Brain, Mind, and the Narrative Imagination

Christopher Comer, Ashley Taggart

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350127814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Stories can inspire love, anger, fear and nostalgia – but what is going on in our brains when this happens? And how do our minds conjure up worlds and characters from the words we read on the page? Rapid advances in the scientific understanding of the brain have cast new light on how we engage with literature. This book – collaboratively written by an experienced neuroscientist and literary critic and writer – explores these new insights. Key concepts in neuroscience are first introduced for non-specialists and a range of literary texts by writers such as Ian McEwan, Jim Crace and E.L. Doctorow are read in light of the latest scientific thought on the workings of the mind and brain. Brain, Mind, and the Narrative Imagination demonstrates how literature taps into deep structures of memory and emotion that lie at the heart of our humanity. It will be of interest to readers of all sorts and students from both the humanities and the sciences.

PART I

Motivations to Explore Our Storied Mind

Humans have deep connections with stories and the narrative arts. Psychology and cognitive science have already made great contributions to literary analysis, and neuroscience is starting to contribute significantly to the understanding of our storied minds. Other fields also have much to contribute, and gains are being made from a multidisciplinary approach to story, its variety of forms, and its effects on us. Perhaps the greatest return has been a better grasp of the reciprocal dynamic by which culture molds, and is in turn molded by our brains and minds, and how the imagination is an important mediator of this.

1

The Scheherazade Syndrome

In 1994, A. S. Byatt published a novella, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, about a contemporary woman with a professional interest in stories. The protagonist, Gillian Perholt, is first seen on a plane leaving London for Ankara to attend a meeting of narratologists. As the plane ascends through the clouds, the novella’s own narrator lays out Gillian’s backstory and the nature of the tale of which she is part. “Her business was story telling, but she was no ingenious queen in fear of the shroud brought in with the dawn” (95). The reference is of course to Scheherazade, narrator of One Thousand and One Nights, the centuries-old collection of folk tales from the Middle East. The allusion also points to the temporal and thematic scope of the novella to come. Behind this is a presumption. For it is taken as given that Byatt, Gillian, and indeed the reader share the propensity to be entranced by entirely invented characters and the experiential journeys they undertake, whether contemporary or ancient.

The story displays some playfully recursive maps within maps; a key reframing device being that, in the course of Byatt’s story, Gillian in effect “enters” the very stories she is studying, mostly folk and fairy tales; the Djinn of the title turning up as a genie with whom she has a series of ever more puzzling and intimate interactions, and who, in the traditional manner, grants her three wishes, but also teaches her how to avoid the traditional folk-tale irony of regretting her choice.

Along the way we are given Gillian’s scholarly take on narrative. We are told that she “was accustomed to say, in lectures, that it was possible that the human need to tell tales about things that were unreal, originated in dreams, and that memory had certain things also in common with dreams; it re-arranged, it made clear, simple narratives, certainly it invented as well as recalling” (203). For the Djinn is not only a dream-like element in the story, the Djinn is story, providing wish-fulfillment even as it offers enlightenment. We too may be puzzled by the intimate power of narratives, especially fictional ones, but we can no more ignore their connection to our mental lives, conscious and subconscious, than we can refuse to partake of three wishes.

Some of the most fundamental questions about narrative, and its effect on us, can be lost if we focus only on completed fictional works, their themes and structure, antecedents, and impacts. If a fundamental aim is to learn how sentences and paragraphs have impact, how they come to appear meaningful in the first place, or prompt the imagination, it is important to consider approaches where the focus is narrower. We need a map on a finer scale. The earliest European narratives, like the Odyssey, and the earliest novels, like Don Quixote, are journeys, a tradition that continues through the years in works like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A journey is composed of steps. For a reader, making their own journey into a text, those steps are words. Narratives, of course, need not be word-based at all: as silent film, mime, dance, and graphic novels all attest.

Most of our attention will be given to written texts, often literary, always remembering that oral narratives far predate the invention of writing. We will also bear in mind Wolfgang Iser’s view of literature as a cultural phenomenon occupying a unique intersection, “the interplay between the fictive, the real and the imaginary” (Iser 1993: 2). Yet fiction, besides pointing to “the real,” has demonstrable effects upon your brain in the very act of conjuring up “the imaginary.” So to provide the fullest account of a complex process, it is necessary to work with a range of survey tools (from narratological analyses and questionnaires, to brain scans and microscopy). Reading fiction is not only a temporal event, as we take in words, then lines, resolving them into scenes and episodes, but one that takes place at an emotional, rememorative, conceptual, and neurophysiological level.

