The Experientiality of Narrative

Marco Caracciolo

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110377804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

Recent developments in cognitive narrative theory have called attention to readers' active participation in making sense of narrative. However, while most psychologically inspired models address interpreters' subpersonal (i.e., unconscious) responses, the experiential level of their engagement with narrative remains relatively undertheorized. Building on theories of experience and embodiment within today's "second-generation" cognitive science, and opening a dialogue with so-called "enactivist" philosophy, this book sets out to explore how narrative experiences arise from the interaction between textual cues and readers' past experiences. Caracciolo's study offers a phenomenologically inspired account of narrative, spanning a wide gamut of responses such as the embodied dynamic of imagining a fictional world, empathetic perspective-taking in relating to characters, and "higher-order" evaluations and interpretations. Only by placing a premium on how such modes of engagement are intertwined in experience, Caracciolo argues, can we do justice to narrative's psychological and existential impact on our lives. These insights are illustrated through close readings of literary texts ranging from Émile Zola's Germinal to José Saramago's Blindness.

Part I:

Notes for a Theory of Experientiality

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“You think the stories are true?”
“No,” Eric said.
“Then why do you spread them?”
“For the tone, of course.”
“For the edge.”
“For the edge. The bite. The existential burn.”

Don DeLillo, Underworld

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1

Not So Easy: Representation, Experience, Expression

Intuitively, we all know that representation can be uncoupled from experience. Instrumental music calls forth strong experiential (bodily and affective) reactions without representing any state of affairs—i. e., without necessarily inviting listeners to think about a storyworld with its constituent elements (some characters, a spatiotemporal setting, a storyline). But in the case of people’s engagement with narratives it can be difficult to tease out these two dimensions, since stories are representational artifacts. How does representation relate to the experience undergone by readers and more generally by recipients while engaging with narrative? The purpose of this chapter is to problematize the relationship between representation and experience, opening up a set of questions that are often sidestepped in literary studies and especially in narratology—whose theoretical foundations are permeated by representational talk. In order to do so, I will try to show why the discussion surrounding mental representations in cognitive science is highly relevant to narratology. We will see that bridging the gap between representational talk in narrative studies and the cognitive-scientific notion of “mental representation” involves some pitfalls. At the same time, I believe that it can yield important insights into people’s engagement with narratives—and into how the representational dimension of this engagement relates to its experiential dimension.

The concept of “mental representation” was the Swiss army knife of first-generation, AI-inspired cognitive science. As William Ramsey puts it in his systematic study of cognitive representationalism, “one of the most distinguishing (and to some degree defining) hallmarks of cognitivism has been a strong commitment to internal representations as an explanatory posit. This assumption is so deeply ingrained that … some cognitivists consider it folly to even question the explanatory value of representational posits” (2007, 223). Yet, together with other fringes of contemporary cognitive science, enactivism is taking part in an assault against this entrenched concept. There are at least two aspects to this debate: one concerns the existence of mental representations; the other has to do with their explanatory value. On the one hand, as we know from subsection 0.4.1, the notion of mental representation had a clear theoretical status—and did genuine explanatory work—in classical computational models of the mind. On these accounts (see, e. g., Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988), a mental representation is a symbolic structure similar to a cluster of 1 s and 0 s in a computer. According to enactivists like Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), the problem with this view of mental representation is that the model of the mind on which it is predicated is empirically false. In other words: talk about mental representations (in this computational sense) may be coherent; but these mental representations do not exist. On the other hand, as Ramsey points out, newer approaches within cognitive science (especially in the fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology) have turned their back on computational models but keep talking about “mental representations” in a theoretically impoverished sense. These “mental representations” refer to phenomena that, while playing a functional role, are not at all representational (Ramsey 2007, xiv–xv).

Either way, it seems that cognitive representationalism is running into trouble. I am convinced that this paradigm shift occurring within cognitive science gives us an opportunity to rethink the concept of “representation” as it is used by students of aesthetics, literary criticism, and—more importantly for us—narrative theory. Hence, in this chapter I would like to develop some conceptual tools which will make my more-than-representationalist approach to narrative more intelligible and also, I hope, more compelling. In particular, I will advance two theses: first, recipients’ engagement with narrative involves representations but cannot be equated with them. The story-driven experience, as I will call it, exists in a network of responses that includes recipients’ past experiences as well as the text itself (section 1.1). Second, characters’ consciousness and experiences cannot be represented as such by narrative texts; what we commonly call the “representation of an experience” is the representation of an event in which a person (e. g., a fictional character) undergoes an experience (section 1.2).⁸

