IBM Research: Knowledge Socialization: Ideas: Quotes: Subtleties

We've been thinking about computer-based tools that can be used with stories -- to deconstruct them, build them, analyze them, visualize them -- and we keep coming up against the hard fact that most stories build on a huge amount of unstated shared information. In our reading we've been compiling a list of subtle passages that might serve as a challenge to algorithms that hope to analyze stories: if the subtleties of these writings can be understood by computer-based tools, the tools might be useful in the realm of stories.

An excerpt from Nabokov's The Gift in which a man contemplates his new apartment:

It would be hard, he mused, to transform the wallpaper (pale yellow, with bluish tulips) into a distant steppe. The desert of the desk would have to be tilled for a long time before it could sprout its first rhymes. And much cigarette ash would have to fall under the armchair and into its folds before it would become suitable for traveling.

We all know what it's like to start over in a new environment, to have to wear in an armchair before we can take flights of fancy in it -- but that's a very complex understanding to communicate, based on shared experiences of change and custom. Here the author uses several different metaphors to convey the concepts we recognize.

A quote from Kobe Bryant, the basketball player, as quoted in Newsweek (5/22/99), about well-meaning people voicing concerns that he skipped college to enter the NBA:

Sometimes what they say may be true, but you get to a point where you hear and you don't hear.

We all know what this means, but it's not an obvious thing. You hear and you don't hear? Which is it? You hear on one level and at the same time you don't hear on another level. Many common idioms have an element of paradox to them which is hard to pick up computationally. And the words "you get to a point" tell us that this is about emotional distancing, not about the workings of the ear.

An excerpt from Albert Camus' The First Man, in which Jacques' teacher M. Bernard pays Jacques' grandmother a visit. M. Bernard hopes to convince Jacques' grandmother to allow the boy to attend a six-year school instead of entering into an apprenticeship, which will bring money to the poor family.

"You," M. Bernard said to Jacques, "go out on the street and see if I'm there. You understand," he said to the grandmother, "I'm going to speak well of him and he's liable to think it's the truth."

Two subtle things here: First, the teacher can tell his student something nonsensical like "go and see if I am there" and it makes sense -- it depicts in a complex way the bond between teacher and student. Second, a simple meaning-parser might think the teacher means to lie about the boy. Of course not; the teacher is going to tell the truth, but this is a subtle (and touching) way of saying M. Bernard doesn't want the praise to go to Jacques' head. Both of these very small subtleties help us to understand the deeper meaning of the situation; that M. Bernard cares about Jacques' future and wants the grandmother to know it.

A bit of conversation from George Eliot's The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton where Miss Gibbs, a spinster, is gossiping about Amos Barton's (supposedly) scandalous behavior with a female acquaintance.

"Well !" remarked Miss Gibbs, "if I was a wife, nothing should induce me to bear what Mrs Barton does."
"Yes, it's fine talking," said Mrs Patten, from her pillow; "old maids' husbands are al'ys well-managed. If you was a wife you'd be as foolish as your betters, belike."

What? Old maids don't have husbands. But when we read it again we realize that's just the point. This is what we sometimes call a "turn of a phrase" -- something that makes us turn around mentally and look at it again. The text itself, taken literally, makes no sense; but on deeper reflection it makes all the sense in the world. If George Eliot thought her readers were incapable of understanding such a turn of phrase, she would have said "old maids' fantasy husbands" instead; but she figures we can do that work ourselves.