For this reason, in the course of our investigation, after we’ve sketched some fundamentals about the choices available to authors, as they guide us into their invented worlds, we spend some time surveying the terrain of the brain sciences—sometimes even the physical topography of the brain—to supplement our understanding of narrative imagination from this perspective, which is after all fairly recent: outlining not only where we’re at, currently, but where we’re coming from and where we might be going, as readers and writers; concluding by looking at novelists who have begun to incorporate the findings of cognitive and neuro-science into their own work, in equal measure inspired and awed by the consequences for ideas of free will, consciousness, creativity, and the self.

A multi-level focus on reading is natural here: before we have the experience of a novel, a chapter, a theme, or even an image, we have eyes scanning a page, the remarkable, serial process of reading, and the highly selective stimulation of a vast multimodal “vault” of memory and association in the reader.

The use of complementary approaches, and the book’s later return to discussion of metaphors, characters, and influences, is also an explicit recognition that traditional critiques of stories and literature are indispensable. Close-reading and exegesis not only retain a role, but are enhanced by the science. Hence they form part of the later chapters, shifting the frame, scale, and projection, upward and outward. Sometimes it is most helpful to take such a conceptual view, at others detailed empirical analysis is more appropriate. We need to analyze the soil and the rocks before we can begin to understand the forests and the towering peaks.

So, for the most fundamental questions about how stories “work” in a basic sense, we will shift between levels, often relating narrative structures back to the primary act of perusing a text, the comprehension of words, and the neurobiology of doing so.

In some respects, the critical stance here reflects Elaine Auyoung’s analysis of the reading mind, When Fiction Feels Real (2018) where she posits “a new form of critical attention … [that not only] approaches the words of a literary text … as bearers of interpretive meaning, but as cues that prompt readers to retrieve their existing embodied knowledge, to rely on their social intelligence, and to exercise their capacities for learning” (18). Hence, this book often touches on reader response, how we assimilate the sensory and affective properties of “storyworlds,” before shifting to more explicit, empirical considerations of reader’s minds through brain organization and function.

Before we can consult these various maps, it is worth enquiring whether the journey is worth the effort—taking time to consider the significance of story, and narrative more generally in our lives, both as art and as everyday anecdote. As Porter Abbott (2008) has pointed out, our tendency is to think of narrative only in the former, more aggrandized sense, but narrative is the mundane currency of everyday exchange, the bedrock of social relationships, the salve of our pains, and the heart of our humor. It is common to almost all human interactions. As Jim Crace—a novelist considered later—puts it:

All writers are doing is doing something formally, between hard covers, that all of us do informally as a necessary function of being human beings. We keep on imagining the future and reinventing the past … it’s a necessary function of human consciousness, to be a narrative person. (Interview, Crace 2012: 1)

A logical place for us to start looking at this “necessary function” is by establishing the natural habitat of narratives, beginning with oral storytelling, since that is where it all began.

The Ecology of Story

Recent observations from anthropology begin to explain what it might mean to say that stories are natural phenomena. Observation of storytelling in pre-literate societies may give some idea of humankind’s deep history as a highly social primate: the relationship between talking and fire. Polly Wiessner (2014) gathered information on conversations and their contents, among Ju/hoansi (!Kung) bushmen on the border between Botswana and Namibia. They are a small-scale society that has subsisted largely on foraging: a way of life similar to that of human cultures throughout much of our evolution, and preceding the cultural invention of writing about 5,000 years ago.

Humankind extended the daily time available for social interaction with the use of fire (something we likely have been doing for 400,000 years or more), and the question behind this study was elegantly simple: are fireside hours being used as a mere extension of daytime? From 174 episodes collected over months, the answer became clear. Socializing at night was not “more of the same,” it was adding something new. Figure 1.1 shows the breakdown of conversation topics during daylight, and at night around the communal fire.

FIGURE 1.1 The ecology of stories. The topics of day and night conversations compared. These data come from Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) bushmen of southern Africa (Botswana and Namibia). From: Wiessner (2014) Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111:14027–35, Figure 1, used with permission of the journal.

Wiessner found that day conversation is dominated by the practicalities of life: economics, complaints, land-rights, etc.; stories are only 6 percent, leavened with some joking. However at night there was a dramatic change: by far the most common verbal activity was storytelling, and fixation on the daily business of survival fell away. As Wiessner indicates, “Firelit stories centered on conversations that evoked the imagination, helped people remember others in their external networks, healed rifts of the day, and conveyed information about cultural institutions” (14027). Both men and women told stories, and Wiessner noted that this often included older individuals who seemed skilled in the art.