These may sound like tricky claims to make, since they involve bridging the gap between two usages of the word “representation” (one cognitive-scientific, the other broadly speaking semiotic) that are not necessarily synonymous. In what follows, I will argue that this gap can be bridged by showing that both mental and semiotic representations are deeply implicated in what Hutto calls the “object-based schema,” whereas experience and consciousness cannot be adequately accounted for in object-based terms. Representation works by referring to object-like entities (such as events, people, and things), while experience is a complex texture created by people’s biological make-up and past experiences; it has to do not just with what is experienced, but with the how, with the ways in which people respond to the world. The upshot is that my critique of representationalism in connection with what is known as “the representation of consciousness” is not merely terminological. Saying that characters’ consciousnesses are not represented in texts is shorthand for arguing that there is a pro found—indeed, essential—difference between “representing” experience and representing objects or events. What really counts is the difference, not the label in itself. If I seem to target representational talk about characters’ consciousnesses and experiences, it is only because I find it potentially misleading—because it obscures the fact that experience is a field of embodied, practical, evaluative interactions and not simply a “thing” that can be referred to.

The concept of expression plays a major role in my account of how experiences can be conveyed by semiotic, and thereby representational, artifacts. In section 1.3 I will examine some of the “expressive devices” through which narrative can have an experiential impact on readers, encouraging them to respond to the represented events and existents. Indeed, depending on the interplay between readers’ experiential background and the expressive strategies implemented by the author, the same set of existents, linked together in the same sequence of events, may lead to markedly different experiences, in terms of vividness and memorability of recipients’ imaginings, emotions aroused, and more self-conscious interpretive responses.

The thrust of this chapter is that a narrow focus on stories as representational artifacts prevents scholars from doing justice to narrative’s experiential dimension. Hence my “more-than-representationalism” about recipients’ interaction with stories: in order to refine our understanding of reception processes and formulate a more comprehensive “cognitive reception theory” (Eder 2003), we need to know more about the ways in which the representational properties of stories connect with readers’ experiential background—and with their experiential responses. Language has both representational and expressive properties: it provides instructions to imagine some object-like entities (events and existents) and at the same time it invites readers to respond to these entities in certain ways, thereby creating the story-driven experience. Thus, the imaginings evoked by narrative have an intentional, representational dimension, since they are directed at the represented events and existents, but they can also take on an experiential quality, depending on the tension between readers’ experiential background and the expressive strategies implemented by the author. In this way, readers’ imagination reflects the intertwining of representation and experience (via expression).

This study thus calls attention to both representation and expression as dimensions of narrative artifacts—an insight that will be further articulated at the end of chapter 8. My study is less ambitious when it comes to defining narrative, and falls back on existing definitions, particularly multidimensional accounts of the kind proposed by Wolf (2003), Ryan (2005), and Herman (2009a). According to these scholars, “being a story” is in fact an interpretation based not on a single criterion but on a range of factors (“narratemes” or “basic elements,” as Wolf and Herman respectively call them). A semiotic object is likely to be understood as a story when 1. it prompts recipients to construct a storyworld populated by characters and structured around a specific temporal-causal logic (plot); 2. it possesses a certain degree of thematic coherence; 3. it relates events that deviate from recipients’ expectations, thus acquiring “tellability” (see Baroni 2013); 4. it focuses on the experiences and evaluations of one or more anthropomorphic entities. These narratemes cut across the distinction between representation and experience, with factors 1. and 2. seemingly leaning toward representation, factor 3. siding with experience, and factor 4. somewhat in between. Clearly distinguishing between representation and experience enables us to grasp how complex and multifaceted recipients’ engagement with narrative artifacts is, accounting for a broad range of responses and interpretive patterns. This is, in a nutshell, the conception of narrativity that underlies this book.⁹

Before moving on it is worth saying a few words about why we respond experientially to events and existents that we know to be non-actual (i. e., fictional or at least not physically present in the discourse context, as in conversational narratives). As often in this book, my answer turns on the idea of “mental simulation.” Keith Oatley (1999) suggests that a “play or a novel runs on the minds of the audience or reader as a computer simulation runs on a computer. Just as computer simulation has augmented theories of language, perception, problem solving, and connectionist learning, so fiction as simulation illuminates the problem of human action and emotions” (1999, 105). In other words, our experiential responses to non-actual events and existents depend on a simulative mechanism whereby we use our cognitive resources in an “off-line” mode (see Currie 1997; Currie and Ravenscroft 2002), reacting to them as if they were actual. I will argue in chapter 3 that this “as if ” is rooted in the structure of experience, which enables readers to cross successfully the divide between the real world and storyworlds. Further, in chapter 2 and more extensively in section 8.4 I will add another piece to the puzzle by showing that the implication of readers’ values in their engagement with narrative is instrumental in triggering experiential responses: the interplay between the experiential and the representational dimension of narrative is thus enriched by a third, evaluative dimension.

