The human brain is remarkably lazy, in part because it is very easily overwhelmed. This is why the field of clear vision in humans is so limited. If you’re reading this post on a desktop, then your eyes are filtering out the ribbon on the edge of the screen and even the other words in this paragraph. Even if you’re reading this on a cell phone, your eyes can really only pay attention to one line. If your brain were actually able to process all of the information in the ultra-HD resolution your focused vision has, your skull would have to be significantly larger. So, our smaller brains prioritize and try to create shortcuts to make things easier.
One of those shortcuts is pattern recognition. Patterns are basically cheat codes that help people get through life. Obviously, some people are better at recognizing patterns than others. (There are those genius children who just somehow know the prime numbers, for instance.) Even if you aren’t one of those instant pattern recognizers, your brain still operates on patterns. Your body (theoretically) has a circadian rhythm that works with sunrise and sunset, and people repeat their morning routines over and over through habit. Following the pattern means the brain doesn’t have to think as much. Our brains are hardwired to find order and make connections, even if there are no real connection to be made.
All of that is a long-winded way to say: we’re talking about T.S. Eliot and his idea of “tradition,” from his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” For those who know their Tolkien, tradition vaguely similar to Tolkien’s theory of “the pot of story.” The (very basic) idea of tradition is that all stories and related things (like poems) are connected to each other. Every time something new gets added to the mix, it slightly alters the meaning of everything that came before it. For you visual types, this metaphor might be helpful: all of the books are on one big library shelf. Every time a new book gets added, all the other books have to shift around a bit to accommodate the newcomer. Obviously, not all of the old books are affected in the same way by the new books–some will have to shift around more and some will barely move a millimeter. But how exactly does this idea actually work in a non-metaphorical way, and what does it have to do with patterns?
Perhaps the easiest way to understand the idea of “tradition” is by looking at it in action–through the eyes of just one individual. And to make it really simple, let’s take a stupid example. Let’s say Jane watches Disney’s Pocahontas and she loves it. The characters in that movie are stable and mean certain things: Pocahontas is a brave Native American who teaches a white man what the earth means to her people, and John Smith is a hero who learns how about another culture with an open mind. Now let’s say Jane has a serious lapse in judgement and watches Pocahontas II: Journey to the New World. (Spoilers, but seriously, don’t watch this movie. It’s a travesty.) In this movie, Pocahontas goes to England, and John Smith is no longer a curious hero; he’s. . . well. . . he’s a bit of a jerk, and Pocahontas finds another man to marry. Now, let’s apply the idea of tradition. If Eliot is right, Jane won’t be able to watch Pocahontas again without her view of the film being influenced by her knowledge of the second movie, even though the first movie was made without a sequel in mind. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult to watch the relationship in the first movie again without it being soured by the knowledge of what happens later. That’s what tradition looks like in action–new things influence the old canon. But . . . how does this apply to patterns?
The idea of tradition is actually at the root of people finding random connections (patterns!) between ideas in books. Things don’t have to be as closely related as the two Pocahontas movies and often aren’t. For example, if you read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, then maybe the ideas you picked up about race relations from that book would carry over and influence how you would read Shakespeare’s Othello, a story about a Moor in a cast of white characters. Your brain might say, “Oh, these two books have race as a theme. They aren’t historically connected, but maybe I can take what I learned about race from this 1960s book and apply it to the Shakespeare play.” Our brains like to lump things into categories in order to make sense of them; patterns make it so much easier. And that’s how the two ideas relate: Eliot’s idea of tradition is what legitimizes people finding those patterns and themes across books in different genres.
Eliot’s idea was somewhat revolutionary. The idea that old stuff influences new stuff is obvious. The old is the muse for the new–for example, Batman is heavily inspired by the vigilante justice found in The Scarlet Pimpernel. After all, people really only can be inspired by what already exists, because they can’t use the future as a reference point. Eliot, however, asks a different question. What if Batman could influence Sir Percy Blakeney–“that demmed elusive Pimpernel”? Now isn’t that an interesting thought. Obviously the woman who wrote about Sir Percy didn’t have Bruce Wayne in mind, but imagine Jane read the Batman comics first and then read about Sir Percy. She would probably expect certain things of Sir Percy because her brain found a shortcut between the two men with pattern recognition: socialite hiding vigilante operations. And that’s just one example; there are hundreds more. Eliot captured in one word how the human mind operates and its love for patterns.
Many times, the connections drawn between works are really only useful or meaningful to the people who’ve found them, and in my last post, I implied rather heavily that historical context should always be taken into account when reading literature. Patterns are not sufficient for literary analysis. But I can’t force people to turn off their brains and stop making connections. The insights people have actually can be useful in helping other people better understand their metaphorical bookshelves. So who am I to tell people not to connect the dots? The picture is different almost every time–connect away!