Deep Thoughts: narrative as a mode of knowledge

Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences by David Herman (Editor)
Reviewed by R.A. Goodrich, Ph.D.

The questions narrative raises seem to pervade all areas of enquiry. Psychologists ask us if narrative replicates patterns of consciousness; linguists ask us whether or not narrative precedes all other types of discourse; even anthropologists ask us if narrative acts as the initial embodiment of our conceptions of time-and-space. Because the capacity for narrative virtually knows no bounds--it is constrained by neither the historical period nor the geographic location, neither the chronological age nor the chosen medium of its telling--perhaps narrative usually invites only the most cursory investigations into its nature, and, with some fortunate exceptions, still remains quaintly transparent to many.

This neglect is all the more curious given the resurgence of the study of narrative for the past generation and a half which was initially spearheaded by literary and cultural theorists eager to apply--or, more recently, to overturn--structuralist analyses derived from the Geneva and Prague, Copenhagen and Paris waves of what is collectively known as the structuralist movement.. The movement aimed at disclosing not what a particular narrative might mean, but how its underlying code shaped the manner in which narrative in general was systemically organized. Almost immediately by the late 'sixties, those rejecting the claim that particular narratives should be construed as manifestations of an underlying code began to look upon the manifestations themselves as the result of interaction amongst the participants in any act of narration within its specific context or definable situation. By so doing, this second phase of analysis placed greater emphasis upon the linguistic and organizational patterns of actual narrative encounters in which participation persists if both the plot and the evaluative strains of the story have recognizable significance or point. Within another decade, others, re-assessing the structuralist conception of code, saw in it a socio-cognitive attribute of the members of any given (speech) community.

David Herman's rich anthology in many respects announces the arrival of the inter-disciplinary field of cognitive narratology. To that extent, it may well become (along with his magnum opus a year earlier, Story Logic ) as seminal a text as many readers of psycho-analytical persuasion have found the 1994 anthology, Psychoanalysis and Development: Representations and Narratives , edited a decade earlier by Massimo Ammaniti and Daniel Stern. Here, there is much to be had for those of us intrigued by narrative, be it spoken or written, spontaneous or planned, solitary or communal, secular or sacred, factual or fictional. Within the limits of this review, we shall sample some of the more suggestive lines of enquiry, though not necessarily in the order presented, before turning our attention to at least three factors largely ignored by Herman's far-reaching anthology.

Beneath their riveting use of a short story by Eudora Welty, Richard Gerrig and Giovanna Egidi argue that cognitive investigations of narrative are primarily concerned with the mental processes by which readers construct the world of the narrative and with the representations cueing or enabling such processes. It is this dual focus that, from at least the 'seventies, has been exemplified in the appeal to schemata, the means by which experience can be resolved into expectations of, say, faces and places by writers and readers alike in the inferential transactions both deploy in their respective acts of crafting and comprehending a story no matter how minimally detailed. How the intricacies of causally tracking connections of both the explicitly and the implicitly embedded kind within narratives work, and that "relevant theories have no way of conceptualizing," lead Gerrig and Egidi to conclude that there is a need "for perpetually broadening the research agenda" (52).

The same expansive mood finds expression in the contribution by Uric Margolin who reminds readers of the methodological need in cognitive enquiries
to concentrate initially on one major component in isolation for the closer study of its specifics, as long as we bear in mind that the only natural unit is indeed the social mind in action (272).

The "semi-intuitive theories" of generations past, we are assured, can now be replaced by "all four levels or circuits of narrative communication" (274 & 273). The four, in largely structuralist terms, involve actual writers and readers, implied writers and readers, textually inscribed narrators and addressees, and, finally, participants in the world of the story itself, all of whom can "engage in any conceivable cognitive activity" (273). Margolin then proceeds to survey typical ways in which an analysis of these four levels yield their "mechanisms and modes of generation" by applications of the "very modern cognitive framework" (293).

The expansiveness of cognitive narratology peaks by the time we encounter claims of the type made by Mark Turner:
Running two stories mentally, when we should be absorbed by only one, and blending them when they should be kept apart, is at the root of what makes us human (120).

This contention is followed by the partial concession that, even if conceptual blending is shared at least rudimentarily with other species in which memories become either backgrounded or foregrounded in our experience and understanding of present or emerging events, then
the advanced ability to blend incompatible conceptual arrays is a basic part of what makes us cognitively modern (121).

Immediately thereafter, Turner assigns blending as "fundamental" to our counterfactual thinking, our apprehension of personal identity, our comprehension of causality, the nature of language and more specifically grammar, the extension and transformation of categories of thought be they artistic or scientific, before highlighting "double-scope" stories identifiable as "cognitively modern" and exemplified by the avowal scene in Act Two, Scene Five of Jean Racine's 1677 play, Phèdre (121ff.). Leaving aside the matter of when cognitive modernity may be said to have begun, the difficulty some readers may of course have with Turner's blanket approach is that there is little said about what actually discriminates, say, narratives in the artistic realm from those in the scientific domain, let alone art and ritual from science and mathematics.