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1.1 From Representation to Expression

Suppose you are reading a passage from Italo Svevo’s 1923 novel Zeno’s Conscience. The first-person narrator is rambling on about his addiction to cigarettes:

At that time I didn’t know whether I loved or hated cigarettes, their taste, the condition nicotine created in me. But when I came to realize that I hated all of those, it was worse. And I had this realization at the age of about twenty. Then for some weeks I suffered from a violent sore throat accompanied by fever. The doctor prescribed bed rest and absolute abstention from smoking. I remember that word, absolute! It wounded me, and my fever colored it. A great void, and nothing to help me resist the enormous pressure immediately produced around a void. (Svevo 2003, 10)

Maybe you have never smoked a cigarette in your life, and have always looked at cigarette smokers with a mixture of disdain and incomprehension. Maybe you have smoked a few cigarettes when you were a teenager, only to rapidly lose interest and decide that no, definitely smoking is not for you. Or maybe you are like the narrator: a passionate smoker, desperately needing his daily intake of nicotine despite hating almost everything about cigarettes. Whatever your relationship to cigarette smoking (and there are many more possibilities than I could mention here), reading this passage will evoke some associations. You will be vaguely reminded of the taste of cigarettes—or of their characteristic odor, if you have never smoked one. You will understand what it means to have “a violent sore throat,” because you know what it feels like when your throat aches so much that you cannot swallow. Possibly, you will recognize the “feel” of addiction, the sense of being deprived of something that is vitally important for you.

All of these associations, of course, may be triggered with varying degrees of intensity in the flow of reading, depending on a variety of factors—including your relationship to cigarette smoking. But at least you will realize that this passage deals with a subject-matter that is familiar, that matters to you (again, to varying degrees) because you have been exposed to sensory qualities like the taste of cigarette or the pleasure of indulging in an addiction, because you are acquainted with the feelings of love and dislike, and because you know how smoking cigarettes can impact your well-being. These are the threads that run through, and at the same time create, the reading experience. How are we to understand these psychological threads? It could be argued that reading invites us to think about these things. But this is hardly consistent with the phenomenology of engaging with this passage—with the way it feels like, from the reader’s (or at least this reader’s) subjective viewpoint. We have no need to think about pleasure, or the taste of cigarettes, or any other of the experiences implicated in this text, because in fact they are seamlessly and as if automatically associated with the character’s words. The difference I am alluding to is one between thinking about something in a direct, focused way (as you do when I ask you to think about someone smoking a cigarette), and having one’s past experiences entangled in the process of reading about the narrator’s addiction to cigarettes. The latter phenomenon is subtler, and more elusive—this is why I was forced to use vague terms like “associations,” “recognize,” “be familiar with.” It has to do with the indefinable, the implied, what goes without saying and yet permeates all our encounters with the world. It has to do, in one word, with experience.

One of the most salient features of experience is that it is irreducibly rich and complex. It is made up by many threads (in Latin “complexus” means “woven together”). It is layered and multidimensional and yet somehow gives rise to a feeling that is like an undivided whole—the sense of being alive to and conscious of the world.¹⁰ Interestingly, the Svevo passage hints at this idea through the indication that the word “absolute,” as pronounced by the doctor, “wounded” the narrator, and that it was “colored” by his fever. Such metaphors suggest that experience is a unified field, where all our modes of engagement with the environment—the pain caused by the prescription, the consciousness altered by the fever—converge. This complex interaction cannot be reduced to the narrator’s thinking about the prescription, because it brings in its wake a number of past interactions (such as memories of smoked cigarettes), sensory qualities (the taste of cigarettes, the pleasure that the narrator derived from them), and more or less self-conscious evaluations about the importance of cigarettes. Svevo’s character is responding to an event on the basis of past experiences and values that are entangled in his engagement with the world—and there seems to be a crucial difference between this entanglement and the simple mental event of thinking about something. Another, more technical way to frame this idea is to argue that experience cannot be equated with what cognitive scientists call “mental representations,” because there is always more to one’s experience than the objects to which one is intentionally directed at.

Let me clarify this point. First of all, what is a mental representation and what does it me...

Table of contents

• Marco Caracciolo - The Experientiality of Narrative
• Narratologia
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• 0 Introduction
• Part I: Notes for a Theory of Experientiality
• Part II: From Experiential Traces to Fictional Consciousnesses
• Part III: Embodied Engagements and Their Effects
• Works Cited
• Index