had ever happened before, during their six years of marriage. Twenty years earlier, he had been in love with a woman named Jeanine who had returned his interest but then revealed that she was already involved. For a while, Dan and Jeanine had a very intense friendship, and Dan was tormented by feelings of hope and fear, but in the end no romance came about. Gradually Dan’s strong feelings for Jeanine faded and after a year, he only thought rarely about her, and by the time he met Ruth, Jeanine was deeply buried in his memory.
And yet all at once, here was this old name bubbling up, reinserting itself into his most intimate thoughts. Even certain aspects of Jeanine’s face were contaminating his mental image of his wife when she was not in front of him. Whenever he thought about Ruth, Dan was haunted by the feeling of not knowing who he was dealing with: their intimacy was now tarnished by a sense of duplicity. Long ago, these feelings had been attached to the concept
Jeanine
, and for that reason the name “Jeanine” and even certain features of Jeanine’s face were now flooding his thoughts. The unintentional distortion of his wife in his mind revealed to Dan that the same fears of loss he had experienced decades earlier had been reborn. The deep analogical link between Jeanine-back-then and Ruth-right-now was something he had no power to repress.
But eventually, Ruth’s infatuation with the other man came to an end and Dan’s fears gradually subsided; indeed, one day Dan noticed, to his great relief, that it had been quite a while since Jeanine’s name and face had come to mind. For a while, Ruth had been
a Jeanine
, but when Ruth’s worrisome behavior came to an end, she ceased being a member of that category.
Seth and Brian were in a museum with their mother. By chance they bumped into Emma, a girl in Brian’s class, who was with her parents. After parental pleasantries and pre-teen small talk, the two families parted. All at once Seth blurted out, “It was so
weird
of them to call her
Emma.
She doesn’t look
at all
like an Emma.” His mother, raising her eyebrows a little, asked, “Oh? So just what do Emmas look like, pray tell?” Seth was momentarily a bit flustered, but he rallied: “I don’t know
exactly
, but a
typical
Emma is that girl Emma who lives down the street.
That’s
what Emmas look like.”
A bit of introspection reveals that the act of pluralizing any of our friends establishes certain expectations, both in terms of looks and personality, based on that person’s first name. Thus, if we’ve “met” somebody solely on the phone or through email, it’s nearly impossible not to have formed a kind of advance image of them, no matter how irrational we might know this is. Certain cues — the first name of course being one — exert power over us in creating a subconscious set of expectations concerning this person.
One time J. had an email exchange with the director of an advanced technology research lab, who was named Agnes. It struck him as somewhat odd that an elderly lady would be so highly placed in such a modern, fast-moving laboratory. When one day J. found out by chance that Agnes was considerably younger than himself, he was caught totally off guard, and he realized that, solely on the basis of her first name, he had unconsciously formed an image of his correspondent as being well on in years.
Like Seth, disconcerted by the girl he met who “didn’t look
at all
like an Emma”, we’ve all met people whose faces and personalities don’t seem to match their name. We find ourselves making frequent errors in naming them; thus we may find ourselves sometimes calling someone “Allen”, or at least having that name jump to our mind and nearly get uttered, even though their name is really “Will”, simply because the person
looks
to us like “an Allen”. How many times have we heard statements like, “The name ‘Alex’ really didn’t fit him. He was dark-haired, slim, tall, distinguished-looking, spoke confidently, and was always well-dressed — the total opposite of my cousin Alex, who’s short, blond, brash, plays rugby, and always hangs out in bars.”
We all have also had the more common experience of feeling that a friend’s name or a new acquaintance’s name perfectly matches the person. Thus it strikes us as inconceivable that the people closest to us — parents, children, siblings, close friends — could have had any other names; it seems that their first name fits them like a glove, and that any other one would have been a cosmic miscalculation. And if we take a different first name and imagine sticking it on them, we recoil with shock, finding it absurd, since their true name is such a perfect fit. No other name would have harmonized with their face or their personality. If one discovers that some old friend goes by a name other than the name they were given at birth, one might be tempted to think that the parents really missed the mark in giving their child a name that doesn’t fit, but that luckily a different name was found later that fits perfectly.