Turning from the expansionary zeal found in some of the thirteen papers of this anthology, let us also focus upon the degree to which the very tools of analysis of narrative are consistently foregrounded by paper after paper. Kitty Klein, when pursuing how narrating trauma becomes part of the process of healing it, examines how psychologists aim at adapting their operational definitions of patients' reports of internal states and perceptions to the largely measurable, observable, consistent descriptions of behavior. Consequently, competing analyses of what constitute significant variables in narrative emphasize such features as structure, cohesion, and density of expression. Not unlike readability scores, much energy has been given to counting lexical and sentential items as well as to lexical frequencies and cohesive connections. Whether such forms of measurement, though easily tabulated, provide sufficient evidence from which to make inferences about the patterns of interpretation employed by the teller seems highly questionable. Other analyses of narrative stress modes of evaluation or judgment by listeners, at times identifying utterances or propositions by which the content is developed, be it in terms of negative or positive feelings, coherent or fragmented thoughts, internalized or externalized perceptions, and the like. Yet here, too, such psycho-linguistic attributes need not be mutually exclusive nor confined to one utterance or proposition at a time. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, more holistic measures have been sought in appraisals of integrative or differentiated patterns of perspectives on the one hand or in judgments of descriptive or interpretive treatment of recollections on the other. Klein as a result finds that operational definitions of narrative have "proven difficult" and to that extent continue to make ways of disclosing the relationship between narrative, causal coherence, and healing "a pressing task" (62).

By contrast, William Frawley and colleagues plot another path by construing therapeutic discourse in performative terms. Unlike consultations between doctor and patient, "therapeutic knowledge is constituted by insight in the moment of speaking, rather than uncovered in factual discovery" (86). To that extent, contend Frawley, Murray and Smith, the "world" in therapeutic narrative "function[s] less as referential descriptions than semantic constructions that determine referential domains" (86). That said, they begin to chart the complexities of therapeutic narrative in terms of co-construction of voice, the goal of plausibility, and the reflexivity and self-organization of re-narrativization itself. Much of this is open to various forms of analysis which trace lexical networks and semantic fields by which a narrative unfolds, metaphorical means by which emotions are articulated and worldviews perceived, and, finally, the introduction of semantic scales by which patients can be asked to grade their perceptions at, say, moments of narrative impasse. In other words, unlike Klein who pursues narrative within a therapeutic context, Frawley and colleagues would focus future efforts upon therapeutic strategies in the context of narrative.

Perhaps we should conclude our necessarily limited sample from the anthology with Monika Fludernik's defense of her highly influential model of "natural narratology," her 1996 text by that name arguably being the pivotal work of the current generation. At the core of her thesis lies the claim that "the cognitive framework" for naturally occurring narratives "can be applied to all narrative" albeit that significant transformations accompany fictional developments associated with its literary forms (244). Moreover, our reading processes constitute narrativity which is not so much "a quality adhering to a text, but rather an attribute imposed on the text by the reader who interprets the text as narrative" (242). In other words, the reader first of all brings to the text his or her basic schemata of, say, actions and events, intentions and goals, schemata which, in turn, define a text from the fivefold perspective of action, telling, experiencing, viewing, and reflecting frames. Thereafter, readers collectively accumulate sets of generic, historically contingent schemata of narratives such as the romantic and the satiric, the didactic and the tragic. The above-mentioned constitutive act of narrativity is one which effectively draws upon all three facets enumerated here in mediated acts of narrativizing experience or consciousness. Fludernik, therefore, does not construe narrative as story or plot, but ''as a process that captures the narrator's past experience" (245)--be it personal or vicarious or testamentary--reproducing, evaluating, and resolving it in terms both of a protagonist's responses and of a narrator's coupling of its "emotional and evaluative significance" (249) and the present context. That the implications of conflating schemata and frames or of appealing to the competence of readers remain two crucial conceptions yet to be resolved by Fludernik indicates the need for the debate to continue over the nature of the cognitive and the pragmatic paradigms that she anchors linguistically.

The highly synthesized and programmatic contributions by the editor himself (1-30 & 163-192) contain a wealth of lines of enquiries to engage a host of professionals and researchers in cognitive narratology and its cognate disciplines. Yet, for all that, there appear to be at least three kinds of questions that the anthology ignores. For example, what role does imagination and pretence play in the formation and reception of narrative? Indeed, is there not a need to account for the distinctions initiated by such recent thinkers as a Gregory Currie or a Kendall Walton (the first of whom is particularly attuned to developments in the cognitive sciences)? The question here is not one about invading the territory of neighboring disciplines so much as one about insisting upon perspicacity in one's key concepts and assumptions.

Next, can discussions of "What is narrative?" be so easily deflected or dismissed in pursuit of "How are acts of narrative to be explicated?"? Can contributors, in Herman's own words, simply "seek less to specify necessary and sufficient conditions for story than to explore the semiotic, cognitive, and sociointeractional environments in which narrative acquires salience and to which stories in turn lend structure" (3)? The concern here is not that socio-psychological and -linguistic investigations lack legitimacy. Rather, it is whether or not they can gain purchase without questioning their basic assumption of whether narrative is susceptible to such definitions or whether, by contrast, it ought to be construed in less "essentialist" ways as critics of Fludernik note (258, n. 10).

Thirdly, has the developmental dimension of cognitive narratology been ignored to the point where narrative is uncritically regarded as a primary mode of discourse "in some sense more fundamental than descriptive, instructive, expository, or argumentative types" (171)? Is the Tuija Virtanen hypothesis--that its primacy, if not its universality, lies in the fact that narrative types of text can be manifested in every other kind of discourse--one that accords with the emergence of spoken language? Notwithstanding Herman's many references to the cognitive revolution associated with Lev Vygotsky, no attention is given to his observations about the joint emergence of two basic functions of an infant's speech. Children do not only use language to recount past experience, they also use it to hypothesize about future conditions. What we are wont to call the beginnings of narrative speech is accompanied by the beginnings of argumentative speech.

(R.A. Goodrich teaches in the School of Communication & Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia and co-edits the online refereed arts-practice journal, Double Dialogues)