She is clear that stories not only entertained but also informed. The quirks and traits of tribe members, such as kin from prior generations, were refreshed and embellished, as were relationships. “Night conversations used multimodal communication with gestures, imitation, sound effects, or bursts of song that brought the characters right to the hearth and into the hearts of listeners” (14030). Furthermore, they typically were “about known people and amusing, exciting, or endearing escapades. Storytellers did not praise heroes or moralize; advancing oneself in the moral hierarchy or demoting others was avoided, as was any form of self-promotion” (14029).

When an anecdote was over, others in the group rehashed details, further embellished, and discussed it. The language of stories tended to be rhythmic, complex, and symbolic, with individuals repeating the last words of phrases or adding affirmations. Frequently, listeners “were stunned with suspense, nearly in tears, or rolling with laughter; they arrived on a similar emotional wavelength as moods were altered” (14029).

These results provide valuable pointers to the issues we will address. For example, Wiessner identifies some key attributes of storytelling: the visible suspense of the listeners; memories brought to life, especially in terms of kin relationships; emotions, moods, and imagination evoked; and behind this, often an implicit “moral” or lesson. Thus storytelling (and as we will see, listening and reading) touches on deep cognitive processes as well as having a social rationale. In short, Wiessner’s study demonstrates the place of oral storytelling in our mental ecology (see also Chapter 3 and Figure 3.1) and suggests its important place in cultural and even biological evolution. Other critics, analyzing casual conversations in so-called developed cultures, have come to similar conclusions: “We spend 40 percent of our conversational time in spontaneous narratives” (Slade 1997: 7—and see also Boyd 2009, on the evolution of stories from play).

The central role of storytelling in the evolution of the human mind has not escaped literary treatment. It is impossible to read the intriguing report by Wiessner and not think of the kind of early human storyteller described in the novel Gift of Stones (see Chapter 2) who almost literally deploys his storytelling prowess as a “prosthetic” after he loses his arm, and hence ensures his practical usefulness in a flint-working tribe.

Wiessner’s field-based study reminds us that if neuroscience is to play a part in the understanding of stories and literature, it needs input from other fields. This means taking anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and other human sciences seriously, and also attending to the theoretical insights of philosophy. Such a wide-ranging survey inevitably presents challenges in terms of register and tone across disciplines, and on this point it seems best to adhere to the terminology appropriate to each domain, in the belief that multidisciplinary approaches—a variety of maps—can take us that much closer to our goal.

Legends and the Scales of Narratological Maps

A fundamental tenet of narratology is that “narrative” and “story” are not necessarily synonymous. Narratologists have made a distinction for years between narrative discourse—how listeners/readers encounter events in the order the storyteller chooses to deliver them (sometimes called sjuzet)—and story per se—the underlying chronology, the timeline of events as they would actually have occurred (fabula).¹

These two—narrative discourse and story—can be very different. They may run “in phase” or “out of phase,” depending on the circumstances of the telling, its style, goals, and audience. Think of the novel Time’s Arrow (1991), by Martin Amis, in which the story of a life is told from its end backward, inverting cause and effect in the process, or Memento (2000), a film that gives us the narrative of an amnesiac struggling (using tricks) to work backward to a forgotten trauma, a desperate daily pursuit of the self repeatedly witnessed by the viewer and interleaved with flashback sequences.

The field of narratology is a rich and thriving one but is not the main focus here. Rather, the aim is to examine emerging insights into narrative, storytelling, and story reception at least partly from outside the frame of traditional literary criticism, and to summarize and evaluate some of the analytical approaches inspired by neuroscience in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. Our journey will traverse, at various times, the fields of cognitive poetics, cognitive rhetoric, Darwinian literary criticism, and linguistics, as well as so-called hard neuroscience: a daunting itinerary perhaps, but, one that often contains ideas that are eminently graspable, often demonstrable, and always revealing.

For our purposes, a broad working definition of narrative will be used—one accepted by theorists such as Seymour Chatman and Mieke Bal—as the representation of an event or series of events. This allows the greatest latitude for an investigation of biocultural, cognitive, and neuroscientific aspects. As regards fiction, it would encompass historical forms as diverse as myth, epic, legend, saga, romance, allegory, chronicle, satire, drama, short stories, and the novel. Yet the term “narrative” is much larger than story. It also relates to some non-fiction—even many disciplines traditionally seen as scientific.

Story is ubiquitous. In the words of Richard Kearney (2002), “Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human” (3). That is to say, the act of storytelling is a cognitive channel for meaning-making, allowing us to make sense, not just of our environment, but of our lived experience as it unfolds over time. Stories are, in other words, profoundly useful instruments for understanding the world we find oursel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Back to the Future
• Part I: Motivations to Explore Our Storied Mind
• Part II: Into the Neural Terrain
• Part III: The Journey from Words to Narratives
• Part IV: Converging Paths?
• Afterword
• References
• Index
• Imprint